The Martial Unity

It was a euphoric surge of control unlike anything she had ever felt in her entire life. It was like she could communicate with and speak to each individual cell in her body. As if each of them was their own living being with their own story to tell. In her case, the surge of information was even more overwhelming.

Her Martial Body was specialized for causality sensation. She could detect the unfolding of causality like a spectator watching dominoes falling one after another. Ordinarily, like with the other senses, her mind filtered out what it couldn’t afford to process, but with the state of mind she was in, she didn’t need to dispose of anything. Her mind was more than powerful enough to comprehend all of it.

So much so that she could sense the causality of the molecules and cells in her body moving towards death. Like she was watching a complex series of collapsing dominoes all moving in the same direction.

Before, it was beyond her power to stop.

Now, she merely commanded her cells to stop the dominoes.

She halted death itself.

The cells in her body shook as the Martial Soul gave her an unprecedented level of communication and control over them. She didn’t need to have every cell in her body connected to a neuron the way the dwarves did; she could communicate with them through all kinds of non-nervous manners. Chemical signals in particular allowed her to have almost absolute control over the cells that comprised her very being.

Her eyes flared with determination.

’I am not dying today.’

All she needed to do was use her Martial Soul to halt the plummet towards death. With a single command, she stopped the blood loss, even undoing some of it by commanding her blood to return. Her cells were more intelligent than those of the other cells in her body, seemingly minimizing the need for extensive manual control.

But blood loss was not the only issue she was dealing with.

Immediately after, she deployed her understanding of biochemistry to prevent cell death. Cells needed oxygen, chemical energy, and other nutrients to survive.

She could easily provide those remotely with the cells that did remain in her body. She used her power to provide the three most crucial substances for cellular life. Oxygen was undoubtedly the hardest, but she had the exo-Martial suit that still fed her the oxygen that she needed.

The suits were equipped with the provisions to keep the breathing systems functional even if there was great damage to the exo-Martial suit. Otherwise, a single minor breach would be enough to suffocate a Martial Artist. She sucked in the oxygenated atmosphere from her suit, allowing it to swiftly flow through her entire body.

It allowed the surviving cells to remain stable.

Now, she merely needed to work on healing her body and preventing any more from being lost. She needed to heal the flesh that had been impaled, her heart and one half of her lungs that had been damaged, and the blood vessels and nerves.

The heart was the most important, of course. With the Martial Soul, she had managed to gain direct control of her circulatory system and, in turn, used her nervous system to have her circulatory system funnel blood across her entire body without the heart. The circulatory system did have its own means of having blood flow, but it was highly strenuous without the heart.

For now, it kept her cells alive and, more than anything, it ensured that oxygen was delivered to the brain through her blood even though her heart was destroyed by the attack from the faceless human.

Maintaining her consciousness was her highest priority. If she let her consciousness slip, then that would be the end of that.

’I must get my heart back on track and fix the hole in my left lung.’

She immediately rushed to work, gathering specialized healing stem cells in her body with her Martial Soul. The local stem cells around the wound could reproduce more cells at a much higher rater than one could have ever imagined.

It allowed her heart to heal in the blink of an eye, followed by her lungs, followed by blood vessels and nerves, and followed by the flesh and the skin that emerged on both sides of her body from the impaling attack of the faceless human.

What would have required a healing potion and even a minute in the past was quickly solved in the matter of seconds.

It was an almost magical sight.

Merely seconds after breaking through to the Sage Realm, she had managed to restore her body to its peak.

STEP

In the distance, the retreating faceless human paused. It turned back towards Ria slowly. If it did have an expression, it undoubtedly would have been an expression of grave severity. For it, too, sensed the surge of power within a target that it was supposed to have eliminated.

Yet, she was alive.

It could sense it.

Then it would have to finish the job.

”Don’t move.”

If the faceless human was capable of shock, then it was undoubtedly frozen in it. Ria’s voice reached its ears in a manner that defied its understanding of causality. Her tone was perilously calm and composed. The kind that simply was incongruent with the emotional turmoil that she should have been drowning in.

Yet, her tone was almost tranquil.

WHOOSH

The faceless human did a double-take as it detected Ria’s presence arriving behind it. It immediately turned around with a lunging strike, hoping to take her down in the blink of an eye.

And yet—

SPLAT

The arm that it swung at her was no longer attached to its body.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!!!

Blood gushed from its arm as it sustained the first real ounce of damage from Ria in the entire battle.

”So…” Ria murmured with a chilling tone of voice as her amber eyes bore deep into the faceless human’s.

”You bleed red, after all.”