WeTried Translations
Translator: ZERO_SUGAR
Editor: ZERO_SUGAR
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 510: Turning Point
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Most magic was systematic, the product of calculation, but not all magic worked that way. Take what was classified as innate magic. Unlike magic that anyone could reproduce if they knew the formula, such magic was unique.
It was like a flame fueled by the wielder's own inner world.
Innate Magic, Abyss.
The Witch's inner world dragged Najin down. Countless hands tangled around his body and pulled. Najin began falling into the enormous hole that had opened at the center of the stage. In an instant, everything grew distant, and there was nowhere left to stand.
Shhhk!
He swung his sword, cutting away the things gripping him, but he could not break through it that way. Once he considered the meaning of the word Abyss itself, it was only natural that there was no way to overcome it.
Abyss meant an unavoidable fall.
There was nothing he could do.
No way to stop it.
Morgan had fallen over and over again. After enduring that unavoidable descent time and again, she became a witch. She chose to become one, and chose to remain one.
That was how the Witch of the Abyss was born.
This was the Witch's essence.
This magic was Morgan's essence itself. It recreated, through magic, the descent she herself had experienced. The depth of the Abyss was equal to the hatred she carried.
"......"
It was a Bottomless Pit, one whose end might not even exist. Struggling inside it had no meaning. He would only keep falling, endlessly downward.
It's getting farther away.
The Star floating above his head, Merlin's Star shining at his side, Merlin herself, the Witch, all of it grew distant. They shrank from the size of his fingers into tiny dots, then vanished from sight.
One by one, the lights went out.
The Stars protecting Najin's body extinguished one at a time, like lamps going dark. As the starlight flickered like an unsteady candle flame, Najin saw them.
「There's a perfect pit here.」
「Throw them in.」
「There's a war on. What funeral? Who has time for that? Toss them into the pit. Firewood is too precious to waste burning them. What, are these corpses supposed to be so important?」
「What about the sick?」
「They're going to die soon anyway. What difference does it make if they die today or tomorrow? Throw them in too.」
Those cast into this Bottomless Pit long ago.
「Abandon them. Throw them away. Bury them.」
The humans abandoned by other humans.
「You call yourselves beautiful, but you're utterly hideous. I want every one of you to die in pain. Slowly. Agonizingly slowly.」
And the humans devoured by the Witch.
「This is where you end.」
It was a space filled with those abandoned and devoured.
Yes, filled.
They said the Bottomless Pit had no end, but things without end could fill even a Bottomless Pit. The Witch filled it with malice and hatred. It had begun with humanity's atrocities, but the tragedies built upon that foundation were the Witch's own.
「You aren't beautiful at all.」
「Look. You offer sacrifices to me.」
「Humans kill humans!」
「As if you were competing to see who can kill more cruelly, you offer me tribute. Isn't it funny?」
Najin saw and heard what the Witch had collected.
「Hate him. Your father who drove you to this place, your father who had no choice but to do so. Your father forced you to become a hero. He forced Fate upon you and threatened your children!」
「You were born the Conqueror King's child.」
「Under Leviathan's coercion.」
「You had to live as the child of a conqueror. That wasn't what you wanted, was it? Why did you have to live that way? Wasn't it all your father's fault?」
Over the years, the Witch had tempted countless humans. She had driven countless people to the edge. Longing for the bright ones to finally fall, she guided them until they exposed their ugliness.
Only then could she believe that she was right.
「You gave everything for your lover.」
「But what about your lover?」
「They don't recognize your sacrifice. They don't repay you. Is there any value in sacrifice and effort that go unrewarded?」
She whispered to countless humans.
「There isn't.」
「There's no reason to protect them, no need for you to sacrifice yourself, and even less reason for you to remain good.」
「Rest, child.」
「The world around you isn't beautiful in the slightest. Why are you trying to be beautiful?」
Many had wavered at her whispers and eventually given in. The Witch burst into laughter at that. Sometimes, she even applauded with all her strength when she saw those who betrayed their cause without her having to tempt them at all.
「Look, Morgan.」
She spoke to herself.
「You and Lucius were wrong.」
You were wrong.
「I was right.」
That was how she assured herself. This was where Morgan had built the unshakable confidence she had held for tens of thousands of years.
Crack.
Najin's body began to crumble. An inner world layered over tens of thousands of years became a formidable weapon simply by existing. The pressure created by that inner world bore down on Najin.
It felt as though he were sinking into the deep sea. The pressure of the water crushed his body, trying to grind him apart.
「If you sing praises of humanity's beauty.」
The Witch's laughter reached him.
「Then I will speak of humanity's ugliness.」
Humanity's accumulated sins. The Witch born from humanity. The sins the Witch had in turn made humanity pile up. A place where the most terrible, foul-smelling things in the world had been gathered.
A place worthy of the name hell.
The Abyss ate away at Najin's body.
As if to say that his ending would be no different from theirs.
2.
Najin fell into the Bottomless Pit.
The hole that swallowed him vanished without a trace, like a beast closing its jaws after swallowing prey. Even the thread that had connected to him was severed.
"Najin."
There was no answer.
"Najin?"
Merlin's eyes shook. She struck the place where Najin had disappeared with her fist, but only a small ripple spread across it. Merlin bit her lip hard.
When she raised her head, the Witch was there, laughing at her.
"I told you. In the end, he'll only disappear."
She shrugged.
"You're like me. More like me than anyone else in this world. Has there ever been another child so much like me in all of history spanning tens of thousands of years? You are proof the world has given once more. That I wasn't an accident, but an inevitability."
Even if it had not been her, another Witch would have been born somewhere.
That was what the Witch said.
"You know how your kind was destroyed, don't you?"
"...You killed them."
