Ensemble Leveling

  Chapter 52: Eyes Gazing the Past

  “No hesitation. Let us begin properly. Now.”

  Jihoon’s voice was steady as he leveled his decayed halberd, Judgment of Light.

  The weapon, despite its rusted, timeworn form, emanated a faint radiance, an aura of light tainted with decay—a paradox of divinity and ruin. No enchantment or magic that he knew could mend it, yet it still carried the will of its past wielders.

  She had already prepared her magic in advance. The air around her quivered, pressure building as a formation of watery bubbles bloomed around her presence.

  The tension shattered like a snapped bowstring.

  Advanced-class Water Magic – Neptunian Hammer.

  From above, rectangular masses of water—dense as steel, vast as boulders—crashed down like meteors. Each one was unnatural in itself, as though carrying the weight of the ocean's pressure, distorting the air with sheer force as they descent toward him and the general surrounding.

  Judgment of Light – 1st Form: Breaking Dawn.

  A golden arc of incandescent tore through the air.

  His halberd cleaved through the first descending mass, splitting it apart in a single, merciless swing. The force behind his strike sent glistening water droplets flying, reflecting light like shattered kaleidoscopic glass.

  He pivoted. Swung again. Another mass fell—another was bisected mid-air, its halves crashing harmlessly to the sides. Jihoon moved with fluid efficiency, each motion a blend of instinct and technique, his halberd tracing afterimages of light in the dimming evening sky.

  He frowned, something felt off with the way she is combat. Although she isn’t a natural-born combatant, it would be blind of him to not take precaution measures and consider her the same as they first met.

  The cut masses of water did not dissipate. Instead, they remained suspended, like hanging prisons of liquid, reflecting the battlefield in fractured, distorted angles.

  Jihoon’s mind raced as he tried to figure out her intents. None of them are ordinary water constructs which he surmised but he fail to grasp what they are for. Jihoon’s grip tightened. She’s setting up something.

  As Aquarius leaped back, widening the distance, she scattered more of them—her hands weaving new spells, summoning more floating cubes to hover in the space between them. She doesn’t even try to hit him with them, which he started to notice as he fast approaching her.

  Then before he could fully discern her strategy, she made her first assault.

  Aquarius dived. She vanished into one of the water cubes scatter about their dueling ground like a fish slipping through the ocean’s embrace. Then—she reappeared behind him with a spell prepared to strike at his momentary weakness.

  Intermediate-class Water Magic – Aqua Bleed

  Jihoon barely twisted in time to intercept. The rush of high-pressured water clashes against his halberd as he narrowly dispersed its impact.

  He knew just how lethal water can be as he remembered that even industrial water cutter split apart diamond like nothing and even though he is beyond peak human in durability, his body is still not without its vulnerability let alone tougher than diamond.

  The moment they clashed just now, she was gone again, diving into another water mass before he could properly response to her swift and sudden attacks.

  She was everywhere and nowhere at once, using the conjured cubes as a fluid battlefield, an extension of herself. Like an ocean on land which she launched herself from one to another like a torpedo while negating the weakness of being a merfolk on land.

  The realization struck Jihoon like a blade to the gut because it is the most obvious there is to be. A merfolk’s greatest weapon wasn’t just water that they cast. It was also the ability to move through it seamlessly—to attack and retreat without warning. In terms of aquatic battle, there really is no race better adapted to it.

  She had turned the battlefield into her home turf and Jihoon is like ironically like a fish beached on land against her swift maneuvers that he couldn’t fight directly against.

  Jihoon barely kept up. Every strike he countered and deflect left him drained, every spell dodged forced him further on the back foot. His endurance was waning, while she only grew more relentless, her Intermediate-class Water Magic setting the sequential steps toward his defeat at her hands.

  For every one of his movements, she had already set up three responses.

  She wasn’t aiming for a decisive, crushing blow—she was bleeding him out. Like a shark circling, waiting for its prey to slip, to drown in its own fatigue.

  “Tch… so that’s your game.” Jihoon exhaled, sweat rolling down his brow.

