Blake was cold.
It wasn't as though she wasn't used to it to a degree. She'd lived in the rough of the woods before, but before there had always been something different. She'd never been so exposed to the elements. There had always been something to provide shelter. A camp, or a tent, or something similar.
There in the forest alone, there were no fires. There were no tents, or camps, or people to say goodnight to. There were only the dark arcs of branches over her head which brushed the world with shadow. Only the quiet of the night. Only her and nature itself.
It reminded her strongly of the day that she'd made the decision to run from her old arrangements. From Adam, from the Fang, from people that she'd considered her friends. Her allies. Her comrades.
She didn't know whether or not the White Fang were still in the forest, or whether or not they had decided to move on and given up on Vale. She just knew that she needed to keep herself to the high ground, keep herself safe, and figure out where she was supposed to go.
Always there, nagging at the back of her mind was the all too real possibility that she'd managed to burn the most important bond that she'd made in years. While she could have absolutely gone back to Beacon if she wanted to, that didn't mean that she knew that it was the right choice for her to make. Mostly, she wished that she had a way to make sense of things.
Even then, with all of her recent history in mind, Blake couldn't concentrate on any of it.
All that she could think of was the too-familiar woman in the forest that had found her, and the instructions that she'd been given.
Blake had a feeling that she needed to talk to someone- anyone about what she had seen and yet she didn't know that she would be able to do so for herself.
At a loss for solutions, Blake made herself comfortable in the treetops above a clearing and closed her eyes. She wrapped her arms around herself and wished that she had something to keep her warm. Perhaps she would get a jacket someday, something that would do more for her than the clothes that she was currently wearing. Her father would have liked that.
Blake forced herself to stop thinking about it, should the feeling become too pervasive.
For a few minutes she sat there in the treetops, allowing herself to just listen to her surroundings. Blake was on high alert for a few things- people, grimm, and animals. If any of the three showed themselves, then she would run, whether she liked it or not. For the moment, her own safety was the main priority.
In the distance she heard something, but Blake tried not to focus on it unless it became more clear. She rested her head against the trunk of the tree that she had made into her perch and took a deep breath.
The sound was there again, and Blake recognized then that it was someone, calling her name. Her ears twitched, and Blake picked her head up, letting her eyes pop open as she scanned her surroundings to figure out who. The clearing was the same as it had been when she'd let herself close her eyes.
There was quiet for a moment, then the sound of a few people mumbling to each other, and then her name was being called again.
This time, she recognized the source. Ruby's voice, followed closely by Yang's. She could also make out the sound of Weiss there with the others, although the sound was a too quiet to make anything else out clearly.
Blake took a deep breath and shifted in the trees, sitting up and doing her best to get a better view of her surroundings in search of her teammates. She still didn't know whether or not she was going to go to them or not.
From where she was sitting, Blake saw the white glow of Weiss' hair, far from her and she realized that she might not have much time before her teammates knew that she was there at all.
It would be so easy. She could just stay back in the trees, and distract them. Run them the wrong way using a clone like she had in the past, and then she could just-
Move on. Nothing was going to be able to make up for the fact that Blake wasn't exactly going into this with anything even akin to a plan.
At the end of the day though, Blake was certain that if she took that possibility and she ran, she would regret it. She liked her team, and she liked being able to be friends with them. She'd liked training with them and rooming and eating with them.
More than anything else, Blake was afraid.
She watched as the other girls drew closer and closer, and Blake prepared herself to leap down out of the trees, leave a clone behind, and then go back into hiding.
But that was when the others drifted into the clearing below where she was perching, and Blake stopped herself.
Ruby was turning, scanning the trees but seemingly unable to find anything. Yang was there, with her arms crossed over her chest and looking thoroughly displeased with the situation, and Weiss looked like she was exhausted or ready to drop.
"Can't see anything." Ruby sighed, turning back to their other teammates. "Do you think that the others might have found her?"
"If they did, then one of them would have called us." Weiss said, taking a few steps so that she was standing in the middle of the clearing. There was just a moment, and then Weiss was swinging her sword with practiced movements and Blake watched a small glyph appear under her feet.
It didn't seem to be doing anything other than lighting the space, but that was all that they would need.
Blake needed to make a decision.
"I know." Ruby sighed, pouting and stepping in towards the glyph. "I just wish that we knew that we were actually getting something done out here."
"We're going to find her." Weiss said, her voice sounding as tired as she looked. "I'm sure of it."
"Or she's running." Yang muttered, sounding like she was brimming with anger and without much else that she could say in that moment. "Or she's already gone. I want to find her too but-" Yang cut herself off. "I just don't know if we're going to find her out here."
"We're going to find her." Weiss repeated the words, her voice much harder and more annoyed than it had been earlier. In a way that came as almost defensive.
Blake took a breath as quietly as she could before finally allowing herself to move. She climbed down from the tree where she was sitting and stepped into the glow of the light of Weiss' glyph. The others were still all looking at each other, but Ruby was facing in her direction.
All at once, she watched as Ruby's expression lit up with excitement.
"Blake!" Ruby cried, pushing past Weiss and Yang and all but rushing at Blake. Blake's eyes widened and she prepared for the impact, leaping out of the way to ensure that she didn't have to take the hit.
She watched as her clone dissipated away immediately and Ruby was left looking very disappointed.
This time, Blake stepped back into the clearing again.
"Please." Blake said, sure to keep her voice down for all of their sakes. "Don't."
Ruby looked up at her, and she looked like she was about to cry. White hot guilt rushed through her. Red blood turning to molten gold and burning her from the inside out. "Are you... leaving us again?"
She couldn't.
"She better not be." Yang responded, stepping in with her eyes burning bright red. "Because-"
She just couldn't.
"I'm not going anywhere." Blake responded, and all at once she started to realize just how tired she was actually feeling. She needed to sleep, or eat something. She'd spent so long out in the woods that just about anything sounded like it would be welcome. "I know that its hard, but I just want to be able to forget about how things have gone today."
Ruby looked back at the others and sighed. She just stepped in closer to Blake. "You promise?"
"Yeah." Blake repeated, trying not to think about all of the things that could have been out in the forest with them. "I promise, Ruby. I'm not going anywhere."
"Then we should call the others." Weiss spoke up, stepping in a little closer to Blake herself now. "And meet back where we agreed."
Blake couldn't help the slow smile that stretched across her face when she realized that Weiss was looking to put herself in her face. It was comfortable, and Blake allowed herself to just hug herself and linger near her teammates. She felt the urge to let her ears flatten back against her head, but didn't allow for it. They still didn't know.
"You should make that call." She said, keeping her voice calm and looking to her teammates. "But I am surprised that you decided to bring others to help."
"Yeah," Ruby said, clamping onto Blake's arm and pulling her in close. "I mean, we knew that Qrow would be out here, and we think that Weiss' sister and the general are looking too. But we ended up coming out here with team JNPR because they wanted to help us find you again-"
Blake blinked, a little bit taken aback. She thought back to the encounter that she'd had out in the woods. The bandit woman. She was going to have to tell someone about it sometime, but she didn't know when she would have a chance. Ideally, she would get to talk to Qrow.
And he was out there, looking for her.
"Right." Blake murmured, feeling for her weapon like it was a security blanket. Moments later, the group was beginning to move again, and Blake fell into step between Ruby and Weiss as they talked.
Yang was hanging back a bit, and Blake couldn't help the stab of guilt that she felt over that alone. She decided not to talk about it.
Out of the corner of her eye, Blake watched as Weiss pulled out her scroll and the girl was clearly about to call someone when the scroll started to go off on its own, ringing too loud for where they were. It cut through the silence, harsh and too clear.
All four of them stopped dead in their tracks, and Blake all but turned away from her teammates in an attempt to get the best possible view of the area they were in.
Next thing she knew, Jaune's voice was blaring to them over Weiss' scroll.
"Weiss!" He cried, sounding panicked. "We've run into trouble! We think its a deathstalker or something, you guys need to get here and back us up."
Blake felt all of the color run out of her face all at once as she realized what had happened.
They were no longer the only ones at Beacon that knew about the threat of grimm in the forests.
"Where are you?" Weiss asked back, beginning to sound a little bit panicked herself. "We found Blake, just tell us where you are."
"We're by the cliffs!" Jaune responded, and on the other end of the line Blake could hear the sound of metal crashing against something. "Please, hurry."
"We're on our way." Weiss responded, hanging up the call and looking to the others. "C'mon, we have to go."
"I'll run ahead!" Ruby called, already breaking into a sprint, rose petals beginning to stream out from behind her as she ran. The rest of them did their best to follow pace and Blake just did what she could to listen and watch in ways that she knew that her teammates couldn't.
Once they were all moving, there was no room for talking.
The sprint felt like it lasted for minutes, and when she was already tired and feeling strung tight, Blake didn't know whether she would be able to keep up with the rest of them or not. When she managed to keep a fairly consistent pace with the rest of her team, it was a blessing of sorts.
The cliffs began to loom over them, and Blake could hear the sounds of battle getting closer and closer to them. Jaune was shouting something. There was a loud crackle of electricity, too-rapid gunfire, metal against a hardened carapace.
Through the trees, the team came into view, the entire space around them lit by the glow of a deathstalker's sting.
Blake hadn't seen anything like it anywhere other than a book, and it put her on more than just high alert knowing that it was going to be something for them to contend with.
As soon as they were in range, Ruby was transforming her weapon, and Blake watched as Weiss all but twirled into place, waving her sword with her and bolts of dust flew out towards the deathstalker.
"Weiss!" Yang called from behind her, and Blake heard a gunshot as her teammate launched herself into the air. Black glyphs appeared by her feet, and then Yang was flying into battle at a breakneck pace.
Blake looked to the battle going on already and thought, trying her best to find a way to enter herself.
In the end there was only one option. Blake transformed her weapon and threw it, jerking the ribbon while it was in midair to propel the chain scythe forward. It hit the grimm and seemed to latch into its carapace, so Blake pulled again and brought herself in with it, cleaver at her side.
Her weapon clanged against the grimm, doing next to nothing on the impact beyond scratching the beast's armor. That was frustrating enough, but Blake could handle it. She took the chance to dislodge herself before she realized that there was a stinger coming down at her. She forced her semblance to activate, thrusting herself out of the way and watching as her clone took the hit and disappeared.
She landed next to where Yang had just been launched backwards. Yang looked over at her, teeth grit. "What do you think we should-"
"We need to immobilize it!" Jaune shouted from the back, clearly hiding back behind his shield. Like he too was preparing for the worst. "Any ideas?"
"We could freeze it!" Ruby called, from the perch in a tree that she had taken.
"On it!" Weiss replied, and Blake saw the heiress rushing into the middle of the fray for herself. Blake blinked because she had a feeling that the grimm was going to need some sort of backup.
She looked at Yang. "We need to back her up."
"Got it." Yang replied, and then the two of them were falling into place at Weiss' flanks. When Blake broke towards the right, Yang went to the left, and Weiss went right down the middle.
Yang took things into her own hands, going for one of the deathstalker's pincers. She threw herself into it, punching it away with her eyes in burning red.
Blake decided to take a more artful method for taking it down, leaping over the pincer that tried to attack her and letting it get tangled in the ribbons attached to her weapon. She was going to have some trouble holding it still, but that was fine.
She ended up behind the beast, sliding forward slightly as it resisted.
"Pyrrha!" Jaune cried, and Blake saw her rocket out of the bushes, a blur of red and gold. She felt something change about the way that she was standing, and Blake realized that Pyrrha was placing herself by the side, her arms splayed wide.
And Blake found that she couldn't move her weapons. They were being held completely in place by a force entirely external to herself. Pyrrha.
She looked back to Weiss over her shoulder, and watched as the heiress cast a glyph on the stinger of the deathstalker, holding it in place just over her head. It wasn't going to last long, but it was long enough for Weiss to thrust her sword into the ground under her and for ice to race out from under it in spikes. It probably wouldn't hold the grimm, but-
"I've got it!" A high-pitched voice called, and Blake watched as Nora rushed into battle, launching herself into the air off of Jaune's shield. Jaune seemed to push as much of his power into the motion as possible. The sound of a rocket going off echoed through the trees as Nora hurled herself down towards the grimm, her hammer raised over her head.
It slammed down, forcing the deathstalker down into the spikes of ice below it. The creature let out a loud sound, almost a screech as it began to struggle more and more. Blake felt Pyrrha lose control, and she felt herself getting flung back towards the trees herself.
She did everything that she could to recover, but found herself getting flung into Ren, who seemed like he had been waiting for her to hit.
He helped her stand up straight and looked at her. "We should distract it with covering fire." He suggested, his voice impossibly even. He smiled and reached over for her though, placing a hand on her shoulder and Blake all but shivered when she felt almost like she'd gone cold.
But she was at peace.
Ren nodded and looked the the grimm. "It won't be able to see us. You take the left."
Blake smiled. "Thanks." And then the two of them were breaking off to the sides, both shooting at the grimm's eyes in the hopes that they could at the very least blind it before it got them hurt.
There was another gunfire, and Blake realized that it was Ruby from the trees, joining in with them.
Yang and Weiss were back by the tree where Ruby was, the three of them seemingly doing their best to make a plan, and Blake looked at the grimm, realizing all at once that she had an idea.
"Ruby, Jaune!" She shouted to her teammate, and was amazed when the grimm didn't even seem to notice. Whatever Ren had done, it was powerful. "The stinger!"
