No! I don't want to be a Super Necromancer!

"Fifth Wave: Ice."

The words echoed like a whisper across a still grave. There was no thunder. No sudden roar or rupture. Only a silence so complete it felt like sound itself had died.

Then came the cold.

It was not cold like winter. Not the sting of snow or the bite of arctic winds. This cold had no temperature. It was an absence, a subtraction of heat, of movement, of meaning. It was the chill that clung to deep space, to forgotten tombs, to thoughts buried beneath centuries of silence.

There was no wind. No color. No light.

Everything around Damien began to slow. Not visually. Not physically. Existentially.

Even time seemed to resist motion.

His breath, once steady, thickened in his throat. The air crystallized in his lungs, not with frost but with stillness. He tried to exhale, and nothing came. His thoughts dulled, their flow sluggish like honey frozen mid-pour.

It wasn't that he couldn't think, it was that his thoughts had to fight to move.

His death energy, always patient and composed, began to shudder.

The circulating strands of necrotic force that once pulsed confidently through his core now crawled. Each rotation took longer. Each thread required more will to guide. Even the revolving motion of his core, the very anchor of his being, began to slow.

Then the true freeze began.

It started at his fingers.

A thin, clear line of ice bloomed along the tip of his index finger and spread. It was quiet, beautiful, almost delicate. But it bit deep. It passed through the skin and into the muscle. Blood vessels burst beneath its path, frost layering over tendons like a second, crystalline skeleton.

It climbed his arms next, symmetrical in its cruelty.

His flesh began to stiffen, the silver hue of his enhanced body turning dull, muted, brittle. The silver couldn't resist the cold. It was refined for endurance, for pressure, for flame. But this was entropy given form, and no metal, no blood, no breath could hold it back for long.

His joints locked. His elbows froze in place, unable to bend. His shoulders tightened as ice webbed across his back, splitting through muscle with microscopic fractures that tore every time he shifted, however slightly.

The cold slipped into his chest.

Not just the surface, but also on the inside.

It invaded his lungs first, coating the delicate inner walls with frost so fine it could cut.

With every forced breath, slivers of ice scraped down his throat. He tried to cough, but the sound didn't come. His diaphragm was already partially paralyzed. He felt his heart tremble, struggling to beat against the thickening fluid in his veins.

His body, his will, his very essence was being reduced to stillness.

He tried to move his legs and felt nothing.

Not pain.

Nothing.

His nerves had frozen.

And yet, amidst the numbness, there was agony.

Not burning. Not sharp. But deep. Penetrating. The kind of pain that didn't scream but wept. A pain so quiet it became terrifying. The kind that whispered, you will never be warm again.

His death energy cracked.

It buckled under the pressure, threads of mana snapping as they tried to push against the freeze. He could feel his reserves dimming, the threads of entropy slowing to a near standstill.

The world itself was falling away. The colors were gone. The weight of existence faded.

And then Damien smiled.

"So you want me to gain resistance against frost too? In that case then I won't be holding back!"

He began to draw in the ambient cold through his necromantic core, not violently, not forcefully, but rhythmically.

He synchronized his breathing with it, shaping every inhale into a current that pulled the cold inward.

Death energy wrapped around the invading frost, not to smother it, but to digest it by breaking it down, absorbing its nature and peeling away the pain to extract the principle beneath.

He devoured the cold the way he had devoured poison. The way he had bent pressure. The way he had endured fire. Slowly, the death energy inside him began to adapt, reshaping itself in harmony with the entropy saturating the air.

His body, in turn, began to respond.

The frost that had webbed across his arms no longer deepened. It shimmered, cracked, then reformed into a thin, glossy sheen, no longer brittle, but reinforced. His skin, pale and tight from the freeze, began to regain its strength, this time layered with subtle ridges of cold-adaptive tissue forming along his veins.

His silver-grade body trembled, then activated, stimulated by the steady infusion of refined death energy and the now-regulated ice mana within his cells.

The regeneration that had slowed reignited. But not with fire.

It moved like ice itself, slow, smooth and precise.

Crystal patterns formed in his blood, minute adjustments in his structure designed to distribute cold rather than resist it directly. His bones grew denser, fortified with spiritual frost armor woven by his will. His nerves, once numb, regained sensation as the cold was redirected through necromantic circuits, insulating thought from paralysis.

