Chapter 404: 404. Finality (Part 11)

What exactly had Jaune Arc done?

To answer that question, one had to rewind the river of history back to the previous iteration, when Jaune Arc activated the rune of Choice.

Jaune's spirit moved backward through the River of Time and and within that endless current, Jaune Arc was inspired.

Salem had just told him that she wanted his body.

At first, the statement had seemed almost absurd. Then, as the implications settled into place, Jaune finally understood what it meant.

Tyrian's vessel had been enough for Salem to transfer her consciousness into the world and was enough for her to exist and wield the Supreme Runes she had acquired.

It was enough for her to eventually pursue the ascension she had been seeking for so long.

But it was the bare minimum.

Tyrian's body was fundamentally flawed. It was already damaged beyond what an ordinary Rank 3 body should have been capable of surviving, and Salem's existence had only made that weakness more apparent. She could force the vessel to sustain her and could use Creation to reconstruct it but there was a limit to how much of herself she could express through it.

If Salem fully realized her power through Tyrian's form and successfully reached Rank 4, she would be the weakest Rank 4 in all of existence.

And Salem intrinsically rejected that possibility.

How could she not?

She had already been sealed once while at the height of her power. Now she had emerged weaker than she had been before, and if she remained trapped within a vessel that forced her to operate below her former prime, then she would spend either an eternity or an unimaginably long period of time existing beneath the strength she once possessed.

She would be vulnerable, and a god like Salem would never accept that. Yet there, directly in front of her, was perfection incarnate.

Jaune Arc.

It was not a simple want. She practically required it.

All of the pieces fell into place. The reason Salem's attacks had changed and the reason Destruction had stopped being aimed directly at Jaune. The reason she had begun using Creation to restrict him rather than simply obliterate him. The reason she had allowed him to exhaust himself while she maintained her own seemingly endless reserves.

Salem did not want to kill Jaune but wanted to replace him.

The moment Jaune understood that, the path toward victory became visible. Like a rainbow of color amidst the dark bleak cold rain of the future.

It was not a path that required him to overpower Salem but a path that required him to make Salem believe she had already won.

Throughout the previous iterations, Jaune had attempted to capitalize on countless opportunities. He had pushed Salem's vessel to its limits and had forced her into positions where a lesser opponent might have been vulnerable.

But his Devouring Sense had always warned him against using his true trump card.

Not yet.

Every time he had approached that particular threshold, something within Devour had told him that the moment was wrong. Salem was not sufficiently vulnerable enough. The conditions were not correct and the pieces were not in place.

So Jaune had never used it.

And now he understood why.

If he could not defeat Salem through frontal combat, then he would have to defeat her through deception.

The idea itself was simple, yet executing it against an enemy whose Supreme Rune granted her an almost omniscient awareness of everything, was anything but simple.

How exactly was Jaune Arc supposed to deceive a demigod who possessed Knowledge?

The answer was almost laughably obvious.

To deceive the enemy, one first had to deceive oneself.

The foundation for the plan had partly come from his father.

Nicholas had spent his entire existence manipulating information, exploiting gaps in perception and using foresight to create circumstances where even those who understood what was happening could not comprehend the whole picture. He had left Jaune memories that demonstrated the kinds of deception possible when information itself became something that could be controlled.

Jaune would do the same.

His first objective was to make Salem vulnerable.

To do that, he needed to separate her from Tyrian. And to separate Salem from Tyrian, he needed to give her exactly what she wanted.

His body.

Jaune Arc would willingly offer the perfect vessel to Salem.

But there was an obvious problem.

If Jaune simply opened himself to Salem while his memories and thoughts remained intact, Knowledge would expose everything.

Devour's greatest defense against Knowledge was its Nullification authority. As long as Devour remained active in its proper form, Jaune's thoughts and conceptual structure could be hidden from the Supreme Rune.

The moment he deactivated that defense, however, Salem would know.

She would see the plan and understand the trap.

She would never step into it.

So Jaune needed to deceive her.

And the only way to accomplish that was to deceive himself first.

He needed to remove a portion of his own memories regarding the plan.

And... most importantly, the trump card.

For a Rank 3 possessing two Supreme Runes like him, that was not exactly impossible. Jaune understood his own conceptual structure well enough to separate specific pieces of information from himself and prevent them from remaining accessible to his present consciousness.

But removing the memories was only the beginning. The trap required three things to happen in sequence.

1. Jaune Arc had to die.

2. Tyrian's body had to disappear.

3. The Supreme Runes had to be inside Jaune's body.

Only then would Salem truly lower her guard and only then would Jaune be able to ensure that she had nowhere left to run.

The first part was easy enough to understand.

Jaune had to willingly surrender himself to Salem and allow her to completely erase his conscious mind.

The second part depended upon Salem herself.

Once she took over Jaune's body, there would be no reason to continue maintaining Tyrian's ruined vessel. She would transfer the Supreme Runes into the superior body, and without those Runes supporting Tyrian's damaged conceptual structure, his vessel would almost certainly collapse.

Jaune knew this and was even counting on it. The third part was the most important. Salem had to believe that she had won. She had to believe that Jaune Arc was dead regardless of the odd circumstances that surrounded his agreement.

But that created the final problem.

How was Jaune supposed to revive himself if his mind had been completely erased? If Salem replaced his consciousness entirely, there should be nothing left for him to return to.

Unless there was another mechanism.

Something that could carry his mind forward through time. The answer presented itself almost immediately.

Inversion.

Not Inversion applied to Devour but instead, to Choice.

The conceptual understanding behind Inversion had never truly been limited to Jaune's Devour Supreme Rune. The principle was something Jaune had learned independently that gave birth to Mastery.

This meant that it could be applied to other Runes.

Devour's inverted expression had three aspects.

Charity, Amplification and Evolution.

But Choice's inverse was different.

Finality.

A choice that had already been made could no longer be changed and could not be undone. It could not be altered. It was a decision that had already happened, and therefore it possessed a finality that forced reality to continue along the path that had been selected.

That was what Finality meant.

And Jaune realized that he could use it in a way that had never occurred to him before. Choice normally sent his consciousness backward through the River of Time yet inversion could reverse that conceptual flow.

Instead of pushing his mind backward...

He could push it forwards.

His memories and mind would not remain with the Jaune who traveled backward but rathe, would be sent to the Jaune of the future.

The Jaune who had already surrendered his body and the Jaune who had already been killed. The Jaune who would exist after Salem had completely replaced him.

And to accomplish it, he would spend another twenty percent of his reserves, leaving him at 20% of his maximum instead of 40%.

It was a tremendous cost, but it was necessary. More importantly, Devour itself would remain uninverted throughout the process. That meant Salem could not use Knowledge's pseudo-omniscience to discover what Jaune was actually planning.

The memories he removed would be absent.

Even Jaune himself would not remember it. He would genuinely believe the thoughts that remained inside his mind. He would genuinely believe that he had used Choice and reached the point where surrendering his body was the only option left.

He would genuinely believe that he had no other choice.

Because he did not know. And because he did not know, Knowledge could not discover the deception.

That was Jaune Arc's gamble.

His resolve.

His final sword against the terrifying eldritch god known as the Sleeper Eternal.

The River of Time carried him onward.

And then the moment came when he descended and when Salem felt the presence of Jaune Arc's mind suddenly enter into his body again.

Her initial expression was one of shock, then fear. The process of ascension and the immense flow of Runic energy surging through Jaune's body faltered as Salem realized what she was feeling.

Impossible.

Jaune Arc had just died and she had erased his mind. She had replaced his consciousness completely. She had watched herself take every part of him.

And yet...

He had returned.

