WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Natty
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
◈ The Regressor and the Blind Saintess ◈
Chapter 6: Regression
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“Bastard!”
A harsh shout.
Then a foot filled Vera’s vision, followed by a dull pain in his jaw.
“Urk...!”
Vera let out a groan, his eyes widening as though they would split apart. A ragged breath escaped him a moment later.
“Ghh...”
“You little bastard, quit whining! You should’ve met your quota!”
Shouting hammered against his ears. The pain made him dry heave.
Vera roused himself from his daze and looked up at the source of the voice.
‘...Doran?’
Doran. The leader of the gutter beggar gang.
And a dead person whose neck Vera had personally snapped.
Vera stared at Doran, his expression disheveled and his breathing unsteady, before letting out a hollow laugh.
‘Ah...’
So he had come to hell.
His soul, torn to shreds, had fallen into hell after all, where it would suffer.
As Vera began to cackle at the thought, Doran’s face twisted in fury and he kicked Vera again.
“You’re still at it, you bastard!”
Thud!
The blow struck Vera’s jaw, knocking him backward.
Still wearing that cackling expression, Vera lay in the muddy water and stared at the sky.
The gloomy, stale air.
It was the gutter.
Though he had struggled desperately to escape it, he had ultimately returned to the gutter.
Cruelly enough, his hell had taken the form of the gutter.
When he realized that, even louder laughter burst from Vera’s mouth.
“Kh... Hahaha!”
“You’re laughing?! You’re laughing?!”
Seeing Vera laugh, Doran flew into a rage and kept kicking him.
As furious kicks battered his whole body, Vera continued to think blankly.
‘The Saintess...’
What was there to say? That woman would surely be in the gods’ embrace.
She had never been the sort of person Vera needed to worry about. She was a woman who had shaken even a monster like him. Surely, that was where she had ended up.
Vera cackled as he recalled the final moments of his life.
What had he been thinking? The thought of his shameless self, daring to hope for another life, was so ridiculous that he laughed.
God was not an idiot. God would never show such mercy to a vile creature who had used God’s Holy Mark however he pleased all his life.
‘...How shameful.’
He was ashamed of himself for becoming weak at the end, for clinging to the fleeting warmth she had shown him.
This suited him. This ending suited him, this vile creature.
He had used divine grace as a tool, sat upon a throne forged from the despair of common people, and indulged in pleasure all his life. This was only natural.
Kicks continued to pound his whole body. Yet laughter still spilled from him.
As Vera endured those two opposing sensations, he thought of the Saintess again and felt his insides tighten.
‘...It would have been better if I had never met her.’
Then he would have welcomed this situation. He would have accepted it humbly. He would not have regretted his past life.
As he thought that, Vera suddenly wondered whether all of this had been arranged by the Lord God.
Perhaps the Saintess had been placed at the end of his life so that he would regret the sins he had built up, so that the sinner who had dared defile divine Holy Mark would suffer all the more.
Was it not plausible?
If that was true, then the Lord God truly was omniscient.
Vera would pay for his remaining sins with deep regret and despair. If the Lord God who had prepared this beforehand was not omniscient, then who was?
Laughter burst from him again.
“Kh...”
There was no reason to laugh. This was a moment when he should have been weeping, yet for some reason, he could not stop laughing.
After he had laughed for some time, Doran, who had stopped kicking him at some point, stared at Vera with a sickened expression.
“Huff... Huff...”
“What? Aren’t you going to kick me anymore?”
“Y-you crazy bastard...!”
Doran stumbled back.
With a frightened look on his face, Doran kept backing away before finally running off into the distance.
Watching Doran flee, Vera thought, ‘That bastard has no guts even in hell,’ before a sense of unease struck him.
‘...Wait.’
Did this make any sense?
This was hell. A place that punished evil souls. So why was the guard meant to punish him running away?
“Ghk...”
Vera pushed himself up, his body throbbing, and steadied his breathing.
Something was wrong. As he ran his hands over his body to inspect his injuries, Vera noticed something that should not have been there beneath his torn sleeve.
He hurriedly rolled it up.
A circle formed of eight interwoven curved strokes was revealed beneath it.
‘A Holy Mark?’
It was the Stigmata of Covenants.
Why was it there? Why had it remained?
As those questions came to him, Vera closed his eyes and examined his soul.
It was an authority granted to those who received the Stigmata of Covenants.
A dark-colored soul appeared behind Vera’s closed eyelids.
A blackish soul that flickered as though it were burning.
‘...It is whole.’
It was not torn.
‘...No.’
It had been fully restored.
Even the part that had been torn away when he broke a covenant long ago had completely healed.
Vera stared blankly at this strange phenomenon before suddenly recalling the covenant he had inscribed before his death. He examined his soul again.
A dark-colored soul.
Golden letters were carved upon it.
‘...It is there.’
The last covenant of his life.
The covenant to live for the Saintess.
It was inscribed there.
Vera opened his eyes and looked around.
A gloomy, stifling back alley in the gutter, hidden beneath the shadow of the Mage Tower.
His soul had not been damaged in the slightest.
It was a bizarre situation that seemed to insist everything up until his death had been a dream. Yet the covenant inscribed upon his soul said that none of it had been a dream.
Vera looked down at his gaunt wrist.
‘The body I had when I was a beggar.’
The only time in Vera’s life when his body had been this thin was when he had been a beggar.
Once he had overcome his hunger, he had always maintained a sturdy build. There was no mistaking it.
