After the blinding light, there was silence. Not a breath. Not a cry. The wind itself seemed to halt, as if the world had been frozen in shock.
Bodies littered the broken earth,scorched, torn, limp.
And then—
A breath.
A scream.
"AAAGH—!"
Rin Solas's voice pierced the silence as he sat up, clutching his chest, veins glowing faintly beneath torn skin. His mouth twisted in agony, but then, he started to laugh.
"Hahahaha…! This isn't even a fraction of what I've suffered! Not even close!"
His body trembled, shaking with the aftershock of the soul-shatter bomb, but he forced himself to his feet. Blood ran down the side of his face, but his eyes gleamed with something more than madness,triumph.
---
His plan had worked.
During the five minutes Arkan gave him, backed by the Master's authority and his own rising status, Rin had taken a soul-shatter bomb. It was a gamble,one misstep, and he'd die. But he remembered something from before: Valen, his terrifying uncle, had once tried to pierce into his soul core to read his thoughts and destroy his mind… but he failed.
Valen, a being who had long surpassed the Soul Stage, had taken time,and still couldn't do it.
Rin had speculated back then: Why?
Now he was almost sure.
> [System Notice: 0 / 300,000 → 45% Tyrant Progression]
[System Notice: Due to overwhelming dominance over soul-stage threats, +50,000 Tyrant Points earned]
The notification rang in his ears, louder than it had in ages. The silence of the system had ended.
Rin's grin widened. " The system must've fused with my soul. That's why even someone like Valen couldn't crack me open."
And the bomb?
It couldn't touch what it couldn't understand.
He stood slowly, surveying the battlefield.
The first corpses he came across were the unfortunate soldiers. Charred. Twisted. Limbs scattered like broken dolls. He exhaled slowly,not from pity, but from the weight of inevitability.
"They were just in the wrong place," he muttered, voice flat. "But I won't waste sorrow on them."
His boots crunched over cracked earth as he walked, scanning the area.
A few minutes later, he spotted Dren, lying face-first in a pool of blood. Breathing, but barely.
Rin stepped over him like a stone in the dirt, expression unchanged.
And then,he found them.
The six bodies that mattered most: the two guards who shadowed him for a month… and the four rebels who'd tried to kill him. All six were sprawled in different directions, flesh scorched, their breaths shallow and ragged.
They were alive,but barely.
Perfect.
That had been his true goal. If he had wanted to kill them, he wouldn't have put on such a dramatic show. The soul bomb wasn't just destruction,it was humiliation, fear, dominance.
Tyrant Points were earned not through slaughter alone, but from making the powerful kneel.
And the closer they were to death, the more the system seemed to reward him.
Rin crouched next to the nearest rebel, whose body twitched with residual pain.
He smiled. "Good. Very good…"