Chapter 3 - Insipid Introductions
"I am so, so, so sorry!" Jaune wailed in mortification for the umpteenth time, even as he furiously scrubbed at the stained boot with an oversized leaf.
"Hmph." Mordred merely growled in response, quietly reminding herself that noble Knights were supposed to be magnanimous and forgiving.
She knew some in Camelot called her a third-rate knight; she wasn't going to prove them right by lashing out.
And they had slain the Addanc together...
Sighing, she finally turned to him, and deigned a response: "Well... at least it can't be worst than Addanc guts..."
Jaune mentally breathed a sigh of relief at the unknown Huntsman's words, and mentally filed away the information that the creature (that probably wasn't a Grimm) was called an "Addanc", if only so he could look it up once they'd returned.
"Anyway, Vomit Guy..."
Hey, she may have been magnanimous and forgiving, but that didn't mean she was going to just forget about it.
Jaune couldn't help the groan that escaped his mouth, and he looked up from the armored boot to pout at the still-covered Huntsman.
Mordred simply snickered under helmet, not feeling the least bit intimidated by the young man as she continued on: "What were you even doing in this forest, and why do you look like you ran into a Saxon raiding party? What was with the light show earlier? And how'd you withstand the Addanc's blows like that?"
Jaune opened his mouth to answer, before blinking as his mind processed the words he'd just heard.
What kind of questions were those?
What was a Saxon raiding party?
As he tried to think about what he'd been asked, his gaze fell upon the Huntsman's exposed slender left arm, still bruised and covered in gashes.
A nagging sense of unease began to tickle Jaune's mind, but he shrugged it off in favor of concernedly asking the Huntsman: "Um, aren't you going to take care of that?"
"Ah, this?" Mordred looked back at her left arm. "Don't worry about it; I left a few salves on my horse."
Salves?
Horse?
Jaune shook his head, and tried to clarify: "No, I meant... with your Aura?"
"Huh?" This time, it was Mordred's turn to blink in confusion. "My... what?"
A sense of uneasy familiarity filled Jaune, but he repeated himself: "You know... Aura?"
Mordred studied the young man and wondered if he was just messing with her or if it was something she should know about.
He just seemed so earnest and genuinely confused, however, that after a moment she settled on the latter, and haughtily scoffed: "Psch. Of course I know Aura. Do you know Aura?"
Jaune's eye twitched.
The person in front of him definitely had no idea what Aura was.
Which meant...
"Wait, you're not a Huntsman?" Jaune yelped in shocked realization.
"A huntsman?" Mordred echoed incredulously, before her eyes narrowed. "Of course I'm not just a simple huntsman!"
Jaune couldn't believe his ears. The not-Huntsman in front of him, who'd hit the creature at least as hard as Ruby's sister... hadn't even had Aura?!
And what did they mean, a "simple huntsman"?!
Ignoring the confusion on his face, Mordred continued on in an prideful tone: "I am Sir Mordred, a full-fledged Knight of the Round Table! Loyal servant of the King and his Kingdom!"
Knight?
Round Table?
Jaune could feel his confusion only increasing as he heard more words he didn't understand, and so he desperately seized on to the terms he did: "Wait, what Kingdom are we in?"
"You... don't even know where you are?" Mordred raised an eyebrow suspiciously, and even though Jaune couldn't see it under his helmet he could certainly feel it burning a hole in him.
"Not a clue." Jaune shook his head frantically. "I just woke up here about three days ago, and I've been trying to get out of this forest ever since! Anyway, what Kingdom are we in? Mistral? Vacuo? Atlas? Menagerie?"
"... what kind of Kingdoms are those?" Mordred cocked her head in confusion, before shaking it. "This is the Kingdom of Logres, in the land of England."
"... England?" Jaune blinked, as his mind began to race (he was by no means a good student in Beacon, but even he knew basic geography).
Judging by the fact he wasn't in a frozen wasteland, he doubted he was anywhere near Solitas.
Was he near Anima then? Sanus?
But when he'd looked up at the full moon, it had been so distant! Typically, when one looked at the moon in Sanus or Anima, the moon was close enough that one could see the cracked fragments!
Maybe... he'd been blown away to another Kingdom?
One that didn't appear on any maps that he knew of... and that apparently didn't have any Grimm, or any concept of Aura?
Was there even a place on Remnant that didn't have Grimm?
Before Jaune could give himself a headache trying to figure out exactly what his situation was, Mordred impatiently cut in: "Hey, now it's your turn!"
"Huh?" Jaune blinked as his attention was brought back to the mysterious armored Knight in front of him.
"I told you my name, so who are you?" Mordred forcefully pressed. "Where are you from? What were you doing before you woke up here? And what's Au- I mean, what do you know about Aura?"
"..." Jaune pinched the bridge of his nose, and held up a hand to stall any further questions as he tried to figure out how to answer Sir Mordred. Fortunately, between his seven sisters, Ruby, and Nora, he was more than used to dealing with rapid-fire questioning, and it only took him a few moments to finally answer: "Okay, in order... I'm Jaune Arc... of, uh... Beacon, I guess-"
"You guess?" Mordred's eyebrow rose again.
"It's... complicated..." Jaune looked away, unwilling to explain his hesitance. "Anyway, I was training to be a Huntsman, but then we were attacked, and..."
And then I got stomped on by a dragon before getting shot in the chest by a fire witch.
Even in his head it sounded ridiculous.
Then again, they had fought that "Addanc" thing...
"Um..." Jaune tentatively continued, as Mordred began expectantly drumming her fingers on the log she was sitting on. "Well... have you ever heard of dragons?"
"Of course I have-" Mordred scoffed dismissively, before doing an incredulous double-take. "What, are you saying you fought a dragon?"
"Well... "fought" is such a strong word..." Jaune rubbed the back of his head sheepishly. "More like I distracted it long enough for my friends to come and help me..."
"Okay, I can believe that much..." Mordred conceded, giving Jaune another once over even as she recalled how the man in front of her had withstood a blow from the Addanc. Certainly, judging by the sad state his breastplate was in, she could believe he'd been in a great and terrible battle...
... but at the same time...
"How come you don't even have a scratch on you?" Mordred's eyes narrowed as she pointed out the obvious inconsistency in his story.
Sure, she was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt, since he'd helped her with the Addanc, but at the same time her mother had drilled it into her just what kind of people existed in the world. It wasn't out of the realm of possibility that he'd just found a ruined breastplate and made up that story about fighting a dragon, and considering she hadn't heard about any of the Kingdoms he'd mentioned, or a placed called "Beacon", or...
"Aura." Jaune simply replied, as if that explained everything. "It's... well... Pyr, my partner... she told me it was supposed to be the manifestation of our souls or something. I... don't really know how it works, but it heals us, shields us, and we can channel it into other things, too. It's something that all Huntsmen are supposed to have-"
"Okay, now I know you're shitting me." Mordred rolled her eyes from behind her helmet. She hadn't heard about anything like that from Mother (or while she'd been Camelot), and now he was saying it was something that all hunters supposedly had?
"..." For a moment, Jaune couldn't help but recall his time in an unfamiliar forest with an armored badass he'd just met.
... how had Pyrrha convinced him again?
... right, he'd simply deferred to her clearly-superior experience and skill after she'd saved him from that tree he'd gotten stuck in.
Something told him that probably wasn't going to fly with Sir Mordred here.
And then she'd unlocked his Aura...
... yeah, that wasn't going to work either.
To put it bluntly, he had absolutely no idea how to actually unlock someone else's Aura.
... maybe if he just used it in front of Sir Mordred?
As Jaune quietly wondered how best to demonstrate Aura (besides the obvious answer of telling the Knight, who could punch harder than Ruby's sister, to hit him as hard as he could), his gaze once again fell upon his injured arm.
Hmmm...
He hadn't really ever thought about it, since everyone in Beacon had Aura, but what would happen if he channeled his Aura into an injured person?
After all, Aura could be channeled into basically anything, right?
(The Beacon Food Fight had become an infamous legend amongst the students from the other schools, as even Professor Goodwitch's Semblance hadn't been able to repair the holes in the floor caused by the leeks Ren had thrown at Yang, or the hole in the ceiling caused by Yang after Nora had smashed her with a watermelon...)
"What if I could prove it?" Jaune challenged, raising an empty hand slowly.
"Oh?" Mordred raised an eyebrow at him skeptically. "You intend on proving that you can... manifest your soul in such a way that it can heal and protect you?"
"... yeah, I guess it does sound kind of far-fetched..." Jaune conceded, though he didn't lower his hand. "But I'd like to try something. Could I see your arm for a bit?"
"What are you planning on doing?" Mordred inquired apprehensively, even as she watched Jaune's hand slowly lower towards her injured arm.
"I'm going to try and channel my Aura into your arm." Jaune explained, before grudgingly admitting: "I... don't know how well this will work, though, so if it doesn't you could always try just hitting me?"
"Wait, what?" Mordred blinked, wondering if her ears had failed her for a moment.
And then, just as his hand gently brushed against her exposed skin, Jaune suddenly began to glow, a brilliant blindingly-bright light that caused Mordred to flinch away and shield her eyes.
Before she could wonder if she'd been intentionally blinded, however, a gentle comforting warmth began to radiate from the point of contact between them, and she couldn't help but subconsciously relax for a moment as it enveloped her.
Then, just as her conscious mind registered the sensations running through her (and she instinctively stiffened in response), the warmth and light faded, leaving behind just a regular-looking Jaune looking at her triumphantly.
"Wha-" Mordred stuttered for a moment as she struggled to find her voice.
"So, do you believe me now?" Jaune asked innocently.
"What the hell was that?!" Mordred demanded as she finally found her voice, before shaking her head and folding her arms. "And what does a light show prove?!"
"Well, your arm's all fixed..." Jaune pointed out.
"..." Mordred blinked again, and looked down at her injured arm to find it bearing no trace of her earlier battle,.
She hadn't even noticed that the pain had faded away, having been so used to simply blocking out pain signals.
"But... how...?" Mordred tested it incredulously, flexing her fingers and gingerly prodding the formerly-bruised spots.
Nope, it was as if it hadn't ever even been touched!
Not even the foul-tasting concoctions Mother forced down her throat during her childhood were that effective!
"Like I said... Aura." Jaune declared, deciding to temporarily forget that he'd admitted he hadn't known that that would happen. "Heals us, shields us, and can be channeled into other things. So, do you believe me now?"
"..." Mordred could only nod dumbly even as she reflected that, if he'd been telling the truth about Aura, then he'd probably been telling the truth about everything else.
Then a thought struck her, and she immediately demanded: "Hey, teach me how to do that Aura thing too!"
"... pardon?" Jaune blinked.
"Help me get Aura too." Mordred repeated simply. "You said it was something all hunters had, right? So it should be easy enough to pass on to others?"
"Uh..." Jaune desperately tried to rack his brains to figure out just where the miscommunication had occurred.
"Come on, Vomit Guy, don't tell me it's some hunter's secret or something!" Mordred pressed on, refusing to give up on the perceived chance to better serve King Arthur. "Think about how much more useful it'll be on a Knight of the Realm, rather than being used to hunt deer and rabbits!'
-ONE BRIEF EXPLANATION LATER-
"... so, let me get this straight, Vomit Guy..." Mordred would have pinched the bridge of her nose, but her helmet prevented her from doing that, and so she instead settled for giving the sheepish-looking "Huntsman-in-Training" behind her a look of utter disbelief. "When you said that all Huntsmen had Aura, you didn't actually mean people that hunt for food, but instead you were referring to some mythical order of warriors that hunt monsters?"
"Uh, yeah, pretty much..." Jaune rubbed the back of his neck even as he looked around at his campsite, and made sure he'd gotten everything important.
"Well, why didn't you just say that from the beginning?" Mordred grumbled, feeling embarrassed that she'd even entertained the thought that all the hunters of the land had secret super powers.
"Uh, well... where I come from, everyone knows that Huntsmen and Huntresses are heroes." Jaune explained awkwardly, holding out a skewer of grilled fish as a peace offering even as he shrugged. "I just... didn't think I needed to say it, you know?"
"Yeah, well..." Mordred began to retort even as she accepted the food and raised her visor just high enough to slip the meat into her mouth, before her voice trailed off into unintelligible gibberish as she stuffed her mouth furiously.
Jaune couldn't help but watch in morbid fascination as Sir Mordred all but inhaled the stick, wondering why he kept his helmet on while eating.
"Ah, that hit the spot." Mordred sighed a few seconds later, spitting out the clean stick and lowering her visor once more, before she continued: "Anyway, that kind of sounds like a Knight of the Round Table, now that I think about it..."
"It kind of does, huh?" Jaune mused out loud, as Mordred began to lead them back towards Snowdonia. Unfortunately, his next thoughts were accidentally voiced out loud as well: "... I think I prefer being a Huntsman, though..."
"Hey, being a Knight of the Round Table is the coolest thing ever!" Mordred hotly defended her chosen profession. "We go on cool adventures, fight monsters, help people, and we get to personally work for King Arthur!"
"... you really respect your King, don't you?" Jaune observed simply, deciding to be the mature one and not take the bait (for once).
"Of course I do!" Mordred nodded enthusiastically. "Everybody here loves King Arthur!"
Except for the Saxons and Mother, of course, but that was besides the point.
"He's the Perfect King." Mordred continued gushing, happy to preach about the person she admired the most. "In just the past two decades, King Arthur pushed back the Saxon invaders, slew the White Dragon, and raised the Kingdom of Logres to levels of prosperity not seen since the height of the Empire!"
"I... guess that sounds really impressive?" Jaune offered weakly, unwilling to admit that he had no idea what any of those were.
"I'm sure you'd understand if you saw Camelot." Mordred snorted haughtily, before remembering something. "Hey, you said you were from a Kingdom, right? How was your King? I mean, of course there's no way they could compare to King Arthur, but if your Kingdom was producing Huntsmen then the King had to be doing something right, right?"
"Uh..." Jaune scratched his cheek awkwardly. "We... don't have a King..."
"..." Mordred blinked.
"..." Jaune found a particularly-interesting cloud to look at.
As the pair strolled along the path in an increasingly-oppressive silence, Mordred finally found her voice: "What do you mean, you don't have a King?"
"Exactly what I said." Jaune shrugged. "The Kingdoms of Vale, Mistral, Vacuo, and Atlas haven't had Kings since my grandfather's time."
"But..." Mordred struggled to point out the obvious problem with that statement. "... how can you have Kingdoms without Kings? Who leads your people, then?"
"Well... if I remember correctly... the people choose their representatives, and the representatives form a council." Jaune explained, basing it on what he'd heard his family mention about politics (he'd never had an interest in politics, between his earlier days as a farmhand on the family fields and his recent career as the weakest student in Beacon). Deciding to cut his losses before he could embarrass himself (any further), he changed the subject: "Anyway, what about King Arthur? How was he chosen?"
Falling for it hook, line, and sinker, Mordred eagerly seized the chance to tell one of her personal favorite stories: "Okay, so a few decades ago, the previous High King, Uther Pendragon, died fighting the Usurper King Vortigern. To prevent the land from collapsing upon itself with infighting, and to maintain hope among the people, the Court Wizard Merlin planted a holy sword into a stone outside a church, and delivered a prophecy. "Whosoe'er pulleth out this sword of this stone is rightwise king of all England", that was both what he said, and what was inscribed upon the sword Caliburn.
"For ten years, many tried to lift the Sword of Selection, and all failed. As the situation got more dire, the Knights and Nobles of the land came to an agreement - if none still could lift the sword, then they would hold a jousting tournament, and the winner would be given the right to lead the Britons against the Saxons.
"Of course, on the day of the tournament, none of the gathered drew the sword, and so the tournament began.
"During the tournament, one of the newest and most promising Knights, Sir Kay, realized his sword was missing, and so instructed his squire to fetch his sword.
"As he set about to fulfil his given task, the young boy stumbled upon an abandoned field by a decrepit church, one containing a sword in a stone. Deciding that an old sword was better than no sword, he drew it, and ran back to the tournament..."
Jaune's eye twitched as he tried to process everything Sir Mordred had just told him, even as Mordred continued telling his tale.
What on Remnant had he just heard?
Wizards?
Prophecies?
Holy swords?
... what was this, a comic book?
Did Sir Mordred really believe magic existed?
And so King Arthur had been selected because he could draw a sword from a stone?
What the Dust kind of Kingdom was this?!
... wait, no, maybe the sword just responded to a hereditary Semblance? After all, Weiss had said something about all Schnees being able to use Glyphs, right? Yeah, that made more sense...
"And then, King Arthur and Gawai- oh, we're here, Vomit Guy!" Mordred called back, as the pair finally emerged from the forest.
"Already?" Jaune's thoughts turned away from trying to figure out how Mordred's story made sense, and he instead turned his attention toward the small village they were approaching.
"That's right." Mordred nodded. "Welcome to Snowdonia, Vomit Guy!"
"... thanks for getting me out of that forest, Sir Mordred." Jaune nodded his gratitude to the armored knight even as a part of him quickly studied the village in front of him, and tried comparing the architecture to anything he'd previously encountered.
"Hey, you helped me with the Addanc, and you healed my arm." Mordred rolled her eyes good-naturedly even as she held a fist out towards him. "I mean, not that I needed it or anything, but still..."
"It really wasn't anything..." Jaune began to shake his head modestly, before realizing that Mordred was still giving him a very expectant look.
Finally, Mordred groaned in exasperation, and whined: "Come on, don't leave me hanging, Vomit Guy-"
"Sir Mordred, you're back!"
A voice interrupted her, and she immediately turned to find the village elder who'd pointed her in the direction of Llyn Cwmffynnon running towards her.
"Heya, gramps!" Mordred called back triumphantly. "You won't have to worry about that Addanc anymore, because- geh!"
"Good afternoon, Sir Mordred." Sir Lancelot courteously greeted the shocked Knight of the Round Table as he emerged from the village elder's house, with Squire Gareth following meekly behind him. "Sir Agravain asked me to come and make sure you didn't do anything... reckless."
Author's Notes: Something something apologies for the late chapter something something lots of work and fatigue something something already warned updates would not be frequent something something.
And to ward off any comments first... yes, Mordred starts off as skeptical of Jaune's claims. I mean, being raised by one of the greatest witches of the era, and living in Camelot... she may be relatively naive and inexperienced, but she's still probably seen far more than the average Briton of the time.
And yes, Jaune doesn't realize he's in a whole other world yet. After all, why would that be his first thought?
Regarding the whole broken moon issue... I did actually plan on address that in the previous chapter, but I cut it out as it was awkward and disrupted the pace of the story too much. Either way, as Jaune mentions here, the moon looks different based on where and when you see it in Remnant (no, I am not making that up). Between that and him being focused on survival (namely securing a source of food), he basically assumed he was in a part of Remnant where the Moon was simply a bit more distant than Vale, and especially too distant for him to see the broken parts of the moon (or that he was seeing the unbroken part of the moon the whole time). He'll probably figure it out once
As for why he immediately figured it out in Skyrim... well, Skyrim had two moons, and both are massive (or just very close to Nirn). Two big unbroken moons are a bit harder to miss...
As for the usual power-scaling issues... yes, Mordred is physically stronger than Jaune, even with Aura (he only managed to pierce the Addanc because he could reinforce his spear with Aura to prevent it from shattering when the Addanc fell on it, whereas Mordred's mundane sword had no such luck, seeing as she only got Clarent after rebelling).
But I'd disagree on Mordred being more durable, considering that over the course of the first three seasons (which is the main source material I refer to) we've seen Jaune get launched a great distance by a Deathstalker (when his Aura had just been unlocked, mind you), get smacked around repeatedly by an Ursa Major, and get hurled into a wall by Ruby producing a whirlwind.
I'm not massively buffing Aura; I'm just treating it exactly as it was displayed by Monty Oum's action scenes. On a side note, the wannabe-Huntsmen were literally running up falling pieces of rock with little issue during Beacon's Initiation, and in Season 2 Team CRDL (one of the weaker teams) were reliably deflecting bullets from Pyrrha Nikos, just to name a few examples.
Feel free to disagree and criticize, sure, but it's really the only way Jaune is going to be able to survive (for lack of a better term) what is to come.
Also of course Mordred and Jaune's initial discussions are going to be bloody awkward. One's a 5/6-year-old Simp of the Round Table, and while the other's almost 18, Jaune somehow didn't even know what Aura was... or that Faunus have night vision...
Yeah, you've got the two least-qualified people in their worlds trying to describe them to each other.