The first thought that struck every mind in the expedition was cold, immediate, and absolute.
Third variant.
No one needed to say it aloud. The realization moved through the group like a silent shockwave, visible in the way shoulders stiffened, jaws clenched, and eyes widened beneath the pale shadow light. This was no Asura Stalker. This was something beyond that, a being that belonged to the next stage of the hierarchy they had only begun to understand.
A Formless Stalker.
A third variant.
Equivalent, at the very least, to a Rank 3 entity.
Truth be told, almost nothing reliable was known about their capabilities. No one had a clear profile on what they could do. The only thing consistently written in those records was that they were monstrously powerful.
All around them, the white eyes blooming from the trunks of the giant trees remained fixed on the expedition.
Then the voice came again.
"I was wondering why some of the lesser ones had been dying, but none of them were growing stronger."
There was a pause, and in that pause Jaune felt something like amusement.
"Now it makes sense."
A chill ran down his spine.
The words hadn't come from the air, nor from any visible mouth hidden in the bark or the darkness between the roots. They slid directly into their minds, as smooth and invasive as oil slipping through cracks.
He understood it then. The thing was not speaking aloud at all. There were no mouths moving in the forest, no sound waves reaching his ears. The words were simply there, slithering through thought itself and bypassing every natural sense. It felt deeply unsettling, like something cold and unseen was rifling through the inside of his skull.
Taiyang did not waste a second.
His body erupted in golden-black radiance as his shadow form expanded, flesh and bone warping outward in a violent surge of mass. In the span of a heartbeat, the man was gone, replaced by a colossal eastern dragon whose scales gleamed like polished obsidian beneath the fractured light. The sound of thunder tore through the clearing, as arc of lightning glittered from his scales.
At the same moment, Qrow moved.
His body burst apart into darkness and feathers, reforming into a gigantic crow so vast that it blotted out the treetops. Then, almost immediately, that single massive form split.
One became two and two became four.
Then, four became twelve.
A murder of titanic crows exploded outward, each clone diving toward the expedition members. Talons large enough to crush vehicles instead scooped them up with surprising care.
Jaune barely had time to brace himself before one of the crows lifted him into the air.
They shot upwards quickly.
The forest rushed past them in a blur of impossible scale. They weaved between the tree trunks, trying to escape that creature's gaze.
Then, they burst through the canopy and flew straight up through the air.
Jaune looked down and the sight that engraved itself into his eyes stole the breath from his lungs.
The treetops below had converged.
No, that was not quite right.
They had become something else.
The entire canopy of the forest had folded inward into a single shape, a vast white eye that was staring up at them from below.
It was enormous beyond reason.
Taiyang's dragon form was already the size of a skyscraper. Qrow's crows were scarcely smaller. Yet this eye dwarfed them so completely that it shattered Jaune's sense of proportion.
It stretched for kilometers.
A mountain-sized white eye set within a sea of writhing black shadow.
The eyes had lashes.
However, its lashes were not lashes at all, but long tendrils of living darkness that twisted and squirmed in a wind that did not exist, like serpents made from shadow.
For one stunned heartbeat, Jaune forgot how to breathe.
Then the voice slid into their minds again.
"Where are you going?"
There was no anger in it.
Only curiosity.
And somehow, that made it infinitely worse. The next moment happened faster than Jaune's mind could properly process.
The black lashes moved.
They shot upward into the sky in a violent surge, streaking past Taiyang and the crows like colossal spears. Then they curved inward, folding around their entire formation.
A cage.
A massive birdcage of living shadow snapped shut around them, its bars thicker than buildings, arching overhead into a dome of writhing black.
"Come now," the voice said, smooth and patient. "You know you cannot run."
Jaune felt the emotional signatures bleeding off the Rank 2s around him. Each of them radiated the same thing.
Fatal threat.
Pure and immediate danger.
Jaune had never sensed feelings like this from people at their level before. There was no uncertainty in it and no attempt to mask the truth.
They believed, utterly, that this thing could kill them.
And strangely, the realization was almost enlightening. To see beings he had come to view as monstrously powerful confronted by something so far above them drove home the true scale of what they were facing.
Below them, the enormous eye dissolved.
Its white surface melted inward, collapsing into a vast swirling pool of shadow suspended in the air like a portal.
"Enter."
The single word reverberated through their minds.
The crows circled within the cage, and Taiyang's dragon head turned toward Qrow. For one tense moment, no one moved.
Then Clover spoke, his voice tight but steady.
"We don't have a choice. It's either that or death. This thing clearly isn't playing around."
No one argued.
At once, the crows folded their wings. Taiyang let out a low, frustrated rumble that vibrated through Jaune's bones, and together dragon and crows dove into the portal.
For an instant, there was nothing but cold pressure and motion, as though they had plunged through deep water made from thought itself.
Then they emerged.
The world opened around them.
They were standing above a vast clearing, though calling it a clearing almost felt inadequate.
It was a crater.
A gigantic basin so immense that describing it as city-sized would not have been an exaggeration. The ground sloped gently downward from every direction toward the center, and around the rim stood the same impossible forest they had just escaped, now revealed as a ring encircling this central place.
The heart of the forest.
And in its center stood the pillar.
Jaune stared.
The thing dwarfed even the colossal trees from the forest.
It rose from the earth like a monument carved by something that had never understood scale in the way humans did. It resembled an inverted tree, exactly as the Asura Stalker had described.
Its crown was embedded deep into the black shadow-soil below, as though the trunk had been driven downward into the world itself.
From the top of the tree roots spiraled upward.
Vast black tendrils which twisted toward the heavens, so large that they simply made the surrounding forest look insignificant.
At their upper reaches, the roots did not simply end.
They disappeared into ripples in the air.
Space itself seemed to distort where they touched it, shimmering like the surface of disturbed water. It was as though the roots were piercing some invisible membrane beyond reality.
'Catalyzer...' Jaune thought to himself.
Then Jaune saw the black spheres.
Small, perfectly round orbs emerged from the ends of those roots, glossy and smooth.
For some reason, the word that came to mind was fruit. He did not know why, but the thought settled in his mind with unsettling certainty.
One by one, the black spheres detached.
Then they shot outward.
Tiny comets of darkness streaked away from the pillar and vanished into the distant forest, leaving faint ripples of Umbra in their wake.
It was surreal.
Beautiful in the way a nightmare sometimes could be.
Then his gaze lowered to the center of the crater.
There it was.
The Formless Stalker.
A shifting mass of living shadow that seemed unable to settle into any stable shape. Its body flowed and reformed constantly, like liquid darkness attempting to imitate life and failing.
Only one thing remained constant.
The eye.
A single white eye suspended at the center of the mass, fixed entirely upon them.
Watching and studying.
Instinctively, Jaune felt the creatures using his Weakness sense.
Just as with every Rank 3 entity he had ever encountered, there was simply nothing for his rune to grasp.
And somehow, that terrified him more than anything else.
Taiyang was the first to let his towering rune form fall away. The colossal dragon of storm-black scales and lightning folded inward, shrinking rapidly until only his human shape remained, shoulders squared and eyes hard with caution.
Beside him, Qrow's murder of giant crows unraveled into a storm of dissolving feathers and shadow, each clone collapsing back into darkness before the original body followed, leaving him once more in his usual form.
It was clear to everyone that remaining transformed served no purpose. Against something like this, size and force had become meaningless measurements.
Even without the oppressive suppression that had nearly forced them all to their knees moments earlier, Jaune could still feel the creature's presence surrounding them.
It was different now, less like a crushing mountain and more like being submerged in something vast and unseen.
The sensation reminded him of standing waist-deep in a dark lake whose water was invisible, something cold and fluid pressing against every inch of his skin and sliding along the edges of his thoughts.
It was not merely physical.
It felt as if the very space around them had become saturated with awareness, every breath and every heartbeat observed from all directions at once. The feeling was deeply unsettling, and yet there was something almost hypnotic in its strangeness.
Clover stepped forward into that invisible pressure.
Jaune stared at him for half a second, honestly astonished.
The man had balls.
Massive ones.
"You brought us here for a purpose," he said, voice steady despite the impossible being before them. "What do you want?"
For a moment, the Formless Stalker simply watched him. Its single white eye remained suspended within that shifting mass of living Umbra, unblinking and unreadable. Then it moved. It did not walk so much as it started to flow, its body peeling away from the ground like liquid shadow drawn upward by unseen currents.
The mass rippled closer, reforming constantly as it approached. Limbs emerged only to melt away a second later. Spines, tendrils, and jagged silhouettes flashed into being and dissolved again, as if the creature itself had never quite decided what shape it wished to wear.
