117. Damn Right I Am
Shen found Washington... claustrophobic.
To be fair, it had a good mix of open areas with few buildings, but the living quarters mainly consisted of people packed together like ants. Even the "mansions" were barely as large as average mortal houses in the Eternal Empire.
How could people live like that?
Shen wondered about that as he rode a black SUV. He had been convinced of the need by reports of crowds waiting for him to arrive in the city—and he had indeed seen those. He felt safe enough to be in a car now that he was in the country's capital. While he could dodge any crowds and get to his destination following his smartphone's GPS, he had been offered a city-wide tour and had accepted it on the condition that Alicia could come too.
He didn't know if she had visited Washington DC before, but she would likely enjoy the time off. After all, she had been very vocal about resting when he had trained her in the tutorial's second stage.
That's how he found himself taking selfies with her everywhere—though, at some point, it had primarily turned into taking pictures of her. She was exploiting the fact that all touristic points had been emptied for his visits, taking "the best pictures possible." She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt.
Shen still couldn't understand how he had become almost an exclusive photographer. He didn't recall accepting the role despite his great memory provided by his expanded mind and learning ability.
"...really, really tiring," Alicia said about the tests as they finally got back in the car after visiting the Lincoln Memorial. She was looking at the pics on her smartphone. "The last test yesterday was seeing how long I could run max speed ahead. I think they were trying to calculate exactly how stamina consumption works and how stats affect it."
"Are you required by law to do these tests?" he asked
"Dunno, why?" Alicia replied, not even looking at him as she did her thing.
"They might be finding ways to kill Guardians more effectively," Shen explained. "For instance, knowing how far a Guardian's stamina can take them, and how fast that can happen, will let the US plan better on how to surround Guardians."
"Oh, yeah, makes sense." And that was the extent of her words on the subject as she added black hearts to the picture she was about to upload.
"Aren't you worried?" he asked.
"What?" She finally looked at him. "No. Why?"
"I don't like the idea of people studying how to kill me," he said slowly as if explaining things to a child.
"Dude, lots of people can kill me already. They always could, all my life. Nothing changes. And there are plenty of fucked up people out there, you know? I feel safer knowing my country isn't useless against psycho Guardians." She smiled. "If anything, it's the psycho Guardians who scare me."
Shen gave it a thought and realized that she felt about her government as he did about the Eternal Empire. He trusted the Immortal Emperor and most Imperial Officials. It wouldn't bother him to know they could kill him more effectively when his life was already in their hands.
He would, however, be bothered by another clan researching how to kill him better. That's why he was so upset by the American research.
Be it as it may, he was too weak to do anything about it even if he were willing to take control of the world by force—which he wasn't, at least not at the moment—so he just let go of the issue for now.
The day proceeded. Mortal monuments were... well, mortal. Shen didn't blame them for being unable to create truly grand things without qi—or mana, he guessed. That should change soon enough.
"Oh, look, they are talking about you again!" Alicia said, showing a video of an influencer commenting about the "King's Reckoning" as most people were calling his fight.
A vocal minority called it the "Royal Massacre." Those people definitely didn't like how a foreigner had been the one to do that to "good" Americans.
A PR battle of the likes Shen had never seen had taken hold of the American side of the internet.
To begin with, pictures and videos of the aftermath of his battle were everywhere, sometimes right beside the pictures of him shaking hands with the President.
A soldier had also photographed him on top of the recreational vehicle, uncaring about a nearby crying boy hugging a corpse.
Finally, images showing the Sorcerer King's lair pictured scantly dressed young ladies with leather collars waiting for their owner's return. One of the people who had stayed behind to protect the "Autonomous Guardian Nation" said those girls didn't matter because they were "normies" and thus inferior beings in the new world order. Yet, another interview showed not everyone in the camp had been briefed about the new social order.
Shen wasn't a specialist in informational war or hybrid warfare. They were part of the Concept of War, but things he hadn't invested in. He would need to meditate deeply to understand them better. That said, he could tell the US government was working hard on painting the entire group as terrible. That would counter any issues that might arise with the killings. It was impressive they had done so much work in so little time.
The skeptical part of him said it could be fabricated too, but it didn't feel like that. There was a sincerity in the abused girls' eyes that crushed the heart, and he felt it couldn't be made up—unfortunately.
It made him very glad for what he had done—though if he ever found out that the US had had random girls suffer terribly in preparation for a PR stunt...
He swore he would crush them like insects.
People had been divided about his battle at first, especially the aftermath. A girl in an interview said he had killed people who ran away, which made most people outrageous.
However, the support he had received after the Sorcerer King's lair was revealed was overwhelming. Only a minority of people claimed it was all lies created by the hidden Crusaders in government to justify the murder of innocents.
Shen read enough to get the general gist of it. He didn't care what people thought, but he did care about his survival. Whether they considered him a hero or a villain was relevant because it might determine whether the US government would attack him.
Speaking of which, news from abroad was worrying.
Some countries were killing all Guardians, while others had Guardians killing everyone. Italy had devolved into an all-out war painted as being between some mafia families and the government. Buildings were getting bombed in broad daylight—and some of them were government buildings. They all wanted control of the Maiden or her death, and the surrounding countries were the same. Some allied with Italy, others declared war. All of Europe was taking sides; there were even reports of an ICBM being shot down before reaching a major city. The US was keeping out of it because they were allied to nations on both sides.
On more personal news, Shen had been contacted by a lot of people. He ignored them all for now. Sai still hadn't emailed Shen back.
"When are we stopping to eat?" Alicia asked.
Shen frowned. "We don't need food to survive anymore."
"No, we don't," she said and went back to checking her smartphone. "But I like eating tasty food."
Shen, who had found the habit of talking to people looking at screens jarring at first, went back to his own smartphone to keep learning about the military capabilities of the modern mortal world.
"Oh, yeah," Alicia said while groaning in pleasure. "That hits the spot."
They were eating fast food burgers in the car. It was nothing compared to the burger Shen had had in the tutorial. In fact, he wasn't even sure it was real food.
Alicia ate hers as if it had been given to her by some descended Immortal Cook. He shook his head in disapproval and threw his back in the bag.
At least the soda, while not especially tasty, was pleasantly refreshing.
"Your apartment is in this building, sir," the Secret Service agent said as they stopped in front of a luxurious-looking tall building.
"Wow," Alicia said as she stepped out of the car.
"Most residents are high-class, discrete individuals," the man in a black suit informed. "There should be no issues with your identity here."
He offered Shen a key card, a paper with a password, and an ID with Shen's name. The latter had one of his online pictures—edited to look more "mortal"—and identified him as a Diplomatic Agent.
"One of the doormen should open the door for you every time you approach, sir, but in case he doesn't, this is the front door's password. The keycard opens your apartment door. It's the penthouse. And we would appreciate it if you carried your ID with you all the time and showed it anytime it was asked of you."
Shen nodded. "Thank you." He memorized the password and put both the card and the ID on his backpack.
"What about me?" Alicia asked.
She had avoided the day's tests. It was late night already, and they only had finished the tour now.
"I was told you can choose whether to pass the night here, if Mister Feng will have you, or back in the base. We'll pick him up tomorrow morning to start with the training proper."
She looked at Shen, who gave her a slight smile. "You're welcome to stay."
"Damn right I am. No use having a rich BFF if I can't use their fucking penthouse. Let me check the restaurants that deliver in this place," she said, picking up her smartphone from her pocket.
As foretold, a doorman opened the door for them. The man was polite but not as submissive as Shen's past servants. He knew from some social media posts that submissiveness was seen in a negative light in modern society, so he didn't complain—though any who joined his group under him would have to learn his ways.
Alicia and Shen split in front of the elevator.
"So you're going to be safe in the stairs but leave me to die in the potentially lethal elevator?" she teased.
"Yes," he replied shamelessly. "It's your choice to put yourself in a confined space that can be rigged with explosives. It's faster for us to take the stairs, too."
"Shen, don't be ridiculous," she said with a serious face. "If they were going to kill you, they would rig the apartment, not the elevator. Why do you think they gave you the penthouse? So they can throw missiles more easily at you."
Her argument would actually be great if the penthouse also didn't give him a better way to see incoming projectiles and escape if needed.
Despite the joke, he answered her seriously. "Even if the elevator isn't rigged, it's still a confined space outside my control. I'll only enter it if I can test my spear against the metal, but I believe the residents wouldn't like that."
He arrived at the top story before the elevator closed with Alicia inside.
The penthouse had three stories and was even more luxurious than both Alicia and Shen expected. Mortal luxury was different from cultivator's, but it was apparent enough, especially after Alicia showed Shen pictures of lower-class apartments.
They talked for a while and took pictures of the great view, but he told her he needed some space after a few hours.
"I'm here if you want to talk," she said seriously for once.
"I know, thank you," he replied with a slight smile.
And then finally, a year after he woke up healed, Shen found himself alone on a bed with no pressing matters pushing him forward.
Alicia had been partly right; he was extra vulnerable against missiles in the penthouse. Yet he allowed himself to relax completely for once.
He needed that.
Shen even took his armor out for the first time since getting it and took a bath. The walking closet had many clothes for his size, including clean martial arts robes, though their cut was slightly different from his. Still, he left his robe in a container labeled "dirty clothes" and put a clean one on.
He slept the entire night and ignored the people ringing the bell in the morning. He just stayed in bed, looking at the ceiling of the large room in silence.
One year; that's how long it had been since Shen woke up healed.
It hadn't felt like so much time had passed, but Earth's calendar didn't lie. Even if the tutorial might've left him unconscious for weeks or months, he estimated he had been awake for at least nine months.
That meant Shen was seventeen now. A seventeen-year-old cultivator at the Fate Origin realm with advantages beyond most cultivators' imaginations; a prodigy the likes of which he had never heard before.
In the past year, his mind had expanded, and his morals had changed. His honor had been challenged and morphed a little too. He had killed, learned of his father's betrayal, and was all alone in the world except for a single friend.
The future looked bleak, but at least he had some strength to protect himself.
The mortals were pretending society hadn't changed. He had withheld his judgment until he rested, but now he could tell he hadn't been wrong in his initial assessments.
The US government knew there was no going back. The General of the Army's declaration to accept civilian judgment once the crisis was over and martial law was lifted was a political one. There would be no lifting it, and the choice to assimilate potential criminal Guardians into the army was a move to future-proof the armed forces.
They knew what was coming. They were studying Guardians and finding their limits to know how to kill them faster when order fell completely. Bombing cities had been a test to determine how effective it was in stopping anyone with great ambitions and a warning of how far the government was willing to go even against its own people.
Shen still felt like it was useless.
There was no stopping the Guardians from ruling the Earth. They already did at the Maiden's hands, though they didn't know what powers she had beyond judging people. Even so, it was only a matter of her getting enough protection to not get killed.
Even if she died and all following Maidens were killed, it was only a matter of time until a B-rank appeared; and B-ranks wouldn't need protection even from atomic bombs.
Shen was extrapolating that conclusion from his father's power and considering Ethereal Harmonization cultivators were the same as B-ranks. Still, he was confident in those assumptions.
The only way for humanity to stop B-ranks from appearing was by killing anyone who showed the potential to become one, but if they did that, they would weaken themselves. Any race of the Alliance would be able to conquer them then. More importantly, if the system hadn't lied, they needed strong Guardians to fight the Void.
So, either Guardians would rule sooner or later, or humanity would be enslaved or killed.
Now that Shen thought about it, that explained why they were treating him well. As a Rising Star, he had advantages that let him grow faster than other Guardians. He was also the strongest Guardian around as far as he knew. They were preparing to kill him if needed but hoping he could be befriended, if not outright controlled.
Control was the keyword here.
The Guardians who were willing not to destroy Earth's existing society would be allowed to live.
The revolutionaries would be dealt with.
Shen concluded that last bit from the online PR battle. The government was prepared to control public opinion. They knew what to do to vilify the opposition and had entire teams ready to do it at the shortest notice.
He felt it was the move of a fool grasping at straws.
Sooner or later, Earth would be invaded by the Void. Only strong Guardians would be able to protect people because Void Spawn could only be hurt by Concepts. Said Guardians would defend only whoever they wanted, no one else.
Though they might accept weaker people above them for a time, you couldn't keep a dragon chained up. At some point, they would create their fiefdoms where their will reigned supreme no matter what others thought. That's how cultivator society had been before the Eternal Empire.
Even if the Maiden could use system- or Alliance-provided tools to rule, it didn't change the fact that the Alliance wanted Guardians ruling over the general populace either. Shen was being skeptical here, but he didn't think mortals had an easy life in the Alliance if the Guardians above them didn't allow such.
So it was only a matter of time—
"Oh," Shen said.
That was it. Time. The powers-that-be were hoping their own people, descendants or sponsored, would rise to prominence in however much time they had. A single extra month to let them grow was another month with a kindled hope. They knew what was going on with the wars in the rest of the world, and that's why they were desperate to keep a measure of control over everything for as long as they could. At the very least, the surviving Guardians, the ones approved by the government, would be less likely to murder everyone belonging to the "old world order" once they rose to power.
Then again, Shen had to admit there was also a more honorable perspective to things. The Pioneers were being trained on effective ways to respond to emergencies. That crucial knowledge was being passed forward even if society might fall in the near future.
So, there were a lot of politics going on, probably a lot he couldn't even imagine. Even so, all in all, Shen was happy the US had accepted him.
This was a nice place to pass that month until rifts appeared. It also had a great structure to understand mortal culture. But more importantly, those thoughts also let him make an important guess.
Shen took his smartphone and called the General's secretary. Half an hour later, he was talking to the man.
"Yes?" the man asked.
"I want to go when you invade Italy," Shen said. "And I'll resent if you kill the Maiden. We'll save her and bring her alive to this country."
The US wanted to control things, but there was another advantage to having a stable society if the Maiden died: Maidens were elected.
The system had said that the Maiden Title was decided by casting a vote among all the highest-ranked beings of a race. Shen was the highest-ranked human as far as he knew. The US wasn't showing interest in Italy because they didn't need the Maiden. They would try to take her for them, of course, but failing that, killing her would also work.
When the elections came, the US would be friends with the stronger being around. Even if other people could vote too, one of the most stable countries in the world, with the third-largest population, would have a clear advantage over all others. Unless, of course, China was half as stable, but even then, politics could give the US the advantage they needed.
There was a pause before the General asked, "The call is secure now. Why is her life important to you?"
"She said she wanted to follow me back in the tutorial," he explained. "I understand you might not like so much power in my hands, but I have nothing against the US yet. This is not a threat. I also don't like your country any more than any other. Bringing the Maiden here and not trying to control her would make me see your nation very positively." He smiled. "Also, until a B-rank appears, any Maiden can sanction my title, so I would rather the current one, who likes me, stays alive."
In other words, he wanted to protect Marzia for his own sake.
Shen wasn't great in politics, but he knew it had a lot to do with favors. He was saying that he would owe the US one in a roundabout way. And Marzia should also owe him one when he saved her.
The General understood. "I'll forward your proposal to the President. Anything else?"
That was all, so they hung up.
With all those things clear for him, Shen could set up plans and detect threats more easily. He cultivated a little, then finally stood up and searched for Alicia.
A trail of a pizza box, cups, a dirty plate, and clothes led Shen to Alicia.
The girl was in the penthouse's infinity pool, looking at the city beyond.
She was wearing a pink bikini, and for the first time, Shen truly noticed Alicia.
When he had met her for the first time, he had considered her a mere mortal. Even nowadays, he barely glanced at any mortal; he only looked long enough to recognize them, and only if they were relevant in his life. He had recognized other people's beauty in the tutorial, but only from the third stage onward, as he started realizing Guardians were more than mortals.
It wasn't that he saw mortals as a sub-race as the Sorcerer King had done, but mortal girls were just not on his plans. Even Guardians were. He was supposed to marry a cultivator with a compatible Path, and he had no reason to seek women until he was ready for said marriage. In fact, seeking them would be a distraction from what truly mattered, cultivating and walking his Path.
So while he had intellectually recognized Alicia's beauty, he had never seen her.
Now he did, and Alicia was gorgeous.
She had light brown straight hair so long they touched her... her... Shen swallowed. The very visible curves of her bottom, on her back. Her hair seemed to cascade down, not hiding her thin waist and big... curves. Shen also got a privileged sight from her frontal curves from where he stood—diagonally on her back, but more on the side than on the back. She noticed him and turned her head, revealing her green eyes and bright smile as she saw he was up.
"Sleepyhead," she criticized as she started slowly swimming his way.
Shen liked brunettes. He also enjoyed a lot fewer curves than Alicia had. Yet he took too long to take his eyes off her smile or stop them from moving downward, and she noticed it.
Alicia stopped swimming, her smile died, she crossed her arms to hide her attributes and arched her body slightly to the front to make her figure small—thus harder to notice.
That reaction felt simultaneously like a slap to his face and a punch to his guts. Shen had only felt worse in his life after finding out his clan was gone and then that his father had betrayed his clan. Yet, even then, he had felt bad in a different way.
This was something horribly new.
Shen felt like he had betrayed something he shouldn't have.
It felt absolutely terrible.
"Sorry," he said at once, turned back, and fled.
He felt pathetic for running away even as he did. Shen had taken lives not long ago, but now he found himself alone in the street within seconds because he didn't know how to face a bad situation.
Yet, his face was flushed, and he couldn't remove the image he had seen from his mind.
That was the first girl he had ever seen wearing so little in person. The internet had plenty of that, but he could easily ignore it, and the scantly dressed girls online weren't really close to him. It didn't feel real. Seeing Alicia in a bikini that close had felt completely different.
To be honest, he had absolutely no idea what to do now.
He felt he needed to apologize, yet he also felt he didn't. That was his home, and she had clad herself like that in a communal area, knowing he might see her like that. He was a young male, and cultivators weren't immune to hormones. Then again, he should be able to control his mundane instincts as he had done his entire life; he was not some mindless animal but a cultivator.
It all came down to why she would dress like that if she minded he looked. Well, he had never looked at her like that before, so maybe she felt she was safe. Perhaps she also had nothing else to wear to enter the pool.
He kept thinking about everything as people on the streets started noticing him. He was wearing a martial arts robe, just standing there. Some recognized him; many took pictures. Shen ignored them as he kept considering all options.
Then it dawned on him.
Alicia had never considered him that way, and it hadn't even crossed her mind that it might be an issue, just like he hadn't thought of that before.
It was all a silly, albeit significant, misunderstanding.
Shen smiled, nodded to himself, and returned to the building. He realized that he had broken the building's and his apartment's front doors when he pushed through them. He would have to find a way to apologize—later.
Right now, he had to apologize to his best friend.
He found Alicia pacing back and forth in the living room, biting her lower lip down and calling someone on her phone. Maybe him, though he hadn't brought his smartphone with him.
She was still wearing a bikini, but Shen resisted the temptation of looking down this time.
When he entered the room, she looked at him in sheer relief. Then, to his surprise, she rushed at him and hugged him tightly.
All the instinctual feelings he was trying really hard to avoid came rushing to him like water through a broken dam.
She kept hugging him tightly in silence, her head right below his shin chin. Shen found himself freezing once again, unsure of what to do. He felt both that this was inadequate and that he wanted that moment to go on forever.
Then, Alicia felt his lower body's reactions.
She instantly shifted her body to avoid it... then slowly returned.
"Alright," Alicia whispered, and he could hear the tears in her trembling voice. She was terrified. "You're a man; you have needs," she said, though Shen felt he was talking more to herself than to him. "Just please, please, don't leave me. Please. I'll do anything. Please don't leave me."
When she finished talking, her whole body was shaking.
Shen never knew he could feel so bad through simple empathy.
His lower body rested down at the same time he gave her the tightest hug he could without hurting her.
"I have no fucking idea what's going on," he told her, forcing himself to use the swear word to try to connect better. It worked. She tensed a lot in surprise, then relaxed, her body trembling a lot less. "But I'm not that stupid. You're my best friend, and you're hurting. I'm not going to do anything to you; please believe me." He awkwardly patted her back lightly. "Stay here for as long as you want, and feel free to leave if you want to. I'll be here for you, Alicia. We're friends," he repeated. "I appreciate your presence. I'll be here."
Her body stopped shaking not long after.
They kept like that, in silence, for a long while.
They eventually separated. Alicia looked down, flustered, ashamed. Shen looked sideways to avoid her eyes.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I never saw... I mean... You are beautiful... And I never... Clothing... Skin..."
He was glad he was looking away from her because she raised her face to look at him.
Shen took a deep breath. "My culture is prudish by your standards," he said firmly. "I've never seen a woman wearing so little. I was surprised and looked at you in an unbefitting manner. I apologize."
Alicia bit her lower lip—he saw it in the corner of his eyes—then said, "No, I'm the one in the wrong. I kinda... Fuck. You're you. I thought you were beyond such things. I kinda forgot you're a fucking teenager. I kinda thought of you as an alien or something." Her face flushed so much it could be mistaken for a tomato. "That's why I reacted the way I did. I felt I was safe, then I was scared. But you know... Boys look at girls... Fuck, this is awkward."
Alicia turned back and walked to the kitchen. She stopped midway and looked back at Shen, who was still doing his best to ignore her.
"See? You're not looking now when a guy normally would... The way I'm used to, too..." She sighed. "Fuck, fuck, fuck. Look, no one will blame you if you admire a girl. Girls... We know boys look at us. If it's not in a creepy way, it's alright. Looking so openly, the way you did, that is fucking creepy. That is only allowed if the girl has feelings for the boy and it's a mutual relationship." Shen thought it was impossible, but her face became even redder. "So what I'm saying is, pretend you're not looking, then you can look all you want. Holy fucking fuck, I can't fucking believe I have to explain this to a guy. Fuck."
Shen just looked at her, not knowing how to respond. Not even his learning ability was enough for him to understand this culture. It was so alien to everything he believed in and had been taught that he was shocked he hadn't short-circuited. He wouldn't be surprised if an arc flash spontaneously happened on his brain.
"Some girls are more open about it," Alicia continued, clearly embarrassed. "Fuck, most of them are. In this day and age, I'm the fucking virgin weirdo." She stopped, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, then hid her face. Then she turned back and ran away. "Oh my God, please kill me," she whispered as she threw herself at a sofa.
Shen took the opportunity to admire her back in silence. His heartbeat quickened. His blood rushed.
He started to wonder if he didn't like curves, after all.
Alicia took a few moments to recover, and when she did, she turned to find him looking to the same point on the ceiling he had been looking at before. He never thought he would one day use his D agility to pretend not to be looking at a girl who knew he was looking.
Mortal culture was weird.
She sat up. "It's about romance," she explained. "I... Girls like me like to pretend boys admire our personality rather than our... bodies. It makes the world feel more beautiful. Safer. Less... dirty. It's also a little game, I guess? I don't fucking know!" she yelled, then took a deep breath. "Look, I don't know how to explain it, alright? It's just the way things work. I'm sorry for overreacting, okay? And can you fucking look me in the fucking eyes?"
Shen did. That's when he saw the fear. She was forcing herself to explain herself and being apologetic because she was afraid he might leave otherwise.
That forced his mind to work again. He considered what she had said, sighed, and approached. He sat on the sofa opposite to her in the large living room.
"Alicia, you're my friend," Shen repeated softly. "My only friend. And if you disregard the friends I had as a child, who were ordered to befriend me by their parents, you're my first friend, too. That means a lot to me. And I do appreciate you for who you are, not how gorgeous your body is."
"In my culture... I'm not sure if what I did would be disrespectful. It's just not done. One's body is kept for one's husbands or wives. Well, maybe mortals were different in purely mortal settlements, but I wouldn't know.
"But things are different for you. You considered what I did to be disrespectful. I messed up, and you don't have to apologize for feeling disrespected.
"We also don't have to play pretend. If you want to live in a world where your best friend will not admire your body, I'll give you that world."
He swallowed, took another deep breath, and continued, "I can control myself. I was just surprised by your beauty because I never thought about you as a woman before, not until your... womanness was slapped in my face. But I can never admire your body again if it makes you feel better.
"I'm sorry for looking at you impolitely in the pool and lying on the sofa. That won't happen again."
A strange silence followed. Alicia crossed her arms, then uncrossed them when she realized she was covering herself, then didn't know what to do with herself. She ended up just leaving her closed hands on her lap.
"I should've known better," she whispered and started trembling again. "It was my fault. It's always my fault."
"What are you talking about?" Shen asked, completely lost.
She shook her head, then took a big breath, and stood up. There was a renewed fire in her eyes. "Listen, you were checking out a friend in a bikini, big fucking deal. This is blowing out of proportion too much.
"I was just surprised and reacted poorly, alright? I kind of have a story, which made me scared. The last people who looked at me the way you did... You know about Ken in the tutorial. I also had a boyfriend back in high school, and he wanted to have me before I felt ready for it. It made me scared of intimate contact.
"But I know it's not really their fucking fault, you know? You didn't mean to make me scared. I'm just too prude sometimes. I mean, Ken helped me against Mark, so I should know I had to repay the favor somehow, right? That's what a girl is supposed to do. I should also fuck my fucking boyfriend. It's natural. Everybody knows that. Everybody does that.
"You're a boy, I'm a girl, we're alone in a big house. I should—" Then she cracked, and tears started rolling again. "I should know better. Ashley was right; just look at me! Why do I keep this hot body if I'm not going to use it?! Of course, men will want a piece of this! And if I get something else in return, all the better for everyone, right?" She lowered her crying face, then looked at him with begging eyes. "So please, do what you want, but don't leave me?"
Shen immediately said, "Alicia, stop offending me. I don't need you to prostitute yourself to me, to stay friends with you."
Her eyes widened, her mouth opened so much her jaw looked like it would fall, and she stepped back as if slapped. "What?" she said finally.
"Listen to what you're saying. We should go to bed because we're alone in a house? That's stupid. You're obligated to give yourself to anyone who does you a favor? That's even more stupid.
"It's not your fault that you didn't fulfill another person's expectations about how you would use your property. Your body belongs to you; other people's lust is their problem, not yours. Would you be obligated to give them all your money if they were greedy for it? Of course not. Did I have to provide my clan's techniques to people in the tutorial just because they wanted it? No.
"What doesn't belong to you is light itself, or how it reflects on your body to create the image my eyes see. I can look at anyone who's showing their body. If we were strangers, that would be all there is to it.
"But did you forget the part where I said we're friends? You have expectations, limits, and feelings. They go against my belief in how I should be allowed to look because you're exposing yourself. So one of us will have to compromise if we want our friendship to continue. Your feelings on the matter are more important because it's your body, so I'll do it; I'll stop looking. That's all there is to it."
He stood up and started walking closer to her. "Look, you're obviously hurt, and I'm not good at dealing with such things. No, not just not good. I have no idea what to do.
"But I know you're—as you would say—spouting fucking bullshit from your fucking mouth. Shut up and believe me when I say this: I. AM. YOUR. FRIEND."
He said those last words loudly and paused. When he said the last one, he reached and hugged her.
"In fact, you're one of the very few people in the whole universe I care about," he said much more softly. "I'll be here for you, and you don't need to do anything for that to happen, okay?"
This silent embrace was much more comfortable than the last one. After a while, Shen broke it and held Alicia by the shoulders. He didn't like touching her naked skin for even longer like that, but he felt it would show how important his following point was.
"Now," he said, "I want you to listen very carefully to me, okay?"
She nodded. Her tears were mostly gone, and her face was almost back to normal.
"You need help," Shen said directly. "I'll not preach my morals to you, but you're objectifying yourself."
"What?" She got away from his hands. "What the fuck are you talking about?" She crossed her arms. "Since when are you a feminist?"
He smiled sadly. "As I said, I won't preach my morals to you. I don't need to. This is about you, Alicia, about what you said, not me.
"You talked about being abused, pretending to live in a 'less dirty' world, and how using your body should be expected. And you trembled and cried while doing so. You're obviously traumatized and trying to justify what happened to you in a weird way. The logic I figured out is that if what happened is your fault, you can fix it easily by changing your attitude. The world won't be a terrible place if it's normal for people to go through what you did; you just need to give in, and all will be fine."
She hugged herself tighter. "You're just making stuff up." She didn't sound convinced about that. "It's fucking stupid."
"Alicia, in the tutorial, I became closer to a computer than any other human in the world. I can make connections, and these were quite obvious. You're objectifying yourself because if you're a broken object, you just have to fix yourself, become functional, accept your place in the world, and everything will be fine. That's easier to deal with than a world where evil people can do what they did to vulnerable people.
"If you felt happy, truly happy, with that belief; if it was who you truly are, I wouldn't care. Our cultures are different enough that it would be just another thing to accept about you. It would be weird to know you experienced the pleasures of the flesh without getting married first, but I can deal with that.
"But look at you, Alicia. You're hurting, and you're afraid. That's not who you are, and forcing yourself like this is not healthy. You're my friend, and I'm thinking of your well-being when I say you need help. Professional help. The kind of help I can't provide."
The Feng Clan had people who specialized in taking care of its members' mental health. He didn't know how it worked with mortals, but he guessed something like that existed if the system had talked about it in the tutorial.
Alicia turned sideways and looked in the opposite direction to his.
Shen suddenly found it very hard to keep his eyes up. The way she crossed her arms created... hills of delight in her upper body, and her lower body's curves were also highlighted by her pose.
Yet he focused on her head and her head only. She didn't want him to look, so he wouldn't, and that was it.
"I'll think about it," Alicia said after a while without looking at him, then left the room without saying another word.
Shen swallowed, took a deep breath, and rushed to his room.
He needed to meditate at once.
Shen didn't see Alicia for the rest of the day. When the bell rang the following morning, she was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt in the entrance hall.
"Good morning," he said.
She avoided his eyes. "Morning."
He opened the door to find a man in black there. "Mister Feng Shen, Miss Alicia Winter," he nodded to them. "Will you be training today?"
"I will," Alicia said.
Shen nodded. "Me too. Give me a minute."
He clad himself in armor and brought his spears and backpack with him. He didn't trust the place's security.
The trip to the training center was uncomfortable.
Shen and Alicia kept silent most of the time, primarily because of her. When they talked, it was awkward and mechanical. Neither of them knew how to act after what had happened the previous day.
The training center was in Washington DC, but not in the urban area. It was a military base surrounded by tall walls and towers. It looked like a prison.
The SUV went through three different checkpoints—one protected by tanks and mounted machine guns—to finally reach a common-looking white utilitarian building in the center. The big square building was protected by more soldiers, password pads, keys, and verbal passwords. The soldier leading Shen and Alicia dealt with everything until they reached an elevator, where another soldier was waiting for them.
"I'll take the stairs," Shen said.
The soldiers froze for a moment, unsure of what to do. "There are no stairs, sir," one of them said.
"Of course, there are stairs," Shen countered. "It would be stupid for everyone to be buried under the earth in case of a power outage. Find out where they are, or I'll leave."
One hour later, they acknowledged the existence of other access points but refused to divulge them.
He took it for what it was; posturing. After getting his goodwill, the US wanted him to understand he didn't have free reign in the country. That place didn't belong to him; he was just another person.
Well, they were coming from the wrong premise; they didn't have something he truly wanted to make him submit. He wished to join the training mainly to better coordinate with other people in chaotic situations, not because he needed it. Even his desire to learn to scout wasn't critical for his plans. He wouldn't make himself vulnerable, as in entering an elevator, just for that.
Shen rode the SUV out of the military base without Alicia, who stayed behind.
With the training out of the way, Shen had one month to do whatever he wanted until the trip to Italy.
The English teacher visited him the following day, then once a day in the next weeks. Elsa Brown was an old lady with a strict teaching method.
Her method was thrown out of the window on the second day in favor of just pushing things into Shen's mind as quickly as possible.
Shen learned too fast. His D-rank upgrade plus his Rising Star bonus gave him an 8.8 learning ability score, and the human average was 1.02, so he learned almost nine times as fast as anyone. Having a D-rank mind let him think of multiple things simultaneously, which also assisted.
One week later, Shen talked like an infant. An extra week after that, he had no trouble holding conversations speaking English or writing posts on his social media accounts. He could also figure out what he didn't know by asking the right questions on a search engine. More importantly, after he understood the grammatical basis of the English language, he became able to learn some of it on his own just by reading and memorizing stuff online.
He stopped the classes then, as that was all he needed.
During those two weeks, Shen also cultivated and meditated. He engaged in a weird training of looking at women showing a lot of skin online to identify his reactions and find ways to keep his rationality when exposed to sexual situations.
That led him to find a particular group of people that claimed it was possible to get addicted to porn. Though Shen hadn't gone that far in his "research," a quick test showed that yes, he had been anticipating the time of the day when he looked at sexy pictures. He significantly decreased the exposure then.
He also trained his spear, and thanks to the internet, he got access to information that let him improve his Concepts slightly. He researched everything from modern martial arts to electrical engineering.
That was a strange manner of improvement. Shen was used to connecting to the very Laws of Reality and drinking from them. However, now he was instead drawing knowledge from other people's understanding of Reality and internalizing it to progress little by little. He didn't connect to the Concepts as he had done in the tutorial, and the progress was much slower.
That showed how outstanding the tutorial's magic formation that improved his Concept Intuition had been.
One of the most important things Shen did was research Earth's recent past. He looked into how the world had worked before the Alliance and how it was working now. He combed through forums and social media looking for irregularities. He tried to understand the most he could in the least amount of time possible.
Last but not least, he talked to other Pioneers online. Most of them shared their worry about the future of the human race. They needed one hundred million Guardians to survive whatever happened in one year, but the way the world was going, they might not even have that many humans by then, Guardians or not.
Another atomic bomb had been used in Europe, in France this time. The world was in complete chaos, and people wondered when Russia, China, or the US would end it for good with their arsenals.
So a kind of Pioneer league was forming, swearing to protect the world from itself. They were too weak to matter at the moment, but they agreed they wanted their Maiden, one of them, who they had chosen, to survive. Shen agreed and incentivized it. He never outright said he would go to Italy to protect Marzia, but he insisted it would be a good idea for as many people as possible to go.
Even that suggestion might put him in danger, as people could figure out his next actions from that. Yet, as he had said, it was important for him to have a Maiden who wouldn't sanction his Title. He needed to risk it to give her a better chance.
Time passed between cultivation sessions, training, research, and networking.
Twenty days after Shen left Alicia in the training facility, he received two visits.
The first was from Alicia herself. She said nothing when he opened the door—which had been fixed for free—and entered the house. She was wearing her usual jeans and T-shirt, but there was something different in her. Shen suppressed a frown as he looked at her walking and realized it was her posture and way of walking.
Alicia felt lighter.
When she arrived in the middle of the entrance hall, she put her hands behind her back, smiled, and said, "Thank you."
"Huh?" Shen asked.
"I'm seeing a therapist. I only saw her three times until now, but it's been great. So, thank you for suggesting I seek one."
Shen smiled slightly. "You're welcome." He didn't care much for her absence; he had gotten used to it in the tutorial. He also didn't care if she wanted to stay away from him; they were friends, not master and servant. "How is the training going?"
"It's tiring as fuck," she said, throwing herself at a sofa. "Can you believe—"
The ringing of the bell interrupted her. She gave Shen a curious look, as if asking him who was there, and he shrugged before going to the door.
A soldier was waiting on the other side. Shen had checked how to tell a military personnel's rank by their uniform and could tell the chubby man was a Captain.
"Mister Feng Shen," the Captain said. "General MacArthur asked me to bring you to a meeting to discuss the operation you asked him about."
Shen nodded. He had searched the price of passages to Europe online, only to find out there were none. He had also researched human economics a bit and started wondering where the petrol and manufactured goods were coming from. Almost all production lines seemed to be broken, yet the US was functioning just fine.
Something was clearly wrong. Shen guessed it was a front put up by the government that would crumble soon enough, but he couldn't understand how they were managing that.
Anyway, Shen was already wearing armor and asked for a second as he went to get his things in his bedroom. "Are you coming?" he asked Alicia.
"Can I?" she asked, looking at the Captain instead of Shen.
"I'll need to ask—" the man started, but Shen interrupted him.
"Yes," Shen said. "Let's go."
He hadn't cared about the attempt to establish authority over him in the training facility, but he cared about this trip to Italy to protect Marzia. If Alicia wanted to be a part of it, she would—even if he had to run all the way there with her on his back.
"What is this about?" Alicia asked as she climbed down the stairs with Shen. The Captain had taken the elevator.
"I'm going to Italy to protect Marzia," Shen explained. "I guessed the US will want to go there and do something about her. Perhaps protect her, perhaps kill her. I asked for a ride, whatever their plans may be."
"Kill her?" Alicia asked, surprised.
Shen explained things to her. The Captain had been secretive in the way he had talked to Shen in the apartment, but Shen didn't much care about it. Only the naive or the idiots would think one of the strongest nations in the world would remain indifferent to the Maiden's arrival. Her ability to judge people was too important.
"After making sure Marzia is safe, I'll visit India," Shen said. "I need to find Sai. Then I'll see how to go about finding my clan's ancestral ground."
He had rested enough; he was itching for doing something more adventurous than isolated training.
"I'm required by law to stay in the training facility for the next five months..." Alicia said. "Though you're saying shit will hit the fan by the end of this month, huh?"
"That's my best guess," Shen confirmed. "I took a look at social media pages and accounts from the months before the Alliance arrived. Something is missing nowadays. Guess what?"
"No fucking idea."
"Conspiracy theories," he revealed, and Alicia didn't hide her surprise. "Nowadays, we get some light conspiracy theories that might as well be true, like Crusaders being in top positions in the government. But no one even suggested that the US created the Sorcerer King and other similar people and organizations to legitimize martial law. It's not likely, but it is a possibility.
"I searched for it and found nothing. Not even a single crazy dude screaming about it. But I did find an absence of controversial political commentators. Sometimes even finding mentions to them was hard. Some were completely erased from the internet, and there's so much going on everywhere that it's easy to make people not pay attention to that."
Alicia was frowning when they reached the ground floor. The soldier was waiting for them and led them to a JLTV. It was being escorted by five others.
"I also research a little about information war," Shen continued, uncaring about the driver and the soldier in the passenger seat. "The best way to deal with conspiracy theories that might be true is to discredit the messengers. But when too many people say the same thing, that becomes hard to do. So they made these people disappear. The more I researched, the most I became assured of that." He gave her a slight smile. "In a society where public opinion matters so much like a democracy, making people disappear isn't a great idea. However, the end of the US as you know it is near, and when that happens, public opinion won't matter so much."
"You're talking about a coup," Alicia said.
"Something like that," Shen confirmed. "There are other signs. The most important is the Guardians. They are the most critical resource at the moment, as they will decide the future of the entire world.
"Rebellious Guardians are killed or imprisoned. All other Guardians are given incentives to be pro-government. You're being paid to be trained; I was given free rein to do whatever I want. And the military is both learning how to kill Guardians better and training their Guardians on how to do battle, I'm sure.
"I'm even willing to bet most of the training you received on emergency situations was about how to better integrate with a military operation."
Alicia bit her lower lip and nodded. "There were many classes about command structure and communication."
Shen smiled slightly. "I guess that's why they didn't care about accommodating my misgivings with the elevator. They would rather I don't know how your military actually functions. I just don't understand why they invited me in the first place."
"Maybe they didn't think you would accept?" Alicia suggested.
"Perhaps," Shen conceded. "Or perhaps the General was putting up a show for the President, whom he plans to betray." The soldiers cleared got tense when he said that. "Or even they were both putting a show for someone else." He shrugged. "Either way, I'm done with this country."
"What do you mean?" Alicia asked, tensing.
"I can't trust your leaders, so I can't trust they'll respect the special status they gave me. I must leave." She smiled at her. "You're welcome to come with me, of course. More than welcome. I would love to have you with me, my dear friend."
She relaxed a little. "Where are you going to live? India? China?"
Shen shook his head. "I'm not sure I'll settle down on Earth at all. I don't think Rising Stars are supposed to stay in their worlds. I need to gain AP to make my Title worth it, and I won't earn any AP here unless the rifts are better than the tutorial made them sound like."
Alicia frowned. "That's... a lot to think about."
He nodded. "Take as long as you want to give me an answer. I like your presence, and I would appreciate it for as long as you want to stay beside me."
She nodded back and frowned deeper while thinking of everything.
They kept silent for the rest of the trip.
"I told you we should've killed him," the President of the United States said. She was sitting in her chair in the Oval Office. The General of the Army, standing in front of her table, had just reported the conversation Shen had had with Alicia in the SUV. "We could keep killing all Rising Stars until we got an American one."
The General didn't respond. He had gotten used to her antics. She wasn't even the worse President he had had to deal with when it came about complaining uselessly about things.
Yet, despite his silence, he stood by his previous opinion: killing Feng Shen would be easy, but dealing with Rising Stars in other parts of the world could get tricky. All manners of issues appeared in operations that had to be put together quickly and required precision. The nuclear option was also not feasible: there were only so many atomic bombs they could use before the world ended—not that many of his aides seemed to understand that fundamental issue.
Having a known friendly Rising Star, or at least a neutral one they knew wasn't a psychopath, was preferable to an unknown variable who hated them.
He still thought it was a mistake not to let the boy participate in the training. The President had gotten livid when he demanded another entrance other than the elevator. Yet, his presence would have deepened his bonds with the other American Pioneers, especially Alexandra King, who had become friends with Alicia Winter after three tiring weeks together.
"We're lucky he has no idea how technology works," the President continued. "If he did, he would know what's going on, and he would resent us. Then we would need to kill him anyway. We're just wasting time."
The General had also been against limiting Feng Shen's access to information. The US had the tech and personnel to do that to a few people, but it wasn't perfect, as shown by the boy's resourcefulness in his online searches. The President wanted Feng Shen in the dark to make him easier to control, but that was too short-sighted.
Despite everything, MacArthur didn't blame the President. She wanted what was best for America. She was just having trouble adapting to a world where people might become strong enough to go against her entire nation alone. She had sacrificed so much to become the President of the strongest country in the world that she couldn't understand treating a teenager close to how others treated her.
Fortunately, he knew just how to fix the mistakes up to now. It started with sending Feng Shen away from DC. At least Lorain agreed with that.
She resented her part on the plan though.
"I'll not be questioned by a random alien," she continued. "I am the President of the United States of America, not a random miss as he calls me. All of this is because of your misguided mercy, General. You better remember that."
"Yes, madam President," he replied at once.
She kept silent for a moment before saying, "Well? What are you waiting for? Go fetch the annoying children. I have a meeting with Senator Livingston in twenty minutes."
The General obeyed his Commander in Chief.
Shen and Alicia were sitting in a corridor in the White House. He had accepted leaving his weapons by the door but had brought his backpack after an inspection.
Separating him from his spears felt pretty stupid, considering anyone with mana was always better armed than him, and Alicia was a mage. Yet, he had gone with it. He was confident of his speed if he needed to escape.
Now that he had decided to leave the country, he was willing to deal with more stupidity than usual. He also reckoned that interacting so much with the mortal populace online had affected his sense of normalcy. It felt proper to not go armed to a meeting with the President of the United States.
And it was a President that was disrespecting Shen and Alicia by having them wait for ten minutes already. That was another thing he was willing to let go of for now. However, it was obviously not doing the President and the General any favors in how Shen saw them.
A woman in her early twenties approached and sat in front of them, on the other side of the corridor.
She had long violet hair cut straight, eyes of the same color, and was tall and thin. She wore large black leather pants and a black leather jacket, both with small metal spikes, over a purple T-shirt. Her long barrel black boots had a thick sole that made her even taller than Shen when standing up.
"Inspect," Shen whispered.
| Holly Dyson (E) | 150 / 150
She nodded to Alicia and Shen, then ignored them completely; she was listening to music on her wireless earbuds and evidently didn't care for conversation with strangers.
Five minutes later, a secretary finally called them to the Oval Office. Holly Dyson followed.
The President and the General, wearing common mortal clothes this time, focused their attention on Dyson when they entered. The secretary left and closed the door.
"Who is this?" General MacArthur asked. He was standing beside the President's desk, with the President herself sitting on a chair behind it. "A friend of yours?" he asked Shen.
Shen shook his head. "I thought you had called for her."
Dyson took her earbuds off, stored them in a jacket pocket, and nodded. "I'm Holly Dyson. I came as a representative of the Save the Maiden Initiative. We know you plan on killing the Human Maiden."
The General frowned and touched something on the table. "How did you get in here?"
"You were fooled by the Sorcerer King's troops for months, General," Dyson replied while shaking her head. "It's not my fault you can't understand the marvels of magic."
MacArthur said as his frown deepened. He was looking at the room's doors. "Where are the Secret Service agents?"
"Asleep. A simple wind spell coupled with a sleeping solution. The Save the Maiden Initiative cannot be stopped, General."
Shen watched everything with surprise. The Dyson girl had acted as if she was just another visitor outside the room. Yet she had been an invader all along?
He was impressed—and careful. He stepped closer to Alicia, ready to protect her if needed.
The General opened his mouth to say something else, but the President beat him to it. "Remove her," she ordered.
"You heard the President," MacArthur said, but Shen noticed the man had no weapon at hand. That was supposed to be a safe area, protected by others. "Your invasion is illegal, and I want you to leave now. Not doing so—"
He never finished the sentence.
Suddenly, all air in the room moved at once to produce a wind blade that materialized right beside the General's head, already moving at a ridiculously high speed. The blade cut his head at once, his innate soul defense and resistance stat utterly useless against the spell.
One moment, General MacArthur's head was on his shoulders. The next, it was rolling on the floor.
Blood sprayed as the body fell. The President stood up and stepped back in surprise, her eyes wide. Shen tensed, ready to bring Alicia out of the room and rush for his spears.
"The old world order is over," Dyson told Lorain. "The Alliance evolved us, but people like you are worms trying to keep a measure of control over gods."
The air rushed at the President, and a wind blade beheaded her.
Dyson turned to Shen. "They were keeping your access to information limited. Ditch your government-issued phone—really, how stupid can you be to accept it in the first place?—stop believing in any random politician who says they have power over you, and come with me if you want a ride to Italy. The Save the Maiden Initiative—"
A lot of things happened at the same time then, preventing the girl from finishing her sentence. Alicia recovered from her shock and screamed, the office door slammed open as three men in black with rifles entered the room, and Shen moved.
He reached Dyson in an instant and tried to punch her to death.
She reacted quickly. A wind barrier appeared in front of her. Shen kept moving. His speed was enough to go through the barrier, but it still slowed him down.
Dyson had also pushed herself back with a wind jet and tried to go through the windows behind the big desk in the room. She failed. Her wind blade wasn't enough to cut through whatever the windows were made of, and she found herself cornered.
Shen kept going her way. Two agents rushed at the desk while the third secured the exit by pointing his rifle at the people inside.
Dyson tried to flee to the door, but Shen intercepted her. She threw wind blades his way, but his armor was enough to stop them, so he kept going. When the air in the room rushed to her front again, creating a transparent distortion that he identified as a new barrier, he used his qi.
Combat, Boundless, and Arc Flash Qi made him faster and stronger. He also pushed some Boundless Qi out of his body, and when his qi met the barrier's mana, a battle of wills started.
Dyson wasn't interested and pulled back. Shen used the opportunity to approach her. She tried to push him away with a lot of wind—now coming from the corridor—but he resisted it. It didn't even slow him too much.
"Stop!" she pleaded. "I can—"
He reached her and punched her in the face.
His hand caved her face in. She took eighty points of damage but didn't die.
He punched again and turned her head into tomato sauce.
Shen didn't care about the dead leaders, whom he had stopped trusting. He could've tried to protect the President, but he had decided against it simply because she had done nothing to deserve it. She had been an unwilling ruler being forced to acknowledge him because the nation's Congress—or sect elders, as he saw it—insisted she did so. Shen didn't mind seeing her dead.
But even if he minded, he wasn't sure he would've interfered. Cultivator honor demanded a leader to have the power to protect themselves, be it personal power, magic, or personnel. For a leader to die at the hands of an assassin that had entered through their front doors was pathetic; protecting her would've been a disservice to the people of the United States. Now, they had the opportunity to find someone better prepared for this new world.
The same honor that demanded him to protect the weak and vulnerable didn't apply when dealing with the leader of one of the strongest nations in the world.
However, Shen cared a lot about being implicated in their deaths.
Dyson had entered the room with Shen and Alicia, and no one would believe they weren't connected to the woman. Even if it was done under wraps, the US had to try to capture or kill him for this. He refused to believe his Diplomatic Agent status would stop them from attempting to do so.
Dyson had done that to him using the blood of others, so honor allowed him to make her pay with her blood for it.
Everything had happened too fast. The two agents finally got close enough to see the President's corpse. Shen rushed to the screaming Alicia, put her over his shoulder, and rushed out of the room.
His spears were by the White House's door, where he had left them. He grabbed them and left the place as fast as he could.
Once outside, he kept running.
A middle-aged man of brown hair and eyes, wearing a tweed, was sitting on a bench in Lafayette Square, the park across the White House. He was reading a newspaper when a blonde in her late teens sat beside him. She had short pink hair in two buns and wore yoga pants under her miniskirt. Her white T-shirt had hearts and skulls, and she had a jeans jacket on top of it.
"Holly is dead," she said emotionlessly while checking her smartphone.
"Thank God," the man said. "that one was nuts. And the targets?"
"Dead too."
They were pretending not to know each other just to avoid immediate suspicions. They didn't care if the conversation was being spied on or recorded, which might cause people to come after them later.
There would be no USA later.
"So the Rising Star isn't all that," the man concluded. "That will make our plans easier."
"That's the strange part," the girl said. "He didn't act until the President was dead. Then he killed Holly so fast that I think he could have protected the old hag if he wanted."
The man frowned. "Where is he now?"
"He moves at over two thousand miles per hour. He disappeared even to our magic."
"He'd better not get closer to the Maiden. She's ours." He stood up and left.
A few moments later, the girl left too.
A being was floating in the Oval Office, unseen by the people there.
They were humanoid and naked, with big mammaries and a reproductive organ seen on biological females. She had a pair of long arms and legs and a rather long tail that ended in a vaguely pointed and narrow end. She was almost seven feet tall, with dark blue skin that faded to almost white in places, almost black in others.
Her face had some resemblance to a human's, though she had no nose or ears, and her head was slightly elongated, with bony ridges at points. She also had no hair visible anywhere but five long appendages on the back of her head.
It was as if she had five additional long and thin tails growing from her back.
Most notably, she seemed almost intangible, as if made mostly of energy.
All that marked her as an alien already, but what marked her as a powerful alien was her eyes. They seemed to be bottomless wells of power, glowing purple, with the intensity of barely contained power.
If she let a glimpse of that power escape her control, everyone in that room would die instantly.
The Primordial Maiden was looking at her dead shell, with a caved-in face, on the ground.
She was very, very angry.
The Primordials ruled over all existence with their overwhelming power and technology. They could literally turn any dream into a reality if they wanted. To be a Primordial was to have the ultimate freedom; they treated the multiverse as their playground, and rightfully so.
That's how Sharendil was born and raised. She obeyed her people's rules and none else—rules that only limited what she could do to other Primordials. If any Primordial wanted, they could just start destroying the Alliance, with no adverse consequences.
Fortunately for the pitiful Alliance, it had nothing they wanted, and they took no pleasure in killing ants. Therefore, they stayed in their home galaxy and let the insects in the rest of the multiverse live however they wanted.
Well, kind of.
The Song of Remembrance was about to be performed in the Alliance for their sins... but that was neither here nor there.
Long ago, Sharendil had been selected as the next Maiden. To become a Maiden was to be given the Voice of a Rising Star. It was a great honor in itself, even more so because to have a Voice was to join the Choir.
Unfortunately, surviving the Choir as an active participant required self-control that the average Dhar didn't have due to their upbringing. Even more unfortunate was that Yornolar's preferred way of teaching self-control was by having her obey many rules created by the pitiful Alliance, plus some rules of his own.
She was obeying the rules of ants!
One such rule she had to obey was not killing anyone. She could usually work around that, but another rule was no threatening, blackmailing, torturing, or doing almost anything, really, to any Titled Alliance member unless attacked first. The ant she was pursuing was, unfortunately, a Titled ant.
She hated all of that with every fiber of her being, but she hated herself more for deciding she would give her target one year. The weeks she had spent there were enough to almost turn her crazy.
Those ants' culture was pathetic, their technology was pitiful, and their arrogance...
Oh, the arrogance! They called themselves gods! They had done so to her face! Hers!
The gall!
To make things even worse—if that was possible—she would need to keep studying their inferior culture—if you could call it culture at all. She simply didn't understand why the ant had killed her.
She had done the ant a favor by killing the bugs that were manipulating it, revealed how some of the manipulations were happening, then offered it a way to achieve its goal of traveling to another continent. It should've basked her in glory and gratitude, just as the Alliance should always do to the Primordials. Yet, both were obviously incapable of that.
She was angry, but Yonolar had taught her the patience to try again.
So she willed it and shrank, then a new human shell appeared around her. She was still beyond the sight of everyone in the room though. She turned her body and appeared above Italy.
"Give me a new identity, a local one," she ordered the System Admin.
She would try another approach.
"Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God," Alicia said. She was panicking beside Shen. They were under a viaduct after Shen had escaped at maximum speed. Sirens could be heard everywhere. "They are dead. They are fucking dead. The President of the United States of fucking America was killed in front of me, and I did nothing to stop it."
