Silver

by Imyoshi

Forced to admit that Crocea Mors didn't feel right in his hands—no matter how he held it—Jaune Arc struggled to overcome this obstacle through the insane idea that Aura could become more than just the armor that protected him. Barriers broke as he pushed past the limits of what Aura was capable of, creating and forging his very own weapons from the manifestation of his soul.

22. Platinum

Disclaimer: I own nothing of RWBY.

---

Platinum

By: Imyoshi

Fear and trust intertwined together in chaotic harmony.

Where one went, the other followed in the shadows.

Two entities stuck in the same body.

Amber?

Ozpin allowed his eyes to widen by the minutest of margins, tongue stuck.

Amber stood before him? While heartbreaking, nothing escaped his throat. Ozpin couldn't even say he was disturbed. He knew of the risk and possibilities before Pyrrha Nikos had stepped into that machine. They all did. That, however, hardly affected the grim situation before them. If Amber was in control, then what happened to Pyrrha Nikos?

What happened to their champion?

"Amber?"

Amber ignored Ozpin, glared down at her new hands, and chalked everything up as an out-of-body experience of the highest magnitude. Her new hands felt like any other, but they didn't belong to her. She glared past them to see her new torso, hips, legs and everything in between. Even her hair, blood shaded and long were all so new to her. Don't even get her started on her change of skin tone.

A freak-out moment was inevitable.

She began to twist and turn in a panic. "What's going on? What's happened to me? Why do I look like this? And where am I and how'd I get here?"

"Whoa! Whoa! One question at a time, kiddo. You're gonna bite your tongue if you keep rambling off like that."

"Qrow?"

The drunk smirked and stood before her. "The one and only. Hey, you know something, you look different. Do something with your hair?"

She huffed. "Ha-ha, very funny, Qrow. Now tell me where I'm at!"

"Bossy, ain'tcha?"

"Qrow!"

"Fine, fine!" He backed away with his arms spread out between Glynda Goodwitch and General Ironwood. "You're at some glorified basement underneath Beacon. I brought you here after the attack. Consider it a safe house."

A safe house?

Attack?

Wait a minute? Wait a blasted minute! It was all coming back to her! The illusion! The confrontation! The fighting! The arrows and fire! The insensible screaming! That dark glove! All of it! Like a nightmare that never ended, the visions of that fight clawed violently against the inside of her skull. Whatever Amber had expected from waking up in that tube, it wasn't this. How long had she been out? Days? Week? Month?!

Breathing frantically, this time she calmed down and went slow. "Qrow? What happened to me. These aren't my arms! This isn't my hair! I think I would remember having long, red hair!"

Qrow sighed, looking to the others for help. None of them offered anything. He was her bodyguard, after all. Bastards.

"Do you want the long story or the short one?"

"Quick question, am I dreaming?"

"Sorry, not a dream."

Amber grumbled. Worth a shot. "Short one."

"The short version; you fought, you lost, and the bad guys almost stole those Maiden Powers of yours, but yours truly put a stop to that." He threw his thumb toward the incubator where her original body laid. "Atlas nerds do their magic, and we transferred your Aura into Pyrrha Nikos in hopes of keeping the other half of those powers. And here we are."

Amber blinked, mute. She peered over to her original body, seeing it for the first time since stepping out of the machine. Initially, she believed her body altered due to the device, but now, now things were different. Her body didn't change, but her Aura flipped scripts.

Walking over, the girl rested her palm against the glass, not missing the subtle sounds of a nearby flatline. The corners of her mouth dragged down upon discovering the gruesome scar covering the left side of her face, but she managed to stop the hiccup building in her throat by trailing her fingers on the glass until she formed a weak fist.

Ironwood coughed. "How's the Maiden Powers?"

Inhaling slowly, Amber backed away from her transparent coffin, casting a quick glance over to the second tube from where she emerged. It went without saying that this body belonged to Pyrrha Nikos. At least that explained the red hair, meaning the Aura transfer gave her control over the champion's body.

Such a haunting thought.

Steeling herself, she bounced back, turning around with one of her eyes glowing with a strange power. "They're fine... at least what remains of them. I don't feel complete, but that's maybe because of the new body. Can't honestly say, it's all so strange."

Lub-dub!

She abruptly dropped to her knees, chest heavy.

James quickly kneeled down to help. "Amber!"

To her credit, the girl managed to wave it all off as nothing urgent, pushing away the General's arm with ease, but a storm brewed in her soul. A foreign Aura, one she knew without a doubt belonged to the previous host, contested against her own and pushed back hard. It came out of nowhere and threw off her balance, forcing the Maiden to concentrate on her Aura to defend against the acting force.

Most of the alien Aura existed around her head.

"I'm fine..." she breathed, slowly getting up. "I'm fine. Just getting used to this new body as all. Note to self, don't turn around so fast while wearing heels." Not a lie by any means, but not the truth either. Standing up, she exhaled that breath she held, directing her sights to Headmaster Ozpin. "So what's the plan now? I leave Beacon and hide for a bit?"

"Correct." Glynda stepped forward, lips thinned. "After you fulfill Pyrrha Nikos' last request."

Amber frowned, tentative. "And that last request is?"

"You must say goodbye to the other members of Team JNPR while posing as Pyrrha Nikos. That is all."

Amber looked away, glaring at her old body. Say goodbye to Pyrrha's team while pretending to be her? It sounded simple enough. Maybe even a final request worth fulfilling? Definitely focused on the aspect of kindness. However, the concept of simple didn't exist in their line of work. Things never were such. Putting everything on the line, if only for a few minutes of tearful goodbyes, sounded too dangerous if the enemy did lurk nearby.

Why risk it all for a few Huntsmen-in-Training?

Biting her lip, she shook her head at Headmistress. "I cannot. That's a terrible idea. If the enemy learns of me leaving early, then it could spell catastrophe. I must refuse that request."

She expected many things upon denying her request. Maybe some stuttering from a flabbergasted professor, or mock silence from Qrow, acceptance from Ironwood and Penny Polendina, possibly a mix from the Headmaster himself, but the air of heated anger rising around Glynda Goodwitch was not something she had anticipated. For all the nook and crannies she knew Glynda possessed, getting angry over the fact she put safety over feelings personally tilted her world.

A Huntsmen's word is everything. Ozpin believes that, but no one believes that more than my leader!

The witch forcefully gripped her wrist, standing between her and the capsule. "You must go."

Such a forceful tone.

While a bleeding heart of generosity for children, which might change, Amber didn't take too kindly to demands or threats. Glynda somehow managed both with a simple sentence, glaring with all the might of an apex predator.

"I don't have to do—!"

"Yes you do!" she snapped, applying pressure. "Miss Nikos gave up her body for you. The very least you could do is honor her final wish."

Ozpin gently grabbed Glynda's wrist, finally jumping back into the conversation. "We're not asking you to stay. We're simply asking you to see her team one last time and say goodbye. They deserve to have peace in mind. It's the least we can do for her sacrifice."

"And if I refuse?"

Ozpin raised a brow? A wise bluff to call out. He—?

"I'll stick you back in the machine." Glynda warned, towering over the ex-champion. The occupants in the room stiffened. "I've given my word to honor Pyrrha Nikos' last wish. If you won't comply, then I'll force you. Who knows what consequences lie for such a risky procedure."

Amber didn't want to believe her, but the stern expression she carried, plus the lack of intervention of the party involved, forced her hand, not to mention that Aura scrapping around the insides of her head clawed worse than a Beowolf the second she refused. Two forces, two practically unmovable forces, demanded she fulfilled the wish.

Damn it.

"Fine. I'll do it."

Glynda huffed. "You should be grateful Pyrrha Nikos even agreed to this. You'd still be lying in that machine if she hadn't."

"I said I'd do it. Stop with the guilt-trip already."

The professor sighed, before casting a quick peek over to Penny. "Miss Polendina, if you would be so kind as to escort Amber here to Team JNPR's current locations. The quicker this is accomplished, the quicker we could put this trouble behind us."

The android saluted, happy-go-lucky plastered. "Affirmative, Headmistress Goodwitch!"

"Good."

For the first time in a long time, Glynda Goodwitch desired a good bottle of scotch or bourbon. So much so that she spared a traitorous glance at the flash in Qrow's hand, contemplating whether to confiscate it or not. He wouldn't miss it. The cursed bird was probably already drunk.

"Let's just get this over with." Amber began walking toward the elevator, taking each step deliberately slow.

The scene of Amber walking away with Pyrrha's body troubled the witch. At times, when her guard was down and mood right, she dropped pretenses and relaxed. Not every moment of her life required order and structure. Such an instance came to pass with the joint activity of stargazing with Jaune Arc. Her words at the time had been unguarded and less astute than now, almost childish and far too optimistic for someone in her position of power.

Maybe that was the reason she lingered on such a memory?

How she missed tossing her worries away.

Watching Amber leave with Pyrrha's body meant Mr. Arc wouldn't be able to compete in the Vytal Tournament. Perhaps fortune smiled down upon him still. With a team of three, they couldn't compete. If that happened to be the case, then she doubted Ozpin would put up much of a fight to wave away his fake transcripts. Still, Glynda Goodwitch had wanted to see the fruits of Jaune Arc's labor, maybe even more than the boy himself.

For it to be ripped away from the both of them, ah, the cruelty of Fate.

Ahead of her, Ironwood grabbed Penny by the shoulder, a deep frown marring across his face, eyes filled with doubt, yet he remained impassive to the entire Pyrrha-Amber ordeal. Poor Penny blinked at the weird acting commander, tilting her head in a perfect forty-five-degree angle.

"General?"

"Penny, I need you to shadow Amber and keep her safe. I am authorizing Ventriloquy-Mode. You mustn't allow anything to happen to her. She is the top priority. Do you understand?" Penny looked away, and he dropped his tone. "Is that going to be an issue?"

When she met his glare with one of a frightened child, her tone, too, dropped. "Forgive my reluctance, General, but Pyrrha was my friend. We even had a slumber party together and talked about cute boys."

He sighed, remembering the report. "I know, Penny. This much be difficult, but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Don't forget that. We cannot jeopardize the safety of the Kingdoms for three souls."

"I understand."

He nodded and disheveled her locks. "I'll be waiting for your report."

She smiled, but it seemed forced, expected of her. James offered his own smaller smile, hidden from prying eyes. He expected some complications, accusations, and tears, but nothing Penny wasn't equipped to handle. Undoubtedly this would be awkward, but he believed wholeheartedly in her capabilities. Penny, by all virtue and protocol, far surpassed all expectations.

After all, how much trouble could the remaining members of Team JNPR possibly be?

...

The long elevator up gave Penny the opportunity to break down Team JNPR to Amber in fiery detail. Anything she might need to know, the android provided in minute, precise detail. Although, the way she explained it left much to be desired.

"And this is Nora Valkyrie!" Penny explained, skipping through the pictures saved in her Scroll. "She's phenomenal! Her energy output matches that of mine!"

Amber's lips wobbled. Two Pennies? "That's super."

Penny noticed the shift in tone. She discerned the moment Miss Amber stepped out of the tube. "Why are you so... different, Miss Amber? You used to be—?"

"Nicer?" Amber finished. "That was before I walked out of a tube in a body that didn't belong to me, Penny. I almost died fighting those three. Dying kind of changes things. I don't want to go through that again. Not until I'm at least a bag of bones."

Meaning Amber wished nothing more than to vacate Beacon Academy and travel somewhere safe. The faster she got this meeting over with, the faster she'd be out of this death trap. If Ozpin and Glynda weren't so incessant for her to say goodbye to these three, she would've left already, honestly, she still might.

Tremble!

Amber paused in her thoughts, glaring down at her shaking palm. She used her other hand to steel her trembling wrist tight, but it proved useless. The shaking—Pyrrha Nikos—remained, fighting against her control, fighting for her body. Her Aura clashed violently against Pyrrha's, the Maiden Powers picking no side between the struggle, what embers remained at least.

If she listened attentively enough, thoroughly emptied her mind, Amber heard the tell-tale voice of the withdrawn champion. Pyrrha Nikos was in her head, possibly able to do and see things. What things, Amber hadn't a clue, but she hated the idea of the champion lingering around in her head, doing Monty knew what.

Damn that raven-haired woman. Damn her!

Having half the Maiden Powers stolen from her crippled her original body, left her vulnerable, but fortune still smiled down upon her. With this body, with this identity, being able to slip away unnoticed might not be possible, but her new name carried weight with it. That weight protected or at least shielded her. Too bad the Aura belonging to that name fought and made attaining total control of this body difficult.

"Are you alright, Miss Amber?"

Amber huffed. No, she was not alright, but allowing Penny, or worse, General Ironwood or Ozpin to know that could potentially open up Pandora's Box. She preferred living over being trapped in a tube like some toy in a display case, but damn if this girl didn't have a strong will. A body with two souls, what a story.

Faking a smile, Amber sighed pleasantly. "Just getting used to this body and all. Nothing to worry about, Penny."

Pyrrha Nikos' soul couldn't last forever. Sooner or later the poor thing had to give out and relinquish complete control over to her. Her Aura would vanish into dust and turn into nothing. It was a matter of time.

Not to say she wasn't grateful. Amber, by all definition, appreciated the sacrifice. Judging by the way Penny stopped smiling, she missed her friend but honored the sacrifice as well.

Ding!

Exiting out the elevator first, Penny hummed and excitedly pointed in an area toward the forest. "Nora and Ren's Scroll signals are this way!"

Amber didn't ask how she knew that, following her lead instead. Instead, she briefly wondered why two members of Team JNPR were located somewhere in the vicinity of Emerald Forest, far from the school?

The thought got interrupted by another surprise headache.

...

Hand-holding.

What a lewd and filthy act! One Lie Ren and Nora Valkyrie were guilty of committing. Did they at least have the decency to act coy about it? Nope! Degenerates! Both of them! Guilty of the dirtiest of crimes! Lock them up and throw away the key! Maybe then they'd learn their lesson.

Probably not.

Nora blushed like a ripe tomato. Ren's hand comfortably wrapped around hers as they strolled across the edges of Emerald Forest. His fingers, roughed with calluses, wrapped around her fingers so tenderly. The size of his hand, while bigger than hers, made for a nice feeling. A pleasant heat escaped from him and entered her, fluttering those black butterflies in her stomach in twirls and swirls. Maybe he planned to spoil her? She cherished the selfish thought.

Nora Valkyrie wouldn't mind being spoiled.

"Nora? What are you thinking?"

"Nothing."

The Lie blinked and acted perfectly unfazed. Dumb Ren! Acting all nonchalant while her heart beat loudly in her ears.

Pretending to ignore her flustered look, he led her to the same rock they watched Jaune and Pyrrha first fight. Ironically, aside from the tasteless memory, the clearing offered a pleasant and secluded area for privacy. She thought so too, pushing him to sit. Before he reacted, she trapped herself between his arms, contently trapped between his hands and chest with a goofy grin.

He chuckled silently at the pose.

The last time they sat on this rock, Nora used him as an object to lean on as their teammates fought. Now he was reduced to a comfy wall, still leaned upon, but no longer by his shoulders, however, the space underneath his neck was overtaken by the top of her head. Dejectedly, the memory pushed his thoughts to the breaking smile and obvious liar Pyrrha told.

He tensed slightly at the thought.

"Are you thinking about, Pyrrha?"

He blinked once and looked down to Nora's upside down eyes, wondering when he became an open book. "When did you become a mind-reader?"

She smiled, wondering when he became so clueless. "Dummy, it's so obvious! Pyrrha's a terrible liar! She's been extra jumpy since meeting Penny. Poor Jaune looked like he was going to have a heart attack with the way he watched Pyrrha walk off with Professor Goodwitch."

Extra jumpy? That would've been nice to know ahead of time. "If you've noticed, why haven't you said anything?"

Nora shrugged, guilty. "I don't know, Pyrrha's weird. She's always been kind of a lone wolf. Roar! She likes to do things by herself. You know that!"

Pink eyes remained calm. Ren found that logic arduous to dispute. Pyrrha tended to act independently. Like the time she decided to stalk Jaune. Who could forget the time she used her actual blood to create her weapons? Declaring spars out of the blue, she loved that. Even now, whatever bothered her didn't stop her from fighting it alone. Entertaining enough, she wasn't the only one to act like this.

Both Jaune and Pyrrha were stubborn blockheads.

"And you're not worried?"

"Nope! If Pyrrha can't handle it, then she's got Jaune-Jaune! And if our Fearless Leader fails, then she's got us! We're Team JNPR! The number one team in all of Vale!" She curled her arms around his head. "So what's the worst that can happen?"

"Famous last words, Nora."

She giggled and booped him on the nose. Then, to spice up the moment, she stubbornly turned to poke him in the chest, her smile stretching.

"And for your information, mister, I don't need to be a mind-reader to know what you're thinking of."

Ren raised a single brow. "Really?"

"Mmm-hmm!"

"Okay then..." he trailed, pulling her close with his arms wrapped tightly around her stomach. "What am I thinking of now?"

Nora squirmed, turning her head to meet his calm, focused, and efficacious eyes. The big dummy was leaning in for a—!

"Salutations!"

So much for privacy.

Amber sighed uncomfortably. From her viewpoint, Penny and she had interrupted some personal alone time. Strange? She had no recollection of anything intimate-based in the reports she heard from the walk here between Nora Valkyrie and Lie Ren. While her partner-in-crime mentioned once or twice about Ren being handsome, a trait that was stubbornly accurate, personal records indicated no such relationship existed.

Penny said nothing about it.

Well, it mattered not.

So those two got together, at least they had each other to comfort the other when she departed. If anything, this was a blessing in disguise. Now her leaving wouldn't sting so much.

"There you two are." Amber grinned, not moving to join them on their rock. "I've been searching all over for you."

Nora waved, jumping out of Ren's hold. "Hey, Pyrrha! Penny!"

Ren eyed them wearily from his rock.

Odd?

Pyrrha traveled with Penny to find them? Where was that extra-jumpiness Nora mentioned? What happened to her nervousness from only an hour ago? They all knew of Penny's unique situation, but their friend carried with her a confident smile, while not surprising from a civilian standpoint, Team JNPR knew better. Pyrrha lacked socialness. That air of confidence had not been there for a few days. For it to show up out of the blue?

It warranted a fair reaction.

Pyrrha laughed at something Nora said with Penny dragging the suddenly nervous girl closer to them.

Hn? Maybe he was overthinking things? Could be his hormones?

"So, yeah, you see..." Pyrrha suddenly started, appearing saddened, dropping the laughs entirely. She breathed in, then breathed out. "I apologize for dropping this out of the blue, but something's come up, and I'm afraid I have to leave. I don't know when I'll be back, but I hope it's not too long."

The laughter ceased.

Never mind. Lie Ren never overthought anything.

Be back? What did she possibly mean by leaving? Pyrrha knew above all else Jaune needed to win the Vytal Tournament. Without her around, that was but a hollow dream. The plan required all four of them! Not three! Four!

Nora must've pieced this together, too, dropping her smile with a glare of contemplativeness. Her laughter ceased altogether, sharing the same spiraling emotions as him. She stared at their friend with such puzzling confusion that he felt the world beneath his feet tilt on its axis.

Pyrrha offered them a sad smile in return.

Ren glared with Aura infused into his Evil Eyes.

That straining smile didn't belong to her. It wasn't her I'm Sorry smile that Jaune named. Not even close. Which begged many questions, like what purpose did Penny have being here?

"Pyrrha?" Nora asked, tilting her head. "What are you saying? You gotta be somewhere after the Vytal Tournament? Family emergency? Yucky cereal commercial? Don't worry! We'll help you pack! Right, Ren?"

The Lie stilled. If Pyrrha answered after then no problem, but if she said—!

"What? No. You misunderstand, Nora." Pyrrha informed, acting uncomfortable. "I must leave before the Vytal Festival."

"Before?" Nora laughed awkwardly, gambling a small peek over to Ren's sharp eyes. "You're talking crazy! Ha! Ha! If you leave, then we can't compete in the Vytal Tournament! And you know how much that means to our Fearless Leader! Doy! Who are you? Are you really Pyrrha?"

The champion blinked slowly. "Of course I'm Pyrrha? Who else would I be, Nora?"

Ren paused, body freezing as he slowly removed himself from the rock with his muscles contracting. Of all things to say, of all words in the dictionary, and those were the words she chose? Nora couldn't have set up that trap any better.

He glared mutely at the glowing pink hue surrounding Pyrrha's body. That innocent smile didn't fool him. He saw past the lies. Saw past the fibs, and moved to stand next to his partner-in-crime.

"She's lying, Nora." Nora gasped, and he straightened his shoulders. "Who are you? What have you done to Pyrrha?"

Penny noticed the way Amber's heart sped up, but she kept calm. "What are you getting on about, Ren? I told you. It's me, Pyrrha! Why are you acting like this? Look, I apologize; I didn't think something would—!"

The collar of his Lore cloak closed and he slowly began walking toward the imposter. His pink eyes shined with a radiance of pink. "I'm not going to ask you again. What have you done with Pyrrha?"

Amber sighed, regaining her wits. "This again? I am Pyrrha. What? If I wasn't Pyrrha, then who would I be? Some imposter who stole her body? How would that work? You see what I mean? Crazy!"

Ren harshly tensed and stood perfectly still. Such an odd combination of words. Who in their right mind would say such a thing, unless they weren't in their right state of mind? Therefore, hidden from prying eyes, he slowly tensed his hands into fists and spaced his feet out by the tiniest of margins. Besides, Team JNPR were all about being crazy!

"Are you?"

"Am I what?"

"An imposter who has stolen Pyrrha's body?"

Amber frowned. "Of course not! That's ridiculous, Ren! It's a rhetorical question—!"

Amber suddenly lifted up her forearm to block an incoming kick aimed for her head. Cracks formed underneath her feet from the high-angled blow. Part of her anticipated such a reaction. What she hadn't predicted was the driving force behind the said kick. It carried far too much weight for a person of his size, too much mass for a man of his stature.

Were they even playing on the same field of gravity?

Ren narrowed his eyes amongst their stalemate. "You're a terrible liar. Pyrrha would know better than to lie to me, but then you're not her. Are you? Don't bother lying. Your tell is worse than hers. And in case you didn't know, that was a rhetorical question."

"Miss Amber! Look out!"

The Maiden's eyes widened from Penny's warning, looking up just in time to see Nora Valkyrie's hammer incoming. She used her free hand to press her palm against the face of the hammer, digging deeper into the ground from the greater opposing force. Both forces working against her strained her new body to its limits, and when she noticed Lie Ren pulling out his weapon, one of her eyes shivered in power.

"Ah!"

A sudden force pushed both Ren and Nora away from Pyrrha. A harsh wind, hot with its presence, blew out of their champion with a glow escaping her right eye that was a multitude of color. Said eye adjusted its color, going from exuberant emerald to fall amber.

First lying and now this, as if Lie Ren required any more proof to engage her.

"You're not Pyrrha. Pyrrha would've never left Jaune to fight alone in the tournament." He observed the way her hand trembled, eyes squinted. "But she's still in there, isn't she? You don't have complete control over her body... Amber?"

Amber glared and halted the shaking, barely. No point in lying. "She's gone."

"I thought I told you." He dashed forward, cloak unmoving in her harsh wind. "You're a terrible liar."

...

Jaune found himself sulking at Beacon's Fountain.

The talk with Blake put a few things into perspective.

Maybe he had been looking at this Lore problem a little misguidedly. What she said was true. Lore resonated from a dark origin and he misjudged it. That wasn't fair. It showed a lack of trust. Trust was the foundation for fighting with a partner. Without it, they'd either end up destroying themselves or handicapping the other.

Like Blake and The White Fang.

She feared for the future of The White Fang. Her trust in it wavered because of said fear. Even if she denied it, at some point in her life, it shifted. That shift caused a rupture and ripped the two apart. She understood his problem better than anyone else.

The White Fang was her Lore.

Just because you accept a power, doesn't mean you cannot fear it.

That quote alone spoke louder than any action and reminded him of the exchange back in the woods. Funny, now that he had a clearer mind, what his friend had mentioned sounded true. Of course the same could be said about Ren's Aura. They were both walking prisons at that point.

Maybe it was time to look past this Grimm nonsense and accept Lore for what it was? Sounded easy enough. The only problem, he wasn't sure if he could turn his back on his family's ideals so easily. To turn his back on everything he once believed was asking a lot for an Arc, but to be ignorant to change was worse for a team leader.

His team deserved better.

Not like he never accepted a Grimm's help before. That Beowolf leader was the sole reason his team's future was protected and—that was right!

Breath captured, he suddenly lost his balanced and gripped the edge of the fountain. Thoughts raced as he struggled to curse his ignorance. A Beowolf had been the reason his team managed to avoid expulsion. Jaune couldn't believe he almost forgot that. It was the first time he started seeing the world as more than just black and white. It was the first time he saw an ounce of humanity from humanity's greatest menace.

Maybe that was why Lore scared him? He possibly didn't wish to be wrong?

Staring at the fountain statue, it tickled his curiosity. For some odd reason that Grimm and stone formation looked notoriously familiar. He shifted his focus on the Grimm to get a better look. Wordlessly, it appeared to be defending the Huntsman, not attacking. Call him crazy, but the statue sculpted didn't resemble anything of a Huntsman and Grimm fighting each other, but side-by-side.

Jaune wanted to laugh.

Adopting Sir Scrabbles was one thing, but this train of thought flipped the switch entirely. While mentally insane, the chance of being wrong lingered. Now he saw his hesitation nothing more than blind arrogance. Who knew? Maybe this unknown Huntsman and Grimm were fighting together? An amusing thought that hardly sounded insane from the mindset of Team JNPR's Fearless Leader.

Knowing a partial truth, he fished his pocket and pulled the Lore shard out, feeling a tad better about the whole ordeal. Lore's properties and Dark Energy wouldn't remain a secret forever. Given enough time and he'd crack it. Still, that required he move past his ridiculous fear. He saw that now. Fear kept him from progressing, and that fear had shattered the trust between Lore and him.

It would take time to look past what he'd been raised to believe.

Concentrating on his Aura, he smiled at the contrast between Aura and Lore. "One of these days."

Space!

Dropping the smile, he felt the wave of pressure hit. It was faint. Not by the standards of being weak, but the distance between him and it. None of that vexed him more than the Auras he felt. They were between Penny, Pyrrha, Ren, Nora, and one he hadn't felt before, and all five were clashing.

"Something's wrong!"

Dropping the shard into his pocket, he began walking toward their direction before picking up the pace as the Spaces continued to collide. Then it became a full-on sprint when he noticed Pyrrha's Aura not getting any larger the closer he got, but getting smaller.

The luxury of time suddenly seemed distant to the Arc.

A gut feeling in his stomach said so.

...

Not the way Amber planned for the meeting to go.

She attempted to throw a fist, but that damn champion wobbled her concentration and Ren landed a straight uppercut to her jaw. If that wasn't enough, he grabbed her ankle before she flew away, tossing her back down on the floor, thumping her hard with that Nora girl closing in with her hammer. Lucky for Amber, Penny stepped in and tackled Nora before the strike connected, separating the two.

Ren acted unfazed and aimed a strike meant for her shoulder.

The Maiden glowed her eye and pushed him away with a massive tundra of wind, barely. To see him only fly so far back, hardly covering any distance, ticked her off. She was willing to believe they weren't playing on the same field of gravity, or he weighed way more than she initially assumed. No matter. Amber hefted herself up and readied herself, throwing one foot back.

Snap!

What? What the? What the hell! Of all times for the heel of Pyrrha's boot to snap! What rotten luck! Not only that, but somehow Ren managed to snag upon her misfortune, charging forward with her balance off. It wouldn't have been such an issue if not for his phenomenal timing!

Amber barely blocked the unusually powerful haymaker aimed for her abdominal.

Admittedly, after the gut-wrenching strike, and when Lie grabbed her wrist to hold her in place to deliver an extra kick to her stomach, before tossing her with strength that surprised her, physical confrontation between bodies was not the way to go, not with the champion throwing her focus off. At least she felt Pyrrha's Aura sink deeper and deeper into darkness, but this guy was getting in a lot of damage.

Things would be so much smoother with her weapon by her side, Pyrrha gone, and the other half of the Maiden Powers.

Throwing a quick glance over to Penny, she found her companion back-flipping from blows that would've crushed her from Nora's hammer. While not on the offense just yet, she knew sooner or later that Penny would switch over and fight back. Specific measurements only needed to be reached first. Maybe when Nora started firing her projectile grenades?

"Ren! Nora! Pyrrha! What the heck's going on?"

Amber frowned, turning her head, alongside with the others, to see the newcomer.

