Sign-In System: Starting With Invincible Physique-Chapter 5: The Questions Between Them

Chapter 5: The Questions Between Them

No one moved. No one spoke.

The training field was silent in a way that silence usually isn’t.

Not the passive silence of an empty room.

The active silence of thirty people simultaneously holding their breath, their minds struggling to reconcile what they had just witnessed with everything they understood about the world.

Their eyes darted from the twitching bodies of Joss and Terran, to the curled, whimpering form of Fennick, and finally to the boy standing over them.

Rhain Voss.

The sect’s punching bag.

The boy who couldn’t cultivate past the threshold of Level 1 after three years of trying.

He had just dismantled Fennick Graves and both his lackeys in the time it took to draw a long breath.

He looked completely relaxed, as if he did not beat three guys, but swatted three mosquitoes.

"Is that really Rhain?"

Someone finally managed to overcome his shock and spoke with a choked voice.

The voice was like a stone thrown into a calm lake.

Ripples of shock spread throughout the training ground as their minds registered what had just happened.

A dozen paces away, Seris stood with her small hand lightly covering her slightly parted red lips, her pale purple eyes filled with shock and disbelief.

She felt as if she was looking at a stranger.

The old Rhain had been many things—gentle, self-deprecating, quietly stubborn—but he had never been this.

Cold, precise, and ruthless.

This was someone who understood violence the way a calligrapher understood brushstrokes.

She didn’t recognize this Rhain Voss at all.

And this part somehow terrified her more than Fennick ever had.

Ignoring the stunned and numb gazes around him, Ryan slowly walked to Finnick, who was still convulsing and retching on the ground, and slowly squatted down to meet his gaze.

"Look at me," Rhain said.

Fennick looked. His eyes were red and wild and full of a terror that went beyond the pain in his wrist.

The terror which he felt by just being in Rhain’s presence.

"I want you to understand something, Fennick."

Rhain reached out and took Fennick’s broken wrist. Gently.

The gentleness was worse than violence — it was deliberate, controlled, the touch of someone demonstrating that they could choose exactly how much pain to inflict and when.

He squeezed.

Fennick screamed. The sound bounced off the training field walls and echoed across the compound.

Rhain leaned closer.

"The next time you touch me, or anyone I care about, I won’t break your wrist." He held Fennick’s gaze. The dark grey eyes were dangerous. Utterly without any shred of kindness. "I’ll take the hand. And then I’ll take the other one."

A pause. Measured.

"Nod if you understand."

Fennick nodded. Frantically. Desperately. With the jerky, spasmodic motion of a man who would have agreed to anything, signed any contract, sworn any oath, to make the pressure on his shattered wrist stop.

Rhain released him.

He stood up.

He scanned the circle of disciples with the same detached, cataloguing gaze he’d used on Fennick.

He didn’t look for anything in particular. He was simply letting them know that he had changed.

Rhain Voss won’t beat the humiliation in silence anymore.

He will break the hand that dares to raise against him.

He began walking back towards Seris.

The crowd parted before him like water splitting around a stone. People who had watched him be beaten for three years now stepped aside, pressing back, creating a corridor of space out of an instinct they couldn’t have named if asked.

Rhain approached Seris and looked at her purple eyes that held shock, doubt and even fear.

He was quiet for a moment.

Then he asked.

"Are you afraid of me?"

Seris was caught off-guard by this question.

Seris thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, which surprised her — she’d expected the answer to arrive instantly, one way or the other.

"No," she said finally.

It was the truth. She didn’t know why it was the truth, but it was.

Rhain nodded, as if the answer confirmed something. He looked ahead again.

"Then we’re fine."

"Let’s go," Rhain said.

She fell into step beside him without a word.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

Seris kept her eyes focused straight ahead, but her mind was in a storm.

She had many questions that she wanted to ask, but each time she wanted to ask those questions, she hesitated.

She was afraid that the answer might be something she didn’t want to hear.

"Do you have any questions?" Rhain asked calmly without looking back.

"How?"

The word slipped out before she could stop it.

Her voice was quiet, slightly trembling.

Rhain didn’t break stride. He kept his gaze fixed on the path leading toward the outer quarters. "How what?"

"How did you do that?" Seris stopped walking, forcing him to pause and look back at her. "Fennick is Level 3. Joss and Terran are Level 2. You’ve never been able to draw enough Essence to even defend yourself against one of them, let alone all three at once."

She took a half-step closer, her pale violet eyes searching his dark, abyssal ones.

"And it wasn’t just that you beat them," she continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. "It was how you beat them. It was brutal, merciless, without the slightest bit of any hesitation. The Rhain I knew would have never been able to do that."

"Who are you? Are you really Rhain?"

Rhain looked at her.

He could see the genuine turmoil in her expression. She wasn’t accusing him; she was desperately seeking logic in a reality that had just upended itself.

But Rhain could never tell her the truth.

So he gave her the only truth that mattered.

"I died last night, Seris," Rhain said. His voice was flat, devoid of self-pity. "When they left me on that floor, my heart stopped for a moment."

Seris gasped softly, her hands flying to her mouth.

"Dying changes your perspective," Rhain continued, his gaze drifting past her toward the hazy peaks of the Greymist Hills. "In the dark, you realize that all the hoping, all the enduring, all the quiet suffering... it means absolutely nothing. The world doesn’t reward the meek. It buries them."

He looked back into her eyes. The dark grey of his irises seemed to pull her in, heavy and bottomless.

"When I woke up. something within me changed. My body was different, my pathways, my foundation — everything had changed. It’s like the shackles that had been binding me had broken. Maybe it was a fortunate encounter on the verge of death that elders talk about, I don’t know what really happened to me. What I know is..."

He stepped closer to her. The oppressive pressure of his physique pressing against her, but he immediately reigned it in.

"I am Rhain Voss," he said quietly. "But the boy who let them use him as a punching bag is gone. He’s not coming back."

Seris stared at him for a long time.

She saw no deception or lie in his eyes. Only a cold, absolute resolve.

The gentle boy was indeed gone. But as she looked at him, she thought that how he had just placed himself between her and Fennick.

He still cares about me.

This thought eased the restlessness in her heart.

It was the only thing that mattered to Seris.

She let out a long, shaky breath and let her arms drop to her sides.

"Okay," she said softly.

"Okay?"

"Okay." A faint, hesitant smile touched the corners of her lips. "But don’t do anything stupid, and be careful."

Rhain smiled.

"Noted."