The Martial Unity

The next several hours were filled with grueling effort. With only thirty-second break between exercises, Rui was truly pushed to his limits. Core building required strong perseverance, there was no other field of training that targeted as many muscles simultaneously as core building did.

Furthermore, the supervisors were unforgivingly relentless and brutal in their pushing, the presence of healing and energy potions destroyed all excuses that students attempted to hide behind. It was hellish.

Yet, among all of them, only one of them had a slight tinge of ecstasy on his face.

('This is great. Although I compensated as much as I could with resourcefulness and clever tricks, you can't really beat the real deal. The potions alone make me vastly more productive than I could have been by myself.')

He enthusiastically engaged in the exercises prescribed by the supervisors. His schedule was packed with exercises, he had only a bit of free time for meals, and a few hours to himself by the end of the day.

He only got to take a good look at his curriculum and evaluation during lunch, he was too busy prior.

('As expected, a significant majority of my training is centered around my physical performative attributes.') He mused to himself.

His physical attributes were rather impressive, well above average for his age. He was quite close to Kane as far as raw statistics were concerned. Although Kane had far superior training and growing resources. Rui largely compensated for that with a lifetime of training, and much better training methodology.

His physical performative attributes like balance, body-eye coordination and spatial awareness weren't as good, if it weren't for his mismatched muscle memory he might have been as good as Kane even in that regard, but alas. He couldn't have his cake and eat it.

However, his mental performative attributes like analysis, judgement and tactical ingenuity were absurd by the Martial Academy standards. Unbeknownst to him, his performance in this attribute was the single greatest performance in the century long history of the Martial Academy. His IQ score was the highest ever recorded in their database, and he was the only one to have ever passed the final test of the intelligence evaluation test. Furthermore, he completed ridiculously quickly than the Academy thought possible for a thirteen-year-old novice.

Geniuses like Nel born with a godly body were truly rare, but not unheard of. Every decade tended to have someone with Nel's physical prowess. The Academy was quite impressed, but it still fell within their predictions. However, Rui broke their model for the limits of the human mind

In their eyes, his mind was unfathomable. And it had reflected in his curriculum. He was the only student in the history of the Academy to not be given even the slightest bit of mental performative training. He only had a monthly evaluation of his intelligence, and even this was a bit outside of their general policy. The Academy wanted to gather more data on this unheard-of phenomenon. It had generated a lot of interest and excitement within many wings of the Academy.

Rui, however, was blissfully unaware of the shock his performance had generated. He lacked context and vital information. Furthermore, he lacked an outsider perspective on himself. He was no doubt aware of his performance being high, even highest among the freshmen who had participated. However, that was as far he thought it went. He thought he was just another yearly topper of the mental performative attribute evaluation, every year had one, so not too shocking.

('The rest of my day is centered around performative training.') Rui nodded. He was not dismayed by this. He needed physical performative training badly. Unlike physical training, it was much more difficult to train physical performative attributes without training resources. The training for these parameters were much more complicated and nuanced.

He could finally erase his greatest weakness.

"Hey man." Kane interrupted his reverie. "Sorry for being late."

"No problem." Rui responded. "Got caught up in exploring the Martial Apprentice library?"

Unlike him, Kane was not mandated to engage in training. He spent his days browsing the Martial Academy's techniques looking for techniques study, and potentially add to his Martial Art.

Kane nodded. "The library of techniques is far, far larger than what my household provided to me when I became a Martial Apprentice. There tons of amazing techniques."

"That sounds incredible." Rui replied with a hint of envy. He couldn't wait to become a Martial Apprentice. The more Kane extolled his experience, the stronger Rui's hunger to experience it himself grew.

"As much as I'd tell you all about the techniques I came across in detail, I can't." Kane told him with an apologetic demeanor. "I had to sign an oath that I wouldn't disclose this knowledge to anybody else during my stay in the Academy."

Rui sighed; he had anticipated this would be the case after having witnessed the Academy's propensity to control information. He would never learn anything the Academy deemed unnecessary for him to know.

"The only way to learn more, is to grow stronger, huh?" Rui murmured to himself.

"Hm?"

"Ah, nothing, just thinking about what you told me."

"Hm, by the way, are you ready for today?" Kane grinned.

"Today?"

"Yeah, Nel's duel with Felix is today."

Rui had almost forgotten about the duel, he had been so caught up in his own matters, he'd filtered out of everything external away. They had discovered the time and location of the duel during their tour the day before. The boy who'd challenged Nel was Felix Harakel, someone Kane recognized. His mother was a retired Martial Master.

Learning that had provided more context to the conflict he'd come across yesterday. His mother was likely a source of pride to him, whereas her retirement might have been a touchy subject to him. Nel had viciously attacked Felix on his possible insecurities with nasty, but successfully provocative insults, resulting in that violent backlash of a reaction.

"Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to it." Rui couldn't wait to see Nel in action.

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