The Will to Protect

Fists, feet, knees, elbows—every part of his body had become a weapon.

His offensive surged like a violent storm, like an eruption of steel—he no longer cared whether each blow landed.

As long as the attacks were dense enough and fast enough, they could cover, compress, and seal off every bit of space around Chen Feng that could be used to evade.

He wanted to force Chen Feng to abandon that ghostly evasion. He wanted to drag the battle into the most direct, most brutal contest of strength.

Wave after wave of energy shockwaves swept outward like tsunamis.

The already fractured planetary surface collapsed even more violently. Massive boulders were blasted into the sky, only to be ground into dust by even more savage energy an instant later.

Within the ruins was apocalyptic chaos.

Chen Feng looked at the mad tiger of an opponent before him—someone determined to close the gap between them no matter the cost.

The corner of his mouth, which had remained calm all along, slowly curved upward.

"Interesting."

His voice was low, carrying a trace of excitement, but his words quickly vanished beneath the deafening roar.

Chen Feng no longer retreated, nor did he rely on extreme evasive maneuvers.

Facing the barrage of fists that had nearly become an iron wall, Chen Feng's body flickered—and he actually charged forward on his own initiative!

"Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom—!"

The two figures were completely swallowed by the rampaging radiance of energy. Only two blurred streaks of light could be seen crossing, colliding, separating, and colliding again at speeds almost too fast for the naked eye to follow!

Hit pushed Time-Skip to its limit.

Every one of his strikes was so fast that it seemed to surpass time itself. Wherever his fists swept past, even space twisted with them, carrying a terrifying force capable of breaking down everything.

Chen Feng, meanwhile, drove Ultra Instinct to another level.

Amid the raging storm, it was as though his body had vanished, leaving behind only countless supple threads.

No matter how dense Hit's attacks became, Chen Feng could always let those star-shattering blows brush past him from the most unimaginable angles, with the smallest possible movements.

Then, he began to counterattack.

His counterattacks were not numerous. They even seemed sparse.

Yet every strike was precise enough to make one's heart tighten.

Every punch seemed able to pierce through Hit's airtight assault, landing directly in the gaps when his strength had been spent but not yet renewed, or in the instant his defenses shifted.

Simple, direct, leaving no escape.

Hit roared wildly, his arms becoming a blur of afterimages as he desperately tried to block.

He stopped three jabs aimed at his throat, but the fourth punched through his defense like a venomous snake and slammed heavily into his abdomen.

He barely deflected the fifth punch, but the sixth came in with a bizarre uppercut, passing over his crossed arms and striking his jaw and cheek solidly!

"Pfft—!"

A mouthful of blood mixed with several broken teeth sprayed from Hit's mouth, turning into a strange string of blood droplets in the weightless environment.

His cheek rapidly swelled, and his vision blurred slightly from the impact.

Yet the fighting spirit in his dark purple eyes burned even fiercer, like flames doused with a bucket of oil.

The pain and blood seemed only to be the fuse that ignited his more violent side.

"Again!!!"

He roared, wiping the blood from the corner of his mouth. Ignoring the churning blood and qi within his body and the agonizing pain of fractured bones, he resumed his attacking stance like a statue of a war god that would never fall.

Chen Feng lightly landed atop a relatively intact boulder some distance away, his robes gently swaying in the chaotic currents of energy.

He looked at Hit—covered in wounds, yet still standing with his back straight and his fighting spirit soaring to the heavens.

The approval in Chen Feng's eyes became utterly undisguised at that moment, intense and clear.

The fierce clash temporarily came to a halt. Only the mournful whistling of lingering shockwaves brushing over rubble remained.

In the brief, tension-filled silence, Chen Feng suddenly spoke. His voice was calm, yet it pierced through space and reached Hit's ears with perfect clarity.

"Hit, do you know what the greatest difference between you and me is?"

Hit panted heavily, every breath carrying the metallic stench of blood.

He did not answer. He merely stared fixedly at Chen Feng, waiting for him to continue.

"It isn't the difference in absolute strength, nor is it speed, or even combat skill."

Chen Feng spoke slowly, his gaze turning toward the boundless dark void scattered with stars, as though he were looking somewhere far more distant.

"It is that—you have yet to find that thing truly worth giving everything for, worth surpassing your limits, even surpassing your 'self' to protect."

"Strength without the will to 'protect' at its core is ultimately a tree without roots, a fire without a source. It can make you stronger, even strong enough to make most people look up to you... but its limit was destined from the very beginning."

After saying this, the aura around Chen Feng suddenly changed.

It was no longer merely transcendent and powerful. It now carried a sense of responsibility and radiance as weighty as the earth and as vast as the sea of stars.

Hit froze, his pupils contracting slightly in the darkness.

"You've lived for over a thousand years, always killing, always completing missions. You're strong, but your strength is hollow. Because you have nothing you want to protect, your power has no roots."

Hit fell silent.

He stood on scorched earth burned black by energy, cracked rocks beneath his feet and fragments of celestial bodies floating in the distance.

The wind—if this dying planet still had any air—should have swept up dust and brushed against his deep-purple battle suit.

He wanted to argue, but it felt as though his throat had been clogged.

Chen Feng was right—he truly had nothing he wanted to protect.

Over the past thousand years, he had traveled through countless galaxies like a shadowless ghost.

Taking jobs, killing people, collecting payment, disappearing.

He remembered the looks in countless targets' eyes before they died. He remembered the arcs of blood splashing under different gravities. He remembered the cold notification chime when his payment came through.

But he had never remembered what he was fighting for.

Fighting was merely work. Killing was merely procedure. Living was merely inertia.

"But I have people I must protect. My people, my companions, my planet. That is why my strength has roots."

Hit looked at Chen Feng, and a complicated emotion rose within him—not jealousy, not anger, but a profound emptiness that nearly made him unable to stand.

Chen Feng stood amid the ruins, yet it was as though fertile land lay beneath his feet; Hit stood amid the same ruins and could see only more ruins.

"Come. Your final strike. Let me see your full strength."

Hit took a deep breath—even though there was no air at all in the vacuum. It was simply a combat habit forged over a thousand years.

He drew upon every ounce of power within his body—every muscle, every nerve, every drop of energy in his blood.

The Time-Skip field roared within him. The gaps in time stretched, twisted, and reassembled in his perception.

The world became a strip of film pieced together from countless frozen frames. He could clearly "see" the flow of time—it was not a line, but a net, a fabric, a flowing river of stars, and the tiny fractures within that flow.

He concentrated all his power into his right fist.

Space-time around his fist began to collapse, swallowing the light and forming a dark spot like a miniature black hole.

A thousand years of combat experience crystallized upon his fist: the tremble in his wrist when he killed for the first time, the precision he learned by his hundredth mission, the efficiency he understood after his thousandth battle.

Everything was compressed into this one punch.