WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 592: Excessive Hospitality

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From his chair, the man could see two figures kneeling obediently beside the table. The same two who had been tied up and sleepless through the night. They did not dare meet anyone's eyes, heads hanging low, only their eyeballs moving.

'They got caught by a Frog. Idiots.'

The man watched Frog rather than Enkrid. It was obvious at a glance that these were the kind who threw their weight around because they had a Frog behind them.

No different in level from the ones who had come to attack last night.

They had no idea who they were dealing with. People trapped inside a narrow well never know the world outside.

Cross Guard was busy with internal guild feuds. Everyone here was too focused on their own interests to spare a thought for anything beyond their corner of things.

Lately, rumors were spreading that the city lord was trying to break away from Azpen.

Did that make any sense? Nobody knew. They just heard it and shrugged.

These were birds and frogs trapped inside their own small world. Was it natural they knew nothing? Or had someone deliberately arranged things this way?

Not Enkrid's problem. When someone came looking for you, the only thing that mattered was their purpose.

"You came to fight?"

Enkrid glanced toward the kitchen and asked. Breakfast had not come out yet. People showing up before the food even arrived, how industrious. Or maybe they had come straight from a night at the gambling tables. The man reeked of stale tobacco, and beneath that was something worse coming from his mouth.

His hair was greasy too. Not someone who made a habit of washing. Worse than Dunbakel, even.

"Hey, you acting tough because of Frog?"

The stench spoke, raising his left hand and giving a lazy wave. A Frog came in through the door. Barefoot, slapping against the floor, she spoke the moment she entered.

"Still haven't killed them?"

The Frog that came in had unusually red eyes. Those red eyes stopped on Ruagarne.

A Frog, huh. Not much fun to cut.

That was what Ruagarne was thinking as she stared back, though of course she had no way to know what the Frog was thinking.

Frog or no Frog, Enkrid only said what he had to say.

"Let's eat before we fight."

This habit had come entirely from the Boatman. With the Boatman, no matter what the other side said, you had to say your own piece or your intent would never land.

He also wanted to chew over and train the insight he had pulled from the Boatman's words, but that would have to wait.

"That so?"

The man in the chair stood as he spoke. Enkrid's instincts laid out plainly what was about to happen. Push the chair aside, draw the weapon, thrust. And before the man had even risen, a figure watching from behind shifted slightly to one side. They were going to hit at the same time.

The one edging just outside Enkrid's line of sight had a well-worn hatchet at his hip. His hand was already moving to it before his foot had finished lifting. The intent could not have been more obvious.

'How should I handle this?'

The question and the answer came at once. These were people who would kill without a second thought. Enkrid decided he did not need to draw even one of his own blades. An accurate read.

Thud. Scrape.

The man kicked his chair away and drew his sword in one thrust. Beside him, the other swung his hatchet down in the same breath.

Both had decent instincts for a surprise attack. Still short of anyone who had completed the Border Guard standing army's basic training.

'Even finishing basic training would do them some good.'

That idle thought passed through him as he moved. He was slower off the mark than either of them, but his raw strength and reflexes were on a different level, so he appeared to move faster.

He reached out and caught the sword blade in his bare hand, then pulled.

The difference in strength was stark. The other man gripped his sword handle with both hands; Enkrid held the blade with four fingers and a thumb, and the sword came away regardless.

He grabbed the blade and tugged. The swordsman let out a short, strangled cry and lost his weapon.

Enkrid took the stolen sword and drove the guard's raised protrusion into the man's skull.

Thwack.

The guard of the Shortsword became a weapon in its own right and opened a hole in its owner's head. A person with a hole in their skull cannot survive. That much was obvious.

"Ugh."

The man who had thrust the sword groaned and toppled sideways. The one with the hatchet fared no differently. While Enkrid's left hand stripped the sword away and caved in the swordsman's skull, his right took the hatchet and returned it to its owner, handle first into the top of the head.

Both died at the same moment, though somehow only one thud rang out. That was how clean it was.

They both went down and bled across the floor.

While the two guild members died, the red-eyed Frog had moved too. But this was a Frog who had drunk so deep on blood that the natural talents of the race were long forgotten.

Drunk on the pleasure of cutting people apart. There were Frogs like that sometimes. Corruption does not discriminate by species.

Ruagarne watched the Loop Sword the Frog drew. The blade was short but serrated like a saw.

Drrrrrr.

It scraped free of the leather sheath with an ugly grinding noise.

A weapon carried purely for the sensation of slicing.

The Frog kicked off the inn floor with a boom, boards cracking and splinters flying into the air. Its intent was clear: close the distance, then shred Ruagarne wherever it could reach. She was sitting; the Frog was standing, and it saw that as an advantage worth pressing immediately.

Ruagarne read its approach while still in her seat, drew the whip, and cracked it. The whip snapped around the Frog's throat with a hiss and stopped the charge cold.

Grrk.

Even with the whip coiled around its neck, the red-eyed Frog only puffed its cheek once.

The moment the whip tightened, the Frog planted its feet, grabbed the whip with its free hand, and gripped. The whip's protruding spines did not let the hand slide clean, and blood droplets flew instead.

Ignoring the pain entirely, the Frog seized the whip and pulled. Every bit of its strength behind it.

Frogs always trusted their own strength.

It thought it could snap a whip by force. Given enough time, that would not have been impossible, but naturally, its wish was not granted.

While the Frog clenched and pulled, Ruagarne drove off the ground and sprang forward. The chair she had been sitting in fell backward with a thud.

Still, her movement was relatively smooth.

