WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 225

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Interlude, A Tale (6)

The hardest part is always the beginning.

Rena stared at the blank white page and thought. About how to begin the story she would tell her child. Finding the right first words for a daughter was no small thing.

She sat with it for a long while.

In the end, she decided to leave the opening line empty and fill in the body first. She had always saved the best bite for last, so perhaps it was fitting.

'What story should I tell her?'

Many questions, but pleasant ones.

Like a parent choosing their child's clothes and shoes with a warm smile, Rena put quill to paper and began to write.

The first chapter: her story with Albert.

In a windowless solitary cell, a stake driven deep into her spine, not so much as a proper desk to write at, she hunched over a sheet of paper pressed against the rough stone floor and told her story.

The story she would leave her daughter.

About what her mother had been.

And what her father had been.

「The one writing this letter is named Rena, the Witch of Sole Supremacy.」

「Sole Supremacy (獨尊), a bit of an embarrassing name, isn't it? Not the (獨存) meaning "to exist alone," but the (獨尊) meaning I alone am great, that I alone stand lofty and exalted above all others.」

「Looking back now, it's mortifying.」

「But there was a time when I wandered the world without even realizing I should be mortified. That was when I met your father.」

The years when she had lived on pride alone.

An era when everything and everyone seemed beneath contempt, when she looked down at the world with an arrogance that knew no ceiling. It was in those years that Rena met a man named Albert.

She thought back to the day that had changed everything.

「Your father was the hero of the Alliance. The hero of the Alliance, Albert the Resounding! Your father was, and I mean this even now, frightfully strong. The way he came at me wielding those twin swords, I'd never been so terrified.」

Rena had been defeated by Albert.

She had never met a human so strong. But Albert did not kill her. Instead, he knelt before her and bowed his head.

「I have witnessed the atrocities the Alliance committed against you.」

「Your desire for vengeance is just.」

「The anger you carry is equally just.」

「But I cannot stand by and let you burn my country. I have a duty to protect it.」

The hero of the Alliance apologized to the witch.

He was an endlessly righteous and honest man, and he could not look away from the crimes the Alliance had committed against Rena. Even though it had happened before he was born, even though it had nothing to do with him personally, Albert knelt willingly.

The hero represented the Alliance.

The first sword raised in their name.

And so the first head should be the first to bow. That was what Albert believed.

As she wrote those words, Rena smiled, though it stung. That day was when the tragedy began.

"I hate humans."

"I know."

"I hate your Alliance, I hate the Empire, I hate every human being in this world. Witches and humans are creatures that can't coexist by nature. The war won't stop until one side is all that's left."

"That, too, I know."

"Then why won't you kill me?"

"Because I don't want to."

Albert would not kill Rena.

No matter how many times she came at him, no matter how much blood she drew and how badly she left him battered, Albert always managed to subdue her without leaving a single mark on her.

"Do you think I'm a joke?"

"I don't."

"Then is it because I'm weaker than you? You're so confident you can win no matter what, so you're going easy on me? You'll get yourself killed."

"I don't think you're weak."

Albert smiled.

Again and again and again, he stood in Rena's way. As those days piled up, Rena found herself growing curious about this man.

What had made him like this.

What had hardened him into something so unyielding.

Curiosity became interest, interest became fascination, and fascination curdled into something like love-hate. When Albert was struggling against a dragon threatening the Alliance, Rena found herself moving toward that battlefield without meaning to.

"Rena?"

"Shut up and watch the front."

She helped Albert hunt the dragon. She didn't know why she'd done it, why she'd made that choice.

"If you're going to die, I'm the one who kills you. Even if this damned Alliance falls, it'll be by my hand. Not some overgrown lizard's. Understood?"

An excuse.

Rena already knew the truth.

This was the longest she had ever spent in a human's company, and in her colorless world, Albert was the only one who carried any color. She had been drawn to that color. She knew it. She just refused to look.

All through those days.

"......"

"Ugh, cough."

One day, Rena won.

The duel that had stretched on for over ten years came to an abrupt end. She looked down at Albert, collapsed before her. A flick of her finger and he was gone, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.

"It's over, then."

Albert smiled wryly.

"Asking forgiveness from the people of the Alliance, that would be too much to hope for, wouldn't it?"

"...Still thinking of the Alliance, right until the end."

"Mm. There is one other wish I have."

He let out a long, slow breath.

"It doesn't quite suit a dying man's last words. A shame. I had meant to say it after my thousandth victory over you."

This was their thousandth duel.

Rena finally sighed and let her staff fall.

"Fine. You win. Call it your thousandth. Say it."

"......"

"I said, say it."

Albert groaned and pushed himself upright.

"You once told me you were the Witch of Sole Supremacy. That in all the world, only you stand above the rest."

"I said that."

"Then."

He went down on one knee.

Lifted his face and looked up at her.

"Then let me become your world. Look only at me. Look down on me, belittle me to your heart's content. If you choose sole supremacy, I will gladly make myself the lesser one."

It was a knight's oath. Or perhaps,

"Will you be my beloved? Rena."

A confession.

"What, I..."

Rena's gaze wavered.

"So suddenly?"

"After ten years together, I wouldn't call it sudden."

"What on earth do you like about me?"

"Hmm. I couldn't say it's any one thing."

"Are you serious?"

"I don't say things I don't mean."

"...Is this about the Alliance? You think if I become your lover, I'll stop trying to destroy it?"

"I'm not cunning enough to use love as a tool. It would be a shame if you can't believe that."

"No, that's not, that's not what I..."

Hesitating, Rena pressed a hand over her face.

She didn't know love. She had never felt anything resembling affection for another person before. And so she couldn't explain why her heart was beating like this.

"Then you'll find out from here on."

Out of nowhere, all at once. That's always how these things begin. Rena reached out and took Albert's hand.

The story continued.

Rena wrote their story into the letter. She didn't want to simply pile up memories. She wanted the daughter who would one day read this to be able to picture what kind of people her parents had been.

She wished she could fill the whole letter with nothing but those kinds of stories.

But there was one she had to write.

How their story had ended. And how the child had come to be. Rena felt the fingers holding her quill grow heavier. But she tightened her grip and wrote on.

The love between a witch and a human ends only in tragedy.

And so Albert and Rena's story was a tragedy, too.

"It seems my own kind cannot forgive me for loving a witch. Nothing to be done. This is the age we live in."

Albert was branded a traitor to humanity.

"Same for me, Albert. The witches can't forgive me for falling in love with a human."

Rena was branded a traitor to witchkind.

"The homeland I protected turns its sword on me."

"The witches I saved raise their staves at me."

Two people who had made enemies of the entire world ran. They ran and kept running, until they realized there was nowhere left to go. Only tragedy remained.

"If it's going to end in tragedy, let us at least leave proof."

"Proof of what?"

"Proof that you and I loved each other. And proof that a human and a witch can love."

A witch cannot carry a human's child.

But Rena had spent long years studying how humans brought new life into the world. She found, at last, a way to birth a new soul from two souls.

Even if she couldn't carry the child herself, she could still bring a child of her and Albert's into the world.

"It will take a long time. Decades, maybe even centuries. But it's possible."

"That would mean..."

"We can't run forever. The end comes eventually. And I don't want that end to be one that leaves nothing at all."

Like you humans do.

Rena smiled sadly. Albert pulled her close with the same gentle warmth as always.

One last night. And a small miracle.

"Being with you made me happy. Rena."

"Me too. Albert."

Rena headed to the Outland, to draw the witches' eyes away.

Albert headed to the continent, to find somewhere to hide the child.

Opposite directions, same purpose.

Rena fought back against the witches, resisting to the end, until a stake was driven into her spine and she was dragged to the Black Spire. Albert defeated the countless knights hunting him down, punched through an entire nation's army, and managed to hide the child somewhere on the continent.

"Not a single one."

The hero of the Alliance turned his blade on the Alliance themselves.

"Not a single one gets through."

Albert met his death.

But he had accomplished what he came to do. What he had hidden, and where, no one learned until the very last.

"......"

Having written it all out, Rena looked at the page.

Everything up to now had been the story. What came next was the letter.

"Listen."

She ran her fingertips along the paper.

"I don't know what you'll look like, what your voice will sound like, or what kind of eyes you'll use to see the world."

She wanted to know. But she could not.

"Will you look like me, I wonder? Or like Albert? I'd prefer me, honestly. For what it's worth, I was fairly famous for being beautiful. But if you take after Albert, that would be lovely in its own way, I think."

She closed her eyes and tried to picture it, and smiled.

"Half of you is witch, and half is human. That could mean you belong anywhere, but it could also mean you belong nowhere. It won't be easy. Truly."

Not an easy life.

"I want to protect you. I want to take your hand and walk beside you. It breaks my heart that I can only leave you in a difficult world."

That knowledge weighed on her.

"I want to tie your shoes, teach you how to walk, wrap my arms around you so nothing can hurt you... but I can't. I'm so sorry, my dear."

