A/N: Yay! Hope y'all enjoy!
The roars of the crowd were deafening, and standing in the middle of the stands definitely didn't help. The sound was so loud that Jaune had stopped being able to hear individual chants or shouts, and the noise slowly blended to become some sort of constant presence that was just there.
That didn't really matter to the blonde though, as he was a little busy trying to push his way through the spectators, eyes roving around to try and find his journal. Blake had a little easier of a time, picking and choosing pockets where there were less people and almost weaving her way past them, searching as well.
They had started in the locker rooms near the arena, before going to one of the professors to ask if they had found a book anywhere near. When the professor shook his head, Jaune set off and made it his personal mission to scour the seats in the Colloseum, seeing if the book had migrated over there somehow. At that point Blake decided to take a break, moving to the sidelines to watch the fights for a little while. It was only when a good three matches went by and Jaune was still searching for his journal that Blake decided to step in.
"Hey Jaune," She said, resting a hand on his shoulder. The boy barely responded, doing almost nothing but tensing his shoulders for a second before continuing to walk, head turning left and right. "Maybe it's time to stop, if only for a little while? Maybe we can continue to search for it tomorrow? Hey," Blake gripped onto him a little harder, finally making him stop and turn around to look at her. "If you haven't found the book yet, I doubt that it's going anywhere. Come on Jaune, let's get something to eat."
Blake could already see how stubborn the blonde was going to get by the way he set his face, his lips pursed into a thin, unsatisfied line. "You can go on ahead," Jaune said, already turning around to venture back into the benches, "I'll catch up later. I think I might've seen it somewhere over—"
"No." Blake tightened her grip, preventing him from moving. His head turned, the look in his eyes incredulous, mixed in with some determination. "We've been searching for hours now Jaune. Let's just go out to eat somewhere, and then we can start searching for it again. We just need a bit of time to collect our thoughts," Blake said, trying to set a reasonable tone. Still Jaune shook his head, tugging his arm softly away from her grasp.
"I- I can't, Blake." Jaune looked away, one of his hands rubbing his arm. "I need to find that journal."
"Why?" She demanded, not understanding why he was so desperate to find the book. She knew how paranoid he was with it. Who writes their passages in code and then locks their journal up in an almost impenetrable way?!
"Because it's important to me Blake," Jaune shot back, hands turning into fists. "Of all the people, I thought you would know about something like that."
"I do!" The words came out as a frustrated growl, Blake wanted to stomp her feet to make the point if she had to. "That's why I'm not telling you that it could be lost, which is very possible seeing how big this place is, but instead I'm telling you to just… wait!" Blake threw up her arms. "I know it's something important to you, and I promise, after we take some time to ourselves, we'll be able to search with clearer minds!"
Jaune let out an exasperated noise, a hand clutching his face as he shut his eyes tightly. Blake didn't know what he was feeling, but she knew that he was probably very worried about the book, which seemed a little weird, seeing as how everything was written in code.
Jaune held out a hand and opened his eyes, his tone cautious.
"Could we- can we check one more place? After that, I promise I'll stop searching for today." Jaune practically pleaded with her, eyes wide. Blake turned from him and furrowed her brow, biting her lip. She had already received several messages on her scroll about how worried everyone was for Jaune, and knew that delaying any longer would probably mean having to deal with even more. Blake sighed, nodding wearily, to which Jaune made a small victory pump and set off, the cat faunus trailing behind him.
"Where're we going now?" She asked, curiosity piqued now that Jaune seemed to set off on a mission.
"We're going down to the lower space of the Colloseum." Jaune called back, turning left at an intersection. "I hear there're video cameras set there. Hopefully I can find some video of me dropping it or something." Blake blinked in surprise at the logical idea before feeling a twinge of annoyance.
"You couldn't have thought of that a little earlier?" She asked grumpily, getting Jaune to laugh nervously, turning back towards her for just a second.
"I wasn't really thinking when we were going around like that—as you were able to tell." Jaune waved off any further questions and set out on a hard run, sprinting towards the doors. When they arrived, they discovered the room to be tightly locked, which made sense for a place overseeing all of the security. Jaune knocked on the door, stepping back and waiting for it to swing up to receive them. The two of them stood there for a little while, not getting a response back.
Jaune stepped forwards again, patience not really something he had at the moment, and knocked again, this time a little louder. When there was still no answer back, Blake and Jaune turned to look at each other, confusion visible on both of their faces. Even if they weren't allowed in, there should have at least been a response to them banging on the door.
"Maybe they're out on break—" Blake's reasonable explanation was cut off as Jaune took a step forwards and kick the door with his boot, tearing the hinges apart and revealing the room behind it.
