WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 438

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Starving One, Atanga (2)

Let us talk about the human act of running.

Two legs are enough. Humans run for all manner of reasons. To make it somewhere on time, to reach the finish line of a race, to flee from something, or any number of other things.

Humans run.

Speed varies, of course. Some are fast, some slow. From a purely biological standpoint, the gap becomes even starker. A normal human sprinting flat out cannot hold a candle to a four-legged beast.

It is true that a human on two legs is slower than a beast on four, and shakier in balance besides.

And yet there is one area where humans have the edge.

Tap.

Endurance. A human may not be fast, but a human can run for a very long time. Turning that thought over in his mind, Najin pushed his body harder.

Tap.

Najin drove his feet into the ground and ran.

"Hah..."

He was out of breath. The sudden deep lungfuls startled his shriveled lungs, and they ached. His pounding heartbeat sounded impossibly loud.

Under normal circumstances, this run would cost him nothing.

He could have sprinted from one end of the imperial capital to the other without stopping. But not here.

"Huuu..."

Nearly two weeks of starvation and thirst had worn him down as far as a body could go. Atanga's Authority of Famine had dragged his physical capabilities to their limit. Even walking was an ordeal. Merely breathing made his body scream.

And yet Najin ran.

He drove off the ground and threw himself forward.

The tip of his tongue burned. When he first started running his vision had spun and nearly sent him to his knees, but he bit down and found his balance. He set his feet to the footprints Atanga had left in the earth and simply ran.

'This is brutal.'

Not an exaggeration. It really was. He had come through countless grueling battlefields, but he had never felt this particular kind of exhaustion. A single mouthful of water was all he wanted. The food he had tasted back in the Empire flickered through his mind.

A rather worldly craving for a Transcendent.

Feeling the most human desire imaginable, Najin pressed on. Somewhere far ahead, invisible in the distance, Atanga was running too. Najin chased those tracks.

Thud.

A drop of his sweat struck the ground.

Thud.

His foot came down exactly on top of one of Atanga's footprints. The same path, the same stride.

...This was Atanga's Domain.

A space saturated with his sweat, scored with the footprints of his steps. A grave where the fragments of his shattered star lay buried. Najin ran through it, feeling his way along those shards.

Running like that, things became visible.

The shape of one foolish knight's life.

2.

Wanting to be special.

Everyone feels it at some point. A young man named Atanga, raised in a backwater village, was no different. What set him apart was that he failed to give up that dream early.

I might be something special. I could become someone extraordinary. I am different from everyone else.

The kind of delusion you were supposed to outgrow in boyhood. Age brings the world crashing in, and most people eventually accept that they are nothing particularly remarkable,just one more ordinary person among many.

When parents abandoned their children.

When children killed their parents to survive.

In an age that ugly, people learned the truth even faster. Atanga was simply more stubborn than most, and there had been no decent adult in his life to correct his mistake.

Why.

Above all else, Atanga kept asking himself.

Why is the world like this?

He hated a world that treated the unacceptable as normal. Why would parents abandon a child? Why should a child have to kill to survive?

A world without beauty.

A world without wonder.

To Atanga's eyes, it all looked unbearably bleak. Perhaps that was what caused it. By chance, or by fate, he ended up doing something reckless.

"Run!"

Demon beasts appeared in the village. Everyone fled in a panic. There was no way an ordinary human could fight a demon beast and win. People who knew they were not special got out without a second thought.

What was left after the ordinary people ran was one idiot who believed he was not ordinary.

Atanga grabbed a rusted sword and threw himself at the demon beast. He believed he was special, and if he was special, he figured he ought to do what others could not. So he charged.

"Guh!"

And was smashed apart. Bones broke. He coughed blood and rolled across the ground. Face pressed into the dirt, he finally saw things clearly. Actually, "finally" might not be quite right.

He came face to face with the truth he had always known but refused to look at.

Right. I'm nothing at all.

When someone is forced to confront a reality they have been avoiding, the typical response is resignation. What Atanga did in that moment was anything but typical.

"Over here, you damn beast."

Children who had not yet escaped were still nearby. In front of the demon beast closing in on them, Atanga beat his rusted longsword against his shield, again and again, making as much noise as he could. The racket caught the beast's attention. It turned and fixed its gaze on him.

"Oh no."

Atanga ran, dragging his injured leg. Cold sweat poured down his back as he heard it coming after him. He was terrified. Apparently he was not special after all. No sudden surge of courage, no dramatic awakening of hidden power,nothing like something from a fairy tale.

I'll be running and then it'll catch me and bite me to death.

Reality was bitter. Nothing like a story. In reality, a young man from some backwater village did not suddenly awaken to power. That sort of convenient ending did not exist.

"Duck."

But even in a reality like that.

"Or you'll get cut."

There were special people.

Swish.

The moment Atanga dropped his head at that voice, a sword stroke passed over him and bisected the demon beast that had been closing in. It was cut apart with breathtaking ease.

"...Ah."

A spray of blood and flesh rained down on Atanga's head. He did not notice any of it. The only thing his eyes could find was the person standing before him.

A girl with platinum hair hanging loose.

She looked a few years younger than him, yet gave no impression of inexperience whatsoever. Every angle of her called to mind one word and one word only: special.

"......"

She glanced down at Atanga sprawled on the ground, then looked toward where he had come running from. Something like understanding crossed her face, and she let out a quiet laugh.

"That was cool."

She left with just those three words. He learned her name much later.

Arthur.

A woman with a name like that. And she was known less by her name than by another word: hero. The more Atanga learned about her, the more he could only smile ruefully.

A person fit for fairy tales.

Special was a word reserved for someone like her. Not for an ordinary person who could be found anywhere, but for a radiant being like that.

"Ah, I see."

The young man from the backwater village nodded. He had finally accepted reality, and now he faced a choice. He glanced back toward the village he had grown up in. An ordinary life of farming waited for him there. Not a bad life at all. It even felt appealing.

But Atanga made a different choice.

He picked up a sword and shield instead of a plow.

The same choice he had made that day, luring the demon beast even after knowing he was not special. He chose the path that a special person would walk, despite being anything but special himself.

"So what if I'm not special?"

There's still something I can do.

Just like that day.

If special people, the ones worth calling heroes, were the ones who scattered beauty across the world... then it was the job of ordinary people,common people,to tend the soil so that beauty could take root.

Instead of turning earth with a plow, Atanga intended to till the world with a sword.

A grand dream. A laughably vain one for someone without the gifts to back it up. Plenty of people would have mocked it, but Atanga did not care. His heart was shouting it at him.

"That was cool."

One sentence the hero had said to him. Addicted to those words, the young man set the direction of his life.

Naturally, it was not easy.

"Ugh!"

He got hurt. He bled. He rolled across the ground, broke bones, and tore muscle until the scars piled up.

"Hah, hah, hahhhhh!"

It was painful. He gasped like his lungs were about to burst. The hand gripping his sword trembled, his teeth chattered uncontrollably. Painful and terrifying both at once, enough to drive a person mad. Even so, Atanga never let go of the sword.

"This way, over here!"

He saved people. He could not save everyone the way a hero might, but even without being special, even in situations where everyone would have died, he could save one or two.

Of course, one or two did not change the tide. A world falling apart did not suddenly become livable again, no dramatic shift occurred. Viewed from a distance, it looked like throwing your life away for nothing.

And the reward for risking his life to save someone?

Pain. A body covered in scars. A shoulder that stabbed with pain every time he raised his arm because of wounds that never healed properly. Injuries so severe that surviving at all was a miracle.

How terrible.

Then what did he get for saving those people?

"Thank you. Truly, I don't know how to ever repay you..."

A word of thanks from the people he saved. That was all. No material reward. No fairy-tale ending where a noble's child turned out to be among the rescued and suddenly became his patron.

"Ah."

That was enough for Atanga. He nodded.

"More than enough."

Because it was.

That was how Atanga lived. He threw himself into battle after battle while trembling with fear, barely survived each one, and went back out to save more people before his wounds had even healed.

"Friend, why do you make life so hard for yourself?"

"Is it not a splendid life?"

"Ha, so you're a madman. Figures. No sane person would keep doing this. Well, fine then. You saved my life, so I owe you..."

Live like that long enough.

"I want to try that splendid life of yours."

And people will gather. One by one, they came to Atanga's side. Things he could not manage alone were manageable enough when they worked together.

Atanga was still nothing special.

The people who gathered around him were nothing special either,just ordinary folk.

"Right then, let's go."

"Where?"

"Somewhere people are waiting for help."

They did special things. They went around the Continent doing the sort of work heroes did. Over time, people started calling them something.

"Did you hear, friend?"

"Hear what?"

"The name the bards are using for us. You know how the ones following that great hero are being called knights these days?"

"Ah, yes. Knights of the Round Table..."

"Exactly! I thought that name was magnificent when I heard it, and now people are using something similar for us."

"Oh? What name?"

"Free Knights."

Free Knights.

"They wear no armor. They carry no well-maintained weapons, no legendary blades. No form to speak of. At a glance, no dignity to them,no different from mercenaries."

"Is that... not an insult?"

"Hear it to the end. Now where was I? Ah, here."

"And yet these utterly ordinary people, who could be found anywhere, accomplish what even heroes find daunting. They act freely, and without anyone compelling them, they uphold the virtues a knight ought to keep."

"Therefore, Free Knights."

"For they live freely, yet more honorably than anyone."

The prose was thick and florid, the way bard-written things tended to be. Atanga smiled wryly, but the people who followed him were delighted with the name.

"Free Knights!"

"Magnificent."

"Now there's a name with style."

They began calling themselves Free Knights, and Atanga's Knights.

"We are Atanga's Knights!"

"Why my name, of all things?"

"Well, you're the face of the group, aren't you? And the name has a good ring to it. If I named it after myself...'Jack's Knights',it'd sound a bit shabby, wouldn't it."

That was how Atanga's Knights came together.

Later, when Arthur heard the story from Atanga himself, she laughed and said this:

"I like that name. Free Knight."

"You think so too."

"I should borrow it myself. I was looking for a title to bestow on the Knights of the Round Table."

"Ah, then I suppose we can't use it anymore."

Arthur shook her head.

"Of course you can. You are the First Free Knight, and the knights with you are the first company. The Knights of the Round Table come after. I am not so lacking in manners as all that."

First Free Knight.

Atanga turned the title over in his mind, then laughed despite himself.

"That is a splendid name."

3.

Even with a special title to his name, what Atanga did day to day did not change much. He did what he had always done. Saved people, went where he was needed, and tilled the ground so that hope could take root in the paths Arthur had walked through.

Where Arthur drove out the monsters threatening the land and saved the lives of those under siege, Atanga helped those people get back on their feet.

"Get up."

He reached out a hand and pulled them from the mud. Brushed the dirt from their bodies. Helped those who had lost their footing find a way to stand on their own again.

"Captain," one of the members said one day.

"Do you never get tired? If we're being honest, you're probably the weakest one among us... and yet you're always the last one standing. What's that about, Captain?"

"I have always been proud of my running."

"Ha! You come in dead last whenever we actually race. What a joke."

"Give me a long-distance run and I'll win."

Put to the test on the spot, Atanga truly did not stop running until every last member had collapsed.

"You beat me, Captain. I give up."

"Did I not say? Running is what I'm confident in."

Sweat pouring off him, Atanga smiled. It was not some exceptional reservoir of stamina that kept him going longest. In raw endurance the members probably had him beat.

Atanga simply had his Star.

Tenacity, or grit.

A Star hardened and completed by a life spent stubbornly walking one path. Thanks to that Star, as long as his mind did not break, Atanga could keep running as long as he needed.

"Hah."

Watching him, one of the members spoke slowly. There was a question he could not hold back any longer.

"...Captain, do you never get tired?"

"Of course I do."

"Then why have you been running like this for decades?"

The world had not changed. Arthur was racing across the Continent, but the darkness was still darkness. The Abyss eating away at the world was still pitch black.

Things don't change.

Because nothing changed, meaning was hard to feel. The members who were not Atanga had been wearing down slowly.

Only because their captain was still running did they keep walking after him, putting one foot in front of the other through sheer difficulty. Worn thin, they asked their captain the question.

"What exactly are you trying to accomplish by running like this?"

"Honestly? I don't think I can accomplish much of anything."

"...What do you mean by that?"

Atanga looked out into the distance.

"Jack. Do you know what a relay race is?"

"Relay running?"

"Yes. Some places call it a relay. That thing."

He pointed toward the darkness swallowing the land ahead, the earth consumed by the Abyss, and spoke.

"I asked myself that question once. Where does it end? Does any of this change anything? Can an ordinary person like me, who is nothing compared to those special heroes, actually change something..."

He shook his head at the question he had once put to himself. Probably not, in any grand sense. Turning the world on its head was the heroes' work, not his.

"But then a thought crossed my mind."

"...What thought?"

"That the world, in a way, is like a relay race."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Human history has always worked that way, I think. One person runs as hard as they can and gets so far, then the next person takes the baton and runs again. Slowly, little by little, things move forward."

Atanga stretched out his hand.

"Are we not somewhere in the middle of that? It might only be a few steps, but surely we've taken one or two steps forward, at the very least."

"One or two steps. You'd give your life for that?"

"It's a splendid thing. Don't you feel the beauty in it?"

"I never know what to make of the way your mind works, Captain."

Jack laughed.

"So how long do you plan to keep running? No one knows when the next runner will come. You've already been at it for decades. No end in sight. The future nothing but a bleak, dark wall."

How long would he keep running?

"Who knows."

He did not know when that day would come. He did not know if it would ever come. He had doubts that anyone existed to hand this baton to.

That was why so many heroes made arrangements. They used their gifts to the fullest, prepared things, wove connections, passed their starlight on to those who would come after them. But Atanga had no such special means at his disposal. The only thing he could do was run.

"I don't know when the next runner will come."

Atanga had always lived the same way. He did not have many skills, so he did what he could. Not special, but steady, living his life at the same pace.

He had lived that way until now.

And he would go on living that way.

"But I'll run as far as I can."

"Ten years? A hundred?"

"Of course."

Atanga smiled.

"Long-distance running is something I'm confident in."

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