The Martial Unity

Chapter 3373: Heavy Question

“Here ya go.” She handed him the weapon. “Don’t worry about breaking it. It’s quite sturdy, as I mentioned to you.”

CLASP

Rui held the greatsword in his hand as he studied it up close.

It still felt as solid as ever, beyond what its material would otherwise be.

A sword still felt awkward in his hand. Rui didn’t like how much it restricted how he could fight while he held it. The last time he had swung a sword was decades ago in the Shionel Confederation, when he created a sword that was perfect to destroy the monsters within the Shionel Dungeon.

He turned his gaze to the armor-plated humanoid dummy before gripping the sword with both hands and swinging it with all his power.

BANG

A loud noise filled the air as every single person in the testing arena froze at the power that they felt from the single attack.

THUD

They stared at the cleaved dummy that was perfectly bisected in half down the middle.

The dwarven woman’s eyes sharpened at the display of power.

Rui’s eyes lit up as he studied the sword with interest.

It hadn’t broken.

It hadn’t even suffered a crack.

“Incredible,” Rui admitted. “The fact that it is able to withstand my power to such an extent without breaking is truly impressive.”

He turned to the dwarf with greater respect. “This must be because your craftsmanship.”

“…Yeah. Still, I didn’t think you were that strong,” she remarked with a wary expression. “Are you a pathwalker?”

“Yes,” Rui replied straightforwardly, even as his attention remained on the sword. “This sword is abnormally strong without any visible technology. I’m guessing that the reason that it is this strong has to do with molecular alignment and how it distributes power across the entire weapon, am I wrong?”

“…You nailed it,” the dwarven woman remarked with a more subdued tone. “We dwarves forge weapons on a molecular level. We control how power flows through the particles, and we can increase the durability of a weapon made of steel by orders of magnitude by ensuring that the molecular alignment of the material of the sword smoothly distributes and transmits power without causing any fractures across the entire blade.”

“Truly incredible,” Rui remarked with an intrigued expression. “How durable can it get? Can you dwarves build weapons that even the most powerful warriors in all the six races can wield?”

“…I can’t, but there are supremes among blacksmiths who can forge weapons that even the most powerful warriors in the world can wield without collapsing to their great power,” she answered him straightforwardly. “Of course, such weapons would need invintium, which is a miracle element that is beyond the reach of ordinary blacksmiths like myself.”

It was difficult to overstate how impressive a feat that was. It was not something that could be done with technology alone, yet doing it by hand was even more unimaginable. To align the molecules in a way that drastically reduced the strain the molecules experienced with a smoother flow of power and maximizing the damage of the attack on the target was impressive.

“I see, I’m glad that there you dwarves are capable of building such powerful weapons without esoteric substances,” Rui remarked, immersed in thought as he considered the implications of this discovery.

One of the things that always constrained Martial Artists was that building weapons that could withstand their power was very difficult and required powerful esoteric substances that could withstand even the great power of a Martial Artist. It was one of the reasons that weapons never became a mainstay among Martial Artists, although MECHAs had begun truly proliferating around the entire continent.

With the dwarves, however, Rui saw a new possibility.

He saw the possibility of Martial Artists gaining access to a massive boom in the supply of handheld non-technological weapons that could withstand their enormous power, without needing any esoteric substances.

If the Kandrian Empire and the Bournvyrne Empire could forge a trade agreement and an alliance, then all Martial Artists in the Kandrian Empire could pursue weapon-oriented Martial Artists more easily than otherwise. With a little bit of childhood steering, it would be possible to drastically increase the number of Martial Artists with weapons.

This would systematically make human civilization stronger in the long run and greatly increase its power at the bottom ranks of Martial Arts. It was one of the solutions that Rui could think of to increase the strength of human civilization when the inevitable threat of the evolutionaries would arise.

The next generation of the Evolutionary Army would be a Realm more powerful than they were.

Rui needed to grasp every single opportunity for power for human civilization that he could get his hands on if human civilization had any chance for survival. Fortunately, he was confident that his father likely had a solid plan for the dwarves. It was only nutcases like the therianthropes, among other civilizations, that required more novel solutions and Rui’s direct intervention in the continent itself to resolve.

He turned to the dwarven woman, handing her the sword.

“Thank you for the demonstration. Unfortunately, I will not be buying the weapon.”

“I could tell,” she snorted, accepting the blade. “It’s a shame that I don’t have a weapon that could withstand your full power. I suspect that not a single weapon here would be able to remain intact if you stopped holding back.”

Rui smiled at her.

He was impressed that she managed to deduce that he was holding back.

“You…” she sharpened her eyes. “Are you a human, one of those Martial Artists from the Lost Continent?”

Her question made the testing arena go silent as they all turned to him with widened eyes.

The air suddenly grew tense as each and every person’s attention converged on them.

“…How could you tell?” Rui raised an eyebrow.

A wave of gasps washed over the people who watched him, affirming his race. Each and every single person grew immersed in Rui and Amare, studying them up and down with intense gazes as they beheld their first homo martialus, or their evolutionary descendants, rather.