WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 442

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Special Instructor (1)

The flag of Famine was broken.

Changes began to appear in the parched earth. No, the land itself had not changed. It was still barren and desolate. Only the Authority of Famine that had been scattered across it was gone.

The hunger and thirst vanished.

The gnawing emptiness from moments ago disappeared all at once, as though it had never been real. The sweat running down his body stopped as well. Only then did Najin let out a long, slow breath.

"Huu..."

The Authority of Famine was gone, but the footprints Atanga had left behind were not. Footprints tracing a massive circle. Those tracks were as good as Atanga's star itself. The crumbling starlight shifted direction at last.

Toward where it was always meant to point.

The starlight realigned itself, following the will its master had left behind. The footprints that had been trapped on this land for a thousand years finally broke free and turned elsewhere.

"......"

Najin watched where those footprints led.

Atanga had wanted to leave footprints behind. He had wanted to preserve the path Arthur had walked,a path that would otherwise be swallowed by time and forgotten. That effort had not been in vain. A road now stretched out before Najin.

Footprints reaching into the far distance.

Visible only to Najin's eyes, they were the path Arthur had walked a thousand years ago. At the end of that road was Arthur. The path that should have vanished, buried under centuries of time, had crossed those thousand years intact and laid itself bare.

"Really."

Najin smiled, though it was a bitter one. What an extraordinary persistence. Who could call this man nothing special? He had done something no one else could.

He gripped the Free Knight's coat, then gave Atanga a brief, silent bow.

"A man of constancy, truly."

Merlin stared at the spot where Atanga had vanished, her expression soured. Right to the end, he had been consistent. That was fitting, for him. An end that suited who he was.

A short silence fell.

Both of them exhaled slowly and put their feelings in order. The dead would not want to be mourned at length. Najin simply carved the life of a man named Atanga into his own star. The Star of the Funeral March shone softly.

"Hwaaaaah!"

Merlin let out a long breath and stretched. Her blue hair swayed as her shoulders and back arched gently. She groaned through the stretch, then flicked a sideways glance toward Najin.

Then she just stared.

She kept her eyes on him, and after a moment she spoke.

"Hey."

"Yes."

"Just now,you were carrying me on your back, weren't you?"

"I was, yes."

He had been. Merlin had been vulnerable to the Authority of Famine, so Najin had carried her on his back as they moved. It had been a kind of division of labor: Merlin handled the detection magic, Najin handled the walking.

"I was wondering..."

"What?"

"Did it bother you? The, uh. The grossness."

Merlin fidgeted with the hem of her clothes as if something was nagging at her. Grossness? Najin tilted his head. Then it clicked, belatedly.

"Oh, because of the sweat?"

"...Yeah."

She had been sweating quite a bit. Her hair had been sticking to her neck, which admittedly had been a little noticeable. But gross enough to bother him? He had done far worse things than this before.

"You worry about the strangest things."

He said it with genuine bafflement.

"I've jumped into sewers with Merlin on my back, and I've rolled around in the Carnival King's paint, which was far more revolting. And now you're bringing up a little sweat?"

"That was my soul-body, okay! The soul-body doesn't sweat! It doesn't have biological functions like sweat or any of that physical stuff. You barely even feel the weight."

That was her point.

Until now, what had been traveling alongside Najin was a soul-body. Even when it materialized, its substance was mana and starlight. Whatever weight it seemed to have was the weight of mana, and something like body odor simply did not exist.

But what stood before Najin now?

Not a soul-body. Merlin's True Form. A body of blood and flesh. Naturally, it had a scent, and it had real, actual weight. Normally Merlin wrapped herself in all manner of everyday spells and Authorities, but...

There was none of that in the land of Famine.

She had needed to run one more pass of detection magic in the time it would have taken to layer those Authorities over herself, so Merlin had dropped every last spell.

Weight reduction, scent removal, a sparkle effect, hair management, the spell that made her clothes flutter from the most flattering angle, a cleanliness spell...

And an assortment of other miscellaneous everyday spells on top of those. For the past few days, stripped of the dozens of spells she usually wore, Merlin had felt as though she had been thrown naked in front of Najin. Feelings of embarrassment and shame leaked through their shared connection and trickled over to him.

Najin's reaction to those feelings and her internal monologue?

"You used that many spells just going about your day?"

Nothing in particular. Reading the heart of a girl who wanted to look her best was not something Najin was built for. And in practical terms, there really was not much of a difference anyway.

The weight was a little different, at most.

Even that was only because Merlin was so light to begin with. Najin was looking at her with an expression of genuine, fresh puzzlement. Merlin worked her lips silently.

"Not all the time,just since coming out in my True Form. I have more than enough mana for that kind of thing."

"Is that right?"

Having experienced both the True Form and the soul-body, Najin tilted his head. Had there been that big a difference? Something had seemed a bit more sparkly, but that was the magic, apparently.

He filed it away without further thought.

Merlin felt a quiet relief wash over her at how easily he let it go. Then, sitting with that relief, she heard a memory of her own past voice echo in her head.

"You changed clothes right in front of him, slept in the same bed, cried and clung to him, and on top of all that you kissed him,and now you're getting embarrassed about this?"

Isn't it a bit late to be feeling shame about something like this? Merlin silently dismissed the entirely reasonable question her past self was raising. What do you know.

2.

The path forward was clear now.

Follow the road stretching out ahead, and they would reach Arthur. Whether Arthur's remains or something like them, the end of that road held something.

And the Witch of the Abyss.

Najin looked up at the sky. Each time one of the Heralds of Destruction was broken, the Witch of the Abyss's star burned with a more ominous light. If they broke the remaining heralds, the witch would show herself fully.

"Hmm."

Staring at the road laid out before him, Najin stopped walking. He would have to go there eventually, but he still had things to do first.

He turned his head toward Merlin.

"Merlin."

"Hm?"

"A while back, you said something about Siegfried,when we were talking about fighting him."

Whatever I can do, Siegfried can do the same. That was how Merlin had described the Sword Demon. Even if she was at a disadvantage because of their affinities, by pure rank they stood on equal ground.

"I did say that."

"Is that still true now?"

"Now, he's..."

Merlin worked her lips. The Siegfried Najin meant was Siegfried after losing his self. Losing one's self usually meant becoming weaker, but Siegfried was a different case.

He had swung his sword for a thousand years without stopping. Against the undying, on the land of the Abyss, honing himself endlessly through combat.

An Incomparable Genius unlike any in human history, who had never once stopped tempering himself. Even with his self gone, his body had grown stronger than before, and the sharpness of his sword was in a class of its own.

If the current Siegfried went all out,

If he recognized Merlin as an opponent,

Merlin ran the scenario through her head, turning it over a few times with her fairy Authority. She let out a sigh.

"I couldn't beat him. Not unless I destroyed that sword of his."

"And if you destroyed the sword?"

"Then I'd win. If there's nothing in his hands. You know it's a meaningless hypothetical, right? It's the same as saying I'm in a situation where I can't use magic."

Something else occurred to her as she finished. There was no ordinary way to win. But if her Companion were to end up in a situation where he might die...

"Let's not think about that."

Najin, who had been reading her thoughts, cut off Merlin's silent train of thought. He knew what she was imagining. She had one hand she kept hidden.

Using the Blight Star.

Releasing the Blight Star,held down by eleven of Najin's stars and eleven of Merlin's, twenty-two stars in all barely keeping it bound. Nothing else would be a variable as enormous as the Blight Star.

"Let's save that for when we can control it for certain. We're getting a feel for it bit by bit, aren't we?"

"...Yeah, that's true."

"If we use that thing, we're genuinely in trouble. Do you have any idea what I went through to get that bound? My arm and my calf that got torn up then still ache sometimes. Ugh."

Najin put on a show of complaining, and Merlin flustered over him even knowing it was a show. Amused, Najin gave her a light tap on the forehead with one finger.

"Using the Endings too freely would make for a terrible story anyway. The final curtain is literally a word for the last act. If you call it a final curtain and then put on the play several more times after, that doesn't work."

The final curtain was meant to be the finale.

It had no business appearing anywhere but the last chapter.

"Well, regardless."

Najin opened his palm. The stars he held now numbered eleven. He had defeated the strongest knight of the Round Table, and he had defeated Mordred, who had stood as a symbol of the Round Table entire.

Since coming to the Abyss, Najin had grown at a steep pace.

And with that growth in mind.

"Now's the right time."

Now was the right time.

"For what?"

"Well, there's still one more thing we have to catch in the end. The biggest one."

Najin reached out toward the great mountain range wrapping around the far edge of the Abyss.

Kugugugugung.

It was always rumbling. The mountains were being worn away, and through the heavy clouds of dust, a coiled dragon was shifting its body. As if readying itself to take flight.

"The horseman of death, Leviathan."

Or the immortal king, Leviathan.

"I do have to bring that thing down, but I can't quite figure out how. How do you even cut something that big? Where do you start putting the blade in? It's daunting."

He had no idea of the method. No sense of how to approach it. If that was the situation, what was there to do? Najin answered his own question.

"So I need to learn."

"Learn?"

"How to cut the largest dragon in the world."

"From whom?"

"From someone who has actually cut that dragon, even a little."

A man who despised dragons to the core. A warrior who had soaked his entire body in dragon blood, baptized himself in it. A Swordsman called the Dragon Slayer for having killed more dragons than anyone in the world.

"Siegfried."

Najin spoke the Sword Saint's name with a small smile.

"I got thrown out of the classroom before for not being up to the level. But I think I'm about the right rank now. I've had the basic lessons, I reviewed with Lancelot and Mordred, and I did my prep work watching the witches get crushed..."

He tapped the hilt of his sword.

"That just leaves the advanced coursework."

Time to go take the advanced lessons.

3.

"You want me to teach you how to catch a dragon?"

"That's what I asked, Siegfried-nim."

Standing before the swordsmen who had come to find him, Siegfried blinked. He tilted his head and pointed at the weapon in their hands, as though the question were the strangest thing he had ever heard.

"You catch one with a sword. What else would you use? Is that thing you're carrying just decoration?"

Siegfried had a foul personality. The swordsmen already knew that well enough, so they held their patience and tried again. For the chance to learn swordsmanship from the greatest swordsman in the world, this much was worth enduring.

"We wish to learn the sword that cuts even a dragon's thick scales. Please give us the opportunity to carry your noble swordsmanship forward to future generations. We beg for the chance to receive your instruction."

"Long-winded."

Siegfried gave a listless tilt of his head.

"A swordsman speaks with the sword. If you're just going to flap your tongue, why are you even carrying one? If you want to learn the sword, ask with the sword. Strange people."

He reached down and pulled a tree up by the roots. Kugugung,it came free with a spray of dirt, and the swordsmen blinked as they watched. What was he going to do with that?

"So you want to learn my sword?"

"...That's what we said."

"Fine, sure. If that's what you want."

Siegfried trimmed the uprooted tree down with the edge of his hand, then split it neatly into several pieces. In no time at all, ten wooden training swords were done.

"But here's the problem. I don't know how to teach. Because I was never properly taught either. The one thing I had that could be called a master beat me half to death. Actually, he wasn't even my master. That man was genuinely trying to kill me, and I just didn't die."

He took hold of one of the wooden swords.

"But somewhere in all of that, the sword came to me on its own. That's just how the world works. Get beaten long enough, and you figure something out sooner or later."

Gulp. The swordsmen swallowed dryly. Siegfried flicked the wooden sword toward them. Just a flick, and the ground split open with a crack.

"I'll keep at this until all of these break."

What he meant was he would not let them go before then.

"What are you waiting for? Not coming? Then I'll come to you."

The swordsmen knew, in their gut, that they were done for.

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