Shang Chi was kind of an unexpectedly great movie, definitely recommend. Also recommend the greatest B movie I've ever seen called Zoombies which is just such a great time.

Professor Paulyne Peach leaned her head back against the wall and sat on the ground, letting the early morning sunlight warm her skin. She nursed her bruised head with a cold pack which by now had warmed up, although it was better than nothing. The cacophony of people jamming into and spilling out of the nearby hospital entrance only exacerbated her headache. After being swatted in the skull but a particularly large ursa, even she needed to take it easy.

Resting outside one of the many overflowing hospitals, eyes closed, trying not to melt into a puddle of pain and panic… not exactly taking it easy. It was something, though; and at least it wasn't dangerous.

In that moment she tried not to think about the suddenly broken world around her. Outlying towns and villages were being attacked wholesale, the grounds at Beacon had been for now entirely abandoned as new waves of Grimm threatened to approach, what survivors remained from the stadium needed to be treated and the Grimm in the city itself had only recently been finished off.

She sighed and hung her head.

"They still haven't found him," said a man above her.

Peach looked up and saw none other than Qrow Branwen, known to most of the staff as Ozpin's good friend. She knew him as one of the few men Jaune trusted and looked up to.

"Well," she said. She closed her eyes again and ground the cold pack against her head, wincing slightly as it agitated her bruise. "It's not even been a day." She brought one hand down to the chains wrapped around her waist and idly clicked her nails against the rough metal there. "Everything's very mixed up."

Every other member of RWBY and JNPR were accounted for and recuperating.

"Yeah," Qrow said. He meandered to and leaned against the brick-and-mortar hospital wall. "Ruby said she couldn't find him even after running all across the campus." He reached for his flask habitually, only to disappointedly remember it was empty.

"Well," Peach said, "I'm sure he'll show up sometime. He's resourceful."

"Yeah."

"What are you doing in the meantime?"

"Lot of hunters are leaving to help out different towns, but I'm sticking around to hold the fort. Just in case."

"Just in case." Peach seemed somewhat distant, even as she spoke. "I'll be on call to do that too, but I'm mostly staying to support the students."

"Yeah?"

"I'm thinking some group conversations and the like… not sure." She sighed frustratedly. "Sorry… I have the sneaking suspicion that I might be a little concussed…"

"Should get that checked."

"All the doctors and staff have more urgent concerns, at least for now," Peach said. She sluggishly sank deeper into her slouch. "I think I'm also just tired, very tired. Everyone ought to just be sleeping right now. I'm just waiting for the exhaustion to finally override the pain and anxiety."

That made Qrow crack a macabre chuckle. "I can relate."

"Guess we just sort of put our faith in things getting better from here."

Jaune had been awake for a while, but the burlap sack over his head and the chains binding his hands and feet made it hard to do much. He sat on hard cement, hands bound behind him around a pipe. Even if he wasn't bound, he doubted he'd be able to move anyway; what with the utter exhaustion infecting all his muscles and the still aching wound. He felt scratchy bandages across his chest, meaning someone had gone through the care of trying to patch him up a bit.

Best now to preserve his strength and wait. Whoever had caught him had a reason for keeping him alive. He should keep calm and play along with that—for now. His captor's motives could change at any time, and his life could suddenly lose its worth. He only hoped it wasn't the Enclave keeping him so they could torture him to death in some excruciating, specialized way. All he remembered was being taken away from them and quickly losing consciousness.

Now he had one goal. Escape and get back to the others. If he had been pulled out, then surely they got out as well. He could give Pyrrha a huge hug, high-five Ren, fist-bump Nora and take Ruby in his arms—

He remembered the horrified look on her face. What she had seen. What she had heard. What had she heard? Had she heard his own admission of his darkest crime? If so, then she could never forgive him, could she? She was never going to look at him the same way again, was she?

How could he properly explain himself? Would he need to open up fully about himself and his past? The past which he would still have to keep covered in lies that stuck to him like tar.

And then there was Bishop. He was not stupid enough to assume he was dead. Bishop, much like the Lone Wanderer himself, had a penchant for surviving. They were creatures of the Wasteland, after all; creatures that had been strong enough and crafty enough and vicious enough to make the Wasteland and its vile occupants bend to their will or die.

He had finally believed himself to be safe from Bishop so long as he was in Beacon. Surrounded by so many hunters and huntresses, they wouldn't dare attack. Right? Wrong. Whatever sense of security he had was now thoroughly shattered. He couldn't trust Beacon. Or Ozpin. Or Goodwitch. Or even Qrow.

Obviously he would. He would go back to his friends. It would be an extraordinarily hard thing to do… one that he had done before.

He still remembered the look on Amata's face when she and the others from Vault 101 ordered him to leave after he saved them from that bastard father of hers. How quickly people could turn on you. The Lone Wanderer had only truly formed after that—

This dangerous thinking ended when he heard a door creak open. Light footsteps hit the concrete floor and stopped just before him.

A small hand tore the bag from his head, and he squinted in the dim light.

A claustrophobic basement boiler room surrounded him. Metal pipes ran along the walls, a single bulb dangling from the ceiling lit up the room, dark concrete enwrapped the space and stale air clogged his throat and nostrils. The coldness, the quiet and the copious layer of dust covering everything made it clear that the room had not been used in some time; but of course, the main thing he focused on was his captor revealed.

He recognized Neo. The last time he had seen here was all the way back on the train coming in from Mountain Glenn. From what he recalled, she had been fighting Qrow, only to disappear and take Bishop along with her.

"You bitch," Jaune said almost reflexively. He was tempted to spit up into her face, but a more reasonable part of his mind told him that she would respond with a solid kick to his face.

As it were, Neo didn't bother giving his insult any recognition. Instead, she pulled out a scroll and typed onto it.

As she wrote, Jaune scrutinized her. She was not wearing the normal stylized Neapolitan-colored outfit, but a simple black shirt, jeans and sneakers. Even her hair was a different color, now a dirty blonde. Strikingly, a huge bruise around one eye nearly forced it closed.

Regarding injuries, he also saw that her wrist was tightly wrapped in a brace, she had a large band aid across her forehead and she kept all her weight on one leg while standing. In short, she had gotten messed up.

Neo cut his observation short when she finished typing and shoved the scroll in his face. He read what she had written:

I saved you. I brought you to an underground doctor who fixed you up. I didn't do this to be nice. I was trying to hunt down Bishop, but when I found him, it was too late. He was surrounded by his soldiers and I didn't stand a chance. So I grabbed you on my way out.

She pulled away the scroll and started typing again into the notepad.

"Why?" Jaune asked. He was surprised by how raspy his own voice was, and his dry throat hurt from speaking. Just how long had he been out, and how long had it been since he took a drink of water? Reasonable thoughts, but what struck him more was that fact that Bishop's ally was an ally no longer.

"What do you want from me?"

When she showed him the scroll again, he got his answer:

I want to kill Bishop. You're his enemy. He talked about wanting to kill you more than anybody else. So you're going to tell me everything you know about him. All his weaknesses and his strengths. Then I'm going to drop you off on a street and that's that.

Jaune looked up at her.

"That's it?" he asked.

She nodded.

"How do I know you'll really just let me go when I tell you everything?"

She narrowed her eyes at his obstinance. Typing quickly, she showed him the scroll again:

I have literally no reason to keep you after or to kill you. Just leave and stay out of my way. If anything, having all of you fighting the Enclave too is a good distraction.

"I'm guessing Bishop double-crossed you?"

Neo gave him nothing. It was all the answer he needed.

"Yeah, the bastard does that to just about everybody he works with," Jaune said. "But before I tell you anything, you're going to—"

Neo whipped out a knife, a well-crafted military sort with a sharp edge and nasty point. The message was clear. Jaune didn't care.

"You," he repeated, slowly, "are going to tell me if my friends are okay, and then you're going to take me near them and leave me with them."

Neo glared at him, a furious snarl on her face. She typed onto her scroll and held the knife close to his face. When she held out her message for him, he couldn't lean in to read it for her blade was already so close to his skin, hovering before his eye. He squinted instead:

You're not negotiating here. Tell me everything.

"Just look up on that scroll real quick if the other members of team JNPR and team RWBY are okay," he said. "Then sure, I'll tell you whatever."

Neo's stare was just as sharp and vicious as the knife in her hands. Jaune met it with a stare of his own. When she scraped her knife's point against his cheek, still he did not blink.

Frustrated and wanting to get over this, she rolled her eyes and pulled back with a huff. She typed into her scroll, sifting through the internet for a couple minutes until she found something satisfactory. She thrust out her scroll again, wrathfully smacking Jaune in the face with it before holding it in front of him to read. It was a news article, one which reported that the "heroes from Beacon" who had fought at the Breach were all accounted for except for Jaune himself.

"Alright, that's all I wanted." Then he began to explain Bishop Beauvais to Neo, mixing truth and mistruth where necessary:

Bishop grew up in Vacuo; he was a part of military experiments that made him vastly physically superior; he had been trained since the moment he was born to be a weapon; his semblance was unknown, at least to Jaune; he was viciously racist, and his ultimate goal was a genocidal new order; he led the Enclave here on Remnant, a ruthless group dedicated to an insane ideology; he got angry, and that was something which could be exploited; he was extremely distraught by Arthur's death, meaning the deaths of those he cared about could be exploited; he had some bizarre issue with his eyes, and no, Jaune did not know anything more about that.

"Now he's close to dead, but I know he's still alive," Jaune finished.

Neo typed out on her scroll and showed it to him:

How do you know he survived?

"Because I saw him get back up," Jaune said in steely tone, "and unless I get to see his corpse myself, I'll never believe he's dead."

Neo looked down at him, waiting for more. Jaune just shrugged. "That's it."

Neo waved her knife with a scowl.

Jaune replied with a scowl of his own. "What, you want me to tell you his blood type too?" he said. He blinked. "Actually, that reminds me he's also immune to poison. Wouldn't be surprised if his blood is some crazy new type or something."

Neo pressed the knife to the side of his neck, threatening to cut open t he ripe veins there.

"Oh come on," he said. "That's all I know. Just dump me on some street somewhere." He locked Neo's eyes with his own. "I told you everything useful. Hell, I'd do it even if you didn't kidnap me. Another person trying to kill Bishop just helps me out."

Neo raised an eyebrow at that last suggestion. Then she scoffed and picked up the burlap sack again to cover his head—

It was at that moment that two shotgun blasts blew off the door's hinges.

The door flew out and landed flat on the floor when a man kicked it down and rushed in. He didn't even have time to take aim before Neo threw the knife, lodging it directly in his skull.

"Ah gods!" cried out a woman behind him. She aimed her own pistol directly at Neo and pulled the trigger. The crack of the bullet flying out the barrel rang painfully loud in the cramped basement.

Said bullet passed right through the illusion of Neo, shattering it and pinging off of a lead pipe. For just a second the room was quiet aside from the shot's echo. She, like her dead partner, wore a black ski mask and civilian clothes. Her bright eyes looked about the room.

Neo fizzled into existence midair, leaping at her from the side. She threw herself onto the woman's arm holding the gun, wrapping around it and dragging her surprised opponent to the floor.

"Gah–damn it!" the assailant shouted, accidentally shooting and blasting out another deafening blam! When she crashed down into the ground, however, Neo bit down hard into her hand, forcing her to both scream and let go of the gun.

Jaune watched these events unfold in a matter of just seconds. Thinking quickly, he looked at what bounded him: a heavy set of chains around his wrists and ankles. His hands had been bound behind him, fastened on the other side of a pipe running vertically. Spotted with rust and cobwebs, normally he probably could have broken the chains and pipe himself.

He heaved forward and pulled, bracing his bound wrists against the pipe. He huffed and winced, instantly feeling pain across the cut on his chest and even in his arms, where the overexerted muscles struggled to come anywhere close to their full strength.

This forced him to watch helplessly as Neo and the attacker wrestled with one another on the ground. The woman was much larger than Neo and was thus able to quickly gain the upper hand; she got on top, grabbed Neo's hair and slammed the side of her face down into the cement, shouting as she did so, "Semper Fi, bitch!"

Oh, so they were already coming for him.

Jaune eyed the gun which had fallen out the woman's hand. It had landed close to his own feet.

The woman on top of Neo spotted her pistol as well. She leapt off Neo and lunged for the gun again, seeking to end the fight quickly.

Jaune bucked and kicked the pistol away just as her hands were about to reach it. It skidded across the ground and slid under a set of pipes, disappearing into the basement's dark metal organs. The woman looked up and glared murderously at Jaune, who sneered back.

Neo wasted no time in hopping onto the attacker's back and bringing her hands down into her face, scratching at her eyes.

"Ah!" she screamed as Neo managed to jam a finger into her eye, scraping it with her nail. The larger woman, however, bucked and threw her back.

Jaune scowled. This chick had given Qrow a run for his money?

He watched Neo try to get to get her feet, noticing how she grimace and stumbled as she had to shift some weight to her left leg. She also bit down and nursed her braced wrist. She probably could hardly see straight through the welt around one of her eyes. She was just as impaired as Jaune was.

That gave the attacker an advantage, or at least a chance despite not having aura herself.

Neo faced him, and the attacker had her back to him. He shook his head to get Neo's attention, and when she glanced toward him, he gnashed his teeth together. He hoped she got the message.

Their assailant decided to rush in and wind up for a punch. Neo surprised her by jumping up just in time to bring her foot up—

And kick her straight in the throat. Neo fell straight down and winced as she crashed shoulder-first onto the cement. The attacker, meanwhile, stumbled straight back and tripped over Jaune's feet, falling right down onto him.

He bucked and lashed out with his teeth.

"Gahhh!" The woman howled in pain as Jaune chomped down on her ear. His teeth ripped straight through the soft skin and cartilage; with a quick jerk of his head, he tore her ear off completely.

The woman desperately scrambled off of him as he spat out bits of her flesh and blood. The taste of iron was unpleasant but not unfamiliar.

The woman nursed her torn ear and looked hatefully at Jaune—

Until her head exploded. Jaune reflexively closed his eyes and jolted back as her blood sprayed across his whole face. The woman's body flopped to the ground limply, pouring out a pool of blood from the gory, destroyed head.

Neo, having crawled for the man she killed, had hoisted his shotgun and ended the second attacker with one well-placed shot to the head. A whisp of smoke trailed out the barrel. The only sound then was the ragged breathing of the two survivors.

Jaune sighed in relief. He held in another breath, held it and let it go. "What the hell was that?"

They heard feet pounding from above the stairs. Neo readied the shotgun, while Jaune could only look intently at this new threat.

"Yo! You guys alright—"

A man came to the bottom of the stairs while sloppily holding a pistol in one hand; he pointed it to the side like someone who truly had no idea how to hold his gun while going into a dangerous situation. His eyes bugged out when he saw the gruesome scene before him.

When he looked to Neo, she already had the shotgun trained on him; her cold eyes gave a clear message.

"Don't you move a fucking muscle," Jaune said for her.

Ruby, the rest of her team and Jaune's team sans Jaune himself all sat around the half-finished statue in the middle of Vale's town square. The statue stood twice as tall as any of them. Intended to be an ambiguous hero in full plate armor, it lacked the arms or the head that would make it an inspiring figure. The city had commissioned it to honor the heroes who had fought at the Breach.

Now those heroes huddled around it silently, managing to do little more than nurse their wounds and idly comment on things that they didn't care about: Did any of them get any sleep? Will the weather clear up? Will they get more ammo assigned to them soon? Will the last of the Grimm be flushed out the sewers today? Will Beacon be recaptured? Will their wounds heal? Will everything be alright?

"Until I see a body," Pyrrha said suddenly, "he's alive." She cut through the meaningless talk and its just as hollow silence like a pair of scissors slicing a ribbon, a long and scarlet and silky ribbon that had been flowing like blood.

"What do you mean?" Nora asked hesitantly.

"What do you think I mean," her teammate snapped. "Jaune told us about his homeland. It sounds like what we went through at Beacon wasn't much worse than the situations he found himself in before."

"We can't—"

"So I won't give up hope," Pyrrha said, scowling. "He's alive until I know for sure he isn't."

Ruby shut her eyes as the others gave their half-hearted assents to Pyrrha's faith.

She felt a deep, awful, burning feeling in her chest. Ruby clutched her hands together and squeezed. She wanted to tell them. She wanted to say that she had seen Jaune alive. But if she did, then she would have to explain why she had not taken him back with her. She would have to say what she saw, and even thinking about trying to talk about the horrifying thing she witnessed made her want to shudder and cry. Even if she tried, then through her own tears she could not have mustered the ability to speak the truth.

She could have saved him. If only she had put her horror aside and dragged him back with her and to safety. Then he would still be with them all. Instead, he was gone. His body was in the belly of some Grimm that had bounded off and away after the few remaining Atlas battleships had left behind the dragon's corpse and shelled the forests around Beacon.

No, surely he had survived. He had fenagled his way out of near-death situations before, so he could do so again. He was likely holed up in some hidden nook or cranny, silently waiting for them to dig him out. He was around somewhere. He had to be.

Ruby buried her head in her hands. She could have done so much.

Suddenly, their scrolls buzzed or pinged with notifications. Ruby didn't bother to check. The others, however, quickly gasped and stood up excitedly. Weiss grabbed her partner's shoulder and shook it excitedly.

"Look!" she said, shoving her scroll into Ruby's face.

It was the group chat for both of their teams. None other than Jaune himself had just sent a message:

I'm okay, be back soon.

The man was feeling quite nervous. He had kept his mouth shut from the moment that he dropped his gun in that basement—an act he sorely regretted—to the present moment, in which he found himself tied with chains.

A burlap sack covered his head.

The chains bound him like snakes and kept him securely fastened to a chair. Ever since he had surrendered to those two, he had been bound, gagged, blinded, dragged who knows where, thrown into the trunk of a car, dragged out again and finally placed into the chair where currently he sat.

He just needed to keep his cool, say nothing, wait for them to come for him. Of course they would help him. They had to find him. They were capable of so much, so surely they would save him—

A rough hand ripped the sack off his head, as well as a clump of hair that his captor had also grabbed. He winced and tried to make no sound. He squinted in the sudden light, as dim as it was.

Observing his surrounding, he quickly gathered he was in a small storage room. Empty laid here and there, a lone rusted dolly sat in the corner and dust covered rafters hung above. Only a handful of lights were on in the place, and any window to the outside was covered with tarp.

Of course, the most important thing to note were the two other people in the room. The blonde kid stood just before him, now wearing his dead friend's clothes—they were a bit baggy on him. The short girl stood further to the side, arms crossed. He bit down on the rag strapped around his head and stuffing his mouth; he glared at his captors, trying his hardest to look unafraid and intimidating.

Jaune smacked him in the side of the head, not entertaining the tough-guy routine for a single second.

The man's vision blurred and filled with stars. His head lolled to the size as sheer disorientation overwhelmed him after the hit. Jaune, however, would not relent. He roughly grabbed the man's shirt and shook him, then slapped him across the face so hard that his teeth rattled.

Jaune grabbed his head in both hands looked him in the eye. "Now let me get this straight. You're going to tell us everything about who sent you, how you knew about that place, what you were doing there. Everything. And if you think"– he reached around and untied the cloth strapped around the man's head and filling his mouth –"that you're going to get out of this without telling us what we want to know, then you're wrong. You're dead wrong."

Jaune removed the gag, and the moment he did, the man hocked up and spat in his face.

Instantly, Jaune slapped him again. This time so hard that his face instantly became tomato red and his ear started to wring. The man groaned and gagged from the strike.

When finally he found his bearings again and blearily looked back to his captor, he saw him holding a knife covered with sticky, aged blood.

"Listen, she and I"– Jaune pointed to Neo, who watched with careful intensity –"just want to know what the hell is going on. Help us with that, maybe you live."

Heavy breathing was all the noise that the man made.

Jaune frowned. He wiped the spit off of his face and brandished the knife in his hands, the same that he had not long ago been threatened by.

"People are just meat," said the Lone Wanderer. "That's all you are. Meat."

Uh oh scary boy.