“Nine mountains and eight seas constitute one world.” The strange, rhythmic clicking of shifting bone echoed clearly through the livestream channel.
Inside Zoro’s empty eye sockets, the crimson soul flares burned with chilling stability as he marched with measured, unyielding strides toward the advancing army of Black Rock Giants.
His dark green samurai robe fluttered wildly in the wind, fully exposing the three long katanas dyed a deep, pitch-black sheen by his Armament Haki.
Two blades were held firmly in his bony palms, while the third hilt was clamped tightly within his jaw.
“A thousand of these worlds gather to form a Small Thousand Worlds.
Multiply this world by three, and there is nothing that can stand against it.” Eighty meters.
Sixty meters.
Forty meters.
The heavy, drum-like thuds of hundreds of advancing Black Rock Giants drew closer by the second.
The earth trembled with increasing violence, the air filling with the harsh grinding of frictionized stone and the scorching, suffocating scent of elemental sulfur.
The towering, fifteen-meter-tall Black Rock Leader looked like a massive fortress of black iron.
Suddenly, the orange flames inside its eye sockets flared with blinding intensity.
It unleashed a deafening roar that sounded like a collapsing mountain, leaning its colossal frame forward as its thick rock arms swung backward.
Boom!
The iron-hard black rock beneath its feet shattered violently under the sudden release of kinetic energy.
Carrying an immense, crushing momentum, its massive body charged toward Zoro like a meteorite launched from a cannon barrel.
Every single stride tore deep, jagged fissures into the earth, sending jagged stone shrapnel flying in every direction.
Behind their leader, hundreds of Elite Black Rock Giants accelerated in perfect unison, resembling an unleashed avalanche of living stone.
Their muffled footsteps converged into a thunderous torrent of death, dead-set on grinding the tiny skeletal figure ahead into dust.
Ten meters left.
Just a split second before the Black Rock Leader’s massive stone fist—a weapon easily capable of pulverizing forged steel—could smash directly into Zoro’s skull, the crimson soul fires inside the skeleton’s eye sockets instantly contracted into razor-thin pinpricks.
Boom!
It wasn’t the sound of an explosion, but a terrifying, concussive sonic boom generated by an instantaneous burst of pure physical power compressing the surrounding atmosphere.
The obsidian ground beneath Zoro’s feet, structurally tougher than standard plate armor, shattered as if struck by the hammer of an invisible titan.
A three-meter radius instantly collapsed inward, carving a deep crater with perfectly clean, sheared edges into the earth.
Before the shattered gravel and rising dust could even lift into the air, a dark green afterimage flashed out from the center of the pit.
It was fast—a level of speed that completely shattered the baseline limits of human visual processing.
In the livestream feed, the vast majority of the audience only saw the exact coordinates where the skeleton was standing suddenly cave inward.
Then, a blurry green and black flash, resembling a jagged bolt of lightning ripping through the dimensions of space, crashed straight into the absolute densest cluster of the Black Rock Giant army.
“Three-Sword Style Secret Technique: Great Three Thousand Worlds!” Screeech!
It wasn’t the clean, melodic ring of a drawn blade, but the instantaneous overlap and physical resonance of tens of thousands of hyper-frequenced, ear-piercing blade vibrations cutting through matter.
The visual data captured by the Broadcasting Eye Stone left every single viewer completely paralyzed.
Under the wide-eyed, jaw-dropped stares of tens of thousands of netizens, hundreds of Black Rock Giants had their upper and lower torsos cleanly separated at the waist at the exact same fraction of a second.
[System Notification: You have defeated a Black Rock Giant (Elite) and gained 1,000 experience points.] [System Notification: You have defeated a Black Rock Giant (Elite) and gained 1,000 experience points.] [System Notification: You have defeated a Black Rock Giant (Elite) and gained 1,000 experience points.] [System Notification: You have defeated the Black Rock Giant Leader (Boss) and gained 2,000 experience points.] [System Notification: Your personal level has been raised to Level 2!] [System Notification: Your personal level has been raised to Level 3!] [System Notification: Your personal level has been raised to Level 11!
You have unlocked the capacity to contract a secondary beast.] [System Notification: Your personal level has been raised to Level 11!
You have granted one free template extraction draw.] Boom!
Boom!
Boom!
