Jaune Arc: The All-Rounder

by Karmealion

When the illustrious Arc family attempts to raise their only male heir, Jaune Arc, as a sheltered and genteel high society type, he rejects their efforts, trains on his own and then runs away at the very first opportunity. Watch as an absurdly undertrained but clever Jaune, changes his name, makes several female friends, and attempts to make it in Hunter society. Jaune/Harem

5. Chapter 5 - John Freeman and Air Travel

I don't own anything related to the RWBY franchise

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Chapter 5 - Jaune Freeman Doesn't Enjoy Air Travel

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6 Months after Jaune's escape from Arc Castle and 1 year before Jaune boards a flight to Vale...

One of the best parts of working and living in a future tech laboratory in the middle of a military installation was all of the super cool training equipment that you could get your hands on. Jaune spent a considerable amount of his time lifting weights, punching and kicking sandbags, running on a treadmill, using a rowing machine, etc, but he was severely lacking in real hands on training and there wasn't much that he could do about it.

That was where the rig came in.

The rig was a sophisticated simulated reality that Jaune could enter by strapping himself down into a very complicated haptic chair, and donning a helmet designed to interact with his brain. The sights and situations that he encountered inside of the simulator looked and felt real, which allowed him to gain experience in a wide variety of areas. Of course for the most part, Jaune had used this rig to study how various types of Grimm behaved, how fast they can move, how agile, flexible or strong, whether or not they're pack animals or alphas and how they react to taking damage.

There was one other simulation that Jaune liked to use however, and he wasn't sure what it said about him as a person...

The simulation was called special operations and it was a military training program that catered to a very specific type of military operative. Jaune wasn't exactly sure who this simulation was supposed to train because the rig was waaaay too expensive to be mass produced, but the special operations simulation forced the person using it to complete a wide variety of missions, in a wide array of locations and under varying degrees of difficulty.

The reason why Jaune worried about what this simulation said about him personally was because for every protection detail or rescue mission that he received there were just as many assassination and saboteur missions. The missions were picked at random by the program that ran the simulation so Jaune ended up doing whatever was assigned, and he had to admit that he enjoyed the challenge despite the fact that the darker covert ops made him uncomfortable.

Today's mission was an assassination, and it was turning out to be quite the pain in the butt. Every single aspect of the target's defenses seemed to be growing stronger by the second, and the target herself had changed from being a normal civilian CEO to also being an aura user long after the operation had already begun, forcing Jaune to direct his squad-mates to their various fallback locations, even as he made some serious plan alterations on the fly.

"Alpha two, draw the new enemy perimeter guards away from the backup extraction point with your illusions while Alpha one continues to the vantage. I need eyes on the fifty-sixth floor of the building but when we're done here we're going to need to leave in a hurry."

"Ten-four boss, Alpha two clearing the extraction point," the generic male voice replied in response to Jaune's order. Then for several seconds no one said a word... "Extraction point clear, moving on towards the vantage point," Alpha one finally added in an unemotional tone of voice.

"Alpha one has iron sights on the building," a similar female voice added almost immediately after.

With a nod at his squad members' responses, Jaune began belaying down the side of the glass paned corporate building towards the fifty-sixth floor office, where his "newly an aura user" target and her six aura using guards were waiting unaware. In less than five seconds, Alpha two, his sniper, would smash open the window using several incendiary dust rounds and then Jaune would belay inside at full speed during the moment of surprise.

Then the situation changed.

"Sir, fourteen more regular guards just ran into the room and they appear to be at high alert," Alpha two called out as she observed the room through her sniper scope.

"Understood," Jaune replied in a calm tone of voice. "Alpha two alternate to tear gas rounds instead of incendiary and fire at the window as soon as Alpha one arrives to support me. Alpha one, I'll need to look like I'm a part of a squad of mercs when I enter that office rather than a single man, so I need you at the vantage point now. Charlie one and two, be prepared to set off the charges, Bravo one and two, please proceed up the stairwells at full speed."

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

The four distant rifle shots slammed into the window below Jaune one after another until the spiderweb cracks that they caused in the glass suddenly converged and the window shattered into a million pieces.

Even as a billowing green cloud of smoke poured out of the newly shattered window, Jaune belayed inside with his nanobot armor up and shielding his face, and then he rolled to the side when hundreds of bullets sprayed haphazardly in his general direction. As about a dozen mirror images of his body created by Alpha one's illusion Semblance leapt away in every direction, Jaune forced his body to move with a calm sense of lethal assurance that was visible to the naked eye.

The fact of the matter was that Jaune wasn't going to actually be the assassin during this particular mission. Not anymore. That outcome was no longer possible, because too many things had changed. Now, he was the red herring instead. He was the waving scarf concealing the magic happening behind the scenes. What this meant was that he needed to look a lot more dangerous than he really was and that meant full strength armor and an enormously powerful attack.

"Would've been nice to have any variety of martial arts training right about now," Jaune muttered, while pulling out his rifle-shield to deflect bullets away from his face as he dashed sideways across the room. Then the fourteen non aura using guards were upon his attacking squad and the vast, green smoke filled office became a cacophony of grunts and rapid gunfire.

Jaune needed a big and showy attack that was relatively easy to pull off... Then he thought of one, realized that it really was his best bet, and began shaking his head at how one dimensional his fighting style currently was... Brute strength would win the day, or at least make him look like he actually posed a threat... Moving up behind a six meter tall and four foot wide marble and rebar column that was holding up the vaulted ceiling of the office, Jaune holstered his shield, crouched to wrap his arms just four feet up its length, and then he recruited all of the aura in his body towards both his muscles and the strength contained in his nanobot armor.

Over the next few loud and chaotic moments, Jaune felt his armor absorbing the impacts from at least a dozen bullets as he heaved the column down and to the right with every scrap of unnatural strength that his body possessed. Then it happened. With an ear piercing shriek of shearing metal and crumbling rock coming from both the base and the apex of the column, the entire damned thing started coming free all at once and the ceiling started sagging down to crash into the room.

Jaune never even noticed the fact that the ceiling was falling in behind him. He was far too busy making use of the massive marble column that he was suddenly holding.

With a loud and berserk scream growl mixture that made him sound like he was the worst kind of meathead, Jaune started rapidly spinning even as he approached the main body of the bodyguard force. He was waving the entire column as if it was an impossibly enormous bat and making a massive spectacle of himself exactly like most strength Semblance fighters tend to do. Then, when everyone who was fast enough to get out of the way of his swings had already done so, Jaune completed one more upwards rotation and released the column to fly through the air towards the objective and her aura using bodyguards.

---

Across the rapidly deteriorating office, the target's lead bodyguard ripped her radio away from her face in order to yank her boss down and under a massive stone column that was suddenly flying their way through the green fog obscuring their vision. Then, when she was finished rolling the both of them back up to her feet, she turned to regard one of her men. "Get rid of that Strength Semblance user however you can while we make a retreat to the bolt hole elevator!"

"But, Boss! We don't need to retreat! We can take these guys." the tall and confident looking bodyguard replied in a truly frustrated tone of voice.

"We are bodyguards, not arena fighters,'' the Leader admonished the man in a disgusted sounding voice. "Do your job and do it now!" Even as she said those words, the lead bodyguard began pulling her boss back through the room towards the express elevator that would take them directly to an underground air-pad and a heavily armored VTOL contained within.

"Why aren't we taking the stairs," one of the nearby aura using bodyguards called out as he covered their retreat with his massive armored body.

"I'm getting reports that the emergency stairwells are being attacked by a pair of B ranked Huntresses with martial arts skills and high agility Semblances," the bodyguard leader replied with a grim look on her face. We're being pincered and we're running out of room, but the guards stationed in the underground claim that no one's managed to infiltrate the air-pad."

With a nod of understanding the squad leader abruptly turned to press the elevator door's combination and open the elevator's foot thick solid steel doors.

---

As another dozen or so bullets slammed into Jaune's fully armored arms and legs, he suddenly found himself with less than a minute of his aura remaining and fifty-four floors between him and his extraction point. On the bright side, it looked like these bodyguards were finally taking his attack seriously enough that they were retreating, on the other hand... Shit...

"Screeeeeeee!"

One of the aura using bodyguards was suddenly sprinting directly at Jaune through the green smoke while releasing a noise so loud and high pitched it was damaging his eardrums right through the protections that his aura armor provided. Jaune flinched, then he almost fell to a knee and then he was bodily tackled by the approaching bodyguard, and the man was trying to shove a pair of aura covered daggers into his guts. While the aura armor could and did manage to stop the thrust of the man's daggers, the toll that Jaune's Semblance took on his aura levels almost immediately tripled and the time that he could continue maintaining his armor dropped considerably.

We'll... Damn... It was time to go...

Jaune allowed the attacking bodyguard to force him across the room towards the shattered windows at which point the man proved that he was committed to his duty by pushing them both directly into open air. Then, even as the two of them began plummeting towards the ground below, Jaune grabbed the man around the shoulders, braced his feet against his waist, and then kicked off as hard as he could. After taking a look at the ground below them, Jaune had realized that he needed to use the attacking man as a counterweight so that he could aim his body in the desired direction.

As the attacking aura user's body careened into and then through a window back into the corporate building, Jaune found himself soaring away from the building and directly towards a large decorative pool of water that flanked the building's front courtyard. Even as he dropped towards this rather shallow pool of water, Jaune allowed his reactive armor to moved back into their bands because he needed to conserve his aura reserves. He only had two percent of his aura remaining and he was going to need it when he finally hit that water.

Splash! Crack!

Ouch... Judging by the simulated pain being introduced into the meat of his calf muscles, Jaune probably had a broken leg or maybe even two... Apparently, the pool hadn't been deep enough to slow his descent and he hadn't had enough aura remaining to completely absorb his body's impact with the stone at the bottom. Still... He was back on the ground and he was jerkily swimming across the bottom of the pool towards the extraction area... Soon enough, he was hobbling into the back of a nondescript SUV, laying down in the back, and letting the getaway driver do his thing.

"You are now leaving the simulation area, you are now desynchronizing," The computer that governed the simulator informed Jaune in a robotic voice.

With a jerk, Jaune suddenly opened his eyes to find himself back in the lab. After allowing a few seconds to pass where he allowed his sensory confusion to ebb away, he pulled off the VR helmet and turned towards a nearby computer screen to see how the rest of his operation panned out... Any minute now...

"You were forced to retreat. You failed your mission," a smooth but masculine voice called out from almost directly behind Jaune's seat.

"I was merely funnelling the target to where I needed her to be," Jaune idly responded, before his body suddenly tightened up and he almost broke his neck turning around.

The General James Ironwood, five star, full regalia, was standing just a few feet behind Jaune, where he'd apparently been observing his operation through the computer monitor. Due mostly to how the man's interest suddenly returned back to the operation taking place on the monitor, Jaune started to suspect that the thirty something year old military man was the reason why his mission had suddenly become so annoyingly complex...

When the General's attention continued to remain fixated on the computer screen, Jaune decided that he could do the same. Back on the screen, the bolthole elevator's doors were closing around both the bodyguard team and their charge and beginning to descend down towards the underground air-pad.

"What's the most effective way to immediately destroy fully aura armored Huntsmen and Huntresses," Jaune asked in a quiet voice while they watched the computer monitor.

"Burn them more than their aura can shield or... crush them," Ironwood haltingly responded as a new awareness started growing in his tone.

And that's when it happened...

A series of very powerful shaped explosives suddenly detonated both in the penthouse elevator control room and the ground level maintenance access to the elevator. Around the time the elevator containing Jaune's target and her bodyguards dropped to the twentieth floor, a concussive wave of enormously intense air pressure met both the top and the bottom of the elevator chassis, flattening the solid steel box like a pancake. Not even a second later, a wave of unbelievably intense flames filled the entire elevator shaft to incinerate anything that remained. The elevator was both crushed and then vaporized at almost exactly the same time...

Both the target and her bodyguards were very, very, very dead...

For several moments, both Jaune and Ironwood were completely still as they watched the rest of Jaune's team quietly leave the mission area. Then Jaune pulled himself out of the Rig's haptic seating and turned to face Dr. Polendina's patron. He'd never met the General before, and if he'd known the man was coming, he'd have liked to have been wearing his helmet and gear.

"So you're Dr. Polendina's new research assistant... I must say... That was a very... thorough way of accomplishing the mission..."

With no real way of responding to Ironwood's implied question without sounding childish, and Pietro out picking up some new tech gear, Jaune merely nodded his head respectfully and waited for the General to say his piece. So far as he was aware, there wasn't a kind or classy way to murder someone, so he'd focused his attention on getting the job done without suffering any losses...

"As I'm sure you already know, I'm the one who made your simulation more difficult just now, but you're not actually the reason why I'm here today," Ironwood finally explained in a calm and indifferent tone. "I merely dropped by to check up on our dear Penny, and then I drifted over when your training caught my interest."

After walking over to the computer monitor, Ironwood stared down at a playback of the reactive armor being used with a level of curiosity that bordered on envy or even avarice. Then he turned back towards the boy and stared at him for several moments in a row. "The good Doctor has explained to me that it's your Semblance that allows you to use the nanobots..."

"Yes sir," Jaune immediately admitted. "It's quite a bit harder than it looks, but essentially I fuel them with aura and direct them with my will."

"Amazing... Simply amazing," Ironwood breathed out while nodding his head both slowly and repeatedly. I have a proposition for you... How would you like to test out how combat effective that armor really is?... I have an operation coming up that will require several teenaged boys and girls, and I like the idea of bringing you on board. I've already seen for myself that you're both thoughtful and meticulous."

"Sir..." Jaune slowly hedged as he drew a hand back through his newly black dyed hair. "For reasons that I'd rather not explain, it's not safe for me to walk around in the general public."

"Yes... You're in hiding from the rest of the Arc family, I know, and I understand your reservations," Ironwood immediately replied. "Let me make one thing very clear to you though... The only reason that you're still free and not locked up in a tower dungeon inside of Arc Castle is because Polendina made me agree to help you. I misdirected the Arc forces away from these labs and I obscured your features from the facial recognition software used in the seeker-bots that the Arc family requisitioned from among their military contributions. Without my ongoing help and goodwill, you wouldn't have lasted a month without having to run to the ends of the Atlesian tundra. Now... I'm not saying that I'll sell you out if you don't help me... but I might be less inclined to be helpful to you in the future..."

"I... I see... " Jaune breathed out as he straightened even further and squared up with the General. "What is this operation? How can I help?"

General James Ironwood grinned as the Arc family's youngest proved to be just as sharp as Polendina always said he was... "Well it's like this Jaune... The heiress of the SDC, a young Lady by the name of Weiss Schnee, will soon be performing in a series of concerts all around Atlas..."

---

1 Year Later, on an Airship crossing the ocean between Atlas and Vale (Currently under attack by a group of raiders)...

"Hey kid stop!" The gun waving raider angrily called out as she dashed after the black haired teenager that she'd just seen running passed an intersection of hallways.

Then she was abruptly knocked unconscious from behind by a length of metal railing swung almost lazily by a short and petite platinum white haired woman.

After quickly knocking out five similarly weak, gun toting raiders as they moved through the airship towards its bridge, Jaune was beginning to wonder if any of these pirates were even worth worrying about from an offensive standpoint. At this point, he and Weiss weren't sticking to the access tunnels anymore, but were moving quietly as they jogged throughout the various hallways. In less than thirty seconds they were going to arrive at their destination and confront this Raider leader, The Hound...

Booooom!

A thick gust of smoky black fumes, blew around the corner at the end of the hallway, causing both Jaune and Weiss to drop to a crawl.

"This smoke is coming from the Bridge," Weiss urged as she wiggled forward beneath the acrid cloud. "What are those cretins thinking?! We're all going down if they've damaged the ship's controls!"

The radio clipped to the shoulder strap of Jaune's machine gun suddenly started squawking, as several raiders asked just what in the hell was going on. The response that they received from their leader on the Bridge, caused chills to run up Jaune's spine. The raiders' mission was a failure. The airship controls were now in pieces due to a blasting charge mishap. The airship was cruising along just fine by itself for now, but that would only last for another thirty minutes, at which point the Captain of the ship was supposed to manually fly it through Vale's coastline mountain range. The raiders were all being ordered to gather at the forward deck, where they would steal all of the airship's lifeboats.

By the time he turned to face Weiss, Jaune's face was a mask of tightly controlled outrage. "Okay. We're done conserving energy. We need to protect those lifeboats at all costs. When the time comes, I work best as a close quarters tank. Can you pull off long distance?" Even as he asked that question, Jaune started hauling ass towards the forward deck.

"I can create glyphs from a distance, but at the moment they only cause status effects like null gravity, double gravity, slow, stick, launchpad, bind, shield, vacuum and flip," Weiss huffed out as she followed her companion down the hall. "The dust in my my weapon allows me to do more, but... Never mind. We don't have time to go to my cabin. I'll focus my efforts on slowing and tripping up your enemies."

Nodding his head as they turned a corner, Jaune brutally closelined the neck of a surprised raider, punched a second one down half a flight of stairs and then emptied a machine gun clip into the armored side of a third further down the hallway. Now that they were just a single hallway away from the forward deck of the airship, Jaune's wrist and ankle bands were shrinking to just three quarters their original size and his body was beginning to turn a dull black color. It felt... ticklish. Jaune wasn't a huge fan of feeling the nanobots directly against his skin. While he knew that the feeling was only in his imagination, when he didn't wear his foundation suit, he felt like his skin was crawling with tiny little bugs. While the imagery was technically accurate, there was no way he'd be able to feel it given that the nanobots were microscopic in size. Shaking off his poorly timed heebie jeebies, he focused his attention back on the task at hand.

In passing, Weiss kicked the armored raider directly in the chin, just to make sure that he stayed down. Then she was behind her companion again, giving the black suit that was growing along his exposed skin a thoughtful look.

With twenty-five percent of his aura armor now in place, Jaune kicked the metal door leading to the forward deck clear off of its hinges, grabbed ahold of its edges even as it flew through the air and dashed directly towards the main body of the raiders. As the ten person strong group of bandana wearing people turned in his direction and raised their weapons, he leapt towards them and held the door up like a shield. Only one or two dust rounds managed to impact against the door before Jaune slammed into the crowd of raiders and smashed them to the ground like bowling pins. Before his momentum could come to an end, he rolled forward off of the pile of bodies, threw the door like a Frisbee at some nearby raiders and then launched himself at a distant man that was trying to aim a gun on him.

He needn't have bothered...

All of the sudden, as if physical reality was malfunctioning, the distant man's body lifted up off of the ground, and he started flailing around in the air. The man wasn't bound by gravity anymore as there was an intricately designed anti-gravity glyph beneath his feet. Weiss was clearly doing her part, which meant that the attackers outside of Jaune's immediate reach were about to suffer all manner of hijinks. In return, he had to make sure that he remained the highly visible center of attention. It was time to pour on the speed.

Partially concealed behind one of the airship's lifeboats, Weiss was focusing on creating chaos with her Semblance. In order to be as efficient as possible, she was aiming most of her attention at her companion's rear and at the raiders that were keeping at a distance. Then, all of the sudden, that prospect became quite a bit more difficult, as her black suited companion's speed more than tripled, and he became a blur of unrestrained movement. Shredded leather flew from the boy's dress shoes to litter the deck and he splintered the wood underneath his feet. He bounced back and forth from one raider to the next, leaving behind broken legs, ankles and feet whenever he couldn't just render his opponents unconscious. He was also spraying dust rounds in his wake that collided with upraised weapons, hands and feet.

More than once, Weiss was forced to use her Semblance to give the boy a platform to bounce off of, when he lost purchase and slid across the deck. No matter how you looked at it, the boy was barely in control of the power that he was using. It didn't seem to matter. His efforts were still devastatingly effective. Not one of the raiders could land a hit on him, and trying to aim their guns was a waste of effort. Less than twenty seconds later, the Stage Hand threw the last of the low ranked raiders to the deck.

"Very impressive!"

A gigantic man in dark red armor, wearing a red bandana, suddenly stepped out of the airship's interior. In his wake, were three women and a man, all of whom were holding onto a child sized hostage.

While slowly turning in place, Jaune manipulated a featureless black mask to grow over the upper portion of his face. He also started preparing to use his armor at a hundred percent. He wasn't going to have a lot of time at full strength, because his aura capacity was only at about seventy percent.

"If you take even one step towards us with that freaky Semblance of yours, we're going to cut open these children's necks," the leader growled out menacingly. "I don't know what kind of Semblance allows someone to move like you do, but you won't be fast enough to save all four of them."

After stretching his neck and shoulders as if he was warming up for a workout, Jaune aimed a look of savage brutality at the raider leader. He wasn't going to get a second chance at making the kind of impression that he needed. "You're right," he finally called out in a confident tone of voice. "I won't make it to all four of the hostages, but you'll still find yourself down three out of four lieutenants."

"You have an extremely unrealistic amount of self-confidence," the raider leader drawled, in an amused sounding voice.

"No, no I don't," Jaune immediately replied, with an amused smile of his own. "I have a completely reasonable amount of confidence when taking my Semblance into consideration. After all, My Semblance isn't even a speed or strength type at all. I'm a rare type of emitter that can warp physical reality to my needs."

"Is that so," the leader mused with his arms crossed over his chest. "And why oh why should mere physical reality scare me so much?"

"If you don't release those hostages and leave a lifeboat for the passengers to use, I'll more than quadruple the weight on both the lifeboats while you're using them." With his hands splayed out at his sides, Jaune shrugged as if to say, "it just can't be helped."

For about fifteen whole seconds, the raider leader enjoyed some really heartfelt laughter, shaking his head with his eyes closed and everything. "No. No way," he finally barked out, while shaking his head and rolling his eyes. "I'm not dumb. I saw the way you just moved! As impressive as you are, you're a strength and speed Semblance without a doubt. You're no emitter..."

"I'll prove it to you then," Jaune called out, as he raised his right hand palm out. "I'll subject you to two times gravity for just a few moments. It won't hurt you, but it'll prove my point."

"Heh, hehe, fine. This I've gotta see," the leader drawled out in a purposefully unhinged tone of voice. "Just keep in mind that the kiddies will sport brand new ventilation holes in their necks if you hurt me."

With his palm facing outwards as if he was pushing on something, Jaune pointed his arm at the leader and waited. If Weiss didn't come through for him soon, he was going to be completely discredited in the eyes of the raiders, and the situation was going to get... tragic.

All of the sudden, as if from nowhere, a large white glyph appeared above the raider leader, and he staggered into a crouch. He didn't fall to his knees, but he did grunt in effort as he strained under the weight of his armor.

"The lifeboats on this airship are only given enough upward thrust to reach a suitable piece of land in a controlled descent," Jaune explained in a casual tone. "If you don't free those children and leave one of the boats, I'll make your trip to the ocean floor both quick and lethal."

"The answer's obvious then," the leader spat out, as the extra gravity piled on his body suddenly disappeared. "I'll take both boats and spread out the hostages."

"I'll still send your lifeboats to the ocean if you do that" Jaune replied, with a small, sad, shake of his head. "If you leave this airship on both of those lifeboats, I'll have nothing to lose, because I'll be going down with the ship. Killing those children will be a less than pleasant task for me to have to accomplish in my final moments, but I know where I stand when it comes to moral mathematics. Raiders like you are monsters. You kill innocent people for a living. Drowning those children will save hundreds and hundreds of people in the long run." Jaune forced himself to believe every single word that he said, so that true conviction would shine from within his eyes. He poured his focus into the idea of bringing a monstrous form of justice down on these raiders.

"Ye... You're serious aren't you," the leader finally spluttered out, completely bewildered. "You're as much a monster as we are..."

Taking a step towards the closest lifeboat, Jaune rotated his arm in an overlarge windmill motion as if he was warming up for a feat of strength. "Well, I suppose I could always just destroy both boats and we could all go down together. We all know I have the strength to make those arrangements."

"No! Don't," the leader called out. "We'll do exactly as you say, but only if you can assure us of one thing! How do we know you won't send us to the sea after we do as you say?"

"It's simple really," Jaune replied in a cold and brutal tone of voice. You are Taylor Teller, also known as The Hound, and you're a well-known C ranked Huntsman from Atlas. Today, for the very first time, you're going to leave witnesses behind at one of your raids. You've always allowed the White Fang to take the blame for your raids, but this time you won't be able to. After today, your money, resources, home base and good name will immediately be stripped from you, and your very well-known face will be posted on wanted posters all around the world. You see Taylor. I don't have to kill you... You're already dead."

With a casualness that spooked all of the raiders, claws suddenly erupted from the end of Jaune's fingers, and he gouged deep furrows into the hull of one of the lifeboats. "Are you sure you don't want to go down with the ship, Taylor? It might be easier than the life you're going to live from this point forward..."

"No! No... we'll go. Just, for Oum's sake, stay where you are." The raiders were all completely freaked out, as they were holding the children to their chests las if they were comfort blankets. They edged sideways across the deck to keep Jaune in front of them and they scrambled into the distant lifeboat as if the hounds of Hell were after them. At the very last second, just as the lifeboat edged off of the deck, the four hostages were thrown out the door. Jaune raised an open palm towards them and a white anti-gravity Glyph caught the children to settle them onto the deck.

After the raiders were gone, Jaune immediately let his armor return to its band form and then moved to check on the children. Then he stopped in place and resisted the urge to slap himself. The children were recoiling away from him as if he was a particularly lethal form of Grimm. He'd scared the living hell out of them. Well... Damn. Soon enough, Weiss emerged from behind the remaining lifeboat, to kneel next to the traumatized children and fuss over them properly. Jaune made himself busy with a nearby coil of safety rope. It was a tricky bit of maneuvering, but he managed to thoroughly truss up all fourteen of the newly deserted henchmen and stow them just inside of the Forward deck's entry door. He also kept his eyes on the mountains growing in the distance. He and Weiss were going to need to get to work like ASAP.

"Weiss," Jaune finally called out, when the children were successfully calmed down and relocated into the remaining lifeboat. "Please go and collect the women and children from the Dining Hall. The one remaining lifeboat will only be able to carry a little less than two thirds of this ship's current passengers. Leave all of the crew and the male passengers tied up for now. We need to keep them from growing ambitious."

Turning away from the children, Weiss gave her black haired companion a completely appalled look. Then the expression slowly eased away and a look of confusion took its place. "What will you be doing while I'm doing all of that?"

"I'll be checking out the Bridge," Jaune sighed out, in a resigned tone of voice. "Through a mixture of my Semblance and the armor that I'm wearing; I might be able to interact with the ship's controls... kind of. It's not going to be a smooth ride, like, at all.

"What are our chances," Weiss asked, as the two of them entered the ship proper and moved towards the central hallway.

"My chances," Jaune immediately corrected. "Not very good... Thankfully, Weiss, you fall squarely under the women and children demographic. "You're getting on that lifeboat."

"You're underestimating me again," Weiss immediately accused, poking the boy on the chest for good measure. "I'm a trainee Huntress heading to Beacon Academy. I have a landing strategy just like everyone else."

"I don't have a landing strategy and neither did Taylor Teller the C ranked raider," Jaune pointed out in a completely candid voice. "I'm not underestimating you Weiss. I'm extremely impressed by your abilities. I believe you when you say that you'd survive free fall. That doesn't change the fact that you'd freeze to death on top of those mountains. There's also the fact that the remaining lifeboat is going to be landing on the coast, far away from civilization. I want you to grab Myrtenmaster and protect the passengers from the Grimm. It'll also be up to you to pick which men should join you, because there won't be room for even a quarter of them. It's going to suck, but you're going to need to prioritize young fathers and then the able bodied. Take the people that look like they can defend themselves. I have no idea how long it'll take for rescue to arrive."

After opening and shutting her mouth half a dozen times, Weiss harrumphed loudly and crossed her arms under her chest. She really did need to protect the passengers and they both knew it.

"Good luck Weiss," Jaune breathed out as he passed the girl and began moving down the hallway. He only had a little over fifteen minutes left to get himself situated on the Bridge.

"John, wait..."

Stopping dead in his tracks, Jaune turned to look over his shoulder with shock clearly written across his face. Even back when the two of them had spent a lot of time together setting up her various concerts, she'd never once owned up to remembering his name. She'd called him Stage Hand over and over again, as if bossing him around gave her some kind of twisted satisfaction. If you'd put a gun to his head and asked him to tell the absolute truth, Jaune would've said that Weiss Schnee would never say his name. The fact that she was using his name now, with whatever tenuous trust they'd once had in ruins, had to be a sign of the apocalypse. Long story short, Jaune found himself staring back at Weiss, open mouthed.

With eyes that were drifting to stage left as if she couldn't quite look Jaune in the face, Weiss drew in a deep breath. "You are the most able bodied of all the men on this ship. If you don't think you'll survive this flight through the mountains, then why don't you come with me and help protect the passengers."

In the moments that followed Weiss's super adorable attempt to save his life, Jaune forced himself to think about the men that were about to be left behind in the Dining Hall. He was attempting to follow a plan of sorts, and he didn't need the Heiress shaking his resolve like this. "I appreciate the sentiment Weiss," he began, in a carefully controlled tone of voice. "But there are compelling reasons why I need to try piloting the airship. The first reason is obvious. I don't want to desert the passengers that we'd otherwise be forced to leave behind. The second reason is less obvious but equally important. If I manage to get the ship through the mountains, I'll be able to communicate the lifeboat's landing coordinates to the military. Those coordinates mean the difference between you spending a day waiting for pickup and having to make your way back to civilization on foot."

For the second time in just as many minutes, Weiss was stuck still, opening and shutting her mouth like a goldfish. Then, when she snapped out of her thoughtful silence, she swiveled around to look away from him. "Fine. Do what you must. Know this though. I hate roughing it in the wilderness more than anything. I'll be very upset if you don't make it through those mountains..."

It was a good thing that Weiss was looking away from him, because Jaune couldn't quite stop a wide and goofy smile from slipping onto his face. The heiress was a ghost from his past that had caused him quite a few lingering regrets. Despite the less than perfect circumstances, it was nice that he was being given a chance to make some form of amends. After nodding that he'd be okay, Jaune finally cued in that Weiss was still looking away from him. He'd have to use his words. "I'll be as safe as possible, Weiss. Please return the favor by being extremely cautious down there in the wild. From what I recall, the coastline is teeming with bug type Grimm like Blind Worms, Centinels and Lancers. If I were you I'd fill the lifeboat with every scrap of the food that this ship is carrying and then I'd use it as a base of operations. I don't have to tell you that keeping up everyone's moral is essential, so I suggest you make use of that wonderful singing voice of yours."

After turning back at Jaune's sudden outpouring of advice, and then turning just a little pink at his praise, Weiss nodded her head in quiet understanding. The Grimm can sense human despair for miles. She really would need to keep up the civilian's morale.

"Oh and one more thing," Jaune added, while dashing back to drop a hand on Weiss's shoulder. "This is important Weiss. Avoid going anywhere near the ocean, even if you're running low on food. I've read reports that there's a massive Sea Feilong prowling around the area. I'd rather you be overly cautious and inconvenienced than unlucky and dead."

"Now you're just mothering me," Weiss grumbled as she very slowly removed the boy's hand from atop her shoulder.

"I'm brothering you actually," Jaune replied in a casual voice. "Force of long habit. I have eight sisters after all." Even as he shared that interesting little factoid, Jaune backpedaled down the hall and then dashed through a bulkhead door heading towards his cabin. If he was going to operate the controls of an airship this massive, he was going to need his helmet's HUD to understand what the Hell he was looking at.

---

By the time the mountains looked more like a wall of rock growing outside of the Bridge windows, Jaune knew for sure that he was about to lose a few years of his life to anxiety. Controlling the airship was like trying to play a first person shooter video game while using a full sized piano as a controller... The right buttons were all there, but there were too damned many of them and they were too far apart.

Jaune was currently standing in front of a burnt out and melted control panel, with his hand pressed down into the panel near the burnt out wires within. The bands around his wrists that comprised his reactive armor were all but gone, and in their place was a rubbery substance. This substance felt solid enough as it dropped away from his hands, but it became softer as its tendrils melted down into the destroyed control bank. Through these tendrils, Jaune's nanobots were connected to the airship's different flight systems and they were also sending signals directly to his helmet. By manipulating the nanobots with his aura, Jaune would be able to operate the different systems of the ship, but the nanobots weren't capable of relaying what they were currently doing directly into his brain. This would normally be a huge problem, and it was the reason why his HUD helmet was the real hero in this situation. Even if Jaune could affect the airship's flight systems, he wouldn't have known what effect his efforts were having if not for the different visual readouts that were currently being displayed on his HUD.

Long story short, hypothetically, Jaune could steer the ship, and the monitor lens on the inside of his helmet would display what he was doing...

Through trial and error, Jaune had just finished ironing out what each system does, as well as how he can operate it with the nanobots. That wasn't to say that he could pilot the ship any better than an ape trying to drive a car. Well... Maybe a little better. By stretching his brain to its very limits, Jaune was tenuously under control of the twelve VTOL thrusters rimming the entire ship, and the two large plasma cannons placed above and below the airship's midpoint. As per the ship's original programming, the flight control system automatically levels its flight path at a predetermined elevation, but if need be, Jaune could also deactivate this safeguard and force the ship to both pitch and roll. For the purposes of passenger comfort, this particular airship had only ever performed extremely gentle yaw style turns with its body almost completely flat to the ground. Jaune was hopeful that he'd be able to do the same today, but realistically speaking... this was about to suck...

Superimposed over Jaune's right eye on the HUD of his helmet was a Primary flight display, a Direction Finder, an Altitude Indicator, a System Information Display, and a Radar Display. Between these digital displays and the three hundred and sixty-degree view that Jaune had from the ship's elevated Bridge, he hoped to be able to see where the Hell he was going. Of course, he'd have asked the Captain to just give him directions through the mountains, but the woman had taken a chunk of debris to the head during the destruction of the Bridge and was unconscious as a result. Four other crewmen were manning some of the rear machine gun emplacements that can be operated manually. They had no idea how to steer the ship even if it was fully functional, so they were preparing to do what they were capable of doing. Off to Jaune's side, sitting in the copilot chair, was a female engineer by the name of Payla. Payla was the current recipient of two broken wrists, courtesy of their mutual friends the raiders. While her injuries rendered her useless when it came to helping out in a physical way, Jaune was quite happy to have a second pair of eyes up here in the Bridge. So far, she hadn't said much of anything to him, which made sense in a morbid kind of way. Jaune was getting the impression that the woman didn't expect to be alive in less than five minutes.

When the airship finally reached Vale's coastline, the System Information Display in Jaune's helmet, warned him that the airship's sole remaining lifeboat was taking off for seemingly no reason. Jaune just smiled in relief. He was pretty sure that he'd given Weiss the harder job out of the two of them. Picking and choosing who would get to leave a doomed airship using triage-esque judgments couldn't have been a pleasant task. Jaune was extremely grateful that the heiress was so strong willed and capable. Yeah... As bizarre as it sounds, he'd gotten pretty lucky... Now all he needed to do was complete his side of the bargain and get this tub between those peaks.

At first, Jaune had wondered why he couldn't just climb the airship high above the mountains so that all of the finicky navigation wasn't even necessary. Then, when he actually took a look at the displays in his helmet, he saw that the airship's thrusters had a max height envelope well below the mountain peaks. According to the System Information Display, this height envelope was mostly due to the thruster's tendency to freeze solid and then explode. As versatile as Dust was, it was also a very volatile form of fuel, and it didn't react well to subzero temperatures.

After giving the idea a little more thought, there was a second reason why climbing the airship above the mountains was a bad idea. Giant Nevermores (humongous bird Grimm) prowled the sky at those elevations, and they didn't take kindly to intruders. While Jaune did have control over the airship's two largest turret cannons, he wasn't going to lie to himself about being some kind of expert marksman. He was on a fast moving object from which he'd be forced to aim at another fast moving object. In order for him to actually hit a Legendary sized flying Grimm moving at the speeds that they move, the damned thing would have to be right on top of them.

Long story short, Jaune was about to get some real time piloting experience. Ironically, this was exactly the kind of stuff that he'd always craved when he was being held captive, and yet he resented having it forced on him with no warning whatsoever.

"Still beats the safety of the castle," Jaune whispered to himself in a determined sounding voice. It was game time. He could do this!

Using a mixture of the altitude and radar display, Jaune plotted an open looking course as if he was piloting a boat through hundreds of little islands. The problem was that what he saw with his naked eye only loosely coincided with the radar view, and he found himself performing hundreds of tiny micro-adjustments as soon as he entered the range. Almost immediately, a cold sweat formed on Jaune's brow as his readouts showed him the effects of wind and air pressure on the hull of the airship. He was bouncing and bobbing all around his plotted course and there didn't seem to be much that he could do about it. Then, he saw on the radar that he was flying towards a tightly compacted cluster of different mountain peaks, and he knew for sure that he was straying off of the intended path. Damn... Leaving the intended path meant danger...

Leaving the intended path meant the Grimm...

With a small flicker of his aura, Jaune cued up a small display on his right eye that showed where the two cannons were currently aiming. He wasn't optimistic enough to think that he wasn't going to need the weapons. While he was doing his very best to keep his emotions under control, there were several men sitting around in the Dining Hall that were alternatively scared stiff or angry as all hell that they'd been left behind. Then there was the crew. They were trying their best, but they were freaking out almost as much as the passengers. The problem was that all five members of the crew knew exactly how badly the ship's systems had been damaged, and they didn't have any reason to believe that Jaune could salvage the situation. What this meant for Jaune was that every single Grimm between him and his goal was going to sense the negativity pouring off the ship and know exactly where they were.

After easing the ship into a slow yaw forty degrees to Starboard in order to slip between two jagged peaks, Jaune allowed his eyes to track over to Payla's pain damped face. He was, in fact, able to control the ship, and she was witnessing that fact with her very own eyes. Now was about the time he needed her to snap out of her pain and fear, and actually take part in their survival. With that in mind, Jaune drew in a deep breath and tried to pour on the charm. "Ahem. Payla right? Thank you for agreeing to join me up here, even though you have reservations about my abilities. As you can see, I am indeed capable of controlling the airship. My biggest problem right now is that I'm tracking a metric ton of different systems all at same time. Eventually, I'm all but certain to miss something that a more experienced pilot would catch. Can you keep an eye on our flight path for any obstacles or Grimm that the system doesn't alert me to?"

"Yes... Sir. Keeping an eye out... Sir." The tone of Payla's voice was strained by discomfort and any respect that she was giving him was purely out of long habit, but it was still a better response than Jaune had expected. He wasn't her captain, and he was sure she hated the idea of some untrained kid being the master of her destiny. It was good enough. Hopefully, he would earn more respect from her as time went by.

For the next five minutes, Jaune poured his entire focus into weaving his way through the mountain range with as much finesse as he could... Which of course meant not much. Over and over again, he found himself having to turn around to attempt an alternate route, and the effort left his legs trembling with unreleased tension. Every couple of minutes, rapid gunfire could be heard from the stern, where the four gunners were taking down the random eagle or owl Grimm that caught on to their presence. So far they hadn't encountered anything the machine guns couldn't handle, so Jaune had left the two larger cannons cycling through a full power standby.

"Up ahead, there's a way through those three peaks, but you'll have to pull off a forty-five degree turn after passing the first two with no loss of speed or altitude."

Those words were the first time Payla had spoken up to offer any advice, causing Jaune to gasp in surprise and bodily twitch in response. Truth be told, he'd forgotten that the woman was even sitting there, but apparently she just hadn't had anything to offer. The woman's advice was good though, and well timed. Jaune had been erring on the side of caution until now, but he couldn't afford to make a hundred more U turns with a finite amount of fuel.

With an indrawn breath and a slow nod of his head, Jaune eased the ship into a wide approach that would hopefully see him making as shallow a turn as possible between the peaks. As they neared the rocky slopes and the blizzards blanketing their sides, the ship rattled and bucked and Jaune's teeth clenched in response. As fast as the airship was moving, the slopes felt like a mouth that was closing around them on both sides. Then, it was time to turn the ship, and Jaune needed to do so with enthusiasm. Over the next five seconds, he strengthened the power to all of the Forward Port side thrusters, aiming them out at a seventy-degree angle so that they'd push the forward deck both up and in the starboard direction. The entire ship creaked as it was subjected to torque far beyond the ordinary, but it held and didn't lose any altitude during the turn. It was working. They were doing it.

That's when all Hell broke loose.

The heat and dust energy being ejected from the Port side thrusters was at approximately seven-hundred degrees Celsius, and when the airship turned away from the third mountain's peak it was with less than a hundred feet of clearance. The heat and reactive dust energy being released from the thrusters slammed into the mountainside, where it rapidly melted an enormous swath of ice and compacted snow. Even as Jaune pulled the airship through the rest of the turn and exited the other side of the three Mountains, he left behind an avalanche the size of the Mistral Grand Arena. A billowing cloud of ice particles erupted into the air between the three mountain peaks, where it swirled around and slammed into the landscape below. From within the depths of this sudden maelstrom, a thick mass of black and white figures stirred. Over the next half a minute, over a hundred different sets of wings took to the sky to pursue the source of the disturbance.

"John," one of the Stern gunners suddenly called through the radio in a nearly panicked voice. "You need to get this airship hauling ass like now! That avalanche woke up the entire neighborhood! We're about to be swamped with the local wildlife and some of them are huge!"

Well... Damn. Looking through his cannon's targeting reticle, Jaune saw exactly what his gunner was talking about, and he felt goosebumps growing along the exposed flesh of his neck. There were at least a hundred of the normal bird and owl Grimm flying in their direction, but that wasn't the worst of it. There were also about half a dozen Gryphon Grimm within that mass. Gryphons are a B rank threat at least because they are resistant to most handheld ballistic weapons. If anything was going to take these more powerful Grimm down, it was going to be the airship's two plasma cannons or it was going to be an aura bolstered sword stroke. At the moment, Jaune didn't know if he was up to accomplishing either of those things. On the other hand, if he didn't at least try to defend them, they were all going to be torn to teeny tiny little pieces.

Widening the target reticle until it dominated his entire right eye, Jaune called out to his copilot in as calm a voice as he was currently capable of making. "My apologies Payla, but if you could call out some very precise navigational directions for me, I'm going to follow them as closely as I can. My primary focus is about to be centered on the cannons, so I'm putting my faith in your good judgment. Are you up to this?"

Aye, aye sir, I can handle this Sir," Payla called out in an eerily manic tone of voice. "Turn thirty degrees to Port in five seconds and then forty degrees to starboard on my mark."

"Thity degrees to Port, four, three, two, one, now," Jaune called out, before blindly following his copilot's orders. Even as a sharp left turn forced Jaune to brace his feet against the Captain's chair, he managed to reroute the power from the ship's fire dust heating system to flow directly into the cannons instead. They were all about to get a little cold, but fire dust was what the cannons used for ammo, and he had no idea if they were going to have enough. What he did know for sure was that they were about to go through a lot of the stuff...

"Forty degrees starboard in two!" All of the sudden, Payla sounded as if she was having the time of her life. It seemed that she was finally getting to act out her fantasy of being the Captain.

"Forty degrees to Starboard, aye," Jaune called back, feeding the woman's enthusiasm as much as possible. Then, two seconds later, he made the changes on the flight system, even as he aimed the guns at the thick mass of approaching Grimm. He needed to target the gryphon's first, before he could even spare the rest of the Grimm a thought. While the rest of the flying Grimm were indeed a threat, they could and were being shot out of the air using normal machine gun fire. That fact alone made them a secondary concern and far beneath his notice. After magnifying his field of vision using the cannon's camera system, Jaune zeroed in on two Gryphon Grimm that were flying together in a tight formation at the front of the mass. The Grimm were four meters tall, part cat, part horse, part bird, and all feral brutality. Jaune didn't hesitate. With a mental pull of an electric trigger, he launched a massive ribbon of light and plasma at the oncoming Grimm, vaporizing the two leading Gryphons and about thirty lesser owls and eagles. Then, without even getting to celebrate his victory, he was turning the ship forty-five degrees to Starboard following a loud command from Payla.

While at first the gunners were celebrating the cannons effectiveness, they soon lapsed back into a horrified silence. The cannon blast had cut through the amassed Grimm like butter and slammed into a distant mountain. The reason the gunners stopped celebrating was because once again the snow and ice resting on its peak crashed to the slopes below, waking up yet another massive swarm of dormant Grimm. With every disturbance that they made on the mountains surrounding them, the number of enemies that they were facing grew in number.

"I see it," Jaune responded, when several different voices screamed out for him to avoid hitting the mountains with cannon fire. He was going to have to be very careful about how he aimed his shots in order to send the energy flying up into the sky instead of down into the snow covered mountains. This was getting harder by the second and that was without having to steer the ship.

"Ninety degrees hard to Starboard," Payla suddenly called out in a nearly frantic voice. A mountain peak that had been concealed inside of a bank of clouds was suddenly emerging into view like a thrusting spear.

Reacting immediately, Jaune deactivated the airship's auto leveling and altitude stabilizing functions so that he could both pull up and tilt the airship onto its Starboard side. The entire world instantly twisted on its axis and Jaune was left hanging off of the control bank by his hands as they banked through the air. That didn't matter. It was working. They were climbing sideways away from the newest obstacle. A few seconds later, an audible gulping sound exploded out of Payla's mouth, as the airship squeaked past the mountain summit with only a dozen or so meters to spare. The sound was all Jaune needed to hear to know that it was time to regain control of the ship. He doubled the strength of the thrusters on the Port side to level off the airship's body and then he peeled out of the tailspin by maxing out all of the thrusters on the forward deck. With that maneuver completed, he turned the ship's nose back down so that they could return to the ideal altitude, and he focused his attention back on the cannons. "Great job Payla! Good eyes and excellent navigation! Keep it up!"

"Aye, aye Sir," Payla responded in a deadly serious and professional tone of voice. "Thirty degrees Port side and then forty Starboard on my mark... Now!"

For the second time in less than two minutes, Jaune found himself both mentally manipulating the ship's thrusters to complete a very specific series of angular turns and eyeing the cannon's target reticle for a shot at the Grimm. Even as he felt the ship shifting and swerving beneath his newly planted feet, he aimed the lower deck cannon up and to the right and erased a massive swath of Grimm from existence. This time he only managed to destroy a single Gryphon as the other two within his sites managed to dodge aside. It was becoming increasingly difficult to aim at the Gryphon Grimm as they gained on the airship and used the nearby rock formations to hide from the cannons. They were getting closer and closer and a few of the bird types were even tagging the stern deck of the ship with some kind of wing feather projectiles.

"I need you to find me a shooting gallery Payla! I need a thin channel between several mountain peaks that I can use to bottleneck the Grimm." Even as he yelled those words, Jaune continued firing the bottom cannon up into the mass of Grimm as quickly as it was able to fire without overheating the system. Over and over, he sent white hot reactive particles up and through the host of Grimm like a scalpel through cheese. It wasn't enough.

A dozen heavy vibrations indicated the moment when the fastest Grimm started landing in the airship proper. So far, it was only the smaller Grimm and they were being torn apart by the machine gun emplacements, but they were focusing all of their attention on the left side gunner. Within just a quarter of a minute, the gun sticking out of the left side turret was rendered into a piece of scrap metal forcing a young female gunner to dive out of the emplacement and retreat back into the body of the airship. Less than half a minute later, the second and third machine guns were also destroyed, and the gunners were sent running for their lives. The airship only had one machine gun left in working order and the man that was controlling it was moving like a bat out of hell.

"Sir, eighty degrees to Starboard in three, two, one, now!" Climb at a rate of thrity degrees, open your damned eyes and adjust to fit." Payla pointed out the window where a jagged series of mountains were shaped to create an impossibly tight ravine. It was simultaneously exactly what Jaune had asked for and a suicidal gauntlet of deadly rocks.

"Shit, shit, shit, shiiit," Jaune chanted, as he pointed the lower cannon straight backwards and then focused his entire attention on threading the ship through the ravine. Even as he maxed the thrusters to push the ship twenty meters to the Port side with only a hundred meters to spare, he indiscriminately fired the lower cannon up into the gathering mass of bottlenecked Grimm. As dangerous as their current maneuver was, it was also working. With every blast from the cannon a thick mass of Grimm were vaporized and most of the pursuing Gryphon's ceased to exist.

The major problem with their current maneuver was that Jaune didn't have the kind of control necessary to delicately weave through all of these tightly packed cliffs. He swerved to the Starboard and then tried to climb back up to the Port side, but the ship was a little too slow in responding and a series of Starboard thrusters smashed into a rock face. With a terrifying metal grating noise that rattled everyone's teeth, the thrusters were sheared clean off of the ship to fall to the earth below. In an immediate response to the loss of thrusters, Jaune rerouted every ounce of fire dust that the ship contained to the starboard side and the three jets that were still intact. As a result, the ship just barely managed to level out again, but the power output to the rest of the ship, including the main cannons, was gone.

Jaune had blown it. He'd destroyed their best defense with his amateur attempt at flying. He didn't even have the time to regret his failure. There was still a job to do. He had to get the ship out of this ravine.

Slamming his mental will into the remaining Starboard thrusters, Jaune forced the ship to turn thirty degrees to the Port, and then he tilted the ship to the starboard as he let it slide through yet another unbelievably tight gap. Over and over again, he pushed the ship's remaining thrusters into the red, causing the System Information Display to become a mass of angrily flickering indicator lights. He was breaking the ship. He was tearing the flight system apart.

When the ship finally emerged from within the twisted line of mountain peaks, Payla started hooting and hollering like a banshee as she smashed her damaged hands onto the padding of her chair. "Sir! Sir! We're almost there! The mountains are clearing! That's the Vale forest boundary ahead!"

"Very good Payla," Jaune gasped as he leaned heavily against the control console. "Now, let's do right by the passengers we were forced to leave behind. The mountains aren't in the way anymore. We need to start sending the lifeboat coordinates to whoever's close enough to receive them. Make sure to tell anyone who's listening that we're in quite a bit of trouble ourselves."

After plotting a course for the airship to fly and then setting the computer to autopilot, Jaune pulled his nanobots back out of the control systems and then collapsed painfully to his knees. He gasped and trembled as his body demanded that he stop throwing away his aura. It was nearly completely spent at this point, and yet he didn't have the time to let it recuperate. There was still approximately fifty Grimm flying towards their crippled ship, and they only had the one remaining machine gun. He needed to get out to the Stern deck to help defend the ship, or they were all going to be killed. Pushing himself back up to his feet, Jaune walked over to a rack in the corner and pulled down his weapons. As per usual, he was using his saber and rifle-shield combo. At the very least, he was going to be fighting with what he knows best.

"Sir..." Payla looked like she wanted to argue against him going out to the deck. She didn't do it in the end, but she looked like she wanted to.

"You were great," Jaune assured Payla, patting the injured girl on the shoulder as he walked towards the remains of the Bridge door. "Listen... When the ship runs out of fuel, it'll settle down on a suitable stretch of land all by itself. Continue to reach out to whoever you can in the meantime. I'm not all that strong, but I do have some tricks. I'll buy us some time..."

Aye, aye Sir," Payla replied, offering a sharp salute and a meaningful nod. Before Jaune was even out the door, the girl was loudly speaking into a com device that was affixed next to her seat. She was repeating the same message over and over in the hopes that someone was nearby and listening.

While walking through the dimly lit hallways of the airship, Jaune drew in several deep and much needed breaths. According to his helmet's HUD, he only had eight percent of his aura left, which meant that he couldn't afford to use his armor anymore. He was going to have to fight it out to the best of his abilities using conventional methods. Yuck... For obvious reasons, Jaune wasn't a big fan of his current odds, but they weren't as bad as they would've been half a year earlier.

For the last six months, Jaune had been undergoing combat training under the Guild Master of the Freelance Guild. Mr. Gears wasn't the man in charge of a Hunter's Guild for no reason. The man knew every single trick in the book and a few that were never written down. Six months wasn't long enough for Jaune to become a gifted martial artist or anything, but it was long enough for him to actually have a form, as well as some techniques that he could rely on in a pinch. No... He wasn't going into this fight like a lamb to the slaughter. If he had to go down, then he was going to take some beasties down with him. Damn right! It was time to get to work...

Emerging into the freezing cold air of the Stern deck, Jaune saw that he'd managed to get in place before the main body of the Grimm arrived. It was a state of affairs that he had to thank the sole remaining machine gunner for, as the enthusiastic man was spraying dust rounds like a madman, forcing all of the smaller Grimm to circle and dodge. If Jaune survived the day, he'd buy that man a cowboy hat. The ranting, raving, profanity spilling man, seemed like the type to enjoy something like that.

Roaarrrr!

Ah... Jaune didn't like the sound of that. There was at least one surviving Gryphon out there somewhere. Hopefully it was alone...

Roaarrr! X2 Thump, thump!

Two of the four-meter-tall Gryphon Grimms slammed down into the stern deck, with enough force that they cratered both the wood and the metal beneath it.

Well... Ugh... With no better options and only the very beginnings of a plan, Jaune started walking directly towards the two massive Gryphons. It was imperative that he distract them away from his last machine gunner. As he moved, he cracked his neck and drew his blade in a circle to limber up his wrist, but mostly he just repeated everything that Gears had ever taught him in his head. When he was close enough to the Grimm to look them in their fiery red eyes, he briefly thought about saying some sort of witty one liner. He didn't. Grimm don't compute anything other than "must kill humans," so it would've been a waste of time. Instead, Jaune grabbed a flask of burn dust that he'd snagged from his cabin and he slammed it down on the deck between the two beasts.

While the explosion that followed wasn't strong enough to hurt either of the Grimm, it was definitely bright enough to distract them, and Jaune was all about grabbing advantage. While the beasts reeled back and pawed at the air, he pushed the spine of his shield forward so that it mechashifted into a rifle. Then, when the closer gryphon looked back down at him, it was just in time to receive a dust propelled bullet directly through its left eye.

Even as the newly one eyed gryphon reeled back in pain, the second Gryphon launched in Jaune's direction. Following Gears' training when it came to fighting multiple opponents, Jaune dove to the side, aiming to keep the incapacitated Gryphon in between the two of them. After rolling back to his feet, he slashed two bloody gashes into the one eyed gryphon's front leg. Then he was forced to dive out of the way again as a wing swept up to throw him off of the side of the ship. In doing so, Jaune missed the fact that the uninjured Gryphon was leaping directly over its injured partner.

By the time Jaune rose back to his feet and caught on to the danger coming from above, Jaune only had a split second to react and he was driven to a knee with the beast's entire weight piled upon his shield. These Grimm weighed upwards of four hundred pounds each, so he was either going to get out from under it now or it was going to crush him. Thankfully, the Gryphon was attacking with its two front legs, which meant that the beast was exposing its feathery chest to his sword. Thrusting up as hard as he could, Jaune felt the hot splash of Grimm ichor pouring down onto his arm. Immediately after, the weight piled onto his shield lessened just a little bit, and he was finally able to dive out from under its crushing body. As soon as he was free of the newly chest wounded gryphon, the one eyed gryphon launched back into the fight, hobbling in fast but jerky movements, with its beak in the lead.

So far, Jaune had managed to injure both of these beasts, but he was having trouble landing a killing stroke. Not only that, but he was down to only five percent of his aura capacity which meant he needed to use it wisely.

The main reason that Mr. Gears thinks that the Creatures of the Grimm are a creation of man, is because they pattern recognize, which is something that no other animal on remnant can do. With that tendency in mind, Jaune leapt backwards multiple times as the half blind Gryphon repeatedly tried to slice him with its claws. After implanting a pattern into the Grimm's mind and creating a routine that they were about to repeat for the fourth time in a row, Jaune suddenly leapt directly towards the beast instead. The Gryphon was thrown off by his sudden change in attack pattern and it wasn't able to react in time when Jaune rapidly launched himself at its face. Stomping down on the beast's outstretched arm, Jaune leapt up over the gryphon's beak and slammed the point of his sword down through the vulnerable socket of its missing eye.

With a ghastly but satisfying death rattle the first gryphon collapsed to the ground, only for the second gryphon to fly in through the black mist it left behind and hammer into Jaune with all of its strength. Jaune was swatted to the side by the beast's powerful claws, causing the visor of his helmet to spiderweb crack into hundreds of tiny pieces. Then, with a bone rattling crash, Jaune's protective aura completely shattered when his body impacted heavily against the airship's metal hull.

As painful as the hit and the following impact had been, Jaune could only be grateful that he'd managed to bring up his rifle-shield in time. If he hadn't, he'd have been trisected into conveniently bite sized pieces by the Gryphon's claws. As it was, he'd cratered the exterior wall of the airship with his body, was blinded by his damaged helmet, and was currently collapsed onto his hands and knees.

Well... Damn. Jaune was in trouble.

While pulling his broken helmet off of his head, Jaune took stock of all of the options available to him. There weren't many. His aura was completely drained. He wasn't shielded anymore. He was essentially a civilian, just as he'd been all that time back at the castle. He wasn't capable of high speed movement or super strength anymore, and he was vulnerable to an absolutely absurd degree. Still... Jaune was more equipped to deal with his current situation than anyone else could ever hope to be. As awful as it felt to have all of the power of his soul drained down to nothing, this wasn't a new feeling to him. Jaune knew how to use his purely physical muscles for maximum effect, and he knew exactly what he was capable of.

As he rose back to his feet, Jaune asked himself what Gears would say under these circumstances? Then he knew. Gears would remind him that it doesn't take a hundred hits to kill a Grimm. It takes the right hit, in the right place, with the right timing... Okay. He could do this. When it was all said and done, all Jaune needed to do was avoid one single attack, and then he'd get his chance. He wouldn't be able to aura dash, which meant that timing was going to be the difference between life and death.

As he took several steps away from the wall, Jaune stared at the smug looking gryphon. It stared back. They both leaned forward as if preparing to dash at each other. Suddenly, Jaune moved to leap in the beast's direction. The gryphon did the same, launching itself at Jaune and sweeping its left claw out to intercept him in a fast paced slashing motion. After feinting just a single step towards the beast, Jaune dug in with his heels and leapt backwards instead. He leaned back like a limbo dancer to avoid the gryphon's claws, but he wasn't fast enough so he took the tip of a claw into the side of his face.

With a lance of searing pain, Jaune's right eye saw red and grey and then nothing at all. It didn't matter. His eye was inconsequential at the moment because the plan was working. After straightening up and mechashifting his shield into its rifle form, Jaune stepped right up to the beast's exposed torso and began slamming bullets directly into its injured chest at point blank range. One, two, three, four, five bullets impacted the gryphon within just instants from each other and they were all aimed directly at the beast's heart. Then, when all the bullets seemed to do was stun the beast and deepen the hole in its chest, Jaune cried out in fury, placed the tip of his sword into the entrance of the wound and stomped it deeper with all of his leg strength.

Shreiiik!

When the sword managed to pierce almost a foot deep into the gryphon's chest, the beast screamed to the sky and rolled onto its back to try to pull it out. No way, not a chance, Jaune wasn't having any of it. With a feral growl of his own, he immediately leapt as high as he could to follow his sword, and then stomped down on its cross guard with both of his feet. With both his momentum and body weight forced down upon the blade, the sword finally managed to pierce the rest of the way into the gryphon's heart. A shrieking wail filled the air as whatever animus had been powering the beast quickly fell apart, and it began disintegrating.

The deed was done... Jaune was done as well. He fell off to the side of the gryphon's newly disappearing body as the last of his strength vacated his limbs. After crashing onto his side, he rolled onto his back and tried to regulate his out of control breathing. He was hyperventilating. He was in aura shock. He was bleeding from his face. He was trembling from head to toe. He wasn't going to be able to fight anymore. The ship was still being circled by nearly forty eagle and owl Grimm. His efforts hadn't been enough.

He'd failed...

Due mostly to the sound of his own heart thumping in his ears, Jaune didn't actually notice the crump crump booming of high powered artillery fire smashing into dozens of flying Grimm. It wasn't until a shadow blotted out the light from Jaune's uninjured eye that he blinked and curled himself up into a sitting position. Someone, probably the gunner, was wrapping a ripped up piece of blue cloth over the right side of his face and screaming words that he wasn't currently capable of understanding.

Despite his current lack of energy and what he suspected was a minor concussion, Jaune did manage to understand that something was happening, and that this something was making the gunner extremely happy. Jaune smiled because the gunner was smiling and the man had really come through for him. They all had. In his fugue, Jaune struggled to remember that he owed this man a cowboy hat... Then he felt himself falling and it reminded him of dropping into the well basin beneath Arc castle. It was dark, it was cool. It was quiet...

---

Waking up under a foreign ceiling is never a good sign. Waking up under a foreign ceiling, with bandages covering half of your face, and a green colored IV drip in your arm, is the trifecta of bad omens.

Over about half a minute's time, the circumstances of Jaune's loss of consciousness finally filtered back to him, and he slowly returned his attention to his surroundings. He was in a small, hard, low to the floor bed, and the room smelled like medicine. This wasn't a Hospital though. This had to be a Med Bay of some kind. It looked military. It reminded Jaune of the Atlas military, but it wasn't quite the same. Vale military then?

As he slowly regained his mental faculties, Jaune noticed that A) the bands that transform into his aura armor had been removed from his body and B) his helmet was gone. Turning his head further to the side, Jaune saw that the airship captain was laying unconscious on a small bed across the room. Then, finally, Jaune felt a subtle thrumming vibrating up through the bed, and he realized that he was on yet another airship. What in the...? Why was he on a Vale military airship instead of at a Hospital? Was he found out? Were these people taking him back to Arc castle?... No... That outcome was unlikely. He was currently on the other side of the ocean. The people of vale don't hold the Arc's in the same kind of esteem.

"Ah, you're finally awake! I gotta say it man. You're the man, man!"

After turning his head until his bandaged cheek was flat to the bed, Jaune was finally able to see the face behind the old school hippie voice. It was the so far unnamed gunner. The man had a mostly healed wound on his arm and a smile on his face, and Jaune would have to admit that he was inexplicably happy to see the man.

"Duuude," Jaune slowly replied... So far as he was concerned that was the only word that needed saying.

"I know right? We're like, alive and everything!" With a fist pump towards the ceiling, the gunner sat down on a nearby chair and then ran his hands through his unruly black hair. "I thought we were gonna die like, sooo many times. I can't even believe some of the stunts you pulled off out there. Oh! My names Greg O'Neil. I'm a..."

"Gunner," Jaune finished with a grin. You're a Gunner. One of the best."

A happy and infectious smile grew on Greg's face as he nodded his head like a bobblehead.

"Can you tell me why we're on a military airship right now," Jaune asked, while gesturing at the med bay that they were sitting in. "I'll admit that I'm a little confused."

"Well, the ship we were fighting on finally ran out of Dust and landed itself not long after you passed the hell out," Greg explained, complete with hand motions. "Payla, up in the Bridge, harassed absolutely everyone that she could reach over any radio frequency to come and help us, and every single one of them showed up at nearly the same time. Search and rescue, the vale military, and even a professor led field trip from Beacon. Everyone and their uncle came. The Vale military were the group that volunteered to pick up the lifeboat's passengers, but only if they could bring along everyone that was on the ship, including us. While they aren't being hostile to any of us, we're all currently being investigated. The Jango... Oh, the Jango's the name of the airship you piloted. Well... She's in terrible shape. You're a complete savage behind the wheel man. Anyway, since the Jango's a Vale military airship that's commissioned to a public company for the purposes of long distance travel, it's their right to head an investigation. As we speak, the military police are going over the airship's camera system and its navigation logs to see what in the hell happened.

"Let me get this straight," Jaune mused in a somewhat uneasy tone of voice. "We're currently flying over the mountains... again?"

"Yep," Greg assured with a thumbs up. "It's nowhere near as exciting this time though. Not with the pilot following the established route and all..."

"Remind me later that I owe you a cowboy hat," Jaune yawned out, as he dropped his head back onto his starchy pillow. Then, after a moment, he opened his eyes again. "Do me a favor will you Greg. Wake me up when we get wherever we're going."

Just as soon as those words left Jaune's mouth, a soft but noticeable thump ran throughout the entire airship. They were there. That much was obvious.

"We're there," Greg supplied helpfully.

---

Now that he wasn't in desperate need of an IV drip full of advanced regen formula X or whatever they call the heal quick medicine over here in Vale, Jaune was free to hang out in a much less comfortable environment. He was sitting against a wall within the airship's Hanger Bay. When he thought about it objectively, Jaune realized that a Hanger Bay like the one he was sitting in was a really good location to house people that are currently under investigation, especially if they're not yet formally charged with a crime. It's a wide open and airy environment and yet it's also secure in the extreme. Jaune found it interesting what choices a military will make when they want to skirt the edges of legality.

About four meters off to Jaune's left, Greg was having what looked like a really satisfying nap, and he found himself resenting the man for his peace of mind. On the other hand, Payla was pacing the entire length of the hanger like a caged animal. No amount of telling her that the evidence would definitely exonerate them was enough to calm the woman's nerves. The rest of the airship's crew and the male passengers from the Dining Hall were milling around in the distant corners of the room, trying to control their nerves with jokes and idle gossip.

Thud, slide, crash, boom! The cargo bay doors suddenly became a symphony of different noises as they activated and started moving. Slowly but surely, they lowered open to reveal a sunny morning on the coast and a large group of very excited women.

One after another, the passengers that had escaped the Jango on the remaining lifeboat walked up into the hanger bay and sought out the family members they'd been forced to leave behind. The emotions were thick throughout the Hanger, as tearful reunions were happening every few feet. Jaune didn't rise to his feet to take part in what was happening. He was well aware that it was his decisions that had torn these family's apart. It seemed hypocritical of him to enjoy seeing everyone reunited when he'd been willing to see all of the older men go down with the ship...

All of the sudden, Jaune's somewhat morbid introspection was interrupted. Someone had dropped a folded up blanket onto the floor on his left hand side and was dropping onto it with a sigh. Weiss Schnee was gracing him with her presence. As capable as the heiress was, Jaune was still extremely relieved to see that she was both alive and uninjured. He was also happy to note that she wasn't scowling at him like she had been earlier in the day. Or was it yesterday? Losing consciousness and then sitting in a Hanger Bay is a good way to lose all sense of time.

"I destroyed about a dozen E rank insect type Grimm, but nothing all that large or especially dangerous," Weiss preemptively answered in a dismissive tone of voice. "Now. Are you going to tell me what happened on the ship?" The woman's question was purely rhetorical. Weiss was clearly demanding that he tell her everything.

After slowly nodding his head, Jaune turned to lean his left shoulder against the wall so that he could keep their conversation discrete. Over the next five or six minutes, he explained everything that happened as factually as possible, while trying to keep the details somewhat vague. It was a little difficult to explain how he'd operated the ship, because he was a little reluctant to describe his very unorthodox and finicky Semblance. Thankfully, Weiss seemed to be tolerating his secretive nature for once. In fact, she seemed to be going out of her way to avoid asking questions that he'd have trouble answering. Finally, Jaune ended his story with, "Then I woke up in this airship's Med Bay and I owe that Greg guy a cowboy hat."

"You've skipped right over a topic that's of great interest to me." Weiss pointed out, with a no nonsense expression on her face.

Jaune was confused. The heiress was acting as if he was keeping some vital piece of info from her. Unfortunately, he had no idea what she was accusing him of hiding. Then, very suddenly, he knew exactly what she wanted to know, and he bit his bottom lip as he experienced a surge of sudden anxiety. Weiss wanted to know about his injury. Monty Oum help him, she even looked a little bit worried about him. Damn... He was going to have to talk about it. During the next few moments, Jaune drew in a very deep breath, because he wasn't quite sure what to say on the matter. Then, in the end, he decided to stick to the truth. He wasn't the type to grandstand or anything, and he wasn't a macho tough guy either.

"My apologies, Weiss," Jaune began in a somewhat hesitant voice. "I wasn't... I'm not trying to be evasive with you. It appears that I've subconsciously been avoiding thinking about my face. Just a few moments before the Vale military arrived, a gryphon that I was fighting managed to slash a claw tip through both my cheek and the orbital bone of my right eye. While I vaguely remember losing sight in that eye and then destroying the Gryphon, I passed out not long after, and I woke up covered with these bandages. While I was unconscious, I was given some military grade Dust infused regen medicine, which of course means whatever healing my face required has already taken place. On the other hand, I have no idea whether or not I still have the use of my right eye, or even if there's anything left in the socket. At the moment, I'm having trouble mustering up the courage to remove the bandages."

It was Weiss's turn to bite her lower lip as she stared at the bandages covering the right side of Jaune's face. "Your aura ran out while you were fighting that Gryphon then," she pointed out as a matter of fact. "I... I have some experience with what you're going through." In a casual motion that still managed to look forced, Weiss pointed up at the scar trailing down her left eyebrow and cheek. "Surviving a life or death struggle under those circumstances is something to be proud of, John... At least, that's what I always tell myself when I look in the mirror and see my damaged features."

"I'm content with what I've learned about my character," Jaune allowed with a small nod of his head. "What I'm not happy about is the exceptionally inaccurate way that you view your own appearance. Pardon me for giving you a very sudden and excessive amount of praise, but... Surely you're aware that you're an astoundingly beautiful woman? That faded little scar on your cheek only serves to accent the brilliant blue color of your eyes. It does absolutely nothing to detract away from your facial features, and I'm quite frankly shocked that you think it does. I mean, even if you can't take my word for it, and I most certainly hope that you do, you need only observe the behavior of your unbelievably tedious male fanbase. I'll tell you right now, at least half of that unruly mob doesn't give a damn about your singing voice."

"Hey," Weiss suddenly interrupted in an affronted tone of voice. "You complimented my singing voice just fifteen hours ago."

"I did, and I stand by my words," Jaune defended, with his palms up in the air. "I saw it for myself though. I had to stop your admirers from sneaking into your dressing room dozens of times while on assignment. For a large percentage of those boys, your ability to hit a high note is of almost no importance. Tell me Weiss. Do your posters sell well? Never mind, I don't need an answer. Of course they do..."

At this point, Weiss had her arms crossed under her chest as she tried her level best to look disappointed in her fanbase and maybe even men in general. She wasn't doing a very good job of it. She looked like a smile might break through her scowl at any moment. Jaune figured the girl was conflicted because her standard teenaged vanity was warring with her drive for artistic excellence. He was perfectly happy to give the girl some time to figure herself out, so he closed his uncovered eye and leaned his head back against the wall. For several minutes, the two of them sat in companionable silence. Then, after hearing some quiet shifting to his left, Jaune suddenly felt some fingers trailing up behind his ear.

"I'm going to remove these bandages for you," Weiss whispered, in a calm and soothing tone. "One way or another, you're going to be fine, but you can't wear these forever."

While one or two sarcastic comments ran through Jaune's mind, he never ended up saying any of them. He just nodded his head and then waited as the bandages were drawn away from his face.

...

"I'm... I'm having trouble believing what I'm seeing," Weiss finally admitted, as John's bandages dropped forgotten to the Hanger bay floor.

"What do you mean?" Jaune hadn't opened his formerly injured eye yet, but his good eye saw that Weiss was extremely surprised.

"Your scar... It looks like a mirror image of mine," Weiss admitted in a somewhat bemused tone of voice. "It's on the right side instead of the left and it's a pale brown instead of pale pink, but otherwise... it's the same."

"Wait what?" In his surprise, both of Jaune's eyes opened wide and to his immense relief he could still see just fine out of both of them. What he didn't expect to happen was that Weiss's eyes would open even wider than before at the sight of his formerly injured eye. "What is it Weiss? What's wrong?"

"So deep a blue," Weiss breathed out as she leaned closer to take a better look. "Your injured eye has turned a royal blue color John. What in the..."

Very suddenly, Jaune felt like a complete imbecile. No wonder he'd been blinded when the gryphon raked his face. The damned thing must have destroyed the dark grey color contact he'd been wearing, and the pieces had obscured his vision. There was also the chance that the durable little piece of plastic had actually saved his eye from irreparable damage! Either way, Jaune was going to have to own up to the truth, unless he wanted Weiss to believe he suddenly had heterochromia. With a small sheepish smile, Jaune reached up and drew the other contact out of his uninjured eye. "Uhh, My apologies for the confusion, Weiss. For the entire time that you've known me, I've been wearing color contacts."

"Bu... Why? Why go to those lengths? Why all the secrecy? Who are you really?" When Jaune looked down at his knees instead of answering her questions, Weiss appeared to lose any and all patience that she'd had up until that point. She rose to her feet, grabbed her blanket and marched across the room.

Great... Just great... Jaune slowly banged the back of his head against the hanger wall, as he thought of what he'd said and done and tried to think of what he could've done differently.

"You had that girl on the ropes right until the very end there," Greg O'Neil suddenly called out from four meters to Jaune's left. Apparently, the gunner had been awake during their entire conversation and just hadn't bothered saying anything.

After a single moment where Jaune was annoyed at Greg, he finally started grinning because the man was right. That had been the longest amount of time that the two of them had ever spoken to each other without Weiss losing her patience with him. As sucky as it was, this latest conversation was a noticeable step in the right direction.

"Thanks Greg. You're the man."

"No way man! You're the man, man!"