WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 569: A Born Hunter?

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The Holy State is famous for not wasting money.

"Heh heh, we offer our blessings in gratitude for your efforts."

That kind of talk-your-way-out approach was one of their favorites. It was well-known.

Whether someone was a believer or not, they never spent Krona. They hoarded it. They tried to handle everything internally whenever possible.

If someone were to rank the nations most despised by the construction guild, the Holy State would probably top the list.

For the continental trading houses, it was unambiguously number one.

Leona had said as much once.

"I respect priests, but I don't work with religious types."

That went for all priests, corrupt or not.

When the Holy State needed mercenaries, they used their own combat Holy Knight Order. When they needed guides, they deployed trained Inquisitors. They even ran their own trading operations.

"Isn't that something? All of it, just to avoid spending Krona?"

That was Leona's view.

Enkrid agreed, but he saw another meaning layered underneath.

'From the start, they never let outsiders into church affairs.'

Well, part of it was that they hated seeing Krona leave their hands. That much was obvious.

So how unusual was this, then.

What kind of sum had they offered, for people to involve themselves in church business?

Bounty hunters, as people who chased down other people were commonly called, never moved without an advance. That meant a certain amount of Krona had already changed hands.

That was a little surprising.

Enkrid thought as much, which was why he had asked.

And beyond the Krona itself, the sheer boldness of the move surprised him more.

Those who had come out of the Holy State would have spread word everywhere as they crossed the Naurillia border.

Using something like the Information Guild to post a commission was nothing. Easy work.

They would have had to pay the corresponding fee, but if they had minded that, they never would have commissioned anyone in the first place.

In other words, from the moment they left the Holy State, they had spared nothing in hunting this Holy Maiden.

Understanding their intent was far easier than imagining kidnappers who had never existed.

'Profit.'

Catching the child who had become a Holy Maiden would yield far greater returns than spending a bit of Krona hiring hunters.

Lofty ideals? None of that. The feeling he got, and the way things were playing out, said the same.

"Who are you?"

The three pursuers had no eyes to recognize them.

All three wore something like thin leather clothing, material that looked like it could stand in for armor in a pinch. Light outfits, all of them.

"Tracks on the girl you're chasing? Nothing, huh?"

Enkrid said it as he noted that the first draw had been a blank.

Then he had no business with these three.

"These bastards, looks like they heard a rumor and tagged along, but this isn't something small-timers should be sticking their noses into."

A woman glared with sharp, aggressive eyes. She looked uneasy. The three who had appeared out of nowhere did not look ordinary.

Audin's bulk alone gave off a wrongness, and on top of that, an elf, and then a man whose face alone snatched your gaze the moment you saw it.

Why is he so handsome?

Despite the shock and confusion, the face still caught her eye.

Black hair, blue eyes, like they worked some kind of spell.

Even so, she did not let her pupils go unfocused and blurt out something like "he's handsome" right there and then.

Just from the woman's words, Enkrid could tell the Krona the Holy State was offering was no small sum.

Had he ever seen the church conduct itself this way? Never.

He did not actually care about the exact figure, so that was answer enough.

"Audin."

Enkrid said it and moved toward the man standing to the right.

Not just a casual walk. From the other side's perspective, Enkrid would have looked like he suddenly expanded. No need to stomp the ground, he tilted his body forward, activated Strong Legs, raised his Will, and launched off the earth with firm legs. The man's face rushed toward him.

The shift in that face, from wariness and unease to outright shock, played out moment by moment in front of him.

Enkrid's senses already operated on a different level from an ordinary swordsman, and it showed.

The man's expression had been moving toward something like a gasp, mouth half-open to show just how startled he was, when Enkrid's Hand Blade caught him at the back of the neck.

He had stopped one step to the right of the man and swung his arm.

His left arm curved softly and snapped like a whip.

Thud.

The man let out a short grunt and crumpled sideways. Enkrid caught him as he fell and laid him gently on the ground.

Right beside him, Audin had charged at nearly the same speed and put the other two down the same way.

One got a hammer blow to the crown with a closed fist.

Thump.

Not dead. Eyes rolled back to show nothing but white, and the man went down with a wet groan.

The other got his throat lightly choked, air cut off.

"Gh, ghk."

The one hanging by the neck from Audin's grip kicked his legs in the air.

