Reality was converging toward Jaune's body in a vast, spiraling motion, bending inward from every direction as though the universe itself had begun to collapse around a single point.
His domain had become something increasingly difficult to describe as merely an area of influence. It was beginning to resemble an event horizon, a region of reality caught in the gravitational pull of something that did not possess mass so much as it possessed authority.
Light curved toward him and disappeared into the golden radiance surrounding his body, fragments of the shattered moon drifted sideways before accelerating inward, loose particles of stone and dust stretched into thin luminous trails, and even the distorted remnants of space itself seemed to bend toward the center of Jaune's existence.
Time did not escape either.
Within certain portions of the domain, motion became strangely uneven, moments stretching and collapsing as Devour consumed tiny pieces of temporal progression simply because they existed within reach.
Matter, energy, information, distance, and time were all being drawn toward him. Jaune had activated his Rune of Devour to permeate the entirety of the space he controlled.
He needed it—the energy, but more importantly, he needed physical prowess.
Tyrian had made it painfully clear that the raw power alone would not win this battle which was why he needed his body to be capable of acting quickly enough to exploit the openings Devour created, and he needed enough power flowing through that body to survive whatever Tyrian decided to throw at him next.
Every fraction of Devour that he spread through his domain made the surrounding reality increasingly unstable, but Jaune could feel his own strength climbing alongside it, his body becoming denser and even his movements becoming more responsive, the liquid-like consistency of his body became less like flesh and more like the physical manifestation of an impossible law.
Across from him, Tyrian himself, had stopped behaving as though his body were something fixed. His form was changing constantly.
New layers of muscle appeared beneath his skin, then vanished and were replaced by something denser.
His bones shifted and his organs rearranged themselves.
His nervous system expanded into structures that did not resemble anything biological. Additional properties were being created for his body one after another, each one reinforcing some weakness Jaune had previously exploited.
A new layer of resistance against spatial distortion.
A reinforcement against internal attacks.
Greater density. Greater speed.
More efficient transmission of force.
Structures that distributed damage throughout his entire form. Structures that allowed Creation to immediately replace damaged matter before Destruction could finish erasing it.
Jaune could sense every alteration because Devour perceived things differently now, and Knowledge was practically screaming the information into Tyrian's movements. Tyrian had been studying him.
His eyes followed Jaune's body with an unnatural precision, Knowledge dissecting the composition of every cell, every strand of energy, every microscopic process that allowed Jaune's body to remain functional even after it had been reduced to almost nothing.
Tyrian did not truly understand what he was looking at. That was the important part. He could see it, measure it, analyze it, and construct theories around it, but there was still a shroud around Jaune's body created by Devour itself, a layer of authority that made the final answer impossible to grasp.
Perhaps, Jaune realized, if that shroud did not exist, Tyrian might have been able to reproduce something similar. Creation could make nearly anything Tyrian could imagine, and Knowledge could tell him how to construct it. If he could fully understand the state of Jaune's body, perhaps he could simply create an equivalent.
But he couldn't.
He was still short of the answer.
Jaune exploded forwards first, but not with his body.
His domain reached outward in thin golden threads that crossed the warped space between them, hundreds of them at first, then thousands, each thread carrying the authority of Devour as it stretched toward Tyrian.
Tyrian's eyes tracked them.
He understood their general function and knew they were not the same as Plunder's invisible tethers. Plunder had been able to reach into the world and seized things through an invisible connection.
Devour was different even though it had a similar property.
It did not simply seize, but consumed.
The distinction had mattered when Jaune first acquired it, because he had instinctively tried to use it like Plunder and discovered that the Rune did not respond in quite the same way. But he had adapted.
He had spent the battle learning and now the threads were not really threads at all. They were extensions of his domain, carrying the authority of Devour into whatever they touched. One of them slipped around Tyrian's shoulder and another wrapped around his chest.
Several more climbed toward his head. Tyrian moved to intercept them, but Jaune changed the relationship between distance and motion for an instant by utilizing his stream devouring space in a constant, which caused the threads to arrive before Tyrian's body finished responding.
They wrapped around his head.
For one brief instant, Jaune succeeded and Devour entered Tyrian's mind.
Memories flooded into him.
Jaune saw pieces of Tyrian's life in violent succession. The gradual erosion of a man into something else.
He saw the pieces that had made Tyrian, Tyrian.
Then, the memories exploded and Jaune's eyes widened. A burst of monochromatic light of Destruction erupted from the inside his skull.
His head vanished.
The golden hair and flesh surrounding it were torn apart as Destruction attempted to burrow outward from the stolen memories, shredding the interior of Jaune's body before expanding through his neck and shoulders.
Jaune's entire upper torso ruptured beneath the force. Yet even as Destruction annihilated him, Devour reacted and consumed the very force that was destroying it. Jaune's golden body collapsed inward around the monochromatic energy, swallowing the Destruction before it could completely annihilate what remained of him.
The energy resisted and tore itself apart as it entered Devour, destroying itself before Jaune could fully seize it, but this time there was enough of a difference. Enough of the energy remained and Jaune forced his authority around the residue and dragged it inward, incorporating the surviving Destruction into his domain.
His head reformed and his eyes opened.
Immediately hurled the stolen force outward to attack Tyrian.
The domain around him rippled violently as the Destruction energy erupted against Tyrian's enormous domain.
Under normal circumstances, it should have worked.
Tyrian had just lost the memories Jaune had devoured. If those memories contained the information necessary for Tyrian's mind to function, then the sudden loss should have at least damaged his ability to think, react, and coordinate the three Supreme Runes.
Jaune had expected the destruction of Tyrian's mind to create an opening large enough for him to tear through the surrounding domain.
Instead, Tyrian's entire domain suddenly contracted and Jaune's attack struck empty space.
The vast expanse of Tyrian's authority, which had stretched across hundreds of kilometers of broken lunar territory, suddenly folded inward. Creation acted as its spearhead, compressing the enormous domain into a single physical point. Reality screamed as kilometers of space collapsed into something no larger than a pinprick, and then that pinprick became a spear of impossible density that Tyrian held in one hand.
Jaune stared at him.
'He still has his memories? How?'
The answer came almost immediately.
Knowledge.
Of course.
Knowledge had anticipated the possibility of Jaune stealing his memories. Creation had generated a perfect copy of them, preserving the structure necessary for Tyrian's consciousness to continue operating even after Jaune devoured the original. Jaune had not actually removed the information that mattered.
He had only removed one instance of it.
Tyrian smiled.
"Useful trick," he said, his voice calm despite the fact that Jaune had just torn through his mind. "But worthless in the end."
Jaune's expression hardened.
The spear in Tyrian's hand vanished and space between them suddenly multiplied.
The distance that had existed between Jaune and Tyrian expanded violently, folding outward into layers of parallel space. One kilometer became ten. Ten became a hundred. Then the space between them separated from ordinary reality altogether, forming a pocket dimension that existed parallel to the battlefield.
Jaune could still sense Tyrian, but the distance between them was no longer simply physical. Tyrian had created an entirely separate layer of space between them, forcing Jaune to devour his way through reality itself if he wanted to reach him.
Jaune immediately moved and his domain surged forward.
Space began disappearing as one layer after another collapsed into Devour as Jaune consumed the distance between himself and Tyrian.
The surrounding reality stretched toward him like fabric being pulled through a hole. He moved forward, devouring kilometers at a time, then entire spatial layers, then the boundaries separating one pocket from another.
Tyrian watched an waited. Then, he destroyed the space between them and everything vanished.
There was no explosion or light or heat.
Simply nothing.
The space between Jaune and Tyrian ceased to exist, leaving a perfect void of nothingness where reality itself had been erased. And because there was no longer any space between them, there was no longer anything capable of separating their positions nor was there any space for their domains to declare that either region of that space was theirs.
The result was that both of their bodies were violently dragged toward one another by the sudden collapse.
The absence itself became a force of attraction to which Jaune emerged from the collapsing pocket at the same instant Tyrian did.
They were suddenly face to face and monochromatic spears erupted from Tyrian's body. Jaune reached toward them and Devour activated.
He consumed the first few spears, and was able to use their runic energy but then the spears multiplied into hundreds.
Hundreds became thousands and thousands became millions.
The entire space around Tyrian filled with Destruction, an ocean of monochromatic weapons erupting from his body in every direction. Jaune's now cut off domain attempted to swallow them as quickly as it could, but Tyrian had already changed the game.
The spears multiplied faster than Jaune could consume them, and then each individual spear began to destroy itself before Devour could fully incorporate it, transforming from physical weapons into raw runic energy. The destruction of millions of attacks occurred simultaneously, and the result was not absence but an enormous detonation of pure runic force at blank range.
The explosion swallowed both of them and space returned, flooding into the void.
The void vanished as reality flooded back into the area where Tyrian had erased it, and the sudden restoration of space created an immense recoil. Jaune and Tyrian were thrown apart as though the universe itself had kicked them away from one another.
Jaune's body spun uncontrollably through the air, golden hair whipping around his face as broken fragments of the moon rushed past him. He forced his body to stabilize, twisting himself upright and spreading his arms as Devour anchored him against the surrounding space.
Then a million points of light appeared directly in front of him.
Jaune barely had time to recognize them.
Plasmatic Lasers.
The beams were already moving before his mind finished registering them. His perception expanded through his domain, slowing the surrounding world until each beam appeared to crawl through space, but even then there were too many.