Ruby leapt down onto the ground by Weiss and Yang, and the conversation that the three of them shared was clearly very short. Weiss was setting up another black glyph, with Yang and Ruby placing themselves in position so that they could fling themselves into action. Yang's hair was on fire, and Ruby...
Ruby was holding Crescent Rose back like she was preparing to make a final stand.
On the other hand, Blake saw the rest of JNPR falling into place together, Ren not giving up on his fire for so much as a second.
Jaune was sheathing his sword in his shield, and Blake saw it shift into a larger weapon for Jaune to wield.
He gripped the weapon tight, dropping into position like he was about to break into a sprint while Pyrrha and Nora did the same at his sides. The three of them seemed to be waiting for some sort of queue.
Jaune looked over at Ruby. "Just say when!"
"Right!" Ruby said, grinning widely as she prepared to go. "Ready Weiss?"
"Yes." Weiss replied, her eyes narrowed dangerously in concentration as she focused in on their enemy even more.
"Good!" Ruby shouted, and then she shouted. "On three!" And then just like that, Ruby was shouting out a countdown, and once she finished, Jaune and Pyrrha both sprinted into the battlefield, Pyrrha throwing her shield like a discus to throw the Deathstalker off balance and Jaune rushing in to slash at its legs.
Blake and Ren exchanged a look and then they moved off to the sides, and all at once Blake felt the calm that had washed over her fade away entirely. That was the moment that she realized that the grimm could see them again, and while that was enough to throw her off, Blake powered on forward.
She threw her chain scythe at the monster's claw, distracting it away while Ren released a spray of gunfire on the other side, just trying to make sure that the two of them were going to be able to maintain a clean path for what was coming next.
"Now!" Ruby shouted from the back, and Weiss took the order. She released the glyph that she had created on Ruby and Yang, and then the two of them were being thrown into battle, Yang taking the chance to hurl Ruby faster at the grimm when the two of them were mid-air.
Blake watched as Ruby flew through the air, changing her scythe in mid-flight and catching the deathstalker by the stinger, firing shot after shot as she sliced it off. Ruby's semblance activated, her flicking out of danger with a trail of petals, and then there was one final shout.
"Nora, now!" Jaune yelled, and Blake saw Pyrrha drop into position to give Nora something to launch off of. Nora landed on top of Pyrrha's shield and launched herself off of it with a fire of the grenade launcher in her hammer before the weapon down onto the stringer which had lodged in the deathstalker's back.
It was a mighty blow, and Blake could have sworn that she had felt the ground shake.
There was a moment, and then all eight of them watched together as the grimm drifted away in a pillar of smoke. Blake allowed herself to relax, but only slightly, while the rest of the teams began to group back up together, all looking to make sure that everyone was going to be alright.
Blake approached Weiss first, because Weiss looked like she was about to drop and that was a feeling that Blake could relate to fairly well herself. "Are you okay?" She asked, falling into place beside Weiss, who was leaned forward and bracing herself against her weapon. Like she was going to collapse any second.
"I am." Weiss said,allowing herself to stand up a little bit more. "Just... tired."
Blake nodded, and then Ruby and Yang were jogging over to them. Yang seemed like she had calmed down quite a bit, and Ruby seemed like she was a little bit wired at the moment. Like she wasn't able to calm herself down just yet, even though the immediate threat was gone for the time being.
"So." Yang said, her expression twisting a little bit and an obvious look of worry flickering across her expressions. "That was... different."
Blake hesitated, because it was quite different from what they'd fought before. The first time they had fought a grimm it hadn't been nearly as big as the deathstalker had been, and it had been taken down quite a big easier on the whole.
The deathstalker had taken them a whole set of eight people, and that just left Blake wondering what they would have to do should the giant in the forest take notice. Would it even be possible for a group of eight to take it on without casualties?
"It was." Blake sighed, glancing over at Team JNPR. It looked like they had decided to group together for the time being so that they could talk things over themselves. All of them seemed distinctly worried, and Blake was hit by the overwhelming realization that they had only ended up fighting the monster because of her.
They had all come out there looking for her.
She tried not to let her worry show and sighed. "We should try getting back to Beacon before..." She looked back to the spot where the grimm had been defeated.
"Right." Ruby said, sighing and sounding tired herself. "Let's just. We'll do that."
It ended up being all that anyone had needed to say.
Together, they walked together in a group, chattering nervously and excitedly the entire time. Not a single one of them was silent.
All that Blake could concentrate on was what was going to come when they finally got back to Beacon.