WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 586: Emblem of the Border Guard Standing Army

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The envoy who had locked eyes with Enkrid shook his head. There was nothing of that sort in the letter. The reason he had stayed in person was because there was something that had to be delivered by word of mouth, not committed to paper.

Everyone around had urged against writing it down.

There were Sect members present, so even these words might be passed on, but the envoy felt something hot rising inside him.

If you want to pass it on, then pass it on.

Enkrid's manner had stirred that boldness in him.

Whether it was the Sect or anything else, if this man believed in the path he was walking and intended to walk it, what did it matter who said what?

That was what the man sitting at the center of the council chamber seemed to be saying without a word.

Who was the one speaking from that seat right now?

A hero of the kingdom. A close friend of the king. The Demon Slayer. The Iron Wall Knight.

Whether blocking his path was right or wrong, he would clear whatever stood before him.

Feeling the urge to shout at anyone who dared obstruct a hero, the envoy opened his mouth.

"To strike the Iron Wall Knight is the same as striking me. So do as you will, and know that it is my will as well."

Those were Crang's words. A promise that he would back Enkrid no matter what, a pledge of full support.

"Ah, right. Tell him if it gets dangerous, he should come lend a hand."

Enkrid answered at once. He did not think the meeting was unnecessary, but he had no desire to waste time on empty ceremony.

He had no desire to deliberate over things that needed no deliberation.

"There are unsettling movements of Demon Creatures, Magic Beasts, bandits, and Cultists in the surrounding regions. Particularly in the south..."

This time it was Krais who spoke.

Since the civil war, the area around Border Guard had stabilized. The capital's surroundings had more or less settled as well, but the kingdom's south was still full of trouble.

Apparently a newly formed bandit group had been making a name for itself recently.

"Send troops. Let them get some live combat experience."

Enkrid had his answer out in one breath. Krais stared at him. This was a point they had not discussed beforehand. Even so, the answer matched his own.

"Is this going to punch a hole in our security?"

Enkrid's gaze shifted to Vengeance, who was standing to one side. Vengeance gave a crisp military salute and replied.

"Not in the slightest."

Krais followed up immediately.

"I'll find the right people and send them."

"If trouble comes, I'll go myself."

Enkrid meant it, the way he always did. If the newly formed bandit group had any idea what was being said in this room, they would have dissolved on the spot and gone back to being ordinary citizens.

"Hey, my hands are free too. So are the kids I've been training."

"I can go alone."

Rem and Ragna each tossed in a word, neither willing to be left out.

"I could stop by for a bit as well."

Jaxon chimed in too.

"Next."

Enkrid nodded and moved on. The nod did not mean he was sending Ragna alone, but that was not something to hash out here.

There were many problems. But nothing that could not be handled. That was Enkrid's attitude.

It had been the same since his days as a squad leader, and it had not changed to this day. That was why people looked to him and followed.

Krais already knew all the answers were there, but anxiety had driven him to call the meeting anyway.

Enkrid, as always, did not blame him for it. He simply made his intentions clear in front of everyone.

"I will be a sword on the path the king walks, and anyone who gets in the way of the path I walk, I will cut down. The Sect was exploiting a child, so I brought her out. If something similar happens again, I'll do exactly what I did now."

Children who could be called Holy Men or Holy Maidens were rare within the Sect of Abundance. It was not for nothing that they had thrown all caution aside the moment they saw Seiki and tried to seize her. They must have been desperate, that was why they had acted the way they did.

So Enkrid had already dealt the Sect a blow worth dealing.

While the priests of the god of abundance were working themselves into a fury over Enkrid's aggression, Overdier and Audin would be steadily striking from behind.

Enkrid's actions had, as a matter of outcome, helped those two, but he was not thinking that far ahead. Krais, on the other hand, was.

He already knew what Audin had gone off to do.

Listening to the back-and-forth, watching the situation unfold, the calculations had finished themselves naturally in his head.

All of this was an attack.

'We're going after the Sect.'

More precisely, it meant making the Holy State an enemy.

If Audin failed, they would be left with a very dangerous foe.

But word was that even a Holy Knight had joined the operation Audin had committed to.

