When an S-Rank Starts Saving Her Ice
Yu Seoa stopped by the civil affairs office before heading out.
She was already in her Baekho combat uniform.
A faint silver shimmer lingered over her shoulders, the prelude to her hair turning a pure white-silver the moment she released her mana.
"Senior. There’s a mutant inside a B-rank Gate. Baekho’s being deployed officially. I’ll be taking the lead."
"Yeah. Go have fun."
"...That’s your answer?"
"What more do you want from me? Should I pack you a lunchbox too?"
Yu Seoa puffed out her lips a little.
It was a face she would never have made in front of me just a few days ago.
"Aren’t you coming with me? You came in person for Jin Seojun’s debut raid."
"He’s A-rank. You’re S-rank. That’s a whole different league. Why would I go?"
"...That actually makes me feel kind of good."
"Don’t get pleased. That wasn’t a compliment. If you’re S-rank and still can’t handle it on your own, that’s the real problem."
Yu Seoa gave a quiet snort of laughter.
Just then, the office door opened and Docheol walked in.
As always, he had a box of Mocha Gold in his hand.
"Another deployment? Baekho’s got its hands full with mutants these days too, huh."
"Vice-Guild Leader, what brings you here?"
"Came to see your master’s face. And also... "
Docheol shot me a side glance and lowered his voice.
"The gallery’s stirring up the Baekjeong rumors again. Your disciples stand out too much. You should start being careful."
"Did I make them stand out? They did it on their own."
"Same thing. People are already digging into who their teacher is."
"Dig all they want. There’s nothing to find. I’m officially dead, remember?"
"And yet a dead man still gets Mocha Gold every month and drinks it like he owns the place."
I shrugged.
There wasn’t anything I could do about it right now anyway.
"Go take care of business, Seoa. You’ll be late."
Yu Seoa gave Docheol a light bow, then turned to leave.
I took a sip of the lukewarm Mocha Gold and called after her back.
"Just one thing."
"Yes?"
"Don’t try to freeze it today."
Yu Seoa hesitated.
"...My main specialty is ice magic. Are you telling me not to use it?"
"I’m not saying don’t use it. I’m saying don’t try to win by freezing it."
I waved a hand.
"Go on. You’ll understand what I mean once you’re there."
Yu Seoa stared at me for a moment, then left the office without asking anything else.
She knew better now.
I would never be the kind of teacher who explained things kindly.
Watching her go, Docheol let out a small laugh.
"Throwing out a riddle and making them solve it themselves. That’s exactly how you used to work the rookies back in the day."
"She’s not a rookie. She’s my disciple."
"...You always say you can’t be bothered, but you’re surprisingly serious about this."
I didn’t answer and brought up Baekho Guild’s official broadcast channel on the monitor.
Watching from a chair while drinking coffee was a hundred times more comfortable than going there myself.
The Gate interior was a blood-red lava cavern.
Heat shimmered up from the ceiling, and magma crawled along the floor.
The System classified it as a B-rank fire-attribute dungeon.
The recommended counter-attribute was ice.
It looked like perfect conditions for Yu Seoa.
For an S-rank ice mage known as Pale Winter, a fire dungeon ought to have been a meal served on a silver platter.
The Baekho hunters on screen all looked relaxed too.
The matchup was overwhelmingly favorable, so by the System’s logic this was supposed to be a clean hunt.
They had no idea that the very belief making them feel safe was about to shatter.
Then the mutant appeared.
It was a massive lizard with horns curved like ox horns.
Its whole body was covered in red-hot scales, and every step it took made the rock beneath it melt away.
"Drake lizard variant. Fire attribute. We take it with ice."
Yu Seoa gave the order calmly.
The Baekho elite team snapped into formation without a word wasted.
When she raised her hand, the ends of her hair turned silver-white.
The cavern temperature plunged, and enormous ice spears rose out of thin air.
S-rank ice magic.
Dozens of ice spears shot forward at blinding speed and hammered into the mutant’s entire body.
Direct hit.
On any ordinary fire beast, that strike would have frozen it solid and shattered it where it stood.
But the mutant didn’t fall.
It didn’t even stagger. The ice spears embedded in its scales sizzled and vanished the instant they made contact.
"...?"
Yu Seoa’s expression hardened.
The mutant roared.
At that moment, its entire body flared even hotter, and the cavern temperature shot back up.
It had swallowed the cold she’d forced down, right along with it.
Even through the screen, I could feel the Baekho team’s panic.
"The ice... it’s not working!"
"But the System said fire attribute! It told us to use ice!"
The Baekho hunters shouted in disbelief.
The System’s perfect answer had lied again.
This mutant didn’t have ice as its weakness.
It fed on ice.
Yu Seoa drew in mana again.
This time the freezing power was twice as strong as before.
A blizzard of cold so massive it whitened the entire cavern poured toward the mutant.
That was her instinct.
If it didn’t work, hit harder.
Crush it with the overwhelming power of an S-rank.
Until now, that instinct had always been right.
Whatever the opponent, everything had eventually frozen before her ice.
The mutant greedily swallowed even that enormous wave of cold.
And grew larger still.
Its scales glowed like a furnace, and melted stone dripped from the cavern ceiling like rain.
The Baekho hunters retreated in a hurry.
"No way... "
The blood drained from Yu Seoa’s face.
The power she had relied on all her life.
The very name Pale Winter was being helplessly denied before her eyes.
Her mana was dropping fast, while the enemy only grew stronger by feeding on it.
I could see her mind going blank through the screen.
I sipped my Mocha Gold and watched the monitor.
This was the second wall that appeared after you shut the System off.
Once you cleared away the first crutch—the System—you were left with a second one: your own strength.
