WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 704: Now

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Heskal, Heskal. Truly a clever man. He had left, and in leaving, he had hurt several people and sown discord besides.

One side had watched Heskal kill their friend with his own hands.

Their eyes had gone bloodshot with it, the kind of betrayal that made a person shake.

"I saw it myself. Riley."

The speaker looked ready to draw a sword at any moment.

"Damn it, if not for my father, you'd have died last year!"

The other side had not seen Heskal act directly. And Heskal had lived a life of devotion within Zaun all this time.

He had saved people, cherished them, loved them, raised a child.

That child had become the center of one of the two factions now facing each other. A friend who walked with a limp but swung a sword as well as any Giant, Anahehra included. His name was Riley Zaun.

Heskal had supposedly invented the swordsmanship that used only one leg.

Enkrid had sparred with him a few times. The rhythm was unusual, a style that moved in its own cadence, and it had been genuinely enjoyable to face.

If pressed to label it, decisive type would be closest.

Not average, though. That had nothing to do with the limp.

Most of the people gathered here in Zaun held the kind of talent that, with a little luck, might one day make them knights. Everyone inside the walls of Zaun was like that.

A system built for geniuses. Teachings designed for the talented. Those within pressed forward without ever losing the drive to improve.

That was the minimum condition for staying in Zaun.

What if you had no talent and still wanted to hold on?

Enkrid applied the question to himself without thinking, naturally and immediately, but there was no answer. Zaun had no teachings for ordinary people.

Keeping that drive alive required someone to look after you, and no one taught swordsmanship just because you begged. Teachers each had their own methods, and no one poured passion into a student who could not keep up.

It was not about Krona, either.

They simply wanted to watch brilliant talent shine.

So the average, and those below average, would have no chance to learn at all.

Cold, yes. But that was exactly why the current Zaun existed.

Still, were all people the same? Were there really only swordsmanship fanatics inside Zaun?

Even among Frogs there were those who made jewelry. Even among dwarves there were those who had sold their craftsman's pride to some tavern barmaid long ago. At the Border Guard there had been a Giant who wanted to become a merchant.

People were not all the same.

That was something life had taught him.

Heskal's son was special in that regard. Nobody had ever thought he possessed extraordinary talent.

Riley was who he was because someone had been patient enough to teach him, to look after him. That the person who had turned a cripple into a swordsman was named Heskal went without saying a second time.

Kwaaaa,

A knight's sharpened senses told him the rain had thinned a little from before. That made sense. If rain like the earlier downpour kept up much longer, there would be nothing strange about the entire continent going under.

The Zaun basin had passed the point of being waterlogged long ago. The ground was thoroughly soaked and turned to mud, and every step threw spatters of filth across boots and trousers.

The family head, Tempest Zaun, had said the work now was to search for the enemy and fight.

But the way Enkrid saw it, the enemy would show themselves when they felt like it.

At a moment of their choosing, in a place of their choosing. The right to open the fight had become exclusively the other side's.

They had stayed hidden. Zaun had not. It was only natural.

Combat would come after.

What Enkrid saw as more urgent was putting out the internal discord first, so he had been watching to see how the family head would handle it.

Ragna came over after getting a rough account from Lynox and said, "There was someone wearing Odinkar's face."

Meaning someone had changed their face at will. The implication was also Ragna asking whether Heskal had truly done all this.

Ragna had only seen Heskal a handful of times, in childhood and a few more visits since, but there was still disbelief in his tone that Heskal could have done it.

That was how much trust Heskal had built.

"It was Heskal."

The family head cut off the questions and answers that would otherwise go back and forth pointlessly. He understood every layer of meaning in what Ragna had said, which was why he answered without hesitation.

Enkrid had not known this, but the family head had already learned that Ragna's group had been attacked and had worked backward through the sequence of events.

It was not his front doorstep, but it had happened close by.

Deceiving the eyes of every patrol in the area?

Even he could not have managed that. Which meant there was help. Someone on the inside.

But where that help began and ended, and why any of this was happening, he could not guess.

What can I do, then?

The family head asked himself and answered. When you lost your way in training the sword, what did you do?

Wait until the path becomes visible again.

