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.

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

continue with relatively regular training of Crea to earn the money needed to fund the training required for Project Bounce. Furthermore, he also felt the need to train with Max and Mana more extensively out of guilt of spending that much time training

no breathing space at all, and every second

all hell for the next few

And he was right.

three months,

a time. He had been increasing the distance over which he was propelled by a straight right punch from a Martial Squire significantly, which

right punch was just one of many strikes that one could launch, if Rui wanted Project Bounce to succeed, he would need to ensure that he could harmlessly convert all attacks into kinetic energy that would launch

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

Part of the problem was that he had

was that he knew ahead of time that a straight right punch was coming. He was able to defend against