The Incident's End
As Cheon Seong's body grew colder by the second, Hwa-young's flesh and spirit cooled right along with him.
The fourth form of the Heavenly Demon Divine Art — Black Moon · Last Radiance — the technique that burned the self to make its final moments blaze brighter than anyone else's.
One minute.
Unable to endure the dark mana any longer, hairline fractures began to spiderweb through every joint in his body.
Two minutes.
His blood, corrupted by dark mana, turned black and murky as ink. Breathing grew labored. His vision drowned in darkness.
Three minutes.
He felt the vessel that held his soul beginning to crack, felt the very essence of himself leaking out through the fissures.
That was the absolute limit of how long Cheon Seong could sustain Last Radiance.
But even as those three minutes ran out, he had only managed to overwhelm the minion — not finish it. And so, even as his lifespan bled away at a terrifying rate, Cheon Seong held the technique.
Four minutes.
His muscles began to dissolve under the dark mana. He forced himself to keep moving by turning that same dissolving mana into fuel.
Five minutes.
His vision was painted entirely black by dark mana. He moved by sound alone, and with every motion he felt his remaining life accelerate toward nothing.
And when Cheon Seong opened his eyes, he found himself adrift in a sea of absolute nothingness.
"Where… is this?"
He looked around. There was nothing. A world of pure void, empty of everything.
"Well, I can still use mana, at least. Wait — hang on. My arm…"
He couldn't get his bearings, but as he checked his condition he discovered that the left arm severed in the fight against the minion was attached again. His face went rigid.
An empty sea of nothing. An arm that should have been gone. A body that should have been a wreck of wounds, now whole.
And the technique he had used to seize the upper hand against the minion was Last Radiance — the form that burned the self to shine.
"Don't tell me this is the afterlife."
Last Radiance chewed through lifespan just to maintain for three minutes. He had held it for five against the minion. Dying in that fight would have been nothing strange at all.
A flicker of bitterness and apology crossed his face. Then Cheon Seong raked a hand through his hair and clenched his fist.
So what if he was dead?
He still couldn't afford to die. He couldn't die to something as trivial as a minion.
At the very least — at the very least — he was supposed to die only after every last enemy was dead.
"So I'm getting out of here. No matter what."
If this was the afterlife, he would escape by any means necessary and go back to everyone waiting for him.
That was when a voice spoke from behind him, and the empty world shifted into form.
Fwoooosh—
A world ablaze. The rubble of collapsed buildings. Pools of blood and the thick, cloying stench of rotting corpses.
"This is… before the regression…?"
The world he had seen until he was sick of it — before he ever met Beatrice. Seoul, burned to ash in the war against the Celestials.
"Who's there?! Who the hell is here?!"
Shock at seeing a world from before the regression — a world only he and Beatrice still remembered — lasted only a moment. Cheon Seong shouted for the one who had spoken to him.
But no matter how far he stretched his senses, he couldn't find the owner of the voice. His emotions surged hotter by the second — and then the voice came from behind him again.
Whip—!
The instant the voice sounded, Cheon Seong spun around. Only the ruined city stretched before him. No one was there.
Whip—!
"Shut up! What the hell do you know?!"
"I said shut up! Stop hiding and come out!!"
Rage boiled up at the voice that clawed at the trauma only he knew — the trauma he wanted to forget and never could.
But the rage couldn't last.
Because not a single word of it was wrong.
After the regression, he had moved with the vow to protect everyone. And yet, even after losing Yuna before the regression, he had grown soft on the peace he had now.
He still had far stronger enemies ahead of him — and he had barely scraped a win against a mere minion of the White Knight by burning Last Radiance to do it.
He had nearly died to a minion that wasn't even a step on the staircase he needed to climb.
He had failed to protect them. He had sworn he would. And he had nearly died to some disposable underling because a little peace had made him soft.
"Shut up… I said shut… up."
"……."
Crrrk!
Cheon Seong had no answer. And then a hand seized him from behind by the throat and hauled him into the air.
Thud!
"Sh-shut… up… I will never… never repeat that day…!"
Cheon Seong grabbed the hand locked around his throat and poured strength into his grip.
"You're right that I… got soft on peace. I'll give you that… But I have never — not once — forgotten any of them!!"
Just as the voice said, he had grown soft on this fleeting peace.
But he had never, not even once, forgotten Yuna. Never forgotten his comrades from before the regression.
Every single night, he dreamed of that day.
It wasn't a nightmare anymore.
It was the one true, unvarnished despair he had lived and witnessed — and he greeted every morning having dreamed it.
He had never told Beatrice.
Because it wasn't a nightmare.
Dreaming of that day was how he made sure he never forgot it.
So he had never — not once —
"I have never forgotten them! So don't you dare — some faceless bastard I don't even know — put their names in your mouth!!"
At Cheon Seong's raw, honest cry, the owner of the voice answered quietly that it was fortunate — and went on.
"What? What the hell does that—"
Crack!
Cheon Seong started to ask what that meant, but the owner of the voice didn't wait. The hand around his throat tightened and snapped his neck. In a consciousness already slipping away, Cheon Seong closed his eyes once more.
"Ugh… my head… Where am I…?"
Pain like a splitting skull blurred everything in front of him.
"Come to think of it, my neck… Okay. Still in one piece. Good."
The memory had been so vivid he couldn't tell dream from reality. He had felt the bones in his neck break so clearly that his hand went to his throat before he could stop it.
As his vision slowly sharpened, he looked around.
"This is… the academy infirmary?"
He was in the academy infirmary — the same place he'd briefly visited when he'd pretended to be injured after his duel with Professor Aren.
Which meant he had, thankfully, taken down the minion and cleared the dungeon.
"Haah — thankfully… is the wrong word. What the hell am I supposed to do about this?"
The left arm that had been attached in the dream was not attached in reality.
Of course it wasn't. In a dream, every wound could heal. Reattaching an arm wasn't that simple — and if it had been whole in reality too, he would have suspected he was still dreaming.
As far as he knew, there were only two ways to regenerate a severed arm.
The first was to consume a healing elixir on the same level as the Azure Spirit Oil he had once taken. The second was to receive healing from those called Saintesses — or sustained care from multiple Upper-rank healers.
The first option was effectively impossible.
An elixir that could regenerate severed body parts wasn't merely priceless — simply owning one made you a target for countless people. And more than that, he had no idea where to even look. The Azure Spirit Oil itself was an elixir so rare that a single drop had once sparked a war in the records. The dose he had taken hadn't been something he'd found — Beatrice had given it to him.
The second method was more realistic than the first, but only by a margin of about 0.1.
Saintess was a title granted to the five greatest healers in the world. In plain terms, it meant a Transcendent of the healing arts. There was no chance a mere academy cadet like him could get an audience with one. He did know of one Saintess — but that was from before the regression. Right now, they were complete strangers who had never even seen each other's faces.
The only remaining possibility was sustained care from multiple Upper-rank healers… and he didn't have the money for that.
Even if he scraped together every coin he currently owned, he could hire maybe one Upper-rank healer. By his rough estimate, regenerating his arm would take at least five. He was nowhere close.
"Haah — maybe I should just get a prosthetic. But then I wouldn't be able to use the Heavenly Demon Divine Art. This is a real mess."
"Hnnnngh—"
"Hm?"
He had been so focused on the missing arm that he hadn't noticed the presence. He looked down.
There, slumped over the infirmary bed he was lying on, Yoo Hwa-young was fast asleep.
Rustle.
"How hard did this girl cry for her eyes to swell up like that?"
He reached toward Hwa-young — her eyes puffy from what must have been a flood of tears while he was out — and raised white mana.
Throb—!
"Ghk! Damn. My body's a wreck."
Just circulating mana made his dantian and mana circuits scream like they were about to burst. His body was too broken to handle even that much.
Gritting through the pain, he kept raising the white mana.
