Ironveil forest
Verdant Hollows, Thalorin Domain
Sol Continent, Terra
Tellus solar system
Luminary star sector
Milky Way Galaxy
21st Vetraeus cycle, 50 New Solaris Prime
Sam and June materialized in an instant at the spatial coordinates Sam had programmed into the Exodus system. The transition left behind a faint shimmer in the air, evidence of the spatial energy folding around them. As they emerged, Sam's mind was already at work—not just on their destination, but on the delicate mechanics of the teleportation itself. She was tracing the way space had warped, analyzing how the Exodus had compressed distance into nothingness, and mentally comparing it to her ongoing studies in Dimensional magic—a school of sorcery that still eluded her complete mastery.
Despite her role as the Asha'Yee and her profound knowledge of Arcane science, the path to Tier Five spells had proven arduous. Between missions, emergencies, and ever-evolving responsibilities, progress came slower than she preferred. So now, whenever she could, she observed how systems like Exodus manipulated space—not through the six elemental energies like Dimensional magic, but through Xeta beam energy, an exotic forcefield capable of warping spatial coordinates. It was crude in its own way, yet elegant in execution.
Still, her Mystical Eyes offered clarity. Through them, Sam could see the undercurrents of reality, the hidden folds of space, and the subtle geometries of dimension. They let her peer beyond what others could see—into the laws that governed movement between worlds.
As the light from the teleportation faded, June stumbled slightly, disoriented. Around them towered ancient trees with massive trunks and sprawling branches, their golden leaves shimmering with light, casting a soft amber hue across the forest floor. The canopy above was so thick it obscured the sky, cloaking the entire glade in a surreal twilight glow. The air felt alive, thick with mana and the raw, untamed pulse of nature. June breathed it in, her eyes wide with awe—and just a hint of apprehension.
"This place…" she whispered.
"Ironveilf Forest," Sam said, stepping forward. "Part of the Thalorin Domain. Dense, wild, and teeming with Awakened Mystical Beasts."
Without warning, a glint of white light burst from Sam's chest. A great avian form emerged—its wings wide and feathered with streaks of radiant white and ink-black stripes. The creature shimmered with ethereal energy, its presence both regal and ancient.
"Avis," Sam called gently.
The Thunderbird Spirit King materialized fully, his eyes narrowing at her with a wary gaze. "You're not planning what I think you are… are you?"
Sam smiled. "I need you to watch over June while I retrieve the artifact. I'll only be gone a short while."
Avis let out a low, whistling chirp—part complaint, part resignation. He rarely left Sam's soul realm, preferring the tranquility within to the chaos outside. But when she summoned him, it was never without reason.
June stared, speechless, at the elemental spirit. She'd read about spirit familiars—heard legends about them—but to see one, this close, this powerful…
Sam turned to her. "You're going to be training here," she said. "Your task is to hunt as many Novice-tier Mystical Beasts as you can. If you can handle Acolyte-tier beasts, even better."
June's face paled. "You want me to fight them?" she stammered. "I've never even battled Dormant ones before…"
"You've slain Infernals, June," Sam said calmly. "You survived encounters with creatures far more dangerous. This will be manageable. You're not the same girl you were a few weeks ago. You're an Ascendant now."
June's mind flickered to Leto… to the blood… the heat… the chaos. She had done most of the fighting back then. Still, Sam was right—she had endured.
Sam raised a palm, several rings hovering above it like tiny orbiting moons. "Choose your weapon," she said. "Sword, spear, bow, axe, hammer, machete—whatever suits you. All are Rare-grade."
June looked at her like she'd lost her mind. But when she glanced at the rings, one caught her eye—familiar, elegant, deadly. A rapier. Her heart settled.
"Sword," she whispered.
Sam gave a small nod and flicked her fingers. The ring containing the sword floated through the air, guided by her refined control of Odic Force. June was mesmerized. It wasn't just telekinesis—it was precision, mental finesse woven with willpower. Such subtle manipulation was impossible for a Dormant Mystic. Even many Awakened would struggle with it.
