WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 683: Spring Sunlight and Mist

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"I always thought tracking and hunting weren't for me. Didn't like them either. To put it plainly, I found them boring. So what did I do instead of tracking and hunting?"

Odinkar kept talking. Those were the words he'd chosen to say, and they ended in a question. Under normal circumstances it would have been strange to ask something so out of nowhere, and in fact it was something neither Enkrid nor Ragna knew anything about.

Grida answered.

"You ran."

"Relentlessly."

Magroon followed right after, as naturally as breathing.

Both of them were used to talking with Odinkar. His nod confirmed it.

"Right. There aren't many people who can catch me in a footrace. Even if someone laid a trap ahead, going alone means I don't have to stick to the roads people travel, so the odds of walking into one are low. And if I spot something in advance, I can deal with it and keep moving."

Odinkar wasn't a fool. He wasn't suggesting he'd charge ahead and court danger recklessly. What he meant was that instead of the road they'd been riding, he'd cut left across the black earth and cross the distant mountains on his own.

"I'm not asking about the method, or whether it's possible or not. Why do you want to go ahead?"

Grida asked. They didn't even know who the enemy was or what they were after, should they really split the group?

Her instincts as a guide said no.

From a knight's perspective, though, the proposal was worth nodding at.

On top of that, Odinkar had joked about staying behind since Border Guard, but right up until they arrived he'd kept adding that something felt off. Even after meeting Enkrid, he'd said he was having a good time but that this didn't feel like a place he belonged.

"Not a bad idea. Nothing will have happened to Zaun. Not a chance. But they won't be completely in the dark about what's going on either. You could stop by the hunter village on the way and ask them to be ready to meet us."

Magroon added.

The hunter village was one of the settlements surrounding Zaun. Those who reached Zaun but ultimately failed to earn the family name sometimes returned home, but those with nowhere left to go sometimes settled nearby instead.

The hunter village was one of those settlements.

"You're saying it's efficient."

Grida nodded. That was the upshot of what Odinkar was getting at.

"I might push forward and trigger whatever trap the enemy has prepared, and even if not, like Magroon said, I could go first and pass along what's happened here. Stopping at the hunter village first, I'm not sure about. Going alone, I can head straight to Zaun."

Odinkar continued, and as he spoke he looked barely capable of keeping himself seated. From where Enkrid watched, one shout of "go" would have sent the man sprinting before the word finished.

Whatever the case, it was a statement made from a clear-eyed read of the situation.

Knights aren't omnipotent. They're called catastrophes because they accomplish things outside the range of what people normally imagine, but the knights themselves knew what they could and couldn't do. Lose sight of that and you'd keep burning yourself out on a surge of omnipotence.

What mattered here was that within this group, the only thing Odinkar could do was walk in step with everyone else.

His strengths weren't tracking or detection.

Magroon, by contrast, knew the roads and was excellent at reading situations. Grida was leading them as their guide and could read the enemy's intentions from a watcher's vantage point.

Of course, only one of Magroon or Grida needed to stay while the other left, but both of them had things they could do here.

In other words, there was no particular reason for either of them to go. But Odinkar was like a sword in its scabbard unless he was actually crossing blades with someone.

A sword in its scabbard isn't useless, but drawing a blade and then never unsheathing it is a waste.

Odinkar had the basics of tracking and detection, but he wasn't exceptional at either, a blade still in its sheath.

The best path available to him might well be to leave first.

Enkrid thought about the Boatman's vision. Was it tomorrow, or was this a taunt, showing him the day he was trapped in first so he could despair all over again? He didn't know.

He knew even less whether the choice being made now was the right one.

But he did know that what was needed here was to set the board so everyone could do what they did best.

Which meant Odinkar was free to go.

"Sharp, you are."

Grida said it to Enkrid, as though summing things up. He nodded in reply.

"Most women say that after three or four sentences with me. One of my seventeen charms, you could say."

"...You're calling that a joke, at a moment like this? Same as always. Crazy bastard."

Magroon shook his head and let the venom loose, the way he always did. It was as if he'd come down with some condition where his tongue would rot if he didn't get one truly cutting remark out per day.

Enkrid looked at him with something like pity. Why couldn't the man just admit it? Why had he ended up throwing out thorns like that instead?

A pessimistic view of the world. That was why.

The same pessimism had given him a cold, precise eye for pulling apart swordsmanship and dissecting technique, but in turn it had left him looking at the world through a lens of blame.

That was Magroon's lack.

Enkrid had learned many things from Sinar, and one of them was that a joke had to be delivered with nerve. Whatever you said, you had to say it with your chest out. So he did.

"I was stating a fact."

"Aren't you just something. Hm?"

Grida took that line and ran with it. Her gaze skimmed briefly over Ann.

Anyone who wasn't a fool knew Demon Creatures had been targeting her.

She probably felt like the current situation had gotten tangled because of that.

The joke Enkrid had just tossed out was partly for Ann's sake. The others had reached the level of knights, so they could afford to look calm, but the freckled healer couldn't be expected to do the same.

"It's hard to listen to."

Whether Ann caught on or was simply playing along out of habit, she chimed in too.

In the middle of that joke, or whatever it was, a long shadow fell across the campfire.

"Then I'll head out first."

Odinkar had gathered his things and stood up. The shadow was his.

A heavy pack on the back cut mobility and got in the way. With a possible fight in mind, Odinkar took only the small satchel that crossed diagonally from his side to his back.

It probably held simple preserved rations and field rations, the kind that felt filling with just water mixed in, if you could ignore the taste.

