The Martial Unity

Rui found himself at the very epicenter of a red dwarf star.

He was drowned in boiling protonic plasma.

His surroundings were a blinding white.

An intense heat pressed against his body, threatening to vaporize the royal Martial attire he wore, woven from Transcendent exotic fibers from the depths of the Beast Domain and the corpse of the gargantian harvested in the past thirteen years.

The heat was, of course, the heat of nuclear fusion.

An intense pressure pressed against his body.

The weight of a star.

It was a new experience.

Perhaps that was why he lingered for a few moments.

At this phase of his life, new and novel experiences were unusual.

All this power he had.

It made the world dull.

The past thirteen years of the Era of Expansion had been exciting and mundane all at once. Exciting for he got to witness the expansion of human civilization and the glory of the human races. Mundane because none of it truly challenged him. The engine of human growth, prosperity, and power was one that changed the lives of every single human being in the world.

Except him.

He lived his life as he had.

As Emperor.

And as a father.

Yet, he had very few opportunities to truly live it as a Martial Artist.

The training, the sparring, the maintenance of the Void of Regime.

It was procedural.

There was no force to challenge him. No force to truly impede him when he exerted himself to even the mildest of degrees.

Nothing to truly push him.

He lived his life waiting.

Waiting for the day that he could run into an adversary that could truly challenge him head-on.

It had taken thirteen years.

And yet, finally.

The pain he felt in his body from the first attack that the Divine Mother had landed upon him.

The first wound he had endured in forever.

The stinging burns.

The throbbing strain on his muscles, bones, and joints.

They made his heart beat.

BADUMP

They made it beat faster.

Harder.

Stronger.

The adrenaline that naturally pumped into his blood, coursing through his veins, the tingling energy in each and every single cell of his body.

They made him feel truly alive.

The smallest of smiles cracked at the edge of his mouth, before widening.

He smiled like a Martial Artist for the first time in more than a decade. The mature calmness in his ethereal eyes made for a younger vigor.

One that he had sported when he was a mere Martial Apprentice

’I’m sorry, Ria.’

His sentiment was sincere.

’Allow your father to be a little selfish this time.’

He came here to fight to protect his daughter, and certainly, he would do that.

But he also chose to fight for more.

For himself.

For the sake of Water.

For the sake of Project Water.

His light-based consciousness surged with extraordinary intensity as his Martial Mind churned all the information that he had gathered since the start of the battle.

Several facts stuck out to him.

’I can’t evade her attacks.’

He had tried twice, but it simply didn’t work. Not even his Martialverse allowed him to evade them properly. From what he could tell, this was a highly sophisticated application of her Webverse.

Everything was connected.

Everything was a web.

She had leveraged that uniform phenomenology to create a very specific application that restructured the causality of her attacks. It was an application that required minimal intervention into reality for maximum effect. When he contrasted it to what he was doing, he quickly understood what she meant when she mused about his inexperience.

His Anti-Arachnia domain was an example of high effort and low results. She had effortlessly negated his domain with a specific but concentrated application of her Webverse.

She used her Webverse efficiently and effectively.

He did not.

’That needs to change.’

There were countless ways he could intervene in reality.

He could try to use it to alter the geometry of space and time. There were countless constants that he could change and manipulate to create all kinds of environments and effects. There were more ways he could alter the fabric of reality with his Martialverse than there were ways he could deploy the rest of his Martial Art.

It was so much power with so many possibilities that he had never felt the need to ponder how to use it most efficiently and effectively. And the infinite ways that it could be applied made it all the more difficult to understand what the most effective way was.

But he had gleaned a hint from how the Divine Mother used it.

A guiding principle.

’Less for more.’

Less energy for more power.

Less input for more output.

Less effort for more results.

That was what he needed to do.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The red dwarf star began shaking vigorously and violently as the volatility began growing more and more intense. More and more solar flares began spewing out of the surface of the red dwarf star in a truly unstable manner.

Several light-minutes away, the Divine Mother sharpened her six eyes at the phenomenon.

’What is he doing?’

She didn’t even entertain the possibility that he was dead. She could sense his Martialverse infringing upon the star system, wrestling control over reality away from her.

There was simply no way that one attack was enough to kill an Administrator, even one that was clearly inexperienced. The solar flares began erupting more and more chaotically.

Until they stopped being chaotic and started being focused.

Focused on one target.

The Divine Mother.

Her six eyes widened as a solar flare shot straight towards her in a manner that defied reality. It moved faster than light, it moved more concentrated than should have been possible, it moved straight towards her, engulfing her in blazing plasma.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

The sheer force with which the solar flare struck would have been enough to vaporize planets. And yet, the webs that protected didn’t so much as even flinch in the face of such destructive power.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT

They shielded her from the incoming solar flares.