WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 733: You Can't Undo Water Already Spilled

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Years of training had drilled the habit deep enough that he could sense presences even in sleep, so there was no real danger.

Being left alone was no reason to feel low, either. He had no time to be lonely.

'The sword.'

If anything, the quiet and stillness made it a fine time to sort through his swordsmanship and everything else he had picked up along the way.

He had learned a great deal, after all.

Recent lessons alone were rich: Imperial Swordsmanship, the sheer presence of Valmund, an Imperial Knight. Every bit of it had been instruction.

'An Imperial Knight.'

Enkrid had spent that time studying Valmund the way you might take something apart to see how it worked.

His eyes traced the developed muscle groups. His ears caught the sounds of movement paired with breath. He brought in every other sense too, working to understand as much as he could.

What kind of experience had shaped that body. What attacks would he use in actual combat.

If Tempest Zaun was a greatsword and Alexandra was a sharp thorn...'Valmund is someone made of sword, spear, and club all at once.'

The image that came to mind was a spearhead jutting between shields, an axe, a sword, a spiked club. From the shadowed gaps between those shields, a single eye peered out, vague and hard to read.

'He's skilled at hiding himself and driving the blade in.'

On the surface it looked like he only carried a single cudgel. But there would be many weapons kept out of sight.

Cunning? Less cunning than consistent with what Valmund had said when he introduced himself.

'He holds nothing back when it comes to winning.'

Should he face him with tactical swordsmanship alone?

Limiting himself would leave no path to victory.

Swordsmanship is used by a person. Confining yourself to a single technique is foolish. In a fight, you can't afford to be selective. It was the same as mixing the Sword of Chance with Flash to cut down that Gelt, or whoever he was.

To face Valmund, he would need to use everything he had. And even then, the outcome would be hard to call.

Enkrid found a suitable cave and settled in. He didn't light a fire. He searched nearby until he found some strongly fragrant fruit, crushed it, and rubbed the juice over himself.

Any guide or mercenary who traveled alone knew this trick.

It masked body odor, which helped when avoiding Magic Beasts or Demon Creatures with keen noses. Traces of animal droppings nearby were a bonus.

When Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts ran thick through an area, ordinary animals couldn't move freely. Finding droppings meant you were at least in a somewhat safer zone.

In the Pen-Hanil Mountain Range, where Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts swarmed, territory lines tended to be clearly drawn.

Without those lines, the animals would have been wiped out and only Demon Creatures would be left crawling everywhere, at which point it might as well be a Cursed Ground.

The heart of Pen-Hanil was said to resemble a Cursed Ground, but most of it wasn't.

Demon Creatures, Magic Beasts, and ordinary animals coexisted here.

So the territories would be distinct.

That said, bad luck could still land you on a Demon Creature's dinner plate. But Enkrid wasn't the sort that happened to.

It was the unlucky Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts that would end up dead.

Nothing was urgent, so there was no reason to sprint to Border Guard by the shortest route. He wasn't deliberately dragging his feet either. He just went where he felt like going.

He figured he still had time to spare, so he sat in the cave turning things over in his mind, revisiting everything he had learned and absorbed.

He drew lines through the air with a Hand Blade, twisted his body this way and that, working through postures. Turning over the various techniques Valmund had shared was its own kind of study. Experience stacks up and becomes strength.

'Of course, picking up bad habits is something to watch for.'

At the knight level, control over one's own body was exceptional, so the odds of developing a strange habit were nearly zero.

Between all of that, when drowsiness came he slept in short stretches. He didn't feel fatigue accumulating. Travel weariness would build to some degree, but.

'Even if a fight came right now, it wouldn't be a problem.'

That was how the night after parting from Valmund passed. Both moons had risen full and bright, and the stars seemed determined not to be outshone, flickering hard against the moonlight.

The cries of night birds, the chirping of grass insects, the rustle of leaves, the ordinary noise of a summer night made a lullaby. The moment he closed his eyes for a somewhat longer sleep, Enkrid became aware that he was standing at the bow of a boat. The Boatman's invitation.

Over the black river water, the Boatman held a purple lamp and looked at him.

The same as any other time? A few things were different.

His face was more sharply defined than before.

The skin was cracked like a gray wasteland, and his face seemed slightly longer, stretched top to bottom.

The black eyes showed nothing of what lay inside, and the same was true of his mouth.

The tongue was purple, and the inside of the mouth was a darkness as deep as an abyss.

Fall into a deep pool at the wrong angle and you lose all sense of up and down before you drown. The Boatman's mouth looked like that.

It was the kind of appearance that reached into the primal fears buried in any human being.

That quality had always been there to some degree, but tonight it was stronger.

The Boatman spoke in a tone that pretended to be kind and gentle.

"Welcome."

The kindness was pretense. Enkrid's sharp instincts read it clearly. What he couldn't read was why.

Until now, hadn't the Boatman told him to save Ann, to protect today as he would Fortune itself?

He had never felt warmth from the Boatman. But tonight was different from any time before.

'What's different?'

The Boatman's shadow stretched long behind him. Normally it didn't draw the eye, but now it was large and wide.

What if you named that shadow "malice"?

It would fit perfectly.

Yes. Tonight the Boatman was full of it. The corners of his mouth rose, and instead of gums, pure black darkness showed. The river was strangely still, unlike usual.

It looked as if even the river had caught sight of the Boatman's malice and was holding its breath.

"That's more hospitality than I expected," Enkrid said.

"If not you, who else should I welcome? In the dark of this bottomless pit, there is only one thing that brings me pleasure."

He said it with that same smiling face.

"And what is that?"

"Repeating a today filled with revelry, ecstasy, pleasure, rapture, joy, and delight."

