WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur
Chapter 470
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Dragon of the Abyss, Leviathan (3)
Breath. The flames a dragon exhales.
This method of attack, regarded as the dragon's signature since time immemorial, is almost disarmingly straightforward: the dragon draws a great breath, transforms it into fire, and releases it.
There is no magic in it. No mystique. Breath scales with the dragon's body. The larger the body, the more air it can draw in at once, and the longer and fiercer the flames it can sustain.
And here, now, was the largest dragon of all.
Drrrrrrrr...
The moment Leviathan inhaled, its scales trembled. The air of the entire world seemed to be sucked into its body. A storm gathered inside that gaping maw, and the storm became fire. A sun rose between those stretched upper and lower jaws.
Even the compressed flames alone were the size of a decent city. The moment they were released, this entire region would become ash. A breath capable of burning a nation to nothing was coming.
"......"
Najin set his stance against the rising heat.
Stirring at the dragon's body and accumulating damage was the work of the Constellations gathered here. Dealing with the dragon's head was Najin's task. The hardest and most dangerous job,which was exactly why it fell to him.
A scene out of myth.
Fighting a dragon whose body formed a mountain range? Najin let out a quiet laugh and brought himself into Unity of Body and Sword. He lifted his sword and exhaled.
First Horn.
Platinum starlight burst free. The Dawning Star shone brighter than every other star assembled here combined. Trailing starlight in its wake, his blade rose,and at the same moment, Leviathan released its compressed fire.
Sound ceased.
The whole world turned crimson.
A wave of flame was coming. Before a breath that would swallow everything and reduce it to ash, Najin thought of a knight. A knight who had always swung his sword from the very front. A hero who had been the symbol of victory and carved the Empire's path forward.
First Horn of the Empire, Aldaran Vasaglia.
Najin was stronger than him now. Even so, the Helmeted Knight remained a towering figure in Najin's mind. He had been Najin's teacher. And a student's duty is to hone what the teacher built and make it sharper.
Najin's sword accelerated. He loaded more force into a single stroke and infused it with the essence of Unity of Body and Sword.
Triumph.
A single line of light was drawn. Cutting between heaven and earth, it split the breath in two. The wave of flame was severed at the vertical stroke.
Crack.
It did not stop there. Najin forced his stance to continue. He could endure the recoil of Triumph well enough by now. He bent the downward arc of the blade mid-swing and spun his body around it.
Sword Aura wrapped around him like a storm, coiled at the tip of the blade, and Najin drove Excalibur forward like a spear.
Horn Charge.
The breath, split in two and losing cohesion, was pierced through by the storm. Shredded flames scattered in every direction. Scattered fire could still hurt, but once broken apart it had already lost its killing force.
Tsssssss!
Merlin's magic extinguished every last tongue of flame. An enormous volume of steam rose where water met fire. The Constellations who had been holding their breath watched,and then the steam cleared, and Najin stood in its wake.
The Dawning Star, without a single smudge of soot.
Cheers broke out across the battlefield. Najin kicked off the dragon's body and broke into a sprint. It seemed about time to move on to the next step.
Flash.
He fired starlight into the sky.
2.
The battle ground on.
When the stars stripped away Leviathan's scales, the Constellations with powerful single strikes drove their Absolute Techniques into the flesh beneath. Countless stars swarmed after every wound they made, prying it open and tearing at what lay inside.
Holes punched through the dragon's body, one by one.
Each hole was small, but hundreds and thousands of them told a different story. Even from Leviathan's perspective, damage at that scale was hard to dismiss.
Splaaash!
From the deep wounds, black filth gushed without pause,too alien to call blood, a viscous liquid that held its own shape. It was the blood of the Dragon of the Abyss, and at the same time it was the dead Leviathan had swallowed.
The dragon's form distorted more hideously with every passing moment.
Leviathan had always resembled a serpent more than a true dragon, and now it was transforming into something beyond description. Each time its body convulsed, scales rained off it in showers, like a snake shedding its skin.
The war of attrition ground on.
Everyone gave everything they had from wherever they stood.
"Sir Gerd!"
"I see it."
Whenever the dragon's tail lashed out like a whip to strike down the stars, Gerd deployed the Imperial Sword and redirected its arc. The Empire is humanity's bulwark, and the First Horn of the Empire stood as that bulwark for the coalition of stars gathered here.
Imperial Sword aura hammered the tail.
With Karon at the lead, the swordsmen sprinted across the dragon's body. The Sword Saint carved away scales and flesh like a butcher filleting meat, cutting down wraiths too sticky to cut cleanly.
"......"
Najin watched them.
Gerd, Karon...
He saw Bedivere swinging the White Spear, hammering at the dragon's body. He saw Anton and Lapis crossing the battlefield as one, saw Roselin finding her own role despite the weight of standing in this place, and Rena cheering her daughter on.
"Keep running! I'll break through here!"
Kirchhoff's voice reached him, falling into step beside him, spear swinging.
"Look ahead. I have your back."
White hair flashed past the edge of his vision. The hands of the dead reaching for Najin's ankles were torn away.
There are so many.
