WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 481

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The End (2)

News of Leviathan's subjugation spread quickly.

The battle had taken place at the Boundary Line of the Abyss, yet the news crossed the Outland in an instant and arrived on the Continent before even the swiftest Constellations could have carried it. How could that be?

The reason was simple.

At the heart of the Continent, within the Empire, there were those who sensed the shift faster than anyone else.

"There has been a change in the constellation of the great and magnificent Lord Najin's stars. They are shining about twice as brightly as usual... could he be trying to obtain another star?"

"Forgive me, but his stars always shine. They shine so intensely they interfere with observations of the stars nearby. This is nothing unusual. Are you new? You'll get used to it."

The Gray Tower. The tower of astronomers.

A place where scholars who made their trade observing and recording the stars of heaven resided. The work seemed quiet from the outside, but that image belonged to a different age.

Four years ago, the day Excalibur was pulled free, the Gray Tower had begun a stretch of days so relentlessly busy there was no room to breathe.

Overtime and all-nighters were standard, all-nighters at the Gray Tower counted as the day shift. Chronic colitis from overwork came with the territory, and hair loss was a bonus. One scholar, staring at his own thinning hair with a complicated expression, tilted his head absently.

'The Dawning Star is shining, you say?'

When did it ever not shine? That little... no, was this not the constellation of the great and magnificent Lord Najin? When something was wrong with the heavens, pointing at the Dawning Star got you the right answer nine times out of ten. Nothing new about that.

'Then what is this, this strange sense of dread?'

Probably nothing. Thinking that, he took a sip of his coffee. He had just settled into his rocking chair, intending to enjoy a rare, leisurely tea break, when it happened.

"Oh, senior?"

His junior turned around.

"The stars are... clustering together."

"What?"

He nearly spat out his coffee. He rushed over and seized the telescope, pressed his wide eyes to the eyepiece, and observed.

He did so for a moment.

Then, without regard for floor or seniority, screams erupted from every corner of the tower. Even the old veterans who had worked at the Gray Tower for years screamed like young men and tore at what remained of their hair.

The cause of those wretched screams was, as always, a single person. It was no different now.

'The great and magnificent Lord Najin!'

The Dawning Star had claimed his twelfth star.

The shockwave was rippling outward through the heavens.

Great constellations brought great change with even small movements, and the largest constellation in existence was throwing itself around violently on top of that. What scale of upheaval that would produce hardly needed to be said.

Kyaaaaaaaaaaa!

And so the scholars of the Gray Tower screamed. A scream was a more efficient explanation than any long and rambling description of events.

"It seems the Dawning Star has done it again."

Listening to the screams pouring out of the Gray Tower, the Imperial historians nodded. When those people screamed, it meant the Dawning Star had done something, which meant an event worth recording had occurred.

Only then did the historians begin gathering information.

As it happened, documents had just arrived from the Imperial palace, papers stating that the Dawning Star had set out to subjugate Leviathan. The historians confirmed them, chuckled to themselves, and started writing.

"Dawning Star achieves twelfth star at the youngest age on record."

The word youngest was getting tiresome at this point. From here on, whatever he did would be both a first and a youngest, would it not? Even so, they noted it down faithfully for posterity and carved out one more line.

"Leviathan subjugated."

Changes in the heavens became the screams of astronomers, and the screams of astronomers became the quill strokes of historians. That was how history was recorded. Recorded history passed to the Imperial palace, then spread widely to the public. It was a remarkably systematic process.

"The Dragon of the Abyss has been slain!"

The news spread across the entire Continent.

Naturally, the impact was enormous.

What was the Dragon of the Abyss? A beast that belonged in mythology, a great evil that not even King Arthur had managed to fell a thousand years ago. Was it not the dreadful monster called, alongside the Witch of the Abyss, one of humanity's two greatest calamities?

A monster of that magnitude had fallen.

The calamities that would one day destroy humanity had been falling one by one, and now the last horseman of the end had fallen too. The sense that the age was moving forward had a way of making people giddy. The public, feeling themselves standing at the center of history in upheaval, let out a roar.

The Dawning Star. The Dawn Horn. Lord Najin. Hero of the Empire...

Every name for Najin was cried aloud.

And so the Empire roared, and the great and small kingdoms roared, and the whole Continent roared, and all of humanity with it. The Empire was already in a festive mood. The public had been thrilled, and had found hope, watching Najin advance with such speed.

'He might actually defeat the Witch of the Abyss too.'

The Dawning Star might bring down that dreadful star that had risen in the sky not long ago.

'If everything threatening humanity disappears, if we no longer have to live in fear of the Witch of the Abyss and never knowing when or how she might come...'

In other words.

'We might overcome the end itself.'

When the public began to think that.

When the vast majority had ceased to fear the end.

"Waaaaaaaah!"

It was then, at last, that the god stirred.

"Ah, ah...?"

For those who had forgotten her, punishment.

For those who no longer feared her, terror.

For those who had looked down on her, death.

"The sky."

Someone in the cheering crowd pointed at the sky.

"The sky, it's strange..."

That was the moment.

Thud.

The one who had pointed at the sky collapsed, blood pouring from their eyes and nose. The god did not suffer someone who dared point at the heavens with two fingers. That person was only the beginning. The public began to crumple, one after another.

"Kyaaaaaaaaaaa!"

"Uaaaaaaaaah!"

"Blood, blood, blood!"

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

The roaring was replaced by screaming.

2.

The first to feel the wrongness was Najin.

The subjugation force was savoring the afterglow of victory, Constellations and craftspeople happily debating what kind of equipment could be made from Leviathan's body...

Najin was not among them.

A high-pitched ringing filled his ears. Every nerve in his body stood on end as though he had been struck by lightning. His fingers clenched involuntarily at the empty air. A premonition more intense than any he had ever felt seized his body and moved it of its own accord.

'It's coming.'

He did not know what. Something was coming.

"Ah."

Najin raised his head and looked toward the horizon. Far away lay the edge of the world that had been hidden behind Leviathan and was now revealed by its absence.

The final gateway to the utopia of Avalon.

At the deepest end of the Abyss, from the deepest pit in the world, something surged toward the sky. It almost looked like lightning shooting up from the ground into the heavens. But it was nothing so natural as lightning.

'A fist.'

A fist. A massive hand formed of hands twisted together shot upward toward the sky. The moment that fist clenched the sky, Najin felt something slam hard into the back of his head.

"Ugh!"

A headache struck and lightning flashed across his vision. Unable to overcome the dizziness, Najin staggered. He was not the only one. Every Constellation gathered there clutched their heads, and some collapsed outright onto the ground.

Now everyone had noticed that something was wrong.

Gritting his teeth through the dreadful headache, Najin looked up at the sky. What the fist had seized was the sky itself. The sky was being crumpled around that enormous hand. As it crumpled, constellations were being forcibly wrenched from their places.

"Ugh, hgh, aghhhhh!"

Several Constellations crumpled where they stood and vomited blood. The constellations were moving against their will. It was like having your own organs yanked out and repositioned somewhere else by force. They convulsed at the agony of their own constellations being twisted and tangled.

But the change had only just begun.

Gripping the sky in its fist.

Something moved from the furthest end of the Abyss.

"Ah."

All the seals that had wrapped around the Abyss, the ones barely holding on, shattered like broken glass.

"Ah, ah, ah, ah."

The Blight Star reclaimed its full position in the sky.

Thirteen dark red stars blazed.

The first thing the witch did, freed from her seals, was to dye the sky in her own color.

Splat.

Blood sprayed from the center of the fist gripping the sky. Blood, splashed across the heavens. It called to mind the image of the Carnival King drowning her sanctuary in paint. There was a difference, though. A difference in scale.

Splat. Splat. Splat...

The Carnival King had, at best, covered her own sanctuary. She had covered a radius of a few hundred meters around where she appeared, and even at the full stretch of her power she had never exceeded a few kilometers.

"Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah..."

The Witch of the Abyss was different.

She covered the entire sky. The dark red blood that began at the furthest reaches of the world swallowed the whole of the Abyss in an instant. As if that were not enough, it crashed onward like a tidal surge and began invading the Outland.

The sky belongs to god by nature.

And there cannot be more than one god.

Only one god may exist. The god does not forgive those insignificant creatures who have deluded themselves into thinking they are divine.

"Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!"

The Constellations screamed.

The sky of the Outland began to stain with blood.

3.

"Retreat."

Gerd, barely fighting through the headache enough to stand, and Kirchhoff, veins bulging in his neck, both shouted.

"Retreat! Full retreat!"

"Get clear of the Boundary Line! Do not let that blood touch you!"

They hauled fallen Constellations to their feet. Those who could not walk were carried on their backs. The ordinary people who had no resistance at all to that blood were pulled from the battlefield as quickly as possible. Najin too was shouting for retreat, teeth clenched, forcing himself forward.

The battlefield descended into chaos in moments.

They had known the Witch of the Abyss would break free from her seals, but no one had imagined it would be this fast, that she would move at the exact moment Leviathan fell.

A thousand years.

A being sealed away for a full thousand years, and she could move like that the instant she was freed? Who could have anticipated it?

Crunch.

Running with his teeth ground together, Najin pulled Dieta up from where she had collapsed on the ground.

"Ah, Na, Najin..."

Bloodshot veins ran through her eyes, and blood was streaming steadily from her nose. Najin covered Dieta's eyes with his palm. She could not look at the Blight Star. Keeping her eyes covered, he pulled her off the battlefield.

The chaos only grew.

Before long, the boundary of the Abyss began to collapse. The barrier was being torn apart. The line that had separated the world of the dead from the world of the living was smashed to pieces, and the distinction between the other shore and this one grew blurred. As if asking whether the division between life and death had any value when everything would die in the end, the witch began dismantling common sense itself.

This scene...

Najin had seen something like this before. Not exactly like it, but similar enough.

'Constellations within their own sanctuaries.'

The bizarre forms of Authority that Constellations exercised within their own domains resembled this. Constellations who had shut themselves away in their sanctuaries for long ages sometimes became something like gods within those spaces.

Common sense, natural law, rules, truth.

Within a confined space, stars could bend all of those to their own will. But Constellations who actually wielded that omnipotence properly were extremely rare, and even those who could always had their weaknesses. That was why Najin had broken through so many sanctuaries by finding and piercing those weak points.

But this.

What in the world was this.

'A sanctuary? This is?'

Looking at the sky, Najin felt fear. His teeth rattled against each other on their own. His body trembled. His head began to bow of its own accord, as though it knew better than to dare look at the sky.

'No.'

There could be no such sanctuary as this.

The range of this sanctuary was the entire world.

What do you call a being who imposes their own common sense, their own natural law, their own rules, their own truth onto all of creation? Najin knew the answer.

A god.

Absolute, indestructible, complete, and perfect.

A single finished divinity sat there.

"Because you did not seek me."

A voice reached him.

"Because you forgot me."

Leaping past every obstacle, ignoring even the distance between them, that voice rang in the ears of every soul alive.

"I have come to find you."

The Witch of the Abyss, Morgan le Fay.

She set foot upon the earth.

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