* * *

Let's turn back the clock a little. Before Wei Ling's shock. Shortly after she'd sent Limon the subsidiary information, he followed her route across the city. The moment he reached a building bearing a Black Dragon Insurance sign, he sprang into action.

"Comrades, let me give you a little advice. Dying for a company..."

CRASH!

"Who let this fucking dog bark?"

"Guh?!"

Limon followed the voice, smashed through the wall, and kicked its owner in the back of the head. He did it all in one fluid motion, flooring Ryu Gang-cheol in the blink of an eye. Ambush or not, it was a deflating sight for those who had been fighting desperately to hold Ryu off.

"W-what?"

"That white hair... Limon Aspelder?!"

"What's he doing here?!"

But the bloodied, panting warriors of Black Dragon Insurance didn't even have time to feel deflated. They were too busy recoiling at Limon's sudden appearance as if they'd come face-to-face with a tiger. Normally, a reaction like that from people he'd just saved would have been insulting. But Limon had never expected anything from the Black Dragon Clan, so he paid the warriors no mind at all. He simply drove Ryu into the floor with his sword.

THUNK!

"Gah! W-what the hell are you doing?"

"I'll be done soon, so shut up a moment."

"You've pinned me down like an insect specimen, and you expect me to just shut up and... Guh?!"

"Tch. You really do bark a lot for a damn dog."

Limon ruthlessly crushed Ryu's crotch, shutting him up and leaving him foaming at the mouth for good measure. Then he paused to think.

'Now what?'

Even a Sword Master had only one body. Not even Limon could run around protecting so many subsidiaries by himself. Yet he'd made that confident declaration to Wei Ling because he had a trick in mind.

'So I can't cut them with Sever the Water's Moon, Release the Flower's Fragrance after all.'

If Ryu's clones had been illusions, Limon could have cut down every one of them—and taken Ryu's life—with a single stroke. That was the principle behind Sever the Water's Moon, Release the Flower's Fragrance, a supreme art of the Demon-Cleaving Dragon-Slaying Sword: cut the illusion, and you cut the real thing, just as splitting the moon reflected on the water would cut the moon in the sky.

But now that he'd struck one himself, he knew Ryu's clones weren't reflections. Each was a physical being in its own right. It was the difference between countless images in facing mirrors and products rolling off a factory line.

'That's about what I figured.'

Limon wasn't terribly disappointed that he couldn't resolve everything with one swing of his sword. He'd sensed the clones weren't mere illusions when he first cut one down; he'd only needed to confirm it. And Sever the Water's Moon, Release the Flower's Fragrance was hardly his only option.

"Let's have a look, then."

Limon narrowed his eyes and looked down at Ryu. His irises had turned black instead of their usual gold. Through steadily playing the Violin of Deepest Black and spending time with Eugene, he'd melted down the starlight and fully mastered the power of the stars. His eyes that could see constellations came to life. If Ryu's clones were the work of a skill, Limon expected to see something. He was right.

'What is this...?'

At first sight, he thought of parasites. Countless things resembling insects seemed to writhe half-emerged from Ryu's eyes, nose, mouth, pores, and torn skin. He looked like a nest of bugs. But after watching a moment longer, Limon realized his mistake.

*'A tree?'

What had looked like skin was bark. The things writhing incessantly were roots. Sap flowed in place of blood. An uncanny vision of a living tree shaped into a human form lay superimposed over Ryu.

'Hmm. That must be the constellation he's contracted with. But why does it...?'

Limon narrowed his eyes. Since gaining the ability to see constellations, he'd met many players and examined their constellations. Ryu was only the second player he'd seen whose constellation overlapped so deeply with him that it was hard to make out the human beneath.

"Oh?"

That was when Limon noticed something like a red tendril trailing from behind Ryu's tailbone. He shifted his gaze and saw it stretch across the floor and out of the building. His lips twisted.

"Well, look at that."

He planted his foot firmly on the tendril.

THUMP, THUMP.

The red tendril pulsed at regular intervals, like a blood vessel connected to a heart. Limon's keen Sword Master senses picked up the pulse, and he gave an incredulous chuckle. One look was enough to tell him that this tendril was the key to sustaining Ryu's clone: both the pipeline supplying its fuel and the string controlling the puppet.

"In all my years, I've never seen a bastard parade his tail around so openly in front of me."

It wasn't hard to understand. The ability to see constellations was unheard of. Like most of the constellations Limon had observed, Ryu's probably saw no need to hide the tendril. It may also have been confident that discovery wouldn't matter. Even if a mere human saw it, surely they wouldn't dare harm a constellation.

There was just one problem. The sole exception among those "mere humans" had found it—and his eyes were gleaming like a madman's.

"You're dead now, you bastard."

After that cold mutter, Limon pulled his sword free of Ryu and focused his senses on what lay inside the red tendril.

THUMP, THUMP.

A vast power surged back and forth within it with every pulse. He followed its flow: from Ryu's clone into the tendril, then along the tendril and out of the building. As the distance grew, the pulse faded and his perception dulled. But he didn't stop.

Focus. Focus. Focus.

He honed his dulling senses, retraced the fading pulse, and kept following the flow as it receded into the distance.

A hundred meters. Five hundred. One kilometer.

Like a seasoned fisherman locating a fish hidden underwater by the slightest tremor in his line. Like the time, long ago, when he'd pursued the Demon God to the other side of the world. With a Sword Master's concentration, sharp enough to cut a speck of dust, he extended his already acute senses farther, tracking the invisible flow.

Five kilometers. Ten. Thirty.

He extended his senses ever farther, detecting tendrils spread in every direction. And the moment he perceived their countless roots—

"—Got you."

SLICE!

Limon severed the neck of the twitching, half-dead Ryu in one stroke. The flow began to scatter. The constellation's power that had kept the clone moving abandoned its now-useless shell and gurgled back through the tendril. That was precisely the opportunity Limon had been waiting for.

TAP, TAP, TAP.

One step, following the flow of power. One step, approaching a root. One step, swinging his sword. In exactly three steps, Limon stood before another root attacking a different subsidiary—another Ryu Gang-cheol clone.

"... Huh?"

Perhaps Ryu couldn't comprehend how Limon, who had been beating another version of him moments ago, had suddenly crossed several kilometers to appear before his eyes. He stared, eyes nearly bulging out of his head, and made a stupefied sound.

SLICE!

Before he could recover, Limon's sword took off his head again. This death was even quicker and more anticlimactic than the first clone's, like an ant crushed beneath a tank's treads. And it was only the beginning.

TAP, TAP, TAP.

SLICE, SLICE, SLICE.

Each time a clone fell, Limon followed the power flowing through its tendril, stepped up to another clone, and cut it down. Repetition made him familiar with the process, and familiarity made him faster. In the end, it became monotonous labor. It wasn't even a fight anymore, just the repetitive work of splitting potatoes as they came down a conveyor belt. The only difference was that the thing moving was a man, not a conveyor belt, and what he split wasn't a potato but a player in the eighties.

"What the hell?!"

"Wait...!"

"This cheap trick... Gack!"

"Fuck?!"

Of course, Ryu didn't simply let it happen. Connected through the tendrils, his clones sensed the threat Limon posed and reacted quickly. But none of their struggles mattered. They could time a counterattack, flee their positions, or multiply to attack together. They still couldn't evade Limon, who appeared like a ghost along the very tendrils connecting them and severed their necks faster than the eye could see.

And as Limon cut him down again and again, Ryu's reactions gradually changed.

First came bewilderment. Then interest in the unexpected turn of events. Then anger at being killed so helplessly. At last came the despair of being cornered. After all those changes, one emotion finally surfaced in his eyes: fear.

It was utterly foreign to Ryu Gang-cheol, who had always considered himself a predator and toyed with death, others' and his own alike.

"Y-you monster...!"

Yet Ryu couldn't shake his fear. The chilling sword that cut down even his will to fight. The crushing skill that left no hope. Above all, the languid eyes that seemed to regard cutting him down as no more remarkable than splitting a log. They told him that this white-haired man was the true predator—the apex of every food chain, a peerless killer beyond anything Ryu could compare himself to.

And Ryu wasn't the only one who felt it.

"... What just happened?"

"That white hair... Could he be the Sword Lord?"

"My God... The bastard who slaughtered dozens of our warriors couldn't even withstand a single move?"

From the experts who had fought Ryu to the warriors he'd been slaughtering one-sidedly, even those whose bodies had been carved up with knives, the Black Dragon Clan members guarding each subsidiary trembled. Every one of these subsidiaries had refused a contract with Guardian. They were places where clan members who scorned Limon as an obsolete relic of a bygone age and treated him as an enemy held sway.

But the moment they saw Limon casually cut down the man who had brought them to the brink of death and disappear, they understood. What a Sword Master truly was. How insane they'd been to mock Limon. What catastrophe might follow if they made him their enemy. Why so many of their ancestors had failed for hundreds of years to surpass the Sword Lord. And why Li Qingyu's willingness to give up everything to arrange her engagement to Limon might not have been mere foolishness.

As their fear swelled, they had no choice but to understand.