Kane had watched the battle with an increasingly bewildered expression. Rui had already caught him off-guard when casually leaped out of Kane's physical contact, and outside of the influence of Void Step. He had almost had a heart attack.
"Wai-"
SLASH
Kane's eyes widened as Rui's blade disappeared and bloodfury rabbits split in half before his eyes. The battle abruptly began as the rabbit immediately pounced on the intruder that came out of nowhere and attacked their herd.
Yet despite swarming him with all their numbers, everything that came within a certain range split in half. It was as though there was a forcefield around Rui that cut anything that dared to cross it.
The domain encompassed by his swinging range ceased to be ordinary space. Instead, it had become a field of carnage, gushing with blood and death.
Kane observed Rui's movements in bewilderment, yet he didn't understand what was happening. Every time Rui inhaled from the pipe and exhaled onto his hapless would-be victims, they froze solid, before his devastating lethality annihilated them. They were entirely powerless.
Rui's face was covered in a malleable mask attached to it, yet Kane could still sense a cold ruthlessness on it. His reactions to the rabbits were excellent, it was almost as though he could see the future and knew exactly where each one was, whenever. His attacks were all proactive, and his blade never rested, whizzing around him smoothly, annihilating anything that came close enough.
Kane was impressed with how well Rui had honed his foundation. He did not use any fancy Squire-level sword techniques, but his basic passive application had reached a respectable stage in just a matter of half a year.
His movements were stable, and the edge of the blade was in perfect alignment with the direction of motion of the blade at every given moment, ensuring that there was not a single avenue for wastage of energy an ill-angled blade.
Rui's sword style at the moment had taken on the shape of a counter-offensive sword style, a fusion of offensive interception of attacks as well as evasive maneuvering. He engaged in just enough evasive maneuvering not to dodge and avoid attacks, but to put enough distance between himself and his opponent. The sword was generally not a close-quarters weapon and required a bit of distance at close range, thus Rui's footwork and maneuvering were targeted to provide adequate distance between him and his target. Thus despite moving away from the swarm he was always on the offensive.
"Unbelievable…" Kane murmured.
SLASH
Soon enough, the final rabbit had been felled. Rui glanced at him despite him being imperceptible.
"Come on, we have work to do," He casually remarked, walking past the death and destruction that he had just unleashed.
"Right…" Kane smiled wryly. "Were you hurt anywhere?"
"Nah," Rui shook his head. "Thankfully, these are primitive creatures. Creating predictive models on them was easy due to how uniformly simple their patterns are. They just attack straightforwardly, with the same identical pace the second that they get a chance to. Predicting them and ensuring that they never touch me is not even a workout."
Kane could scarcely believe that Rui just described a feat that not even a party of three Martial Squires could accomplish before dying, in such a trivial manner. He realizes that when Rui had assured him that he was very well prepared to handle the threats of the dungeon… He was not exaggerating in the slightest whatsoever.
That was even more amazing. Kane had seen what Rui could do firsthand when he prepared for certain circumstances. He had taken down a powerful Martial Squire with a single attack on Vilun Island, something that was only restricted to powerful high-grade Martial Squires as far as such feats went. Furthermore, he rapidly defeated a high-grade Martial Squire at the time in head-on combat!
His ability to accomplish feats far beyond his physical limits never ceased to amaze Kane. His faith in Rui being able to fulfill their objective in the Shionel Dungeon only grew after witnessing his remarkable performance against a large herd of bloodfury rabbits.
"We still have tons of harvest to plunder," Rui smiled. Before pointing further down the city-sized space that was inhabited by even more herds of bloodfury rabbits and esoteric harvest. "There are a lot more monsters too, but as we've come to see, that should not be a problem.
Rui walked over to the bags in Kane's hands, reaching out for them, before fiddling with his ring.
FWOOP
"Woah!" Kane jerked his head back in surprise when the bag disappeared. "That's the first time I have ever seen one in action."
"They're extremely impractical cost and energy consumption-wise, but one cannot deny that they are also extremely useful," Rui smiled as all of the many bags of esoteric harvest disappeared into the ring one by one. "In our circumstances, they're golden."
"Hm," Kane nodded. "Alright, what now?"
"Let's continue," Rui replied. "We're going to plunder all of the remaining esoteric harvests on this floor."
It was a mad thing for a single Martial Squire of a team of two to say, but Kane could not even deny it when it came from Rui, he scratched his head. "Alright, but I am surprised that there are so many reserves of esoteric minerals and organic harvest left, honestly. Why wasn't this floor completely cleared before heading to another floor?"
"That's because the difficulty of completely clearing a floor increases the more progress you make, and the reason for that is the ratio between monsters and plunder increases the more progress you make. The monsters grow cornered and then group up in big herds that we ran into," Rui explained. "It's easier to just start on a new floor where the esoteric harvest reserves are more bountiful and ever-present."
"Easier?" Kane smiled wryly. "Less insanely difficult you mean."
Rui shrugged casually. "Same difference. Let's not waste any more time, we're clearing this entire floor of the remaining pockets of esoteric reserves before heading down deeper to the frontier floors."
