The Martial Unity

Where she expected the vulnerable tissue of his abdomen, her fist found itself slamming into the tough meat of her father’s arm. She wasn’t too surprised that her attack failed; her father was the pioneer of deep-prediction systems of thought. It would be far too easy if something of that caliber managed to catch him off-guard.

But she was just getting started.

Her fists flew forth as she continued gathering more and more data. With her father, there was no point in using information of old from previous sparring sessions because it was useless. He constantly changed, or at least none of her old causality models were ever useful.

It was like his muscle memory was water too, unable to ever be pinned down. Or at the least, she wasn’t able to force him to bring out his true fighting patterns.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG!

Her attacks grew sharper, leaning more and more into the future. And yet, her father never once budged, defending against each attack perfectly. She couldn’t even use her SOUL System against him, since she couldn’t sense his mind.

He didn’t attack her.

He didn’t need to.

CRACK!

”Ngh…” she gritted her teeth as she felt her fist snap, slamming into her father’s seasoned elbow.

He took his first step forward, balling his palm into a fist.

She could barely react to the attack that followed.

BANG!!!

”Rgh!” she barely managed to block the heavy blow, as it lifted her off her feet, launching her away.

Yet, before she could even land, her father had already blitzed to the destination that his own attack had flung her to.

BOOM!!!

She balled up defensively, feeling several bones in her body crack upon impact. Her Martial Body was specialized for sensory prowess, which was why she could feel it.

He was on a whole other level with just his raw physical prowess.

She could also feel that his movements weren’t calculated.

He wasn’t even using his systems of thought.

This was just his Martial Body and standard Martial Art foundation. And despite that, she found it impossible to even visualize victory against just the bare minimum her father had to offer.

’What absurd power.’ Her amber eyes sharpened. ’I guess he’s telling me to stop holding back.’

BADUMP!

Her Martial Heart surged as bright red streaks ran across her entire body from head to toe. She felt a tremendous rush of power, allowing her to reorient herself and charge towards her father midair with a violent charge.

WHOOSH!!!

The air blazed with the sheer friction between herself and the atmosphere. In the blink of an eye, she managed to reach her father, unleashing a tremendously powerful attack against him.

BOOOM!!!

The sheer force with which her fist slammed into his body was enough to level an entire mountain. The compression wave that emerged from the attack, rippling through the air, was so intense that it created an optical illusion effect with light, resembling a gravitational wave.

And yet, despite that, her father’s defense never crumbled. Not only did it not crumble, but she could feel her power being sapped upon contact. The devastating impact that should have at least inflicted some blunt force trauma suddenly became jelly.

Her father had smoothly absorbed it, returning it to her and more.

BOOOM!!!

She gritted her teeth, feeling the flow of power coursing through her body. The countless channels it could pass through would inflict great damage on her body. She threaded the correct path for the power to follow such that she could wield it herself, as her father did.

A smile of approval and challenge emerged on her father’s face. Her amber eyes sharpened as she heightened her senses. Every cell in her body honed in, assessing the causality of the environment around her.

In terms of raw energy output, she could feel that she greatly exceeded her father. Her mind surged as she sensed the dominoes of power all around her, waiting for her to push.

And she did.

Or at least, she tried.

BOOOM!!!

Her fist slammed into his guard even as he spun, allowing her attack to slip off.

An attack that should have inflicted great damage on her father barely nicked him, instead exposing her flank to a well-timed blow to the ribs.

BANG!!!

”Rgh…!” she grimaced.

The exchange had unfolded in a way that completely defied her understanding of causality.

The dominoes she thought she saw were drowned.

They were drowned by water.

’He’s adaptively evolving to deprive me of a path to victory.’

Domino chains were fragile. A single piece out of place could disrupt the entire line, preventing the flow of causality from unfolding.

Her father exploited that.

A single step off from where he would need to be.

A shift.

A sway.

Moving a beat earlier or later.

All of these disrupted the dominoes of causality that her daughter perceived, preventing her from exploiting.

Every time she reached to tip over a domino, a flush of water slammed into the entire chain, disrupting it entirely. Every time she thought she saw a path forward through a maze of possibilities, a flood of water would emerge from the opposite direction, blocking her entire path.

Each attack she launched failed for inexplicable reasons, and those failures created openings that her father ruthlessly exploited, targeting her vitals.

She gritted her teeth, activating her Martial Mind and Soul at once.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The world shook violently as her mind painted over it, using it as a canvas.

Rui’s eyes lit up as he beheld the universe itself.

He beheld the Universalis Mensis.

He could see more than most.

He could even see what she saw: the countless infected worlds that were spread across the entirety of the cosmos. He admired the beauty of the countless stars and galaxies amid a muck of dark matter, driven away by dark energy.

He could appreciate her perspective of the universe. She saw matter and energy as billiard balls; the four fundamental forces of the universe were the drivers that struck them. It was a very different perspective from his, where everything was Water.