WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 273

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Where the Stars Shine (3)

The cage that had sealed Artman broke apart.

Beyond the severed ceiling of the underground city, the cityscape came into view. Beyond the church rising like a spire, the night sky spread open. Stars embroidered across the sky were shining.

Starlight poured down.

The eyes of the underground city's residents shone like stars as they watched that falling light, but unlike them, Najin's gaze turned cold.

Because he knew.

The stars in the night sky were not as perfect or beautiful as these people believed. He knew what kind of emotions were carried in that starlight.

Curiosity, doubt, shock, rage, longing...

Countless gazes poured onto Najin. They were the gazes of stars. He lifted Excalibur high for them to see. If they wanted to look, they could look all they wanted. Najin did not hide his starlight.

He revealed to the whole world that he had drawn Excalibur.

At that instant, the pouring gazes grew even fiercer. Arthur had just as many enemies as allies among the constellations. If half the world stood with Arthur, the other half stood against him.

Under normal circumstances,

at this very moment, the night sky would have split open and countless constellations would have attempted descent. Even if their stars eroded, even if they shattered, even if they themselves became fallen stars, they would have moved without hesitation.

To kill Arthur's successor.

Or to protect Arthur's successor.

And yet, even after Najin revealed Excalibur, none of them moved rashly.

...A moment ago, they had seen it.

The sky in upheaval, the Round Table moving, Camlann's constellations stirring. After a thousand years of silence, Mordred's constellation moved. The constellations felt that fearsome baleful star with eleven stars writhing to enter the continent.

Then the violent trembling, as if the heavens would rip apart, suddenly calmed, and Mordred's star was pushed back into Camlann.

The constellations understood what that meant.

Someone had stopped Mordred. Then who? Who in the world had stopped that terrifying baleful star? They did not need to search far for the answer. In that moment of upheaval, one constellation had gained a new star.

The Star of Dawn.

As all eyes gathered,

"..."

Najin raised Mordred's heart.

Then he clenched it in his hand and crushed it.

The moment he did, Mordred's constellation convulsed violently, like it was bleeding.

For a Transcendent, the heart was more than a simple organ. To crush the heart meant damaging the very foundation of that Transcendent. A long crack tore across Mordred's constellation.

A normal Transcendent would have lost several stars from a blow like that, but Mordred endured. As expected of a knight favored by the Witch of the Abyss, he endured... but even so, he could not avoid cracks spreading across his constellation.

「......」

The stars that witnessed that scene fell silent.

They knew.

They knew how terrifying Mordred was.

A constellation with power equal to Grand Constellation Merlin, in other words, a Transcendent strong enough to face hundreds of stars alone, that was Mordred. The stars were stunned that someone had managed to wound him.

At the same time, they hesitated.

Descending into the inland was never easy.

It was like forcing through an extremely narrow hole. Even if they succeeded, they had to burn enormous amounts of starlight, and even top-tier constellations had to prepare for their own extinction. Even after taking that risk and descending, they could not use the full power of their true body. They would descend in a weakened state.

Of course, even with that level of loss, many constellations would gladly attempt descent if they could kill Arthur's successor. There were plenty of them. But that only held true when they were sure they could kill him.

The current Najin was no easy target.

The Star of Dawn, a Transcendent with seven stars.

On top of that, Excalibur was in his hand, and the Empire stood behind him. Even if they descended, they could not be sure they would kill him.

While the stars hesitated like that,

a flash of light appeared.

Among them, one star shone.

The Carnival King, the star of merriment.

Her stars moved among the wavering constellations and scattered paint. Najin did not know what she was whispering to them. Even so, he glared at the sky and aimed his sword tip at the Carnival King.

"..."

「......」

Najin stood at the lowest bottom, on land beneath land.

High above in the heavens, the Carnival King shone.

Their gazes met. No words were needed. The stories inside each of their stars had already given the answer. In that instant, Najin and the Carnival King both knew.

Someday, likely in the near future,

one of those two constellations would fall.

Not by anyone else, but by the other's hand.

2.

Life in this world, you never truly understood it.

Eurypylus suddenly found himself thinking that.

He had lived for four hundred years. A long time, by any measure. Yet the longer he lived, the less he felt he understood the world. Things he thought he fully understood still brought events he had never imagined.

When he used to grumble like this,

「That is exactly what makes living in this world fun!」

once, she had told him that.

「It is full of unknowns. No one knows when, how, or what will happen. That is why it is fun, right? In a situation that looks hopeless, what is more exciting than suddenly finding an answer, Eurypylus?」

The image of her smiling like that flickered before his eyes.

"Yeah."

Eurypylus muttered weakly.

"That must be it, Ariel."

Clang.

Eurypylus dropped the halberd he had been holding. At its tip was the Lighthouse's heart. Having lost her heart, the Lighthouse collapsed to the floor, blood pouring from her.

Her whole body had been hacked apart, she had lost her heart, and her throat was split open.

She could not make a sound.

But Eurypylus could understand what she was trying to say.

She was asking why.

"It is not some grand reason."

Eurypylus took a deep breath.

With heavy steps, he moved and dropped down beside her. Next to the Lighthouse bleeding out, the Lighthouse Keeper spoke.

"You do not remember why you made the underground city, or why you gathered power through methods this extreme, but I remember."

The Lighthouse asked what that was.

With a sigh, the Lighthouse Keeper answered.

"Someday, the Abyss will swallow the continent. Led by the Endbringer who proclaims the end, monsters crawling out of the Abyss will cover the world, the Empire will split, and humanity, having lost its center, will be trampled."

The future she had once foretold.

Because prophecy gained stronger force the more it was shared and made public, the Lighthouse had shared it only with the Lighthouse Keeper.

"To stop that future, you stockpiled power. To become a savior on the day of ruin that would come someday, you asked me to stockpile strength. That was our promise, Ariel."

Eurypylus gave a bitter smile.

"I never imagined that day of ruin would be today, or that the Endbringer who preached the end would be you."

As he said earlier, it was nothing dramatic.

A promise made hundreds of years ago.

Eurypylus had simply kept that promise.

"I had no interest in salvation. I never cared about saving people. This world is full of filth. A world where beasts that are barely human strut around as humans, and where even good people cannot resist one night of temptation and turn into villains."

The Lighthouse asked why, even then, and Eurypylus gave a dry laugh.

"Just because, even so, the days I spent with you were fun. Because the world you talked about was beautiful."

The Lighthouse Keeper brushed back the hair of the dying Lighthouse. He moved aside her blood-soaked hair, met the gaze in her hidden eyes, and smiled.

"I just did not want to stain the memory of that day. I wanted to keep at least one beautiful thing."

The Lighthouse's stars fell one by one.

When all her stars had fallen, when she was no longer the Lighthouse and had become only a woman named Ariel, she was freed from Camlann's whisper.

Freed at last, she smiled at Eurypylus in her final moment. She said something, and Eurypylus smiled bitterly.

"You are a stubborn woman until the very end."

Ariel's body crumbled away. Eurypylus looked at his own body.

His body was crumbling too.

He had drawn too much power.

It was the price of burning through more than three hundred years in one go. In exchange for using power his flesh and soul could not endure, Eurypylus's body was breaking apart.

The death he had postponed was approaching.

As it came closer, Eurypylus organized the last things he needed to do. Until the end, he thought only about his duties.

'Still, well...'

Looks like I finished what needed doing.

He had stopped the Lighthouse and closed the hole opened to Camlann. The only thing left was Mordred's avatar body rampaging above, and for that, he had no choice but to trust that kid had handled it.

While Eurypylus was sorting through those thoughts,

thud.

He heard footsteps.

Eurypylus tilted his head toward the sound.

"Huh."

He laughed as if he could not believe it.