Dirt and dry leaves stuck to his soles scattered left and right.

His feet even grazed Audin's chest, but that was all.

Thud.

Audin put him out and set him down.

No signs of Demon Creatures or Magic Beasts nearby, and they would not stay unconscious long. None of them would die.

"Next."

Enkrid moved at once toward the next trail. Nothing difficult from here on.

Footprints in the ground, snapped branches, scent, sound, the remains of dead Demon Creatures, the lay of the land, the kinds of paths a person would naturally take. He moved by those markers.

Anyone watching would have thought he was sprinting like a madman.

Along the way, he ran into a familiar face.

Someone who had once stepped forward and offered him seventy percent of the commission if Enkrid would fight first.

A hunter who made kidnapping his trade. Rotten. The worst kind.

Either word fit him well enough.

Enkrid had assumed this one was long dead, but he was still breathing.

The seventy percent offer? He had known from the start it was empty talk, so back then he had lured over some Magic Beasts and bolted.

This was the first time they had crossed paths since.

The man was less a tracking expert and more the type to solve everything with brute force.

Muscled limbs and a mace were the symbols of that identity.

Blood dripped from the mace in scattered drops.

Nearby lay two women who appeared to be from a different hunting party, both dead.

"Got greedy over the Krona and took those two out first, did you?"

Situation read. Enkrid asked.

The bounty hunter with the mace did not recognize Enkrid.

Neither did the two men standing beside him.

Rumors might have gone around about the Iron Wall Knight, but how many people would actually recognize a face when they saw one up close?

Audin's build was absurdly large, but even looking at him, it was hard to immediately think of the bear Beastfolk from Border Guard. People would just assume he was some Giant half-blood.

Sinar looked at the marks left on the ground and spoke.

"Attacked from behind."

They would have sweet-talked the women into joining forces, then brought the mace down from behind. That was why the backs of those skulls were caved in.

"What're you, then?"

It had been true back then, and it was still true now. The man oozed confidence.

He had the ability to back it up, to be fair.

Back then. Not now.

For Enkrid, the past was just the past. Nothing here rose to the level of a grudge. He was the kind of person who lived looking toward tomorrow, not today.

Still, even by the standard that bounty hunters stabbing each other in the back was everyday business, this had crossed a line.

"You went a bit too far."

Enkrid did not bother introducing himself. He drew his sword.

Drew it and moved forward and sliced in one motion. Every movement joined like a single flowing line.

It was the unbroken sword of Knight Aoara, who had protected the City of Aoara.

A gently curved line traced an irregular arc through the air, then that arc grew a long tail and straightened like a meteor.

The meteor became light and blade, and came down onto the man's head.

The mace had no chance to block. A natural result.

Ching.

The iron helmet sitting on his head was cut through by the blade without resistance. Steel Cut, which had once demanded long hours of practice, was now something natural.

The resistance against his hand was markedly lower than before.

The force behind drawing and swinging the sword, the angle, the Will to cut.

All of it combined.

Crack.

The helmet and skull split together, and brain matter and blood dropped heavily to the ground.

He had swung fast enough that barely any blood got on the blade.

The mace's owner lay down beside the two women hunters he had killed.

The reddish-brown soil drank the blood and turned dark.

When Enkrid killed the mace hunter, the two who looked to be his companions tried to bolt immediately.

"Huh?"

"Ugh!"

They were fast. More accurately, they had been ready to run at any moment, that was the more fitting way to put it.

A hunter's ironclad rule: if things go wrong, run. As ironclad as rules got.

Their luck was just terrible.

A knight appearing out of nowhere to cut them down?

About as likely as a god descending to hand out punishment personally.

Of course, the odds of running into a knight and dying were higher than the odds of a god descending, but both were the kind of thing that almost never happened, so in that sense they were similar.

Enkrid reached out with his senses and caught the two as they fled in opposite directions. Everything after that was simply making real what he had already seen through insight.

He spread both arms wide like wings, then folded them in. Two daggers drawn, thrown in the throwing-blade style. The daggers flew left and right with a shriek of air.

Thwack.

One punched through the medulla and out the back of the neck, pinning the man to a tree. The other buried itself in a skull and became a grim decoration.

The one with the dagger in his head thrashed for a few seconds, then walked face-first into a tree with a thud and slid slowly down to the ground, dead.

