WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 591: Lawless City

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"The Cult?"

Enkrid asked without any particular concern, and the one-eyed man's brow creased.

"What are you on about?"

Probably not. It didn't seem likely. If it were the Cult, they would never go about things this sloppily.

And Krais had once said that anyone doing meaningful work for the Cult would know who Enkrid was.

"Think about it. If someone keeps showing up to ruin your plans, of course you're going to find out who they are. It would be strange if they hadn't tried to assassinate you."

That had been Krais. Looking more closely at things, there had been actual assassination attempts, though Enkrid's group was unaware of most of them.

Requests had even come to Jaxon.

Other attempts Jaxon had intercepted or dealt with somewhere along the way.

A Cursed Apostle had come once too, though the full story behind that one was hard to know.

How would anyone have known that the gaunt, ugly corpse who had just dropped dead was a Cursed Apostle?

At any rate, the Cult apparently ground their teeth at the mere mention of Enkrid's name. So if the attack was only at this level, the odds of these people being Cultists were extremely low. That was his conclusion.

"Human trafficking?"

He asked again without even reaching for his weapon, and the thugs began to feel that something was off.

Did we pick the wrong target?

Should we back off?

But they couldn't do that either.

Enkrid didn't know it yet, but Cross Guard was in the process of becoming a lawless city. The mayor and city officials held little sway, while the Thieves' Guild and outfits like the Brotherhood held the real power.

The group that had just attacked Enkrid went by the ridiculous name of the Awl Brotherhood, meaning they would stick you if you crossed them. They were also known as a criminal guild that took revenge without fail if you touched one of their own, but the problem was they had no idea who they were dealing with.

Travelers came through rarely, and even after spotting this one being escorted by a city official, all they saw were the Krona he might be carrying. Their leader had been an idiot from the start. That any of them had survived this long was frankly impressive.

"Kill him!"

The one-eyed man gave the order, and the thugs drew blades shaped like tapered awls and charged.

The corridor was narrow, not ideal for drawing and swinging a longsword. They had adjusted for that, arming themselves with awl-daggers roughly a hand's length long. At least their coordination among themselves was decent.

Instead of swarming all at once, they filed into the narrow corridor two by two and came in together.

But even if only a Squire from a knight order had been standing here, they never would have landed a hit.

In fact, a skilled soldier from the Border Guard's standing army would have been more than enough to handle them.

Enkrid didn't draw his weapon. He stepped once to the left and once to the right, reaching out with his hands.

Naturally, it was at a speed they couldn't react to.

Lamplight threw shadows that swelled huge on both walls, then collapsed.

It looked as though an Evil Spirit made of black soot was swallowing the shadows of living men. From the Awl Brotherhood's perspective, that might have been exactly what was happening.

Enkrid seized a wrist and snapped it before they could even flinch.

Crack!

"Agh!"

The scream came right after. The moment he broke the wrist, he also dislocated the jaw. It was Audin's specialty, press just beneath the cheekbone with your fingers and push straight down, and the joint pops right out.

"Ugghergh."

Having a joint forced out of place, the pain must have been beyond words. The man with the dislocated jaw couldn't even scream properly and just drooled. Then came the tears too.

The one-eyed man took one look, thought something along the lines of what the hell, and turned to run, but Enkrid wasn't about to let that happen.

The awl-dagger dropped by the first man whose wrist had been broken was already in Enkrid's hand.

Enkrid weighed it for a moment and threw it.

The dagger split the air with a sharp whistle and buried itself in the back of the one-eyed man's thigh.

Thwck!

"Gah!"

Crash, clatter, thud.

He had tried to bolt but ended up rolling down the stairs instead.

Enkrid hadn't planned on killing him, though if the man died from that, he figured it couldn't be helped.

All of this was over before a single breath could be let out.

The ones still on their feet went rigid. The men who had been clumsily trying to thrust their daggers forward rolled their eyes back and forth.

