WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 700: The Storm After the Calm

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The calm before the storm was just that, calm, right up until the storm arrived.

Enkrid was no different.

'Nothing in particular to do.'

Something felt like it was coming, but no immediate threat had shown itself yet.

Grida seemed busy enough, but that was no reason for Enkrid to go poking around everywhere.

So he didn't. He spent the whole day swinging his sword.

He had done the same at Border Guard, but he pushed himself even harder here at Zaun. And this was a place that encouraged exactly that kind of behavior.

No one looked at him strangely for it. Instead, they marveled that an outsider was working so hard and enjoyed the days alongside him.

What he taught them was fresh and different, so there was no reason not to enjoy it.

Everyone at Zaun hungered for new techniques, every last one of them.

"Rest day's over! Time to fight!"

A boy shouted that and came at Enkrid before dawn had even broken.

"Care to melt in the arms of this beautiful woman?"

One of the Giant women, the finest beauty Zaun had to offer, also came at him with that line.

Beside her stood an old swordsman named Lynox, trailing a laugh that was almost impossible to imitate.

"Hey, this is my home. You won't be fighting by the same 'calculation' you use out there."

And then there was the swordsman who had spent days quietly combing the area, convinced something was off inside Zaun, suspecting the family head all while keeping a perfectly calm face on the outside.

That was Grida, gone for another day or two before showing up again and acting like nothing was wrong.

"You've got dark circles. Sleeping all right?"

"...My sleep's been rough lately. Maybe because it's been a while since I've been home."

It was probably less about being home and more about tension quietly eating away at her.

Draw a bow, string it taut, and leave it that way, and both the bow and the string will break before long.

People were the same.

Knights might have thicker skin than most, but they were still people.

Well, knight or not, it would be hard for anyone to rest easy in the unsettled air drifting through Zaun right now.

Of course, that assumed a normal person. Enkrid had slept soundly. He was eating well and sleeping well. Ragna was too.

"You said you came for Ilchul. How come you haven't gone to get it yet?"

He threw the question at Ragna, who was drilling beside him.

Ragna wiped the sweat from his brow and quietly turned his head toward where the family head might be. He had the direction wrong, so he ended up looking toward the path that led out of Zaun.

"Hmm."

Ragna paused to choose his words. That was new. Back in the trouble-making squad, the predecessor to the Madman Knights, he had blurted out whatever came to mind. Now he actually thought before he spoke.

Calling it deeply moving would not be an overstatement.

While Ragna was still choosing his words, a boy who could have been his nephew muttered nearby.

"The muscles are really firing. Everything's catching right. Oh, yeah. Good."

Enkrid had been sharing Audin's physical conditioning methods with them between spars and training sessions.

A few of the children at Zaun had taken to Audin's methods almost immediately after trying them, and this boy was living proof.

He muttered to himself as he hoisted a stone and worked his back muscles. His body was already developed enough that he bumped up the weight in no time.

Zaun had its own training methods, and Enkrid had watched and learned from them too, but for sheer physical conditioning, nothing he had seen could match Audin's approach.

Audin had taken the training methods of the orthodox combat priests of the holy city Legion, refined and rebuilt them from the ground up, layered in a few theories of his own, and tailored the whole thing to fit Enkrid.

It was, on reflection, a glimpse of Audin's genius.

If Audin were here to see it, his face would have split into a wide, satisfied grin.

"Outstanding, brother! Well done! Sister! Did I ever mention? Your strength surpasses most men!"

He would probably bellow something like that. These young people had adapted to Audin's brand of torment that well.

On top of that, they were fiercely competitive and relentlessly driven. They gritted their teeth watching the person beside them and threw themselves into training, so there was no reason their skills would not grow.

After watching for a while, Ragna finally spoke.

"I was sure it was urgent, but I don't feel like going."

"Why?"

Enkrid asked because he could not guess. Ragna did not know which way his own heart was pointing either. He had gotten lost again.

"That's what I'm wondering too."

He said it plainly, but to Enkrid it looked like there was something more beneath it, some dissatisfaction.

'Or anger.'

Ragna gave his vague answer and did nothing but swing his sword. Enkrid did the same.

Ann, meanwhile, was off to one side, always tinkering with something.

Enkrid glanced over a few times and caught fragments.

"Did I draw the poison out of the corpse? No, I kept the infected person alive and extracted the seed. See? That's right, isn't it?"

She would say something and then turn to check with him.

"That's right."

Enkrid agreed even though he had no idea what she meant. Something in Ann's manner made it impossible not to respond.

She had dragged a table from somewhere, set a chair in front of it, and was working away in a corner of the training ground, mixing solutions, pouring them, sniffing them, handling something carefully with green leather gloves on.

From behind, all you could see was a small back. But she was pouring everything she had into whatever lay in front of her.

You just knew she was doing something. Enkrid's sharp senses picked up the momentum radiating off her.

'Will,' he thought.

So Ann was a genius too. He arrived at that conclusion naturally.

"Something like this is nothing."

She spoke while absorbed in her work, seemingly unaware that Enkrid was watching.

"I can do this. I'm going to get rid of it. This damned thing."

Ann muttered to herself, one sentence after another.

If you could have seen her eyes in that moment, they would have been blazing.

"How many days has she been like this?"

He asked Ragna, who was keeping watch outside the lodgings. Ragna answered without much concern.

"Since the moment we arrived, straight through until now."

Ragna had done his sword training right beside Ann and, whenever he could, stayed close to her.

Enkrid nodded and headed out the door. Ragna called after him.

"She said she likes me."

"...Rem?"

"Even as a joke, I find that tongue of his so unpleasant I want to cut it out."

"Make him apologize."

"It was Ann."

Enkrid thought back to Ann at Border Guard.

