"Good afternoon class." Miss Goodwitch called as we entered Combat Class the next day. Nora was practically glued to my side as we entered, drawing odd stares from a majority of the class as we all found our seats. It wasn't a romantic thing either - that morning, JNPR or rather N, P and R had pulled lots to decide who was going to be stapled to my side all day. My team had decided that my situation was entirely too precarious for their tastes, and while I loved them for staying by my side in this, it was actually pretty annoying. In the space of a few hours they had gone from seeing me as a competent dust technician to an incompetent swordsman - even though my status as the weakest member of our class was entirely predicated on my unwillingness to just kill everyone I fought. Silently I reaffirmed my desire to take the class by surprise today.
We didn't have many group sessions, but it was inevitable that every so often - usually once a week - Goodwitch would gather us up for two days of evaluations, to see how we were doing. It usually took that long to see everyone fight when it was essentially one fight at a time. The week before I had shown some minor improvement in my swordsmanship, but she had still been over all unimpressed. Now though, I had my Fortified Dust, and my shape crystals. I was confident I could use my Magecraft without destroying the room.
"Today I have some announcements to make. The Vytal Festival will be held in Vale this year, and examinations will be held at the end of the month to determine who is fit to represent Beacon in the event. Naturally this means you will be competing against all four years of the Academies students. Even so, I expect you to try." Goodwitch said as everyone found their seats. She turned her gaze fractionally towards me when she spoke.
Goodwitch didn't like me. I had no idea why. I mean, I could guess - I hadn't made the most stellar impression on her. But even with that, she seemed to be particular strict with me. She rarely had anything nice to say to me in class, and tended to spend longer giving me 'advice' after my bouts than anyone else. It was weird, and made me distinctly uncomfortable, but the weird part was that - with the exception of initiation - she hadn't really done anything to me. She was just... really really strict.
"Oooh! We should totally sign up for that." Nora chortled from right next to me, half whispering into my ear as she spoke. Behind me I could hear whispered conversation from other teams.
"Hey did Nora and Ren break up?"
"Were they even together? It was hard to tell."
I groaned as the rumour mill started to grind to life all around us. If these people knew Nora at all, they'd know that she had something of a single target sexuality - and that target was very obviously Ren. Unfortunately we were in the middle of class, and while people could get away with whispering to each other while Goodwitch spoke there was no way I could turn around and speak loud enough to be heard without earning her ire.
"I don't think -" I started.
"In addition," Goodwitch called out, subtly smacking her riding crop in one hand to let us know she could hear us talking and did not approve. I took the hint and shut my mouth.
"In two days time, the first year class will be embarking on a trip to the Forever Falls. This is a mandatory class and will be your introduction to field work." She explained, turning away from me to gaze about the class.
"Now, with all that said, todays matches will be as follows..."
The class went by fairly quickly after that. I had been expecting Goodwitch to call me to face Cardin at some point early on, as she had every time we had a group session, and so had begun class with a nervous energy filling me. But as each new pairing of students was called forward I began to grow more and more relaxed. By the time Pyrrha was called upon to face all of Team CRDL at once I had all but slumped into my chair, paying only the most minimal attention to the duels happening below me. It was obvious I wasn't going to be fighting today. After all, if Cardin was fighting Pyrrha than there was no way Goodwitch would make him fight me. It was unfair.
So I spent a good majority of the class working through the defenses I was going to put on the bedroom my team shared. I had a little help from Archer - who had much more experience preparing for an ambush for a supernatural murderer than I thought was all that healthy. I would have to make shape stones for each member of my team - fuse a few different types of dust, alter them into a solid state, key them to the wards and -
"Next will be Jaune Arc, and Weiss Schnee." Goodwitch called.
I couldn't actually think of a response to that, and at first thought I might have misheard her. Me and... Weiss? We'd never actually fought infront of the class before. Not at the same time. And when Weiss did go up she sand bagged terribly. She only ever showed enough growth in the group sessions for Goodwitch to give her passing marks. But our private sessions were a whole different ball game. It had taken the white haired demon woman all of three days to realize that my huge aura capacity made me the ideal target for the extremely destructive wide area attacks she had been constructing. Worse still, the only way I could think of to even vaguely stand up to her was to go all out - at least as far as my non lethal options were concerned. Which meant that if Weiss felt the same way, then neither of us could sandbag this fight.
