I Pulled Out Excalibur Chapter 221

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Interlude, A Tale (2)

Anton Quixano had eight stars.

Najin was startled when he heard it, but when he thought it over, it wasn't really that strange.

'Anton is a being of Transcendence who has lived for at least four hundred years.'

On top of that, Anton had spent decades hunting witches and killing the Transcendents entangled with them. He'd ntioned once, offhandedly, that the witches he'd personally killed numbered in the dozens.

Even the weakest witch possessed strength on par with a Transcendent, which ant the numbers only added up if Anton was sothing considerably beyond ordinary.

'And...'

Najin thought back to monts ago.

Anton, flipping his middle finger at the Carnival King's star with that look on his face, what are you staring at? If the information Anton held about La Mancha was truly a threat to her, the Carnival King should have killed him or turned him into a jester long ago.

Yet for four hundred years, Anton had walked freely through the world.

"Hah."

Najin laughed like he couldn't believe it.

"So the Carnival King didn't choose not to touch you. She couldn't."

"Well, if that demon had co at in earnest, I'd have had a hard ti too. But the Carnival King is a coward at heart. The kind who pulls back the instant she thinks she might take even the smallest scratch."

Anton shrugged.

"To kill , she'd have had to accept losses, and she didn't want that. So she left alone. Besides, I fight dirty."

"Dirty... you an?"

"Not every fight can be honorable, or fought with pride. Sotis you just have to win, even if it ans throwing all of that out the window."

Do you know that kind of fight?

Anton asked it with his eyes, and Najin nodded. He did. More tis than he could count.

"Fighting in the mud. Dragging the opponent into the mire, into a brawl where you can't tell front from back, can't even tell where to step. That's my specialty."

"You were famous for that, weren't you? The witch you killed, the Witch of Blazing Flas, she also had eight stars."

Lapis, who had been listening, added it with a worried look at Najin.

"The Carnival King, though. That's quite the opponent you've chosen for yourself."

"Do you know about the Carnival King?"

"I've lived quite a long ti, you know. Long enough to know what the Carnival King looked like before she was called by that na."

Lapis closed her eyes as she spoke.

"Was it seven hundred years ago? Eight hundred? I once watched a certain demon go hunting. No na to speak of, and the weakest demon I'd ever laid eyes on, and yet... it was trying to hunt a demon at the very top of the hierarchy. I was curious, so I watched."

The lowest of the low, below even that, a creature barely maintaining the shape of what could be called a demon. That was what the Carnival King had originally been, Lapis said.

"Demons are fundantally the sa kind of being as dragons. Their strength is decided at birth. And that strength is absolute, so even with growth, it's all but impossible to overturn the gap in rank. A lower demon cannot beat an upper demon by any ans."

But, Lapis continued.

"The demon I watched was the lowest of the low, and yet it tried to hunt a demon at the very peak, and it actually succeeded. Can you imagine? A being without even a single star, hunting a demon who held seven."

"...Is that even possible?"

"Impossible. The number of stars doesn't guarantee strength outright, but there's still a fundantal gap between ranks. It's as absurd as a Sword Expert defeating a Sword Master."

And yet.

"But that child did it."

"......"

"It laid traps, corrupted concepts, incited humans, guided a procession of star-devouring beasts, and brought down the highest demon's star through sheer persistence. Then it devoured the corpse greedily."

Ugh, Lapis grimaced.

"Made my skin crawl. Ti passed, and before I knew it, that demon was being called a mid-tier demon. More ti passed and it was upper-tier, then top-tier, and now it's called the Demon King, the apex of all demonkind."

Born weak.

From a race where rank gaps cannot be crossed.

"Anton called that child a 'coward,' didn't he? Yes. The Carnival King, empress of rrint, is indeed a coward. But that doesn't an the Carnival King is weak. If anything, it's the opposite."

Lapis warned.

"A cowardly being is thorough by necessity. It prepares against everything that frightens it, and through that preparation, it finds its ans. After a thousand years, I've learned that truly frightening opponents aren't the overwhelmingly strong."

She said it looking tired of it all.

"Humans who can throw everything away. Those who cling on no matter what. Fiends who will fight to win by any ans necessary. Hunters who lay every trap imaginable before going in for the kill."

Listening, a certain figure surfaced in Najin's mind. The one who had given him the hardest ti on the continent. The Techo Mountain Ranger, Kapman Theosis.

"The Carnival King's nature is that of a hunter. A scher."

And then Lapis stopped. A short "Ah" escaped her, sothing had just surfaced in her mory. Her face went pale. She shook her head.

"Actually, no. Let take that back. Hunters like that are frightening, but there's sothing worse."

What is it? Lapis's answer was to raise a finger toward the sky, as if she couldn't even bring herself to say the na aloud. Both Anton and Najin looked where she pointed.

Eleven stars hung in the sky.

The Wizard of the Lake, rlin.

Lapis, pointing at rlin's Star, had gone white as chalk. As if she were terrified.

"It probably won't co to that. But."

Lapis said, her voice trembling just slightly.

"Best not to catch the eye of that... no. Grand Constellation rlin-nim. Really."

rlin-nim. Najin caught that, and shot a sideways glance at rlin standing beside him. rlin blinked, then let out a short, incredulous huff.

-Would you look at this? She gets a few pieces of ice jamd into her and treats like I'm a complete lunatic.

'You jamd ice into her?'

-Hm? Ah, yeah. Not that many, though.

rlin spread her hands open. Counting down from the thumb, one, two, three... she nodded.

-About six? She had six stars at the ti. So I only put in that many.

'......'

-What. She's a witch.

'It's nothing.'

Fair enough. By rlin's standards at the ti, not gouging out her eyes and tearing out her heart had probably been quite generous. The rlin Najin had seen a thousand years back was terrifying enough in her own right.

'Gouging out eyes, dragging people around by the hair, piling corpses into mountains...'

And she hadn't been any gentler with him. The mont they'd made eye contact. Who are you? Do you want to die?

'Fairy rlin really was sothing else.'

While Najin sat there recalling the fairy version of rlin who'd once grabbed him by the collar, the human rlin narrowed her eyes.

-Fairy rlin?

rlin tilted her head.

-What's that supposed to an? Are you saying I look like a fairy?

'Not you.'

-...... Then where's another rlin?

'There is one. Sothing like that.'

rlin started shouting that there was no such thing, that there was only one rlin in the world, that the real rlin was standing right in front of him, but Najin let it go in one ear and out the other.

A tower built on a solitary island in the middle of the sea.

They needed to make it back to the coast, so Najin and Anton had huddled together on the island's shore, whittling wood to patch up their battered sailboat.

"This is a bit awkward to say, but."

Lapis watched them with a flat expression.

"What are you two doing?"

"Hm? Cutting wood."

"Whittling it."

"And why?"

"The sailboat got damaged."

Najin and Anton pointed to the vessel they had arrived on. After the rough voyage it was half-wrecked. Broken things needed fixing, didn't they?

"You're going to ride that? Across this sea?"

"We rode it all the way here."

"And we made it just fine."

The oarsman and the captain nodded in unison.

Lapis pressed a hand to her forehead and sighed.

"You haven't forgotten who I am, have you?"

Lapis snapped her fingers.

Trees along the shore pulled themselves free of the ground, and within seconds a full boat was complete. Najin and Anton stared in silence, looking back and forth between the sailboat they had painstakingly whittled plank by plank, and the boat Lapis had conjured with a single snap.

Then, like primitive n seeing fire for the very first ti, they smacked their own foreheads.

"Damn it, Oarsman. In the face of magic, we're nothing but ignorant savages."

"I really should have learned magic, Captain."

A ship carrying two primitive swordsn and one great mage set sail. No oars needed, no need to set a heading. Magic handled everything.

"......"

Robbed of their purpose by magic, the captain and the oarsman huddled glumly in a corner of the ship.

"Oarsman, what can we even do?"

"I wonder, Captain."

Deep-sea magical beasts and reefs blocked the path every now and then, but unlike the first voyage, Najin and Anton had no need to step forward. Lapis sat perched on a chair at the bow, and every ti she waved her fingers, whatever stood in their way was shredded to pieces and sank to the bottom.

"By the way, Oarsman. What have you been sorting through this whole ti?"

Anton pointed at the bundle of letters in Najin's hands. Ever since leaving the tower, Najin had been steadily sorting through what looked like a sheaf of them.

"Ah, these?"

Najin held up the bundle.

"When we first t, Captain, do you rember what you said when you introduced yourself?"

"What I said? The greatest romantic of the age?"

"Not that."

"The fool who lives for romance. One of only three fools in all of human history stupid enough to fall in love with a witch?"

"Yes, that last one."

Najin nodded.

"The two remaining, excluding you, Captain. These letters are connected to one of them."

"...What?"

"What does that an?"

Lapis leaned in beside Najin, curious, and peered at the letters. When she saw the na written on the paper, her eyes went wide.

"Rena?"

As though hearing a na she had long missed.

The words Lapis had spoken inside the Black Spire.

Among them was this:

「I never imagined I, who had looked at Rena, the witch who loved a human, and laughed at her as a madwoman, would make this sa choice. It's all your fault, Anton.」

Rena. The witch who loved a human.

Like Lapis, and even before her, a witch who had broken the Taboo of loving a human. Laughed at by other witches as a madwoman.

Hearing that na, Najin's mind went back to a certain witch he'd encountered while climbing the tower.

The part glossed over amid Anton's story.

The ti it took Anton to complete his Breakthrough to the final floor was roughly thirty days. During those thirty days, Najin hadn't stayed only at Anton's side. Thirty days was a long ti to just wait around.

'What's this, rlin?'

-Ah, that?

Wandering the Black Spire, Najin would consult the rlin encyclopedia and listen to old stories. Exploring the spire one day, he found a hidden room.

The Black Spire was fundantally a prison.

A prison naturally held prisoners.

In that hidden room was a prisoner who had been confined far longer than Lapis.

"......"

The prisoner's hair was red.

Her eyes, the sa.

"Roselin."

In a voice dried out and cracked from long years of neglect, the prisoner stared into empty air and murmured a na.

"My dear child, Roselin..."

The witch, murmuring ceaselessly, turned to look at Najin. In her red eyes, he recognized soone.

Roselin Ascalo. The red-eyed rcenary.

A witch who looked just like her stared up at Najin and murmured:

"Let see Roselin."

The red-eyed witch pleaded.

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