The school kept a faithful palette of greys and whites that highlighted its medieval motif, while the half-ring of pillars in the courtyard was a vague homage to the perpetual half-moon overlooking the planet like a sentinel bent by eons, glory faded but willpower far from broken.
Castles were but storybook memories for the millennials of Remnant, but the antique creativity of their elders, who grew up on those tales of towers and turrets, saw fit to turn their fanciful figments into architecture as tangible as a quaint little woodland cottage or the imposing silhouette of Atlas City. It was the thought that spurred the conception of many an infrastructural marvel all across the continent, Beacon Academy among them.
But there are no royals or peasants in this palace. Only professors and pupils, and of course the widely esteemed Professor Ozpin, his legendary wisdom pushing the school to a whole other ascension of renown. As bevies of students marched to their classes in solemn paces, Ike, his skin tingling from a rush of warm air as the pull of gravity rooted him to the pavement, surveyed the areas where lush verdure met unyielding stone and pointed shadows met gossamer sunlight. Nothing at all like the rough neatness he was accustomed to back at the Greil camp.
It was a scenery that, while surreal in the initial weeks of his residence, would greet him in regularity in the later months. Not even Marth's plans for the Vytal Festival could pull him away from the picturesque beauty of the campus. And Marth's plans were so simple that even a child could cite the obvious flaw that was the erratic placement of foresight that guided its threadbare components, about to collapse at any second by the onus of failure. Ike felt obliged not to disclose his misgivings, as Marth only bothered to step into his learning shoes once he was backed into a corner.
Living with the Greils, the two boys grew up on the fundamentals of swordplay, and when they were in their preteens, even the most adept sellswords began to see them as equals in terms of skill. Majority of the first-year curriculum had been ingrained into Ike's brain from persistent storytellers with nothing better to do around the winter campfires, and he didn't realize it at that moment, mostly since he was preoccupied with the arduous task of shepherding a frenetic Marth in the direction of an induction assembly courtesy of Beacon's eminent headmaster...
"But learning about the history of this hardship-razed continent will give us a noteworthy advantage in the hours when we must do battle." Eir spoke softly to Korrina as they ran a double-check on their equipment, not that they had much gear to begin with. Efficient victory plans were Eir's forte, and Korinna has spent enough time with the blooming tactician to invalidate any fears of failure that might creep into her thoughts.
"Shouldn't our concern be about the forest's layout?" The taller, louder blonde spoke up, the shining golden blade beside her radiating a glow as it fed off the flames of the lights overhead. Outside crickets chirped, the shrill crescendos of their songs muted by the ancient walls of the school.
"Common sense dictates that the layout would be typical of any forest, so rocks, trees, and of course, if there's despair afoot,"
"Grimm" Korinna finished with a resigned chagrin, spots of drowsiness dancing in the peripheries of her vision.
"Exactly." Eir confirmed, an unmotivated heaviness rising in her throat. "But if you must know, I'm not as concerned at the prospect of facing a stampede of mindless killing machines than I am at the two members we will need to complete our circle of Huntsmen." Some candidates are more viable than others, but there is so much individuality that I might as well be in the bowels of a casino gambling for the best stroke of luck, and that's a rare find even to the most seasoned cardsharps.
"We'll worry about that tomorrow." Korinna replied as she lay down on her spot, her own doubts whirring in her mind, "Now, getting some beauty sleep should be our top priority."
Eir nodded wordlessly as she sheathed herself in her blanket, drifting off in a whirlwind of strategies.
When she opened her eyes, she was a lot smaller, and the lights were out. She wasn't on a bag on the marble tiles of Beacon's halls either.
Eir was back home. Returned to where it had all began, and the terror was as gripping as it was when it forced her down the blackened steps of the house, pressing her to creep past windows mosaicked with blood and floorboards slippery with something reeking of foul metal, forbidding her from calling out to her siblings and parents. Reducing her into silent tears of anguish as she discovered their husks dried out and stiff as if frozen in the midst of being ravaged by an illness.
She remembered staying like this for a while. Not too long after, Korinna and her mother, Mikoto, found her, a sobbing wreck collapsed just a few kilometers into a reluctant departure from the only shelter she knew as the newborn strings of her Semblance compelled her to leave. She remembered how they looked, Mikoto's gentle features reflecting her own grief, Korinna's face knotted with confusion and foreshadows of her adolescent beauty.
The Creatures of Grimm have given all of Remnant's people a reason to grieve, and to Eir a polestar for her intellect: the destruction of destruction itself.
Yes, my child. Seek me out in a path of blood!
"But take care that they do not spill a drop of yours, or you might just find yourself a split second too late to stop the rest pouring out as they tear you apart in hollow carnage."
Korinna, on first impression, didn't seem to be the type to take up the mantle of a Huntress, but her mother insisted that she learn to defend herself in the case that she find herself surrounded by hordes of Grimm, "They do not distinguish, only decimate, and what with us on the move, we're more likely to be the unexpected but welcome toys for the Grimm should we happen upon them." She warned gravely.
Ah, another facet of her hectic childhood that she didn't understand. "Why are we running the first place though?" It was fun when she was younger and merely saw it as a game that her mother would bring up at any given moment, but as the years went by, her mother's urgency began to disturb her, and when she dropped the whole playtime act completely, any hope of a civil conversation was thrown out the window. By then, that same question became one that promptly shut her mother up, no matter her mood, regardless of the situation. If she was guarded about her daughter's ability to fend, then she was doubly secretive of her motives for sending them on a trip across Remnant, as if they were fugitives and she was keen on keeping her daughter in the dark about it for as long as she thought possible.
Again, a particular of her early juvenescence you wouldn't ordinarily associate with one as amicable as her.
This went on for a good four years or so, and when she was at the midway between ten and eleven years of age, Korinna decided that she'd had enough of the running. If her mother wanted her to able to look after herself, she would, but not as a prisoner. Settling in Mistral with Eir by her side after a friend noted the flaring tension between her and her mother, she enrolled at one of the training schools for aspiring Huntsmen, using each term to explore the limits of her combat style, and when both girls were eligible to apply for one of the major academies, they both agreed on a whim that Beacon was the superior choice.
None of it Mikoto Stelnoir approved, and that infuriated Korinna so that she endeavored to fulfill it, purely to spite a mother she saw as nothing more than a selfish hag that held no congenial warmth, only smoldering fire.
And when inquired of her motives from Ozpin, a name whispered like a legend, she answered in defiance, the frustration of her birthright as a renegade fueling what was both half-truth crudely carved and a lie amply sewn upon her lips. "To be free. To be able to make my own decisions."
"And how exactly do you intend to do that?" Rejoined Glynda Goodwitch, Ozpin's ascetic right-hand. Eir had counseled her never to dare make any attempt at falsehood under this woman's scrutiny. "How would a Huntress achieve such liberty?"
The most peculiar of this interview was that Korinna could not recollect her response to the question that appeared to have poured straight from the icy pools of the elder Huntress' paralyzing gaze, or if she had even graced it with a response of any sort. She only recounted a terrible phantom burn in the palm of her hand as it clamped over the hilt of the Yato, and the unnerving audience of a fourth member in the room, one neither Glynda nor Ozpin could see.
She asked Eir about what had transpired, but for once, confusion found its way onto her face. "You've not even gone to meet them yet."
Not yet, not yet, mentally chanted Marth as he crouched to the level of the dense shrubbery, hands poised to claw for Falchion should a Grimm pop up. Unlike a Greil Mercenary, a Creature of Grimm was hardwired to rip out his throat, so it was a fairly more predictable opponent, easy to dispatch, yet devoid of any opportunities for some creative setups. However, his love for the thrill of a duel didn't cloud the threat that came with a single Grimm-the numbers that bolstered its charge and continue from where it had fallen. Combined with the pressure of having to find two other people for his team, Marth found himself juggling responsibilities and he also realized that it was far less exciting that juggling an opponent on the arc of his blade.
He sighed. Can't complain. I concocted this scheme, I gotta commit to the end, even if it turns out to be harebrained than that momma's boy Yarne. Beside him, boots pushing against the base of a tree, was Ike, a heavy look lining his face, the two-handed Beorc Ragnell planted into the ground by its tip. Suddenly Marth's arm began to tingle and his nose caught a whiff of something burning, then his ears picked up a slow, crackling, hissing noise that he's heard plenty of times.
"Levin Sword!" He shouted just in time for Ike to shift Ragnell in the trajectory of the lightning blast, using its grounded position to send the attack into the soil. Anticipating that she would remain posed at Ike, Marth his reflexes vaulting him a good six feet up into the sky and out of his sobriety, dove for the girl in the black hoodie, the bolt-shaped blade in her hands unmoving, even as she glanced at his direction.
Something struck him square in the torso, and he was sent reeling backward as another girl jumped into the fray, the silver sleek contours of her armor creating dazzling strokes of liquid shimmer as she wove it around him in speedy lunges. What in Dust is this Semblance? Panicked Marth as he desperately tried to search for an escape before attempting a bold slash on a particular thin tendril aimed at his left shoulder and nearly lost his sword hand to an explosion of geysers that encircled his enemy, a clean counterattack that transitioned seamlessly into a fluid shield.
Next thing he knew, he was on his back, staring at Ike, who was barely holding his own against a woman with a common weapon you could get in the lower districts of Mistral with a few sheets of yen, his heart pounded so wildly that he could feel reverberate through his breastplate. Damn, whoever these two are, I want them on my team! He grinned widely as he flipped back up onto his feet and began to charge her yet again, and then turn back a few inches short of her reach. He repeated this for a single few times, never letting her movements out of sight, and then, just as she began to make just the smallest of approaches to him, he saw her lift her arms away from her sides, an open window that was just wide enough for Falchion to dance into...
...to deal a blow like the press of a Goliath's foot. Eir had to admit, she was mildly surprised at Ike Artorias' admission into Beacon. To her understanding, the Greils weren't the most...societal of people. They were free spirits who relished a lifestyle that was unorthodox, but mercenary all the same. They demanded payment, but took it by compromise rather than force. They were an army, but chose to use their words first instead of their weapons. While most would see mercenaries as harbingers of doom, the Greils were heroes of hope, an uncanny affiliation, but one many more than publicly assumed can afford to appreciate.
Unfortunately, she did not have the luxury of a slow evening's candlelight nor the leisurely orbit of the noontide zenith to appreciate how effortlessly Ike wields his two-handed sword. She was too preoccupied running more ominous numbers through her head, like how many more hits she can take before she's squashed flat like a wooden paddle to a watermelon, and the more she tries to focus on those calculations, the less likely she might emerge from this unscathed. Her Aura was a shield to be reckoned with, but Ike's confident hammering on her was wearing it down quickly and soon she might not have enough to endure the next one.
I must regain neutral footing. But it would be easier thought than done, as Ike wasn't letting up. He was locking onto her every move, baiting out mistakes on her part, then punishing them. The ferocity and precision with which he attacked confirmed what she'd researched about him, and from what she was getting, he's not utilizing his truest potential.
As for his spry ally, he was currently bombarding her with manic purpose, maintaining just enough space between attacks to simultaneously evade Korinna's counterattacks and connect meaningfully. One thing Eir observed with Marth Altheos was that he was more inclined to perform a flurry of light attacks to accumulate a high damage percentage before topping it off with a swift and deadly finisher, his tipper slashes keeping him well out of the radius of whoever it was he was trying to gut.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd fought opponents on equal footing, but under these circumstances, I should've exerted a little more into the planning...
"And I should have seen this coming" Korinna swore under her breath as from the depths of the scarlet foliage emerged a behemoth of an insect, its bone-white exoskeleton tattooed with the crimson marks of...
"Come on! Who brought the Scarab to the melee?" Marth whined loudly. Ike and Eir momentarily paused from their respective skirmish before leaping on either side of Korinna, digesting the dire twist their eccentric meetup has taken. Scarabs are Creatures of Grimm that devour anything in their way, their body armor shrugging off most attacks, as for one's weaknesses...
"Your sword Artorias" Eir suddenly spoke up, her voice fighting over the incessant, vigorous drone of the beetle Grimm's glassy wings. "I believe you keep a reserve of Flame Dust in it. Fire is a Scarab's bane, and if we can raise its temperature high enough, we can inflict some consequential damage to it."
The tall swordsman, a second of bemusement widening his eyes, took in the tactician's directions, "Alright, and then what?"
She then swiveled to Marth. "Altheos, what do you know of 'frame trapping?'"
"You're gonna have to auto-explain, since I don't know anything!" Korinna's former opponent replied with unabashed honesty. Great, looks like it's more than just his swordplay that's a little crazy.
"She needs to you keep hitting the Scarab so it remains in an incapacitated state. You will have to string certain techniques to ensure it can't react to you." Korinna explained with a small drip of exasperation as the Scarab withdrew its wings back into its obsidian carapace and charged scuttling on its six legs, a thunderous shriek escaping its insectoid, horned maw.
"Now you're speaking my language!" Marth roared as he aligned himself to the small between the Grimm's eyes. "I know just the combo to keep this thing grounded."
Eir said nothing to Korrina, but she already knew her role in this formation. Moving to the rear guard, she prepared her Semblance, the elements of her joints gurgling with Dragon Fang venom. "Altheos, I'll cover you."
He smiled at her, which was deceptively sane given the foaming-at-the-mouth lilt to his voice. "When this is all over, tell you and your friend over there to come with us."
She couldn't explain it back then, what with her focus on vanquishing the Scarab, but the memory of the offer always brought a smile to her lips. And Korrina couldn't help but wonder if we were fated to be a team.
"It does feel like the pieces fit." Ike said to his father one cool midsummer's evening as they both evaluated the jigsaw pieces, plain woods with nary a droplet of paint or a fretwork of patterns to indicate that they formed anything beyond a square of polished carvings, which of course, confused Ike, a much simpler boy thinking of grander things.
"And that feeling would be all that you need my boy." Gawain Artorias replied to his son in a voice gruff with experience and exhaustion. "Hold on to it, and let it lead you to those with whom you will trust your lot with." The advice was almost proverbial, so much in fact, that the merit of it would have evaded Ike had he not met Marth and pledged allegiance to his crusades.
Now, here he was, in battle against this chitinous behemoth of a Scarab with a full team of four, each unit with their own unique strengths and skills as they waged a merciless battery on the Grimm, each with an essential part to play as their opponent peeled crumbled under the unwavering pressure.
Together they formed what felt like to Ike as an unbeatable jigsaw. Nothing could stop them! On that fateful day in the Emerald Forest, four Beacon Academy freshmen stopped one of the most fortified of Grimm with barely a scratch on them, and those same four would not commemorate this event as the day they rose to renown amongst Beacon's many cliques, nor would they immortalize it as the start of their respective journeys as Huntsmen and Huntresses-in actuality, it seemed that the profession of slaying Grimm became relegated to a mere technicality.
No. As they stood there eyeing the destruction they wreaked upon the Grimm. Marth Altheos, Ike Artorias, Eir Levenstein, and Korinna Stelnoir, felt that the kinship that bound them in that fight would remain with them forever, and as the first day of the Vytal Festival concluded with the midnight chime of Beacon's clock tower, Team KEIM's dynamic, having withstood numerous trials the likes of Professor Port's deadening lectures, Dr. Oobleck's frenetic cadence, and Glynda Goodwitch's stringent jousts, is still as secure as always.
"Secure enough to keep a pointless secret." Said Weiss Schnee to her team who were tired, but not sleepy, "And for the record, Hero King is such a stupid name."
"We know." Seconded Yang Xiao Long as she sat at the edge of her bed, flicker her knee with her index finger. "Still it does have a nice little ring to it."
The other two participants, Blake Belladonna and Ruby Rose, Yang's feisty flower of a younger sister, merely watched. Their names rang familiar to the students of Beacon too, but tonight, Team KEIM's astounding performance against Team MPRR was a hot topic as they trudged back into the dormitories. Everywhere they went, they couldn't but listen to the breakout of excited whispers that broached on the quartet of swordfighters. Many fawned over Korinna's looks and her deluge of power, the fame that Eir garnered from her erudite peers skyrocketed as students began to consider the viability of a Levin Sword, Ike had enkindled confidence among the students to speak praises of the Greils, while others wondered what an Artorias was doing so far from the wildlands.
But it was Marth who got the lion's share of acclaim. His short work of Ryoma would not be forgotten. People began to speculate if he would be a viable contender for the champion title, the more skeptical asserting that he would fall to either one of two prodigies: Atlas' adored Pyrrha Nikos or the fierce Young Lion of Vacuo, who wielded a burning blade that many alleged to be the only plausible answer to the Hero King's Shield Breaker
Team RWBY were personal friends of Pyrrha, so it wasn't hard to see how that scenario would play out. "I would say it's a 50/50 chance." The level-headed, golden-eyed Faunus concluded. She might not be as accurate as Eir when it comes to her mental math, but Blake's clever enough to approximate a match-up, and her guesses are as on-the-mark as her night-vision. "It all boils down as who lands the deciding blow, will it be Pyrrha and her magnetism, or Marth with his Aura-shattering fencing."
"But they've already got the high ground." Ruby said with a slight giggle. "Thanks to Eir, Team KEIM's virtually unbeatable." Ruby might be the youngest, only a year younger than Marth, but she has a penchant to see what others don't, and in this case, her perception singled out the noteworthy trump card that was Eir's tactical aptitude. "She's managed to get the dirt on everyone here. Beacon, Haven, Shade, and Atlas. Everything's laid bare for her to chart out their road to victory."
"I wonder if Korinna's got something to do with that?" Yang mused aloud as her sister tailed the question with one of her own.
"Follower surge?"
"It's been happening a few days after our initiation. Started out with a few harmless little DMs, and then, when the Vytal Festival dropped and the other schools started coming, she's been unusually active on a lot of SNS platforms, especially Flour Vale Forums." Weiss elaborated, a tinge of jealously in her nonchalant pomp. "She doesn't look like it, but she's got a mean sweet tooth, and boy does she keep it well fed. And by the way Yang, the answer to your question is yes. Korinna's diligent networking was a major factor. It made gathering the data much easier."
"Can't believe I'm saying this, but I could really use some of that nerd power right about now." Yang, who normally wore her business on her fists, said in an uncharacteristic longing, her nose pointing upward at the ceiling.
"Come on girls!" Ruby chirped, shooting up to her feet with typical fifteen-year old gusto, "We can't just sit here and mope how better they are! Even if that is kinda true, but we can let that get us down! All of us, RWBY, JNPR, KEIM, CFVY, all the people who came to fight in this festival are here because they're all special, and includes us too. It doesn't matter how we win, what's important is that we do."
A good thing about Ruby as a leader was that she instinctively knew what to say, and at that moment, she knew her team didn't need a pep talk to rally them into a vindicated frenzy against Marth's team, but a gentle reminder that they too, can, no, have achieved lofty heights as Huntresses.