Only then did Vera realize what all of this meant.
‘...Regression.’
He had returned.
Time had been rewound.
He had returned to when he was still a pathetic little child in the gutter, before he had accomplished anything.
His thoughts went blank. The pain faded with them.
Unable to understand this phenomenon at all, Vera stared blankly at the sky.
It would have been natural to ask why, but absurdly, one thought filled his mind before all else.
‘The Saintess is alive.’
That fact alone filled his thoughts.
A relief he could not explain began to fill him.
She was alive. And not merely alive.
Her skin had not melted away from burns.
She had not gone hungry while eating pigswill worse than livestock feed.
...She had not hidden herself away in this gutter.
Vera clenched his fist as he thought of that. After savoring the rising relief for some time, another thought came to him.
Why had he regressed? What was the reason?
He tried to make a plausible guess, but no suitable answer came to mind.
Still, one being capable of doing such a thing came to mind.
‘...The Lord God.’
The One seated upon the highest throne.
The One who shaped the world and wove fate.
There was no one else who could have done this.
* * *
Vera walked through the gutter in a daze, covered in muddy water.
His thoughts had yet to settle.
If the Lord God had done this, what could the Lord God want from him?
Questions continued to arise, and only at their end did Vera finally recall the covenant he had made.
‘...I will live for the Saintess.’
If there was something the Lord God sought to accomplish through him, it would be the fulfillment of that covenant.
Was that not obvious? Why else would the Lord God pay such attention to Vera?
Vera was an apostate who had abused divine authority.
A vile creature who had thrown the world into chaos.
The second life granted by the Lord God could not possibly have been for Vera’s sake.
Then a conversation he had shared with the Saintess suddenly came to mind.
“If the Lord God valued love so highly, they would’ve taken pity on the Saintess and not left her in a place like this.”
It was something Vera had said to the Saintess, who had lived a miserable life in the gutter.
She had answered that it was her own choice.
Remembering it, Vera let out a small laugh.
Once again, his gaze turned toward the sky.
‘It seems even the Lord God could not break that woman’s stubbornness.’
That was why the Lord God was borrowing another’s hand to save her, was that not so?
Vera thought for a long time.
If that was what the Lord God wanted...
‘I will gladly play along.’
A long breath escaped him.
With it, the stale air filling his lungs flowed out.
‘Before that...’
Vera turned toward one corner of the gutter.
One of its deepest alleys, the Scavengers’ den.
Vera remembered Rene’s corpse lying in the muddy water.
His fist clenched at the memory of the indescribable despair that had risen in him then.
‘...I should take out the trash before I go.’
It might have become something that never happened, but to Vera, they were still sinners who needed to be torn apart.
* * *
A shabby tavern reeking of mustiness.
At its center, where all the furniture had been broken and the place lay in complete disarray, Vera stood covered in blood, looking down at the corpses.
They were the Scavengers whose necks he had snapped with his own hands.
It was ridiculous that the first thing he did after receiving a second chance was murder, but he had no regrets.
If anything, he would have regretted not doing it.
Logically speaking, did it not make sense?
They were the deepest darkness of the gutter. Mold that would spread without end if left alone.
If he did not clean them up now, they would crawl out beyond the gutter. It was only right to deal with them.
...That was what he could have said.
‘...An excuse.’
A small laugh escaped Vera.
He did not bother to dress up his actions that way.
He had hunted them down and killed them purely to vent his anger.
The memory of her final moments was still engraved in his mind, and it had enraged him enough to kill them for it.
The bloody stench filling the tavern entered his lungs, bringing an unpleasant sensation with it.
Vera let out a long breath to shake off the foul feeling.
“Haa...”
He had won by borrowing the Holy Mark’s power, but fatigue still filled his body.
Naturally so.
His current body was far too weak.
Vera’s gaze turned toward a shard of mirror on the floor.
Reflected in it was a gaunt face, black hair covering his eyes, and a boy with a gloomy appearance.
Yes, a boy.
His current body was that of a young boy who was barely fourteen years old.
Moreover, he was thin from failing to eat properly, and injured from being trampled and beaten all over.
Of course he was exhausted after facing the Scavengers in that state.
‘The cleaning is done, at least...’
Vera found a chair that was still mostly intact and sat down.
He needed to plan for what came next.
The covenant inscribed upon his soul.
What did he need to do to keep it?
He could not live as he had before.
...No, now that he regretted that life, he had no desire to live that way anyway.
He had vowed to live for the Saintess, for that strange woman. He needed to become someone worthy of standing by her side.
...Fortunately, he had a useful tool for that.
Vera looked at the Holy Mark carved into his right forearm.
‘...A paladin.’
A paladin of the Holy Kingdom.
A path he had not even glanced at in his previous life.
Yet it was a path he could take more easily than any other if he chose to.
It was also the perfect position for guarding the Saintess’s side.
The events that would unfold across the continent ran through Vera’s mind.
‘The Saintess will receive her Holy Mark four years from now.’
The year she turned fourteen, and he turned eighteen.
He remembered it clearly because he had been gathering rumors about the Imperial nobility at the time, hoping to open dealings with them.
‘Four years...’
In his previous life, it was time that had now vanished.
Yet to Vera, it had been barely more than two weeks ago.
He remembered her finding him collapsed at the entrance to the gutter.
‘In my previous life, you found me...’
So...
‘In this life, I will find you.’
A smile formed on Vera’s lips.
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