I Pulled Out the Excalibur - Chapter 476

WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 476

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Mortal King, Leviathan (9)

Siegfried. Grand Master of the Sword Order.

He had lived like a single sharpened blade, always seeking something to cut. To him, the world was full of things that needed to be cut down.

First it was his stepfather's rod that beat him. Then the demon beasts blocking his path. Then a dragon soaring through the sky.

"Cut. If you wish to cut, you will cut."

Siegfried swung his sword and cut them all down, cutting whatever he set his mind to. The Sword Saint who lived that way sought, at the final moment, to cut something he could not cut.

Leviathan, the horseman of death.

A beast that was also a god's apostle, and an apostle that was also the representative of humanity. An existence far too vast and mighty to be cut down by a single sword. To cut down such a being, Siegfried had given his life.

"Swing, and swing again."

He was swallowed, again and again. Spat back out, again and again. He died and died until he could no longer challenge death itself, and even then he never let go of the sword. Even after all that endless tempering, Siegfried ultimately could not cut death.

Thousand Stars.

His blade did not reach death.

Ten Thousand Radiances.

His life did.

Thousand Stars, Ten Thousand Radiances. A thousand stars, ten thousand beams of light.

Among those thousand stars, Siegfried's star was there too. Within the Sword Aura spreading in ten thousand directions, Siegfried's blade was there too. His sword's edge could not reach death, but the life he had honed sharp across a thousand years could.

Shhhhhhhhaaak!

Sword Aura swept the area. Tens, hundreds, thousands, eventually tens of thousands of beams slashed through the dark. The platinum Sword Aura stretching out endlessly looked just like starlight. With starlight flooding the world, even death could not hold it in place.

There were simply too many to swallow.

Not one life.

Death, unable to swallow ten thousand sharpened lives, was at last forced to spew out light. As light seeps through even a hand pressed over it, light seeped through the darkness. The death wrapped around the Conqueror King was torn away.

It split. It ripped.

The death that had hung long like a cloak, concealing his body, burned away before the starlight. If death was a cold chill, then life was warm heat. If death was darkness, then life was fire. Even if that fire would one day be extinguished, while it burned it drove the darkness back.

And here was the most brilliant fire of all.

Crash!

Najin burst through the parted darkness. Blood ran from his whole body, but paradoxically, that hot blood was proof that he was alive. Turning even the blood he shed into starlight, Najin accelerated.

Boom.

He stamped his foot into the ground and swung the sword. The Conqueror King stepped back, the tearing death still wrapped around him. His arm was broken, his shoulder carved deep, Najin's blade was not fast enough. He managed to cut away just a sliver of the death surrounding the Conqueror King.

But that was fine.

He let go of the sword. Between the fragments of Excalibur dissolving into starlight, Najin swung his fist. Just as Siegfried had done, Najin used bare-knuckle fighting to fill the gaps between his movements.

His bare fist hit with a crack, driving into the Conqueror King's abdomen.

He felt something breaking.

Najin pulled the corner of his mouth up.

Got him.

He had reached the king wrapped in death. The death torn to shreds was not pulling back together. An opening like this could not be wasted.

Crunch.

Jaw clenched, Najin kept moving. He swung his fist, scattering blood. He kicked. If he could keep the attack going, he did not hesitate to headbutt either. The fingers that touched death rotted and crumbled, and blood poured freely from the forehead torn open by the headbutt, but...

"Ha!"

Najin laughed anyway.

Crack!

He hammered at the death again and again without pause. When death tried to counter, he drove his foot into its abdomen and shoved it back, then charged in again. Did he think Najin was going to throw another punch? The moment the death wrapped around the Conqueror King sharpened into spikes like thorns, Najin scoffed.

He grabbed at empty air.

Faking the punch, he pulled Excalibur out of nothing and drove it through the raised spikes, splitting them apart. The instant armor appeared beyond the stripped-away death, Najin kicked off the ground and lunged like a hound.

He forced his fingers into the seams of the armor. Broken fingers bent and jammed between the plates, wedging themselves there, and Najin's eyes went wide.

"Got you."

Covered in blood, eyes burning, there was something almost monstrous about him. They say humans flee from death in fear, but now it was impossible to tell who was death and who was not.

Gripping death so it could not run, Najin kept up the close-quarters fight. He swung the sword. He swung his battered fists. He pulled on the hand jammed into the armor's seam and drove his knee into the face.

Death has no face, they say.

But the king wearing death has a face, does he not? He was only wearing death. What was packed inside was the indestructible king. As if testing just how far that indestructibility could hold, Najin never stopped attacking.

Blood burst. Bones broke. The parts of his body that touched death rotted away. Even so, Najin moved.

Then, with a slice.

Death began to strike back. The fingers wedged between the armor plates were cut away. The death wrapped like a cloak around his body became a blade and cut into Najin.

But by then it was far, far too late.

"I told you."

One of Najin's hands was already gripping the crown.

"I've got you."

Gripping the crown that symbolized Leviathan's indestructibility, Najin pulled the corner of his mouth up.

Crack.

