WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 427

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Domain of Dead Knights (2)

Mordred's sanctuary is vast.

Absurdly vast.

The sanctuary spreading from the castle at its center was comparable in size to a decent city, and the soaring fortress itself could hold its own against the imperial palace. By any Transcendent's measure, it was far from small.

Crash!

Najin smashed through the castle gate, shouldered through the iron bars with his bare body, and forced his way inside, swallowing the urge to catch his breath. There was no time to recover. Naturally, the castle's interior was packed with Knights of Death, just as it had been outside.

Clank, clatter.

Armor grinding against armor. Spears and swords came flying at him an instant later. Attacks poured in from the parapets, from the corridors, from every direction at once.

"Huu..."

Najin exhaled and narrowed his eyes. His senses expanded, nerves standing on end. That sharpened awareness stretched even the flow of time.

Time slowed to a crawl.

Within that drawn-out perception, only Najin's eyes moved quickly. Spears and blades slicing through the air toward him, arrows skimming low to catch his ankles, footsteps from beyond the wall...

He saw. He heard. He felt.

Blink.

The moment his eyes closed and opened again, time snapped back to its normal pace. Najin stomped the ground. The shockwave rattled the floor hard enough to throw off a spear aimed at his throat.

Thud.

He jerked his head to one side, ducking the spearhead, then reached out and seized the shaft. The knight gripping the other end fought to hold on, but no Knight of Death could match Najin for raw strength. He swung the whole spear, knight and all, in a wide arc.

Clatter, crash!

Knight slammed into knights. A gap opened. Najin drove into it, sword already moving. An arrow snapped. A spear was knocked aside. A rapid succession of metallic scrapes rang out as he stripped away every unnecessary motion.

Many enemies. A long way still to go.

Bedivere was covering his rear, but clearing a path forward was Najin's task alone. Until Mordred was dead, those knights would keep regenerating. He could not afford to get pinned down.

Disable them fast.

The approach was the same as fighting the dead. Cut the ankles away. Sever the spine. Shatter the joints until movement was impossible.

Thud, boom!

Behind him, Bedivere was making his own noise, fighting and advancing toward Najin one step at a time. By the time the disabled knights regenerated, Bedivere would be there to deal with them.

Fast. Simple.

Najin was still sprinting when he suddenly swung his sword at the ceiling. Almost the same instant he swung, the ceiling exploded and knights dropped toward his head, hammers and halberds raised to strike.

He had heard them coming. Responding was easy. A platinum arc cut through knights and weapons alike. Rather than slowing, he accelerated, charging deeper into the castle.

"......"

Fighting through the Knights of Death, Najin's brow furrowed. Individually, none of them posed a real threat. At best, a single one might scratch him.

But there were hundreds. Thousands of them.

They moved as one body and threw themselves at him. As if they could not allow him to reach their lord, they clung to his ankles and refused to let go.

The deeper one goes...

The resistance grew fiercer as he pushed toward the castle's heart. Then, at some point, their movements changed.

Clank, clatter.

They held formation as they pressed in on him. Like soldiers who knew exactly how to handle someone far stronger, they hung on his every step with every tactic at their disposal. Intelligence flickered in beings whose reason the Abyss had supposedly consumed.

How?

The answer came quickly. Najin caught sight of their armor. The shape was different. Up here, near the castle's highest floor, every suit of armor filling the corridor bore a single mark.

The mark of the Round Table.

The old symbol of Britain.

He understood what it meant. Knights of the Round Table. Not among the Thirteen Seats, but knights who had fought alongside the Round Table against the Abyss.

Knights who knew how to fight an overwhelming enemy they could never beat alone.

If one was not enough, two. If two was not enough, ten. If ten was still not enough, dozens would lock onto a single target together. These knights had thrown their lives away against stronger foes, wanting only to give the Thirteen Seats any edge they could.

Even after so much time had passed.

Even after falling into cursed existence within the Abyss.

They had not forgotten how they fought. Reason was gone, but pride remained. Najin let out a short breath and adjusted his grip on the sword.

A brief sword salute.

What he showed them next was Atanga's swordsmanship. With a blade meant for knights, he faced them.

The Star of the Funeral March shone.

2.

Vibrations ran through the walls.

Mordred listened to them. The tremors his old comrade made as he ran wild. The approaching footsteps of the heir of the king, climbing as if he meant to tear the fortress apart. Every sound reached Mordred as though from a great distance.

"......"

He raised his head. Starlight poured through cracks in the shattered ceiling above. Only the Blight Star hung in the sky of the Abyss, but beyond the barrier the heavens were thick with stars.

Among them, one burned brighter than the rest.

Arthur's star.

Mordred stared at that star, still shining after a thousand years, and let the past come back to him. It had been shining that day too.

The day he first saw a star.

He turned that memory over.

* * *

There are moments when a person comes to believe in God.

Not because someone forces it on them. Not through pressure, and certainly not through indoctrination. That moment arrives without warning and turns a life upside down.

Mordred had known such a moment.

"......"

As a child, Mordred used to stare up at the sky with hollow eyes. The sky he looked up at was dark. Against that pitch-black expanse, empty of stars, only a crimson star flickered.

"I told you not to look up."

Whenever he stared at the sky like that.

"Did I not tell you not to dare look at it?"

A shadow fell over his head.

The witch who owned him, and who owned this land. A witch who took pleasure in kidnapping people, torturing them, running experiments on them. Mordred had been born and raised on her domain.

"I don't like much about you, but those eyes, those I like. You have the makings of one who can hold the Blight Star. That one will be pleased with you too."

