Jaune's consciousness and spirit drifted backward through the River of Time, carried along by the authority of Choice as the endless current of causality flowed around him.
He had already become accustomed to the strange experience of moving against the direction in which time naturally progressed, though he still hated the feeling of the river wearing against his existence as he forced himself through it.
Every moment he passed contained possibilities that had once been futures, presents that had already happened, and pasts that had become nothing more than memories, yet Jaune moved through all of them with a singular purpose.
He was going back.
Again.
He had lost the fight.
Again.
The realization sat heavily within his mind, and despite everything that had happened, Jaune could not help but internally sigh in frustration. His plan had failed for the second time, and the result had been almost identical to the first iteration.
His reserves had slowly been emptied until there was nothing left, while Tyrian's seemingly bottomless reserves had continued without any indication that they would ever reach their limit. For a time, Jaune and the other three Rank 3s had managed to maintain the deadlock.
Qrow, Raven, and Velik had fought beside him with everything they possessed, and together they had pushed Tyrian harder than Jaune had thought possible. They had forced him to sacrifice his body repeatedly, broken his Creation constructs, disrupted his Destruction attacks, and prevented him from reaching the thousands of awakened beneath them.
But eventually, Knowledge had done what Knowledge always did.
It learned and it adapted.
It found the cracks in their strategy. One by one, Tyrian had begun escaping their encirclement, and once he had broken through the deadlock, the battle had started shifting entirely in his favor. Jaune had eventually been forced to abandon Inversion and return to Devour simply because maintaining the inverted state had become too expensive.
Yet, it had not mattered.
The outcome had already been decided by then.
Yet there had been something strange about the way Tyrian had fought during the final portion of that battle, something Jaune had initially dismissed because he had been too occupied with survival to properly examine it.
Once Tyrian had begun overwhelming the four of them, he had stopped using Destruction against Jaune. Instead, the overwhelming annihilating force had been directed primarily toward Qrow, Raven, and Velik.
Against Jaune, Tyrian had relied almost entirely upon Creation. That alone wasn't strange, considering that Jaune's inverted body had proven capable of directly tanking the power of Destruction.
And yet, what was strange was that, Tyrian had changed his fighting style entirely. He had started constructing barriers around Jaune, creating spaces designed to restrict his movement, producing layers upon layers of Creation that attempted to trap him in place.
Rather than destroy Jaune, Tyrian had begun trying to ensure that he could not move. Jaune had noticed it, but he had not given it enough thought. At the time, Tyrian had been dominating the battlefield, and there had been too many other things demanding his attention.
Now, drifting backward through the River of Time, Jaune could see the pattern with a clarity that had been impossible in the middle of combat. Tyrian had not been trying to overpower his body, but rather, had been trying to contain it, for some reason.
In any case, Jaune supposed that it was indeed a viable strategy.
Jaune closed his eyes as the River carried him farther into the past.
He had thought that amplifying Qrow, Raven, and Velik would be enough. He had thought that if he could elevate them to a level where their Rank 3 powers could operate alongside his own, the four of them might overwhelm Tyrian through superior coordination.
For a while, that strategy had even worked.
It had worked beautifully, even. Qrow's Black Calamity had transformed the battlefield into a flock of colossal crows, Raven's Eclipsing phenomena had become capable of directly contesting Destruction, and Velik's Darkness had turned the surrounding space into a constantly shifting battlefield filled with infinitely regenerating soldiers and the impossible movements of his Shadow Stalker.
Jaune had stood at the center of it, body amplified beyond the limits of Devour, and together they had nearly torn Tyrian apart.
But nearly was irrelevant.
Tyrian had survived and Knowledge had continued to observe.
Knowledge had continued to understand.
Knowledge had continued to adapt.
Every advantage they gained became something Tyrian could study, and every new ability they revealed became another tool he could account for. Jaune finally understood that he had been looking at the battle from the wrong direction.
He had been asking himself how he could become stronger than Tyrian, when the real question should have been how he could prevent Tyrian from becoming stronger through Knowledge. The more he thought about it, the more obvious the answer became.
Inversion been his trump card but against Tyrian, it had been almost completely useless. Worse, it had actually made one of Tyrian's greatest advantages even stronger.
When Jaune inverted Devour, he had inverted all three concepts that had formed it which all directly stopped the conceptual shield upon his form.
The strength was enormous, but so was the cost.
During that battle, Tyrian had been given a complete view of the conceptual structure Jaune had previously hidden from him, and Jaune had willingly handed that knowledge over in exchange for power.
Yet, in the end it all amounted to nothing.
Their teamwork and power of friendship had not been enough.
