The Martial Unity

WHOOSH!

Rui evaded the first attack of the battle smoothly with a combination of Autocorpus and Eye of Prophecy. An attack that should have been inevitable.

An attack that no other pathwalker would have been able to survive.

But before the sheer depth of his evasive capacity, it was found lacking.

The laminar integument, however, was only just getting started.

Several more tendrils phased through the very fabric of reality, materializing on his neck, threatening to decapitate him once more.

Only quicker this time.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH

Rui evaded each of them smoothly, only to find himself face to face with even more phased tendril attacks converging on his eyeballs, threatening to gouge them from his head.

WHOOSH

He spun through the space, ‘stepping’ on the very fabric of space itself. Space-maneuvering was very different from sky-maneuvering and earth-maneuvering.

There was no matter medium for him to exert force directly on. Instead, space-maneuvering involved generating thrust through gravity. The absence of an atmosphere meant that he had to use black holes, something he had innovated when searching for the Divine Doctor in outer space before he metamorphosed.

He used them to generate gravitational thrust.

Of course, it wasn’t a replacement for sky-maneuvering or land-maneuvering, and Rui’s motions had become ‘smoother.’

There were no sudden starts and stops in outer space.

Each starting and stopping motion he made needed to occur with sustained acceleration or sustained deceleration. This made it difficult for him to use some of the blitzing motions that he used on land terrain, but it was still very much within the realm of his ability to evade point-blank attacks one after another.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

The tendrils of the jellyfish-like laminar integument continued phasing through the very fabric of reality. The blood-red suns within the depths of his eyes shone with blinding brightness as they bore deep into the laminar integument he faced, trying to read it.

He was unable to.

He couldn’t even fathom what the creature was ‘thinking,’ if it even possessed the kind of cognition that life in Gaia possessed. Its consciousness was a fundamentally different nature to the point where his mind sense was entirely obsolete.

The only thing he knew was that its consciousness was composed of light that flashed across its entire body from within.

Thought emerged from its very core.

Sensory data came from the outside, moving inwards.

Each layer across its entire body was a layer of memories that were activated when light passed through it. The chromatic spectrum across its entire body, making for a colorful lifeform, was nothing short of the life record of the creature he was looking at.

It was deeply transparent.

Not physically.

But as far as its consciousness went.

He could ‘see’ its memories.

He could ‘see’ the light signals that made up its existence.

He tried imagining what kind of civilization humanity would be if all humans could see each other’s memories and thoughts.

‘It would lead to chaos and friction.’

The reality was that every person wore a mask to hide their true thoughts and their true selves from almost everybody, except for highly trusted and loved ones. A layer of opaque deceit served as the scabbard to the sword of their true selves. Walking around with uncovered swords hanging from their hips without protective scabbards would lead to people getting hurt.

The scabbards of opaque deceit were the lubricant that allowed human civilization to get along well.

What kind of psychology would laminar integuments need to have in order to get along despite being able to ‘see’ each other’s memories and thoughts?

‘Deep homogeneity and deep social bonds.’

Otherwise, such a species would have torn each other apart if they possessed human-like psychology. This meant that the psychology of the laminar integuments was extremely different from anything he had ever come across in Gaia.

The closest equivalent would have been the Hive, which had connected minds, but even that was limited to a channel of communication that allowed them to share emotions, not a complete and total transparence in terms of all their memories and all their consciousness laid out in the open for everybody to see.

These musings weren’t just interesting to him, they allowed him to find a path towards adaptive evolution against this laminar integument.

‘If I can see the sum totality of its holographic consciousness, then that means that I can create a predictive model of this laminar integument based on the light signals that emerge from within its translucent chromatic depths.’

It would allow him to create not just a predictive model, but also a large soul model that would make the entire laminar integument completely and wholly transparent in and out.

That was the key to achieving dominance against a creature of such great power. WHOOSH!

He shifted ever so slightly, evading a phased tendril whip threatening to slice him in half. Only to find himself face to face with several more tendril attacks swinging down on him exactly where he had dodged to.

WHOOSH

He barely managed to evade them with a hair’s breadth, squeezing himself through the gap between them. Only to discover a perfectly timed attack phasing on him at that very moment.

As if the laminar integument had perfectly predicted where he would move to.

It was an attack that not even he could evade.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

The unfathomably destructive tendril whip would have ripped him apart.

It would have ripped him apart if not for the Outer Divergence that he had used at the very final moment, using quantum gaps to just barely redirect the attack in time.

And yet, despite that, the impact it had inflicted upon him cracked his bones, causing them to snap. He activated his predictive model, using it to foresee exactly where the next attack was and evading just at the right moment.

And yet, even that was within the prediction of his alien opponent.

It foresaw his every move.

As if he were the transparent one.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!!!

The very fabric of space and time quivered under the destructive impacts that the laminar integument whipped him with as more and more tendrils emerged from its bodies.

Every maneuver.

Every evasion.

Every attack.

The laminar integument predicted each and every single one of them.

It was only then that he understood the full consequences of a creature whose consciousness moved at the speed of light. Electrical signals in his brain were fast, but they didn’t compare to the speed of light signals.

They were millions of times slower.

It created a devastating disparity between them in processing power, giving the laminar integument a devastating advantage in intelligence.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!!!

The laminar integument quickly secured an advantage early on in the battle, overwhelming Rui with a barrage of destructive attacks.