Even so, Rena wrote.

"The half Albert gave you will let you live in a peaceful world. And the half I gave you will protect you. Because your other half carries the soul of roughly the fifth-strongest witch in the world."

So.

"I hope you find happiness. I hope you get to laugh. I hope you live without hating the world, because hating it would be such a waste of your life. I don't know when or where or how you'll be living, but..."

The last line was coming.

"You are the fruit of everything Albert and I shared. The proof that we loved each other. So you weren't born under a curse. You were born into a blessing. Even if the whole world curses you, the two of us will bless the path ahead of you."

A final sentence she had rewritten again and again over six hundred years.

"I love you. My child."

The last sentence. And also the first.

"To my beloved daughter, Roselin."

Rena pressed the quill firmly to the page.

"Your mother, Rena."

Roselin Ascalo.

Half witch, half human.

"......"

She turned the last page of the letter and fell silent. Her eyes were unsteady, and the fingers holding the paper shook. She set the letter down gently and covered her face with both hands.

Only her breathing filled the room, quiet and unsteady.

Hands over her face, eyes hidden, Roselin turned the words over in her mind.

'Rena, the Witch of Sole Supremacy. Albert, hero of the Alliance.'

She had known their story.

She had once looked into the legend of The Three Fools Who Loved Witches. But not once had she thought they might be her parents.

The timeline didn't fit.

They were people from six hundred years ago.

So she wanted to believe this letter was another pleasant-sounding lie someone had concocted. But its contents could not possibly be false.

A place only she knew.

The ruins where she had been born were described in the letter in careful detail. Even so, if that were all, it could still have been the work of some mage playing a cruel trick. Roselin was a mercenary. She trusted nothing and believed in no story that sounded too good to be true.

She doubted and doubted.

She looked for every crack through which the story could be a lie.

But she held evidence in her own hands that couldn't be argued away.

Slowly.

Roselin drew the twin swords from her hip.

Masterpiece No. 21, the Echoing Swords.

The masterpiece she had come to own one day, as though pulled to it by some unseen force.

The weapon said to have been wielded by Albert, hero of the Alliance.

When she had first obtained them, Roselin had simply thought herself lucky. But the world is not made of luck and coincidence alone.

「A masterpiece can still break.」

「If one who has reached Transcendence deliberately pushes a masterpiece beyond its limits, accumulating damage beyond what it was built to handle, the masterpiece falls asleep. Like a living creature.」

「And then it reappears somewhere, suddenly.」

The rule that governs masterpieces.

「Before the person most closely connected to its previous owner.」

「Before someone of their bloodline, or their family.」

A possibility she had always known but never connected to herself.

One she had entertained briefly, only to bury it under the thought of, 'But that's far too convenient a story.'

"Ah......"

A sound escaped Roselin.

A sigh, or something close to a groan.

Roselin Ascalo.

From the moment she opened her eyes to the world until now, she had never once felt a parent's warmth. She had thought of herself as someone who had no parents from the start, as something that had simply been made. And so she had never been able to love herself.

Artificial. Cursed. Filthy.

When those words were thrown at her, the reason they hurt most was that she had no way to argue back. To her own mind, every one of those taunts was true.

But.

「You were not born under a curse, but into a blessing.」

The letter had said.

「Even if the whole world curses you, the two of us will bless the path ahead of you.」

That it wasn't like that.

That she was not what they said.

"......"

Roselin's expression crumpled.

Head bowed, she bit down on her lip. Forty-odd years of life in this world, and for all of them she had not been able to love herself. After forty long years, the woman who had spent her whole life unable to affirm her own existence finally could.

A Resonance that had crossed six hundred years and the vast distance of the Outland, arriving at last on the continent.

As that Resonance settled over her, Roselin glanced at the masterpiece in her hand.

The masterpiece, the Echoing Swords.

A masterpiece with the Mystique of returning whatever Resonance it receives.

"Echo."

The word slipped out before she realized she had said it.

And in that moment, Roselin affirmed the half of herself she had denied for forty years.

......Witches sometimes choose their Mystique after the fact.

Roselin's Mystique was decided.

獨尊 and 獨存 are pronounced identically in Korean but are written with different Chinese characters. Rena's witch name uses 獨尊, meaning "I alone am lofty and exalted above all others," while 獨存 means simply "to exist alone." The distinction is the entire point of the letter passage, Rena is clarifying that her name was never about solitude but about arrogance, and cannot be conveyed without retaining the hanja in the body.

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