So many stars who had willingly gathered here under his name. People whose lives were tangled up with Najin's,people who had reclaimed their lives or found their footing because of him. There were so many of them.
"Hah."
The realization made him laugh without thinking.
He had understood something.
Only Merlin had walked alongside Najin on his journey. He had never had companions the way the Knights of the Round Table had companions, and he had handled most things on his own. There had been times he sought help, but the majority of his trials he had pushed through alone.
I never really thought about having comrades.
He had never tried to gather them, either.
Yet whether Najin intended it or not,
When he looked around, he was surrounded by people who deserved that name. Just as the Knights of the Round Table had once answered Arthur's call, there were stars all around him who would run to the end of this hell at a single word from him.
"Why are you smiling?"
"No reason."
Najin smiled at Merlin's question.
"It seems I lived a better life than I gave myself credit for."
"Only now?"
"Yes. Only now."
There are bonds built over time. They are not only the living. The stories carved into Najin's constellation held him up. Running with the spear made him faster; when he leaped it was as though wings had been added, carrying him to great heights in a single bound.
Crack.
Najin drove his sword down onto the dragon's upper jaw. The maw that had opened to loose another breath snapped shut with a crack. Suppressed fire detonated inside the dragon's body, and Najin exhaled sharply.
...The war of attrition continued.
But this approach could not settle things.
A dragon is immutable, indestructible, eternal.
To kill a dragon, one must first shatter its mystiques. Najin studied the dragon's form. As the damage mounted, Leviathan was shedding,exposing the essence hidden beneath its scales.
Two existences woven into one.
From the very beginning, Leviathan had been a fusion of countless millions of lives and the first dragon. Two natures in one being. The surface was a proud dragon, but inside it was packed with terrible things. Najin had made the dragon bleed, blurring the line between them.
A dragon that should never change had changed.
Leviathan was no longer immutable.
One mystique shattered. Two remained: indestructibility and eternity. Najin already knew how to break the second one,indestructibility.
Immortal King Leviathan.
The being at the core of Leviathan.
The being that must be dwelling within it.
In the end, there is only one way to kill a dragon.
Destroy the heart that exists within it. To make that possible, there was only one method,something Najin had done once before.
Leap into the dragon's throat.
Choose the hardest path. That was the only way to achieve the great deed of killing a dragon. The first two stars Najin had ever obtained scattered flashes of light.
The Star of Challenge shone.
The Dragon Slaying star shone.
That starlight was a signal. Two people fell in beside Najin.
"Leaping into a dragon's mouth to kill it,I know the theory, but I never imagined there'd actually be a madman who'd go through with it."
"So, are you afraid?"
"Not at all! Excited, if anything."
Kirchhoff laughed.
"The mouth will open soon. I will clear the dead blocking the throat. The flames are yours."
Yuel ran right beside Najin, sword raised sharp. Coincidence or fate, the three who had led the raid on the Sanctuary of Oblivion were assembled here again.
"Now."
The instant the dragon's mouth opened, all three of them leaped inside.
3.
The inner world of Leviathan, Dragon of the Abyss.
A dragon's inner world is its origin and its heart. When Najin had leaped into the red dragon's mouth long ago, what he had seen was a world full of fire.
Its heart was a giant mass of flame.
He had endured the flames searing his entire body and burst that mass apart to achieve the great deed of dragon-slaying. Calling up that memory, Najin opened his eyes.
He was falling from high in the sky.
As vast as Leviathan's body was, so too was its inner world. From the moment he entered the inner space, the starlight wrapping his body began to be shaved away rapidly. An inner world naturally rejects what comes from outside.
In other words: the dragon's digestive process.
To scrape away what it had swallowed, dissolve it, and make it nourishment. That was the dragon's digestion.
"......"
Yet why?
There were things here that had not been digested. Or perhaps things that never needed to be digested,for these, after all, were Leviathan's own essence.
Human structures stretched out in rows.
Countless bell towers rose high, well-laid roads spread between them, and waterways flowed through the gaps. The scale of it dwarfed the imperial capital. All of the Empire's territories combined could not compare.
The greatest nation of all was here.
A nation whose very name had been erased.
A great empire that had unified the Continent,that had made not only humans but giants, fairies, dragons, and countless races now extinct and nameless into part of itself,spread out before him.
Only the nation remained.
There were no citizens.
The dead who had melted into it ten thousand years ago writhed, fused with the nation itself, and among all those who breathed even in death within that great empire, only one still held a recognizable form.
"......"
The highest seat.
A place above all,above every person, every living thing.
He had subjugated every life on the Continent beneath a single purpose, made even dragons bow their heads: the most arrogant king of all sat there. The names given to him were too many to count.
Conqueror King. Tyrant of the age. Madman consumed by vengeance. King of Arrogance. Iron-blooded sovereign. Monster wearing a human's skin. Butcher. Sage-king. Emperor who unified the entire Continent. Wise ruler. Subjugator. Father of all heroes...
A figure whose infamy matched his fame.
The most brilliant emperor.
And, at the same time.
The emperor who had cast the deepest shadow.
Immortal King, Leviathan.
The king who embodied the indestructibility of dragons looked down at Najin.
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