The Martial Unity

Half a day earlier, Rui watched with excitement as the Deacon raid force clashed into a wave of roots.

Immediately, the Martial Squires of the raid force was overwhelmed suffering significant wounds. The only ones who were able to cleanly able to cope and handle the attacks were the grade-ten and grade-nine Martial Squires. Martial Squires weaker, unless defense-oriented, were simply unable to handle the sheer ferocity of the Root.

He couldn't help but admire Captain Deacon's defensive prowess.

"What a powerful large-scale defensive barrier," Rui murmured.

Such techniques definitely existed, just like there were large-scale offensive attacks, there were also large-scale defensive attacks of various kinds.

As the battle progressed, Rui couldn't help but admire Captain Deacon's prowess. He used multiple large-scale defensive techniques after defensive technique to protect his raid force as much as possible.

From barriers to suction breathing techniques that attracted all the attacks to himself which he withstood with his superior defensive prowess. He had done a lot for his fellow adventurers.

Rui definitely had to grant him that. Even if he did fail, he had exercised his duties as a leader quite well.

One of the biggest reasons that the raid force did not crumble immediately was because of the five grade-ten Martial Squires that had been assembled. Rui was quite impressed by all of them.

He even recognized one of them. "Squire Fren…"

He remembered her, she was the leader of Party Saberstrike that was part of the Voidhunter squad. Her team members had gotten annihilated by Guildmaster Bradt's well-timed and placed assassins, with some assistance from Kane. She had denounced Chairman Deacon, but it seemed as though Chairman Deacon had managed to rope her back.

Her grappling techniques were as powerful as ever, as she impressively caught root attacks with her arms, stopping them on the spot with sheer force.

The others were also quite eye-drawing. One of them was a powerful heat-oriented Martial Artist, something that he hadn't come across in a long time. He thought back to one of the Martial Apprentices from nearly six years ago in the Martial Contest. She too had a flame-oriented Martial Art, even if she was more than a thousand times weaker than the grade-ten Martial Artist that Rui was witnessing fight against the Root.

Still, as much attention Rui paid to the Martial Artists, he paid even more attention to the Root as he mentally recorded everything in his Mind Palace.

The Root's active patterns came to life as the Root encountered a force that it wasn't able to crush in an instant.

Rui stared hard as he reaped the fruits of their labor

"The roots do not initiate an attack within ten meters of their target," Rui murmured excitedly as he noticed the first active pattern of the battle!

He noticed that every time a root attacked a target, it attacked from a distance greater than ten meters.

This by itself did not prove that the Root never attacked from less than ten meters away, but what did prove it is when the roots moved away from the target when it was less than ten meters away, and then charged back in after reaching ten meters away from the target.

This indicated that there was an unwillingness programmed into the defensive mechanism to attack from less than ten meters.

('Probably to have enough distance to charge enough momentum,') Rui's widened.

This meant that dodging Roots was highly effective against them!

The fight was just getting started, and Rui couldn't help but grow excited. Just this one pattern alone changed the game. He instantly felt a lot less uncertain about how he was going to deal with the offense of the Root.

As time passed, the Root began overwhelming the raid force, revealing even more active patterns in its movements and attacks.

('It has zero defensive concerns despite this whole thing being a defensive mechanism,') Rui realized. ('It acts as though it cannot get hurt, and rushes forward even if the root is extremely damaged.')

Another thing he noticed was highly critical in aiding his understanding. The grade ten and other high-grade Martial Artists had destroyed several roots of their stumps, yet Rui noticed that the stumps of the roots kept moving as though the roots were still attached to them,

('It doesn't realize that the roots are destroyed?') His eyes widened. ('The Root continues moving them as though they are intact!')

That revealed a lot about the nature of the Root.

Firstly, it did not possess sentience or self-awareness. It did not possess an instinct for self-preservation. The defense mechanism that it had was highly primitive and resembled a programmed bot, rather than a sentient being.

That gave Rui a lot more confidence that his method of taking the Root down would work, given what he had learned from the battle already.

That wasn't the only extent of what he was learning from the battle, because each Martial Art was unique, Rui got a wide array of empirical data surrounding how the Root handled them, and how effective certain approaches were against the Root in certain respects.

Some Martial Artists were able to cope remarkably well relative to their grade, while other higher-grade Martial Artists seemed almost entirely useless despite being higher in grade.

Poison Martial Artists seemed almost impotent relative to the Root as if they weren't even Martial Artists in the first place!

The physiology of the monsterified roots was too different from the norm, and the mechanisms by which the poisons produced by the Martial bodies and techniques of poison-oriented Martial Artists were simply ineffective against the roots seemingly.

The fight progressed as Rui gathered more information on all these traits as his predictive model began taking on a more distinctive shape and form, solidifying by the second. At this rate, it wouldn't be too long before he was ready to accomplish what he had initially set out to accomplish, the whole reason he had gone through the efforts of setting all of this up.