Jaune couldn't properly understand what his father had just said.
The words themselves were simple enough, but his mind refused to accept the meaning behind them.
His eyes remained fixed upon his father, the man who had spent the last few years existing as an answer to questions Jaune had never known how to ask, and for several seconds Jaune could do nothing but stare.
Plunder?
His father's memories?
If he did that, then wouldn't his father well and truly die? Not merely die in the physical sense, but to have the last remaining thing that made Nicholas Arc, ripped from him and transferred into another vessel.
Memories were not some collection of photographs stored in a cabinet. They were the experiences that had shaped someone and the knowledge a person had accumulated, the decisions a person made and the mistakes they committed.
Whether it involved the people they had loved or the people he had betrayed, the countless moments in a memory that a person experienced transformed a boy into a man.
To strip those memories from his father with Plunder would be to take away the final thing that belonged solely to Nicholas.
Plunder was, in a sense, an extremely sinister rune. The power to forcefully steal and take away what wasn't yours, made to be yours. To this day, Jaune had seen few runes with the same capability to affect the mind.
And to use it on his father, was somehow that felt even worse than watching the light of Destruction consume his body.
It would be as if Jaune himself were killing him.
His hands shook ever so slightly, and he clenched them before himself, trying to force them to stop, but the trembling only worsened.
"No," Jaune whispered, his voice barely more than air.
He swallowed, his throat painfully tight.
"What... what kind of decision is that? If I... If I..."
The rest refused to come. He couldn't say it. He couldn't bring himself to say that if he activated Plunder, he would be the one to finish his father's death.
Nicholas looked at him with eyes that Jaune had rarely, if ever, seen before. It wasn't fear or regret. It wasn't even the despair that any ordinary man should have felt when his body had already been reduced to little more than a slowly crumbling torso.
His arms and legs having already disappeared beneath the crawling monochrome radiance. Only the upper portion of his body remained, and even that was being devoured piece by piece, as cracks of monochrome light crawling across his chest and shoulders like fractures spreading through stone.
Blood seeped from his mouth when he coughed, but even the blood did not remain blood for long. The droplets emerged crimson and were immediately invaded by the pale, colorless phenomenon, disintegrating into fragments of light before they could even touch the ground.
Yet somehow, despite all of that, Nicholas remained calm. He looked at his son, and the expression on his face was almost gentle.
"What... happened to that burning resolve of yours, Jaune?" he asked quietly. "What... happened to wanting to stop Salem from awakening?"
The question struck Jaune harder than any physical blow could have. Nicholas coughed, his body convulsing slightly, and another portion of his shoulder broke away into dust. He didn't even look down at it.
"You know this as well as I do. I'm dead. There is no saving me. But just because I'm going to die doesn't mean that you should leave the rest of the world to follow my fate."
Jaune felt a profound sadness settle over his own mind, heavier than anything he had experienced in his life. It wasn't merely grief. Grief implied that something had already been lost, but his father was still here, still speaking, still looking at him, still thinking, still feeling.
Jaune could sense those emotions because of weakness, and now there was something almost unbearable about it.
Nicholas Arc wasn't drowning in despair.
Instead, Jaune felt resolve.
Pure, unwavering resolve.
It was the same kind of resolve he had sensed in his father before, the kind that had allowed Nicholas to manipulate events on a scale that Jaune was still struggling to comprehend, but now it was concentrated into a single purpose.
His father had already accepted his death.
Perhaps he had accepted it long before Tyrian's spear of Destruction had ever pierced his heart or perhaps he had accepted it the moment he had seen the future. Perhaps he had even accepted it the moment he decided that the future he had witnessed was unacceptable.
Jaune sometimes struggled to wrap his head around what exactly his father was capable of. He constantly had to remind himself that Nicholas Arc wasn't a normal awakened. He wasn't merely an exceptionally powerful Rank 2, nor was he simply another strange figure among the legends that inhabited the upper echelons of LUCID.
Even among the weird and powerful awakened, Nicholas stood apart.
This was a man who had seen the end of the world through his rune. Not metaphorically or through some vague prophecy or symbolic dream.
He had seen theapocalypse. He had looked beyond the countless possible turns of history and witnessed where the final road ultimately led, and then he had spent years trying to break the road beneath his own feet.
What did that imply?
What did it truly mean to possess such knowledge?
Jaune could barely imagine it.
To know that the world would end and still wake every morning knowing that everyone you loved was walking toward that ending. To see the destination while everyone else remained ignorant of the road. To understand that the apocalypse wasn't merely some distant possibility but something that, according to the future his father had witnessed, would eventually happen if nothing changed.
It was Destruction incarnate.
Not simply because of the power represented by the Supreme Rune itself, but because of the terrible certainty that had followed Nicholas for years.
His father had explained some of it to him, but there was only so much an explanation could communicate.
Words could describe a mountain, but they could not make someone feel the pressure of standing beneath it.
Words could describe an ocean, but they could not communicate the sensation of looking toward a horizon where water stretched farther than the eye could perceive. And the future Nicholas had seen was larger and more terrible than either.
It was an entire world becoming a graveyard.
To Nicholas, things would have eventually turned out according to what he had seen. That was the most terrifying part. If he had simply walked the path that Foresight had shown him and changed only a few things along the way, the Sleeper would awaken.
Jaune and his family would probably survive, perhaps even thrive, living a luxurious existence amidst the ruins of civilization.
They would rule alongside the other members of Sleepless while the world outside their walls burned. They would possess power, wealth, safety and immortality by association, while the God above watched as the rest of life was consumed by her Grimm tidings.
Nicholas could have accepted that future and become one of its architects. He had possessed enough knowledge, power and enough influence to do so.
After all, while Salem was evil, she was, after all, a necessary evil.
The alternative was worse.
"They encroach upon our world."
Jaune remembered his fathers words.
The creatures from beyond.
The Sleeper, was, not the only god out there. The entire existence of the Dream realm shrouded the Earth in a haze of invisibility—hiding them from the monsters from beyond.
An unintended effect, perhaps, but it was an effect, nonetheless.
Better the the devil you know?
Wrong.
Evil was evil.
Which was why, Nicholas Arc refused. That refusal had shaped everything that came afterward. He had carefully curated the events surrounding Jaune, turning him into an artificial awakened, engineering scenes and circumstances that would force him down a particular road.
He had manipulated encounters, arranged dangers, moved pieces across the board and ensured that his son would eventually reach the destiny Nicholas had planned for him.
Of course, that didn't mean that he didn't play both sides.
It was always good to have a backup plan, after all.
Jaune knew this. He had known it for some time. He had willingly danced to the strings of his father's puppeteering because he needed answers, because he had needed to confront the man who had shattered his family.
Because somewhere beneath all of the anger and hatred was a desperate desire to understand why.
And then, Jaune finally understood the cruelest part of it. His father had never been puppeteering Jaune merely because he wanted control. He had been trying to make one specific piece survive the collapse of the board.
Nicholas looked at his son for a long moment, and something in his expression softened further.
"You... know," he murmured voice growing less strained as if the damage of Destruction could no longer affect him.
"There's an old kind of story about a man who found a kingdom burning. He had enough time to save only one thing from the palace before the flames reached him. There was a crown of gold sitting in the throne room, and there was a book beside it. The crown represented everything the kingdom had been, while the book contained the names, memories and stories of everyone who had lived there. Yet, the man could only carry one. Do you know what he carried, Jaune?"
Jaune stayed silent.
"He took the book." Nicholas replied.
He paused to breathe, and his next breath came with a painful rasp.
"When people asked him afterward why he hadn't taken the crown, he told them that a crown could rebuild a kingdom, but only if there were people left, who remembered why it deserved rebuilding."
