Qrow and Raven sat several meters behind Jaune and Nicholas, their palms extended toward one another as their respective runic energies flowed between them in a slow, controlled exchange.
Neither spoke.
The concentration required to merge three mastered runes into a single Master Rune was already immense, and the circumstances made the task considerably more difficult.
There was no quiet meditation chamber, or controlled atmosphere in which they could slowly experiment with the architecture of their runes. They were sitting on the surface of a crimson moon while Rank 3 entities fought somewhere on horizon, domains colliding with enough force to make the landscape tremble—and, while an ancient barrier containing the sleeping brain/heart of a god was being forcibly breached several hundred kilometers away.
Every few seconds another thunderous impact rolled across the moon, sometimes followed by a flash of runic energy bright enough to illuminate the entire horizon. Yet Qrow and Raven remained still, their minds turned inward as they attempted to combine the conceptual foundations of their three runes.
Jaune stood several meters away from them with his father, both watching the barrier. At first, the changes had been somewhat subtle. The enormous crimson barrier had rippled whenever Tyrian pushed his power into it, sending waves of energy across its continental surface. Now however, those waves were becoming increasingly violent.
Every pulse was larger than the last, and the crimson illumination surrounding the barrier had begun to spill outward into the surrounding atmosphere like a veritable lightshow. Streams of red runic energy poured from its surface, twisting through the air like rivers that had been ripped free from some invisible ocean.
At first they had remained gaseous and ethereal. Then, gradually, the energy began condensing and the streams became physical, almost solid. When they collided with the surrounding atmosphere they produced tiny explosions that crackled and popped across the battlefield. The air itself seemed volatile, as though reality had become saturated with too much power to remain stable.
Nicholas watched the spectacle for several seconds before his eyes shifted toward Qrow and Raven.
His expression tightened.
"Shit."
Jaune glanced toward him as his father clicked his tongue.
"Looks like they won't complete it in time."
He stepped forward and raised one hand toward the pair.
"Both of you, don't fight the feeling and simply work with it. I'm going to speed up your perception of time. It should allow you to merge your three runes much faster than before. Well... for us at least."
Qrow's eyes opened slightly, but before he could respond, Nicholas released a thin thread of temporal runic energy that crossed the distance between them and sank into Qrow and Raven's bodies.
The two Rank 2s simply froze for half a heartbeat as their minds were suddenly accelerated into an entirely different perception of reality.
Jaune understood immediately what his father had done.
Foresight had already shown Nicholas the approaching failure. Qrow and Raven were probably not going to finish their Master Runes before Tyrian opened the barrier and the final battle began.
Nicholas had therefore chosen to alter the future before that future could become reality. It was precisely this kind of thing that made Nicholas's Foresight rune Rune so terrifying. The future was in the palms of his hands.
It was also what made his Time rune so incredibly horrifying as well.
During their battle only a few days earlier, Jaune had experienced that power firsthand. He remembered the sensation with uncomfortable clarity. His father's Time Rune was one of the most absurdly powerful meta runes in existence, a rune that could even bend the relationship between consciousness and temporal progression in ways that made conventional combat almost meaningless.
Had Jaune not awakened Null during that battle, everything they were attempting now would have been impossible. The entire plan would have died before it ever reached this point.
His father's ability was especially sinister because it not only had the capability to simply make a person faster but it could also accelerate their conscious perception while leaving their physical body operating at normal speed.
The distinction was everything.
To an ordinary person, a punch lasted perhaps a fraction of a second. Under Nicholas's temporal acceleration, the mind could perceive that same fraction of a second as minutes. A person could watch the fist approaching, understand every movement, anticipate every angle and comprehend the impact before it arrived, yet their body remained trapped within ordinary time.
Jaune remembered experiencing that terrible dissonance when Nicholas had punched him during their confrontation. He had been forced to experience every inch of the strike, every movement of his father's fist and every moment of pain transmitted through his body as though the attack had lasted several minutes rather than a single second.
The mind raced ahead while the flesh remained behind. In combat, such an ability could be devastating to someone unfamiliar with it.
In this situation, however, it was exactly what Qrow and Raven needed. They didn't need their bodies to move faster, but needed their minds to have more subjective time to understand the architecture of their runes and find the path where those three separate concepts could become one.