  “You catch on fast, but can you do something about it?” Her voice echoed, shifting from one cube to another. Her tone was teasing, but he could hear the undercurrent of genuine curiosity. She wanted to see how he would turn this around.

  Then he would show her. Jihoon stamped his halberd into the ground, his free hand reaching into the air.

  Advanced-class Light Magic – Aurora Borealis.

  The incantation shimmered through reality, shifting through its stages as the magic built up in his grasp.

  From Initiate, a mere string of light.

  To Novice, a taut rope and a whip in itself.

  To Intermediate, a luminous cable that pulsed with radiance.

  And finally— at Advanced—

  A brilliant iridescent fabric unfolded between his fingers. Like the very Northern Lights had been woven into cloth. It expanded as Jihoon expended his mana into it, stretching wide across the battlefield, casting waves of dancing color in its wake.

  Jihoon snapped his wrist, the fabric surging forth in an attempt to ensnare Aquarius.

  But she was far from an easy catch. She dived once more, narrowly slipping past the net’s edge, but Jihoon was already adjusting, sweeping it across like a fisherman closing in on a writhing catch.

  Aquarius’s eyes sharpened. She twisted mid-motion, angling her trajectory to slip through a gap just before the net could close around her.

  Jihoon grinned. “That’s fine. That’s what I wanted either way.”

  In that instant, his other hand flicked back—and with a burst of strength, he hurled his electric guitar skyward.

  Aquarius’s focus was still entirely on the net—on evading, dodging, reacting. She didn’t see the second act unfolding, entirely unaware of it in the slightest.

  ______-----{////\\\\}-----______

  Doppelganger

  Classification: Illusion Magic

  Rank: Master

  Effect:

  -Create up to 3 duplicate clones that share base stats of the user,

  can interact with mundane objects with equal proficiency as the user.

  Can't utilize System [Skills]. Stats can't be enhanced by external effects.

  User could customize the appearance of the Doppelgangers if one wished

  No duration limitation. Cooldown: 3 hours.

  ------_____{\\\\////}_____------

  A flicker in the air—then, in a split second, an emotionless duplicate of Jihoon stepped from the unseen. No wasted motion. No hesitation.

  Advanced-class Light Magic – Wings That Don’t Reach.

  The clone immediately took off, launching itself into the air using translucent, golden ethereal wings of light as it unfurled, flickering as they propelled the clone skyward at blinding speed. All before shattered in one flap as feathers scatters as though wings of wax melting in the sun.

  Aquarius’s eyes flicked upward as she recognized the motions unique to him and only him. Her lips pressed into a thin line as she understood the conflict in her heart.

  She had known Jihoon fought better with music. She didn’t understand how or why—but she had seen it firsthand. She didn’t need to know Song Magic to recognize its impact on him. She wasn’t blind to its apparent effects that allowed him to perform the miracle of Lap 4 of the First Trial of Odyssey.

  And just now, Jihoon reclaimed the key to turning this fight around.

  Initiate-class Light Magic – Between Two Worlds

  Establishing the mental connection between him and his Doppelganger using the same method that created the string of light, Jihoon mentally communicated his Doppelganger to play his own personal character theme. As egotistical that may sound.

  ______-----{////\\\\}-----______

  Exceed!

  Classification: Song Magic

  Rank: Intermediate

  Effect (MAG 92):

  -+(MAG*10)% to all Physical Attributes of self. (Currently: 920%)

  -----_____{\\\\////}_____------

  ______-----{////\\\\}-----______

  +Physical Attributes:

  -STR: 24 (+221)

  -END: 25 (+239)

  -AGI: 25 (+230)

  -DEX: 24 (+221)

  +Non-physical Attributes:

  -MAG: 92

  ------_____{\\\\////}_____------

  Just one Song Magic, and his Physical Attributes skyrocketed with very little to no reason. Just like what is seen in the broadcast of the First Trial of Odyssey when his ranking placement fluctuates chaotically from last to first amongst the 300 participants until Lap 4 when he is the sole participant at that point.

