Argonaut (2)
The pillar that supports the empire.
The hero of the empire.
In the present age the empire's pillar is embodied as a Horn through the existence of Alderan Basaglia… yet of course pillars of the empire had existed long before Alderan, and those men had carved their names not with the character for Horn, but with the character for Pillar.
The man standing before Najin now was one such example.
Pillar of Tomorrow, Abraham.
The Empire's First Horn of four hundred years past—no, the Empire's First Pillar.
To the empire's hero who had poured out his entire life so that tomorrow might be better than today, Najin put a question laden with respect.
"What is 'tomorrow'?"
"It means a tomorrow better than today."
Abraham answered with a smile of his own and returned the question.
"What is 'dawn'?"
"The light that announces the end of night."
Swords still leveled at one another, the two men turned each other's epithets over in their minds. Tomorrow and Dawn. One smiled that a distant successor should carry a name so near his own; the other smiled that his senior had thought of much the same thing.
"I request a bout."
"A bout it is."
Their blades crossed. In the duel that leapt across four centuries, Abraham beheld the empire's future, and Najin beheld the empire's past.
As he swung, Abraham thought:
So the empire has transformed over four hundred years. The sword Najin wielded resembled the Imperial Sword, yet it was not the Imperial Sword Abraham remembered. Well, of course, he laughed to himself.
The Imperial Sword had never been a rigid, ossified art. It was a sword refined and improved by the heroes of each age, evolving as the eras flowed onward.
Clang!
And as always, it was the geniuses who drove the great leaps in swordsmanship. Yet even those geniuses stood upon a foundation laid by countless ordinary men.
A foundation named history.
Countless trials and errors, the piled records of failure and frustration left by those who had lived through ages past and kept charging forward—all of it had accumulated into the platform that… clearly lay beneath the feet of every genius.
Ah.
Abraham looked ahead. There stood a genius. One who had drawn Excalibur and would write a new myth hereafter—an unmatched prodigy stood before him. Abraham watched the sword that prodigy swung, again and again.
A beautiful sword. Truly.
Gazing at the path of the blade the genius traced, Abraham could not help but laugh. Laughter slipped past the corners of his mouth.
"Ha……"
Because in the sword displayed by the successor four hundred years later, that once-in-an-era genius, he could faintly feel his own. Abraham suddenly understood that his name, too, was written upon the foundation the genius stood upon.
I thought I had been forgotten.
He had believed himself unrecorded, erased from history… yet that, it seemed, was not so. Somewhere in the world a trace of him remained. The knowledge gladdened him.
Clang, claaang!
He swung his sword again and again. Through the meeting of blades Najin glimpsed the life of the old hero and poured it into his own steel. As their swords rang together, Najin turned over the words Abraham had spoken.
May tomorrow be better than today.
Tomorrow—a tomorrow better than today.
May tomorrow be more peaceful than today.
Najin learned the sword of the hero who had fought for tomorrow. He received the ultimate techniques Abraham unleashed, sought teaching from him, and carved the life of a hero nowhere written in history into his own blade.
"What name is attached to your sword?"
"I've never given it one, but if I must, the Sword of Tomorrow would do."
"I see."
Najin smiled.
"When I return to the outside, I shall record it as such."
"……Ah."
Abraham let out a long breath.
"Yes. Please do."
"It seems I was thinking about this the wrong way."
Wrong? About what?
"That climbing the tower would be difficult—that winning victories from the heroes would be hard. Half right, half wrong."
Najin gave a bitter smile.
Through his conversation with Abraham, he had understood.
"Winning against the heroes will be easy. Because whether they win or lose, it is still a victory for them."
Najin spoke on.
"If they fall to me, it is proof that a better tomorrow has arrived—proof that the time they spent their entire lives buying was not meaningless. So they have won either way……"
Defeat, for them, was as good as victory.
"And even if they defeat me, they will have gained a lesson to leave for a successor. That, too, is precious to them."
Win or lose, they would willingly open the path for Najin. Or they would help him climb higher. Of that Najin was certain.
Because—
"They are still heroes."
In the Outer Land heroes often broke, compromised, and in the end forgot the very purpose that had driven them. Paradoxically, that was never true inside the Sanctuary of Oblivion.
Here the heroes remained heroes forever.
What composed them was not only their own memories, but the way the age they had lived in had regarded them. So long as that recognition remained, they would always be heroes.
"So winning against them is easy. Climbing this tower, however, is still going to be hard."
Why?
"Because simply winning is not enough."
Najin revised his thinking.
He changed his attitude and straightened his posture.
"I have to prove it to them."
Prove what?
"That the future you protected is this beautiful. That I, standing before you, am the proof."
Even if the world has forgotten you, I will remember you. I will carry your existence out into the light. That was what Najin had to prove. Proving anything was never easy, of course, but……
Since when have you ever walked the easy road?
"True enough."
Najin nodded and set out for the next floor.
Floor 42, 43, 44……
He spoke with those who dwelt there, sometimes told them stories of the future, and at the end of every tale he always crossed weapons with them.
"A single action is more certain than a hundred words. Shall I show you? How far humanity has come."
45, 46, 47… 49.
"Magic, you say. I don't know much about magic myself, but as it happens there's a great mage right beside me. Merlin?"
"You call me?"
"H-huh?"
"Curious how far magic has advanced? First of all, you're from six hundred forty years ago, so let's see… you said you developed the light of Faeram, right? Your spell was forgotten, but the mages of your school never stopped. And at the end of that road they finally……"
"Is that true? Truly—the children of the Emission School?"
"Yes. The Emission School went on to found the Crimson Tower. One of the five strongest magic towers on the continent. It stands in the imperial capital now."
"Ah……"
50, 51, 52, 53… 57.
"My name is Parcell. I never did anything as grand as the other heroes. I simply founded a school for children. Have you heard of the Academic City? I don't know whether it still stands……"
"Ah—do you mean Arcana?"
"……What?"
"It exists in my age as well. Arcana. The foremost city of learning on the continent. A kind of neutral zone jointly owned by the empire and the allied nations. A place where high or low birth makes no difference—everyone is treated simply as a student."
"So it remains. Still."
58, 60, 68, 72.
"Half the blood in my veins is a demon's. My mother was toyed with by a demon and forced to bear an unwanted child. That child was me."
"……"
"Until the moment she died, my mother resented and cursed me. It must have been horrible. How she must have hated the existence that ruined her life. And yet—why? In the end she could never abandon me."
She could have left me to die… yet Mother never left me, the woman said with a bitter smile.
"Perhaps because, for all the hatred and resentment, half of me was still her daughter. Even while she beat me, at night she would hold me while I slept. She would cradle me and weep, saying she was sorry, she was sorry."
At that time my mother was only nineteen, she murmured, looking down at her own hands.
"I didn't understand then, but with time I came to know. We were both so young—I and Mother both. Once I realized that, other things became clear."
"What things?"
"That she had loved me all the same. That every time the demon's instinct tried to rule me, she beat me because she wanted me to live as a human."
And so, she said,
"I am human. Even if half the blood in this body is wicked, it was not a demon who raised me—it was my mother. So I will live as a human. Because until the moment she died, my mother never let me go……"
She looked straight at Najin's Excalibur. The holy sword a demon ought to fear—she did not fear it.
"I am no demon."
She seized Excalibur with her bare hand. And nothing happened. The blade that burned demons could not burn her. Of course it could not.
Because she was no demon.
At that truth she laughed aloud.
"Thank you, Najin. Because of you I was able to prove it. That I am no demon—that my mother raised a fine human being."
Even with a demon's eyes she looked upon the world as a human would, and smiled as a human would. In that case she was no different from any human.
73, 74, 79, 80…… 97.
"My name is Sentry."
The one who waited on the ninety-seventh floor was not in human form. Between the words of his voice came the hiss of steam, and every time his body moved there was the clank of interlocking machinery.
"My homeland was a nation famed for its magitech. Not a great power, yet one of exceptional technical skill. The nation's name was Sentry."
Yes—my own name.
Proudly he touched his breastplate. Instead of human skin there was steel. Fingering the national crest engraved upon that armor, he spoke.
"In the end we could not escape destruction, yet every technology of the nation is concentrated in this single body. Because of that my bones and flesh are iron, and mana flows in place of blood."
Clank, hiss.
Venting steam, he continued.
"I possess a body that can no longer be called human, yet my lord always called me a knight. He was proud of what I was. Even when enemy nations, enemy soldiers, called me a monster, my lord always called me a knight."
A frame three or four times a man's size. The knight of steel and mana instead of bone and flesh looked at Najin.
"And so I wish to ask you."
"Me?"
"Yes. Are you not the descendant of the greatest knight, the knight who protects knights—a free knight?"
To the one most like a knight he put the question.
"Am I a knight?"
Rust covered the body; where the steel had flaked away, clanking machinery showed instead of blood and flesh. By any measure it was a hideous form that no longer resembled a human being.
"In answer to my king's wish that I become a knight, I fought and fought even after the nation fell. Bearing the national banner I set out into the Outer Land, and I never stopped fighting until this body broke."
So I ask you.
"Can I… be a knight?"
Can I be a knight, as my lord wished?
"……"
Najin did not answer with words. Instead he raised his sword. With full ceremony he requested a duel. The sword salute Najin offered was the one a knight gives another knight, and his eyes held respect.
A single action more certain than a hundred words.
At that sight Sentry's frame trembled.
He could no longer smile like a human, yet he thought that if only he still could, he would have laughed hard enough to shake the tower itself. Hiss—he vented steam and settled into stance with his mechanical body.
"Sentry."
You are a knight.
Having broken through the ninth stratum, Najin set foot upon the tenth. After meeting so many heroes and climbing without rest, he paused a moment on the tenth stratum to catch his breath.
"By the way."
While he was catching that breath, the hero of the hundred-and-first floor pointed at Najin's shoulder and asked,
"That thing on your shoulder."
"Ah—this?"
Najin indicated his own shoulder. Affixed there was a pauldron modeled after the Helmet Knight's helm.
"Yes, that. I've seen something that looked exactly like it."
"……What?"
Najin blinked. The hero before him had been active eight hundred years ago. There was no reason he should have any connection to the Golden Horn Knights.
"Outside, you mean?"
"No, no—here. Inside the tower."
At Najin's confirming question the man shook his head. Then he pointed upward.
"I used to stay on the eleventh stratum, you see. Then one day some lunatics came charging up like they meant to tear the tower down. The one leading them wore a helmet shaped just like that……"
Najin drew the Cross-Star Spear he had bound to his back.
"Did you happen to see a spear that looked like this as well?"
"Ah—aaaah! Seeing that brings it back."
The man slapped his knee.
"Golden Horn Knights? Something like that. They were horrifyingly strong. A dozen or so of them running around together—how terrifying was that?"
Though the actual duels had been one-on-one, he had been thrashed like a dog by the one at their head, he said with a wry smile.
"They're probably on the twelfth stratum."
The twelfth stratum—the place nearest to where Galahad dwelled.
There, the Golden Horn Knights waited.