The upper stone torsos of the giant formation were thrown forward by raw, unspent inertia, while their severed lower legs continued forward for one final, hollow half-step before collapsing into heavy ruins.
A continuous cascade of dull, heavy impacts echoed across the dead wilderness as tons of solid rock slammed into the dirt.
There was no longer a single intact Black Rock Giant left standing anywhere within the perimeter.
Only heaps of sliced obsidian boulders, their surfaces marked with perfectly glassy, flawless cuts, lay scattered across the earth.
[System Notification: Your contracted summon ‘Zoro’ has reached Level 2!] [System Notification: Your contracted summon ‘Zoro’ has reached Level 10!
All core attributes have been permanently increased.] [System Notification: Primary Instance Quest ‘Survive under the siege of the Black Rock Giants’ has been successfully completed!] [Mission Clearance Rating: Perfect (Instant Blitz Kill)] [Total Time Elapsed: 00:00:10] Silence.
Total, absolute silence.
The synthetic notification text chimed cleanly across the top of the screen, confirming a clearance time of exactly ten seconds.
At that exact moment, the livestream chat box, which had been overflowing with a toxic barrage of sarcastic comments and mockery, fell completely empty.
Not a single netizen sent a message.
Every single person tuning into the broadcast had their eyes bulging out of their sockets, staring at their screens in a state of utter shock and structural disbelief.
“Ten seconds…” Lee’s lips trembled as he unconsciously muttered the system prompt aloud in his cubicle.
The cup of cheap instant coffee in his right hand, long since gone cold, had tilted completely to the side.
The dark brown liquid was actively soaking through the front of his faded work shirt, leaving an unsightly, spreading stain across the fabric.
But he was completely oblivious to his clothes.
His eyes remained locked onto his smartphone screen, his pupils dilated and his gaze unfocused, gripped by an overwhelming wave of cognitive dissonance as his entire understanding of the world was systematically dismantled and rebuilt.
He had completely wiped out the first wave of a Nightmare-Hard instance in exactly ten seconds.
Even the elite Elemental Mage streamer from that premier Imperial Capital family, who currently occupied the number two spot on the global popularity charts, had to carefully utilize defensive kiting strategies just to satisfy the basic survival clock.
Actually killing the entire spawn pool to force an early completion was something ordinary players simply couldn’t achieve.
Yet, a supposedly garbage, White-tier common Skeleton Soldier with the worst baseline metrics on the market had completely slaughtered hundreds of Elite monsters and a regional Boss in ten seconds flat.
Actually, to be perfectly precise, the active combat phase had only lasted two seconds, because the other eight seconds were spent entirely on reciting poetry!
Was this entity even a Skeleton Soldier anymore?
After a ten-second vacuum of stunned, dead silence, the streaming channel violently exploded into a frantic riot.
“????????????????????????????” “I…
Holy shit!!!” “Impossible!
This is absolutely impossible!
I must be experiencing a mass hallucination!” “Someone pinch me right now!
Am I dreaming?!
This is a Nightmare-difficulty instance!
Hundreds of Elites and a Boss deleted in an instant?!” “My god!
What kind of hidden skill was that?!
What kind of absurd damage scaling?!” “The regional Boss was instantly deleted!
2,200 points of raw Defense cut through like wet tissue paper?!” “Holy crap!
This thing is a Skeleton Soldier?!
You’re telling me that terrifying swordsman is a baseline skeleton?!
If regular Skeleton Soldiers possessed this much physical output, the undead factions would have conquered the known universe centuries ago!” “Aren’t skeletons supposed to be bottom-tier manual labor trash?
How is it this aggressive?!” “Could it be an ultra-rare mutation?
I’ve heard rumors that certain contracted beasts have a microscopic chance to undergo a qualitative mutation and jump several tiers during the initial soul-binding sequence.” “A standard mutation wouldn’t look this broken!
Based on that clean wipe metric, its actual tier is at least Legendary High Grade—no, it has to be a true Mythic rank asset!” “Nobody try to stop me, I’m liquidating my savings to buy a Skeleton Soldier right now!” The torrent of comments broke through like a massive flood smashing through a failing dam.
The text lines refreshed at a rate of thousands of entries per second, completely submerging the video playback feed beneath a wall of text.
The logs were packed with frantic excitement, incoherent screaming, and the existential crises of viewers whose core logic had completely collapsed.
Following immediately behind the chat explosion was a massive, viral wave of stream shares.