Jaune's gaze swept across the battlefield with efficiency, his mind reducing the overwhelming chaos into a thousand moving variables with his weakness sense.
Rank Ones struggled to hold fractured defensive lines while Grimm crashed against them in seemingly endless waves. Every minute they remained bogged down here was another minute Tyrian continued breaking apart the prison beneath the moon.
Time was no longer merely valuable.
It had become the single most precious resource humanity possessed. The Rank Twos could continue their duels indefinitely if necessary, but the Rank Ones would eventually drown beneath sheer attrition if the pressure upon them wasn't relieved.
His eyes settled upon the densest concentration of Grimm, a seething black tide of Beowolves, Ursa and lesser abominations converging upon one section of LUCID's formation until the defenders were scarcely visible beneath the living mass.
Without taking his eyes off the battlefield, he calmly pointed toward the immense swarm.
"Get ready, I'm going to launch you straight into that hive."
Nora followed his finger and immediately spotted the target. It looked less like a battlefield and more like an ocean of Grimm surging against a crumbling seawall.
Before she could comment, Jaune continued, "Afterwards... well, you like breaking legs, don't you? Help the Rank Ones deal with their Sleepless opponents."
Nora blinked before looking back toward him with obvious confusion.
"Shouldn't we help the other Rank Twos first? Besides, if I interfere with the Rank One fights while Sleepless is still around, they'll have an excuse to attack the lower ranks as well."
Jaune nodded slightly.
"That's true. They could."
He allowed the statement to linger for just a heartbeat before the corner of his mouth lifted into a confident smile.
"But you're forgetting one thing."
Nora frowned.
"What's that?" Jaune finally looked directly at her.
"Me."
Recognition had barely begun spreading across Nora's face before space itself twisted violently around them. The crimson landscape distorted like rippling water as Plunder reached not toward matter but toward distance itself, stealing the separation between two locations and forcing reality to reconcile the impossible theft.
The world lurched.
For an instant Nora felt the nauseating sensation of standing in two places simultaneously before gravity reclaimed her. She found herself freefalling hundreds of meters above the battlefield, crimson winds roaring past her while the vast Grimm horde rushed upward to meet her.
Beside her, Jaune descended with effortless composure, seemingly unaffected by the impossible transition. Nora glanced sideways at him in bewilderment. She had witnessed him appear and disappear throughout the battle already, yet every demonstration only deepened the mystery.
Once, years ago, Jaune had possessed a teleportation rune capable of folding space. If anyone claimed he had somehow recreated something similar, she might have believed it.
Yet this wasn't a true teleportation rune.
It felt fundamentally different.
Everything she had witnessed since his arrival suggested his abilities had evolved into something that no longer obeyed ordinary rules. He had seemingly erased attacks before they existed and reduced an experienced enemy Rank Two to helplessness in a single movement.
Even now she couldn't identify the mechanism behind what he was doing. Whatever Jaune had become during his disappearance, it existed far beyond the framework of normal Rank 2 awakened. Before she could ask anything, he simply smiled faintly before vanishing again, leaving her to continue plummeting alone toward the writhing sea of Grimm below.
Nora hit like a meteor.
The instant her form collided with the crimson earth, every ounce of force accumulated during her descent detonated outward through Discharge. A blinding explosion of lightning erupted across the battlefield, arcs of blue-white electricity spreading through the Grimm horde in every direction as though an entire thunderstorm had been compressed into a single heartbeat.
Hundreds of Grimm convulsed simultaneously before exploding into drifting ash, while countless others were launched through the air by the sheer force of the discharge. Cracks raced through the moon rock beneath her feet as the explosion continued expanding outward before finally dissipating into flickering residual sparks.
Yet Nora never paused.
She had spent years refining herself into the embodiment of lightning itself.
Her Rank 0 rune had been Discharge, allowing every ounce of kinetic force inflicted upon her body to transform directly into stored electrical energy. Most awakened considered such a rune dangerous, for it demanded one willingly endure attacks before retaliating. But Nora had embraced precisely that madness.
Upon reaching Rank One, she had selected Storm, a rune perfectly complementing Discharge by granting authority over clouds, rainfall, thunder and lightning itself.
She no longer merely wielded electricity but could summon the skies that birthed it. Then, when the time came to forge her Rank Two rune, she had bound both concepts together beneath a single governing principle.
Feedback.
Unlike the overwhelming literal force of her previous runes, Feedback acted as the lattice connecting everything into one terrifying system. Electricity generated through Discharge could now be endlessly recycled and amplified.
Fire, heat, explosions and numerous other forms of energy impacting her body could likewise be converted into reserves, stockpiled until needed before being redirected into either overwhelming physical reinforcement or exponentially stronger runic techniques.
Separately, each rune had been powerful. Together, they transformed Nora into a self-sustaining storm engine whose strength only increased the longer battle continued.
It was an arsenal perfectly suited for prolonged warfare, where every enemy attack merely became another resource to fuel her own destruction.
Lightning exploded continuously around her as she accelerated through the battlefield like a living thunderbolt. Rank Ones scarcely registered her passing before entire clusters of Grimm simply ceased to exist in storms of crackling energy.
She bypassed the embattled infantry entirely, her attention immediately locking onto a far greater threat. Towering above the battlefield loomed a Rank Two Ursa nearly the size of a fortress, its colossal claws descending toward another LUCID Rank Two already struggling to hold the monstrous creature at bay.
Nora crossed the intervening distance almost instantly. Nora's Magnhild swung upward with all the force accumulated inside Feedback before smashing directly into the Ursa's forelimb. The impact sounded like mountains colliding. Electricity erupted across the beast's body as its enormous claws shattered completely beneath the blow, sending the gigantic Grimm staggering backward several hundred meters while chunks of its rocky hide exploded away in smoking fragments.
Only then did Nora allow herself the briefest glance elsewhere across the battlefield, and what she witnessed nearly caused her to forget the monster standing before her.
Jaune was no longer fighting so much as he was carving a path through the battlefield like an unstoppable comet.
Nothing seemed capable of slowing him.
Lesser Grimm that attempted to intercept him simply collapsed into drifting ash before he even reached them, their bodies disintegrating so completely they appeared to dissolve into dust upon approaching him.
Nora immediately understood why.
Weakness.
She remembered that terrifying rune from years earlier, though what she saw now dwarfed her memories. After reaching comprehension, Jaune's Weakness rune had no longer merely been able to only sap strength. He became capable of unravelling molecular bonds between objects as well.
Previously, at Rank 1, the true horror of Weakness couldn't be truly shown.
But now that Jaune was Rank 2...
Rank Zero and Rank One Grimm couldn't even survive entering the field surrounding him. They simply... came apart.
In one hand he casually dragged a seemingly paralyzed Rank Two Sleepless woman by her ankles as though hauling little more than inconvenient luggage.
Simultaneously, an enormous Rank Two Ursa charged directly toward him, roaring loudly enough to shake the battlefield. Jaune didn't bother drawing a weapon. He simply pivoted and kicked. The impact launched the gigantic beast backward with such overwhelming force that it resembled a toy struck by an enormous siege hammer.
Before the Grimm had even finished flying through the air, the Sleepless woman apparently bypassed her paralysis and and attempted one final desperate attack.
Instead of invoking a rune, she lunged with her spear, perhaps already realizing conventional runic combat had become impossible against him.
The spear however, never reached him.
It vanished midway through the thrust before instantly reappearing within Jaune's own grasp. Without breaking stride, he reversed the weapon and hurled it.
The spear became a blazing streak that pierced cleanly through the airborne Ursa's chest before erupting outward in a violent explosion. A hole large enough to drive a train through appeared in the Grimm's torso as molten flesh vaporized around the wound. The spear continued onward, still carrying overwhelming momentum, impaling one Rank One Grimm after another until it disappeared somewhere beyond the battlefield, leaving behind only a glowing molten corridor of annihilation stretching across the crimson plain.
Nora stared in disbelief.
Every passing second seemed to make Jaune stronger rather than weaker. He continuously stole runic energy, distance, weapons and even attacks themselves. And she was sure that there was even more that he was capable of which she hadn't yet seen.
It resembled watching a snowball rolling downhill, steadily accumulating more mass until it transformed into an avalanche capable of crushing everything before it.
She forced herself to tear her attention away. Admiring Jaune accomplished nothing if she failed her own responsibilities. Already she could see the immediate consequences of his intervention. Nearly half the Grimm assault pressing against the Rank One front had vanished beneath his advance, allowing LUCID's lower-ranked awakened to finally concentrate upon the Sleepless operatives rather than fighting desperately simply to survive the Grimm tide.
Jaune barely acknowledged the devastation left in his wake.
The Sleepless woman hanging from his grasp had already served her purpose. Somewhere during the previous exchange he had removed her Grimm mask, stolen a significant portion of her runic energy, stripped away her comprehension and emptied her mind just as thoroughly as the operative before her.
When he released her, she simply collapsed limply against the broken moon rock, alive only in the most biological sense. She would never again think another coherent thought and soon a grimm would probably finish her off.
Jaune immediately launched himself forward once more, Plundering the distance separating him from the Rank Two front where the fiercest battles continued raging.
His eyes quickly found Pyrrha. Even by Rank Two standards she fought spectacularly, weaving gracefully between four simultaneous opponents while her weapon, Miló flashed through the air with astonishing precision. Floating around her was a stream of metal that blocked attacks and was shuttling her through the air at extreme speed.
Yet numerical superiority inevitably pressed upon even her remarkable talent. Seeing an opening, Jaune reached into the reservoir of stolen runic energy accumulated from previous opponent.
His fist drove forward and the stolen power erupted outward, condensing into a gigantic runic energy construct that mirrored his own punch.
The enormous spectral fist slammed directly into two advancing Sleepless Rank Twos, sending both crashing violently across the battlefield while leaving Pyrrha entirely untouched. Though, judging from the way her body had already begun phasing through one incoming strike, she likely would have avoided the attacks regardless.
Pyrrha spun instinctively toward the source of the unexpected assistance. There, floating calmly beside her amidst the chaos, stood Jaune. For a long moment she simply stared. Her emerald eyes widened as though struggling to reconcile memory with reality.
It was not merely surprise. It bordered upon disbelief. Jaune offered her a small, almost apologetic smile.
"Yo. Been a while, eh?"
Pyrrha said nothing. She only continued looking at him as though afraid speaking might shatter whatever impossible illusion stood beside her. Jaune understood that expression better than he wished. There would be time later.
If they survived.
The surviving Sleepless Rank Twos recovered quickly, one immediately raising both hands as blazing streams of fire condensed around his body while enormous Rank Two Nevermores circled overhead, their colossal wings casting sweeping shadows across the battlefield below.
Before the fire technique fully manifested, Jaune simply reached toward it conceptually. The flames vanished. Simultaneously, the man's thoughts disappeared alongside them.
Confusion instantly replaced murderous intent. The Sleepless operative blinked repeatedly, lowering his hands while looking around in complete bewilderment as though awakening within an unfamiliar dream. He no longer remembered where he stood, why he fought or even who surrounded him.
Jaune had stolen not merely the fire but the mind directing it.
Without pausing, he Plundered space itself once again.
Reality folded, depositing him directly before the open beak of an approaching Nevermore whose body dwarfed an entire hill. Before the colossal Grimm could snap its jaws shut, Jaune seized both halves of its beak and forced them apart through raw physical strength enhanced by the thieving he had accumulated throughout the entire battle so far.
Then, Jaune breathed out. From his lungs, came a stream of golden, stolen fire that was directly released into the creature's throat.
A torrent of roaring flame erupted point blank down its gullet.
The Nevermore convulsed violently, its entire neck glowing crimson from within before molten cracks raced across its enormous body. Its agonized screech echoed across the battlefield as flames burst outward through its flesh, reducing the gigantic Grimm to disintegrating ash.
Jaune pushed away from the collapsing corpse before gravity reclaimed him, already spotting another hill-sized Nevermore sweeping toward nearby LUCID forces. A whip woven entirely from stolen fire snapped outward from his hand, coiling tightly around the creature's neck.
The Grimm shrieked furiously as Jaune yanked himself onto its back, transforming the blazing tether into an unwilling harness. With ruthless efficiency he bent the monstrous creature to his will, riding the furious Nevermore through the crimson skies like a living war mount before steering it directly toward the remaining Rank Two Grimm still circling above the battlefield, turning one of Salem's own beasts into the spearhead of humanity's counterattack.