The dimension exploded into chaos the moment their weapons met.
Joon had become a corrupt berserker. His blade came down like a falling mountain, the impact cratering the earth and sending jagged cracks racing outward. Dust and stone erupted skyward, but before the cloud could settle, Rin's sword cut through the haze, shrieking against Dominion with a scream of sparks.
Each clash was a calamity. Shockwaves hurled rubble across the battlefield, stone pillars shattered like glass, and the ground itself groaned under the relentless exchange. Joon's strikes were titanic—every swing gouged trenches into the earth, tore chunks of masonry from the walls, and split the very air around them.
But Rin met that raw power with terrifying precision. Dominion carved through space with merciless bursts of corrupted mana, every slash tearing violet scars across the battlefield. Walls crumbled, trees split, and the sky itself seemed to darken beneath Joon's wrath. Yet Rin answered with ice.
Joon roared, charging forward with inhuman speed for a beast his size. His weapon crashed down again and again, each blow shaking the ruins like thunder. Rin's counters were sharper, faster—his blade unleashed arcs of annihilation, ice crescents that carved through Joon's onslaught and obliterated everything caught in their path. Where Rin's blade passed, the ground froze solid, and debris crystallized midair before shattering.
The frost spread from him like a plague, freezing everything within reach—stone, structures, even the air itself locked in glassy crystal. But Joon simply phased through it, sending the soon-to-be-frozen parts of his body into another dimension before the frost could touch him.
They battled like gods of destruction. The earth was reduced to a wasteland of ice craters and shattered stone. Every time Joon was driven back, his corrupted vitality pulled him forward again, roaring defiance. Every time Rin struck, the world itself seemed to recoil, as if reality could barely endure the cold nature of his blade.
By the time their blades slowed, the dimension was unrecognizable—reduced to a field of ruin, carved by two forces too immense for the mortal world to contain.
And deep inside, even through the haze of corruption, a whisper stirred in Joon's heart. He was tired—tired of battling his son.
Moonlight fractured upon the battlefield as two forces converged—one a sovereign of frozen storms, the other a corrupted colossus steeped in malice.
Rin moved with chilling elegance, his matured form exuding icy authority. With a whisper, his Transcendent Release—Eternal Winter Sovereign ignited. The air crystallized, his sword radiating frost that spiraled outward into glaciers that unfurled like the wings of a frozen god. The land itself groaned beneath the weight of his power—only to warp and distort as Seo Joon twisted reality to block it.
Rin's composure remained unbroken. The edge of his blade—the ??? Blade—gleamed in the gloom, each movement birthing a storm of ice petals. They rose in monolithic arcs, each shard a glinting blade poised to fall like a frozen hail of judgment.
At their center stood Seo Joon. Corrupted. Monstrous. His grotesque frame pulsed with dimensional energy, flesh and mana fused into a warped vessel. Even the air seemed to buckle around him, reality bending to the cruel satisfaction burning in his gaze.
---
Blades ignited the night as Rin struck, winds howling with his frozen storm. Ice shards speared upward, carving the earth into crystalline pillars that shattered into avalanches of glittering shards.
Seo Joon roared, swinging his weapon with mountain-splitting force. A wave of twisted mana radiated outward, crushing ice and landscape alike. The frozen pillars fractured, glaciers collapsing into splintered debris.
But Rin unleashed his silent storm. Petals of ice erupted in cascades, razors slicing through the suspended battlefield. Hundreds of frozen blades tore the air apart, scattering like deadly butterflies in flight.
Seo Joon staggered, slash-marks burning across his corrupted armor. Yet still he advanced, a titan's defiance roaring from his chest. His weapon swept in a brutal arc—splitting not only the ground but the very stars above, the heavens cleaving into two.
Rin blurred aside at overwhelming speed. His blade plunged into the earth, and the world froze. The battlefield became an ocean of ice, tempests erupting from fissures, towering geysers of frost clawing at the sky.
Enraged, Seo Joon unleashed a barrage of dimensional slashes, each one a guillotine meant to bisect Rin where he stood. The sky was torn ragged—but Rin endured, weaving through destruction, unbroken.
Seo Joon closed the distance. Blows rained down with the weight of mountains, each strike grabbing, hurling, teleporting, and slamming Rin against the earth. The colossus pressed harder, until at last he seized an opening—his blade carving a dimensional slash at point-blank range.
Rin had no choice.
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The battlefield darkened as if the world itself recoiled. Behind Rin, mana erupted—dense, suffocating, and terrible. At first, skeletal ribs clawed into existence, glowing with an otherworldly frost. Then, layer upon layer, it grew until the towering frame of an Ice-forged Monarch loomed over the ruined land.
It was a god wrought of glacial flame, a warrior avatar clad in crimson-tinted frost. Its eyes burned with Rin's ruthless clarity, reflecting judgment inevitable. Plates of jagged ice wrapped its form, armor forged from the marrow of winter itself—grace and horror fused into a single visage.
In one hand, it bore a Spirit Shield, shimmering like liquid aurora, deflecting the weight of worlds. In the other, it raised the ??? Blade, now manifested as a spectral weapon sharper than reality itself. Its essence carried the silent promise of eternal seal. Each sweep unleashed avalanches, torrents of frost that froze stone, steel, and soul alike.
The Monarch's aura swallowed the battlefield in freezing glow. The sky dulled into dusk, as if the sun itself had been entombed in ice. Seo Joon faltered, the scriptwriter's corruption inside him shuddering at the presence before it—not an S-rank, but something transcendent, a god of vengeance manifested in mortal flesh.
And at its core stood Rin. Calm. Silent. Unyielding. His Monarch avatar was not defense, nor simple attack—it was inevitability itself, the fusion of his will and the eternal edge of the ??? Blade: unstoppable, eternal.
Seo Joon raised Dominion, and the void quaked. Space folded, ruptured, and then vomited impossible masses into the battlefield.
First came a mountain—no, not just a mountain, but a fragment of a continent torn from some forgotten world. Its summit scraped the heavens, ridges bristling with jagged stone that shrieked as they tore against the broken sky. It fell like a guillotine meant for gods.
Rin's eyes narrowed. He swung the ??? Blade once.
A wave of frost surged outward, not simply freezing the rock, but robbing it of kinetic energy itself. The heat in its atoms, the momentum of its fall, even the vibration of its molecules—all bled away into the void. In an instant, the mountain was no longer matter in motion but a corpse of stone, crystallized mid-collapse. One more swing, and it shattered, scattering into galaxies of frozen dust that glittered like shattered constellations.
But Seo Joon was relentless.
He tore a moon into existence, its cratered face glowering with borrowed light. Its mass warped the battlefield with tidal force, the ground beneath Rin fracturing as gravity itself bowed.
Rin stamped his blade into the earth. Frost erupted—not as simple ice, but as an inverse gravitic lattice. His cold stripped away thermal energy until atoms slowed to near stillness, creating a crystalline matrix so dense it pushed back against the moon's pull. The lunar mass halted mid-fall, cracks spreading across its surface as the frost dug deeper. A final swing severed it, and the moon splintered into billions of frozen shards that fell like meteors, only to dissolve into pale mist before reaching him.
Still Seo Joon continued.
He summoned a black sea from another plane, its waters sloshing with phosphorescent nightmares. Leviathans writhed within it, their scales reflecting dim stars. The flood roared forward, a tide meant to drown the world.
Rin exhaled, his breath visible even in the vacuum. He swung his blade in a rising arc, and the ocean froze in a heartbeat. The creatures inside became jagged sculptures, their final thrashes immortalized in crystal. The entire sea stood as a wall of glass, then fractured and collapsed, glittering into silence.
