He dumped everything he had into his core. The golden liquid pumped through his body. He fully engaged the latent agility of the Dreadwing, ripping away every single restraint.

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.

His lungs burned. His muscles screamed under the sudden, explosive output.

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.

And he saw her.

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.

Faster. Move faster, damn it! he roared in his own mind, his eyes locked onto the massive shadow of the charging Beetle.

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...

With a final, desperate burst of speed that tore a groan from his lips, Sol finally intercepted the Beetle’s path a mere hundred yards from the Veynar walls.

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.

Furthermore, Sol had a strict bottom line. He had already showcased terrifying combat prowess, but he had kept the absolute maximum output of his Sun Core completely hidden. In a primitive, savage world like this, revealing all your cards to the Elders was tantamount to handing them a leash, especially when there were clear traitors.

He had to kill it without exposing his deepest secrets.

He had to rely entirely on his battle IQ, his speed, and the exceptional senses the Dreadwing provided.

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.

CLANG!

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.

Sparks showered the mud, but unfortunately the leg didn’t sever.

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

Since he couldn’t break the armor. He had to use the beast’s blindness against 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.

Sol accelerated, blurring directly in front of the beast’s blind, charging path.

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.

BOOM!

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.

The Beetle reacted instinctively, jerking its massive body violently to the right to crush whatever had caused the vibration.

But Sol was already gone.

Using the split-second distraction, Sol had vaulted sideways. As the Beetle’s massive, tree-trunk-sized front right leg came down, shifting the entirety of its multi-ton weight onto the joint, Sol struck.

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.

Normally it would have been impossible for him to locate it in such a fast exchange, but thanks to Dreadwing reflexes it wasn’t an issue, you have to know that dragonfly had almost 97% hunting success rate thanks to their fast reflexes, let alone their ancestral, powerful version.

The sapphire blade slid in with almost surgical precision.

Sol violently twisted the hilt inside the joint. The pressure instantly ruptured the tendons and synovial fluid holding the massive limb together.

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.

And the Beast crashed.

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.

But thankfully, he wasn’t crushed underneath it.

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

But it wasn’t dead, at least not yet.

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

Just a bit behind it, the mud shifted, and Sol exploded out of the muck, gasping for air.

"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.

He had to hurry up and dispatch it to hell, before it got the chance to recover and charge striaght in the settlement.