The Martial Unity

One of the suns had set in City Stormfront, while the other remained, illuminating the sky a little more dimly without her sister. The disruption of day and night in binary star systems was one of the hardest things that humans who had migrated to other stars had had the hardest time getting used to.

The concept of day and night had changed completely and had been replaced with exposure, because most of the surface of a planet was now exposed to starlight, completely disrupting the circadian rhythm of each and every single person. Human civilization had retained its use of a twenty-four-hour cycle; however, it was deeply ingrained in all of them. Clocks were all synchronized with those on Gaia Prime, and it ensured that all of human civilization remained roughly in synchronization with each other.

Of course, now that human civilization had become an interstellar civilization, true temporal synchronization was no longer possible due to the fact that people experienced the flow of time differently. Before, when everybody on Gaia experienced the flow of time very similarly, for the most part.

However, now that Gaian Civilization had moved to the stars, to different planets, and sometimes even in spaceships moving through empty space, never to take a step on a planet, everybody experienced time very differently due to special and general relativity. This made synchronization even more difficult, and it meant that human civilization was even more disconnected within itself.

It was a truly jarring transition that should have been impossible to adapt in the span of just thirteen years, but when Ria glanced around City Stormfront, however, she found a human civilization that was well-adapted.

The reason for that was that it wasn’t just humans originally from Gaian Civilization that had traveled to the stars to settle in a new home. In reality, most people in Gaia had remained there, even if a substantial minority had indeed immigrated. But the true reason that so many people appeared well-adjusted was that many of the humans in the stars were humans born in the new era, the Era of Expansion.

They had acclimatized to a foreign environment, and to them, the concept of Gaia was the one that was rather alien and strange. They had undergone accelerated maturization, a concept Ria found a little disturbing, in order to reduce the number of years they needed adulthood, so that they could become assets to civilization and the economy sooner. However, it was indisputable that this generation adapting to the new circumstances of Gaian Civilization was one of the reasons that humanity had managed to adapt well to radically new circumstances.

“Adaptive evolution, as always,” she muttered absentmindedly as they trudged through the city.

“Hm?” Runark turned towards her.

“Nothing, let’s just get going.” Her attention turned forward towards a tremendously massive establishment with a skyscraper that stretched so high that one couldn’t even see its end.

On the front of the establishment was a giant hologram featuring the name of the establishment.

[Gaian Adventurer’s Guild]

The establishment was characterized by a roughness that was reminiscent of the frontier, as well as a refinement that reflected the organization it belonged to. Even in the frontier, the Gaian Adventurer’s Guild held itself to high standards as one of the major brokerage platforms through which pathwalkers in the frontier could find customers and clients, and vice versa.

As they arrived at the establishment, they found themselves among a large flux of adventurers moving in and out of the building, most of whom were adventurers.

Of whom, most were Martial Artists. The reality was that the number of Martial Artists had exploded the most out of all the other pathwalkers in the world, despite the fact that the other six races had poured a tremendous amount of capital and resources into developing ways in which their pathwalkers could progress down their paths faster, too.

In the span of thirteen years, they had managed to achieve decent results. So much so that they prevented the astronomical gulf between the number of Martial Artists and other pathwalkers from proportionally increasing too much.

However, they had never managed to close the gap.

The reality remained that there were as many Martial Artists in the world as there were all other pathwalkers combined, causing a massive over-representation of Martial Artists in the stars. And it was a gap that had stalled in its closure, for several reasons.

The first reason was that Martial Artists were simply more economical than other pathwalkers. They could be sustained with sleep and two meals a day, and that was enough for them. The same couldn’t be said for many of the other pathwalkers, whether they were giants, tekvores, elves, or even therianthropes. They scaled with civilization, and while civilization had indeed scaled, Martial Artists simply scaled with population and technological integration, leading to much greater numbers nonetheless.

STEP

STEP

They stepped into the Adventurer’s Guild, immediately heading to the commissions wing of the establishment, where one could browse the many commissions placed by customers and clientele. Because virtually anybody across the interweb could place a commission, that also meant that powers from within human civilization also placed commissions for various adventurers.

The two of them sat in an isolated cubicle, quickly logging into a terminal and into their accounts in the Gaian Adventurer’s Guild before heading to the latest popular commissions section.

They found what they were looking for.

[Amadeus III Gravitational Anomaly Survey Commission]

The commission detailed more information than what Runark had managed to gather by himself.

It was in the Strehegeld Star System, some ten light-years outside of human-controlled territory, at the very edge of what was considered explorable and safe.

Most conventional spaceships only had a five-light-year travel limit. Even if they rented an adventurer transportation service, it meant that they would have to go to the very edge of the places that humans could travel to and actually return from.

The risks to the mission were much higher due to that.