WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 629: Cutting with All My Strength

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A tree giant smoking tobacco. Of course, it was Enkrid's first time seeing that.

Before he could even open his mouth, the tree giant spoke again.

"Ah, a human. Then I suppose it would be your first time."

Dark brown eyes carved from bark blinked and fixed on Enkrid with open curiosity. He had heard of elves made from wood.

"...A Woodguard?"

Ruagarne took half a step behind Enkrid and tilted her head as she asked.

"That's right."

The white-haired elf nodded.

Woodguards were one of the elf tribes created long ago by the god who tended forests, made to protect and watch over the trees.

Which meant not all elves were like Sinar.

Elf was a broad term that covered Dryads, Woodguards, and Wing Fairies alike.

Dryads, he had heard, resembled bright green leaves, and Wing Fairies were winged creatures smaller than a palm.

Yes, he had known all of that.

He just had never imagined one of them smoking tobacco with such obvious enjoyment.

Between lips crusted with bark and dry leaves, a rolled brown leaf burned red at its tip, then faded.

Puff.

A breath of smoke drifted out, curling into clouds that floated lazily through the air.

How was it doing that?

The most any tobacco-obsessed mercenary from his old days could manage was blowing a smoke ring.

If that smoke-trick fanatic from back then saw this, he would have sprinted over and called the thing master on the spot.

"Want a drag?"

the tree giant asked.

"Don't be rude to our guests, Bran."

"Rude? It's nothing like human tobacco. This one's good for you."

The tree giant kept talking as it walked off to one side. The sound of bark rubbing together followed its steps.

"I don't smoke."

Enkrid answered at last. He was only human. If something was worth being surprised about, he would be surprised, and this was one of those moments.

What was that tree giant, exactly? Why was a tree burning tobacco? Shouldn't a tree be careful around fire?

And yet here it was, strolling off to one side, puffing away at its leaf cigarette with clear contentment.

What would happen if it caught fire?

Was that why Sinar had always been careful around flames?

All kinds of thoughts crossed his mind.

When Bran the Woodguard stepped aside, the surrounding scene came into view. Nobody was paying the smoking tree giant any attention. They were too busy watching Enkrid and his companions.

Enkrid swept the area by reflex.

"Observation is the foundation, whether you fight or not."

That was Ruagarne's teaching. Enkrid did as he had been taught.

At the entrance to the city was an open clearing, and thick, ancient trees lined its edges. Open sky stretched above it, with warm sunlight pouring down.

Quiet and still. The city carried a calm mood all around it.

Birdsong and the cries of insects drifted through the air, but even those felt like background music that belonged to the peace of the place.

Enkrid used his insight and took in everything around him. There was plenty to catch the eye.

A small elf poked its head out of a hollowed-out old tree, just like a squirrel.

Beneath the ancient trunks stood more tree giants like Bran.

Each one warped perspective just by existing. They were enormous.

Some stood taller than Audin, and others were easily twice the height of a human, the same as true Giants. A few could have been three times as tall.

The largest, eyes shut and mouth closed, looked exactly like a big tree standing there.

After taking all that in, Enkrid widened his view to take in the whole.

A wide clearing sat at the center, with wooden structures arranged around it. But those structures did not seem to be all the city had to offer.

'Did they shape the city by using the forest itself as its boundary?'

This was a place where elves numbered in the hundreds at least, and likely well past a thousand. It was not something you could take in at a single glance.

Walking the whole thing would probably take days.

The city was large. Larger than Border Guard.

There were no wide paved roads the way a forest settlement would lack them, but paths wound between the trees in every direction, wide enough to pass through.

He had observed closely. He had taken in the big picture.

Now Enkrid caught the one thing that nagged at him most: the bases of the wooden structures shaped like houses.

The structures themselves looked like natural wood homes a squirrel might commission from the construction guild. Roots broke through the ground and held them firmly in place. They kept their tree-like forms throughout.

So why did they bother him?

Why?

He asked himself twice and went looking for the answer. His instincts were speaking. Those were not ordinary houses.

They looked like trees with roots sunk into the earth, but that was not the whole picture.

'If things go wrong, those structures can move.'

That was what his gut said.

Arranged in too neat a formation around the clearing to be anything natural. And the color of the soil around the roots was slightly off in places.

Sharp observation, that. Was the Sensory Technique really all he had learned from Jaxon?

He had always placed great importance on accepting a situation as it was.

On top of that, knowing the terrain before a fight was something Ruagarne had drilled into him until her mouth must have been sore from saying it.

Enkrid had only done what he was taught. It was natural not to forget something once it was learned, even if the learning came slowly.

He had clung to things for a week that others picked up in a day, so forgetting was never easy.

And he always listened with full attention and gave everything he had.

All of it together made sure nothing slipped away from him.

'The houses move?'

That was the conclusion.

Beyond that, the only other thing filling his view was a sea of glassy, dry eyes that gave nothing away.

Among those glassy eyes, Enkrid's sharp senses caught faint notes of puzzlement and curiosity, but from the outside looking in..."Why do their eyes look like that?"

That was exactly what Fell had said. Eyes that showed no emotion stirred something primal, it seemed.

Not that it was actually frightening.

Fell had said it casually enough. They had all been through enough that this did not rattle anyone.

Living alongside Enkrid would do that to a person. Fell had survived among madmen long enough to reach this point, and his nerves had quietly hardened into something incomparable to what they once were.

"A human guest. How unusual."

One of them stepped forward and spoke.

It was a Dryad, one of the forest tribes known for their healing arts, a race so strongly feminine that male individuals almost never appeared.

The Dryad who approached was a woman. Her hair was deep green, and her skin was a pale, luminous shade of the same color. The right way to put it was that her looks carried the clear, refreshing feeling of a forest rather than any human idea of beauty.

A green cloth embroidered with gold thread, made of some material he could not identify, made her look even more otherworldly.

She swept her gaze over the group with green eyes that looked as if carved from leaves, then spoke again.

"Not like those potato-sprout types, I'd imagine?"

Calm and quiet, yet sharp.

That was the feeling she gave, and from that point on, Enkrid let his mind settle into something close to empty.

They said you had to empty a vessel before you could fill it. Drop the assumptions, drop the preconceptions, and you could accept almost anything.

He had shifted his own attitude in that brief moment.

The white-haired elf caught it with the precise sensitivity elves were known for, and was quietly surprised.

'A straight and solid mind.'

Worth noticing, yes, but not anything to react to openly. Accept what these people were as they were, and move on. That was the kind of boldness Enkrid was showing, and the elf could read it clearly.

"Guests at this time of year are unexpected. Everyone must be surprised."

the white-haired elf said.

"Human guests haven't come in a long while either."

A different tree giant took up the thread. Its voice sounded like stepping on dry leaves, rustling, yet strangely clear, so that every word still landed cleanly.

Like Bran, the voices of the Woodguards were deeply unusual.

Enkrid looked at the giants before him and concluded that telling individual Woodguards apart by appearance was going to be hopeless. Distinguishing Frogs from each other would be easier by comparison.

Not that that was easy either.

"Humans really have been gone a long while. A long, long while."

The rustling voice said again.

With vocal cords built so differently, the sounds were unique. But if you could hear it, that was enough. He had already done his share of being surprised, so he simply accepted it and moved on.

If adaptability was a skill, a talent even, then Enkrid stood at the top of the continent.

He had been the squad leader of the Madman Knights back when Rem and the others were a unit held together by sheer chaos. The man who had stayed with them through all of it was Enkrid.

Even if Woodguards looked unusual, they were surely not as unusual as Rem's personality.

Enkrid faced the tree giant blocking the clearing head-on. Time to introduce ourselves, then. Even in an elf city, a conversation between thinking beings was not so different from anywhere else. The atmosphere made that clear.

"Enkrid, of the Border Guard."

He said it the same way he always did. A short silence followed.

"He is Sir Demon Slayer."

A large elf who had been following the white-haired one added the explanation. At those words, several nearby elves spoke up.

"Demon Slayer?"

"The Iron Wall knight?"

"The knight of fatal charm?"

"The heartbreaker?"

Every one of them spoke as if reading from a book, flat and matter-of-fact. And yet this was their version of surprise.

Their glassy eyes had grown slightly wider.

Of all the titles the elves had murmured, it was the last one that made Enkrid falter for a moment.

He had not heard that particular nickname much anywhere else. So why was it turning up here?

Enkrid was genuinely puzzled.

Either way, the faint warmth he had felt before surfaced again a moment later.

"We'll show you inside."

the white-haired elf said. And so they walked in, carried along by goodwill whose source they did not understand. As they passed the clearing to one side, the elves' eyes stayed on them without letting go. It was the kind of attention that should have felt oppressive.

Those eyes, masked by blankness but holding something like reverence beneath, traced Enkrid carefully.

It might have been easier if they had whispered among themselves, but every single one of them simply stared in silence.

Elves, Dryads, Woodguards alike. If their eyes were instruments and their gazes were music, the piece playing now was a duet of observation and curiosity with goodwill woven quietly through it, an orchestra so hushed you had to lean in close just to hear it.

"This way."

The white-haired elf led them into a house carved from the inside of a tree. It was the second large tree on the left side of the clearing.

The entrance was taller than expected, and the inside was not wide, but it felt cozy. The humidity and temperature were both comfortable, and a short corridor walled with intertwined roots opened into a room where a table covered with a green cloth gave off a clean, cool feeling.