A pulse beat through his core. Stronger. Steadier.

And the system whispered.

[Status Updated]

[Silver Grade Body: Frost Resistance +47%]

[New Trait Acquired: Winter-Touched – Slows mana loss under extreme cold and increases death energy absorption in frozen environments]

Damien opened his eyes, breath steady now. His skin was still pale, and his limbs trembled faintly, but the worst had passed.

He lifted his arm. It moved without resistance.

He stepped forward. The air was still frozen, but it no longer felt suffocating. It was no longer a prison.

It was his environment now.

He spread his fingers and drew the frost from the ground around him, pulling the residual chill into his body with quiet control. The cold no longer bit at him. It flowed through him, a part of his domain.

The final gust of entropy swirled across the barren field, but it no longer found prey. Only an anchor.

And then the wave ended.

The silence returned but this time, it felt earned.

Damien stood alone in the frost-hardened field, breath visible in the air, surrounded by a shimmer of residual death energy that curled softly around him like a protective fog.

He had endured again. And as always, he had emerged stronger.

Not just because of what his body had gained, but because of what his will had refused to surrender.

He looked up toward the sky, feeling the weight of each previous trial still coiled in his muscles, in his soul.

And he smiled again.

"Bring the next one."

"Trial of Life - Passed." Came the booming voice. "The next trial is the final trial. Young man… This is… The Trial of Death."

"Trial of Life – Passed."

The booming voice echoed with finality, each word rumbling through Damien's chest like the tolling of an ancient bell. He stood still, his breath steady, his core burning with silent rotation. Ice still clung to the edges of his cloak, flickering away into mist as the next words came.

"The next trial is the final trial."

A pause. A silence thick enough to hold its own weight.

"Young man… This is… the Trial of Death."

The world around him shifted.

The frost-covered plain dissolved into shadow. Not darkness. Shadow. Something richer. Something layered.

Damien stood now in a space that had no beginning and no end, filled with endless gray mist and a sky so deep it swallowed thought. He could no longer feel his body. He was still himself, yet without weight. Without form.

And then a shape emerged before him.

It was not a figure, not in the traditional sense. More like a presence carved into the void. A towering being wreathed in black flame and swirling fragments of bone and ash. Eyes like dying stars turned toward him, and the air around Damien grew still.

"Welcome… to your end."

Damien narrowed his eyes, but said nothing. He let the pressure settle. Let the space form.

The presence tilted its head, amused.

"To pass the Trial of Death, you must surrender all things. Form, thought, memory, will. You must die not as a warrior, not as a survivor, but as yourself. Completely. Only then can you be judged."

Damien blinked. "That's it?"

The voice echoed again, layered and ancient.

"You must die."

A silence followed.

And then Damien's core pulsed once, just once, and the entire world stopped.

Not figuratively. Stopped.

The presence froze. The swirling ash halted mid-motion. Even the void itself seemed to hesitate, as if reality had stepped back to let something else take its place.

Damien felt it instantly.

It wasn't the death energy inside him. It wasn't the revolving core, or his silver-grade body, or his necromantic techniques that caused the strange world and the strange being to stop.

It was his name.

His truth.

He was the Sovereign of Death.

And death did not test its Sovereign.

Death obeyed.

The trial construct shivered.

Then, with an audible groan, it fell to its knees.

Not in submission.

In recognition.

A chime rang through the void, deep and reverent.

[Trial of Death – Initiated]

[Congratulations – Trial of Death Passed by Right of Dominion]

The mist surged outward like a bowing sea.

The towering figure raised its gaze, no longer hostile, no longer testing.

"You are not one who faces death. You are the one to whom death bows."

"The trial is not yours to take. It is yours to judge."

And in that instant, Damien understood.

He had not come to pass the Trial of Death.

He had come to inherit it.

He had been walking the path all along, not as a candidate, but as a heir reclaiming his throne.

"I did not need to hide my status as the Sovereign of Death from the Gravewalker." Damien realized. "In fact, the Gravewalker needed to know if I am the Sovereign of Death. His true inheritance was meant for me!"

The void trembled.

And death itself waited… For Damien's command.