Nicholas lowered his hand slowly.
"It's working," he murmured.
His eyes narrowed as he watched them.
"But it's definitely going to take a while."
Another enormous pulse erupted from the barrier and the air shook violently.
His father's expression hardened.
"In any case, we can't worry about whether or not they reach Rank 3 now. It's opening."
Jaune turned toward the barrier. What he saw was enough to make even his Rank 2 senses tense. The streams of crimson runic energy surrounding Tyrian were no longer simply flowing. They were bending. Space itself seemed to warp around them as though the sheer concentration of power was distorting the geometry of the surrounding world. Tyrian had condensed his entire domain into a single point against the barrier, and now that point was beginning to yield.
The Rank 3s fighting in the distance seemed to realize the danger at almost the exact same moment. Their movements changed abruptly. They began ignoring the Grimm attacking them. Several enormous domains collapsed inward as their wielders redirected their attention toward Tyrian. The Rank 3 Grimm continued their attacks, but the awakened simply endured them, tanking strikes that would have annihilated lesser beings as they charged toward the Sleepless leader.
Jaune could feel multiple domains suddenly overlap the region surrounding him. The pressure was immense. The air seemed to become heavy enough to crush a mountain. Qrow and Raven felt it too, their bodies momentarily tensing despite Nicholas's temporal acceleration. Then the pressure vanished from Jaune's surroundings as the Rank 3s redirected their domains toward Tyrian. In the distance, something tiny appeared within the barrier. A hole. A tiny, almost laughably insignificant opening in something continental in scale.
Tyrian had created it.
His body disappeared into that opening. In the same instant, Jaune and Nicholas looked at one another.
Neither needed to speak as they both understood.
In an instant of a second, both father and son disappeared from reality.
To Jaune, the world simply stopped.
There was no transition in between.
One moment the crimson moon existed around him, full of motion and violence, and the next everything had become perfectly still. The streams of runic energy suspended in the air were no longer flowing.
They had become solid crimson structures, frozen in place like enormous glowing threads woven throughout the atmosphere.
An explosion several kilometers away had stopped midway through its expansion, its fragments suspended in the air. Even the distant Rank 3 battle had become a collection of frozen silhouettes and unfinished attacks.
Nicholas Arc stood beside him, equally unaffected by the stopped world. Above them, Jaune could perceive something else. It was difficult to describe because his mortal senses were not designed to comprehend it.
An enormous river stretched above them, or perhaps beneath them, or perhaps through every direction at once. It seemed impossibly distant and infinitely close. It was the great stream of Time itself, a vast, thread-like river flowing endlessly from the past toward the future. Countless tributaries branched from it, each representing possibilities, choices and paths that could have existed.
The main current was so vast that Jaune could not properly comprehend its beginning or end. He could feel the terrifying scale of it pressing against his perception. This was why his father's Time Rune was considered so dangerous. The rune wasn't controlling time in the simplistic sense of stopping a clock. It was interacting with the dimensional architecture through which time existed. Jaune could have reached toward that enormous current if he wished and entered it. He could feel the possibility sitting just beyond his grasp, waiting for him to exert more runic energy and enter the great stream itself.
But that wasn't what they were doing.
What Jaune and Nicholas had done was utilize one of the Time Rune's most extraordinary abilities:
Time Dimension Traversal.
Contrary to its name, the Time Rune could not truly stop time in the conventional sense. Completely freezing the entirety of reality would require an absurd quantity of aura, enough that even if the entire population of humanity were to somehow become Rank 3's and donate their aura to him to freeze time—it still wouldn't be enough.
His father's could influence time locally, slow it, accelerate it and perform other temporal manipulations, but true universal time-stop was outside the practical limits of the rune. Yet the distinction did not matter because the Time Rune possessed something far more useful.
It could move the user into a parallel plane of existence where the flow of time differed from that of the primary world.
A dimension in which time was effectively frozen relative to the outside. From within that dimension, the real world appeared motionless. To anyone outside, the users simply vanished and looked like they had teleported. It was a loophole in the rules of reality, a distinction between stopping time and stepping somewhere that time did not meaningfully progress. And that loophole was precisely what Jaune and Nicholas needed.
