The Martial Unity

Chapter 3510: A Single Mistake

Rui repurposed his pluripotent matter from negatrons to organic matter to help accelerate his healing. The pressure that the Dragon Emperor put on him was so intense that he truly couldn’t afford to give him even a single moment’s opening, lest he unleash an attack that threatened to break his body.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH!!!

Rui evaded a barrage of blows from the Dragon Emperor, while simultaneously using the fractal hydro lens to redirect and refract them away.

WHOOSH

Rui barely managed to evade a claw swipe, sidestepping it only to be drowned in a flood of gamma radiation that forced him to bring up his hydro lens once more.

Almost in anticipation, the Dragon Emperor’s tail came crushing down on him with great speed and power at that very moment.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!

Rui gritted his teeth, evading the blow as his hydro lens faltered a bit with the sharp motion, causing some gamma radiation to pass through, flooding his body. The Dragon Emperor grinned as he flapped his wings once more, shooting towards Rui with a violent acceleration, unleashing a destructive attack against Rui yet again.

WHOOSH

Once more, Rui evaded the blow, only to be pinned by the flood of radiation that came with the attack. The very next moment, like clockwork, the Dragon Emperor’s follow-up physical attack came, threatening to crush him where he stood.

WHOOSH

Rui evaded the death blow, compromising on the radiation that had now begun saturating the ocean around them. He gritted his teeth as the radiation flooded his body, damaging his cells. Fixing them required time and attention, something that the Dragon Emperor was unwilling to give him.

The Dragon Emperor’s mastery of gamma radiation was even greater than Rui had expected. Not only could he manipulated gamma radiation like threads that he wove into a tapestry, but he could combine a gamma radiation offensive with his physical offensive, almost as if there was no distinction to be made. The sheer physical prowess that he displayed meant that withstanding an attack from him was out of question, while the gamma radiation followed suit, filling in the holes in his offensive while he used it to incapacitate Rui momentarily.

The way he combined his physicality with a high principle reminded Rui of Martial Art, even if the resemblance was superficial. It allowed the Dragon Emperor to fight extremely powerfully even in an environments that were supposed to be antithetical to him.

Rui gritted his teeth as he was pushed to the very limit, balancing both the physical and the electromagnetic attacks that Lord Shenlong unleashed upon him. Ordinarily, dealing with this would have been easy. He had dealt with worse in his life as a Martial Artist.

However, the biggest issue was that the Dragon Emperor’s destructive output was too high. The power that he unleashed with both his physicality and radiation was so absurdly high that Rui could only deal with one at a time while the Dragon Emperor wove them together, threatening to crush him where he stood.

It took a combination of Neo Godspeed, the many water techniques he had created with the Forge of Creation, and his Prophecy of the Void to deal with all of them. It wasn’t perfect, and he sustained physical and radiation damage, but it was manageable.

Even if barely.

Rui’s pitch-black eyes sharpened as he kept his focus fixed on the Dragon Emperor.

Despite being backed into a corner, he never once stopped waiting.

Despite being backed into a corner, his eyes were the eyes of a predator.

He knew that the Dragon Emperor was not a beast built to last for a long time.

He knew that this environment was antithetical to him, even if it certainly didn’t feel like it.

These two facts pointed to the unavoidable conclusion that with each passing moment, the Dragon Emperor drew closer and closer to his limit. Even as Lord Shenlong pressured Rui with an incredibly vigorous assault, his body drew closer and closer to its hard limit, making it harder and harder to keep pushing Rui to the extent that he did.

’All I need is a single mistake.’

That was all the Dragon Emperor needed.

In some ways, it was already a small concession. The fact that he needed Rui to make a mistake to win the battle was not an admission that the Dragon Emperor was proud of, nor one that he would ever say out loud. But Rui had proven to be beyond his wildest expectations.

His body was astronomically weaker, and yet, through the sheer genius of his foresight and the decisions he made, he foresaw the future and chose the correct path to avoid it.

Every single time.

The Dragon Emperor had launched millions of attacks against Rui in the span of their battle, and yet, not a single one of them had landed on him properly, save for faint grazes. He didn’t even know such a thing was possible, even powerful animals of species designed for evasion could possibly pull off such a feat against none other than the Dragon Emperor.

And yet, Rui threaded the future correctly each and every single time.

’A single mistake will be enough to crush him and finally consume him.’

The Dragon Emperor grew more and more desperate as he felt his energy reserves, his oxygen reserves, and his constitution reaching their limits. Although he fought belligerently and aggressively, the fact of the matter was that the ocean had taken a deep toll on him internally.

The astronomical pressure crushing down on him at the very bottom of the ocean as the tremendous water pressing down on his scales crushed the flesh beneath, causing him chronic pain. Rui’s Phantom Pain was still active, exacerbating his suffering.

His desperation only grew even as every motion he made unleashed destruction upon the world.

RUMBLE!!!!!

The cracks in the seabed deepened, spreading wider and wider across the Great Void Ocean as faint traces of lava and magma emerged from within them.