The Martial Unity

The way the system of thought functioned was actually similar to how the Angel of Laplace worked, except in reverse. She collected a series of vectors that were spread across an entire area.

Rui had needed to do this using sensory techniques that would allow him to map vectors.

But Ria didn’t need to develop a technique for that.

She could do it naturally.

It was what her Martial Body was specialized for. In the Era of Expansion, the templates and the possibilities for Martial Body had exploded exponentially, and at the same time, it had all become possible with a body that looked entirely normal to the naked eye.

As a Martial Artist who specialized in causality, her Martial Body was designed for the purpose of sensing causality across the environment very directly.

In a sense, all the cells in her body were sensory.

Her entire body was a kind of sense organ, allowing her to scoop data from her environment so well that it was like she was abusing extremely high-grade sensory techniques twenty-four-bar-seven.

Each cell was sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, to pressure, to temperature, and to virtually any kind of causal stimulus. And through chemical messaging and her highly developed nervous system, her brain received all of that information.

And it was why she was so good at analyzing causality almost reflexively in the heat of battle.

Ordinarily, the sheer amount of information that this would require exceeded human limitations, including Ria’s. The reason that Rui was able to deploy such a technique even as a Martial Squire was that his mind had undergone the cognitive explosion of growth twice.

Ria relied on a much simpler and much more ubiquitous solution.

Neural inlays.

The technology was biotechnological, comprising a set of biologically engineered neurons and glial cells that were one thousand times smaller than regular cranial cells while retaining the same functionality, allowing them to be a thousand times more efficient than the brain.

It vastly improved the information processing capabilities of a large majority of the human beings who managed to get access to them, which was most of human civilization, even if not all, thanks to how easy they were to manufacture with modern biological fabrication technology and how small they were.

She could conduct an area-wide scan of vectors with her causality sensation biology, process them, and derive the future from them.

Beyond her system of thought, she also had her intuitive sense for causality, which allowed her to deploy the entirety of her mind, not just her conscious mind or her neural inlay, allowing her to scan the entire environment for what she was looking for.

Just the slightest anomaly in causality that simply didn’t seem to be consistent with reality.

”Here.”

Her eyes opened as she walked over to a specific spot on the ground where she sensed an anomaly.

She began digging, arriving at a spot where the fabric of space and time had the strangest of wrinkles that didn’t seem to add up with the rest of its environment.

She stuck her finger out, touching it.

WHOOSH

Her finger disappeared.

A confident smile emerged on her face.

”I can do this.”

She was confident she could hunt infected worlds like no one ever had before her.

RUMBLE

The fabric of space and time around her shook as the manifold unfolded, right on time.

RUMBLE

A powerful gravitational wave emerged from the manifold, only to be suppressed by vegetation in the environment. Although it was indistinguishable from regular vegetation, it was actually cutting-edge botanical biotechnology, built on top of the elven biotechnology acquired in transactions that happened decades ago, shortly after the Unfolding.

”Hey, you’re here.”

Ria’s eyes lit up as she heard Runark’s voice, turning around to spot him walking towards her with his father.

The moment she laid eyes on Runark, she could feel how much stronger he had gotten. Before, his presence was light in her senses, but now, it had grown more substantial and heavy.

She could even feel a faint sense of threat from him, something that she had never been able to sense before. The three years that he had spent in the manifold had apparently allowed him to cross a certain threshold of power, enough to register just a little bit of uncertainty in how he was.

Visually, he was the same, however. His clear green eyes and his unkempt silver hair were the same, although the latter had grown a little longer. His body had actually grown a little leaner than she remembered, as if he had chosen to lower his weight a bit and shed just a little bit of muscle.

”You look good, Runark.” Ria smiled at him. ”I’m glad to see that your time in the manifold has done you well.”

She turned towards Kane, who walked some steps behind, inhaling deeply.

”Oh man, how I’ve missed civilization.” Kane couldn’t help but heave a deep breath of relief before turning towards the two of them with a nod as he walked by them, ruffling both their hair with a hand each. ”You kids have fun and be safe, okay? If you need anything, just give me a call. But for now, I’m going back home and taking a good long nap in a proper ergonomic bed.”

He disappeared after she bid him goodbye.

”I’m ready, Ria,” he said with a determined tone. ”Let’s get this show on the road.”

Ria smiled, nodding. ”We are ready as well. All the preparations are made. We can leave tomorrow if we want.”

He nodded with an expression of anticipation.

”I can’t wait.”

After three and a half years in the manifold training hard every day for this very specific purpose, he had finally gotten strong enough to stand with Ria, rather than behind her, when the time came for battle.

With the final member of the team ready and on standby, EsoQuest Solutions quickly moved to commence their first infected world hunting operation. It was finally time for all of their preparations to culminate in the first step.