Jaune's thoughts became bitter as he finally accepted it.
'Knowledge is just too strong.'
It was not Tyrian's Creation or Destruction rune that carried him through, despite how devastating that power was.
It was the supremacy of Knowledge.
It was then, that Jaune realized something else. Something he had been subconsciously ignoring throughout his entire time as a Rank 3.
He had never used Devour on anyone else except Tyrian.
None of his allies.
Jaune had never wanted to take their power from them. He had never wanted to reduce them to fuel simply because Devour allowed him to do so. He had viewed that as crossing a line. It had been a bias, one he had carried without ever properly acknowledging it.
And now, as the River of Time carried him toward another attempt, Jaune finally understood that this bias had been limiting his options. Devour did not care whether the power belonged to a friend or an enemy. It recognized only recognized what could be consumed and utilized.
Jaune had imposed the restriction himself.
During the final moments of the previous fight, when everything had already begun collapsing around him, he had finally abandoned that restriction.
He had devoured portions of Qrow's, Raven's, and Velik's power and used them for himself. It had not been enough to change the outcome as Tyrian had already become too powerful by that point, and Jaune had been too depleted to properly capitalize on the new strategy, but the moment had revealed something important.
The power of his allies did not simply vanish when Devour consumed it. Jaune could hold it and combine it.
He could even utilize it in some ways better than they might have been able to. His Rank 2 self had been limited by Plunder's three simultaneous streams of stolen power, but Devour was something entirely different.
His body without weakness could contain hundreds of different forms of runic energy simultaneously. He could turn the strength of an entire battlefield into his own.
Jaune opened his eyes.
'So that's what I was missing.'
The thought was almost painfully simple. He did not need to make the others stronger, but only himself.
Not through the inverse power of his rune but through the true functionality of it.
Through Devour.
The River of Time continued carrying him backward, and Jaune calculated the cost of what he was about to do.
'I'll be down to sixty percent of my maximum reserves after this iteration of Choice. That means I have around two more chances to use Choice before Tyrian completely wins. In that span of time, I need to figure out a way to defeat him.'
It was a harrowing situation.
Salem, through Tyrian, possessed a level of power that should never have belonged to a Rank 3. But even that thought was beginning to feel slightly incorrect. Tyrian's raw power was monstrous, yes, but it was Knowledge that made him terrifying.
If Jaune wanted to win, then he needed to remove Knowledge first.
Somehow.
He needed to either devour the Rune directly from Tyrian's spirit, or disable it, or find some conceptual loophole that allowed him to prevent it from functioning. Whatever the method, Knowledge had to be dealt with before anything else mattered.
Jaune's consciousness finally reached the moment he wanted.
He descended and the River vanished.
His spirit returned to his body at the exact moment in the past when Tyrian had detonated that enormous mass of Destruction.
The Crimson Moon returned around him in an instant, the black heavens fractured by crimson light and enormous floating fragments of the moon. The shockwave was still spreading. Jaune's body reformed within the devastation, and Tyrian's voice immediately tore across the battlefield with fury and recognition.
"JAUNE ARC!"
Jaune turned toward him and answered with a calmness that felt almost absurd considering the circumstances.
"In the flesh."
His next movement was already decided. He turned toward the thousands of awakened, preparing to unleash Devour upon them and strip away their power. It was the strategy that had carried him through impossible battles when he was Rank 2, the same fundamental strategy he had relied upon whenever an opponent was simply stronger than he was.
Take everything available. Turn the battlefield itself into fuel and become stronger through accumulation.
However, Tyrian's next words stopped him right in his tracks.
"Inversion... your body... hahaha. Jaune Arc, your body is truly fascinating. This is... the second use of Choice, isn't it?"
Jaune froze and the world seemed to become unnaturally quiet.
His thoughts ground to a halt.
The fact that Tyrian knew that Choice had been used more than once, did not surprise him. Knowledge could observe the inconsistencies created by temporal alteration and could even examine reality and infer that something had changed. What shocked Jaune was the first word Tyrian had spoken.
Inversion.
Tyrian should not know about Inversion.
Not yet.
Jaune had not used it yet at this point in the iteration. In addition to that, his memories of the previous timeline should have been isolated from Tyrian because Devour had concealed the information.
Unless...
Jaune's stomach dropped.
The answer struck him with horrifying clarity.
During the previous iteration, he had inverted Devour. And when he inverted Devour, he had inverted Null. That meant the very phenomenon that had hidden Jaune's information from Knowledge had ceased to exist.
Tyrian had seen everything. Not merely the existence of Inversion but everything.
The entire battle involving Qrow, Raven, Velik and Jaune's amplification form. Jaune's fighting style and even the way his allies had been empowered.
The fact that his reserves had been steadily depleted and Tyrian's hadn't. And, worst of all, Tyrian had also probably also retained every new capability of utilizing his own runes during the period of Jaune's inversion.
Almost every single piece of advantage that Jaune had gained from the previous iteration had been exposed to the very enemy he had been trying to outmaneuver.
Jaune's mind shook.
'Shit.'
His thoughts became increasingly frantic.
No, no, no.
Choice had been supposed to give him an advantage. That had been the entire reason he was willing to sacrifice portions of his reserves and repeatedly travel through the River of Time. He could make a mistake, return to the past, retain his memories, and make a different decision. Every iteration was supposed to teach him something new and every failure was supposed to become knowledge that he could carry into the next attempt.
But Tyrian had now removed that advantage and rendered it all worthless.
'Those chances are all worthless, now!'
His trump card had never truly been his own but a true double-edged blade. It had become a sword of Damocles that was hung over the top of Jaune's head without him even knowing.
All due to Knowledge.
'All due to Knowledge!'
Desperation surged through Jaune's consciousness so violently that for an instant it threatened to overwhelm him completely. His carefully constructed plan had collapsed before it had even begun. The future he had witnessed was no longer a secret and now Tyrian knew what Jaune could do.
And yet, despite all of that Jaune forced the desperation down.
His eyes hardened.
'No. I... I have to win. I'm sorry. All of you.'
Then Jaune disappeared.
He moved with the speed of a bolt of lightning, his domain erupting outward as the golden authority of Devour spread across the battlefield.
"DEVOUR!"
The Rune answered and Jaune unleashed the full power of his domain upon the awakened. There was no distinction.
Friend or foe.
Awakened or Sleepless.
Grimm or human.
Everyone within his reach became fuel.
The first Rank 2 Sleepless was consumed almost instantly. Their body disintegrated into raw runic energy as Devour tore through their Aura, their Rune, and the conceptual foundation that allowed them to exist as an awakened being.
The next followed.
Then another.
Grimm were swallowed into the domain, their forms collapsing as their power became fuel for Jaune's body. Rank 2 Sleepless members directly disintegrated into energy. Some Grimm suffered the same fate.
The rest of the LUCID aligned awakened were not spared. Their strength was ripped away from them in enormous waves, their Runes stripped of power and their Aura reduced as Jaune devoured everything he could reach.
Rank 2 awakened dropped and their powers vanished. Their bodies remained, but the strength that had elevated them to Rank 2 was gone.
Almost all of them fell all the way down to the realm of Rank 0. Rank 1 individuals suffered the same fate.
The battlefield changed in seconds.
Thousands of awakened who had been fighting against the endless Grimm suddenly felt their power disappear.
They looked toward the black heavens and saw Jaune.
They witnessed his horrific visage as his all devouring power absorbed rivers of energy from them into himself.
Jaune continued.
He could even see the faces of some of his friends.
Ruby.
Yang.
Pyrrha.
Ren.
People he knew and had once fought alongside. People whose lives had intersected with his own so many times that their faces had become permanently embedded within his memories.
Now their prowess was becoming fuel for him. Jaune's expression twisted with guilt, but he did not stop.
He could not stop.
He had already learned what happened when he restrained himself. He had already learned what happened when he tried to protect everyone while fighting Tyrian.
He had already learned that friendship and teamwork were not enough.
This time, Jaune would not make the same mistake.
Devour continued consuming and his body began filling with an overwhelming collection of runic energies.
Light.
Shadow.
Strength.
Speed.
Elements.
Weapons.
Movement.
Defense.
Concepts he barely recognized and concepts he had never encountered. Everything flowed into Devour.
Jaune could feel his power rising and his domain became denser. His Aura expanded and his conceptual state became saturated with devoured energy.
And still he continued.
There was no longer any hesitation or any artificial boundary. He had finally abandoned the bias that had prevented him from using Devour against those around him.
He was going to use everything. Every last shred of power available.
Tyrian watched him without moving or attacking, his expression remained strangely emotionless.
He simply observed.
His eyes followed Jaune's movements as thousands of different Rune energies disappeared into the golden domain.
Then his brows slowly began to lower and a frown formed across his face. Jaune noticed and turned his head toward Tyrian.
The two stared at each other across the crimson battlefield.
Jaune had no idea whether this would work. He did not know if the power he was accumulating could overcome Tyrian.
But he knew one thing.
He would use every last shred of power he could take. And this time, he couldn't simply allow himself to be restrained by the limits of his morals.
Jaune Arc would consume everything necessary to defeat Tyrian.
Everything.
Or he would die trying.