I don't own anything related to the RWBY franchise
Author's note
I'm not actually a chemist, so I apologize for any inaccuracies present in the science I reference. Fact checking can only get me so far...
Chapter 11 - The Wall
The day of the Beacon Initiation Test, 20 Minutes before the first year class boards airships headed towards Croftlan Colony...
After retrieving Ember Celica from her new locker and making sure that her gear was ready to go, Yang Xiao Long started meandering her way down towards the cliffside field where the Initiation was supposed to take place... Truth be told, she was in no hurry to arrive at the Initiation. She had some things to sort out within herself first.
Yang was... a mess.
A little under an hour earlier, in a courtyard just off of the cafeteria, Yang finally noticed for the very first time that Ruby Rose, her super sweet and adorable little sister, thought that she was a particularly virulent form of bitch...
It wasn't the words that Ruby had said because the girl was far too nice to ever say something truly cutting. No... Ruby didn't swear at her, nor did she yell at her. Instead, her sister just stood there and blinked up at her as if she was a dog with rabies or something, and then she said something that was completely profound in its simplicity. "Look... Yang... You're so, sooo, sooo much better than this... Please just... pull up."
And that had been enough.
Along with the imagery that Ruby's words brought to mind of airship pilot Yang spiraling her VTOL out of the sky and plummeting towards the ground, had come a eureka moment of sorts, an epiphany... except both of those things are supposed to be enlightening, and Yang was just confused.
Was she becoming a bitch? No... Was she already a bitch?
It wasn't as if Yang was unaware of her own actions. She knew that she made fun of John far more than could ever be considered normal and it was far beyond the point of just joking around. In fact, Yang could picture in her mind just how disgusted she'd be with anyone else if they made exactly the same comments that she was making.
Next there was the fact that John was right... Yang wasn't showing his privacy any respect at all... Now that she was thinking about it, really thinking about it, If Yang was the one on the run from some mysterious group of people and someone else started joking about it as if it was nothing right there in the middle of a cafeteria, she could only imagine how upset she'd get...
Then, finally, there was the way that Yang had primed her dad to go all alpha overprotective crazy lunatic mode on John during their training trip... At the time, she'd just thought that she was pulling a prank as revenge for John catching her staring at his muscles, as well as for the annoyingly self-satisfied expression on his face... Now she wasn't so sure what she'd been thinking. The roughed up shape that John had been in when he stumbled his way across Patch's Airfield... John could say whatever he wanted about how he'd made their dad angry, but Yang somewhat doubted the boy was being completely honest...
When had she become such a menace? Why? How?
Domineering isn't how Yang would've described herself back when she was young, back before her training, back before her dad decided to toughen her up. For most of the years that she spent as a primary school student, Yang was much quieter, quite a bit more... meek. At the time, Yang was pouring her entire focus towards being the mother figure that little Ruby needed so very badly, and the very last thing she'd wanted to do was be a bad influence.
Of course Yang's more gentle personality back then only allowed that jackass Gary Savoy to run roughshod all over her, picking on her every single day at school with thumb tacks and leg trips and assorted juvenile nonsense. As loud and obnoxious as the boy had been, he was also relatively good looking and one of only four boys in her entire year at school, which is why Yang hadn't wanted to get on his bad side. All told, Yang's desire to make nice with the boy caused her to suffer a little over two years of nearly constant abuse, all without ever saying a single word in protest...
Then the boy did something so horrifying, so unbelievably, monumentally stupid that Yang completely snapped and ended up inheriting her family's Huntsmen legacy...
Gary Savoy took a pair of safety scissors, snuck up behind Yang and cut off the extra-long and shiny ponytail that she loved so much right near the base of her neck, severing well over three quarters of her hair all at once to fall to the hardwood floor of the classroom.
And in the ten seconds that followed, Yang's aura exploded out of the core of her being, coalescing around her body as her eyes lit into the twin red orbs that betray the use of her Semblance.
Of course, the events that followed in that classroom were and would likely always remain a vague blur of red tunneled vision and barely controlled violence. What Yang always would remember, was that Gary Savoy's nose, arms and legs ended up being broken to the point of a three day stay in the hospital even with a steady dose of quick regen medicine speeding up his recovery, and that he transferred to another school instead of coming back to the one that she was attending.
In the days that followed Yang's outburst and the two week suspension that followed (unlocking an aura usually involves extremely wild emotions, which is why she wasn't expelled), Yang fully expected to be hated by the rest of the girls in her class...
She wasn't...
As it turns out, Yang hadn't been the only girl that Savoy was picking on, and the rest of the girls in her class were all releasing a collective sigh of relief. It was also around this time that Taiyang declared he was going to begin training her, to toughen her up. Her dad said that he wanted to prevent her from being pushed around by every shithead boy that the world had to offer.
Looking back, Yang could see how a somewhat stereotypical childhood bully paired with her father's over the top and paranoid dislike of boys in general, ended up being the heat and the anvil that helped forge her current mentality. Neither of those things were a valid excuse because Yang was self-aware enough that she should've recognized what was happening a long damned time ago. On the other hand, it couldn't be denied that Yang was currently taking a big step in the right direction purely by realizing that there was a problem...
Now the really important question was obvious... What could Yang do about all of this? John's presence still made her feel completely squeamish and that much was obvious. Just the idea of being near the boy made her feel as if she had adrenaline flowing through her veins, but at the same time she felt a powerful aversion that was likely to cause her to act out again...
With a lack of other options, Yang finally decided to do what she does best, keep things simple. She was going to focus her entire attention on doing the one thing that mattered most...
Beacon Initiation Test, One and A Half Hours Later, Croftlan Colony Airfield...
After sliding down the smooth stone of the gorge to drop onto the rampart wall of Croftlan Colony's Airfield, Jaune jogged along its length both to get a better idea of the fortification's strengths and weaknesses and to find whoever was in charge.
The rampart walkway was about forty meters long and three meters wide, topping a solid steel barrier that was thirty meters tall and over a half a meter thick. All told, it was a pretty well constructed little siege wall and it was deep enough in a gorge to stop most aerial Grimm from approaching, but it wasn't made to endure more than a middling sized surge of Grimm, and that much was obvious
The Airfield's lack of defenses was going to become a huge problem for Jaune and Blake within the next few minutes, because while the number of Grimm entering the gorge may not have actually constituted a full sized swarm, it was definitely an extremely large surge, and it was a frenzied one at that...
At the bottom left of Jaune's peripheral vision, on the ground at the base of the fortification, a boiling mass of Beowolves, Ursas, and creeps were slamming into the wall, scratching little grooves into the metal and attempting to climb up on top of each other to get closer to their prey.
Due to how densely packed the Grimm were, the mass of them looked more like a single spastically writhing monster made of oil than it did several hundred distinct creatures, and that made sense because while the Grimm never fight amongst themselves, they generally aren't helpful to each other either. No... These Grimm were growing higher and higher against the siege wall purely because of overwhelming numbers and their intense desire to tear the humans within into hundreds of pieces.
Just the idea that the Grimm might grow to have some variety of coordination someday was enough to bring chills to Jaune's spine.
"What are you doing here kid," a burly man wearing Security BDUs and holding a machine gun called out as Jaune approached him.
"My name's John Freeman and this is my partner Blake Belladonna," Jaune began as he gestured behind himself at Blake's rapidly approaching form. "My partner and I are Hunters and we're here to assist you in defending the walls until further backup arrives.
"My name's Alec Foley, and while I'm grateful for any variety of support at all, I don't see how two teenagers, even two teenaged Hunters will make any difference." The Security guard spoke in a somewhat despondent tone of voice and he stared down at the Grimm the whole entire time.
"Well that remains to be seen," Jaune returned with a very stern and somewhat disapproving tone of voice. "If I requisition all of the resources that are just laying around the Airfield unused and direct some of the civilians to perform tasks that won't immediately make any sense to you, will you oppose me?" Along with his question, Jaune gave the man a look that conveyed that opposing him would be a very bad idea.
"No! Not at all," Alec immediately replied. "Everything within these walls, including us, will be torn to pieces by the end of the day if the Grimm aren't stopped, so you can have atter!"
"Very good," Jaune allowed as he gestured down at the Airfield's main terminal where a large group of civilians were huddling against the walls. "If I wanted some volunteers to assist me moving and manipulating some machinery, is there anyone you'd recommend?"
"She's scared almost to the point of catatonia at the moment, but if you can get through to her, there's a skilled engineer down there by the name of Payla who..."
"Wait! Did you just say that she's an engineer named Payla," Jaune gasped out in his surprise.
"Uhh yeah, that's what I said," Alec responded with a look of confusion on his face.
Turning to look at Blake, Jaune pointed at himself and then down at the Airfield Terminal. "I have an idea that should make defending the wall quite a bit more manageable, but I'm going to need some help. I'm going to go down there and recruit some people. Can you keep me abreast on the level of the Grimm?"
With one look over the edge of the rampart wall at the Grimm mass that was growing larger by the second despite the endless stream of Red dust rounds tearing it to pieces, Blake silently nodded her head.
While sitting with her back to the Airfield Terminal wall with her arms wrapped tightly around her knees, Payla Brown found herself wondering about a great many things. She wondered why the world was the way it was. She wondered why Remnant appeared to be getting worse and more violent with every single year that passed. She wondered why she'd ever thought a new job placement at a static site with large impressive walls and two massive machine gun platforms was going to bring her the safety that she'd been craving. She wondered why me, why now, why here, and why can't I just catch a break?!
Then Payla saw 'the boy' enter the Terminal at a fast paced and purposeful march, and a loud hiccup followed by a sudden outpouring of tears was the only reaction that she was capable of making...
"Hello... . My name's John Freeman. I'm a Huntsman with the Freelance guild and a current trainee at Beacon. More importantly, I'm here to help defend this Airfield from the Grimm, and I have a few ideas that just might improve our current situation. Now... . Does anyone want to help me?..."
With a shaky indrawn breath and a hard push on a pair of extremely wobbly legs, Payla immediately began sliding her back up the length of the wall in order to rise to her feet. After succeeding in that endeavor, she staggered over to crouch between two of her fellow engineers, gestured over at John with a visibly shaky hand, and then attempted to whisper into her co-workers' ears.
"He's the one," Payla gasped out, her voice far louder and more emotional than she'd ever intended. "He's the boy from the Airship. If we help him, he can save us. If it can be done, then he can do it. I'll bet my life on it."
Both of Payla's co-workers recoiled in alarm at the nearly manic faith that was visibly pouring off of their very pessimistic and borderline cynical co-worker, and then they looked over at John only to find that the boy was already staring in their direction. Slowly, but with newly resolute looks on their faces, the two engineers rose to their feet and walked in John's direction.
When someone on Remnant thinks of an Airfield, the first two materials that immediately come to mind are Red and Black dust. In almost all VTOL style airships, red Dust causes the combustion and black Dust is the spark, the trigger, the explosion, the pop.
What people tend to forget is all of the other varieties of Dust that go into making an Airfield a very streamlined and efficient operation. Blue dust is used to keep the tarmac from warping under the superheated air ejected from especially large VTOL airships taking off. Brown dust is used to repair the tarmac and concrete from routine wear and tear. Yellow Dust provides the electricity to power nearly a mile of conveyor belts moving both fuel and components around the entire complex.
Plenty of different Dust goes into the maintenance and function of an Airfield and yet none of it was being used in its defense.
Jaune was about to change that...
"Grab every baggage gurney and passenger trolley that you can find in the entire compound and bring them to me here at the base of the wall," Jaune ordered as he began grabbing barrels and crates and moving them to a space that he'd set aside. He already had a civilian with no engineering background smashing open all of the vending machines in the entire facility to bring him as many screw lid pop bottles as he could possibly find.
"You better pick up the pace John," Blake called down from her spot up on the wall, her voice far more anxious than Jaune had ever heard from her before. "The number of Grimm piling into the gorge has doubled if not tripled since we first came down here! They're already managing to pile up to about fifteen-sixteen meters the height of the wall! We're running out of time!"
"With a quick nod and a nervous bite to his bottom lip, Jaune began doling out precise mixtures of one part black Dust five parts blue into a row of glass bottles sitting on his table. This kind of fast and dirty roadside chemistry using Dust would normally be an excellent way of killing yourself, but since he had dominion over extremely tiny things, he could settle all of the dust into place in the bottles as gently as physically possible. Monty Oum only knows why, but when Dust is actually contained inside of an airtight container it becomes far less reactive and prone to exploding than when it's being moved around in the open air. Science and Dust only loosely coincide, so Jaune was just thankful that Dust had one or two constants that could be relied upon.
When the civilian that was collecting all of the Airfield's bottles finally arrived, Jaune asked the man to bring him the large signs that denote entrances one through four in the terminal. Then he continued his Semblance assisted mad science until he had nearly forty pop bottle ice grenades and sixty electric grenades ready to be thrown over the wall.
It wasn't going to be anywhere near enough...
Around the time Jaune finished preparing his ad-hoc explosives, Payla and her co-workers finally returned with nearly two-dozen gurneys and trolleys, lining them up on Jaune's right hand side.
"Hoookay, here's the deal," Jaune began as he rose from his work bench and moved towards the closest gurney. "forty meters of wall is much too much space for Blake and I to defend, even with those huge machine guns firing red Dust rounds down over our shoulders. I need to shorten the distance that the two of us need to focus our attention."
"How will we," Laura, one of Payla's two co-workers began, only for Payla to put a hand on her shoulder to silence her.
With a quick nod of thanks in Payla's direction, Jaune activated one of the gurneys and it floated up a single foot away from the ground. Then he tore off the control bank at the front of the machine and began rewiring it with a very specific goal in mind. As he worked, he pulled the gurney towards the base of the wall and then braced it on its side with its bottom facing the three engineers. About twenty seconds later, when he was finished with his rewiring, he gestured for Bernadette, Payla's third co-worker, to slowly approach the gurney.
While at first Bernadette had no trouble at all approaching John and his turned over gurney, when she closed to about four meters away from the piece of machinery, she suddenly lost her balance and was forced backwards into a fast paced roll.
"Wha... How..." Laura called out.
"These gurneys make use of Purple Gravity Dust in order to float a foot off the ground," Jaune explained with a smile on his face. "All I did just now was reverse the direction that the gurney is casting its gravity, supercharged its output to way above maximum, and this is the result. Of course neither the gurneys nor the trolleys will survive being used at this power output for very long, but I suspect they'll work long enough for the cavalry to arrive."
"Ingenious," Payla breathed out as she stared at the neat little rows of gurneys and trolleys that they'd just brought over. "How are we going to affix them all to the top of the wall in time?"
Turning towards the table, Jaune pulled out a large box full of brown Dust and waved at it as if he was a beautiful assistant on a gameshow. "Earth Dust replicates whatever mineral or ore it's crushed against in a bulbous rocky mass. If I slam it down against two sections of steel plate, then a large steel ingot will immediately form and bind the two sections together. I plan to use the Airfield's entire supply of brown Dust to flash weld all of these gurneys to the top of the rampart wall. Then we'll turn them on and..."
"And they'll push the Grimm both down and away from the wall over and over again," Payla finished in an absolutely astonished tone of voice. "The Beowolves and Ursa won't be able to dogpile their way up and over the wall." Then Payla paused as she counted the number of gurneys and made a rough estimate of their combined length. "We don't have enough to work with though... We won't be able to cover the entire wall."
"Three quarters if we're lucky," Jaune agreed with a very serious nod. "Blake and I are still going to have to get our hands dirty, but this will help us concentrate our efforts in a much smaller amount of space."
The entire time that Jaune and Payla had been speaking, her two co-workers had been studying the rewiring that he'd completed on the first gurney. By the time Jaune finished his explanation and called out for them all to get started, they simply nodded their understanding and quickly moved towards gurneys of their own.
A little over fifteen minutes later, the anti-gravity sleds were all rewired, and Payla was holding the last gurney in place so that Jaune could Dust weld it to the top of the wall. At this point, around twenty-four anti-gravity sleds were thrumming with power from where they were spanning both the left and the right side of the wall, making the gravity being applied directly beneath the rampart barrier five or six times stronger within a range of four meters.
Any Grimm that attempted to form a cheerleader pyramid beneath these anti-gravity sleds would be both slammed down and cast away from the wall by one of the oldest and most powerful forces in the universe. Of course this still left a ten meter gap in the center of the wall that didn't have a gravity barrier, but with everyone's help, Jaune had covered as much space as possible, and their chances of survival were quite a bit better than they'd been just fifteen minutes earlier.
The timing of the job's completion couldn't have been more perfect either, but that outcome was an extremely frightening one considering how fast Jaune, Payla, Laura, Bernadette, Blake, Alec and the dozen or so other people comprising the Security team had just moved, how the machine guns had been pouring a veritable river of fire down into the main body of the Grimm surge the whole entire time, and the fact that the Grimm had only been about halfway up the wall when they first started. Every single human residing inside of Croftlan's Airfield had just experienced an extremely close call...
At this point, the Grimm surge was howling, scratching, and baying just five meters below the top of the ramparts, with the effect that Payla shook and shivered with every single step that she took. On the other hand, the female engineer continued to do her part to the best of her ability despite the extreme fear that she was experiencing, and that was far more than Jaune had expected from anyone when he first arrived at the Airfield.
"Good, it's done. Now let's finish getting these number signs welded to the wall," Jaune suggested.
"Why are we numbering different segments of the wall one through four," Payla asked as she grabbed the number four sign, pressed it to the top of the wall and closed her eyes to ignore the Grimm that were snarling at her from just a few meters away.
"I'm going to need someone with a really good throwing arm to lob all of the Blue and yellow Dust grenades I've mixed up over the wall," Jaune replied as he coaxed the brown Dust to meld the last sign to the rampart wall. "If I yell out zone number one for example, then that area is being flooded by far more Grimm than Blake and I can handle, and we're in need of some area of effect damage. We only have about a hundred of the bombs so we'll need to use them very, very efficiently."
Due mostly to the fact that she had a completely useless throwing arm, Payla looked to both Laura and Bernadette with a questioning look in her eyes.
A wicked smile immediately grew across Bernadette's face as she windmilled her right arm in a large clockwise circle. "My team, the Huntresses, have been the women's softball champs three years in a row," she called out with a crack of her neck. "You call out a number and I'll rain down death from above."
Jaune smiled at the woman before turning back towards Payla. "One more thing Payla and this is important. I need you to go get the refueling truck, fill it with as much water as it'll hold, connect every single hose that you can find to the tank, and then drive it over to the base of the wall. I'm going to need a huge supply of fresh water at the top of the wall and I'm going to need it at a moment's notice."
"Turning back to the massive cistern of water in the far corner of the Airfield and then the refueling truck near the garage, Payla bit her bottom lip in concern. "Filling the refueling truck with that much water will take me at least twenty minutes."
"If everything goes to plan then that might be perfect timing," Jaune assured Payla with as confident a smile as he could manage. "Now... Blake and I need to get back to areas two and three of the wall. The central span is about to become Grimm central... It's time we get to work..."
As if to accentuate Jaune's words, the anti-gravity sleds that they'd only just finished installing on the wall suddenly began doing their job with a series of frenetic whirring noises and small energetic pops. Scattered clusters of piled up Grimm all along both the right and the left side of the central span were suddenly being slammed both out and down towards the ground whenever they climbed too close to the top of the wall. The effect made the growing piles of Grimm along those segments of wall look like waves breaking against a cliff face, only uglier and far more violent.
Jaune couldn't quite stop a look of intense satisfaction from slipping onto his face. No one anywhere had ever tried what he just did. So far as he knew, this was a brand new way of using Dust, so it would be very interesting to find out if it was efficient enough to be officially adopted by the military...
Demonstrating a level of faith that was almost intimidating, Payla never even looked over the wall to confirm that the gurneys were indeed doing their job. With one last completely serious and professional salute, she immediately started sprinting down the stairs leading to the Airfield's garage and the refueling truck that it contained. Laura and Bernadette trailed after their more frenzied co-worker at a normal jog, aiming to collect all of the Dust grenades and carry them up to the right side lookout tower.
It was only after the two young hunters began moving through the visibly terrified Security Guards towards the completely unoccupied central span of the ramparts that Jaune noticed Blake's eyes boring into the side of his head. The woman was curious. The woman wanted answers.
"We only have time for a few answers to all the questions you appear to have," Jaune pointed out as he sharpened his sword with an aura filled finger and then swung his arms back and forth at his sides. Even as they stood there, a particularly ambitious Beowulf managed to scrabble its claws up to within just a foot of the top of the wall, and Jaune felt the hair on the back of his neck rise on end...
"Payla was shaking like a leaf and very nearly hyperventilating the entire time she was up here working with us, and yet she did everything that you said without complaint or a single moment's hesitation." Blake finally began after several seconds of deliberation. "Why does that woman have such fanatical faith in you?"
"Payla's much braver than she looks, and we've saved each other in the past," Jaune answered with a shrug of his shoulders. "It's a long story."
"Then will you tell me what you intend to do with the water," Blake immediately continued.
"Unless you know the ins and outs of a mostly neglected branch of science called chemistry then that's also going to require a longer explanation, but I promise to give it to you later," Jaune quickly assured with a slightly frazzled look on his face. "Look... Please ask me something that I can answer with a yes or no."
After moving closer to stare up into Jaune's eyes, Blake whispered so that none of the frightened Security Guards off to their right and left would overhear them. "Are any of these tricks and gimmicks that you've cooked up actually going to work?"
After opening his mouth to reply, Jaune froze in place, closed his mouth, opened it again and then sighed. "I think it's of paramount importance that I never lie to you Blake. Considering your personality, I believe doing so to be a fatal error in judgment..."
The only reply that Blake made in response to Jaune's words was a nod, but somehow she made that one movement seem even more meaningful than an entire day of explanations.
"The grenades will work just fine until they run out, but we don't have anywhere near enough of them. Likewise, the anti-gravity barriers will function as intended until they burn out and stop working," Jaune admitted in a slightly weary tone of voice. "I don't know how robust these machines were built to be, so I don't know how long they'll last when pushed far, far beyond their limits. My plan with the water... that's going to be very, very dangerous... but only for me."
Stepping even closer until they were only inches apart, Blake gestured up at the newly red tinted and angrily chirping HUD glasses that she was wearing. Then she gestured down at the fantastically violent surge of Grimm that had grown to be at least four times larger than it was back when they first decided to help. "Are the two of us about to die, John?"
This time, a look of absolute conviction and determination immediately grew across Jaune's face as he rapidly shook his head in a negative, mechashifted his shield into its rifle form, and fired a Dust round down into a Beowulf's face from nearly point blank range. "No Blake! No... We're going to live... Twenty minutes... If we can hold on for just twenty minutes, the day will be ours."
"What makes you say that," Blake asked, her tone making it obvious that she wanted to be convinced.
Raising his arm directly above his head, Jaune pointed up at the Red and Black Dust flares that were still burning up in the sky. "Those red lights up there in the sky are symbolic Blake, they're inviolate. Those flares are the one thing that every single nation on all of Remnant can agree upon... If you have the strength to fight the Grimm and you see those flares in the sky... you fight... We're not going to be the only ones down here for long..."
"Your faith... I don't share it... I want to more than anything, but I just don't..." With a long suffering little sigh, Blake rapidly shook out her head, mechashifted her sheath into its cleaver form, and then jogged four meters to Jaune's left. "I really do hope that you're right though John... for all our sakes..."
There was nothing reassuring that Jaune could say in that moment, so he didn't bother trying. He nodded his head, channeled his aura throughout his body, and settled into a fighting stance.
It was time... The Grimm had arrived...
At first, the fighting was almost anticlimactic. For the first minute or two, the Grimm that did manage to scramble to the top of the wall arrived in ones, twos or threes and they were destroyed long before they could truly get their bearings. Jaune and Blake both found themselves jogging up and down their appointed side of the central span, kicking, shooting and slicing their swords through what felt like a medium paced conveyor belt of incoming Grimm.
Then both Jaune and Blake noticed that the waves of Grimm that were colliding into the wall to the left and the right of the central span were decreasing in size so that all of the Grimm could focus their efforts on the central span instead. Both Jaune and Blake immediately knew what they were looking at and they shared a quick but extremely meaningful look back and forth. What this meant was completely obvious... The two of them were about to get very, very busy...
Soon enough, the main body of the Grimm surge was only a meter or two below the top of the wall and the number of Grimm that were gaining access to the ramparts was increasing with every single second that passed.
On the one hand, Jaune and Blake were the primary targets of every Grimm in the entire area because they were the only two people present with unlocked auras. What that meant was that most of the Grimm would focus on tearing the two of them to teeny tiny little pieces before they'd move on to the Airfield itself, and those few Grimm that did end up ignoring them would be shot full of holes by the Security team. This arrangement was extremely convenient when it came to fulfilling their primary objective, protecting the civilians...
On the other hand, every tooth filled mouth, every claw tipped arm, every poisonous stinger that made it up to the ramparts was about to be aimed directly at Jaune and Blake, and needless to say, neither of them had the speed or stamina required to fight off an entire Grimm surge.
Though the two of them never made the conscious decision to divide the labour in any specific way, Jaune found himself focusing his attention on a four meter wide area on the right side of the central span while Blake careened back and forth over a six meter wide patch on the left. She was an ultra-agile damage dealer the likes of which Jaune wasn't currently capable of keeping up with, so his pride had to take a back seat to matters of much greater importance. He dug in within his allotted space, and he sawed his way back and forth with an implacable determination that made him look more like a butcher than a martial artist.
Just as an Ursa was about to gain the top of wall for the very first time by riding on the back of a tightly packed wave of Creeps and Beowolves, Jaune powerslid under the slashing arms of a Beowulf already on the ramparts and swept his molecule sharp sword through the bear Grimm's newly revealed throat before using his remaining momentum to bounce back up to his feet. Then he was backslashing at the Beowulf from before, spinning to avoid the stabbing claw of a Creep to his left and then slamming his shield into the creature's face to smash it back down into the main body of the surge.
As close won as that moment of fighting had been, it was also nothing new anymore. With every second that passed, the Grimm attacks came faster and faster, while averting complete disaster became that much harder to accomplish.
With a sudden growl of aggression that fueled an explosive expansion of leg muscle, Jaune aura dashed four meters down the wall in a single instant to remove the leading claws of a pair of Beowulf that were trying to get the drop on Blake from within his area. He'd be damned if his new partner was pushed off the wall from behind because he wasn't fast enough to do his job!
A claw slashed hard against Jaune's aura shielded back even before his feet settled back on the ground, but then his sword was bisecting the Beowulf's face into two pieces with barely a glance spared back in its direction. In the next instant, Jaune was slashing his sword in a wide, fast paced circle to cut down a trio of Creeps that were closing in on him from every side.
Off to Jaune and Blake's left, an Ursa finally managed to gain access to the ramparts even as Blake fought like a madwoman to get to its side. Soon enough, she was slicing into the beast from every angle as her body popped out of existence over and over to avoid the attacks that were flying towards her back.
Blake dodged nearly a dozen hits with only inches to spare as she weaved in between three Beowolves until her cleaver finally severed the Ursa's right shoulder from its body at the neck. Then she took a nasty claw slash to the back of her right thigh that dropped her to a knee, stabbed her attacker in the forehead and was slashed again from her left. With a feline growl of aggression, the woman exploded back to her feet in a whirlwind of kicking feet, and waving swords, and then popped from existence.
When Blake reappeared, it was with her sword planted directly through the Ursa's throat.
Blake Belladonna was just as lethal as ever, but because there was no space that was actually free of danger for her to dodge to, she was taking more and more damage with every single minute that passed.
In a twist of fate that Jaune could've gone without, the shield that Taiyang had said he should just get rid of was saving him from taking a lot of the damage that his far more skillful martial artist partner couldn't avoid...
"Incoming machine gun sweep," Laura suddenly screamed out from her spot on top of the lookout tower, causing both Jaune and Blake to immediately drop to a knee as a river of Red Dust flew by just a foot or two over the barrier wall between them and the Grimm surge.
The seemingly never ending series of Dust rounds sliced and diced all of the Grimm that were currently trying to gain the ramparts, giving the two young Hunters a chance to regroup and take a few deep breaths. Then the machine gun fire suddenly disappeared again to aim somewhere else, and the two Beacon Initiates were instantly returned back into the thick of it.
It was at that moment that the situation became much, much worse for Jaune and Blake, and yet it took several moments for the two of them to figure out exactly why. At first, all they knew was that the machine gun fire wasn't slamming into the Grimm surge at the base of the wall anymore. In the end, it took Laura calling out an explanation from atop the lookout tower for the reality of their situation to fully settle on their shoulders.
"C ranked Bug Grimm are approaching the Airfield on the cliff sides," the engineer shrieked out as if the fact that they were bug Grimm somehow made them ten times scarier than normal.
And perhaps she was right.
Now that the higher level, more versatile Grimm were beginning to enter the gorge, the machine gunners were having to focus all of their attention on the cliff faces to their right and left, where an incoming wave of Ants, Spiders, small breed Centinels and Sulfur Fish, were crawling along the rock directly towards the lookout towers. The Sulfur Fish especially needed to be destroyed ASAP because their acid stingers could and would destroy whatever metal they managed to hit within only a minute or two at the most...
Jaune and Blake weren't going to be getting any more support in the form of machine gun sweeps. One of the biggest assets that they'd had going for them up until that moment was no longer available...
Well... Damn...
They'd just have to move faster then. They'd just have to fight harder. They could do it. They could make it. Jaune immediately started mustering his entire will into becoming a focus of destruction, both his sword and the point of his shield sharpened to a molecule thin point that he used to sever necks and limbs with every single movement that he made.
It wasn't enough...
A hard claw slash to the back of Jaune's right shoulder slammed his body forward so he used the momentum to punch his sword through a nearby Beowulf's chest and then leapt over its disintegrating body to dropkick a climbing Ursa right in the face and launch it back down into the surge. Then Jaune was falling backwards into a writhing mass of Creeps and Beowolves and was rolling free with his sword sawing indiscriminately through whatever patch of flesh and sinew that he could reach.
A razor sharp mouth closed around Jaune's left bicep and a set of claws slashed at his right thigh. In return, the beasts received a sword slash to the chest and an aura bolstered shield bash to the face, and Jaune used the momentum generated by those attacks to bounce back up to his feet. After shaking off the mass of Grimm that were clawing at his back and shoulders, Jaune saw Blake being similarly overwhelmed just a few meters behind him and he whistled loudly to get her attention.
In the seconds that followed, Jaune and Blake, backpedaling towards each other even as they continued to struggle. Their backs met somewhere in the middle, and they covered for each other as if they could read each other's minds. Now that they were stuck fighting back to back in the middle of the wall, the odd Grimm decided to ignore them completely and then had to be shot full of Red Dust by the extremely frightened Security team.
"How's the aura," Jaune called out even as he cut a nearby Beowulf in two right down the middle.
"It's bad. Below fifteen percent," Blake immediately yelled back. "I can't keep taking hits like this!"
Nodding his head, Jaune immediately turned towards the lookout tower where one of his engineers was waiting for the signal. It was time. It needed to be done. "Six bombs over zones two and three," Jaune screamed towards Bernadette.
"Righteo boss," Bernadette immediately screamed back with a scary amount of excitement in her voice. Then the woman was lobbing six grenades, three ice and three electric right over Jaune and Blake's position on the wall, causing a series of five by five meter wide elemental explosions to freeze and then incinerated a massive swath of the Grimm that were at the front of the surge.
In the seconds that followed the explosion, the two Beacon Initiates rapidly popped back up from cover, and destroyed the eight or nine Grimm that still remained on the ramparts with them. Then Jaune immediately dashed back to Blake's side.
"Please stay still while I supplement your aura," Jaune called out in an urgent voice as he tightly wrapped his hands around both of the woman's shoulders. "You're our damage dealer, Blake! I need you back in fighting form like now!"
Blake drew in a breath to form a reply, but then the words never came. Instead, a high pitched "nyah" exploded out of the woman's newly wide open mouth as she dropped to her knees, slapped her hands down atop Jaune's wrists, and began shaking like a leaf from her head to her toes.
Jaune had begun channeling a strong current of his aura directly into Blake's body right through her aura field, and it was just as intense and foreign a sensation as you'd expect it to be. Aura was a form of energy that was generated by the human soul after all... It was an extremely personal, exceedingly intimate type of energy, and while most Huntsmen or Huntresses could sense other people's auras to a certain degree, very few people on all of Remnant would ever feel someone else's core essence to the extent that Blake was currently feeling his.
Blake's face almost immediately turned a vibrantly bright red, the skin of her arms and legs developed a rash of very pronounced goosebumps, her back arched like a bow, and she released a long, low and throaty groan that somehow sounded both tortured and overtly sexual.
Mostly to keep his focus well away from the oddly erotic sounds that were leaking out of Blake Belladonna's mouth, Jaune stared down at the rapidly regrouping Grimm host and took stock of their current situation. On the one hand, things were just as bad as before and the two of them were only moments away from being swamped by the Grimm again. On the other hand, he couldn't deny that he was extremely pleased by how well suited his body was to surviving a siege...
While it was obvious that Jaune was nowhere near as fast or as lethal as Blake in a one on one fight, he was extremely well suited to enduring endless waves of mob level enemies because he could absorb tons of damage without losing too much of his aura. The fact that he'd been cutting off his aura whenever the opportunity arose all afternoon was finally beginning to pay off, because Jaune's reserves were still over seventy-five percent even after all of the abuse that the Grimm were giving his body.
The truly surprising aspect of their current situation was that Jaune would probably still have over half of his aura left even after he finished completely restoring Blake back to full strength. Even as he dropped closer to the metallic rampart to follow Blake's increasingly curled up body, Jaune could sense that the woman's max capacity wasn't even a quarter the size of his and that her reserves were filling up at an extremely rapid rate...
Good. They were going to make it. It looked like they had just enough time for Jaune to bring Blake back up to full strength before they'd need to start fighting again
In the meantime, Jaune hoped that Blake could still hear him through the paroxysm of sensation that she appeared to be experiencing, because he needed to keep her informed about what was going on, and he needed her prepared to rejoin the fight.
"In about fifteen seconds the Grimm will be at the top of the wall again, and we're going to have to get back to fighting," Jaune explained almost directly into the shivering woman's ear. "I don't think I'll be able to repeat this aura exchange a second time Blake, because I'll need a ton of my aura later when it's finally time for me to use my Semblance. Please nod if you understand."
With a haggard and shaky indrawn breath, Blake slowly nodded her head, but she never let go of Jaune's hands and it didn't look like she intended to until they actually ran out of time.
With a nod of his own, Jaune glanced aside at the surge of Grimm that was just a few meters away from gaining the wall again, and then he began counting down from "five, four, three, two, one, now," he yelled out, yanking his hands from Blake's shoulders, drawing his weapons down from his back and then slicing the lead Beowulf's face in half with a rapid downward stroke.
Then Blake was flying back into battle with the exact same aura bolstered speed and ferocity that Jaune had found so impressive earlier in the afternoon, and he found himself fighting his way back to his four meter long stretch of rampart with a feral smile stretched across his face. It had worked. It was working. Due to the fact that it was his aura that was currently fueling Blake's body, Jaune could actually feel the fact that his black haired Huntress counterpart was topped up, firing on all cylinders, and ready to cause all hell.
For the next five or so minutes, Jaune and Blake fought their way through a never ending tide of D ranked Grimm, while making excellent use of Bernadette and her grenades to clear some space whenever they were being overwhelmed. They'd learned their lesson about being too frugal with the explosives, and with their help they were just barely staying ahead of all the chaos. They were doing it. They could do it. They could make it...
Jaune should've known better than to start raising death flags like that even in the relative safety of his own mind...
An absolutely gigantic lump that had been subtly growing into place underneath the main body of the Grimm surge suddenly exploded up into the air at the top of the wall, revealing itself to be a superior breed of Centinel (Centipede Grimm). This B ranked Grimm waved half of its twenty meter long body up high in the air and then blurred back down towards Blake's tiny human body like the cracking of a whip.
Blake attempted to dodge. She tried to move. She couldn't. An Ursa Beowulf pair that she'd been fighting ended up impeding her progress with rapid sweeps of their claws, forcing her to dodge their attacks with her Semblance and slowing her down just enough to keep her stuck in place.
The Centinel's body slammed down into the top of Croftlan Colony's barrier wall like a hammer made of chitin armor and rapidly clawing legs, cratering the metal with Blake Belladonna slammed flat on her back underneath its bulk.
As he sprinted across the central span towards the Centinel and Blake, Jaune took comfort in the fact that he knew his partner was still alive. The aura that he'd channeled into Blake's body was largely gone, used up to protect her body from such a fantastically powerful blow, but she was still alive and she was struggling to break free from underneath the beast's crushing body. She needed out of there now. She was taking damage with every second that passed. She didn't have much time!
Leaping between four Beowolves and an Ursa without even recognizing that they were still a threat, Jaune flipped his sword upside down in his right hand so that he was holding it like a dagger, activated his aura armor at twenty percent output, and then stabbed the sword down into the Centinel's head with all of the armor bolstered strength at his disposal.
The reactive armor strengthened attack still wasn't quite enough to pierce all the way through the massive bug Grimm's brain, but it was enough to make the damned thing rear back and attempt to bite Jaune's arm off. Acting entirely on instinct, he immediately shoved his rifle-shield directly between the beast's protruding mandibles to pry open its relatively tiny mouth, mechashifted his shield into its rifle form, and began firing bullet after bullet down its unprotected throat.
For the next five to ten seconds, Jaune desperately sawed his sword blade back and forth inside of the massive Grimm's cranium, looking to find something vital inside of its oversized and underutilized brain even as he fired round after round of Red Dust down the beast's mouth and throat. That was the moment when the Centinel decided that crushing Blake wasn't its main priority anymore, and it reared back into the air, carrying Jaune's body right along with it.
Immediately after being drawn up and away from the wall, Jaune planted both of his feet over the Grimm's mandibles, and kicked off as hard as he could to rip both his shield and sword from within the beast's torn up head. Then he was crashing back down onto the ramparts a few meters to Blake's right, rolling over to grab the woman around the waist and bodily throwing her through the air towards the lookout tower's catwalk.
Blake yelled out in apparent indignation as she flew through the air like a sack of potatoes and slammed into the side of the lookout tower, but Jaune didn't even notice, let alone care. The woman was almost completely out of aura. She wouldn't have been able to survive what he could sense careening down towards the ramparts from above. Even as he turned around from completing his throw, Jaune could see the Centinel's shadow rapidly growing larger, its body dropping down to crash into him at speeds that he'd never be able to dodge.
After raising his rifle-shield, Jaune prepared to use the armor to parry the beast's weight to the left. He had no intention of suffering the same fate as Blake. He couldn't afford to hesitate.
Then Jaune saw a bright yellow streak careening down through the air even faster than the Centinel and his eyes widened in a mixture of extreme surprise and confusion.
"I'm sorry!"
Smash!
With a deafening crashing noise, the blonde haired woman haymaker punched the Centinel right out of its downward trajectory so that its body slammed into the ramparts four meters to Jaune's left. Then the woman was straddling the beast's head from above and raining down a rapid-fire blur of devastating punches that were made even more powerful by the Shot Gauntlets that she was wearing on both of her hands.
"Did she just apologize to that Grimm before punching it in the face," Jaune yelled out even as he turned his attention back towards the Beowolves and the Ursa that were leaping in his direction.
"Wasn't that girl apologizing to you," Blake immediately called back as she joined Bernadette at the railing of the lookout tower.
"No way! Not possible! Apologizing to the Grimm is far more likely," Jaune replied as he ran his sword through three tightly packed Beowolves, kicked an Ursa off of the wall and then finally allowed his aura armor to drop back into its bands. He needed to stop hemorrhaging aura like this. He needed to conserve his strength until Payla arrived with that tank of water. He needed to work together with... Yang...
Well... shucks...
Wading back into the mass of Grimm that were pouring up onto the ramparts, Jaune got back to the grizzly task at hand, but he also began yelling over to Yang in the vain hope that she'd actually listen to him. "Did you come down here with a partner Yang?"
"Nope," Yang grunted in reply as she finally finished hammering a series of deep craters into the Centinel's head, causing it to release a bone shaking shriek as it began turning into a black mist. Then the blonde woman was leaping back down towards the central span of the wall, and slamming her entire body weight into a Beowulf's spine with both of her feet. "I figured all of the people worth pairing up with would already be down here helping, and I figured this is where you'd be. I really am sorry by the way."
"Ah... Well... okay then," Jaune haltingly replied, his words containing far more incredulity than he intended. He was far too busy disemboweling a nearby Creep and stoving in a Beowulf's head to worry about controlling his tone of voice and mannerisms. Not only that, but Yang had to know that her current actions would come as a surprise... On the other hand, Jaune knew that it was time to grow up. He had to bridge the gap. He had to coordinate with this woman.
"My new partner over there, Blake, took a surprise attack and is out of the fight," Jaune called out as Yang settled in on his left hand side and started raining punches on every Grimm that dared emerge within her sites. "I have a plan to deal damage to the A ranked Goliaths that are moving up the gorge, but I need to preserve my stamina until that moment comes. Will you support me here in the center?"
"You got it," Yang immediately called out as her eyes took a fiery red cast and her fists picked up speed with every single movement that she made. Without another word, the woman began tearing her way back and forth across the central span, shredding the amassed Grimm against her fists and each other, and spraying black Dust every which way from her shot gauntleted hands.
"John, John! The left side! The canyon wall! The Sulfur Fish are destroying the left side machine gun emplacement," Blake started screaming out.
With a loud grunt of aggression and alarm, Jaune twisted his sword free from the top of an Ursa's head, cast his eyes to the left side of the barrier wall, and then gasped at what he saw happening.
While the machine gunner within the right side lookout tower was firing quick and deadly sweeps of red dust that neatly cleaned up any Grimm that approached it, the left side gunner was nowhere near as skillful and the gun emplacement was beginning to take acid damage from the incoming Sulfur Fish.
This was bad... Jaune didn't have the faintest clue what to do... He couldn't desert Yang and the center span. He needed to stay in the area if he wanted to enact his plan. He needed... something...
As if summoned from the desperation of his thoughts, a series of beautiful white glyphs formed in the air just above Jaune's head and two women vaulted down the different platforms to land atop the ramparts on his left and right side. Weiss Schnee and Pyrrha Nikos were arriving on the scene, and Jaune would have to admit that a huge sigh of relief wanted to explode from his mouth. He didn't let it happen, but it was a close won thing...
"Where are we needed most, John. I'll trust you to point me in the right direction," Weiss called out as she sliced a Creep in half with a rapid sweep of Myrtenaster.
"After nodding his head to acknowledge the very subtle Atlesian style apology that Weiss was trying to make, Jaune gestured at the far right side of the gorge and the trouble that was developing there. "I have a plan to deal with the Goliaths, but it's keeping me locked in place here in the center. Yang's an excellent damage dealer and should stay exactly where she is, but the left side machine gun is being taken down as we speak, and we don't have any long range defenders to take its place!"
"On it," Weiss instantly announced as a series of glyphs formed beneath her feet and she rocketed down the wall towards the left side machine gun emplacement.
Eight meters to Jaune's right, one of the smoking and sputtering anti-gravity gurneys suddenly caught fire and exploded, destroying two more gurneys to its right and left, and opening a gap in the gravity barrier. Almost immediately a large segment of the Grimm slamming against the center span detoured to attack from this newly opened up direction.
In response to this new crisis, Jaune immediately looked towards the Mistralian hoplite that was slicing a nearby Beowulf into several pieces, and he wasn't all that surprised to find that the woman already knew the direction of his thoughts... With a single backwards glance, and the parting words "I'm sorry for my earlier misunderstanding," Pyrrha Nikos was off, running down the length of the wall to take up a position in the middle of the new gap.
Woah... So cool... Jaune was extraordinarily impressed. In fact, Jaune was probably a fan... He was also surrounded on all sides by Beowolves and Creeps and he didn't have the time to be fanboying! With a rapid shake of his head, Jaune slammed his shield into an approaching Creep's jaw, shattering its teeth before punching it clear off of the wall.
With a sudden crash of rapidly displaced bodies, two light pole like structures slowly grew up into the sky over the lip of the wall, and then unfurled to reveal that they were the segmented stingers of an exceedingly dangerous variety of Grimm. Jaune immediately yelled at Bernadette to throw the last eight grenades that she possessed and the woman nodded her head.
"Yang, down," Jaune screamed out as he ran towards the blonde woman's side. "Death Stalkers are at the wall! We're throwing explosives!" When Yang was far too busy tearing an opposing Ursa to teeny tiny little pieces to hear his words, Jaune bodily tackled the woman from the side, and the two of them crashed down against the foot of the rampart's barrier wall. They were just in time to feel a massive discharge of electricity shake the wall beneath them and fill the air over their heads with yellow arcs of cascading lightning.
"We threw explosives. Death Stalkers are at the wall," Jaune panted out almost directly into Yang's ear, just in case the woman hadn't heard him the first time. Then he was slowly rising up and off of the woman's tensed up body, and looking down over the lip of the wall. The Death Stalkers weren't dead. The explosives hadn't been enough. All that the grenades had done was destroy the Grimm that the two scorpion Grimm had been climbing upon, which had dropped them seven or eight meters towards the ground.
They'd be back. Those Death Stalkers were going to be a problem...
After reaching his feet and offering a very silent Yang a hand, Jaune and the blonde turned to take on the newest wave of Grimm that were swelling up the wall and pouring over the barrier.
For an indeterminable amount of time, Weiss held back the bug types on the gorge wall, Pyrrha was a blur of motion at the gap in the gravity barrier, the right side machine gunner was so damned good that Jaune found it oddly familiar, and Yang supported him enough that he didn't lose too much aura. The problem with their current situation was both twofold and obvious. The first problem was that the number of Grimm in the gorge was growing with every single second that passed. The second problem was that Jaune had no clever idea to make easy work of the two Death Stalkers that were climbing closer with every moment that passed...
Then it was finally time, the Death Stalkers were rising up to assault the wall again... Jaune and Yang both shook out their bodies as they approached the barrier wall and watched the two scorpions' stingers wave in the air above their heads. They shared a glance. They both knew the truth of their current situation. This was going to be a mess...
"Big brother!"
"Say what now," Jaune spluttered out in surprise as his head swiveled up to catch sight of four people dropping into the gorge on the back of an extremely overburdened looking eagle Grimm... Nora Valkyrie, Lie Ren, Ruby Rose and... "Penny," Jaune screamed out in his surprise and shock.
"I'm sorry for not telling you big brother," Penny called out even as she mercilessly steered the eagle Grimm directly into the right side Death Stalker. The impact that followed was so powerful, the bird Grimm immediately exploded into a cloud of black smoke. Of course, by the time the bird smashed against the Death Stalker's side, the four Beacon Initiates riding on its back had already leapt off to land upon the ramparts.
"I was bored and lonely and I missed you, so I wanted to go to a school where I'd have family," Penny continued to explain as she ran up to Jaune's side.
Jaune caught the orangette in an extremely tight hug without any hesitation whatsoever, even as he saw that neither of the Death Stalkers were dead yet, and he needed to keep his attention on the task at hand. "I'm not upset with you at all Penny, but I'm going to be a little distracted until we finally put an end to this crisis. Can you bind the heavily armored stingers of those two Death Stalkers for me with those floating laserswords of yours?"
"Oh! Good idea big brother!" With a subtle wave of her arms, eight different brilliantly bright green swords flew up towards the tips of the two Death Stalkers' stingers, where they slammed into and then around the chitin armor and levitated them both straight up into the air. The Death Stalkers screeched as they tried to stab their stingers down at their prey, but found that they were trapped in place. They tried to skitter towards the wall next, but they were being held back by the high tech aura force that allowed Penny's laserswords to float in place.
"Everyone, pick a limb and sever it at the underside of the joint where it briefly turns a dark grey color," Jaune called out even as he drew his sword and leapt down atop the closest Death stalker's body.
Lie Ren used the his chain scythes to sever at least four of the Grimm's front legs, Yang grabbed a hold of the newly dismembered Grimm's leading claws and ripped them right off, one after another, in an extremely impressive application of strength, and Nora laughed with violent glee as she hammered away at the second Grimm's many legs with her massive hammer.
Showing that she was an excellent team player, Ruby decided to focus her attention on the waves of D ranked mob Grimm that were trying to capitalize on their distraction by moving in from the sides. Her scythe sliced apart anything that came too close in a blur of fantastic speed and agility.
With most of the limbs removed from the two Death Stalker's bodies, Jaune finally swung his molecule sharp sword towards one of the links between segments on the beast's stinger, severing the appendage from its body at the base. Even as he leapt across the gap towards the second scorpion Grimm, he was immensely grateful for Penny's assistance, as performing a severing cut on the weak point of a moving Death Stalker's limbs would've been nearly impossible...
In the end, nobody ever even bothered putting the two Death Stalkers out of their misery. Within just twenty seconds of Penny's involvement, the Death Stalkers were both limbless and stingerless and were rolling down the mass of Grimm below like when a pill bug rolls into a ball.
Even with the Death Stalkers no longer a concern, Croftlan Colony Airfield's situation was still becoming more and more dangerous with every single second that passed. More and more of the anti-gravity barriers were beginning to fail as they used up all of their purple Dust reserves or burnt out under the load that they'd been subjected to, and the Goliaths were just a few minutes away from slamming into the wall.
Over the next minute or two, all of the Beacon Initiates found themselves manning a segment of wall, relieving the overwhelmed and nearly useless Security Guards, and doing what they could to hold back the seemingly endless tide of Grimm. Penny seemed reluctant to leave his side at first, but under Jaune's directions she joined Weiss on the left side of the wall so that the two of them could use their long distance Semblances on the approaching bug type Grimm. Blake's swords could also mechashift into machine guns, so she joined Weiss and Penny.
Jaune found himself fighting next to Yang again, which was an extremely surreal situation because the blonde woman was being the very definition of helpful and cooperative. It was almost eerie... If doing so were possible, Jaune actually would've liked to back off from the fighting to conserve his aura, but the siege was still far too one sided for that and they were all spread far too thin. He'd just have to hope that he could get the job done with what aura he had on hand...
It was during this time that Payla finally sprinted back up the stairs to the ramparts, where she started turning a winch attached to the stairwell with all of the aggression of a strength type Huntress punching an A ranked Grimm to death. The woman had tears forming in her eyes and her legs were visibly shaking in fear even from a distance, but she was moving like a bat out of hell and a long segment of chain was rapidly being drawn up from the Airfield below.
In his peripheral vision, Jaune saw the massive refueling hose being pulled up the height of the inner wall towards Payla's winch, and he breathed out a massive sigh of relief. The Goliaths were upon them. The three massive elephant Grimm were only thirty meters away from the wall and getting closer by the moment. The time was now...
"Can you handle both of our zones while I work on something," Jaune called out to Yang after shattering a spider Grimm's carapace with his shield and then stabbing a Beowulf through the eyes.
I'm all over it," Yang confidently responded as if defending eight meters of wall completely unassisted were no big deal at all...
Seriously... Jaune was going to have to find out what in the hell was going on with Yang sooner rather than later, but first they needed to survive the day, and to do that, he needed to get to work.
Sprinting over to the stairs, Jaune ran down a single level to grab a hold of the hose for himself. After leaping back up to the level of the wall, he patted Payla fondly on the shoulder, and then whispered for her to go find a secure place to wait everything out. Then, when the fearful but brave engineer was running down the stairs, Jaune dragged the massive hose over to an area of wall that still had a working anti-gravity barrier and he aimed the nozzle over the edge.
At first, when Jaune turned the spigot on the industrial sized nozzle of the hose, the only thing that happened was that a high pressure outpouring of water began spraying out to soak the Grimm below. Then, as he furrowed his eyes and set his face into extraordinarily determined lines, the beam of water thinned out and was joined by what looked like extremely cold water vapor that seemed to be glowing just the faintest yellow in color. Finally, after about fifteen seconds spent releasing a mixture of water and vapor down towards the Grimm below, the high pressure water coming out of the hose was completely replaced by a frigid gaseous mixture that had Jaune shivering even as he clutched desperately at the hose.
In about a minute, I'm going to need all of you off of the wall," Jaune loudly called out as he pushed and strained his body in a way that wasn't the least bit physical.
"What's that boy even doing," Weiss asked aloud as she continued to use her Semblance to smash Spider, Ant and Sulfur Fish Grimm off of the gorge wall and away from the colony.
Stepping forward, Penny's neon green eyes stared down at the frozen gas and vapor that was spewing forth from the refueling hose in Jaune's hands. Then her eyes widened even as she began explaining. "That hose is feeding John a huge supply of pure water, or its chemical name H2O, one part Hydrogen and two parts Oxygen... John is... He's splitting up the water molecules using his aura and the heat in the water to provide the energy required to tear the covalent bonds apart. What we're looking at right now are two separate gas clouds occupying the exact same space. One cloud is completely composed of pure Oxygen atoms and the second cloud is completely composed of Hydrogen atoms. John's using his Semblance to fill the entire gorge beyond the wall with these two very, very very reactive gasses..."
"How very reactive," Blake added in a newly worried tone of voice.
"If John does what I think he's about to do," Penny breathed out with a very well executed look of growing anxiety on her face. "We all need to get down below the wall as soon as possible, and hope to Oum that John knows how to survive what he's currently unleashing. Those two gasses in that particular combination are usually so explosive that a single spark, one tiny little current of static electricity, could turn us all into a black stain on the nearest solid surface. I assume John's currently keeping that from happening by controlling the particle matter inside those gas clouds..."
Both Weiss and Blake stopped what they were doing to stare over at the black haired boy that was hugging at the hose nozzle as if it were a teddy bear.
With teeth that were chattering and hands that were nearly frozen to the metal nozzle of the refueling hose, Jaune found himself channeling over ten times more aura than he'd ever attempted in his entire life in order to keep the quickly growing clouds of Oxygen and Hydrogen not only separate, but stable and floating in the same place within the gorge. Even though the plan was working exactly as he'd intended it to so far, there was a problem... Jaune could feel that he was almost entirely out of Aura, which meant that he wouldn't have enough energy left to make use of the reactive armor.
If Jaune wanted to use his Semblance to continue controlling the very volatile mixture of gasses in the gorge below, he needed to be close enough and he needed line of sight... What this meant was that he was about to completely vaporize himself unless he thought of something extremely clever within the next few seconds...
And then a thought really did occur to him...
Jaune suddenly remembered how his parents had bottled his aura within those crystals during all of the years he spent in captivity... Aura was clearly a physical and tangible type of energy just as much as it was a spiritual force... Could he... Could Jaune split an aura particle? Could he expand on what he had by dividing it in half two or three times and then spreading it all out? Did he dare try it?
Did he dare not to?
With clenched teeth and a fiercely determined expression on his face, Jaune cast his attention deep inside of himself, where he began using his Semblance to split and then resplit his dwindling aura pool into smaller and smaller parts over and over again, and then he spread out these newly created aura particles throughout his entire body.
Right away, Jaune found that splitting his aura was torturously painful in a way that simply couldn't be described, leaving him groaning and twitching as his inner being was strained to its very limits. At the same time, Jaune felt himself burning up as if his aura was fueling a Dust reactor within his chest, and the resulting energy felt like it was expanding outwards to press against the soft fleshy parts that comprised his physical body.
Amongst all of the wrack and ruin that Jaune was absolutely certain he was doing to his body, he could also feel a brand new variety of roiling and vibrating aura energy bursting forth from within his every pore, ready and waiting to be used...
It was working... Hot damn...
As a yellow and white shroud of aura began leaking up and off of Jaune's skin as if it was a molten gas that was drifting up into the sky, he growled in increasing amounts of metaphysical agony, drew his reactive armor up around every inch of his face and body, and then drew in a very deep breath.
"Everybody, off the wall, now," Jaune suddenly demanded with an amplified voice for every single person defending the wall to hear. "No, I'm not joking! Anyone still on the wall when the next ten seconds comes to an end will end up being completely incinerated! Move! Move now or get yourself completely vaporized!"
By the time, Jaune was finished screaming at everyone, they were all aura leaping down the various structures inside of the wall and were well out of the way of the explosion. Even Blake, as drained as she was, managed to vault off of a series of metal beams to safely reach the ground.
With a sigh of relief and a deep bracing breath of suit filtered air, Jaune returned his entire focus back to the two glowing yellow gas clouds that were hanging around the three rapidly accelerating Goliaths, and all of the B ranked Grimm that were trailing in behind them. Now that none of his classmates were manning the walls, the surge of mob Grimm were frantically scrambling up and onto the ramparts and were dashing in his direction from every single angle.
Jaune's perception of time seemed to shift. The various Grimms' movements felt like they slowed to a crawl.
It was time...
What followed felt like Jaune was just giving the two gas clouds a little nudge. It felt like he simply reminded the two gasses that they were extremely attracted to each other. He reminded them that under normal circumstances, ninety-nine point nine-nine percent of all the Hydrogen that exists on Remnant is tightly bonded to Oxygen in the form of water... He reminded the two gasses that they were very, very attracted to each other. At least... that's what it felt like within Jaune's mind as he huddled against the rampart's barrier wall and decreased the light entering his suit to preserve his eyesight. Whether or not that kind of imagery is how his Semblance actually operates, he'd likely never know.
What Jaune did know for sure, was that it worked...
The two massive clouds of purified gas, instantly and completely bonded to each other at the atomic level in an exothermic reaction so immensely powerful, so spontaneously enormous, and so unbelievably hot, that Jaune didn't even remember the exact moment that the explosion happened. One second there was an ominously large but tightly controlled gas cloud floating down near the Grimm, the next second every inch of his reactive suit was on fire, he was barely conscious from the force of the blow he'd just received, and he was flying like a cannonball across the entire airfield towards the end of the gorge.
After slamming down against the tarmac at the end of the Airpad, Jaune's body dug a fifteen meter long trench in the concrete before slamming shoulders first into a massive boulder that spider-web cracked in half under the impact. The flames, luckily enough, were put out at some point during Jaune's crash landing, but he was left just slumped there against the boulder with what felt like an extraordinarily broken body. At the very least, he couldn't move his right arm at the moment... Thankfully, he suspected that it was merely dislocated.
After allowing his aura armor to retract back into its bands, Jaune slowly and painfully, one arm pushupped himself back up to his feet, and then looked around himself with an amused expression on his face. His HUD glasses were indicating that his aura level was currently at ?#** percent, and he was standing within a grey tinted environment. He was outside of the testing area.
He'd failed his Initiation...
Figures...
With a small shake of his head, Jaune started stumbling drunkenly back across the Airfield towards the barrier wall and the immense cloud of dust and steam that was rising to the sky behind it... The barrier wall itself was still standing but... the entire massive metal shell was visibly dented inwards.
Payla sprinted up not long after Jaune regained his feet, so that she could drag his uninjured arm over her shoulder and help him walk in a relatively straight line. Not long after that, when Jaune crossed the threshold that designated the testing area, he was met by quite a few of his fellow Beacon Initiates, which he figured meant that his plan had worked, at least for the moment. From where he was standing, Jaune could just barely see Lie Ren and Nora manning the wall to keep an eye on the Grimm surge as it rebuilt itself. He could also see that the right side machine gun was still hard at work...
Weiss, Ruby, Yang, Blake, Penny and Pyrrha's mouths all began moving as soon as Jaune approached them, but he ended up shaking his head and gesturing at his ears. "Both of my ear drums have ruptured," he explained, or at least, he hoped he explained, as he currently couldn't hear a damned thing. At the very least everyone's lips immediately stopped moving.
One thing that Jaune didn't need working ears to notice, was the fact that Blake didn't have a yellow halo over her head anymore, and that she was standing next to Yang. It was relatively safe to assume that since he was disqualified from the Initiation Test, the two girls had instantly become partners upon seeing each other.
In the seconds that followed, as Jaune became increasingly distracted by what this new turn of events might mean for his future, Weiss walked up to him with a very concerned look on her face and a handkerchief in her hand. She softly drew the white fabric across his chin and neck, and it came away wet with blood from his ears, nose and mouth. Jaune slowly pulled himself off of Payla's shoulder so that he could run his uninjured arm across his own face, and he stared down at his newly bloody forearm for several seconds in a row.
And then the world kind of went sideways on him... and the last thing that Jaune felt was his body dropping towards the ground...