Rui gritted his teeth as he repositioned his mangled body and closed off wounds with other parts of his body, preventing blood loss from debilitating him any further. Final Breathing minimized his energy and nutrition requirements, giving a bit of ammunition to his evolved healing factor, which furiously began working again to prevent his body from tending toward death.
Wounds clotted soon after, as his healing factor began focusing on stabilizing the most vital organs.
If even a single one of them failed, the probability of death rose exponentially. The bones, muscles, and damaged flesh were less important compared to them, and far down the list of priorities that his body had at the moment.
Fortunately, a trend of positive developments had slowly begun. It took an hour, but slowly, his internal organ systems had reached a point where they wouldn't plummet any time soon.
Soon, his healing factor began focusing on secondary interests as it began the healing of flesh, bones, and muscles.
Unfortunately, the degree to which they had been damaged was beyond the abilities of even his evolved healing factor. He would not be able to heal completely with it alone.
However, what he really needed was to gain enough stability, and control to ensure that he could regain the ability to operate his dimensional ring and summon his healing potion.
That took much longer. His healing factor was good at performing the most essential of first aid rather swiftly, but more healing required more time.
It wasn't three hours after initially falling out that he finally tried to reach for his dimensional ring.
The very effort of the action caused him blinding pain. He felt as though he couldn't even think, of how much it hurt to move.
WOOP
He managed to operate his dimensional ring after immense perseverance.
The vial of potion fell to the ground underneath his hand. He wasn't concerned with the potion breaking, but bringing the vial to his face was another pain.
CLICK
He released the potion in its depressurized gaseous state, deeply inhaling. He could feel the potion coursing through his blood as he took a deep breath in, swimming across his entire body as it restored tissue.
Unlike normal, he wasn't fixed in a few seconds. Despite working alongside his normal healing factor, it was a few minutes before he finally no longer resembled a meat sack.
He had endured so much damage, that even the healing was tremendously painful as his bones were pushed back into place by his mending muscles and flesh.
"Oh god…" Rui gasped for air as he finally undid his Final Breathing technique after five minutes of accelerated healing. He struggled to get up, feeling extremely weak. He had abused the Forestep technique, which meant that he had shed a lot of body mass. His healing had almost no ammunition and instead began drawing from his health.
His body had become much thinner as if he was malnourished.
Which he was.
"Ugh…" He groaned as he struggled to get up.
At that moment, he felt so weak that he wouldn't be surprised if even a Martial Apprentice could defeat him.
He turned, facing the Root. Although he could still sense it with Riemannian Echo, he hadn't had time to care about the Root when his own body was failing, approaching death. It was only now that he finally could afford to pay attention to anything but himself.
The Root had completely dropped, as had all the roots. Rui wasn't sure whether or not they were dead, but they were clearly incapacitated.
"Huh…" he shrugged weakly. "That actually worked. Crazy."
He knew that he couldn't hurt the Root with his own power. It was absolutely impossible. But if he could get the Root to hurt itself, then that would solve everything. But, of course, like Kane had reminded him. The Senior level Mind Mask drew roots to himself, he did not have the ability to control the roots and direct it to his opponent.
That was why Kane had thought that the trick he had used in the Serevian Dungeon would be useless here.
It was only Rui who considered the idea that perhaps it was possible to direct the roots towards himself, but hit his opponent instead. It sounded absurd, but became possible if Rui was inside his opponent.
Normally, that, too, was an absurd notion, but in this case, his opponent was more than big enough for the unthinkable to be possible.
The only issue was that there was a good chance that he would be chewed to hell, which is why he had spent months observing the force with which the Root broke down esoteric ore deposits.
It was definitely far from sake, and could easily kill him if he made even a slight inaccuracy, let alone an actual mistake.
After months of visual preparation of the measures to take to prevent getting chewed to death, he was finally ready to take the plunge.
('It was still worse than I had anticipated,') Rui sighed. He had truly come close to the brink of death at several moments because he had underestimated the damage he would suffer. If not for luck and his enhanced healing factor, it may very well have been game over.
('I guess… I've won?') He scratched his head as he took his time burning the memory of the impaled Root. The sheer amount of biomatter that had escaped it with the many boring holes across its body.
He could say with certainty that this was by far the greatest achievement of his entire life. To think he would not only take the Root head-on but also successfully keep up and even defeat the Root, a quasi-Senior level being, as a Martial Squire, was something that he certainly had the right to be proud of.
He turned around as he swept his Riemannian Echo across the entire floor as a standard safety check, when he suddenly froze, growing pale.
"There's… one less corpse than there was!"
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