The City of the Abyss, Atman (1)
A few minutes passed.
After a stretch of time not worth describing, Najin dragged the barely-breathing Berlo toward the far edge of the underground city.
The place the Holy Knights had been guarding.
The only path that led to the landfill.
In truth, it could hardly be called a path at all. It was more of a cliff, and below that cliff lay only darkness without end.
“······.”
Najin stood at the outermost rim of the underground city and looked down in silence. Even with vision that had drawn near the level of a transcendent, he could not see the bottom of this pit. All that registered was a workshop built on a jutting ledge close to the cliff face.
The workshop of Druggy Hakan, now without its master.
How much farther the pit continued beneath it, Najin could not know.
“Haaah… hngh… hah······.”
Najin turned.
He regarded the gasping Berlo with indifferent eyes, then flung him out over the cliff. Berlo loosed one final scream. Even after that scream thinned into nothing and silence reclaimed the air, no sound of impact rose from below.
Dozens of seconds more brought nothing.
Minutes passed, and still the sound never came.
So you can’t know until you go in yourself, after all.
Najin let out a long breath.
“Hoo······.”
The seething emotions settled into a quiet calm. Revenge was not finished, yet it had been eased to some degree. Now it was time to do what still needed doing.
Somewhere in the underground city, a Court Jester of the Revelry Emperor was hiding.
And if one wished to conceal something, the landfill was the only place left, Najin reasoned. He leapt toward the bottomless pit. Along the near-vertical face of the cliff, he began to climb down.
“Feeling a bit calmer?”
To some extent.
“So what’s the plan from here?”
What’s the plan, she asked.
Najin fell silent for a moment at Merlin’s question.
First I need to learn about the constellation hiding in the landfill. Even if we don’t fight it, I should at least get a sense of what it feels like.
“And then?”
After that······.
Najin let the words trail away.
Honestly, I don’t know.
“Don’t know?”
I can’t begin to guess how far the connections run.
That a Court Jester of the Revelry Emperor was hiding in the underground city was fact. Therefore some link between the Revelry Emperor and the Holy Light Church was already certain—but precisely how far that link reached, Najin could not tell.
The highest authorities of the Holy Light Church were, broadly speaking, three.
First: Archbishop Orlan, who oversaw external affairs and the church’s administration.
Second: the main deity of the Holy Light Church itself—the Lighthouse that Illuminates All Creation.
And third: the Lighthouse Keeper, Eurypylos.
Of those three, Najin was certain Orlan and the Lighthouse were connected to the Revelry Emperor. Their movements were suspicious enough, and without the main deity’s consent something of this scale could never have been set in motion.
That leaves the Lighthouse Keeper.
Lighthouse Keeper Eurypylos.
A transcendent who, if he so chose, possessed the martial power to confront the entire Empire—the strongest on the continent.
Najin could not read that man’s intentions.
Why had the Lighthouse Keeper wrapped the Holy Light Church’s sanctuary in light and severed it from the outside world, and what was he doing inside? Ally, enemy, or mere bystander? There was simply no way to tell.
But one thing.
One thing he could be sure of.
Everything turns on the Lighthouse Keeper’s decision.
Depending on where Eurypylos chose to stand, the entire situation would reverse. He was a transcendent of that magnitude.
For now.
Gazing into the endless dark, Najin descended farther, and farther still.
Confirming comes first.
Whatever waited below, he felt certain he would find a clue there.
2.
Down, down, and down again.
Climbing the cliff face, Najin furrowed his brow. He had already gone a long way, yet the end remained invisible. The darkness was endless, as if it simply continued forever downward.
A bottomless pit—an abyss whose floor could not be seen.
It was a bottomless pit in the most literal sense.
At first the stench of corpses, refuse, and filth caught on the jutting ledges of the cliff had risen to meet him, but even that faded after a long descent. The space became colorless, odorless, lightless.
From a certain point onward.
Najin began to feel a profound wrongness.
A strange sensation. Fear climbing the length of his spine. The instinct that he was doing something that should not be done. The certainty that he was approaching a place that should never be approached. His instincts were screaming at him.
Go no farther down.
You must not descend any more.
“It’s designed to make you feel that way.”
Merlin seized Najin’s hand. What you are feeling now is a lie, she told him; this space is simply forcing that sensation upon you. Najin steadied his breathing and continued downward, then downward again.
Heading for the floor of the bottomless pit, he suddenly recalled a story he had once read while investigating the churches.
It was a tale of hell as defined by humanity’s religions. The present major faiths of the continent—the Holy Light, Holy Blood, and Holy Body Churches—each held entirely different doctrines······ yet for some reason the three shared a single concept.
The definition of the hell into which the wicked fall.
The three churches declared:
Hell is the floor of all things, the lowest place in the world, fashioned to inflict suffering upon sinners. Neither starlight nor sunlight reaches there; only darkness fills it completely.
Thus the underground city of Atman was itself a kind of hell.
A hell created by the Holy Light Church.