Her frown deepened upon recognizing the face from Penny's scroll. Great! Another one. This time the leader of Team JNPR, Jaune Arc. Ranked dead last on the tournament lineup. Hn? Maybe, if Penny was willing, they could capture him to use as a bargaining chip, because fighting these two proved difficult with Pyrrha stunning her movements.

First, she'd try manipulation. "Jaune! I'm so glad you're here! Tell Ren and Nora to stop attacking me. I think they've gone mad."

Ren's facade remained. "She's lying. I don't know how, but somehow this imposter's gained control of Pyrrha's body. Our friend's in trouble."

Penny dodged Nora and ran up to the leader, hoping to end this in friendly terms. "Friend Jaune, this is all just some huge misunderstanding. Please order Ren to disengage with Pyrrha before someone gets hurt."

Behind that innocent smile, the Fearless Leader gawked wearily at Pyrrha's dull blood Aura and this fall colored one. Once he noticed the clashing Aura, he couldn't help but compare them to the intense interactions Lore had with Aura. Only one could exist at a time. The other died off. Two Auras, one body. Ren was telling the truth! A foreign Aura was trying to gain control of Pyrrha's body.

Shifting his view, an understanding passed between Ren and him before the Fearless Leader of Team JNPR stood between Penny and Pyrrha. A fair distance existed between the two, but Jaune hardly worried, eyes trained on his new opponent.

He trusted Ren and Nora.

"I don't really know what's going on, but I'm counting on you guys to keep Pyrrha busy. Leave Penny to me."

Penny blinked, finally noticing the barrier in front of her. "Are you saying you believe them?" Her answer came when he shifted into an amateurish fighting pose, fingers locked. "How unfortunate. Please reconsider! I do not wish to engage combat with you, Friend Jaune. I'm combat ready!"

His hands lowered slightly. "Then leave."

"I cannot do that."

That made two of them.

Frowning, he refrained from summoning any of his Aura weapons, still adamant in saving Penny's soul, leaving only his fists as weapons. He ran toward her with his Aura concentrated to a fair level, a powerful gust of wind rushing past his hair. Not too much to damage her screaming Aura, but enough to end this fight quickly, or so he thought. Penny herself only released a tenth of her optimal Aura output, weighing in the factors and risks as he charged toward her.

Scanning Aura levels resembled the function that the Scrolls contained. Penny Polendina held such an ability, able to read and gauge a person's Aura output and skill cap by crunching the data. While more advanced than the typical function of the Scrolls, this ability enabled the android to control her Aura output for optimal use.

Jaune Arc sat at a moderate twenty-percent Aura production. Not the vastest Aura readings at Beacon Academy, it was reasonable in the plot of mediums, but it was no outlier, not like General Ironwood or Miss Amber's. If anything, Penny wouldn't need to release her limiters if things went south. Twenty percent was more than enough to subdue him.

Still.

Penny hated the idea of hurting her friend.

She enjoyed Jaune's company, the attention he gave her made her smile, but orders were orders, and sadly, nothing could be done to change that. Miss Amber required to leave Beacon Academy before the enemy moved in and reclaimed the remnants of the Fall Maiden Powers. Nothing was going to change her mission's objective, not even a friend.

"Friend Jaune, I repeat: I do not wish to engage in physical combat with you. Please back down."

Ignoring her, he aimed a fist back, throwing it forward, hoping to connect to her jaw, but Penny caught his hand without moving from her spot as a new Space crashed against his. The pitied look she shared with him hurt, but not as much as the side-kick she connected to his stomach that sent him flying back, tumbling against the lush floor with a small trail of dust.

He managed to quickly upright himself, digging fingers into the floor to stop his momentum. Bits of blood escaped his mouth, unable to stop from his reluctance to allow his Aura to heal the damage done to his body. Wanting to save someone's soul forced him to make such choices, both figuratively and literally.

How upsetting.

"It's nothing personal; friend, but I have my orders."

He stood up and coughed. "That's Pyrrha you're talking about, and I don't care if you're following orders! I'm going to save her! That's my order as the leader of Team JNPR!"

She frowned, deeply hurt, and slowly extended both her arms out with her fingers laced outward in a flowing direction. Clicking sounds attracted the Arc's attention, forcing him to perceive the influx of Aura swishing toward her back with ones and zero becoming more prominent. Slowly, like the gears of a wind-up doll, strangely shaped boxes stretched out in all directions, adding up to an impressive total of fourteen. Each hovered in the air, motionless, and through Space he observed rays of Aura travel up to this boxes in a linear fashion until they merged with the objects themselves. Then things changed.

Clicks and clangs echoed, and the boxes opened up to become blades with strangely circular hilts. They floated perfectly in the breeze, immersed in her screaming Aura, all suddenly pointed with the tips of their blade in his direction. If anything of this surprised Penny, she hid it well.

She managed to smile sadly at his stunned position. "Do not fret, Friend Jaune, my Strings won't engage you until I give the order."

Strings?

So those flying swords of hers had a name. String, huh? Not bad. Original and unique. An odd name for a weapon, but look at him and his arsenal.

"There's a lot of them."

"Please surrender. I do not wish to hurt you."

He said nothing, narrowed his eyes, and moved his body into a somewhat decent fighting pose. His feet were pushed evenly apart with his arms locked near his chest. Penny appeared disappointed with his choice and shook her head, before flicking her hands out in a lazy, precise motion. Like clockwork, the Strings moved in sync, dancing in a circular path around his person, but failed to come at him from any angle. When neither moved to attack him, he spared a quick glance at her, wondering what was going on. She didn't make him wait long, spreading her hands fall apart with her fingers stretched in odd positions, resembling that of a puppeteer. Still, before going on the offensive, she offered him one last to forfeit.

"Last chance." Jaune narrowed his eyes at the opportunity to surrender and charged at Penny. She only sighed and flicked her fingers out. "I'm sorry."

Suddenly, the Strings stopped spinning in an endless loop and shot toward him in every conceivable direction, points drawn. Fourteen Strings and one Jaune Arc. At least four came from his blind spot. Then there were the ten coming from both his sides and his front. Space allowed him to feel the Strings hiding behind his back, granting him the possibility of sidestepping a potential backstab, but what of the others?

Grunting, he charged anyway, hoping to get in between the Strings and at her, but his reflexes weren't sharp enough at his current Aura concentration to avoid all of them. He dodged one by bending his body back, but another took its place and aimed for his still feet, and when he managed to throw himself into the air, others rained down and pressed him back down into the dirt, cutting into his outfit and Aura reserves.

Rolling out of the struggle, he barely had time to breathe before they came at him, speed much quicker. Jumping back, each time he lunged out of danger, another String came and dug itself where his feet had last been, forcing him to dance around the battlefield with half-second window to dodge while Penny controlled them from afar.

Jaune Arc wasn't dumb.

Through Space, he saw the lines of Aura attached to those Strings, with a path leading to her back. She unmistakably controlled them, mirroring that of the way he commanded Gravity, but the question remained whether or not a flaw existed with her movements. So far, from what he perceived, she wasted no steps, moving in an almost robotic style. Even if he wanted to, he doubted his ability to break down her finger placement, not while dodging and trying to counter, let alone exploit any weakness in her form. Then again, if he summoned Excalibur, observations meant nothing. Excalibur could merely sever the chains of Aura connected to her Strings.

Problem solved.

"Pyrrha! Snap out of it!"

The leader blinked, looking back to find Ren dealing with a hailstorm of iron. When had all that happened? Where did this liar find all that metal, and was she slowly learning how to use Pyrrha's Magnetic Polarity, or was this something else entirely? Never before had Pyrrha been able to control that much metal. Either way, his breath hitched upon seeing Nora barely saving Ren from a collision of iron and rust.

When spears started forging, Jaune fluctuated his Aura.

No!

The small distraction costed him. Aura chains wrapped around his body with the Strings charging in. He tried to struggle free, moving back and forth to dodge any incoming Strings, but most managed a cut to either his arms or body before wrapping alongside the others. Soon they began to squeeze his body in a vice-grip, pulling in all directions. When a spurt of blood escaped his throat, he glowed.

Enough of this!

For a brief moment, he moved his Aura control past the boundaries he felt comfortable fighting Penny in. A white, blinding light encased his body and his muscles expanded, giving him the strength to push back the bonds that held him. Then, when Penny remained stunned by the sudden display, he dashed and delivered a mean haymaker to her chin that strangely stung his arm.

It was like hitting a wall of metal.

The girl simply used one of her Strings as a stand to upright herself, too busy inspecting the sudden light show her opponent presented her to worry about minimal damage.

She found herself intrigued by the Arc's sudden increase of overall power and threw a few Strings at him.

Concentrating to a higher degree of Aura control, Jaune moved forward, speed increased, and dodged each String. No more playing around! He may not want to damage Penny's screaming Aura, but Pyrrha and his team needed him more. A few hits with his Aura charged fists should be enough to end this and knock her out. He knew that much with her current Space pressing down at him.

Dodging another set of Strings, he flicked away the last two, and she this time bounced back when she used her palm to block his fists.

Penny frowned.

This light show, this influx of Aura or whatever it was presented a major problem. Jaune moved with more elegance than she had expected with his punches packing more force than calculated. Could this be his Semblance? Penny remained skeptical. No record of Jaune Arc's Semblance existed in her database or Beacon's. While possible, and odds said it was, she wasn't tempted to find out and withdrew her Strings to float in a loop above his head. Unknown variables must be erased.

"While I must admit you're moving better than I had anticipated, I'm afraid I must end this."

He blinked.

Green streaks shot out of the Strings. Couldn't be Aura, he felt no pressure, which either meant Dust or her Semblance. Either way, the beams all fired into the ground around his feet, evenly spread apart a fair distance. Jaune didn't know what to make of it until green energy leaked out from the terrain and started to entrap around him in half a dome-like shape.

Soon, his entire range was in encompassed in a fluorescent of green energy. While nauseously bright, it was still transparent, barely, through a green-tint. He quickly ran up to a side of the barrier while charging in the direction of Penny, and attempted to break through it with an Aura-charged fist. It ended up bouncing back and smacking him right between the eyes.

Smack!

Rubbing his nose, he was happy no one saw that, and picked himself up. The barrier was harder than he initially thought. He stood up and moved toward it, wondering about its overall defensive threshold. Laying a hand tentatively on the green dome, he found his fingers pulsating a margin of ripples from where they touched, but still noticed a lack of Aura.

Dust, Barrier Dust if anything.

Penny trapped him in a dome of Dust.

Okay. Nothing to worry about. Sooner or later the Dust would run its course and deplete itself, and from where he stood, she needed to focus all her attention on keeping it up. Still, why wait? Experimenting a few times, Jaune began throwing a volley of blows upon a designated center point, hoping to dissipate the barrier, and Fate would have it starting to fracture from his focused strikes.

The only warning given was the deep frown crossing her face.

Screams!

His punches stopped, only for him to cover his ears. The shrieks from before have returned, cursing him with sound from every imaginable angle. The pressure from her Space was hard to ignore, which meant Aura came into the mix. How no one else heard these pained sounds were beyond him, but the damage from his strikes repaired themselves instantly, and if Jaune was a betting man, he knew the barrier just got reinforced with an added layer of Aura.

The Space Penny fed the barrier currently outranked the Aura output he allowed himself to use.

That sounded like a real problem, but it wasn't. Confliction held him back from throwing one-hundred percent of his power into his swings. Anyone of his Aura weapons had the capabilities to dismantle this barrier, but maybe that was all unnecessary?

Dust required Aura and Penny only held so much.

Running forward, he stepped back and threw another barrage of fists into the barrier. This time he snubbed the screaming with all his strength as his hands hit fast and hard. Only so much Aura existed in her body. This Barrier Dust wouldn't last forever, not under his onslaught. While not a perfect plan, the Arc grinned when telltale cracks soon began forming again.

"I'm sorry." Penny's voice ran from outside. He barely heard it through all the screaming. "But I cannot allow Miss Amber to be in any further danger."

Penny's fingers went from spread out to a pair of gripped fists. He didn't know what to make of it until the wall abruptly started pushing toward him, cracks treated and Aura output improved. Wait? What?! He panicked. It was beginning to close in!

Penny sighed outside the barrier. She hadn't wanted to resort to crushing him, but a few broken bones was a small price to pay for safety. General Ironwood understood and she silently hoped Jaune would too someday. Definitely not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday.

Pushing against the closing barrier, he dug his feet into the soil and turned his head to find the other half closing in slowly. The more he moved, the smaller and smaller it got by the second. Soon he'd be crushed into a tiny sphere. Pressing even harder, he eventually sighed and threw his head down. The screams resonated all around him reminded the leader of his failure to help Penny. Help Pyrrha. Even help himself.

Giving up, he banged his fists against the green dome, resonating sound from inside the sphere of Aura, but nothing drowned out the screaming piercing all around him. This Aura, while indeed powerful, wasn't nearly as condensed. For better terms, the Aura distinctly resembled his first attempts at forging Aura-based weaponry. It fizzled and remained unfocused. With enough force, it'd shatter instantly, Dust or not. That much he felt and saw with Space.

What was he supposed to do?

Fight at full power and potentially damage Penny's already broken soul? Or fight and save Pyrrha's vanishing soul? Both options either condemned one or the other. Neither saved them both! Unless there was a third option he wasn't seeing, Jaune fell to his knees and pounded fruitlessly against the enclosing dome? Why was this happening? Why him? Why his partner? Why his team!

Why?

At his temporary level of strength, he was hardly a match for Penny, not in his current state of control at least. Her weapons were too quick and numbered. She was built stronger than Pyrrha. He didn't want to harm the girl. Every move she made that related to her influence over her Aura made the screams resonate stronger in the air. None of it mattered if only Jaune heard it, he still wanted to someone save her Aura and not hurt her. He vowed on his word that he would.

Slowly, with a heavy heart, he was learning how impossible a task that was becoming. Perhaps Professor Goodwitch was wrong? Maybe he couldn't reach the stars. Whatever answer they might have, whatever message remained hidden within their vast numbers, simply remained beyond his grasp. He saw that now and banged his head against the dome.

First, he failed to reach out and bond with his Lore. He couldn't retain the promise he made to himself to help Penny, and now his partner was fading away.

What was the point anymore?

Penny frowned as Strings pressurized the dome further until it resembled the size of a little more than the typical human body. "I'm sorry, Friend Jaune, I truly am, but orders are orders. Please don't hate me. Please forgive me."

