The Martial Unity

He raised a second finger. “Second, the average beast is not as swift or fast as Martial Artists. They cannot move out of the way as fast as Martial Artists can. This makes them even easier to hit.”

He raised a third finger. “Third, the average beast, being larger, can withstand diluted attacks exponentially better than focused attacks. This principle is true in general. An impact dispersed across your entire body is much easier to weather than a focused impact. There are even Martial Art techniques that employ this principle.”

Many Martial Artists in the audience nodded knowingly. Dispersion was one of the most common principles for active defense techniques at the Lower Realms.

The Esoterist raised a fourth finger. “They don’t possess the extraordinary insights and foresight that Martial Artists possess with greater experience. Martial Artists of the Upper Realms possess an innate quasi-future vision by virtue of their sheer experience and intuition, making them so much more difficult to strike.”

Having shortly elucidated four powerful reasons that made existing siege weapons extremely incompatible with beasts and monsters, the Esoterist waited as the problems human leaders hadn’t even thought about dawned on them.

“Think about it, leaders of humanity.” He smiled confidently. “Why do you think the Esocline Federation is outperforming some Sage-level powerhouses against the Beast Incursion despite the fact that we have no Martial Artists?”

A wave of murmurs spread through the conference hall.

Many people realized that the remarkable defensive power of the Esocline Federation was indeed proof that the Esoterist’s solutions were powerful. After all, he had absolutely no Martial Artists in his nation whatsoever.

That meant that he dealt with every beast or monster that sought to destroy his technocratic nation, including the Sage-level ones, all without a single Martial Artist. Thus, if human civilization could gain even a portion of this technological power, the difference would be incredible.

Combined with Rui’s immensely effective Hellbringer model, as well as the Esoterist’s highly effective siege weapons, many leaders grew genuinely optimistic about their chances of dealing with Sage-level beasts with Martial Masters alone. “And thus, my first solution is to share my new design paradigm for esoteric siege weapons with all of you.” He waved his hand, causing the existing siege weapons to shift and change. “This new paradigm and siege weapons will be exclusively focused on inflicting as much damage on beasts and monsters as possible. They will be able to inflict critical damage on Sage-level beasts before Martial Masters attack. Significantly wounding these beasts and monsters  should allow Martial Masters to, in conjunction with the extraordinary Hellbringer model that my colleague has developed, deal with Sage-level beasts and monsters without excessive losses and without Sages.”

His gaze swept across the adjusted designs. “In addition, I have increased the flexibility of the scope of the output, allowing you to deal with beasts and monsters of varying sizes. After all, the Beast Incursion is highly diverse in the kinds of beasts and monsters that it has. This should allow you to tailor your scope to each individual target, allowing you to inflict the maximal possible damage, potentially even killing them just like that.”

His eyes returned to the conference of human leaders around him. “I predict that it should increase the effectiveness and efficiency of siege weapons against beasts and monsters by a factor of several times.”

A wave of jubilation swept across the entirety  of the leadership of human civilization. This was extremely promising as a solution and inspired much confidence.

“Naturally, although this was the lowest hanging fruit I could think of, it is not without constraints,” he went on. “For one, it is quite challenging to refit and alter the structures of existing siege weapons to adopt the new engineering paradigm that I’m willing to share with all of you. After all, this requires a substantial manufacturing capacity that not all nations have. Even for the nations that do have it, it will take months if not years to refit and alter each and every single siege weapon in existence.”

The energy in the atmosphere dampened a bit with his words.

Indeed, this was the problem with esoteric technology. It was extremely resource intensive. While upgrading Martial Artists could be done without any cost potentially, upgrading esoteric siege weapons was an extraordinarily taxing industrial affair. Not all nations had extremely developed industries domestically. Many nations often traded and imported what they needed from the suppliers of siege weapons.

And in this case, the largest supplier of esoteric siege weapons was none other than the Esocline Federation.

“I’m more than willing to trade with all of you to accelerate your refitting and upgrading process.” He smiled with a hint of mischief. “…For a price, of course.”

They stiffened once more as they experienced a wave of deja vu.

Yet another fellow who was supposed to be providing solutions using his leverage to make an extra buck out of the exchange. And yet again, they had no choice but to comply and adhere to his conditions as long as they weren’t too outrageous. They knew that it was ultimately better to cooperate with the Esoterist than to delay the departure of Sages and risk absolute destruction.

The Esoterist grinned at the indignance emerging from the audience. He didn’t intend to go too far with squeezing them with leverage, but he certainly intended to take his reward for being one of the saviors of human civilization.

“And now, I will proceed to talk about the rest of my solutions one by one,” he continued. “These are all higher fruits that will take greater effort to initiate. However, once the Sages leave, they will be extremely valuable in the long run. Many of these solutions are mundane and technical so I won’t bore you with all the details and only go through the overview and leave information packages for your scholars. However, some of them are…”

A smile emerged on his face. “Revolutionary. I believe that some of them will change humankind forever.”

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