With directions from Blake, the motley crew of teenagers met up in the alley where she and Naruto had had their confrontation. There was much rejoicing and heartwarming reunions to be had. And then, it was time to plan.
"So... Do we even have a plan here?" Yang asked sceptically, arms folded across her chest and leaning against a wall. "We're hunting White Fang? Okay. Where are they?"
"We're not hunting them," Blake denied, having a problem with that particular word choice for multiple reasons. "We're trying to find the dust robbers."
"Which of course couldn't be the White Fang," Weiss said with a roll of her eyes. At receiving varying levels of glares from most people present she added, "What? I'm on Blake's side but I'm not going to deny a rational explanation just because she doesn't like it."
"It's just as likely to be Roman Torchwick's gang," said Ruby, "He was robbing dust shops before the school year started and he's not been caught yet."
"Either way, if this is all about dust, shouldn't we focus on that?" Naruto asked. "Whoever's doing this has been knocking over dust shops for so long they're afraid to do business. So where would they target now?"
"Welllllll..." Sun drawled as he swung lazily from a windowsill by his tail, "I just happen to know there's a big shipment of dust coming in tonight! A Schnee freighter."
"I'll be damned! Broflex is actually good for something!"
The monkey faunus frowned down at the fox faunus. "Bro, where does the hate come from?"
"Okay, so... What? We stake out the docks?" Yang asked shrugging and leaning back with her hands behind her head.
"Sounds like the beginnings of a plan to me," Weiss agreed.
"And if we find the thieves?" Ruby asked, the subtext of her question, 'What if we find the White Fang?' remaining unsaid.
"We shall apprehend them with judicious applications of violence!" a new voice supplied in cheerful, chirpy tones.
"Gah! Penny!" Ruby shrieked on seeing the new, uninvited arrival.
"Friend of yours, Ruby?" Naruto asked, catching the slight smell of machine oil the same as he got from Ruby from time to time.
"Oh, yes! Ruby and I are good friends!" the girl with the oddly vibrant green eyes answered promptly. "We met yesterday! Shall we be fighting crime together, new friend?"
"Uhhh..." Naruto saw the pleasant expression of the girl, and behind her the frantically waving hands of everyone (save for Sun who just seemed bemused and uninterested in being any help). "Ruby, help me out here?"
"Penny, this will be dangerous, maybe you shouldn't–" Ruby tried to say.
"Don't worry, Ruby! I'm combat ready!"
Somehow, that statement did not evoke the confidence it was probably meant to. "How... combat ready, exactly?" Weiss asked.
"I am a student of Atlas Academy! Hic!" the girl announced proudly, only slightly undercut by her getting caught by a hiccup. "I am here to participate in the Vytal Festival Tournament!"
Yang shrugged. "Good enough for me."
Ruby shot her sister a look. "Yang!"
"What? That means she's at least as good of a fighter as the rest of us."
Weiss brushed off her skirt as she stood. "So we have a plan. What will be our strategy?"
-(-)-
In the end, they ended up with a fairly straightforward strategy. Blake, Sun and Naruto would hole up on the docks nearby the Schnee freighter to watch for suspicious activity. Ruby and Yang being the most mobile of them with Ruby's semblance and Yang's bike Bumblebee, the sisters were assigned to watching the roads leading into the docks. At Ruby's insistence, Penny was to stay with her, 'just in case'. Just in case what she was unable to answer in any satisfying way but the others who were not quite fully convinced of Penny's combat aptitude decided to let it go. Weiss likewise insisted she be with the team inside the docks. Her whole reason for being there was to prove she would support Blake as her teammate. And so she would do exactly that.
And so that brings us to the scene on the docks. Three teenagers lying on the roof of a warehouse watching a ship and all of the nothing happening on it.
Naruto, having rolled his very visible coat into a ball so he wasn't quite so noticeable looked to Weiss' open and active scroll. "Any contacts?"
"Just like you asked five minutes ago, Naruto. No," came the voice of Yang.
"Nothing here either," Ruby added.
"Man this is boring," said Sun, returning to his place on the roof taking a bite of an apple and handing one to Blake.
"Where did you get that fruit?" Weiss asked with narrowed eyes.
"Market, where else?" Sun shrugged, winking at Blake so Weiss wouldn't see it.
"Down!" Naruto hissed.
"What?! What's going on?!" Ruby demanded over the scroll.
"Airships!" Blake answered. "They're gonna airlift the cargo out of here."
"You two should get back here," Weiss added.
"Got it!"
"On my way."
The three faunus and the heiress watched from their prone positions as the airships landed. As it the closest touched down, the rear hatch quickly opened and uniformed men and women wearing black and white uniforms covering them head to toe. Their faces covered by featureless grey masks with slitted eyeholes.
"It's really them..." Blake breathed.
Naruto shrugged, pretty much expecting it would be. Sun placed a comforting hand on the cat faunus' shoulder.
"HEY! WHAT'S THE HOLD UP?!" a male voice shouted from inside the airship before the source sauntered down the ramp out of it. "We're not exactly the most inconspicuous bunch of thieves at the moment! So why don't you animals try to pick up the pace?"
"Isn't that the Torchwick guy?" Naruto asked quietly.
"This isn't right," Blake said shaking her head before standing. "The White Fang would never work with a human."
"What the hell are you–" Naruto started to demand but the faunus girl had already leapt off of the roof. "Dammit!"
"Guys! If that's Torchwick thatt crazy lady with the fire semblance might be there too! She fought Professor Goodwitch to a standstill!" Ruby shouted through the scroll, only semi-audible through the rushing wind of both her semblance and Bumblebee's engine from Yang's end.
Naruto was the last one still on the roof, the only one to hear the warning. He gave one more report. "Blake just jumped in and is holding Torchwick up. Guys, get here now." With that, he started making clones and had them circle around behind the building he was on, hoping to surround the White Fang grunts before they could notice. One more clone to take the scroll and keep the sisters informed and he started to pick his moment to join in.
"Brothers of the White Fang! Why are you aiding this scum?!"
Intentional or not, Blake was doing an admirable job of keeping all of the attention on herself while the others were finding good ambush positions. Sun hung off the back side of a shipping container, ready to fling himself into the fight. Weiss was on the ground, moving as stealthily as one could in bleach white clothes to get around the other side of the enemy in a flanking position. Naruto, suddenly finding himself taking an overwatch position, watched and directed his clones to surround as best they could without giving the game away.
And then there were more airships.
And Blake and Roman exploded.
If ever there was a signal to kick off a fight, that had to be up there with the best of them. Blake rolled out of the explosion away from Roman, having to dodge the firework-like blasts coming from his cane as she escaped around a shipping container to get her bearings. Sun dropped in behind her and turned to face Roman to hold him off... Or at least that was his intention until more White Fang dropped out of the circling airships to surround him. Weiss meanwhile had come out of cover sliding through multiple henchmen on a wave of ice. Spinning around to face them once again, she twirled her rapier and thrust it point down onto the ice, causing it to erupt and encase all those along her previous path.
Seeing the main forces on the ground mostly handled, Naruto got an idea and popped a clone to pass the thought on to his doubles. Quickly, the clones started to enact it, climbing to the highest points they could reach before leaping onto the closest airships in an attempt to weigh them down.
"Hey, what's the weight limit on these things?!" one clone asked a pilot with a grin as it hung on the cockpit door.
The pilot shot him in the face. "A lot. We're here to haul cargo, moron."
"Good point," another clone admitted as it ripped open the opposite door and lunged forward to deck the pilot in the face.
"Now... How do I fly this–?" the clone started to ask the unconscious pilot before the whole ship tilted forwards and drove into the ground.
Naruto, the real one still in overwatch position, palmed his face as he got the memories back from all the popped clones. "Well... That's... Does that count as a win?"
Sun finished up his brawl with the grunts, ready to take on Roman directly, only for Blake to shove him aside with a grunt of "He's mine!" before taking the thief on herself with some quick, close-range swordplay. While she was a capable fighter in this regard, head-on confrontation had always been a slight weakness and Roman seemed to be toying with her, knocking her to one side. Before he could capitalise, Sun returned to the fray with an impressive display of skill. His weapon, a pair of shotguns attached by a chain, twirled, parried and deflected Roman's cane over and over again. The weapons barked as they were fired whenever Sun had a good shot but Roman always seemed to deflect it at the last moment. Even so, Roman was wholly focused on keeping the assaulting monkey faunus at bay.
One of Blake's best skills was ambushing a distracted or unaware opponent.
With a single, well-placed strike from the cat faunus, the thief was sent skidding across the asphalt. Before the two trainee hunters could capitalise, Roman spotted a hanging shipping container suspended by cables. With a single shot from his cane, he broke the cables and dropped the container on his assailants. They escaped being crushed by the two tons of metal but were left separated by it.
Surprisingly, Roman wasn't so lucky to escape the effects of his actions. The Naruto clone that had been standing on the container hoping to latch on to the last flying airship saw a silver lining to his platform being removed and dove directly for Roman, feet first. The impact as both feet slammed into the crook was enough to dispel the clone but it also transferred all of the force of the fall directly onto Roman. The thief bounced off of the ground as he took the brunt of the impact, air driven out of his lungs as his aura shattered.
Blake rushed over and kicked him in the head to make sure he was out of the fight.
"So... That other airship..." Naruto wondered aloud, watching the aircraft as it gained altitude, first to avoid the clones still trying to board it and then to escape as the pilot saw all of their forces taken down.
And then, a beam of vibrant green light pierced through the night sky. And the airship.
"Uhhhhh..." Naruto had no idea what to say on seeing that, the airship cut cleanly in two before crashing into the water.
"Penny! What the what?!"
"I told you Ruby! I'm combat ready!"
-(-)-
The clean up of the docks was extensive, exhausting and very time consuming. Explaining the situation to the police, explaining very patiently that the faunus present not wearing White Fang regalia were in no way complicit and please stop trying to insinuate they were, and finally officially handing over the prisoners to the police. While the second part was the most directly frustrating for some of them, the last one ended up infuriating all of them.
Handing off the White Fang members went just fine. But as Blake put a hand on Roman to get him moving her hand seemed to pass through him and his image shattered. Revealing beneath it yet another masked faunus.
Two and a half dozen White Fang members caught red-handed. But the main culprit got away clean.
"So, Mister Fox. This does feel nostalgic, doesn't it?" Ozpin asked as he sipped his coffee. Naruto had to wonder why the man seemed to always have coffee with him, always in that mug.
"You, me and an interrogation room, cops trying to arrest me for bullshit crimes? Yeah, just like old times, ya know?" Naruto shrugged, little burbles of laughter escaping him at the absurdity of it all.
"Yes, well I imagine they'll stop and be very apologetic now that they know you're a trainee huntsman," Ozpin said in an attempt to soothe any ruffled feathers the faunus' poor treatment my have caused. "So, you've had a rather exciting evening. What brought you into this? From what the others tell me, you had little stake in these affairs."
The fox shrugged. "Ruby asked me to help find Blake. I helped find her. Then Blake was all whacked out about he White Fang and... Well, I guess I just kind of went with the flow, ya know?"
"Dope rhymes," Ozpin observed, sounding every bit the upper-middle-aged man he happened to be.
The fox faunus openly, hysterically laughed at that. "Oh, oh man! Please, please never say that again!" he begged, wiping tears of laughter from his eyes."So, you really do take all kinds when it comes to your school, huh?"
"I make it a policy to always welcome promising individuals. No matter which of life's many roads they happened to have walked, if they are willing and able to combat the Grimm, I will walk alongside them all the same."
Naruto snorted. "No kidding. So, we all getting heart-to-hearts like these? Or am I special?"
"I shared some words with Miss Belladonna before visiting you. However, everyone else is already back at Beacon on my orders, quite possibly being dressed down by Professor Goodwitch and receiving their detentions."
"Okay... So?" prompted Naruto, waiting for the real reason the Headmaster was visiting.
Ozpin placed his mug on the table, leaning forward with steepled hands. "I would like to make you an offer. It's... An opportunity. To do more than you might otherwise be able to. There are forces at work. Subtle machinations that need to be unmade for humanity and faunus to continue to thrive. This is me directly, personally asking for your help going forward. There are greater dangers in the world than the Grimm. They must also be challenged before they can take root."
"When we talked before... Last year. At the farm," Naruto recalled, "You weren't talking about just being a huntsman, were you?"
"If that is what you would prefer, then that is all I was talking about," Ozpin denied. "Huntsmen choose their missions. This has always been the case and it is the case with this. If you wish to help, we would be glad to have you. If you would rather remain a huntsman, your contributions will be invaluable there also. Nor do I ask you to agree sight unseen.
Take some time. Think about it. If you're interested, please come and speak with me. I believe there are a great many things we could accomplish together."
-(-)-
"Where have you been?!"
On returning to his dorm, Naruto was confronted with the sight of an angry bear faunus poking a finger into his chest, the other male members of Team NCTR standing behind her and glaring disapprovingly at him. "Uhhhh..."
"Don't 'uhhhhh' me!" said Topaz, mimicking his dazed expression before poking him harder. "We saw it on the news! 'Trainees from Beacon apprehend White Fang terrorists'! You were out having violent adventures without us!"
"Uh, y-yeah, kinda... But it wasn't intentional, ya know?! It started off with some really personal stuff for someone else that I can't talk about and then one thing led to another and–"
"And Team RWBY is better than us, is that it?!" she growled. "They're all girls and they're fun and spunky and kick ass! You like them better than us, don't you? Don't you?!"
"... This is going in a direction I wasn't really expecting," Russell admitted as he watched Topaz continue jabbing their leader with her finger in new and creative ways.
"Yeah, I'm just gonna–" Cardin agreed, picking up the faunus girl by the head and depositing her behind them. "What Topaz means is–" he began before stamping his foot out, kicking Naruto back out of the room, hitting the opposite wall. "–Include us next time, dickhead."
As Naruto blinked at the door that had been slammed in his face, he nodded to himself. That had gone about as well as he could have expected.
-(-)-
A/N: … I'm frustrated. I set out to make my chapters 5000 words now. And that was fully my intention here. But in putting down the outline I made for this chapter... That's it. 3000 words. And I can't put any more scenes in there without basically kicking off the next arc which would feel super awkward.
So... Yeah. While it still hits my 2500 word minimum, I can't help but feel unsatisfied by this chapter.
But let's put my grouching to one side, shall we? The docks fight goes basically the same. More fang guys get caught but that's pretty much a non-factor for the plot. Roman gets away due to circumstances the characters could not possibly have predicted. You could claim railroading but Roman has so many outs for times like these it's not even funny.
If you would like to support me directly, there is now a way you can do so through popular donation platform that I'm not allowed to say the name of on this site. You know the one. Please consider helping out. As long as I'm receiving even a single dollar from someone who thinks my writing is worthwhile, I guarantee at least a chapter of something a week.
Thanks for reading.