WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 619: Let's Be Friends

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The origin is the same. That was the Sorcerer's view of things.

"All things share a common source. Everything changes by starting from that source."

Right or wrong, that view itself was useful.

If someone was rigid enough to insist that sorcery was sorcery and divine power was divine power and never the two shall meet, there was no going further from there.

"There are parts I agree with."

Sinar added her own thoughts to Esther's words.

An elf knight uses Will, neither divine power nor sorcery. She takes the vital energy of the forest and converts it into Will.

Unlike Enkrid or Ragna, who build something up inside themselves and draw it out, she takes in something external.

'Is Will something that was originally inside me?'

If the origins are the same, probably not. If Will were inherently internal, if it were only a matter of awakening strength already inside, then so few people would not be managing to awaken it, as things stand now.

"A fascinating perspective, Black Panther."

Audin nodded too. Enkrid turned his thoughts toward divine power as well.

Divine power is the strength given by a god. That would mean it should be awakened through prayer. Through faith alone.

But just as character and ability do not run parallel, faith and divine power did not run parallel either.

What did it mean that lessons learned during mercenary work also held true for those who had awakened divine power?

It meant you could not obtain divine power through prayer and faith alone.

Sorcery was the same in that sense, though sorcery had direct methods for building its strength.

"One way to cultivate sorcery is choosing the right place. What would you call it, a spot with good energy?"

The origin is the same. Those were Esther's words.

"Then does that apply to magic too?"

Teresa asked.

The half-giant's voice, husky but pleasant, drifted between them like music carried on the firelight.

"Same, but different."

Esther held goodwill toward these people, so she explained what she knew at exactly the level they could follow.

"It changes depending on how you perceive and regard it."

The origin is the same. But it changes according to perception.

Those who believe it is a god's power, for them it becomes divine power.

Those who perceive and use a supernatural presence they call a spirit, something that is not a god but acts like one, for them it becomes sorcery.

Those who believe it is a force born from will, for them it becomes Will.

Those who perceive it as the energy flowing through the forest-for them it becomes vital energy.

"Dragonkin are said to use the dragon's energy."

Ruagarne added to that. They perceived and used Will through their own framework, she said.

Not ordinary Will, but something they called dragon speech, was it?

The dragon's words, the dragon's power, the dragon's will.

Something along those lines.

And yet the origin is the same.

No one can know every secret of the world. That was as true now as ever.

Simply hearing and turning over what had been said was enough for Enkrid to feel the Will inside him grow a little more solid. On top of that, he had set up something resembling a small pillar of theory.

For that to become a house, a real structure, he would need to grasp many more things and set them in place once grasped, but even so, he had gained something here.

While they talked, snow began to fall in thick, steady flurries. Rem watched it and spoke.

"Still not going to shovel any snow with my own hands."

It was his reply to something Audin had said earlier while explaining divine power, that the Lord did not sweep up fallen snow on anyone's behalf.

"Of course not, sir. Why would that be any great matter?"

Audin answered. If snow piled up, someone had to clear it, but once they were back at the unit he could put the soldiers to work.

Audin had no intention of shoveling snow himself either.

Not that there was anything wrong with that. Enkrid thought so.

There was no need to do everything yourself.

Using Will was the same kind of thing. Not that Will could shovel snow. The point was that some tasks did not have to be done by hand.

Like how it was easier to use a momentum built from Will than to press a blade to someone's throat to frighten them.

New realizations came brushing through his mind one after another. He turned them over several times, working at them slowly.

He naturally fell quiet. Jaxon was the first to notice.

He looked at Ropord, who had started to open his mouth to say something, and raised a finger to his own lips.

Quiet.

He had not even activated his Will, but the intent came across clearly.

Everyone glanced at Enkrid and closed their mouths. The only sound was the crackling of the fire.

Snow fell and kept falling. The horses they had ridden here had been whinnying out in the cold now and again, but now they had gone quiet too.

Jaxon, seated toward the outside, looked over and saw Odd-Eye moving among the other horses, guiding them along.

'You pick up on things too, do you?'

Odd-Eye was clearly no ordinary horse. The night passed that way.

Everyone settled their own bedding without being told. A bit of snow was no reason to abandon the road, but their captain had sunk deep into thought and was turning something over, working at it piece by piece.

Esther chanted quietly and sealed off the cold wind from entering the cave and the makeshift tent.

Warmth rising from the fire wrapped around them all.

"It's warm."

Sinar murmured it softly, quiet enough that not even someone right beside her would have heard. The warmth, and the way these people carried themselves, it had drawn the words out of her naturally.

And because of that, she felt a little, just a little, of something heavy settle in. A sadness. A natural feeling for someone walking a road with a fixed end.

She did not let it show, though. Elves were already skilled at hiding their feelings, and Sinar was exceptionally so.

So no one noticed her quiet melancholy at all.

* * *

"We are grateful for the dedication of the Madman Knights, and for His Majesty the King's generosity."

The Holy State had gone through something close to civil war. Without the knight order Enkrid led, far more blood would have been shed.

Even with Overdier rallying the armies and the Cult Extermination Priest Corps stepping in, that would have been the case. As it was, the whole affair had been settled cleanly through the sheer presence of that powerful knight order.

The one who had stood at the center of it all was Enkrid. As a result of everything that had happened, an envoy from the Holy State came to Crang.

It was a reception room inside the palace, a chandelier hanging overhead.

Steaming teacups sat on the table, maids and attendants lined up along one side. Crang smiled his easygoing smile and spoke.

"Empty-handed?"

The only noble seated in that room was Viscount Baysar. Not the Baysar who had been the thumb house of a ducal family, but the young Marcus who had become one of the king's close confidants.

He sat listening to whatever the king said without a word, quietly drinking his tea. Occasionally he crunched through a biscuit too.

His whole manner suggested this was not a particularly difficult meeting.

The thing was, it did not make the atmosphere feel relaxed so much as it gave the impression that the Kingdom of Naurillia did not particularly care what the Holy State had to say, and the diplomat priest's expression grew gradually darker.

"......It seems you enjoy speaking plainly."

The priest said, moving his heavy lips.

"Is there any need to make this complicated? Everyone calls me a king dredged up from the gutter, so I gave up on elaborate manners to match."

There had been talk like that directed at Crang. Inside Nauril or within the kingdom itself, few would dare say such things, but rival trading companies competing with the Rockfreed Trading Company spread that kind of talk freely.

They were the ones who believed that the kingdom backing Leona Rockfreed was eating into their profits.

In truth, it was the Border Guard doing the backing, but from the outside it amounted to the same thing.

That was also what Crang wanted. What Enkrid did was the same as the kingdom's intent.

"Is there something you wish for?"

The priest could not find a good answer to what the king was saying. Falling in line with Naurillia's king, he put the question directly.

At the same time, he ran through a list in his head of what could be offered.

The Holy State produced many rare things found nowhere else.

Healing potions, for one, showed a purity and potency that was hard to match anywhere on the continent.

On top of that, the sacred amulets handcrafted by the priests were no small export either.

Objects that could stand against formless Evil Spirits were not common anywhere.

Where a mage could produce a Spell Object, a priest who worked with divine power could produce a Divine Object.

Beyond that, their wine was twice as fine as anything Naurillia produced, so if the kingdom obtained it at a relatively low price and turned it into a national enterprise managed by the crown, it would be a significant help to the palace's finances.

He had heard plenty of rumors lately that Nauril's finances had taken a serious hit from various recent affairs, which was what put the thought in his head.

Showing open enthusiasm for wine imports would look undignified, so they would probably front a suitable trading company. In cases like these, a royal relative or a trusted noble's illegitimate child often became the company head and set up a new outfit.

'They might demand all three.'

In that case, the thing to do was yield at an appropriate point and give a little ground.

"Let's be friends."

The words that came out of the king's mouth shattered the priest's expectations for the negotiation entirely. Completely beyond the range of anything he had anticipated.

"......I beg your pardon?"

The priest stumbled over the words.

"I said, let's be friends."

The king's reply was cheerful.

"Have a biscuit. They're good."

Even after that follow-up, the priest still could not string a proper response together.

A few more words were exchanged after that. If you stripped them down to their meaning alone, they went something like this.

"Be friends? That's it?"

"More or less."

"You're serious?"

"Yes, serious."

"Are you feeling all right up there, Your Majesty?"

"I feel fine."

"Then why are you doing this?"

Crang only laughed at that. Marcus laughed too.

The priest envoy concluded this was not something he could resolve at his level, and a different envoy came after.

"My name is Noah."

The Noah that Overdier had brought inside the Holy City had by now become a diplomatic envoy priest.

"I've heard the name."

Crang had received a letter from Enkrid a few days before and knew about Noah from it.

Even without the letter, he probably would have known. The things the Madman Knights had pulled off were too loud to miss.

"It seems we share a mutual friend?"

"So it seems. Though I would not presume to call myself a close friend of Your Majesty."

The two spoke over two days divided into sessions. On the surface it looked like inconsequential talk, eating biscuits, drinking wine, gossiping about Enkrid alongside Marcus.

The things they said were not actual criticisms, but talk along the lines of at least he was definitely a madman passed back and forth.

"I would agree with that."

The king himself nodded along.

Words wound together, talk went back and forth, and a conclusion was reached.

"Let us indeed be friends."

Noah said it. When Noah left, Crang appeared to have received nothing in return. On the surface, that was genuinely how it looked.

* * *

"You didn't break your sword this time? I'm moved."

He returned and received Krais's thanks.

"Did I not say it was the natural outcome?"

Beside Krais, he saw Abnaier nodding along.

After that, things fell into a familiar rhythm. Castellan Graham and the rest of them, call them challengers, or call them victims infected by Enkrid's influence.

Those obsessed with sparring had gathered.

"Give me a round, won't you? I've refined a new technique."

Even if their level fell short of a knight's, watching a technique that someone had put real work into was a pleasure in itself.

There was no reason to refuse.

Training resumed as well. Audin and Rem sparred repeatedly for over three days, and the result, to put it plainly, was a draw.

If you looked at it with a careful and precise eye, Audin had a slight edge in pure skill, but in an earnest fight, calling a winner would have been difficult.

In the middle of it all, one more characteristic of divine power became clear.

"I can spread the light of healing."

Something neither Will nor sorcery could do. The origin may be the same, but the differences were this numerous.

No wonder divine magic had developed along its own separate path.

He also learned that the divine power a Holy Knight used and the divine power used in sacred prayers were different things.

Amid all of it, Enkrid sat with what he had come to understand and turned it over again.

'How does someone awaken Will in the first place?'

By posing the question inward, you arrived at something close to an answer.

'It isn't only something from outside.'

It was not only a matter of awakening something already inside either.

Both were needed. You took in what was external, tended it within yourself, and brought it to completion.

Put simply, it was a question of whether you could receive the elements that made up the world and cultivate them or not. Whether you could grow a plant or not.

Water it and give it the right amount of sun, and a plant grows. But what if you did not know how to water it? What if you did not even know water existed?

'You could not even begin.'

That was surely why the number of people on the continent who used Will was so strikingly small.

And beyond water, you had to know that sunlight was needed too.

In the end, Enkrid came to this conclusion.

'It's because there is no systematic method of training for it.'

If the training of Will could be organized, could the number of people who used it not be increased?

'It would mean learning how to train the mind.'

However far he had clawed his way up from nothing, this was not something Enkrid could easily get a feel for.

It was not easy. But the thought that it was absolutely impossible did not come to him either.

What he found strange, though, was that what the renowned martial factions scattered across the continent had actually been doing all this time was precisely that: establishing training methods to awaken Will.

They had used that to cultivate talent too.

Enkrid himself was in the middle of laying that foundation right now.

In terms of speed, it was like covering in a short time what those groups had spent decades doing.

Enkrid was used to taking sword techniques and skills one by one, reshaping them to fit his own body, and building new ones from scratch. So even now, he had no preconceptions.

'A method for training Will.'

Like how the Isolation Technique shaped the body, there ought to be a method for this too. He could not build something right now, but there was the expectation that if he kept moving forward step by step, something would come of it.

Beyond all that, going through everything that had happened, returning, and trading stories with the people who had been with him, he had also awakened many things on the technical side.

And yet there was still more left to learn. That alone was so enjoyable it set Enkrid's chest beating hard.

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