Destroying a single monolith didn't restore Shen's ability to use his blocked Concepts. He was still limited, though he kept improving.
As he had expected, within minutes, he further refined his movements to decrease qi expenditure and increase effectiveness. Half an hour and many, many gnolls' lives later, he reached peak efficiency.
By then, Shen recovered five percent of his maximum qi every minute, even while maiming and killing gnolls. In other words, he could destroy a monolith every ten minutes.
Destroying the second one also didn't give him hold over his "stolen" Concepts. Each army had around three hundred of the things, and all four armies had gotten together by now. A dozen hundred monoliths were all around him, equidistant from each other, and each one's area of influence was enough to cover twenty others.
It would take Shen over three hours to clear a small area where he could use all his Concepts again, but to be honest, that would be a waste of time. He could already kill the gnolls well enough to get some AP, and if he used the extra qi to kill them faster instead than destroying monoliths, his AP gain increased even further.
So he killed.
The gnolls realized they were doomed another half hour later. Yet, they could do nothing to stop Shen. Even when they tried throwing all their flying vehicles against him from all directions, he simply avoided them. He was too fast for them.
They tried other things too. They produced an enormous metal net out of nowhere, held by the people in the skies and some on the ground. When it appeared, Shen was already inside it together with many unlucky gnolls. He guessed they pulled that with the illusion capabilities they had shown earlier.
The troops in the skies released the net. The gnolls closest to the edge were touched by it first, and Shen felt them become weaker. The mana inside them stopped moving, and they couldn't use their Skills any longer.
The net was in place to affect one's energy, and Shen felt danger from it; he bet he would also be affected despite using qi instead of mana.
Yet, with his aura in place, he no longer needed the net to be still and stretched to be able to cut it. He sliced it as soon as it approached, then avoided touching it by tiptoeing between the wires on the gnolls and ground.
The tens of thousands of gnolls inside were quickly disposed of; after deciding to go for AP, Shen decreased how many he maimed to improve the Flow of new bodies to kill.
Terrible memories of days past threatened to come to him as he turned into some sort of meat grinder, but he quelled them by focusing harder on the task at hand.
In the end, the gnolls decided to sacrifice even more of their numbers for a shot at killing Shen. They spread out, and the white cubes got to the skies again.
Shen was sure that no matter how many gnolls died, the cubes would not stop falling until he wasted all his qi and was squelched like a bug.
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Liya watched the battle as she waited for the portal to reopen.
In theory, she could teleport away to Earth at any moment. In practice, that would leave a more obvious trail of her "escape" from Earth. She would rather not depend on the System Administrator's goodwill to hide her tracks more than necessary.
A goodwill she was doubting by the second.
Those gnolls were not behaving naturally. They adapted too fast and pushed too hard. Liya had fought the damn pests before, and they had been nowhere that quick to change their tactics.
In fact, the lack of D-ranks was further evidence of that. Her domain let her feel them still holed up in the depths of their fortress beside an illegal mass of Void Energy—which, by definition, was not energy, yet there was no better name for it—waiting for something. She didn't know what, but she was sure they would do much better if they sent at least half of them outside to deal with her charge. Yet it would take them many Earth hours, maybe days, to change their initial plans, whatever they were.
The D-ranks were acting like the idiots she recalled, so she concluded a will was behind the E-ranks. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't locate it, so it might belong to an above-average B-rank or stronger. She didn't like the sound of that.
She didn't believe for a second that the Administrator was acting directly. Whoever was responsible for the Guardian System had more to worry about. The Superintendent also—
Suddenly, she located the source, and it was no B-rank.
Feng Shen himself was forcing the gnolls to adapt.
His tactics were alive and created a flow to the gnolls' strategy. The gnolls likely didn't even notice it, but they acted and reacted accordingly. The flow refused to be stopped; it was never-ending, never-breaking. When her charge obstructed it—for instance, by obliterating the flow of gnolls getting to him—the gnolls instinctively found ways around it.
It was a unique experience to see one's ability used against oneself like that.
She shook her head as she watched him prepare to struggle against the white cubes. His fighting style was too widespread and unfocused, and his enemy took advantage of it. He wasted too much time on grand schemes when all he needed was to destroy anyone or anything that got close to him.
Her Annihilation would do much better than whatever Concepts Feng Shen was using. If it was her there at peak D-rank, things would be over already.
Then again, she had been one hundred years old—trained from birth—when she reached peak D-rank; he was still an inexperienced baby in comparison.
She kept watching, hoping the boy would improve in the eleven months remaining until she trained him.
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Shen had two ways of dealing with the cubes: avoiding or facing them. Avoiding them was easier because he could simply run away faster than them, but he refused to submit—
"Go kill, and don't stop..." the memory came unbidden, followed by the faces of thousands of people—
Shen shook his head, dispelling the memories. He almost fled out of fear of the consequences. Almost.
But running was not him.
That was a bit of the surety he had about the entire situation he had gone through. Perhaps he had been at fault for being too headstrong, which had put him in hot waters. However, Shen would rather suffer the consequences of being himself—whatever they might be—than become a shadow of his true self for extra safety or comfort.
He would have to learn to deal with said consequences, but his Path didn't involve denying himself. Few Paths, if any, were a smooth, straightforward road to the pinnacle of power. He had to come to terms with what he had gone through, but he wouldn't deny himself on his first failure.
Of course, that was easy to say when it was others who had paid the price in blood for his mistakes—
He shook his head again. Not now; not yet. The time for reckoning would come, but now, he had white cubes to survive against.
The dozen thousand cubes covered the skies once again. Shen traced a plan and started running—not fast enough to escape their descent and not linear enough to let the objects get on top of each other. He wanted to destroy only one of them to get to the other side, thus not wasting too much qi. The most critical part of his plan started after that.
He succeeded. He moved too fast, and the cubes couldn't reposition themselves to create a double layer where they fell on him.
They struck, and Shen jumped, thrusting his weapon against the cube above.
Last time, Shen had used his Foundational Qi to go against Reality and weaken the cubes while using the same qi to strengthen his attack. He had gone through two cubes at the cost of half his total mana. So, around twenty-five percent per cube.
Now, his aura had thirty percent effectiveness compared to that, plus thirty percent of two extra Concepts. The math there wasn't easy, but in the end, his aura was half as good in weakening reality as his Foundational Qi.
That alone decreased the qi expenditure by an overall ten percent. If that was all, each attack would cost fifteen percent. Yet, the same math applied to strengthening his body with his aura. Moreover, he could use his Skills more effectively than before. All those factors together further decrease the cost of going through a cube.
In the end, Shen spent as little as two percent of his max qi to go through the cube directly above him.
However, that was the cost to go through it with his entire body. Shen's plan was to destroy the cubes without needing to do that. As long as the cubes weren't about to smash him, Shen could use much less qi and multiple attacks to make them inoperational.
As soon as he went through it, he tested his theory on the cube beside him, which had struck the ground. Using only his aura, his spear pierced almost three feet into it. With another thrust, he reached the center of the thing. However, the cube still floated with the others.
Shen thrust and swung and twisted his spear and found he had to damage at least two sides of a cube to make it fall and not move again. On the bright side, the next cube he destroyed revealed the damage could be relatively superficial—a single thrust or swing of his spear could accomplish that much.
And so Shen started running and jumping over the cubes, moving at least twice as fast as them, destroying them with alacrity.
Then the gnolls engaged the plan they had in reserve for when Shen got above the ground.
An enormous orb of dark violet light appeared floating high on the skies where it had been previously hidden—and it pulled.
Shen resisted with his aura, weakening the pull a lot, but not enough. He used his Foundational Sphere next, and it worked, but Shen was surprised to see it only made the pull as weak as gravity.
Shen was left floating above ground like a sitting duck.
The white cubes all left the surroundings not to give anything to grab, and tens of thousands of attacks came his way.
