Jaune had never personally witnessed the full combat capabilities of a Gladius Centurion. He had, however, seen what an Archer Centurion could do, and the memory rose unbidden with terrifying clarity.
Two nights earlier, in the Dream Realm, he, Weiss, and Blake had been waiting at the perimeter of a Rank Two Nightmare zone. Winter had insisted they remain outside while she handled the core herself. While she was gone, Beringels had emerged from the broken surroundings and had gotten ready to feast on their new prey.
By themselves, Beringels weren't the most dangerous Grimm. However, they were indeed smarter than Beowolves and more coordinated than most of their rank, capable of flanking maneuvers and ambush tactics that punished complacency. A group of them could overwhelm unprepared teams through sheer pressure and numbers.
That night, interestingly enough, they had barely registered as a threat.
An Archer Centurion had deployed ahead of them, an earlier model than what Jaune was currently witnessing. It lacked the helmets and reinforced plating of the newer units.
It had fired once and the group of Beringels had ceased to exist.
Reduced to scorched impressions in the nightmare terrain where they had stood. The shot had been so fast that Jaune had barely processed the movement before the aftermath was all that remained.
Yes, that meant that Archer Centurions had peak Rank 1 combat strength. Possibly even slightly beyond what rank 1 should be capable of.
That memory crashed into the present the moment the first Centurion fired.
Jaune barely had time to even see the projectile.
Yet, he did feel it.
His weakness sense flared violently, screaming danger before his conscious mind could catch up. The sensation tore through his perception like a tearing of fabric, a sudden void where stability should have been.
The shot detonated among a cluster of unawakened personnel.
The explosion was absolute. Flesh and bone were converted into a spray of matter and heat in less than an instant. Blood vaporized midair. What little remained was consumed by the secondary thermal bloom, leaving scorched metal, shattered consoles, and a charred absence where people had been standing moments before.
The command floor reeled.
Before Jaune could even fully register the carnage, more shots followed.
Archer Centurions pivoted with mechanical precision, their mounted weapons cycling without hesitation. Each discharge carried the same annihilating force, aimed with surgical intent at clusters of movement and heat signatures.
Jaune caught the motion out of the corner of his eye. Pietro Pollendina raised one hand, fingers splayed, and reality seemed to fold in response. A transparent barrier bloomed into existence, layered with glowing blue mechanical patterns that interlocked like shifting circuitry. The shield expanded outward, enveloping Pietro and his two assistants in a dome of force.
The next volley slammed into it.
Explosions tore across the barrier's surface, warping the air and shredding the surrounding environment. More consoles shattered and even the structural supports of the area groaned. The shockwave sent debris skidding across the floor.
Inside the shield, Pietro and his assistants remained unharmed and they didn't stop moving.
Jaune saw their hands flying across holographic interfaces, command tablets projecting streams of code and diagnostics. Pietro's expression was taut with concentration, his focus absolute as he attempted to reassert control over systems that were no longer listening.
The shield held.
Elsewhere, Weiss reacted by using her rune. Element flared into a cold cascading outwards, violent surge. Ice erupted from the floor and air alike, forming a massive crystalline barrier that sealed off an entire partition of the command room. The wall rose thick and dense, layered with reinforced runic power that gleamed under the emergency lights. It enclosed dozens of unawakened operatives, cutting off their line of sight to the Centurions and providing what should have been impenetrable protection.
For a heartbeat, it seemed like it might be enough.
Then the Gladius Centurions charged.
They moved with terrifying momentum, heavy frames accelerating far faster than their mass suggested possible. Their four armed blades ignited as they ran, edges glowing with an unnatural heat that distorted the air around them.
The first strike hit the ice wall and the barrier failed.
The blade slid through the reinforced ice as though it were water, carving a glowing channel that instantly collapsed into steam. Another strike followed, then another, each cut widening the breach. Chunks of ice sloughed away, melting before they hit the ground.
The wall failed in seconds.
Yet Jaune was ready.
He reached out with his weakness rune, focusing on the nearest Gladius Centurion as it burst through the collapsing barrier. His weakness sense flooded him with information. Structural stress points. Energy distribution. Material density far beyond conventional alloys. Integrated systems layered so tightly that they bordered on redundancy.
