Qrow felt as though time had come to a stop.
There was no other way to describe the sensation. The world around him had not technically stopped, he knew that much, but Nicholas Arc's temporal manipulation had slowed his perception to such an extreme degree that the distinction had become almost meaningless.
The movement of his own eyes behind his closed eyelids felt sluggish, each minute adjustment of his gaze stretching into what seemed like an eternity, yet at the same time he could perceive every minute sensation with horrifying clarity.
He could feel the circulation of his Aura through his body, the faint pressure of Raven's presence beside him, the minute vibrations of the ground beneath him, even the distant impacts of the colossal battle occurring hundreds of kilometers away.
All of it was stretched into temporality.
Everything had become painfully precise. The runic energy cycling through himself and Raven during their combined meditation faltered for an instant as Nicholas's Time Rune took hold of them, their carefully constructed rhythm disrupted by the sudden distortion of their perception, but Raven seemed to adapt almost immediately.
Where Qrow struggled against the sensation, Raven appeared to accept it almost instinctively, slipping into the distorted perception as naturally as a fish entering water. Qrow could only sigh internally at the realization.
Of course she could.
Raven had always been the more naturally talented of the two of them, particularly when it came to combat. Even when they had been children, Qrow had learned to accept that his sister possessed an instinctive sharpness that he had always needed to work harder to cultivate, and as his mind adjusted to Nicholas's manipulation of time, memories he had not consciously thought about in years began surfacing with strange clarity.
Qrow remembered his early teenage years, back when he and Raven had first awakened and the world had not yet become the nightmare it was now. At the time, the two of them had been orphans living in a miserable orphanage in the Kingdom of Vale. Not the city of Vale itself, but a neighboring settlement known as Patch.
It was a large town by most standards, bordering on something that could almost be called a city simply because of its population and physical size, though it had never quite crossed that threshold. Their home had been the Branwen Homestead, an orphanage established by a man bearing the same surname.
That man had passed away long before Qrow and Raven reached adolescence, but his influence had remained embedded in the community and the institution he had created. Neither sibling had known their mother. The little information they possessed claimed that she had been a prostitute who became pregnant with twins and subsequently died during childbirth.
Their biological father was an even greater mystery, one that neither Qrow nor Raven had ever bothered to investigate particularly deeply. Whatever circumstances had surrounded their birth, both children had eventually been sent to the Branwen Homestead, where they grew up together and, for the most part, lived relatively normal lives.
They were not especially well behaved children, however. Neither of them had ever been adopted, partially because they were both difficult children, and Raven in particular had a tendency to pick fights with anyone who irritated her.
Qrow wasn't much better.
Together, they had been a pair of little troublemakers, constantly testing boundaries and getting themselves into situations that adults wished they would stop creating.
That was probably why neither of them had been adopted.
Everything changed however, when LUCID personnel came to the Homestead. They explained that Qrow and Raven were about to become hosts to the Nightmare System, that they were candidates for awakening, and they would become Awakened who would eventually be drawn into the never-ending war against Grimm within the Dream Realm.
At first, neither sibling had truly believed them. The entire concept sounded absurd. A hidden world entered through dreams, monsters that could invade humanity's subconscious, an organization secretly fighting an endless war, people chosen by some incomprehensible Nightmare System and given supernatural abilities through Runes.
It sounded like the sort of story designed to frighten children into behaving. Then they went to sleep. When Qrow opened his eyes within the Dream Realm for the first time, everything he thought he understood about existence had been torn apart and replaced with something infinitely larger.
It had been terrifying, exhilarating and completely impossible to forget. From that point onward, Qrow and Raven were no longer simply orphaned children from Patch. They became combat veterans fighting creatures capable of threatening entire communities, creatures whose existence could spill over into the waking world and endanger people across the planet.
Their lives became missions, training, battles and advancement through the Ranks, and before long they were assigned to a squad alongside three other people who would become some of the most important figures in their lives: Taiyang Xiao Long, Summer Rose, Qrow Branwen and Raven Branwen.
Looking back, Qrow almost found it amusing that such a dysfunctional collection of personalities had ever been considered a workable team. Raven and Taiyang had barely tolerated one another in those early days.
They had been like oil and water, constantly arguing, sparring and competing over who was stronger. Neither would willingly concede an inch to the other, and Qrow had lost count of how many times their disagreements had transformed into impromptu training matches. Yet despite the constant friction, the four of them had worked remarkably well together.
They traveled across Vale, taking missions wherever LUCID needed them, and eventually began operating in Vale more frequently after reaching Rank 1. They had fought Grimm, rogue Awakened, hostile entities and everything else the organization could throw at them.
Eventually, as their power increased and their responsibilities changed, the original squad disbanded when they reached Rank 2, but the relationships did not disappear. They remained in contact, even if their lives gradually began moving in different directions.
Qrow eventually settled in the city of Vale and somehow found himself recruited into the role of one of Ozpin's personal operatives, effectively becoming the man's lapdog, though Qrow had never particularly minded the arrangement. Ozpin himself had been a peak Rank 2 who had already taken his first steps toward Rank 3, a half-step Rank 3, if you will, and was expected to assume leadership of Vale's LUCID branch once he completed his advancement.
Qrow traveled extensively then, across Anima, hunting rogue operatives and handling missions that required someone willing to operate outside conventional boundaries.
Then he learned that Raven had become pregnant.
Of all people, she had somehow ended up having a child with Taiyang Xiao Long. Yang had been born, and for a brief period, Qrow thought perhaps his sister might finally settle down. Instead, Raven disappeared, leaving Yang and Taiyang behind while she continued traveling across the world on missions.
Eventually Taiyang found comfort in Summer Rose, who remained at his side during the difficult period, and Ruby was born. Everything seemed to settle into something resembling happiness.
Then, several years later, Summer Rose died.
Neither Qrow nor Raven had been present when it happened, and neither knew all of the details surrounding the incident, but the broad outline was clear enough. A Rank 3 Grimm had attacked a mission location where Taiyang and Summer had been operating. Another Rank 3 had eventually driven the creature away, but not before it killed numerous operatives and destroyed that entire section of the Dream Realm.
Summer Rose had been among them.
Qrow remembered what happened afterward with painful clarity. Taiyang had been devastated. The loss pushed him into a deep depression, and Qrow had found himself returning again and again to Patch simply to make certain his friend did not succumb to his own self-loathing.
There had been moments when Qrow genuinely feared that Taiyang might kill himself because he believed he had failed to protect Summer and everyone else around him. Eventually, however, wounds began to heal. Time had done what time always did, slowly dulling the sharpest edges of grief, and even the wounds Raven and Summer had left behind eventually became scars rather than open injuries.
Qrow internally sighed as he realized how far his thoughts had wandered. Nicholas's manipulation of time had given his mind an almost obscene amount of room to think, and apparently his subconscious had decided to use that opportunity to drag half his life into the present.
Yet perhaps that wasn't entirely a bad thing.
Those memories grounded him.
They reminded him of what he was fighting for.
Ruby and Yang.
Qrow had never had children of his own, but he had always considered those two reckless little rascals to be his own blood regardless. They were precious to him and they were family. And now, as he sat in the distorted stillness of Nicholas's temporal field, the horrifying truth settled over him with greater weight than it ever had before.
They were going to die if he failed.
Ruby would die. Yang would die. Raven would die. Taiyang would die.
Everyone Qrow had come to know and love would eventually be consumed by the consequences of the Sleeper's awakening. The thought was enough to make something inside him harden. He couldn't allow that future to happen. He couldn't afford to fail. That was why he needed to merge his Runes.
That was why he needed to become Rank 3.
And the first step toward that apotheosis was the creation of a Master Rune, which Qrow would have to find a way to accomplish it even if the path had to be carved into his own soul.
He turned his attention inward and felt the three Runes within his spirit. Misfortune, Murder and Crow. They appeared to him as points of light suspended within something that could only be described as his spirit.
The spirit itself was an illusory concept, something that could not normally be perceived through ordinary senses. There were certainly Runes capable of interacting directly with the spirit, but Qrow possessed none of them, meaning that the best he could experience was an instinctive sensation regarding where his Runes conceptually existed within himself.
Even after everything he had learned as an Awakened, Qrow still wasn't entirely certain what a spirit truly was. Some people referred to it as the soul, but he had never been convinced that the two concepts were completely identical. To Qrow, the spirit seemed more like a combination of mind and soul, the place where consciousness and the deeper essence of a person intersected. After all, a Rune could only be activated when the conscious mind directed the Aura reserves of the spirit into the rune, transforming that Aura into runic energy.
The relationship between consciousness, spirit and Rune was fundamental to everything an Awakened could accomplish.
But Qrow was digressing again.
He didn't need to activate his Runes. He needed to merge them. He needed to forge them into something greater. However, every time he attempted to use his Will to force the three concepts together, he encountered resistance.
Something was missing.
The Runes did not simply refuse to combine. They seemed fundamentally incompatible when approached from the wrong angle. Qrow knew what would happen if he forced them. The Runes would begin breaking down and the resulting instability would explode within his spirit, causing permanent damage and potentially crippling him for life. He couldn't simply brute-force the process.
There had to be another method.
