WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 681: Playing with Fire

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"What are you doing?"

Ann asked, blood soaking her from head to toe. Enkrid was holding a lit branch.

"Playing with fire."

He said it and threw the branch into a dry thicket. It had not rained in days, and the clump of thin brown brambles caught almost immediately.

Whoosh!

Only a few breaths passed before the flames climbed to Enkrid's waist.

"...What?"

Ann asked again, but the others already understood why he was doing it.

Dark out, so light up the area and flush out whoever was hiding. That was the idea.

They watched for a moment. The fire grew taller than anyone standing there. You could have believed a Giant made of flame had come to pay a visit.

Enkrid watched the blaze rise and sharpened his senses further.

Where are you?

He stayed alert and stepped in front of Ann. The smell was still there. Ragna saw where Enkrid had positioned himself and came over to stand at Ann's back.

"Why?"

Ann had not picked up on the killing intent. She could tell something was wrong just from the mood, though. Anyone who was not a fool would have noticed that these two had placed themselves to protect her.

A Magic Beast had been cut down right above her head. She had bled too.

"Something seems to be after you. You didn't skip out on someone's Krona, did you?"

Enkrid slipped a joke into it.

Grida glanced toward Ann. If the person they were protecting panicked too badly, things would get complicated, so why say that? That was what she thought.

But Ann did not spiral. When it came to raw nerve, she was not the type to fall easily behind anyone.

She was a woman who had traveled alone, attached herself to a trading company, and found her way all the way to Border Guard.

"It wasn't much."

Ann wiped the black blood running down her face.

"You had a debt?"

"A small one. I was in a rush back then. If they come looking, help me pay them back a little."

"Sure."

Before coming to Border Guard, Enkrid had worked as a bodyguard. Most of that work had been playing the decorative escort for noblewomen, but he had still picked things up.

When a target was clear, so was where you needed to stand.

"What is it?"

Ragna felt the wrongness on instinct. Enkrid recognized what it was from experience.

"Spell."

That was enough.

Ann did her part. She kept her mouth shut and stayed still.

The attack came before midnight, and after that, none of them slept through the rest of the night.

The fire did not spread far. There had only been a few clumps of brush to begin with, and Grida had cleverly set a counter-fire partway through to cut off the blaze.

"You're not trying to burn us all alive, are you?"

Gray smoke filled the air by dawn, and still the enemy said nothing. When the counter-fire went up, the smoke had billowed thick and cut off all visibility, a perfect opening, yet nothing came.

Grida had not said so out loud, but that was partly what she had been hoping for when she set the counter-fire. Put out the blaze, yes, but also bait them.

They still did not move.

Enkrid sat quietly with his thoughts.

Careful? Or scared?

Maybe both. With no picture of the enemy to work from, predicting them was difficult. Though even if he had known, he would not have presumed to guess at their reasoning.

None of them were the kind who ran short on stamina. Even so, spending a night on full alert was not pleasant by any measure.

It was a grating night. A night that gnawed at the nerves.

"This isn't fun."

Odinkar said it as the sun began to rise. Enkrid did not answer. His thoughts kept moving.

Are they treating us as prey?

The sharp, sweet smell that had clung to the air all night was gone by the time dawn broke. Either the scent lingering on those dry flower petals had simply run its course, or someone had deliberately removed the flower from right under their noses.

The latter, without question. The whole night had felt like standing sword-drawn across from an opponent you could not locate.

An enemy whose position could not be pinned down.

What is this?

No answer. Only one thing was certain.

Odinkar had said it was not fun. Enkrid did not feel that way.

He never turned down a fight. That was something even Grida and Magroon had not yet figured out about him.

Whatever shape it took, Enkrid was a fighter who refused no fight. Without that nature, he never would have started down the road that had become his long history of struggle.

He would have quit the moment he lost to a kid a decade and a half younger than him.

A fight was not only something you did with a sword in your hand against another person.

Fighting a world that told you to give up, fighting the part of yourself that wanted to break down, that was a fight too.

And this, uncovering what was hiding and working its schemes in the dark, that counted as well.

"We need to find somewhere with water. Time to clean up."

Enkrid said it. Ann was drenched in Magic Beast blood. Washing up first made sense.

Everyone agreed. Grida stood and led them toward a stream she had spotted the evening before.

"Go this way and there should be a stream."

