WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 484: The End (5)
──────
Night arrived without warning.
The Outland sky, already dark by nature, deepened to a black with no bottom. The stars that should have lit the night slipped away without a sound. A dark tide rising from the Abyss spread until it swallowed the Outland sky whole.
From the Abyss to the Outland.
From the Outland to the Continent.
The sky above the Continent split with a long, tearing crack, and black blood poured down like a waterfall. The blue sky turned black. The sun shining overhead, the stars, all of it vanished in an instant. A world filled with nothing but darkness had arrived.
And then.
「The god spoke.」
The opening verse of the oldest myth was reenacted.
「Let there be stars.」
Light gathered in the darkened sky. The first star was born. With its birth, a reference point appeared in the heavens. From that single star, order arose. An axis was planted into a chaotic world.
Though it was not especially friendly to humanity.
What right did humanity have to be the world's standard?
Humans believed themselves the greatest beings in existence, capable of becoming anything, the center of the world. That was nothing but human arrogance. The god did not look kindly on that arrogance.
「Know your place.」
The star rising in the sky was not beautiful. It was a hideous, distorted Blight Star. Thirteen dark-red pupils rolled and lurched across the heavens. Thirteen eyes forming a single constellation, and that one constellation claimed the entire sky for itself.
Because the sky had always been hers.
From the beginning the sky had never belonged to humanity. The god had merely lent it to them for a time, and to lend a thing is to prophesy its eventual return. As though there were no reason today should not be the day of that prophecy's fulfillment, the god moved.
"Ah, ah, ah..."
Astronomers collapsed. Those who had dared to observe the sky, to try to understand it, were struck down as punishment. And starting with them, retribution began raining down on all of humanity.
People fell one after another.
From small children to the elderly, all of them went down with perfect equality. Warriors who had never known defeat, sturdy knights, renowned mercenaries, all of them the same. They were all human in the end.
Every ordinary person collapsed.
What remained were the Transcendents, those who considered themselves superhuman, but they were not much different. Before a god, everyone was ordinary. The Constellations fell too.
Every being in the world descended.
A descent no one could resist.
In other words, the Abyss.
All of humanity fell into the Abyss.
2.
Najin opened his eyes in the dark.
Dark.
Nothing but darkness, not even a hand's width visible ahead. He searched his memory. The last thing he had seen was the Witch of the Abyss spreading her star domain. He had not been able to stop it.
He hadn't reached the Witch in time.
Without any interference, she had spread her domain. No, perhaps it was a Divine Realm. A star domain was supposed to wield god-like power within a local area, but the Witch's territory was anything but local.
Its range was the entire world.
Its imposed rules covered everything.
This was different from an ordinary star domain. Something omnipotent across all space could only be called a god.
"......"
Najin said nothing and steadied his breathing. His heart, which had been hammering wildly, gradually settled. As it calmed, his senses sharpened to a fine edge, and yet even with those senses, Najin could feel nothing.
No sign of anyone nearby.
No sound at all.
Only his own heartbeat and his own breathing reached his ears. Had his senses dulled? Or had something gone wrong with them? He decided it was neither. His senses were functioning normally.
That left only one conclusion.
Nothing.
There truly was nothing around him.
Can't see it. Can't feel it.
The Witch, who moments ago had seemed ready to swallow him whole, was gone without a trace. The terrible pressure she radiated had vanished too. In the darkness, only Najin remained, alone.
No, not alone.
He focused on his inner world. A faint thread made itself known. He grasped it, still connected, and moved. He walked through darkness where not a step ahead was visible, pressing on for what felt like a long time.
Tap.
Footsteps reached him from the opposite direction. It seemed she too had been walking toward him, just as he had been walking toward her. The sound drew closer until it was right in front of him.
"Najin, right?"
"That's what I want to ask. Merlin, right?"
Merlin gave him a look of disbelief. She tapped the blue cord knotted at her neck with a finger and said, unhappily, "You tied it there, who else would I be?"
"It is Merlin."
Only then did Najin let out a short breath.
"How much do you remember? I remember up to the moment the Witch spread her domain."
"About the same. You faced the Witch, and right after that she spread her domain. You two exchanged some words, I think, but I couldn't catch them."
The last scene they remembered was the same.
"Then this place..."
"Probably the Witch's star domain."
Merlin looked around the space of pure darkness.
"I've experienced something like it once before. Not on this scale, but before the Witch was sealed, the deepest part of the Abyss felt like this. Covered in darkness where you couldn't see a step ahead, no way to tell where anything was..."
Merlin waved her hand through the air. She found Najin's shoulder and grabbed it, then let out a breath of relief.
"It was a place where you could lose even the person standing right beside you. Better not to let go of each other. You might find yourself somewhere isolated without even realizing it."
"Any way to break it?"
"No."
"......"
"More precisely, I couldn't find one at the time. That's why I never moved aggressively to subjugate the Witch. I couldn't find that method."
The deepest part of the Abyss had been exactly that. Even if you managed to bypass Leviathan and set foot there, a darkness that stripped you of all sense of direction was waiting for any hero who came.
"Light doesn't reach here. Any magic loses its way. Even the starlight Excalibur produces gets bent out of shape."
Darkness accumulated over tens of thousands of years. The deepest part of the Abyss was a place that could warp even the brilliance of starlight, Merlin had said as much in the past.
"But."
Merlin narrowed her eyes.
"It's different from before."
"How?"
"More ways than one. The Witch didn't originally move like this. She had been blocking the path to the end of the world, the path toward utopia, and standing guard there. She never once stepped away from that place."
Utopia. Avalon.
The place said to exist at the far end of the Abyss.
"This space is the same. This approach isn't the Witch's style. It's more like..."
The moment she was about to say something.
Keheheheheh!
A burst of laughter from somewhere buried her voice. Najin knew it well, could never forget it. Laughter that burrowed into the ear and rang all the way to the back of the mind, shallow and vile.
"...Carnival King."
The Carnival King's laugh. Was that vulgar jester somewhere in here? Impossible. He had killed her with his own hands. He turned his head at that thought, and his body went rigid.
The Carnival King was there.
More precisely.
The Carnival King's corpse, slashed to pieces by Najin, severed head and all, was dancing on a fine thread. Her mouth was split wide in a grin, but black blood ran freely from her eyes.
Keheheheheheheheheh!
The laughter tore loose. Between those fractured peals, a pair of fingers came into view. They gripped the Carnival King's jaw and worked it open and shut, open and shut. Each time, the Carnival King burst into laughter.
......That once-mighty demon.
A Demon Lord who had bent countless Constellations into puppets, rewritten their stories, and turned them into clowns for her own entertainment.
The Carnival King, king of revelry, was being played like a puppet by someone else's hand. Those fingers stretched the corners of her mouth wide. There was no need to ask whose hand it was.
"A curious child."
The Witch.
"This child was born far too weak for an age far too harsh for demons to survive in. The immortality a demon should possess was so thin in her that she would have died on her own before long."
The Witch spoke while holding the Carnival King's corpse.
"And yet, what do you know. This child survived. She survived again and again. Even Demon Lord Baal, the most powerful in recorded history, met death at Arthur's hands. Countless demons crumbled before you all, and still this child survived."
As if astonished.
"She learned from the deaths of her own kind. She thought hard about what a weak creature had to do to stay alive. And she discovered the tools of schemes and stratagems. Lure them into traps. Burrow in from within. Scatter poison. Strike at weaknesses..."
As if delighted.
"That is how this child learned from defeat. Just like you humans. She grew from failure. Just as you have always done."
The Witch stroked the Carnival King's head.
"And she arrived before me at the end of it all. Something that had never happened in tens of thousands of years. A demon, not even a human, but a demon, offering me counsel?"
As if caressing her own daughter's face, with boundless affection, the Witch pulled the Carnival King close.
"This child gave me inspiration. The power this pitiful child wielded was mine in the end, but I had never imagined it could be wielded that way."
What did that mean.
There was no need to ask.
"A method for the weak to stand against the strong."
The Witch burst the Carnival King's head open. Paint splattered in every direction, flecking the Witch's face. She dragged a finger down through the paint on her cheek as if she found it amusing, then tilted her head.
"Then why couldn't I do the same?"
Heroes who face great evil are said to pile up every manner of scheme and stratagem and hard-won wisdom to bring their enemy down. That is practically a cliche of heroic tales.
But why should that be theirs alone.
A god can target humans too. Can find weaknesses, dig into them, and rot them from the inside out. There had simply been no need to, so it had never been done. Crushing them under overwhelming force had always been enough.
"How did it go again? I believe it went something like this."
The Witch smiled.
『Life is a single play.』
『Not even death can bring down the curtain.』
Click. The Witch snapped her fingers.
『The play must go on.』
The stage was the entire world.
The cast was every living thing in existence.
The grandest play raised its most magnificent curtain.
3.
The moment the curtain rose, Najin clenched his teeth. It was coming. Something he had experienced once before was about to descend on him in a form of a completely different order.
He squeezed.
Najin gripped Merlin's hand. She had told him. Don't let go. If he did, he could be swept away and lose even the person standing right beside him.
"Merlin, from now on..."
He opened his mouth. He pulled Merlin's hand and began drawing up starlight. But something was wrong. Her hand came too easily. As though there were nothing there at all.
"Merlin?"
No answer.
"......"
Najin looked to his side. Nothing was visible. But something was clearly in his hand. He slowly raised it.
Merlin's hand.
Only the hand was there.
Blood ran from Merlin's severed hand. The Blue Knot connecting Najin and Merlin had been cut as well. Leaving only her hand behind, Merlin was gone. Najin slowly lifted his head.
Still nothing to see.
But there was something to hear.
Laughter. Weeping. Cheering. Every sound a human makes when emotion runs to its limit flooded in. The Carnival King had commanded nothing more than laughter, but a god was different.
A god commanded everything.
Najin touched the corner of his mouth.
His lips had curved into a smile.
He felt tears running down his cheek. He was crying. Then came a rage that raised every hair on his spine, and a deep, bottomless despair.
Every emotion at once.
A Stage for All had begun.
Footnotes:
Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried
