Jaunedeux
Class started as he remembered it. He was sitting in the front row of the room and Glynda was asking for students to volunteer for a sparring match.
The first hand that shot up was none other than Cardin Winchester's hand. "Alright Mr. Winchester, since you're so eager." Glynda nodded as Cardin stood up. "Select your opponent."
A smirk spread across the boy's face as he pointed towards Jaune. "Get me in the ring with Arc."
Pyrrha sat up in her seat, clearly worried for him now. "Professor Goodwitch-"
"Cardin's made his selection." Glynda looked her in the eyes. "I think it's time we evaluate Mr. Arc's skills properly, don't you agree?"
"Y-Yes…" Pyrrha sat herself down with a sigh.
Jaune and Cardin both stepped out into Beacon's Amphitheater with their weapons out. Crocea Mors was in the state it was when Jaune originally got it. His team had only just gotten Ruby's invitation for weapon upgrades.
This meant he was without the upgrades he had grown comfortable with through his original journeys, but perhaps this was a good chance to test his base skill.
"Try not to scream too much, Arc." Cardin laughed as Jaune held a firm stance with his weapon, remembering Pyrrha's instructions clearly.
The redhead in question noticed his stance, it seemed similar to her own and just as firm. "Has he been training?" she asked curiously, glancing over at Ren and Nora, hoping for an answer, but the duo merely shrugged.
Cardin ran for Jaune immediately and swung hard with his mace.
The blonde raised his shield up to block it and swung with his sword towards Cardin, striking him in the chest and making him stagger back while he held firm in his stance.
Notably that block had taken a lot of wind out of him. Jaune knew he had to chalk this up to his current body's lack of actual training, meaning his muscles weren't fully adjusted for combat yet.
"Lucky shot…" Cardin swung wide with his mace again and Jaune ducked back from it and the next couple of swipes sent his way. "What's wrong Arc?! Scared to fight me?!"
Jaune was looking for any opening he could potentially exploit from Cardin and managed to sneak in a couple of fast hits between Cardin's heavier swings, slowly chipping away at his aura.
Cardin was finally fed up with this and activated the burn dust within his mace, which caused it to start glowing. This was going to be his decisive hit against Jaune. "Try backing up from this one!" he slammed his mace harshly into the ground, shattering the floor tiles and sending a pillar of flame shooting out in Jaune's direction.
As he saw it, Jaune hopped to the side of this attack and bashed Cardin directly with his shield, making him drop his mace. With this last opening, Jaune swung downward at Cardin with his sword, breaking his aura while he stumbled back.
Panting heavily, Jaune looked at the board and saw that his aura was still relatively high, while Cardin's was completely depleted.
"Impressive Display Mr. Arc. This certainly contradicts what we saw from you during your initiation." Glynda remarked while adjusting her glasses. "Although, it seems your form could still use some work as I saw clear signs of strain from that initial block. However, you did account for that by avoiding the need to do more. You pass."
Cardin sat himself up and looked annoyed at Jaune. "You were lucky today, Arc."
"Mr. Winchester. There is an element of luck involved in most combat scenarios, you know. Perhaps if you weren't so strong headed in your approach, you could have realized Mr. Arc was wearing your aura down slowly. Until you gave him a bigger opening." Glynda corrected as she used her semblance to fix the shattered floor tiles.
Jaune smiled in Pyrrha's direction now while she awkwardly waved back at him.
Team RWBY was waiting right outside of Beacon's cafeteria with their lunch trays in hand before Jaune stepped out and approached them, leaving his team to their own devices during lunch.
"So, that was a pretty impressive display you had in class back there." Yang chuckled.
"Right?!" Jaune sat down with his tray on his lap, the rest of RWBY following his lead in that regard.
"I mean I was thinking we'd go back to our dorm room to be a little more discreet about what we were gonna talk about." Weiss pointed out.
"Let's eat first." Ruby took a sip from her milk carton.
