The Martial Unity

When Rui returned, he had only a single intention in his mind.

”I’m going to seclude myself to train in the manifold now,” Rui told his sister in a serious tone of voice. ”I shall entrust the matter of the war to Central Human Command. They should be able to handle it from this point forth. Just tell them to stick to the big picture that we planned out and let them handle the minor stuff.”

Ru simply heaved an exasperated sigh at those words. She didn’t like her brother’s decision to go into isolation at such a crucial period of time. A secondary conflict between the arakai salvager teams and human armadas had already commenced, trying to prevent the arakai from capturing as many resources as they possibly could. Soon, the main war with the Web of War would commence once the interdiction force was completely repaired and restored.

However, she had no power to stop him. She would simply have to make sure that Central Human Command would do its job properly.

Rui could sense her woes, but he didn’t care enough. She was competent enough to fill in the gaps wherever necessary. And Claris was competent enough to take his place for most matters and to act as he would have.

More importantly, he wanted to continue with his investigations into higher dimensions.

Firstly, of course, he released his Martialverse allowed himself to disappear, and woke up in a new body.

Then, he immediately secluded himself in the manifold, continuing his hyperdimensional explorations.

His goal, for the time being, was not to thoroughly explore this phenomenon to its depths. But rather to explore some of its properties and develop some techniques based on it. Not the crude techniques he used against the Divine Mother that consumed a lot of his metaphysical stamina, but more refined techniques that he could use across the battlefield.

His hyperdimensional mode needed to be worth the sacrifices it made to his other techniques. Otherwise, it would not be very combat-applicable. That was a tall order, obviously.

The rest of his Martial Art, which he had developed over more than a century, was extremely rich and vast, not to mention deep. It wasn’t something that could be easily replaced by a newcomer field of Martial Art.

However, Rui suspected that higher dimensions could very well be the most powerful field if successfully harnessed in Martial Art. After all, conventional technology was no match for hyperdimensional technology, as proven by the First Battle of Arima III.

His Martial Art used many of the same high principles that conventional technology used. Thus, he speculated that a fully mastered hyperdimensional Martial Art would be a force to reckon with.

”Good luck opening the higher dimensions without a Verse, though,” he scoffed. ”I still have no idea how you open the Calabi-Yau manifold using natural phenomena.”

He used the Water of his Martialverse to ’wash away’ the quantum zero-point fluxes that kept the quantum manifolds closed. But that was obviously a solution that only he could replicate.

He shook his head, ignoring these tangential thoughts, continuing about his task of understanding and weaponizing higher dimensions. Weaponizing higher dimensions was difficult, of course. The fact that it required the Martialverse as a fundamental condition meant that he had to rest more than he would require for researching other new fields of combat.

And thus, he immersed himself day in and day out, transferring in and out of thousands of bodies.

Fourteen months passed by in the blink of an eye.

Only a month passed by in the real world.

A month had been enough for the Web of War to restore their interdiction force.

They had commenced their invasive onslaught, picking up right where they had left off. Divine Mother —o-o—o commanded her Web of War to secure Arima III as Bridgehead Alpha, a consolidated and fortified stronghold entirely under the control of the arakai to serve as a launchpad for their invasion into the rest of human civilization.

This involved a handful of operations primarily.

First, of course, was stellar consolidation. Stars were the easiest source of large volumes of energy. While the Web of War did come equipped with portable limitless energy generators like black hole generators and dark energy generators, these energy generation systems were not nearly as scalable and expandable.

It was why advanced civilizations still relied on stars despite possessing limitless energy generation systems like black holes and dark energy. Dyson spheres were simple, had low sophistication, easy to scale up at a very rapid pace, while black hole generators had a very high initial energy price to generate the singularities in the first place, and dark energy generators required intricate quantum architecture, which was not very mass-producible.

That was why, as much as they disdained the two red dwarf stars for their low energy output, they needed the two stars to fuel the vast amounts of energy that opening a gate would require. The good news for the arakai was that the Dyson swarms that the humans had constructed were good enough.

Of course, human civilization had no intention of allowing them to consolidate the stellar energy of Arima III. Central Human Command deployed seven armadas to intercept the fleets that tried to conquer humanity’s stars, creating a new front of war within Arima III.

Another front of war opened up at the fleet of ships that began erecting a portable world bridge gate that the Web of War carried with it, meant to open a stable world bridge between Arima III and Arakai Web Civilization some four hundred light-years away.

A third front of war opened up at the guard force protecting the interdiction force. The arakai had no intention of repeating old mistakes. This time, the interdiction force was protected by a literal shell of warships and battle cruisers meant to protect the force from any damage while they interdicted the fabric of space and time.

This resulted in some self-sabotage, as the interdiction force didn’t distinguish between foe and friend, but protecting the force was more important than getting out of the way.

Thus, three fronts of war opened up in the blink of an eye the moment the arakai repaired their interdiction force.