This is kind of inspired by Not This Time, Fate!, but the idea came originally from "what if somebody in Atlas that was killed by team RWBY's somewhat questionable decisions to teleport two whole cities worth of people into a desert". Also, not an SI btw.
Updates will be extremely sporadic, and this is basically a plot bunny I don't know what to do with. So, I'm posting it,
Hope you enjoy…
-SpiritOfErebus
(Come talk about the other, probably better fics I've written! discord . gg / 9t9MK3jHmV)
It ended.
And then it began, once more.
…
Looking up at the faces that had guided us to this place, the faces that floated in the air or circled around the civilians, desperately protecting all of us from the waves and waves of Grimm that attacked us, I wondered.
"What did we do to deserve this?"
Once the topic of gossip that I had seen the adults discuss as a child, Winter Schnee finally fell from the air, exhausted.
It had been a couple of hours now. I had lost track of exactly how long. Wielding a simple sword, and with a standard pistol in my pocket, I was amongst the line of huntsmen students warding off the Grimm that sprang up like endless weeds in the sandy desert.
"She's down! Oh fuck!"
I finally kicked back the medium sized sand worm attacking me and slashed at it with my knife, before instinctively pulling the trigger at the cloud of dust approaching me.
I had forgotten that the gun has been long since empty. We had run out of ammunition three hours ago.
"This is it, huh?"
I turned to see a fellow student next to me, a bloody stump where her left arm had been. She had a vacant expression on her face.
"I suppose it is." I said, turning back to the worm attacking me. My scratched and worn blade glanced off of its keratin armor. Normally, the Grimm would be slashed in half by the blow, but with aura dwindling and nobody to replace anybody in the wide defense line, we had to resort to desperate measures to protect… literally everybody in Atlas.
"Semblance-less scum."
That now had been put in the middle of the desert. People that had very well never seen a grain of sand in their life were now being bombarded by it. It was like a blizzard, except instead of sapping your heat, it took your willpower.
The grimm took the sounds of despair as encouragement to attack, and with more and more of us finally running out of aura, the most powerful of us falling in exhaustion, and the grimm redoubling their efforts…
It was hopeless.
Grimm tore through our line as many of us simply lost hope. As I watched three worms approach, I attacked them only out of self preservation instinct.
"D-lister."
As I kicked a worm in its mandibles, the beast took my boot, the formerly supple leather now showing its cheap quality. With the storm sanding away at it for hours, the worn leather had finally given way.
Without the footing provided by the boots, I slowly sank into the sand. The worms coiled around me as I slashed at them, stabbed at them, even chewed on them while they dragged me slowly into the sand. The last of my aura flared to defend against their agonizing bites.
In the end, it wasn't the grimm that killed me. It was suffocation.
"You'll die on your fist mission, you piece of shit."
As I felt my outstretched hand sink below the surface, I gave up.
I couldn't do anything. Nobody could do anything against the tides of the monsters and the grimm-controlling threat called… Sally? That the huntresses on the screen spoke about.
My lungs felt tight now. They screamed for breath, but I couldn't even open my mouth.
Again, it was survival instinct that drove me to act. Despite knowing that certain death still awaited above the sand, despite knowing that I was too weak, not diligent enough, not strong enough, too lazy...
I tried to crawl up anyways.
"Consider choosing a… safer career." My father had said.
Those were the last words that echoed in my mind as I died there in the sand.
…
"Your aura is the culmination of your being." A kind voice said as I seemingly lurched forward. The familiar gym floor met me. During some… conflicts during junior huntsman training school, I had always been the one pushed onto the rubbery surface, somebody else's foot on my cheek.
"As you can all see, Amaranth's aura takes form as a barrier around your body. It can both be used to shield and enhance you."
I fell to the floor. The gym floor and my aura, both haunting shades of yellow (a color only slightly brighter than sand), sent waves of panic through my mind. I quickly stood up, breathing heavily.
As the colors stopped swimming in front of my vision, I fell to my knees.
"Usually, there is no such violent reaction to getting aura, but I suppose that there are exceptions. People with abnormal amounts of aura usually-huh?"
I looked up to the aura bar. If I remembered correctly, I was ridiculed for the slightly below average amount of aura that I had, but now…
The bar was glitching out. The green bar fluctuated up and down as the sickeningly yellow color flared… and then finally dissipated.
My bar was back at slightly below average.
"Perhaps you'd best head to the infirmary, Mister Rena."
I nodded, still slightly disoriented, before walking out of the Gym.
The sights of the school were eerily familiar. The open windows. The slightly frosty hallways because of the badly affixed windows. The military green lockers. The fact that I was skipping class once again.
I looked down at my fresh, delicate hands and my uniform.
This had to be some sort of weird dream.
I searched for my locker for a while, wandering the halls. After finally coming across a vaguely familiar area in front of a classroom, I entered the 82-52 combination, and then retrieved my sword. It was still in its unmarred sheath, the leather grip unused and still a soft black. Its grip felt unfamiliar in my hands, but that was because I had to taper off a good section of its weight to be able to use it with proficiency.
I habitually clipped it to my belt, only for my weapon to slide off of my uniform jacket and clatter onto the floor.
Just holding it in my hand, I looked outside. The fragments of the moon had just peeked over the barren horizon of the Solitas continent.
In the city that the academy overshadowed, there was no chaos. There was no great whale spewing out that cursed, black liquid. The city's lights were a disgusting yellow instead of the emergency red. The traffic of airships was normal, instead of desperately cramming into the ports to deliver as many people as possible to the safety of the city.
I descended down the stairs, garnering some strange looks from the janitors bustling around to fix a frozen water fountain, before pushing myself out of one of the heavy, frost-covered doors to the front steps of the academy.
For a moment, I just closed my eyes and breathed. The cold, harsh air was in a heavy contrast from the dry, gritty breaths that I had drawn in Vacuo. The-
I choked for breath, my eyes snapping open as I subconsciously stepped down with all of my might. I had to make it to the surface. I couldn't just-
My eyes opened again.
Oh, right. I was in Atlas. Not Vacuo.
That had to just have been a strange dream, right? Was I in a dream. Was dying a dream?
I didn't know anymore.
I walked down the stairs of the academy, watching the constant hail descend on the city. Flakes of ice ended up in my black hair, the cold bringing me back to … whatever this was. It certainly didn't feel like reality.
…
"These stairs really were long." I thought, as I finally reached the city. The block shaped houses and a wide street greeted me.
There were three fragments of the moon visible now, signaling that it was about two in the afternoon. However, with the eternal clouds hanging over the city, it always seemed like it was almost night. The eternally bright lights of the city was something that I had admired, growing up in the slightly wealthier areas of Mantle, but after five years here, attending the academy, it was nothing but a fact of life.
Now, however, it seemed relieving. I walked forward, looking at the convenience stores that lined the streets around the academy. Lazy students like the old me dawdled around it, chatting and enjoying some warm snacks, or for the particularly cold resistant ones, a cold bottle of soda. Some waved to me and I waved back absent mindedly, looking up at the clouds. The white and light grey gave way to the dark blue, where the moon peeked through the clouds.
I knew the world was going to end. I knew how it was going to end. When, and where too.
But I was the only one. The most useless and insignificant of them all.
How could a cloud stop the approach of the horizon?
…
After training for day and night, sending emails and letters to the top Atlesian officials, and monitoring the news closely, I had thought I was ready. The dream of the fall that had besieged my mind on the day that I had unlocked my aura in had guided a lot of my actions. I described as many factors of the fall of the city that I remembered in those messages.
Something would have changed. Someone would have done something.
Still, the chaos at Atlas continued. The city fell once again to unknown saboteurs, the lists of wanted criminals still expanded to include some rogue huntresses that had betrayed us on the inside, and the video message played once more to the world.
Nobody came to our aid, and the golden portals appeared again.
Despite doing everything I could, I had ended up on the desert again. The soft sand and the winds whipping through the air. The yellow color of the sand, and the golden glow of my aura reminded me of my failures as the worms came again.
I was two spots away from the huntress-in-training that had lost her arm this time.
…
"Your aura is the culmination of your being." A kind voice said as I stumbled forward.
A pastel color graced my fingers as I looked down again.
It looked like that the dream I had of the future wasn't the future after all.
…
"Your aura is the culmination of your being." The teacher's voice said as I staggered forward.
An amber color flared out of the edges of my vision.
…
"Your aura is the culmination of your being." A distant mumble sounded as I stood there, opening my eyes.
A bronze color filled my vision as I dragged a hand down my face.
…
""Your aura is the culmination of your being."
A rust color flared as I opened my eyes once again, a vacant gaze present.
I really wanted to change my wallpaper this time. Why had I kept it as yellow?
"As you can all see, Amaranth's aura takes form as a barrier around your body. It can both be used to shield and enhance you."
I was at the beginning of the dream again. As I saw the fireworks of what was probably my old experiences assimilating itself into this new body, I put my hands in my pockets and walked back to the only empty plastic chair for the first time after the very first dream.
Technically, I was about thirty mentally now. After four of the cycles of dreams, I was not convinced whether I was really good at dying, or the worst at sleeping in class.
This was… what I was doing, right?
I tried to gather my memories from sixteen years ago, but nothing would really come to mind.
Perhaps the problem would solve itself this time. As everybody heard the teacher's discussion about aura intensity and amount, the sound of laughter reached my ears again.
This was probably about my below average aura capacities again. This time, instead of blushing in shame, I just smiled and nodded with the rest of them. I really was pathetic, wasn't I?
I couldn't change anything after four of those strange dreams. Literally anybody else could have done better, with sixteen years of training in technique and knowledge of prior events. Still, all it did was help me kill a couple more worms. Learn some new tricks and talk to a couple new people.
Contacting General Ironwood was still impossible. He was too well-guarded for me to sneak into his residence, and all my messages were probably regarded as spammed or conspiracy theorist ramblings. Even posting the oddly specific way of the world ending hadn't done anything, with skeptics disliking the post into oblivion until the end actually came.
All I had managed to change in the grand scheme of things was the form of the gigantic grimm, for some reason. Still, it had performed the same function every time. Whether the creature was a gigantic whale, horse, or nevermore, the black goop was still spread, the grimm would still spawn, and the creatures would come.
Maybe me doing something was actually making everything worse.
That day, I decided to quit becoming a huntsman. Somebody more competent could take my place. Meanwhile, what was it that my dad suggested I do?
Go to college in Vale instead? Well, Vale falls and cuts out all of the inter-kingdom communication, so it's probably not even remotely safe there. I'm not studying in Vacuo. That's just a dumb idea. And, besides… I don't really like sand.
Mistral sounded like my best option.
…
"Dude, have you seen these new huntresses in action? They look pretty awesome, stopping that train and the attack!"
I took one look at the scroll screen, and an oddly familiar red cape flashed across the news video's panel. Wasn't that the outfit of one of the saboteurs?
I shrugged. I would deal with them in the next loop… or maybe not. The world ending wasn't exactly my problem to solve, anyways. Besides, why would they ever have a reason to come to peaceful, remote Mistral?
Hope you enjoyed. Please review or something to let me know what you thought.
-SpiritofErebus