Seo Joon smirked behind his mask and pulled deeper. This time, he summoned a sun.
It wasn't the true star, but a copy—dense, furious, a ball of plasma that seared the void in gold and white. Its corona lashed outward, arcs of stellar fire boiling the fractured dimension, solar winds flaying the battlefield with radiation.
Rin's expression sharpened. His blade gleamed with impossible cold. He swung—and ice devoured fire.
The frost consumed photons themselves, stripping the light of its heat, binding plasma into a crystalline lattice. To the watching S-rankers, it looked as though he had frozen the concept of flame, locking nuclear fusion into stillness. The sun turned into a globe of frozen light, fissures of blue-white crawling across its surface. With another strike, it shattered into an aurora, ribbons of frozen plasma spiraling away like slain serpents.
And still it was not enough.
Seo Joon carved once more, and from the rift tumbled a black hole. Not vast—no larger than a mountain—but its presence bent the battlefield. Stars in the dungeon's crafted sky twisted around it, light curving into rings. Gravity screamed. The battlefield stretched toward annihilation.
Rin slammed his blade into the ground, pouring all of himself into a single act. He froze entropy. The spin of particles, the heat of accretion, the devouring spiral of spacetime—all were clamped beneath the weight of absolute zero. The black hole solidified, its event horizon locked in frost like a sphere of obsidian glass. For the first time in history, the devourer of worlds became prey, sealed and shattered into nothing.
Their clash crescendoed.
Avatar against avatar, father against son, frost against void. Each time Dominion fell, reality itself bent or broke. Each time ??? Blade rose, existence remembered the stillness of winter and was forced to obey.
They fought until the dimension itself began to unravel.
It started as hairline cracks in the sky, threads of light bleeding like veins. Then the ground buckled, folded in on itself, and vanished. Stars flickered and died as if someone had extinguished them by hand. The dungeon's walls peeled away to reveal only vacuum, endless and suffocating.
And still they clashed.
Rin's Frost Sovereign avatar slammed its blade into Joon's corrupted form, each impact sending quakes that split the void wider. Seo Joon countered with dimensional cleaves that erased space wholesale, creating gouges of nothingness that Rin only barely sealed with frost.
Finally, Rin's blade carved across Joon's chest, slicing through body and dimension alike. His father's form fragmented, breaking into shards of light and blood. For a heartbeat, it seemed finished.
But even in pieces, Seo Joon refused to vanish.
From droplets of blood, from torn fragments of flesh, regeneration began. Cells unfolded, multiplied, reformed. Like a malignancy written into the code of creation itself, he clawed his way back into being.
Rin staggered, his breath ragged. Oxygen no longer existed in the vacuum, and his Frost Sovereign avatar cracked, fading at the edges.
Then the ??? Blade pulsed.
Its cry echoed without sound, reverberating straight through Rin's soul. The avatar collapsed, frostlight spiraling inward, funneling not outward but into Rin's chest.
"If the void won't let you breathe," the blade whispered, "then I will be your breath. If your heart falters, then I will beat as your heart."
The frozen power threaded through his veins, sealing his wounds, sustaining his body. His pulse steadied—unnatural, eternal, but alive.
And Rin, his heart now bound to the blade itself, stood once more to face the abomination his father had become.
---
Rin, seeing that Seo Joon was regenerating even from the slightest blood cell and gradually adapting to his power, decided to put his father out of his misery.
The setting shifted back to the S-rank dungeon.
The world itself split open as Rin unleashed his attack. From the heavens, a column of frozen brilliance roared downward—an apocalyptic spear of light wrapped in spiraling rings of frost. The air screamed as the temperature collapsed, shockwaves tearing across the land.
Where the pillar touched, the battlefield shattered. Earth froze mid-eruption, mountains of ice rising only to fracture and collapse under their own impossible weight. The once-scorched ruins became a glacial crater, ice racing outward in rings, freezing rivers of blood and shards of stone into a single, crystalline wasteland.
The beam did not stop. It consumed everything—trees reduced to glass, towers of frost piercing upward before shattering, the very clouds above spiraling into frozen ribbons. Reality itself seemed buried beneath a storm that would never end.
---
Caught in the heart of the maelstrom, Berserk Seo Joon roared—a sound swallowed by the avalanche of ice. His titanic body strained, each step cracking under the weight of encroaching frost. The storm swallowed him whole, encasing his flesh in jagged layers, layer after layer of ice climbing over his form.
He swung, he thrashed, he resisted—but his colossal frame was drowned in the glacial torrent. His roars turned into muffled echoes as his limbs froze, his monstrous face etched in crimson fury beneath the encroaching white.
Noticing that Seo Joon was resisting, Rin proceeded to slice the cause of Seo Joon's rebirth with Cause Severance, halting the cycle.
The frozen storm reached its peak, and with a deafening crack, Seo Joon's body began to fracture. First his arms, then his chest, then even his furious gaze—splintering apart like glass under unbearable cold. Shards of him scattered into the void, fragments of a god reduced to dust on the icy wind.
---
When the light of the storm finally dimmed, silence reigned. The battlefield no longer resembled a land of men—it was a frozen graveyard, a canyon of ice stretching farther than sight. A crater smoldered at the center, not with fire, but with a ghostly frost, the ground still cracking as it fought to hold the impossible cold.
Seo Joon was no more—faded, erased, his essence dissolved into the storm. What remained was not his body, but only the memory of his defiance, frozen into the very glacier that marked his end.
The S-rank squad, hardened warriors who had faced calamities that would break ordinary men, could only stare. Their breaths caught in their throats as the pillar of frozen light erupted skyward, spirals of glacial power shredding clouds and freezing the very winds that carried them.
One warrior shielded his eyes with trembling hands, whispering, "This… this isn't human."
Hyun-woo replied with a faint smile, "No. He's better than human."
Another staggered back as the shockwave hit them, the ground quaking beneath their boots, frost racing across stone and soil toward their feet. Their armor groaned under the cold, as if even steel feared the storm.
The healer of the squad sank to her knees, eyes wide with horror. If we were any closer, she thought, watching the mountains collapse into frozen ruin, …we'd already be dead.
Even the commander, who had stood against dragons, leviathans, and abyssal horrors, felt his throat tighten. He clenched his jaw, but his eyes betrayed him—filled not with anger or resolve, but reverence and dread.
"So this," he muttered under his breath, "is what it means to transcend an S-rank…"
As the light dimmed and the battlefield was revealed—a wasteland of shattered glaciers and a void where Berserker had once stood—the squad remained motionless. None cheered. None dared speak.
They had witnessed not victory, but a force that could erase armies, nations, perhaps even the world itself.
And in that silence, the unspoken truth bound them all together:
Rin was no longer one of them.
He had become something far greater—and far more terrifying. Or so they thought, ignorant of what was coming.
---
The last thing Rin remembered was the roar of collapsing dimensions, the cold fury of his own power clawing at his body, and the unbearable silence of the void. His vision blurred, his chest caving beneath exhaustion, until even the heartbeat of his blade faded into nothing.
And then—darkness.
When his eyes fluttered open, he was no longer standing on broken glaciers or void-stricken stone. He was lying on soft grass, cool and damp beneath his palms. Sunlight filtered through a canopy of towering trees, golden rays dancing between emerald leaves. The air was crisp, alive with birdsong and the gentle whisper of a flowing stream nearby.
For a moment, he could only breathe—slow, unsteady breaths as though relearning the act itself. The icy weight of battle had vanished, replaced by the fragrance of wildflowers and moss. The world seemed impossibly serene, as if mocking the devastation he had unleashed.
Rin sat up slowly, his body trembling, his cloak heavy with fatigue. He gazed around in disbelief—the forest stretched endlessly, its beauty unmarred, untouched by the violence he had left behind. Shafts of light painted the mist with colors too soft for war, too delicate for a man drenched in blood and frost.
His voice broke the silence, hoarse but steady:
"Where… am I?"
The question drifted into the forest, unanswered but lingering—as though the trees themselves listened, as though the world waited for him to discover the truth.
📜 Codex Record: Chapter 24 – Frost Against the Berserker
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Subject: Seo Joon, the Masked Calamity
Titles:
The Masked Calamity
Father of Rin
Voidborn Warlord
The Man Who Split Space
Weapon: Dominion — a Transcendent Blade that amplifies spatial authority. Unlike ego blades, Dominion possesses no consciousness. Instead, it acts as a flawless prism, fusing Joon's martial arts with raw dimensional distortion.
Core Attribute: Spatial Sovereignty
Joon doesn't merely manipulate space — he owns it. Every inch of battlefield becomes his to twist, fold, erase, or weaponize.
Corruption State: Berserker Form
Triggered by the Scriptwriter's infection.
Strengthens destructive output while crippling higher reasoning.
Loses complex constructs (dimensional crafting, long-term traps) but gains unstoppable ferocity, regeneration, and instinct-driven slaughter.
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⚔️ Abilities & Techniques
Spatial Dominion
Can compress, expand, fold, and shatter space at will.
His blade strikes are not swings of steel but equations of absence—lines where reality ceases to exist.
Dimensional Summoning
(Manifestations during Chapter 24 battle)
Falling Mountain: Ripped a continent-fragment into the battlefield.
Borrowed Moon: Summoned a lunar mass, exerting gravitational tides strong enough to fracture the earth.
Drowned World: Flooded the battlefield with an alien ocean, leviathans thrashing within.
False Sun: A forged plasma star, locked in nuclear fusion.
Bound Singularity: A small but active black hole, capable of devouring the dungeon's crafted heavens.
Each of these constructs was countered by Rin's Frost Monarch techniques, freezing not merely objects, but the physics that governed them.
Dimensional Erasure
Point-blank dimensional cleaves capable of deleting not only matter, but the record of its existence.
Used as close-quarters finishers during the clash with Rin's avatar.
Regeneration Beyond Reason
Even fragments of blood carried his entire form's blueprint.
Reconstructed from the cellular level, defying conventional death.
Could not be halted except by Cause Severance.
Corrupted Berserk:
Amplified regeneration speed.
Loss of human restraint: every blow was a mountain-breaker, every roar a storm.
Movements unpredictable, raw instinct replacing refined sword techniques.
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🧊 Opposition: Seo Rin, the Frost Sovereign
Weapon: The ??? Blade (identity withheld).
Form : Frost Monarch's Avatar / Frost Monarch Skeletal armor — skeletal frame of living ice, expanding into full sovereign form.
Key Countermeasures Used:
Freezing kinetic energy (nullifying the mountain's fall).
Constructing inverse gravitic frost lattice (countering lunar mass).
Atomic stillness (freezing plasma fusion of the False Sun).
Entropic stasis (locking black hole's event horizon).
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📖 Narrative Notes
Seo Joon (Berserker State): Displayed the raw destructive capacity of a world-ending calamity. Yet corruption stripped him of precision—turning a sovereign into a beast.
Seo Rin: For the first time, utilized Frost Monarch's full sovereign armor. His blade didn't just cut matter—it challenged concepts. Ice was no longer an element, but a law.
Final Exchange:
Rin unleashed Cause Severance, slicing through the root of Joon's corrupted rebirth.
Joon fragmented into ice-bound shards, scattered into void.
The dungeon collapsed, leaving only silence and awe in the S-rankers who witnessed it.
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🩸 Codex Closing Line
> "And thus, the father who split worlds, and the son who froze them, tore a dimension apart. But blood, no matter how corrupted, refuses to vanish so easily."