Looking at how things were moving, success seemed more likely than failure. The anxiety still surged, of course. The cost of failure would be enormous, which was exactly why he was working his mind this hard.

'But if it succeeds?'

Then they would have gained an extraordinary ally.

Even if the Sect simply stopped being an outright enemy, that alone would be a gain.

Until then, what was Border Guard's job?

Hold. No matter what the Sect did, hold. Going out to fight them head-on was the worst possible strategy.

They were not actually trying to start a religious war.

Enkrid would do that if things came to it, but Krais would not.

That was the worst outcome. It could not be allowed to happen.

"We have to endure. If a head-on clash or a religious war breaks out, winning or losing stops mattering. The only ones who come out ahead are the Cultists."

Krais was working through it all in his head when the genius strategist Azpen had produced spoke up beside him.

Krais turned to look at Abnaier. It was exactly what he had been thinking.

"We endure. While keeping up appearances on the outside."

"Right. And behind those appearances, we do everything that needs doing."

"What's the most dangerous thing here?"

"Any move that causes direct harm to allied or neighboring territories."

The rise of Demon Creatures, Magic Beasts, bandits, and Cultists. Stopping those threats was one thing, but weathering it all without losses would be a genuine success. Would that be easy?

"You're thinking it won't be easy, aren't you? No, I see it differently. Even with our forces spread out, we'll have more than enough."

If Abnaier had any edge over Krais, it was his eye for judging the quality of troops, and his confidence.

Abnaier saw a clearly bright future ahead. A genuinely brilliant tomorrow.

Krais felt the anxiety ease a little. Abnaier was someone called a genius strategist for good reason, and there was something about his words that landed.

'They've all been grinding themselves to the bone.'

Two sharp minds were exchanging words that others could barely follow.

Thud.

Enkrid tapped the table. The sound was not small. The room had grown noisy with everyone putting in their two words, but that single knock made them all go quiet, and every eye turned to the man at the center of it all, the one who guarded this land.

All gazes gathered on him. From that center, in a perfectly unhurried tone, Enkrid spoke.

"Then I'll be going."

A plain farewell, and a declaration that the meeting was over.

He had said what he came to say, and he stood. Rem and the rest of the knight order followed behind him.

Sinar, the Golden Witch, had been present, as had Esther, the Black Flower. No one had spared either of them a single glance. Everyone had only looked at Enkrid.

They watched the road he showed them, accepted the will he had made clear, and listened only to the future he spoke of.

When Enkrid and his group left, only those who had been won over by his spirit and presence remained in the room.

"Right then. Vengeance, call a squad leader meeting with all available forces minus the minimum needed to hold the city. Lord Graham?"

Krais began sorting out the finer details. The broad direction had been set; the rest just needed handling.

"Speak."

"I'd like to request full armament for all personnel by drawing on the equipment stores."

Not training gear, a proper war footing.

"Please pass word to the trade guilds and everyone else as well. Inform the neighboring nobles that Border Guard forces will be moving out on commission, with payment to follow."

If they were going to help, they would help with everything they had. Ordinarily, troops crossing between territories was a sensitive matter, but Border Guard's forces carried a different weight.

Enkrid's presence would see to that. With a name like the Iron Wall Knight behind them, no one would mistake their deployment for territorial ambition.

And if someone did misread it and chose not to ask for help? That was their choice. But everyone who reached out a hand would be saved. That was the decision.

It was what Enkrid wanted too.

"This works. This will work."

Abnaier said it again from beside him.

'Not bad at all.'

Krais ran through a few more calculations silently, in the span of a breath.

All of this was, in practice, an act of expanding their influence in the region. If Crang, the king of Naurillia, had moved to check Enkrid's actions, none of it could have even started. Yet he had come out in official support and promised to help.

In other words, there was nothing left to obstruct Border Guard's movements.

That did not mean the anxiety was entirely gone.

'My skin is crawling.'

If something went wrong, the troop losses would not be light. A single decision here could send people to their deaths.

Krais had something of a weakness in that regard.

People killing and dying, and a wave of the hand sends them tumbling? He hated it. He did not want to do it. But if it had to be done, then it would be done.

