Chapter 1398: Range

The disguise technique was quite new, unexplored territory regarding techniques as far as Rui was concerned. The triggering mechanism was something that he had delved into before, but the actual techniques themselves were quite unlike anything Rui had learned before.

He had never heard of a skull-altering disguise technique before. Nor had he heard of disguise techniques that allowed one to completely impersonate another person without any problems.

That was why he was rather certain that most of these principles were probably something that Master Reina had developed herself over her long career as the Silent Shadow.

With such a powerful technique, he couldn't imagine just how many extraordinarily well-protected people she had managed to successfully assassinate. The numbers surely had entered the quintuple digits by this point.

Just thinking about it left Rui in awe.

"Can I ask you something?" He said to her out of the blue.

"Can you?"

"Why did you retire?" Rui wondered. "I doubt it was because your ability had deteriorated and I bet there are countless people who are willing to pay a lot of money to commission your services."

She paused from the book she was reading, glancing back at him. "Well, if you must know, I got bored."

"Is that all?"

"Well, you try doing something for centuries and not get bored." She snorted.

"Hm." Rui could understand the sentiment, but he got the feeling that she was hiding something. Regardless, he didn't pry. If she cared to reveal the truth, she would in time. It wasn't that big a deal even if she didn't.

Time passed as he dedicated his time to training.

In addition to the disguise technique, he was also working on two additional techniques. The misdirection technique and the close-range assassination technique.

He had refused help from the Silent Shadow because he was sure that he could do something about it on his own. He had even developed his own ideas for it when he was mastering Death's Sympathy.

A close-range version of Death's Sympathy was definitely a good idea. Although he could technically use the long-range version at any range, it was impractical at close range due to the time it needed to be launched compared to close-range attacks and the inefficiency of the attack compared to close-range attacks.

In exchange for vast range, long-range attacks were generally less efficient than close-range attacks and less powerful. The reason for that was the fact that long-range attacks generally relied on a medium to inflict attacks through, namely the atmosphere, there was inevitably some proportion of energy loss from generating an attack through the atmosphere compared to if that same power had been directly inflicted on the opponent.

In this case, of course, the power didn't really matter too much since the whole point of Death's Sympathy was inflicting damage to an extremely vital organ such as the brain, which was so delicate that it did not take much power to kill the target.

Rui had considered the possibility of relying on Reverberating Lance to generate the resonance frequencies needed to bypass exterior defenses and strike an extremely vital organ.

Reverberating Lance had never been able to generate sound back in the Squire Realm, but he hadn't tried doing so in the Senior Realm yet.

BADUMP!

He activated a breathing technique along with the Martial Heart. An immense wave of power encompassed his entire body, invigorating all of it. The Martial Heart empowered the Martial Art rather than the Martial Body, for it was the Martial Art that actually unearths the Martial Heart and squeezes out the potential energy from deep within the body.

This meant that only the parts of the body being employed in a Martial Art technique would be empowered by the Martial Heart. Of course, thanks to breathing techniques in passive defensive techniques, the entirety of the body was under the influence of the Martial Heart when activated.

However, for this technique, Rui was only interested in his arm.

He began vibrating his arm back and forth, and immediately, the Martial Heart aided him, increasing the vibration frequency and the oscillating speed to far greater heights.

VMMMM!

A smooth yet loud humming sound arose from the Reverberating Lance as it seemed as though Rui had two right arms that largely overlapped with each other. He glanced up at a target that was uniformly made up of a certain Senior-level alloy, before launching a powerful attack.

VMMMM!

The impact was heavy, but most of the momentum was permeated away straight through the target without resistance.

"Wow," Rui murmured.

The principle of sympathetic resonance was extremely compatible with the principles of Reverberating Lance. The two were a match made in heaven and had great synergy with each other.

"It's a shame that this isn't a combat-oriented technique in the first place." Rui sighed.

It took him days, along with the help of a musician to figure out what his target's multiple innate resonance frequencies were. This was not something he could accomplish in the middle of a fight, within the fight.

However, it was a great assassination technique. All he had to do was begin mastering the pitch of the Reverberating Lance the way he had mastered it for the Mighty Roar Flash Blast, and then he would be able to precisely target the innate resonance frequencies through the technique, allowing him to assassinate his target in close-range with no imperfections.

The best about this project was that its success was all but guaranteed because he was relying on principles that had been proven to be effective and were well within his comfort zone, what he was really doing was making the best out of the available resources.

With this technique, he would be deadly at all ranges as an assassin. Even those assassinations that he was unable to accomplish at long range due to power and sensing constraints could be easily executed at close range with this technique. It reduced the prospects of his target surviving an assassination attempt from himself.

'Including Chairman Deacon.' Rui narrowed his eyes.