WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 707: Why Is He Unscathed?

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Enkrid was speaking to Ragna.

"Half at best."

Ann, who had been lying down, raised herself partway and watched them leave as she said it. Her gaze stayed fixed, unblinking. If you looked at her head-on right then, you might have seen their retreating backs reflected in those large eyes.

Enkrid, Ragna, and Grida, who had been lying down, all turned to look at Ann.

"I'm sorry, Ragna. I said I could cure everyone."

Half the people she could save. And only those who went out there to fight and didn't die in the process.

That was how Enkrid heard it.

Ann could have made excuses, offered justifications, or laid out entirely reasonable explanations.

She didn't.

Even a genius couldn't speed up time.

The curse-sickness had plagued Zaun for a very long time, because someone had been using this place as a testing ground. The malice behind it ran deep.

If Ann had been given just one year, she wouldn't be saying this now. She would have said she could save seven out of ten.

Give her three years, and her answer would have changed again.

She would have declared, boldly, that no one would die from this disease.

But not now.

Applying the treatment she had built on the foundation of alchemy required multiple experiments, and time to observe each reaction.

What use was talent against an absolute shortage of time? No different from a handful of crumbled dead leaves.

"I'm sorry."

Ann said it again. Ragna's gaze had also drifted outward, following hers. He watched the backs of those who had been born and raised in the Zaun family.

Among them, Grida Zaun, his own sister, added her voice.

"Nobody's blaming you."

Ragna couldn't find his way. He had no sense of direction. He had never thought of it as a flaw. If anything, he had considered it a blessing.

New paths, new worlds, new things had always welcomed him.

A road walked in daylight became an unknown road walked at night.

A curse? Hardly.

But pick up a sword, and the path became clear. He could walk a road that shone open before him and see the end of it. In the journey with a sword in hand, nothing was unknown to Ragna.

Which was exactly why that road had never held his interest.

That was why he had left home. A break from a path he could see too plainly, or a life he had chosen because he craved living. Either way worked.

"Ragna, this is where you were born and raised."

Enkrid said it. Ragna had been turning over his own behavior since returning to Zaun.

'I didn't want to find Ilchul.'

Why was that? He threw the question out and turned it over.

"The answer is inside you. What you've built up becomes your signpost."

Words Enkrid had said countless times now reached Ragna too.

What was really behind that permission to be angry?

"They dumped filth on your home and hurt your family and tried to destroy the place where you were born and raised."

That was why Ilchul didn't matter right now.

By instinct, he had only been swinging his sword at the air. It was like sprinting full speed and then pulling up short all at once.

Was he going to reach the end without leaving anything behind? He felt no particular dread at the thought.

He had simply needed to stop. Instinct. Intuition. As if some god had written it into fate, that was how he stopped.

Now he understood why.

'Because the family is in danger.'

Enkrid had called Zaun a small nation, but to Ragna it was the fields he had run through as a child, the people who had raised him, the place where everything began. Home, in other words.

The prodigal had come back in body long ago. Only now had he opened his eyes.

His father had wasted away until his face looked half the size it used to be. His mother wore a bitterness in her eyes he had never seen before.

His sister had a hole in her stomach.

The ones he could call brothers were spitting blood and suffering under the sickness.

"Whoever did this will be out there."

Enkrid said it.

"I know."

Ragna answered.

Right. Now he understood. Why he was angry.

Had he thought he shouldn't step forward because he had abandoned his duty?

Who was going to make him feel that way?

"One bout of swordwork can't make up for the years you weren't here."

That was Enkrid offering something that wasn't quite advice.

The meaning packed into it was clear: coming back only after the family had fallen apart and swinging your sword hard wouldn't earn everyone's admiration.

Whether Ragna caught all of that or let it wash over him was hard to say, but he answered.

"Don't care."

Enkrid inwardly nodded at that.

Right. That's Ragna.

With that, he quietly set aside a scene that had surfaced from the past. No reason to chew on something that hurt more the longer you held it.

Right now, he was just here to lend a hand so his friend and squadmate didn't have to see what he had seen.

"Grida."

"Say it."

"Watch over Ann."

"I'd guard her with my life even without you telling me."

Grida wasn't the only one staying behind. After Heskal had gone, there were a few people who had been too sick to even breathe properly during their fits. Ann had kept them alive, including the sword-bearing page who had guided them at the start.

Even the boy, barely thirteen, had been within Ann's reach.

He had been terminal. Of the seeds planted by the madman behind all of this, the one the boy had caught was said to be among the most virulent.

Flesh slowly growing in his organs until it killed him.

He was one of the children left behind, too sick to go out and fight.

"I'll protect her too."

The boy said it. Did he even understand what he was saying?

At least he seemed to know more than Ragna had at that age. That much was clear from the way he spoke.

"I can't go out and fight right now, but if anyone comes after this healer, I can put a blade in them."

Yes, he probably could. The boy had no shortage of spirit.

"There was a poisoner before, right? And when you dealt with that one, Ann made sure nobody got hurt? For an enemy like that, I'm as good as you."

That was Grida adding on. She was trying to reassure him. She had a hole in her stomach. She could still fight in her current state, but pushing herself to her limit would kill her.

That couldn't happen. Fortunately, it was simple enough to prevent. From here on, let no one slip past to her back. What needed protecting was behind her. In time, that would be the legacy she left even after death.

Ragna looked at Ann.

"If I come back alive..."

