WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Hydrogen B

Editor: Abstract

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

A KNIGHT WHO ETERNALLY REGRESSES

Chapter 740: A Life Grasped by One's Own Hands Is This Precious

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The Hidden Village did not run on private property. Everything went into a shared pool, owned by all.

And since no one ever knew what might happen next, quite a lot had been squirreled away, the way a squirrel buries acorns for later. Storage hollows tucked under tree roots or sealed with planks and packed earth now came open.

'Even in summer, the cold stays in there. Good for keeping things.'

The holes were dug in shaded spots where sunlight never reached. When you could not afford magic tools to hold a chill, you squeezed every drop of ingenuity you had.

Even so, summer was coming, so anything that spoiled easily had already been used up. The spread on the table was smaller than a winter feast but still generous: smoked meat, dried fruits no one had seen before. Plenty of both.

"We won't have anything left to eat later."

One of the villagers muttered it under their breath. Even now, with everything that had happened, the fear of waste still gnawed at them.

They had never actually gone hungry. Half of it was luck, but wherever they had settled there had always been useful berries or medicinal herbs to gather, and they had built a working relationship with passing peddlers. They hunted animals when they could, and when food ran truly short they rendered Magic Beast meat and ate that too. Strip out the venom, stop caring about the taste, and it was nourishment enough to stay alive.

"Just do what you're told."

A timid man said it while watching for reactions. Harkvent, who had been speaking for the group, pressed his lips together and kept himself busy filling the table. His activity level today was several times what it normally was, and even setting that aside, he had already been eating more than usual these past weeks. Today he ate still more.

The children's hands moved first, reaching across the full table. Everyone else followed.

Forget it. Eat now, think later. If you eat and then die, at least you won't go out hungry.

Something like that was probably running through a few heads.

And alongside it, vague and shapeless, a feeling that things might somehow work out.

Vague was the right word, because no one could name the reason. But a closer look would have told anyone paying attention: it all came from the attitude Enkrid carried. Anyone not too wrapped up in their own belly to notice their neighbors would have caught it.

Harkvent pushed a piece of smoked pork loin into his mouth and chewed it down. The salt hit hard enough to make his tongue prickle, and he drank water in long gulps.

'What we did was train.'

Train for what?

'To fight Magic Beasts.'

If your head was working at all, the next question followed naturally.

'Can training actually let us fight Magic Beasts?'

Would pressing backs together and jabbing spears really change anything?

Some people had given up thinking about it somewhere along the way. Others had not.

Harkvent had moved past the stage where dread clenched his stomach, but that did not mean he felt easy. It was more like lying under a roof of loosely packed dirt. If it held, good, but it felt like it could collapse and bury you alive at any moment. Still, whenever his eyes drifted across the table and found Enkrid quietly chewing something, some of that unease bled away.

'Strange man.'

The man had a way of steadying everyone around him. A word here, a gesture there, the simple manner he carried through every ordinary moment. That was what did it.

The vague hope drifting through the room had a clear source, once you looked: Enkrid was sitting among the villagers with a child beside him, chewing away at something.

* * *

Enkrid bit into a small fruit, worked the seed loose with his tongue, and spat it out. The seed landed on the floor and rolled wherever it wanted.

The fruit had a wrinkled skin, and the chewy flesh inside held a seed roughly the size of a thumbnail. The taste was sour, sweet, and faintly astringent all at once, and somehow it kept pulling your hand back for another. Someone had aged the tree fruit by some particular method.

"Good, right?"

The child sitting beside him asked. Right next to that child sat Brunhild, a fresh lump on her forehead where a third eye might have gone.

"It's kind of like a plum."

A sharp-looking boy said it again, by way of clarification. When Brunhild had tried to push him around and Enkrid deflected her with a single finger, this boy had stepped forward, muttered "what an idiot," and immediately taken her side.

"She's excellent with her body but can't be bothered to use her head. And she's stubborn, once she decides something, she can't change course. That's the one flaw in the genius called Brunhild. So this is all a misunderstanding."

His age was probably somewhere between thirteen and fourteen at most. Small frame, thin arms and legs. He did not look like he could fight.

"Name?"

"Eirik."

