[MA] 125. Settling Dust (Patreon)

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[A/N: A bit of a slow chapter, but a necessary one. Things will start to gain momentum from the next chapter onward.

1/3 chapters this week. Next one on Thursday.

Yes, the release schedule will change to Tue-Thu-Sat. I'll start taking Monday offs because my schedule is crazy right now and I really, really need a day off.]

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.

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