WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 339

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Rules Written in Blood (5)

"So you're saying I'm not dreaming, and all of this is real?"

"That's right."

"So amnesiac me came crawling back into this fucking Sealed City with our fingers laced together? To kill that crazy bastard, Hermann or whatever the fuck?"

"That would be correct."

"What the fuck is this now..."

Yuel blinked, like she couldn't keep up with any of it. At first she'd thought she was dreaming, but after hearing the story, she no longer seemed sure it was a dream.

"Hah."

She laughed in disbelief.

"I thought I fucked up that gear-covered bastard and got fucked myself too, but I guess not. I thought I died there."

"You lost your memory. You didn't die."

"From my point of view, that's basically the same thing, isn't it? The me before losing my memory and the me after would be completely different people."

Yuel shrugged.

"I definitely should have wiped my memory, but I don't know why it's still here..."

Why was her memory still there?

Najin could have explained, if he wanted to. He had a few guesses.

'Because this place is the domain of the Star of Omniscience, which stands opposite the Star of Forgetting, because this is the Sealed City, because that bracelet you had interacted with this place somehow...'

He could have listed those guesses, but he didn't. Yuel didn't ask for details either. To her, the why was not what mattered.

Watching silent Najin, Yuel smirked and rubbed the bracelet on her wrist.

"Well, whatever."

Clink. The bracelet rattled.

"It feels like I got unexpected overtime pay. I mean, fuck, if you work someone that hard with no days off, you should at least pay extra."

"How much do you remember?"

"Well, I remember up to the part where I talked with you at the end. After that, I don't know what I did once I lost my memory."

What she had were memories as "Yuel." It seemed she did not have memories as Yuel Razian. Najin held his chin in thought, and Yuel narrowed her eyes and shot him a sidelong look.

"What? Did you maybe like the memory-lost me? Well, I guess you did... seeing you all tender with fingers interlocked like that."

"Huh?"

"If that's what you're worried about, nothing vanished. I can feel it sitting in one corner of my head. Why, want me to switch?"

She snapped, her voice oddly displeased.

"I said, want me to switch?"

"Why would I?"

Najin tilted his head.

"If neither side disappeared, then it's fine. And if you can switch that easily... well, that's fine, right?"

There had to be a reason the bracelet suddenly reacted and her personality changed. Najin thought so.

"And..."

Najin gave a small smile.

"It's nice to see you again after a long time. If possible, I'd like this side to stay. More than anything, this Yuel knows this city best."

Yuel's shoulders twitched. The sharpness in her glare vanished in an instant. She worked her lips and spoke in a small, sinking voice.

"Is... that so? Well, fine then. If that's what you're saying."

Najin stood first.

Just like when he had served as the lord's adjutant in the Sealed City, he held out his hand to Yuel. Getting his lord on her feet, since mornings were always a nightmare for her, had always been Najin's job.

A smile spread across Yuel's lips as she looked at the hand in front of her. "Thank you, Adjutant," she murmured, then took Najin's hand and stood.

"So how far did you go with memory-lost me? Fuck, I confessed first, but some other bitch got all the fun..."

It took a little time to clear up that misunderstanding.

That happened.

2.

Najin and Yuel wandered around the Sealed City for a while.

It looked a little different from the city they remembered, but this was definitely the Sealed City. While circling the city, Yuel spoke.

"Looking at the outer walls and the bricks laid across the streets, this seems like a time not long after the city was built. It can't be the era when we stayed here."

So, she continued.

"I don't really know how you so-called Transcendents work, so let me ask: what does this city have to do with killing that bastard?"

"First, this is Hermann's Domain. A Domain is where a Transcendent stays, basically their home base."

"Aha, so we're in that bastard's base right now?"

Najin nodded and continued.

"Our goal is to take the Star of Omniscience from Hermann. To take it, we need to hand Hermann a perfect defeat."

"A perfect defeat?"

"You have to win on the stage the opponent prepared, in the opponent's way. If the opponent sets up a chessboard, you have to win through chess. You can't flip the board, and you can't blow off the other player's head for trying to move a piece."

It was the same as when he faced the Star of Scorn.

He could not win by smashing the stage the Star of Scorn had prepared, like the Helmet Knight had. As Najin had done, he had to win on the opponent's stage under the rules the opponent set.

"Sounds annoying just hearing it."

"It is troublesome."

"Still, if that's the only way to get what we want, then it's trouble worth accepting. So what do we do? What's the win condition this time?"

"..."

"..."

"Najin?"

"Yes, Yuel."

Yuel looked at Najin with suspicion.

"You don't know?"

"We'll find out now."

"So you don't know, fuck..."

You usually didn't know until you crashed into it yourself. The rules of each Domain were all different, so in most cases, you had to charge in first to get an answer.

"I do have a guess."

Najin raised a hand and pointed at the sky.

He explained the sight he had seen when he first entered this world.

A sky where tens of thousands, hundreds of millions, trillions of gears interlocked and turned. A space where the unknown and the mysterious did not exist. A sky lined with nothing but precise machinery, everything exposed, dismantled, and analyzed.

And beneath that sky, abandoned things piled up.

Cities used and discarded to produce the gears that made up that sky. A gigantic experimental site built by Hermann. The place where Najin and Yuel now stood was right in the middle of that site.

"The Domain of Omniscience."

Najin spoke.

"In their own Domain, a constellation is basically a god. Not a false god, but a truly godlike being that creates a world and makes its rules."

A Domain was, in the end, a space built around that constellation. But Najin continued.

"At the same time, a Domain also works as shackles on that constellation."

"Shackles?"

"Yes, shackles. Because in the end, the foundation of a Domain is the concept that constellation holds. Inside their own Domain, a constellation can never act in a way that violates its own concept."

If Najin unfolded his own Domain, then inside that Domain, he had to challenge. If he did not, the Domain would collapse at once.

Therefore:

"It means that inside this space made by the Star of Omniscience, Hermann has to truly know everything."

In this space, Hermann had to be omniscient. There could be nothing in this world she did not know. If there was, that would lead to Hermann's defeat.

After saying that much, Najin clenched empty air.

What came out was Excalibur. While Yuel's eyes widened, Najin raised Excalibur's output. Brilliant light flooded the Sealed City.

"..."

"..."

About thirty seconds passed.

Nothing happened.

Yuel, who had been silent, finally spoke.

"What are you doing?"

"..."

"It's blinding. Put that away."

He put it away. Merlin, inside Najin, finally burst out laughing, and Najin made an excuse. He had thought that since this weapon was so mysterious and full of unknowns, taking it out would trigger some kind of reaction.

"But nothing reacted?"

"Looks like things from outside don't count. We have to find something inside this world."

After that, they tried a few more experiments, and it proved true. He brought out Excalibur, stars, even Star Relics that Hermann herself might not know, but nothing reacted.

"So no shortcuts, huh? That Excalibur, that shiny sword, doesn't seem to do anything either."

"Looks that way."

"So now we need to find something in here that denies that damned omniscience..."

Murmuring that, Yuel stroked her chin.

"We've already done this once."

"Doesn't seem hard."

With that smile, Yuel walked ahead.

3.

Ten days passed.

Ten days since Yuel confidently stepped up saying it would be easy.

To get to the point, it was not easy at all.

For ten days, Najin and Yuel tried every bizarre thing they could think of, but none of it changed the Domain. On the tenth day, they sat side by side on a bench, looking up at the sky.

"You said it wouldn't be hard?"

"...Shut up. I'm embarrassed too."

He had expected it to be hard, but once they actually slammed into it, it felt hopeless. They could not find even one thread to follow.

When they had conquered other constellations' Domains, the process had been difficult, but finding the method itself had not been. The hardest one had been the Glass Castle's Tomb, but even then, there had been clues.

Was there even a method to begin with?

