The Martial Unity

It didn’t take Rui more than a few moments to deduce the impact of the Martial Heart on a poison Martial Artist’s power. It most likely empowered their ability to survive their own poisons and deploy greater concentrations and amounts of it, it also most likely empowered their ability to handle higher degrees of potency and toxicity. It allowed them to deploy these poisons against their opponents with greater ease.

Rui could see firsthand how effective the Martial Heart was in this regard.

It hadn’t even been a minute, and the poison user had already wounded Senior Xanarn without any help from her comrades.

(‘She was caught off-guard.’) Rui gritted his teeth. (‘Not just that, but her defense isn’t as effective against poison.’)

The reason for that was simple. It had to do with the mechanics of airborne poisons.

They were basically gases. 

Senior Xanarn’s sound was certainly tremendously powerful, however, her sound traveled through gases.

The keyword was ‘through’.

In this case, her sound barriers seamlessly traveled through the poisonous gas the same way that it traveled through normal air.

That was why she had been unable to defend against the poisonous attack whatsoever.

It meant that she had basically withstood a Senior-level attack on her Martial Body without any defense whatsoever.

Rui clenched his fist as he observed the ongoing fight.

She had immediately switched up strategies wisely, she focused half of her power blasting the poison-oriented Martial Senior with concentrated sound attacks to keep her at bay.

Thankfully, it was effective enough.

The fact that the Martial Body of a poison-oriented Martial Artist was not centered around speed or durability meant that she could not handle being bombarded with Senior Xanarn’s offense very well.

However, it also meant that she needed to handle her original three opponents with just half her full power.

That was not good.

Because originally, those same Martial Seniors were able to force her to a stalemate with her full power.

Half her power could accomplish that.

BOOM!

Senior Xanarn gritted her teeth as she did her best to guard against an attack that she was unable to defend against entirely with her sound shield.

She reduced the amount of power she dedicated against the poison user but made sure that it never went below one-third. She needed to find the exact most optimal distribution of power. She needed to use the bare minimum needed to ensure that the poison user was kept at bay while diverting the rest towards maintaining a pure defense against the other three.

One good thing was that this time her only focus was survival, while last time she had dedicated some amount of power towards dishing back with her Banshee Whisper as much as the damage they inflicted on her.

This time, however, she didn’t give a damn about putting so much as a scratch on her opponents. She only cared about surviving.

Specifically, surviving past at least the Martial Heart phase.

She knew that she could not survive if the fight proceeded uninterrupted. Four Martial Seniors, that too one that could bypass her sound as if she was created to counter her, was far too much for her to survive against, even if it was in the environment of Ajanta Island.

Her only hope of survival was…

Her thoughts briefly drifted towards Rui.

She felt less tense when she remembered that she was not alone.

Rui, on the other hand, only grew more tense.

(‘Damn, she should especially be focusing on opening up the range as much as possible, but she’s too worried about the poison potentially affecting the civilians or the Squire guardians of the sect.’) Rui could instantly notice the shifts in patterns and infer the psychological reason behind all of them.

This was actually something that Rui was not too afraid of. The gas poison that the Martial Senior employed was one that did not appear to linger at all after deployment, it seemed to disintegrate into the air harmlessly given how the green-colored gas did not seem to mix into the air, merely disappear in a strange and unexplained fashion. 

It made sense that she had adopted poisons with such a trait among others because otherwise she was too much of a liability to be around, and was prone to causing more damage to her allies than her enemies if her Martial Art ended up passively killing everybody around her. Even if she was a Martial Senior, nobody would accept such a person as an ally. Regardless, it didn’t matter here because it appeared that she had quite the amount of control over her Martial Art, and Senior Xanarn simply couldn’t apply the best solution to dealing with her.

She was too committed in her drive to protect the people that she had made a commitment to protect.

Thankfully, it appeared that she had kept in mind what Rui had told her. She made sure that she did not waste her Martial heart for anything other than surviving and making them burn their Martial Hearts.

The quicker that she could force all of them to burn the stamina of their Martial Heart, the better it would work out for her in the end. 

Rui too approved of this. He had been refining his predictive models on the three original Kaddar Martial Artists with the new data that he had access too while building a predictive model from scratch from the poison Martial Senior.

The refinements in his predictive model made him less uncertain about the plan that he had come up with. It made him more confident in executing it as time passed.

Yet it was hard for him to watch Senior Xanarn suffering. Ultimately, she simply could not contain the rush of attacks from four Martial Seniors entirely. Over the course of the battle, she had been wounded many times, so much so that even her healing factor simply couldn’t keep up with the amount of damage that she took, they kept piling wound after wound on her body.