ACSP: Chapter 186: Nanga Shrine, Hero Monument!
Yang Ke was now severely wounded, his breath ragged and his chakra reserves dangerously depleted. He could barely muster the strength to stand, let alone continue fighting.
With his comrade out of commission, the crushing weight of the entire battlefield fell squarely onto He Gen's shoulders. Facing a furious siege of hundreds of bloodthirsty East Island Contractors, he had no illusions about their situation. He knew full well that in a head-on clash, they would be utterly slaughtered.
"——Wood Release: Wood Locking Wall!"
Acting on pure survival instinct, He Gen's hands blurred into a desperate sequence of seals, unleashing a high-tier defensive Wood Release secret technique.
In the next fraction of a second, colossal pillars of dense, reinforced timber erupted violently from the forest floor. They curved inward with terrifying speed, interlocking perfectly to form a massive, domed wooden vault that encased him and the battered Yang Ke in absolute darkness.
Rumble!
The relentless barrage of high-impact ninjutsu, piercing elemental skills, and explosive shuriken unleashed by the charging East Island horde slammed into the wooden fortress. A continuous, deafening roar echoed through the forest, shaking the very foundations of the earth.
Huddled inside the airtight dome, Yang Ke and He Gen managed to secure a temporary breath of life. But it was a fragile sanctuary. Under the concentrated, unyielding fire of hundreds of specialized Contractors, even a legendary Wood Release barrier with extreme structural durability had its limits.
It didn't take long.
The relentless detonations outside began to take their toll, and fine, spiderweb cracks rapidly splintered across the exterior of the wooden wall. It was giving way.
"Keep pressure on the assault! Tear that barrier down! I want those two crushed to dust!"
Hato Yui's voice was twisted with unbridled rage, her gaze locked onto the crumbling wooden structure. Her eyes burned with a terrifying, venomous killing intent.
Aoi Bing wasn't just a fellow division captain; she was her half-sister, sharing the same mother but different fathers. The two had been inseparable since childhood, forging a bond far deeper and more intimate than mere family. Now, the person she cherished above all else in this world was permanently mangled, having sacrificed an entire arm just to shield her from a lethal sneak attack.
The sheer agony of watching her lover bleed out filled Hato Yui with a murderous fury that demanded total annihilation.
"Sister Hato... wait..."
Aoi Bing staggered forward, clutching the bleeding, cauterized stump of her severed arm. Her face was deathly pale from the shock and rapid blood loss, but she forced the words through her gritted teeth. "Those two are exceptionally powerful... they didn't stumble onto us by accident. They must have been stationed here specifically to ambush our advance. We cannot simply kill them yet. We need to break them open and extract whatever intelligence they have on the local defenses..."
Although Aoi Bing had used her Ice Release to freeze the wound and stop the bleeding, the agonizing trauma of losing a limb was taking a heavy toll. Beads of cold sweat drenched her delicate face, and her voice was a faint, trembling whisper, as if every syllable required her to drag herself through white-hot needles.
Hato Yui stared at Aoi Bing's broken state, then glanced over at the empty space where her severed arm had been completely pulverized into a fine crimson mist by the Dust Release. For a moment, her chest tightened so violently it felt like her heart was being twisted by a serrated knife.
"Little sister... those two ruined you," Hato Yui growled, her voice dropping into a guttural, terrifying register. "I must make them die. Right now. I don't give a damn about their intelligence, and I don't care about their secrets. I just want them torn to shreds!"
It is often said that when a woman becomes truly ruthless, even the most bloodthirsty men cannot compare. At this exact moment, Hato Yui had completely unraveled, driven into a blind, hysterical frenzy by the agony of the one she loved most. The tactical maps, the invasion strategy, and the absolute commands of Captain-General Shimura were completely wiped from her mind. Her entire existence had narrowed down to a single, psychotic directive: slaughter Yang Ke and He Gen, no matter the cost.
Aoi Bing fractured her lips open, desperately wanting to urge her sister to maintain her composure.
But before she could utter a single word—
——BOOM!
A catastrophic, thundering roar detonated from the exterior of the one-kilometer perimeter.
Immediately following the blast, a massive, swirling cloud of jagged crystal debris began to rain down from the sky like a storm of crimson snowflakes, dyeing the entire atmosphere in an eerie, blood-red hue.
The absolute barrier was under direct, overwhelming attack. And it was failing fast.
"Damn it! How are there more of them?!"
"No... it doesn't matter who it is! These two die today!" Hato Yui screamed, her eyes snapping up to the disintegrating ceiling of her labyrinth before veering back to the fractured wooden dome. "No matter who comes to save them, I will slaughter them first!"
Her fingers blurred into an insane, frantic sequence of hand seals, desperate to unleash a high-impact piercing jutsu to detonate the [Wood Locking Wall] and execute the two hiding inside before her perimeter completely collapsed.
But her manic movements were a crucial second too slow.
Before her final hand seal could lock into place, a massive, towering arrow of concentrated purple Chakra violently pierced through the outer membrane of the barrier, screaming through the crimson snow straight toward her chest.
Recognizing the lethal, piercing trajectory, Hato Yui was forced to abort her offensive sequence. She pivoted her stance instantly, shifting her hand seals to manifest a desperate, high-speed defense.
"——Crystal Release: Single Arrow of Light!"
In the absolute nick of time, Hato Yui was forced to violently disrupt her own momentum. Forcing her chakra into an entirely different pathway, she materialized a dense, interlocking shield of triangular red crystals that encased her form a split second before impact.
——BANG!
The devastating [Susanoo Arrow] tore through the atmosphere and slammed directly into the crimson crystalline armor, detonating with a violent, earth-shattering crash.
Yet, as the smoke and shockwaves rippled outward, the seemingly fragile red crystals remained completely pristine, without a single hairline fracture on their geometric surfaces. Instead, the purple arrow of divine chakra shattered into useless fragments under the absolute density of the barrier, dissolving completely into the air.
"How dare you rats meddle in my vengeance! Go to hell!" Hato Yui shrieked, her mind completely unraveled by rage.
With a fierce thrust of her arms, the triangular red crystals floating around her instantly rearranged themselves, condensing into a localized, blinding beam of kinetic energy that immediately traced the trajectory of the assault, screaming back toward the source of the arrow.
High above the tree canopy, Jiang Chen was riding the broad back of his giant eagle summon, [Garuda], guiding Li Yanran and the rest of the vanguard straight through the disintegrating remnants of the labyrinth.
Catching sight of the incoming beam of lethal light, his eyes narrowed. Without a single word of warning, he decisively leapt straight off the giant eagle's back, plunging downward into freefall.
A swirling vortex of high-density chakra instantaneously ignited within his right palm. The roaring sphere expanded into a massive [Big Ball Rasengan] in a fraction of a second. Gritting his teeth, he thrust the churning mass of energy directly into the path of the incoming light beam, violently grinding it down until it was utterly obliterated in a shower of sparks.
Boom!
Landing on his feet with a heavy thud, Jiang Chen smoothly absorbed the kinetic force of the drop. He immediately looked up, his sharp gaze locking onto Hato Yui.
It seems this woman's mastery over the Crystal Release Kekkei Genkai is exceptionally refined, he calculated internally. No wonder she managed to completely neutralize my Susanoo Arrow just now.
The raw defensive capabilities of the [Crystal Release: Single Arrow of Light] were notoriously absurd. In the historical legends, the kunoichi Guren had famously weaponized this exact structural adaptation to head-on deflect a cataclysmic [Tailed Beast Bomb] fired by the Three-Tails itself. It was entirely logical that this East Island captain could leverage the same crystalline density to withstand his projectile.
After all, his current evolution level hadn't reached its peak yet. His [Susanoo] was still in its foundational infancy, leaving an immense trajectory for growth and amplification.
Whish! Whish!
The group moved with military precision, instantly locking into a tight defensive matrix the moment their boots hit the dirt.
Li Yanran anchored the absolute center of the formation, wrapping a supportive arm around the waist of the still-unconscious Zhang Xiaolin. Around them, Wang Shanshan, Lin Ye, Yuan Danqing, and Xiao Tu synchronized their movements, fanning out toward the four cardinal directions like an iron wall, shields and weapons raised to keep the two girls fiercely insulated from the surrounding chaos.
"Damn it... how the hell are there this many East Island Contractors clustered in one forest?" Lin Ye muttered, his eyes darting across the overwhelming sea of enemy uniforms.
"Did we just blindly march right into the absolute heart of the tiger's den?" Yuan Danqing hissed back, a bead of cold sweat rolling down his jaw.
"Cut the panic," Wang Shanshan snapped, her grip tightening on her weapon. "Jiang Chen is standing right in front of us. Who is the sheep and who is the tiger in this woods has yet to be decided!"
While they exchanged hushed, tense whispers, their eyes never stopped scanning the hostile perimeter. Truthfully, none of them fully understood the tactical macro-play that had driven Jiang Chen to fly them directly into this hornet's nest. But their trust in him had been forged in blood; out of absolute loyalty, not a single one of them questioned his trajectory.
High on the shattered ridge, Hato Yui slowly lowered her hands, her chilling gaze sweeping over Jiang Chen's vanguard with a look of unadulterated disdain curling her lip.
"I wondered what kind of legendary army had broken through my labyrinth membrane," she sneered, her voice dripping with mockery. "And it turns out to be nothing more than a pathetic handful of Great Xia brats who don't know the definition of death."
She recognized the youth leading them. His facial structure matched the high-priority, Super-Kage Level threat profile circulated by their central military intelligence—Jiang Chen.
But so what?
Behind her stood hundreds of elite East Island combatants. Every single individual occupying this clearing was a veteran Contractor who had broken past Level 50, packed with lethal, optimized build paths. Even if this Great Xia prodigy possessed three heads and six arms, he wouldn't be leaving this forest alive today.
"Sister Hato... please, look at him closely," Aoi Bing urged, forcing her mangled, trembling body up to the ridge line. She pressed a hand against her frozen shoulder, her voice strained as she whispered a desperate warning. "That truly is Jiang Chen. You memorized his combat files before we deployed from the coast—do not let your guard down against him under any circumstances."
But Hato Yui was entirely consumed by a toxic cocktail of grief and battle-frenzy. Her sister's rational words didn't even register in her mind.
"Hmph! It's perfect that he crawled right to us!" Hato Yui's eyes burned with a sudden, fanatical fervor, her expression twisting into something manic. "If we execute the Great Xia's greatest prodigy right here, His Majesty the Emperor will grant us unparalleled domain rewards. When we return victorious, our names might even be carved into the sacred [Hero Monument] at [Nanga Shrine]!"
The mere thought of it sent a shudder of ecstatic ambition through her spine.
In the East Island empire, the Nanga Shrine was far more than a specialized military bureau operating directly under the Imperial Family's oversight. It was the spiritual epicenter of their nation—the holy ground where the souls of the empire's greatest ancestral conquerors and war heroes were enshrined for eternity.
To have one's name engraved upon that pristine monolith meant receiving the absolute worship, prayers, and offerings of hundreds of millions of citizens across generations. It guaranteed that their descendants would be elevated into the absolute upper echelons of society, blessed with wealth and influence forever.
To a Contractor of the East Island, that wasn't just a promotion. It was supreme, immortal glory.
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