Jaune stared at the carnage in front of him with an expression of serenity. As if the frantic, shaking boy who had stood there seconds ago had been peeled away like old skin and what remained was someone new, someone who had finally understood the shape of the world around him.
The clarity was almost overwhelming.
His mind felt impossibly clear, as though he had been trying to think through water all this time and now someone had drained the entire ocean away from his mind. He could feel each thread of his rune with painful precision. He could feel how it flowed and where it wanted to move. The moment comprehension bloomed, Weakness was no longer just a rune, but a truth that he could direct like a sculptor shaping clay.
Before this moment, Jaune had only ever used Weakness one way. As a debuff on a person. Jaune had used it to shave away fractions of their strength. All the way up to 20%, was possible if he pushed hard enough. 20% of someone with an Aura stat of 10, was a huge advantage, but it ate through Jaune's resources with frightening speed. Every second he maintained the debuff was a second his own aura burned away. Meta runes were raw contests of will and runic force. To affect a person's body directly, was to fight against the meta resisting natural passive effect of aura itself.
That had been the limit of his world.
Even his breakthrough in the Brute fight, with the trick of condensing Weakness onto a single section, like a limb or vertebrae, was only to conserve the energy cost of weakness. This had been a shallow understanding of the rune. A small optimization. The thought of affecting anything other than a person had never even crossed Jaune's mind. Weakness had been something he applied to enemies. Nothing more.
Reaching comprehension had shattered that assumption like thin glass under a hammer.
Why stop at people?
Why not apply Weakness to the ground under someone's feet? To the objects in their hands? To the structure of a wall or a floor or a machine? Why not apply Weakness to the air itself, which could alter buoyancy, viscosity, friction, resistance? Why not apply Weakness to molecular bonds, bindings and barriers and the environment in ways no one would expect?
Why not redefine what Weakness meant entirely?
His eyes lowered to his hands, fingers curling slightly. Energy surged through his palms and spine. Weakness pulsed outward like a second heartbeat, quiet but steady.
The battlefield roared around him. Qrow was still pinned under the grotesque, fleshy monstrosity with dozens of hands and mouths blended into one twitching mass. Raven struggled to stay upright and Ruby stood to his right, blood streaked across her cheek, and chest heaving with fear and panic. Yang hovered near her, teeth grit. Her aura reserves had recovered somewhat from their fight against Roman earlier, but it still wasn't enough.
Nothing about this scene promised survival.
Comprehension did not suddenly make Jaune strong. He was still Rank One, peak as though he might be. He was still small in the face of monsters who could dismantle buildings with casual swipes. That truth did not change. But comprehension gave him something else entirely.
A plan.
His mind flashed back into the last conversation he had with his father.
The words echoed through him. Words spoken on that night on his house's roof, under the light of the broken blood moon. Words where no one else could hear.
"The Sleeper favours no one. That being is neutral."
Neutrality meant that whatever power the Sleepless was invoking from the Sleep was not directed like a spell or aimed like a weapon. It was a presence that was almost akin to a law. An indifferent truth of existence. If the Sleepless worshipped something ancient and uncaring, then perhaps the power they channeled was not selective either.
And if it was not selective, then perhaps... Jaune himself might be able to touch it.
His thoughts clicked together in a chain, each link forming with perfect clarity. He spoke without looking back. His voice carried none of the fear that once defined him. It sounded strangely level. Focused.
"Raven. Can you teleport Qrow to us?"
Raven blinked through her pain and vigilance, confused. Blood trickled down her jaw when the flesh beast had slammed her and Qrow's combined form against the world.
"What are you talking about?"
"I have a plan."
Her brows furrowed.
"To be safe, I need all of you touching me. At the same time. And If that thing attacks, protect me and buy me time."
Yang was staring at him with confusion and Ruby almost asked a question.
Jaune did not any of them time.
"I'm going to give you an opening."
The ground beneath Jaune's feet vibrated as Weakness gathered according to his Will. This time, instead of shaping it narrowly, instead of reaching for a limb or a single target, he let it expand.
Weakness surged. Not toward people or toward the beast suppressing Qrow.
It poured outward into the earth and into the air, seeping into the environment like fog sliding under a door.
The flesh beast's vertical maw peeled open once again like a wound in reality. Rows of uneven teeth clicked together, its many throats vibrating at once as a distorted voice pushed through them.
"Do not struggle. It will only make this all the more troublesome. Besides, you should be grateful, child. Among all of them, you alone are permitted to live and leave this place with your life. Rejoice."
Jaune said nothing.
His eyes did not flicker, his breath did not tremble and his will did not waver.
The power of his rune erupted from him.
It was not a wave, a pulse or even a visible light. Instead, it was a phenomenon. A physical rewriting of structure at the most fundamental scale. And as it expanded outward, the world buckled in response.
The air popped once, a microscopic implosion of stability, as molecular bonds in a radius of over a few hundred meters abruptly shifted toward entropy.
The ground groaned.
Everything that made it solid began to collapse inward. Atomic cohesion weakened. Covalent bonds stretched past safe limits. Ionic bonds unraveled. Metallic lattices lost their grid. Concrete, asphalt, soil, steel, gravel, all of it slipped into a state between liquid and particulate as if the earth itself forgot how to hold itself together. The strength that let a surface resist weight and pressure suddenly, all dissolved into a slurry, water-thin but dense substrate. It was akin to a billion tiny beads floating without friction in a collapsing matrix.
Qrow's massive Corvid body dropped several meters downwards into the slurry of terrain as the flesh beast's hold over him loosened. The creature's limbs sank into the melting terrain, its anchoring mass unable to maintain grip as every foothold suddenly turned traitor.
The air itself sagged with an icy cold heat.
"What the hell?" Yang exclaimed, watching the world suddenly shift.
"Jaune... what did you just—" Ruby started to ask, but Jaune didn't have time to answer. He was too focused on what he was willing his rune to do.
Nitrogen and oxygen molecules lost a fraction of the kinetic energy that kept them bouncing freely. Their bonds lost the firmness that granted natural resistance. Pressure shifted in uneven pockets. The atmosphere thinned and warped, its viscosity growing inconsistent. Even sound moved strangely, swallowed by soft pockets of weakened cohesion, as if the entire world inhaled and forgot how to exhale.
And all of it had cost Jaune the entirety of his Aura reserves.
Yet the lack of resistance made the cost bearable. Weakening an awakened person meant clashing against their aura, a constant war of metaphysical pressure. Weakening the world itself meant no such contest. The earth did not resist. The air did not push back. Nature simply bent.
Jaune felt the difference. He could sense the clarity of it. For the first time, he understood exactly how his rune behaved when it encountered no defensive substrate. Aura expenditure fell into a smooth curve without spikes or churn. It was clean and beautifully efficient.
The others did not see the elegance. They saw catastrophe.
Roman staggered, dropping his already broken cane as the ground sloshed beneath him. He plunged calf-deep into the destabilized slurry, mouth snapping shut in shock. Neo's eyes widened as the platform she leapt away from suddenly started to disintegrate, and her form dropped straight into the liquefied terrain. It pulled at her legs like living liquid quicksand. The Dragon Gang members all, also faltered as one. Even those with stronger mobility had no purchase. Boots sank. The ground slid out from under them. Traction was a memory.
However, Arias, being their leader, reacted before panic could even sharpen.
He lifted his unconscious daughter higher against his chest, then swept a hand outward. Space folded sideways in a jagged ripple, a wide displacement field blossoming under the entire Dragon Gang. The world stuttered around them, and then all of them were gone, yanked violently out of the collapsing area and safely flung onto stable ground far behind the crater.
At the same moment, Qrow wrenched himself free from the flesh beast's hold.
The slurry could not support the creature's strength. It's limbs collapsed inwards and its mass started to tilt. Qrow took the split second of loosened pressure and forced his body to move. Feathers and muscles melted away as he shifted back into his human state. Mid-fall, he staggered and coughed up a thick stream of blood.
Raven seized that moment.
She reached for Qrow's shadow, and through the pain, she willed it to transfer him away. Qrow's shadow flared outwards over his form and dragged Qrow straight through the slurried floor as if he was being swallowed by a hole in the world. He reappeared instantly beside Jaune, Ruby, Yang, and Raven herself.
Jaune's hand shot out.
He grabbed all of them. Yang's wrist. Ruby's shoulder. Raven's arm. Qrow's forearm. It felt like trying to hold lightning inside a glass jar. Every nerve in his body screamed. His aura was gone, but his will burned bright enough to push the invocation forward.
He closed his eyes and reached for something beneath his consciousness. That invisible feeling that he had felt in that being's presence.
And, Jaune spoke that horrifying invocation.
"The Sleeper beyond the Grave,"
The monster reacted instantly.
Shock radiated through its entire mass. That enormous vertical maw split wider, dozens of its tendrils convulsing in dissonant alarm. Its limbs exploded forward in a tidal wave, hundreds of hands and arms and bone-mouthed tendrils lunging for their group. Panic and what appeared to be reverence, pulsed beneath its skin.
It knew that chant.
However, it was Qrow who moved first.
His back tore open in a spray of black light. Copies of him split outward from his spine, one after another like shards of shadow peeled from a mirror. Forty clones. Fifty. Each transformed mid-flight, bones stretching, wings blooming into monstrous structures, their spans reaching dozens of meters. They threw themselves between the beast's assault and Jaune's group.
The hands slammed into the clones like meteors.
Wings shattered. Bodies burst. Feathers and blood splattered in arcs that evaporated before hitting the ground. Qrow convulsed as every destroyed clone sent backlash directly through him. His eyes bled first, followed by his nose, then thick lines tearing from the corners of his mouth. His legs buckled.
But he held.
The beast was slowed.
"Matron of Slumbering Nightmares,"
Raven followed.
Her shadow erupted around them, spiraling upward into a dome of pure black. A barrier formed, thick and layered, vibrating under the pressure of her will. The flesh beast crashed down on it like a falling moon. The shield cracked. Then splintered. Then shattered.
But the moment it bought was enough. Jaune finished the invocation.
His voice was calm. He spoke the last line without fear or hesitation, staring at the flesh monster with nothing but clarity in his eyes.
"The Horror who denies the Sun."
The world inhaled.
A silence like the inside of a tomb pressed over the shattered battlefield.
The Sleeper heard him.
.
.
AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon