Author's Note: And now, for something completely different.
The central conceit of this story is that Grimm the size of Leviathans are as common to this AU as Beowulves are in canon. To face this threat, humanity built Humongous Mecha, namely the highly-modular, near-infinitely customizable Armored Cores, ripped straight out of the From Software game series of the same name.
Heads-up, this is gonna get nerdy.
As an aside, some of the concepts or names of mech parts may be similar to ClemPrime13's mecha AU story, By the Power of Our Hearts, as a result of our shooting the shit over mech stuff. His story, however, is going in a much different direction than this one will, and is, I believe, primarily an adaptation of the tech bases of Mobile Suit Gundam and possibly Mechwarrior as well.
But yeah, check out his stuff, but only after you read this first chapter of my story. Muaha.
Reign of Steel
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Jaune watched in satisfaction as the last Grimm went up in smoke, unable to stand up to the onslaught of his Armored Core. The creatures of Grimm were gargantuan nightmare monsters, each one of whom was capable of flattening a town with little effort. To combat them, humanity had invented giant war machines to take the fight to them head-on. Standing at twenty meters tall, the machines consisted of modular parts attached to a central core, the end result being a mechanical effigy of a person. As this core contained the cockpit, and was thus the most heavily-armored part of the mech, these machines were swiftly titled Armored Cores - 'ACs' for short.
And Jaune's father had been the first to pilot one.
With the legendary Crocea Mors, the first functional Armored Core, Gil Arc had personally repelled Grimm assaults on Vale, single-handedly. Gil Arc and The Yellow Death were as effective as entire fleets in destroying the Grimm. With the concept proven in the field, the technology behind the Armored Core disseminated across the globe, and as a result, all of Remnant had experienced decades of unprecedented peace and security. From the four centers of Beacon, Haven, Shade, and Atlas, AC pilots, many of whom had been personally trained by Jaune's father, deployed to stop the Grimm in their tracks long before they could injure or kill innocent people.
Jaune was so proud of being Gil Arc's son that it hurt. And he wanted nothing more than to follow in his footsteps.
"Game Over! You win!"
He sighed as the simulator game halted, with scores scrolling past before the credits began rolling. As a reflex, he entered the three letters - ARC - that took their place at the top of the leaderboard, the same three letters that crowned the next fifteen places on the world scores.
Jaune Arc wanted nothing more than to follow in his father's footsteps as an AC pilot. It was just too bad for him that that was the last thing that Gil Arc wanted for him, for any of his children, and he had forbidden Jaune from attending the pilot training courses that could have put him in the cockpit of an Armored Core. But what his father couldn't do - or perhaps, what he hadn't had the heart to do - was ban him from the AC simulators in the local arcade. They were stripped down, pale imitations of the real thing, but if that was the closest that Jaune would ever get to the inside of one, then he was going to make the most of it.
The door of the simulation pod popped open, and Jaune stood up, waving awkwardly to the crowd of spectators that always seemed to gather whenever he hopped in to give the machine a whirl. He had drawn so much attention over the years that the arcade's owner had set up monitors slaved to the audio/visual feed from the pod, so that more people could clearly see what he was doing as he played. It wasn't quite the same as a crowd of cheering people applauding as he left a real cockpit, having made a real difference, but the teen would take what he could get.
He stepped out of the pod entirely, nodding and smiling as spectators offered their congratulations. It was all starting to feel...hollow. Yeah, he was the best, and by a large margin, but he was the best at what was essentially a civilian game, and he was utterly thrashing new AC scenarios faster than the designers could release new ones. There was just no challenge to it, and worse, no meaning. Pretty soon, Jaune would probably give up on the sims entirely, and then...well, he didn't know what he was going to do with himself.
Jaune was leaving the arcade when his phone rang. He sighed once more as he saw that it was his mother calling.
"Hello?"
"Hey, dear. You're not going to be late to dinner again, are you?"
Jaune checked the time on his phone, and just barely stopped himself from swearing.
"I'll take that to mean that you will," his mother replied, her tone wry. "I don't suppose you happened to be out socializing with normal kids, then? Maybe bringing a girl home for once?"
He coughed. "Uh…"
"I suppose that would be too much to hope for. Just tell me that you weren't wasting time at that arcade again?"
"...Okay, I won't tell you."
"Jaune."
He involuntarily stood straighter at his mother's rebuke. "Listen, I know you love goofing off there, but you need to think more seriously about your future," she continued to lecture.
"Well, maybe I could have a future defending humanity from the Grimm."
"You and I both know it's too late for that."
"No, it isn't! There's still time for me to klep into Beacon! I know I'm good enough, I just need a shot! Put me in a sim, a real one, and I'll show them I've got what it takes!"
His mother sighed on the other end of the line. "Jaune...it isn't a matter of you being good enough."
"Yeah, I know," he said, bitterly. "Look, I'll be home soon. Just...ugh."
"We'll get it figured out. I love you."
Jaune sighed. "...I love you too, Mom."
[/]
Dinner with his family was as impossibly awkward an affair as any Jaune could imagine. The Arcs had certainly enjoyed the fruits of their patriarch's labors to secure a prosperous future, and Gil and Isabela Arc boasted no fewer than eight children - seven sisters and Jaune - and four grandchildren, with another grandchild on the way. While one of Jaune's sisters, Saphron, had bucked tradition and moved to the new city of Argus to live with her wife, most of Jaune's older sisters brought their spouses and children to a family dinner once a week. With six sisters, three in-laws, four grandchildren, and Jaune, it made for a very lively dinner.
