WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 409

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Land of the Abyss (2)

He crossed the Boundary Line of the Abyss.

One step past the barrier, into the interior of the Abyss, and Najin felt something strange. A sensation he had never experienced before.

Creak. Cre-creak, creak, creak......

He had expected his senses to sharpen the way they always did, but the opposite happened. His body felt heavy. Every sense went dull, like cotton soaked through with water. Even his breathing and heartbeat began to slow.

The closest thing he had felt to it was the time Merlin's magic had pulled him down beneath the surface of the water.

The sensation of falling into a darkness with no visible bottom. So the Boundary Line of the Abyss and the interior really were different. Najin exhaled slowly and raised his fist.

Thud.

He drove it into his own chest. Forcing his sluggish heart to pump, he wrung sensation back into his body.

"Huu......"

He had crossed the boundary and stepped fully into the Abyss. A long breath out, and then Najin looked ahead. Thick fog lay over everything, yet he could still see.

The Land of the Abyss. Camlann.

The landscape of a place people called hell.

"......"

Najin found himself going quiet. He had traveled the Outland and seen all manner of horrible, extraordinary things, but this was scenery that silenced even him.

The terrible things he had witnessed in the Outland.

Landscapes that defied common sense.

Terrain whose shape and origin he could not begin to guess at.

All of it had its roots here in the Abyss. The starting point of the great lake where the mother of all ancient whales once lived, the first trunk of a tree whose roots stretched up into the sky, the remains of the first giant, and more, all of it was strewn here in a chaotic heap.

Corpses, black ichor, giants formed from the cursed ones, inverted trees, pits gouged into the ground, earth and canyons coiled as if something had wrung them out, demon beasts made of dark red eyeballs......

Far too much was tangled together to capture in a single sentence. He could only list it word by word. Every piece of it was striking on its own, but something else had seized Najin's gaze.

"That thing."

"Yeah."

"What... is that?"

He raised a finger and pointed.

"The giant's corpse?"

"No, further back."

He pointed toward something in the far distance.

"That thing that looks like a mountain range. Unless my eyes are wrong, it seems to be moving... do landscapes breathe in the Abyss?"

A mountain range, far off toward what looked like the horizon, a thin line of peaks. And it was moving. Slowly, but moving.

'Do mountain ranges move in the Abyss?'

In the Abyss, it seemed plausible enough.

Common sense and natural law did not apply here, so a moving mountain range felt possible. That was the thought in Najin's mind when he asked, and Merlin gave him a bitter smile.

"There are terrains that move, but that isn't terrain."

"......Sorry?"

"That's a beast."

A beast, she said.

At that moment the mountain range heaved violently. The surrounding area shook as if in an earthquake, and the tremor carried all the way to where Najin was standing.

Boom.

Feeling that vibration, Najin narrowed his eyes. From this distance it had looked like a thin thread of a line, but when he enhanced his vision and looked more carefully, he saw something different.

'Scales?'

Scales. Dense, interlocking scales that looked as if they would rattle and clatter when disturbed. Every time the creature moved, those scales rolled like waves.

"The first and last dragon."

Merlin pointed at the mountain range.

"The Dragon of the Abyss."

The mountain range trembled. The cry of a beast too vast to measure rolled through the Abyss. Najin could not bring himself to process what he heard as the sound of an animal.

Have you ever heard a whale cry?

Once, when he had fought Icarus's sky whale, Najin had heard that sound until he was sick of it. The noise those enormous vocal cords produced felt less like an animal's voice and more like some natural phenomenon.

What he was hearing now was the same.

"For now."

Merlin grabbed his arm and pulled.

"Get down. Low."

Najin did not ask why. He pressed himself down alongside Merlin, suppressing his starlight, hiding any trace of his presence.

......Before entering the Abyss, Merlin had told him: when you hear the Dragon of the Abyss cry, lower yourself and press flat against the ground. Reduce any sign of life and suppress your starlight to its limit. When Najin had asked why, she answered:

"When the Dragon of the Abyss cries, lightning strikes."

There was no need to ask what that lightning was.

Thunder cracked.

Still low to the ground, Najin let his gaze travel outward. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled, not from sky to earth but from earth to sky, dark red bolts splitting the air. He had seen lightning like that before.

The phenomenon Gramr produced.

Dark red thunder flashed over and over. For a long stretch it struck without pause. The distance was too great to see clearly, but each time it flashed, the terrain in that area was cut apart and collapsed.

'When the Dragon of the Abyss cries, Siegfried goes on a rampage.'

That was one of the few constants in the Abyss.

He had not yet built the strength needed to face Siegfried. Encountering a rampaging Siegfried in that state, the outcome was not hard to imagine.

'He dies.'

No question about it.

There was nowhere to run. If Najin crossed paths with Siegfried right now, if he crossed swords with the Sword Demon of the Abyss unconstrained by any of the limits that had applied before, he would 'certainly' die.

No amount of crude tricks or sheer stubbornness could bridge that gap.

And it was not only Siegfried. The Dragon of the Abyss, still sealed for now, and the Witch of the Abyss too, they were all enormous existences the Najin of this moment had no chance of defeating.

So for the time being, he would have to keep himself hidden and stay out of their way.

Turning that over in his mind, Najin found himself smiling without meaning to.

"Ah."

"What?"

"It reminds me of when I first came to the Outland."

"How so?"

"Stronger above the strong, higher above the high, sky above sky......"

Sky beyond sky. At the peak of the Continent and the Outland both, he had taken a step forward and found another sky waiting.

"Still a long way to climb."

Najin looked up. The sky of the Abyss was nothing like the Outland's. Not a single star hung in it. Only pure black darkness filled the Abyss's sky, and Najin stared at it for a long moment.

A pitch-black sky with no stars visible.

The sky where he would have to carve his own stars from here on.

2.

The Land of the Abyss was wide. Obscenely wide.

That was the impression Najin had formed wandering through it.

"It is wide, isn't it. A lot of things have been pushed out and pushed aside. All of it piles up here."

"Pushed out?"

Yeah, Merlin nodded.

Those who could no longer remain on the Continent had been pushed outside to form the Outland, she explained. Camlann was where those pushed out once more came to rest.

"You remember the City of Forgetting?"

"The sediment ground city?"

"Right, that one."

Walking as she spoke, Merlin continued.

"The whole of the Abyss is basically one vast sediment ground."

Recorded human history stretched back barely a thousand years at most. But humans had existed before that millennium and left behind their own histories. All of it had simply been erased by the Witch of the Abyss.

"This is where the erased things ended up. The scraps the Witch of the Abyss swallowed."

The accumulated history of at minimum tens of thousands of years.

Sure enough, just as Merlin said, there were things that resembled ruins scattered everywhere.

"Similar to the Outland, but."

Najin said.

"Much quieter."

Strange to call it quiet, given the howling creatures and screaming all around him, but what Najin meant was something different.

No people.

The Outland had its share of demon beasts and the dead, but there were still plenty of hunters and Constellations moving around freely, and even the crow-like star hunters, unsettling as they were, could be spotted fairly often.

The Abyss was not like that.

No matter where he looked, there were no people. Only beings that had once been human, now soft and half-melted, and stars consumed by the witch in the distant past, shambling around in shapeless masses. Calling those things people felt like a stretch.

'Calling things with limbs sprouting from every hole people is a bit......'

Even for Najin, whose definition of a person was quite generous, it was a difficult call. The sight of something that looked like a dozen people kneaded together like dough made him grimace.

'No wonder they call it hell.'

Religions that bickered endlessly over doctrine and interpretation all gave the same answer when asked where hell was: the Abyss. Najin was starting to understand why.

This was a place the word hell suited. And no one would be living in hell.

Watching the cursed ones swarming toward him from the distance, Najin exhaled. He had intended to avoid combat for a while and take time to adjust to the Abyss, but it was becoming clear he could not avoid it entirely.

Grip.

Najin seized the Lance of the Crossed Star. He had spent several months working as a warden at the Boundary Line of the Abyss, and during that time Bedivere had put him through various training. He had learned a handful of techniques.

"After long years working as a warden, fighting the Cursed Ones of the Abyss, you develop a knack for it."

"Of course, this is a technique that works well in combination with my great strength and the White Spear, so there are limits to how useful it will be for you. That said, you should be able to learn it."

"You happen to have a spear as well, so."

The White Spear. Bedivere.

The Round Table's spear-wielder had passed his techniques on to Najin.

"It will serve you well."

Calling the movements Bedivere had shown him to mind, Najin settled into his stance. He let the tension out of his body and held the spear shaft loosely.

Then, bang.

He drove the spear butt down into the earth and used the rebound to launch himself upward. The leaping power of a Transcendent carried him high into the sky, and from there he looked down at the ground below.

-■■, kee■■■■ah, aaah■■ah?

The wraiths of the Abyss, trailing black ichor as they advanced, tilted their faces up toward him. Looking down at them, Najin adjusted his grip on the spear shaft, not in the middle, but at the very end, both hands clenched tight.

Kiiiiiiing!

He compressed his starlight into the spear blade. The blade wrapped in starlight flashed like a star high above. Najin fell like a meteor toward the figures staring up at him, entranced by that light.

The technique Bedivere had taught him.

Descent.

Falling straight down from the sky, Najin swung the spear. He crashed into the middle of the cursed ones that had been rushing to attack him.

Crack.

On impact, the ground caved in around the point of collision.

Boom!

A shockwave followed with a roar. Wind swept through and stripped away the fog blanketing the ground. The bodies of cursed ones caught in the blast tore apart. Black ichor scattered in all directions, and Najin breathed out through the spray.

......Against the dead of the Outland, one blow like that would have ended the fight. Not here.

Even having lost most of their bodies, they crawled along the ground toward him. The Abyss would not grant them death. Najin was about to draw his starlight up to sever their connection to the Abyss when a voice reached him.

"It has been a long time since I've seen that coat."

He turned toward the sound.

"Ah, that familiar coat. It has been a long time since I last saw the man who used to wear it. I regret it sometimes, I think, perhaps I should have spoken with him a little more while he was still himself."

Someone walked out of the thick fog.

"He was good company. And in this wretched land, there were precious few I could actually talk to."

A middle-aged man stepped into view.

"Hmm."

The man's eyes were dark red.

"It has been long since my decline, yet the duty of this land's lord remains. So when a guest arrives, welcoming them is my part to play."

Dark red brands were carved into the man's body.

"Welcome, knight from distant lands."

As for myself, the man said.

"I am the king of this land."

It has been a long time since I had a nation or subjects, but a king is still a king. Najin let out a short breath as he looked at the man who spoke those words.

He had thought no one could be living in a place like hell, a place that matched it in every way......

But apparently, even in hell, people found a way to live.

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