Death From Above and Below
“Aaaaaagh.”
“What do we do now?”
“The sky! Look at the sky!”
This time it was Baek Do-hee who cried out.
Every head snapped upward on pure instinct.
The ceiling pattern had flushed crimson—harbinger of the pillars about to fall.
Then they looked down.
The floor pattern had flushed crimson—harbinger of the flames about to erupt.
“……!”
Every face went white.
This was no coincidence.
The safe zones free of the raining pillars were exactly the danger zones where the floor would explode.
Above.
And below.
A perfect crossfire of death with nowhere left to run.
“This wasn’t designed to be beaten!”
Baek Yeon-ho shouted, voice raw with outrage.
“There’s nowhere to go, Hyeong-nim!”
Hwang Dae-un’s eyes were wild with panic.
This must be how livestock felt standing on the slaughterhouse floor.
The premonition of death brushed across every member’s skin.
“……Are we actually going to die?”
“So this is how it ends……”
Hands and feet trembled; pupils shook.
Even so, Rex never stopped attacking Hyun Si-woon and Kang Si-a.
What now?
Hyun Si-woon had one method left.
Die and try again.
But he refused.
This regression was not one he intended to throw away.
—Looks like there’s truly no way out. This lady knew the Tower was deranged, yet even she never imagined it would go this far.
Ha-wol muttered, but Hyun Si-woon did not hear her.
No—could not hear her.
His eyes kept rolling, searching without end.
His brain felt ready to burst.
No escape above or below?
Then……
Ah. Wait.
Thinking about it, the pillars were one thing—but the flames only mattered if you were standing on them, right?
Flash.
Hyun Si-woon’s eyes lit with pure mania.
When instinct struck?
You just did it.
Back in Tower of Despair, that approach had carried a surprisingly high win rate.
“Everyone!”
A roar torn raw from his throat exploded out of him.
“Gather in front of me!”
“Yes!”
“Hah!”
In truth, clustering together on the tenth floor of the Tower was no different from agreeing to die as a group.
But no one had room left to think.
Die this way or die that way—same result.
If anything, the members felt a flicker of relief.
Their only hope—their leader, Hyun Si-woon—was still gripping this nightmare with both hands and refusing to let go.
“I’m coming!”
“Yeon-ho, hurry!”
Thud-thud-thud!
The party moved on pure reflex.
They were standing on floor patterns already dyed red.
Which meant?
Blue, instant-death flames would bloom here any second.
If we don’t stand here, the pillars hit us instead.
Si-woon has a plan. He has to.
Please—find us any answer at all.
They gathered, praying desperately inside their heads.
“Everyone jump!”
Thump!
Hyun Si-woon kicked off the ground and rose.
The others leapt in the same instant—
Fwoooooosh!
The entire floor vanished under a carpet of blue fire.
At the same moment Hyun Si-woon sent his will to Noim.
Make me ground in midair.
Noim nodded and swept both arms.
Rumbleeeee!
As though invisible seeds had sprouted in empty space, hard earth and stone twisted together in a heartbeat, forming a crude platform roughly five meters across.
“Whoa!”
“Wait—this actually works?”
“W-we’re alive!”
Dazed cries spilled from the members as they landed.
Having clawed their way back from the edge of death, relief flooded every face.
“Kang Si-a!”
But Hyun Si-woon had no time.
Noim was already groaning; Si-woon felt his internal energy draining at a terrifying rate.
An intermediate spirit could not support the weight of six people for long.
“No time! This won’t last! We have to force the next phase right now!”
“How?”
“While you were shooting, did you notice any weak point? Any spot that took the arrows better than the rest?”
“Mm… I’m not sure. Almost nothing seemed to work… Ah?”
Kang Si-a’s pupils wavered for a fraction of a second.
“What? Spit it out!”
“I’m not certain, but whenever I aimed near his navel, he twisted his body just a little.”
“Navel?”
Hyun Si-woon’s brow furrowed.
Navel? There was nothing like that back in the game days of Tower of Despair…
Kang Si-a pressed the point again.
“It really might be nothing. Just… even while dodging everything else, he seemed especially careful not to let that spot get hit.”
Navel……
Fine. One last gamble.
He would stake everything on this uncertain sensation.
We’re already all-in.
If this attack failed?
Then there was truly nothing left to do.
Standing still meant dying to the patterns anyway.
One shot.
Everything had to end with the single strike he had left.
“Kang Si-a, covering fire!”
“Yes!”
No questions.
Kang Si-a answered at once and drew her bowstring without hesitation.
Thwip! Thwip!
From beneath the platform she poured arrows into the space between Rex’s brows, harassing the monster that stood unharmed amid the blue flames.
—KRAAAAAAAAH!
The instant Rex roared and looked up in fury—
Thump!
Hyun Si-woon kicked off the midair platform and hurled himself downward into the spreading blue instant-death fire.
“Si-woon!”
“Hyeong-nim!”
“You’ll die if you fall there!”
Shocked cries exploded from the party.
—You insane brat! So you really mean to regress after all?!
Even Ha-wol shouted in pure astonishment.
No.
Hyun Si-woon had decided to wager everything on a single technique he had polished relentlessly for the past six months—yet had never once succeeded in using.
The strongest technique currently within his reach!
—You… surely not?
Ha-wol’s voice was thick with disbelief.
—You intend to force that absurd delusion into actual combat? It isn’t even finished—the theory itself is half-baked!
I think it will work.
Hyun Si-woon clenched his teeth.
Ha-wol’s warnings never reached him.
As he had said before, he walked the heretical path of fusing Moon Spirit Swordsmanship with spirit arts.
Moon Spirit energy was the extreme of yin.
