The Knights of La Mancha (2)
La Mancha.
The heaven Don Quixote and his companions reached at the end of their journey. It was Don Quixote who discovered La Mancha, yet he never forgot the promise he had once made to his friend long ago.
That wild tale about gifting him a domain of his own.
But after accomplishing the even wilder feat of arriving at a heaven that was never supposed to exist, there was no reason left not to keep a wild promise. Don Quixote honored his word to Sancho—his dear friend, his squire, and his irreplaceable companion.
And so Sancho became the lord of La Mancha.
Lord of La Mancha, Sancho Panza.
Even if the very concept of La Mancha had been defiled, even if the Star of Laughter had been twisted into the Star of Contempt, even if Don Quixote’s tale had been distorted and misconstrued…
The fact that Sancho was the master of La Mancha remained unchanged.
With that Sancho, Najin had once exchanged a single promise. Najin had not forgotten it, and he knew exactly where he ought to spend the one chance he had been given.
“I, Sancho, master of La Mancha, do swear.”
“La Mancha shall answer your call without fail.”
And Najin knew, by instinct, that this was the moment to spend that chance.
“Sancho Panza.”
The banner of La Mancha bound to the Cross-Star Spear snapped and billowed. Though no wind blew, the flag whipped about with violent vigor.
And then—
Buuuuuuuuuuu……
From somewhere a horn blared. It was the horn that announced the opening of battle, the horn that called for the advance, the horn that summoned the muster. The instant that sound rolled across the field, Najin felt a star rising at his back.
The war banner of La Mancha.
Another name for a lord is war-lord.
Najin naturally released his grip on the banner-spear. Even after he let go, the shaft did not tip; another hand had seized it.
“La Mancha,”
Someone stepped up beside him.
He did not need to look to know who it was.
“does not forget its promises.”
Sancho Panza, war-lord of La Mancha, raised the Cross-Star Spear to which the banner was bound. In that instant starlight erupted from the flag. Like fireworks bursting, the light radiated in every direction and at last took on human form.
And then—
“I was having such a fine dream, and you go and wake me. What delightful adventure have you cooked up this time that you have to drag me out in such a hurry?”
Voices rose.
“I never expected to get a proper night’s sleep in the first place. Who is the master we serve? A madman who suddenly grabs your shoulder, shakes you, and shouts, ‘I’ve had a splendid idea—this adventure is bound to be a joy!’ while pointing at some random destination.”
“That’s part of the charm, you know.”
“Can’t deny it—ahahaha!”
More voices joined in.
“Ah, true enough. Then we would only smile reluctantly and ask, ‘So what sort of adventure is it this time, Sir Knight?’”
“The barber will sigh.”
“And the gardener will inevitably ask, ‘Are there flowers there, then?’”
Their laughter rang out.
“Heh. Waking up after so long makes me thirsty. Anyone got drink? I’ll handle the snacks—I’ve adventure tales enough for everyone!”
“We’ve heard your adventure tales until we’re sick of them.”
“A truly fine adventure tale is a joy no matter how many hundreds of times you hear it. Ahahaha!”
“Well, I’ll be. Never thought I’d be glad to hear that booze-soaked voice again. Live long enough and you see everything.”
Laughing, chattering voices—voices of dalso, of easy talk and shared mirth—rose and fell in their own rhythms.
“Still.”
“Yeah.”
“Yes, well.”
“Right.”
Their eyes grew steady and deep.
“There’s something we have to do first.”
“Spinning the epilogue can wait until after the finale. No—it must wait.”
“Chatting about the aftermath in the middle of the play is just poor form.”
Tak.
Someone rapped a staff between them.
“Well said.”
The one who approached Sancho’s side was an old man—an eccentric who, though he had reached transcendence and grown young again, still insisted on wearing an elderly guise with magic. Rocinante, the magician of acceleration, spun his staff once.
“Wouldn’t it be a shame if the star of the stage were missing?”
He pointed the staff at Najin.
Through Sancho they had seen it—how this youth named Najin had rewritten La Mancha, that place that had been nothing but an endless nightmare.
“……”
They were silent, yet their eyes shone with reverence, respect, gratitude, awe, and above all a deep, abiding affection. To them Najin was no longer an outsider.
Eyes that looked upon a comrade.
Feeling that gaze, Najin could not help but smile. Only now did he truly understand Sancho’s words—that nothing done in La Mancha had been meaningless.
“Najin.”
Sancho smiled, still holding the banner.
“We do not forget your efforts. The incredible adventure you wove inside La Mancha—we will never forget it.”
Behind him stood a host of transcendents.
The barber, the gardener, nameless stars, the princess once locked in a tower, the transcendent who had longed for death, the star that had sought rest, the thief who had dreamed of becoming a hero, the star that had wanted only to see a flower field one last time—and countless others still.
Standing at their head, Sancho spoke for them all. He lifted his face to the sky and cried out.
“No one dares question your right. I, master of La Mancha, and the stars that form La Mancha itself, bear witness to your qualification!”
The Revelry Emperor’s scheme—struggling so hard to cast Najin out—was stopped cold by that alone. Her claim had been that Najin had no place upon this stage, that he was a character who never appeared in La Mancha.
But to that claim Sancho answered: Who dares speak of qualification for La Mancha before me? I myself attest to this one’s right.
“Did you call this place a stage, jester?”
Sancho Panza burst into laughter.
“Then all the more reason you cannot drive him out.”
The players of La Mancha arrayed behind Sancho raised their voices each in their own way. Some stamped their feet, some roared with laughter, some slammed their weapons down.
“The one who crowned La Mancha’s finale!”
Through that roar Sancho shouted, as though introducing the lead of the play.
“The one who turned a tale that nearly ended in tragedy into comedy. Who restored honor to those who had lost it, pride to those who had lost it, dreams to those who had lost them…”
And then—
“and laughter to those who had lost their laughter.”
Sancho thought: the role that belonged to the youth before him could only be this one. Before he spoke the name of that role, he could not help but laugh.
The play called La Mancha.
A nightmare repeated for hundreds of years.
A story that had ended in tragedy had, through the youth standing there, met an entirely different ending. That ending was the one Sancho and his companions had longed for with all their hearts. And La Mancha chose to accept that ending as its true history.
“A tale like a lie, isn’t it?”
“But that doesn’t matter.”
“Whether it is truth or falsehood, reality or dream—the distinction hardly matters.”
“If it is a dream, so what? If it is a lie, so what? If it is fantasy or delusion, what of it? In the end, the understanding you and I gained from this adventure is real, is it not?”
“And above all, this story…”
“has become something we can tell while laughing!”
Because their captain, their lord, their teacher, their knight, their benefactor had said so.
Because it was a story that could be told with laughter.
Which side they would choose was obvious.
Thus, by that rewritten ending, a new role was prepared upon the stage called La Mancha.
“Najin.”
Sancho spoke the name of that role.
“Free Knight, Najin.”
The one who makes a knight a knight.
The knight who would close this tale as comedy.
Whish.
Sancho held out the banner-spear to Najin. Originally it had been Don Quixote’s place to ride at the vanguard with La Mancha’s banner streaming. But the one who could stand in for the man now facing them across the field was not Sancho—it was Najin.
Najin took the Cross-Star Spear and let out a breath.
In this moment he had no need to act. For the role he had been given was simply himself. He moved as he always did.
Kuuung.
The instant Najin drove the banner-spear into the earth, the knights of La Mancha erupted in laughter. As though they had been waiting only for this, they drew their weapons. At Najin’s back the stars flared.
“Quixote.”
Najin’s sword pointed at Quixote.
“What is a knight?”
To that question the Star of Contempt, Quixote, answered with a sneer—as if the query were not even worth a reply, as if he had never once considered it deeply.
Then the answer from this side was simple.
Star of Contempt, Quixote.
Your failure to answer this question will be the reason you fall.
2.
The stage of the Star of Contempt, Quixote—La Mancha—was not, strictly speaking, a place-name that pointed to a location.
His stage was a single story.
The long adventure of searching for La Mancha—that very journey itself—was what the Star of Contempt used as his stage. Therefore the La Mancha he unfurled was not a place but a play.
A play is, by nature, fiction.
Yet Quixote had transplanted fiction into reality again and again, and had cultivated his dreams within the real world. The stories he had built upheld his stage with solid strength.
