The Martial Unity

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

Arastia’s shining blood-red eyes sharpened as a shield of blood emerged behind her back, protecting her from a devastatingly intense bullrush from her opponent. The sheer force of the collision caused the blood of the shield to spew out into the air in the skies.

She spun towards the creature behind her, thrusting her arm out as tendrils of blood stretched out towards where the black-furred homoarachnoid should have been.

And yet, she was gone.

CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK CLICK…!

The continuous eerie sound of clicks hung in the domain that Arastia had gotten trapped within, emerging from seemingly all directions, making it impossible for the hemosapien to track the homoararchnoid.

Arastia’s shining blood-red eyes shifted around her environment in the sky carefully as she slowly turned, guarding her back with a pool of floating blood. She hovered in the skies, carefully scrutinizing the space-time web domain that her opponent had created.

It seemed to crack reality itself.

The view of the world around her at the point of the stratosphere that she floated in should have been a continuous view of the gray planet, now half-dyed red, and the sky that led to outer space.

And yet, that view was fragmented. It was like looking at an image in a cracked mirror with dislodged fragments. All she saw was a cracked image of the entire world.

It wasn’t a visual trick.

It was the very fabric of space through which light traveled that had been restructured.

Her opponent had managed to create an isolated domain of restructured space-time. Her webs clung to the fabric of reality, reshaping it as she pleased. So much that Arastia found that she couldn’t leave the domain.

It was a form of a manifold.

An extremely advanced space-time phenomenon that had yet to be reverse-engineered due to how extremely advanced the technology was. Her enemy had managed to create an inferior version of it that didn’t appear to have the necessary time-flow perks that a four-dimensional space-time manifold had.

From that alone, Arastia knew that her worst fears had been surpassed.

They weren’t just dealing with an ordinary advanced civilization.

This was undoubtedly far, far more powerful than she had anticipated. Most likely, if she had to guess, a civilization that was more advanced than even human civilization.

She clenched her fists as a hint of grim severity had emerged on her face. It was inevitable that human civilization would eventually run into a foe that was extremely powerful.

And yet, to think it would be merely thirteen years into the Era of Expansion. That too is just a hundred light-years away from Gaia Prime.

They lived in a truly populated galaxy.

If they wanted to survive, they would have to grow stronger.

CLICK CLICK CLICK…!

Almost as if taunting Arastia about the fact that she couldn’t track the homoarachnoid.

And the unfortunate reality was that she couldn’t.

It allowed the homoarachnoid to launch charges that Arastia didn’t detect until the last second.

WHOOSH

Her eyes widened as she detected the faintest hint of danger to her side, her blood reflexively rushing to the side to defend herself against.

BOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

With a collision with enough power to scar an entire planet, —oo—oo crashed into her side, intercepted by a shield of blood that blocked the attack. Upon the very moment of contact, Arastia rushed to crush her with her blood hoping to inflict some damage on her opponent.

And yet, the female homoarachnoid was covered in webbing that created a pocket-dimension barrier around her.

No force could penetrate it.

It made her clinically immune to regular attacks. And yet, the homoarachnoid scurried away into the cracked reality that she had created, immediately disappearing from Arastia’s field of vision and her senses entirely. Despite possessing extremely powerful defenses, the black-furred homoarachnoid appeared to be extraordinarily cautious about Arastia’s raw power.

The gulf of power that existed within them was real, but the homoarachnoid compensated for it by operating with higher principles than Arastia, relying on the very structure of reality, space, and time to her advantage.

If Arastia intended to win, she would have to find a way to tap into the power of space and time as well.

She could naturally manipulate space and time through gravitational wells created from concentrated power, the way Martial Sages manipulated them. But such an indirect way of deploying power was inefficient, and she would forsake raw power.

In order to maintain her raw power advantage and find a way to break out of this prison of space and time, she would need the power of esoteric matter.

The small amounts of negatron matter that she had integrated into her biology. It was something that a handful of Martial Sages had done, modeled after the original pioneer, the Emperor of Water, to gain access to teleportation.

But the amount of negatron matter at her disposal was not that much. In comparison, her opponent seemed to have a large amount of Transcendent-grade esoteric matter.

There was no comparison.

But she didn’t need much.

’I just need to teleport a single blood cell into her body.’

The goal wasn’t to use that blood cell to inflict damage on her. No, instead, the goal was to use the blood cell to track her opponent. Her blood, again a technique inspired by her elder brother’s Antithesis Hive Mind composed of cells, was interconnected across cells with quantum entanglement.

Not even the fragmented geometry of reality would be able to hide the homoarachnoid from Arastia if she managed to time the teleportation just right. She prepared a single blood cell, preparing the negatron matter within her body, all but ready to activate at just a moment’s thought.

And then, she sensed it.

The incoming attack.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

Arastia didn’t put much thought into defense, allowing the attack to crash into her as she dedicated her entire mind to teleporting a single blood cell into the body of her opponent.

Even at the cost of the tremendous damage she sustained from the homoarachnoid.