The raging flames instantly enveloped Li Ke's greatsword, but this time, the element was stripped of any past gentleness. His Dragon Fire aggressively drilled into the micro-fractures lining the steel, rapidly melting the internal spine from the inside out. Heavy crimson jets of fire violently jetted out from the web of cracks as the entire chassis of the weapon turned blindingly white-hot.
Realistically speaking, if he initiated a high-speed telekinetic reforging process right now, he could probably salvage the blade for a few more rounds. But Li Ke chose to refuse.
He simply lacked a high-efficiency, wide-range mob-clearing skill in his current portfolio. More importantly, even if he spent the energy to reforge it, this piece of iron would still only survive another strike or two anyway. Armed with his signature Dragon Fire, he had no need to be overly sentimental about broken steel.
He continuously compressed the roaring dragon flames deep into the marrow of the blade, the chaotic power driving the thermal parameters of the weapon to an absolute extreme. Li Ke didn't dare to be careless; his advanced sensory perception closely monitored the violent structural vibrations of the steel to ensure the weapon wouldn't detonate prematurely right in his grip!
Finally, just as the cracks webbed across the surface became dangerously pronounced and the blade officially began to sag and liquefy, Li Ke halted his chaotic compression.
Through the radar of his world-attuned "Observation Haki," he could distinctly perceive that this sword was a mere millisecond away from a total explosive rupture!
"I have no idea if you freaks possess any real self-awareness, but—catch!"
Intricate luminous Mana geometric lines flashed across his limbs. Under his absolute mental command, a massive surge of raw magical energy flooded into the melting weapon, primed to detonate exactly one second later!
While his baseline micro-control over raw Mana was still relatively unpolished, orchestrating a crude, high-yield magical explosion was well within his current wheelhouse!
His bloodline violently thrummed within his veins, the magical energy reinforcing his muscles as Li Ke locked into a powerful throwing stance. With a monstrous burst of physical power, he hurled the molten white-hot greatsword straight into the encampment of the stationary yokai!
The incandescent greatsword streaked through the dark like a meteor, dragging a massive, violent thermal cyclone of roaring dragon flames directly in its wake!
The swarming yokai, however, harbored absolutely zero fear. Gnashings their fangs, they howled chaotic, distorted syllables as they lunged en masse to intercept the incoming projectile.
"You saw me! You saw me!"
"Human flesh! HUMAN FLESH!!"
"KILL! KILL! KILL!!!"
They screeched and threw themselves directly into the path of the blade, led by the hyper-velocity aerial phantoms that possessed flight capabilities!
Driven by his monstrous physical strength, the hurled greatsword carried an immense payload of kinetic energy, slamming dead-center into a spectral sheet-like yokai. The entity's anomalous form was cleanly perforated and instantly incinerated upon contact, exposing a weapon-wielding demon lurking right behind its wake.
The dense white fog wrapping around this secondary demon's frame generated massive friction, aggressively fighting the momentum of the sword. Through his Haki, Li Ke perceived that the tip of his melting greatsword snapped cleanly off against the monster's sternum, but the absolute, obscene temperature of the steel effortlessly liquefied through the protective spiritual mist anyway. The broken edge buried itself deep into the demon's chest cavity, instantaneously setting its entire internal anatomy ablaze!
Skewered alongside it were two more yokai lurking directly behind its shadow.
The white-hot greatsword buried itself deep into the earth, emitting a heavy, nauseating stench of scorched flesh. But before the surrounding entities could even comprehend what had just transpired, Li Ke casually snapped his fingers from a distance.
The crisp snap triggered a violent detonation of Mana. The magical energy instantaneously converted into an explosive blaze, entirely rupturing the over-pressurized greatsword. Countless fragments of semi-molten shrapnel burst outward, tearing through the air in all directions!
These savage, blazing metallic jets thoroughly riddled the surrounding yokai like a swarm of hornets. The unique properties of the attached Dragon Fire ensured that the shrapnel would not stop burning until the absolute limit of its energy was spent.
The chaotic thermal shrapnel ignited every single entity in its path, creating a sudden inferno that shattered the nearby wooden fences and blew the city gates straight off their hinges!
Simultaneously, the residual magical pressure coalesced into a towering fire tornado, violently expanding into the perimeter!
