Ethan’s gaze darkened.

He opened the system at once and scanned the red giant in front of him.

A data panel unfolded across his vision, line after line of information sliding into place.

Very quickly, Ethan confirmed one thing—

this red giant also came from The Infernal Abyss.

But her power wasn’t pure.

That Infernal Abyss energy felt like it was sourced from the fringe, mixed with thick, muddy, filthy components. It was massive—past Tier 35—but it didn’t have that clean, razor-bright texture of true Infernal Primordial Power.

Ethan’s eyes dropped to the blue gem embedded in her chest. The energy sphere in his hand kept rotating, tightening with every turn.

She was strong.

But she was dirty.

Ethan narrowed his eyes.

The enormous red sphere in front of the giant was still swelling. Its pressure—beyond Tier 35—rolled outward in rings, forcing even the distant fleets locked in chaotic skirmishes to drift off their lines.

That blue gem kept flashing. The filthy Infernal Abyss aura was mixed into the red energy like rotten sludge set on fire—violent, explosive, and anything but clean.

Ethan didn’t wait for it to fully finish forming.

The sphere in front of his palm crushed forward, white lightning coiling around it as it rolled straight at the red giant.

At the same time, Ethan turned into a streak of electricity and shot after it. A long white trace ripped across the sky behind him. Wherever he passed, the air split, and the edges of space warped aside under the pressure.

The red giant’s expression changed.

She clearly hadn’t expected Ethan to seize the initiative—much less charge straight in, head-on, like that. Not from a human from some low-tier Plane World.

But at this distance, she had nowhere to retreat.

She let out a low roar. The blue gem in her chest flared even brighter.

The red giant swung her fist and slammed it forward.

That punch carried crushing red energy. The air in front of her knuckles compressed into a visible arc of rippling distortion.

Her fist met Ethan’s energy sphere first.

Red power and white lightning touched—

then detonated together.

A shockwave swept out between them, shredding nearby clouds into powder and blasting a few floating chunks of warship wreckage into glittering metal fragments.

BOOM!

Heaven and earth twisted under the squeeze of those two forces.

Red energy rolled outward in waves. White lightning speared through it. The two ground against each other in midair, forming a chaotic zone that kept collapsing inward—then rebounding violently, over and over.

In the distance, several red giants stopped and stared dead-center at the clash.

They’d thought their leader’s power would crush this human outright, but that storm of white lightning wasn’t being scattered at all.

If anything, it was starting to tear the red energy open, bit by bit.

Ethan’s eyes sank a little further.

This red giant really did have some skill. Her filthy power might not have been pure, but the speed of her burst was insane—she’d completed her counter the instant he moved.

Against an ordinary expert, that one punch would’ve shattered body and shield together.

But against him?

Not enough.

Ethan let out a slow breath and curled his five fingers, pulling the portion of power he’d released back into himself.

The white lightning stopped rushing forward wildly.

Instead, it spread flush against his skin—over his shoulders, chest, arms, and legs—condensing into an extremely solid shell of electric light.

In the next instant, he charged straight into the center of the collision.

The red giant’s pupils shrank.

To her, that impact zone should’ve been the most lethal place imaginable—red energy and white lightning tearing at each other, a grinder that would shred anything that entered.

But Ethan walked out of the chaos like he was pushing through ordinary fog.

White lightning flowed tight along his body, forcing all red energy away the moment it tried to touch him.

In a blink, Ethan was right in front of her.

His hand shot out and clamped around her throat.

The instant his five fingers closed, the blue gem in her chest flashed violently. Power inside her surged upward on instinct—

only to be slammed back down by the white lightning pouring from Ethan’s palm the moment it reached her throat.

The red giant’s body went rigid.

Ethan drove his arm down.

That massive body dropped from the sky like a meteor, punching through layer after layer of lingering energy and slamming toward the shattered earth below.

On the way down, the red giant still tried to struggle, both arms clawing at Ethan’s wrist again and again. But white lightning had already drilled into her throat and shoulders, forcibly interrupting the circulation of her power.

BOOM!

She was slammed into the ground. The earth beneath her caved outward, cracks racing away until they ran under distant piles of warship wreckage.

Ethan landed on top of her. One foot pinned her chest, snow-white lightning pressing down on the blue gem embedded there, making its glow flicker and stutter wildly.

"You’re nothing but something from the edge of The Infernal Abyss," Ethan said, looking down at her. His voice didn’t rise or fall.

"And you still dared to put yourself on my level. You were asking to die."

The red giant tried to roar back, but Ethan had already placed a hand on her chest. White lightning poured from his palm into the area around the blue gem, spreading inward along her energy channels.

Her body convulsed violently. Filthy Infernal Abyss power surged up from inside her—

only to be crushed layer by layer by Ethan’s lightning.

Ethan hooked his fingers and locked onto her energy core.

He didn’t give her a single chance to resist. His arm snapped upward—

and he ripped it out.

The red giant collapsed instantly once her core was gone. The blue gem’s light died completely. Her originally massive body began to wither at a frightening speed—crimson skin losing its sheen inch by inch, muscles caving, bones shrinking.

Before long, she was nothing but a dried-out corpse at Ethan’s feet.

In the distance, the other red giants all stared, eyes wide.

Their leader—dead.

Just like that.

And she’d died at the hands of a human from a low-tier Plane World, someone they hadn’t even bothered taking seriously.

That clean, almost brutal suppression made them realize for the first time that the power this human held wasn’t something that should exist in an ordinary world.

But they didn’t retreat.

After a brief, suffocating silence, the red giants let out deep, furious roars and rushed Ethan all at once.

Multiple streams of red energy pressed down from different directions. The blue gems in their chests lit up in succession, and fused-energy skills crossed in midair into a heavy red tide.

One of them—shaped wrong—charged the fastest.

This one’s body was covered in small red spheres. From shoulders to chest to arms to back, it was packed with those bulging nodes, dense as boils.

Inside every red ball, violent energy spun like a spark about to explode. As it ran, the spheres shook with its movement, releasing a dull, pounding energy hum. 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

It reached Ethan first, yanked one of the red spheres off its own body, and threw it straight out.

The red sphere shot toward Ethan. In flight, it swelled rapidly, layers of energy pushing outward. Fine cracks spread across its surface, and blinding red light bled through the gaps.