Day 9: Ren & Pyrrha
Genres: Friendship
Disclaimer: I do not own RWBY.
Chapter 9. Coal And Crimson
"Come on, you can do it! Just one more time," Pyrrha called.
"I'd really rather not," Ren replied hollowly.
"If you don't, you leave me no choice but to come back over there and throw you myself."
"Alright, alright." He raised his hands for peace, trying to deter her from taking any hasty actions. "Just give me a minute."
Presently, he stood at one end of a chasm while his teammate faced him from the opposite side. The two of them were currently in a bit of a predicament.
Team JNPR had been sent out to deal with a Beowulf sighting on the outskirts of the Emerald Forest. Citizens of Vale had mentioned seeing the monsters close to town, and reported it. Beacon Academy's immediate response was to send out a capable team to deal with the issue, and they had managed quite well with the first group of beasts.
However, they hadn't been expecting more than the number they had been told to expect, which was twenty. Therefore, when another hoard of the beasts had come howling down the hills from behind them, team JNPR had been split in two.
Jaune had declared it would be better to break the wolves apart and deal with smaller groups. But the way things worked out, the pairs they ended up being split into were not with their respective partners, and they'd had no choice but to work with the plan in that manner.
Pyrrha and Ren were currently on their way back to reunite with their teammates, having stumbled upon an alternative route to fighting the bloodthirsty beasts that had chased them through the trees; fueled by adrenaline, the two had managed to clear the chasm the first time, leaving the beasts to fall into the pits where they were made easy targets for the students' bullets.
But now, Ren stood at the edge of the cliff face, looking down at the still-disintegrating bodies of the Grimm and swallowed hard. The only thing motivating him to make the jump this time was Pyrrha, who was thankfully quite different from a pack of hellhounds.
He had taken the running start five times already, but always came screeching to a halt just before he could jump. The first time, Pyrrha had nearly suffered a heart attack, but now it was becoming clearer to her that he was just not motivated enough to make the jump. While she didn't want to rush him and have it result in him injuring himself, she also wanted to get back to find her teammates as quickly as possible.
"Okay, you've go four options," she called to Ren. "One: I jump back over there and throw you myself. Two: you climb down the cliff, across the bottom and back up the other side, although I can't assure there aren't more Grimm lurking down there," she added meaningfully. "Three: you wait for some other pack of monsters to motivate you into jumping back over. Or four - and what I believe to be most preferable - you stop worry and make the jump right now."
"I said to give me a minute," he reminded her.
Ren had never exactly been the most athletically adapt person. No matter how hard he trained he never seemed to gain much muscle, and he always ended up collapsing after long battles or hikes through the woods. Even now, he was already starting to feel tired, and he still believed it to be truth that Nora sapped his energy away and took it as her own.
"Come on, Nora," he mumbled to himself. "Just a little bit."
Tracing back the path he had run five times already, crouched low, he measured the distance for the jump. Pyrrha was poised on the other side, watching his movements carefully and prepared to nail him to the side of the cliff with her javelin if necessary. He really hoped things wouldn't turn out that way, and he gathered as much power as he could before taking off.
He didn't hesitate this time, leaping off the cliff and firing two blasts from Stormflower into the ground to help propel himself upward and forward. He couldn't stop himself from glancing below what must have been a mile down to where the bone masks of the Grimm were the only things left of them by now.
Pyrrha anticipated that he would make it across and promptly dropped her weapon, reaching out to steady his rough landing when he finally reached her.
"See?" She punched his shoulder affectionately, as only she could. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"
"Just... give me a minute..." Ren sat down heavily onto the ground as he put away his guns.
Pyrrha kept her shield at her side as she surveyed the forest around her. "If we keep going in a straight line, we should end up right where the four of us split." She guessed. "I wonder if we should stay there or go out to search for them?"
"Let's just get back there first, shall we?" he suggested.
"Right." Pyrrha reached down her hand and he gratefully accepted the offer.
He followed her back through the woods at a steady pace, as they were both fairly exhausted, even though Pyrrha concealed the fact more effectively. "Let me know if anything looks familiar," she suggested.
"Not really," he replied. "Everything just looks like trees. But I'm sure we'll find them soon enough," he added, noticing her emerald eyes flashing with worry.
They continued on for a while, and Ren noticed she was growing more and more anxious. "I'm sorry," she said at one point, which seemed to be her favorite phrase. "This is all my fault."
"No, it isn't," he informed her. "You know they'll be fine, so why are you concerning yourself?"
"Because it was my fault for not noticing the wolves sooner. I thought we were winning so I got careless and let my guard down."
"That happens to all of us," he said. "You're doing it again, Pyrrha, worrying about trivial things that no one else is worried about. Do you honestly think any of us blame you specifically for it?" She seemed to consider for a moment, and he went on. "Besides, it's not that big a deal. It's not like we're on a time limit or anything. I know it might be against your nature, but you should try to worry less."
She cast him a sideways glance and smiled slightly.
"Right. Thanks, Ren."
"No thanks necessary."
He had noticed this about Pyrrha since their first mission, how she tended to blame herself for everything and anything that went wrong, no matter how small it was. Sometimes, she would hang her head shamefully for days afterward, always under the impression that the rest of them was mad at her until they told her directly that wasn't the case.
Ren couldn't help but worry about her sometimes, and he knew Jaune and Nora felt the same way, as the three of them had made it a goal for themselves to have Pyrrha stop her self-imposed guilt trips.
Feeling that he had been successful this time, Ren continued to walk beside her, trying to recall whether any one tree looked somewhat more familiar than another. Rather than calling out to their teammates and drawing more unwanted attention to themselves, they relied on sight, seeking out any splash of color.
However, what they ended up spotting weren't the familiar figures they were searching for.
Pyrrha sensed them as well and stopped moving, slowly raising her shield as Ren drew his guns.
"How many?" he asked her.
"About twenty."
"Fantastic."
The sounds of grunting and squealing grew louder as the trampling of the underbrush drew toward them. Seconds later, the bushes exploded with the beady red eyes of the Borabatusk, their burly black bodies charging clumsily through the foliage.
Pyrrha blocked the first one's charge with her shield, knocking it backward and dazing it long enough to allow Ren to shoot it between the eyes. Normally, if it had been the four of them, Pyrrha would have stuck to using her shield and fending the beasts off in this manner, disorienting them before allowing her teammates to finish them off.
However, being they were two members short, she needed to use her javelin as well, as the beasts were too well armored for her rifle to be much use.
Her aim wasn't as precise as Ren's when it came to such close-range battles, and he was able to use his guns to blast the eyes every time. Pyrrha kept one eye on him as she bowled over another of the creatures, running her spear up its belly to silence it.
But once they had halved the number of adversaries, she could tell Ren was getting tired, already enervated from the previous battle and leap across the chasm. With a mighty swing of her spear, Pyrrha forced back the circle of boars for an instant, confusing them momentarily and giving Ren and herself a bit of free time. "Ren!" She got his attention and crouched down, readying her shield above her knee.
His magenta eyes locked with her emerald ones for a split second.
"You're not serious-"
"Up you go!" she said in a voice that didn't allow for questions.
The boars were beginning to reconvene and Ren saw no other options. He jumped up in the same fashion he usually saw Nora execute, as this was her favorite move and she was always eagerly waiting for Pyrrha to cue her in every battle.
His feet came into contact with the shield for a split second before Pyrrha gathered her strength and jumped, launching him up into the air, soaring above the trees.
The boars were already upon her, and Pyrrha slashed out left and right, taking down two more of them. But from his vantage point, Ren could see that her back was wide open and he took aim, shooting down three more of them and giving Pyrrha more time to react to the remaining five. She caught her shield around one's tusks and gave a powerful yank, tearing the bone and leaving the beast screaming and bleeding. She slashed the throat of another, which knocked the one behind it onto its side, giving her a clear shot to the neck.
As Ren descended, he shot the final two, landing seconds later over the corpses as they began to rot away. He looked up to find Pyrrha giving him a triumphant smile, but all he could do was slump to the ground.
"That... was absolutely insane," he wheezed.
"Do you see now why Nora enjoys it so much?"
"I guess I can," he put a hand to his head. "But please... if we can help it, let's not ever do that again."
"No promises," Pyrrha shrugged. "I wonder how she'll react when she finds out you did her 'special move'. The Jump of Justice, I believe it was?" she mused, sitting down beside him for a moment to catch her breath.
As Ren put away his guns, he noticed a line of red trickling down Pyrrha's arm, too dark to be her hair. A long, nasty gash from one of the tusks bled freely, and he winced just looking at it. She noticed his reaction and quickly tried to cover the injury.
"It's okay," she reassured him. "It's not that deep."
"Either way, it'll heal better if I help. Your aura's already pretty strained after the first fight." He placed a hand over her arm and channeled from his own aura, emitting it onto the wound. It healed notably faster after that, and Pyrrha bowed her head.
"Thank you, Ren."
"I told you, no thanks necessary." He got to his feet, this time offering his hand to her. "We're teammates, after all."
Pyrrha smiled up at him as she slipped her palm into his. "Right!"
Picking their way around the disappearing bodies of the Grimm, they continued on their original path in an attempt to make it back to the location of their initial battle.
Thankfully, it was only a few minutes longer before they saw two familiar figures up ahead. Nora raced over to them as Jaune followed on wobbling legs.
"Ren!" As she always did every time they had been separated for more than five minutes at a time, Nora threw her arms around his neck. "We saw you! I mean we saw you flying above the trees! You did the Jump of Justice, didn't you? Wasn't it amazing?!" she babbled.
"Yes, it was... quite something." He cleared his throat, trying to stay on his feet as she let him go.
By then, Jaune had limped up to them, panting.
"Are you... guys okay...?" he asked, trying to use his leader voice.
"We're fine," Pyrrha replied, happy to have the four of them back together. "What about you two?"
"We're right as rain!" Nora saluted. "We were fighting the Beowulves for, like, half an hour because more of them just kept coming! But I made this rift in the ground and..."
As Nora babbled on, Pyrrha listened attentively, smiling all the while.
Ren looked up as Jaune limped over to him.
"I don't know how you do it, man," his leader muttered. "Keeping up with her, I mean."
"I really don't know either," Ren replied. "It just looks like I can manage. Somehow." The two boys let out a simultaneous sigh as their eyes flashed to the girls in front of them.
Then, the girls turned back to stand beside them, and the team listened to Nora's eager storytelling as they headed back home.
A/N: Haven't done some JNPR love in a while. Hope you liked it! Next chapter is the finale!
Please review!
