Jaune inhaled slowly and let his awareness sink downward.
The sea beneath them shimmered with a powerful runic density, each wave crest glinting faintly with the compressed power of Neptune's rune. It behaved like water, but its internal structure felt tighter and heavier. As if Neptune had forced the bonds between molecules into a rigid embrace rather than a loose shifting state that water naturally had.
Jaune extended a thread of his Weakness carefully.
Ordinarily, liquid was difficult for him affect. His rune excelled against solidity and structures that relied on fixed relationships. Stone, steel etc. Even the arena floor could yield to him, crumbling into slurry if he pressed hard enough.
Water was different. Its bonds were looser and always reforming.
But this water wasn't loose. It was unnaturally dense.
He focused on a small patch beneath Neptune's feet and pressed.
At first, nothing happened.
Then, faintly, he felt a subtle slackening. The dense cohesion within a palm sized section loosened. The surface rippled oddly, dipping where it should have held firm.
It worked, very slightly.
Jaune narrowed his eyes and increased the pressure. The water grew less resistant in that small area as its glow dimmed a fraction.
But it was still water.
Even weakened, it still remained liquid. It simply flowed back into itself, reforming around the compromised section.
He would have to unravel an enormous volume to create meaningful instability. That would drain his aura reserves rapidly, and Neptune could simply replenish the density with another pulse of energy.
Jaune exhaled softly. Testing was complete. He withdrew the thread of his rune before he wasted any more power.
Pyrrha glanced at him.
He met her eyes and gave the smallest shake of his head.
'I can affect it, but it's not enough.'
She nodded once in understanding. Sun decided that contemplation time had expired.
He crouched briefly atop the small sea, then launched upward like a cannon shot. Light erupted around him, condensing into twin colossal staves that extended from his hands in radiant arcs.
He swung down with overwhelming force.
Pyrrha reacted instantly, guiding the metal platform backward in a smooth glide. The staves crashed through the space they had occupied moments before, cleaving air with a thunderous crack.
Jaune however, did not retreat with her.
He leapt forward.
As he moved, he coiled Weakness around the descending constructs of light, attempting to press into their structure the same way he would press into steel.
The rune slid off because there was nothing for it to grasp.
The staves were not matter and like how Jaune understood it. They were condensed radiance, shaped by Sun's rune and sustained by aura. His Weakness sought bonds to fray and structures to unravel but Light offered neither.
The sensation was like trying to squeeze smoke.
Jaune grimaced internally.
Of course.
To weaken such intangible things, he would need a deeper understanding. Mastery, probably.
That was a threshold he had not yet crossed.
The staves descended.
Jaune twisted midair and kicked off nothing, using Will to redirect himself. The twin pillars of light smashed past him, their force tearing wind in violent spirals.
He recovered instantly and lunged forward, blade flashing toward Sun's exposed flank.
Under the weight of Weakness and Plunder, Sun's stats were suppressed. The disparity was great, his own strength and speed now exceeded Sun's by a significant margin.
This should have been decisive but Sun's expression didn't change into panic.
As Jaune's blade came down, the staves deformed.
The radiant constructs melted inward at the speed of light, reshaping in a blink into a massive spherical barrier of condensed light that enveloped Sun entirely.
Jaune's strike collided with it.
A crack spread across the surface like lightning across glass.
In the same instant, ten echoes of the identical strike manifested around the sphere, each one slamming into the same point in perfect succession.
The barrier shattered into a storm of glittering fragments.
Jaune pressed forward, expecting to see Sun behind the broken shell.
Instead, something far larger filled his vision.
A massive ape stood where Sun had been.
Not colossal in size but still equally imposing. Roughly the size of a powerful silverback gorilla, yet more refined in proportion. Muscles coiled beneath sleek fur and broad shoulders. Long and powerful arms.
And the face.
It was unmistakably Sun's. Handsome and fierce. Grinning with unrestrained exhilaration.
'The Primate rune.' Jaune thought to himself.
In the back of his mind, Jaune couldn't help but recall an old Mistralian tale he had once heard in passing. A story of a monkey king born of stone, who ruled a mountain of flowers and fruit and defied heaven itself on a long journey westward.
