WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 594: Windblade Is Dead

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"Could you show me where they're keeping the people they've captured?"

Enkrid figured the person Gielpin's Guild had sent might already be dead. Krais had said as much.

But if they were still alive, rescuing them was the obvious thing to do.

Just before the fight, he had asked the castellan in passing, and the man had mentioned something about people being held captive.

Having heard that, Enkrid had his priorities straight.

Shouldn't you save the people who can be saved? All the more so when they were captured doing their job, and that job was for the city he was staying in.

"Who are you?"

The castellan asked, startled. Enkrid had never hidden himself, but he had never given his name either. Thinking about it after the question landed, no one had actually asked him who he was.

"Enkrid of the Border Guard."

After that short introduction, the castellan stared with his mouth hanging open, then asked again.

"...The Iron Wall Knight?"

Even with limited information, no one could fail to know the Iron Wall Knight.

The surprise and disbelief in those eyes were genuinely refreshing. As if they were asking why he was here of all places.

Enkrid nodded. The castellan's mouth fell open wider.

He'll start drooling at this rate.

Enkrid thought it, but did not reach over to push the man's jaw shut.

"No, why are you here?"

The spearman standing behind the castellan asked. His eyes had gone wide as well.

Why are you here of all places?

The question seemed to fill him completely. Enkrid answered helpfully.

"I heard the Cultists were a problem, so I came. Turned out some other problems looked even more complicated, and then people tried to threaten me, so I handled it."

Enkrid remained matter-of-fact. Considering he had just dismantled three of Cross Guard's worst crime guilds moments ago, his calm was almost unreasonable.

Blood still ran freely across the ground, and the vagrants who had been stealing glances from every direction had retreated deep into the alleys. Only a few with more nerve than sense were still lingering, watching.

What just happened here? The castellan could have answered that in a single line.

The city's biggest headaches had disappeared.

And the man who had made it happen was so unbothered, which only made him seem that much more remarkable. At least to the castellan and his group.

From where Enkrid stood, after everything he had been through, these people were something like sparrows living in a cage, convinced the cage was the whole world and that they were the strongest thing in it, pecking away with their beaks.

An eagle had walked into that cage. Of course there was no contest.

A single magpie would have been enough to set this cage straight. That was how it looked to him so far.

If this was what the Boatman had warned him about, if these were the sum total of the city's problems, he was going to be deeply disappointed the next time he saw him.

'Ominous? Oooominous?'

He would have to say something like that the next time they met in a dream. The look on the Boatman's face would be something to see.

Not that this was the whole of it, of course.

Enkrid knew that by instinct. The Snake Eyes administrator and the castellan standing in front of him were each suspicious in their own right, and that was just the obvious part.

"Well, the Cultists are a problem too, I'll grant you that. They've been holding secret gatherings all over the place. But knowing about it and stopping it are different things. The crime guild people were running wild and we simply couldn't keep up. And on top of that, there are rumors of vampires appearing lately, and people claiming they've spotted a werewolf."

The castellan was usually a composed speaker, but he was too rattled right now, and the words came out poorly.

Enkrid still understood him well enough. Listening carefully had always been one of his strengths.

This was what you would call a complete disaster. The Cultist problem existed, but the crime guilds had come first and kept him from touching anything else, and in the middle of all that, things like Demon Creatures had apparently slipped into various parts of the city. He had the feeling he had been in a situation something like this before.

Back in Nauril, a noble who had transformed into an Owlbear had been hiding inside the city, hunting and killing people.

Enkrid did not bother asking what the Self-Defense Force or any military presence was doing about it.

The answers would be obvious, and he could hear them later.

"So do you know where the captives are being held?"

He had decided to get to the people first. He shook the blood from his sword and fixed the castellan with a flat look as he asked.

"There are dozens of guild men guarding that place."

The castellan answered. Enkrid rested his hand on the grip of his sword and looked at the man steadily.

There was not much that needed to be said. The castellan thought back on what had just happened, specifically, the moment Enkrid killed the supposedly untouchable Wind Blade in a single stroke and crushed three guilds by force, and spoke again.

"I'll lead the way."

Following the castellan's lead, Enkrid walked through the city. They passed through filth-covered ground and wound through back alleys, and along the way he spotted a tree. Even from soil mixed with refuse, it had pushed blossoms up onto its branches. White winter flowers.

His gaze followed them up toward the sky.

If you looked up instead of down, there was nothing but white flowers blooming against a clear, open stretch of blue.

Looking back down, people were sprawled here and there, collapsed from whatever they had taken, and among them were bodies no one had gotten around to removing. Even amid a scene like this, the flowers had broken through and made themselves known. He found that striking.

After following the castellan for some time, he saw a staircase angled downward alongside a decrepit manor.

A tomb. Or a cellar. People with power in older times had buried themselves in grand structures like this. The steps Enkrid was looking at were the same kind, but sections had crumbled and the whole thing had gone untended, suggesting that whoever lay here had long since been forgotten.

"Here?"

"Yes."

Below the steps was darkness, thick with a stale, sunken feeling.

Even someone without much instinct for these things would have felt a chill and steered clear. Enkrid stepped down without hesitation.

Since becoming a Knight, he could see through darkness to some extent, but even without that, the smells, the traces, the faint shifts in the air were enough to tell him that people down there were bracing for an ambush.

If you're going to hide and strike, shouldn't you at least keep your breathing quiet? These people could not manage even that.

What would Jaxon have said?

"The enemy is naked and asking to be stabbed. Stabbing them."

Something like that, probably.

What was more surprising than their clumsy hiding, though, was what happened next. Before Enkrid could do anything, they spoke first.

"Hey, who's coming in? Get out. You'll get hurt."

Beyond not hiding their breathing, they were actually calling out?

A group planning an ambush had just announced themselves. Even Enkrid could not help being surprised at that.

And on top of everything, the warning was genuine concern. They were in hiding and still worried about him.

"You idiot, you just told him where we're hiding!"

"Well, he could have taken a wrong turn."

The sound of bickering drifted up from below.

Were they foolish, or were they just decent people?

He decided they were both.

Enkrid did not think of killing as something determined strictly by a person's moral standing, but he still weighed things when he could.

Honestly, it was more accurate to say he rarely raised his hand when he was not in the mood for it.

Was he just doing whatever he felt like? Yes. He did not deny it.

He followed his instincts. So he gave them the kind of question that left room for a different answer.

"Have any of you ever killed someone who couldn't fight back?"

"Huh? No."

The fool who had shouted the warning answered first, and immediately there was a thump, someone next to him hitting him on the head.

Then came the scrape of a flint, and a torch flared to life.

There were five of them guarding the foot of the stairs. Three of the five had faces so open and plain that you could not have faked that expression even if you tried. And even if someone tried to fool him, Enkrid was not going to fall for it.

What would getting close while pretending to be harmless even accomplish, given how wide the gap in ability was?

Someone could swing a blade right in front of his face and he would have them in five pieces before the edge reached him.

"This is Wind Blade Guild's territory."

The one among the five with a face that had actually seen some hard years spoke up. Three deep creases ran across his forehead. Instead of talking back, Enkrid moved his feet and walked steadily forward.

"Hey, don't come closer!"

The man in front panicked and grabbed the dagger at his hip, trying to draw it. Enkrid's hand was already resting on top of his before he managed it.

"Draw that and you die."

A man who picks up a weapon has to accept that he might die by that same weapon. In the mercenary world, it was an iron rule that anyone who went armed had to be ready for the blade to find them too. Somewhere along the way, it had become a truth that applied to everyone who carried a weapon.

Draw your sword and swing it, and you accept the possibility of death.

That was what Enkrid's words carried. One of the five caught it quickly. These five had grown up begging together since childhood, like brothers, and they were by nature too gentle for killing. The sight of it turned their stomachs.

That was why they had been put on door duty.

"And if I don't draw it?"

One of the five asked. The one with the slowest mind of the lot. The same one who had called out the warning earlier.

"Then you don't die."

Enkrid answered, and the man nodded.

"Then I won't draw it."

At that, another of the five slapped his own forehead. It was the kind of exchange too absurd to respond to. And yet oddly familiar. It was not the first time something like this had happened.

One of their little brotherhood had always been like this, always playing the fool. Everyone still liked him anyway. He was slow, but things always seemed to work out when he was involved. That was genuinely strange. Right now, because of that same quality, the others all fell quiet.

With the mood shifting like that, the five naturally looked to Enkrid to see what came next.

His bearing and movements made it clear he was not an ordinary person, but if they let him through without a fight, they might lose fingers for it later. Two of the five had already lost fingers. Wind Blade's doing. Given how things tended to go, they were probably lucky to still have their heads.

"If we let you pass, Wind Blade will kill us."

The one with the clearest read on the situation spoke, the one with the deep creases. Enkrid lifted his hand from the sword grip and said,

"Wind Blade is dead."

All five blinked at once.

What?

Five faces wearing the exact same baffled expression.

The choice was theirs now. Whether they believed him or not, dying in loyal service to a crime guild was their decision to make.

Would they draw? Four of the five were sweating. What now? Just let him through? And what if it was a lie?

The one they had all assumed at first was simply the group's fool turned out to be its center. The one they all deferred to.

"Let him through."

He said it, and the other four nodded. Truthfully, it was not entirely about believing Enkrid. They did not have much of a choice.

If things went wrong, Wind Blade might come cutting through them like the wind, but what could they do.

There was no other option right now.

Smart.

Ruagarne watched from behind and thought that. There had been no answer for them except to fight and die, so they had made the right call.

"Well then."

Enkrid tapped each of them on the shoulder as he passed the group guarding the underground tomb.

"Here."

The fool even handed over the torch. Enkrid gave a small nod and took it.

Inside was wider than expected, and the structure itself looked solidly built.

The walls were straight and the joints nearly invisible. He knocked on the stone. No echo. Solid all the way through.

"Doesn't really look like a tomb."

Enkrid said aloud.

"No, it doesn't."

Ruagarne agreed. She added,

"I heard that wealthy merchants and nobles used to build places like this as refuges. The idea being that even if the city fell, at least they would survive."

It was not a bad place to hide out. Block the entrance and security was more or less assured.

Enkrid looked around. There was a faint draft moving through. Someone had thought about ventilation.

Even so, the musty smell of the underground stone chamber was not going anywhere. Stepping inside, a cool chill settled over the skin. Cold enough that stored food probably would not spoil easily, though midsummer might be another story.

He did not map the full layout as he walked. He simply noted that it was the kind of place where sealing the entrance firmly in wartime would make for a solid refuge.

It was wide, but only by the look of it. Not so vast you would actually get lost in it.

His best guess put it at roughly the size of a large manor with three or four rooms. Add a parlor and a kitchen, and even that counted as generous.

Looking at it that way, whoever had built this was no amateur.

A dwarf's work, maybe? It was possible.

Walking through the underground refuge, Enkrid felt a nagging sensation he could not shake. He had been feeling it since the city's outskirts, a persistent sense that someone was watching him.

But when he tried to find the source, there was nothing. Too faint to name.

He had even thrown a fork earlier to check, and found nothing.

'Maybe my instincts are just off.'

That was possible too.

He was still scanning his surroundings as he walked when a presence reached him. He followed it, and inside one of the stone chambers found a man sitting in shackles.

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