WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 589: Worry Upon Worry

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"Is something ominous approaching, by any chance?"

Enkrid had never taken the Boatman's warnings lightly.

He always listened carefully and never ignored them. As usual, Enkrid was completely serious.

"Is it really coming this time?"

Two questions in a row. The Boatman stared at him. Enkrid was not the type to miss it when someone was cursing him with their eyes, but today the Boatman's gaze held no emotion at all.

He was grayer than usual. An emotionless doll, a mask carved from stone.

The purple lamp shone from below, splitting its light at the nose so shadow crept all the way up to the forehead. That face, taken purely on its appearance, was the sort you might fear seeing in a dream.

Though this moment itself was more or less a dream anyway.

Dream or reality, Enkrid was not the kind to let another person's looks frighten him.

So he simply said what he had to say.

The Boatman answered.

"I would rather not make today the day you come to regret."

There was no emotion in it, yet the tone pretended at kindness, which made it sound like a child mimicking an adult, or an adult mimicking a child.

For a long moment their eyes met across the empty air between them.

Enkrid sat near the bow and stared at the Boatman plainly. There was little to read from that look.

So he simply spoke his truth, as always.

"Really?"

Pure curiosity. He genuinely did not know whether something ominous was coming or not, or whether this was just another attempt to rattle him.

On any other day, a reaction that unexpected might have cracked the Boatman a little, made him waver. But today he was a rock.

He dismissed Enkrid's words cleanly.

"I will give you two choices."

He said only what he intended to say. Enkrid listened. Listening with full attention was one of his strengths. That the other person did not react was no reason to feel embarrassed.

The Boatman set the lamp down on the table and raised two fingers. Gray fingers, dull milky nails. The lamplight cast a shadow between them.

He curled his middle finger down and held up only his index finger.

"One: find the nearest rock, right now, and dash your head against it until you are dead."

What did that mean? It was the same as what Overdier had implied.

Stop where you are and enjoy the present. Naturally that was the kind of thing that would fall on deaf ears, so the Boatman kept going.

"In doing so, you could become an immortal who savors days as rich as today. Travelers passing by would sing your praises. You would walk with sunlight and wind as your companions, sleep beneath the moon and stars, and share a few jokes with the people at your side. It would be comfortable. You could rest easy."

Enkrid said nothing about how he would never have come this far if a day like that was all he wanted.

The Boatman already knew. He only stared, and that was answer enough. Without waiting for a reply, the Boatman continued.

"The second: turn back. Go back and ready yourself to meet a wall. Not now. Not this wall, meet a different one."

How to describe it?

Advice? Counsel? It was clearly something close to those. The Boatman was twice as serious as he ever was when talking about swords.

Enkrid looked into those colorless gray eyes. Were those black irises the same as a Demon Creature's? No, probably not. When he focused, color began to appear in them.

A dull gray, but once the pupils were distinct, something like expression could be read there. What he found was concern. If his instincts were not broken, that was what it was.

But this was a dream, and the Boatman could show only what he chose to show. Enkrid remembered the Boatman saying something like that once, long ago.

He had also said that Enkrid would not remember what happened in the dream, but Enkrid did.

He could not recall every word the Boatman had spoken from that first time until now, but the broad lines had not left him.

That was why he knew today's Boatman was different. On any ordinary day, the Boatman had never shown even a scrap of concern.

There had been only deliberate words with clear purpose. Today was something else. He was not telling Enkrid not to climb the wall. He was pointing toward a better path, suggesting it would be wiser to meet a different wall, to wait for a later time.

Was that bad? No. It could even be good.

When the road ahead is blocked, going around it is the smart move.

"If you go forward, you will regret it."

The Boatman's dull gray lips moved.

That sounds like the usual thing he says.

This was a dream, a world of the mind, so there was no vibration of air alongside sound. Meaning passed across directly.

What the Boatman had offered was a fork in the road. Two choices, and he had even shown the way forward.

None of it changed anything for Enkrid. Whether the Boatman's concern was real or whether his words were wiser, it did not matter.

This was not pride. It was not stubbornness.

Tomorrow is always uncertain. That is what makes life beautiful and worth living. Enkrid believed that sincerely, which was why he could not believe that an endlessly repeated today counted as a life.

That was probably the difference between how the Boatman saw the world and how Enkrid saw it.

So he would not follow the Boatman's words.

If the Boatman was speaking because he had seen the future, Enkrid would follow them even less.

Even if the tomorrow that had been decided was harsh, he would still choose that.

That was how Enkrid had always lived.

"Thank you for the advice."

He said it, and woke up. It was a morning with winter rain falling in a soft patter.

Thin mist greeted him, and the temperature had dropped sharply, colder than it had been since yesterday. He breathed out and white vapor drifted from his lips.

"Cold? Want me to hold you?"

Beside him, Ruagarne was casually kicking the wet campfire embers aside with one foot. Enkrid blinked a few times. He turned her words over in his head for a moment, then answered.

"Do you spend time with Sinar?"

"Ha. Just like the elf said. She told me that's exactly the kind of answer you'd give."

Ruagarne puffed up her cheeks and laughed. She had said that traveling together like this was quite enjoyable.

It was not even a long road, and yet that was what she had said.

Enkrid did not mind it either. It was a pleasant enough time.

The Boatman's words? If he were going to carry that worry and concern around with him because of something like that, he would have taken the Boatman's advice and stopped at today.

But he was not going to, so he set it aside cleanly and kept moving.

He thought about it for a moment, exchanged a few more words with Ruagarne, and found himself quietly impressed by Sinar. Even without being here in person, she had managed to deliver her own joke through someone else's mouth.

What a remarkable skill.

It was not as if elf-style jokes were a trend or spreading like a sickness. The only people who made jokes like this, aside from Sinar, were Esther and Ruagarne.

She had said she wanted to come along.

Nearby Cultists had been hiding in the forest and conducting strange rituals, so Sinar was extremely busy. That was why she was not here.

She always took her responsibilities seriously. It had been that way when she was Company Commander, and it was the same when they took the job of rescuing Crang.

Once she took something on, she did it properly.

Did that make her reliable? Of course. Enkrid thought he was lucky. Everyone who had stayed around him was a little crazy, but good.

The thought that people had gathered around him because of who he was never occurred to him, but that was the kind of thing that is hard for a person to see about themselves.

"Let's get moving."

Enkrid said it and set out again toward Cross Guard. The rain stopped quickly. Once it did, a sky as blue as a painting opened above. Around midday the sun scattered warm light.

Audin came to mind for no particular reason. He was sorry for thinking it, but today's sunlight was warmer than sacred light.

They walked steadily and arrived at Cross Guard. Seeing the battlements and the outer wall brought back memories of the last time he had come here.

The thorn-vine sorcerer, Finn, Torres, the werewolf pack.

Back then, he had struggled just to get over the wall. He had needed to repeat that day over and over just to force a way through. Now the gate opened simply because he was walking toward it.

Grrrk.

Oil-soaked timber banded with iron swung open to either side, and behind it he could see the group of soldiers who had worked the pulley.

There was nothing like a moat, but the wall itself was thick. Looking up at the battlements, Enkrid reckoned that with his current physical ability he could scale them far more easily than before, but he noticed something that had not been there last time.

Sharpened spikes had been embedded along the top of the battlements.

It had become a bladed battlement.

They had done that after what happened with him. Enkrid knew it was a measure Abnaier had put in place.

"There is a saying: raising the palisade only after the Ghoul gets through. An obvious thing to say, but shouldn't you raise it even after the fact? If you don't, aren't you just asking to get hit again?"

Abnaier's words, and Enkrid agreed with them strongly.

If you did not move because you thought it was too late, nothing would ever happen.

Late or early, what mattered was acting.

Enkrid passed through the open gate and swept his gaze around.

A few things caught his eye. One was a group in robes weaving among the rows of rough shacks built without any order inside the wall.

A clear wariness radiated from them.

Since becoming a knight, Enkrid's instincts had grown sharper and more precise than before. He could pick up something like that just from the way people looked at him.

Wariness.

The ones who seemed to be the shack owners were visible too, all of them in shabby clothes, thin and worn, staring his way with blank expressions.

It was the look of someone wondering what this was about, and what rose from it was a different feeling entirely.

Unease.

Among the others he also spotted several people with blades at their sides. A handful of the gazes that lingered on him carried an obvious meaning.

Curiosity.

Or the itch to test themselves against him.

Wariness, unease, and curiosity all tangled together in the looks that followed him, and over it all hung something like the smell of tobacco drifting through the city.

There were actually people right beside the gate holding lit tobacco between their lips.

"Welcome."

Enkrid looked at the person greeting him. A man with narrow, snake-like eyes. That was the first impression.

Krais had spread word widely that a Border Guard standing army was heading to Cross Guard on account of the Cultist problem.

It was a deliberate act with several intentions layered into it. The largest was building justification, conveying that the Cultist problem was something the whole continent needed to address.

That was why they could walk openly into what was formally an enemy nation, whatever alliances existed behind closed doors.

Had that news found its way here through those channels?

Either way, the snake-eyed man had come out to meet Enkrid, introducing himself as an administrator working directly under the city mayor.

Three swordsmen had followed as his escort, and none of them were especially skilled. Enkrid read their level at a glance.

"How did you know to come out and meet us?"

Enkrid kept his tone reasonably courteous, and the snake-eyed man smiled as he answered.

"I was told to be notified the moment anyone arrived from Border Guard."

By whom? The people stationed on the wall?

There were a few archers up there with bows slung across their backs, but they did not look particularly sharp.

Well, wherever he had heard it from, it was not worth worrying about.

"It is an honor to receive you, Sir Knight."

Enkrid had not identified himself. His name had spread widely enough, but recognizing someone purely from appearance and bearing was genuinely difficult.

His general description was known, but no portrait had been made and no detailed account of his face had circulated.

On top of that, sleeping rough and wandering the roads had a way of making even a fine face look rough and travel-worn.

Enkrid was no exception right now.

His habit of swapping out pieces of armor constantly would have made it harder to place him by equipment as well. This time he wore a navy cloak over gray scale armor, with the pauldrons torn off because they restricted his arm movement.

The only gear that matched anything from before were the leather gauntlets wrapped around his hands.

Those had never torn no matter what he put them through. Aetri had shaped them from leather bought off a Giant merchant in the Border Guard market, and even while making them he had commented on how fine the material was.

"Sounds like you know who I am."

Enkrid let the words drift out casually.

"How could anyone not know the knight with black hair and blue eyes?"

The snake-eyed man smiled as he answered. Enkrid gave a small nod. The man's flattery did not sit especially well with him, but there was nothing to say about it.

He could not go around hitting everyone who rubbed him the wrong way.

"Let me escort you to the manor."

"That's all right. An inn is more than enough for us."

Enkrid declined politely. The snake-eyed man said he understood and shifted course toward an inn without asking why or looking the least bit thrown off.

The three escort swordsmen did the same, following along without a word.

The place he led them to was not a rundown building, but a stale smell greeted them at the door.

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