She always whispered to him. You were born human, and yet you hate the world and loathe humanity, which means you have the making to become one with the Blight Star.

It was not for any special reason.

He had been beaten by his parents from birth and abandoned in the end, never loved even once, so coming to hate the world was only natural. That ordinary thing had simply looked beautiful to the witch.

"So do your best. Make yourself pleasing to that one."

The effort she spoke of was endurance. The witch performed countless experiments on Mordred. She remade his body, drove mechanical devices into his flesh, made mana flow through his veins where blood should have been.

Both her test subject.

And a doll to be offered to the Witch of the Abyss.

That was the existence Mordred was raised to be. From his owner, Mordred was conditioned to believe that God meant the Witch of the Abyss, that she alone was salvation and divinity.

God is a perfect and beautiful being.

Turning those words over in his mind, Mordred looked at the sky. His owner had told him not to dare look up, but he would steal glances at it when no one was watching.

"......"

The sky he looked up at was not beautiful.

The Blight Star was not beautiful at all.

And neither...

Was he himself. He looked around and saw nothing but dolls. Dolls the witch had made. She told Mordred he was special, but he felt no different from the rest of them.

A life that would be used and discarded once it had no more use.

A life that would choose nothing of its own, carry no self, and move wherever the strings pulled it. There was no Mordred in that life.

"Your era is ending."

Then one day, as he lived that way.

"The sky is no longer dark. The age when only the Blight Star shone is over. Time that has begun to flow cannot be stopped by anything."

The cage around Mordred shattered. A woman who had broken into the domain subdued every last one of the witch's dolls, tore the witch's magic apart, and finally separated her head from her body.

With his owner dead at his feet, Mordred stared up at the woman, dazed. Perhaps what he was trying to see was not her, but the sky behind her. The thing he had believed was the sky his whole life was not the sky at all.

When the darkness the witch had draped over everything lifted slightly, a different sky was there. A sky unlike anything Mordred had known. He stared at it as if spellbound.

"......"

But the woman standing before him blocked his view. Then their eyes met for just a moment, and she gave a small laugh and stepped to one side.

Rather than casting a shadow over him.

She stepped aside so he could see the sky.

Mordred looked at the sky. It was still stained dark red by the Blight Star's light, but the Blight Star was not all that was there.

"Ah."

A platinum-colored star.

Still small, but shining.

"What do you think of the first star you've ever seen?"

Mordred looked toward where the voice had come from. She wore a platinum sword at her hip, and she was pointing at the sky and smiling.

"Beautiful, isn't it?"

It was. Incredibly so.

"The Witch of Puppets. A vicious witch who could not rest until every last thing in the world was her marionette. That was the name of the one who owned you."

She looked at Mordred.

"The strings are cut. The cage around you is broken. You're free now. Live however you want."

He did not know how to live. All Mordred had ever been taught was how to hate the world, how to become the witch's apostle and curse all of creation.

"You said you don't know how to live or where to go. I see. In that case..."

She pointed at the sky.

"Look at the sky."

The stars were shining.

"I'll show you the way forward. If you don't know how to live, follow me."

No one had ever taught Mordred how to live. No one had ever truly looked at him. So it was all a first for him.

Someone looking straight at him.

Someone holding a hand out to him.

It was all so unfamiliar because none of it had ever happened before. Mordred took her hand. For the first time, he chose of his own will. Of his own will, he looked at her. She was a person who shone bright enough to hurt his eyes.

"Your name?"

"...Mordred."

A brief hesitation. Then Mordred asked the name of the star. She answered.

"Arthur."

She tapped the sword at her hip lightly and smiled.

"The name of the hero who will hang a star at the highest point of that sky. Remember it well."

...One day, without warning.

There are moments when a person comes to believe in God. For Mordred, that moment was exactly that day. The star he saw that day, in that place, he never forgot for the rest of his life.

Through everything that followed.

Through everything he left behind, even now, after a thousand years had gone by, he remembered the star he had seen that day.

Blink.

Mordred opened his eyes. Time to wake from the dream. He planted his feet in the present and looked ahead.

Thud, boom, crash...

Vibrations rolled through the walls.

Crack, crash, crumble!

Something breaking, shattering, coming apart, one sound after another. And getting closer. Someone was climbing upward from below.

Then.

Click.

The iron door at the top floor swung open. The one who stepped through was a young man. A young man whose star resembled the platinum star he had seen that day, and yet was somehow different.

So you've come. Finally.

Their eyes met. Neither of them drew a sword or lunged. Not because there was no need to, because it would come to that soon enough, and there was no point rushing.

"Three times."

The first to speak in the silence was Najin.

"This makes the third."

3.

"This makes the third."

Najin looked at Mordred.

This was their third encounter. The first had been in the Underground City. The second, right before escaping from the Abyss. And the third was now.

"......"

Najin steadied his breathing and looked around. The topmost floor of the old castle held all manner of weapons, shields, and suits of armor. His eyes narrowed as he took them in.

Failnot.

Tristan's longbow, Failnot.

Galatine.

Gawain's greatsword, Galatine.

Percival's battle hammer, Bedivere's old ashwood spear, Agravain's double-edged sword, Kay's five shortswords...

Every weapon that stood as a symbol of the Knights of the Round Table was gathered here. Even the Cross Shield of Galahad, whom Najin had faced himself.

"To you, this place is..."

What does it mean to you.

Mordred answered with a single word.

"An armory."

He raised his arm. The moment he did, the entire castle began to shake. The weapons on the top floor, the armor, every piece of armament rose into the air.

Eleven stars.

As if drawn by Mordred's stars, the arms of the Round Table flew toward his body.

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