I ran until I figured I had lost whoever that girl was. I felt a little bad about screaming and running away, because I figured it might have hurt her feelings. And also because she might have been super hot, and getting a super hot female partner would've been awesome! But then I didn't feel bad, because maintaining the sacred integrity of the Boiz was of far greater import than finding a happy-hole for my penis. Sorry, random girl...bros before hoes.

Anyway, I ran into a tree branch. It hurt. I fell over.

"Elias," greeted the tree branch. Then I realized it wasn't a tree branch. It was Woodie's extended arm, which was actually a pretty close resemblance now that I think of it.

"Bruh," I said. I took off my blindfold. He had taken his off, too. We made eye contact.

We were partners. Noice.

"For once," said Woodie, "your imitation of the mating call of a Retarded Mexican Sasquatch came in handy."

"That's not what that was!" I protested, disappointed in my friend's evident lack of culture. "I was doing the noise that the Wild Animu Grill makes when agitated! This is the wild mating call of the - "

"Don't you dare, Elias. Don't you fucking dare, I will strangle you."

Woodie is a snake-Faunus - a snake-Faunus - as well as a brawling spirit wrapped in 190 pounds of muscle and rage. If he gets a chokehold on you, then you are dead. Well, unless you have Yang's Semblance, but even she almost couldn't get out.

Suffice it to say, I did NOT fucking dare.

So now that we're both just standing here and have a whole-ass chapter's worth of space to fill with my bullshit, I figure now's the perfect time to talk more about our get-ups.

My outfit consists of a silver breastplate, with smaller plates of matching color covering my elbows, forearms, and shins, as well as a mag-lock belt for my weapons and extra Dust cartridges. The breastplate doesn't reach very far past my ribcage, a sacrifice I made in favor of mobility. Underneath the armor, I wear a dark green long-sleeved shirt, steel-toed combat boots (because nutshots), and baggy green camo pants. Why the baggy camo pants, you ask? Because I like them. That's why.

Woodie wears a light kevlar combat vest over an old shirt that he ripped the sleeves off of, and he also wears baggy camo pants. The choice makes sense for him, though, because the rest of his outfit is camo, too. His camo is more brown than green, though. His vest carries ammo for his Dust cannon gauntlet, as well as for his collapsible sniper rifle, which he also has slung over his back at all times. He says it's to give him a ranged advantage, but we all know it's really just because he's the edgelord.

And Cas

isn't here yet, so we'll talk about him later. Also, I wanted to show off me and Woodie slapping the shit out of some Grimm.

We were standing in the little clearing when we heard a growl. Apparently, Woodie had not been the only one who used my Wild Animu Grill screech to determine my general location. Six Ursai came out of the trees, surrounding us.

We shared a sadistic grin.

Prey.

"YIKI-KIKI-KIKI-KIKI-KIKI - " I hollered as I launched myself towards the Ursa directly in front of me with a double front flip. As my body gyrated epically, I combined Locust and Mud Wasp into Scherzo's staff form, while shifting the blades into sabre form. The weapon finished its transformation just before I brought it down on the creature's nose. Predictably, it bellowed in pain and reared up on its hind legs to avoid future attacks on its face. It exposed its neck in doing so, which I then julienned in a rapid succession of spinning slashes. The other two then charged me at the same time, so I just rolled to the side and let them crash into each other. It was hilarious.

Man, I really love my job.

As the two beasts struggled to untangle themselves, I made short work of the larger one's back legs. What with the momentum of its companion, it fell backwards onto my blade that I had planted into the ground. The final Ursa seemed to get a grip on things, and charged at me with a swipe. I swung the curved blade of Scherzo upwards to meet it, slashing right through its paw as I stepped back. I then shifted the other blade into shortsword form as I brought it up to impale the Grimm through the abdomen. I slashed further upwards with a very satisfying squelch and knocked the corpse off my blade with a efforted kick.

