Four enormous dark violet orbs of light suddenly revealed themselves floating inside the dome. They had also been invisible nearby and came to view while already trying to pull Shen in opposing directions.

The gnolls wanted to stop him at all costs.

The orbs were much more potent than the monoliths. One's aura was more powerful the closer it was to its user, yet Shen's instantly decreased to less than five yards when the orbs pulled him.

It was still much better than in the rift. Back there, he hadn't yet mastered most of his Concepts and could only weaken the gravity pull. Now, he kept the orb's influence entirely at bay.

However, as much as his aura denied the pull, it wouldn't be long until he was captured if he did nothing. Barriers of all elements popped around him, aiming to keep him in place until the enemy's auras denied his. Dozens of gnolls took big black metal nets from previously hidden leather bags and threw them at Shen. He recalled those: they could resist energy.

Shen had believed himself capable of foreseeing most of the gnolls' moves, yet they managed to surprise him...

...in their stupidity.

Shen had dealt with gnolls trying to lock him down with spells and nets; only an idiot wouldn't think of ways to counter them.

More importantly, he had been locked in place by eight orbs before the portal reopened; it was obvious that he would think of ways to deal with them.

Did the gnolls even recall that the orbs exploded when they got destroyed? That he had killed a big chunk of their army just by blowing one up?

What was the catch? Were the orbs boobytrapped? Would a portal to the Void suddenly appear as he approached one? Would a secret A-rank Protector of Violet Orbs descend and obliterate Earth if Shen targeted them?

Whatever the case, a good trap was one the enemy couldn't resist stepping into—and Shen could target nothing else.

The gravity orbs couldn't pull him anywhere while his aura was in place, but its range was decreasing quickly. Once it was gone, he could try to kill gnolls and destroy their spells—as long as the orbs weren't around. If they were, he would either get frozen midair or slowed down so much that he wasn't confident in winning the fight.

And, again, explosions! He was almost sure destroying an orb this close to the D-ranks would kill at least a few hundred of them!

So, the orbs had to go first.

As for Earth's troops that might be caught in the blast...

Shen could hear their screams, and while somersaulting to avoid spells, he had also seen what the D-ranks outside were doing to them. He had severely overestimated how well human E-ranks could go against gnoll D-ranks. On top of that, all the gnolls' E-ranks were also invading the world and would overwhelm what little resistance Earth might present.

Humanity stood no chance. Soon, there would be no human around to die from the explosion. Killing as many gnolls would be worth it, even if there was collateral. And it came with the additional advantage of freeing him to help his army survive the onslaught.

It was like the nuclear option, only magic and with a greater chance of success.

Shen didn't lose himself in the morality of it. That choice might weigh on him for the rest of his life. He might regret it as soon as the battle was over.

But right now, this was a war for survival, and they were losing.

He was putting his life on the line, and so was everyone else. If it took the potential death of a few to protect many—if this was the best option he could see...

Shen would take it.

But first, he had to destroy the orb.

To accomplish that, Shen would have to use the most unrefined of the many tactics he had thought of in the past days. He couldn't fly to get to air targets, only jump. Therefore, his idea to deal with the orbs as fast as possible was simple: he had perfected his jumps until he created a jumping technique of all things.

He had aptly and uncreatively named it the Self-Launch.

An extra ten percent of his qi pool filled his body, focusing mainly on the legs. He reached the limits of qi his body could withstand without exploding.

Then, he crouched and pointed his spear straight at one of the orbs.

The Concepts of Zephyr and Flow were infused in that single jump to make him perfectly aerodynamic. Arc Flash gave his legs explosive power and his move extra speed. Sharpness made his spear as sharp as it could be. Combat strengthened his body to deal with what was to come. Boundlessness and his aura pushed it all one step further.

Shen had mastered most of his Path's Concepts—Arc Flash was only one step away—which let him use them right at the line between the laws of physics and higher Laws. Not beyond that line, but not one inch back, either. What he would do might not be possible if he didn't try to bend the rules a little.

He was touching the ethereal.

The Self-Launch had been created with one purpose only: to reach a point in the air in the least amount of time possible. It would either bludgeon through every obstacle in the way or fail. Shen knew next to nothing about aerial combat and maneuvering and hadn't had the time to learn such things to add them to his move. He had focused on aerodynamics, air resistance, speed, and piercingness.

So he jumped, making himself spin at a breakneck pace. His aura made the air in front of him spin even faster than he was and pushed him from below.

Path-filled qi left his feet now and then for extra bursts of speed. He didn't create any permanent "qi thruster" in case a Concept-filled spell pierced into his aura and touched his qi. If that happened, he would freeze at once and be done for.

His aura was the primary stabilizer of his ascent. However, Shen also had to use tiny bursts of qi sideways here and there to correct deviations despite the danger of touching enemy mana.

The world became a blur as he spun and moved on. He dedicated only a small part of his mind to protect his limited aura range and focused instead on keeping course. It took all of his D+ agility reaction time, D-rank mind, D-tier learning ability, Concepts, and aura to stay on track under that circumstances.

There were seven barriers between him and his target. Not a big number, likely because the gnolls had bet on him to keep going for the aura users or even just focusing on defense. It was still a number that could be the end of him.

Shen could only hope his plan worked.

The perfectly aerodynamic spinning spear-man, moving at dozens of times the speed of sound, met the first obstacle on the way.

Shen felt nothing as he went through it and quickly approached the next one.

