WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 701: Even Without Thinking, He Knows What to Do

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It was the first time Enkrid had caught a flicker of emotion in the family head's eyes. Something close to worry, or concern, but it vanished as quickly as it appeared. He could not be sure he had really seen it.

"Don't follow me."

The family head said it again, steel and empty as a puppet with all feeling scraped out. Ragna bristled. Enkrid could tell something had been simmering in him, and he was right. Ragna was furious.

"You want me to take Ilchul right now?"

He said it and stepped his left foot forward, crossing the threshold of the doorway. It was the kind of step that meant he was ready to draw. His anger ran hotter than anything Rem showed when someone stole his rations.

Emotion became momentum, and momentum became Pressure, and Pressure filled the corridor outside the room.

The family head did not respond to Ragna. He acted like a man with wisdom to spare, only turning to look at Enkrid in silence, urging him along without a word.

And somehow it looked like a desperate plea.

Something's a little off.

Enkrid thought it, and gave an inward nod.

When you can't read a situation, move first and figure it out from there.

If Grida's suspicion was right and the family head was up to something, this would be a chance to find out.

"Ragna, stay here. I'll be back shortly."

Enkrid said it. Ragna held the family head in a cold stare, then gave a small nod.

Only after that did the family head move, boots squelching with each step. Not the silent walk from before. His rain-soaked boots dragged against the corridor floor and made their own little performance.

Outside, of course, a full orchestra was already playing, thunder and lightning and a raging storm, so catching the sound of footsteps meant picking them out from the roar of the tempest. Anyone without a knight's ears would not have heard a thing.

And in those steps, Enkrid caught a trace of quiet relief from the family head.

Not the open kind. More like the understated sort Alexandra had shown when she guided him through swordwork to express her gratitude. Subtle, barely-there.

Then again, it was hard to be certain. It might have been nothing at all.

As Enkrid followed him outside, the family head spoke first.

KRAAAAOOM!

His voice reached Enkrid's ears through sheets of rain falling like a waterfall from the sky.

"Ragna listens to you."

"No reason he shouldn't."

"He never listened to anyone from the time he was small. When he came back he looked no different."

"Well, he made up his own mind about it, don't you think?"

"More than that, I'd say he simply listens to you. How did you win him over?"

Win him over? No idea. Enkrid took a few more steps and thought it over, then answered.

"I wouldn't say I won him over. I just scraped along trying to stay alive, and when I looked up Ragna was there swinging a sword beside me."

The family head paused, seeming to choose his next words. The storm howled around them, and between its roar the two sets of footsteps traded off, squelch and tap, squelch and tap. Then he spoke again.

"Yes. You can't force a person's heart. That's something I've come to regret. Should I have just subdued him by force? I suppose it's all too late now."

Alexandra stood outside the lodging, wrapped in a black cloak. Her face held nothing. Milestia had been her oldest friend, and Milestia was dead. She had died for the Zaun family.

That fact dug into her chest like a blade. So the expression kept leaving her face.

It had been twelve days since Enkrid arrived in Zaun. The storm had rolled in without warning, turning day indistinguishable from night.

His goal had not changed, same as when he first arrived. He had decided from the start that he did not need to play fixer and go hunting for anyone. That thinking still held.

Whoever it was would surface eventually. Until then, Enkrid's job was simple enough.

Protect Ann.

Keep himself sharp and wait.

"Family head!"

A voice cut through the rain, through the lightning, through the storm.

The quiet was over. The tempest had arrived.

CRAAAACK!

White lightning flooded the world. On the far side, a crowd of figures split into two groups.

An invisible line seemed to run through the middle of them. The two sides looked ready to come to blows any moment.

Then Enkrid registered that the family head was in front of him, and Alexandra had moved to stand at his back.

He also registered that these two were among the strongest people in Zaun, and that not many would survive if both of them attacked at once.

In other words, somewhere along the way, Enkrid had ended up with the two most dangerous blades in Zaun standing before and behind him.

* * *

I'll be the one to end this disease.

Ann had sworn it to herself more than once.

The curse had killed her family.

To tell it in order: a plague had spread, and the people who feared it had torched the slums. Fire set by those same poor souls burned the people she had called family.

That was when Ann made her decision.

Get revenge.

The target lay somewhere behind a wall of fog she could not see through.

So first she had to learn. She did. She took in everything new she could and stepped into the world of alchemy.

She named ignorance and disease as her first enemies to defeat. Alongside that, she hanged a few alchemists who were doing unconscionable things, abducting children for experiments or gutting humans to build chimeras. That was less revenge and more cleaning house.

Either way, it would be a lie to say she did not enjoy the world of alchemy just because she had named ignorance her enemy. She loved it. Every bit of it.

Whether it was the goddess of fortune's whim or simply the reward of effort, she could not say, but the rush she felt when an unusual idea struck her and solved a problem was something she had never experienced before in her life.

Ah. Got it.

Ann felt that rush again now.

She had identified the types of seeds spreading through Zaun, and she had found a solution. Not a complete one.

But I understand the core principle.

Explaining it to someone unfamiliar would require a full lecture on the fundamental properties of what she called essence, its basic nature. So explaining was not easy. But she did have something to tell Ragna.

The moment to break this family's curse had come.

There were also parts that lay outside what she could reach, and she would have to say that too.

She lifted her head to speak, and an unfamiliar voice addressed her through the window.

"I still don't understand."

Ann's room was too small for a person to slip through the window easily, but the window was wide enough for a face, a hand, or whatever else might fit.

The voice came from outside it.

"What are you, that I have to be the one to move for you?"

CRACK, KRAAOOM.

Thunder and storm and driving rain filled the air, but his voice drove clean into Ann's ears.

BANG!

The window frame buckled and tore free. The figure ripped it out with his bare hands and kept talking.

"No hard feelings."

Wet blond hair plastered flat against his face, the man aimed what he held at her. It looked like a short spear. The tip was pointed and sharp, and the handle was a little too short to call it a proper spear.

Even in the hammering storm, Ann recognized the face. She would, it was one she had been seeing the whole way here.

Square jaw, blue eyes, short blond hair. A distinctive look. She knew who it was.

Odinkar.

Huh?

Ann's eyes went wide, but Odinkar looked at her with flat, empty eyes and threw what he was holding. She never saw his arm move.

Only the before and after.

CLANG!

At the moment Odinkar ripped out part of the window frame and hurled the short spear, a greatsword swinging from behind swatted it out of the air.

CRACK!

The spear bounced off and buried itself in the wall.

Ann felt someone grab her arm and pull.

Ragna, obviously. He pulled her behind his back and spoke.

"What are you?"

Ann realized she had been holding her breath.

"Hah-hah, hah."

She focused on breathing first. The figure standing outside the window looked at Ragna with an empty gaze.

Ann's eyes dropped to the fingertips gripping the window frame. She had only caught a glimpse, but the tips of his fingers were black.

That was what happened after years of handling poison.

"That's not Odinkar."

Ann was sharp. Her mind was working even now.

She had never once caught the smell of potions on Odinkar the whole way here. This was a fake.

The fake in the window frame pressed his lips together.

"Oh."

A short sound. Then he spoke again.

"How did you know?"

"It reeks. Hard to miss."

Ragna answered for her. He had spotted it the same moment. The Will was completely different, and the stench really was foul.

He watched the figure without so much as a twitch of his brow, keeping steady eyes on it, but he did not rush out through the window. More precisely, he couldn't.

Too many.

The figure was not alone. Things lurked in the shadows all around, waiting for an opening.

How did they get inside?

Someone opened a door for them.

Thinking about it would get him nowhere. He dropped it.

CRAAAAACK.

White lightning flooded the room and lit up everything beyond the window. Behind the figure standing there, Ragna caught a glimpse of several winged Demon Creatures. At a glance, more than five.

Didn't the captain say he'd seen variant Demon Creatures in Aoara's city?

He had heard that. The things in front of him now looked like exactly that.

Variant Demon Creatures meant Demon Creatures that could use Will.

Ragna judged that the space worked against him with a greatsword, and reached that conclusion just as he drove the blade forward anyway.

Pivoting on his left foot, he twisted from the waist and thrust the greatsword at the figure's shoulder.

THUD!

He had aimed for the head, but the figure dodged enough that he only caught the shoulder. Even taking a greatsword to the shoulder, the figure twisted with the force so that the shoulder blade stayed intact and the arm stayed attached.

Part of that was the dodge. The other part was that the skin was remarkably thick.

One strike told Ragna everything he needed to know.

"That hurt, you bastard."

The figure said it and flung what was in his hand. Yellow liquid sprayed through the air. Ragna had already yanked the greatsword back and leaped away, grabbing Ann and hauling her into the corridor.

