The Martial Unity

“Huff…” A single girl stood before him, still standing. “Huff…”

She was the strongest of them all.

She had short hair and plump cheeks, still having yet to shed her baby fat. Rui couldn’t help but find her glares at him to be profoundly cute, triggering his paternal instincts. He smiled, kneeling before the girl, before patting her head. “What’s your name?”

She glared at him. “…Siea.”

“What a pretty name.” He ruffled her hair a little. “You’re quite strong for your age. And you’re such a pretty baby.”

“Siea is not a baby!” She insisted, trying to charge forward to hit him.

But she remained stuck in place because of his hand on her head, creating a comical scene that just made her even more adorable in his eyes.

“You’ll be strong one day, maybe even strong enough to defeat me.”

“Of course I will, just you see!” she insisted. “Just you watch.”

“I’ll be watching,” Rui promised with a smile, before ever so gently tapping her on the neck.

She instantly lost consciousness, falling into his arms as he gently placed her on the ground. She reminded him of his daughter in several ways, making him even more mixed about these children. He knew that they were a threat, but he couldn’t bring himself to harm them, having always had a soft spot for kids, especially since he became a father.

He turned towards Deputy Commander Wiles, who was still trying to fiddle with his comms device, trying to get the word out one way or another. He tried escaping the camp in one direction to get out of the domain, but merely emerged into the camp from the other side. Any direction he tried escaping the camp, he would only return back to it from the exact opposite direction.

“What is this…?!” Deputy Commander Wiles heaved an exhausted breath. “What have you done?! Why can’t I escape?!”

“I created an extrinsic looped four-dimensional space-time geodesic.” Rui smiled at the exhausted interim leader of the Evolutionary Army. “I call this technique the Garden of Salvation…”

His smile grew smug.

“…in honor of the OG.”

Over the past five years, Rui hadn’t simply drowned himself in his boundless love for Ria. He had also shored up some of the boring projects he had at his disposal, ones that weren’t particularly difficult, but tedious and time-consuming and not mentally stimulating, things he could almost do on autopilot without thinking. And he did, thanks to Autocorpus.

One of those involved grinding through the Transcendent and quasi-Transcendent esoteric matter that existed in their inventory. Injecting samples of it into his body, conditioning his body to accept it, and then creating more of it with exotic pluripotent matter.

Among those esoteric samples was a particularly potent kind of gravitationally-active esoteric substance that used to be known as the Myeriad Dew. In more modern eso-scientific nomenclature, it was known as tachyonic condensate.

Tachyonic particles were once hypothetical particles with imaginary rest mass that always moved faster than light. A condensate of these particles described a state where described a state where a quantum field had reached a local maximum of potential energy and was rolling down toward a more stable state, potentially releasing the massive amounts of negative energy required to decouple a pocket universe. It was a highly potent Transcendent-grade esoteric substance that had been found in droves in the Elder Tree’s esoteric physiology, and was thought to be responsible for the creation of the Garden of Salvation.

After Rui got his hands on it, it took him years in the manifold to learn how to use this highly unfathomable form of esoteric matter. Learning to use it had been extremely difficult, for the matter interacted with space and time itself in a truly mind-boggling manner.

And yet, nothing was beyond him in his current state.

A few years in the manifold, spaced out every time Ria slept, of course, was enough for him to learn how to deploy the substance to warp space and time to create not a perfect manifold like that of the alien tree, but rather an extrinsically-closed three-dimensional topology.

His own Garden of Salvation, from which nothing could cross to and from without his permission.

“You…” Deputy Commander Wiles gazed at Rui with a horrified expression.

“What are you if not a God?”

Rui smiled wryly, shaking his head.

“If I were a god, I wouldn’t need to come here asking for your cooperation on a matter that is beyond me individually.”

Deputy Commander Wiles sharpened his elderly eyes.

He wasn’t a fool.

When Rui had first teleported behind him, he had assumed that he and the children of the Generation of Miracles were going to die, and the entire base camp was going to be destroyed. Not only did they not die, but he could also tell that Rui had been extremely gentle and kind when dealing with the attacks from the children.

His actions were unfathomable, but one thing was clear.

He was not here to wage war and wreak destruction.

Deputy Commander Wiles gazed at him with grave severity. “…Just what do you want? Why have you come here like this?”

“I come here in peace. I need your help on a certain matter of existential importance.” Rui grew serious. “I came to you because I know that you’re the most rational and well-reasoned leader in this godforsaken army. Just hear me out, by the time I’m done, I guarantee that you’ll be on board.”

The man stared at Rui for several moments before heaving a sigh. “Could you not have chosen to approach as through official channels?”

“I don’t want to waste time going through the motions,” Rui tutted. “This is serious. I was not exaggerating when I said that this was a matter of existential importance. We need full temporary coordination with you on this matter to minimize the risk that all life on Gaia will be wiped out.”

The man grew more severe at those words before eventually nodding reluctantly.

“Very well then, I’ll hear you out.”