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On Those Brave Yet Ridiculous Ones (2)
They had to pierce the windmill.
Yuel stroked her chin at the plan Najin had laid out. Her eyes narrowed as she considered it, moving between Najin and the Star Incarnation.
"I believe you're the right one to do the piercing, Najin," she said.
"In terms of raw force or destructive output, it would make more sense for me or the Star Incarnation to take the lead. But in a fight against a Constellation's domain, against their Authority, there is something that outranks physical force."
Yuel held up two fingers.
"Symbolism, and concept. To bring down a Constellation's Authority, or the domain that Authority is spread across, these two things matter far more. And neither the Star Incarnation nor I have a star that can resist the Carnival King's Authority."
Both of them, for all their Transcendence, had cycled through the same ordeal seven times without once sensing anything was off.
"But."
Yuel pointed at Najin.
"You noticed."
While the two Transcendents wandered lost inside the domain, only Najin had felt the wrongness, and he was the one who'd found the flaw in it.
"The stars you carry resist the Carnival King's domain. That is an advantage only you have."
Breakthrough, Indomitable, Requiem.
The three stars Najin had won in the Outland. More than mere concepts, the very narratives woven into those stars stood in opposition to the Carnival King.
Crunbelle, Aldaran Vasaglia, Viola Oldina, Azure Spear, and the countless dead Najin had given requiems to, or the companions who had traveled alongside him.
They had broken free from endlessly repeating lives, or deaths, and pressed on. Each had met their end in their own way. The stories of those people, carried within Najin's stars, gave him something to push back with against a space built on meaningless repetition.
"That is why it must be you."
The lance to pierce the windmill and shatter the domain. It had to be him.
With that settled, Yuel began to loosen up. She gathered her snow-white hair, whipping in the wind, and tied it back in a single tail. The buttons on her coat, always kept fully fastened, she undid one or two. Her sleeves she shoved up past her elbows.
"I'll open the path."
Yuel Razian took her stance. The Star Incarnation, who had been listening quietly, stepped up to Najin's side.
"Finally."
Arms folded, she gave a nod.
"Time for this one to shine."
With a soft chime, she swept her golden hair back and smiled.
"Look only forward and run."
Every obstacle, she would clear away.
The wind blew in.
Najin steadied his breathing against the oncoming breeze. Spread out before him was the Carnival King's domain of merriment, clowns and giants that came back no matter how many times they were cut down.
Beyond those giants stood the windmill.
Painted over in layer after layer of garish color, it looked like nothing more than meaningless background scenery. But Najin was certain that windmill was the anchor holding the Carnival King's domain in place. Merlin had agreed.
"......"
The plain was still quiet. No laughter reached his ears, only the occasional whisper of wind sliding past. But Najin knew this was the calm before the storm.
A few steps forward.
The moment he kicked off the ground and started running, the instant he drew near the Carnival King's domain, laughter would ring out. Laughter that gnawed at the mind and warped perception. And Najin would have to drive straight through all of it.
Without flinching. In a straight line.
One chance. That was all he had.
He felt it in his gut. He couldn't afford to miss it. And he wasn't alone in that feeling.
"Najin."
At Yuel Razian's call, Najin's eyes went sharp. He loaded force into his bent knees and the foot planted against the ground. Weight forward, an off-balance stance that looked ready to launch at any second, and in it he tightened his grip on the spear.
Then Yuel Razian moved.
She reached into the empty air and seized it, and where there had been nothing, a greatsword appeared. A zweihander with a blood-red blade and a crossguard wrapped in thorned vines. The Star Relic bestowed by the Thorned Martyr upon her apostle.
A greatsword meant to be gripped and swung with both hands, but Yuel typically handled it one-handed, as casually as she might a longsword. A Transcendent's strength made that easy enough.
Not now.
Yuel took the sword in both hands and let it hang behind her back. Pure white Sword Aura coiled around the blade.
Pure white Sword Aura.