The flames swept outward like a massive tidal wave.
However, because this particular Mana-converted fire lacked the absolute, obscene temperature of pure, unadulterated Dragon Fire, the yokai caught in the secondary blast radius weren't instantly vaporized into dust. Instead, they were left writhing and howling in pure agony on the scorched earth.
The single strike effectively wiped out half of the yokai vanguard that had stalked them out of the city. In return, the massive output drained roughly a fifth of Li Ke's overall stamina; generating such an immense volume of Dragon Fire and Mana simultaneously in a short burst was a heavy tax even for his robust system.
Fortunately, the World Energy leaking from the falling anomalies immediately began to flock toward his system, slightly elevating his baseline parameters and refilling his stamina reservoir back to full capacity before he could even break a sweat.
Despite the spectacular victory, none of them felt a shred of celebration. Li Ke remained indifferent, but Shinobu's brow furrowed into a deep, anxious knot.
"They refuse to leave the city boundaries... Which means if we ever want to eradicate or properly investigate them, we are strictly forced to operate within the urban centers? This makes things incredibly problematic. And it's not like none of them can leave..."
Shinobu felt a massive headache coming on. If they were trapped fighting inside the city, the civilian populace would inevitably witness the horror. And if Li Ke's hypothesis held true—that these anomalies grew exponentially stronger by feeding on human terror—forcing a confrontation inside the pen would cause the enemy's combat metrics to skyrocket.
Yet, leaving them alone wasn't an option either. If these entities systematically manifested the Hyakki Yagyō specifically to harvest human fear, then playing a passive waiting game was exactly what the invaders wanted.
Furthermore, the mere fact that certain high-tier variants could break away from the human population baseline proved that once an anomaly gorged itself on enough terror, it would eventually become entirely independent of its human source. They were running out of time!
She bit her lower lip raw, her analytical mind frantically cycling through tactical solutions. But staring at the fresh wave of phantoms surging forward, only to grind to a rigid halt exactly at the city perimeter, she found it utterly impossible to draft a viable strategy that relied on conventional strike teams.
But the dilemma remained.
If they deployed too few fighters, the efficiency of purging the yokai would drop to an absolute zero, placing the slayers in immense peril. Not everyone possessed an overwhelmingly dominant and aggressive physical system like Li Ke did.
Yet, if they gathered too many humans in one spot... the operational territory of the yokai would inevitably expand far past the current city limits.
They desperately needed to amass high-tier experts, and they needed to do it immediately!
As these racing thoughts consumed her, Shinobu couldn't resist looking over at Li Ke, voicing her burning curiosity.
"Lord Li Ke... could the technique you are utilizing actually be the legendary Sun Breathing?"
Due to the massive, unchecked influx of demons and yokai across the country, many closely guarded historical secrets had ceased to be secret. Shinobu had picked up quite a bit of lore. If Li Ke's staggering, volatile power truly stemmed from Sun Breathing, she would immediately find a way to have the Master broker a massive transaction with him to secure the manual—offering wealth, land, or beautiful women. She wouldn't mind it at all. She understood with absolute clarity that if the situation demanded it, their Master would gladly pay absolutely any price to satisfy Li Ke's desires and needs.
He wouldn't let Li Ke suffer even a fraction of a loss.
"Not even close," Li Ke replied, shaking his head. "Breathing Styles are far too much of a hassle for me. Besides, I already have one specialized combat art that violently tears my body apart; I have absolutely zero need for a second one."
As he spoke, crimson Dragon Fire manifested over his palm, actively soothing and repairing the flesh of his hand which had been severely blistered by the superheated steel of his greatsword.
This particular limitation left him feeling quite helpless. His raw dragon flames would never harm him directly, and his baseline fire manipulation was the same—as long as he maintained focus, he was entirely immune to his own element.
But a white-hot piece of iron bar was a completely different story...
When he launched that sword throw earlier, the immense kinetic friction and thermal output had literally sheared a layer of skin clean off his palm. If he hadn't grown thoroughly desensitized to physical trauma during his previous world trials, the sheer agony would have had him crying out loud.
It wasn't that he was biologically incapable of mastering a Breathing Style; after all, the breathing principles of the elemental bending arts were essentially just exercises in extreme mental concentration.
The real structural bottleneck was his anatomy: his cardiovascular highway was already running a high-yield, hyper-destructive blood-qi secret technique from the Dungeon & Fighter Berserker class. That Berserker art actively modified his heart to force a massive, unnatural physical overdrive, so adding a second, high-pressure Breathing Style that aggressively overtaxed his lungs and heart on top of it...
Even a monster like Li Ke had a biological ceiling to what his heart could endure.
Besides, whether it came to the physical stat-boosts or the sheer structural damage it inflicted on the user's body, a standard Breathing Style wasn't even fit to lace the boots of a proper bloody-qi secret technique.
"What... So it's actually some variation of traditional Onmyodo sorcery?"
Shinobu's jaw dropped in absolute shock. She had spent this entire time firmly believing that Li Ke was a rogue prodigy wielding a highly modified, secret Breathing Style, but she had been completely off the mark.
But if his powers were rooted in Onmyodo magic...
Her mind automatically drifted toward their master, Kagaya Ubuyashiki. The Ubuyashiki clan traces its lineage back to an ancient family of Shinto priests. If Li Ke's supernatural flame manipulation was truly a form of Onmyodo sorcery, did that mean the ancestral spells their master previously dismissed as useless might actually function now?
As for why those priestly rituals had been entirely inert in the past but could potentially work right now?
Simple—the world didn't harbor physical, mythical yokai back then!
"I mean, if you want to rationalize it that way, there's nothing wrong with it..."
Li Ke didn't feel like parsing the multi-system dimensional physics of bending and magic for her, so he simply let her jump to whatever conclusions she preferred.
Noticing that the skin on his palm had successfully regenerated back to its pristine state, Li Ke gave his hand a brisk shake, flinging the residual motes of Dragon Fire onto the scorched grass. He reflexively felt the urge to casually grab a handful of chest to test the tactile sensitivity and motor control of his freshly healed fingers. Unfortunately, the moment his eyes locked onto Mai Shiranui, her ninja instincts picked up on his shifty behavior immediately. She sharply snapped Kashu up, training the steel right between his eyes.
Smoothly pivoting without a shred of shame, Li Ke redirected his gaze and marched straight toward Shinobu instead.
Before his hand could make contact, Kanae Kocho gracefully stepped in front of her younger sister, using her warm, gentle smile as an impenetrable shield against Li Ke's advances.
Tch, this woman.
Li Ke narrowed his eyes in slight annoyance.
However, he knew this was genuinely not the time for such antics. Lowering his hand, he casually dug a finger into his ear, tuning out the persistent, chaotic shrieks of the yokai chanting phrases like "You saw me!" from across the invisible boundary.
"Well, putting that aside for now, the threat these yokai pose is highly specific."
Based on the explosive results of his last attack, Li Ke could definitively map out the enemy's logic. These phantoms weren't the high-dimensional, original conquerors that fractured the 7 Days to Die world. They were localized bio-weapons—a newly engineered vanguard cultivated specifically to harvest this native realm.
Because they were far too weak!
Their seemingly impenetrable physical hides couldn't even withstand semi-molten shrapnel, and they immediately turned to dust the moment his Dragon Fire licked their frames. His tactical retreat had essentially been for nothing.
Conversely, the Lovecraftian entities that spearheaded the invasion were a completely different story. Those true aberrations undoubtedly possessed lethal, high-tier techniques. What remained unclear was why they had halted their direct expansion to cultivate these localized folklore monsters instead. Was it because they faced strict dimensional restrictions, forcing them to ranch the world through proxies? Or was it simply an intrinsic property of their existence—that their mere presence automatically mass-produced monsters out of human history and fear?
If it was the former, he wouldn't have to plan a desperate, multi-world evacuation. If it was the latter...
He would seriously have to consider gambling on the hope that other continents like Europe or America were unaffected, and immediately flee this island with Shinobu and the others. There would be zero hope of saving Japan. Even with the world's consciousness actively refilling his stamina after every kill, an opponent that fundamentally outscaled his raw defensive limits would still crush him.
As these grim tactical options weighed on his mind, Li Ke's gaze drifted up to the sky. He spotted several airborne yokai drifting out from the city limits toward their perimeter. Effortlessly conjuring a volley of Dragon Fire to incinerate them into ash, his eyes settled onto Kanae, whose temporary conceptual lifespan was rapidly ticking down to its final minutes.
"I forgot to ask you earlier—have you ever actually seen a god while you were a wandering soul?"
"A god?"
Kanae blinked in surprise, then slowly shook her head.
"No, never. But I could always faintly perceive that some manner of divine presence has been silently watching over us."
"Did you feel that presence before the world broke, too?"
"Yes, it was there before the cataclysm as well."
"Then what the hell are those deities even eating to sit idly by..."
Li Ke muttered, casting a deadpan, unimpressed look at the heavens. He didn't know what the spiritual bureaucracy of Japan's gods was playing at, but expecting a divine intervention at this stage was pure wishful thinking.
"Alright. You two sisters should share your final few words. I'm going back out to slaughter a few more waves of these things."
Li Ke scanned the immediate perimeter. The local monsters inside their clear zone had been temporarily wiped out. While the overarching mystery of the invasion remained unmapped, accumulating as much localized World Energy as humanly possible was a strategy that could never go wrong.
Besides, these localized grunts were incredibly easy to farm, making them perfect dummies to test and refine his Firebending and magical arts.
"I'll help you clear them," Mai Shiranui volunteered.
She smoothly tossed Kashu back into Li Ke's grip, and in a baffling display of ninja storage, reached directly into her cleavage to pull out a pair of pristine folding fans. Even with his advanced Observation Haki active, Li Ke couldn't fathom exactly where she had managed to conceal those bulky props within her form.
"Are you sure you'll be fine using fans?"
Li Ke looked at Mai Shiranui's unsheathed weapon with a deadpan expression. Even though the ribs of her folding fans were forged from reinforced steel, they still lacked the optimal parameters for clearing out a horde of mythical monsters.
They were just too short.
"Don't you dare look down on me! I'm a qualified martial artist who earned a spot in the King of Fighters tournament!"
Mai shot him an annoyed glare, throwing her hands on her hips. She noticed that Li Ke was consistently trying to play the protective shield for her, which triggered a strange, simmering frustration in her chest.
She was a professional fighter, for crying out loud!
"Be that as it may, you should still keep the sword. I don't strictly need a weapon to tear these things apart anyway."
Li Ke casually threw a testing punch into the air. His signature Dragon Fire danced in a violent swirl around his knuckles, but the extreme kinetic friction instantly blistered his skin again, forcing him to wince slightly.
"Your form completely collapsed just now... You aren't actually trained in hand-to-hand combat, are you?"
Mai rolled her eyes. She knew this reckless scoundrel was relying entirely on raw stats and cheat abilities rather than actual martial polish.
"I only know the bare basics. Why? Interested in giving me some private lessons?"
Li Ke shrugged, openly admitting his limitation. Compared to a generational prodigy like Mai, his unarmed combat skills were practically non-existent. He didn't harbor the same deep disdain for martial arts techniques as he did for heart-taxing Breathing Styles; a solid physical foundation was a versatile asset that could never go wrong.
"I mean, it's not impossible... But do you have a specific style you prefer? My mastery is strictly rooted in the Shiranui-ryu."
Mai answered without overthinking the request. From her perspective, Li Ke's punching technique was elementary at best, but if she was going to formally instruct him, she needed to know his mechanical preferences.
Li Ke didn't actually care about the specific martial style, but her answer triggered a sudden, explosive realization in his mind.
The King of Fighters universe didn't just harbor Mai Shiranui!
There was the fiercely elegant, traditional Chizuru Kagura; the massive ice-wielding doll Kula Diamond; and the lethal, villainous duo Mature and Vice! With the right tactical maneuvers, every single one of them presented a golden opportunity to expand his harem!
As for Athena Asamiya, Yuri Sakazaki, Kasumi Todoh, or Angel—even if their personal backgrounds made them a bit more complex to deal with, they weren't entirely outside his scope of operations!
Especially Mature and Vice! Since they were literally working for the villainous Orochi clan, nobody in society would give a damn if he locked them away in a private basement for his personal amusement!
It was an absolutely ironclad, flawless blueprint!