"Looks like you somehow wrapped up your side too."

3.

With the Lighthouse's death, the stage was crumbling.

As the city collapsed and scattered,

at the city center, Najin walked over and sat in silence across from Eurypylus, who was leaning against the rubble.

"Did it get resolved?"

"Thanks to you."

Najin looked at Eurypylus.

He was a wreck. Najin's wounds were not light either, but compared to Eurypylus, he was almost fine. Eurypylus had lost one arm and one leg, and several large and small holes pierced his body.

One eye had been pierced through by a heat ray and was gone. With the eye he had left, Eurypylus looked at Najin.

His face was calm. Even with death approaching, Eurypylus showed no fear. He only looked like someone accepting that what had to come had come.

"Do you have any last words?"

"Last words?"

Eurypylus stared into empty air with blurred eyes, then smiled as if something came to him.

"Ah, right. One of your stars was Requiem. Requiem, huh, are you an undertaker?"

"Something like that."

"Hmm. I do not really have anything to leave behind. I did not prepare some stylish line to shout at the world."

"Even random talk is fine."

"Random talk, huh."

His eyes were losing focus.

Eurypylus spoke slowly.

"You said you were born in the underground city."

"I was born and raised here."

"You left for the outside around eighteen?"

"Yes."

"Similar to me. I was born in an abandoned city, a city where trash got dumped. What I saw growing up was trash, or humans like trash."

Eurypylus chuckled.

"It was brutal. A brutal life. If it is to survive a single day, humans can become as vicious as they need to. Living in a place like that, you naturally become hard too. You need venom to survive. You know that."

"If it is to stay alive, what can you not do?"

"Yeah, what can you not do? If you want to live, you do whatever it takes."

Eurypylus spoke in a broken voice, words cutting in and out. It was the childhood of a man named Eurypylus, probably written nowhere.

It was not a fine life, not even with empty flattery.

To survive, Eurypylus sharpened himself. He lived fiercely. He did whatever he had to and became whatever he had to be. Najin listened in silence. Whenever Eurypylus asked now and then, "You listening?" Najin only answered, "Yes."

The words of someone dying had no order.

They broke off, jumped around.

Even so, Eurypylus talked about his youth.

A star that once held a dream and then lost it told the story of that dream. He spoke of a goal that had been beautiful, had shone, and had therefore been worth challenging.

"So..."

Remembering his life, he smiled.

Looking back, it was not that bad.

"Yeah."

Eurypylus drew a heavy breath.

"Even at the very bottom, where there was nothing, there were always guys like that. For some reason their eyes shone. Life had no answers, they were the kind who would rot here forever, yet they still thought they could become something and dreamed useless dreams. There were always bastards dreaming those damned dreams."

The one in the mirror had been him. But at some point, his eyes in that mirror began to resemble the eyes of the adults who once looked at his younger self. Remembering those cold eyes, Eurypylus gave a bitter smile.

"Hey."

"Yes."

"Did you become something?"

"I think I did."

"Did you become the you wanted to be?"

"I am trying to."

"Do you feel like you are getting closer?"

"Yes. Definitely. Thanks to you, I took a step closer too."

"Right."

"So that is how it is."

Eurypylus let out a breath.

"That is... a bit enviable."

His senses were fading.

His vision disappeared.

The last thing left was hearing.

"Still, well. Looks like I did something meaningful at the end. Do you see it that way too? Do you think what I did will change the world a little?"

"It will change, for sure."

"The world does not change that easily."

"It will still change. In one direction or another."

"I hope it is the direction she wanted."

"Lighthouse that Illuminates the Abyss? If it is the direction that star wanted, we might be in trouble."

"You lunatic. Do not say that, even as a joke."

Eurypylus smirked.

After exhaling for a long time, he muttered.

"Sorry. For dragging you into our story."

With those words, Eurypylus closed his eyes.

"Eurypylus."

No answer came back.

Najin quietly lowered his head toward him.

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