Carrying nothing within it, taking no particular form. Sword Aura that did nothing more than wrap itself around a blade seemed too plain to call that of a Sword Master. But that plainness, that simplicity, was Yuel's essence.
A sword was a tool for killing.
Nothing more. No need to fill it with meaning, no need to give it a special form.
Tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of kills, and one could become a Sword Master without Imagery or swordsmanship technique.
A once-in-an-age killer who had taken a theory proposed long ago and proved it real. Her sword was, paradoxically, snow-white. Fingers as white as that Sword Aura curled around the hilt. The moment all ten fingers closed around the grip, the Sword Aura surged violently.
Hummm.
The air around Yuel shifted. A crushing pressure bore down from above, and a thick, viscous bloodlust seized the whole area.
What a killing intent...
Even though she wasn't its target, Najin's body gave an involuntary shudder. The Star Incarnation was the same. She wiped cold sweat from her brow and absently ran a hand over her forearm.
Then Yuel took one step forward.
One step past Najin and the Star Incarnation.
The moment she stepped forward, the moment her bloodlust, which she made no attempt to conceal, found a clear direction and fixed its aim on the giants, the space groaned.
Ha, hahahaha, hee hee, ahahaha!
Before they had even approached the domain, laughter rang out. As though it had sensed danger. Clowns burst from the ground and paint streaked across the sky, the Carnival King's domain on the very verge of fully unfolding, right at that instant.
Ha, haha...
Yuel swung her sword.
Skreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
A sword cry that resembled a human scream buried the laughter. It swallowed the swell of laughter, shredded it apart, and raced across the plain as if to declare that what belonged here wasn't laughter but screams.
A strike fired without a thought for what came after.
Every last bit of starlight and mana she possessed, poured into the single most powerful blow she could deliver right now.
Pure white Sword Aura became a wave and swept over the giants. Everything it touched was shredded apart. Those screams wrung from the world by Yuel's Sword Aura were louder than the clowns' laughter. As if trying to bury the entire space, the Sword Aura flooded the Carnival King's domain.
The space groaned. The paint-stained sky shuddered. To keep the domain from collapsing, the Carnival King drew power from La Mancha. In that process, just for a moment, the laughter died down.
"Now."
The opening Yuel had made.
Boom.
Najin didn't miss it. He and the Star Incarnation kicked off the ground and ran. Najin sprinted flat out, forgetting even to breathe. The scenery blurred past him.
The giants swept away by Yuel's Sword Aura, reduced to nothing but paint, couldn't stop him. The ground heaved belatedly, and clowns erupting from the paint came charging at him, but Najin didn't break stride. Eyes forward, he ran.
Dealing with the clowns wasn't his job.
"Don't forget the promise."
The Star Incarnation flung out her arm. She grabbed the heads of the clowns lunging at Najin and crushed them, sliding across the paint-covered ground. With Najin pulling ahead, she let out a long, slow breath.
Then she murmured.
"Aurora."
What she did, what she set off, Najin had no idea. He hadn't looked back. All he knew was that a Flash had erupted behind him, and that hundreds of clowns had evaporated in an instant.
And that the paint-stained sky had, just for a moment, gone pure white.
The path was open.
Nothing stood between Najin and the windmill.
Don Quixote, mistaking the windmill for a giant, charged headlong at it. A truly magnificent lance charge. He drove forward as if to run a giant through in a single blow, brave and bold!
...Calling to mind the passage from The Knights of La Mancha.
And calling to mind the figures woven into his own stars.
Najin ran, feet hammering the ground.
In both hands, the Lance of the Crossed Star.
The Hornblower, Crunbelle's lance, left behind for Najin. The lance of an ill-fated knight who had been broken on the Carnival King's stage of eternal repetition. His beloved Charging Horn had never been able to open the path forward for himself.
But in his final moment, he had moved by his own will.
Not as one of the dead, doomed to wander a hell worse than death for eternity, but as a knight who met his end as a knight. He stepped down from the stage on his own two feet.
