The Martial Unity

As he was thinking about the classes of missions he immediately crossed out covert operations. The skill pre-requisite for the covert operations missions was much more niche and extensive than the other classes. One needed stealth, sensory, infiltration and espionage capabilities that Rui just frankly lacked.

While it was true that Rui had mastered Blink, Blink was not good enough all by itself. Blink had weaknesses, for example, it's timing and usage was largely out of Rui's hands. He could not use Blink whenever he wanted because he needed his opponent to Blink.

Furthermore, the greater the number target numbers, the exponentially harder to became to apply Blink. Because people didn't blink at the same time usually. These two rather big shortcomings made it harder for Rui to apply Blink the way covert operations required him to. Things like espionage and infiltration required timing, accuracy and precision control. Blink was simply not a technique whose timing could be controlled; this was simply a fact about the fundamental nature of the technique.

Perhaps in the next round of training he would learn some more stealth-oriented techniques.

('No...') He shook his head. ('The next round will be focused purely on head-to-head combat, because of the Martial Festival.')

Most of the competition in the Martial Festival was head-to-head one-on-one fights, stealth was largely unnecessary for the most part. He did not want to waste one his technique slots on learning stealth techniques that he almost certainly wouldn't use.

Although he intended to diversify his Martial Art to other classes, that would have to wait until after the Kandrian Martial Festival.

He turned away from the covert operations missions. Some day he would undertake one of them, today was not that day, however.

He really didn't want to go for a defense-class mission just yet.

"That leaves..." He turned to the offense-class section and the miscellaneous-class section of the library.

He immediately walked into the offense-class section. It was no contest between assault-centric missions and a messy hotchpotch of odd missions that had no place in the other classes of missions.

There was one thing about the offense-class section of missions that stood out from the other sections of the library.

A large majority of the mission bills, slotted in the shelves of the library had a special insignia inscribed on them.

('The Royal Insignia.') Rui mused. Assault was still largely outlawed within the Kandrian Empire, although most domestic physical disputes did not reach the stage of prosecution, the Kandrian government and the Royal Family would not tolerate the commercialization of violence within the borders of the country. That would simply give rise to tyranny on large scales as those with the greatest amount of wealth would be able to monopolize the greatest amount of violence.

Of course, like all illegal services and goods, there was an underworld with black market and mafia that provided such services. One less extreme example would be the local gangs that that the Lowminers had effectively paid to handle their dirty business.

Therefore, an overwhelming amount of the commissions for unaggressed violence that the Martial Union received were from the Royal Family, via the law-enforcement branches of the Kandrian government.

These commissions had all received Royal authorization and were perfectly legal.

As Rui sauntered through the section he could see a variety of types of missions. Capture missions centered around known felons that were too dangerous for ordinary law-enforcement officers to arrest. Execution-missions where the mission objective was the death of a particular target or targets. There were missions centered around royally authorized destruction of property too. A lot of the missions were related to the criminal activities.

Even among them, a lot of them were connected with objectives concerned with the underworld and the mafia. It seemed as though the Royal Family was off-loading all this work to the Martial Union.

Which in a way made sense. The Martial Union and the underworld were probably eyesores to the Royal Family, that no doubt wanted to retain as much power and control over the Kandrian Empire as possible. These two goliaths stood in the way of its ambition and there wasn't much meaningful that the Royal Family could do.

Especially against the Martial Union, which was sorely vital and important to the Kandrian Empire.

The underworld, however, not so much. The Royal Family had effectively managed to get both of its eyesores to fight against each other by dumping a lot of the workload centered around the suppression of the underworld via the Martial Union. Rui was able to sense that much, atleast.

The underworld was too pesky of a problem and almost impossible to fight head-on against. This had much less to do with the Royal Family itself and more to do with human nature.

If Rui had learnt anything during his time on Earth was that you can't wage war against the underworld and win, for one very simple reason;

Where there was demand, there would also be supply. This was almost a law of humanity.

The government of the United States had waged war against illegal supply of alcohol and lost horribly. It was still waging war against drugs and was losing hilariously yet again.

Online piracy despite copyright laws was rampant. Pirates managed to supply movies, TV shows, novels and games and not a single damn person could stop it.

This was why the Royal Family had simply washed their hands of this matter to the Martial Union in exchange for an unfathomable amount of funds, resources and privileges.

Not that the Martial Union was having an easier time, but the commissions were useful because it kept the Martial Artists busy and allowed the Martial Union and its Martial Artists to be sustained.

Rui had decided.

It was time for him to undertake an offense-class mission.

Out of all the classes of missions, the offense class guaranteed combat much more than the other classes of missions did. It was literally a class of mission that revolved around attacking people!

This would be good experience for the Martial Festival. That alone was good enough reason for this decision.