The Martial Unity

Clone Rui’s movements were slight and subtle. Upon each incoming blow, he would shift ever so slightly, causing the angle of Rui’s incoming blows to be off by just a single degree.

That alone, however, would not have been enough to cause the attacks to slip so smoothly.

Rui’s ethereal eyes sharpened as they bore deep into two blood-red suns that shone with blinding brightness in clone Rui’s eyes. He closed the distance between them, shifting his balled fists into open palms.

Open palm thrusts were more stable than fists because they had one less moving joint across the flow of power. They offered more stability and solidity in the attacks, even if it came at the cost of range, allowing Rui to use the stability to hopefully overcome the slippage effect that had caused his attacks to be negated.

His palms thrust forth with greater facility, each aiming for the torso of clone Rui’s body in a direct manner.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Rui sharpened his eyes as his pupils contracted, shifting his vision to the microscopic scale, trying to understand exactly what the hell was going on.

He thrust forth with his palm, watching it reach clone Rui and then…

WHOOSH

The slipping sensation was identical to one’s hand slipping when leaning on something to support one’s weight. Rui needed to stabilize his balance each and every single time his attack slipped. WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Clone Rui kept his movements to the bare minimum, swaying gently and gracefully as each and every single one of Rui’s attacks mystically ‘slipped’ off of him.

Rui couldn’t even read clone Rui’s mind because of Gigabrain, causing him to struggle to even comprehend what he was doing using the SOUL System. The slipping sensation was truly frustrating and tiring. Each time, he would thrust his palms forth with great power and speed and perfect form, ensuring that the flow of power and materia prima throughout his body was absolutely flawless.

And yet—

WHOOSH!

‘Goddammit, how the hell is he doing that?’ Rui cursed inwardly as he felt the pressure of time slowly starting to mount. ‘It’s impossible for such a level of slippage to occur naturally!’

Slippage was a real phenomenon in combat. If one’s opponent was sweaty and oily, then landing a clean blow became ten times harder. So much so that it was a prohibited tactic in combat sports.

But what he was experiencing now went way beyond what even an esoteric substance would be able to cause. It was utterly inexplicable and beyond the realm of fathoming.

‘It’s almost as if there’s an empty space between my body and his body at all tim—!’ His ethereal eyes widened with shock as a thundering realization dawned on him even as he thrust forth with powerful palm attacks.

An empty space between their bodies.

Such a thing already existed.

In fact, it existed between all objects in the world.

The reality was that no two objects truly touched each other directly. There was an extraordinarily minute space, on the quantum scale, between the electrons of two objects.

It was due to something known as the Pauli Exclusion Principle. It stated that no two electrons could occupy the same quantum state, or more broadly, no two particles could occupy the same region of space.

The laws of physics demanded a space between all particles.

However, the space between two objects was so incredibly small that most people couldn’t even realize it, let alone make use of it.

But what if one could?

What if one could devise a redirection technique that worked with such extraordinary precision and accuracy at the quantum scale that it caused an attack to be redirected away so smoothly, thanks to the quantum gap, that it was indistinguishable from slipping?

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!!!

Rui’s aggressive onslaught continued as his body turned into an engine of straight thrust attacks while clone Rui remained in a composed, passive defensive position, swaying ever so slightly as each palm thrust struck him.

WHOOSH

It slipped.

Clone Rui had smoothly intercepted the attack with his body, but instead of tanking the impact, he could ever so slightly shift into exactly the right position, even on a microscopic scale, such that he could cause each and every single attack to simply slip off his body.

Quantum slippage.

That was the secret of the technique that the clone Rui had made to deal with Rui’s astronomical power advantage. Even with the Metabody System fully active, a forbidden technique, the sheer disparity in power between the clone and the original could not be bridged so easily.

Thus, clone Rui had spontaneously created an extraordinary technique with Gigabrain and the Forge of Creation. Outer Divergence.

A technique that negated any and all, no matter how much force and power they had. A technique that was as powerful as Rui’s Aqua Existentia, despite the fact that Aqua Existentia made use of Autocorpus and the Gene Realm.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!!!

Rui’s body pushed itself increasingly closer to the limit as he began leveraging the full speed and power of his body, attempting to blast clone Rui’s body with everything he had.

And yet, not a single blow could make proper contact against clone Rui.

The clone was beyond the reach of the original.

It was an outcome that would have horrified any other original.

And yet, a smile emerged on Rui’s face.

A smile of unfettered excitement.

His ethereal eyes lit up with boundless ecstasy and joy, as if he were a child in a candy store.

Even as each and every single one of his powerful attacks was effortlessly negated by an inferior clone, he found himself laughing.

He found himself laughing with a euphoric excitement.

“Yes!” He laughed. “This is it! Show me more! Give me more!”

The air boiled with his excitement as he mobilized the full extent of his physical power.

In the depths of his mind, he activated a technique.

A very special technique.

“Mirror Mode.”

It was a technique, or a neurological state rather, that he had created in the past five years since Ria’s birth.

A mirror made up of neurons in his brain.