Hello again! If you're here from Scatterer, you should have a good idea of what's going on, but if not, you'll need some explanation. Between volumes four and five, I began writing a RWBY/Worm crossover taking place several months after Salem's death, wherein Ruby was transported to Earth Bet and had to find her way back. That's still ongoing (and will be for... a significant amount of time), but volumes of RWBY are continuing to come out in the meantime. Volume five actually lined up fairly well with what I had planned for the intervening period, but Volume six is going in a completely different direction. I'm now writing this, partially to help me keep my own timeline straight, and partially to show my audience what is and isn't canon to my own story. I'm writing this as a sort of mini-NaNoWriMo project, aiming for 30,000 words in the month of November, and staggering releases to perhaps twice a week.
This picks up near the end of Volume Five, with a few key changes - Vernal is the Spring Maiden instead of Raven, and Cinder has no idea where they are. There are many other differences, some of which you're about to see, but otherwise, the broad strokes are very similar to Volume 5.
To clarify, this is not a fix-fic. I'll admit to having some minor issues with RWBY's writing, but I'm perfectly happy with how its story is playing out. If you haven't read (and don't want to read) the fic that this is a sequel to, then you can treat this as simply an alternate take on canon. Neither fic will be required reading for the other - they should both function as independent stories.
Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy!
Chapter One
52 Months until Crossover
Haven Academy
Until the explosions started, this had been a pretty fun night. Lionheart had been acting sketchy and nervous, but that wasn't unusual for him. Then the whole school had shaken as something blasted its way through what was, according to Ruby's ears, the exterior wall of Lionheart's office, and we had all started running, the headmaster himself hanging back in what looked to me like raw terror.
Whatever, we'd figure out what was up with him after.
The door was locked, but I, assuming the office was probably irrecoverable in the other side, (and totally not just ignoring the possible collateral damage), blasted a hole through it with a single shotgun-enhanced punch and dived through the new hole in the door. I rolled, coming to my feet in a guard that fell apart as soon as I saw the damage.
The entire wall was gone, fire from the explosion burning everywhere I looked and dangerously close to escaping the room and reaching the neighboring rooms. A second hole, torn through the upper half of the wall to my right, looked to have blasted through into an elevator shaft, with scorch marks heading down. Ruby joined me as I watched the area, and I heard Weiss and Team JNPR coming up behind her.
A gunshot echoed, followed by shouting and return fire. I jumped with the first one, but the return fire was muffled enough to give away its location on the opposite side of the building. Before I had even figured out what was going on though, Ruby was already turning and shouting back through the gap - "Jaune, Nora, Ren, find out what's going on and see if you can stop the fighting! If this is Cinder, then that might be White Fang backup. Weiss, you come with us, we might need your glyphs!"
The building shook again, this shockwave seeming to come from far, far beneath us, down inside the mountain. A rush of heat came up the shaft a moment afterword.
Ruby jumped up onto the ledge, looking down into the shaft in a way that should have terrified any normal older sister but was a downright weekly occurrence for us. The rest of the door came down, and Qrow pulled his sword out of the pile of rubble before joining us, Weiss strutting carefully over the rubble after him. Oscar-slash-Ozpin, however, was nowhere to be seen.
"Where's the wizard?" I asked.
Qrow responded, "Ozpin's dealing with Lionheart, he'll join us once he's done."
He was doing that now? We were about to go up against a Maiden, one of the strongest people on the planet, and now he was leaving us behind. Fantastic.
Yet another shockwave, the biggest one yet, seemed to make the entire mountain shake underneath us. The fighting outside seemed to pause for a second, then start right back where it left off. Ruby was the one to say what we were thinking - "We don't have time to wait for him, we need to move before Cinder brings the whole mountain down."
Weiss looked toward Qrow, who was looking down the hole himself as if trying to see what was happening. "Could she do that? Are the Maidens honestly that powerful?"
He looked up, and though nobody else aside from Ruby would have noticed it, I could see the worry on his face. "I don't know. Amber couldn't, but she was new to the job."
"It doesn't matter." Ruby's voice had that note of determination that worried me to the same level that someone else might've had while seeing their family standing on that ledge. Dad had always said she was too much like Summer for her own good, and it was these moments where I could see what he meant. "Cinder's going after the Relic, and from the sound of things, she's blowing right through all the defenses protecting it. We need to get down there."
