The Martial Unity

Rui leaped away with a hint of displeasure as he evaded his opponent’s attack calmly.

He was not happy that Ieyasu was able to overcome his offensive prowess this well. However, he had to admit that he was not surprised. The man had undoubtedly mastered many powerful techniques in his time. Rui didn’t even think that there were any techniques, barring forbidden ones, that could down him very easily.

Perhaps in the past, when he had been able to only use one Martial Art at once, he wouldn’t have been able to overcome Yin-Yang Spear that easily, but in the present when his Martial Mind allowed him to smoothly evolve Martial Art with other Martial Art, he could deal with virtually anything.

However, while Rui was dissatisfied with the outcome, he was not dissatisfied with the overall progression of the fight. For once, he was winning in terms of stamina.

For reasons that not even his SOUL model was able to discern, Ieyasu was extremely intent on attack and offense. Since the very start of the fight, Ieyasu had aggressively pursued Rui with a powerful offense that threatened to kill him at any point. This was an extremely strange and unexpected approach, for Ieyasu was fundamentally a reactive Martial Artist, just like Rui was. They did not actively pursue, but instead reacted to their opponent’s movements, actions, and decisions by adaptively and assimilatively evolving to them.

In their first fight, Ieyasu had reacted to and begun copying Rui very early into the fight. Yet, despite the fact that they were well into this fight, he had shown no attempt in even trying to copy Rui’s Martial Art. However, Rui could sense the greed for his power in Ieyasu. He knew that the man deeply wanted to get his hands on his power.

‘He has a plan.’

Rui could sense it.

He just didn’t know what it was. ‘Then again… so do I.’

BOOM BOOM BOOM!!!

He somersaulted away as he evaded attack after attack from Ieyasu who chased him down doggedly. With each passing moment, his attacks grew more varied and diverse.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!!

Rui evaded sharp wind bullets, each with the power to blast holes in his Body. He felt his nerves tingle as Ieyasu manipulated the heavens at an extraordinarily large scale.

He shaped heaven into a giant magnifying glass, magnifying and amplifying the sun’s light into a thin destructive beam that threatened to cleanly bore a hole in Rui’s head.

VMMM!!!

Unfortunately for Ieyasu, Rui had already adaptively evolved to this Martial Art. The beam tilted as it got closer and closer to him, missing him harmlessly by the time it got to him. Rui exerted powerful but unshakable control over the atmosphere around him, ensuring that its optical density was just enough to throw off each beam.

On top of that, he kept randomly adjusting it so that it was almost impossible to adaptively evolve to the degree deviation.

Ieyasu narrowed his eyes as he launched sound bullets to tear down Rui’s quasi domain. THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!

Rui wisely dodged them as much as possible. He knew he couldn’t let the sound bullets tear down his heaven domain due to the fact that it was the only thing that allowed him to evade the destructive light beams.

They both knew that. And thus, yet another contest within their battle began.

THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!!!

Ieyasu fired innumerable attacks while keeping his destructive light beam technique on standby. He targeted Rui’s refractive domain, hoping to tear it down so that he could then laser a hole in Rui at the speed of light. The best part was that he didn’t even need to hit Rui, he just needed to hit the domain around him, which was a much bigger target and thus easier to strike.

A truth that Rui was keenly aware of.

And one he didn’t intend to do nothing about. In the blink of an eye, he activated Neo Godspeed. As much as he would have liked to conserve his stamina as much as possible, he couldn’t afford to get caught lacking against Ieyasu’s powerful light beams.

That wasn’t all. “Temporal Harmony.”

“Tsk.” A hint of irritation appeared on Ieyasu’s face. “Tricks will not protect you from me.”

His dark eyes sharpened, flaring with power.

“Everything that has happened thus far is merely a prelude of what is to come.”

His tone was chilling.

“Allow me to show you the sum totality of everything I have ever assimilated.”

RUMBLE!!!

Rui’s eyes widened as the man activated dozens of techniques at once!

This was the power of Assimilative Convergence, Ieyasu’s very first system of thought. It not only allowed him to evolve any technique by assimilating other techniques into it, it also allowed him to assimilate all Martial Art.

On top of that, it had perfect affinity with the Master Realm.

The Master Realm vastly increased the cognitive limits of the number of Martial Art techniques that the Mind could juggle at once.

Martial Masters had enough cognitive power to activate and manage more than ten times as many techniques as Martial Artists of the Lower Realms. That, along with experience, was one of the areas where Rui was lacking in compared to other Martial Masters. It was one of Ieyasu’s greatest strengths.

Rui’s expression grew severe as he felt many techniques—including the Metabody techniques that Ieyasu had copied from him—unfolding simultaneously. In the blink of an eye, a hail of sound, wind, and fire descended down upon him.

BOOOM BOOOM BOOOM!!!

His eyes flared with intensity as he wound through all of them one by one, barely avoiding some of them. The flames singed his hair as he barely managed to evade them while the sound and wind that Ieyasu had unleashed were either too diluted to cause him any harm or too concentrated to actually hit him due to his systems of thought.

RUMBLE!!

His eyes widened as a familiar sensation triggered his instincts and nerves. He leaped into the air, barely evading familiar spikes from impaling him. “You’re going nowhere.” Ieyasu’s cold voice reached his ears as all of heaven and earth shook!

RUMBLE!!!

–