Who on earth would think that every preparation would go up in smoke because a debuff blocked the skill right before casting?
Vincent kept most variables in mind, but he had never even considered that skill usage itself could be sealed.
What he couldn’t understand wasn’t only that Kang-hoo—an assassin—had attempted to seal his skills.
If a debuff stat related to skill sealing had been visibly stacking on Vincent’s own status window, he would have fought with that possibility in mind. At the very least, he wouldn’t have been hit like this with his eyes open.
But this was far too sudden. Kang-hoo had one-sidedly blocked his skill usage.
The disaster didn’t end there.
【Blood Flower】
Pu-pu-pu-bang! Bang!
“Kghh…!”
The Blood Flower Kang-hoo triggered early used blood as a sacrifice, worsening Vincent’s deep wounds.
He didn’t even dare look down at his flank.
Just feeling something hot continuously running down was enough to realize how bad things were.
A body he couldn’t control.
A body caught in Blood Flower staggered like a paper doll twisting in a gale, unable to find its balance.
Kang-hoo’s attack chain continued.
【Thorn Hell】
Ka-deu-deu-deu-deuk.
Pu-shu-shut!
“Aaaagh!”
Sharp ashen thorns erupted from the ground and pierced through the sole of Vincent’s foot as he was shoved backward without a moment to regain control.
Thorn Hell lightly punched through the top of his foot, dripping blood and scraps of flesh down the sides of the thorns.
Because Thorn Hell returned to its original position after reaching its apex, it would soon vanish from view.
【Qi Cannon】
So without even needing to close in, Kang-hoo added another skill that could instantly strike the exact spot he wanted.
A Qi Cannon shot out with a tearing airburst—
Kwa-deu-deuk!
—and shattered Vincent’s right shoulder before he even had time to brace.
It happened so fast that even Vincent, the one who got hit, missed the timing to groan.
“Keok.”
A delayed groan spilled out off-beat. His right arm, now directionless, dangled limply along with it.
Dizzying.
Everything he saw looked like a lagging, glitching screen—nothing was smooth.
Vincent closed his eyes and opened them again and again. He couldn’t secure a proper field of vision.
His stamina had dropped to around 10%. At this rate, he could fall into a near-death state.
The next moment—
【Sacred Leap】
When Kang-hoo lowered his body as if to leap, Vincent poured all his strength into both legs.
One foot was in a sorry state from the piercing wound, but he wasn’t in a position to pick and choose.
As long as he was alive, he had to struggle desperately—no matter how pathetic it looked.
Whooong!
As Kang-hoo’s body lifted—
“Aaaagh!”
Vincent hurled himself forward with a sound that was neither a groan, nor a scream, nor a battle cry.
Kang-hoo skimmed past the spot Vincent had been standing a heartbeat ago, and the attack went wide.
He bought time.
Distance opened between Kang-hoo and Vincent—a precious gap that gave Vincent a sliver of time.
‘Fuck! You think I’m going to die like this?’
Without hesitating further, Vincent pulled a talisman from inside his clothes.
A Grade-1 talisman with a one-time effect that could instantly restore stamina.
A game changer.
Vincent could say it outright: the moment he used this talisman, the stamina advantage would flip again.
He had already finished identifying Kang-hoo’s decisive elements. There was no chance he’d repeat the same mistake.
A fight that had gone wrong from the start because of his carelessness—and because Kang-hoo had been more formidable than expected.
But once he finished recovering with the talisman, all of it would be nothing more than an incident.
Vincent was sure.
Kang-hoo might have had something to rely on, but of course Vincent did too.
He just hadn’t wanted to use it unless he had to. Now that he was using it, he had no regrets left.
Clench.
Vincent gripped the talisman.
At the same time—
【Stamina has fallen below 10%. Strong recovery is required. Check your condition.】
A system warning popped up.
A warning about low stamina.
It was nothing new—he’d seen it before. In moments like this, it was even welcome.
But right then—
【‘Judgment’ status has been activated.】
“……?”
Vincent’s eyes filled with question marks at the incomprehensible additional notice.
Judgment status activation?
He didn’t possess any ability or skill by that name.
And the status window format wasn’t the usual one shown for himself—it had a red border.
Meaning, it was a negative effect triggered by someone else. Debuff notifications usually looked like that.
But there wasn’t any separate “Judgment debuff stat” stacking, either.
It just said Judgment status had been activated. He didn’t even know what that status meant.
The next moment—
【Execution can now be triggered on a target whose stamina is below 10%. Once per day.】
【On execution, shock is induced for instant death, but your damage contribution must be at least 50%.】
A status overlay—unclear whether it was meant for him or the enemy—layered itself into Vincent’s field of view.
Execution trigger on target.
The instant he read it, a shiver ran through Vincent’s entire body.
And everything from head to toe froze solid. Extreme fear compressed in his wide-open eyes.
If there was a fleeting instant right before death, was this what it felt like? He could feel himself crossing the border between life and death.
And then—
Ku-goong!
“Ugh!”
Vincent felt his heart stop. A heart attack initiated entirely by an outside force.
So this must have been the Judgment status he’d just seen. Trigger execution and kill the opponent instantly.
He was dying.
No—he was going to die!
He didn’t want it to end like this.
His heart had already stopped, but his mind hadn’t blacked out yet.
Vincent was desperate.
Dying like this felt unbearably unfair—wasn’t this just being toyed with by Kang-hoo from start to finish?
And not only that, he still had a pile of skills he hadn’t even gotten to use tactically.
If he died without doing anything—despite having so many options—because he got caught by the enemy’s setup!
He would feel wronged even in death.
It was humiliation.
A dark history of his that gossips would chew on for a long time—so shameful it would follow him into the afterlife.
So he tried to force Dark Energy up into his heart.
Of course Dark Energy couldn’t negate death. But it could delay it—like a stay of death.
Even if he only bought time, he wanted to leave Kang-hoo with something to regret. Better yet, die together!
But the problem was elsewhere.
Kang-hoo had already closed in and was openly forcing his own Dark Energy into Vincent’s chest.
Then Vincent’s and Kang-hoo’s Dark Energy tangled together inside and around the heart like ink stirred into water.
Vincent’s desperate ploy—to buy time for his dying heart through sheer grit— but even that—
【Dark Energy Ignition】
was shut down.
The Dark Energy Kang-hoo had mixed into the heart ignited flames, using even Vincent’s Dark Energy as fuel.
“……!”
An ending beyond debate.
With his heart burning away inside his body, Vincent died without even having time to let out a final scream.
A perfect execution by Kang-hoo—one that allowed not even the smallest grudge to remain.
A life snuffing out fast.
For a brief moment, though, in a hazy vision that might have been near-death symptoms, Vincent felt he could see something like a halo behind Kang-hoo.
He had once glimpsed something like this around Jang Si-hwan too, but this light looked far larger than that man’s.
He was dying—having been toyed with and killed without ever managing to show a single proper countermeasure.
Maybe because he had already accepted death, he didn’t feel resentful or ashamed.
He only realized that Shin Kang-hoo was far, far more formidable than he had ever thought.
……A loser’s belated regret.
Vincent had no strength left to think any further.
And so—
Koooom!
He collapsed onto the cold dirt and never rose again. It was an unquestionable end.
“It’s done.”
Constellation plunder messages and hidden-skill plunder messages streamed down in succession.
Then came the completion message for the test tied to the Angel of the Battlefield’s fifth privilege.
A festival of notifications that only appeared when the opponent was definitively dead.
Using the “Judgment” option linked to Great Decapitation.
That had been the foundation from the start—why Kang-hoo entered a chicken game where both sides bled stamina against Vincent.
Kang-hoo was sure that if he only dragged Vincent’s stamina below 10%, he could kill him with Judgment without fail.
But Vincent had never understood why Kang-hoo was forcing the fight into a war of attrition.
The time it took Vincent to even try to measure it became a fatal blunder.
‘If someone could watch what I did today as a novel or a webtoon…… everyone would think the same thing, right? That you couldn’t find a clearer example than this of what a gap in information does to fate.’
Certainty that he could kill.
Vagueness about whether he could.
Clarity and lack of clarity in judgment—born from a gap in information—produced stark results of life and death.
Kang-hoo knew Vincent well.
Vincent didn’t know him.
If Vincent had known about Judgment, would he have just watched his stamina fall? Of course not.
But because he didn’t know Judgment existed, he endured until the last possible moment.
He even had a rationale.
Because he had a recovery talisman, as long as his stamina didn’t fully bottom out, enduring could be advantageous.
He could also set up a strategic reversal—nearly dead, then suddenly restoring a huge chunk of stamina and flipping the tide.
That calculation—
Kang-hoo twisted perfectly at the end.
Kang-hoo had known from the beginning that Vincent had a recovery talisman.
He also knew Vincent would hesitate and use it late, because he would have done the same himself.
It seemed Vincent had set the bottom line for using it at 10% stamina—and that became the worst possible move.
“Twelve.”
Now the Thirteen Stars from the original story no longer existed.
Since escaping Cheongmyeong Detention Center, this was the first name he erased by the reason of “death.” Vincent Meyer.
Yu Cheonghwa, Emilia Rose, and Akiyama Takashi were already creating cracks in their relationship with Jang Si-hwan.
And Lars Abel’s swelling interest in Jang Si-hwan was rapidly cooling because of Kang-hoo.
In the bigger picture, it meant five of the Thirteen Stars had been pulled away. One of them, he had killed.
The beginning had felt overwhelming—could he really stand against the Thirteen Stars? But now…… it was reality.
“Act 2 again… maybe Act 2-2.”
When he killed Warden Jo Hwan-seong in the battle to retake Cheongmyeong Detention Center and severed himself from past nightmares,
Kang-hoo had believed that was when Act 2 of his life began.
Now, it felt like he was marking a major inflection point along that extension.
A rising chain of tension and challenge as everything built toward Act 3.
Yeah. Act 2-2.
There was no better expression than that.
Vincent’s corpse, cooling rapidly as it took the cold north wind full-on, was the opening of Act 2-2.
