Update time!
Reviews:
Reader - Yup, that's going to be a training arc. Also, I don't think Oscar's going to use the cane for an Over Soul.
Pedro Alonso Buby Huayanay Zamudia - I'm glad that you don't mind it.
Midnight49 - Well, you will have to keep reading if you want answers for the future questions like that.
Gamelover41592 - Thanks as always. :)
98kazer - I don't really hate Ozpin, though I guess with how I wrote the previous chapter that might seem like that. He actually is one of my favorite characters, especially after the backstory we got from season 4. I just like the concept of an immortal hidden person guiding the humanity from the shadows.
X3runner - Well, thank you for the review.
NinjaFang1331 - Thank you.
Tension in the tent rose after Raven's words reached everyone's ears.
Whether it was because of seriousness, fear, or even just simple curiosity, none of them dared to utter a word. Even Nora, who usually was the loudest and most energetic of all of them, stayed silent, awaiting an explanation from the Branwen tribe leader.
"The story of Hao starts somewhere most of you probably haven't heard of." Raven started with a grumble before turning slightly towards Jaune and gesturing at him with her head. "The only one out of all of you who should know anything about it is that blond brat that Summer chose to follow if I think correctly."
Jaune and Summer blinked at once in response, as far as they were aware Hao was as much a stranger to them as to everyone else. The Arc shaman then pointed at himself with some confusion before tilting his head slightly and speaking.
"Me?"
"Yes, you." Raven nodded. "You've been taught by the Asakura clan, right? I may not know any of them personally but I would be a terrible judge of the Shaman Fight if I didn't know about the famous shaman teachings of the Asakura clan."
Everyone turned towards the blond shaman who still looked as confused as earlier.
"You're right." Jaune said slowly with a stiff nod. "I've been taught by the old man Asakura back when I was traveling aimlessly through the kingdom of Vale, I still consider him to be my teacher of shaman ways, but I don't see how that's related to Hao at all. All of the Asakura clan is already dead and only a few of them remain as spirits on Remnant."
"It's actually quite simple, kid." Raven grinned a little as if she knew something that nobody else knew, which considering the situation was likely the case. "That monster, Hao, who you all have undoubtedly met or at least heard of, is one of the most powerful and oldest ancestors from the Asakura family. He is so ancient in fact that he likely predates these so-called 'brother gods' that cursed Ozpin here with his immortality."
At that revelation everyone shuddered in surprise, though out of all of them the one who was most surprised by the information appeared to be none other than Ozpin of all people.
"That's impossible!" Ozpin shouted through Oscar's body as he quickly stood up with an angry expression. "The brother gods are so old that people of my time considered them to be ancient! There's no way that there exists someone who's older than them, even if he can endlessly reincarnate into another life every generation or so."
Raven calmly raised one of her eyebrows with an expression that somewhat resembled a pity. She stayed like that for a couple of seconds in silence while looking at the old immortal before finally sighing and continuing her explanation.
"Hao might not be older than the 'brother gods' age wise since those spirits are almost as old as the Remnant itself but he certainly comes from a time before they gained their godly powers."
"What do you mean by that?" Ozpin asked with a scoff. As far as he was aware the brother gods were deities that had shaped the world into what it was known as today.
"Do you really believe that those old spirits were always all-powerful?" Raven asked back with a lazy tone but before anyone could answer her she continued. "I may not have seen how the world looked during your time but I can tell you that those brothers only received their powers somewhere around the time of your first life. Tell me, do you remember them doing anything remarkable before they've cursed you to become immortal?"
Ozpin stayed silent in response, trying to remember at least a single tale of the gods actually doing something before his time. Sadly, despite him being able to remember countless stories of gods supposedly being omnipotent and divine, he couldn't actually remember a single tale in which the gods actually did something.
"B-But-" Ozpin stuttered as his worldview was questioned.
"The spirits you know as the brother gods were simply the guardian spirits of the previous and the last shaman king to have graced the Remnant. Sure, they always were strong spirits that could contend with the greatest of the ghosts in the world but most of their famed power came from their connection to the shaman king and therefore the Great Spirit." Raven said tiredly.
"That's..." Ozpin said absentmindedly without even noticing how Raven pointed at Summer with one of her hands.
"If the Arc kid wins this Shaman Fight then Summer will be able to reach a similar status." Raven said with some amusement in her voice. "Will you consider her as a god equal to those brothers if that happens?"
"I-" Ozpin started with a weakened voice but before he could say anything Raven coughed loudly to cut him off before turning to the rest of the people in the tent.
"That isn't important at the moment anyway. I've brought you here to tell you about the danger that is Hao and maybe to help you a little bit before you have to face him, and not to talk about the previous shaman king." Raven said with a grumble.
Jaune and all of his friends nodded briefly before leaning forward, awaiting the story of Hao. When Raven saw that they were taking it seriously she smiled a little and nodded but she didn't allow others to see it clearly so she hid it with a smirk.
"I don't know the exact details of what happened back then or what the reasons Hao had for becoming the person he is today since the Branwen tribe back then was only in its infancy and didn't have the best relations with the Asakura clan but I can tell you that for some reason Hao went rogue killing most of his clan before declaring that he will create a world where only shamans exist."
All of them blinked a couple of times as they processed the information.
"That..." Jaune started to say something very slowly before stopping himself with a wince as he couldn't find a good word to say what he wanted without sounding insulting.
"Sounds extremely vague and abbreviated, almost as if you had almost no idea about it too." Thankfully Whitley didn't appear to have this issue so he easily spoke the words that most of them were probably thinking.
An amused snort escaped Raven when she heard that critique, somehow she wasn't offended by Whitley's rather crude observation.
"It's because it is vague and abbreviated. It's a hidden history from before the brother gods came to power, do you really think that we have any concrete records of that time?" Raven answered with a smirk.
That smirk quickly turned into a loud laughter in response to the dissatisfied groans and grumbles all of them let out when they heard how Raven didn't know much more than that about Hao's origin.
"What I can tell you is that after dying for the first time Hao managed to somehow overcome the natural life and death cycle which allowed him to reincarnate every time he dies and that at one point during his reincarnations he managed to reborn as a leader of the Branwen during its peak which caused it to fall from grace and decline into nothing more than a common bandit tribe it sadly is now." Raven said seriously after she finally stopped laughing.
"Wait!" Yang interjected loudly. "You mean that your tribe wasn't always this rundown bandit tribe in the middle of nowhere? That's not how uncle Qrow always described it, he claimed that the tribe was always terrible."
Raven scoffed at the mention of her brother's name, almost as if just the prospect of Qrow being of any relevance in the tribe made her feel offended.
"Please, a failure like Qrow wasn't even taught the history of the tribe. All he knows about it is from all the actions we took in the last few generations. If he were to learn of our true legacy he would have called it nonsense." Raven grimaced a little.
Yang cast her eyes downwards and tightened her fists in anger. Was that why Raven had abandoned her? Because she was a non shaman failure like her uncle was? Was she simply not good enough?
Outside of the blond huntress in training's sight, Summer looked at her with concern in her eyes.
That concerned look was momentarily changed into a brief glance of anger at her living ex-teammate to reprimand Raven a little however the black haired huntress didn't look fazed by it at all and she simply stretched her neck a little in response.
"Branwen tribe was never supposed to be a bandit tribe." Raven added solemnly.
Yang abruptly stood up with enough force to knock everyone next to her back a little before rushing off outside the tent.
"Yang!" Ruby shouted with concern in her voice before lifting herself off the ground and reaching out to stop her older sister. Her arm was stopped before she could reach her however as Jaune grabbed it with a stern hand.
Ruby turned around to look at her friend questioningly and the only thing she received from Jaune was a shake of his head and a gesture as if he was pointing at something or someone right outside the tent.
"Summer has already left to comfort her." Jaune said as he looked through the tent's exit. "I know she's invisible to you two but she insisted that you stay here while she helps Yang calm down."
Jaune made sure that his words were loud enough for Yang to have heard him. Summer might have left the tent to help Yang but if she wasn't aware of her being there then it wouldn't really accomplish much.
As if his words reminded Yang of something, the blond brawler suddenly stopped in place at the other side of the camp and shook a little after the realization that her mother was with her was processed by her mind.
"I know it isn't my place to meddle with your family affairs but I believe you could have treated your daughter a bit better, Raven." Ozpin said from the corner of the tent and Jaune couldn't help but agree with the body snatching immortal.
"This conversation doesn't even concern her." Raven rolled her eyes in exasperation. "I'm just warning you of Hao, it's not my fault that she started asking unnecessary questions and then got some harsh conclusions from my answers."
The entirety of team RWBY that was left in the tent and Chocolove looked at the Branwen shaman with pure hatred in their eyes. They accepted that they needed all the help from her they could get but they certainly weren't happy about it.
The gazes of all the rest of them turned cold as well, although their eyes were filled with less hatred and more disappointment than the eyes of team RWBY.
"Well, you kids certainly seem emotional right now." Raven said with a small yawn before lazily getting up from the ground and gesturing for all of them to follow her. "It's good, it means that you will have more energy for what I have planned for you all."
Seeing their host walk towards the exit all of them quickly looked at each other before Jaune slightly nodded and stood up as well to follow the Branwen tribe leader. They might have their gripes with the stronger shaman but they weren't going to decline help from her.
After they have left the tent, Yang briefly looked at them in clear surprise and some hidden hope. Sadly that hope quickly turned into an even bigger discontent the moment she realized that Raven wasn't moving to console her.
Jaune had to say, it was the first time he saw Summer looking with so much anger at someone.
He trusted that she knew how to help her daughter without any help and while unable to be heard or seen because he wasn't going to go against her wishes and let any of her friends help her. Even if the rest of team RWBY looked ready to murder him because of that decision of hers.
As Raven walked straight towards the camp's exit she didn't bother to pay attention to her daughter sulking right next to her. She had something important to do and the family bonds would only slow her down right now.
They left the camp in absolute silence, leaving Yang alone with Summer to come to terms with her own emotions.
...
In the camp...
...
Yang didn't bother to stand after seeing her mother lead her friends somewhere and immediately after she found a good corner of the camp she sat down with her back towards the wooden wall.
Usually when she felt bad she always went out to find a way to release all the tension built up inside her. Whether it was at an arcade, shady bar or even a forest full of grimm, it didn't matter as long as she could exhaust herself enough to forget about any other issues she might have.
It was such a pity that it didn't seem to be an option here since none of her mother's goons appeared willing to fight her and since apparently Summer was hovering right over her to later give her scolding through Jaune for releasing stress like that.
Not that she could see her real mother of course, Summer was a ghost and she was anything but a shaman.
"There they go." Yang said somewhat wistfully before looking upwards at the sky. "It's just you and me here, mom. Though unlike Jaune, I can't really talk to you on my own. Well, at least a monologue when I know that you are listening is better than having to talk to you through Jaune."
Silence met her words, unsurprisingly. Even if Summer had said something that would have improved her mood instantly and turned the day into the best day ever, she didn't have the capabilities to hear that.
A soft sigh left her at the gentle wind that was flowing in the camp.
She supposed that it wasn't all that bad to be left almost entirely alone in here. There was no saying how much more awkward it would have been for her if her younger sister saw her moping like that.
Ruby was the last person she wanted to make feel worse, especially so soon after finding Summer again.
"I don't suppose you can blow the wind around me to create sounds loud enough to have a conversation?" Yang asked awkwardly.
The wind blew as leisurely as it had before, there was no change that she could hear or even feel. If Jaune hadn't told her that Summer was near her to comfort her then she would have believed that she truly was alone in that bandit camp.
That was, if she could call the camp of the Branwen tribe a bandit camp. Uncle Qrow had always referred to this place as such but as she had just learned he apparently had no idea what he was talking about.
After all, uncle Qrow was a 'failure'.
Just like her.
She whined pitifully into her arms and some tears might have stained the sleeves of her clothes as well.
Here she was, a badass huntress in training, the arguably best freshman at Beacon, supposedly an heir to an ancient shaman family responsible for overlooking the most important and secret tournament in the world, weeping pitifully in the corner of a bandit camp where nobody was bothering her. She truly deserved to be called a failure if that's the best she could do after finally meeting Raven for real.
At the very least there wasn't any of her friends here to see her like that. Not counting Summer who supposedly stayed with her, of course. Although knowing her mother she probably was patting her back with as much gentleness as any living, or in this case not living, person could.
"W-Was my worth really decided the moment I left that woman's body?" Yang asked with a quiet and strained voice.
She didn't know if this question was directed at herself, Summer, anyone in this damned camp or if she was asking that to the brother gods themselves, considering what she had learned not ten minutes ago she didn't know if those supposed gods mattered at all in the first place.
Despite the fact that the question itself was probably quiet enough to not be heard by anyone aside from her and maybe Summer, depending on how close to her she was, someone appeared to have heard that as rough footsteps suddenly started resounding through the camp while growing in volume as they came closer.
Yang looked up to see who was coming over to her to see a short haired girl at most a couple of years older than she was walking up to her with the most annoyed walk she had ever seen.
The girl looked pissed, furious even, although her rage seemed to come from annoyance at something rather than an actual heavy feeling of anger.
Yang blinked a couple times as she looked at that and her eyes cleared a little from the tears that were filling them up earlier. She had no idea why that girl would be angry at all, in fact she barely knew who that was.
"Are you two idiots!?" The girl shouted at her in an almost comical rage.
Yang blinked once more before a sudden realization hit her. That angry scream made her remember who the girl was quite well, especially since she had heard her scream a couple of times already.
"Your name's Verny, right?" Yang frowned as her mind tried to remember the name more clearly. "You are Nora's friend."
Sadly it seemed that her guess was an incorrect one because the moment she said that, Verny exploded in anger and Yang had to wince from the volume of the short haired girl's denial. If she wasn't feeling so down already she might have joked a little at that reaction or maybe teased the short haired girl a little but with the situation as it was she just didn't have it in her to be playful.
"I'm not her damned friend!" Verny shouted in annoyance. "That crazy redhead is just being extremely clingy to me for some spirit damned reason. I swear if I wasn't supposed to keep away from all the tournament as a judge, I would have beat her up a couple of times to teach her a lesson already."
So she wasn't wrong about it being Verny. It would have made their conversation really awkward if she truly mistook her for someone else, especially since the short hair girl was the one to walk up to her and not the other way around.
"What do you want?" Yang asked somewhat rudely but her question fell deaf on Verny's ears as she was too busy grumbling in discontent to pay attention to what was going on around her.
After seeing the powerful shaman who brought them here act so silly in front of her for a couple long seconds, Yang couldn't help herself but to snort loudly at the situation she found herself in.
"Are you laughing at me now?!" Verny asked angrily with her fist tightened.
As if on command from Verny, a short snort instantly turned into a fit of giggles. Which soon changed into snickering that wasn't too far off from a full-blown laughter that Yang could barely contain.
Verny turned red from anger and before Yang could stop laughing the short haired girl knocked on her head with a fist.
That appeared to be enough for Yang to calm down as right after being hit in the head she grabbed the place she was struck at to relieve the pain a little. Verny didn't strike her very hard, the punch was weaker than what most of the huntsman in training did during the spars and her Aura absorbed most of the damage from the hit, but it still stung a little.
"Are you finally done with laughing like a loony, you idiot?" Verny spat with contempt.
"Hey! Stop calling me that!" Yang protested with a genuine anger in her voice. She had enough of being considered a failure by her own biological mother, she really didn't want to be called an idiot by her henchman on top of that.
"I call it as I see it, and when I see two fighters brooding around in the corner of the camp despite being stronger than almost the entire tribe, I call them idiots." Vernal said with something that resembled a grumble.
Yang looked at Verny for a few seconds in silence with a contemplative look before slowly glancing around her to see the tribe living their day and keeping themselves busy as usual.
She didn't understand what Verny tried to accomplish by calling her stronger than all those people. Sure they didn't look that strong compared to her, they looked as threatening as any common bandit, but Jaune and Whitley didn't look strong either and she had witnessed just how powerful they truly were.
Shamans just couldn't be compared to ordinary people when it came to fire power. So what if she was more skilled at hand to hand combat than most of them when a single more useful Over Soul would leave her helpless. There was simply no way for ordinary people to compete when they couldn't see, hear, or interact with the main weapons and abilities of shamans.
Especially so if someone was a 'failure' like she was.
A stinging feeling once again made Yang wince a little as Verny lightly punched the top of her head. This time she didn't look angry though, if anything the short haired girl looked disappointed.
"You were about to go back to being stupid, weren't you, you idiot?" Verny said in a tone that wouldn't be out of place on a thug that was trying to rob someone.
"So what if I was? It's not like you should be concerned about the thoughts of a 'failure' like me." Yang said through clenched teeth as she looked at Verny with anger in her eyes.
In response to her rather rude question, Verny exploded in laughter, leaving Yang slightly confused.
Thankfully it didn't look like she was the only one who was confused as all the tribe members around them started looking at them with clear puzzlement present in their eyes. It felt oddly refreshing to finally have more than three people to be confused at what was happening with her.
Finally, after a couple of really confusing seconds, Verny's laughter subsided a little as she moved a little closer to Yang.
"You must be a bigger idiot than I thought you were if you truly call yourself that." Verny remarked with a loud scoff.
"What do you mean by that!?" Yang asked loudly as she stood up in a quick movement to get on the same level that Verny was at.
Her hand shot forward in an attempt to grab the short haired girl and demand to explain what she meant but it was easily dodged by Verny who simply stepped to one of her sides before slightly turning around to face the same direction as she was.
"Tell me, you blond idiot." Verny spread her arms wide open as if to gesture at every member in the tribe that was before them. "Do you see all those 'failures' before us? They are about as spiritually gifted like you, if not less, and they certainly are a lot less useful than that."
"What?" Yang asked briefly before quickly looking from one bandit to another. "They are all members of your damned shaman tribe, how can they all be more useless than me, someone who didn't even know about the shaman side of the world more than a month ago?"
Verny once again snorted in laughter as she looked at all of her fellow tribe members and Yang swore that she saw contempt in the girl's eyes after she mentioned the Branwen tribe's real purpose.
"Please, at this point Branwen tribe is a shaman tribe in name only." Verny said with a lot of displeasure in her voice. "How many shamans do you think there are in this tribe nowadays?"
Yang raised one of her eyebrows in response before looking at the tribe members around them once more. She supposed she might as well answer Verny's question, it wasn't like she would be losing anything by getting it wrong.
Or at least she didn't think she would be.
Her mind immediately tried to come up with an answer. The number couldn't be too big since Verny had practically just shown her that there weren't any other shamans in the camp aside from Verny herself and it didn't look like there were many members that weren't present. It probably wasn't a really low number either since the Branwen tribe was still a shaman tribe and it had to have at least some shamans to be considered as such.
"Four?" Yang guessed, saying a slightly lower number than she thought of because Verny likely wouldn't have asked that question if the number of shamans was bigger than she expected.
"Two." Verny corrected with a scoff. "Only me and Raven."
Yang turned to look at Verny with her eyes wide open. It meant that in just a single hour and two short meetings she had managed to meet with all the shamans in the tribe and she didn't even know it.
She wasn't sure whether it was comforting or worrying.
Was the Branwen tribe in an even worse position than she had thought initially?
"Then how...?" Yang asked with a small gasp as she tried to put her disbelief into coherent words.
"How are we considered a shaman tribe?" Verny smirked as she put what Yang wanted to say into words. "It's simple, even if none of those guys are actual shamans themselves, the fact that we are actively continuing the shaman tradition and don't abandon the teachings of our ancestors is more than enough for us to be considered as a tribe of shamans. That, and our ancestry of course."
Yang looked at all the tribe members with a stupefied expression on her face. If history and following some old shaman teaching was enough to be called a shaman tribe then she really had to wonder why there weren't more shaman tribes around.
"Wait, if what you're saying is true then why was uncle Qrow called a failure? He shouldn't be worse than any of those weak tribe members." Yang asked after a second or two.
"Even if the Branwen tribe is focused around the concept of strength, it isn't the only thing that we judge our members on." Verny shook her head with a smirk before pointing at a certain tent in the camp.
"Do you see that tent?" Verny asked before continuing after getting a slight nod from Yang. "It's the place where upon reaching a certain age every tribe member goes to be judged by the spirits of our tribe. Among those spirits we obviously have the guardian spirits that me and Raven are using but the ones judging the members also include the previous tribe leaders."
Yang looked at the seemingly unassuming tent with wonder in her eyes though she also tilted her head a little in confusion. She had no idea how that thing was related to her uncle being a failure.
"That bastard Qrow not only didn't show up to be judged by those spirits the first few times he was asked to but he also somehow managed to offend almost every single spirit that was tasked with judging him." Verny let out a small laugh as if she was remembering a particularly funny story which, knowing Yang's uncle, it probably was. "Him not being able to interact with spirits was only a small part of that."
Yang's eyes were so large after she heard that, that Verny had to giggle to herself a little after seeing them.
"T-Then what about me?" Yang whispered to herself in confusion.
"What about you?" Verny asked.
"Why am I a failure?" Yang asked a bit louder than earlier.
"You're a failure?" Verny asked with an almost comical tone. "That's the first time I've heard of it. Have you been judged by the spirits already when I wasn't looking? Because if you have then I'm honestly impressed you managed to pissed them off so quickly to be considered a failure by them."
"I-I..." Yang was at a loss of words.
A rough hand pushed the blond brawler upwards making her tumble a little forward from disorientation as Verny sat down to rest.
"Go meet with you friends, little ro-I mean, blond idiot." Verny smirked crudely. "If I'm guessing correctly, they should already be in the Spirit of Fire Sealing Cave and they will need all the help they can get there, trust me."
Yang quickly turned around to look at Verny for a moment with a warm expression on her face.
In the end after a couple seconds of looking and blinking a few times, she returned the smirk Verny gave her with her own confident smile and turned around to the exit of the camp before running towards it.
"Thank you for that!" Yang shouted as she came closer to the exit.
"Thank me for what, you idiot?" Vernal grumbled to herself quietly, knowing fully well that Raven's daughter wouldn't be able to hear her. "I just did what was asked of me and passed around a few messages."
Vernal shook her head slowly before waving her arm violently as if to chase something, or someone, away.
"Now, you better stop nagging me you annoying ghost and go return to your friends and daughters." Vernal said with a grimace. "There's no place for the dead to mope around in here, we are not some graveyard."
...
With Raven and the others...
...
The place that Raven had brought them to didn't appear as anything impressive at the first glance. It was a simple empty cave in an unassuming mountain that even the most curious of people wouldn't bother with exploring.
There were no ruins in this place shamans like them would often visit, nor were there any Dust deposits that would attract any potential huntsmen or businessmen. In fact there didn't appear to be anything around here.
Yet despite the unquestionable ordinariness of this place, everyone present could feel that something was off about it.
None of them could really place what that odd feeling was, for some the temperature seemed to be both hotter than it should logically be and colder than it was normally, for others it appeared to be a bit darker than it would be in other caves and dark places. What all those weird feelings had in common however was that all of them were so inconspicuous that nobody could really notice them.
Those bizarre properties of the cave weren't scary or threatening in any way but they for sure created an uneasy atmosphere around this place. An atmosphere that was only magnified by the sour mood that everybody had after seeing Yang struggle earlier.
"What is this place?" Whitley asked with a serious, almost professional, tone while looking around in hopes of finding anything useful here.
Whitley wasn't the only one who was wondering that either as almost every one of them kept glancing from side to side in curiosity about the seemingly normal cave. The only one of them who wasn't doing that was Nora who instead chose to run around the cave with no worry for her safety while exploring everything that they were missing by following Raven.
Unsurprisingly, she didn't appear to be finding much. Raven brought them here for a reason and if there was anything interesting or peculiar about this cave then she was going to show it to them herself.
They continued going deeper and deeper into the cave for quite some time. The more they advanced into the cave the more noticeable the peculiarities of this cave became at some point even those of them who weren't paying too much attention to the cave realized that something was going on.
Finally after a few minutes they reached the end of the cave and just before they could reach the wall at the end of the tunnel, Raven stopped all of them in place with a single move of her hand.
"That's the place." Raven said.
"What place?" Ren asked before looking around. "Everything looks about as normal as it looked the moment we entered the cave."
Raven didn't answer the question, instead she smirked a little before pointing at the ground before them with one of her fingers to show them what she meant.
Curiosity won over all of them and soon they all leaned a little bit forward to see what was going on, only to instantly reel back after realizing that a hole so large that they couldn't see its bottom was right before them.
"Okay, this looks unusual." Jaune admitted with a single step back before turning to Raven questioningly. "Can we finally get the explanation of what's going on here? We would really appreciate it."
"It's the place the Branwen tribe was tasked with keeping the Spirit of Fire in." Raven sighed lightly. "Currently, as you can clearly see, it's empty because Hao had taken the Spirit of Fire away."
Jaune turned slightly to look at the giant hole in wonder. It was the place that somehow was sacred and unique enough to hold a Hao's guardian spirit in place which, after witnessing the Spirit of Fire's power personally, he could say was beyond impressive.
"The Spirit of Fire was supposed to be sealed?" Whitley asked quietly while watching the deep hole.
"It and the other four Spirits of the Elements." Raven nodded slowly. "After the previous shaman king took their throne, they assigned their guardian spirits as the spirits with the biggest authority over Remnant, which meant that other spirits of similar power had to be hidden away to not shake the balance the shaman king created. Each of the most important tribes at the time was tasked with keeping one of the Spirits and we as Branwen were given the Spirit of Fire to take care of and this is our sealing ground."
All of them silently listened with curiosity as the fate of the five elemental spirits was revealed to them, it was always interesting to learn something new. However despite the relative allure of the topic, that knowledge wasn't actually necessary for them.
"Why are we here though?" Whitley asked impatiently.
"We are in this place to start your training." Raven asked with a wide grin that for some reason looked a bit scary on her. "You didn't think I would tell you all of those things about Hao and leave you without any help, did you?"
The moment those words were processed by Jaune and his friends almost all of them reacted in surprise, the only exceptions were Ren and Jaune himself who shivered a little as they heard that. They already had the experience of dealing with hellish training and they certainly weren't looking forward to another session of something similar, especially if this training was going to be overseen by a person like Raven.
Summer and Nora were already bad enough on their own, they certainly didn't want to imagine what training under a bandit leader would look like.
"So do you want us to practice making our Over Souls in here, or something?" Whitley asked loudly. "I don't see how doing that here is going to be any better than training outside the cave."
"Don't worry, we are not going to be doing something stale like that." Raven said with a grin that spoke of trouble. "In fact, you won't even need your guardian spirits to help you with this exercise."
"Wha-?" Jaune turned around to ask Raven what she meant but a sudden and powerful gust of wind interrupted him by pushing him and all of his shaman friends, with the exception of Oscar, towards the hole.
"Aaaaahhhhhh!" They screamed in panic and surprise as they suddenly found themselves right above the deep dark hole.
"You won't be able to feel anything in that hole making it seem as if you've died." Raven said with a smile as all of them were still held directly above the hole by her wind Over Soul. "You have one week to leave the cave."
The moment those words entered their ears, all of them began falling down and as they looked up they saw Raven looking at them with an annoyingly smug grin that no doubt would be haunting them in their nightmares from now on.
"Good luck."
And cut!
The training arc begins!
There might be quite a long break after this or the next chapter since my exams are beginning and I will have quite a busy time right after them so don't be surprised if the next update will be only in a month or two. I will try to update whenever I can though.
See ya!