Rogue Huntsman
Slaughter
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Ignorance.
The choice to ignore or the result of intellectual failure. It brings bliss or destruction, pleasure or pain, it exists in every world and devastates each one day by day. Three times this world went to war, never once was that struggle purely against the Grimm incursion.
Idiocy brings both the savior and the executioner. It brings about the end and the beginning.
The world is run by incompetent corruption.
They higher powers seek to control, they bring blood and they create ash, devouring the time the world possesses before spitting it back in the faces of those who need it more. Ignorance comes hand in hand with those who are born to conform.
Those willing to accept society as it is, not as it's supposed to be nor potentially be, but as it exists in this moment… will never survive this coming era of annihilation.
Society will die. Humanity will end. And the Grimm will fester once more.
That was my justification… for making the decision to erase the population of grimm within this immediate area of the Emerald Forest.
That was the only reason why I'm still standing here in this field of blood and feathers.
Jaune cowered behind his shield as he held his sword in a weak grip, he stood at my side. Ruby brandished her scythe in a non-balanced stance with the tip buried in the dirt in front of her. Those were my 'allies' that stood beside me.
My real ally stood with the other two behind me.
Nora stood on the other side of Ano, back facing us as she lifted her polished glorified paperweight into the air and brought it down in a collapsing flourish, contracting its mechanisms and sliding its panels to compact her hammer into a rotating grenade launcher.
Ren pulled out two sharpened green twigs that resembled guns…
I knew his uselessness as much as he did.
"I don't suppose you've swept the area yet for any aura signatures?" Ano asked from behind me, my ears easily picking up her light voice over the diving sounds of angry nevermores.
"No," I replied, I hadn't cared enough to take a moment to find potential casualties.
"Well, whenever you have a moment," I can feel the smirk in Ano's voice, let alone the humor.
I clenched my fist, fingers pressing into thin black fabric covering my palm as I felt my aura surge. Lime green light poured down my arm, pooling in my palm and fingers as I brought my hand up and pulled new aura strands from the cluster of aura hovering in my palm.
7 seconds.
A screech tore through the air, both nevermores banking toward us with beaks angrily snapping at the air in front of them.
Their plan was to take us from opposite side.
It was ignorant in every sense of the word.
I took a step forward, the two at my sides turning their glances toward me as I tore out an array of streaks of light. In a quick flash, I dragged my shining glove through the air as swirling strands of my aura twirled together and weaved in and out of each other, pulling themselves taught into a form of my creation.
A curved, rapidly expanding, single edged blade. Its shining edge reached outward and circled upward slightly at the front, a jagged back edge running down its spine, with a clawed hilt stretching out of the base of the blade itself.
All of it was the solidification of my own aura.
Eight feet of solid, weightless, glowing glass brimming with energy.
6 seconds.
I heard Jaune's boots shuffle for a moment behind me, "Maybe we should-"
"Shut up and do nothing," I cut him off, dragging my blade through the air as I paced forward, "And Ruby?"
"Y-yes?" The young girl squeaked.
"Don't hesitate."
1 second.
The looming nevermore spanned its wings outward, catching the wind in a vast expanse of feathers as it reached its claws out for the skin of my chest.
If only it had the actual capability of being faster than me.
I brought my sword down and lowered my stance, solid boots momentarily digging into the dirt before I kicked off the ground. The entire expanse of the forest floor in a spanning nine-foot circle caved in as I leaped into the air, dirt and stone trailing behind me as the rest dispersed across the field from the sudden impact.
A bright light streaked behind my sword as I slipped through the air, passing inside then leaving the nevermore's guard before it could even blink.
It hadn't even felt the hide of its neck splitting open as my pristine blade passed through it.
Ruby didn't hesitate. Thankfully, her drive and decision to cast aside all second thoughts led her into a dash that soon kicked upward into the air. I felt her bring her scythe around and fire an impact round into Remnant's surface below, propelling her small frame toward the falling avian grimm.
Jaune just stood there, exactly as I told him to.
That just made him a submissive wimp.
The small girl fired another round just before meeting the grimm in the air, sending her into a vicious spin. The glint of her steel disappeared into the gaping slash I left behind in the creature's throat… a tense, resistant pull appearing for only a moment before she severed the grimm's head from its oversized winged body.
Landing first, I impacted the ground in a softer collision than my initial burst. Ruby followed soon after, tumbling to her feet at my side with her scythe in hand.
The dead nevermore landed on a screaming Jaune Arc.
"J-jaune?!" Ruby's eyes widened as she watched a cloud of dirt whip into the air from the settling grimm's body.
"He should've moved," My voice spoke out coldly once again, the tense atmosphere refusing to shift into any new moods as Ren, Nora, and Ano clashed with the second nevermore.
Ruby let out a quiet, almost innocent whimper, "I think he tried to…"
"Then he thinks as slow as he runs," I replied, walking over to the tail of the slumped nevermore and took an iron hold of its feathers. I let my sword fade back into my glove before my hand clasped the tail of the bird, aura brightly flaring from my arm as I lifted and dragged the large corpse from the crushed teen.
Ruby quietly jogged around me as I let go of the grimm's tail, "I-is he… is he hurt?"
"He's not dead, which is unfortunate," I stated dryly, words emphasized by the heavy thump of the nevermore's lower body thudding to the ground, "He shouldn't even be here."
I knew my words held more truth than their initial meaning suggested.
Ruby ignored me for now and made her way over to the large depression in the ground, imprinted from the heavy body of the nevermore.
Jaune's embedded and wheezing form was sprawled out at its center.
And now he probably felt as useless as he looks.
"Are you good?" Ruby asked carefully, meekly standing over his scrawny body as his eyes blinked in blurry pain.
Very slowly, with an annoying amount of struggle, Jaune dug his arm out of the ground at his side and gave Ruby a thumbs up, "Y-yeah… j-just peachy."
He didn't even use his aura. It was currently working away at rebuilding his cracked ribs and a fractured spine, leaving the bruises across his back and legs for last.
"That's good," Ruby sighed, relaxing her shoulders for a moment before quickly looking up to her partner in white. She currently fought at the other end of the field we were in.
"If you can't stand, then stay down. Grimm usually ignore dead things," I spoke down into the minor crater, standing at its upper ridge.
"What?! No one told me this… I would've started playing dead a long time ago…" Jaune muttered, dropping his arm back to his side.
"Uhh, are you sure? I thought grimm eat, well, dead things…" Ruby tried to ask.
Anything can eat anything, little red. But, you're still wrong.
"Grimm don't find pleasure in sustenance. They find sustenance in pleasure. And they take pleasure in tearing you limb from limb," I elaborated, kicking a stone down the slope in front of me before turning around, "It's what they were spawned for."
"Spawned?"
Heat pushed its way through my coat.
I could feel it.
An inferno rose at the center of this bustling field.
The heat felt warm, like a soft spring breeze under a waking sun. I felt pieces of Ruby's cloak burn away as her hair bristled, sensing as she shied away from the heat after the entire tree line lit up in an illumination of bright orange.
It was Anoel.
All shadows lurking between the trees and brush dissolved in the encroaching light, disappearing without a trace as the leaves above blew back then pulled inward toward the strong updraft of hot wind.
Flames swept into the sky.
The silhouette of the second nevermore twitched and sputtered at the center of a rising tornado of fire. Its screeching immortalized within the dancing flames as it craned its neck up and choked on searing air. A scorching wind tore through the entire field, rushing into the trees like raging rapids of a white tempestuous collapse of water.
I felt it crash into Beacon's Cliffside in the far distance, flooding up its face of stone, dirt, and roots, before blowing past the two that stood at the peak of its outcrop.
To me, it was only as warm as the sunrise on a spring's early morning.
Ren and Nora had already run off, seeking some solace from the bristling heat behind the nearest trees of thick wooden spires. Ruby had already dragged Jaune and his glowing chest plate away, yanking him behind her own cover as the nevermore incinerated within its veil of crushing heat.
A strand of fire shot out of the vortex of Anoel's power, brushing over the blades of grass beneath its tail as it crashed into the wounded deathstalker in the background. Its tail was embedded in a now evaporated column of ice…
And its previous two combatants only merely dodging the incoming culmination of flame.
The grimm's core was torn through in an instant, the beast collapsing to the ground and dissolving away now as the heat before me began to decline.
This was Anoel's strength. This was her unrestrained affinity. This was her link to all that lived before her.
This power… it barely warmed the cold surface of my skin.
Our power here is unparalleled… the system can't hope but try to control us within the rules and boundaries of this Beacon Academy.