Nicholas Arc sighed as he finally looked down at his body and the cracks of destruction spreading throughout it.
"The kingdom wasn't in the stone walls, nor was it in the throne. It was in the stories carried by those who survived."
Nicholas's eyes remained fixed on Jaune.
"That's what I've been trying to do with you, my son. I've spent years walking through a burning kingdom, Jaune. I couldn't save everything and I couldn't save everyone. Hell... I couldn't even save myself. So I now... I'm trying to make sure that someone carries the knowledge of what was lost into whatever came after. You are not merely my son in this moment, Jaune. You are the person I've been trying to send through the fire."
Jaune's breath caught.
He understood the analogy immediately, and somehow that made it worse. His father wasn't trying to preserve himself, but a future.
Jaune had spent so long believing that Nicholas had treated him like a pawn that he had never considered the possibility that Nicholas had been willing to sacrifice the player himself so that the pawn could reach the other side of the board.
It didn't absolve him or erase the manipulation, the suffering and the years of uncertainty or the terrible things Nicholas had done. But it gave those actions a context that Jaune desperately wished he didn't understand.
Nicholas Arc had always known that if he were to walk this path, he would die. He had always known. Every step he had taken toward Jaune had been made with the knowledge that he would eventually have to hand the future over to his son.
This was... his final act of atonement for all the sins he had committed under the name of Sleepless. The final destination that he would walk.
"I wish things were different, you know?" Nicholas said.
This time, there was a hint of something fragile beneath his voice.
"Perhaps if runes, or the Sleeper, or the gods and all this supernatural crap didn't exist, our family... we could have been a regular one."
He smiled faintly, and the expression was so painfully human that Jaune almost couldn't bear to look at him.
"Maybe I'd have been a boring father, complaining about bills and yelling at you for leaving your shoes in the hallway. Maybe your mother and your sisters would have hated my cooking. Maybe you'd have grown up and hated me for some ordinary reason. Teenage drama..."
A quiet laugh escaped him, but it immediately turned into a cough.
"I'd have liked that."
Jaune's eyes burned with unshed tears.
"There are things that... I want to tell you, Jaune," Nicholas continued.
"Things I've wanted to tell you for a very long time. Things I should have told you before all of this. But I don't have the time to do so now."
His gaze lowered briefly toward the light crawling across his chest before returning to Jaune.
"You'll simply have to understand what I want to say through my memories." He took a slow breath.
"There are things that you will come to understand about why I did what I did. Some of them you'll hate me for and some of them you may never forgive me for. That's fine."
His smile faded, leaving only quiet sincerity behind.
"You don't need to forgive me. You only need to understand enough to decide what you do next."
Jaune's fists tightened.
"Dad..."
"Now do it."
The words were quiet, but they carried more authority than any command Nicholas had ever given him.
"Make me proud, my only son."
Jaune's eyes widened.
Nicholas Arc looked directly into his son's eyes, and no mystery in that gaze. There was simply a father looking at his son.
"Jaune Arc."
Something inside Jaune broke.
His father had made his decision and the world had made its decision. Tyrian had already taken Knowledge, and Destruction was consuming Nicholas.
Creation and Choice would soon follow—falling into his grasp. The Sleeper was approaching awakening, and the future was narrowing around them like a closing fist. Jaune had wanted another answer and another way.
But there was no other way.
His father had given him the only thing that remained.
Jaune slowly raised his hand.
His fingers trembled as they moved toward Nicholas's head. He could feel his own Aura struggling to recover, the remnants of energy slowly returning after Null had spent everything it had keeping Knowledge from destroying him.
It wasn't much but it didn't need to be much. Plunder did not require the strength necessary to kill a man through force.
It required intent, and a target and his father had already given him permission.
Jaune stared at him for another second.
"I'll remember," Jaune whispered softly and activated his rune.
The world vanished.