Then he stopped.
He had found a burn scar on Hwa-young's cheek. His hand faltered for a moment — then slid down from her eyes and gently traced the burn mark across her face.
It wasn't healing magic, just white mana with restorative properties, so the scar wouldn't vanish at once. But slowly, carefully, with everything he had, he worked at healing her wound.
The crimson flames Hwa-young had used against the minion were her unique ability.
A fire that would not go out until it had burned the enemy to nothing.
It was the same unique ability she had used before the regression — when she became the first human in history to kill a Celestial.
There was only one reason she never used a power that strong in ordinary circumstances.
It was so overwhelming she couldn't control it. It burned the enemy — and burned the user, Hwa-young herself, right along with them.
She had always avoided using her unique ability. But in the fight against the minion she had used it anyway, and the flames had scorched her too. Ending up with only burns was a miracle in itself.
Even when Cheon Seong had unleashed the Heavenly Demon Divine Art at full power before activating Last Radiance, he had only managed to put a small crack in the minion's armor. The moment Hwa-young used her unique ability, that same armor had melted away in an instant.
If she could control it and refine it, it was a unique ability with the highest raw firepower of any he knew — strong enough to reach even the Celestials.
Seol Si-yun, whom he always called a monster, had absurd talent — but in pure destructive power of a unique ability alone, Yoo Hwa-young was a full two steps ahead.
She would know the danger of her own ability better than he did. The fact that she had used it anyway… meant she had wanted to save him badly enough to take that risk.
The thought brought a wave of guilt crashing over him.
If he hadn't gone soft on peace — if he had been strong enough to kill the minion alone — if he had kept his distance from Hwa-young from the start so she never fell for him — she never would have gotten hurt like this.
"Mmh… who… huh?"
Maybe because he kept touching her, Hwa-young stirred, rubbing her eyes as she woke.
"Ah, sorry. Looks like I woke you—"
Whump!
Before he could finish apologizing, Hwa-young threw herself at him. She crashed into his chest and sent him toppling backward onto the bed.
The arms locked around him were shaking. Where she buried her face against him, her tears soaked through his clothes.
She clung to him without a word, crying all over again. Cheon Seong smiled and gently stroked her trembling back.
"Why are you crying again? I just finished fixing those puffy eyes."
"You idiot… Why… why did it take you so long to wake up…? Do you have any idea how worried I was?"
"Beats me. I just woke up, so I don't know how much time passed. Want to fill me in?"
Under his gentle hand, Hwa-young's grip tightened. Her voice cracked as she spoke.
"A week. A whole week… You were lying there like a corpse for a week. I thought — I thought something had happened to you, and I—!"
Squeeze.
Cheon Seong pulled her in close as she sobbed into his chest, her tears thick with grief and fear.
"I'm sorry I took so long. And thank you for worrying about me. I'm okay now, so you don't have to be so scared."
"Hic… hic! Waaaaaah!!"
His warm voice. The clear, steady beat of his heart against her ear. Hwa-young couldn't hold it in anymore. She broke down like a child in his arms, wailing at the top of her lungs, and Cheon Seong simply held her and stroked her back in silence.
The terror of knowing the person you love might die.
Warmth fading by degrees. A heartbeat growing weaker.
Watching someone you love walk closer and closer to death.
For a full week Hwa-young had kept vigil at his side, praying through the nights until exhaustion took her. Now, woken by a warm hand, held in the arms of the person she loved as he smiled down at her, listening to the heartbeat tickling her ear — she cried like a child, loud and unrestrained.
When she had finally poured out every knot of fear lodged in her chest, Hwa-young lifted her head. Looking up at Cheon Seong — who gazed back at her with that same gentle, tender smile — she pressed her lips to his.
Smack.
"Thank you so much for being alive. And I really, truly love you. I like you so much."
A girl's first love — the first time she had ever known what love was.
A love that had nearly ended the moment she recognized it was only just beginning.
Brighter than anything, stronger than anything, the girl's love burned.