SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP!

Chapter 303: Blindspots in Sovereignty!

The lead Mammoth exhaled heavily, frost pluming from its trunk in a long, resigned breath. Its legs trembled once, then locked, standing but spent, a statue of what it had been moments ago.

It had been neutralized, for now at least.

Bruce didn’t linger. His gaze was already fixed forward.

He shot across the field, and the sky changed.

Not darkened but webbed.

Crystalline threads stretched across canyon gaps and mountain passes, glittering like constellations suspended at eye level. Frostweaver Spiders clung to cavern walls and jagged outcrops, horse-sized bodies anchored by eight crystalline legs embedded deep into ice.

Their abdomens pulsed faintly as they spun silk strands thicker than cables, each strand refracting pale blue light in prismatic arcs. The webs spanned entire chasms, turning open sky into a lethal lattice.

Touch one, flash-freeze. Conduction through ice-crystal silk would immobilize prey instantly, frost racing through veins before thought could follow.

Hundreds waited. Still. Patient. The most disciplined predators he’d encountered yet, trappers, not hunters, content to let the world deliver prey to them.

Bruce slowed for the first time, expression sharpening.

“The beasts of this world seem almost unending.” He exhaled through his nose. But he understood. This Labyrinth was a world unto itself, and a world had ecosystems, not just monsters.

He extended his perception carefully. Nine kilometers pulsed around him, every tension line mapped, every anchor point illuminated within his mind like a three-dimensional blueprint of silk and ice and waiting death.

Vitality Sovereign expanded further.

The nearest spider twitched. Its crystalline legs weakened fractionally. Web tension shifted by imperceptible degrees, subtle enough that the spider didn’t realize what was happening until its silk began to sag.

Bruce moved.

A strand brushed his shoulder. Frost detonated outward, but he’d already adjusted, body angling past the conduction point before the cold could propagate.

Heal.

Cold resistance recalibrated again. The frost that touched him melted on contact now, his body running hotter than the Labyrinth could comfortably suppress.

His trajectory shifted microseconds ahead of collapsing tension vectors. He wasn’t simply flying through the lattice. He was reading it, mapping structural weaknesses, predicting cascade failures, threading through gaps that existed only because his Authority was quietly loosening every anchor point he passed.

Spiders reacted. Jets of crystallized silk shot toward him in glimmering arcs. He wove through them mid-flight, leaving afterimages in the pale light. Any spider within his radius sagged subtly, vitality drained just enough that their web integrity faltered.

Silk loosened. Anchor points cracked. Entire sections of the crystalline sky-net collapsed behind him like falling constellations shattering against the abyss.

The spiders remained alive. Just unable to maintain dominion.

Bruce burst through the final lattice in an explosion of snow and fractured ice, acceleration spiking as he cleared the last canyon.

Ahead, two streaks of overwhelming presence carved through the frozen horizon.

Duke. Isolde.

Their auras didn’t merely part the Labyrinth. They imposed upon it. Ice bent away from them. Predators veered instinctively aside. The very geography of the Abyss seemed to soften in their wake, as though the world itself had decided that resistance was not worth the cost.

Bruce pushed harder.

The Abyss blurred beneath him, Authority pulsing steady and controlled. His mind no longer trembled under the influx of information, no longer strained beneath the weight of nine kilometers of life and terrain pressing against his consciousness.

It felt natural now. Tempered. Forged by repetition and restraint.

Within minutes, he closed the distance.

Duke glanced sideways without fully turning, hands clasped behind his back as he advanced through the air like a monarch inspecting conquered land. “Took you long enough.”

Bruce rolled his shoulder casually, frost cracking from the fabric. “Was sightseeing.”

Isolde didn’t look back. Her silver hair trailed behind her like a banner of winter. “The Core is ahead. The Labyrinth is responding to our presence.”

Bruce felt it too.

Far in the distance, the sky shifted unnaturally. Pressure rolled across the horizon in slow, deliberate waves. SS-Rank territories thinned, beasts retreating into deeper layers, clearing space the way lesser animals fled before a wildfire. Mana density spiked and then fell, like a breath being drawn inward.

Something deeper was awakening. Not territory guardians. Rulers. The kind that didn’t reshape land but defined it.

Bruce exhaled slowly, eyes narrowing as his Authority pressed outward, nine kilometers and still growing, brushing against something vast and coiled far below the ice.

But one thing nagged at him.

He hadn’t sensed a single SSS-tier beast along their path. Not one. The SS-Ranks had been formidable, the Wyrm, the Mammoths, the Spiders, but in a Labyrinth this vast, this overgrown, there should have been SSS-class signatures prowling the deeper territories. He’d felt traces of them earlier, dense and predatory, pulsing like slow-burning suns beneath the surface.

Now, nothing.

He glanced at Duke.

The guild leader walked through the air with his hands clasped behind his back, expression perfectly relaxed, as though he were strolling through a garden rather than cutting across a world-class Labyrinth. Not a hair out of place. Not a trace of exertion.

Bruce’s eyes narrowed slightly.

Spatial Lock.

He’d seen the skill once before, back in the palace, when Duke had frozen the guards in place during the confrontation with the parasite. One moment they’d been moving, the next, they simply were not. No visible effect. No mana flare. No distortion in the air. If Bruce hadn’t been watching them directly, he would have noticed nothing at all. It was as though the concept of movement had been quietly revoked from their existence, and reality hadn’t bothered to announce the change.

His own senses couldn’t penetrate it. Life Glance registered the frozen guards as alive, heartbeats continuing, vitality stable, but the space around them had become opaque to his perception, a blind spot that his senses slid off of like water on glass.

That had been used on ordinary guards.

If Duke had used Spatial Lock on SSS-tier beasts along their route, creatures that should have been continent-level threats, apex predators with Domains that reshaped reality itself, and had done so casually, without breaking stride, without even mentioning it, then it was understandable why Bruce wasn’t able to sense them.