Three days with Winston had quietly dismantled everything Freya thought she understood about class holders.

She had known the gate was false from the first day, so she wasn’t that shocked by the Giant Tree Troll at Level 22, an obvious Tier Two monster, well above anything a genuine Tier One region should have produced.

In a normal situation, Freya was honest enough with herself to admit that a high-level Tier Two monster would have pushed her hard.

The Troll was on the lower end of that bracket, and she could have found a way to kill it, but not cleanly and not without cost.

Yet Winston had taken its head off in a single movement.

’Is this what a Sacred class actually feels like?’

The thought came before she could stop it, but she pushed it aside just as fast.

Winston was pulling the energy stone from the Troll’s chest cavity, moving with the same unhurried efficiency he brought to everything.

Freya straightened as he approached, composure locked back into place. She didn’t know why she kept having to force it around him specifically.

Normally steadiness came naturally to her. With Winston, it required conscious effort.

"You got a spell from that kill," she said.

Winston glanced at his panel and gave a small shrug. "It’s just a level 22 spell; it won’t come in handy anytime soon."

Freya kept her expression neutral, but internally she turned that over twice.

But after thinking about it for a while she seemed to understand why, even if Winston hadn’t explained it directly.

But back to matters at hand, they had spent three days building Mastery instead of rushing to the beacon, and that decision had been the right one.

Now both of them were approaching the peak of what their First Realizations could naturally hold. They would fill the remaining gap on the way in. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝓮𝒘𝙚𝙗𝒏𝙤𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝒐𝙢

Winston stepped forward without announcing it and Freya fell in beside him.

❖❖❖❖

The forest ended abruptly at a ledge, and Winston almost didn’t process what he was looking at.

A waterfall dropped from the edge they were standing on, it was massive and the roaring sound filled the entire space around them.

But instead of crashing into a riverbed below, the water fell into an open void with no visible bottom.

Across that void, far on the other side, the base of a mountain range stretched out in both directions.

Winston stared at it for a moment, then shrugged it off. Strange geography was just part of the Astral Heaven. Logic didn’t always apply here.

"The beacon is over there," Freya said, eyes fixed on the mountain base.

Winston nodded. He had felt it too. Then something else caught his eye.

Movement on the far side. A group of people were running hard, pushing through the open terrain at the mountain’s base, moving with the desperate urgency of people who had already burned through most of their options.

Behind them, closing the gap with grinding, inevitable steps, was the reason they were running.

[Rock Golem — Level 30]

It had a solid rock body, was bipedal and wielded a great blade carved from the same stone as its frame.

At Level 30 it wasn’t built for speed, but it was still gaining and the people ahead of it were running out of ground.

Winston didn’t spend time on analysis.

"Hold on tight."

Freya looked at him. Then at the void below the waterfall. Then she wrapped her arms around him without a word.

Winston’s knees bent.

『IGNITE』

The ground cracked under his feet from the pressure as he burned eight souls into his Realization and launched off the ledge.

They cleared the waterfall in a single arc, the waterfall roared beneath them and wind cut past in both directions, before Winston angled his descent toward the Rock Golem and came down like something dropped from a siege engine.

BOOM!

The impact was immediate and total.

He drove through the Golem from above, shearing through solid rock like it wasn’t there.

The creature crumbled on contact and the Level 30 Tier-Two monster reduced to rubble and scattered particles in a single strike. Winston skidded forward across the ground, momentum bleeding off in a controlled slide, and came to a stop.

He set Freya down and brushed the stone dust from his mantle.

The group ahead had stopped running. They were standing completely still, staring back at the pile of broken rock that had been chasing them ten seconds ago.

Then their eyes moved to Winston.

A Rock Golem at Level 30 sat at the minimum threshold to serve as a guardian in a Tier Two region.

These people had been fleeing from it. And someone had just dropped out of the sky and killed it before it could take another step.

Every single one of them had the same expression.

’What in the world is happening?’

❖❖❖❖

[0.25 Mastery Gained]

[1 Soul Gained]

Winston dismissed the panel and walked toward the four survivors.

Three males, one female, all students, but not from Nightwing. Their uniforms marked them as coming from a different academy entirely. They were shaken but standing, which already said something about them.

One of the males stepped forward before Winston reached them.

"Thank you for saving us." He extended a hand. "My name is Josh. These are my colleagues. Drake, Spencer, and Carly."

"Winston." He shook Josh’s hand. "And this is Freya."

Freya gave a small nod. The moment her name landed, something shifted in all four of their expressions, a flash of recognition, that they quickly managed. Winston caught it without reacting.

’She’s well known outside Nightwing too. Makes sense.’

He was about to move on when he caught Carly whispering to Drake, her voice low but not low enough.

"Do you think they can help us?"

"Help with what?"

Carly went still not expecting Winston to hear her but Josh stepped in smoothly to explain . "Our Base. We’ve run into a problem."

Winston’s eyes narrowed. "Explain."

Josh did and Winston discovered something new.

Most of the candidates from the First Entry had been dropped at the mountain range when they crossed the gate and the majority had reached this Base without too much difficulty, largely by avoiding the Tier Two monsters roaming the region rather than engaging them.

Direct encounters with Tier Two creatures as fresh initiates almost always ended the same way. Josh’s group had learned that the hard way just now, before Winston had dropped in.

But that wasn’t the problem Josh was building toward.

A Sacred class holder had apparently awakened in the same First Entry, someone who had managed to locate a defensible position and pull most of the surviving students and agents together into this functioning Base.

Freya went quiet beside Winston.

She hadn’t expected anyone else to awaken a Sacred class. Three Sacred awakenings in a single First Entry was something that had never happened in recorded history. Not once.

The odds against it were almost incomprehensible, and yet here they were.

"So this Sacred class holder organized the Base and kept people alive," Josh nodded but Winston was still skeptical.

"How? An Initiate Sacred class holder shouldn’t be able to go up against multiple Tier Two monsters directly." He had spent three days with Freya.

He understood her capabilities better than most. Sacred classes didn’t experience the fatigue that temporarily capped Mastery gains for lower-grade holders, and their Realizations let them punch above their natural level, but none of that made a freshly awakened Sacred class a match for multiple Level 25 to 30 monsters simultaneously.

Avoiding them was the only sensible strategy and that could only be done alone and not with a large group.

Josh nodded.

"That would be true, but It’s not just the Sacred class holder keeping people safe." He paused, letting the weight of what came next settle properly.

"They found a secret realm. That’s where the base is."

Winston and Freya both went still at the same time.