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.

immediately tossed out. Taking a head-on brute-force approach was not really viable. That

would need to ensure that the conflict between himself and the gang occurred asymmetrically and non-confrontally. Meaning, he attacked them in ways, timings and places that mitigated their advantages and

flesh out the ones with the highest probability of desired success while tossing out the ideas that

Rui intended to see what their arrangements for the night were. That was a crucial piece of

saw. When it was night, the gang members

observed. The working farmers stayed in the fields for quite some time more until they

('They're basically slaves.')

during the night, however he realized that might not be as easy as he had hoped. The night shift guards and patrollers were actually quite alert and sharp, to 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

would have been manageable. Rui sighed. Even though this hadn't meant to be a covert mission,

He had Blink

best plans regardless. Unless something better popped up somehow, he would probably

and statically. But