Nicholas vanished again and this time Jaune was prepared.
Or at least he thought he was.
His weakness sense screamed and he twisted instinctively, bringing his forearm up just in time to intercept a strike aimed directly at his throat.
The collision detonated like artillery fire. The air burst apart between them and the stone beneath Jaune's feet shattered into fragments. Before he could counterattack a second punch was already arriving from another angle.
Then a third, then a fourth.
Nicholas moved through the battlefield like a ghost.
No.
Like a force of nature.
Every strike flowed seamlessly into the next, every movement perfectly timed and executed with such precision that Jaune felt as though he was fighting a future version of himself who already knew every decision he intended to make.
But Jaune knew that it wasn't his father using his Foresight rune.
This was just experience.
Pure unadulterated combat experience.
Their fists collided repeatedly, producing shockwaves powerful enough to split apart the floating pyramid beneath them while chunks of stone were blasted into the sky and scattered across the desert below.
Technically speaking, Jaune should have possessed the advantage.
His Body stat sat at thirteen.
A number that bordered on absurdity for a Rank Two.
The sheer physical power flowing through his muscles exceeded what most awakened would have considered possible. Every punch he threw carried enough force to pulverize buildings. Every movement generated explosive bursts of air pressure. Yet despite that overwhelming advantage, Nicholas matched him perfectly.
Because his father was cheating. Time wrapped around Nicholas constantly and every movement was accelerated with every reaction being enhanced. Every fraction of a second expanded into opportunities that nobody else could exploit.
And worse.
He wasn't merely accelerating himself. His attacks themselves were strengthened through temporal manipulation.
When Nicholas struck Jaune's ribs with a hook, the impact landed once, then it landed again, and again and again.
Aura Echo.
Except layered atop it was something far more horrifying.
The same strike reverberated through multiple moments simultaneously, causing the force to repeat across time itself. The result was a stacked impact so devastating that Jaune felt several ribs crack despite successfully blocking part of the attack. Blood erupted from his mouth as he was launched backwards across the battlefield.
"Aura Echo and... Time Echo," Jaune muttered while skidding across the stone.
His father grinned.
"How will you counter it?"
The next moment they collided again and the battle tore across the floating pyramid before spilling onto the black sands below. Craters formed wherever they landed. Shockwaves raced across the desert for kilometers. Entire dunes vanished beneath the force of their impacts.
At one point Jaune slammed his foot into the ground and unleashed Weakness across a massive area, instantly converting hundreds of thousands of tons of sand and stone into slurry before using Will to launch the transformed terrain upwards in towering waves. Gigantic tsunamis of liquid earth surged toward Nicholas from every direction, large enough to bury entire cities.
Nicholas merely glanced toward them.
Then snapped his fingers.
The waves froze and every droplet of slurry stopped moving. Entire mountains of slurry became motionless sculptures suspended in midair.
A moment later temporal energy pulsed again.
And the phenomenon reversed.
Jaune watched in frustration as the slurry returned to ordinary sand, the very effect of Weakness being undone as though it had never occurred.
The attack simply ceased to exist as if reality itself had been edited. He attempted to use Plunder next.
His senses brushed against his father's mind.
For a brief moment he felt thoughts.
Comprehension and information and just as he was about to pull— everything snapped back.
The connection vanished and the stolen thoughts returned. The phenomenon reversed and every attempt produced the same result.
Plunder was undone.
Anything that relied on runic interaction was simply rejected through temporal manipulation.
Yet amidst the chaos of combat, an idea suddenly formed.
As Nicholas unleashed another barrage of strikes and Jaune blocked them one after another, his mind raced furiously.
Rune synchronicity.
Plunder's thought stealing phenomena functioned through his Weakness sense in a manner of Rune synchronicity.
The two runes were interconnected.
The problem was hierarchy. Time existed on a conceptual level beyond what either rune could affect.
But Null...
Null existed at a theoretical hierarchy level [0].
The lowest possible number which gave it the highest possible authority. If he could somehow synchronize Null with Plunder, then perhaps Plunder could inherit that hierarchy. Perhaps it could steal things that should be impossible to steal.
