WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 412

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Land of the Abyss (5)

The Abyss is said to have existed since the very distant past, tens of thousands of years ago. Over all those tens of thousands of years, was Arthur truly the only one who ever raised a hand against the witch?

The man who answered that question with "of course not" was sitting across from Najin right now. Najin watched the middle-aged man in silence. To the eye, he looked perfectly ordinary.

'Can I kill him?'

Yes. Even without Excalibur, a light gesture would be enough to end him. That should be true, and yet.

'That man will not die.'

Najin's instinct gave a different answer than his reason.

'Even with Excalibur, I cannot kill him. By no means, by no method, can this being be killed.'

Rationally, it made no sense that Najin, a Transcendent, could not kill the middle-aged man sitting before him. But instinct kept whispering the same thing: he cannot be killed.

"Huu."

Najin let out a short breath, closed his eyes, and opened them.

"You said I already know the answer."

"That I did."

Enough clues had been given, the king said. Najin began tracing back through their conversation piece by piece.

"In your era, dragons and giants still possessed intelligence, you said as much?"

"I did. I had the occasional brawl with a few bold dragons, but I kept quite a friendly relationship with the giants. We look alike to begin with, don't we? When dragons came charging at us, the giants would help us out."

"And you said you were friends with the evil dragon Fafnir."

"Oh, he's called an evil dragon now, but back in my day he was arrogant, yes, yet wise. A friend who always gave me counsel."

So. During the age this man had lived in, dragons and giants clearly possessed intelligence. They cooperated with humans, and sometimes became friends.

From that, a single question arose.

"That's strange."

Tap. Najin knocked his own chin.

"The dragons and giants of my era have nothing resembling intelligence. They desire the end of the world. They eat any human they find on sight. They burn civilization to the ground wherever they find it."

Those were the dragons and giants of his time. And Najin had a rough sense of why they had fallen to such a state.

"Dragons were originally proud creatures. Not all of them, but there were certainly noble and refined dragons among them, before the Dragon of the Abyss appeared, that is."

Merlin had said that once.

"A dragon cannot resist the main current of its kind. The first and last dragon, the primordial and final dragon, the Dragon of the Abyss. The moment that monster desired the end of the world, it was only natural that all dragons went mad along with it."

She had shaken her head in disgust, saying the Dragon of the Abyss's awakening was what had broken all dragons. If that was true, then the moment the Dragon of the Abyss awakened was the very moment the dragons were corrupted.

And in the age this king had lived, the dragons were not yet broken. So, Najin continued the thought.

"Do you know the first dragon?"

"...Ah, I do."

"What manner of being was it?"

"A conceptual existence. The master of all dragons, the king of dragons, something like a concept without tangible form."

Najin went quiet for a moment.

"The problem is that even after falling to the level of mere beasts, the mystique the dragon race itself possesses did not disappear."

Information Merlin had shared once about the mystique of dragons, all those scattered details, drifted through his mind. Fragmented pieces of knowledge floated through Najin's thoughts. There were far too many gaps to connect them all.

"Immutable. Indestructible. Eternal."

And yet, click, the pieces began to lock together. What filled the gaps was Najin's intuition. He could not say why. The grounds were thin. The conclusion he was about to reach was certainly a leap, closer to conjecture than proof.

"Immutable. Does not change."

"Indestructible. Does not crumble or cease to be."

"Eternal. An existence unconstrained by time."

Even so.

"Immutable."

Najin felt this was close to the right answer.

"Does not change. Put another way, does not age, and maintains its current state."

He looked at the king as he spoke.

"Indestructible. Does not crumble or cease to be. Simply put, it does not die."

The more Najin said, the more the king's eyes grew still. The king tilted his chin as if to say: keep going.

"Eternal."

Najin exhaled.

"An existence unconstrained by time."

Dragons are born already carrying all three of those mystiques. They are innately immutable, indestructible, and eternal. That is why they are perfect.

"......"

Najin raised his hand without a word.

The king had said it.

He had chosen to become a mortal king in order to challenge an absolutely immortal god. He had tried to become a god of the earth and drag down the god of the sky. And as the price of that challenge, the king had his very life denied to him.

Mortal became immortal.

Acquired became innate.

Imperfect became perfect.

And so the king became an innately immortal and perfect being. Just like a dragon.

"Is that them-the souls and bodies of your people?"

Najin pointed at something with one finger. Not the writhing cursed ones. And not the king sitting before him either.

"Ah."

The king looked to where Najin pointed and let out a long breath. A moment later he burst out laughing, as if it had surpassed anything he had expected.

"I was wondering whether I needed to give more clues, but you're a man of keen intuition. Yes, that's the answer."

"Then that is your true form."

"In a manner of speaking. What's sitting across from you right now is, in some sense, an empty shell."

No wonder it could not be killed. Until the true form's life ran dry, what sat before him would not die.

"Do you know its name?"

"I do not."

"No, you know that too. Did I not already tell you? I gave you its name."

Over the course of their conversation, the king had only spoken two names aloud. One was Fafnir. The other was the name the witch had called him by.

Leviathan.

The name of a monster from ancient myth. The name of a dreadful and immense monster that dwelt at the world's end, in the depths of the abyss. Pronounced differently depending on the language, but in the current Empire's tongue, that monster was called this.

"Leviathan."

What Najin pointed at was the far edge of the Abyss.

There, a single beast existed like a vast mountain range. The one responsible for reducing all dragons to beasts and casting them into the Abyss, the one who was the master of all dragons.

He pointed at that beast with one finger.

His eyes stayed on the king before him as he spoke.

"Dragon of the Abyss, Leviathan."

"Correct."

2.

"You got it right, so I ought to give you a reward. Do you enjoy plays or novels set against the backdrop of war?"

"I do not."

"Oh, what a shame. Then what about stories of heroes?"

"Those I enjoy."

"Good, then. Well then."

The king closed both eyes.

"Look straight into my eyes."

He opened them. Najin met the gaze of dark reddish-black pupils that seemed to draw him in. Beyond those eyes, Najin glimpsed something pale and indistinct.

The moment he looked at it.

From somewhere came the sharp crack of a single clap, and Najin's vision flipped. The scenery rewound rapidly. Time retreated from the present toward the past.

Ten years, a hundred years, several hundred years, several thousand years...

Many things rose and fell, again and again. Then time suddenly found its proper pace. What unfolded before Najin's eyes was the world as it was ten thousand years ago.

Humanity ten thousand years ago thrived and flourished.

Beyond the Continent and into the Outland, stretching even into parts of Camlann, all of it was humanity's territory. Countless stars shone in the sky, and they willingly stood at the forefront for humanity's future. The Stars of countless heroes blazed brilliantly.

It was not only humans who shone.

Faeries freely bestowed blessings on humans. Giants were humanity's closest friends. Even the arrogant dragons who ruled the sky willingly let humans ride upon their backs and became their allies.

Because they had a purpose to fulfill.

For a single purpose, transcending rank, race, and species alike, every being in the world cooperated.

"Bring down the false god."

Their purpose was one.

"Kill the witch who defiles this world."

Kill the Witch of the End, of destruction.

Be free from that destruction. For this, all of humanity surrendered individual freedom. They became one army and marched toward the Abyss.

At their back stood a mortal king.

A king who had whittled down his own life to stand against the Witch of the Abyss and forged himself into a single spear. An ordinary human who had come to possess Authority. All who made a pact with him gained the power to resist the Abyss.

To kill an absolutely immortal god, the army led by a mortal king marched toward the Abyss.

Thud, thoom, thud.

The earth shook with the giants' stomping. Dragons flew through the sky and breathed fire. The brilliant Stars shining in the night sky marched in step with humanity.

Tens of thousands of dragons, hundreds of thousands of giants, millions and tens of millions of humans advanced on the Abyss.

It was a sight out of myth.

And there was a woman watching it all, laughing. As if utterly delighted, as if the situation were too entertaining to endure, she doubled over with laughter.

"Everyone believes they are special."

"Special, and so they believe they are different."

"Believing they will write a story found nowhere else, convinced without a shred of doubt that they will reach a different ending than those who came before, they march forward so bravely."

She.

"As if that could possibly be true."

Gave a light wave of her hand.

Crack.

The earth split. The sky tore. Dark red Thorn Trees erupted from the cracked earth and skewered the giants. The heads of giants hung from the tips of those thorns like fruit. From the ripped sky, dark red blood poured down, and those it touched rotted, crumbled, and finally fell to dust.

"The reason I let you gather your armies, the reason I allowed your heroes to grow so numerous, it was simple whimsy. A god's whim can sometimes look like a miracle."

Thirteen stars rose in the sky.

Dark red stars blazed as blood poured down and flooded everything below. The flooding blood became a deluge. Dark red waves swallowed the army whole. Millions of humans drowned, and still they thrust their spears and swords at the witch.

"Did you think it was a miracle?"

Pierced by spears and swords, the witch bled. Even as she was swallowed by filthy water, the flames the dragons breathed charred her body. The starlight Transcendents created by detonating their own Stars, the Absolute Techniques heroes traded their lives to unleash, tore the witch's flesh apart.

She bled, was torn apart, was broken, and still the witch did not stop laughing.

"Little child."

The witch walked all the way to the king and stopped before him.

"Was the life I guided you through enjoyable?"

She touched his face with fondness.

"For me, it was the most delightful story imaginable."

At that, people came charging at the witch. The hero who had survived to the last, who held Excalibur. His eyes carried hatred and resentment, for the witch, and for his own father.

He swung Excalibur with the intent to cut them both down at once. But the sword did not reach. The moment it grazed the hem of the witch's skirt, the hero crumbled. He became dark red slime and pooled at the king's feet.

The dead gathered like a swamp at the king's feet.

"You killed them."

The witch smiled.

"All of them. You killed them all."

The world turned dark red before Najin's eyes.

A thick, drawn-out voice echoed in his ears. All of them, you killed them. Everything was destroyed because of you. That voice scraped against Najin's eardrums.

And then everything tangled together into one.

The king's soul melted. Tens of millions of already-melted humans wound into the king. The dragons who had made a pact with him screamed and went mad, and the madness spread to the giants too.

Only the king did not go mad.

Without going mad, he heard every scream. The screams of tens of millions in agony echoed in his ears. Between the screams, the witch's laughter rang out. The world filled with a noise that threatened to swallow the mind whole.

Tangled, entwined, mixed together, and finally...

-Najin.

Ah.

-Can you hear me?

Her voice reached him through the noise.

Only then did Najin release the breath he had been holding.

'I can.'

-Good. Then you're fine.

Merlin's voice. Leaning on it, Najin let out a short breath and opened his eyes. The scenery that had been rushing past was gone without a trace. He was back in the middle of the Abyss, exactly where he had been sitting all along.

"Well then."

Najin looked across at the man before him.

"You of all people, who will soon face the witch, need to know. Just how fearsome a being she is."

There sat someone who had challenged the witch long before Najin, long before Arthur even. The king who had been imprisoned in this hell for eternity as the price of that challenge smiled.

"That thing was not made to be defeated, my friend."

The immortal king pointed at the Dragon of the Abyss.

"Challenge a god, and you will simply end up just like me."

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