WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 443

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Special Instructor (2)

Historical heroes are often mythologized, their reputations inflated or their characters reshaped to fit a cleaner image. That tendency only grows stronger when the real person had serious flaws. The chroniclers of the age figured it was a kindness, at least, to let people who had given their lives to save the world be remembered at their best.

So what if someone had a rough personality? These were heroes who sacrificed everything. The decent thing was to keep their records pretty.

An anecdote about stealing food out of hunger, for instance, would be quietly repackaged as "moved to tears, took food by stealth so starving children might eat." That was the unspoken rule of the era.

「Sword Saint, Siegfried.」

Of course, unspoken rules being what they are.

「Arrogant, haughty, contemptuous of others, and utterly without regard for anyone around him.」

「Wherever he went, incidents and accidents followed without fail.」

「Swordsmen who came forward claiming he had robbed them of their blades never stopped coming. According to testimony, he would beat them senseless, saying, "A sword like that is wasted on someone like you. Hand it over if you're just going to swing it like that."」

Even in the age of heroes a thousand years ago, there were exceptions.

「His accomplishments were extraordinary.」

「His character was deeply lacking.」

Siegfried was the prime example. Even the chroniclers of his day tried to spin his conduct into something presentable and then gave up. He was not merely rough around the edges; he was closer to someone who simply did not acknowledge that other people existed.

「This is the distortion that comes from empire-centric record keeping.」

「Because Siegfried was not a hero aligned with the Empire, malicious editing was applied. By nature he would have been a flawless hero, and his achievements prove it.」

Some historians did argue the record was tainted by imperial bias, that Siegfried could not possibly have been that person. The problem was that there were far too many surviving accounts to make that argument stick.

'Then again, heroes unaffiliated with the Empire had their records preserved just fine.'

No one could say for certain which version was right. Historians could only trace documents; they had not actually lived in that era. With that thought, Najin opened his mouth.

"What do you think, uh... senior?"

"What?"

Right here was someone who had genuinely lived through that age. A living witness to history, going back a full thousand years. Najin had decided to ask directly.

"About Siegfried. There are all these different takes, this version is right, that one is wrong, it's imperial bias, and so on. Which do you think is closer to the truth?"

"Hold on. Before we get to that."

"Before?"

"Yeah. What did you just call me?"

"Senior?"

Najin was a young man who knew how to show respect to his elders. Moved by this display of fine manners, the elder delivered a spirited kick straight to his shin.

2.

"Siegfried. What kind of person he was, you're asking."

Hmm. Merlin, who had been rubbing her chin, opened her mouth.

"A foul-tempered man."

"That's blunt."

"I'm actually being generous. That's after he met Arthur. Before Arthur, he was past foul, closer to garbage."

What on earth kind of person had he been? Najin tilted his head, and Merlin made a complicated face, as though she wasn't quite sure how to explain it.

"Try imagining a seven-year-old with no idea how the world works. No sense of right or wrong, no awareness of anyone around him, no consideration for others whatsoever, just a completely insufferable little brat."

"All right, I've got the picture."

"Now put a body that can beat a dragon bare-handed and sword skills at the Sword Master level into that seven-year-old."

Najin winced. What happened when an insufferable brat with no regard for anyone else was handed that much power was not hard to imagine.

"That sounds horrifying."

"That was Siegfried before he met Arthur."

"...Really?"

"Really. Though his upbringing played a part. I heard from Siegfried once about the guardian who raised him, and honestly I thought it was a miracle he turned out no worse than that."

If you have no strength, things get taken from you. If you have strength, you can take anything you want. So take. A strong man taking from the weak is simply the natural order. It is the weak who are at fault.

"He was raised by a scoundrel who preached things like that and beat him nearly every day. Apparently Siegfried eventually did exactly as he had been taught, beat his foster father senseless and took his fortune. In a way, the man got back exactly what he'd put out."

Merlin shrugged.

"Not that I'm defending it, but it was a situation that would warp anyone. Everyone from my era was like that. They were all pushed to extremes that left them twisted one way or another. What made Siegfried stand out..."

She shook her head.

"Was just that he was disgustingly strong."

A body built for combat from birth, sword talent that nothing could rival, and eyes comparable to Najin's at his current level, he had all of it. The incidents he caused were simply larger in scale.

"And after meeting King Arthur?"

"He changed. A great deal."

The records backed that up. Accounts of Siegfried's worst behavior clustered almost entirely before his meeting with Arthur and were hard to find afterward.

