The battle transformed.
Up until this point, the fight had largely focused on two incredibly powerful awakened testing one another through direct combat, exchanging techniques, probing weaknesses, and analyzing capabilities.
Or rather, only one of them was doing that. Jaune could multitask pretty well, but there were limits to what he could do. There was only so much that he could analyze in a single instant while fighting his father. The truth of the matter was, allowing Gula to take over the battle, would allow Jaune to directly utilize more of his brainpower in order to think of a way to condense a rune that could counter his father.
A Delegation of Resources.
The battlefield itself began to change beneath their feet. The moment Gula received Jaune's command, its stalker's form twisted unnaturally and attacked.
Six spear-tipped arms lashed outward simultaneously.
The attacks did not follow any conventional martial art. They did not even follow movements that a human body should have been capable of performing. One spear thrust forward only for the limb to suddenly unravel into a writhing tendril of shadow halfway through the attack. Another arm split into dozens of smaller appendages that twisted around one another before converging upon Nicholas from multiple angles. A third transformed into a massive clawed limb large enough to crush a truck.
Tiny needles formed from condensed shadow runic energy constantly erupted from Gula's body, aiming for lethal strikes and disruption. Every needle sought to alter footing, interrupt momentum, obscure vision, or force Nicholas into less favorable positions.
The battlefield became increasingly hostile.
Gula's lower body liquefied into darkness before elongating into a serpentine shape that surged across the desert with terrifying speed. The creature lunged forward and its arms expanded, growing larger and larger until gigantic claws descended from above.
Sand exploded upwards and entire dunes were torn apart. The scorching desert became flooded with shadow.
Dark pools spread outward in every direction as runic energy seeped into the terrain itself. The shadows were not merely darkness. They were extensions of Gula's body, extensions of its perception and power. Every second that passed increased the creature's influence over the battlefield.
Yet none of it seemed to matter as Nicholas continued moving with perfect efficiency. Every attack appeared to arrive moments after he had already decided where he would stand.
Every tendril missed by fractions of an inch and every claw struck empty air.
Every attack found nothing.
Watching him fight felt odd. The movements he was performing possessed an unsettling inevitability.
Foresight was a terrifying rune.
Perhaps for another awakened, it acted as a simple warning system or perhaps a heightened instinct that provided glimpses of danger.
Nicholas Arc's version was far more developed than that. After the interaction with Knowledge, his foresight did not merely warn him about attacks but showed him futures and presented possibilities.
It guided his body through those possibilities with an effortless grace that bordered on omniscience.
Gula attacked with increasingly elaborate combinations but Nicholas simply wasn't there. And whenever an attack finally reached him...
Something even stranger occurred.
Jaune's eyes narrowed as he analyzed the ability.
He had already noticed the phenomenon several times throughout the fight. Any attacks that his father couldn't block, he would simply destroy. He didn't bother creating his time-frozen walls of air anymore.
Instead, he would simply reach out and his hand would pass through the attack. Then, reality would change.
A multitude of Gula's shadow needles lunged toward Nicholas's throat but the man casually swept a hand through it and the needles froze.
Conceptually.
The movement flattened and the attack compressed as space folded inward. A moment later, Nicholas was holding something that resembled a pane of translucent glass. And within that glass existed the frozen image of the attack.
The shadow needles that remained visible inside it.
Locked forever in motion. A preserved instant and a frozen moment, akin to a painting. Nicholas examined it thoughtfully before tossing it aside.
The glass drifted downward and embedded itself within the sand.
Jaune watched silently even as his mind raced
'He's actively showing his capabilities to me when he doesn't need to. That settles it. There's definitely something that my dad is trying to do here. I just need to defeat him and find out what.'
In any case, attacks that were being turned into frozen moments in time. A painting of reality that would forever be preserved in two dimensions.
Or more likely whenever his father's aura ran out. Regardless, the implications were absurd. Time was not merely being used to stop or regress things. His father was interacting with causality itself and converting actions into artifacts.
Transforming events into objects. Gula retreated several meters. The stalker's eyes watched Nicholas warily.
For the first time since the battle had begun, there was caution in its posture. Nicholas glanced between the creature and Jaune before smiling.
"You've come very far, Jaune. Oh... and you too, little stalker."
His tone carried genuine approval. There was no mockery or condescension. Only honest acknowledgement.
"You possess far more versatility than you once did. Truly, you could be called one of the strongest among your Rank."
He slowly rotated one of the frozen glass paintings in his hand.
"Even a Rank 2 standing at the Half-Step of Rank 3 would struggle immensely against you."
Within Jaune's mind, Gula's voice appeared.
'Injuries are getting worse. Substitute now?'
Jaune could feel it as well. The Masochism rune was empowering him, but his body was accumulating damage faster than he could ignore it.
Blood continued dripping from numerous wounds and several bones remained fractured. His organs were also certainly not in ideal condition.
Yet he disagreed.
'Not yet. I still need to test Reflect.'
The stalker hesitated then sighed dramatically in his mind. Even mentally, Gula somehow managed to sound annoyed.
'We're running out of runes, Jaune. And none of them are particularly working.'
'We still have a few. And besides, we need to catch him in Transpose, before anything else.'
'Fine.'
A brief pause followed.
Then Gula spoke more quietly to Jaune in his mind. '
Surely by now you've gathered enough to make...'
'No. It's still not enough.'
The answer came instantly. Firm and sbsolute.
'It's still missing something.'
Jaune clenched a proverbial fist in his own mind as his gaze sharpened.
'I can feel it. But...'
The understanding lingered just beyond his reach. Close enough to touch and close enough to taste, yet still incomplete.
All the pieces existed but they simply refused to fit together.
Gula immediately understood.
'Soul.'
Jaune nodded internally. 'That's the missing component.'
Silence followed, then Gula sighed again. "Wonderful. We only need the most complicated thing imaginable."
'Don't worry about it. Just keep fighting. And let Masochism build a little further. We only have about a minute left before the rune disappears, anyhow and... I think there's a new possibility for rune synchronicity that we can use with Masochism.'
The stalker immediately understood the plan. Moments later, the desert exploded into chaos. Every shadow pool scattered throughout the battlefield erupted simultaneously as dark forms climbed from the depths.
Then more appeared. And more and more and more.
Hundreds.
The landscape became flooded with creatures born from the interaction between two separate runes.
Minion and Shadow.
Rune synchronicity.
Jaune had spent months exploring combinations such as these. Months hunting and experimenting as well as learning. His first objective had been straightforward. Reach Peak Rank 2. Ordinarily that would have required a bit of time.
Rank 2 Grimm were vastly more dangerous than their lower-ranked counterparts as they possessed powerful runes and unique abilities that were native to their physical biology.
There were also countless dangerous variations not to mention that almost all of them were gigantic building sized entities. Yet Jaune had still achieved the feat at unprecedented speed.
The reason was simple.
Plunder.
Few abilities in existence were more unfair. Jaune could steal thoughts, runic energy and even a little bit of strength.
And... one extra aspect about Plunder's thought stealing capability was that Jaune could also steal a small part of the comprehension that a person had over their runes.
Against Grimm, it was devastating. Entire battles became one-sided slaughters as the creatures literally lost power while fighting him.
Many never even realized what was happening before they died. The true challenge had never been growing stronger.
The true challenge had been creating something new. A rune capable of opposing Time.
He had tested countless concepts.
Severing.
Border.
Fire.
Lightning.
Dozens more.
But every attempt was deemed as a failure. Because ordinary runes could not challenge a meta rune of that magnitude.
Time existed on an entirely different level. Even normal meta runes didn't stand a chance against it. To oppose it required something equivalent.
Something fundamental and something worthy of being called an unprecedented meta rune.
