Stars Shine (1)
Stars rose over the underground city of Atman.
Seven stars shone.
In truth the sky of the underground city had never been anything but a ceiling of stone, and the only “stars” Atman had ever known were the false lights of luminous ore set into the rock. But not tonight.
The dark ceiling became a night sky hung with stars. The ore embedded in the stone caught the starlight and glittered like stars themselves. Light that began at the highest point poured downward.
The stars lit the alleyways of the underground city, every dark corner, every place the ore-lamps had never reached—every place at all.
The mineral lanterns hanging from every house drank in the starlight and shone like stars of their own. Light reflected once, then again, and again, until it filled the eyes of everyone who lived in the city below. They could not shine by themselves, yet by reflecting the stars they, too, could shine.
Stars shone over the underground city.
A city that had never known so much as a scrap of true starlight was, for this one moment, brighter than any city on the surface.
The stars shone.
And at their center stood the Dawn Star.
The Dawn Star—the star that banishes darkness.
The star that announces the end of a long night and the coming of morning. While that star of daybreak blazed, every gaze turned of its own accord toward the plaza.
Because that was where the star was.
Even Mordred, Knight of Treason, was no different. He stared at the youth standing before him—at the Excalibur in Najin’s hand.
It was different.
The blade Mordred remembered was not this shape. The form of the blade itself, the cross-guard, the grip, the pommel—everything had changed. Naturally the constellations carved into the steel were different as well.
This was no longer Arthur’s sword.
“······.”
Mordred steadied his breathing. The fire that had filled his skull ebbed, if only a little.
A twist of the wrist. A firm re-grip.
He no longer hung his arms like a beast. Straightening his bent back, he raised his sword and hid his face behind the steel.
“Mordred.”
He spoke his own name. Offering a light sword-salute, he leveled the point at Najin—as if asking, And what is your name?
“Najin.”
Najin answered. Names were exchanged. Salutes were exchanged. Both of them knew perfectly well what had to come next. They were knights—or had once been knights.
A soft scrape of steel.
Mordred’s blade dragged low. In that instant Najin felt the man’s stance change completely. No more mockery. No more contempt. The bestial crouch was gone without a trace.
Mordred of the Round Table.
The knight who had once sat at that table no longer questioned Najin’s worthiness. Such questions were no longer needed. All Mordred wanted from him now was something else—something Najin could not name.
But he knew what he had to do.
As he always had.
Najin took one step forward.
The Sword of Stars, Excalibur.
Najin had drawn Excalibur two years earlier, yet in all that time he had swung it only twice.
Once to kill the Demon Knight Bernhaigen.
Once when he leapt into a dragon’s maw and cut out its heart.
Aside from those two occasions he had never wielded the sword. After he left for the Outer Land his experience with it was nonexistent. No matter how keen his senses or how quick his adaptation, a new weapon always demanded time to master.
It should have.
Yet somehow Najin felt that entire process had been skipped.
The sword in his hand no longer felt like something separate from himself. It felt like a part of his body—so familiar he might have carried it from the beginning. He realized there was no longer any need to distinguish between the blade and himself.
The sword was him.
Among the sword masters who reach transcendence after long years of training, a rare few attain the realm of perfect unity with the blade—where sword and self are no longer separate, where the sword is the self and the self is the sword.
The stars carved into Excalibur granted Najin that oneness. A star is a life, a path walked, and Najin himself.
He kicked off the ground.
His body was light. His mind was clear. Every beat of his heart flooded him with vigor. He felt as if he had been wearing chains over his entire body until this very moment; each step was weightless.
Only one step.
He never even registered how much ground that single step had covered. He simply found his foot planted exactly where he had intended to be.
Face to face with Mordred. Najin’s eyes tracked the arc of the oncoming blade.
A deafening crash of steel on steel!
Until now the shockwave and rebound of clashing swords had always sent him tumbling across the ground. This time he did not yield an inch. Even as the earth split and a storm howled around them, Najin stood unmoved.
A heavy thud.
He stepped in again—this time meaning to drive Mordred back entirely. Mordred, of course, did not simply allow it.
Fallen though he was, traitor though he was—
he was a transcendent who had lived a thousand years. A swordsman who had already stood at the peak more than a millennium ago. Clarent flashed as Mordred unleashed his art. The tip of the blade traced an uncanny path—wrapping, flinging, twisting, seeking an opening in a single breath.
Technique so exquisite it bordered on the miraculous.
Faced with that precise, perfectly balanced art, Najin’s eyes narrowed. Until now he had been hard-pressed simply to weather those bizarre strokes. No longer.
Because now he could see them.
Having set foot in transcendence, Najin felt it: his senses had grown immeasurably sharper. Or rather, “sharp” was the wrong word. They had expanded.
And that expansion included his sight.
Even before transcendence, Najin had possessed eyes that rivaled—and sometimes surpassed—those of the transcendent. When he touched transcendence, those eyes transformed.
His field of vision widened.
Things he had never been able to see before became visible. The tiniest shift of Mordred’s body. The dozens of sword-paths that flickered and changed as the tip of Clarent trembled. Where the blade had come from, where it would flow next, what shape it would take after that.
He saw it all.
With every breath, every footwork, every minute adjustment of Najin’s body, the future kept rewriting itself. Peering down countless branches, he chose the optimal path.
A grinding scrape of steel.
He deflected Mordred’s blade—and did not stop at deflection. His foot drove into Mordred’s midsection. In the space of a single exchange it was Mordred who was forced back.
A brief clash.
In that clash both men finished their assessments. The instant the assessments were complete, they hurled themselves at each other.
Clang after ringing clang. Every collision birthed a storm that scoured the plaza. They met in fractions of moments too fine for ordinary eyes to follow.
To a transcendent, time is relative. Absolute time held no meaning for either of them in this instant. Sweeping attacks that flooded an entire area with sword-aura were likewise meaningless. What kills a transcendent is not a great wave. It is a single sharp spear—a dagger thrust into the heart.
Attacks condensed to the sole purpose of killing the man in front of them flew back and forth without number.
Najin’s sword cut Mordred. Mordred’s sword cut Najin. Blood sprayed. Sometimes Najin was driven back; sometimes Mordred. Platinum sword-aura and dark-crimson sword-aura tangled together.
A high, keening scream of power.
They shoved each other, carved each other, shattered each other.
Through the flying blood both lunged. Blood that touched the auras vaporized. Flesh was sliced, steel sank home, aura burned flesh—and neither man stopped. They only accelerated.
It was not a fight in which one side overwhelmed the other.
It was an equal exchange of wounds and blood. Najin filled the gaps in his technique with foresight and the raw output of Excalibur; Mordred filled the gaps in his output with pure skill.
A soft hiss.
Their blades skimmed each other’s flesh at the same instant. Behind each of them buildings and boulders split open without a sound.
A spin. A crunch of impact.
Almost simultaneously they reached, kicked, swung. Deflections and counterstrokes landed as one. The wet crack of bone echoed.
Now I understand.
Spitting the blood that filled his mouth, Najin clenched Excalibur harder. Clenching it, he understood.
Now I know what transcendence is. What it means to become a transcendent. What it means to be certain of yourself.
A flash.
The first star carved into Excalibur blazed. The moment the Star of Challenge shone, Najin’s movements turned bold. He closed the distance in a single breath and cut upward—exactly as Ivan once had.
Mordred’s stroke split apart with a sharp crack.
As if he had known it would break, Mordred tried to continue the assault. Najin met him with a thrust as sharp as a spear. Like a Golden Horn knight, he unleashed a Ramming strike with a single sword.
The third star—Breakthrough—shone.
A storm erupted from the tip of the blade and shattered Mordred’s stance. Yet Mordred drove his own sword into the opening. Dark-crimson aura punched through Najin’s shoulder.
The fourth star—Indomitable.
I can endure this much pain.
Where his stance should have collapsed, it held. Najin brought the sword down. Four of the seven stars carved into Excalibur flared at once, amplifying the aura.
A rending crack.
Mordred’s shoulder was laid open in a great slash. The ground was gouged deep; scattered starlight blazed pure white.
“······.”
Driven back, Mordred regarded Najin in silence. Then he raised the sword he held in both hands.
As if he had seen enough.
As if it was time to settle everything, stars rose behind Mordred. He possessed eleven, yet this mere clone could draw on scarcely a quarter of that power.
Three.
Mordred chose three stars.
Negation—he denied what had been given him.
Defiance—he chose to reverse the order of heaven.
And last, the Finale.
The sword that had closed the legend of King Arthur blazed.
The moment Mordred lifted Clarent, the landscape around them warped. Najin knew at once: this was Mordred’s mindscape—his stage.
A land stripped of color.
Fallen stars, corpses, and the shed scales of dragons littered the ground where Mordred stood alone. In that colorless arena, only Clarent in his hand burned a dark, vivid crimson.
A grinding, creaking groan.
The scenery could not bear the force. The stage began to buckle. Under a torrent of power no mere clone could contain, the entire underground city started to shake.
“You shall deny me thrice.”
“You shall reverse the order of heaven.”
“And you shall place the period at the end of my story.”
The Star of Negation shone.
The Star of Defiance shone.
The Star of the Finale shone.
Najin realized that the voices reciting the stories woven into those stars were not Mordred’s.
Arthur was speaking to Mordred.
The knight who had been granted the role of traitor by his own king raised his sword. Mordred said nothing, yet the ominous light of his blade asked Najin a question:
If you mean to write a new history, you must first shatter this dark-crimson star.
The Star of the Finale trembled.
Najin settled into his stance without a word.
Challenge. Dragonslayer. Breakthrough. Indomitable. Requiem. Dalso. Seonbyeol.
All seven stars carved into Excalibur blazed fiercely. Merlin, who had been sharing Najin’s power, was already back inside his mindscape. She closed her hands over his.
Release.
The starlight stored within Excalibur burst free. The authority inherent in the sword amplified Najin’s aura and the starlight alike. The radiant platinum aura did not lose its color even on Mordred’s colorless stage.
It did more than keep its color—it dyed the entire arena in Najin’s own hue. Even upon a transcendent’s stage, Najin no longer lost himself.
Standing upright in the underground city where stars had risen, Najin lifted his sword. The stance of the First Horn—the same posture that had been the symbol of the Empire’s first emperor—took shape in his hands.
Clarent was the sword of the Finale that had ended a legend.
Excalibur was the sword that announced the beginning of a new history.
Two blades of opposing nature shone. Stars of different lights shone. In the color-drained Camlann a dark-crimson star moved; in the starless underground city a newly risen star moved.
The ■■ Star and the Dawn Star blazed.
Stars shining each in their own color collided.