C'mon now man, I was replying to the 'decade' of experience you said she had. Ruby was fighting opponents of that level on and off for two years at most. A majority of her training (since we're apparently believing Qrow trained her against live Grimm when she was 5) was against mindless Grimm and school-regulated training. then the series proper started which has a two-ish year length.
The decade of experience she has was spent fighting people of that caliber, not just fodder mooks. And no, even if you want to lowball it to just what we see on-screen she would have a bare minimum of 6 years, three years for the timeframe the show takes place in and three years from the fact that she was a junior at Signal which is a combat academy with a high school year structure. The first three seasons of RWBY alone take place over the course of a year and a half.
Yang glows bright yellow when using her Semblance
Weiss and Winter have bright glowing glyphs when using theirs
Nora glows with big bright lightning bolts
Phyrra's coated everything in a noticeable black field
Sun has bright glowing clones
Vine
etc
I am talking about giant neon-sign obvious factors that mean someone is using a Semblance. In the anime when Maka and Soul fight they are not glowing that obviously until Maka goes in for a Hunt, which was my point.
They do not, no. Glowing is not something that people with Semblances do.
For the World of Remnant episode about Semblances, see Aura (WoR episode). Your Semblance is like a muscle. The more you practice with it, the stronger it will become. But if you only focus on one aspect of it... if you fail to test the limits of what you think is possible... then you'll never...
rwby.fandom.com
Here is a list of semblances. The only one that outright glows is Jaune. Pyrrha in particular explicitly does no glow as her entire schtick was that her semblance is stealthy enough that she was able to keep her semblance hidden from everyone in the world for years despite being constantly recorded, to the point that even Atlas' best analytical technology and scientists were not able to determine what her semblance was.
Maka does not need to glow for Ruby to figure out that she is using powers.
Aura does not specifically defend against soul-based attacks. It's the user's soul acting as a shield from harm. These are two very different things. It's been stated multiple times in Soul Eater that meisters can use their Soul Wavelength to bypass defenses and attack the soul directly. It's kind of the thing in Soul Eater.
Im aware that thats how Soul Wavelengths work. Im telling you, Aura has blocked attacks that target the soul directly before.
Again, you're not keeping in mind that Soul is right there in the fight with her. Maka is not fighting with just her own combat skills. And listen, let's be fair here: Maka even has better hand to hand showings than Ruby does, so let's not put the 'when disarmed practically useless' discussion solely on Maka.
Until Ruby disassembles him and flies him miles away from the battlefield. And no, Maka is not the more skilled hand to hand fighter. Maka in H2H combat just throws wild haymakers, karate chops, and drop kicks. Ruby has gone through three timeskip training arcs specifically to improve her h2h combat skill because she recognized she was lacking in that department, getting h2h combat training from Yang and Harriet across the show's run. And the point i was making is that If Ruby is disarmed, she is still the same tier stat-wise, being Small City level and FTL, but if Maka is disarmed she drops from Town level to Building level and Relativistic to Subsonic.
Alright, let's break this down. Maka and BlackStar start fighting KinshinCrona in chapter 105. Maka is separated from Soul in the last 5 pages of this chapter. Not even halfway into 106 she's got Spirit and beats KinshinCrona bad enough they freak out and transform. Being pedantic, this is not even a majority of the fight. I will also point out that Maka and Soul are not using Chain Resonance during this fight, which is a big crux of your arguments against her scaling anywhere reasonable. This same fight has Crona rip a tooth out of the moon with their strength (calculated in the teratons here on the site) and Maka both took and deflected hits from this same KinshinCrona. Before BBD, before Chain Resonance. There's no reason to believe KinshinCrona here is holding back.
There is so, so much wrong with this analysis. So lets break this down PROPERLY:
Chapter 105, the first
few pages are Maka attacking Crona and
Crona allowing her to use her like a punching bag, and
despite Maka pummeling Crona with all of her strength to the point that she is destroying the ground beneath Crona and Soul is questioning if she's actually trying to kill Crona, Crona is visibly physically unharmed.
Crona then starts to actively attack Maka and
Maka admits that if she were fighting alone, Crona would have killed her because of how weak she is. BlackStar starts to fight Crona, and
admits that Crona is even stronger than he is.
Maka tries to get a hit in but it does nothing, and
Crona sends her flying.
Crona then follows up with a Bloody Lance, which BlackStar has to redirect so it doesnt kill Maka.
Maka admits that BlackStar saved her, and then
admits that she's glad he's always around to save her in fights, which BlackStar says just shows how weak she is. Crona then
rips out one of the moon's teeth and
tries to crush Maka and BlackStar with it, but
BlackStar catches it, a
feat of power which scares Maka. Crona then
attacks Maka and BlackStar with Thorn Storm, which
infects them with her madness and
negates their soul wavelengths, preventing them from using soul resonance. Crona then
disarms Maka and BlackStar, forcing them to
fight barehanded, which BlackStar states Maka isnt good at.
Chapter 106, the first few pages are just BlackStar fighting Crona until
Spirit shows up and
has Maka wield him in
place of Soul. Maka
immediately notes the increased power she gets from wielding him and
starts tearing through Crona's defenses and
harming her with her attacks before
hitting her with a Witch Hunt and
Demon Hunt which
does actual damage to Crona.
Spirit explains that the
wavelength bond between a parent and child is so strong that it is able to overpower Crona's wavelength nullification.
So to address your points:
Yes, they were not using Chain Resonance, only Soul Resonance up until Crona nullified it, and Maka still wasnt able to harm Crona in any way, shape, or form while Soul Resonance was active while wielding Soul. Maka took no hits from Crona, Maka herself admitted that Crona would oneshot her if she hit her and BlackStar was constantly protecting Maka and taking hits from her, up to and including being the one to stop the tooth feat because it would have killed Maka, a feat which explicitly terrified Maka because of how strong BlackStar would have had to be to perform said feat.
The ONLY time Maka would scale to Crona is when she is wielding Spirit. Not a moment earlier.
It happened after she realized it was molecular dispersal as well. Volume 9 Chapter 5. Also I'm pretty sure her Aura was not broken the entire fight. It's only broken during the fight with her and Neo. And I'm pretty sure Molecularly Disassembling Neo's weapon would have been beneficial. I'm not even going to try and argue she could have done the same to Cinder because no-one in that fight besides maybe Penny was doing anything.
Neo was already disarmed, there wouldnt have been a point in disassembling her weapon when she didnt even have it.
My point was she couldn't petal into someone and take them along with her. In fact, I don't think there's a single showing where she takes a personagainst her will with her petal. She's only transported her friends. This is why I say the molecular disassembler wincon isn't something she can do. And if that's the case, I don't even think she could theoretically take Soul who is both a weapon and a person. This whole thing is up to speculation though, and we'd be making arguments that have no definitive answer. My point here is that the Petal Burst isn't the be all win-all technique. Also slipstreams, tornadoes and boiling points are not even things that can scratch Maka, and that's even before factoring in BBD.
...Bro. I literally just posted multiple instances of her doing that. Watch the video. Soul is made of physical matter, there is zero reason to assume she wouldnt be able to use her semblance on him. And those extra effects are strong enough to overpower people stronger than Ruby, so Maka, who is weaker than her, would absolutely be affected.
Again, this is the same fight that afterwards had Ren say "Yo you guys lost because you weren't fighting at your best" Ruby never fought peak Harriet. Just like Ace Ops didn't fight a maiden that wasn't trying to actually kill them. Maka and Soul fought the reincarnated Kinshin on the moon and took hits from it that punched holes the moon (with the mass of the Earth) before Soul Chain and BBD even happened. There is no reason to believe that Asura was holding back for any reason. He was trying to kill the three (seven) of them the whole fight.
She did fight peak Harriet though, they explicitly say both in and after the fight that they were actively trying to kill Team RWBY, the only one who wasnt was Marrow who was fighting Weiss.
