The Martial Unity

What followed was one-sided dominance amid the mid-grade and high-grade Martial Masters who stepped up to fight him. They had entered the combat arena with no hope for victory; their sole goal was to drain his stamina, but Rui effortlessly overcame them.

Only when the higher end of high-grade Martial Masters started pouring in could they avoid being instantly overcome. Grade-twenty-eight Martial Masters didn’t go down nearly as quickly as their lesser peers.

“Rah!” One Martial Master spun as he launched a tremendously powerful spinning blow towards Rui.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Rui lightly leaped away, evading each and every single blow one after another. He was impressed by his opponent’s torque-centric Martial Art. Through torque, he was able to accumulate power far beyond anything he could have otherwise, launching blows that were several times more powerful than his actual limit.

On top of that, high-speed spinning offered a very natural defense that made it impossible for anyone to touch him. Rui could tell that the man’s Martial Body had been designed for an unfathomable amount of joint rotational flexibility that allowed him to truly harness the power of rotational dynamics to its fullest extent.

And yet, before Rui’s endless versatility, it was all but naught. Rui stopped evading as he ran straight into a kick head-on, activating Neo Godspeed and Nemean Blossom at fifty percent. And then and there, he created a technique spontaneously.

“Mirror of Might.”

CLASP!

He intercepted the strike with his hand, using the principles of Flux Earther to let the power flow through him. Yet, instead of simply letting the power go to waste, he utilized the principle of hydraulics to transmit the tremendous power of his opponent’s attack from his receiving hand to his attacking using the principle of hydraulics.

Seventy percent of the human body was water, after all. Rui relied on this power to transfer power from one hand to another.

This technique had been inspired by the Esoterist’s MECHA design, which utilized hydraulics to transfer and convey power from in all sophisticated manners of application. The same was true for hydraulics back on Earth; it was one of the most ubiquitous forms of transporting and manipulating the flow of mechanical and kinetic energy.

The result?

A blow of titanic power without even needing the use of Hypertrophic Surge and Yin-Yang Spear.

BOOOOOM!!!

A powerful fist crashed into the man’s abdomen, effortlessly shattering his bones and flinging him away like a ragdoll. The Master landed a great distance away, entirely unconscious. And just like that, a respected high-grade Master had been downed in just a minute even while Rui held back as much of his power as possible to preserve his stamina.

“Next.”

The woman who had originally scorned him when he had entered the arena.

She was one of the few grade-twenty-nine Martial Masters of the Sekigahara Confederate. The only one who was not fighting off the beast tides at the moment. STEP

She arrived at the wide Master-level combat arena before Rui, glaring at him ferociously. “You…”

Rui glanced around him. “Who, me?”

“Enough with your mockery!” she snarled. “I, Mito Buki, challenge you to a battle!”

Rui smiled with a hint of expectation. She was strong.

Although one could not trust one’s danger evaluation when it came to Masters due to how sophisticated, complex, and nuanced their power was, Rui had the feeling that she was in the same echelon of power as Master Brigsby, Reina, or Zeamer.

In other words, he needed to remain alert, lest the rug was pulled under him in a moment of surprise. He did not want to be caught off-guard and lose in an embarrassing fashion.

“Take your stances.”

Rui adopted a neutral stance with semi-centered feet and an offensive and defensive arm set. He smiled with amusement as his opponent refused to take a stance, adamantly glaring at him with a puffed chest.

One thing he found rather bizarre was her Martial attire.

She wore a baggy yukata that dragged on the floor. It was an extremely strange set of clothes that would hinder any Martial Artist in combat unless…

‘…it’s a part of her Martial Art?’ Rui raised an eyebrow.

He also got the sense that his senses were being faintly impeded.

Like he wasn’t able to sense what was beneath the depths of her baggy clothes.

Not that he wanted to peek at what was beneath her clothes, of course. But it was suspicious that he wasn’t able to sense it in the first place.

“Begin!”

Rui remained cautious even as his Realms of power blazed to life. It was Master Mito who surged forth before him in the blink of an eye as her hand reached into her robes.

And out came a katana.

SWING!

Rui summersaulted away as he barely managed to avoid his head being chopped off with a sword drawn so blazingly fast that he couldn’t even perceive its motion. WHOOSH

In the blink of an eye, she arrived before him as the blade swung towards him. Yet in the moment he was out of the way of the trajectory of the swing, she did something that he never expected to see a swordsman do.

She let go of the blade.

She let go of the blade, allowing it to increase its range significantly at the final moment, once more coming within inches of decapitating Rui.

WHOOSH!

Had Rui not developed a predictive model on her with the of the Angel of Laplace, he would undoubtedly have failed to evade the attack, which would have undoubtedly led to the loss of his head.

This was the advantage of weapons.

They had extraordinary lethality, it didn’t require the user to have sophisticated high-principle techniques for them to be a threat to non-weapon users. And just when he thought that she was done, her second hand pulled out out yet another blade from her sleeves swinging around yet another katana from her sleeve at his neck.

And yet, Rui knew it was merely a decoy for the real attack.

He leaped sideways as her earlier discarded weapon just narrowly missed his back, flying right back to her hand.

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