"When was it? There was a time Siegfried told Arthur something like, 'This is the only way I know. It's the only way I can solve things.'"

Ahem. Merlin cleared her throat.

"Arthur answered him like this."

「Is that so? Personally, men like you are the type I dislike most.」

「Born that way, raised that way, so you will live that way?」

「A life that flows wherever it is aimed. Fine, live like that. No one will say a word to you. There is a certain pleasure in a life that simply goes where it is pointed.」

「Only, I dislike that sort of person most.」

「I have no wish to keep such company.」

"It must have hit him hard, because he was a different person after that."

"Oh..."

Najin had been forced by Dieta to work through a fair amount of genre literature, covering roughly half the categories. This was a compelling setup. A shame to let it pass without snacks. He could have gone for popcorn. He missed the fried corn he'd eaten at that theater once.

"Arthur didn't usually talk to people that way, but she was particularly sharp with Siegfried of all people. It was entertaining to watch from the side."

Merlin wore the expression of someone who also wanted popcorn.

"After that, well, he was still rough around the edges, but he was decent enough. Ask him for something and he'd grumble but do it. Arthur would give him a look and he'd sigh and fix his behavior."

It was the kind of opening that would have had the Marquis of Adelmar on his feet shouting bravo. The story was compelling enough, but the location was not ideal for sitting quietly and listening.

Shwaaaaash!

Najin cut through the Cursed Ones of the Abyss spilling toward him and kept walking. His mouth was getting bored without snacks.

"Even so."

Thwack. Merlin moved alongside him, freezing demon beasts that drew too close.

"There was one part where he never changed."

"One part? What?"

"The sword."

Merlin said it plainly.

"When it came to the sword, he never compromised. If someone asked him to teach them, he would beat them half to death, as if that were the only method he knew. Whenever anyone pointed that out, he acted like he hadn't heard a word."

Siegfried was the first Sword Saint, and a Swordsman who had plunged deeper into the sword than even Arthur. His position was clear: if you dared discuss the sword in front of him, surpass him first.

"How could anyone learn anything that way? They'd all just wear out and quit. Does he have no intention of passing anything down? Everyone thought that."

Merlin let out a small, dry laugh.

"Was that why? No one saw it coming."

"Saw what?"

"That there would be people crazy enough to actually awaken to the sword after being taught that way."

Najin asked who those people were. Merlin grinned as she answered.

"You already know."

"Don't tell me..."

"That's exactly it."

They had been walking, and without quite noticing it they arrived at their destination. Stars were fighting there against the Cursed Ones pouring in from the Abyss, and Merlin extended her hand toward one of them.

The Star of a Thousand Swords, Karon.

She pointed at the banner of the Sword Order he had raised and said,

"The Sword Order."

3.

Beneath a sky slowly being eaten away by the Blight Star breaking free from its seal, Karon had been keeping himself busy. The work was hunting the Cursed Ones coming through from the Abyss, and fighting them had left him genuinely impressed.

'Monsters that just will not die no matter how many times I cut them?'

Their regeneration made the fallen Constellations and the dead of the Outland look like amateurs. Beings truly forsaken by the world, stripped of even the right to die.

By rights, these things belonged locked inside the Abyss.

The Boundary Line of the Abyss had crumbled, however, and as cracks spread through the seal they had broken out into the Outland. The Constellations of the Outland, fire at their feet, had mobilized. Since the Continent could not escape unscathed if the Outland was swallowed, the Constellations from the Continent had moved as well.

Some fought to defend their own territory.

Some fought for a larger cause.

And some fought purely because they found it interesting.

Karon was that last kind.

The moment he heard that endlessly regenerating opponents were everywhere for the taking, he had made a beeline for the Boundary Line of the Abyss. Where else would he find opponents like that? To his mind, this was experience, and excellent training fodder.

While other Constellations bled, figuratively speaking, to hold the front line...

'Tch. That one's not getting cut either.'

Karon was spending his days in pastoral contentment, testing his sword. The way a farmer hoes a field without a stray thought, Karon swung his blade without a stray thought.

"Looks like the world is heading for ruin."

"What are we even supposed to do about this."

"The Blight Star has started shining brighter."

"An ill omen."

While the other Constellations sighed and worried over the future, Karon kept swinging. The future could wait until it arrived on his doorstep. Better to swing the sword one more time than sit around worrying.

That was the nature of the Sword Order's master from time immemorial.

