WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 424

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Motive or Origin (2)

Mordred, traitor of the Round Table.

His name has since become synonymous with betrayal itself, but Merlin said it had not always been that way, whatever history might record.

"If he'd been that kind of man from the start, either I or Bedivere would have dealt with him long before. Mordred was a loyal knight. A knight prepared to do literally anything Arthur asked of him."

All the more reason, then.

"That same man became the Witch's apostle and turned his blade on Arthur. No wonder the Round Table was thrown into chaos."

Mordred's betrayal had been a shock.

"The one who drove Arthur to the brink of death was the Witch of the Abyss, but the one who wrote the final line of Arthur's story was Mordred. He pierced Arthur's heart with Clarent."

In that last moment, he had run his own sword, Clarent, through Arthur's heart. What brought down the curtain on the legend of King Arthur was not a demon, not the Dragon of the Abyss, not the Witch. It was Mordred, a Knight of the Round Table.

"......"

Merlin's expression was complicated as she spoke of the past. Najin found it a little unfamiliar. Whenever she had talked about Arthur's death or the Round Table's traitor before, Merlin had always spat the words out like something bitter.

As if she could barely hold back her rage.

As if killing them a thousand times over would not be enough.

She used to say their names with her hatred boiling openly on the surface, not bothering to hide it. Now she was different, no longer simply furious the way she had been back then. When Najin asked why, Merlin stuck out her lower lip and pointed at him.

"Because of you, you idiot."

"Because of me?"

"It was supposed to be a memory I kept buried. Something I hated, raged at, something that made me shudder just to think about......"

Poke. Merlin jabbed a finger into Najin's chest.

"You dug it all up. You made me come to terms with it."

Originally, Merlin's memories had not been whole. The memories and emotions that the Merlin of a thousand years ago had been unable to bear were taken away by the fairy Merlin.

What remained in the human Merlin was only a vague hatred.

She could not know the exact details. She could not even guess at why they had made the choices they did. The past was blurry, and all that remained was the result: their betrayal had ended Arthur's story.

She had hated them with all of that buried beneath the surface.

But now that Najin had helped her recover all her memories and reclaim the other half of herself, things were a little different. Merlin looked down at her own body.

"A thousand years have passed since then."

She smiled bitterly at the sight of herself, grown, closer to who she had once been.

"And my other half spent several times that long inside a dream."

Merlin pressed a hand to her chest.

"Inside that dream, I ran the simulation over and over. Trying to figure out why Mordred made that choice, what he was trying to gain, what reason he could possibly have had for doing what he did."

"Did you find the answer?"

"Not precisely. Any conclusion I've reached is still just a guess."

Even so, Merlin breathed out slowly.

"I've reached some kind of conclusion. I still hate him, but I can't hate him without reservation anymore. It's... mm, complicated."

The fairy Merlin had arrived at her own conclusion. The human Merlin could not accept that conclusion outright, but she could understand it to some degree.

"I'll have to meet him in the end. We'll have to talk."

Even Merlin, unchanged for a thousand years, had changed. Unlike the fairy who had festered through all those centuries, the Merlin standing here kept talking about what came next.

Najin watched her for a moment and smiled.

The image of the fairy Merlin, weeping and begging him to end her, flickered briefly through his mind. This was definitely better. He was somewhere in the middle of feeling satisfied with the adventure he had carried out in the Eternal City when it happened.

Flinch.

Merlin's shoulders jerked. The scene Najin had pictured was shared with her.

"C-can you maybe forget that?"

"Forget what?"

"What you just thought of."

"The Merlin who was crying and begging? Or the Merlin who whined in the middle of the night and kept pulling the blanket away? Or maybe......"

"Aaaaaah!"

Merlin shrieked and clapped her hand over his mouth. Of course, given that they shared each other's thoughts and inner monologue, physically covering his mouth was not a particularly effective solution.

Merlin let out another shriek as Najin's internal monologue and his frustratingly sharp memory conjured up scene after scene.

"Hey."

And then.

"...Mm."

"Mm-hmm."

"Pfft, you got me back. Didn't you?"

Najin had been replaying things from the Eternal City one by one to tease Merlin, and then he accidentally recalled one particular scene he had promised to forget.

"Ah."

He caught himself and glanced at Merlin warily. She had her head bowed, shoulders trembling. Her ears had gone bright red with embarrassment. Trembling shoulders, a tightly clenched fist. Najin could see what was coming in a few seconds.

That fist was going to connect with his jaw.

He could see a future where his jaw got knocked sideways, but he could not dodge it. Or rather, he could dodge it, but he was not supposed to. If he dodged, a far more terrible future waited for him.

'Well, I'm done for.'

Najin screwed his eyes shut. An instant later, Merlin let out a sharp shriek and her fist connected with his jaw.

Crack!

And that was how that went.

2.

Not at all knocked unconscious by Merlin's fist, having simply fallen asleep of his own entirely voluntary accord out of genuine exhaustion, Najin had a dream. He had not dreamed in a long time.

A dream that was also someone's memory.

The Star of Tomorrow engraved in Excalibur acted as a dream catcher and led Najin into the dream. More precisely, Lancelot's star dwelling within the Star of Tomorrow pulled him in.

"Why."

Najin watched a fragment of Lancelot's memory.

"Why are you standing over there."

