WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 599: How Far Will He Protect?

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"If you do something wrong, it might feel good in the moment, but you can't sleep easy afterward. Keep it up and the unease never leaves. Why put yourself through that? Better not to do it."

These were the words of a friend who looked like a fool but wasn't, one of the five who had guarded the underground.

"What if you got used to it, and the discomfort faded?"

Enkrid pushed back.

"I don't want to get used to it."

The friend answered without a moment's hesitation. No sign of deliberation at all.

"Fair enough."

He had come during the morning, when Enkrid was training and drenched in sweat. Enkrid had wondered why, and it turned out the friend only wanted to say thank you. That was all. A few more words followed, and the conversation drifted into that exchange.

Afterward, Delma came by with water and asked if there was anything he needed. The uncle kept sneaking glances at Enkrid but never pushed him away.

He always looked at Enkrid with eyes full of respect and reverence. Same as Lord Lui.

There were quite a few people who looked at Enkrid that way. But did that mean only reverent eyes remained in the city? No.

"There's a rumor going around that if anyone does something bad, you'll come for them and kill every last one. So apparently some are saying they should strike first, before you get to them."

That was what Delma said. These were people who saw him as a threat. They talked like that among themselves, but of course none of them had actually tried anything.

The castellan was forming troops and cracking down inside the city with fire in his eyes.

And even without that, there was no way Enkrid would be caught off guard.

As Delma's words made clear, people who meant harm or carried ill intent were still in the city.

"The Demon God shall descend and purify all things!"

There were women who screamed things like that, half-mad. There were people who hid blades in their sleeves and glared at him. Others lurked in the shadows and watched.

There were the destitute, people dulled by whatever they had taken, and people who studied him out of sheer anxiety.

"And after all that, they're still like this?"

Ruagarne looked at them and muttered.

"Cut them some slack. They're fools."

That was what the fool who had come to visit said.

"I don't really understand it. I can tell things are better now, but something still feels uncertain."

Delma, who had never once felt safe in her life, added that change frightened her.

Right. Some people were like that, and some were different.

Enkrid thought back to the sword instructor who had trained him on a beach, long ago.

"I was an executioner."

That was what the man had said.

"I didn't need to know whether the person standing before me was guilty, or wrongfully condemned, or falsely accused, or just a scapegoat. All I had to do was swing the blade and kill them. A helmet with nothing but eye slits was my only armor, and the best weapon I had."

When he said those things, he looked deeply troubled. Like a man who would rewrite and erase his past if only he could.

Enkrid had asked him about it once when the man was a few drinks in, and he said he would do exactly that if he could, but of course it was impossible.

Thinking about it now, Enkrid himself could repeat today endlessly and still never return to some point in the past. That much was the same.

Not that he wanted to repeat today, either.

"Among the people I killed, there was a child. Yes, a child. And that child's mother asked me why her child had to die."

The instructor said his past was not something he could stand behind with his head held high.

"I swung the blade without thinking."

And yet his skill at cutting people down only kept improving through all of it. He said there were things he had come to understand while working as an executioner.

Listening to him, you could tell the man had something like talent.

Then one day, the question from the child's mother changed the course of his life.

"I regret it."

He spoke of regret.

What did his life look like after that?

Enkrid only knew fragments. After the man quit his work, he never killed carelessly again.

He never once killed someone who offered no resistance.

He started mercenary work using the blade skills honed as an executioner, survived, and eventually found his way to a self-governing city in some corner of the continent. Somewhere along that road, he had become more absorbed in saving people than in killing them.

"Does this bring back the people I killed? No. But this is how I'm going to live."

Was the number of people he had killed greater, or the number he had saved?

No way to know.

Enkrid did not think he could weigh the good and evil in any person's life.

He was not making any claim about forgiving or not forgiving.

There was simply something he held more important than all of that.

It was the anchor that had dropped into his life. The moon that guided starlight. A milestone set down on the road ahead.

"Your goal is to protect the people within the limits you've set for yourself, right? Then it's simple. Take them all into the underground shelter. You have more than enough ability for that."

The Boatman cut in. It was the moment of looking back over the day. Enkrid watched him slip in as a faint apparition.

At some point, people and air and wind and sunlight had all come to a stop. With everything frozen that way, the world around him turned gray.

The end of a recalled memory.

The Boatman's words were correct. A sound path.

Following that logic, Enkrid could have gathered Delma, the fool and his friends, Delma's uncle, Ruagarne, the castellan, and a handful of others, and kept them alive.

Walking Fire would burn the city. If it found nothing left to burn, it would disappear.

Protect them until that point. No need to risk his life. No reason to climb a wall with no visible path over it.

Inside the gray world, Enkrid stared quietly at Delma.

"What do you think she'll grow up to be?"

He asked the Boatman without moving his gaze. The Boatman could not answer. He was not a seer who knew the future.

Enkrid had asked, but he did not know the answer himself. Nobody would.

Delma might become an innkeeper.

She might become a hunter. She might wander a churning continent and someday nurse a grand ambition, founding a kingdom. Could that happen? Maybe it could.

"Nobody knows."

Enkrid added. The Boatman watched with gray eyes, quietly studying the one who would have to live forever under a curse.

The only one who held color in a gray world.

"So?"

The Boatman asked, and Enkrid brought up the words that had once struck him like a stone dropped into still water.

"How far do I protect?"

The Boatman picked up the thread.

"Yes. How far will you protect?"

People. Life. The space behind his back.

To put it another way, the lives of the people living behind him. That was what he had decided to protect. But was it enough to protect only that much?

If so, if that was truly all, there would be no real reason to live in such a loud, tangled way.

A reason to go rescue a Holy Maiden from the distant Holy State? There was none.

Go out of his way for a child he did not know? She was not standing behind him. So there was no reason to save her.

Enkrid knew he had wavered. The Boatman's words had reached him for the first time.

Save only those within your reach, those who are on your side.

This city was only four days of connection. Nothing more.

True words. Words that could not be more true.

Pak.

In the gray world, Enkrid slapped both his cheeks with open hands.

The world blurred and returned to the original dream, the world of the Black River. On the surface of the churning black water, the Boatman stood holding a lamp and watched him.

Enkrid did not protect a mere four days of connection. What he protected was something else entirely.

"These people will have their chances too. I will protect that possibility."

Inside Cross Guard, there were people hiding daggers out of fear that his blade might find them. Assassins were still there. People drunk on the Cult were still there.

There would be those beyond any forgiveness. Husbands who beat their wives. Mothers who beat their children.

Children who had stabbed their own parents. People who lived by stealing what others had.

And.

A child who had decided she wanted to become an innkeeper.

An adult who had looked after that child so she would not starve.

A bunch of fools who had joined a thieves' guild of all things, and lost fingers protecting the city's people.

A castellan who could have simply run but stayed behind, saying he loved everyone inside these walls.

People who had stayed beside that castellan even when nothing was coming to them for it.

There were the righteous. There were the crooked. And all of them were living in this moment, in the present, in this instant.

Enkrid wanted to protect that fleeting now. Nobody could know how any of them might change in the future, but this fire pouring down on them right now, a forbidden spell unleashed specifically to kill him, would erase tomorrow from every single person inside this city.

How could he let that stand?

War's End. He wished for war to end.

Why?

Because every person deserves the possibility of a tomorrow.

War's End. He wished for war to end.

Why?

Because whoever he was today, he could not know who he would be tomorrow.

He did not want that possibility taken away.

He wanted the Cursed Ground erased.

Because Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts always killed and erased tomorrow.

The Boatman asked again.

"How far will you protect?"

"My tomorrow. And theirs as well."

Enkrid raised one hand while standing on the boat drifting across the Black River. There was nothing in that hand, but to the Boatman's eyes, a sword was visible.

A formless blade spoke for his resolve. Those words showed his Will. Enkrid had given his answer.

Heh heh heh.

Pfhahaha.

Ha ha ha ha ha.

Heeeee.

What an idiotic answer.

Is he stupid?

If that is your will, then.

We respect it.

The Boatman said nothing, and yet words were heard. More precisely, they came from the being wearing the Boatman's face, something that could not be counted or measured.

Dozens of intentions overlapped and poured into Enkrid's mind, trying to corrupt his Will, but it was useless.

