The One Who Is Absent (1)
It was a long corridor.
As if to stage the path to an audience with a nation’s king, a red carpet stretched the length of the hall. Flags crowded the walls in disordered ranks.
Flags of nations, cities, knightly orders.
Najin walked the corridor lined with the symbols of everything the Revelry Emperor had swallowed. At the far end, the Revelry Emperor rose from her throne and walked toward him in turn. The two of them advanced along the straight line of the hall, each toward the other.
Tak.
In that moment Najin’s heart was utterly still. Even facing the enemy he had hated for so long, he was calmer than he had ever been. Because at last everything felt settled.
No room for compromise. No room for persuasion. No need for intricate plans, strategies, or the question of what he ought to do. There was no answer but to drive the sword in his hand through that demon’s heart.
A simple, crystal-clear situation.
And so Najin’s mind was clearer than it had ever been—clear enough that he could even spare a few words of conversation with the demon before him. Had she thought the same? The Revelry Emperor parted her lips with the faintest smile.
“Don’t you think it’s cowardly?”
“What is?”
“To move an entire nation just to face one woman? Not even a nation, truly. You moved the whole continent—all to kill a single woman like me.”
Her slender fingers smoothed the hem of her dress. Her voice was thin, a delicate, high tone that brushed against Najin’s ear.
“Most unknightly conduct, greatest of all knights.”
“A demon lecturing on knighthood. How absurd.”
“This is a world where mere humans discourse on providence, and even the lowest rabble chatter about the affairs of nations. A world where a man born at the very bottom speaks of the heavens.”
She laughed.
“Compared to that, well… can’t we overlook a demon—an enemy of knights—discussing ‘knightly virtue’?”
She tilted her head. Jet-black hair spilled down. Toward the woman wearing an endlessly harmless smile, Najin spoke without heat.
“I didn’t move humanity to face you.”
He pointed at the flags hanging along the corridor.
“I pulled every nation in to face what you stole from humanity.”
Flags of every kind. Banners of nations she had destroyed, emblems of cities burned to ash, standards of knightly orders reduced to her jesters. Najin’s eyes narrowed as he indicated them all.
“None of this is yours.”
“They are the spoils I claimed with my own hands.”
“No. You never claimed them once. You only forced masks on them and made them jesters because you couldn’t make them kneel.”
Najin tapped the back of his hand against his pauldron.
The standard of the Golden Horn Knights bound there stirred.
“You poured a hundred and fifty years into it and still couldn’t bring a single knight to his knees. You erased his memories, twisted history, drowned him in curses—and still.”
“······.”
“I’ll say it again. Nothing here is yours. In the domain you built, nothing can ever be yours. You called it cowardly to drag the continent in just to catch one of you?”
Najin snorted.
The Revelry Emperor’s brow furrowed.
“You overestimate yourself far too much.”
“And what, exactly, does that mean?”
“Once I clear away everything you stole from humanity, only you remain. And to catch the one of you that remains, I alone am enough.”
“I see.”
The Revelry Emperor raised her arm.
A pure-white finger pointed at Najin’s heart.
“Then you have no need of your companion, do you?”
Najin’s companion. There was no need to ask whom she meant. She was speaking of Merlin. The fact did not surprise him in the least.
That Merlin stood at Najin’s side was already known across the entire continent. The demon before him could not have been ignorant of it, nor unprepared for it.
And more than anything else······
“Isn’t that true of you as well?”
Najin leveled the tip of his raised sword at the Revelry Emperor.
“Apostle of the Witch of the Abyss.”
The Revelry Emperor’s eyes curved into crescents.
“When did you learn of it?”
Knowing denial was meaningless now, the Revelry Emperor asked a question instead. Najin answered briefly.
“In the city of the Abyss—Atman.”
That was where the suspicion had first taken root.
Another city at the bottom of the underground metropolis. In Atman, city of the Abyss, born of the fallen lighthouse that lit the Abyss, Najin had felt something wrong.
The lighthouse had been a court jester of the Revelry Emperor, yet the loyalty she offered was not to the Revelry Emperor but to the Abyss itself.
She had been contaminated by Kamran, worshipped Kamran’s doctrine, and for the four hundred years she lay hidden she had communed only with Kamran. And still she had shared plans with the Revelry Emperor and answered her bargains. Najin’s question had not been about the bargains themselves… but about the fact that the Revelry Emperor had contacted the lighthouse at all.
How had the Revelry Emperor even known the lighthouse existed? That the lighthouse had fallen—something even its own keeper had not known?
That day Najin and Merlin had formed a single hypothesis: that the Revelry Emperor herself must share some connection with Kamran. And that hypothesis······
“Ah. So it was there after all.”
…had fit perfectly.
The Revelry Emperor sighed as she spoke.
“What happened there was beyond even my imagination. I never dreamed things would unfold that way. I was certain the Knight of Rebellion would kill you······.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“Yet he failed. You survived the Calamity Star rather admirably, didn’t you?”
The Revelry Emperor remembered. The countless things she had done to make contact with the Witch of Kamran, to draw the gaze of that exalted witch. She did not bother to put the journey of those long centuries into words.
I am different from a creature like you, born with such brilliant talent and merely chosen by chance by a star.
She wanted to say it, but did not.
She only tilted her head and said, “And so.”
As the angle of her head shifted, the corridor shuddered. The entire fortress began to groan.
“You stood before me knowing all of that.”
She pointed at Najin.
“And alone? Am I to understand it that way?”
“As you can see.”
Najin shrugged. The Revelry Emperor burst into laughter, as if she could not believe it. Not a manufactured laugh—a true, incredulous huff of breath, as if she genuinely could not understand him.
Then she gestured.
The fortress creaked and the ceiling tore away. A vast night sky was revealed, and at its center the Revelry Emperor’s star blazed. A constellation of eleven stars.
Beneath her own star the Revelry Emperor narrowed her eyes.
“Eight stars. A half-measure transcendent who can only reach transcendence by leaning on Excalibur. There was only one way someone like you could ever stand above me.”
She pointed to a corner of the sky.
“By receiving the aid of the Round Table.”
Merlin’s constellation hung there.
“If that detestable constellation were to descend here, it would certainly make for a hard fight. All the more so if I had to face Merlin and you together.”
A battle steeped in the color of defeat. The Revelry Emperor would never simply accept such a fight. Knowing that, she should have prepared… yet she had made no particular preparation.
As if the preparations had been finished long ago.
The instant the Revelry Emperor’s star shone, the sky heaved. Centered on her star, the stars of the night sky began to be pushed aside. The eyes of Merlin, standing at Najin’s side, narrowed—as if she had expected exactly this.
—So this is how you play it after all.
The sky groaned. The Revelry Emperor had sent a signal, and as if in answer a certain star began to thrash.
······The first principle of war is to block the opponent’s moves.
To strip away their advantages, to whittle down whatever they hold over you. The Revelry Emperor remained faithful to the basics. She had already prepared a means to render her opponent’s options worthless.
“If the last card you hold is the Round Table—”
Beyond the groaning sky a single star revealed itself.
“—then my last card is the Abyss.”
Kreeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—!
An unpleasant, rending sound, and the sky inverted. What it revealed was a dark-red star.
A star that should not be seen.
A star that should not exist.
A star twisted free of providence.
The star of the Abyss, the Calamity Star of the Witch of Kamran, rose above the Revelry Emperor’s constellation.
The Revelry Emperor’s domain sat close to the border of Kamran. The entire domain had been an altar, and the starlight reinforced within it had at last drawn down the star of Kamran.
Just as the lighthouse of the Abyss had once tried to do.
—······.
Merlin’s expression crumpled as she looked at the star.
The Calamity Star was warning her. If you move even a little, if the seal you hold frays even a little, I will use the Revelry Emperor’s star as a medium and descend here at once.
Come stop me, child who belongs to neither side. You’ll have to hold me as you did that day, won’t you? Otherwise I will trample everything that is yours.
As on that day long ago.
The dark-red star shone with that ominous whisper.
···This had been the trap the Revelry Emperor prepared from the start.
If a being of lower rank like Najin possessed any means of defeating her, it could only be by receiving Merlin’s aid. With that means sealed, Najin had no path to victory.
“Merlin.”
It should have been so.
“Go. We just won a war—if the seal shatters and the Witch of Kamran gets free, just thinking about it makes me dizzy.”
And yet.
“So go.”
Najin had appeared here alone even knowing that fact. He was even trying to send Merlin, who stood at his side, away. He was moving exactly as the Revelry Emperor intended.
As if it did not matter.
The Revelry Emperor’s eyes slowly narrowed. Meeting that gaze, Najin spoke as if nothing were strange at all.
“There’s nothing strange about it.”
Hadn’t he said it already?
“Because I alone am enough to face you.”
The blue light overlaid upon Najin’s soul vanished. At the same time the dark-red star that had loomed behind the Revelry Emperor scattered beyond the sky. Now there was no one behind either of them.
Only the two of them.
In a fortress where only two beings remained, Najin let his sword hang and took a step. One, two—on the third he kicked off the ground and began to run.
“Revelry Emperor.”
“Dawn Star.”
Each spoke the other’s name. The eight stars carved into Excalibur blazed brilliantly. At the same moment the eleven stars nailed into the Revelry Emperor’s cloak flared.
“Was the revelry enjoyable?”
“Was the delusion that night had ended enjoyable?”
Questions flung at the same instant.
Both answered at once.
Flash.
The answer was not formed by moving the mouth. The Revelry Emperor’s star shone and a stage began to form. Najin’s star shone and began to drive back the darkness she sought to cast.
In the end, the ones who would raise the curtain on this story were these two.
Not the countless battles of transcendents raging outside, not the collisions of mythic beings that would take place behind that stage—nothing but the fight unfolding here and now was the true climax of the drama.
Starlight born of Excalibur.
Threads billowing from the Revelry Emperor’s fingertips filled the fortress.
Most of the atrocities the Revelry Emperor had wrought had been carried out not by her own hand but by the jesters she commanded. For long ages she had simply coaxed transcendents into becoming her jesters and swollen her power that way.
Then what of the combat strength of the Revelry Emperor’s true self?
Najin had, by chance, been given an opportunity to confirm it. Not long ago, in Yuel’s past, he had encountered the Revelry Emperor and blocked her attempt to intervene upon the stage.
He recalled the fight he had fought that day.
Though it had been swept up in the explosion Yuel created not long after it began, and so had ended… even so, there was something Najin had confirmed that day.
The Revelry Emperor is fundamentally a mage.
And every one of her magics begins from a single origin.
Clap—
The Revelry Emperor struck her palms together. That was the signal. Mana erupted from her and swept through the space. The form of the fortress they had been standing in no longer mattered. The moment she clapped, the surroundings became a vast plain.
Her stage unfolded across the land.
Originally, a stage is the self.
A space in which one can be certain of oneself, a landscape that exists within one’s inner world—to unfold one’s mindscape is the true nature of a stage.
Cackle, cackle, cackle-cackle-cackle.
But the Revelry Emperor’s stage was something else entirely.
Bizarre. Alien.
Spattered paint covered the plain. Spreading pigment became watercourses and flowed. Flowing waterways covered the land like tree roots, like spiderwebs. Plants began to grow, feeding on the paint.
Buds sprouted, stems lengthened, leaves unfurled, fell as autumn leaves, and withered into twisted dead wood.
Flowers bloomed, reached full bloom, wilted, and fell.
All of them became a single graveyard.
Graves of music, graves of swords, graves of paintings······ Somewhere in the wasteland lined with graves of countless things, laughter began to sound. The laughter started from the Revelry Emperor. She laughed and clapped her hands.
“Life is but a single play.”
Arms thrust up from the graves. Withered arms clutched the things that had been most precious in their lives. For some it was a sword, for some an instrument, for others a book, for others magic—for others, life itself.
“I am the jester who dances for eternity.”
Tens, hundreds, thousands of lives.
The lives the Revelry Emperor had collected.
They offered their lives up to her.
“I am all things.”
The Revelry Emperor’s white, slender fingers seized the mask clenched in a hand that had thrust up from one of the graves. She tore it free. The hand of the one whose life had been stolen crumbled to dust.
Click—she set the mask upon her face.
In that instant she was no longer herself. She was a woman, an old man, a child, a youth—she was everything.
She was everything.
And paradoxically, she could never be herself.
An actor upon a stage may play countless roles and become anything at all—yet can never become their own self. And so the Revelry Emperor’s life was missing herself. Even so, she had risen to transcendence.
If I have nothing that is myself, then I need only stitch together others’ and make one, don’t I?
That was how she made herself certain of herself—and that was her stage.
Najin, too, unfolded his own stage.
The place where he had been born and raised.
The place where all his stories began, where he first held a dream—in other words, the place where Najin had clearly recognized himself—that was Najin’s stage.
The landscape of the underground city of Atman unfolded.
Two stages took their places at once. Both were the stages of transcendents, yet their natures could not have been more different. One had stolen the lives of others to adorn its own; the other was a stage decorated with the stars of those who had illuminated its owner’s life.
The way they had lived, their convictions, the elements that composed their lives, the conclusions they drew—everything stood in opposition.
And so, paradoxically, the two of them understood each other’s stages perfectly. If each imagined, from the standard of their own self, the things they would never do—there stood the opponent across from them.
Two transcendents standing at opposite extremes collided.