Dopey didn’t care about their shock. He swung again, his fist crashing toward the next Mightkin.

At the same time, Aeralon and Aerisara moved the instant they hit the field—both of them lifting a hand and dropping two massive cyclones.

The roaring winds swallowed more than a hundred Mightkin warriors in a blink.

Aeralon’s cyclone was pure slaughter. It tore through the trapped Mightkin and shredded them into pieces.

But Aerisara’s cyclone was different. It only killed some of the lower-tier ones. Anyone above Tier 27 came out riddled with countless cuts—blood everywhere—but still alive.

"So tough?" Ethan muttered, genuinely thrown.

Aerisara was on par with Tier 30. And she still couldn’t rip apart Tier 27 Mightkin.

That alone told him these "dwarves" weren’t just strong—they were built wrong.

But the ones even more shaken were the Mightkin elites. They stared at the two soulless thralls like they’d seen a ghost.

"Stage S..." the leader choked out, face drained of color.

"Stage S soulless thralls...!"

He could feel his confidence collapsing in real time.

A Stage S soulless thrall wasn’t some small detail you shrugged off. If he’d known Ethan was holding a card like that, he would’ve reconsidered this whole clash from the start.

But now?

It was too late.

Mightkin were born with terrifying bodies—fighting above their tier was practically normal for them.

But they had a fatal weakness: no real ranged attacks, and no control skills to pin enemies down.

Against three soulless thralls at this level, they had no clean answer.

Dopey, especially, was having the time of his life. This was exactly what he was made for—no tricks, no lockdowns, just enemies close enough for him to punch apart, one after another.

"Forget the thralls!" the Mightkin leader shouted. "Kill the humans! If they die, the soulless thralls are useless!"

The Mightkin immediately stopped trying to grind down Dopey and the others and instead rushed straight at Ethan’s side.

Ethan let out a cold laugh. "All units—control skills!"

Twenty thousand Fallen Star Guards with control abilities struck at once. In an instant, the battlefield filled with every kind of restraint and debuff—bindings, slows, staggers, suppressions.

The Mightkin warriors slammed into it and suddenly couldn’t move right. Every step turned into a struggle.

"Now," Ethan said to the Fallen Star Squad at his side.

Then he vanished with Teleportation, dropping straight into the middle of the melee. Nullspace Domain flared open around him, and his poleaxe came around in a brutal horizontal sweep.

Thump thump thump...

A series of heavy impacts boomed out.

Ethan’s hands went numb from the recoil—

—and he realized, with a jolt, that he hadn’t killed a single one.

"Holy shit. These guys are tanky." His eyes widened.

Watching Dopey one-punch "little dwarves" had made it look easy. Only when Ethan swung for real did he understand how insane these Mightkin bodies were.

No wonder Aerisara’s cyclone couldn’t shred them.

The Mightkin around him roared and hammered their fists at Ethan from all sides.

Their punches were about to land—

—and then they hit nothing.

There was no impact, no resistance. Like they’d punched straight into empty space.

Worse, the moment their fists crossed a certain line, they simply vanished.

The Mightkin warriors’ eyes nearly popped out. They yanked their arms back fast, faces twisting with panic.

Ethan’s smile turned sharp. "Heh. My turn. Let’s see just how hard you really are."

Black light crawled along the edge of his poleaxe.

Then he swung again—harder, faster, meaner.

BOOM BOOM BOOM—!

The sound hit like a cannon shot.

Three Mightkin heads exploded at once, smashed into pulp under the sweep of his poleaxe.

The sight made the Mightkin leader’s eyelid twitch. He hadn’t expected it—sure, the soulless thralls were terrifying, but even these humans themselves were ridiculously strong.

"Spatial-type ability..." His expression turned ugly.

Then he shot forward in a blur, cocked his arm, and drove a punch straight at Ethan’s back.

Right then, Ethan was surrounded by Mightkin.

And because none of them were strong enough to break his Nullspace Domain, Ethan had been fighting without restraint—so focused on the bodies in front of him that he didn’t even register the ambush in time.

The leader’s eyes flashed with savage certainty.

One punch. That was all it would take.

But just as his fist was about to connect—

The space in front of him split open like a seam tearing.

A jagged rift yawned wide and swallowed him whole.

"???"

As he got dragged in, his mind was basically a wall of question marks.

Hearing the disturbance behind him, Ethan glanced over his shoulder in time to see the leader vanish.

He nodded once toward Mia.

Obviously, that had been her Spatial Banishment.

Truthfully, even if Mia hadn’t acted, if the guy had actually been capable of cracking Ethan’s Nullspace Domain, Ethan would’ve sensed it instantly and used Absolute Stasis to disengage.

But saving mental energy was always a win.

By now, the Fallen Star Squad had fully joined the fight.

They didn’t dare plunge deep into the enemy pack like Ethan. Instead, they fought along the edges, pairing up and rotating cleanly.

With the Fallen Star Guard tying enemies up, the Mightkin might have had the numbers—but the squad rarely had to face more than a few at a time.

Even so, the battle was enough to make their scalps prickle.

The Mightkin were built like walking fortresses. Most hits barely did anything.

At this point, only Chris and Mia were reliably getting kills. Everyone else’s attacks felt like they were bouncing off, even Skinny Pete’s Lightning Storm barely leaving a mark.

Chris could kill because he was stacked with enhancements, and because his Corrupting Spear—paired with that black edge of sharpened energy—made "defense" meaningless. No matter how hard they were, he could still punch through.

Mia, on the other hand, relied on Soul Spike.

Their bodies were tough, but their souls were pathetically weak. Her Soul Spike landed like a guillotine—one shot, one kill.

Normally, Soul Spike could only outright kill targets below her tier. Same-tier enemies would take damage, not die. But the Mightkin’s soul force was so low that even ones a tier higher than her were getting dropped.

That made the two of them the squad’s main damage dealers, with everyone else working to support and feed them openings.

Garrick’s Quagmire turned the ground into a nightmare, making every step a slog. Layered with Henry’s Endless Vines, it kept the Mightkin from closing the distance at all—and when one did manage to push through, Sean would meet it head-on.

Sean’s Titansteel Form, stacked with Thorn Armor—and then boosted again by Henry’s Divine Shield and Emily’s Warding Armor—was basically a wall with teeth. Even when the Mightkin’s raw strength spiked, Sean could still take it.

The ones the squad handled were mostly Tier 24 to Tier 27. There weren’t many Tier 28s and 29s left on this side anyway—the three soulless thralls had already chewed through most of them.

As for the surrounding Fallen Star Guard, their job was simple: lock them down. Control, control, control.

The fight was blazing hot.

But the Mightkin’s hearts were ice-cold.

This was humiliating. Suffocating. Every advantage they were born with was getting strangled out of them.

"Boom..."

A muffled impact sounded from the void.

The Mightkin leader’s body dropped out of empty air and slammed onto the ground.

Just like Mia had predicted—someone strong enough could brute-force their way back out by tearing through space.

The moment he got his bearings and saw the battlefield, his face went a nasty shade of green.

"Stop!" he roared. "We surrender! We’ll go back right now!"

"Now you want to surrender?" Ethan snorted, not slowing down for even a second. "Too late."

"You...!" The leader dragged in a harsh breath, forcing himself steady. "If you kill us, you’ll be enemies with the Mightkin forever. When the time comes, our million-strong army will slaughter every last one of your humans!"

Ethan’s smile was cold. "Like letting you go means we’d be ’fine.’"

"You’ve got a million soldiers? Great. We’ve got hundreds of millions of zombies. Who’s scared of who?"

Then his eyes sharpened, voice dropping into a taunting drawl. "And I’m not trying to insult you, but—do the Mightkin even have Stage S?"

"Let me tell you something. Soulless thralls like these? We’ve got tens of thousands. How do you plan to play with us?"

Bluffing was easy.

The hard part was saying it like it was already fact.

"How is that possible?!" The leader’s face cracked—real fear, not anger.

The Mightkin did have Stage S powerhouses... but only a handful. If humans truly had tens of thousands of Stage S soulless thralls, then charging into their territory and acting tough wasn’t bravery.

It was suicide.

A bitter heaviness settled over every Mightkin warrior.

What kind of world did we just walk into?

And then—

In the distance, a new mass of figures surged toward the battlefield, drawn by the noise and the slaughter.

Ethan’s expression sank.

The first problem wasn’t even finished, and the next one was already at the door.