  Jihoon braced his halberd once more as he swung the Judgment of Light with renewed vigor. The sheer strength imbued by his newfound vitality combined with the weapon as by sheer quantified statistics, he now matched equally with Aquarius in brute strength.

  Judgment of Light – 1st Form: Breaking Dawn.

  Now, she was facing that same absurdity in real-time. His stance shifted. His grip tightened. His advance began.

  Aquarius had a dangerous premonition as instead of lunging from one cube to another, she quickly rushed upward like a koi swimming upward against the waterfall to become a dragon. Then, in that same instant, numerous floating water cubes in front of him cleaved apart and its form no longer maintained as by sheer force he disrupted its stability. With such raw impact that the water dispersed before it even had the chance to collapse into liquid.

  Aquarius quickly guides her own trajectory into another water cube/Neptunian Hammer nearby as she narrowly stabilized herself. She had no idea how just him listening to music alone brought him to such differences.

  Her advantage had shifted. Before, she held both speed and strength over him. Now, all she had left was one single edge— Magic Potency.

  By [Observance], her MAG was 500. His? 92. Even with his absurd buffs, her spell potency was still in another league.

  She couldn’t let him get close. She had to drive him back.

  Aquarius raised her hands, and the air quivered. Jihoon’s instinct screamed immediately, knowing the danger she is capable of.

  Advanced-class Water Magic – White-headed Vortex

  From the pooling water that scattered about as the result of the shattered water cube. A torrential vortex exploded into existence, a maelstrom formed mid-air, surging outward with the force of an ocean’s fury.

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  Jihoon barely sidestepped, his halberd carving through the spiraling tides as he narrowly escapes its deadly grasp, but the sheer force of impact sent him breathless as the onslaught only just begun.

  She wasn’t done with him. Not even close in the slightest.

  Advanced-class Water Magic – Abyss Trident

  From within the water cubes, tridents of condensed, high-pressure water launched forward, so sharp and swift they ripped the air apart with an ear-piercing shriek.

  Jihoon twisted his body mid-dash, his halberd striking and deflecting against them in rapid succession. The impact sent shockwaves rippling across the battlefield.

  One after another. More. Faster. Stronger. She wasn’t letting up in the slightest.

  He could see it now in her expression. She knew he could match her physically, so she was leveraging every single ounce of her superior magic to compensate as she used her magic more liberally.

  As he parried another Abyss Trident, Jihoon smirked while Aquarius frowned. “How do you even do that? Aren't your physical capabilities a lot weaker?” She said while her confusion was genuine.

  He shrugged, still grinning even in the heat of their duel.

  "When your own character theme plays, it's rules of cool all the way.”

  His halberd spun once before pointing it toward her.

  “When you know it’s your moment, you feel as though you can surpass your own limits.”

  "Perhaps you’d like your own theme?” He tilted his head mockingly in a jesting gesture.

  Aquarius scoffed but smirked despite herself. “I’ll consider it after this.”

  She raised her hands again and Jihoon readied his halberd. The battle has only started.

  Aquarius was relentless. Her form flickered between the conjured water cubes, twisting, launching, striking from impossible angles. Even though he is destroying and limiting her maneuver on his initiative, Jihoon barely had time to counter before another wave of spells crashed upon him.

  Advanced-class Water Magic – Blue Ascension.

  A colossal geyser erupted beneath her, launching her skyward in an elegant spiral as the cascading torrents of water formed a shining crest around her.

  For a brief moment, she seemed untouchable—like the very embodiment of the ocean’s wrath. The fury and horror when one is at complete mercy of the volatile world all-around.

  Jihoon wasn’t about to let her control the skies when she already hold dominance of too many field of battle already.

  Judgment of Light – 2nd Form: Rising Sun.

  He stepped forward and launched himself with a devastating upward strike.

  The ground beneath him shattered from the sheer force, the blade of his halberd illuminated in brilliant radiance as he aimed to cleave straight through her ascent— His martial weapon arts a distinct thing from his magic entirely. And by logicality, doesn’t suffer from the same thing his Advanced-class Magic did. Unfortunately, unlike magic, it is too straightforward against the more strategic opponents who could see the attack coming from a mile away.

  Aquarius uses Aqua Bleed again with ease as though flicking empty air. And unable to easily alter his own trajectory midair, Jihoon forcefully cast his only mobility magic.

  Advanced-class Light Magic – Wings that Don’t Reach

  In an instant, the translucent wings of light made out of shattered glass manifest behind him as he backpedal mid trajectory away from her attack. Yet, with just one single time he flapped to steer away, the wings that he had shattered in one use. Again.

  Aquarius, instead of pressing her advantage, sighed mid-air. She shouldn’t be doing this. Jihoon was her opponent in this duel and she had the upper hand.

  But something about the way he struggled with his own power annoyed her more than it should.

  It wasn’t like he lacked talent. In fact, the fact that he reached Advanced-class Magic alone without proper guidance or insight was proof that he had a terrifying level of natural intuition and realization of magic itself.

  And yet, he was wasting it. His magic, his skills—they weren’t meant to be thrown away in a single burst. He knew precisely the component of self yet for some reason missing the most integral aspects of it.

  “You’re doing it wrong.”

  Jihoon blinked upon hearing her words. “...What?”

  “Stop using Advanced-class Magic like an overglorified bomb. You’re supposed to be wielding it, not breaking it every time you use it.”

  She twisted her fingers in mid-air.

  “Watch.”

  Advanced-class Water Magic – Hydro Cannon.

  The vast pillar of water of Blue Ascension compressed into a single point before its trajectory altered forward and then detonating forward like a railgun, cutting through the battlefield with surgical precision in a surge.

  Jihoon barely dodged, or more that it narrowly misses him deliberately. The sheer pressure alone slicing apart the landscape behind him.

  Aquarius didn’t stop casting at all as the magic didn’t break apart. She moved fluidly between her spells, extending their effects, sustaining them.

  Jihoon felt frustration boil inside him. He did understand that part already so why is it that his shattered in one use? What is he missing entirely from the component of self that makes his Advanced-class spell way more fragile.

  “How?”

  Aquarius glared down at him, sometimes he really had it with the man who changed her life for the better yet so blind with his own.

  “Because I don’t just use magic. I am my magic.”

  “I get that already. So why in the living hell do my magic shatter apart in just one use!?”

  Jihoon gritted his teeth. He could feel the rage simmering beneath his skin, his frustration reaching a breaking point.

  He did everything right. He had understood the structure, he had imparted his meaning, he had become one with his own magic. Each sequential stages of Magic Proficiency led him here.

  So why? Why did it still break apart? His Advanced-class Magic never persisted, never flowed beyond the first moment of activation—

  What separated him from her?

  "I did precisely as you said! I became my magic! I integrated the component of self! So what separates us!?" Jihoon roared with bitterness of relapsing issues, the weight of his failure pressing down on him like a crushing tide.

  Aquarius narrowed her eyes, seeing the absurdity that Jihoon embodies. The genuine brilliance that he had in understanding magic, yet missing the entirely obvious things altogether. Someone so paradoxically display both of the worst and best at the same time in what he does.

  "You of all people—" she began, her voice cutting sharper than any blade, "—who understands and empathizes with the lives of others, who has changed them for the better, who SEES people for who they truly are...

  How can someone like you be so utterly blind to your own self?!"

  Jihoon staggered mid-air upon hearing those words. Her words cut deeper than he expected, more than any swung blade of S-rank Hunters, more than Extinction-class Monsters.

  Blind? To himself? That was absurd because it can’t be to him. He knew who he was. He knew his strengths, his weaknesses. He had spent years in mortal combat against monsters far deadlier than his capability. Then the scant time he had now in order to refine his abilities, sharpening his skills, making himself stronger.

  So what the hell was she talking about—

  Then, it struck him like a freight truck with no break.

  Magic wasn't just an extension of the self. Magic was the self.

  And yet— What part of himself had he been using?

  His mind raced back over everything he had learned.

  The core of Advanced-class Magic was the component of self. That much was unquestionable.

  And he had included that component. He had taken himself and woven it into his spells, letting his magic move as an extension of his own will.

  But who was "himself"? Once the question settles in, he is forced to face the truth of himself

  [Eyes Gazing the Past, Safeguarding the Future]

  Jihoon realized, with chilling clarity, that his magic only reflected his present self.

  The Jihoon of this moment.

  Not the Jihoon who had lived. Not the sum of his experiences. Not the pain, the struggles, the victories, the failures.

  His magic had always lacked weight and stability because he refused to acknowledge his own history.

  It wasn't just about merging with the magic. It was about accepting everything that made him who he was.

  And the moment he truly looked at Aquarius's magic—he saw it.

  Aquarius’s magic wasn't just powerful. It was alive. Her Neptunian Hammer, Blue Ascension, Hydro Cannon— they weren’t just techniques.

  They were a reflection of her life as a whole.

  The merfolks, born and lived in the depths of the ocean. The struggles of adapting to land, mastering the limitations of their bodies, slowly transforming weaknesses into strengths. Thus the way her magic moved like currents, how she fought like a tide that never relented—

  Everything about her magic spells told the story of who she was. Her magic was her history, her battles, her triumphs, her burdens.

  Her life is her magic. And her magic is her life. The two were inseparable from the beginning.

  Even if her tapestry of life is filled with many disgraces and shame. Even if a lot of it is just her worst display of selfishness and self-centered behaviors, the fact that she had reached Advanced-class Magic Proficiency before their first meeting means that she accepted all of that ugly side of her with acceptance way before. That someone whose first impression is as petulant and immature like her, was ultimately far more mature than Jihoon ever did until now.

  And that stung more than any spell she’d thrown at him.

  When someone like Jihoon continues to deny his own past because he selectively even if instinctively chose to ignore the pain that it brought. All of that saying should have been obvious the moment he received [Eyes Gazing the Past, Safeguarding the Future]. But it took someone spelling it out for him to realize.

  He had denied his own history. That was the missing piece. That was why his magic shattered upon release.

  Because he had been rejecting parts of himself.

  Jihoon closed his eyes even in the direst moment of the duel. He took a deep breath as his perception of time accelerated in the trance.

  He had been separating himself from his past, thinking of his life story as baggage instead of foundation.

  His present self was just a snapshot. A single frame in a full-length film. But magic at this level needed the entire reel which he prohibitively denies.

  The component of self that it referred to isn’t himself in the moment. But the totality of oneself.

  Jihoon’s mind flashed back to everything ever since the Gate.

  His first chord played on an electric guitar beneath a broken ceiling just immediately after the Gate broke out, when he is still in denial of the sudden alteration of his life.

  The nights he spent hungry and alone in the underground shelter, chasing light in a place where none existed. Thoughts consumed by endless anger at whatever force it was that had ruined his life and made him suffer pointlessly as he is beset by forces far greater than his capability and understanding.

  Longer into the nightmare, it only got worse. The rage mutated. Into bargaining. Into poisonous introspection. Every battle became a barrage of questions: ‘Why? Why am I still doing this? What if I had chosen differently? What if I’d run? What if I died here and now? ‘

  He clung to what-ifs like they were ropes dangling above a pit. Wrapping it around his own neck like a noose before the drop terminate everything. He fought endlessly—against monsters, enemies, and the gnawing feeling that he was living a life that wasn’t really his anymore.

  And once a form of civilized world finally returned from the chaotic mess it becomes after such long grueling combats he underwent. After he earned his severance pay, when the fighting stopped, and he was handed his severance pay like a paper medal for enduring hell. His first decision with said money… is to wall himself off from the world itself and uses only the minimum to kept himself going.

  He fell into depression, living all isolated in the lightless world while the world goes on moving. After having lost all that, he had, he no longer wished to have any aspiration in life anymore.

  He bought silence. He bought darkness. He used just enough to survive, but no more. He built a coffin for himself and let the world continue without him. After losing everything, he chose to desire nothing.

  What no one ever saw—what even he refused to call by name—was that all of it, from beginning to end, had been the longest, quietest, most brutal session of the five stages of grief ever lived.

  Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression.

  Similar to Jin Sarae in his final moment when Jihoon deflected Der Freischutz’s 7th bullet, the Bullet of Despair with the resonated Judgment of Light back at him. Within that instant, his old friend and once junior of Arisen Studio undergo the same grief before at last, arrived at his acceptance at fate’s end at last.

  For the longest time, Jihoon had never once gotten close to his own closure. Even with the dream therapy of Lotus Chamber, he refused to directly confront the section of his life during the Gate Outbreak and instead resorted to the closest thing that his subconscious could pass itself as acceptable temporary solution.

  A laugh escaped him—not mockery, not joy, but a laugh of release, a breath after drowning too long beneath the surface.

  “I see it now,” he whispered, his eyes shining with something new—not light, but clarity. “I see me now.”

  Because he had only brought the him of now to the spell, leaving all those broken versions of himself locked away in the dark. But those versions—the scared one, the angry one, the hopeless one, the one who still cried for a dream no one believed in—they were all still him.

  He just never forgave them.

  But now, with this clarity, this piercing, searing truth brought on by Aquarius’s merciless honesty, by her spells that screamed who she was with every crash of water—

  Jihoon finally looked his past in the eyes. And then—like a note struck deep in the recess of his soul—he remembered.

  The Forgotten Melody.

  A tune that had no name when he first stumbled across it online, played in some obscure, glitchy recording with frayed quality and background static. He couldn’t remember who composed it. He doubted anyone could.

  But that melody, ethereal and heart-wrenchingly beautiful, had planted the seed. It was the sound that first made him feel. That made him pick up a guitar, even when his fingers were too clumsy and his timing all wrong. The first time he heard it, he wept. The second, he vowed to create something like it. The third, he recreated it.

  A submerged graveyard of swords on a still lake, there a little girl half-submerged in the water surface melancholically playing her harp surrounded by these embedded swords where white roses float and took hold around them. As he looked at her, her eyes remained close yet holding onto the harp closely to her chest as if in slumber or deep contemplation.

  The very song that she played, is the same as the Forgotten Melody.

  When he approached, she didn’t treat him with any specialty. She didn't ask why he came. She only asked what he played and why he arrived here. And when he played that melody, she listened in silence. When the final note faded, she gave him no applause. No praise. Only wisdom.

  "Your music remembers you," she had said. "Even when you do not."

  And then, she taught him Song Magic—not as a system spell, not as some formula of numbers and buffs, but as a legacy. A sacred extension of the soul rendered audible. It wasn't about chords or damage or amplification—it was about resonance. With the world. With others. With oneself.

  That was the moment he truly began his journey—not to slay monsters or top raid charts—but to find his place in a world where he never belonged. Where Hunters and Gates and stat screens wrote the stories of victors and vanquished. But what was he? A musician clinging to broken strings?

  He wandered from place to place. Fought for his life. Wrote songs with no audience in mind.

  Then one day, to find a companion of his in a lonely journey. He searched in his old belongings and find another legacy similar to the Forgotten Melody. Its name ‘Memories of Absence’ is all of that description it has. And when he played and recreated it, he was transported to another world entirely. Similar to when he first transported to the little goddess through the Forgotten Melody.

  Him meeting Karim, the wood elf merchant who sponsored his musical endeavor. Alvorna, the Daughter of the Matriarch, trying to find her own voice when others around her wanted her to be something she herself isn’t comfortable with. Rosa who would have went on not acknowledge the slightest of her own legacy as her father waste away alone, and finally, Aquarius whom Jihoon confident as the first person whom his intervetion directly changed her fate for the better.

  And now, here they were.

  Two broken people. Two fractured mirrors finally reflecting each other clearly through the clash of water and light.

  At long last—after ten long years—he had reached the fifth stage of the five stages of grief.

  Acceptance.

  Of what he was.

  Of what he had lost.

  Of who he had become.

  And of the life that shaped it all.

  Jihoon stood tall, the Judgment of Light pulsing with renewed resonance. It didn’t shatter. It sang.

  And for the first time in a long decade of grief, the music inside him no longer cried for the past.