"Please understand, I wouldn't be asking you if it wasn't critical."
The two boys stood at ease in front of Ozpin once again, unamused and perhaps displeased with the gravity of the situation.
"You may not like it, but I don't want you to interfere with team RWBY's investigations."
Naruto's grip behind his back tightened, not liking this order in the slightest. He had just gotten used to the concept of Ozpin as headmaster, he was not fully ready to accept the older man as his commander.
"You will observe and report back. Your primary goal in this mission is to be undetected. Failure means that you lose your anonymity, and so you would lose your primary value to me." The logic was sound, it was everything anyone could have hoped for in a leader, and as a mission it would be a breeze for the trained shinobi.
"You can't tell me that if I see my friends in danger that I can't do anything about it!" Ease of completion was not important to the blond boy. He was much more concerned for the safety of his friends than playing recon for Ozpin's edification.
The man's poker face did not slip a minutia. "I won't stop those students from conducting their own investigation. They will become a part of this soon enough, if we cannot prevent what the White Fang and their associates are planning. Exposing them to the dangers you face would only increase the problems for both you and them. If you do the job right, they will never have to know anything. So I repeat: do not reveal yourself, to either enemies or friends."
Sasuke nodded at the finality of the man's tone, taking it for dismissal. He turned to leave, Naruto following a second behind, but not before staring the man down behind the safety of his desk, briefly contemplating seeing if the man was a capable as he portended to be. He restrained himself, scholastic learning helping to temper him by making him think farther into the future about consequences.
They had almost made it to the elevator when Ozpin called out lightly. "That is also to say, as long as you remain anonymous and return unharmed, you can use any methods you wish to accomplish this task." He now stared directly at Naruto with his amber eyes sandwiched between his snowy eyebrows and indigo glasses. "I will not blame you for any other actions you deem necessary in the completion of this mission. Am I clear?"
"Perfectly."
So here they were, freezing their asses off on a damp and cold rooftop in the harbor district draped in a thin, black tarp to hide them from their potential targets and from Blake and Sun on an adjacent rooftop doing much the same thing.
After debriefing Sasuke on his and Blake's conversation, he sought out Sun again, and dropped the older boy the fact that Blake would be waiting for him at 9:00 PM in the harbor district. He tactically omitted some of the more incriminating parts of that conversation, though.
"Maybe they won't show?" Naruto whispered shakily to Sasuke. He wasn't scared, just cold. Sitting still on a damp and deserted rooftop in the middle of the night was not something he enjoyed doing. They had to arrive before the Faunus pair, and so had been staking out the potential crime scene for the past five hours. Naruto idly wondered if the other two were having similar thoughts.
Sasuke shook his head negative. "Ozpin knows more than he is letting on. He wouldn't have asked us out here and gave us so specific instructions if nothing was going to happen."
As Sasuke concluded this observation and fell silent, a low whirring noise became evident to the twos' battle honed senses. "And here we go…"
Two unmarked Bullhead transports glided in to the clearing in front of the storage buildings where the shipping containers holding the millions of Liens worth of Dust resided. The force from their descending engines whipped up debris scattered on the dock and sent a gust up the walls of the building where the two ninja crouched, carrying the smell of oil and fish on a warm wind.
They saw several forms emerge from the craft, even before they had landed. Their outfits resembled greatly the ones worn by the ANBU forces back in Konoha, but knew them to be the hallmarks of the White Fang from the briefing Glynda had given them before departing.
Another familiar form from the hasty PowerPoint then emerged from the farther Bullhead. He was even wearing the same clothes. Was that some kind of evil villain protocol?
"Hurry up you animals, before the cops show up!" Roman Torchwick shouted at the assembled White Fang members who did not seem to like being addressed as such, but proceeded to give a wonderful emulation of ants as with military-like precision began to deprive the shipping containers of their contents and transport it in bucket lines to the idling craft.
Naruto's heart went out to Blake out this outcome, but almost stopped dead when he saw her shadowy form leap down for her concealment to accost the criminals in the midst of their laboring.
Her voice projected around the entire courtyard.
"White Fang members! Why are you working with a criminal like Roman Torchwick?"
The only reply she got from the two ninja's perspective was for the masked and uniformed individuals to produce bladed weapons and advance on the lone interloper.
Naruto was ready to leap himself right behind Blake. He had learned some restraint in these past few months, but it handily went out the window when a friend was in danger. Sasuke held firm to the hood of his tabard, though.