Worse, now that Jaune's mind was back, the entire body began turning against her. The authority of Jaune's existence activated and his body without weakness did exactly what its nature demanded. If even a single portion of Jaune's mind remained, then all of Jaune had to exist.

His existence state reconstructed him.

Jaune Arc had defied death.

"JAUNE ARC!"

Salem screamed within his soul as she desperately drew upon the Supreme Runes, attempting to resist the state of zero weakness that was now turning against her.

She could barely contend with it.

She still possessed authority over Devour because she had occupied Jaune's body and integrated herself with its Supreme Rune, while the other four Supreme Runes clashed against its supremacy, creating a struggle that threatened to tear apart the conceptual structure of the entire body.

But now it was no longer a physical battle.

It was entirely mental.

Two existences were wrestling over the same body.

Jaune's authority and Salem's authority clashed within every cell, every conceptual thread and every fragment of his existence. At first, the balance was almost perfectly divided.

And then, Jaune's mind-form gave grin—one born from predatory fashion.

"In the flesh, Salem!"

Salem desperately tried to resist the zero weakness state as it attempted to identify her existence as the foreign element within Jaune's body and purge her.

"How?!"

Jaune's grin only became wider.

Even as his consciousness strained against Salem's overwhelming power, even as the power of five Supreme Runes collided within him and the pressure threatened to tear apart the surrounding space, there was unmistakable satisfaction in his expression.

"Fuck you! I'm not telling you jack shit!"

Salem screamed and pushed back wildly. The authority shifted again with sixty percent of it going to Jaune and forty percent remaining with Salem.

The balance had changed.

Jaune was winning.

Slowly and painfully.

But undeniably.

Salem's existence was being ground away.

The battle between them also manifested through Jaune's entire domain. Vast arcs of flame and lightning tore across the internal conceptual space created by their struggle, while the authority of Devour twisted around the competing wills of the two beings. Their mental confrontation was powerful enough that its consequences were no longer confined to Jaune's mind.

The entire Crimson Moon felt it.

The awakened below watched as Jaune's body began shifting between states, vibrating violently as though his physical form were attempting to split itself into two separate existences.

The awakened fell to their knees from the power of his domain. Even those who had survived the previous battles struggled to remain conscious beneath the pressure. The Rank 3s immediately attempted to protect everyone from the enormous waves of power erupting from Jaune's body, throwing their domains outward and trying to contain the aftershocks.

But it was not enough. Jaune's power bypassed their defenses without him even consciously attempting to attack them.

They were like reeds caught within a storm. They could only bend and pray they did not break.

Salem became even more desperate. Jaune's body had become a cage that was trapping her. She didn't even have another vessel to escape into. The moment Jaune won, she would be well and truly dead.

Jaune felt her reach toward the portion of Devour that she still controlled, and then he realized what she was attempting to do.

The seal.

She was trying to use Jaune's own domain to devour the seal covering her core, the same seal that had kept her true body trapped within its perpetual sleep.

If she could destroy it, then she could access the rest of her existence, and Jaune simply could not allow that.

He forcefully wrested control of his physical mouth. His consciousness surged forward and his authority seized the body. And then, finally, Jaune Arc activated the second gift his father had left him.

His mouth opened and the words spilled into the atmosphere.

But they did not merely travel through the air.

The parts of his domain that he controlled, forcefully pushed them outward, causing them to resonate through the void itself. The sound crossed the shattered surface of the Crimson Moon, passed through the domains of the awakened, through the distance between the Dream Realm and reality, and somehow continued onward.

The words reached the minds of the awakened below. Then farther and farther still. They reached the minds of ordinary humans fighting Grimm in the real world. People who had never seen Jaune Arc and people who had never entered the Dream Realm.

People who had no understanding of what was happening.

Every human in existence felt the words.

They echoed in their ears as though they were infinitely far away and eternally close at the same time. And Jaune Arc spoke the title that had been waiting inside his father's second gift all along.

Genesis of Yesteryear,

Warden of Hollow Night,

Marauder of Destiny!