Swordsmanship and life were the same to him. Always had been.

Year after year the illness deepened, and year after year Tempest held on.

Tempest felt emotion in shallower colors than most people. Empathy did not come easily to him. Fickleness was the last word anyone would ever use to describe him. On a continent-wide scale, his patience ranked among the very highest. It was a peculiarity born of that emotional distance.

To add one thing: he only spoke of emotion when swords were crossed.

He had overcome what he lacked through the sword. A swordsman worthy of Zaun's teachings, perhaps.

He had waited. He had known what was called the family curse was in fact a disease, and when cases suddenly multiplied and symptoms appeared that had no explanation, he had endured. Then the problem grew.

The disease in his body was putting Load on him faster than he had anticipated.

More than half of every day, he could not put strength into his body. His lungs had seemed to shrink, and his breath cut short. Convulsions seized him at times, like sudden fits.

Being a knight did not make him something other than human. Ordinary illness he could shake off easily enough, but this was a disease someone had spent years spreading and worsening. It was eating into him.

Still, he held on. And in the meantime, he did what he could.

"Odinkar, go out and bring Grida and Ragna back."

Sending Odinkar out protected him and moved him outside the circle of suspicion. Odinkar was reluctant, but he followed the order.

"Family head, there is a monster of a man at the Border Guard."

That was what Odinkar had said when he returned covered in dust, so the journey had not been a dull one.

The family head set aside his thoughts and walked into the middle of the two arguing groups.

"I can't believe it."

Riley Zaun spoke. He was the son Heskal had raised. Not by blood, but everyone said that made no difference.

Which was exactly why even the fact that Heskal had not taken Riley with him when he fled made people's feelings complicated.

Anyone would suspect Riley now.

If it really was Heskal, he should have taken Riley. That was how people thought.

The family head looked across at those on Riley's opposite side, their eyes red with rage.

"I was just coming back from wrapping Grida's stomach in bandages. She barely survived."

One of them said it. It sounded like they had watched Grida get stabbed from close by.

"It was Heskal himself. Who else could have done it? The swordsmanship, the habits, all of it matched."

Calm, but underneath that calm there was fire. The kind that would not go out easily even in this rain.

The family head looked at both sides.

Not one person there had escaped the rain.

Riley's pupils trembled badly. Watching the silent family head, his thoughts were close to dissolving.

Was I abandoned? The question kept returning like a blade stabbing through his own chest.

He had always suffered from loneliness, always crumbled under self-doubt when he went unrecognized.

And this child, too, had Zaun at the end of his name.

"Riley."

"...Yes."

"Go and ask him. When Heskal appears, put the question burning in your chest to him. Until then, hold."

He did not need to hear the answer yet. Riley let go of the defenses he had been building for Heskal. The family head had not told him to take up a sword and charge. He had told him to ask. So he had to wait for that moment.

The group had split in two, but Riley's side was at a relative disadvantage. If they had drawn swords, unless thunderbolts had come down one after another to take sides, the faction Riley led would have lost.

"We are going to fight. Until then, conserve your strength. That is an order."

The family head's orders were absolute. He never issued commands unless Zaun's safety was being threatened. Everyone knew it.

These were not soldiers, so no one raised their voice.

Shhhhhh.

Lightning scattered white light through the rain, which had thinned just slightly.

Crack!

As though a god had reached down a finger to kill something small and missed. The bolt struck somewhere beyond the basin and tore into the earth.

If it had come down here, it would have taken one or two people with it.

It had dodged around the lightning rod planted high on one side of the basin and accomplished nothing.

"What we can trust is the sword in our hand. Do that."

The family head said it and turned away first.

Enkrid watched all of it and nodded.

No need to quiet the discord.

No need to trust everyone at your back, either.

The only thing worth trusting was the single sword in hand.

Well, Lynox was carrying six of them, but still.

Rather than a speech, the family head had genuinely told everyone to save themselves for later. In the meantime Ragna came over and told Enkrid what had happened inside, and when Enkrid had heard it all he said, "I see."

"They are targeting Ann."

"Then we make sure they never get the chance."

A simple exchange, but the resolve behind both of them was firm. The kind of resolve that said if they ever laid eyes on whoever had done all this, they would not walk away quietly.

The rain seemed to thin a little, but there was no sign of it stopping anytime soon. A fierce wind came in and felt like it could lift a body clean off the ground if you let your guard down. That was the kind of wind it was.

"Bad. This is bad. Damn it, my old condition's acting up too."

Lynox came over with his brow creased.

"What condition?"

"Sometimes I lose strength in my hands. I've been managing it with the medicine Milestia gives me."

"Old condition, he says!"

Ann's voice.

When a gust strong enough to uproot a person tore through, Ann tucked herself into Ragna's arms and braced against it. She shouted into the wind with everything she had.

"That's not an old condition, someone spread that disease on purpose!"

Lynox knew how grim things were. That was also why he had no room to be shocked by Heskal's betrayal.

Multiple people were already going down with that so-called condition flaring up.

And the enemy picks now to attack? Rough. Genuinely rough.

Lynox thought it through and said, "What do you mean?"

"Tell everyone to come inside! We can't talk out here!"

Terrible weather. Ann felt like a few more drops of rain would punch holes straight through her.

Ragna wrapped his cloak around her head, picked her up, and held her against him.

They went inside. The sturdiest place available was the mansion where the family head was staying.

"Family head!"

Lynox had started to send a hand signal, realized there was no point in the rain, walked over, and passed on what Ann had said.

"Do what the girl says."

The family head decided, and everyone followed Ann inside.

Ann had gotten in ahead of them. She grabbed a towel, dried her hair and body in rough strokes, then stood at the foot of a staircase leading up.

The ground floor had flooded. No place to stand down there.

"Where's Grida?"

Ann shook the water from her hair and asked.

"Bring her."

The family head said it immediately, and several people including Anahehra moved. Anahehra had mentioned that Grida was her closest friend.

Even Giants talked of friendship and kept their loyalties.

And a human, someone who had sworn a knight's vow to love Zaun and give their whole life to it, had stabbed them in the back.

Stabbed them hard and clean enough to throw Zaun into chaos.

Ann stood on the stairs as though they were a platform, looking down from above.

She had been moving through Zaun this whole time, gathering symptoms from everyone who had fallen ill.

Inside Ann's head lived combinations for hundreds of ailments. Some she had learned from a teacher full of malice. Some she had worked out alone. Some she had wrung from Krais at the Border Guard through sheer pestering, pouring every Krona she had into getting them.

"Everyone, tell me your symptoms once more, then get me the herbs I name. Can you do that?"

"We can."

For some reason the family head answered fastest.

Enkrid knew that Tempest felt emotions thinly, which was exactly why he thought he understood what the family head was feeling right now.

Impatience.

He could not put it into his voice, so it came out in his actions instead.

And slightly excited, too.

Not that any of it showed on the surface.

"Then please."

Ragna called out loud enough for everyone scattered loosely around the room to hear.

"Form a line."

Orderly was more efficient. Before Ragna even finished saying it, the family head was already at the front.

"Now."

The family head said it. He was probably correcting himself after having said not now before.

Ann looked at him with blank disbelief.

"Family head, your illness won't be cured just like that. That's not something I can do right now."

"...Then a medicine that slows the symptoms will do. Something that takes effect the moment it's drunk before a fight."

"That's a very specific request."

"Is it not possible?"

Ann was not nervous, so she did not even bother to take a steadying breath. She answered straight away.

"It's possible."

There was a great deal to do. Outside, some enemy was apparently on their way, so her job was to get everyone into the best shape they could fight in.

That meant she was busy, and her mind had already started spinning before her hands even began to move. There was no time to be nervous.

"Do you have centella?"

"...What is that?"

The one standing directly behind the family head was Lynox. Ann had asked the man standing behind him, and he asked her back.

"Green, this shape, go find it."

Ann tried to describe it with gestures, but it was not easy to follow.

"Go to Milestia's study and bring everything that looks like an herb. Be careful not to let it get wet in the rain."

The family head said it without pause. He looked just as busy as anyone else.

Asking someone to keep things dry in a storm like this was a tall order, but those who were still in any shape to move got going.

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