Which had led Jaune to his second objective.
Experience.
He hunted Sleepless. Not merely because they were enemies but because they were opportunities. Each battle taught him something and each thought and rune that he captured revealed fragments of understanding that a person had.
Each stolen memory exposed new perspectives, interpretations and possibilities. He studied runes through the minds of their owners.
He learned how different awakened understood identical powers in entirely different ways. And through that process he discovered a variety of fascinating Rune synchronicity concepts.
The emergence of entirely new phenomena that he couldnt't have even dreamed of. Not that he dreamt any longer, of course.
In any case, eventually, one realization became clear. His father could see the future. Therefore overwhelming a single future with powerful attacks would never work.
The answer was quantity.
Complexity.
Chaos.
Force the future itself to become crowded. After all, if there were so many possibilities and so many attacks as well as variables, even foresight would struggle to navigate them perfectly.
Hundreds of shadow creatures surged forward and the horde attacked from every direction simultaneously. Some resembled wolves and others looked vaguely humanoid. Many possessed no recognizable shape at all.
An ocean of darkness crashed toward Nicholas Arc.
And yet...
The man merely stood there.
Watching, waiting, thinking.
Expecting.
Then he moved a single step and performed a casual turn.
A light touch and one creature dissolved. Another, crumbled and a third, collapsed into dust. Nicholas flowed through the horde with infuriating ease.
Every movement appeared effortless and every gesture appeared insignificant. Yet wherever his fingers brushed against shadow, entire monsters simply ceased to exist.
Like sketches being erased from a page and ideas being removed from reality. The horde continued growing and the battlefield continued darkening.
Still, Nicholas advanced calmly through the storm of shadows. As though he had already seen every possible outcome and had already chosen the one he preferred.
He glanced at Jaune out of the corner of his eye and smiled faintly even as the battlefield descended into complete chaos around him.
Yet despite the overwhelming number of attackers, Nicholas still moved through them with an ease that bordered on the absurd. He dodged as though he possessed eyes in every direction, vaulting off the shoulders of one creature before twisting through the claws of another.
Several monsters attempted to use their allies as stepping stones, leaping through the air in coordinated waves designed to attack him from multiple angles at once, but every time Nicholas touched one of them, whether through a casual kick or the brush of a hand, the result was always the same.
The creature would crumble.
Sometimes a second would pass and sometimes even two.
But eventually the affected monster would collapse into dust, causing any shadow beasts relying upon it for support to lose their footing and crash harmlessly into the desert below. The entire battlefield had become a constantly shifting web of attacks and movement, yet Nicholas navigated it with effortless precision, never once appearing rushed or pressured.
Then he suddenly crouched and launched himself upward.
The force of the jump alone created a shockwave that blasted outward across the desert floor, scattering dozens of shadow creatures in all directions while kicking up enormous clouds of sand. In the next instant he was already hundreds of feet above the battlefield, suspended against the bright sky as he calmly turned his body and looked down upon the horde beneath him.
Jaune's weakness sense erupted into a screaming warning. Without hesitation, he sent a command through his connection with Gula.
'Back away.'
Gula obeyed instantly.
Their merged form abandoned the swarm and shot backward across the battlefield, putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the mass of shadow creatures below Nicholas.
High above them, Nicholas slowly raised both hands and then he framed his fingers together as though constructing a picture frame.
And spoke.
"Fractals of Future Time."
The moment those words left his lips, Jaune felt it. A vast surge of temporal energy exploded outward from Nicholas's body.
It was not merely powerful, but overwhelming. The energy swept downward like an invisible tidal wave and washed over every shadow creature beneath him.
The result was immediate. Every monster turned to dust.
Not one survived.
An entire army vanished within a fraction of a second.
The shadow pools scattered throughout the battlefield suffered the same fate. Vast lakes of darkness that had taken precious time and energy to create simply disintegrated into nothingness, their forms collapsing under the relentless advance of accelerated time until only ordinary sand remained behind. Moments later, the battlefield had become eerily empty.