She was a remarkable guide. Enkrid had worked as a guide himself once and had met quite a few along the way, but none of them had been as sharp as Grida.

She read the terrain around her quickly and in detail. Magroon had handled the directions getting here, but it was Grida who had actually guided the group this far.

Same as now. She found the direction to the stream without hesitating.

When they had gone to gather firewood, she had already smelled the soil nearby, checked how well the trees were growing, noted which way the green grass ran, and memorized the route.

Back then, they had not needed water. Why bother?

Any guide's guild would have had the answer ready.

Guides were, by nature, people who prepared for every contingency.

Beyond that, Grida had already noted which paths were likely to have Demon Creatures, tracked signs of Magic Beasts, and located droppings from wild animals that had survived out here.

And by her judgment, the kind of judgment that could place her at the top of any guide's guild right now, last night's attack was awkward. Strange.

Under ordinary circumstances, there should have been no attack at all. Or if one was coming, there should have been signs beforehand.

She had chosen a route that accounted for exactly that kind of risk.

Feels like a trap someone hid and left here.

Instinct could be as good a weapon as the sword in your hand. Grida knew that. Something had caught in the back of her mind, a small snag she could not name.

But for now, she had nothing concrete to say.

She was still turning it over as she walked, and the stream appeared exactly where she had expected it to. Ankle-deep water running quietly along its course.

Grida turned to face the group. In her field of view was the healer with freckles on her cheeks. Ann.

Why would someone be after that girl?

Twenty at most, possibly younger. Barely old enough to call an adult, and a talented healer, but that was all Grida knew about her.

A target could still be chosen for reasons Grida was unaware of. A grudge, something else, any number of things she might not know about.

But the more she thought along those lines, the less sense it made.

The enemy had been watching them from hiding with no real cover to speak of.

Is that kind of enemy common?

Something that slipped past her own instincts and went unnoticed by every person in this group?

That was not easy. Someone capable of that, why bother targeting this?

Nothing about it added up.

The group washed at the stream, filled their water skins, and let the horses drink their fill. They cleaned themselves as best they could, drank, topped off their flasks, and set out again.

"The weather's lovely."

Ann looked up at the sky, then brought her gaze forward and added, "Shame the road is long."

She was right. Thin clouds scattered the light gently as it came down.

Aside from the small stretch of woods they had entered to find the stream, there was nothing blocking the view in any direction.

The path ahead especially.

In the distance, several uneven ridges rolled across the horizon, but right here the land was open on all sides.

To the left and right, dark soil lay exposed, packed and shaped as if kneaded by hand.

"I heard this used to be volcanic country. There's a story that fire Demon Creatures summoned by the Cursed Ground Holy Sect settled here for a while."

Enkrid looked around as he spoke. Something about a Demon Creature causing a volcanic eruption, he had heard something like that once.

The ground was rising by degrees. Keep going and it would lead up into the mountain range.

Beyond the ridges ahead, a gentler-looking range came into view. Part of the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, the great spine running across the whole continent like the backbone of some enormous beast.

"Let's rest here before we move on."

Grida offered her judgment as guide. Enkrid agreed. They had spent the whole day on guard. That had not been planned.

Which meant taking time to rest in order to stay at their best was a reasonable call.

It was the kind of decision a real guide made.

There was no reason to push the schedule forward either.

"The illness they believe is a curse doesn't flare up overnight, and it doesn't kill overnight either. Before death, the person suffers for at least two weeks. That's based on what I know, assuming nothing has changed."

As if asking for confirmation, Ann glanced toward Odinkar and Magroon. Magroon nodded.

"That's right. You suffer and then you die. Before that, there are early signs, things only we talk about among ourselves."

"Is that so? Good."

The reply came from Ragna. Magroon looked over at him.

Why say good? Was he relieved on their behalf?

Magroon had never had much to do with Ragna personally. By the time Ragna left, Magroon had not yet been pulling a full weight of their own.

"Means there's time to get to things you've been putting off before the end, right? Isn't that what it means?"

Ragna added.

Magroon did not know Ragna from before, so they assumed this was just how he was.

Still, it was hard to picture someone this eager and full of drive leaving Zaun because sword training had gotten boring.

Is there something I don't know?

Magroon had the thought but let it go. It was a pointless suspicion.

"...Yeah, that's right."

