The Horizon of Steel
2025. The DMZ / South Korean Border. The world had collapsed into the inevitable: World War III. The border was no longer a line; it was a graveyard of the future. Thousands of tanks lined the ridges like iron beetles, and the sky was choked with the black silhouettes of supersonic jets and predator drones. Millions of soldiers from a coalition of a hundred nations stood ready, their fingers trembling on triggers.
Then, through the thermal scopes and high-definition satellites, they saw him.
A lone figure walking calmly through the "No Man's Land." Jeongwoo. He wore no armor, no uniform. His eyes were no longer human; they were twin abysses-total, unblinking black. The air around him distorted with heat, not from fire, but from the sheer density of his killing intent.
The Massacre: The 360-Degree Stillness
"Target sighted. Capture or Eliminate," the command echoed through the global comms.
A battalion of elite soldiers moved in. They fired. Thousands of rounds of lead and tungsten shredded the air.
The Logic (Hypersonic Dilation): To the world, Jeongwoo vanished. To Jeongwoo, the world froze. The bullets hung in the air like lazy insects. He stepped between them, the sound of his breathing the only thing moving in the silence of stopped time.
He drew Rakt-Viraam. The black blade shrieked as it broke the vacuum of frozen time. He didn't just slash; he moved in a geometric pattern of death, a 360-degree orbit of pure, focused hatred.
He walked past the front lines, his hand resting on the hilt. As the hilt clicked into the sheath-Clack-time resumed with a violent roar.
The Detail: In a singular, synchronized heartbeat, the heads of a million soldiers slid from their shoulders. No scream. No struggle. Just the wet, heavy sound of a million bodies hitting the mud.
The Psychological Collapse
Panic, more lethal than any weapon, infected the remaining forces. In the cockpit of a stealth jet, a pilot looked down and saw Jeongwoo standing on the wing. A second later, the pilot saw Jeongwoo in his rearview mirror.
"He's everywhere! He's in the cockpit!" the pilot screamed over the radio.
The Hallucination Effect-the Void's passive aura-had taken over. Fearing that Jeongwoo was among them, commanders lost their minds. Jets turned back and firebombed their own bases. Tanks opened fire on their own infantry. The sky turned orange with the fire of friendly casualties.
The Crimson Tide
Four hours. That was all it took.
The military might of 100 nations lay in pieces. The Han River and the surrounding seas didn't just turn red; they thickened with the sheer volume of blood, becoming a stagnant, crimson swamp.
The Jeoseung Saja (Messenger) appeared on a hill of empty shells. He wasn't the stoic reaper anymore. He was trembling, his spectral hands clutching a mountain of glowing scrolls.
"Stop..." the Messenger whispered, his voice breaking. "The Underworld is overflowing. The gates are jammed. These are 'Illegal Deaths'-they were not on the ledger! You are breaking the cycle of reincarnation itself!"
The Climax: The King of Silence
As the smoke cleared, the remnants of the South Korean government-the highest generals and politicians-crawled through the mud toward him. They offered him the keys to the country, the world, the stars. They worshipped him out of pure, gut-wrenching terror.
Jeongwoo didn't even glance down at them. To him, they were no different than the insects he stepped on in the forest.
"I don't want your throne," Jeongwoo said, his voice carrying over the silent battlefield like a cold wind. "I want the world to stop making noise."
He turned his back on civilization and began his ascent toward the Forbidden Mountain, a place where the veil between the gods and the void was thinnest. He didn't want to rule; he wanted to vanish into the quiet of the end.