The Lioness of Lemumni
Leon, the First Prince, and now the Guild Master standing right in front of him—why were people who bore the surname Liewinzer all so uniformly bothersome?
No matter how hard Jun thought about it, he could not find the answer.
One thing, however, was certain.
Just leave me the hell alone already.
He was thoroughly sick of them and had no desire to keep playing along.
So he had stubbornly peeled off the cub lion—Leon—that kept clinging to him. He had also forced himself to forget his rage toward the male lion—the First Prince—who had thrown a tantrum just to plant himself as the alpha.
In doing so he had tasted a deeply satisfying liberation… only for the lioness—the Guild Master—to approach with a sly little smile before a full day had even passed, as if mocking him.
The Guild Master had not particularly done anything wrong, yet for Jun, still steeped in the joy of freedom, irritation was inevitable.
Wiiiiing!!!
As if answering his anger, his cores began to spin with violent force.
The fierce, majestic trio woven by the three cores thundered through the sparring arena.
Only then did the smile on the Guild Master’s face crack.
It was a reaction he liked. It was not, however, enough. He wanted to crack it further—until, in the end, it twisted completely.
“Brat. There’s killing intent in that aura of yours. Is it just my imagination?”
“Wouldn’t you say so? Why would I harbor murderous intent toward a Guild Master I’m meeting for the first time today?”
“Not toward me, maybe. But toward my bloodline? That I could believe.”
She narrowed her eyes at him as if to say, Isn’t that right?
Jun answered with an unnatural curl of his lips.
“Absolutely not. Harboring murderous intent toward the imperial family? That doesn’t even make sense. I don’t particularly want to die.”
He spoke words that were the exact opposite of what he felt.
Yet—
Crack! Crackle!
His eyes, dyed a vivid blue and seething with enraged lightning, declared that the truth was something else entirely.
“…Well, whatever. It’s none of my business. And from what I’ve heard, he did more than enough to earn that anger.”
After studying those eyes for a long moment, the Guild Master merely shrugged and drew a clean line: the matter had nothing to do with her.
Then she grinned with open satisfaction and continued.
“Actually, this works out perfectly. I like the thrill. Now come at me. Unleash every last desire you’ve got piled up inside you on this big sister of yours.”
“Then I won’t hold back!”
Jun immediately drew a short spear from subspace and hurled it at her.
Throwing knives and arrows followed hard on the javelin’s heels.
The assault was so precise and so powerful it was hard to believe it had been launched in a single breath.
“What the hell is this! So bland!”
Yet the Guild Master grumbled as she casually slipped past every projectile.
Her light, swift movements were exactly those of a lioness on the hunt.
In that same instant Jun space-transferred behind her and thrust a sword crackling with blue electricity straight toward her back.
Martial Art — Weapon Explosion
KRA-KOOM!
Thunder rolled. Blue current shredded space itself; iron fragments sprayed outward.
It was a single strike terrifying enough to drop even an equal opponent in one blow.
Even after unleashing it, Jun did not relax. Instead he drew a fresh weapon from subspace and swung hard to the side.
CLANG!
A collision that stabbed the ears. Red sparks flew, yet Jun kept his eyes wide open and stared straight ahead.
“That one was pretty decent.”
The Guild Master stood there grinning.
She looked no different from the moment the spar had begun.
Exactly two things had changed: black gloves of unknown material now covered both hands, and a strange pattern had surfaced inside her blue eyes.
Of the two, it was the latter that truly bothered Jun.
…I definitely moved first.
In the slowed world, the Guild Master had already begun her evasive maneuver before he even thrust the sword forward.
It was pure intuition, yet Jun was certain the patterned eyes were the reason she could do it.
Detection-type Mystic Eyes, huh.
Mystic Eyes.
Eyes that, like Medusa’s, activated special power merely by looking, or like the Clairvoyant Eye, revealed things ordinary humans could never see.
Because eyes and vision mattered more than almost anything in combat, facing a Mystic Eye holder of either type was extremely troublesome.
There was even a common saying: avoid fighting Mystic Eye holders whenever possible; if you must fight, do it with two or more people.
Fortuna.
Just in case, he asked Fortuna about his physical condition.
Judging by the aura rolling off the Guild Master, her rank was Yellow—and not merely Yellow. It was a Yellow that brushed endlessly close to Orange, easily on par with Leonard.
At that level she could have slipped an illusion or a curse past him without his noticing.
It’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with Jun’s body.
The answer came back all green.
That settled it: the Guild Master’s Mystic Eyes were detection-type.
And that meant—
I have nothing to lose at all!
Clang! Skang! Clang!
Exchanges flashed back and forth in the blink of an eye.
Eyes and hands should have been spinning, yet neither fighter showed the slightest hesitation.
Perhaps that was why their exchange looked like a couple’s dance whose every step had been choreographed in advance.
It meant each was reading the other’s movements with perfect accuracy.
Crackle!
Clang! BOOM!
Background music as explosive as their passionate footwork shook the air.
Carol, watching from the outer edge, was just beginning to worry that the sparring arena itself might collapse when Jun and the Guild Master suddenly stopped their dance and each took a single step back.
“… ”
Thud.
“Overclocking every single weapon you pull out… For someone who looks the way you do, your weapon handling is pretty vicious.”
Jun glanced once at the sword spider-webbed with cracks, then dropped it to the floor without a shred of attachment.
The Guild Master lightly scolded him after sweeping her gaze over the similarly wrecked weapons scattered across the arena.
Jun merely shrugged as if to say, So what?
“Weapons are consumables anyway. Unless it’s something special, there’s no reason to spare them. The ones I have now I was planning to dump anyway, so all the more so.”
Most of Jun’s weapons were cheap pieces hammered out in rural forges.
And he had just signed an exclusive contract with a skilled blacksmith; he intended to replace every last one before entering the labyrinth.
So working them to death didn’t matter in the slightest. Even if he carried them out intact, all he would get was scrap-iron prices.
“Even if that weren’t the case, it still wouldn’t matter. I can just carry that many more.”
“Yeah, you’re so great.”
The tone was teasing.
Yet that single line was packed with the Guild Master’s genuine feeling.
Those taciturn bastards were practically foaming at the mouth with praise for once… he really is worth it.
She recalled conversations with a former rival who still couldn’t forget his first love and had ended up stuck with a walking headache, and with a former junior who had retired far too early out of needless worry. Then she looked at the brat standing before her.
A body crackling with threatening electricity. A stance that looked wide open at a glance yet contained not a single real opening. A vortex that seemed ready to suck in everything around it.
All of it was impressive.
But if she had to pick the single thing she liked most, it was the blue eyes visible through the eyeholes of the mask.
Would mixing the eyes of a fearless warrior, the eyes of a merciless predator, and the eyes of a wise sage produce something like that?
She didn’t know. But the Guild Master could assert one thing with absolute certainty.
Those eyes were truly the eyes of an adventurer.
The Church made a damn good call for once.
A kid who had only just completed his coming-of-age ceremony was fighting this body on equal terms—even if he had cut a few corners.
Even in high-speed combat and mind games, the very areas this body was most confident in!
It was nothing short of astonishing.
At this level she had no choice but to acknowledge it, like it or not. The boy would become one of the heroes who would save humanity, exactly as the Church had declared.
If he continued to grow like this, that is.
The Guild Master idly stroked the empty socket hidden behind her eyepatch.
Regrets of the past and worries for the future came flooding in like a tide.
I’ve really gotten old. Living with regrets and worries I thought I’d never carry in my life… Anyway, as an adult who’s thoroughly tasted life’s bitterness, I can’t let a kid with a bright future walk the same path. So…
“Brat. Brace yourself. From now on, I’m going all out.”
She would smash him thoroughly—so thoroughly that he would finally understand just how weak he still was.
“…Go ahead. But I have no intention of just sitting still and taking it.”
Jun could roughly guess why she was revealing her full power.
Without a doubt, as an adult with more experience, she intended to give a little “advice” to a child who had only just stepped into society.
If that was the case, there was only one thing for Jun to do.
Exactly as children always did: rebel head-on against an adult’s advice—and by doing so, force that adult to acknowledge him.
Copy — Overdrive
Martial Art — Overclock
Electricity ignited every cell in his body. Aura reinforced all three cores.
Then—
Crack! Crackle!
Whoooosh!!!
Electricity became scales that armored Jun from head to toe. The vortex became a howling wind that wrapped around him.
In that instant Jun became a dragon clad in a living storm.
“Haha! You little monster!”
The lioness laughed like a madwoman and charged the dragon.
The dragon answered with roaring lightning, a storm of claws, and a cascade of chanted spells.
BOOM! BOOM-BOOM!
The underground chamber—reinforced by every kind of ability—shook as though it would collapse under the two monsters’ movements.
That was how fierce their battle had become.
Yet the longer the fight continued, the more the impacts gradually quieted.
The lightning that blinded eyes and deafened ears faded the same way.
The dragon was certainly strong… but still too immature, still too incomplete, to face a lioness who had begun to see a little farther into the future.
At this rate the dragon’s defeat was inevitable.
Yet the dragon neither retreated nor surrendered to despair.
Hang in there, Jun.
Because he knew he was not alone.
Hang in there, Jun! Blow her away!
The angel of fortune smiled upon the dragon.
In that very moment—
Rattle…
Fortune arrived for the dragon,
and
Slip—
misfortune for the lioness.
“Huh?”
The lioness lost her balance the instant her foot landed on a cracked sword that had coincidentally rolled beneath her.
It was the first time in her life the present had failed to match the future she had already seen. Shock froze her so completely she could not even think of recovering her stance.
Toward that open target the dragon spoke.
“You told me to unleash everything I’d piled up, right, Guild Master?”
“Huh? Uh—uh!”
“Clench your teeth. My pent-up frustration—”
“W-wait a second!”
“—is going to be a little hard for you to handle alone.”
THUD!!!
He drove a clean, thoroughly satisfying punch straight into her face.