His Devouring authority spread across the incoming attack, consuming beam after beam, stripping away their matter and energy, dragging them into the golden spiral surrounding his body.
But they were not truly inside his domain. At least, not completely.
Jaune realized it immediately.
'He's creating pocket spaces using Creation, outside of physical reality, to bypass my domain's authority of Devouring to get close to me.'
The beams had not traveled through conventional space. They had emerged from countless miniature spaces that Tyrian had created outside the ordinary structure of reality and then forced into existence directly in front of Jaune. His domain could consume what entered it, but the attack was arriving from somewhere that technically existed parallel to it.
'And he's also utilizing plasma instead of other states of matter to attack me. Because plasma can move faster than other states of matter in a vacuum!'
Jaune pushed his domain harder to devour. The golden spiral around him tightened as Devour attempted to breach into the parallel spaces and consume the impossible geometry behind the attack.
He almost succeeded, but then, the beams exploded and destruction erupted from within them.
The plasma was annihilated before Jaune could complete the devouring process, leaving behind only a residue of energy that Jaune instinctively swallowed and incorporated into Devour.
And in that instant, something appeared directly in front of his face.
A fist.
Tyrian's.
There was zero distance between them and the punch landed.
The impact was monstrous and Jaune's face collapsed inward as Tyrian's fist drove through it with the full force of his enhanced body. Bone, flesh, and golden-like liquid erupted backward, but Jaune never had the chance to move because Tyrian destroyed the space between his fist and Jaune's face, creation a void of distance and no room for momentum to carry Jaune away.
The force had nowhere to send him.
Instead, Tyrian's fist remained connected to Jaune's face as the destruction of space created an attraction that dragged Jaune's body toward the blow, forcing the impact to continue.
Jaune's entire body was obliterated into chunks of flesh.
But this time, Jaune had done it himself.
He had recognized the trap a fraction of a second before his body completely failed, and rather than allowing Tyrian's attack to determine how his body would break apart, he had invoked the Destruction property he had just taken within Devour against his own flesh.
His body exploded outward.
A couple hundred pieces of golden flesh scattered through the battlefield, each fragment launched in a different direction by the force of the controlled detonation. Tyrian's fist passed through empty space.
Jaune reformed fully whole from one of the pieces while the rest disintegrated.
He appeared several hundred meters away, chest rising as though breathing could somehow help him process what had just happened.
His mind was racing.
Tyrian's energy expenditure was increasing and yet his attacks were becoming more numerous and more creative.
More precise, even.
Every time Jaune found a way around one of Tyrian's abilities, Knowledge analyzed it and Creation produced a new method of bypassing it. Destruction ensured that anything Jaune tried to consume could be annihilated before he finished incorporating it.
Knowledge gave Tyrian supremacy over the flow of combat, allowing him to anticipate Jaune's movements before they fully developed. Creation gave him the ability to construct counters to nearly everything Jaune attempted.
It was becoming less like fighting a person and more like fighting an endlessly adapting system.
Jaune clenched his fist.
'Damn it.'
His domain surged outwards and a hundred attacks came and went.
The battle moved from the ruined ground into the sky and then beyond it, into the broken continental fragments of the Crimson Moon. Jaune tore through a massive slab of moonstone as Tyrian created a forest of Destruction blades inside it.
Jaune devoured the stone around himself and emerged from the other side. Tyrian created an enormous creature from condensed matter and sent it charging forward, only for Jaune to swallow its body and repurpose the matter into a golden spear.
Tyrian destroyed the spear before it reached him. Jaune consumed the resulting energy. Tyrian created gravity. Jaune devoured it. Tyrian created an absence of gravity. Jaune consumed the absence. Tyrian created distance. Jaune ate the distance. Tyrian destroyed the space Jaune occupied. Jaune's body flowed around the attack and reformed from fragments that existed outside the immediate zone of annihilation.
Every exchange was faster than the last and every exchange made less sense. And Jaune was beginning to realize something deeply uncomfortable.
Tyrian wasn't running out of Aura. In fact, his reserves seemed to only be growing further and further. Jaune's reserves on the other hand were slowly diminishing. As a Rank 3 with a Supreme Rune, Jaune's reserves were around 10 times larger than that of a regular Rank 3. However, Tyrian's seemed to be unending.
If this continued, Jaune was bound to be defeated from sheer attrition.
'Should I use Choice now?'
The thought came sharply.
'That will level the playing field for a bit and buy me time to figure out a bit of counter.'
His eyes narrowed.
'No. Not yet.'
He couldn't.
'I still have options.'
He forced himself to think through the problem instead of reacting to it.
'Besides, I haven't even revealed my inversion concept yet.'
That was another weapon he had been keeping hidden. A concept he had not yet introduced into the battle because he had been waiting for the correct moment, waiting for Tyrian to play his whole hand and enough of his capabilities that Jaune could determine exactly where to apply it.
Jaune was saving it as a trump card.
But there was a more immediate problem.
'Why isn't his Aura running out?'
Jaune's eyes flicked toward Tyrian. The man was standing in the middle of the storm, surrounded by his own monochromatic light.
'Is he using Creation to create Aura?'
The thought seemed absurd. Then again, nothing about this battle was normal anymore.
'Is that even possible? No. It would cost the same amount aura to create Aura so it's not a generator. He's doing something else.... but what?'
Jaune's domain continued devouring the surrounding energy, pulling fragments of matter and light toward him as he fought to maintain himself. He could feel the immense expenditure occurring inside Tyrian.
Every Creation construct required energy and every Destruction attack consumed energy. Knowledge itself was constantly processing the battle, and Tyrian's body was continuously being modified to withstand Jaune.
His expenditure should have been astronomical but it wasn't stopping.
In fact, it was increasing.
'The problem is that he's overcoming my Devouring by destroying his own energy before I can fully devour it. I'm only getting residue while his force keeps multiplying.'
Jaune dodged another attack and a spear passed through his shoulder.
He consumed it and it exploded inside him. He swallowed what remained and Tyrian appeared above him.
Jaune blocked a kick and the impact cracked the surrounding space. He countered but Tyrian had already moved away.
Knowledge knew.
Jaune changed styles yet again, yet Tyrian knew that too.
Jaune feinted and Tyrian didn't fall for it.
Jaune abandoned the attack halfway through and turned it into a movement Tyrian could not have logically expected, forcing Knowledge to recalculate.
For a fraction of a second, Jaune gained the upper hand.
Then Knowledge produced an answer and Tyrian once again countered with Creation.
The battle continued.
Thunderous flashes erupted across the Crimson Moon as the two beings tore through the ruined continental fragments. Entire pieces of the moon cracked apart from their clashes, sending enormous slabs drifting into the crimson sky before they were pulled into Jaune's domain and devoured.
Rivers of golden energy spiraled toward Jaune. Monochromatic Destruction spread through Tyrian's domain like an expanding infection. The two authorities collided again and again, neither completely overwhelming the other.
And somewhere amid that chaos, Jaune finally realized what was occurring.
The merge.
Jaune's eyes widened.
The moment he had stolen Choice, Tyrian had not stopped the process of merging with Salem.
He had simply changed it.
Before, Salem's conscious mind had been participating in the integration, helping Tyrian's vessel absorb the Supreme Runes. Choice had interrupted that process by being taken from him, but the underlying connection had never vanished.
Tyrian had adapted and the conscious aspect of Salem's contribution had been replaced by something else.
Her reserves.
Her immense, seemingly endless reservoir of runic energy was being converted into the fuel required for Tyrian's continued existence.
The full reserves of a damned Rank 4.
Jaune watched as Tyrian's domain pulsed.
It didn't grow. The enormous territory it already possessed remained roughly the same. But something inside it was changing.
Its density was increasing, becoming more saturated with power. The realization hit Jaune with the force of a physical blow.
'He had been been buying time too.'
Jaune stared across the battlefield and Tyrian's eyes met his. Knowledge had already understood that Jaune had figured it out. Tyrian smiled without any trace of amusement.
He had known Jaune would eventually notice and simply needed Jaune to notice too late.
The merge with Salem had continued throughout their entire battle. The loss of Choice had slowed the process, but it had not stopped it. Rather, instead of the enormity of her sleeping consciousness being merged first, the target had changed to her reserves.
More and more runic energy was being generated inside his domain, feeding Tyrian's body, replenishing the energy he spent, empowering Creation, Destruction and Knowledge. And allowing him to continue generating counters faster than Jaune could consume them.
Jaune's stomach tightened.
He had been fighting under the assumption that Tyrian was racing against his own reserves but he wasn't.
Tyrian had been racing against Jaune's time.
And Jaune had just given him plenty of it.
Jaune's expression slowly hardened. There was no clever workaround left that he could safely rely upon.
Well... no.
There was one.
But it wasn't the time to use it just yet. If he were to utilize it now, it would fail.
Jaune knew this for a fact.
But for now, there was hidden trick that could guarantee victory. No amount of devouring would solve the fundamental problem if Tyrian could continue creating more power than Jaune could meaningfully consume.
And his own reserves were not infinite.
His body might be without weakness but he was still fighting something that could manufacture more and more of what he needed to overcome.
Jaune's hand slowly tightened into a fist.
That moment had arrived for when he needed to use Choice.
Jaune looked toward Tyrian as the Crimson Moon trembled around them, golden spirals of Devour and monochromatic Destruction twisting across the black heavens like two impossible storms consuming the battlefield between them.
His thoughts became quiet.
'It's Time.'