Chapter 124: Six Figures in One Swing

Kael’s gaze sharpened with absolute, razor-like precision the instant the charging warrior came into focus. Recognition clicked into place within his mind instantly.

Wolf-2. The server’s only confirmed Stonewarden, a hidden archetype engineered exclusively around defense, further fortified by an elite, A-grade talent that shaved a flat fifty percent off every point of incoming damage.

Functionally unkillable, by most practical standards. In his first life, this exact player had forged an ironclad reputation as the toughest human wall the server had ever produced, presenting a genuine, grinding headache even for Kael back then.

In this current run, however, the fundamental math had been completely rewritten.

The Skyborn Bloodline alone had organically doubled his attribute growth compared to baseline, a displayed character level of 48 that quietly housed the true, terrifying output of something closer to level 58.

Layer the Void Cataclysm’s staggering eighty percent fusion bonus directly on top of that monstrous foundation, and the number resting on his active status panel right now soared far past anything most players gathered on this blood-soaked plain could ever begin to conceptualize.

Whatever reputation a second-tier dungeon’s worth of defensive mastery had bought in his first life, it simply ceased to register against a blade honed sharp enough to cut through anything in its path.

Whether striking fragile paper or master-crafted steel plate, the distinction stopped mattering entirely.

Kael met the thundering charge without decelerating by so much as a single step. He raised the fused weapon high and brought it down in a single, contemptuous, sweeping arc.

Clang.

The impact struck dead center against Wolf-2’s raised shield and simply kept driving forward, shearing it clean in two before the metal-on-metal shriek had even finished echoing across the river valley.

Equipment destroyed.

Ascension’s underlying mechanical engine permitted precisely this outcome whenever the gap between two combatants widened past a critical threshold: a small chance to shatter an opponent’s gear outright upon contact.

A gargantuan damage number bloomed in crimson above Wolf-2’s head in that exact instant, utterly impossible to misread even from a distance:

-115,329

His heavily bolstered health bar collapsed in a single stroke, dropping to a bare, microscopic sliver of red.

The global streams and chat feeds detonated into pure, unadulterated chaos the moment the digits registered.

"Wait, how many digits is that?!"

"A hundred and fifteen thousand. In ONE hit."

"I’m level 40 and my whole health pool doesn’t even break six figures!"

"And that wasn’t even a skill, that was a basic swing. What on earth is that sword?!"

"It’s not the sword. His own attributes are just operating on a completely different scale."

"I don’t understand any of this and I’m somehow still emotional about it."

Across the blood-slicked mud of the battlefield, the remaining nineteen elite operatives froze stiff, their veins turning to ice as the same wave of profound disbelief paralyzed their limbs.

These four teams trained relentlessly side by side, sparring often enough to map out the exact ceiling of every single member. Wolf-2’s defense, in particular, was legendary.

Even Ashworth’s own strongest single-target skill, their hardest hitter by a wide margin, had never once managed to crack two thousand damage against that same shield.

That was precisely why they had thrown him in first: as bait, engineered to stress-test Kael’s true output before committing the rest of the unit to a full plan.

Not a soul among them had anticipated that the test would nearly end in a single exchange.

A casual, unrefined sword swing had shattered a Legendary-grade shield into useless scrap while dealing six figures of damage in the process.

Every strategic assumption they had marched onto the field with evaporated in the wake of that single number.

For a long, suffocating beat, not a single operative in the group managed to assemble a coherent thought.

Wolf-2’s earlier arrogance drained away entirely, replaced by the cold, paralyzing grip of raw terror.

"Staying on your feet after one normal swing." Kael’s voice cut through the silence, flat and bordering on insulting boredom. "That’s already more than you should be proud of."

He did not wait for a stammered response, extending the point of his blade forward as he triggered the next skill without missing a beat.

Skyrend Barrage.

A dense, howling volley of jagged bone blades tore violently free from rifts in the void, screaming forward in a concentrated, lethal spread.

The nearest operative caught one dead center, his body shattering into a storm of white dissolution before his mind had even processed the threat.

The rest of the volley continued unchecked, forcing the surviving members into frantic, uncoordinated scrambles of desperate evasion.

That brutal display finally shocked them out of their paralysis."Weaken him! Chain the control, then focus fire!" Ashworth’s voice sliced through the mounting panic, hard, crisp, and immediate.

Several priests raised their staves in unison, chanting as a concentrated cluster of high-tier debuff spells converged upon Kael from all directions.

The Skyborn Bloodline’s immunity protected him only against hard control: stuns, roots, and knockback. Weakening effects, however, slipped cleanly past those safeguards, landing with chilling precision.

A thick, ash-gray haze wrapped tightly around his armored frame, dropping his attributes by a staggering sixty percent across the board.

It was a genuinely impressive, perfectly synchronized debuff deployment, backed by four priests wielding hidden classes rare enough to rank among the finest configurations on the entire server.

Unfortunately for them, the timing was hopelessly flawed. Even reduced by sixty percent, what remained of Kael’s stats still utterly dwarfed anything the gathered teams could realistically answer.

Two assassins broke away from the main cluster next, dissolving smoothly into stealth, their daggers gleaming with lethal intent as they converged from opposite flanks.

Against anyone else, that textbook maneuver would have worked beautifully.

Against someone wearing the Seer’s Eye, however, stealth was rendered utterly meaningless.

What the assassins intended as a flawlessly coordinated ambush read, from Kael’s heightened perspective, as two predictable targets walking calmly into point-blank range.

He did not bother drawing out the exchange. A cold, ruthless glint flashed deep within his eyes, and he brought his booted heel down hard against the muddy earth.

Cataclysmic Stomp.

The range of the shockwave scaled directly with the caster’s own size, and since Kael’s fused frame sat nowhere near the colossal proportions of the Void Cataclysm, the resulting seismic wave manifested as a condensed ten-meter radius around him.

It was more than sufficient.

Both assassins failed to emit so much as a strangled gasp before the concussive force tore through them, their bodies dissolving into scattered pixels of light long before the ambush had even technically begun.

The momentum from the stomp carried him onward in one fluid motion, his blade already rising in a deadly arc, aimed straight at Ashworth, who stood anchored at the front of what remained of the formation.