FREE USE in Primitive World

Chapter 348: Chapter 348: Sol’s Daring Maneuver

He kicked off the ground hard and immediately became a gray, blurring streak across the sunlit battlefield. It was the very first time he was using his absolute maximum speed. The physical toll was instantaneous. The air resistance slammed into him like a solid wall. He was moving so fast that the morning wind felt like literal blades slicing across his exposed face and neck.

As he ran, his eyes snapped upward. The bright morning sunlight glared off the petrified wood, illuminating the defenders standing exactly where the beast was going to hit.

Kira was standing right on the edge of the wall, her war-bow drawn back, completely focused on the swarm below her. She had absolutely no idea a mountain of iron-hard chitin was seconds away from turning her section of the wall into a cloud of splinters and crushed bone.

The distance closed in terrifying, slow-motion snapshots. Two hundred yards. One hundred and fifty. The rumble of the beast’s charge was drowning out his own frantic heartbeat. If that thing hit the timber, the kinetic shockwave alone would…

But Sol didn’t try to stand in front of it and block it. The Great Badger gave him terrifying defense, but he wasn’t stupid. This was a Layer 3 beast on the absolute threshold of Layer 4. The sheer kinetic mass of its charge would turn him into a yummy jelly for the beasts to enjoy for free, regardless of the armor.

He had to kill it without exposing his deepest secrets.

As the blind Beetle thundered past him, Sol lunged at its flank. He swung the Dreadwing Blade in a brutal, horizontal arc, aiming for the beast’s thick, armored leg.

The impact violently jarred Sol’s shoulder. The sharpness of the iridescent sapphire blade, which had been effortlessly bisecting Layer 2 beasts, barely managed to carve a two-inch groove into the Beetle’s dense chitin.

The level gap is real, Sol gritted his teeth, his boots sliding through the mud as the beast’s momentum carried it forward. Seems likeraw strength isn’t going to cut it.

Sol darted alongside the massive insect, his Dreadwing senses hyper-dialed to the microscopic shifts in air pressure and vibration. He noticed that the Beetle was slightly favoring its right side, instinctively compensating for the scrambled nerve damage in its left hemisphere.

But he didn’t attack. Instead he channeled the tectonic weight of the Great Badger into his legs and violently stomped the bedrock beneath the mud.

The seismic shockwave rippled directly into the Beetle’s sensitive footfalls. The sudden, massive vibration directly in its path completely confused the beast’s rudimentary navigation.

But Sol was already gone.

But this time, he didn’t swing at the thick chitin plating. He aimed the pinpoint tip of the Dreadwing Blade directly at the microscopic, fleshy membrane nestled deep within the articulation of the beast’s knee joint.

The sapphire blade slid in with almost surgical precision.

The Beetle let out a horrific, clicking screech. With its primary weight-bearing joint severed from the inside, the multi-ton momentum of its charge violently backfired. The right leg buckled completely.

It was like watching a mountain collapse. The Beetle hit the mud at sixty miles an hour, its massive, branching horn plowing into the earth and violently flipping its enormous body sideways. A tidal wave of displaced mud suddenly washed over Sol, completely burying him in the muck, before he even had a chance to fully escape.

The Beetle tumbled, screeching and thrashing wildly, sliding to a violent halt a mere thirty yards from the Veynar gates.

Its legs kicked frantically, trying to right its overturned, massive domed carapace.

“Damn! That was a new experience.” He muttered as he cleaned his face, even though his whole body including the silver armor was painted entirely in brown sludge, his silver-crimson eyes burned with absolute, focused lethality.