WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur
Chapter 477
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Mortal King, Leviathan (10)
Beast, human, and dragon.
If a human is simply a beast that walks on two legs, then a dragon is nothing more than a beast that happens to fly through the sky. Yet both are reluctant to admit they are merely beasts. They insist they are different, and they spend their lives trying to prove it.
Humans, through the intellect they possess.
Dragons, through the dignity they carry.
Compelling logic, to be sure. But turn it around, strip away those two qualities, and there is not much separating a human or a dragon from any ordinary beast.
"......"
Najin looked at the figure lying at his feet.
The Conqueror King. Leviathan.
He was human and dragon at once. He had once possessed a brilliant intellect and carried within him the three mystiques that allowed a dragon to exist with such lofty dignity, but now, well.
Splat.
No immutability. No eternity. No indestructibility to follow. A dragon stripped of all its mystiques had become a beast. And the human intellect? That too was gone. The king who had once worn death like a cloak and fought with cold composure was nowhere to be found. What remained was a beast gnawed to the bone by death, thrashing and refusing to stop.
A beast, then.
A once-great being had fallen to this.
What was left now was nothing more than...
"It seems I haven't arrived too late."
...one man who had released a glorious past and admitted he had been nothing more than a beast all along.
"Leviathan."
"Yes. That would be me."
Turn around, and he was there.
The other half of the Conqueror King.
Even in the middle of this hell, one human stood unscathed-unscathed, because he had no other choice. Depending on how you looked at it, he was the very one who had brought this hell into being.
"Aah."
He looked at the half of himself that had lost the crown and fallen into beasthood, then at Najin, who held that crown in his fist.
"You actually did it. You truly..."
For the past ten thousand years, not one soul had managed this. Not even Siegfried the Sword Saint had been able to cut down this death. The entire world had long since accepted that this was something that could not be killed, and yet the hero standing before him had gone and cut death down anyway.
"A feat. A feat no one else has ever managed."
He held nothing back in his praise.
"You brought down an immortal being, one that could not die, into something that can be killed? How great an act is that? No exaggeration intended. Truly, this is a magnificent thing. I, who have watched the whole of humanity's history across ten thousand years, say so without reservation."
Leviathan clapped his hands together and offered a bow of respect.
"But."
But, he said.
"The war is not over yet. Is it?"
Najin said nothing. Because it was true.
The immortality has been stripped from the dragon.
Even so, a dragon was still a dragon. Falling to beasthood did not make the creature's strength disappear, and any beast will thrash when death draws near. It will wring out strength it never had before and fight to the last.
From here on, it would be a long, grinding battle.
Leviathan would "eventually" die. A dragon that was no longer immortal would certainly die. But how many stars would have to squeeze out every last drop of their power before that "eventually" arrived, and how many stars would be lost along the way, was impossible to say.
Of course, the stars had already made their peace with that.
This was that kind of fight. That kind of battlefield. Everyone had staked their lives and steeled themselves for sacrifice. Even if someone fell, the stars would not stop.
"You've prepared yourselves for sacrifice."
"It's not a fight we can win without it."
"And you'll be the one leading the charge."
"That's how it'll go."
Leviathan and Najin met each other's gaze. Leviathan took in Najin's battered state in silence, then let out a slow breath.
"...While I was flying here."
He said it quietly.
"I saw the stars you brought with you. I saw the humanity that has grown over the past thousand years. I kept looking. I couldn't stop, embarrassing as that is to admit."
It wasn't only what lay outside the dragon. Shift your gaze slightly, and you could see the stars gathered here. Even now they shone brilliantly as they held back the army of death. Stars that had set long ago, burning once more.
"They were shining. As brilliantly as anything I've ever seen."
For those who lived in the past, the future is always something that shines.
"I sacrificed countless stars over ten thousand years. I can't keep doing that right up to the end. I shouldn't. At least at the very end..."
Leviathan looked up at the sky.
He thought, and he decided, and he made up his mind.
"Najin."
"Yes. I'm listening."
"You were right."
Right about what?
No need to ask.
"The empire has fallen. I tore it down with my own hands. Even the nation's name has been consumed, and its territory has sunk to the deepest reaches of the Abyss. The contract I made with all those people, I failed to keep that too. I acted on their behalf with a promise of peace and security for tomorrow, and yet..."
He smiled bitterly.
"As you can see, it's a disaster. I had them use their own hands to cut off their tomorrow. It goes beyond simply failing to honor the contract. I disgraced them."
His crimes sat before him. His failures, preserved in this place exactly as he had left them. Leviathan watched the Conqueror King still writhing against the death eating into him, still reaching toward the crown that had been taken away.
Still believing himself to be king.
How ugly that was. How arrogant. Leviathan could not suppress a sigh. Tainted by the witch or not, that was still him. A being that had once been him.
"I am no longer an emperor. I cannot call myself the representative of humanity. I shouldn't be."
"Is that so."
"Yes. And yet."
Leviathan exhaled.
"I am still a king."
Even denying it, he still was one. What that meant was something different from the Conqueror King. Where Leviathan's eyes were turned was different from the Conqueror King's as well.
"......"
Leviathan saw.
His people, still screaming in this hell after ten thousand years. He saw them.
"My people remain here."
They regarded not only the Conqueror King but also Leviathan, who had set foot in this place, as their king. Under the Conqueror King they had been a fierce army capable of swallowing the world whole. Under Leviathan, they were not.
They were children looking for a parent. They were the sick, begging to be saved, begging for the pain to end.
"Even having come to this."
Listening to their screaming, Leviathan spoke.
"They call me their king, so I remain one. It does me no good to deny it. If someone serves you as their king, you must bear the responsibility that comes with it."
Those were words he had spoken once before, the first time he met Najin. This was a continuation of that day. Leviathan looked at Najin as though he had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Najin. Do you remember what I said when we first met?"
Najin nodded.
He remembered.
Please free my people. Leviathan had said that clearly. And the means of that liberation, Leviathan had told him once before as well.
"Kill me."
"Kill me, who cannot die."
Remembering those words and looking ahead now..."Now is the time."
Standing there was a king who had fallen from immortal to mortal, from something that could not die to something that must.
The Mortal King, Leviathan.
He held out his hand to Najin. Najin understood what he wanted. Najin asked, quietly and without fuss.
"Is that the choice you're making?"
"It is. Thank you for letting me choose. To give even someone like me a chance to choose, you're a kind one."
"I doubt that. Can someone who shows you the road to hell really be called kind?"
"What could be more welcome to a sinner who wants to face judgment than someone willing to deliver it?"
Leviathan smiled.
"The crown."
He wanted the crown. He who had responsibility but had denied his own worthiness now sought to be king again.
"......"
Najin looked wordlessly at the crown in his hand. Then he looked down at the Conqueror King screaming at his feet. The Conqueror King was gnawed through by death and still reaching toward the crown, because he still believed himself to be king of humanity.
He had not let go of his ambition.
The Conqueror King, who had failed to liberate the Continent from the witch, now sought to fulfill that burning wish by becoming the witch's instrument and swallowing the entire Continent whole. He was still the Conqueror King.
The one with the right but none of the responsibility.
The one willing to take responsibility but who had forfeited the right.
Which of them deserved the crown was obvious. Najin handed it over.
2.
"......"
After ten thousand years, he looked at the crown that had come back to him. A platinum crown that had once shone as brightly as the stars overhead. A crown fashioned after laurel leaves. The artists of its age had exhausted their praise on it, declaring it more radiant than any work of art the world had ever seen.
How beautiful was this crown.
How sweet was the power it promised.
He remembered what he had done, once, to wear it. He had killed his brothers. Killed his own father. They had been too indecisive. Too self-interested. Too unworthy of the emperor's seat.
I had to be the one.
Using the justification that such immense power must not fall into their hands, he had executed even his own blood.
Executed. Removed. Disposed of.
He had been an ordinary human being. An ordinary human daring to stand against a god had to seize power first. And so he had done anything to get it.
He started wars. He destroyed nations that fractured humanity. He killed their leaders, and when they resisted, he had their people executed as examples.
All to bind humanity into one.
All to challenge the god.
He killed, and killed, and killed again.
Blood ran in rivers. There was no peaceful path to unifying the Continent. He had created so much death that at one point there was nowhere left to bury the bodies, and they had to be burned. That was why he was the Conqueror King.
All for one single objective.
So as not to fall to beasthood. So that humans could live as humans should. So that they would no longer be toyed with at a god's hands, and could preserve their dignity...
He could pile up justifications without end.
But in the end, everything collapsed into a single objective. Because that one objective existed, he was the Conqueror King and not a tyrant carrying out meaningless slaughter. Those deaths had meaning.
Kill the witch.
Drag the false god down to this earth and kill it. Kill the god that treated the world as a game board and human beings as playthings. For that one burning wish, he had charged forward. He had climbed a staircase built of blood and corpses and thrown his challenge at the sky.
Once the wish is fulfilled, I will pay for my sins. The sin of soaking the Continent in blood, the sin of killing so many countless human beings, the sin of murdering my own kin...
He had always considered himself a criminal. He had known he was committing crimes and committed them anyway, which made the crimes all the darker.
If only he had been brazen about it.
If he could have sneered at those who pointed out his failings and said that cattle must be sacrificed for the greater cause, would anything have been different?
No. Probably not.
If he had, he could never have made the contract with Fafnir. She had come to punish a human being committing crimes on this scale, only to hear him speak and burst out laughing.
"Killing you here would almost be a reward for you, wouldn't it? Look at yourself, human. That face is practically begging to be put down. I'm not merciful enough to bother killing someone for whom every day alive is already hell."
So then, she laughed.
"Let's make a contract. Just as you did with others of my kind, I'll make one with you. You've caught my interest."
The contract with her was simple. Fly high. Fly to the highest place there is and achieve what you desire. As for your sins, I will personally see to it that you pay for them.
"I will be your hell, human."
"So go forward."
"I, Fafnir, the cleverest, the greatest, and the most ruthless dragon in the world, will personally be the one to punish you."
On the day his objective was achieved, she herself would deliver the punishment. So do not look back. Having come this far, see it through to the end.
And that was how it went.
A little further. Just a little more.
He pressed forward until he threw his challenge at the sky. He made a god bleed. He dealt a blow to a god's very existence.
But he could not drag it down.
In the end he snapped, fell, and broke apart.
"All of this is your fault."
The Abyss. The god had bestowed upon the human who dared challenge it a descent from which there was no recovery. The human who fell and fell again came face to face with his sins. For an endless stretch of time, he had to confront his own failures.
Fafnir, who had promised him hell, fell with him. Far from making him pay his debt, Fafnir suffered the same hell alongside him.
The people who should have held him accountable lost even their will and consciousness and became a loyal army. The sages who should have condemned the contract became fools. The stars that should have lit the sky turned black and helped to blot it out instead.
Everything broke.
"All your fault."
Only the witch's whisper remained. Not one person blamed Leviathan. Not one person allowed him to pay for what he had done.
Not one.
...Ten thousand years passed that way.
Then one day, after ten thousand years had gone by, he looked again at the crown in his hands.
"...Aah."
He had once coveted it, longed for it, thought it radiant. But after ten thousand years, not anymore. Not in the slightest. It was hideous, nothing else.
His sins.
The debt he had never been made to pay was right here.
He looked at the crown and smiled, a wide, unguarded smile. Then, without a moment's hesitation, he put it on his head. A dreadful, ugly, heavy crown. But what did that matter. It was his. His responsibility to wear.
"I am Leviathan."
The one who had responsibility but no right had now earned the right.
"I was the Conqueror King, the representative of humanity, an unparalleled slaughterer who buried tens of millions alive, a tyrant who destroyed seven nations and crushed every last remnant underfoot."
He spoke his sins aloud.
"And that is only the beginning. I killed my own blood with my own hands. Throughout history, even the worst tyrants found it in themselves to spare their kin, yet the first to die by my hand were my brothers. Then my sisters. Then my father. The last I killed was my son."
The thrashing of the Conqueror King went still. The true king was here now. Death abandoned the Conqueror King and wrapped itself around Leviathan instead.
"I deceived tens of millions and drove them into hell."
Cloaked in death, he cried out.
"The king of all arrogant things stands here."
He looked at Najin.
"The most wretched of criminals, right here."
Tens of millions of his people looked at him. Still, Leviathan was their king. The army of death that should by all rights have gone berserk at the loss of the Conqueror King fell silent in that moment.
"The long contract is severed."
Wearing the crown, he announced the Termination of Contract.
With a sharp, clear sound.
The shackles that had bound every last one of them crumbled to dust.
"Claim the price of the contract. Claim the rights that should have been yours to enjoy."
These were people who had been forced into absolute loyalty to their king. The moment the shackles broke, what they saw before them was the king who had thrown them into the heart of hell.
...From time immemorial.
It was never the heavens that punished kings. Never some transcendent being like a god. The ones who punished those crimes were other human beings, the people who could no longer endure the tyranny.
It had happened countless times throughout history.
And now the same thing began to unfold, on a scale history had never once seen.
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