WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 441

──────

Atanga (5)

For long years, Atanga had been wracked by hunger.

He had wandered this land feeling the most human of all torments: hunger and thirst. The hollow that refused to be filled could not be solved by anything, for the pain did not belong to the body.

He could eat until his stomach burst, swallow water until he drowned in it, and still the hunger and thirst would not relent. It was the soul that starved, not the flesh. Without filling the soul, there was no escaping that pain.

And on the day he raised the flag of Famine.

A hole opened in Atanga's soul. An enormous hole that could not possibly be patched. Through that hole, the starlight that should have filled his soul drained away. His body, emptied of starlight, withered and dried. His soul fell into ruin.

'I am being swallowed.'

A ruined soul is swallowed by the Abyss. Swallowed and warped beyond recognition. To stop that from happening, Atanga had resisted. Not wanting to lose the faint sense of himself that remained, he repeated the one act that still made him feel real.

Running.

Running without stopping had been Atanga's defining mark. By repeating that symbol of himself, he tried to keep his own image from fading entirely. Even now it was dim, but dim was better than gone. As long as it was dim, he could still remember who he was.

And so Atanga ran.

A month. A year. Decades. Centuries.

A thousand years passed.

A cracked jar holds nothing. His soul was no more than an empty shell. The days it had run dry far outnumbered the days it had been full. Pouring water into such a jar now would not fill it.

That was certainly how it should have been.

Yet Atanga felt full. The hunger that had tormented him across all those years was gone. The thirst had lifted. Without eating or drinking a thing, he was filled.

'How?'

The answer was simple. Pouring water into a cracked jar was pointless, but if you threw the jar into a lake entirely... the jar could fill to the brim.

Atanga looked ahead.

There, before him, was starlight enough to fill his soul and more. A star that stood no less brilliant than the heroes he had once faced shone right in front of his eyes.

"A distant descendant," he said.

And that star.

"I am honored to meet the first Free Knight."

Wore the same clothes as Atanga.

"I am Najin. Free Knight Najin."

And held the same title as himself. At that, Atanga found himself smiling without meaning to. Seeing the young man with Excalibur at his hip only made it harder not to.

Who could have imagined it.

That the successor he had waited so long for, the great hero who would carry the age onward in Arthur's wake, would arrive wearing the same clothes and bearing the same title as himself.

Who could have imagined such a thing.

"I am Atanga."

Atanga opened his mouth with effort.

"A Free Knight, same as you."

It was the first time he had introduced himself in longer than he could say.

2.

Najin looked at the man standing before him.

The man looked like someone waking from a long sleep, blinking slowly, eyes opening and closing in turn. As if trying to make sense of where he was, and, in case this was some pleasant dream, testing whether it might dissolve if he blinked enough.

Fortunately, no matter how many times he blinked, nothing changed. This was not a dream but reality.

When Atanga finally seemed to gather himself, he spoke. The first question he put to Najin was this:

"How much time has passed?"

"A thousand years."

At those words, Atanga drew in a quiet breath.

No doubt a span of a thousand years was hard to grasp. But once he had turned the weight of it over in his mind, his reaction was not what Najin had expected.

"Is that so."

He smiled.

"The world must have changed a great deal. How far it has come from the age I knew, I cannot say."

Instead of alarm or heavy silence, he seemed almost relieved that so much time had gone by. Najin was still thinking about where to begin when a voice reached them from some distance away.

"Changed a great deal, it has. Enough to surprise even me."

Atanga turned toward the voice. Merlin was walking toward them from across the way, ambling along without any particular hurry. At the familiar face, Atanga's eyes went wide.

"Merlin?"

"Yes, it's been a while. Atanga."

"If you are here, then......"

Merlin gave a small nod. There was no need for a long explanation. The bearer of Excalibur and the guide Merlin, together in the land of the Abyss. What that combination meant was not hard to read.

"Good."

A short word, but one that held a great deal. Merlin did not bother asking what was good about it. She just nodded, then glanced toward Najin.

As if to say: speak with him, not me.

She dearly wanted to catch up with an old friend, but she knew that was not possible here. There was not much time left to Atanga.

"......"

Atanga looked down at his own fingertips. His body was crumbling from the edges inward.

A soul and body worn thin over long years. Even if you gave water to a parched soul, the soul could not take it all in. The same as a person who had starved too long and could no longer properly digest food.

Crumble.

A flake of his body fell away like shed skin. It would not take long for the rest to follow. A cruel thing to contemplate. After a thousand years of endurance, what had come at the end was an annihilation that would leave not even a handful of soul behind.

'Not so bad.'

But Atanga felt no particular bitterness about it. Whether something was cruel or tragic, shifting one's perspective only slightly could turn it into an entirely different story.

From Atanga's perspective, this was not a tragedy.

After a thousand years of waiting, he had passed the baton to the next runner. And on top of that, had he not been given time to speak with that successor while his mind was still clear? In his view, that was more than enough of a reward.

"Najin."

Above all else.

"You introduced yourself as a Free Knight."

The very existence of the successor standing before him was more reward than Atanga could have hoped for. Looking at the young man who held the same title as himself, he asked:

"What is a Free Knight?"

