WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 570: Letting It Slip Isn't the End

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"Leave traces leading into the forest."

That way, he could funnel most of the pursuers in there.

Forests were not good places to search. Their sweep would eat time.

By drawing them in and forcing them to hunt for tracks, he could buy at least half a day, maybe more.

That was the idea.

Drive them into the woods, and the Holy Maiden takes a different route out.

Simple enough as facts went.

Remarkable, really, how well she used her head. Either that, or someone had drilled this into her bones through brutal training.

Which brought him back to the same question.

Why did the Holy Knight Order come themselves?

From what little he had gathered, the Holy State's pursuers were the Holy Knight Order. Part of their armed forces had stepped forward for this.

Why?

Chasing down one child. Why send Holy Warriors who proved themselves through combat?

Their presence would have forced a formal notification to the kingdom as well.

His mind churned through it and landed on one conclusion.

What the Holy Maiden had not accounted for was someone who could slice through a forest in one sweep, Manticore or not, and come out the other side without a scratch.

That was exactly what Enkrid had done, running the outer edge of the forest in one go, and that was how he had reached this conclusion.

Ignorance punishes your legs, but legs that hurt have earned something in return.

He had read the fugitive's intent.

Had he tracked each clue slowly and methodically, he never would have noticed it.

The pursuit party was in the forest east of Pelheim. The target's trail had cut off near the forest's edge, angled naturally inward.

So. He had torn through the area and pulled out information. What about the Holy Knight Order?

Had they anticipated even this?

They might have.

They knew this Holy Maiden. They were the ones who had chased her this far. They had been tricked before, probably more than once.

The Holy Knight Order were not Ghouls. Take one hit and you prepare for the next.

What would their preparation look like?

So that's why they padded the numbers.

It was not simply about casting a wider net with Krona. These bounty hunters were bait. Bait to make the Holy Maiden react.

Even so, the stinginess was plain even here, which was almost funny.

"Normally you get half the fee upfront, but this time they only gave us a tenth. Still, the Priest swore on his god, so we trusted it and moved."

That was how it went.

They already knew these hunters would fail, so they played it this way. Cut the advance payment to almost nothing, then sold their god's name as collateral.

Rotten did not quite cover it. They had sold their god's name in a genuinely creative fashion.

Quite the crew.

While the bounty hunters and the rest moved, the Holy Knight Order would be tracking the girl's trail separately, taking a different direction.

Seen from a distance, the shape of it was clear. A driven hunt. Like running hunting dogs into every burrow to push a rabbit toward the trap.

"Got played," Enkrid said.

No one was perfect. This kind of thing happened.

The odds in a chase had never been better than fifty-fifty, and they still were not. Becoming a knight did not change that. He had not trained relentlessly to become a great tracker.

Was it too late? Maybe. But that was no reason to stop.

It had always been this way. Getting caught was not the end, and neither was losing a trail.

A fifty percent success rate meant half the time it worked, and Enkrid had been on the wrong side of that more than he cared to count.

But when things finally did work out, it was because he had never quit.

"Return to the city. Keep up with me."

He said it and ran.

Boom.

The ground tore where he kicked off, letting out something close to a scream. Strong Legs driving him forward, not a breath or drop of strength held in reserve.

A Ghoul stepped into his path. Enkrid did not draw his sword. He passed it like a blur and snapped its neck.

Excellent Valaf Martial Arts.

Both hands found the Ghoul's neck. The cervical bones cracked and pulled free, a section of spine briefly greeting the world, and the Ghoul dropped.

After that, Demon Creatures, Magic Beasts, whatever crossed his path, he cut through all of it and kept running.

He reached the city.

Enkrid pulled a breath in deep, chest expanding.

"Deu-tsch!"

The same Will-carrying voice that had once summoned Audin cracked through the entire city.

"Aaah!"

A child feeding a donkey nearby startled and fell backward.

A construction guild worker putting up the inn building drove a hammer straight into his own hand and cried out.

"Agh!"

The shockwave of that shout. Enkrid ignored everything registering around him and kept running as he called out, and soon enough the one he had called appeared.

Barefoot again, as usual.

"What? What is this, what's going on?"

A startled Deutsch found Enkrid's blue-lit eyes shoved right up to his face.

"Do you know where the Holy Knight Order is?"

He did, as it turned out.

After Enkrid left, Deutsch had kept gathering information from everywhere he could.

"Yes. They were spotted somewhere to the north."

They had no talent for concealment, so finding their trail had been easy enough.

But that was all. North? North where?

Enkrid decided to be blunt about it again.

Use his legs to fill in what information could not.

"Let's run."

Enkrid shook the city with another thunderous shout and sprinted back out.

"Good to see you again, brother!" came a voice behind him, from one large man with a reputation for being a bear Beastfolk.

"Right then. On behalf of my betrothed, you have my gratitude," said an Elf following close behind, throwing out a peculiar remark.

All three vanished as fast as they had arrived, running off in the same direction.

It really did look like they had swept in and swept right back out.

Deutsch stood there for a moment feeling like he had been visited by ghosts.

That man Enkrid, whenever he showed up, showed you something impossible to predict.

Deutsch let out a slow breath and headed back inside the manor. Not long after, another visitor arrived.

"Would it be possible to know where the people from the order went?"

A man with drooping eyes that gave him a gentle look. Mid-to-late forties, armed with a Plate Cuirass among other things, and one glance at that equipment was enough to know this was no ordinary person.

The most striking feature was his eyes. Silver pupils.

One more thing, if pressed: he looked older than he appeared on the surface. Nothing but a feeling, but the feeling was clear.

"If it's a burden, you need not say a word, but I would still ask. No harm will come of it. Brother."

Deutsch could not offer a clumsy refusal here.