SSSSSS!

The desk and floor where the liquid landed began to dissolve.

"You think you can get away?"

The voice followed them from behind. The moment Ragna opened the door, he sensed something dropping toward him from above.

Both of them were going for Ann. Neither cared about their own life at all.

He did not look up, but Ragna read the shape of the attack.

Five senses pulled together, casting a net around his body and sketching the movement within it.

Two Owlbears stretched full length, claws raked forward, diving at him.

They came like bolts fired from a ballista.

Ragna held Ann with his left arm and swung the sword in his right.

He stopped breathing and let Will burst through him. The blade moved at a speed the eye could track but the body could not stop, and it cut through the Demon Creatures as they came.

CRUNCH, CRACK!

The force sent them flying into the corridor walls.

One had its skull split. The other had a gash running from chest to jaw, a long line carved through its body. Black blood welled and pooled across the corridor floor.

Rain had driven in through the broken window and soaked everything. The rainwater ran along the floor and diluted the spreading black.

Ragna cut through both of them and leaped sideways on instinct, but he still caught a sharp, acrid smell.

Not good.

That was what instinct said.

At the same time, Ann could not handle the pace of his movement. She leaned out of his grip and vomited.

"Ugh!"

Yellow splattered across Ragna's boots.

The speed Ragna had just moved at was not something an untrained body was built to survive.

Ann's head was spinning hard enough that it felt like someone had grabbed her skull and was shaking it without stopping, in plain terms, she felt like she was dying. Still, she clenched her back teeth and said:

"Poison!"

Just the one word. She had no breath left for more. Ragna had just figured it out himself.

Those two Demon Creatures had coated themselves in something before they came at him.

They had bathed in the stuff.

That was how Ragna had breathed the corrosive poison in, and now he felt strength draining from his limbs.

Will stirred and began fighting the toxin inside him. That was how it worked.

But Will could not burn out every poison. It would only let him hold on a little longer.

The problem was, this poison seemed made to go after a knight. It moved fast. His legs were going soft. He had not even exerted himself, yet his body would not respond the way he told it to.

"Does being a knight make you immune to every substance?"

Ragna and Ann were making for the open air. The figure wearing Odinkar's face stepped out of Ann's room and into the corridor as he said it.

Odinkar's face. Something else entirely inside.

"Not a chance. So don't get arrogant just because you're a knight. Idiots drunk on your own omnipotence."

Ragna looked at the figure steadily. It looked different from before. The arms and legs were thicker. The torso had swelled.

Not from the rain.

Someone had modified their own body.

The figure raised blackened fingers and pointed at Ragna.

"You'll be coughing up blood and rolling on the floor begging for your life."

Said the way someone speaks about something they already know. No smile, no bluster, just calm certainty that the words were true and would come to pass.

Ragna was not the type to use his head, not the way Rem or Enkrid did.

So he was not asking himself what was happening or why.

He did what he always did instead. He simply knew what needed doing right now. In its own way, that was Ragna's gift.

"When I start fighting, go find the captain."

He said it.

If this was the moment to burn through what was left of his life, and if what he could leave behind was this woman staying alive, that was enough. That was exactly what crossed his mind. Short life or long. Either way, no regrets.

Ragna had made his peace.

"What are you talking about, you lunatic? Here, chew this."

Ann roughly wiped her mouth, pulled a pill the size of her thumbnail from her clothes, and shoved it between Ragna's teeth.

Ragna held the pill in his mouth without fighting her, and Ann asked:

"I'll handle whatever tricks that thing tries. Then you can protect me and still cut them all down, right?"

Ragna nodded at her nerve and answered.

"Easy."

The figure wearing Odinkar's face furrowed its brow.

What is this idiot saying?

"Neither of you wants to die clean?"

Maybe it should make them regret mouthing off right up until they were turned into test subjects.

It said so, and then Ragna felt the strength draining from his limbs flow back. Will settled inside him, going quiet.

The effect was immediate.

Normally curing a poison is several times harder than inflicting one. And yet, here.

Anyone who knew alchemy would have put it this way: Ann's skill was at least ten times beyond the figure standing in front of them.

The gap between a genius and an ordinary person. You could just as well call it the gap between a child and a trained adult soldier.

Ragna did not know any of that, of course, so he raised his sword.

He knew it was his turn to do what he did best.

Which meant that even without using his head, Ragna knew instinctively, down to his bones, exactly what he was here to do.

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