A hell into which sinners were cast so they might suffer.
What, then, lies beneath such a hell?
Najin kept descending.
Perhaps he was already falling.
The three churches said so. And the faiths that had existed before those churches, and the primordial religions that had existed even before any religion was born—before the transcendents called constellations ever appeared—those ancient teachings declared:
Hell is the bottomless pit.
An endless chasm.
The abyss, and the Abyss.
Hell, they said, is none other than the Abyss.
Why was that story rising in his mind now? Because he was heading for the floor of a bottomless pit? That alone was not the reason. Najin turned the word over carefully.
Abyss—when he heard it, the first thing that came to mind was never simply hell.
Merlin.
“······.”
Merlin?
“Just a moment.”
Merlin’s voice had gone hard.
“Wait. Stop.”
Her tone was rigid. Najin drove his sword into the wall and halted where he was.
“Something’s wrong.”
Merlin’s eyes were trembling. It was rare to see her so shaken. She pressed five fingers hard into her own arm and furrowed her brow.
“Why is there, inside the continent—”
She pointed toward the depths below.
“—the Abyss?”
The Abyss Merlin spoke of was not hell. The Abyss she always meant was only one place.
The land of the Abyss: Kamran.
The place where Arthur’s journey had ended, and the land Najin would someday have to reach. The moment Merlin muttered those words—
Crack.
The darkness of the Abyss opened its maw toward him. In that same instant the cliff into which Najin had driven his sword collapsed without a sound, as though it had never existed at all. Losing every handhold, he fell.
“······!”
Najin’s eyes flew wide. He reached into empty air, but nothing came to hand. He plummeted downward at terrifying speed. With nothing to grasp, he could neither slow the fall nor stop it.
“Listen carefully.”
Merlin stretched out and seized his face. Even through the panic and confusion she steadied her breathing and spoke on.
“I don’t know why the Abyss is here. I don’t know—but from this moment you have to keep your wits sharp.”
She looked straight into both of his eyes.
“Never lose yourself.”
Najin fell into the dark.
3.
Looking back, it had always been strange.
The starlight of Excalibur was not something that could be hidden simply by wishing it hidden. Even in a place where light neither entered nor escaped, one could not conceal the starlight of Excalibur.
Yet the fact that Najin had drawn the sword had been known to no one outside. Even Merlin had only realized it after he emerged.
Merlin had said it once before.
This is strange.
Something unknown must exist within the underground city, she had predicted. But at the bottom of that city waited something that surpassed even her imagination.
Merlin.
“I’m listening.”
Falling, Najin realized at some point that his speed had slowed. At the same time he felt a sensation both unfamiliar and deeply familiar.
This.
“Yes.”
Isn’t this the same feeling as when you enter the Grave of Stars?
The sensation that accompanied stepping into the Grave of Stars—similar, yet slightly different. That was what he felt now.
Immediately afterward, the darkness cleared in a single instant.
The moment it lifted, what Najin saw was a vast city.
The underground beneath the underground.
The bottom beneath the bottom.
The end of the endless pit.
The place where things discarded once are discarded again and finally arrive—hell beneath hell, the Abyss created by the Holy Light Church—Najin had reached it.
Lighthouse Keeper Eurypylos rested his chin on his hand.
Chin propped, he remembered.
A distant past—a past when he had still believed the world was somewhat livable. Recalling it brought little pleasure. Looking back now, it was merely ridiculous.
A foolish, untempered time.
A time when he had believed something might change.
Lighthouse Keeper Eurypylos had once been called a hero. There had been a period when he marched at the forefront, crying out for the salvation of humanity. A season when he had quelled chaos, calmed wars, proclaimed balance, and roamed the world.
In those days he had been a hero.
So—had any of those actions held meaning?
“Not at all.”
Eurypylos laughed.
“If they had held meaning, would I be sitting here like this?”
Neither meaning nor value.
No matter how hard a human struggled, one could not reverse the great current. All that could be grasped was, at best, one’s immediate surroundings. And even that, had he not failed?
It was best simply to let the world flow however it wished. That was how Eurypylos saw it now.
Involving oneself in the affairs of the world only made one wretched.
Living long years did not particularly make a human wiser, nor better than one’s former self. Eurypylos did not consider himself wise.
Yet even if he was not wise—
Even if he was an old man left behind by the age, a has-been—there were still things he could decide. After long deliberation, Eurypylos had reached his decision.
Really, what a nuisance.
Thinking that, he smiled bitterly.
“······.”
Tick. Tick. Tick.
Listening to the clock that reached his ears, Eurypylos rose from his seat.
He defined himself by time.
429 years.
The years he had lived.
312 years, 3 months, 21 days.
The time remaining to him.
Eurypylos raised his hand.
Thunk.
The clock fell silent.
As he rose and started somewhere, someone asked where he was going. Eurypylos answered shortly.
“To meet an old friend.”
He took a step.
Toward the city of the Abyss—Atman.