WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 696: Either Already Knew or Meant To

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The sky looked ready to pour at any moment, but the rain had stopped again. It felt like a giant larger than the city was holding water in its mouth, cheeks puffed out, staring down at the ground.

After watching the same weather drag on for days, Enkrid had started thinking a sudden downpour would actually be a relief.

He struck the flint and lit the lamp.

Two sharp clicks, and the flame caught the wick, lighting up the small room.

No fireplace, nothing like that. A table beside the bed and a single wardrobe for clothes and odds and ends. A spare, plain room.

"Haven't seen you in a few days," Enkrid said, settling onto the edge of the bed. Three-Iron was still leaning at an angle against the corner.

Grida pulled off her oiled cape. The rain had not grown heavy yet, but even drizzle soaks through to the undershirt if you stay out in it long enough.

The moment the cape came off, drops pattered to the floor. The water was thick with dust, no different from muddy runoff.

"Looks like you covered a lot of ground."

He could tell just from reading her appearance and posture.

"Yeah. Something felt off."

Grida stood where she was and opened her mouth. She seemed to think for a moment about where to begin, then spoke without preamble.

"You know the saying? A great guide is a fine hunter?"

It was talk between guides. Not quite slang, but among guides it meant that someone with outstanding skill would naturally be sharp at tracking quarry too.

Obvious enough, really.

Guides were not simply people who walked paths.

The catch was that a guide could be a fine hunter, but never a great one.

That edged close to wordplay, but it landed well enough in those circles.

Dig into what Grida had just said and there were two meanings packed inside it.

Among guides you had poor ones, fine ones, and great ones. Apply the same scale to hunters and she was saying: as skilled as she was as a guide, she could pass for a fine hunter, but as a hunter she would never reach the level of a guide.

The premise being that "great" sat above "fine."

She had thrown that line out knowing Enkrid had worked as a guide himself.

Short, but the core of what she wanted to say was all there.

What the saying pointed to was that she had been sweeping the area with a guide's eye and found something, the way a hunter finds quarry.

Folded into it was also the admission that she had lost the trail.

"What did you find? Demon Creature signs would be everywhere out there."

Past here was Imperial territory, and below lay the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, with three villages scattered around the area. This was the kind of place where something would be wrong if Demon Creatures were absent.

There was no manpower here to run the large-scale extermination campaigns they had at Border Guard.

Fighting in place of actual combat practice was one thing, but there were simply not enough hands to wipe out every Demon Creature in the vicinity.

A knight could cut down a thousand in battle if the body held out, but a knight could not replace a thousand soldiers.

Against Demon Creatures, a thousand kills in a single day was a battlefield figure, not a real one.

Demon Creatures did not bunch up and charge as a mass. And the people here did not seem inclined to do it that way regardless.

All of that passed through his mind while she was talking.

"Not just any Demon Creatures. What I saw was the trail of a large-scale migration."

"Colony?"

"Damn, yeah, probably a Colony. I spotted a few of those four-legged lizards too."

Lizards. Magic Beasts that had come charging alongside the Scalers before.

In sheer size and strength, they might actually be more threatening than Scalers in a straight fight.

Grida seemed to have caught her breath. She exhaled, kicked the cape aside with her foot, and kept talking.

"But that part's fine. Colonies are everyday business out here."

Everyday. Right, for these people it was.

They competed with each other, taught each other, pulled each other along, sharpened their skills through learning, and kept their drive alive through the atmosphere around them.

The geography itself forced their combat ability higher.

Demon Creatures were always passing through where the Zaun family was based, and every so often an outside expert showed up to test themselves against the household.

Not a secret, exactly, but it was part of what made the Zaun strong in ways that did not show on the surface.

The constant threat of nearby Demon Creatures was an asset to their swordsmanship.

If what Enkrid was doing was purely refining a technical system, the Zaun did everything needed to forge knights.

There was no point arguing which approach was right.

Each person did things their own way.

"Have you heard about named Demon Creatures in the Cursed Ground? Besides the demon god?"

Grida asked. She parked herself on the corner of the small table, settling her weight on glutes hardened from years of travel.

"Exceptional individuals?"

"When an exceptional individual survives long enough, word spreads. That's what a named Demon Creature is."

Grida had traveled from the borders of the Cursed Ground all the way south and knew the danger those creatures carried.

Ones that surpassed the ordinary measure of power were called named Demon Creatures.

Some people just called them Named.

Same principle as a skilled fighter who battles long enough and well enough to earn a name. A Demon Creature that had fought hard and survived far too long, until people started calling it something.

The Cursed Ground was known as a graveyard for knights.

Some of the Demon Creatures living inside it were called knight-hunters. They existed in this world.

If humans could surpass their limits, Demon Creatures could have individuals that did the same.

"What I found was the trail of something that started as a small snake, grew a horn from its head, learned to handle spells, and slowly evolved."

He had heard something like this before.

A creature with a human face and the lower body of a snake.

"A Lamia?"

The name for a Demon Creature evolved from a snake Magic Beast. Lower body of a snake, upper body humanoid in shape.

Used charm spells, if he recalled correctly.

Genderless, but resembling the female form outwardly, and known for clumsily trying to lure human men with that appearance.

And in the Cursed Ground, there were higher-ranked individuals above even those. Grida shook her head.

"No. A Medusa."

A monster wearing dozens of snakes instead of hair, capable of casting the petrification curse with a glance alone.

Her eyes reflected the lamplight as she said it. She did not look frightened.

Enkrid let out a low whistle.

Not many people would react that way upon hearing something like that had been spotted nearby.

Grida was not surprised by his reaction. Inside the Zaun household it would probably be much the same.

A strange Demon Creature turns up?

They would want to go kill it immediately.

The problem was that she had tracked the trail and ultimately lost it.

"There were clear traces of sorcery."

That was what had interfered. Sorcery.

The same sorcery she had seen several times on the way here.

"What makes you say the family head is acting strange?"

This was exactly why Grida had come to find Enkrid.

She turned the question back on him.

"Why would someone do nothing in a situation like this?"

Enkrid heard her and gave an almost imperceptible nod.

From the road here to right now, the strange things had been piling up, one after another.

Schmidt smelled of spells.

And he had lingered even after his business was done, in no hurry to leave.

On the way here, attackers had shown themselves targeting Ann.

But since arriving, nothing had happened.

Was that because their enemy's reach had not extended this far? Or were they waiting for the perfect moment?

If it was one or the other, which carried more weight?

That was why Ragna had not left Ann's side. During that time, Ann had been moving freely around the Zaun estate.

Enkrid put together what he already knew with everything he had observed and heard since arriving.

Was the Zaun family blind to outside information? Completely cut off? No.

And yet they kept insisting they knew nothing about Odinkar's disappearance or anything that had happened beyond their walls.

Not just the family head, either.

"Scalers? Sorcery? Spells? First I've heard of any of this."

He had slipped that question to Lynox during sparring. That was what came back.

"I haven't heard anything either."

Same from Heskal.

This was not the enemy being clever.

Someone inside was deliberately poisoning the flow of information.

Grida had been moving around trying to find that blind spot and stumbled onto the Demon Creature trail instead.

The Zaun family organized patrol forces to rotate through the surrounding area on a regular schedule. You could not pull off that kind of information manipulation without knowing their routes.

Grida had already reached her conclusion before she came to find him.

She had come because he knew the inside of the Zaun household better than she did right now. Her actions had made that plain.

Someone had stopped up the Zaun's ears and covered their eyes.

That was the conclusion. And beyond that.

The family head knows something.

Running back through the situation and stacking up predictions, it became plain enough. The reason was simple.

The family head, the person responsible for the household and obligated to ensure its continuity, was doing nothing.

Even if that person was unaware of most of what was happening right now, multiple people had raised the alarm about something being wrong, and yet there was no sign of any effort to find out more.

Not trying to find out meant one of two things.

Already knew.

Or had intended it, so there was no need to know.

"The family head is acting strange."

Grida said it, and her unease was plain. If her inner state were put into words precisely:

What if the family head intended all of this?

That was what it came down to.

But did the family head have a reason to do that?

That was Enkrid's question.

Actions needed reasons.

And right now, the reason was nowhere to be found.

In the damp air, Enkrid blinked slowly.

"Magroon said he can't move for now either. Because of treatment," Grida added.

"Who said that?"

"Milestia."

The healer inside the Zaun estate. She could not use a sword, apparently. He had not even seen her face because of it.

Strange things everywhere. What he knew was little, and the people pulling the strings were hard to pin down.

During his mercenary days, Enkrid had come across quite a few fixers. They were an unusual type among mercenaries, people who tracked down the missing or lent a hand untangling incidents. If a murder happened inside a city and someone needed the killer found, a fixer would step in.

Was this the moment a fixer was needed?

But even if one were available, fixers could handle matters tied to nobles or merchants flush with Krona. Something involving knights was another matter entirely.

Either way, someone was working against the family, and Grida suspected the family head.

Not only the family head. She suspected others too. That was why she had come looking for him.

"This feels wrong, Enki."

Thunder cracked.

The sound came with Grida's words, and a flash of light burst through the room, gone just as fast. In the lamplight, Enkrid saw Grida's face, shadowed and dark.

The worry etched into her expression was as deep as the shadows that carved it.

The thunder had rolled, but still no rain. This had happened a few times already. Alexandra had passed by once, noticed the same thing, and mentioned there was a name for it. Dry lightning, she had called it. A sign of a coming storm.

"Something is happening inside the Zaun family."

Enkrid agreed, though he did not nod.

There was no rush. The thing to do now was work through it carefully, one piece at a time.

Still, going only by what had surfaced so far.

A Sorcerer and a Mage were involved.

They had gone after Ann.

Out beyond the walls, a Medusa had settled in along with other Demon Creatures.

That they had masked it with sorcery meant they were still trying to keep it hidden.

People who learned to think in complicated ways sometimes forgot how to look at things plainly, but Enkrid was not one of them.

"Why did those Demon Creatures gather?"

He asked it simply.

Grida tilted her head, then raised it.

"Hm?"

"They gathered to attack, didn't they?"

"Well, yes? There's a strong smell of something artificial about it, but."

"So they'll come eventually. Unless they're headed into Imperial territory instead."

"Obviously."

"Then can't we just deal with them when they do?"

That was how you handled Demon Creatures. Simple and clean.

"And whoever is stirring things up inside the family, that's a separate matter. The family head isn't the only suspect, is he?"

She had been away a long time, but this was still her home. Small things might shift, but the core of it should have stayed the same.

The reason she had stepped in was because something had happened that should not have.

And what should not have happened was this: someone was tearing the family apart from the inside, and she was certain of it.

That was how Enkrid read it.

"...I spent the last few days going around the area, and I even started wondering whether I'd been fooled by some kind of confusion magic."

She had been that careful about how she was reading the situation. Only three days, but she had worked most of it through.

"Five people in this family have the reach to control the surrounding area to this degree. Seven if you count Magroon and Odinkar, but those two are out of the picture right now, and I've been gone too long to manage it myself."

The way Enkrid heard it, Grida had placed Odinkar and Magroon, both of whom had traveled the road back with him, inside the circle of suspicion as well.

"So."

At the right moment to prompt her, Grida raised her right hand and spread it open, showing all five fingers.

"The family head and his wife. Lynox, Heskal, and Andante."

Enkrid had met all of them except Andante.

More than met, in fact. They had been his sparring partners over these three days.

The conversations, the sparring matches, all of it was sharp in his memory.

"Going to be difficult," Enkrid said.

"Can't trust any of them," Grida answered.

She did not hide how tangled up she felt inside, and Enkrid thought it made sense that she would.

Everything she had said so far amounted to this: someone raised on the Zaun way, or moved by what the Zaun stood for, had turned against the family from within.

And not just anyone. One of the people at the very heart of the household.

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