June caught the ring, feeling its hum against her skin. With a pulse of intent, she summoned the weapon it contained.
The sword burst forth in a gleam of silver light—a beautifully forged, double-edged blade with a polished metal hilt. Intricate runes ran along the length of the blade, pulsing faintly with latent energy. It felt… right. Balanced. Familiar. Like it had been waiting for her.
"Alright. I'll see you soon," Sam said, and with a shimmer of movement, she vanished.
It wasn't teleportation—June recognized that. No surge of spatial distortion, no pulse of folded reality. Just speed, sheer and overwhelming, propelled by a movement technique so fluid it blurred the line between sorcery and martial mastery. Sam was gone in an instant, leaving behind only silence and the soft rustle of wind-touched leaves.
June stared at the space her master had just occupied, then slowly exhaled. She turned to face the luminous figure beside her—the one being who remained.
Avis, the Thunderbird Spirit King, regarded her with something bordering on pity, though there was no mockery in it—only knowing. He understood Sam's decision. She had always been forged on the battlefield, shaped by blood and chaos rather than calm instruction. When Sam had first Awakened, she had not been trained in polished halls or pampered with tutors. She had been thrown into war zones, hunted by enemies, forced to adapt or perish.
And now, she was giving June the same lesson.
"Come along now, dear," Avis said, his voice laced with gentle command. He would guide her, scout ahead, find appropriate targets for her growth. But the fight would be hers alone.
"First things first. Do you know the name of your ability factor?"
June nodded. "Ice Empress."
"Ice Empress, huh?" Avis tilted his avian head. "Doesn't sound like a bloodline factor to me."
He was right. Ability Factors came in two forms: Bloodline or Awakened. Bloodline Factors were inherited—passed down through generations, refined through centuries of tradition, cataloged and documented by the great Houses. Families like the Haravoks or the Sinclairs possessed entire libraries of techniques linked to their ancestral traits, often revered and feared across the star sectors.
But Awakened Factors… those were different. They weren't inherited—they were born. Formed through a convergence of soul data, unique life experiences, personal willpower, and the activation of the Ethereal glands—the interface through which a soul imprinted its will upon the flesh. These abilities reflected the individual's essence, and though raw at first, could eventually become refined enough to pass down as Bloodline Factors to future generations.
The Wrywards were neither a Named nor a Great House. They held no legacy techniques, no ancestral manuals. June's parents had been the first in their line to Ascend, and even her siblings had developed abilities unrelated to each other. June's Ice Empress Factor was hers alone—a power awakened from within.
"Still, it's a potent one," Avis said. "S-Class, by the looks of it. That means your cultivation talent is… let me guess—Mythical?"
June blinked. "How do you know that?"
"Everything Sam knows, I know," Avis said with a wink of one glowing eye.
They emerged into a sun-dappled clearing. At its center squirmed several gelatinous shapes—nine in total. Slimes. Their slick, translucent bodies pulsed faintly with an inner glow.
"Slimes?" June said, frowning. "Aren't those… harmless?"
"I wouldn't make that mistake," Avis replied. "Dormant Slimes, sure. Docile, slow, easily dispatched. But these? These are Awakened. They're far more resilient—and much more aggressive."
He gestured toward a nearby corpse—what had once been a large Dormant beast, now riddled with puncture wounds. Its blood pooled around it in steaming rivulets. The Slimes had hunted it, overwhelmed it as a pack. Now, their red eyes fixed on June, serrated fangs glistening with blood beneath the gelatinous membrane of their bodies.
Avis vanished—no flash, no sound. Just absence.
She was alone now.
June's heart pounded in her chest, and a cold dread crept into her limbs. These creatures—once dismissed as low-tier threats—now looked terrifying. Their red eyes gleamed like coals. Their mouths dripped with gore.
One launched at her.
