Chapter sixty-seven

Sparring practice

Journal entry #233

"We've been sparring with team STNE every other day and we each have our preferred partners. My style of fighting meshes well with Sunstone's own. Because of their similar semblances, at least in terms of application, Eclipse and Raven prefer to spar each other. Neph and Tai are both heavily physical fighters so they naturally chose to partner with each other. Terra and Qrow were both the odd men out but neither one of them seem to mind that fact."

In the days leading to the Vytal Festival Tournament, Team RWBY fought Headmistress Sunstone in sparring matches several times. They hadn't faced combat in over a year, so Sunstone told them that she had 'volunteered' them for the Vytal Festival Tournament and that their time of receiving special treatment was over. She told them that she would be whipping them back into fighting shape, and while she would be holding back, that was no excuse to slack off.

They sparred for hours every day, and every day Sunstone pushed them incredibly hard. She had let them use their weapons. She said that if they somehow killed her, then they deserved to immediately graduate.

Their record against her was fifteen minutes, which the older woman admitted was not bad. Not the best, but far from the worst.

Sunstone grabbed Yang's wrist, and brought the older girl over her head before slamming her down onto the mat, putting her knee onto the brawler's neck gently. "Down, we'll do it again." She offered Yang her hand.

Yang groaned softly. She rotated her shoulder and winced as she took the offered hand. "Ow, I think you broke my shoulder."

Ruby, Blake, and Weiss all sat up. Weiss shook her head to clear the stars from her vision. Blake cracked her neck while Ruby rubbed her nose to make sure it wasn't broken.

Sunstone chuckled softly as she walked to the side and took a drink of water from her canteen. "Trust me, Yang. If I had broken your shoulder, you'd know because you'd be in a massive amount of pain. Not to mention, you wouldn't have been able to take my hand."

She paused before she looked at the four girls in front of her. Her mind briefly went to when she and her team had looked at Theodore in the same way that team RWBY was looking at her right now.

Eyes glistening with fire, their sweating bodies tensed to go another round. "Well, the fire in your eyes tells me all I need to know. You four have come a long way, and I know that you're not done yet. So, make me proud when you compete okay?"

They all nodded and Ruby smiled softly. "We won't let you down."

"I have a feeling that you won't. If that's everything I'll be heading back to my quarters now." She smiled slightly and turned on her heel, ready to take her leave.

Yang had slowly raised her hand and was still holding it aloft. "Um, Headmistress Sunstone? I have a question if I may ask it."

Sunstone turned around again and nodded. "You don't have to be cautious. Just say what's on your mind."

Yang stared at Sunstone and slowly nodded. She was a bit unsure of how to say what was on her mind as requested.

The Headmistress's petite body was glistening with sweat. Clad in nothing but a sports bra and spandex, she was showing the most skin yet. Her arms had full sleeve tattoos in Old Vacuoan script that wound up her arm from her wrists to her shoulders. From the middle of her back down was Remnant's shattered moon above a meteorite. Sunstone's body didn't just have tattoos covering her figure, it also had a myriad of scars that spoke of a life of combat.

"Yang? What is it?" Sunstone snapped her fingers in front of the girl's face, and that snapped her out of it. "Look, I'm all for you admiring my curves. I mean, I'm fine playing for both teams, but I don't think Weiss would be alright with that. Besides, you said you had a question for me?"

Yang blushed, as did all of the girls, before she shook her head. "Right, sorry. Anyway, last year you seemed to know who my sister and I were… was that because of the news?"

Sunstone shook her head. "Not exactly, I actually went to school with your parents. Team STRQ was at Beacon the same year that my team, Team STNE went here." Her voice lowered slightly, as she tried to stop her eyes from clouding over.

"For… various reasons… Summer and Qrow spent a lot of time with my team in the last few months leading up to graduation."

RWBY looked at each other with confused expressions. "What do you mean?" Blake asked, her head tilted slightly.

"It's… complicated… and messy. I'll explain it one day, but now is not the time, nor the place. The point is that Summer was like a sister to me as well as my best friend and Qrow… well." Her pale white skin turning a very deep scarlet told them everything that they needed to know about what she was talking about.

"What is your team like? Are they… as forward as you are?" Weiss asked, and Sunstone's head dropped. Seeing the woman's reaction made her regret asking. "I-I apologize. I didn't realize it was a sensitive subject."

"It's fine. You couldn't have known," Sunstone paused, took a deep breath, and forced her softly shaking body to relax again before she sat down to continue.

"Terra, Neph, Eclipse, and I, we were team STNE. Terra was… a trouble maker, but he was also an incredibly gentle young man. He would throw himself into a fire if it meant protecting those that he cared about… and he was…." She trailed off, closing her eyes for a moment. "He was the closest thing I've ever had to a big brother."

Her body started to shake and a soft whimper escaped from her throat. As RWBY moved to embrace her, a guttural growl erupted from the woman's vocal cords before she opened her eyes.

Just like that, the shaking stopped and her eyes blazed with green fire. Her voice was stronger, and lower, as she continued.

"Neph was kind of like a hurricane. She was calm one minute and the next she'd be bouncing off the wall from all the energy that she had stored up. I don't know how Terra managed to keep with her but somehow, he kept that girl grounded, and they were an amazingly adorable couple,"

Sunstone got up, raked her hand through her long dirty blonde hair and smiled. Except her smile was more of a snarl. It seemed that she had forced down the sadness and anger had taken its place.

"Eclipse was a little bit like you, Blake, except for the fact that they were even quieter. I think that they probably spoke twenty words the entire four years that I knew them. They might've been quiet, but they were something fierce when it came to a real fight. They held nothing back."

She growled as she put her hand over her face. "They were my family… and I let them die, and for what? They died for nothing."

She swayed back and forth a little bit before she collapsed into unconsciousness

Her lack of sleep from the nightmares, the physical exhaustion from pushing her body past its limit, and the emotional strain to keep her rage, and her guilt in check finally broke the camel's back. Losing her team still affected her deeply, even after all these years and she was still struggling.

Ruby reacted first, using her semblance to catch the Headmistress before she hit the ground. Her teammates gasped and moved closer, unprepared and not knowing what had just happened. For a moment, their rational thoughts came to a screeching halt as their emotions took over in the shock of watching the seemingly invincible woman collapsing mid-conversation.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl as Ruby's teammates gathered around her and the fallen headmistress. Within Ruby's mind, time stopped completely before her mind's eye rewound the last few minutes, replaying and sucking in every iota of information that was available to her. Each was a separate puzzle piece that connected to form a full picture, several hundred shards floated in her mind awaiting their place to reveal what they had to reveal.

The headmistress had exerted herself, but not by much. The weather was very hot and dry, as it was every day but they were underground. Besides, Sunstone was a native Vacuoan so she had long adapted to the desert climate. Ruby and her friends had physically exerted themselves far harder, repeatedly throwing themselves against the seemingly sheer wall that was Headmistress Sunstone. But she was old, not Professor Ozpin old, but like Dad or Uncle Qrow old.

That line of thought was discarded as the phenomenon before her was atypical of people like Dad, Uncle Qrow, and many others.

Sunstone's body was warm, but not overly so. Ruby could feel the sweat on her hand as she felt Sunstone's forehead which didn't line up with heatstroke so her body wasn't compromised by dehydration.

Ruby put one hand to the woman's neck and felt a pulse, but this information didn't do her much good beyond telling her that it wasn't blatantly atypical. So, this was set aside and discarded.

She heard her teammates quietly talking but she wasn't processing what they said. It sounded like gibberish to her as her attention was turned elsewhere. Shards of facts, probabilities and statistics floated past her mind's eye.

Sunstone's collapse had been a sudden one and with no readily available reason as to why. If there was a medical reason for her collapse then none of them would know that since none of them were privy to her private information.

Her mind turned to The Battle of Beacon and the flood of injured people, including herself. There had been a strain on medical resources so the personnel had to prioritize the cases that couldn't wait and stall for time with the rest. This piece linked to a concept stored as a motor impulse; a single wave of a siren's call flowing out of her body. Both primed and spurring for action yet faithfully waiting for approval from her. As this happened, her inner voice simultaneously pinged her consciousness with the strategy's verbal label: [Delaying action. Okay check.]

Formulation threads snaked outward from this mental packet and branched out to other shards of memory and experience. Dozens of faded branches sought out boughts and lessons, yet several stronger ones homed in on another shard that rested on the periphery of her mind. A piece that glowed in imaginary brilliance.

A memory of Sun hanging upside down from outside their window. "That's dumb, you should always get friends involved. That's why I brought Neptune."

Ruby's brain supplied compiled formula to her consciousness with a further virtual 'ping' [Hold position, call for back up, and wait for reinforcement.]

Of the hundreds of people that Sunstone interacted with on a daily basis there were only two that were constantly by her side and likely to know such private information.

"We need someone who might know what's happening. Weiss, go find either the Vice-Headmaster or the Vice-Headmistress."

Weiss rose to her feet, her body already predicting the haste of running out of the training room. Her team had been through this before.

Ruby didn't bother watching Weiss leave. Instead, her mind's eye flagged something for her to review. Sunstone's behavior contradicted itself in the moments before her collapse.

It was almost as if one half of her brain had felt fondness while the other half had become agitated and angry.

Ruby had used her Semblance to catch Sunstone before she hit her head, but she wasn't a medical practitioner so she couldn't be sure that Sunstone didn't accidentally hit her head regardless. Of course, there was also the possibility that her contradicting behavior was caused by a seizure. Again though, she couldn't say for certain.

"Yang, go get towels from the locker room and make sure they're soaking wet. We need to cushion her head and I can't say for certain that she didn't hit her head." Ruby felt the Headmistress's forehead, and it was normal. But she didn't want to risk it.

Yang nodded, leaping into action as she jogged over to the locker room.

"Blake, help me rotate her onto her side," Ruby ordered softly and Blake obeyed.

Was the way that her team looked at Sunstone how they looked at her when she was injured? The girl filed it away for future reference and review.

When Weiss arrived with Vice-Headmaster Theodore, they saw the three remaining members of Team RWBY sitting around the most powerful woman in Vacuo.

Sunstone's head was in Ruby's lap, with a few towels supporting her neck. Blake had moved the woman's hair out of her face and had put a wet towel on her forehead, while Yang was lightly running another cloth across her arms, neck, and lower stomach.

"Weiss told me what happened. I should've known…" Theodore muttered under his breath. He walked over to them and effortlessly picked the tiny woman up.

"Is something wrong with her? Why'd she just collapse?" Ruby's voice was very quiet.

Theodore paused as he considered what to say. He didn't have his counterpart's talent for knowing what their adopted tribe member would say before she did, but he had what Weiss told him.

He knew that Sunstone had a large soft spot for Summer Rose, and he had a feeling that that affection transferred over to her daughters as well.

"I think the only reason that she opened up to you girls was because of your mother. I'm sure that she told you about her relationship with Summer, and I'm sure she undersold it. The two of them were practically twins; they were that inseparable. Summer, for all intents and purposes, was the fifth member of Team STNE. After… what happened, Summer was living with them full-time. And no, I won't tell you what happened with that ugliness. It wasn't my business then, and it's neither my business nor my story to tell now. She'll be fine. She always is."

Theodore muttered before he clicked his heels and vanished, leaving Team RWBY behind.