WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 423

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Motive or Origin (1)

The first trip into the Abyss had been one hardship after another.

He had encountered Leviathan, who introduced himself as the true form of the Dragon of the Abyss. He had fought a wicked dragon infamous from a thousand years ago for three days and three nights without rest. And on top of all that, immediately after, he had been forced into a desperate escape against dozens of witches and the armies of the Abyss.

'And then, at the very end?'

Mordred's arrows had skewered his shoulder and calf more times than he could count. Even for Najin, who was no stranger to grueling ordeals, it had been the kind of suffering that made him think, this is a bit much.

"Huuuh......"

Najin let out a sigh that could have sunk the floor. Every inch of him ached. The shoulder Mordred's arrows had punched through ached worse, his joint grinding every time he rotated his arm.

"Life, I tell you."

Clang. Najin tilted his cup.

"It really isn't easy. Ah, this world is not an easy place to live in. It feels like the world has it out for me specifically. I don't particularly like alcohol, but lately I keep thinking about a drink. Life is hard, so liquor tastes sweet."

Najin muttered as he sipped.

It was the kind of grumbling a mercenary rotting away in a tavern might say, but the problem was that the world genuinely was cruel to Najin, and his life genuinely was not easy.

"Starting from the Underground City, the order kept throwing themselves at me trying to kill me, and once I'd finally dealt with that, the next one was the Carnival King, supposedly the greatest demon in all the Outland, and after that there was......"

Ugh, Najin sighed.

"Why are there so many people who want to knock me around?"

"So who is it this time?"

"Do you see that up there?"

Najin pointed at the sky. His drinking companion tilted his head back to look.

Three crimson Blight Stars.

Stars that had appeared in the sky not long ago. He recalled that thirteen of the witches' sealed stars had been bound away, and three had since been released, sending the Constellations and the Gray Tower into an uproar for quite some time.

"What on earth did you get up to down there?"

"Let's see......"

Najin set down his cup, stroked his chin, and began to talk. His drinking companion listened in silence, and then Sword Saint Karon let out a hollow laugh.

"So."

"Yes."

"While being chased by dozens of witches and hunted by the armies of the Abyss, you summoned the Sword Demon to make your escape, and then ran into Mordred on top of that and came out alive?"

"That's more or less how it went."

"How are you still breathing?"

A perfectly reasonable question.

2.

Najin and Karon had taken to sharing drinks from time to time. He couldn't quite remember when it had started, but most likely Karon had been the one to show up unexpectedly first.

"Care for a drink?"

Whenever word reached Karon that Najin had returned to the Continent, he would bring drinks and snacks to the Dawning Tower, and since Najin had no particular reason to refuse, the two had fallen into the habit of sharing a cup together now and then.

Najin thought Karon was a good drinking companion. His easy-going nature aside, he was simply someone comfortable to talk with without reservation.

"One thing led to another, and it worked out."

"One thing led to another, huh. Quite something."

So it was that today, only a few days after Najin's return from the Abyss, the two were still clinking cups.

"So how was it?"

"How was what?"

"The Sword Demon of the Abyss."

Karon said it while chewing on a strip of dried meat.

"I crossed swords with him once, back at the Boundary Line. But there were a lot of restrictions then. He wasn't in a position to display his full ability."

"True enough."

The Siegfried Najin had encountered at the Boundary Line of the Abyss had been under numerous constraints. The time limit was one thing, but the binding seal dragging him back into the Abyss had also been clinging to his heels.

"So the Sword Demon of the Abyss with all those restrictions removed."

Karon paused to collect himself.

"How was the first Sword Saint?"

"......"

The phrase "first Sword Saint" made Najin go quiet for a moment. Not many people knew that the identity of the Sword Demon of the Abyss was Siegfried, or that he had been the first Sword Saint.

At most, the Round Table and a handful of ancient Constellations who still remembered the era a thousand years ago would know such a thing.

But Karon knew. However he had come to learn it, he was aware that the Sword Demon of the Abyss was Siegfried, long before he had ever met Najin.