Fused to the darkness as if one with it, the crown clung thick and tangled. Najin seized it with his bare hand. The blood he had shed stuck to the crown in clots. The crown had been rattling with each blow he landed, and now it could no longer hold its place. The things that symbolized him had already been crumbling.

Not immutable. Not eternal.

Only indestructibility remained, barely holding him together, but through the process of the shredded death gathering back around his body again and again, the crown had grown unstable.

It's already started to come loose.

Something that does not shake is hard to pull free. But something that has begun to shake is easy. Najin put strength into his hand and pulled the crown.

Rrrrrip...

The last mystique remaining.

It began to peel away.

He had changed Leviathan to bring down the mystique of immutability. By making the Conqueror King sacrifice his own mystique, he had brought down the mystique of eternity.

What remained was indestructibility. Just the one.

That one remaining mystique was now about to be stripped away.

"Aaaaaaaaah!"

Whether they sensed their king was in danger, the army of death went berserk. With their own bodies torn to shreds, they cared nothing for it and threw themselves at Najin to protect their king.

But no army is as vulnerable as one that has turned its back on the enemy.

Horn Charge.

Twelve streams of storm swept through the army with its back turned. Along the road that opened, a massive knight came sprinting. Fast, impossibly fast for that frame. Every step his armor clanked with a heavy, grinding sound.

The army of death did not recognize that sound.

But the heroes did.

There had been a man who appeared one day without warning and climbed to the highest floor of the Tower of Heroes. The heroes knew better than anyone how strong that man was. Watching him leap without hesitation into the middle of the enemy, one of the heroes laughed.

"So this is who came after me?"

Tomorrow Pillar, Abraham, burst out laughing. And sure enough, the Empire's pillar who had come to succeed him had ended the war and won back peace?

"Makes sense."

The one who had achieved a feat great enough to rewrite the title of Pillar, held for hundreds of years, into Horn.

First Horn of the Empire, Aldaran Vasaglia.

Boom!

He landed in the middle of the enemy. The army of death was moving to protect their king, but even they could not afford to ignore Aldaran's presence. They swarmed to bury him in an instant, but...

Thud.

Aldaran's stage had always been the battlefield, from the very beginning. His specialty was leaping alone into the middle of an enemy force and breaking the army apart from the inside. He did what he did best.

A storm raged in the middle of the enemy.

Cut, smash, break, blast.

As the army of stars pressed in to exploit every gap, Aldaran raised his sword. He took his stance as if to say he would let no one interfere with Najin.

First Horn.

A brief stillness.

Triumph.

Then, with a roar, a single sword slash cut off the path. As if to say he would let no one through, Aldaran carved a towering cliff of a strike into the ground, rolled across it, and bellowed. No one crosses this line.

Not while I, Aldaran, stand here.

Not a single one.

As if they could not bear to fall behind him, the heroes charged in. They would not let this sticky, clinging past hold back the road toward the future they had longed for so deeply. Old dead men though they were, their bodies overflowed with vitality.

The roaring continued.

Listening to those roars, Najin smiled. Looking ahead, all he could see was darkness seething madly with death. No, a human wearing death. He was clawing at Najin's arm, trying to sever the grip on the crown.

That resistance did have an effect.

Najin's flesh was rotting, crumbling, tearing away. But it was not being severed. He was drawing on starlight and holding death at bay.

"I'll say it again, Leviathan."

Najin spoke. The polite speech was gone. He generally kept to formal address, but this opponent did not deserve his respect.

"Your empire is gone. Half of it the witch brought down, and the other half you brought down yourself. With your own hands, you denied everything you had built up."

The king wearing death said nothing. He only clawed at the one trying to take his crown. The darkness seething from every direction tried to slash Najin apart. Yet that power had visibly weakened.

This was death that had been slashed apart by Thousand Stars, Ten Thousand Radiances.

Death burned away by the fire of life had lost its strength. And on top of that, was not this crown itself suppressing its power?

"To stand against an absolutely immortal god, you chose to be an imperfect, mortal being. That was your pride. It was the excuse you made to the countless humans crushed under your hand."

Kill the witch. Protect humanity. Even if a few must be sacrificed, once that goal is achieved our descendants will live in an age of peace.

That was the contract Leviathan had made.

"How does it look now?"

Najin wrenched at the crown. He fixed bloodshot eyes on Leviathan.

"Wrapped in immutability, eternity, and indestructibility, you are blocking the future. You denied every value you ever spoke of with your own hands. And yet you still cannot let go of the contract? Even now, even at this point, you still cannot let go of this crown?"

Najin scoffed.

"How contradictory."

The contradiction bit into Leviathan.

Immutability had been shattered. Eternity had crumbled. And indestructibility, at this very moment...

"This does not belong to you."

Crack, Najin tore the crown free. He crushed it in his hand.

"Because you are not the indestructible king."

Indestructibility shattered.

At last, every mystique the Dragon of the Abyss possessed was broken.

Immutability converged into changeability. Eternity converged into death. Indestructibility converged at last into mortality.

And so Leviathan finally became the Mortal King. Perhaps it was a return to his original form.

"Aah."