The Martial Unity

Dragons with fiery lava scales that towered over the landscape.

Phoenixes that were fire incarnate set ablaze the entire battlefield.

Golems the size of small tectonic plates seemed to have their own field of gravity.

Griffons that unleashed roars that stripped and melted the very fabric of heaven and earth.

A variety of monsters from the Central Highlands of the Beast Domain, a massive Sage-level belt that included countless Sage-level beasts of numerous species, surged forth.

Each was a monster that could wipe out an entire nation with its destructive might.

And yet, before the overwhelming formidability of Martial Sages, they fell nonetheless.

“Rargh!” Damian snarled as he released a devastating and tremendous nuclear explosion, relying on nuclear fission and fusion to unleash nothing short of pure destruction on his hapless victims.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

Each blow of his felled a beast or a monster.

The tougher ones could withstand his attacks for longer, but they were still no match against the Devil.

Not a single one of them could even survive a single minute against the wrath of the dreaded Devil. As the strongest Martial Sage in all of East Panama, there were very few creatures in the Beast Domain that could truly be regarded as his equal.

“HAHAHAHA!!!” He guffawed with a maniacal grin. “IS THAT THE BEST YOU MAGGOTS CAN DO?!”

With each passing moment, his Martial Embodiment seemed to grow ever more real.

It almost ceased being an illusion.

It was as though he had truly become an embodiment of the very concept of destruction. Nothing was his equal.

Nothing could withstand the destruction he unleashed upon all those who dared to attack him.

Just looking at him gave Rui goosebumps.

15:46

Just feeling the sheer amount of energy the Devil was outputting sent chills across his skin.

Just looking at him gave Rui goosebumps.

Just feeling the sheer amount of energy the Devil was outputting sent chills across his skin.

The sheer destruction sent shivers down his spine.

Rui thought that the monsters of the beast tide would be among the worst he had ever laid his eyes on. He was wrong.

The Devil was the fiercest monster of them all. RUMBLE!!!

World shook as calamities in beast and human form waged a war unlike anything he had ever seen in his entire life. The eight Sages also dominated their battles, albeit to lesser extents compared to the Devil.

The issue was that the sheer number of monsters and beasts seemed endless. Even after being mowed down by the Apocalypse-class siege weapons of the Kandrian Empire, there was still a shocking amount of beasts and monsters that still surged towards them.

Rui had never felt as small as he did watching such a horrifying demonstration of power.

The monsters and beasts were generally enormous, on average.

They covered the lands.

They covered the skies.

The eight Martial Sages, on the other hand, were small.

And yet, they radiated more power than any other being on the battlefield. They were singularities of war, overcoming any and everything.

Compared to them, Rui was truly weak and insignificant. He was valued as much as any Sage, yet he was never under the delusion that he was actually their equal. When he beheld the sheer amount of power they commanded, he was flooded with deep envy at the power they possessed.

He yearned to have that power.

Unfortunately, he was still extremely far away from the Sage Realm.

Recently, he had also just gotten close enough to make out the faintest hints of the highly distant gates to the Sage Realm.

It meant that he was still very far from understanding who he was. “…No matter.” A whisper escaped him. “I may not be a Martial Sage, but…”

His eyes flared with power. “I am more than powerful enough to take down some dumb beasts.”

BADUMP!

His Martial Heart and Mind blazed into life as an endless ocean of darkness erupted within the depths of his eyes. It flowed, gushing from within the depths of his mind as it washed over the entirety of the entire world.

An infinite void.

Yet, he wasn’t done.

His eyes burned with a blood-red glow as he activated Megamind, unleashing a tremendous tsunami of information upon all those who beheld him.

The Martial Sages were unfazed by the weight of his thought.

The same, however, could not be said for the beasts and monsters.

They froze where they stood.

They froze as they felt a horrifyingly burning pain searing inside their heads.

They froze as a flood of information and knowledge overwhelmed their brains, impeding the decision making process of their brains.

They froze as they beheld the powerful systems of thought in the depths of his Martial Mind.

The VOID algorithm,

The SOUL System.

The Angel of Laplace.

And, most importantly, the Tree of Life.

“Niflheim,” Rui whispered.

WHOOOOOOOOSH!!!

The Niflheim domain reduced the temperatures in the air at a rapid rate as the lands beneath began freezing over at remarkably high rates. The very atmosphere began condensing as heaven and earth began freezing over.

To the Martial Sages, it was irrelevant.

They could easily generate more heat faster than Rui could disperse, even if they didn’t have a single heat technique, just by virtue of their power. More importantly, they didn’t have a sharp physiological weakness to the cold.

The same could not be said for a lot of the monsters and the beasts that shivered with horror under the plummeting temperatures.

With Tree of Life predictive model, Rui could, quite literally, see environments that were antithetical to each of them. It was impossible to create a domain for all of them, but he could tell that most of them were horrifically weak to the cold. The creatures began shivering as they felt their output plummeting. Adverse reactions and physiological harm began befalling them.

Some experienced a sense of suffocation as their blood failed to deliver vital compounds to their cells because it began falling beneath usual temperatures.

Some began choking as they could no longer inhale due to the air not being crackling hot enough for their body to extract materia prima from it. Despite the fact that this was a Master-level technique, many upper-level quasi-Sage-level beasts and even Sage-level beasts began being affected by it.

And yet, he still wasn’t done.

His Martial Embodiment altered as he deployed all of his supreme cognition solely on the Tree of Life, dedicating the entirety of his mind to nothing else.