The Martial Unity

The elves focused on long-range sieges, while the therianthropes, evolutionaries, and tekvores served as broad-based foundations that covered all bases. And it was the Martial Artists and the MECHAs of the Panamic Alliance that led the counter-offensive into the ranks of the vast laminar army, drilling through their numbers at an alarming rate.

Led by the Martial Transcendents, they managed to inflict a tremendous amount of damage upon their enemies. It was the surprising ease with which they drilled through the laminar army that dawned an unexpected realization on them.

“The laminar integuments suck at close-range combat.” Amare realized. “They don’t have any great combat prowess at all.”

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

With a single blow, she managed to cause hundreds of thousands of laminar integuments to explode into the superfluid slop that composed their bodies. The biggest impediments that the Gaian forces ran into were the spacecrafts, often composed of bubble-like spacefighters, and the various classes of warships that the laminar army seemed to have in much greater excess of the Gaian forces, creating a mounting burden on the Gaian forces to take warships out before they could get past the Gaian army and inflict great damage upon their home world.

But the individual laminar integuments that swarmed the flanks of the army were just… underwhelming.

Their combat power was… ‘normal,’ as if they were just the alien equivalent of regular humans who were trained in combat, maybe given some weapons and gear, and given a few enhancement potions. What was even more surprising was that the combat power of the laminar integuments was uniform. The variance was extremely narrow by the standards of Martial Artists and other pathwalkers. It was almost as if—

Amare’s amber glinted with realization. “Almost as if they don’t have any paths to tread.”

It was a stunning realization, but the more she looked at the vast spread of uniform and uniformly powerful laminar integuments, the more she realized that this was the truth.

“They don’t have paths!” Amare told her Martial Sages and Central Command. “They’re just individuals armed with a standard amount of power. This is a static species where its individuals do not tread on paths of power.”

This came as a shock to all pathwalkers in Gaia as they took a deep look at the laminar integuments with astonishment. Indeed, to them, civilization was synonymous with paths of power. Not a single person could imagine what it was like for a civilization this advanced with technology much more advanced than their own to have no paths of power.

Some of them had heard that ancestral homo sapien prior to the Epoch of Evolution also didn’t have any paths, but that was much more detached and hard to fathom. To see intelligent and highly powerful alien life and civilizations devoid of paths of personal power of pursuit made them realize that paths were perhaps not the norm for intelligent and rational life.

The realization made them feel strange, because it made them realize that ‘paths’ perhaps weren’t as universal as they might have thought. On the other hand, it made them feel special as well, since it suggested the possibility that they were among the complex and intelligent alien life of the universe, of which they presumed there were other kinds of, that had paths.

Regardless of what the truth was, it proved to be the one and only advantage that they had in this battle.

The laminar integument infantry wasn’t able to even remotely pose a threat to them or even mildly resist their approach towards the main warships of the laminar army. The space infantry had one job, which was to swarm other infantry and stop them, or swarm enemy ships and inflict damage upon them. However, they were just deeply unprepared to withstand the full might of the three thousand Martial Sages and thirty thousand Martial Masters.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

The Martial Artist army wiped them out, drilling past them, as they charged towards the laminar warships.

There were nearly ten times as many laminar warships as there were Gaian with a stock of powerful weapons that, if left unchecked, would easily annihilate even a planet as durable and invincible as Gaia was.

That was exactly what they couldn’t allow. The Martial Artist army overwhelmed the infantry battalions flanking the wave-like laminar army, charging towards the warships with the sole intention of taking them out before they could even get to destroying Gaia.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMM!!!

The warships were clearly caught off-guard by the stunning, destructive power that the tiny infantry soldiers native to Gaia seemed to be able to inflict upon their world. Infantry was known to be weaker in raw power; thus, protocols of the laminar space force did not involve even bothering to direct heavy artillery towards them. They let the laminar integuments attack them while they focused on destroying the infected world.

But for the first time, they had come across tiny lifeforms that possessed as much destructive power as alien space monsters.

The complete defiance of their expectations of this infantry led to tremendous losses among laminar warships, forcing them to redirect firepower to deal with the infantry, increasing the amount of time they would need in order to destroy Gaian civilization.

This was a truth that even the laminar integument leader that fought Rui recognized, far, far away at the edge of the solar system.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

The leader of Gaian civilization and the leader of the laminar world ship teleported and phased through the very fabric of reality, evading each other’s attacks with an extraordinary amount of speed, beggaring the imagination.

In just the span of a second, a billion attacks were exchanged.

And yet, they were hardly pushed to their limits.

A series of flashes of light escaped the laminar integument as it thought and communicated to Rui all the same.

“Your. Civilization. Not. Weak.”

The blood-red suns within his eyes flared with a glint of pride and satisfaction. “We are strong. Strong enough to survive. Strong enough to emerge victorious.”

The laminar integument wasn’t focused on which way the battle was leaning, but rather the curious combat power that Gaian infantry possessed.