The Regressor and the Blind Saintess - Chapter 69

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Natty

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ The Regressor and the Blind Saintess ◈

Chapter 69: Strange Phenomenon - 3

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A stranger flickered.

Its form warped. The surrounding scenery rippled. Vera's perception wavered.

As Vera's muscles tensed,

Slip...

The stranger vanished.

Vera flinched. His gaze remained fixed on the spot where the stranger had stood.

‘How...?’

He had not looked away for even a moment, so how had it disappeared? No, how had it approached while deceiving his senses in the first place?

Confusion crossed Vera's face, but then he realized he was alone and sheathed his dagger.

Thump. Thump. His heart had yet to calm. As he tried to dispel the tension rising within him, a question surfaced in his mind.

‘What...?’

What had he just seen? The illusion, Aisha at its end, the stranger.

Vera began to recall each thing he had seen.

‘...The sound of a second hand.’

That ticking sound. He distinctly remembered hearing it before. Vera stretched his thoughts back to the moment he had heard it.

‘The end of my previous life.’

The moment he had regressed. He had surely heard it as his consciousness sank deep into darkness.

Then the stranger he had just seen was...

‘The one who intervened in my regression.’

He could only make that assumption. Otherwise, there was no way to explain what the stranger had done.

As Vera continued thinking, he began to speculate on the stranger's identity.

‘A god?’

Was what he had seen a god? The gods were the most likely beings to have intervened in his regression, so they were naturally the first to come to mind.

‘...No.’

Vera soon denied it.

Something far more fitting than the gods already existed to explain the stranger he had seen.

A shabby figure with its face hidden beneath a deeply pulled hood. A bony hand, half transparent, with the background visible through it. And...

‘...A pocket watch.’

An enormous clock, too large to truly call a pocket watch. It had certainly been hanging around the stranger's neck.

Vera's eyes darkened.

‘...Orgus.’

The traveler who walks through time.

An anomaly counted among the ancient races, just like Terdan and Aidrin, whom he had seen before.

A strange being that traveled through the past, present, and future, scattering mysteries in its wake.

Only after recalling that did Vera understand what the illusion from moments ago had been.

‘...The future.’

Or perhaps it should have been called the past.

Events that would occur if he did not intervene. The illusion Orgus had shown him must have been something like that.

Yet even after realizing this, something still did not sit right with him.

‘Why?’

Why had Orgus shown him that? And what had its words meant just before it vanished?

[Four.]

It had certainly said that while curling its fingers.

‘A count?’

He wanted to think of more clues, but he had far too little to go on.

Orgus, the traveler who walks through time, was especially poorly documented even among the nine ancient races. It was simply too difficult to encounter.

Its existence was uncertain enough that people dismissed it as an anomaly from stories. With knowledge of the ancient races no greater than that of an ordinary person from the continent, Vera could not learn much from what he had seen alone.

Vera clicked his tongue at the frustration swelling within him, then recalled the scene Orgus had shown him.

‘Aisha, and the Demon Sword.’

An older Aisha, more grown than she was now, clutching the Demon Sword and running. A desperate figure that seemed to be fleeing from something. Torn, filthy, and crying.

Vera clearly remembered what he had seen in that moment.

‘The Demon Sword was being forged.’

The moment Aisha murmured those words, the Demon Sword had clearly reacted. A dark red light of resentment had risen from it.

A hollow laugh suddenly escaped Vera.

‘Was Aisha the one who completed the Demon Sword?’

A question that had tormented him for so long was answered.

‘Dovan dies, and Aisha's hatred settles within the unfinished Demon Sword.’

That must have completed the Demon Sword, and Aisha must have joined the ranks of heroes afterward.

Once more, Vera recalled Orgus, who had just vanished, and frowned. His teeth ground together. Veins stood out on the hand gripping his dagger.

‘What do you want?’

What Orgus intended. What it hoped to gain by showing him that future. He did not know, and that was why he felt this way.

It had clearly acted with some purpose, yet he could not grasp what that purpose was.

Confusion filled Vera's heart.

* * *

Dovan was in the smithy's front yard, sipping liquor and looking up at the sky, when an approaching presence made them turn.

Who could be coming at this late hour? At the end of that gaze stood...

“...Sir Vera?”

Vera, wrapped tightly in his robe, was walking over.

Dovan cocked their head and asked Vera as he approached.

“You're not asleep yet?”

Dovan had thought Vera would surely be sleeping, so it was strange to see him emerge from the forest. Vera lowered his head slightly and replied.

“Yes. I was taking a short walk.”

“Ah, I see. I was startled, thinking something had happened.”

A laugh escaped Dovan.

Vera watched Dovan, then looked at the cup in Dovan's hand.

“...Were you drinking?”

“That I was. The moon is bright, and sleep won't come, so naturally I felt like having a drink. Ah, would you like a cup?”

Vera stared blankly at the cup Dovan offered, then shook his head.

“No, thank you. I don't enjoy it much.”

“What a shame.”

Dovan did not press after Vera's refusal and drained the liquor in the cup.

As Vera watched, the hesitation that had been lingering within him rose again.

‘I need to get them somewhere safe.’

