The western horizon did not just turn cold; it crystallized.
The purple twilight over the highway connecting Incheon to Gangnam was violently sheared apart by a moving wall of brilliant, blinding silver frost. The moisture in the air didn't drop as rain—it flash-froze into millions of microscopic ice needles that rattled against the abandoned corporate vehicles like a hail of steel buckshot.
CRASH.
The sound of a concrete overpass collapsing under pure, unbuffered kinetic mass echoed from two miles out.
Min-jae stood at the lip of the crater in the center of the Gangnam intersection, his long, lean arms hanging loose at his sides. His bare chest, marked by that flawless ivory luster of the newly achieved [Golden ridian Core] realm, was completely relaxed against the freezing gale. Inside his torso, the [Golden Axis] spun along his spine with a smooth, infinite velocity, silently converting the atmospheric friction into a steady, pressurized reservoir of physical force.
With his Perception sitting at an advanced 65, he didn't need a system tracking radar to see the incoming entity. He could feel the precise molecular alignnt of the silver frost. It was a high-tier, system-granted domain: [The Dragon’s Frozen Wake (A-Rank)].
Within less than thirty seconds, the silver wall reached the edge of the district.
The frost didn't crawl along the asphalt—it sprinted. The luxury storefronts and neon displays along the avenue were instantly coated in a three-inch layer of opaque, brittle ice that shattered from its own internal thermal stress. And standing in the middle of the frozen highway, walking with the heavy, rhythmic stride of a seasoned executioner, was Park Sung-hyun.
The Master of the Helios Guild—and the premier A-Rank Dragon Knight of the peninsula—was an imposing sight. He stood well over six feet tall, his massive fra completely encased in ancient, dragon-scale plate armor forged from the deep crimson hide of an Abyssal Drake. In his right hand, he held a colossal, six-foot-long executioner’s broadswords nad The Glacier’s Tooth—a mythic-grade item whose blade was composed of a solid, translucent chunk of permanent glacial ice that crackled with a furious layer of white mana data.
His face was weathered, his single visible eye burning with a cold, ruthless intellect that had spent the last twenty-four hours dismantling a Level 45 Raid Boss in Incheon.
Behind him, three hundred high-tier corporate hunters from the Helios primary elite vanguard ford a silent, disciplined crescent, their staves and bows glowing with an array of S-Rank preparatory buffs.
"Director Choi claid you were a glitch," Park Sung-hyun said, his voice deep, gravelly, and entirely amplified by his armor’s internal magical array. He stopped exactly twenty paces from the crater, his glacial sword resting against his crimson greaves. "He said you disard the Iron Wall like a child and erased three B-Rank core matrices without a single unit of mana data. But I look at your vessel... and I see nothing but an unregistered commoner who found a gap in the network's initial synchronization."
Min-jae didn't drop into a stance. He loose-jointed his shoulders, his bare feet planted firmly on the jagged edge of the cracked asphalt.
"You corporate masters always have the sa script," Min-jae said, his voice carrying that deep, tallic resonance that caused the ice on the nearby buildings to web with fractures. "You see a man who earned his strength through his own bones, and your first reflex is to call it a gap in your ledger. Your son tried to run his numbers on yesterday, Master Park. His platinum armor is currently sitting in a scrap pile at the bridge. Are you here to pay his debt, or are you just here to add your own na to the account?"
Park Sung-hyun’s single eye narrowed, the silver frost around his boots violently expanding into a tight, spinning vortex of razor-sharp ice shards.
"My son is a fool who relied too heavily on his gear paraters," the Guild Master said coldly. "He forgot that a system class is not just a collection of numbers—it is an inheritance of intent. The World Tree granted the Dragon’s Core because I was capable of executing its commands without hesitation. If your vessel cannot be read by the system... it ans your coordinates have no historical right to exist in this epoch."
[Active Skill Initiated: 'Dragon's Frozen Lung (A-Rank)'.]
[Channeling 1,200 units of highly concentrated Glacial Mana...]
[Your baseline attributes are multiplied by 300% for 5 seconds.]
[Targeting designated coordinates for total molecular stagnation.]
With a sudden, explosive contraction of his heavy chest armor, Park Sung-hyun didn't lunge—he breathed. A torrential, blinding beam of absolute-zero white frost erupted from his dragon-scale helm, crossing the twenty-yard gap with a velocity that instantly turned the oxygen in the air into a solid, brittle mist. The stream was wide enough to swallow a three-story building whole, freezing the asphalt bedrock down to a depth of ten feet within a fraction of a millisecond.
The forty corporate hunters in the rear let out a synchronized shout of triumph, their screens flashing a massive, red confirmation border. An A-Rank absolute-zero strike was mathematically rated to halt the molecular movent of any physical object, reducing its structural density modifiers to zero.
Min-jae didn't use Formless Step to escape the radius.
Against an absolute-zero elental attack, trying to slide or leap away would allow the thermal vacuum to expand and saturate his lower limbs. He took half a step forward, his weight settling into his rear heel, his skeleton locking into the immovable, crystalized axis of his [Jade Bone] frawork.
He didn't draw upon his internal energy pool. He kept his right hand open, his fingers closed together like a solid iron wedge.
Formless Style: Unyielding Dividing.
He drove his bare palm straight forward into the center of the advancing glacial torrent.
SHIIIIIIING—!!!
The collision did not sound like an explosion. It sounded like a massive sheet of diamond being struck by a high-velocity steel piston. A visible shockwave of displaced thermal mass rippled outward from the point of contact, completely shattering the three-inch ice layer across the entire Gangnam district and turning the freezing gale into a harmless spray of fine white snow that drifted down into the crater.
Min-jae stood in the exact sa position, his bare arm extended, his bare skin gleaming with that pristine, living ivory luster. The absolute-zero frost hadn't even managed to turn his chest hairs white; the unyielding density of his 120 Constitution had completely repelled the elental data before the temperature could drop by a single degree at his cellular layer.
"Absolute zero," Min-jae murmured, lowering his hand as his golden-ringed pupils flared with a predatory, tallic brilliance. "The World Tree loves multiplying your percentages, Master Park. But zero multiplied by three hundred... is still just an empty ledger."
Park Sung-hyun gasped, his legendary glacial broadsword trembling in his grip as his user interface flashed a massive, flashing error log that he had never seen in his entire career.
[Warning: External Domain Collision Error.]
[The target's physical structure has rejected the molecular stagnation calculation.]
[Your elental penetration efficiency has dropped to 0.00%.]
"You... you monster," the Guild Master whispered, his voice finally losing its corporate authority as he dropped The Glacier's Tooth into a low, defensive stance. "What kind of item are you hiding in your vessel?!"
"I'm not hiding anything," Min-jae said, his body suddenly blurring into a gray distortion as his [Golden Axis] re-engaged the first movent of the [Formless Step]. "I'm just here to audit your paraters."
BOOM.
The space between them compressed instantly, Min-jae appearing directly inside the Guild Master's guard before the crimson dragon-scale armor could even cycle its secondary defense cooldown, his bare right fist already coiled back to his hip like a hydraulic ram preparing to shatter the foundation of their world.
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