Sun Wukong.
The name had carried myth within it.
Now that manifested myth stood before him, breathing and alive.
The ape roared with challenge.
Jaune lunged.
Monkey Sun met him head on.
Ape fist clad in light energy collided with dual swords in a thunderclap.
Even weakened, the Primate form amplified Sun's physicality. The impact reverberated up Jaune's arm, but he held firm. He drove forward with a slash aimed at the ape's shoulder.
Sun twisted with startling agility.
Despite the stat gap, he moved with extraordinary fluidity. He ducked under the blade, tail flicking for balance, and sprang upward.
Tiny platforms of light flickered into existence beneath his feet.
Sun bounded from one to the next as though they were stepping stones in an invisible river. Each platform lasted only a fraction of a second before dissolving, but it was enough.
He reappeared above Jaune, swinging a massive glowing staff that had reformed in his grip.
Jaune raised his sword and met the blow.
The clash sent a shockwave outward, scattering away droplets from the sea below.
Sun landed lightly on another light platform, then another, zigzagging through the air in a pattern too erratic to predict cleanly. For anyone that wasn't Jaune, at least.
His weakness sense covered that weakness with extreme precision.
Jaune pressed forward, echoing his own movements, multiplying his strikes to intercept.
Their blades and staves collided in a rapid exchange. Jaune's advantage in raw stats was evident in the force behind each swing, yet Sun compensated with mobility. He flowed around attacks with simian grace, twisting his torso, flipping midair, tail whipping to redirect momentum.
Jaune adjusted his rhythm.
He condensed his strikes tighter and tighter around Sun's body but Sun responded by accelerating.
His Light rune flared brighter. The platforms became more numerous, appearing in cascading sequences that allowed him to spiral around Jaune in a three dimensional dance.
Jaune slashed through two platforms, dispersing them before Sun could use them, but three more manifested instantly in a new formation.
Below them, the glowing sea churned and Neptune maintained it steadily while launching Pillars of water to Pyrrha who maneuvered her metal constructs to block the attacks and probe for openings.
Pyrrha extended her hand.
The air around her trembled as fragments of metal converged above her palm, condensed from nothing and forging themselves into colossal spears. One spear became three and three became six. Each of their shafts were dense and perfectly balanced, their tips honed to needle precision. They hovered for a breath, gleaming like a constellation of forged intent.
Pyrrha thrust her arm forward.
The spears tore through the air toward Neptune.
The small sea beneath him rippled and shifted as he leaned forward into motion. Water compressed beneath his feet, flattening into a smooth surface. He skated across it with effortless grace, leaving faint wakes of luminous spray behind him.
The first spear struck where he had stood an instant earlier, punching through the dense water and embedding into the arena floor below. The second and third followed, carving violent furrows through the sea before anchoring themselves deep into stone.
Water surged upward in response, disturbed and displaced.
Neptune pivoted sharply, the sea curving with him as though obeying the tilt of his shoulders. More spears descended in a staggered pattern, forcing him to weave between them in tight arcs.
Each impact drove another metal pillar into the arena.
The water churned violently now, disrupted by the intrusion.
Neptune exhaled and lifted both arms.
The sea answered.
Two massive arms of condensed water surged upward from the surface, thick and muscular, shaped like translucent giants. They reached for Pyrrha in tandem, fingers spreading wide.
She did not retreat, choosing to instead angle her platform forward and launch herself into him.
A slab of ultra dense metal snapped into place before her like a shield. The watery hands slammed into it with crushing force, sending vibrations up her arm, but the metal held. She redirected her momentum along the surface of her own shield, sliding upward along it and continued launching herself toward Neptune.
As she closed the distance, her spear reformed in her grasp, metal flowing into a flawless shaft tipped with a gleaming blade.
Neptune reacted instantly.
A vortex formed at his side. A compact mass of water spun inward, tightening until it took on a distinct shape. Three prongs extended outward from the spinning mass, solidifying into a trident of impossibly dense water.
He caught it in his hand just in time for their weapons to collide.
The impact rang across the arena.
Pyrrha felt the reverberation through her fingers. She channeled Aura Echo instinctively, releasing four perfectly timed echoes of the same strike. The force multiplied, each subsequent impact layering atop the first in rapid succession.
Ordinarily, that would have shattered most constructs, however the trident did not dissipate.
Instead, an answering resonance pulsed through Neptune's weapon.
Four counter echoes rang out, matching her rhythm precisely. The force rebounded into her arm, pushing her backward through the air.
Pyrrha's eyes narrowed slightly.
Aura Echo.
He had mirrored her timing exactly. That alone would have been impressive.
But there was more.
The trident had not lost structural integrity under her density enhanced blow. Its cohesion remained intact, the water packed so tightly that it behaved like forged steel.
She tested again, pressing more of her Density rune into her spear as she drove forward.
The clash this time produced a shockwave that flattened the surrounding water into a circular depression.
The trident held. Realization flickered across her face. She should have realized it from how the water was behaving.
"You have Density too?"
Neptune's grin widened, bright and infuriatingly charming.
"Guess we're more alike than you thought," he replied lightly, flicking a droplet from his shoulder as though they were engaged in casual sparring rather than a high level tournament match. "Though I have to say, I wear it better."
Pyrrha frowned slightly at his tone.
Then her lips curved.
"You're pretty good," she admitted, voice steady and confident. "It's just too bad you're not on my level."
Neptune opened his mouth to answer.
Then his expression shifted.
Understanding dawned a fraction too late.
Earlier, when Pyrrha had launched her massive spears, they had not dissolved upon impact. They had embedded themselves deep into the arena floor beneath the sea.
From each spear's shaft, metal had branched outwards in organic shapes.
Coral like structures spread through the dense water, twisting and interlocking, their growth accelerated by her control. They expanded rapidly, weaving beneath the surface like a metallic reef forming in seconds.
The sea was no longer uniform.
Neptune cursed softly and leapt upward.
The coral-metal erupted with supreme force.
Spear tipped branches shot upward from below, piercing through the water in a violent forest of ascending spikes. Each one aimed with precision at where Neptune had been.
He twisted midair, narrowly avoiding a thrust that would have impaled him through the side. More spikes followed, tracking his movement as Pyrrha adjusted their trajectory with minute gestures.
For a moment, it seemed that his loss was inevitable.
Then Neptune did something unexpected.
Water from every direction surged toward him in a sudden contraction. The surface collapsed inward, spiraling into a central column beneath his airborne form. The dense liquid compressed and began to rotate violently.
Within seconds, he was suspended inside a formation of spinning rings.
It separated into multiple horizontal bands, each rotating in alternating directions. The rings intersected and overlapped, forming a miniature hurricane contained within a sphere.
The incoming metal spikes struck the outermost ring.
They were deflected instantly.
The rotational force redirected their momentum sideways, snapping their tips off or hurling them away in showers of sparks.
Pyrrha's brows knit together.
The coral forest continued to grow, but each new branch that attempted to pierce the rotating barrier was knocked aside by the relentless spin.
Neptune hovered at the center, balanced effortlessly as the rings whirled around him.
He extended one hand.
The rings tightened then they flared outward, collapsing into a forward surge.
What had once been a defensive vortex transformed into a concentrated tidal wave.
It roared toward Pyrrha in a towering arc, the dense water glowing as it curved upward with crushing force.
She raised both hands.
Metal surged from beneath her feet, forming a layered bulwark in front of her. She poured Density into it, compressing the structure until it shimmered with near crystalline hardness.
The tidal wave struck.
The impact thundered across the arena.
Water exploded outward in a spray that glittered under the stadium lights. The metal shield buckled but did not shatter. Pyrrha was driven backward through the air.
She steadied herself.
Neptune descended slowly from the collapsing remnants of his vortex, landing lightly upon a newly stabilized surface of water. His trident spun once in his hand before dissolving back into liquid that rejoined the sea.
His gaze met hers across the turbulent expanse.
Pyrrha lowered her shield and allowed it to dissolve into floating shards that hovered around her in orbit.
The next exchange would not be exploratory, but decisive.
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon