WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried

Chapter 485: A Stage for All (1)

──────

『Life itself is a single play.』

『Not even death can bring down the curtain.』

The Witch's whisper rang out.

The moment the stage took shape, Najin felt his emotions being yanked out from under him. They stopped obeying him. His heart broke free from his control and began pounding on its own.

Because Najin was a cast member.

Every cast member moves at the director's discretion. An actor's role is to carry the emotion that fits each scene and to throw themselves into the moment. To the Witch, Najin was nothing more than one actor among many.

"Ha."

A laugh escaped him. The Witch had not goaded it out. The laugh came from Najin himself. As if he would let himself be played by something this cheap. Once was enough of that.

Creak.

Teeth clenched, Najin seized his trembling inner world with a firm grip. He had been played so thoroughly on the Carnival King's stage. Because of that, he knew exactly how to shatter a stage like this one.

Anchor yourself.

If you don't waver, you can break through.

Don't let the Witch take hold of your emotions and shake them. I am only myself. No one can seize me and shake me. Drawing up starlight, Najin pushed back against the Witch's touch.

Snap, snap, snap...

It worked. The threads draped over Najin's head snapped apart one by one. Unlike with the Carnival King, the Witch could not directly interfere with Najin's mind. He had come close to completion through countless ordeals since then.

Twelve stars. Twelve achievements.

From all of that came an unshakable self-confidence.

Not even the Witch dared touch it. Surprised by that fact, and just as intrigued as she was surprised, the Witch's laughter grew louder. As the stage completed itself, she let out a long, slow breath.

Even in the eyes of a god, the human before her was formidable.

The man standing in front of her was comparable in every way to Arthur, the most formidable human she could remember. The light Arthur had generated when Arthur challenged the Witch in the past, and the light this man was generating now, were remarkably similar.

Radiant. Beautiful. Blinding.

Perhaps even more so than Arthur.

Because he had inherited what came after Arthur, because he had carried on the legacies left by the heroes of the past, because he had climbed the steps humanity had endlessly stacked toward what lay ahead, that was why the place where Najin stood was humanity's apex.

But it was not new.

It was a light Arthur had already shown her once before. The Witch, who had been caught off guard by that light and sealed away because of it, had no intention of falling for the same trick twice. She had learned from her past failure.

「How does one bring down a hero with an unbreakable will?」

She had once posed that question to her apostle. The pitiful demon had answered like this:

「You must defile the starting point, my lady.」

「If you ruin the foundation heroes stand on, their origin, they will collapse on their own. If you cannot touch the foundation, there is also the method of finding a tiny crack and slowly eating inward from there.」

「Great Witch, bring them to ruin not through force, but through cunning.」

But what if they withstood all of that? Say there existed a being with unwavering self-confidence, like Arthur. Such beings would not simply watch as their story was defiled. Wouldn't that leave no crack to exploit?

「Then I would have no method. I would not make an enemy of someone that formidable from the start, but if I had no choice but to face them as an enemy, well...」

「I would need to give them another enemy, wouldn't I?」

「Another enemy?」

「The world.」

The demon smiled.

「They cherish their identity as a hero. But here is the thing, a hero is not something one becomes simply by believing in oneself.」

「Because a hero is something the world decides. There is no hero who exists without someone's support. My god.」

「A hero is, at its core, something very close to an illusion.」

If the hero could not be touched,

「It would be a nuisance, but one could simply touch everything except the hero, yes? Of course, that is beyond my current capacity. It would require at least several centuries of working in the shadows.」

Weave threads through everything except the hero.

And the demon did just that.

The Carnival King had kept her word.

She had extended her reach beyond the Outland all the way to the Continent, and had used every means available to overturn the Continent itself. Though that attempt ended in failure, the Witch had watched the Carnival King's efforts with great interest.

If humanity, driven to the brink of destruction in ages past, had bloomed a flower named Arthur, then the flower that demonkind, pushed to the edge of extinction by her, had bloomed was the Carnival King.

A variable. An anomaly. A being that had never existed before.

A demon who had not been buried under the values of what came before, who had taken those existing values and wielded them as weapons. A being who had been on the verge of creating something entirely new, who had stood at the threshold of true transcendence in the most genuine sense of the word.

She had ultimately failed and been stopped.

But there had been worth in what the Carnival King attempted.

The god who had watched over her life completed the stage she could not finish in her place.

『The play must go on.』

Not for a single individual who was a hero.

The curtain rose on a stage for all.

2.

Every landscape blurred together into chaos.

As the whole world split open and reformed, Najin held his ground. Without being swept up in the waves the Witch was creating, he anchored himself more firmly than before.

In the end, I just need to not waver.

Recalling the moment he had smashed the Carnival King's stage to pieces, Najin steadied his center. Even as the scenery churned around him, Najin alone remained unchanged. Still himself, he drifted through the transforming world.

And then, in a blink.

An entirely different landscape welcomed him.

Najin looked around. The scenery had changed. Just a moment ago he had been wandering through darkness, standing at the very edge of the Outland, locked in a standoff with the Witch of the Abyss. But what met his eyes now was...

"...Artman?"

The landscape of the Underground City, Artman.

Najin's brow furrowed. Was she trying the same trick as the Carnival King? Using Ivan and Offen to deny his starting point all over again? He clicked his tongue.

He had no intention of being played by that kind of game.

He had been caught by it once and broken through. There was no reason he couldn't do it a second time. If the Witch thought a trick this cheap was enough to trap him, she needed to rethink that plan. Najin reached out and seized the empty air.

'Find the crack in the stage.'

Just as he had broken through the Carnival King's stage, he meant to cut straight through this one as well. That was when Najin narrowed his eyes.

He felt something off.

Something was different.

Different from the Underground City he remembered.

"......"

Najin looked up at the sky.

He had assumed it was the Underground City from the past because no light came through the darkness, but that assumption was wrong. The ceiling of the Underground City was broken apart in the exact shape Najin had cut through it.

Then why was it dark?

The reason was simple. Sunlight and starlight had been blocked. What the Underground City's ceiling had once done, the blackened sky was now doing in its place. In a sky stained pitch black by what looked like dark blood, not a single star floated.

...It isn't the past?

Najin's eyes narrowed a little more.

Looking around made the change even clearer. He hadn't visited the Underground City often since that incident, but Najin had heard from Dieta every now and then about how it was changing.

「Artman has changed a great deal.」

「Whatever anyone says, it's your hometown.」

「They've even put up a statue of you, and apparently they're packaging you as a tourist attraction? Our trading company has actually had a small hand in that, I'll admit.」

He remembered grinning awkwardly at those words. Recalling that conversation, Najin looked around.

There was a statue, sure enough.

Except the statue's head had been knocked off and it was smeared with garbage. A doll made in Najin's likeness lay rolling around on the ground. Najin was quiet for a moment. Then he started walking, slowly.

The Underground City was still.

Not a single person moved outside. Every house had its curtains drawn and its windows shut tight. It was like a ghost town. And yet Najin could feel it, a presence behind every door in every house.

He could feel eyes watching him through the gaps in curtains.

Bloodshot eyes stared at him. The moment they met Najin's gaze, they vanished behind the curtains again.

Hostility. Anger. Hatred. Contempt.

The senses of a Transcendent could read emotions even from a pair of eyes glimpsed for a split second. But even reading them clearly, Najin could not easily accept what he found there.

"......"

Something was wrong.

Clatter.

That was when it happened. The door of a tavern flew open and someone staggered out, drunk.

It was Karvin. The man who had welcomed Najin back when he returned to the Underground City, who had smiled bitterly and said you were my idol. The moment Najin recognized that face and parted his lips to say, "Karvin," Karvin spoke first.

"Well, look who's back. The great hero himself."

Najin shut his mouth. What came out of Karvin's mouth was a sneer.

"The nerve, crawling back here. What kind of face is that to show in this place? You were so wrapped up playing hero that you went and ruined the whole damn world, and now what. Feeling a little guilty?"

"...Karvin?"

"That's right, Karvin. What. Feel rotten because I'm mocking you? Hah, feel rotten, you bastard!"

He hurled the bottle he had been nursing.

Watching it roll to a stop at his feet, Najin's eyes went cold. Was this the same method as the Carnival King? Showing him a version of the world where he had failed? Najin slowly steadied his breathing.

Najin was rattled, but he was not shaken.

At this point, something this small shouldn't...

"You should've left well enough alone. Should've known when to stop. They say all of that is your doing. You! They say you woke the Witch! That seal, the one that would've held for another hundred years, several decades at the very least, you broke it. You broke it! All for that pathetic little goal of yours, climbing higher than King Arthur. You woke a calamity. Are you out of your mind?"

Najin's head turned before he could stop it.

Karvin's voice rose.

He pointed at the sky.

"You see that? Every time a red eye blinks in that black sky, everyone bleeds out and dies. Old man Hogel too. He died smashing his head against a wall, blood streaming from his eyes!"

It's fake. A constructed stage. The Karvin shouting in front of him was nothing but an illusion. Thinking that, Najin gripped his sword.

He meant to cut this stage apart.

There would be a crack somewhere in the stage. There was no need to listen to that voice. Find the flaw.

Grip.

That was the moment Najin closed his hand around Excalibur.

"Ha."

Karvin laughed.

"What, going to cut me down too? Like your teacher?"

Najin's hand faltered. He turned to look at Karvin, who met his gaze with a laugh.

"Going mad and dying after meeting the Blight Star's gaze, or dying cut down by the great hero's sword, makes no difference, does it. Go ahead and cut me, then, you bastard."

It would be fake.

But every sharpened instinct Najin had was reaching an entirely different conclusion.

'This is real.'

This was not a stage. This was genuinely the Underground City, and what stood over there was genuinely Karvin. No crack was visible anywhere. The flaw that would have to exist in the Carnival King's stage simply did not exist here.

"......"

Instead of swinging his sword, Najin moved his feet.

He needed to look somewhere else.

This was a stage, and the flaw would be somewhere else.

3.

Najin walked, searching for the crack.

He left the Underground City and moved outward, but everything his eyes fell on was real. Just how far did it extend? Cambria, the regions he had worked during his mercenary days, wherever he went...

Everything was real.

No cracks.

This was not a stage built from his memories. These were simply things that had always existed there. When he swung his sword the ground shook and mountain ranges split, but the stage did not tear.

No.

Najin kept walking. It couldn't be like this. With every step, what he encountered was a procession of people driven mad by the Witch's release. They cursed each other and tore at each other.

No.

They killed each other. Several villages had burned to ash. More than a few corpses lay with blood streaming from their eyes.

No...

Wherever he went, people glared at him. The cheers that had once greeted Najin were gone. In their place came fear and contempt and hatred, pouring over him from every direction.

"......"

Something was wrong.

This was different from the stage the Carnival King had laid out.

That was when Najin understood.

The Carnival King had prepared her stage for Najin alone. Everything on that stage had been a lie. Only Najin had been real, and it had been a stage made for Najin alone, built to manipulate him.

That was why, if Najin held his center, he could avoid being swept away. The stage had that structure to it.

But now.

What of the Witch's stage?

There was no falsehood in the Witch's stage. Everything was real. Every cast member was a living, breathing human being. The emotions they felt were real, and the tragedies they faced were not hypothetical events staged under some "what if" premise. They were things that had actually happened.

Everything except Najin was real.

This stage was not made for Najin.

A stage for all.

A stage for the countless, nameless masses standing in the shadow of the great light called "hero", those who received no spotlight in the story, the overlooked multitudes. Najin was not the lead on this stage.

And so.

Here, Najin was the audience.

Footnotes:

Join our discord at https://dsc.gg/wetried