WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

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◈ I Pulled Out Excalibur

Chapter 483

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The End (4)

A Blight Star rose from the darkness.

A Blight Star, a star twisted at its very core. A star that exists in a fundamentally different way from every other star. Najin had seen the light such stars scattered more times than he could count.

The star he had witnessed in Yuel's past was one. The Terminus Star the fairy Merlin carried was another. And the apostles of the end had been the same.

Living as long as he had, Najin had encountered Blight Stars multiple times, things most people would never see even once, and he had survived each one. Because of that, he had come to believe he had grown accustomed to the light Blight Stars produced. During his fights against Mordred and Leviathan, he had managed to hold on well enough.

"......"

But now, the moment he faced the star rising before his eyes.

Najin could only go silent.

It was different. Different from every Blight Star he had seen before. It was on a different level entirely from the apostles, who merely borrowed power from outside themselves, and different too from Yuel's Blight Star, which had only just been born. The closest comparison was the Terminus Star, but even that held only a fragment of the resemblance.

What stood before Najin now was a Blight Star made complete. One that had existed for tens of thousands of years, a star that had hardened itself over every one of those years. Nothing like Merlin's star, which had never stopped doubting itself.

There was not a single crack anyone could pry into. No argument it would ever accept. That was the kind of existence standing before him.

Thirteen Blight Stars blazed.

They had taken the shape of eyes.

"I find myself thinking, sometimes."

Even a single one of those Blight Stars dwarfed the combined mass of all twelve of Najin's stars. And there were thirteen of them, lined up together. Moving like pupils, the Blight Stars fixed their gaze on Najin.

"Why you believe it belongs to you alone."

The Witch of the Abyss did not advance.

She stood where she was, watching the stars Najin produced, savoring them, and smiling.

"You say it, don't you. That humans learn from failure. That you study from defeat. That you use the failures of those who came before as stepping stones to climb higher... and you speak of it as though it were a privilege exclusive to your kind."

A breath escaped her lips.

"As if that could be true."

That breath became a laugh.

"Learning from failure is not something only you do. Demons, for a start, are exactly the same, aren't they? The demons slaughtered by Arthur evolved in order to survive. They watched their ancestors die, used those deaths as lessons, and changed the direction of their lives."

Najin knew such a demon.

The Carnival King was proof of it.

As though pointing that out, the witch sneered.

"You consider yourselves special. You say you are different from beasts, that you are beings of incomparably higher nobility than demons. But look here. Even those demons evolved in a way not so different from your own, didn't they?"

She tilted her head.

"So let me ask."

Click. The laughter stopped.

In an instant, the Blight Stars went dark. All the red eyes that had shone in the darkness closed. In the darkness that followed, only Najin's stars gave any light.

"Why would you think I haven't been learning?"

A voice came from within the dark.

"I have lived for a very long time. I watched civilization begin. I watched it end. I watched the shape it took as it fell to ruin."

From behind. From the side. From above. From below.

"And I was always there at that ruin. You challenged me, again and again. Do you think I was a perfect being with no weaknesses from the very start? Hardly. I was an incomplete thing at the beginning as well."

The voice resonated from every direction. Najin turned his head. He raised his sword toward wherever he sensed a presence, but quickly understood that none of it mattered.

Ah.

Because.

All of it.

Every stretch of darkness he could see in this place was the witch.

"I was burned alive. The flesh scorched away in a fire carrying the hatred of all of humanity, and I swallowed the ash."

And so the witch gained immunity to fire.

"I was run through by the spears and swords of countless crowds. Cut to pieces. My head split open by their thrown stones."

And so she gained immunity to betrayal.

"I was hacked apart by the axe of a warrior who had never known defeat. Strangled by the hands of those I trusted. Had my heart pierced by a child I raised myself. I absorbed more spells than I could ever count."

And so she gained immunity to all of it.

"As humanity's representative, I faced a sovereign who sought to unite all of humanity and drag a god down from its throne."

Leviathan.

"I came face to face with a madman who drove his own star into the earth as a stake to keep me bound."

The great hero, Arthur.

"I have experienced all of it."

That is what the Witch of the Abyss is.

Whenever humanity makes a new discovery, cracks open a new horizon, or thrashes desperately against the approach of annihilation, a wave passes through the world in those moments. The Witch of the Abyss was the existence that stood at the very front to meet those waves, and the last one standing when they receded.

Here, an immortal.

She does not die. She does not fade. She does not wear away.

Such a being had experienced countless things and learned from each one. She would not be caught by the same thing twice. She learned from defeat and grew from failure.

For how long?

Tens of thousands of years.

"I will grant you this. You occasionally challenge me in ways I never anticipated. Your predecessor was proof of that. It had been quite some time since I last bled that much."

Eyes shone within the darkness.

"And so I thought."

The witch's red eyes opened halfway.

"I would try moving in a somewhat different way."

2.

Arthur had postponed the end.

Trading his own life to hold the witch in place, he bought humanity the time to rise again. That was something worthy of being called a great achievement. Thanks to Arthur's sacrifice, humanity built civilization, made progress, and lived through peaceful years.

A thousand years passed that way.

Was the millennium Arthur bought worth something?

It was. Without question.

Through the advances of those thousand years, humanity brought down Leviathan. They won against the old civilization and showed the world that civilization had grown. That alone gave Arthur's sacrifice meaning. They had defeated an ancient dragon that had stood unbeaten for ten thousand years.

"Child."

But the blade civilization forged would never reach the witch. She is simply not the kind of being who can be brought down that way.

The advance of civilization converges toward destruction.

Progress is made, then declines into ruin.

To a witch who had watched that process play out more times than she could count, the advance of civilization was nothing but the repetition of countless cycles that had existed before. And she was not dull enough to be defeated by something that only repeated what had already been done.

"Your blade is sharp, child. Beautiful. You must have lived a brilliant life. A life worthy of being called a hero's. That is why you are still holding that sword."

Najin ground his teeth. Ignoring the witch's voice whispering in his ear, he kicked off the ground.

Something is coming.

The witch was doing something. He had to stop it. That single fact filled his mind completely. Najin kept his teeth clenched and made his body move. He drove the sword toward the witch's eyes, glimmering in the dark.

A perfect strike.

Clean and sharp beyond measure. Even if Siegfried were the one receiving this sword, even he would have needed to answer it with his full strength. The blade carving a perfect sword path as it bore in was sharp enough for that.

"But, well."

It was not enough.

"It isn't new."

It did not reach. The witch caught Najin's Excalibur with her bare hand, far too easily.

"Knights. Pride. Honor. These are all worn-out ideas. They are not a particularly new set of values. Aren't you simply following paths already laid down by those who came before you?"

He respects and reveres the old things. Najin is aware that he has climbed up using them as stepping stones, and precisely because of that, he cannot deny them.

Najin wrenched the sword free.

He put distance between himself and the witch and drew starlight toward him. Stars shone in the darkness, but not brightly enough to push it back. In the end, everything is relative.

Tak.

The witch stepped toward Najin. The moment she moved, the darkness swayed.

"If you truly learn from failure and defeat, shouldn't you also bear the price that comes with them?"

The Witch of the Abyss smiled.

"The price you have been putting off."

Thirteen Blight Stars opened their eyes. Their scarlet starlight pressed down on Najin's own. What buries light is not darkness. It is a more intense light. The starlight the Blight Stars produced lit up the whole world like a sun.

"Look at the things you have forgotten."

What unfolded immediately after was something Najin witnessed with his own two eyes but could not comprehend. The sight was simply too horrifying for a mere human to take in.

...The ancient religion. The myth of the beginning.

That is what the religion is called.

No one knows when or where it started. It had existed since a time beyond reckoning, and even ten thousand years ago, in the age of Leviathan, it was already being called the Religion of the Beginning. Even Leviathan himself had not known exactly when it began.

Countless civilizations were born and fell to ruin, yet this religion alone persisted without fail, passing itself on to the next age.

For tens of thousands of years.

And its first line was so famous that even those who did not follow the faith knew it.

"Let there be stars."

"And so the first stars were born."

What had Najin thought when he read those lines? He had not been able to picture the scene clearly in his mind. The stars came to exist because a god said so. The first stars. He had assumed it was simply a figurative expression, or perhaps the very first stars to be born were devout believers. Something like that.

But now.

The moment he saw what was unfolding before his eyes, Najin was forced to realize there had been no metaphor in those words at all.

"...Ah."

The sword he had raised, Najin lowered. He simply did not know what to point it at. He looked up at the sky with hollow eyes.

Heaven and earth split open.

Every established truth crumbled.

A world built with perfect precision came apart completely, for no reason other than that a god found it displeasing. The sky is not blue. The sky had belonged to a god from the very beginning, and was never made to be looked up at by something as small as a human.

Common sense. Natural law. Truth. The things that had never changed.

All of it collapsed in a single moment.

Najin was a beat slow to understand that what the Witch of the Abyss was doing was nothing more than spreading her star domain. He could not be blamed for that. Who could possibly imagine that a change of this scale was something called a star domain?

Its scope was the entire world.

The rules it imposed were everything.

Before the miracles a god displays, humans are no more than insects. What can a human do before a god who moves mountains with a gesture, tears open the heavens, and shakes the earth? Faced with that overwhelming sight, Najin despaired.

What on earth. How.

The strength left his hands. He had no idea what to do, no sense of where to even begin, and Najin's steps came to a stop.

The god speaks.

This is where your road ends.

The god had personally drawn a line for humanity. Shown them their limit with their own hand. Raised a wall they could never cross. Before that wall, all a human can do is live in contentment with what has been given.

Do not dare reach beyond it. That is what the god says.

"Cross the line, Najin."

But paradoxically.

"Reach for what you cannot touch. Anyone who mutters that you should know your place, drive a fist into their face."

At those words, Najin came back to himself. Because that was one thing he simply could not agree to. Looking at the star of challenge shining beside him, he steadied the breath that had gone ragged.

"How far you can go is something only you know."

Najin put strength back into his hand.

Challenge it.

That had to be the only way.

An instant later, the Divine Realm swallowed Najin whole.

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