WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 597: A Vivid Blue Winter Sky, Flowers, a Child, and a Fool

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"We'll see each other when you're scrambling for a corner to hide in, you little shit."

The Boatman had failed, in the end, to collect himself. There was no doubt some demon had taken up residence in that bastard's mouth.

"Get lost."

He said it again.

Enkrid opened his mouth to respond, and the Boatman could not stand to watch. Those lips were curling into a round shape, about to do that "boo" nonsense again.

He drove that madman Enkrid out, then sat at the prow, watching the lamplight, reading the day that was coming.

'Let's see how you push forward this time.'

He said it, and then caught himself, a little surprised. It was what he had whispered inside his own mind that gave him pause.

He had spoken not of the clear future, where Enkrid would surely suffer, trapped in a single day, but of an uncertain future, one concerned with how the man would move forward.

'Am I actually expecting something?'

Maybe it was everything Enkrid had shown him so far. That could be it.

Still, he thought it unlikely to end well.

Why would it? He had watched countless heroes over the ages, and countless great figures.

Some among them had gone further than anything Enkrid had managed yet.

But how had they ended?

The Boatman tried reaching out to those who lived within him. They were all much the same.

"He'll be swallowed up like the rest in the end."

"Expecting something? What are you expecting? That's idiotic."

"He's still holding on?"

"Don't call it repeating a single day. Convince him it's eternal life."

Only a very small number offered anything new.

"Maybe we'll get to watch him writhe in agony. That sounds entertaining."

"How do you think he'll manage to endure this time?"

Real anticipation. Lukewarm reactions like these, instead of disappointment and despair.

The Boatman had never been a single being to begin with.

He had always been many. It was only natural that Enkrid sensed a different Boatman each time he arrived, because that was the truth of it.

It was natural, too, that these many selves held no single unified opinion. And yet, though they were many, they were also one.

What that one original Boatman had always wanted was a new companion.

That unity was now showing cracks.

This was the result wrought by the tenacious madness and obsession of one human being.

"What are you trying to do? What are you expecting?"

One of those inner selves spoke. The Boatman currently occupying the body said nothing in reply. He only smiled.

A line curved through the dull gray skin, carving something grotesque across his face.

If Enkrid had seen that smile, he would probably have said it was the most ominous thing about him.

* * *

Enkrid's work was still not finished.

In a single night, he had smashed three crime guilds, killed the Evil Eye, the Cult's experiment and Demon Creature that had been pulling strings from behind the city, and put down the vampire who had played castellan while chasing nothing but its own pleasures, along with three werewolf sentinels. Even so, scorch marks still darkened corners of the city.

"Die!"

A band of assassins, barely past the stage of forming, came at him.

Three of them moved as one, but their technique for concealing their presence was sloppy, and the fact that one of them announced himself with a war cry before charging said everything that needed to be said about their mindset. They had clearly never been properly trained.

The reason was plain enough. Once the Evil Eye had taken hold of the city, it had turned the whole place into a sandbox for its own amusement.

That was why the crime guilds and these half-baked assassins had survived at all despite their shoddiness.

The Evil Eye's reason for reducing the city to this? Entertainment, it seemed. A creature with nothing better to do.

Watching these so-called assassins rush him, Enkrid shook his head inwardly.

'Jaxon would take one look at this and just sigh.'

He drew his sword. Steel rang in the air, and the blade split the sunlight and split all three assassins with it. More of the same followed.

"O Demon God!"

He tracked down a gathering place and walked in to find a group of Cultists driving daggers into their own chests, trying to summon a demon.

Naturally, no demon appeared. The demons of the Cursed Ground were not that cheap.

Instead, an Evil Spirit was born, feeding on the will of the dead. The one who had stabbed their own heart crumpled, and a dark ripple tore open in the air.

A manifestation of an Evil Spirit. Not quite on the level of the Evil Eye, but if left alone, it might have posed an even greater threat to ordinary people, an amorphous Demon Creature with no fixed shape.

Ruagarne watched it, puffed out one cheek, and said, "For crying out loud."

Then she cracked her whip and wiped it out in a single blow.

Shhreeek! Kraaaaaah!

