WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 568: How Much Did They Say They'd Pay?

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When something crosses from strange into the realm of the uncanny, there is usually a reason for it.

'Does the Holy Maiden have help?'

No.

Then there was only one answer. The Holy Maiden, fugitive or runaway or whatever she was, had been managing to evade capture entirely on her own.

But did that even make sense? She was a child, wasn't she?

Both Holy Men and Holy Maidens were said to manifest their abilities in early childhood. Audin had told him that, so it was reliable enough.

Enkrid tried to picture a child in his head. For some reason the image that surfaced was Ann as a little girl, the version he had seen recently.

When he thought of someone being hunted and running for their life, it was hard to picture any of his usual companions beside him. Esther, Sinar, Teresa, they all gave impressions of such toughness that the idea seemed absurd.

Ann, on the other hand, was easy enough to imagine being chased. That was just what his mind conjured up without thinking.

Anyway, there was a child out there somewhere. Not a redhead, probably, but a kid with hair swaying as she ran, slipping away from her pursuers?

That was a ghoul barking nonsense.

And yet the fact remained, plain and undeniable, that someone had slipped through the fingers of trackers who ranked among the best on the continent at finding people.

If that was not uncanny, what was?

'Could she be a mage?'

No, that did not fit either. She was a Holy Maiden, not a mage.

Which brought him to one conclusion: the child had some exceptional talent, something rare enough to create the situation they were now chasing down.

The odds of that guess being wrong were not high. Nothing else accounted for it.

'Alone.'

Enkrid ran through the three approaches a hunted person would typically use, working from what he knew.

'If there are people scattered across the continent willing to hide you, it's possible.'

Someone who had allies or safe houses in every city they passed through, sure, they could stay ahead of a pursuit for a long time. The second option was mastery of disguise.

'But the people the Holy State sent wouldn't miss something like that.'

So were those first two methods even viable? Hardly.

Unless every last one of those trackers was the sort who would lose a chess match against a ghoul, they were capable of thought. And what would they think to do?

Looking into the target's family, friends, lovers, and acquaintances was the foundation of any manhunt.

Disguise? Just hiding your face a little, was that enough?

Smearing mud on your cheeks and dabbing on some dye, did that make you someone else?

Fine, say you had real talent for concealing your appearance. But could anyone, however gifted, spend their entire life hiding like that?

There would always come a moment when you had to prove who you were. Or a gap in your cover story that someone would poke at. Someone who grew suspicious.

Hide in some mountain village where Demon Creatures never showed up?

Where exactly was a place like that?

Even if such a village existed, the fewer people living there, the harder it was to keep secrets. In a small community where the whole village knew about a couple's quarrel by the next morning, concealing a person was not easy.

So you would end up living in a town, and towns checked identities more rigorously than people expected, even with forged papers.

'Nothing stays secret forever.'

And spending every day of your life suspecting everyone around you, that was not really living.

On top of that, anyone who had done bounty hunting for any length of time never stopped watching for strangers who appeared in a city without explanation. Information guilds and bounty hunter guilds existed for exactly that reason.

It was the same in Border Guard. During the day the standing army worked as a peacekeeping force, checking on people, and at night Gielpin's guild handled that role.

Every city had people doing the same job. Border Guard was already seeing new guilds start to put down roots.

So you ended up hiding in the slums, and trackers knew that. The moment a trail went cold, the slums were the first place they turned. They did not show up in every city and start glaring at the vagrant districts for nothing.

Then again, going to an inn to take care of food and sleep?

That was more or less asking the gods to hand you over in chains.

Vanishing completely in an ordinary city was therefore not possible. Hiding from people's eyes was simply the hardest thing in the world.

Of course there were those who had managed it, who disappeared and were never found. But they were rare. Truthfully, Enkrid figured most of them had tucked themselves into a slum somewhere and quietly made their way to the gods' side without anyone noticing, with no shortage of people ready to empty their pockets the moment they heard a coin jingle.

That left the third option, the one that was actually viable and the most sensible of the three.