The question had been one of the most important ones Jaune had asked his father when they were developing the plan before being transported to the Moon.
How were they supposed to enter the barrier?
Technically, Jaune already possessed the answer. Null could theoretically allow him to walk through it. Null denied runic phenomena and the rules governing them. If the barrier said that Jaune could not pass, Null could simply deny the phenomenon preventing him from doing so. In theory, the barrier would become no more substantial to him than air.
However, the problem was energy.
Null was extraordinarily powerful and had a theoretical hierarchy of 0, but it was not free to use. The rune required aura to deny phenomena, and the more powerful the phenomenon being denied, the more energy it consumed. Jaune could deny an ordinary rune without much difficulty.
He could easily deny phenomena that would cripple a normal Rank 2.
But the barrier was not made from ordinary runic energy. It had been created through the power of a Rank 4 entity, a being two entire ranks beyond Jaune's current level.
It was the work of a dead god and the final defense of the Life Creator. If Jaune attempted to simply walk through it, Null would have to fight against the entire conceptual weight of the barrier. His aura would vanish almost instantaneously. Even the temporary reserves he had stolen from Sleepless operatives would not be enough. There was a genuine possibility that Null would fail halfway through and Jaune could end up physically sliced apart as he was caught between the denial of the barrier and the barrier itself, leaving his body divided horizontally or vertically. There would be no opportunity to recover either as his reserves would be functionally empty.
Which meant that he couldn't perform the same procedure of fixing himself like he had once done earlier to Raven.
He would simply die.
Plunder offered another theoretical solution, but it was arguably even worse. Jaune could attempt to plunder some of the barrier's runic energy and use that energy to facilitate his passage. The problem was that nobody knew whether Plunder could even successfully establish a connection with something of that magnitude.
The barrier contained the power of a god.
Jaune's Plunder Rune might simply be overwhelmed before it could properly steal anything. And even if it somehow managed to steal a microscopic fraction of the barrier's power, perhaps 0.0001 percent, that energy would be vastly beyond anything his body could safely contain. He would probably explode.
Null could deny the phenomenon of him exploding, but that created another vicious circle. Plunder would have consumed his aura reserves while attempting the theft and Null would then need aura to deny the resulting destruction.
If he had already exhausted himself, Null could no longer save him.
The only way to discover whether either approach actually worked was to attempt it. And that was precisely why Jaune had rejected both options. There was a difference between taking a calculated risk and deliberately testing whether a god's power could turn you into paste.
So they had developed another plan.
The instant Tyrian created an opening, Jaune and Nicholas would use the Time Rune to move into the frozen temporal dimension. From there, they would approach the opening without being detected.
Since they existed in a separate dimensional layer, Tyrian's domain would not easily perceive them. Even an entity as powerful as Tyrian would have difficulty detecting something that technically did not exist within the same temporal plane. Only highly specialized runes or unusual rune synchronicities could potentially bridge that distinction.
It was not foolproof, but it was far safer than attempting to force their way through the barrier directly. There was still one enormous problem, however.
Distance.
The opening Tyrian had created was hundreds of kilometers away. They could not simply walk there. If they moved too close to Tyrian before entering the temporal dimension, his domain might detect Nicholas's presence and immediately suspect sabotage.
Despite Tyrian starting the organization of Sleepless, the leader had no true trust in anybody.
He trusted the Grimm because they were extensions of Salem's own body but he was actually a type of person that did not even completely trust his own Sleepless puppets because he knew the possibility existed that someone might eventually find a way to free their minds from Puppeteer's influence.
With thousands of runes existing across the world, Tyrian could not guarantee that one of them wouldn't possess a combination capable of breaking his control. Nicholas approaching him while the barrier was opening would be an obvious threat when he had been clearly instructed to kill as many awakened as he could while on the moon.
Which was why they somehow needed to appear at the opening itself without travelling towards it from their current position.
Fortunately, Jaune had a rune capable of producing a phenomenon remarkably similar to teleportation.
Plunder.
After the developing the Null rune, both Plunder and Weakness's capabilities had changed. Jaune, when channeling the runic energy through either of the two runes could achieve law ignoration with their capabilities as well.
For the past few hours that Jaune had been traversing the moon, Jaune had been secretly dedicating part of his attention to Plundering the aura reserves of Sleepless operatives. Every opportunity he had encountered, every person foolish enough to get within range and every fight where he could establish a tether without compromising his position—Jaune had been stealing aura and stockpiling it.
He hadn't done it merely because more aura was useful but because he had been preparing for this exact moment. His normal reserves had long since ceased to represent his true available energy. With the stolen aura accumulated inside him, Jaune currently possessed reserves equivalent to roughly three hundred percent of his normal capacity.
It was an absurd amount of aura for someone of his rank, but Jaune intended to spend a large portion of it now.
Nicholas extended his hand toward him.
His expression was unusually serious and there was no humor or of the calculating confidence he usually displayed when discussing one of his plans.
The entire world existed around them in impossible stillness.
Nicholas looked directly into Jaune's eyes.
"Last chance to back out, kiddo." His fingers remained extended. "Are you certain you want to go through with this?"
Jaune stared at his father for a long moment. There was a great deal he could have said. He could have mentioned his family. LUCID, Ruby, Pyrrha, Blake or Yang. The countless awakened scattered across the Moon. He could have mentioned the Earth they were trying to save, or the billions of lives that would be threatened if Salem truly awakened.
Instead, he simply reached forward and grabbed his father's hand.
"I'd rather die than let some sleeping god end the world." Jaune's eyes hardened. "So yes. I'm sure."
He took a deep breath.
And activated Plunder.
Two-thirds of his available reserves vanished in an instant. The sensation was almost nauseating. The rune seized upon the immense spatial distance between Jaune and the barrier, treating that distance as something that could be appropriated.
Reality seemed to fold inward.
For one impossible instant, the hundreds of kilometers separating them ceased to exist as meaningful space. Jaune and Nicholas were pulled forward through the conceptual connection established by Plunder, the frozen world stretching around them like an unmoving painting while they crossed an enormous gulf in a single act.
Then they stopped.
They were directly in front of Tyrian's opening.
Jaune stared at it.
It was surprisingly small.
After witnessing a barrier large enough to cover a continental expanse, Jaune had expected the breach to be enormous. Instead, it was roughly the size of a large barrel, perhaps wide enough for a single person to squeeze through.
Its edges were jagged and unstable, crimson energy twisting around them as the barrier attempted to repair itself.
That was the most disturbing aspect of the sight.
Even within the temporal dimension where everything else was effectively frozen, the barrier was moving. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, the edges of the opening were creeping inward. The breach was closing.
Jaune's eyes narrowed.
'The power of a Rank 4 being surpasses time.'
That was the only explanation.
Even Tyrian, with the partial consciousness of Salem inside him and two Master Runes theoretically approaching the strength of Supreme Runes, had only been able to create this tiny opening by sacrificing almost everything he possessed.
And even then, the barrier itself was already fighting back.
Time could be frozen around it, but the barrier was not truly subject to their temporal trick of a different dimension in the same way as ordinary matter. Its power existed on a level that allowed it to resist even this dimensional separation.
Jaune looked beyond the opening.
Inside the barrier, the atmosphere was red.
Not illuminated red but crimson red.
The very air was saturated with solid runic energy. Crimson particles hung within the interior like dust suspended in some ancient chamber, except every individual particle seemed to contain enough power to obliterate an ordinary awakened. Jaune could feel the pressure even from outside. It pressed against his Null Rune almost instinctively, as though reality itself were warning him that he was approaching something he had no business touching.
Nicholas stood beside him, equally silent.
Beyond that barrier was Salem's heart.
Not a literal biological heart, but the core of the Sleeper's body, an incomprehensible fusion of brain and heart where the fount of her consciousness and power remained imprisoned. Beyond it were the Supreme Runes that had been translocated into the barrier as the Life Creator's final failsafe and beyond it, was the thing Tyrian/Salem had spent years preparing to reach.
And now, Jaune was about to enter.
Without hesitation, he simply stepped forward and Nicholas followed, right behind him. Father and son crossed the threshold together, slipping through the barrel-sized opening as the crimson energy swallowed them.
Behind them, the opening continued closing.
Ahead of them waited the heart of the Sleeper.