Caine didn't dodge. He didn't raise his arms in a panic, nor did he back away toward the storage tanks.
As the golden, energy-infused halberd neared his chest, Caine drew the massive ocean of compressed energy from deep within his chest core. For the first time since his awakening in his cramped apartment, he stopped holding back his Phase 1 reinforcement. He stopped regulating the flow to mimic a fragile Level 10 baseline.
He flooded his entire torso, his shoulders, and his arms with ultra-dense, compressed CrystalHeart energy, locking it tightly beneath his skin and muscle tissue without allowing a single lux of light to escape outward.
CLANG!
The halberd struck Caine's jacket.
The sound was not the tearing of fabric or the crushing of bone. It was the sound of a high-speed artillery shell striking a solid, unyielding mountain of reinforced steel.
The golden energy blade didn't pierce his uniform. It didn't push him back an inch. The tremendous kinetic force generated by a Level 42 High Intermediate strike simply stopped dead upon contact with Caine's chest. A blinding shockwave of golden sparks exploded outward in a three-hundred-sixty-degree ring, blasting away the loose gravel, tearing the blue moss from the ground, and shattering the glass windows of the nearby industrial facility.
Julian's eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror. The violent recoil from the blocked strike traveled back up his halberd's shaft with terrifying velocity. The metallic grip vibrated so violently that the skin on Julian's palms tore open, and his arms went instantly numb from the wrists to the shoulders.
"W-What... what are you?" Julian choked out, his voice trembling as he desparately tried to yank his halberd backward.
Caine casually pulled his right hand out of his jacket pocket. His skin was completely bare, showing no crystalline scales, no glowing runes, and no materialized armor. Yet, as he reached up and clamped his bare fingers around the golden blade of the halberd, the weapon ceased to vibrate entirely. It was locked in place as if encased in concrete.
"Is this the full power of Section 1?" Caine asked softly. His voice was low, entirely devoid of anger, which made it infinitely more terrifying.
"Let go!" Julian yelled, trying to channel more energy down the shaft, but his core felt completely unresponsive, stifled by the overwhelming pressure radiating from Caine's hand.
CRACK.
With a simple, fluid twist of his right wrist, Caine snapped the Level 42 alloy halberd in half like a dry piece of wood. The upper golden blade shattered into dull glass-like fragments, dissolving into harmless blue particles that rained down onto the dirt.
The two Section 1 squadmates standing on the catwalk frozen in place. The axe wielder dropped his weapon an inch, his mouth open, while the twin-blade user instinctively took two steps backward, his face draining of all color.
Julian stumbled backward, falling onto his hands and knees in the gravel. He looked up at Caine, his chest heaving, his immaculate white armor covered in dark mud.
"Your CHPower... it's not 10!" Julian stammered, his confidence completely broken. "You're a monster! An Anomaly! A Level 50 hiding in the Beginner tier to mock us!"
"My official rating is 10," Caine said, taking a slow, deliberate step forward. The gravel crunched quietly under his combat boots. "My density, however... is something else entirely."
Caine flexed his right hand. Instead of suppressing his power completely to maintain his cover, he allowed a tiny fraction—less than five percent—of his true internal pressure to leak into the immediate surroundings.
The atmospheric pressure in the alleyway plummeted instantly. The air grew so dense and cold that Julian, Jax, and Lyra all felt a heavy weight press down upon their lungs. The dust hovering in the air flattened to the ground, and the faint hum of the distant Jahgred radiation was completely drowned out by the silent, absolute authority of Caine's presence.
It wasn't the wild, uncontrolled energy of a wild beast. It was the absolute, organized density of a Master.