The Martial Unity

As his brain was flushed with energy and nutrition, his mental processing spiked.

His perception of time slowed down.

WHOOSH…

Divine Mother —ooo— blows began to appear in slow motion to him, her six intense arachnid eyes never once leaving his. Her stinger pulled back in a similar slow-motion draw, preparing an attack to impale and incapacitate him once and for all.

A kilometer away to his right side was o—o. She took the role of long-range heavy artillery, wearing a malevolent grin, her pincers wide apart in a celebratory gesture. Like him, her Webverse was focused on her body, and specifically on her web stinger, which was considerably more muscular and larger than those of her sisters.

She used her Webverse to increase the compressive force that pushed out her webshots, enhancing it by orders of magnitude. An attack that would have otherwise merely sundered moons had enough power to vaporize a fleet of planets if lined up. She was the reason that the bones on the right side of his body were rapidly being shattered into gravel.

And yet, with time slowed down in his perception, the immediate urgency slightly reduced in its edge, even if he knew just how serious this situation was.

Rui hadn’t used Megamind in a long time. Part of the reason for that was that he hadn’t needed to. Another part of it was that ever since he got the Gene Realm, he could replicate its effects without needing to weaken his physicality. And secondarily on top of that, he had upgraded the hardware of his brain from bio-electrical to bio-photonic, allowing him to reap even greater benefits for the same price.

Megamind came at the price of weakening his body, in comparison, since it diverted blood flow. Of course, with the Gene Realm and with the primordial core, he could generate an extraordinary amount of blood, but he didn’t want to waste exotic pluripotent matter for such a trivial use.

Megamind was a technique to be used when he was in a true pickle. It was a technique that he used when he needed to truly adaptively evolve.

There were two categories of adaptive evolution.

The first was retracing old territory. The second was developing brand-new solutions that he had never used before.

The former involved using existing strategies and tactics, old techniques and principles, and other parts of his arsenal that he wouldn’t conventionally use in most battles, but were still a part of his regular arsenal.

After all, when he was younger and less experienced, he would often be forced to come up with new solutions every battle. Every situation was a new situation forcing him to come up with creative solutions to adaptively evolve to them. However, with each battle where he created a new adaptive evolution solution, that was one less situation that could force him to innovate. If he ever fought somebody similar, then he could reuse that solution with minor changes.

As time went on, the frequency of situations that could force him to innovate new solutions rapidly reduced. He had fought so many battles against so many kinds of opponents in so many situations that most of the time, reusing old solutions with some customization changes was enough to solve most problems.

He had mastered most forms of high principles, including those of the four fundamental forces, relativity, and the elusive principles quantum mechanics. He had the primordial core. He had the Gene Realm. He had the Corporeal Realm. He had his many systems of thought, including the VOID algorithm, the SOUL System, the Tree of Life, the Scriptures of Terra, and the Tapestry of Nature and so on and so forth. He had the Eye of Prophecy. He had Soul Retcon.

And, of course, he had his Martialverse.

These solutions alone were enough to overcome 99.999999999% of situations. It was one way to trace how much progress he was making with Project Water.

At this stage in his life, he knew that running into situations that could force him to develop new solutions were increasingly scarce.

This was one of those situations.

None of the existing templates would be enough to allow him to defeat his opponents. With two Webverses that were amplified to an enormous degree, ordinary solutions were utterly powerless.

Trying to convert all of his primordial matter into Transcendent esoterics would help him fight back, but the bodies of his three opponents were infested with Transcendent-grade esoterics that could warp space and time and interact with the fabric of reality itself.

On top of that, his goal was to escape alive. For that, he needed negatron matter, so he had already converted most of his esoteric pluripotent matter into the substance. The Corporeal Realm was already pushed to the limit, helping him react to the speedy attacks of his opponents. It was one of the reasons he could think in such an immersive way at the moment despite being bombarded on two fronts. The Gene Realm had already spent 80% of its genetic capital on endurance and healing.

His cells had become mechano-kinetic energy absorbers, turning his body into a dynamo that sustained itself by being hit. If not for that, his body would have been annihilated the moment the Divine Mothers attacked it with amplified Webverses.

His systems of thought, including Prophecy of the Void, were barely keeping up with the fact that the Divine Mothers could read his mind. There were only a handful of trump cards left, but even those wouldn’t be enough to change the course of the battle. And lethal trump cards like the Tide of Samsara or the Circles of Infinity weren’t suitable for the current situation.

He needed something new.

A new solution was required to adaptively evolve.

A fire lit up in his heart as his mind raced with thought. He had already decided that knocking them out or incapacitating them was a fundamental necessity to escaping. He needed to come up with a new solution that would allow him to achieve this condition.

It wasn’t something as primitive as simply absorbing more power from other sources. He could tentatively tap into dark energy to a limited extent, even if only with his Martialverse, but the Divine Mothers weren’t lacking in raw power. Not to mention, his Martialverse was too busy to focus on such a taxing alternative.

At the level of Transcendents, raw energy was less important. Even if he had ten times the amount of raw energy he had at the moment, he would not be able to overcome the Verse disparity.

What he needed was something that was asymmetric. Something his opponents didn’t have. Something that could serve as an exclusive variable to support his side.

And thankfully, he had just the candidate in mind.

”Higher dimensions.” His glowing red eyes blazed with equal parts determination and enthusiasm.