He pierced through the energy-resisting nets with ease—thanks to his aura. Even the magic metal they were made of couldn't deny the extra force of certain Concepts of Reality in his aura. They snapped, and he continued unhindered.

To the gnolls' credit, they reacted quickly.

Shen's main worry wasn't barriers on the way. He could shatter those or try other things if that failed. His greatest fear was getting off course. Suddenly finding himself midair between the gravity orbs, with almost no aura, would be terrible.

The gnolls tried to accomplish that by making solid objects stand in his way on top of the magic barriers, throwing dozens of explosive spells at him, and creating a cyclone around him.

Shen still didn't know how humankind could make metal appear out of thin air, but the gnolls did. Metal and earth, ice and rock, water and lava materialized before him. Explosions rained on him while the wind tried to throw him everywhere.

The flight became turbulent chaos.

The material barriers ended up being much easier to go through than he had expected because they were so thin. The magic barriers couldn't resist him because the gnolls didn't have enough willpower to stop such a piercing, big object from moving so fast. The nets were shredded. The explosions did no damage, and the wind had been created too quickly and still couldn't push him too strongly.

But everything together added up to too many factors and slight pushes here and there that threatened his obtusely simple move. Shen pushed his reaction time to the very limits to stay on course. Qi flowed from his dantian into his body and then to the world. Bursts of perfectly timed qi in all directions kept him straight ahead while avoiding touching any mana.

Shen also used the gnolls tactic against them. Whenever lightning came his way, he pushed a thin qi thread toward it. He never let his qi touch enemy energy but waited for the electricity and qi to get close enough, microscopically so, for an electric current to form.

Then, he forced a strictly controlled arc fault.

The resulting arc flash—and blast—had just the strength to correct his course and keep him on track.

Likewise, whenever a gnoll was fast or strong enough to put a solid, material block in front of him, he drilled in precise angles to use it to his advantage. He always left the barriers more on track than he met them. The gnolls didn't notice on time and kept their material barriers fixed instead of moving them and making it harder for him.

His counters provided mere micro-corrections yet let him save some qi, which he sorely needed. The qi bursts were so many that his qi reserves dropped by an extra five percent in a few instants. When Shen reached the last barrier between him and the orb, he had only eighty percent of his total qi remaining.

Yet he reached it—and beyond.

His aura range was already less than four yards long when he entered the orb's defensive field, also made of lightning and wind. Both were much more potent than what the gnolls had thrown at him on short notice, yet what Shen had just experienced against the gnolls' spells ironically helped him here. He kept moving, using enemy lightning to his advantage, his aura nullifying the rest.

And then he was upon the orb.

Shen created a big Path-filled qi blade on one side of his spear. He crouched and pushed qi in powerful, quick bursts to stop twisting sideways and rotate ahead instead. Then he used more qi and his aura to spin faster.

A hypersonic-spinning Qi blade met a gravity orb—

—and hacked through without slowing down.

Shen let go of his qi as soon as he felt something inside the orb give—as soon as it was destroyed. He didn't stop but kept going, planning to use the remaining power of his Self-Launch to both get away from the incoming explosion and reach the magic domes. He would assist the explosion in destroying as many domes as possible, thus spending some of their casters' willpower.

All his plans and thoughts disappeared when the orb actually exploded, and he realized he had miscalculated.

A D-rank mind or D-tier learning ability didn't give Shen perfect memory. Close enough, but not there. Shen recalled the orb's explosion being terrible, but he had survived. He thought his aura, now with almost all Concepts, would let him resist the blow much easier.

It didn't.

Corrosive mana poured from the orb in multiple, constant explosive waves, a stream of death-seeking energy. It covered, invaded, and denied his aura's last three yards like a phoenix feather going through a block of ice.

The moment his aura disappeared, the monoliths' influence reached him, and he also lost access to his secondary Concepts.

He barely had the time to create a Foundational Sphere around him and push against Reality to save himself. Only by using qi to weaken Reality could he also undermine the power of the incoming mana.

Shen kept spinning. His earlier plan hadn't been so terrible; he did reach the magic domes. His spear did assist in destroying them.

But he barely noticed as he tried to survive.

Like last time, his Foundational Sphere, a ball of pure Path-filled qi, 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. The light pierced through his closed eyes, burning his retinas and punishing his brain. The absolute torture destroyed his ability to focus on anything beyond himself.

Fortunately, unlike last time, he was moving away quickly.

He only had to withstand the pain for less than two seconds, and even that much, only because the explosion and barriers slowed him down considerably. Soon, Shen left the orb's explosive range and fell from the skies lower than the speed of the sound.

His robe was gone, and so was his skin. Churned muscles and bones were exposed to the air. His hand still held tightly to his spear, which was but a long and thin, twisted and blackened wooden stick with a chipped crystal on one end.

| HP: 134 / 200

Shen was dazed but recovered quickly. He purchased a healing crystal and a new black robe from the store and looked down while system magic made him whole again.

The orb's explosion was still going, a thing of pure light. It created a perfect ball of shining white mana at least six hundred yards wide.

And then, it expanded—three times in a row.

The explosion had destroyed the other orbs, which added to it.

Shen hoped it would also spell the gnolls' doom.

The now over-one-mile-wide ball of mana covered everything to the portal and beyond. On Earth's side, a good seventh of Earth's troops would've been caught inside it—if they had been alive.

Shen wasn't sure if it was a good thing he had probably killed no one just because humanity's front lines were completely gone on all sides of the portal.