For Yu Seoa, that strength was ice.
If it didn’t work, then just freeze it harder. That unconscious belief.
The stronger the hunter, the higher this wall stood.
The weak would have started thinking long ago, but the strong had solved everything with force, so they never learned how.
That was why S-ranks fell harder when they hit this wall.
The moment that belief broke, they became real hunters.
Of course, if it didn’t break, they’d just burn through all their mana in there and come out as charcoal.
I took another sip of coffee.
It tasted bitter.
Because once things truly became dangerous, I was probably going to have to get up after all.
On screen, Yu Seoa stood still, breathing hard.
Then, slowly, she closed her eyes.
Don’t try to freeze it today.
Only then did my words seem to click into place in her head.
If brute force wouldn’t work, the answer wasn’t to find even greater force—it was to set the force aside and look for another path.
It wasn’t until she stood on the edge of death that she understood.
Yu Seoa stopped squeezing out mana to make a vast sheet of cold.
Instead, the way she might catch a pebble.
The way she might play tag.
She began reading the mutant with her own skin.
The flow of heat it exhaled.
The rhythm of the rock melting beneath its feet.
The one sliver of cool breath leaking through the gaps between its scales.
At first, everything would have seemed hot.
After all, the whole world was lava and the enemy was a ball of fire.
But she traced the texture of that heat, strand by strand.
In the end, that was what Kang Taehyun’s training had taught her.
To pick out one tiny irregular thread in a flood of overwhelming information.
And at last, she found the identity of that coldness.
"...The mouth."
The reason the mutant could devour ice was its scale armor.
But to keep spewing fire, it had to keep the inside of its throat cooled down.
It was a structural weakness meant to prevent overheating, and even the mutant itself couldn’t do anything about it.
It was information the System would never display.
Only someone who could read the texture of heat with their own skin could find that one opening.
Yu Seoa opened her eyes.
This time, she didn’t cast a gigantic spell to freeze the whole cavern.
At the tips of her fingers, a single needle-thin shard of ice formed.
It was rough, crooked, and ugly—a crude ice pick the System would never have produced.
Looks like she’d really absorbed the sensation I taught her on the first day of pebble-catching.
Big and flashy didn’t matter.
What mattered was a small strike placed with perfect precision, one that landed exactly where it had to.
The instant the mutant opened its jaws to breathe fire, Yu Seoa slammed a foot into the ground.
Her body became a silver streak, diving through the flames and straight into the mutant’s chest.
It was the same movement she’d learned in tag—slipping just past the edge of the enemy’s killing intent.
She read the arc of the flames half a beat early and slid into the opening.
Then, deep inside the gaping maw, right in the center of the throat that had been kept cold...
She drove the crude ice pick in.
The cold that struck the mutant’s weakness exploded outward from the inside.
It was a freezing force even the scale armor couldn’t block, and the creature’s entire body began to turn white from within.
Crack, crack-crack.
The giant mutant froze from the inside out under a single shard of ice and collapsed all at once.
Thud.
Silence fell over the cavern.
The Baekho hunters stared, speechless.
The mutant that wouldn’t die even after Yu Seoa poured out every ounce of S-rank magic was finished by an ice fragment no larger than a fingernail.
"How... how did you do that with something so small... "
One hunter stammered the question.
Yu Seoa caught her breath and answered in a calm voice.
"If I’d kept trying to freeze it on a grand scale, I never would’ve beaten it. Force alone wasn’t enough for an opponent like that."
She looked down at her own fingertips.
"All I needed was one tiny point. Just precise enough to hit exactly where it mattered. That was everything."
"But the System said the weak point was the center of its chest... "
"The System couldn’t see that the inside of its mouth was cold. It couldn’t capture the data beyond the scales, deep in the throat."
Yu Seoa looked down at the fallen mutant.
"There’ll be more and more mutants the System can’t properly read. Every time that happens, we shouldn’t look for stronger power. We should look for a more precise point."
The lesson she had just learned, she was already passing on to her teammates.
The girl who, just days ago, had been trembling because she didn’t even know how to shut the System off was now the one teaching other hunters to do it.
The way Baekho’s elite team looked at her had changed.
It wasn’t the look you gave a simple S-rank ace anymore.
It was awe for an entirely different kind of hunter—the kind who knew what lay beyond the System.
Beside me, Docheol whistled softly as he watched the monitor too.
"A week. You turned an S-rank around in just one week."
"I didn’t change her. She changed herself."
"There you go again. Then who was it that threw the pebbles?"
"Do pebbles change people? A pebble’s just a pebble."
Docheol shook his head, looking absurdly unconvinced.
Then he tossed the empty paper cup into the trash and stood up.
"I’m adding one more line to the list. Kang Taehyun, instructor suitable. Subject will deny it to his grave."
"Don’t write that."
Docheol laughed and left the office.
I turned off the monitor and finished the cold coffee.
Today, I figured I could afford to give her about ten pebbles.
Then the phone on my desk rang.
It was Yu Seoa.
"Senior. I understand what you meant now. Thank you."
"If you got it, then fine. Hang up."
"...I was a little disappointed you didn’t come in person today."
I was briefly at a loss for words.
"But if you had come, I wouldn’t have realized I did it on my own. So thank you for not coming."
"...I said I got it, so hang up already."
"You’ll throw pebbles at me again tomorrow too, right?"
"I’m upping it to ten. Be ready."
She let out a small laugh and hung up.
I stared blankly at the phone for a moment, then clicked my tongue softly.
That’s the dangerous thing about teaching.
Once you feel the reward, you keep getting dragged back into it.
That night, a new post climbed the real-time best list on Hunter Gallery.
At the last comment, I paused for a moment.