This one's a lot more...happy than the last.
No deep meaningful talks, no brutal combat. Just...some calm. Probably just before a storm but who knows at this point, since I have no clue what's going on half the time, and the other half I'm maniacally petting a white cat and swivelling in my executive chair!
...yeah I have no idea either...
Chapter 17
"Jaune! Stop trying to mimic Pyrrha!"
Startling the blonde boy out of his stance, Ruby strode over to him, grabbing his arm. "Look at your shield Jaune." The boy did so with a confused expression. "Feel the weight, the shape, right?" The boy nodded dumbly. "Okay, now look at Pyrrha." Jaune looked over to see her staring back in confusion. "Pyrrha, can you throw your shield at that target please?" Ruby pointed to a dummy, and a second later Akouo was buried a foot deep in the target, the redhead looking back with a smile. "Thanks Pyr. Now Jaune, see how she can throw that shield so quickly? That's because it's a great deal lighter and more manoeuvrable than your own, but without sacrificing integrity."
Flicking her hand across the straps holding his shield to his arm, Ruby took Crocea Mors's sheath, mentally berating the idiot who named the shield and sword as one weapon before hefting it in one hand a few times then launching it like a discus. When it struck the next target along, the shield absolutely obliterated it, carrying on after barely slowing down to dent the wall behind it with an ear-burstingly loud crash. "Woah." Jaune breathed in surprise.
"Your weapons are far heavier than Pyrrha's, and for good reason. She is an agile and dextrous fighter. You...are more of a tank. If you tried even a tenth of the moves Pyrrha could pull out in a fight, you'd be on the floor faster than I could say 'strawberries'. You could pull them off with practice and strength, just like that-" She pointed at the shield, smirking as it clanged against the ground, having fallen out of the divot it dug. "-but you'd be better suited to finding better ways to defend yourself. Your entire motif is to be a tank. You have more aura than the entire rest of your team combined, you have body-armour, a large shield, and you have the will to defend those behind you." Planting a hand on his shoulder, Ruby shook him slightly. "Don't try to mimic her just because of the fact that what she has worked for her, because you have a totally different build." Patting him once then releasing him, she rolled her head to look around the room, sighing to herself.
"Cardin, try that move again, and The Executioner is going somewhere even Grimm would blanch at, sharp end first!"
"Ahh, Ruby, a little help here?"
Sighing, Ruby zipped over to Peach with her semblance, ignoring the dissolving petals to take some of the vials she was balancing on her arms with a frown. "Seriously Peach, you really have to carry two-dozen vials of this stuff at once? Do you not have a box of something to put 'em in?" Peach shrugged, warily waving her arm to keep one vial of red, viscous liquid balanced atop another.
Eyeing the wobbling glass vial carefully, Ruby reached up and grabbed it, putting it on her own pile. "Thank you Ruby. I would carry less at once, but I'm in a bit of a hurry. The students are going on a trip to collect Forever Fall sap soon so I need to use up all these old samples. In fact, I'm fairly certain at least a quarter of these armfuls were from the last time your team went out gathering just before graduation." Humming, Ruby looked at the vials on her arms.
Sure enough, on the marked little paper notes was, underneath the date gathered, the team signature proudly written. Thinking back, she vaguely remembered spending a night writing out those signatures on all the little stickers and putting them on their vials. The fact remained that by that point it'd become a competition between teams to not just get 4 jars per team, but instead get as many as humanly possible back to Beacon. One team even requisitioned their own private Bullhead to airlift out several hundred sap jars.
It was a shame, since at that point Goodwitch put her foot down and said that each team was allowed to collect no more than five jars per person, one for the team to have, whilst the other four would be handed in. "Good times..." She rubbed a thumb against the sticker, remembering one time how Violet had wagered her share of the tree-sap that she could suplex a Beowolf into a puddle of sap without getting any in her hair. She managed to pull the suplex off, but ended up literally upside down chest-deep in the sap, because Roux had sneakily dug the puddle way deeper than it appeared.
Watching Violet chase Roux around literally wielding a dazed Beowolf and swinging it about by the leg was quite honestly the most hilarious sight she'd ever seen, even better than that time she and Jay tried to get Goodwitch with a bunch of pink dye, but ended up making Ozpin look absolutely fabulous. Immortal Headmaster or not, that man could make anything work, even having his hair and face all dyed pink didn't phase him.
Turning her focus back towards Peach, she gave the professor a grin. "Some of them are. So...these have literally been sitting around for a year?" Peach, forgetting she had her arms full, tried to throw them upwards in exasperation, but quickly stopped herself and settled for a growling noise.
"Well, considering that stunt Team BLNT pulled with the bullhead they filled with sap, I had enough sitting in my storage room to fill a Mistralian Swimming Pool! Honestly, I can understand being competitive, but sending several thousand jars back...did you hear that one of them accidentally admitted that they literally paid a bunch of rookie hunters to sneak into the area, tap a bunch of trees then hide them so they could retrieve them and claim that they did it all?" Ruby rolled her eyes.
"Of course they did. I did wonder just how they got so many jars. So, they ended up cheating in the end?" Peach frowned and nodded. "Ugh, just kills the competition. Shame that Goodwitch doesn't let anyone gather more than 5 any more, those got really competitive really quickly. All started because two teams argued that they were more efficient at harvesting sap, then a few other teams, including ROVR, got mixed into it, and it snowballed so quickly..." Smiling softly, Ruby allowed herself a moment to reminisce on those days, often ending with at least one of the girls, very often Violet, covered in red tree sap and brawling with a Grimm or three.
"Ha, you don't have to remind me. I remember that day you all but dragged Olive and Roux into Beacon behind you." Snorting, Ruby recalled the event, at the same time as Peach spoke. "What was it, they thought trying to swim in sap was actually a good idea?" Wincing, she nodded.
"Yeah, I think Violet might have had a hand in convincing them, even if they never said as much. Honestly, Grimm-infested forest, and they thought swimming in a small pool of Grimm-attracting fluid which has a vaguely distracting effect, with aura mind you, was a good idea! What's funnier though is that they even wanted me to bloody well join them! I still remember Olive acting pretty much drunk off the sap and trying to kiss me!" Peach gave up and started laughing, trying to hold her vials with one hand and covering her mouth with the other. "The whole bullhead ride home as well!"
Peach's high-pitched laugh echoed through the room, with Ruby's joining her soon after.
"Oh shit-"
An echoing explosion blasted out of the room, sending Ruby crashing backwards through a table and then the door, finally coming to a stop half-embedded on the other side of the hallway. "Ow." Coughing a few times, Ruby extricated herself from the human-shaped hole her aura had smashed into the wall, rolling her arms and wincing. "Ahh shit." She muttered under her breath, brushing down her cloak to remove the fragments from the now-splintered door.
She wanted to try and infuse some of the dust she'd managed to obtain in Vale into a spare knife, the idea being that she could activate the dust, throw the knife, and after a few moments the dust would go critical and explode into a wave of force, bursting through several strategically-placed vents along the length of the weapon to create essentially a big ball of kinetic energy. Unfortunately, the crystal she was using was a bit too volatile, it went off with just a slight brush of aura. It had to be strong enough to create a good impact, but not too strong that it ripped the weapon apart. Unfortunately, to get a good balance was really damn hard.
She wanted to use a crystal because unlike with powdered dust, a crystal could be regulated to release only a certain amount of charge. Powdered dust would just burn itself all up at once, making it a single-use weapon, then having to be refilled. With a crystal, as long as it was high-density and well-regulated, she could use the gravity-pulse at least a few dozen times before the charge wore out and she'd have to get the crystal recharged, or if she wanted to save lien she could just replace the crystal entirely.
It was far cheaper to get a new crystal after all, since actually recharging a drained crystal was extremely difficult, expensive, and volatile. After a few recharges the crystal would hold far less energy and would go off at the drop of a hat, which is what had just happened to her despite assurances that the crystal would be perfectly stable. Huffing, she plucked out a shard of wood and tossed it to the side, ignoring the staring students as she strode back into the room and picked up the now-dead crystal.
When it went off, it burnt all its energy in one fell swoop, throwing all loose objects around the room. Being used to taking hits, Ruby had her aura up and ready the instant she saw the crystal start going critical, so she was already prepared for it then exploding, and she easily redirected the thermal energy which was generated as a by-product. Didn't help that it had so much force that the blast, well, blasted her off her feet and across the room. Shame about the table which was now split into two dozen pieces across the room, but she could just replace it.
What was most infuriating for Ruby however was the fact that that crystal was not, in fact, a freshly-mined one, but a refilled crystal. A newly-cut crystal which hadn't been used would have never gone off like that, but one that had been recharged a few times would act just as that crystal did. Fortunately enough the drop in potential energy stopped the crystal from obliterating the workbench it was on, but it was still extremely infuriating.
Throwing the crystal into a container which had been tossed on the floor, Ruby also grabbed her bag and left the room, ignoring the gawping students in favour of striding down the hallway, quickly flicking her scroll out and sending a message to Glynda that one of the labs got damaged in an experiment and needed to be repaired. She put it away again without looking to see if Glynda had even seen the message.
She had a dealer to punch.
"LAXER!"
The aforementioned man ducked as a knife came flying at him, yelping as he then got dragged over his counter by the collar. "Ahh, Miss Rose, a pleasure to see you." He spoke eloquently, completely at odds with his position in the arms of an elite huntress. "To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?" Ruby tightened her grasp, choking the man slightly.
"Oh gee, I don't know, maybe that the gravity crystal you sold me was a re-charged piece of junk?" The man's face hardened instantly, his brow furrowing. He waved Ruby's hands off his collar, straightening his clothes for a moment after he slipped back off the counter, then pulled out a ledger from under his counter.
"Let's see, let's see. Ahh, G-273012-C, mined, cut and transported from the Schnee Felris mines seventeen days ago. That crystal should have been pristine." Laxer peered up at Ruby from his ledger, looking her over closely and making a noise in his throat when she glared at him. "Well now, this means we have a problem..." The crystal seller entered the back-room, the sounds of cardboard being pulled open and plastic rummaging around audible through the open door. Humming to herself, Ruby swayed on her heels. While she didn't really like the man too much on account of selling her a faulty crystal, she knew he wouldn't try to flee from a huntress who was well known for her speed above all else.
He gave back in holding several metal-grey coloured crystals, laying them out on the glass. "Lemme guess, all these are crystals from the same place?" Laxer nodded in agreement. Lifting one up whilst carefully holding her aura way from that hand, Ruby tipped the diminutive little crystal one way then the other, frowning. "It looks pretty normal to me, it doesn't have any signs of being a recharged crystal..." Placing it back down, she looked up at Laxer. "Well, want to give me one so I can test it? Because I have a pretty feeling that all these crystals are re-charged."
The man shuffled three towards her, pushing the rest back into the box. "Take those three, test them in the room downstairs, and we'll see whether or not these are faulty crystals." Nodding once, Ruby used her semblance to disappear, smirking as the man ranted about her leaving rose petals everywhere. Sure, they disappeared on their own, but it still left a mess whilst they were in existence. Hearing the man clambering downstairs after her, Ruby held one crystal out in the palm of her hand, the other two safely hidden away in her pouch, before pulsing a tiny amount of aura into her hand.
Immediately the crystal began glowing, getting brighter and brighter as it released more and more energy. Holding onto it for a few more moments, Ruby tossed it away at the moment where it was teetering on critical, making it release its energy in mid-air as to not damage the building. Sighing, Ruby took out the other two crystals, and repeated the experiment, for the exact same result. The crystals were definitely recharged ones, they took a fraction of aura to set off, and they would ramp up their energy output swiftly, then hit a critical point and expel all of their energy in a single instant.
The weird part was that Ruby couldn't figure out why the hell someone would do that. Recharged crystals were expensive to produce, more expensive than just buying freshly-cut crystals. It was designed for weapons which couldn't replace their energy crystals easily, making it worth the cost so they didn't tear their own weapons apart every time the crystal was drained. Selling them to a dust-shop was just stupid, it'd cost more to recharge the crystal than you'd get back for selling the damn thing. "So Laxer, where'd you get these from?"
"That's just the thing Miss Rose, these came in with a Schnee shipment." Blinking, Ruby stared at him. She must have heard that wrong. "These crystals came in with a freighter about a week ago, signed and sealed since they were sent out from the mines they came from." Palming her chin, Ruby stared at the wall in thought. Snapping her fingers, she looked at Laxer with a grin, something which made the man wince as he knew the huntress had a probably-stupid and dangerous plan in mind.
"When's the next freighter coming in?"
Short, and a bit boring, I know, sorry boos.
Next chapter should be quite exciting though, Ruby starts digging into a conspiracy involving the SDC, so evidently Weiss and Blake are going to end up mixed in somehow, dragging Russet and Yang into it through osmosis or some sciencey-sounding words. Hope you guys are enjoying this, and maybe you could check out some of my other stories if you want more to read!
