The coffin lid hadn't finished sliding when the air curdled.
A tall figure stepped through the fog with courtly disdain, hair like spilled wine, pupils slit to a needle. Blood threaded from his fingers and coalesced over his skin—an autonomous cuirass that skimmed every strike away before it landed.
"An Elder," Jae-seok breathed, throat tight.
So-yeon didn't wait. He blurred forward, heel, elbow, shoulder—taijutsu in a torrent. Each impact rang off that liquid shield like knuckles on glass.
Tch. He tore off the weighted bands from his ankles, slate clanking on stone. A quick flick through his panel—stat points dumped into Speed—and he vanished.
The Elder's eyes finally widened.
So-yeon reappeared behind him, knee slammed into spine; the follow-up hook spun the vampire mid-air. He chased his own after-images, stitching blows into the same inch of that shield until spiderweb cracks flashed across it—then healed, red knitting over red.
"Fast," the Elder murmured, smile thin. "But you strike the surface, pup."
Aura erupted around So-yeon, dense and hot. Iron Body ignited without a scream—only a low, thrumming growl. He launched the Elder straight up with a rising kick combo, caught the falling body with a roundhouse, and booted him across the hall, stone pillars exploding in his wake. So-yeon was there first, driving him into the ground with a piston of a punch—then another, and another—
"Meteor Rush!"
Dust geysered. The floor cratered.
The body under his fists burst like a blood balloon.
"Clone—!" Hyun Woo shouted.
A red blur appeared behind So-yeon. A casual backhand—no, a tap—and So-yeon's body skidded twenty meters, carving furrows with his heels before he flipped and landed on one knee, coughing copper.
"If that had been my true self," the Elder said, voice velvet over razors, "you would be less than ash. Still—" He offered a small, aristocratic bow. "For a child, not talentless."
The temperature dropped. Blood mist rolled off the coffin, spreading like tidewater.
"Blood Domain."
The crypt warped. Gravity thickened. Runes bled down the pillars. Sound came back wrong—too close, too wet—while the Red Moon painted itself on the ceiling and began to pulse.
Jae-seok's barrier flared to life around the squad, groaning under a pressure that wasn't weight so much as hunger. "Keep tight! Don't breathe the mist!"
Hyun Woo slammed his palm to the floor. "If you want a domain—"
Fire traced from his hand in a perfect circle, climbing the air in luminous script.
"—then Flame Domain."
Heat shoved back the red. Where blood hissed against fire, steam turned the air into knives.
The Elder's lip curled. He flicked two fingers.
Spikes grew from the ground.
Hyun's legs locked mid-glyph. "He's binding me!"
Rin tried to slice through them but th elder created multiple clones to stall him
"I've got you!" Jae-seok's telekinetic force ripped the spikes sideways—then stuttered, like an engine swallowing grit. He winced. "He—he's smothering my signal. I can't get a clean hold!"
Hyun gritted his teeth, forcing the last sigils into place. "Fine. Then we borrow a hand."
The floor split like a pupil dilating.
A shape climbed out—antlered horns, hair a cascade of embered red, jewelry that jingled like shackles. Ifrit looked at Hyun first, then at Rin—and flinched.
For an instant, Rin saw it as Ifrit saw him: a silhouette wreathed in scripture, a holy abomination crowned with too many wings. The spirit recoiled from the idea of possesing Hyun's mind and, wisely, chose obedience.
"Breathe flame," Hyun said, voice tight.
Ifrit smiled.
A thousand blue inferno aloft, each compacted to an arrowhead. They hung for a heartbeat—then screamed across the hall. The Elder's autonomous shield flowed to intercept—
Shk-krack.
One arrow hit, and the blood-glass fractured. Ten more and the cuirass shed off him in runnels. The Elder stopped underestimating them.
"Clones," he hissed.
They bloomed from the mist like reflections stepping out of a mirror, a dozen at once, then two dozen—each wearing that same cruel smile.
"On me," Rin said.
Jae-seok's hand jerked, and the world twitched. Invisible grip seized three clones and dragged them into a single point, like stars collapsing. He yanked, then threw—and Rin was already there, blade half-drawn.
Against the Grain. He didn't cut where a throat was; he cut where it had to be in the next breath. The steel whispered forward, catching a step that hadn't yet fallen. Heads parted from necks in perfect, premature timing.
Two more rushed him. He listened—not with ears, but with the Codex. Every motion had a seam. Every swarm had a loose thread.
