The City of the Abyss, Atman (5)
Eurypylos, the Lighthouse Keeper, is an unusual constellation.
In ages past he had been a constellation whose name thundered across the world. He had swept the entire continent, stilled wars, and carved out countless feats of valor by cutting down the demons and fallen stars that poured in from the Outer Lands. To the constellations who remembered that era—or who had lived through it—the name Eurypylos was synonymous with strength itself.
Guardian Eurypylos. The hero who once fought beside the Lighthouse that Illuminates All Creation. The one who laid the foundations of the Holy Light Church, and the liberator who freed cities from oppressors wearing the mask of religion. That Eurypylos, once called by such names, had at some point sealed himself inside the lighthouse. No matter what unfolded outside, he showed little interest.
And so hundreds of years passed.
The heroes who had shared his era departed for the Outer Lands; those who remembered that age died. Stories of Eurypylos remained only as records—and even those records have grown faint in the present day…
Eurypylos raised his weapon.
Shing.
A halberd nearly three meters long. Gripping it in one hand, Eurypylos narrowed his eyes. What filled his pupils was his enemy—or rather, the existence he had to bar the path of.
A fallen transcendent with nine stars: the Lighthouse.
A clone of a transcendent with eleven stars: Mordred.
Either one was a terrifyingly powerful foe. Even if all five pillars of the Empire stood here now, the scales would tip toward defeat rather than victory.
An eight-star constellation had accumulated power across hundreds of years. The Constellation of Hope had drawn hope from the countless humans who fell into the underground over those same centuries. The force thus forged transcended common sense entirely.
Her stage—the entire vast city—surged like a living thing. From the summit of the lighthouse at the city’s heart, a flashing light swept outward like a heat ray. Eurypylos watched in silence as the beam approached, bisecting the city.
Then—
“…”
Without a word he moved. The motion was not fast. It was slow. Moving with deliberate slowness, Eurypylos tightened his grip on the halberd.
Tick.
The sound of a clock hand rang out. The ticking that should have been audible only to Eurypylos reached Najin beside him as well. Najin looked at him. Eurypylos spoke shortly.
“Stand back.”
You’ll get caught up in it.
The instant Najin took a single step backward—
Boom.
Centered on Eurypylos, cracks raced across the ground. They were not limited to the earth. The air itself warped. The ground caved in, and the moment the flying rubble and the city’s debris drew near him—
Crunch, rrrrrrrumble—!
They bent, snapped, and crumbled to dust.
No authority and no magic intervened in that process.
Najin’s eyes flew wide. It was not that he failed to understand what was unfolding before him. The opposite: because he understood, his eyes went round. Pure physical force, with not a scrap of mana involved, had produced the phenomenon. Only then did Najin grasp it—
why Eurypylos had answered “That’s why I abandoned it and came” when asked if the Church was the reason for his life,
and what it truly meant for him to expend the three hundred years of time he had accumulated.
Najin understood.
Crunch, rrrrrrrumble…
Every time Eurypylos moved, the entire district—the entire city—trembled, as though a colossal giant were shifting its body. The moment he settled into stance, his form blurred into afterimages and surged forward.
The city that had become a single living organism charging to swallow him, the heat rays the Lighthouse unleashed, the magic vomited from the circles embroidering the sky—
Eurypylos’s answer to all of it was simple.
A single strike.
He swung the halberd. Ground the blade never touched caved in. Space warped along the weapon’s arc. Crushed and refracted by overwhelming force, the power reached its critical point and exploded outward as a shockwave.
Everything flying toward him vanished in an instant.
Before that absolute physical force, magic lost all meaning. The Lighthouse’s heat rays scattered; the surging city shattered into fragments. Across hundreds of meters the shockwave turned the land into a wasteland and reached all the way to the Lighthouse herself.
“…”
The Lighthouse flicked her hand and knocked the blow aside. Confirming the blood welling from the tear across the back of her hand, she twisted the corner of her mouth upward.
Two transcendents who had accumulated power in similar ways over similar spans of time looked at each other.
Snap.
The Lighthouse flicked her fingers. The ground heaved; fragments of the city rocketed into the sky, reshaped themselves into lighthouse forms, and drove themselves upside-down into the heavens. Their light sources were none other than the nine stars she possessed.
Eight inverted lighthouses driven into the sky,
and one lighthouse standing at the city’s heart.
Nine lighthouses shone upon Eurypylos at once.
2.
Before a landscape that was beyond overwhelming—transcendent in the most literal sense—Najin fell silent.
An existence that can match the Empire single-handedly.
Najin felt the true weight of that single sentence. A transcendent who had resolved to remain motionless and merely watch had moved. Both Eurypylos himself and Najin knew perfectly well what would become of him when this movement ended. The overwhelming martial prowess unfolding before their eyes had been purchased with Eurypylos’s remaining lifespan.
A storm raged. Torrents of power crashed like waves. Amid a battlefield where everything split, broke, bent, and crumbled beneath a colossal tide, Najin clenched his teeth.
Eurypylos is strong.
Powerful—so powerful that the word itself felt inadequate.
But what was truly terrible was this: the Lighthouse facing him was not falling behind in the slightest. In a duel between the two alone the scales would never tip either way—yet Najin could see it.
