On Those Valiant and Ridiculous (2)
They had to pierce the windmill.
Yuel stroked her chin at the plan Najin had proposed. She seemed to be turning something over in her mind, her narrowed eyes studying Najin and Seongyuksin in turn.
"I judge that you, Najin, are the one best suited to the role of piercing it," she said.
"In terms of pure physical force or raw destructive power, it would be more appropriate for me or Seongyuksin to take the central part. But in a struggle against a constellation's domain—that is, against its authority—there are things that outrank mere strength."
Yuel raised two fingers.
"Symbolism, and concept. When it comes to shattering a constellation's authority, or the domain over which that authority has been unfurled, these two matter far more. And neither I nor Seongyuksin possess a star capable of resisting the Revelry Emperor's power."
Indeed, even after the same events had repeated seven times, the two of them had never felt the slightest sense of wrongness.
"But."
Yuel pointed at Najin.
"You noticed."
While the two transcendentals had wandered lost inside the domain, only Najin had felt the dissonance and discovered the flaw in the realm.
"The star you carry holds resistance against the Revelry Emperor's domain. That advantage is yours alone."
Breakthrough. Indomitable. Requiem.
The three stars Najin had claimed in the Outer Land. They were not merely the concepts of the stars themselves; the very narratives sealed within them stood in direct opposition to the Revelry Emperor.
Kruenbel. Alderan Basaglia. Viola Oldina. The Blue Lance. And the countless dead Najin had laid to rest, or the companions who had walked beside him.
They had broken free of repeating lives or deaths and pressed onward. Each had met their end in their own way. The stories of those people, held inside Najin's stars, granted him the margin needed to resist this "space of meaningless repetition."
"That is why it must be you."
The spear that would pierce the windmill and shatter the domain had to be his.
With those words Yuel loosened her body. She gathered her snow-white hair, tossing in the wind, into a single braid and let it fall, undid a button or two of the clothes she normally kept fully fastened, and rolled her sleeves high.
"I will open the path."
Yuel Razian settled into her stance. Seongyuksin, who had been listening, stepped immediately to Najin's side.
"At last."
Seongyuksin nodded with her arms crossed.
"It is time for this body to shine."
She brushed her golden hair back with a laugh.
"Just run straight ahead."
I will clear every obstacle from your path.
2.
The wind rose.
Facing the wind that came rolling in, Najin steadied his breath. Spread before him was the Revelry Emperor's domain—the clowns and giants that rose again no matter how many times they were slain.
Beyond those giants stood the windmill.
A windmill painted over and over in garish colors until it felt like nothing more than meaningless backdrop. Yet Najin was certain that this very windmill was the anchor binding the Revelry Emperor's domain to this place. Merlin had agreed with his assessment.
"…"
The plain was still quiet. No laughter reached them; only the intermittent whisper of wind brushed past their ears. But Najin knew this was the silence that came before the storm.
A few more steps.
The moment they drove off the ground and began to run, the instant they approached the Revelry Emperor's domain, the laughter would ring out. Laughter that ate at the mind and twisted perception. And Najin would have to pierce through every last bit of it.
Without wavering. In a single straight line.
There will be only one chance.
A chance that might never come again.
He could not let it slip away—Najin felt it in his bones. And he was not the only one who felt it.
"Najin."
At Yuel Razian's call his eyes snapped wide. He drove strength into his bent knees and into the feet planted on the earth. His center of gravity tilted forward—an unbalanced stance that looked ready to explode into motion at any second—as he gripped the spear.
And then Yuel Razian moved.
When she closed her hand on empty air, a greatsword appeared where nothing had been. A zweihänder with a blood-red blade and a cross-guard wrapped in thorned vines. The star relic granted by the Martyr of the Thorned Vines to her apostle.
It was a greatsword meant to be wielded in both hands, yet Yuel normally swung it lightly with one as if it were a longsword. A transcendental's strength made that possible.
Not now.
Yuel gripped the sword in both hands and let it trail behind her. Pure white sword-aura coiled around the blade.
Sword-aura of pure white.
It held nothing. It took no form. It simply wrapped the steel. For a Sword Master's aura it was almost monochrome, almost plain. Yet that very plainness and simplicity were Yuel's essence.
A sword was a tool for killing.
To her a sword was nothing more than a tool for slaughter. It needed no meaning poured into it, no special shape.
If you kill tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, you can become a Sword Master without mindscape or refined technique.
The rarest of murderers, the one who had taken that old theory and proven it real. Paradoxically, her sword was pure white. Fingers as white as the aura itself closed around the hilt. The moment all ten fingers clenched, the sword-aura surged violently.
A low boom rolled out.
Around Yuel the very air changed. A crushing pressure as if something were stamping down from above, a sticky, clinging killing intent that seized the entire area.
What kind of presence is this…
Even though the killing intent was not directed at him, Najin could not stop a short shudder. Seongyuksin was the same; cold sweat beaded on her skin as she absently rubbed her own forearm.
And then Yuel took one step forward.
One step past Najin and Seongyuksin.
The instant her foot landed, the instant the killing will she made no attempt to hide acquired a clear direction and fixed on the giants, the space itself creaked.
Ka-ka-ka-ka! Kya-ruk! A-ha-ha-ha!
Even though they had not yet reached the domain, laughter exploded. As if the realm had sensed danger. Clowns erupted from the ground, paint blotched the sky, and the Revelry Emperor's domain began to unfurl in earnest—at that exact fleeting point.
Ka… ka-ka…
Yuel swung her sword.
Kiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiing—!
A sword-cry that sounded like a human scream buried the laughter. It swallowed the rising mirth, shredded it to pieces, and raced across the plain as if declaring that the only sound belonging in this place was screaming, not laughter.
A single strike loosed without a thought for what came after.
Every last drop of starlight and mana Yuel possessed, poured into the strongest blow she could deliver right then.
The pure-white sword-aura became a tidal wave that swept the giants. Everything the aura touched was finely deconstructed. The screams born of Yuel's blade drowned out their laughter. As though she meant to bury the entire space, her sword-aura blanketed the Revelry Emperor's domain.
Space groaned. The paint-stained sky heaved. To keep the collapsing domain from falling apart, the Revelry Emperor's realm borrowed power from La Mancha. In that process, for the briefest instant, the laughter thinned.
"Now."
The opening Yuel had carved.
Boom.
Najin did not miss it. He and Seongyuksin drove off the earth and began to run. Najin forgot even to breathe as he sprinted with everything he had. The landscape blurred past him at terrifying speed.
The giants that Yuel's aura had scraped into paint could not stop him. Belatedly the ground heaved and clowns burst from the paint to charge him—but Najin did not respond. He simply ran, eyes fixed only forward.
Dealing with the clowns was not his part.
"Don't forget the promise."
Seongyuksin stretched out her arms. She seized the heads of the clowns lunging at Najin and crushed them, sliding long across the paint. Leaving the advancing Najin ahead of her, she let out a long breath.
Then she murmured, short and sharp.
"Aurora."
Najin never knew exactly what she did, because he did not look back. He only knew that a flash erupted behind him and that hundreds of clowns evaporated in a single instant.
And that the paint-stained sky turned pure white for a heartbeat.
The path opened.
Nothing stood between Najin and the windmill.
3.
Don Quixote, who had mistaken the windmill for a giant, charged straight at it. A magnificent lance charge. With the force to pierce a giant's body in a single thrust, Don Quixote charged valiantly!
…Recalling the crests of the knights of La Mancha.
And recalling the people sealed inside his own stars.
Najin drove his feet into the earth and sprinted.
Clutched in both hands was the Spear of the Crossed Star.
The spear left to him by Kruenbel, the Horn-blowing Star. The spear of the tragic knight who had finally broken upon the Revelry Emperor's endlessly repeating stage. The Ramming he had once boasted of had never opened a path for himself.
