One.
The Velvet Eclipse fell.
Crimson moonlight broke like a sea of thorns, raining razors and fear across the garden of silk. The Codex rose in Rin's mind like a wall of night—illusions struck it and died. The pain, however, was real.
He cut—one smooth arc—and an ice dome unfurled over him, a pale cathedral of frost that rang with a thousand impacts. Vel'Sharra smiled without warmth and simply fed the sky more mana. The red wave thickened, the dome screamed, then split.
Rin met the collapse with noise of his own—Frozen Fang Dragons tore upward in packs, jaws of crystal swallowing carpets of thorns mid-fall. She answered by drinking through her roots; the floor's silk bled energy, and the dragons' bodies thinned into mist.
Her outline flickered.
She was behind him, bare foot whispering like a guillotine.
Her heel crashed into his ribs and sent him tumbling across broken pillars of glass and moonlight.
He slid, cut, and stood in the same breath.
"Eternal Winter Sovereign," he said, calm as absolution.
Cold erased sound. Absolute zero swallowed color. Vines stopped mid-coil like ideas that forgot themselves. Even her crashing moon dimmed, a red lantern trapped in permafrost.
She did not panic. The last living veins she'd left coiled around the periphery spasmed, drank, and broke—long enough to let her body fall out of the rules. When she rematerialized at Rin's blind spot, the kick this time took him like a comet.
He skidded, skates of ice blooming under his boots to bleed momentum. He stopped against his own wall, breath white, eyes brighter.
And then—
A low rumble rolled through the battlefield, like the earth itself had begun to growl. Dust lifted in thin, spiraling columns. Rin froze—not in obedience to command, but in primal fear. Every sense screamed that something unnatural was about to be born.
Cloaked in his crimson armor, the legendary monster seemed almost serene. Her eye, glowing like embers of some long-dead god, watched the world not with curiosity—but with judgment. Her mana pulsed in her other eye, an ancient rhythm of dominion. Raising a single hand, she commanded a million vines toward Rin.
The ground trembled violently. A moment later, it tore apart.
Massive, writhing roots erupted from the soil, thick as towers and blackened with age. Vines—not normal trees, but monstrous, sentient things—sprouted in seconds, twisting and curling like serpents, each one groaning as it reached toward the heavens. Branches snapped outward, shattering stone, splitting mountainsides. Leaves as wide as shields rustled with ominous breath. The forest wasn't growing—it was invading.
Rin, flying in mid-air, swung his blade to create an ice wall to block while simultaneously swinging at his back so he could crash into his ice, stopping his motion. By the time he stood up, the entire battlefield was covered in vines. Seeing the damage he had taken from a mere Scripted monster—when his true goal was to fight Void—he got serious.
Rin removed the power restriction bracelet and dropped it into the forest, which exploded in a shockwave of raw energy, the result of what it had been suppressing. Without allowing the succubus to enjoy her shock, he started moving quickly on the vines with ice beneath his feet, until he became a blur of light—traceable only by the frozen trail left behind.
The succubus, seeing this coming, acted as if she was scared and then smirked at the last moment, which threw Rin off.
And just like that, the earth trembled as the sky itself seemed to shift with the immense power being summoned. From the dense forest of trees around him, a great surge of mana erupted, twisting the very roots of the land. A deep, resounding crack split the air, and from the shattered earth rose a towering figure—massive, like a living mountain of wood.
The succubus's gaze was steady, unwavering, as she called forth her creation. The Wood Golem stood before him now, an imposing colossus of gnarled branches and thick, twisting trunks that formed into a humanoid shape. Its eyes, made of darkened bark, glinted with an eerie sentience as the creature took its first heavy step. The ground buckled beneath its weight, its wooden fingers scraping against the heavens as if the very sky were beneath its command.
The golem's body was a canvas of nature's fury and beauty—its chest and limbs formed from sprawling tree roots, knotted and sinewy, wrapping around each other in an intricate dance of raw power. Its face, rough and weathered like the bark of the oldest trees, held no expression, but in its silent gaze there was a promise of destruction to anyone foolish enough to challenge it. It towered above the battlefield like a living fortress, a shield of nature's will, ready to crush anything in its path.
The succubus's mana resonated with the golem's essence, and though it was a mere construct of wood, it felt as though it were alive—alive with the pulse of the earth itself. The golem's wooden fingers clenched into fists the size of small mountains, and with a single, thunderous motion, it swiped the ground. Trees were uprooted, boulders crushed, and the landscape itself seemed to bend under its weight. But through it all, there was a strange serenity—like the ancient will of nature had come alive to protect its master.
As the battle raged, the Wood Golem did not rush. It moved with the measured precision of an ancient guardian, every step deliberate, every strike calculated. It was not the speed of its movements that made it a force of nature—it was the certainty in its every action, the unyielding resolve of the forest that had given it life.
The golem was not a mere tool of war; it was an extension of the succubus's own will, her connection to the earth and the trees, her belief in life and violence. And as it stood tall, its great form casting a long shadow over the battlefield, the world seemed to pause in quiet acknowledgment of the monumental power it contained.
For those who faced the Wood Golem, there would be no escape, no place to hide. Its roots ran deep, its reach was vast, and its strength unbreakable. Like the trees themselves, it would endure.
However, Rin wasn't a normal person.
He continued to clash blades with the succubus while the golem attacked, which annoyed him. Since he couldn't focus on both, he decided in his heart to erase the golem. He took his stance.
The temperature plummeted, and the very fabric of the world seemed to bend under the weight of Rin's power returned.
From the ice, a shape began to form—majestic, powerful, an ethereal dragon of crystal-clear frost. It spiraled around him, a majestic creature born of his will and the power of the ??? Blade, its icy form coiling upwards, stretching toward the heavens.
Rin's eyes glowed with an ancient, unspoken wisdom as his sword began to shift, the blade cracking open with the force of a thousand winter storms. In an instant, the golem split apart, shattering into fragments that coalesced into a perfect, glowing pentagram of ice. The intricate pattern gleamed with a cold, blue light, pulsing as if a large amount of mana had gone unused.
"The power of ice... and the soul of ??? Blade ... unite as one," Rin whispered, the words flowing from him like a sacred incantation.
Each point of the blade flared with a brilliance that made the very air shimmer with icy energy. The ground beneath him cracked as shards of frozen earth shot upwards like jagged spears. The wind howled, a low, mournful cry as it swept through the battlefield, its edges sharp enough to cut through anything in its path.
And in that moment, Rin was no longer just a boy—he was an embodiment of winter, of storms and stillness. The ??? Blade pulsed, and the air grew thick with the sheer weight of his power, the frost creeping into every corner of the battlefield, turning the very atmosphere into a frozen wasteland.
"This is the might of the son of the boss," she declared, her voice breaking but unwavering. "This is the true power of the son of the boss," said the succubus as she passed away.
The ice dragon roared above him, a sound that rang out like a distant thunderclap, and the ice flared with energy. In that instant, Rin knew that no one would stand against him, for his power—suppressed by the bracelet—had returned, and with it, the frozen fury of the world.
The garden exhaled a last breath and died.
Vel'Sharra's body crystallized where she floated—silk, sigils, and the cruel calm in her eyes turning to a snowfall of glass. The four crescent wings shattered one by one in slow, beautiful arcs, ringing like crystal bells as they fell.
Silence held. Then the world remembered sound.
Rin lowered the blade. Frost shed from the steel in pale threads. He let the Sovereign's cold recede, but not entirely; its afterglow kept the ground honest.
Beyond the torn treeline of the silk garden, the other battlefield answered: a single cut of light far away, too clean to be an explosion, too absolute to be anything but a decision. It left a line across the sky that did not fade quickly.
Rin's eyes moved to it, unreadable. The Codex hummed like a hand on his shoulder, neither urging nor warning—only there.
He sheathed the ??? Blade. The air steamed once, then stilled.
"Next," he said softly, and stepped out of the frozen grove.
Codex Record — Vel'Sharra, the Thorn of the Velvet Moon
Classification: Scripted High Arcana Entity
Designation: Forbidden-Type Boss — Obsidian Garden
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Profile:
Vel'Sharra was not born, but written. A creation of the Scriptwriter's will, she embodies temptation weaponized and desire twisted into warfare. Draped in thorn-silk, wielding Crimson Vel, she fought not for hunger or survival, but for remembrance—every strike designed to carve herself into the memory of her opponent.
Her battlefield was never just ground and steel; it was a stage. Moonlight illusions, vines that writhed like serpents, a cursed garden where even standing still meant death—she controlled every note of the dance.
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Abilities Observed:
Moonpierce: Sword strikes that ignored armor, carving flesh and spirit alike.
Velvet Eclipse: Summoned a crimson moon whose collapse drowned battlefields in thornlight.
Crimson Caress: Burned ultimate skills into cursed reflections of themselves.
Queen's Tapestry: Terrain turned against her foes, vines binding or bleeding them depending on their movement.
Kiss of the Hollow Throne: Phase two transformation, wings severed into autonomous turrets raining magic as she dueled directly.
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Assessment:
Her illusions could have sundered entire squads; her thorns could have reduced armies to silence. Against most, her victory was inevitable. Yet against the heir of frost, her dominion broke.
Where she wove gardens, he froze them. Where she summoned moons, he birthed dragons. Where she demanded memory, he answered with inevitability.
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Codex Annotation:
> "Vel'Sharra sought to be remembered. She is. But not as a queen.
As the shadow that proved ice can silence even the loudest song."