Anna gazed down at Tyler, his form a broken silhouette against the frozen expanse. She drew back the arrow, her eyes narrowed. *So this is how the Shadow Hunter dies, she thought. Honestly, he doesn't even deserve the title. Throughout this entire fight, there was no shadow. Just an ordinary S-rank with a few strange skills. That's all.*

Tyler, lying on the ground, his body screaming in protest, saw the arrow take flight. *Damn it… I don't want to use that thing.* But he knew. If he didn't, he would die. If he did… he risked losing himself to the entities. The weight of that knowledge pressed down on him, a physical ache. *What the hell should i do?* The thought swirled in his mind, a vortex of panic gripping his heart.

Anna released the arrow. Then another. And another. Three arrows, identical to the ones that had met his lightning attack. Three arrows now arced towards him.

He clenched his teeth, the cold fear threatening to consume him.* If I don't… I die.* He mentally willed the Void Armor to manifest. In that instant, in that agonizing fraction of a second, the system panel flashed before his eyes, the words written in a harsh, unforgiving red:

Cannot equip Void armor. Cannot equip shadow armor. Void armor is restricted for user safety. Void armor causes harm to the system. Void armor corrupts the system.

The messages, a torrent of red, filled his vision, a thousand warnings screaming at him.

Tyler's eyes widened, realization dawning in a single, horrifying instant.

The first arrow slammed into his chest.

A blinding sphere of blue mist exploded outwards. The air crystallized. The cold was an absolute, a searing null that flash-froze the breath in his lungs.

THOOM.

A second impact detonated, the thunderous blast hurling him backward. The blue mist deepened, the cold intensifying from pain into a pervasive presence, a force that sought to stop time itself.

THOOM.

A third cataclysm struck. The consecutive explosions merged into one rolling wave of obliteration. The ground answered. A tide of solid frost erupted from the point of impact, a wave of instantaneous crystallization that flooded the land. It spread like water spilled across a vast, flat stone, relentless, seamless, swallowing four kilometers of the world in a single, gasping instant. The plain vanished, replaced by a glacial desert of absolute white.

Then the earth ruptured. Monstrous icicles, each the size of a watchtower, speared upward in a violent, ascending wave. They climbed over one another, a jagged, growing mountain of ice that stabbed toward the heavens, its peak aiming for Anna as she floated higher.

The storm twisted into a weapon. The torrential rain flash-froze into a billion shards of crystalline ice. A deafening roar filled the world, the cacophony of the downpour and the endless clatter of frozen needles shattering against the newborn icescape.

Anna lowered her bow. Silence should have followed.

Her breath hitched, a sharp, audible gasp.

She could still feel it.

His aura.

*His still alive?*

The thought was an impossibility. *He should've died.* Yet, a flicker remained, a faint, guttering ember in the vast frozen wasteland. His life force was thinner than a spider's silk, wavering on the edge of the void.

The white bow gleamed. The blue arrow vanished. In its place, a shaft of brilliant gold materialized, its light so incandescent it painted her features in sharp relief and cast long, dancing shadows across the ice. A serpent of pure, coiling fire wrapped around the arrow, its body a vortex of living flame that hissed and spat, vaporizing the frozen rain in a cloud of sizzling steam. The light grew, pulsating, a miniature sun held between her fingers, the final, blinding verdict.

The last of the blue mist peeled away, unveiling the monstrous icicle in its terrible entirety. It was a prison of perfect, crystalline clarity, and Tyler was trapped at its heart.

He was fused with the ice, his body locked in an agony of absolute zero. The cold had merged with him, the icicle feeling like an extension of his own frozen nervous system, a searing, burning cold that was also a profound, paralyzing numbness. His eyes were wide open, locked in a stare of silent horror. The ice had filled them, coating his corneas in a thin, unbreakable film, forcing him to witness the world through a glazed, unforgiving lens.

He could not blink. He could not breathe. His lungs were solid blocks of ice. The pressure of the ice encasing him was immense, a vice of unimaginable force crushing in on his chest from all sides, threatening to splinter his ribs. He was a statue of his own suffering, a fossil of pain preserved in a glacier of Anna's making.

His only freedom was the prison of his own mind.

The system panel hovered before him, a cruel hologram etched into the ice itself.

Passive Skill Enabled: Undying.

The skill that made him invincible for 30 seconds now felt like the most exquisite form of torture. It was a curse, not a blessing. He wanted to die, to escape the sensory overload of this frozen hell, but the skill held him fast, forcing him to endure every single, excruciating millisecond.

Words failed. There was no vocabulary for this pain. Each fraction of a second stretched into a searing eternity, an endless loop of primal need—the need to twitch a finger, to gasp for air, to simply escape. He was in a living hell, and his own power was the demon keeping the gates locked.

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A new, deeper dread washed over him, colder than the ice. He couldn't access the Shadow Armor. He couldn't access anything. His mind screamed the command, a desperate, silent mantra.

*Equip Void.Armor. Equip Void Armor. Equip Void Armor.*

Over and over and over, the mental plea was a frantic drumbeat against the walls of his skull. But nothing happened. The ice around him did not yield. It was stronger than forged steel, harder than mountain rock. It was absolute. He was trapped, undying, and utterly, completely alone with the agony.

His HP was locked at one. A single, stubborn point of life that refused to vanish. He should have died. In that moment, there was no fear of death, only a desperate, all-consuming need for it. Any end would be a mercy, an escape from the white-hot agony that had become his entire universe. The pain was a blinding, featureless whiteness in his mind, and every atom of his being screamed to get out of it.

But then, through the crystalline prison coating his eyes, he saw it.

A glowing golden light. It was like the arrow Anna had fired, but this one burned with the intensity of a forging sun, growing brighter and brighter until it seared his vision even through the ice.

Suddenly, through the overwhelming static of pain, Tyler's pupils dilated. A foreign sensation pierced the agony, a familiar, yet utterly alien, feeling. It was a slight hint at first, a heavy pressure at the base of his skull. Then it wasn't a trickle; it was a flood.

The searing cold in his limbs began to recede, but it was not a relief. It was a betrayal. The agony was retreating from his body only to focus itself, condensing into a single, unbearable point within his mind. It was a pressure cooker of pure suffering building inside his own head.

A jolt of psychic pain rammed through his consciousness, so violent it forced a twitch through his completely immobilized body. A subtle, hairline crack webbed across the ice covering his left eye.

Then, a faint, white glow ignited behind his pupils.

A hum started in the back of his skull, low, resonant, and deeply repulsive. It felt wrong, a violation that bled out all the other sensations, the pain, the numbness, the immobility, replacing them with this singular, invasive frequency.

Suddenly, his vision went black.

His eyes were still wide open, staring at the golden light, but he saw only darkness.

Then, He was falling.

His body slammed onto a solid, unyielding surface, the impact jarring the breath back into his lungs. He gasped, a raw, sucking sound in the absolute silence. He pushed himself up on trembling arms, his head spinning.

He was no longer in the ice.

He stood in an endless, featureless white void.

"What the...? Where the hell am I?" Tyler's voice was a dry rasp, the words swallowed by the immense, soundless whiteness. He looked down at his bare chest, his skin pebbling not from cold, but from the sheer, sterile strangeness of the place. He felt… nothing. No warmth, no chill. Just a hollow, neutral normalcy that was more unnerving than any extreme.

He was only in his pants and boots, the absence of his shirt making him feel vulnerable, exposed. He turned in a slow circle, his boots making no sound on the non-existent ground. "I was just about to die," he muttered to the void, the memory of crushing ice a fresh brand on his mind. "Getting crushed. But then… I'm here…."