Only dust, sand, and massive craters remained.
Jaune watched silently.
That was another capability of the Time rune. The ability to accelerate temporal progression itself.
His father had effectively forced those creatures to experience years, decades, perhaps centuries of entropy within an instant.
The inevitable decay awaiting all things.
The power of time itself.
And yet...
That was exactly what Jaune had wanted him to do. A smile slowly formed beneath Gula's monstrous features.
Because Gula's current body was not truly independent. It was made of Shadow Runic energy and Umbra. Every shadow creature and every shadow pool or construct which had spread throughout the battlefield... also shared the same trait.
All of them were connected to Gula. And Gula was currently merged directly with Jaune. Conceptually speaking, Nicholas had just destroyed portions of Gula's body.
Which meant damage had been inflicted and Jaune was currently operating under the effects of Masochism.
Power surged through him. It arrived suddenly and violently, spreading through every limb like liquid fire.
His muscles expanded, senses sharpened and even his Will stat seemed to grow heavier. The strength flooding his body exceeded what a Rank 2 should have been capable of producing.
Perhaps it still fell short of a true Rank 3.
But it was still incredible.
Jaune felt the desert beneath his feet tremble.
'Now, Gula,' he said quietly. 'Use everything.'
Gula grimaced and then launched forward. The moment he moved, every bone within their shared body shattered. Gula forced Jaune's body to operate on a greater level than what was biologically possible. The force being generated simply exceeded what flesh and bone were designed to withstand.
Yet neither Jaune nor Gula cared. Will surged through their bodies and even their Jaune's organs were forced to work harder.
Muscles were compelled to contract beyond their natural limits and the very logic of the body was being violated.
The air ignited around them and a massive sonic boom detonated across the desert. The ground collapsed beneath the force of their acceleration, forming a crater nearly a kilometer wide.
The entirety of Gula's monstrous form transformed into a single overwhelming attack.
A spear.
One thrust.
Nicholas watched it approach and smiled. Jaune saw the spear reach him and saw the point nearly touch his chest.
Victory felt within reach. Then something happened. Temporal energy suddenly surged from Nicholas.
Jaune felt it swirl around his father's body like an invisible vortex. And then, in that instant of a second, his father disappeared.
One moment he stood directly before the spear and the next, he was standing several meters to the side.
Untouched and unharmed. As though he had never occupied the previous location at all.
'What?!'
Gula's shocked thought echoed through their shared mind.
'How? What did he do?'
Jaune's own confusion matched it perfectly. Neither of them had an answer.
They blasted past Nicholas, their momentum carrying them forward while the air exploded behind them. Gula struggled to stabilize their trajectory before finally skidding to a halt in the air, high above the desert.
Blood poured from his mouth but Jaune ignored it. Both the pain and the damage. His mind was focused entirely upon what he had just witnessed.
It wasn't teleportation. Or at least, not true teleportation.
Jaune had become intimately familiar with spatial runic energy during his travels and fights. Many awakened from Sleepless had runes with that property. Had his father used a spatial rune, he would have sensed it immediately.
But there had been no spatial energy. Only temporal energy.
It wasn't acceleration born from his time rune either.
With Masochism amplifying every aspect of his perception, Jaune would have even been able to see a Rank 3 traversing at max speed. Which meant that his father, who was only a Rank 2, couldn't have been able to move fast enough to be able to escape his senses.
It was as though Nicholas had simply ceased existing in one location and begun existing in another.
The implication disturbed him.
But by now, the power of Masochism was fading and the temporary strength vanished piece by piece. And just like that, Jaune realized he had exhausted every combat-focused imbued rune he possessed.
All that remained were utility abilities. Gula coughed up another mouthful of Jaune's blood that was clogging his lungs.
'We have to use it now.'
Jaune frowned, then nodded.
'Fine.'
