The Martial Unity

"Like what?" Kane frowned. "What could you have possibly learned in such a short amount of time?"

"Well, for one, the amount of time may have been short, but what you need to consider is what was accomplished in this time," Rui told him.

More than a thousand pythons had been annihilated by the Root in half a minute. Rui had gotten enough data for him to get the active data patterns that he was looking for. He had even analyzed yet, and he had already noted several patterns.

('It does not attack until things move within a certain range from the Root,') Rui concluded.

It hadn't attacked the pythons from the moment that they had entered the Root Floor from the edge of the floor. Furthermore, it only attacked them after they entered a certain range.

Even now, when he observed the corpses of the pythons, their positions confirmed the pattern. It meant that simply entering the dungeon did not make you a target of the Root, you needed to enter the dungeon and then cross a certain boundary.

That gave Rui a bit of relief. It meant that he did not need to leave the floor if he wanted to retreat from the attacks of the Root. It also meant that he could effectively control when the attacks would begin.

That wasn't the only thing he had noticed at first glance.

('The attack of the root begins from the base, before going up to the tip of the root.,') Rui noted.

This was an extremely significant discovery. It meant that he had discovered a cue and a tell that would allow him to concretely predict the attacks and movements ahead of time. It would serve as a strong basis for the predictive model that he had been creating for the Root.

Predictions were the basis of the means by which he intended to resist the offense of the Root, and finding such a useful pattern in the manner in which the attacks of the Root evolved was definitely quite useful.

He had been afraid that the Root lacked such concrete tells and cues that would allow him to predict the moment of attack. If such a thing really was the case, then Rui would be in quite the dilemma. But fortunately, his fears hadn't come to pass.

('After all, that isn't the only significant pattern there is,')

He discovered that every time a root attacked, it would always be the closest root to the target of the Root. This might not seem like much of a pattern or an advantage, but it meant that at any given time, he knew where the attack was coming from, ahead of time, and even when it was coming.

That was a huge gain, without a doubt. The prior pattern only established his ability to predict an attack from a root, now he knew which ones would be attacking him.

Unfortunately, these were not enough in and of themselves.

He needed more data in more varied situations and circumstances. He needed to know what would happen if it was forced to attack highly powerful grade-ten Martial Squires who could resist some attacks and potentially even hurt it. That was what he himself intended to do, so he definitely wanted data on that.

A grade-ten Martial Squire would last far longer than the Squire-level python monsters that he had tossed into the Root floor did. Martial Squires at the peak of the Squire Realm could not be compared to mid-grade Squire-level monsters.

All in all, the plan was a success, it definitely did yield the result that he was hoping for it.

But, at the end of the day, Rui did not feel confident in dealing with the Root as he was now. The information that he had currently would allow him to use the Void Forestep technique defensively to handle the attacks of the Root to a certain extent, but he would die unless he had access to even more information.

"That's the problem with relying on information on your opponent to perform higher than your limits," Rui sighed. "You need to go through the efforts of procuring it."

Normally, he did that in the actual fight itself. Gaining more information on his opponent to form a predictive model on them was feasible, but only when his opponent wasn't powerful enough to blitz and flatten him with a single attack.

This was the only weakness of the VOID algorithm, arguably. Its need to gather information could be quite a drawback in certain circumstances where the very act of obtaining information was extremely difficult and potentially even deadly.

Of course, it wasn't as though other Martial Art would fare better than his own. This was most certainly not the case. Rui's VOID algorithm was the only Martial Art that he knew had the necessary potency and prowess to be able to bridge such a gigantic gap between the Martial Artist and the opponent.

Still, it was most certainly not a bad thing to recognize and acknowledge the limitations of one's Martial Art. It was actually quite a good thing and was also something Rui was actually accustomed to, in his former life, at least. He had spent most of the latter half of his career recognizing and attempting to get rid of the flaws, drawbacks, and limitations of the VOID algorithm.

The VOID algorithm had gone through multiple upgrades before, so he wasn't averse to the idea by any means at all. It was just that he had absolutely no idea how to go about it at the moment. Conceptually, the VOID algorithm was extremely sophisticated, he couldn't think of an avenue to improve it fundamentally.

He shook his head. This was a matter for the distant future, certainly not something that he sought to achieve now, with the sheer amount of time and effort it would take, the Shionel Dungeon would have long faded into irrelevance by the time he completed such a gigantic and ambitious endeavor.