The Martial Unity

Chapter 3129: All Out

A single step was all it took.

Rui sabotaged each and every attack by shifting the very world around them with the Scriptures of Terra, allowing him to ensure that each and every attack missed. The system of thought allowed him to be extremely subtle in his warping of the world. While conventional earth-bending was noisy and clumsy, the Scriptures of Terra allowed it to become a surgically accurate process.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

He didn’t just evade his opponent’s attacks, no.

With each moment, he healed all his wounds with the combination of the pluripotent exotic matter and Weaving Blood.

He had rendered all the damage that Anthea had inflicted on him entirely moot.

Anthea’s ethereal eyes grew irritated as he raised his foot, stomping the ground.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

In one fell swoop, he displaced a mountain’s worth of land from the ground, leaving them fighting midair once more.

”No more tricks.” Anthea’s fist surged towards Rui with powerful momentum, threatening to knock him out right then and there.

And yet, Rui’s hand shot forth, intercepting the attack with his palm, before gently increasing his resistance the closer it got to him.

Like a spring.

The attack caused his body to turn, generating a surge of torque that he poured into his other fist, which flew forward towards Anthea with the power of two attacks.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

The extraordinary blow blasted Anthea’s body with powerful momentum, and yet it didn’t leave so much as a scratch on his body. Rui sharpened his eyes at the elastic dent in Anthea’s abdomen that simply came undone and healed itself.

Not even an attack fueled by the absorbed power of his opponent’s power was enough to harm the powerful evolutionary.

”Your paltry power is of no consequence.”

The Supreme Commander’s tone was unyieldingly arrogant.

”You have been able to leave no lasting mark on my body.”

He gazed at Rui with a serious expression.

”You can only last by borrowing the power of exotic treasures.”

Rui smiled wryly at his misguided words.

”If this is the limit of your power...” Anthea continued with a condescending tone. ”Then you are not my equal, and you will die at my hands.”

He surged forth towards Rui with a blindingly high speed, unleashing a myriad of blows against Rui with great speed and power, refusing to give him even the slightest bit of reprieve.

BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM!!!!!

Rui’s expression hardened with resistance as he deployed Body of Water and Flux Earther to disperse as much damage as he possibly could, shifting to protect his vitals from the ruthless onslaught of attacks that Anthea unleashed upon him.

Rui wasn’t sure how he did it, but his raw power and speed greatly exceeded his own. This was despite the fact that his Martial Body and techniques were quite powerful and strong as well.

And yet, Anthea’s body had adaptively evolved to maximize power and physicality.

Strangely enough, this was perhaps the best way to overcome a fellow adaptive evolver. If he relied on some sort of gimmicky power, then it was quite likely that Rui would adaptively evolve to it outright and completely demolish the ability.

However, if he relied on pure fundamentals, then it became increasingly difficult to antithetically negate his power. Normally, even this wouldn’t be enough thanks to his systems of thought allowing him to perceive the future and overcome his opponent.

Against Anthea, however, those very systems of thought were entirely negated by the power of chaos.

BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM BOOOOOM!!!!!

Rui grimaced even as a maelstrom of blows ravaged his guard. ’I really need to find a counter to chaos.’

He couldn’t allow himself to have such a profound weakness to chaos. His systems of thought were too centrally important to his power for them to be negated by chaos so easily. He had already resolved to look into the matter after Ieyasu defeated him, but got sidetracked by a number of more pressing matters. But now that he was impeded to such an extent by yet another individual, he needed to find a solution to it as soon as possible.

The worst part was that it even impeded the Forge of Creation because even the Forge of Creation relied on the Prophecy of the Void to create techniques.

”I guess for now...” his gaze shifted to Anthea. ”...I will just have to stop holding back.”

Anthea’s eyes widened at those words.

”What?”

And yet, an excited smile emerged on Rui’s face as a blood-red glow entered the pitch-black darkness in his eyes.

”Soul Retcon.”

One moment, he remembered his life as it was; his early days in the Quarrier Orphanage, and then later in the magicademy, and then later his life in missions, his life on the run from Chairman Deacon, his return to the Kandrian Empire, the war, the Beast Incursion and all the events that had followed.

The very next moment, he remembered a different life.

One where he had spent his entire life, every second of it, practicing his Martial Art.

Almost eighty years of pure practice and repetition.

It gave him a realm of mastery second only to Amare.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!!!

A thundering blow of astronomical proportions ravaged Anthea’s body faster than he could even react, thoroughly catching him off guard. The blow dug deep into Anthea’s abdomen, denting it deeper and deeper, leaving an indentation on the opposite side of his body.

”...Rgh!” Anthea grimaced as the body-wrenching blow of tremendous proportions inflicted great damage upon him.

The evolutionary couldn’t even believe how much faster and stronger Rui got all of a sudden.

On top of that, what stunned him even more was the fact that he could tell that this power came not from the Body Phase as it had earlier when he used the Metabody System, nor had it come from the Mind Phase, which he had adaptively evolved to with chaos.

No, it came from the Soul Phase.

A level of mastery of the Soul Phase that exceeded anything Anthea had ever seen from any evolutionary.