"What is happening?" Rui murmured subconsciously with a bewildered expression. His sharp senses strained themselves to the limit as he did his best to get a good view of what was happening.
So many of the things that he had witnessed from the very start of the battle had flummoxed him, he wouldn't even know where to begin had someone asked him what was wrong.
Normally, he shouldn't have been able to even perceive what was happening. Martial Seniors were exponentially faster than Martial Squires, or at least, the two Martial Seniors who were currently fighting most definitely were.
The Matriarch of the K'ulnen Tribe was moving so fast that both her clothes and the air caught on fire due to the friction caused by drag. However, Rui knew that only rockets moving at dozens of times the speed of sound generated such a degree of friction due to their speed!
It was a level of speed that he could only dream of achieving. Not even Kane with the Squire-level version of the Godspeed technique could hold a candle to it, Rui suspected.
The reason he, and other Martial Squires, were able to perceive the battle at all was because of the size of the attacks and techniques that each Martial Senior was using, and also due to the distance away from which they were spectating the battle.
The further away an observer, and the larger the size of the event one was perceiving, the easier it was to perceive extremely rapid events.
This was due to the fact that at great distances away, the field of vision covered a massive area, which meant that despite the fact that the Martial Seniors were engaging in attacks and maneuvers that crossed massive distances in seconds, they still did not exceed the boundary of the field of vision of the spectating Martial Squires, allowing them to barely keep up with the battle, even if incompletely.
It was the same reason that ordinary humans could perceive a rocket take-off despite the fact that they moved at Mach twenty-three, or the same reason that humans had no trouble perceiving the moon despite the fact that the moon was moving at supersonic speeds.
Size and distance mattered. Many of the techniques that the Martial Seniors were using definitely had the latter.
He was shocked when Senior Ceeran breathed what looked to be a dark-colored opaque gas, but once he realized that it was an enormous volume of gas that was highly condensed, his mind was boggled.
He gritted his teeth as he pushed back against the force of the air currents that the mere presence of the temporarily-solidified dense gas had created. Wind currents naturally emerged flowing from high-pressure areas of air to low-pressure areas. The side-effect wind currents that were created from Senior Ceeran's opaque breath were so powerful that Rui had to exert himself to a little degree to prevent himself from being blown away despite the gigantic distance he was from them.
When Senior Ceeran harnessed those wind currents and directed them at his opponent along with his breath, the scale and power of the attack were greater than Rui had ever seen before in his entire life. That attack alone would easily destroy both the Martial Union settlement and the K'ulnen village many times over.
That was why Rui had grown even more shocked when, in the face of such a shockingly fast and powerful attack, the matriarch of the K'ulnen village casually ignited and blasted away a huge volume of the atmosphere, generating an immense amount of accelerating via Newton's third law of motion, evading the attack at the last moment.
She was literally a rocket in human form!
Senior Ceeran was like a tactical homing nuke launcher in human form!
"I see... so Martial Seniors are no different from superweapons disguised in human flesh!" Rui laughed weakly. "I wonder if that has something to do with the glowing thin red tattoos that they both have on their bodies.
Rui would have to be as blind as a bat if he missed that incredibly peculiar feature that the bodies of both Martial Seniors had come to bear. He hadn't even the faintest idea what they were, and how they were related to the Senior Realm, if at all. But he noted that both Martial Seniors had grown much more powerful since they appeared on their body. They resembled volcanoes in Rui's eyes.
('They're not much weaker than volcanoes, if at all!')
Rui watched the ensuing battle like a hawk as the two mighty Martial Artists clashed against each other violently. The battle between them had stabilized into a pattern, reaching an equilibrium.
The Matriarch of the K'ulnen Tribe, despite her magical techniques, was clearly a Martial Artist whose Martial Path was centered around speed and agility, as opposed to power and toughness.
She had yet to land a strike on Senior Ceeran, who expertly foiled all of her attempts to get close to him so she could pummel him into bits.
('The fact that she's content evading all of Senior Ceeran's attacks instead of clashing against them with her own indicates that she most likely is not a power-oriented striker,') Rui analyzed the battle as he calmed his beating heart.
The battle began morphing into the most common model and template for battles between long-range and close-quarters Martial Artists. Though, there were clear differences. Rui recalled that Senior Ceeran's Martial Path was post-launch trajectory manipulation, allowing him to alter the trajectories of his attacks even after they had long been launched. Rui got to witness exactly what this looked like. In the distance, dozens of infernos rapidly extended across the sky for a dozen kilometers in every direction, all before Rui could even react to a single one of them.
The matriarch of the K'ulnen Tribe danced across the clouds as she was pursued by dozens of homing projectiles. While Senior Ceeran continued launching an increasing number of attacks at a pace that was invisibly fast even to Rui's eyes.
The battle only continued to get more serious.