'The reason the Sword Saint challenged Excalibur in the first place was......'

To face Siegfried. Najin tilted his cup and slowly opened his mouth.

"Terrifyingly strong."

The opponents Najin had once struggled against would not have lasted a moment against Siegfried. The image of Siegfried shattering the witches single-handedly, slashing through Kether again and again, still circled in Najin's mind.

"More than anything......"

Najin set down his cup, reached out, and closed his fist around empty air. Gripping Excalibur, he settled into a stance. The moment Karon saw it, his eyes narrowed.

"You saw it? That technique?"

It was rough, but it was the stance for Thousand Swords. Najin nodded at Karon's question.

"I managed to grasp Thousand Swords, at least. I could follow it somehow, but what came after was completely beyond me."

"Ten Thousand Forms."

"Right, the one that follows Thousand Swords."

Najin lowered the tip of the sword and frowned.

"I watched it. I saw the sword paths it traced, I watched the stance, I tracked the trajectory the blade carved through the air."

He had seen all of it. And if he had somehow "seen" it, Najin could at least clumsily imitate the technique.

That was how he had copied countless techniques up until now. Perfectly reproducing one required understanding the person's life and glimpsing their inner world, but if he was only mimicking the form, watching alone was usually enough.

"I saw it."

But.

"Far from imitating it, I couldn't even conjure it in my mind."

This time was different. He had watched. He had seen every movement, and still understood nothing. Thousand Swords he had somehow followed, but Ten Thousand Forms was on an entirely different level from any technique he had seen before.

Different. Strange. Something else entirely.

Every time he tried to call it to mind, all that surfaced was a pitch-black canvas. A white canvas painted over with black until not a single spot remained.

"Well, it isn't a single technique."

Karon said it over a sip of his drink.

"Thousand Swords, mastering a thousand blades."

He traced his fingertip through the air, drawing sword paths in the empty space before him as though his finger were a brush.

"Ten Thousand Forms, weaving ten thousand stances."

A single stroke. From that stroke, lines branched outward in every direction like the limbs of a tree. What took shape was a single tree in full growth.

"Thousand Swords, Ten Thousand Forms."

A thousand swords. Ten thousand forms.

Capable of becoming anything.

And capable of cutting anything.

"I only ever mastered Thousand Swords myself. If I had learned Ten Thousand Forms, the epithet of my star would not be the Star of a Thousand Swords. Why else would my star have that name?"

Karon chuckled and sipped his drink.

"Even after mastering a thousand sword arts, I just could not advance beyond that point. Not that I was anything less than a once-in-a-generation genius, mind you. Before you came along, anyway."

Before Najin appeared, that description had belonged to Karon alone. At the time, Karon had been the youngest person to achieve Expert, then Sword Seeker, then Sword Master.

A person who had lived barely fifty years, not even a hundred.

And yet that person possessed a sword art that surpassed even Transcendents with centuries behind them, and if you set aside the status and Authority of a Transcendent and spoke purely of swordsmanship, the only person in the Outland right now who could defeat Karon was Najin.

In fact, setting Najin aside, the one who had endured the longest against Siegfried was none other than Karon himself.

"He's far away. Unreachably far. No matter how long I think about it, I cannot see the answer."

"How do you know?"

Karon did not ask what he meant. He simply knocked back the rest of his drink and let out a long breath.

"I saw it once. When I was young."

Karon looked up at the sky.

"In the Sword Order, there is a sanctuary only those considered candidates for Sword Saint are permitted to enter. A sanctuary left behind by the first Sword Saint."

"What's inside?"

"A warning thrown at arrogant little bastards who think they're geniuses."

He smiled, bitter.

"It's pure white. At first you don't even know what it is, just a white space sitting there. But later, once your level rises and you go back, you see something different."

What is it you see?

"Sharp. Get close and it cuts you. You barely manage to understand that something has been sliced apart. The moment I grasped that, I became a Sword Seeker."

And then?

