ACSP: Chapter 190: Annihilation!
"You guys clean up the battlefield here. Collect their spatial rings and equipment. I'll be right back..."
Jiang Chen glanced back at the mounds of Dongdao Contractors cooling in pools of blood. After giving his brief instructions to Li Yanran and the others, his silhouette blurred. With a faint whish, he disappeared from the spot like a ghost, leaving only a small eddy of wind in his wake.
Meanwhile, on the far side of the dense forest, Aoi Bing was clutching her severed, frozen shoulder, struggling to stagger out from the wreckage of the shattered crystal barrier. The fragments of the red crystal fruit were scattered across the mossy ground, shimmering with a faint, colorful luminescence under the refracted sunlight before rapidly dissolving into pure chakra particles.
Back when Hato Yui had mounted the crystal dragon to launch her final, suicidal charge at Jiang Chen, her automated crystal clones had simultaneously escorted Aoi Bing away from the epicenter of the carnage. But the exact millisecond Hato Yui's life force blinked out, the absolute tether snapped; the crystal clones and the protective fruit instantly dissolved into nothingness.
"Sister Hato... rest assured. I will not let your sacrifice be in vain," Aoi Bing whispered, her voice trembling with a heavy, sorrowful grief as she stared back at the distant column of smoke. "I will inherit your will. I will return, train until my blood boils, and ensure that the grand cause of His Majesty the Emperor is completely fulfilled by our generation."
Her voice sounded incredibly weak, fractured by the agonizing pain of her phantom limb, but her eyes burned with a fanatical, unyielding light.
"You gave your life for the Empire. I will report your valor truthfully to His Majesty, and your name will absolutely be engraved upon the Hero's Monument at Nanga Shrine..."
Knowing she was running on borrowed time, Aoi Bing took a sharp, ragged breath, cast one final, lingering look at the clearing where her lover had fallen, and spun on her heel to flee toward the coastline.
Her steps were violently unsteady, her balance completely warped by the missing arm, and the frozen nerves in her shoulder throbbed with a sickening, localized agony. Yet, she gritted her teeth, pushing her remaining stamina to the absolute limit as she ran desperately through the undergrowth. At this moment, her entire existence had narrowed to a single, primal directive: survive, preserve the intelligence, and serve the Emperor.
But she hadn't even covered a few hundred meters before a sudden, oppressive weight dropped from the canopy.
A silhouette cut through the brush with terrifying, effortless velocity, planting itself directly into her escape path.
"Jiang... Jiang Chen?!"
Aoi Bing skid to a halt, her face instantly turning as pale as bleached paper. The sheer speed of his tracking parameters defied comprehension—she hadn't expected him to clean up the main battlefield and hunt her down so catastrophically fast.
Looking at the unreadable, chilling expression on the youth's face, a desperate survival instinct overrode her martial pride. She slumped her shoulders, letting her knees tremble as she forced a fragile, utterly pitiful appearance into her posture.
"You... you have already executed my sister," she whimpered, her eyes welling with calculated, tragic tears as she looked up at him through her messy hair. "You systematically slaughtered every single member of our East Island assault force... Not a single one remains. Do you truly possess such a heartless soul that you must completely wipe out a defenseless, mutilated survivor?"
She lowered her head slightly, squeezing out a few tears from the corners of her eyes at just the right psychological moment. Her slender frame trembled with calculated fragility, a textbook display designed to pierce through any man's defenses and weaponize Jiang Chen's basic empathy against him.
But against Jiang Chen, she was performing for a brick wall. He had encountered this exact "green tea bitch" routine more times than he could count in the New Era. Pretending to be pitiful, acting weak, and crying damsel-in-distress just to buy a second of hesitation? She could keep dreaming.
"If you think I am wiping you all out... then so be it."
Jiang Chen's voice was a flat, unyielding echo. His eyes were completely devoid of mercy, filled only with a dense, suffocating killing intent.
Before the last word fell, a sharp, deafening burst of lightning exploded from his right hand. Violent electrical currents crackled and danced wildly across his palm, casting a harsh, flickering blue glow over the surrounding brush and illuminating his frozen, expressionless face.
In the next millisecond, he vanished.
A high-speed [Body Flicker] bypassed her dynamic perception entirely. Before Aoi Bing could even register the shift in the air currents, Jiang Chen drove his lightning-infused palm directly through her chest, rupturing her heart.
——Pfft!
Aoi Bing's jaw fractured open as she spat out a massive spray of dark crimson blood. Her pupils contracted violently into pinpricks as she stared fixedly at the youth standing inches from her face. Her eyes were wide, drowning in a toxic mixture of absolute shock, shattering unwillingness, and venomous resentment.
"His... His Majesty the Emperor... will never let you... long live... the East... Island..."
"Noisy."
Jiang Chen frowned in pure disgust, his tone dripping with irritation.
Without a shred of hesitation, he cleanly yanked his bloody hand back from her chest cavity and lashed out with a brutal, whip-like kick. Packed with immense, concentrated physical power, the strike caught her securely and sent her flying backward over a hundred meters like a ragdoll with its strings severed.
Her broken form traced a violent arc through the forest canopy before slamming heavily into a massive, ancient tree trunk.
CRACK!
The sheer kinetic force of the impact snapped the dense trunk clean in half, sending a chaotic flurry of leaves raining down through the clearing. By the time Aoi Bing's body rolled off the shattered wood and hit the dirt, the last spark of her vitality had completely blinked out. She lay limp and twisted in the brush, her unblinking eyes still staring blankly at the sky, utterly unable to rest in peace.
Having completely erased the final straggler, Jiang Chen turned on his heel and smoothly backtracked to the original coordinate.
When he arrived, Li Yanran and the vanguard were still meticulously sweeping the area. The strike team they had just liquidated wasn't a batch of generic foot soldiers; they were the absolute elite raiding unit of the East Island forces. As a result, their corpses were a literal goldmine—packed with high-tier weapons, advanced military rations, stacks of specialized explosive tags, and highly coveted [Space Scrolls].
Li Yanran and her team were executing a flawless, professional cleanup, leaving absolutely no corner unchecked. They understood the macro-situation perfectly: if Jinghai City was ever going to be successfully rebuilt from the ashes of the invasion, it required a massive foundation of raw, high-tier resources. Letting these materials rot in the dirt would be an unpardonable waste. Everything had to be stripped, cataloged, and stored away.
While the squad remained buried in their logistics work, Jiang Chen walked straight past the bodies and stopped in front of the massive [Wood Locking Wall] He Gen had erected.
The structural dome had taken the brunt of the Dongdao bombardment for an extended period, and its exterior looked devastatingly battered. Deep, intricate fractures splintered across almost every square inch of the bark, forming a massive, charred spiderweb that looked ready to collapse at the slightest breeze.
But as Jiang Chen stepped closer, his sensory perception picked up the internal mechanics. The devastating cracks were entirely localized to the outermost layers; the inner core of the barrier remained completely solid and undamaged.
It was clear that He Gen, safely insulated within the darkness of the dome, had been continuously channeling his own [Wood Release Chakra] into the structure, rapidly repairing the inner fibers as the outside detonated. That relentless, manual feedback loop was the sole reason a standard defensive jutsu had managed to survive a coordinated siege by hundreds of high-level Contractors.
The fighting out here was practically tearing the forest apart, yet these two haven't even peeked outside, Jiang Chen noted, a playful, slight smile curling the corner of his lips. It seems the soundproofing and sensory dampening on this Wood Release matrix is exceptionally thorough.
"Since that's the case, let's give them a proper wake-up call..."
He reached out, pressing his open palm flat against the fractured, solid timber in front of him.
In the next fraction of a second, instead of utilizing destructive ninjutsu, Jiang Chen opened his pathways and let a sudden, massive surge of pure [Sage Chakra] erupt directly into the wood.
His eyes instantly transformed into horizontal frog pupils, and a brilliant, golden-orange pigmentation manifested around the contours of his eyes like two radiant gems.
"——Sage Mode, Activate!"
"——Sage Art: Frog Kumite!"
Jiang Chen pressed his palm against the fractured wooden barrier and sent a violent wave of Senjutsu energy surging through its core.
——BANG!
The massive, interlocking wall that had withstood a prolonged, catastrophic bombardment by hundreds of elite Contractors instantly shattered into a million pieces. Splinters of dense timber flew in every direction, kicking up a heavy cloud of pulverized earth and dust.
As the screen of debris settled, the interior of the dome was laid bare, exposing He Gen and Yang Ke huddled within.
Both of them were in absolutely abysmal condition. Yang Ke's face was completely drained of color, his clothing torn and heavily soaked in dark crimson blood from a dozen distinct wounds. Having borne the brunt of the initial siege against hundreds of Dongdao combatants, both his physical stamina and mental focus had been pushed past their breaking points.
He Gen wasn't faring much better. Because he had been continuously burning his internal reserves to manually repair and hold the structural integrity of the timber dome, his chakra pathways were utterly exhausted. He was slumped against the dirt, chest heaving as he gasped desperately for air.
"Boss?!"
"Why... how are you here?"
Both of them blinked through the dust, their faces twisting in absolute bewilderment the moment they realized the entity who had breached their fortress was Jiang Chen.
"If I hadn't tracked you down," Jiang Chen said, extending a hand to effortlessly haul both of them up from the scorched earth, "do you two honestly believe you'd still have a chance to draw breath?"
The moment his boots left the dirt, Yang Ke's eyes naturally drifted past Jiang Chen's shoulders. The sight that met him made his expression freeze. For as far as the eye could see through the fractured tree line, the forest floor was completely choked with a carpet of cooling corpses clad in East Island uniform.
His jaw dropped, and he veered his gaze back to Jiang Chen in sheer, unadulterated disbelief. "Boss... don't tell me... did you systematically wipe out every single one of these Dongdao Contractors?"
Jiang Chen shrugged noncommittally, his expression entirely casual. "Nonsense. Look around. Who else do you think liquidated them?"
Hearing the casual confirmation, Yang Ke and He Gen involuntarily exchanged a stunned, wide-eyed glance.
An irrepressible wave of shock rippled through their chests. They had just fought those exact Contractors firsthand; they knew with absolute certainty that this wasn't some generic vanguard squad—it was a highly optimized, high-level elite raiding unit from the heart of the East Island forces.
Especially the psychotic woman spearheading the formation. Her mastery over the Crystal Release Kekkei Genkai was flawlessly refined, her micro-tactical instincts were incredibly rich, and her raw combat output was monstrously powerful.
They had braced themselves for a gruesome, tragic end inside that dome. Yet, Jiang Chen had arrived and completely annihilated the entire division.
And the speed of the execution was what truly made their minds go numb. Exactly how many minutes had they been sealed inside that Wood Release wall? Ten? Fifteen? In that microscopic window of time, the entire enemy force had been completely erased from existence.
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