"Assumptions and expectations can cause that," Shen said. "You never thought it would happen, so you had no idea how to react when it did."
She crouched and grabbed her head. "What am I going to do? What's going to happen to the US? Fuck, what the fuck is going on in this fucking world?"
Shen pressed "send" on his smartphone. He had just revealed he had killed the President's murderer and would leave the country out of fear of retaliation due to the circumstances.
Then he crushed his smartphone and threw it away. He didn't completely believe Dyson, who had claimed there was something wrong with his smartphone, but he knew it could be tracked.
"I can bring you to Mexico or Canada before I leave for Italy if you want," Shen said. "Or you can come with me."
"What?" she snapped her head to look at him. "No, I'm coming with you."
"Then let's go," he said and approached to grab her. "I hope you like salty water."
It took Alicia a lot of complaining to have Shen develop a way to bring her more comfortably. After testing a few things, they ended with a chair tied to his back. Alicia sat on it with her back to his and was further bound to not fall down. They agreed he would do the running, and he took care to not spend more stamina than he could recover.
He could still run faster than a bullet forever despite the extra weight.
He felt like a tamed qilin being ridden, but they were friends. She wanted to come, and he appreciated her presence. So he tried to ignore the discomfort.
They went to Canada first. He had decided against going from the US straight to Europe in case something went wrong.
At first, Alicia had to visit smartphone stores to check their maps, as she had also got ridden of her phone to prevent being tracked. She had said it was stupid for him not to just steal a smartphone, but he didn't want to use his power to oppress the innocent in any way. It might be silly, but it was in the small things that one got used to abusing their power.
When they checked the news in the smartphone stores, it only said they were being investigated, but not that they were wanted. Shen didn't believe a word.
They lucked out in a tourist information center, where they got a physical map and reached the border of Canada without issue. On the way, Alicia also used her charms to beg people to print her maps for the rest of the way. It worked.
Shen ran on water through the few miles between some Canadian islands first.
Running on water was common enough for cultivators that it was the first cool thing children did when they got fast enough—and Shen had been very jealous of that. Likewise, modern Earth people had started having fun with that as soon as the first F-ranks arrived. There were many online videos showing people running on lakes.
The ten-mile journey between Ellesmere Island and Greenland was a little more challenging than a lake. The sea wasn't still water, and he had to deal with waves of multiple sizes. After some trial and error, he concluded it was best to just use small waves as ramps that made him leave the "ground" for a few moments; it was fun. Then came the tall waves which he could jump over.
He used his spear to deal with the single wave too tall for him to avoid. A powerful thrust, a twist of his pulse, and rotating his arm correctly created a corridor that let him go through without feeling like he had struck a wall at three thousand feet per second; that would've hurt.
When Shen reached the Denmark Strait that separated Greenland from Iceland, they stopped to look at the endless ocean ahead.
"Are we really doing this?" Alicia asked.
"Yes," Shen said and turned his back to her. "Let's go."
The standard tutorial was something out of a fairy tale.
Marzia walked the halls of the enormous, gigantic crystal palace that might as well have come out of a Disney movie or maybe a fantasy game. It was beautiful, made of bright colors, with lots of crystal and expensive objects everywhere.
Beings of different races, mostly fairies, elves, and treefolk, walked the halls with her, going everywhere. Only a few fellow Pioneers had come with her to the tutorial, but the place was bursting with alien activity. It seemed like some bigshot had died, complicating things for everyone.
She climbed the palace's stairs and reached the second story. Minutes later, she found the room she was looking for. Though she had never been allowed in the second story before, she knew some visiting dignitaries were staying there.
It was impossible to miss the door to the room she had been summoned to because it was made of yellow crystal that shone like a sun. She was confident she would've been blinded if she had only G resistance. At E+, it still annoyed her, but she approached and touched the door.
It opened by itself, revealing a relatively small round room with seven seats that looked like wooden thrones.
Six were occupied, and the most beautiful elf Marzia had ever seen—the only one she had with dark skin in the palace—commanded the girl's attention at a glance.
The elf wore black scaled armor and a dark red cloak that looked both practical and regal. Her boots and gauntlets had inlaid metal for better defense and offense, and instead of a helmet, she wore a silver tiara with a white stone in the center.
If that palace had a queen, Marzia would bet all her money that elf was it.
The other five were noteworthy in different ways.
One was a pile of white goo that seemed to be eternally melting without decreasing the being's size or dirtying its surroundings. A lizard wearing a suit was drinking something from a teacup. An owl taller than any human stood on its chair. A big, red orc wearing the most badass dark and silver plate armor she had ever seen sat opposite the dark elf. And finally, a wisp floated above its seat.
Marzia would've Inspected them if she hadn't learned in the tutorial that it was impolite. Really, the Pioneer Tutorial seemed intended on just creating bloodthirsty warriors and nothing else. Everyone should've been forced to take the regular tutorial.
"Greetings to the Human Rising Star," the lizard said. It had a high-pitched male voice. He jabbered like a hyperactive child, but the system translation made it intelligible. "I have put on human clothes for rapport. Does it work?"
Marzia nodded. "Yes, it does, esteemed dignitary." In the Alliance, that was the proper way of greeting unknown people that likely had some significance. "You have me at a disadvantage. My ignorance makes me unaware of your identities."
"We're Observers," the lizard replied and pointed at the empty chair. "Take a seat; this will take a while."
"Observers?" the girl asked while sitting.
"We're here to guarantee humans won't exterminate themselves with their new power," the lizard said. The gorgeous elf snickered but said nothing. The lizard glanced at her in fear rather than annoyance. After a few seconds, when the elf said nothing, he continued, "Such extermination is unfortunately about to happen, although they are using their old power for that."
"Maidens appearing straight from the Pioneer Tutorial are rare," the wisp said with a soft female voice, "but when it happens, we don't usually instruct them until they leave the standard tutorial. Unfortunately, we predict that over ninety-five percent of Earth's population will die unless you intervene."
Marzia started sweating cold but didn't understand where they were going. "What?"
"A race's leaders can issue Decrees," the wisp explained. "Humanity has no B-ranks or stronger, so you're its sole leader. There's a wide range of things you must be taught, which is the Observatory's secondary job. We'll teach you after you leave the standard tutorial, but this is urgent."
"You must Decree all non-magic weaponry be banned," the lizard said. "That will—"
"That will be the end of your race," the elf interjected. Her voice was like a goddess speaking from the heavens. It was silky and stirred something in Marzia's very soul.
The orc grunted, clearly upset at the elf's interruption, but said nothing. Everyone else—at least those who had facial expressions—looked afraid.
"Sorry?" Marzia said after she recovered from being exposed to such a godly voice.
"These people don't understand what it means to grow up weak in a universe that sees you as an inferior being," the elf said. "Get rid of the big guns, but leave some way for the ordinary people to defend themselves from Guardians. That's all I'll say on the subject."
There was a long moment of silence before the lizard cleared his throat and said, "Well, you see, humans used atomic bombs seven times already, and we determined—"
"What?!" Marzia yelled, standing up in shock.
"Yes, yes, and they are about to use even more," the lizard continued. "We determined they are about to destroy themselves soon. So we came to suggest you ban non-magic guns..." He looked to the elf. "...that can lead to significant life loss. Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons should be enough. If the Drow Maiden allows it, I would like to suggest banning anything above a thousand pounds of TNT just to be safe."
"I'm not here to allow or disallow anything," the elf, apparently the Drow Maiden, said. "I have already said too much. You were elected the Speaker, and I'll respect it."
"Sorry," Marzia said. "You said seven atomic bombs were used already? Why? Where?"
"We can't reveal more than that," the lizard said. "Not until the standard tutorial is over. And unfortunately, now that you have been informed, you can't give up on it. Now, please, let me teach you how to issue the Decree I suggested."
Marzia suddenly felt she had bitten way more than she could chew. She was sixteen years old. She was in no way prepared to deal with a nuclear Armageddon, much less to have a say on how to avoid it!
So she listened to the Observers and did as instructed.
They found a terrible storm on the high seas.
Dealing with the chaos of water, wind, and thunder was challenging. Shen decreased his speed even before the winds made the waves tall because hitting the raindrops while running as fast as a bullet was uncomfortable to Alicia. They didn't pierce her skin because they weren't actual bullets, but she complained about the constant pain.
She was okay with hitting them half as fast as a bullet. That was still fast enough that they didn't take too long to leave the storm. Shen spent considerable stamina and qi to create one tunnel after another in the enormous waves. Those tunnels weren't always perfect either, and the length of the waves had the water falling over them as they went through.
The water destroyed the maps no matter how much Alicia tried to protect the backpack, but at least nothing worse happened.
The first time Shen had considered running to Italy, he had memorized the position of the stars and what they meant for his journey. He was sure they were still going the right way. Even if they weren't, they would arrive somewhere sooner or later.
Shen felt Alicia slapping his shoulder and slowed down below the speed of sound to hear her speak.
"Yes?" Shen said as he kept running.
"I need to talk," she said.
"Go ahead," he agreed.
She kept silent for a while. Then, she said, "I feel like I'm in a weird nightmare. The President of the United States was murdered in front of me. I mean, it's not the first time a President gets murdered, but still, I feel terrible."
Shen elected to not answer that. He had nothing useful to add.
"I wish I could call my therapist," she continued. "Do you think she'll do a consultation over the internet?"
"Maybe," Shen replied, though he had no idea.
Alicia kept talking about her feelings, then changed into superficial things. She had found a way to keep herself warm without spending too much willpower, and it made her comfortable enough to swap her focus to talking.
Shen didn't mind. Running for hours wasn't the most fun activity, though it helped him get more out of his D agility. He still had a lot to improve to make the most out of that stat.
When they saw land far ahead, she finally asked the question he wished she wouldn't. "Could you have saved her?"
"Probably," he replied sincerely.
Silence befell them for a long while. "I wish you had," Alicia whispered.
Shen had nothing to say to that. He wouldn't apologize because he didn't regret it. They just had to agree to disagree.
Or so he thought until they finally reached dry land.
The beach was very short, filled with rocks, and surrounded by grass and green hills. Alicia asked to stand for a few moments, and as soon as she left her seat, she asked, "Why didn't you help?"
Shen sighed and explained his outlook on things to her; how he would protect the powerless, but not those who should have the power to defend themselves. How he had been disrespected.
Alicia didn't get it. "So you just let someone get murdered in front of you?" She sounded very disappointed, sad rather than angry.
"It was an internal dispute among people of another clan," Shen tried to explain in another manner. "It's not up to me to interfere in the internal affairs of other people. I would've protected the President against the Void, maybe against a foreigner attack, but not against what I identified as one of her own people. She was supposed to have ways to protect herself."
"She had no ways, she was defenseless, and you watched it happen."
"Yes," Shen said remorselessly. "She was in one of the better-protected places of her nation, and it was still invaded. She failed to either foresee the possibility or prepare for it and paid the price." He shook his head. "I was there by happenstance, and expecting my goodwill for free is irrational at best. A family of dragons can't expect a phoenix to light their candles. A leader can't depend on someone they have been treating poorly to save their lives."
"She was human, Shen!" Alicia yelled. "Human! Like you and me! A real person of flesh and bones, not some concept like 'leader!' And you let her die because she wasn't over-polite to you?!"
Shen frowned, not appreciating being yelled at. "You're not just a human, Alicia," he said with a level voice. "You're a Pioneer. That comes with privileges, responsibilities, and expectations. The leader of a nation is supposed to lead that nation to survive the Void, Alicia. You fought the Void Spawn, you know what that means.
"If a President can't keep her own position, how can you trust her to guide millions of innocent people in such a crisis? The US destroyed some of their own cities because they couldn't maintain control. Wake up, Alicia. The world changed, and if you want to be a key player in this new reality, you have to be good enough. If you're not ready, give up. But don't expect random people to save you out of their kind heart. I'll save the weak, but not those who put themselves in dangerous positions without being ready for that.
"Remember what we were taught in the tutorial, to exist is to exclude others. People will want your position. We were taught that, and any leader who doesn't understand that isn't fit to be a leader at all."
"So she deserved to die for her ignorance?" she lowered her voice, sounding even more hurt than before. "Should I die if someone comes to kill me?"
"It's not about deserving it; it's about accepting the consequences of your position and choices. But no, you should not. Besides being a Pioneer, you're also my friend, another title that makes you more than any random human. I'll protect you to the best of my ability. Your former President made bad choices that put her in a disadvantageous position when her enemies came for her. I dislike politics, but I understand the benefits of having the right connections. She cut hers with me."
Alicia hugged herself. "If it's all about politics, what about saving her for the benefits it could've brought you?"
"I saw no benefit to doing that," he said simply.
"So you let her die because it wasn't fucking profitable enough?!"
Shen was getting tired of the same arguments. "Honor and power were the pillars that kept my homeworld standing for a very long time. Honor without power will let you die a good death but not protect your people. Power without honor will lead to anarchy. Both are needed for a functioning society, especially in important positions. I believe that with all my heart.
"Your leaders invited me to a training facility then denied my entry when I showed concern for my safety. They gave me a smartphone but limited my access to information when using it." Shen had thought about it, and unless the US had the power to kill or silence any conspiracy theorist, a targeted operation against him was the only possibility. "They invited and brought me to the White House, then had me waiting for fifteen minutes. I wasn't thanked even once for dealing with the Sorcerer King for them. The PR stunt to protect me was later revealed to be an excuse to legitimize military abuses elsewhere.
"I was subtly offended every step of the way until now, Alicia. I was merciful in ignoring it because I would leave the country soon enough, but my honor wouldn't let me use my power to protect someone who repeatedly offended me."
Alicia hugged herself more tightly. "You could've shown more honor by saving the President anyway."
"If people can offend my honor repeatedly and bear no consequences for it, if they can offend me and have me come at their beck and call, then my honor is worth nothing. I am worth nothing. No one will respect you if even you don't."
She turned her face away from him. "Basic human decency and sympathy should be worth more than your misguided honor."
Shen shrugged. "Maybe, but I don't believe it, and my power is mine to do with it as I see fit. Remember our conversation about your body being yours? I don't expect you to agree with everything I do, but I do expect you to respect decisions that are mine to make."
"So I should just shut the fuck up and accept everything you do like a little bitch?"
"Of course not. You're my friend. We can talk about anything, including decisions you disagree with. But I resent being yelled at like I'm a child."
She muttered, "Sorry," after a while, and Shen suppressed a sigh. He had expected their cultural differences to get easier to deal with as time passed, but that wasn't the case.
"Can we continue?" he asked, already turning his back to her.
"Actually, I would rather you princess carried me," she said with a flushed face. "It sucks not seeing where we're going, and hugging your neck hurts my arms."
Shen felt a bit frustrated. Alicia had complained so much in Canada, and it had been an enormous stroke of luck to find a chair and some rope on the streets. They had had no money to buy them, just as they didn't have any now. Alicia had left her wallet in his penthouse, and most of her tutorial items were back in the training facility. Only her E+ weapon, a ring that turned invisible, was still with her.
Still, he understood her point. They got rid of the things, and he grabbed her. Only then did he realize how her wet white T-shirt clung to her body—the storm hadn't happened too long ago. It made him uncomfortable, but the training he had gone through helped him not let that affect him—much.
Things became much easier when she hugged his backpack, partially covering herself.
Carrying her like that had no disadvantages other than how awkward it was to hold his spears, but she had been very vocal against it back in the US. Now, she looked more comfortable despite being upset at him. She was so hard to understand sometimes.
Either way, the sun was right in the skies. He turned Southwest and started running. He planned to get to the opposite side of the country, then follow the coast until they found a city.
Midway through, Shen and Alicia got a system message.
Decree Issued
Uh, hi, fellow humans? Maiden speaking.
It has come to my attention that humanity is one step away from destroying itself.
As such, I have decided to ban the use of the following non-magic weaponry:
- Nuclear weapons
- Biological weapons
- Chemical weapons
- Any explosive with a yield of more than a 1,000 pounds of TNT
Anyone who orders their production, produces them, orders their use, or uses them will become an enemy of the Alliance. A Bounty will be automatically generated for their summary execution. The weight of the infraction will be calculated based on the potential life loss that such weapons can bring.
Many will love to hunt these criminals for the AP, so don't become one.
Even so, I couldn't trust just this fear, so I used the very precious Management Points to have the system intervene directly. Any nuclear weapon you attempt to use will be immediately deactivated. Unfortunately, I don't have enough points to deactivate the other weapons. By the way, I was told to hide any weaknesses, but I want to be transparent in my decisions, which is why I'm telling you everything.
I have also asked the system to create a Racial Bounty to have you destroy all illicit weapons. All humans are automatically in on the Bounty. Don't worry about the radar that will appear on your vision. I also used Management Points to have all illegal weaponry marked on the radar. The radar will disappear after the last weapon is destroyed or I change or rescind this Decree.
The system, through the Bounty, will also give you knowledge on how to destroy any weapon safely once you get close enough.
Unfortunately, there won't be much AP gain for destroying most non-nuclear weapons, but do it for the greater good, everyone.
Please, let's focus on the true enemy: the Void.
Stop killing each other.
- Marzia Martino, the Human Maiden
Shen checked the new radar at the top right corner of his vision. It was an ugly green circle. He managed to zoom in and out by willing it and saw that the radar only indicated land, sea, and country boundaries, nothing else. It should still help him get to Italy, which was great.
There were shining dots of different colors everywhere. Shen knew what their colors meant at a glance; the system probably used the translation function to push the meaning to his mind.
Red meant nuclear weapons, orange was for biological ones, yellow for chemical, and white for powerful explosives.
Shen had memorized all countries with nuclear weapons out of a sense of self-preservation, so he was surprised to see two red dots in Iceland, one on the East and another on the West. Moreover, it had three biological dots, one chemical dot, and multiple dots for powerful explosives.
Shen thought about the Decree and concluded it was a good thing. The world order had already changed with the arrival of the Alliance, yet people had been having a lot of trouble adapting. That would shake things up and slap them with reality.
But the most important thing of this all was the fifty white dots and ten red dots at the ocean, coming his way from the general direction of the US at a breakneck speed.
"Oh, fuck," Alicia said.
The dots were fast, faster than he could move. Shen didn't think twice before turning North and running as fast as he could.
Nine red and ten white dots returned after a short while, probably because of the Decree, but one red and forty whites kept coming. They changed their trajectories to intercept Shen, making him sure they were coming for him.
Shen estimated he had two minutes before the incoming explosives with a yield higher than a thousand pounds of TNT reached him. He considered digging the earth to create a bunker of sorts, and he might've done so if he had more time or the right tools, but his hands and spears were nowhere good enough for that.
So instead, he put Alicia on the ground and said, "Time to find out how good our defense is."
"I wish they had tried to only use atomic bombs against us instead," she said.
If they had, the bombs would just not work. Shen and Alicia were unfortunately not that lucky.
Shen pushed qi Boundless and Zephyr Qi to the range limit he could, three dozen feet for Boundlessness, a dozen feet for Zephyr. As soon as the energy touched Alicia, it started getting countered by her innate soul defense. He told her not to move and willed his qi not to affect the place she stood at. It took some effort, but it wasn't exactly complex to achieve.
Alicia complained about not being able to push mana away from her body because it fought Shen's willpower when it got in contact with his qi. So he created a sort of tunnel straight above her, and she used it to build a barrier of black flames a hundred yards away. She made it slightly transparent so they could see through it.
"Make a bubble around us instead of creating a unidirectional barrier," Shen said. "When those things explode, we'll be covered by flames from all sides. Make it thicker, too. And leave a small hole for me to throw my spears through."
She did as told, then they waited.
The blue skies made it easy to see a fleet of fighter jets coming their way—at least with Shen's enhanced eyesight. Each plane had a missile below them.
According to Wikipedia, Shen could move faster than most air-to-surface missiles the US had, if not all. Unfortunately, he doubted the military command center would order an attack without considering that. He prepared himself for the possibility of dealing with a hypersonic missile that the US was not supposed to have.
That said, he kept close to Alicia and would flee with her if he determined the missiles were too slow to catch him.
The planes shot as soon as they got a couple miles away, one missile after the other, creating a rain of death coming Shen's way. The planes had likely gotten that close to ensure he wouldn't have much room for maneuvering. He also guessed that the missiles' homing system wasn't as good at maneuvering as fighter jets.
Once shot, the forty-one missiles got even faster than the planes—fast enough that he had trouble following their path. They were hypersonic missiles indeed. It seemed public information on countries' war arsenals wasn't reliable after all.
Shen threw his two qi-filled spears at the things at once. The two missiles he targeted tried to dodge his attack, but they were too close by then, and Shen connected his spears' path just enough.
Spears and missiles met each other two hundred yards away from Shen.
The E- spear shattered into bits when it hit one of the big solid metal tubes. It kept coming.
Fortunately, the E+ spear was sufficient to force the warhead it hit to explode. Shen had hoped that would be enough to detonate the other missiles at a distance. Unfortunately, it didn't.
Missile after missile hit Alicia's flaming bubble.
The world turned into fire and pressure.
The explosions released yellow flames that tried to overcome Alicia's black ones. However, not only had her spell forced the warheads to explode, but it had also prevented the ensuing fire from going through. It impressed Shen.
Unfortunately, it did nothing to stop the incoming pieces of thorn metal or the explosion's shockwave.
They entered his Boundless Qi bubble...
...and also kept traveling mostly unhindered toward him.
Boundlessness was a bad Concept to use against a straight attack like that. Trying to make it more effective by thinking how death would limit his future was a stretch at best. Unfortunately, he was applying Boundlessness to his qi, then that qi to empty air, so the Concept's fundamental meaning mattered a lot.
Zephyr did much better. It was a gentle breeze from the Laws of Wind, so affecting the air around him strengthened it.
It couldn't completely change the trajectory of the shrapnel, but it could alter it just slightly enough to ensure none of it hit Shen. It was almost perfect for dealing with that, and Shen wondered if it wouldn't just make him immune to gunfire either.
As for the shock wave, Zephyr imposed its nature on the world, attempting to change it to match it. If he had done that with Boundlessness, it might've empowered the shock wave instead. Zephyr, however, demanded the shock wave become gentle.
It helped a lot, but the pressure didn't just stop to get countered. It went through his qi at the enormous speed it was already moving. Significantly weakened or not, it was still ridiculously potent.
So Shen quickly turned and hugged Alicia to protect her with his body and, more importantly, his armor. His E+ Kardor Elite Sargeant Armor had E+ shock reduction enchantment.
He wouldn't bet both their lives on its effectiveness though.
He filled his body with War, Combat, and Flow Qi.
War was his mastered Concept, and he declared a mental war against the shock wave. As with Boundlessness, it was also a stretch and didn't work much more than pure qi did to strengthen his body, but it was still more than Boundlessness had done.
Combat saw this as a combat situation and protected his body much better. Still, enough pressure remained. Fortunately, Flow helped push the shock through and out of him, redirecting the flow into a harmless release.
He didn't take a single point of damage.
Unfortunately, his defenses weren't enough to prevent Alicia and him from being pushed away like discarded potatoes. Shen held to Alicia the best he could and even pushed the three Concepts he was using inside him as far as he could to protect her.
War and Flow could completely encapsulate her, but Combat only left his body for a few inches. He put one hand on her head, which he held firmly against his chest, and managed to cover her whole skull with Combat Qi. He also put a hand against her back where her heart was, hoping it would be enough.
The Boundless and Zephyr Qi "balls" surrounding him accompanied him as he was thrown away by the mighty explosion like a ragdoll. Alicia's magic worked differently, either inherently or because that's how she had used it. It hadn't been anchored around her but on the space around them.
So Shen was pushed by the shock wave and dislocated air, he came to a sudden halt as soon as his Boundless Qi reached the black flames.
The shock wave inside Alicia's body, plus the willpower battle, was enough for her to faint—he felt as her body went limp.
Her flames snuffed out, and the inferno surrounding them invaded the previously safe space around Alicia and Shen.
The heat was overwhelming, painful, and deadly.
Still, Shen's defenses held against the fire. He had two external defensive qi layers that decreased the fire potency and used three Concepts internally to deal with what remained. His armor helped immensely with the shock wave but did nothing against the heat.
In fact, the metal in his armor scales heated very fast, and Shen felt his skin burning where it touched him.
The flames that Alicia had dealt so easily with threatened to cook them alive. His lungs also begged for him to breathe after his body had received the powerful impact of the shock wave, but there was no oxygen around to do so.
Shen could only resist and try to survive, but one thing became clear very quickly: Alicia would die unless she woke up and defended herself.
Shen refused to let her just die like that. He refused to be bound by circumstances and the "inevitable" like that. The Boundless Qi surrounding them flared intensely and fought better against the flames, but he knew it wouldn't be enough.
This could be seen as a fight against circumstances, but Shen knew this wasn't something Boundlessness could solve. Not when he understood so little of it.
The focus here had to be the fight, not the circumstances.
The struggle.
The Combat.
This was a fight for survival, and for the first time since he had added Combat to his Path, Shen considered how to use it to save someone else. How to triumph for the good of someone else.
He tried to push Combat Qi further away from his body. He wanted to fight, truly fight, and stop the flames and their heat from touching Alicia at all.
And that, he realized, was the essence of Combat.
He already knew Combat happened when two forces willingly opposed each other. In this case, Reality itself demanded Shen and Alicia bow down to the elements. Shen refused its demands.
Thus, Combat ensued.
Previously, he had considered Combat to exist for its own sake. War, he knew, sought its own end. Combat, he had thought, could go on forever without seeking victory or defeat.
Now, as fire threatened to take his best friend away from him, he realized he had been wrong.
He had ignored the limited but blazing fuel that the motivation behind the Combat gave to the Concept.
Yes, Combat could happen as training, a spar, but there was an underlying goal even then. Improvement, victory, mutual destruction. Combat didn't exist in limbo; it had a purpose. There was a reason two opposing forces were fighting.
That's what had been lacking in him; that was the thing he had needed to take that final step and master that Concept:
The desire to win no matter what.
He had fought for so long in the tutorial, where there were little to no consequences in defeat, that he had forgotten the true purpose of his Combat. Shen fought to win. No matter who was his enemy, no matter the circumstances, no matter the terrible and final consequences, he sought victory. He would go against anything, anyone, to pursue his goals.
Even if Combat might have had a part that existed for its own sake...
...the Combat in the Path of Feng Shen would follow his will and his alone.
Mastering War had been complex. He had considered all kinds of different things and possibilities. Morality had been deeply intertwined with it.
But Combat...
Combat was simple.
Combat was Shen's way of imposing his will on the world when the world would rather not. It was the most primal tool one could resort to when dealing with their issues.
The Combat of a cultivator against the Heavens.
The Combat of two warriors fighting for supremacy.
The Combat of a person against Reality itself.
Shen's very existence was Combat. He had fought against the fate brought to him by his crippled meridians to the bitter end—and had been defeated. His father, however, had fought everything for him and won.
Shen existed through Combat, and his existence sought Combat to both keep existing and shape reality according to his will.
It was that simple.
Moral considerations didn't matter so much. That was the part Combat didn't care about. It only cared about overcoming the enemy.
And Shen would fight to the bitter end with everything he had against the mighty of the forces trying to crush him like a bug.
At that singular moment, as he went against both the power of mortal weaponry and the underlying Laws of Reality behind it, Shen finally mastered Combat.
As had happened with War, something clicked in his mind and soul. The entire "page" containing the Concept of Combat was suddenly slammed on his brain. He understood Combat entirely, even tiny details he had glossed over. He had never felt more like Combat than now.
That also allowed him to see the dozens, hundreds of pages that were the tiny footnotes explaining everything even better; where Combat came from, its purpose, how it connected to everything else. Details that could further push his understanding in smaller parts of the Concept of Combat.
Shen felt the Concept settle inside him like a piece of a puzzle fitting the gap it was supposed to. It immediately merged with the piece beside it, War, and became a weird War-Combat hybrid that was stronger than the sum of the parts.
He pushed War-Combat Qi out of his body as far as he could. To his surprise, it reached almost thirty yards.
And it hated the flames trying to kill Alicia with a passion.
Reality was the enemy of this War, of this Combat. His Qi let him impose his will upon existence to demand it cease its efforts to kill Alicia or him.
That's when Shen felt it for the first time:
Reality's might.
He felt the underlying fabric of Laws that weaved everything together. The fabric pushed the Laws of Reality to create the terrible flames that threatened to burn Alicia alive. Shen created a bump in that fabric, pushing back, fighting back with his all.
Shen truly felt what he was dealing with, the weight behind existence itself, a mountain so high and heavy he could only despair as he glimpsed it. And yet he kept his will going against it.
When he had done it with his separate Concepts, he had been spending energy to affect matter. Now, his War and Combat reached an entirely new level.
Shen didn't fight just the physical flames, but the very Laws of Fire attempting to reap the life of his best friend. He went beyond the physical and reached into the building blocks of Reality to make the fight Conceptual, making his qi affect things fundamentally. He was fighting the Laws to affect the physical reality they created, cutting the source of the fire rather than throwing water on it.
Reality fought back, but it had no true will. It was exactly like a fabric trying to get back straight, except that the longer he pushed against it, the stronger it pushed back. He concluded he could do that for a few seconds at best.
And that was long enough.
His War-Combat Qi voided the flames almost entirely, and the little went through was quelled by Zephyr. Alicia didn't have to deal with even an extra bit of heat.
Mere seconds had passed from the moment Shen's spears hit the missiles. The flames didn't keep going for long. The issue quickly became oxygen, as he was surrounded by dust and smoke, and Alicia couldn't hold her breath as he was doing.
He stood up from where he had fallen and rushed away from ground zero as fast as he could, holding Alicia firmly in his arms.
Shen left the dust behind not long after, back into what looked like endless grasslands. He gently placed Alicia on the ground.
Her burnt body was almost completely exposed. Her ordinary clothes hadn't resisted the intense heat and were little more than traps. Most of her hair and eyebrows were also gone. Shen Inspected her.
Alicia had less than 40 HP left.
Threatening, but not terrible. She would heal naturally soon enough.
If he had a potion or a healing crystal, he might've used them on her. However, his G-tier belt had been destroyed in the shock wave and fire, and the crystals were gone too.
It annoyed him greatly that he didn't even get their effects because the crystals hadn't been touching his skin when they got crushed. That was a lot of AP thrown away for no reason.
In the skies, the jet planes made a U-turn. Shen tried to see the insignias on the aircrafts' fuselages, but they had gotten even higher after attacking, too far for even his improved eyesight. He did recognize their model as American, though they were models that the US had sold to other countries. They flew away, and there was nothing he could do about it.
What he could do was watch the explosions' dust settle down as he thought about the attack.
Shen had survived, but it had been terrifying to be forced to face his mortality. If there hadn't been a Decree and the nuclear warhead had exploded, would he have died? He didn't know. He had saved himself by mastering Combat, which might have been enough anyway—or not. Who knows if a nuke wouldn't have just instantly cooked him before he could use a split second to master the Concept?
He had been fortunate the Concept of Combat had already been sitting on 93% of the way to completion. That was the max percentage he could take his Concepts to without mastering them. After that, a single, last step was required to fill the remaining gap.
Unfortunately, something weird had happened when he accomplished it:
War and Combat had utterly blended together.
Shen found himself incapable of using only one or the other, though he instinctively knew he could keep learning about them individually to "specialize"—for instance, focus on learning more about information warfare or a specific type of combat.
He focused on the mixed War-Combat Concept and found that it had the strengths of both parts. To make things better, some of the weaknesses of each were countered by the other. War wasn't great in individual combat, while Combat knew nothing of overarching battle strategy. However, the mixed Concept could deal with both.
Shen pushed War-Combat Qi out of his body to generate the defensive qi field around him. He spent a while feeling it deeply, analyzing it, meditating upon it, and actively using his learning ability to understand what had happened. The conclusion he reached, extrapolated from multiple data points—primarily how the mixed Concept fit in his Path—was simple:
A Path's foundation was not supposed to have more than one Concept.
That hadn't been an issue when his foundational Concepts had not been mastered. Shen had already completed his Path, but it was still developing in other ways. It was as if he had finished his Path's blueprint but was now building his future. The unmastered Concepts were like building materials he had brought to his Path, and now he was using them to create actual firmer foundations.
Whenever he mastered Sharpness in the future, it would also be added to the mixed foundation. He wasn't sure if having a mixed thing as his foundational Concept was good or bad, but he wasn't about to give up on his current Path and start over. He was glad about his choices, even if they ended up proving imperfect in the long run.
His current Path was his true self, and Shen wouldn't deny himself.
Shen wondered what would've happened if he had Concepts of different Laws as foundational Concepts. War and Combat fit perfectly because they were part of the same Laws of the Spear. If he also had, say, the Concept of the Flow as a foundational Concept, would he end up with something unique, or would he have crippled himself?
He didn't know and didn't waste anything on that; he had more important things to do.
After determining why he had a strange War-Combat Concept, Shen checked if the mastered Combat part had given him any unique ability, like War.
It had.
However, Shen couldn't activate it alone. Both the War and Combat abilities had to be activated together. The Concepts had indeed become inseparable from each other.
He experimented a little and determined that the unique ability of the Combat part of his Concept did three things.
First, it gave him full awareness of his body in a way he had never felt before. He understood himself and his fighting capabilities to the last cell.
Mere moments in that state were enough for him to consider multiple ways to improve his Skills. He would definitely do that soon enough.
Second, it made him aware of everything about any enemy around. He had had to mentally set Alicia as an enemy for that to work, but when Combat connected him to her, he was overloaded with information.
The information War already gave him was more strategical in nature. Instead, the Combat ability provided him with detailed data useful in a head-on fight.
All the things he had ever learned were employed in a single instant to determine Alicia's potential weak spots, look for openings, assess possible ways she might fight, infer where she would prefer to fight, and basically everything he might want to know or estimate about an enemy. Everything he knew about her was also factored in to create the most complete picture of her abilities and how to exploit them.
That alone would give him a huge advantage, but those two things only existed to feed the third part of the ability, which genuinely turned Shen into a killing machine.
Everything Shen knew about fighting, including his Skills, together with the feedback about himself and his enemy, was used to determine the best path to crush the enemy quickly and efficiently. He instantly calculated ways to attack Alicia with extreme prejudice, protect himself, flee, and everything in between. Shen made plans multiple moves ahead, guessing and second-guessing the result of every single exchange possible.
Shen felt powerful in that state. Everything the War and Combat links let him know and feel—the way the Concepts let him use the abilities he already had to the extremes—was magical.
He already anticipated fighting his first enemy in that state.
When the explosions' dust finally settled down, Shen saw a deformed burnt crater, lots of metal shrapnel, and a distorted metal ball the size of his head.
As he approached, he felt something strange coming from the ball. It was cracked open in multiple places. Shen guessed that was the nuclear warhead. Though it hadn't exploded, it was still releasing radiation.
He was immune to it; he just knew it. His D- resistance was more than enough to deal with nuclear radiation, at least of that level.
He wondered if the thing could be disarmed further to give him some AP, but nothing happened no matter what he did or how much he checked the racial Bounty. Not even touching the ball did anything, though it burned him for a point of damage. So he was still vulnerable to enough radiation.
The thing wasn't producing a red dot on his radar anymore, either. Whatever the system had done to it when people tried to use it had changed it from a nuclear weapon into just a dangerous nuclear object. Then again, the change might be because of the explosions it had been subjected to or even because the core was exposed instead of being weaponized somehow.
He searched for the things he had stored in his backpack, especially the Time stones, but they were gone. He found his E+ spear far, far away. The explosions had thrown it a considerable distance away, but it was still intact, probably after having self-repaired while he wasn't looking. His armor was also already looking as good as new.
With his spear recovered and Alicia unconscious, he passed the time the best way he could:
He activated his War-Combat state—which he would definitely not call WC state—and used it to improve himself.
He reckoned that whoever had attacked him, going as far as deploying tactical nukes, hadn't loaded their hypersonic missiles with weak explosives. He also guessed he could deal with any shock wave or heat caused by non-nuclear mortal explosives with his new War-Combat qi range defense. Therefore, he was basically immune to explosives.
That meant there was no rush away anymore. He had run away from the US to make their attacks less powerful when they happened. It hadn't worked; they had managed to quickly deploy tactical warheads against him. However, now that he knew he was safe, he could just stay there.
More importantly, he could let Alicia rest and wake up on her own, a little better healed, before resuming their journey.
At least that's the justification he gave himself to start training at once.
He lost himself in the joy of self-improvement.
"Shen?" Alicia said.
She was far away from him, but there was nothing around, and he could hear her with his enhanced hearing.
He rushed to her, finding the girl standing up, covering her mostly naked body except for a few strips of darkened fabric. She was almost completely healed. There were still burnt areas on her skin, but they would be gone soon enough.
Shen did his best not to look at anything other than her eyes.
"Thank God you're okay," she sighed in relief when he saw him. Then she became over-conscious of her body and crouched a little. "Fuck."
Shen didn't know how to behave, so he changed the subject. "I'm guessing you'll hug me from behind this time instead of asking for a princess carry," he said, only half-joking.
"Hell no," she denied vehemently, to his surprise. "Do you have any fucking idea how sensitive... nipples... are..." She slowed down and lowered her voice as she realized what she was saying. Her face became as red as a tomato. "Can you give me your armor, please?"
Shen widened his eyes in even more surprise. He hadn't even thought of covering her body.
A few moments later, Alicia was clad in his armor's inner robe while he kept the defensive outer layer. He had effectively separated the thing in two. He wasn't sure how its self-repair function would work or if it interfered with its protections.
Either way, it made her comfortable, and after grabbing her, they resumed their journey to Iceland's coast. There were a lot of mountains he went over, a lot of ice, but at long last, they got to the coast.
From there, they sought a city, got some clothes for Alicia from a girl who took pity on her—jeans and a T-shirt—determined the way to the Faroe Islands, and kept going. Then he went to Norway to avoid the UK, which had become a military state.
Shen avoided big cities and crowds on his way to Italy. The Decree's radar, showing countries' boundaries, helped him immensely all the way there.
Speaking of which, he was constantly seeing dots of all colors disappearing. Guardians seemed intent on getting rid of those weapons, and he understood they had double the incentive to do that. Not only did they get the AP, but disabling the weapons also took away the power of some people to deal with them.
At long last, he stepped on Italian soil.
"Florida declared independence too," an energetic man in his sixties, wearing a suit, told Evelyn.
They were sitting by a long wooden table in a spacious dining room. Two maids waited by the walls while the old man and the girl ate their dinner.
"They are the fifth state," the man continued, "and many others will follow. That's how the US falls, like a domino." He pointed the fork at her. "And your friends toppled the first piece."
"I don't think they were part of the attack," Evelyn replied.
"What you or I think is irrelevant," the man said, getting back to eating. "I'm not willing to spend political currency to make my version become the true one. Are you?"
"I am... not," she said unwillingly. As much as she wanted to do right for Alicia Winter and Feng Shen, she wanted to stop the US—or what remained of it—from descending into anarchy even more.
"Don't worry about them," the senator said. "I heard they can defend themselves."
Evelyn sat straighter. "What does that mean?"
"It means you should send them a private message telling them you believe in their innocence. If they die, it won't matter. If they survive long enough to become strong, you'll have supported them all the while." He shook his head. "I still can't believe you gave up on the Title. Try not to act like a moron again."
Evelyn smiled bittersweetly. That was the exact reason she had done it. She couldn't resist her family, and God knows how much advantage they would have had in the country—and taken of her—if she were a Pioneer.
"I'll try, senator," she replied.
"At least we still have the Pioneers. Say what you want about old 'Softheart' MacArthur, he was good at training soldiers. I'm surprised the Winter girl ran away; the other six can't go to the bathroom without asking permission. I'll have one of his attendants teach you his techniques. Do your best to learn."
"Yes, senator," Evelyn said.
The dinner with her father went by painfully slowly.
"It worked," the wisp whispered as it passed by the dark elf in one of the crystal palace's halls.
Liya showed no sign of acknowledging the words and kept walking in the opposite direction.
She had no interest in the pathetic games of Observers, but she had been forced to act anyway. No one would believe she had no agenda if she kept quiet, and that would cause them to unite against her.
So she had manipulated things to save Feng Shen from something he definitely didn't need saving. The nukes had been the perfect excuse. Mortals overestimated nuclear weapons too much, while the other observers didn't understand the rudimentary tech. That way, the others would look at her and see something they could understand.
Liya had even asked someone else to pursue the matter to make it look like she cared if others knew about her move. However, she had chosen the greatest gossiper among the Observers, the wisp, to help her. Now, everyone knew she was playing and that she was an incompetent player. That would let her act and react slowly, thus saving her precious time.
As she moved to a training area to get better acquainted with her stats, she thought about what her people might be going through.
Observers could receive no external communication. Of course, no one obeyed that rule, but she would have to. She was there to survive a possible purge of her people, and getting expelled for breaking the rules would be unwise at best.
Liya clenched her fists and opened them again slowly, repetitively, wishing she could fight someone to vent her frustrations.
Sai rushed through the streets of Bengaluru. The moon was covered by clouds, and electricity had long stopped being something most cities in India had.
The night was dark and filled with assassins.
He had gotten a dark leather armor with dark metal pieces as the reward for becoming a Pioneer. For a weapon, he had cheated and gotten two twin black daggers. The downside was that they couldn't show their true power unless he simultaneously held both. He could stay at most three seconds without one of them before both become only as good—and brittle—as a kitchen knife. They also did not have the usual self-repair enchantment. If he ever broke one of them, or if he lost one, he would've lost his entire weapon.
But an assassin who didn't understand his target's capabilities, or missed a vital spot and hit armor instead, didn't deserve their name.
Well, he wasn't an assassin, not really. He was only hunting big criminals with Bounties. The system didn't generate as many as he would've liked, but India was a heavily populated country with many issues. Giving different castes similar power had not been good for the social order. Well, kind of similar; the top casts still controlled the military.
He was midway through an alley when someone jumped in front of him.
It was a man wearing armor and holding a shield, just like the one that appeared behind him. At the same time, arrows and spells came from above. An ambush. Sai didn't know why and he didn't care.
He was too fast for the idiot in front of him. He dodged to the side and went past the man. The projectiles never got close to him.
He might've killed those people in another situation, but Bounties were rare and disputed. He wanted AP, not the blood of idiots. He kept running toward his target.
Suddenly, the system gave him the Decree.
Countless dots appeared on his new radar.
Sai's eyes shone brightly, and he checked the Bounty. Disabling a nuclear weapon rewarded between 1,000 AP to 10,000 AP depending on its yield. It wasn't enough to turn from his current Bounty; killing the guy who called himself "Dark Shiva" would give him 30,000 AP. But after he was done, he might go for the weapons if there wasn't any better Bounty around.
Sai thought of Shen, but as much as he wanted to reunite with the cultivator, he had a family to care for in India. He needed the money to leave with them, but he had none.
Fortunately, his first wage as a Guardian would be paid in a week. He hoped it would finally let him get away from the hellhole that India had become.
Until then, he had people to kill.
He kept running in the night.
With each step Shen took, he smelled War.
The roads were all but gone, either bombed or damaged from having to withstand the many tons of tanks and military convoys. Alicia and Shen found the first metal debris that had previously been a convoy a few miles from a relatively big city in Northwest Italy. Not far from there, they saw the remains of an attack helicopter.
Things got only worse after that. The city with an unknown name had been almost razed to the ground. Countless buildings had been put down, destroyed cars and corpses littered the broken streets, and crows ate what they could.
Whoever used to live there was either gone or hiding.
"This is fucking horrible," Alicia said, being held by him. She covered her nose to ward off the terrible smell.
"Logic dictates that we search for someone hiding around for information," Shen said. "They will be afraid and vulnerable, which will make them more cooperative."
"That sounds fucking horrible," she said, not hiding her disgust.
"Yes," Shen agreed and ran toward the next city.
The most important thing they needed to find out was where the Maiden used to live. She would likely arrive there. The US had probably known but hadn't told him.
The first living people they found in Italy were in the middle of a road. Shen identified the insignia of the French military at a checkpoint with concrete blockades, war tanks, and lots of people pointing guns. He recalled an atomic bomb had been used in their country not long ago, but he didn't know if the chain of command had been kept. These people might either be soldiers following or modern highwaymen.
This side of the checkpoint had two tanks pointing their barrels at nothing, three manned mounted machine guns, a big truck in the middle preventing the passage, and concrete walls surrounding everything. Shen could see people behind the walls, wielding weapons, ready to fire.
Shen slowed down as he approached. A guy left the truck in the middle of the road, took a bullhorn, and said, "Halt!"
Alicia and Shen were only two, unarmed, and still over two hundred yards away. It seemed they had learned to fear Guardian magic.
"State your business or go around us," the soldier said. "Keep this distance from us the whole time, or we will open fire."
If Shen recalled it correctly, France wanted to keep the current Maiden. Whether that was still the case after being nuked was anyone's guess.
He used the Lion's Roar to reply, "I'm Feng Shen, the Rising Star. I'm here to save the Maiden. I want information about where she'll appear."
The man in with the bullhorn widened his eyes, and another soldier went to look for someone. A moment later, an officer took the bullhorn. "Get closer for me to Inspect you," he said.
Shen complied, and the guy said a low "Shit" before telling Shen to approach and ordering everyone to lower their guns.
"Be ready for anything," Shen told Alicia as he put her on the ground.
Nothing bad happened, though the captain and his soldiers were really tense the whole time. They told Shen that Marzia hailed from San Marino but had probably been at school in Florence when the Alliance arrived.
"Her family should know more," the officer continued, "but they allied with some mafia families and parts of the government and founded some weird mix of a paramilitary group and a city-state. I have no idea how they got France to ally with them, and they told us shit about the Maiden. Well, not to me anyway, but who cares? I'm just waiting for a bored Hungarian bomber to decide it will be fun to kill me." Hungary wanted to kill the current Maiden.
Then he proceeded to explain how Italy had become hell on Earth.
Most of the fighting was going on in the air—or at least coming from the air. Planes, drones, missiles, and artillery destroyed everything they touched, including each other. Supposedly, there was also some maritime fighting, but the man knew nothing about it.
"Any chance you can go decimate Spain for us?" the Captain asked. "They are biting the hardest, the fuckers."
Spain was supposedly pro-current Maiden too, but they had changed their position a week ago, after a coup. The troops, which had been together with other allies, had backstabbed everyone for max damage.
"To be fair, only about a tenth of the fuckers killed us in cold blood. The others retreated first. Then they attacked us from our weak spots. They knew what to exploit."
He finished the tale by telling Shen to beware of anyone he met. Even some Frenchmen had decided the Maiden was better off dead; they believed the war would end if she died. Shen should also take cover if he heard any plane.
"Your best bet is making the Maiden's family believe you want to help and stay in Florence," he concluded.
"Thank you, Captain," Shen nodded and took Alicia in his arms.
"Just one thing if you don't mind," the Captain said.
"Yes?"
"Were you in on it? The murders?"
Obviously, the Captain was talking about the President and the General. Shen shook his head. "I didn't. I can do whatever I want to humans, so I probably won't have a criminal record no matter what I do. But you can Inspect Alicia. The system didn't mark her as an accomplice, and she was there too."
Of course, she might have just been ignorant of Shen's plans, but that was the best he could do.
The Captain did as told, then nodded. "Good to know our strongest guy isn't a murder hobo. Good luck in Florence. I'll let them know you're coming."
There were vantages and disadvantages to arrive unannounced. Shen decided he would make a better first impression and avoid friendly fire if he didn't hide his approach. Also, the man was a soldier, so asking him to keep a secret was the same as asking him to betray his country. Shen didn't want to ask someone to betray their honor, especially when Shen's gain would be minimal—a little less danger as people would know where he was and where he was going.
"May you tread your Path with honor, Captain," Shen said and resumed his journey with Alicia.
Not long after, they spotted the troops surrounding Florence.
Many financial and human resources were required to surround Florence completely, yet it had happened.
The armed forces of multiple European countries, both pro and against the current Maiden, plus Florence's population and whatever paramilitary groups were involved in its defense—and maybe attack, too—had created different levels of barricades to stop anyone from entering or leaving the region without their say so.
Cars and trucks, Humvees and war tanks, from brand new to carcasses, were piled beside concrete blocks and sandbags. Helicopters scouted the perimeter, providing air support to countless foot soldier battalions either defending the place or shooting each other. Multiple forward operation bases from many European countries were scattered in and around the city.
There were plenty of corpses too.
Florence had once been a beautiful city, but becoming a warzone had been its doom. Even as Shen approached, he saw jet fighters fighting in the skies, both sides supported by SAM batteries. A plane was hit and fell on one of the few still standing tall buildings—most of the others were entirely or partially destroyed. Fighting was also happening around the city, involving the armed forces coming from nearby cities or countries. An explosion in the middle of the town rocked the ground.
Countless white dots were on Shen's radar, some disappearing at the same time he heard or felt explosions. Neither side was willing to obey the Decree when it could be the difference between life and death for them.
It surprised Shen that no one had used a nuke there if the fight was that bad. France had been nuked in a failed coup attempt, yet Florence, a much more important place, still stood. That option was out of the table now, which probably had given the pro-Maiden side many new allies who had previously been afraid of nuclear escalation.
"Wow," Alicia said as Shen put her on the ground. They were on one of the mountains close to the city. "That's a fucking lot of death."
"Indeed," Shen replied, also impressed. He had not expected things to be so heated. There were about six and a half days remaining until the Maiden arrived, and it seemed both sides were going for a final push. "I'm curious about how the military is obeying their countries if things in Europe are supposed to be pure anarchy. I feel like social media and big media companies lied to me to make the US look better."
"Forget that. More importantly, how the fuck are we supposed to know which side to help?"
"We'll ask and kill whoever answers they are here to kill or capture the Maiden," Shen replied simply.
Looking at the armies' flags and insignias would help, but it didn't account for deserters. In a warzone, verbal confirmation was the least he needed to do. Double-checking and investigating things after one declared themselves allies was the never-ending next step.
Alicia snapped her neck as she quickly turned to look at him. "What?! Killing people for not answering what you want to hear?!"
"This is a warzone, Alicia. You'll find only allies or enemies among the deployed soldiers. If you don't want to fight, you can wait here, or I can bring you to a nearby country of your choosing."
She shook her head. "I want to stay, but I want to just defend myself instead of going on the offensive."
"Attacking amassing enemy troops is a form of defense," Shen countered. "It's better to reduce their numbers before they have enough to crush you. Not killing your enemies when you have the chance is the same as attacking your allies."
Shen had expected a lengthy argument, but he was surprised when Alicia bit her lower lip and thought about what he had said for a while. She seemed to be warring against herself about what she should it.
He waited for minutes before saying softly, "We don't need to reach a consensus. Different people, including best friends, tread different Paths, and it's alright if you want to defend even when it's unwise to do so."
She bit her lip harder and hugged herself. Then she sighed. "No, you're right. Gotta kill the baddies before the baddies kill you or your friends. Mercy to your enemies is cruelty to your allies and all that."
Shen rose his eyebrows in surprise. "Where did you hear that?"
She looked at him with surprise, then laughed. "You told me that, mister wise man."
He smiled back at her. He didn't recall saying that, and it also showed his D-rank mind or E-tier learning ability didn't give him perfect memory.
It had been easy for him to remember contact information about Pioneers back in the tutorial. He also felt he had a much easier time recalling almost everything that happened to him, but it wasn't eidetic memory. He could still forget things, especially minor ones.
"Let's go?" he asked, motioning for her to go first.
He wouldn't carry her anymore unless he decided they needed to run. This was a warzone. He might need to attack or defend without warning, and having Alicia in his arms would get in the way. Grabbing her at short notice was much easier than getting rid of her.
Alicia stepped ahead, going down the mountain with the grace and speed expected of E+ agility. Shen followed.
They were at the base in moments, and then they kept going.
Gyula Geőcze hated being in Italy. He hated the war. He hated the heat.
But he loved his country.
His commanding officer said war was needed. The current Maiden had to die so Hungary could get some sort of deal with another country that would be better for everyone. Gyula understood his duty better than almost everyone. He had stayed behind while disobedient soldiers went to the tutorial, and he didn't regret it. It had let him save his wife, who now waited for him back in his country.
He heard some commotion from the FOB's access point. They weren't shooting but rather yelling. Probably yet another negotiator.
Gyula didn't leave his tent, which he shared with seven other soldiers. He was alone there, trying to take a nap before going to the night watch, but it was hard. It had been two weeks already, and his country was nowhere near winning the war as far as he could tell. It was making him stressed—
A loud siren sounded. They were under attack. He stood up—
There was a blur in his vision and then darkness.
Shen went through the first forward operations base he came across like a hurricane. They had said, "Hungary will kill the Maiden," when asked, and that sealed their fate.
He killed everyone he saw without mercy. He had no way of dealing with prisoners, and he wouldn't believe anyone who might promise they would just leave.
They tried to resist, to fight back. There were some Guardians there too. But that place was likely not very important because everyone was weak.
They shot him, and he confirmed that surrounding himself with Zephyr made him immune to bullets. He redirected them almost effortlessly, though there was a cap of doing it to around twenty bullets simultaneously. The ones that hit him deal minimal to no damage.
