Ruby sighed to herself as she stepped onto the launch pad. The idea of launching students into the forest was, while amusing, highly impractical. She would do her best to not question the headmaster of Beacon, but she really doubted the worth of being launched into the forest to collect artifacts. The only true bright side she could think of from this situation, is that it let her basically choose her partner. As long as the person was launched before her, then she could easily manipulate her fall to place her in close proximity to them.
The silver-eyed girl smiled to herself as she watched her older sister launch off of the cliff. She would need someone who's already semi-familiar with her situation on her team. Additionally, having Yang as a partner would make it easier to meet with her parents, and she needed to try and spend time with them. It didn't hurt that partnering with Yang would help her convince Yang that she didn't hate the blonde girl. Her smile disappeared as she thought about her first meeting with Yang. There were plenty of ways that could have gone better, but she couldn't bother herself to sound or be more caring at the time. Perhaps, if she had gone through the past ten years clinging to the memory of her family and her times with them, she would have reacted in the way they were hoping for, but she didn't. She had long since lost all of her memories with her family and replaced them with other, less joyful, memories.
A click underneath her brought her attention back the the immediate surroundings as she got launched into the sky and quickly used her body to alter her course so she was following Yang through the air. The blonde had this annoying plan of using her rocket bracelets to help propel her forward, which forced Ruby to use her semblance to convert her body fully into rose petals and gain a little bit of altitude and speed. Eventually, Yang let herself land, and Ruby moved herself so she landed within a few feet of her blonde sister.
Yang, who had started running as soon as she hit the ground, stopped and turned towards the sound of someone else landing right behind her, and seeing Ruby standing there, staring straight at her, she immediately snapped her eyes forward again and froze.
"Yes, Yang, it's me," Ruby deadpanned as she watched Yang's reaction. "Your cruel sister, back to torment you some more."
"I'm sorry, Ruby," Yang said softly while hanging her head. "I'm probably the last person you wanted to be your partner."
"Are you an idiot?" Ruby asked with a glare and a small amount of exasperation present in her voice, earning a questioning look from her sister. "I think you're being an idiot. Let me explain something to you. I can, contrary to apparent popular belief, control how I fly through the sky. It's a neat thing really."
"So-" Yang began hopefully, only to be cut off.
"Yes, Yang," Ruby said with a small smile that wasn't quite genuine. "Out of everyone here, I'd rather be your partner. I hope you don't mind that I made that decision by myself." Ruby then held out her hand towards her older sister and waited for Yang to respond. She felt more than a little awkward when she saw tears of joy falling down her sister's face. This awkwardness only increased when she found herself wrapped tightly in a hug with Yang's face in her shoulder. She didn't really know what to do about that development, and for a while she did nothing. She just stood there with her hand still outstretched as if waiting for a handshake while being hugged and cried on. The silver-eyed girl eventually realized that she was probably supposed to return the hug, and moved to do so. Which, however, did nothing to get rid of the awkwardness she felt. "So... can we go find the relics now?"
The question seemed to bring the blonde-haired sister back to her senses as she backed away and nodded firmly. "Yeah, let's go! Nothing can stop us now!"
Ruby allowed herself a small smile at the lofty claim of her older sister. It wasn't entirely inaccurate, but Ruby wasn't going to help Yang fight a goliath if they ever ran into one. 'If that happens we might get stopped at some point,' Ruby joked to herself.
It wasn't long before the two got to the temple and chose their artifact, which just so happened to be a chess piece. Ruby facepalmed as Yang grabbed whatever chess piece intrigued her the most before the two decided that they wanted to sit and wait to see which students would get to the temple first.
They did not expect six students to arrive almost simultaneously. Especially not when one rode in on an ursa, and another seemed to have been catapulted across the sky, and yet another got chased in by a death stalker. Luckily, the partnership of Blake and Weiss seemed to have a fairly normal entrance. The two girls just casually strode into the clearing before pausing to glance at the redhead known as Pyrrha, who was being chased by the death stalker.
"I'm going to go distract the death stalker. Tell the others to get the artifacts and get ready to run, it seems to be too old for us to kill easily." Ruby told her sister. "And don't worry, I won't get hurt." With those words said, she disappeared in a flurry of rose petals, only to appear moments later between Pyrrha and the death stalker.
Within a second of her appearance, the death stalker attacked her. She moved to avoid all of the incoming attacks from the giant scorpion-like grimm that she faced. Attacking it would be useless unless she could get a clean hit through its eye, but even that was questionable, as her scythe would likely get stuck. For a moment she cursed herself for making Crescent Rose as she had. Crescent Rose, while having more weight behind it compared to her old scythe, was also a wider weapon, making it easier to get stuck in a grimm's armor if she wasn't careful. She almost got punished for her mild distraction in the form of the grimm's stinger flying directly at her face. She quickly sidestepped to the left, before jumping over it's claw that came to grab at her.
She was playing a dangerous game, with a very old grimm. Simply dodging forever was an impossible task, and she'd eventually get hit. She just had to hope that everyone would be ready to run long before that happened. Her mind almost didn't register when the red-haired girl started fighting alongside her. She knew who this person was of course. The girl was Pyrrha Nikos, a exceptionally strong hunter in training who had won the Mistralian tournament multiple times, stood six feet tall while wearing her standard heels, and was a general expert in melee combat. Though she lacked a little bit in ranged combat, and her body's physical endurance was a little lacking, overall, Pyrrha Nikos was registered as a moderate threat if the two were ever to cross paths as enemies. Though that thought was useless for now, as the two were currently fighting side-by-side.
"How do we beat it?" Pyrrha asked nervously, after a few of her attacks failed to even scratch their enemy.
"If we can get it to sit still for a few moments I can kill it, but if not it'd be better if we just ran." Ruby responded calmly as she stared at the death stalker in front of them. Her breathing was still even, a testament to the intensive physical training she had been through, but that didn't help with this. She couldn't magically freeze the creature.
It was at that moment that a large block of ice decided to mystically appear on the back of the death stalker, effectively locking it in place. Ruby needed no further cue as she rushed forward and swung her scythe downward with all the strength she could, while still being reliably accurate. She hit one of it's largest eyes dead-center and Crescent Rose sunk deep into the creature, it would certainly be a fatal wound, though it would take a bit for the creature to die. She immediately dodged the stinger, which came crashing down on her position, but she had to leave her weapon lodged in the creatures eye.
She glared at it challengingly as it attempted to charge her but failed, as it's back half was still encased in ice. The creature glared balefully at her for a few moments before it collapsed and started dissolving into thin air.
"I never did find out why they seemed to have a delayed death whenever you hit them there," she said to herself as she walked forward to pick up Crescent Rose. "I suppose it's a similar thing to bleeding out." She then turned towards the person who was hidden behind the block of ice.
Weiss Schnee. 5'3" when wearing heels, which she was always wearing. Heiress of the Schnee dust company, though seems to have different beliefs than her father. Obviously raised with a bias toward the faunus if her disapproving glances at Ruby's wolf ears were any indication. Her chest was small enough that it wouldn't be a hindrance in combat, though her heels could be if broken. Not very well trained, but skilled enough to take out weaker grimm no problem. Likely has a couple of pride issues. Threat level, low.
"Thanks for the assist," Ruby said as she walked towards the Schnee Heiress. "Probably would have had to run for it if you hadn't helped."
The white-haired heiress gave Ruby a disapproving look. "Then why did you attack it in the first place?" She asked angrily as she took a few steps towards Ruby, who leveled her own withering glare at the approaching girl.
"I attacked it with the intent of giving everyone else the chance to escape, not kill it. Though getting help and killing it worked better than my original plan," Ruby responded with a small amount of venom in her voice. "I'm not so stupid as to be unaware of my own limitations." She continued when she saw the shocked look on Weiss' face. The ex-assassin then walked past the white-haired heiress towards the rest of the group.
"Why would giving us time to run be better than killing it though?" Weiss asked herself quietly, unaware of the redhead that was walking up to her.
"I think," Pyrrha said in response to Weiss' question. "That her reason for making that decision was the death stalker's age. It was older than any grimm I've ever fought before, and it's armor was impossible for me to even scratch. If you could get a good look at it before it disappeared, you'd have realized that it took no damage other than from her scythe lodging itself into its eye."
Weiss gave Pyrrha a questioning look. "But, she'd have to be close to it to know that," she said as she thought about what she could see of the death stalker as it originally approached them. However, she started to feel a little insecure about her response when she was met with silence instead of agreement. "Right?"
"Semblance, sharp eyes, or she saw it beforehand and decided to avoid it," Pyrrha said with a light smile on her face, holding up her hands to count the possibilities she listed. "Or I could be wrong and she just made up a plan on the spot without telling anyone. There's no need to figure it out now, we need to get back to the professors at the cliff."
"Right," Weiss responded, her mind calmed by the suggestions of the redhead. She then turned around to see the rest of the group walking towards her and looked towards Blake. In response the black-haired girl who had become her partner held up a chess piece with a shrug. "The relics are chess pieces?"
"Not like they could use actual relics to test us," Blake responded.
"If they did," Ruby joined in as she walked by. "I'd be tempted to break mine, just to see their reaction."
A/N
Hey guys. You know, I promised myself that I wouldn't let this chapter be a short chapter… and then I realized that it was initiation, and my hatred of initiation took over, and I procrastinated, writing only every now and then and only for an hour or so at a time… and now today I'm like "No, I've made them wait long enough. They deserve another chapter, and one much better than this… but I can't improve it due to my distaste of initiation as a whole."
Hopefully you guys will be happy to note that, I'm not past initiation, which means that the next chapter should come more easily. Which should hopefully mean that I will be able to write a longer chapter, and maybe improve on the overall writing, as I know I'm not the best writer and I'm always looking for ways to improve.
Hope you're all doing good. Have a great day everyone, and please leave a review about what you liked, didn't like, and what you feel I could improve on.