With his Body stat having reached fifteen, the world felt lighter beneath Jaune's feet, as if gravity itself had become negotiable. Though, considering that he was able to bend physics, that was perhaps not an inaccurate statement. The arena floor cracked under the force of his missile-like launch as he surged forward like a released bolt, both swords angled low and ready. The smoky wolf-beast met him mid charge, jaws opening wide enough to swallow his entire body whole.
Its teeth closed on runic steel.
The sound that followed was not so much the crunch of bone but the shriek of something brittle shattering. Jaune's strength tore through the wolf's bite with a brutal finality. The blade split through fangs, muzzle and through the hazy skull beyond. The beast's form ruptured into a violent spray of smoke that scattered outward in a spiraling gust.
For an instant, there was nothing where it had stood.
Then the vapor curled back in on itself, gathering and compressing. The wolf's silhouette reformed, its body stitching itself together as though the cut had never happened.
Jaune had expected that.
He had watched their earlier match. He had seen how the summons were able to return and how the smoky mass obeyed its master's will like loyal hounds returning from a hunt. Still, even with expectation, there was something irritating about the resilience.
Though, more importantly, he felt a subtle dip in the summoner's aura. There was a faint flicker but it was measurable, by his weakness sense. The wolf's destruction had cost the man something.
Jaune's mind analyzed that detail.
In a drawn out fight, he could win this exchange. He could cut the beasts down over and over again, grind away at the man's reserves until the man's aura ran dry. It was a clean equation.
But this was not a battlefield for patience.
He and Pyrrha needed to end this fast. Speed and momentum. A decisive strike before the girl's starlight rune turned the entire arena into a celestial nightmare.
That previous fight had been eye opening enough to see her capabilities.
So instead of lingering on the animals, Jaune pivoted his trajectory toward its master.
The bull charged him, hooves cracking the arena stone, horns lowered like twin battering rams. Its bulk cast a wide shadow, smoke trailing behind it in thick streamers.
Jaune did not slow.
At the last possible second he dropped, sliding beneath the beast's frame. His blades flashed in mirrored arcs, slicing through the tendons at its hind legs. The bull's roar fractured into a distorted bellow as its back half dissolved into smoke mid stride.
Jaune pushed off the ground with both hands.
Will gathered at his feet, condensed and then detonated in a focused burst of aura.
The echo cracked like thunder.
The force launched him forward so violently that his form blurred through the air. The ground beneath him spiderwebbed in his wake. To an outside observer it might have seemed like a short range teleportation gimmick, a blink from one point in space to another.
In truth, it was raw propulsion and precision.
He arrived before the summoner in a breath, swords ready to cut.
The man didn't panic—that was the first wrong note.
Jaune's swords came down in a crossing strike meant to cleave through his neck and end the exchange in a single explosive impact.
Suddenly, the arena floor beneath him erupted.
Stone and light surged upward in a sudden bloom as a massive taloned hand of starlight burst from beneath the summoner's feet. Its fingers snapped closed around Jaune's blades just as they descended, radiant claws grinding against steel.
The collision detonated with a concussive boom.
Jaune's Will flared in response, instinctively triggering four hits of Aura Echo to amplify the strike and break through the hand.
And yet.
The starlight hand answered in kind.
There was a second detonation, luminous and precise, meeting his Echo with one of its own. The air between them convulsed. The counterforce hurled both combatants away from the epicenter, Jaune skidding backward across shattered stone while the conjured hand fragmented into glittering shards of fading light.
He caught himself mid slide, feet carving furrows into the arena floor.
His mind raced faster than his body.
The hand had used Aura Echo?
The construct itself had mirrored his amplification. The timing had been perfect, the resonance exact.
Jaune had not known that was possible.
Aura Echo was a technique of control that essentially required great and precise timing. It required awareness, intent, a sense of one's own Will. To channel it through a rune construct implied layers of mastery he had not anticipated.
As he stabilized himself, flipping upright and landing in a low crouch, his gaze snapped toward the girl.
