He Who Believed in Himself (4)
The night came crashing down.
The stars that had hung in the dark fell one after another, each chasing the next. Together with the night they became a meteor shower, pouring down until the wasteland blazed pure white. It was a fall vast enough to be seen even from far away — even from beyond the Outer Land.
Najin, watching it from the closest place of all, steadied his breath and looked up at the sky.
His eyes were still. They were not the eyes of a man gazing at a landscape, nor even of a man looking at the heavens. They were a swordsman’s eyes, already calculating how to cut the opponent the moment steel met steel — a gambler’s eyes, searching for the path to victory.
What had been invisible became visible.
And once the unseen could be seen, a path opened of its own accord.
Najin took a single step forward. The stars engraved on Excalibur became lighthouses, illuminating the road he had to walk. Along that road, he began to move.
Tap.
The instant he chose his path with that one step, the countless roads before him vanished all at once. Of tens of thousands of branches, only one remained. Whether it was the right answer or the wrong one, he could not know, but—
At the very least, it will be a better answer, won’t it?
It would be a better answer. Najin had chosen his own path. In a way, he had selected — from among tens of thousands of roads — the one that belonged to him alone.
Shrieeeeeek—!
A meteor, trailing a tail of light, plummeted toward him. Stars filled the sky and poured down without end. Each falling star was someone’s life, someone’s great deed — the final secret art of a constellation, detonating its own existence as sacrifice.
They were not easy to strike aside, and cutting them was harder still. Every single one was a killing blow.
Flash.
The moment it touched the sword Najin swung, the star exploded. With a burst of searing light, shards of radiance scattered. Through the dust and grit the blast had raised, Najin’s blade punched free.
Two.
Light burst forth like an explosion.
Three.
The sword he swung did not carve through dozens of meters, did not whip up a storm, did not raise anything grand. Yet wherever the tip of Excalibur passed, that space belonged completely to Najin.
Four, five, six…
He shattered the falling stars one after another. Fragmented stars crumbled. Stepping on their collapsing remains, Najin advanced.
Seven, eight, nine.
Nine stars cut, and hundreds still remained — and that vast sky itself was falling. So Najin’s steps did not stop.
The sword that had been swinging slowly accelerated.
With a light step that then slammed into the ground with a heavy thud, Najin began to move fast, as if only now had he fully adapted to his own motion.
And then the change began.
The stars engraved on Excalibur lit one by one. First to shine was the point where Najin had begun. The moment the Star of Challenge flared, his stance shifted. It was Atanga’s sword. Najin’s blade smashed a star head-on.
With the Star of Dragon-Slaying, he hurled himself into the meteor shower exactly as he had once plunged into the heart of a dragon’s flame. As if piercing a dragon’s heart, he drove through a star and burst free together with the light.
The moment the Star of Breakthrough shone, Najin seized the empty air. Now he knew how to reclaim a spear he had thrown. The weapon that came flying out of the void and slapped into his palm he thrust straight ahead.
Ramming. A storm opened the way.
Unyielding braced his steps; Requiem performed the funeral rites of the falling stars; and the Star of Dalso cast a spotlight on him as if decorating the climax of a stage.
The sword of Selection shone, and the Star of Adventure shoved him forward from behind as he advanced with his eyes on the sky.
…At some point,
the stars that met Najin’s blade no longer exploded or shattered with noise. They split without a sound and scattered. Meteors poured endlessly, but so did Najin’s sword.
Where to swing. Where to go.
With the direction of the blade perfectly clear, there was no hesitation in his hand. In the end, a person finds their answer through the past they have built. The more he looked back, the sharper his sword became.
KRAAAAAASH!
Severed meteors slammed into the earth and thundered. The ground caved and shook — but Najin was already gone from that place.
Thud.
Several strides ahead, he set his foot down and raised his sword.
First Horn. Triumph.
The instant he swung, a pure white streak of light carved a slice of the sky. The pouring meteors were wiped away in a single sweep. There was still more to cut, but in the brief silence that followed, Najin let out a long breath.
At the end of walking the path of the past, what appeared was an unknown road.
It was not clearly visible. He could not gauge what kind of path it would be — because no one had ever walked it. Looking at that road, Najin laughed as if he could not believe it.
Had all those people walked a road like this?
The unknown — a path where even how to take the next step was unclear, a path filled with fear of the uncharted. They must have walked it and, through it, forged techniques of their own. Kruenbel’s Ramming had been like that. Alderan’s Triumphant Sword had been like that. The Blue Spear’s Blue Hydrangea had been the same.
Now it was Najin’s turn.
It’s all unknowns, so even taking a single step is frightening. Of course it is. Fear is only natural.
Thump — Icarus shoved him in the back.
But when you steel yourself against that fear and take the step… only then does a certain landscape come into view.
He was right. The moment Najin stepped forward, a landscape that had not been there before finally revealed itself.
The ninth star engraved on Excalibur shone.
Bearing the Star of Confidence, Najin’s sword blazed.
2.
The stars were splitting. The stars that had adorned her were vanishing. In the moment when everything she had built over a thousand years disappeared, the Revelry Emperor felt fear.
Why?
Each of those meteors had been forged by trading the lives of transcendents — secret arts of transcendents in all but name. How could they shatter so easily?
…It was something she could not understand.
But the stars she had sent falling had no self. No matter how transcendent the magic, no matter that it had been made by offering up stars as sacrifice — if the self was absent, how could it be called a transcendent’s life?
They broke, were cut, shattered, and scattered.
And with every one that fell, Najin drew closer to the Revelry Emperor.
Or perhaps the Revelry Emperor was drawing closer to him. The falling night was as good as her true form. She had merely borrowed a woman’s body; the essence of the Revelry Emperor was a veil meant to deceive and to blind.
She had stolen others’ stars, parasitised them, taxidermied them into her flesh, and decorated herself with them. No matter how vast she had grown — vast enough to blot out the entire night sky — her nature had never changed.
And so, in this moment, she felt fear.
The terror that had been gnawing at her for so long.
It was the terror of death and annihilation.
Demons, immortal by nature, stood so far from death that they should never have felt such a thing. But the Revelry Emperor had been born weak, and so she had always lived with the threat of dying. She had watched countless demons meet their ends.
She feared death.
That fear had made her thorough, and that thoroughness had lifted her to this lofty height. To her, terror was the sharpest weapon of all.
But—
She had never once steeled herself against that fear and taken a step forward. That was the decisive difference between Najin and the Revelry Emperor.
First Horn. Triumph.
The sword Najin swung cut a strip of the night. Blood ran from the Revelry Emperor’s body. It was the same blade that had once pierced her heart. Her pupils shook even harder.
Excalibur shone.
The terror engraved upon the entire race of demons rattled her soul. Arthur’s voice — the voice that had lifted Baal’s severed head and declared it to every demon — echoed in her ears. But the terror the Revelry Emperor felt was not aimed at something that had happened in the past.
It was aimed at the human standing before her now.
At the human named Najin, who was leveling a sword at her, the Revelry Emperor felt fear.
And yet, she thought.
The fall of the night could not be stopped.
Even stripped of the stars that adorned her, she was still a constellation of eleven stars, a being who had contracted with the Witch of Camlann. Before that falling night sky, Najin settled into a stance.
A stance no one had ever seen before.
And with the newly risen ninth star, Najin’s sword blazed.
3.
Beneath the falling night sky, Najin thought, almost absently.
Come to think of it, the night sky had always held many meanings for him. From the day he was born, he had lived looking at a false sky. The ceiling of the underground city was, in truth, nothing but a counterfeit heaven.
He had lived his whole life under a veil someone had artificially hung to hide the real sky.
And so the first dream he ever held was a simple wish: I want to see the stars. How happy he had been on the day he escaped the underground city and finally saw the open sky. Remembering that past, Najin looked up.
There, a false sky hung.
A night sky a demon had made was covering the heavens. It was trying to hide the stars that must be shining beyond it, to deceive him, to cover his eyes.
Then what must he do?
What did he intend to achieve by swinging his sword?
Najin put the question to himself. The answer to that question had been decided long ago. Steadying his breath, he stamped the ground.
The air shuddered. The earth heaved. Rocks that had lifted into the air froze in place.
Time slowed until it stopped.
In that endlessly stretched moment, Najin offered an answer that was his alone. In the process of producing that answer, he could borrow no one’s help. Only an answer reached by his own thought alone would have any value.
Najin hated the night.
He hated the false night sky where no stars could be seen. He hated the melancholy the very word night carried. He hated the nights of the underground city, where they snuffed the ore-lamps and declared it night even though nothing had changed from the day — that dim, lightless stretch of hours.
A night without stars. That, Najin hated.
Staring at the false night sky, he had thought: How wonderful it would be if stars hung there. How wonderful if a star rose to light the dark ceiling of the underground city. But no one had ever fulfilled that wish in his place.
Then what was he to do?
He would have to seize it with his own hands.
With his open right eye he watched the falling night sky; with his closed left eye he looked at the landscape of the underground city of Atman that lived inside him. The sky his open eye saw was nothing but dark, but in the sky of the underground city his closed eye saw, stars were shining.
The Dawn Star.
The star that lit the night.
In Najin’s inner world — in the sky of his dream — stars shone, while the sky of reality remained dark. But what did that matter? Najin was a transcendent, and he had adventured with the knight who had once made a dream into reality — a member of the expedition of La Mancha.
There was no reason, as far as he was concerned, why he could not spread the landscape of his inner world into the outer one.
He had learned Atanga’s sword. He had learned the foundations of the Sword Church. He had learned the Sword Saint’s blade, watched the Executioner’s sword, mastered the Horn-blowing Star’s piercing strike, received the Triumphant Sword of the Empire’s First Horn, and taken in the charge of the Star of Laughter…
Countless people had stayed at his side and then moved on. Their lives had come to adorn his. Like stars, they had become the footholds for every step he took.
He could see the path.
Everything he had realized while learning their techniques, he now wove together in his own way. On a foundation packed hard and firm, he made a flower of his own bloom.
Dawn Sword.
If the long night is to end and dawn is to come—
Night Severer.
First, the night itself must be cut away.
Najin swung himself. He swung his own star as if it were a single blade. Following the edge that swept diagonally from low to high, something made a sound of splitting.
A clean slicing note rang out — sshk.
Starlight that had begun at the lowest point surged toward the heavens and, at last, drew a single line across the sky. In that instant the falling night sky froze in place. The night that could advance no farther — the true form of the Revelry Emperor — shuddered.
And then—
Upon the false night sky, a sword-scar was carved that resembled the constellation of the Dawn Star. Light flooded along that diagonal constellation. The overflowing light split the night sky.
It severed. It cut. It drove the darkness out and tore the false heaven to shreds.
CHAAAAAAAAAAK—!
With the flood of light, the night sky was sliced apart. The lines that had bound the Revelry Emperor’s stars to one another snapped, and the night sky that was as good as her true body shattered into pieces. The very concept that made up the star called the Revelry Emperor was denied.
How—?
To the demon who stared at him as if she could not believe it, Najin spoke.
“I already told you, Revelry Emperor.”
“To cut you down, one of me is enough.”