At the Crimson Ascent Pavilion, the curriculum was never just martial. Every six months, they sent you on a mission not to showcase your strengths, but to crack open your softest parts. Too kind? You were handed a throat to slit. Too cruel? They let you taste your own fear. There was no mercy. Only calibration.
Jang Mok handed me my assignment, as always fan in hand, gaze like he was decoding a cypher instead of speaking to a person.
"One rat. A low-level node in a spy ring. The others will burn the roots you'll sever the thought. Consider it a mercy mission. Remove the fear."
"Yes, hyungnim. I accept."
I'll never forget what hit me first.
Not the blood. Not the smoke.
The smell.
Oily. Sweet. Rot-sugar. It clawed at my throat as I crested the hill, and still—I stepped forward. Some foolish part of me still thought strength meant protection. That part of me died before I reached the village.
It wasn't burning. It was already dead.
Bodies flung like broken dolls charred, twisted, caught mid-run. Some were still moving, crawling as the flames ate them alive. It wasn't a massacre. It was a message.
"Betray the Cult, and you vanish. Blood. Memory. Even your shadow."
That was the Divine Cult's mercy. Clean, total erasure. No names. No martyrs. Just smoke. This was my first real mission. My first lesson in what the Cult meant when they said "strength."
We don't just destroy your enemies. We rewrite the truth of their existence.
I used every ounce of courage I had left to walk through the scorched village, my boots kicking up ash where homes once stood. The world smelled like blood and burnt wood. The kind of smell that clings to your lungs long after you've left.
The spy was exactly where Jang Mok said he'd be cornered, injured, muttering to himself like prayer might undo his choices.
A boy. Skin pale with fear, clothes tattered. He looked like the kind of person I might've sat next to in training if things had been different.
"Ji-Hye... just wait. I swear I'll make it back."
I wanted to feel rage. Justice. Anything.
All I found was the numb quiet of a heart trying to disappear.
He looked up not defiant. Not pathetic.
Just broken.
"I don't know who that is"
"But you won't be going back."
"Please," he begged, falling to his knees, "I have a sister. She's just a child. If I don't come back, she dies. Spare me. I'll do anything."
"You should've thought of that before you tried to poison our Cult from within."
Anger sparked not at him, but because of him.
I needed him to be the villain. It made everything easier.
"This is your fault. You and your kind thought you could infiltrate us, weaken us. You're why the massacre happened. Not me. Not us. You."
I clenched the dagger in my hand.
He deserved to die.
No, he needed to die.
If he didn't, none of this would make sense.
I stepped forward. And that's when I heard her voice.
"Woon—stop!"
Seo-noonim.
She was panting, out of breath, like she'd run the whole way. She didn't look angry. Not yet. Just sad. She looked at the boy, then at me.
"Do you really believe this is justice? That what happened back there was right just because we were stronger?"
Her words were soft. Too soft for the battlefield. They clashed with the blood on my hands.
"There were children in that ash. We didn't punish a traitor we buried a bloodline. You call that strength?"
I stayed silent.
"Tell me, does strength make murder holy? Does power erase guilt?"
I didn't answer. I couldn't. Because deep down, part of me knew: if I didn't kill him now, I'd have to live with the weight of everything else. The ash, the screams, the silence. And if I did kill him, I might finally silence myself.
"Then what was it all for, noonim? The screams, the blood, the fire was it all for nothing?"
I lashed out, I couldn't understand how she could see all of this and still hold onto her naivety.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this. You were never meant to become this."
She looked at me not with anger.
With pity.
It fanned my fury.
I wanted to hurt her.
"You still don't get it. Kindness doesn't stop swords. Mercy doesn't stop massacres. I'm trying to survive, and your pity is a death sentence."
"That's what they taught you. Not what you believe."
She was still trying. Still reaching for the part of me she remembered.
"I have to. Because if it's not true…"
I caught myself. Almost cried. But forced the words out.
"Then why does the entire cult live this way?"
"You think they brought this on themselves? That they deserved to burn?"
"They were weak. And the weak suffer. That's how it's always been, how the Orthodox sects live behind their polished gates pretending they're better than us. Their justice is just another kind of control. The world is not moral. It's simply obedient to force."
I had started to sound like Jang Mok. Quoting him, really. Like a student hoping it would sound like truth.
"And what's ours, Woon? A better kind of cruelty?"
"So what if it is? We aren't gods, we can't control fate we can only live for ourselves. If those people in the village really wanted to survive, they shouldn't have been weak, that was their sin and they were punished for it."
For the first time since I'd met her, she looked disgusted.
"Is that what you truly believe, Woon? That being weak is a crime?"
"It has to be... otherwise none of this has any meaning. I need it to mean something."
That was the moment she broke me.
"It does mean something. It means you're bleeding inside and no one's teaching you how to stop."
"Bleeding makes you soft. Soft makes you dead."
She didn't flinch.
"No. Bleeding means you're still alive. It means you're still you. Don't let them take that from you. Not even if the Heavenly Demon himself demands it."
If anyone else had heard her say that, she'd already be dead.
But she trusted me. So I gave her the same.
"Nobody took it. I buried it. When I saw those flames, I stopped being someone. I became what they needed a shadow that follows orders."
"I saw a boy who still hesitated. Who still wanted to choose something different."
"That boy is gone."
"Then let me mourn him. Because if you kill this spy, there won't be a grave left to bury him in."
I looked at the boy trembling, bleeding, too human.
I saw myself.
Not in his face.
In his fear.
He wasn't the enemy.
He was me.
I started to see myself in him the more that I looked at him, the more I felt Seo-noonim was right.
"...He's just like me, isn't he? Just on the wrong side of the line."
"There is no line. Just people drawing them in blood to feel less afraid."
"I'm not afraid."
"Then prove it."
I wanted to. Gods, I wanted to.
But when I lowered the blade, it wasn't mercy.
It was surrender. To her.
To the person I used to be.
And then I broke.
I cried until I passed out.
When I woke, she was still holding me like she hadn't let go once.