The Evil Spirit tore apart with a shriek, its death cry echoing outward. A curse was woven into that cry, but it landed on nothing.

Enkrid caught the blue streak the whip had left behind.

"A magic weapon?"

He asked Ruagarne, and she tilted her head in a nod.

"Jealous?"

"Not at all."

He answered immediately, and he meant it. Normally he would have coveted something like that without a second thought, but this time, genuinely not.

There was another gathering after that, but this time Enkrid was the one to cut it down, and in doing so he proved he had a similar weapon of his own.

The longsword worked with hardest iron carried an enchantment that Esther had put there herself, so Enkrid's blade could be called a magic weapon too.

Kraaaaaah.

The Evil Spirit screamed, became smoke, and vanished.

"I told you I'm not jealous."

It reminded him, strangely, of the first time he had seen a Whistle Dagger. Back then he had been something close to desperate to collect them all.

Combing through more of the city brought a familiar name to his ears in the slum quarter.

"O Balrok, Demon God of Battle, come reside here!"

It was a Cultist, flailing with a rusted sword. The man chanted a spell that borrowed Balrok's name, and with it his eyes flooded with light, one arm ignited, and it stretched into something like a burning whip.

Sometimes Balrok lent a fragment of its power to a human host in a rough approximation of divine descent, though this was nothing more than a sliver of borrowed strength. It was nowhere near a true Balrok descent.

Even so, watching it made something simmer in Enkrid's chest.

"I hope this reaches you. Tell him to wait, I'll be coming for him soon."

He let some of that feeling into his voice. He meant it. If he could find out where Balrok was, part of him wanted to go right now.

The man had already lost his mind, flames spilling from every hole in his face, his eyes and nose and mouth all burning. He tilted his head in confusion.

It was not a true Balrok Fragment that had stepped forward, only the faint echo of power Balrok had left behind. One stroke was more than enough.

Right foot out and to the side, a draw-cut on the unsheath, one clean blow. The blade dragged against the scabbard and flashed across the man like lightning.

Thp. Thunk.

His head flew. The presence faded, and with it, Balrok's borrowed strength.

After that sweep, barely deserving the name, Enkrid spent two days combing through the rest of the city.

The castellan followed at his heels the whole time and came to understand, again, just how remarkable Enkrid was.

'Different.'

It was not his swordsmanship, his reflexes, or his physical strength that impressed. Those had been beyond measuring from the start.

What truly struck the castellan was his judgment and his ability to act on it.

Something that might take another person a full day of deliberation was, to Enkrid, something that simply passed in an instant.

Was it a difference in the size of his vessel?

Or purely the ability he carried in that body?

The castellan believed it was the former. His vessel was different. There was no hesitation between decision and action. What kind of person could be like this? That was what the castellan could not stop marveling at.

On top of that, for all that Enkrid had stepped up like this, he never once asked what would happen to the city next.

That was baffling too. Did he have no ambition? Right now, the castellan would have knelt without a word if Enkrid had demanded a pledge of loyalty.

There were obvious obstacles standing in the way of simply swallowing the city whole, but ambition had a way of making people overlook things like that.

That was what people called the blind spot of desire.

Yet this man had truly done nothing but cut down the city's problems. What did that say about him?

The castellan could not say. Enkrid was beyond his ability to measure. And so respect came naturally.

Which was why the castellan said what needed to be said before it was too late.

"My name is Lui. It'll sound brazen, I know, but, thank you."

"It was nothing."

Not modesty. That was the truth. To Enkrid, every last bit of this had amounted to an evening's exercise.

To others, though, it looked like something else entirely.

Especially to the man who had finally recovered what was his by right and by duty, Lui. For him, it was something more.

After he shed the scavenging opportunist act, all Lui showed toward Enkrid was respect.

There was nothing unpleasant about that.

All the more so when everything about this man, his bearing, his way of doing things, suited Enkrid's taste.

Even if Lui was someone who held sway over a foreign city, Enkrid had no reservations.

Work was work, anyway. Enkrid had set a broad scope for his commission.

He had agreed to deal with the Cultists, so he saw it through until he had rooted them all out.