The Frog had shattered the floor; she only tipped a chair.

Between the two Frogs stood one of the building's posts. She moved as if heading left around it, then reversed and burst right, driving her sword in.

A simple feint, but the fighting habit of someone experienced.

The red-eyed Frog tried to drag its blade across in a parry aimed left, but that was a wasted motion.

The Loop Sword in Ruagarne's hand punched straight through the red-eyed Frog's belly.

She dragged the blade upward in one pull. One Frog's brute strength split another Frog's gut open.

Crunch.

The blade tore through organs, skin, and ribs, and reached the heart.

The Heart Armor the Frog wore split under the blade.

The stupid Frog had not bothered with separate armor on the belly. Its Heart Armor might have held against a straight frontal strike, but slicing upward from below left all that hardness wasted.

"Graaak!"

The Frog died with an ugly scream, tongue lolling out. The long tongue drooped down, and blood ran along it in a steady stream.

The heart had been split and blood was flowing the wrong way. Ruagarne pulled her blade free and wiped it clean on the Frog's clothes.

Where had a rotten Frog like that crawled out from? The city had this kind of atmosphere, so it had probably drifted in and seeped into the cracks. Rotting meat draws flies.

Either way, splitting a heart was not something to feel good about.

"What a mess."

Ruagarne said. Yesterday she had said the same thing about the water, but now she meant the whole city. Enkrid agreed.

"Clean it up."

At Enkrid's word, the two former Brotherhood members who had taken up cleaning duty moved quickly. They dragged out the bodies and poured water over the blood, but somehow the smell of iron only grew heavier. In the middle of it all, the server came out with food, face pale with shock.

On a battlefield you ate with the dead lying nearby. What made this any different.

Enkrid was about to dip white bread into bean puree when the child went completely pale and began mouthing words, looking like someone with a great deal to say. Enkrid swept his gaze over the child once, head to foot.

A very short look, not even a few seconds, but what he took from it was considerable.

Details a normal person would pass over were plain to him.

A flicker of anxiety. The body easing almost imperceptibly backward. A complexion entirely different from when the child had suggested they leave earlier.

Enkrid stared at the child steadily, and before long the child went white.

"Please spare me."

A whisper. Meant for him. Why? Because the food just brought out had been tampered with. They had used a sleep-mist before, so there would be people who used poison too.

"I did it. Kill me."

The owner stepped out and spoke before the child had finished pleading. Nothing in his hands this time. Father and child, maybe. Enkrid looked at the child, too terrified even to cry, and the inn owner, and thought:

'These ones have fast reaction times.'

When had someone leaned on them to put poison in the food? The incident had been last night. So this had all happened in a single night. Two attacks, and now poisoned food on top of it. The hospitality was excessive.

Or had they prepared for this in advance? Enkrid felt something behind all of it, a gaze full of ill intent fixed on him from somewhere unseen.

Once that thought took hold, it genuinely felt like something was watching him.

Enkrid trusted his senses and threw the fork in his hand.

Thwack.

The fork flew straight and buried itself in a dim corner of the wall, still quivering.

At that, the owner closed his eyes and pulled the child into his arms. His forehead and face were running with sweat.

"What was that about?"

Ruagarne asked.

"Felt like something was there."

Enkrid looked back at the wall where the fork had stuck. Nothing. The child had grown even more frightened in the meantime. The owner too.

Enkrid stood, tapped the child lightly on the head, and spoke.

"Nothing's going to happen to you. Asking who put you up to this would be too much to answer, wouldn't it?"

If it was the criminal guild behind it, they would be afraid of retaliation. So he would not press these two.

Some tampered with the food, some with the sleeping arrangements, and some sent a pair of swordsmen and a Frog to test Enkrid's ability.

The odds that something else was waiting outside the inn? Very high. And whatever it was, it would be worse than anything so far.

"Fighting inside the city, there's a good chance traps have been laid."

Ruagarne said it as if she had read his mind. When it came to experience wandering the continent, this Frog was not behind anyone.

Watching how things were unfolding, Ruagarne had already worked out what needed working out.

"Looks like there's some cleaning to do."

Enkrid answered. His tone showed no concern for the danger Ruagarne had named.

He had come to catch a Cultist, and yet arriving here, he found garbage before he found any Cultist.

He was about to leave when the inn door rattled open ahead of him. The administrator, now with two more escorts than the day before.

"I heard you were attacked last night. These fools."

The administrator's expression managed to be urgent and composed at once, and troubled beneath both, and to Enkrid it looked distinctly forced.

"I apologize. The city's order has fallen apart, and it is all because of the Cursed Ground Holy Sect."

The administrator added.

Up until the administrator entered, Enkrid had felt vaguely unsettled by the sense of something watching him. When the man came through the door, that feeling vanished clean. Strange.

"Escort these two."

At the administrator's word, two soldiers in gambesons seized the former guild members who had been on cleanup duty.

"You two are for the gallows."

The administrator said it as the pair were walked past him. A cold tone.

"News travels fast."

Enkrid spoke. He was asking how the man had known to come.

"A few soldiers were keeping watch. I had ordered them to report immediately, and still, ha, I cannot apologize enough. I personally arranged your stay, and an incident like this still happened."

The administrator spoke with what seemed like genuine regret. Enkrid nodded. He did not bother adding that the criminal guild apparently considered this man useless.

"This situation appears to have grown somewhat complicated. Allow me to escort you to the manor."

Before Enkrid could reply to the administrator's words..."No. You'll be coming with me."

A voice from outside the door cut in. Someone else entirely.

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