That, too, was something Krais had learned from watching Enkrid.

'I just want to open a salon and spend my days with a full belly.'

What Krais truly wanted was something that could only happen in a time of peace.

Dreaming of drawing people from across the entire continent to come looking for pleasure cities where they could eat and idle away their days, that was an ambitious dream.

So when you got down to it, his dream was not so different from Enkrid's.

Krais steadied himself.

A wave of the hand, and people die. But that could not be helped. They had all made their own choices.

"If they didn't know that and stayed in the army, that alone can kill you."

Something Enkrid always said.

If you had picked up a spear or a sword and steeled yourself to kill the enemy, you had to accept that you could be killed too.

Without that resolve, no one would make it through Border Guard's basic training.

"All right. Let's get moving, everyone."

Krais said it, his resolve quietly settled. They would all be run ragged for the foreseeable future.

And all of this happened before the Sect had even begun to make their moves in earnest.

* * *

Harrison Viscount, one of the nobles of the kingdom's south, was red all the way to his scalp as he shouted.

"Absolutely not!"

"But if we keep on like this, we could all die. I think we need to use scorched-earth tactics, burn the fields and hold out."

Scorched-earth tactics meant burning supplies, food stores, and everything else to keep them out of enemy hands.

What had just been proposed was burning every field the Viscount had cultivated over the years, down to the last one.

The words came from the captain of the Self-Defense Force, a former mercenary who was now one of Harrison's retainers.

The man was right. Harrison knew it. But surrendering the land made what would follow painfully obvious.

Lose the land, lose the grain. Burn it all and ruin it, and recovering that land would be an impossibly distant prospect.

What came after? He would probably spend the rest of his life being squeezed dry on a tiny patch of ground.

The enemy was a newly assembled bandit group, and somehow they commanded Magic Beasts. Hundreds of wild boar Magic Beasts, and the bandits numbered well over a hundred themselves. There appeared to be several dozen skilled archers among them too.

Harrison's Self-Defense Force had fifty spearmen and thirteen archers. That was it.

He had spared no Krona on military spending, and that was what he had to show for it, while the bandits outnumbered him by more than double.

Harrison Viscount had two choices left.

One was to abandon the land, hold out, and fight the bandit group.

The other was to die defending it.

Neither was acceptable to him. Cold sweat ran down his head. Winter was closing in and yet his body burned. He felt like he might just keel over from the fever at any moment, when a member of the Self-Defense Force keeping watch outside came in and said:

"Uh, sir, reinforcements have arrived."

"...Reinforcements?"

The Self-Defense Force captain repeated it back. No one was supposed to be coming. The whole southern region was swamped with Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts right now.

There had been word of Cultists turning up too.

And now someone was saying reinforcements had arrived?

"Shall I bring them in?"

"Bring them in!"

Reinforcements, of all things. Harrison had no idea what was happening, but he was in no position to be picky.

"Good day."

A soldier. A complete stranger, by any reckoning.

But the soldier lifted the edge of his cloak, and a bright city crest on the fabric caught Harrison's eye.

A bold horizontal line layered in steps, shaped to represent a city wall.

The crest the king of Naurillia had recently granted anew to Border Guard.

Anyone would recognize it, not just a herald. The crest of the Border Guard Standing Army.

The home of the knight order some called mad, that had gone beyond guarding the border and swallowed Azpen whole, a former enemy nation.

The home of the man who had once gifted his own holy spring water.

All of it flashed through Harrison's mind in an instant. A handful of phrases used to describe that city swept through his thoughts in rapid succession.

"Reporting the arrival of one squad-strength unit under the Standing Army."

The soldier said it without a trace of concern.

The number was not particularly large, but Harrison Viscount saw in it the first spark of hope.

What followed would go rather far beyond what he had expected.

"Wild boars? Good. We'll handle this ourselves. Self-Defense Force, watch for any threat from the rear, in case someone's hiding behind all this."

The so-called reinforcements had arrived, taken one look at the charge of several dozen Magic Beasts, and declared they would fight it alone. Harrison was baffled.

Then he watched them fight, and the words died in his throat.

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