Enkrid had been steering people into hidden hollows and thinking ahead the way Krais would. Not a single decisive clash, but reading what was coming and positioning for it. You could say he had driven them the way Rem drives and planned the way Krais plans.

"From the start you grouped people who already lived close together, matching them by size, and had them form up as a unit. The goal was to keep them from dying easily. Make them hold on, right?"

Eirik had seen straight through it. A breeze moved through, cool for summer, and lifted the child's hair. The blonde was pale enough to reflect white.

An interesting child. Enkrid chewed his way through a piece of smoked meat, too salty, so he had tucked it inside bread made with medicinal herbs, and asked.

"The circular formation, and spears instead of shields?"

"Because the whole point is to get them face-to-face with the Magic Beasts and buy time, you need to keep distance. Only a few of the stronger ones need shields spread through the formation. We could call it the Frightened Hedgehog. Not letting anything close at all would mean nobody dies, but if they can't hold they'll all die anyway."

"Wouldn't a bow or a Sling work better for keeping distance?"

"No. An arrow means a gap when you reload. If stones and arrows were enough to drive them off, it wouldn't be this dangerous in the first place."

The same bright, burning look Enkrid had seen in Brunhild. Light-colored eyes looked straight back at him, two pale lakes side by side catching the noon sun.

Enkrid's eyes were a deep blue. These were lighter.

Before he could say anything, the child asked.

"Was I wrong?"

He was a child who had not stood out among the ones Brunhild led, nor among the adults in training. Invisible until now.

"You were right."

"That's a relief."

Asking with conviction, then calling it a relief.

No, wait.

He had known this feeling from long years spent around Krais. This child had genuinely doubted his own thinking. Had actually been uncertain.

'There was fear in it too.'

Worry about a stranger's intentions.

'This was a check. A way of confirming.'

Brunhild stepping forward, and the way the child had defended her, those were part of the same process.

It reminded him of what Krais must have been like as a child. A mind that worked differently from most.

Talent is not fair. It tips the scales without asking anyone's permission. That was why accidents like this happened at all.

Where Brunhild's gift ran through her body, this child's ran through the mind.

"Memorize the formation shape. If it breaks down, everyone dies."

The whole approach of keeping the beasts at a distance from the start rested on one assumption: give them distance and it is already over.

"What comes next?"

No matter how clever the child was, he could not imagine something outside the world he knew, so Eirik could not even guess at what Enkrid had in mind.

"Predict and reason it out. Think it through yourself. Sort out what needs doing."

"If you're thinking of taking us with you..."

The child was measuring Enkrid's goodwill. That kind of boldness might have irritated someone else, but Enkrid was not made that small. He had watched Brunhild without envy. He looked at Eirik without malice.

Eirik was trying to read how far his goodwill extended.

Had this been calculated too?

'No, not this part.'

From here the words were more like a throw of the dice. Saying them with a life on the line, for the sake of this village.

"It won't work. We came all the way out here because we'd rather all die together than live under someone else. We can't give up what we've built."

Better to die than go back to living as slaves in some city.

That was the will behind it.

A foundation. A foothold. A home. Different words for the same thing, and this place was theirs.

Without meaning to, words he had heard before leaving Zaun came back to him.

"I'm sorry. I'd like to come with you, but my place is here. That much I know for sure."

"If you asked me to follow as a slave, I'd follow. But if you're asking me to live as Riley Zaun, I won't leave Zaun."

"Can I visit someday?"

They had turned it around and asked him to stay with Zaun instead. Funny people.

He understood the child's worry. He had noticed Harkvent glancing over at him every so often too. Neither of them was doing it out of admiration.

Were they afraid of being uprooted? What did they actually want?

Questions kept circling in his head, but if a single sentence could have put everyone at ease, he would have gathered the whole village from the start and made a speech. It could not, so he left it. Even if it could, it would not mean much and would only waste time.

Enkrid reached over and ruffled the child's hair.

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"...Seventeen?"

"Yes, small for my age, isn't it? That's the source of my inferiority complex. I've been physically weak since I was young. No strength to speak of."

"You're still sharp."

That last part came from Brunhild.

"That goes without saying. You should listen to her more."

"I do listen. I really do."

