The Path to the Tomb (4)
"You're awake?"
Merlin smiled. It was a natural smile—exactly the kind she always wore. The deep blue eyes, the flowing water-colored hair, the tilt of her head, her gait, her breathing—down to the smallest detail, she was the Merlin Najin knew.
Merlin, and yet—
Something sealed his mouth shut. His heart hammered hard. Something—a thread as fine as spider silk—was teasing at the edges of his mind. So thin, so delicate, that if he didn't focus he would lose it completely.
"Come on, let's move."
Najin looked at her.
Looking at Merlin always settled him. At every moment, in every crisis, she had made the right call. And she was an overwhelming power in her own right—unlike him, she was never someone who could be toyed with.
"We have to move while we still have even a little freedom. You're going to take my hand, right?"
Najin trusted Merlin.
And because he trusted her—
He made his choice.
"Here."
Najin reached out. But the hand he extended did not meet the one she offered. Instead, his fingers closed around Merlin's throat.
"Ghk—you—what are you—"
Merlin stared at him with eyes full of disbelief. Outrage. Confusion. Tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. Fingers that reached out to resist, then curled back as if afraid of hurting him. A strangled breath. Wounded sorrow.
And Najin did not loosen his grip.
He squeezed harder. His fingers dug into her flesh with a wet, grinding sound. As Merlin's face twisted in pain, Najin crooked the corner of his mouth.
"Third-rate acting, even for a hack."
"What—are you—"
Najin shoved his face close to hers. Eyes locked, he spat the words like something bitter.
"Merlin wouldn't do that. Even if I got hurt, wrong is wrong. She'd break my arm and throw me to the floor on the spot, muttering, That's on you—because she's a foul-tempered mage with a rotten personality."
"…Huh."
A hairline crack ran across Merlin's face—a flicker of pure, blank disbelief, as if the information she had extracted didn't match what she was seeing.
Najin snorted.
Of course it had been a lie. He had no idea how Merlin would actually react. The one certainty was this: in a situation like this, Merlin's emotions should have flooded back into him. They hadn't.
The Merlin in front of him was a fake.
And Najin had just proven it.
"Well, well."
Even with a hand around her throat, her voice rang clear. The corners of her mouth stretched wide. Her eyes curved into crescents. She began to laugh.
Ha. Ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-ha.
The laughter.
Ha—ha-ha—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
The sound of laughter.
Laughter fills the entire world!
Laughter is contagious. From the mouths of your comrades, collapsed as if asleep, laughter begins to leak. The corners of their mouths tear wide. Look up at the sky, and even the stars have mouths—and they are sneering down at you.
And then—
Pop!
Your guide—the one who always gave you the right answer, no matter the situation—bursts. She explodes like a firework. Splat. Paint spatters across your face and body.
"…"
You brush it off without a word. Your guide just exploded and died in front of you, and it doesn't bother you at all?
How cold-blooded.
Pop. Pop. Pop!
Your comrades all swell like balloons and burst! Is it blood? Entrails? Or just paint? Still you refuse to open your eyes?
Ah. Excellent.
You're close to the answer. You've realized you're being toyed with by the Revelry Emperor's power. But so what if you've noticed?
Splat. Splat. Splat. Splat.
Paint falls from the sky. Paint spreads across the ground. The whole world bleeds into a riot of color. The world you were looking at was nothing but a lie. You are still standing inside a hallucination.
Is it a hallucination? Have your senses been rewritten? Has the information been intercepted? Or is this a dream?
You cannot know.
How could you possibly know?
The rain keeps falling. Green, red, yellow, blue—multicolored rain hammers your body. It hammers the ground beneath your feet. Splat—and you feel the earth turn to mud beneath you.
"…"
You still won't speak. Closing your ears to the voice and turning inward—a good choice.
But not the best one.
Closing your eyes means abandoning new information. Close your eyes and you see nothing. And you cannot verify anything, either.
You are not standing in a mire.
Lurch—the ground suddenly gives way. What you thought was solid earth was a vast pit. Perhaps an ocean. Or a sea of flame.
It is cold. Your body, pierced by spikes, screams. Fire eats into you and you feel the heat. Sinking into the sea, the pressure crushes you flat.
Or perhaps you are falling from the sky.
Hurry—open your eyes.
Open them and respond.
You must move.
Act.
Choose.
Ha—ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!
Open your eyes.
With them shut, you can go nowhere at all.
His body sank. Or perhaps it rose. Perhaps he was falling; perhaps he was burning. Amid the flood of every sensation at once, Najin steadied his breathing.
And he focused entirely on his own interior.
He turned over who he was. He clenched his teeth and refused to let go of his faith in himself. When he looked inward, Merlin was there. She gave him a bitter smile and shoved back the tide of paint crashing in.
She was with him.
He was not alone.
Merlin was holding the line inside him—so Najin had to find a way out from without. He still had no idea where to start or how to move.
He steadied his breath.
And he closed his fist on empty air. Even if every other sense shattered, the feeling of the hand that held Excalibur remained whole. Even the Revelry Emperor could not touch Excalibur.
With the hand that gripped the sword hanging loose at his side—
Najin began to light his stars. The stars carved into Excalibur vibrated and scattered light. The slapping paint was driven back, and he carved out a single handspan of ground to stand on.
He must not open his eyes. The moment he did, he would take in new information; that information would be warped; and the warped thoughts would fill his head completely.
Najin shut down his own senses.
Leaving only the feeling of Excalibur in his hand, he found his center so that nothing could sweep him away.
Ah.
And something came back to him.
From the day two years ago when he had drawn Excalibur, the sword had become part of him. His body was the scabbard that held it; Excalibur was housed in his soul and had walked the road with him.
Why was it that while he held Excalibur, he could reach the realm of a Sword Master?
Because the sword amplified its wielder's starlight, yes—and because of the Mystery dwelling within it. But there was a more fundamental reason still.
Sword-Body Unity.
Najin regarded Excalibur as himself. The stars carved into the blade led back to his own conviction. Even if he forgot who he was, the moment he held Excalibur he could still protect himself.
It was a realm reached only by those who had trained the sword their entire lives, poured their existence into it, and then forced their way through the narrowest of gaps to seize enlightenment.
Najin had set foot there by a shortcut.
And those who reached that realm always said the same thing: that the sword in their hand felt as if it were alive.
The First Sword Saint—Siegfried.
The swordsman who had sometimes outpaced Arthur, sometimes followed in her wake, and in the end stood at her side, had crooked the corner of his mouth and roared:
The words of a swordsman who had gone beyond Sword-Body Unity, into the realm past it. Recalling the story Merlin had once told him, Najin focused his senses. He shut down the feeling of his body and took in information through Excalibur alone.
It was not easy. It was like learning to use an organ he had never used in twenty-odd years of life. Like learning for the first time how to blink, how to breathe, how to walk on two legs—he moved.
Rustle.
And then—
"Ah."
It began to appear. It began to be felt. Through Excalibur, Najin perceived the world. He cut through the paint surging toward him.
No matter that it was the Revelry Emperor—
She could not cast a dark curtain over Excalibur, which had no sensory organs of its own. And even if she could, who in the world could pollute Excalibur? The star-forged sword, natural enemy of demons, fed him information free of distortion.
He cut. And cut again.
Until a gap appeared.
A moment would come when a hairline crack opened in the Revelry Emperor's stage. Waiting for it like a seasoned hunter, Najin steadied his breath.
Shhhhhhhhhhk!
He parted the water. He split the paint. He cleaved the heaving ground and severed the magic; he sliced through the masks of the laughing jesters.
How much time passed?
Little by little, cracks began to open in the Revelry Emperor's perfect stage.
Because she was not facing Najin alone. She was pouring her greatest effort into him—but right now she was exercising her power against at least ten transcendent beings at once.
And every time Najin cut the paint—
Every time he took a single step forward—
the Revelry Emperor had to shift paint from elsewhere to fill the empty places he had carved. After this had repeated dozens, hundreds of times—
the rain that seemed it would never stop, the earth that seemed it would never dry, the lake whose bottom could not be seen—
showed their floor for the first time.
Barely a second.
Perhaps not even a full second—a fragment of an instant.
One transcendent seized that time.
As he swung his sword, Najin felt it.
Something had changed.
Somewhere, starlight erupted in a violent bloom and swept the paint aside. That star was racing toward him—cutting, sweeping, driving through the paint that surged at Najin as it came.
Najin thought he knew who it was.
He swung his sword in silence and kept walking. He did what he could. By quietly performing his own role, he made room for the other to run wild.
The time Merlin had held.
The stage Najin had seized and scratched.
Turning those scratches into cracks, and the cracks into a vast hole, was the work of another star.
Shhhhhhhhhhk!
A wave of paint split apart, and someone landed beside Najin with a soft tap, sliding into place. He stood directly at Najin's back. The moment their spines met, Najin laughed.
"What did I tell you?"
Najin opened the senses he had shut down.
"I said it was time to show that Rondinel still stands."
When he opened his eyes and looked ahead, blue hydrangeas were blooming across the stage. Looking at those beautiful blue flowers, one could slip free of the Revelry Emperor's power.
Because every single blossom was a star.
Flowers risen across the battlefield.
A star in every flower.
The stars that had hung in Rondinel's sky had become flowers and filled the wasteland.
"I knew you would come."
Najin turned.
"Kirchhoff."
There he was—Kirchhoff, back to back with him. Breathing hard, he adjusted his grip on his sword. And only then could the two of them understand where they were standing.
Above the paint-stained earth, tombstones crowded thick.
Swords were driven into the ground. Spears were planted. Instruments lay there, and paintings; in other places, bows and arrows—every kind of weapon, every object that could stand for a life, filled the wasteland.
Every one of them was a Star Relic.
And every one of them was the grave of a constellation.
Sword-tombs. Music-tombs. Bow-tombs. Flower-tombs. Painting-tombs…
A place lined with every kind of grave. Only now did they understand why no one had been behind them when they looked back. Everyone but Najin had been dragged into those tombs. By now they would be wandering the stages of constellations.
This was the trap the Revelry Emperor had prepared.
"It wasn't a path to the stage."
Merlin, appearing at Najin's side, spoke.
"It was a path to the tomb."
She was right.
The road they had thought led to the Revelry Emperor's domain—to her stage—
had been a path to the tomb all along.