"Gwuh?" I said, less a word and more a gurgling noise as I struggled to find a way to phrase what I was thinking out loud. Weiss stepped over the bench next to me to reach the stairway down into the combat cell, but paused next to me. Her hand fell onto the top of my head, which came up to her middle just by dint of how tall I was, and she patted me twice, like a dog being comforted by its owner.
"Come along Jaune." She said pleasantly, but when she turned to walk away there was a crooked grin on her face. It was a grin I recognized. It was the grin she had on her face when she had affectionately nicknamed me her 'Favorite Target' right after learning people thought we were having sex. It was the same grin when she had learned to hold more than one glyph at a time.
It was a grin that said 'you will suffer, and I will laugh'.
My eye twitched once, and I turned towards my teammates as I stood, taking in the rest of Team RWBY's curious looks along with my teams bemused ones, and bowed to them.
"Tell my mom I loved her." I said with solemnity.
"Jaune, none of us even know your mother." Pyrrha giggled, placing one armored hand over her mouth in a ladylike fashion.
"Ew we have to watch?" Yang chortled, and was immediately silenced when Ruby punched her lightly in the arm.
"Yang!" she cried out, turning bright red.
"Yang!" I complained at her, not because I found the joke completely without merit, but because I knew Weiss had heard it too - and I could swear I felt the killing intent leaking off of her. She despised the long running joke. I couldn't tell if it was because it was me or if it was because it offended her sensibilities as some kind of Atlesian royalty. But either way, bringing it up was a sure fire way to get her to blow up at something.
"Any time now Mr. Arc." Goodwitch called, and to my annoyance she sounded amused.
"Coming." I sighed, and stepped over to the stairs to begin my descent into my apparent grave.
"Do we... I mean do we have to do this?" I tried, drawing Crocea Mors from one hand, but forgoing the shield. Instead I pulled a handful of shape gems from my pouch, and swiped my thumbs over both sides of my belt, unconsciously checking my dust stores. I had replaced them this morning so I knew they were full - but it was a habit Archer had encouraged. Always be aware of your resources before going into a battlefield. A single bullet could be the difference between living and dying.
"I- " Weiss opened her mouth, her angry expression softening. It seemed she wasn't as interested in trouncing me as she was in hiding her trump cards. It was an interesting change. When we had first started training together she had been quite keen to display her full might at every opportunity. But somewhere between all the Magecraft practices I had explained to her, and all the swordsmanship she had taught me, she had adopted the very Magus like tendency not to broadcast her capabilities. For a second I held hope that we could both get through this with minimal grandstanding, and I could just use the fact that I was able to use my semblance at all as a sign of improvement.
"I should mention that this fight will determine whether or not you are getting all you can from your present sparring partner." Goodwitch chimed in with a wicked gleam in her eyes. My face fell as Weiss incredible brain immediately seized on the implications of the statement. We didn't have a huge amount of time to work together outside of class, each of us usually with our teams for one thing or the other. And since Pyrrha had so recently claimed my after school hours for her own sword training, losing our class time would effectively make training together a non possibility. And Weiss was far to smart to allow that to happen.
"God dammit." I grumbled, as her face immediately changed into the cold calculating expression she took when she was really and truly taking something seriously. When she was shutting everything else down just to focus on what was in front of her.
"You may begin." Goodwitch commanded, stepping back from the combat cell to watch from the sidelines. I didn't bother acknowledging her or seeing if Weiss was ready. There was probably no one in this school I knew better than Weiss, at least in terms of combat. Which is why I knew her first act would be to either try to blow me into next week, or create a barrier to stop me from reaching her. It wasn't a situation that came up often - because I was a shitty swordsmen - but my vast Aura reserves and reinforced strength meant that I would generally win any fight where I could actually get my hands on the smaller girl.
True to my expectations, Weiss waved her rapier through the air once, and a wall of frost immediately sprung to life between us. It was a good construct. It used minimal dust, but was much more solid than a wall of ice without any thought put into it. Where before this would have been an expenditure of pure force, it was now a work of art. And I had seen it so many times that there was no way I was going to fall for it.
