* * *

Of all the clans in the Seven Dragons Society, the White Dragon Clan had fought Limon the least often. But that did not mean they took him lightly. If anything, it was the opposite. They were more wary of him than any other clan in the Society, and had kept running away to the point that the other clans reviled them for it.

Of course, that fear had faded considerably with the dawn of the Iron Age. But that was true only of ordinary clan members. Ainsha, who knew about the world-peace plan, and the White Dragon Clan's elder-level members still retained some awareness of the danger Limon posed.

"Hic."

"Your Highness, hold your breath. I hear that stops hiccups."

"If I stop breathing, I die. Hic. You cannot fool me."

"Then try getting a sudden fright. They say that works too."

"Hic. You are trying to give me a heart attack. Tata really is a traitor. As wicked as the Black Dragon Clan."

... So much so that Ainsha, the White Dragon Princess herself, was shocked into having hiccups for the first time in her life simply by learning Limon's identity.

And she could hardly be blamed. Every princess but one would have been horrified to discover that the man she had spent all day on a date with was actually Limon.

Finally abandoning her attempts to calm Ainsha down, Tata looked at Limon with a stiff expression.

"Are you truly the Sword Lord?"

"Yes."

"Just to confirm, the person who saved Her Highness that day was also...?"

"Me."

At that unequivocal answer, Tata's face fell. The one remaining hopeful possibility—that this Limon was merely a stand-in, and Ainsha's destined partner might be someone else—had been utterly dashed.

"... So Her Highness and I were deceived from the very beginning."

"Not from the beginning. If she hadn't proposed to me out of nowhere, I wouldn't have had any reason to meet your princess while hiding my identity."

"I did not mean that you deceived us."

Tata thought that she should never have trusted the Black Dragon Princess. She had even used Ainsha's destined partner to deceive them.

... It was an unjust accusation against Li Qingyu, who had only intended to make use of Limon's playing, but perhaps this, too, was the price of her past deeds.

'If I had foreseen this... No, it would not have changed anything anyway.'

Lamenting her own shortcomings, Tata soon shook her head. If he was the destined partner who could save Ainsha, she would have tried to bring them together even if he had been the Sword Emperor rather than the Sword Lord. That was why she could smile again.

"Then that is all that matters."

"What is?"

"In the end, what I must do remains the same."

"You're still determined to carry out a terrorist attack? To pair your princess with me, of all people?"

"They do say that the deeper the enmity in a past life, the happier the marriage in this one."

Tata gazed at him calmly, as though her resolve was already firm. Seemingly inspired by her, the Divine Dragon Unit had also quelled their agitation and now radiated a menacing air. Limon narrowed his eyes at them.

"And you? Are you prepared to bring me down if that's what it takes to kill your nanny?"

"... Of course. I am a princess of the Seven Dragons Society. I will not abandon what I must do."

"Is that so? Then come at me."

Limon chuckled at Ainsha's answer, her hiccups forcibly suppressed with psionics. He had known persuasion would not work anyway.

Had he insisted on asking because he was an old man who couldn't resist lecturing? Or because he wanted to hear that refusal itself?

He did not bother seeking an answer. He merely let his sword hang at an angle and gave them a cold smile.

"I'll make you understand exactly how foolish a choice you've made."

* * *

THWACK!

"Huh?"

"Producer? What's wrong?"

"Didn't someone just pass behind us?"

"Probably one of the staff."

"No, I think I saw something a little too white and floaty to be a staff member."

"... We're not filming a summer horror special. What are you talking about? You're giving me the creeps for no reason."

"Was it just my imagination...?"

After tilting his head in puzzlement, Kim Seung-jun finally turned back around. Busy as he was preparing for Music Challenge's live broadcast, he would not have had time to spare even if a real ghost had appeared.

But Kim Seung-jun did not know that his eyes had not deceived him. That a Divine Dragon Unit member had dropped behind him like a ghost. Or that, had the man not been sent flying back up like a salmon swatted by a bear's forepaw, his hand would have smashed Kim Seung-jun's head.

Limon, the very man who had saved Kim Seung-jun's life, made no particular effort to tell him either. He merely flicked a screw lying nearby with his sword.

PING!

A Divine Dragon Unit member, just about to run riot among the audience, dodged the screw flying toward his face. Before he could even recover his stance, Limon rose behind him like a ghost, struck him on the head to knock him unconscious, and settled him into an audience seat in a dozing posture.

He was not the first Divine Dragon Unit member forcibly made into a spectator. Three others sat in a row right beside him. Up above, another five members hung limply from the ceiling like quilts draped over a drying rack.

'... He truly is a monster.'

Glancing at the sight, Tata marveled. It was not Limon's skill in defeating a dozen or so Divine Dragon Unit members in just a few minutes that surprised her. She had expected as much from the moment they found themselves fighting the mighty Sword Lord.

What was terrifying was that he was handling every one of those fights cleanly, without any commotion.

The one who tried to leap onto the stage. The one who tried to attack the staff. The one who tried to smash a camera. The outcome was the same for all of them. Before anyone on set noticed, Limon appeared like a ghost and subdued them without letting them make a sound.

In truth, it was inevitable. A combat unit's true worth showed when it moved as one. Scattered as they were to carry out their terrorist attack, the Divine Dragon Unit made perfect targets to be defeated one by one. It was a tactical error born of their failure to foresee that Limon himself would appear to stop them.

Yet even knowing this, Tata could not command the Divine Dragon Unit to form a battle formation or keep Limon in check. She had more pressing matters to attend to—such as batting away a hazy mass of light flying toward her in the shape of a dragonfly with the hem of her robe.

CRACK!

Struck by the robe's hem, hardened like cast iron by the psionics of the Iron-Robed Long Garment Style, the dragonfly shattered and reverted to the thread it had originally been. But that was not the end of it. There were still close to several hundred dragonflies flying around her.

Nor were their movements sluggish or predictable. Each dragonfly moved erratically as though alive, and carried power that could by no means be ignored.

"Argh!"

The Divine Dragon Unit member whose shoulder had just been pierced by a dragonfly was clear proof. Though each of them was a master of unit-captain caliber, not even they could emerge unscathed from the attacks of dragonflies imbued with such powerful psionics.

At the center of that swarm, a white-haired girl stood on a narrow structural beam less than a handspan wide, moving her hands without expression.

Sometimes bending her fingers. Sometimes turning her palm over. Sometimes clenching her fist.

By minutely controlling hundreds of threads to manipulate the dragonflies, she drove them back without taking a single step. Her technique was nothing short of miraculous. It was possible only because she could foresee every detail of the future—exactly what result each movement of a thread would produce—and follow it perfectly.

As a result, the Divine Dragon Unit members facing her, apart from Tata, were being wounded and driven into a corner one by one.

In a way, it was only natural. Neither their beloved princess nor Limon, a Sword Master, was an opponent Tata, a mere master-level fighter, and a Divine Dragon Unit unable to form a battle formation could handle. In fact, it was nearly a miracle that they had not already been wiped out while facing both at once.

There was only one reason that was possible: Ainsha and Limon were not on the same side.

BANG!

That much was clear from the way Limon shattered a dragonfly just about to pierce a Divine Dragon Unit member's throat with a fragment of stone flicked by his sword. He ignored minor injuries, but intervened to stop attacks precisely when they seemed likely to inflict a fatal wound. Without his help, not only the Divine Dragon Unit members but Tata herself would already have been corpses.

Yet Tata could feel no gratitude at all. Limon was obstructing them far more fiercely than he was helping them. Even as he saved one Divine Dragon Unit member just now, he was striking another and draping him over the ceiling.

"... You really are in the way."

Ainsha, of course, was likewise glaring at Limon with an expressionless face. Without him, she could have slaughtered Tata and the Divine Dragon Unit long ago. Instead, she was wasting time because he intervened whenever she attempted even a slightly lethal move.

Still, she did not try to attack him directly.

Her goal was to punish the traitors. With them right in front of her, she had no reason to waste her strength on Limon, however much he interfered... But that was not why.

It was because every vision she sought of a future in which she attacked Limon was blurred or riddled with gaps, leaving her unable to tell the outcome at all.

'I do not understand. This is confusing. This is inexplicable.'

Ainsha could not understand it. Though foreseeing him had been difficult, she had at least been able to read Limon's future during their date. Yet from the moment he took up his sword, she could no longer see his future at all. It was as though she had been rejected for daring to look at his future without being qualified to do so.

For the foremost prophet of her age, who could freely see anyone's future, it was as shocking as encountering an invisible man. That was also a major reason she could not attack Tata and the Divine Dragon Unit more aggressively. Unable to see the future accurately in this situation, she could not help hesitating over every choice and action.

'... This cannot continue.'

But even that hesitation had its limits. Only a few Divine Dragon Unit members remained. Once Limon subdued them and Tata as well, she would have to face him alone. That meant she had to settle matters before they were all subdued, while Limon was still busy prioritizing the prevention of the terrorist attack.

Finally steeling herself, Ainsha gathered her psionics.

Or rather, she tried to.

THWACK!

... She would have, had Limon not darted out and subdued Tata before she could even move.

Ainsha abruptly froze like a white rabbit whose tastiest carrot had been snatched away before its eyes. She had failed to foresee that Limon, who had prioritized the Divine Dragon Unit members until now, would launch such a sudden surprise attack on Tata.

The Divine Dragon Unit likewise stopped moving the moment their commander, Tata, was subdued, as though they had been waiting for it. Amid them, Limon spoke calmly, one foot planted on the sprawled Tata.

"Why don't you give up now? You should already understand that struggling any more is pointless."

"Cough, cough, cough!"

Perhaps the blow to her solar plexus had been too severe. Only after coughing harshly several times did Tata manage to speak in a strained voice.

"Yes, I know. It was only a matter of time."

From the moment Limon and Ainsha had appeared here so soon, this outcome had been inevitable. Even so, Tata felt no regret at the result. She merely raised her head slowly.

"But that is enough."

Ainsha flinched involuntarily. It was not merely because a faint smile had appeared on Tata's upturned face. Her precognition, disrupted by Limon, had righted itself, allowing her a momentary glimpse of the future.

Only then did Ainsha understand everything. Why Tata and the Divine Dragon Unit had mounted this reckless resistance against her and Limon. That it was not because they believed they could break past them and carry out their plan, but because they wanted to buy even a little time. What Tata had meant by the inevitable outcome. And why this scene looked so familiar.

"Sword Lord, you are too late."

But just as Tata said, Ainsha's realization had not come soon enough. By the time Tata smiled, the time bombs she and the Divine Dragon Unit had planted throughout the set before the pair's arrival were already in their final countdown.

And so, the moment the bombs' timers reached zero—

BOOOOOM!

Blazing light and a thunderous roar swept through the studio.