"Once you can read the sword paths, you see something completely different. What you thought was empty white space turns out to be all the paths where swords have passed. When I realized that, I became a Sword Master."

Karon pointed toward the sky above.

"At the end of those paths, there he was. Not looking back this way. Looking toward something even further away. Even having grown that strong, even having become that great, still looking ahead at what comes next."

Only his back was visible.

"Seeing that made me furious."

"Furious, you say."

"Yes. I was called a once-in-a-generation genius. Praised as a swordsman without equal. My name rang out across the entire Continent. I would be lying if I said I was not arrogant. I was arrogant. I was full of myself."

In his younger days, at least.

"No matter how much praise came from outside, the moment I set foot in that space, I was just a kid. From the first Sword Saint's perspective, not even worth turning around to look at. That infuriated me."

Karon stretched a hand toward the sky.

"I want to reach that man. I want to make that arrogant swordsman turn around and look back at me. I want to cross swords with him. That was the wish I carried, and my origin."

A sight he had held in his eyes since childhood.

An idol he had been chasing since childhood.

"And then, at the Boundary Line, the moment I caught sight of the Sword Demon beyond the line, something struck me all at once."

"What?"

"Ah, so it's him."

Karon breathed out the words.

"That person is the first Sword Saint. The one I have been chasing all along is right there. When that realization hit me, grief came, but another feeling came with it. Somewhat shamefully......"

Karon gave a short laugh.

"I was glad."

Glad, he said.

"Because I could actually cross swords with him. Not a phantom from the past, but a real, living being right there to fight."

He closed his fist around his star.

"A tragedy and a stroke of luck, at the same time."

The Star of a Thousand Swords, a star reaching for a thousand blades.

"What, are you disappointed by such an impure motive?"

Karon chuckled and tilted his cup.

"I am not some particularly noble person. I am not the kind who sacrifices himself for a greater cause. I simply love the sword. I am a man who wants to test how far a single sword can take him."

A man who needed nothing beyond the sword.

"No matter how fine the words you dress it up in, the Sword Order is a place only those who are mad about the sword can enter. And naturally, the head of an order like that......"

Karon gripped his sword.

"Should be the one who is most mad about the sword. Don't you think?"

Najin gave a faint smile.

"That's true. And I am not particularly disappointed. It is not as if I am so noble myself."

"Oh? The heir of King Arthur and the one carrying the fate of the world is not noble? Now there is an interesting topic."

"Reaching the highest peak."

Looking at the sky, Arthur's star still sat at the very top. Najin's star was still positioned somewhere beneath it.

"Many reasons have come along since then, but the fundamental purpose driving me is that. Not a very noble reason, when you put it that way."

Karon burst out laughing.

"Indeed. You are a little mad too, in your own way."

"As if anyone in their right mind would have pulled this sword out."

"That's true enough as well."

So then, Najin said.

"Are you ready?"

"Almost finished."

"Soon, then."

"Yes."

They clinked cups.

"The day we defeat the Sword Demon of the Abyss is drawing near."

3.

"What kind of person was Mordred?"

"The knight who respected Arthur most."

"Respected her most?"

Najin blinked. Merlin let out a sigh and nodded. That was exactly why she had found it so impossible to understand, she said.

"If Arthur pointed at a pit of fire and said jump in, Mordred would have jumped without a moment's hesitation. Even if he burned to death, he was the kind of person who would think, there must have been a reason, and go to his grave at peace with it."

It was a portrait of the man quite different from how he appeared in the Chronicles of Arthur. In every heroic tale tied to Arthur, Mordred was branded a traitor, a rebel, always painted in a suspicious light.

"That is because the recorders who came later already knew Mordred would betray Arthur, so they wrote it that way. Right up until the moment of that betrayal, Mordred was a loyal knight."

Excessively loyal, even.

Merlin's expression turned bitter.

"So no one saw it coming."

She spoke as if drawing the memory back to mind.

"Who could have imagined that a Mordred like that would take the witch's side and drive Arthur to her death?"

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