I would describe Woodie's fight as well, but that would require me having paid attention to it. I did get to see the end, though: I saw him riding the back of the last remaining Ursa with his grappling cord lassoed around its neck. He raised his left fist up and activated the Iguanodon spikes -

Oh yeah, I forgot. Woodie's gauntlets have one other feature that he actually did show to Ruby earlier on, and I just forgot to bring it up. Each weapon has a retractable spike on the outer side, sort of like downward-stabbing daggers. I call them the Iguanodon spikes, because the Iguanodon - you know what, just Google "iguanodon", you'll see what I'm talking about. Anyway - though the spikes can inflict some nasty gashes in a fistfight, he mainly uses them to finish off Grimm by hammer-striking them on the head.

Which is exactly what he did to the Ursa.

The crack of metal splitting apart bone never gets old.

When it's a Grimm, that is. I'm not a psycho or anything.

We stood among the disintegrating corpses of our foes like the utter badasses we...

...were then suddenly interrupted by the giant-ass SNEK that we saw barrelling towards us, knocking down trees as it went.

Aw, hell nah. We noped the fuck out of there.

In our defense, it was probably one of the biggest King Taijitus on record - maybe even bigger than any on record. That was the first thing that spooked us.

The second was that it only had one head. King Taijitus usually have two, so this was a very strange case indeed. And when it came to the Grimm, strange cases usually meant very bad things.

But the third thing - the broken pieces of Huntsmen-grade weaponry sticking out of its back - pretty much spoke for itself.

Fuck that - this was a job for Cas! Or maybe Jac, but only if Cas had already gotten eaten or something.

So anyway, me and Woodie ran away like little bitches, hoping that the big SNEK wouldn't get us. Woodie quickly turned and fired an ice-Dust round, hitting it in the face before resuming his sprint. All that really did was distract it for a couple of seconds, and then it kept on coming. This wouldn't have been a problem if it wasn't a LOT faster than us, which it was.

"Might wanna use your Semblance?" Woodie panted as death in SNEK form rapidly gained on us.

"Won't do any good against something that big!" I responded as I ducked a tree branch, whose tree subsequently splintered under a tide of black scales.

"How bout...we fight it out, do whatever we can to it until someone comes to help?"

"If someone comes," I said, but I whirled around with him. The coiling monstrosity charged headlong, narrowly missing us as we jumped to each side. I rammed Scherzo into a chink in the moving mass, yelping as I was then pulled along. The thing didn't even seem to notice, which was either very good or very bad. I detached my weapons, freeing Locust as Mud Wasp was buried into my quarry, and then stabbed the former into its scales as well. As the SNEK writhed about in its quest to eat Woodie (how ironic that would be), who was doing a most excellent job of distracting it, I hatched a plan. I would stab my way up the giant's neck until I got to the head, and then I'd go for the eyeballs.

Go for the nuts, my mentor Parsnip always told me, and if it doesn't have nuts, then go for the eyeballs!

I was fairly certain that this thing didn't have nuts, and if it did, I did not want to be anywhere near enough to stab them.

That would prerequisite me seeing them. Hell, nah.

So anyway, I started stabbing. As I did, I noticed that each of the scales was approximately the size of my breastplate - another reminder of just how screwed me and Woodie were.

Speaking of that, I made it about three stabs before the SNEK scraped past a tree and inadvertently smashed my face into it. This not only ruined my brilliant plan, but also separated me from my weapons. Which really sucked balls. Big, ugly SNEK balls.

I just barely dodged a flying Woodie, who then proceeded to eat, by my rough estimation, four pounds of dirt as he simultaneously face-planted and skidded across the ground. I helped him up, just in time to see our SNEK friend with what I am very sure was an enormous, shit-eating grin as it reared up to a height of A HUNDRED FEET - AND WITH COILS TO SPARE! - and prepared to kill us with its face.

The last thing I thought as doom came crashing down towards us was that it technically had a smecksy-Huntsman-eating grin on its face...

...

And the first thing I thought after that was, "Where the hell were you, Cas?!"

Before I explain what happened next (no, we did not die), I will take some time to elaborate on Cas's stupidly OP Semblance, especially considering what exactly happened next.

Cas's Semblance is called "Rhomboids". I am not going to explain to you what a rhomboid is, partly because I'm lazy and I don't want to, but mostly due to the fact that if you do not know what a rhomboid is, then you are an idiot and you need to retake your fourth grade geometry class.

