WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur
Chapter 468
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Dragon of the Abyss, Leviathan (1)
The Sword Aura that cuts through the night shot toward the writhing Leviathan. Platinum light carved through the darkness in a straight, unbroken line.
Dawn Sword, Cutting Night.
The technique that had once finished off the Carnival King. Najin's signature. A massive strike whose range alone stretched hundreds of meters. But size is relative. To a human it was enormous. To Leviathan it was not.
In the minds of the Constellations, a vision formed: even the Dawning Star's starlight swallowed whole by those churning waves. Would even the Dawning Star's sword strike fail to reach? And if it did, what on earth could they use against that dragon?
But.
Boom!
There was a gap between what they had imagined and what actually happened. With a thunderous crash, the platinum Sword Aura slammed into Leviathan. The starlight was not swallowed. Far from it-it drove straight into Leviathan's body.
Crack and slide.
Leviathan's scales rippled violently. For just a moment the charge stopped, and that colossal body was shoved back. Every Constellation watching went wide-eyed.
It landed. The attack got through.
The instant Leviathan so much as flinched, the whole mood of the battle shifted. Not an untouchable mythic being, a beast that could be hit. That was what Najin had wanted to show them, and so he had opened with his Absolute Technique from the very start.
Spin.
Najin adjusted his grip and pointed toward the slowing Leviathan. The speech was already done. Grand words and declarations had no place here. He said one word.
"Charge."
That was enough.
"Aaaaaaah!"
"Go, go!"
"May the stars bless us."
"Hahaha! There's no way I'm missing a chance to stand on the vanguard alongside the Dawning Star. I'm going first!"
Raising battle cries, the stars broke into a sprint. Mages and archers who needed to hold their positions were left behind. Najin and the other warriors charged straight at Leviathan. Najin was at the point of the vanguard, and right behind him came Yuel and the representatives of the various orders.
"For the Empire."
"For Londinel."
Gerd, the Empire's commander, and Kirchhoff, the Last Knight of Londinel, took the left and right flanks respectively. The army of stars spread out like wings and advanced.
Boom!
The earth shook from Leviathan's charge bearing down on them, but no one so much as flinched. They had no need to run only on the ground.
......A thousand years since the seal on the Abyss.
A thousand years someone had bought for the world.
In those thousand years, humanity had grown.
Once, humans had stood with their feet on the ground and looked up at the sky. The sky belonged to dragons and witches. Humans were creatures bound to the earth. Not anymore. Thanks to one cheerful adventurer, the stage of humanity had expanded into the heavens.
The Star of Adventure shone.
As the laughter of the freest adventurer who ever lived rang out across the battlefield, starlight burst from the rear. The mages' circles ground against each other and scattered flashes of light.
Magic that began with Cheon Yuseong, Icarus.
Using the Wings of Icarus he had developed nine hundred years ago as their foundation, mages of later generations had refined and improved levitation magic. A thousand years on, the mages of the present age could float even a city into the sky if they had mana enough.
Mansangdaehae.
What had once been the exclusive art of a single individual named Icarus had since become an entire school of magic, one of the pillars of human civilization.
Flash.
The light the mages produced struck the earth.
Crack, crack, crack.
An instant later, the ground began to rise.
Hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of fragments of earth broke apart and lifted into the air. It was not only ground that rose. The moisture in the air froze, and shards of ice took flight alongside the stone. Together they formed a road spread across the sky.
Against a Leviathan that swam through the earth as it charged, the stars stepped across floating chunks of ground and closed the distance.
Swallow the earth all you like. Churn it up and reduce it to ruin. We'll face you from the sky. A dragon that should have ruled the heavens was swimming through the ground, while humans who should have been chained by gravity stood high above.
Ground rose hundreds of meters up. Thousands of meters.
From a height that Leviathan would have to crane its neck to reach, Najin looked down at the beast. He gripped his spear and let out a long breath. The war had begun. His task, as the one standing at the point of the vanguard, was simple.
Press it down.
From the highest point, Najin leaped. He was not alone. With Najin at their head, a great number of stars jumped from high up toward the Dragon of the Abyss.
Descent.
Countless stars descended on the dragon. Trailing one after another they fell like a meteor shower, and the meteor shower hammered into Leviathan's body.
2.
Descent. Simple and effective.
All it required was enough height and a body that could survive the impact, the power was guaranteed. Against a single human opponent the technique was awkward, but when the target was an army, or something enormous enough to compare with one, the calculation changed entirely.
Leviathan. The largest target in the world was right here. However and wherever they jumped, Leviathan would be there to meet their descent.
Boom!
The first to slam into Leviathan's body was Najin. The Lance of Crossed Star swung like a bludgeon and struck hard against the scales. The scales caved in where the blow landed, and that massive body lurched.
Bedivere descended behind him, then the order representatives, then Kirchhoff and Gerd.
Crash!
Weaker than Najin individually, but together their attacks shook Leviathan's body all the same. The tremors built on each other. More stars followed in a continuous stream, dropping onto Leviathan one after another.