She was engaged with Pyrrha, luminous arms weaving in complex patterns around her. Yet her eyes were not fully on that fight. There was a flicker of attention in her periphery, a quiet acknowledgment of his presence and his attempt.
She had seen him coming. Jaune couldn't help but wonder if the girl had her own form of special sense that was similar to his own weakness sense.
The battlefield shifted again.
The remnants of the shattered starlight hand did not dissipate. Instead they curved backward and reformed with fluid grace around her summoner teammate. The luminous talons wrapped around his right arm, sinking into him rather than remaining separate.
Light fused with flesh.
When it stabilized, his right arm had transformed into a colossal starlight limb, proportionally immense and edged with radiant constellation-like claws. The glow contrasted sharply against the smoky darkness that already clung to him.
Then the wolf and bull dissolved entirely.
Their bodies collapsed into formless vapor that rushed back toward their master in twin streams. The entered him and seemed to be changing something fundamentally.
Jaune felt the pressure spike.
The man's silhouette blurred as the vapor merged into his frame. A bestial visage formed over his features, elongated muzzle and sharp ears shaped from dense smoke. Bull horns curled upward from his brow, thick and brutal. One shoulder broadened grotesquely, the outline of a partial bovine torso layered over his own.
He became something hybrid and monstrous.
Akin to a werewolf and a minotaur fused together, sculpted from dark glassy smoke that refracted the arena lights in jagged patterns. The transformation was not elegant. It was primal, violent and stitched together from summoned wrath.
Only one element disrupted the image.
His right arm.
The massive starlight talon gleamed with pristine brilliance, cosmic and clean, attached to a body of shadow and distortion. The aesthetic clash was almost absurd. Celestial limb on a nightmare frame.
Jaune could have laughed at the visual if it had not radiated so much power.
The summoner flexed his new arm.
The starlight claws carved faint lines through the air, leaving glowing afterimages that lingered a fraction too long. Smoke coiled from his shoulders in slow spirals. His danger signature thickened, heavier and more compact than before.
This was no longer a simple summoner hiding behind beasts.
He had consolidated.
Jaune just wondered why he didn't use this form in the previous match. He paused for a moment.
'Damn. Did he really reach comprehension mid fight with me?'
Jaune rolled his shoulders once, blades steady in his grip. His pulse beat in controlled rhythm, adrenaline tempered by focus.
'No. It was probably before-hand when he was fighting Clarion's team. Still kind of crazy though.'
It was a reminder that Jaune and Pyrrha weren't the only strong ones in this competition. Jaune might have been an anomaly and Pyrrha, a prodigy, but that didn't mean that the other kingdoms didn't have their own geniuses.
Jaune had to admit, he had been underestimating some of these people. Perhaps it was due to the arrogance of him having once fought as a Rank 2. Perhaps it was also due to the fact that he had achieved all of his strength in the span of a year. Or maybe even due to the fact that he held two meta runes. Regardless, Jaune could admit that he was definitely becoming more ostentatious.
Silently Jaune resolved himself to be better.
He couldn't afford to underestimate people anymore. Not when there were dark horses appearing during this tournament again and again.
Across the arena, Pyrrha vaulted over a sweeping starlight limb, her metal spears colliding against radiant defenses in cascading sparks. She spared Jaune a brief glance, reading the shift instantly.
They would have to adapt again.
The smoke clad hybrid man lowered into a crouch, then he moved.
Fast.
The massive starlight arm swung, cleaving through the air in a horizontal arc that seemingly distorted the space it passed through. Jaune crossed his blades and met it head on.
The impact rang like a cathedral bell struck by lightning.
His arms strained as the force traveled through him, legs digging trenches across the fractured stone.
The man's stats after being plundered away by Jaune's should have been at 7 each. However, this new hybrid form might have pushed his body stat back to 9. The addition of the starlight hand made his attacks hit with the power of a body stat of 12 or 13.
The starlight claws scraped against his swords in a shower of radiant sparks. Smoke swirled around the man's torso as he followed with his left, now reinforced by the spectral bulk of the bull's frame.
Jaune pivoted inside the strike, feeling the brush of smoky horn graze past his shoulder.
Up close, he could feel the flicker of runic energy beneath the transformation. It was powerful, yes, but not infinite. The earlier dips from cutting down the wolf and bull had not been illusions.
There was still a cost.
Jaune adjusted his stance, muscles coiling.
.
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While Jaune adjusted to the summoner's monstrous consolidation, Pyrrha had been weaving an entirely different tapestry.
Each clash with the starlight arms had not only been an exchange of force, but an act of quiet preparation. With every parry and deflection, every spear shattered against radiant talons, she had streamed a whisper thin current of invisible metal particles into the air around her opponent.
The aim was to get it into her blood.
The girl could bleed like any other human. During their exchanges, she had guided microscopic fragments into that internal current, dispersing them so finely that even the slightest fluctuation in circulation would not betray their presence.
Now the reservoir was sufficient.
One thought and a single pulse of her rune, would cause the particles to expand outward into a forest of invisible spikes, shredding her body from within. It would be instantaneous and the rank 3 seal would trigger, kicking her out of the fight and the arena.
Yet something had been troubling her.
From the moment their fight began, Pyrrha had felt a strange sensation. When her senses brushed against the girl's bloodstream, the iron within didn't feel singular.
The best way to describe was... that it felt layered.
As if there were multiple flows occupying the same space. Like sheets of glass pressed together, slightly misaligned. The anatomy was correct, yet, beneath that, there was akin to an echo. A second texture woven into the first.
Pyrrha couldn't sense runic energy the way Jaune could with his weakness sense. All she had was her metal sense and her instincts.
She forced the thought aside. In battle, hesitation was a luxury that bled consequences.
The moment came during a brief opening. A starlight arm lunged for her shoulder. She pivoted, redirected it, and in that fraction of a heartbeat, she triggered the detonation.
The metal within the girl's bloodstream expanded outward.
Not explosively visible or in a spectacle of gore. The spikes were microscopic but lethal, designed to rupture vessels and organs in a silent, devastating bloom.
The girl staggered.
A small cough escaped her lips. A thin line of red traced downward from the corner of her mouth.
And then the starlight arms descended.
Massive luminous fists smashed into the space Pyrrha had occupied an instant earlier. Stone erupted in a rain of fragments. Pyrrha retreated in a fluid arc, legs skimming across fractured ground as she widened the distance between them.
She stared.
That should have ended it but the seal had not triggered. No golden flare or protective teleportation signaling a fatal threshold.
The girl wiped the blood from her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled.
The expression wasn't pained.
It was almost amused.
"It won't work," she said calmly, her voice carrying clearly despite the chaos around them. "I analyzed your abilities in the previous match."
Pyrrha's eyes narrowed slightly.
Before her, something shifted.
Light gathered along the girl's outline, coalescing in a thin luminous sheath. It peeled away from her skin like a second form emerging from the first. The separation was smooth and seamless. What stood beside her now was an identical figure, sculpted entirely from starlight.
A clone.
It shimmered faintly, its features mirroring the original with eerie precision. The surface of its body refracted the arena lights like a prism.
And within that radiant form, Pyrrha felt it.
Her metal.
Every particle she had threaded into the girl's bloodstream now pulsed within the clone instead. They were no longer lodged in flesh. They were embedded in light.
The original girl stood untouched.
The starlight double dissolved almost immediately, flowing back into her body in a cascade of brilliance. As it merged, Pyrrha sensed the displacement complete itself. The layered sensation returned, more obvious now.
The girl had not simply endured the attack.
She had redirected it.
Her anatomy had felt layered because it was layered. Flesh and starlight intertwined. A second body coexisting within the first, ready to separate and absorb harm.
The girl tilted her head slightly, eyes bright with interest.
"So," she asked lightly, brushing a stray lock of hair from her face, "what other tricks do you have up your sleeve?"
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon