The Martial Unity

Rui headed back home once the training session with Crea ended. Today was the first session between them, thus he didn't engage in any deeper training. He simply sparred with her to get a preliminary evaluation of her prowess, he spent the rest of his time getting to know her.

Her desire to become a Martial Artist was strong, however, it was different from the determination he saw in Max and Mana. The two of them were truly fascinated by Martial Art and thus chased after it. They enjoyed training and especially sparring as well, he could see that their motivation was true.

With Crea, it wasn't quite as simple. She yearned to become a Martial Artist, even more so than Max and Mana, but she didn't enjoy sparring or fighting, even if she was quite fierce during training. Rui could sense that she had a deep sense of reverence and admiration for her father, as a Martial Artist. She even displayed that towards Rui to a lesser degree, though less so because Rui hit his presence unless he needed not to. That along with his informal interactions with her had caused her to become a lot more informal and casual with him.

From what he could tell, her desire to become a Martial Artist wasn't a calculated objective or goal. He could sense it was a deep desire of hers. It seemed that simply becoming a Martial Artist, in and of itself was probably something she desired extremely. Not for the things that Martial Art seemed to bring, she didn't display much of a desire to make money, to obtain tremendous power, or prestige and social status. It didn't seem it be any of those, or perhaps it was all of those.

It was as though she simply couldn't stand not being a Martial Artist, more than anything.

Even if he didn't expect to figure her out on the first day he met her, it was clear that she was inscrutable and complex.

Still, that didn't particularly matter. Her motivation and determination were real, and that was all that mattered to him as a trainer. Everything else came after.

he put the matters regarding her aside. He had plenty of work to do. His schedule was jam-packed. He had two techniques to learn for Project Sniper in the Martial Union that ate away at a significant chunk of his time, he also had to work on building up Project Bounce from

for Project Bounce. Furthermore, he also felt

truly had no breathing space

to be busy as all hell for the next few

And he was right.

next three months,

Project Bounce, one small step at a time. He had been increasing the distance over which he was propelled by a straight right punch from a Martial Squire significantly, which was good

to succeed, he would need to ensure that

truly one of the most difficult and frustrating parts of Project Bounce. It was the sheer number of types of attacks that he needed to learn to elastically defend against to ensure they harmlessly launched him in an elastic collision, that was too many. Countless different kinds of punches, jabs, kicks, swings, and other striking attack variations, and he

the only difficult part. Part of the problem was that he had discovered that it wasn't so simple to apply what

the straight right punch was that he knew ahead of time that a straight right punch was coming. He was able to defend against it because he knew that that attack specifically was coming, and he was prepared for it. This was something that did not normally happen