He had never analyzed a Centurion this closely for he had never thought that he needed to.
Curiously enough, his weakness rune responded in a way he didn't expect.
Instead of resisting the density and pushing back as it would against an awakened with Aura or a Grimm, it yielded and invited more input. The sensation was almost permissive, as though the Centurion's structure did not have the same metaphysical shield that operatives and grimm had against his meta rune.
So Jaune pushed.
He poured more weakening force into the target than he ever had before on a creature at peak rank 1.
The effect was immediate and catastrophic.
The Gladius Centurion dissolved.
Metal lost cohesion and molecular bonds unraveled. The armored frame slumped inward, collapsing into a viscous slurry that splashed across the floor in a smoking heap. The glowing blade guttered and vanished as its structure failed, leaving nothing but warped remnants sinking into themselves.
The cost hit Jaune a heartbeat later.
Aura drained from him in a sharp, dizzying rush. The expenditure was far greater than it should have been. It seemed that although a Centurion didn't have the same defense of aura against his meta rune, it did have runic energy flowing in its system, which meant that it would cost Jaune more aura to weaken the robot's bonds.
Surprise flickered through him at this but instinct took over.
Another Gladius Centurion lunged toward Weiss, blade raised in a killing arc. Jaune moved without thought, intercepting the strike with a brutal collision of force and will. The impact sent a brutal shockwave through his body and launched him backwards painfully, into a row of broken consoles, but fortunately the blade was stopped inches from Weiss's position.
Weiss didn't falter, she jumped backwards and evaded the following few attacks. A few operatives jumped forwards and engaged the Centurion that were aiming at Weiss.
Her attention was now freed up to be locked elsewhere. Her rune flared repeatedly as she deflected Archer Centurion shots aimed at exposed personnel. Each deflection required precision and timing, redirecting annihilation away from unawakened bodies and into reinforced structures that could barely withstand the impact.
Around them, other awakened operatives were caught in the same impossible bind.
They formed moving shields, intercepting fire, dragging the wounded out of danger, and striking back when openings appeared. There was little room to maneuver as the command floor, while relatively large was still too confined.
The Centurions too relentless.
The environment was deteriorating rapidly.
Explosions chewed through walls and support beams buckled. Holographic displays shattered and sparked, their data spilling into static. Smoke and steam filled the air, carrying the acrid scent of scorched metal and burned circuitry.
The base alarm wailed, its tone rising and falling in an unending warning.
Unfortunate as it was, Rank One operatives weren't built to fight Centurions in the real world.
The limitation was absolute and unforgiving. Rank One awakened could only retain 10% of their Dream Realm output when manifested in reality. Even with that fraction, they were vastly beyond ordinary humans in speed, strength, and reaction time. But Centurions were not ordinary enemies. They were engineered to operate at peak Rank One combat performance at all times, without fatigue, hesitation, or fear. And furthermore, because they didn't have "stats" in the same way an awakened did, they were probably even more powerful. What a Rank One awakened could only partially access, the Centurions embodied fully and constantly.
It was an uneven equation from the start.
The awakened fought with instincts dulled by reality's restrictions, while the machines fought as if the Dream Realm's rules still applied.
It did not take long for that imbalance to become fatal.
The command floor had already become a warzone of fire and debris when the first Rank One operative died. The death did not arrive with dignity or warning rather, in pieces.
A Gladius Centurion surged through a cloud of smoke, its mechanical limbs digging into the fractured floor as it closed the distance with terrifying speed. One moment, two operatives were fighting side by side deflecting shots meant for the unawakened personnel behind them, the next, one of them was no longer whole.
The Centurion's blades moved in a precise, vertical arc.
The woman was split cleanly into four sections, her body divided before her nervous system could even register pain. Blood and organs burst outward, painting the air and floor in a violent spray. The sound that followed was not an explosion or a scream, but a raw, animal wail torn from the throat of the man beside her.
Blake was standing close enough that the remains struck her.
Warmth splashed across her face and armor. The copper stench flooded her senses. For a fraction of a second, her body locked up, instincts colliding with horror in a way training could not immediately suppress.
The Gladius Centurion turned toward her.
The man reacted first, lunging forward in blind fury. His armament rune flared as ethereal lightning condensed around his arms and weapon, crackling violently as he struck. The Centurion barely acknowledged him. Two of its blades intercepted his attacks with effortless precision, metal and energy colliding without slowing its advance.
It stabbed toward Blake and they passed through her neck. Her head separated cleanly from her shoulders.
But then, her body dissolved.
The severed form collapsed into shadow and smoke, dispersing into nothing.
A Phantom clone.
The real Blake emerged behind the Centurion in the same instant, her katana already descending. She drove the blade down into the seam at the base of the Centurion's neck, targeting the junction where armored torso met command core. More copies of her appeared in flashes of black and violet, each one striking at joints, legs, and connection points in coordinated precision.
For a heartbeat, it almost worked.
The Gladius Centurion responded by anchoring itself.
Its spider like legs drove into the shattered floor with brute force, metal claws digging deep as if locking the machine to the world itself. Then it spun like a beyblade.
The rotation was sudden and violent. The blades became a horizontal storm, slicing outward in a perfect circle. Blake's clones were shredded mid motion, severed and erased in flashes of dissipating shadow. The real Blake reacted instantly, activating her Substitute rune. Her form vanished and was replaced by her clone just as the spinning blades passed through the space she had occupied and cut down her clone instead.
She reappeared several meters away, already moving.
The man that was near her was not so fortunate.
An Archer Centurion fired.
The shot detonated nearby, the explosion hurling the man through the air. He raised a glowing shield of electric energy just in time to absorb the brunt of the blast, but the force still carried him forward, straight into the path of the spinning Gladius Centurion.
He tried to recover and block but when the shield met the spinning Beyblade centurion, it shattered.
His body was torn apart in a fraction of a second, reduced to shredded flesh and fragments that scattered across the command floor in a gruesome arc. Blood splashed across broken consoles and scorched walls, mixing with smoke and fire.
The deaths did not stop there.
More operatives fell as the Centurions advanced. Some were cut down while shielding unawakened personnel. Others were obliterated by Archer fire while attempting to reposition. Rank One awakened fought with everything they had, but every exchange cost them ground, stamina, and lives.
Jaune's weakness sense registered the absence where presence had been, voids opening and closing as people died from the battlefield. The impact from blocking the Gladius Centurion's strike was more powerful than he had expected. For a moment, his vision had dimmed and his consciousness had wavered. If the Centurions had pressed him then, he would have died.
Yet he couldn't afford to slow down.
Five Centurions. That was all it took. Five machines were dismantling a command floor full of trained operatives.
He reached out with his Weakness rune again, but this time he did not focus on a single target. He expanded his awareness, locking onto every Centurion within range. His sense mapped their structures simultaneously, flooding him with overlapping data and stress points.
He condensed his rune and the metaphysical weakening force surged outward in layered waves, each one targeting molecular cohesion, energy pathways, and structural integrity all at once.
Aura drained from him in a brutal rush. His reserves plummeted, yet he pushed anyway.
The effect was instantaneous.
The first Gladius Centurion collapsed inward, its frame liquefying as bonds failed and metal lost meaning. The second followed a heartbeat later, its blades sagging and dissolving before the rest of the body slumped into a heap of smoking slurry. Archer Centurions fared no better. Their mounted weapons sagged and fell apart as internal systems unraveled, their frames melting into warped pools of useless material.
In seconds, all five Centurions were gone.
The battlefield fell silent.
Not a peaceful silence, but the stunned absence of immediate violence. Smoke drifted through the ruined command floor. Fires crackled where ruptured systems burned unchecked. Gore and chunks of bodies lay scattered among debris and shattered machinery.
Jaune staggered, catching himself against a fractured console as the last of the weakening force dissipated.
Then the sprinklers activated.
Water rained down from the ceiling, hissing as it met hot metal and extinguishing flames in sputtering bursts. Survivors stood frozen beneath the artificial downpour, soaked and shaking, staring at the aftermath.
The alarms continued to wail.
Jaune straightened slowly, water dripping from his hair. His body ached and his head throbbed, but he was still standing.
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AN: 上級章はパトレオンで入手可能です