The Martial Unity

Rui bade him goodbye before sky-walking away. The blade made out of Tethered Bellhorn Steel was one of his solutions to the problem of the monsters that he hoped to handle with Project Monster Repellant.

He had commissioned a single-handed curved sword with a blade fashioned out of Tethered Bellhorn Steel. The reason for this kind of blade was rather simple, he would likely be putting himself in a situation where he would be facing multiple threats omnidirectionally, thus he needed a blade whose application was flexible and versatile and could be rapidly adjusted to fit his situation.

In this regard, slashing was a more desirable means of attacking than stabbing or thrusting. The former was much more flexible as it had a large number of directions and angles of attack, and was less committal allowing the swordsman to return back to a guarded stance swiftly and easily. Stabbing and thrusting were more lethal, yet also required more commitment from the swordsman.

The latter style of sword combat was unfit for the circumstances of the Shionel Dungeon. He could not focus on committing everything to a sure-shot way of killing a single opponent when his goal was to cope with the monsters in a situation where he would be facing many, not just one. Furthermore, he did not need to commit too much inflicting damage why thrusting thanks to the presence of the cooled Tethered Bellhorn Steel blade that would magnify the damage his attack inflicted on the monster tremendously.

Thus Rui decided to go for a basic slashing-oriented sword style. Furthermore, he wanted to minimize the commitment that he gave as far as his body went when wielding it, thus he decided to commission single-handed curved swords that were meant to be wielded by a single arm and were suited towards slashing rather than stabbing or thrusting.

He had even ordered a special scabbard laced on the inside with a rare esoteric that constantly had a standard temperature many degrees below the freezing point of water. Even when heated, it would seemingly violate the Zeroth law of thermodynamics and lose heat to its surroundings before reaching its standard temperature.

Thus he had a natural cooling system for the Tethered Bellhorn Steel blade, allowing him to ensure that it had a low temperature that was needed to obtain the reaction that he was hoping for.

That was his first solution against the monsters. He had already begun training in basic swinging forms for the blade with a replica whose size, shape, and mass distribution of the set of blades that he was commissioning.

He knew his limits, of course. He was not arrogant enough to believe that he could master swordsmanship in a matter of months. Swordsmanship was a field deep and vast enough to be qualified to be the Martial Paths of Martial Artists.

However, he had no intention of mastering the in a matter of months, what he was subjecting himself to was basically the Martial Foundation Stage equivalent of swords. He needed to make sure that, at the very least, his fundamental maneuvers with the sword were solid.

The rest he could make up for to a great extent with the VOID algorithm which would allow him to predict monsters with remarkable accuracy and depth, while his elementary and basic adaptive-evolution model would allow him to appropriately deal with them. Even if the latter was primitive in comparison to the adaptive evolution model that he developed for unarmed humans, it still allowed him to make decisions quicker than if he had to process and make a choice each time.

However, he also was planning to bank on Primordial Instinct which would help him test whether a counter is good or bad.

These were the measures he had come up with for Project Monster Repellant. The unique thing about this project was that, for the first time, he would be creating a technique that wasn’t actually a technique, not truly. Technically it was, but it wasn’t something he would ever use again after the Shionel Dungeon raid, realistically.

On top of that, he was not interested in pursuing swordsmanship. It wasn’t that he particularly disliked it, it was just that it required exclusive commitment for the most part.

Once one picked up the sword, all of one’s combat was centered around it. He would not be able to perform unarmed attacks anywhere nearly as well with a sword compared to without it. Punching and kicking became far more constrained when holding a sword since merely holding it was detrimental to the kind of balance and maneuvering needed for unarmed attacks.

He could effectively forget grappling if he ever decided to pursue swordsmanship. The number of times two swordsmen ever got into a wrestling match in the middle of a fight could probably be counted on one hand.

Every other field became much harder to use if he pursued swordsmanship. It was because of this demand for exclusivity that he could never pursue the blade seriously.

That still did not mean that he was against the mastery of weapons in general, just not swordsmanship and similar weapons that demanded an exclusive commitment to them. He did not mind a smaller weapon that could be used in conjugation with his existing unarmed-based techniques.

However, he had not felt the need to adopt such a weapon, nor had he come across a weapon that would suit his Flowing Void Martial Art.

For the purpose of fulfilling the difficult goal of exploring and plundering the entirety of the Shionel Dungeon before all other forces, he was willing to adopt the sword for a limited amount of time.

Yet that was not the only weapon he had readied.

STEP

He landed in front of the Martial Union.

(‘Time to procure the other ‘weapon’ that I have commissioned,’) He thought to himself with an eager smile.

He quickly passed through the security check-ins before heading straight towards the commercial wing of the Union branch, walking over to one specific store.