I reinforced myself, urging my Prana through my circuits. I had long since mastered reinforcing my Skin and Muscles at the same time, and while that might be enough for me to get through a fight with a lesser opponent, Weiss knew me nearly as well as I knew her. But she didn't know all my tricks. I used my Prana to tap the Cyan Dust on my hip, and converted my Aura to a cloak of pure force. Then I pushed off with one foot, launching myself at the wall. The Force Aura I had cloaked myself in did its work, immediately repelling the floor as I pushed off, and that single step was all I needed to ram into the ice wall, pushing out the other side of it like it was made of wet tissue paper. Without thought, I reverted my aura to normal, unsure of what I would find there, and knowing that my aura couldn't defend me when it wasn't in its default state.
Which turned out to be a good idea. Because Weiss wasn't behind the wall. She wasn't anywhere. What was there, was a dome of over a half dozen glyphs, all angled towards where I had appeared - and the minute I did so, they began to barraged me with blast of fire and ice - the two elements Weiss seemed to favor the most. I tumbled forward, cursing the fact that I hadn't drawn my shield, and considering the best way out of this situation. Quickly, I tightened my grip on the sphere gem in my left hand, and channeled the blue dust through it, guessing at the dimensions I would need and then curling up as a dome of pure frost sprang to life around me. All about me the muffled sounds of explosions and the dull thud of ice spikes crashing into the ground around me filled the air. Then, after what I guessed to be only a few seconds they stopped.
Weiss had figured out long ago how to hold more than a few Glyphs at once. But I hadn't realized she could leave them as traps - that was new for me, and it meant this was going to suck twice as hard as I already thought it would. Thankfully it seemed like the amount of time she could keep a glyph in existence was still consistent with what I remembered, so I plotted my next move.
"You know Jaune, I think that's always been your problem. You have to do so much thinking to use your power that you freeze up when presented with the opportunity to think." Weiss mused from somewhere immediately next to my dome. I swore and pushed a pulse of force through the dome, splintering it into an a spray of ice shards that peppered the area around me.
Weiss danced away from where she had been standing, stabbing Myrtenaster into the ground and changing her grip on the rapier. Then a glyph appeared behind her, and she hopped backward, launching herself off of it like a wrestler from the ropes - straight at me. I quickly whipped my sword arm up to deflect the blow, then spun on my left foot to ram my shoulder into her, launching her away and giving me time to think on my next move. She slammed into what remained of the ice wall she had cast, creating a dense mist as she landed that obscured my vision of her. I readied myself for another attack that never came, and when the mist clear Weiss was nowhere to be seen.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of white, as the proud Atlesian girl slipped around me and through the hole in the wall I had created. I turned just in time to see her sighting on me once more - but this time when she waved her rapier the glyph didn't appear behind, but on the wall of ice. Several glyphs appeared there, and I dreaded the moment I recognized what she was doing.
Gritting my teeth I spitballed the size of the wall and thumbed my rectangle gem, forcing every ounce of my remaining Cyan Dust through the Mystic Code. The Ice Wall began to splinter and crackle as the force of both our abilities pressed against it, her attempt to turn the wall into a shrapnel barrage thwarted by wall of force in the opposited direction. With a great crack the wall imploded, once more shrouding the battle field in mist.
This was my moment. I could counter attack like this. She couldn't see me any more than I could see her - and that meant I had the advantage. She might have been learned wide area attacks - but I was practically built for them.
Lamenting the loss of my force dust, I channeled gravity into my Aura, lightening and throwing myself above the battle field to drift gently over the mist. It wasn't flight - not really. I was just falling very, very, slowly. Then I reversed the flow of gravity around me, abruptly going from light as a feather to heavy as a bullhead in the space of moments. I rocketed towards the ground with enough force to disperse the mist as I fell. The goal was to hit the ground with enough force to hurt Weiss no matter where in the room she was. I was confident that as long as I didn't land directly on top of her she would be too seriously injured - but this should definitely tick off some of her Aura.
Or so I thought. Just before I would have made contact with the ground Glyphs appeared all about me, and suddenly everything slowed down. I found myself watching the world around me as though it shifted into fast forward. Which was why I could see the mist disperse and Weiss come flying towards me but couldn't respond fast enough to avoid what happened next. She slammed Myrtenaster into the ground, creating a pillar of ice as wide as a car that extended from the ground directly towards me at an angle. The column of ice crashed into me with the combined force of my fall and the Weiss' semblance, and instead of impacting the ground as I had intended, I found myself suddenly embedded three inches deep into the concrete wall of the room, directly beneath the projector showing our Aura levels.
Weiss raised her rapier again, preparing to follow up even as I prepared to receive the attack - but Miss Goodwitch stepped between us with an annoyed huff of air from her lips.
"That will be enough." She scolded.
"Mr Arc, I appreciate that you have chosen to bring your all today, but I should hope you could come up with a tactic that is slightly less prone to collateral damage." She chided me. And then, much to my surprise, she smiled. It was a slight thing. One I would have missed if I wasn't so used to seeing a frown on her face at all hours of the day. But there it was.
"But still, I commend you. You have shown remarkable improvement and control, if not necessarily in swordsmanship." She said.
"T-Thank you?" I said, so confused by the praise that I actually had to pose it as a question. Goodwitch merely shrugged, waving her riding crop at me and using her semblance to pull me from the wall. Something I was grateful for. My only real way out of the wall otherwise would probably include destroying it.
"Think nothing of it Jaune." She said, and then her expression returned to it's usual disapproving glare - and she released her semblance, dropping me four feet to the ground with a surprised yelp.
"Next up is -"
-ooo-
Ah. The sweet, wonderful taste of a well earned victory. I would never, under any circumstances admit it aloud - but defeating Jaune in a match where he put the effort in to actually win was an achievement I would always dearly covet. For all his bizarre tendencies, he was if nothing else, an expert in his singular field of Dust Manipulation. Thing's he had considered routine and basic were practically non euclidean geometry, and I had improved drastically with him as my partner.
"Good work Weiss!" Ruby cheered for me, and I nodded gratefully at her. She had... grown on me. She was eccentric, and annoying, and loud, and a host of other things my father would find reprehensible in a team leader. But even with all that, she genuinely was a good team leader. More importantly, she was my team leader, and I had finally come to accept that. If Jaune had taught me nothing else it was that there was always a bigger fish - and that fish wasn't always rich or famous.
"Thank you." I said, trying to hide my embarrassment at the casual praise. One annoying side effect of genuinely caring about other people was that I was shockingly unused to genuine complements. Oh I could spend hours hearing the heir to some other company espouse my beauty and wit. But that was always a political game. It was disingenuous, and therefore, of no particular note. It was no more important the move of a game piece on a board.
As I turned my head to head the slight blush on my face, I noticed Pyrrha staring at me, squinting as though trying to discern something. It wasn't hard to figure out what. For reasons I couldn't quite place, she had a strange dislike of me. Obviously she didn't really trust me around Jaune - which was perhaps warranted given the... unsavory... rumors floating about, but Pyrrha seemed to have some other less obvious reason for her dislike that she refused to voice. She was always polite to me, never abrasive, and of course more than willing to speak amicably with me when the occasion demanded. But that was all. When the occasion demanded.
I rolled my eyes at her, the rudest gesture I was really comfortable making to someone of similar social standing to myself. She could dislike me all she wanted, it didn't change the facts. She might be Jaune's teammate, but purely on the basis of working together to improve ourselves I was Jaune's partner. A fact that seemed unlikely to change given our showing in this class. Truthfully, Jaune probably didn't need me as much as I needed him, but he didn't actually know that, and I certainly wasn't going to tell him. His probably had never been one of power - it had been one of control. And there were few things I excelled at more than control.
"Um, Weissy?" Yang prodded, jamming a finger into my side in a way that sent me scooting the side to avoid the sudden intrusion into my personal space.
"What!?" I hissed at her. Yang was my teammate, and I supposed friend, but she was meddlesome in the extreme. Not the type of person I enjoyed being near when I was feeling high strung.
"Your doing that thing again." the Blonde explained in a stage whisper.
"...what 'thing'?" I said, blinking at her in confusion.
"Staring contests with Pyrrha." Blake explained, the taciturn girl turning the page of her book where she was hiding it behind the wall of students in front of her.
"I assure you I don't have -" I began but was cut off by Yang.
"You totally do~" Yang teased, and I found myself mentally going over the list of revenge options I had constructed for each of my teammates within the first week of school. They were all petty revenges of course. Small things that could be forgiven between friends. But I could only tolerate being needled about such things for so long.
"It's a little awkward." Blake admitted when I turned to her then Ruby for confirmation. Ruby merely nodded her head in agreement, holding her hand up with two fingers barely touching in the universal hand sign for 'just a bit'.
"I suppose you'd know all about awkward stares wouldn't you Blake," I snarked tapping a finger on the erotic novel she so shamelessly carried with her everywhere.
"I - you - that's -!" she blurted. I snorted, then immediately covered my mouth to hide the unladylike gesture while my team descended into good natured ribbing over our raven haired compatriots habits and tastes. I had come to love them all dearly, my first real friends, but they were shockingly easy to manipulate.
I turned my gaze back to Pyrrha, and found her tapping Nora on the shoulder, then whispering something in her ear before they switched places, Nora returning to her customary place by Ren's side while Pyrrha settled into the spot next to Jaune. Entirely too close to Jaune in fact. I tamped down on the annoyance, even if I couldn't understand where it was coming from. I'd see Jaune tomorrow in our combat cell. There was a formula I needed some help with, and really, no one else was as qualified as him now were they?
-ooo-
'Archer.' I called as the Bullhead landed, and could feel more than see the spectral presence of my Servant leap forward to scout the area in response to my unasked request.
Two days had passed in the blink of an eye, and I was not at all happy with it. My team had become increasingly paranoid about when the next attempt on my life would come, to the point where they wouldn't even let me leave the room after class without all of them accompanying me. If that wasn't bad enough, the sheer amount of time they spent practically on top of me meant that I had very little time to do my research. What had once been an activity I attempted to sneak in during my downtime was something I all but had to beg to be allowed to do, especially now that Pyrrha had decided I wasn't good enough at defending myself to be allowed out and about alone. To her credit - she was an amazing teacher, easily capable of correctly the flaws in my stance and giving me advice that would have taken me months of getting my ass kicked to figure out for myself.
But she was also a brutal taskmaster, allowing for extremely limited breaks between training rounds and seeming genuinely confused when I had to eventually beg her to let me stop for a period of time greater than two minutes.
These sparring sessions were also the only times I ever found myself without Nora and Ren around, though I had no doubt they were somewhere close by and merely awaiting a signal from Pyrrha. A suspicion I felt was confirmed by the fact that they rarely took more than a single minute to appear by our sides after the sessions were done.
The good news was that, despite all the wasted time I had managed to set up a rudimentary set of bounded fields around our room. Nothing to ostentatious yet - just an alarm keyed to make the stones I had given to everyone heat up if something passed the threshold without our permission. I had wanted to go for a screaming alarm, but Archer had pointed out that sometimes its better if your attacker doesn't know your aware of them, and I had given in to his superior experience on the matter.
JNPR and RWBY spilled out of our assigned bullhead, into the small clearing near the Forever Falls that we had been tasked with gathering sap in. I had no idea why something as pedestrian as getting sap was a task assigned to us at first, but when I had asked Miss Goodwitch - banking on the tiny bit of good will she seemed to have developed for me - if this was a common job for Huntsmen. She had said no - but that we weren't actually Huntsmen yet anyway.
It made sense if I took the time to think about it. We weren't fully trained yet, and the Forever Falls were close enough to the city walls that there were very few grimm there. Plus, if something did go wrong, we would be close enough to the city to just make a break for it.
Our two teams had barely started to move off into the trees to start trying to fill our sap jars, treating the outing less like field training and more like a picnic, when Archer reported in.
'Heavy duty bounded fields surrounding the waterfall. Like, 'boil the blood in your body' strong. I can't get past it to see whats behind it, but if I had to guess there's Magus' set up out here.' he warned.
'Seriously?' Is every new place I go to going to have some mysterious magus living in it?' I complained, freezing on the spot and quickly looking around for hidden dangers. My team noticed my sudden anxiety pretty much instantly, and each of the broke off from what they were doing to approach me.
"What is it?" Ren asked calmly, as he, Pyrrha and Nora came to form a small huddle around me.
"Bad mojo at the waterfall." I explained, not even trying to explain the concept of a bounded field to them. I doubted there was anyone in the school who would be able to understand the concept except possibly Weiss, but he Glyph's didn't really lend themselves to creating the things, so even she might have issues with the concept.
"How bad?" Pyrrha asked, pulling her spear from her back and stabbing it into the ground by her feet. I actually wasn't sure how to answer that so I asked Archer for his opinion instead.
'I don't think whoever it is really cares that there are people here. Our landing wasn't exactly discreet. You should be okay as long as everyone stays away from the river. You should probably try to avoid using any Magecraft too. If the enemy knows there's a magus here they might try and do something about it.' Archer said, giving me his opinion on the situation.
