The Martial Unity

DRIP DRIP DRIP

Blood started spurting out of his guts as the branches extricated themselves from his body. He coughed blood as fell to the ground. The shock had initially left him frozen, but he immediately activated Final Breathing which immediately accelerated the clotting process, slowing down the profuse bleeding. He weakly reached for his pouch, pulling out a healing potion.

He gasped as the healing potion diffused into his lungs in gas form and dissolved into his blood, aided by the Final Breathing technique. It quickly reached his wounds, healing them at a remarkable pace.

He gasped in relief as the pain disappeared along with the wound, before getting up abruptly stressing Primordial Instinct to the absolute limit on his immediate surroundings. He eyed the branch with his blood on it.

('What the fuck was that?') He narrowed his eyes.

A branch of the tree randomly attacked him and then went back without doing anything else? At the very least, if it was a carnivorous plant that attacked him in order to consume him, that would make more sense. But why attack him without doing anything else other than injuring him?

Rui immediately dashed out of the forest at a high speed, leaping off of the elevated landmass and landing back in the ordinary forest. The branch that attacked him wasn't visibly different from any of the other branches in the forest, it was just the closest.

Yet it landed an extremely fast and potent attack that allowed it wound him critically. If he didn't have Final Breathing or the healing potion, he would have died on the spot. The fact that it wasn't visibly different from the other branches likely meant that it simply wasn't. This led to the scary conclusion that every branch in the forest was likely capable of the same feat.

"If that's the case, that makes the forest, or the tree itself, extremely dangerous." He noted.

He had no doubt by now that the forest-tree was probably responsible for the environmental and ecological anomalies of the Serevian Plateau. But he wasn't satisfied with just that.

"Why did it attack me?" Rui wondered. "If it was going to attack me, why didn't attack me the second I entered the forest?"

If it was a carnivore tree species, then would it really need to wait that long to attack him?

not impossible, but what are the other

his initial presumption of the branch that attacked him was no different from any other was

that still runs into the problem of it leaving me

to indicate that it likely wasn't trying to consume him. Then there was likely another reason why the tree attacked him

as realization dawned upon him. "It attacked me the instant I used the

a logical explanation as to why the tree reacted so adversely to

the Squire-level mind mask. If that was the trigger

could do it again, except this time under less dangerous

good distance away from the branches of the tree on the elevated landmass, before taking a deep breath and heightening his alertness

goes nothing.')

as a Squire-level aura descended upon the

RUMBLE

both the plateau and the elevated

branches lashed out from atop elevated landmass,

time,

WHOOSH

WHOOSH

WHOOSH

following him down at a rapid pace unperturbed. Rui was surprised at the ridiculous amount of range these

long, which meant they were likely being extended

the wood mass of the tree is not fixed and can