Jeanne shot forward on her steed, her lance forward to impale the goddess before her. She was not expecting the deity to just stand still, but she assumed such a blatant and direct approach would be the best way to get Nyx to reveal what she was capable of.

The sky above morphed like liquid, forming tentacles of black that extended down. Like an eldritch horror, the tendrils headed toward Jeanne, whose horse began maneuvering around them. A normal horse would be incapable of the speed and precision to do so, but a horse raised by Jeanne herself was no normal steed.

The tendrils increased in number until the entire sky from horizon line to horizon line was nothing but tentacles, flooding the entire battlefield.

Jeanne thrust her jousting lance rapidly, piercing tens of tentacles at a time and destroying them. The knight added a twist to her thrust, making her strikes like the stab of a drill, twisting what it hit until it was rent asunder.

Nyx was face to face with Jeanne, dodging a stab from the Maid of Orléans.

Nyx created a platform out of the remnants of one of her tendrils, the goddess flying high into the air above on it.

More tendrils formed to replace those lost, all of them continuing to assail Jeanne while Nyx now sat high above. Jeanne seemed helpless, but it was actually no issue, the savior of France thrusting her lance in the direction of Nyx while twisting the weapon with such force that it created a vortex of air using a precise technique reminiscent of Ali's Accupunch. The spiral of slicing wind ripped apart all the tendrils in the way as it sped toward the night goddess.

Nyx dodged out of the way, but Jeanne kept thrusting, creating more vortexes. The deity didn't notice they were being corralled over toward the barrier, which Jeanne proceeded to ride her steed over to, the horse beginning to run up the invisible wall thanks to their physics breaking speed.

When Jeanne was at the same height as Nyx, the knight leapt off her horse, her body flying like a bolt. The gold lance grazed the shoulder of Nyx, who dodged just in time. The twist of the weapon caused the skin and outermost layer of muscles of the god's upper arm to get ripped up, but the limb was still usable.

Part of Nyx's platform formed a tentacle that wrapped around Jeanne's wrist, holding her in place. More tendrils came from above to impale the knight with their sharp tips.

They crashed into the Maid of Orléans' back, the knight getting slammed into the ground, creating a crater like a meteor impact. Nyx didn't stop, sending all the tentacles that had been made of the entire sky continue stabbing into the divot's center, as if they were fists rapidly jabbing at an opponent.

A pit was forming, going deeper and deeper from the constant stabs from the tendrils, but this stopped when a vortex of wind, one far bigger than the previous ones, shredded all the tentacles. Nyx barely avoided getting caught in the wind spiral, having to actively try and fly away from it on her platform after dodging to avoid getting sucked into the vacuum created.

Out of the hole leapt Jeanne, who was completely unharmed, not even having the slightest scratch on her armor. The knight held her banner high in the air before she landed back on her horse.

The raised banner and unscarred form of Jeanne made humanity cheer. Jeanne felt powerful, invincible, a true icon of humanity, but what few noticed was the change in Jeanne expression at the praise thrown at her by her people, the look of disgust, not directed outwardly at the audience, but internally.

"Jeanne just took a beating like a champ and her armor isn't even scuffed! This fight might not be as even as we thought if Nyx isn't even strong enough to hurt Jeanne!"

Nyx pinched her chin. She was suspicious of Jeanne's apparent invincibility. The fact that not even her armor was affected was noteworthy to her. It could have been that both the knight and her armor were just bizarrely tough, but it was also possible it was something else. Nyx considered that the armor had some special ability, or possibly something else about Jeanne, an object or a power she possessed, made her unable to be harmed. It might even be the result of her artificial holy relic.

Nyx could sense that Jeanne's lance, banner, and the sword at her side were all holy relics and her only holy relics, so it was likely the armor wasn't responsible which meant that its durability was unusual and likely the sign of some power, but she had no idea what powers each of the holy relics possessed, and she had no way of knowing if Jeanne's durability was tied to any of them.

The goddess of the night decided that the best strategy moving forward would be to separate Jeanne from her relics.

A new mass of tentacles formed from the dark sky to attack Jeanne. The Maid used her vortex thrust once again, destroying all the tentacles in one go, but they quickly reconstituted and continued toward Jeanne.

The knight rode away on her horse, the tendrils pursuing and surrounding her. Jeanne created a vortex that bored a tunnel through the mass that she rode through before they could regenerate.

One thin tendril extended and grabbed the banner, trying to pull it out of Jeanne's hand. The knight's run was halted while then tentacles finished regenerating. Jeanne wasn't going to be able to dodge as long as she held her banner.

A swarm of giant tentacles attacked but Jeanne vortex thrusted them to pieces, but they would just regenerate again.

Jeanne stabbed at the tentacle holding her banner. Nyx had made that tendril especially flexible so it would just stretch rather than break.

"Belial."

The lance stabbed through the tentacle and split it, allowing Jeanne's horse to run off again and avoid a wave of more titanic tentacula.

The jousting lance was Belial, who, as an embodiment of worthlessness, can pierce anything by making anything it touches worthless, weakening it to the point that anything that would allow it to avoid being pierced such as being durable or flexible enough gets nullified and thus made worthless.

Nyx didn't understand the specifics of Belial's power but she knew she likely couldn't block the lance's attacks and would need to find a way around that.

Tentacles began burrowing underground, outside Jeanne's awareness. They dug until they were directly under Jeanne and her steed, doing so carefully as to not create many vibrations. Though the ground barely trembled, Jeanne's perceptive nature and strong senses normally would have let her notice, at least if she was standing on the ground itself. Being on her horse, her ability to feel the movements of the underground was limited to the point she couldn't feel the trap being set up.

The tentacles burst out from below the checkerboard floor, wrapping around the horse and Jeanne. The dark appendages made sure to wrap around Jeanne's arms so she couldn't move them before grabbing both the banner and lance to try and rip them from the knight's grip.

The tentacles also tried to crush or rip apart the Maid of Orléans, but it was as fruitless as the beatdown before. It was clear that Jeanne would receive no harm as she currently was. Nyx redirected the efforts of all her tendrils to keeping Jeanne immobile and trying to take away her holy relics.

While Jeanne's grip on the relics in her hands made it a struggle to try and wrench them from her, the sheathed blade that was at her side was easy to take away.

The very moment Jeanne realized her sword was taken away, she was filled with a rage so palpable that almost everyone felt a chill run down their spines, a terror on the same scale as that which Necessitas induced as Elli, but then that horror died as the temper of Jeanne mollified, being replaced with a clear melancholy.

She once treasured that sword as a gift from Yahweh, but now she knew the truth of who Yahweh was. She was instinctively enraged at seeing the armament taken, but it didn't last.

In an attempt to snap the blade in two, tendrils stabbed their ends at the armament and tried to grab and bend it, but the weapon remained intact. Nyx decided to just have some tentacles hold it far away from Jeanne.

It seemed that Jeanne had no way to free herself, no leverage or even the ability to move her limbs. But, that wasn't the case.

Throughout her life, Jeanne heard voices in her mind that guided her, that led her on the path through life she took, giving her advice, granting her good fortune upon heeding their words. The knight believed these voices were those of angels and saints, telling her the words and desires of God. They are one of the biggest contributors in Jeanne's belief that she was a warrior following the words of heaven.

In truth, the voices were not those of God, or angels, or saints. They were not even the words of a separate entity from Jeanne. In modern day, humans discuss and try to diagnose Jeanne with a variety of mental illnesses that could be the cause of the voices she heard. They were wrong about the voices being the result of an ailment, but they were dead on that they were related to her mind, for Jeanne had a special mind, with special capabilities.

Jeanne d'Arc was psychic.

Telekinetic force grabbed the tendrils and removed them from Jeanne and her steed before twisting the appendages until they were ripped apart on a sub-quantum level.

Jeanne then did the same to the distant tendrils holding her sword before telekinetically pulling her sword back to herself.

Now that the tentacles were dealt with, Nyx was the next target to get extirpated.

When the psychic assault hit the night goddess, instead of getting turned into a whirl of matter, Nyx managed to resist the force upon her. She was tougher than her sky constructs. The only reason Nyx's arm got damaged before was due to Belial's power is to weaken things it hits.

The Maid of Orléans released her lance and began moving it telekinetically, launching it at Nyx. Jeanne's new plan was to manipulate Belial psychically without needing to get close.

"Aries!"

The Aries constellation in the night sky came into everyone's focus, the stars that made it up shining bright. Their light coagulated in front of Nyx, forming waves of golden wool, so soft that just looking at it infused the desire to wrap one's self within it and sleep, embracing eternal comfort.

"Leo!"

The Leo constellation glowed and its light formed a new layer around Nyx's body, a full body suit of golden fur, a lion's head on her shoulder, only her head uncovered. From the tips of her fingers came claws that seemed to split the spacetime they passed through, creating little wormholes that quickly closed every time Nyx moved her hands.

Belial stabbed at Nyx's solar plexus, but it failed to pierce the skintight suit. Jeanne determined that whatever power it was infused with couldn't be nullified.

While Belial was made ineffective, the waves of golden wool flew at Jeanne. The Maid's horse began to dash away, the wool chasing after them.

Nyx swung her claws at Belial, Jeanne moving the lance out of the way and bringing it back to herself. The night goddess flew on her dark platform to where Jeanne was currently heading, making her steed need to do a sudden turn to avoid Nyx. Now both the goddess and the wool were chasing after the knight.

In an attempt to stop the wool, Jeanne tried to telekinetically grab it, but the telekinetic force seemed to get absorbed into the golden waves. The wool had the power to absorb things into itself, not dissimilarly to Beelzebub. Jeanne wanted to see if Belial would work on the wool, but she'd have to do a u-turn and get in range of Nyx.

Jeanne decided to risk it, willing to trust in her invulnerability.

Jeanne thrust her lance at the wool when she got in range. She raised her other arm to block an incoming swipe from Nyx. Belial successfully pierced into the wooly waves, but before Jeanne could twist her weapon to cause further damage, she felt the claws of Nyx slice off Jeanne's hand and split the shaft of her banner. The hand and flag hit the ground. Jeanne knew that Nyx's claws could ignore her invulnerability, not that it mattered since her invulnerability was granted by holding her flag. Jeanne's psychic visions told her to have the banner made by a master of holy mysticism to act as her ultimate defense.

A swipe from Nyx's other arm forced Jeanne to lift herself with telekinesis and fly away. The horse wasn't fast enough to get away, getting decapitated.

The heart of the Maid panged at the sight of her treasured gelding being slain. She needed to make sure their death was not in vain.

The wool and Nyx both flew after Jeanne, attempting to flank her. The battle became a chase through the sky as Jeanne danced through the air, avoiding swipes of claws and the grasp of the golden waves that the knight had yet to find out the full capabilities of, but understood enough to know was a threat.

Nyx's claws rent reality to cross endless distances thanks to being able to rip holes in spacetime, making it so Jeanne would only be able to dodge at the very last moment. It was made worse when Nyx grew more claws on her toes so the knight had to worry about four limbs instead of two.

The waves have wool split into multiple large hunks, again increasing the number of individual things Jeanne had to keep track of. They were also far faster than they were one large mass, flying so fast that it wasn't just a chase, but was now a dodging match. The knight needed to actively swerve out of the way of the wool waves rather than just stay away from them. It didn't help that as soon as Jeanne would dodge a wool wave, Nyx would wormhole teleport one of her claws right where Jeanne was dodging toward, the reality rending blades appearing point blank next to Jeanne's vitals. The Maid had to be as quick and as vigilant as she could to not die in one blow.

Jeanne was lucky enough that the guidance of The Voices born from her psychic powers alerted the knight to oncoming threats and how to best avoid them, as well as what the best action to take in any situation was.

The Maid still had to process and follow the instructions of The Voices, but Jeanne had been listening to them for so long they took no longer to process than her own thoughts, partly because they technically were her thoughts which a fact that she never realized in life.

Ignorant of the true nature of The Voices, young Jeanne thought them to be angels and saints.

Jeanne, thinking she was following the will of God, had no fears as to the righteousness of her actions, that she was making the world a better place.

To be fair, she was fighting for her people during the Hundred Years War, becoming a hero.

When she was getting sentenced to death, her resolve began to waver. She wasn't sure what God was planning, how her death after a lifetime of faithfulness was just.

But, Jeanne assumed she was simply unable to comprehend the machinations of a divine mind.

That self-assurance was proven wrong when Jeanne died and found out the truth.

Yahweh didn't care about her or humanity beyond their ability to serve and worship her.

Suddenly, the weight of every death she caused was like a black hole. Her holy war was now a sham. Any good she did was gone from her mind, the Maid of Orléans only being able to focus on the negatives.

Jeanne felt betrayed, but more than that, she felt stupid, like she was a gullible buffoon who had deceived herself.

The savior of France had gone to literal heaven after her death, yet all she felt was regret, self-loathing, and aimlessness.

Then, Satan arrived before her, asking her to fight for humanity's survival. Such a cause should seem perfect, one where she could fight without worry of being on the wrong side, or causing more harm than good, or deceiving herself.

Yet, she still felt uneasy. She felt like she was unworthy of such an honor as to fight for humanity. She felt like she wasn't strong enough. She felt she would be committing a murder. She felt like she would be committing a murder with her own hands. She felt that she'd somehow cause more harm than good.

But, after her conversation with Nyx, the knight decided to avoid thinking about what ifs, and instead focus on reality. She was fighting for good as far as she could logically determine based on the information available, so she would accept she was fighting for good.

And in order to secure a victory for the side of the righteous, she had to give it all she had.

While continuing to dodge, Jeanne began concentrating her telekinetic power on one of Nyx's arms.

Normally, Nyx would be strong enough to resist, but by focusing the psychic force, and aiming not to completely supersede control over the goddess' arm, but alter the direction of one of Nyx's swings midway, this problem was circumvented.

A swing of lion-esk claw was diverted and reclaimed so the goddess' claws thrust into their own solar plexus.

Nyx's claws were meant to be an unstoppable attack, and the goddess' bodysuit was intended to be an immutable defense. What happens when these two existences collided and created an inherent paradox?

The answer was that one was revealed to be far less absolute than the other In this case it was Nyx's fur armor.

Bladed fingers dug deep into Nyx's body. Redness came out of the wound when Nyx ripped her claws back out.

The wound was worsened when Jeanne fired her lance telekinetically, the relic stabbing into the newly created chink in the goddess' armor. The weapon began to spin while inside Nyx's organs, blending them into a red soup.

The weapon was pulled back out with the same psychic power that stabbed it into Nyx. The lance deftly avoided getting sliced into six pieces by the Nyx's claws.

The goddess of night was still trying to regather herself after such a serious blow, leaving Jeanne with time to deal with the wool mass. Jeanne stabbed the wool repeatedly with her lance, still controlling it with her mind. The soft wool became smaller as Belial shaved away at it until it was gone.

Both fighters took a moment to recuperate, both of them exhausted by the chase and the damage they took.

"Such a colossal clash! These two warriors are not to be underestimated!"

"Jeanne's lost a hand, but it seems like Nyx is in worse condition! She took a hit that probably messed up her guts! She may be one of the toughest gods around, but she probably isn't doing so hot like that!"

"Nyx doesn't have regeneration, does she? I'm really sick of regeneration." Sin said.

"No, she doesn't, at least as far as I'm aware. She does have enough stamina that she can survive without most of her organs, so the fight isn't over yet."

"She's also had the powers of the remaining ten zodiac signs up her sleeve. She can only use two at a time at least."

Nyx coughed up a wad of blood and organ tissue. "Man, I was really not prepared for that one. Jeanne, you are an absolute beast."

"You are also an amazing fighter." Jeanne lifted her handless arm. "I've never sustained such a grievous wound in combat before. At the same time, you are still honorable, more than worthy to be a knight."

"That's so sweet of you to say. If I chose to be a knight, I'd make you my role model."

"I'm not so sure I'm the person to be a role model. I've made too many mistakes in life."

"That's no problem, nobody's perfect, even your role models. There's a reason they say you shouldn't meet your heroes."

"That's true."

"If you know that's true, you should use that same understanding when you evaluate yourself, not just others. It's only fair."

"True."

"Plus, you just caved a hole into the chest of one of the toughest gods on the block. If that ain't impressive, like, what is?"

"Nyx, you make it seem so obvious."

"What d'you mean?"

"You manage to make my anxieties…just…float away. Talking to you makes me feel better."

"I don't think I'm saying anything deep."

"It doesn't have to be."

"Well, I'm glad to have helped, or keep helping, or whatever."

"It truly is a tragedy we can't both survive this."

"A lotta gods are sadists who wanna see blood splatter." Nyx flicked her fingers, some droplets of her blood flinging forward a few inches in the direction of the godly spectators. "Not all gods are like that, I'm obviously an example, but there definitely needs to be some changes in the way the gods as a whole see themselves. They need a reality check and this tournament is the perfect way to do it. They've already got a bit of one since they've lost three times, but they need to lose this tournament for it to really sink in that they aren't better than everybody else."

"All the more reason I must win."

"And all the more reason I wish I had the guts to just let you win. But, survival instincts and all, you know how it is. Plus, I don't wanna belittle you."

"I definitely wouldn't be satisfied if you just handed me victory."

"And that's why I'm gonna give it my all. Taurus."