WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 564: The Last Picnic

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No reason to dance around it, and no intention to either. So he went straight to the point.

Sinar blinked her distinctively green eyes. The wind came and pushed through her golden hair, tangling and shaking it loose.

The scattered strands spread through the air like fine gold thread, then settled back down with a whisper.

Even on ordinary days she was called a beauty beyond human, but looking at her now, it was hard not to wonder how a face this lovely could exist in the world at all.

Even among elves, a look like hers would not be common.

However comfortable the journey, washing properly on the road was never easy, yet her skin was flawless, without a single blemish.

Enkrid's skin was naturally clear too, not a mark on it, but hers seemed to catch the light from within.

It literally reflected the sunlight, in fact.

If Crang drew people's eyes through speeches and Enkrid did it with his sword, Sinar looked as though she could gather every gaze around her simply by willing it, using nothing but her face.

She held that briefly thoughtful look as she watched Enkrid, then opened her mouth.

All three of them, Audin included, kept walking without breaking stride.

The soft crunch of footsteps continued underfoot, and Sinar's voice joined it.

That alone made it feel as if some instrument had struck up a tune.

"My name is Sinar Kirhaise. An elf knight, born and raised in an elf family. Yes, I want to belong to your knight order."

Sinar said nothing about how her life was constrained, how she might eventually have to leave the order, or how the duties set before her were no light thing.

Watching Enkrid all this time, she had learned something beyond how to dream and how not to give up.

What had she learned?

This man never rushed to conclusions about the future. He simply lived each moment, each day, with everything he had.

She had learned that from him, so she did the same.

To enjoy today, right now, this moment.

Right now, she did not want to leave Enkrid's side.

"Deputy commander is fine. I'm content with my current position."

He had no chance to say she could leave if she wanted something else. Sinar said everything she wanted to say.

There was no reason the order would not take her, and Enkrid's own feelings were the same.

Sinar, the elf who loved to joke, had tried to keep him alive even as her own body turned to dust, calling forth her Will as she was dying.

Enkrid could never forget her as she was in that moment.

He thought back to it and nodded, making up his mind.

If she had something she wanted, and if his hand could reach it, then at that moment he would repay everything Sinar had given him, from long before until now.

Having settled that, one thing snagged in his ear.

Had Sinar just said she was content with her current position?

"What is your current position, exactly?"

He had offered her something besides deputy commander, hadn't he?

"The commander's fiancée. The mother of whatever children you end up with. That ought to be enough."

Without a trace of a smile, the elf's deadpan joke landed square.

Audin let out a small laugh beside them.

As commander, Enkrid wanted to demand who had the nerve to laugh, but held it back.

He had already snorted and smiled himself.

"It's good to see you smile."

A small smile crept over the elf's otherwise expressionless face. The slight lift at the corner of Sinar's lips looked as though it could fell a fair share of the men on the continent.

They would all perish from lovesickness, that rarest of plagues.

After Sinar, Enkrid put the same question to Audin.

Asked what he wanted, Audin offered a short prayer calling on the Lord Father, then turned his gaze somewhere distant and spoke.

"I want to spread the teachings of the Holy Temple. I want to protect those who have little. I want to bring happiness into unhappiness. I want to look after children who have been orphaned. I want to meet those who must be sent to the Father's side, following the Lord Father's teachings. So, how is that? Isn't it all something I can do by staying at your side, brother commander? That is why I am here. This too is the will of god. Above all, I believe I am doing what I should be doing, from where I stand now."

The way he kept talking, Audin might well have been the best talker in the whole unit.

Setting aside Krais and Enkrid himself, anyway.

Come to think of it, Krais had been taken into the order as well.

The surface reason was that belonging to the order made it easier to guard and protect him.

And if he were not part of the order, his position would have been awkward anyway.

"Pleasure! Salons! Cities! Ladies! Gold coins!"

Krais summed up his reasons for staying in the order with five words. His dream was vivid and clear, as ever.

A knight order typically only accepted those who had proven themselves through force of arms, but by that logic, Odd-Eye was a horse. Not even a person, and the order had taken her in.

They had also taken in the witch.

So setting aside conventional notions every now and then was perfectly fine.

"Yeah. Alright."

Enkrid just nodded.

It made for a peculiar knight order, taking in Krais too, but they had never been a group assembled to impress anyone, so it did not matter.

Madman Knights.

At least the name was perfect.

He thought that and moved on, putting one foot in front of the other.

Crossing open plains, climbing mountain paths in between, the three of them walked at a steady pace.

After the talk about their dreams, Audin spoke a great deal.

"Those who are crushed by hardship, who have been swallowed by misfortune, when such people seek the Lord, I will be a source of strength for them. Just as you do, brother."

It sounded close to the resolve Enkrid had once declared about protecting the backs of those around him.

"Why did you come along?"

When Enkrid asked, Audin gave an awkward smile.

