The results board still glowed overhead, Rin's name etched at the very top. Whispers rippled like a tide—some reverent, some fearful, some envious enough to burn.
But Rin didn't stay to drink in their noise.
He stepped down from the stage, each footfall echoing like it carried weight beyond his years. His aura leaked not in a wave, not in a burst, but in a steady pressure that filled the hall like falling snow. Cadets parted instinctively, creating a path before him without realizing they had moved.
No glare. No words. Only silence trailing in his wake.
The supervisors tried to regain control of the room, barking orders, but their voices died thin against the pressure of his presence. Even the bribed noble, half-conscious from ejection, twitched as if Rin's shadow alone reminded him of what true power looked like.
Rin adjusted his glasses, the faintest gesture, and continued.
When the heavy doors of the Spire swung open, the outside air struck him—brisk, alive with flashing cameras and murmuring crowds. They, too, went silent as his aura spilled out into the plaza. Not crushing, not hostile—simply undeniable.
The Phantom Eclipse sat at the curb like a beast leashed in patience, black finish drinking in the neon around it. Its engine stirred the moment Rin came near, a low growl rolling through the ground.
He opened the door without hurry.
Behind him, Hyun-woo caught up, grinning nervously but matching his stride. Jae-seok lingered at the edge, silent as always, before slipping away toward the waiting car of his own family.
Rin slid into the driver's seat, his hand falling on the wheel. For a heartbeat, the city lights reflected across his glasses—cold, sharp, unreachable.
The engine roared alive.
And as the Phantom Eclipse glided into the night, no one dared to speak until its tail-lights had vanished from sight—leaving only the chill in the air, the memory of presence, and the thought on every tongue but none daring to voice aloud:
"That wasn't just a cadet. That was something else."
The plaza outside the Obsidian Spire seethed with noise. Reporters shoved microphones into each other's ribs, drones hovered overhead, and holo-screens replayed his test results on endless loops.
"Seo Rin, what do you say to accusations of enhancement drugs?"
"Is it true your father was Seo Joon—the Blade that Defied the Void?"
"How does it feel to set an all-time record at seventeen?!"
The noise scraped against itself, too frantic to be called human.
Rin descended from the Phantom Eclipse without slowing. His coat settled against him like it had been ironed into place, his glasses catching the neon of camera flashes without ever reflecting his eyes. For a heartbeat, the crowd pressed closer—until his aura stirred.
It was not an attack, only presence. Heavy. Cold. Like snow falling on the inside of their ribs. The plaza hushed in a ripple, microphones lowering in spite of themselves.
He walked through them without a word.
---
Inside, staff directed him to an elevator marked with gold runes.
"This floor is yours, Mr. Seo," one attendant said with an awkward bow. "As per Guild decree—all cadets ranked within the top ten receive a residence within headquarters. Yours… is the entire level."
The doors parted.
The suite was less a room and more a stronghold in glass and steel. The entrance opened into a private lobby with dark wood floors, floating light-strips curving like constellations overhead. A central lounge stretched wide, couches circling a fire-pit whose flames shifted color according to mood. One wall was entirely transparent, opening to the skyline—a thousand city lights bowing before him like subjects.
To the left: a study, lined with floating shelves and a desk that seemed carved from obsidian itself. To the right: a sparring chamber, wards built into every tile, the air humming faintly with restraint fields. Beyond, private gym, meditation chamber, even a hot-spring pool fed by mana-heated water.
The crown jewel was the military-grade residence core—a sealed chamber capable of withstanding S-rank domain collapses. Every cadet had quarters. Only the ten were given fortresses.
Rin's expression did not flicker. But for a moment, his fingers brushed the glass wall, the city sprawled beneath him like a chessboard waiting for its next move.
"Feels like chains dressed as privilege," the Codex muttered in his mind.
Rin turned from the window. "Chains break. So do floors."
The suite hummed softly in reply, as if it already belonged to him.
---
And then → the summons arrives from the Guildmaster.
He did not sit. The call arrived before the air could cool.
Report to the Guildmaster. Alone.
He went.
---
The office was glass and shadow. A desk like a slab. Two doors flanking the back wall. The Guildmaster stood before the window with his hands folded behind him, a man built like a command: tall, squared, a presence that had bullied battlefields into listening.
"Seo Rin," he said without turning. "Congratulations on your… spectacle."
Rin's gaze skimmed the room once. Two breaths. "You hid rats in an office."
The Guildmaster's smile didn't reach his eyes. "Paranoia ill becomes a boy."
The doors blew inward.
Four assassins came from the left, two from the right, one dropping from the ceiling. Short blades, no warning, no speech—the kind of men who only existed when you were already bleeding.
Rin stepped, not back but through. A knee brushed a carpet seam—Against the Grain—and his blade was where an ankle would have been, not where it was. Cut. Pivot. Silence. He never raised his voice; the room carried the sound for him—steel on bone, air parting, a wet punctuation and then nothing at all.
They fell in neat pieces. The blood ran toward the desk and did not pool.
Sigils woke beneath the rug in a ring of red light.
"Now," the Guildmaster said, delighted, "we are alone."
The circle lifted with the room, and then the room was gone. They dropped into a place built of fracture and reflection: a ruined nave of black glass pillars and riven flagstones hanging over a sky of furnace-red and glacier-white. Wind carried cinders and snow in the same breath. Somewhere far below, something like a river screamed.
The Guildmaster turned at last. He wore a faint smile and drew his sword. It came free with the hunger of old fire.
"Mythic-grade," he said lightly. "Cinder Regent."
Rin drew nothing extra. He only eased his grip on the ??? Blade, frost whispering along the edge like a breath taken in winter.
No domain. No spells.
Steel first.
---
They met in the center aisle. The first blow was not a blow but a question: where do you break? The Guildmaster's answer was pressure—weight through the wrists, shoulder through the cut, hips locking the floor to the swing. Rin's reply was refusal. His blade slid a half-inch, caught, and turned the weight so it fell past him, not on him. He returned not with force but with inevitability—an angle that opened and closed in the same heartbeat.
Sparks braided into flowers. A pillar sheared. The floor stuttered under their feet.
The Guildmaster's footwork was the map of a man who had won too long: efficient, cruel, economical. Rin's was the grammar of a blade that moved first in the mind and only then in the world. Twice the Guildmaster aimed at where Rin stood; twice Rin occupied the future instead.
"Good," the Guildmaster said, eyes bright. He stepped in, shoulder-checking the air, and the air yielded as if it knew him. His cut came down like a sentence. Rin caught it, wrists soft, let it glance—Judgment of Silence—and the boom that should have cracked the nave died to a felt thud. Their faces were inches apart. Neither was breathing hard.
They broke.
The next exchange shattered three pillars and wrote a diagonal canyon across the floor. The one after carved a stairway of cuts into the open air; they climbed it without looking, met at the apex, and traded promises no paper could hold. When they landed, the shock knocked snow and embers from the broken sky.
The Guildmaster laughed softly. "Enough grace."
He lifted his left hand. Fire answered like a dog to its name.
---
Flame bled from the seams of the world.
A dome of heat rose around him, a Sovereign Pyre that turned the air into a screaming thing. He stepped, and a phoenix unfurled from the edge of his blade—black core, red mantle—its wings casting a city's worth of heat in a single sweep. It wheeled and dove.
Rin set his heel. Frost ran in a hairline crack that flashed outward in a web. Frozen Edge breathed, and a wall tore itself from the floor—faceted like crystal, layered like scales. The phoenix struck and split. The wall steamed, broke, and knit as quickly as it died.
He moved and the ground obliged. Ramps of ice shouldered him into the air. A twist of his wrist and spears grew like winter wheat; they fell in a storm that found gaps between flames like a river finds a path around stone.
The phoenix banked. Rin met it with a dragon.
Frozen Fang Dragon tore free of the frost-field, a luminous arc of jagged power that coiled around the fire-bird and crushed until both beasts detonated in a storm of ash and diamond. The shock peeled a curtain of glass from a distant wall and sent it singing into the abyss.
The Guildmaster smiled without warmth. "You rate S. Barely."
He didn't wait for the echo of his contempt. He stepped—and a chain of black suns snapped into existence beneath his feet, each one an anchor of gravity and hate. He leapt between them as if stairs, blade scything. The edge dragged black flame like a comet tail and wrote the first cut of a cage around Rin.
Rin's answer was not bigger. It was nearer. Against the Grain again—cut not at the fire but at the seam the fire would open. The cage came apart before it closed. He slid on air, toes brushing a shard of ice he had placed in the only place they could have belonged, and came down shoulder-to-shoulder with the Guildmaster, blade moving in a line so small it felt like an insult.
The Guildmaster's vambrace cracked. He blinked. So you are not a rumor.
He stopped pretending to breathe.
---
The pill was a bead of night. He bit it, and his veins turned ultraviolet.
Corruption crawled up his neck in a lattice of sick light. Fire went black at the edges, then wholly black, the heat changing flavor from burn to erasure. The world around him began to peel—colors bowed, lines warped, distance wobbled like a drunk thing.
Rin moved to step and discovered the step had moved. The Guildmaster blurred. A backhand of flame slammed him end over end into a pillar. Stone exploded. An instant later the man was already there, knee rising, strike following, blade hammering. Rin blocked, once, twice—on the third he slid and let the hit take him, turned with it, and bled the force into a roll that sheared the floor like ice being planed.
Speed doubled. Strength multiplied. Technique fattened into brutality. Rin's coat smoked. The edge of his blade glowed where black fire kissed it and didn't die.
The Guildmaster's barrier woke—a roiling globe of heat that bent what it touched. He stepped behind it and the world within it jittered as if uneager to exist.
Rin's eyes narrowed.
A cut like a breath: One-Point Severance. He laid the edge on nothing in particular—only on the weakest point of the barrier's pattern, the place the heat braided wrong because it was strong everywhere else. The skin of fire clouded white. Cracked. Rin pushed frost into the crack. The globe ossified in plates. The Guildmaster snarled and blew it apart.
"You're done," he said, and the voice wasn't his only.
Flame chased Rin. Black spears fell like a rain of hateful stars. The floor went to glass and then to gas. His arm sang with every parry. Heat got under the skin and scratched at his bones.
He let it.
Then he stopped letting it.
"Frost Monarch," he whispered, and the world knelt.
---
The temperature fell like a guillotine.
Breath fogged and froze in the same instant. The cinders in the air hushed, turned to snow, and fell in a slow, stunned drift. Ice did not grow; it arrived—a cathedral raised in a heartbeat, columns hammering themselves up, buttresses pinning the broken sky to the ground. Runes shivered awake along the floor and climbed the walls like winter ivy.
The Guildmaster's next step cracked. His next two burned a trench through a lake that hadn't been there a second before.
He roared and punched, and a city's worth of black fire answered. It came on like the front of a storm—rolling, shouldering, bending pillars as it passed. Rin lifted his blade and swept left to right; an arc of ice the height of a street rose into a tsunami of frost and met the storm chest-on. The crash cut the sound out of the world. When it returned, sleet rattled in sheets.
Then it went to hands.
The Guildmaster's fists shed black plumes with every twitch. His sword cut voids into the air; the edges of those voids smoked. Rin met him with blades and walls and a geometry of movement that used the world like an instrument—he rode a rail of ice, dropped, slid under a swing that erased a yard of stone, stood, cut, stepped, cut—his blade writing a line only he could see.
The man fought like a disaster. Rin fought like a verdict.
Black fire ate a wall to his right; he let it. The man followed through, wild, greedy. Rin gave ground for the first time, then Judgment of Silence again, and the shock that should have crushed his ribs fell asleep around him. He put two inches of steel into the man's forearm at the quietest angle possible and froze from inside out. The arm shattered from elbow to palm like glass. Flame regrew it in a blink.
"Persistent," the Guildmaster hissed, the void pill chewing voice into a chorus.
"Predictable," Rin said, and it was true now that the corruption was steering.
The man powered through anyway. Power will do that.
Until it doesn't.
He raised his sword for a cut that had cleaved leaders and monsters and walls and history, and Rin—calm, cold—let the blade lower a fraction, breath slide out, eyes half-close.
The world stopped trying to move.
Chrono-Frost Severance.
Flame stilled in the air like stained glass. Snow hung, every flake a polished coin. The ripples in the Guildmaster's coat froze as if painted. Sound fell off a cliff and never hit the ground.
Rin walked forward. He didn't hurry; there was nowhere for the moment to go. He looked at the man's chest, at the lines of corruption sinking into the heart like bad roots. He set the edge exactly once where all the lines met, then tilted the blade and drew it through cleanly, gently.
He stepped behind him and watched the color in the man's eyes, stopped mid-rage, mid-certainty.
Time remembered itself.
A white line opened along the Guildmaster's sternum. Frost bloomed out of it as if the wound had been waiting years to breathe. Black fire went out the way a candle does when you put the lid on gently. He tried to turn. He didn't make it halfway. Then he cracked—quietly, almost politely—into a thousand pieces that became snow before they hit the floor.
Then the last words of Kang Hyeon-rok was that "You look like the reflection of the former guild master , your father ". After his last words he crumbled into small ice crystals like ashes from the flames
For a breath there was nothing, and then the dimension exhaled. The circle underfoot flickered. The ruined nave canted. Glass fell in long, silver sheets.
Rin stood in the middle of it, blade low, aura rising like a weather front. The frost he'd called did not retreat; it settled—into the pillars, the floor, the memory of the air. His presence pressed outward, filling the space the way winter fills a field: not loud, not savage, simply absolute.
He let the aura sit there a long moment, the weight of it a statement the world could hear even without ears.
Then he sheathed the blade and walked out as the magic circle died and the office remembered itself around him—desk unscarred, windows clean, the carpet still hiding the faintest scent of iron.
Outside the door, the corridor was empty.
He adjusted his cuffs. His breathing never spiked.
"Trial over," the Codex murmured, dry as paper. "A pity he mistook a pill for a path."
Rin didn't answer. He didn't need to. The frost that clung to the window frames did it for him, glittering like a crown no one had the right to wear.
He left without a backward look, and the building's bones seemed to notice—quieting the way a forest does when something larger moves through it.