The Martial Unity

Rui, on the other hand, pulled his right arm back as he twisted his core, generating more power. He was practically telegraphing his attacks with such loud and predictable wind-up movements.

When the two of them reached other, his palm shot forward, aiming for her face. Her arms shot upward looking to intercept his attack and get a firm of his arm.

Yet when she reached for it, her hands just passed through, dispelling the image of it in her head. Rui's hand, instead was still sitting back, not having moved forward.

('A feint!')

His Phantom Step technique had been quite successful. It was a technique that he had learned as an Apprentice, and while it had grown less potent when he mastered it in the Squire Realm due to the fact that Martial Squires had sharper senses, it was still quite a useful technique when used in the right circumstances.

Rui used it not to fool senses, but to fool expectations.

Her futile clasping attack had failed, leaving her momentarily open.

BAM!

His right leg crashed into her chest.

She had already braced for an impact, yet to her surprise there was none. Instead, she felt as though a powerful mysterious force spread across her entire body, universally propelling her backwards like gravity.

WHOOSH

She flew backward at tremendous speed, leaving behind a few shockwaves. Rui had used the Reverberating Catapult technique to fling her backward, a technique that he had come to hone in the Umiana Trench. It was useful in circumstances like this where he could open up distances between himself and his opponent.

SSSSSSKKKK!

She finally managed to come to a stop before she finally got up, facing Rui.

But it was too late.

A tremendously powerful impact struck her in her gut!

CRACK!

She grimaced as a powerful sound projectile crashed into her ribs. What shocked her was the sheer power of the attack!

It was something that far exceeded the limits of what a normal Martial Squires could possibly dish out.

She had been hit with tier-four Transverse Resonance. An attack that was four times as powerful as his otherwise strongest long-range technique. The power of the attack firmly reached the upper limits of what Martial Squires could generally achieve, it was approaching grade-ten-level power.

As much as she would have loved to take a moment to assess how many ribs she had broken from being ambushed by such a devastating attack, Rui ruthlessly spammed a barrage of long-range attacks.

She gritted her teeth as she bore the pain in her chest, doing her best to avoid the attacks, yet to her surprise, the difficulty had risen!

Not just because she was injured, but it was as though the projectiles were magically finding a way to hit her!

The ODA System became increasingly viable the more Rui's predictive model on her grew. The more data and information he had, the more he could use it to figure out exactly what the trajectory of the sonic projectiles ought to be.

In short, she could not avoid him.

Rui calmly, and ruthlessly buried her under an avalanche of sonic projectiles each hard to evade than the last.

Not every battle was climactic in its ending.

BAM!

"Rgh!" She grimaced as she fell flat on the ground. "Cough!"

She vomited blood, as she struggled to push herself up. But Rui targeting her broken ribs had caused a lot of internal bleeding that, while her healing factor did its best to fix, was continuously being inflicted far faster than she could recuperate with such injuries.

STEP

She glanced up with a weak eye as Rui arrived before her with a detached expression, before kneeling and taking out healing potions. He quickly fed her one, waiting for the potion to course through her body and do its job.

"Cough…" She got up weakly after half a minute, grimacing. "You… are strong."

It would be disgraceful for her to maintain airs after Rui soundly defeated her but also nursed her back to health with a potion. Furthermore, she knew how strong he was without a doubt. Their battle had been decisive, it wasn't close. She had never been in a position where she felt like she had an advantage. From the very start, he quickly took control and created an opening that he then systematically exploited to suppress her with unquestionable dominance.

The outcome was crystal clear.

He won, and she could even tell that he had won while holding back considerably. Not once any time had she gotten the sense that he was going all out with his power, or straining himself in any way whatsoever.

The most embarrassing part was that she still wasn't sure what his Martial Path was. That was humiliating because it was easy to tell what a person's Martial Path was when fighting them because they would be forced to use that Martial Path to win.

However, the fact that she couldn't even hazard a guess as to what his Martial Path was meant that Rui had likely used a very small portion of his Martial Art and had only displayed a small amount of all the capabilities that he had.

The fact that he was still able to dominate her so definitively despite not having gone anywhere near all out was absurd to her. It defied every expectation that she had held towards him.

"Just… who are you?" She couldn't help but murmur.

"Good fight," Rui replied, stretching out a hand as he ignored her question, pulling her up.

"It seems I underestimated you severely," She replied as she regained her composure. "To think that you excelled at Martial Art more than you excelled at being a scholar, that was outside of my expectation. You are truly strong."

She was not someone who was distastefully egotistical. Even if she was the head of defense and someone that possessed a degree of authority over Rui in so far as how he was deployed, she still had to show him the respect he deserved by virtue of being stronger.