WeTried Translations

Translator: ZERO_SUGAR

Editor: ZERO_SUGAR

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Chapter 489: A Stage for All (5)

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What did he want to become?

More specifically, what did he want to do?

"......"

Najin did not answer the girl's question right away. Instead, he raised his head. When you look up, a vast sky stretches above. An utterly black sky, with no sun and no stars.

The sky the Witch of the Abyss had swallowed.

The sky from which the stars had vanished.

People would feel fear looking up at a sky like that, but ridiculous as it was, what Najin felt was familiarity. Because the sky above the Underground City had looked exactly like that.

"Ahh."

Najin smiled, bitter. The faces of people he had seen while traveling the Continent came to mind. Since the Witch of the Abyss blanketed the sky, people had stopped looking up. They kept their eyes on the ground and endured each day without ever glancing toward the heavens.

It makes sense.

Looking up only meant seeing the Blight Star. Deprivation and despair. Nothing but longing for a past that could never come back. Rather than feel that, people bowed their heads.

Just as the people of the Underground City had done.

No one looked at the sky.

Najin thought of the people living with their heads lowered, thought of the Underground City, and traced back through a past that had grown hazy. A time when he had accomplished nothing grand, shone with no particular brilliance, held no particular strength...

What had he dreamed of back then?

"...Stars."

Najin opened his mouth slowly. As if speaking too quickly might make the dream evaporate, he sounded out each word at his own pace.

"I wanted to see the stars."

"Stars?"

"Yeah. The sky above the Underground City is dark."

"It really is!"

"I kept wondering, what exactly are these shining stars that show up in all the fairy tales? How bright could they be, that people outside always look up at the sky? That curiosity was where it started."

And then, Najin said.

"I wanted to hang a star up there. Not a fake star hammered into a ceiling. A real one."

"Then you've already made your dream come true?"

"Who knows."

Najin gave a short laugh.

For the first time, Najin laughed.

"Dreams are supposed to be big. Once you achieve one, you start looking for something higher."

Still gazing up at the sky, he spoke.

"Fake."

"What is?"

"That sky. And those stars."

Najin pointed at the Blight Star.

"While that wretched thing hangs up there, the sky is a fake, and every star decorating it is a fake too. Actually, whether it's real or fake doesn't even matter. To me, it's fake."

"Oh, I can't look at the sky! If I do, I just collapse like everyone else."

The girl shut her eyes and shook her head.

Watching her, Najin smiled, then reached into the inner pocket of his coat and pulled something out. Objects that held memories for him.

A single book, and a courier's hat.

They had symbolized his past, which was why he had taken them out to look at from time to time. But he no longer needed them. He handed the book to the girl, who was eyeing what he had pulled out with curiosity.

"What's this?"

"A fairy tale book."

"And that? It looks like a courier's hat."

The girl's eyes lit up. Of course they did, she had idolized Najin. For a girl who had started working as a courier in imitation of him, the courier's hat was clearly more appealing than any book. She pulled off the hat she was already wearing and glanced sideways at Najin.

Thunk.

Najin placed the hat on her head. She patted it with a thoroughly satisfied look and gave a bright, cheerful grin. "Thanks, oppa!"

The girl had not given any answer at all.

She had only asked a question.

It was Najin who answered it. Through the thinking he did in order to find an answer, he found one. Whether it was the right answer, he did not know. Whether it was the optimal path, he did not know either. But those things were not what mattered.

What mattered was that it was an answer he had arrived at after thinking it through.

And that it was what Najin wanted.

"You don't need to keep looking at the sky."

Najin stood up.

"You'll know even if you don't want to. Even if you try to pretend you don't, you won't be able to. It'll shine so brilliantly you won't be able to look away and pretend you didn't see it."

"What will?"

"What else."

Najin closed his hand around empty air.

"The star that announces the end of night."

Gripping the sword engraved with the Dawning Star, Najin smiled. Then he started walking.

Najin no longer wandered.

He had set the direction he needed to go.

2.

Najin walked.

Of course, nothing had actually been resolved.

The world was still being destroyed, and everyone in it was still cursing his name. Unlike when he faced the Carnival King, no realization on his part would shatter the Stage. The Stage was far too solid to be broken that way.

In other words, nothing had changed in any practical sense.

The only thing that had changed was Najin's attitude.

"If you truly feel responsible for all of this, then you should be the one to make the sacrifice. With your single life......"

"So what."

"...Pardon?"

For now, that was enough.

"Are you hard of hearing? I said, so what."

Najin tilted his head toward the Constellation blocking his path. He rested Excalibur over his shoulder like a club and jerked his chin.

"Either get out of my way right now."

Najin raised Excalibur.

"Or get out of my way after losing an arm."

"You intend to commit violence?"

"Why wouldn't I? I won't kill you. I'll let you off with just the one arm. I'm feeling rather merciful."

"Wha, what in the world, gaaaaaagh!"

Without hesitation, Najin lopped off the arm of the Constellation who had been droning on. A clean cut, if it was reattached properly, it could probably still be used. Evidently no one had imagined a hero would actually resort to violence, because the gathered crowd fell into confusion. Najin walked on through it.

Slowly, piece by piece, go back to the beginning.

Najin looked ahead. Eyes fixed only on the direction he needed to go, he sorted through his thoughts. The clutter that had filled his head was entirely gone now. Only then did things that had been invisible to him start to come into view.

Why?

A question.

Why did the Witch prepare a Stage like this?

The question pushed its way forward.

If the Witch were truly omnipotent, if she had the power to swallow the entire world at once, why would she resort to something this cumbersome?

It was a question he had not been able to form the first time the Witch appeared before him, crushed as he was by the weight of her presence. One question thrown out drew more trailing behind it.

To toy with me?

Because she wanted to watch me crumble from within?

No. That can't be it.

What mattered was that the Witch had moved quickly. The instant Leviathan fell, the Witch appeared directly before Najin. He remembered Merlin, who knew the Witch well, describing this as strange.

"The Witch always moves slowly."

"She guides things toward destruction, gradually but surely."

"Because there's no reason for her to be in a hurry."

And yet the Witch had moved in haste.

Was there a reason she had to act immediately?

Najin's eyes narrowed.

In the end, just as the Witch herself had said, this was the method of the weak.

Schemes and stratagems, strategy.

To win against an opponent you cannot defeat outright, or to secure victory while minimizing your own losses, or to cut off the variables an opponent might create.

Those were the reasons strategy was used.

For someone truly powerful, someone who could overwhelm an opponent with sheer force, such strategy was meaningless.

"From the very start."

Najin's eyes narrowed a little more.

"Without going to all this trouble, couldn't you just kill everyone and be done with it? Wouldn't that be your victory?"

There was no need to destroy the world this slowly. Stir everyone's emotions at once, then march on the Continent, humanity would be finished. So why wasn't she moving? Why, in all these past weeks, had she not come to the Continent herself?

Why.

Did she throw me, standing right in front of her, back toward the Continent?

Why didn't she kill me there?

What state had he been in at that moment?

The exhaustion from the battle with Leviathan had still lingered in him. He had not been at full strength. In that state, the Witch had moved hastily. And even after moving in haste, all she had done was drive Najin from the battlefield and trap him in a snare. Then, in the weeks since, she had not swallowed the Continent.

The clues fit together.

Najin arrived at a single conclusion.

"You were not at full strength either, were you, Witch of the Abyss."

On the Stage for All that you built, everyone demands my sacrifice. Everyone denies me and tries to drag me back down to the level of an ordinary person. Put another way, the purpose of the Stage you built is to make me weaker.

Stall for time. Wear down the target.

Najin let out a scornful laugh at the Witch who was using methods that might as well belong to a human.

"You can't imitate the Carnival King."

Najin took a step forward.

"That's a coward's method. The way of a weak demon who can't win otherwise. But you're not that kind of being. You couldn't become one even if you tried."

Each step, deliberate.

"So of course it comes out clumsy."

Sure enough, people began appearing one by one. They tried to block his path. The road to the Outland, the road that crossed the Outland toward Camlann, the road leading to the Blight Star still poisoning the sky above.

Right. Why hadn't he noticed?

The Witch of the Abyss still stood in the Abyss.

"......"

Najin exhaled slowly and looked ahead. The Witch had turned the whole world against him. A hero who speaks for the will of all cannot betray the wishes of all. She had used that to grab him by the ankle.

Made him hesitate.

Made him doubt.

Made him cradle a fear of failure.

The attempt had been effective. Najin had genuinely been shaken. Even now, he had no certainty he could defeat the Witch. But even so, his choice did not change.

"When I think about it, that's what I've always been."

Najin took a step.

"Doesn't matter what anyone else says."

He walked toward the people blocking his path.

"My teacher once told me."

He closed his hand into a fist.

"If anyone tells me to stop, drive a fist into their face."

Najin smiled.

"Come on then. As many of you as you like."

I'll smash every last one of you and engrave my star on this wretched sky. Try to stop me if you can.

Truth be told, this felt more familiar to Najin.

From the day he pulled out Excalibur, hadn't he spent a long time being hunted by the world? It felt like returning to where his adventure had begun. A false sky, countless people standing in his way, and once upon a time even his own teacher blocking his path.

He had no intention of resenting any of them.

Their lives were on the line too.

And yet Najin had challenged them and broken through. He had trampled their wishes for the sake of his own dream. He did not regret that choice. Even if he were put back in that situation, he would make the same choice again.

A similar situation, a similar environment, but a larger stage.

Then the same held true now.

His choice was the same.

If heaven itself would compel him to stop, he would flip even heaven upside down to make his dream real.

The Star of Defying Heaven blazed.

Najin stopped walking. He stamped his foot against the ground and broke into a run. The path ahead was set. There was no longer any need to hesitate.

Kahahahaha!

The moment Najin started running, laughter echoed around him. As if she could not contain it, the Witch who had been watching all of this burst into laughter.

"Even if all the world denounces you."

The Witch asked.

"Even if everyone tells you that you're wrong, you still say that you are right?"

A god asked a human.

"Even if your own Self-Confidence leads you to ruin?"

And the human answered.

"Even if that end is ruin......"

By taking one step forward.

"That's not yours to decide."

At the human's answer, the god burst out laughing. Laughing as if the whole world might be swept away, the thirteen eyes nailed into the sky opened wider than they ever had. As if determined not to miss a single moment, the Blight Star stared down at Najin.

"Go ahead then. As much as you like."

Everyone rushed at Najin.

The Stage for All began to creak.

Footnotes:

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