The Martial Unity

Rui’s fist ravaged —ooo—’s abdomen heavily, causing her to cough up blood from the internal hemorrhaging. He raised his second fist, swinging it at her with the intention of knocking her out and triggering her disappearance, but Divine Mother o—o blasted him with a speed webshot, threatening to tangle him in her web.

SPLAT!

A flowing palm chop was all that he needed to cleave the attack in half. Behind him, however, the third Divine Mother had appeared in the blink of an eye, jabbing at him with her web stinger.

WHOOSH

Her six arachnid eyes widened as her attack passed right through his body in the blink of an eye. Rui had used Etherea Corpa, severing his connection with the Higgs field. It was one of his most high-end techniques, without a doubt.

Yet his opponents weren’t as unsophisticated as any other he had used the defensive technique against. His ethereal eyes widened as he felt his connections with the Higgs field returning, restoring the mass to his body.

He turned around towards the distant o—o who was making a gripping motion at him with her hand, concentrating with sharpened eyes. She was using her Webverse to overwrite reality and force him to regain substance.

Alas, with his Martialverse contained within his body, Rui could resist her attempts to make him corporeal once more. The only problem was that using the Martialverse to defend his incorporeal nature also reduced the pressure on o-ooooo, who slowly healed from the wound that a single attack from Rui had inflicted upon her.

Because her specialty was mind webs, she was not able to regenerate cells using her webverse as quickly. If not for the esoteric bioengineered upgrades, that one attack would have exploded her and turned her into a blue mist.

She gritted her teeth, resuming her attacks on his mind.

’You shall go no further,’ the Armor of Flowing Wisdom impeded her every attack. The sheer amount of information density that impeded her consciousness was unlike anything she had ever imagined possible from a non-Administrator entity.

The consciousness that Dwight had bestowed upon the armor radically improved its primary function. Not only could it resist, but it could resist intelligently. It could redirect the fractal geometries of uncollapsed fields of energy matter to the vectors of psychic attacks that the Divine Mother attempted, impeding all of them with great efficiency.

Rui, on the other hand, dealt with the other two Divine Mothers of his own merit.

Divine Mother o—o, who fought him with a passion, appeared to be a long-range web-shooter of sorts. She launched web artillery directly from her web stinger. She leveraged her Webverse to amplify the power of her attacks by manipulating her body to blast harder.

The other Divine Mother, who recognized as —ooo— from o-o-o-o’s memories, was a close-quarters fighter. Her body was covered with webbing fashioned from Transcendent-grade esoterics, which she manipulated directly as well as through her Webverse.

She clenched her fists, swinging at his head with a well-trained swing.

THWACK

Rui expertly intercepted the attack at her wrist, absorbing her momentum and converting it into torque for his own jab. His eyes lit up as she caught the jab in an arm lock, trying to hold him in place before thrusting her web stinger at him.

Rui simply smiled and activated his Gene Realm, turning his arm into liquid flesh, escaping her lock and evading the attack. There was no need to use the Webverse for everything. Rui had so many trump cards at this point that the Webverse was almost merely a cherry on top of a very large and extravagant cake.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!

He immediately found himself bombarded with an onslaught of webshots moving at speeds extremely close to that of light. The sheer amount of power that she put into each strike was so great, despite their unassuming appearances, that Rui knew he couldn’t afford to withstand them with his body, for even planets would be reduced to fine dust under such momentum.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Avoiding them was easy; he had already developed predictive SOUL models on all of them. And with the Armor of Flowing Wisdom, they couldn’t access his information as easily as they could before, giving him the intelligence advantage.

He swerved to the right, evading a barrage of heavy artillery, only to find himself charging straight into a web stinger attack from —ooo—.

WHOOSH!

He spun backwards, barely avoiding a stinger headshot, only to find that the Divine Mother appeared to have anticipated that, launching a close-range, wide-scale webnet that expanded from her stinger.

In the blink of an eye, the web net swallowed up the area around him immediately, before contracting, threatening to catch him in the net. Rui’s eyes sharpened. The Divine Mothers had amplified the interdiction suppressors with their webverses, so teleporting was at best a time-consuming ability. He would not be able to use it to escape them.

”We. Have. You. Now!” —ooo— roared as the net compressed on his body, on the verge of fully imprisoning him.

Once he was bound by the Transcendent adhesion of her webs, they would be able to use their webverses to amplify the durability and the adhesive strength, preventing him from escaping it.

Victory was all but guaranteed in their eyes.

WHOOSH

—ooo— widened her six eyes. Rui disappeared anyway, emerging outside the web net. There were more forms of teleportation beyond wormholes. This time, he had relied on quantum tunneling, rather than opening a wormhole. He had developed this ability with the Forge of Creation when he had ambushed NOVA, never feeling the need to use it when Worm Step was more convenient thanks to the lower energy costs.

It came in handy when facing interdiction measures.

The three Divine Mothers immediately grew grave as they understood that trapping him was much more difficult than they could have ever imagined. If he could still teleport despite the interdiction measures, then they would need to get lucky.

”Forget. Trapping. Him,” —ooo— growled. ”We. Have. To. Kill. Him! I. Refuse. To. Fade. Away. Without. Having. Achieved. A. Result.”