'Stop in a city as rarely as possible. Get all your rest and sleep somewhere beyond the walls.'

You avoided people and dealt with Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts instead. You traveled on the paths animals used, through mountains, forests, and open fields rather than trade routes cleared by merchant caravans. There were problems with this approach too, though.

Even the best fighter alive still needed to sleep and eat.

So how did you eat? Where did you sleep?

Raw strength alone was not enough to make a good fugitive.

Well, maybe if you had the combat ability of a junior knight, the kind that even a knightly order would acknowledge internally, then it became more feasible. But even then, staying clear of the Holy State's reach for any length of time seemed a long shot.

So what would actually work?

Becoming a skilled Ranger. Or a skilled hunter.

If you dropped someone anywhere on the continent and asked which profession gave the best odds of survival, it would be a Ranger or a hunter, without question.

They knew how to sleep in trees. They knew how to dress a Magic Beast for meat.

Taste was not really a factor in that calculus.

Enkrid's thinking had brought him to that point.

"A born hunter? Could something like that exist?"

He asked the question as he walked. There was no urgency in his pace. Trailing the rear of a pursuit had a way of requiring patience, waiting for things to ripen before pressing forward.

The autumn sunlight was pleasant enough, but he had been too deep in thought to take much of it in. The same went for anything else along the road behind them.

They were climbing a low rise. Sinar raised a hand to shade her eyes from the sun and said, "Something like that cannot exist."

This was Sinar speaking, an elf who had personally built and led a Ranger Unit from the ground up.

Enkrid agreed with her.

A hunter needed to learn the terrain, understand the habits of Demon Creatures, and build up that knowledge through experience. Without learning, without practice, hunting was a hopeless ambition.

Which made all of this strange.

Still, the mystery would sort itself out once they found the girl. Ask her directly and some answer would come. For now, there was nothing to do but keep chasing.

Enkrid had put together a plan of sorts. That was exactly why he had turned down Doitchi Fullman's offer at the end.

"I can attach soldiers who know the terrain. It won't take long at all. I can spare a squad."

"No, I think we're fine without."

He had declined Deutsch's offer politely.

He had his own thinking on how to go about it, and Deutsch had already done more than enough by breaking up that brotherhood operating inside the city and passing along what he knew.

Over twenty parties, by the sound of it, bounty hunters, mercenaries, guides, people with a reputation for tracking down other people, all moving at once.

Enkrid had no idea which direction east of here to head for. He had set out anyway.

That was not blind luck. It was deliberate.

Back during his time as a guide and later as a bounty hunter, he had been on both sides of a chase, the one running and the one following. What were his odds back then?

Less than half. He had a reasonable eye for finding a path but was no expert tracker.

'Would have been a little easier if Rem were here.'

The gray-haired barbarian who despised nobles, if he had been along, he would have put his hunter's instincts to use. Rem knew how to follow people and how to find them.

If Dunbakel had been here, her nose and instincts would have been a serious asset.

Sinar helped, of course. But this was not her home ground, not the land she had grown up in.

More precisely, Rem and Dunbakel could become hunters anywhere. An elf could not, not in the same way.

Short-range tracking was within her ability, but hunting with the terrain factored in was a different matter.

Did that cause problems? No, not really.

The person he had been as a bounty hunter and the person he was now were not the same.

Enkrid knew his natural ability as a guide was ordinary, nothing to boast about. What he had now, in its place, was a pair of legs that could range through the night without tiring.

Strong Legs.

If a narrow view missed something, you widened your field of sight.

Audin and Sinar were not people who would wear out from a half-day of scouting the surrounding area either.

And scanning this area and pushing into the eastern forest looked like it would take no more than half a day.

He had already spent plenty of time in Border Guard running himself across the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, checking just how far his legs could carry him.

Ruagarne had said it once: knowing clearly what you are capable of is the finest tactic there is.

Enkrid had trained on exactly that principle, and it was paying off now.

He divided the terrain he could see into sections and calculated how long it would take him to reach each at a run. It came naturally from having done it with his own body so many times.

This was not aimless wandering either.

He had heard that over twenty specialists had been deployed to this task. They were stepping stones, signposts pointing him toward his destination.

Better still, they were not the ones being hunted, so they had made no effort to hide their trail.

Even now, moving at a light jog toward the eastern forest, the mangled and scattered remains of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts were already visible.

Ahead, large trees with jagged, spiky leaves blocked the view. The smell of blood hung in patches. On one side, a monster had been flung into a boulder with enough force to crush it. Among the scattered remains in front of that boulder, a severed human-faced dog's head lay with what looked like burn marks pressed into it again and again, deliberate and methodical.

"These are traces of a Holy Knight Order."

Audin stopped beside the remains of a Demon Creature and said it. He dropped to one knee and examined a few of the bodies.

"Sounds like someone with a nasty streak is in the mix," Sinar added.

Killing was killing, but this was killing with cruelty drawn out along the way. Less a grudge against Demon Creatures, more someone who had a taste for inflicting pain.

Enkrid nodded and caught Sinar's eye.

"I see my assistance is required," she said, her face perfectly blank. "Very well. I shall step forward for the sake of my betrothed's difficulties."

She said it and then did exactly that, turning to examine the marks left by the fighting.

Her experience would read the scene better than he could on his own.

Enkrid was not standing idle either. He looked over footprints and snapped branches, reading the traces.

Some of those in pursuit had been moving fast. Signs of forcing through living branches, breaking a path ahead, were plain to see.

'Decent work.'

The cut surfaces of branches told him this was not someone mediocre. One clean cut rather than several ragged strikes.

Still, it fell a little short of what you would expect from a Holy Knight Order. The cut faces were somewhat uneven.

Sinar studied the ground, pressed close to smell it, then lifted her head. Enkrid looked at her.

"Which direction?"

"This way. It won't be long."

She answered immediately. The two of them finished speaking and moved, with Audin falling in behind.

From here on, even if Doitchi Fullman had come himself, the gap in pace and movement would have shown. There was no way to bring soldiers who knew the local terrain through ground like this at this speed.

Covering the entire area in half a day meant moving exactly like this.

Enkrid cut through a few branches with the shortsword Aetri had lent him and pressed forward.

The grip fit his hand the way a good sword should, the blade feeling like an extension of his hand rather than a separate object. A fine sword.

Aetri had said to use it for the time being, but this was a weapon made to fit one person exactly.

A sword that settled into the hand the moment you picked it up.

'Feels good to use.'

Thinking that, he turned his attention outward and caught what sounded like voices, far ahead.

Sinar's "it won't be long" had meant close enough to catch sound.

She had been right.

The distance was still too great to make out words clearly.

"Let's pick up the pace."

Enkrid said it and pushed off the ground, short, light kicks, bending at the knee, reading the surface for sharp stones and uneven patches and landing cleanly past them.

No dirt sprayed up where his feet touched, but his body drove forward steadily. A dark shadow trailing a blurred afterimage, seen from above it would have looked like a long snake threading through the trees.

The path ahead had been opened by those who came before, which made following it easier.

Audin came behind him. A frame that large should have been catching branches at head height with every step, but he ran with his torso half-folded and managed just fine.

Sinar needed no comment at all.

Once they were inside the forest, she ran like a fish finding water, driving off the ground with each stride. When something blocked the path, she ran straight up a half-toppled tree without breaking rhythm.

A talent that made you think: yes, that is an elf.

None of the three were pushing themselves, but they moved faster than any squirrel.

Three large squirrels arrived at the source of the sound in almost no time at all.

Before them, two men and a woman came into view, cutting a path ahead.

The first pursuit party.

They had not come quietly, so all three turned around at once. Their wariness at the sudden appearance of Enkrid's group was plain.

Enkrid looked at them and decided to satisfy one small curiosity.

"How much are they offering?"

He wanted to know what the Holy State had put on the table, enough to bring this many self-styled trackers swarming in such a short time. A minor question that had come to him along the way.

He was curious about the spending habits of a tight-fisted religious order.

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