The Martial Unity

Rui sighed visibly as he took his place among his fellow contestants. They did not cease observing him. It was actually embarrassing to be the object of scrutiny of an entire crowd that he was forced to be with.

However, this wasn’t entirely inconvenient. It meant that he could already begin executing one of the strategies that he had come up with to handle the fact that he was going to become a target due to how high-profile he had become.

The reason he was a target was because he was perceived as the greatest threat.

That was something he could alleviate to a certain degree. Among Martial Artists, strength could be perceived, sensed, and intuited. Although the substantive rumors surrounding Rui were not things that could be dismissed, most Martial Artists were most confident in their own senses.

That was something he could work with. By utilizing a Mind Mask, he could reduce the amount of threat he conveyed to his fellow peers.

Because of his enhanced mind, his Mind Mask was powerful enough to completely suppress any sense of danger and threat he evoked, turning him into a normal person, or even less than a normal person despite not having a strong affinity for stealth.

However, he knew that in these circumstances he could not go that far. His fellow contestants were not stupid, they knew that he was a Martial Squire, if they could not at least sense a Squire-level aura, they would be even more afraid and determined to take him out because it meant that he could effortlessly conceal his power despite it being immense. That would only make them more concerned.

Instead, he did not reduce it all the way down, or even most of the way down. Trying to make himself a grade-one or grade-two Martial Artist was too much of a bluff. They would definitely be suspicious as no contestant participating at the moment was low-grade. They were all high-grade Martial Squires, many of whom had arrived at Church town for the sole reason of partaking in the contest.

Death was not forbidden in the contest, thus low-grade Martial Squire would have to be suicidal to consider participating in the contest.

That was why he decided to lower his perceived grade from as incredibly high as it was to grade eight. The power he was at more than three years ago.

Grade eight was as low as he could without the bluff being too suspicious. It was high enough for the participating Martial Squires to put more faith in their senses and intuition than in some rumors.

After all, rumors could be falsified and grossly exaggerated. The severe exaggeration of the power level of a grade-eight Martial Squire wasn’t even the most egregious example of why crazy rumors could not be trusted.

Rui heaved a sigh of relief when he saw that his plan was partially effective.

Many of the stronger Martial Squires immediately dismissed him as a threat when they realized that their senses didn’t even perceive him as a genuine threat.

Yet there was a good chunk of Squires who remained wary, albeit to a lesser extent. That was fine by Rui, he would take everything he could get.

He knew that this underestimation was temporary. Eventually, the contestants would realize that he was even more of a threat than the rumors indicated the longer the battle prolonged. The Mind Mask technique would not be of much avail once they actually saw him fight.

Rui had many thoughts on how he ought to fight in this contest. The most dangerous parts of the contest were actually the earliest phases of the conflict. This was when the greatest number of Martial Squires would fall by far. The colosseum was large enough to give the Martial Squires enough space to fight at whatever range they wanted, but that was it. It was still congested enough for there to be enough chaos for many Martial Squires to fall like bowling pins.

In fact, the ones that would survive the earliest phase were the ones that could handle the chaos the best.

(‘Kane would thrive in this contest. He would have a very serious chance of winning if he participated in my place.’) Rui mused.

The Void Step technique was simply too overpowered, generally speaking. He would simply need to zip around and stab people in the back, literally.

Rui could not do that, so he decided to take another route. Surviving the chaos was his greatest priority. Unfortunately, there was too much chaos, such circumstances were where the difficulty of executing the VOID algorithm was the greatest. There was simply too much data for him to be able to process and create predictive models for. It was one of the aspects of the VOID algorithm that needed to be improved. The VOID algorithm was created for one-on-one hand-to-hand combat, after all. 

Although Rui had used it against multiple Martial Artists in the past during the Serevian War, that was limited to single-digit numbers. This was on an entirely different level of difficulty. 

Therefore, his greatest priority was to last despite being targeted until the situation became less chaotic. 

(‘Looks like I’ll have to rely on the Metabody System earlier than I expected.’) Rui mused. (‘I can forget about offense in the earliest phase of the contest. My focus is lasting, so I’ll have to choose between the remaining Metabody techniques.’)

He considered Void Forestep, before dismissing it. It relied on the VOID algorithm too much out of all the Metabody techniques. 

That left Nemean Blossom, Weaving Blood, and Hungry Pain plus Final Breathing. 

He could see cases being made for all three techniques. Which probably meant that he would employ all three techniques to a partial degree. The question was figuring out to what weightage he would give to each technique. Activating them to equal degrees was probably sub-optimal. He needed to figure out which one was most important, and how he could make the best use of the new-found resources that he had.