Chapter 47 - The End of Blood and Greed

To be clear, Limon agreed with Li Qingyu that the constellations needed to be watched. But he had reserved judgment on what they were. What did they want? Would they harm the world someday? Did every constellation belong to the same faction? Was it necessary to wipe out every last one? He knew too little about them to turn against them blindly.

Back in the Age of Heroes, he had encountered countless monsters and madmen who decided for themselves what was “evil”—whether it was people from an enemy country, followers of another religion, or those with a different skin color—and slaughtered them while believing themselves righteous. That made him all the more cautious.

But at this moment, whatever might be true of other constellations, he could say one thing for certain about the Serpent That Connects the Ends: this snake bastard was dangerous. And not just because it had mocked Yu Na-gyeong’s death, or because it might even have caused it.

‘Anything that does this to a human has to be dangerous.’ Park Hyeon-gun looked exactly as he had before—but only to ordinary eyes. With a black gleam lingering in his eyes, Limon saw something entirely different.

Black scales covered its entire body. Its head had become a snake’s; its tongue stretched all the way to the floor, and tentacles had sprouted where its arms should have been. Since gaining the ability to see constellations, Limon had seen all manner of players. But this snake was fundamentally different. Other constellations had looked, at most, like parasites attached to players or beings fused with them. Here, scarcely a trace of the human form remained.

More telling still was the head of the real Park Hyeon-gun, half-melted and screaming inside the snake’s gaping jaws. It showed Limon that this snake bastard now occupied Park’s body—and that, unlike the shadows he had seen before, this was a true constellation in its actual form.

“There’s so much I’ve wanted to ask you constellations...” Limon adjusted his grip on his sword, then lunged like lightning at the snake wearing Park Hyeon-gun’s skin and roared, “But you can die first, you snake bastard!”

SWISH!

He was a flash of light. His leap was so fast it looked less like a charge than a missile launched from its platform. The sword he thrust out at the height of that speed had already pierced its target and passed through by the time it seemed to touch.

There was just one problem: the snake he had cut vanished like an illusion. From behind him came a mocking voice, almost as if its owner were flicking its tongue. “『Eightfold Barrier』.”

Eight barriers closed around Limon, one inside another. The snake stretched its mouth into a sneer and, as if showing off, raised a hand toward Limon and flicked a tentacle growing from its tail in place of an arm. “Boom.”

KABOOOOM!

At once, a vortex of lightning, fire, ice, curses, blades, deadly poison, crushing pressure, and deafening blasts erupted inside the barriers. Though contained within them, the storm would have been more than enough to bring down Infinity’s headquarters and obliterate everything for several kilometers around it. Fortunately, it was Limon trapped inside. He cut through every skill with a single stroke and escaped the barriers, averting a catastrophe that would have wiped out the heart of the city. But that was only the beginning.

BANG! BOOM! KABOOM!

‘This snake bastard...?’ As though its first attack had been no more than a greeting, the snake unleashed skill after skill. Limon cut each one down, frowning. It wasn’t only that the snake fired off large-scale skills capable of causing enormous damage at any moment, as though holding the city’s residents hostage. Something about its fighting style felt familiar: the way it anticipated his attacks and moved through space to evade them, the way it combined hundreds or thousands of skills to maximize their power. Of course it was familiar. It was how the Infinite Monarch, Lee Cheon-gi, had fought him yesterday while 【Overlord】 was active.

“... So that’s why you did it?” Limon understood why the snake had chosen this moment to appear before him, even going so far as to steal Park Hyeon-gun’s body. “You figured that now you can use the Monarch’s power that idiot stole, you’ve got the perfect chance to kill me?” The snake gave no answer. It merely flicked its tongue and grinned hideously. That was enough for Limon to know his guess was right.

At first glance, it seemed a foolish judgment. Park Hyeon-gun himself had proved that merely stealing a Monarch’s power was not enough to defeat Limon. But there was one decisive difference between Park and the snake: the snake was a constellation. Park had destroyed himself trying to wield a few dozen skills; the snake poured out hundreds, even thousands, without hesitation, each more powerful than when Lee Cheon-gi had used it. The limit on how much power a human could handle was simply different from a constellation’s. The snake lacked Lee’s finesse in combining skills, but its overwhelming output made up for that. And its capacity for power was not the only difference between human and constellation.

SWISH! SWISH-SWISH-SWISH!

He slashed, stabbed, and smashed. But however many times his sword struck, the snake dissolved like an illusion and reappeared somewhere unexpected, unleashing more skills. Attacks launched from in front struck from behind; even when Limon leaped forward, he somehow found himself moving sideways. It was as though space itself had twisted—or as though he were chasing a snake through its burrow. Unable to counter tricks he had never encountered even in his fight with Lee, Limon was forced entirely onto the defensive. Naturally. This was the snake’s own power, belonging to neither Lee nor Park: the authority of a great constellation, beyond comparison with the skills humans used.

That was why the snake had accepted an imperfect incarnation and even renewed its contract to descend into Park’s body and face Limon. Humanity’s guardian deity, a Sword Master—whatever they called him, he was still human. As the only human who could oppose them, he had been marked as a threat; defeating him would bring immense rewards. The deed alone could lift the snake from its current rank straight into the ranks of monarch-class constellations. And if it failed? It could simply retreat. Park Hyeon-gun was a worthless tool whose usefulness had run out. What happened to him meant nothing to the snake. Low risk, high reward. With so little to lose and so much to gain, the snake had no reason to pass up this chance. It coolly pressed Limon into a corner, rehearsing its meticulous, cunning calculation. Or so it thought.

“The Serpent That Connects the Ends... Was that your name?” Limon had done nothing but swing his sword through empty air, failing to land a single blow. Then he spoke quietly. “I think I understand what you really are.”

The snake did not know that Limon’s futile swings as he chased it were not simply the result of falling for its tricks. All that time, he had been watching the snake and carefully recalling what he had felt through his sword. His gaze was less like that of a swordsman fighting for his life than that of a snake hunter blocking the exits to a burrow before digging the creature out.

“It looks as if you control space, but that’s just a disguise. Your real power is lies and deception: making the false real and replacing the real with the false.” “...!” The Serpent That Connects the Ends flinched. Limon was right. The “ends” in its name did not mean one place and another. They meant the real and the false. Truth and lies. Illusion and reality. Its name as a constellation came from its authority to connect those opposing extremes. Its power grew stronger the more thoroughly it concealed it, so it had deceived players by posing as a constellation that controlled space.

Seeing how shaken the snake was to have its nature exposed so quickly, Limon gave it a cold sneer. “Stupid snake bastard.” Was it stupid by nature, or blinded by greed? All it could think of was lunging at prey before its eyes, even if that meant throwing its contractors—and itself—into the flames. “You came before me trusting in nothing more than a cheap hustler’s trick. I’ll give you credit for the nerve.”

Perhaps the insult enraged it. The snake glared and let out a savage shriek, preparing to spew forth a strike layered with hundreds, thousands of skills. But before it could move, Limon had already taken a step. One step past the distortion. A second to close the distance. A third as he swung his sword. In just three steps, he crossed the maze of twisted space. Even as the snake watched him swing at it, it felt anger, not alarm.

Its authority was lies and deception. Moving between reality and illusion, it could turn even a blow that had struck it into a lie, rendering it illusory. Such was the power of a constellation: a transcendent authority that crushed the laws of the world to work miracles beyond the reach of mere humans.

SLICE.

“?!?!?!” And so, in the next instant, the snake’s eyes flew wide. Limon’s sword had cut an illusion made by its own authority. Yet as the illusion’s arms split apart, its real arms dropped to the floor too, accompanied by the unmistakable pain of blade parting flesh and bone.

Why? He cut an illusion! How did that sword reach the real me? “What’s got you so surprised, dumbass?” The snake’s bewilderment showed plainly even on its reptilian face, as though it were having a nightmare with its eyes open. Limon gave a short laugh, held up his blade so the snake could see its reflection, and said coldly, “If you can turn truth into a lie, you should have expected that cutting an illusion might cut the real thing too.”

“...!!!” The snake was aghast—not because it failed to understand Limon, but because it did. The shock was enough to make it bite its own tongue. To cut the real thing through an illusion meant cutting the moon in the sky by cutting its reflection in the water. Even the snake, a constellation of lies and deception, had no such power. And a human had done it? With nothing but swordsmanship? It could not believe it. No, it did not want to. It wanted to believe Limon was lying, trying to deceive it with some trick. But it could not.

Its severed arms, which would not regenerate; the pain shooting from the stumps; above all, the cold, steady look in Limon’s eyes—all told the constellation of lies and deception that this was no lie or trick. And then the snake understood why, among humans it considered less than insects, only this man was treated as a threat—why even monarch-class constellations merely watched him rather than laying a hand on him. Humanity’s guardian deity. A being who had protected the world alone. Put another way, a monster with the power to destroy the world alone.

THUD.

The instant it realized that, the snake acted. It spat out Park Hyeon-gun’s body. Leaving him sprawled like a rotten, fallen tree, it hurried toward the sky. Its forced incarnation, followed by its hasty abandonment of the body, had cost it a considerable amount of karma—enough that its rank might fall to marquis, perhaps even count. The snake did not care. Its cunning, its animal instinct, and above all its surging terror drove it to discard every calculation of gain and loss and flee.

“You really are a stupid bastard.” In the next instant, the snake froze. “You appeared before me in your real form, not a clone. Did you think you could run away now?” It had shed its body and fled an enormous distance in the blink of an eye, yet Limon was looking straight at it. How? A human shouldn’t be able to see me. Then it saw the black gleam coloring Limon’s eyes and understood. Horror seized it. Quite apart from his swordsmanship, that was a power no human should ever possess.

“Remember this as a parting gift.”

WHOOOOSH!

Limon paid no heed to the snake’s horror. High in the sky, far above the earth, he had caught up to it in just three steps. Now he dropped toward the snake as it tried to escape into the night, sword in hand. “I am a Sword Master.” The last master of the Sword Tower. Humanity’s last Sword Master. Limon Aspelder turned in midair and readied his sword. “No one in this world can escape me. And even beyond this world, there is nothing I cannot cut.”

Was it an unconscious decision, or pure instinct? Instead of fleeing, the snake opened its jaws and lunged at Limon, as though it knew that killing him now was its only chance of survival. But before its fangs could reach him, Limon was already drawing his sword down. With the sky as his canvas, his blade swept through the air with the grace of a brush painting an orchid.

『Demon-Cleaving Dragon-Slaying Sword, Supreme Art

斬魔龍殺劍 絶藝

Cut the moon reflected in water, and flowers bloom

切水月開花香』

[■■■■■■―!]

The West Sea split in two. A terrible scream rang through the world, and a star that had shone brilliantly in the night sky went out.