Imperial First Horn (5)
Najin recalled a conversation he had once shared with Merlin.
It was back when, for amusement, they had ranked the strength of the transcendent beings they had encountered in the Outer Land. At the time, he had asked her this:
“Then who’s first?”
Merlin had answered without a moment’s hesitation.
“The Helmet Knight.”
Even in an incomplete state—unable to use sword aura after rupturing his own heart, eroded across a hundred and fifty years—if he still displayed that much majesty, then in his prime he would have been a being who could stand equal to the Knights of the Round Table. That was what Merlin had said.
At the time, Najin had simply thought, He really was incredible, and let the matter pass. Looking back on it now, though, he should have paid closer attention to the fact that those words had come from Merlin’s mouth, of all people. It was Merlin. Najin knew full well how much weight the Round Table carried for her.
Pride. Love and resentment. The brightest years. The glory of the past.
To Merlin, “Round Table” was not a phrase to be spoken lightly. And she had declared it outright: that Alderan Basaglia was a man who could be compared to the Knights of the Round Table.
Ah.
Only now did Najin understand the meaning of those words.
So that was what she meant.
He flung his body sideways. Something whispered past his ear. A few strands of hair were sheared away. An instant later the ground behind him split with a wet crack. The sword aura had not even touched him; the wind pressure of the swing alone had torn the earth open.
He opened the distance. Hold out until Gerd joins. Najin moved while sketching every possible countermeasure in his mind, yet—
Slash.
The moment Alderan swung his sword once, every plan collapsed. Distance could not be held. The instant Najin took a single step back, hundreds of sword paths that would crash down upon him bloomed in his vision.
He would be pierced. He would be cut. No matter how he struggled, he could not escape a future in which one of his arms or legs was severed. He could see the future, but he could not change it.
The foot that had been about to retreat stepped forward instead.
If he met it head-on, it would at least be bearable. Najin clenched his teeth, forced his eyes wide, and swung as though his arm would tear free of its socket.
Really, now.
Of course he was driven back. Blood flowed. The shoulder that had been run through only moments earlier throbbed. Wounds opened faster than Excalibur’s regenerative power could close them.
Blood sprayed. The ground turned red.
The instant he was thrown far back, Gerd arrived. Where Najin was being forced open, Gerd filled the gap; the moment Gerd was driven off, Najin clung on with stubborn tenacity. Three blades tangled wildly, struck, parted, and met again in endless succession.
The battle of transcendent beings who could split earth and sky if they so chose unfolded at the range where swords a meter and a half long could clash. From a distance it might almost have looked like a single, continuous sword dance.
Were you this much of a man?
While he swung, Najin thought. He had known the man had been great in the past, but only now, facing him, did he truly feel it.
What it meant to stand equal to a Knight of the Round Table.
How brilliantly that man had once shone—the one who had brought down half the stars of the Revelry Emperor.
Having understood that truth, Najin clenched his teeth. Bitterness rose at the fall of a hero who had once blazed so brightly. Watching Alderan swing his sword while still stained with paint, strength naturally flooded into the hand gripping the hilt.
This was wrong.
This could not be allowed to stand.
…Alderan’s blade stabbed into the earth. A storm erupted. The moment Gerd was swept away by the gale, Alderan was already charging the wounded Najin. He pressed hard.
Crack.
A rising cut from below. The instant Najin caught the blade, a storm exploded from the steel. His body was flung skyward by the blast. Hurled more than a hundred meters into the air, Najin’s pupils narrowed to slits.
Alderan shrank to a black speck. Looking down from that height, the land below was riddled with sword scars. The earth gouged this way and that looked exactly like a spider’s web.
And then—boom.
After hurling Gerd aside, Alderan moved. The ground already cracked like a spider’s web caved in. The speck that had been Alderan grew large. He had kicked off the earth and leaped.
Grit.
Clenching his teeth, Najin twisted in midair. Almost at the same instant the leaping Alderan swung at him. Blades met. Balance shattered. With a single exchange their positions reversed.
Alderan above. Najin below.
Alderan brought down the sword he had raised high against the sky. Evasion was impossible. Counterattack or even twisting the trajectory was impossible. Najin pulled Excalibur tight against his body and took the strike.
Crack.
The moment the blades locked, his entire frame shuddered. Fingers gripping the hilt broke. His organs were shaken into pulp. Blood flooded his throat and choked off his breath. Then Najin’s body shot diagonally toward the ground like a cannonball.
The instant he struck the earth, consciousness cut out for a heartbeat.
A ringing filled his ears. When awareness returned he had already bounced high, tumbled, and was skidding across the ground. Biting his tongue to keep hold of consciousness, Najin drove his sword into the earth and slid to a stop.
He fixed his stance once more.
He dragged his ragged breathing back under control.
Strong. Filthily, impossibly strong. Najin had grown so much that comparison with the past was meaningless, yet even so he still could not reach Alderan. He whipped his creaking body forward again.
Strong—so strong it seems I can’t reach him…
Najin spat the blocked breath out together with a mouthful of blood.
But he’s still in a place I can see.
Unlike the past, when Alderan had stood so far away that the thought of reaching him had never even formed, the man now was right there, within sight.
Najin stretched out his hand.
To reach just a little farther.
At some point during the blood-spraying duel that continued with blades rebounding and rising again, Gerd felt it while he swung. From a certain moment onward, Najin’s movements had begun to change, little by little.
At first the boy who had been completely overwhelmed was gradually catching up to Gerd’s own rhythm. Where Gerd had once been parrying nearly seven-tenths of the attacks, Najin was now receiving four-tenths, then nearly half.
Najin dug in boldly. As though he already knew the opponent’s every motion, he moved a full step ahead of Gerd.
Yet those things were secondary.
The true change was that the trajectory drawn by Najin’s sword was growing more precise. Superfluous motion vanished; blade flowed into blade with liquid smoothness. It was as if, through the sword of the man standing before him, he had grasped something essential.
Ka—gagagagagak!
Posture was corrected. What had been a full stride forward became a half-step, conserving power. The strength saved was poured into the following second strike.
Just when he seemed to be driven back, he slid along the opponent’s blade and closed the distance in an instant.
It looked exactly like watching his master’s movements.
At the sight, Gerd even forgot the present crisis and laughed in pure disbelief. Come to think of it, the Sword Saint had once said it: that boy’s eyes were strange. He did not merely see; he did something beyond seeing.
So this is what he meant.
Marvelous. It was not talent alone. That boldness of shoving his body into the opponent’s interval, the obsession that kept him clinging even while coughing blood—it was plain why the boy had become the master of Excalibur.
…Najin was a genius of a kind that appeared once in an age.
But the same was true of the opponent. The talent of Alderan Basaglia, the hero who had once led an entire era, did not fall short of Najin’s. As if sneering at the brat who was catching up, Alderan’s movements began to accelerate.
Gradually, very gradually—yet with absolute certainty.
Leaving Gerd behind, the two of them seemed intent on continuing a private duel of their own. As though anyone who could not keep pace was unnecessary, as though such a person had no right to join the fight, they looked ready to race off into the far distance.
The eyes of the ordinary man watching the two geniuses remained calm. A faint smile touched the lips of the aged boy.
Because this was a familiar sight to the old man.
Gerd had never considered himself a genius.
He had become a Sword Master only after passing the age of one hundred. Unlike those who lived passionate, dazzling, flame-like lives and rose to transcendence, Gerd’s life had been quiet. The old man had simply swung his sword, day after day.
Living that way, those called geniuses often brushed past his side. A swordsman he had known became a transcendent and left the Continent. A boy born when Gerd himself was still a Sword Seeker was, before he realized it, called the Sword Saint and had already risen to Sword Master.
Caught up to. OverTaken. It did not matter. Let them go. He would simply keep his place.
The old man who had stubbornly swung his sword had reached a realm. That very stubbornness had become his strength. The old man would rather break than bend. He had lived that way.
Empire, and sword.
A life submerged in those two values alone.
A smile formed on the old man’s lips as he watched the shining sword of the empire before him. Toward the two who tried to pull ahead, the old man took steady steps. He did not hurry. As always, he swung his sword and advanced one pace at a time.
Slowly, yet with certainty.
Not fast, yet without a single gap.
He cut. He swung. He thrust. He dug in. He parried. Repeating the motions, Gerd closed the distance. Watching the duel of Alderan and Najin from that near range, he understood something.
…It was a shining sword.
The blades of those two blazed far too brilliantly. His master had burned everything he was and, at the end of his life, taught the sword to that youth. And the youth had answered the sacrifice by mastering the Triumphant Sword to perfection.
The first disciple had been Gerd himself.
Yet the one who had completely inherited the master’s sword was that youth.
Beside the light those two blades created, the sword Gerd swung felt crude. In truth he already knew it could not be otherwise.
Because it is only a sword I imitated by groping through memory.
Gerd did not possess talent like Najin’s.
He too had a gift for “seeing,” yet he lacked the extraordinary ability to remember and reproduce, with perfect fidelity, something he had witnessed only once.
Therefore Gerd’s Triumphant Sword was incomplete.
A swordsmanship reconstructed from the memories of youth. Even that reconstruction was imperfect. No matter how he searched his recollections there had been parts he could not understand, parts he could not follow, so he had patched those places with his own intuition.
He had taken pride in that sword nonetheless. Had he not still managed to recreate the Triumphant Sword? Did it not resemble the master’s blade in his memory? Then was that not enough?
He had always thought so—yet he could no longer think it now.
He compared the perfect Triumphant Sword shining before his eyes with his own. His sword resembled rags. It was the shape of an ordinary talent arbitrarily cutting and stitching a technique born of genius.
Similar, yet different.
Alike, yet not the same.
Form and path of the blade might match, but the moment aura was poured in, the road diverged.
“…”
Had another transcendent been placed in this situation, most would have despaired. The moment they realized that what they had devoted an entire lifetime to creating was ultimately a counterfeit, they would have broken.
And this old man?
The old man did not despair.
He simply, as always, took one step forward and swung his sword. He walked toward the geniuses who were pulling ahead.
What of it if it is incomplete?
He swung.
Rags, a fake, and therefore unable to shine? Then what of that either. Those things do not matter in the least.
He swung, and swung, and swung again. From a certain moment Gerd’s sword began to seize the flow. The gazes of the two who had been racing ahead turned back at the same time.
This is my sword.
Gerd’s blade was shining.
The one I learned from my master and completed myself.
It shone with a light different from Alderan’s and Najin’s, yet a light that could not be ranked above or below theirs. The radiance created by an ordinary talent filled their vision.
This is the sword of the Empire.
The Imperial First Horn swung the sword of the Empire.
And blood sprayed.
Not from Gerd—but from Alderan’s body.
Staring at the blood running down his forearm, Alderan retreated a great distance. Najin tried to charge into that first moment of withdrawal, yet accumulated fatigue seized his ankles and held him back.
It was the same for Gerd.
The old man likewise corrected his stance while steadying his breath.
While the two of them repaired their broken postures, Alderan, still withdrawn, drew a breath. It looked less like breathing than as if the air of the entire area were being sucked into him.
The flow reversed.
Having swallowed that breath, he moved. He raised a foot and slammed it into the earth. The moment the step landed, a shockwave spread outward with him at its center and the ground began to heave.
Space creaked. The air convulsed.
Najin’s senses screamed.
It’s coming.
Gerd felt it as well.
It’s coming—the secret technique of the Triumphant Sword.
Sensing the crisis, Najin’s subjective time stretched long and thin. In that slowed world he saw.
The space surrounding Alderan itself groaned and warped.
From the tip of the sword he had raised high against the sky came the sound of glass shattering—crack. The fracture spread. Centered on the blade’s point, the scenery spider-webbed with cracks.
First Horn.
Rocks that had been flung into the air hung suspended. They had not truly stopped; they only appeared frozen because Najin’s sense of time had stretched so far.
Something, however, had not stopped.
Alderan’s sword continued to move even inside the world that had slowed as though frozen.
The blade that had formed a single straight line with the heavens was swung.
With every span the sword advanced, the world began to shatter like glass. Scenery, space—unable to bear the colossal force—collapsed.
Triumph.
The sword fell.
The secret technique of the transcendent who had once shattered the stage of Quixote, Star of Contempt, in a single blow, who had brought down half the stars of the Revelry Emperor and pierced that heart, was descending. The very technique that had driven Najin to the brink of death even without wrapping itself in sword aura now fell while fully charged with a transcendent’s aura.
Both Najin and Gerd knew, in that instant, exactly what they had to do.
From the moment Alderan assumed the stance of the First Horn, the two of them took a single posture without the slightest hesitation. Najin’s stance matched Alderan’s with perfect precision. Like a mirror reflecting its opposite, Najin’s sword moved.
Gerd’s movement was different.
Originally he would have forced himself to imitate the master of his memories, yet the Gerd of this moment did not. The one who had perfectly received the Triumphant Sword from their master was not himself but that youth. The master’s life was melted into the youth’s blade.
Then what had melted into his own sword?
“You try it.”
“Me, Master?”
“Yes. Next is your turn.”
Gerd had been entrusted with the “next” by his master. The responsibility of carrying forward the empire his master had protected rested on him. Therefore Gerd thought:
He must look beyond victory itself.
Not stop at triumph.
He must consider what came after returning victorious.
So Gerd took a light step forward. Exactly as Najin had done a moment earlier, he prepared for what would follow. Catching that movement, Najin smiled. With the smile he stepped even more powerfully, taking on the strength Gerd had set aside.
I’ll open the way.
I’ll leave the rest to you.
…The old man had swung his sword for a lifetime.
He had walked slow but certain steps. He had refused eternal youth and accepted the flow of time. The foundation he had built without discarding a single thing was now ready to bloom into anything.
The two hundred years he had lived bore their fruit.
In the hand of the Imperial First Horn, the sword of the Empire shone.