WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 475

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Mortal King, Leviathan (8)

Since the day Leviathan was born, countless heroes had been swallowed and erased. Before that dreadful, mythic beast, all humanity could do was submit.

Look at that colossal body. Raise your head and it touches the sky. Before that enormous creature bridging earth and heaven, even the greatest Transcendents were nothing but human. Who could face it and walk away unscathed? No one under the sun.

Even if you grasped the nature of that existence.

Even if you realized Leviathan had once been the Mortal King.

And even if you understood every last weakness.

Being unable to respond was the same regardless. Who would stop that vast dragon in its tracks, and how would you strip away scales hard enough to break the mind, and by what means would you leap into a dragon's maw and cut down tens of millions of soldiers? No one could hold confidence in themselves before tens of millions of wills.

That was why Leviathan had been immutable.

Immutable, and therefore eternal.

Eternal, and therefore indestructible.

Even Arthur had failed to bring him down, and even Siegfried, the Incomparable Swordsman who cut through all things, had knelt before him. The terror of Leviathan, which had subdued even the greatest heroes, seemed as though it truly would last forever.

Boom.

But right now, in this moment.

"Aah."

A crack ran through that eternity. Put there by nothing other than a single human being raising a sword against death itself.

"So this is what you looked like."

Standing before death, he smiled. Rather than waiting for death to come to him, he walked toward it on his own two feet. As if he were not afraid at all.

Thud.

Najin kicked off the ground and began to run. Charging in a straight line toward death, he steadied his breathing.

'I stacked the numbers.'

Everything that had been needed to reach this point, everything piled up to face Leviathan, flashed before Najin's eyes.

'I gathered the stars.'

To stand against Leviathan, he had gathered countless stars. He had united those stars and thrown down the challenge. Because of every step Najin had taken until now, because he had made his mark across both the Outland and the Continent alike, the stars had answered his call willingly.

'I changed the dragon from a mythic beast into a symbol of old humanity. I broke immutability, I declared the duel, and...'

He had weakened the dragon's symbolic weight. By challenging Leviathan, who had put forward the concept of representing humanity, to a duel as a representative himself, he had dragged him down to equal footing. He had shown that present humanity was no longer inferior even measured against old humanity.

'To counter tens of millions of soldiers, he had summoned hundreds of millions of stars to this side as well.'

So that his confidence in himself would not waver before tens of millions of wills, Najin had gathered the stars that trusted in him. They became a fixed point that would not shake even in the face of tens of millions.

Even now, if he listened, he could hear them.

The war cries rising from outside the darkness, the voices of heroes fighting against tens of millions, reached him. At that, Najin smiled without thinking.

'And so, he had arrived here.'

He had canceled out every hand Leviathan held. A thousand years after Arthur's death, gathering everything humanity had built up over that time, Najin had come to this place. That alone was achievement enough, but naturally Najin had no intention of stopping there.

He raised his head. He looked forward.

Looking forward, there was a king wrapped in death.

The existence that no one had defeated in ten thousand years stood right there. The wretched ghost that was stagnating humanity's history, trying to pin it in the past, stood before him. Having come this far, what Najin needed to do next was simple enough.

Boom!

Fight and win. Break through, as he always had.

'Cut down the one no one has ever cut down.'

That is what the world calls a hero.

As the representative of heroes, Najin swung his sword.

2.

If the Witch of the Abyss was a being compared to a god, then her most powerful Authority, death, was... truly something that could be called a divine miracle.

A miracle. Something fundamentally alien, in the most literal sense.

Common sense did not apply. It was not bound by rules. Unconstrained by anything, there was no way to block it. The starlight Najin had wrapped around his body, the mana, all of it rotted and crumbled the moment death beckoned.

Shaved down.

A great warrior and a dying old man are the same single life before death. As if to say that everything you have gathered until now is useless in this moment, the thick darkness gnawed at Najin's body.

Crack.

Blood flowed. Pain came, but even that pain grew hazy. His senses dulled, and even as he swung his arm he found himself doubting whether his arm was actually still attached.

"...Ha."

