Pyrrha had faced prodigies of combat before.
She had faced those who relied on brute force, clever tricks and overwhelming versatility.
Neptune was the rare kind who blended refinement with instinct. His Density rune mirrored her own use of it with unsettling precision. The only difference was him using it with his water rune rather than with a metal-type rune.
Each clash between spear and trident rang like a bell struck underwater, heavy and resonant. Every time Pyrrha pressed harder, he matched her intensity. Every time she attempted to entangle the battlefield in metal coral, he reshaped the sea to swallow the intrusion.
Above them, Jaune and Sun's battle raged like a constellation in motion. Through her Ferrous rune, Pyrrha extended her perception, feeling the iron flowing in their blood.
Jaune was monstrous in frontal combat.
In raw engagement, he pressed at the absolute ceiling of that rank. Weakness eroded defenses and Plunder fed him strength. When the two synchronized, the feedback loop was terrifying. He suppressed, he stole and rose.
If Sun had been fighting him on the ground, the outcome would likely have already been decided.
But they were not on the ground.
They were suspended over a sea two meters deep, a false ocean compressed into density that punished intrusion. Jaune's strength thrived where structure existed. Here, everything shifted. Light constructs offered no bonds to unravel.
Versatility.
That was where Jaune suffered.
Pyrrha then saw Sun Wukong perform something fairly incredible. Previously, he had only been using the small platforms of light as stepping stools to dodge Jaune's attacks and counter using his own. Now, however, he was leaving the light platforms in the air, no longer dispelling them.
Soon, the platform surrounded Jaune in a loose sphere, and when Sun Wukong jumped out of Range, each of thee platforms transformed into laser beams that shot towards Jaune.
Fortunately, Jaune's weakness sense was absolutely overpowered. Pretty much a full on danger sense, and he was able to block or dodge every one of the attacks.
Pyrrha turned her attention back to Neptune and deflected a thrust of his trident which slid along her own makeshift shield, metal screaming under the torque of redirected force.
She smiled faintly.
Well.... Jaune was struggling. It was a while since she had seen him like this.
But in any case, she had prepared for a different problem.
The idea had come to her when she considered the limitations of blood manipulation. Directly seizing iron within another's bloodstream was costly and could be resisted. Flooding Will through the body could disperse her influence. The iron in their blood didn't really belong to her, after all.
But what if the metal in their blood did belong to her? What if what was already inside, was unrecognized and microscopic.
Dust.
Shavings finer than pollen.
Her Ferrous rune allowed control over all forms of metal. She did not need large masses, rather, all she needed was presence.
Microscopic iron particles could be seeded into the air. Inhaled naturally during combat. They would pass into the lungs and into circulation. And once there, her runic imprint would already be embedded within them.
Less aura to manipulate something already hers.
More precision and more danger.
She had never used it because it was dangerous and invasive.
Once activated, it was very easy to kill someone.
But that seal that was preventing fatal damage... perhaps this was the opportunity that she could use to truly unleash for the first time?
Neptune lunged, forming a dome of condensed water that snapped shut around them. The interior became a whirling chamber, pressure rising as the liquid compressed inward.
Pyrrha's spear spun in her grasp, Density flooding its tip until it shimmered with crystalline hardness. She thrust downward and rotated, drilling through the dome in a spiraling burst of force. The water shrieked as cohesion fractured under concentrated stress.
She burst free into open air.
Neptune followed, reforming his sea beneath him with practiced ease. He did not look winded. He looked entertained.
"Still smiling?" he called lightly.
Pyrrha did not answer because her plan had already begun.
Invisible to the naked eye, a haze dispersed outward from the metallic fragments orbiting her. The shards shed dust so fine it did not glitter. It vanished into the spray and mist kicked up by their battle.
She divided her focus.
One thread to deflect Neptune's trident. One thread to maintain her aerial platform.
A dozen threads to guide microscopic iron motes through turbulent air.
It strained her mind.
Precision at that scale demanded an intensity that pressed behind her eyes. Each particle was a whisper of control. Together, they became a storm too subtle to see.
