Black Paladin
Chapter 16: Training Daze (BYRNJ)
AN: The progression is both fast and terrifying. You have been warned.
While working with Ruby and Weiss, I ensured that I also took time to work with Blake and Yang.
Yang's training evolved from three simple questions that I would soon discover had horrifying consequences.
I took Yang aside after one training period and we went to the training room.
The first question was answered nearly instantaneously and she quickly perfected the consequence. "So Yang. You get mad and then catch fire. Do you need to catch fire, or can you control that?"
She paused and looked at me confused. "What?"
I explain, "When you get angry you catch fire. I was wondering if you can just not catch fire."
She looked at me again, "Why wouldn't I want to catch fire?"
"Because if the fire isn't just streaming from your hair, maybe you can light something more useful on fire. Namely your fists." I explain bluntly.
She looks pleased with that thought, and then I throw gasoline on it. "And maybe you can just launch fire from your hands."
She states, "That sound impossible."
"Only if you don't have the mental discipline to contain your power." I snark, and she slowly grows angrier.
I nod slowly, and she finally lights up. I reach out telekinetically grabbing her clothes and demand, "Finally! Now contain the blaze, and see if you can hit me with your fire from..." I turn, avoiding a plum of fire heading for my face. I spend the next half an hour avoiding her increasingly accurate and colorful blasts of fire. Then she pauses and smiles.
"Destructo Disk." She says calmly and forms her auratic fire, which had taken a golden glow that isn't even slightly natural, into a solid meter of glowing frisbee. I dodge her disk, only to take the second one directly to the chest.
I fall backward, highly aggravated at the trick. As I stand, I see her create another disk of fire, her hair only having a trivial glow to it compared to before, and I decide to show off a tad. She tosses the third disk and I simply hold out my hand. As it gets close, I reach out again and catch the disk midair. The look on her face was priceless.
Working with Blake was different than anyone else on team RWBY. As I worked with her she proved to have a reliable answer to almost everything I could dish out. Her nearly unprecedented agility and her ability to dodge anything that wasn't invisible was amazing. Then it hit me. Literally.
I swung Fóvos and she clicked her gun. I knew something bad was going to happen. Then Blake blinked and a fiery version of her appeared, my sword through its chest. Then is moved, striking me with its fiery copy of Gambol Shroud. I paused.
I sheathed Fóvos and I turned asking, "You can command them?"
Blake pauses, her ears twitching with concentration, and says, "Slightly."
I walk over, "How?"
"When I shift from them, I can give simple commands." She says, and she looks up then her ears flatten. The smile that the girls had come to associate with experiments stretched across my Grimm features.
"What kind of commands?" I ask, a chuckle bubbling through my voice.
She explained, some fear and confusion in her posture, but mostly a concealed sense of adventure. "Single sword slashes, simple movement, things like that."
"What happens when you try more complex commands?" I ask, thinking back to my early experiments with Grimm.
"They don't do anything, or begin and then stop." She says.
"Tell one to walk over to me." I reach out to feel her aura and her clone.
As she does, I feel it move, and slowly draw aura until it suddenly stops. After a moment it fades, and Blake says, "See?"
"Concentrate on what you want it to do." I reach out again and feel the aura copy itself into the shadow. It made it exactly the same distance. I frown, and ask, "How many can you produce?"
Blake tilts he head, and says, "I don't know, they aren't effort intensive."
I smirk again, "One more time." This time I feel it form and push a little bit of my aura into it. Its form stabilizes slightly but goes exactly the same distance.
I frown, "So it's not power, then..." I think, and realize that it may well be the same thing holding Weiss back. "How long do you think they last?"
"A second or two." She says, and I realize something. It's not complexity or distance, it's her.
"One more time, I think I can stabilize it long enough to reach me." I say, lying right to her face.
She looks skeptical and I continue, "Blake, I project invisible hand capable of catching fire, and bullets. I think I can help you with your shadow projections." I emphasize the point by letting the dozen or so hands I have hovering about become visible for a moment, and her doubt fades.
She concentrates for a moment and the clone makes it all the way over and as it slashes, fades. She asks, slight shock in her voice, "What did you do?"
"Not a damn thing." I say, my experimenter smile back, "I just convinced you that I was."
She looks struck, and then angry, "Why lie to me?"
I wave to where the clone stood just a moment before, "To experiment. You believed it would make it to me, that it could accomplish complex tasks. And then it did."
She looks away, and then back, "It did." Then another clone appears, and sprint over, before slapping me across the face. "Don't lie to me again."
I smirk, "Unless it will improve your progress."
Another clone runs over, and slaps me, to both of our amusement.
My second question for Yang was inspired by a class in dust usage and the questions about universal forces; specifically gravity.
I took Yang aside again and straight up lied to another of my teammates, "Yang, I am going to push against you, just slightly, to test your Semblance's sensitivity." I reach out my hand and move a force measurement plate, one specifically used to test bombs.
She activates her semblance, and for a moment looks confused, then, seeing the smirk on my face, put there specifically to motivate her, she closes her eyes, and stretches her power, and then sighs.
"Now, I want to track how much force you actually absorb, so deactivate or dissipate or whatever you call it, and punch the plate. Then after say a full second of you semblance, OK?" I say, slight disappointment building in the mad scientist portion of my brain.
She hit with almost 4300 newtons of force. After one second of trying, she hit with exactly 4300 newtons. It didn't grow at all.
She turns slowly to me, asking, "So what force were you putting on me?"
"None." I say, sighing.
"I didn't grow any, did I?" She asks.
"Nope."
"What were you trying to do?" She asks.
"See if you can absorb gravity."
She frowns, and I smirk, "No gravity punch for you." She responded with a rainbow fireball.
After several more weeks, Blake's clone could do any number of things, and last for hours after deployment. That alone was incredible progress. About a month and a half after that revelation, another question occurred during a spar.
I slashed at her, and her clone sprung into existence catching my blade, while she went up to hit me from above. I moved a set of knives to intercept her, and the clone in front of my dissipated, and Blake formed another. However what struck me was the delay between the creation of the one above and the dissipation of the clone in front of me. I sheath my sword, and call over to Blake, "Can you have more than one clone?"
She pauses, sighs, and asks, "Is this going to be another experiment?"
"Yes. Yes, it is." I say, my now infamous smile spreading. "So, can you have more than one?"
"No." She says.
"You said that you couldn't have one that does complex commands. You were sure of it. Now you're sure you can't have more than one?" I ask, and she looks to the clone she had left above me.
"I don't..." She began, "I don't think can."
"So you can't," I begin slowly. "Because once again, you believe you can't"
She looks up, the growing defiance in her eyes reassuring. "So, what do you want me to do?"
"Create more than one?"
"How?"
"Well, we could work on creating more than one at a time, or we could work on creating one after another, what would you like to do first?" I ask.
Blake pauses, her ears twitching, "Two at the same time." she breathes out softly, and she concentrates. Two creations burst forth from her, branching in two different directions. I reach out, and as I touch them, I feel them dissipate under my touch.
"See, I..." She begins.
"Nope, I touched them too hard and dissipated them," I explain. "Try again."
She does, and this time I push aura into them and they feel normal, and complete the route to me. I dissipate my support, and they shatter. "Put more energy into them." I say calmly.
She does, with a very small drop in her aura, she creates two more shadows, both much more powerful than I had anticipated. They attack, and I impale one. It keeps moving, and Blake gasps as they both fade.
"Maybe not so much?" I say humorously.
She created another set, ones that feel normal, and ones that act normal as well. She pushes, and the two coming dissipate and three spring from her.
"Good, good." I say, trying not to laugh, but a slight cackly bleeding through, "Try supporting more than one at a time."
She creates one, and it hovers by her, and then with concentration, she begins to form another, and as the one next to her begins to fade, I push just enough aura to maintain it. Then she creates another, and then another, until a solid six of her stand in a circle. Then the original dissipates, and I comment, "You believe you can, and then you can."
She looks unhappy, and the clones around her mimic, drawing weapons. We both look at them in surprise. Then she smirks, and says, "Well, let's see how many of me you can handle."
It turns out Blake can create 12 clones of herself. Yang's litter jokes were unappreciated.
My third question for Yang came to my while studying with Ruby, and Crescent Rose for her stopping power. Some old law of physics said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. What about Yang's punches? For a time I considered dismissing the idea, as cities disappearing into craters flashed into my mind, but the mad scientist in me prevailed. So I took her aside for what I hoped would be the final time to ask her horrifying question.
We walked into the training room, and I got a different plate, one used to measure much larger explosions, and I asked her bluntly, "Have you ever heard of the laws of motion?"
"Nope! Do they relate to hitting things again?" She asked with a smile equally as deranged as mine.
"Well, the one that matters to you says that every action has an equal and opposite reaction." I say simply. At her slightly confused look, I elaborate, "When you hit something, an equal force is applied to your hand."
She looks at her hands, then her smirk returns, and she punches the pad, I note passively it hasn't changed. Then she hits it again, and my jaw comes loose. Her original of 4300 newtons was dwarfed when she hit 17200 newtons with her second punch. Her third was an astronomical 86000 newtons. Her forth was pushing 2150000, I vaguely noted number until the scale broke again. It took 11 strikes. 167 Billion Newtons of force. The force of her hitting the plate cracked the floor, the ceiling, and the walls on either side of the plate. I ran the numbers in my head, stunned at the resulting force, approaching 40 tons of explosive force. She looked over as the dust settled and Professor Goodwitch ran in demanding, "What happened?"
She looked over and saw the scrap metal that was the force meter and groaned. "I can't fix that." She muttered, before demanding, "Mr. Sinclair, Ms. Xiao Long, explain what happened here."
"I taught Yang the third law of force." I said numbly.
Professor Goodwitch went pale and asked, softly, "Can you fix that?" She waved her riding crop at the smoldering wreckage.
I waved my hand and the machine slowly reassembled. I quickly comment, "You may want a repairman to ensure I wired this up correctly. I can't tell if it is correct as I'm not an electrician, and doesn't have an aura to tell me I got it right."
She nods numbly and I take Yang back to the room. Then she asks, "So, how hard did I hit it?" I laughed, and then I explained how hard she was hitting.
Something I learned quickly when working her is that Nora's fighting style is unpredictable. She regularly switched between her launcher and her hammer. She would occasionally fire grenades from her hammer and hit people with the launcher.
One thing I quickly noticed was that she telegraphed all of her strikes and that her grenades were easily detonated by any application of aura. Something I exploited viciously.
After several sparring sessions, my curiosity broke, and I had to know, "How does your semblance work?"
She paused for a moment, then shrugged, "I get zapped I get stronger."
I pause to think and take a faceful of her grenade. I would say the thought struck me, but that would be a little on the nose.
I yell, running toward RWBYO's room. I pull Ruby aside asking, "Can we make a motion charged dust capacitor?"
Ruby and I quickly found ourselves over our heads. We tagged out to Weiss, and she was helpful.
"No, you dolts! Using dust to compensate for current discharge will make it explode! This disaster waiting to happen would sooner take off her arm then help her!"
After a few more consultations with our resident dust expert, we had a functional prototype.
"No, this needs to flow unidirectionally, you can't bounce back and forth between alternating current and direct current. The details you have on Nora suggest you need to install a small direct current motion generator. And then this housing will work, but the delivery system needs to be over a larger area or you run the risk of nerve damage."
Ruby and I used the fairly ridiculous properties of my particulates to compensate for the size requirement we were working within. Said ridiculousness was something Ruby was very vocal about.
"That's not possible. Switching back and forth between a zero ohm and several petaohm substances without a seam or a structural difference shouldn't be possible! Nottomentionthatasubstancewitharesistancebeyondanythingelseinexistencebeforetheapplication ofaurashouldn'tbethislight!"
After several further explanations of how my Grimm particulates work and demonstrating their properties, we finished Nora's capacitors. Dust save us all.
"Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" Nora said jumping up and down, randomly cutting about the room. And on the walls. And on the ceiling. As she settled down, I explained. "Nora, these are moton charged capacitors. When they get full, the green light comes on, and they stop drawing current." I point to the small LED embedded below a clear layer of particulates. "These three triggers pop out when you consciously run aura through it, while it's full." I attach them to her forearms, and she tries, only to realize that the light wasn't on. "You will need to move around a lot more the first time due to the initial nonbonding contacts." I explain, and she is off.
She runs around the training room until the lights come on. Three triggers in her left, and one on her right. She asks, "What do these do?"
"The three on the left are controls. The rightmost one is to set it to automatic. Whenever your aura drops into the red it goes off. Recharging you in a messy situation. The center has it disperse the energy over exactly fifteen minutes. The third is a full charge. On the left, we have one preset long-term charge. Dropping two full charges into your system at once is bad for your health even with you semblance, so we prevented that eventuality." I explain. "So, wh..."
Nora interrupts when she drops her right gauntlet as a full charge, and triggers her left, long-term simultaneously, before smashing me through the wall. I slowly stand, just fast enough to bring up armor and to jump out of the way of her follow up. As I fly around the ring, she pulls her grenade launcher, and I detonate the full set of them as she tries to launch them from her opened chamber. The blast knocks her backward and she yells, "No fair!"
In extraordinary contrast to Nora, working with Ren was almost calming. We spoke very little, we simply traded blows from his Stormflower to my knives. One day between working with Blake on multiplying herself and Ruby with both Nora's gear and her own, I had to ask, "So Ren, I realize I haven't a clue what your semblance is."
He pauses and says slowly, "I don't usually speak of it, for it has little use in combat outside of the Grimm. I can suppress emotions consciously for others, and passively for myself."
I pause thinking, before shifting my eyes to Grimm, and ask, "Can I see?"
He obliges, and slowly the emotional ping I can normally see from everyone is gone. He is clearly human but more visually comparative to a corpse than anyone alive. I ask, "Can you move, or fight like that?"
"No, but I hope to someday." He says resolutely.
"Do you want to practice that with me? I can see when it breaks or falters and call you on it if you can't sense it yourself?"
"Yes." He nods, and we get to work.
After several sparring sessions, I can feel more from him, almost like when his resolve is cracking, and ask, concerned, "Is it faltering, I can just feel you?"
He closes his eyes and concentrates. Then the alarm goes off, and we turn to see the screen. His aura is gone. I walk over and feel his aura when I do I can feel what is like a big lead blanket is draped over him. Like an artificially suppressed aura. "You are suppressing your own ability to generate and use aura. On the plus side, I literally can't see you anymore."
He sighs, "As I explained, not a combat worthy ability."
"No, not something to use against Hunters, but when fighting Grimm? The second level would make you completely invisible to Grimm. If you can spread it to another, or a group, you could be invaluable. I physically can't see you without reverting my vision to that of a human's. You take Ruby or Nora with you and you can just shoot the Grimm in the face and they can't retaliate." I explain, perking him up.
"You can't see me at all?" He asks.
"Not as a Grimm." I say, "Grimm don't exactly see like other creatures. We see emotionally, and the reason we can see structures and the like is that aura from the people present now, and the aura of the people who built it stay for years. The temple from our initiation had emotional imprints from hundreds of years ago still flowing through the stonework."
I get into a combat stance as I hear him draw StormFlower. Then get blindsided anyway thinking I could hear his approach. After several minutes of dueling again, a question occurs. I stop, and ask, "Ren, can you project that over a distance."
He stops at the unexpected question. He thinks and reaches out toward me. I get closer until I get about a meter away. Then I feel like a weight is lifted. I reach out to feel why, and I realize something magnificent. I can't.
I gasp, and the feeling stops, as the entirety of the emotion in Vale fall over me I kneel and say, groaning, "Your power cancels out my empathy." Before slipping into the bliss of sleep.
After the incident with Ren, I had Pyrrha come join us to test his power's effect. Originally she would sit further and further distances away until he could suppress even aura from about 8 meters. Then we moved to a combat environment, Pyrrha and I getting into it lightly, and him working to suppress her as she fought. We soon discovered that his effect could be targeted, or a dome of his power, which resulted in some really aggravating lapses into unconsciousness. Until he gets an absolute control over it. A truly horrific hunter fighting weapon that is fortunately not at all long term.
AN: Yes Jaune gets something.
Training Jaune was something I had purposefully kept away from. Pyrrha and Weiss had taken it upon themselves, as his partner and girlfriend respectively, to get him to a level that was at least above the minimum requirements for Signal.
However, in the downtime he had between training with them, he approached me, asking, "You've been able to help the other become, like super-hunters, can you help me do something cool?"
I nod, "Let's see what I can do."
Day one I realized that he had a huge issue, that he didn't understand aura.
I explained, "Jaune, aura comes in two states, passive and active aura. Ok?"
"Yup." He says.
"What do you know about how active aura is channeled?" I ask slowly.
"It is a forcefield." He says, and I wait. He look toward me and I groan, realizing that he doesn't know anything.
"Ok. Active aura is a thin layer found overtop of our skin, that advanced users can create a field of it to protect larger areas, yes. But for novices, like you, that isn't something you should be attempting. Now, how close to the skin do you carry your aura?"
"Close?" Jaune asks confused.
"Yes, the barrier of your aura. Where have you been envisioning it?"
"Aura has barriers?" He asks.
I call Pyrrha and Weiss, demanding, "What have you been teaching this mo... Jaune?!"
"The basics of combat." Weiss says, "Don't get hit, control how you do."
"Basic striking, how and when to swing so as to not be left vulnerable." Pyrrha explains.
I question slowly, "How far have you gotten him?"
"Paired with someone of equal skill, he could probably survive a normal initiation." Weiss said, slowly.
I breathe, "You pushed him through almost 4 full years of training in six months. Very nice." I applaud, to their contentment, then cut them back down, "But you forgot to teach him the fundamentals of aura. How you carry it, how you control it."
"He isn't stup..i..d." Weiss began and turned red.
"I'm going to fix it, don't worry." I smile in a way that promised pain, and hang up. Jaune suddenly felt regret coming to Obsidian.
"Ok, Jaune. Step one. I am going to feel for the edge of your aura and then I am going to compress it to where it should be." I say, reaching out, my annoyance manifesting visible geist hands. I wrap around him, almost a full inch from his skin, and push. I squint through my hands when nothing happens. I can feel his active aura against the limbs, this should work.
I stop momentarily, confused, and ask, "Can you see how far from the skin your aura is? Every bit of that is wasted and it exhausts you faster than it should be by being that far from you."
Jaune squints, and his aura slowly retracts, and I watch the board flips out a tad and resets. I say, "Ok Jaune, we are going to duel once and you are going to see the difference in effort required. Ok?"
He nods and I lash out, dissipating some anger into his chest with Fóvos. I look over to the board to show him the small decrease in his aura, and am confused. He hasn't dropped from full, at all.
I reached over and reset the tv and its connection to the scrolls, then I reset Jaune's scroll, and then I looked over at him. I went full Grimm and drew Fóvos. Then I lunged, striking him directly between the eyes, and withdrew. I looked over, and say something disturbing. It sat at 93%, bairly dropping enough to even be visible on the screen. I stepped back, and sighed, "There, your freaking superpower." I mutter, and I stormed out of the training room growling, "Stupid ridiculous boy...stupid invulnerability."