One-Point Severance.
He touched the weakest point in the flowing blood that made their shields—just a stitch—and the entire weave unraveled, clones collapsing into puddles that steamed under Hyun's heat.
So-yeon surged back to his feet with a hoarse laugh, pain bright in his eyes. "Round two."
"Stay on your feet," Rin said without looking. "He respects strength. Show him yours."
"Like you needed to tell me."
So-yeon dove into a knot of clones, moving like a storm uncoiling: knee slide into an uppercut; palm heel to the jaw; a spin kick that scythed two heads clean; a drop step and a stomp that caved a chest in like rotten plaster. He was a blunt instrument used with a surgeon's discipline.
The Elder's real body stood atop the dais, third eye closed, watching the culling with academic interest—until Ifrit remembered exactly what species vampires were.
The spirit inhaled.
Inferno: Thousandfold.
Blue arrows flooded the air once more, then twisted mid-flight into a spiral drill of fire that would have bored through a mountain. The Elder flashed sideways in a smear of crimson, abandoning pretense. Blood art stacked over blood art, sigils racing across his arms as he bled speed, weight, and space from the world.
The drill shaved his shoulder. Flesh sizzled. He did not scream.
His third eye snapped open.
Sound died.
The domain fell, not like a curtain but like an ocean, and Jae-seok choked. "My—my link—" His telekinesis flatlined, barrier dimming to a membrane. "He cut the frequency. I can't… there's nothing to hold onto."
Ifrit's grin faltered as the blood tide pressed against flame. Hyun forced mana through desiccated veins, skin blanching.
"Don't," Rin said softly.
Hyun's answer was a ragged smile. "Then do."
Ifrit lifted both hands. The blue fires flared white. For a heartbeat, the flames were not heat but judgment—and the Blood Domain reeled.
"Heavenly Flame Domain," Hyun rasped. The spell burned his last reserves to the wick, but it opened a corridor through the crushing red, a tunnel of clean air that led straight to the dais.
"Eun-ji!" Rin called without taking his eyes off the Elder.
Min Jae-seok already knelt by So-yeon, silver light pooling between his palms. "On it." Regen Sigil stitched flesh; Min Jae-seok bled his reserves into Hyun in thin, steady lines. His eyes flicked up, met Rin's, steady. "Go."
Rin stepped into the corridor.
The Elder's smile finally sharpened. "Come then, little swordsman. Teach me why your blade thinks it can speak to kings."
Stone thrummed under Rin's feet. The Red Moon pulsed, matching the beat of a second heart above the Elder's brow. Blood streamed to his hands, coiling into claws, into spears, into words.
Rin let the Codex open behind his eyes.
Threads everywhere—causes reaching forward to touch their effects, consequences crawling back to stain their parents. In the screaming pressure of two domains, there was still a seam. There was always a seam.
Cause Severance. He drew a breath and cut—not the spear that would pierce his chest, but the decision two beats earlier to raise that spear. The intent fell away. The weapon drooped like a puppet whose strings had been snipped.
The Elder's third eye narrowed. "Ah."
Rin moved through the gap. The dais felt strangely quiet beneath his steps.
He lifted his blade.
The Codex whispered the next page.
Judgment of Silence.
Rin set the edge where sound lived, where vibration made the world real, and began to bring it down.
The Red Moon seemed to lean closer.
And the crypt, for a breath, held its tongue.
---
📜 Codex Record — Heaven-Severing Codex (Extract III)
Among the severing arts, two techniques stand as paradoxes to the very laws they cut apart.
Judgment of Silence —
A stroke not upon flesh, but upon vibration itself.
When invoked, the world falls mute. The clash of steel, the roar of monsters, even the pulse of one's own heartbeat—severed.
The silence it brings is not absence, but condemnation. For in that stillness, the enemy is laid bare, deprived of motion, deprived of resonance. To struggle against it is to fight against the void itself.
Cause Severance —
If Judgment cuts what is present, this art cuts what must be.
A strike delivered not against an enemy's blade, but against the very reason it was swung. To undo the "cause" is to unravel the "effect." A burning wound vanishes, a collapsing wall stands once more, an arrow loosed finds itself never fired.
It is a heretical blade, an affront to logic itself. Few survive witnessing it, and fewer still comprehend that what was… simply was not.
Thus the Heaven-Severing Codex reminds us: to master the blade is not merely to strike the enemy before you, but to cut apart the truths the world insists upon.