"Pretty bad, but Archer says we should be okay if we stay away from the river." I finally answered after some thought.
"Hmm." Pyrrha mused, apparently not entirely convinced.
"How about we stick together instead of splitting up like we originally intended to." I offered, and that seemed to relax her a bit.
"We should probably inform RWBY of the situation as well." Ren noted, gesturing towards our friends. None of them seemed particularly intent on ranging that far off from the Bullhead, but Ren was right - best they know not to head in that direction.
"I got it." I said, pointing myself at Ruby and heading towards her. Weiss noticed me coming long before I actually reached her team leader, and strode confidently over to listen in.
"Hey Ruby. Weiss." I said, remembering to greet the heiress at the last second even though she wasn't who I had originally been coming to speak with.
"Jaune."
"Hey Jaune!"
They answered me in unison, Ruby with a happy jump, and Weiss with slight inclining of her head towards me. Typical.
"What's up?" the red hooded leader of team RWBY asked me.
"So, there's a problem." I said carefully, running my hand through my mess blond hair while I stalled for enough time to try and actually explain why they shouldn't go in the direction of the falls. Weiss stepped toward me as I spoke, mild concern on her face, but was thwarted when Pyrrha all but materialized at my side.
"Jaune noticed something dangerous at the falls as we landed. We wanted to advise you not to go in that direction." She explained calmly, never turning away from Ruby as she spoke.
I watched the interplay curiously. The two obviously didn't get along. My best guess as to why was that they mutually consider themselves to be the best possible teachers for me. In a way they were both right. Weiss was an amazing resource to have on hand for my Magecraft, and Pyrrha was almost literally legendary in her swordplay. Still, when I had brought the notion up to Nora and Ren, they had merely frowned at me, and then Nora had accused Ren of 'infecting' me. Then they had descended into a tickling contest and promptly ignored me.
"Define something dangerous." Weiss asked, a glint in her eyes that said she would remember this and take it out on me later.
"Kinda can't." I admitted. "You're just gonna have to trust me on this one."
Ruby and Weiss exchanged a look, apparently communicating something between themselves far to fast for either I or Pyrrha to catch, then returning their looks to me.
" 'Kay, I'll tell Yang and Blake. Thanks Jaune." Ruby said, then darted off to intercept the rest of her team.
"Thanks Rubes!" I called after her. I didn't often use the nickname Yang had for her, but I tried it on now and then just for familiarities sake. It seemed like the kind of thing a friend would do, and I did genuinely consider Team RWBY my friends.
"Come on Jaune, Ren and Nora are waiting for us." Pyrrha said once Ruby had gone, tugging gently on my elbow as she walked away.
"Thank you for your time Weiss." she called over her shoulder with a somewhat less warm smile than I was accustomed too.
"Later Weiss!" I called after her as we left. She inclined her head to us as we went, and then we were back with Ren and Nora.
"Alright! Lets get'er done!~" Nora growled playfully, pulling Ren down into a grapple that pressed the taciturn boys face into her chest. Ren merely blinked once before slowly trying to extricate himself.
I slowly allowed myself to relax, and we took the rudimentary taps we had been given from our bags to hammer into the nearby trees. An hour or two of peaceful conversation, the only other sound the gently burble of the river in the distance and the dripping of sap as it slowly filled the jars we had brought with us. I had been at the school for over two weeks before the enemy Magus had deigned to notice my presence. This shouldn't be any different. Plus, I wasn't even using Magecraft here. It was completely unneccesary after all - there were basically no Grimm, and we were only collecting sap.
It took a while - Nora developed a taste for the obscenely sweet stuff and consumed a jar and half of it - but we eventually filled our quota of two jars per team member, and began heading back towards the bullhead.
As we returned to the clearing, we found RWBY awaiting us with worried looks. Pyrrha and I exchanged a glance then jogged over to them, leaving our jars on the stack by the Bullhead so they could be loaded with everyone elses.
"Whats the problem?" I asked after a second of waiting for someone to come forward and explain things to me.
"Team CRDL hasn't shown up yet." Blake explained flatly, and with significantly less worry in her tone than everyone else seemed to be displaying. There was no love lost between her and Cardin's cronies. She may hide her ears at school - something I had taken note of and eventually decided not to bring up - but she was still a Faunus, and Cardin had made his position on the species abundantly clear.
"Where do you think they are?" I queried. "They might just be taking a while to get the sap, or gotten lost or something."
I could tell before I finished speaking that I was off base. Hopeful - and off base. Everyone on Team RWBY began shaking their heads at once and Ruby spoke up.
"You remember how you said 'don't go near the river?'" she asked tentatively, and I got a sinking feeling in my gut.
"Well CRDL headed that way before the rest of us really thought to question it." she continued.
I didn't really know what to say to that, so I closed my eyes, took a deep breath to try and calm my frustration, then drew Crocea Mors.
'Archer, can you see where they are?' I asked my servant.
'Sorry - the highest point I can reach would be the waterfall, and I'm not touching that one. I can't get high enough to see over the treeline.' He apologized.
"I'll go look for them." I eventually said with a sigh.
"Jaune I don't think it's a good idea to run off without telling Miss Goodwitch." Weiss pointed out. I had to admit she wasn't wrong but... memories of a war in a far off land, memories full of blood, and death, and misery, were on my mind. Memories of a school full of slowly decomposing, and yet still alive, people.
It was those thoughts that buoyed me forward. Those memories that forced me to commit.
"You guys wait for Miss Goodwitch and catch up with me afterwards then." I offered, then reinforced myself to the limits of my ability and jumped away from them, soaring over the trees and coming to a halt before taking another huge leap forward.
'This is stupid.' Archer pointed out admidst the cries of outrage from behind me. There was no way any of them could keep up with me. Well, anyone except maybe Ruby.
'Nothing for it Archer. I don't like the guy, but I certainly don't want him to die or anything.' I griped, already knowing what Archer meant without any further explanation.
'He's not going to be any more or less screwed if you wait two minutes for back up you know.' He said with some annoyance.
'Did you ever wait for back up?' I asked already knowing the answer.
'No. You'll also notice I died fairly young. Maybe think on that a second a slow the hell down.' Archer snapped at me, but it was too late. I could already hear the falls in the distance, and I exploded out of the treeline to find the four members of Team CRDL surrounded by humanoid figures.
They weren't Grimm, that was certain, but neither did they look like real people, or feel like servants. They clicked and whirred as they moved, as if powered by a giant grandfather clock. And there was something distinctly uncanny about the way they moved. Like it was a perfectly choreographed action with no room for change. As if they could perform the same motion a thousand times and never vary the movement by even a single inch.
"Cardin!" I called as I approached, and several of the figures turned towards me, displaying completely smooth faces. No, calling them faces didn't do justice to what they actually were. Caricatures of faces. The closer I got the more details I could make out. Like the fact that the figures each held grimy daggers in one hand, while the other had fingers that appeared to be made of syringes. Or the fact that their bodies seemed to be made entirely out of a pearly white material that I could quite recognize.
Or the fact that they had no eyes, or mouth. Just smooth white indentations where those things should have been. For a second I wondered how they could see at all, but quickly shelved my worries. There was fighting to do.
'Should I take this?' Archer asked and I shook my head in the negative.
'Let me take first crack. I don't want whoevers here to detect a servant and respond appropriately.' I answered.
Cardin's face was a mix of relieved and annoyed as I landed next to him, sailing over the heads of the mannequin like automatons assault him. His teammates too seemed unsure of how to respond, but they opened ranks to allow me to assist in their defense regardless.
"Is anyone else coming?" Cardin asked, a faint tremble to his voice that he hid admirably.
"Probably not fast enough to help." I admitted. "What the hell happened?"
"We were taking a break by the river and then these things just showed up. Their weapons go right through our Aura." Cardin said, and he gestured towards Sky, how had a mean looking gash on his arm.
I blanched at the idea of that. I had assumed Sky was wounded because he had run out of aura. If these things could just ignore it, that meant I had to get Cardin's team out of here fast. They weren't nearly as accustomed to fighting without an Aura as I was. Which was ironic - because most people probably considered that to be an entirely useless skill. And usually they would be right.
"Get to the Bullheads, I'll hold them off." I ordered him, staring him down when his head whipped around to argue with me. I could see it in his eyes as he looked at me. The memory of that moment in the cafeteria. The moment when I had subdued him as an after thought. Then the moment passed, and he nodded once at me.
Good. He wasn't dumb enough to let schoolyard bullshit kill him. Wonders never cease.
The entire time we had been whispering to each other, the automatons had been advancing, slowly tightening the circle around us as the six weaponized humanoids closed in. My hand fell to the pouch at my side, and I slid a thumb under the button that held my stones in place. When the attack came, it'd be fast. Probably too fast for me to entirely counter. That meant I had to respond with overwhelming over. Preferably before the attack came.
"Now!" I yelled, flicking my pouch open and jamming my hand inside to grab the triangular gem inside. Mentally I formed the blade that would herald my Magecraft, and slid it out of its scabbard, generating a barrage of lightning bolts that arced from behind me to spark and dance between the automatons. The machines instantly froze, twitching and jerking like a real person would if electrocuted, and Cardin took the opportunity to marshal his guys and flee, running around the smoking constructs, which remained almost entirely still, save for the occasional errant spasm here or there.
For a moment I allowed myself to believe that would be it. That I had been over reacting, and these things were of no particular consequence. Unfortunately, Murphy's law kicked in, and I became aware of another wave of the things silently dropping out of the trees around Cardin as he rushed his friends to escape. Most of the had evaded the attack and run out of the encirclement before it closed, but Cardin - valiant, stupid Cardin - stayed behind, bellowing madly and swinging his mace wildly through the air to hold the things back.
Annoyed, I fired another volley of lightning bolts at the things, and Cardin looked up from his wild flailing towards me. His mouth opened, and his hand came up to point at me. No... not at me... past me!
I whirled around just in time for a syringe to plant itself in my neck, the soft hiss of a plunger being pressed the only sound I could hear over the sound of my own heart beating. The charred forms of the machines I thought I had stopped were all around me now, and I stumbled away, swiping my sword wildly at them keep them back so I could recover.
'I was wrong. This ones on you buddy.' I told Archer, as I tried to move the energy in my circuits towards him. But something was wrong. My Prana... it felt sluggish somehow. Slow like ichor instead of the untamed rush of pure life energy it was supposed to be. And before I could even think to question why that might be the case, the things had closed with me again, driving more needles into me, filling me with more poison. My head began to swim and my consciousness narrowed down to just what was around me, which turned out to be the grass and nothing more, because I had unknowingly fallen over at some point.
I could hear Cardin yelling weakly behind me, and assumed they'd gotten him too, a theory that proved true when I caught sight of him, limply being carried by two of the machines past me and into the water fall. Then I too was being lifted, and the sudden motion was too much for me.
The last thing I could remember thinking was that Pyrrha would never let me hear the end of this. Two days of guarding me and the second I go off alone I get captured.
Serves me right for assuming Archer would always be able to bail me out.
Stupid. Stupid. Stu...
-ooo-
Eyyy. I'm back. Mid length chapter. So if anyone is curious about why it might seem like Jaune is getting a handle on Magecraft way to fast, its important to remember he's not very classically trained. He mostly just picking up bits of practical information as he goes, and is putting it to use where he can. Unlike a normal magus, who would have to learn their origin and element (things Jaune doesn't even know exist) and then have to learn how to manipulate or create different elements, Jaune really just has to direct the energy already present in dust. It's drastically less work, and requires drastically less skill. In that way, Dust is actually very much the type of thing that would be considered a rare and powerful resource in the Clocktower. Its just that its pretty much ubiquitous in the world of RWBY.
So here we see that Jaune has been sort of blase about his own safety. He's pretty much always functioning based on the idea that Archer will inevitably be able to step in and save him no matter what happens, which just isn't true. Jaune still mostly thinks in terms of straight fights, where two people square off and try to blow each other away. Things like poisons and other more insidious options aren't really a part of his thinking, so he doesn't really prepare for them.
Meanwhile - Pyrrha and Weiss don't get along. I'm not really sure where I'm going with that just yet. I didn't really plan it this way, but many of you readers have correctly pointed out that Pyrrha and Weiss are essentially Jaune's equivalent to Saber and Rin. I've decided to just embrace it - mostly because they're very similar characters anyway.
This is another one of those chapters where dedicated FGO players will recognize some things, and I'm pretty hype for the chapters inevitably leading up to the end of season 1 of RWBY. I'm frankly amazed I got this far, but something about this story just keeps calling back to me. I post chapters for this *way* more often than I originally intended.
Remember to comment or review or what have you if your into it, I'm always watching for peoples opinions and theories and such, not only because they help me keep things in perspective but because Review's are basically catnip for authors.
Oh, and as always -
Thanks for reading.