Update time!
Reviews:
Reader - I don't think I will add Penny to the story at this point. (Maybe if I thought of her earlier then I would be able to do that but at this point in the story it would be difficult to add her as anything other than a single throwaway character in the third round of the tournament.)
Kolomte'49 - I think that at the moment she learned that her son is a shaman as well she just accepted that the shamans are a thing and that she should support any shamans she knew in someway. Also, glad to know that you liked the transitions.
Pedro Alonso Buby Huayanay Zamudio - Thank you and Whitley's second Over Soul is coming soon.
Gamelover41592 - Thanks
X3runner - Glad to know you liked it, and I had to do something with Pyrrha in Argus because I haven't really planned for her outside of that one part of the story. Anyway, thanks for the review.
The town of Azalea was far from being anything impressive. There weren't any beautiful landmarks near it, nor was it close to any of the bigger cities where one could find some success. Even its size wasn't that much greater than that of any other common village that could be found in Mistral.
If there was anything remarkable about that small town in the middle of nowhere at all then it had to be the train station around which the entire town was built to ensure it had an easy access to resources from bigger cities like Argus or the city of Mistral.
The train station alone wasn't enough to attract any tourist or long term visitors though so it wasn't like there was any commotion happening there on a daily basis.
Despite all of that however, for the last couple of days in the town of Azalea one could barely find a single well rested and not weary person. Everyone in the settlement looked either constantly afraid for their life or on edge and worried about something.
The reason for the pitiful states of all the Azalea's citizens was actually quite simple, an infamous bandit tribe known throughout the entire Mistral decided to set up their camp in a thick forest not two hundred steps away from the thin walls of the town.
While those bandits had tried telling them that they weren't there to cause trouble and they even paid for everything that they requested of their town, it hardly made anyone in the town feel better about the dangerous travelers visiting their bars and shops on a daily basis.
Those bandits had such a presence that some of the shops and bars in the town had already started having a special two hour period of time during the day in which they only served the people from the tribe in hopes that they would be spared if the bandits ever decided to stop being so docile towards them.
This day the town's people appeared to be even more afraid of the bandits than usual as a rather large group of eight different bandits led by a young short haired girl was slowly making their way towards the train station.
People locked themselves in their houses, some of them barricading their entrances to make sure that nobody would be able to enter without a struggle, and only the bravest of them dared to look out of their windows to observe what the bandits were doing.
It wasn't the first time that such a large group entered the town and if the bandits acted how they usually did and simply crashed at one of the opened bars to drink some ale then nobody would have been nearly as afraid as they were. Sadly this situation appeared to be a slightly different one as none of the bandits looked anywhere near as drunk as usual and the leader of the group had her weapons ready for a fight.
"Oi! You lot better scram, the Branwen tribe is taking over this station!" The short haired girl shouted rudely while pushing the armed guards at the station away.
The moment militiamen hit the ground all of them hurriedly got back on their feet before running away and finding a place to hide. They might have been responsible for keeping peace around here but none of them were willing to pointlessly die for it.
A couple of loud shots echoed through the town as few of the bandits fired their weapon in the air to scare off any wannabe heroes who would try to stop them.
"We are doing all of this so that in the future you will have a chance at existing at all, you damned weaklings!" The girl scoffed before sitting down on one of the benches at the train station.
After a few of the bandits made sure that there wasn't going to be any unannounced guests trying to stop them, they subtly nodded to each other before quickly moving towards the control rooms of the station.
At the same time that all of this was happening, the youngest guard of the town quickly rushed towards the mayor's building to report the situation and ask for reinforcements.
Without the guard's knowledge, the leader of the bandit group noticed him rushing away from her bench but instead of getting up and trying to stop him, she only raised one of her eyebrows before shrugging without any worry.
If the town had any way of dealing with the bandits then they wouldn't have acted so boldly in the first place.
...
At the mayor's building...
...
The doors of the mayor's building slammed open as the young militiaman entered the building in a hurry. Some of the people who used this place as a temporary hideout from the bandits shook in fear the moment they saw the doors moved, thinking that the bandits were coming for them.
Nobody stopped the young man as he ran to the stairs to get to the higher floor in order to find the mayor.
Not a single person among the people in the building bothered to stop or help him. The only ones who reacted to the young man's actions at all were the older residents who looked at him with some pity in their eyes before sighing.
"Mayor! The bandits took over the train station! Please order all the guards to help with fighting them!" The young man shouted as he opened the doors to the mayor's room.
The mayor was an old and sickly man who sat in his modest wooden desk and looked at the young militiaman with tired look in his eyes in silence.
A few long seconds passed in silence without any answer and the young militiaman shifted awkwardly in place under the pressure of the mayor's tired gaze before looking out the window at the back of the room to avoid eye-contact.
The sight that the young man saw outside the window was the taken over train station that he had just came here to report about and he immediately started to feel stupid for his decision to come here in the first place.
Of course the mayor would know about the train station takeover, he's the one who's got the best view at everything that was happening. The mayor had probably already ordered all the guards to help them fight the bandits and the only thing he accomplished by arriving here was running away from the fight.
A tired sigh escaped the old mayor.
"I have no idea what you wished to accomplish by coming here but since you are already here then you can just as well use my room to hide as well." The mayor said to the shock of the militiaman.
"W-What?" The young man took a step back. "Aren't we going to stop those bandits with all of our guards?"
The mayor sighed again.
"Tell me young man, do you truly believe that we stand a chance against any of those bandits?" The mayor slowly stood from his desk and turned towards the window while ignoring the militiaman's reaction. "They didn't need to come here with all those people, you know? I'm sure that the young girl alone would have been more than enough to slaughter our entire village. We are actually lucky that they didn't choose to kill anyone."
"Y-You can't be serious." The young man said shakily.
The mayor stayed silent in response and merely looked at the train station with something reminiscent of melancholy in his eyes.
"T-Then, are we just supposed to hide away and hope that nobody's killed by those savages?!" The militiaman shouted in anger. "How will we be able to face the conductors and all the passengers on the train that's about to arrive if they are going to be robbed or maybe even killed because we did nothing about those bandits?!"
"How will we face them if all of us are dead?" The mayor asked back before sighing for the third time. "The train station is to be left alone and everyone is ordered to hide and if those bandits are doing what I think they are doing then we can only hope that they succeed."
"W-What?" The militiaman asked in confusion at the mayor's last remark but he received no answer as the older man was too busy observing the train station.
...
On the train...
...
The train ride through Mistral was both bizarre and chaotic. While the fact that they had an entire train car for themselves would have made Jaune consider this train ride unusual on its own, the eccentricity of this situation was increased by the VIP treatment they appeared to be getting.
Despite the train itself being second class at best, they were still being treated as if they were on the most prestigious of rides.
Jaune blamed Weiss and Whitley for that. Apparently when you had an heir of the richest family on Remnant in your group even the most common of goods turned into high-class treats.
Seriously, what had they ever done that would make the conductors of the train coming to them in person to ask if they needed anything?
It almost felt bad to ask them for anything, especially since all of that was merely a result of the Schnee family's fame.
Jaune shook his head slightly before looking at the Rose mother and daughter duo who constantly moved from one window of the train to another while admiring the landscape. At least two of them weren't conflicted about the treatment they've received.
A loud snoring sound resounded in the train car to his left as Nora comfortably slept through another station and Ren was trying his hardest to stay still and not wake his best friend up.
A cursory glance told Jaune that almost everyone besides him didn't feel too bad about using Weiss's and Whitley's fame for their own gain. That, or they all were simply too thick skinned to care.
Jaune groaned a little before leaning back on his somewhat hard chair that couldn't have been adjusted by the train staff to meet the Schnee's standards before the ride. Hopefully the ride's about to end because he didn't know how much longer he would be able to continue before succumbing to his greed and starting taking advantage of the Schnee's fortune himself.
How hard was it to stay noble under those circumstances?
"Can you stop running from place to place, you dolt?" Weiss's loud question towards Ruby brought Jaune out of his quiet lamenting. "You don't have any footing so the moment the train stops you will be thrown to the back of it."
"I'm sorry, it's just that the ride is so long and there's nothing to do here aside from admiring the view." Ruby, for all her excitement about being treated like a guest of honor in a common train, did look a bit bashful at her partner's remark.
Summer on the other hand didn't care for Weiss's warning at all and still continued her weird routine of gushing over Ruby and looking outside the windows in wonder at the landscapes they were passing, making Jaune raise one of his eyebrows at her as if to ask what her excuse was.
"What?" Summer asked with a look of slight confusion. "My little rose is right, there's nothing to do here and it's not like the law of inertia works the same way for ghosts like me. There's literally no danger for me to do anything here."
A quiet grunt of acknowledgement was the only answer Jaune could give because despite the rather childish tone that his guardian spirit took in explaining her reason, she was correct in saying that personal safety wasn't really a concern for her most of the time.
Unless they were going to fight against Hao and his crew anytime soon, there really wasn't a thing that their spirits should fear.
"Did mom say anything?" Yang leaned forward after hearing his grunt.
A quiet and tired sigh left Jaune as he heard that question. There was one other thing that made their train journey chaotic as whenever he answered or talked with any of the spirits about literally anything Yang or Ruby would instantly ask him if that was their mother and what they were talking about.
It wasn't like he didn't understand where this was coming from, if he could communicate with his close ones only through another medium then he would have been probably acting in the very same way, but even the most patient of people would become tired of always summarizing every conversation they had for someone else. It really made him wish that at least one of the Rose-XiaoLong sisters was able to communicate with spirits.
Shouldn't at least Yang be able to talk with ghosts and spirits?
Unlike Ruby's, her mother was a shaman and quite a powerful one at that or were the shamanic traditions in such a decline at this point that being a descendant of a shaman didn't guarantee an ability to interact with spirits?
It wasn't like he had a lot of time to ponder about it because just as he was about to think of many different possibilities, their train stopped at one of the last stations before their destination.
"We apologize but it appears that the train station of Azalea is facing some issues." A forcefully calm yet still quivering voice echoed from the train's speakers. "Please make sure to stay in your seats and don't panic."
Hearing the warning from the speakers and not really knowing what was going on, all of them did the only logical thing they could do. They stood up from their seats and grabbed their weapons, preparing for a fight.
At the very least they didn't panic.
"Do we know what's going on?" Whitley asked with a frown as his grandfather merged with the saber in his hand.
"Nothing as of yet." Ruby said quickly before stopping to think about some possibilities. "The train is probably being robbed by some bandits, nothing we shouldn't be able to take care of."
All of them nodded quickly to each other in understanding, even if some random bandits weren't exactly their equals in terms of strength they still had to take care of them and couldn't afford to take them too lightly.
Jaune and Ruby moved first, they were the fastest so if the bandits turned out to be stronger than they expected they could easily run away and regroup, with the rest of their group closely behind them.
Leaving the train wasn't an issue, they were traveling in the very last train car and the closest exit was right next to them and that wasn't even considering that Jaune could simply use his Over Soul to safely teleport outside without any issues.
The problem began only after he and Ruby left the train though.
The entire train station was filled with bandits in cheap and torn clothing that all had their weapons aimed at the newly arrived train. They didn't appear to be wanting to steal anything from it as none of them moved forward to actually rob people in the train, instead all of those bandits merely stood with their weapons at the ready waiting for someone to come out.
Ruby immediately tensed her body and spun her weapon to get a better grip on it but the moment Jaune saw the bandits and more precisely the spirits that appeared to be accompanying them he relaxed and only looked at all those armed people in slight confusion.
"Looks like we've stopped the right train." A snarky voice remarked from the side causing Ruby to instantly shift slightly to get a better angle at all the bandits.
Before Jaune could answer or Ruby was able to attack the bandits, the rest of their rather big group caught up to them, leaving the train. Almost all of them immediately raised their guards upon seeing the bandits surrounding them and got ready for a fight.
The only exception to this were Ren and Nora who looked about as calm as they always were after noticing the person who led all the outlaws around them.
"Hey Verny!" Nora called out while waving one of her hands. "Were you the one who stopped our train? If you wanted our help with something you could have just called us, you know?"
Every bandit around them turned towards their temporary leader with questions in their eyes.
Vernal's head turned red from either embarrassment or rage, Jaune couldn't quite tell which one, and her body began to shake violently as the two spiritual birds flew around her in a flurry.
"Don't call me that ever again." Vernal said through gritted teeth.
All the Branwen tribe members beside the short haired girl did the smart thing and began to slowly back away just in case a fight were to happen. They might not have been as clever as some of the shamans in the tournament but even they knew that they shouldn't stay in the attack range of an angry Vernal.
"Why not, Verny? We are all friends here right? If it wasn't for you then Renny wouldn't have even taken part in the elimination stage of this tournament." Sadly Nora didn't have as much self preservation instinct as the Branwen tribe members as she asked again with a slightly tilted head.
Vernal looked ready to explode in anger at the orange haired girl and she would have probably done so if it wasn't for a stupefied looking Weiss suddenly screaming out in confused anger.
"Wait! You know who she is!? Are you acquaintances with a bandit group like them?!"
Weiss's voice was high, loud and painful but for what it was worth, it at the very least has made all the bandits around them wince from the volume. Jaune looked at them with a small amount of pity, poor guys had to deal with their rowdy bunch.
If they hadn't taken over the entire train station to meet them he would have maybe even apologized to them for the ruckus they were making.
"Well yeah, of course we know Verny!" Nora said cheerfully to their dismay. "She was Renny's examiner during the elimination round of the tournament and judged the first shaman fight between him and Jauney! Why wouldn't we know her?"
"You were judged by a filthy bandit?!"
It didn't take long for that conversation to turn into a very one sided shouting match between Weiss and Nora, and for everyone else to lower their guards after realizing that the situation was nowhere near tense enough for a fight.
After a couple of Weiss's shouts even the bandits that took over the station and the villagers who hid somewhere in between the buildings started to look at them in pity. They could only offer wry smiles in response, it wasn't like they weren't aware of the mess they were causing, they just couldn't prevent it.
"Shut up! Both of you!" Vernal shouted after getting tired of the small comedic skit her target's friends were doing. "We are taking you to the tribe, understand? Boss said that you guys need some training if we ever hope to stand a chance against Hao so you will be getting it whether you like it or not!"
With her piece said, Vernal turned around angrily before stomping out of the village and giving order to all the tribesmen in the station to escort them to the tribe.
Seeing that they weren't meaning them any harm and knowing that he and his friends wouldn't be able to defeat them even if they did, Jaune merely shrugged his shoulders lightly before casually following behind the short haired girl.
Of course the moment he had decided to move all of his friends followed right after him, trusting his decision as an unwilling leader he apparently was.
"Who's that Boss she's talking about?" Yang whispered to Jaune's ear in question while gesturing towards Vernal to clarify.
Jaune frowned slightly while thinking of the answer. It wasn't that he had struggled with remembering who that boss was since he knew it very well but it was more about how to breach that topic with Yang without her going ballistic in response.
He subtly looked towards Summer as if to ask what to do, Yang was her daughter so if anyone knew what to do it was her.
Thankfully Summer didn't appear to have any issues with him simply telling Yang the truth as she didn't respond to his prodding look in any way and only smiled lightly in response.
"That boss is Raven, your mother." Jaune answered calmly after a second of deliberation. "I'm not sure why she wants to meet us though. For all intents and purposes she shouldn't do that. She's one of the tournament judges so she should be as impartial as possible."
At first Yang looked shocked but her expression quickly turned into one of deep thinking and consideration. When she heard that even Jaune had no idea why her mother wanted to meet them.
"Maybe she's got enough of this tournament and wants to get out of it by cheating?" Yang suggested, only to receive a shrug from Jaune.
With no other idea on what might be happening, they decided to stop wondering about it and simply follow the tribe. It wasn't like they could do more than some light speculation with the information they had access to.
...
In the Branwen camp...
...
When Ozpin had come to the Branwen tribe and demanded to talk with Raven he expected many things to happen. He knew he wouldn't be able to simply walk up to her and begin asking questions, he planned for there to be some opposition but he also hoped that once he got past it he would have a chance to get some answers.
He certainly didn't expect to end up sitting in the biggest tent in the camp with two guards constantly watching him after Raven had left him alone here saying that she had something more important to do.
Ozpin grumbled in discontent quietly as the repetitive song that Oscar had been humming in his mind to pass the time repeated itself for the fifth time.
It wasn't like Raven was doing anything important either, he could see her lazing around the other side of the camp and drinking beer. She didn't even bother to close the tent to make him unable to see it!
The two guards tasked with keeping him in place looked towards each other in response to his rage before shrugging without any concerns. Somehow that only made Ozpin even more annoyed.
And the humming from Oscar continued as well.
"Can you please stop that, Oscar?" Ozpin whispered to himself.
"What do you want me to do then?" Oscar asked back in their head, being just as, if not more, annoyed as Ozpin was. "It isn't like whatever complaining you keep doing is any better. If anything, it's me who's trying to be positive here and you are the one who should stop bringing the mood down even more."
"Do nothing and stay silent. We need to think of a plan on how to get answers from Raven and now we've got time for just that." Ozpin whispered his answer back.
"Do we really need to?" Oscar whined a little in their head. "It's not like she's going to come here to talk anytime soon. You can see how she's wasting her time there, there's no way she's actually going to change that simply for us."
Around this time in their conversation, the guards that were looking over them turned directly towards them with nervous expressions on their faces. They didn't say anything though and the only different action they made was grabbing their weapons tighter but they clearly acknowledged and reacted to Ozpin's conversation.
Ozpin hummed slightly as he noticed that change. It didn't seem as if those random grunts of the tribe knew of his condition or his ability to reincarnate but they still appeared to be afraid of him for some reason.
Was it the unexplained infamy he supposedly has around here in action? Or were they simply reacting like that because seeing a young child talking to itself in the voice of an adult was always weird?
He wouldn't mind figuring that out but sadly there wasn't really a chance to do that since the guards kept being as silent as ever. If he wasn't in the body of a young child then he would have thought that they were afraid of him for some reason.
A sigh left Ozpin as he saw Raven shift slightly from one side to the other. She didn't turn around to go towards them, of course. It couldn't have been that easy and convenient for him.
"It looks like she's waiting for someone." Oscar observed from their head after being tired of the companion in his head ignoring everything he said.
"She might be." Ozpin mused in a tired tone while quietly hoping that Raven wouldn't have to wait for long. "The question in that case changes to who she's waiting for? No matter what she's doing or how it affects us, we have too little information to do anything about it. Even speculating about it is difficult at this point and it doesn't seem like anyone's going to help us."
Ozpin leaned back slightly in fatigue before collapsing to the ground to lay down instead of sitting. Sadly there wasn't any bed or even a mattress here for him to comfortably lay on so he had to satisfy himself with the ground.
The quality of his stay here was almost insulting.
A bunch of loud noises and cheers suddenly exploded through the camp as every bandit in it turned towards the entrance. Ozpin tried to take a peek at what was happening but the only things he was able to see were the backs of rowdy bandits and crowded entrance to the camp.
Whoever had just arrived, they had to be in some high position in the camp. Maybe it was that short haired girl who tried to stop him at the camp's gates when he arrived here?
The noise quickly subsided as all the tribe members who were swarming the entrance moved to the sides to allow the arriving people a clear path towards the main tent.
Taking advantage of people stopping obscuring his view, Ozpin shifted a little to look at the people who were coming towards him only to immediately sit up straight after realizing who those people were.
The entirety of team RWBY and two members of team RLND were being escorted by quite a large group of bandits around them. Ozpin chuckled slightly upon seeing them, it didn't look like they were playing truant right now.
It wasn't his students or their equally young friends who were in that group that surprised Ozpin the most, however. A ghost of a very familiar person was floating right beside that group and Ozpin could only sigh in sadness after seeing her.
Out of all the things that he had expected to encounter in the Branwen camp, seeing Summer Rose once again wasn't among them.
He could only hope that she would forgive him for being the indirect cause of her death.
By the time that the group of his students, their friends, and a couple of spirits arrived at the main tent, the commotion in the camp died out completely and Raven finally decided to talk to them.
It looked like these kids were the ones for whom she was waiting.
Ozpin shook his head slightly as he observed the group of teenagers awkwardly find a place to sit in this tight tent of Raven's, none of them even tried to greet him with all of them either ignoring him or assuming he was just another one of the tribe members.
Well, they certainly were going to make his conversation with Raven more interesting.
...
A short moment later...
...
Jaune slowly looked around the tent, for a main living place of one of the few tribes responsible for judging the Shaman Fight, it was surprisingly small and shabby. There weren't any pretty decorations or relics of older shamans to make the place look better and even the material from which the tent was made looked like a cheap cloth that could be found anywhere.
There weren't even that many shamans in the entire camp in the first place, or if there were some then all of them had to share at most a dozen spirits between each other since there weren't any ghosts or spirits hanging around beside the few bird ghosts that followed Raven and Vernal.
An uncomfortable silence reigned over the tent as nobody said anything while Yang kept glaring at her biological mother so intensely that Jaune wondered if Raven was being silent because she was too afraid of doing anything under her daughter's gaze.
A young boy with freckles on his face fake coughed into his fist to get their attention before looking at them with a raised eyebrow.
Jaune did his best not to react to the boy's prodding in any way. That freckled face, brown hair, and hazel colored eyes of his reminded him too much of Hao for him to trust that boy.
He knew that he shouldn't judge people based on their appearances but when that appearance clearly showed the relation to a monster like Hao it was hard not to be cautious.
"Maybe we should stop staring so intensely at one another and actually start talking?" The freckled boy asked in a mature tone. "It is the reason you gathered all of us here Raven, isn't it?"
The freckled boy's tone threw Jaune for a loop, a tone like that, while surely bizarre when coming out of someone even younger than Ruby, was also completely unlike the tone Hao would use. Hao, despite his mysterious identity, more often than not acted incredibly childishly.
The sudden comment made Yang momentarily turn her head away from Raven to stare at the boy who said it and allowed Raven to relax a little because of that.
"I have no idea who you are but you will have your chance to speak with that cowardly mistake of a mother only after she apologizes for what she did to me and explains why she did that." There wasn't anyone who couldn't feel the venom in Yang's voice as she said that.
"Of course, I won't be stopping you from questioning your mother, miss Xiao Long." The freckled boy leaned back while raising his hands up a little to show that he wasn't a threat. "But I probably won't be speaking only for myself when I say that there's a bit more important issue that we have to discuss before you can resolve your family issues."
"How do you know who I am!?" Yang asked in a demanding tone in response.
The boy shook a little after hearing Yang's question, although that shock seemed to be less like one of fear and more like a shock one would have after remembering something slightly important that had been forgotten earlier.
A tired sigh from Raven brought everyone's attention before the freckled boy could explain to everyone who he was. The black haired woman appeared to be more annoyed than tired at the entire situation.
"This guy is your late headmaster, Ozpin." Raven rolled her eyes in exasperation. "He's an immortal parasite who devours the soul of a random similarly minded person every time he dies."
"What!?" Practically all of them screamed, some of them in surprise and others in pure terror. Learning that the world famous headmaster of Beacon was some spiritual parasite wasn't among the most comforting things one could hear.
Raven and Ozpin winced a little from the volume and a frown appeared on Ozpin's face, probably from some feeling of being offended though it wasn't like any of them particularly cared for the man's opinion after hearing that he literally ate human souls.
"Relax, you brats." Raven said after recovering from the wince. "It might sound terrible, and it certainly is if you look at it in a vacuum, but compared to a monster like Hao he's actually quite harmless. Honestly, if he wasn't so weak and insignificant then we might have been treating him like an actual threat and dealt with him somehow but as it is right now? This guy's nothing to be worried about."
At first Jaune wanted to argue or at least say that they should still be wary of the man but after thinking about it and remembering the massacre that Hao had done in Argus, he decided against it. If the shaman tribes responsible for the Shaman Fight were aware of such an existence then there was no way that they wouldn't actually have something prepared just in case they deemed Ozpin as too dangerous.
"Thank you for making me look like some sort of evil being, Raven." Ozpin said with a cough and a roll of his eyes. "I always do my best to help humanity as much as possible no matter who I reincarnate into. Summer here can actually confirm that I'm not an evil person if you truly do not believe me, she knew of my nature even before I changed my host."
Jaune turned towards his guardian spirit to ask if what Ozpin was saying was true but a surprised look on Summer's face stopped him from asking that question.
"You can see me?!" Summer asked loudly.
"I wouldn't be referring to you if I couldn't, would I?" Ozpin answered with a chuckle
"You couldn't before." Summer said quietly.
"That's actually the reason why I'm here. Throughout the many years that I've lived there has never been a situation where I could see ghosts and spirits but the moment I entered young Oscar's head suddenly the dead talked to me as if it was normal." Ozpin explained before nodding towards Raven. "It was a good thing that I remembered that Raven used to mention her duty as a shaman back when your team still studied under me in Beacon. I have no idea what I would be thinking right now if I didn't know about that."
While all the shamans in the tent followed the conversation without any issues, team RWBY and Nora were looking at Ozpin in confusion as he talked to himself like a madman from their perspective.
"Is that another one of those shaman things that we cannot take part in?" Nora whispered to Ren, though her whisper was loud enough for everyone to hear.
"Kind of." Ren shrugged lightly. "Headmaster Ozpin is apparently a shaman now. It makes me wonder though, how is he related to Hao? I doubt that Raven and Vernal would have decided to talk to him if he was completely unrelated to that issue."
"If you wanted to know something, you could have asked me, Miss Valkyrie. Whispering to your friend was completely unnecessary." Ozpin said with an awkward cough after realizing that not everyone could see Summer.
"Sorry." Nora said with a small smile.
Raven loudly grunted to get their attention, the impatience on her face was clear for everyone to see.
"Are you done with the small talk already?" The black haired woman asked rudely before continuing without waiting for their answers. "If yes then we can finally move on to the real issue we have and talk about Hao. The family and immortal teacher drama can be taken care of later."
Everybody shifted a little to take more serious positions the moment Hao's name was said. Even those of them who hadn't interacted with the powerful shaman yet were aware of how much of a monster that person was.
"It's good to know that you already know about him." Raven said while everyone's attention was on her before frowning slightly and taking a solemn tone.
"Because it will make it easier for all of you to learn just how much of a monster Hao is."
And... Cut.
The chapter's a bit shorter this time because I didn't want to forcefully fit the exposition meant for the next one in here and writing just a part of it here wouldn't feel well.
Speaking of which, the next chapter is an exposition chapter. Yay?
See ya later!