The Martial Unity

SLASH SLASH SLASH

SPLAT

Rui grimaced as he leaped back, caressing the wound on his neck. He had attempted to see whether his incredible sword-based offense was able to cut down the branches that lashed out at him when he triggered the defensive mechanism.

Unlike the first time, where both he and Kane were caught greatly off-guard, he was prepared this time when he entered its range. He had just tried to see whether he could potentially make progress against the volley of branches that inevitably blasted toward him.

It was clear that the tree, like all living beings in the dungeon, had been monsterified with the esoteric substances running through its veins. This meant that the chilled Bellhorn Steel ought to be able to destroy the branches apart pretty easily, all things considered. What Rui was hoping for was the destruction to be potent enough to prevent the branches from actually reaching even as he proceeded moving towards the large singular esoteric deposit

He just realized he couldn’t.

(‘It’s not a matter of my sword being too weak, my sword is cutting through just fine, the issue is that my slashing frequency speed is not enough to prevent the branches from ever reaching me, especially when moving forward,’) He tutted to himself.

It was harder to prevent the branches from striking him when he moved forward for multiple reasons, the first reason was, of course, he had less time to slash at them when he was moving towards the branches than if he was standing in one place. The relative velocity between them grew higher and the branches would only be moving faster from his perspective, making it even harder to cut them down before they could reach him.

Furthermore, the number of branches attacking also increased the closer he got. He had hypothesized that each branch’s defensive system was autonomous to a certain extent, and they would simply attack whatever entered the radius. The closer he got to the tree, the more branches detected him and lashed out at him, making it even more difficult than it already was.

(‘If it’s just standing stationarily at the edge of the range of the branch’s striking range, I can manage, so can Kane to a lesser degree,’) Rui noted. (‘But that’s not enough,’)

Another thing that frustrated Rui was the fact that there was really no scope for the VOID algorithm to succeed. Although the VOID algorithm wasn’t strictly limited to humans, it was truly out of its element against a non-sentient tree that only had a single attack pattern; straight. Normally, Rui could drastically reduce his reaction times and lag with the help of the predictive model, but even though he had already created a predictive model, it was nowhere near as shockingly effective as it normally was.

The reason for this was that anybody could predict it, it was just that elementarily simple. The problem was that it didn’t really help, this was one challenge that required adequate amounts of speed and destructive power, and unfortunately, Rui’s Martial Art could not make up for the gap as easily as he normally did.

“Damn,” Rui cursed after hours of attempts. “This isn’t good news.”

“Yeah,” Kane sighed. “We’ve tried basically anything. Hell, we’ve tried more than I would have had I tried doing this alone.”

“Honestly, this is the first real setback we’ve faced in the Shionel Dungeon,” He said out loud, there have been a few headaches here and there, but this is the first time our winning strategy has been shut down this hard.”

“True,” Kane concurred, nodding. “What do you think we should do?”

Rui considered his options. There were a few avenues to be considered. The first avenue was simply relying on themselves to slowly make progress and hopefully find a way to break through the tough defensive measures of the tree.

It wasn’t that this method was without merits, but to Rui, it was simply far too inefficient. The two of them would have to spend a lot of time hacking it, and Kane was basically useless when it came to cutting down the branches, the only reason he could avoid dying was that he was an excellent evader, that was able to avoid critical wounds.

There was another avenue that Rui was considering.

“Maybe we don’t have to do all the hard work,” Rui remarked.

“Huh?” Kane tilted his head in confusion. “Like, abandon the floor and look for ones that we’re less incompatible with?”

“No,” Rui shook his head. “What I am talking about is the fact that we can literally get others to do all the dirty work for us.”

“How?” Kane frowned.

Rui smirked. “There are ways to go about this.”

From what he could see, it required far too much effort and time for the two of them to slowly chop off all the branches that would attack them if they did try to extract the giant deposit under the hollow space beneath the trunk.

Frankly, if he was not willing to, then he could simply get others to do it for him. Of course, no one would willingly do all the hard work and let Rui and Kane steal the fruits of their labor.

Willingly, being the keyword.

If they were tricked, then Rui could get them to do it under deceived impressions of the fourteenth floor. Still, he needed to trick a large number of people, and that wasn’t easy. He couldn’t just pass out flyers with a map to the fourteenth floor and the location of the giant esoteric deposit on the fourteenth floor. That would instantly backfire in record time.

It was practically impossible to manipulate a large number of Martial Squires one by one and somehow convey the information to all of them through a hundred different ways, it was just far too impractical to go about such a crude of manipulating Martial Squires. There were more efficient ways of manipulating Martial Squires, and also more poetically satisfying ways of doing it as well.