Guo Shanni wasn't entirely clear on how strong jin people and iron people could get.

Jin beasts, though — she understood those. The Command's propaganda reels had covered the military's battles against jin beasts extensively. Many of the stronger specimens could shrug off artillery fire, even bombs. Standard bullets, which could end a human life easily, barely registered against them. Xuanwu and the Great Earth Dragon had required nuclear detonations to bring down. That blossoming mushroom cloud was something Guo Shanni hadn't forgotten, and neither had any of the survivors who'd come north from Nanjing — it was why the Command had put those two creatures on its currency. They were proof that humanity, even reduced to a fraction of its former numbers and stripped of its civilization, remained something no animal could match.

Those reels had given Guo Shanni a clear sense of what fighting jin beasts cost. Enormous quantities of ammunition. Entire organized units committed to a single engagement. Soldiers dying.

The bigger the creature, the higher the cost.

She recalled a video that had circulated internally not long ago — the 31st Group Army's 2nd Bone-Gold Infantry Battalion fighting through Pizhou City, encountering a mutant resembling a Komodo dragon. The footage showed over a hundred armed soldiers making a coordinated assault with firearms, howitzers, and mortar support, and losing seventeen fully equipped bone-gold infantry before it was over. Not the strongest jin beast the Command had ever faced, but in the top fifty by any assessment.

The creature now dragging behind Chen Kun's truck was roughly the same size.

And the wounds were all on the head. The body was intact. No blast damage, no shell craters, no burn marks. Just cuts.

Guo Shanni didn't know much about combat, but she could read what she was looking at. This had been done with a blade.

By one person.

Does Colonel Chen's individual combat power genuinely equal an entire military unit?

How is that possible?

The picture before her was too far outside her reference frame. Her internal model of what a person could be was simply insufficient…