Bang, bang, boom.
Each strike on its own was small. But one becomes ten, ten becomes dozens, dozens reach a hundred, and then the story changes.
Thud, thud, thoom.
The vibrations that began with Najin spread outward. The Constellations descended without pause, hammering Leviathan's body relentlessly. Even the smallest insect, if it burrows into your flesh and makes you bleed, is not something you can simply ignore. The Dragon of the Abyss shuddered hard.
Rumble.
Then the locked scales peeled apart. Like gills opening, a gap formed and air was sucked through it. The Constellations who nearly got pulled in scrambled to the floating platforms of earth.
It sucked in air.
What came next was obvious.
A storm erupted.
It breathed out the air it had swallowed and blasted everyone standing on its scales up into the sky. Dragons create storms by beating their wings, the Dragon of the Abyss created one just by breathing.
Tap.
Those thrown into the air regained their footing on the floating chunks of ground. That was what those pieces were there for.
The first descent ended. The second began.
As the Constellations leaped down in rotating shifts, dozens of beams of light and showers of arrows poured in alongside them. With support from the mages and archers, the stars dove. Undaunted by the sheer size of the thing below, they roared as they descended.
Thud, thoom, thud.
The stars' descent pounded at the dragon's body.
Slash!
Najin, who had not been blown off even by Leviathan's storm, was still slashing at the dragon's scales. Dragon blood gushed out like a fountain, yet he felt no excitement.
Because the fight had not even begun yet.
If it were this easy, Siegfried would never have lost to the dragon. Merlin, Arthur, the Round Table would never have provisionally declared Leviathan undefeatable.
Come on.
Najin ran.
Show me what you really are.
It wore a dragon's guise and called itself a beast, but its true nature was something else. The very civilization of an ancient humanity, woven from tens of millions of souls.
Crack.
So its true nature was.
Crack, crack, crack, crack.
The underworld that had swallowed the old humanity. A walking underworld, that was the true nature of this beast.
"......"
Najin saw it. Through the gap in the parted scales, an enormous darkness stretched out. A dreadful hell hidden beneath those magnificent scales, gleaming like black gems.
The next moment, the scales flipped.
Something erupted from the space between them.
3.
The scales turned back.
What came bursting from between them was a hand. Not the clawed forelimb of some great beast, a human hand. Ordinary human hands and feet pushed out through the gaps in the scales.
Crack, crack crack crack.
A mere human hand should have had no chance of seizing a Transcendent. Yet somehow, the faces of the Transcendents who had been standing on those scales and swinging their weapons went pale with shock. Those reaching hands grabbed them.
Because there was not just one.
Not one.
Not dozens. Not hundreds. Not thousands. Not tens of thousands.
"N-, no, aaaah!"
Tens of millions of hands burst through the opened scales. Half-melted heads pushed out. Chattering teeth followed. The fate of the humans who had been swallowed by the Dragon of the Abyss, or who had become one with it.
They grabbed at Constellations with those hands. Bit at their bodies with their teeth. Screaming in a strange, eardrum-splitting shriek, they clawed frantically at anything they could touch.
-Help me. Get me out of here.
The Dragon of the Abyss is the horseman of death.
A horseman of death is, in essence, the same as the underworld itself.
Those trapped in an eternal hell want to escape. But their bodies had already become one with the dragon. There was no way out. And so the hands they stretched outward in yearning to escape became, by a cruel perversion of that longing, malice that dragged other humans in.
......The Dragon of the Abyss has no forelimbs, no hind legs, no wings. The features a dragon ought to have are absent.
Because it has no need of them.
The tens of millions of arms and legs reaching out from between the scales were Leviathan's forelimbs and hind legs. The arms and legs of giants jutting from its spine, the heads and wings of the countless beasts it had consumed, these served as Leviathan's wings.
There was no nobility in it that a dragon ought to carry.
No beauty anywhere.
The most horrifying beast in the world was here. A walking underworld shook free the things clinging to its body and raised its head. The dragon's head tore up through the earth and let out a roar that nearly swept the ground itself away.
"Ha."
That massive head swung around and fixed on Najin. Crimson eyes bore down on him. Those eyes alone were dozens of times his size. He did not tremble. He laughed.
"Well, that's one ugly son of a bitch."
Not a dragon, not a serpent, more like a centipede, honestly. Standing before the thing that had revealed its true nature, Najin let out a snicker. Hands reaching from the dragon's body surged toward him, and he did not move.
"My sentiments exactly."
No need to.
Screeeeeeee!
A Sword Cry like a human scream buried the screams of those trapped in the underworld. Every last hand reaching for Najin was severed and fell across the dragon's scales. She crushed the still-twitching hands underfoot and spoke.
"Cutting them is unsatisfying. The shape is hideous, and this is not an opponent I care to look at for long. So......"
Yuel Razian.
"Rather than cut, I think I'll dissolve it."
The human who held the mystique of Dissolution.
The human who undoes things bound together plunged her blade into Leviathan's scales.
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