A/N: Hello everyone, hope you've been enjoying the story so far. After this chapter I plan to take a little time and decide what ending to do for this fic. There are several in my brain that I need to mull over.
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
2 years ago.
The Signal Academy cafeteria was loaded with young students, all seated at various round tables. There was a line at the eastern part of the room where the students grabbed their food. Currently, Richter had his tray filled up and was looking for a spot to sit.
It had been only a week since he started at Signal and already the homework was starting to pile up for him. Richter hated homework. He always aced the tests and for him that was enough. He would much prefer practicing with Dyrnwyn than sitting around a desk all day writing. The young boy didn't want to become a huntsman to be a glorified secretary.
"Aw! You got the last of the strawberry shortcake!" Ruby whined next to him.
Richter grinned at her. "Should've moved faster, isn't your semblance speed?"
Ruby pouted, "No fair, you had a head start because I'd fallen asleep in class."
"And whose fault is that?"
Ruby answered with a series of indecipherable grumbles. Richter chuckled, she always amused him when she pouted like this. As they continued searching for a place to sit, Richter began catching snippets of conversation between some nearby kids.
"Look at that faunus in the corner, he looks like he just crawled out of the woods." One kid said. Richter looked in the southwestern corner of the cafeteria and spotted a lone male faunus, seated at a round table by himself. He looked tall for his age with brown hair and ears that reminded Richter of a lion. The faunus boy was dressed like he'd been living in the forests all his life.
"I bet he smells like a sewer!"
"How'd a kid like him get into Signal anyway?"
"Look at him sitting all by himself, no one's gonna go near him!"
As Richter heard more and more of the pieces of conversation from the kids near him, he found himself clenching his teeth in suppressed anger more and more. What a bunch of condescending pricks those kids were.
"Richter…" Came Ruby's voice to his left, he felt a hand on his shoulder and looked to see her silver eyes looking at him with concern. She must have picked up on his growing anger. "Don't do anything reckless. You can't afford to get expelled."
Ruby's words pierced through Richter's veil of anger and he started to force himself to calm down. She was right, if he got expelled he had nowhere else to go. His father, his only family left, was now in the hospital for a nasty heart disease. The only thing he had left to do was to fulfill his dream of becoming a huntsman. Where he could curbstomp monsters and get paid for it.
Still, he couldn't just let those kids continue to ridicule that poor faunus boy. However, he had to do it in a way that wouldn't be violent. Richter thought for a moment, his eyes suddenly lighting up as he came up with a solution. He began to walk with a purpose.
"Richter wait….!" He heard Ruby call from behind him, caught off-guard by his sudden brisk pace. Judging by her desperate tone, she probably thought he was going to beat up those kids. The short boy had another destination in mind though.
Arriving at the table where the lone faunus sat, Richter smiled politely at him, "Mind if I sit here?"
The faunus' green-slitted eyes stared at him in surprise, "Huh? You actually want to sit with me?"
Richter shrugged, "I don't see a reason not to." He readjusted his grip on his tray, "Unless you don't want to be bothered?"
"N-no it's fine!" The faunus boy quickly replied, Richter took a seat. "What's your name?"
"I'm Richter." He informed him, he heard the sound of a chair sliding back on his left and caught the glimpse of a familiar red cloak. He pointed in that direction, "And this is Ruby."
"Hi." Ruby greeted cheerily.
"I'm Pearce." The faunus boy said.
"How have things been for you at Signal so far?" Richter asked, taking a bite out of his mashed potatoes.
Pearce shrugged, "The homework and stuff is fine." The faunus boy stabbed his fork into a piece of steak, "Socialwise? Not so much."
"Yeah I know what you mean." Ruby said, "Richter and I are kind of in the same boat. I'm a weapon nut and Richter has short-guy syndrome." The red-cloaked girl stated, earning her a glare from Richter. She gave Pearce a big smile. "So we can all be awkward buddies!"
Pearce raised an eyebrow, "Awkward buddies?"
Richter chuckled, "She does this a lot, get used to it." He took moment to eat another mouthful of food before continuing. "So Pearce I was thinking that after class today we can go out to the training dummies and…" Richter stopped suddenly, his expression turning grumpy. "Ruby, did you just eat my strawberry shortcake?"
He looked towards his red-cloaked friend to see her silver eyes wide, like a deer in headlights. She shifted her gaze continuously, refusing to look at him. Her cheeks were puffed wide, and bits of frosting were caked around her mouth. Ruby swallowed hard and her cheeks returned to their normal size. She held up her fingers in a "V." Sign, laughing nervously. Richter's eyes were narrowed at her now.
"I am not a crook?" She said tentatively. Richter suddenly made a grab for her hood, but Ruby was already gone in a haze of rose petals.
"Get back here you food thief!" He shouted at her, giving chase.
VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVV
Present Day.
Shifting Dyrnwyn into pistol-form, Richter fired a rapid series of rounds at Weiss Schnee. The heiress responded by performing a rather impressive series of acrobatics, dodging all of his shots. She then extended her right hand and a glyph appeared in front of her palm. Multiple blasts of aura shot out from the glyph, all converging on where he was standing.
Richter was forced to dodge, diving to his left and transitioning smoothly into a roll. He could feel the blasts impacting just behind him, but his quick reaction had saved him any damage. As he rolled to his feet, he spotted the Schnee heading towards an alleyway. No doubt trying to stick to relatively unpopulated areas to avoid people getting hurt, what any huntsman or huntress would do.
The short ex-huntsman gave chase, darting down the same alleyway the heiress just jumped into. Looking ahead, he could see that she was ahead of him by a good fifty meters or so, jumping from one of her glyphs to the other repeatedly. Lifting his pistol, Richter took aim, channeled his aura through Dyrnwyn to create a beachball-sized ball of black-white aura, and fired. The auraball struck true, crashing into one of Weiss Schnee's glyphs right as she landed on it, shattering it. She fell unceremoniously to the ground below, rubbing her head as she slowly got back to her feet.
"You're not getting away that easily." Richter announced, shifting Dyrnwyn back to sword-form and dashing towards his target. With a sudden swiftness, she whirled to face him, her weapon, a rapier, at the ready. He smirked, preparing to deflect her first strike, when she suddenly pointed the tip of the blade towards the ground and stabbed it.
Too late, he realized his mistake, the ground froze all around her. Richter found himself sliding past the Schnee. Thinking quickly, he thrust his sword into the ground, using it to stop his sliding and anchor himself. Gripping the handle of Dyrnwyn tightly with both hands, he swung himself back around, planting both of his boots into his target's back. Weiss Schnee was knocked forwards, out of her ice pool, landing face-first on the concrete.
Richter dislodged his sword from the ground. He channeled his aura into Dyrnwyn and reared back, performing a powerful upwards vertical slash that scraped the tip of his blade against the ground, causing the ice to melt around him. The powerful slash generated a crescent-shaped blast of black-white aura that slid across the concrete, heading right for his target. The Schnee managed to roll to her right, narrowly avoiding being hit by the crescent wave.
Shifting Dyrnwyn back to pistol-form, Richter fired a handful of shots at the heiress. She had managed to rise to a crouching position, and thrust her right hand out, creating a glyph that soaked up his shots. The Schnee then made a few waving motions with her rapier and a few more glyphs appeared around her, all aimed at him. Richter raised an eyebrow, the heiress was not bad, defending and attacking at the same time. The first few glyphs fired their aura blasts, each about the size of his head. The short ex-huntsman blasted a few out of the air before switching Dyrnwyn to sword-form, his blade a silvery blur as it sliced up the remaining blasts. They exploded all around him, but didn't even leave a mark on his grey cloak.
Richter had barely finished destroying the last projectile when he saw Weiss Schnee charging in fast from straight ahead of him, her rapier pointed right at his heart. He barely sidestepped in time, turning around to find his target using her forward momentum to keep running from him. He narrowed his eyes at the retreating Schnee, it had to be a trap, but he had no choice, phase two could not be completed without her. It was time to use his other tools.
Tapping into his aura, Richter felt a wave of nausea run through him as black flames with a glowing white outline enveloped him. Ever since the brutal experiments performed on him, his aura had become "Tainted." Like ink being poured onto white paper. Heavily using it like he was doing now always brought a sickening feeling to him, but he could endure it. He just had to worry about not stirring the hunger within him.
The short ex-huntsman leapt up like a rocket, jumping high into the sky and clearing the rooftops of buildings easily. Because of how his quarry dressed, in a lot of white, it was easy to spot her position from his high altitude. She was still running through the alleyways. With his target spotted, Richter began his very rapid descent. He crashed down half a dozen meters in front of Weiss Schnee, forming a small crater in the ground as he impacted. He saw his target perform a small leap back in surprise at his explosive arrival. The black flames that had enveloped him disappeared.
"End of the line." He stated to the Schnee.
The heiress suddenly smirked, "You think so?"
Richter caught the glimpse of rose petals wafting in from behind him, before he could react a very familiar voice sounded from behind him.
"Stop right there Richter!" Ruby Rose ordered, the tip of her scythe embedded into the ground, the barrel of its sniper rifle section pointed at his spine.
"Ruby…." He hissed, of course she would be behind this. She had a knack for plans.
She smirked, "Looks like old habits die hard." The smirk quickly disappeared, her facial expression becoming determined. "Tell us where Darion Shiver is hiding."
"And why would I do that?" He asked her.
"Because we'll pound you into a pulp if you don't!" Another familiar voice said from above him.
Richter looked up towards the rooftop of the building on his left and spotted Ruby's sister, Yang Xiao Long, standing at it's edge. She wore her usual outfit, her eyes betrayed her surprise at seeing him alive. On the opposite building was a young woman with amber eyes and long dark hair with a bow on top of her head. Richter felt his anger spike at seeing her eyes. They were the same color as Cinder, the one who began his suffering. She wore an assortment of white and black, with part of her pants being purple.
He smirked at Ruby's elder sister, "Always so quick with the violence Yang."
"So it really is you Richter." She replied, "Why are you hanging out with losers like Darion Shiver anyway?"
The smirk on Richter's face quickly turned into a frown. "Because I need his help."
"You don't need his help Richter, we can help you." Ruby coaxed gently from behind him. "We can get your head straightened out." Richter half-turned his head to glance at her. She didn't know, she had no idea how much he had been changed by Cinder. If he had his way, she would never know.
"You can't help a ghost Ruby…" He replied softly, not able to keep the tiniest bit of regret laced into his voice.
"You look pretty human to me." The amber-eyed dark-haired woman said.
He scowled up at her. "How I look and what I am are two different things."
"This is getting us nowhere!" Weiss Schnee suddenly piped up, pointing her rapier angrily at him. "Are you going to tell us Darion Shiver's location or not?"
Time seemed to slow down for Richter as he assessed his options. The first one was to keep going with the original plan and kidnap the Schnee girl. The second one was to surrender to Ruby and her team and give them the location of Darion's hideout. While he was ready to immediately rule that option out, he found himself toying with the idea in his head. For a brief moment, a very brief moment, he fantasized about being a huntsman again.
Images raced through his mind, images of him practicing fighting techniques with Yang, building weapons with Trista, having Pearce pester him about finishing his homework. Finally images of Ruby popped up, of her coming up with weird names for attacks, stealing his strawberry shortcakes at lunch time, more images continued to flash through his brain, ending on that day she showed him Crescent Rose for the first time. Richter remembered how proud he was of her that day.
Then his brain shifted to images of the manor.
The endless horde of grimm, the blood he spilled, his screams of agony, the hungry growls of soulless creatures who sought to rip him apart. His mind shifted again and he saw her. He saw Cinder Fall, that cursed bitch with the red dress and those hated amber eyes. He saw the black tubes, as they filled up over and over. The agony he endured from those tubes that seemed to last centuries. Finally, he saw the mirror and his face upon it.
The day he realized he was no longer human.
Richter snapped back to reality, time resumed pace. The options had been assessed, but really the second option was never an option at all.
The short ex-huntsman spread his arms wide, his long grey cloak flourishing behind him, he saw Ruby's teammates tense at his action. He smirked, they were distracted by his cloak. Partially activating his semblance in his right hand, Richter hastily channeled it into Dyrnwyn and the sword became encased in a black-white aura. He then opened his right hand, releasing the sword from his grip. Gravity began to pull it towards the ground, the tip of the blade aimed at the concrete.
"Richter! NO!" He heard Ruby shout from behind him. She had picked up on what he intended to do, but she was too late.
The tip of Dyrnwyn's blade made contact with the ground and the alleyway exploded with black fire.