His wishes were one thing, but there was no obvious reason he had to come in person.

Like the time he had followed along to the capital, was this about breaking free from the prison of delusion?

For that, he had been awfully eager to join.

Even now, asked directly, his face said he did not want to answer. What else could that expression mean? He definitely had a reason for coming.

Even so, Enkrid did not press him a second time.

If he did not want to share what was on his heart, what was the point of prying?

Walking north for a day or two had grown a little dull.

He kept reviewing things, training, sparring, but he had not spotted a single Demon Creature or Magic Beast.

The safe road had not been laid this far yet, but for some reason there was still oddly little to see.

Bandits had been targeted by extermination orders across the whole kingdom, and for someone with no place to go and nothing to eat, throwing their life into a move to Border Guard was a far better bet than turning to banditry, so their absence was only natural.

Word had spread all across Naurillia that going to Border Guard meant you would not starve to death.

It was the work of Krais and what had by now clearly evolved into a proper information guild, Gielpin's Guild.

Word traveled faster the more it passed from person to person.

That said, criminal groups had not vanished entirely.

In each city, brotherhoods of one kind or another still banded together and got up to all sorts of things.

Among them were groups who dabbled in schemes not unlike bandit outfits while waving some grand cause around, and others who doubled as information guilds.

No matter how livable a place became, people who dealt in the shadows always found a way to exist.

As long as people lived, crime could not be stamped out.

Enkrid's view was simply that there were certain lines that should not be crossed.

Crossing those lines meant things like this.

Kidnapping people to dissect them in the name of researching spells. Using them for drug experiments. Tying children to trees in the forest as offerings to some god.

Idol worship was one thing, but the madness that accompanied it was something he could never understand.

Beyond that, there were plenty of people who did things he could not even name out loud, and if he came across any of them, he would cut them all down.

Thieves extorting protection money were at least better than this. People who had lost their minds or armed themselves with some deranged belief, every last one of them deserved to die.

Anyway, whether it was the lack of Demon Creatures making him bored or something else, Audin revealed a piece of what was on his mind.

"Do you know who they mean when they say Holy Maiden?"

"A symbol of divinity designated by the temple."

"That's rather cynical of you, brother."

"It's not wrong though, is it?"

Sinar added a word of her own. She too knew the current temple had its rotted and festering corners.

"Holy Maidens are those truly born with a special divinity. Holy Men are the same. If the child is a girl, she is venerated as a Holy Maiden; if a boy, as a Holy Man."

There were in fact a few Holy Men and Holy Maidens within the current temple.

"There was a child I knew once who was called a Holy Man."

It was the kind of story worth listening to.

They still had several days of walking before reaching the city, and with no Demon Creatures in sight, there was nothing but time to kill.

Audin quietly began telling an old story of his own.

* * *

"My name is Fildin. And you?"

It had been autumn then too.

Beneath a tree carpeted in countless fallen brown leaves that had piled into something like a cushioned chair, there was a child.

Even without looking twice, the exhaustion was plain on the child's face.

Audin had stopped by the monastery for the first time in a long while.

It was an out-of-the-way corner of the monastery, a place where Audin himself had gone alone to pray and think since childhood.

A child was there.

Dark brown hair that looked almost black, dull brown eyes.

Yes, those eyes had looked truly dull.

That made the exhaustion stand out even more, and the child looked like an old person worn down by the hardships of life.

Maybe that was why the casual familiarity in the way the child spoke did not feel strange.

Audin answered readily.

"I'm called Audin Pumray."

"Oh, someone from the monastery?"

"I stayed at the monastery once."

"A martial monk?"

That was what they commonly called monks.

The monastery where Audin had lived also trained those who followed the martial path, so it was a natural question.

Looking at Audin's build, it was a question that would come up on its own.

"Yes, I was."

"Not anymore?"

"Now I work as an Inquisitor."

It was a short leave, and he had come to soothe an uneasy heart.

"Catching heretics? Ah, I see."

"What do you do, Brother Fildin?"

"Me? I make medicine."

Not an alchemist. Anyone looking would say no. Not a trace of that air about the child.

"I make medicine underground all day. Feels like I'm going to die doing this, but that's how I live."

Fildin, that child, was a Holy Man belonging to the temple of the god of abundance.

Abundance also symbolized the great earth mother.

When the God of the Scales, who governed the sun and the moon, split into two, into radiance and sacred light and the darkness of the deep earth, the god of abundance who formed the earth accepted the deep earth and embraced it.

That was what the Holy Temple's teachings said.

And the god of abundance had been called from of old the master of fruit that fell to the ground, so the god's followers never neglected the work of caring for orphaned children.

Separate from that, eight out of ten of the divine-infused potions supplied across the entire continent came from the temple of the god of abundance.

The priests of the war god had no interest in making potions, saying a little spit was enough to heal anything, but the priests of abundance were different.

