FROST
Chapter 137: West’s Downfall

Chapter 137: West’s Downfall

West’s feet hit solid ground, but the clearing was gone, replaced by an endless black mirror beneath him, rippling with each movement.

Above, stars shimmered and pulsed in a sky of inverted color—purple bled into red, black into blinding white. The world twisted without warning like some kind of a void.

Figures danced at the edge of West’s vision—tall, humanoid silhouettes draped in mourning veils and laughter, shifting like mirages. Every sound echoed with unnatural delay. Every breath he took felt like it wasn’t quite his.

This was Wrenalthor’s world now.

A void between sleep and shadow where reality flickered, and logic dissolved.

"Welcome," Wrenalthor’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere at once, smooth as silk and laced with amusement, "to the Phantom Nocturne Realm. Where time forgets its shape, and dreams feed on clarity. Not an illusion. Not a trick. Simply a reality."

West stood still, his violet aura flaring defensively, scanning the illusion-stricken expanse.

"Well no shit," he could only scoff.

West’s boots skidded lightly on the black mirror floor, its surface rippling like liquid glass with every step. The sound of impact didn’t match the motion—his footfall echoed a full second late, as if the world were processing his presence on delay.

The stars above blinked like the dying eyes of gods, pulsing in erratic rhythms. West could feel his heart syncing to it against his will—an unnatural lull, dragging him into the lullaby of madness this realm crooned softly beneath its skin.

"Yeah truly a domain," he muttered to himself. "A real one. Of course."

He could feel the mana embedded in every breath, every tremor beneath his feet. It was dense, inescapable—like being submerged in a thick dream that knew it was being watched. It shifted when he shifted, thought when he thought.

And the worst part was—Wrenalthor wasn’t wrong. This wasn’t illusion. This wasn’t a trick.

This was architecture. The very rules of reality bent to Wrenalthor’s will here.

He raised his mana blade, its violet edge flickering more erratically now. It pulsed weaker than usual.

West exhaled sharply, tension knotting through his spine. "How messed up can this get?"

He gathered his strength and slashed downward, mana roaring from the blade like lightning crashing. The strike should’ve carved the floor open, ruptured the air—but instead, it sank with a wet sound and dissolved into light.

No damage. No echo.

"Figures," West snarled, already scanning his surroundings. "If teleportation worked, Sebastian would be here already. Which means... this is sealed."

He knew domains. Forbidden. Lost. Ancient. Only the oldest of beings—Lords of Time, Dream-Walkers, the Demon Kings—could wield such magic. For a mere elven swordsman to conjure this?

He’s either a liar... or he’s older than the Lunar King himself.

That’s when he heard it.

Click. Click. Click.

Like footsteps on marble, but too many at once. From behind. From the side. From above.

West turned swiftly, blade raised.

The shadows around him twisted, stretched... and took form. Dozens of versions of himself emerged from the darkness.

But they were wrong.

Some too tall. Some with limbs bent backwards, twitching unnaturally. Their eyes flickered white or glowed with fractured amethyst light. They grinned in ways he never had. Their voices whispered in mimicry, but their mouths didn’t match the words:

"I failed too."

"Why did you leave me?"

"You’ll never get out."

West didn’t wait. He lunged.

The first doppelgänger moved to meet him, blade raised. Their swords clashed—his blade solid, the echo’s blade like wind around steel. Yet the impact slammed through West’s arms like he’d struck solid stone. He gritted his teeth, pivoted, and struck low.

He cleaved through the thing’s legs.

It shattered into black smoke—but behind it, three more had already surged forward.

West ducked the first strike, deflected the second, and skidded back from the third. His aura erupted in a defensive flare, surrounding him in a shell of violet energy. The ghosts hesitated—but only for a second.

They didn’t bleed. God forbid those are endless minions.

West struck one down, then another. Each kill bought him only seconds as more emerged, flickering from the corners of the realm. The air grew colder. The stars above began to laugh.

And through it all, Wrenalthor’s voice coiled through the dark.

"How does it feel, Autumn Apprentice? Facing every version of yourself you buried?"

Another echo leapt for him, this one smiling. It wore the same uniform West once wore at the academy back in the Human Realm—the day he was expelled. Its blade was made of ash and bone.

West groaned and parried, his eyes blazing brighter, breath rough with fury. "You think I fear myself?"

He twisted mid-air and fired a pulse of mana directly into the crowd of phantoms. The blast detonated in a wave of searing violet flame, flinging echoes apart—but the floor rippled beneath him like a disturbed pond, and he fell through.

No ground. Not even gravity. Just a plummet into upside-down sky.

He tumbled through constellations that screamed in his ears. Wind howled sideways. Memories he hadn’t recalled in years flashed before his eyes—his mother’s voice, Xavier’s scowl, the whispers of Asmaros inside his veins.

And then and impact followed.

He slammed back into the mirror floor, gasping. But it wasn’t a mirror anymore. It was sand, black as ink... stretching for miles under a bleeding moon.

Wrenalthor stood several meters away, blade drawn. His veil was gone now—his face fully visible. And yet... it changed every time West blinked.

Sometimes it was Wrenalthor. Sometimes it was Xavier. Sometimes it was Asmaros himself.

"You don’t understand yet," the figure said, smiling cruelly. "You carry something ancient. I can smell him in you and he wanted to get out so bad, he wanted to devour you."

West rose to his feet, spitting blood. "Then let’s see if you can smell this," he growled—and dashed forward.

The final clash began in a storm of magic.

Blade met blade with deafening resonance. Sparks showered the false sands. West’s violet aura writhed with every blow, adapting, burning hotter. Wrenalthor responded in kind—his blade now coated in runes that shifted like oil slicks, predicting West’s every move.

They spun in a violent ballet—each strike carving rifts in the ground, sending pieces of the domain shuddering. The very domain of Wrenalthor’s Phantom Nocturne Realm trembled under the force of their clash, and the edges of this dreamscape began to fracture. Shards of warped landscape floated upward—floating platforms of cracked mirror and obsidian glass.

Twisting stars spiraled above, and entire cities, relics from West’s buried memories, began melting into the blackness—ghosts of places he once loved and lost.

And then it happened. One slip of focus, West fell.

Wrenalthor lunged with sudden, predatory precision within that uncertainty, his shadow-forged blade singing through the air. West barely managed to parry—but the maneuver was half a second too slow. The violet blade of his mana sword met Wrenalthor’s, but the angle, the pressure was entirely wrong.

Of course, it was. Wrenalthor owned this entire space. He could do things that do not follow logic.

Wrenalthor shifted his foot, dipped his shoulder, and thrust his blade forward in a single, serpentine motion.

The strike landed—right through West’s chest. A sickening, muted crack echoed through the void. Not just flesh, not just muscle, but his mana core.

West’s violet eyes widened in horror. Pain tore through him—cold and deep, like a hook driven straight through his spine. His knees buckled. He gasped sharply, breath stolen from his lungs, blood spilling down his chin. He could only groan.

His sword, his lifeblood, the manifestation of his soul’s resolve, flickered... and then it vanished.

With a soft hiss, the blade dissipated into violet mist. His grip loosened, fingers trembling, until he dropped to one knee. The realm around him darkened further, shadows hungrily pressing in as the light of his aura dulled.

Wrenalthor stood over him now, breathing evenly, looming, blade humming with residual power.

"I expected you to last longer," the elf said softly, not mockingly, but with the tone of a disappointed collector whose prize had cracked too soon. "But even stars fall... they say."

West couldn’t speak. The pain blinded him, his consciousness already fraying. This is somehow... A kind of pain that... is different from all the other pains he had ever felt before.

It came somewhere deep... a humanly pain that he couldn’t explain in this cursed space.

The Phantom Nocturne Realm faltered. Not because of Wrenalthor, nor the blow—but because West’s mind reeled back into memory.

Like a floodgate bursting, his thoughts tumbled inward, dragging him into recollection—into his life in the human realm.

A new life East had forged for him. Not as a vessel, but as a boy named West Crystalvein.

He remembered the bright hallways of the Crystalvein estate. The scent of polished marble. The laughter of his little sister, South, as she pulled at his sleeves and forced ribbons into his books. His mother’s arms. His father’s pride. A family of warmth, power, and influence—and for the first time in all his lives, he had felt truly human.

East had given him that. Had chosen him. Had named him "West" and placed him in a world where he could learn other emotions aside from hatred. Where he could learn to love and care.

Because as a vessel, West was innately emotionally hollow and that is one of the reasons why, that perfect human life of his, didn’t last.

Rival conglomerates, greedy and brutal, tore at the Crystalvein family’s legacy with rumors, blackmail, and orchestrated failures which resulted to his father taking his own life.

It continued slowly—financial bleed, then public scrutiny. And then... fire.

West’s mother was killed in an attack masked as an accident. And his sister South later died in depression and anxiety.

West had felt something inside him collapse. A hollow heart which supposed to learn how to love has been devoured with hatred.

He had hunted those responsible—not for justice, but for retribution. There was no trial. No grand reveal. Only silence, followed by ruin.

West say a thing. He didn’t threaten. He simply moved in shadows, unraveling the lives of those who had desecrated his family name. One by one... nice and slow.

The first to fall was Marwen Tross, the banker who had frozen the Crystalvein accounts on fabricated charges of fraud. West poisoned his reputation with irrefutable forgeries, expertly planted within the regulatory bodies Tross once controlled.

When the audits came, so did the arrests. Tross was found dead in a holding cell two weeks later, his tongue cut out and eyes were covered with candle wax. It was clearly a torture and yet, no one questioned it. No one knew who had done it anyway and the city mayor didn’t want the terrifying news to circulate the municipality.

Then came Veredith Lane, the lawyer who had served as the mouthpiece of their enemies. She woke up one day to find her home reduced to smoldering cinders, her private vaults leaked to every media outlet, revealing bribes, dark contracts, and rituals long banned. West never laid a hand on her—he didn’t need to. By the end, she was begging for obscurity.

But the most personal reckoning—the one West had memorized step by step—was reserved for Mr. Cabot.

Lysander Cabot. A respected industrial tycoon with close ties to government procurement and military weaponization. He had been one of the masterminds behind the orchestration of West’s mother’s assassination, Lady Aureleia.

The explosive used to murder her had been funneled through a dummy subsidiary owned by Cabot’s conglomerate. He had signed off on it and smiled for cameras the week after.

West found him not in a boardroom, not behind some fortress of lawyers or security enchantments—but in a private sauna, tucked inside a mountain retreat reserved for the elite.

He’d waited for hours, hidden among the steam runes embedded in the walls to cloak his presence like mists.

Cabot had entered alone, humming, sweat glistening off his thick neck and silver chest hair. He sipped from a jade gourd of electrolyte tonic, unaware.

"You like the heat?" West’s voice came like a whisper which made Cabot froze. The gourd slipped from his hand and shattered against the stone tiles.

He turned, but too late. West was already there, seated across from him in the haze. Perfectly still. Perfectly calm. A towel draped over his lap, as though he were just another guest.

"You... y-you’re supposed to be dead," Cabot breathed. "The Crystalvein boy—"

"Ahh I see. So you were also trying to kill me?" West chuckled, "I mean, of course. You already killed my family, who am I to be spared?"

Cabot’s jaw clenched. He was so confused how West ended up inside before him when the guards surrounded the area. And yet, he couldn’t even open his mouth to ask.

"I-I didn’t kill your father," he swallowed.

"Oh? That’s an odd thing to say, Mr. Lysander, sir," West grinned, leaning forward.

"W-What do you want?" Cabot finally stood, backing toward the sauna door, but it was sealed shut right away.

"Asking what I want and leaving..." West mumbled, slowly turning to Cabot who is now trembling, "is a very disrespectful thing to do."

Suddenly, the runes West placed all over the place glowed red-hot, melted into slag. The heat was rising fast now. The panic in Cabot’s eyes began to set in the moment he turned to West.

"J-Justice?" the man rasped. "R-Revenge?! You think a boy like you could win against me? I could kill you right now, you little pig!"

"Ironic," West scowled as he stood up to face the gigantic Mr. Cabot and yet Cabot was the one who felt so small by West’s looming presence.

"Retribution is what I want," West mumbled. "You ruined my father, you burned my mother alive, and you emotionally tortured my sister to death..." his eyes widened, "what kind of death befits such a monster like you?"

Cabot lunged for him, but West barely moved. A small gesture—a flick of his finger—and mana surged from the steaming walls. The heat condensed into spectral blades, slashing across Cabot’s back. The man howled, stumbling, boiling sweat cascading down his skin.

He collapsed to his knees, trying to crawl.

West stood, stepped barefoot across the stones, and placed his hand on Cabot’s head.

"I want you to remember the smell of her," he whispered, grinning. "Of what you made me bury."

Cabot screamed once more, but it was lost in the roar of steam as the door burst outward, serving him his slow, agonizing death. The chamber, now scorched and choked with heat, pulsed like a furnace at the peak of wrath. It only cooled when West willed it so—his magic withdrawing like a predator sated by blood.

The man’s body lay motionless, blistered and pale on the tiled floor. Skin peeled from muscle. Eyes open but unseeing. The scent of burnt mana and boiled flesh lingered long after West stepped out barefoot into the frostbitten mountain air.

Since that day, no one in the city had seen West Crystalvein again. Not in the council halls, not among the academy registries, not in any district, black market, or ledger.

Rumors bloomed like rot.

Some said he had died alongside his mother. Others believed he had fled eastward, consumed by guilt. A few whispered that he had become something unholy—an avenger, a curse, a revenant in human form.

Everything flashed before West’s eyes until Wrenalthor took form in front of him once again, his figure briefly haloed by a wash of mana.

West was still on his knees, trembling, blood dripping from his mouth and wound. The pain in his chest was unbearable. It wasn’t just the wound. It was the unraveling of his mana core— the threads of power that once held his being together now frayed into entropy.

Wrenalthor knelt before him, eyes soft. Slowly, he reached out a hand—not in mockery, not in malice—but in something disturbingly tender.

West, barely conscious, watched it approach. For a split second, it looked like Wrenalthor meant to embrace him, but only agonizing pain followed.

Wrenalthor’s hand shot forward like lightning, his fingers diving into the very wound his blade had opened earlier. No steel, just raw ether. His arm plunged straight into West’s chest, through flesh and bone and broken mana.

West arched back, a guttural cry ripping from his throat as the domain around them cracked even further—mirrored cities crumbling, skies folding like torn parchment, time halting in reverent horror.

He couldn’t scream anymore. He could barely breathe.

His body failed him, numb and hollowed. The sword once bound to his soul had long since dropped cold to the ground, its glow fading like a forgotten oath.

And in that final flicker of lucidity, West heard Wrenalthor’s voice—low and reverent.

"Come back to us, My Lord... Asmaros."

And then, West’$ world collapsed into darkness.