"You feeling better?" Rui asked.
Karura nodded as she finished consuming her rejuvenation potion. When she had collapsed, the match had ended and a team of paramedics had immediately rushed to the ring and had administered a healing potion to her.
"Glad to hear that." Rui replied.
He said as he extended an open hand out to her, which she promptly accepted, standing up. "Good fight, you're incredibly strong."
"You're quite good yourself." Rui replied.
"Hmph." She snorted mildly. "That's not very convincing coming from someone who defeated me with a single attack."
"I mean it." Rui scratched his cheek awkwardly. "I won because I exploited a weakness in your battle approach."
"Weakness?" She squinted her eyes with curiosity.
Rui nodded. "In exchange for being formidable at super-close-range combat, the natural and obvious weakness that your fighting style has is that you cannot fight well outside super-close-combat."
"Wait." She frowned. "I never told you that I was close-range fighter, how did you figure that."
He looked at her like she was dumb. "Because it was obvious after analyzing your stance."
"..."
"Anyway." He continued. "I could tell that your tried to compensate for this weakness by boosting your maneuvering capabilities so that you could chase down your opponents outside your striking range."
"..."
"That's not a bad solution, but is insufficient and doesn't truly address your shortcoming. It can be dealt with the way I dealt with it. Instead of running away, I turned and charged straight at you, we both attacked at the same time, yet my attack landed first." He paused, before asking. "Why is that?"
"Because you have greater range." She finally understood.
"That's right." Rui nodded. "As long as my attacks have greater range, I can always ensure you are unable to attack me, by attacking you before you are close enough to strike me. That is why chasing people is not a real solution. You'll just be barricaded and restricted to a distance by attacks with greater range than yours."
"Then what do I do?" She sighed with frustration. Rui could tell this was problem that had been bugging her for a while.
"I cannot tell you what to do, though I could give you some suggestions."
She nodded vigorously. "Please do."
"Not all strikes can be used to keep you at a distance." Rui said. "Only attacks with significantly greater range than your attacks can be effectively used to keep you at a distance. Things like hooks or short jabs are too short, your opponents can only really keep you out of range with straight punches and kicks. This can be exploited."
"How does that help me?" She frowned, not understanding.
"I wouldn't be surprised if the maneuvering section of the library has Apprentice-level techniques that allow the user to evade straight attacks and close the distance between the user and their opponent." Rui mentioned. "If you can find techniques like that, you better purchase and master them. Also, I wouldn't be surprised if the offense section of the Apprentice library has techniques that are specifically meant to inflict damage on strikes and attacks optimally. Thus, every time they attack you to push you out of range, their limbs endure damage. Something like that could also work." He said.
She grew engrossed as she realized the solutions he considered 'suggestions' could be the key to erasing the range weakness of her Martial Art. "Thank you for your suggestion! I'll take that into consideration." She said as she rushed to the Apprentice library.
Rui chuckled at her retreating form.
* * * * * * * * * *
A week had passed by, Rui had finally accrued enough experience with the technique he had recently learnt. He had spent the entire week testing the techniques against different types of Martial Art with different ranges, different specializations in regards to fields, Martial Art centered around different principles, mechanics and systems.
He had gone onto make several adjustments to the way he used certain techniques. He had optimized the way he used Outer Convergence and Inner Divergence, though those were the easy parts. What he had trouble with was optimizing his application of Blink.
For one, he had already resolved not to reveal his mastery of this technique to the students of the Academy. Which meant he could not test his application of the technique against his peers and competitors in the Martial Festival.
Fortunately, he had managed to find a solution. He had trained with his former Apprentice supervisors from back when he was merely a student in the Explorer Stage.
He could have chosen to train with the Martial Squires, but had ultimately decided against that. As helpful, knowledgeable and experienced as they were, they were simply far too strong on a fundamental level to be of use and to be able to provide what he was looking for.
Martial Squires seemed to live and view the world on a fundamentally different level of speed and time. Blink was an Apprentice-level technique that was wholly ineffective against Martial Squires no matter how much they held back. At the very least his remaining Apprentice-level techniques were such that as long as the Martial Squires held back most of their power and reduced their combat prowess to the Apprentice Realm. But the same was not true for Blink, it simply would not work against them no matter what they did.
In comparison, the Martial Apprentice instructors were susceptible to the technique. All of the instructors he had approached had readily agreed to help him out even though mentoring and sparring with Martial Apprentice students was well outside their purview. Rui had an extremely good reputation among the staff of the education department, and was what many would consider the ideal student.
After long periods of training with them, he had finally reached a satisfactory level of comfort and practical real-world proficiency with techniques he had learnt.
With that out of the way. He had completed all the agendas that were holding him back from the next stage of mission completion.
