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Ruby watched as Jaune disappeared into the forest. At first glance, she appeared calm, but if one looked closer, they could see the nervous sweat that had broken across her body.

"Why did you put me in charge? I don't know how to do any of this!" her thoughts screamed, even as she did her best to keep her outward composure. She turned around stiffly and looked at the members of her group, hoping they didn't notice the sheen of cold sweat that dotted her forehead. "All right then, gang!" she called out, her squeaky voice cracking the whole time, "we have work to do until Jaune gets back!"

Yang's partner- what was her name? Oh yeah! Weiss. She had told Ruby after she blew her up- leveled the mother of all glares at Ruby. "And what business do you have ordering me around?" Weiss sneered.

Ruby fought the urge to curl under her cloak and disappear, even as the icy glare she was being sent pierced through her very soul. "Um, because Jaune said-" she began in a shaky voice, but was cut off by Weiss. "Because nothing!" Weiss snapped, "Jaune has even less authority than you do, so permission from that vagabond means nothing."

Ruby didn't like the way Weiss emphasized Jaune's name, and clearly, neither did any of the others. "Why'd you say his name like that?" Blake jumped in, accusation lacing her tone."Got a problem with him?" At much the same time, Pyrrha stepped forth. "I would appreciate it if you were to refrain from bad-mouthing my partner," she chastised in a polite, yet hard tone. Yang added her own two cents. "Yeah, at least he's leading us in the right direction, bitch."

"What did you just call me?!" Weiss shrieked. "I was just trying to say that some nobody from a mining colony has no business ordering any of us around! He has no qualifications! He was acting smart about it earlier, but how can you be so sure he actually is taking us in the right direction?" Weiss yelled out her defence before crossing her arms with a scowl and leaning back, doubling down on her argument. Ruby noticed a frown make its way onto Pyrrha's face, and her polite tone became audibly strained. "Jaune has been leading us Southeast with rather uncanny accuracy for the past ten hours. I would know, since I've been keeping constant track of where North is since the beginning of our journey and have not needed to make any corrections."

Ruby noticed Weiss' stance falter for a second under Pyrrha's response to her questioning of Jaune's capabilities and felt a small tug in her mind telling her to jump in and defend her friend's honor as well. However, she pushed past the group mentality and instead decided to draw attention to herself. Jaune gave his trust that she would mediate, and she wasn't about to break it.

"Guys!" she yelled over the group, silencing the brewing argument. "Quit fighting before you draw grimm! Regardless of who gave them out, we still have jobs to do in order to be able to eat tonight, so let's do that instead of wasting time!" Ruby finished off her rebuke with a stern look at the group. The rest of the group turned to look at her once more, and Ruby had to desperately fight not to quail under the attention.

Pyrrha came to her rescue when she nodded her head and also looked to the rest of the group. "Ruby has a point, regardless of who said to do what, there are still tasks to be done, and bickering accomplishes none of them. Come on, Blake, we have fish to catch." Blake simply nodded to Pyrrha and the two retreated to the stream.

Yang walked up to Ruby and gave her a smile, patting her on the shoulder. "Good thinking, sis. Let's get some firewood," she said, and began to walk, not giving so much as a glance towards her partner. Ruby shot Weiss a quick glance, only to see her glaring at the floor. Ruby felt a bit of concern for the girl, but ultimately decided to leave the conversation for when she was a bit calmer, and bounded off after her sister.

"That could have gone better… Please come back soon, Jaune!" Ruby whimpered in her head.

((()))

I had been tree hopping for a few minutes, and so far no progress was being made. Which I guess is to be expected, but it still kinda sucked. I had my eyes and nose taking in as much of my surroundings as possible, searching either for signs of a cave or animal activity.

"While I would like to avoid that outcome as much as possible, forcing an animal out of its resting spot for a night is a viable option. Animals like wolves or bears really know how to pick shelters, and I have a group of armed and dangerous huntresses. Besides, so long as we don't kill them and refuse to mark our territory, they'll come back in a day or so. That said, let's try to find somewhere uninhabited first."

I decided to pick up the pace. I had people waiting for me, after all, and the sooner I could find shelter the quicker I could report back. Taking a second to think, I crouched on a branch and scanned the trees in the direction I was headed. Satisfied with the number of footholds I saw, I engaged the firing mechanisms on my bracers and launched one of them ahead. My first attempt was a little rough, with me kicking into the tree a bit harder than I wanted to and having to stop on a branch to shake the impact out. I gave a few more experimental reels, and once I was confident that I had found a good technique found myself flying through the treeline at new speeds.