A seat meant for fools who knew nothing but the sword and put no value in anything else. In that sense, Karon was fulfilling his role faithfully.

"That one over there fights well."

"Is that not a young star, not even a hundred years old?"

"The level of the children from the Continent lately is something else. Take the Sacred Blood Church's executioner, or this generation's Star Incarnation. Nothing like the old days."

"Is that so?"

"And the Empire's Swordmaster? I could count on three fingers the stars that could hold their own against that ancient prodigy."

"My goodness!"

From the outside, of course, he just looked like a hardworking young man. Whatever his intentions and convictions, Karon had not taken a single day off from swinging his sword at the front lines.

Forging himself that way, he waited for the right moment.

The appointed time was approaching.

And that day came sooner than Karon had expected.

"Another wave."

"And they never tire of it."

"This one looks more intense. The front line is going to get pushed back again. All we ever do is fall back."

The Cursed Ones rolling in like a tide in the distance. Any one of them alone posed no real problem. But when they came in a mass, pushing through by sheer weight of numbers, there was little to be done.

Still, they had to hold for as long as they could.

That was the thought as the Transcendents steadied the front line. Then the Constellation keeping watch from the high tower went wide-eyed.

"Damn it, a Dead Star!"

The shout rang out. At those words the Constellations went rigid. Some clicked their tongues, some ground their teeth, and others were already preparing to retreat.

...A Dead Star.

The name for a Constellation that had been buried in the Abyss for a long time.

A thousand years ago, or even further back, there were stars swallowed by the Witch of the Abyss. Beings that had spent ages being digested and ground apart within the Abyss.

Different from the Inverse Stars or the forgotten stars.

Stars that should have been shining had lost their light. They existed to defile the very concept of being a star. As if they could not bear suffering alone, they scattered poison to drag shining stars down into the same ruin.

The worst possible opponent for a Constellation.

Face one and your star gets contaminated. Kill it and it comes back, so naturally you were drawn into a long war, and the longer it dragged on, the more your own star got eaten away and corrupted. There was nothing easy about it.

"Awful. I can't deal with that. Last time I faced one I lost a star. Lose another and I'll become a fallen Constellation. I'm sitting this one out."

"Then I suppose it falls to me. I can spare one."

"Again? Use them up like that and there won't be any left."

"Someone has to hold the line, don't they?"

"This is maddening."

The Constellations sighed and shook themselves loose. Some retreated. Others did not. The ones staying to fight struck Karon as strange.

'A battlefield where you can only lose stars, never gain them.'

Stars staking their own light on a front like this, fighting as if bound by some duty to hold it. It was not as if such stars had never existed before. Even in the past, there had been a rare few.

Rare being the word.

Constellations had once been heroes, but that was all in the past. After achieving Transcendence and living through the long years, the heroism and conviction they had carried when they first broke through tended to fade.

Because they had to survive.

Because becoming one of the dead was not an option.

Once you understood how precious a star was, how far you could fall by losing one, you learned to protect yourself. Stars who threw themselves into a battle where they might lose their light, for nothing in return, were vanishingly rare.

"You, of all people? Ha. The you from a hundred years ago would call this insane."

"What else is there to do? The world has changed."

"Since when were you this brave?"

"You are one to talk. You who never took on an apostle because you wanted to save your starlight."

And yet somehow, this place was full of stars like that. Something that should have been rare was happening all the time. Stars that had once guarded their light with everything they had, stars that had always moved with the utmost caution, were acting like heroes for no reason anyone could quite name.

There was not much mystery to it, really.

Before entering the fight, they looked up at the sky. What shone up there was not only the Blight Star. Other stars burned bright enough to hold their own against it.

The Stars of the Round Table.

And the Dawning Star.

They looked at the Dawning Star and smiled. They saw a hero's star and remembered who they used to be. Even a swordsman who had set down the sword, watching a great swordsman in their prime, will feel their hand drift back toward the blade they abandoned.

These stars were the same.

Heroes who had abandoned themselves were being drawn back toward heroism, pulled by the sight of a hero carrying the age forward.

"......"

Facing the Dawning Star, they each offered their own kind of prayer. Constellations who should have been receiving prayers were praying to another Constellation instead. As if asking to be watched over.

"Wait a moment."

One Constellation stopped mid-prayer and blinked.

"Does it seem particularly bright today?"

It was not imagination. It really was shining brighter.

...Dawn Sword.

And it was getting closer.

Cutting Night.

The Constellations blinked, and from deep within the Abyss, a single sword strike swept through the tide.

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