The Martial Unity

Two months passed.

Rui continued his mission grind. Day-after-day, hour-by-hour. He relentlessly exposed himself to a wide variety of missions of different kinds. Occasionally he would form a party with his friends and complete some grade-nine missions, but otherwise he was mostly operating solo.

In these two months, he had gotten an immense amount of experience with mission completion. He had also consecutively gathered six thousand Martial credits in merely the span of two months. This was nearly thrice his previous rate, on average.

Part of the reason for this was because personal commissions were generally much more lucrative, and he had received a lot of them across the span of two months. Most of them were miscellaneous missions, but he did get enough missions of defense, offense and hunting classes to keep him going.

He had also continued with the sparring partner missions as well as his representative fighter commission with Nartha Freier.

Both of those missions had yielded him outcomes that he was quite pleased with. All of those missions were remarkably well-suited to his Flowing Void Style.

He had confirmed that the Martial Apprentices he had sparred with had grown much better in the span of two months. All of them had become remarkably more solid. Their Martial Art itself had not grown stronger, nor had the quantity or quality of techniques increased thanks to him specifically. However, the quality of the application of their techniques had indeed risen significantly.

They began applying their techniques more efficiently, and more mindful of their shortcomings and weaknesses. No longer could Rui effortlessly exploit and abuse their weaknesses the way he did on day-one. Of course, he still defeated them even without Blink and the Stinger, however by the end of sixty days he needed to fight quite seriously, barring his trump cards.

That was not an insignificant boost, especially not in the span of two months. Usually, this kind of boost required years of experience. Yet, Rui had confirmed that the Flowing Void Style was able to shorten the process significantly. He highly doubted any other form of training could possibly result in such a drastic increase in efficiency and effectiveness. Perhaps the Martial Union could rival him if it invested a lot in esoteric technology, however, the difficult and the cost of such an endeavor would surely be astronomical. He, in turn, could do it at no special cost.

Of course, he didn't necessarily intend to turn this into his main career, of course not. However, it was nice to see the fruits of a two lifetimes of labour result in such an unexpected boon. Perhaps he could reduce the frequency at which he accepted such commissions but still keep doing it once in a while for all the validation it gave him.

There were no worries that he wouldn't be able to either. The effectivity of his sparring training was not gone unnoticed. He had received many sparring partner commissions in the span of two months, not that he had accepted any, of course. Three was already pushing it. But having received all these commissions allowed him the luxury of variety of choice.

His representative fighter commission had gone even better. Two months later, he was still the defending champion. He had been knocked off his throne a few times by newer exceptionally powerful Martial Apprentices. There were Martial Apprentices far older than he was, with much greater experience and accumulation.

However, he always managed to knock them back and take back his spot eventually. The Flowing Void Style and the VOID algorithm was more effective the more data they had. However, it still usually took him a few tries and even then, it was quite close. Furthermore, it didn't mean they could never defeat him again, there were several who were strong enough to win even after his adaptive evolution. These were Martial Artists with greater physicality, greater number of techniques and experience.

Furthermore, Rui had truly begun to feel his limitations in the past two months of fighting in the Martial games. Blink, Stinger and Phantom Step were now all well-known by all of those who came to fight him. It became far harder to execute these techniques in a fight. He needed to go through herculean effort in order to apply them the way he wanted, and it only kept getting harder and harder.

Not only had it grown harder, it had actually grown dangerous. People had learnt to be extremely careful, but also had learnt to set traps and be prepared for both of those techniques. Although most Martial Artists weren't as intelligent, strategic and tactical as he was, they were not morons either. Once Blink had become largely common knowledge, setting traps with some basic prediction and some powerful attacks while they purposely blinked had started to become more and more common.

This made Blink increasingly risky. Stinger was still a threat, but he still needed to be careful. He had broken his knee once because someone had predicted and prepared to intercept the Stinger. He had grown extremely wary ever since.

He had accumulated more than enough Credits for a set of new techniques, he just kept going to gain more experience. Experience was just as important as technique.

However, he had grown more than satisfied with the two months of mission grinding he had engaged in, he had broadened his worldview and enriched his understanding of the Martial world. Now it was time to take a step forward, down his Martial Path. He felt his Martial Art would stagnate if he postponed this any longer.

He intended to immerse himself in a long training period where he comprehensively took one step towards becoming a Squire candidate. He hadn't forgotten the new goals he had set for himself to immediately focus on; becoming a squire candidate and, eventually, a Martial Squire.

('It's time.') He mused as he paused before the large doors to the Apprentice library. He breathed deeply as he pushed forward.