The Martial Unity

Ria’s expression tightened as she felt a lot of pressure mounting on her. More than any of her peers, she could feel just how dangerous and powerful the guardian of the Manifold Tree undoubtedly was. The creature was easily as powerful as a Martial Sage, at bare minimum. Her powerful senses allowed her to bore a hole through even the information-jamming effects of the esoteric matter present throughout the planet.

”We’ll need to be extremely careful when we plan for this,” Ria remarked, sitting down on a rock at an enclosure. ”Once we get in, we’ll probably immediately get into a confrontation with the guardian beast. We’ll need to go all out in order to achieve the goal in this case.”

She couldn’t help but get a bad feeling, not just because of the pressure that she felt from the guardian beast, whatever it was, that was guarding the manifold tree, but also from a fainter ominous sensation. As if an instinct deep inside her was warning of danger.

”We’ll adopt a strategy, the same battle formation that we’ve used thus far,” Ria remarked. ”Siliscia handles long-range attacks. Misha and Sternon handle mid-range attacks while Runark and I will take on close-quarters combat. Together we can overcome the creature.”

”We should consume the best potions at our disposal,” Misha remarked knowingly, inhaling a potion. ”…Assuming that this creature is going to be more powerful than anything that we’ve dealt with thus far, we will have our work cut out for us.”

”Any idea on what the creature will look like?” Runark turned towards Ria. ”After all, with your senses, you might be able to peer past the mist and see what the center of the manifold is like, right?”

”The impediments to my senses are too intense even for me to know what we’re dealing with from this distance away,” Ria replied with a grim tone, taking off the helmet of her suit to wipe some sweat off her forehead. ”Unfortunately, I don’t think I can offer much insights before the battle actually begins, before we confront the creature. Ideally, we would be able to just walk past it before it can detect us, of course.”

She had no hope that they would get that lucky, unfortunately. The pattern of life getting more complex and more powerful as they moved towards the center of the manifold had held up quite robustly. The cell counts increased progressively while the cells reduced in volume progressively, growing more denser, allowing creatures to get stronger without experiencing too much of a volume increase.

Ideally, the creature would be so massive that it wouldn’t even be able to target them specifically, but she had dismissed that concern when she saw how much smaller the cells were getting.

They had already become thinner than the width of a strand of hair. Who knew just how small the cells of the guardian beast would be? Who knew how many cells it would have? It was entirely possible that the creature would have as many as ordinary large lifeforms in Gaia did.

In that case, they were dealing with a level of power that was truly far beyond the limits of ordinary rank-four pathwalkers.

The keyword being ordinary.

With Ria leading the team, they stood a chance against Sage-level threats. She was, after all, the most powerful Martial Master, able to fight Martial Sages head-on. Then, there were Sternon and Misha, both of whom had the DNA of superhuman evolutionary descendants of the seven pureblood races that descended from homo sapien.

With this team, she had reason to believe that they could emerge victorious, especially when she had prepared some of the best automatic first-aid kits and tech for them. Automatic healing potions that injected the substance directly into the blood without requiring anything from the person in question, and they had premium and powerful exosuits that could tolerate a tremendous amount of pain.

”Remember, the goal isn’t to beat it,” Ria reminded them. ”The goal is to take shelter in the manifold tree. If achieving that goal without beating it seems impossible, then we’ll confront it in battle. Else, we will not.”

They nodded. That made the task less daunting. That was right, they told themselves; they didn’t strictly have to win. They just need to get a certain spot. If it proved to be this unbeatable beast, then it would suit them all to have one of them, probably Ria, distract it momentarily before heading towards the tree.

Ria knew that she was undoubtedly going to undertake a significant burden. When it came to a singularly powerful opponent, a team was much more difficult to manage, especially when the others weren’t up to the task by themselves. Thankfully, she had avoided using her Martial Mind so that she could be at her absolute peak by the time the battle started. Runark had already used his Martial Mind extensively, and the other four had also stopped holding back by the end. Ria and Siliscia, to an extent, were the only ones capable of fighting without going all out.

However, based on her extrapolations of how powerful the creature likely was, she didn’t think it was likely to be completely beyond her abilities. She suspected that she would get strained to her limit, at most. This was based on how powerful the creatures up until this point were.

Even if the guardian beast was ten times as powerful as the next most powerful beast, she would still be able to deal with it without too much of a problem.

’I just need to keep my cool.’

She felt nervous. Most of the operations she had undertaken in the past two years after leaving the Kandrian Empire didn’t truly stimulate her. And now she rapidly found herself in a life-or-death situation.

’It will be fine.’

Yet, she was merely trying to convince herself more than anybody else, trying to suppress the unease that she felt.

The five of them rested, gathering their energy, making the necessary preparations.

Until it was eventually time.