By that point, Ruagarne had already finished off the two on the roof and come back down. She had jumped outside entirely and was working her way up from the ground floor. Enkrid wouldn't let anyone slip past, but in case someone tried something unusual, like a sleeping-smoke trick, to escape, she planned to be there to catch them.

Not that any such attempt would have gotten away from her either, but reading the terrain and working with it was just how Ruagarne fought. Enkrid had learned that well from her, which was part of why they had split up in the first place.

The whole setup cut off any way out.

The two of them hadn't exchanged many words, but they understood this much from instinct alone.

Two men were still standing. Both held daggers, but neither moved a muscle.

"Did you kill them?"

Enkrid asked downward, ignoring the men still on their feet. Ruagarne came up the stairs and answered.

"Yeah. We only need one or two alive, right? The kid didn't seem involved. The innkeeper knew what was going on, though, looks like someone put the scare into him."

Ruagarne's hands were fast. She had still found time to read the innkeeper's face on her way through.

Enkrid nodded without making much of it.

He knew and looked the other way to get by. That could be called a fault. Seeing something wrong and taking a cut from it, sure, that too.

Depending on how you looked at it, nearly anything could be a sin, but Enkrid had no interest in judging. People adapted to their circumstances to survive, and anyone bold enough to come at you like this would have had no trouble threatening an innkeeper.

"Want to keep going?"

Enkrid asked pleasantly. The two thieves with daggers quietly dropped to their knees.

In their eyes, these two were monsters. They weren't wrong.

To an ordinary person, a Frog and a knight were exactly that.

They had trusted the sleeping smoke, and it hadn't worked. The result was only natural.

Enkrid shrugged, carried the smoking brazier with the sleeping incense outside, and said as he came back in, "Change the brazier."

"Pardon?"

"Swap out the brazier."

There was no need to move lodgings yet. A quick read of the situation told him things wouldn't be any different elsewhere.

Someone had clearly seen the official escort them here, and yet they had still tried their luck. That meant one of two things.

Either the administrator knew and was playing dumb, or the administrator was actually backing them.

Enkrid stopped his thinking there, patted down the thieves, and searched for rope. He found a thick coil.

So it really is human trafficking.

If you were going to take people and sell them, you would need something to tie them with. He had been right. They hadn't planned on killing anyone. Enkrid bound the two thieves hand and foot and propped them in front of the room's door.

"Wake us if anyone comes."

He had made himself a pair of improvised doorbell-thieves.

"A man should sleep when he can sleep."

He said it, and Ruagarne nodded. It was the truth. Rest when you could. And both of them did exactly that.

The two thieves had rope coiled tight around them, but more than that, they couldn't find any will to run.

They sat among their companions' bodies and fought off terror through the dark hours, convinced that at any moment those two would step out and run them through.

It was only around dawn that the source of their fear emerged, cut their ropes loose, and said, "Clean it up."

The two thieves scrubbed away every trace of the previous night. Naturally, they couldn't erase everything, especially the blood that had soaked into the floor. The inn already had a stale, musty smell about it, and now the blood had mixed in.

Enkrid dragged a backless chair from the room out into the corridor with a scrape and sat down.

Ruagarne rubbed her eyes a few times, wrapped her whip around her waist, and came out to lean against the wall at the top of the stairs. She had picked a spot where she could react to anything.

"Who sent you?"

Enkrid asked.

"Nobody sent us," one of the thieves said, swallowing hard.

"When travelers or merchants come through, we just rough them up, take their Krona, and lift what we can."

It didn't sound like there was any lie mixed in.

As luck would have it, the leader who had rolled down the stairs was dead, and the manner of death was strange. Not a broken neck. The whites of his eyes had small dark spots in them like flecks of grit, and that was how he had gone.

That's not a snapped spine.

Even accounting for rigor mortis, the corpse was unnaturally stiff and heavy, as though the body were slowly turning to stone, or as though the organs inside had been stone to begin with.

