The Martial Unity

"Good fight man." Kane complimented. "That was clean."

"Thanks." Rui replied.

"Good application of Phantom Step." Kane noted. "I never thought about using it like that."

"It was the fastest way to end the fight." Rui lied. If he truly wanted, he could have ended the fight in ten seconds with either Blink or Stinger. But Gheelain was too weak to force him to use it. He didn't mind taking longer to win, what was three minutes versus ten seconds? It didn't make any significant difference. In exchange, his trump cards weren't revealed.

As time passed, they all got assigned their third fight one-by-one. Dalen and Milliana had fought only once, and they went onto fight two more times.

At the end of the day, out of all of them, only Rui, Kane and Fae got perfect scores with three clean victories. Milliana won only once out of three times and Dalen won two out of three in total.

The scoreboard was revealed by the end of the day, with all seventy-nine contestants' scores ranked.

Out of seventy-nine contestants, only nineteen contestants had three wins and zero losses, and about as many had three losses and zero wins.

The former nineteen roughly constituted the top twenty-five percent of the Martial Apprentices of the Academy as far as combat prowess went, of course there were some discrepancies where strong Martial Apprentices had run into just a notch stronger Martial Apprentices in the very first round or extremely incompatible Martial Apprentices against whom they had a disadvantage against.

Most of the Martial Apprentices fell in the middle with both wins and losses.

Rui glanced at the scoreboard and at the Martial Apprentices with three wins and zero losses. He was quite sure that the victor of the preliminary contest would go on to be elected. Whoever the victor was, this person could not afford to lose a single battle.

As the days passed on, each Martial Apprentice fought roughly three battles a day. The number of matches per day would reduce until it hit one match a day by roughly around the end of month, by when most matches will have been over.

As the days passed, Rui noticed a peculiar trend. Despite many days passing, he hadn't faced any of the top-twenty contenders asides from Gale. In fact, neither did Fae or Kane. They consistently faced the proportion of martial Apprentices that had much more losses than wins. Rui hadn't run into Nel, Fae and Kane yet.

('Could it be... they're trying to maximize suspense and energy of the event by ensuring the most likely candidates don't battle it out from the get-go?') Rui wondered.

The battle between the most likely candidates would likely decide which one of them would become the representative of the Hajin branch. This was true regardless of whether the Martial Artists fought in the beginning of the preliminary contest or the end. Thus, postponing those battle to the very end would undoubtedly create a much more tense and suspenseful preliminary contest.

This wouldn't affect the end outcome either. At the end of the day, regardless of the order, all martial Apprentices would fight against all other Martial Apprentices. It did not matter who fought who when, at the end of the month, the one with the highest score would be selected as the representative of their Academy

He almost wanted to laugh. Headmaster Aronian sure knew how to keep himself entertained. How else was the old man going to stave away his boredom? He was a Martial Master who had experienced things that none of the Apprentices could even begin to imagine!

Rui would simply have to wait for his time to come. In any case, this was good news for him. The more time he had, the more data he would be able to gather. And the better he'll be able to create counter adapted styles.

He found Fae to be the least difficult. Not because she was the weakest, it was just that she was a much more conventional Martial Artist than Kane and Nel were. Her strength came from having an immense number of potent techniques that she could apply extremely well. She had more defined and conventional weaknesses and strengths. She was generally average in all regards, but her offense was astronomical. Even the weakest of her attacks were stronger than Rui's strongest attacks, barring Stinger, and the sheer amount of force she was able to output was the single greatest that Rui had ever seen.

Nel on the other hand was this powerful because of his absurd physical ability. He had always believed that humans were not capable of superhuman feats without Martial Art, but Nel had shown him how wrong he was. He still didn't understand how he was as strong as he was. Was it just a mutation? Was he just one of the handful of humans who were born with broken limits?

He didn't know. And it didn't matter. His physical prowess was off the charts and Rui needed to contend with that with techniques alone. Thankfully, the lack of techniques meant that the VOID algorithm was actually quite compatible with him, since his fighting style was actually the closest to what humans on Earth would do.

He didn't have maneuvering techniques, he just ran.

He didn't have defensive techniques, he just blocked.

He didn't have offensive techniques, he just swung.

Rui might actually be the most compatible person against him in the entire Academy. The problem was Nel was stronger than him in every regard aside from stealth and perhaps sensory. Being decisively superior to Rui in all major aspects of combat was a huge advantage. Whether or not Rui could compensate and cope with that remains to be seen.

As for Kane...

Kane was actually the most confounding, because he was the most deviant of them all. Rui just wasn't sure how to even begin going about beating him with such a perverse and overpowered ability. Furthermore, as powerful as Void Step was, Kane had also mastered another Grade ten Apprentice-level technique; the Godspeed technique. This technique when executed successfully had knocked out Fae instantly and forced Squire Kyrie to use a Squire-level technique to beat it.

He was an absolute menace.

All three of them were.

Yet, despite this, Rui still found himself grinning uncontrollably when he thought about fighting them.