The Martial Unity

Rui headed back home once the training session with Crea ended. Today was the first session between them, thus he didn't engage in any deeper training. He simply sparred with her to get a preliminary evaluation of her prowess, he spent the rest of his time getting to know her.

Her desire to become a Martial Artist was strong, however, it was different from the determination he saw in Max and Mana. The two of them were truly fascinated by Martial Art and thus chased after it. They enjoyed training and especially sparring as well, he could see that their motivation was true.

With Crea, it wasn't quite as simple. She yearned to become a Martial Artist, even more so than Max and Mana, but she didn't enjoy sparring or fighting, even if she was quite fierce during training. Rui could sense that she had a deep sense of reverence and admiration for her father, as a Martial Artist. She even displayed that towards Rui to a lesser degree, though less so because Rui hit his presence unless he needed not to. That along with his informal interactions with her had caused her to become a lot more informal and casual with him.

From what he could tell, her desire to become a Martial Artist wasn't a calculated objective or goal. He could sense it was a deep desire of hers. It seemed that simply becoming a Martial Artist, in and of itself was probably something she desired extremely. Not for the things that Martial Art seemed to bring, she didn't display much of a desire to make money, to obtain tremendous power, or prestige and social status. It didn't seem it be any of those, or perhaps it was all of those.

It was as though she simply couldn't stand not being a Martial Artist, more than anything.

Even if he didn't expect to figure her out on the first day he met her, it was clear that she was inscrutable and complex.

Still, that didn't particularly matter. Her motivation and determination were real, and that was all that mattered to him as a trainer. Everything else came after.

Once he reached home, he put the matters regarding her aside. He had plenty of work to do. His schedule was jam-packed. He had two techniques to learn for Project Sniper in the Martial Union that ate away at a significant chunk of his time, he also had to work on building up Project Bounce from scratch and all from the ground up, which was no doubt a daunting task that also ate away at his funds, that were needed to hire his sparring partner.

He also needed to continue with relatively regular training of Crea to earn the money needed to fund the training required for Project Bounce. Furthermore, he also felt the need to train with Max and Mana more extensively out of guilt of spending that much time training Crea, their competitor.

He truly had no breathing space at all, and every second mattered.

"I'm going to be busy as all hell for the next few months." Rui sighed.

And he was right.

For the next three months, Rui slogged away.

He painstakingly made progress with Project Bounce, one small step at a time. He had been increasing the distance over which he was propelled by a straight right punch from a Martial Squire significantly, which was good progress to be made. However, it was far from enough.

A straight right punch was just one of many strikes that one could launch, if Rui wanted Project Bounce to succeed, he would need to ensure that he could harmlessly convert all attacks into kinetic energy that would launch him flying rather than hurt him, for all strikes.

This was truly one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of Project Bounce. It was the sheer number of types of attacks that he needed to learn to elastically defend against to ensure they harmlessly launched him in an elastic collision, that was too many. Countless different kinds of punches, jabs, kicks, swings, and other striking attack variations, and he needed to train his elastic collision against each and every single one of them the hard way.

That alone raised the difficulty to ridiculous degrees, however, it wasn't the only difficult part. Part of the problem was that he had discovered that it wasn't so simple to apply what he had been training in real-life combat.

Part of the reason that he was able to elastically defend against the straight right punch was that he knew ahead of time that a straight right punch was coming. He was able to defend against it because he knew that that attack specifically was coming, and he was prepared for it. This was something that did not normally happen in real-life combat.

Normally, that was.

Rui was different, with the VOID algorithm, Rui would be able to predict whenever his opponent was coming, allowing him to overcome the impediment. This was the difference between Project Bounce and Project Severer. The former was a project that was to yield great power by overcoming barriers by synergizing extremely with Rui's Martial Art, and strengths. Employing and leveraging the predictive prowess of the pattern recognition system of the VOID algorithm gave Rui active defensive prowess that he would not have been able from the technique normally.

This meant that only Rui could use this technique, this was the peak of synergy.

In comparison, Project Severer was just a hotchpotch of elements thrown into one technique with the hopes that they would work together to form a lethal attack, it did not make use of Rui's strengths to reach even greater heights, nor could the Flowing Void style make use of its strength in a special manner. It was a highly impersonal and distant technique in hindsight.

While he did feel sorrow for having to abandon a project that he was initially passionate and excited about, the lessons he extracted from this failure benefited him even more.