The Will of Refusal had already taken deep root inside Enkrid.

Whatever anyone said, even if it meant becoming the enemy of every person on the continent, if it was not something he felt was right, he would refuse.

"What a madman."

The gray-faced Boatman held up the lamp and spoke. Enkrid could feel this was the moment everything around him pulled away and he woke from the dream.

But in that moment of pulling away, the Boatman's face looked like it was smiling.

'Must be my imagination.'

The Boatman smiling, of all things. Unthinkable.

Nothing at all like Sinar's smile, or Esther's.

That was how Enkrid was pushed out of the Black River.

The Boatman left behind on the boat went on chuckling softly long after Enkrid was gone. There was no deception in that laughter. It was sincere, plain and simple.

Teaching. How long had it been since he last did this?

Swordsmanship? That was not teaching. Techniques for handling the body, anyone could figure those out on their own.

What lodged itself inside the mind, what took root in the heart, the spirit one came to carry, awakening that in someone, that was true teaching.

If this was not worth enjoying, what in the world was?

They called it eternal life, but in truth it was a prisoner locked in the cage of today, and the one who should have screamed and merged with him was thrashing instead.

The Boatman had come, at some point, to enjoy watching that.

Not that every Boatman felt the same way, of course.

"A practical problem remains. O prisoner who dreams of mortality."

The Boatman spoke into the empty air where he sat alone. Somehow those words seemed to reach Enkrid, who had already woken.

* * *

"A practical problem remains. O prisoner who dreams of mortality."

Enkrid heard those words the moment he woke. Another brief start to this day, repeated so many times now. His thoughts accelerated, each one pulling the next behind it.

Somewhere in that chain was his answer to the Boatman's words.

'I know.'

The practical problem, Walking Fire, was still there.

Over the course of more than a hundred todays, he had never uncovered a single clue, and that spell had made him stand by and watch as people burned to death, were burning to death, over and over.

Strangely, though, Enkrid felt that part of the helplessness he had carried right up to the previous today was gone.

In truth, it had never really been helplessness in the pure sense.

'It was a problem of the heart.'

He had not settled on a path, so no matter how far he walked, naturally he could never reach a destination.

Now he had settled on one. He had cleared away the vague residue of ash left inside him and put it into words, making it plain.

One thing remained. Cut whatever Walking Fire was.

How do you cut something that cannot be cut?

If the answer had come to him right away, he would never have felt that helplessness to begin with.

So what was he supposed to do?

"Going to die."

The words slipped out of Enkrid's mouth on their own. A groan. This was genuinely rare for him.

But it made sense.

Because to the question of what to do, there was only one answer. Keep going until it works.

Still, he decided to change his approach a little.

"Rua, tell me everything you know about Walking Fire."

No time to waste. He asked and listened with his thoughts at full speed. Then he threw himself at it. He swung his sword at Walking Fire, holding nothing back, pouring Will into the strike and pulling up every trace of that feeling of omnipotence he could summon.

Pwaaaak!

Enkrid threw his body into it, literally. One sword swing was all he could manage, but because he threw himself behind it, the heat of Walking Fire reached him and burned him.

Blub blub.

The scale armor melted from the heat and fused to his skin. The pain was extraordinary. His eyes burned, the world turned red, and all that remained was searing heat driving agony into him.

Enkrid died again.

After dying by burning twenty-five more times after that.

"Call me an idiot if you want."

Enkrid said it the moment he woke. The words escaped because he could no longer hold them back.

"What?"

Ruagarne came over, puffed her cheeks, and rolled her eyes. She wanted to know what on earth he was suddenly saying.

"I mean it."

Enkrid said it once more and pulled out his trump card, the one he had been keeping close. It was a mirror. Esther's mirror, the one she had told him to take out and look at his own face whenever things felt grim.

Who knew magic best?

A sorcerer. Or a witch.

Among them, there was one who stood out as brilliantly capable even by Enkrid's own measure. A witch named Esther. The dark-haired beauty blinking at him from the other side of the mirror right now.

"Walking Fire. Do you know it?"

Enkrid asked. The dark-haired beauty on the other side of the mirror nodded as though the answer were obvious.

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