The Martial Unity

The powerful blow contained so much power from the cold fusion nuclear reactors in Anthea’s body that it would have knocked him out.

If it cleanly landed, that was.

WHOOSH!

Anthea’s eyes widened as the blow smoothly slipped off of Rui’s head despite getting a clean hit. Rui cleanly redirected the attack with just his skin alone, using the quantum gap between all matter to negate the attack entirely.

[Tail swipe down in fifteen nanoseconds.]

The dragon’s tail glowed with a corruptive red, swinging down upon Rui with a devastating momentum, threatening to crush him right then and there. WHOOSH

Rui evaded the blow with a simple step away, only to find himself running into Anthea’s onslaught of attacks.

BANG BANG BANG!

The blows peppered Rui as Anthea began adaptively evolving his skin to inflict more damage on Rui’s body. He overloaded the cold fusion reactors in the outermost layer of his skin cell, causing them to become explosive upon contact with Rui, drastically increasing the power he was able to output.

And yet—

WHOOSH!

Rui smoothly absorbed all the attacks with Aqua Existentia, adaptively evolving his cells’ capacity to absorb head by making them thermodynamically conductive.

“RAGH!” The Dragon Emperor swung at both of them, with a wave of gamma radiation erupting from his attack, poisoning the very world around them. A dangerous glint emerged in Rui’s eyes as he chose to face the attack head-on this time. WHOOSH!

He smoothly redirected the attack as it slipped off his body, flipping the dragon’s body and using his momentum to send him flying into Anthea. He used Temporal Disharmony to momentarily slow down Anthea’s reactions, causing him to be unable to evade the barreling dragon.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

The two crashed into each other, as the devastating momentum and the intense gamma radiation took their toll on the former Supreme Commander, causing a part of his body to break down.

“Get off me, you brainless beast!” Anthea coldly glowered at the Dragon Emperor.

“Do something other than becoming a target, you puny ant!” The Dragon Emperor snarled as both of them returned their anger and hatred towards Rui, before charging at him once more together.

Rui calmly waited for them as they came to attack him once more, their coordination growing smoother and smoother. But the paradigms of the battle had already been set.

The Dragon Emperor relied on a great, big, powerful attack of momentary maximum force and radiation to make Rui evade them rather than withstand them. It was much easier to evade such attacks than to take them head-on, especially since he had a predictive model on the Dragon Emperor. Anthea would use the evasion as an opportunity to try to get an ambush on Rui to potentially knock him out with a precise and well-timed attack. He used Body of Chaos to negate Rui’s predictions, something that Rui himself had used against his clone. He even managed to get extremely good ambushes and clean hits that would have downed almost any other pathwalker.

And yet, Rui would emerge unscathed thanks to Autocorpus. It didn’t matter whether they caught him off guard or not. It didn’t matter if they tried to squeeze him for space or if they tried to overwhelm with attacks from multiple sides; Rui managed to evade, redirect, or absorb each and every single one of their attacks.

He did it with a calm and composed demeanor.

He didn’t brag or taunt them.

He simply highlighted the gap between them with his actions, relaxed as they were.

It was a humbling realization that even as they began growing more and more coordinated, even as NOVA’s predictions began growing more and more accurate, and their teamwork grew better, they were still unable to inflict a true injury to him.

“Hyargh!” The Dragon Emperor unleashed a heaven-shattering attack of catastrophic power at Rui.

RUMBLE!!!

The sheer force of the power caused great tumult within the cavity, threatening to crush him flat. The immense radiation it released seemed to curdle even the fabric of space and time itself.

And yet, a single touch was all it took.

WHOOSH

With just the gentlest of touches from Rui’s fingers, the Dragon Emperor’s attack ceased to exist.

His fist was rendered stationary.

His momentum, gone. As if destroyed in a manner violating the law of conservation of momentum.

Rui’s chilling ethereal eyes bore deep into the Dragon Emperor’s reptilian eyes. “You don’t understand how to use power.”

His tone grew chilling.

And yet, instead of punishing him, he simply sent the lumbering dragon flying away harmlessly, as if he wasn’t even worth raising a fist against.

It would have been less humiliating if Rui had killed him then and there.

The Dragon Emperor gritted his teeth as he struggled to stabilize his barreling body. Rui had used the dragon’s power to completely destabilize him in a manner that escaped his understanding. He didn’t know how long had passed since their battle, but the sheer gulf between them in their combat prowess shocked him. He had never felt so helpless in his entire life, not since fighting Ecclestia.

Anthea was in a similar position, except it was even more humiliating for him because Rui’s body was only half Anthean. The other half was his regular homo antithesis species. Then, didn’t it stand to reason that Anthea would be twice as strong as he?

Instead, he felt as if Rui was twice as strong as him.

And that was while clearly holding back for reasons that escaped his understanding.

THWACK THWACK THWACK THWACK THWACK!!!

A thundering onslaught of attacks emerged from Anthea, only to be smoothly parried by Rui, who indulged the former Supreme Commander in a hand-to-hand bout.

But the true battle was not about hand-to-hand combat. Anthea knew that he could never outskill a Martial Artist in brawling, especially not the most skilled Martial Artist alive.

No, the true battle was fought at the cellular level, when their bodies made contact with each other at each impact. Anthea mobilized his cells, sending them to Rui’s body each time he made contact with Rui’s body.

He was fighting a battle of biological warfare.