The Martial Unity

Chapter 3123: The Four Phases of Adaptive Evolution

Anthea’s eyes widened with a stunned expression as his invintium armor cracked and broke on the spot upon Rui’s invintium-laced attack.

”Impossible...” Anthea grew surprised at Rui’s mimicry of his tactics.

He didn’t understand how it even happened.

Did Rui have invintium in his body the entire time as well?

He found it hard to believe, considering how difficult the element was to synthesize. It was hard to even fathom that his opponent coincidentally had also inserted invintium inside his body. Naturally, he couldn’t have even imagined that Rui had a primordial core of pluripotent exotic matter inside his body that could turn into any form of matter once exposed to it.

BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM!!!!!

Rui smirked as he unleashed a myriad of attacks of tremendous power, each laced with invintium. It wasn’t easy mimicking the heavy stable element; he had needed to get beaten many times by the evolutionary before he had converted a sizable amount of his pluripotent exotic matter into invintium.

On top of that, because he hadn’t adapted his body to invintium, he couldn’t go all out with it either. Perhaps the only saving grace was the fact that invintium wasn’t an esoteric substance, in that it was still made of the same subatomic particles that Rui’s body was made of. This made it less toxic and thus easier to integrate as an exoskeleton for his body.

However, the battle was far from over.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!!!

Anthea’s eyes sharpened as he swiftly reconstituted his invintium armor, before unleashing a barrage of blows against Rui. The two combatants entered into a brutal invintium armored slug fest as they unleashed a myriad of attacks upon one another.

Rui attacked with short, swift, and continuous barrages while Anthea chose to rely on powerful singular attacks.

The invintium armors colliding against each other generated not just a lot of damage on each other but also a lot of heat as the attacks that each inflicted upon each other were converted to heat, generating Sage-level heat energy in the invintium metal.

As durable as the nigh-indestructible metal was, its capacity to resist heat was not infinite.

And certainly, the capacity of the user to resist heat was far from infinite.

Their silver-clad bodies began growing a bright red as their furious exchange of blows increased the amount of heat that their attacks generated, before eventually turning white-hot.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

Anthea’s body adaptively evolved to the increasing heat in the invintium armor by growing heat-resistant, allowing him to withstand higher temperatures while also dispersing heat through his respiratory system, turning it into a cooling system.

Rui, on the other hand, activated Nemean Blossom, increasing his durability within the invintium armor while creating a breathing technique that exorcised as much heat from his body with each breath as he possibly could.

The two sides only intensified their attacks as their fists flew against each other with greater speed and power, causing the invintium to grow white-hot with the sheer amount of heat energy that it had gained by virtue of the powerful attacks that both sides had inflicted on the powerful substance.

CRACKLE CRACKLE CRACKLE!

The sheer friction the attacks created not only heated the metal up to an extraordinary temperature where any substance would have long before turned to vapor and plasma, but it also caused it to release drops of molten slag that chipped off the armor with each blow.

The invintium armor had gotten so hot that both Rui and Anthea had begun shining like bright stars that illuminated the entire world. So much so that even the evolutionaries and the Martial Sages needed to avert their eyes from the blinding light that far outshone the overhead afternoon Sun.

BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM!!!

With attack after attack, Rui’s fists chipped away a bit of his opponent’s molten hot armor, causing molten invintium to spew around freely.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

A thundering kick to Rui’s abdomen caused an entire chunk of Rui’s molten armor to peel off into a liquid invintium armor before turning into regular old primordial seed.

Anthea’s eyes lit up with wonder at that transformation.

”Fascinating.”

With each passing blow, they eroded each other’s molten invintium armor, drop by drop, until finally the entirety of their invintium armor had been melted only after containing the equivalent of a million Sage-level attacks’ worth of heat energy.

Their bare fists, stripped of all invintium, surged forth, blasting into each other with great power.

BOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

The sheer power of the impact flung them apart as they took a moment to size each other up.

Anthea’s body was pristine and unharmed.

Not even the faintest spot of singed skin could be seen anywhere on his body.

Rui, on the other hand, was covered in mild burns across his entire body that swiftly healed with his healing factor.

”I have never seen invintium be overwhelmed with heat in all my time,” Anthea regarded him with a hint of respect. ”However, your weak human body does not allow you to adapt as freely as mine does. Thus, your Body Phase is much weaker than ours.”

Rui raised an eyebrow. ”Body phase?”

”In Moridian schools of thought, adaptive evolution is comprised of four broader phases that encompass the entirety of the field,” he continued. ”The Body, Domain, Mind, and Soul Phase.”

Rui’s eyes lit up with interest at the little lesson that Anthea was generous enough to offer him, considering that he intended to kill him.

”The species of evolutionaries tend to have a strong affinity for the Body Phase,” Anthea remarked. ”We are born with the ability to alter our DNA, a feature that our ancestors evolved during the Age of Tumult after the Epoch of Evolution. During this age, 187,000 years ago, the Moridia Continent came to be characterized by extraordinarily extreme environmental shifts in between seasons, so much so that it was virtually impossible for any creature that survived one season to possibly survive any other season. And thus, the last of our ancestor human beings on this continent, on the very verge of extinction, evolved through natural selection to develop the ability to change our DNA from one season to another, and that was the birth of our race.”