Neptune spun his trident and collapsed his surrounding water into a narrow spear that he hurled past her.
Her eyes flicked sideways.
The spear elongated mid flight, splitting into three thinner lances that streaked toward Jaune.
He was mid exchange with Sun, blades colliding against a reforming staff of light. The interruption forced him to disengage, twisting as one water lance grazed his shoulder and another passed within inches of his side.
Annoyance flashed across his face.
Pyrrha felt it in the iron of his blood, a spike in pulse.
The distraction cost him. Sun's tail snapped around for balance as he rebounded off a light platform and descended with renewed aggression.
Neptune pressed the advantage, sending more water spears in staggered patterns.
Neptune breathed steadily as he fought. Spray misted around him constantly. The battlefield itself assisted her plan.
Suddenly Jaune moved.
He kicked off nothing, Will compressing beneath his foot as if the air had become solid for a heartbeat. He smashed through a descending arc of Sun's staff, blades ringing, and launched himself straight toward Neptune.
Sun's eyes widened a fraction.
Neptune reacted instantly, drawing water inward into a spherical shield.
Jaune hit it like a meteor.
The shield fractured on impact.
His body stat had reached fifteen. Combined with applied Weakness, the densified water unraveled at its stressed seams. Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface before shattering in a burst of luminous spray of liquid.
Neptune's composure slipped for a single heartbeat.
Jaune's blade came down.
And then light flared above.
A concentrated radiance gathered in Sun's palm, condensing into a point so bright it etched afterimages across vision.
"Pulsar Beam!"
The words echoed across the arena.
A lance of light erupted downward.
Jaune sensed it only because of his weakness perception catching the strain in the air itself as energy displaced matter. He twisted violently, crossing his blades before his chest just as the beam struck.
Impact detonated.
Light swallowed him, driving him downward in a streak, blasting him away from Neptune.
For an instant, it looked as if he would plunge into the sea.
However, mid fall, he kicked again against nothing, Will solidifying beneath his heel. The motion redirected his descent just enough. He skimmed the water's surface, droplets exploding outward from proximity, before angling back toward Pyrrha.
She widened her platform without looking.
Metal flowed outward seamlessly, extending beneath his landing point. He struck it hard, boots scraping as momentum carried him a short distance before he stabilized.
The platform trembled from the force.
Jaune exhaled sharply, eyes already tracking both opponents.
Sun hovered above on fading light platforms, palm still faintly glowing. Neptune reformed his trident, though his breathing had deepened by a subtle margin.
Pyrrha felt it.
The iron within Neptune's bloodstream now carried something else.
Microscopic presences had settled.
Not enough yet.
But they were there.
She suppressed the flicker of satisfaction that tried to surface. Maintaining control of the particles required ongoing attention. They drifted through his lungs, brushing alveoli, slipping into circulation.
She needed more time.
Jaune rolled his shoulders once, before pausing and sparing a glance at her. It seemed as if Jaune's weakness sense had sensed her metal particles.
"Pyrrha? Is that you that's doing that?" he asked with a mutter.
"Yes," Pyrrha replied calmly.
It was annoying how damn powerful that danger sense of his was. This probably meant that she couldn't use it against him in battle.
Across from them, Neptune twirled his trident with renewed caution. Sun descended slightly, light gathering again around his limbs.
And beneath Neptune's skin, unseen and waiting, the iron listened, simply waiting for her command.
Jaune didn't wait for another exchange.
The moment Pyrrha's quiet confirmation left her lips, he moved.
He stepped off her platform thundered forwards.
The metal coral forest that Pyrrha had seeded into Neptune's sea still writhed beneath the surface like the roots of some metallic mangrove. Branches jutted upward at irregular angles, glinting through the dense water.
Jaune hit the first one with the ball of his foot and used it as a stepping stone.
The next branch became another stepping stone. Then another. He zigzagged across the erupting lattice, using Pyrrha's constructs as a staircase toward the two boys hovering above the fading turbulence.
Sun saw him coming but it was Neptune who reacted first.