"One who makes knights into true knights. Also one who guards the old code of knighthood."

"And the code of knighthood, what is that?"

"Know honor. Keep pride. A knight without honor and pride is a knight in name alone."

Najin spoke the code of knighthood, written a thousand years ago, to the very person who had given it its foundation. The code had taken its foundation from Atanga and its form from Knight King Arthur.

That those words had traveled all the way through a thousand years seemed to catch Atanga off guard, and he let out a quiet laugh.

Because when that single line was written, it had carried no grand significance. It was nothing more than something said among comrades while debating the finer points of how to live, a line born from a desire to live brilliantly and die the same way.

"Honor and pride!"

In their minds, those were the most radiant words there were.

"Know honor, keep pride. A knight without honor and pride is a knight in name alone!"

To live carrying radiant words, surely that was a fine way to live. That was the spirit behind all their talk. The words eventually reached King Arthur's ears, and the Knight King, with a satisfied laugh, inscribed the line in her autobiography.

What is a knight?

He had added that there was no more accurate answer to that question than those words.

"I never thought they would be remembered this long."

"Many do not follow them. But some still try. They call themselves Atanga's Knights."

"...They still exist?"

Najin nodded and drew out the token he had received from Atanga's Knights. Atanga's eyes went wide at the sight of it. It was the very token his own members had once shared among themselves.

"My first teacher came from Atanga's Knights. He was the one who taught me what a knight is. What honor and pride are."

Ivan had made Najin what he was today. Something in that made Atanga smile, a little awkward, as if slightly embarrassed.

"...I never thought a life of saying what anyone could say and doing what anyone could do would be remembered quite like this."

"They may be words anyone can say, but not words anyone can keep. And deeds anyone could do, but that no one ever does."

Najin said it plainly.

"That is precisely why such a life shines."

A shining life, is it.

"......"

Atanga silently looked back over the path he had walked. Footprints stretched away into the distance behind him. From that day, the moment he first met Arthur-a single unbroken line of steps pressed into the earth. A life drawn as one straight line lay there behind him.

A consistent life has value in itself.

It had been a hard and difficult road.

But as the successor said, that was precisely why it shone. Looking back at his own life, it was luminous. Even Atanga himself was surprised by how much.

"Ah."

He breathed out slowly. Exhaling in peace, he looked at Najin. At the successor who had found the waymarks he left behind and pushed through all the way to this place.

Not much time remained.

There was much he wanted to say, but he gathered it together and let most of it go. Someone who had come this far needed no advice. A person walking forward with certainty in their own path had no need of teaching.

"The words I left behind are hollow things."

Atanga said.

"Even if that one line moved the hearts of those who came after, when my comrades and I wrote it down we could not have told you precisely what honor was, or what pride was. Nor was it something we could have answered."

What is honor. What is pride. Vague and ambiguous words. Words that bundle together whatever each person finds most radiant cannot be explained with precision.

"What are honor and pride?"

The question every knight ought to ask themselves.

The most knightly knight put that question into words.

"There is no answer. The only true answer is what one proves through the living of a life."

He pointed at Najin.

"So it was never my place to make those two words shine. That is the achievement of those of you who believed in their worth and lived hard for them."

Hollow words though they may have been.

Some knights had carried those words in their chests and lived their lives by them. At the end of those lives, or somewhere along the way, each of them had given their own answer. They had made something of worth out of a hollow line.

Atanga was no different.

He had chased after something fleeting. He had staked his entire life on a hollow line. Words, when it comes down to it, matter less in themselves than the person who speaks them.

"Go your own way."

Atanga was a waymark. For those who had gone before him, he told them their lives were not wasted. For those who came after, he told them they were not walking the wrong road.

Having held his place for a thousand years, he said it now.

You were not wrong.

Go forward, with yourself intact.

"You are already a fine knight."

The most knightly knight smiled. In his final moment, Atanga blessed the road ahead of his successor. Hoping, from the depths of him, that the end waiting at the far side of that hard journey would be worth it.

3.

The body of the horseman of Famine crumbled.

A horseman of Famine who had stopped running had no more reason to exist. The Witch's war horse, meant to spread hunger across the world, must not stop. Until death, until the very moment of death, it had to keep running, racked by hunger and thirst.

But Atanga did not run.

He was neither hungry nor thirsty.

The flag of Famine broke without a sound. A final moment that stood in stark contrast to the black horse, the horseman of Famine before him. Where the black horse had kept charging forward to its end, still thrashing even as Siegfried's blade cut through it, running headlong into death, Atanga met his end standing still.

......There are two ways to overcome the horseman of Famine.

The first is what Merlin had done in the past.

Kill the horseman through sheer force. Cut the body apart, shatter it, burn it down to a handful of ash, and repeat until at last the horseman of Famine dies.

The second method is, in a sense, simpler.

Satisfy the horseman of Famine who has been consumed by hunger and thirst. When hunger no longer gnaws at them, when thirst no longer burns, when they can no longer find a reason to keep running.

One freed from Famine meets death.

Crumble.

One who feels no hunger has no right to raise the flag of Famine. And one who raises no flag is no horseman. When there is neither Famine nor horseman left, what remains is a single human being.

Atanga met death as a human.

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried