RWBY: LUCID

Adam was clearly wary of the level of skill that Gula had displayed, and even with the Grimm mask concealing his face, there was no mistaking the subtle shift in his body language. His movements had become more deliberate, his positioning more cautious, and his attention kept flickering between the strange Stalker and Pyrrha as though he were recalculating the entire engagement in real time.

Adam Taurus was not a man who enjoyed fighting battles he could not control, and the exchange had already demonstrated something he had not anticipated. Close combat against either of them was dangerous, while engaging both simultaneously was beginning to resemble a slowly sinking ship with no convenient shore in sight.

Gula's bizarre, fluid swordsmanship had forced him onto the defensive, while Pyrrha's Density rune made conventional attacks against her body almost meaningless. Yet Adam was not out of options simply because the distance between their blades had become unfavorable. There was one distinct advantage he possessed over both of them, an advantage that had been surrounding them from the beginning and had been growing more numerous with every passing second.

The Grimm.

Gula's body might have been extraordinarily malleable and strong, capable of reshaping itself into blades, spears, tendrils and countless other weapons without any apparent concern for conventional anatomy, but Rank 2 Grimm were monsters in their own right.

Particularly the peak Rank 2 specimens that had gathered around the battlefield. Their bodies possessed immense physical strength and their runes could turn individual attacks into devastating assaults. Their sheer mass meant that even a skilled awakened could be overwhelmed if enough of them attacked simultaneously. The fact that Pyrrha could kill them with relative ease was not proof that they were weak.

It was proof that Pyrrha's Density rune was exceptionally well suited for fighting creatures whose primary defense was their physical bodies. She could phase her metallic constructs through flesh, shifting their density and then solidifying them inside the Grimm's body, turning the creature's own durability against itself. That did not make a Rank 2 Grimm a pushover. It merely meant Pyrrha had found a particularly brutal answer to the question of how one killed them.

However, Adam was sure of one thing. Pyrrha's attacks were clearly operating under a non-negligible cost. Adam understood that distinction, and he was perfectly willing to exploit it.

He proved it moments later.

His blade swept through the air, and crimson runic energy erupted outward in a storm of slashes, bolts and compressed arcs that filled the space between him, Gula and Pyrrha. There was no attempt to overpower them with one singular devastating attack. Instead, Adam unleashed dozens upon dozens of comparatively weaker attacks, each one controlled with frightening precision.

The battlefield became a lattice of red light, crimson blades carving through the air from every direction. Gula reacted immediately. His entire body twisted, the shadowy substance that comprised him folding inward before spiraling outward again, transforming him into something resembling a living helix. He moved forwards through the storm rather than retreating, his body constantly shifting its contours to slip between the incoming attacks. A slash passed through where his torso had been a fraction of a second earlier, another scraped across his shoulder and dispersed harmlessly through his Umbra, while a third was caught by a suddenly formed blade extending from his arm and cleaved cleanly in half.

Gula continued advancing, his movement almost impossible to predict because there was no fixed anatomy dictating how he had to move. He could bend where a human could not bend, twist where bones would have prevented motion, and change the shape of his body in the middle of an attack as naturally as a human might change the angle of their wrist.

The Grimm, however, barely acknowledged him.

That was perhaps the strangest part of the entire encounter. The creatures surrounding them did not rush towards Gula, nor did they seem particularly interested in the black, humanoid figure tearing through Adam's attacks.

As a Stalker originating from the Shadow Realm, Gula occupied an unusual place within the sensory awareness of Grimm. He was not exactly invisible to them, but their instincts treated him as something closer to scenery, something that existed but did not warrant attention. Their senses simply did not assign him the same importance they assigned to living humans. Pyrrha, on the other hand, was unmistakably alive.

To the Grimm, she was an obvious target. Their attention consequently shifted toward her, countless monstrous forms surging in her direction while Adam remained free to concentrate on manipulating the battlefield. It was an elegant solution to what had otherwise been a troublesome two-on-one fight. Adam did not need to defeat Gula immediately. He only needed to keep him occupied while the Grimm forced Pyrrha to spend her attention elsewhere.

The strategy worked better than Adam probably expected. Pyrrha found herself surrounded once again, metal constructs erupting around her as Rank 2 Grimm attacked from multiple directions. She thrust one hand forwards and a massive spear of liquid metal shot through the skull of an approaching Beowolf, while another metallic construct formed behind her and intercepted the claws of a second creature.

Yet every time she attempted to redirect her attention toward Adam, another Grimm appeared. Every time she attempted to support Gula, another attack forced her to defend herself. The battlefield had become a machine designed to divide their attention, and Adam was sitting comfortably at its center.

Gula was having problems of his own. Adam's crimson runic energy had begun behaving in ways that made simply dodging it increasingly difficult. The attacks did not merely travel in straight lines anymore. Adam could curve them, reverse them, redirect them and send them circling back toward Gula after they had already passed. What had begun as a storm had become a hurricane. Crimson slashes surrounded Gula from every angle, and the Stalker was eventually forced to abandon his attempts at simply slipping through the gaps.

His arms elongated into broad blades, his torso twisting as he began cutting apart the incoming attacks directly. One crimson slash shattered against his forearm. Another was sliced apart by a blade that grew from his shoulder. A third struck him from behind only for his body to flatten into a sheet of shadow, allowing the attack to pass over him before he reformed.

Adam watched carefully, then smiled beneath his mask.

He had found the opening.

The hurricane of energy had succeeded in slowing Gula's advance. With the Stalker forced to divide his attention between dozens upon dozens of attacks, Adam suddenly surged forwards. His physical blade flashed in one hand while another floating crimson runic sword followed independently, both weapons moving with terrifying synchronization.

Gula's head turned, his white shadow-eyes narrowing as Adam appeared within striking distance. The two collided in a blur of steel and Umbra, and for several seconds the battlefield around them became almost impossible to follow.

Adam's swordsmanship remained extraordinary. His movements were refined through years of experience, every slash carrying purpose, every step designed to place him exactly where he needed to be.

But Gula continued to adapt.

His body flowed around attacks, changing shape in response to Adam's movements rather than anticipating them through conventional human technique. A blade became a shield. A shield became a spear. A shoulder elongated into a tendril that Adam had to sever before it reached him. Gula was not fighting like a swordsman but akin to something that had learned the entirety of swordsmanship and then forgotten that it was supposed to have rules.

Pyrrha, meanwhile, was beginning to feel the strain. Her metal spear was currently embedded in the chest of a massive Grimm, and she had just barely managed to densify the construct enough to block an attack coming from behind. The impact launched her backwards. She crashed into the crimson moon's surface, rolled once and came to a stop on one knee, her metallic constructs scattering around her. She looked upwards and saw the red hurricane surrounding Gula and Adam. Around them, Grimm continued to converge. Hundreds of smaller creatures filled the battlefield while towering Rank 2 specimens moved between them like living buildings.

Pyrrha exhaled slowly.

Her Aura reserves were still substantial. Rank 2 awakened possessed tremendous amounts of Aura compared to Rank 1s, but that did not mean Aura was infinite. Her Density rune consumed a significant amount every time she manipulated the properties of her constructs, and the more complex the alteration, the greater the cost. She had already been fighting for some time, and the battle had become exactly the sort of war of attrition she had feared. There was no simple victory here. They were surrounded by Grimm, the Sleepless were moving toward the core, and more enemies were arriving from the horizon.

Pyrrha's eyes narrowed.

Perhaps it was time.

She had hesitated to use her third rune for precisely this reason. It consumed an absurd amount of Aura, roughly forty percent of her reserves merely to activate and sustain it, and while the power it offered was immense, spending that much Aura in the middle of a battle like this was dangerous.

But she could no longer afford to hold back. Regardless of whether she should be waiting for Blake to appear(according to Jaune's words), there was one thing that was still threading through her mind.

Lives were at stake.

She activated her rune.

At first it looked almost like liquid silver, gathering from the hundreds of metallic fragments scattered across the battlefield. The particles converged toward her body in a spiraling torrent, wrapping around her limbs, torso and head. The metal formed a seamless suit, perfectly smooth and reflective, its surface possessing a mirror-like quality that reflected the crimson moonlight around it. Within seconds, Pyrrha had completely disappeared beneath the silver shell.

Then the shell expanded into a sphere.

It grew larger and larger, swallowing the space around her as metal poured outward in impossible quantities. A Rank 2 Beowolf saw the expanding sphere and immediately lunged, its runic energy gathering around its claws. It slammed into the metallic surface with enough force to crack the ground beneath it.

The sphere rippled.

The impact did not disappear.

Instead, it traveled through the metallic shell, spreading across its surface like a wave moving across a perfectly still lake. The kinetic force gathered, condensed and redirected. Then the entire sphere suddenly refracted the stored energy back into the Grimm.

The Beowolf was hurled backwards like it had been struck by an invisible mountain.

The sphere continued expanding.

It grew beyond the size of a building, then beyond the size of the surrounding Grimm. It became a small mountain of silver, towering over the battlefield and eclipsing several skyscraper-sized Rank 2 Grimm surrounding it. Creatures turned toward it in confusion, some attempting to attack while others instinctively recoiled from the sheer pressure radiating from its surface.

Then the sphere moved.

The metal began to reshape itself.

Its rounded surface became angular. Its proportions shifted. Limbs emerged from the enormous shell, followed by shoulders, a torso and a head. The entire mass of metal contracted and reorganized with mechanical precision, forming something that was neither human nor Grimm, neither armor nor simple construct.

A giant machine. An artificial body of silver metal rose from the battlefield, towering over the surrounding Grimm. One enormous arm lifted and metal flowed toward its hand and condensed into a colossal energy blade.

For one brief instant, everything seemed to hold still.

Then the blade moved.

The swing was so fast that the atmosphere itself ignited around its edge. A sonic boom erupted across the battlefield, and the Rank 2 Grimm surrounding the construct were suddenly cut apart. Bodies split in two. Claws fell away. Heads were severed. Crimson moon rock fractured beneath the force of the passing blade.

Steam erupted around the giant silver figure, generated by the immense heat produced by the blade's movement through the atmosphere. For several seconds, the machine was almost completely obscured by the white vapor.

Then, the steam began to clear.

The silver surface reflected the crimson light of the Moon, giving the machine an almost divine appearance as it towered over the battlefield.

Pyrrha's third rune.

Mecha.

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