WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur
Chapter 400
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Arthurian Legend (1)
There is a word called Fate.
Fate. That damned word.
As far as she was concerned, nine out of ten people who took that word into their mouths were soaked through with defeatism, either far too pessimistic, or the sort who carried themselves as though they had already made their peace with this world.
It tended to go something like this.
"Every living thing has a life already decided for it. Life is like a well-crafted story, and from the moment of birth to the moment of death, every part of that story has already been written."
One through ten, everything is predetermined. There are roles to fill and lives to live, and humans can never escape them. That was the logic.
"The being who decides this story is none other than God."
Then who is that God?
Who is the one that weaves this story?
"Morgan le Fay."
The God they spoke of was the witch. The Fatalists gave the name of God to the witch who had stained the sky black and was pushing the world toward its end.
"God has declared the end of this land. God has judged that we no longer deserve to live. What can we, mere humans, do against the will of the great God?"
Nothing can be done.
Absolutely nothing.
Even the most celebrated heroes had fallen to their knees before the witch, and even the brilliantly shining Stars had lost their light. The sun had set and the moon would not rise.
"Everyone has failed."
Everyone has failed, so you will fail too. If failure is inevitable, what is the point of trying? Effort is meaningless, and resistance just as useless. Before the great current God has set in motion, the human will is like a sailboat in a storm, it will be swept away and disappear.
If the voyage is doomed to fail from the start,
it is better not to attempt it at all.
"Accept the life you have been given."
So accept the life you have been given, walk the path God has laid out, and close your eyes along the way. That is the only choice left to humans in a dying world.
"Follow your Fate."
The Fatalists proclaimed this every single day.
More and more people began to follow those words. The light drained from people's eyes, and their pupils grew a shade darker than even the sky above.
The whole world was dyed in defeatism.
Those soaked in defeat had no vitality. Even children barely old enough to be called children stared at the world with hollow eyes, like the aged who had already fixed a date for their own deaths.
"Better not to try than to fail anyway?"
And the girl.
"What a load of absolute crap."
Arthur hated the word Fate.
2.
The girl's name was Arthur.
She would one day be called the great hero, the protagonist of the most widely read epic tale, yet her birth was as unremarkable as could be. The polar opposite of every heroic narrative cliché.
No dragon's blood ran in her veins. She did not hatch from an egg. Her parents were neither nobility nor royalty, and she was certainly no heir to some distinguished bloodline.
Arthur was born to ordinary parents.
They were farmers, the kind of ordinary people you could find anywhere. They lived ordinary lives, devoted themselves to religion in an ordinary way, and by the standards of that era, died ordinary deaths.
Dangling.
Around the time Arthur turned ten, the first sight that greeted her when she woke one morning was her parents hanging from the ceiling.
Tongues lolling, they were dead.
The cause of death was asphyxiation.
They had left their own child behind and hanged themselves. Falling too deep into the Fatalist religion had been the cause. Today and tomorrow would be no different, and since they were going to die miserably anyway, there was no reason not to die today. That was their logic.
"......"
Arthur looked at her parents' bodies without a word.
They had beaten and worked her every day of her life, but they had also held her warmly through the night. And now they could no longer hold her.
They hung too high for Arthur to reach. Staring up at them, she clicked her tongue.
No wonder it was so dreadfully cold last night.
Her parents had not fulfilled their duties, but Arthur fulfilled hers as a child. She collected their bodies and held a funeral. Digging graves with a shovel felt like too much trouble, so she cremated them in the field they had tended.
A ten-year-old child cremated her own parents.
The adults who watched Arthur wipe the soot from her face with the back of her hand whispered among themselves. She must have gone mad from losing her parents, they said, and pointed fingers at her. Arthur paid them no mind, dusted off her hands, and stood up.
Those who need to live will live.
Her parents had never taught her how to live. But whether parents want it or not, children always learn from them.
"Fate."
In Arthur's mind, the cause of her parents' deaths was Fatalism. That damned Fate. An excuse invented by those soaked in defeat to escape from life.
She did not yet know how to live.
But at the very least, she had no desire to live like that.
She had not decided what she should do, but she had decided what she would not do. From that day on, Arthur developed an almost obsessive hatred of the word Fate. She started by asking the adults around her.
"What sort of adult do you think I'll become?"
The answers she got: a farmer, probably. Or with a face like that, sold off to some wealthy man. Or maybe a tavern or a brothel, that's the most likely bet. Things like that.
Not words suited for a small child, but that was the average for that era.
Arthur listened and thought.
Right, I'll cross all of those off the list first.
She had been born a contrarian. After crossing off everything the adults suggested, few options remained.
A mercenary.
That very day, Arthur stormed into a mercenary band. There was hardly any band that would take in a girl of around ten, and after being turned away several times, one finally accepted her.
"Leave her be. We needed a chore-runner anyway, works out well. Hey, kid."
"The name is Arthur."
"Why would I bother learning the name of someone who'll run off after a few days? I'll give you food and a place to sleep, so stop being a nuisance. Fair warning, no pay."
Arthur started with odd jobs and slowly worked her way into the band. Polishing the mercenaries' gear, running their errands, she learned how to handle weapons along the way.
Four years passed like that.
She became a mercenary.
Nobody had ever taught her directly, but from the talk mercenaries threw around in taverns and the movements she picked up watching over their shoulders, Arthur drew her learning. A girl of only fourteen began to stand out on the battlefield.
"Dead."
"Dead."
"What about Touslek?"
"Died with his head chewed off."
"That's a shame. If he'd been chewed from the legs up, he would've been chattering away right to the very end."
Death was everywhere in that era, but mercenaries lived a little closer to it than most. Arthur grew up in a place where a comrade joking around yesterday came back as a corpse tomorrow.
"And you'll be dead soon too. My plan is to throw you out as bait and run. Those who need to live will live."
"Reasonable."
"It is. That's the mercenary way."
"......"
"......"
"Aren't you scared, kid?"
The captain stared at Arthur with a look of disbelief as the horde of demon beasts closed in. Arthur shrugged.
"I've lived long enough."
"Quite the thing to say for a fourteen-year-old."
The captain let out a hollow laugh.
"What was your name again?"
"Arthur. Captain."
"Right, Arthur."
The captain had watched Arthur since she was small. He let out a long breath as he looked at her.
"If you survive this, quit being a mercenary."
"Pardon?"
"I'm saying it because you remind me of my son, who got swept up following me into this life and died for it. You're different from the rest of us, your head works. You learn everything fast. And on top of that, you're still young."
"Where is this coming from all of a sudden?"
"So."
The captain ruffled Arthur's hair.
"Whether it's as a noble's guard, working under those people, finding somewhere a bit safer, that's what I'm telling you. You've got the talent for it."
"Shouldn't someone with talent be standing at the front?"
"Gwahahahaha! You tiny little brat, if everyone in the world were like you, the world wouldn't have ended up the way it has."
He pointed at the battlefield.
There were no heroes there.
It was a battlefield full of people just trying to earn the day's meal, and yet paradoxically, the ones fighting the demon beasts threatening to swallow the world were exactly those kinds of people.
"Heroes are for lunatics."
The captain shoved Arthur aside.
"So don't become a hero. You won't die clean."
He became the bait instead of her, and the captain died. The mercenary who had always made the rational choice made, in his final moment, a choice even he could not explain.
The captain was dead.
Arthur put more care into the captain's funeral than she had for her parents. She took up a shovel and dug into the earth, and went to the trouble of burying what little remained of his half-consumed body that she had managed to recover.
Standing before the grave in silence, Arthur raised her head.
"I'm terrible at doing what I'm told, but even I'd have a hard time ignoring the last words of the person who saved my life."
Arthur smiled faintly.
"I'll quit being a mercenary."
But Arthur was not good-natured enough to follow someone else's dying wishes without question. So she decided to carry out only half of the captain's final request.
"Instead, I'm going to try this thing called being a hero."
3.
Fourteen.
With the money she had saved from her time as a mercenary, Arthur began buying up epic tales and all manner of books. She studied what it meant to be a hero. She corrected her manner of speech, corrected her posture, and observed the ways people around the world lived their lives.
* * *
Fifteen.
Arthur threw herself into battle after battle. She plunged into the most dangerous frontlines and fought on the side of the most vulnerable, asking for nothing in return.
Rumors of Arthur began to spread among the soldiers. She survived one demon wilderness after another.
She survived, and survived.
And survived again.
* * *
Sixteen.
With age came a broader view. Eyes that had once lived only to refuse other people's expectations, thinking only I refuse to live like that, began to see something different.
* * *
Seventeen.
Battlefields, villages in peril, places ravaged by demon beasts, she traveled everywhere and broadened her understanding. The more she saw and heard, the more naturally her thoughts deepened.
"I can't stand any of you."
One day she rescued some Fatalist zealots. Arthur despised them with a passion, and in the past she would have thrown a punch the moment her eyes met theirs, but the years and the wider perspective she had gained meant she could now sit through a few words with them.
"I hate those defeatist faces of yours. I hate that Fatalism you preach, and I can't understand how anyone makes an already miserable life even worse on purpose."
Arthur asked the zealot.
"Why do you live like that?"
Why.
"Is that really the only way you know how to live?"
The zealot answered.
"People look to the sky and dream of tomorrow. They say that in the distant past, stars hung in the sky."
"They did."
"People dreamed while looking at those stars. With the great heroes who had lived brilliant lives as their signposts, with those heroes as their lanterns, they would dream of a magnificent tomorrow. But......"
"But?"
The zealot pointed at the sky.
"There are no stars now."
"......"
"Even when we look up, no future can be seen. Every shining star has fallen, and it has been decades since the world began its end."
"So what you're saying is."
"Yes."
"The cause of all this, in your view, is that there are no stars in the sky?"
"That is correct."
Arthur looked up at the sky.
No stars were visible.
A sky full of lies. The false sky the witch had made. Staring up at it, Arthur found herself laughing without meaning to. When the zealot asked why, she answered.
"It reminded me of something from when I was young."
Looking up at a starless sky, the young Arthur had dreamed of stars. Recalling that past self, she smiled, something like relief easing through her chest.
"Even worthless people have something to teach."
"What do you......"
"If your lives are this wretched because there are no stars,"
Arthur raised her hand.
"then keep watching the sky."
Arthur pointed upward.
"A star will rise soon enough."
* * *
Eighteen.
Having left home at ten, having seen and learned much and faced countless people, the girl had grown. Now an adult, she was capable of thinking in ways her past self could not.
The world was still wretched.
Nothing had changed.
In this wretched world, people all went through life with their heads bowed. Resigned to their Fate, content with the lives handed to them, never looking upward, dying day by day. Arthur hated the sight of those faces. She hated the word Fate.
...... When a child dislikes something, they throw a tantrum.
To avoid doing what they dislike, they refuse to listen to adults and dig in out of stubbornness. There is no conviction behind it, no noble purpose. It is simply not wanting to, throwing a fit at the world the way a child does.
For the past eight years, Arthur had lived like that.
But now that she was an adult, well......
She could make a different choice.
"Stars."
She reached her hand up toward the sky.
"People need stars."
The signposts of the world were broken.
In a broken world, people wandered because they did not know where to go. In a darkness where they could not see a single step ahead, it would be wrong to scold those who had taken a wrong turn, they simply could not see clearly.
Even so, Arthur wanted to tell them.
Stop living like that.
That road is wrong. Walk a proper road.
But if she was going to scold them, she would first have to light the way ahead of them. Becoming the kind of person who could point toward the right road was what would give her words any meaning.
"It is because there are no stars."
"It is because there are no stars that we cannot dream of tomorrow."
Arthur intended to drive a stake into the sky so that the wretched Fatalists could no longer make their excuses.
"If I."
Arthur fixed the direction of her life.
"If I become a Star, that will be enough."
That was roughly when it happened.
"Hold the Sword."
A voice began to reach Arthur's ears.
"Hold the Sword."
"You, and only you, must hold that sword."
To the one who had raised her banner against Fate, the world, with bitter irony, whispered of Fate.
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