Li Ke's eyes lit up like binary stars, and his surrounding aura of dragon flame flared three times as intense out of sheer excitement.
Flashing a winning, overly familiar grin, he smoothly stepped forward and wrapped his arm right around Mai's shoulders, locking into a cozy, friendly posture as he pitched the idea.
"Shiranui-ryu sounds absolutely perfect! Hey, tell you what—how about I help you globally market and revitalize the Shiranui clan? Once we wrap up this saving-the-world gig, I'll tag along back to your universe to study martial arts under your roof. What do you think?"
Realistically speaking, training on the Arad continent under a high-fantasy Nen Master or Grappler would offer vastly superior stat growth, but Li Ke knew his real bottleneck was basic physical muscle memory and fundamentals—and those could be mastered in any universe.
"You absolute degenerate..."
Mai immediately picked up on the thick wave of underlying malice radiating from his grin. She narrowed her eyes at his satisfied face, her ninja instincts screaming that this perverted scoundrel was plotting something monumentally indecent. While she couldn't map out the exact target of his schemes, she knew for a fact he was up to no good.
But when he mentioned permanently restoring the global prestige of the Shiranui lineage...
"As if it were that easy," Mai muttered, her voice dropping as a wave of melancholy hit her. Shifting her weight, she firmly planted her palm right against Li Ke's face, shoving his head away while simultaneously slapping his wandering hand off her shoulder before he could squeeze her flesh.
This man was always like this, never making any effort to hide his absolute lust for a woman's body, which genuinely annoyed her to no end.
"Leaving your raw talent aside for a moment, the Shiranui style isn't something you can just master overnight. Besides, if you want to make a global name for yourself, you either need massive wealth or overwhelming strength. Do you honestly think you have what it takes to become the champion of the King of Fighters tournament? If you can't, then stop carelessly throwing around promises to revitalize the Shiranui clan. If our lineage has to rely on a guy like you to achieve global prestige, that would be a true tragedy."
Finishing her lecture, Mai shot him a look of absolute disdain, continuing her deadpan critique of his character.
"After all, you are a complete, unadulterated degenerate. If the world ever found out that the successor helping to globally market the Shiranui-ryu was a shameless pervert, I would honestly have to commit seppuku just to apologize to generations of our clan's past masters."
The King of Fighters tournament?
Why the hell would I waste my time trying to win that cursed event?
Hearing her bring up the tournament, Li Ke immediately recalled that practically none of those global competitions ever reached a normal conclusion. It was an absolute miracle that such a cursed event, which constantly got derailed by cataclysmic anomalies and villainous plots, managed to be successfully hosted year after year.
Then again, the various final bosses did seem strangely obsessed with keeping the tournament framework alive for their own agendas.
"Maybe I really can't trade blows with the absolute top-tier martial artists of your universe right now, but we can easily secure the financial side of the equation," Li Ke replied, flashing a confident grin as he pointed a thumb at his own chest.
"Isn't this entire world practically littered with abandoned wealth? We're putting our lives on the line to save their realm; harvesting a massive mountain of gold leaves along the way can hardly be considered an overcharge, don't you think?"
With the local population being systematically decimated by the invading horrors, there were bound to be countless elite estates and noble vaults currently sitting completely vacant with zero surviving heirs. Under those conditions, him utilizing his spatial abilities to open a door and casually sweep up the unclaimed gold was just standard logistical common sense, wasn't it?
He hadn't focused on accumulating wealth before simply because material riches held no intrinsic value to his dimensional survival system.
"Huh?! Are you suggesting we collect a massive savior's bounty? But isn't that a bit unethical? We came here to rescue a dying world out of the goodness of our hearts!"
Mai stared at him in utter bewilderment. Driven by her innate kindness, her wholesome mind completely failed to register that Li Ke was actually talking about opportunistic looting.
"Well... what I actually meant was, those wealthy families who have already been wiped out down to the last soul..."
Li Ke felt forced to gently prod her moral compass.
Mai: "..."
She processed the concept for a quiet moment, her face twisting into a hilariously conflicted expression—torn between a desperate, practical desire for funding and a rigid martial artist's sense of propriety.
"That's... that's still pretty bad, isn't it?"