June moved by instinct. Her blade came up, intercepting the lunge and deflecting the creature's mass to the side. A second slime slithered forward, trying to clamp down on her leg. She twisted, swung, and brought her sword down with a clean arc—but the blade bounced off the slime's skin as if it had struck rubberized armor.
What? Her eyes widened. How can a Novice-tier beast shrug off an enchanted weapon like that?
She forced herself to breathe.
No panic.
She centered her focus, drawing in mana from her lattice network. The nodes across her body opened, and energy surged through her channels. She initiated Infusion—the second level of mana application. Her muscles tightened, her bones hardened, her senses sharpened. The sluggishness left her limbs, replaced with clarity and controlled strength.
This is different… she thought. This is what it means to be Awakened.
Before, as a Dormant Mystic, she had struggled to maintain even a flicker of steady flow. But now—with her star core and refined Odic force—her control was precise, her flow stable. It was as if her body had finally remembered how to move.
She lunged, mana swirling through her arms and into her blade. The runes along the sword's edge glowed as her mana merged with its enchantments. The blade gleamed with power as she struck again, aiming for the slime's core.
CRACK!
The creature was thrown back, crashing into a tree—but not split. Not even pierced. Her strike had impact, yes—but not penetration.
June exhaled, sweat beading on her brow. Her arms trembled—not from fatigue, but from frustration.
A Rare-grade blade… and it still wasn't enough. My mana isn't strong enough to meet the blade's full potential.
She stared down at the sword, then at the approaching slimes, their red eyes glowing brighter now, sensing her struggle.
"I'm not strong enough…" she whispered.
But even as she said it, she raised her sword once more.
Not yet. But I will be.
The slimes circled her now, their grotesque forms undulating across the moss-laced forest floor. Red eyes gleamed like cursed gems, locked on her every breath. Their bodies shimmered faintly with condensed mana—thicker, more concentrated than she expected from Novice-tier beasts. They were intelligent enough to strategize, and bold enough to strike without hesitation.
One launched again. Two more followed.
June's pulse roared in her ears. Her sword snapped up defensively—metal met gelatin, and again, the blade was repelled. Her footing slipped slightly on the soft loam. A fang-laced maw nearly clamped down on her thigh.
She rolled to the side, heart pounding.
I won't last long at this rate.
Another lunge. Another dodge. But her breathing was growing heavier, the gap between reaction and execution thinning.
Then it happened.
A cold pressure stirred inside her chest—sharp, crystalline, and ancient. It pulsed once... then again, deeper this time. Not painful, but undeniable. It was as if something frozen within her had just begun to crack open.
She gritted her teeth, backing away as the slimes began to press in.
And then she called to it.
June lowered her stance, driving her palm against the earth. Her mind reached inward, past the rush of mana and the glow of her lattice. She plunged into that frozen space within herself where her Ability Factor dwelt. She didn't need to understand it. She only needed to feel it.
"Ice Empress..." she whispered.
The world shifted.
The air temperature dropped in an instant, the humidity crystallizing into frost that danced across the surface of leaves and bark. The breath from her lips came out as mist. Even the slimes hesitated, their instincts alerting them to the unnatural change.
Mana flooded into her, but it was no longer chaotic. It moved with eerie calm, like glacial currents beneath a winter sea. Her star core rotated slowly within her, drawing in the raw ambient mana around her and refining it into icy resonance. Her Odic Force merged with the Elemental vector of her factor, and her body—her very presence—began to emit cold.
The ground beneath her feet cracked as frost spread outward in jagged tendrils. Her blade, once simply enchanted, now shimmered with an aura of pale azure. Runes pulsed softly, responding to the sudden synchronization of mana and intent.
Then the first slime lunged again.
June didn't move at first. Instead, she focused.
With a swift motion, she drew the ambient heat away from the air around her attacker, transferring it into a nearby rock formation. The effect was instant. The slime's body began to freeze mid-leap, its gelatinous membrane crystallizing as its momentum carried it forward.
June stepped aside, calm, controlled. The frozen slime struck the ground like a shattered statue, its body breaking apart into brittle fragments.
The others hissed in confusion.
[Ice Empress: Unique Technique: Cold Reversal]
The name of the unique technique appeared in June's mind like it had always been there, a result of her Ethereal gland. A second slime rushed her, but June raised her palm and swept it sideways. The ambient temperature plummeted once more. A spiraling draft of frost coiled from her outstretched fingers and lanced toward the creature, siphoning its internal heat and flash-freezing its outer layer.
It screamed—if a slime could scream—and flailed before she closed the distance, driving her blade clean through its exposed core. This time, her sword didn't bounce off. The fusion of mana and the Ice Empress' force allowed her to pierce clean through.
[Ice Empress: Unique technique: Glacial Rend]
Three more beasts now encircled her, but June stood taller now, blade gleaming with frost and breath steady in the frigid air.
So this is the Ice Empress…
She felt it in her veins, like snow-fed rivers running beneath her skin. The ability wasn't just about freezing—it was about dominion over thermodynamic balance. Her power wasn't brute cold—it was control. To move heat, to drain it, to redirect it. To reshape the battlefield, one thermal unit at a time.
"Come on then," she muttered, eyes glowing with determination. "Let's dance."
****
Meanwhile, on the other side of the forest, Sam was gliding through the trees, her body weaving fluidly through the ancient trunks as light filtered down in golden shafts. She moved with precision and speed, a blur among the leaves, her movement technique propelling her effortlessly without disrupting the natural rhythm of the woods. Though to an outside observer it might have looked like teleportation, it wasn't—just sheer, refined mastery of physical movement enhanced by mana.
Her mind, however, was elsewhere.
Sam's focus remained locked on tracking down the Key—an ancient relic vital to healing Terra's fractured World Core. It was buried somewhere within the forest's deeper reaches, cloaked beneath layers of illusion and natural interference. She used every sense, both mystical and mundane, to scan for its signature.
At the same time, through her soul-link with Avis, she kept watch over June. She could feel the surge of mana fluctuations from her apprentice, the trembling uncertainty, the sudden bursts of resolve. And despite everything—the weight of her responsibilities, the pressure of the mission—Sam felt a glimmer of happiness.
June was doing well.
Though Sam had matured greatly since the day she stepped into the Awakening Temple and faced that Infernal, she still remembered what it had been like. Alone, terrified, outmatched. That moment had changed her—ripped away the last remnants of her innocence and forced her to become something more.
She had always learned on the field. Not in lecture halls or quiet training grounds, but on blood-soaked earth, in collapsing ruins, with death breathing down her neck. And now, she was doing the same for June—because she knew that kind of trial forged strength faster than any classroom ever could.
But this… this was different.
Sam had been the student once. She had leaned on masters and mentors like Emanu and Emily. She had been taught, guided, even saved. But now, for the first time in her life, she was the one leading. The one shaping another's path.
June wasn't just a mission. She wasn't just another talented Ascendant.
She was Sam's responsibility.
And that scared her more than she wanted to admit.
She prayed—silently, fiercely—that she wouldn't fail her.
As Sam moved swiftly through the forest, her internal senses pulsed with precision, finally locking onto the subtle frequency she had been tracking. A faint vibration echoed through her soul—a resonance too delicate for ordinary perception. But with the Terra Constellation Formula, she could trace even the most elusive of energetic signatures. That signature belonged to the Key—an artifact vital to Terra's healing. By overlaying her perception with the Eyes of Mathias, she could pierce through any illusion, distortion, or reality-bending trap that might attempt to mislead her.
And it was a good thing she had come prepared.
The place she had arrived at reeked of danger. An insidious fog wafted through the air, thick and unnatural, veiling the land ahead in a shifting, spectral haze. She stood at its boundary, a thin, nearly invisible line of energy marking the entrance to an Echo Field—a spatial memory, a temporal scar created by powerful echoes of the past. One step beyond that threshold, and she would be pulled into an alternate spatial coordinate where the laws of time and identity often warped.