He could not delay any longer. They had to flee from Garthea, who was beneath that mountain range.

It was clear what he had to do, yet the covenant he had engraved was the reason he hesitated.

Sending Dovan and Rene away to plan for the future meant turning away from the atrocities Garthea would commit.

That would violate his covenant, and Vera could not find his bearings.

A shadow began to fall over Vera's face.

In his mind was Aisha from the different time Orgus had projected. Aisha's face as resentment forged the Demon Sword, tears of hatred streaming down it.

Vera wanted to stop that.

He did not believe in a greater cause completed through the sacrifice of unwilling people. He believed it was wrong to turn away from such a thing. He wanted to get them somewhere safe at once.

Yet to do that, he would have to turn away from something else. What could he do in a moment like this?

The people who would be sacrificed to Garthea below and Dovan and Aisha were on opposite sides of the scale.

There was no way he could choose either side.

As Vera's worries deepened,

“Do you have something on your mind?”

Dovan spoke.

Vera flinched at the sudden question and looked at Dovan.

Dovan was looking directly into his eyes, their expression calm and peaceful.

“You look troubled. Don't you?”

Dovan smiled faintly.

“At my age, you learn some things. Even a simpleton who has spent a whole life hammering blades gains a little wisdom. I think I might be able to help, so would you tell me?”

Vera's lips parted for a moment at Dovan's words, then closed.

For some reason, he felt pathetic for nearly blurting out his situation.

Would telling Dovan not simply be shifting the responsibility onto someone else?

Was it not the same as asking Dovan to weigh Dovan's own life against the lives of others and make that choice?

Vera frowned briefly and swallowed the words rising in his throat. Then he spoke of his concerns in a more indirect way.

“...I have to choose one of two things, but I don't think I can do it.”

“A choice?”

“Yes. There are two things I cannot let go of, and they lie in different directions. Yet I have found reasons why I cannot give up either one.”

Throughout his explanation, his gaze remained on the empty air. He looked at the serene moon in the black night sky, deliberately avoiding Dovan's expression.

Seeing Vera like that, Dovan quickly dismissed the thought that it might be a concern about Vera's relationship with Rene, then chose their words carefully.

A choice.

It was a concern that had been inseparable from Dovan's long life. Since this young friend was struggling with it now, Dovan thought perhaps they could help.

“Do you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“When anxiety fills a person, their view narrows.”

Vera, who had been looking at the sky, turned his gaze toward Dovan at those words. Dovan thought the gray eyes fixed upon their face looked terribly sorrowful, then continued.

“There are many reasons for anxiety. Pressure from a lack of time, an obsession with perfection, or perhaps distrust in oneself. But if I had to name the most vicious of them, I would choose responsibility.”

There had once been a time when Dovan had struggled with the very same concern.

“When I first learned that I was of imperial blood, I went to the battlefield. I was consumed by the absurd sense of responsibility that I had to end that war myself.”

Dovan believed the devastation caused by the war was due to their own inadequacy. Dovan believed ending the war was their duty, that it was something they could not turn away from.

“I think I wandered the battlefields for around ten years. That was how long I spent determined to rise up myself and mediate between them. Do you know what became of it?”

Vera looked at Dovan, then at the wheelchair beneath them.

When he thought of what Dovan had lost in war, that wheelchair was what most stirred his imagination.

Dovan smiled deeply and nodded.

“That is right. I lost this leg. And I could not end the war.”

Dovan raised the bottle and filled the empty cup.

“Only after losing it did I see what had been before me all along. The truth that I was never important to them. The truth that their war had nothing to do with me. The truth that there was work I could do elsewhere.”

The cup filled to the brim. Reflecting the black night sky, it seemed clothed in pitch darkness.

“The day I realized that, I left the battlefield. Then I took Aisha in. If that war was beyond my reach, then as someone with imperial blood, I thought I should at least lessen the number of people hurt by war, even if only by one.”

Dovan sipped at the night sky reflected in the cup, then added,

“The moment you become bound by something beyond your reach, you begin to break. I think it is all right to set down your anxiety and turn your head a little. Surely there is something you can do there as well?”

Before long, the cup was empty again.

Dovan looked at the empty cup and smacked their lips in regret, then turned to Vera and added playfully,

“If the two choices lie in different directions, why not carve out another path to connect them? There is no law saying you must only follow the paths already laid out.”

As Vera silently listened to Dovan's words, one phrase stirred his heart.

“...Something I can do.”

“That is right. It is not as though you are half crippled like this old person. You are healthy, and you are an Apostle besides. I am sure you can find a way.”

After saying that, Dovan added a touch of humor.

“Well, if you still cannot, try resenting the gods in the heavens. ‘The trial you gave me is too difficult, so I am suffering like this!’ If you complain to them like that, perhaps they will send down a miracle.”

Vera let out a small laugh at Dovan's dramatically elevated tone, as though reciting from a script.

“...That is amusing.”

“Did I offend you?”

“Not in the least.”

As Vera replied, he raised the words something I can do once more within his inner landscape.

What he could do.

What he did best.

Once he thought of that, an answer that felt right sprang into his mind.

‘The sword.’

His strength, which no one could surpass. He had that.

“Dovan.”

“Yes?”