“…”
In the middle of the city being reduced to rubble stood a single figure, aloof amid the torrents. The moment that figure took one step—
the balanced scales shattered. Every sense in Najin’s body stood on edge more sharply than ever before; his eyes read the near future. Bloodshot veins flared as he foresaw the change Mordred would create.
Crunch.
Gritting his teeth, Najin decided what he could do—and what he had to accomplish.
As he poured out every last scrap of accumulated power, even Eurypylos himself found the strength unfamiliar. He had experienced this once before—most likely the moment he first reached transcendence. Most transcendents, unable to adapt to the sudden surge, fail to unleash their full might at least once. Eurypylos had been no exception.
It was the same now.
Three hundred years of accumulation. Under the sheer weight of that time his body creaked. Power that his flesh could no longer contain spilled outward in every direction. Feeling his body erode at terrifying speed, Eurypylos gave a bitter smile.
…So in the end it comes to this.
Yet he did not stop. One could not simply stand by and watch an old friend go astray. Swinging the halberd, Eurypylos advanced. Against the Lighthouse alone, he could manage.
The problem is—
the star of Camlann hanging in the sky. The hole connected to the Abyss was feeding power to the Lighthouse, and Mordred’s gaze looking through that hole pressed down on Eurypylos’s body like a physical weight.
Constellations belonging to the Abyss were of an entirely different caliber from ordinary ones. As beings who borrowed the power of the Witch of Camlann, they possessed strength that defied imagination. Recalling past battles against the cursed undead of Camlann, Eurypylos clicked his tongue. Back then they had been undead; what stood before him now was the infamous Knight of Treason.
The Knight of Treason—Mordred.
His clone, which had been quietly observing, began to move. Eurypylos gauged its power. Even if it was a star of the Abyss, that thing was still only a constellation’s clone—not the true body, and therefore nothing more than a degraded copy. Mordred had carved out his own heart to create it, yes, but a clone remained a clone.
Even if an ordinary constellation manufactures a clone, the result is usually no stronger than a Sword Seeker who has yet to reach transcendence.
Yet Mordred’s clone radiated the same presence as a true transcendent. A hollow laugh slipped from Eurypylos’s lips. Well—one would have to be at least that strong to be called a knight of the Witch.
But—
Eurypylos tightened his grip on the halberd.
In raw output, I hold the advantage.
If Mordred’s clone was an ordinary transcendent, then Eurypylos was a transcendent who had spent three hundred years accumulating power and was now prepared to die by pouring every last second of it out. In pure output he held an overwhelming edge.
I can sweep him away. I can clear him out.
That was how Eurypylos saw it—and the judgment was not wrong. Had an ordinary constellation intervened here, the aftershocks created by Eurypylos and the Lighthouse would have flung them aside like debris.
If it had been an ordinary constellation, yes.
Thud.
What Eurypylos had overlooked was the single sword in Mordred’s hand.
The blade used when knights of the Round Table were appointed. The Sword of the Round Table—Clarent.
It was also the sword that, a thousand years ago, had dealt Arthur a mortal wound. In the world it was sometimes called the Sword of the End, the blade that closed the curtain on the legend. Originally it would have ranked merely as a famous sword; after being bathed in Arthur’s blood and tempered as Mordred’s own star, Clarent had sublimated into a Star Relic.
A sword that approached Excalibur without end.
Mordred, gripping Clarent, moved.
Before the shockwave that came roaring in, shattering the city with the clear intent of burying him, Mordred lowered his stance and kicked off the ground.
Swoooooosh—!
Like a single streak of light his form shot forward. A hole punched clean through the surging wave. Debris floating in the torrent melted limply the instant it touched the charging Mordred’s body.
One second—the time required to cross hundreds of meters.
Having closed the distance in an instant, Mordred swung. Clarent’s pitch-black blade flashed; the red stars embedded in the steel pulsed like living blood vessels.
Spin—thud.
Eurypylos reacted at once. The halberd in his hands whirled a full circle. He caught Mordred’s sword on the aura-wrapped shaft while simultaneously driving the axe-blade toward the clone’s neck—offense and defense in a single perfect motion.
But in that fleeting instant Eurypylos saw Mordred’s pupils move. Those eyes were tracking the halberd’s edge with perfect precision as it swept toward his throat.
What happened next, Eurypylos could not comprehend.
The sword that should have been forced downward instead surged upward. The halberd blade that should have taken Mordred’s head instead sliced empty air, severing only a few strands of hair. Even amid the astonishment Eurypylos did not freeze; he twisted his body, turned his neck. One eye nearly took the rising blade; he escaped by sacrificing an ear instead.
Evasion flowed straight into counterattack.
Eurypylos knew how difficult close-quarters work with a halberd could be. The moment both hands left the weapon he drove a fist forward, slammed the ground, and crossed both arms.
BOOOOOOM—!
A shockwave hurled Mordred sliding backward—yet the one bleeding was not Mordred. Gripping a hand that had been split cleanly in half, Eurypylos furrowed his brow. Even in that moment Mordred had raised his blade and met the fist edge-on. Sealing the dripping wound with starlight, Eurypylos let out a long, weary sigh.
“What a fucking pain, seriously.”