Crunbelle was not the only one.
Aldaran Vasaglia was the same. He too had stepped down from the eternal stage the Carnival King had built for him, and tried to meet his end in his own way.
And.
Azure Spear, who had repeated the same single day for three hundred years in a desert. Najin remembered the words he had left behind at the very end.
"Move forward. Toward tomorrow."
Najin's stars shone. Carrying those shining stars in the Lance of the Crossed Star, Najin charged at the windmill.
Charging at a windmill while mistaking it for a giant?
Clowns creeping back from the edges split their sides laughing. They mocked Najin, pointed their fingers. Doesn't that idiot look just like one of them! Najin ignored every word. What did he care what anyone said?
To Najin's eyes, the windmill was a giant.
That wicked Carnival King had clearly disguised the king of giants as a windmill. With the corners of his mouth curling up, Najin thrust his spear forward. The lance found its mark in the spinning windmill blades. And in that instant, an overwhelming, irresistible force shoved his body back.
『Don Quixote, charging at the windmill, was sent flying by the force generated by the windmill's turning.』
The story written in the original text. To break that story, Najin's starlight wasn't enough. If the recorded story played out and Najin was sent flying, the tale would repeat.
He already knew that.
He already knew what happened to Don Quixote after he charged the windmill in The Knights of La Mancha. He knew it was coming, so he had prepared for it. For precisely this moment, Najin spoke the name he had been saving.
"Violet."
The Performer, Violet.
Or, the Hero, Viola Oldina.
At Najin's call, the tie holding his hair shimmered with a gentle light. A figure appeared at his side. A woman with hair that was half black and half white reached out and wrapped her hands around his.
Haven't seven repetitions (Da capo) been enough already? She smiled. She tapped lightly on the back of his hand, as if his fingers were piano keys.
『Al Fine.』
The final note.
In that moment, the windmill pressing to send Najin flying lost its strength. An abrupt end arrived at a stage that had seemed like it would never close. With the Lance of the Crossed Star driven into it, the windmill became the center of the stage's collapse.
The clowns regenerating crumbled apart. The laughter that had stubbornly rung out again, pushing back against the screams Yuel's Sword Aura had made, disappeared. The paint-stained sky found its way back to its original color.
But.
『Good heavens, milord!』
One laugh didn't disappear.
『You'll be the death of me, truly. That is a windmill! Not the king of giants, a windmill that turns by the power of the wind. A windmill!』
Laughter of disbelief.
The laughter of a Squire who can't live like this with his master, with just a hint of mockery mixed in, asking how many times is this now.
『Are you all right? You're a mess. You haven't hurt yourself badly, have you?』
『Hurt by a mere giant? Not a chance. I'm perfectly fine. And even if I were hurt, it's no mark of a knight to go about declaring every ache and pain. I am fine!』
Then another voice.
The Carnival King's domain collapsed, and everything began returning to its original color. In that brief, stretched-out moment,
In a world slowing to a crawl, Najin saw.
A knight crumpled on the ground, and a Squire helping him back to his feet.
『Even so, I do wish you'd tell me when something hurts, milord. It would put my mind at ease.』
『Hmm. That's not wrong.』
The knight laughed, a little sheepish.
Then both of them, looking at each other, burst out laughing. Not the mocking kind. Easy, warm laughter.
『At any rate, there's never a dull day thanks to you, milord.』
『True, isn't it? Didn't I say this journey would be the finest of our lives?』
The knight laughed and took the Squire's hand, rising to his feet.
『Then let's keep going, Sancho.』
The place where the Carnival King's domain and La Mancha's domain overlapped.
A single strand of laughter binding two domains together.
The Star of Scorn, Quixote's Squire, Sancho.
He was there.
The boy turned his head and looked at Najin.
『......』
Their eyes met, and Sancho said something to Najin. What he said, Najin couldn't hear.
Snap.
Like a light going out, Najin's vision went dark.
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