Field rations would make an ordinary person's stomach rebel with discomfort and nausea, but knights ate a lot by nature, and running while eating would sort out the digestion on its own.

Odinkar gave Enkrid one last look before going.

"See you at Zaun."

Enkrid answered with a nod. Odinkar stroked the mane of the horse that had carried him, said his thanks, and walked off with long strides into the dark.

It was a night when clouds had swallowed the moon, so as he moved away from the light he looked as though he were walking into the open maw of a Demon Creature lurking in the darkness.

Not that a creature that size would go unnoticed, the smell and presence alone would give it away, so that sort of thing couldn't actually happen.

'And even if it did, someone at that level would just cut his way out, wouldn't he?'

Odinkar's back disappeared beyond the dark. That man was probably one of the most formidable people within Zaun itself. Skilled enough that sending him alone didn't stir any real worry.

He didn't know what shape this would take later, but for now this was what could be done, so they were doing it.

If he'd raised the idea and everyone had pushed back, he hadn't planned to force it, but everyone had gone along with what Enkrid said.

Magroon turned the situation over in his mind and looked at Enkrid.

There he sat, quiet by the campfire, picking things out of his pack one by one.

'Why did I go along with what Enki said without a second thought? Because his idea was reasonable?'

After spending months together, was it because he'd come to know that this man's eye for things was anything but ordinary?

Or.

'Has a habit of just following along grown in me without my realizing it?'

Enkrid was the kind of person who made you fall in naturally with his thinking.

'It's not for nothing that he earned that nickname. Charm, was it.'

Apparently the whole unit had turned into training fanatics after watching him push through drills with that stubborn relentlessness.

Magroon had seen the changed Border Guard Standing Army. He hadn't seen what they were before, but he knew there was no unit like that anywhere on the continent, which told him they were anything but ordinary.

The only comparable force he could think of was this:

'Maybe the Imperial Army. That might be a match.'

He didn't know how an actual fight would go, but in terms of the quality of the troops, that was the one comparison worth making.

* * *

"It's strange that we're all traveling in a group like this. We're perfectly fine on our own. Ragna here has been setting out alone since he was a child."

It was something Grida added mid-conversation.

"It's a road you can walk by moonlight alone. No need for complicated detours."

Ragna took that up.

"...That guy is genuinely lucky to be alive. Shouldn't he have stumbled and died somewhere by now? The Cursed Ground, or a cliff?"

Ragna's sister expressed her worry for her brother in her own way. Her brother answered in the particular dialect of affection they shared.

"Where are your eyes? It's not just that you can't remember faces, you can't find a path either? Why would anyone walk toward a cliff on purpose?"

Short of pulling out swords to actually kill each other, that probably counted as affectionate.

Enkrid decided to read it that way.

The two went back and forth a few more times, keeping up that warm manner of theirs.

"A cliff's fine, you can just jump down. Oh, right, you can't?"

"You son of a dog, little brother. You sound just like Rem."

Grida put her years of wandering the continent to use and displayed the colorful vocabulary she'd picked up along the way, with some recently learned curses mixed in.

The sort of wordplay that would have Rem reaching for his axe on the spot.

Listening to their tender exchange, Enkrid felt like washing his ears out. You wouldn't hear banter that vicious even in a typical mercenary company.

"I have no idea what's happening."

"Neither do I."

Those were the lines Magroon and Ann traded beside the two, ignoring the performance entirely.

The red campfire light painted Ann's face in warm color. Even in a situation like this, she never said she was going back.

She said only the opposite.

"I need to see that illness myself."

She didn't say "in person" or "with my own two eyes," but the meaning came through perfectly.

"Then do."

Enkrid respected Ann's choice. She had made an impression on him from the very first time they met.

She sees even alchemy as one more way to heal people. So is what Ann does alchemy, or healing?

He didn't know. She could call it whatever she wanted.

Enkrid pulled out his weapons and laid them out beside the fire. Time for maintenance.

Ten horn-blade daggers, the ones Jaxon had said showed about as much aesthetic sense as a human-faced dog or Rem. Then Three-Iron and Penna. He'd brought along one shortsword made with Valerian Steel too, just in case.

He was in the habit of keeping weapons on his body whenever possible, nothing left hanging off the saddle. He'd picked that up during his mercenary days, not from anyone who'd told him directly, more from watching everyone else do it and falling into line.

Among mercenaries it was called keeping your weapons close.

"So you did mercenary work too."

Grida, sharp-eyed as ever, said it. She'd wandered the continent herself, and naturally that had included a stint in the mercenary world.

She pulled out all of her own weapons and began checking them over.

Oiling what needed oil, making sure nothing had come loose. That kind of thing.

Ragna and Magroon joined in, and before long the only sound was the soft clinking of metal.

After that came quiet.

Everyone knew how to sleep when they needed to, and for as long as they needed.

They did. Ann eventually loosened up and fell asleep too. Enkrid kept part of his awareness taut even as he slept, but nothing happened, and he met the morning sun without incident.

He stretched, ate, and took care of what needed to be taken care of.

Without incident, the group moved forward again.

Black earth and wide open ground like a vast plain, with rolling hills appearing now and then.

Some rose high enough that you couldn't see past them even on horseback, while others barely reached Ann's waist. The land moved like waves.

They were walking with the lazy spring sun sitting high to their right when it happened.

A few trees stood at the edge of the wide plain, and from around them, fog began to spread.

Anyone looking could see it was unnatural, something that had been made to happen. And it was something Enkrid had experienced before.

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