Blood soaked the earth again.

"God awaits you."

Audin sent them off with a brief prayer.

Should he mention that the god said to be waiting was the war god?

By doctrine, the war god received the dead by dragging them in and beating them first, before anything else.

Knowing that, those words were hard to take as a blessing.

Audin was mourning the dead in earnest, no doubt. If asked, he would probably say:

"If you do something worth hitting for, you should get hit."

Fair enough.

After handling that party, the group kept moving.

Enkrid killed and spared by his own criteria, cycling through them without pause.

From Sinar's perspective, there was a clear line in him. His standard was plain.

Those who only did their own work, he left alone. But anyone who went beyond what was needed, or did something inhuman out of greed, died without exception.

It was not about punishment.

He simply acted as his heart dictated.

Watching him move that way, Sinar felt like she could almost glimpse what his Will was.

He did not hesitate to act on what his heart told him.

The standard separating right from wrong was not found in someone else's eyes. It lived inside him.

And that looked radiant. To Sinar, it did.

After that, they kept running into hunters.

Some of them opened up readily even without knowing who Enkrid's group was.

"The tracks led into the forest, so we followed. A child alone in a forest is suicide, so we figured we'd find the body at best. We were moving while staying out of sight of the Demon Creature and Magic Beast packs. But, hm."

He trailed off mid-sentence.

He had heard there was a Manticore somewhere in this forest, and he had just seen that very Manticore cut into roughly six pieces, scattered at the feet of a slender elf. That was reason enough to go quiet.

Clean cuts through bone and muscle in a single stroke. Just looking at it made you want to be polite.

Most of all, they might have been the ones facing that Manticore.

"Oh, right. Do you know where the Holy Knight Order is?"

"They didn't enter the forest. We arranged a signal for when we met them."

He held up an arrow as he said it, one with a pouch of glittering powder tied to the end.

Enkrid glanced at the arrow and moved again.

If things went well, they might find the child before the Holy State's pursuers did.

'But there are almost no tracks. Isn't this extreme?'

Erasing your footsteps was something a skilled ranger could manage.

Even so, this was a bit much.

Was something off?

The doubt surfaced, and Enkrid spoke.

"Sinar. These tracks."

No need to say more. The elf agreed.

"I know. I find it strange as well."

Strange. That said, no other path was presenting itself right now.

Strange as it was, they had been told she came east, and there was nowhere to hide except this forest.

Enkrid adjusted his thinking here. He decided to move more boldly than before.

Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures posed no real threat, so whenever a trail appeared, he simply drove straight through it.

Moving that way, sweeping a semicircle centered on the forest, they caught and dealt with fifteen hunter parties, and not one of them had found a trace of a girl fleeing alone.

'This doesn't add up, even for an exceptional ranger, let alone some incarnation of a born hunter.'

The thought hit him and his feet stopped.

"Ha."

One of the key principles in pursuit was tracking a line, not a point.

In other words, the best approach was to read the target's mindset, work out the line they would move along, and get there ahead of them.

Predicting a point, exactly where the target would be, was difficult. But find the line and follow it, and things became comparatively simpler.

And the question he had asked himself as they left the city came back to him.

'Is she a born hunter?'

He had swept a rough look over the forest and its tracks.

It was not that there were absolutely no traces.

The pursuers who had come here were all people with experience in this line of work.

The reason they had come to this forest was that they had seen tracks leading in.

A young girl had entered the forest alone.

They would have assumed she was dead, and hoped they might at least recover the body.

If not that, then maybe she had become a meal for some Demon Creature or Magic Beast, and they could salvage a few bone fragments.

Even that would not be easy.

There were plenty of Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts that crunched through bone.

The Manticore Sinar had cut apart tracked by scent and took pleasure in chewing people down to the bone. Of course, that one had reacted because the group had been moving noisily, but still.

They had seen Ghouls, too, and run into a few spider-type Demon Creatures along the way.

Even for an exceptional hunter, could someone survive this? Alone? A child?

"I think we were played."

More precisely, they had been taken in by the trick of the one they were chasing, not by the Holy Knight Order.

In other words, the Holy Maiden had run a con on them, and they had swallowed it whole.

Enkrid sorted his thoughts and began working backward through the Holy Maiden's escape route.

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