Chapter 349 |
Skirmish (1)
His head was a mess.
"......"
Pressing two fingers against his temple, Najin sorted through the scenes he had witnessed in the dream.
'Lancelot was a knight.'
Whatever guilt had set him on that path at the start, Lancelot was clearly a man of good heart. He had lived as a knight, acted as a knight, and after meeting Guinevere had carried himself in a way that matched the name of hero.
He had honor. He had pride.
He was the kind of knight who could rightly be called noble.
Even after cutting away his own "most perfect parts" to create the being called Galahad, Lancelot had walked a precarious edge, but he never abandoned the Life as a Knight. Because he questioned himself without end, Lancelot had, paradoxically, always chosen the right path.
Najin could not comprehend how Lancelot had committed the betrayal of turning against the Round Table. The only clue was that single moment: Lancelot setting out to find the missing Galahad, seeing something, and then laughing as though his mind had snapped.
In the end, this was something he had to confirm from the man himself.
Lancelot and Guinevere. They had committed terrible sins, suffered under the weight of those sins, and sworn to spend their remaining lives in Atonement. So why had they destroyed an entire nation? Why had they massacred millions?
He needed to know.
That was what Najin had decided.
"So that's how it was..."
Merlin, who had listened to every word of the story, slowly nodded while rubbing her chin.
"Whatever their reasons, the fact that Lancelot is a criminal doesn't change. The fact that he is a monstrous traitor to the Round Table doesn't change either."
But, she said, and a bitter look crossed her face.
"Setting aside the unforgivable nature of what they did, I'd at least like for the motive to have been something understandable. I don't want to believe they did it for no reason at all."
She let out a long breath. Najin watched the complicated expression on her face, then slowly opened his mouth.
"Lancelot."
A question he had been meaning to ask for some time.
"I know he's strong, but exactly how strong?"
"Hard to say what he's like right now, but speaking from his peak... well."
Merlin spread all ten fingers.
"At his peak, Lancelot was a Constellation with eleven stars. With one fallen, he'd be at ten now."
She waved a hand.
"Of the Constellations you've fought so far, how many had ten stars or more?"
"Cheon Yuseong Icarus, Omniscience Hermann, and the Carnival King. Three of them. Mordred counts too, but the circumstances there were unusual, so I'll leave him out."
"Right. So, what were those three fights like?"
"Hermann was already broken, so skip her. Cheon Yuseong and the Carnival King..."
Najin had been folding his fingers down. He frowned.
"Were hard. Cheon Yuseong was already one of the dead and still that strong, if he'd been at his peak, I don't think I could have even called it a fight back then. Even by today's standards, he'd be a genuinely tough opponent."
"And the Carnival King?"
"......"
A short silence.
"Brutal. Horrifyingly so."
Even Najin, with his enormous resistance to mental attacks, had been caught by the Carnival King's Authority more than once. That time he was trapped in the landscape of the Underground City, he had come terrifyingly close to Submission.
"Even going in fully prepared, I almost lost. My impression is that I only pulled through because of a matchup advantage."
"Honestly, that fight was unfair from the Carnival King's side too, wasn't it? Every plan she had ready got smashed to pieces."
Though that was all karma, Merlin added.
Najin had closed in on the Carnival King by tearing apart every tragedy she had constructed. Escorting the Helmeted Knight, Don Quixote, and all the other clowns whose lives she had toyed with, he had walked the hardest possible road toward her, and so the narrative carried in his blade had reached her.
"Calling it a simple matchup advantage might be a bit unfair, but all things considered, the battle against the Carnival King was closer to 'exploiting a weakness,' wasn't it?"
"Pretty much, yes."
"And even then it was an agonizing fight."
Merlin raised a finger.
Then drew a slow circle to the right.
"The Carnival King had eleven stars, but she was a Constellation specialized in conceptual combat using her Authority and her stage rather than raw physical strength. Mental attacks were her main weapon, and the fact that she also had formidable force on top of that is what made her such a powerful Constellation."
Merlin's finger stopped, then moved the other way, drawing a circle to the left, the opposite direction from the Carnival King.
"Lancelot is exactly the opposite."
"The opposite?"
"No remarkable Authority, no stage to speak of. He doesn't fight while unfolding his own domain. He doesn't draw on his star's concept for combat either. He fights using nothing but his own physical strength."
Blue mana rose from the tip of Merlin's finger.
It shifted into the shape of Lancelot and began to move. A knight gripping a great sword. The knight's movements were simple.
Boom.
Swing the sword, shove an enemy back with the shield, follow with a blow, then slam down. Straightforward, and without a single gap.
"No real weakness. No exploitable matchup. He just comes straight at you and fights head-on. Simple, but that simplicity is what built eleven stars."
No tricks like stealing stars, no shortcuts like squeezing knowledge out of countless humans through endless experiments. A knight who had earned eleven stars through nothing but the correct path.
"He's strong."
Merlin said it plainly.
"Not by your standards. By mine."
"......"
"If you faced Lancelot right now without my support, you would lose. No question about it. This is different from the Carnival King."
Unlike with the Carnival King, where exploiting a weakness was possible. Even with my support, I can't guarantee victory unless my True Form descends. Merlin cut it off there, leaving no room for argument.
If she was saying it this directly, it meant this was not the kind of fight that a few lucky variables could flip.
"Lancelot is the Strongest Knight of the Round Table."
Gawain the Knight of the Sun, Tristan the master archer, Mordred the Knight of Blind Faith, Bedivere the White Spear... among all the powerful warriors gathered at the Round Table, if you set aside Arthur and Merlin, the one called "strongest" was Lancelot. Even the proudly self-assured Gawain never denied it.
The enemy you're about to face is exactly that kind of being.
Merlin's unspoken words hung in the air. Najin was quiet for a moment, then smiled.
"I'm starting to actually feel it now."
"Feel what?"
"That I'm getting close to the Abyss."
The place where Arthur's story ended. Where a thousand years had passed without the next chapter ever being written, where the story had frozen. The fact that he was approaching the final chapter of the Chronicles of Arthur had become something he could sense.
"Still funny, though. Just a few years ago you were a complete amateur, and here you are saying things like that."
"From your perspective it's fast, but for me it was..."
"Was it?"
Merlin cut him off. She leaned her face right up to his and smiled.
"It was long for me too. Unlike the thousand years I simply wasted, these past few years have been enjoyable."
"I'm glad to hear it."
Najin held out a fist. Merlin's met it with a light tap. The two of them had just started discussing their plan for dealing with Lancelot and what they would need when it happened.
"So about this part, Merlin..."
"......"
"Merlin?"
"Ah, yeah."
Merlin suddenly went still.
She stared into empty air, her expression crumpling, then let out a long sigh.
"Well, it was about time. Things had been quiet lately, so I figured it was coming..."
"What was?"
"It'd take a while to explain. Let's head outside first. Bedivere will be looking for us."
"Sir Bedivere?"
Merlin nodded.
"You just said you were starting to feel that you're getting close to the Abyss, didn't you?"
"I did."
"You were right. It's come out to greet you personally. How considerate."
Najin tilted his head. Merlin told him.
"The Abyss has started expanding its territory."
Which meant the Cursed Ones of the Abyss had crossed the Boundary Line.
2.
Arthur's story was over, and most of the Round Table knights had met their deaths, yet the stars that had gathered under Arthur's banner still remained in the Round Table.
The Round Table, where the stars of past heroes slept.
Using those stars, the Round Table had taken on several duties over the last thousand years. The foremost was maintaining and repairing the seal at Camlann that Arthur had left behind. The second was hunting the Cursed Ones of the Abyss that occasionally tried to cross the Boundary Line.
The edge of the Outland.
The front line where the Boundary Line dividing the Abyss from the Outland stood.
The stars of the Round Table were stationed there, watching the Boundary Line without rest. Because of that, the Round Table had another name: Wardens of the Abyss, or Watchers of the Abyss.
"The Boundary Line of the Abyss has begun to move."
Bedivere, the Warden, spoke.
"There are likely multiple causes, but I suspect the main ones are the several stars that fell in the Outland recently, and the Witch of the Abyss being provoked during the battle with the Carnival King."
At that, Najin felt a twinge of guilt. The one responsible for bringing down multiple stars in the Outland was none other than Najin himself. Seeing that, Bedivere gave a rueful smile and shook his head.
"I am not reproaching you. That was necessary, and Camlann had always attempted to expand its territory periodically. What was already coming has simply arrived a little earlier."
Above all else, Bedivere said.
"This has been a common occurrence over the past thousand years. The scale is somewhat larger this time, but they must sense that the age is changing drastically."
At the edge of the Outland, in the place called the last land, Najin looked out at the Boundary Line that divided the Outland from Camlann. The Boundary Line that Arthur had created at the cost of his own life, the massive iron cage that imprisoned the major figures of the Abyss.
Even at this distance, the churning pulse of the Crimson Blight Star's aura from within the Boundary Line made Najin hold his breath.
"What happens when the Boundary Line is pushed back?"
"The Outland's border gets pushed back badly."
It was Merlin who answered.
"There have been times when the Outland's border got pushed far into the continent, or the continent got swallowed outright. Most of those cases were caused by Camlann's territory expanding."
Merlin sighed as though she had grown thoroughly tired of it.
"For a thousand years, every time there's an opening, it surges. Whenever something big happens in the Outland and the star formations shift, they try to cross the Boundary Line. If the Cursed Ones aren't dealt with in time, the Abyss expands its territory outright."
While Merlin was saying this, Bedivere casually swung one arm. Something dark that had poked its face past the Boundary Line burst apart with a wet crack.
"Have you ever seen the Cursed Ones before?"
"I've seen monsters similar to them."
Najin recalled the monsters he had seen in the Black Spire. Bedivere gave a short answer: "They are similar in essence."
"Their true nature is those buried in the Abyss, beings who existed in an era far older than when we were active, a thousand years ago. They are the Ancients, the old humans whom the Witch of Camlann consumed entirely."
Once upon a time, the Witch of Camlann had devoured nine-tenths of the world, and every person living on those lands had become one of the dead. That was the true nature of the Cursed Ones of the Abyss.
"......"
Najin looked at the Boundary Line.
There were the dead, formed from dark crimson slime, slamming their heads against a wall they could not cross, clawing at it, screaming.
-■■ah, ■■■ah■■■■■, aah■■!
-■■■■■■, ■■■■■■.
Once human, they were now nothing but wraiths whose only remaining purpose was to spread the Abyss and stain the world a deep, bloody red. They shrieked on.
The Cursed Ones of the Abyss.
Unlike the prisoners sealed within Camlann, they were not strongly bound by the seal. At times like this, when the Outland shook violently, they would cross the Boundary Line and dye the Outland black. Hearing that explanation, Najin's expression grew heavy.
"You will grow used to it."
Bedivere said that, and tapped Najin on the shoulder.
"And the situation is good right now."
Bedivere looked back.
Unlike the past, when only the Round Table and a handful of allied Constellations had been left to hold the Boundary Line, a line of Constellations now stood behind Najin.
Demons and beings like the Carnival King had long interfered to prevent others from aiding the Round Table, but with the Carnival King dead, that was no longer the case. Nothing stood in their way, and countless Constellations had been able to gather at the edge of the Outland.
Bedivere swept his gaze over them, then turned back toward the Boundary Line.
Creeeeak, creak, creak...
The Boundary Line, which had been letting only one or two through at a time, was starting to groan. Soon, hundreds of thousands of wraiths would come pouring out. Watching that, Bedivere's eyes narrowed.
"......"
Because he had spotted something.
"That's..."
And he was not the only one.
Najin pointed. "What is that?"
Inside the Boundary Line, the wraiths were fleeing from something. They screamed as if begging for their lives, slamming their heads against the Boundary Line. Najin's eyes narrowed as he found what they were running from.
Someone was rampaging.
Deep within the Abyss, drenched in the blood of the Cursed Ones, someone was swinging a sword.
"Sword Demon."
Merlin said.
"Sword Demon of the Abyss, Siegfried."