Interlude: The One Who Discarded Memories (2)
There is a human named Yuel Razian.
Sword Master, Great Warrior of the Martyr of the Bramble, Executioner of the Holy Blood Church, Heavenly Slaughter Star, murderer… She bore many names and a matching infamy, and so of course she was famous. Her appearance had surely played its part as well.
One of the three Sword Masters who represented the Continent.
The symbolic weight of being the Holy Blood Church’s executioner.
The notoriety of a blood-mad killer.
No other figure drew the eye quite like her. That information about her circulated so freely was only natural. A fair amount of material on Yuel Razian was available across the Continent.
But all of it was limited to the period after she had risen to prominence.
The further one reached back toward her past, the thinner the information grew, until it simply vanished. It was not as though someone had deliberately hidden or erased it; it was as if those records had never existed at all. Information about Yuel Razian’s past was simply absent.
What little was known amounted to this:
A ghost wanders the Dawn War.
A girl with pure white hair trails through the field. She kills the stragglers. She lives by tearing at corpses. If you meet her, do not look back—run.
Estimated rank: Sword Seeker.
Sightings from the Dawn War, and nothing more.
Of anything earlier, there was no record. Even when the Empire’s historians tore through every archive in a frenzy, even when the intelligence organs staffed by the Empire’s elite scoured every corner with methodical precision, they could not unearth a single grain of information about Yuel Razian’s past.
As though she had never existed from the beginning.
No one knew Yuel Razian’s past.
And—
“I do not know my own past.”
—that “no one” included the woman herself. Yuel let out a short breath and spoke.
“When I opened my eyes, I was standing in a wasteland. Why I was there, what I had been doing—I knew none of it. The only thing that remained was a name.”
Yuel. Her true name, separate from the baptismal name Razian.
That was the entirety of the memory she possessed of her past.
“I never questioned what I had lost. I never felt curiosity about what sort of being I had once been. Because it was meaningless to me.”
“Meaningless?”
“The memories have evaporated, but the emotions remain, faintly.”
She rested a hand over her heart.
“The me of the past did not regret her choice. She believed that choice was the correct answer, and she felt joy, relief, and a quiet pride in having made it.”
She had discarded her memories with her own hands.
And the her of that time had called it the right answer.
“I trust only myself. If the me of the past declared it the correct answer, then it is an answer beyond doubt. A settled conclusion, a conviction already confirmed—looking back on something that needs no looking back is meaningless.”
Having said that much, Yuel swallowed. She chewed at her lip.
The Yuel of before would have finished with certainty. The Yuel of now added one more thing.
“But……”
She looked at Najin.
Her eyes were unsteady.
“I do not think I can say that any longer.”
“……”
“I saw my past. It was too blurred to make out, but I could still feel the emotions the past me had felt.”
“Emotions?”
“Fear.”
Yuel pressed hard into her own forearm. The fingers digging into flesh trembled.
“The me of the past was afraid. What was she so afraid of, what terrified her so deeply—I questioned that fact, and……”
She pointed at herself.
“I looked into the hole bored into the deepest part of my soul.”
The hole in her soul.
A hole the past self had almost certainly carved open. In the dream, Yuel had peered into it, and—
“Something I should never have seen was there.”
“What?”
“I remember what Lady Merlin once said. That even if it stood in a cooperative relationship with the Revelry Emperor, the Star of Oblivion would never intervene.”
Najin turned his gaze. At some point Merlin had materialized at his side. Her eyes narrowed.
“I did say that. And?”
“Yes. And you added this: that the Star of Oblivion abhors having its existence revealed, and moves only when someone approaches its information.”
Merlin nodded.
Yuel exhaled a short breath and said:
“At the edge of the dream—blurred, but I saw it.”
She spoke briefly.
“The true form of the Star of Oblivion.”
In that instant—
The earth shook with a deep, heavy thud.
Najin burst out of the tent in a rush. He was not the only one. Countless knights and transcendents had already spilled outside.
They stood staring blankly upward.
Some let out hollow laughs as they looked at the sky; others simply collapsed where they stood. Najin lifted his eyes in silence. And he understood at once why they had reacted that way.
……Ordinarily, the sky of the Outer Land was broken.
Like a shattered pane of glass, sections of the firmament had been torn away, and through those rents lay pure black night. Because the broken portions made up the greater part, the Outer Land’s sky was always night, and the work of lighting that night fell to the stars.
But not now.
Beyond the fractured sky, eyes had appeared. The eyes blinked along the cracks etched into the heavens. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of eyes blinked in unison and looked down upon the ground.
Those eyes were watching the imperial army.
As though searching for something.
Faced with a spectacle that overwhelmed even transcendents, Najin knew instinctively. Those eyes were the authority of the Star of Oblivion. The moment it sensed its information had been exposed, the Star of Oblivion was fixing the range so that it might erase that information.
“Ha.”
A laugh drifted from somewhere.
Najin looked toward the sound.
“Yes. It looked just like that back then, too.”
The Sword Master of a fallen kingdom, Kirchhoff.
He was staring at the sky and letting out a hollow laugh. But only for a moment; he ground his teeth and lowered his head, as if he would look no longer.
“Close your eyes!”
Kirchhoff roared.
“Lower your heads. Close your eyes—do not meet its gaze. See nothing. If you have already seen, forget. Do not regard it as important. Do not question it!”
A brief exchange of looks with Najin.
Najin nodded, and together he and Kirchhoff raced through the ranks of the imperial army, seizing the heads of knights who seemed half-possessed and forcing them down. Najin clenched his jaw.
He could already tell how the situation was unfolding.
While Gerd, having grasped the situation, joined in and began restoring order, Najin went to Yuel and took her by the wrist. Head bowed, she let herself be led.
They arrived at a tent.
The place where the transcendents who led the army had gathered—the pillars of the Empire, beginning with the Imperial First Horn. Najin gave them a brief account of the situation.
“So what the Dawn Horn is saying is… that the Revelry Emperor has drawn in the Star of Oblivion? Through that woman there?”
Eternal Brilliance Horn Cypria frowned.
“How?”
“Until a short while ago—until I brought down the Star of Contempt—everyone else was trapped in the Graveyard of Stars. That was the trap the Revelry Emperor had prepared.”
“It was.”
Najin continued.
“But this side is different. While all of you wandered the Graveyard of Stars, for some reason the Church’s Executioner wandered inside her own memories. Setting aside how that was even possible……”
He tapped the table lightly.
“This was a trap constructed to target only the transcendent named Yuel Razian—unlike the one that caught everyone else.”
And Yuel, who had walked into that trap, had become a walking bomb. More precisely, she had become bait capable of summoning a being that could shatter the entire war situation in a single stroke.
It was impossible to call it coincidence.
The Revelry Emperor had known of the connection between Yuel and the Star of Oblivion, and by some means had dragged the past even Yuel herself had forgotten up to the surface. She had guided Yuel into recalling the form of the Star of Oblivion.
“……”
“……”
When the explanation ended, silence settled over the tent. As if her head were throbbing, Cypria pressed hard at her temples and spoke as though chewing the words.
“I would love to argue whether that’s even possible, whether any of this makes sense—but this is not the situation for that. The situation has already happened, and we have to resolve it.”
Cypria raised two fingers.
“One: exile Yuel Razian. That absurd monster calling itself the Star of Oblivion is focusing on that woman, isn’t it? We could send her somewhere far from here, somewhere that won’t affect the army.”
That was the first option.
She folded one finger down.
“Two: kill Yuel Razian.”
“……”
“Ah, of course in that case friction with the Holy Blood Church would be unavoidable. But it would still be far simpler than facing a Demon King who holds eleven stars and a Star of Oblivion whose star count we don’t even know—one that even has a traitor of the Round Table with it—at the same time.”
Eternal Brilliance Horn Cypria Gachevska was a mage.
As befit the lord of the Platinum Tower that stood at the Empire’s center, she excelled at weighing profit and loss. In her eyes, the methods for handling the present situation were simple, if they were anything.
In both cases, Yuel Razian died.
She knew it as well. Yuel Razian was a formidable combat asset, and excluding her would be an enormous loss. But if they did not exclude her here and now, they might be annihilated.
A commander was one who rendered judgment.
Cypria raised her hand.
“What will you do, Executioner of the Church?”
“……I regard it as a rational judgment.”
Yuel nodded. Only, the time it took her to nod was a little longer than usual.
“And rather than fighting every one of you and trying to survive, facing the Star of Oblivion offers the higher chance of survival. Yes. I will leave.”
Having said so, Yuel rose from her seat.
The moment she made to go—
Najin seized her wrist with a firm grip.
“……?”
Yuel blinked.
“Najin? What is the meaning of this?”
“Wait.”
Najin said.
“Wait a moment.”
“Dawn Horn, there is no time. Those eyes blinking above us—who knows when they will come crashing down? For the moment……”
“A moment.”
Najin lifted a hand and checked the Eternal Brilliance Horn. He himself agreed that, in this situation, exiling Yuel was the rational judgment.
A lesser evil that could never be the best option.
He understood that he sat in a seat that required him to make such calls. Separate from that, however, his intuition was sounding an alarm.
This is the wrong answer.
It was not an emotional judgment. Najin always made decisions quickly by relying on intuition and instinct. He discarded the intermediate steps and arrived at the answer, and he acted according to that intuition.
Until now—when he and Merlin had operated alone—there had been no need to explain the process. Merlin understood his intent and intuition without a word spoken.
But now was different. Najin now sat in a place that required him to explain those intermediate steps. He had to persuade the people seated in this tent.
Where do I even begin.
While Najin was organizing the words in his head—
“Lord of the Platinum Tower, was it? Your words are rational enough.”
Merlin, now fully materialized, sat down at Najin’s side.
At her appearance Cypria drew a sharp breath, but given the company she slowly nodded.
“But do you think the Revelry Emperor failed to consider that?”
Merlin flicked a glance at Najin, as if to say she would organize and speak in his place what he was already thinking.
“The Revelry Emperor never digs only one trap. And she designs even how the other side will respond to the traps she has set. You know that from experience, don’t you?”
Traps laid in double and triple layers.
“To break those traps, you have to strike the unexpected. You have to put forward a move she never anticipated at all.”
Merlin pointed at Najin.
“And the brat has always broken the Revelry Emperor’s traps that way. It seems to me that what we need to catch the Revelry Emperor is not a rational judgment so much as an unforeseen variable.”
A mass of pure variables was sitting right there.
Najin had proven it through his actions. Uncovering the Revelry Emperor’s existence, driving her this far—every bit of it had been Najin’s doing.
“……”
Cypria fell silent.
And then the old man who had remained silent throughout opened his mouth.
“Najin.”
Imperial First Horn Gerd.
The old man looked straight at Najin as he spoke.
“Two days.”
He said.
“That is the time we originally planned to remain here and rest.”
As always, the old man did not speak at length.
“For two days the sky will not fall. I will see to it. So for those two days, do what you can.”
Gerd rose from his seat.
“If it is not resolved after two days, I will cut down Yuel Razian myself. That should be sufficient, yes? Eternal Brilliance Horn.”
“……If Lady Merlin is going this far, there must be a reason. I have no complaints either.”
Gerd gave a look.
Najin offered a brief salute, then stepped out of the tent with Yuel.
“Najin. That is not a rational judgment.”
Yuel spoke briefly.
“It is uncertain. It is a risk you need not take. My leaving this place is the correct course. That is the answer the Eternal Brilliance Horn and I have given.”
“It’s the wrong answer.”
“There are no wrong answers or right answers in this world. There are only choices that are rational and that reduce loss.”
Yuel spoke quietly, steadily. She stared at Najin’s hand where it still held her wrist and continued.
“And my leaving can reduce the loss with certainty.”
“I suppose so.”
“Then why choose a path this difficult? I cannot understand it. I had thought you were a rather rational person.”
Instead of answering at length, Najin gave a short, crooked smile. Rational, was he.
“Well. I think both you and I possess only the bare minimum of rationality.”
“Pardon?”
“We look rational, we seem easy to talk to—but at the important moments, don’t we both just act on impulse?”
It was the same for Najin and for Yuel. They appeared to pursue rationality, yet when a truly critical situation arrived, the two of them simply did as they pleased.
“You said there are no wrong answers or right answers?”
“That is correct. The world……”
“There are better answers, though.”
Najin cut across her words.
“There have to be. Better answers.”
The place Najin led Yuel toward lay a good distance from the tent—the site where he had fought the Star of Contempt a short while earlier, and the Graveyard of Stars where the imperial army had fallen into the trap.
A cemetery where countless graves stood in rows.
Without hesitation Najin walked toward the place where Yuel had slept. Upon each grave of stars lay an object that symbolized a life.
On one grave a spear, on another a sword; on still others a painting, a score, an instrument, a crown……
Past the endless ranks of graves,
Najin stopped before one of them.
There lay a bloodstained codex of law.
The grave in which Yuel Razian had wandered.
The grave, most likely, where her past lay buried.