SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 308: Turning Point!

Chapter 308: Turning Point!

[You’ve healed and adapted to 735,898 tons of force.]

Bruce lay there for a fraction longer than necessary, chest rising and falling in a slow, controlled rhythm as the notification faded from his vision. The ice beneath his back was fractured into a spiderweb of impact lines, crimson pooling in the cracks like veins beneath glass.

The Turtles didn’t give him the courtesy of stillness.

The hammer crashed down again, slamming into his raised forearm with catastrophic force. The frozen plain shattered outward in a violent ring, shards lifting into the air before clattering back down like broken mirrors.

His arm didn’t break.

Pain tore through him, white, incandescent, raw, but no fracture followed. The staff came immediately after, driving into his ribs with the weight of a falling mountain. He felt bruising bloom beneath his skin. Felt the shock reverberate through his organs.

But nothing collapsed.

Golden light flickered across his flesh, not the desperate eruption from moments ago, but something steadier. Something earned. It glowed beneath his skin like embers banked beneath forged steel.

They struck him again. And again. The brutality didn’t lessen. The violence didn’t thin. Hammer. Staff. Hammer. Staff. Each blow precise. Each one meant to obliterate.

But something had changed.

He wasn’t folding anymore. He wasn’t breaking.

Bruce pushed himself to his feet in one fluid motion, boots grinding against cracked ice. Blood slid down his chin in a thin line, but his breathing was even now, deliberate, controlled. The warhammer descended once more in a screaming arc of compressed force.

He caught it.

Both hands closed around the haft mid-swing. The impact still drove him down to one knee, shockwaves tearing through his skeleton, ice splintering beneath him in violent fissures. His muscles trembled under the strain.

But the weapon stopped.

For the first time, it stopped.

The staff whipped toward his side. He twisted with the motion instead of absorbing it, redirecting part of the force into the ground. Ice fractured beneath his boots, but his ribs held firm.

His body had learned. His flesh had remembered. He had adapted.

The warm light pulsed stronger now, not frantic, not reactive, but confident.

He rolled his shoulder once as the Turtles pulled back, Red spinning lightly between his fingers before settling into a reverse grip. His stomach was whole. His ribs reinforced. His spine perfectly aligned. Organs humming with flawless efficiency.

A faint smirk curved his lips despite the blood staining them.

They had dismantled him. Shattered him. Tried to erase him.

And he was still standing. Completely healed. Completely aware. Adapted.

Excitement surged through his veins, not reckless, not careless, but sharp and alive. Six SSS-tier guardians, boosted, disciplined, fighting in defense of their Core.

Good.

The first Turtle reached him in less than a heartbeat. Its warhammer rose high, frost vapor trailing from the head like the breath of a winter god, and descended with annihilating intent.

This time, nothing held it back.

Bruce pivoted at the last instant. The hammer smashed into the ice, carving a crater dozens of meters wide, the shockwave lifting snow and frozen debris skyward in a violent plume. Before the echoes faded, the second Turtle lunged from the opposite side, shield raised like a moving wall of glacial steel.

Bruce’s Authority surged outward instinctively. Vitality Sovereign expanded from him in an invisible tide, pressing against the Turtles’ cores, seeking to destabilize, to drain, to bend their life-force under his dominion.

The red glow in their armor intensified.

They resisted.

Not fully immune, he felt the slight fluctuation in their vitality, the faint tremor of suppression taking hold at the edges, but they weren’t collapsing the way S-Ranked beasts would have. The will of the Labyrinth stood behind them like an unyielding wall. The Core pulsed again, and his suppression efficiency faltered, Authority sliding off their reinforced vitality like a blade skipping across armor.

Bruce’s eyes sharpened.

Five percent. Just a five percent boost, and it was enough to blunt his Authority’s edge against SSS-tier resistance.

The first Turtle recovered instantly, swinging again, and this time the hammerhead glowed faintly with contained energy. Bastion Pulse. Compressed kinetic force stored within the metal itself, waiting to discharge on impact.

Bruce didn’t block. He stepped inside the swing.

Red flashed in a precise arc, striking along the Turtle’s elbow joint where armor met articulated plating. The cut wasn’t deep. But it was enough.

The hammer discharged early.

The shockwave detonated sideways instead of forward, splitting the ice field in a violent crescent that tore a trench across the frozen plain. Wind screamed past Bruce’s face, ripping at his hair and clothes, but the force that should have pulverized him spent itself on empty air.

A surgeon didn’t need to overpower the body. He just needed to know where to cut.

Behind him, a different kind of pressure strained the air.

Cracks spiderwebbed through the invisible barrier where Duke stood, palm pressed against the ground. Sweat rolled freely down his face now, dripping from his jaw. The remaining guardians were pushing hardest, colossal frames straining against Spatial Lock with the slow, relentless force of tectonic plates grinding against one another. One of the Diamond Golems placed its palm flat against empty air.

Space bent.

Not metaphorically. Physically. The distortion rippled outward, subtle but terrifying, a visible warping of the world that meant something with SSS-tier strength was pressing against the fabric of reality and finding purchase.

“I can’t hold all six much longer,” Duke said sharply, his voice tight with controlled strain. “They’re putting up far more resistance than they should.”

Bruce’s gaze snapped across the battlefield.

Isolde had reached the Core. Frost spiraled around her in tightening helixes as she hovered inches from its pulsing surface, palm suspended just shy of contact. But she’d paused, turning her attention outward instead of initiating the claim. Sweeping arcs of frost radiated from her hands, encasing the two Turtles that had been bearing down on Bruce in layers of restricting ice. Not enough to stop SSS-tier beasts outright, nothing short of a Domain could manage that, but enough to slow them, frost crawling across their shells and locking joints for precious seconds at a time.

She was shielding him instead of finishing the objective.

The Core recognized the opening.