Chapter 10 – we need to talK

Adam and the others didn't get detention for being late to class, but they did miss the first few minutes of the lecture. If ever they found themselves in a situation where they needed to know the formula for Gibbs Free Energy change, Blake would have a leg up over them.

That wasn't the important part, though. The important part was ensuring that she had the evening and night free. Blake paid extra attention in class and started working on her homework in advance during the breaks between classes to guarantee that nothing would interrupt her when she snuck out. She was going to prepare an excuse for Ruby's benefit, but the young girl said she wanted to speak to Ilia alone and pushed her two teammates out of the room. Adam said he was going to go train anyways, so Blake just lied and claimed she would go with him. Ilia waved bye as they left, and Blake saw Ruby sit down in the chair across from her just before the door closed.

"K. What will you actually do?" she asked Adam.

"Oh, I fully intend to train. I just won't be doing it for myself."

Blake arched an eyebrow, and Adam explained on.

"I figure that the training rooms will be a popular haunt for the strongest of the strong, and I'll be able to narrow down our list of suspects a tad."

"If the killer is as competent as we think, they won't need to train."

"Perhaps not, but maybe I might be able to eliminate some of the others by observing them – they'll still need to train, and if I can narrow the already limited list down even more…it's just a hunch. I take it you'll be scouting for the aura transfer device?"

"If I can. I'll let you and Ilia know if I find anything. When Ruby's done with her, that is."

Adam's sole visible eye shifted back and forth in a wily manner. "Whaddaya think they're talking about?"

Blake shrugged. "Human stuff?"

"Now, now, young Belladonna. You mustn't be so racist," Adam said with a grin as he departed. "Try to be more openminded, like me. Happy hunting." With a nod, he was gone.

Blake exited the dormitory building and breathed in some of the crisp night air. It may have been a chilly fall in Vale, but for an Atlesian gal like Blake, this may as well have been a balmy spring. It was 7pm and dark enough that most humans wouldn't be able to see her. Faunus with night vision might catch a glimpse of a shadow flying through the air, but Blake knew that not even they would be able to make out her face.

The most obvious place to investigate for clues to the missing aura machine was the headmaster's office, but Blake felt like she needed to work her way up to that. Before breaking into a secure location, Blake first needed to scout out some hiding places that she could fall back to in the event of discovery. Additionally, if she did find something of value like a map or a note describing the location of the machine, knowing the lay of the land would come in handy when interpreting it.


"Okay, so this is going to be a bit of a tough conversation – for both of us – but I think it's one that we need to have."

No sooner than Ilia had finished waving bye to the others had Ruby sat down and begun something that sounded an awful lot like a the start of a lecture.

"So, I firstly want to admit that I'm probably out of my league on this, but I'm your team leader, so I'm going to have to ask you to work with me here. Secondly…actually I only had one disclaimer. Look, Ilia, I can't tell you what to do…well, I can, but I don't want to have to. What happened earlier today, that kind of thing has to stop. It probably made Adam and Blake uncomfortable, and they might not have said anything, but I will. Unless we all consciously make an effort to fight our own biases, nothing is ever going to get better."

Okay, now Ilia was truly lost. "Ruby, what are you taking about?"

"I'm not saying that you have to go out and challenge Team Sword or something, but when they seek us out and pick a fight, just, you know, have our backs, maybe? Not just because I want Team Rabies to be a united front, but because those four are kind of super racist. If you laugh at their jokes, it makes a difference. It may seem like nothing, but you give them the idea that they've done nothing wrong and that they can go and do it again to the next innocent Faunus."

"Wait wait wait, are you…are you saying I'm a racist? Against Faunus?"

"No, but you laughed at their jokes and nodded along. I'm all for making friends, but I don't think that's the way to go about it."

"Ruby, you're a human. And I'm a F…friend of two Faunus."

Whew. That was a close one. I need to make sure I don't slip up.

Ruby looked away uncomfortably. "I know I'm not a Faunus, but that doesn't mean I should stay silent. I'm your team leader, which makes your behavior my responsibility. Having Faunus friends doesn't mean you can just…this is so difficult to phrase. Again, I can't tell you what to do, but I personally think that Weiss and her cronies were saying things that weren't okay. If you could–"

"Let me stop you right there. I have no love for the bitch or her three stooges."

A smile spread across Ruby's face. "That's good to hear. I mean, I'm not lad that you guys aren't friends cuz friends are always great, but maybe it's not a good thing to be friends with bullies like them. Especially Weiss." Ruby stuck out her tongue. "And maybe Cardin."

"Ruby, Team Sword might have one girl and three boys, I'm pretty sure they're just three pussies following around a giant dick."

Ruby chortled and patted Ilia on her shoulder. "So I take it you won't be laughing at their crude jokes anymore?"

"I–"

Ilia froze. The whole reason she was pretending to be a human was so that she could cozy up to the bigots and Faunophobes that Adam and Blake couldn't get close to. It was mission essential that she did continue to align herself with them.

"Well, I might…maybe if I can befriend them, that might be the first step to changing them…because, I mean, it's not like they're a problem that's going to just fix themselves, and like you said, every good person has a responsibility to fight bias, so by playing along for a bit and then…uhhhh…"

Ruby's smile faded and her face fell as the explanation dragged on and on. Ilia knew that she could just lie and say yes and this would all go away, but it would only be a temporary solution. Ruby would just pester her the next time she played along with Weiss and her gang.

"…so I'm actually being the opposite of them because I'm trying to convince them to give up their hurtful ways."

"Ilia…"

"Look, it's not a problem, Ruby. Adam and Blake are my best friends. I'm not a racist."

"Some of your best friends are Faunus, Ilia? Really?"

The worst part was that Blake and Adam would chide Ilia if she did as Ruby asked. Neither were made uncomfortable by Ilia's faux racism; Adam practically demanded it when it was relevant to an assignment. And, ironically enough, the only person here who was made uncomfortable by it was the team's resident human.

But she's being better than almost any human I've ever met. She's trying so hard to care about the Faunus.

And I'm going to have to be the asshole here, aren't I?

"Just leave it alone, Ruby."

"I can't. What if Cardin sees you laughing and think that hating Faunus makes him more popular with other humans? What if he decides to start ramping up his bullying and hits the next Faunus he sees?"

"Blake and Adam can take care of themse–"

"It's not just about them! There's a lot of other Faunus that can get picked on! For the Brother's sake, Ilia, do you even hear yourself? Why would you want to be friends with Team Sword? They're unrepentant, ignorant bullies!"

This is about more than schoolyard bullying¸ Ilia wanted to scream. Someone's trying to kill us, and we need to figure out who it is! And I'm not even a racist! I'm a Faunus, I just can't tell you that!

"Ruby, I'm probably going to keep spending time with them. You'll just have to make your peace with that, one way or another."

"Well." Ruby stood up. "I won't give you orders on how you spend your free time, but I suggest you enjoy your new friends on Team Sword, because you just lost one on Team Rabies. Good day, Huntress Amitola."

Ruby stomped out of the room before Ilia could say anything further, leaving her alone in the dorm room. Never before had Ilia felt so ashamed of herself, at least not since her time at Iridium.

I chose to bury Ilia Manzat and become Ilia Amitola. I guess this is the price.


Atlas was a smartly designed academy. Buildings ran along a grid pattern and fit into uniform design patterns. If two buildings were similar in function, like a training ground and a healing ward, they would go next to one another. Everything was planned in advance, down to the wiring.

Beacon was not a smartly designed academy. Beacon was a massive, sprawling campus with no coordination to the buildings or foresight on the part of the builders. Circular halls surrounded long rectangular cafeterias with differently shaped dormitories speckled across the campus at random. There were libraries adjacent to sports arenas, classrooms bordering administrative facilities, rec facilities joined into laboratories. Blake at first thought this was another one of the enigmatic headmaster's eccentricities, but then she remembered that Beacon was built centuries ago, back just after the end of the Great War. The kingdoms had been actual kingdoms then, with monarchs and nobility and whatnot. Perhaps they had possessed foresight and wanted the school's layout to make no sense to outsiders. If so, their pre-emptive planning was working well against Blake.

It took until the stroke of midnight, but Blake was finally fairly certain that she had the entire school mapped out. Memorizing every building as she saw it, she'd identified 30 major wings and 12 ancillary buildings, smaller things like sheds or storage units. She'd also been able to map out the rough layouts of the borders to the surrounding forests, all of which would be ideal locations to sneak away to, should something go wrong.

Beacon did provide maps, but Blake had always found it useful to catalog the buildings in person. Maps could be outdated, two dimensional, and generally unreliable. Plus, scoping out the school gave Blake a better understanding of the distance between halls. Blake's acrobatic arsenal of moves included things like jumping from rooftop to rooftop, swinging with her ribbon, and leaping through windows. If she needed to plan out an escape route on the fly, having a spatial memory of the actual design of all structures was paramount.

