The Stars Shine (2)
A stage raised by a transcendent is nothing other than their mindscape.
A searing memory. An unforgettable landscape. A turning point that rewrote a life. Whatever form it takes, a scene branded deep into the self.
Most people bury those memories and live with them tucked against their chests. Those who have risen to transcendence do not.
They draw what was buried outward. They take that landscape as their stage, and upon it they become themselves — and become certain of themselves.
"······."
Najin said nothing as he looked at the landscape unfurling before him. The stage Mordred had raised was colorless. The land stripped of hue was carpeted in corpses. Standing atop the dead, Mordred held his sword.
Clarent — the blade that had ended Arthur's legend.
Humming with a dark-red sword-aura, Clarent seemed at once to scream and to fling a question at the world. On behalf of a master who would not open his mouth, the sword howled with raw desperation.
Krrk. Krrk. Kreeeeek······.
The stage groaned, unable to bear the power gathered into a single blade. Mordred was nowhere near even half his true self — less than half of half — and still the force concentrated in that one sword deserved the word transcendent.
A single strike that could have sheared the entire subterranean city in two.
Najin knew it by instinct.
This would be the end. Mordred had staked everything on that one blow. Then of course this side would have to stake everything as well. Holding the stance of the First Horn, Najin steadied his breath.
In his hand: the sword of the stars, Excalibur.
Excalibur is a weapon forged as a star and strengthened as a star. Its outer form is made of Arthur's stars; its inner form, of Najin's.
Challenge. Dragonslayer. Breakthrough······.
The stars carved into the blade lit one after another. With each star that kindled, a soft thunk of something locking into place rang out, and Najin's sword-aura swelled.
Indomitable. Requiem. Laughter.
Najin's sword-aura, shaped like a constellation, blazed. The stage he had raised was the landscape of the subterranean city, and at its heart a star rose and shone.
Selection.
With a final thunk, the sword-aura surged in a great wave. Platinum light flooded the space around him. Najin's eyes, reflecting starlight into a pure platinum-gold, locked onto Mordred.
Their gazes met.
No words were needed.
Mordred and Najin drove a great step forward at the same moment. The earth shook. Amid the dirt and stone that heaved upward, the two of them moved almost as one.
First Horn. Triumph.
In the instant Najin brought down a blade aligned with the sky, Mordred's sword dragged the ground and rose toward heaven.
A blow falling from above. A blow surging from below.
The sword that announces the beginning of a story. The sword that announces its final curtain.
Platinum sword-aura that stands for shining stars. Dark-red sword-aura that stands for the Calamity Star.
Blades of utterly opposed natures crossed. Najin's stage and Mordred's slammed together. The stars they carried scattered light as they collided.
In that instant, Najin saw it.
A dark-red tide burying his starlight.
In the moment he swung, what Najin saw was Mordred's strike splitting his own sword-blow apart — Mordred's colorless stage swallowing the subterranean city. It meant Najin's defeat. It meant the future that was about to arrive.
A short future Najin had read ahead.
Guessing why he would lose was not difficult. The weight of their mindscapes was simply different. Mordred was a transcendent who had lived more than a thousand years. The landscape branded into him was a poison that had festered and rotted across that entire millennium — a venom of his own making.
That venom would shatter Najin's stage.
As if the twenty years he had lived meant nothing before a thousand.
"Time doesn't matter."
A voice reached him. Merlin's.
"What matters is how you think of it."
She closed her hands around his and smiled. This place was Najin's stage and Najin's mindscape, so she who had walked every stretch of the journey with him stood at his side.
Manifested in form, she gave his back a shove.
As if telling him to have faith in himself.
She did not speak long. She only pointed — to the seventh star carved into Najin's sword.
Selection.
You were not chosen by Excalibur.
It was you who chose Excalibur.
Najin laughed. Merlin always showed him the direction he needed to go. This time was no different. Swinging his sword, he took another step forward — drove the blade toward a deeper place still.
Only a single step.
But that one step changed a great deal.
Release. Starlight stored in Excalibur surged up and wrapped his sword-aura. What had merely resembled a constellation became one the moment it drank the starlight. The lengthened aura blazed as if it might reach the sky itself.
All of it felt like part of his body. Through the sword-aura he sensed the world and caught hold of its current.
He met Mordred's sword-aura as it rose from below, carving the earth and climbing toward heaven. At the moment of impact his entire body shuddered.
A torrent — a true torrent. A vast current that would sweep everything away slammed into him.
To keep from being carried under, Najin clenched his teeth. He locked his strength so his stance would not break, and endured. Vibration, shaking, pain hammered his body, and still he held. And then, in some moment after he had held and held —
Something slender caught in the senses expanded by transcendence, in the widened field of his vision.
Ah.
Najin breathed the word like a sigh.
I can see it.
What had been invisible was visible. He could not put into words what it was. Something that refused language. Something that sat in the realm of the abstract. He still could not explain it in speech.
He could only sense it.
And he was certain.
It was a domain he could not yet reach.
Mordred stood in that domain. Even with his output fallen, even with the stars he could draw reduced to half of half, a Mordred standing there could cut down anyone stronger than himself without difficulty.
That was why Najin was being pushed now.
But he had no intention of being pushed forever.
Krrk.
Najin gripped his sword hard. Staring into that domain, he brought the blade down. He knew he could not reach it. So what? He had always stretched his hand toward what he could not reach.
Had his master not said as much?
Reach for what you cannot reach.
If you cannot reach it, imitate it. Mimic it.
The Star of Challenge blazed and poured strength into his sword. In that instant the sound his blade made changed. Where before he had heard the noise of something being shoved forward, now he heard the sound of something being cut.
Technique falls short. Skill is inferior. The realm is different.
He knew.
Which was why he was using everything.
Excalibur's unique nature. The stars. The output of the sword-aura. The senses. Everything I can drag into play.
He was pushed, he pushed back, he shoved, he was shoved, and again······.
The moment of collision was only an instant, but in a fight between transcendents, time is relative. Nothing is absolute. Tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of moments. Inside a stretch of time that felt endlessly long, Najin clenched his teeth.
Blood ran from his eyes. Blood burst from his nose. The aftershock of the clash hammered his body, reopening wounds that had begun to close, and blood sprayed. The flying droplets evaporated in the heat of the sword-aura.
At the end of all that endurance, something shifted.
Crack.
Mordred's avatar began to crumble. It was not only that he had drawn more power than an avatar was permitted. Just as the shockwaves of Mordred's sword-aura had battered Najin, the light born of Excalibur was battering a being of the Abyss.
Even as his body crumbled under the starlight, he did not release his sword.
The Star of Termination convulsed.
At the fact that a story he had ended — a story he had had no choice but to end — was beginning anew, the Star of Termination screamed. The star flung its question back at Najin.
This is a story that has stood still for a thousand years.
A story of failures who failed long ago.
You, too, will meet the same end as we did. No matter how you thrash, you will face a wall you cannot climb, and in the end you will break.
At that cry, Najin found himself laughing.
He could not help it.
Countless people have already failed. Do you think you'll be any different? That light does not suit you. It is more than you deserve. Know your place. Give up······.
A throng of voices brushed past his ears — the same things he had heard to exhaustion in the subterranean city. And the answer to them was something he had already left behind in the past.
"That's your story."
That is your story, not mine.
I will write a story of my own.
That is why I drew this sword.
The Star of Selection shoved the Star of Termination aside. The balance broke. The dark-red tide split. Cutting through Mordred's sword-aura, Najin's blade surged forward. What decided the match in that last moment was neither skill, nor the output of sword-aura, nor mindscape.
Mordred had asked a question.
Najin had given an answer.
Shattering Mordred's sword as it rose from the earth toward the sky, Najin's blade fell from the heavens and split the ground. The sword of the stars cut through everything that stood before it.
For a new story to begin, the old one must be severed.
Najin's sword cut Mordred down.
Overflowing starlight swept across the colorless stage.
Mordred's stage was dyed in starlight.
The corpses strewn across it were swallowed by the light; the dark-red sword-aura scattered. What remained was Mordred, who had lost half his body.
"······."
Having lost the left half that had not held a sword, Mordred looked down at himself. Then he looked around him, and at last he raised his head and looked at Najin.
A boy gripping an Excalibur that was not Arthur's.
Gazing at the boy who would write a new story, Mordred released the sword he had refused to let go until the end. Clarent dissolved into the air.
"So it was not that I was selected."
Mordred murmured.
"You said it was you who chose this path."
Turning the words over, he gave a short, dry laugh.
Krrk.
With the hand that had released the sword, he tore out his own heart and threw it to Najin. For some reason his face looked light — as if he had been freed, even a little, from a long fury.
"I'll be waiting."
With those final words, the heartless avatar collapsed. At the same moment his stage collapsed with him. When the stage vanished, what lay revealed was the landscape of the subterranean city of Atman.
"······."
Najin looked around in silence.
There were people watching this place.
Even through the shockwaves of a clash between transcendents — even knowing those shockwaves might sweep them away — the residents of the subterranean city had come to see. As if it would be fine to die so long as they could watch.
They had gathered for one last look at the stars. Even those who had not come out leaned from their homes, watching the star Najin had made.
Countless eyes.
Longing, envy, yearning, admiration, nostalgia······ every kind of feeling mixed together, all of them turned toward him.
Receiving those gazes, Najin steadied his breath.
He knew there was still something left for him to do.
He walked toward the heart of the subterranean city — the place where, once, he had drawn Excalibur. On the way he met the eyes of a child. His younger self was looking at him.
He blinked, closed his eyes and opened them again.
The child was gone without a trace.
Najin gave a faint laugh and slowly raised his sword. He looked up at the sky of the subterranean city.
A false sky. False stars.
There had been days when he had looked at that sky and found comfort. Days when that ceiling had seemed an immovable wall he would never climb. Days when he had believed he would rot here for the rest of his life and die without ever seeing a real star.
Walking through those days, he had come to stand here.
Najin swung his sword lightly.
The rising cut split the ceiling of the subterranean city. The sky, which the Triumphant Sword had once cracked open, was sheared apart by a single casual stroke. The cage that had held his childhood self shattered without a sound.
The ceiling of the subterranean city fell.
And what unfolded was the world outside.
The city built above the subterranean city. The night sky that even the towers rising high above that city could not entirely hide. The countless stars nailed into that night sky poured their light down into Atman.
The stars shone.
The stars were shining.