Qrow and I exchanged a glance, but I still stepped up. Ruby was a little too comfortable with risking her life for either of us to be comfortable, but she wasn't wrong. Qrow transformed - and holy crap was that still freaky - and started nosediving as the three of us stepped over the ledge.
It didn't take long for me to notice that this hole was way deeper than I thought it was. I kept my eyes open so I didn't hit the ground unprepared, but it still took a solid twenty seconds before I saw the bottom of the shaft. I fired Ember Celica forward and down to push me toward the wall, then raised my Atlesian prosthetic and slammed it into the side, burying it up to the wrist and using it to slow my descent. Beneath me, Ruby used her Semblance to take the fall, Qrow turned back into his human form, and Weiss hit one of her glyphs at full speed, stopping in an instant as the force of her impact rippled out through the ground under the glyph.
Show-off. It was good to have her back.
The damage ahead of us was incredible. The ceiling must've been a hundred feet in the air, the entire, enormous room outlined in shades of blue and black, but fires raged everywhere. The smoking remains of automated turrets and even a couple of Atlesian spider-mechs smoking in the middle. A fifteen-foot hole was burned through the middle of a side wall, forty feet in the air and ten feet thick.
On the bright side, her trail was super easy to follow.
We climbed up through the wall as fast as we could and found yet more wreckage on the opposite side. This time, it seemed as though the walls themselves were Cinder's target, and from the looks of things she had even switched to using lightning and ice attacks. This room was way less ostentatious, and there weren't any more obvious barriers. Cinder had kept attacking the walls as she moved through though, and every once in a while, as we ran past, I caught glimpses of machinery struggling to move. Hidden defenses?
A flash of light caught our attention up ahead, at the far end of the seemingly-endless hallway. It was punctuated a second later by a shockwave that nearly blew us off our feet as we ran and a wave of cold sweeping down the hallway in its wake that actually did. Whatever she was doing, we were at serious risk of getting hurt just from the collateral. I thought I could hear screaming from that general direction, though what she had to scream about I had no idea.
We picked ourselves up and started running even faster, everyone but Ruby tapping into their second or third winds. We had to get there, had to stop what she was doing, or Salem would-
We stumbled into the final chamber, a room the size of a small office building that had been absolutely shredded by elemental attacks of all varieties - but there was no crazed Maiden to greet us. We looked down, at the base of the three-story high tiered structure that dominated the center of the room, and saw a broken body lying folded over a stair. Cinder's dress was shredded, and the hole in her torso was proof enough that she was about as dead as you could get. I hadn't expected the Grimm arm, but then I also hadn't really been expecting to live this long after going inside, either.
We had all stopped, frozen in shock, and I was the first one to partially recover. "What… what the hell happened?"
I looked to Qrow, hoping he would have some kind of answer for me, but he wasn't looking at the body. He was looking at the room's center, where a cube made entirely out of shimmering black Dust had been blown apart in the fighting.
I couldn't figure out what he was doing, but Weiss did. "The Relic. It was in there, wasn't it?"
He dropped his sword, and as I heard Ozpin and JNPR's footsteps running up to join us Qrow pulled out his flask and chugged the rest of its contents in one go. "Yeah. Yeah, it was."
"Yang? Yang, wake up."
I groaned, wanting nothing more than to curl back up into the warm, fuzzy comfort of the blanket. Say what you will about Atlas, they know how to keep a person warm.
"Yang. I will get a bucket of water. Don't think I'm joking. We're almost there, Ozpin wants to talk to us."
Hearing Ozpin's name woke me up the rest of the way. I sat up, stretching my good arm, and blinked the sleep out of my eyes as I looked up at the speaker. "Are we there yet?"
Blake rolled her eyes. "We will be in twenty minutes, and Ozpin's being pretty insistent. Come on, let's go."
Ugh, of course, he was. I wished I could complain about it, but then it sounded like an opportunity to get some information out of him for a change. I rolled out of my bed, glanced out the window at the rapidly approaching Solitas coastline, and followed Blake out the door.
Normally, I'd put the Author's Note down here, but I already said most of what I wanted to up above. Again though, thank you for reading! Next chapter probably on either Tuesday or Wednesday.