"This is a map of the entire region." She pointed to a large map inscribed on a table. Surprisingly, most of the region was empty into a no man's land and forest, while there were several small states littered here and there.
In the center of the region was a small dot representing Crexeet town.
('That's unfortunate,') Rui noted the fact that the town at the center in a region with several states littered across it.
"We have a surveillance division comprised of Martial Artists and long-surveillance scopes operating throughout the day, all days," She said. "They inform us of any attacks ahead of time, we deploy Martial Artists and potion users to combat them ahead of time, to ensure that the conflict occurs well away from the town so that the townsfolks aren't any the wiser. If you possess the necessary sensory prowess, you can serve on the surveillance division if you wish to."
Rui probably had better senses than anybody in the town, and he was sure that he did not want to be part of the division. He had no interest in being perched in some hidden trench only to spend his day keeping an eye out. He would rather fight.
Kane, on the other hand, wouldn't mind joining the surveillance division, but he didn't have Rui's sensory prowess.
"I'll take the front lines," Rui immediately replied.
"As will I,"
"Alright then," She nodded. "You don't have to worry about hierarchy or position or anything of the sort. You will simply be given a set of orders and a few guidelines, and that's that."
This was probably to reduce mistakes due to lack of coordination. Since the military by design included external warriors, thus they could not have an overly sophisticated system. It needed to be simple and straightforward enough so that the temporary foreigners would be able to integrate well enough.
"You'll be part of a squad, however, there are no squad protocols or anything like that barring basic guidelines, you'll be moving independently, but the other members of the squad may also receive the same order simultaneously. You will be expected not to get in each other's way, at the very least."
She handed Rui and Kane small booklets containing some things that they needed to abide by.
Rui skimmed through the guidelines. He had to admit that they were quite liberal and basic. The department of defense had made sure not to go overboard in this regard.
"This is acceptable," Rui nodded.
"Did you read all of it that quickly?" She raised an eyebrow. "Then again given your scholarly feats, it's not that hard to believe."
"Is there anything else?" Rui asked.
"Here," She tossed them two devices. "You'll receive your instructions through that."
Soon enough, their meeting ended and the two of them left the department, heading back to their quarters in the institute.
"Finally," Kane heaved a sigh. "We can get started on training now."
Rui nodded. "You head back to your room, I intend to finally visit the libraries of the institute."
"Gotcha," Kane nodded. "Good luck."
The two of them split ways as Rui headed towards the library wing, quickly making his way through security with his newly administered high-clearance library pass.
The second he walked in, the multiple students inside stared at him with intense stares. He sighed inwardly before checking out the library.
It was extremely well-organized and neat, not to mention incredibly vast. Rui couldn't even imagine the sheer amount of information that was stored inside. He felt a strange curiosity as to whether he would be able to store all this information inside his Mind Palace in the first place. It was a seemingly impossible task, after all.
He shook his head as he headed towards the applied esoteric material science section. Most of the literature in the institute was contextualized in regard to Martial Art since that was what the institute's research was centered around.
That was preferable to Rui, it meant that he didn't need to spend extra effort into pruning out data that wasn't relevant to Martial Art.
His goal was quite simple, he was looking for a substance that could generate electricity that could also be integrated into the Martial Body.
For now, his work simply entailed going over the literature bit by bit. He knew that this wasn't going to take a short amount of time. He recalled how much time it took to research esoteric substances for his Riemannian Echo. It took more than half a year to create that technique.
The esoteric material science was thankfully only a portion of the entirety of the library. However, he still needed to go through an immense amount of literature to find what he was looking for.
As for whether it existed or not, he didn't have any doubts about that. The reason for that was simple. The sheer variety of esoteric substances that he had seen, and what they were capable of made him think that there was far too high a chance for there to be an esoteric substance that could generate electricity.
Much to his convenience, the esoteric material science section of the library was further divided into a variety of categories across different kinds of categorization. This was something that he had learned while studying for the exam, and it allowed him to skim through exactly what he wanted.
[Esoteric Phenomena and Lightning]
A simple low-level book that allowed him to get started on the subject and topic. From this, he could branch out in certain directions that seemed more promising than others, and systematically explore every topic that he came across.
Because esoteric material science was a largely data-driven and empirical field of science, it meant that it wasn't something he could fly by just by thinking about it really hard, most of the work was going to be centered around pouring over data scrupulously while compiling and organizing each time he filtered away at it.
('This is going to take a while.')
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