WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

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A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 682: I Never Turn Down a Fight

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A slender jaw?

Somehow today's Boatman looked leaner than before, as if he had shed some weight, but there was no point in commenting on what Enkrid noticed. The Boatman was not the sort to give him an answer anyway.

So he kept his mouth shut. Neither of them spoke, and only silence lay across the river's surface.

Without words, they simply watched each other through the fog between them.

Enkrid gazed absently at the robed figure beyond the thin black mist. The Boatman said nothing either.

No tremor in the air. No preparatory movement.

And yet Enkrid, without blinking once, knew the Boatman had closed the distance to right in front of him.

There was no way not to be startled. That said, it was not enough to make him lurch back in a panic.

Even inside his own mindscape, Enkrid was composed. By now that steadiness had become habit, as natural as breathing.

The Boatman reached out wordlessly. A palm cracked like drought-parched earth came into view. Something seemed to writhe in the dark gaps between the cracks, and the moment Enkrid focused on those squirming black lines, he was no longer standing on the ferry above the Black River.

A vision.

He recognized it immediately, without needing to think it through.

The Boatman's intentions were never easy to read. They had met countless times, and the Boatman had become a constant companion through every repeated day, yet that had not changed. Still, what the Boatman chose to show him came into view.

"Ugh."

He could not make out the ground or the weather. Only blurred shapes moved through black soot, but recognizing one of them was not difficult.

Ragna.

Ragna spat blood, wiped the corner of his mouth, and raised his head.

"You said you never turn down a fight, so don't turn this one down either."

Who was he talking to?

Behind Ragna's blurred form, someone seemed to have fallen, though the image was barely there.

From just a shadow, there was no telling who it was. Ragna's shape then scattered like smoke and vanished. He looked close enough to touch if Enkrid reached out, yet there was a strange, unsettling sense of distance, as if he were watching and listening from somewhere very far away.

Ragna disappeared. Right after, a shape rose from within the soot.

"...I admit it. I could have fixed everything if it had been me. I won."

"You stupid woman, if you're dead, you lost."

"I am the Elixir. I am the Panacea. I am the Remedium Omnia."

What kind of nonsense is that?

Words he could not begin to parse came one after another. Enkrid set the unfamiliar terms aside and focused only on reading the situation.

Ann had been struck by someone, and she was saying these things just before the end.

Who is she talking to?

He could not see the other person. The voice was indistinct. He could not even tell if it was a man or a woman.

"If you died, you lost. You are nothing."

Ann coughed, then dissolved into smoke and was gone.

The smoke gathered again. This time, someone he had never seen appeared. A middle-aged man. Thick eyebrows, hollow cheeks, a solid build.

He could only take in the man's appearance, so there was no reading his presence, but even from appearance alone there were things to work out.

Hollow cheeks and no excess fat at that age meant he either kept up his training or took care of his body in some other way.

He reminds me of Graham, somehow.

Border Guard had its own castellan, a man who had never set down his sword even in old age and had climbed to the level of a junior knight. A genuine triumph of human will, he had become a model for every soldier there.

"It is never too late. There is only the self that never tried."

Words Graham kept on his lips.

He was the kind of man who had taken something Enkrid once said and digested it into his own terms.

That the stranger instinctively reminded him of Graham meant the man was probably similar. Enkrid was a knight, and he had trained his Sensory Technique separately, so his instincts were closer to high-probability predictions than mere guesses.

The unfamiliar man's expression hardened, and he opened his mouth.

"So all of this is my fault?"

Another thread of smoke rose and took a different shape. Ragna. His chest was soaked in blood gone stiff, and though he normally kept his jaw clean-shaved, dried flecks of blood-crust lined it now like stubble. Ragna held his sword and asked,

"Then isn't it?"

Whether the man had actually left a pause, Enkrid could not be sure, but as he perceived it, a brief silence came before the answer.

"...This is my best."

"Nonsense."

Ragna fired back without drawing a breath.

The smoke thinned and fell away, and without knowing when it had shifted, Enkrid was at the rail again. The Boatman, who had been right before him, stood at his usual place with his back turned, holding the lantern.

"Why show me this?"

Enkrid asked. The Boatman turned his head. The face visible beneath the robe was as dark as it had been at the very start of this day. Eyes, everything else, nothing could be made out.

Then, not a voice but a single thread of meaning flew through the air and touched his forehead. It was less speech and more the direct transfer of intent, but Enkrid translated that intent into words and received it.

"You can remember this too, can't you? Don't forget."

He woke up. Dim darkness around him. A completely different texture, a different light, a different reality from moments before.

"Bad dream?"

A voice reached him. He tucked his chin and looked down to find Magroon standing just outside the tent. Early evening. Beyond Magroon's back, the sky had deepened to a clean blue as dusk faded out. His shadow stretched a faint black across the ground and reached all the way to Enkrid's feet.

"Not a bad dream."

Enkrid answered and got up, his thoughts settling on how hard the Boatman's intentions still were to read.

What the Boatman had said about the Walking Fire, that it was something different, had clearly been advice.

What came before that had been interference.

Advice in name, but the Boatman had never once given him the words he actually wanted to hear.

Then again, advice rarely came in a form the listener wanted, so perhaps he should be called an excellent advisor after all.

Just a joke. One he could not share with anyone.

Well. Jokes aside, what was this one about?

All the Boatman had done was show him a few people and let him hear a few lines of conversation. The Boatman himself had not said a single word throughout. Even the message at the end had felt different from the usual way he conveyed meaning.

"Anything happen while I was out?"

"Not so far."

Enkrid asked, and Magroon answered.

The attack the night before would not be the last. Magroon had judged as much. Everyone else had come to roughly the same conclusion. So had Enkrid.

"You've got the look of someone who just ran into a 'thoughtful scholar.'"

Magroon said it after watching Enkrid's expression shift as he came awake.

"What?"

"It's a joke from the Empire side."

"What kind of joke?"

While Enkrid moved and loosened his body after sleeping stiff, Magroon crouched down in front of the tent, propped his chin in his hand, and started talking.

He had been the one to bring it up, and then a moment later found himself wondering where to even begin, or whether explaining it was worth the trouble, and so had briefly closed his mouth again.

Magroon dropped the hesitation and kept going. The listener could make of it what they would.

"Well, it's one of those jokes that sounds like nothing when you say it out loud. Embarrassing to explain, really. The idea is that scholars pride themselves on being wise and say what they please without caring how it lands. A thoughtful scholar, though, leads with a joke to put the other person at ease and soften the mood before getting to the real point, which then makes the listener's head spin. The thoughtful part just means they loosened things up first. The actual subject matter is still something only they and their kind understand. Saying it out loud, it does sound strange."

"Yeah, it does."

"That's because for people on the Empire side, it lands all at once without any explanation needed. Not my fault."

"I never said it was."

Enkrid said it and stepped outside. Off to one side, Ragna was staring blankly at the sky. Odinkar stood beside the horses for no particular reason, stroking a mane. Ann was right next to Ragna, and Grida was reading the path by the stars overhead.

"No rain tonight."

Grida, sensing someone nearby, said it. Enkrid glanced up at the sky, nodded in agreement, then looked over at Ann.

"Ann. Did you get any sleep?"

"No."

He did not ask why. The night before she had been drenched in Magic Beast blood, stayed up through the night, and then been told there were Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts hunting specifically for her.

In circumstances like that, there were not many people who could sleep soundly, outside of the Madman Knights.

"Try to get some sleep tonight, at least. I don't think we'll be slowing the march."

"Yes."

It would not be easy, but Ann was not stupid enough to complain in a situation like this.

"Let's rest one more day."

What Grida said meant he would rather spend another day here than set out in the middle of the night. That had been the plan from the start when they chose to stay.

Grida built a campfire, and Enkrid pulled out the preserved rations they had brought. He put water in a pot, tossed in dried meat and some vegetables, and made a stew for the evening.

Then he brought out a few pieces of pemmican and chewed them down. Krais had apparently improved the flavor, but it still fell squarely into the category of food you ate to survive.

He added something called knight's rations on top of that.

It was meat, fish, and fruit, all dried and ground to powder, and mixing in a bit of water produced something with several times the caloric value of pemmican.