Perhaps it could finally touch Time itself.
The realization electrified him. For the first time since the battle began, Jaune saw a possible path toward victory.
He only needed to figure out how to do it. Unfortunately Nicholas chose that exact moment to attack again.
Jaune raised his arms to intercept the incoming strike.
His weakness sense exploded and his father disappeared. Temporal energy flickered behind him. Then, a hand pierced forward like a knife.
The strike slipped past Jaune's defenses and drove directly into his side.
Pain erupted through his body and blood sprayed from his mouth. And in that instant everything finally clicked.
All the strange movements and the impossible repositioning. All the moments where his father seemed to teleport without activating any spatial rune.
If Jaune had possessed doubts before, they vanished now. His father was not merely accelerating himself.
Acceleration alone could not explain this. No amount of speed could completely bypass Jaune's perception.
There was only one explanation left and only one possibility that made sense. Nicholas Arc had reached Mastery over Time.
The final stage and the culmination of everything the rune represented.
Staggering forward while blood dripped from his lips, Jaune slowly turned toward his father, who calmly withdrew his hand and regarded him with a serious expression.
And finally Jaune understood the truth.
He wasn't teleporting or accelerating.
The damned old man was stopping time.
Jaune shook his head internally even as his body continued moving through the battle almost entirely on instinct.
That explanation did not make sense.
The idea that his father was stopping time sounded correct on the surface. Every observation pointed toward it, and yet the more Jaune thought about it, the less the explanation held together.
Time was powerful, terrifyingly powerful even but even the Time rune had limits.
A rune capable of freezing an entire localized area was one thing. Jaune could accept that. Freezing several meters of space around oneself, or perhaps even a battlefield, was already absurd enough to qualify as a terrifying ability.
But stopping all of time? For the entire world, the atmosphere, the stars and for the moon hanging overhead?
For the greater universe itself?
That was insanity.
Nicholas Arc's Aura reserves simply were not large enough. No Rank Two awakened possessed enough power to freeze existence on such a scale.
Hell, Jaune was not even entirely convinced that the Supreme Runes themselves could accomplish something so ridiculous. Perhaps some transcendent being standing at the absolute peak of reality like Salem or that Shadow Realm Source Eye could force something like that into existence.
But, his father, Nicholas Arc?
Impossible.
And there was another problem. If time truly had been stopped, then Null should have ignored it. The very purpose of Null was the nullification of phenomena.
If his father truly were stopping time itself, then Jaune should have been completely unaffected.
Something else was happening. Something that looked like time stop but it was not actually time stop. The answer sat somewhere beyond his current understanding.
And that frustrated him more than anything.
A fist smashed into his jaw and Jaune's head snapped sideways. His thoughts shattered apart as pain exploded through his skull.
The world spun and before he could recover, Nicholas stepped forward and drove a knee into his stomach.
The impact folded Jaune in half and air exploded from his lungs. Then another strike followed.
And another, and another.
Jaune skidded across the black sands of the Dream Realm, carving a trench hundreds of meters long before he managed to stabilize himself.
His feet dug into the ground and the desert erupted as a shockwave blasted outward in every direction.
Jaune's father appeared before him. His weakness sense screamed and he raised both arms at where the punch should have hit.
Unfortunately, the punch accelerated past his guard and landed. The resulting explosion flattened dunes for a kilometer wide.
The floating pyramid trembled in the distance.
Their fists collided together again and again. Every impact generated enough force to reshape the landscape around them.
Black sand erupted into the sky and cracks spread through the desert floor.
Yet despite all of that, despite his Body stat sitting at 13 and despite possessing physical power that should have eclipsed nearly every Rank Two awakened alive, Jaune could feel himself slowly being pushed backward.
Not because he was weaker but because his father's physical abilities surpassed his own. But because Nicholas kept doing that impossible thing.
Every time Jaune established a rhythm and every time he found an opening, every time weakness showed him where victory could be found.
His father would suddenly appear somewhere he should not have been and a strike would emerge from an impossible angle.
A defense would materialize where none should exist. The battle constantly reset itself in Nicholas's favor.
