Their route to the ruins he'd chosen as their battle grounds opened up into a long and wide clearing with pillars in various states of decay lining the path to either side. The clearing lead straight to a chasm, a stone bridge leading to some sort of stone tower with several connecting pathways that presumably once led to structures that had long since fallen victim to the winds of time. The tower itself seemed sturdy enough, and they were able to use the pillars in the clearing as cover on their approach against the bird, which Jango had overheard the name "Nevermore," in reference thereof.
"Go! Move to the ruins, now!" Jango ordered, rolling out from around his pillar and firing a small flurry of bolts from each blaster towards the bird, with each bolt finding its mark somewhere on the beast, and seemingly doing enough to at least make it back off. He only began moving after confirming all else had began moving first, before turning back and firing once from his left blaster pistol and striking the scorpion, a "Deathstalker" he'd learned to be its name, in the same eye he'd struck earlier, slowing it down once again and buying a little more time before kicking off himself to catch up.
The bridge he wanted to get across was far too narrow for the massive scorpion to cross, but more than wide enough for their group. As soon as he'd reached the bridge and caught back up to the back of the group, Jango took stock of his surroundings, noting any terrain features they could use to their advantage and the weapons at everyones disposal. Grenade launcher and Warhammer hybrid, machine pistols with integrated blades, rapier with a dust cylinder, two swords and shields, one of the swords able to turn into a javelin or rifle, shotgun gauntlets, a blade with a ribbon that could transform into a pistol, the glaive-AMR that this "Riley Crimson" was using, then there was all the weapons himself, Ruby, Nero and Yaeger were packing. They certainly weren't lacking for firepower, but the overemphasis on melee weapons seemed somewhat counterintuitive.
"So, how are we doing this?" The blonde female asked, taking his attention over to Ruby's sister. The girl simply cocked her gauntlets and readied herself for a fight. Truth be told, he wanted to just shoot it with his jetpack missile, but his sixth sense told him to hold off, that there'd be something far more prevalent to use it on shortly. Currently, Jaune, Nora, Yang, Blake, Weiss, and some girl named Riley Crimson were all closest to the tower, while himself, Ruby, Yaeger and Nero stood along the middle, while Pyrrha and Ren stood nearest to solid ground. "We could probably just brute-force our way through the Deathstalker, but that Nevermore is the real threat!"
"Riley, Weiss, Blake, Yang, get in the tower, take down that Nevermore with whatever you have at your disposal. Jaune, Nora, Pyrrha, Ren, to the fore, take down that Deathstalker before it starts getting creative. Everyone else, try to support- RUBY, MOVE!" Jango had begun barking orders out to everyone, before looking back and down into the fog just to notice the Nevermore coming up at them from under the bridge, smashing through with ease and knocking everyone in the middle of the bridge off their feet. He'd had the sense enough to jetpack away before the impact, but Nero, Yaeger and Ruby had all been sent reeling from the blow, his partner among them taking the heaviest impact of the group and having her weapon knocked out of her hands as she was sent flying.
Darting over to the tower, Jango fired his whipcord launcher around his partner's forearm before extending his gauntlet blades and digging them into the stonework beneath him and bracing for the pull. Sure enough, it came, though thankfully she was much lighter than that one Jedi he'd previously been pulled into a similar situation with, and she had the sense to immediately begin climbing up the cable. The loss of her weapon was unfortunate, but it could be retrieved later. For now, they had more pressing matters, foremost of them being the Nevermore, but he couldn't dismiss the Deathstalker, nor the faint buzzing he was hearing shortly after he saw Crescent Rose disappear into the fog below them.
"Gah... thanks for the save, Jango, but I lost my weapon! Do uh... do you got a spare I could-" Before she could finish her sentence, Jango shoved his left-hand blaster into her hands, retracting his cord the moment she unwrapped her wrist and turning back to the others who'd been knocked down. Surprisingly enough, both Nero and Yaeger made quick recoveries, with the former using a grappling hook to get back up, and the other using his clawed gauntlets to scale back up the falling debris quicker than it could descend.
With all bases covered, the maniacal ginger with the Warhammer and the blonde boy both on the side facing the Deathstalker with the ninja and Spartan, and the other four scaling up the tower to get better vantage on their own foe... but he wasn't concerned with those two anymore, as the buzzing was growing louder and louder. Groaning as he almost knew something was about to come up, Jango only narrowly threw himself back in time to not have his head removed for the second time in less than two weeks by a pair of snapping mandibles as some sort of black and white bug with a massive thorax and stinger shot up and over him, followed shortly after by dozens upon dozens more...
"Holy... what the hell are Lancers doing here?!." It was Nero who'd identified them first, and Jango received a first-hand demonstration of their quirk as one of them shot their stinger at him. He was able to evade the attack fairly easily, just pivoting his body back and left and allowing it to pass him, striking the stonework behind him and bouncing off before whipping back into the strange beast's thorax. Spinning his Westar-34 on his finger, he aligned the blaster and took his shot, predicting the path the beast would try to run and nailing it in the head, killing it instantly.
"Easy enough to kill. Ruby, Nero, Yaeger, form a box, keep close, but mind your spacing and sector. Weapons free." Jango ordered, with the three others snapping into action on his command. Despite the increasing number of these bugs, he kept a cool head, steady hand and stayed light on his feet. Within an instant a storm of fire erupted from where they stood, as the four warriors stood their ground against the horde without giving a single inch.
Snapping his blaster right while pivoting and lifting his right knee to to his left side, he let off a few pin-point accurate shots and fired off the two knee-missiles in his right kneepad, instantly killing two Lancers trying to hit him from his blind side while he swatted down five more with his blaster. Stamping his foot down, Jango moved forward slightly, ducking under a launching stinger and turning under it before whipping back up and unleashing a mighty inferno upon the handful of Lancers that had dared to move in for the kill, sending their burning bodies plummeting back down into the depths from whence they'd come. Already in a crouch with his left knee forward, Jango tossed his blaster over to the opposite hand and snapped right with it whilst crossing over his right gauntlet, firing off the integrated twin wrist blaster as he launched his other two knee missiles forward and blasted another lancer to his right in the head. Both blaster bolts from his gauntlet and missiles from his left knee found their mark, taking the lives of four more Lancers in a heartbeat just before Jango could fire off his whipcord launcher, strangling another bug by the throat as he yanked it back to himself and slashed across its back with his hidden wrist-blade and let its lifeless corpse, rapidly disintegrating as it was, pass him as it dragged along the ground...
Rolling back over the disintegrating Grimm body, Ruby snapped up with the blaster Jango was allowing her to borrow and loosed a swift flurry of bolts into the swarm that was beginning to swirl around them, hitting home with most of her shots yet occasionally missing the mark. Fishing out a magazine of explosive rounds from a pouch on her belt, Ruby took a moment to analyze the flight patterns and speeds of the swarm, before smirking slightly and tossing the magazine hard into the air ahead of her. Ducking down and rolling forward to avoid a trio of stingers that had launched for her, She snapped back up in a crouch and sent her Hail Mary off, striking the magazine just where and when she wanted to and causing a violent explosion, consuming several Grimm beasts in the fireball and swatting four more out of the sky with the shrapnel. Bracing herself as much as she could, Ruby kicked off to her right with her semblance on full blast, shoulder-checking a Lancer that had just landed full-force in the face and causing it to recoil, giving her just enough time to pivot back around to her previous spot and blast it through the throat before snapping onto other targets.
He cartwheeled right to avoid the hole-riddled bug that came crashing down upon the ground where he'd once stood, before sweeping around in a wide arch with his left gauntlet and splitting another Lancer into several pieces effortlessly, letting rip with his LMG the moment it was back on target. On his right Yaeger noticed another Lancer coming around for a shot, and pivot his upper body back just in time to avoid impalement, grasping the tendril the singer was attached to with his right hand and yanking it down as hard as he could, before grasping it with both hands and swinging it around in a circle overhead in a display of both brute strength and cunning, as he used the Lancer's own body as a weapon against its kin, smashing aside at least ten or eleven by his count before his impromptu weapon disintegrated itself, killed by the repeated collisions. Another lunged down for him, and with a backhanded sweep, he deflected the stinger and kicked off his back foot, stabbing the beast through the torso and pinning it between his fist and the ground as he brought it down, savoring its useless struggle before watching it go limp and ripping his blades out to refocus on other foes.
A handful of grenades filled the sky before every single one of them were struck just as a mob of Lancers were passing them, tearing them all to ribbons as Nero just blew the smoke from her pistols' barrels. Holstering her twin pistols, Nero pulled up her shotgun and fired it off behind and above herself, slapping another bug out of the sky as it tried to be sneaky with her, spinning and cocking the shotgun on one hand as she brought it back to fore and blasted another in front of her away from the hip, taking out her grenade launcher with her left hand and firing it into the mouth of one more that landed just beside her, knocking it off its feet as she spun around and smashed her heel into the side of its head and knocked it over the side of the tower, with the timed charge detonating mere seconds later and erasing several more bugs that were trying to get the jump on them by crawling up the tower. Holstering her grenade launcher while blasting another back with her shotgun, she pulled out her grappling hook and launched it towards another beast, snagging it by the back and yanking it close enough to blow the head off of with another shot from her shotgun. Holstering her shotgun and cartwheeling backwards while dropping the grappling hook, Nero deftly evaded four more stingers, lazily tossing a sticky grenade onto each before snapping out her SMGs and began corralling any bugs that lingered outside the blast radius of the grenades as the stingers were pulled back in by their unwitting owners back inside. The ensuing explosion took out at least twelve, bringing a small laugh to the girl as she watched a few of the survivors of the blast fall back down into the depths, their bodies ablaze...
Just as the skies began to look as if they were clearing, dozens more shot up from the abyss, prompting all save one to take a step back in shock, as to them the swarm just seemed endless. However, having felt something like this may well happen and been saving his ace in the hole for just this moment, Jango holstered his pistol, closed his left fist, and raised it overhead as he let loose his entire volley of whistling birds. Ripping through the air with a menacing hiss, each missile course-corrected itself to a different target, blasting apart every single beast they struck and clearing the skies in an instant. Ruby, Nero and Yaeger all gaped in awe at the display of carnage that unfolded around them, before turning their eyes to Jango, who'd already returned to his usual posture and holstered his pistol.
"Hey uh... Jango? Could you have maybe done that a little sooner?" Ruby asked, handing the man back his pistol who just pat her on the shoulder and holstered his returned weapon in response. She sighed as he began looking back towards the tower again, then to the edge of the chasm. He noted that each group seemed to be finishing up with their respective fights, or at the very least they were both preparing to land the killing blows. However, just before he could say anything for his hastily formed team to assist the others, another, this time much heavier-sounding, buzzing began to emerge from beneath them. Turning back towards the side the buzzing was coming from, he chuckled as first he saw Ruby's weapon rising out from the abyss, then an absolutely gargantuan version of the Lancers he'd already killed rose from the fog, alone and imposing in its own right. "What the- LANCER QUEEN! SCATTER AND CONCENTRATE FIRE, NOW!"
Flying away to a different platform just as it began to pepper their position with stingers from its face like bullets, Jango fired off his whipcord launcher at Ruby's weapon, snagging the armament just above the spearhead at the bottom of the scythe's shaft. With one hard tug, the weapon ripped through and opened up a nasty gash along the creature's back, and with one well-timed swing of his arm in a circular motion, Jango slashed the Lancer Queen across the eyes. Just as the weapon began coming back around, Jango detached the cable and allowed the weapon to fly free, coincidentally decapitating the Nevermore that had survived the other group's Hail Mary before burying its blade into the cliff face behind it. Finally dropping down onto the platform, he somersaulted across the stonework beneath him a few meters, with assistance from a burst from his jetpack to swiftly throw off the beast as it still seemed to have one good eye to track him with so it could accurately shoot at him. Coming up from his roll in a crouch, he dropped his rangefinder and locked onto the behemoth mid-roll and sent his jetpack missile straight down its mouth, blasting apart the creature into possibly hundreds of rapidly disintegrating meaty chunks in a heartbeat.
And with the mighty explosion's black cloud clearing out, a quick look to either of the other battles revealed their victory. A short flight back towards the group that had reconsolidated at the cliff face, and it was done. Now all they had to do was make it back to Beacon in one piece... That being said, of course, given the foes they'd already slain, nobody was particularly concerned with whether or not they'd make it...
"Aldrin Yaeger, Jango Fett, Nero Friedman, and Ruby Rose. You four Retrieved the Black King, Queen, and Rook pieces. From this day forward, you will work together as Team JRNY [Journey]." Ozpin spoke as Jango and the rest of the group he'd fought alongside stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their hands folded just at the small of their backs. The auditorium was jam-packed both with their class year and their seniors, and upon the stage all lights were currently trained upon them and the Headmaster. Just above, their portraits were displayed upon a large holographic screen and followed by the letter with the initial of their first, or in Yaeger's case last names displayed just below. The clapping that followed their team's official formation wasn't short-lived, especially since their fight against the Lancers, Grimm that he'd only just learned were foreign to this part of the world, was observed by the entire academy, however, Jango kept his ears open and attention trained on Ozpin as he proceeded to name the leader. "Lead by... Jango Fett!"
He didn't say anything as the Headmaster named him leader, having picked up on the common trend of the leaders always taking up the first letter of the team name like with CRDL, JNPR and RWBY before them. Still, he didn't miss the big smile and the pat on the back from the smaller redhead beside him, nor the thumbs-up and nods of approval from Nero or Yaeger to Ruby's left. All considered, the position of leadership wasn't new to him, as during the Mandalorian Civil War he'd lead his own troop of Mandos, and later he lead the True Mandalorians as Mand'alor against the Deathwatch... now he just had to make sure he didn't walk himself and his subordinates into another trap like Galidraan was.
"Looks like things are shaping up to be an... interesting year." Was all that was said before they were allowed to step off the stage. The only eventful thing worth noting to Jango however following their formation was the last few closing remarks from the Headmaster before they were permitted to make way for the cafeteria, eat and go to their new rooms. That being said of course, he was greatly surprised at the variety of food offered for dinner, and had to wonder if it was normal for the meals at this school to be so over the top.
However, with dinner aside and the team situated properly in their new room, Jango quietly slipped out for a few minutes to fully restock his supplies before returning to offload his equipment and organize everything properly. Strangely enough, he'd found that the Bounty Hunter dorms were separate from those used by normal Hunters in training, and the layout of the room was different, to boot. Completely different building, but the two were linked by multi-floored walkways with railings and a proper roof on the top floor.
Their room was Room BH516, with the first number denoting what floor it was on and the latter two detailing which in the order of rooms it was. The only reason that they were in the Bounty Hunter Dormitory was because their leader was a Bounty Hunter in Training, however, so if he hadn't been selected as leader, they probably would've been situated in the normal dormitory, likely just beside RWBY or JNPR. Nevertheless, their room had oak hardwood flooring, four beds with walnut frames, mid blue blankets and snow white pillows. The beds had integrated drawers underneath them, their housing built into the frames. At the end of the bedroom in the center of the wall facing outside was a large window, with a decently wide shelf at its base, currently unoccupied by anything. To either side, there was a bedside table just before the bed, and between the beds on either side was an armoire, with the final bedside tables tucked into the outside corners of the room. At the foot of each bed was a dresser, and ahead of the beds sat each of their respective desks, with two flanking the door to the hallway on either side while the others sat against the connecting walls inside, leaving the inner corners of the room to be occupied by some sort of special terminals that took up the space as a full kiosk. On the left side of the room, a door led to their shared closet, while the right led to a sort of common area that had a kitchen table with chairs, a couch, a wide, empty shelf with a few devices linked to the flatscreen TV mounted on the wall above it, a kitchenette, and a bathroom.
Most of the room didn't interest him too much, but he gave the integrated terminals a closer look, and was surprised to see the device was dedicated to helping Training Bounty Hunters find, accept and track student-level bounties. Supposedly it was linked to a larger bounty registry, but access was restricted down to just low-level bounties that didn't pay too incredibly, since most of the payout was taken by the academy for additional funding. Seemed he'd be working his way back up to the top again, not that he minded too much. After all, he already had what basically amounted to infinite supplies in the Slave 1, so he wasn't concerned about costs of living or anything like that.
With everything taken stock of, his surroundings noted and the presence of his team in their beds confirmed, Jango ensured the door was locked, before tucking in for bed himself. The day was a fairly easy one, since he'd had all the right tools for the job, but hell if that didn't mean he couldn't use some shut-eye...
Classes came with morning, not that he was ever too concerned with what was going on. In their introductory class to combat basics he'd floored his opponent so easily that it wasn't even worth mentioning by the end of the day, but now 15:30 had rolled around, leading to the conclusion of their classes and his team's return to their dorm. It didn't take an expert to pick out that his partner was behind the grind in terms of what they needed to know, and the only reason he wasn't himself was because the only skill he wasn't already taught was their world's history and Grimm Studies, which he'd already taken the week prior to their initiation to brush up on all the major details. It wouldn't hurt to help her catch up, since she was technically accelerated two years ahead he already expected she'd be somewhat behind... that being said though, she'd demonstrated that combat was not a skill she needed to play catch-up on, at least in comparison to some other students who despite being older were thoroughly outclassed by the little reaper.
Rolling his shoulders as he stepped up to the terminal, he was surprised to find that Intermediate-Level Bounties had become accessible, although a closer inspection showed that it was only made accessible by the Headmaster, and he could only select one. He supposed that he had demonstrated himself to be a cut above the rest, so it was easy to surmise that this was the Headmaster's way of showing his trust. If he accepted, then Ozpin would likely be looking for a certain level of performance before determining whether or not he was ready to take on more missions of the level or higher, something he was perfectly fine with. Now looking through the contracts, Jango halted as he noticed a familiar face, that of the criminal he and Ruby had stopped not too long ago...
"Roman Torchwick, Age 31, Threat Rating High-Intermediate. Easy money." Jango read aloud before making a confident comment and accepting the contract.
-=𝕼𝖀𝕰𝕾𝕿 𝕬𝕮𝕮𝕰𝕻𝕿𝕰𝕯: 𝕱𝖎𝖓𝖉 𝕽𝖔𝖒𝖆𝖓 𝕿𝖔𝖗𝖈𝖍𝖜𝖎𝖈𝖐=-
He chuckled inaudibly as he watched the text burn across his upper peripheral vision and the voice read it off. He knew he wasn't schizophrenic, but he wasn't wholly comfortable with the fact that he could accurately say he was hearing a disembodied voice that wasn't his own in his head, and it definitely wasn't something he'd tell anyone else ever. However, just as he was turning around to collect his stuff and embark on his hunt, he felt himself bump into someone, and just before him now stood his partner, who was giving him a curious, if mischievous look.
"So, Torchwick, huh?" She questioned, having clearly overheard him and likely seeking to dissuade him... or perhaps not, if the look on her face was anything to go by. It wasn't as if he was trying to keep things to himself, after all, the others were in the room with him and he was thinking out loud. A quick look around, however, told him everything he needed to know, and that was that his team wanted in on this hunt. "So, when do we begin? After all, for the two of us, this is a little personal, isn't it?"
"On the weekend. We still have the rest of the week to get through, and it'll give us a larger window to work with." Jango answered in a rather simple manner. Truth be told, he was planning on leaving immediately, but now that his team wanted in, the last thing he wanted to do was jump the gun before they could properly ready themselves. On his own it would be a simple matter, but the additional hands would be more hinderance than help when they didn't have any proper training as a Bounty Hunter... besides, it was clear that his quarry was focused on Vale, so he could safely assume his prey wouldn't go anywhere, and even if he did, a quick look at his helmet's HUD revealed that the man's general location was being tracked within a grid square. By all means, he had time, time he fully intended to take...