The Martial Unity

The very thought of Siliscia and Sternon made her heart sink and her blood boil. Tears laced her eyes while her throat choked. Yet rage and hatred fueled her, prolonging her rush. It allowed her to power through the death of two of her friends.

As did the desperation of wanting to save the other two. She knew Misha and Runark were still alive. She knew that. She could feel it. They had lost a lot of blood, but they were not beyond saving.

She didn’t have time to think ’how could this have happened?’

She had been temporarily blasted out of the battlefield for what was merely seconds in real time.

And the moment she returned, half her friends were already dead.

The other half were barely clinging on to life.

They weren’t weak by any means.

It was their opponent that was extraordinarily powerful.

Every instinct in her body wanted to immediately kneel down and feed Runark and Misha some healing potions and at least stabilize their conditions.

Yet, her opponent had no intention of allowing that. The faceless human shot towards her with determination, charging towards her at blinding speeds. Each movement the creature made caused massive air currents to emerge from the dense atmosphere. Despite the tremendous amount of air resistance, it arrived before her in the blink of an eye.

Its hand thrust forth with a blindingly fast charge, threatening to impale her in the blink of an eye as it had her friends.

WHOOSH

The attack struck an empty image.

A feint.

BANG BANG BANG!

Ria blasted the creature’s body with an onslaught of short and swift blows, each her attacks targeting vital points that she had identified across the creature’s body. The impacts caused the sturdy body of the faceless human to stir ever so slightly.

But they were merely a set-up to calculate the resonant frequency of its body. She quickly prepared Death’s Sympathy, aiming it at the creature’s skull.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH

The faceless human, to her surprise, stepped back, bobbing and weaving to avoid the blows to its skull, as if realizing the danger that those attacks posed to it. Ria gritted her teeth as she pushed her Realms of power to the limit.

RUMBLE

The world shook as her Martial Heart and her Martial Mind flared with power. Her celestial Martial Embodiment embodied the entire universe, painting itself across the canvas of heaven and earth.

Her mind surged with thoughts that cut through the emotion. She understood, painfully, that now was not the time to drown in her wrath and hatred. She had friends that needed saving. If she didn’t dedicate everything she had to this goal, then they too would die.

’I need to defeat it. Quickly. How do I do that?’

Defeating a being of this kind of power was something that couldn’t be done in a short amount of time. Ria had absolutely no idea what it was or how it was so human-like in an alien world with very different conditions, but she didn’t care.

Her highest priority was defeating the creature in a short amount of time so that she could save both Runark and Misha. Ordinarily, she wouldn’t be able to take on a creature this powerful in such a short amount of time. Even if she could barely eke out a win, it would undoubtedly require a long, grueling battle with a pyrrhic victory at the end.

’Runark and Misha will be long dead by then. I can’t afford that.’

She needed something that would bring her to victory sooner. Her Martial Mind surged as she activated her system of thought.

”Omnivoyance.”

It was a powerful system of thought that made use of advanced mathematics to scry causality itself, forming a causality model on her opponent. It allowed her to have a robust understanding of the causality of her opponent’s power.

What the time lag was between the creature’s inception of intent, which she could sense with her powerful mind sense and her bodily sensory organs, and the inception of its movements. What brain activity was activated by what sensory data and what actions were born from said brain activity.

At the same time, she acquired a thorough gauge of the creature’s physical prowess through a series of exchanges.

BANG BANG BANG!!!

Her fists shot forth, striking the faceless human’s torso, which it didn’t bother protecting or avoiding for some reason. Even though she had forsaken power for speed with each of those quick jabs, the fact that it didn’t seem to take any active defensive measures was odd.

’It doesn’t have internal organs,’ she realized with grim severity as her powerful senses breached its body, permeating into its depths. ’This thing is just a fighting machine.’

BOOOOOOOOM!!!

She gritted her teeth, barely defending against the extraordinary swing from the faceless human that threatened to crack her body. Her defense was impeccable. She had foreseen the impending attack, preparing her body to disperse the impact far and wide across all the cells in her body to minimize the damage done.

Only to find herself face to face with the creature’s foot that swung towards her with blinding speed and immense momentum.

WHOOSH

The slightest of shifts across her body allowed her to evade a blow powerful enough to crush her skull. But the faceless human relentlessly followed up, unleashing an onslaught of attacks, each meant to be a finishing blow.

And Ria withstood or evaded each of them even as her mind rushed with thought, processing the information that she had gathered.

’Its body is too robust and powerful; killing it will not be easy. Death’s Sympathy is my only hope for a quick victory.’

Merely seconds had passed in real time since her return to the battlefield. One of the benefits of being a Martial Master was that even minutes was an immense amount of time. She needed to be quick, but she needed to avoid panicking.

She had already detected that the creature didn’t have vital organs, so trying to inflict a critical injury through ordinary means was likely a vain venture. In that case, she would have to rely on the assassination technique that her father had developed decades ago.

That was her only hope to saving her remaining friends.