The Martial Unity

Rui watched his reaction carefully. In Rui's mind, there was a forty-five-percent chance he would head straight into the cave, a forty-five-percent chance he would go back to the village to get his hands on some lighting so he could see, and only a ten-percent chance he would forget about hunting the beast.

Vranil turned around and sprinted away in the direction of the village.

"Hm, cautious." Rui muttered unhappily. He had hoped Vranil would enter the cave blind. That would have made his life much easier. Had he done that, it would have been game over.

Darkness did not matter to Rui. The combination of Seismic Mapping and Primordial Instinct was more than enough to comfortably fight even with his eyes closed. Vranil on the other hand clearly did not possess great sensory capabilities. The test from earlier as well as the fact that Fria managed to escape was enough evidence in favour of that matter. The fact that he chose not to enter the cave blindly proved this as well.

Rui truly wanted to fight him head-on. He was quite confident in his ability to win. Vranil had defined weaknesses, meaning the VOID algorithm would eat them up, especially now that he had acquired the ability to use the pattern recognition system of the VOID algorithm.

However, he wasn't stupid.

This wasn't a training spar in the Academy. Nor was this a contest like that of the Martial Contest.

This was a real fight. This was life and death.

If he lost, it would be game over and the lives of those villagers would be at stake. There were plenty of powerful Martial Artists who he could fight in a fair setting. But when it came real fights where his life was at stake. He was not going to pull his punches by not using unfair tactics that gave him unfair advantages.

Everything was fair game in war.

"Get me torchs, lamps, matches and a rope!" Vranil snarled at his men when he reached the village.

His men had no idea why he wanted those items, but they did not dare question him as several of them scurried about to procure the items he wanted.

Vranil quickly tied the smallest of lamps to the belt loops in his lower garments. He quickly grabbed the matches and the torch and immediately sprinted back into the forest at top speed.

He had no intention of letting the beast go. The beast had already killed twelve of his men, and more importantly, if it did have cubs, then the situation was much worse than he thought and he would need to kill them as soon as possible otherwise they would become a threat even he would not be able to handle.

Soon, he reached the cave. He lit the torch quickly before tucking the matches in his clothes and immediately walked in.

The multiple sources of light he had with him gave him the confidence to jump straight into the cave. But the deeper he travelled, the more he felt something was wrong. He could not hear anything; it was almost as if the cave was entirely deserted. If there were indeed carnivore offspring feeding on the corpse of one of his men, then there wouldn't be such silence at all.

He was already quite deep into the cave and the light from the entrance was already dim.

Suddenly, he stepped on something soft.

His eyes widened when he recognized the headless corpse as that of one of his men. His confusion turned into fear when he realized that he already reached the end of the cave.

("Something's wrong here.') He could feel it. Something was very wrong.

Yet the realization came too late.

POW POW POW.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, several wind blasts came out of nowhere, striking blasting against his body. They did not do much damage to him. But the same could not be said for the sources of light he had brought along.

The wind blasts shattered the torches and the lamps into pieces, completely dispelling flames.

"Fuck!" Vranil had no idea what was happening, but his sense of danger was tingling. Yet before he could even turn away to leave.

PEW

"AAARRGHH!" Vranil snarled as he felt an excruciating piercing pain on his neck. He abandoned the plan of running back to the entrance.

He needed to leave immediately.

BOOM!!!

An explosion blasted a hole in a clump of rocks in the forest, reverberating across the entirety of the forest.

From the dust, Vranil's body emerged as he leaped out of the cave.

He glanced at his left shoulder.

His neck was bleeding profusely. He squeezed his neck muscles and bleeding stopped. He had applied an endurance technique that mitigated the impact wounds had on his combat prowess, it was a technique that had saved his life multiple times.

Vranil turned back to the hole he had made. He had come to realize what had happened.

"You...!" He said to the masked figure that emerged from the dust. "You did this! You did all of this!"

His eyes were bloodshot with rage.

Rui did not say a word to him. He didn't understand the language, but he more or less understood what the man was trying to say.

He raised his closed fist, and a single finger stood up, drawing attention.

The middle-finger.

"I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU." The man rushed towards Rui. Just as Rui hoped. Rui's only regret was that he wasn't able to inflict a critical-enough wound to the man, as the detrimental effects of the Stinger to the neck weren't enough. Furthermore, the man's flesh was quite tough.

Still, Rui was unperturbed. He took a neutral stance with an eager expression as the man lashed out at him. He was secretly and guiltily relived that his Stinger ambush hadn't done much damage. He intended to test his new-found prowess against someone at the peak of the Apprentice Realm, who was rushing towards him to kill him.