They were literally inside a tree, so the fresh smell of greenery filling every corner made complete sense.

"It smells like summer. Even on a day this cold."

Fell murmured.

Exactly right. The smell was grass and old wood and soil, all braided together.

No perfume was needed. The woody scent that had always clung to Sinar was here in every direction.

Sinar's scent had been richer somehow, but still.

Fell and Ruagarne came in behind Enkrid and glanced left and right, clearly impressed by the structure.

The whole thing was made from a single tree, and the furniture and the shape of the house both overflowed with character.

The chairs set before the table, for instance, could not really be called ordinary chairs. Barely achieving the form of a chair would be more accurate.

Left on a road somewhere, they would have looked like plain lumps of wood.

Lumps of wood that had grown however they liked, that is.

"You said you came to find Sinar of the Kirhais family?"

The white-haired elf settled into one of those chairs and asked.

"Yes."

Enkrid answered. That was the reason they had come here.

It was part of why he had decided to set aside the surprise and the strangeness for now and deal with it later.

Originally, he had assumed that arriving here would make meeting her the easy part. She was fulfilling an obligation, or so he had heard, that meant doing something for the city, which meant she would naturally be in it. Looking at things now, that did not seem to be the case.

If she had been here, she would have come out to greet him with something like, "You came because you missed me, didn't you, fiancé?" Or maybe, "Have you finally decided to go through with the wedding?"

None of that had happened. Sinar was not here. Reason said so, and instinct agreed.

"A guest no one expected. Truly."

While the white-haired elf added a few more words, a silver-haired elf emerged from a passage connecting deeper into the house and set down cups of tea.

The cups were like the chairs. They looked like scooped-out pieces of wood.

The tea inside was drinkable. More than drinkable. It was excellent.

Had this been a time to sit and enjoy it, he would have had nothing but praise.

"Sinar is not here, then?"

Enkrid asked anyway, even though he already knew. Some questions you asked even knowing the answer. There was no need to dance around it.

"No."

The white-haired elf nodded.

"Is she dead?"

She would not be. As he had said, he asked knowing the answer. Some things you had to hear even when you already knew them. This was one of them.

The white-haired elf shook their head.

"She won't be able to die even if she wants to, for a few years yet."

Heavy emotion came through in those words. Something like regret, like grief.

It was the first clear feeling Enkrid had sensed from this elf.

For a human, it would have been nothing more than the faintest shift in tone, the thinnest thread of feeling woven into speech.

Several thoughts passed through his mind.

He did not know the details, but it sounded like she was bound somewhere. Tied down and unable to leave.

"Could you tell me more?"

The other party was showing goodwill, so there was no reason for Enkrid to give anything other than the same.

Not just the white-haired elf, even the one who had brought the tea seemed to hold nothing but warmth toward them.

"I have something I want to ask you as well."

The question came back as a question, and this time the feeling behind it came through clearly. Wrapped in composure, but the urgency at its core was unmistakable.

Enkrid waited for what the elf would ask. A show of patience. He had just been told Sinar was not dead, so all he needed was the way to her.

Was this a lie?

"Elves are a race that finds it difficult to lie."

Something Sinar had once said came back to him. It was not a lie, then.

An elf who had gone out into the world and been worn down by its edges might be another matter, but an elf raised in a society where everyone could intuitively read the truth of what others said would have no use for lies. They would be unnecessary.

He had heard that the elven language did not even contain a word for falsehood.

The white-haired elf waited a moment, then spoke. The voice was careful but steady, steady but urgent.

"Do you know how to kill a demon?"

Enkrid did not answer right away. He could sense the desperation behind the question, so a careful answer was needed.

He thought it over, lips moving slightly before he stopped himself, gathered his thoughts once more, then gave a slow nod and opened his mouth. He answered sincerely, with a heart that wanted to repay the elf's goodwill.

"Swing vigorously."

Silence fell. No one could find words. A rustling sound came from the next room. The place was so quiet that the noise from next door carried right through the wall.

"...I'm embarrassed."

Fell broke the silence with a murmur. Ruagarne glanced briefly at the elves, then added,

"She's not trying to make fun of you."

Enkrid sat with his own words for a moment before realizing his mistake.

This was entirely Rem's fault. Ragna, Jaxon, and Audin carried some of the blame too.

Talking about swordsmanship and combat with them over the years had left him with a habit of giving the shortest, most direct answers possible. There were too many things he could not explain even when he tried, so it had come down to that.

And now that habit had slipped out.

Enkrid recognized the mistake and added something in an attempt to recover.

"Swing vigorously until you die."

"Should I sew his mouth shut."

Fell murmured again.

"She's not usually this bad."

Ruagarne muttered, then looked back at the elves and said,

"She truly is not trying to make fun of you."

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