The Force shall set me free

Chapter 5

Jaune sat in the empty training room covered head to toe in sweat, it was currently three in the morning and his nightly training session had ended. His masters wanted him to master the technics he had already acquired and to them something less than perfect was not to be accepted.

Nihilus pushed him to use force drain and force lightening while Ragnos demanded that he mastered the use of the force itself. But if there was something that both his teachers agreed in is that he needed to use the sith holocron to uncover its secrets, but the thing was that they both refused to give up their time of training, and he also couldn't skip classes so he needed to find time in between. He had postponed this long enough. With a tired sigh he made his way into the showers and started to clean himself. As the cold water fell down his body, Jaune started to move the water around with the force, creating a small river in the middle of the air, Jaune smiled at the sigh and felt a new found sense of purpose. If this was just the basics of the force he didn't just need to get more knowledge of the force, he wanted to get this knowledge.

He would go as far as to say that he hungered for it.

So he decided he wouldn't go back to his dorm today, he still had time left so he would try to uncover what the Sith Holocron had to say. Jaune finished his shower and made his way back quietly back to his room. No one was up yet and the cameras on the building where getting easier and easier to avoid as time went by. He opened the door as quietly as he could and walked inside his room.

Jaune searched through his things making sure he wasn't making any noise and after a few seconds of searching he found the small red pyramid locked away on a wooden box, Jaune looked at the eerie glow and felt the same feeling that he had felt when he had encountered the sith cave not so long ago.

"Let's see what you really are all about" Jaune said to himself as he exited his room unaware that Pyrrha had been awake.

She hear the door softly click and once it did she sat up, Pyrrha frowned at Jaune's empty bed and couldn't help but to shake her head. She had been aware of his nightly escaped since the very beginning, he was not exactly very subtle about the first few nights. But after some time, he started to become quieter and she sometimes didn't even feel when he returned back, as if he were a ghost.

"He's training" she muttered under breath as she returned to her pillow.

Jaune was rapidly becoming something far more than just a friend for Pyrrha and the more she observed him the more she realized that he was so much more than just a regular student of Beacon. At first she thought that maybe he just couldn't sleep, nightmares plaguing his dreams.

But when she put some real thought into it she realized that wasn't the case, Jaune was out training. Training to become better, because he didn't believe he was a good enough leader.

Guilt slowly creeped its way into Pyrrha's heart, she should have said something sooner, he was probably really worried if he was doing a good job or not.

Pyrrha yawned and decided that she would talk to him today, at a sensible time. Maybe they could even eat lunch together, all alone. The though brought a slight blush and a smile to the sleepy Pyrrha as she drifted back into sleep.

Jaune entered an empty classroom and kneeled next to the holocron and stared at it.

"How do I open this?" he asked himself as he toyed around with it for a second. He knew he had to use the force but did he try to open it by simply splitting it in half or was it more like puzzle that he had to solve.

Jaune brought a hand to his chin as he stared at the pyramid, he thought for a second, he had opened it before but memories of the cave where a little foggy.

With a sigh he closed his eyes and figured that he just needed to use the force on it. He reached out and focused only on the pyramid the echoes in the force growing stronger as he realized what he had to do. Little by little pieces started to move and the red glow grew brighter, Jaune smiled in satisfaction as he opened his eyes and saw the frowning face of an ancient Sith Lord.

"I'm Darth Bane, sith master and founder of the Rule of Two" the voice said, hollow and lifeless. But just by looking at his image Jaune knew that this man was beyond powerful. His face was riddled with scars and his armor looked broken and tattered, a testament to the battles he had fought.

Jaune raised his hand toward the holocron and moved it with the force towards the desk. Darth Bane was now in the middle of the room, the red light illuminating it.

"Lord Bane, I need your knowledge" Jaune said out loud wondering if this was how holocron worked. To his surprise Bane scoffed.

"True knowledge is found in battle, but the new Sith forgot this and built libraries in order to study the Dark side of the force, to me that knowledge is beyond useless! The search for true knowledge is in the heart of battle"

Jaune looked at him with curiosity "The Dark side of the force?"

"We the Sith use the Dark side of the force to fuel our power, we use our emotions, our ambition our anger to push ourselves forward in order to achieve our goals, the Sith of old tried to teach many of their apprentices this and yet they all failed, time and time again the Sith where at the brink of victory only to be thwarted by our very own people, it was the hunger for power that led to the defeat of Revan, if not for his apprentice he would have conquered the entire galaxy, if it wasn't for the betrayal of Visas Mars Nihilus would have devoured the last Jedi"

"Devoured?" Jaune said in surprise, but the red figure of Darth Bane didn't respond. Maybe the Sith Lord only answered stuff he thought it would be important to answer?

Jaune looked at the figure and remembered his introduction "Tell me more about the rule of two"

"The Sith have become nothing more than shadows, once powerful rulers that none dared to oppose, warlords who could consume entire planets with nothing but their power over the force reduced to another political group in the galaxy" Bane said as his face twisted into a displeased snarl "I searched for the Sith because I thought they were more, but when I found them I realized just how low they had fallen, it pained my very soul to see the foundations laid by Ragnos, Revan, Nihilus and Vitiate being misplaced by children playing at being teachers of the Dark side. I watched the demise of the Sith with glee and knew that in order for us to rise once more there had to be a change, we have to be selective in who we choose to become a Sith, dark side users are one thing but a full-fledged Sith is another thing entirely, so there can only be two, a master to hold the power and an apprentice to crave it, the master will amass all the knowledge found in all Sith artifacts and holocrons at his disposal while the apprentice will crave to become like the master, once the master thinks that he is ready he will teach the apprentice all that he knows and fueled by his own ambition and hunger for power the apprentice will strike the master, if he succeeds then he will search for an apprentice so that the cycle proceeds and each time the Sith get more and more perfect by each generation, but if the apprentice fails the master needs only to seek a new apprentice" Banes said making Jaune shiver.

The figure was silent once more and Jaune shook himself out of his surprise and looked at Bane and then at himself, Jaune knew he was just starting but when he heard the stories told by Bane he realized just how much more he needed to learn and the most glaring issue right now was his sloppiness with his weapon.

With a nod he turned to look at the holocron "I need to learn more about the lightsaber and how to use it" Jaune said as he pushed all the chairs aside except for the one where the holocron was.

"To wield a lightsaber is to wield a legacy of power, but merely waving it around is no good, a Sith must strike a fine balance between brutality and finesse, each form that I will teach you has to be used in specific types of encounters" Bane said and Jaune prepared himself once more for training.

Blake woke up with a gasp, a nightmare had awaken her from her dreams. With a groan she dropped back into bed and hoped she hadn't startled any of her teammates.

A quick look around denied this as Yang snored softly and Weiss and Ruby slept without a sound. Blake brought a hand to her eyes and fought the tears that threatened to form on her eyes.

"Adam… you piece of absolute…" she started to say, but never finished the sentence knowing that it wasn't really worth it. He was not worth it.

"Then why do I keep dreaming about him?" Blake asked herself as she wrapped her arms around her body. And not just him but also the White Fang, she dreamed that Adam led the white fang into Beacon and hunted her down.

It was slightly childish of her to dream of that she said to herself but she couldn't deny that the possibility of that happening had indeed crossed her mind more than once and now with the rumors of their presence in Beacon.

"This is all so stupid" she said to herself as she threw the covers to the side and grabbed her weapon from the desk. She needed to clear her mind right now so a nice walk through the campus would do her just fine. As she walked around she felt an odd sense of peace overwhelm her. This place was different.

Beacon truly was (and she hated herself for thinking of the pun) a beacon of hope for many people, herself included. She hadn't stayed for long but she was starting to cherish the place, it gave her hope for the future.

The empty hallways where illuminated by the faint glow of the moon, but she didn't need that much light to see, her Faunus heritage allowing her to see as clear as if it was day.

A faint buzzing sound reached her ears, one alien and foreign to her. Deciding that it would be best to investigate, Blake cautiously followed the sound, making sure her footsteps where faint. She approached one of the classrooms and found that it was half open, Blake frowned as she saw a red light emanating from the room.

She gently pushed the door just to see what was inside and to her surprise she found Jaune, wielding his trademark weapon. A lightsaber he had called it but what interested her the most was that he was imitating the movements and instruction of a hologram. She thought that technology was only found in Atlas and yet here it was, being used by one of the young students in Beacon.

Jaune stopped spinning his sword around to listen to instructions and then prepared himself, he charged forward and sliced down and out of nowhere he shot literal lightening out of his hand and into the lightsaber and used it again into and upwards trust the lightening crackling around him like a storm.

Blake gasped as the lightening the shot out in all directions, Jaune then deactivated his weapon. With a wave of his hand the image of the warrior disappeared. For moment Jaune stood still but before Blake could react he turned around and looked at her dead in the eye "Hello Blake"

A/N:

Hi, sorry for the short chapter I want to finish clearing up Jaune's training before he gets into a real fight. Thank so much for the feedback! I really appreciate all the comments they help me out a lot and I would like to address some of the comments that I have received in no particular order. For example I have gotten some comments saying if Jaune will remain a hunter for long, and the answer to that would be a no. A Sith craves power and the thing with power is the more you have the more you see how other misused it and Jaune has shown in RWBY that he is displeased in the way Ozpin is handling things.

Another common comment I have gotten is where I am placing this story, canon or legends. I would say that I'm in the middle, with Disney rewriting and re integrating old legends concepts back into canon I decided not to wait for them and cherry pick the aspects I think would work best for the story, in both canon (making the lightsaber "bleed") and Legends (KOTOR 2 and the old Sith Empire).

Thank you so much for reading!