Overwhelming

Bater lowered his head to look at his broken right arm. The confusion in his vertical pupils had yet to fully fade.

For three hundred years, he had relied on these hands to tear countless opponents apart. Federation Grandmasters, powerhouses of the Dawn Empire, and those blind Alien Race stragglers on the Astral Battlefield—too many to count had died beneath his fists.

He had never believed that any opponent of the same rank could overpower him in sheer strength, much less break his arm with a single punch.

Yet now, bone jutted out from his elbow, dark red blood running down the jagged fracture. Agonizing pain surged over him in wave after wave like a rising tide.

This was no illusion, nor was it a mistake. It had been a frontal punch, and his arm had broken.

For the first time, shock appeared on Uerhan's heavily furred face.

He had lived several decades longer than Bater and had seen more human powerhouses. He had fought Shen Jin of the Federation and Zhu Nanxing of the Dawn Empire—Divine Intent Grandmasters who stood at the pinnacle of human civilization.

Shen Jin's blade could cut through his defenses, while Zhu Nanxing's sword could pierce his plate armor. That was suppression on the level of rules.

But this young man before him had used nothing but raw physical strength to break Bater's arm with one punch.

It exceeded everything he understood.

Xiao Chuyun stood amid the rubble of Ore Vein Continent, her thick-backed saber still gripped in her right hand. The bruising on her left shoulder was rapidly fading under the effect of the Life Rule.

She looked at Bater's arm, bent at an unnatural angle, at the dark red blood of a Bearfolk King trickling from the broken bone, and then saw that