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The massive weapon didn’t even make it halfway down the corridor.

Because the space was too tight, the thick bone club violently slammed into the opposing stone walls, scraping against the slate with a loud, deafening crack, and sending a shockwave of dust and stone chips exploding outward.

The heavy weapon got firmly stuck between the narrow rock walls, wedged tight by the giant’s own tremendous forward force.

The Grand Chieftain was like a furious, angry bull trapped in a cage.

He snorted loudly, thick jets of hot vapor blowing the limestone dust into chaotic swirls. He yanked hard on the thick handle. The veins beneath his thick, gray hide bulged like iron cables, but the stone refused to yield.

He couldn’t move forward, he couldn’t back out easily, and he couldn’t swing his main weapon.

He was completely jammed by the very terrain he had arrogantly ignored.

A bit distance away, Sol watched the giant’s clumsy struggle, his silver-crimson eyes narrowing with a curious and highly wary look. But he also didn’t run away, at least not yet.

His eyes narrowed further, calculating the next possible steps, but in the end, he didn’t take the bait.

Any other warrior would have seen the stuck weapon as a golden opportunity and rushed in for the kill.

But Sol wasn’t a hero, and he certainly wasn’t stupid.

His mind remained alert, and he knew that a Layer 4 powerhouse was a dangerous breed of monster, even when they looked stupid and trapped.

Sol stood his ground, his hand resting loose on his hilt, perfectly balanced on the balls of his feet, waiting to see what the brute would do next.

Suddenly, the giant stopped pulling on his club.He let go of the thick handle entirely. He slammed his massive hands flat against the slate walls on either side of him, his eyes flaring with a dark, suffocating light.

Beneath Sol’s ribs, the molten pool of Golden Silver energy gave a sudden, violent thrum of warning. His expanded senses flared with a sharp warning as he felt the air currents in the pass instantly freeze.

All the ambient essence suspended in the atmosphere of the entire valley was suddenly turning, rushing like a wild whirlpool straight toward the Marauder Chief.

The atmospheric pressure dropped so violently that Sol’s ears popped.

The loose white dust on the floor lost its gravity, floating upward in eerie, suspended sheets.

The surrounding rocks began to groan. High-pitched cracks echoed through the pass as spiderweb fractures shot out from where the giant’s gray palms pressed against the stone.

Sol got a terrible, heavy feeling in his gut.

His internal instincts screamed that staying inside this stone chute for another heartbeat meant certain death.

Without a single moment of hesitation, Sol kicked off the pile of Marauder corpses beneath his boots.

The kinetic force of his launch shattered the bones under his heels.

He shot backward like a skipped stone fired from a railgun, channeling his essence entirely into his legs to maximize his speed.

In a blurring flash of black armor, he cleared the length of the pass, abandoning the kill zone entirely.

He launched himself out of the stone corridor and hit the open gravel flats on the opposite side of the mountain barrier in a dead sprint.

A split second after his boots cleared the rock gate, the world seemed to have torn apart.

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

A deafening, apocalyptic explosion ripped through the mountain range. The sound was so physically loud it felt like the sky itself was splitting in half.

The Grand Chieftain had ignited his Layer 4 brute-force essence to its absolute limit.

The terrifying shockwave hit the towering stone walls and simply erased them. Millions of jagged fragments blasted outward like shrapnel from a colossal bomb.

Boulders the size of huts and massive slate shelves were pulverized in an instant, erupting into a towering, choked cloud of white limestone dust and deadly stone shards that shot hundreds of feet into the pale sky.

The ground beneath Sol’s feet groaned and buckled like the deck of a sinking ship.

Deep, jagged fissures ripped through the clay as the physical structure of the entire mountain ridge was violently, effortlessly torn to pieces.

...

Sol stood out on the open gravel flats, his heavy boots dug inches deep into the baked clay as the residual hurricane of the blast washed over his black armor.

The shockwave felt like a solid wall slamming into his chest, rattling his body and threatening to push him backward.

He raised his armored forearm to shield his eyes from the flying, razor-sharp grit, his silver-crimson pupils dilating as he stared through the settling white cloud in genuine, cold shock.

He had kept a hawk’s eye on the giant, reading the muscle tension and the essence buildup, but even with his processing speed, the sheer, catastrophic scale of that attack was a reality-breaking anomaly.

He had personally seen Warchief Veylara use her strength before, so he knew Layer 4 warriors operated on an entirely different axis of power compared to the lower tiers.

But still, actually seeing this gray brute blast a narrow, five-man-wide mountain path into a wide, open ground in a single heartbeat was a massive shocker.

The ancient wall that had separated the two sides of the territory for eons was simply gone, turned into a flat highway of crushed gravel.

The violent stone blast hadn’t just altered the landscape, it had also instantly killed dozens of nearby Coalition warriors.

The surrounding Marauders and Zerith stalkers who had been crowding tightly behind their chief’s back, eager to flood through the gap, were caught directly in the shockwave, their bodies flattened or turned into bloody mist by the exploding slate.

As the dust thinned, the giant Chief didn’t even cast a single glance back at the horrific carnage he had just inflicted on his own vanguard.

He simply rolled his massive shoulders, shaking the limestone off his gray hide.

But since the giant chief didn’t even look back at the carnage, Sol certainly didn’t care about their lives either.