Killing those people was like stepping on ants until he found an obstacle he couldn't overcome.
The tanks couldn't zero in on him to shoot, but Shen found out he couldn't kill the people inside either. The people manning the mounted machine guns were swiftly dealt with, but when Shen tried pulling the hatches, he only broke the external handles. Even with the Concept of Sharpness, his spear wasn't enough to penetrate the tank's armor more than a few millimeters on each hit. While he could theoretically get to the people inside with enough time, the tanks started retreating, and he didn't want to go with them.
Shen asked Alicia if she had any idea on how to destroy the tanks.
"Mana goes through non-magic objects," she said, though clearly unwillingly. "Doesn't qi?"
Unfortunately, the answer to that was no. Qi was a form of energy, like mana, but they weren't the same. It was like how the visible light spectrum could go through transparent things that might block infrared light instead.
Maybe the difference between qi and mana had to do with their metaphysical frequencies or something?
Shen looked at Alicia, but a single glance was enough to determine she wouldn't kill the people inside. She had attacked with him, but killing retreating people was something else entirely.
He got another idea, but she would definitely want to cook the soldiers inside by surrounding the tank with fire. That was even crueler than creating a fireball inside the hull.
Throwing grenades down the tanks' gun barrels also proved ineffective. Shen didn't know how to operate anything fancier than that—not explosive charges, not tanks—and Alicia, who might know, didn't want to help. So Shen ended up just sighing, and they moved on.
They left about one thousand corpses in that place.
They destroyed two other FOBs after the first one. Shen credited finding so many enemies in a row to sheer unluck. They had probably simply come from the wrong side because Florence would've fallen much earlier than this if only enemies were on all sides.
Shen was finding out he cared less and less about killing each time he reaped lives.
War was part of his Path, of his very self. To be against killing enemies in such a situation would be to deny himself. However, he felt no joy in killing those people. He liked overcoming challenging enemies, but killing weaklings was just a dull task that needed to be done. He took satisfaction from taking human resources from his opponents, from acting in a way that pushed him closer to victory, but that was it.
The thrill of a good battle that he had frequently found in the tutorial was nowhere around.
They reached the city proper after the last FOB. Everything was blown up, from the road to vehicles to buildings. It was like a scene from an apocalyptic movie.
There were corpses in the open, but unlike the ones Shen had left behind, most were not from soldiers. Some were covered with blankets, but the populace had either run out of blankets or given up after a while.
"Fuck," Alicia summarized, and Shen agreed.
Shen activated his War-Combat ability to better avoid ambushes. The War part of it linked him to some people inside the broken buildings. They were few and far between.
Because they were also potential enemies, the Combat part of his ability—which he decided to call Battle Sense—also let him feel more minute details of their existence. One such detail was whether they were armed. That's how he felt five soldiers in a house's basement.
Shen approached them, and they reacted instantly, meaning they had been watching him. When he got to the place's door, all five pointed their guns at the entrance.
Instead of invading, Shen knocked and said, "I know there are five people inside. I'm the Human Rising Star. I'll ask you a question, and if you answer wrongly, it'll mean you're my enemies, so I'll kill you. If you ask correctly, I'll ask you to take me to your people. If you lie and lead me to an ambush, I'll kill you anyway, plus whoever is involved in the trap. So it's better for you to tell the truth and hope you answered right.
"Oh, and not answering will also make me attack.
"So, are you trying to save the current Maiden, kill her, or capture her?"
There was a long silence. Shen felt them looking at each other before nodding, and one of them said, "We're armed and will shoot—"
Shen moved. He crushed the door with his body, got inside, and in a moment, had disarmed everyone, broken their guns, and thrown the soldiers against a wall.
They fell harmlessly to the ground.
The basement was small, filled with boxes on one side, and sleeping bags on the other. It had no windows, but Shen saw a few small pipes going through the walls. The soldiers could look through them to check what was happening outside.
A radio was on a corner, and one of the soldiers had been sitting beside it when Shen invaded. He had kept silent, but Shen had heard him whisper something when he started walking their way—probably that they might've been compromised.
The soldiers had no insignia or flag on their uniforms.
"Now, let's try again," Shen said. "Are you pro-Maiden or against her? Remember, silence will cause me to attack anyway."
Alicia entered the place then, looked around, and closed her arms close to the door.
Shen looked at the soldiers, five young people no older than twenty-one. They were inexperienced if their utterly terrified faces were any indication.
Though he had threatened to attack if they didn't reply, he wasn't sure what he would do if they just kept silent. Could he kill potential allies just because they refused to answer a question? Probably not.
Fortunately, one of them stood up defiantly and said, "France stand by our Italian friends to the very end," he said in French, then spat on Shen's foot. "Fuck you."
Shen was curious about the free offense, but Alicia breathed in relief. Her entire body relaxed from relief for not having to kill or witness Shen kill five more people.
"Oh, thank God," she said.
After a very impolite conversation, Shen understood those people were operating on misinformation spread by the US government.
The US had claimed Shen had murdered the President because he had been a Chinese plant all along. After all, only the Chinese had another cultivator, which was proof enough. Now, the US had sworn to help the Maiden, some troops had even landed on Italy already, but the allied forces were supposed to beware Feng Shen and attack him on sight. Those soldiers hadn't attacked because they were scouts and were under orders to only report his location—as they admitted to having done.
Shen hadn't expected such a complicated mess and wasn't sure what he should do.
He was here for the Maiden, so it made sense to ally with her official protectors. However, now those protectors were against him. Should he kill them? Avoid them? Try to negotiate?
He would definitely kill whoever attacked him, but he decided against killing the five soldiers. They were misinformed idiots, not actual enemies.
Shen thought of the French Captain, who had talked to Shen without prejudice or aggressiveness. Had the man not been told the lies? If so, why?
He didn't want to waste time guessing things. Fortunately, there was a way to directly ask those involved what they were thinking.
"Alright," he said, "Make a call with your little radio and let me talk to your commanding officer. For your people's sake, let's hope the attacking force doesn't get here before I leave."
The Free Republic of Florence's command center was in a fancy underground restaurant. The tables were filled with papers and laptops, and adjuncts ran everywhere.
Of the ten countries allied to Florence, only one had sent a general, France. General Vivienne Boisclair was therefore making all strategic calls—she was pretty good at it—except when overruled by the Commander in Chief, the Free Republic's self-appointed Interim President, Giorgio Martino.
Theoretically, a local country's ruler shouldn't have command over the allied forces. However, the General was obeying the man for whatever reason—politics, probably—and the military was under her. In the end, the man ruled over everyone.
The Interim President and the General sat side by side at the head of what looked like a very long table created by pushing many smaller tables together. The most important people were also sat there, and they could talk to each other quickly to make important decisions.
Giorgio Martino, the Interim President and the Maiden's father, was a ruthless former mafia leader. He had been uniquely positioned to become an insurgent leader backed by foreign nations who didn't want the Italian government to have control of the Maiden.
Most powerful countries had experience financing and training insurgents to varying degrees of success. Now, ten of them were putting everything on the line to fall on the graces of the fifteen-year-old Maiden who, her father promised, would do whatever he wanted. Therefore, they did what they could to fall in his graces.
Colonel Walter Schneider was one of the German soldiers sent there to protect the Maiden. Unlike Giorgio Martino, he had had neither the political clout nor the cunningness to use his son's position as a Pioneer to his advantage. However, he had been a lieutenant colonel at the time, which did put him in a position to try something stupid if he had wanted.
Therefore, he had been considered a potential threat to Germany's public order, got promoted, and was sent to Italy to give the powers-that-be time to make his son obey them.
Walter didn't mind. He was a soldier first and foremost. He wouldn't get himself killed on purpose, but he understood his country came first.
General Boisclair was a fair commander. Walter had shown he was competent enough to be in the commanding tent but not enough to make big decisions. Therefore, he didn't sit by the big table. Instead, he sat not too far, by a small one, alone. From there, he commanded the scouts in Florence.
That task effectively made him a glorified errand boy slash supervisor. The General determined where his subordinates should be deployed and the directives of the deployment, and he merely organized how the orders were sent. Then he read the reports, made minor decisions, and told the General the important stuff and the lay of things.
Just as he didn't mind being in Italy, he also didn't resent the post. Rather, it put him in the safest building in Florence, especially now that nukes were out of the picture. Regardless of the Maiden's survival, he would likely return home as a war hero.
There were many worse places to be or things to do.
But when a Major came running to tell him they got a priority message claiming the Rising Star had been spotted, he found himself torn between family and country for the very first time in his life.
His leaders had taken him away from his son as soon as possible, but he had talked to the boy for a few days before that. The Pioneer had pleaded repeatedly that no matter what, Walter should not, under any circumstances, go against the Rising Star.
"Feng Shen is a monster," the young man had said. "He'll survive, and he'll take revenge. Stay away from him. Surrender if you must. Please, dad, this is important. I'd be willing to bet my life on this. Please, don't fuck with him."
However, Interim President Giorgio Martino had been clear when he said they were now allied with the US and that the Rising Star was to be killed on sight. Walter didn't need to obey the man, but he had to follow General Boisclair's orders. And she had explicitly and directly told him to pass any sightings of the Rising Star to her, so she could dispatch the right troops to Feng Shen's position.
He sat frozen for a long time. His adjacent asked for directions enough times to attract the General's attention. The woman was like a hawk, what with her E-rank and E- stats.
She stood up and approached Schneider's table. Isolated, her brown eyes were clear and beautiful, yet her facial features were so fierce that her eyes looked like weapons that could kill. Her blonde, almost platinum hair was held in a tight, perfect bun. She was at least sixty but looked twenty years younger than that.
"What's the matter here, Colonel?" she asked.
Schneider gulped, saluted, and decided to trust his boy in this one. After all, his son hadn't become a Pioneer by being stupid.
"Ma'am," the Colonel said, "I want to be discharged or imprisoned for desertion."
There were very few political moves Schneider knew, but no one became a Lieutenant Colonel without some political savviness. He was worse than almost everyone but not completely daft.
When your subordinate would rather become a deserter than follow through with an order, they had all the confidence in you being absolutely wrong. That was a somber statement.
General Bosclair frowned. "What kind of joke is this, Colonel?" Before he could reply, she turned to the likely source of the disturbance, the Major. "What did you just tell him?"
"The Rising Star has been spotted, ma'am!" he said loud and clear.
That attracted the attention of everyone nearby. The General squinted her eyes and turned to Schneider. "And you would rather go to jail than tell me that, Colonel?"
"Yes, ma'am," Schneider replied.
"Why?"
"As you know, my son is a Pioneer, ma'am. He was very clear when he told me any attempt to kill the Rising Star would fail and that he would come for revenge."
"And you would rather trust your son's words than the mighty of the military?" she asked as if talking to a particularly dumb child. "A power that had to be outlawed because it could destroy the entire world?"
"Yes, ma'am," he replied.
"Good," she said, to everyone's amazement, then turned to her adjunct, who had come with her. "Major Weber, Operation Star Hammer is a go."
The Major said, "Yes, ma'am," and left the room.
The General left too, through another door, following the Interim President who had gone there as soon as it was revealed the Rising Star was in Florence.
Colonel Schneider just sat there, unsure of what had happened or what he should do.
After Shen asked the soldiers to use the radio, they looked at each other confusedly. After he prodded, one of them finally went to the radio and contacted their people.
Well, he tried to.
"I don't understand," the guy said. "No one is replying."
"What would be the reasons for that?" Shen asked. He knew absolutely nothing about that tech or military protocols.
"Equipment malfunction, jamming, the other got destroyed, or they don't want to talk to us."
"Try again," Shen ordered. The guy did. Five minutes later, it was obvious it wouldn't work.
"Looks like I'll have to go talk in person—" Shen started, then heard multiple vehicles approaching. "We got company," he told Alicia and left the room.
His hearing was superb after his rank-ups. It took a while for the three Humvee-like vehicles to get in sight, running fast through the broken road. Above the ground, dozens of jet fighters and as many helicopters had been deployed for air supremacy.
The vehicles stopped in front of Shen, who was prepared to fight at the slightest offense. Instead, a female Major with short brown hair and blue eyes left the car, walked quickly toward him, and extended her hand.
"Rising Star," she said, "I'm Major Lavigne of the Free Republic of Florence. We would like to discuss terms to ally ourselves with you. Would you come with me to discuss things in a safer environment?"
Shen let himself raise an eyebrow to showcase slight confusion and interest. "I was told I am to be shot on sight."
"The Americans demanded we do that in exchange for their help." She spoke quickly while looking around. "We knew we were just being used, so we pretended to accept to understand their operation better and plan how to protect ourselves. To look like we were helping them, we deployed recon units all over Florence but under orders not to engage under any circumstances. The units with standing orders to shoot on sight are kept much closer to the command center, and whoever is outside the scouts' range was told nothing about you." That explained the polite Captain that Shen had met. "We're cutting connections with Americans as we speak and repositioning ourselves to fight them if they attack. Please, come with me to a safer place—"
She was interrupted when an RPG hit one of the helicopters flying the perimeter. All other helicopters opened fire. Enemy jet fighters appeared on the horizon, and a new air battle started.
"Let's go," Shen said.
Lavigne nodded and rushed to the Humvee. Shen followed but waited for Alicia to get in before entering.
He considered that the vehicle might be bobby-trapped and that the woman might be a weird suicide bomber. However, he trusted his ability to protect Alicia and himself from lethal damage if that happened.
The three vehicles rushed to safety as war raged in the skies.
Major Lavigne said nothing as they traveled the streets of Florence. There were multiple checkpoints, and they eventually got to an underground garage. Once there, they led Alicia and Shen to a restaurant kitchen of all things.
A man in his early thirties and an old lady General were there. With brown hair and eyes, the man resembled Marzia to a fault. Shen Inspected them.
| Giorgio Martino (G) | 100 / 100
| Charges: murder x7,544, attempted murder x11,988, torture x75, assault x20,774, blackmail x72
| Vivienne Boisclair (E) | 110 / 110
| Charges: murder x7,388, attempted murder x10,877, torture x72, assault x20,544, blackmail x11
Shen was impressed, in a bad way, by what he saw.
"Don't let the system deceive you," Boisclair said. "It doesn't acknowledge our war, so we get charged when our engagement orders are followed."
Shen kept what mortals called a poker face. "Did it also force you to torture and blackmail people?"
Martino nodded to the Major, who exited the kitchen and closed the door behind her, leaving the four people inside alone.
Then, he had the gall to look condescendingly at Shen. "War is not black and white, boy," Martino said. "Difficult decisions must be made for the greater good."
Shen snickered. "Don't you lecture me on War is, old man. War is in my Path; it's part of me. I am War. I understand it much better than you ever will."
"Oh, is that so?" Martino smiled coldly. "Let me ask you something, then, boy," he said, stressing the last word. "How many wars have you fought in your ample lifetime?"
Shen had used the Concept of War in many battles, but they weren't actual wars. Not between nations, or even large enough groups of people. Shen didn't feel bad for that; he had been blessedly born in the Eternal Empire, where peace and stability were abundant. Instead, he was grateful for his peaceful life.
He opened his mouth to reply, but Martino talked over him. "Let me guess: none. So let me tell you something about knowledge and experience, boy.
"You're a greenhorn who knows only victory under controlled or advantageous situations. Yeah, I heard all about your grand achievements. All luster with no substance. I found many Guardians like you who think they are fire or death or whatever because they learned something about the elements through magic and mysterious ways.
"Sorry to break it to you, but that doesn't make you truly wise in the ways of war. You're just some edgy teenager talking big words about things you could have read in a tweet. You're just a boy who memorized a lot about something you don't understand, no matter what the damn aliens might've told you.
"You've never dealt with unwilling soldiers who would rather go home than fight, never had to decide whether you would torture someone or let your imprisoned soldiers be tortured by your enemy instead, never stayed weeks without bathing because the recycled water from everyone's piss smells like the piss it is.
"I'm not talking about guessing what you would do in bad situations; I'm talking about being there and doing it. You haven't been there, haven't done it. If you had, you wouldn't spill your pathetic morality at me with such ease. You would understand the situation much better.
"Me? I was born poor and fought all my life to get where I am. War is part of me because there was only victory or death. So don't you talk about being at war with me, boy.
"We're fighting true war, not whatever you think you know. I was told you're a powerful fighter, but don't try to bite more than you can chew. Leave the important decisions to the grown-ups. You're just a child with an oversized stick, and you'd do well to remember that or stay out of my sight."
Shen heard everything in silence, then nodded and said, "If that's what you truly want, I can give it to you." He turned into a blur, and the next moment, Martino put his hands over his eyes, screaming in pain.
Shen had just pierced them and blinded the man.
"Now, you don't have to see me anymore," Shen said with his Lion's Roar, just loud enough to be heard over the man's screams.
Alicia and the General widened their eyes in astonishment.
"What did you do?!" Boisclair yelled as she started fawning over the man.
"This is a war zone," Shen explained calmly when the man stopped screaming. "He claims to know so much about war, yet he didn't foresee the stupidity of offending someone much more powerful than him in this situation?"
"Are you out of your damn mind?!" the General insisted. At least she was wise enough not to try to shoot Shen or call for help; neither would be any good. "We were talking, not killing each other!"
"In his life, there's only victory or death," Shen insisted back. "He's not dead. By elimination, I believe this counts as his victory."
That attack wasn't something Shen would usually do. However, unlike what Martino had stated, Shen was War.
Therefore, Shen understood perfectly the strategic fight happening right there.
Martino wanted to own Shen. His words were poison targeting Shen's heart and Path, to rule over Shen through a twisted tongue and gaslighting. He had tried to lead Shen's Path astray, thus making it easier to enslave Shen's will. Shen wouldn't have cared about any other offense, but claiming his Path was only theoretical and separated from him was the same as trying to cripple him.
In cultivator culture, challenging one's Path was worse than a sneak attack from your most trusted ally.
The system's blackmail chargers showed Giorgio Martino's primary weapon was his mouth. Shen had thought of arguing back for a few seconds before deciding against it. He knew better than to fight against the man on a verbal battlefield.
A fight of words wasn't just about being correct. Martino and Shen weren't in a mortal academic environment or in one of the Truthseeking Summits of the Eternal Empire where only the truth mattered. Instead, identifying and exploiting your opponent's weak spots was more important than speaking the truth. A lie was as valid a tool as any other—and often much better than others.
Indeed, whether knowingly or not, Martino had already lied to Shen.
Understanding a Concept was not the same as memorizing things one didn't understand.
Adding a Concept to one's Path meant becoming it, fully, with all it entailed. Shen's very reaction to the man saying otherwise showed it. When attacked, when placed in a conflict situation, Shen had used what he knew, what he was—War, Combat, Sharpness—to achieve victory.
Shen understood the dangers of engaging in a fight—verbal or otherwise—in a war zone much better than the self-aggrandizing idiot who claimed to also be War.
Shen also understood the need for torture in certain situations. It had been part of his Path Resolution Tribulation, and he had concluded he might just cross that line if there was a need for that. His honor wasn't more important than everything else. If he had to decide between his honor and thousands of lives, he would choose the latter.
It was terrible to admit to himself how low he was willing to go for the supposedly greater good, yet he wouldn't pretend to be someone he wasn't.
When he had Inspected Martino and Boisclair, he hadn't questioned the morality of their actions at first. They had been the ones to proactively attempt to justify the blood in their hands. The excuse they had given was pathetic, so he had pointed it out to them.
The system wasn't at fault for their actions; it hadn't forced them to kill. They might believe killing to protect the Maiden was necessary, and Shen agreed with that, but that had been their own decision. They should own up to that.
Shen hadn't come to fix everything wrong in the world; he wasn't a saint. He wasn't there to judge everyone either; that was up to Marzia. He just hated the hypocrisy, so he had pointed it out and had been ready to move on.
That had been his original intention.
However, Martino's attack made Shen reevaluate the situation.
At the end of his Path Resolution Tribulation, he had concluded that he would cross any moral bridges when he came to them. This was it, here, now.
He was standing in front of a moral bridge, at an ethical crossroad.
The people in front of him were torturers—or at least had allowed it to happen and were alright with it. Shen understood the need for torture when too much was at stake, but it was the first time he found himself face to face with such people. When he looked at them, he imagined dozens of people screaming, bleeding, and suffering because those two let it happen.
He could justify torture by his hands because he trusted his judgment to only do that when there was no way out. But could he just let a manipulative, arrogant, and dominating torturer walk free like that?
Marzia was officially the one in charge of deciding the fate of criminals, including war criminals, yet could he trust her judgment when it came to someone obviously related to her? Or should Shen become the judge in certain situations? Did being the strongest person around give him the right to decide who should be tortured and who shouldn't?
Alicia had said power corrupts; now, Shen wondered whether a higher power should be held accountable for things that existed to regulate the actions of smaller men.
The Immortal Emperor had, after all, been above all the laws he had created himself.
Were Guardians a superior caste as the Alliance suggested? Was Shen becoming some sort of superior being by growing stronger?
Shen had hated that part of the Alliance. Maybe it was simply because he had been too weak to understand the perspective of those so high above him. With power came the responsibility to make choices that weren't always obviously good or bad.
Where should his honor draw the line—or rather, should his honor draw a line?
He chuckled to himself in sadness as he thought of honor.
Shen's father had abandoned his honor for Shen. Shen had avoided thinking about that, but now he couldn't anymore. The truth was that the man had managed to betray his clan so thoroughly because of one simple fact: he had had the power to do that. He had been the strongest in the clan, one of the strongest in the entire Eternal Empire. Very few people could've stopped him even if they saw what he was doing.
In fact, it was likely that some people had detected his movements but kept quiet out of fear. What was honor in the face of someone so powerful they might as well be gods—even when compared to other cultivators?
And what was honor in the face of the life of a loved one—the situation his father had had to face when Shen's life was on the line?
More importantly, what was honor in the face of torturers?
Should Shen imprison them? Then, what? Would he spend his time watching over them? What if Marzia absolved them after she arrived; would he just accept it? Did he even have the right to blame them for doing something he might do himself one day? Maybe he should just ignore their transgressions?
Who was Feng Shen?
What did his honor demand, and how easily did he ignore it when it became inconvenient?
The inconvenience was more than feeling bad for killing a relative of the person he wanted to save. Marzia was the Human Maiden. She could sanction his Title if she wished to, making it useless to him. It was likely that she could also make his life very hard with her Decrees.
Shen thought about it all while Boischair looked at Martino's pierced eyes. The tip of his spear had barely perforated them. Just enough to blind the man.
"Don't worry, a potion will fix this," she told him.
"Are you here, boy?" the man growled in rage, ignoring Boisclair's care. "You're finished! You have no idea who I am! What I went through! The Martino family will put your skull through a spike..."
Shen shook his head. The man had really mistaken being alive for a victory. There was no changing such a person. Shen could see how Martino's entire life had been shaped by his past conflicts.
Indeed, as Martino had said, only death would stop him.
Shen took a deep breath and decided he couldn't let a monster like Giorgio Martino stay around. Letting Martino do whatever he wanted was a terrible idea, especially if he was in charge of so many people as the General had suggested.
Shen couldn't just arrest Martino and Boisclair; they were too dangerous. Martino's words were poison, and the General was entirely under his thumb—Shen could tell even with his Battle Sense inactive. Speaking of which, he activated it to analyze those two.
From Boisclair's actions, body language, words, heart rate, and even body temperature, Shen concluded that she was indeed little more than a trained hound.
As for Martino, Shen detected no doubt, no hesitation, no lies in the man's entire self. He fully believed that he was above everything and that Shen would die for his transgression. Martino saw himself as an untouchable god.
Shen could only wonder; if Martino had any sway over the Human Maiden, if he could even use a little bit of her influence to affect the world, how far would such a man go?
"I'll destroy you!" Martino screamed. "Destroy your life! I have friends, connections, power you can't imagine! You're over, boy! Over!"
'Power I can't imagine, huh?' Shen thought.
Power. It was time Shen accepted, once and for all, that his power gave him the privilege to decide other people's fates. He would keep questioning his morals to not become a monster, but he wouldn't let his questions lead to inaction.
So, now, he would kill Martino because his morals and honor demanded he do it for the greater good—even if those same morals kept questioning themselves.
He noticed how he was behaving exactly like Martino. For the greater good, he would act in a way that, isolated, could be seen as immoral. He was putting his beliefs above another person's because that was the Path he had treated and believed on.
And that was Shen's answer, the truth of his Path, the reaffirmation of himself:
If he sought absolute power, he had to be willing to use it when needed. If he sought to tread his Path to the peak, he had to be ready to crush other Paths that got in the way.
Once again, Shen turned in a blur and returned to his position.
This time, blood splashed as the heads of Giorgio Martino and Vivienne Boisclair rolled on the ground.
"Looks like I was wrong," Shen said as he looked at the falling corpses of the two people he had just killed in cold blood. "It wasn't his victory, after all."
Shen had killed thousands of people, but it had always been in a battle context. Even back in the US, when he had killed prisoners trying to escape after the Sorcerer King's failed ambush, they had been part of the ambush. They had tried to take his life first.
This time, Shen had killed two people outside a direct, physical confrontation, and it weighed heavily on him.
Yes, Martino had attacked his Path. Yet, Shen had answered to it by blinding the man. What came after was simply Shen deciding he had the right to take a life because that person was too dangerous to live.
He didn't regret it; he felt he had done the right thing. He would do it again if given another chance.
The issue was that there was no coming back from that decision. If Shen was found wrong later, Martino and Boisclair would be dead already. Shen's decision had been final.
It had taken him what, a couple minutes to decide to end everything those two people were?
Alicia had said that power corrupts. She might be right, might be wrong, but it was undeniable that power, at the very least, changed. It affected one's perspective, reach, and actions. The D-rank Rising Star Feng Shen was not the same as the G-rank cripple Feng Shen. Even if he lost his power right now, he would have already been changed by the power he had wielded.
The person who gave the first step on a Path was not the same who reached the end. Shen had known that on an intellectual level. But to be a part of the process, feel it so crudely, and witness his transformation in real time... It impacted him.
Today, Shen had evolved, and he wanted to believe it had been in a good direction.
| Bounty complete: Kill the Italian Rebellion Leader
| Base reward: +100,000 AP
| Rising Star bonus: +25,000 AP
| Total AP: 156,564
| Bounty complete: Kill the Italian Rebellion General
| Base reward: +50,000 AP
| Rising Star bonus: +12,500 AP
| Total AP: 219,064
The notifications surprised him. Not the Bounties' existence, but the rewards. That was a lot of AP. He couldn't believe those two people had stayed alive for so long with that kind of Bounty on their heads.
Right after Shen killed Martino and Boisclair, Alicia opened her mouth wide. She kept like that for a while before saying, "What the actual fuck? Now you torture people before killing them, too?"
Shen frowned. "Torture?"
"You blinded the motherfucker for no reason!" she pointed out. She wasn't yelling, but her voice was raised because of her shock.
"I blinded Martino because he tried to cripple me," Shen explained. "I killed him because he was a terrible war criminal with too much power to be left alive."
"What do you mean, tried to cripple you?"
"His discourse wasn't random or out of a desire to protect his actions as it might have sounded. He deliberately chose to verbally attack me in the places that would hurt an inexperienced or non-self-confident youngster the most. He wanted to crush my will to control me. He had around sixty extra charges of blackmail over the General. He knew what he was doing."
Alicia frowned. "Are you sure about that?" Shen nodded, and she said, "Fuck that guy."
Shen raised an eyebrow in surprise. "I thought you would argue more against killing them. They were defenseless."
She snickered. "Motherfuckers using their power and influence to stay above the law is nothing new to me. I want to kill my relatives, remember?"
He didn't hide his frown. "You sounded much less enthusiastic about killing when we witnessed that girl do it back in the White House."
Alicia crossed her arms. "That was different. She murdered them in cold blood because she disagreed with how they were doing things."
"I did the same," Shen insisted. "Both the girl and I killed for the greater good. As you want to do. We're not that different."
She frowned. Shen waited, but Alicia said nothing in the end. He shook his head, approached the corpses, and crouched.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
"Pillaging, of course," he said without stopping. "Cultivator culture is clear on it. Whatever you leave at home or at your organization's headquarters will go to your descendants or whoever you appoint in your will. If you bring it to the battlefield, it'll belong to the winner. I doubt the Alliance will be much different."
"That's crazy," Alicia said. "Who will go around with their best items if it's like that?"
"I wouldn't leave my spear at home," Shen said while patting the General's corpse, looking for any magic items. "Without it, I'm more likely to die."
"And with it, you're more likely to be attacked by people who want to take it from your corpse," Alicia countered.
Shen shrugged. "It's up to you to find the right balance. But you're right that the most important thing is personal strength. Even in my time, showing too many riches or extraordinary artifacts without the power to protect them was a sin. The perpetrator was almost always found and punished, but the victim would also almost always be already dead by then. We had a cautionary saying: the rules don't matter if you don't get caught. People will take their chances no matter what."
Alicia snorted. "Sounds to me like they were teaching you to ignore the rules if you can get away with it," she said.
Shen froze in realization, then laughed. "Maybe they were, but I was too stupid to understand. Then again, I was also repeatedly taught that any crime in my hometown would be investigated and discovered. It does explain why mystical realms were so dangerous."
Shen had previously considered how few people returned to mystical realms. It seemed he had been right: he had been very sheltered in his upbringing.
"Mystical realms?"
Shen started Identifying everything on the corpses while talking to Alicia. Identify didn't show the dead person's name, so it didn't prevent Identifying items like it did in living beings.
"People always want more than they have," Shen said. "Some people in my hometown specialized in opening portals to other places, searching for opportunities. We called those explorer portals. I don't understand how, but sometimes they found some spatial 'bubbles' in the realities superimposed on our galaxy. We called those bubbles mystical realms."
"So you raided other people? Like Vikings?"
"No," Shen said, taking a golden bracelet from the General's arm. "Simply finding enough minerals in uninhabited places, or even some qi-rich resources, more than made up for the work and resources required to open a portal. If there were sapients on the other side, we negotiated. If they attacked us, we crushed them. If they just ignored us, then we left at a loss. Sometimes, portals were opened to our hometown too. Wars were rare but not unheard of."
Alicia frowned. "And mystical portals are like... a ghost world on top of hours?"
"Superimposed, yes, but I understand it's not on the same... depth as what we see, for lack of a better world. I don't know much about it, only that mystical realms—not mystical portals—were always qi-rich and hid many treasures and secrets. My... government sent agents to make sure the law was followed there, but not enough to keep track of everything. Exploring mystical realms was very dangerous. I was told it was due to the dangers already there, but I wonder if some cultivators didn't just kill others for the riches instead."
Alicia had no further questions, and Shen kept searching. Other than the bracelet, the only other magic item was Martino's boots.
After double-checking the corpses, he Inspected the items again, this time paying attention to what they did.
Gold Bracelet of Shermina (E-)
Enchantments: Anti-Wear (E-), Physical Senses (E-), Mana Sense (E-)
Bracelets of this kind belonged to the gold-tier Priestesses of the long-departed Shermina. It was believed it connected one with the spiritual world, but it was a trick caused by having improved senses.
Boots of Stability (F+)
Enchantments: Self-Repair (F+), Stability (F+)
Makes the wearer less likely to stumble.
Shen expected both more magic items and better ones. Instead, he found simple things that only slightly improved oneself. Those people really hadn't come prepared to battle.
"Do you have magic boots?" Shen asked, passing the boots to Alicia.
His own F+ Autaur Boots had resisted the fire of the missiles' attack in Iceland. He didn't use their functions nowadays, but they felt comfortable and more resistant than mortal boots.
"Nope," she said, taking her shoes off and putting the new ones on.
Shen put the bracelet on. It was a thin gold wristband with a silvery moon surrounded by two diamond stars. It was decidedly feminine, but Shen cared little for what he wore if it could improve his ability to stay alive.
As soon as he put it, he felt something different. The physical senses enchantment did nothing to him, whose stats and senses were already D-rank. However, for the first time in his life, Shen felt mana.
Qi was refreshing. Feeling qi was like feeling a cool breeze on your skin—except beyond it—or static electricity in your soul. Mana, however, felt heavier and dirtier. If qi was a breeze, mana was tainted steam.
Moreover, while qi was all around, Shen felt mana only inside Alicia and the magic items. That confirmed that it was a manufactured type of energy, or at least scarce and controlled by the Alliance.
"Would you mind producing a floating flame, please?" he asked Alicia.
She complied, and he felt mana in the ball. The range wasn't great, the feeling disappeared after a dozen feet, but it was better than nothing.
"Does this helps you at all?" he asked Alicia, passing her the bracelet.
She widened her eyes. "Wow. It's weird to feel mana that isn't connected to me."
"Does it help with your spellcasting in any way?" Shen asked. "Or in understanding your mana better?"
"No." She shook her head. "I can feel my mana much better than exterior mana, with or without it. The bracelet makes no difference for that... And now that I know it's possible to feel mana in items, I think I can find a way to do that myself."
"Then I'll keep it," Shen said. "It'll improve my combat capability."
He put it on again. Sensing mana wasn't pleasant, but just as he didn't care about the thing's appearance, he also didn't mind the sensation. He could only compare it to smelling a fart all the time. He would get used to it; his survival was more important.
"They didn't come prepared to fight, but Martino was very antagonistic of me," Shen said. "I don't get it."
Alicia shrugged. "Don't look my way. I have no fucking idea how assholes think."
Shen frowned, looking at Martino's corpse as if it would have any answers. Shen's Battle Sense detected dozens of people outside the restaurant's kitchen, yet the man hadn't brought anyone to protect him after Shen's strike. Moreover, no one had come to investigate the screaming, which hinted at them being previously told not to interfere.
"Martino wasn't a Guardian," he said, "so he didn't have extra anger issues. The General, who did have it, was calmer than him. What is going on?"
"Some people are just stupid," Alicia tried to help despite saying she had no idea what had happened.
"He was in a position of power," Shen insisted. "He had a General under him, and the Major obeyed his command to leave the room. We know that the Major brought a lot of air support when she came to us. Martino wasn't small fry.
"People in power, especially if they rose to power themselves like he claimed, aren't stupid enough to threaten the life of someone who just proved they are willing to do them physical harm. Even if he interpreted it as me being unwilling to go all the way and killing him, I could've hurt him badly again. How could—" he stopped talking when he realized something. "Oh."
"What is it?" she asked.
"He wanted me to hurt him," Shen concluded. "He would use it against me in some way. That explains the General's reaction, too. She was a military woman yet didn't even try to put herself between Martino and me. It was all a setup, but I bet they never expected me to kill them."
"That sounds very dumb for someone you said wasn't small fry," Alicia pointed out.
"It does, doesn't it?" Shen shook his head. "I guess we'll never know what they thought, but they were clearly given bad intel about how far I'm willing to go—or concluded stupid things from good intel. Either way, they are dead, and it's time we figure out what we're going to do now."
"Leaving sounds good," Alicia said at once.
"Six days in a war zone doesn't sound so bad," Shen agreed. "We're strong, don't need to eat or sleep, and have anti-boredom enhancements. But we need to find where the Maiden was when she entered the tutorial. We're here to save her, after all."
"As far as we know, she'll arrive in Florence. We can just follow the fight when she's about to arrive."
Shen thought for a moment and ended up disagreeing. "That might backfire if the fight was far from where we might be at the time." He moved toward the door that separated the kitchen from the restaurant's dining room. "We should just ask."
On the other side, he found a military administrative room. Uniformed people sat by tables, discussed things, and walked everywhere. Notebooks and papers showed a lot of information, and a big map on a long table—created by putting smaller tables together—showed the disposition of troops around the city.
An X on the map with the label "Marzia" showed precisely the building where that underground restaurant was.
The few people who noticed Shen didn't come to do something about him, though they showed surprise. He immediately turned, grabbed Alicia by the waist—she was walking after him, and they almost collided—and kept walking. Soon, he was out of the door through which he had entered the place.
"Marzia will arrive in this building," Shen explained as he put Alicia on the ground. "There was a map and a big X. I doubt they will say anything different if I ask."
The kitchen's staff entrance led to a small room with a few doors. Shen took the exit, finding himself on a very long, narrow concrete stairway leading to street level. He and Alicia climbed it quickly.
Two war tanks and multiple soldiers protected the stairs. Shen grabbed Alicia again, jumped over the protection—no one attacked, as he was leaving instead of invading, and they had no orders to prevent that, it seemed—and disappeared into the city.
The following days passed fast. Alicia and Shen kept hiding or killing anyone they identified as enemy troops. They also got unlocked smartphones from their fallen foes and got internet access.
There was a lot of news about the US. After deliberation, Congress had confirmed that it was indeed illegal for any state to declare independence. A civil war of gigantic proportions had arrived in America.
Evelyn appeared a lot on the news too. The civil war made almost everyone worried about the threat of the upcoming rifts. Evelyn was the face of the solution, the Guardian Association.
The Guardian Association claimed to be looking to protect Earth from external threats and nothing else. Its members wouldn't interfere with the civil war but instead wait to deal with the rifts. The US Congress had already given it its blessing to operate in the non-seceded states. They had also passed a law allowing military Guardians to temporarily leave service and join the Association until the danger of rifts was adequately assessed.
Shen had gotten plenty of messages. The US government hadn't shut down or taken control of his social media accounts, though he guessed they were now using his access to track him down. He didn't care. He could deal with whatever they threw at him.
Almost all Pioneers he had contact with agreed Marzia should be protected. He sent them a message saying he was in the area and telling them where Marzia would arrive at. He doubted whoever might intercept the message would have difficulty finding out about the location, but the "common people" like the Pioneers might.
Finally, Italy was the main focus of what remained of news agencies and social media—by the way, many people swore the Alliance had to be interfering for the internet to still be a thing.
Pictures of destroyed Italian cities, especially Florence, were all over the internet. Videos of attacks, torture, and gore were shared without limits. No one seemed to know why the filters were off.
People argued for and against the Maiden, but Shen got tired of it after a few minutes. No one wanted to change their minds; they just repeated the same things and offended each other.
His relationship with Alicia improved a lot. They shared both superficial and personal things about themselves. Shen talked about how he had felt lonely as a child, and Alicia told him she was afraid of boys and was glad he hadn't exploited her weakness to abuse her.
Shen even participated at the beginning of a session she did manage to set up online with her therapist, though the audio delay was annoying to deal with.
Most of his idle time was spent training. Mastering Combat, plus the personal knowledge his Battle Sense gave him, gave him the extra edge he needed to level up his spear Skill.
| Skill Level Up — Windstorm Spear Art (C-) — Level 4
The knowledge of a C- Skill at level 4 was enough to push his understanding of Zephyr ahead too. The Windstorm Spear Art drank heavily from the Concept of Windstorm from the Laws of Wind, and Zephyr came from the same Law. The insights he got pushed it way, way ahead.
Currently, his levels of insight on his Concepts were at 90% Sharpness, 87% Zephyr, 66% Arc Flash, 65% Flow, and between 22 to 47% Boundlessness.
That was a result of studying mortal laws of physics, which gave him a fresh perspective on many things, the extra 10% learning ability provided by his Title, a lot of meditation back in his house, training his Skills, and using his Battle Sense to better apply his Concepts to his body—which, in turn, let him understand the Concepts better.
He also improved his footwork, but not enough to reach level 7.
Lastly, his Battle Sense's range had significantly increased. Merely merging Combat with War's ability had been enough to double its range—all he had needed to do was try to push it further. After realizing it, he also took his time to study the ability.
His desperate defense against the missiles back in Iceland had been crucial for that improvement. When he had pushed against Reality, he had felt how the Laws weaved the fabric of existence together. It let him understand better how his Concepts could simply connect him with his allies and enemies—and without energy expenditure to boot.
Shen managed to push his Battle Sense up to six hundred yards, though the number of people he could connect with was still limited to about five hundred. On the positive side, the "Combat part" of his ability now worked on them all, enemies and allies both—though the fewer people he used it on, the more moves ahead he could plan against them.
Another improvement was feeling vague impressions of traps, weapons, and the like. Those impressions didn't take the slots of the people he could feel, which was great.
All in all, it was a significant improvement that he was proud of.
His Battle Sense was one of the best tools in his arsenal. Shen still hadn't found anyone who could block the ability. He guessed going against it required a mastered Concept. Fortunately, no one seemed to be there yet.
Shen felt like a well-oiled machine created for slaughter. He also felt like he had hit a bottleneck. He had just improved the most he could without something to push him ahead.
To go further, he required actual challenges.
Earth, it seemed, lacked those.
"After saving Marzia, I'll go find Sai, then search for a way to find my clan's ancestral grounds," Shen informed Alice on an evening.
It had been four days since he had killed Martino and Boisclair.
Shen had admitted online to killing Martino and Boisclair, whom he had learned were the Free Republic of Florence's Interim President and General, respectively. The Republic's new leaders insisted Shen had fabricated lies about the torture and blackmail.
To make things worse, Martino was also Marzia's father, who had been coordinating all efforts to save her. His claims of wanting to protect Marzia fell on deaf ears. Shen didn't think there was any scenario where she wouldn't sanction his Title now, either.
He still didn't regret it.
Either way, both sides called him a murderer and wanted his head.
"Sounds good," Alicia replied from where she was sitting, looking at a black fireball floating in front of her.
They were in a destroyed house's basement. Shen had had to move a lot of debris out of the way, but they had learned that air surveillance made staying outside too annoying. Everyone found them and tried to kill them even after repeated failures.
"Regardless of how fruitful my search for the ancestral grounds is, I'll go looking for challenging rifts next," Shen continued. "And I guess I wouldn't mind checking the Alliance's sanctioned training grounds."
He felt the front lines were still a big no. On a scale of power that went from G to A, his D-rank was right in the middle. He wanted to be at least above average before facing Void Spawn, though his plans might change depending on what he learned in the future, especially on the training grounds. For all the tutorial had taught them, it had said very little of the power balance in the Alliance—probably on purpose.
"I'll be right behind you," Alicia said absentmindedly.
She had revealed to him that her therapist had pointed out that she was in a dependency relationship with him. It was supposedly bad for her, but she wasn't ready to move on. She would go wherever he went for the foreseeable future.
The ground shook as something exploded nearby—Shen estimated it was closer than a mile. That was pretty common these days, so he ignored it until the first explosion was quickly followed by others—and got closer.
He activated his Battle Sense.
In the past, the ability had automatically connected with whoever was nearby, without his input. It still did that, but when there were more than five hundred people in its range, it came with an extra "function."
Shen felt a very muted warmth in any direction with a living being he wasn't liked to. He could will the ability to connect with whoever was in that direction, and it would link him to the first person there, at the cost of removing one of the already existing five hundred connections.
He was currently only a few hundred yards away from a military encampment. His Battle Sense immediately connected him to five hundred people, none of whom were close to the explosions—which he felt were artillery shells hitting the ground.
Shen had to will his Battle Sense to connect with whoever the shells were trying to hit—there was warmth in that direction—and he found them instantly.
The War part of the ability let him feel the person as if they were in front of him and he had instantly analyzed everything he could about them.
The person he connected with was a girl around eighteen years old running for her life. She was wearing tight-fitting leather armor and wielding a shortsword. Her facial expression and body language were of pure terror.
The Combat part of his ability gave him even more details about her. He felt her power—middle E-rank—analyzed how she ran and held the sword, determined how likely she was to fight, assessed her threat, and made countless battle plans on how to kill her.
She was running at F+ speed, and her path would place her a couple buildings to the side.
That wasn't the first time Shen saw or felt a young person in Italy; he had killed plenty of them in the past few days. It was also not wise to get involved in a fight he knew nothing about; there were no innocents on that battlefield—e had found not a single civilian around except as corpses.
So, Shen didn't think for even a second that she was a naive Guardian who had taken a wrong turn and suddenly found herself in the middle of Florence two days before the Maiden arrived.
However, something in her absolute panic made him want to save her.
Maybe it was simply the basic human decency that Alicia had accused him of not having when it came to the US President. Possibly, his hormones simply wanted him to save a girl in need. Or perhaps he was just bored.
Either way, Shen said, "Be right back," and rushed to the rescue.
He just hoped she wasn't an enemy, or he would have to kill her anyway.
Shen got to the woman in half a second and Inspected her.
Valentina Bianchi (E) — 45 / 110 HP
Valentina had long, curly red hair held in a ponytail and light caramel eyes. Her leather armor was black and laden with golden metal plates, giving it a beautiful appearance. It was also quite tight, more than any armor Shen had seen yet.
Her body, armor, and something hidden in her neck—probably a necklace—were filled with mana. She also kept a transparent spell barrier in the air to provide some manner of protection against the artillery shells in case she was too slow to get out of the way.
Shen passed by her and struck the next shell head-on. He deployed around him War-Combat Qi—which he decided to call Foundational Qi—around him and easily quelled the explosion and pushed the shrapnel aside. Artillery shrapnel was made of huge pieces of metal, and it gave Shen an idea. He redirected the pieces to a vast area around him. The metal moving at a fast speed destroyed whatever it hit, creating a cloud of dust to mask Shen's following movements.
Valentina slowed down and raised her arms when everything around her blew up. Shen swiftly grabbed her and ran back to his hideout before she finished the movement.
Seconds after he had told Alicia he would be right back, he returned with the flushed and confused Valentina.
Alicia looked surprised for a moment before pretending she was clearing a tear from the corner of her eye. "Look at my big boy! He's bringing girls home now!"
Valentina finally realized she had been brought by someone and turned quickly to see who it was. The word "boy" and Alicia's joke probably hadn't helped; Valentina might as well have thought she had been kidnapped by some weirdos.
When she saw Shen, however, her fear quickly turned into delight.
"The human God blessed me!" She stepped toward Shen, who instinctively stepped back. "Please come with me to save people who need saving!"
Shen and Alicia exchanged a look; the way she was phrasing it sounded off. "What do you mean?" Shen asked.
"I'm Marzia's friend," Valentina explained. "Her father kidnapped me and some other friends to blackmail her. You know how he's an evil man; you pointed it out in your social media accounts. Right?"
Shen stopped himself from showing any facial expression, but the way Valentina talked was quickly going from off to suspicious very fast.
She continued her tale. "The guards kept arguing with each other when you killed Marzia's father, and I used the opportunity to escape. But we need to get there fast to save them. I don't know what'll happen to them now that I escaped."
Shen looked pointedly at her armor. "And did your kidnappers let you keep your magic equipment when they locked you up? Or did they just wait for you to dress up before trying to stop you?"
"They let us have it," she said without missing a beat. "Please, we have to go. Please, I beg you. Please." She put her hands together and jumped a little like a child begging their parents for something. It felt very out of place.
Shen shook his head. Her words were suspicious enough, but more than that, his Battle Sense was still active, and he could tell she was lying through her teeth.
"I don't know what kind of wicked plan you have in your mind," he said, "but believe me, it won't work. I'm basically immune to non-nuclear mortal weaponry, and I can deal with any amount of magic attacks if I need."
"That's why I need you!" she insisted as she started crying. "Please, please, let's save them. Please."
Shen was starting to find that attempt pretty ridiculous, so he tried another approach. "You claim to be a good friend or Marzia, is that correct?"
"Yes! Please, believe me!"
Shen produced his smartphone from the fold in his clothes where he kept it and gave it to her. "Show me any picture of you two together."
She looked afraid at him, then shook her head. "I can't," she said with exaggerated suffering. "You're right; I'm not her friend. I just wanted you to come fast. I really found her actual friends locked up." She looked him straight in the eyes. "I'll explain later, but we don't have much time. Please."
Shen had heard about people who could look someone in the eye and tell whether they were lying. He couldn't. He could only analyze their posture, the trembling of their voices, their pupils' dilatation, temperature, sweat, and heartbeat rate. His Battle Sense let him do all that instantly, using all he knew about people's reactions when they lied.
Obviously, the woman was lying through her teeth, but he didn't understand why she was so insistent.
Had someone elaborated a trap that might actually kill him?
"Stop lying first," he said firmly. "If you explain it to me and I believe you, then I'll follow you."
Valentina looked at him for a while, tears flowing freely from her eyes and whispering, "Please, don't do that to those innocent people waiting for rescue. Please."
Shen wasn't moved.
When Valentina understood nothing she said would change things, something changed inside her, though he couldn't pinpoint what, only feel it through the Battle Sense.
A moment later, She widened her eyes slightly. Then her tears stopped falling, and she showed a completely blank face. There were no emotions lost in her expression at all.
"In your current state, you're incapable of accepting anything I say as the truth," she said while putting her hands on pockets in her upper leather armor. He hadn't even noticed those pockets before. "The sky is blue. Red. Yellow. Your name is Jack. Alicia. Feng Shen."
She was right. Even when she said something that Shen knew was true, he felt like she was lying.
He suddenly found himself very, very wary of the woman.
"Now, let's try something else," she said. "Turn your Conceptual Bond off."
"Conceptual Bond?" Shen asked though he could guess what she meant by the context.
"You're using Concepts to bind yourself to me. Which can be quite dangerous when done to stronger beings, by the way. Go ahead, turn it off," she insisted. "I'll teach you something for free."
Shen frowned, glanced at Alicia—and she understood his look because she started slowly stepping away from the woman—then turned his Battle Sense off.
"The sky is blue. Red. Yellow. Your name is Jack. Alicia. Feng Shen," Valentina repeated.
Valentina hadn't changed anything in her posture or the way she spoke. Even her words were the same. Yet, Shen was now absolutely sure she was telling the truth. Everything he knew told him that, just as it told him the opposite a moment ago. It was as if his knowledge was being rewritten to make him conclude she was telling the truth.
Shen started getting really worried.
"What did you do to me?" he asked, clenching his spear.
"I exist on a different level than you, beyond your comprehension, and your mind is trying to compensate however it can," she explained unworriedly.
"When you use only your ordinary senses," Valentina continued, "you take anything I say as truth because I'm close to what mortals would see as a god, and a god's word is absolute.
"When you use your Conceptual Bond, you take everything I say as a lie because Reality doesn't have a strong enough hold over me. It instinctively rejects me, and you feel that through your active usage of your Concepts.
"I would've never tried this stupid ruse if I had known you had unlocked a Conceptual Bond." She looked at the skies. "I blame you for this, Yornolar."
It became pretty obvious Valentina was from the Alliance. She also at least thought of herself as much superior to Shen, though she might as well be lying. He couldn't read her and wouldn't know.
"How did you identify my 'Conceptual Bond' now if you couldn't before?" he asked directly while reactivating his Battle Sense.
Shen would not let himself be intimidated without a fight. Valentina was still an E-rank unless the system was lying to him—and supposedly, this wasn't any of the two situations in which the system might lie. "Different level" or not, he bet she could still bleed.
"I didn't want to reveal my abilities, so I didn't use them, and some are needed to detect Conceptual Bonds," she clarified. "I miscalculated how weak I should get to approach you. It's hard to differentiate an ant from another, after all."
That kind of explained it, but the way she kept talking as if she was much superior to him... What if she truly believed it? What if it was true?
"Is the system lying to me about your strength?" Shen asked.
"Of course," she said matter-of-factly as if that didn't put in check everything he knew about the system.
Either she or the system was lying. Shen had to pick one to decide on his course of action, but for that, he needed information.
"Who are you?" he asked. "What's going on in here?"
"I'm currently... What was my name again? Yes, of course, Valentina Bianchi. I'm here to negotiate. I knew you would get defensive if I asked directly, so I tried to become your friend instead. But not even I can feed false information to a Conceptual Bond or twist it in a way that you wouldn't notice.
"Now, to business. Tell me about this planet's past. How was your home? Who ruled over it? Who were the strong cultivators in your time? Name your price to tell me everything."
Shen's mind was working very fast. How powerful was she? What was her agenda? Why did she want to know about the Eternal Empire?
"I was just living in a small cultivator town—" he started, but that was all he could say before she exploded.
"Don't you lie to me, you disgusting insect!" Valentina suddenly yelled, and Reality trembled.
The world shook. Shen was struck by a sound wave strong enough to deal a few points of damage to him and force him to step back. Alicia screamed and put her hands on her head as if it hurt.
"What?" Valentina said as if surprised at what happened. "No, no! I didn't attack anyone! It's not my fault this anthill is so fragile, and don't you dare say otherwise!" she yelled while looking at the skies, this time without any strange power behind her words. "Yes, of course. Yes. What? No, I won't tell him that! That will make everything much harder— Yes. Yes, of course. Alright."
The strangest thing about her was that she still showed no emotion on her face. Not when she had yelled, neither when she had been talking to someone invisible. Her voice was emotional, but that was all.
She looked at Shen. "I was ordered to tell you that I cannot and will not, under any circumstances, attack anyone on Earth unless attacked first. No matter what, my supervisor will not give me permission. Not that the last two ants were much to write home about." She rolled her eyes. "So, your price?"
Shen ignored Valentina and approached Alicia. "Are you alright?" he asked, though the answer was an obvious "no." She had fallen to her knees, and blood was coming out of her ears, nose, and eyes.
"Oh, stop it," Valentina said. "It's just a scratch. Heal."
The way she said the last word had power. A kind of power that Shen felt in his very bones. It was primal, powerful, and promised more, like a beast growling in the depths of the universe.