The rotten roots that would ordinarily have resisted any attempt to pull them up had embedded themselves deep in the city, but the one who had stepped up to the task was a knight called a disaster.

On top of that, a man with brute stamina thanks to tireless Will.

It was Enkrid's fourth day in Cross Guard. Compared to the first day, the mood of the city had changed completely. It was nothing short of a miracle.

Along the way, a few unexpected connections had formed.

"What's your name?"

He asked the boy from the inn. The kid had been hanging around him for the past few days whenever he rested.

"Delma."

"What do you want to be someday?"

"I have to take over my uncle's inn."

The boy said it with total seriousness. It was not greed reaching for something that was not his. He simply wanted to carry on what belonged to the city. The uncle bowed his head and said, "I never thought a day like this would come."

An adult protecting a child in a city like this, a place that had been lawless and rough to its core.

The uncle had looked away from Enkrid's danger to protect the child and his own life from the people burning sleeping incense to fleece a few Krona.

'Is it worth blaming him for that?'

He did not want to. Even while pretending not to see the crime guilds' work, the man had done what he could. He had tried to keep the child safe, and had sent a signal by serving food laced with poison.

That was how Enkrid felt. He did not want to lay blame. Not everyone in the world could do right at every moment. That did not mean he would forgive everyone who did something wrong or let something weigh on their conscience, but.

"You don't have to do bad things anymore!"

That was the fool's shout.

Whether it was the crime guilds or whoever else, the castellan had said he would take in anyone showing signs of reform and turn them into soldiers.

The fool and his group bowed out, saying they wanted nothing to do with fighting.

"Once things settle, it would be good to open a trade route with Border Guard. I'm thinking of building a boat, something that can run back and forth across the Pen-Hanil River."

One of them had a talent for building boats. Why he had come to tell Enkrid this, Enkrid was not sure.

"He's saying thank you."

The fool said it from beside him.

Enkrid gave a small nod and thought nothing more of it.

He heard later that these people, even as members of a crime guild, had quietly looked the other way and shielded the city's residents when they could. One of them had lost fingers over it, apparently. That said something about who they were.

A few others were like that too.

"Here, take this."

He had spent days circling the city and cleaning it up bit by bit. Someone whose face had grown familiar tossed him a shriveled apple.

He bit into it. Astringent and sweet together, rolling across his tongue. Not something he could call good, even to be polite.

"That's my last apple."

The smile of a fruit seller missing one front tooth stood in for the taste.

The city probably would not change overnight. The castellan would have to fight for it to become somewhere livable, and there were likely still people inside it doing wrong. No matter who you were, you could not catch and kill every bad person.

Sorting them out was work in itself. You could not handle everything on instinct alone.

So he let it go. What remained was for the people left there to figure out on their own.

They would die and kill and sometimes cry and sometimes rage and sometimes find joy.

That was life, was it not. These were the days they would live, and the responsibility that fell on those who wanted to protect the ground beneath their feet.

"Should we leave tomorrow?"

Enkrid said it, watching Ruagarne come back after spending the day going around the city.

"Sure."

He let the day pass. The uncomfortable, vague feeling of being watched had been gone for a while now. The Evil Eye had probably been spying through some kind of spell.

The next morning, having slept well, Enkrid ruffled Delma's hair, trained as he always did, then leaned against the tree beside the inn for a while, looking up at the sky.

The cool early-winter breeze came through and dried the sweat on his skin. He tilted his head back and saw a cloudless, vivid blue sky.

Ha ha ha ha!

Children's laughter drifted from somewhere far off.

Would he get cold if he fell asleep like this? Probably, he figured, but he wanted to stay in the moment, so he closed his eyes. Drowsiness rolled over him. Not a bad feeling at all.

Children laughing, a blue sky, a cool breeze, everything woven together, and peace settling in.

Maybe it was for days like this, for moments like this, that he picked up a sword.

That thought passed through him too.

It was still early morning, not yet noon, and people were already moving about busily.

Even the sound of that bustle reached him like a lullaby.

That was because a wind of hope was blowing through the city.

And from beyond that hopeful wind, carrying its peace along with it, something that would burn everything to nothing came walking in.

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