The Martial Unity

One thing had become extremely clear to Rui the moment he felt her aura surge up close while uttering her ominous threat.

He had underestimated her. Not by too much, but he undoubtedly had.

Perhaps it had been because of his string of dominant victories recently. Or perhaps it had been because he had beaten the previous two top eight contestants without using the Metabody System.

Regardless, he had gained a wave of overconfidence, that nothing within the Squire Realm could overcome him.

That was the sort of attitude that was the downfall of Martial Artists.

Thankfully, once he recognized it. It had only taken a moment to correct it.

He immediately activated the Metabody System.

Previously, he had abstained from using it since it didn't have great stamina unless he used Final Breathing and held back a lot. However, now he realized that he didn't have much of a choice. In fact, the very notion that he could overcome her without the Metabody System was rather overconfident at best.

She was a warrior who managed to stalemate the abyssfeeder without letting it gain an advantage. What made him think he could beat her without it?

When she lashed out at him, he unhesitantly activated all of the Metabody System except for Hypertrophic Surge.

The time for offense would come, but for now he needed to address the issue of the failure of the pattern recognition system.

BOOM!

Her fist crashed into his guard with a powerful impact leveraging her momentum, yet to her surprise Rui managed to calmly deflect it away, standing his ground unperturbed.

'It's that thing again...' She mused to herself. 'He has that powerful body technique.'

Her eyes sharpened. Her muscles brimmed with power as she unleashed the entirety of all her power. 

BOOM!!!

The powerful impact crashed into Rui, propelling him a good distance away. It looked impressive and flashy, but they both knew that it wasn't nearly as effective. 

All that had happened was that Rui had lost some leverage, he didn't suffer any real damage.

A flash of displeasure appeared on her face.

His eyes narrowed he felt her power fluctuating. 

She activated a maneuvering technique, rapidly shifting towards Rui as she left behind a series of afterimages.

WHOOSH!

Rui casually evaded her attack with Forestep, his predictive model predicted three swift kicks to the chest.

Her expression grew more ugly.

Her power fluctuated even more than usual.

POW POW POW!

Rui's eyes widened as her attacks deviated from his predicted model even more than usual!

The three kicks launched him into the distance as Meera rushed in immediately to exploit the opportunity to extract his eyeballs.

A dangerous circumstance.

He knew that.

And yet...

"Heh..." A smile appeared on his face. "I see. I understand now."

Her emotions fluctuated.

Then her power fluctuated.

And then the timing of her attacks deviated from his initial predictive model.

This had happened fourteen times in the short time that had passed after the initial invalidation of his predictive model.

The process of scientific induction was the derivation of a conclusion through propositional logic in conjugation with empirical data, the principle of uniformity of nature, the law of causation, and Occam's razor.

This was a fancy of way saying one could could learn things about the world around them by applying common sense to the things that they observed.

Fourteen times now, her emotions fluctuated, as visible by non-verbal cues, followed by a fluctuation in the pressure she exerted, followed by a greater deviation of her timing from the predicted timing.

There was only one conclusion to be drawn.

'They're connected.' Rui grinned. 'Her emotions are unstable. This seems to cause an instability in her expressed power affecting all her physical parameters. This fluctuation in her physical parameters invalidates my predictions of her timing. An attack slower than the one I based my predictive model on will have a later timing. A faster attack will have an earlier timing. Because that speed keeps changing, my predictive model is useless.'

His eyes narrowed as he glanced at her.

The more he fought her, the more he realized that she was a deeply disturbed individual.

Either she had been born with a cerebral deformity that caused her to exhibit traits that were otherwise humanly impossible or...

'Or she suffered an extraordinarily traumatic event early on in life causing severe PTSD and other extreme symptoms.' Rui tried to quash those thoughts.

It did not bode well to feel pity for an opponent he was at a disadvantage against.

He did not know what caused her to become such a damaged human being, but there was one thing he did know.

A grin emerged on his face.

"Hah... Hahaha!" A laugh of pure mirth rang across the colosseum. 'I can overcome this. I will overcome it!'

Normally, emotions did not affect the metabolic power outputted by the body, yet, in her case, it happened.

Then there was only one thing that needed to occur.

'I need to alter the predictive model to include her emotions as avariable!' Rui grinned. 

By inputting her emotional state at any given point, he would be able to predict her metabolic output, which would allow him to correctly predict her timing. 

And finally, the predictive model would return to being as effective as before.

'I can measure her emotions via the pressure that she exerts.' Rui noted sharply as his eyes narrowed, focusing on her. 

Her emotions altered, both, the output of her body and the pressure that she exerted. He wanted could use the pressure she exerted as a measuring device for the magnitude of her emotions. 

'However, I still need to measure the exact correlation between her emotions and her output.' He noted. 'Just knowing that they are connected is not enough. I can do this. But can I do that before the Metabody System times out?'

For the first time in a long time, Rui felt uncertainty about the outcome of a battle.