They made and supplied potions in enormous quantities.

As a side note, the Apostles of the war god were not actually taught to literally use spit.

Their doctrine was to temper the body through training and more training, until it healed on its own.

And was not the God of Regeneration born from that very idea?

"You don't look like you're enjoying yourself."

"How would I be? It's not fun at all."

Fildin spoke and raised a glow of sacred light at the fingertips. That was truly astonishing.

The idea that a simple gesture could manifest divinity and make it visibly apparent.

"Mm."

Even Audin was startled into a low sound.

Then from somewhere behind them came a voice calling out Fildin, Fildin, searching for the child.

"You should go back," Audin said.

"I don't want to be a Holy Man," the child answered.

Between the words there was something like the dissonance of a broken instrument, but Audin at the time did not think much of it.

He himself had once hated life at the monastery.

It had been suffocating, stifling. He had been thirteen or fourteen. He did not know why, but he had wanted to break out and run.

The Holy Temple, its teachings, monastery life, none of it was something he hated or disliked, all of it was fine, and yet.

Was Fildin the same?

And even if not, what could he do about it? Nothing.

What could a mere Inquisitor and common believer of the temple possibly say or argue?

At that time Audin had not yet learned to use divinity with any ease.

The child called Fildin wore white clothes made of very fine cloth, hair neatly kept, and though tired-looking, the body was well-fed and well-raised.

A little frail, so training with some heavy stones would probably help, but that too was not something he had any place to involve himself in.

"Maybe it'd be better to just die."

A child's recklessness. That was how Audin saw it. Or rather, that was how he chose to see it.

Standing against the temple was something he could not even imagine back then.

Soon those searching for Fildin came rushing in, scolding the Holy Man with gentle words about wandering off without permission and the trouble it could cause.

Audin stood at a distance, watched, and turned away.

Their meeting was brief, but it may have been the very thing that first planted the seeds of distrust toward the temple in Audin.

Later, Audin happened to hear news of the child called Fildin.

"Holy Man Fildin passed away. They say he died treating a plague. That's what I heard."

A plague? Where? He had never heard a rumor like that.

Apparently disease had broken out in some rural town.

And Holy Man Fildin had eliminated it by sacrificing himself.

Audin had been on his way to bring in someone suspected of heresy.

It was a time when he was weighing right and wrong and agonizing over everything, so he went to find the town Fildin had supposedly saved through that sacrifice.

In that town, no one knew the name Fildin.

"A plague? Oh, a few people got sick I suppose, but they got better pretty quickly."

That was it. Fildin's story was not there.

Should he have pushed further? He should have.

Does he regret it? He does.

But the darkness that had closed around Audin then would not let him step forward.

And yet one suspicion gnawed at him relentlessly, rising like a storm out of the dark.

"Why did you pretend not to know? You knew. You knew I was going to die. That my sacred power was just going to get sucked dry until I withered. You knew."

It was a nightmare he had dreamed more than a hundred times.

Fildin wept tears of blood and held Audin to blame.

And now Audin looked directly at the hallucination of Fildin that only he could see, and spoke.

"I don't know whether that child died by accident or whether there was another reason, but now that my doubt has grown into something like a monster, the appearance of a Holy Maiden feels to me like no coincidence at all."

Borrowing Audin's words, Enkrid spoke.

"Like the Lord Father handed down a revelation?"

Audin answered with a faint smile. In his eyes, the phantom of Fildin was still visible.

"Yes. That's right."

Audin wanted to stay at Enkrid's side, but he had no intention of breaking the Prohibition Seal.

"When were you ever going to abandon me? And you'll break the seal?"

The phantom of Fildin accused him.

Even setting that aside, he would not break it.

Even though he had set out with the readiness to give his life for this mission if it came to that, if it would be even a small help, he still would not.

Unlike Enkrid, who had set out with a light heart, Audin was deeply serious.

Because right now Audin was facing his own failures, his faults, his wrongs.

Whatever the outcome, Audin would do what he believed was right.

"Right. Let's go."

Enkrid felt Audin's resolve.

So what could he do for him?

Nothing. But if something like that had truly happened, and the ones blocking the way were that sort of people, then regardless of what organization they belonged to or who they were, he would draw his sword.

This required no great stirring of his Will, no need to reach for his sword in his heart first. No bracing of resolve at all. It was simply how Enkrid had always moved through the world, how his life had always been.

This was just the kind of man he was.

Audin knew that well, which was why he had come.

If something went wrong, Enkrid would protect that child.

And somewhere in the middle of it all, perhaps there would be a moment for Audin to step forward himself.

When he had first come to Border Guard, he could not have imagined going back out into the world.

And yet from the capital alone he had gone out twice.

Once to fight, and once to walk out of the prison of delusion on his own.

Audin walked and breathed in the autumn smell that colored everything around him.

If this turned out to be his last outing, he wanted to enjoy it to the fullest.

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