WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 449

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Sword Demon of the Abyss (1)

Ten days had passed.

On the eve of his departure for the Abyss, Najin sat perched on a boulder and held his sword up to the starlight. The light flowed smooth along Excalibur's blade.

Sharp.

Sharper than it had ever been.

That was only natural, given how hard he had honed it. Since the day he first faced Siegfried, Najin had grown, and as its wielder grew, so too did Excalibur.

Arthur's stars. The Star of the Round Table.

And his own stars besides.

Forged from so many stars, Excalibur was sharper than it had any right to be. Najin's own senses, the hand gripping the hilt, were keener now than at any point before. He was in peak condition. That much was certain.

"......"

Peak condition, and yet he had no certainty of victory against Siegfried. He still felt the gap between himself and the Sword Demon. It refused to close. No matter how hard he reached for it, the distance stayed the same.

Growing, gaining stars, raising his rank.

None of that could get him there.

One step.

Siegfried stood one step ahead of him, and unless Najin closed that single step, no trick or technique would be enough to beat the Sword Demon of the Abyss. He knew it.

Should he train more? Lock himself away somewhere and do nothing but stare at his sword and swing it until time ran out? Or spend decades, maybe centuries, grinding against the undying things of the Abyss?

Countless approaches came to mind.

He shook his head at every one. There was no time for any of them, and beyond that, none of them felt right. In situations like this one, Najin had always chosen the same path.

Collide head-on.

Challenge it. Throw yourself in, even if you crash and shatter. A person who challenges comes away with something more valuable than one who never tries.

Shatter. Break.

Take on an impossible feat.

And break through the other side.

Glint.

The star engraved on Excalibur shone. Looking at that light, Najin smiled before he knew he was doing it. Closed-door training had never suited him. Crash into an opponent, get wrecked by someone who felt like a wall, and the understanding came on its own.

"Huu."

That was how he had lived until now, and he knew no other way. So there was nothing for it. He would do what he had always done, the only way he knew how.

The path would show itself.

Najin rose and started walking.

Ten days had passed.

Now it was time to challenge the Sword Demon of the Abyss.

2.

Merlin walked the Abyss alone.

Since the day Najin pulled Excalibur, she had always been at his side. Walking now without him felt genuinely strange, her own feet pressing against the ground, no one beside her.

Tap.

The moment she left Najin behind, the expression drained from her face. The warmth in her chest went cold, and her eyes froze over like a lake in the dead of winter.

"Why do you look like you're attending your own funeral?"

"That's the most serious face I've ever seen on anyone."

Najin was not here to prod her with jokes like that. He was not here to ease the mood, to pull her back to the surface whenever she started sinking too deep. The absence felt larger than it had any right to.

How strange.

The time she had spent without Najin was hundreds of times longer than the time she had spent with him. That thought drew one last small smile from her before she let her face go still and let herself sink.

Merlin descended.

She needed to, right now.

"......"

Her hair lengthened. She shifted away from the person she had become after meeting Najin, moving back toward something closer to the fairy Merlin she had been before. The form the world knew as the Wizard of the Lake.

The mage who had reigned over witches like a nightmare.

The Grand Mage recorded in the annals of human history. If Najin could see her now, he might say something like, "I cannot believe it, she actually looks formidable."

Tap.

With every step, cold frost spread from where her foot touched the ground. Uncontained mana bled into the air and dropped the temperature around her.

Crunch.

Snow scattered across the heart of the Abyss.

Crunch, crunch.

Walking through it, Merlin pressed forward. Her destination was deep inside the Abyss, the place where Siegfried had once stood with his eyes closed and simply stopped. With each step it drew closer.

The Sword Saint's grave, and at the same time, the Sword Demon of the Abyss's Sanctuary.

Weapons jutted from the ground there. Broken spears, greatswords, snapped spear shafts, longswords worn down to nothing, and countless more beyond counting. It looked as though every weapon that had ever existed had been planted in that earth.

Which was, in all likelihood, close to the truth.

Constellations swallowed by the Abyss.

Heroes who had existed in an age before Arthur, then been erased from the record of human history, lay buried in this land. Buried, they found no rest, and they clutched their weapons and cursed the world from beneath the soil.

Siegfried had broken them.

Broken, and broken again.

Over a thousand years wandering the Abyss, he had slaughtered countless stars and stripped them of their weapons. What lay here was the result.

Consumed by death.

And yet unable to die.

He does the work of a herald of death better than any actual herald.

The dead who could not close their eyes even in death. Siegfried had taken their weapons and taken their reason to keep those eyes open. That was how he had built his own Sanctuary and completed his own grave.

A grave adorned with the weapons of countless stars.

Or an armory filled to bursting with trophies.

The master of this Sanctuary would return here one day. Draped in his spoils, he would come back to add to what he had built.

"Honestly."

And Merlin intended to speed that arrival along a little. The method itself was simple enough. She only needed to set out bait that Siegfried could not ignore.

Appearing as something close to her old self.

There was a reason she had chosen to walk this ground in a form closer to what she had been a thousand years ago. She steadied her breathing and spread her mana as wide as it would go. Frost settled over Siegfried's Sanctuary, rolling outward like a wave and blanketing the weapons.

Rustle.

Merlin raised her hand. She stretched it toward the sky and thought of the past.

"About that signal, what is it?"

Siegfried had asked her once.

"The one you fire into the sky. Visible from anywhere. Every time it goes up, the Stars of the Round Table start moving at once. What is it, exactly?"

She had answered him.

"What else would it be? What single thing could make all the Stars of the Round Table move at once?"

"A signal that the Witch of the Abyss has appeared?"

"That's usually when it's used, but not exclusively."

"Then what?"

"A signal that Arthur is in danger."

When urgent help was needed, when Arthur was in crisis, when the king who led them had run into a wall she could not climb alone, the signal was fired. Whenever it appeared, the Round Table would drop everything and converge on that point.

"Is that so."

Hearing it, Siegfried smiled. The meaning behind that smile became clear a little later. Turning the memory over in her mind, Merlin drew her mana up.

Magic more than a thousand years old.

So old she could not even guess when she had last used it. Searching through her own memory, she fired a single thread of mana into the sky.

Trrrrrr.

Starlight shot upward with a strange, keening sound. A signal clear enough to be seen from within the Abyss, even from the Outland beyond it, stretched up into the sky. Watching it go, Merlin smiled a bitter smile.

There had been a time when this signal meant the Knights of the Round Table would all gather in one place. Hearing that the king was in danger, they would throw themselves into hell without a moment's hesitation. Twelve knights in full armor standing in formation had been a sight worth seeing.

But not anymore.

Every Knight of the Round Table was dead, save Bedivere. Bedivere knew what this signal meant, which was exactly why he would not come. No knight remained to answer this call.

A knight, though.

There was one who was not a knight.

Boom.

Thunder rolled somewhere far off. The instant Merlin fired her signal into the sky, lightning cracked in the distance. It flared upward in a continuous streak, again and again toward the sky.

The darkness shrouding the Abyss's heavens.

The fog filling the Abyss.

Both flickered and pulsed red in turn. Storm clouds gathered in a sky that had been clear a moment before. The thunder that had started far away drew steadily closer, rolling toward her fast, dragging lightning in its wake.

Boom.

When lightning struck, Arthur used to say:

"He'll come, that man."

Lightning struck.

"Say what I like, he'll come anyway."

Another bolt crashed down. Each time the flash blazed out, shadows swept across the Sanctuary.

"Because that's the kind of man he is."

A bolt hit close enough to turn the whole world white. Squinting against the glare, Merlin smiled without meaning to.

"Honestly."

Even after a thousand years.

Even having lost every star but one.

Even after being swallowed by death.

Even after losing his will / consciousness.

"Still the same as ever."

Siegfried was coming.

If she needed him, he would come, no matter where she was.

Boom.

Dark red lightning drove into the center of the Sanctuary. Everything in the area cracked apart. The landing alone split the earth, and dust and soil erupted upward. Through the billowing cloud, residual lightning popped and crackled as it bounced.

A gaze flashed through the dust.

The Sword Demon of the Abyss revealed himself.

3.

Siegfried arrived with the Thunder.

Because this was his Sanctuary, the one place where some faint image of himself could still surface. Because Merlin was here, calling that past back to him. Because thirteen days had passed, aligning the constellation. Because from Merlin's outstretched hand a signal had risen that he could not ignore.

All of those things had locked together.

And Siegfried had answered the call.

But.

That was as far as it went.

He could not remember. He had forgotten. He did not know why he had come here, either. That too was forgotten. No memories remained in him.

What remained was instinct.

Everything in Siegfried's field of vision was an enemy. For a thousand years wandering the Abyss, everything in the Abyss had been his enemy. What his eyes found now was Merlin.

A powerful Constellation.

Siegfried lifted his foot. The ground was already cracked from where he had landed like a thunderbolt, and he drove his foot into it again.

Thud.

The earth shook. The frost blanketing the Sanctuary scattered. The ice that had covered the weapons jutting from the ground shattered entirely. Through the flying frost, Siegfried swung his arm.

A violent gust tore through.

The shockwave from his stamping foot sent every weapon planted in the Sanctuary flying upward at once. Swept up by the gale Siegfried's arm created, the weapons smashed into each other wildly in midair.

Clang, clang, clang!

Blade on blade, spearhead on sword edge, the friction rang out. Through the weapons colliding at random and scattering in every direction, Siegfried reached out a hand.

This was his armory.

Everything here was his weapon.

Whatever his hand closed around became a blade. And so, in a place holding more than a thousand weapons, Siegfried was a Swordsman holding a thousand swords.

Shhhhhhhhk.

He swung a blade toward Merlin. Even as the sharp steel came at her, she did not move. Because she already knew.

Flash.

Just as Siegfried had arrived with Thunder, someone arrived with a shining star and stepped between Siegfried and Merlin. From outside Siegfried's awareness, Najin closed the distance in a single instant and swung his sword.

Claaaaaang!

Blade met blade. The shockwave burst outward and Najin's clothes billowed. Standing guard over Merlin, Najin pulled the corner of his mouth up. Karon, who had closed in just the same as Najin, set his blade to a sharp angle.

The stage was ready.

The players had taken their places.

There was nothing left to wait for. Raise the curtain and let the play begin. The laughter of the Star of Mirth echoed in Najin's ear. An opening, after all, ought to be something worth watching.

The second star engraved on Excalibur.

The dragon-slaying star shone.

The surest anchor there was, the one thing that would make Siegfried unable to look away, that would keep him from leaving the battlefield no matter what, that would hold him here. Najin drew it out.

"Siegfried."

A dragon. Siegfried's reverse scale.

Excalibur. The thing he could not turn away from.

"This is a duel."

The duel you wanted more than anything.

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