WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 565: The Field Where the Holy Mother Stayed

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"A child who entered my land is weeping, so there is no reason not to help."

That was the stated reason in Crang's letter.

More precisely, it was that he could not simply walk past something clearly wrong when it was right in front of him.

Case in point: Crang tolerated no bandit activity anywhere within the kingdom's territory.

Of course, there might be people who turned to theft because they had no other way to eat.

Could there be those who became bandits because a lord had pushed them to the edge? Probably. There could be.

But those cases were very few.

Honestly, it was more accurate to say they were almost nonexistent.

Living as a bandit on land overrun by Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts was something you could only manage if you had serious confidence in your own abilities.

So anyone in Naurillia who chose an occupation other than mercenary or bodyguard was, plain and simply, doing it because they preferred stealing and taking from others.

There was no longer any room for grand nobles to back a bandit gang and use them to encroach on a rival lord's territory, none of those schemes applied anymore.

Declaring "I'll become a bandit or highway robber and live by theft!" was practically the same as praying with all your heart for someone to come cut your head off as quickly as possible.

Crang would literally mobilize the kingdom's direct garrison forces to crush anyone who even showed signs of bandit activity.

When that was not enough, he sent out the capital's peacekeeping corps.

As a result, organized bandit gangs and highway robber outfits roaming the kingdom's wide lands had become nearly impossible to find.

What remained were little more than crime guilds parasitizing the cities.

Even those types all ended up dead if they got caught doing things like human trafficking. No excuse and no bribe could save them.

And yet someone had abducted a child and crossed the border into Naurillia?

Could he just let that go?

That seemed to be what Crang was asking. And so..."Agreed."

Enkrid decided without hesitation to follow Crang's intent. That had been the reason he took this job in the first place. Honestly, that was all there was to it, the imperial delegates and great-power visitors had already faded from his mind entirely, and on top of that, Audin's past had been layered over it.

He had been motivated to some degree from the start, and now that motivation had become something more active.

Enkrid picked up the train of thought he had been carrying the entire journey here.

Everything started with a question.

What did proper swordsmanship require?

A certain level of strength. So he built strength first.

He asked questions, found answers, and acted on them.

The same applied now. To solve the problem in front of him, Enkrid posed a question.

Where should he begin?

This was not the first time he had handled something like this.

'Been a while since I worked as a bounty hunter.'

He was chasing a kidnapper, but in practice it was not all that different from chasing a wanted criminal.

In fact, once both situations reached the point of active pursuit, they were nearly identical.

Did you need to move without being seen?

Yes.

Could you afford to have people recognize you?

No.

If you caught a suspicious look or your gut told you something was off, did you need to run?

Yes.

If things went sideways, did you need to deal with every witness before moving on?

Yes.

See? Exactly the same.

So Enkrid could approach this job in much the same way.

"So what I was thinking is, well."

He trailed off and turned to look at Audin and Sinar.

There might be a better approach than what he had come up with, so it was only right to hear what the group had to say.

"Say whatever's on your mind. We don't know who the kidnapper is, and we have no description of the Holy Maiden. The conditions for a chase are about as bad as they get, but if you have an idea, speak up."

Audin answered first.

"I am waiting for the Father to guide the way."

He said it with both hands clasped together and a smile, in the posture of a man at prayer.

There was no need to chew over those words.

'He's telling me to figure it out myself.'

Enkrid accepted it without argument.

Having heard part of the man's history, he understood him well enough by now.

Audin had experience catching heretics, but he had never tracked a single person across the continent.

His heretic hunting amounted to finding someone hiding in a corner of a city.

The main task was tracking that person down and pressing them to confirm whether they were in fact a heretic.

In other words, he might well become a Master of the beating, but it would be hard to call him a master of tracking or hunting.

"And if no divine guidance comes, you just let it go?"

He asked again just to be sure. Better to confirm everything clearly.

"Is the Commander not here, brother?"

Audin was being honest.

In some ways he could be called an even more laid-back piece of work than Ragna.

He had laid out his entire past, taken on the weight of it all, and then told Enkrid to handle the actual work himself.

If he were lazy about it there would be room for complaint, but this was a man who said those words and then prayed and trained and did everything asked of him.

He seemed genuinely faithful to his own stated position of waiting for the right moment.

And underneath that, the resolve, that when such a moment came, Audin would be the first one forward, was still visible.

That resolve carried a hint of something beyond ordinary worldly concerns, a kind of serene acceptance.

No matter how warm his smile was, the massive frame that made people mistake him for a bear-type Beastfolk never disappeared, and in the same way, behind his easy-going manner, a heaviness of heart was still there.

Nobody knew how this would end. It might conclude without incident, with nothing more than catching a kidnapper and going home. There might be no moment that required him to step in at all.

But if something happened, Audin would not weigh what he stood to lose or gain. He would do whatever it took for the sake of what he believed.

That was how it looked.

Enkrid gave a nod, taking it as it was, and turned to Sinar.

"You are asking me?"

The question came out with no trace of a smile, same as always.

The autumn sunlight was pleasantly warm, a cool breeze moved through the air, and small wildflowers scattered across the ground caught the eye.

Sinar was in the middle of walking and looking at those wildflowers when she felt Enkrid's gaze and opened her mouth.

Her sharply developed senses let her perceive where he was looking even without seeing it directly.

When it came to tracking and pursuit, she was better than Audin. Much better.

"Finding tracks and following them is not difficult."

Not every elf was fleet-footed and skilled in tracking, but Sinar was.

The problem was that she had never given any thought to the process that came before finding those tracks.

In other words, Sinar was an exceptional asset for short-range pursuit once a chase was already underway, but she had no real skill in the long-range tracking that began with estimating a target's location from scratch.

You had to know something before you could chase anything.

Tell her to find tracks starting from this forest and follow them, and she would be a swift elf and a master of the hunt. But in the current situation, that ability was not much use.

'Exactly as expected.'

Honestly, he had not counted on anything from her. So there was no disappointment.

Enkrid was unfazed.

The fortunate thing was that he himself had dealt with this kind of work quite a bit.

Sinar was looking at the wildflowers, naming their meanings, and saying that one of them had nectar inside it. Audin was saying that butterflies and bees would fly for that nectar day and night without rest.

In other words, both of them had switched off from the job entirely and were making small talk.

What was surprising was that Audin and Sinar had something in common somewhere.

"You appear to want none of the nectar for yourself," Sinar said.

Enkrid was watching the two of them idly while turning things over in his head, and the content of that exchange branded itself into his mind like a mark burned by fire.

"The nectar belongs to the butterflies and the bees. If a passing bear-type Beastfolk tried to take it, there would be nothing left."

"Bears do not eat nectar from wildflowers. They eat honeycomb nectar."

Among people of faith, there was sometimes a form of exchange called a koan.

It was a kind of dialogue used to seek truth, and to someone who did not know it, it sounded like grasping at clouds, but for those searching for meaning within it, it could bring genuine understanding.

Enkrid thought the two of them were approaching something close to a koan.

The one who had started it was Sinar, and she was the one steering it.

It was a rare sight, to say the least.

Sinar, who had no interest in other people's business and was the same elf who had slapped Ragna across the face, was apparently offering something like guidance to Audin.

The Sinar who tossed out elfin jokes and the Sinar right now felt like entirely different elves.

The wind moved, and a field of Holy Gold in full bloom came into view.

Under a cloudless sky, it looked as though an orange sunset had settled onto the earth while still holding its light.

A field of Holy Mother flowers blooming so thickly they filled the entire view was the very road the group walked.

Here and there were patches where a Magic Beast or some animal had been at them, but it was a genuinely beautiful sight.

Locals from the nearby city called this place the Field Where the Holy Mother Rested.

Within it, the two of them looked like a painting come to life.

One of those figures kept moving his feet and spoke.

"That is so. Bears eat honey hidden between the trees."

Audin stopped mid-sentence and looked at the flower field. His pupils seemed to lose their focus for a moment. Even so, he did not stop walking.

He seemed to think as he walked. He murmured again, almost to himself.

"Whosoever desires the honey, give it to them."

It had the sound of something from scripture. His tone said as much.