She'd learned that lesson after reading a map of Mantle and thinking she could escape by leaping from rooftop to rooftop in a pinch during a White Fang op. The maps didn't mention that one row of apartments was thrice the height of the surrounding privately owned houses. General Ironwood and Winter had to pull quite a few strings to get her released without revealing who she was to either the Mantle PD or the White Fang.

Once that was done, Blake figured she had about two hours left before she had to return to the dorm room and catch enough sleep to function. She was certainly able and willing to pull an all-nighter if it came to it, but this was a marathon, not a sprint. Finding the aura transfer device would take time, and falling asleep in class would draw attention to her that K couldn't afford. Things might have been laxer if it weren't for the fact that she knew someone was intently watching the entire batch of first years, just waiting for her to slip up and reveal herself.

That was the part that unnerved her. She was no stranger to life-threatening situations, but the thought that there was a killer somewhere, just out there, was almost too much for her. She had no idea how to go about stopping them or even identifying them, and she never knew how close to finding K that they were. Honestly, an open confrontation would have been preferrable. Blake made a mental note to thank Adam later on for being the one to go to the training center instead of her.

Two hours. Not enough time to truly search any of the buildings, and Blake wasn't even sure that the device was hidden within them. The general had provided them with some grainy satellite photos that showed an object fitting the aura transfer machine's dimensions being unloaded from a bullhead, but it was impossible to make it out clearly. The satellite moved on in its orbit before the item was moved to its final location, and the bullhead and item were both gone when Beacon re-entered its field of view twenty minutes later.

So, what could Blake do for two hours? The CCT was too high to scale and infiltrate in that time, but perhaps she could lay out some extra groundwork for when she ultimately did get around to it.

General Ironwood had granted her access to the schematics of the CCT Tower, so she knew what to look for in advance. The tower was comprised of four support spires that fed power, fiber optic, and computer cables into the main building. The first ten floors of the main building were available to the public, and the next ten floors were restricted to technicians and Beacon personnel. The final floor belonged to the headmaster and was accessible by him and his deputy alone.

Fortunately for Blake, the elevator system that accessed these floors was available to all students. The only security that guarded Ozpin's office was a keypad that required a nine-digit code to let him or Goodwitch go on up. As such, Blake would be able to freely access the elevator and check the keypad for fingerprints. She wouldn't be able to determine the order of the numbers in the code, but she would be able to decipher which numbers went into said code. It wasn't much, but it was a start.


Of course, the one person who was training had to be the idiot boy, Jaune Arc. Adam had been hoping that he might have the opportunity to face someone competent like Pyrrha Nikos or someone he would enjoy beating with like Weiss Schnee, but Jaune Arc was neither. He had half a mind to turn around, but the entire point of this little excursion was to find someone on their list of suspects, fight them, and hopefully clear their name (or prove their guilt). Blake had put Jaune Arc on that list, and he trusted her not to waste his time.

Thus, Adam approached the blond knight as he imitated the movements of the combat instructor in the video on his scroll.

"Next, we're going to be trying a tierce, the third type of parry. To do so, you must space your feet apart, place your sword arm's shoulder at your waist, and face forward. Wait for your opponent to–"

Adam cleared his throat, making Jaune jump. "You do know that those types of movements are meant for fencing, right?"

Arc put a hand over his chest and exhaled. "Woah, you scared me there, dude. Uh, sorry, what did you say just now?"

"Correct me if I speak in error, but you wield a bastard sword, not a rapier. The video–"

"Hey! Don't call Crocea Mors a bastard! R-Ruby says it's a family heirloom, so it's…I guess it's special. And not a bastard."

Adam sighed. "A bastard sword. Too short to be classified as a longsword, but too long to be aptly considered a shortsword. Do you not know your own blade?" Blake had suggested he actually didn't and was secretly more familiar with some other weapon (a spear or something? It seemed farfetched). Adam wasn't expecting him to admit this, but if he gave a reasonable excuse, it might score some points in favor of his innocence.

"Well…it's kind of an Arc family sword. Hunting is a family profession, but my dad doesn't like to talk about it, so I don't really know much of about the Arc legacy. Only that every male Arc for ten generations has been a great warrior."

"Wait, the Arc family? Those Arcs? Like Nicodemus Arc?" Adam had heard about him back when he was still a kid. The man was supposedly a legendary warrior from a century and a half ago that fought in the Faunus Rights Revolution. He was one of the only humans to fight on the right side of the war. "You're related to him?"

Jaune looked around the room like it might contain the answer. "I…guess? Maybe? Again, I don't know much about my history. Dad says that I don't need to be burdened with a legacy and should live my own life, but…well, I want my own life to live up to that legacy. I want to be just like the Arcs of old – ancient heroes, noble quests, daring rescues of maidens."

Adam cringed slightly at the absurd and romanticized depiction of the 'Arcs of old.' Nicodemus Arc, his wife, and more than half of his children were burned alive by humans who decried them as race traitors. Still, Jaune's goal of imitating one of the good humans was acceptable, so Adam elected to give him a helping hand.

"As I was saying, the video you were watching is meant for fencers using light dueling swords: rapiers, sabres, épées, and foils. You won't be able to adapt the lessons within to a weightier, medium sword like your own." Adam drew Wilt. "Like my straight sword, you need to use your bastard sword to mix powerful blows with light, fast movements. Flexibility is the key. Would you care to spar?"

"Would I!" cried Jaune. "…I would?" He nodded.

"Very well." Adam moved to the combat ring control panel and set it to sparring mode. He selected the largest ring setting and lowest allowed aura level for elimination (10%) in hopes of extending the duel for as long as possible. Blake had already fought Jaune, so Adam's goal wasn't to test his skill. Here, he hoped to instead pry some secrets out of him by conversing mid-fight. People often tended to let the truth spill when they were devoting the majority of their focus and concentration to combat.

"Begin when you're ready."

Jaune took up a fighting stance, then charged at Adam, holding his sword back until the last moment when he thrust it forward. Adam leaned to the left as the attack gently clipped his coattails, gripped Jaune's wrists, and flung him towards the edge of the arena.

BZZZZT!

Adam had expected Arc to catch himself mid-air or use his sword to slow his momentum, but the boy had flown through the air straight out of the ring. Wilt was still sheathed.

"Woah. You really got me there."

"Hmmm. I suppose I did. Perhaps we should try again."

Jaune climbed to his feet and dusted himself off as Adam reset the arena. He hadn't wanted the fight to conclude so quickly, but he supposed that he should have expected it, given how weak Jaune clearly was. This time around, he would go easier on the boy.

Jaune raised his sword. "I'm ready."

"Let's begin, then."

Adam unsheathed Wilt but kept it at his side and instead raised Blush. As he was going easy on Jaune, he intentionally took one second longer than he needed to, in hopes that it would be enough time for the boy to raise his shield.

It was not.

"Wha–"

The shotgun spray connected with Arc's breastplate and sent him flying backwards.

Out of the ring.

Again.

Sighing, Adam sauntered over to the hapless human and offered him a hand. Jaune refused it and remained seated. It was then that Adam noticed how Jaune was bleeding from his left shoulder.

"Why was your aura not raised?"

"A-Aura? Oh, right, the thing. Yeah, I…I forgot." The wound quickly sealed itself.

"You forgot?"

"Yes. Hey, what was that? The thing you used?"

"Blush. A semi-automatic shotgun."

"Y-Your sheath? It's a gun?"

Adam looked away. "It's not that bad a combination. True, I will admit that it does limit me somewhat by preventing me from accessing any ranged options without unsheathing first, but I've often found that the Wilt's weight helps me balance when taking my shots. I suppose that if you feel it appropriate to critique, you keep your gun in a better location?"

"My gun?"

"Is it in your sword?"

"What gun?"

"Oh," said Adam, quietly, as the realization of just how poorly equipped Arc was swept over him. "You…does your sword do anything special? Utilize Dust? Launch missiles?" Adam remembered Blake's theory. "Transform into something…a spear or lance, perhaps?"

"No. Although my sheath also can turn into a shield." Jaune raised his sheath and pressed a button, causing a shield to spring into existence. He handed it to Adam. "Not a gun, like yours, but it's still…okay, it's actually kind of lame."

"It's not…lame," Adam said stiltedly as he inspected the shield, then handed it back. As Arc took it back and switched it back to a sheath for his sword, Adam made sure to apply a hearty helping of hand sanitizer to his fingers from the bottle on his belt. "Why didn't you use it to defend yourself from Blush?"

"I forgot that I had it."

"Forg– how did you get into Beacon?"

"Yeah, I know. I'm a loser."

Adam stood over the still seated Jaune and looked directly into his eyes. "That wasn't a rhetorical question. Jaune Arc. How exactly did you get into Beacon?"