Yet in the final moment he had moved by his own will.
Not as a dead man wandering a hell worse than death, but as a knight, he had met his end. He had stepped down from the stage on his own two feet.
And was Kruenbel the only one?
Alderan Basaglia was the same. He too had stepped down from the eternal stage the Revelry Emperor had built and sought to meet his end in his own way.
And.
Najin recalled the final words left by the Blue Lance, the man who had repeated the same day for three hundred years in the desert.
Najin's star shone. Pouring that shining starlight into the Spear of the Crossed Star, he charged the windmill.
Charging a windmill because he mistook it for a giant?
At that ridiculous sight the clowns that had been creeping up burst into laughter. They mocked him, pointed fingers. Didn't that stupid figure look exactly like a clown? Najin ignored the voices. What did he care what others said?
In Najin's eyes the windmill was a giant.
The wicked Revelry Emperor had clearly disguised the king of giants as a windmill! Mouth twisting into a grin, Najin thrust the spear. The spearhead sank into the vigorously turning sail. And in that very instant he felt his body shoved by some vast, irresistible force.
"Don Quixote, who charged the windmill, was thrown clear by the force of its turning sails."
The story as it had been written. Najin's starlight was not yet enough to break that record. If he were thrown exactly as the story dictated, the tale would simply begin again.
And Najin already knew that.
He already knew what happened to Don Quixote when the knights of La Mancha charged the windmill. There was no way he would have left himself unprepared for something he knew. For this precise moment he spoke a name he had held in reserve.
"Violet."
The pianist, Violet.
Or the hero, Viola Oldina.
At Najin's call the cord that bound his hair shed a soft light. A phantom of someone appeared at his side. A woman whose hair was half black and half pure white closed her hands around his. She smiled as if to say that seven repetitions of Da capo had already been more than enough, and lightly tapped the back of his hand as though it were a piano keyboard.
"Al fine"
⟨ End of the Performance ⟩
The terminus of the piece.
In that instant the windmill that had been trying to hurl him away lost its power. An abrupt end arrived upon the stage that had seemed destined never to finish. Centered on the windmill pierced by the Spear of the Crossed Star, the stage began to collapse.
The regenerating clowns crumbled. The laughter that had been forcing its way back, pushing against the screams of Yuel's sword-aura, vanished. The sky stained with paint recovered its original color.
But.
"Oh, master!"
"I really can't live because of you. That's a windmill! Not the king of giants—a windmill that turns by the power of the wind. A windmill!"
Laughter that would not disappear.
An incredulous laugh. A laugh that mixed a little mockery as it asked its master how many times this made, claiming it could not go on living like this.
"Are you all right? You're a mess. You haven't been badly hurt, have you?"
"Hurt by a mere giant? I am perfectly fine. And even if I were hurt, saying 'it hurts' would hardly be a knight's proper duty. I am fine!"
And another voice.
In the fleeting instant when the Revelry Emperor's domain collapsed and everything returned to its true colors—
in a world flowing with unnatural slowness, Najin saw them.
A knight sprawled on the ground, and the squire helping him up.
"Still, I'd prefer it if you told me when it hurts. That would make things easier for me, master."
"Hmm. Not wrong."
The knight laughed, a little embarrassed.
Then the two of them looked at each other and burst into laughter. Not mockery—genuine, cheerful laughter.
"Honestly, thanks to you there's never a dull day."
"Isn't that right? Didn't I tell you this journey would be the most enjoyable one of all?"
The knight laughed as he took the squire's hand and rose.
"Then let us keep going, Sancho."
The place where the Revelry Emperor's domain and La Mancha's domain overlapped.
A single thread of laughter that had bound the two realms together.
Sancho, squire to Quixote of the Star of Contempt.
He was there.
The boy turned his head and looked at Najin.
"…"
The moment their eyes met, Sancho said something to him. Najin never heard the words.
Flash.
As if a light had been snuffed out, Najin's vision went black.