WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 606: Marching to War

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What should you do when a situation spins on without regard for your intentions, and watching it is anything but pleasant?

"This is bad."

Krais was not happy with how things were playing out, so far from his own calculations. It was keeping him awake at night.

Insomnia, after a very long absence.

From the moment he realized something had erupted inside the Holy State right after Enkrid returned, all the way to watching the gray god's holy army assemble, he had tracked every development. The conclusion he reached was this:

The Cultists' reach was buried deeper into the continent than he had thought.

Even if the Cult had not orchestrated every piece of this, its hand in some of it seemed certain.

"Can we sweep out all the Cultists?"

How? No method came to mind, so only worst-case scenarios kept flashing through his head.

What if a Cultist showed up who could scatter curses with a single touch?

Krais had no way of knowing that someone exactly like that had already come and failed.

"If it were me, I'd go for the top first."

Whatever anyone said, the Border Guard was a territory that turned on one person. Without Enkrid, no one could fill that gap. The unit people called mad, called the spirit of madness, would scatter first.

"How do you hold onto Rem, Ragna, Jaxon, and Audin?"

Who could possibly hold all of them together?

And that was before adding Esther, Sinar, Fell, Ropord, and Teresa.

Krais could barely handle a single one of them. Yet Enkrid carried all their hopes on his back, drew them close, and stayed perfectly calm. Under that kind of pressure, Krais felt he would have lost his mind, but Enkrid just swung his sword, same as always.

"I've already spoken to Aetri, so head on over."

"Not going to scold me for breaking my equipment this time?"

"Would you even listen if I did? And this is an undershirt woven from true silver. Esther said she breathed a protection spell into it, so take it with you."

He was handing over a thin, near-transparent undershirt. Enkrid stared at Krais for a moment before asking, "Are you sick?"

"What, I do something nice and you complain about it?"

"Get some sleep."

After that, Krais never said much about what was weighing on him, and he spent several more sleepless nights.

Then Enkrid brought up the march.

And somehow, without Krais doing anything in particular, the sleepless nights went away. It probably was not what Enkrid had intended, but watching him move gave Krais something like an answer.

"If a situation spins on without regard for your intentions, what do you do?"

What do you do? You just do it.

You move the way you want to move. Does it always go the way you plan? No. Then you start changing things around you, one step at a time.

If you don't change, what's around you doesn't change, and if that doesn't change, everything stays exactly the same.

So one step at a time.

That was how Enkrid had lived, from what Krais had seen.

But if he added a Krais-sized dose of reality to that.

"Does the world just change because you want it to?"

No, it doesn't.

Then what does it take to chase your dream, to follow your own wind?

Strength.

Not just skill with a blade or raw force. In a world where ironclad conviction born of Will could itself become strength, the word meant more than that.

Still, what was needed right now was fists and swords.

Had everything Enkrid done until now, all those days of training and hardening, been for exactly this?

He wasn't sure. But there was something Krais felt for the first time in his life.

"We're off."

Enkrid said it, and the people who could be called a knightly order each mounted their horses and rode out. Strangely, not a single dark thought crossed Krais's mind watching them go.

Which meant he felt no urge to send a blessing after them, either.

"Do you know what he said when I thanked him last night for saving Cross Guard?"

It was Abnaier, coming up beside him, the same Abnaier who had asked Krais to speak casually.

"What did he say?"

Krais found it easier to use formal speech, so he kept to it. Abnaier respected that.

"He said he just went and swung his sword a bit."

Abnaier watched the departing group a moment, then added, "Right. Maybe that's all it was, just swinging a sword. But for someone, that one swing will be the moment that changes their entire life. And for someone else, it will be the moment they realize the choice they made was the worst of their life."

"Ah."

Krais let out a short sound. The meaning hit him cleanly.

He had only just figured out, watching Enkrid, how to face a problem. If you need strength, you draw that sword for the things you believe in, even if it means using force. That was the knight called Enkrid. The thought moved through him.

"You must know hunger to know abundance. You must know waiting to know joy. The fallen fruit first ripens on the branch."

Abnaier had believed in the god of abundance for a long time.

"Sounds like it's someone's turn to learn what hunger feels like," Krais said. He meant the people building their new cult around some gray god or whatever it was.

Of course, they would never get the chance to hear it.

* * *

Moving fast did not mean you stopped noticing the world around you.

Sky, wind, flowers blooming in winter, they all passed through his eyes.

Not even a day after leaving, sleet mixed into a cold wind and fell.

Snow dropping from a clear blue sky with not a cloud in sight. Quite a sight.

The temperature had plunged, but the sleet itself was beautiful. It looked as though someone had scattered white paint thickly across a blue canvas.

Crunch.

And however beautiful the scenery, one person had a grievance boiling up inside.

"Why can't these bastards come at us when it's warm?"

That was Rem. His complaint was the cold. Ragna enjoyed cold weather, so he let it pass. He himself disliked heat more. Come midsummer, he never wanted to move.

"Cold is better. Move your body, generate heat. That's all there is to it."

Ragna replied to the muttering, and Rem's eyebrows twisted, not just a twitch but a full rolling wave, up and down.

It was a trick you couldn't pull off without being genuinely annoyed.

The first time anyone saw it, it was strange enough to ask whether he had ever worked in a circus.

"Hot is better, you bastard. Sweat just runs off you. Drink some water, sink into a cool lake, and you're done."

"I forgot for a moment that I was talking to an animal."

"Hey, you go on ahead, get way out in front. Sick of looking at you. Send you off first and I feel like I'd never have to see you again."

A familiar exchange. The two of them had always fought over this exact topic whenever summer or winter came around.

It rarely came to actual blades.

In summer, Ragna couldn't be bothered to draw his sword, and in winter it was Rem who couldn't be bothered.

"Let's go fight whoever those gray or black types are. Quit wasting it here," Enkrid said, cutting in at the right moment. Before long, the twisted resentment from both of them pointed itself at the enemy.

"Let's see what you've got, you fanatic bastards."

"I am fully prepared to swing my sword on behalf of some idiot fanatics who can't even find their way."

Jaxon said nothing and rode along. Teresa hummed quietly to herself during the slower stretches.

Enkrid rode and used the time to review everything he had learned, turning over how he swung his sword and what he wanted to do differently. Over the past few days he had picked up a bit more from the unit.

"It's cold, but I'm fine now. I can stand on my own."

Sinar had shifted her approach, or more precisely, shifted the direction of her jokes. She had taken to quipping that she was fine alone, that she didn't need anyone's arms around her, that she was perfectly all right on her own.

Enkrid was curious why she kept at it, so he asked.

"Is that fun for you?"

"What do you mean?"

"The jokes."

"Enormously. Greatly. Deeply."

She paused, then opened those clear green eyes-eyes too bright for "beautiful" to quite capture, and looked straight at him.

"Fun."

Right. She means it.

Enkrid nodded evenly. They rode hard toward Noah's monastery, passing through several towns along the way.

At relay stations the others switched horses, but Enkrid had no need to swap mounts, Odd-Eye was carrying him.

"You're not hurting anywhere, are you?"

He had felt the muscles along Odd-Eye's back had grown noticeably stronger, so he asked. Odd-Eye tossed his head side to side as if to say what kind of question is that.

Whinny.

It sounded like: don't ask pointless things.

As they rode through the hours, eating and sleeping only when needed, Enkrid found himself thinking back to his conversation with Aetri.

"Did it break?"

He had come back from a fight that had split the hardest-iron sword apart. Aetri's tone was calm even so, though the sword must have taken enormous care to make.

"Should I apologize?"

Enkrid asked, and Aetri shook his head.

"Not at all."

Then, as if he had been waiting for exactly this, he produced a new sword.

"It will feel light. True silver mixed in."

Before, it had been a heavy hardest-iron blade. Now it was a quick sword carrying true silver.

"A fine vein of silver came in from the mines near Lewes. Exceptional material."

Enkrid nodded and took it. He swung it a few times, light, no question. The blade was thicker than Spark, but weighed less.

The hardest-iron longsword had seemed to drink in light and swallow it. This one took the light gently and let it rest along the edge.

That was probably why the blade looked almost golden at times.

No, every time the light in the sky shifted, the color the blade shed shifted with it.

Light, hard, a fine sword.

More than anything, there was a quality to it that told him Aetri's craft had grown.

"Fits the hand better."

Better than the hardest-iron sword. It was as if the sword were saying, you are my master. Swords don't speak, of course.

"Hmm? Want to cut loose? Hold on. Soon."

So there was no need to talk to it the way Rem talked to his axe.

On the ride, Enkrid also caught the burning stares from Fell and Ropord. Both clearly had something they wanted to say.

But neither spoke up, and Enkrid didn't ask. Reading their eyes, they needed to sort something out inside themselves first.

Because he had climbed up from the very bottom, one step at a time, Enkrid's eye for people had grown sharper than most. It let him see well enough what the two of them were carrying.

Teresa's face was calmer than he had ever seen it.

"They say divine power is the exclusive domain of the faithful, but even that force must have its own principles, so a gray sacred light existing comes as no surprise," she said at one point, though she was mostly quiet.

Esther had come along in panther form, so her silence went without saying.

Of the group, Teresa seemed the most settled. Half-giant, of all things.

Riding on like that, they finally spotted where the enemy had gathered.

"There's part of a force up ahead, not yet in formation."

"Which side?"

Overdier was supposed to be coming with an army too. It could have been them.

Enkrid and the others had ridden so hard there had been no time to pick up news along the way, and they knew nothing of how things had shifted.

Even Jaxon had not had a chance to gather information.

They had simply charged forward.

"Enemy. Gray sacred light confirmed. Holy Warriors are leading part of the force. Siege equipment is being set up in front of the monastery."

Jaxon had ridden far ahead to scout and come back. He hadn't just seen the force assembling, he had taken in everything out to the far distance.

"Looks like Noah held on."

If they were still setting up siege equipment, no serious fighting had happened yet.

And Noah had held on. He had turned the monastery into a fortress and hunkered down inside. He had even bought time by putting out word that he was open to negotiation, though that wasn't the only reason he had lasted this long.

Muel, who called himself the pope of the gray god, knew this was the best chance he would ever have to gather strength, and it would not come again. Right now, gathering those who believed in the gray god mattered more than fighting. He had used the pretext of attacking the monastery to draw like-minded people in. Consolidating strength was more important than showing results immediately.

If open fighting started here right away, some of the fence-sitters might slip away.

Of course, the monastery was nothing more than a candle in the wind. Once his preparations were complete, he would crush it by force and prove his cause was right. It would be the Sacrifice that demonstrated his conviction.

Beyond that, he also had in mind to wait for the Holy State to send out its army, then fight that battle too.

That was part of why his movements had been slow. But Enkrid had no way of knowing any of it.

To him, they were just there, and it looked like Noah had managed to hold.

They had found the enemy, and their own numbers were far fewer. Ordinarily that called for regrouping before pressing in. These people did not do ordinary.

"We hit them."

Enkrid said it and charged. Odd-Eye kicked off the ground as if in answer. After all the riding they had done, there was no sign of fatigue.

At some point the sound of Odd-Eye's hooves disappeared and Enkrid felt his body lift, as though the ground had dropped away beneath him. The acceleration had pushed their speed to something close to a knight's full movement.

He drove into the enemy's flank. One of them reacted.

It was someone wearing a breastplate painted gray all over.

The person's mouth fell open. They were on horseback too. Startled, they pulled their lips together and swung a flail. At exactly that moment, Odd-Eye adjusted speed with perfect timing.

Enkrid drew the new sword and swung. The true silver blade caught the sun and scattered golden light.

The flail came in on centrifugal force, aimed at Enkrid's forearm.

Not the head, not the body, the forearm. That alone showed the enemy's experience.

Enkrid moved only his wrist. The blade flicked, changed its line in an instant, and cut through the enemy's wrist.

Spurt.

Blood sprayed and the wrist hit the ground.

"Aaaaah!"

A scream followed. Enkrid shook the blade once through the air and wheeled his horse around. Odd-Eye reversed with easy grace.

"Not bad. Actually, better?"

The hardest-iron sword had been heavy. This one felt almost too light. But that lightness made every motion crisp. A blade suited to fast, nimble swordwork, if anything.

Either way, the satisfaction was high. Aetri's sword had sent a wrist rolling across the ground.

"I..."

The one who had lost the wrist couldn't finish the words.

Thwack.

The hatchet Rem had thrown buried itself in the person's skull, and the body snapped off the horse and fell.

"What the..."

"Huh? Huh?"

"What is it? What?"

"It's a, damn, enemy!"

Thud, thud.

The body bounced across the ground and tumbled into the ranks of enemy soldiers. While the startled soldiers each managed one word, the madmen had already driven into the heart of the army.

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