Sam inhaled deeply, then exhaled in quiet resolve. She knew the cost of what she was about to do—how Echo Fields had a way of unearthing fragments of oneself best left buried. But there was no turning back. Terra needed her. The Key was within. She stepped forward. The moment her foot crossed the veil, the world twisted. The fog swallowed her whole, and in the blink of an eye, everything changed.
The scent of blood hit her first—thick, metallic, and suffocating. It flooded her senses, curling into her lungs, clinging to her tongue like rust. Her eyes took in the sight of a battlefield unlike any she had seen in decades. Corpses—dozens, hundreds—lay piled atop one another, creating grotesque mounds of flesh and armor, bones jutting skyward like the spears of a ruined army. Races of every kind lay strewn across the blood-soaked soil. This wasn't just a warzone—it was a mass grave.
A blade came hurtling toward her neck.
Sam moved instinctively, her body twisting with precision and grace, the edge missing her by mere inches. Her survival wasn't luck. A Mystic Art had activated—Full Guard—a defensive Aura technique she had pre-scripted into her Odic force. The technique didn't need to be consciously triggered; the moment her internal senses registered danger, the formula fired like a reflex, sharpening her awareness, accelerating her perception, and heightening her reaction speed to supernatural levels.
She straightened, and her gaze swept across the battlefield.
Her internal senses expanded outward, spanning over a hundred and fifty kilometers in all directions. Everything became clear—every movement, every intention, every hidden threat. The attacker, a figure clad in rough leather armor with bestial features, was merely a projection—a constructed simulation born of the Echo Field. A Beastman, snarling with hate.
"You die today, Asha'Yee," it growled, its guttural voice laced with killing intent.
Only then did Sam notice her appearance. She wore a resplendent suit of green armor—her Symphony-class armor, a self crafted armament of ethereal make, its emerald hue glowing softly as if singing with power. In her hands rested a massive greatsword, a weapon so large and refined it looked as though it could cleave a mountain in two.
Realization struck her. This wasn't just an illusion. She was inhabiting a version of herself—a past life. Somehow, the Echo Field had drawn her consciousness into the remnant of a life she had once lived as the Asha'Yee. She'd always been aware of the possibility of reincarnation, of lives stretching backward through time like stars scattered across eternity. Take the figure of Inastasia who she had also met in an Echo field. She had been one of Sam's past life, who Sam had inherited some of her memories. But this was different. This time Sam was in the body of one of her former life.
What unsettled her most, however, was her lack of control. She could not move freely, nor could she access this version's memories. The body reacted on its own, the reflexes of a warrior long dead—or perhaps still alive somewhere, echoing across time. That first dodge, she now understood, hadn't been her reflex. It had belonged to the Asha'Yee of this body.
More enemies surrounded her—three warriors of the Wolfkin, blades drawn, eyes alight with murderous intent. Their will pressed in on her, distorting the air with killing intent so thick it felt like chains tightening around her limbs. Their aura gave them strength, fed by their thirst for blood.
And yet...
Sam's body did not flinch. The greatsword in her hands lifted, not with effort, but with grace—like an extension of her breath. The muscles of her arms moved with the memory of endless battles, and in one fluid motion, she swept the blade in a wide arc.
The result was devastation.
The Wolfkin were torn apart, their bodies shattered into flying limbs and fountains of blood. The air shook. The earth quivered. Blood rained down around her like crimson petals, falling over her green armor and pale skin. But it wasn't fear or revulsion that stirred in her chest.
It was... joy.
The body she inhabited rejoiced in the carnage. She felt it—that intoxicating ecstasy of battle, of wielding death like an artist holds a brush. In that moment, Sam was not just a reaper of life—she was a conductor, and the battlefield her orchestra. Her enemies were notes on a page, her allies instruments, and her blade the baton with which she dictated the rhythm.
And right now?
She chose the rhythm of death.