Chapter 294: Meaning of True Fear

"Who are you?" Victor asked, his irritation giving way to a far more interesting suspicion.

Victor kept his eyes on the woman, waiting for an answer to the question he had just asked.

She said nothing.

She merely smiled.

And it was in that smile that something clicked.

For an instant so brief that it almost seemed imaginary, Victor no longer saw the stranger standing before him.

He saw Yu Seol-Ha.

His Seol-Ha...

Not because their faces were identical, but because of small details that were difficult to explain: the way the corners of her lips rose when she seemed to know something others didn't, that insolent tranquility hidden beneath a gentle appearance, and even the slight narrowing of her eyes when she was enjoying herself at someone else's expense.

Victor was still trying to process the resemblance when a blur crossed his field of vision.

A wooden sword, drawn from who knew where, came straight toward his chest.

Victor reacted before he could think, driven purely by survival instinct!

His hand closed around the blade.

The impact shattered the ground beneath his feet, spreading cracks across the black stone at the base of the staircase, but Victor didn't retreat. His fingers gripped the wood with brute force, stopping the strike just a few centimeters from his heart.

For a second, he was almost satisfied with his reaction.

Then he noticed that the woman was still smiling.

"What are you doing?" Victor asked, keeping his hand closed around the sword and observing her carefully for the first time since she had appeared.

Seo Baek Hyang didn't answer immediately.

She simply looked at the hand that had stopped her wooden sword and then at his face, like a teacher evaluating a child who had just correctly performed the first movement of a basic technique.

There was no irritation at having her attack blocked.

No surprise.

Her smile remained gentle, almost affectionate.

That was when Victor felt it.

His body reacted first.

Before his eyes could detect any movement, before his mind could find an explanation, and before the woman's energy had even changed, every instinct he had developed over two lifetimes screamed at once.

Let go.

Get away.

RUN.

Victor released the sword and retreated at a speed that would have made the Cult's disciples completely lose sight of his movements. His foot struck the ground dozens of meters away, and Lilith almost materialized by reflex, but he stopped the summoning before it was complete.

Because he finally understood what he had just felt.

Fear.

Victor knew danger. He knew what it felt like to face someone stronger than himself. His body had been destroyed, pierced, crushed, and split in half. He knew pain well enough to treat it as an inconvenience and had developed an almost offensively casual attitude toward the possibility of being injured.

Since his rebirth, his first instinct when confronted by something stronger had always been to analyze, resist, adapt, and find a way to win.

This was none of those things.

Calling it fear seemed insufficient.

Victor felt, perhaps for the first time since his reincarnation, the true realization of his own insignificance.

It wasn't like standing before a larger beast.

It wasn't like looking at a mountain and understanding that he couldn't destroy it.

It was as though, throughout his entire life, he had believed himself to be something simply because he had never encountered a scale large enough to prove otherwise.

And now, before that youthful-looking woman with black hair and equally dark eyes, his entire existence seemed to have been reduced to a grain of sand trying to comprehend the ocean.

Victor's brain attempted to analyze Seo Baek Hyang.

It failed.

He tried to measure her energy.

He found nothing he could actually measure.

He attempted to identify mana circulation, spiritual pressure, killing intent, or any manifestation that could justify his body's reaction.

Nothing.

She was simply standing there.

And that was the problem.

Everything Victor knew about powerful beings involved signs.

Serafall possessed an overwhelming presence whenever she stopped restraining herself.

Chysis resembled a calamity on the verge of exploding when she released her energy.

Yu Jin Cheon possessed a density that made the environment bend around his existence.

Even Fafnir, within his inner world, carried the natural authority of a Dragon that made any creature understand it was standing before something ancient.

Seo Baek Hyang displayed nothing.

She looked like a beautiful woman sitting on a rock with a wooden sword in her hand.

And yet Victor's body told him that if she had completed that strike, he would have died.

Not injured.

Not mutilated.

Not temporarily destroyed before his regeneration rebuilt him.

Dead.

The word took on a meaning it hadn't held in a very long time.

Seo Baek Hyang tilted her head slightly.

"What good instincts," she remarked, resting the wooden sword on her shoulder, her tone carrying an almost maternal approval. "You realized I was going to kill you with one strike and managed to get away. How cute."

Victor didn't answer.

He couldn't.

That gentleness made it worse.

Her smile didn't seem fake. That was precisely the disturbing part.

Seo Baek Hyang genuinely seemed to be kind.

She wasn't threatening him out of sadism, wasn't trying to intimidate him, and didn't seem interested in demonstrating her superiority.

To her, that difference simply existed.

There was no obvious arrogance because an existence at her level no longer needed to assert anything.

It was an arrogance so absolute that it had surpassed the need to appear arrogant.

Seo Baek Hyang didn't need to declare herself superior, just as the sky didn't need to remind an ant that it was above it.

Victor took a deep breath.

His heart was racing.

That was new too.

"You..." Victor began, trying to force his mind to function again, but the words died before he could form a question.

Seo Baek Hyang took a small step.

Victor immediately retreated.

He didn't even realize he had done it until he felt his foot touch the ground behind him.

Her smile widened slightly.