She had been in and out of the Madman Knights' training hall constantly. Always grumbling about how busy she was, but still showing up all the time.

She brought food. She brought drinks. Sometimes she mixed up recovery potions and carried them over.

'And everything went into Ragna's mouth first.'

Ann also stayed closer to Ragna than anyone else, no matter what she was doing.

Krais had figured it out long ago. Enkrid had figured it out. Even Rem knew.

Ann liked Ragna.

The problem was that Ragna was completely oblivious to it.

This guy could not only not find his way, he could not read people's hearts either.

"Now that I think about it, I believe I felt the same way about her."

Ragna said it quietly, at a volume Ann would not hear, in that flat tone of his.

What he meant was that he had come to feel warmth toward her in return for the warmth she had shown him, but he managed to say it in the most charmless way possible.

"You're not asking me to pass that along."

"I'm just saying that's how it is."

Some part of him probably just wanted someone to know. Ragna's thinking was that simple.

He did not know why, but he could not bring himself to go and claim Ilchul. His chest felt tight because of it, maybe. Or perhaps the illness had gotten worse.

He had coughed up blood in his sleep last night too. The whole journey here, he had been fine.

'Is the end getting close?'

Maybe.

So it made sense that he felt this way right now. Fog had settled over one part of his heart, making it heavy, and so some other part wanted to be clearly seen. That was the impulse behind what he had said.

"That doesn't mean I'll be getting close to Ann."

And then, quietly:

"Though I don't know if that might change."

Enkrid nodded.

"Do what you want."

He said he felt warmth for her but would not be getting close. Right. That was madness. The kind of thing a madman would say, and it made sense understood that way.

So there was no real need to understand it.

Going back to the trouble-making squad days, Enkrid had long given up trying to read what Ragna or any of the others truly had going on inside.

So he went back outside and swung his sword again.

Dark ink-black clouds still covered the sky like a pitch-black wall above him. It looked as though a black ceiling had been built across the heavens.

That's supposed to be clouds? No way.

Someone might have said something like that.

Enkrid himself was unfazed. Sunlight would have been nicer, sure, but he had no complaints to air about it.

He just swung his sword, same as always.

The Boatman had not appeared again, but what he had said still lingered.

Protect Ann.

Enkrid passed that on to Ragna, leaving out anything about the Boatman and whatever else.

Ann might be in danger. So protect her.

He had also seen a Demon Creature targeting Ann on the way here. Rather than ask questions, Ragna took those words to heart.

The day passed, wearing the face of an ordinary day.

Enkrid found himself drifting into thought at intervals.

Who had stirred up the family? Someone had made their move. That was an unchanging truth. Add one more: someone had taken something that happened by chance and used it as a tool.

He thought only that far and made no effort to hunt for answers.

There was no reason for Enkrid to cast himself as the one who solved everything. Even as he saw and heard more, that did not change.

"Family head, are you really going to do nothing?"

One day he saw Heskal come back from the retirees' village and confront the family head directly.

Lynox also requested a private meeting with the family head, insisting he had a position to press, but nothing changed.

Spending time with Enkrid, Heskal let something slip.

"I just wish the family head would be a little more proactive."

It came after a spar where Heskal had not been focused, limp, deflated swordplay. Enkrid pulled Three-Iron back and asked.

"You mean accept Schmidt's offer?"

"That could work too. The Empire's embrace is wide."

It was hollow. He did not mean a word of it. That was how it sounded.

Enkrid did not know the family head's heart. But he felt like he understood what Heskal wanted. His eyes were full of something he was trying to build, some aspiration he was reaching for.

"May I ask what it is you want to do?"

Heskal had the eyes of someone with a dream.

"I'll tell you someday."

Said with a smile. From it, Enkrid got the feeling that whatever dream Heskal carried was going to be extraordinarily hard to realize.

And yet he also knew this person would not give up. He would keep moving forward.

Call it instinct, the kind that recognized a kindred spirit.

"There's no sign of that damned Odinkar anywhere."

Grida went on combing through every corner of Zaun for days.

Neither Magroon nor Odinkar was anywhere to be seen, and the worry was showing.

In the evenings, an old woman called Milestia came to visit Ann, Zaun's healer.

"What is all this?"

She heard part of Ann's research, eyes going wide, then said it might actually work and broke into a wide smile.

Passing by one of those evenings, Milestia saw Enkrid and greeted him.

Then came a certain dawn.

Enkrid was wrenched out of sleep.

CRACK!

Lightning struck with a sound that hammered his ears.

BOOM!

Before the thunder even finished rolling, rain came down and beat the earth. He sat up and turned toward the window. The rain was falling so hard the streams looked like iron rods.

He found himself worrying the ground might actually cave in.

"Enkrid of Border Guard."

Someone called his name from outside the door, someone he would never have expected to come at this hour.

Enkrid rose and immediately checked his equipment.

Three-Iron, Penna, a shortsword, the horn-blade dagger, cloth gauntlets, the undershirt the elf had given him, and over all of it, leather armor covering his shoulders and torso.

'The cloth armor is out.'

Too much rain. If it soaked through, it would slow him down. He knew that from experience, and right now he was moving on instinct.

There was no obvious reason to arm up, but Enkrid armed up fully anyway before calmly opening the door.

The family head was standing there. Soaked through to the skin.

"Come with me. Milestia is dead."

Enkrid obviously had no part in it, but the family head looked as though he had come to make an accusation.

"Sounds like I should be asking why you're telling me."

Enkrid asked from where he stood. Water pooled at the family head's wet feet. The same drained, emotion-stripped voice came back as before.

"Come quietly."

Creak.

The door to the next room opened. Ragna.

"Who are you accusing of what?"

A candle flame swayed in the thick dark, and Ragna's shadow lurched with it.

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