He walked forward, the endless white offering no landmarks, no sense of distance or progress. *That Pale Reaper… she almost had me.* The thought was a spark of fury. *She wanted to kill Joy-*

His eyes snapped wide. "Joy!"

He spun around, a frantic energy seizing him. "How the hell do I get out of here? Where am I?" The questions were a desperate mantra. "I have to stop her. She's going to kill Joy!"

Suddenly, the system panel shimmered into existence before him, a stark, silent rectangle of solid blue. No text. No stats. Just a featureless, glowing azure plane.

Tyler stared, his mind stuttering. "Huh? System… what is going on?"

As if in response, words began to form on the blue field, materializing one by one with a soft, pulsing light:

The user has been trapped in a conscious state of their own mind.

"What?" Tyler breathed, the word laced with confusion and a dawning dread. "What does that mean?"

The letters vanished, erased into the blue. A new sentence began to form, the characters appearing with slow, deliberate finality, each one a hammer blow:

A void entity has taken control.

"What?" Tyler muttered, the word a hollow echo in the boundless white. "A void entity...?"

The realization crashed into him, cold and heavy. He knew the curse. He knew the entities were fragments of his own soul, twisted by void energy into sentient hunger, desperate to merge back, to consume him to become whole.

"But that's impossible," he argued aloud, his voice the only sound in the stifling silence. "I didn't even equip the Shadow Armor. I couldn't." His mind raced, scrambling for purchase. He looked down at the featureless floor, the answer forming like a chill down a spine he could no longer feel. "Unless... a piece was already gone. From the first time."

The system had warned him. It said he would feel them. It never specified how they would strike.

He looked up at the silent, blue panel, the memory a fresh wound. *The pain in my head... that wasn't just pain. That was it. That was the entity forcing its way in.* A tremor of pure violation ran through him. How did this white prison equate to his own mind? And how was he supposed to break out?

"System," he said, his voice sharpening with demand. "How do I get out of this place? How do I take back control?"

Letters materialized, their glow impersonal and cold:

The user must have an anchor to pull them from the white void.

An anchor? Tyler's thoughts snagged on the word, trying to find meaning in its abstraction. "What do you mean by an anchor?" The system remained silent, a blank, blue slate. Frustration boiled over. "Dammit!" he shouted, the sound swallowed by the void. "You can't just ignore me like this!"

Silence. He stared at the panel, his chest tight. He looked down, grasping for a different question, a better word, anything that would force the silent system to give him a real answer.

"What is an anchor?" Tyler demanded. The system gave him nothing but silence.

*How am I supposed to get this thing to answer me?*

He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples, as if he could physically force an idea out. The seconds were piling up, each one a weight on his chest. *Joy. That Pale Reaper is going to kill Joy while I'm stuck in here.*

A cold, sharp thought cut through the panic.

*Wait. The system said a void entity took control. I'm trapped in here... so it's out there. In my body. What the hell is it doing right now?*

"System," he said, the words sharp with a new, desperate hope. "Is there any way I can see what's happening?"

The panel glowed a sudden, brilliant white. Tyler's eyes widened as a holographic window shimmered into existence before him, a silent movie of his own reality.

The massive ice that had encased him was now just shattered chunks and glittering dust. And there he stood, shirtless in the freezing air. But it wasn't him.

A shroud of living shadow smoked off his shoulders and back, a dark aura that twisted and coiled with a will of its own. The figure stood with an unnatural stillness that was utterly alien.

*So I can see,* Tyler thought, leaning closer to the image. *What are you-*

The system panel didn't just move. It *lurched*, rushing from its place to slam directly into his face. There was no impact, only a dizzying, nauseating blur.

Then, the white void was gone.

He was standing on the cracked, frozen earth. He felt the chill of the air, saw the devastation through his own eyes. But he was a ghost in his own skull. He tried to turn his head, to lift a hand, to even twitch a finger. Nothing. His body was a statue, occupied by another. He could only watch, trapped behind his own eyes, as the shadow-smoke curled lazily from his arms.

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