The situation was particularly troublesome because both Qrow and Raven possessed Meta Runes as their third Runes. Conventional wisdom said that Meta Runes made the process of creating a Master Rune considerably more difficult.
To date, the only known Awakened who had successfully combined a Meta Rune with two regular Runes and reached Rank 3 was Velik, the Rank 3 of Menagerie and widely regarded as the strongest Awakened in the world.
There was, of course, another exception, though Qrow wasn't entirely certain whether the circumstances surrounding him were even comparable. Tyrian Callows, the leader of Sleepless, who supposedly possessed two Master Runes which were merged from 6 meta runes, something that should have been impossible under normal circumstances.
Qrow still didn't understand how that had happened regardless of how Jaune Arc explained it. Though he suspected Salem's possession of Tyrian had something to do with it, anyhow. Every other Rank 3 Qrow knew had achieved their advancement by fusing three conventional Runes. So that strongly suggested that Meta Runes were the problem.
Qrow felt Raven's runic energy flowing through him.
It was strangely soothing.
The two siblings had synchronized their Aura and were allowing their energies to flow through one another, communicating without words. It wasn't conscious communication in the traditional sense as neither sibling was hearing the other's voice, nor were they transmitting literal thoughts.
It was closer to instinct, an understanding communicated through the movement and resonance of their respective runic energies. Regular Awakened could not normally do this, yet Qrow and Raven had always possessed an inexplicable ability to synchronize in ways that others could not. Perhaps it was because they were twins.
Qrow remembered an obscure fact about their birth that had always amused him: apparently they had emerged from their mother at almost exactly the same moment, practically hugging one another as they were pushed into the world.
Neither was technically older than the other and there had never been a meaningful firstborn between them. Fate had apparently decided that even their births should be a shared event.
And then an idea emerged.
Raven's Meta Rune was End. It represented the phenomenon of endings. Qrow's Meta Rune was Murder. It represented the act of killing. Perhaps the problem wasn't that their Meta Runes were incompatible with their regular Runes but rather that they were supposed to use the concepts together. Murder and End. To kill what they currently were. To bring an ending to their existing existence as Rank 2 Awakened and allow something new to emerge from the remains.
This was the path toward Rank 3.
The path toward apotheosis.
The path toward becoming a demigod.
Qrow sensed Raven arriving at the same conclusion almost simultaneously. Their runic energies shifted, and he knew she understood what he was thinking without needing words. Yet understanding the concept was only the beginning. Putting it into practice was another matter entirely.
How was Qrow supposed to Murder his past self? If he literally murdered himself, there would be no ascension waiting afterward. He would simply die. Raven faced the same problem. The answer had to exist on a more spiritual level. It wasn't their physical existence that needed to be murdered but rather, the current configuration of their Runes, the identity they had built as Rank 2 Awakened. Qrow began to suspect that the process required him to conceptually kill the very Runes that defined his current existence.
With that realization came another decision. Qrow and Raven instinctively shrugged off Nicholas's accelerated perception. The effect had been useful, but they no longer needed it. They couldn't allow another Rune's influence to interfere with the process they were about to undertake. Because Nicholas's temporal manipulation wasn't an attack, their Aura could counteract it, and both siblings did so simultaneously.
The battlefield around them suddenly returned to normal perceptual speed. The thunderous clashes of Domains, the explosions of runic energy and the distant battle against the Rank 3 Grimm resumed their natural pace.
Yet to Qrow and Raven, the world seemed almost silent. Their attention was entirely inward.
Qrow located his three Runes once more. He felt Misfortune, Crow and finally, Murder. This time, however, he didn't use Murder to enhance himself. He didn't wrap it around his body or channel it outward.
Instead, he turned the conceptual force of Murder inward and wrapped it around the other two Runes. The sensation was immediate. The energy of Murder stabbed into Crow and Misfortune, and the two Runes violently rejected the intrusion. Qrow didn't stop, even pushing further to utilize the energy of Murder into stabbing itself to accomplish the act of the killing the origin.
He maintained the conceptual act.
Murder.
Kill.
End the existence of what had been.
Suddenly, something extraordinary happened. Cracks appeared across his Runes. At first, Qrow thought he had failed.
Then all three began cracking.
The points of light within his spirit fractured, their structures breaking apart and shifting. Their boundaries melted. Their identities began swirling together, no longer distinct concepts but fragments of something larger. Qrow felt an instinctive rejection rise within himself, a primal part of his mind screaming that this was wrong, that his Runes were being destroyed, that he was destroying something fundamental to his existence as a Rank 2.
But he realized that the rejection itself was only fear. His Runes were not truly dying. They were changing. The names Crow, Misfortune and Murder began disappearing from his consciousness, each word fading as though erased from the very structure of his mind. Their individual identities dissolved into one another, and then, at the center of the storm, something began to form.
Qrow felt an entirely different presence emerge from the remnants.
The three concepts condensed and they became one.
A singular Rune appeared within his spirit, massive compared to the individual Runes that had existed before it. Its presence was oppressive. It radiated a pressure that Qrow immediately recognized. He had felt that kind of weight before, but never from one of his own Runes. It was the pressure of something fundamentally greater. Something that existed on an entirely different level.
A Master Rune.
Qrow barely had enough time to comprehend what he was seeing before the name entered his mind.
Black Calamity.
The Rune began radiating runic energy on its own. Qrow didn't have to command it. He didn't have to activate it. The newly formed Rune simply existed, and its existence was enough to cause a reaction throughout his spirit. Runic energy poured outward in enormous quantities, filling the conceptual space around him.
His spirit began expanding.
At first, Qrow thought it was going to hurt, but there was no pain. Instead, it felt right. The boundaries that had constrained his spirit to his body for his entire life were being pushed outward, stretched beyond their previous limitations and his awareness expanded with it.
Larger.
Larger.
Larger.
His spirit continued growing until it escaped the confines of his physical body entirely, becoming an immense sphere of awareness that spread across the surrounding battlefield.
Ten meters.
Twenty.
One hundred.
One kilometer
Ten.
Fifty kilometers.
That was approximately where the expansion finally stabilized, though to Qrow it felt as though he had suddenly become aware of an entire world. Everything within the radius existed within his perception.
Every movement, every vibration, every disturbance in the air, every trace of runic energy. He didn't need eyes to see.
He simply knew.
The world had become part of his awareness.
Then his body lifted from the ground as he felt it grow in strength. It was a feeling so indescribable that even the transition from Rank 0-1 and Rank 1-2 couldn't compare.
Twenty times stronger than his Rank 2 self?
Fifty?
Qrow wasn't certain.
But what he did know what that the difference between a Rank 3 and a Rank 2 felt even greater than the difference between a Rank 2 and a Rank 0.
It was...
Incredible.
Qrow's physical form kept floating upwards, eyes remaining closed as his consciousness settled into the enormous new spirit surrounding him. Within his spirit, he could also feel Raven undergoing her own transformation.
Her presence had expanded alongside his, her spirit stretching outward as she completed her own apotheosis. For an instant, Qrow felt her spirit pushing against his. The two enormous territories strained against one another, each attempting to occupy the same conceptual space. Then something changed.
Their spirits gently intertwined and the boundaries vanished, occupying the same space without contest.
Truly, Raven and he had a special connection. One that even extended into their spirits.
No.
Not spirit.
Domain.
This was what Rank 3s possessed.
They had done it.
They had apotheosized.
Qrow's eyes opened at exactly the same moment as Raven's. For several seconds, the two siblings simply looked at one another. No words were necessary. They could feel the transformation. They could feel their enormous Domains surrounding them, intertwined yet distinct, and they could feel the profound difference between what they had been and what they had become. Rank 2 was gone. The limitations they had lived beneath for years had been shattered. They had crossed the threshold.
Then Qrow's body began to transform as he activated his Master Rune for the first time.
His flesh dissolved into something far greater.
The human form of Qrow Branwen disappeared beneath an eruption of black feathers and runic energy. His body expanded with impossible speed, bones and muscle and Aura reshaping themselves into something monstrous and magnificent. Wings erupted outward, each movement generating enough force to shake the surrounding air. His form grew larger and larger until it surpassed the scale of a Rank 2 creature.
The transformation did not stop and continued until Qrow's new body reached the size of a mountain, then akin to the size of a city, until his silhouette stretched across the world and his wings became vast enough to shroud enormous portions of the battlefield beneath their shadow.
The creature that emerged was no longer merely Qrow Branwen transformed into a Crow. It was something worthy of Rank 3.
Something enormous enough to stand alongside the titanic Grimm tearing the battlefield apart. Something that could blot out the world beneath its wings.
And then, with a movement that seemed almost casual compared to the impossible scale of his new existence, the colossal Crow opened its wings and the sky disappeared beneath black.
One Crow became many.
The enormous body fractured into countless forms, the mountain-sized creature splitting apart into a multitude of gigantic Crows that exploded outward into the battlefield like a living storm. Their wings thundered across the crimson sky, their silhouettes racing through the air in every direction, each one carrying a fragment of the same overwhelming presence. Thousands of titanic black wings filled the core, and the sound of their collective cry rolled across the battlefield with enough force to drown out the distant thunder of the Rank 3 Domains.
A Black Calamity indeed.