Cold, razor-sharp, a force that severed all things.
In contrast, the four spirits he commanded each leaned toward yang of differing natures.
At first he had simply layered flame over Flash.
The technique he had used against the wraiths in the Spiral Library.
Moon Spirit Swordsmanship.
First Form.
Flash.
Fire.
But?
Hyun Si-woon’s obsession had not stopped there.
If I can mix one, what about two? Three? All four?
It was not simple addition. It was the mad idea of forcibly welding together opposing forces that refused to mix—like water and oil—forces that actively destroyed one another.
Ha-wol had been adamantly against it.
She had begged him to stop, telling him to go ahead and die of qi deviation if that was what he wanted.
Even the founding master of the Moon Spirit sect had failed while trying to reconcile yin and yang; a brat who could barely walk was trying to take flight.
Yet Hyun Si-woon never gave up.
I already succeeded once, didn’t I?
For six months he had poured more than half of every training session into this reckless gamble.
Fire’s destructive power, water’s fluidity, wind’s speed, earth’s weight.
He had repeated the experiment of cramming all four natures into the tip of a Moon Spirit sword thousands of times.
And amid those failures he discovered a single possibility.
Not control—harmony.
Not crushing the four powers into submission, but letting each nature bite and tear at the others until they formed a razor-thin balance: a single point of chaos.
Like the eye of a typhoon—the paradoxical moment when the most silent, most devastating force condensed inside a vortex of pure destruction.
Under normal circumstances it was impossible.
But right now everything was different.
A crisis so sharp it felt as though his brain might leap from his skull.
A moment when all five senses were amplified to the absolute limit.
Standing on the boundary between life and death, his innate sensory stats were rocketing skyward without ceiling.
Right now… I think I can do it……
That sensation never appeared when he simply accepted death……
It only surfaced when he thrashed and clawed for life.
Yes.
This was the raw power of the will to survive.
The world looks slow.
His own falling body.
The blue flames undulating below.
Even Rex’s face, far away and twisted with bewilderment.
Everything moved as though the entire world had slipped into slow motion.
Hyun Si-woon focused.
Swaaaaah!
Even while plummeting he kept his balance and condensed silver-white sword energy at the tip of his blade.
Salamander.
Fwoooosh!
He forcibly dragged in a fierce torrent of fire qi.
The cold sword energy tried to push the scorching flames away; the flames tried to swallow the sword energy whole.
In the past he had simply coated the blade in fire and thrust. That would not work now.
Undine.
Shhhhk!
Graceful water qi flowed in.
I can’t suppress the collision.
That would make his meridians explode.
Exactly as Ha-wol feared—his blood would reverse, and he would plunge into qi deviation.
They have to coexist on a knife’s edge.
Control so fine it bordered on the impossible.
In this single moment even the genius Yoon Seo-a would have gaped in shock at the precision of his command.
Hyun Si-woon did not stop.
Noim.
Heavy earth qi wrapped around everything and forcibly gave it shape—
like crushing a core on the verge of detonation beneath solid bedrock.
This stage was relatively easy.
The real problem came next.
Sylphe.
The most difficult, the final puzzle piece he had never once succeeded in placing.
Wind qi had no form.
It was free, unpredictable force.
Try to cage it and it tore everything apart in a rampage; let it loose and it scattered in an instant.
The worst variable—capable of shattering the precarious balance he had built so far in a single breath.
Focus.
Hyun Si-woon delicately drew in Sylphe’s sharp wind qi.
As if threading a needle, he stabbed the wind straight into the absolute center of the three-power core armored by earth qi.
Crackle-snap!
The tip of the sword screamed.
Agony like his dantian being ripped open flooded him.
Just as expected.
The moment wind invaded, fire tried to burn even fiercer, water tried to evaporate and explode, earth groaned under pressure it could not endure.
Total collapse—chaos on the brink of annihilation.
No. That’s not it.
In that instant a flash of insight tore through Hyun Si-woon’s mind.
I’m not stabbing with the wind. I’m opening a path!
Wind was not something to be imprisoned—it had to be allowed to flow.
He twisted the direction of the wind qi he had been forcing inward.
Inside the earth-qi armor, the three powers still bit and tore at one another in a chaotic whirlpool. He set the wind riding that current.
Like the axle of a giant millstone, the wind seized the center and began to spin.
Fire, water, and earth were pulled into that rotation and traced one enormous circle.
The forces that had been destroying each other now chased one another’s tails, forming a circulating ring that amplified their energy into something colossal.
At the tip of the sword the four colors could no longer be distinguished.
Like a miniature galaxy, every color and every darkness had fused into one.
A condensed mass of chaos trembling as though it might explode at any second.
—……!
Ha-wol’s spirit form shuddered with pure shock as she watched.
Could something like that even be called a martial art?
One thing was certain: a force far more profound and elevated than Moon Spirit Swordsmanship itself was unfolding before her eyes.
Even at its current level, most Rankers would turn pale and flee. What if it climbed higher still?
What if he ever used a technique like this together with the Spirit Kings?
Gulp.
Ha-wol’s spirit form swallowed hard—
Target: the navel.
Sparks flared in Hyun Si-woon’s eyes.
For the first time, bewilderment flickered across Rex’s face as well—
as though the energy radiating from this human had stepped outside the bounds of its comprehension.
Hyun Si-woon did not thrust the sword.
He simply released the thread of balance he had been holding by a hair’s breadth.
First Form — Flash
True
There was not even a sound.
The instant the condensed chaos gently sank into Rex’s navel, the entire world seemed to freeze.
And then—
KRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAASH!
From inside Rex’s body a storm of the four elements began to rip everything apart.