"Let me g-!" Sasuke clamped his hand over Naruto's mouth and Naruto tasted the dirt and grime they had been huddled in all night long. He sent Sasuke a withering glare, but the boy was unrelenting.
"Idiot," Sasuke said, voice barely audible over the sounds of combat below. "Ozpin specifically told us not to interfere. Besides, you should have more faith in their skills."
True enough, as Naruto swallowed much of his indignation and turned to regard the scene unfolding down on the docks, he saw both Sun and Blake were both more than capable of taking care of the clearly inferior forces of the White Fang. He was still upset at being kept from the fight, but was not going to go leaping into the fray just yet.
The two on the ground were methodically taking down their Faunus foes, slowly but surely whittling away their numbers. A brief shadow in front of the stars out to their right set them alert again. There trained eyes focused in the minimal light from the stars and shattered moon three more quickly approaching Bullheads.
"Fuck it." This apt statement said, Naruto leapt off the rooftop before Sasuke could restrain him. He watched the back of the black-caped blond, quickly melting into the darkness, and looked back to the fight, where it seemed the two sides were at a standstill, with Roman Torchwick deciding to throw his hand into the ring. Sasuke bit his cheek in consternation, for once, unsure of what to do, or not do.
"Idiot."
Naruto quickly closed the distance on a path that would take him right underneath the craft of their current trajectory. He came skidding to a halt on a steepled rooftop of a particularly tall building and waited in the shadow of a clay chimney until the aircraft got within his range. He reached into his utility pouch and withdrew a handful of shuriken. He had felt around in his pouch for the telltale texture of paper that would be the ones he had plastered with his homebrew explosive notes.
He had yet to test them in combat, but the last few practices without the prying eyes of Jaune had shown them to be devastating enough to the young man. By the third day of his trials he had gotten quite frustrated with the whole endeavor, and so when he imbued them with his chakra, he might have potentially slipped in some of his tenant's more portent blend.
This suited him just fine. He had some frustrations to work out right now.
He flung the batch at the Bullhead that was on point in the formation. The shuriken would not pierce the aluminum armored skin of the hull, but the body wasn't his target. In fact, he hardly had need to aim as the powerful turbines sucked in the metal disks like a small flock of pesky birds. Unfortunately for the machine and the pilot, these were no birds.
The explosion that erupted from the engine vaporized the stubby wing and part of the body. The force was such, that instead the craft of peeling off to its port side, the same direction as the now defunct engine, the Bullhead instead leapt to the starboard, right in the path of the next one in formation.
Naruto couldn't have planned the attack better, except that he had some inclination of the devastation he could cause in the milliseconds before he let the weapons fly. The damage snowballed as the first craft crashed solidly into the second, and debris from the two's collision entered the flightpath of the third, bringing all three down in one fell swoop.
They had been flying in close formation, good for avoiding detection, but not so effective if one had an enemy equipped to deal with aircraft.
The first two Bullheads had burst into angry flames during the explosion and later crash and both dropped like bricks into a commercial neighborhood where they all but disintegrated on impact.
The third, having merely lost an engine, lost control for enough time that it veered into a building adjacent to the one Naruto was still perched on. It merely clipped the overreaching gables and lost use of its other engine before it too plummeted to the streets below.
It was mostly intact, though, when it rolled to a stop in the middle of a deserted street, despite the fact that it had ruined several cars parked along the sidewalk.
Naruto grimaced witnessing the damage. He was more upset, however, that the last craft failed to be completely destroyed. That meant that he would have to see if any of the passengers survived the crash, and if they had, then he would have to 'clean up' his mess. It was one thing to throw a handful of explosives into a populated craft. It was another thing to take a life with one's own hand.
He descended from his perch over to the wreckage of the downed craft. He paused on another rooftop overlooking the devastation. It was a testament to the technology of this world that its passengers seemed to be relatively unharmed, already up and collecting themselves and critical equipment from the crash site.
He couldn't allow them to regroup.
"Shit! No one said that we were expecting it to be difficult. What hit us?" One White Fang member yelled over his ringing ears, hands roaming his head to check and see if his curly horns were indeed till attached.
"Me."
Naruto had drawn a pair of kunai and like bird of prey descended on the survivors. His first strike slashed the throat of the sheep Faunus that had just spoke, silencing him further. He moved to engage the next closest target, a woman with the ears of a bear and matching dirty blond hair. He didn't think, he just slashed with his other hand. She had just begun to raise her hands in defense when the strike tore through her raised hand and across her masked face.
Naruto cursed. That strike had almost not been fatal. It was clear that he would need a weapon with greater reach to overcome his still too-short stature.
Not foolish enough to pause now in his assault, he seamlessly threw the kunai he had just used on the female Faunus and it embedded into the penultimate survivor of the crash who was so badly burned Naruto couldn't tell what kind of Faunus he was.
He took this moment to pause and breath. Breath, and not think. Can't think, can't stop.
He looked over to the final survivor, a young male Faunus with rabbit ears. He could smell the singed hair on their crumpled form. He could smell the fear.
He approached the man-no boy, he looked barley older than Ruby, than Naruto himself. His leg was bleeding profusely, and he could not stand without leaning on the burning wreckage of the ship. His mask had come off during the crash and Naruto met him eye to eye.
He wondered if his own face showed such fear, in that instant. He had not stopped to think when he killed the others, knew that any hesitation would have frozen him as he was now. They looked at one another, both there and both not. There were tears, on whose face he wasn't quite sure, as he imagined himself leaning against the ship with the bloody leg, waiting patiently for the man who had already killed the rest of his team to finish the job.
"I'm sorry."
For whom? He wondered as he stepped yet closer.
Naruto watched as the boy collapsed at his feet, his knife never having touched the sooty flesh. It might have been tragically ironic, had he died from fright, a rabbit Faunus.
But no, he realized as hands came from the shadows cast by the still burning flames to effortlessly pick the unconscious White Fang youth up and sling him over a familiar dark-cloaked shoulder. Sasuke looked back at Naruto, flames dancing in stone pools.
"Good job, baka. Now, can we go home before they add another page on to our repair bill?"
Home? What an interesting concept. He thought of, what? Family? Never existed. Security? Laughable. Sustenance? There was that. Friends…
"Come on, idiot, snap out of it and let's-"
"I think I saw the fire over here!"
The familiar voice echoed around the corner and addressed the two as they stood in the interrupted darkness clad in their hooded cloaks. Ruby, along with Penny rounded the corner at the far end of the street.
"-Book it."
The two came upon the burning carcass in the street, Ruby took a swatch of her cloak to cover her nose form the acrid stench. Neither took notice of two flickering shadows amongst the many the licking flames cast.
Seeing nary a soul alive and nothing to be done immediately for the dead, the two moved on to find the origin of the destruction, and hopefully locate Blake in the process.
Though she got as much of a look at the diorama of bodies as Ruby did, Penny's analytical mind retained far more of the actual detail. The bodies of the White Fang were located outside of the crash, and had been all felled by very clean cuts to vital areas. The one slumped against the craft still retained a small knife lodged in its sternum.
Not being able to correlate this oddity with previous data, she just filed it away with a blink and resumed following her distressed friend.
Ozpin sat securely in the ironwood and emerald velvet chair behind his desk. He stared intently at the live feed from his scroll, actively being sent to him form a camera the ninja had installed on one of the warehouse rooftops before their departure. He watched the conclusion of the confrontation between a handful of his students, their acquaintances, and several squads of White Fang Backed by Roman Torchwick.
This was confirmation he desperately wanted and feared. It meant that they could, and needed to step up preparations.
Fortunately, it seemed as if his longtime friend and colleague James Ironwood had already started dabbling in alternatives to sending countless lives to the slaughter, the windup girl handily downing two Bullheads with apparent ease. Though as he watched the following interaction between Ruby Rose and this so called 'Penny', he began to wonder if Ironwood truly knew the consequences of bequeathing his creation a human soul.
Here was an artificial being struggling to come to terms with its position as both a tool and totally random labor of love.
Was he any better though? Asking humans to mold themselves into his precision instruments, all the while distracted by the thought that they may never see their loved ones again.
His coffee sat cold.
"Blake! Ruby! Sun! Are you guys okay?" Yang shouted as she jogged with Weiss at her hip up to where Ruby and Blake were seated on the bumper of a police van, both draped in shawls of rough wool.
They had resisted the treatment as invalids, but Ruby had not been able to refuse the steaming cup of cocoa professed to her.
"We're fine, Sis. Really."
"You really shouldn't go running off like that! And you!" Yang turned accusingly to Blake. "You had us really worried!"
Blake had the decency to look chagrined, seeking comfort in her own cup of chocolatey mud. Weiss stepped around the accosting Yang to stand in front of her recently absent teammate. Any apology that had been forming in Blake's mind was cut off as she opened her mouth and Weiss held up a commanding hand, silencing her.
"I've had a lot of time to think about it." Weiss began seriously. "And I realize: I don't care."
Blake blinked, waiting for an elaboration to this potentially damning comment.
"I don't care that you're a Faunus, or that you were once part of the White Fang. I do care that you went and did something foolish like this without telling us! We are your teammates, and you need to share your problems with us. We are here to help you, no matter what."
Blake felt a growing warmth in her stomach that had nothing to do with the seldom sipped beverage.
"You had us really worried, you were gone for more than 24 hours! We even had Naruto look for you for almost a solid day!"
Sun, who had been content to let the female team discharge their pent up emotions perked up at the mention. "Mini-me? Wow, tough luck, he must have just missed you. He ran into me twice in the same day." Team RWBY looked over to the other Faunus interested to know what had transpired between the two blonds.
"Yeah, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure he was the one who told me where to find you, Blake."
Blake's mind on the downswing from the recent adrenaline rush struggled to focus on the oddity of the statement made by her countryman.
"What are you talking about, Sun? We met earlier in the day at the café, and I told you to meet me here."
"Really?" Sun said, scratching his head and wincing as he found a previously unaccounted bruise beginning to form. "Dang. I must have gotten hit harder than I thought."
"Hey, where's Penny?"
Ruby's interjection caught most of their attention as the assembled gang looked around for the socially-awkward girl, seeing that she had indeed vanished in the aftermath including Yang and Weiss's arrival.
"Huh, I didn't see her when we arrived." Yang confessed.
Most were diverted by the oddity of the girl's sudden disappearance, content to take Sun's lapse in memory at face value. Blake however, couldn't shake a deeply troubled feeling, a familiar one that she had experienced months ago, during the time the gang was still getting to know each other's ins and outs.
She looked to the blond Faunus and his preoccupied look as he puzzled along with the rest of her team at the strangeness of the whole circumstance. She recalled the look and incidental touch the two had shared in that bright and damp morning in the outside café. Suddenly, she couldn't imagine that same expression on this Sun's face. She didn't know this person nearly as well.
"Well done you two."
Ozpin had been alerted by Goodwitch at the return of his shinobi subordinates, and had met them at a safe house on the outskirts of Vale. They had arrived no worse for the wear, borrowed black cloaks slightly scuffed, but the limp body ported by the more stoic teen was clearly worse for the wear.
He had not witnessed the destruction of the Bullheads cause by the blond, nor the following cleansing of people who could have identified him. But one look at the hollow look on the boy's face told him much of what had transpired. The shell stared back and he desperately wanted to curse himself for the decisions he had made that he knew where right.
His right hand clasped the wrist of the other behind his back, muscles straining at the tension. He gestured to a moth-eaten corduroy sofa along one of the bare concrete walls with a nod.
"Set him down there." He referred to the unconscious captive still being carried by Sasuke. The boy grunted in acknowledgment and more or less gently deposited his limp form on the indicated piece of furniture.
"I want you to know, Blake and the others are unharmed. Roman Torchwick did escape, but hopefully with his cooperation," He once again indicated in the direction of the unconscious form. "we should be able to get some information that will allow us to be a step ahead of them, next time."
The prospect of a next time did not seem to fill either the stoic teen or the other distraught boy with any elation, though Sasuke nodded silently.
"You can clean up and go back to Beacon, there is a shower, here if you want, and a change of clothes."
Naruto began to mechanically turn to the door from whence they came, but Sasuke waited a beat before approaching the professor. Naruto stopped at the door when he noticed that Sasuke wasn't following him. The other boy withdrew a lightly used blue moleskin notebook from within his utility pouch and proffered it to Ozpin.
The older man reached out and took the notebook like it was a centuries old bible of incredible provenance. He carefully opened the cover, and his eyes methodically scanned the page before carefully thumbing the next page, repeating the process.
The two in the room without the patient onyx eyes waited in mild confusion.
"For the 'next time'." Sasuke offered.
He did so again, as he reached the bottom, and this time waited a beat before he turned the notebook sideways, taking in what was undoubtedly a large diagram.
"What is this?" Ozpin now asked, inquisitive and perhaps slightly amused.
"Tradition."