The Martial Unity

His opponents rushed in, ready to blast him with more attacks.

Meanwhile, Rui simply leaped away, maintaining his distance as his powerful mind scrutinized his circumstances at extraordinary speed.

Time slowed down in his eyes.

‘They’re strong. But I would have won by now…’

He would have won by now if not for the invisible Master constantly saving them from the brink of death or knockout.

There had been six moments up until now where he was on the verge of eliminating one of them, only to be intercepted by a deadly beam of light. This allowed them to remain in the battle for longer than they would otherwise have been able to.

He had tried ending it with Greater Phantomind Void, yet the skills of the marksman had exceeded his expectations. This invisible opponent had not only been able to apply his Martial Mind in the brief second that Rui appeared but had also been able to aim and shoot accurately in that same timeframe.

Rui had failed to adaptively evolve against his opponent in this particular attempt.

“Oh well, I’ll succeed next time.”

BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM!

Rui leaped away as he evaded long-range attacks with ease. With the VOID algorithm and the SOUL System at play, the probability that the enemy Masters would be able to land a clean attack on him was almost nil.

BAM BAM BAM!!!

He blocked the powerful attack from the speedster, Master Lela, while evading thundering blows from Master Silik, who threw powerful overhead axe blows and dropkicks as though he wanted to bury him where he stood. The other close-range and mid-range Masters continued attacking him.

Yet, none of them could even hurt him.

Rui carefully chose the right response to each attack, evading some and blocking others after conducting a thorough cost-benefit analysis with the VOID algorithm and some of its lesser systems.

Evading fast attacks took too much speed and energy. It also required high agility, which he simply didn’t possess, especially not in his current nerfed state. On top of that, these attacks were usually not that powerful and thus were ones that he could afford to take, especially when he could disperse the impact into the ground below him with Flux Earther.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Against stronger attacks, though, he needed to dodge. They were starting to exceed his capability to tolerate. And although Flux Earther had grown stronger thanks to the Megamind, his body grew much weaker than that, limiting his blocking ability. Thus, he couldn’t take them head on.

Dealing with each of these individually was effortless, but dealing with more than a dozen simultaneously was challenging for him.

With the predictive and SOUL models on each of his enemies, he could foresee the future. Now he needed to rely on his experience and intellect to chart out a future where he didn’t die. Each decision needed to be the right decision.

A single mistake would trigger a series of events that would get him killed.

Anybody else in his position would falter and fall.

Unfortunately for his opponents, however, he was not just anybody else.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH

He pirouetted through a barrage of heavy blows while his guard flew together to block the incoming barrage of speedy attacks from Master Lela.

POW POW POW!

He flipped sideways, evading yet another powerful wind blast all while still blocking each and every single attack that his agile opponent dealt him.

His opponents’ frustrations only grew as time passed and they failed to land a single critical blow on him despite going all out to take him out. Forget even succeeding, they had yet to find a single opening that they could exploit to gain a critical opportunity.

He had no intention of giving it to them, for he knew that the moment he did, he would have to deal with the lethal sniper who was waiting for such critical moments where he could turn the tide in their favor.

Rui wasn’t particularly happy with this particular strategy.

It was purely defensive.

It couldn’t win him the battle.

In the long run, he would run out of stamina before his opponents.

He needed to fulfill his plan of adaptively evolving to the sniper’s Martial Mind before he could move to the offense.

‘I need to deal with the light beams somehow. I can’t keep relying on my instincts to dodge them. It’s too dangerous,’ he realized.

It was possible that he could rely on his systems of thought to predict when the light beams would come so as to avoid them and successfully kill his opponents, but the issue was that he only had a predictive model on the man from the passive pattern he had gained from the Angel of Laplace at the start of the battle.

On top of that, for a predictive model to work, he needed to perceive his opponent. Without doing so, he could not rely on pattern recognition to predict the next move after analyzing a sequence of moves in a given pattern.

And since he couldn’t perceive the man, the idea was bust.

Which meant that he needed to scrap evasion as a solution to the light beams. If they had been sound projectiles, he would still have been willing to rely on evasion because they could be avoided even after they were launched.

But not light.

The speed of light was the absolute highest in the entire universe. If he didn’t entirely get out

of the way before the beam of light was launched, then he would get hit.

Thus, Rui decided against dealing with the beams of light through evasion.

BOOM BOOM BOOM!

Rui dodged a series of attacks with ease as he fell into thought about how he could deal with

the beams of light.

‘Could I tank them with Nemean Blossom?’ Rui narrowed his eyes.

He could… but the issue was that he would have to undo Megamind entirely. And that left him vulnerable to the chaos of so much information that he could only deal with if he had the

Megamind.

The latter was more suited to adaptively evolving to his current circumstances.

Thus, he couldn’t evade and he couldn’t block.

He needed to find a third way to deal with beams of light.