What She Wanted (1)
There is no distinction between day and night in the Closed City.
The night sea that blankets the sky is always pitch black. What separates day from night is not a rising and setting sun, but the ticking second hand and hour hand of a clock.
Tick.
The clock in the office pointed to two in the morning. Every lamp in the city had gone dark, yet a soft light still leaked from the top floor of the lord’s castle. Yuel sat with tea held in her mouth, leafing through a stack of documents.
Then, abruptly, she looked toward the window.
Is he not coming tonight? It feels like I haven’t seen him in days. While the thought drifted through her mind, a shadow fell across the sill. Then came the familiar knock—tap, tap—against the glass. Hiding her delight, Yuel rose, crossed to the window, and opened it.
Wind rushed in with a soft whoosh, filling the office.
Meeting the cold air, Yuel leaned her back against the frame. When she tipped her head back, the man was there. Watching Najin perched on the windowsill, his coat fluttering, she smiled.
“What brings you at this hour?”
“I figured you wouldn’t be sleeping.”
“Well, fair enough.”
Yuel shrugged and pulled him inside. As if the routine were already second nature, Najin shrugged off his coat, draped it over one end of the sofa, and sat. Yuel, equally accustomed, handed him a teacup.
“Here.”
She no longer took the seat across from him. With a soft thump she settled beside him and let out a breath.
“There’s plenty I want to say, but…”
She leaned back against the sofa.
“Thank you.”
She did not explain what for, and Najin did not ask. Yuel gazed at her own cup and smiled bitterly. The silence felt comfortable to her.
“I’ve decided I no longer need to wonder what you do outside these walls, or who you really are. There doesn’t seem much point in knowing.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. What’s the use of uncovering the identity of a man who doesn’t use aura or mana and still thrashes Sword Experts like rats with his bare hands? He’s clearly someone with a long story.”
None of that mattered anymore. She rested her head against the sofa and closed her eyes. Breathing easily, she spoke again.
“Thanks to you, we put it down early. I would have needed several times the manpower, and even then I was considering dragging those beast bastards into the ranks… but you made the whole thing simple.”
The city was still chaotic.
People still killed people.
“Thanks to you, I could catch my breath.”
Because of Najin’s work, Yuel could take this brief moment to rest and chat with him. That short respite felt precious beyond measure.
“……”
“If there’s something you want to say, say it. What is it?”
“Lord.”
“Just call me Yuel. I’m sick of the title.”
“Yuel.”
“Yes, Najin.”
“This city.”
Najin began carefully.
“Probably……”
“A testing ground built by a transcendent, right?”
She answered before he could finish. Najin looked at her without a word; Yuel sipped her tea and smiled bitterly.
“That fucking transcendent, constellation, whatever—those ridiculously high-and-mighty gods made this place, didn’t they?”
“You knew?”
“I suspected. I became certain recently.”
To create an entire city and stuff more than a hundred thousand kidnapped humans into it—that was the sort of thing mad black mages might attempt, yet the scale was far too vast for any mere human.
“I don’t know much about Sword Experts or Sword Emperors or Sword-whatever. But I’m guessing you can’t pull off something like this just by swinging a sword well. You’d need a transcendent hanging in the sky for that.”
“……That’s not what I meant.”
Najin shook his head.
As she said, that much could be guessed. What had caught his attention was the word she had used: “testing ground.”
“Ahh.”
Yuel sighed.
“You’re quick on the uptake, I’ll give you that.”
“You knew?”
The same question again.
Yuel’s eyes sank low.
“Same answer as before. Yes, I suspected. I became certain recently.”
“How?”
“Najin? I told you once. I used to be a mathematician.”
She set her cup down and looked at him. Bitterness clouded her gaze.
“Calling myself just a mathematician undersells it. I was rather impressive. Do you know of the Ivory Tower?”
“I’ve heard of it. The tower where scholars gather.”
“Yes, well. It’s embarrassing to say myself, but the Ivory Tower is where the continent’s finest scholars collect. A place for the ones whose brains spin like absolute bastards.”
Remembering the past, she exhaled a soft “huh.”
“Me? I climbed pretty high there. In other fields maybe not, but when it came to calculation no one could touch me. My speed was the best.”
She flicked her fingers rapidly.
“Even the old fossils who strutted around the tower would look at me and scream, ‘You did that in your head? You solved it in a few seconds?’ Making those geezers straighten their spines was endlessly entertaining.”
So perhaps that was why, she said, looking at Najin.
“Encountering the unsolved problems that came into the Tower was a natural next step. Word was, some ridiculously important patron of the Tower had commissioned this particular problem……”
Yuel pulled out a sheet of paper and began filling it with formulas. In moments the page turned black with numbers.
This is……
Najin, who knew nothing of mathematics, could not read it, but Merlin at his side seemed to recognize the equations. Mages were scholars by nature, and magical formulas and mathematical ones shared a common root.
“This is it.”
Just as Merlin’s expression grew grave, Yuel’s fountain pen stopped. She tapped the paper.
“I was one step away from the answer—one single step—when I was dragged into this city.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know either. It was a problem of deriving the correct answer from set conditions, variables, environment, and so on… explaining the solution process would only be tedious and pedantic, wouldn’t it?”
She moved the pen again.
“After I fell into this city I never had the leisure to revisit the problem…… until recently, when extremely familiar numbers began flickering before my eyes.”
The city’s population. The new residents who periodically dropped in. The number of murderers. How many people they killed, and at what count they reached the rank of Sword Expert.
The moment she confirmed those figures, Yuel suddenly recalled the unsolved problem she had been working on before her abduction. The breathing room Najin had given her let her take the problem up again.
A problem she had nearly finished.
Once a few fixed numbers appeared, deriving the answer was not difficult. She wrote the result on the page and tapped the figure with her pen.
“One hundred seventy-two thousand three hundred ninety-eight.”
“……”
“It matched the city’s population exactly.”
The population was fluid, of course.
Yet every time new residents fell into the city, the count always reset to exactly 172,398.
“Eighty-seven.”
The number required to reach Sword Expert.
“Four thousand five hundred ninety-one.”
The number required to reach Sword Seeker.
“One hundred seventy-two thousand three hundred ninety-seven.”
The number required to become a Sword Master.
“Meaning this entire city is a vast testing ground for birthing a single transcendent.”
After hearing Yuel, Najin fell silent.
No need for the art of mana, no secrets of the sword, no techniques refined to the extreme, no mindscape to pour into the blade. Simply kill enough humans and harvest their souls, and one could rise to transcendence.
A theory put forward by some mad transcendent.
The number required by that theory was 172,397—exactly the city’s population minus one.
Why make the numbers fit so perfectly?
Najin thought he already knew the answer. He himself had set foot on the path of transcendence, and he understood the ways one could climb it.
Therefore—
“I don’t fully understand why the numbers match so precisely, why no margin was left……”
“Because it has to be that way.”
To Yuel’s murmur, Najin could reply.
“A transcendent must have absolute faith in the self. That is the foundation of transcendence. Through fierce belief in oneself, a transcendent achieves sublimation of the soul.”
He spoke to the blinking woman.
“But there is another method.”
“Another method?”
“Confirming the self through others. There are transcendents who solidify themselves through the fear and terror others feel toward them.”
The Revelry Emperor was one such example. She possessed no self of her own; she completed herself through the faith and concepts of others.
“This city……”
Najin paused.
“is sealed. Impulses are hard to restrain, and emotions are amplified.”
A closed space. One hundred seventy thousand trapped humans. Violence and murder born of impulse. But what Najin focused on was the last part—the amplification of emotion.
“Terror, dread, hatred…… the intense feelings that erupt at the moment of death. By concentrating them all onto a single human, the effect is maximized.”
That was the experimental apparatus built into the city.
And if the perfect numerical match was also part of the apparatus, then Najin could guess the reason.
“So the numbers fitting exactly—”
“As I said, the city is sealed. No one leaves until they die, and in the residents’ minds this place has become a world cut off from everything else.”
If one killed every human in that world except oneself, the result would no longer be a simple matter of transcendence or not.
Something else would be born.
Najin’s intuition told him so. The being that emerged would be different from a transcendent. Contemplating what authority, what concept it might hold was almost repulsive.
Hermann, the Constellation of Omniscience.
Merlin spoke.
That madwoman had a phrase she repeated like a mantra. She said it in front of me, so I remember.
She continued.
“One who would be born must destroy a world. The moment a human destroys the world that confines them, they leap into a space no one else can reach.”
Then she added:
Some transcendents are strong, some weak—where does the difference come from? From the shape of the world they have recognized.
Najin stayed silent.
Merlin’s face twisted.
That lunatic was obsessed with creating her own apostles until a few centuries ago. Then she vanished without a trace.
Which was why, when Merlin had taken physical form, she had asked Yuel whether she knew Hermann. In Merlin’s eyes Yuel had already proven Hermann’s theory and would have made a disciple the constellation coveted.
“Aha.”
Hearing Najin’s account, Yuel laughed.
“So the entire city is—”
“……”
“—basically a cattle pen built by some ridiculously lofty transcendent. If a god ends up alone in the world after slaughtering every other human, I don’t know the details, but it sounds thoroughly nightmarish.”
Even after learning the truth she seemed calm. Najin studied her, as if asking what she intended. Under his gaze Yuel merely shrugged.
“Actually, knowing feels rather liberating. So if I kill every human except myself, I can leave this city?”
“Are you going to do that?”
“That’s how it will end up, yes.”
Yuel spoke without hesitation.
“No one in this city is allowed to murder. The law forbids it. Do you think I would stand by and watch someone kill hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, a hundred thousand people here?”
Fuck that.
Yuel sneered.
“I will not watch it. That law was made by my godfather—that damned old man. And I am the one who has kept it. I will not open my eyes and look at that.”
“Then what do you plan to do?”
“Nothing changes. Same as now.”
She stroked the law code that sat in the most visible place in the office.
“I execute those who break the law. Only I will get blood on my hands.”
Whether it took months, years, or decades, no one could say.
But one thing was certain……
“This city will die slowly.”
“……”
“There will be no beast that kills every human here and escapes. If an ending exists at all, it will be one human who has slain every beast, dying as a human.”
Yuel hugged the law code to her chest.
Her fingers trembled.
“That is the role given to me as lord of this city.”
Even if she had to stain her hands with the blood of a hundred thousand, she seemed to swear she would never let go of the code. Najin watched her in silence. Even while her hands shook, she did not release it.
Even after realizing her life had been toyed with by a transcendent.
Even though that transcendent was forcing her to become a murderer.
She raised a middle finger toward the sky and managed to squeeze out a bitter laugh. Cursing it to go fuck itself, she glared at the heavens.
“Do you think I’ll let it go the way you want?”
The murderer you desire will never be born.
I will live as a human and die as a human.
“……”
Yuel looked at Najin. She had shouted confidently at the sky and declared her resolve, yet fear and wavering still showed in her eyes—fear of the future she would now have to endure.
Perhaps that fear was natural. Future Yuel would be a transcendent who could cleave tens or hundreds of meters with a swing of her sword, but the Yuel of this moment was an ordinary human.
……Yuel was nothing more than a human.
She would die if she did not eat or drink. She grew tired without sleep; if something pierced her she bled and could die. She was the kind of person you could find anywhere. Not a transcendent—not even a Sword Expert. Just a human.
A human who wavered, hesitated, and sometimes felt fear.
That ordinary human looked at Najin.
In her gaze Najin finally understood the role he had been given in this city.
……Thinking about it, it was strange.
Whenever Najin entered a star’s tomb he was granted an important part to play. Even when no part was assigned, his power was never restricted. Yet the moment he entered this city he had been reduced to the level of an ordinary person.
Why?
Because Don Quixote, the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, had performed the most necessary role on countless stages, the Star of Chatter that carried his story allowed Najin to play “the role most needed on any stage.”
At first he had thought it a restriction of the stage.
It was not.
It was because the protagonist of this stage wanted it that way.
“……”
Najin looked at Yuel, who was looking at him. Trembling eyes, trembling lips. He thought he knew what she was trying to say even though the words would not come easily.
She did not ask for much.
She was a cynical, pessimistic person. She did not expect a prince or a hero to appear out of nowhere and save her. She expected nothing from the world; she simply tried to fulfill her own responsibility.
Even so, there was one thing she wanted.
She did not need a hero. She did not need overwhelming martial power. She did not need a sage who would lend wisdom to solve the situation. She expected nothing so grand.
What she wanted was simply a companion.
Someone who would listen to her story, look past the lord’s mask, and take the hand of the individual named Yuel rather than the lord. All a lonely woman had wished for was that much.
“Yuel.”
Najin held out his hand. Yuel stared at it, then lowered her head. Only after several minutes that felt like an hour did she finally manage to open her lips.
“……Will you go with me?”
“Of course.”
“You must not fear me, or be disgusted by me, or keep your distance. Whatever I do, I hope you’ll understand there was a reason.”
“If it looks completely wrong I’ll stop you, though.”
“Aha. So you won’t let go.”
Still looking down, she rubbed her face with her palm. When she raised her head again she wore the same slightly mischievous smile as always—though the corners of her eyes were faintly red.
“You’ll regret it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“……”
“Really,” she muttered, bowing her head again.
Then she reached out and took Najin’s hand. Her pale, slender fingers pressed firmly into the back of his hand.
“I won’t let go.”
“That hurts.”
“Don’t be dramatic. I will never, ever let go.”
Yuel pulled his hand closer.
At a distance where their breaths almost touched, she looked straight into his eyes.
“So watch me.”
She whispered into his ear.
“Watch whether I can die as a human.”