"Excellent. I am pleased with how I performed."

"Me, too," said Ciel, trying to keep franticness out of her voice. She almost longed for the loops when she only had three or four notes to track each time. Now she needed over an hour just to write out everything, to document every action she needed to take, every argument she needed to make, every person she needed to move, every key she needed to turn to make all those things happen... and she'd lost all but half an hour of Penny's practice time.

Her script was just too damn long to memorize, was the problem. It took too long to write it all, but if she didn't she would miss things, and…

"Are you alright, Miss Ciel?"

"Fine," she said, unconvincing even to her own ears. "Fine. Listen, Penny… how would you like to call Ruby?"

A few minutes later, with Penny merrily off to the cliff to await her bird strike-delayed Manta and her upcoming call to Ruby, Ciel made her way to the Emerald Tower. She was glad she had the route down pat; that part, at least, she'd memorized, which let her devote more attention to her note-taking. She couldn't stop, there was no time to spare, experience told her that her talk with the headmaster took up the whole evening, she would just have to try and jam her notes in as they went along.

The elevator arrived at the appropriate floor. It took Ciel a moment to remember the code, preoccupied as she was with her notes, but after a few seconds she conjured up the 7-9-2-9 and let herself in.

At last she put the scroll to her side, looked up fully—

-giant gears falling at her face—

-and flung herself back into the elevator.

"I assure you, there is no danger here," came the polite call from across the room and a million miles away.

Ciel closed her eyes as she tried to rein in her hyperventilation and her pounding heart. Stupid. She'd forgotten to warn herself about the gears.

What else would she forget with her schedule this tight?

Rising with her eyes closed, Ciel spent another moment calming herself before she trusted her own voice. "Ciel Soleil, Atlas Academy."

"This is awfully late for office hours. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

There. That was a prompt. Even if it was a different prompt from other loops, she could still latch onto it. "I have Listing's semblance. This is the fourth time we've had this conversation."

A buzz at his desk drew Ozpin's attention for a moment, but after he looked down with a frown and pushed a button, he returned his gaze to Ciel. "In that case, we have much to discuss."

And she was off to the races.

A too-apt metaphor, she thought with a suppressed grimace, for someone running out of time…

"There's no such thing as magic."

"Penny's their next target."

"I like where your head's at."

"Stocking extra ammunition?" Ciel said, not startled this time.

"You bet," said Nora. "I like to be ready for bad stuff."

"Then you're just who I need," Ciel said. "Headmaster Ozpin has learned about an attack coming up on Beacon, and he's trying—very quietly—to prepare for it. That's what I'm doing here-" she gestured at the different types of ammo she was stocking in her locker- "but I need your help for the rest."

Nora's eyes glimmered. "You mean I get to be part of a conspiracy?"

"Starting right now," Ciel promised. "I know RWBY cut you out of the last one, but this time, we need you involved. Professor Ozpin brought in Pyrrha before when he called her to his office solo, and I'm bringing you in, too."

"That… sounds… amazing! What's the plan?"

"The enemy's going to attack this evening, while most students are in their dorm rooms. No one can get to their weapons from there, and there aren't enough exits to evacuate everyone."

"Well, that's simple to fix. Just blast a hole in the dorm wall."

"That's what we need. I need you to rig something that will crack open the wall. No one can see you make it, you have to be done in time to get up to Amity for the fight, and it has to go off at exactly 1810 tonight."

"Gimme ninety minutes."

"I believe you," Ciel said, with good reason. A brainwave struck her even as Nora reached for her locker. "Hey, Nora… do you think you could put me in contact with Pyrrha?"

Nora's outgoing demeanor collapsed into suspicion in the blink of an eye. "What for? 'Cause I'll tell you now, you're not getting an autograph, she hates that sorta thing."

"Nothing like that," said Ciel, mind racing. She hadn't planned this, but she couldn't leave it be, either. The memory of Penny saying how hard it was to throw a fight wouldn't leave her head. The memory of Penny accepting a maiming as the cost of avoiding death was even clearer and harsher. "I wanted to talk to Pyrrha about the fight tonight."

"Have fun with that," said Nora, returning her attention to her locker. "You're on another team, and Pyrrha is psycho competitive."

Ciel's knuckles turned white from squeezing her hands together. "Is she, now?"

"You don't win that many tournaments in a row unless your competitiveness setting is jacked way the hell up," Nora confirmed. "She's really nice, so she won't just blow you off, but don't think she's gonna say anything meaningful. She won't wanna give you a single edge."

"It's about the conspiracy, though," Ciel insisted.

"Yeah, well, she'll be expecting people to have all sorts of excuses when they come sniffing around. Good luck."

Ciel would need it. How did you convince someone that invested in competition to be part of an unfair competition? Ciel didn't even know where to begin.

Use trust relationships that already exist.

"Well, who could talk to her about it?" Ciel tried. "If she won't listen to me, who would she listen to?"

"Well, she really likes Ruby—I mean, who doesn't like Ruby—and Weiss, RWBY is our sister team after all. Ooh, but if you can find Jaune, that's the one. He's close with Pyrrha."

Oh—oh, and Ciel knew where and when she could catch Jaune. "Thanks, Nora."

"No problem," said Nora, her eyes dancing with delight. "Time to play with fire, heh heh heh."

Ciel made herself scarce.

She clung to her schedule ever more tightly, even with the ever-growing number of things on it. She had to. It was all that kept her afloat.

And, if she was going to make any attempt at recruiting Pyrrha, doing everything right when scheduled was essential…

Specifically, she had to commit the ultimate party foul at the right time.

She peeked out the window of the north dorm common room. There was Jaune. Good. She waited a bit—she needed to not splash him and throw him off—before tossing the fridge. Then it was down and out as swiftly as possible. She had to follow him, had to…

She rounded the corner, took one look at what was going on, and retreated.

Oh.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Jaune had had two bales of cotton candy in his hands. They weren't both for him, of course, you idiot. And when Nora said Jaune and Pyrrha were close, she meant that they were close.

Face burning in embarrassment, Ciel tried to collect herself. Even with the world ending, even with Ciel desperately needing their help, even with them being in a public place… maybe people deserved privacy when they were being affectionate? She retrieved her task list, determined to let them be, and looked it over to see where she could go from here.

There was a crashing sound.

Ciel stopped in her tracks and turned. Pyrrha was running away from her conversation with Jaune. Maybe it hadn't gone as well as she'd expected. But what had caused the commotion?

She advanced curiously, looking around the corner once more. There was Jaune, sitting on the ground, rubbing his head like he was shaking off an impact.

And the wall behind him was cracked and smashed in a vaguely human-shaped way.

Ciel felt like the chances she'd get a decent conversation with Pyrrha had just dropped the rest of the way to zero. Pyrrha was clearly under immense stress, and Ciel's 'in' of using Jaune was burned up. Ciel felt the tug of the other items on her schedule. Best to abandon this and tend to those.

No. If she could get to Pyrrha, it would make a bigger difference than half her list. She turned towards where Pyrrha had run and followed at a distance.

Pyrrha didn't seem to notice her tail nor have a destination. Her head was down. Eventually, she came to a stop by the statue in Beacon courtyard.

Ciel approached slowly, uncertain of how she could do this. She'd seen Pyrrha talk several times, she realized, but in all those loops she'd never engaged with her directly. She thought she knew what Pyrrha was like—sensitive, empathetic, guileless—but she hadn't seen nearly enough to know, and all of her experience was second-hand.

Pyrrha's head had lifted. She was looking at the statue, at the Huntress displayed there. Her face was scrunched up with an emotion Ciel couldn't parse.

Now or never. "Good afternoon, Pyrrha," she said as she approached.

Pyrrha started. Ciel spotted the moment Pyrrha's public relations training took over. "Hello," she said with a smile. It was a fake, plastic thing that didn't reach past her mouth.

"Ciel Soleil, Atlas Academy."

"Yes, I recognize you," said Pyrrha with forced grace. "I saw you in the earlier rounds. You fought well."

"Penny carried me," Ciel said honestly. "Actually, it's about that."

The little bit of practiced courtesy Pyrrha had projected now escaped her. "Oh?"

"You're going to be picked tonight to fight against Penny," Ciel started.

"I beg your pardon, but I'll have to ask you to stop right there," said Pyrrha, and as polite as her words were, her voice quaked with emotion. "I don't talk about my fights until after they've happened."

"It's all a trap," Ciel plowed on. "A setup. I'm trying to help you both escape it."

Pyrrha was having none of it. "Have a nice day," she said, in tones other people used to deliver vile curses.

"Penny's throwing the fight!" Ciel said desperately as Pyrrha turned away. The taller woman paused. "We've worked it out. That's how we escape the setup. She's going to throw the fight, but if you help it'll be much easier."

Pyrrha turned, slowly. Tears were running down her face. She was clearly an emotional wreck—and Ciel still took an involuntary step backwards. Pyrrha was flexing her Aura, perhaps subconsciously, and Ciel could feel it. So much, so strong… it wasn't skill alone that made Pyrrha such a force of nature.

Even at her worst, her most muddled and tortured and confused, she was still Pyrrha frickledy-fracking Nikos. Ciel tried to swallow and failed.

"Please don't take this the wrong way," said Pyrrha, her voice wandering across its register, "but I don't know you. I don't trust you. I can't just take your word on any of this. I'm from Mistral. Do you think this is my first brush with corruption?"

"I'm not…" Ciel tried, but Pyrrha silenced her with a glare.

"My… life… is complicated right now… and so much of it is uncertain, and slipping away…" she sniffed, but there was a roaring fire in her eyes. "This is the one thing I'm good at. The one place I can be fully myself. The one thing in my life that's true. And I won't let you take it from me."

Ciel nodded dumbly.

The intensity in Pyrrha's expression faded slightly. Ciel was able to breathe again. Pyrrha dabbed at her eyes with her hands; the gesture did little to dry them. "If… uh… if it does turn out like you say, then I will apologize afterwards. But… for now… I believe we're done."

"Yeah," said Ciel in a daze. "We're done." She left Pyrrha by the statue, walking away completely on autopilot.

When she recovered her wits enough to look at her schedule and see all the things she'd missed, she couldn't find it in herself to regret them. The only regret she had was for inflicting further anguish on Pyrrha Nikos.

What the hell was in that subbasement?

Beacon photographer faunus.

A sky like blood.

"You are a bioluminescent bug to me, as well."

"They're showing each other a great deal of professional respect!"

"Alert: incoming grimm attack. Threat level: Eight."

"Get away from them!"

"No one will fault you if you leave."

"I did not expect it to be so difficult to lose a fight."

"Coming in hot!"

Here it came: time for Ciel to put into action every tweak, every change, every optimization she'd worked on, everything she'd learned through all these loops. She'd sprint to the Emerald Tower, covered by the north dorm, and set up shop in Ozpin's office, guiding a coherent force of students through a battle in which she knew most of the beats and could muddle through the rest.

This was it…

A blur of fire and yelling; read, react, call out, track; over and over again, until…

…until, somehow…

…she didn't die.

Was this victory?

It didn't feel like it. That sensation gnawed at Ciel. She was sure she'd be elated and thrilled to survive. For so many loops she'd fought with everything she had to live through this battle. Now, she'd done it.

So why did she feel so awful?

Why was she thinking, of all things, about Swan?

From her perch in the Emerald Tower, she looked out at Beacon from a remove. She heard sporadic bursts of gunfire as the defenders cleaned out straggling, hiding, or gorging grimm. (That last was a bitter possibility she couldn't stand, but couldn't dismiss.) She smelled nothing from here, but she knew what stench was out there: the reek of dissolving grimm, the tang of discharged Dust, and the acrid smoke of so very many fires. Fires burned out of control across campus, with one of every five buildings aflame. Almost every structure was defaced by bullet holes and scorch marks. There seemed not a single piece of glass un-smashed. The carefully-manicured lawns of the school were pockmarked with blast craters, some still smoking.

More smoke came from Vale City. Two wrecked battleships were the epicenters of the worst blazes: Benefactor, shot down by its fellows to prevent its hijacking, and Generosity, destroyed by the Wyvern. Ciel knew, intellectually and from experience both, that a crashing battleship typically took its whole crew down with it. Other fires marked the crash points of Mantas or Bullheads, smaller but no less morbid for the fact. The fire alarms and emergency sirens were audible even at Ciel's range, harsh and urgent despite the distance.

In Beacon courtyard, the wounded were being gathered for evacuation near the cliff, where exhausted medics walked amongst them, tending as best they could. Elsewhere, near the rubble of the statue, people gathered corpses. Fewer corpses than before, Ciel was sure, but still far more than she'd ever seen in one place. Many of the bodies wore White Fang livery. Others were civilians and staff from the Festival area and the school. Some were Atlesian soldiers. Too many were students.

A few Ciel recognized from earlier tournament matches, like May Zedong, still holding tight to her shattered sniper rifle in death and surrounded by the stricken survivors of Team BRNZ. Others she didn't recognize beyond their uniforms, mostly Beacon-issue. A handful were mutilated too badly to tell.

A small number Ciel knew personally.

Distance made no less distinct or poignant the wailing of Nora Valkyrie, the trembling of Lie Ren, and the bottomless grief of Pyrrha Nikos. There was nothing "invincible" about a girl brought to her knees by sorrow. Pyrrha had come up the elevator of the Emerald Tower alone. She'd carried the hilt of a cane, and a large slab of metal that was warped from heat and scorched almost beyond recognition.

Almost. Ciel saw it had once been a heater shield, colored cream and gold.

And Pyrrha's eyes, full of tears and clenched shut as they were, betrayed a glow Ciel had only ever seen from Cinder Fall. Ciel didn't know what had happened down in that subbasement, but it was clear Pyrrha was the only one who'd walked away, and Pyrrha couldn't bear that fact. Whatever Pyrrha had been dreading would happen, something even more terrible had.

Professor Ozpin hadn't brought enough force with him down to the subbasement, again, Ciel noted. He'd paid for that mistake. She wondered what, if anything, could break through that stubbornness.

She huffed. She'd gotten so used to planning for the next loop, for taking down notes on how to improve, how to optimize… it'd gotten instinctive.

There was no need for that anymore, though. She'd lived through the battle this time, just like she'd lived through that training mission with Swan. She'd "won".

The word didn't sound right, even in her head.

Sure, the casualties were so much less—a dead May was a far cry from a wiped-out Team BRNZ, for example. Sure, the damage was so much less—damage to the Emerald Tower was less severe than it being blasted apart. Sure, losing two battleships was inarguably better than losing three.

"Better" just didn't feel like enough.

Maybe she'd gotten greedy. Maybe she'd thought there was a perfect resolution, or a right answer, like on a test back at Atlas. Maybe this was all she could hope for—the best-case scenario. Maybe this wasn't so bad.

Beacon still stood, most of its students and faculty had survived, Vale's defenses were bloodied but unbroken, relations between Kingdoms were intact or even strengthened, and these enemies were destroyed. The headmaster had gotten his wish: the enemy was not able to "run free". They'd all died or been captured trying to break Beacon, and Beacon had withstood the blow.

All these people were crying because they didn't know how good they had it. They were crying over a bloody victory only because they didn't know the alternative was disastrous defeat. Maybe they were wrong to feel this way.

Did that make Ciel wrong, too? Because she felt like them, and not from empathy alone.

Her eyes strayed to the huddle and the grieving around Team RWBY. She'd trusted them with so much, and they'd performed magnificently, tackling the hardest battles with vigor and success. They'd turned the tide. It had cost them dearly.

Her eyes touched on the only figure in that grouping that was standing, that was able to stand, Weiss Schnee. Ciel had known what to expect from Weiss by reputation and family name: someone cold, imperious, distant, arrogant. She saw a facsimile of that now. Weiss was standing rigidly, not looking down, not looking at anything, hands firmly at her sides.

Except those hands were quaking, and tears were gushing down her pretty face, and she was holding on to her composure by the thinnest of threads. For all that Ciel had expected from Weiss, what she hadn't foreseen was the ferocious devotion Weiss had shown her teammates. Weiss had made them her everything. Now Ciel was seeing the complement to that: the hurt that came from-

No. Ciel tore her eyes away, unable to grapple with the sight. Maybe someday, but… not now. She cared too much. She'd become so attached to people who didn't even really know her. She didn't want them to suffer. She didn't want them to feel this much pain.

What could she do, though? The idea of her going up to people and offering sympathy was absurd. She didn't know how, and she certainly wouldn't be good at it. How could she go to Pyrrha, who was writhing in agony, and tell her, "Yes, but this time you survived"?

That wouldn't console her any better than it was consoling Ciel. Knowledge, it sometimes seemed, offered only cold comfort, no matter how useful it was.

Useful…

It wouldn't be useful, though. She'd survived. The loops were finished.

Were they? Were they actually?

Should we fail, and the battle turn against us, you must find a way to die and let us try again.

The battle hadn't turned against them… but there was, perhaps, a way to die still.

The idea came upon her slowly, creeping up like the dawn. She became gradually aware of Metronome hanging heavy on her hip.

Was she really considering this?

No. No, this was ridiculous. She should accept the victory, any victory. She was sick and tired of dying, sick and tired of reliving the same day over and over, sick and tired of the same terror and trauma—she wanted to be free of it.

She was just about out of time, anyway. She couldn't define or explain it in words, but she could feel it. She could feel her link to the past fraying. Her Aura reserve was depleted. She wouldn't return to the same place. It was uncertain if she'd return at all.

If she were, hypothetically, to try and go back one more time… would she even have enough time to make changes? As much time as she'd lost, she didn't know if she'd be able to get to everything, to make all the changes she'd need to make. She might very well make things worse.

That prospect was terrifying. It had been so hard, taken so much effort, to achieve this narrow victory. Throwing away a victory was hard enough. Throwing away a victory and maybe getting a defeat? Words didn't exist to describe how awful that would be.

Done, then. Yes. She was done.

…that was supposed to feel like a relief. What was wrong with her?

Because I didn't save him. I could have, but I didn't...

If I just… had another chance…

With no plan in mind, but also nothing left to do where she was, she pushed a button to summon the elevator. No light came on and no sound reached her. She supposed she should have expected that, after whatever battle had gone on below her feet. Still, she was a Huntress trainee. She had a landing strategy. She went out the window.

On ground level, she could hear and smell all the things she hadn't before. She felt the heat of the fires, heard the wails of sirens and people alike, was assaulted by the post-battle stench... and still it was the sights that struck her most forcefully. There was a difference, seeing them from above in the Tower or through the remove of a camera. Distance mattered. Closing that distance changed everything.

It put the grief right in her face, immersed her in it, drowned her in it, until she couldn't feel anything else. She could barely move beneath the weight of pain and loss.

She felt it all so strongly, here amongst the living and dead alike. Even if she wasn't connected to these people—even if she was an outsider to literally everyone in the courtyard—she still felt it soul-deep. Maybe that was what it meant to be human.

If only she'd been able to share that insight with Penny.

Maybe the General wouldn't have been so deeply affected by this. Maybe he wouldn't see this as failure; maybe he'd be secure enough in a job well done to not be swayed. But Ciel wasn't the General, and she knew now she never would be.

Her mind drifted as she walked about, looking at people still working, and others that had worked until they couldn't. Her memory was reaching back to a lesson she'd learned long ago, in an early Grimm Studies class in combat school.

Why, a student had asked, were funerals allowed to happen? Didn't they attract grimm?

The teacher had replied that it was because funerals were an expression of grief.

That answer had frustrated the class. Wasn't grief a negative emotion?

No, was the answer. Grief was often accompanied by other emotions—despair, sorrow, fear, anger—that were negative and did draw grimm. But grief itself, in its pure form, did not, because it came from a different place from those other feelings.

Funerals were allowed for the same reason weddings were. As different as those two events felt, both had the same wellspring. They both came from the same place, a place the grimm couldn't see and couldn't comprehend.

Love.

Grief didn't attract grimm because it came from love.

For years, Ciel had never understood that lesson. She'd certainly never believed it.

But as her eyes met Weiss', as they looked at each other and understood one another without saying a word, as their two hearts broke in synchrony... she thought she believed at last.

One more time.

She had to try.

Ciel drew Metronome from her hip, put its barrel in her mouth, dropped her Aura, and squeezed.

Next time: Trust Love