"Don't lie, child. My children did the killing, but humans were the ones who sold information to my children."
Merlin knew that as well.
"Hateful, wasn't it? But you held back after killing that one human. You didn't kill that person's family too. You must have believed their young children had done nothing wrong."
The Witch sneered.
"How foolish. Those young children hated you, sold even their souls to demons, and tried to threaten you. In the end, you stayed silent, and it was your comrades who killed them."
Her mockery echoed.
"It's always like this. Always. Be honest, child."
The Witch spread her arms.
"Didn't you hate them? You lost everything, and yet didn't you hate those who laughed and played atop the things you had lost? Didn't you find humans who took your devotion for granted utterly disgusting?"
"......"
"When you returned from the battlefield, what did you feel toward the humans who looked at you as though you were unwelcome? What did you feel when a Knight of the Round Table fell, and even their corpse was not properly recovered?"
All the things that had piled up.
"Arthur had barely vanished, yet didn't you feel disgust toward those officials, those pathetic humans, discussing how they should divide power?"
The Witch had watched Merlin's life as well.
"Those who built peace atop Arthur's death did not even mourn Arthur. They treated it as though it were only natural. Didn't you hate all of that?"
She must have hated it.
She must have been disillusioned.
She must have wished for them all to disappear.
"Don't say you didn't."
The Witch pointed at Merlin.
"The fact that you can use the same magic as I can."
There was undeniable proof right here. Merlin, too, could use Abyss, which should have been Morgan's innate magic. Its details differed, but its essence was the same.
"The Star that became a Blight Star is proof of that."
In the end, that was the truth.
"......"
Merlin knew it too. She knew that she resembled the Witch, that she too could have become a witch, and that if she had taken even one wrong step, that ending would have awaited her.
"You're the same as me."
Because she knew.
"Your destination, in the end, will also..."
Merlin swung her arm.
Crash.
The flames surging toward Merlin froze and shattered apart with the sound of breaking glass. Destroying and blocking the magic rushing at her, Merlin lifted her chin.
"What the hell are you talking about, you crazy bitch?"
Merlin laughed, cutting off the Witch's words.
"I've been listening to you go on and on, but what exactly are you saying?"
She swept back her blood-soaked hair, just as Najin did. Tying her hair back like Najin, Merlin let out a long breath. After spitting out blood and steadying her breathing, she stared straight at the Witch.
"I'm like you? My end will be the same as yours? I'm going to become a witch like you?"
Merlin raised her middle finger.
"Who gave you the right?"
The Stars she possessed shone. The brightest among them was the Terminus Star. Leading with the Star that had once become a Blight Star but found its original light again, Merlin spoke.
"Did I hate humans? Yeah, I hated them. I wanted to kill every last one of them. I had the power to do it, too. It's true that I even wondered whether I should really go through with it. But so what?"
Boom. Merlin stomped her foot.
"It was a moment. I may have hated them, but I liked them even more than I hated them. For every filthy person, there were many more who shone brightly enough to make me forget that filth."
Remembering her journey with the Knights of the Round Table, the humans she had seen alongside Najin, and above all, the hand Najin had held out to her, Merlin smiled.
"I'm different from you."
The Stars shone.
"My story is different from yours. It's different from Arthur's story too. It's different from every story that has come before."
Merlin grasped the Terminus Star. Only by putting a period to one story could she move on to the next. She had come to accept her mystique, and she now knew how to use it.
"This is my story."
It was their story, one found nowhere else.
"Will you stop deciding it for me? Putting down the period is my job. How dare you try to lay a hand on it?"
The Terminus Star shone.
A period, my mystique.
A period was the boundary line separating the end and beginning of a story. Only now could Merlin decide what to call that line.
「The place Merlin is waiting isn't your final destination, it's a turning point, right? A turning point where I've completely surpassed Arthur. We can be together from there, so what's the problem?」
Because he had told her.
"This is my turning point."
For a thousand years as a human and thousands more as a fairy, Merlin had waited for this moment alone. Perhaps that moment had already arrived.
The Terminus Star scattered its light. Najin was not the only one who had accomplished a great achievement.
Merlin had accomplished one as well.
Achievements piled upon achievements became Stars.
Transition, Merlin's thirteenth Star, shone.
"Ha."
Seeing Merlin's thirteenth Star rise, the Witch let out a hollow laugh. She could not help it. Morgan pointed to the place where Najin had disappeared and sneered.
"Will you still be able to say that after that child dies? You're unbearable, truly. You depend on someone other than yourself in the end, yet you think you'll resist me with a Star created that way?"
It was different from Najin's thirteenth Star. Merlin's Star could only exist because Najin, who shared that constellation, existed.
How pathetic was that?
Still, Merlin tilted her head without caring about the Witch's mockery.
"You've been talking like you're so impressive for a while now."
As its name implied, Transition marked a turning point she had reached long ago. She had changed, despite believing she never would. She welcomed that change gladly.
Unlike Morgan, who had stagnated here for tens of thousands of years.
"To begin with."
Remembering what she had learned from Najin, Merlin smiled.
"You didn't even know there was a way to restore a Blight Star, did you? But I did it. Unlike you, I've become a Blight Star and returned to my original Star."
It was a provocation.
"So how are we the same? Stop comparing me to you for no reason. It's disgusting."
With all thirteen Stars shining, Merlin stretched out her arm.
She did not doubt it.
If it's Najin, he'll definitely return.
If so, there was not much she had to do. She only had to keep that woman here.
And Merlin believed she was best at exactly that.
Author's Note
I posted a notice saying the chapter would be late, but somehow I finished it on time. Nice!
*For the next chapter, I recommend reading in scroll mode or dark mode!
Footnotes:
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