It had taken two grown men grunting and straining to haul it away.

Enkrid found it odd but had no one to ask. Ruagarne had seen it too and only said it was strange.

"The official walked us in here. What did you think would happen after something like this?"

When he put that to the two improvised doorbells, both said they paid no attention to the official at all. He was a useless wreck nobody respected.

They said this city already saw killings every other day from wars between criminal guilds, and the administrator was a man consumed entirely with keeping himself alive.

Enkrid privately thought, really? He had already met the administrator with the serpent eyes, and that man had not struck him as particularly meek.

The two surviving thieves also mentioned that the truly dangerous one in this city was someone called the Wind Blade, and that story was interesting to hear.

Apparently, the Wind Blade had killed a member of a famous knight order somewhere and was now hiding here.

The two of them talked without stopping. Naturally, neither of them wanted to cross the Black River on the edge of a blade.

Half in tears and half babbling, they let slip a few pieces of information Enkrid could actually use.

The conclusion was that Cult or no Cult, this city had rotted as far as a city could rot.

So what now?

Breakfast first.

Enkrid did what his instincts told him. He got up and ordered a meal.

"You're seriously planning to eat here?"

The innkeeper stared at him, a big kitchen knife in one hand, no apparent desire to fight. Whatever the man was feeling showed plainly on his face, nothing but anxiety and worry.

"Where else would I eat at an inn?"

"You could go catch grasshoppers out in the road," Ruagarne said from the side.

Enkrid just tapped the table twice.

The innkeeper let out a long breath and turned away. Then a child employee scurried over and whispered, "You should, um, run."

"Why?"

Children see the world through children's eyes.

This child had never once left Cross Guard since the day of being born into it. What was the most frightening thing to a child like that?

The people who threatened them every day. The ones who had done as they pleased for as long as anyone could remember, and never faced consequences.

To this child, the criminal guilds were as good as death itself.

"Scary people are going to come."

The child hadn't thought Enkrid was a bad person. That was why the warning came with real courage behind it, but the person it was aimed at didn't even pretend to listen.

The inn's ground floor doubled as a dining room. It was still early morning, but customers trickled in one by one. Among them, two hard-looking men made their way toward Enkrid.

Scrape, drag.

One of them gripped a chair by its back and dragged it across the floor, then set it beside the table where Enkrid was sitting.

He straddled the chair with the backrest against his chest, settled in, and fixed Enkrid with a steady look.

"Who are you?"

Enkrid turned and looked the man over.

The first thing he noticed were two short swords at the man's waist. Those were the primary weapons. The leather wrapped around the grips was worn smooth, weapons used long enough to leave that kind of mark.

The posture might have looked casual, but the man had his toes and fingers braced and loaded with tension, ready to draw at any moment. You could read it just from the feel of him.

The intent was plain enough.

"A customer waiting for breakfast."

"Can't argue with that," Ruagarne said.

Cross Guard was under the thumb of three criminal guilds.

A great deal had happened to bring the city to this state, but the short version was that several criminal guilds had grown very large very quickly, and nobody had been able to rein them in. A garrison commander had gotten caught up in a guild war and been killed. Another commander was rumored to be practically a guild member himself.

As time passed with things in that condition, the city had quietly become a lawless place with criminal guilds at its center.

From there, gambling and drugs had spread through every alley, and finding someone who had died in the street overnight was common enough.

Step into any back alley and the smell hit you immediately. Waste wasn't properly handled either, so filth was scattered everywhere.

Rats overran the place, and people falling sick was the norm.

The man who had just walked over to Enkrid was a member of one of those three criminal guilds.

"Oh, is that right?"

The man gave a thin smile. His face wasn't what anyone would call charming, though Enkrid found it a little funny somehow.

He was acting relaxed, but his toes and fingers were braced tight with tension.

The intention was plain enough.

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