I Pulled Out Excalib Chapter 245

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On That Adventure Worth Telling With a Smile (3)

There is an unwritten rule in chivalric literature.

What might be called a cliché.

In the chivalric romances that go on about romance and knightly ideals, one trope shows up without fail: 『a knight protecting a noble lady』. "The Knights of La Mancha" was no exception.

In The Knights of La Mancha, a woman named Dulcinea appears.

The protagonist, Don Quixote, would cry out at every turn, "I dedicate this achievement to my lady, Dulcinea!" And whenever he accomplished a feat of valor or set a wrongdoer straight, he would shout, "Kneel before Dulcinea and beg her forgiveness."

Naturally, Dulcinea is a fictional character. Not fictional in the ordinary sense of being a made-up person, but fictional even within the fairy tale itself. Even inside the story, Dulcinea is a fabrication.

『A knight protecting a noble lady.』

She was written to mock that very rule of chivalric literature, to ridicule it. Even within the story, Dulcinea remains a figment, and she never appears, not even on the final page.

And the same was true for Alonso Quixano.

Alonso Quixano was deeply absorbed in the novel "The Knights of La Mancha." That fairy tale set him on his journey. He named himself after its protagonist, "Don Quixote," and set out on his adventure.

「I am the ingenious gentleman of Quixano, Don Quixote!」

So he declared.

「Wahaha! I dedicate this achievement to my lady, Dulcinea! For any knight worth his salt must accomplish feats of valor for his lady!」

Mimicking the lines of the Don Quixote inside the fairy tale.

And he kept doing so throughout decades of journeying.

In the Outland, where human achievement becomes a star and takes on physical power, words were never just noise stirring the air. They carried weight beyond that.

『Don Quixote is a knight.』

『A knight needs a lady.』

『Don Quixote's lady is Dulcinea.』

『A part of the achievements he has accomplished belongs to Dulcinea.』

Those were the sentences inscribed upon his star.

『And Dulcinea is a fictional being.』

『A non-existent, imaginary figure.』

Into that final sentence.

"My name is Dulcinea."

A demon crept in.

"Your lady has come to find you, my knight."

Dulcinea was meant to remain a fictional entity. But Don Quixote had found La Mancha, a place that should not have existed anywhere. He had set foot upon that land. In doing so, he had made real what should have stayed fictional.

Heaven is not a fictional entity.

La Mancha exists here.

With that declaration, Don Quixote had created an opening for his lady, "Dulcinea," who had served as his heaven throughout the journey and who should have stayed a fiction.

"Congratulations on completing your journey."

The Carnival King pressed into that gap.

"I, Dulcinea, was moved by your journey."

Naturally, the Carnival King is not Dulcinea. Her true name is not Dulcinea, and no one knows the Carnival King's true name. She is nothing like Dulcinea in character, neither noble nor the least bit respectful of a knight's honor or pride.

"Look at me."

But what mattered was this.

"My knight."

For a very long time, the Carnival King had been clinging to Don Quixote.

"Did you enjoy the adventure? The tale of slaying the Blood Demon, the tale of surpassing the Heaven-Wandering Star, the tale of the golden helmet, the exploits held within the golden gauntlet, the countless heroes you saved!"

Across a long stretch of time, she had crept into Don Quixote's journey. Slipping into the cracks of his story. Sometimes as his companion, sometimes as a jester dancing alongside him, sometimes as a villain, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes......

The Carnival King smiled.

Perhaps Dulcinea smiled.

She had always been there with Don Quixote, woven into the cracks of his story with such cunning. She accompanied him as an observer, as a performer, as a playwright directing the stage. For nearly decades, the Carnival King had waited for this single moment.

Because she coveted it.

She is merriment.

Performers, stages, jesters, laughter, joy, and above all else, something that towers above every one of those: mockery. The concepts that make up who she is share a connection to the things Don Quixote possesses.

"It must have been enjoyable. Certainly."

And so she had resolved.

To swallow him.

To make this pitiful knight her own.

"It could not have been anything but enjoyable."

The final act of the play.

Lights out, the curtain falls, and in that last breath of darkness before the actors take their bow and the story ends.

The pitch-black curtain drawn across the stage for that darkness.

A blackout curtain. The shadow behind the scenes.

A black curtain fell across the sunlit sky of La Mancha. In the darkness that swept in, the Carnival King whispered.

"For that is what this play is."

Dulcinea made her declaration.

Don Quixote's journey had been nothing more than a performance.

The Carnival King exists within the story as Dulcinea.

The weight Dulcinea carries within that story is far from small. She may never have appeared on the page, yet she had established herself as one of the very reasons Don Quixote set out on his adventure.

Let me sing for my lady.

I dedicate my deeds to her.

So that I may stand tall before her!

Compared to his other purposes, that one was trivial. And so Dulcinea had simply waited for Don Quixote's journey to reach its end, waited for this very moment, when every loose thread had been tied up and every lingering regret resolved.

The moment when the only remaining thread in his journey was the existence called "Dulcinea."

"For that is what this play is."

Dulcinea declares.

"There is no way a story this beautiful could exist in the Outland. Stories this absurd, this lighthearted, this cheerful simply do not exist. Leading the stars, they say. Those self-righteous Constellations being led by someone? That could never happen. Wouldn't you agree?"

She denies the premise of the story.

"There is not a shred of truth to any of it. Do you truly think this place is heaven? Ha. Really?"

Splat. The sky smeared with paint. Rocinante and Sancho snapped their eyes wide open and tried to cry out, but their words never reached Don Quixote.

"Adventure tales of surpassing the Heaven-Wandering Star's domain? Every bit of it was staged. You think you surpassed the Forgotten Ones? You think you defeated the Blood Demon? All of that was just pitiful people taking pity on you and playing along with your little performance."

Splat. Drip.

Paint smeared across Don Quixote's armor. His eyes wavered. Just as he was about to shout that this was nonsense, the Carnival King clapped her hands. Clap.

The Authority of Forgetting began eating into Don Quixote.

It corroded his memories. Punched holes through them. What this was, what that had been, why it became what it became, what connected to what, the Carnival King severed every one of those threads.

An artificially created void.

Into that void, the Carnival King stuffed her own words.

"From the very beginning."

Dulcinea scoffed.

"There is no way a shut-in who did nothing but read fairy tales could ever truly become a hero. As if the world were that simple? The world is not a fairy tale. Nor is it a chivalric romance. The world is just, the world. Alonso Quixano."

She is guiding him.

"You are no hero."

Toward Alonso Quixano denying himself.

"You are simply a madman. A delusional patient. A dreamer. Everything is false. Nothing more than a well-staged farce. You never set out on a journey. You are still locked inside your room."

Dulcinea whispered.

Don Quixote's eyes wavered.

"How laughable."

Laughter laced with mockery echoed.

Under ordinary circumstances.

Even the Carnival King could never have infiltrated the mind of one who has reached Transcendence so easily. Let alone someone like Don Quixote, whose Imagery was so firmly established, a trick this cheap should have had no effect on him.

But the Carnival King exists here not as a demon but as "Dulcinea." As an entity who had shared the same stage, she had earned the right to intervene in the story.

Forgetting, direction, the stage, falsehood, deception, mockery.

Pouring out everything she had spent nearly decades preparing, the Carnival King bored into Don Quixote's mind with every Authority she possessed. She held nothing back.

"Reality is bleak, dull, and thoroughly cruel. Just as you said. Reality is no fun."

The goal was not to overturn everything that made up Don Quixote. That would have been impossible.

"Instead of a dull world, a play. Instead of tedious reality, an imaginary stage, a fantasy, a delusion."

She was simply painting the core of what made him in her color.

"The world lacks laughter."

Splat.

"So laugh. For nothing but laughter holds any value."

The Carnival King's body melted like paint.

Sky, earth, everything that met the eye became smeared with paint. A vivid yellow sky. Crimson grass. Blue apples. Black smoke. Azure fields and emerald lakes.

Laughter rang out through the paint-stained world.

The laughter that rang was neither refreshing, nor pleasant, nor beautiful.

Just mockery.

Only laughter meant for ridicule echoed on.

Don Quixote was smeared with paint.

Vivid colors were poured into his mind. Where laughter had once filled his Imagery, mockery began to echo. Don Quixote knitted his brow.

Gnash.

He ground his teeth and seized his own head. The mockery echoing at his ears threw his mind into confusion. Unknown memories and fragments crowded his thoughts.

No. This is false.

But what is false? Where does it begin, and where does it end? Am I truly forgetting my memories? Was this nothing but my own delusion from the very start?

Don Quixote thrashed and screamed. In a grotesque hell smeared with vivid paint, he had no idea where he was. Had he really thought of somewhere this bizarre as heaven? Even screaming, he resisted.

No. I am Don Quixote.

The ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, Don Quixote.

What I call laughter is not this. This can never be laughter......

「Sir Quixote! Sir Don Quixote!」

Sancho and Rocinante caught Don Quixote and held him steady. They cried out for him to come to his senses, that he was being deceived by that demon right now. But in Don Quixote's eyes, they no longer looked like his companions.

