Out in the wilderness, there weren't any rules to follow, no laws to break. Rhys was probably thrilled by that, but it ran counter to everything Ilex had grown up with. Structure pervaded much of his life back home, and moving past that wasn't something that came easily. He did his best, however, because that was what was expected of a Huntsman; the Grimm wouldn't adhere to rules of engagement, after all. That didn't mean he had to enjoy it, though.

"How are we supposed to find Aspen in the middle of the forest?"

Carmine's scowl was practically audible. "We're Hunters. It's in the title. I'm sure even you can figure it out."

Ri-i-ight, Ilex thought bitterly. Because, y'know, I'm a total idiot. Reaching out, he snapped a branch off a nearby tree and fiddled with it before letting it drop to the ground. "I mean, she seems like the type of person who doesn't get found unless she wants to be."

The human paused, giving Ilex a look that said he'd actually made a good point, but not one that he was going to outright agree with. As Carmine resumed walking, he jerked a thumb back in the general direction of where they'd last seen Mantis and Tawny. "Why don't you tell that to them, then?" he said sarcastically. "I'm sure they'd love to hear it."

The corner of Ilex's lip curled upward, but he kept quiet. Carmine was on his side on this, even if he would never say it. He wasn't sure what was wrong with Aspen that had caused her to collapse but, considering she had run off with no trouble, the faunus doubted she was in any actual danger. This was the girl who apparently ripped plates off of Grimm for fun, after all.

A cracking in the brush ahead of them caused them to stop, and the blades in Ilex's vambraces extended as he tensed up. To his left, Carmine already had his crossbow drawn and ready. Judging by the sound, whatever was coming was big—probably an Ursa—and moving fast. Fighting down the sick feeling in his stomach, Ilex readied himself for a fight.

The brush parted and an irritated-looking Rhys stumbled out. He didn't see them at first, cursing with his hands as he plowed through the bushes and branches. When he did see them, he immediately signed a question. |Have you found her yet?|

Ilex rolled his eyes as he snapped the blades back into their sheaths. "If we'd found her, don't you think she'd be with us right now?" Pouting, the deaf faunus made a few strangled noises before asking another, almost identical question. "No, we haven't seen any Grimm, either," Ilex answered. He paused and turned to his partner. "Come to think of it, that does seem a little weird."

"Not really," Carmine countered, resting his crossbow up onto his shoulder. "This forest is right next to the fairgrounds. It would be a bloodbath if the Grimm populations weren't kept in check. Plus, I'm sure all the Grimm Aspen killed yesterday helped." The human turned to Rhys. "Now, where have you looked already? I don't want to waste my time."

Ilex filtered his teammates out, ears twitching as he turned his attention to the forest around them. No Grimm, huh? This whole ordeal might not be so bad after all. Something snapped behind him, and he caught a flash of red eyes and pale skin before everything went black.

(- - -)

Aspen followed Deirean through the forest in silence. The injury to her ankle had healed long ago, and now she simply waited for the man to come to a halt. She yearned for the help he could provide, a desire strong enough to override the fear and uncertainty still residing in her chest.

Eventually, they entered a large clearing. Though she could not recall having been there before, something about it resonated in Aspen. A single structure stood amongst the trees: a round, stone ruin with pillars that may have supported a roof of some kind. It was to this place that Deirean led her and, when they were close enough, she ran a hand over one of the pillars that still stood. How had she not come across this before? "Is this… rephaite?" she asked.

"These stones were not laid by our kind." Standing in the center of the structure, he let out a shuddering breath. "A city once stood here, the largest of all our settlements. It would seem the havneel built over it in their victory, and yet even they had to cede these lands to the pech ter'al."

Pech ter'al. The words echoed in Aspen's ears. The wild ones—Grimm. Images of blood and viscera flashed through her mind, as well as one of herself, teeth bared and a crazed look in her eyes. "The Grimm—the creatures in this forest—they are rephaim?"

Deirean's lips drew into a thin line as he gazed about the ruin. "At one time, they could have been, but acting without control for untold millenia has twisted them beyond recognition." His head dipped. "They are lost." Even without an aura to feel, Aspen could sense the despair in his voice, and it only served to bring her own actions to her attention.

"I… did not know." In just two days, she had slaughtered countless Grimm. She had hunted creatures of her own blood and torn them to pieces. How was she supposed to feel about that?

The man was silent for a minute before he turned toward her again. "When did you last meditate?"

Aspen considered the question for several moments, brought out of her previous thoughts. The simple answer would have been to say she had never meditated, but the word had begun to resonate faintly within her. She should know what he meant, but she did not. "I do not understand."

A low hiss emanated from Deirean's throat. "rephaim do not require sleep as the havneel do, something I am sure you have discovered in your time among them." Aspen nodded. It was a ritual she had witnessed Laurel and her team perform multiple times, but had never felt any draw to take part in. "We instead focus our minds and our bodies, regaining our energy and building our strength without leaving ourselves vulnerable."

That… made sense to Aspen. While she still wasn't entirely sure she grasped the concept, one moment stood out to her. "Four nights ago," she said, answering his question. She had been on the massive airship with Laurel. As the woman had slept, Aspen had been gazing out the window down at the clouds below and straining against her "seatbelt." She couldn't explain it at the time, but doing so had made her better than she had been before.

Though he was not moving, it was clear that the answer surprised the man. "And have you collapsed since then?" he asked, almost clinically.

Aspen stared at the ground, finding something new building in her chest, something she couldn't quite place. It was stifling, like cotton being pressed over every surface of her body. Shame. "Yes," she admitted. The feeling only grew worse. "That is why I ran."

A weight settled onto the back of her head. Looking up, she saw that Deirean had placed a hand on her neck, thumb resting behind her ear. "You were unaware. It is no fault of your own." His words eased her shame, though she still could not shake it entirely. "Have you killed in that time?" Aspen nodded and he removed his hand. "Then by now your koravah will do little to restore your energy."

The girl did her best to understand what he was referring to—the word sounded familiar, and not simply because he'd used it earlier—but she could not. "I do not know what that means."

Looking away, Deirean rolled his shoulders in disappointment. "For all the knowledge we are capable of imparting in the havashah, there are still things that must be taught." Recognizing that the words were not directed at her, Aspen waited patiently for the man to speak again. "The havneel would call the koravah a 'blood lust.' They are not wrong. It is a call to battle, to kill: to take our enemies' strength for our own. To sate it can stave off the need for meditation, but it is not a substitute."

Returning to the center of the ruin, the man turned back to face her and gestured to the ground in front of him. "Sit." Aspen did as she was told, and the man lowered himself to the ground as well. "It is time you learned what it is to be rephaim."

(-)

Hunting in Vale was a lot different than hunting in Vacuo. For starters, there weren't nearly as many trees in the desert. The Grimm were different as well, with the most common ones being more like mammals than insects—Oliver couldn't be thankful enough for that. At the very least, looking for someone who'd gone missing wasn't a new experience.

"So, Tawny, what's with the sudden concern for Aspen?" Oliver asked, idly tapping at Venation's trigger guards. The woman didn't answer, pretending she was too focused on keeping an eye out for Grimm or the girl for small talk. "I mean, last night you were complaining about how she woke you up at three in the morning, but now you're worried because she might've passed out and died again?"

Tawny sighed and lowered Timekeeper. "It's our job to keep track of her and her team," she said, still slowly advancing through the forest.

"Well," Oliver said, dragging the word out, "technically our job is to keep them from dropping out—" Tawny gave him a sideways glare. "—but I'm on board with you. It just feels like this whole 'caring about Aspen' thing came out of nowhere."

It wasn't until Oliver had taken a few more steps that he realized his partner had come to a stop. When he looked back at her, her eyes were pointed downward. "I guess…" she started, pursing her lips. "I guess—if I'm being honest—I've been thinking about what you said last night, about her and I being similar?" Oliver nodded patiently. "I got thinking about how, if I was in her situation, I'd probably be pretty freaked out…" She looked up again, the edge having returned to her eyes. "And Aspen freaked out can't be good for anyone."

Oliver smirked. "Ah, there it is. You had me worried there for a—" His sentence was interrupted by his scroll ringing. Holstering one of his hand cannons, the Hunter pulled it out to see who was contacting him. Carmine. Answering the call, he put the scroll up to his ear. "Please tell me you've found her."

(-)

"Now, where have you looked already? I don't want to waste my time." As Rhys began to explain where he'd searched, Carmine heard something heavy hit the ground to his right. He turned just in time to see Aspen slam Ilex's head into a nearby tree, splintering the bark and rendering the faunus unconscious.

The surprise attack caught Carmine off-guard, and by the time he'd fumbled his weapon into a ready position, the girl had already wrapped her hands around his partner's neck. As much as he disliked Ilex, Carmine wasn't going to stand by and let Aspen kill him. Aiming at the black-haired assailant, he fired with the intention of drawing her attention.

What he hadn't intended was for the bolt to bury itself between two of her ribs. Aspen's back arched in pain as she let out a short scream. She really doesn't have Aura… he thought dumbly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rhys lifting Bullrush to his shoulder in preparation to fire. Carmine quickly reached out and yanked at the rocket launcher, much to its wielder's ire. "Nothing lethal!" he ordered. Granted, lethality seems to be a narrower spectrum for her than most, he mused as the girl reached around her back to extract the bolt.

Rhys rolled his eyes and dropped the hunk of metal to the ground before flaring his Semblance and charging forward. Aspen had barely removed the projectile when the otter faunus impacted with her, knocking her off Ilex. Collapsing and returning his weapon to its quiver, Carmine ran over to where his partner was slumped and quickly checked him over. Still breathing. Lucky him. As the human stood, he pulled out the knife sheathed at his lower back in preparation for a more intimate fight.

Aspen had taken the upper hand over Rhys as soon as they had come to a stop, straddling him as she landed punch after punch directly onto his face. Through it all, the battle-crazy faunus grinned. It probably helped to know that his Semblance effectively kept the girl from doing any damage to him whatsoever, but that sort of reaction still wasn't normal.

After the sixth punch, Rhys reached up to grab Aspen and forcefully head-butted her. Stunned by the blow, she fell backward off the teen. With a happy laugh, Rhys sprang to his feet before relaunching his attack with a chaotic flurry of arms and legs.

Letting the faunus handle the fighting, Carmine pulled out his scroll and keyed a call to Mantis. The answer came quickly. -/Please tell me you've found her./-

The teen glanced up at Aspen as she struggled to block Rhys's unpredictable assault. "Yeah, but you might want to get over here quick before Rhys breaks her." While the brown-haired faunus was a year younger than most first-year students, he made up for that lack of experience with sheer ferocity.

Unfortunately, that didn't seem to be enough to stop Aspen entirely. Having recovered from the headbutt, the girl grabbed one of Rhys's arms as he came in with a wide swing and twisted it under her own. She turned into his guard before he could react and flipped him over her head. Had it not been for his Aura, the move would have surely done serious damage to the faunus's arm. As it was, he was grabbing at his shoulder when he stood up, though the manic grin on his face belied any pain he might have been feeling. With a throaty laugh, he leapt forward again, only to get knocked back with a flash of bronze as Aspen caught him under the chin with an uppercut.

Great. Carmine grumbled to himself; Ilex was unconscious and Rhys had blown through his Aura, which meant it was down to him to subdue the madwoman who was capable of besting Yang Xiao Long in hand-to-hand combat. Quickly estimating the distance to the girl, he flipped the knife in his hand and threw it at her.

The blade thudded into Aspen's back, just below her right shoulder, and she staggered forward a step. Not giving her a chance to recover, Carmine dashed forward. He ducked beneath a wild swing from her right arm, slipped behind her and pulled the knife out with a spurt of blood. In a moment, he'd pulled her into a half nelson, holding the crimson-stained blade against one of the major blood vessels in her neck. She immediately tensed up as if to attempt to break the hold, but just as quickly went limp.

The sudden dead weight surprised him, and he leaned back instinctively to better support it. He didn't, however, remove the blade from her neck. "Aspen?" No response. Slowly easing the knife away, he wiped the blood off on his pant leg before lifting it back up beneath her nose. The metal fogged over, so she was breathing, at least.

Sheathing his weapon, Carmine eased the girl down to the ground. "Well," he muttered, looking around at the three unconscious or near-unconscious bodies surrounding him, "this is going to be fun to explain."

(-)

Aspen awoke to the sound of beeping. There had been no visions. There had been no sudden pain. Only darkness. She didn't know if she preferred it that way or not. There was, however, a dull ache in one of her arms. Opening her eyes, she found herself lying on a bed and enveloped in white, with a familiar… sterile smell hanging in the air. Hospital. At least, that's where she'd been the last time she'd smelled it. Glancing sluggishly down at her right arm, she saw a tube stuck into it, just below her elbow. She'd had one last time too, and Oliver had called it… He'd called it something. She was having trouble remembering it for some reason, though.

Lifting her other arm, Aspen attempted to reach over and remove the tube. She was stopped almost immediately, as something tugged at her wrist with a metallic clink. Her eyes drifted over. A metal restraint held her wrist to a rail on the side of the bed, and she realized that there was one around her opposite wrist as well.

"She's awake."

With an unusual amount of effort required, Aspen turned her head to see who had spoken. Two men stood next to the door to her left, guns pointed at her. Oh. She blinked as they briefly blurred in her vision. Why hadn't she felt their auras? Straining, she reached out and eventually found them. They were full of distrust… and just a hint of fear. Why? What had she done to—

The forest. Her team. She turned her head back to look at her restraints, now understanding what they were for. They were scared of her. They were scared that she would attack them. They were scared that she might kill them. But why was there so little fear?

She drifted over to the tube in her arm, following it up to a pair of bags hanging from a metal rack. One contained what looked to be water while the other contained a ruddy-brown liquid she couldn't identify. But, maybe…? If they were… sediment… sedition—sedating her, that would explain why she was having trouble thinking and moving, and why they weren't so afraid of her. That and the guns and restraints, she added as an afterthought.

Seconds later—or maybe not—the door opened. Aspen rolled her head to the side to see Ozpin walk in. With effort, she was able to grab onto memories from their last meeting. Many of the details were familiar, though he held no ceramic cup this time. Last time, he had given her a challenge that had led to her becoming a student. Something made her doubt this meeting would end in her favor.

"I am extremely disappointed in you, Miss Gray."

Aspen blinked. Ozpin now stood at the foot of her bed, and the two other men were nowhere to be seen. When had they left? She didn't think she had taken her eyes off the door.

"When I accepted you into my school, I did so overlooking the fact that you attacked and nearly killed three of my students." The man stood with both his hands on his cane, leaning his weight onto it as he gave her a hard look over the odd wire-and-glass frame on his face. "I did so under the impression that you wanted to utilize your gifts to combat the Grimm. Instead, you once again attacked your fellow students—your own team—and this is something I cannot overlook."

Aspen stared at the man, struggling to discern the Headmaster's intentions. Her inability to focus on his face was making that even more difficult, however. Did he want her to—What was the word?—apologize? From what Ruby had asked her to promise, she felt she at least had a basic grasp of the concept. Attacking Ilex, Carmine, and Rhys wasn't something she was proud of. Maybe if Ozpin just understood that—

"—eason as to why I should not expel you immediately?"

What? Aspen refocused her eyes on the man. He had been talking, and she had lost focus. What had he said? Had he given her a chance to explain?

The man shook his head in disappointment. "I thought not." Lifting his cane, he began to walk toward the door. Frustrated, Aspen closed her eyes in an attempt to focus her thoughts. The last time they'd spoken, he'd asked her something important. What was… "Do you know what you are?"

She heard the man's hand settle on the door handle, and she spoke as quickly as her present state allowed. Even then, her words sounded labored, even to her own ears. "I know what I am now." She kept her eyes closed, but could still tell that the man had not left.

"And what might that be?"

Aspen took a slow breath before reopening her eyes. Ozpin was looking down at her from the door, his brown eyes looking intently at her. "I am rephaim."

The man did not seem surprised by the information. "Indeed. Do you understand, then, why I have given you the opportunities I have?"

Aspen slowly nodded, finding the action not as difficult as it should have been. "I think so."

"Good." There was a slight upturn to the corner of Ozpin's mouth as he spoke, but it soon vanished. "If there are any further incidents, I will not be so forgiving."

That had been the sort of challenge Aspen had been expecting, and its meaning was clear. "As you say."


So, if it wasn't clear before this chapter, Aspen is a Grimm. Sort of. I guess the title of the story really isn't even that accurate since she's not born of the Grimm, but rather the Grimm come from… Never mind. So, yeah, the whole "humanoid Grimm" thing was kind of the whole premise of this story. Not necessarily a unique concept on its own, but I wanted to put my own take on it. Hopefully it's been enjoyable so far.

If this chapter seems a bit frantic, it's because it wasn't really planned out as far in advance as other chapters have been. The decision to have Aspen attack her team came at the end of writing Chapter 12, so even as I was writing this chapter I was trying to work out just what the repercussions of that would be. We got a bit of those this chapter, but it's going to end up bleeding into the next three chapters at the very least.

That's it for now. I'm still trying to work my writing around my college schedule, and I'm optimistic that it'll improve soon. Until the next chapter, I encourage you to give feedback and follow if you're not already. Au revoir!