I'll make a mockery of it all.
Every last one of them.
I'll show them what it means to hold power. To manifest the soul into aura, bringing forth a power derived from the very depths that make you who you are. A power in the culmination of every piece of your soul, collected into a single entity of strength, and transferred into an epitome of a controllable combination of destruction and creation.
I'll show them what it means… to be a huntsman.
I brushed my fingers through the wall of swirling fire, reaching into the bursting inferno with ease as it dwindled away. Wisps of orange fluttered into the air, green grass glistened in the returning winds below, before I turned my eyes to Ano and placed my palm on the hot ground.
My glove pressed into the grass and the dirt, not a single blade blackened or scorched, as a flood of aura passed through my arm and deep into the roots of Remnant's surface.
My eyes sparked with crackling lime green light, dashing the air in front of it as my senses crashed through the ground and rippled outward in a spanning glow of expanding aura. The waves of flashing light tore through the ground in a harmless flood, rushing through the dirt and roots as it climbed every tree it contacted, illuminated every leaf it touched, and registered every atom it passed through.
The rendering was complete in four seconds.
"Two students walk three klicks at your nine o'clock, four within two clicks at your five," I slowly stood up as Ano stood still, hand on her hip, "Five klicks to your eight o'clock is a roaming group of twelve, one klick to your eleven o'clock run four more, and the remaining six are each four klicks away at your two, six, seven, and ten."
"You're missing one," Ano spoke lightly, eyes regarding my form as I brushed my glove off with my other hand.
"The fortieth student died fourteen minutes ago. His body is half a klick to your six," I nodded behind my partner, past Blake, Yang, and the kitsune unconscious against the tree, "That girl's presumable partner."
Ano hummed, her lips pressed into a thin line as she let my words drift through her thoughts, "He deserves a funeral. I'll be sure to avoid that area too."
"Do as you please. Keep the heat in moderation around each of the groups with some temporary barriers, and let's hope they have the brains in them to not touch the visible field," I commented, letting Ano slip down onto one knee and place her soft fingertips into the grass in front of her.
Half a second later, the tips of the blades of green surrounding her glowed like embers in a burning forge.
The pupils in her now dark-green eyes flickered with a golden flame, and the full expanse of her long raven hair shimmered in smoldering shines of gold fire. Her leather jacket fluttered in seams of bristling ember, fire-infused leather and cloth only emblazoning now as the field of embers around her shot outward in an explosion of controlled heat.
No acre of forest within ten kilometers was left untouched… save for the few patches other students resided in.
A new bright light illuminated the forest floor in every direction. The undergrowth and foliage of the Emerald Forest were now blanketed with an ocean of dancing calculated destruction.
Leaves glowed but didn't burn, grass bristled and flickered yet remained full and lush, bushes blazed yet ash never fell, roots pulsed and embered yet never cracked, infernos rose and climbed into the canopies above yet the air remained in smokeless clarity beneath a crystal sky.
The heat was high enough to ignite all that it touched.
And the sound of shambling grimm, crying out in a cacophony of pain and incineration, was loud enough to deafen the sound of your own voice in the bristling winds of the blazing Emerald Forest.
"How long?" I asked, glancing down to my partner as her eyes remained fixed on the ground beneath her fingers.
"I-I can hold it," She shuttered out a tight breath, her aura was slowly draining.
I crouched down in front of her, "How long, Ano?"
Her eyes didn't move, "Thirty minutes…"
"That's all I needed to know," I stood back up, regarded my concentrating partner one more time, before turning my eyes to the several teens rushing our direction, "Cut the fire in thirty minutes, we don't need the trees turning to cinder."
"U-understood," She breathed out her understanding in a hushed whisper, loud and clear enough for me to detect within the smothering screeches of our forested surroundings.
The timer started now.
"What do you think you're doing?! There are students out there!" Weiss, the girl in white, all but yelled at me in her rush.
If I were anyone else, her words would have only been regarded by the wind two centimeters before her lips.
Yet, I heard her from eleven meters away.
"If they're smart, they'll be unharmed," I informed lowly, my voice carrying a presence with it strong enough to cut through the deafening air of agonizing torture.
"How can you say that?! The heat out there is smoldering-" She tried to reply, but I didn't let her finish.
"Don't underestimate my partner. She's far more capable than you or anyone in any relation to you," Her face burned red and her anger flared, "Now, you can either stuff a sock in your mouth and choke down any more rebuttals or you can stare in gawking confusion at what's about to take place."
She almost shut up. Stunned silence was the only delay before her next words.
"H-how dare you!" This time, she really did scream.
"Weiss! It's okay, he didn't mean it. Or, well, he probably did mean it but that's not the point! He's helping us! Ano's helping us too! They know what they're doing!" Ruby's shrill voice reasoned with the one yelling at me.
I hardly cared. But in the interest of time, I let her try to calm the heiress down.
"Ruby, he not only insulted my ability but insulted the entire lineage of my blood! How can I ever trust a man like that?!"
"I'm not asking you to!" Ruby pleaded, "Just… just don't challenge him. Please. Let him say what he needs to say."
"I'm with Ruby on this," Jaune was inclined to add, despite most of his weight pushed into the supporting shoulder of Ren. The swordsman seemed to be healing rapidly, though. Despite his fatal injuries sustained two and a half minutes prior.
The contempt, malice, and begrudging contemplation was easily visible in the icy stare of Weiss's unrelenting eyes.
She was going to yell. She was fuming. Her teeth were clenched, her delicate brows were furrowed, and the long frost white hair of her off-center ponytail shook with bristling rage. Her sharp pale cheeks shined the very same red as the inside of her pale blue bolero jacket's collar, yet she still bit her tongue.
Her thigh-length dress, despite being pale blue, glowed in dancing shadows of flickering orange beneath her jacket. Her bolero's sleeves seemed to darken into shades of blue as they trail closer to her wrists, and upon her back I sensed an insignia of a large snowflake proudly displayed in a Crest for her family lineage.
She was a Schnee.
Her knuckles, pale as they were, pulled tightly as her fists balled. One hand gripped the handle of an intricate rapier in a relentless clasp while the other shook against the folds of her combat skirt.
The young girl's apple-shaped necklace glistened in the ambient light of an illuminated forest. White, heeled wedge boots dug deeply into the glowing grass beneath her, reaching as far up as her mid-calves, while the crooked scar dipping down her left eye scrunched up in both disgust and restrained relent.
She quietly reached around to a small bag on the back of her dress, held in place by a ribbon around her waist, where Dust vials clinked and Dust crystals glistened.
Six chambers in her silver rapier spun in a tense rotation. White, yellow, blue, red, cyan, and violet flashing by as she refilled a soon opening Dust slot with ammunition from her reserves.
She said nothing.
Her weapon had a unique guard, four prongs curving back into sharp points that provided a shielded hilt to a weapon designed for thrusts and slashes. They were likely there for two reasons, protection for her pale hand and protection for her chambered Dust.
The aesthetics of the design were appalling, and the thinness of the connecting piece between the handle and the guard was abysmally weak. It relied on a hinge system in order to access the chambers of Dust to refill and exchange types.
It was ungodly stupid.
If that hinge broke… the weapon was useless.
All weapons are only as strong as their weakest parts. Whoever designed that sword was as much of a damn fool as they were a pampered privileged prick.
I hated her already.
"Three things are going to happen in the next forty seconds," I spoke slowly, strongly, so her small mind could understand, "One, I'm going to stand here smiling until you all get what I'm saying. Two, Grimm in mass numbers are going to be corralled into this field in varying degrees of disarray and degradation. And three, you're all going to station yourselves strategically in a perimeter around Anoel and end the miserable lives of the creatures still breathing."
My words were cold, calculated, spoken through a small grin of slight satisfaction and pleasure. This was their first test. This was a challenge of my own creation that solved several factors all at once.
It eliminated the threat of the immediate future while sustaining the credit I needed to approach Ozpin's desk. It revealed to the naïve souls around me what paths their occupation will, in all cases, head down in this line of work.
It was insurance that weeded out the weak from the strong.
"Is there no other way? Can we not simply complete the assignment and arrive back at Beacon like we were told?" Jaune's partner, Pyrrha, asked with a forced smile for politeness.
It was as unnecessary as the flash of cleavage revealed by her strapless leather and bronze-colored metal-padded top.
"You wish to complete the bare minimum, yet you aspire for excellence. It's people like you that get on my nerves. What sympathy should be shown to creatures of Grimm? What situation, in any lifetime, could possibly convince you that sparing even a single one could result in a fleeting moment of salvation?" I asked harshly, fixing her with a mild glare.
Her smile fell.
"I was only-"
"You were conforming to the society this world has engraved into your mind and soul. Open your eyes, all of you. This is your life now. This is what you are training to become," I growled, aura beginning to flair as the first grimm stumbled and clawed out of the glowing tree line, "Ruthless, merciless, efficient, grimm slaughtering machines with buttons and strings other people can use to control your every action. Accept it now, or just walk away and quit."
I drew back my arm, a solid spear of aura stringing together in my grasp before I hurled it over Pyrrha's left shoulder and pinned a burning Ursa to a tree in the far distance. It was dead a moment later.
"Decide now, or I'll kill them all myself and damn this world into a failed future with your naivety as the cause." My voice was unwavering.
They had nothing to say.
I threw another spear, and they still had yet to move.
They traded glances, grimaced in moments of tense silence and gurgled chokes of the grimm shambling out of the trees, and refused to utter even a single word.
Whether or not they take my words now doesn't matter. This is only the beginning. Their futures are their own. If they choose to neglect the very reason why they exist… then let them die in the end.
This is reality. This is real. This is their lives now.
Accept it, and move on. Ignore it, and lose all hope for an even remotely long life.
It was up to them.
It was also up to the half-melted pack of beowolves tripping and scraping the ground behind them. Thirteen of them dragged their long, thin, and raggedly black-furred arms across the ground as they stumbled toward us.
Sharp teeth bit into the flesh of their own maws. Crazed red eyes glowed, wide and open, as they trailed in a fleeting red light behind non-blinking stares. They were hungry. Black mist seeped into the air behind them as the fur on their backs, legs, and necks, burned in wavering flames that clung to them like napalm.
They were half-dead… which only brought out their more instinctual side. The side that kills most hunters who drop their guard.
Their deadliest state, yet also their most vulnerable.
I don't know if any of those around me made a decision, but they finally took action.
Jaune and Pyrrha paired up and took the east side of our small group. Ren and Nora took the south, Weiss and Ruby took the north, and I took the west.
I briefly considered whether or not they were at all competent to take down already heavily damaged grimm, but those thoughts were thankfully ushered away as the sound of fur and sinew tearing in two filled the roaring air of the Emerald Forest.
They were competent enough to slay a beast teetering at the age of death.
That was good… that was the only thing that convinced me their naivety wasn't going to lead to an early deathbed.
An Alpha Araknik scurried out of the trees in front of me, its bony hide half-melted from the immense heat of the domain of trees behind it. Its cluster of baked eyes glowed and snapped to me as its whole body shook and convulsed, then it began a slow stumbling approach in my direction.
Its usual bony shell was doubled on this spider-like grimm, its size rivaled that of an adolescent nevermore, and its legs were as sharp and jagged as the golden stinger of a large deathstalker.
It was hardly worth any effort.
I tore its legs from its body and impaled it in seven different places, its eighth leg having already been burned away from the bushes it pushed through.
It was dead in seven seconds.
The rest of our thirty-eight minutes was a slaughter.
A slaughter bathed in black and rising flame.
What? Did you expect that all of Ozpin's brutal initiations went flawlessly? It appears that someone died… hmm…
Ignorance can get you killed! Did you know that? Niro does!
Seriously, though. This is one of the concepts I want to push through this story's development. The world of Remnant is full of death and desolation. Civilization can't even branch out into the world that surrounds it. Societies die off every year that try, while the rest huddle and hide in high walls of defended cities.
This is the life of the rwby-verse. This is the life that I WILL make apparent in this story.
Of course, though, this story will be full of powerful characters that regard death as easily as a hunger to be satisfied. Trust me when I say this, I am going to strike every chord I can with this story that'll test the very knowledge anyone here possesses about the world of RWBY and its predecessors.
This story will have a lot of humor, satire, satisfaction, tension, and a whole lot of cynical thoughts and realistic turns.
One of the goals of this story is to show you what Remnant is really like. Another goal is to entertain you with a cleverly crafted story. And, for the sake of revealing a third goal, to display characters in a light of my own imagination.
This is going to be fun.
For now, Favorite and Follow.
I look forward to seeing REVIEWS for this. You'll be introduced to a LOT of concepts of mine. Feel free to give me your thoughts.
Cya XP