Enkrid didn't sense depravity in the Boatman's words. He sensed obsession.

Where did that obsession come from?

Desire and want. The Boatman was not human, but the way he thought was not so different.

'If you want to understand someone well, you need to know what they want.'

He recalled what watching Heskal had taught him.

Tonight the Boatman was full of malice. The reason it was showing...'He's letting his true feelings out.'

The Boatman was being honest. What he used to hint at sideways, he was now showing openly. These words were spoken with everything he truly felt poured into them.

Repeating a today drowned in revelry.

That was what the Boatman wanted.

"What would have happened if I hadn't protected Ann?"

The corners of that malice-filled mouth curled higher and higher. From the cracks in the gray wasteland skin, fine dust crumbled and fell.

"You would have been repeating a today full of nothing but the pain and agony of sickness. That wouldn't be bad either. No, not bad at all. But was that the end you were hoping for?"

The Boatman asked again. Enkrid said nothing and kept watching him.

"Such a day will come eventually. A half-step in the wrong direction at a crossroads, and an irreversible time will close in."

The Boatman was not a prophet. He already knew that. Even so, the words the Boatman spoke now felt like they would come true exactly as said.

"Look."

The Boatman showed him a day that had not happened, a today he had never lived.

In it was himself, dying of sickness.

"You said you enjoy any fight. You should have meant it."

Ragna's eyes went dark as he watched that version of him dying. Beside him lay Ann's body.

The surroundings were blurry, but one thing was clear. In that scene, he was repeating his today with suffering as his only companion.

No one to fix him. Nothing but an endless reliving of death.

The Boatman's voice arrived like fingers prying into a gap.

"I helped you."

The fingers he spoke became dozens of blades that reached all the way to Enkrid's heart.

At every moment of choice, the Boatman had been there.

He had warned him before a Demon Creature could target Ann. Before facing the battlefield, he had spoken words that helped.

Was this the truth? That wasn't even the point.

The Boatman was pressing on the fears any human being would naturally carry.

One small mistake and everyone around him dies. That today cannot be undone.

Yes, he could accept that. It was devastating. Fear crept through his whole body. It would be reasonable to collapse under it. A person's will is not infinite. It wears down.

That was how the Boatman caged someone in fear and forced them to believe there was only one way forward.

Enkrid felt the fear too. He was human, after all.

But fear is worst the first time you face it. The more you repeat it, the more bearable it becomes.

Fear is one of the most powerful emotions that drives a person.

If pleasure waited on the other side of it, all the more so.

And right now, Enkrid was separating what the Boatman could do from what he could not.

'The Boatman can observe the present and extrapolate toward the future. But the past is beyond him.'

If the Boatman knew his past, he would never have bothered trying to shake him with this kind of fear-baiting.

The bizarre creature holding a purple lamp had no knowledge of who he was before today started repeating.

Enkrid thought back.

To those he had lost because he wasn't strong enough.

To those he had failed to protect with his own hands.

To the time that had broken apart from a single choice.

Things he had already lived through more times than he could count.

"If I stop here, everything I've done until now loses its meaning."

So he said.

The Boatman's expression twisted. That was clearly irritation, not a smile. The lamp swayed, and the river began to sway with it.

"...You will regret it."

"That's something I already do every day."

A brief silence followed. The Boatman's face stayed as it was, but somehow it felt like he was scowling with everything he had.

Then came the sensation of floating. And though it felt like part of the dream, several strange voices drifted in.

"Well done."

"You little..."

"That's right."

"This is why you put gold on the high-odds bet."

"Look at that guy's face."

Woven among them were sounds of snickering. Taken all together, it was a mess.

Really loud in here.

Enkrid thought, and woke up.

He surfaced from the noise that might have been hallucination or dream, opened only his eyes, and looked around. Still completely dark night. No sounds from Demon Creatures or Magic Beasts.

He hadn't woken from a threat or a warning instinct.

Enkrid wiped the corner of his eye.

'Thank goodness.'

He seemed to have shed a tear or two in his sleep. If he had done that back at the barracks, Rem and everyone else would have stuck him with a nickname like "the tearful squad leader" before he could blink.

And then Krais would have spread it everywhere.

Real lunatics, the lot of them.

Enkrid closed his eyes a little longer, then rose when the sun was coming up.

He looked toward where the sun had risen, got his bearings, and started walking. Rather than a straight line to Border Guard, it was a detour in search of the easier path.

Then he found something he hadn't expected.

Traces of people having passed through. The direction the grass was bent between the brush, faint lingering smells, things like that told him someone had been here.

This was deep in the mountain range that divided the Empire from the rest of the continent. Not a place anyone should be living.

So what was this?

A hunter's tracks? Too deep for that. Hunters came to hunt, not to die, so they wouldn't venture this far in.

Only something that wasn't human wouldn't feel curious.

Enkrid followed tracks that would have been nearly impossible to find without his eye, tracks that chance and luck had conspired to put in his path. Following them, he found a village.

One look and he already had a sense of what kind of settlement it was.

'A village of recluses.'

The continent's structure didn't allow for small villages to exist openly. With Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts everywhere, people clustered inside cities.

But every so often, there were those who couldn't adapt to city life and ended up wandering.

Crushed by a lord's exploitation, framed for something they didn't do, or carrying real crimes on their backs.

Where did people like that go to live?

They hid to survive.

To avoid Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts as well, they did whatever it took.

The traces he had found led to a village like that. A quick look told him they had made use of natural terrain and dug traps to keep Magic Beasts and Demon Creatures from getting close.

'And that's not all. They would have used the territory lines between Demon Creatures and Magic Beasts too.'

It was familiar to Enkrid. The place where he had grown up was a village just like this one.

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