Taste? That had not been a consideration. It was combat rations, nothing more.

If a fight had not been in the cards, they might have hunted and managed a decent meal, but there was no helping it now.

A soldier who eats properly fights better. Knights were no different.

As he ate and thought things over, Enkrid decided there were a few more options available to him in the current situation.

The easiest and first was to turn back to the city.

We haven't come that far.

They had ridden out on horseback, so they could ride back the same way.

The second option was to send Ann back and continue on without her.

If someone is targeting Ann, Border Guard would be safer for her.

Esther was in the city. With her there, any third-rate sorcerer would be useless.

There were other unit members there too.

But Ann won't want that.

The third option was to bring more allies. It would cost time, but they would be safer.

If Jaxon had been there the previous night, whatever had come after them would not have gotten away so cleanly. When it came to detection and tracking, there were not many things that could slip past Jaxon's eyes.

The fourth option was to press on as they were, push through with what they had.

He did not think he would choose the first three. All of them clearly meant losing time.

In truth, all of this had come from not yet knowing what the enemy wanted.

One part of that intent was becoming clearer, and it was precisely why the first three options felt limited.

Staying here and waiting had partly been about reading the enemy's next move. More than rest, that had been the real reason.

If they were truly set on Ann, they would have come back harder by now.

But the enemy had not. They had held off. Which meant what the enemy wanted might simply be to pin the group in place.

Should he push the march faster than before?

That's not easy.

He scratched his jaw idly, thinking it through.

Even if Ragna carried Ann on his back, it was not simple. Ann was not a knight. Being carried would still take a toll on her.

And Ragna could not run all day.

The basics of a march were not about moving at the fastest possible pace. They were about moving quickly while keeping combat strength intact and cutting out every disadvantage.

Ragna carries Ann. Or he carries her himself and runs. To preserve fighting strength, he could not pour everything into Strong Legs and charge ahead.

That would leave nothing in reserve.

Even if Ann could hold on while being carried, the problem remained.

"Is this kind of fight hard to deal with?"

Just then Ragna asked from beside him.

Enkrid answered on instinct, the way he always had. He said exactly what was on his mind without dressing it up. He had not thought to organize his words.

That was how the Madman Knights talked, and for a long time he had kept that same way of speaking with Rem, Ragna, Audin, Jaxon, and Krais.

Because he said things straight without hiding anything, they too had never shown pointless hostility toward him from the start.

Habit led the words out.

"I never turn down a fight."

The moment he said it, Enkrid, who had been staring into the campfire, gave a short flinch and felt a brief chill run through him. He slowly raised his head and looked into the darkness. The chill came from the dream the Boatman had shown him.

"I don't turn them down either."

Ragna agreed. It sounded like he meant it.

And Enkrid thought.

The future?

He wondered whether what the Boatman had shown him was not yesterday or today but something that had not yet come, a glimpse ahead.

Or perhaps the Boatman had shown him the "today" he was about to be locked into.

The same as before. The Boatman had sometimes shown fragments of what would happen, in pieces, like a dream.

They had not always played out exactly as shown, but something close enough had usually followed.

This time, the Boatman had simply shown him one of those fragments without adding a word.

What was the intent?

He could not say. At moments like this, Enkrid knew he could not afford to think in circles.

Then what should he do? Narrow down what was possible and start with the most straightforward. That came first.

Within the range of what he could actually handle, what could he do right now?

His gaze landed on Odinkar. Tension and restlessness were plain on his face. Even while eating, he kept showing signs of discomfort he could barely contain.

After the fourth option, a fifth had just come to him.

Split the group.

Odinkar was skilled enough that Enkrid could not guarantee an easy win even if they fought to the death. He knew the way back to Zaun, and his instincts were clearly pushing him to go.

"Let's send Odinkar ahead."

The thought reached its end, and Enkrid said it. Grida and Magroon looked at him.

"Does that not work?"

He asked again, and the two exchanged a glance. Odinkar, who had been sitting blank-faced, got a light back in his eyes, clapped his hands together with a sharp crack, and said,

"Right, that's an option too. You've always had a habit of pulling out some unexpected move. Yeah. I'll go on ahead."

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