The night air clung faintly to Rin's clothes as he stepped back into the quiet halls of the Seo estate. The grandeur of the Guild's Obsidian Spire still lingered in his mind, but here—surrounded by polished wood, the faint scent of tea, and the muffled footsteps of servants—the world felt still again. He loosened his tie, letting his body sag into the familiar comfort of home. For the first time since morning, his shoulders eased. Tomorrow promised trials and spectacle, but for now, sleep awaited, and the blade at his side hummed like a heartbeat in the silence.
The steam rose like pale silk.
"Bath first," Da-som said, arms crossed at the doorway, "or your joints will complain tomorrow."
Rin had already loosened his tie. He met her eyes, then stepped into the private bath where lines of faint runes pulsed beneath the water. Heat welcomed him; the surface condensed around him and then sank into his skin as if the bath were breathing in reverse.
Stat tonics bled from the copper coils at the pool's lip. Strength, vitality, clarity—measured additions that didn't scream, only settled.
"Ten minutes," Mi-cha called from beyond the screen, voice calm. "No more."
He closed his eyes and sank until the world softened. When he lay down in bed after, the body slept; the mind didn't.
The throne appeared—the old stone, the endless horizon. In the Codex realm a cold wind moved with purpose, and the will of codex was already waiting, a blur seated on black steps, paddle balanced on one knee as if he'd simply paused a game against himself.
"Your hands," the Codex said. "Show me they still belong to you."
Rin drew the blade that wasn't quite a blade here—his will shaping it first, the shape answering after. He moved through the forms until motion and breath agreed. The ancestor prodded, disrupted, corrected without mercy. They did not count time. When Rin finally sheathed the phantom edge, the Codex's smile was a thin white line.
"A swordsman sleeps," he said, "only when his blade is sharp."
Before dawn, Albert's stealth craft lifted off the back lawn without a sound, a shadow peeling from darker shadow. Rin and Hyun-woo belted in; a third seat stood empty.
"Jae-seok?" Hyun-woo asked.
"His family," Albert answered. "He'll meet you there."
The craft crossed a snowswept range where the sky wore iron. At its heart rose a stronghold cut from a single idea: the Frozen Spire Base. It thrust upward like a split glacier plated in obsidian—vents breathing orange somewhere deep within, snow curling from its shoulders as if even weather bent around it.
They settled in a private hangar. And because Albert believed composure was a habit, not a mood, the Phantom Eclipse rolled from the belly of the stealth craft like a panther dropping from a branch. Rin drove it the short corridor to the staging bay, silent engine a low purr that somehow made the other arrivals look borrowed.
He parked. The car's body drank the light and gave nothing back.
Outside, crowds: thousands upon thousands of cadets and their teams funneling toward the vast staging concourse. Broadcast drones hovered at respectful distance; holo-screens relayed murmurs and movement.
"Is that—" "Seo Joon's kid." "Too young to drive that. Too calm to be new."
Rin ignored the noise. His posture said nobility without effort, the quiet certainty that comes from surviving too much to need to talk about it.
They found Jae-seok by a window. He stood still as a lighthouse, gaze half-lidded, like the ocean in him had no reason to worry about weather. He nodded at them once. Hyun-woo bumped his shoulder; Jae-seok allowed the jolt to move him an inch, then righted like a weighted doll.
A chime carried over the concourse, silencing a city.
The Guildmaster walked the air like it was a stage he'd commissioned—cloak heavy with insignia, voice tuned to this hall and no other. Behind him hung a projection of a map that wasn't quite any country, a scar of rifts stitched into a single region.
"In the Rifts' first years," he said, "void gates opened where they pleased. Cities fell in a single night. An alchemist whose name the world forgot built a spatial redirector in this mountain. Since then, most void gates in this zone open here—and close here."
The projection shifted. The Frozen Spire's foundations expanded, veins like a heart's underside lit with orange.
"You are not auditioning," he said. "You are proving you can stand where the world cannot afford to fall."
Rules bloomed as simple glyphs:
Solo entry, shared dungeon.
Endless spawn.
Survival grants points. Kills grant bonus.
Hide, and the dungeon multiplies until you learn why that is unwise.
Top 100 advance.
Top 10 receive sovereign privileges: solo-clearance rights; private mansions on guild grounds; priority supply; pay equal to S-ranks.
The concourse hummed like a hive trying to pretend it wasn't afraid.
Names rolled down the displays—world prodigies introduced in slices: Leonhardt Kruger, a runic lightning knight from Berlin, crackling like a storm in polished plate; Isabella Marquez of Valencia, flame weaving like lace; Tariq al-Rashid from Giza, dunes and mirage riding his shoulders; Aoi Takahashi, twin blades bright as clean water; Cassandra Wright, Boston's quiet telepath with hands at her temples and everyone's stomachs in their throats; Sergei Volkov, frostbear shaman; Hans Müller, a man who made space fold at rifle's whisper; Kwame Dlamini, whose presence felt like a mountain walking.
Korea's pair drew a longer lens: Park Hyun-woo—S-rank reserves in a body still learning to measure cups; Min Jae-seok—A-rank on paper, but the air around him bent without being asked.
Rin's name did not get the same ceremony. It moved in whispers instead, like a rumor too heavy to print: Seo Rin. Seo Joon's son.
A row of capsules opened like mouths. Supervisors in matte coats watched from their mezzanines—most with the indifference of professionals, one with an interest that gleamed too wet. The noble boy he'd been seeing to—expensive hair, expensive smile—hovered nearby, already rehearsing victory poses.
"After you," Hyun-woo said. He was trying to joke and only half failing.
"After all of you," Rin replied.
Some of them wore protective gear and suits and the all proceded to enter the portal one after the other.
---
The dungeon did not welcome; it appraised.
A cathedral of bone and basalt stretched to a horizon that kept rewriting itself. Torches burned blue in wall-sockets that were human skulls. Shadows moved as if obeying another wind. Above it all, a tower's silhouette cut the sky like a second blade.
Wave One hit as a line of armored skeletons with shields of fused ribs. Hyun-woo threw his hands up on instinct; flames coughed, stumbled, then found their column. A ring of fire spun out and settled into a flame domain—uneven at the edges but alive, fed by reserves that did not care about finesse.
"Easy," he told himself, and meant control the cup not control the ocean.
Monsters walked in, burned, walked in, burned. When the line thickened, he called Ilfrit; the summon ripped from the domain like a lion from a curtain—horned, molten, delighted to be asked. Scores spilled up the board like an odometer long overdue for a reset.
Jae-seok did not call anything. Space curled around his open palm, and a gentle pull became a ravenous compression. The front ranks folded like paper sucked into a drain. He took a step, blinked; more bodies became fewer bodies. His restoration ticked in a rhythm his breath believed. He looked bored. The dungeon learned to be careful around him the way animals learn to be careful around a cliff.
Across the world-rooms, prodigies had their moments—Leonhardt blitzed like a thunderhead, Isabella painted arcs of fire, Cassandra's psionic shriek shattered a charging line and left her swaying.
And Rin?
He walked.
The ??? Blade came into his hand the way breathing comes into lungs. A line of cold traced along the edge, not fog but a resolution sharp enough to make fog decide it had somewhere else to be.
Frozen Edge: the awakening form. Every swing exhaled mist and needle-shards, frost starting from the wound and rushing inward like an argument that refuses to be interrupted. Skeletons cracked without ceremony. The floor learned to be quiet.
The second wave arrived as packs of ghoul-hounds, tendon and bone lashed into a shape too fast to respect. Rin took a breath and cut Cause Severance —not the body, not the path of the charge, but the cause of the leap itself. One step mid-air faltered; the pack broke rhythm in a ripple. He moved through that ripple, and by the time the first hound remembered it had legs, it no longer had a head.
The third wave came like weather. The horizon lifted, and out of it poured tens of thousands, a Madara-style avalanche of iron and hunger. They crested, they fell.
Rin planted the tip of the blade with the smallest thud.
Winter Burial.
Ice cracked from the steel, spider-webbed in a heartbeat, and then rose—barbed ridges shouldering into ranks, a white garden blooming into a graveyard. He stepped onto his own frost and did not sink. Movement became a proof. Proof became music.
He drew a circle in the air. It did not glow; it promised.
Frozen Fang Dragon.
The circle collapsed into a dragon of faceted ice, each scale a trapped breath of winter. It lunged, it struck, it shattered on purpose—exploding into frozen shockwaves that chewed an avenue through rank after rank. A second ice dragon curled from his retreating step. A third woke from the swing that looked like a feint and was a birth.
"Is this… the power of a cadet?" someone asked in a viewing hall somewhere, and no one answered because most of them had forgotten they had mouths.
The scoreboard couldn't keep up. Numbers jittered, skipped, corrected like a panicked clerk.
Up on the mezzanine, the bribed supervisor had been chirping into a mic every time his noble ward so much as breathed. "Excellent composure. Textbook guard-break—yes, look at that conversion—" The boy's fear finally found its shape as a mistake: he tried to hide, the dungeon multiplied, and he screamed himself out of the instance like a pearl being spat from an oyster.
The supervisor's mouth closed around a new lie and couldn't find purchase. "Ahem. Numbers mean little without—without discipline," he tried, as Rin's wolves of ice ran in a pack beside him, their paws shedding shards that became spikes that became walls that became coffins. Even the other supervisors glanced his way with that special brand of bureaucratic pity that means we see you; stop.
Rin's breath misted once. He shifted his grip. The blade hummed.
Eternal Winter Sovereign.
It did not look like a shout. It felt like a decision. The world within thirty paces accepted winter at a level below weather. Space slowed—not time, but the willingness of space to collaborate. Blood, water, and the aimless mana in the air crystallized, and Rin moved through that decision like a king walking through a balcony door onto his own balcony.
Shield phalanxes became glass sculptures. Charging throngs slid in place like actors whose marks had been iced over. He cut only what he needed to cut. He let the domain do what it was: law.
He did not use his ultimate move. Not yet. He did not need to.
Across instances, prodigies fought to stay in the camera. Hyun-woo's domain wavered, collapsed, flared again; he swore under his breath and fed more mana, which worked because he had oceans where others had lakes. When his circle threatened to implode, he dropped Ilfrit like a hammer on a nail and bought himself five more minutes that looked like genius on the broadcast and compromise on the inside. He grinned anyway, because he was alive and that tasted expensive.
Jae-seok had long since stopped looking at what he crushed. He was calculating something else: distances, angles, the fatigue curve of his own restoration, the way the dungeon moved like a thing that learned. He adjusted. The scoreboard adjusted with him.
Names climbed and fell. Top 100 formed, blurred, reformed. The Top 10 hardened around a few and then around fewer.
Rin did not check the board. He could tell where he belonged by the way the dungeon looked at him. The waves began to behave less like waves and more like strategies. He answered with geometry. When the field tried to smother him in bodies, he drew up a wall, then cut a door in the wall, then walked through the door and erased the wall so the bodies ran into a space that wasn't there. When archers appeared like moss on parapets, frost dragons hunted them like pheasants. When the floor opened, his frost answered first and it opened on ice, which is another way of saying it did not open at all.
He reached the place where most dungeons remember they are dungeons and stop. He did not stop. The last skeleton fell like a sentence that doesn't need a period because the silence after it is the period.
Every other cadet—Hyun-woo, lungs heaving; Jae-seok, heartbeat even; the prodigies with their pride intact and their pride dented—ejected to the staging hall in ripples of light. Medics moved like practiced hands. The crowd in the viewing galleries released the breath they were pretending not to hold.
Rin remained.
The dungeon, suddenly empty, took a breath of its own. The bone-cathedral's ribs shifted, the walls unscrolling themselves. The horizon folded like a map closed by a tired king. A throne room assembled around him—arch after arch, blue flame rising in bowls of skulls, cold licked by something older than cold.
At the far end, the throne was already occupied.
He was not a lich in rags. He was not a crone behind a veil. The Necromancer Lord sat like a prince who had learned to be a god, black suit needled in gold, jewels at his throat like captured screams. Bone crowded his dais: skulls stacked like a chorus; vertebrae braided into balustrades. Where his shadow touched the floor, hands pressed from beneath as if the dead still wanted in.
His eyes opened. They were coins minted in hell. Souls whirled behind him like a storm of faces—swords, shields, spears made out of human refusal, grinding together into a sound that wasn't sound at all.
"You silenced my spawn," he said, as if complimenting a neat piece of embroidery. "Come then, little living thing. Inherit despair."
The air cracked. A field of AOE soul-blasts rolled outward; the first row of pillars screamed and turned to dust. Spectral shields latched together into a wall thick as a lie told by a city. The Lord descended the dais one step at a time, and each step wrote a new rule into the room.
Rin did not answer with a speech. He let his aura fill the hall instead, the way the tide answers the moon—quiet and absolute. The dead-weapons hesitated; the storm stuttered.
He slid one foot back. The blade tilted, winter humming along its edge.
"Good," the Necromancer Lord said, and the word sounded hungry. "Don't die quickly."
They moved at the same time.
Codex Record — The Frozen Spire (World Relic)
Classification: Dimensional Anchor / Dungeon Bastion
Affinity: Void-Sealed Frost / Spatial Binding
Location: Northern Range, [REDACTED] Sector
---
Description:
The Frozen Spire is a colossal citadel carved of obsidian-black stone and eternal ice, forged atop the very scar where countless Void Beasts once sought to break into the mortal plane. Towering higher than mountains, its structure refracts both mana and light, making the air shimmer with perpetual auroras.
At its heart lies the Spatial Redirector, an ancient alchemical engine created during the First Rift Wars. Instead of allowing new gates to open across the continent, the Redirector forcibly drags all void-tides to this single prison. Every rift, no matter where it tries to bloom, is anchored here—trapped inside the Spire's field.
---
Function:
Trial Bastion: Serves as the guild's universal elimination ground, filtering weak aspirants through endless spawns.
Dimensional Anchor: Forces all minor rifts to converge within the Spire's core chamber.
Living Dungeon: The Redirector itself fuels an eternal dungeon ecosystem—its monsters are fragments of Void souls recycled infinitely.
---
Historical Note:
The Frozen Spire was raised over three centuries ago, during the fall of the Northern Front. Millions perished, their souls crystallized into the walls themselves. It is said when the wind cuts across its towers, one can still hear the screams of those who fell.
The Spire has since become a symbol of both hope and despair: hope, because it contains the Void; despair, because it reminds humanity that the invasion was never truly defeated—only chained.
---
Danger Class:
☠☠☠☠ (S-Class+)
"Here lies the lock upon eternity's hunger. Should the Spire fall, the world follows."