A/N: I own nothing. RWBY and Titanfall belong to their License holders respectively.
The first week went by quick once Steele got a hang of school life, workout in the morning, hang out with XR, go to class, workout in the afternoon, study into the night, weapon maintenance, sleep, repeat. He had made some serious strides with understanding his Semblance and controlling his Aura, his strength had nearly tripled and his stamina was off any chart he had been on in his life; turns out that your Aura amplifies what you have already before allowing you to grow past your old limits.
His first real breakthrough in working with his Semblance had been during Gunsmithing classes; he had expected that the energy bayonet for Justice would need its Dust refilled from time to time, instead he found that like his magazines, it was refilling on its own. That observation started him down a train of thought that had led down a rabbit hole of experiments to power game his Semblance, from there it wasn't hard to figure out that it didn't have to be standard ammunition for it to refill on is own, Dust vials were fair game, as were ammo for weapons that weren't his, his knives and guns would return to him if he didn't put them in a weapon rack or his locker; he found that out when he went to the bathroom and left Justice on his bunk.
With this in mind he had started working with Weiss and Ruby to make some hardcore Remnant style ammunition, stuff that would be way too expensive and labor intensive to make in bulk, but were reasonable if he only made a single round and resupplied it until he had a mag worth, then make bulk stock using his Semblance. They were working on a new set of DMR rounds, gyro stabilized with various dust loads. Red tipped HE rounds, Blue tipped arc rounds, Green tipped Aura penetrators, and Yellow tipped Incendiary rounds. They would make some variants for his other weapons at some point, for now the DMR was the easiest to work with. They were also working on creating an A-wall projector that would activate while the bipod on the DMR was deployed.
At the moment it was Friday morning and he was standing in the center clearing of the newly constructed gauntlet, Ozpin had pulled out all the stops on getting the thing built in record time. There were some slight modifications, most of the obstacles were now made with adjustable hard-light projectors that would allow him to adjust the courses at will, as well as cutting costs in the long run when a student inevitably broke an obstacle.
There had been a poster put up advertising his class as well as announcements by some of the teachers, he had no idea how many people were showing up but he was collecting a paycheck for running the class, so he didn't really care. As long as people showed up, he would teach them. To that end there was a black board on which he had drawn up the four laws of motion as defined by Isaac Newton along with some diagrams to help build understanding, he had done some searching and discovered that the people of Remnant had discovered them but they weren't considered basic knowledge taught in schools.
He was fully loaded today, he wanted to reinforce what he was and his qualifications as a teacher. He was sitting on a small podium in the middle of the clearing, a set off raised seats around it. To his surprise the first people to show up weren't his own team but a group about six older students who quietly sat in the first row of seats, two of them passing a single piece of toast between them.
Slowly people started to trickle in, first team JNPR dragging a barely conscious Jaune with them, his own team rested and ready, CRDL to his surprise, Velvet and Fox from CFVY, and Luna who sat next to his team. Interestingly enough a few of the teachers had shown up, the standouts being Dr. Oobleck and the Headmaster himself. He hadn't expected to have even ten people for his first class, yet here he was with over twenty.
He heard XR marching up towards them, he would be helping out with the class. "Ok, before we get started, I need to lay down some ground rules. First, no getting physical, you want to fight you come here Monday through Thursday at 1700 hours. Second, no one goes into the rings or the annex buildings without my permission, they are not fully finished, and I believe in proper safety protocols. Last, no offence headmaster, there are only two people who have any say about anything once you step through the boundary of the Gauntlet: Your instructor, me, Lieutenant Steele. And the DEADLIEST SON OF A BITCH IN SPACE, Sir Isaac Newton! Can anyone here tell me one of the Laws of Motion? Teachers, you are welcome to answer."
Absolute silence, fucking crickets for almost a full minute before the good doctor put the group out of its misery. "Force is equal to mass times acceleration." There was no containing his obvious excitement at realizing where this was going.
Steele flipped the blackboard to show what he had put on it earlier. "dead on! Thank you, Doctor. This is common knowledge where I'm from, here… well you people fuck physics off on the regular with Aura. For what I intend to teach you, these laws are very important. In the history I am familiar with, Newton discovered and described the four Laws of Motion. Miss Schnee, could you get us a small zero-gravity field, perhaps my arm span in diameter, Thank you."
As he spoke Weiss formed a perfect sphere of zero-gravity in front of him. He pulled two grenades from his belt and carefully held one in the center and the other in his hand ready to throw into the air. "The first Law of motion states that an object in motion stays in motion and an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by a force. Second, Force is equal to mass times acceleration. Third, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Fourth, all forces can be described as vectors that can be added together. Observe." He released the grenade inside the sphere where it sat still, while tossing the other into the air.
The first grenade simply floated in place until the other fell into the sphere where they collided, and both began to drift downward and away from each other. "so that wasn't a clean hit, anyway this is a good example of all four laws. The grenade in zero gravity just floated in place without any forces acting on it, the other went up when I threw it before falling once gravity overcame the force I had applied to it, once it entered the field it stopped accelerating and maintained its velocity; an object in motion stays in motion, at rest stays at rest. When I threw the grenade it accelerated with an applied force, same with gravity pulling it back down; force is equal to mass times acceleration, bad example cause I didn't plan this well enough and didn't use things with different masses. When the grenades collided, you may have noticed that the velocity of the falling grenade was split between the two and that they pushed away from each other, the grenades push against one another when they collided. When I threw the grenade, it pushed against me with equal force to what I applied to it; every action has an equal and opposite reaction. When the grenades collided one had a force vector on it- downward in our frame of reference- and the collision being off of center of mass applied a force vector in the direction opposite the point of contact on both grenades, the resulting vector was a combination of the downwards and sideways vectors; all forces can be described as vectors that can be added together."
Steele gave them some time to think it over before starting back up. "this won't change the way you think about movement right now, but by the time I'm done with you, all of you will live by these laws. Before we get into the practical, are there any questions?"
"Yeah, what makes you think you can teach us anything?" There it was, fucking Winchester. Asshole couldn't keep his dick headedness to himself even in class, no reason to expect different here. "Yeah you got a lot of guns, but what makes you special."
Steele had to assert his authority in his class, wrong place to beat the shit out of him, probably the wrong place to insult him as well. "The reason I think I can teach you anything; I have years of specialized training that barely exists on this backwater, and there are only three people in this group that have taken the life of another intelligent being, the headmaster, the doctor, and me; that changes you Winchester, pay attention and you might learn something, no one can teach a closed mind. If no one else has anything lets all head for the first ring here."
XR finally showed up, standing at the entrance to the inner ring as the group approached it. Steele reached out and got a fist bump, they had gone over the plan earlier when he had come by to take a look at his simulacrum; he hadn't been able to go through it, it felt like looking at his skeleton, it felt wrong. He would have to do it at some point, just not yet. "Inside this ring, you will not be timed, you will not be scored, you will not have targets, and you will not be able to just walk through. The only thing I want you to do, is show me how you move. To demonstrate some of the ways that you can move and the superiority of advanced movement, I am going to race XR here to the finish."
He started at a dead sprint, jumping up to the wall on his right. He sprinted, slid, jumped, vaulted, and mantled his way through the course, keeping his feet off the ground as much as possible and shifting his type of movement at every opportunity. Even with XR sprinting and dashing in an attempt to win, Steele handedly beat him, a Pilot moving properly was the fastest thing on the ground anywhere. He waited for XR to finish the course before he started back up. "as you saw, this course has plenty of options for traversal. All we are going to do today from here on, is run this course as a group, ill go over things at the end of each run. Take it easy in there, I don't want to see any injuries."
For the rest of the hour they ran the Gauntlet, all in they were absolute garbage. Every single one of them with the exception of Jaune was able to jump and leap and mantle, the problem was their ability to chain movements, or just use them. Shouts of motivation, and direction rang out as Steele sat on the top of the inner wall. "VALKYRIE! Around the obstacles, not through them!" and 'WINCHESTER, you can swing that mace you can swing those arms." Or "ARC! Just… get over the wall, its only two meters… come on man." It took nearly 10min for the whole group to finish the first run, Pyrrha, Ruby, and Nora finished in 1st, 2nd ,3rd respectively. Almost everyone finished in under 5min, one of the second years, Cardin, and Jaune were last.
Jaune was unsurprising, something was off about him, the fact that he was at Beacon meant that he should be much further along physically and combatively than he was, the kid hadn't won a spar in the whole week, not that Steele had even been allowed to fight. Cardin was the surprise, Winchester was an ass, but he was capable, strength didn't always match with mobility- even with Aura.
He gave out a few pointers and made them run it again, watching from the top of the wall with the Headmaster and the Doctor. "neither of you want to run the gauntlet?"
Ozpin stood next to him, his mug in hand. "oh no, my time in the field is long over. I am merely curious as to your methods, so far I am happy with your performance." He fell into silence as he sipped at the mysterious contents of his mug.
"And you, Dr. Oobleck?" Steele kept his eyes on the course, the students were learning at least, all of them were moving faster.
"My dear boy, I could not resist the chance to observe the training practices of an individual from another reality. No… this is my first chance to observe you; a native of another existence, a parallel reality, without Aura or Grimm, without Dust." He was suddenly inches away from Steele. "Simply marvelous, your armor is similar to that of the Atlas military at its most basic principles, defense against weapons more than claws. Your people chose ballistic fabrics over metal plates, only logical if the primary threat come from other armed individuals. Your weapons are far more streamlined than any made on Remnant, look at the casing, the ergonomics. You have a partner that is a mechanical intelligence, ours are too cumbersome for any use outside of the CCT system, our robots are limited to the Altesian Knights, crude in comparison. Tell me Mr. Steele, these gauntlets that you are overseeing here, are they something common to the training of your people?"
"only the Pilots, without Aura you need a jump kit for this kind of training to be of any use. I used to run courses like this at least 50 times a day during my training; every Pilot trains on these, from the lowliest rifleman training to become a Pilot, to the most elite veteran. I can attest to the effectiveness of the gauntlet."
The end results of every run ended up the same, he had a good idea of who was ready to move forward onto the more difficult rings. He made them run the inner ring for the remainder of the time, forcing them to work through the course until they had a handle on how to move. He gathered them up just before the end of the period. "alright, most of you did good out there. Monday will be basic movement practice, most of you need it if you want to get anywhere, almost all of you have absolutely garbage form. Get showered and cleaned up, first class is in an hour."
He waved his team off as he had to lock up, he made sure to count everyone as they left, only locking up once everyone had stepped off for the day. His first block was with the Doctor, which would be uncomfortable; the current unit dealt heavily with slavery and oppression, things he was personally all too familiar with. He hadn't explained his past to his team in any detail and had gone out of his way to hide the marks it had left on him.
The locker room was empty when he got there, yet he felt like he was being watched. It was silent and brightly lit, there was no one around, nothing to put him on edge, yet here he was. He thew a pulse blade, there was a flicker near the door that vanished as soon as he saw it. Someone was running around Beacon with a cloaking device… a Pilot… A Predator.