All those months of preparation had paid off. The many months that he spent scraping up passive patterns in the Root’s movements and the two large-scale battles in which he had spent gathering its active patterns had paid off.
The predictive model that he consequently built was functional. Rui could see its attacks coming from a mile away, sometimes literally. The passive cues and tells warned him of every attack, while the previous attacks and the positions and timings allowed him to see even further into the future.
The predictive model he had on the Root was still not quite as powerful as the one that he had on Kane, but it was not too far behind either.
The sheer insight he had on the Root’s future movements was quite remarkable, yet it became scary when those same movements became too fast for him to react to with his own reflexes. His own movements were on par with the faster grade-ten Martial Artists, his eyes could barely catch them, and they were almost entirely over before he could react.
WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!
Rui somersaulted through the air at hypersonic speeds as he gracefully evaded five root attacks converging on his location. His mind had predicted eight more attacks from ahead, he swiftly prepared the appropriate Forestep movements, waiting for precisely the right moment, before mindlessly executing them with sheer and pure reflex, allowing him to surpass his normal limits when it came to execution speed.
The battle from his perspective had become rather bizarre. One moment he was doing in position, moving in a certain way. The very next moment he was elsewhere entirely, moving in an entirely different way.
It was a jarring experience, and one that he wasn’t entirely accustomed to in the middle of combat, but he quickly got used to the sensation of applying it when his life was on the line.
The more comfortable he grew, the smoother he became, the more fluid his movements ended up being, and the greater the intervals at which he could maintain Godspeed. He couldn’t maintain Forestep continuously since his mind did not operate at that speed, with predictions, he could circumvent the issue, but at the end of the day, even predictions were limited by the speed of the predictive capability of the mind.
A combination of predictions and seamless thoughtless reflexes allowed him to bypass thinking speed limits to a certain degree which allowed him to spend about half of the time in combat using Forestep continuously. Thus, half the time he was as fast as his normal self, while the other half he moved at speeds close to on par with grade-ten speed-oriented Martial Artists.
In this manner, Rui coped with the onslaught of roots better than he had expected!
The Root launched attack after attack, and Rui dodged one after the other.
(‘Alright, preliminary ability to contend with Root offense confirmed,’) Rui thought as he evaded yet another attack. (‘Initiating counter-offense as a solution to begin closing distance between target and myself.’)
SHING
SLASH
He instantly drew his sword that he had previously stored, programming a Forestep slash to slice off an incoming root attack. Much to his delight, it seemed that the overpowered offensive nature of his cooled Bellhorn steel blade was effective even against the roots of the Root.
He hadn’t been sure if this would be the case, but the blade managed to inflict remarkably heavy damage on the roots with a single attack. Only grade-ten Martial Squires were capable of such feats!
“FUUUUU!” He exhaled crackling hot air onto a root, freezing its expansion before swinging at the root with Outer Convergence and Forestep.
CRACK!
Rui’s eyes lit up as he destroyed his first root!
He was quite ecstatic a the fact that his previous tactics still retain their effectiveness against the roots. His current battle prowess was the result of his previous two training phases that gave him the necessary power to singlehandedly cope with an onslaught of attacks that ought to have been far beyond his capabilities as a Martial Squire who had only spent four years in the Squire Realm.
He vigorously fought back with as much of his Martial Art as he could!
Forestep, Outer Convergence, his sword techniques and hot air attacks, Mind Palace technique, and the VOID algorithm at the core of it all, chugging away furiously in order to cope with the onslaught that the Root was exerting against Rui.
Many variables across many years came into play in this battle. A variety of factors pushed Rui forward, bit by bit, allowing him to accomplish the impossible with what little he had. Rui felt a profound sense of culmination as he employed power that he had gathered across the entirety of his second life.
(‘No,’) Rui noted as he reflexively dodged a root with Forestep. (‘Across two lives.’)
He had persevered through some truly hellish times, and after seventy-nine years of being alive, he was here today. The power he had obtained was born out of seventy years of amassing.
A giddy sense of jubilation and euphoria shot emanated through his body, giving rise to a remarkable surge of power as his movements grew swifter and sharper. He shot across the floor, twisting and twirling through the air as he narrowly avoided waves of root attacks, cutting them down as and when he could.
Rui almost felt it was a shame that no one could see him at the moment, although he fought for himself, it didn’t hurt to be validated by fellow Martial Artists that walked their own paths.
Suddenly, his eyes widened as his predictive model foresaw a problematic development. The number of roots lashing out at him doubled as the Root seemingly decided to increase the heat since it was unable to take him down swiftly.
(‘Shi-!’) Almost all his escape routes were cut off!
More than a hundred roots piled in from all directions, threatening to absolutely crush his puny little body flat!
CRACK!𝑜𝐯𝗅xt.𝑐𝑜𝚖