WeTried Translations
Translator/Editor: Hydrogen B
Discord: https://dsc.gg/wetried
Chapter 170: I’m a Fool
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* * *
Ainsha was the White Dragon Princess.
Born with the essence of psionics, she had lived reading the future as naturally as breathing.
To her, reality had been little different from a dull play in which what she had foreseen simply came to pass.
But at that moment,
the sight before her was enough to overturn everything Ainsha believed.
“...Why?”
Before Rimon's sword could pierce her,
Tata would step in front of him to take the blade in her place.
The sword, thrust out as though it could pierce anything, would suddenly stop in midair.
And...
“Why on earth?”
Rimon would catch the threads she had unconsciously unfurled with his bare hand, rather than cutting them with his sword.
Perhaps because he had grabbed Celestial Silkworm Thread imbued with enough psionics to form a dragon.
His hand had been cut, blood spraying from it.
Yet Rimon paid it no mind.
He merely met the blankly staring Ainsha's gaze with his golden eyes and spoke calmly.
“Look at where you're standing, and you'll know.”
Ainsha reflexively looked down.
She had been so determined to kill Tata.
Yet when Tata threw herself before the blade, Ainsha had instinctively moved forward to shield her instead.
It made no sense.
She was the White Dragon Princess, the most exalted member of the White Dragon Clan.
Especially since she had not yet produced an heir, Ainsha's life was worth more than the lives of every other member of the White Dragon Clan combined.
She knew that better than anyone. Doing something so reckless should have been impossible for her.
As if he had read her confusion, Rimon gave a faint snort.
“You don't even know why you're standing there, do you?”
“...”
“But, foolish Princess, not everything in this world needs a complicated reason.”
A girl so accustomed to living in accordance with the future because she could see it.
A foolish princess who had become unable to do anything without a reason.
Rimon spoke calmly to her.
“Just like how you said you were facing me to kill a traitor, or that you would kill me for your clan and change the future. Those were all excuses you came up with afterward.”
“...They were not excuses. They were real.”
“Don't lie.”
Rimon dismissed her bluntly.
No matter how important punishing a traitor was, it was not enough reason to take the risk of facing Rimon.
Likewise, even if Tata was an Elder of the clan, she did not compare to the fated counterpart tied to Ainsha's very life and death.
Ainsha had merely pretended to be rational.
In the end, there had been no rationality in her actions from the beginning.
And Rimon could roughly guess why she had acted that way.
“You just love your nanny so damn much that you got upset, didn't you?”
Her blunt demeanor had hidden it, but Ainsha had tried to change the future because Tata ultimately meant more to her than her fated counterpart.
She had become angry when Tata tried to die on her own.
And in the end, she had protected Tata.
Ainsha refuted Rimon, who had neatly stripped away logic and self-interest to identify the emotions behind her actions.
“I deny that. I am not a child.”
“But you are a fool.”
“I am not a fool either.”
“No, you are.”
Rimon flatly rejected Ainsha's protest.
Then, despite her expressionless face, he looked into the girl's wildly trembling eyes.
“If a fool who is so obsessed with the future that she cannot understand the feelings she has right now is not a fool, what is she?”
He could tell just by looking into her eyes.
Ainsha was not emotionless.
She was simply so used to hiding her feelings that she had forgotten she was even capable of feeling them.
That was why she was a foolish princess.
The greatest fool among fools who lived looking only toward the future, the one who knew the least about reality.
Ainsha asked Rimon in her usual blunt manner as he mocked her.
“...I want to know what exactly you want from me.”
“What I want? Simple.”
Rimon did not bother adding any more needless words.
He simply nodded toward Ainsha's back.
“I want you to look behind you.”
“...”
Ainsha slowly turned around at those words.
The person who had shielded her.
The person she had shielded.
The woman who could not dare join their conversation because of her position, yet anxiously worried over Ainsha.
Ainsha hesitated as she looked at Tata.
Normally, she would have had no need to hesitate.
She could have simply spoken, acted, and chosen as her precognition told her to.
But Rimon's tearing apart of the future had left her unable to see even the immediate future. She did not know what she should say.
“Tata.”
Instead, Ainsha could feel it.
The faint tremor she had never noticed, buried as she always was in the future she read through precognition.
Amid a torrent of anxiety, impatience, and relief, she realized what Rimon had wanted to tell her.
So Ainsha did not speak in order to follow or change the future.
She spoke the words she wanted to say most at that moment.
“Are you hurt anywhere?”
Tata's eyes widened.
She looked surprised, perhaps flustered, as she stared blankly at Ainsha.
Then her face twisted, and she shouted as though she could no longer bear it.
“That is what Tata should be asking! Why did you do something so reckless?!”
Ainsha's clothes were torn in places, and her skin was bruised blue.
Even without a sword wound, she was clearly far from unhurt.
Tata lamented as she looked at her.
“All that had to happen was for Tata to die! If you had not tried to change the future, you could have been happy, Princess!”
“You are wrong.”
“What do you mean, I am wrong?”
“There is no happiness for me in a future gained through Tata's death.”
“That cannot be. In the future I saw...”
“Tata, look at me.”
Ainsha cut her off.
She cupped Tata's cheeks in both hands, making her meet her eyes, then continued quietly.
“It is I, not the future, who decides my happiness.”
“...!”
“And rather than happiness the future has decided for me, I treasure more the happiness Tata gives me at my side.”
She was not unhappy.
She asked Tata not to pity her.
She asked Tata not to make her present self unhappy for the sake of future happiness.
Tata stared blankly at Ainsha, who still wore an expressionless face and spoke in her usual blunt voice, yet held her with hands full of warmth.
Her lips moved as though she wanted to say something.
Or as though she did not know what to say.
Only after a long while did she finally speak.
“...Sister Rahasha.”
Tata flinched at the name that had slipped out unconsciously.
“No, Mother Krusha.”
Yet she could not hold back from saying another name.
“Do you truly think Tata... no, that you can be happy only if I am by your side?”
Tata looked at Ainsha with trembling eyes, whether from anxiety or something else.
To the woman who had been her aunt before becoming her nanny, and who had once been her younger sister and daughter, Ainsha answered without the slightest hesitation.
“Of course, Tata-sha.”
The moment Tata heard the name she had abandoned when she chose to become Ainsha's nanny, along with words she had wished to hear for so very long but never could,
she clung to Ainsha like a child clinging to a parent and burst into tears.
* * *
Click.
Rimon sheathed his sword.
Then, wiping the blood from the hand whose wound had already vanished, he gave a faint snort.
‘Fools, honestly. They never understand unless you spell it out for them.’
That was why the White Dragon Clan was troublesome.
They were endlessly vexing as enemies, but even more frustrating as allies.
Still, they did have their merits.
That foolishly straightforward quality of accepting what they learned without resistance was a rare talent within the Seven Dragons Society.
That was why he had sheathed his sword.
If Ainsha had remained unaware, that would have been one thing. But now that she had seen her own heart rather than the future, she would not try to kill Tata.
Nor would Tata throw away her life.
Tata would live.
The fixed future had changed.
His sword had fulfilled its role.
Of course, that did not mean everything he had to do was over.
Murmur.
“Tch. I guess we can't just let this slide.”
Rimon clicked his tongue as he looked down at the people still staring at the ceiling in uproar, and at the filming set where the broadcast had nearly been halted.
Then again, if people did not realize anything after a dragon had rampaged over their heads, they would not be people. They would be fish.
“...Can't be helped.”
Rimon sighed.
He had stopped Tata from ruining the broadcast, but there had never been any absolute need to protect Music Challenge.
His purpose in getting involved with the program had already been fulfilled.
And now that he had prevented the future where Tata died, he could simply disappear without caring whether one television program was ruined.
But...
‘Can't become some fucking bastard who refuses to take responsibility for his own mess.’
Rimon shook his head when he saw Kim Seung-jun, pale as a corpse from yet another broadcast accident.
Then he swept back his hair, changed his appearance, slung a duffel bag that had been lying in a corner over his shoulder, and lightly jumped onto the stage.
Thud!
“Who are you?”
“This is a live broadcast...”
The hosts were flustered by his sudden appearance, as though he had fallen from the sky.
Rimon did not care.
He merely took an item from the duffel bag.
Kim Seung-jun's eyes widened as he urgently gave orders. The hosts followed those instructions, babbling as they drew the cameras' and audience's attention.
Rimon placed the Pitch-Black Violin on his shoulder and took hold of the bow.
Hummmmmm.
Then, a moment later,
a chilling strain of music swallowed every sound in the world.
* * *
Ainsha held Tata and gently patted her back, all while watching Rimon begin to play.
And she listened to his true performance, on a level entirely beyond any recording, enough to make viewers forget even the broadcast accident from moments earlier.
That was why she understood.
Why Rimon was doing this, among so many other things.
“...You seem like a fool.”
He kept calling them fools, but Ainsha did not think he was acting much smarter himself.
His meddlesome willingness to go through trouble just to teach fools.
His stubbornness in taking responsibility on their behalf by going onstage.
His idea of resolving the entire situation with nothing but his performance.
None of it was a wise choice.
Yet perhaps because he was the Sword Duke, or perhaps for another reason, it did not merely seem foolish.
Ainsha watched him silently, then suddenly raised one hand to her chest.
She felt the heartbeat she had experienced before, only far stronger and clearer now.
Then she gave a faint laugh.
“And I am a fool too.”
Now was precisely that “soon.”
Without realizing even that, she had thought herself already in love.
Ainsha let out a quiet, self-mocking laugh at her own foolishness, then spoke softly.
“Tata, I will be back.”
“...Yes, Princess. Leave the rest to Tata and go without worry.”
For a moment, Tata was surprised to see the faintest smile on Ainsha's usually expressionless face.
Then Tata smiled as well and let her go.
As though copying Rimon,
Ainsha lightly jumped down beside him.
Then, before the people and cameras that had been watching Rimon's performance in a daze, she removed the newsboy cap she had been wearing.
“Uh...?”
“Uh? Uhhh?”
The moment they saw her snow-white hair fluttering,
the two hosts, the staff, the audience, and viewers all looked as though their eyes would pop from their heads.
Few had seen her in person, but almost no one failed to recognize that face.
Ainsha did not care about their reaction.
She simply looked quietly at Rimon.
‘Why are you here again?’
‘I came to take responsibility.’
‘Are you sure you can?’
‘Just watch.’
Though she was the White Dragon Princess, the girl was better known by another name.
A priestess who could mediate even conflicts among the gods through song in the Holy League, where religious strife never ceased.
Not a Player, yet always counted among the world's greatest singers.
The Singing Whiteness, Ainsha.
After exchanging intentions with Rimon through their eyes alone, she saw him give a faint snort and nod.
Ainsha took a small breath.
Then her pink lips parted.
The instant Ainsha began to sing,
the world, whose every sound had been swallowed by melody, was overlaid with a new sound that erupted like an explosion.
It pierced the heart more deeply than when Rimon had played with Eugene, while creating harmonies deeper and more beautiful than anything from that time.
It was the moment Music Challenge's future as a globally popular program was assured.
And the moment the musician who stood shoulder to shoulder with her, the Violinist of Blackness,
first revealed himself to the world.
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