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.