"Stop. I don't want to hear anything about coming back alive or dying, so just come back. If things get dangerous I'll call for you. Come back and protect us too."

Ragna nodded with his sentence still unfinished.

"I'll do that."

If he died here, what would be left behind?

For a start, the woman in front of him would remain, wracked with guilt over lives she couldn't save through no fault of her own, and still somehow radiating life.

Ragna opened his mouth, then closed it.

More precisely, he swallowed the words: 'the version of me inside your memory will remain.'

"Let's go."

Enkrid said it and moved forward. Ragna fell in behind him.

'Behind me.'

Ann wasn't the only one who would remain. The man who had clawed his way to him and insisted he was allowed to be angry would remain too. The version of him that man carried in his memory.

They left the manor and walked. Moving briskly, they caught up to a family member who had been walking at a slower pace. A woman with short hair. She glanced at Enkrid and asked.

"So why is Enki staying here anyway?"

She was one of the people Enkrid had grown fond of during his time here.

For a friend, or to protect the people standing behind him, there were plenty of reasons.

But he wouldn't say anything that embarrassing out loud.

Ragna thought it over as he drifted a step to the side. He had spent less time talking to family members than Enkrid had, since he had been busy guarding Ann.

The woman found Ragna hard to approach.

Tap, tap. Enkrid spoke in rhythm with his own footsteps.

"Samcheol's been..."

"...Pardon?"

"Keeps bugging me, wants to play."

Said the madman, giving the sword at his hip a light pat.

Shhhhhhhhhh.

Rain swept sideways through the wind and hit everyone in the face. The Zaun woman who had asked stepped about half a pace away from Enkrid.

"So what the healer said was true."

That he talked to his sword like it was a person, or something like that?

"Yeah, yeah, Samcheol. It'll be fun today."

Enkrid ignored her reaction and soothed the sword with a stroke. Watching that, the woman picked up her pace and put more distance between them.

He wasn't trying to tease her. Should he have said instead that he was genuinely furious at whoever had torn his friend's home apart?

Or that he hoped just one fewer person he had grown to care about would die today?

Too embarrassing.

Better to just make it clear he was serious about this fight.

Samcheol cried out. That part wasn't a joke either. The blade rang, a faint zing, trembling in response to Enkrid's Will.

Of course, the sword hadn't actually cried out. It was just what happened when Will filled the blade.

"Why are you teasing her?"

Ragna turned it back on him. Not a scolding, but he had caught that the joke was a bit much for someone trying to hide what they really felt.

"Me?"

"Weren't you?"

"If I asked what would be left behind after you, what would you say?"

Enkrid turned the words Ragna had used earlier around and struck back.

"Left behind? The people who watched me fight, I guess."

A smile cut clear through the rain. Ragna laughed.

Right. He was angry at the ones who had wrecked his home, and he was on his way to see them now. Good enough reason to smile.

Ordinary people might have called it the logic of a madman, but still.

Since Zaun sat in a basin, the road leading up out of it was a gentle slope. It had been laid wide, and the Zaun family called it the Sword Pilgrim's Road.

'They worship a god of swords, don't they.'

Enkrid was walking that road now. Muddy puddles had pooled here and there from the wind and rain. Still, it was an even road.

They didn't wield divine power, but they revered and venerated the sword. It was called the Pilgrim's Road because it was the road walked to honor the god of swords.

Down where the road curved gently away, those who had orchestrated all of this were gathered.

The rain and wind cut visibility short of where they stood.

Still, the family head at the front and those blocking the way ahead were visible.

Enkrid and Ragna watched the family head's back.

Without a word exchanged, he drew his sword. The other side responded. Two Scalers, black scales streaked with red, split left and right and charged, and the family head stepped out alone to meet them.

What had Ann said she had prepared for him?

In truth, most of what the brilliant healer had given them would have been closer to stimulants, something to make them capable of fighting right now.

She had said the real treatment would need time.

Either way, the family head must have taken the medicine. The Pressure radiating from his whole body was twice what it had been before.

Thick and heavy as a sword blade, that Pressure rose steady and immovable through the curtain of rain.

* * *

"Why are they fine?"

Heskal couldn't remember the last time he had been this surprised, not once in the past few years. That was how much it shocked him.

So much that the words slipped out before he could stop them.

People who should all have been wasting away by now were standing out there looking perfectly well. There was no sign they were forcing themselves through it.

The one who called himself Dmuel's top disciple spoke beside him.

"I don't understand this."

He was a man past seventy. He had gone blind in childhood and, in place of opening his mind's eye, had fitted a new eye into his forehead. He had harvested an Evil Eye, studied it, and reprocessed it, and that was what let him see through the rain and wind without difficulty.

"Someone has interfered. Didn't you say the healer woman had been killed?"

Heskal processed the current situation with the sharp calculation that set him apart from others and answered.

"They must have failed."

A simple answer.

'This is Ann's doing.'

That was his instinct talking. Dmuel hadn't tried to kill her without reason.

'Dmuel already knew about the girl named Ann.'

The moment Heskal had passed along the information, Dmuel had said to kill her. The reason given was that those who were meant to die must die.

'He was trying to kill her because she was someone who could stop his sickness.'

Heskal's first arrangement had produced no results. Even so, Dmuel's top disciple showed no agitation. Heskal was the same.

"She has only delayed it. Who would dare undo in a single day what my master spent years preparing?"

That too was true.

Beyond that, Heskal judged that the outcome of the fight would not change.

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