I launched my hook at a tree about thirty feet ahead of me and reeled myself towards it. At the last second, I detached my hook and kicked into the tree at an angle, sending me bounding off towards another tree, where I briefly touched down on a branch. My aura flared with each impact as I called upon it to absorb the force. Jumping off of that branch before I could lose momentum, I began repeating the process over and over again, and after a few minutes I began adding in acrobatic corkscrews and flips for the hell of it.

I found myself nearing the base of one of the many cliffs of the Forever Falls when I decided to execute a particularly daring flip. I kicked off the tree and flipped over backwards, curving my body in a C shape with my chest facing the ground. I fired my hook into a tree, only to be horrified as the hook was reflected in a brief flash of light. With a startled cry of "what the fuck?!" I was sent crashing into the forest floor below.

Thankfully, my descent to the ground was nowhere close to Neo speed, and I was able to bring my aura to the fore despite my initial surprise. Didn't make impacting the ground at high velocity any more fun though.

I fell a good ten or twenty feet to the forest floor, which might not have been as bad had it been in a straight line. Unfortunately, I had momentum, and fell in a diagonal to the ground. I crashed through a multitude of branches, some as thick as my forearms, and landed face-first in the dirt, my aura flaring a bright white with each impact.

I continued along the ground, leaving a small scar in the ground where my face had received a deep-tissue massage from the dirt. My spine had been bent so my heels were almost touching the back of my head, and after a second of staying in that position, straightened out so I was laying face-down on the floor with my hands by my side.

I slowly pulled myself up off the floor, and I felt my aura mending the strained muscles in my lower back, and bent forwards to feel my spine readjust itself. "Thank Oum for aura!" I mentally cheered despite my injuries. "Now what the hell was that?"

I hobbled over in the direction of the tree that had set me on a crash course with terra firma. As I walked I felt my strides grow more stable and lengthen as the damage to my body was rapidly repaired. By the time I reached the tree, I only carried a slight limp.

I went to put my hand on the tree, but was stopped about an inch or so from the tree by a blue hardlight barrier that materialized in a short radius around my hand. I moved my hand to try to get around it, only to watch as the barrier kept a constant radius around where my hand was touching it. It flickered and crackled, clearly barely holding on, but still strong enough to stop me from getting closer.

"What the hell?" I mumbled, leaning in to take a closer look at the tree. Upon closer inspection, the bark of the tree was revealed to be painted on, and small divots where the hard light projectors were could be seen. "Okay, so at least no one is going around putting barriers on random trees. Question becomes, why is there a fake tree here, and why did whoever placed it want to protect it so badly?"

I searched the area around the base of the tree, trying to look for any markings that would indicate what it was used for, but came up blank. Whatever trail may have existed had either been hidden quite well, or taken by the forest. Filing that information away, I placed one of my trackers in a knothole of an adjacent tree. "I'll bring the others along to look at this later. Maybe they'll see something I can't."

Straightening to look at the nearby cliff face, I mentally shrugged. "As long as I'm here…" I thought, before making my way over to the cliff to look for anything that might serve as shelter. I searched along the edge of the cliff for a few minutes before coming upon a relatively innocuous cave. It seemed to be a good size for our current group, so I decided to take a look.

First thing I noticed was that it was deep. The cave had an initial chamber that was a few hundred feet long and led to a sort of tunnel system on the other side. As far as I was concerned, it seemed pretty uninhabited, so it was worth a shot.

I entered the cave, checking off my mental list to make sure it would serve us well in as many conditions as possible. The initial cavern seemed to check out, but the cave system it was attached to still concerned me, and I'd have to check it out before bringing the rest of the group over here. I'd rather not be the one responsible for getting us all killed in the dead of night, after all.

I made my way carefully through the entrance to the cave system, noting that it was wide enough for several of me to stand side-by-side in its rocky corridors. My natural night vision eliminated the need for a light source, so I was able to go straight into cave diving. "Y'know, of all the things I thought I'd be doing at Beacon, spelunking was not one of them," I remarked to myself as I began trekking deeper into the cave system.

For some hole in the wall, the place was surprisingly lush. Maybe there was a waterfall running at the top of the cliff? Regardless, the place looked far more beautiful than the hole-in-the-wall cavern I was expecting, coming complete with vines growing across the ceiling, moss on the floor, and small puddles of mineral-infused water to go with the usual stalactites and stalagmites.

I had walked down the cave for only a few minutes when something struck me as odd. The Forever Falls was an area that had no shortage of running water, what with the rain and the very waterfalls that gave it its name. As such, most caves in the area smell damp, and more mineral rich caves have a particularly earthy smell to them; a smell I was familiar with. What struck me as odd in this cave was the distinctive smell of rust and iron, way too much to just be an exposed vein or a mineral pool.

I followed my nose, tracking the scent of metal through a small series of equally lush caverns until I came upon its source. The walls of the cavern began to taper down as the pocket of worn stone began to lead to a new one, but instead of an entrance to a new segment of cave, there was a large metal wall installed directly into the stone.

"What the hell is this?" I thought, moving closer to place my hand on the wall. The metal was slightly corroded from what looked like years of disuse, and some form of mould or lichen had begun to grow across the grime that had built up on the surface of the wall.

I moved slowly, brushing my hand to clear off some of the grime. As I brushed my hand across the wall's rough, semi-corroded surface, I felt a groove in the material that was far too smooth to be the result of erosion. Continuing to wipe away the grime, I noticed that there was some sort of symbol etched into the metal.

The wall was taller than me by a good deal, so I had to jump in a few places, but I eventually succeeded in brushing off enough to view the etchings on the material. The first thing I noticed was that the wall was actually a door. The second thing I noticed was that said door had a large symbol engraved into its surface.

The symbol was of a hexagonal shape that had three offshoots on the outside. One jutted out from the very top corner, one from the top right, and one from the bottom left, each ending in a hollow circle. The hexagon was hollow as well, and within was a set of three shapes that were stacked on top of each other to resemble an M.

"M? What does that mean?" I wondered as I took a closer look at the symbol. Practically on autopilot, I backed up a few paces to get a good vantage of the symbol before pulling out my scroll and snapping a picture. I lowered my scroll, still looking at the wall, when something caught my eye.

On the left side of the wall, partially covered by a patch of moss, was some sort of access panel. I moved in to inspect it, wiping the moss off to reveal a keypad attached to a small screen. As I brushed my hand across the pad, the screen suddenly flared to life. I jumped backwards from the door with a startled hiss, my tail fluffing in response.

Taking a second to collect myself, I inspected the pad. "With how overgrown this place is, I really didn't expect anything to work…" And I didn't. With how rusted and old this thing was, it was a wonder this keypad had power, much less was in good enough condition to turn on.

Performing an experimental button press, I was once again surprised to see the input register on the screen. "Okay… this is getting weirder and weirder…" I thought, pressing the button to clear the number pad. It seemed I needed a six-digit code to open the door.

"Well, let's get crackin'." I thought, flexing my fingers. I took a second to examine the number pad to evaluate my approach. "Numbers are etched directly into the metal, so I can't guess based off of wearing on the buttons… pad clearly hasn't been used recently to leave any form of scent, and even then I'm not that good... and I'm certainly not about to sit here and guess every combination… well, guess it's time for the old reliable!" I clapped my hands together as I decided my course of action and unsheathed my sword.

"I either get in, or it's someone else's problem. Hope whoever made this uses the same crappy systems as the SDC!" With that thought, I pulled a trigger built into the handle of my sword, causing electricity to arc across the length of the blade before I speared the panel.

The electricity from my blade surged into the delicate electronics of the access panel, thoroughly frying everything inside that still worked. The screen flashed a multitude of symbols and error messages before crashing entirely and shutting off. A brief silence followed before I felt the ground rumble ever so slightly by the movement of heavy steel doors.

It felt like needles were driven into my eardrums as the rusted and corroded mechanisms behind the door decided to make their age known with a metallic shriek. I quickly clapped my hands over my ears, but wasn't able to block very much of the sound. I stood there, hunched over in pain for a full fifteen seconds as the screeching wail bounced and echoed off the cavern walls, multiplying in intensity as time went on before finally stopping.

I shakily removed my hands from my ears, only to find that I couldn't hear anything other than a high-pitched keening in my ears. "Well, that's unfortunate." Even as I spoke the words out loud, they only registered in my thoughts due to my damaged hearing, my only indication of having actually spoken the physical sensation of doing so.

I felt an odd sensation in my inner ear. "Seems my aura's already working to fix my hearing. Gonna take a bit, by the feel of it…" I looked into the opening left behind by the opening of the mysterious door. "And I just fried the terminal, so I can't just close it either. Way to think ahead, Jaune," I mentally groused.

Shrugging my shoulders, I decided that I might as well check it out. I came down here to make sure there was nothing that could ambush us, so I wasn't leaving the place unchecked. With that thought, I took a deep breath and moved to walk through the door.

On my way in, I yanked my sword out of the terminal and unscrewed one of the knobs on the bottom of the hilt. Pulling on the knob slightly, it slid outward to reveal itself as the cap to a dust chamber which contained a vial of lightning dust. Checking the vial, I noticed that I was running dangerously low on lightning.

Letting out a sigh which I still couldn't hear, I slid the chamber back into place and screwed the knob back in. Roman's words slammed into my mind in a wave of irony.

"C'mon kiddo, I'm not running a charity here! You gotta buy your own ticket to Beacon. Wasn't my idea to sneak myself in, was it?

Dust? You won't need all that stuff, initiation'll probably be a cinch, then you can use the school's money to buy all the dust you need.

Knock 'em dead, kiddo."

I shook myself out of the flashback with another inaudible sigh, making a mental reminder to take this vial once it was empty and show Roman where he could shove it.

Behind the door was a short, equally wide hallway which led to a freight elevator, the natural cavern wall a few feet from the other side of its caged walls. I tentatively stepped on the platform, feeling the metal creaking under my foot, and walked over to try to peer down the shaft.

As I stepped into the middle of the elevator, I felt it jerk downward, unbalancing me. I looked up and saw one of the cables to the elevator had all but snapped, and was rapidly fraying. I moved to lunge out of the elevator, but the cable snapped before I could reach the door, and the freight elevator was sent crashing down the shaft with me inside it.

The safety mechanisms of the cage had broken almost instantly, but the small amount of deceleration provided by their activation caused the elevator to jerk violently. Stars danced across my vision as I was slammed into the floor of the cage with enough force to bounce me a good foot in the air. The cage kept speed despite the jerk, which led to me finding myself pinned to the roof of the cage, head swimming, ears ringing, and overall disoriented.

Trapped on the ceiling, the force behind my descent had me struggling to hold onto my already slipping consciousness. What was probably only a few seconds of falling felt like an eternity as I felt the g-forces of my descent crush me against the ceiling and further strain my already tenuous hold on consciousness. Somewhere, I became faintly aware of a black glow flickering and dissipating around my arm, then the world went dark.

((()))

Ruby looked down at her group's work with a sense of satisfaction. Pyrrha and Blake spared no effort in gathering fish, and they had gotten more than enough food to have a hearty meal. She and Yang had managed to gather a couple of pretty decent bundles of firewood. It also helped that after about ten minutes, Weiss had also begrudgingly begun gathering firewood, though she hadn't gathered nearly as much as Ruby and Yang had on their own.

"Alright gang, good job!" Ruby cheered. Yang gave an enthusiastic thumbs up in response, Pyrrha and Blake gave nods and smiles, and Weiss flicked her ponytail over her shoulder with a huff. "Now all we need to do is wait until Jaune gets back," Ruby said, placing her hands on her hips before shrinking slightly. "Which shouldn't take too long, right?" Her voice had a hint of optimism to it, but the uncertainty was still noticeable.

Pyrrha smiled at her. "Oh, that should be no problem, Ruby. He seems to be reliable so far, so we don't have any reason to doubt him," Pyrrha said in a comforting tone. Ruby nodded, her spirits bolstered. "Yeah, he'll be fine. He's probably on his way back now." She said, crossing her arms and nodding her head resolutely.

Pyrrha tilted her head slightly and smiled, but the smile was quickly replaced with a look of confusion. "Something wrong, P-money?" Yang asked. Pyrrha's face transitioned into one of concentration, before becoming visibly worried. "Pyrrha, what's wrong?" Ruby asked, taking a step towards the amazon.

"It's Jaune," Pyrrha said, worry lacing her tone, "I lost track of him." Now it was Ruby's turn to be confused. "What do you mean 'lost track of him?'" Pyrrha looked at Ruby, her face flushing even despite the situation. "I… may have gotten over excited during our first meeting and used my semblance to, um… mark him, and that's how I found you guys the first night." Pyrrha averted her gaze, embarrassed, but quickly snapped her head back up. "But that's besides the point! I was checking up on him every few minutes and everything seemed fine, but when I tried just now I couldn't find him."

Ruby gasped and put her hands over her mouth, and Blake's expression fell as they reached the same conclusion. "Is he…" Blake began. "Dead? I don't know," Pyrrha responded. "But I doubt him dropping off the face of Remnant is a good thing either."

"Well, can you at least bring us to where he disappeared? He could be in trouble, and I'm not about to sit by and let my first friend go out like that!" Ruby cried. Pyrrha nodded. "I can take us at the very least in the direction of his last known location, maybe not the same spot, but definitely the same direction." Pyrrha pointed roughly in the direction of East as she spoke, and Ruby threw her bundle of firewood onto her back. "No time to lose, let's go!" She cried, and with a burst of rose petals disappeared into the forest.

As Ruby sped through the forest in a burst of petals, all she could think about was whether or not her friend was okay.

-(0)-

Holy shit that took a long time to write. I got blasted with a huge period of writer's block and lack of motivation shortly after posting my last chapter, so this chapter stagnated for a while. So I just decided to press on and bang it out once and for all, since once I completed this chapter I would be able to transition to the next planned event. That said, here it is, and I'm at least somewhat back in my groove, so the next chapter hopefully won't take 20+ days to come out. Hope you enjoyed, see you in the next one.