Ozpin's voice carrying effortlessly as he announced the next bout.
"Atlas versus Menagerie."
The names flared across the great projection screen.
Atlas sent a different team this time.
Jaune narrowed his eyes as the two Atlas representatives strode into the arena. The first he recognized immediately, though the name eluded him for a heartbeat. He had seen that man months ago, on patrol with Winter, just days before the Centurion tragedy had torn through everything. He remembered their clipped, professional exchanges.
Clarion.
That was it.
Clarion moved like a drawn blade given legs. His katana rested sheathed at his hip, hand hovering near the hilt with a casual familiarity that screamed discipline. His teammate, broader and heavier in stance, bore some odd glowing markings that were etched along his forearms which glowed a pale iron-blue.
Opposite them, Menagerie's team stepped forward.
The girl was slight, almost delicate in frame, but the air around her seemed to ripple faintly, as though something vast was breathing just beneath the surface of reality. This was one of the other five meta rune users that he sensed from menagerie.
Her partner was lean and sharp-eyed man.
Ozpin's voice fell silent.
The gong thundered.
Clarion drew first.
The katana left its sheath in a flash of cold silver. The air shrieked as crescent blades of compressed energy tore forward, slicing toward the Menagerie duo in layered arcs.
The girl did not move but something else did in her stead.
Behind her shoulders, two enormous hand-limbs burst into existence. Translucent arms that shimmered like the night sky, speckled with faint points of star-like brilliance. They flexed once, and all other lights seemed to dim in response.
The sword beams struck and the hands caught them.
The impact rang like steel colliding with the firmament. The energy blades shattered into glittering fragments that rained harmlessly against the ground.
Clarion's eyes sharpened. He vanished in a blur, reappearing a heartbeat later at her flank, blade cutting in a precise diagonal meant to cleave through shoulder and collarbone in one decisive motion.
A third limb sprouted from her back.
It intercepted the katana mid-swing, fingers closing around the steel. The blade hummed, runic energy flaring out in response of the attack, but the luminous hand did not falter. It tightened its grip and the metal groaned.
Clarion twisted, and wrenched the blade free with a smooth pivot. He flowed into a spinning cut that forced the girl back a step.
Her teammate moved forward. Energy flared outwards, spreading like ink dropped into water. The ground behind him distorted. Then rose.
A massive phantom beast clawed its way into existence. It resembled a tiger in shape, but its body was made of translucent smoke and fractured light. Its eyes burned like twin coals in a midnight furnace.
It roared without sound and Clarion's teammate answered in kind.
Chains erupted from his forearms in a violent spiral, steel links tipped with wicked barbs. They lashed outward, snapping around the phantom beast's limbs. Sparks flew as runic energy met runic energy.
The arena became a storm.
Clarion pressed forward again, blade a silver comet. Each swing sent rippling crescents of force that cracked the stone floor. The girl's star-limbs multiplied in response. Four, then six, then Eight. They unfolded around her like a celestial bloom.
Jaune leaned forward to watch her meta rune's power unfold.
One smashed into Clarion's guard, sending him skidding backward across the stone. Another lashed sideways, clipping his shoulder.
Her movements were subtle and she barely shifted her feet. The limbs did the fighting for her, moving with uncanny independence, as if each one possessed its own predatory awareness.
On the other side of the arena, the phantom tiger clashed with the chain wielder in a brutal dance. The chains bit into smoky flesh, tearing off chunks of glowing mist, but the beast reformed with each breath. In response, another phantom manifested behind him. This one shaped like a massive hawk, wings spanning wide enough to cast half the arena in flickering shadow.
It dove.
The chain wielder barely rolled aside in time and Jaune could sense the strain building.
Clarion adapted.
He leapt, aura flaring bright blue, and descended in a vertical slash aimed straight through the girl's guard. The blade cut through two limbs, dispersing them into a spray of starlight.
For a split second, she was exposed.
Then the air around her erupted.
More limbs burst forth in an explosion of radiance. They sprouted from every angle, overlapping, twisting, writhing. It was as if the night sky had grown hands and decided to grasp the world.
Clarion landed inside that forest of luminous arms.
He cut and pivoted very well, flowing like water around stone. But there were too many.
One limb caught his ankle and another seized his wrist. A third struck his ribs with crushing force.
Across the arena, his teammate was dominating. The hawk and tiger phantoms which had once pinned him, was dispersed as a multitude of chains whipped wildly in sharp arcs, piercing and somehow constricting the very essence of the animals, trapping their partial mist-like forms in spheres of rotating chains.
The girl's expression changed.
Until now she had seemed composed and focused but now urgency flashed across her face.
She glanced toward her partner.
He was losing.
Without hesitation, she raised both hands.
The arena ground shuddered.
Hand-like limbs multiplied in waves. Dozens, then scores. They filled the air like a living flood, overlapping in a writhing mass of clawed fingers and glowing palms. The crowd was stunned as the entire arena disappeared behind a ceiling of luminous grasping shapes. Even the very chains that Clarion's teammate had been using had somehow started to morph into the girl's star-like limbs as well.
Clarion and his teammate tried to retreat but there was nowhere to go.
The limbs descended, claws raked and palms slammed.
The runic seals ignited simultaneously on both Atlas fighters, and the illusion of fatal damage registered. The system judged the blows to be lethal.
In the next heartbeat, both men vanished from the arena, transported out by the protective enchantment.
Silence held for a fraction of a second.
"Victory, Menagerie."
The limbs dissolved like mist under sunlight, fading into nothing. The girl staggered slightly as the last of the starry glow receded into her body.
The crowd roared.
Jaune sat back slowly.
His mind did not linger on the spectacle.
The final attack.
The way the limbs had flooded the arena, saturating space itself until movement became impossible.
It felt familiar in principle.
When Jaune used weakness, he could identify fragility and pressed on it until structure collapsed. He could unravel the molecular integrity of stone, turning solid ground into slurry with a thought. He did not need to overwhelm with force. He made the world softer, less certain, until it gave way.
Her rune did something similar in a different language even having the capacity to turn an opponents ability into her own limbs, as seen with what happened with the chains.
Meta rune.
Jaune's fingers curled slightly against his knee.
If she could multiply them like that now, what much more powerful would she become at Rank 2?
Above, on the viewing platform, the thin old man watched with eyes that twinkled faintly.
Power gathered here like storm clouds.
And this was only the beginning of the rotational brackets.
The pattern shifted again overhead, lines of light sliding into their next configuration.
Vale versus Vacuo.
The brackets shifted again overhead, luminous lines sliding into their next configuration.
Vale versus Vacuo.
Jaune rose when their names appeared.
Pyrrha had asked him a few days ago, almost casually, if he would be interested in partnering with her for the two versus two matches. He had agreed without hesitation.
She was, after all, one of the strongest fighters he had ever faced.
More importantly, they understood each other.
They had crossed blades often enough to know the rhythm of the other's thoughts. She knew when he would press and when he would yield. He knew how she liked to angle her attacks and how she layered pressure—how she created inevitability instead of spectacle.
They walked into the arena side by side.
Across from them stood Sun Wukong and Neptune Vassilas.
Sun appeared to have restless energy coiled inside him like a spring waiting to snap. Jaune had heard from Ruby that he bore the Primate rune and the Light rune. Jaune wasn't entirely sure about their capabilities as he had never seen those runes before, but from the sound of it, Sun would be able to create constructs of light.
Neptune stood beside him, tall and composed. Jaune studied him carefully. From what Sun Wukong had once mentioned, Neptune had learnt how to perform Aura Echo. Similar to Jaune's own.
Jaune's lips twitched faintly.
He doubted Neptune's was as refined as his.
Jaune had been in the shoes of a Rank 2 when he had fought Arthur Watts all those months ago. That encounter had carved something permanent into him. A sharpness and a density that few could match.
Ozpin's voice echoed across the coliseum, announcing their names to which there were cheers in response. Jaune was pretty sure he heard Nora's voice. And... Mocha too?
Then the gong thundered.
Sun pressed the attack first.
He launched into the air in a blur of motion, golden light igniting along his arms. In his hands, brilliance condensed and stretched, forming a massive staff of radiant energy. It hummed with contained force.
He brought it down in a sweeping arc aimed at both Jaune and Pyrrha.
They split in opposite directions, the staff crashing into the stone where they had stood. The impact sent a shockwave rippling across the arena floor, cracks spidering outward.
Jaune did not waste the opening.
He focused and both Weakness and Plunder flowed outward from him like twin tides. Invisible and precise settling onto Sun and Neptune simultaneously.
He felt the shift immediately.
Their stats dipped and their strength wavered and at the same time, his own increased.
Sun's eyes flicked toward him and Neptune's posture tightened.
Recognition dawned in there.
Meta rune and a powerful one that affected their very stats themselves.
Pyrrha did not give them time to dwell on it. She launched forward, her expression calm, almost serene. Metal coalesced the arena floor, rippling upward in liquid streams and wrapping around her like living armor before surging forward in waves toward their opponents. In addition to that, Jaune could sense that Pyrrha was attempting to control the iron in their blood to stop them from moving.
Under normal circumstances, that alone might have decided the match.
With their stats weakened, the pressure should have been overwhelming.
However, it seemed that Vacuo had come prepared.
The runic energy of Pyrrha that was wrapping around the two of them was almost instantly dispersed by their Will's and Neptune lifted his hand in response to Pyrrha's metal attack.
Runic energy surged from him in a deep blue pulse. The air grew heavy with moisture. Then, impossibly, water poured into existence.
It wasn't a simple stream but a tide.
It erupted outward from Neptune in a sweeping wave that flooded the arena floor in seconds. The stone disappeared beneath a churning surface that shimmered with condensed aura. It was not natural water. It glowed faintly, dense and luminous, as though the sea itself had been compressed into a confined space.
Jaune reacted instantly.
He leapt upward, Will igniting within him. He anchored himself to the air, standing on nothing through sheer force of presence. The water below had an incredible amount of density. Far greater than what regular water should have. It would drag him down if he let himself fall.
Pyrrha's metal streams struck the rising tide and they stopped.
The water held.
It was thick and almost solid in resistance. The flowing metal dispersed and fell harmlessly, swallowed by the glowing sea.
Sun descended beside Neptune, landing on the water's surface.
In contrast, the liquid supported him as though it were polished glass.
Pyrrha adjusted smoothly. A broad sheet of metal formed beneath her feet, lifting her into the air. She guided it toward Jaune and extended it so he could step onto its surface. The metal hovered steadily under their combined weight.
For a moment, the arena transformed into a surreal tableau.
Sun and Neptune stood upon a glowing sea.
Jaune and Pyrrha hovered above them on a floating platform of steel.
The crowd quieted slightly, sensing the shift.
Jaune studied Neptune more closely now.
Some type of Water rune, clearly. And dense enough to counter Pyrrha's Ferrous rune directly.
Sun twirled his staff lightly, golden light reflecting across the water's surface. Even under the pressure of Weakness and Plunder, he did not seem shaken. His grin remained intact.
Pyrrha stood beside Jaune, poised and balanced, eyes sharp as drawn blades.
Two teams. One in the sky and one upon the sea.
Jaune felt something stir inside him.
Excitement.
The kind that came when variables aligned into something unpredictable. When strength met strength and the outcome refused to reveal itself too easily.
His mind pulsed faintly.
This was going to be fun.
.
.
AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon