WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 610: Of Course

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When Enkrid weighed everything together, the situation ahead, his current abilities, the knight order's fighting strength, he did not judge the present to be a crisis.

He did not know every face gathered out there, but he had come with a rough idea of what to expect, and even so.

"I heard a Holy Knight joined them. That's not going to stop you from going, is it?"

Krais had said as much.

The unpredictable variable was those coming from the Holy State.

"They were in the middle of a factional war among themselves. On top of that, Cultists were breaking out everywhere, causing fights in every direction, and they say Demon Creatures came flooding out of the Cursed Ground in droves. Total chaos. I can't predict how they'll react."

That was what Krais had said. Enkrid simply nodded.

Even if every last one of them turned against him, he had no intention of changing what he had decided.

This was just who Enkrid was. Everyone around him knew it well. If he had not been this kind of madman from the start, he never would have come this far.

And so Enkrid set his intention clearly.

Noah lives. The monastery lives. No one inside dies.

That was what he decided. Which made this a commission he had given himself.

"Now that we've become friends, shouldn't I try even harder to talk you out of this?"

Noah said. Still sincere.

"Ah, I've never been great at listening to people."

Enkrid's reply left Noah at a loss for words.

"So sit back and watch from here."

The words came out carrying Will without him meaning them to. Enkrid let his resolve pour out of him. Noah, still speechless, watched the hero who had asked to be his friend.

That hero rose to his feet, the light from the window at his back.

* * *

"Gather up."

Enkrid said it as he stepped out of the room, but everyone was already assembled nearby.

Among them, a warrior of the Cult Extermination Priest Corps approached. None of them looked like they planned to stop him. They had waited too long and been through too much getting here.

The nameless Holy Warrior's expression was rigid. He looked urgent, and there was worry threaded through it.

"Do you know who's out there?"

He did not. Enkrid shook his head.

He had caught the broad strokes, but had not listened carefully, so he genuinely did not know.

What on earth are they counting on, coming here? What are these people thinking?

The Priest Corps member felt that way, but still had things to say.

These people were not just mad in name.

I need to make them understand the danger.

He had to snap them to their senses, make them think about their own survival.

At the very least, people who had come this far to protect what was right could not be allowed to die pointless deaths.

"There are two Holy Knights, one from the Scales and one from the god of abundance. Both have proven themselves."

The nameless Holy Warrior's tone was grave and deliberate.

Now do you see how dangerous this is?

That was roughly what reached Enkrid's ears.

He stared at the nameless Holy Warrior and blinked. The look said: so what?

The Holy Warrior could not read exactly what those eyes were saying, but one thing was certain. There was no retreat in them.

"Not just any knights. The best among Holy Knights."

The Holy Warrior said it again.

Do you understand what you're walking into?

"So they say?"

Enkrid glanced at the Holy Warrior's chest and gear, then addressed his own knight order. His voice was flat.

"We heard already. So we're told."

Rem answered. He had already had the Holy Warrior buzzing in his ear about it. The man had not stopped talking the entire way here, going on about danger this and danger that.

Rem's tone was not so much flat as faintly irritated. The same as when they had left Border Guard.

The reason for the irritation? It was not the Holy Warrior's lecturing.

There was only one reason.

Why is it so cold while all this nonsense is happening? A sense of crisis? What's that, something you eat?

He was saying it through his posture and expression. So nothing the Holy Warrior said was landing.

Ragna, standing beside him, made a brief show of thinking it over, then answered.

"Both of them are mine?"

Holy Knights? Fighting Holy Knights fortified with divine power might actually be fun. Audin, that arrogant bear, had said he would train him, hadn't he? Then maybe he could use these two as a warm-up before the arrogant bear came back.

Cut those two down and it would not be hard to beat that bear senseless again when he returned.

Good training partners. That was the chain of thought passing through Ragna's head.

Nobody could know what was going on inside Ragna's head, of course.

"I shall show you the swordsmanship of the spring wind that sweeps away winter's cold."

Sinar said something incomprehensible, though she had actually said it to Enkrid a few times on the way here.

That she would show him the sword arts unique to her kind.

Enkrid had taken it as half a joke.

An idle joke from an elf did not make Sinar's skill any less real.

She was perfectly capable of keeping her word against the army standing ahead.

Put plainly, she was saying she would cut through that army with her spring wind swordsmanship to show Enkrid what it looked like.

Elves do not spare concern for others' feelings, so naturally she showed no sense of crisis. She would not have displayed it even out of courtesy.

The nameless Holy Warrior watching all this drew a deep breath and steadied himself.

It felt like he could not get through to a single one of them, and the frustration squeezed at his chest.

Ropord, Fell, and Teresa just nodded. Oh. Holy Knights. That was their whole reaction.

Do we even get to fight them? Hard to win, maybe, but wouldn't it be something to try?

Ruagarne and Jaxon were not much different. Jaxon was thinking should I go ahead and kill them first? while Ruagarne was curious how Enkrid would fight against Holy Knights.

None of it needed to be said aloud. The mood said it clearly enough.

The knight order had been stained by Enkrid's madness, and so they were the Madman Knights.

"Are you actually listening to what I'm saying?"

The nameless Holy Warrior could not hold it in.

He had seen their performance cutting through the monastery's front lines himself, and he had heard the name, the Madman Knights, or the Iron Wall's knight order.

But they had only built that name recently.

The two Holy Knights standing guard out there had held their positions for over twenty years.

One bore the name Protector of the Nest.

The other had inherited the name of one of the god of abundance's apostles. The most battle-capable of any apostle outside the war god's line, bearing the nickname the Joint-Crushing Serpent, Azratic was a disaster in human form.

In pure hand-to-hand combat, this was a monster whose name could be argued as the finest on the continent.

"No chance there are any priests or worshipers of the war god out here?"

Enkrid was still completely unruffled.

Is that really what you want to ask right now?

The nameless Holy Warrior paused mid-breath and answered the question.

His plan was to answer what was asked, then try persuading him again.

"Followers of the war god are few in number. There may be some among them, but anyone who has reached the rank of knight or junior knight will be at the front lines, not here."

Inside the church that followed the war god, after losing Audin, several things had shifted. One of them was that Inquisitors and others like them had nearly stopped involving themselves in the church's internal affairs.

They had lost the talent who was going to lead the next generation. It would have been strange if nothing changed.

And so the war god stepped back from every matter within the church. Because of that, the war god's apostles present here were few enough to count on one hand.

This had also become the beginning of a slow retreat into seclusion for those who followed the war god.

Without involvement in external affairs, there was no opportunity to grasp for power. Lose power, and your words naturally carry less weight.

Naturally, it had become a reclusive church.

The current war god's pope was simply keeping internal order and focusing on the work at hand.

Naturally, there was no need to explain all this in detail.

Enkrid had not been asking out of curiosity about any of it.

"A holy war?"

"Fighting to hold back the Demon Creatures."

The nameless Holy Warrior's expression darkened noticeably, and a murmur followed.

"You could call it a true holy war."

The front lines the Holy Warrior had mentioned were the battles holding back the Cursed Ground.

Enkrid nodded.

Even in a situation like this, there were always those doing what had to be done.

If there were not, the continent would have collapsed long ago.

Which was exactly why Enkrid was going to do what he came to do.

"Azra? What was it?"

"Azratic. Azratic!"

The nameless Holy Warrior's urgency made his voice rise.

Not all knights are the same.

He muttered it under his breath.

"Yeah, agreed."

The gray-haired barbarian nodded beside him.

What is wrong with these people.

Holy Knight Azratic was nothing less than a twenty-year-old serpent. Get caught in that serpent's squeeze and you would not walk away with just one or two broken bones, and yet they had no sense of danger at all.

"Are you actually planning to fight?"

"Did this look like a sightseeing trip?"

Enkrid answered the Holy Warrior and turned to lead everyone toward the monastery's front gate. It was the answer that ended the lecture.

The Holy Warrior had nothing more to say.

With Enkrid taking the lead, the Holy Warrior had no choice but to follow.

Walking through the monastery along the uneven path, they passed dry vines draped over the colonnade, the statue of the god of abundance polished clean compared to everything else, and small hut-style dwellings. Along the road beside the pillars, every person living in the monastery had come out and stood watching Enkrid's group walk past. In those gazes, hope and anxiety were tangled together.

To be precise, the anxiety outweighed the hope by double.

Enkrid saw it and kept walking in silence.

The nameless Holy Warrior did not know whether it was right to give these people false hope, or whether making them face reality was the right call.

So he too had nothing to say.

Even Noah had wrestled with the thought of lying to comfort a child.

Passing through like that, a child called out.

"Mister, did you come to protect us?"

A middle-aged priestess stood with her hand on the child's shoulder.

There was no fault in the child for asking. It was the question everyone standing there wanted answered.

Noah had gotten the monastery in order and then taken in children who had lost their parents in the nearby city.

"Let's share what food we have and squeeze together for sleeping space. That should do it," he had said.

That choice could not be called right anymore.

Because of his decision to take in children, more than ten of them were now at risk of becoming corpses here.

The nameless Holy Warrior knew that, and it was why he could not stand aside.

For power, for strength, must the innocent truly die? Lord. Give me an answer.

The Lord Father gave no answer, so he came to find one himself.

As the scriptures say, ask and you shall receive, for what is only wished for in silence will never be obtained.

And then a child at the monastery asked. It was a question split evenly between anxiety and hope.

Enkrid placed his hand on the child's head.

"Of course."

Would such a plain answer give them hope? The anxiety thinned a little, but the dark clouds did not lift.

Of course not. This kind of thing never lands through words alone.

When they reached the monastery's front gate, those ahead had reorganized their forces to some degree, likely stung by being broken through earlier. One figure sat in a high chair at the center, others gathered around, and it seemed these were the core among the family of ghouls that served the gray god.

As Enkrid walked, the nameless Holy Warrior fell into step beside him again and kept talking without pause. He was genuinely worried about them.

"It is not only the two Holy Knights. There are priests and those skilled in divine magic as well. Among them, a man called Noma can fire more than twenty gray Light Bullets in a single volley, and each one hits like a Giant swinging a full blow. No matter how strong a knight order is, charging straight at them head-on like this is not the way. At least if we formed some kind of strategy..."

Noisy, but tolerable.

Enkrid noticed the dented breastplate covering the Holy Warrior's chest. The exhaustion on his face made it clear he had not slept in days.

A few days back, he had gone out risking his life to seize supplies and nearly died, hadn't he?

He must have been hurt then, because he was limping faintly on his left leg.

It was barely visible unless you were looking carefully.

Which meant he was walking straight right now, masking the pain.

Enkrid had also noticed the Holy Warrior's eyes waver when the child asked that question.

And yet the man had straightened up all the same, walked with his chest out, and turned to the child Enkrid had patted on the head and told them not to worry.

He knows that if he falters, it affects the people around him.

He had heard from Noah which organization this man belonged to.

The Cult Extermination Priest Corps existed solely to fight and destroy the Cult, and yet here he was.

Why?

He had asked Noah and gotten an answer.

"I couldn't stand by and watch innocent people die. That's all there is to it."

That was what he had said.

Enkrid liked this one too.

He had looked at the situation and decided it was wrong, and come here ready to die.

Would his death change anything? Probably not. Judging by what he said, he already knew that when he came. So why would he accept such a pointless death?

Because he believed it was right. That was what conviction looked like.

Which was exactly why Enkrid liked him.

"If you're nameless, does that mean you have no name?"

Enkrid asked, looking out at the group assembled in the distance.

"Yes, I haven't been given one yet. Brother. Though this is hardly the moment for that."

Enkrid found the address Brother unexpectedly warm.

"Fair enough."

The moment Enkrid finished speaking, dust stirred along the top of the monastery wall and took shape, a pale, hazy form. It was a gray mass of light that looked like a dragonfly.

"Gray Explosion Spell!"

An allied Holy Warrior recognized it and shouted.

That gray mass would detonate the instant it made contact.

It was a spell exclusive to those who had awakened to the gray sacred light.

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