The Martial Unity

The remaining day before the battle was tense and prickling. Those in the know did not like how much control they surrendered to the outcome of a single battle.

It was almost inconceivable that two Masters could decide the future of the war and, thus, of East Panama. While the war would not conclude instantaneously if one side killed the other, it would still almost irreversibly go down a direction from which it could not be shaken off.  While Emperor Rael and the other leaders of the Kandrian Empire began preparing for the best and the worst, Rui had completely isolated himself.

Over the past two days, he had immersed himself in meditative conditioning, all for the sake of honing his mind and achieving a state of absolute focus and concentration. He simply refused to take any and all calls from anybody, including his father. Guildmaster Bradt had tried to call him many times. Yet, he had refused even him. He knew that they were probably itching to speak to him. But he didn’t care, regardless.

He needed to be at his very best if he wanted to win what was about to come. He needed to be at his absolute mental and physical peak. He could not be bothered to deal with any political or domestic matter from the very moment that he learned who his opponent was. None of it mattered.

The only thing that mattered was his rematch with Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Rui didn’t know why Tokugawa Ieyasu had chosen to side with the enemy alliance when the Kandrian Empire was clearly a more attractive option to all Martial Artists. If not for the fear of destruction at the hands of the East Panamic Treaty Alliance, all of them would rather go to the Kandrian Empire and reap the benefits of its now increasingly well-known treasures.

Yet, for some reason, Tokugawa Ieyasu seemed to have ignored this benefit and chosen to align himself against the Kandrian Empire. This was despite the fact that there had been a recent influx of Martial Artists with those very intentions into the Kandrian Empire, which meant that it was an extremely normal occurrence to retroactively join the Kandrian Empire.

A smile cracked at Rui’s mouth as he honed his mind.

“He just wants to fight me.”

Friendly spars and duels were not true battles.

There was no fear that your opponent would go as far as killing you in most of these events. There was an implicit and often explicit agreement to withhold lethal attacks. The air was rarely tense to the maximum.

Neither of them wanted that. It had been twenty years since their last battle, where they had been determined to kill each other to break through to the Senior Realm. And now, twenty years later, at the peak of the Master Realm, they were ready to fight each other once more. Neither of them would have been satisfied with a simple spar, to say the least.

Whatever battle they had must be worthy of a battle between them.

That must have been the sole reason that Tokugawa Ieyasu had chosen to side with the enemy alliance.

If so, then Rui would make it worth his time.

While mentally conditioning himself and bringing himself to peak focus and concentration, he also revisited his old battles and predictive models against Tokugawa Ieyasu. Once Rui fought a Martial Artist, he would forever be extra-strong against them by a huge margin due to already having adaptively evolved to them.

However, he knew that Ieyasu was probably the exception to this rule.

The man had copied countless Martial Artists over the past twenty years since they last met on Cloudia in Master Zeamer’s place.

“On top of that, there is his Martial Art assimilation.”

He could assimilate different Martial Arts into each other to create hybrid evolutions that would make it quite challenging to adaptively evolve against him effectively. In addition to that, he had also copied the Harbinger’s Martial Art, which Rui was certainly wary of. He had probably copied it as a final preparation for his battle against Rui.

Regardless, Rui had no intention of losing to it or to any Martial Art that was thrown at him. When he had fought Ieyasu, his Martial Art had been rather limited and narrow. Over the past twenty years, he had made enormous expansions into entirely new fields and dimensions of adaptive evolution. He was no longer as pitifully limited as he had been back then. “I wonder how strong he has gotten.”

Even as Rui honed his concentration, the very thought of fighting a refined and matured Assimilative Evolution instead of the prototype that he had last fought in their previous battle was extremely exciting.

On top of that, Rui was convinced beyond doubt that Ieyasu was perhaps his final shot at taking another step toward the Sage Realm in this war. And he was eager to take another step toward the distant Sage Realm once more. One step at a time, and eventually just climb the impossibly high mountain.

One thing that the two of them had in common was probably that they were running out of options to quickly promote to the Sage Realm. It was most likely one of the reasons that Ieyasu had chosen to fight Rui in such an important and high-stakes battle.

Rui couldn’t afford to lose.

The Kandrian Empire would suffer extraordinary consequences and that was something that Rui definitely didn’t want.

More importantly, Rui simply wanted to win because he was a Martial Artist.

He shook his head, ridding himself of tangential thoughts as he returned to honing his mind and focus, putting all his energy into ensuring that he could truly bring out every ounce of power and potential for their upcoming battle.

Yet, while he quietly and intensely conditioned his mind to be at its most optimal state, the outside world only continued growing increasingly more volatile and electric as the war shifted to a singularity that would decide which direction the rest of the war would go.

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