The Martial Unity

The battle escalated in intensity. The spectators cheered every time Squire Ran bashed Rui with her powerful kicks!

"Go get him!"

"Tsk, all that hype and this is all he's amounting to."

"Man, I wish she would suffocate me in between her legs."

Yet, while the normies mindlessly consumed the entertainment, the Martial Artists frowned.

Something was off.

She was winning, but the air of the battle was strange.

It was the opposite.

Her gritted teeth. Her desperate aggression. Her increasingly fatigued appearance.

Rui, on the other hand, simply stared at her. His body was wounded, he had yet to land even a single attack on her.

Yet when people saw the look in his eyes... They couldn't bring themselves to bet against him.

A variety of different opinions, judgments, and evaluations flew through their minds, yet none of them mattered.

Certainly not Rui.

His mind had already kicked in top gear.

The margins of error caused to my sense of balance by the poison is no longer skyrocketing like it was when the poison was kicking in. He sharply noted. Diminishing returns. She cannot endlessly poison me, it has already reached a saturation limit. Especially given that she does not specialize in poison.

That meant that as bad as things were, they were unlikely to get worse. This was a good thing, this meant that he did not have to worry about a developed solution being too outdated due to the problem escalating.

Focus. Rui's eyes narrowed as he finished evaluating the problem.

A sense of balance was the ability to measure the torque that a body was experiencing. It was simply a measure of the net forces acting on a body. If a person held weights in only one hand, there would be an imbalance of force on that side, and the sense of balance would allow one to perfectly compensate by shifting one's body weight to the other side to ensure that the person did not fall over.

It was this sense that was being disrupted by the poison.

Objective; creating a system of thought to help me adapt to inhibited balance. His eyes narrowed. I have already verified that the inhibition is static. The next step is to measure the degree of inhibition of balance. Given that I know that the disorientation in my balance is a chemically induced illusion inside my brain, I can measure the degree to which it occurs by comparing how disoriented my sense of balance is even when I perform movements I know are balanced based on muscle memory.

There were some movements that Rui had executed so many times that he mastered them in and out. He knew for a fact that these movements and maneuvers were perfectly balanced because he had performed them for nearly ten years.

These movements alone weren't enough to overcome the deviation in his balance, but they allowed him to measure how much his sense of balance was being deviated when he performed those movements. It was no different from weighing objects against known weights to find out how heavy they were. These short muscle memory movements with perfected balance served as a measure of how messed up his sense of balance was.

Once he knew to what degree his sense of balance was being deviated, he could essentially calculate a correct sense of balance by looking at his poisoned sense of balance.

It was simple subtraction. Subtract the deviation from the deviated sense of balance, and one was left with a pure sense of balance.

If it turned out that his balance was being disrupted by fifty percent, then he could account for that calculate what his normal sense of balance would be, and make sure that his movements matched up to the calculated correct sense of balance.

The issue is the means and the reliability of measuring how much my sense of balance is messed up. Rui narrowed his eyes. I'll essentially have to rely on my own senses since I do not have an objective measuring tool.

The process had already begun. Even as he defended from her attacks, he threw in maneuvers, combos, and other short-burst movements that he knew he could trust and simply observed the chaos that his sense of balance was.

He swiftly measured and registered the deviated readings, before comparing them to his perfected-balance movements.

It's being deviated by a factor of four-point-eight. His eyes widened.

Such high deviations required massive overcorrections. Furthermore, different movements resulted in different deviations in his sense of balance, complicating the matter even more

He would need to process an immense amount of information in a short amount of time. A hopeless task for any sane Martial Artist.

Yet Rui didn't even hesitate.

He felt a sense of excitement. An enormously challenging and interesting mental exercise with exciting constraints was something he enjoyed more than most.

Even as his mind raced, a grin broke out beneath his mask.

Yet, Squire Ran did not intend to make it easy for him by any means.

BAM BAM BAM!!!

She pummeled him with powerful attacks, launching him across the colosseum. Yet she didn't intend to let up in the slightest. She immediately shot after him, launching an incredibly powerful kick to his head.

If she could land even a clean kick to his head, it would be game over.

WHOOSH!

Her eyes widened.

Something had changed.

Rui successfully evaded an attack cleanly for the first time.

"Not too bad eh?" Rui laughed as he glanced at Squire Ran.

Squire Ran's expression grew more severe.

She knew more than anybody else the significance of what had just unfolded.

BOOM!!

Her body coiled as she gritted her teeth, propelling her leg forward with extraordinary momentum, crashing into Rui. She didn't stop bombarding him with attacks.

She couldn't.

Not when Rui began successfully dodging even more attacks. A trump card that had gotten her to the top eight of the Martial Contest was more hollow than she had ever imagined.

A trump card she had dedicated everything to.

Yet... it was more hollow than she had ever realized.

Fear and frustration gripped her heart like a vice as Rui returned to form, curbing her ruthlessly.

WHOOSH!

Rui cleanly crouched, launching a swift and crisp low-sweeping kick.

How can he overcome it so easily?!

With each passing second, his maneuvers became sharper.

With each passing minute, his blocks became cleaner.

With each passing attack, he grew more comfortable.

What took her years to accomplish, he seemed to accomplish in a matter of minutes. An attack that confounded every single Martial Squire that it had ever worked on, was slowly being consumed by him.

She knew how difficult it was to overcome it. She herself had subjected her to it for years before she regained complete combat proficiency.

It was more than just a technique.

It was the core of her Martial Art and Path.

She gritted her teeth as an overwhelming sense of despair emerged deep within her.

"HAH!!" She roared as she launched a furious attack on his temple. A heavy attack empowered with torque generated with every cell of her body.

BOOM!

A resounding impact reverberated across the colosseum.

Rui's fist buried itself in her gut as a powerful Flowing Canon crashed into her.

His first attack of the fight.

She gazed into his eyes even as she coughed blood. Cruel eyes that saw right through her. Eyes that saw right through her as though there was nothing to be seen. Her Martial Art, her Martial Path may as well have been nothing.

His attack may have struck her solar plexus, yet it hurt something much deeper.

CRACK!