Reality twisted itself to obey. Shen felt it in a way that was hard to describe. Alicia seemed to flick, her image swiftly doubling before one of them disappeared. It was like her existence had just been instantly rewound in time. One moment, she was hurting on the ground. The next, she was whole again, standing, and the blood was gone.
"See, she's fine," Valentina said. "Stop ignoring me or avoiding my request and tell me what you want," she insisted. "Riches? Power? Information? Name your price, tell me about this planet, and we'll all be happy."
Shen looked at Valentina—or whatever her name was—with new eyes. What she had done... Shen had felt neither qi nor mana being used. She had commanded Reality in a way that he couldn't even explain.
It was as if she was a ruler that all existence had to obey.
She was also clearly unstable. She had said she was forbidden from attacking, but how could he believe she would comply with those limits? He didn't even have any proof she was talking to someone real instead of hearing imaginary voices in her head.
There was no chance he would ever tell her anything about the Eternal Empire.
The big question was: should he fight her—and her mysterious power—to keep his secret, or should he tell a lie?
At the Primordial Bridge headquarters, Commander Kanikuli had been sitting by the table for the past month or so. The Primordial Rising Star, Yornolar, had sat by the other side as they watched the Maiden's actions.
Their conversations had been superficial and brief, with significant silence gaps in between. The chubby gnome leader always tried to direct the discussions in a direction that would benefit his men by showing glimpses of the Primordials' attitude. The over ten million troops were almost like statues for all the emotion they showed, but Kanikuli had still noticed how they had been displeased with what they saw as arrogance in Yornolar's words.
Nevertheless, the more time passed, the more the members of the Primordial Bridge understood that a Primordial didn't just think they were superior; they were.
What they saw and felt made it very evident to them.
Spacetime around Yornolar was compressed and contorted around him. His armor Deephase Nanocrystal armor suit reflected the stars beyond the bridge, and in the middle of the distortion, it made him a dark, formless existence.
The spacetime distortion affected the Primordial, his chair, half the table, and part of the ground below him. At that moment, only S-ranks could affect anything within. Yet, as soon as the phenomenon disappeared, all objects that were currently nigh-indestructible would simply cease to be. There would be not even any atom left.
That wasn't happening because of anything the Primordial Rising Star had done. Instead, that was the mere consequence of his existence. Reality couldn't bear a Primordial's presence in the same place for too long, so it created that sort of cocoon to protect itself.
That alone was proof that they existed beyond most people's comprehension.
Speaking of comprehension, most of the Primordial Bridge's regulars, and even some officers, were benefitting from witnessing such a wonder. Their understanding of spacetime was increasing just by being there. In that past Earthen month, none of the millions of Guardians standing attention in rank and file at the bridge had moved even a millimeter, except maybe their sensory organs to better observe the distortion.
Kanikuli had been pretty happy with such arrangements—until the Maiden approached the human cultivator for a second time.
Now, he was frowning heavily as he looked at the Primordial Maiden's actions on Earth. She had begged a human to do something. BEGGED. Even if it had been an attempt at a ruse, the Bridge had paid for it.
Their entire headquarters were filled with cracks caused by Yornolar's slight displeasure. It had taken the power of all generals and officers to protect the regulars from dying.
The episode had served to demonstrate to the men the Primordials' complete disregard for every other living being in existence. The Primordial Rising Star was easier to deal with than any other Primordial that Kanikuli had ever met, but that didn't mean Yornolar wasn't proud of his race. He hadn't liked seeing the Primordials' pride tossed aside when the Maiden begged.
The gnome was glad the bridge had survived Yornolar's expression of displeasure at all. Earth, however, would be gone soon. The fabric of Reality was bending around Earth as the Maiden prepared to break the bindings the system had placed on her—not that they had done anything to stop her Whisper when she healed that female human.
Kanikuli would be willing to bet the planet wouldn't exist for much longer.
Not unless he interfered.
The Commander of the Primordial Bridge stood up. He marched determinedly toward the Primordial Rising Star, whose eyes were still fixed on the far-distant Earth.
Kanikuli stopped in front of the Primordial, kneeled, then prostrated himself on the Primordial's feet.
"This lowly one begs the supreme being to exchange this lowly one's life for that lowly planet's continued existence," the gnome pleaded.
Usually, Kanikuli's life would be worth much more than the entire human race. He was one of the few S-ranks in the Alliance. He could protect many more lives than the mere few billions on Earth by staying alive and fighting the Void.
However, circumstances begged to differ. The life of the Primordial Bridge's Commander was always tied to either the Primordial Maiden or the Primordial Rising Star, whichever was the strongest at the time of the Anointment. Kanikuli couldn't leave the bridge while the Primordial Rising Star was there, and after the Primordial left, both Kanikuli and Yornolar would die within days. That wasn't enough time to do anything meaningful except perhaps die for Earth.
The gnome envied the first few Bridge Commanders in history. Back then, when it was time for a Primordial Rising Star to Rise or for a Maiden to Debut, Commanders went to fight in the front lines and died in a glorious blaze, taking countless Void Spawn with them.
However, the Void had learned to tell when that was about to happen. The Void Spawn all but disappeared from the front lines for the last hundred standard years or so. That had many geopolitical and social implications, but for Kanikuli, it only meant his chance at a final, triumphant moment was taken from him.
He had absolutely nothing meaningful left to do. His enemies were long dead, his descendants' futures were protected, his subordinates knew what to do, and all the charity he had been willing to do by teaching others had already been done in his very long life.
Kanikuli had briefly entertained the idea of fighting for Earth, but whenever a Primordial was defeated or died, more Primordials came for a reckoning. The circumstances didn't matter. They were tyrants who bore no challenge to their power. If Kanikuli won, Earth would be destroyed anyway to teach the Alliance a lesson.
So, only submissive self-sacrifice was left to him. Dying for mere billions of sapients wouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things, but it was better than waiting for an uneventful and worthless death sitting on his ass.
He only hoped he succeeded; whether the Primordial Rising Star would even look his way to consider his request remained to be seen.
Shen was thinking about how to gain time to fabricate some believable history about his past when he got two system notifications.
| Achr Vanuugandr: Our common friend says you should not lie to the being in front of you. Tell her everything.
| SYSTEM WARNING: You've received unauthorized communication during Earth's isolation period. You will be investigated.
Achr Vanuugandr was the giant wolf that had given Shen the Immortal Emperor's orders. Receiving a message like this told Shen many things. The yellow-colored warning told him even more. However, Shen left the analysis of what all of that might mean to another time; right now, he had a crazy woman to talk to.
His Battle Sense immediately detected an echo of surveillance around him. It was like feeling someone behind you while you checked something on the smartphone, but stronger.
Valentina seemed to detect it too. She frowned and looked in one direction through the walls, then another. A moment later, she harumphed and said, "Don't interfere in my business. I'll track the culprits myself."
Shen had previously entertained the possibility that Valentina might have been talking to some imaginary being. But the subsequent notification he got told him that at least the system was paying close attention to her words—and that she had a lot of sway in the Alliance because the system obeyed her.
| Warning removed. Investigation canceled.
The feeling of being watched disappeared just like that.
Everything pointed at Valentina not being someone Shen wanted to mess with: the strange power she had shown, the Immortal Emperor going back on his desire of secrecy to please her, the system obeying her will. For all of Martino's hubris, he had touched on a truth of Shen's track in the tutorial: Shen hadn't faced a situation where he couldn't do anything but submit.
That sat wrong with him. War accepted a tactical retreat, Combat understood stepping back to punch harder later, but this situation was different. This was complete acquiescence. There was no planned revenge, no comeback in the foreseeable future. Shen had to obey, and that was it.
At least, that's what they were telling him to do.
In all honesty, he shouldn't care about telling the truth. Putting his life at risk for no good reason was stupid. Still, he couldn't just lower his head like that.
"Tell me exactly what you want to know so I can name my price," Shen said.
Valentina turned her eyes back to him and frowned. Shen wasn't sure if her show of emotion instead of a blank face was better or worse for him.
"You'll use that knowledge to lie about what matters the most, won't you?" she asked.
"No," Shen replied sincerely. "I'll tell you exactly what you want to know."
She tilted her head slightly as she considered it. "Very well, I want to know who you talked to in the Pioneer Tutorial, what you talked about, and the general gist of things on Earth before you went to sleep. I'll ask questions to clarify some points as you talk."
Shen nodded and was about to name his price when he felt terror.
It was an overwhelming feeling that came from nowhere. Shen just knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that if he tried to exchange the information for something, he would die. That certainty had been pushed into his brain like a Skill, maybe even by the system itself. There was no doubt about the outcome of this conversation, no way around it, only the absolute truth of his end if he didn't submit.
Shen didn't want to submit. He hated it. He refused it with his entire being.
And yet, should he die for his pride?
His heart screamed, and his Path trembled as he bowed down—with a silver lining to keep his sanity.
"I'll not name a price," he said slowly, and the terror subsided a little. "I'll tell you what you want to know, and I'll let you decide what that information is worth to you."
Then, the fear peaked. Whatever or whoever was pushing it into him wanted him to tell everything to Valentina for free.
Screw them; Shen would not submit. Maybe it was needless prideful, but he would rather die free than live in fear.
Boundlessness was part of him for a reason.
Yornolar didn't look in Kanikuli's direction at all. He kept staring at the Maiden.
And suddenly, She was there.
The Primordial Maiden, back into her combat suit, materialized beside Yornolar, though her head was turned toward the gnome instead.
"Do you really believe your worthless life is worth anything, pathetic creature?" she said with a void full of scorn. He hadn't noticed she had been listening to their conversations at all. "If it were my desire to destroy that world or this bridge of yours, it would be my prerogative. Die knowing your sacrifice meant nothing. You can kill yourself now."
Kanikuli froze for half an instant before obeying at once. Any slower than that, and his subordinates would try to interfere. It was better for him to die a meaningless death just because the Maiden got angry than let the entire Primordial Bridge be eradicated to be made a point of.
He grasped his Realization and folded it on itself to obliterate it. That was the only way an S-rank could commit suicide without external aid. He held nothing back to succeed as fast as possible. The longer he stayed alive, the greater the chance one of his generals would try to interfere.
His Realization was destroyed, and death would follow swiftly.
Or rather, it should follow swiftly, but it was stopped with two words from Yornolar.
"Stay alive," the Primordial commanded.
Back on Earth, the Maiden had Whispered a heal. Now, Yornolar used his fully formed Voice instead of the much weaker power the Maiden had employed.
Before that very moment, it was a death sentence for any S-rank in the entire multiverse to lose their Realization. There was no way to survive it at all.
However, from that moment onward, the rules of existence changed. All existence bowed entirely to the Primordial's command. Reality was wholly rearranged to make his will true.
The multiverse froze as all Laws rearranged themselves to make Yornolar's will possible. That caused multiple loopholes to be introduced to the previously almost perfect interactions between Laws, which forced Reality to rearrange itself again. The chain reaction was an endless feedback loop that took an eternity to conclude. Fortunately, the Laws of Time were also frozen, and as such, time itself held no meaning.
Very few beings were powerful enough to sense what happened. Fewer still could do something about it. None dared.
When it was done, Kanikuli felt like someone had thrown a black hole through his soul. He should be dead, yet he was commanded to stay alive, so he did. Unfortunately, there was no command to live healthily.
Before fainting, the last thing he saw was the Primordials disappearing from the bridge and his generals rushing to help him.
Shen told Valentina everything she wanted to know, holding nothing back. The Eternal Empire was laid bare before her. He also told her everything about his meeting with Achr.
Valentina kept throwing demeaning comments at everything he said.
"Calling it Eternal Empire is a joke, correct?"
"An Immortal Emperor who was afraid of the Alliance doesn't deserve that name."
"Really? In human language, you call it 'cultivation'? I thought you were ants, but I was wrong. You're more akin to weeds."
Anger grew inside him, but the more furious he became, the greater the feeling of terror became, and it helped him control himself.
He couldn't tell if someone wanted him to survive or simply didn't want him to attack their protege. He continued talking nonetheless. It didn't take long for Valentina to say she was satisfied with what she had heard.
"That's enough," she said, then looked at Shen from head to toe as if examining a curious bug. "I have decided on your reward." She made a pause, then smiled wickedly. "You already developed a Conceptual Bond, but you don't have an aura yet. I'll help you with that."
Shen raised an eyebrow. That sounded actually helpful, but it didn't reflect her twisted smile at all.
"I know you like fighting," she continued, "so you should focus on that. But what is a battle without a little spilled blood? So, go kill, and don't stop until you've developed your aura."
Valentina simply disappeared as soon as she said that.
Shen, however, didn't notice it. He was focusing inwards.
Something was invading him. He couldn't feel any energy or anything of the kind, but his Battle Sense made it clear that his physical integrity had been breached somehow. What he could feel was what happened after the breach.
His brain was changed and twisted to ensure Valentine's orders would be obeyed.
The Alliance had made him extra aggressive, but now? Now, any part of his brain that could regulate his killing instincts disappeared. Moreover, he received an unquenchable desire to kill and kill and kill without stopping, forever and ever. That was just who he was. He felt that if he stopped, he would die. He had to kill, and he had to do it right now.
He looked around and saw a girl. He almost attacked her, but an echo of a thought came from his soul and made him stop. It told her she was not a target. He should not kill her.
Somehow, he knew the invader had only affected his brain. However, his mind had partially merged with his soul when he ranked up. That was the reason he retained a tiny part of his previous self.
Yet, he didn't delve into those thoughts. He had people to kill, a Concept to master, and an aura to develop. He had no time to waste thinking about anything else.
His desire not to waste time was also what saved the girl nearby. Part of him wanted to kill her; the other part was against it. Reaching a conclusion would be a waste of time. So, he would instead use that time looking for prey that both sides of him agreed with killing.
He didn't even have to look too far. He felt targets nearby with his Battle Sense.
He turned to the door and rushed at his actual targets.
Alicia jumped on top of the half-broken temple as Shen killed everyone inside.
Istanbul was relatively intact. Many buildings had holes on them or were half-collapsed, but compared to Florence, they might as well be considered brand new.
It had many fewer corpses too.
Shen had brutalized Italy; there was no other way of putting it. While they had been in hiding, he had ignored the pro-Maiden troops even when attacked. After Valentina changed him, he started cutting down everyone who showed him any hostility except Alicia.
All troops withdrew from Florence after only a few hours of nonstop carnage. Shen didn't murder those who surrendered, but he cut their vehicles and equipment into pieces and screamed provocatively in front of their faces. Those who tried to do something about it were killed. Those who didn't rise to meet his challenge survived. Then, he went looking for other people.
Half a day later, he had rediscovered the Bounty System and then traveled away from Italy, looking for those who would fight for their lives.
Now, two days later, and only a few hours away from the Human Maiden's arrival, they were in Istanbul. Alicia was glad Shen had been going East at least. It made them closer to Sai.
As for the Maiden, Alicia didn't really care too much about it. She also definitely didn't want to be there when Marzia learned that Shen had killed her father.
All she did these days was follow him, hoping he would find a way to heal himself. Despite his state, she was the safest close to him. Not only did he not attack her, but he also came to her assistance if she was threatened.
Alicia wasn't sure for how long she would keep following though. All that killing was getting to her. He hadn't stopped for a single minute ever since he had started, and she was beginning to wonder if it was reversible at all.
Maybe he would just keep on killing forever—or until put to rest by someone stronger than him.
Valentina's words had talked about developing an aura. Alicia had no idea what that was or how difficult it was. What if only A-ranks could do it? Then it would be an impossible task without end.
One thing that made her continue was a visible improvement in his movements. She wouldn't have noticed if she weren't E-rank or had E+ agility because it was so minute, but she was sure of what she was seeing. His spear cut a little bit deeper, his movements were slightly more effective, and even his speed increased. Shen was becoming a more effective meat grinder.
There might be hope for him to accomplish that aura thing yet.
Alicia felt guilty for feeling more hopeful the better he became at wanton slaughter, but it helped that he was getting rid of people with big Bounties on their heads.
Shen killed the last person with a Bounty in the temple and stopped for a moment. Alicia jumped from the point she had climbed and waited a second. As expected, he had just stopped to check the next Bounty and was now running toward his new target.
Alicia followed to the best of her ability. She would lose sight of him, but the desperate cries of his foes would lead her to him again.
He felt the thousands of people underground and established a course to kill them as effectively as possible.
Then he acted.
No one could stop him. Whenever an obstacle appeared, he assessed the cost of crushing it versus going around it and took the path of least resistance. He wanted to kill more and more; wasting time made him feel physically ill.
Through killing, he improved. He was War at war, and Combat in combat. He experimented with his limits and overcame himself repeatedly in all things.
His Skills hadn't evolved yet, but they had gotten more refined—or maybe, it would be fitting to say they had gotten more personal. If before they were like a mass-produced spear he had bought at a random store, they were starting to feel like a spear crafted by a master artisan just for him.
The Windstorm Spear Art was benefiting the most from his unique state. He had been so very wrong about being unable to improve without a challenge. By fighting any person, he could test new theories, see how they reacted, and extrapolate how stronger people would fare.
It was the same with his Zephyr-Gale Footwork. He got creative, saw how his foes reacted, and estimated how stronger beings would've reacted.
That extrapolation was accurate thanks to his Battle Sense. He was a master of War and Combat. He had said so before, yet he had never truly understood what that meant.
The Concept of War contained the wisdom of all types of war in all of Reality. The Concept of Combat was the same. They were pieces of the big puzzle of existence that held everything together and working.
By mastering those Concepts, he had become a master of those pieces of the very universe.
The shift in perspective and his pursuit of excellence no matter the cost in human lives had helped him improve his Battle Sense the most. He connected to everyone in a thousand yards range now; that was the least a war master should do. He was still trying to push it further, but he felt a piece was missing.
Sharpness.
He had called his Path the Path of the Spear previously. While it was a bit off, it showed how deeply connected to the Spear his Path was.
Yet, he had almost shifted from it by mastering War and Combat first. Both Concepts, alone, were more closely concepts to the Laws of Conflict than the Spear. He needed an anchoring element amid his mastered Concepts to bring them back to track.
That was directly relevant to his desire to develop an aura. He knew little about the subject, most of it thanks to the information given to him when he leveled his footwork to 6. However, he instinctively knew that his foundational Concepts had to produce an aura first, or something would go wrong.
So, everything pushed him toward mastering Sharpness first, and he did everything he could to accomplish it.
That involved a lot of cutting different things. He had found he couldn't cut through a war tank's gun barrel, but most thinner vehicles were fair game. Concrete felt like butter. And flesh...
Cutting flesh was an art.
There was a Flow of veins and blood, a pattern to the way muscles were interwoven together. By following it, he could cut with maximum efficacy. His spear was currently dexterous enough to separate a vein from muscle on a living, moving person.
His Concept of Sharpness sat at 93%. Only the final step remained.
Yet, he was more excited about another insight he had gotten: all his Concepts were connected.
War, Combat, and Sharpness were obviously connected as Concepts of the same Law, but Flow was also present in all three. Zephyr gave him a subtly to his movements and attention to minute details that also pervaded everything. Arc Flashes happened on arc faults and gave him insights on the aspects of continuity and how to capitalize on any failure—or even purposefully break his Flow for a greater effect.
And Boundless pushed every Concept beyond its limits.
He knew he was in a singular state of existence. It wasn't Boundlessness, not entirely, but it was much closer than he had been in the past. He truly touched on the Concept now, understood it on an intrinsic level he had never before.
Whispers of honor and morals, ethics and fairness, responsibility and duty kept coming from somewhere deep in his mind, yet he brushed it all aside with ease.
He had the freedom to be his Path in a way he had never before, all parts of it, without a controlling, limiting will.
Not killing the annoying woman following him around was still restricting though. To make things worse, every time he saw her, he felt the depths of his mind rein him in a little bit more. He was already not as Boundless as he had been initially. He was changing.
Yet, the realization that his marvelous state would not be eternal as he wanted, not Boundless in itself, only pushed him to strive more and better. He killed more, faster, better. He improved.
He had long forgotten his name, but he knew himself as War, Combat, Sharpness, Zephyr, Flow, Arc Flash, and Boundlessness.
He selected a new Bounty and rushed its way.
Suddenly, precisely, or quickly; in the proper context, "sharp" could mean any of those things and more.
Indeed, he had drawn a little from those meanings as he pushed his Concept forward. However, he had first touched on the Concept of Sharpness through the Laws of the Spear. Now, more than ever, he needed to focus on his Concept's origin Law to anchor his foundations on the Spear.
Therefore, he would seek a way to master Sharpness in the physicality of his weapon rather than in any other aspect of the Concept.
But what did it mean to be physically sharp?
The definition of sharp was to have an edge or point that could cut or pierce through something. Indeed, that explained well what happened when he beheaded his enemies or stabbed their hearts.
In other words, the definition boiled down to two aspects: cutting edge and piercing point.
The aspects had adjectives and nouns. Merely having an edge or a point wasn't enough; what each accomplished also mattered. Likewise, a ball might pierce a body if enough power was applied, and a baseball bat might cut through something, but their form wasn't sharp.
Form and attainment, Sharpness needed both.
Determining if an object's form was an edge or a point was easy, so he didn't waste time trying to get too philosophical about it. Instead, he focused on the adjectives.
What did it mean to pierce or cut? It meant separating something whole, dividing it, splitting it apart. And something was sharp when its form facilitated those results. So the result came first, and the form existed to assist it.
Sharpness was about finesse and effectiveness, about splitting something apart with as little effort as possible. That's what differentiated something sharp from a dull object that would also cut or pierce. The amount of force used to accomplish the goal was inversely proportional to how sharp an object was.
Therefore, a sharp blade or point sought to be as infinitesimally small as possible to more easily separate the parts of whatever came into contact with it.
Sharpness sought the extreme to cut through anything.
He had once thought that for something to be sharp, it only had to be able to cut through its target and nothing else. While there was truth in there, that was also misleading. There was an absolute Sharpness to be pursued.
And he would reach it.
He was in a military base, killing all who protected a mass-murderer Colonel whose head was worth 5,000 AP. A pitiful sum, but he wasn't in this for the AP.
He killed and killed and found his swings getting easier, the armor and flesh of his opponents resisting less. He not only exploited his enemies' openings but also the flaws of how their flesh was knit together by nature itself.
His Spear's blade was filled with Sharp Qi. He kept pushing it to the extreme, willing repeatedly, with all his willpower, to have it get thinner without losing its stability. The more he tried, the better he understood the process, and the better he became at cutting and piercing through trial and error, the sharper he managed to make his blade.
One insight that he had gotten through killing was that a sharp blade also needed to be stable to be useful. A paper sheet was thinner than many blades, yet it seldom cut and only through the skin of unsuspecting people. He couldn't have that. So he killed more to find out how to push extra stability in his blade.
The fulfillment of his Sharpness mastery would be forged in blood and tempered by death.
He forced his will upon reality. The Sharpness of his blade was stretched beyond its natural boundaries. The very physical form of the metal was changed to represent its new Sharpness just because he filled it with qi and willed it to become Sharper.
He had been doing that for a long time. He would keep doing it until it worked. There was no wasted movement or invading thoughts, only a goal and the living whetstones he used to accomplish it.
And suddenly, Shen's perspective changed.
While Shen looked at an enemy, he was abruptly made aware of exactly how easy it would be for him to cut them. He understood precisely where his blade would find the least resistance. He looked at a concrete block and knew exactly how well it would withstand his spear and how to better cut it.
The world became just a block waiting for him to split it apart.
Shen looked around, localized the perfect target to test his newfound understanding of Sharpness, and rushed at it. His will was applied to his blade's metal through qi, forcing it to shape into his ideal of perfect Sharpness. The blade was sharpened to the maximum he could make it. One day, he would be able to split atoms, but not yet.
Today, he would merely split a war tank.
Shen reached the heavily armored vehicle at full speed. He jumped and rotated his body while keeping his momentum ahead. He just knew how the steel was held together and chose a weak spot at the front of the gun barrel to start his attack.
His blade cut through the metal more easily than he had thought it would.
Shen was like a saw going over the tank at high speed. While doing that, he connected to the Concept of Sharpness, and knowledge about it slammed into his mind.
He had mastered it.
And in mastering it, his blade became even sharper... and longer.
Shen's qi was enhancing the blade's sharpness, and now, it went one step further. It grabbed that enhanced sharpness and projected it away from the physical object. A nine feet tall and three feet wide blade of pure qi materialized beyond the spear's reach and cut as well as the blade did.
The qi expenditure was enormous, but the astounding effect was worth it.
When Shen stepped on the other side of the tank, it had been clearly cut exactly in half. Yet, his blade had been so Sharp and his cut so perfect—and the object so heavy—that only a few dents could be seen at the top of the tank.
When mastered, War had given Shen an awareness of his surroundings and slightly increased his personal power. Combat had given him an awareness of himself and his enemies and significantly improved his might.
Sharpness let him acknowledge how to better cut his targets, made him extra aware of his blade, and increased his spear's power beyond its physical limits.
The Concept quickly merged with War and Combat. The amalgamation pushed his Battle Sense to yet another level. Besides feeling everyone in range, Shen could now also tell how easy it would be to cut them, on top of understanding it just by looking at something.
As he had expected, adding the Concept of Sharpness to his foundational mix anchored it better in the Laws of the Spear. Shen's ability with the weapon underwent a "sharp" rise.
He could kill so much better now!
Shen smiled... then frowned.
Shen.
He was thinking of himself as Shen.
He knew his name now.
Mastering another Concept had made him master himself a little more, and that deep, annoying part of him had benefitted from it. He could feel it telling him to just stop and think things through instead of continuing like that.
Shen's time was limited. He had to rush to improve the most before he was once again bound by the annoyances of society.
It upset him to levels he couldn't even begin to describe. He was also Boundless, and the thought of getting limited again was the worst thing that could happen to him.
So he pushed back; he pushed back with his all. Doing so wouldn't extend his time, he just knew it, but it let him stop following some annoying rules the "deeper guy" was trying to make him follow. He had previously acquiesced because he didn't want to waste time fighting back, but now, he saw value in doing so.
Shen would no longer be limited by Bounties, surrender, or even something silly as finding out if whoever was in front of him were friend or foe.
He would see, and he would kill. Except maybe the Alicia woman; his instincts screamed that his Path would be broken beyond repair if he hurt her.
Shen picked a random direction and started killing faster than ever before.
The six Observers and the Human Maiden were sitting in the same meeting room as they usually did. The seven chairs were occupied as they looked at the three-dimensional image in the middle of the room, a projection of the Human Rising Star attacking anyone in sight.
Liya could see the look of greed in the other Observers; they wanted the talented Rising Star for them. In fact, making connections with a new race's Titled was the main advantage of becoming an Observer. It was even more important than cataloging the planet's natural resources for exploitation.
The Human Maiden was not as excited as the others. She showed open hostility at the image.
It was her first time watching a projection in the room, and only because her return to Earth was only minutes away. Supposedly, she was being given a small briefing on what to expect. In practice, the others tried to hook her into a disadvantageous bargain.
Yet they all shared the same confusion: what had happened? The already crazed Feng Shen had suddenly become even crazier after mastering a Concept related to cutting and piercing—probably Sharpness. Why? Was his madness related to his Path?
No one knew, and they had no way of finding out.
Before the Observers actually descended to Earth, all six had to be in that room to observe whatever was happening on Earth. The system usually guided those sessions, too, as it was hard to just guess what was relevant and what wasn't on a new planet, especially when they had such a strange culture as humans. There was so much religious and political noise in their every interaction that letting the system take care of things was much easier.
Therefore, neither Liya nor the others had seen whatever had happened to the Rising Star to drive him crazy. Foul play was obvious, and it became clear that some higher-up was involved when any attempt to look at what had happened showed an "access denied" message. That was enough for her to discard any other theories than "The Alliance was screwing someone over again."
That couldn't be allowed to happen, not on her watch. The drow had gone to war for smaller offenses. They hated any form of power abuse by the Alliance and would rather die than watch it happen without doing anything about it.
They did for others what none had done for them.
Not always, of course. There were only so many races they could war against at the same time. But they worked around that by exploiting grey areas in the rules.
And she had spent the past month familiarizing herself with the laws governing Observers just so she could give the Human Maiden a piece of advice at the last hour.
Now, she would use this opportunity to also help her charge.
Liya bid her time, waiting for the perfect moment, while the others talked about what the Human Maiden should do if the Rising Star came for her. The girl had very few tools at her disposal, but at least she had some, and only because the threat was from her own race. Even then, those options required her to become indebted to someone in that room.
They pushed for it like sharks smelling blood.
Unfortunately for them, the time for Liya to talk had come.
"...and the White Truefrost Powder would leave him frozen for twelve years, more than enough time—" the orc Observer had been saying when Liya interrupted.
"Human Maiden, listen to me very carefully," Liya said softly, but that was enough for the orc to stop talking and everyone in the room to tense up.
The orc disliked Liya, but he understood the hierarchy of power well. For all of his race's faults, they knew when to submit.
"I'll give you one advice and one advice only on dealing with your Rising Star," Liya continued. "This is a costly way, but the best one available to you. Don't let your love for your father cloud your judgment."
The girl had cried when the system gave her the news, as it did to all close kin of B-ranks—and Maidens had the same privileges. She was that soft. Then again, she was little more than a baby by most sapient races' standards and had no business being a Maiden. How stupid were every Pioneer on Earth to elect a kid for such an important position?
The Human Maiden had also been informed of how her father had died and even received a recording. She wanted the Rising Star to suffer for what he had done. Liya didn't blame the girl, but much more was at stake there.
"Your world is doomed," Liya informed, to the surprise of all Observers. "You produced a single D-rank too early while everyone else is too weak. That means D-tier rifts will open in your world, and only your Rising Star has any chance of dealing with them."
"Stop!" the lizard Observer yelled. "You can't talk about this!"
Liya glanced at the man, harrumphed, and created a null capsule around her and the Human Maiden. It looked like ever-moving liquid darkness separating the two and their section of the room from everyone else.
The null capsule, powered by the Laws of Annihilation, utterly destroyed all sound and light inside. Even the Guardians' sight enhancement had trouble piercing through it, which became evident in the Human Maiden's surprised and fearful face. Unfortunately, that was Liya's best defensive ability unless she released her domain, but doing so here would make things complicated for her later plans. She could only hope the girl would hear even through her fright.
"We're Observers," Liya said. "We're here to observe, nothing else. We'll not move a single hand to protect you or any other human on Earth. Helping you indirectly deal with a threat from your own race is already a stretch of the rules and one we would risk for the benefits of having you owe us; affecting how you deal with rifts is completely illegal, no matter how you look at it. Therefore, you'll need a D-rank human of your own to deal with the D-tier rifts, or your race will get decimated before any of you rise to the challenge—if anyone does."
To Liya's surprise, the girl recovered quickly and asked, "Why would the Alliance do that to us if the Pioneer Tutorial took so many resources?"
Maybe her recovery speed shouldn't have come as such a surprise. She was a Pioneer.
Liya squinted her eyes.
Or maybe the other human Pioneers had seen something more in the girl to pick her. Had the girl been playing the Observers, pretending to be dumber than she was? If so, that boded well for the human race.
"It's cheaper in the long run," Liya replied quickly, not getting into the intricacies of Alliance politics.
The faction that wanted to help everyone everywhere for free was still the strongest and in charge of mostly everything. However, as the system got stretched, it had been forced to make concessions in some areas to preserve others. One such area was caring for new, unproven races after the initial investment.
The Human Maiden was right that it made little sense, but the strongest faction saw it as a better alternative to not having the Pioneer Tutorial. The minutiae of why and how was lost on her.
"But we don't have time for questions," Liya continued. As if on cue, the room and her capsule shook violently. The beings outside had started attacking. "Rift of random tiers will start appearing at random locations on Earth, but you can use your Management Points to open rifts of a tier and location of your choosing. To protect your race, you must open a D-tier rift in front of your Rising Star. That will be doubly useful because it'll decrease the chance of a rift of the same tier from forming elsewhere. Your Rising Star might die, but he'll grow stronger if he survives." Then, Liya stressed, "It might be bad for your feelings, but it might also be the only way to save your race from a much worse doom."
None of that was a lie and would give Feng Shen time to recover if all went well. He was a D-rank, so his soul already had the blueprint of his brain memorized in the same space it stored part of his mind. Whatever had been done to him was reversible as long as his soul was intact and he had enough time to pull his body back in sync with itself.
Outside, the Observers kept attacking. The defensive capsule was shaking so violently that it was clear it would pop at any moment. Even though Liya was the strongest C-rank she had ever seen, she was limiting herself too much in not deploying her domain. That allowed the others to interrupt her, though defeating her would still be impossible.
"Why are you helping me or my race if Observers don't care?" The Human Maiden asked quickly.
"Because my people suffered much worse at the Dreamer's hands, and I don't want to see something even close happen to someone else. That's why your race even had mind healers to deal with traumas caused by Pioneer Tutorial. Use your B-rank privilege to get information about my race if you doubt me. I'm the Drow Maiden."
The bubble finally exploded inwards. The liquid darkness threatened to cover Liya and the Human Maiden, and they hid the powerful attacks also coming their way.
More importantly, the system was coming back to them. To expel an Observer, the others had to formally inform the Observer first. However, her nullifying ability was one of the abilities that cut off the connection with the system in a legal manner if used in battle. The idiots outside had just justified her use of it by attacking her, as she expected they would.
Unfortunately for them, Liya had perfectly timed things out.
The system covered them all in the teleportation white light while informing her there would be a formal vote at the tutorial for her illegal actions there.
The loophole she would abuse was that none of them would be allowed back in the tutorial. It was a stupid slight of words in the rules that would get fixed as soon as it was reported. However, she would get away with it.
The Alliance was formed with beings of such different cultures and comprehension, so there was no such thing as the "spirit of the Law" as she had seen on Earth. Only whatever was written was valid. The others would get pissed at her, but they would get even more pissed at not seeing or abusing the loophole themselves.
Liya smiled as she imagined their anger while they were all teleported to Earth.
Colonel Walter Schneider was one of the thirty people allowed in the command center when the time came. They were organized in rows to one side, with their speaker closest to where the Maiden would arrive.
The Free Republic of Florence's forces had been the first to return to the city when the maniac Rising Star left for the East. This time, they came with fresh troops and equipment from the US and Canada, giving them much better control of the entire city. The arrival of dozens of Pioneers from all around the globe to help also hadn't hurt.
They were confused and divided about the Rising Star's latest killing spree, but almost all had agreed with helping protect the Maiden's arrival. After that, they would discuss what they would do about the crazy fellow.
To Walter's dismay, his son had come too. At least Walter had managed to put Karl into guard duty instead of going to the actual fight. The boy was right outside, protecting the room with his life. It filled Walter with a mix of pride and fear for the boy's life.
The war had gotten even worse in those few hours before the Maiden's return, and even now, Walter felt the ground repeatedly shake as the troops fought outside.
But the restaurant still stood protected; the Republic had won.
Light flashed in the middle of the room, where the Maiden had been dining with her friends when the Alliance arrived. An instant later, the girl materialized there.
Schneider's first impression of her was how young she looked. She had been fifteen when she entered the tutorial, and now, a year and a month later, she looked only slightly older—if at all.
Marzia had short auburn hair and eyes of similar color. She was wearing what looked like equestrian clothes—except she might ride some robot horse in the Star Wars. It felt futuristic and functional at the same time. They were brown and white, with a black jacket on top.
She looked around quickly as soon as she arrived, seemingly looking for someone. She didn't seem to find whoever it was, but instead of being disappointed, she showed relief.
"Thank God they didn't come with me," she whispered, then said, "Inspect," and looked at the people in the room.
"Marzia, my girl," their spokesperson said warmly while stepping ahead. "I'm so sorry to have to say this, but..." he opened his arms to hug her.
The old man in a suit was the very image of a Mafia family from the movies. Schneider had never thought the movies were so close to reality until the "famiglia" appeared and took over the Free Republic once the Interim President died. How the nations of the world allowed that was beyond him, but then again, he knew his political knowledge was limited at best.
Strangely, he never finished the embrace or his words. He just froze there, his arms open wide about ten feet from the girl still looking around.
Her eyes went over Schneider and kept going, then returned quickly, as if she had recognized him. "Are you related to Karl Schneider, the Pioneer?"
Her voice was nothing like the young, naive girl she looked to be. It was icy, serious, and commanding. Schneider would've taken her for a spoiled rich brat if he saw her in an ice cream shop. In here, and considering she had E+ stats, she became a very dangerous person to deal with.
He was surprised at being addressed at all but nodded. "Yes... ma'am?" He had no idea how to address her.
"Where is he?" she asked. "Why do I only see old farts and useless bureaucrats around?"
He looked around, seeking his superiors' guidance on how to answer that. Most looked offended but didn't look his way.
In fact...
Schneider frowned when he noticed one of them with his mouth open as if he was about to say something, yet the man kept his silence, frozen like the spokesperson.
"Don't mind them," Marzia said. "I'm not in the mood to entertain whatever condescending gaslight you have prepared, much less pretend to fit in whatever manner of hierarchy you might've developed amongst yourselves. Earth is mine. You'll all come to understand that soon enough."
As if on cue, all thirty people except Schneider fell to their knees at once. It was an unnatural movement, as if they were controlled by invisible strings.
"Well?" Marzia said. "Where is your son?"
Schneider found himself not wanting to tell the girl anything about his son. If anything, he would rather find a way to tell the boy to run away.
She sighed and shook her head theatrically. "I see now why my father was killed if his subordinates are so incompetent they can't answer a simple question." She looked at the old man who had talked to her. "Luigi, you were my father's chief adviser and head of security. You swore to protect him with your very life, yet he is dead, and you're alive. I'll remedy that for you." She smiled slightly, and the man's head turned a full hundred-eighty degree.
Schneider, who was in the last row, shivered as the dead man's eyes seemed to lock straight on him.
Marzia shook her head, sighed again, put her hands behind her back, and started walking from one side to the other, speaking as if giving lecturing a problematic audience.
"My father was the worst person I've ever met," she said. "Yet, he was also one of the most competent. It's a shame that it was partly because of the people he surrounded himself with.
"Those people were very loyal to him while he was useful, but they were quick to ditch him when he became a problem. He was between them and me, a needless layer separating them from what they saw as an easily controllable kid.
"Unfortunately for them, they were wrong in almost everything.
"Foremost among all, they didn't understand all the privileges of being a Maiden. I got a full report of my father's death, the culprits, and everyone who led him to be where he was, doing what he was doing at the time of his death. He was fed false information about the Rising Star's power and personality so he would offend Feng Shen beyond redemption. He didn't find it strange because he had dealt with plenty of powerful yet easily intimidated people before. I hate everyone involved, and they will pay for being the snakes they are."
She stopped walking and turned her back to everyone.
"But most of all, I hate Feng Shen with all my heart, for Feng Shen took from me the pleasure of killing the man who beat me up at least once a week from the day my mother died when I was ten. The man whose birthday present when I turned fifteen was making me watch one of his clients fuck, demean, and hurt a hooker so I would learn to save myself for my husband. It worked. I fear human touch in a way neither of you would ever understand."
She turned to the audience. Her eyes were red with tears, and her face was filled with absolute rage.
"Let me repeat it: my father was the worst person I ever knew. And you put him in charge. I doubt any politically influential figure in Italy didn't know about him, and I doubt the best intelligence agencies in the world wouldn't find out about it.
"Most of you knew the person you were supporting, yet you backed him because it was a way to get to me. To control me. As far as I'm concerned, you are all complicit in that man's crimes, and you will pay for that too.
"But that isn't even why I'm more upset with you.
"I knew the dark side of the world; I was born in it. I learned to lie and manipulate to survive in a den of snakes. I had every few friends I trusted, but none I would classify as good—which, I now realize, was because my family controlled everyone I interacted with to make sure I would see the world through their lens. I was born and raised to accept that theirs was the only way to live because everyone was equally condemnable. The many supposedly good celebrities and kind philanthropists I met all had dirty secrets that my family made sure to inform me about. Whenever I became interested in a boy or saw someone as a hero, they crushed that person's image to me.
"Yet, they messed in one thing: they sent me to Catholic school. A deeply corrupted one, but the basics of human decency were still taught to me. I was taught and believed it was a stupid ruse to keep the naive masses controlled. Yet, a feeble seed of already dying hope was planted in my heart, and it germinated in the tutorial.
"There, I saw a boy who gave me hope that decent people might exist. People trusted him to do the right thing because of who he always showed himself to be. I chose to support him for that and nothing else.
"Then, I saw him kill my father when he noticed the danger such a man in a position of power would be. That's when I understood Feng Shen was actually an honorable person. He might not go around hunting evil people, but he won't stay there and let people like my father pollute the same air he breathes.
"And you tried to hunt him down because he was an inconvenience to your project of power. Because he did the right thing.
"You all sicken me, and you will pay for it too."
She then looked Schneider straight in the eyes. "Now, Walter Schneider, you better tell me where is your son because only other Pioneers can stop me, and I don't trust myself to make a reasonable judgment at the moment. I'm outraged at you all, and, worst of all, I was told to put the best person I know through a potentially lethal ordeal for the greater good. Unless someone stops me, I'll kill people I might regret later—starting with you."
Schneider gulped.
This was the girl which so many people had died to protect?
God help them all.
Shen was moving towards the people he felt with his Battle Sense.
Mastering War had made it easier for him to master Combat, which then made it easier to master Sharpness. Now that he had mastered three Concepts, he understood the process of progressive Concept improvement better than ever before.
Moreover, having his entire foundational Concepts finally at the master tier gave him a kind of anchoring on Reality, an intimacy with the way things worked that he couldn't even explain.
All that contributed to him improving his understanding of all his Concepts by leaps and bounds. And that, in turn, greatly benefited his Skills.
Mere hours after mastering Sharpness, Shen had pushed his Skills the extra mile they needed to level up.
| Skill Level Up — Windstorm Spear Art (C-) — Level 5
| Skill Level Up — Zephyr-Gale Footwork (D+) — Level 7
His speed reached a new high, and he killed so fast that he was getting out of targets nearby. The Alicia woman was barely keeping up. He was usually already leaving whenever she reached him.
After the level up, the new information given to him by the system pushed his improvement rate to even higher heights. It contributed greatly to everything.
His learning ability let him instantly absorb all he could and apply it to all he knew. His understanding of Zephyr, especially, was one step away from mastery, with Flow just a little behind.
Unfortunately, that had been a fleeting peak of his learning journey. After the flux of new information and all he did with it, he noticed diminishing gains with killing weaklings.
Shen realized that he hadn't been that wrong about how useful fighting weaklings was; he had merely not considered that forcing them into life-and-death battles could push him a little further. He had squeezed the last drops of potential insights he could from people so much below him.
And that's when he started to get worried.
He needed to develop an aura. It was fundamental for his existence. There was nothing more important than that in all of Creation for him.
But he had no idea how to accomplish it, and killing weaklings wasn't pushing him further even in his non-mastered Concepts; so, how could it help him with the mastered foundational Concepts?.
His existence, Shen realized, would become one of endless killing without ever accomplishing his one goal in life.
The realization brought him to despair. He forced himself to kill even faster and more effectively, to squeeze the very last drop of potential from those people's sacrifices for his benefit. He hoped that would be enough to let him develop an aura.
It wasn't.
And that's when the terror started.
Shen kept killing, yet he learned nothing. He kept killing, yet he didn't improve. He kept killing, yet he had reached an insurmountable bottleneck.
He kept killing, and killing, and killing, but he...
He didn't want to kill anymore. Neither the current him nor the one in the depths of his mind wanted to continue.
Yet they couldn't stop because Shen refused to deny himself, and killing was a core part of himself. It might not have been so in the past, but it was now, and that's all that mattered.
The deep, annoying part of him pointed out a lesson for him there. He had been punished for refusing to submit, and now that same trace of his personality was working against him. Trusting too much on himself and his instincts, being inflexible when it cost him nothing but his pride, might not be the—
Shen yawned to stop the boring thoughts and kept running.
He had more killing to do. It wasn't fun or fulfilling, it served no actual purpose, but it was who he was, and that's all that mattered.
Shen was running on a street full of abandoned cars, trying to feel anyone with his Battle Sense, when a bright explosion of violet light happened far ahead of him. He was forced to blink, and when he opened his eyes, there was an enormous hole in the world where the explosion had happened.
It looked like one of the portals he had seen in the Eternal Empire, except it was much bigger. The half-circle with at least a mile wide, demarcated by a thick frame of slowly-moving violet light.
"Inspect," he said, and a giant tooltip appeared in its middle.
| D Rift — Rebellious Gnool Cult (0%)
| Protection: 5 days
| Duration: 2 months
| Guilty of: communing with the Void
Shen was ecstatic. That was a D-tier Rift! It should have actual strong people for him to fight! That's precisely what he needed!
He rushed at it at once.
The portal looked like a common hole, except it stood in thin air. On the other side, it revealed a vast desert before an enormous fortress surrounding and set on a massive rock mountain. The creatures on the other side had also noticed the portal if the approaching dots on the skies or the dust rising from the ground was any indication. They were likely aerial and ground troops coming from the distant fortress to investigate things.
Going through the portal felt like leaving an air-conditioned room on a hot day. The alien desert was the kind that had solid, dry, cracked ground rather than sand. Shen felt his body working harder because there was less oxygen in the air, but it was nothing it couldn't handle.
A small white text appeared on the top-right corner of his vision, a simple "0.00%" that he guessed was related to the percentage he had seen outside on the tooltip.
Shen rushed at the enemy, and the enemy rushed at him.
The aerial troops got closer first.
They were twenty black wyverns, each carrying three beings on their backs. The two beings at the front and the back wore black plate armor, while the one in the middle looked half-human, half-hyena, wearing only light clothes, also black.
The wyverns dove to the ground when they were about twenty miles away. The two armored beings on each wyvern jumped off, and then the hyenas rode the flying beasts back to the distant fortress.
Shen Inspected his forty enemies while still running full speed ahead.
| Knoll (E) — 200 / 200
The system let him know that although those creatures were sapient and had names, he would not see their names. They had been relegated to little more than training dummies for their crimes, nothing more. It was already merciful to let them fight back.
Shen felt disappointed at them being E-rank, but the D-ranks were probably the leaders of those creatures. These should be scouts or first-responders.
All forty gnolls wielded double axes. They didn't seem to care that Shen was D-rank. They rushed at him in a V formation aimed at him.
He smiled, clenched his spear, and activated his Battle Sense.
He got a feeling of light resistance from their black armor. As long as he pushed his spear's Sharpness to the utmost, he could cut them like an ordinary knife going through butter. The bodies inside the armor would be even more easily split apart.
Tactically, they were the best he had faced to date. The V formation wasn't intended on stopping him but on surrounding him. They were sacrificing the one at the tip, counting on Shen to get to the middle of the formation out of stupidity.
Shen's smile widened, and he did exactly as they hoped.
The gnoll at the front had probably been picked as a sacrifice because he was a terrible fighter. Shen had no trouble leveraging his speed and technique to pierce the being's skull before they could do anything with their axes.
| Gnoll (E) | 7,419,064 → 7,419,189 AP
It had been a while since Shen got AP for a kill like this. He had completed a lot of Bounties in the past two days, but it was usually him killing hundreds or thousands of people for no AP and then executing the actual target for tens of thousands. Getting AP like this—and the extra 25% from his Title was already included—felt nostalgic, reminding him of his time in the tutorial.
To his surprise, and also like in the tutorial, the gnoll turned to light together with everything they were wearing. It seemed the Alliance didn't want humankind to use the rifts as a way to amass equipment or resources.
Shen kept running, hoping those beings would show him something better than the humans had.
They did.
When Shen reached their midst, their armor released a violet light. Shen felt like he was suddenly moving through water while half the gnolls approached at peak E-rank speed to attack him.
He was tempted to fight like that, but it would be dangerous if they had some other hidden ace in their sleeves. So Shen released his Foundational Qi around him and defied whatever was affecting the surroundings.
Shen felt magic was involved in their armor's magic, but it was surprisingly weak-willed. He immediately guessed magic equipment had remnant willpower from whoever enchanted it, yet they weren't made to fight proper, living beings with willpower.
Well, at least the equipment trying to bind him hadn't been created with that in mind—which was weird, considering their function was exactly suppress another living being. His best guess was that they had been designed to subdue manaless warriors, who couldn't push energy into their surroundings to seize the environment's control from the enchantments.
To the gnolls' credit, they had a backup plan. While half were approaching, the other half put their weapons back on their belts and produced thin metal nets from a compartment in their armor.
Thanks to his mastery over the Concept of Sharpness, Shen felt the nets would resist his spear better than the armor. He would be able to cut them if they were held tightly. However, if they were thrown against him, he wouldn't be able to cut them midair.
It wasn't a matter of lacking Sharpness. It felt like the thing had been created precisely to avoid his Concept.
He was, however, strong enough to tear it apart with his bare hands.
Those gnolls were terribly outmatched.
Shen's Foundational Qi crushed the enchantments' hold over his surroundings, and he rushed at the nearby gnolls unhindered by anything. He learned quickly that these knolls were skilled but simply too slow for his D agility and level 7 D+ footwork. He cut five before a few threw their nets at him, and he easily avoided them before killing the rest.
He resumed his journey toward the fortress before the corpses had even finished turning into light. At the top corner of his vision, the percentage had been updated to 0.01%.
The rising dust on the ground was soon revealed to be caused by about a hundred armored gnolls mounted on worgs—larger back wolves with shining white eyes. They wielded heavy bows and split apart when Shen was approaching. They intended on shooting arrows at him while keeping their distance.
Shen was once more disappointed when he saw only E-ranks among them. The worgs were fast, maybe even faster than what E+ agility alone could make anyone, but he was much faster than them. The arrows were enchanted, but nothing he couldn't deflect with his blade or redirect with Zephyr Qi.
He made short work of those warriors and resumed his journey once more.
The next batch of flying enemies was a group of three hundred wyverns, only half of which were transporting armored gnolls. Instead of two armored gnolls each, the other half had two gnolls in leather armor. The armored gnolls were put on the ground, and their wyverns returned to the fortress. The hundred fifty others stayed behind.
As soon as Shen engaged the three hundred gnolls on the ground, the ones in the wyverns attacked. They hurled spells, metal nets, and explosive crystals at him. It was a nice break from the monotony he was used to, but his superior stats and Skills put him leagues above them all.
They tried to make up for it with numbers, and, to be fair, the gnolls were better fighters this time. Many of them exchanged a blow or two with Shen before he killed them.
Well, to be honest, he could've cut even their axes' blades if he wanted, but that would've expended too much qi. He didn't know how many he still needed to kill in that rift. He had hundreds of thousands to go if the percentage was any indication. At the very least, he needed to keep enough qi in reserve to run away from there if something happened.
Many mages on the wyverns were able to slow him down without directly touching his soul, thus avoiding his innate soul defense. However, he still felt their mana close enough that pushing his Foundational Qi upon his surroundings would put him in a fight of wills against them. Doing so against so many would be a bad idea, so Shen despaired for two seconds before uncovering a way to fight it.
It involved keeping qi only inside his body and was heavily inspired by things Alicia had previously talked to him about.
He pushed the Laws of Reality inside him in the opposite direction he felt the mages were doing it. However, while he had just matched the enemy pull when fighting the enchanted armor, this time, he pushed harder. That way, his qi created ripples beyond his direct action, like a pebble thrown at a lake or a gravitational pull generated by a heavy body.
It worked wonders, and he found that their superior numbers didn't matter in that indirect combat. Shen had mastered Concepts while they hadn't. His hold over Reality was overwhelmingly, absurdly, indescribably greater than theirs, so it was pathetically easy to stop what they were doing.
Once again, Shen fought unhindered. He became a reaper amid the few hundred people, dodging attacks and killing his enemies with at most two swings of his spear.
He was almost caught once when he tried to push a net away with Zephyr Qi. The metal seemed to resist the energy in a way he had never felt before. He barely nudged the object to the side, but his speed still let him dodge it.
After killing the ones on the ground, he contemplated throwing his spear against the wyverns but decided against it. If they grabbed it, he would find himself unarmed.
So instead, he surrounded himself with Zephyr and Flow Qi and jumped.
Reaching D-rank had made him lighter, but he had never been so close to mastering Zephyr or Flow before, so this move wouldn't have worked. Now that he was close, he made the wind flow around him, removing the air resistance above, making himself aerodynamic, and propelling his body further upwards—or sideways. By his estimates, he had been running at around forty-five hundred feet per second when he jumped, which was enough to go far on momentum alone. His application of qi let him change the direction he was shooting at, turning him into a homing missile of sorts.
Shen's entire went through an unfortunate wyvern's body. That took away most of his momentum, but he was close enough to another wyvern. It was tricky, but he managed to land on the beast.
That was all he needed.
From there, he used his great dexterity, superior footwork, high speed, and the Concepts of Zephyr and Flow to jump from wyvern to wyvern, killing beasts and riders with ease.
Shen had shot upwards so fast, by surprise, and killed so swiftly that it was only after he had killed over a hundred people that the wyverns dispersed. They were too close though, and he killed a hundred more before being forced to fall back to the ground—almost like a feather, thanks to Zephyr.
The wyverns didn't approach anymore.
So Shen resumed his rush toward the fortress, hoping they didn't take much longer to throw D-ranks against him.
