('Well, what else is my Martial Art lacking at the moment, as far as fundamentals go?') Rui wondered.

Well, that was an easy question to answer. This wasn't quite like the later days of his Apprentice times when he had so many Martial Art techniques that it was exceedingly difficult to find a technique that wasn't redundant.

Now he had returned back to stage one, in a way, where he once more needed to fill the gaps in his Martial Art like he already had once upon a time.

('The only difference is the difficulty of this task is exponentially more difficult than it was before.') Rui sighed, yet he couldn't suppress the mild grin on his face no matter how hard he tried.

His attention returned back to the matter at hand as he pondered through what his Martial Art needed and could use.

('Lack of range is definitely one thing to consider.') Rui nodded.

When he was a Martial Apprentice, he had mastered the Tempestual Ripple technique, which allowed him to launch attacks a good distance away by manipulating the air into a dense ball which he then launched with a strike.

('How on Earth am I going to create a long-range technique from scratch?') Rui sighed.

The sheer difficulty of the task made it amply clear why the population of Martial Artists decreased across higher Realms.

('If it was easy, everybody would do it.') Rui chuckled cynically.

In this particular case, Rui suspected that it was probably better to modify existing techniques to suit him and his Martial Art better. It wasn't an absolute necessity that every technique he ended up mastering in the Squire Realm was something entirely brand-new that was purely constructed out of thin air without borrowing from any existing foundation. That was an extremely rare occurrence and a pointlessly impractical condition.

Rui estimated that less than one percent of techniques fell into that category. He didn't need to feel too self-conscious about borrowing from existing foundations as long as whatever he ended up creating satisfied the conditions he had already created for himself; synergetic, original, and unique, all to a certain degree.

('What would it mean for a long-range attack to be synergetic with me and my Martial Art?') Rui asked himself. If he wanted to make one that was synergetic with his Martial Art, he needed to understand what that statement or idea actually meant in a practical sense.

('It would be one that is most effective when paired with my strengths and one that isn't hampered by my shortcomings.') Rui noted.

Of course, this was still merely a very general statement, he needed to derive more specific conditions that the technique would need to fulfill.

('My timing and placement are excellent thanks to the VOID algorithm, Primordial Instinct, and the Mindmirror brain. This what makes my Martial Art powerful and high-grade') Rui noted. ('That means a technique with a great amount of power in exchange for an extremely high requirement for accurate and precise timing and placement would be the ideal.')

This was still a somewhat general statement, but it was something much more concrete to work on. He could take his time deriving more specific conditions until he eventually came up with a technique that suited those conditions perfectly.

('What kind of long-range technique would have an extremely high requirement for accuracy and precision?') Rui wondered.

However, the answer struck him the very instant he finished parsing that thought.

('The super-dee-duper long-range type.')

It sounded like a silly thought, but in reality, there was truth to be found in his words. He thought back to every action movie that featured snipers back on Earth. Sniping from a large distance was always portrayed as an extremely difficult feat that required nearly superhuman levels of accuracy and precision as well as a lot of aid from instruments that measured all kinds of environmental parameters.

Of course, Rui wasn't a moron, far from it. He was aware that action movies were nothing short of fiction. However, whatever he knew about marksmanship and sniping, it was at least close to the truth. The details didn't matter.

If one further extended that thought, there were even more extreme examples like an intercontinental ballistic missile. The sheer calculations that were performed by the launch and propulsion systems were so incredibly much that they surpassed human cognition. Not even Rui dared to think that he could perform the necessary calculations in the necessary amount of time in order for a successful launch and hit.This is property © .

Not yet, at least.

('My technique is going to be closer to the sniper analogy than an intercontinental ballistic missile.') Rui chuckled. At the Squire Realm, at least, he had no fathomable way of creating a technique rivaling missiles.

If he could find a way to tremendously increase the accuracy and longevity of his long-range attack at the cost of extremely high demand for accuracy and precision, then it would be worth considering without any shred of a doubt.

('Just how unbelievable will my long-range attacks become if I actually succeed?') Rui wondered as he clenched his fist, trying to contain the sheer amount of excitement he felt at the prospect. He began envisioning grand visions of him sniping away targets from unbelievably great distances.

He chalked out the plan a bit more as he considered various possibilities. He still hadn't decided on the nature of the long-range technique. It could be based on shockwaves, but it could also be based on other projectile systems. Hell, even lifting up a rock and throwing it could technically be considered a technique.

('I should probably stick to wind-based techniques. I already have a pretty good understanding of them thanks to all my experience with Tempestual Ripple. I ought to adapt it to the squire Realm while also modifying it so that it suits all of my needs.

The Tempestual Ripple was a somewhat generic, albeit powerful, technique centered around wind-based principles. What he intended to create, on the other hand, was something that wasn't necessarily more powerful in general, but something that was more powerful if it was in the hands of Rui.