Across from them, Nicholas sighed dramatically.
"Ouch."
His expression remained amused.
"This is going to hurt."
Jaune resisted the urge to swear.
'Damned foresight.'
Without hesitation, he activated Reflect. Invisible runic energy erupted from his body and connected directly to Nicholas.
A moment later the effects appeared. The countless injuries covering Jaune's body instantly manifested across Nicholas's own.
Reflected.
Blood erupted from his father's mouth and his posture faltered. His body visibly weakened. For the briefest moment, Jaune thought it had worked.
Then Nicholas returned to perfect condition.
Just like that.
As though nothing had happened.
Time rewound for his body and his injuries vanished.
His father stood healthy once more.
Jaune coughed violently and released control of Gula's transformation. Shadow receded from his body as he returned to human form.
Then he activated Substitute. Once more invisible energy surged outwards. Except instead of simply reflecting his state of body, now, his injuries directly transferred.
Broken bones, internal damage and torn muscles.
Everything.
All of it shifted onto Nicholas. And once more the result lasted only an instant. His father briefly staggered and then time corrected itself as perfect health returned.
Nicholas tilted his head.
"What now, Jaune? Any more tricks up your sleeve?"
His eyes narrowed slightly.
"Although... that is interesting."
"Shut up," Jaune replied.
"You already knew this was going to happen."
Nicholas chuckled.
"Well, the surprise still matters. And haven't I told you already? Beat me, and I'll answer every question you have. Every concern and every secret."
He folded his arms casually. "You'll even see them again."
Jaune's jaw tightened.
"Our family."
The words struck harder than any punch. "Isn't that why you're here, my dear son?"
Jaune spat into the sand. "Then you won't remove Reflect even though you know what's going to happen?"
"Why would I?"
The answer made him scowl. Reflect would only last another minute at most. But that was enough. It only needed to last a little longer.
Slowly, Jaune reached into the last of his collection of runes and activated one final ability.
Transpose.
The world blurred and reality dissolved.
And an instant later both father and son opened their eyes beneath a black sky illuminated by a shattered crimson moon.
The Dream Realm.
Dark sand stretched endlessly beneath their feet, but Jaune barely noticed. His attention had already shifted elsewhere.
Toward the floating pyramid hovering silently in the near distance. It had the same appeareance of the Pyramid that they had been in just earlier. Except instead of it being hidden in a chasm, it was in the air, defying gravity.
And finally his gaze floated toward the massive figure peeking from behind it.
A humanoid Grimm.
Titanicly towering and black all over with minimal bone spurs on his body. Its skull-like face-mask seemed almost timid as it stared at them from behind the structure.
A Rank 2 Grimm.
The moment Jaune looked at it, something inside him changed. Pressure settled across his body and an overwhelming lethargy spread through his being.
His emotions dulled and his thoughts slowed. Motivation drained away like water slipping through his fingers.
He could hear Gula shouting in his mind, but the word felt off like they were moving though molasses and impossibly far away.
Like it belonged to another world.
Jaune's eyes widened.
Soul damage.
This Grimm attacked the soul directly.
Nicholas began walking forward, completely unconcerned. "Did you think you were the only one preparing?"
His smile returned. "Come now, my wayward son you mustn't be this naïve. Though, I suppose, despite everything, you're still only eighteen."
He gestured casually toward the giant Grimm.
"You aren't the only one growing stronger."
His voice remained calm. "Your allies grow stronger and even your enemies grow stronger. The entire world continues moving forward."
Then he stopped and looked directly at Jaune. "So allow me to introduce a little gift that will hopefully push you far beyond anything you can dream of doing."
The giant Grimm slowly peeked farther out from behind the floating pyramid.
"This Rank 2, is the result of a series of very interesting coincidences. Though... I suppose they weren't really coincidences as... I may have helped things along."
Then he spread his arms and pointed to the grimm.
"In any case, allow me to introduce you to, Apathy."