The Martial Unity

However, while his Martial Mind prototype was more elementary compared to what Rui was accustomed to himself, it was not necessarily wrong.

Rui did indeed have a time limit.

He also could not neutralize Senior Zenshin's approach. Even if he could, he would certainly waste more energy trying since it took more energy to generate an attack of a certain power level compared to that of close-range attacks.

However, the most impressive part of the plan was not the plan, but the raw physicality that supported the plan.

THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!

Senior Zenshin dedicated more energy towards neutralizing Rui's enhanced raw power than he did towards progressing towards Rui. He prioritized his health over closing the distance. It was because he knew that he would gain his chance at closing the distance that he was willing to remain patient.

This was not pleasant to Rui.

'I'm blasting him with the power of Hypertrophic Surge, but the only thing I'm able to do is stop his approach. He's defending every single attack extremely well!' Rui gritted his teeth.

This was the first time that he had used Hypertrophic Surge and failed to hurt his opponent despite it. It was such an absurd notion that Rui had difficulty believing it for a second. In fact, he had hurt Senior Zenshin only a single time this entire fight, when he caught him off-guard with the transformation.

Senior Zenshin weathered every single incoming attack, dispelling it with his lethal offense. Every swing of his claws, tore apart Rui's offense like it was paper.

Even though his raw power was not extraordinarily above Rui's Hypertrophic Surge, his offense was disproportionately lethal. The sharpness of his claws allowing him to split any and everything within the Senior Realm.

Perhaps the only exceptions were hyper-defense specialists like Senior Gemu who was so durable that not even Rui had managed to actually cause damage.

Regardless, he could only work with what he had. THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!

The battle raged on. The two of them outputted tremendous amounts of power. Rui poured all of it into offense, while Senior Zenshin poured all of it into defense. The sheer amount of energy from their fight spread across the surrounding lands, inflicting much damage.

RUMBLE!

The very land beneath their feet shook violently under the onslaught of Rui's power. It was a terrifying and yet beautiful sight to behold. However, while the battle appeared to be even on the surface, they both knew that Rui was at a disadvantage. Such spontaneous power was rarely ever permanent. Just the fact that Rui activated later into the battle was more than enough evidence to suggest that it had its limits.

And Senior Zenshin was right.

The Metabody System was meant to be used after the pattern recognition system was complete, not before. It was the Hypnomatrix that was supposed to fulfill the role of adaptive evolution of the mind prior to the completion of the pattern recognition. However, Rui ended up using the Metabody System before the pattern recognition system was completed.

The reason was that his opponent was too strong. He was quite proud of the Hypnomatrix. It was a set of three grade-nine techniques, that were amplified by his augmented mind, effectively functioning like grade-ten techniques. Senior Zenshin's raw power was astronomically higher than that of Rui, and these powerful techniques had managed to chop it down significantly.

However, not even that had been enough to close the gap. Rui had been forced to use Hypertrophic Surge to close the gap, but Hypertrophic Surge had a much shorter time period than Senior Zenshin's raw power.

When Rui looked into Senior Zenshin's eyes, he sensed predatory patience. The man was waiting.

He was waiting for the right moment. Although Senior Zenshin was nowhere near as intelligent as Rui was, he was vastly more experienced. More than three hundred years of aggressive combat had created an intuition and instinct the likes of which Rui simply did not possess.

That same intuition told Zenshin that it wasn't long. Rui didn't have much time left. He was right. He just needed to wait.

And wait, he did. He hadn't moved from that one spot since Rui flung him into the forest. Rui had been unable to even budge from that one spot, at most he was rotating about to face Rui as he attacked from different angles. Attack after attack crashed into the man, only to be shredded into nothing by the man's shocking piercing power.

THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM THWOOM!!!

"Ngh!" Rui gritted his teeth as he blasted Senior Zenshin with a flurry of Mighty Roar Flash Blasts. However, while it appeared that he was mindlessly blasting attacks at Zenshin, he was not.

Rui's strategy was simple.

Continuous offense.

If the man had temporarily resigned to hurting Rui, then he didn't need to worry about getting hurt for the time being. He could focus on gauging as much information on the man as possible before Hypertrophic Surge had reached its limits.

'I need to compute all possible attacks. I'll attack him from new angles that cannot be blocked by old parries, forcing him to demonstrate new parries,' Rui narrowed his eyes. 'His moves are infinite, but the combinations are numerous, they may as well be infinite.'

However, this was not a problem.

'It will allow me to learn more about the core patterns that are a manifestation of one's very identity and being,' Rui's focus intensified. 'The more you fight, the more you show me.'

The more he was shown, the more he learned. The more he learned, the better he could adaptively evolve.

Rui had already given up on trying to hurt Senion Zenshin with Hypertrophic Surge. Rui underestimated the raw power of a close-quarters monster that had lived for three hundred years. He sacrificed it to gain more information, information that the VOID algorithm greedily consumed, eating it up. It wasn't long, however, before that came to an end.