Brunhild was not entirely without sense. Looking at the situation, the stranger who had taught her the spear was not doing any of this with bad intentions.

The night of feasting passed. Someone's dread and fear still coiled in one corner of the heart, but the shape of that fear had shifted a little.

"Magic Beasts!"

Before the two moons had even set, in the last darkness before dawn, a mixed pack of Feral Dog Beasts and Wolf Beasts came pouring into the village, more than fifty of them. They left the traps laid out front alone and came in through the forest, red eyes gleaming, thick forepaws thudding against the ground.

The ones holding spears swallowed hard. Before, the killing intent rolling off a pack like this and the sharp, raw stench alone would have turned their legs to water. Not now.

These people had spent the last two weeks close to something more dangerous than any Magic Beast. Enkrid had been ruthless about driving into their backs during training, swinging a blade casually to within a breath of their faces.

"Fall down and I cut you wherever I reach. Hold."

Anyone watching from outside would have thought he was simply trying to hurt them. But every person he had put through it came out the other side with a larger gut.

Facing Magic Beasts now, their legs did not shake the way they had before.

"Begin."

Harkvent looked at the pack and shouted.

"Ha!"

With the shout, groups of ten pulled into tight circles. The human formations lined up against the Magic Beasts with spears leveled forward, a ring of fighters around those who could not fight, protecting them at the center.

Eirik stood at that center and looked around.

'Hold.'

The stranger's intent was clear. The reason behind it was not.

'A pervert?'

Someone who wanted to watch people thrash and die? Who wanted to torment them before the killing blow? Who planned to finish off the survivors himself?

Every dark thought imaginable ran through his mind, but the weak do not get the luxury of choices. All they could do was fight to stay alive.

What the stranger had built was not individual strength but the strength of the group.

'Not calibrated to the exceptional ones. Calibrated to the weakest, so the whole can move as one.'

Eirik had seen it exactly right. An army's strength only exists when the whole becomes one.

"Turn!"

"Ha!"

They had been pushed to the limit, and most were aching in every muscle, but their minds were clearer than they had ever been.

Woof!

Four Feral Dog Beasts closed on one of the circles.

The spear-holders knew exactly how to thrust. Both hands on the shaft, claiming the space the beasts were moving into.

Brunhild circled through the formations as she had been told, filling in gaps in their technique. Enkrid's orders, naturally. Only then did the adults finally understand that she had been born with something other children simply did not have.

Defense was the job of the person right beside you. Long spears stabbed out, holding the beasts back. Spears shot left and right in exact spacing and timing, becoming the quills of a hedgehog.

Woof! Woof! Yelp!

Magic Beast hide is softer than a Demon Creature's. With a few exceptional ones aside, they were manageable. And this was not about killing, it was about holding on. For that, this was enough.

'All right, then.'

Enkrid watched from a tree, looking over the people holding the line. They would not die easily anymore.

In the air above, the Boatman's phantom appeared and said, "Sly bastard."

Sly. Something like this deserved to be called excellent tactics.

The Vallen Style Mercenary Sword, the feigned-loss technique. Playing at losing was a strange art. You let yourself get pushed back for real, and while the enemy pressed forward your ally hit them from behind. Accounting for help from others: that was the Vallen Style Mercenary Sword.

Some people looked down on it because they only knew a few of its tricks, but anyone who understood what the style actually held inside could not dismiss it that way.

'The Illusionary Sword is no different from tactical swordsmanship. No meaningful distinction.'

Enkrid had already absorbed the Illusionary Sword to a high level. The problem, as with any blade art, was that using it required force behind it. Iron only means something when someone picks it up and swings it.

Enkrid sharpened his senses from the branches above.

When enough time had passed, he dropped down and drove the Magic Beasts off, killing what needed killing and scattering the rest.

"Hah-hah, hah, huh, huuu."

Ragged breathing everywhere, but no one was dead. More precisely, not a single wound. They had held.

"Rest today."

Enkrid said it. This had been practice under real conditions. With him watching over it, it still counted as practice. One true battle was enough.

"Yeaaaah!"

A cheer broke out that would never have come when they survived only by leaning on someone else's hands.

Life seized by one's own hands is worth this much.

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