The Martial Unity

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Rui evaded three dozen dark ravens in the sky.

"CAWK CAWK CAWK!"

The angry birds hawked at him as they surged forward with their talons poised to tear him to shreds.

Yet, much to their surprise, the talons never reached him.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

They passed right through him.

They passed through him as though he was an empty image.

Rui stood in place with closed eyes as he relaxed his body. Each time a raven approached him, he would evade their strike at the final moment but would feint toward his original position, making it seem like he was there the entire time. Simultaneously, he would misdirect them to said feint, causing them to completely ignore his dodge and believe that he had been standing there the entire time.

The creatures never stood a chance at seeing through his illusion.

Yet, he wasn't doing this just to flex.

It was a good exercise because it required an extremely high level of precision and accuracy when it came to his timing and placement.

His SOUL and predictive models needed to be immaculate.

His feinting and misdirection needed to coincide within microseconds of each other.

It was a great workout to train his finesse.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Once he got the hang of it, though, he was on a roll; nothing could stop him.

"Show-off," Kane muttered as he faced two dark ravens by himself. "Ok now, think…should I enter stealth mode or agility mode?"

He tried out a sequence of thoughts, which was his first prototypical system of thought.

'These guys are kinda fast.' He squinted, trying to think. 'They certainly don't look heavy or anything like that. Also, their wings are freaking huge and they can do some incredible maneuvering with them.'

WHOOSH WHOOSH!

He evaded them. 'That means they can faster and quicker opponents, but can they handle stealthy opponents that well?'

That was the extent of his system of thought thus far.

'Hmmm…' He stared at their eyes. 'They have eyes.'

A keen observation.

'If they have eyes, they probably rely on it. Which means misdirection should be pretty decently effective against them.' Kane realized. 'In comparison, their fast maneuvering should be less dominated by Fulminata Godspeed. Alright, Void Step it is.'

And there, his line of thought was completed.

Unbeknownst to him, Rui paid more attention to his battle than his own. A fleeting smile cracked at the edge of his mouth.

"Good."

He knew that Kane was taking his very first baby steps when it came to creating a Martial Mind. Although it was an extremely elementary and minimally effective single-layer decision process, it was still a first step in the right direction. Rui had faith that someday he would eventually develop a mature system of thought.

"Not anytime soon, unfortunately," he huffed impassively. Kane still had an extremely long way to go before he fleshed out his system of thought to become larger and more powerful in its impact in combat.

The good news was that the road to the Master Realm was shorter for him than it was for Rui.

Martial Minds were proportional to minds.

That meant that Martial Seniors with more powerful minds had to create much larger systems of thought. Their path to the Master Realm was more difficult than those of the rest.

That was why Rui, despite creating tremendously powerful systems of thought such as the VOID algorithm, Angel of Laplace, SOUL System, and the Tree of Life, had only just recently reached a stage where he could be certain of the saturation of his nascent Martial Mind.

That was how staggeringly powerful his mind was.

Kane, on the other hand, could make do with regular systems of thought, unlike Rui. However, in order to ensure that his individuality manifested, Rui never once tried nudging him or offering recommendations.

Unlike techniques, thought affinities were less clear. Rui could very easily contaminate his Martial Mind with thought that was not suited for Kane's Martial Art and Body.

It was different for the distilled voidlet techniques that the Martial Union had already begun to aggressively propagate. Those had been stripped of Rui's thought patterns and were truly able to be adapted by others to suit their own needs.

Ultimately, he decided to let Kane do his own thing. If he gained inspiration from Rui and followed suit, that would be one thing since that came from within, but Rui himself would not interject from the outside.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!

Rui's stoic gaze returned to the ravens that converged on him from all directions.

It appeared that they weren't as stupid as they looked. They sought to deprive him of any escape, threatening to shred him from all directions.

Alas, it was for naught.

RUMBLE

They froze as a horrifying tsunami of peril erupted from deep within Rui.

Within his eyes stirred an endless void.

A single remark escaped him.

"My data collection on your species is complete, so…"

His eyes darkened.

"Heavenly Convergence."

At that moment, heaven and earth converged on the hapless ravens.

BOOM!!!

They never stood a chance, dying on the spot.

Not because Rui's raw power was extraordinarily great, no.

It was because he applied it in the most antithetical manner possible to produce the most devastating effect.

The Tree of Life had long shown him that his Heavenly Convergence was actually the most suited domain out of all environments possible to taking the ravens down.

They never stood a chance at taking him down in the first place.

He glanced at Kane, who had promptly used Void Step to quickly cut down on the two ravens, bringing them death by a thousand cuts.

SPLAT SPLAT SPLAT!

"Huff…Huff…" He panted heavily, sheathing his blades.

STEP

"Well done, your nascent system of thought was not ineffective." His tone lightened up as a soft smile cracked at the very edge of his mouth.

"Hah," Kane snorted. "Not ineffective, that's rich."

"It's where everybody starts," Rui replied. "Including me."