Shattered fragments of the Round Table lay scattered across the ground. Looking around, there was a battlefield reduced to ruin. Lancelot had tried to stop Arthur from leaving for Camlann by force, and in doing so had attacked Arthur and clashed with the Knights of the Round Table.

Lancelot had been the spark. The fire he started swallowed the Round Table whole in an instant.

Differences in outlook, conflict, accumulated grievances, all of it erupted at once, and the Round Table fractured. In the chaos, Arthur slipped away quietly toward Camlann. Someone appeared before Lancelot, who had been trying to give chase to the king who had left without telling anyone.

"...Mordred."

He had vanished without warning around the time all this began, and now he stepped into Lancelot's path. Lancelot's eyes narrowed at the strange energy emanating from him.

"Explain yourself. Why you're standing on that side, and what that energy flowing through you is."

Lancelot leveled his sword at the Blight Star's aura he could feel coming off Mordred. Faced with a blade pointed at him, Mordred said nothing.

"If you won't explain, step aside. We can settle this later, once everything is over......"

"There's no point going after him."

Mordred did not move.

"What did you just say."

"I said there's no point, Lancelot."

He looked at Lancelot without expression.

"Nothing will change. Even if you give chase now, you'll be stopped. You'll run into Merlin at the barrier, and you'll clash with her. Are you confident you can survive that clash?"

No. Even in peak condition, surviving against her was not something he could promise, let alone winning. In the state he was in now, he would die for certain.

"Don't count on any bond of fellowship. She has no room to spare for a traitor who attacked the king without a word of explanation."

The Round Table had fractured. Arthur had gone to the Abyss alone. The Abyss, stirred by Arthur's star, had begun to run wild, and Merlin, facing a fracturing Round Table and the Abyss alone all at once, had no room to spare.

"I......"

Lancelot gritted his teeth. He had seen it. He had looked into the future through the starlight left in the Holy Grail and knew what end awaited Arthur.

"The king means to die. I have to stop her. I cannot let it end like this."

Lancelot tried to persuade Mordred.

He knew Mordred well.

Mordred was a man who revered Arthur more than any other knight of the Round Table. Beyond the devotion of serving her as a knight, he practically worshipped Arthur as though she were a god.

"So......"

Help me. Those words, reaching out for cooperation, were cut off by Mordred.

"I know."

"...What?"

"I said I know."

Mordred looked up at the sky.

"That the king intends to die. What you saw. What is going to happen."

All of it, he said. Lancelot stared at him, uncomprehending. If you know all of it, then why are you blocking me.

Of all people, why you?

To that question, Mordred gave a short answer. He pointed to Arthur's star hanging in the sky, or perhaps to the Witch of the Abyss's Blight Star, and said:

"Because the god wills it."

"......Have you become the Witch of the Abyss's hound?"

"If it's necessary, there's nothing I won't do."

Mordred pointed at Lancelot.

"Lancelot, you already drew your sword on the king. Whatever your intent, you have become a traitor. It was you who caused the Round Table to fracture."

That was true. The one who had shattered the Round Table, which had been holding together by a thread, was none other than Lancelot himself.

"You will be recorded as a traitor. You will be recorded as the one who tore the Round Table apart. And by now, it is far too late to undo any of it."

What was done was done.

Nothing could be undone.

"The die has been cast. You cannot take back something already thrown. Then what you have to do is simple."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Make it come up the number you want."

If something irreversible had already happened, the least you could do was make sure it flowed in the direction you wanted. Carve and shape the ground the die would roll across so that the number its thrower intended would come up.

"Do what can be done. Lancelot."

"......"

"Chasing the king right now is the worst move you could make."

"You."

Lancelot glared at Mordred.

"What are you looking at?"

"I have no eyes to see the future. I'm no different from a blind man with open eyes, so what I see doesn't matter."

Mordred was still looking at the sky.

"What matters is what the one above sees."

Was it the Witch of the Abyss, or was it Arthur's star?

Lancelot could not tell who Mordred meant by "the one above." When Mordred lowered his gaze and their eyes met, Lancelot found that the companion he had known all these years felt like a complete stranger.

"Neither you nor I will die cleanly."

Mordred smiled, and there was nothing but bitterness in it.

"The place we fall to is hell. I'll be waiting there ahead of you, Lancelot."

He seized his sword. The blade was not pointed at Lancelot. Instead, Mordred turned to face the knights who had come after Lancelot following his injuries and fought them in his place, buying Lancelot time to escape.

At the same time, Mordred shouted:

"I am Mordred."

Above them, the Witch's Blight Star shone in the sky.

"A knight who serves the great god, a Herald of Destruction bestowed with starlight by that great one."

The Knight of the Round Table who had become the Witch's apostle ran amok.

3.

"The Abyss has begun to expand."

Bedivere told Najin this.

"Through the crack opened in the seal, the Witch of the Abyss has recovered a measure of her strength, and her apostle has begun to move. The Boundary Line is being pushed back at a rapid pace."

The Boundary Line of the Abyss was being driven back.

The Abyss was expanding its territory.

The Blight Star that had appeared in the sky was still shining, and Bedivere said that a Herald of Destruction had begun to march under a banner marked with the Witch's symbol.

"One of the Four Heralds of Destruction."

One of the Witch's four apostles.

"Mordred stands at the vanguard."

Mordred, leading the Knights of Death, had begun to advance.

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