The atmosphere, the bearing, the tone, all of it made plain that the power this man carried was far from ordinary.

Even so, should he speak just to look out for himself?

No, but he should speak anyway. Whatever this man's intent, he could say something and then step in himself to manage the fallout.

Deutsch, who had been looking to step back as things grew tangled and complicated, made his decision.

"Come with me."

He would step in himself, in case things went sideways.

The silver-eyed man broke into a wide smile.

"My gratitude, then."

* * *

The first thing the girl who became a Holy Maiden ever held was a bow, and the first thing she ever made was a trap.

A rock leaned against the dirt floor, a small stick propped underneath, a thin piece of leather laid on top, and a stone set on the leather so that when touched it fell with a small thud. It could barely catch a single mouse. But that was her toy, and that was her game.

That was the Holy Maiden's childhood.

Somehow having become a fugitive, the Holy Maiden had decided here to shake off the ones chasing her.

Pelheim.

She recited the city's name out of habit, took in the surrounding terrain, and made her assessment. Leave traces near the forest edge to the east, and she could shake most of the pursuers.

She knew that from experience.

They'll let their guard down, won't they?

She could make it look as if she were being cornered and forced to flee. Let it look that way on the outside. But whatever the pursuers thought, the Holy Maiden had no intention of going deep into that forest.

She knew well enough, even if this was not the land she had grown up in, just how dangerous a forest was to a person.

A human-faced dog or a Ghoul or two, maybe. But not the forest itself.

In open ground, your vision opens with it. The natural eyesight she had been born with reduced the danger in open fields.

But not in a forest. However sharp her senses, however good she was at staying half-awake while half-asleep.

Death felt too close in there.

She felt it in her gut.

You die.

Enter a forest without preparation, and you die. Climb a mountain without preparation, and you die.

Her grandfather had taught her that. Her experience had confirmed it.

So she would not go into the forest.

But she could make them think she had.

That was what she had spent three near-deaths setting up.

She had laid out a route no ordinary person would dare attempt and moved through it to create exactly that impression.

As the thought passed through her, the girl known as the Holy Maiden reached up and touched one of her ears.

The ear that rose to a point but stopped short was far blunter than an Elf's, yet still sharper than any ordinary person's. That said something clear.

She was a Half-Elf.

The Holy Maiden read the terrain and made her call.

I'll cut it here.

If she vanished too cleanly from the start, as if she had leapt into the sky or sunk into the ground, the pursuers would grow suspicious.

She needed to funnel their thinking in one direction.

Leave footprints here.

She deliberately laid down tracks pointing into the forest.

To sell the look of a panicked escape, snapping a few branches would help too.

After planting the right amount of evidence, the Holy Maiden tied a cord around her waist with a blunt, oblong stone knotted at the end.

Whirr.

She swung the stone and threw it at a branch overhead. The tough cloth cord caught on the stone's weight, looped around several times, and held.

She stepped up the trunk, got herself horizontal, then leapt to the nearest branch and moved from there to the next. A path through the trees.

Moving through the canopy meant she could fool anyone looking for prints on the ground below.

She would work around the edge of the forest, not go inside, then come back out.

What that required?

She would need to climb trees the way a flying squirrel did.

She could. So she did.

She would have to stay sharp the whole time, ears tuned for any flying Demon Creature or Magic Beast. If she heard wingbeats, or sensed an anomalous creature entering her range, she would have to bolt immediately.

That, too, was putting her life on the line. But the chances of running into that kind of danger were not high.

Evil Spirits and their kind did not appear in sunlit borderlands, and Harpies and large flying Demon Creatures tended to avoid the clutter of a forest interior.

The biggest threat here would be something like an owl Magic Beast, but it was midday, and the odds of running into a nocturnal creature were low.

That was why she had chosen this time of day.

Everything calculated, everything set in motion, and this was where it had landed.

Not bad.

What her grandfather had taught her, and what she had learned through her own experience, had put her here.

Obviously, none of it had been easy.

Escaping the Holy State was never going to be easy.

Getting this far had meant appealing to someone's conscience, and it had meant someone else walking into danger for her sake.

There had been a Priest who had cared for her like a wet nurse, and in the end a monk who had finally made her escape possible.

They'll be branded heretics and killed.

She had known nothing at first, but she had received over eight months of education aimed at making her a Holy Maiden.

Seiki knew enough now.

She knew, for instance, what this wretched order intended to do with her.

Why does it matter so much that I make holy water, or potions, or whatever it is?

The teaching was to prove her divinity, but it was starting to look like brainwashing. She kept her suspicion hidden inside and wore a calm face on the outside.

She had had no choice.

The Holy Maiden set the thought aside for now.

This was a time to concentrate.

The last step of erasing her traces along the tree path: she gripped a branch and braced herself, planting her feet against the trunk.

It was unlikely anyone would track her this far, but you never knew.

"Hoo."

Seiki steadied her breath, bent her knees, and launched herself.

Her body kicked off the trunk with a thud, and for a moment she hung in the air like a flying squirrel catching a glide.

Her body leveled out horizontal to the ground.

She had no wings, so of course she fell, and fall she did. When the ground came up to meet her, she tucked her shoulder into a roll and came back up.

The landing was clean. Not a scratch on her.

Her wrist ached a little, but that would clear up soon enough.

She unwound the cord from the tree, wrapped it around her waist, and set off.

Now she had to loop back near the city and work around it from the outside.

As she moved, Seiki found herself thinking back to how all of this had started.

That day had been a real mess.

She had not known it at the time, but looking back, that was what it was. Looking back, she thought, if she had handled that day better, maybe she would not be running now.

Though honestly, that was hard to say.

The order would not have given up on a Holy Maiden easily.

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