Doomsday Vanguard: The Bare-Handed Heretic

Duo Yanshan, the fiercely loyal and famously explosive Patriarch of the Ashen Bone Cult, awakens strapped inside a plummeting, catastrophically damaged junk-tier mecha. He is in the dead center of a live-fire orbital drop at the Vorghast Interstellar Academy, serving as cannon fodder for the elite cadets. Furious at the metal coffin restricting him, Yanshan blows the emergency hatch. Unarmored and exposed to a lethal barrage of plasma, he executes his cult’s forbidden Lightness Skill. Stepping effortlessly across the searing laser beams in mid-air, he brutally dismantles a multi-ton war-machine with a single, qi-infused palm strike. His impossible display rocks the VR Star Network and infuriates Talan Ro, the academy’s icy top pilot and Yanshan's fiercest rival. But as Yanshan’s chaotic internal energy violently clashes with the simulation's code, a hidden encrypted file cracks open. The galactic regime has abandoned them. In exactly eighteen days, a dark-matter warhead will sterilize the entire orbital sector to cover up a military blunder. Surrounded by government spies and forced into a vicious alliance with Talan, Yanshan must punch a hole through an interstellar blockade before his newfound people are reduced to cosmic dust. Can a relic of the past save the future from annihilation?