"I noticed that while my mind remembers how to fight decently, my body doesn't." Jaune admitted, thinking back to the match earlier.
"Well we gotta train ourselves up again obviously." Yang stated before taking a bite out of an apple.
"That's easier said than done." Blake let out a sigh. "Having to take classes again means we have to doubly manage things."
"Well classes won't matter if the school's gone." Ruby pointed out. "We need to be proactive in stopping the enemy and to do that we need a plan!"
"A plan, huh? And what pray tell might you girls be planning?" Professor Ozpin asked while approaching the group, which made them freeze up immediately.
"O-Oh um… You know? Just um… Planning out the rest of the semester!" Ruby tried to drop the raised suspicion on herself now.
"I mean maybe some transparency-" Weiss was promptly elbowed by Yang before she said any more. "Ow!" she grunted while rubbing her gut.
"I don't mean to alarm you girls. And Mr. Arc… I must say your display earlier was a little eyebrow raising when comparing it to your performance during initiation. But perhaps it might be a little performance shyness?" Ozpin took a sip from his mug.
"W-What?! No! L-Look I was very disoriented during the initiation. Being flung off a cliff will kind of do that to you…" He lied.
"I see. Well, in our line of work we sometimes are dropped directly into the line of fire. Which is why I have my students launched off Beacon cliff during the initiation." Ozpin explained. "I trust you all will stay behaved now, yes?"
"Pssh of course! Who do you take us for?" Yang awkwardly laughed, which just left the group in an awkward silence.
"I'll leave you all to your lunches. Sorry for taking up your time." he walked away from the group.
"That's why we need to talk about our plan somewhere quieter." Blake pointed out.
"Valid point." Weiss sighed before taking a bite of her mashed potatoes.
The air in Team RWBY's dorm room was still as they all stared at the whiteboard Ruby had managed to borrow from Beacon's facilities.
Ruby was standing by the board with a marker and thinking. "So we need a complete rundown of events that are going to happen, right?" she spoke, breaking the silence.
"Y-Yeah…" Yang shook her head from her tired daze.
"Right um… Where should we even start?" Blake asked.
"Well what's supposed to happen next?" Jaune questioned.
Ruby crossed her arms deep in thought. "Doesn't Blake run off?"
"That's not till after our trip to Forever Fall." Weiss corrected.
"After I save Cardin from that Ursa and then he finally backs off from me." Jaune nodded. "I thought beating him in sparring today would make him back down early. But it just seems to have angered him more."
"Guys like that typically don't take getting beaten lightly." Yang pointed out. "They'll do anything to preserve their tough image with others. I wouldn't let your guard down around him if I were you."
"Duly noted." Jaune agreed as he watched Ruby write on the board.
"So we got the Forever Fall trip, Blake running away, which is probably not gonna happen here…" Ruby put the marker to her forehead.
"Don't forget what happened before that!" Yang snapped her fingers. "We met both Sun and Penny for the first time!"
"Oh right!" Ruby's eyes lit up while Jaune's eyes darted away.
"Well I definitely don't wanna miss out on befriending Penny, so we definitely gotta repeat that." Ruby affirmed.
"After I ran away, I set out with Sun to stop a White Fang heist. Well my intentions were to prove that they weren't involved, but they sadly were." Blake looked down.
"Well then, that's where we strike first then!" Ruby wrote it on the white board and circled it. "If we stop the heist and capture Roman Torchwick, that might just speed things along and force Cinder to show her face sooner!"
"Are we sure we can take her as we are now though?" Weiss pointed out. "I'm-"
Jaune stood up at the mention of that. "I was in the vault when she stole the Fall Maiden power. She doesn't have it yet."
"Then we can beat her!" Ruby grinned now.
"After we've gotten ourselves back into the ideal shape." Weiss added. "We'll also need to upgrade our equipment. Tonight's a good time, right?"
"For my team? Yeah, I don't think we've got any plans and I definitely feel a little naked without all my upgrades." Jaune admitted.
"Then it's settled." Weiss noticed Ruby and Yang were now playing tic-tac-toe on the whiteboard. "Hey, that board's important for our plans! We need all the space we can to fit as much info on it!"
"Why not just record this stuff on our scrolls?" Blake pointed out.
"Because Whiteboards are cool!"
"And I win." Yang chuckled.
"You win every time Yang, it's not fair!" Ruby stomped her foot down.
"Well maybe you should go first." Yang stuck her tongue out.
"No! I know a second player victory is possible!"
Blake shrugged her shoulders. "You should get to your teammates, Jaune. They'll be at this for a while."
"I'll message you the location details of the upgrading shop we'll be going to." Weiss assured him.
The city of Vale during the night time was still as stunning as ever and the two teams that stepped off the airship from Beacon took it all in.
"It feels weird to see everything not in ruins around here." Yang remarked.
"It's almost haunting to think about how such a peaceful place can get destroyed so easily." Blake's eyes darted away.
"Hey, we're gonna do our best to prevent it from happening, aren't we?" Yang asked.
"Y-Yeah… We are." Blake affirmed before finally walking into the shop with her.
They wasted no time getting to their upgrades. While they didn't have access to all the materials Atlas had to offer, the group was at least able to figure out decent enough makeshift workarounds for it all.
Yang's mines weren't exact and the new feature's inclusion did make her gauntlets bulkier than she would have liked, but they would likely still have a similar effect.
Ruby's upgrade to Crescent Rose was easily added, although she did have to shed off a little bit of material for it.
Weiss didn't originally have an upgrade, but the new upgrade she gave Myrtenaster added 3 more slots to its barrel, allowing her to hold 9 dust rounds inside of it in total.
Blake was similar to Weiss in that her weapon lacked significant upgrades initially, but she decided to optimize it more for dust cartridges of ammo and strengthen the blade's steel a little bit, using some of the extra material Yang didn't use for Ember Celica.
Team JNPR's upgrades were mostly a decision on Jaune's part, since they were unsure of what they could really make use of.
Ren's only change to Stormflower currently was just the ability to shoot its knives out with a grapple wire attached, something that sounded oddly familiar to him the more he thought about it.
The upgrade Jaune suggested to Nora allowed her to feed some dust in her weapon directly into her body to charge up her semblance quicker.
Jaune's recommendation to Pyrrha was simply an upgrade to the caliber of round she had in her rifle, citing their fight with the Deathstalker and how ineffective her rifle's rounds were against that monster's armor.
Finally Jaune's upgrade was most of what he had by the time he went to Atlas. instead of the gold he once had to represent Pyrrha, he instead opted for more silver on his weapon. The great sword transformation and the gravity dust in the shield, both of which wound up costing Weiss a lot more than she expected, even with her SDC discount. He knew he'd be paying her back for that later.
"Oh yeah, I think we're definitely ready for whatever's coming our way!" Ruby grinned as she practiced swinging her weapon around in the testing facility the shop had. The others were also testing their weapons in the same room.
The sound of thunder outside made everyone pause for a moment. "Well looks like we don't really gotta rush for this." Yang pointed out as everyone immediately went back to what they were doing.
Just outside of the shop, in the rain stood an individual with an umbrella which was sheltering her from it. Her eyes narrowed while watching the inside of the building. After another flash of lightning, she was gone...
Commentary: Here we are with chapter 2! Things still haven't started to pick up yet. But I mean in all fairness this is still well within the grace period time of Volume 1, where the threat isn't immediate. Our heroes have a little time to have some good old fun again.
And we got some upgrades for our main teams! Of course, these upgrades aren't the exact ones they originally had due to Atlas just having so many more resources that they just don't have access to in Vale, but for what it is worth, they can at least work with this stuff similarly for now.
On another note I'm still not sure how to go about uploads for this story, I may just keep uploading as I finish chapters, or I might just release them in batches when I feel like it. I've yet to decide. But I have decided to update this story with another chapter so soon after the first couple of chapters since I finished this one off.