WeTried Translations

Translator: Hydrogen B

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◈ Omniscient First-Person's Viewpoint

Chapter 585

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Night Parade of a Hundred Demons

A demand to jump, tied to an owl's leg by a stranger. Not exactly inspiring confidence, but no particular reason to refuse either. Whatever the conditions, Shei and I were both under lock and key. Getting out of this situation was worth the price of a leap.

"What do you think, Mr. Shei? A note like this arrived."

"Let's go."

Shei answered without hesitation.

"Even if we escape, Nevida won't kill you. That makes it worth trying. Better to know now who might end up on my side and who won't."

"You could die, though."

"Hughes. It's fine if I die. I'm a regressor."

That's exactly why you can't die. The world rewinds with you.

"That's hard to wrap my head around."

"It's fine. I just mean don't worry too much about my death. I'll try to survive, but if I die and still come away with something, that's enough."

Shei left it at that and walked straight toward the owl. Then she realized her arms still weren't working and turned to me with a demand.

"...Carry me."

"How would you like me to carry you?"

"Why are you even asking! However you want, just do it!"

"Well, I have to hold the owl too, so I don't exactly have a free hand for you..."

No hands meant improvising. I wove some vines into a sling, strapped Shei securely against me, and headed for the owl. The owl apparently hadn't expected two passengers, because it blinked wide and let out a low hoot.

"Hold tight so you don't fall."

The moment I gripped the owl's legs while hanging from the windowsill, it spread its wings and launched itself upward as though it had been waiting for exactly this. My body snapped taut in an instant. I honestly wasn't sure we'd make it, but the owl didn't fight my weight, it angled itself and picked up speed.

Whoooosh. The wind scraping past my face grew fiercer. It felt like invisible feathers were slashing through the air and tearing at my skin.

We'd been falling for a while and the speed wasn't slowing. I glanced up at the owl, a little alarmed, but it showed no sign of doing anything about our situation.

"This isn't flying, it's falling. Was this actually an invitation to kill ourselves?"

"...Hughes. See you next cycle."

"You're giving up on life already?!"

I was genuinely starting to think about bracing for impact when something moved at the edge of my vision. Shapes swept past the owl from outside my sightline, then looped around and began closing in from behind, matching our speed.

"Owls," Shei murmured.

They pulled alongside as if on cue, one to each side. Together they took hold of my shoulders and arms. One might not have been enough, but with three of them it felt like we were being lifted rather than dropped.

The wind gradually eased. The ground came close enough. The owls tilted upward and set us down gently.

"Fweet. Fweeeet."

A short whistle. The owls spread their wings and turned toward the sound.

A cluster of people with strips of cloth wrapped around their arms and shoulders came forward to welcome them. The owls perched lightly on the cloth, rubbing their heads against their handlers with easy affection and earning bits of meat for the trouble.

While I was getting Shei down, a girl with an owl on her shoulder came over. Her long hair was pinned up with a hairpin, and dyed cloth was wrapped around her shoulders and arms. She had dressed for function over fashion, but a quiet elegance showed through despite her efforts to conceal it.

She fixed her gaze on my face and raised her arm up to eye level. A bow without bowing her head. She spoke in an archaic register.

"It is a great sorrow to meet you, King of Humanity."

"A sorrow? That's not something you say to someone you've just met. Refreshingly honest, though."

I held up the note I had pulled from the owl's leg.

"Did you write this?"

"Indeed I did. Time is short, let us be moving."

"Hold on. I need to know who you people are first. I can't just follow along with nothing to go on."

"Then as a compromise, I shall answer as we go. I will answer you faithfully, and if my answers displease you, you are welcome to jump off."

Straightforward. They got what they wanted in the end, but getting away as quickly as possible was the right call regardless.

"Fine. As long as you answer."

"Companion, please remain where you are. Better to stay in a hold you're accustomed to."

"It's not exactly accustomed..." Shei grumbled but settled back into position.

Shortly after, a man with antler-like branches hanging from him led out a large stag. The great-antlered deer, its coat a pale grey, had a saddle strapped to its back.

"Is it a familiar?"

"A tamed beast. A gentle one. As long as you do not yank at its fur, you will not fall."

I climbed on, and the stag set off without waiting for a command. The enormous antlers looked like they would catch on everything, but they simply snapped through branches and brushed aside leaves as it went.

The girl with the owl on her shoulder pulled alongside me as we rode.

"Ask what you will."

Right. Let me think. What to ask. First, use mind reading to get the measure of her, then figure out which question to frame around what I already know.