A wall of condensed water snapped into existence between Jaune and Sun, thick and shimmering with layered Density. At the same time, a second shield wrapped around Neptune's own body as Pyrrha's coral branches speared upward toward him.
Jaune drove straight into the frontal water shield.
The compressed liquid fractured under the applied strain. His body stat at fifteen turned him into a human battering ram.
The shield shattered in a spray of luminous droplets.
Behind it, Sun's golden eyes narrowed.
A Light barrier flared into being at the last possible instant, curved and radiant, its surface humming with condensed aura.
Jaune's blades slammed into it.
For a fraction of a heartbeat, the shield held.
Then Aura Echo detonated.
The initial strike layered into itself again and again in rapid succession. Ten perfectly timed reverberations crashed into the same point in less than a second. The barrier spiderwebbed with fractures and burst outward in a corona of shattered light.
Sun vaulted backward in his primate form, tail snapping for balance. Midair, radiant energy gathered in his hands and elongated into twin nunchucks of pure light, each segment blazing like captured sunrise.
He descended in a spinning arc, bringing the nunchucks down toward Jaune's head.
Jaune released his swords which fell towards the churning sea below
His hands then shot upward and caught the glowing weapons by their handles.
Sun blinked.
The contact lasted less than half a breath.
Then the nunchucks dissolved into photons, dispersing in a flash. Sun twisted through an unnecessary backflip, landing in a burst of light that detonated outward in a blinding flare.
The arena became white.
Jaune's eyes narrowed against the brilliance.
But he did not falter.
His weakness sense made sight somewhat optional in battle.
He lunged and his right fist shot forward.
Sun tilted his head in confusion even as he shifted to evade.
The punch was short and it clearly would not reach. Sun assumed Jaune had misjudged the distance due to the flash.
Then space folded as Jaune's two swords that had been falling toward the arena floor vanished. They reappeared in Jaune's hands mid-strike, as though reality had simply corrected an oversight.
Jaune had used Plunder to steal his blades back towards him.
The blades completed the arc his empty fist had begun.
Sun barely managed to raise a Light shield in front of his torso.
The impact struck.
Aura Echo erupted again, layered concussive force slamming into the same point over and over in cascading rhythm.
The shield held for a split second.
Then it imploded.
Sun was launched downward like a comet.
Neptune darted forward instinctively, catching the primate form before he could crash into the small sea floor. The sea surged upward to cushion the descent.
"Nice trick," Neptune started, breath tight but grin still trying to form.
Suddenly, he coughed and a spray of red erupted from his mouth.
For a split instant, confusion crossed his face. Then the seal around his body flared brilliantly.
Runic patterns ignited across his skin, reacting to internal damage that crossed a predefined threshold. The flare intensified and in a blink, Neptune vanished from the arena entirely.
The sea collapsed.
Without his control, the dense water lost cohesion. It fell apart into mist and then into nothing, evaporating as though it had never existed.
In the distance, a smile bloomed across Pyrrha's face.
Sun and Jaune dropped.
Sun hit the arena floor and he rolled and came up on one knee, staring at the empty space where Neptune had been.
"What just happened?" he muttered.
Jaune landed lightly several meters in front of him.
Neptune had been fine.
Then he had coughed blood.
Sun's nostrils flared smelling the scent of metal in the wind.
The air.
Before he could ponder further, the ground beneath him liquefied.
The stone lost cohesion as Weakness flooded through it. Structure dissolved into slurry. Sun's eyes widened as his lower body sank abruptly into the softening floor.
"Hey, hey, hey!"
The arena re solidified if albeit looking a bit broken.
Stone locked back into place around his waist, trapping him from the hips down. His massive primate form struggled instinctively, muscles bulging as he tried to wrench free.
A few seconds later he would have succeeded, however, Jaune was already there.
"No water, no platforms and no sky."
A faint smile touched his lips.
"Nowhere to run now, Monkey boy."
Sun bared his teeth but Jaune's fist was already enlarging in his vision.
Aura Echo triggered.
Then everything went white.
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon