Jaune Arc

"I choose Option 3"

The world went white, the walls of the library collapsing on themselves with the books fading into nothingness. The Promethean was ripped apart, absolute fury and shock barely visible on his face before it disappeared in the bright white light.

Everything around Jaune faded away, all sounds, feeling, even emotion. He floated in the numb white warmth blissfully. His thoughts were fading, dissolving and mixing with the emptiness around him.

His memories had started to go now; he forgot his mother's face, the sound of his dad's voice, the giggling of his sisters whenever they dressed him up in dresses. He started panicking, trying to retain those memories any way he could.

His attempts were fruitless like sifting water with a sieve. His surroundings started getting darker the harder he fought to hold on. He had lost his body, his aura, his conscious thoughts, he couldn't bear to part with his memories this quickly. His mind thrashed in agony as his surroundings went from white to grey.

Something echoes around him and the pain disappeared. His mind stopped leaking, each remaining memory properly locked in place by fortified mental bonds. The darkness started taking on a texture and form, creating lines and perspective.

Feeling returned first. A cool breeze played across his skin, soft padding pressing into him from behind. Smell came next. Luxurious and rich smells of nature overwhelmed at first, but grew extremely pleasant. He could almost taste each individual smell on the breeze, but there was something stronger near him.

The world took on shape, and sight returned to him. A rich rainforest spread out under him to the horizon, strange trees and plants of all shapes and sizes immediately noticed by his eyes. His vision felt sharper, more robust, but slightly nauseating. There was something off about everything. He tilted his head, for he had a body now, and almost jumped in surprise.

His vision wasn't merely sight based alone, there was another layer underneath. Colors flowed through the trunks of the trees, flitted around the canopy in groups of dots, and pulsed in the ground itself.

Even the chair he was sitting on pulsed with the same light that underlay the world. Its texture was wooden and looked to be carved out of a single piece, but to his secondary vision, it was solid white, much like his aura.

He shifted in the chair and it molded itself to the new position while still providing constant support. It was the most comfortable chair he had ever sat on, with just enough pressure to make him aware of its presence.

The legs of the chair were part of the platform that the chair sat on. There were no walls anywhere to be seen.

Is this what happens after death? This beats my theory honestly. This is great!

The horizon grew lighter as a bright orb started rising over the treetops in distance. It's light blinded Jaune but his eyes quickly adapted to this second sun's brightness.

"Beautiful isn't it?"

Jaune's head whirled to the side where he saw a woman sitting in a chair next to his. It looked identical to his, but it was completely black to his secondary sight. Her voice was the same as the woman who had shown him the visions in Atlas. But it wasn't adversarial or mean, but smooth, pleasant, and downright affectionate.

Her face stared peacefully out into the distance, the sunlight twinkling in her eyes. Jaune continued to stare at her, a strange feeling bubbling in his chest. Her head turned towards him and he lost himself inside her light red eyes. For the first time he understood what people meant by 'truly mesmerizing eyes'.

"Are you done staring?" Her mouth curled in a small smile as Jaune attempted to stammer out an apology. She laughed and waved, causing Jaune to smile too.

"So, uh, hey, I'm Jaune. I don't want to be rude, but what exactly is this place?"

Her smile dropped and she looked out into the distance. "I think I have outdone myself this time. The view is beautiful."

Jaune continued to look at her, waiting for her to start talking.

"It's a long story and I wished to not meet so soon, but recent events have forced my hand." She looked down at her hands, which were playing with the red hem on her black dress. It was a simple thing, plain and modest. "I'll explain everything in due time."

"Alright, I can wait for that, but can you at least explain what happened back in…well, in the real world?"

"Your final opponent on Remnant was an ancient being whose true name has been lost to entropy. He was a formidable warrior and tactician, but he fell to the same vice that countless individuals have fallen to over the ages: jealousy.

He was jealous of another, one very close to him whose success slow ate into him over millions of years and eroded away the friendship they had fostered. This led to bitterness, betrayal, and eventually war."

"War? On Remnant? How long ago was this?"

"Yes, no, and billions of years ago."

Jaune gaped at the answer. He thought he had misheard the time scales of which the individual had bittered. Billions of years? How long did these beings live?

"Where did it happen then? What was the scale? What happened?" Jaune was eager to know as much as he could about this.

"Patience, please." Her voice grew sharper.

Jaune shut his mouth. The tone booked no argument and he had none.

"The war was very one-sided number wise. Our kind had mastered energy, entropy, gravity, and space, but there was one thing we could not do. Overcome the basic concepts of the natural form. Any attempt at improving our bodies using technology resulted in corruption and disaster. We had to rely on machines and artificial means to do anything beyond the physical.

Our lives grew naturally longer, but try as we might, we could not live in our prime for most of it. We grew old, our minds grew dull, and we withered away over millennia. Countless technologies were tested and always resulted in premature and violent death. One time the patients mutated so heavily and multiplied so quickly, we had to destroy the entire planet. Billions of lives lost, countless resources down the drain, and a blot on the history of science.

Then one day, a man announced that he had found the solution to it all! A field that is attached to each individual and acts in both defensive and medical capacities? It was too good to be true."

"Aura. It was created?" Jaune wasn't as surprised as he thought he would have been, though it did throw a wrench in his theory that the humans on Earth just hadn't unlocked theirs yet.

"Indeed it was. He bestowed this aura upon all, and coupled with the wonderful Dust, ushered in a golden age of near immortality and progress. Of course, there were countless attempts are explaining and reverse-engineering this physics-breaking technology, but none achieved satisfactory results."

"You mean to say, even after billions of years of attempts there was no way to replicating or understanding this?"

"None at all. The only one who understood this to any degree of mastery was the creator himself, the Aurawielder."

Jaune's mind went straight past hyperdrive and into ultradrive. The Aurawielder was what he called me down in that alternate space under the SDC mine! What the f…

"I can see you understand the crux of the matter. The Aurawielder was you as you are here right now; not Jaune, but your 'soul', which is the closest this crude language can get."

"But how? How did that man become me? You said there was a war."

"Indeed. You became a legendary figure, the 'mad scientist' alone in his laboratory, better than us mere creatures. The masses envied you for your talents and abilities, rather than thanking you for the gift of aura. Only those closest to you knew the truth about you and your ways, and you were happy in their company and they in yours.

That was, and I hate to be so cliché, but your darkest secret came out. The true drawbacks to the miracle of aura was leaked to the public. The backlash was fierce, and you were soon on the run from every authority in the galaxy, hopping from star system to star system, using pocket dimensions as makeshift hideouts and laboratories."

"Wait, hold up. What was the drawback to aura that caused this severe of a response?"

"Darkness, malicious intent, and hatred given form. The Creatures of Grimm."

"The Grimm are caused by aura?!" If's Jaune's mind had been attached to a turbine, he could power half the Earth by now.

"The laws of physics in action. The conservation of energy is a cruel mistress. Energy of all forms in created out of nowhere in the form of aura. Where does this energy come from? The answer was negative energy. You know about pair production: how light can spontaneously produce a particle and antiparticle near a nucleus. The same concept applies here."

"You're saying that the energy that is created in the usage of aura causes the spontaneous production of 'anti-energy' elsewhere?"

"That was the leading theory, yes. The Aurawielder had managed to control the production of this byproduct and spread it out across space in both the main and pocket dimensions. The result was that everyone had a weaker aura than he did and that there were unstable pocket universes filled entirely with negative energy.

When the authorities raided his home planet, they disturbed the delicate balance and caused these pockets of space-time to unravel and release their contents to the main universe. The planet and its entire solar system was sealed off in quarantine, soaked with Grimm, aura, and bio samples from experiments. You are quite familiar with this remnant of your former glory."

"Remnant…it was my laboratory before everything went wrong?"

"Exactly. Your sentient creatures managed to escape the tainted lab and take over the land, the most prominent being aura-infused hairless bipedals."

"You're telling me I created fu**ing humans?" Jaune's self-restraint snapped. "That is beyond crazy, beyond ludicrous, straight into territory unexplored by dictionaries. How could I create humans?!"

"Don't get ahead of yourself. You merely augmented lesser sentient life with aura and experimented on them. But you did create a subset of humankind: the Faunus race."

Jaune blinked. "Bloody hell. Alright, moving past that bombshell. The escaped lab animals populated the Earth, discovered the aura that I undoubtedly implanted in them, and started building a civilization despite the pressing threat of the Grimm?"

"A fight that is coming to head now. The Grimm threat has been getting smarter recently, their attacks more cunning and coordinated, the kind of coordination that implies conscious thought."

"A central intelligence?"

"Precisely, but we shall get to that later. There is much to cover but not enough time to cover all of it. With your lab destroyed, you were on the run, successfully managing to avoid capture while continuing your attempts to make aura more efficient and less dangerous.

However, this was where the betrayal came in. Your friend had been coordinating the raids on your hideouts for millions of years. He thought you deserved worse than death for the release of Grimm on the world without warning the world. He told himself that he was in the right and that his betrayal was for the best.

His motivation, like all things, was corrupted over time. Jealousy clouded his mind and all he could see was how much more powerful you were and how unfair it was. He didn't see the burden on you, or what you had to sacrifice to get the power that you possessed. Aura became a cheap, simplistic tool in his eyes."

"That explains a lot actually." Jaune steepled his hands and stared out at the view in front of him, the bits and pieces of information he had falling into place. "So in one final act of betrayal he outed my hideouts to the authorities?"

The woman nodded, a faraway look in her eyes. "They struck swiftly. It was utter chaos, your defensive systems holding them at bay for mere moments. All the guns, traps, bombs, and barriers were just enough for you to prepare your final defense: you."

"Me?"

"Your Prometheus plan wasn't an original idea, you copied yourself across space and time."

"Clones." Jaune's eyes widened in revelation as the final pieces clicked.

"War. All-out war that spanned hundreds of millions of years more and caused havoc on scales unimaginable. With aura and your control over it, you effectively were each of the clones at the same time, controlling them all. Killing one didn't mean anything. Hundreds of planets destroyed during the war, thousands more when the Grimm joined the fray.

You managed to capture your treacherous friend in a surprise attack on a military planet and lock him off in a pocket dimension. Your forgiving nature however got the best of you, making you give him some leeway in his shackles inside the prison. He used those privileges to create the situation to lure you into letting him free."

Jaune sat in silence and processed the information. His past self had used aura and clones to wage a war on the galactic scale against a vastly superior force. He had imprisoned his friend for betraying him for who knows how long.

"How did the war end?"

She sighed. "You ran out of resources, they overran your defenses and captured you. They stripped you of your aura and memories, and cast you into the void as a punishment. Through sheer luck you must have washed ashore on a planet inhabited by humans and were reborn."

"Earth. It was chance, all chance." Jaune pursed his lips. This story was the highest level of ridiculousness, but it clicked somewhere in his mind.

"Perhaps, but I cannot say for sure."

"Another question. When I first stumbled into Remnant, I touched this piece of red crystal. It was acting like a portal, sucking in everything around the room like a vacuum or a source of strong gravity. Do you know what that was?"

"I unfortunately do not know much about the world outside the Remnant pocket universe and I cannot help you there."

Jaune just nodded. They sat in silence for a moment before Jaune decided to ask the next question on his mind. "Do you think he died in the explosion down there?"

"I would think so, yes. He denounced aura and lost the ability to manipulate his own 'soul' and would not have left remnants of himself in the world. I think we have seen the last of him for sure."

"So is that why I remain? Because of the remnants of my aura dispersed among my clones?"

"That is how I managed to keep you here. Otherwise, the aura would have decayed within minutes. You must have felt your concept of self erode after your 'death'."

Jaune shuddered. Her words brought back the rush of horrible feelings that had filled him in the terrible, bland whiteness that had enveloped after the explosion. A question rose from the memories like a bubble. He turned his head to look her full in the face.

"I'm sorry, but how do you know all that you are telling me?" Jaune spoke slowly, careful to keep any hint of an accusation or doubt out of his tone. "It sounds like you were…"

"Right there beside you?"

Jaune nodded, happy that she hadn't taken offense and that she seemed to understand his query.

"That's because I was."

Jaune lacked the ability to be surprised any more. He just motioned for her to continue.

"I was captured shortly after you lost the war. I was there beside you at every step and was there with you for the execution. However, they took 'mercy' on me and kept me locked up until my early death in jail. However, against your wishes, I had stored some part of my aura in the lab as a backup, just in case something happened to me. Turns out it kept me anchored to Remnant with nothing to do but wait for you to arrive."

"Huh. I…I'm sorry." Jaune didn't know what to say, really.

"Don't be sorry." She looked at him sternly, fire in her eyes. "My life is over, but yours is not. You have managed to escape the void twice. You still have the Grimm threat to deal with on Remnant. Stop it before it overflows the limits of this dimension and spills into the real universe."

"Alright, but how? I could barely take on the weakened soul of my treacherous dog of a friend. How do you expect me to take on whatever is at the heart of the Grimm forces?"

"Your aura. It is your greatest strength. Do not hesitate to use it; the Grimm army is far too big for your tiny contribution to play any large part in increasing it. Here, bow your head. I still retain enough knowledge of aura to unlock more of your potential. You must do the rest on your own."

Jaune felt her hand on his head, but it wasn't a physical sensation. It felt like she was touching something inside his head, inside his brain. A buzzing sensation started in his chest and expanded outward, pulses of white exploding in his vision.

"Fight well, my love."

The forest fell away from him as his sight whitened and his other senses died. He felt himself adrift in the sea of whiteness, but it was different this time. There was no sense of panic, no sense of loss. He felt a strong sense of duty, of conviction. There was no way he would let his friends down a second time.

The whiteness darkened, leaving only a white blob in the center. Jaune focused on it and he zoomed towards it. As it got bigger, Jaune realized that it wasn't just one dot, but a cluster of dots that were so close together as to appear as a single unit.

He noticed smaller colorful dots swarming around the central white dots, but unlike the white dots, these were covered in some sort of grimy darkness. The white dots filled his vision and made everything all white yet again.

A pulse of electricity travelled through him and he jolted upright. His head smacked into something hard, but at the same time, didn't. He felt blinded by bright lights, but at the same time, didn't.

There were a million contradictory smells and sensations that assaulted him from all around. He was both lying down and standing up, in air and in liquid, clothed and naked. He focused on the source of sensations that made him the most comfortable: lying down, in darkness, and in air.

He sat up and groaned as nausea hit him over the head like a brick. A few deep breaths until he didn't feel like passing back into the white void and he was as good as new. He was sitting on what felt like a metal surface but he couldn't make out any details in the dark.

He had a hospital gown on him that barely covered his private areas and didn't retain any heat, causing goosebumps to sprout all over his arms and legs. The only source of light came from the edges of a door seven feet away from the foot of his bed. He swung his legs off the bed and walked on unsteady legs to the doorway. He groped the smooth metal of the door for a few moments before finding the doorknob.

He turned it and stumbled into a clean, brightly lit room. He looked up just in time to see a flash of white and hear a squeal and then he was on the floor.

His head pounded as the person who he had crashed into continued to scream. Jaune raised his hand and waved it around, trying to get it to stop. It worked, in a way, as the person turned and ran out of the room. Jaune pushed himself up off the floor into a kneeling position and took his first look around.

The first fact immediately visible to him was that he was back in a hospital. A desk was a few feet to his right, and a door a few feet to his left. The person he had ran into was probably entering or leaving when Jaune had emerged.

"HALT YOUR MOVEMENT!" A soldier had stepped into the doorway of the room, rifle aimed right at Jaune. "FAILURE TO COMPLY WILL RESULT IN LETHAL FORCE."

Jaune just raised his arms and continued kneeling. The soldier walked over to him and gave him a once over. He mumbled something into the mic on his lapel and two other soldiers walked into the room the same way the first had, guns drawn and aimed.

A bag was put over Jaune's head and his hands were tied behind his back. The soldiers dragged him through hallways of different brightness and lengths. He could've walked, but he was too tired to do anything but go along. The soldiers looked Valean and Jaune had a sneaking suspicion about where they were.

Cool tiling gave way to a carpet and he felt the room start ascending. An elevator, which means that we're going to…

The bag was taken off his head and he was pushed to his knees in front of a familiar desk, with a familiar spectacled man sitting behind it. Yeah, that confirms it.

"Jaune Arc. You look quite well for a dead man." Ozpin waved his hand and dismissed the two soldiers who had 'escorted' Jaune up to Ozpin's office.

"I've felt better. No idea how I look, but thanks." Jaune waited for Ozpin to say something more, but the headmaster tented his arms and rested his head on his folded hands. "Uh, Professor, can I sit down? This position is pretty uncomfortable."

"No Jaune, not yet. There are far more important matters we need to clear up beforehand." Ozpin turned to his computer and started typing. "I'm sure you know about the Grimm attack on Vale."

Jaune nodded. "Last I heard, they were at the walls." He shuffled around a little to get more comfortable.

"They are much further in by now, but their progress has been slowed by the bravery of our Hunters, police, and army. However, there is a threat that is far greater than any one Grimm that is possibly preparing an attack on this city."

"What's the threat?" Someone else I pissed off in my past life? Given how difficult the last guy was even in a weakened form, I don't want to meet this one.

Ozpin turned his monitor towards Jaune. His blood chilled as he recognized the location: the inner, more secret area of his lab that he installed in the cave system under Beacon. It wasn't much, but it was somewhere to store things that couldn't be risked storing in Beacon.

There were pods upon pods attached to the rocky walls, each filled with liquid and a growing human body that drew from the aura crystal embedded in the side.

"Care to explain this Jaune?" Ozpin's voice was neutral, controlled, and far more dangerous than any amount of anger.

Jaune moistened his lips while structuring his thoughts. He could've explained keeping a clone or two as an experiment of sorts. But Ozpin had dug into his deepest secrets, and it was time for the entire truth to be out.

"Professor, I know it sounds kinda crazy but…" Jaune began to speak quietly and steadily, explaining how he had first read about the Color War experiments and started experimenting with his own aura. He explained how he developed the clones and the systems necessary for their growth and survival.

Ozpin stayed silent to the end of the explanation about the clones and their adventures. Jaune's voice gave way to silence. Ozpin turned his chair and stared out at the burning city, where smoke and fire dominated the skyline.

"So you simply transferred your soul to a clone body?" Ozpin finally broke the silence. His voice was as calm and steady as always.

"Yeah, pretty much."

"Can you go into more detail about who attacked you on the airship?"

Jaune grimaced. "I don't know. He singled me out, but didn't really explain why." Not technically a lie…

"Hmm." Ozpin spun around and tapped a button on his keyboard, causing the shackles on Jaune's hand to spring open. "My apologies for the rough treatment, but we have reason to believe that the aforementioned threat can disguise itself. I wished to take no chances, especially with your perceived resurrection. Please, take a seat."

Jaune took the chair Ozpin motioned at, rubbing his sore wrists. "Are all of the developed clones in the morgue in the hospital or are there more elsewhere?" His mind was already formulating a plan on countering the Grimm threat, especially after regaining access to his lab.

"Only some of them were moved to the morgue. The rest of your lab is exactly how you left it, for criminal investigation purposes. Though with the current state of affairs, I do not expect one to take place anytime soon."

Jaune grinned. "Awesome. So, what's this new enemy that you were talking about?"

"We don't know much about it to be perfectly honest. It is either an extremely ancient and adaptive form of Grimm or some sort of lifeform we have never seen before." Ozpin paused a second. "I have heard stories about it and reviewed information files on it from all sorts of sources and they agree on one thing: it is a master of disguise and manipulation, taking on many different forms to lure prey.

"There hadn't been a confirmed sighting for many years now; the last one was well before the Color Wars. From what has been recorded, there is no way to tell where it will pop up next. The most common speculation has been that it has burrows far underground that it retreats into when it senses overwhelming opposition. For that reason, it has been called The Deep in such texts."

Jaune blinked, taken aback with the scope of the problem. "That sounds pretty dangerous. It can pop up anywhere without warning?"

"As far as we know, yes. A nest is spawned underground, and it starts accumulating biomass. Overtime, it becomes larger and larger and starts to extend its reach outwards. It has been known to imitate everything from the smallest fly to a full-fledged Hunter."

"What stage is the infection in right now? Who found it?" Jaune was way past the point of being surprised anymore; the revelations hurled his way in the last day had been too much. He just wanted stuff to go back to normal (or what counted as normal in Beacon) as soon as possible.

"Team RWBY encountered it in Mountain Glenn and Doctor Oobleck stayed behind to fight it."

"Wow, that's sobering." Jaune ran a hand across his face. "It's a good thing that it anchored itself in Mountain Glenn, then. Is there a chance that Doctor Oobleck can defeat it?"

"There is, but we do not have the liberty of waiting. Grimm are marching on Beacon and I fear that their attack is more coordinated and direct that any other in the past."

"A central intelligence, but we can't deal with that right now."

"Doing some extracurricular reading of Grimm Theory? Dry subject, but I digress. You are right, our priority is evacuating as many civilians as we can, which is currently almost over. Beacon is the next priority and must not fall. It is our only hope of having a fighting chance against the masses of Grimm and their origin."

"I see. I have a plan, but it will require the utmost coordination and focus. Is Professor Goodwitch available?"

Ozpin looked at him curiously. "Whatever your plan is, you'll have to make do with Beacon's supplies and yourself. All the staff are busy with coordinating the city's defenses."

"Understood, Headmaster." Something struck him. "Sorry but if I may be so bold, you seem to be taking my whole 'multiple bodies' thing quite well."

Ozpin smiled his small, mysterious smile. "Give me a little more credit Jaune, I am the Headmaster of Beacon. Knowing what is happening in my school is the least of my responsibilities."

Jaune looked at him quizzically. "You knew I was doing all this?"

"Not exactly, but I had my suspicions about such a thing. It was lower on my list of plausible explanations, but I anticipated such a thing. Hence the retrieval and storage of the bodies in your lab."

Jaune nodded, the explanation satisfying him. He opened his mouth to start explaining his plan but Ozpin stopped him with a hand.

"I trust you to do the best thing for you, your team, and this city. I fear if you start explaining your plan, we may be here for a while and I cannot afford that much time. Good luck Jaune, you may leave."

Jaune got up awkwardly and took the elevator down. The meeting had been less 'What the actual hell, Jaune' and more 'This is completely normal', contrary to his expectations. Ozpin had taken Jaune's clones incredibly well and had not dwelled on them or his upcoming plan. Jaune smiled at the permission Ozpin had given him; it was basically a moral blank check that let Jaune do pretty much anything if he could prove it was for the defense of the city. He sent a quick command over to Alfred, chuckled at the response, and continued on his way.

I hope Ozpin doesn't mind a 60% chance of the entire research wing of the school going up in flames…

Jaune hurried into his lab, which was both familiar and different at the same time. He could tell people had rummaged through some of the contents and it disturbed Jaune in a weird way. He shrugged off the feeling and walked from his lab to the shared warehouse, keeping its main doors open. All the different labs kept their large projects in here, from experimental forms or Dust to more efficient crops. The four dozen shelves covered in weapon prototypes alone would have sent Ruby into a happiness-induced coma.

He walked past all the other projects to his own section, where a few dozen-odd foot long metal tubes of varying thickness lay piled in a corner. Jaune took deep breaths as he walked to his Dust cabinet and pulled out all the Dust required for the mission.

Flame, Scorch, Shock, Ice, Gravity, Wind, Aura. He lay them out onto a desk, keeping two Wind crystals in his hand. He drew from both the Aura crystals and his own considerable pool and channeled the energy into the Wind crystals. He swept his hand and the air followed his intent, sweeping out a wide path straight to the large doorway.

He had built the metal tubes in the warehouse itself, so there was no method of moving the heavy pieces outside so he had to do it manually. He took the rolling platform that carried boxes in and out of the warehouse and rolled it in front of the pieces he would need to carry out his plan.

He picked up and set down each tube, connector, and component box and placed them neatly onto the platform, shuttling it outside whenever it got too full. His mind fell into a sort of meditative state with each item he had heaved with the power of Dust and aura. Time seemed to pass both quickly and slowly, each second both an instant and an eternity.

It was only when the Aura crystals on the desk ran out that Jaune mentally rejoined the real world. Every part was now outside and now the real work would begin. By his estimation, he had about an hour before his teammates would be in the city and fighting. He had to work fast and break a few records while he was it.

Jaune pushed his cart outside and replaced the empty Wind and Aura crystals, then got back into the swing of things. A specially designed heat-resistant plate was set down first, 20 feet by 20 feet and an absolute pain to construct. The 25-foot-tall support tower went up next.

The main stage engine was the first real component to be placed down. It was a fascinating design, a marriage of the utilitarian Earth design and the elegant Remnant design. The exhaust cone was attached to the engine and boasted a 60-degree angle of rotation. The engine itself was quite unique, a hybrid Dust and liquid-propellant design. The Dust was used to reduce the complexity and size of the engine block, as well as to dramatically increase the efficiency of the liquid propellants. The resulting engine had a thrust-to-weight ratio that was unheard of on Earth.

Jaune levitated over the largest body piece and welded it into place, using Scorch to weld the pieces of metal, Ice to keep the surrounding metals from heating up and compromising their strength, and Wind to keep the entire structure steady. The internal fuel tanks were put in, followed by the separator blocks. After a few other details, the first stage of Remnant's First Rocket aka Please Don't Go Boom-Boom was done.

The next and final stage was mostly similar, except for one detail: the fuel tanks were much smaller and had just enough space to fit twenty pods all around the perimeter. Jaune opened each of the hatches and attached the stage to the support tower before taking a well-deserved break.

He walked back to the table, utterly mentally exhausted from the strain of channeling outrageous amounts of aura. Whatever that woman, his partner from another life, had done to him, it had worked. He would have been burned to a crisp a day ago, but now only his brain felt like dying.

He leaned on the cart for a minute before running all the way back to his lab. He jabbed himself with a syringe labeled 'Pick Me Up', tried to contain the sudden boost of energy the unholy concoction provided, and dropped into his cave, or as he called it, Where the Bodies are Buried.

One by one, he opened and levitated nineteen bodies out of the cave and back into his lab. He reactivated the housekeeping system that regulated the creation and storage of bodies before heading back out. In the coming war, he would need bodies and lots of them.

The nineteen bodies were armed, armored, and supplied. He topped up each Aura crystal before slotting the body into the waiting cavity in the rocket. The aura should protect them from too much damage during the flight. If they didn't, that would really, really suck. Burns were no joke.

He put the nosecone on his rocket and stepped back for the last time, an hour and ten minutes after starting. It was knock-off quality, but Jaune hoped it would do the trick. Not worrying too much about looks, press pictures, quality control, the lives of the passengers, the cost of materials, the actual construction procedures, and overall quality helped a lot.

Scratch 60% chance of failure; if this thing even leaves this sorry excuse of a launch pad I'll be surprised. Even that is somehow too optimistic. Oh well.

Jaune climbed into the largest cavity, the only one outfitted with a pillow for padding and a set of gauges. Travelling in First Class, the Jaune Industries way. He chucked to himself at the absurdity of the situation. He was sitting in a rocket designed over a year, constructed in an hour with no quality checks ever, with 19 other clones of himself on board, and not a single worry about his own life.

This is the real hard part. Here goes nothing… Jaune closed his eyes and focused on the aura of the clones on board, filtering out everything else. He had felt their aural signatures when we was coming back down to Remnant from the..the.. The Land of History Class? The Land of Exposition? Land Before Time? Whatever. He knew how to search for a particular signature whenever he wanted to control a clone, but he never had tried to focus on more than one.