"Jaune! You can't just do something like that!" Not that Blake was really the one to say that, seeing how many times she's done something similar. Jaune didn't reply though, as something flew through the room and tackled him to the ground, before rolling back up. A mass of pink and brown hair flew around the assailant's face as she tried to slam the pointy end of her umbrella into Jaune's throat, only stopped by a timely block from Gambol Shroud, Blake flicking the blade back to repel the psychotic girl.
The tiny aggressor flipped backwards gracefully, a cocky smile on her face that only served to annoy Blake further, who unloaded a few shots at the girl.
Brown and pink eyes disappeared behind her umbrella, the thing blocking every single bullet before closing again, revealing a fast approaching Blake, trying to get an unexpected strike in.
Just as Gambol Shroud's blade touched the girl though, she shattered into thousands of pieces, disappearing completely from Blake's sight.
The next few minutes were tense and quiet, Blake's ears moving behind her bow to try and listen in on any movement, her head turning to look at any possible angle that the girl could be attacking from.
"I- I think she's gone Blake." Jaune said weakly, getting himself onto his feet. Jaune rubbed his chest, wincing a little as he turned to Blake, who sheathed her blade angrily. "One day I'm gonna catch that girl and freaking tie her up, I swear." He muttered.
"What was she doing here?" Blake demanded angrily, glaring at Jaune, who looked completely defenseless. The boy backed away, holding out his hands.
"Uh, I don't know if you know this Blake, but I'm not one of the bad guys." He answered back. "I'd probably be the last person you need to ask." The cat faunus let out a short curse, walking into the surveillance room to see what Neo could've been doing in there.
The inside was a mess. Some of the screens were cracked, a chair had been upended, and there was blood everywhere. Not to mention the two dead bodies that were lying on the floor, completely cold.
Stepping over them, Blake started to type on the control panels, pulling up the past few hours of recordings, eyes speeding through the screens to try and piece together what was happening, or why Neo was in the room in the first place.
"Did you find anything?" Jaune asked unhelpfully, standing in a corner. He knew the moment Blake had seen Neo that the faunus's never ending battle for justice had been switched, which he wasn't sure he liked or not.
"No. There's a lot to go through. Watch those screens and tell me if you see anything worth mentioning." Jaune didn't say anything, instead walking up next to her and crossing his arms, his eyes flickering from screen to screen in an attempt to catch anything.
What was Neo doing here? It was a little unnerving to discover that a criminal psychopath like her could get into the Colloseum, let alone the one of the more secure parts of this place. That didn't even get past the point of why she was here. Her boss was locked up in one of the Atlas blimps, wasn't he? If she was doing anything around the Vytal tournament, shouldn't it be there? Even if she decided to mess with the footage or communications here, that wouldn't do anything to the Atlas forces, which Neo would need for that to happen if she wanted to break her boss out of jail.
So jailbreak wasn't what Neo wanted from this. Then what was?
Jaune's head was starting to hurt from all the conjecture when he saw a peculiar movement on one of the screens, noticeable because it was one of the places where there wasn't usually a soul in sight. He spotted a boy with gray hair walking up towards the wall, pressing a button beside it before leaving the shot. It wasn't anything crazy, but when the ground on the screen opened up, slowly replaced by a solid gold line that traced its way out of the boundaries of the screen, Jaune started to take a little more notice.
"Blake, do you see this?" Jaune pointed at the screen, attracting the girl's attention. Her fingers flew over the keyboard, reversing the footage and playing it again, watching what was happening.
"Is that… unusual?" Juane asked uncertainly,. Keeping his eyes on the screen. Blake bit her lip, nodding at his question.
"A little bit." She answered. "I don't think the Colosseum is supposed to be doing that. I mean, there's a lot of special effects that it has, but for something like this in a deserted hallway…" Black stood up, not even glancing at Jaune as she strode out. "Let's see what that actually is." Jaune nodded ineffectually and scampered behind her, the echoes of their footsteps bouncing against the empty walls.
It wasn't very long before they noticed something peculiar with the floor that they were walking on.
"Is this..." Blake asked uncertainly. Jaune nodded, hand rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
"Yeah." He knelt down to look at the golden line that started in the middle of the hallway, before fading off into one of the intersections before them. It traveled to the end of another hallway before splitting off in both directions going off for dust knows how far, the hallways actually disappearing before the lines did.
In fact, the closer the two of them looked, the more lines they found, all types of symbols and writing on the floor that only increased the dread that the pair had, one more than the other.
"Jaune, I thought you said—"
"I know what I said," Jaune cut Blake off, face going a little pale. "But even I'm wrong sometimes."
The amber eyes looked at Jaune worriedly, not knowing what to say to him.
There wasn't much to say really.
"Someone's making a transmutation circle," Jaune murmured, "out of the whole Colloseum."