WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 464

──────

Age of Man (1)

Najin saw the past.

Perhaps he saw the starting point of his own story. Stories have a form called a prologue, but there are situations where a prologue cannot be the true beginning. Najin's life started from a tale that had been building long before even that.

A prelude. A story from further back still.

Najin caught a glimpse of someone's life, the life of one who had laid the foundation for the world as it exists today. He watched the life of a rebel who kept raising a middle finger at the world until the very end, the life of the hero he had long admired. Then he took a step forward.

Tap.

Najin was dreaming right now. And he was not the only one dreaming. From more than a thousand years in the past, there had been someone who had dreamed only of this single day.

Tap.

Walking on, he arrived at a vast open plain. A green field stretched out beyond the horizon. The sky was blue and the sunlight warm. Not an unfamiliar sight to Najin, but to one particular person, it was a landscape they had spent their entire life dreaming of.

"As I thought."

Najin stopped walking.

"You stayed behind."

"Aah."

She was there.

"I stayed to get a look at that insufferable face of yours. I wanted to confirm it with my own two eyes."

"You waited a thousand years for that?"

"Felt faster than I expected."

In the middle of the field, Arthur stood.

Shush.

A breeze swept through and the field swayed. She reached out and ran her hand through the reeds, watching them pass between her fingers, and smiled.

"Good to see you, junior."

A remnant of thought. A handful of soul.

Drawn by the Star of Idol, Arthur stood before Najin.

2.

"So, what did you think after seeing my memories?"

"Blazing. Using a star as a Stake? I had no idea a star could be used like that."

"Well, I didn't know either until I tried it. It started with a question: Excalibur was made from stars, so couldn't you make other things from stars too? That was the idea. Ah, I'd recommend against copying it, though. It hurts enormously."

Arthur shrugged.

"That was my method. You need to find your own, right?"

"Of course. Following the same method only leads to the same failure. Besides, copying the lead runner exactly, that isn't any fun, is it?"

"Ahahahaha!"

She burst out laughing. An unexpected answer, yet the very same thought she herself had once had.

"You're alike, aren't you."

"I want to ask who you mean, but."

Najin shrugged.

"I think something similar myself."

"Right."

"We are alike. You and I both."

Alike. The two of them felt a kinship with each other. Not because they both held Excalibur, but because their way of thinking itself was alike. Facing each other, the two of them laughed.

"How much time has passed outside?"

"A thousand years. To be precise, a thousand and some thirty-odd years."

"A thousand years. Is that so."

Arthur gave a small, dry smile.

"The Witch of the Abyss told me a thousand years was my limit, so I thought I'd hold out for at least eleven hundred... looks like I managed? Given that the seal is still holding."

That was just like her.

"Right."

Arthur breathed out.

"You read my life."

"Because you left it behind."

"But I don't know how you've lived."

Arthur looked at Najin.

"Would you show me? How you've lived."

"Not a difficult thing to ask."

Just as Arthur had shown Najin her memories, Najin could show her his own in return. It might have been difficult with anyone else, but Arthur shared the common thread of being Excalibur's bearer, and so it was not a hard thing at all.

The stars engraved on Excalibur shone.

Stars were the marks of Najin's lived journey. Using them as a medium, Najin let Arthur see his life. The journey from the Star of Challenge to the star of Victory in Battle, the memories held in all eleven stars, she watched in silence.

"......"

She saw a knight who had challenged from a place where starlight did not reach. In the city where his journey began, she watched a distant successor accomplish the feat of dragon-slaying. Looking at the stories packed to overflowing in every single star, she laughed.

"What is all this."

She could not help but laugh.

Because she herself was in every one of those stories.

"That's Arthur's constellation."

"The stars of Arthur, engraved on the Sword of Selection."

Najin had dreamed while looking at what Arthur left behind. He had read the Chronicles of Arthur over and over and carried admiration in his heart. Even in places where the stars could not be seen, Najin had dreamed of stars.

"I will engrave a star at the highest point."

"Up there, higher than Arthur's constellation."

He had set surpassing Arthur as his goal.

"Cambria, the City of Opportunity. They said it took King Arthur two years to reach the hundred-rank tier, right?"

"I'll do it in one."

"One year is more than enough."

Najin had charged forward as if competing against the Arthur of the past.

That was true of every step of his journey. Najin had thought of Arthur as something like a rival, and everywhere he walked was thick with the traces Arthur had left behind.

The storybook called the Chronicles of Arthur in the hands of a small child. The City of Opportunity, Cambria. The Britain Empire. The chivalry still alive in the harsh Outland. The dream that constellations stained by the mundane world kept tucked away in some corner of their hearts.

The traces she left behind were immense.

Far beyond anything she had imagined.

Even now, a full thousand years later, Arthur's name had not been forgotten. Far from fading, there was no one alive who did not know it.

"......Ha."

The nation she built had flourished. Britain had become an empire, and the descendants of the regents she passed the crown to still had not lost their pride. Watching the young emperor cry out for a fight to the death against the demons, Arthur laughed.

But she could not only laugh.

She had seen Merlin breaking apart, and she had seen how Merlin and the rest of the Round Table had fallen to pieces after her own death. Knowing it and actually seeing it were different things.

"......"

She saw Lancelot's end. Mordred's end. Siegfried's final moments.

"...I."

Having read all those memories, Arthur opened her mouth.

"I was, honestly speaking, not so ideal a monarch. I betrayed my knights at the end. In the age you live in, people call Lancelot and Mordred the knights of betrayal, but......"

She gave a bitter smile.

"It's the other way around. The betrayal was mine."

That was the regret Arthur carried.

"I betrayed my comrades' trust. I promised to lead them in the right direction, then abandoned them. No, maybe abandonment alone would have been better. I forced a cruel choice on them."

Lancelot. Mordred. Every other knight of the Round Table.

"I passed the burden to those who were left behind."

Bedivere and Merlin were left behind. Without knowing any of the reasons, they spent a thousand years holding fast to what Arthur had left, clinging to a Round Table that everyone else had already departed.

"Even if it was the best I could do, it doesn't change that I betrayed them. I have no intention of denying it."

As ideal as she was.

She was a cruel monarch in equal measure.

"And so I came to this place."

Arthur pointed to the ground beneath her feet.

"You've seen it, so you'll understand."

Najin nodded, and Arthur smiled bitterly.

"I threw everything away to arrive here. I succeeded in sealing the Witch of the Abyss and promised humanity a thousand years of peace unlike anything before. In the thousand years since, you all must have prospered."

Her words were accurate. Humanity had prospered as never before. After living through dark ages for thousands of years, they could finally live with their faces turned toward the sun.

"As the representative of the past age."

Arthur looked at Najin.

"I have a question for you."

Their eyes met. Arthur's pupils were clear. Clear enough to work as a mirror, reflecting Najin back at himself.

"What do you intend to do?"

Buy time the same way I did.

Or wager all of humanity's fate and challenge her.

"......"

Najin had faced that question before. But unlike then, he now knew far more. He had felt in his bones just how powerful the Witch of the Abyss truly was, and he had watched with his own eyes what became of those who fell to her.

Two paths lay before him.

If Najin chose the same method Arthur had, he might be able to hold the Witch of the Abyss in place for as long as Arthur had, or perhaps even longer.

'And if I challenge the witch instead?'

The odds of success were unknown. A razor-thin possibility. To reach for that tiny chance, he would have to place all of humanity's extinction on the scale. A witch held down for a full thousand years would swallow the Continent whole in a single instant.

'Either way.'

It could be an answer. There was no wrong answer. Only a better one. Najin looked at Arthur and smiled.

"Isn't it an obvious answer?"

"Even obvious answers need to be spoken out loud sometimes."

That was true. Najin opened his mouth slowly.

"...Excalibur was made by the Witch of the Abyss, and those who hold Excalibur exist to be offered up to her. That has been true for thousands of years. They were offered up and erased without ever being remembered."

And so, paradoxically.

"One who pulls Excalibur cannot defeat the witch. They have lost until now, so they will go on losing."

That narrative had become set in stone. Which came first was unclear, whether they lost because such a narrative existed, or the narrative accumulated because they lost. Either way, those who pulled Excalibur carried a fate of falling to the witch.

"But not anymore."

Arthur did not die to the witch. She lost to the witch, but the witch also lost to Arthur. For the first time, humanity fought the witch to a draw. The scales held in balance, tipped neither way.

"Thanks to none other than you."

The age of myth had passed.

The flames of chaos had died down.

"You severed the old story and left behind a blank page. Shouldn't a different picture be drawn on that page? A story that exists nowhere else."

"Aah."

"I made a promise to Merlin."

That he would show her a future she had never dreamed of. That he would give her a future belonging to none of the tens of thousands of possibilities she had mapped out while rotting away in the Eternal City. So come with me.

"I'll challenge the witch the same way you did, and reach a different outcome. That's the only way I can keep the promise I made to you that day."

So then.

"I will take the witch's head."

"You'd make me a turning point of your age?"

"Shouldn't I be the one pulling my own age forward? I have to hang a star at the very top of the sky. I can't spend forever gazing up at the stars of a past age in wonder."

An insufferably arrogant way to say it. Arthur could not help but laugh. As if she couldn't hold the laughter back, as if she had been waiting for exactly this answer, she laughed until she couldn't stop. Wiping the tears that gathered at the corners of her eyes, she said:

"That's right."

That's how a lunatic who pulled Excalibur should talk.

"Unlike me, chosen by Excalibur, you chose Excalibur. You of all people should say that."

Arthur raised her hand. The space began to crumble. The remnant of her thought, the last of her starlight, gathered into her palm. The gathered starlight took the shape of a sword.

"Take it."

Arthur's Excalibur.

"It belongs to you."

3.

Arthur's final star.

Her thirteenth star was unfinished. A star she could not complete in her own age, existing only as an outer form with nothing inside. And that form was something Najin recognized.

It bore the shape of Excalibur.

Those who ran ahead lay the groundwork for those who come after. Believing in a razor-thin possibility, they throw their lives into it. Giving that life meaning, completing it, that is not their task but the task of whoever follows.

"Take it. It belongs to you."

Arthur held Excalibur out to Najin, lifting the blade with both hands. Najin looked at the sword she was offering for a long moment, then reached out his hand, and did not take it.

"......"

Najin silently lowered himself.

He knelt on one knee before Arthur and bowed his head. He said nothing, but Arthur knew exactly what that posture meant.

She could not fail to know.

It was something she herself had done again and again, as the Knight King.

"Aah."

Arthur smiled.

"You're showing me respect?"

"Not respect. Reverence. The proper reverence a successor owes to the greatest knight."

Looking up at Arthur, Najin said:

"I admired you, and that is why I arrived here."

Because you hung a star in the sky.

Because your story remained.

"Even in places where stars could not be seen, even in places where starlight could not reach, your epic tale arrived. I dreamed while reading your story, and today I am here."

You did not fail. The possibility you threw everything away to hold had value. Arthur understood what Najin meant and smiled faintly.

"......"

Then she steadied her breath. Her breathing changed. Her posture changed. With different eyes, wearing a different air, Arthur opened her mouth. In this moment, she had to be the Knight King.

"You shall be just."

She gripped the sword in one hand instead of two.

"You shall hold to your conviction."

She touched the blade lightly to Najin's shoulder.

"You shall know honor and keep your pride."

The oldest way. The most traditional way. An investiture. Britain's first emperor and the one called the greatest knight, the Knight King, bestowed a title on the successor who had come from a far distant future.

"You are a knight. None other than I, Arthur Pendragon, do hereby invest you as a knight in the name of the Knight King."

And so.

"May you reach Avalon at the end of the Abyss."

Stand on what I left and go beyond me.

Fwsh.

Along with the space, Arthur's remnant thought crumbled. Najin wordlessly raised his hand. With a soft thud, a single sword fell into his waiting palm.

The Sword of Selection, Excalibur.

Arthur's final star settled into Excalibur.

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