"ROAR!!"
The grizzly bear abandoned its meal completely. It rose violently onto its hind legs, its barrel chest expanding as its small, dark eyes locked onto James and Aurora emerging from the thicket.
Two sabertooths!
The white-furred similidon looked like a sub-adult, carrying a lean frame that offered little real concern.
But the larger, golden-brown male standing beside her brought a heavy, immediate pressure.
James's physical development had reached the upper limit of a mature Smilodon fatalis. Ever since his recent integration of the American Lion gene, which had completely overhauled his skeletal architecture, his growth rate had accelerated into a new bracket.
He cleared two meters in length, his mass packing nearly 400 pounds of solid muscle.
He was no longer an easy resource to displace.
Yet, holding the structural advantage in pure tonnage, the grizzly felt zero existential dread. If this golden intruder intended to contest the pronghorn, the bear was fully prepared to show him the reality of fifteen-centimeter claws tearing through feline flesh.
"Grrr——"
The grizzly's warning was explicit. James didn't bother with diplomacy, answering with a high-pitched, shattering challenge roar.
His amber eyes burned with raw, territorial aggression—resembling two pockets of open flame in the dark.
The roar and the stance sent a singular, undeniable frequency through the brush.
Provocation.
Pure, unadulterated provocation.
An instant later, before the grizzly could even dropped back onto all fours, James moved. Moving like a flash of golden light across the needlegrass, he closed the distance with terrifying acceleration.
He had no intention of letting Aurora enter the fight; the mechanics of a grizzly duel were far too volatile for her current frame.
SWISH!!
Mid-stride, James retracted his sheath walls, allowing his long, curved foreclaws to lock into position. He vaulted off the turf, his paw executing a lightning-fast diagonal sweep across the bear's upper shoulder, cleanly tearing through the hide to leave three deep, bleeding channels.
Against his upgraded, reinforced claws, even the grizzly's dense winter coat and thick dermal layers failed to hold any defence.
"GROWL~~"
The bear uttered a sharp grunt of pain. The heavy muscle knots along its hump bunched together like stone, and it brought its massive right paw down in a crushing, vertical arc targeted at James's skull.
While a prime Smilodon could generate a one-ton striking force when pinning a prey, a fully mature grizzly bear or a giant short-faced bear held the monopoly on raw lateral impact power.
BAM!!
A heavy thud rattled the grass, but the grizzly's palm met nothing but empty air.
Using his newly modified Lv1 Hind Limb Musculature, James had executed a precise, backward pivot the exact millisecond the blow cleared his ears.
His momentum carried him completely around the bear's turning radius. He swiveled behind the blind spot and delivered a second, horizontal slash, stripping a massive sheet of coarse brown fur away to expose the crimson flesh underneath to the night air.
"Grrrr——"
The grizzly bellowed in fury, pivoting its massive bulk in a desperate effort to pin the agile cat. But its wide, low-slung skeletal frame simply lacked the transitional speed to track James's rapid shifts.
"Wrestling this bear head-on is a rookie mistake," James monitored the distance. "This is called hit-and-run tactic."
Before the initial launch, he had already mapped out the tactical limits of the grizzly build.
His velocity and agility metrics were inferior to the tool cheetah's, but compared to this omnivorous heavy, he was operating in a completely different dimension.
James began circling the bear in a tight, fluid orbit, intentionally using short, aggressive lunges to bait its defenses. The moment the grizzly lost its discipline and swung wide, James would exploit the slow recovery time , closing the distance to deliver a fresh laceration before backing out.
One cut, two cuts, three, four...
As the bleeding channels multiplied across its chest and flanks, the grizzly's small eyes dilated completely. It swung its head frantically, trying to lock its vision onto the golden shadow, but it couldn't anticipate the tiger's trajectory or intent.
Despite holding the definitive advantage in sheer weight, the river-valley heavy was being systematically dismantled, reduced to a passive punching bag with zero capacity to mount a counter-offensive.
The war of attrition lasted less than two minutes. The bear's chest and shoulders were reduced to a uniform, dripping red canvas, its stamina draining rapidly through its torn hide.
The grizzly was panting heavily, its chest heaving as it faced a predator it couldn't even touch. A deep, instinctual dread began to override its territorial pride.
The resource wasn't worth its life. The constant, burning pain of the slashes triggered its flight reflex; it began shifting its weight toward the timber line, searching for an opening to retreat.
"You think I'm letting you walk off after all this?"
The moment James detected the bear's rearward weight shift, he closed the gap instantly. He reared back and drove a high-pressure paw strike straight into the grizzly's heavy hip structure.
The thick, fat-laden rump was the most resilient sector of an omnivore's anatomy, built to absorb impact. But the sheer kinetic force behind James's paw strike went straight through the muscle layers, transferring its momentum directly into the pelvic architecture.
CRACK.
The heavy sound of the impact masked the slight, internal fracture of the bone, but the deep skeletal pain was impossible to suppress.
The grizzly let out a high-pitched shriek, but the true trauma followed a millisecond later.
James's ten-centimeter foreclaws functioned exactly like a row of iron skinning blades, burying themselves deep into the gluteal muscle sheets.
Then—
TEAR!
He yanked his paw back with a violent twist, ripping open several massive, horizontal gashes that exposed the bone structure beneath a heavy torrent of dark blood.
"ROAR!!"
The trauma broke the bear's psychological threshold. In that single second, the sheer agony crossed from fear into a blind, hysterical madness!
It abandoned the retreat entirely. Swinging its massive torso around with frantic, unhinged ferocity, it opened its blood-flecked jaws, its long white canines catching the moonlight like ivory stakes.
James was positioned too deep within the distance to execute a lateral pivot. The angle was gone. Capitalizing on the proximity, the grizzly locked its jaws onto James's right shoulder, driving its teeth down with everything its massive mass could muster.
CLANG.
An unnatural, dull metallic resonance echoed through the timber.
The grizzly's eyes widened in sudden confusion. It felt as though its teeth had just slammed into a solid block of glacial granite, the intense rebound force vibrating through its jaw bones until its roots ached.
Beyond the shock, its oral cavity felt as if it had been thrust into a nest of steel needles, the pressure cutting into its own gums.
The biological reaction completely cleared the bear's comprehension.
And James, witnessing the live performance of his newly integrated Lv3 Dermal Density, was equally stunned.
"Holy Sh*t... the level of defence."
Under normal conditions, his coat remained soft, flexible, and porous to manage his core temperature and allow heat dissipation during long migrations.
But the precise millisecond his framework detected a high-mass external impact, the skin and fur structures experienced an instantaneous reaction, compressing into a hyper-dense, impenetrable barrier.
It functioned exactly like a non-Newtonian fluid—fluid and compliant under normal motion, but converting into an unyielding stone shield the moment it absorbed an aggressive force vector.
James had originally tensed for a major skeletal injury, his reflexes failing to clear the bear's desperate counter-bite.
But the giant's ultimate, all-or-nothing offensive hadn't even managed to scrape the skin beneath his fur. The reality of the defense had effectively broken the grizzly's primitive understanding of biology.
"ROAR!!"
The bear's over-extended, twisted position left its primary defense entirely exposed.
Its wide, muscled neck was sitting right under James's nose.
Recognizing the closing window, James didn't waste a fraction of a second. He executed a short, forward lunge, opened his massive muzzle to its full eighty-degree threshold, and aligned his long curves of ivory directly over the bear's throat.