Maybe it's the gods of the universe having their greatest laugh yet.
Maybe this is one of Weiss' sneaky ice tricks.
Maybe it's just the culmination of his life's awkward clumsiness compressed down into a single moment in time to humiliate him in front of as many eyes as possible, because the moment he sets foot on the frozen surface of the Lake of Zen, he slips. The foot on ice slides three feet forward while the foot still on solid land remains anchored: and thus, Jaune Arc executes the full splits for the first time in his life.
His squeal is so high in pitch that probably only Nora can hear it.
As he topples over onto his front, lying prone on the hard-packed shore, he seriously contemplates driving Crocea Mors into his stomach and committing seppuku right there. The ice everywhere would definitely dull his pain. Or maybe he'll just let the horrified embarrassment do all the work; he's already halfway there.
{Promise me you won't give up.}
Five seconds later, he mentally pulls his big girl panties on, picks himself off the ground, and shuts out the echoes of laughter that buzz over the roar of a hundred simultaneous conversations. These faunus didn't see him with Pyrrha the Awesome Tigress, so this is probably their first impression of him. He wants to facepalm, but he's aware that there might be cameras trained on him even now, projecting even the smallest of his movements into the holospace above.
{Act cool and collected. You're not bothered in the slightest by Weiss and her—whoa!}
What appears to be a small snowstorm is currently whirling about Weiss, again tugging at her clothes and pulling at her hair. However, all those tiny white particles appear to be consolidating and crystallizing into six glimmering feather-shaped structure. The six glyphs are each of a different color and gather around a large circular glyph to form the spokes of one gigantic snowflake.
Jaune unsheathes Crocea Mors and weighs the weapon in his hand. One puny sword against a giant intangible snowflake designed to blast a combination of explosive elements in his general direction.
The headmistress' voice abruptly reverberates over all. "Initiates, prepare yourselves."
This is it. This is where it all ends. Or begins, if he's extremely lucky.
{Ah hah hah who are you kidding?}
Weiss prepares herself, both palms held out flat towards the gigantic Dust-loaded glyphs in front of her.
As soon as the headmistress announces the start of the fight, he is going to sprint in one direction. Maybe throw Weiss for a loop by plunging his sword into the ice to turn sharply and reverse directions. And survive the first minute. Survive the explosive fury that he instilled in her a few minutes ago. That's all he has to do.
Thankfully, nobody screams atrocities about bodily disfigurement. Nora wouldn't be the one to state the obvious, anyways.
The Headmistress calmly announces, "Begin."
The following cheer is ear-splitting, but Jaune only hears his heartbeat and the pound of his sneakers across the ice as he darts to the left. Immediately he knows he's made a mistake; Weiss hasn't acted yet, and he's already gone ahead and revealed his skimpy game plan. Which, by the way, is so shamefully bare of any real substance that onlookers should be hollering at it to stop stripping and put its clothes back on.
"O admonishing melody, arise in the name of the Rooster!" Weiss intones, her voice amplified. "Mystic Cage!"
He shoots a glance her way at her unexpected attack calling. If he was in the stands, he might be starstruck at the sheer splendor of her weapon mechanisms; as the poor dolt about to feel the full grandeur of its special snowflakey magnificence, though, all he can feel is pure terror as all six feathers, as the central glyph, as Weiss herself glows with a brilliant white light. Intricate diagrams of circular disks layer themselves on top of the snowflake construct, their rotations quickly synchronizing as if to release a killing blow any second now. Barely thinking straight, it's all Jaune can do to sprint out of its path, terror pressing at the back of his throat. No really, he feels like he's going to throw up at any second. Whatever, he can do that after he's dodged Weiss' one-hit kill shot—
An unexpected surface abruptly reverses his body's forward motion, much like the time when his brother launched him with a blast of concentrated Dust against a trampoline propped up against the house. (It worked. They didn't find his body until the next morning.) For a moment, Jaune can only sit and stare at what seems to be empty space, right before a large hexagon flashes white—it and its neighbors, a delayed ripple of light that originates from his impact point and spreads way over his head, racing around the inner surface of a gigantic half-sphere that cages him within.
And at the direct center of his reflective confinement is Weiss and her charging ice cannon.
{Out of all the possibilities in the universe, projectile vomiting right before incineration by ice lasers isn't the worst way to go, right?}
His gut reaction had been to panic and run, but Jaune realizes that he should have attacked her from the very start. In fact, Weiss had probably intimidated him beforehand and was counting on him to bolt, all to give her enough time to build the charge for her insane light show.
With nowhere to run, Jaune has no other choice. He hefts up his sword, aims its sharpened point at Weiss' butt, and rushes her.
"O sword of conviction," Weiss practically sings, her eyes closed. "Loose the might of your brilliant colors! Prism Sword!"
He's maybe three feet away when Weiss declares those last two words and slams both hands into her gigantic snowflake cannon. A brilliant beam of pure white explodes outward, hits the reflective panel of her Mystic Cage(C), and fragments into a thousand smaller rays of rainbow light. Shooting stars rain about him.
He feels nothing. He's floating in at the center of the universe, completely deprived of sensation… and perfectly content.
{Is this what death feels like?}
His sense of balance returns first, informing him that he is falling really, really fast. His temperature-detecting nerves recover next, informing his brain of the kind of cold that's so frigid that it blanks out and registers as searing heat instead. The second he feels the chill on his stomach, his scent returns: burning. Burnt cloth.
His armored leather pads had withstood the heat and shield his chest, but he can feel the cold wind on his bare, un-muscle-y stomach {okay, how did she burn just your shirt off?}, can hear it screaming in his ears. Or is it the roar of the crowd?
{It's probably your own pathetic voice.}
His vision is the slowest to return, fading from a blinding white to a faint green. It's disorienting, not being able to see anything but vague movements and shifting forms through the emerald haze that hinders his sight, but his body seems to act instinctively on its own by angling itself feet down.
{Where's the pain?}
He's still falling. An explosion that's knocked his body this high should have hurt like a mother; why hasn't—
He impacts the lake surface so hard that it shatters, plunging him straight through sharp splinters and into glacial waters. Maybe it's the sheer cold that ices out most of the pain. Maybe it's because he loses consciousness in the dark waters.
He's jolted back to full attention as a blazing meteor smashes through the ice above him. Struggles for air and swallows a lungful of freezing waters instead. All-out panics, thrashing limbs and all, before some higher power kicks in and coordinates his motions to begin swimming in an upward fashion towards the glimmering curtain of blue flames and silver spheres of air masking the meteor-created hole.
A pressurized pulse sweeps away the bubble curtain, but it also knocks Jaune off course. Weiss floats underneath Jaune's escape route, using graceful movements of each hand to perform separate tasks: one maintains a large bubble of air around her to keep her warm and dry, while the other stops the rotation of her six-pronged weapon on a crystallized feather of pale blue. She says something—probably reciting her battle line, though the water plugs up his ears—before a gigantic piston of ice slams into his back from beneath. Instead of pushing him towards the hole, though, the piston threatens to pancake him against the hard, frozen underside of the lake surface.
{It's been a good five minutes, world.}
Without warning, a sphere of transparent triangular green tiles flashes to life around him and bears the brunt of the impact. The frozen ice ceiling gives way instantly before the emerald force field, so instead of getting smooshed, Jaune is instead launched high into the air like a glowing green pinball.
Despite Weiss not being anywhere in sight, her voice reaches him: "O frigid blades, pour forth! Icicle Rain!"
The pillar beneath him erupts into an ascending shower of tiny ice needles that, failing to pierce his shield, at least continue to drive him upward. The entire way up into the stormy morning sky, Jaune tries to wrap his mind around… well...
{WHERE IN REMNANT DID THIS COME FROM?}
He's never been able to manifest anything remotely close to this. If he had, then he wouldn't have let Roman break his legs so many times in his childhood…
Wait. Is this the Dust in action? But… how did he—
There's no time to question his subconscious awesomeness in making use of Miltia's Dust (without actually knowing how), because he's currently passing through the holographic airspace—the three-dimensional holograph that's being projected to the entire school. The pixels that scatter before him capture his attention briefly: tiny nanobots that glimmer with individual colors, a lot of green with a bit of white in the distance that seems to be getting larger and larger…
{WEISS WARNING!}
He tries to twist his body in midair to face the oncoming femme fatale. It looks easy in the movies, but for some reason, the only thing Jaune succeeds in doing is uselessly flailing his limbs like an octopus trying to fly.
"Partake of boiling steam! Raging Mist!"
The cloud of the flying ice shards that had previously been pushing him upward vaporizes into a heavy mist, completely encompassing his shield of green. Weiss isn't letting up either as she rides a glowing white glyph up to his height, spins her Wheel of Misfortune, and incites, "O darkened storm cloud, loose thy blade and run mine enemies through! Thunder Blade!"
Crackling blue lightning shoots straight out of her snowflake construct and into the mist, while two parallel glyphs rotating in opposite directions manifest on polar ends of the storm cloud. Jaune get half a second of hope as the electric bolt wraps crackling fingers around his spherical force field, seemingly unable to find a way in—until his protection shatters into flickering green fragments. Even worse, now that Weiss has practically transformed the mist into a thundercloud, there's no shortage of shocking surprises waiting for him.
Well, at least his nerves are so fried that he doesn't feel a thing upon hitting the frosty earth twenty seconds later.
{This girl is way overpowered. Why hasn't Rooster Teeth taken over the world yet?}
Sure, he can't feel a thing—but that doesn't stop his body from getting to its feet. The crowd roars in approval at his apparent persistence in staying alive and functional despite Weiss' worst, but…
Okay, that's scary. So he's done some strange things in the past day—like sliding on his knees beneath Ruby's wicked scythe, or shoving aside his drowning-induced panic to swim towards the surface. Things that he didn't decide to do, but that his body just did. He'd just excused those actions as adrenaline, or his future identity (Jaune Arc, human ex-n00b become butt-kicking secret agent) suddenly manifesting. But this…
It feels like a puppetmaster is tugging on invisible strings attached to his arms and torso. He's not in control of his body.
Screw throwing himself into an all-faunus battle school to learn how to fight from the brutal and the best. This sensation right now… this is terrifying. Panic threatens to block off his throat.
{No, that's just the puke trying to force its way up.}
It's this humanizing thought that apparently breaks the supernatural hold over him. Gasping, he slumps to his knees, drops to his hands… and upchucks his entire breakfast.
{There we go… let it all out... now nobody will ever suspect you of being an undercover agent.}
The cheering grows in volume and excitement, peaking the moment the land shudders violently as Weiss lands not ten feet away from him. Her entire chest heaving with exertion, she grunts, "Lemming. My. Ass! Why haven't you died yet?"
Jaune tries to say something. A bit of half-digested bacon and omelet splatters out instead. After he's finished clearing thatout of his mouth, he finally manages, "Watch your language. Bluegh."
Weiss uses her hands to weave patterns in the air as she retorts, "Eat this! O roar of the earth, bring forth the frozen fangs of the mighty dragon. Ground Dasher!" In that instant, six huge boulders in the shapes of jagged teeth explode from the terrain behind her, frost quickly encasing their masses to transform them into floating icebergs.
"What's with the battle quotes?" His jeer is significantly dulled when he coughs up a wet loogie directly afterwards.
"Why would you care, if you will only perish by them?"
"You're announcing your attacks! Why?"
"Even Cockroaches deserve a chance," Weiss hisses, shifting her hands towards another feather-glyph. Steam begins to rise from its icy tines. "But I tire of this. I could step on you a hundred times and you would just peel yourself off the pavement and keep running. No, I think the only way to stop you in your little tracks is to boil you alive, Blessed Drops!"