“Life itself is a single play!”
“So laugh and make merry.”
“Until the very moment the curtain falls upon the stage.”
Thus the stage unfurled by the Star of Contempt stood on a different plane entirely from the stage once raised by the “incomplete Quixote” Najin had faced inside La Mancha. Centuries had passed; the Star of Contempt was complete, and he enjoyed the Revelry Emperor’s support besides.
Here, everything became truth.
The boundary between dream and reality grew hazy.
False and true could no longer be told apart.
The jesters that rose upon the Star of Contempt’s stage all became real. Every one of them dancing in jester masks was a transcendent—members of the La Mancha expedition that had once traveled with Quixote.
They did not fall.
They did not die.
They would always reach the ideal.
So long as Quixote, master of the stage, held it so, they could never know defeat. The script of a finished stage would not permit the protagonist’s loss.
—That was precisely why the Star of Contempt was so formidable.
From the moment his stage and the Revelry Emperor’s authority fused, he was no longer an individual. He was a swarm of transcendents, accompanied by dozens of undying ones.
If you mean to defeat that Quixote…
Najin recalled words once spoken by the Imperial First Horn and by Merlin.
Either field enough transcendents to crush the undying ones by sheer numbers…
Or else—
Shatter the stage in a single blow with power on the level of Icarus or Alderan Basaglia.
Both were impossible for Najin.
And so he had chosen a third path.
What opposes La Mancha… is La Mancha.
A path only Najin could take.
And this is the opening you overlooked, Revelry Emperor.
The Revelry Emperor had wanted the Star of Contempt Quixote’s strength for her own, and so rather than turning him into a mere corpse she had chosen to “reinterpret the story.”
A choice worthy of her. By leaving the core of the tale intact and twisting only the ending into her possession, she could wield Quixote’s power without loss.
Yet that very choice had become a weakness in this moment.
Because she had not altered La Mancha’s foundation, the narrative she had scattered across this stage applied equally to the army of La Mancha led by Sancho. The dagger she had prepared to kill Najin had turned, and now pointed straight at the Star of Contempt.
Here, in La Mancha, they will never break!
An immortal army crashed against an immortal army.
You are alone.
Unlike the Star of Contempt who is the protagonist of this stage, you have no knights following you.
You cannot defeat them!
The Revelry Emperor’s narration, which had been so certain of Najin’s defeat, shattered the moment Sancho appeared. Her scheme, the stage she had directed, the narrative she had imposed—all of it shattered.
From this point on, no one could know.
How this story would end, how it would unfold.
“Rocinante!”
“Ah, of course I’m ready.”
At Najin’s cry Rocinante rapped his staff. Najin was not startled by the acceleration that bloomed around him; he had received that magic once before.
“Run! Run!”
“Let’s go!”
“For the knight!”
“For our lord.”
“He never used to smile like that, you know.”
It was not only Najin who ran under the acceleration.
Whenever Rocinante struck his staff—
Tak.
—Sancho would snatch up a spear from somewhere, set it keenly, and charge; the barber would lift enormous shears; the gardener would raise a great scythe. Accustomed to Rocinante’s acceleration, they raced across the battlefield without a flicker of surprise at their new speed.
Tak, tak, tak.
With every rap of the staff the constellations kicked off the earth and ran. The charge that began with Najin at its head became, before long, a march of dozens of stars.
Across from them Quixote was charging as well.
“Run, Rocinante, run!”
The Rocinante that had been twisted into a demonic beast snorted and stamped; the spear that had been fashioned from Sancho’s warped flesh screamed. Drawn by that scream, the transcendents in jester masks raced forward.
It was as if a mirror stood in the middle of the battlefield.
Though they wore jester masks, transcendents of identical faces, identical builds, identical weapons and identical powers hurled themselves at one another.
Only three were different.
Star of Contempt Quixote, donkey Rocinante, Sancho-become-spear.
Dawn Star Najin, Rocinante of acceleration, Lord Sancho Panza.
Ahahahahaha!
Or perhaps—
Come, Sancho, let’s run, Rocinante.
And my dear friend, Najin!
Four.
The Star of Laughter shone.
In the end, the one who would decide this story was the duel between two: the Dawn Star and the Star of Contempt.