"The Watcher, Nenyaph. Nevida's disciple. And a druid of the fallen Kingdom of Ten Thousand, keeper of the Forest of Knowledge. Am I right?"

That was when Shei spoke up out of nowhere. The regressor's signature one-sided familiarity with a stranger. I had a rough sense of how that worked, but for the sake of appearances I lowered my voice and whispered.

"What? You learned that through regression too?"

"Yeah. She showed up briefly every time I fought Nevida."

Nenyaph hadn't expected her identity to be named on the spot. A small ripple of surprise passed through her.

"...There is no reason you should know us. Enough to startle heaven and earth. I had meant to answer your questions, and instead I find myself the one with questions."

"Well, mutual curiosity isn't a bad thing. More to the point, introductions... Mr. Shei already handled that. So what's your purpose in bringing us here?"

"To protect you from Nevida's reach."

"No, not the method. I'm not asking what you'll do with us. I'm asking what you intend to achieve by getting us out."

Like any secret group worth its name, Nenyaph was concealing parts of her plan. But since Shei had seen straight through to her identity, Nenyaph let some of her intentions show.

"The druids have always had only one purpose. To tend the World Tree, and to keep all things moving in accordance with nature's order. We have been watching the Tree of Corruption and preparing for that day, so that the sins of the past are not repeated."

"Sins? Oh, the thing the great witch mentioned?"

Nenyaph reacted at that. She thought of the great witch with a faint longing, a touch of guilt, and a fair measure of resentment, and asked.

"Did the princess speak of it? What did she say?"

"That the druids burned the World Tree. That she couldn't forgive it."

"...She said that."

Nenyaph murmured it bitterly, the earlier tangle of feelings still in her. Then something caught her attention and she lifted her head to look around.

Kyaaaaaaa,,

Wind doesn't travel well through dense jungle. Even a fierce typhoon breaks apart against centuries-old trees and countless layers of leaves, scattering into thin threads.

But right now, an unidentified wind was blowing from the direction of the Root Tree.

It spread through the whole jungle like the exhaled breath of the World Tree. Damp and ominous air pressed in from behind.

The stag felt the strange energy and spooked, kicking up its hind legs. While the group fell into disorder, Nenyaph swung her arm sharply and sent her owl into the air.

"...The princess."

"You mean the great witch?"

"Yes. The child who was keener and wiser than anyone, now surrendering herself to rage and singing of revenge."

Dozens, hundreds of beasts came crashing through the trees. The sight of them tearing through the night, swallowed by fury, was exactly what the old tales called a parade of a hundred demons. Dozens of pairs of eyes glinted in the dark and locked onto us.

In the middle of it all, an unfamiliar parrot's voice rang out.

[You people...! How dare you kill Polly?! I'll tear the flesh from your bones!]

"I think she's upset because the owl killed her parrot."

"If she truly cherished beasts, she ought not have shared her cursed blood and made it a familiar. That parrot should have died decades ago. The owl only followed the natural order."

"Well, it was your owls that killed it."

Natural order or not, killing someone's familiar is going to make them angry. The nerve.

Surrounded by beasts, Nenyaph calmly produced a bow, it looked like a rough piece of work, branches snapped from nearby. Even mounted on the stag, she drew the bowstring with the stillness of an old tree.

"Duck."

I grabbed Shei and ducked fast.

Ping. Nenyaph loosed. The arrow flew in a nearly flat arc and buried itself in the throat of a beast sprinting in the distance. The shadow running on four legs lost its balance and tumbled hard, rolling several times before stopping.

Enough force to punch through tough hide. Druid archery, drawing on the living bend of wood.

Her shot was the signal. The other druids opened fire at once.

"Fire!"

Arrows poured down like rain. The druids kept their aim even on moving mounts and found vital points with each shot. Fallen beasts rolled into the path of those behind, tangling them up. The marksmanship of people who had lived their whole lives in these woods.

But most of the beasts struck by arrows climbed right back up and kept coming. The druids were visibly shaken by something that refused to stop.

"Keeper. They won't go down!"

"Something strange is in them! It must be!"

Nenyaph muttered as she picked another arrow.

"The princess's children..."

[Nenyaaaph!]

A great winged shape came beating through the darkness ahead of us. Wings wide enough to blot out the world, a beak curved like a hook, a golden eagle. The raptor that ought to be gazing down from the heights in cold sovereignty was instead staring straight at us with wide eyes. At me, and at Nenyaph.

One dead owl was clutched beneath its talons.

Nenyaph spared her owl a brief moment of mourning, then spoke.

"Princess. I trust you have been well."

A parrot landed on the eagle's back. Different feathers from Pero's, it cried out in fury.

[What face do you have to show up here?!]

"I have come to escort the King of Humanity. Please let us pass."

[Ha! Did you think you could show yourself before me and walk away in one piece?!]

The stag, which had already been slowing, stopped entirely. Not only from fear. It had no path left to take.

The great witch's familiars closed in ahead of us, emerging one by one from the dark. A pack of predators with sharp teeth and claws had gotten ahead of us and cut off the way forward.

True predators would have been bad enough, but these were the great witch's familiars, and more than that, her thralls. The great witch, who had received the Progenitor's blood, had made these creatures her own limbs in place of bloodkin. Even a druid would struggle to bet on those odds.

Even so, Nenyaph climbed calmly off the stag and bowed to the parrot.

"Princess. Do you intend to repeat the events of that day?"

[What? You dare bring up that day? You, who betrayed me, who abandoned the kingdom?]

"I may have betrayed the kingdom, but I did not betray the bonds of heaven. And you, princess... in the end, you could not betray those bonds either. You helped us."

'Helped? The great witch helped the druids?'

In the middle of that parade of a hundred demons, Nenyaph was calm. Druids who had spent their lives flowing with river and wind tended toward that kind of ease, but Nenyaph was something beyond that, she carried a certainty.

Like someone who had hold of another person's weakness.

She glanced at me and opened.

"Princess, it seems you told the King of Humanity one thing and kept the rest hidden."

[What more was there to say? You burned the World Tree, you ruined my country, you killed my mother!]

"...Why we burned the World Tree. Why so many of the Kingdom of Ten Thousand's tribes rose up against it. What crime the former queen committed. Did you say nothing of any of that?"

[That wasn't a crime! There is no such crime anywhere in this world! And you, of all people, who ate the kingdom's rice, you have no standing to judge the Warrior!]

"It has nothing to do with my rank as grand scholar. Nothing to do with being a druid. If I had been nothing more than one ordinary person, I would still have had no choice but to resist the former queen, to keep my dignity from being violated."

Leopard, hyena, jaguar, parrot, hawk, owl, cat, squirrel. Dozens of species of beasts stared this way as if in a trance. Even with their natural predators standing nearby, Nenyaph showed no fear and no wariness as she went on.

"You know, don't you? You saw it yourself. That is why the princess can no longer look humans in the eye, isn't it?"

[You, you!]

The parrot's beak opened and closed without finding words. This time it was Nenyaph who turned to speak to me.

"King of Humanity. Do you know how beastkin came to be?"

I answered the sudden question.

"Yes. Agarta lay with the Beast King and gave birth to them, they said."

"The Warrior inherited the authority of sovereigns across generations. It was an authority of union with humans. The Warrior, who could captivate all people, was able to commune deeply even with the Beast King, who wore a human shape. The former queen used that power to conceive children not of humans, but of other beasts."

I had already heard some of this in Ende, and understood more of it from reading the great witch's mind. Honestly shocking and disorienting, but I had settled for thinking of it as a strange preference. Powerful people with everything they could want seeking out ever-stranger stimulation, common enough.

"Had it been only that, it would not have run against the natural order."

But Nenyaph wasn't really speaking to me. She was only using the form of speaking to me to dig into the great witch's old wounds.

"The one who gives birth is only one person. The Warrior bore a number of beastkin across generations, but a number like that is no different from a mutation, appearing briefly and then vanishing. Some didn't survive. Others mixed with ordinary humans and disappeared. Perhaps a small tribe might have come of it."

There were beastkin like the centaurs, who had survived only by attaching themselves to the Progenitor just to preserve their kind. Some lines had been cut off entirely, their existence beyond anyone's knowledge.

But unlike those, some beastkin had flourished.

Enormously so.

"Yet that was not the Warrior's true intent. The Warrior wished to make beastkin into a people, a single race. To become the king of beastkin."

The number of beastkin was vast. Beyond tribe and bloodline, they were becoming something like their own humanity. A number that defied common sense. They hadn't been multiplying steadily over thousands of years, and they didn't breed in litters like true animals. Far too many to have come from a single person.

"The meat fruit the princess created with good intentions. Her discovery, meant to fill countless mouths with food. The Warrior stole the World Tree's vital energy and into those corrupted fruit... planted people."

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