Magroon answered Ragna, and they agreed to split into pairs and take watch shifts. Enkrid and Ragna would alternate sleep between them.

"I hate this kind of thing."

Odinkar said it while checking his gear. In a straight one-on-one fight, Odinkar was among the most gifted in all of Zaun, but hunting a hidden enemy or tracking someone down was not something he had any patience for.

If they were not going to pick up a sword and fight cleanly, why bother attacking at all?

That said, a knight's instincts did not simply disappear, and Zaun had taught him enough that he knew the basics of tracking.

He had just never cared enough to take it seriously, so he had picked it up loosely and left it at that.

Enkrid took the first watch with Odinkar. In the middle of the day, they had unloaded the gear from the horses and rigged it up as a makeshift tent, leaving the sides open for airflow.

The two of them crouched out front, passing the time with the occasional yawn.

Even Enkrid could not very well suggest sparring here.

"We can't exactly spar, can we?"

So when Odinkar asked that, Enkrid had room to scold him properly.

"Are you thinking straight? Or are you trying to leave half your mind somewhere else and wave a sword around like you're asleep on your feet?"

Keep alertness at full height and you could not spar properly. Do the reverse, pour yourself into the sparring, and your guard came down. That was the issue.

"I know it's not allowed."

"Then why ask? That's a bad habit. Break it."

Odinkar had a tendency to choose his words carefully with everyone, but it was less about worrying that slips of the tongue would cause misunderstandings and more that he hated having to repeat himself because someone had not followed the first time.

With Enkrid, though, whatever he said landed. And beyond that, Enkrid picked up on the intent behind it.

Because of that, Odinkar spoke more freely with Enkrid than with anyone else.

"You have a habit of saying things in the most irritating way."

"Yeah, I do. Go ahead and say what's been bothering you."

Like just now, cutting straight to the point in one go, while making it easy for the other person to talk in circles if they needed to.

Noticing that he had been beating around the bush out of some vague worry, that was sharp perception.

Strange man, Odinkar thought, and let the words out.

"Unlike the family head's child back inside, Zaun is everything to me. I can say that without hesitation."

That much was obvious. Odinkar had always kept himself ready to return. He never hid how much he cared for the family, or how much he respected it.

"And?"

Enkrid drew out the rest, and Odinkar put it plainly.

"I have a bad feeling. Like something has happened to the family."

"A bad feeling? Let's hear it."

"Just instinct. The kind where you think something might have gone wrong back home. I know, like Magroon said, we're not yet in Zaun territory and we're not in Imperial land either. We'd have to cross those ridges and the mountain range before you could call it Imperial land. And even then, not fully."

Odinkar raised his left index finger toward the distant outline of the mountains as he spoke. The midday light made even far-off things easy to see.

Not much was widely known about the shape of the Empire. Odinkar had grown up in Zaun's house and still did not know the details well enough to say more.

Besides, what he wanted to say had nothing to do with the Empire.

"Even so, I feel like I should go back. To protect the family."

It sounded like a pull between belonging and unease. Enkrid offered no particular comfort.

"Shouldn't I be where I'm needed? That thought keeps coming too."

Hearing him out, it seemed Odinkar had not wanted to be part of this from the start.

"Ragna Zaun. Yes, I know the name, I'd heard of him. But couldn't someone other than me have brought him back?"

"You thought that. So why did you come?"

Enkrid picked up a twig and dragged it across the dirt as he spoke. The sharp tip drew a few lines, all of them connected to swordsmanship in some way.

"They said there was no one else."

"And?"

There was more, that was why his voice had trailed off. Enkrid had caught that Odinkar always left the important thing for last. He had not needed more than a few exchanges to see it. Listen properly, really listen to someone, and things like that became easy to spot.

"The family head told me to go."

Half an order, then.

Enkrid read between the lines and understood. After that, both of them sank into their own thoughts.

A few hours later, when their watch shift ended, Ragna and Magroon woke up.

"Get some sleep. There's still a long way to go."

Magroon said it while taking over.

A short rest did not change what had to be done. Enkrid knew that too.

He lay down with the rigged canvas above him as a roof and his pack beneath his head as a pillow, and when he closed his eyes, he found himself on a boat rocking on water.

The Boatman stood before him, someone he had not seen in a while. At the swaying edge of the boat, a purple lamp scattered its light. Through the hazy violet glow, gray skin and a lean jawline came into focus.

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