"Instinct before thought," Seo Baek Hyang remarked, watching his reaction with obvious interest. "That's good. Your body is smarter than you are."

Victor gritted his teeth.

Normally, he would have had some insolent response to that.

Nothing came.

His eyes remained fixed on her hands.

Her shoulders.

Her feet.

The wooden sword.

Any tiny movement that might signal an attack.

But the more he analyzed, the worse it became.

He couldn't find an opening because he couldn't even identify a fighting stance.

Seo Baek Hyang could have been completely defenseless or ready to destroy everything around her, and Victor wouldn't have been able to tell the difference.

Fafnir remained several meters behind him.

For the first time since Victor had met her, the Dragon was completely silent.

That said quite a lot too.

Seo Baek Hyang continued looking at Victor, and behind that gentle expression was something his mind simply refused to define.

It wasn't cruelty.

It wasn't madness.

It wasn't malice.

It was distance.

A distance so vast between what she was and what Victor could comprehend that his brain searched for familiar explanations and found none.

It was like trying to imagine a color that had never existed or understand a dimension his senses had never been created to perceive.

Victor felt his chest tighten.

And suddenly, he remembered.

Darkness.

His first death.

His unresponsive body.

Serafall holding him.

His consciousness fading without knowing whether anything existed afterward.

The memory pierced his defenses like a blade.

Victor had died once.

He knew what it was like.

And at that instant, he became absolutely certain that this woman could send him back into that darkness whenever she wanted.

That thought was enough.

His heart seemed to stop.

For a fraction of a second, all the confidence he had built since his reincarnation disappeared.

There wasn't enough regeneration.

There was no Divine Blood.

There was no Lilith, Gram, White Fire, Black Ice, or any other technique capable of dispelling the irrational certainty that he was standing before something that could simply end his existence.

Victor gave in to despair for less than a second.

That was all Seo Baek Hyang needed.

She was standing in front of him.

Victor hadn't seen her move.

There had been no displacement.

No sound.

One instant, she was far away.

The next, their faces were separated by only a few centimeters.

Victor's eyes widened.

Seo Baek Hyang smiled.

"How cute," she murmured, slowly raising one hand as though she were about to comfort a frightened child.

Victor tried to retreat.

His body didn't respond in time.

She pressed her middle finger against her thumb.

A flick.

That was all.

Seo Baek Hyang flicked the center of his forehead.

Victor heard something burst.

For a moment, he was certain it was his skull.

His vision disappeared.

The sensation that followed was impossible to explain.

There was no ordinary pain.

It was as though his entire head had ceased to exist, as though his brain, thoughts, and senses had been erased by a force too great to even allow pain to be processed.

Victor didn't know whether he had fallen.

He didn't know whether he had died.

He didn't know whether Seo Baek Hyang had actually destroyed his head or simply made his brain believe she had.

The last thing he registered was her voice, far too calm to match the emptiness swallowing his senses.

"Yu Jin really did a terrible job with you," Seo Baek Hyang remarked, watching his body completely lose its strength, like a teacher lamenting the poor education of a newly transferred student.

Then came darkness.

This time, Victor didn't like it one bit.

Hours later, Victor opened his eyes.

He didn't get up immediately.

That was unusual too.

He remained lying down for several seconds, staring at a ceiling he definitely didn't recognize while waiting for his mind to reorganize its functions.

The first thing he did was move his fingers.

They worked.

Then his feet.

Those worked too.

He ran a hand over his face and found his head exactly where it was supposed to be.

"...I still have one," Victor muttered, touching his forehead and searching for any injury left by the flick.

Fortunately, everything was in its proper place.

There was only the humiliating sensation that his brain had been switched off like a lightbulb.

"Hahh... ahh."

Victor took a deep breath and finally began examining his surroundings.

This wasn't Yu Seol-Ha's room. He was certain of that.

The place was spacious but extremely simple. The walls were made of dark wood, with practically no decorations apart from a few old paintings and shelves filled with books. There was a low table near a large open window, a kettle resting over a small brazier, and an ancient sword casually leaning against the wall.

The air was different too.

It was strangely pure and cold.

Victor turned his head toward the window.

Outside, there were no courtyards, houses, or disciples.

There were only clouds beneath him.

Victor froze.

Then slowly sat up.

"No..." he murmured as a suspicion began forming.

He looked outside again.

Mountains that had previously seemed enormous were now below his position. Most of the Demonic Cult couldn't even be seen through the distance and the cloud formations scattered around the peak.

Victor ran a hand down his face.

Was he at the summit?

The same staircase that had taken him hours just to reach the seven hundredth step?

That woman had simply brought him all the way to the top?

Victor remained sitting on the bed for several seconds, trying to decide exactly how he felt about that.

His hand involuntarily returned to his forehead.

"What an absurd woman..." Victor muttered, remembering that single flick and feeling a shiver run down his spine despite all logic.

Then a woman's voice came from somewhere outside the room.

"Already awake?" Seo Baek Hyang asked with the same gentleness as before, as though she hadn't just taught Victor the meaning of true fear in the most humiliating way possible. "Come eat."

It was an order.

His body stiffened before he could stop himself.

The sound of her voice was genuinely terrifying.