The Martial Unity

Chapter 3279: Return to Nature

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM!

A surge of flora came to Rui’s rescue as he struggled to use flora defensively, trying to protect himself from the endless onslaught of attacks that Mother Alicia unleashed upon him.

A flurry of leaf-blades emerged from the nature, converging upon him with great speed and power.

Rui willed a shield of roots to emerge from the ground, protecting him from the leaf attacks of his training partner. In the next moment, with a flick of his hand, he manipulated the trees around him to surge towards with great momentum.

And yet, it was hardly enough to best the wood vessel of the Mother of Alicia.

WHOOSH

She smoothly leaped away, somersaulting out of the attack effortlessly as Rui unleashed an even greater flurry of wood attacks, trying to tag her.

Yet, her mastery of nature manipulation was sublime. All she needed was just the minutest contact with nature to get it to launch her in a certain way the moment she touched it or set foot on it.

It made it seem like she was extremely acrobatically gifted, but in reality, it was just that her nature manipulation was highly subtle and effective.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH

She smoothly evaded each and every single attack that Rui threw at her, bouncing and weaving through the trees of the forest, manipulating them to increase her motion speed. In comparison, Rui’s nature manipulation was downright clumsy and full of wasteful decisions.

The domain and the system of thought in his Martial Art that he was using to manipulate nature were, of course, highly efficient as Martial Art techniques were, but the resulting attacks from nature paled in comparison to what the Mother of Nature unleashed on him.

She didn’t beat him down with overwhelming power.

No, instead, she used less vegetation and less flora to bring about a greater impact.

This was despite the fact that Rui possessed a much higher reaction speed than she with his Martial Heart, which spoke to just how large the difference between himself and her little vessel was.

She turned to him as she closed her eyes, before snapping her fingers.

BOOOM!!

Rui barely managed to get a shield of roots around him as the trees around him exploded in a titanic, fiery explosion. A giant green plume emerged from the area as the heat subsided, leaving Rui singed across his body.

“Damn…” Rui muttered. “I forgot that these trees do that.”

He couldn’t be blamed for not keeping track of all the things that elven trees had done in his last series of battles against the dark elves. They were biologically engineered to turn into diverse weapons of destruction in the blink of an eye at the very moment they needed to.

“I don’t blame you for not understanding how elven botanical technology works.” Mother Alicia arrived before him as the battle took a momentary reprieve. “Our flora is vastly superior to the flora of other continents and species. I’m sure you are not accustomed to exploding trees, but to us elves, it is simply a trait. An unfortunate one, of course. But one simply offers too much to refuse the boost in our military power.”

Rui dusted his Martial attire. “The biggest issue, I presume, would be the fact that the stronger your own flora is, the more you would be unable to do when you leave the continent.”

Rui turned towards the wooden dark elf vessel.

“I can’t imagine how disempowered elves must feel when they depart from the continent.”

She smiled melancholically, tapping her foot on the charred land around Rui.

RUMBLE…

Tremors passed through the land as new flora grew from within the soil, filling up the destroyed part of the forest.

“That is the reason that we seldom leave our continent.” She heaved a sigh. “In particular, we don’t do any operations overseas like other nations and polities do.”

It also meant that they couldn’t refrain from doing much internationally with their military presence. The most they could do was deter people from attacking them on the Genora Continent due to their continental power, but they couldn’t stop anybody from doing anything else unless they leveraged trade, as they had in an alliance with the Panama Continent.

“However, things are that hopeless,” she remarked with a confident smile. “For instance, we have means and methods of empowering nature across the entire world.”

Rui raised an eyebrow.

“What do you mean by that?”

“We call it the Return to Nature Initiative,” she answered. “It is a program where we elves, dark and light alike, use our mastery of botanical biotechnology to create a seeding technology that can spread our flora far and wide, even across titanic continents and vast expanses.”

Rui’s eyes lit up with a hint of amazement. “You seed the entire world with elven flora?”

She nodded. “We use older and previous generations of biotechnology, of course. We can’t be giving our cutting-edge technology away. But we use spores instead of seeds that can track coordinates with our exo-flower satellites in outer space to move to the other five continents and the many other islands in this world and populate them with our flora. The spores contain all the protocols to slowly gather nutrients, reproduce and spread more spores, which will all eventually germinate to become saplings and eventually trees.”

That was a creative idea to try to make a world that was more elven-friendly and more nature-oriented. It appeared that the elves were not resigned to their fate to be shackled in a natureless world.

“Does that actually work?” Rui’s eyes lit up with a hint of surprise. “I can’t imagine that it’s that easy, no? The other races and species will surely find out and try and exterminate these spores in fear of being infiltrated by this botanical biotechnology.”

She shook her head. “We actually make it rather public as I’m sure the administration of the Panamic Alliance is quite aware. We even release blueprints of the botanical biotechnology, since they are very outdated and pose no harm, to prove that the spores are not beholden to elven loyalty or something of the sort. We don’t taint nature by enslaving it.”