It was mind-bending, to say the least. He had to focus, while remaining unfocused and calm. He had to take control of the clones while remaining aloof and separate. It was like dipping your fingers in five different bowls of soup while trying to keep your finger from becoming dirty. Whatever had changed in him from his little death trip made the process much easier and within ten minutes Jaune was looking through twenty pairs of eyes.

All right, next stage, try not to look like a crap dance troupe. Controlling each of the clones individually at the same time would require every ounce of brainpower he had, and meant that he had to reassign concentration depending on the needs of the situation. 3% of his total capacity could fight the lower denominations of Grimm, but anything more required more. He would have to end each fight as soon as possible and continuously cycle through each body to ensure peak performance.

Not as confident in his abilities as he would have liked, Jaune flicked a couple switched and waited for the startup programs to finish preparing for launch. He was already over time; his teammates would be far into the thick of it by now. A beep echoed inside the small metal cage, indicating that the ship was ready.

Now or never… The big green button was pressed and Jaune lost his breath. The rocket groaned as 10g's of force slammed into Jaune like a ton of brick. Each of his bodies felt it and each hurt the same amount. He fought to retain consciousness through the ordeal, keeping an eye of every readout through the ascent. His bodies would only have to be taken to a few tens of thousands of feet before the drop to ensure maximum spread. The rocket itself had to continue into orbit; the payload inside the long nosecone contained some nasty surprises for the enemy.

The drop zone approached steadily, the altitude readout barely readable through the shaking. His aura was flaring around him, protecting each body from the fate of becoming Jaune soup. He pushed a button and felt the entire ship lurch as the first stage separated. The ship continued for a few dozen more seconds before Jaune pushed the button again, this time separating the second stage and ejecting him and his other bodies into the clouds. The rocket would continue its planned course autonomously or bust; the most important part was miraculously over and no one had died.

From this height Jaune could see the entire city of Vale spread out under him, the rocket's trail pinpointing Beacon grounds. He rotated himself and the other bodies into a circle. Each body would go to a different part of the city and assist in the fighting there. Jaune flared his senses out once more, this time using all twenty bodies as an antenna for receiving aural signals from the city below.

The vague murky feedback he received from just his own body turned into a glowing map as soon as he used all twenty. The idea was an offshoot of the 'Very Long Baseline' techniques astronomers used on Earth for celestial observations. A few telescopes across Earth collectively could collect the same information as an Earth-sized telescope. Jaune was happy to learn that this could also apply to aura.

A familiar cluster of seven auras caught his attention. A large, but shrinking, army of darkness was on one side of them, with an unfamiliar aura in their midst. Weiss's white, Pyrrha's red, Blake's black, and Yang's yellow were circling at lunging at the unfamiliar aura, while the other three snuffed out the quickly shrinking blot of darkness.

He put 10% of his mental capacity into the clone closest to that sector of the city and angled it (myself? This is gonna be confusing) downwards, leaving the other nineteen in the air. Hopefully the element of surprise and an explosive entrance would dispatch the threat quickly and he could turn his focus to the defense of the city. He couldn't survive in any fight longer than ten seconds against a Hunter-level enemy. And he really didn't want to die.

Five Minutes Later

God. Damn. It. That's nineteen clones left, already. What a wonderful start to the day, two deaths already!. And I need to remember to say sorry for subjecting my team to watching me die twice. Maybe a nice vacation after this is all over…


AN: Lots of revelations in this chapter! And sorry about the huge gap between the last chapter and this one, I had to rewrite half of it and that took a while.

And as always, please review and PM me about any criticisms or things you liked. It's a huge part of the writing process!

And I don't know why I didn't do this before, but I'll try to address the Guest reviews in these otherwise useless ANs from now on(I would encourage creating an account though, it's free and I get to direct message you rather than do this).

And shameless self-plug: I have uploaded another story, this time humor focused! It shows the inside workings of the Valean government and how it is stopped from collapsing every day by the efforts of one Malcolm Tucker. It contains very, very mature language and is based off the brilliant political satire show 'The Thick of It' and its movie 'In the Loop'. Check it out, it would make me happy :).

Thank you all for reading and I hope you have a great day!