Rui gained a more thorough understanding of Hafbor’s formidability through their exchanges. The man was probably the best defense-oriented Martial Artist he had come across. Arjun was strong as well, but his Martial Art was mostly passive, since his Martial Path was body conditioning.
Rui was of the opinion that well-balanced defenses such as Hafbor’s were the hardest to deal with.
Still, one good thing about the fight was that Rui could be as aggressive as he wanted. Hafbor’s offensive and counter-offensive initiative was not all that threatening to Rui. In most cases, he was too slow to land a clean strike on Rui, and even if he weren’t his offense was not impressive. It wasn’t weak, either, Rui couldn’t withstand it with zero damage, but it would truly take a long time before the damage could actually hinder Rui.
Thus, Rui increasingly hit the pedal harder as he began pushing his maneuvering to the max. Hafbor increasingly grew strained as it became more and more difficult to redirect all of Rui’s attacks. He began relying more on his passive defense, his conditioning, than his redirection.
Although redirection was not physically taxing, it was mentally taxing. Although Hafbor was good at it, estimating the correct timing and placement for applying force to correctly redirect strikes away was difficult. This was especially true for speedy motions like the one Rui was exhibiting. This was the adapted style that Rui had created with the VOID algorithm.
POW POW POW
Rui launched a powerful flurry of attacks that Hafbor redirected smoothly. Suddenly, Rui lashed out an attack for his groin, Hafbor shifted.
Yet;
WHOOSH
It was a feint.
(‘Now!’)
PEW!
His right toe cut through the air.
“Aaargh!” Hafbor grimaced as the toe plunged into his right eye, blinding him.
A wave of surprise fluttered across the guests.
Rui retreated as Hafbor cradled his bleeding eye. He tried to regain his bearings as he entered a mild state of shock. He hadn’t even seen the kick coming, he felt the pain before he even realized.
Rui had been waiting for the timely blink. The problem with the Blink technique was that Rui had no control over when they occurred. Furthermore, Hafbor was very careful, his eyes and groin were always guarded.
Rui needed a bit of luck for him to pull off a successful Blink-plus-Stinger combination. He needed to divert Hafbor’s guard and also hope for a blink to happen that he could then use to exploit and land a Stinger to his vitals.
The best thing for Rui to do was simply creating opportunities that he could exploit and hope for a timely blink.
It had taken a while, but it finally happened. And Rui didn’t hesitate to abuse the opening and inflict a critical injury on Hafbor.
Hafbor had managed to lessen the severity of the injury, despite being caught off-guard by the Blink. Yet, with half of his vision effectively gone, he didn’t have much leeway.
Rui had also managed to cripple his active defense because perception was necessary for his delicate redirection.
What followed was one-sided domination. Rui abused the blind spot he had created to pepper Hafbor with powerful strikes. With one side of his vision gone, Rui was able to land the Stinger a few more times.
Eventually, Hafbor collapsed.
“And what a shocking outcome!” The butler cried. “Apprentice Falken is the new defending champion of the Martial games!”
A round of applause erupted from the guests.
“Seriously.” One of the women around Nartha said. “Who is he?”
“He looks young. I bet he’s a real hottie under that mask.” Another chimed in.
“Congratulations Lady Freier, seems like you caught a big fish.”
“My.” Nartha smiled. “It seems I did indeed get a good one.”
As the guests bantered, Rui couldn’t help but think back to the fight. He felt uncomfortable by how few options he had had in his fight with Hafbor. The Stinger was supposed to be a trump card, but it had ended up his only path to victory.
This wasn’t the first time either. The same thing had had happened in the Martial Contest. He wouldn’t have been able to beat Ian without it, and he would have been able to hurt Fiona without it. Even in some of his hardest fights in preliminary contest. He needed the Stinger to win several of them.
That wasn’t necessarily bad, however, he was coming to realize that at the highest levels of the Martial Apprentice Realm, his techniques were starting to grow obsolete.
A lot of the times, he chose to incorporate the Stinger technique into his adapted fighting style not because it was the best possible technique for the job, but it was the best technique that he had. If he had a more diverse set of higher-end techniques, he would not be forced to be so over reliant on the Stinger.
The same could be said of Blink.
Blink, at the highest echelons of the Apprentice Realm, was no longer enough by itself. It required Rui to go out of his way to create special circumstances and hope that his opponent blinked, and only when they did could he actually use Blink confidently.
Both of these techniques lost a lot of their power once his opponent knew about them. By now everyone knew about these, or atleast the Martial Artists did. In a way, this made him weaker than he was before the preliminary contest.
Rui was not pleased about that. He had felt a certain degree of confidence in his prowess, but he soon realized that he needed to get stronger fast. He needed to be able to defeat the strongest of Martial Apprentices without going through a huge amount of strategic effort. Although his tactics and adaptive evolution were powerful, his techniques needed to support the VOID algorithm, not hold it back.
(‘The next training stage…’) He clenched his fist as a wave of determination flashed through him. He stared at his next opponent with sharp eyes.