"If there is one who hoards the honey for themselves alone, that one is already touched by evil, and you shall rebuke that greedy soul harshly and send them to god's side."

Being sent to god's side was a synonym for death, so what it meant was that if such a person existed, you should beat them to death.

They say three years in a noble's service puts table manners into you without your trying.

Enkrid was exactly in that position.

Having listened to Audin's communal prayers so many times, he could now follow the rough meaning without much trouble.

"But that would have to be done by someone with the standing for it."

Audin said it like a doll stripped of all feeling, not a trace of emotion, and then closed his mouth.

Sinar had not said any of it out of a sense of responsibility. She paid no attention to Audin's reaction and simply let it pass without pressing further.

Instead, looking at the flower field,

"Betrothed of mine, that field looks like a bed prepared just for us," she said.

An elfin joke and nothing more.

"By all means, go take a nap."

Enkrid gave a vague reply and went back to the thought he had been working through.

Whatever was on Audin's mind or in his heart was not something he could get to the bottom of by pushing right now.

Doing what needed to be done was enough.

Enkrid did that.

He kept walking through the flower field, letting his thoughts continue. They were thoughts about what the pursuit would require.

'The most important thing is information.'

Right. Information.

Where was the target, what condition were they in, what did they look like, all of that.

The job had come to him, but the pursuers from the Holy State had not passed along any of that information.

That, well, he could understand.

Honestly, those people had not sent that request because they genuinely wanted help.

So what method could he use to obtain the information?

The solution he had worked out drew partly on his own experience, but Krais's input was mixed in as well.

They had talked it through right before he set out after accepting the job.

"I gathered a few things through the Gielpin Guild network, do you remember that city we went to before? The village where you told me to hold a knife to the throat of someone called a headman or a Village Headman? The village that was going to name its walls after the Commander?"

Having repeated the same day so many times, it all felt like something from the very distant past, but it was not something he could easily forget.

How could he forget a Gnoll Colony built by Cultists?

"What about that village?"

"Apparently the kidnapper headed there."

The first destination after leaving Border Guard was decided.

Even so, Enkrid still had no idea what the kidnapper looked like, and he had no description of the Holy Maiden's appearance or age.

Did that mean there was no way forward? No, there was.

If he did not know who he was chasing, he could chase whoever was chasing them.

That was the first thing he had learned from a senior hunter back when he was doing bounty hunter work.

"Hey, where do guys like us get information to work with? You think we have Krona to spare? You think we can use an information guild? Drop all the half-baked nonsense and just memorize the faces of the famous ones instead. Then if you spot one of them, you follow right behind."

It could be called a breakthrough tracking method.

Any target everyone wanted always had pursuers on them.

What if the target hid perfectly?

You simply did not chase that kind of person in the first place.

"And if you chase them alone, you think you can take them down?"

Someone hunted with a bounty on their head, what kind of ability did they have?

Could someone who could not fight their way out of a paper bag push through a place where bandits, Demon Creatures, and Magic Beasts all walked side by side?

No.

That was obvious.

So anyone with a bounty on their head was in all likelihood a capable fighter. More than likely, it was practically certain.

"What we eat is the scraps. If you want to live long, follow the hunter's code."

That was the teaching.

Well, Enkrid had never followed the hunter's code and had no intention of starting, but it went something like this.

Don't risk your life on a hunt.

If you can't win alone, go with a partner.

Even if you see someone bleeding out in front of you, throw a crossbow bolt or a throwing knife first.

The code was full of things like that.

The first senior hunter he met had been a decent person. The one he met after that had no code to speak of and just pushed him in first, saying he would get seventy percent of the bounty if he caught the mark now.

That one was a piece of trash who could not track anything to save himself, fronted his fighting as his only skill, and made a habit of betrayal.

Of course it was all a lie. It was obvious from the start that he planned to kill Enkrid the moment he took a hit and went down.

"Sorry, sorry, I got a little pressed for time."

There had been one who said exactly that while pulling out a knife after Enkrid really did get hurt.

Enkrid decided to use what he had learned in those days.

The method was to track the tracker, since he did not know who the target was.

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