She lifted her arms up and clasped her fingers together, suppressing the sphere further. Orders were orders, no matter how much they hurt to follow, and each String reacted and fired a final burst of green Aura to finalize the dome's crushing.

"Jaune!" Nora cried out, unable to run and save her leader as she was busy absorbing Amber's lightning. She desperately looked at Ren, busy holding a struggling Amber in a vice-look. "Ren! Save Jaune!"

Ren huffed and avoided a torrent of iron sand that Amber summoned amidst the confusion. Believe him, he wanted nothing more than to charge in, but the iron sand kept him at arm's length from such a close range. While Nora managed to delude some of Amber's electrical charge, Pyrrha's Polarity still acted as a buffer between him and Penny. It took the two of them alone to hold Amber off. With one of them missing, Ren knew Amber would waste little time in subduing Nora. He couldn't allow for that to happen, but he couldn't allow for his leader to fall!

The Lie hadn't a clue on his next move, but a resonating soul did.

Seeing her leader getting trapped inside Penny's ever-decreasing dome—with his reluctance to hurt someone's who was Aura was crying out—Pyrrha's lingering Aura blazed to life in a last-ditch effort. She admired her leader's hesitance, but she hated his simplicity as of now. She knew of her leader's kind and gentle heart. Wanting to help save someone's soul sounded like the kindest thing in all the world. To make him choose between the two was cruel, but more was at stake than he knew.

Amber was already fighting her tooth-and-nail to keep her at bay, and honestly, Pyrrha Nikos was tired. The suppression was too oppressive to bear any longer, her soul felt heavy, and her Aura slowly faded deeper into oblivion, but she wasn't leaving without making sure to give her leader one last parting gift.

With the last of her fading strength, she momentarily gained back control of her body and screamed her bloody lungs out. "Jaune! Penny's an android!"

Jaune felt Pyrrha's Aura burn before she screamed and opened his ears to listen beyond the endless screaming. Somehow his partner's final message managed to pierce through the sphere of madness and shined clarity within the storm in his mind.

Penny's an android!

Arms stunned, his eyes enlarged astronomically as the green dome slowly enclosed around him. Pyrrha's words bounced around the inside of his head, clawing at the inside of his skull, and for one, glorious moment, he managed to reach the stars. The answer he searched for in The Constellations had finally revealed itself, and with Pyrrha's fading Aura withering away, his Aura flared to life—feeding off the remains of her ashes to fuel his burning soul!

"Atone, Excalibur!"

Penny Polendina took two-steps back when her sensors picked up a massive spike of Aura and when a blade of pure white sliced right through her prison of Aura. Only one cut was needed to disperse and disrupt the current flow of Aura discharged by her Strings. The cage then instantly dematerialized and out stepped Jaune Arc shining an extraordinary radiance of white that banished her Aura's glow away with a sword, purer than snow, attached to his right hand. His other hand held a sphere of the same color that got quickly absorbed into his palm. Whatever damaged he had sustained was gone, and the remnant of her green Aura burst and disappeared without a trace.

Her turn to be stunned, Penny temporarily found her audible settings muted. She detected energy spikes of a highly concentrated epicenter of Aura around Jaune Arc, all of them centered on the leader of Team JNPR, including that sword he held. Levels never before recorded were being monitored and her processor made her recall her Strings back from the high influx of Aura.

Beyond the record-breaking Aura readings, beyond the sudden shift of events, and beyond her processing unit, what stood out the most was his glare. He didn't look at her, but through her, like she was a puzzle he finally managed to put together, and the picture before him hadn't been worth all the trouble.

To be fair, Jaune was doing just that. Now knowing about her android status, well, Penny Polendina was nothing more than ones and zeroes. While not concrete, and a bit cruel, he heavily theorized her screaming Aura was the result of a machine with Aura jammed into it. His gut told him to believe this theory with all his resolve. Additionally, it no longer mattered anymore for he made up his mind.

You can't save everyone, Jaune.

Damn it, Ren! The one time he wished he lied.

Focusing his Aura, he dangerously narrowed his eyes into slits and glared over to the current holder of Pyrrha's body. Amber was her name, wasn't it? That was what Penny called her. Whatever. He held no sort of pity for her, and with a quick shuffle of vision, Jaune smirked confidently at both Nora and Ren.

"Sorry for acting like a complete dolt, guys. I'll take care of Penny now! You two subdue Pyrrha! I'll fix her Aura after we win!" His gaze shifted back to the stunned android with such confidence. "Got it?"

Nora grinned predatorily, and Ren nodded with a subtle shift of the collar. "We're on it! You can count on us!"

Not sparing them another glace, he hoisted Excalibur up and pointed it directly at Penny's body. Now that he knew about the secret of her Aura, how was he to ignore what stood before him? A lifeless Aura filled with ones and zeroes? Allowing such a crime to take place, evidence only supported by her Aura's constant screaming, damaged his soul. For good moral standing alone, he didn't dare allow that Aura to suffer anymore.

Still, he'd offer her one chance to run. They were friends once. A last ditch effort to keep a fragment of his promise alive. "Leave now, Penny. I don't want to hurt you. I would rather not. But if I have to, then I will."

"I repeat, Friend Jaune, I do not wish to fight you."

He sighed humorlessly, weapon lowered. "Yeah, well, I wish my partner's Aura wasn't being corrupted. I wish she hadn't been losing sleep over whatever it is you forced her to do, or that you wouldn't stand in my way to save her, but wishing's not going to do a blasted thing. So either get out of the way, or I'm taking you down."

"I'm under orders not to allow Miss Amber to be harmed. That includes both friendly and foe. And have been granted the use of deadly force."

"Then I guess we're fighting."

Penny barely retracted one of her Strings on time to intercepted Friend Jaune's preemptive strike. He had unexpectedly transitioned from standing to striking before her processor accurately decrypted the data. It was like going from zero to one-hundred in the blink of an eye. Now she not only found herself fighting back a tremendous force with him towering over her lithe body, but she saw his weapon cutting through her String with relative ease.

Dropping her String, she skipped back and narrowly avoided his weapon landing a cut on her. From this distance, she detected the high-degree scorch mark cutting through half her String. It leveled at a high-degree of Kelvin and any Aura pertaining to that String was severed entirely. Any attempt at a connection was met with futile resistance and an unshakable firewall to sort of speak.

Now she only had thirteen Strings left.

Collecting date, she meticulously analyzed the weapon in Friend Jaune's hands and correlated it with her failed connection to her String. A quick review inferred that any Aura cut with that blade would permanently divide all ties to her Strings if she wasn't careful. On a side note, she wasn't too sure whether subtracting Aura to her swords would be sufficient in halting their destruction.

That intense heat only complicated matters.

Not waiting for Penny to start and knowing Pyrrha's Aura was fading more and more the longer this took, Jaune ignored formalities and dashed forward. He quickly invaded her personal space with intent to end this with a quick slash across her chest.

He entered and crouched with Excalibur traveling up a diagonal angle. However, his attack clashed with one of Penny's Strings, intercepting his sword in a power struggle. She then used one hand to twist her String and hold his sword back, while she used the other to summon a quick spinning-loop of Strings to attack him from his sides, but he anticipated her.

A complete one-eighty from the Jaune Arc a few minutes ago!

Quickly aiming his hand at the direction of the twirling Strings, he never removed his eyes from hers and discharged a sphere of Aura at the spinning wheel, displacing the blades with a sideshow of light. Her processors barely had time to configure what just happened before he was tapping and crashing a second orb of Aura right into her metallic chest, switching places where his sword used to exist.

"Burst, Supernova."

Burst!

Jaune would admit this. Compared to Pyrrha, Penny's body absorbed the blast impact from Supernova much better. That was probably related to her body being made of coppers and wires and such. Still, metallic or not, there was no denying the power Supernova carried with it, and unlike Pyrrha, who managed to stay standing within the blast radius, Penny got blown back in a sphere of heated Aura that sent her hurtling through a few trees with a boulder to finally halt her momentum.

The resonated crash and dust cloud almost made him jump up for joy, but Jaune simply narrowed his eyes and absorbed a few Aura spheres into his palm. Penny's Space was still very much active and still just as powerful. That blast, as devastating as it was, only did so much damage to her, yet it unaffected the amount of Space crashing into him.

How perplexing.

All of this threw him into a loop. The fighting and the way her Aura responded, it all made him give Penny a hard look. This moment, this fight reasonably implied the first and last time he'd ever battle her, and it was distinctly the first time he'd ever seen her Aura firsthand in combat. While not the first time he felt it, feeling and observing was two opposite sides of the same coin, and things were strange.

Penny Polendina's Space was unique compared to any other Space out there. It wasn't a typical Space, nor an Outer Space, not even an Empty Space, but a one-of-a-kind Space all of its own. Ones and zeroes existed within her green Aura and her Aura fluctuated, but her strength never faltered. Neither did her Space weaken over time. It was constant. It subsisted perpetually in a system he never observed. A Space all of its own. A Space designed solely from her cybernetic parts and trapped Aura.

Penny Polendina's programming and Aura interacted purely in a Cyber Space.

Jaune Arc doubted he'd ever meet another one like her.

Back in the crater and hidden within the dust cloud, Penny had her body lodged deeply into the bedrock with her processors running at full speed, trying to analyze what just happened. One instance she only needed twenty percent to deal with the leader of Team JNPR, and now he pushed her to her current limiter with relative ease. All her movement proved too slow to keep up and the overwhelming power of his Aura sphere, classified as Supernova, spiraled her across the battlefield like a training dummy.

Addressing the subject of his Aura pushed her processing power to their limits. Where did this unknown power originate from? She had no data on any Aura-based weaponry. No data from CCT databanks correlated between Aura created weapons. Not even the Aura scientists back at Atlas had access to such techniques, but Jaune Arc did? His files—as limited as useless as they were now—never spoke of such abilities.

Evidently, the leader of Team JNPR hid his true power.

With not enough data for the restrictions she was going up against, she released a few of her fail-safe limiters, just inside the margin of error to prevent malfunction. Thirty-percent wasn't going to cut it, but perhaps fifty-percent could tip the scales in her favor. Without having all the numbers to crunch, it was a calculated risk worth investing in.

He heard the screams coming from Penny's Aura before feeling the shift of Space hit him. It went up, that much was obvious with the screams sounding like nails on a chalkboard. If he ever needed a reason to stop her, it was now. Nonetheless, it lacked the Space to contend with him. This amount of Aura was somewhere around Weiss's level, just a tad weaker, but he had a gut feeling more power was waiting to be unleashed.

Jaune summoned and held Excalibur near to his chest when Penny's Strings collected around the dust cloud. A few ruptures later and she was walking out the smoke, practically fine, but no one missed the damage done to her midriff. Even if she appeared perfectly functional, he regarded the scorch marks and exposure of some of her metallic skin from the damage dealt by Supernova.

Against all the damage, she stood across from him, frowning.

"Before we begin, I implore you to listen to me. You don't understand what's at stake here." Penny begged with her String aimed directly at the Arc. "Amber's Maiden Powers are vital for everyone's safety. She must be allowed to leave Beacon."

Penny hoped that Jaune would listen to reason, but her hopes were crushed when he sighed angrily and waved Excalibur. Aura gathered at the edge of his fingertips, and he discharged with an impressive tone of white.

He didn't have time to argue, Pyrrha was in danger.

"You're right, Penny, I don't understand, and I don't want. I don't care. Not one bit. All I care about is saving my partner's life. All this stupid Maiden nonsense, whatever it is, means nothing to me. Amber means nothing to me. Only Pyrrha's life matters and I'm not going to let you, or anyone else, stand in my way in saving her."

Penny sighed with her head lowered, weapons raised, and human emotions scattered. She cherished both Amber and Pyrrha. She related. Being different was never fun. Having to choose between the two ripped her soul into two, but something incomprehensible was at stake. Personal feelings wouldn't cloud her judgment.

"I'm sorry you feel that way."

He scoffed sadly, hating how hurtful the truth felt with a tone filled with bitter contempt. "I'm sorry, too. Sorry that it's too late to save you. I see that now." He smiled with the sun on his face. "It... it was stupid to think I could help. The most I can do now is free your Aura from its suffering. It's too late to save you, but I can still save my partner!"

Taking one step forward, he sighed and then charged at android. Penny counter-measured his approach by sending out a wave of Strings to intercept and block his path, but he sidestepped the first few, flicked a few others, and then jumped on top of one to avoid the rest and close the distance between them with Excalibur aimed to cut Penny right down the middle.

She called the Strings she hadn't sent out and created a makeshift barrier, blocking Jaune's strike with a circle of twirling swords embedded with barrier Dust. He powered on through and grabbed one of her Strings and attempted to dislodge the barrier to strike any point on her body.

Penny was having none of that.

She summoned her other Strings back and calculated the chance of landing an attack on Jaune's back in the high eighties, but he crushed those odds and avoided them all by leaping back at the last possible minute, taking a String with him. Unknowingly to her, any Aura she used to control her weapons made it easier for Jaune to sense and dodge them respectively through Space.

Probability meant nothing.

Gaining a fair distance, he casually pulled upon one of Penny's String and sliced right through it, severing ties with yet another one of her weapons. She didn't have any time to take into account the loss of her weapon, busy preparing to parry his next strikes with now two Aura blades, and he kept her on her feet by making her twist and turn in the air, forced to dodge a strike meant to hit both her head and legs at the same time. During the small interval of time stuck midair, she willed her Strings to counter and fire a few blasts of concentrated Aura.

He narrowed his eyes and kicked her in the stomach, before avoiding the energy blast meant to hit his chest and head by using one Excalibur as a shield. The other was used to protect his chest from two Strings attempting to land a quick strike. He couldn't avoid a few other Strings landing a clean hit on his sides, cutting into his skin, but Jaune managed to trap one between his arm and body.

A quick step back allowed his Aura to heal his injuries and sever the ties to yet another String while avoiding the rest of her attacks.

Meanwhile, Penny was rolling on the floor after he kicked her in midair. She quickly got up on her feet, resting one knee upon the dirt, and found the kick perplexing after scanning the length of the dust trail that followed the soles of her shoes. Based on Jaune Arc's muscles mass, that kicked shouldn't have been remotely possible, Aura or no Aura. His swords she understood, not remarkably, but she could, but that kick and his ability to not only intercept, but flick away her Strings at fifty-percent power created an unknown variable in her algorithm.

None of it added up.

