"Sir, I think I may have found the perfect candidate," Stemple announced, exhausted. "The K'ulnen Tribe. A Martial tribe centered around close-quarters combat, mostly focusing on striking. They have a warmongering culture, as expected. And they are very touchy about their hunting territory. They are a good distance away with no other Martial Tribe territory butting in."
"Hm…" Rui considered the suggestion.
The diplomatic team's eyes lit up at this sight.
"You might actually be right," Rui murmured. "Furthermore, one of the Martial Tribes that they are in conflict with at the moment is the G'ak'arkan Tribe. It's a very direct measure of the performance of our techniques. There is no clearer perspective to offer them."
"Then…" Stemple peered at Rui with hope.
"Everybody double-checks everybody's work, make sure we have not missed anything," Rui announced. "I'll go through it myself as well."
The diplomatic team spent an entire week making sure there was nothing wrong at all.
While the diplomats of the Martial Union were fleshing out their plans, the G'ak'arkan Tribe had their own things to consider.
"Sir, we received reports from one of our scouts regarding one of their hunting sessions," K'Mala patiently explained to the chieftain of her tribe.
"And…" N'kulu asked, raising an eyebrow.
"The same as the previous one," K'Mala sighed with a hint of admiration. "Their techniques allow them to strike down Dusk Eagles with a single attack, all while on the ground, never having sky-walked into the air. These were all from Martial Artists of the second rank."
"What…?" K'ahru was the most surprised out of all of them. "Impossible! Martial Artists of the second rank should not be able to do that."
"And yet…" K'Mala followed up with a smirk. "They are clearly capable unless you think the scouts were daydreaming."
The two bickered back and forth until N'Kulu intervened.
"Enough…" He raised a hand, silencing the two immediately.
"What should we do, chief?" K'ahru sighed.
"Nothing," N'kulu replied straightforwardly.
"Huh?"
"They are simply hunting game within their territory," N'Kulu calmly recognized. "While this has led to interesting discoveries. That's all that is."
"It also gives their claims of their own techniques more merit." K'Mala pointed.
"It's just one or two techniques in the second rank. That's far from enough from being able to chase after all of our techniques!" K'ahru snarled.
"Neither of you is wrong. K'Mala, you're correct in saying their claims of their own prowess are more credible, however, K'ahru is also correct that this in and of itself is far from enough for possessing the merit to exchange all of our Martial Art in an equal manner," N'Kulu pointed out. "For now, nothing has changed. My ultimatum still stands."
His eyes grew narrower as his aura grew more perilous. "We will destroy them should they cross the line."
The G'ak'arkan Tribe was content with observing the Martial Union settlement while it was constructed. The Martial Union, on the other hand, ironically didn't have any time or leeway for the G'ak'arkan Tribe at the moment.
For now, the construction was still underway, and Rui had been concretely fleshing out the various potential plans for provoking them to trigger a conflict.
He needed to carefully measure how much aggression the Martial Union could show, by looking at the responses to such aggression displayed by other Martial tribes to their target the K'ulnen Tribe. By looking at how vehemently the G'ak'arkan Tribe responded to certain kinds of provocations or slights against the Martial Tribe.
"Kidnapping some of their women is a big no-no," Rui murmured as he scoured through the documented history and the second-hand intelligence gathered from the other Martial tribes and such.
Another Martial tribe had once done such a thing to have more women to increase the birth rates of their tribe, and the K'ulnen Tribe had dropped all conflicts with the other Martial tribes in a heartbeat and had deployed all of their forces against the offending Martial tribe to retrieve their women.
"Infringing on their hunting territory and airspace are much less severe slights against the tribe in their eyes,"
This led to parties present at the time of the infringement to escalate the situation and get into a fight. It also caused more frequent clashes between the two sides.
"Stray attacks in their direction are declarations of war and will be treated as such. Also, infringing on their water source the Challan River is a pretty serious slight against them too. Perhaps this wasn't at the level of all-out war despite water supplies being very important because rivers were not confined to one location.
"Spats between human-level conflicts aren't that big a deal," Rui shrugged as he read through how human-level conflicts happened even without the knowledge and authorization of the higher-ups of Martial tribes.
Apparently, these conflicts were so inconsequential to the big picture that all of the martial tribes let all of it slide, they could not be bothered and even viewed it as a good thing given their warmongering nature.
"Hm, this is starting to become more transparent,"
Rui had become increasingly clear regarding exactly what buttons he could press and what lines he ought to cross in order to trigger an initially mild conflict that would go on to escalate just at the pacing that Rui wanted it to.
He intended to take his time with Apprentice-level conflicts, followed by more serious Martial Squire conflicts.
Maybe the Martial Union could really cross the line and abduct some women of the K'ulnen just to piss them off enough to deploy their Martial Seniors so that they could display the prowess of their Martial Senior versus Martial Seniors that were native to the island.
"I bet Senior Ceeran would have no issue with that whatsoever," Rui chuckled.
Of course, Rui did not intend to toss him into combat with many martial Seniors only for the man to very likely die. That would ruin not only the mission but also Rui's career in the process.