Only grotesque monsters wearing jester masks.

"Heh, heaaaahh!"

Don Quixote screamed and fled. Sancho and Rocinante, not understanding why he was running, gave chase. Through a heaven turned to hell, screams and mockery rang out.

Cackle, cackle, cackle, shriek, ahahaha!

With nothing but mockery echoing, Sancho and Rocinante did everything they could. Recounting the adventures they had shared, they held onto him, trying to pull Don Quixote back to his senses.

Surely Sir Quixote will come to his senses.

That was what the two of them believed.

They tended to the maddening Don Quixote. None of it helped. One day, Don Quixote began to shout. That he had to find Dulcinea. That he had to find his lady, who had vanished somewhere.

"Dulcinea. Where is Dulcinea?"

Don Quixote's condition worsened by the day.

"We need to leave this place."

"If we stay, we'll go mad too."

Sancho and Rocinante tried to escape La Mancha with Don Quixote, but every attempt failed. What they had believed was heaven had become a prison.

The Carnival King had made it so.

The paint-stained heaven was hell.

"Please, sir. Please come to your senses!"

Sancho, Rocinante, all of them were slowly falling apart. The mockery that rang without a single moment's pause gnawed at their minds. Even so, they kept on.

Believing that one day, Don Quixote would come to his senses.

But that hope would never be fulfilled.

Sancho knows.

The ending this story meets.

Don Quixote ultimately breaks. He denies everything that makes up who he is. And so the Star of Mirth becomes smeared with paint and turns into the Star of Scorn.

「The world has gone mad. Then what reason could there be not to go mad myself? Laugh. For nothing but laughter holds any value!」

One day, Don Quixote shouted those words and rose from his sickbed.

He burst out laughing.

He laughed until the world washed away. Mocking the whole world, sneering at it, looking down on it, declaring it worthless, Don Quixote howled with laughter. A mad cackle was a better word for it.

「Oh, Sancho! My one and only friend!」

「Do you recognize me?」

「How could I not know you? Come! Let us set out on an adventure, Sancho. The world awaits us!」

Had he come to his senses? At last? Sancho, who had smiled thinking his long efforts had finally been rewarded, was run through by Don Quixote's lance.

「Sir......?」

「Come along. Let us go together. Sancho.」

Even as he coughed up blood, Sancho could not understand what was happening. Eyes wide open, Sancho died. Watching that, Rocinante clasped his hands and prayed.

「Why do you give us such trials?」

That prayer went unheard. Don Quixote cut Rocinante to pieces. He threw the pieces into the paint-stained lake, and they came back as a monster, for a lake holds a wizard's Mystique within it!

「Run, Rocinante. Run with all your might!」

Rocinante snorted.

「Come, Sancho. Our adventure must continue!」

Sancho's scream, now one with the lance, rang out.

「Wahaha, wahahaha! Wahahahahaha!」

The laughter.

The mockery.

Echoed through the heaven turned to hell.

「For my lady, Dulcinea!」

In that place, the ingenious gentleman of La Mancha, Don Quixote, was no more.

A certain cheerful knight who had wished that anyone reading his story might set down their worries for just that brief time and find a smile, that knight no longer existed.

What stood in his place was the Star of Scorn.

Nothing but a jester enslaved to the Carnival King.

"Is that."

And then.

"Is that what you went through."

A knight who had watched all of it opened his mouth.

"Sancho."

The knight rose. Across from him sat a boy. To the boy, the knight spoke.

"I understand what you're trying to say. Then please, send me back."

"To outside the dream?"

"No. To the moment you stopped."

"......What are you going to do?"

"Forgive the late introduction."

The knight smiled.

"I am Najin. Free Knight Najin."

"What's a Free Knight?"

"A knight who protects knights."

"Then......"

"Yes."

The Free Knight drew his sword.

"I must make a knight into a proper knight again. That is my job."

Najin opened his eyes.

Opening his eyes.

What greeted him was Don Quixote, driving his lance straight at him. Taking in the sight of the knight who had finally, completely gone mad, Najin moved.

Not Sancho. Najin moved.

The change came in an instant.

Gone was the cloth armor Sancho wore. The Free Knight's coat billowed in its place. His hand at his waist found not Sancho's longsword but Najin's own blade. His hand at his back found the Lance of the Crossed Star.

The master of the stage had permitted Najin's intervention.

Najin, given the role of Free Knight rather than Sancho, moved one step ahead of Don Quixote.

"Sir Don Quixote."

Najin said.

「It's past time you came to your senses.」

Ramming Horn.

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