Aura, however powerful, could only supply so much power at any given time. Limits existed as to what the muscles could take and to what they could exert on any given mass. Yet they were just that, limits. Having this much energy supplied, but with an insufficient muscle mass didn't bold too well. One of two things might happen upon release of such Aura levels.

Either upon usage of his abnormally high Aura levels, his muscles stretched and expanded, far past their limits, resulting in a nasty drawback. Or his body had become too infuse with Aura to return to no-Aura, and dire consequences awaited him when his power source was utterly exhausted. Too many unknowns! Too many questions! Not enough data!

Penny wished to experiment with the problem presented to her.

Narrowing her eyes, she retracted eight Strings to act as a barrier as she sent out the last three to deal with Jaune. By now she noted how Jaune Arc figured out her attack pattern, easily deflecting back three Strings at a time. When she sent them in a diagonal formation, he parried and pushed out Excalibur over his head to push them back.

If she sent them for his chest, he dodged her Strings with a simple sidestep that set up her weapons for a clean cut by his Aura weapon. Only quick evasiveness allowed her to retract her weapons at the last possible minute. Any other attack was too slow to be of any use.

Fifty-percent power wasn't a suitable match.

While the power was more than enough for the average Huntsmen-in-Training, it proved insufficient against him. Her current output wasn't enough. He bashed away all her attempts with strikes and parries without losing a beat. Every slash he met with a flick from his weapon. Her processing power wasn't enough to combat his speed, strength, or reflexes. Nothing worked against him.

She needed to release the limiters installed and hit one-hundred percent.

Penny wished for other options, but knew logically that was her only viable choice. The ramifications it might inflict upon her body might be too much, but orders were orders, and General Ironwood said to protect Miss Amber at all costs. Simply put, it couldn't be helped.

He outperformed her.

Gambling on a last-ditch effort, she willed her Strings to attack both his shoulders and chest at the same time, hoping at least one would hit, but the Arc prevailed by willing away his Aura blades to grab the Strings meant for his shoulders and used them to block her third String. Then, before she could process what happened, he switched one of the Strings to his other hand and promptly cut through both of them with Excalibur, before converting his Aura sword into ammunition and firing Shooting Star at the one he just blocked.

Penny Polendina was left with only eight Strings to fight with.

She kept her barrier up to crunch the data, just in case Jaune decided to fire a volley of Shooting Stars at her, and frowned at the inconclusive results. Things weren't adding up. Data was missing or entirely misinterpreted. The little things were bugging her. How could his arms not get tired lugging those weapons around, didn't his Aura blades have any weight to them? Being able to cut through her Strings required some considerable strength.

Jaune glared and held out a sphere of Aura. He didn't dare allow Penny to data crunch, knowing above all else the look of someone doing the math.

"Magnhild!"

Gasping at the sounds of Nora's cry, he stared over to their direction to find this Amber person capturing Nora's hammer with his partner's Semblance and crush up the weapon into bits of small metal sand. Nora herself was slacked in Ren's arms, watching this all happen with frightening eyes, unable to save her cherished weapon.

Without Pyrrha's Aura around to contest with this Amber person, Amber must've acquired full control over Pyrrha's Semblance. Her movements weren't sluggish either. Not good. Nora and Ren needed an opening.

Wishing he could help his team, he knew of only one technique that might sway the flow of the battle for them.

Crushing the sphere of Aura in his hand, he pushed his foot back and prepared himself for a running start with light seeping out between his fingers. Penny maneuvered into place, adjusting for any contingencies, receptors entirely focused on him, precisely what the Arc wanted. Without waiting, he charged at Penny and tossed up the concentrated Aura sphere into the air.

"Ren! Nora! Quasar's coming!"

Penny had no idea what a Quasar was until a sudden light encased the entire clearing in a blinding light. It resembled the likes of an intensely heated flash bomb! The unrivaled brightness scrambled her augmented receptors. Aura readings picked up a highly concentrated amount of Aura Radiation, burning not only her body but skin and Aura. She couldn't focus, couldn't see, couldn't react until she felt a scorching, burning hotness travel across her stomach and diagonally across her body, forcing her to leap back and retract her strings as a circular shield.

Once a considerable distance, she quickly readjusted her receptors and shielded her eyes by using her forearm. Even then, Penny had a difficult time seeing past the light, only able to register Jaune's shadow outline in the middle of bright radiance.

Glaring underneath the threading of her sleeve, she frowned deeply, unable to connect to a portion of her stomach, chest, and right shoulder. Her mechanical components still functioned, but their movements and programming slowed. Her Aura refused to reverse the damage done to her circuitries! It could not establish a connection.

Application was no longer working!

For whatever reason, the portion her opponent managed to strike with Excalibur had its systems corrupted. That marginally explained his abilities to be able to cut through her Strings. A power that probably had zero issue doing so, and if Jaune Arc had the ability to corrupt her systems, then there wouldn't be any more delays.

Waiting for Quasar's light to dim, Penny braved a brief glance over to Miss Amber, noticing her trouble with the remaining members of Team JNPR. Unlike her and Miss Amber, Nora and Ren knew to avoid their eyes from Quasar's unnatural brightness and had used it to their overwhelming advantage. Poor Amber's Aura readings read less than previously recorded.

This needed to end now!

Dropping all pretenses, Penny glared and released her final limiters. "Fair warning, Friend Jaune, my restrictions have been released to ensure Miss Amber leaves Beacon safety. I'll be fighting at one-hundred percent capacity from here on out."

Releasing everything she had, Penny Polendina's system glowed in an orbital of perpetual green. Every streak of green around her body lit up, including the Strings, and her angry eyes reflected that of a wayward soul. Each String danced around in a counterclockwise circle spin, and the screaming of her soul overflowed between all the ones and zeroes.

Jaune said nothing, bringing Excalibur up, and quickly felt a splash of Cyber Space crashing down upon him. Fifty-percent sounded about right, because her new power practically doubled, rivaling that of Pyrrha's, maybe even more. Perfectly fine with him, he had grown a tad bored and insulted of her holding back. Once he defeated her, then he'd save Pyrrha.

Grabbing a String with each hand, Penny dangerously narrowed her glowing eyes and attached the remaining Strings to her back. He barely had time to break down what she was doing before she was jetting across the battlefield in a speed he could scarcely react to.

Lifting up Excalibur, he used both his hands to hold the Aura blade in place when Penny crashed right into him. Both her Strings hit different parts of his weapon, near the base and tip, and his arms wavered, struggling to hold her in place with the aid of both his hands. Her velocity alone accelerated them across the battlefield with his feet dug deep into the soil, but the bedrock proved useless against her ever-increasing momentum, and he soon found himself butting heads with her shrieking Aura.

This up close and personal allowed him to not only see and hear her screaming Aura, but he felt it clash with his own. Ones and zeros uniformly traversed down her Aura and he discerned the energy regularly shift with each decimal of scream. Few words accurately described the sensation, but a couple nipped at the end of his tongue. Words like cold and unfeeling.

To think this Aura once belonged to someone else! The thought burned a hole in his soul. It was the same thing that was happening to Pyrrha but in reverse! His partner was losing her life and body to another clashing Aura, and he was stuck here dealing with this nonsense!

An indescribable fire ignited in the depths of his soul and Jaune dug his soles deeper into the rock and halted Penny's momentum, glowing white. The earth beneath their feet fractured in all directions, unable to withstand the clashing forces. Holding back Penny's jets pushed his Aura-improved muscles to his limits, and the clashing Spaces mingled in together. That invisible force weighed upon the Arc, but he ignored it, and focused on the glowing eyes of his adversary.

Penny frowned and increased the power of her jets, vibrating her Strings and digging him deeper into the ground. For the first time, he noticed the Aura in her Strings bounce up and down in a fast motion, only regarding that much before forcing his legs not to bend underneath the force.

Scream!

Hearing the screams grow in volume, he flipped his leg back and diverted Penny's momentum in a different direction, forcing the android to shield herself before colliding into the forest trees. The sudden shift of force caused him to crash into the ground, but at least he managed to avoid sinking any further into the soil.

Digging himself out, he wiped some dirt from his face, coughed, and studied Penny's Aura and Strings from a distance as she brushed the trees aside. Whenever her Aura acted up, those Strings moved, vibrated. He noticed that now. The screams seemingly correlated to that as well, affected by the usage of her weapons' vibrations.

In other words, her Strings controlled some part of her.

If they made her Aura scream louder, affected her energy output, and controlled her Aura levels, then by his understanding, her Strings controlled her, similar to a puppet.

The oscillations, vibrations, and change in their position did things to her trapped Aura. One moment they were acting as a driving force to propel her, being open, then they were acting as a shield, being closed. Sometimes they were linear, other times random, but never faltered away and always looped back to their original source.

By theory, Penny was nothing without them. No Strings, no Penny Polendina. She was like a living, breathing puppet. It wasn't much to hypothesize on, but it was theory he believed to be true.

Penny Polendina existed because of a potential String Theory.

Unbeknownst to everyone, including the Aura expert, sound ordinarily couldn't travel through Space, and no one could hear people scream through Space. Penny Polendina was an exceptional case. The vibrations coming from her Strings admitted sound the capability to progress through said Space, a characteristic unique only to Penny's String Theory.

Gripping Excalibur tightly, he summoned a sphere of Aura and absorbed it, reloading Shooting Star's chambers for one shot. If that had to be the case, then he'd only have to cut more until she fell. Shooting Star's job needed to keep the rest at bay until he severed them all!

Funny, Penny must've learned about his plan because she jetted right at him, this time in a perfectly horizontal axis, colliding directly with his Aura blade. With a String in each hand, she locked him into place, not permitting him to withdraw his hand away from Excalibur as her jets constantly kept his body skidding away from Miss Amber and his team. Not even the soles of his feet slowed her down, racing them across the forest floor with a trail of dirt and rocks following of them.

Penny glared and glowed powerfully between their moving stalemate, green lines streaked down from her eyes to the bottom of her jaw. "Surrender, leader of Team JNPR, after careful research, I know the weakness of your techniques. You cannot use your other weapons when your hands are preoccupied."

Jaune frowned deeply with eyes to match, accepting the challenge. He didn't miss the way Penny no longer regarded him as Friend Jaune.

While true, he did, in fact, need his hands to discharge his weapons, and his hands were preoccupied with enduring her weaponry back, that did not mean he was weak. Quickly, he wagered a risk on this next move, but faith aside, technically speaking; this should work like a charm.

Penny watched him flex his fingers—with the hand holding Excalibur's handle—into Shooting Star's firing mechanism. Crosshairs rested underneath the handle with the chamber resting above; all aimed directly at her chest, point-blank, with her nowhere to go.

The sphere of Aura condensed at the tip of his fingers, and she glanced up in time to see his face illuminated by the light of a star. "Soar, Shooting Star."

A ball of Aura collided directly with Penny's metallic chest and overpowered her String's momentum.

Her propeller system malfunctioned from the small distraction, and she ended up gritting her teeth at the orb of Aura pressing her back with blinding heat and a high-velocity spin. Now it was her turn to dig her feet into the bedrock, vibrate her Strings to divert her momentum, and grab Shooting Star with her bare hands in an attempt to redirect its line of trajectory.

Unlike Jaune's Supernova that burst in a fiery explosion of power upon contact, Shooting Star had a never-ending trajectory that would soar in an endless direction. Her silver skin, powerfully manufactured as it was, slowly had the metal chipped away, but she powered-on through and managed to redirect Shooting Star's line of trajectory and avoid further damage. Her Strings vibrated and closed, spinning in a clockwise direction to buffer her speed and reduce the recoil from her collision into the dirt.

Glaring down, she saw the silver peeking out from where skin and clothing were supposed to be. Any longer and the outcome would've escalated.

Shrugging off the dirt, her Strings pulled her up and aimed themselves directly at his stunned position. Her targeting systems picked up his rapidly rising chest, and her sensors focused sharply at his dropping Aura levels.

Team JNPR's Fearless Leader huffed, surprised. "Even with a direct, point-blank hit with Shooting Star, you still managed to shrug it off?"

Penny virtually laughed.

Shrug it off would be the incorrect choice of words. Shooting Star chipped away a substantial chunk of her Aura. Aura readings accounted for that. Her metallic structure simply deviated pain away from her receptors and both shielded and mitigated damage. Penny Polendina did not feel pain.

What her Strings didn't want her to feel, they erased. She knew this. She knew statistically that the damage from Shooting Star should measure high from an experimental point-of-view. By all means, her body should be hurting from Shooting Star's backlash, but a lack of a nervous system made that point moot.

One of the perks of being an android!

Flicking her android eyes over to Miss Amber, she frowned. Their Maiden was fairing well against the other two, but Penny knew if Jaune Arc managed to confront her and add his personal strength to the mix, then the match would be over. Who knew what implications Excalibur could add to the mix.

Calculating the risk of such an outcome, she discarded the notion of heavy-hitting strikes and changed her settings to befitting close-range combat. She reached for two of her Strings, seized them tight, and flew forward at the stunned Arc. He was, as expected, quick to the uptake and met her challenge head-on, lifting up that Aura-dense sword to meet her Strings.

They began trading blows.

Getting within his personal space, Penny pushed a String for his side abdominal, missing by a hair's length when Jaune pushed it away by the back of his palm. He tried to retaliate, hoping to twist that same wrist and bring Excalibur up to cut her cleanly across the torso from the bottom-to-top, but she intercepted that strike with her second String. Dejectedly, he smeared his other hand with a coat of Aura and accomplished a powerful punch across her face, before gripping her wrist intercepting Excalibur.

There, he attempted to crush her wrist, but she ended up releasing her String to expand its range and deliver a cut across his cheek.

While she managed a cut in, Jaune took advantage of her weaponless arm and raised Excalibur up, still holding her other arm in place with his intention clear from the start. Penny quickly retracted the other String she held, blocking his aim to sever her arm clean in two with a one-armed String. While unknown if he possessed the necessary force to cut her arm, too many unknowns scared the robotic girl and lifted her foot up and planted a massive kick to his stomach.

This time he did not fly back.

Jaune absorbed the blunt force trauma and powered on through, not bleeding through his mouth like last time. This time, he dematerialized Excalibur from hand to materialize it in the other, landing a swift strike across Penny's stomach in the process. He advanced for another hit, but she narrowed her eyes and clashed her weapon against it, holding her String with both arms with the others posted above her.

Logically speaking, she was rhythmically faster. Every strike was robotic, precise in their actions. No moves wasted. She never ran out of breath.

None of that mattered to him.

Bringing Excalibur up, he strained underneath the weight of a double-handed String. Then, without much reaction time, he covered his arm in Aura to capture a String aimed directly for his chest, forced to have his wrist bent in an uncomfortable angle. Sadly, he couldn't avoid the volley of charging energy blasts coming from every conceivable angle. Like a flash of green light, he found his body shunned in a tunnel of everlasting green.

Whatever outcome she anticipated from such a point-blank, Aura charged beam of energy to accomplish, it failed.

Jaune grabbed her one of her arms, while still tanking the beams, and converted Excalibur into Supernova. This time Penny would not fly away upon the burst, this time he held her place and crashed the sphere of Aura directly into the spot where Shooting Star damaged her body. This time her body was coated with a layer of Aura to exploit.

"Burst, Supernova!"

A sphere of Aura entrapped them both, but only Penny received any form of backlash.

Narrowing her eyes, she pouted, knowing the destructive power of this particular technique and had no desire to be stuck taking the full brunt of the damage. Not again. No. She recalled her Strings to drag her out while she fought against his formidable grip. So much force—so much friction—went into her pulling against Jaune's hold, that once she saved herself from the dangerous sphere of Aura, Penny gasped at the missing skin from where he held her.

Groaning, she moaned with her core processor overheated. A String floated down for her to lean on. Too many spheres, not to mention a strike with the highly heated Excalibur, damaged her stomach and chest region. Her systems weren't equipped to deal with such temperatures. No machine, android, robotic, or cybernetic, was designed for such extreme heats.

Burst!

The sphere broke apart with him walking without Aura damage, Excalibur re-summoned. Damage from her beams existed across his chest, but the unknown density of his Aura must've protected him from some of the destruction. At least her Aura damaged him. The patches of her skin remained burnt around his fingers, but he ripped those off and tossed them to the ground.

Penny frowned.

One-hundred percent wasn't enough.

She glared down at her exposed arm, the metal reflecting her pained expression, and she stood still before him. Aura readings spoke of their dropping levels, but, statistics and contingency protocols aside, she knew full well that sword in his hands had the stopping power to end this fight.

Penny Polendina had to stop Jaune Arc from pointing that sword at Miss Amber!

Shifting her gaze, she had little choice but to aim her next line of attack at the preoccupied Nora and Ren, hoping with those two gone, Miss Amber could escape. The need of the few outweighed the need of the many! She must protect Amber for the betterment of Remnant, even if it meant hurting her friends in the process.

Gripping the String holding her up, she stepped a few steps back, hunched over, and before Jaune realized what was happening, she threw her hands out and summoned her remaining Strings to dance circles around her hands. His eyes grew when an incredibly powerful, but unconcentrated sphere of turquoise Aura breathed life between those circles, but then they narrowed when she closed her hands together, creating a larger version of Shooting Star's barrel!

A barrel not aimed at him, but at a stuck Nora and Ren!

He swiftly lunged between the path for his friends and gathered up his remaining Aura—Excalibur—into his palm. A quick flex of his fingers created his handgun, and he aimed at the ball of Aura building up between Penny's fists. Like the gambler's game, this was all or nothing. Both had stakes they couldn't afford to lose and drew for the chance to protect what they valued most in the world.

Aura levels reaching zero, Penny grimaced and fired her beam of green Aura. "I'm sorry it has to end this way, Friend Jaune!"

Feeling the pressure of Cyber Space crashing down upon him, he gripped his wrist and remarked the beam voided any precise control. Unlike his Aura, this one was excited and scattered its powers upon firing. It lacked refinement.

Seeing the beam of energy coming straight for him, he steadied his hand and aimed dead-center in the middle. "Soar, Shooting Star!"

His sphere of Aura shot fast and hot. It collided against Penny's beam of Aura and the torrent of green Aura split in two against Shooting Star. Energies of Aura clashed together in a fiery of destructive power, large and small. One fueled by non-condensed Aura without proper control, but what it lacked in refinement, it made up for in mass and fuel. The other condensed and well-controlled, lacking size for velocity, heat, and durability.

Jaune remained between the two beams now, putting all his faith into Shooting Star's power. His body went numb, and he was stuck resting on his knee while Penny's beam proceeded to be cut in half. The very center point of the green beam had a white orb shining bright and somewhere in the background he could hear Penny screaming in retaliation to Shooting Star forcing a standstill. Each tunnel of green raced across the battlefield and traveled past Amber, Nora, and Ren, across Emerald Forest, where the forest was partially incinerated from the intense blast.

You can't save everyone, Jaune.

Her beam split into two. Then it branched out to four. Next eight and so on and so forth, until Penny discovered her Aura shifted back and divided into an inconceivable quantity of tangents from the base of her fists. That technique he designated Shooting Star, split through her blast and remained fixed where her fists continually released her discharge of Aura.

Program flashing before her eyes, Penny calculated her chance of success and found the number to submerge in the single digits. All her power, all the mechanical advancements, and her Aura meant nothing. This tiny sphere of white was overpowering her Aura output, and that frightened the girl. All of it proved futile against this power. Her sacrifice—her human will to win—didn't come to close to stopping the other two from attacking her mission's objective.

Shooting Star's power proved too much.

"No! I won't give up!" Penny screamed, Aura blazing to life. "I won't give up!"

The Aura trapped inside her body flared from her outburst, but her eyes freezing when she found none of it beckoning to her call. Her need for more power was met with silent resistance and Penny had no clue what was going on, but Jaune Arc had some inkling. Only he saw and heard her Aura's screams growing weaker by the second, and if he was guessing, truly theorizing at this point, he gambled the boundaries of her robotic body finally reached their limits.

Aura wasn't a power that could be captured and locked away in a cage—just look at Ren's issue—it needed freedom and space to grow, time to nurture, and understanding to manipulate. Penny desperately tried to bypass all that and brute force more power, but Aura bent for no one, he included.

Only Lore's power forced Aura to bend.

"Goodbye... Penny."

Hiccup!

Shooting Star soared right through her fists, destroying her beam of Aura in the process, and pierced the android's body with the momentum of a falling star. It soared right out the other side of her body, taking a substantial chunk of her metallic body and Aura with it. Jaune hacked out some blood, body beyond injured. He hastily shifted to Lore, panting from having zero Aura left to support his body.

When he managed to balance on one foot, he finally analyzed the amount of damage she received and couldn't find it in him to be joyous over his hollow victory.

A hole existed where her heart was supposed to be, if she ever had one.

Like a puppet cut from its strings, Penny's body quietly went limp, and her head fell with the green fading from her eyes. Both her knees sprawled into two different directions and her back arched forward with her arms lying lifelessly to her sides. A bitter wind passed, and even the static discharge vanished. Her Aura slowly lost light until it vanished.

She died.

Nothing was left behind but a husk of a shell where life once existed.

Breathing heavily, Jaune glared and looked away with his body sore and damaged. Android or not, Penny was once someone he called a friend, someone he had wished to help above all else. Not everyone could be saved. He saw that now. Penny's Aura wasn't salvageable, not when he met her, maybe before it was, but who knew.

The only humane thing left had been to silence her screaming soul, and now, now he heard nothing but the calm, soothing wind brushing past his skin.

Her Aura finally found peace.

Painstakingly, the façade only lasted so long, he still had the opportunity to save Pyrrha's Aura—her life—and Jaune Arc would be damned if he failed his partner and allowed this Amber girl to take over. Over his dead body!

Turning around, he used the tiniest of moments to stop and acknowledge his Aura. He knew, without a shadow of doubt, he only won because his Aura drove him as hard as he pushed it. Unlike Penny's once trapped Aura, his protected, fought and yearned for him. Penny's Aura hadn't. Most of all, he thanked a certain crimsonette for teaching him the weapon that pulled through in his most dire moment.

Jaune shifted his fingers into his makeshift handgun and smiled wistfully at his creation.

"Thanks for the help, Rubes."

Penny Polendina's defeat came by the same weapon Ruby Rose helped Jaune Arc craft.

...

Looping the clocks back a few minutes.

"I don't really know what's going on, but I'm counting on you guys to keep Pyrrha busy. Leave Penny to me."

Once Amber heard Jaune utter those words, she bit her tongue. That settled that. Damn it! She still hadn't the foggiest clue to how they figured her out so quickly, but now they separated her from Penny!

Beyond angry, she summoned another gust of wind to push Ren off her body. Bastard still managed to stick the landing, hardly affected by the torrent of wind, not like the other two she fought, and speaking of other two.

Two versus one.

Not her idle match-up, but at least this time she had some backup to deal with the third. If only she had her weapon though. Things might be different. As of now, she wasn't so sure of her abilities to hold these two off, not while Miss Champion bounced around in her head. Fighting in an unfamiliar body with only half the Maiden Power certainly didn't help.

Facing her opponents, Nora moved next to Ren who was cracking his neck. He slowly walked toward her, StormFlower out. "Nora, aim to neutralize. I can't believe I'm saying this, but break her legs if you have to."

She shuttered. "But that's still Pyrrha's body, right?"

"Right. I know this must be hard, but we can't allow this Amber person to get away with our friend's body. So just this once, hurt Pyrrha. I'm sure she'll forgive you."

Nora steeled her gaze, battling Amber's. "Okay. For Pyrrha."

Amber frowned, wind blowing heavily. "I still don't get how you figured me out so quickly? I was sure I nailed Pyrrha Nikos' personality."

Nora challenged her frown, switching Magnhild to its launcher form. "Trust me... you weren't even close!"

A heart-shaped projectile of explosives, that was a new one.

Ducking out of the way, she used the cloud of dust from the explosion to hide and plan her next move. She panicked when a rainstorm of bullets passed over her head, throwing her arms up as a shield, yet, when none succeeded in hitting her, she cautiously lowered her arms to find the bullets trapped in midair.

Stunned, she experimentally flicked her arms and found the bullets swaying in the same direction. She did it again, managed the same result and dropped her arms for the shells to fall to the ground.

Reaching slowly out, Amber felt a calling summoning her arms. An unknown force beckoned to her. It came from the bullets in front of her and other objects around her, but most importantly, she felt a powerful connection between Penny and her weapons. At any moment, she felt capable of calling them to her side.

Like how she stopped those bullets from hitting her.

"This must Pyrrha's Semblance?"

Throwing her arm forward, Amber tried to summon the ground up, but only the bullets followed. She attempted to move the grass, but nothing. So at least she ruled out dirt and grass. So far only ore appeared to be influenced by her willpower. Just in case, she affected Pyrrha's metal leggings and threw her fingers up, smirking when her leg jolted upward.

Oh yeah, a Semblance that controlled metal! Amber could use this!

Boom!

Looking up, she frowned upon the incoming grenades. Those two must've gotten tired of waiting for her to come out of the dust cloud. Flicking her wrist forward, she attempted to send them back, but pain flashed across her head, and she ended up pushing them in a different direction instead.

"Why won't you die already?"

She gritted her teeth to focus intently on her Aura, removing away the pain to step out of the dust cloud. Another volley of explosives came for her, followed by a hailstorm of bullets. Throwing her arms out, Amber gripped the metal and crashed them down preemptively onto the ground, stunning both her opponents. She then dug her feet into the ground, mind partially elsewhere.

Metal, she felt nearby metal around, and she wasn't thinking about Penny Polendina. It laid scattered beneath in the somewhat tall grass, practically screaming at her with a sense of longing. Like a magnetic force, she felt that familiar tug in her soul. First the Maiden Powers and now this? How much did her soul have to interact with the outside world?

Forming tightly enclosed fists, she radiated and focused her entire soul to reach out to that very call, controlling this unknown Semblance to the best of her abilities. It was still strange to her, controlling another body and that soul's reflective Semblance, but she didn't dare lose here!

Flinging her hands in the direction of a crater-like clearing, she huffed and willed pieces of corroded ore from the dirt to surface up, alongside the fragments of Nora's Dust grenades and Ren's ammunition. Pieces with severe scorch marks rose from the ground, forgotten to everyone but Ren and Nora, and the remains of Miló and Akoúo̱ hovered in the air, rushing toward the body snatcher. She stretched them over her body, hands out, before compressing them into impossibly tiny bits that resembled grains of sands with a torrent of thunder bursting downward toward her body.

Thunder!

When finished, Amber expected the sand, willing it to dance for her between her fingers with a smirk gracing her face. Small currents of Maiden electricity danced around her body, unknowingly amplifying her control over metals. It was all instinct. Even Pyrrha Nikos couldn't control so much metal at once without straining her Aura. A weakness overcame by the inclusion of the Maiden Powers.

Ren sighed dejectedly, knees bent. "She's slowly learning how to use Pyrrha's Semblance. We need to stop her before things get out of hand."

Nora pouted, wondering why the weather suddenly changed, then a wall of iron sand was heading right for them. She flipped her weapon back to hammer mode, hitting the wall of iron away with a hefty swing. Fortunately, that barrier of metal wasn't too difficult to smash, but what it lacked in raw power made up for in structure.

Smashing the particles away barely did squat.

Once apart, the metal dust quickly reformed again, creating a barrier between Amber and the two, acting as both shield and sword when it began to shape into various sharp objects, resembling Pyrrha's bloody weapons, but metal based. Spikes of iron quickly shot out toward Nora, and she was forced to balance herself on the handle and Magnhild and fly off, invaded a rainfall of steel. Ren ended up taking a brunt of the damage, still sore from his earlier spar with Jaune, limited to using his Lore cloak as a shield.

"Ren!"

He threw one arm back, shielding his face with the other. "Stand back, Nora! Cover some distance!"

Another current of iron flowed out toward him, acting like liquid as it began to swoosh around his pinned body. Ren swiftly released a strain of Misfortune, dashing the sand's chances of pinning him down. While it worked, he felt his Aura levels dropping. Releasing so much Bad Luck at such an instant drained his body, even with the Lore cloak giving him perfect control over the output.

Nora must've noticed his exhausted appearance and yelled out to their teammates. "Pyrrha! Snap out of it!"

Amber scoffed, ignored her headache, and swept another waterfall amount of iron sand toward him. Narrowing his eyes, he swept his hand forward, packed with Aura, and cleared away another wall of iron sand, only to jump back and avoid a head-on collision with a quickly reforming wall, but karma turned against him when a tendril of iron wrapped around his ankle to hoist him forward.

Nora rushed to his rescue, smashing away the tendril before pulling him back by the shoulder, narrowly avoiding a collision of iron.

When they covered a safe distance, Amber's frown deepened, and she lifted her arms up, summoning all the iron sand to come together to form makeshift spears the size of her bodies. All pointed directly at the pair. They twisted and turn, spinning with a building velocity before she willed them to fly at the duo.

Nora hammered a few away, dodging by back peddling. "How's she doing this? Not even Pyrrha can control this much metal?"

Ren eluded a waterfall of spears, watching the way Amber controlled the metal with electricity dancing around her fingertips, body, and hair with a gust of wind blowing past her feet. Her right eye glowed with power, matching her growing frown.

A sight that didn't belong on the face of their cherished friend.

"It has to be the electricity. It's affecting Pyrrha's Polarity somehow. The longer we fight her, the more she's getting used to Pyrrha's Semblance."

Nora suddenly grinned. "Oh! If that's the case, then leave it to me!"

Without getting a word in, he watched Nora zigzag across the battlefield, swinging her hammer around and around to gather an impressive momentum to launch herself directly at Amber's body and block any incoming spears. Upon release, her opponent readied her fingers, prepared to fire a volley of iron, but another headache flashed across her temple, and Nora tackled her in a fierce embrace, flipping sideways to grab her from behind and use Magnhild's handle to hold her.

"Ren! I got her!"

"You're an idiot!" Amber's eyes narrowed, and she summoned a bolt of lightning from the sky. A voltage of electricity rained downed.

Thunder!

The Maiden dropped her frown, eyes growing in size upon turning her head to notice the smirking Nora Valkyrie, not sizzled by Mother's Nature's wrath. Lightning, too, danced around her body and electricity sparkled in her eyes, electrifying her growing grin and tightening grip.

"Nope! Nope! Nope! See! If you were Pyrrha, you knew that wouldn't work!" Nora gripped Amber tighter with a teasing smirk. "But you're not! Now stop fussing and let Jaune fix you already!"

She tried to throw her off, but that petite girl was stronger than she looked, and she only appeared to be gaining more strength by the second.

"Ah! Get off!" Hearing footsteps, she turned to see Ren running up to her. Damn it! Not him again! "Arg! I said get off me! Let go!"

Throwing her arms out, Amber tried to will the iron sand to move, hoping to keep that man away, but far less beckoned to her call. Which hardly made sense. Her Aura levels felt fine, but the iron refused to obey. Damn it! This Nora girl might be to blame! She had to shake her off!

Gripping Nora by the forearms, she staggered, trying to remove the Valkyrie in a violent shake, but the annoying girl wrapped her legs around her waist, effectively cutting that plan down to size. What enormous strength!

"Keep her still, Nora!" Ren yelled, hands doused in Bad Luck. "I'm almost there!"

Cooling her jets, Amber inhaled and summoned another gust of wind, this time keeping it close to her body. Slowly, but surely, the temperature began to drop around her, only she wasn't affected by the Maiden Powers, Nora, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. Heat drops gradually started to work their magic, but the girl held on, teeth chattering somewhat.

Throb!

No!

Lie Ren was almost here, and Pyrrha pushed back the cooling temperatures by throwing off her concentration. She needed a miracle!

To answer her call, a green light flickered across the battlefield, and they all stopped to observe Jaune Arc getting trapped in a dome of Dust. A few words were spoken between him and Penny before the dome started to compact within itself at a slow pace with the leader banging against the dome.

"Jaune!" Nora cried out, unable to run and save her leader as she was busy absorbing Amber's lightning. She desperately looked at Ren, busy holding a struggling Amber in a vice-look. "Ren! Save Jaune!"

Ren huffed and avoided a torrent of iron sand that Amber summoned amidst the confusion. Believe him, he wanted nothing more than to charge in, but the iron sand kept him at arm's length from such a close range. While Nora managed to delude some of Amber's electrical charge, Pyrrha's Polarity still acted as a buffer between him and Penny. It took the two of them alone to hold Amber off. With one of them missing, Ren knew Amber would waste little time in subduing Nora. He couldn't allow for that to happen, but he couldn't allow for his leader to fall!

The Lie hadn't a clue on his next move, but a resonating soul did.

Seeing her leader getting trapped inside Penny's ever-decreasing dome—with his reluctance to hurt someone's who was Aura was crying out—Pyrrha's lingering Aura blazed to life in a last-ditch effort. She admired her leader's hesitance, but she hated his simplicity as of now. She knew of her leader's kind and gentle heart. Wanting to help save someone's soul sounded like the kindest thing in all the world. To make him choose between the two was cruel, but more was at stake than he knew.

Amber was already fighting her tooth-and-nail to keep her at bay, and honestly, Pyrrha Nikos was tired. The suppression was too oppressive to bear any longer, her soul felt heavy, and her Aura slowly faded deeper into oblivion, but she wasn't leaving without making sure to give her leader one last parting gift.

With the last of her fading strength, she momentarily gained back control of her body and screamed her bloody lungs out. "Jaune! Penny's an android!"

The entire battlefield stilled, Amber almost rolled her eyes as control slowly reigned back to her. So what if Penny was an android? What could that possibly change about their leader's ultimate defeat? Not like he was planning on breaking out of that dome any time soon?

"Atone, Excalibur!"

A dome abruptly shattered from a light piercing through it. It sliced through the curves with practical ease, dissipating the barrier in seconds, and the prize awaiting inside was Jaune Arc glowing a beautiful shade of white, holding a blade of snow. The Arc assessed the situation before turning their sights on them, smirking with such a cliche hero pose.

"Sorry for acting like a complete dolt, guys. I'll take care of Penny now! You two subdue Pyrrha! I'll fix her Aura after we win!" His gaze shifted back to the stunned android with such confidence. "Got it?"

Nora grinned predatorily, and Ren nodded with a subtle shift of the collar. "We're on it! You can count on us!"

Sorrowfully, Amber hardly heard a single word either one of them said after the Arc turned to address them. All her focus was on the lack of pain in her head. She finally felt the remnant's of Pyrrha's consciousness slipping away into oblivion, not in small recluse hidden away in her mind. A small, daunting smile drew across her cheeks.

About time!

Absolute controlled sparked at her fingertips! No more trembling or unbelievable headaches! This body finally belonged to her now!

Grinning, she glanced down at the small body wrapped around hers, losing that grin when Nora's hold tightened. While minor, Amber hated the way Excalibur shined from over here. From the pieces she remembered him talking about earlier, she wanted to scoff momentarily at the notion of fixing her Aura. Now, well, she didn't know what to think. That was by all accounts a blade of freaking Aura or something else! Fix Pyrrha's Aura! Fix her Aura! Now she truly believed him capable of such a feat!

If that was the case, then these two needed to go down now.

Glowing her right eye in power, she summoned another gust of wind from before, this time allowed full control. Slowly, her body ascended into the air, dragging Nora along with her with electricity bouncing around her body. She still held her tight, arms and legs locked. Well, that wouldn't do!

Time to get this monkey off her back!

Across from them, Ren used the sleeve of his cloak to shield his eyes from the harsh wind, vision narrowed. The ability to float in the air? Must be related to the powerful gust of wind, but why now? The wind had never been this powerful before. Now the iron sand practically danced for her, moving much faster with better structure, and this newly improved iron sand created a puddle of metal underneath their hovering position.

What was Amber planning?

Without any warning, Amber seized Nora's arms and maneuvered her body midair, so Nora had her back toward the puddle of iron sand. Then they began descending toward the puddle, and Lie Ren hadn't a clue to her next move, not until the pool swiftly started sprouting spikes.

A pit of iron spikes!

"Nora!" Ren dashed forward, gravity heavier to combat the wind, and stole his lover off Amber's back midair before she could crash into the iron sand. "Are you alright?"

The wind brushed against her hair, and she nodded silently, lightning in her eyes. When they landed safely on the ground, she slowly removed herself from his hold, eyes wide in shock at the dismissing Amber. The body snatcher in question eyed her while floating above the death trap, arms folded in displeasure. She thinned her lip before willing the sand to move at them in a tidal wave.

Ren braced himself, shielding Nora. "Get ready, here she comes."

She bunched her hands together. "Bring it! I absorbed a lot of power!"

"Good. We'll need all the firepower we can get. Alright, same plan."

Gripping Magnhild tightly, Nora dashed forward swung at the first barricade of sand, flicking globs back at Amber with her added strength.

Their opponent merely waved an arm out, stopping the metal before expelling it back with a gust of wind to thrust it faster, not to mention the other iron sand still attempted to crush them with only less mass. Lucky for Nora, Ren swooped in and swept the sand away with StormFlower's blades, kicking away the rest.

Only for the iron to quickly reform and grip his ankle before crashing him to the floor.

Moving fast, Ren clawed away the iron with his blade, rolling out of the way of an incoming waterfall. Nora swung away the second attempt and helped him to his feet, glaring down the impassive doppelganger with a fierce frown. The more she fought, the harder it became. No matter what angle she looked at it from, that was still Pyrrha—their friend—and it hurt to think someone was controlling their friend's body.

"This isn't working, Ren."

He couldn't agree more. "Strength isn't enough. We need more than just muscle to beat her. I'm open to suggestions."

Nora quirked her head, eyes flashing. "Well, I have one idea."

She pulled him close to whisper the plan to his ear, acting all giddy while Amber frowned. When it was all said and done, the Lie had no choice but to nod his head, slowly touching Magnhild's head with his back arched. The next torrent of iron sand came, and this time he jumped upon Nora's hammer, holding StormFlower in a horizontal angle to act as a propeller as Nora quickly began spinning in circles. Amber painstakingly admitted this little idea worked. Any of the sand that got close was immediately shredded away and—?!

Boom!

Ren flew across the battlefield from the momentum of Nora's hammer, across all the iron sand in incredible speed, and right for the floating girl. Before Amber managed to get her bearings, he moved in and grabbed the back of her head with one arm and pulled her in, adding in Misfortune to her whole body as his knee dug painfully into her stomach with his other hand gripping her forearm tightly.

They sped across the clearing from the sudden force with him staring directly into her eyes, unbias to their propelling. Pink eyes glared at brown, looking for any sign of their friend in there. She would've decked him, but he was already removing herself from her body, dodging an incoming strike of Dust grenades with her body still speeding across the field.

No problem.

She clutched her stomach with one arm while she moved the other to intercept the incoming heart-shaped shells, but it wouldn't budge! What the? When in the hell did her arm fall asleep! She instantly gazed over at Ren, hair hitting her face and found him baring the tiniest of smirks at her confusion.

What rotten luck.

Explosion!

Ren shielded his eyes from the explosive backlash, digging his feet into the ground. Hopefully, such a compacted explosion meant she was down for the count, but Lady Luck rolled him Snake Eyes.

Shaking with fury, Amber dug herself out of the rubble, covered in burns and ash. She stepped out of the dust cloud with her steps heavy. The Iron sand from afar sped back to her, and she gritted her teeth at the two eyesores getting into attack position, right eye glowing in retaliation.

The sight made her laugh.

"Ha! Clever girl, you set me up. I can't believe this. You honestly set me up." Amber huffed and brushed away dirt, unable to comprehend out how Team JNPR figured her out. "I have to hand it to you, Pyrrha. You have some annoying teammates, but I'm the one who's going to be leaving here."

Summoning another gust of wind, the leaves on nearby trees froze, and she willed the sand to condense above her. The Maiden Powers' electrical properties helped. Lightning buzzed to life all around her body, increasing the strength of her magnetic field to a level Pyrrha Nikos had never reached. Amber doubted she'd be able to create iron sand without the power aiding her.

Power.

She needed more! The remains of those forgotten weapons weren't enough. She needed more—much more—and she only saw one possible to place to acquire more. Without any warning, without uttering a single word, she reached out and amplified her Magnetic Polarity to reach out and seize this Nora Valkyrie's metal hammer! The unfortunate Valkyrie barely had time to register what happened, flying through the air, until Ren wrapped his arms around her stomach and pulled her away from Amber's pull.

Sadly, one casualty fell from Amber's assault.

"Magnhild!"

Nora remained slacked in Ren's hands, unable to tear her eyes away from Amber hovering her hammer above her form. Like a nightmare, she raised an arm up and then created a fist, condensing the metal of Magnhild to condense and scrap into each other. Little by little, the metal bent, fractured and condensed into tiny particles of dancing iron sand to be mixed in with Pyrrha's late weapons, broken, and bullets.

Now two weapons met their tragic demise in this same clearing.

"She... tore apart Magnhild, Ren."

Ren pulled Nora closer and held her firmly in his hold. His voice resonated softly, but urgently. "Nora, I'm sorry, but if we don't act fast, that won't be the only thing she'll be tearing apart."

"She has no weakness."

Ren hated to admit, but Nora was right. That iron sand acted as both an offensive and defensive weapon. Whenever they moved, this imposter managed to create the perfect weapon to combat against their tactics. They needed a ploy, some opening to get the drop on her. Anything to land a direct hit on her. Anything to allow his Misfortune to flourish.

Then Lie Ren saw light stretching their shadows!

"Ren! Nora! Quasar's coming!"

Hearing his Fearless Leader's warning made him want to laugh. Even when fighting a different opponent, Jaune still found moments to aid his team.

Ren grabbed Nora's shoulder, trying to console her. "Nora, get ready, we might not get another opening like this."

Nodding, she pounded her fists together, planning to avenge Magnhild. "Okay!"

Amber hadn't a clue to what they were planning, instead taking the fight to them with her iron sand molder into spear-like objects. She flew on one of the spears, fingers controlling the sand with her attention focused on them. Then a blinding flash of light appeared from behind them and doused the entire field in intense light.

Arg! Amber forcefully stopped to shield her eyes. Such a blinding light! It burned her eyes!

Nora didn't waste a single second. The moment Amber covered her eyes, she reacted. With fury in her eyes, the Valkyrie charged forward and got underneath Amber, pulling all her captured strength into her right hand. For a split-second, the turquoise lightning latched onto Nora's body, pushing her muscles to the limits. A fist connected squarely on Amber's jaw shortly after, driven by a compelling force that dispensed a shockwave supported by a roar of thunder.

Thunder!

Amber flew and crashed into the same iron sand she created, splattering the wave in every direction upon the collision. She laid on her back, metal bits all around her, delirious from such a strike. Her senses sharpened when shoes collided with both her hands, pinning her to the ground with a hand pressed against her neck. The blinding light still existed, but she found the body on top of her shrouded in shadows, sporting eyes of deep pink.

"Stay. Down. You've lost."

She struggled against his hold, but that off-balance weight of his endured. She persisted, anyway, struggling to move and will the sand to aid her, but he added more pressure and thinned his eyes.

"Stop it already. Without your hands, you can't use our friend's Semblance."

"I'm not like your friend." Her right eye glowed. "I'm much stronger!"

A wind blew out from underneath her body, pushing against Ren. He attempted to knock her out, palm to temple, but some iron sand managed to heed her call and wrap around his wrist, effectively halting his momentum. Amber then twisted her wrist until she could wrap her fingers around his shoe and dug her fingers into the fabric.

She twisted and turned, unbalancing him in his hold and eventually managed to free one arm, immediately calling forth iron sand to aid her. Ren swept the metal away from his hand, leaving behind a fair share of Bad Luck, and dodged her blow by leaping back. He expected her to retaliate right after, but the iron sand formed a barrier around her.

Inside the barrier, Amber breathed heavily, gasping for air after freeing herself from Ren's strangle. Damn Lie almost made her pass out. A few more seconds and she would've turned black and blue, but then again, that was probably his plan from the start. She needed an idea out of this mess, and she needed it now. These two were a well-oiled machine! She'd be better off fighting only one of those two.

Wait a minute?

Now there was an idea. Why not just take out one of them? Didn't matter which, either was fine. Of course, that begged the question of who to choose first. Who could she take out first?

Rumble!

Blinking, Amber felt her iron sand shaking from numerous impacts, most likely by that Nora girl as she doubted Ren had the firepower to inflict such damage. The rumblings then doubled, and she reconsidered her notion, remembering how much the man weighed at times.

"Okay! You got this! Just take down one of them!"

Bringing her hands together, she drove them apart and spikes formed outside the dome. The rumbling stopped, but she knew they avoided her attack and willed the dome to break apart. This Semblance of Pyrrha's was sure handy. Humph! Iron sand! The perfect offense and defense!

Once the dome separated, she studied their movements. They stood across from her, covering each other's blind spots. One was the speed and the other the muscle, even without her hammer. Attacking only one always left the other to worry about, either about attacking her or defending the other. It was quite a troublesome situation.

Stepping forward, Amber willed the iron sand to move as her steps increased in speed until she was full-on sprinting to her targets. From this point onward all her strikes were aimed to maim or kill. While a dangerous tactic, Amber didn't worry, not while Penny continued to fight. She couldn't afford to be too reckless. Not like tactical strategy worked against these two, anyway.

Lunging forward, Amber jumped between the two, using the iron sand to act as a barrier. Having the iron sand act solely as a shield limited some of her movements, but it was a calculated risk. So she ran forward toward Nora, metal forming a sharply angled staff in her hand. Nora barely reacted, having not expected for Amber to dash at her, unable to block the first few blows to her sides and chest. She quickly regained her bearings and tried to fight back, but the Half-Maiden had a weapon over Nora and kept her at a safe distance by striking her knees and then stomach.

Lie Ren soon joined the fight.

Amber willed the iron to condense within her staff, sharpening the corners to narrow points. Blocking his attempted kicks, she cursed the unknown force. Nora soon came back and delivered another smack across her cheek with Ren adding to the fray by sweeping kicking her.

She stood up soon enough, blocking their conjoined blow with the center of her staff, but found her body still sent flying back, actually breaking from the combined force. Rebuilding the pole was an easy matter, but this fighting two versus one wasn't working out as she had planned. Her Aura was dropping, and they moved smoother than the other two she fought earlier.

Her thoughts were interrupted upon noticing Penny charging a beam of energy, aimed directly at the duo. Flashing a smirk, Amber charged at the two, staff ready. They took the bait, and she blocked their attempted blow, quickly shifting the iron staff into sand again to hold them in place with the surrounding sand wrapping around their ankles. The trick required her full focus and didn't need to last forever, only long enough for Penny's beam to vaporize them.

Their leader noticed this and foolishly jumped in front of the beam. No matter. Two birds with one stone! Finally! This damn battle was over!

The beam fired, and Amber's grin flipped upside down.

"What the heck?!"

The beam started off strong as a singular, linear line, but that leader fired an orb at it, and now it broke apart into two lines of energy with the three of them in the center of two energy waves. Soon it shattered apart, turning into various streams of much smaller beams, becoming impossibly divergent. Then that orb soared right through Penny and took most of her hopes with it. The rest fell apart when Penny's body fell limp.

Amber struggled to grasp the situation. "No. This can't be happening!"

Penny Polendina lost?!

Gazing back, Ren sighed, brushing away iron. His Fearless Leader won. While the gruesome sight of Penny's limp puppet body struck a nerve with him, better her than them, besides, they had a friend to save. Nora thought so too, gripping her hands together in preparation to knock Amber out cold.

Nora grinned. "It's over, faker! You lose!"

It was one thing to see it, but it was another to hear it from someone else's mouth! Amber's right glowed to impossible heights of luminosity from the thought of losing a second time. She growled and a storm brew overhead, picking up extreme levels of wind.

"No! You're not putting me back into that tube!" Wind as powerful as a tornado pushed them away. "I'm not going back!"

Amber was not going to lose for a second time!

Setting her sights on the annoying one first, she swiftly willed all of the iron sand to strike Nora while she was bust recovering from the wind blast. Iron sand prepared itself to crush every bone in her body, flying at the defenseless girl.

Time slowed down for one set of pink eyes.

Eyes were said to be windows to the souls. All emotions conveyed within them, The Lie Evil Eyes especially. Every crack in their armor came from their eyes. That was why their greatest strength proved to be their biggest weakness. From the hues of pink to white, the essence of lost control reflected dully in those eyes. Lie Ren was no exception.

Even now, with all the years of locking away his emotions and caging his Aura, emotions shackled him to a miserable plane of existence. A monstrosity held no love for others. A monster only fended for itself. He considered himself a monster and dressed the wardrobe of the beasts themselves, but all lies contained a bit of truth.

His bit of humanity, the piece of his soul that made his heart sun, was that bit truth.

Fear now threatened to rip that away a second time. Once was enough for this Lie! He wasn't a monster. He was Lie Ren. He wished naught to be a monster, not if it forced his truth in such mortal danger. Not if it meant he couldn't protect what little humanity he clung onto.

He would sacrifice his life one-hundred times over to protect that bit of truth!

"Nora!"

The collar of his cloak opened up and revealed the face of a man filled with despair. He reached—begged—for his Aura to save the one person that meant more than the world to him. If a prison was what he banished his Aura to, then Ren opened the collar and base of the cloak, allowing freedom for a power that never should have been locked away.

Bad luck would either destroy everything he cherished, or turn him into the man Nora Valkyrie believed him to be.

Aura reacted to Ren's desperate emotions and finally took hold of his wayward soul.

Crossed fingers reflected his desires, and the pink hue radiated brilliantly in his eyes. A massive amount of Aura escaped out of his soul and turned into reality, becoming a messy-mirrored doppelgänger before his very eyes. Before he could question, the mirror clone grabbed, spun and tossed Ren with the Lore cloak fixing his weight automatically for them.

Flying through the air, he braved a glance back, witnessing his mirror clone smirking before shattering into a million fibers of glass. He didn't bother questioning it anymore and narrowed his vision. It wasn't possible to push Nora out of the way in time, not in the trajectory he was flying, but he had another idea.

He threw his hands out and acted as Nora's shield, blocking the iron sand from getting to her and taking the full brunt of the damage. Amber didn't care and flexed her fingers to twist the sand around his body to encase his entire being in a layer of iron sand.

By the time Nora figured out what was happening, she barely had time to turn around and witness Ren get enveloped in metal. Remaining Bad Luck caused Amber to slip on the boot without a heel and mistime her action, but she still closed her palm together and applied as much pressure as humanly possible to the trapped Lie.

Crunch!

Nora let out a soundless scream, unable to stop the iron sand from applying pressure to his body! The scream he let out would haunt her dreams for years to come, before deafening silence filled the battlefield. Leftover Misfortune and the Lore cloak mitigated some of the pressure, but the damage left him teetering on the edge of unconsciousness. She didn't hesitate and tackled the coffin of iron sand, using all the remaining strength to pry Ren free and disperse the sand.

She then ran, carrying Ren while covering a fair bit of distance.

The moment she felt somewhat safe, Nora carefully put his head into her lap, gasping at the way white encased his usually pink eyes. Stains covered the inside of his cloak, specs of blood seeping here and there. All of it robbed Nora of her sunshine. All of it robbed her of any emotion except despair.

"R-Ren..."

Not a sound escaped him. He had one of those cherishing, goodbye smiles that no one ever wanted to see. Reaching up, he weakly placed his palm over her cheek, wiping away the tears spilling, fighting the edging darkness.

Then his hand fell limp.

Before Nora's cry traveled across the clearing, Jaune felt Ren's Outer Space diminish to near nothing and turned around to see Nora bawling her eyes out with fresh tears and a downed, frozen Ren. Putting two-and-two together wasn't too hard and his vision sharpened over to the volley of metal spears heading toward his distraught friends.

Nora and Ren were in trouble!

Jumping to his feet, he dashed and prayed for the best, but his mind became clouded with endless doubt. There was no way he could cover the distance in time, and even if he could, then what? Use his own body to block the spikes of iron sand that would easily impale right through him anyways and hit his teammates? Lore's abilities could only protect them so much.

No matter which angle he looked at, the outcome would end the same.

If only he had more control!

If only his Lore reached out and granted him such a level of control!

Gritting his teeth, he felt tears building. Maybe if he had any Aura left, he could fire Shooting Star and burst the iron sand away, but he lacked any Aura. The only power available was Lore and the Lore shard in his pocket.

The feel of the shard made him contemplate what Blake had said. Fear gripped his heart with the idea of connecting that gap he had created because the reality of the matter was Jaune did fear Lore.

He feared the power's origins. He feared what it might turn him into if he threw his whole soul into, but he feared what the power represented as a whole because that power existed within his soul, and for a lack of a better phrase, it lived within the Grimm as well, and that fear made him keep the dark power at arm's length.

Fear had destroyed the trust he built with the power and halted their progression to a stand-still, and sadly, that was the same scenario that plagued him and Pyrrha all those months ago. Now he was the guilty for shattering the trust they had built. Guilty for not taking Lore's feelings into account since it was more than just another power source. It had feelings and reflected them back whenever he fought, and when he pushed it aside, lost trust in that power and turned his back to it, he longer embraced it with open arms and Lore retaliated by doing the same, but it never abandoned him.

Lore always kept him just within arm's length should he even need it.

You wouldn't abandon your shadow... because it wouldn't abandon you.

Jaune hadn't been doing a very excellent job of being a Fearless Leader. It was time to stop being afraid of Lore. It was there to help him. No! Not just him! It was there to help his team, and they all desperately needed him. They needed him to be the leader they all believed him to be! Team JNPR demanded Jaune Arc!

The Fearless Leader of Team JNPR!

Stretching his hand out, he gambled everything, his reason for fighting, his reason for making it this far, everything! Time to repent for his past ignorance. Time to believe in the story of Ragnarok! The Arc had to make sure the lessons of the past weren't forgotten. Darkness wasn't a power to be afraid of. Just like the light, it was there to aid whenever needed. When the light fought, it blinded its foes with a brightness that hurt. The darkness hid and protected within the shadows, acting like a shield to protect.

His friends needed that shield!

Throwing one hand forward, he searched his soul for his Lore and pressed roughly against the barrier blocking him. Fear gripped his heart and he hiccuped at the thought of losing everyone because of his cowardliness. He would do anything to prevent a future where his friends died. Even repent for the mistakes he had committed.

"Please help me! I can't win this alone!" Jaune begged with eyes wet with tears. Lore was an emotional power. "Everyone's in trouble! I know I haven't been fair to you, and haven't given you a reason to trust me, and I'm sorry! But please help me now! Please! Give me a second chance to get it right! Our friends need us!"

Lub-dub!

Gasping, he shut his eyes on instinct, remembering the time he drew the Lore blade during Grimm Studies. Only this time the image was turning around, escaping the two-dimensional realm to join him in the third-dimensional plane where he belonged. That barrier from before turned with it, allowing his soul to finally reach out and connect with the power he so desperately longed for, and when the power revealed itself to him, he found his chest out of breath and mind racing.

That wasn't a sword at all! It was a—!

Lub-dub!

The iron sand sharply stopped mere inches away from Nora and Ren's bodies, suddenly pulled by an immense gravitational force that it could not escape from. Each grain of sediment hurled itself at a focal point and clashed together against a mass of force. Iron sand remained locked in place, and when Amber tried to will the power to budge, it hardly moved to her command.

"What?" Amber screamed. "What the hell happened?"

Nora opened her wet eyes to follow the trail of iron sand. There, at the end of spikes, was her leader with the blades of iron centered near his left arm. A cloud of dust made it impossible to see what the iron was attracted to, but she felt her hopes defy gravity when an impressive glow of black radiated from Jaune-Jaune.

"Fearless Leader?"

Standing unharmed in the circle was Jaune Arc, releasing a powerful flood of Lore. His shadow disappeared, hiding from the light in an Empty Space Amber couldn't see. Dark Matter oozed from underneath his feet, spreading slowly across the terrain. Not to mention those Gravities of his have increased in number, representing five now. However, what seized Amber's soul in an iron-grip was the pitch-black shield attached to his arm, defying physics and logic with its floating arc crescents that resembled eclipsing moons.

Taking a deep breath, he sighed with negative emotions leaking out of his soul. The darkness clawed at his humanity, but not to harm—never to harm. He knew that now. Lore just wanted to reach out and connected with the soul that happened to be born under its star. It wanted him to know it was here to fight alongside him. To protect all those that mattered and didn't have enough strength.

Fury and grief for Pyrrha's soul anguished his own and Jaune wanted nothing more than to make the pain go away. The suffering he felt from Pyrrha's soul needed to be washed away! Whatever it took, he would pull Pyrrha from the brink of Death! He wouldn't allow her to walk into the light!

Opening his eyes, Amber flinched at what she saw, fear tightening an invisible noose around her neck. His sclerae were covered in darkness with only his cobalt irises to shine through with a dead light from a deceased star. He raised his shield up, sensing her terror like a monster, and showed little emotion in the heat of battle.

What made him human were the tears in his eyes.

"Repent... Ragnarok!"

---

Author Notes: By the way, this was all hinted in Chapter 9: Fog. And for those keeping tally, Ragnarok saved Nora Valkyrie (Thor) and she happened to be the first victim of Lore. Repentance, anyone?