Beacon Ruins

The young Beowolf padded carefully from block to block as he took in the unfamiliar scents that each block carried. They had strange blocky symbols painted upon them and the older Beowolves didn't trust them. The young one saw no reason to go against their judgement.

His foot moved a loose rock and he twisted his leg as he fell down the pile of rubble. This set off a chain reaction and soon the entire pile was collapsing the way. The beowolf tried his best to stay above the rubble but a chunk of rebar smashed through his skull and he dissolved.

His pack didn't pay much attention to his death; there were more than enough where came from. However, what used to lay under the debris interested the pack leader greatly. It was a concrete trapdoor about a meter in each dimension and, had it not been for the cracked ground everywhere else, almost completely flush with the floor.

It was completely undamaged, almost new. The pack leader sniffed around the edges until he found an exposed corner. He raised his bone covered muzzle to the sky and howled, calling every able bodied beowolf in the area. The strongest of them wedged their claws under the corner and strained upwards, their dark bodies pulsing with the effort.

As the door rose, other wolves joined in and wedged their bodies in to push it further up. With a final heave the door was open. A dark hallway met their eyes. But it was not the sight that tempted them; it was the delicious stench rising from inside that drove brother to fight brother to be the first inside the tunnel.

Jaune Arc

"Piece…of…trash…" Jaune muttered in anger as he struggled to manually start the generator with his one good arm. The other was cut off below the bicep and hung uselessly. "Goddamn Atlesian…garbage."

Finally, with a violent rumble and groan so loud it could've mistaken for a dying Alpha Nevermore, the generator managed to start turning. Jaune fell backwards and lay there in triumph. He may have accidentally unleased an ancient horror on the land, destroying military property, an entire goddamn Hunter Academy, as well as his own life in the process, but at least he could get a generator to do its job.

Another rumble echoed through the maintenance tunnels the branched out from the auxiliary generator, this time decidedly not the roar of a generator that didn't want to start up. Jaune sat up against the warm metal of his only source of electricity and took aim with his sword.

A beowolf head peered into the room, and then in its place was a fine mist. Yelps of pain and surprise poured from the dark tunnel. Jaune didn't need his helmet to see that the tunnel was now empty, each Beowolf running away with its tail firmly between its legs.

Jaune extended a finger of aura to a nearby switch and shuffled the conducting Dust crystals around to power cycle the lab. He waited for the confident hum that usually accompanied this, but to no avail. He sighed. He was good, but apparently not even his systems could survive the systematic destruction of the academy.

He stood up, every inch of his leg shaking with the effort. He hadn't felt this weak since seventh grade when he had tried running a marathon, in the rain, with only a week of practice. He had passed the seventeen-kilometer mark before passing out face down in the mud. He dug his sword into the dirt and used it like a walking stick as he limped his way into the tunnel opposite the direction the Beowolves had come.

Balance was difficult with legs made of cold marzipan and the lack of an entire arm, but he made do. It would've been easier if the tunnel was lit and the lab powered. Then he could've just taken control of another body inside the main lab and escaped. But due to the emergency protocol, the entire lab was under lockdown and could not be opened without restoring power to the mains. The lockdown was designed to keep the lab in stasis: nothing got in or out until the situation was under control. He would have to go all the way to the main generator to reset the situation. With two uncooperative legs, one arm, and a sword for a walking aid. It would have to do. The darkness of the tunnel swallowed Jaune.

Team RWBY

The four girls collapsed in the clearing, their clothes singed and torn. Their expressions were shell-shocked and their shoulders slumped, the very image of defeat. Ruby slid down a large oak-like tree into what could have passed for a sitting position. Yang clenched her fists and disappeared into the woods, with Weiss in tow to make sure she didn't do anything rash. Blake gazed numbly into the distance, her face perfectly porcelain.

Neither said a word for the better part of an hour. The Sun continued to arc through the air and the shadows lengthened, but neither teammate moved. An hour passed, then two. The sky reddened, and the chatter of insects grew louder, seemingly unaware of the tumult inside the minds of the two warriors.

The Sun had touched the horizon when Yang came back, her gauntlets steaming with the ichor of countless Grimm. Weiss nimbly followed the brawler, her saber held securely by her waist.

"We should continue moving", Weiss' voice was filled with authority and false confidence born from years of training under her father. "We can rest later."

Ruby got to her feet. She and Blake followed their teammates back into the forest, their destination unknown. All Ruby wanted to do was curl up into a ball and go to sleep, but she knew there would be time for that later. They had to get to safety first.

Team JNPR

Nora and Ren were alone. Again. They had given it their all to defend Beacon from the assault, but in the end it was too much. Nora could only focus fire on one area, and by the time she pushed back the local surge, there was another elsewhere. She hadn't heard Jaune's announcement and hadn't believed Ren when he came to get her.

Beacon? Fallen? With Jaune leading the defense? It was impossible! But it was near impossible to deny the hopelessness of the situation. She had helped everyone evacuate into Vale and then onto the Atlesian ships that had arrived to gather the students.

The two had watched from the air as explosions ripped across the campus. The only place she truly called home was not under meters of rubble. Ren held her close as the explosions died down and shared in her misery. It was like their childhood all over again, helplessly watching as everything they knew was torn down.

But this time would be different. This time they were ready to face the world. They would take the fight to the Grimm themselves. For their lost family. For their friends. For humanity. The remaining half of JNPR stepped off the airship into Atlas with only one goal in their mind: vengeance for the fallen.

Jaune Arc

Jaune sat down hard onto a chair, the images from the television screen playing across his disbelieving features. He had never felt this lost, this torn. News reports were playing stories on Faunus riots, a White Fang attack on Haven, and the Atlesian military's decision to quarantine the kingdom from the rest of Remnant, and general mayhem as many cults popped up calling this the end of the world.

In short, it was the absolute worst possible response to the Grimm threat. His eyes roamed his desolate lab and fixated upon the major cause of his consternation: the hole in the vault where he had stored his bodies. Somehow, someone had managed to hack his systems (Jaune had a pretty good clue as to who it was) and made their way past his defenses and into the lab proper.

Knowing the only way out of the vault that didn't involve tunneling through meters of solid rock was through the lab, Jaune decided to play the waiting game while he came up with his plan of action. He began by taking inventory and the result was everything he had expected.

Beacon students: dead or scattered. Beacon staff: unknown, dead or scattered. The population of Vale: dead or scattered. The only things that hadn't left Vale were the Grimm, and there was no reason to think they'd do so anytime soon.

He had only the Dust that remained in his stores, as well as anything in Beacon's that survived the assault. The Applied Mechanics department had been blown up in front of him, taking with it both construction equipment as well as most of the unfortified labs. The fortified labs contained nothing useful and were used to develop and test volatile weapon systems. Nothing that he was desperate enough to use. Yet.

His own stores were probably more than sufficient to last him months, but that's where his biology interfered. He had managed to stabilize his wounds, but he wouldn't be able to take on anything past a particularly stupid Ursa anytime soon. He had to get a new body.

And food. He added as his stomach grumbled. He had to eat to maintain the bodies and he had no clue where he would find food in the apocalyptic wasteland outside. Deciding upon an immediate course of action, he heaved himself off the chair and stumbled over to the door to the vault.

He powered up the vault, powering down his lab's auxiliary systems and stepped into the cavernous space. Before he had the chance to observe anything, he doubled over and retched. Nothing came out as it had been a few days since he had last had anything to eat.

His nose had seized up in its futile attempt to block out the offensive smell, but even pinching his nose shut didn't fully stop the smell. Why is the mouth allowed to smell? Who designed the mouth to allow smell to travel from the mouth to the nose? Knowing that it was important to produce nasal sounds did nothing. He would much rather have given up the ability to say 'Many mommies were nicely meeting on the moon' than smell this stench for long.

He moved forwards and tried to figure out where the stench was coming from. Something had died here, and it didn't take a genius to figure out what it was. Most of the life pods that held his bodies were showing red, the universal sign for "not good"". However, the pods should've been hermetically sealed, throwing that theory out the window. Maybe…

Jaune recoiled as his newest theory was confirmed. Two of his bodies lay dead on the ground next to a group of damaged pods. Fluid had leaked from the pods and had congealed around the two bodies making the dark scene even more grotesque. A set of footprints led away from the scene and into another alcove that Jaune had meant to fill with a pod but had forgotten.

A young man's body was slumped over, the state of his body the only evidence Jaune needed to peg his cause of death. Starvation. He must have gotten trapped inside when the emergency lockdown was put into place. Poor guy.

Jaune knelt next to the body and patted him down for any identification. His non-descript olive-green and black jacket hung loosely off his emaciated body. His grey eyes stared lifelessly at the ground. His feet were the only part of him not withered away and the reason was obvious with one touch: they were robotic.

He left the legs for later and searched the inner layers of his jacket, his nose about ready to fall off his face. His searching paid off in the form of a scroll stashed in a hidden pocket. Despite the situation, a smile fought its way into existence on his face. Now this was something he could act on in his current state.

Five minutes later, the body lay prone on a table in the far corner of the lab with a sheet over it. Its robotic feet had been thoroughly dissected and their parts lay spread out. The design was nothing special: prosthetics with shotguns embedded inside, Dust powered of course. Nothing about their design gave away any details of note and so Jaune had abandoned them in favor of hacking the scroll he had recovered.

Turning it on had revealed the man's name had been Mercury Black and that he had 400 odd messages. The rest of the details were secured by a top-of-the-line encryption, reserved solely for the highest government secrets. Either another government had decided to betray Vale's faith and had sent a spy to investigate him, or someone had access to government classified tech. Given what he had seen of the rampant crime in Vale, he couldn't be sure which option was the truth.

Jaune had experience with cracking systems, but the scroll was encrypted in such a way that to crack it he had to apply every technique in the book…then brute force a solution through the combined processing power of a Hunter academy to get anywhere. He frowned. This was no small task; they must have a master programmer with them.

Luckily, he had a Hunter Academy on hand, ready to serve the cause. One that still had most of its servers still functional, despite a rapid degrade in the quality of its infrastructure. It had taken quite a bit of his time to convince Ozpin and then the furious Headmistress to dedicate the (in her words, exorbitant) resources in moving the bulk of Beacon's processing power off-site and in a nearby underground bunker. Jaune knew the power of computers in a time of crisis and had worked his ass off to convince Beacon's heads of the same. In the end, he had succeeded. It was completely off the charts, with its own power supply and minimal footprint.

In short, it was designed for a (then) unlikely attack on Beacon. Jaune pinged each server and with each success, his smile grew wider. The server cluster connected to the CCT directly through Beacon, which meant that due to the current ruined state of Beacon, he couldn't access even local CCT without routing traffic through another device already connected to local CCT, which was the scroll in his hand. He had planned around this obstacle as well, sacrificing 5% of computing power to instead put in a back-up server that would hold raw text of everything that passed through Vale. Storage space wasn't at a premium, thankfully, and fudging something as trivial as this was easy when most people didn't understand half of what he was doing.

He had spent about a week making and months training an algorithm to detect garbage information like social media posts and only store data from law enforcement, individuals on watch lists, the dark web, and information databases. In the end, it was a rough snapshot of the CCT that minus the junk that made up most of it. Only information that was potentially useful to him (and by extension law enforcement) was kept, which reduced the total size to 0.1% of the total estimated size of the CCT. It also meant that social media's video and image content was essentially useless as it used server-side encryption that would require too long to decode. It would've been fine if he could've connected to their source server, but the fact that he couldn't was the entire reason for the backup's existence. A lot of formatting was broken, and there was a lot of irrelevant or garbage data, but it was better than being completely blind in an emergency.

Jaune set the machines working their magic and decided to nod off, the events of the past few days jumbling about in his head like a storm designed to drive him mad. Portals opened and closed, black birds flew down from the skies in dozens, only to turn into Atlesian robots as they fell. He saw black maws opening and closing, fluids pouring out into the shape of Vytal. Flames flickered, and smoke drifted, throwing shadows onto nothingness where eyes tracked his dream self. He fell through layers of rock and metal, each shattering like glass under him as laughter surrounded him, louder and louder and louder…

It was about four restless hours later when the computer pinged completion. Jaune woke up with a grunt, wiping away the drool from the corner of his mouth and blinked blearily at the screen, slowly coming back to reality. With a roll of his shoulders and a short breathing exercise, Jaune was refocused on the task at hand.

Only text files had been recovered so far, but they were the most important. They contained emails, chat logs, and most importantly, identifiable information. Jaune opened the chat logs and immediately face-palmed. The most recent chat header contained only three words and were the only three words that Jaune needed.

Message Received! From: Cinder

Jaune took a moment to reflect upon the slight sense of relief that had shot through him upon reading that. It really spoke about his utterly skewed priorities that he was relieved that it was only one of the biggest crime bosses probably in all Vytal that was behind this break-in. Guess being thrown into ancient history isn't as fun as Hollywood made it seem.

Jaune cancelled everything but location history (the fool had left it on) on the decode stack and sat back to scan this behind-the-scenes peek into Cinder's lackey. Everything of note was copied onto one of the many blank scrolls Jaune possessed in his lab with a few quick keystrokes.

From what the texts told him, most of Jaune's guesses had been right. Mercury had been sent to infiltrate his laboratory while everyone was distracted with the battle and was meant to gather as much tech as he could. (Corporate sabotage? Huh.) Unfortunately, by the timestamps, it seemed the lockdown had engaged as soon as he had gotten inside. After several unsuccessful attempts, he must have realized his situation and tried to sabotage as much as he could get his hands on, judging by the state of the life pods.

As thirst and starvation set in, he must have turned to more and more extreme measures. Namely, cannibalism of the bodies in the broken pods. Jaune felt pity well up inside him, but he quickly squashed it. This man had willingly helped perform the largest terrorist attack of modern history, and had done so extremely willingly, judging by his messages.

Aside from his messages to Cinder, mostly related to the attack on Vale, he had also coordinated with several White Fang captains and with someone whose ID on the CCT gave a cascade of fake IDs, much like Mercury's or Cinder's. Another one of Cinder's lackeys?

Whoever it was, her last known location was in a White Fang stronghold just outside the city, where she had gone to after the attack was well underway. Jaune frowned, brow furrowing in thought. If this was one of Cinder's lowly goons, Mercury wouldn't be texting her like he had been. She must be one of Cinder's closer goons, maybe even directly under her. Whoever it was, she had taken part in some of the fighting, but was pulled out midway.

Maybe it was because she's not a fighter? Jaune dismissed that idea almost immediately. Cinder didn't strike him as the person to keep a weak ally close to her without them giving her some great advantage. If that was the case however, Cinder wouldn't hesitate to keep them close at all times.

That leaves the possibilities of her being a coward and running away from the battle, but why would you hide out in a White Fang base if you had turned tail and ran away? Jaune struck that idea out too. That left the possibility of her being deliberately stationed there as being most likely. And if her being there was something his enemies wanted her to do, it seemed like the best thing to do was to not let her be there.

Jaune stretched, feeling the fatigue of the past 36 hours wash over his tormented body in a dull ache. This was a promising lead and was probably the best he would get without heading out into the remnants of Vale and collecting new information. All the data in the world couldn't help if you didn't know what you were looking for, and he wasn't going to sit around and piece together the pieces of the Mercury Puzzle collected from the CCT backup. What was he, Ozpin?

No, he was the farthest thing from Ozpin. Ozpin would be content to sit in his tower, pushing his pieces around and wait for things to fall. No, now was not the time for patience. Now was the time for action. He would go to that White Fang base. He would force his way inside. And he would make Emerald Sustrai tell him everything she knew about Cinder Fall.


Slight edit: I posted a new story called Lives Worth Taking! Check it out, I think you guys will like it.

AN: Shorter chapter that usual, because making 6k+ word chapters is incredibly difficult for me, especially in the last year since I don't get enough time to really sit down and just write for a few hours. This was I'm hoping it makes it easier for me to update faster, while also having the motivation from having a rolling story (fellow authors, you get what I'm saying).

Speaking of no time, I'm so so sorry for the extra long gap between the last chapter and this chapter. My life has changed a lot in the past year and I have a more cohesive plot going forwards from here. To those worried that his story will go to extreme fantasy and ignore science entirely, bear with me. The past chapters aren't what the rest of the story is going to be like, so stay tuned.

To everyone who followed, favorited, reviewed, and PM'd, thank you all so much. This chapter was more exposition to lubricate the move to a new Act (new structure hype), which isn't the most exciting chapter to post, but what can you do.

Hope you guys enjoyed reading this chapter, and as usual, please follow and favorite if you liked this story, post reviews as reviews, and PM for any praise/complaint/question/anything. Love you guys, until next chapter!