This is a sort of aftermath chapter.
I wrote this to relax from all of the hectic stuff that I've been doing lately, and I hope this turned out okay.
Thank you for all of the comments and the hype in the last chapter, but for now, the fight scenes and the conflict will end to show the more… human side of things. The faunus side will be shown soon.
Enjoy, and please follow, favorite, and review!
-Spirit
(Discord: discord . gg / 9t9MK3jHmV )
… (Pyrrha POV) …
Pyrrha was currently lying in a hospital bed. Her injuries, while not severe, were debilitating in that she might have to walk with a limp for the rest of her life if she didn't heal up her tendon before walking again.
Besides here, the doctors were puzzling about Yun, her savior from the lady that somehow got laser beamed to death by Ruby, whose semblance was speed.
Maybe this dealt with the existence of magic that the now late Headmaster Ozpin had told her about, but Ruby wasn't one of the maidens… right?
Back to the topic of Yun, nobody knew why he wasn't waking up. His aura was regenerating, although it was constantly fluctuating up and down. His heart rate was standard, although a bit slower than the average person, his airways were unobstructed, and the superheated environment that he was in somehow didn't cook him alive.
Still, he was unresponsive.
He was hooked up to an IV drip, considering he couldn't even eat to supplement whatever his aura was regenerating.
His blood vessels were very pronounced, for some reason, and even vibrated occasionally. Sadly, medicine had no answers for his plight.
Still, Pyrrha had an even more vexing issue.
"You have to come back to Mistral, Pyrrha."
Her mother was here. She had been against Pyrrha becoming a grimm fighting huntress in the first place, citing the fact that her tournament career and cereal sponsorship had already landed them enough money to live their whole lives without worrying about money.
And now that she was caught in the middle of a terrorist attack, her paranoid mother (who had grown increasingly controlling after her father died on a mission to one of the frontier villages) obviously wanted her at Mistral, where it was still relatively safe. The Beringel problem was nothing compared to Vale's gigantic grimm-spawning dragon issue, and now that it was safe, her return was demanded.
In a softer tone, her mother continued.
"I know you want to be a huntress, and I'm not going to stop that anymore. It's just… Beacon isn't really habitable anymore, isn't it?"
Pyrrha looked out of the window and at the bleary cityscape. Vale was usually a lively place, with lights in the tall buildings of the city even at night. Now…. Everything was… empty.
The lights had shut off. The imposing height of the CCT tower was diminished, due to the antenna on the glorified radio disappearing some time during what the media now dubbed "The Fall of Beacon".
"There's nothing here for you." Her mother whispered.
But there was! Jaune was her partner. Ren and Nora were her teammates. Team RWBY were her friends! Her first real friends, ones that didn't want to mooch off her status!
Even Yun… Pyrrha's heart felt a twinge of guilt.
She had been happy when he was defeated in the tournament. Now, he had fallen unconscious because of an unknown problem just to protect her, somebody he didn't even know very well.
In a way, she felt that Yun and herself were somehow alike.
Even if Yun could be described as… brisk at best or just completely cold faced and she was, to the admission of others, "a generic nice girl".
Even if Yun was ignorant of many of the occurrences on Remnant and possibly the poorest out of their group of students, compared to her knowledge of how the media worked and her fame and fortune.
Even if Yun was possibly the most genuine out of all of them, totally honest with opinions and possessing one of the realest motivations: to enjoy life.
It was because of knowing his real motivations that Pyrrha realized how they were both alike.
They were incredibly selfish.
Pyrrha had finally constructed an environment she wanted to be in, and because of it, she didn't want it to end. She didn't want her four years of beacon to be cut short at one year.
The afternoons of training alongside Jaune (even if they weren't training together, per say). Nora's wacky antics and Ren's equally humorous attempts to keep her in control.
Amidst the reminiscence and her mother's ceaseless prattling, Pyrrha realized something.
Why did Yun save her?
Yun, the single least heroic and the most selfish person out of their group… had saved her from her death- No. She shouldn't be thinking about this.
Still, the brush with death had her shook. The promise of comfort, of being back in a familiar environment, the welcoming sense of safety and homeliness that Mistral still was… enticing.
After her mother finished her last paragraph about why she should come back to mistral, she sighed.
And accepted the offer.
Pyrrha Nikos was going back to Mistral.
(But was it what she really wanted? Was it driven by the primal fear of death? The fear that, had Yun not come to save her, that she would be gone from this world? The fear of the world-ending cult that wanted to cripple all of Vale?)
(Nobody really knew.)
(Not even her.)
… (Jaune POV) …
The airship out of the city of Vale was very crowded. Pyrrha had already healed her ankle and now was being flown back to Mistral, but because of the amount of bullheads flying out of the city, there couldn't even be a proper goodbye between the teams.
Blake was just gone, and Jaune, Ren, and Nora were all crammed one corner next to Yun's hospital bed, his now gaunt form still hooked up to an IV that was rocking around as the bullhead. A nurse was also near the bed, but everybody was so tightly packed that even if there was an emergency, nobody would be able to react in time.
In these grimm times (Would Yang be proud? Jaune wouldn't know. She was unconscious, missing an arm, and on a different bullhead heading for Patch), Yun seemed so… frail.
The fellow teenager (could you believe that he was only 16?) had climbed a tower and then survived the firestorm that had lit up the night on top of Beacon tower with not a burn to speak of.
Still, he was rendered unconscious, and Pyrrha had been incapacitated after only a couple of minutes of fighting.
The two strongest people in his life had fallen before this unknown threat, and at that moment, Jaune felt… small. Insignificant.
And he hated to say it, but… helpless.
The very feeling he had set out to stop.
From training with Yun, killing those Grimm at the breach, and then getting into the second round of the Vytal Festival tournament! Pyrrha had fought with Ren during the second round, but he was still their team's leader, and everything was looking up!
And then everything was shattered.
With some unseen force pulling the strings, Pyrrha somehow killed a robot girl. Grimm poured into the city. And Pyrrha went up to fight a woman that had just killed another girl in something that looked like a stasis chamber. Then, he called Yun up to help her, and then there was a burst of flame that rivaled the heat of the sun. It also had lasted for three minutes.
In the end, Yun was alive, but if Jaune was the one that climbed the tower with Pyrrha…
Jaune and Pyrrha would both have died.
Ruby somehow also got up the tower, and then saved both Yun and Pyrrha by unleashing something that was even brighter than the storm of fire.
Anyways, the point was, why was he always the one to be protected?
The more confusing thing to think about was why Pyrrha had kissed him, in the context of his helplessness. Why would the champion like the wimp?
Pyrrha had everything. Even if Jaune didn't know at first, Pyrrha was a champion, had an adoring fanbase, and Jaune was… Jaune.
So why had Pyrrha chosen him?
He didn't know. And he didn't know a lot of thing. The fact that the entirety of Vale had fallen was still not registering with Jaune, and the bullhead kept rattling, echoing in the emptiness of his mind.
Jaune felt like a pawn, being ignored as the pillars behind him. The bishops, the rooks, the queens… all falling.
Leaving just the pawns behind, scattered on a battlefield of titans.
(But still, what could pawns do except move forward?)
…(3 months later - Yang POV)…
Winter had cast its spell on the land, and overnight, turned the woods of Patch into a frozen winter wonderland.
She was up and about now, and currently, she was just… sitting on the couch… watching TV. Her Right arm still ached, and she absent mindedly reached out to scratch a limb that wasn't even there.
The door was suddenly slammed open, most of the force coming from the foot that just kicked it open and a bit of the force coming from the frosty winter wind blowing in shards of snow.
"Guess what came in today!" her father, Taiyang said enthusiastically.
"… Hey dad." Yang mumbled, turning around to look at him.
After dropping the bags in the kitchen, her dad came back holding a long, rectangular white box.
"… What?" Yang said, looking up slowly.
"I can't wait for you to try this." Taiyang said, putting down the box that had the Atlesian military symbol on it.
"It's… for me?" Yang said, faded purple eyes looking into the bright blue ones of her father.
"You and you only." A reassuring smile was plastered on Taiyang's face, and Yang took this as the cue to open the box. She grabbed the lid, and was surprised to see that the box didn't budge at all when the lid came off. Whatever was inside was clearly heavy.
It revealed… a silver arm?
"Brand new, state of the art, Atlas tech." Taiyaing gestured grandiousely at the contraption within.
Several emotions rushed into Yang. One was mildly happy about this development. It was finally time for her to return to normal, right?
"You know, I thought I had to pull some strings, call in a few favors?"
That slight wave of happiness was immediately knocked away by the sight of those markings, the red flash, and then the pain. Of aura focusing on something that wasn't there.
The last emotion was one of a bit of remembrance.
There was somebody else who wore an armored arm.
"But you earned this one all on your own, kiddo."
Finally recovering from the hodgepodge of thoughts, Yang looked up at those last words.
"Huh?"
"I was surprised too!" her dad said, shifting from foot to foot. "General Ironwood said he already had one of his top scientists working on this… for you!"
Yang looked at the arm again. It did look really advanced.
"He wanted you to know that you fought valiantly. You should be proud of yourself."
A feeling of self depreciation invaded her thoughts. She… didn't really do anything. She just jumped at somebody attacking-
The thought of her runaway teammate made her eyes turn to a dull red briefly, before it faded back into melancholy.
Still… there was something she wanted to ask.
"How about Yun? How is he doing? If General Ironwood made this arm for me, then he must have done something for Yun."
"The other kid on the top of the tower, huh?" Taiyang said. "He's in a hospital ward at Signal. Nobody has figured out what's wrong with him yet. His aura keeps regenerating to heal something, but nobody knows what."
Yang sighed.
Yun… another complicated topic for her. Months ago, she would have thought of that guy and feel the urge to fight him. To challenge him and best him hand to hand. He was so infuriating to fight, and so… un huntsmanlike normally. But when he fought, he gained this oddly intense look in his eyes, and he fought nothing like what he acted like in the libraries. Dirty, bold, straight up close and personal.
It was something the old Yang would have liked to fight.
Now, on the other hand (not that she had one at the moment), it was just… pity.
She had seen what coma patients had to go through after their endeavors. Her losing an arm was bad, but after these three months…
Yun would have become a skeleton. He was already skinny beforehand, and now? Nothing but bones would be left.
"So… are you going to try the arm on?"
"M-maybe later." She said, interrupted from her thoughts. "Just… not really feeling good right now."
She staggered back to her room, silver arm still on the table.
Habitually, she stopped in front of her sister's room, only to realize that it was empty.
It was hard to accept that Ruby really did go on another adventure. This time, to Mistral.
Something inside her leapt at the word adventure, but the rest of her still remained lifeless.
If so much training and efforts to prepare for the Vytal festival and being a huntress just lead to endings like her losing an arm and Yun's three month coma…
Maybe becoming a huntress wasn't as fun as she initially thought it would be.
…
Yun's aura monitor began dipping into the red. Everybody in the ward was panicking. The patient that had remained stable for the past three months was suddenly slowly dying.
Aura boosters were give, consultations with atlesian scientists were made, and cross references to other huntsmen comas (which were a rarity, since huntsmen either just… died or ended up crippled) were made.
Nothing came up.
Still, something was definitely happening. Some force was bouncing around in Yun, leaving around various red bruises that were caused by internal bleeding on the arms, legs and torso.
There wasn't much left of the patient. An inability to consume any food, solid or liquid, rendered the IV drip as the only source of nutrition that Yun was getting. Combined with the regeneration that he was constantly somehow using to heal the bruises and… something else... it ended up making the patient lose weight fast.
Suddenly, the needle in his arteries quivered. The whole IV bag was rattling, and a gust of wind began filling the room. The bed Yun was on rattled, and his baggy hospital clothes began billowing out in an invisible gust.
As quickly as it happened, the movements stopped. Yun flickered purple, and his aura had shattered.
The doctors recovered from their shock, reconnected the life monitoring equipment, and then, to their surprise, an hour later…
A pair of grey eyes slowly peeled open.
…
The truth was, the coma was the price of the continuous Chi burst. Even if Yun didn't want to cannibalize his organs, it had already happened. The life force was drained from the five essential organs and then propelled outwards as Yun's Chi reserves ran low. Such was the price of tapping into forbidden power.
The wounds and tiny little holes on the organs that marked the beginning of the cannibalization were immediately healed. From a Chi amateur, that surely was a good thing, right?
No. It was much worse. The excess life force from the five essential organs were converted into Chi, but now that the organs were sealed up and Yun wasn't performing chi bursts anymore, the energy was trapped between the organs and the boundaries of Yun's body, with Aura acting as the shell keeping the energy in.
The Chi had been bouncing around, attacking and assailing the prison that Aura was, totally destroying Yun's already fragile blood vessel connections. The formerly ordered and systematic transport system was now in disarray.
The aura had held up for the first two months, but even the soul had its limits. Without any input from its host, the body, the regenerative capabilities of Aura slowly weakened until it had to spend more and more energy healing the wound.
Like a trapped bird, Yun's Chi had been scratching and pecking at the cage that was Yun's body, and when his aura finally strained and shattered, the energy was finally released through the pores on his body and the hole in his arteries.
Finally, the imbalance was over, and the five essential organs were no longer acting as the fragile walls that the Chi was bouncing on.
With biological functions restored, the rest of its body began slowly restoring itself. Aura finally did its job completely, no longer inhibited by the force that it was trying to trap, and after an hour of healing the bruising and slight scarring that was everywhere in his body, his soul finally woke up his mind.
Still, now as thin as a scarecrow, with barely any muscles to speak of, no money or a place to go, and no other paths to the future in sight…
Was waking up really worth it? Maybe it was better to remain blissfully unconscious than have to face life's trials and tribulations
But humanity has always recovered, be it from plagues and epidemics, wars, famine, despair, or oppression.
And thus, the shattered clock ticks on.