Even watching death with both eyes, he could not tell exactly how its attacks worked. To swing a sword you have to move your arm, to cast a spell you have to move your fingers and scatter mana, and yet this thing had no preparatory motion whatsoever.

No warning before it moved.

So Future Sight was meaningless, too.

The only thing he could rely on right now was instinct. The sense cultivated by always keeping death close while he fought. That sharp instinct alone was the answer.

'It's coming.'

Trusting his instinct, Najin moved his body.

Something silently raked across his shoulder and passed. No pain registered. Only when he moved his shoulder and heard the grating crunch of bone did Najin realize his shoulder had been cut.

White bone was exposed. If he had not moved, his left arm would have been gone.

And it did not stop there.

Something struck him. His arm bent in a direction it was never meant to bend. The moment he tried to set the bone and move, something nearly tripped him. Looking down at his own body, he found a long pole driven clean through his stomach.

Click.

He gritted his teeth and yanked it out. As he spewed blood and swung his sword, something collided with the blade with a ringing clang and spun away into the air. Attacks he could not track, could not tell when or where or how they were coming, kept coming.

For that is what death is, at its core.

Even recognizing how close it had drawn was difficult. By the time he came to his senses, a scythe was already leveled at his throat. Sometimes it was a sword, sometimes a spear, sometimes fire, sometimes a foul-smelling poison.

For death takes many forms.

"......"

Thrashing about on instinct alone, even those instincts were dulling. Something pressed down on Najin from above. Death by crushing, the enormous pressure made his joints creak and groan with a terrible noise.

Death by burning, death by drowning, death by illness, death by old age...

Every variety of death surged in at once. Fire scorched his body, something blocked his breathing, thorns that had grown from inside him burst through the skin. A cudgel swung to beat a sinner to death tore the skin from Najin's back.

It felt like wandering lost on a vast, open sea.

Death was visible, far away.

But swinging his sword could not reach it. Reaching out could not grasp it. Kicking off the ground and sprinting brought him no closer. Facing death, Najin let out a hollow laugh.

'So this is the witch's Authority.'

Against a witch scattering an Authority like this, Arthur had endured for seven days and nights? A newfound respect for her rose in him. Alongside it, a competitive streak.

Then he could not afford to lose.

Najin steadied his breathing. He drew up the starlight. Arthur had burned through her own starlight challenging the witch, but Najin had no intention of using the same method. Repeating the same approach only means repeating the same failure.

'Death. The end. The final moment.'

Countless lives fear death. Humans are no different. Before the death that will come someday, humans thrash and run, and none dare think of standing and fighting it. In youth you might push death back, but someday death will come calling again.

In the end, all anyone does is run from the ending that will come.

He did not deny that. But he had no intention of simply accepting it either. Najin gripped his sword.

'Someday the end will come.'

But not now.

'The day death catches up to me will arrive.'

But that day is not today.

"The one who decides that day is me. Not you. The method, too, will be decided by me."

Najin exhaled. He stamped his foot down and shattered the deaths closing in around him. As if to say he had not the slightest intention of dying like this, the corner of his mouth curled up.

When I die, and how I die, is for me to decide.

If one of the apostles of the end were to say that deciding that belongs to the domain of gods, Najin would happily raise a middle finger to the heavens, just as a certain rebel of the past had done. He had no interest in fatalism. No intention of believing in it.

"Besides."

Najin swept death aside.

"My end is already mortgaged to someone else."

A terrifying fairy who holds the Terminus Star has his life as collateral. If Najin ever wants to decide his own end, he will have to reach an agreement with her first. Thinking of her, Najin laughed in a way that was entirely out of place for the situation.

Najin walked.

Even as his body was eaten away, he pressed straight ahead toward death. As if crying out that this was not his death, he swung his sword and smashed apart the Authorities crashing over him.

Death by burning, dying consumed by fire, was not to his taste. This was Najin, who had endured even a dragon's flames and carved straight through the scorching fire of witches without slowing. He gave a scornful laugh at the thought of dying by fire and split the blaze apart.

Death by drowning and death by freezing.

Sinking in water, dying as every drop of moisture in your body turned to ice. Those were not his death either. Above all, his guide would never allow it. The current split apart and the ice shattered to pieces.

Death by starvation, and the unbearable hunger, made Najin burst out laughing. He had been through this already. More than enough times to be sick of it.

Boom.

Feeling the hunger, if anything, let Najin kick the ground and run. Drawing on the experience of sprinting through the Domain of Famine, he exhaled and pushed his speed higher.

Against death in battle the Victory in Battle star answered, against death by crushing the indomitable star rose, against dying far from home in some strange land the Star of Adventure stirred, and against every form of death that came for him, Najin met each one with a star of its own.

'Above all else.'

The Star of the Funeral March spoke.

'This cannot be my end.'

This is not the place he will be buried. It cried out that he had not lived to meet a death like this. Bleeding, retching, setting broken bones back in place, Najin stepped forward.

He did not run from death.

He fought back against the death that came for him.

Death ends someone's life, but it cannot erase the footprint of how they lived. That becomes a record, remains in someone's memory. And so the steps Najin had taken did not vanish, even within death's domain.

"......"

Looking back, they were there, long imprinted behind him. The footprint Najin had left behind. Leaving that trace in his wake, Najin raised his sword.

Crack!

Something drove into Najin's heart. Death's fist was clenched around it, as though it meant to stop that heart and pass its sentence. At that, Najin coughed up a mouthful of blood and sneered.

"Who is doing what to whom."

Najin looked at the king wrapped in death. Even that king was not free from death. Under the Crown of Immortality, he had been thrashing and struggling to keep from being swallowed by death himself.

He had no intention of dying for a coward like that.

Najin swung his sword. He cut through the king's arm that had seized his heart. He pulled the arm free from his chest, and then Najin gripped his own heart with his own hand. Blood circulated through his entire body. Feeling the starlight swelling up inside him, Najin swung his sword.

One strand. It started with a single strand.

A single thread of Sword Aura split the darkness by a hand's width. The start was thin. But what followed was not light either. Dragging that single thread of Sword Aura low, Najin took his stance.

'If you try to bury me under every form of death.'

Then I cut you with a thousand lives, ten thousand radiances of light.

Thousand Stars, Ten Thousand Radiances.

From that single thread of Sword Aura, starlight overflowed.

3.

The first to feel the change were the stars locked in struggle within the dragon's interior. From deep inside the darkness that had settled thick at the center, at the highest point of that inner world, light began to leak out.

Darkness that no light had been able to reach.

Darkness that could not be penetrated.

From inside that darkness itself, light burst free. As if it could not hold it down after all, the light the darkness spat back out became a sharp blade and cut across the battlefield.

One, two, three, dozens...

The leaking light swelled without end.

Hundreds, thousands...

The armies of death were swept away. Sword Aura falling like a guillotine severed entire armies, a tempest of blades ground armies to nothing, and the unbroken chain of Sword Aura carved the battlefield to pieces.

And then tens of thousands.

Watching Sword Aura extend in tens of thousands of threads, the gathered stars found themselves smiling before they knew it. Because inside that Sword Aura was their own lives.

"Seems you're making good use of it."

Abraham, the Tomorrow Pillar, felt the traces of his Tomorrow Sword and broke into laughter. And that was not all. Heroes who had been erased from history and had not been able to leave a single mark behind realized that their lives were there, inside that technique, and could not help but smile.

Najin had kept his promise.

He had remembered their lives. He had joined their techniques to his own. How could they not smile at that?

"Follow the captain!"

"Which one, the first? The second? The third?"

"All three in one place!"

"All three see the same thing, so there's no need to debate it. Charge, charge!"

The Golden Horn Knights raised a battle cry and unleashed their Horn Charge, crying out to follow their captain. Running at the very front of them all, Aldaran Vasaglia swung the Triumph sword.

"Advance, advance!"

With Kirchhoff at their head, the forces of Londinel pressed in with greater ferocity. The Constellations following behind Yuel pushed hard as well, not letting the moment slip.

The darkness split apart.

Immutability and eternity had crumbled away. And now, with indestructibility on the verge of crumbling too, the dragon finally exposed its weakness.

The dragon's reverse scale, its very origin.

From within the splitting darkness, the dragon's heart was laid bare.

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