It felt like being dropped into a massive maze. A maze where they could not even tell whether an exit existed. If someone told him to smash the maze, he could do that instead...

'Merlin.'

-Yeah.

'Got any ideas?'

-Not yet. If things really get impossible, we can use another method, but that's a last resort.

'Last resort?'

-Break the Domain, drag Hermann's True Body outside, and dunk her until she admits defeat... but leaving aside whether that would even work, I can't promise we'd get the star that way. High chance the star gets damaged beyond repair.

I tried it before, and nine out of ten just broke. Najin let Merlin's mutter pass.

"Still, it wasn't like we gained nothing."

Najin spoke.

"We did find out this place is an old test site, didn't we? And we confirmed people were brought here long before you were, Yuel."

"I suspected as much, but actually confirming it feels strange. Back when I was lord, an old man testified they all dropped into this city at once around seventy-eight years earlier..."

Yuel gave a bitter smile.

"To think that before them, people had been dropped into this city hundreds of years earlier."

That was what they had learned over the past ten days. There were no people left in this city, but traces of people who once lived remained. People had definitely lived here, in this place, in this era.

"That bastard Hermann told me this before. She asked how many people had to be sacrificed to create me. How many rounds of experiments there must have been. This was probably one of those experiments."

An experiment conducted in the Sealed City's earliest days.

The ending was not hard to guess. If that experiment had succeeded, Yuel would not be here.

"It failed, and they all died. Without leaving anything behind...?"

Yuel trailed off mid-murmur. She touched her lips, as if something in her own words bothered her. She tapped her lips with her index finger, then spoke.

"Left nothing behind."

She tilted her head.

"That's strange."

"What is?"

"Isn't it strange? If it were me, I'd have left something, even out of pure spite."

Yuel stood up.

"Let's visit the lord's castle again. Something just came to me."

The lord's castle stood in the middle of the city.

Its exterior was different from the one Yuel had stayed in, but the interior was similar. They walked through the bleak hallway toward the office. Yuel swung the office door open and let out a long breath.

"There are signs people lived here, but no records were left? There's no way they never tried to leave records."

"Wouldn't they have cleared them out? Like cleaning an experiment site before a new test..."

"If that was the plan, erasing all signs of people having lived here would've been cleaner too, but they didn't. No idea why."

Yuel sat in the office chair.

"We don't know if they cleaned carelessly or couldn't erase everything, but in that case, doesn't it seem likely someone hid one or two things?"

She started feeling around the office desk. She crouched and crawled under it, pulling drawers, tapping surfaces, searching for something.

"Especially if the person was the lord. People who become lord in a fucked-up city like this are never sane. They always hold onto one thing: duty, conviction, obsession, or all of them."

The woman who had held all of them grinned.

"If you sit in this seat long enough, you naturally get more and more gloomy. You end up with more things to hide, more things to cover up. So..."

Yuel crawled back out from under the desk and began searching the entire castle top to bottom. Then suddenly she stopped in front of a cabinet. She tilted her head slightly, found something, and laughed like she couldn't believe it.

"Fuck, people really do think alike."

Tap, she nudged the underside of the cabinet with her toe.

Clunk. The cabinet shifted.

A narrow space appeared behind it. The sight looked familiar even to Najin. Yuel used to hide liquor in hidden spaces like this too.

Something had been placed in that tiny space.

Yuel reached in and picked it up. What she held was a handwritten journal. A diary hardened with dried blood stuck to it. The moment she pulled out the diary, Najin's eyes narrowed.

"That."

"Yes?"

"That's a Star Relic."

A very faint trace of starlight remained. Yuel exchanged glances with Najin and slowly nodded. Then the two opened the diary.

"I am the lord of this city."

"I do not know whether I am the first, the second, or the dozens-th sacrifice, but whatever the case, I am here."

"I do not know who will read this diary. I also do not know whether you are in the same situation as me. But if you are in the same situation as me... I hope this diary helps you."

That was how the diary began.

"These are rules written in the blood of one hundred thousand."

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