Anyway, he has the ability to conjure - you guessed it - rhomboids, composed of pure Aura. The size and strength of said rhomboids depends on how much Aura he puts into them when he conjures them. Does that sound lame? Yes, it absolutely does, but that's because I haven't FINISHED YET, YOU GEOMETRICALLY ILLITERATE NINCOMPOOP!

The thing is, Cas doesn't only have the ability to conjure these Aura rhomboids; he can also move them, and he can do it as fast as his own mind can process it. Now, there are limitations as to how he can move them: he can slide them only along their particular plane of existence, or rotate them along either of their axes of existence. What's more, is that he can do only one of those two things at a time on a given rhomboid. Even with these limitations, it's a pretty useful combat ability: he can use a rhomboid for either attack or defense, and they're great for conjuring on the floor to trip people with. It also makes for a good ranged attack, especially if he augments it with Dust.

All this makes Cas a pretty powerful and utilitarian combatant, even assuming that he could only conjure one rhomboid at a time. Unfortunately, that's just the thing with his Semblance.

He can conjure as many of the damn things as he wants.

Oh, yeah - and he can also move every single one of them at the same time.

If you are not at least aware that the tactical possibilities a Semblance like this presents are nothing short of tremendous, then you are, by definition, not an intellectual. In fact, you are probably the exact opposite of an intellectual, whatever that might be.

Now, all this might not be so bad if Cas's Semblance was in the hands of someone stupid (like you), or even someone who wasn't stupid, but not exactly an evil mastermind (like me or Yang). We simply wouldn't be able to process all the tactical possibilities. Unfortunately, an evil mastermind is exactly what Cas is, which means that he can think of a whole lot more ways to screw with people than any of us could.

Take everything I have said thus far about Cas and his Semblance. Now consider that he has been training with said Semblance as his primary method of kicking other people's shit in since he was twelve, and under the tutelage of Professor Glynda Friggin' Goodwitch herself during his final year at Signal.

You see why I said that Cas's Semblance is stupidly OP?!

The worst part about it is that he freaking loves being stupidly OP. He'll get this grin, see, and it's like he's saying, "I don't wanna brag, but you have absolutely no chance against me - none whatsoever." It wouldn't be so infuriating if he wasn't always right about it!

Ah, well. The important thing is that he's one of the Boiz, and so when he does make use of his OP-ness, it's usually to save our sorry asses.

Like he just did right then.

Cas can do a whole lot of stuff with his Semblance, but that isn't to say that he doesn't have his favorite moves. One of said favorite moves involves dealing with very large Grimm. What he likes to do is get the Grimm moving at a fast pace - usually by having it chase one of us around. Once that happens, Cas will conjure a gigantic rhomboid pointing directly at the creature like a spear, and then infuse it with earth- or ice-Dust.

In the case of our slithering friend, he infused the rhomboid with a combination of earth and fire.

Thus it came to pass, that Sammy the SNEK sadly ended his own life on a lance of burning lava...and all for the chance of a SNEK snack. It was almost tragic...

...except that Woodie and I had been said intended snack.

Cas hopped onto the ground from the conjured platform he'd been levitating on, then shook his head disappointedly. We then saw Jac leap down from a tree branch, his boots hitting the ground with a clanking, metallic THUD. He looked at the dead SNEK, and then at Cas.

"I coulda gotten that," he said. Cas shrugged.

"Eh, too slow."

Jac wasn't wrong, as a matter of fact. See, his Semblance is -

NO, NO, NO! I am DONE writing about Semblances for this chapter! Jac has a stupid-ass Semblance anyway, IMO.

Anyway, we all just stood around for a few seconds.

"Guess we're a team now," I finally spoke up.

"Not quite," said Woodie. "We gotta get the Relics first, and make sure they match."

So we went and found the temple. Nobody else had gotten there yet, which was neat. We got the relics. We made sure they matched before heading towards the bridge leading to the cliffside. Everything was going according to our plan.

Except for the ominous sound of monstrous keratin plates sliding on the grass behind us.

We all looked to each other with very unsettled expressions before turning our collective, horrified gazes towards the forest.

And the gigantic SNEK, very much alive and looking very pissed, that we thought we had killed not five minutes ago.