The Martial Unity

Her hand drove forth towards the eye of the creature.

And yet, it wasn’t her hand that pierced the eyeball.

It was the blade that extended from it.

A construct of the Water Integument suit.

It could alter its form and become anything.

Just like her father.

She bridged the distance between them with a blade of water emerging from her straightened fingers that pierced the creature’s body.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!

The blue blood that spewed from her, the creature’s eyeballs spewed over Ria’s bare skin even as the creature shuddered in pain. Ria’s amber eyes blazed with intensity.

She saw the causality of the creature’s death.

She understood why Sage Sayfeel’s previous attack had failed to kill the homoarachnoid, allowing the creature to catch him off guard.

The brain of the ascendant homoarachnoid was made up of webs, not neurons.

The webbing of the homoarachnoid could serve as fiber optic cables, allowing them to funnel light through them, allowing them to serve as signal carriers and storage units. The web itself was extremely fluid, allowing it to be reshaped and moved around.

The creature had evaded Sage Sayfeel’s attack by altering the shape of its brain webbing.

That was why Ria made the blade split into branches and shards in all directions after it entered the creature’s eyeball, inflicting an omnidirectional blast within the homoarachnoid’s brain.

She severed the integrated information that composed the homoarachnoid’s brain.

Immediately, -oo—oo’s body went limp.

THUD

The hefty body of the homoarachnoid fell to the ground as she creature’s hefty body collapsed to the ground as a heavy hunk of meat.

The light of life within the creatures’ four remaining alien eyes began to fade.

The last thing that the creature’s fragmented consciousness beheld was the depths of Ria’s eyes.

The universe that existed within them.

And the flow of causality that reflected in her amber pupils.

It was on the cusp of death that the creature understood the true cosmological miracle that was the being before her.

She understood why the Divine Mother sought her.

And yet, it was too late.

Her consciousness faded away.

Ria panted heavily as her amber eyes beheld the death of the creature before her with a solemn severity. Her expression crumpled with a deep graveness as she thought about just how close she was to being captured by the homoarachnoid.

It was chilling to think what would have happened to her had she been taken to this ’Divine Mother’ that the homoarachnoids spoke of.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT…

She slowly extracted the Water Integument blade and shrapnel from the skull of the homoarachnoid as it shed the blue blood and webbing inside the skull of the creature, before protectively covering her exposed body once more. If not for the fact that the homoarachnoid didn’t know that her armor could completely detach from her skin and extend outwards like a blade, Ria wouldn’t have been able to catch the creature off-guard in that fashion.

THUD

The creature’s corpse collapsed completely before the world around her began to quiver. The cracked structure of reality, caused by its webbed geometry, began to come undone. The space-time webs that held the domain together began to unravel. The webbing of the homoarachnoids wasn’t made up of simple static substances, but rather dynamic esoteric structures that were maintained by the mind of the homoarachnoid, which Ria had destroyed.

Soon enough, the entire domain came apart, unveiling reality as it was.

The gray sky, previously cracked, mended back together while the world around her returned to a smooth, seamless reality.

The gray ground her, covered in the blue blood of the deceased homoarachnoid.

The webbing that bound Sage Sayfeel also came apart, revealing the unconscious Transcendent Candidate.

”Sayfeel!” She rushed towards him, shaking him with alarm.

The man stirred as he slowly opened his dark eyes.

”Sayfeel, are you ok?!” She asked with an anxious tone. ”Did you suffocate? Can you hear me?”

The man frowned as his blurry vision slowly cleared, as he saw a worried Ria gazing at him with a concerned expression. A faint memory of the first time they met face to face emerged in his foggy mind at the sight of her.

’Why are you hiding?’ A five-year-old Ria had asked him as she spotted him in the shadow of a tree on a sunny evening in the Royal Garden.

Sayfeel’s expression widened with surprise at the fact that she had found him.

He was hardly going all out with his stealth to hide from the princess, but the fact that she had detected his presence despite only having broken through to the Apprentice Realm a month prior was shocking.

That was when he knew that he was guarding a truly extraordinary being.

One with limitless potential.

On that day, he swore to protect her for the rest of his life, even if it meant disobeying the Emperor’s orders.

”Sayfeel! Are you ok? Can you hear me?”

Her anxious, urgent voice broke him out of his reverie as his dark eyes widened with alarm, remembering everything. He leaped to his feet in a flash, protectively guarding the princess as he took stock of his environment.

Only to find himself face to face with the corpse of the homoarachnoid before him.

His eyes widened with shock at the collapsed, wounded body, noting the poison he had inflicted on her and the second wound he hadn’t inflicted on her.

He turned towards Ria with an amazed expression. ”Your Highness, did you take down the alien?”

She nodded with a grim expression, turning towards the corpse of the homoarachnoid with a severe disposition. ”Only because of your poison. Otherwise, I would have stood no chance.”

Even then, he knew that what she had done was undoubtedly impressive. It was truly absurd for a mere Martial Master to take on a creature who could fight the Blood Empress and Transcendent Candidates head-on.

His expression lightened with a hint of pride.

”You are truly His Majesty’s daughter and His Majesty’s granddaughter.”

Ria laughed at that strange compliment. Even nearly twenty years after the death of the Emperor of Harmony, he still regarded his original liege as if he were still alive.

Such was the man who stood in the shadows of the people he served.