His aura wasn't enough to let him divert that many attacks or to strengthen his body enough. He would need to use some qi—or a lot of it, considering almost all flying vehicles, wyverns, worgs, and gnolls positioned themselves to better aim. It was a matter of time before he ran out.
So Shen didn't waste time thinking about the most optimal solution; as soon as he found a solution, he used it. He let go of his Foundational Sphere and used his aura to weaken gravity while strengthening the orb's pull.
The thing pulled him hard, so he shot at it quickly when he reversed his resistance. Not as quick as some projectiles coming his way, but merely moving at all was enough to let him avoid the non-homing attacks.
Countless attacks reached his aura, and he diverged most of them away. Both Flow and Zephyr helped immensely with that. He had to deal with some attacks using his spear though, and even then, a few dozen struck his body every second.
Shen used the Zephyr part of his aura to push him faster; Zephyr was gentle, but it was all he had. The orb's pull decreased when Shen got a few hundred yards from it, but he used his Foundational Sphere to go against gravity and toward the orb.
More spells struck him. A plasma ball exploded only twenty feet away. His HP decreased.
A defensive field of lightning and strong winds appeared when he got too close to the orb. He used his aura to decrease its effects while buying and crushing multiple healing crystals. His speed slowed to a crawl while his qi expenditure became ridiculous high. Bolt after bolt struck him, spell after spell damaged him, projectile after projectile pierced his body.
Shen focused on keeping the needles away from him because he still feared the acid substance they contained.
The AP expenditure to survive the lightning reminded him of his fight against the tutorial's final golem. Like a man on the moon, he slowly approached the orb. The lightning and wind became stronger as he got closer, and only the Zephyr of his aura was now slowly—very slowly—pushing him forward.
At lost last, he reached the orb, filled his spear with Foundational Qi, and used all his power to cut it down.
Like the monoliths, it discharged a lot of mana when destroyed. However, it was immensely more powerful and continuous.
His Foundational Sphere wasn't enough to completely deny the heat and corrosive mana from getting to his body. He screamed as his skin and flesh dissolved slowly under the mana's effect, and the heat cooked him alive.
Instead of the monolith's blast, Shen now faced a stream of pure destruction. He resisted as best as he could, knowing he couldn't use healing crystals. Merely speaking to purchase them would distract him from his survival, and even if he did buy a crystal, he doubted he could crush it before the mana stream obliterated it.
The stream took around twenty seconds. Each second felt like an eternity in hell. Still, though some of the mana and enormous heat could go past his defensive qi, it was little enough that he resisted in the end.
The heat, light, and mana died down at last.
Shen's body started falling from the skies, at least twenty percent of it wholly burned down or molten away, his flesh and bones visible, his eyes blind, and his ears deaf.
His equipment was utterly destroyed, including his spear. He was a naked monstrous falling star.
| HP: 37 / 200
Yet he was still alive.
"Buy two healing crystals," he said—or tried to say. He had no lips or front teeth, half his tongue was missing, and his throat was as dry as the desert.
The system still understood his grunt. He didn't feel the crystals touch his body because his tact was gone, but he felt them with his aura.
He made a fist, crushing the crystals, and a healing wave ran through his body, recovering all his HP.
The next instant, Shen was fully healed.
He softened his fall with his aura—
No, he softened it with mastered Zephyr Qi, gliding down harmlessly until he touched the huge, perfectly round crater on the ground. At least one-fifth of the gnoll army—the combined army created by the four smaller ones—had been destroyed, including nearby monoliths. That's how he could use his Concepts once more.
The remaining gnolls weren't moving yet, but he knew it was only a matter of time.
Shen needed a weapon, so he checked how many AP he had; 4,984,120. That was enough for a D- spear but not a D one. He would rather not use so many points at a subpar weapon.
He figured it was time to see how good a Spear his D body could become.
But better yet, he would find this out by using a superior mind.
"Buy D-tier learning ability upgrade," he said.