The Martial Unity

In the following days, the two of them followed through with their investigation.

Or rather, Kane merrily joined along for the ride while Rui did most of the data-gathering. He was quite content hanging out with his best friend in a cool new world. He experienced deep anxiety and stress when he got absorbed into the new world and spent three days by himself and the Divine Doctor.

However, the moment Rui entered, he felt quite secure and confident. Over the many years that he had known him, he learned a simple truth. Rui Quarrier Silas Kandria could overcome anything. With the power of adaptive evolution, man could handle anything that the world threw at him and eventually overcome it.

Admittedly, Kane had grown overreliant on him to a certain degree, but it was difficult not to. How could one avoid doing so when the person in question was extremely reliable such that he could fix every problem?

Still, he did his best to contribute with everything he had.

POW POW POW!

He devastated three quasi-Squire-level crocottas with a blow each, crushing their skulls effortlessly. The dog-wolf monsters died on the spot.

“Ok, done with this species,” Rui remarked stoically. “Let’s go.”

In the past week, they had run into many species since they began investigating the dungeon, and it hadn’t taken Rui too long to make a belated realization.

“These species…” Rui narrowed his eyes. “These aren’t in the inheritance I got from the Elder Tree. Yet, they are still a part of the Tree of Life of Gaia.”

In other words, they stemmed from the same last unifying common ancestor that gave birth to all life in the world. The enlightenment he gained from the Tree of Life allowed him to instantly deduce the most antithetical world to the species, even if he didn’t recognize the species itself.

He didn’t recognize a single one of them.

‘Despite belonging to the Gaian Tree of Life, these species have undergone eons of isolated evolution,’ Rui realized. ‘After all, assuming that this place has been around for as long as the Elder Tree has, then that’s an enormous amount of time.’

Time flowed one hundred and forty-four times faster in the Mellow Manifold. Thus, the biosphere of the Mellow Manifold had undergone an additional hundred and forty-four millennia of evolution over the rest of the biosphere of the Beast Domain.

Of course, life had been around for billions of years, which was why Rui was still effortlessly able to understand each of these species and what it took to evolve them. The entirety of the Mellow Manifold and Mellow Dungeon was only a minute twig in an absolutely gigantic tree.

“Fascinating,” he muttered with a hint of intrigue in his eyes. “To think that such a thing can happen.”

He greedily added all the data that he needed from them and the environments most suited to them to the Tree of Life, increasing its acuity bit by bit. The more data he fed it, the greater the predictive model would function, like all predictive models.

He began gaining deeper insights into the species of the dungeon as he mapped the layers of the dungeon. The danger level of the dungeon grew drastically as one went deeper into the dungeon, yet it was a gradient. It started from zero from the very outskirts such that even the Divine Doctor could remain there without any problems whatsoever, eventually growing stronger and stronger the deeper one went.

This gradient allowed Rui to make extremely educated guesses about the danger level of the core of the Mellow Dungeon.

“…As previously estimated, definitely Master-level,” Rui remarked stoically. “…Both mathematical extrapolation and statistical sensory resistance correlation yield a result of the core being Master-level. Thus, the certainty of this result is quite high.”

“Damn!” Kane cursed. “So, a region filled with multiple Master-level creatures after all? I was kinda hoping that we would discover that you’re wrong.”

“…Well, I was partially wrong,” Rui replied quietly. “…It’s definitely a Master-level region, but there’s probably only a single Master-level creature.”

“How do you figure?”

“…Area.” Rui’s tone was confident. “There’s too little area for more than a single Master-level creature. If you recall the Master-level creatures that we faced in that Master-level region in the North of the Beast Domain, they occupied an enormous amount of territory divided between the six of them.”

Rui knew that these creatures were extremely territorial. Each of them possessed the power to dominate an enormous amount of territory. Thus, he highly doubted that so many could live together, trance or otherwise. Their instincts would fundamentally cause them to fight against each other.

“A single Master-level beast…” Kane’s voice trailed off.

He was certainly more hopeful, yet it was still unfathomably difficult to believe. Master-level beasts were Master-level because they absolutely could not be beaten by Martial Seniors, according to the Panamic Martial Federation.

And as Martial Seniors, they had absolutely no chance of beating a creature that required Martial Masters to fell them.

Yet, when Kane thinks of Rui, he feels as though he cannot put Rui in the same category as himself. Regardless, even if he could not handle the beast like last time, Kane was confident that Rui would find some way to deal with the creature, or at the very least, that he would be able to get them out of there alive.

“…It’s certainly more manageable than the six Master-level beasts that we faced that one time. However, it won’t be easy,” Rui’s expression grew severe. “However, a Master-level beast in a trance…”

He had many thoughts about that, yet he had no idea what kind of strategy would work under a creature that was put under a trance.

It also mattered who or what exactly was putting the creature under a trance. Of course, it was the dungeon or the source of the manifold, but depending on what kind of living being it was, he might have had to change his approach quite differently.

“RRROOOOOAAAAAARRRR!”

A powerful roar drew his attention as he felt a higher level of pressure from the dungeon than before.

They had run into their first Senior-level creature.

–