The Martial Unity

"What?!" Kane almost whispered as he glanced back at the new floor.

The ceiling of the floor was strangely lit up, as it usually was. There wasn't much he could see on the ground due to the high density of esoteric resources that obscured his vision greatly.

"There's no mistaking it. They're human beings. Some even have clothes on that are clearly man-made," Rui murmured, his eyes lost as he focused on his Riemannian Echo. "They're not Martial Artists, I highly doubt that they are. Besides, that's not all there is. This place is unbelievable. We need to get to the bottom of this."

He turned towards Kane. "You're up. It's time for us to vanish."

Kane nodded as he put a hand on Rui's shoulder as they began sky-walking down, vanishing into thin air.

STEP 𝒃𝙚𝒅𝒏𝙤𝙫𝒆𝒍．𝙘𝒐𝙢

They reached the ground, looking around vigilantly as they walked forward in the direction that Rui directed them in.

"You said that's not all there was," Kane turned to Rui with a mixture of interest and concern. "What else is there?"

Rui didn't reply, instead choosing to gesture forward.

Kane frowned as he turned forward squinting as a large object made its way into his hampered field of vision. Yet it wasn't until after he actually realized what it was, that his eyes widened with complete shock.

"Is that a… building?!" Kane raised his voice.

"Ssshh!" Rui told him to quiet down but nodded anyway. "You're right."

"That's insane!" Kane couldn't believe that he would run into a building on an undiscovered floor in the Shionel Dungeon.

It was already a shock that there were non-Martial Artist humans on the floor, but to think that they were creating buildings? Inside a dangerous floor that had yet to be cleared? That was on another level of unbelievable.

The building wasn't particularly large, it was just a small single-story house, from the looks of it. Furthermore, its condition was extremely poor as he identified several places of collapse. It was hardly habitable, if at all.

Still, that did not change how absurd the notion of a house inside an uncleared dungeon floor was.

"Don't shout," Rui urged. "You might attract their attention."

"Their? The humans? If they're alive we ought to help them. The least we could do is inform the Shionel Adventurer Guild. Why don't you want to attract their attention?"

"It's better if I show you," Rui sighed as they walked forward.

"Show me wha-!" He underwent his umpteenth shock for the day as he beheld a strange creature that entered his field of vision.

No, not a creature.

It was human, but it may as well have been a creature.

The skin across her bare body was a sickly black from head to toe, just like the corpse that they had encountered. Yet she wasn't dead. She was very clearly alive. Her eyes were blackened too, where they should have been white.

"What the fuck." Kane couldn't help but whisper. He didn't even care that she wasn't a Martial Artist, he was not undoing Void Step. He could feel a sense of threat to him regardless of the fact that she wasn't a Martial Squire.

Her body retained its human figure even though her skin had taken a sickly black creature that made her look like a walking corpse, her skeletal and muscular structure had remained unchanged. Her flesh too had retained normal human features, as did various features like her face, hair, and secondary sexual features and characteristics. It just appeared as though she had been rotting from the inside, rather than the outside.

Kane abandoned any thought of trying to communicate with the humans. It was very evident that such a thing was not going to work out.

"She's mindless, almost like a monster," Rui confirmed his own thoughts. "Dilated pupils, incoherent noises, lack of awareness of surroundings or even self-awareness."

The two of them watched speechless as she aimlessly seemed to wander about without purpose. It was clear that she had no conscious cognition of the world around her. From what Rui could see, she was not operating on even a primal instinct or drive. Her movements were slow and lazy, as she was dragging herself forward.

"What the hell is going on here Rui?" Kane asked, disturbed by what he saw. "What is that? Is that the same as the corpse we ran into? Was that man also like her? Are they all like her? Where in the world did the buildings come from if these people are all mindless? No, where in the world did these people come from? Are they monsters that deeply resemble humans? Is that it? Is that why they're unaffected by the psychological pressure?"

Kane had so many questions that he had no idea where to begin. He was witnessing multiple impossibilities unfold right before his very eyes!

He had no idea how to even begin approaching analyzing such a thing.

"Calm down," Rui told him with a composed voice, yet even his expression was very severe and grim. "Let's gather as much information as we can before we make sense of this. There's no point in trying to force ourselves to make do with less information."

Rui already had some thoughts on the matter, but he refused to voice them until he was at least less incredulous about them. It felt far too absurd to voice out what he was thinking.

"…You're right," He sighed.

They ignored her as they proceeded forward, exploring this strange new floor. The two of them ran across multiple buildings and even road-like pathways between them. Most of the buildings were homes, they were all extremely damaged with many being reduced to complete rubble.

Rui's eyes widened as he came across some normal human corpses in some of them. "These aren't sickly black like the others. It's rotting the same way a normal corpse does."

It looked to be about a year old and the corpse had largely deformed and the skeleton was visible.