His body is moving before she's finished speaking. Despite his terror, he thinks his movements this time belonged to him and himself only; at least, it felt real enough to be his own, and it definitely saved him from the severe burn of a blast of boiling water fired almost point-blank
{Okay, stop thinking logically and work on surviving now!}
A plume of steam to his right causes him to alter his run-away trajectory to the left. He shifts leftwards again to dodge another potshot to the right, but when the third serpent of water flies wide to his right yet again, he catches on pretty fast: she's herding him towards that stretch of land right underneath the floating icebergs, each supported by a large blue glyph. Acknowledging that she wasplanning on dropping them on his head is all good and stuff, but it's useless unless he actually has a way to counteract or stop her hot shots—
Okay. Stupid Plan Time.
He sprints straight towards the open plain, keeping his eyes looking up for signs of meteor movement while keeping his head down in hopes that Weiss doesn't catch on that he's caught onto her. She doesn't seem to notice, even stopping in her herding attempts as soon as she's confirmed that he's headed straight into her minefield. Meteorfield. Whatever.
The first flying iceberg begins its slow descent as the glyph underneath it begins to flicker out of existence.
He doesn't slow down. He continues to sprint forward, even as the gigantic ice-covered boulder moves to intercept him from above, its momentum increasing until he's sure that the gravity holds more control over its flight than the glyph does. He then plunges Crocea Mors into the frosty earth and slides around the sword, completing a 180 degree turn in three seconds flat without too much loss in momentum. Then he's sprinting again, this time in the completely opposite direction, and thus only feels vibrations in his feet and bits of shrapnel peppering his back when the asteroid finally dashes itself into the ground.
Weiss skitters away on her floating glyph-mobile when he nears, her hands ever weaving new patterns into the air as she manipulates her ethereal diagrams. And… she's singing? A haunting voice drifts in on the winds that whirl about Weiss, carrying pleading whispers to his ears.
"Mirror, mirror, what's inside me? Save me from the things I see!"
The sound of air screaming past a second falling meteor alerts him just in time. Using his sword to abruptly changes directions again, he barely avoids the second impact—just barely, though, because the shockwave generated by this massive collision is enough to hurl him twenty feet forward, and shrapnel the size of his head rain about him.
And still the song continues, senseless words that bounce off his mind. "I can keep it from the world; why won't you let me hide from me?"
The third and fourth meteor have already begun their deadly descent, somehow managing to hone into him despite Weiss not apparently paying attention. A glance her way shows her head lifted to the skies, eyes closed, hands lifted as if in the final stretches of a magnificent swan song.
The perfect time to take advantage of her.
{…}
Jaune hefts up Crocea Mors, aligns its pointy end with her rear end, and rushes her. He almost gets there too.
She hasn't said any sort of fancy battle quote yet, so he's only half-prepared when one of the hands lifted upward in the ecstasy of song drops suddenly to point at him. A practically invisible airplosion smashes into his face and knocks him flat onto his back. His momentum, however, keeps him sliding forward on the icy floor—and just like that, he's slipped underneath Weiss' guard, and right underneath her floating glyph too. With no better opportunity to attack her than right now, he stabs upwards at her legs with his sword, aiming at a space between the glyph markings.
His strike bounces off a reflective hexagonal tile. The effect ripples up the much smaller Mystic Cage(C) that Weiss must have set up around herself, drawing her attention.
"Again?" Weiss rages the instant she realizes that Jaune's body is zipping right underneath her.
He flips to his feet as soon as possible, only to find Weiss simply hovering there, a couple feet away. Steam rises off her frost-coated outfit (or maybe it's coming out of her ears).
"What again?"
Weiss takes a moment to reply, because the third meteorite chooses that moment to smashe itself into gravel atop her force field. She stumbles slightly as the Mystic Cage(C) flickers and dies. The fourth falling iceberg never makes it before Weiss carelessly uses a red glyph to push it up and over herself (and thankfully him too). As soon as she's recovered, she heaves a longsuffering sigh and points straight up.
{Huh what is she—aw Grimm to the no.}
The massive holospace above him replays the moment over and over from multiple perspectives: his body sliding underneath her glyph; his eyes focused on the underside of her skirt; his sword stabbing at the pixelated space between her legs.