When it spoke, the words arrived directly in their minds, smooth and cold, accompanied by the unnerving sensation of something brushing against the surface of their thoughts.
"Mere curiosity."
Jaune stiffened. He could feel the thing touching the pathways of his mind as it spoke, as if invisible feelers were sliding through the outer edges of his consciousness.
"I have never seen creatures like you before."
The Formless circled them slowly, its eye passing over each person in turn. Pyrrha's grip tightened around her spear. Raven's hand remained poised near her sword. Even the researchers, who had spent the last two days practically vibrating with excitement at every discovery, stood frozen beneath the weight of that attention.
"Your forms are beneath lesser ones," it continued, and Jaune felt the ripple of offense and unease move through the group.
Before anyone could react further, the creature added, "Yet your thought structures approach the greater."
That phrasing sent a chill through him. The creature was not merely observing their bodies. It was categorizing their minds.
The invisible pressure around them shifted, and Jaune finally understood what it was. These were not just impressions of presence. They were tendrils of thought, thin and cold, brushing lightly against each member of the expedition. Every flicker of fear, every spike of anger or confusion, seemed to sharpen the creature's attention.
Then it stopped and its eye locked onto him.
Jaune's breath caught.
The Formless surged forward with a suddenness that made several of the Rank 1s flinch. Its body rose around him in a loose ring, shadow spiraling upward until he found himself enclosed by a small wall of shifting Umbra. From within that mass, several tendril-like appendages unfurled, each one ending in a single white eye.
One became three, then seven, then more, until a halo of watching eyes surrounded him from every angle.
"You," the voice slithered through his thoughts, colder now, more focused.
One of the tendrils drifted closer, the eye at its tip lingering near his face. Another moved lower, hovering near darkened chest.
"You are both."
Jaune swallowed.
"A newly born lesser one sleeps within you. Yet your thoughts remain separate. How?"
The question hung in the clearing. Jaune opened his mouth, then hesitated. What was he even supposed to say?
That the thing inside him had once tried to spear its way through his skull and now seemed content to sleep like a gluttonous beast after overeating? The absurdity of it nearly made him laugh, if not for the terrifying circumstances.
Before he could attempt an answer, the senior researcher stepped forward, fear visible in the tightness of her shoulders and the trembling of the stylus in her hand.
"When you refer to greater ones," she asked carefully, "do you mean beings such as yourself?"
The eyes surrounding Jaune lingered for a moment longer, then slowly withdrew. The Formless drifted away from him, reforming into its broader, shapeless mass with the single central eye.
"Indeed."
The answer was simple, almost clinical.
The researcher immediately began jotting down her notes in her holo tablet despite the obvious terror written across her face.
Jaune had to admire her nerve.
The creature drifted a short distance away, its eye narrowing as though in contemplation. Then it spoke again, and this time the mental feelers seemed to slide more deliberately through the surface of their thoughts, skimming images and impressions.
"Now that I think about it… all of you bear a striking resemblance to that one creature that appeared not too long ago."
A hush fell over the clearing.
"How curious."
Its eye moved across the group, lingering briefly on each face.
"Are all of you the same kind?"
The question was so alien in its phrasing that it made Jaune's skin crawl. It was trying to classify them the same way it classified Stalkers.
Before anyone could respond, the Formless suddenly flowed back toward him, faster this time, its tendril-eyes spiraling out once more.
"But… you…"
The white eyes fixed on him from every direction.
"You bear the closest resemblance to that creature."
Jaune's heart began to pound.
"At least... in technical terms. However," the creature continued, "that one did not have any of us within it."
The mental feelers pressed closer to the sleeping presence of Gula inside him. Jaune could almost feel them brushing against the edges of that dormant consciousness.
"Rather," the Formless mused, its voice slower now, as though thinking through the concept even as it spoke, "it was more akin to… a different being altogether?"
There was a pause.
Then the final word slid into every mind in the clearing like a cold knife.
"A parasite?"
Silence followed.
The word seemed to hang in Jaune's mind long after it had been spoken. His thoughts raced. What creature was it talking about? Something it had seen before? Something that resembled humanity, yet different enough for it to struggle with classification?
He felt the Formless catch that spike of panic and confusion in his thoughts.
Its eye brightened.
Curiosity.
Pure, clinical, dispassionate curiosity. It was not looking at them as enemies. It was looking at them as answers.