And Jaune was losing.
The realization tasted bitter.
It was both equal parts embarrassing and infuriating.
Months.
Months of preparation, hunting Sleepless operatives, stealing thoughts, runes and gathering comprehension.
Developing strategies, creating combinations. Experimenting with rune synchronicity.
Creating Null itself.
Only to still be standing here getting beaten by his father.
A laugh almost escaped him.
It was absurd.
Null was perhaps the greatest achievement of his life. A rune that theoretically stood at hierarchy level [0].
A rune capable of ignoring every phenomenon in existence. And all it was doing right now was preventing Nicholas from directly affecting him with Time.
It was not winning the fight but was simply keeping him alive. Jaune ducked beneath a punch and countered with a hook.
Nicholas blocked and the resulting collision generated another explosion.
Sand vaporized yet Jaune's thoughts continued racing.
Rune synchronicity.
There had to be a way.
Null and Plunder.
The answer had to lie somewhere between them.
Plunder stole and Null... nullified. Weakness itself identified vulnerabilities. All three operated according to completely different principles.
Yet if he could somehow merge them...
A fist struck his face and the world blurred. Jaune spun through the air and blood scattered across the black sands below.
As he tumbled, an idea suddenly appeared.
Simple and elegant.
Obvious.
His eyes widened.
Of course.
Null was not a rune meant to be used as a weapon.
Its power was utility, meant to be used in accordance with its hierarchy. Its power came from the fact that it was existing above all other runes.
Which meant...
He did not need to merge Null with Plunder. He needed Plunder to latch onto the greater hierarchy that Null had.
Jaune's body crashed through a dune and the entire structure exploded apart.
He rose immediately. His mind raced. Plunder's stealing tendrils operated according to hierarchy level [2].
That was why they could not affect Time as Time was probably operating on a hierarchy level of [1].
Time existed higher, or rather lower.
A stronger hierarchy.
But what if Plunder itself became equivalent to Null? Not permanently, but only while passing through it.
Null was a rune that could ignore laws. Why couldn't it nullify Plunder's hierarchy and strip away its position before imparting its own hierarchy on it?
Jaune just needed to force the tendrils through Null and allow them to emerge carrying hierarchy [0].
Rune synchronicity!
Plunder borrowing Null's authority. The realization hit him like lightning. Immediately Jaune acted. The connection of Weakness and Plunder dissolved as Jaune dissolved the link that his meta runes were taking from his father.
His father noticed and paused. Only for an instant.
His eyes narrowed as if wondering what Jaune was doing. Then, he accelerated forward. Danger screamed through weakness.
Yet Jaune ignored it.
Because he had finally found the answer. Plunder activated and pushed through the Null rune. The tendrils emerged from his soul, wrapped in the authority of hierarchy [0].
The moment they appeared, something changed.
The power of understanding threaded through his mind about ideas, thoughts and possibilities regarding his rune. Jaune was a single membrane away from reaching the level of comprehension regarding his Null rune.
Regardless of Jaune's state, the tendrils of Plunder stretched forward, toward Nicholas Arc. Toward the temporal energy constantly circulating throughout his father's body.
And for the first time in history. For the first time since Nicholas Arc had created Time. The impossible occurred.
The tendrils touched temporal energy and then they stole it.
Jaune's father froze and his eyes widened. Genuine shock appeared across his face as temporal runic energy ripped free from his body.
Huge quantities.
Power flooded across the connection and the link... held.
Nicholas stared at him.
Jaune stared back with a malevolent grin threading across his features. For the first time during the entire fight.
The balance shifted.
Neither spoke for neither needed to. Both understood exactly what had happened. Then Nicholas moved.
Temporal energy surged and that mysterious ability activated once more. The one that looked like time stop.
The one Jaune still did not fully understand, only this time something was different. Because the connection remained.
Because the energy now flowed through both of them and because Jaune could finally feel it, without hesitation, he copied what his father had done.
Temporal energy surged through his own body and the stolen energy of time guided him. The ability activated.
Reality disappeared and the Dream Realm vanished. Everything vanished as together both father and son disappeared from existence.