WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 596: Even Amid Filth, Flowers Bloom

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Enkrid let his arm hang loose. The tip of his sword pointed at the floor. In front of him, a Demon Creature split clean in two lay sprawled in a heap of flesh.

Black blood soaked the ground in wide, dark patches. On top of it, nothing remained but a brown lump of meat.

"Anyone else want a turn?"

A flat question. Heads came up when they heard it.

"Please—please spare me."

Thud.

A soldier dropped his weapon and said it. The spear he had been holding clattered to the floor. Enkrid had not swung his sword at the soldier in particular.

The sight of the administrator turned Demon Creature had been so shocking that the soldiers and everyone else looked as if they had lost their minds entirely.

There were moments when those who had simply followed orders had to be held accountable. This was not one of them.

With that thought, he turned his head. Ruagarne was crouching over the dead Demon Creature and speaking.

"The Cult really does experiment with everything."

Listening to her, it sounded like the Cultists had done far more than simply hold their gatherings.

All of it had been resolved, more or less, by his blade.

The Demon Creature at the root of every last bit of this was dead now.

Enkrid looked at the self-proclaimed castellan, head bowed deep.

Was this the part where he asked what had happened and then told the man to start cleaning up the mess?

The man's shoulders were trembling.

In a situation like this, what would someone who could be called the responsible party actually feel?

Were those shoulders shaking from joy? Or was there emptiness underneath?

The emptiness might come before any joy. Everything had turned on its own while he knew nothing of it, and now it had ended somewhere beyond his reach.

On top of that, the person who had resolved it had come from Border Guard.

Setting aside any question of pride, this was not a situation in which he could simply beam with uncomplicated happiness.

Enkrid did not know politics, but he read situations well enough, and he understood people.

Even if relief came first, the emptiness would be hard to hide. The castellan raised his head and looked at Enkrid.

Enkrid shifted his weight back without quite meaning to. Ruagarne felt it and looked at the castellan.

Why do that man's eyes look like that?

The eyes of the man who had lifted his head were bright. Remarkably, almost startlingly bright.

"Your skill is truly extraordinary, Sir Knight."

Reverence came through in his tone.

"Sir Knight, surely you are not planning to leave already?"

What followed was something close to desperation.

"Once the Cult problem is dealt with, leaving would be the right thing to do, would it not? This is Azpen's territory."

Enkrid answered. He did not actually need to leave immediately. There were still remnants from the gatherings and all the rest, and he had thought about dealing with those too.

Ruagarne had followed along precisely because of the Cult's presence, after all.

"Dangerous eyes on that one."

Ruagarne sized up the castellan's gaze. Enkrid silently agreed.

Those eyes are genuinely a little off.

He wondered if Krais ever looked like that—only when finding ruins packed with Demon Creatures, maybe.

The man calling himself castellan was staring at Enkrid the way an herb picker would stare at something rare pulled from the earth.

"What do you mean, Sir Knight? Now that things have come this far, please—help us!"

He said it and dropped to his knees on the floor.

The castellan's name was Lui. Lord Lui knew his own abilities were nothing special. But the love he had for his city was real.

"All of you, get down on your knees too!"

He turned and demanded it of everyone around him. The fool who had been guarding the cellar was the first to kneel, and when the soldiers caught the mood and followed, those from the criminal guild had little choice either.

"Please help us! Everyone, follow my lead!"

Urgent crises had come one after another, leaving no time to take the measure of the man, but now that there was a brief pause, his character was starting to show.

He was the kind of person who did not let go of an opportunity once it appeared. His shining eyes were those of a merchant who had found something rare—or a vagrant who had finally grabbed a loaf of bread after days without food.

And somehow it did not look entirely bad.

"Please help us!"

For Lui, what mattered more than arguing with commanders about whether he had been trailing the administrator was what stood right in front of him now.

The most important thing of all?

A knight had come. One who was favorable to the city, at that. This knight had made no demands, had calculated nothing, and had killed the Demon Creature.

Should he just say thank you and call it done? Should he weep tears of relief? Or drown in emptiness because something he had staked his life on ended with a single swing of someone else's blade?

No.

Lord Lui's wish was desperate, and it was clear.

When he was small, Lui had believed he would become a knight without peer. He held that belief for a month or two, but it faded fast.

"There is not much in this world that a single sword can accomplish," his father had told him, meaning it as comfort. Lui had not particularly minded.

Did being bad with a sword change anything? It did not. He had tried learning magic afterward, tried his hand at plenty of other things.

Lui knew he had no particular talent. He also knew he did not want for much.

The biggest thing he had wanted as a child was simply for the fighting to stop.

Cross Guard had clashed constantly with Border Guard over the Pen-Hanil River.

Why can't everyone just get on quietly.

Living quietly, without too much fuss, was what he wanted. For the people of his city to not go hungry. To earn enough for firewood in winter and not freeze to death.

That had been the whole of what Lui wanted.

And when had all of this started going wrong.

Letting some sorcerer through the city gates. Letting in a man who claimed to control Demon Creatures. Having a lunatic installed as a military commander who thought burning the city to the ground was perfectly acceptable as long as it served Azpen.

Misfortunes pile on each other, as they say, and around that time his aging father passed away from illness.

His mother had died when he was small, so the family left were a handful of relatives, and none of them could honestly be called good people.

They either wanted the castellan's seat or wanted his life. One of the two.

The one who had driven him out and claimed the seat was supposedly one of his father's half-brothers, though Lui had serious doubts about whether they shared blood at all.

The one thing the current castellan had over him was the sword.

Either way, from that point until now, Lui had held to one wish: that the people of this city would not have to live in misery.

A reason? Did he need one? If pressed, it was simply that he truly loved the city where he was born and raised.

"May I ask what it is you want help with?"

The man was speaking formally, so Enkrid matched his tone roughly.

Watching someone get pushed around this badly and still insist on calling himself the castellan, there was no point pretending to be anything other than what he was.

And what was left in this city worth claiming to rule over, anyway.

"There are still remnants. Since you have already put in the effort, if you could manage a little more..."

The sentence trailed off into a smile. Brazen—but Enkrid saw something genuine in the man's words.

If he was wrong about that, there was nothing to be done.

Before he nodded, Enkrid asked in passing, "Why go this far? You could have escaped if you wanted to."

Getting out of the city and going as far as Border Guard would have been enough to get by.

Why stay in this rotten city? For what? Because he could not let go of the title of castellan? Or was there something else he was after?

When the castellan opened his mouth to speak, there was nothing in his manner but plain straightforwardness. No shame, no emptiness.

He had never wanted to be a hero, and he had never wanted to be a savior.

An angel descending from the sky one day to sweep the city clean? He would have been grateful beyond words.

But that kind of thing does not happen in the world. What could happen, perhaps, was for a sword to arrive in an angel's place and lend a hand.

Perhaps this was that moment.

"Simply because I want the place where I was born and raised to be a little more whole."

The castellan said it.

"You could have taken your people and gone into exile."

Enkrid's follow-up was fair. Wanting things to be whole meant caring for his people, did it not? Was there no ambition underneath?

"The kind of peace I want is not something you get by abandoning your country. And, well—if something similar happened again later, would I have to flee again? Sort through who to take with me again? Who would want that? Before I am a castellan, I am a person who loves this city. I only want the city walls to protect the people inside."

There is will inside those words. Even without training the Will to swing a sword, if what a person wants is clear, that is strength enough.

Lord Lui had no particular talent, but the feeling he had for his city was real, and when an opportunity came he knew how to fight to hold on to it.

Enkrid nodded.

After that, the castellan threw everything he knew into the effort.

"You there—give up the location of your base. Otherwise this knight will cut you down!"

He started by wringing out the nearest criminal guild member.

"What? Oh, mercy, I'll show you the way. Of course I'll show you the way."

Like a fox riding a tiger's back.

He called out boldly for them to lead the way. Ruagarne muttered beside him that this was an amusing man.

They moved before the afternoon sun had even set.

Enkrid visited three guild bases in turn.

At one of them:

"Do you know who I am? I am the second finger of the guild!"

He had wondered what the second finger meant. Apparently it meant the man considered himself the second strongest in the guild.

"Who is the first?"

"Wind Blade, of course."

"Is that right?"

The man used a blunt weapon—a chunk of iron spiked with sharp bristles. His technique alone was not bad.

He had one poor habit, though. Every time he swung the blunt weapon in his right hand, his left shoulder opened up.

Enkrid stabbed him in that left shoulder.

Thunk.

"Aaah!"

He had hit a vessel cleanly. Blood poured freely.

"Please spare me!"

One thrust, and all the swagger vanished.

"Have you ever spared anyone who begged for their life?"

No answer came. His eyes darted around and his lips quivered. Before the man could start lying, Enkrid's sword moved.

He kept moving through the city after that. After what amounted to a sweep, they reached the manor where the administrator had been singing.

"Do you dare challenge a noble of the night? Your choice is a grave mistake."

A vampire with a heavy taste for the dramatic stood waiting.

"Just as I suspected—no relative of mine would ever be like this!"

The castellan shouted it. Apparently this creature had claimed to be a relative and used that as cover to drive him out.

Inside the manor, it had been taking young women and children from the city and drinking their blood.

Not only blood, it seemed. There were other foul habits mixed in. This was a vampire who delighted in the screams it drew out while torturing people. The bodies it had tortured to death numbered more than ten. A habit carried over from its human days, unchanged even now.

Nothing needed to be said. Enkrid cut it down.

Vampires were not common Demon Creatures. A vampire that could reason and speak was something that deserved to be called a high-ranking Demon Creature without exaggeration. That vampire was split in two with a single stroke.

"We need to burn it."

Ruagarne, with her long experience, took charge of what came next. She put the vampire's dismembered body into the brazier and burned it steadily. The smell of burning flesh and raw blood spread through the manor.

Three werewolves appeared after that.

Grrrrrrrr.

They had no reason in them. Enkrid cut them down without expression. Using the technique of Aker's Web, he herded them to one side as they charged, then took all their heads in turn.

With a dull thud, the severed heads rolled across the floor.

"There are also ones that appear late at night."

The shameless castellan said it in a perfectly polite tone.

There genuinely were Demon Creatures that appeared in the dead of night. Werewolves, again.

At this point it was almost strange that this city had functioned at all until now.

Enkrid kept at it, spending a full day and night without sleep, swinging his sword.

At one point he passed the front of the inn where they had first stayed. A child standing outside watched him with drowsy eyes.

"There will be no one left to bother you. Go and tell your father."

"It's my uncle. No blood between us, actually—he took me in and raised me."

Words that had not been asked for. The child seemed flustered by it too. The city was changing too fast and too suddenly.

"Is that so."

Enkrid answered without making much of it.

Orphans are everywhere.

The people who take them in are not.

In a city this worn down, they would have been rarer still.

Enkrid walked through the whole city, hunting out hidden Demon Creatures and killing them, cutting down those who attempted assassination, and catching Cultists who had been holding gatherings.

"Cultists, yes."

Ruagarne stepped forward when it came to catching the Cultists.

Could something that is a disaster for one person be a blessing for another?

At the very least, for the castellan and for those who had been trying to live decently, the disaster named Enkrid was a blessing.

A blade that shed blood. A blade that cut through darkness. From it, something like a blessing grew.

Enkrid spent that stretch of days and nights seeing the city, and seeing its people.

In this city there were those who were part of criminal guilds and yet quietly looked out for people anyway.

There were adults who had taken in a child on the edge of starvation and raised them.

There had been a retired mercenary who had thrown themselves into protecting someone and died for it.

There was a man who called himself castellan and said all he wanted was for the place to be livable.

There were those who scraped by day to day and still shared bread with vagrants and kept a pot of stew going.

Even among filth, flowers bloom.

After staying up through the night, Enkrid came back and saw the tree growing next to the inn.

White flowers had bloomed on it too.

Even inside a ruined city, there were people worth protecting.

Even if they were not his city's people, people like this could not be left to die.

To speak of War's End—to reach beyond simply guarding what was at your own back—meant something like this.

This was not a new realization.

It had been the goal he had set from the very first time he picked up a sword and lost himself in the traveling bard's song.

It was the reason he had swung his sword instead of spending time blaming his lack of talent. And it was why he could not remain where he stood today.

That night, the Boatman appeared again and said,

"Are you satisfied? For saving them all? You will come to regret every last bit of it."

The Boatman heaped curses on him, and Enkrid answered, "Bourkiilham?"

The Boatman grew furious.

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