{Now would be a good time to commit seppuku.}
Weiss speaks before he can turn his blade on himself. "I will reclaim my honor as the Heirness Schnee," she says in all seriousness. "By washing my hands in your blood."
"Weiss…!"
She throws both arms in the air this time, shouting straight up to the heavens, "O noble conflagration within me, incinerate all by thy sacred will to strike down those who would be our enemy! Divine Razing Phoenix!"
Maybe she's been pumping out ice all this time to charge up an overwhelming amount of fire, because blue flames literally erupt out of her outstretched arms and unfurl into majestic wings at least twenty feet long each. A glowing phantom rises from Weiss' upturned face and shapes into wicked white eyes, completing the form of a gigantic bird about to take flight above the ice princess—an ethereal weapon with hundreds of fiery feathers, each with the potential to be a missile of instant incineration.
Overkill. Total overkill is what this is.
With nothing left to lose (well, besides his life), Jaune channels Pyrrha, hefts his sword up like a javelin, and lobs it at Weiss.
It misses.
Of course it would; he'd hoped it would at least break her concentration and dissipate the Phoenix of Death, seeing as she seems to be exhausting all her resources on maintaining and controlling its form. He did not intend for Crocea Mors to fly right past her head and pierce straight through the center of the snowflake glyph hanging behind her.
He doesn't remember much after the nuclear explosion.
-flashstep forward-
(days)
The incoming freshmen speech is way more brutally boring than the introductory speech. Bodily disfigurement is mentioned as carelessly alongside academia, diet, and curfew—not that she really cares. When living on the run has been your life for the past ten years, things like these are small fry. Like sardines compared to tuna.
{Mm. Tuna.}
Regardless of her inner turmoil, she's become very good at distancing her outward countenance from her mind. To the world, Blake Belladonna probably looks bored—not that she currently has friends to observe her; she'd pretty much established herself as an independent force from the get-go, so her fellow freshmen have treated her as much. Blake doesn't need dozens of friends anyways. Having a single one and only is sufficient enough.
After the speech, instead of following her ambassador towards the West campus for a tour (she already knows the entire geography of the school, having scouted it out the year before while applying), Blake sneaks out of the building, strolls down to the Lake of Zen, and perches atop a large boulder to observe her only friend: Weiss Schnee, who looks like quite the heroine. A gigantic phoenix of crystallized fire hovers behind the ice princess, a perfect mirror image of the girl who swore to bring certain death to her greatest enemy.
Said enemy being a pathetically tiny, shirtless blonde frozen in the middle of a terrified scream.
Both have literally been frozen in mid-action for the past seven days.
During their Initiation match, the ever-incompetent Jaune Arc (from Lemming… ha) managed to catch Weiss at a time when all her guards were down: during the grand finale. The result of putting his sword through her almost-forgotten motherboard snowflake glyph was a messy detonation that managed to encase forty percent of the faculty and student population in a gigantic block of ice.
Even though Jaune was ultimately the one to cause the explosion, most of the students being released every day blame the fiasco on Weiss. Not enough control, they say; rage made her take on more than she could handle. Just how insane could she be, summoning her inner Grimm? Who does that? When the heiress Schnee is finally melted out of her frozen prison, there won't be a warm welcome to greet her—not from the general students, anyways. From the Cat though…
That's why she's been coming down to the iceberg every day. It's her way of letting not only the Rooster but everybody at the school know that Blake Belladonna stands by Weiss Schnee, no matter the circumstances. Faunus have definitely noticed; the rumor mill has chalked it up to practically everything, from devoted follower to obsessive groupie to secret flame.
{Hmm, forbidden lover might be fun to play with. Rowr.}
Either way, the intent is mostly true: at Zodiac Academy, Weiss is the only person who really matters to Blake. If she can't return to the happier days of her childhood, then at least, here with Weiss, she can accomplish something much greater.
She's brought out of her inner contemplation as her ears catch approaching footsteps. Well-built. Solid. Probably male. Not too concerned with stealth, since he's walking with heavy footfalls. Loud but carefully controlled breathing through the nostrils. The clink of metal against leather: a sheathed sword.
"Blake… it's time."
-end flashstep-