The Martial Unity

In summary, the able adult farmers worked relentlessly while the elderly and the children who couldn't work were used as leverage. The presence of arms as well as the powerful Martial Apprentice made their situation absolutely hopeless.

Rui only counted a little less than half of the gang members from the known number of members of the gang in his reconnaissance, which meant they were hidden in the village. He wasn't able to pin-point which seismic signatures he was sensing via Seismic Mapping were the unseen gang members, but they were likely cooped up in the building.

Now that Rui had completed the initial reconnaissance surveillance of the village. He wanted to take his time gathering more information of the movements and activities of the villagers and the gang members before making a plan of how to complete the mission.

He had already ruled out running into the village at this very moment at attacking the gang. Although the human gang members with muskets weren't a threat by themselves, they were a threat if he was fighting another powerful Martial Apprentice.

Although musket bullets were faster than he was to some degree, the humans firing them most certainly were not. By the time normal humans would shift, take aim and pull the trigger, Martial Apprentices could easily have killed all of them thanks to their enhanced battle cognition and superhuman speed, especially one as good as Rui. Even if some stray bullets hit Martial Artists, most of them had defensive techniques that could mitigate their damage.

The problem was that even though Rui could easily deal with the gang if they were by themselves, they weren't by themselves. Rui would be distracted with fighting Vranil and they could pepper him with bullets or even take hostages.

Although Rui could probably still fight and even win under those extenuating circumstances, it would be far riskier and would certainly end up with a lot of dead villagers. One of the conditional constraints of the commission was that the loss of life to the villagers needed to be minimized, and he could certainly be violating that condition with this tactic.

this idea was immediately tossed out. Taking a head-on brute-force approach

the gang occurred asymmetrically and non-confrontally. Meaning, he attacked them in

but intended to gather more information to gauge their probabilities of success and flesh out the ones with the highest probability

to see what their arrangements for the night were. That was a crucial piece of information that would be required before he decided on how to

while carefully observing what he saw. When it was night, the gang members who

in the fields

('They're basically slaves.')

their credit. Rui could see they were highly aware of their surroundings at all times. Despite the night, it would be difficult to ambush them without being instantly noticed. It seems they were extremely wary of being

Rui sighed. Even though this hadn't meant to be a covert mission, it kind of was turning into

He had Blink

was one of his best plans regardless. Unless something better popped up somehow, he would probably be sticking

statically. But in the morning, there