The Martial Unity

A profoundly strange battle had erupted at the very bottom of the depths of the Nest of Terra. At the center of the battle was him. He hadn’t moved so much as a step away from his initial position.

Everywhere else was his opponent, launching himself and his clones at blindingly high speeds and tremendous momentum.

And yet, not once did the Terrampager strike Rui.

He missed billions of times.

Against a stationary target.

A nonsensically impossible miracle.

And yet, it was a miracle that Rui had created with the power of the Scriptures of Terra and his extraordinary mind.

Each time he sought to sabotage the Terrampager’s tremendously astronomical charge, he had a nigh-infinite possible paths to achieve his goal.

And yet, the Scriptures of Terra whittled down that number to just 1.

The correct one.

The optimal path of action.

His earth-bending flowed like butter.

It flowed like it was water.

Like it was heaven.

It flowed to his opponents just a dozen nanoseconds before his titanic attack began, deviating the trajectory by just three degrees. The sabotage happened within a window of a few nanoseconds before the attack began, but after, it was too late to change.

That was all it took.

WHOOOSH!!!!!

BOOOOOM!!!!!

“Rgh!” the Terrampager snarled with mounting frustration.

Never in his life had he experienced such a confoundingly elusive target. Never in his life had he even dreamt of the possibility that the most confoundingly elusive target was a stationary target.

Rui’s counter solutions to dealing with the man’s charges were the most unique and divergent solutions that he could even begin to fathom. So much so that this entire Martial Mind had been rendered useless!

He had three systems of thought for the most common ways that his opponents dealt with his charges: Evasion, defense, and counter-offense.

While he had come across sabotage before, they were usually crude attempts at doing so with lethal attacks before he could take his stance.

He had never come across such an absurdly magical means of sabotage before, rendering his systems of thought entirely obsolete.

And that was why Rui had chosen this method out of all the possible techniques that could have been created with the Forge of Creation. He was not just adaptively evolving against the man’s attacks but also against the man’s solution to the most common counters his Martial Mind was accustomed to dealing with. He was adaptively evolving against everything that his opponent had to offer.

The first minute of the battle passed as both combatants came to a profoundly shocking realization simultaneously.

Rui firmly had the upper hand.

Regardless of why, just the fact that he was unable to win was shocking enough, let alone him being pushed to the back foot. He gritted his teeth as he found himself exerting even greater and greater power just to apply pressure on Rui.

What shocked him was that it didn’t appear as though Rui was straining his stamina either. Nor did it appear that he was harming himself to maintain this level of power. In other words, the Dawnbringer was able to reach this level of power without a forbidden technique.

“Is this the power of the Scriptures of Terra?” the Martial Sage couldn’t help but wonder with a shocked expression.

In his mind, this was surely proof that the Dawnbringer had found the Scriptures of Terra that only the Shield of Gaia previously had found. If that was the case, then all the legends and mythical reverence that existed for this legendary treasure were real.

“If I harness this power, how strong will I, a Martial Sage, become?” his eyes grew starry with dreams.

In his mind, he attributed all the extraordinary power that the Dawnbringer displayed to the Scriptures of Terra, assuming he was a regular peak Master without it. Thus, it would stand to reason that he would also be able to bridge the gap between Realms if he got the Scriptures of Terra!

“I would be able to become the strongest Sage from the weakest!” he gasped. “Maybe I will be able to fight Martial Transcendents!”

“…” Despite being in the trance of Gigabrain, the statement was so absurdly nonsensical that Rui simply stared at him with dubious expression.

“I’m afraid you are too cognitively impaired for that,” he murmured. “Even if I tried sharing the Scriptures of Terra with you, your brain is too small for it to fit inside.”

The Terrampager’s glare grew chillingly wrathful.

And yet, his words struck painfully deep in the context of the battle. The Terrampager truly felt stupid for jumping around billions of times, only to miss his target each and every single time. He had made up his mind.

“I will defeat you and then take the Scriptures of Terra for myself.” The Terrampager grinned. “And then, I shall ascend to become the strongest of Martial Sages!”

RUMBLE!!!!!

Rui felt a tingling sense of peril as the world shook with the power of his earth-bending. It shook under the weight.

“I don’t normally use this because it takes too much time against Martial Sages, leaving me wide open,” the Martial Sage began as he brought his hands together. “But you…”

His grin widened.

“You don’t have any way to take me down, do you?”

Rui narrowed his eyes.

“Hehehe, you may think I’m stupid, and you may even be right,” the Sage glared at Rui with vindiction. “But I have lived three centuries. There are some things that only experience can teach you.”

RUMBLE!!!!!!

Rui’s eyes widened with shock as the very fabric of heaven and earth began converging upon Rui as space and time bent to the Martial Sage’s will.

“Terranova Armageddon: Gaia’s Convergence!”

A high-grade Sage-level technique that deployed space manipulation and gravity to converge the entire battleground as narrowly as possible, allowing destroy any chances of missing his target due to the absence of any other possibility.

“Now then,” the Terrampager growled. “Let’s see you sabotage this with your clever intelligence.”

BOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!

RUMBLE!!!!!

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