The Martial Unity

Chapter 3305: Fear

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

He barely managed to break out from underground, desperately gasping for air as he returned to the surface, only to find an onslaught of branches converging on him, threatening to kill him where he stood.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

…

Rui’s eyes flared with a fierce determination as he pushed both his evasion and defenses to the very limit, switching to Neo Godspeed and Nemean Blossom as he pushed himself to the very limit.

And that was exactly what he did.

Wound by wound, his skin disappeared.

His flesh grew exposed as his bloody appearance amid a storm of razor-sharp wood propelled by an unfathomable amount of power. Weaving Blood surged forth in the blink of an eye, reconstructing his outer skin once more.

Only for it to get shredded again.

Even as he tried wading through the boundless destruction that the Mothers of Nature unleashed upon him, he found himself truly approaching his limit.

His Martial Body began approaching death.

Even the cancer keeping the gu in check began weakening as he began hitting the limit to the parts of his body that he could cannibalize to fuel his healing and regeneration. The dormant gu that remained silent only because of the cancer that kept it in check, balancing out the death-bringing gu, began fading, slowly unleashing the boundless gu within him.

The solution that he had chosen to keep the gu in check was a double-edged sword.

It kept the gu in check, but it also meant that if his body’s nutrient reserve ever replenished to the extent that not even the cancer would be able to survive, then the gu would slowly become unsealed and unlocked, continuing the ravaging assault on his body that had begun almost thirteen years ago when he had broken through to the Sage Realm.

The gu began working against him as it had against the flora around him through his Palm of Death technique, becoming an all-destructive force.

“Rgh…!”

Rui’s body began growing pitch-black once more.

Not from the outside, however.

But from the inside.

His body began dying.

From the inside.

And from the outside.

And yet, the expansion of the gu fueled the cancerous growth to an extent, as the cell death gave the cancer some fuel to continue to its expansions, before it ran out of fuel once more, and the gu continued its assault.

It was a cycle of death.

One that slowly began killing him from the inside.

The greatest source of death, however, came from the outside.

The Mothers of Nature smelled blood.

They smelled his death lingering in the air.

They pushed their advantage, maximizing their energy output with the sole intention of crushing him where he stood.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMM!!!

RUMBLE!!!!!

His body began growing weaker and weaker.

His movements began sloppier.

His strength began fading.

His flesh began to melt in the face of the destructive offense that his opponents had unleashed upon him, threatening to bury him where he stood. Pain, unlike anything he had ever experienced, had begun ravaging his body since the Squire Evolution began.

His nervous system was set on fire as his nerves unleashed a flood of pain signals to his brain.

His figure became a grotesque, bloody, humanoid mound of pitch black and red flesh.

His techniques began faltering as the storm of explosions and collisions overwhelmed his evasion and defenses, ravaging and piercing his body despite the fact that he had pushed his Martial Arts to the very limit.

He was dying.

He was dying with each passing second.

And yet, despite the sheer horror of the state of his body and the state of the battle, Rui grinned.

It was a grin of pure delight.

Pure delight and sincere gratitude.

A single whisper escaped him.

He closed his eyes.

“I’m grateful.”

His tone was eerie.

It sent chills across the Mothers of Nature.

“I’m grateful that you are this strong.”

His sincerity was chilling.

“Grateful that you can push me this far.”

The earnestness of his words was perilous.

“Now…” his voice was reduced to the barest of whispers. “Now I can go all out without worrying about the consequences.”

The Mothers of Nature didn’t understand.

They didn’t understand the meaning of his words.

And how could they?

Nobody in the true world had seen it before.

Thus, nobody in the true world could even fathom what was to come.

Even as a destructive onslaught of attacks converged on him, his eyes remained closed.

Even as the gu spread death within his body, he remained still.

Even as he found himself on the verge of destruction, he didn’t take a single action.

And then, he opened his eyes.

Two blood-red Suns shined with blinding brightness within them.

RUMBLE!!!

The world shook as his Martial Embodiment grew exponentially more powerful, as the sheer surge of water elevated to unfathomable levels. The tsunami of water that emerged from his mind, magnified by a titanic amount, spread across the entirety of the elven forest and beyond.

’What…’ the Mothers of Nature could barely even begin to fathom what they were beholding. ’What is this…? What is this power?’

RUMBLE!!!!!

In the blink of an eye, the tsunami of water consumed the entire continent.

It went even beyond.

It consumed the entire world.

RUMBLE!!!!!!!

Time slowed down to a crawl as his mind elevated to an entirely different plane of cognition, and his brain became a galaxy of information. The sheer weight of his consciousness bore on the very fabric of reality as the sum totality of his logos reached a critical threshold of awareness and fathoming.

And then, he felt it.

For the first time in his life, he felt fear unlike anything he had ever known in his.

A horrifying terror of infinite magnitude gripped his heart, paralyzing him where he stood.

A pure horror shackled his soul, leaving him almost frozen where he stood.

It was unlike anything he had ever experienced in his life.

It was fear personified.

And yet, it was almost abstract.

Almost beyond material cause.

For the first time in his life, Rui experienced Transcendent Fear.