The problem was that, while Jaune didn't know what to do with himself if he couldn't pilot an Armored Core, everyone in his family had a suggestion.
"With a bit of application, you could probably do well in med school," his sister Violet put in. "Guaranteed job security, and you'd be way more marriageable."
Jaune tried hard not to make a face, especially as Violet was one of his younger sisters, and she was only trying to help. He wasn't stupid; of course doctors would always be in demand, and given how many times his father had been patched up after a rough mission, he certainly understood their value. It just...well, it wasn't him. He used his fork to push some carrots around his plate, making a noncommittal grunt.
"Jaune Arc, you speak properly at the dinner table."
"Yes, Mom," he sighed as he looked up from his food, looking at his parents directly.
Isabelle Arc certainly looked like the sort of woman who had given birth to eight children, and had kept them in line through sheer force of will. She had steel-gray hair bound in a matronly bun and her face was well-worn with creases born of laughter and worry alike. Gil Arc's hair had gone entirely white from age, though his back was still straight, his deep blue eyes still sharp, and he kept his beard neatly trimmed.
The Arcs had started their family later in life, as a result of Gil spending so much of his time fighting in Crocea Mors, and later on, training new generations of Armored Core pilots. Jaune's eldest sister wasn't born until Gil was in his forties, with Isabelle only a few years younger. Really, it was something of a miracle that Jaune's younger siblings had been born at all, though Gil often joked that his children did more to turn his hair white than any combat mission ever had.
And at his mother's familiar sigh, Jaune's father turned that sharp gaze onto him.
The old warrior set down his knife and fork, running a hand through his thinning hair to collect himself before speaking to his only son. "Jaune," he said, after a moment. "You're a smart boy. You could do practically anything that you set your mind to doing. So why do you insist that your future is to pilot an Armored Core? Do you really have so little respect for my life's work?"
That took Jaune by surprise, the youth recoiling as if he'd been slapped. "W-what?" he stammered, hardly comprehending what his father had just said to him.
"Why do you think I've fought for so long, son?" Gil sat back, shaking his head. "I learned war, mastered it to a level that few in this world can match, and when I had mastered it, I passed on what I knew to others. For decades, I've waged war so that one day, you, my children, and your children after you, will inherit a world where you won't have to face the same bitter cruelties I have had to endure. I studied war so that you and your sisters could be free to study things like medicine, law, business, or the sciences."
Slowly, Jaune shook his head. "But Dad...that world isn't here yet. The Grimm are still a threat - "
"And I've trained students who will take up my mantle when I am gone, who in turn have gone on to teach students of their own."
"So it's okay to leave the duty to others?" Jaune challenged. "To let others fight and risk their lives for me?"
A wistful smile crossed Gil's face, his eyes crinkling. "Why not? For a long time, the city and nation of Vale left that duty to me. After a lifetime of service, is it really so wrong that I ask for this one thing, that my family be allowed to live peacefully?"
Jaune deflated at his father's question, his objections turning to ash in his mouth. Jaune knew more than anyone else save his mother and the old man himself what Gil Arc had endured in the course of his long career, and he had too much respect for his father and his accomplishments to continue to deny him his one true wish.
Listlessly, he picked up his fork once more, and resumed pushing around his carrots, which refused to divulge any argument that could change his father's mind. "...It's what I'm good at," Jaune murmured, tonelessly.
Gil winced, especially as his wife none-too-subtly nudged him, and he felt the eyes of the rest of his children and their spouses on him, none having dared say a word during the impassioned debate between father and son. It hurt to see his boy like that, Jaune's obvious distress feeling like a fist clenched around his heart. He may have overdone it; he'd merely meant to dissuade the boy, not crush him outright.
"Look," he began. "Maybe tomorrow, you can grab the old toolset and help me touch up Crocea Mors. The engineering of an Armored Core is just as important, probably moreso, than the dumb bastard they have piloting it. With some time studying material sciences and combat engineering, you could do well designing the damn things. You could contribute, do your part for the fight without cramming yourself into a cramped, sweaty cockpit and scaring your poor old parents half to death, hmm? How does that sound?"
Before Jaune could answer, the familiar sound of the Grimm Alarm went off, a harsh blatting noise that emanated from the Scroll in Gil's pocket. At once, Gil shot to his feet, pulling the communication device from his pocket. "Speaking of cramped, sweaty cockpits," he said, pausing for a second to catch his breath. Got up a little too quickly there, getting dizzy. But the dizziness didn't fade, each breath he took came harder than the one previous, and the Scroll fell from his numb left hand, just before he followed after it.
Oh, he thought, with the same detached clarity that had guided him through decades of live combat with the most dangerous machines devised by man. I'm having a heart attack.
While his wife and many children rushed to his side, Gil further considered the situation. He had meant what he'd said to Jaune, but he had also put off shifting his responsibilities onto another pilot - probably Xiao Long or his wife, Summer - and going into full retirement. That always seemed like a problem for tomorrow, that he wasn't that old yet, and there was still a little more to be done. It seems as though his work ethic was catching up to him, as he was fighting for consciousness, possibly dying, with a Grimm attack imminent. He had programmed Crocea Mors to recognize Jaune as an authorized pilot, as he had left the machine to Jaune in his will, though he had hoped - probably in vain - that he wouldn't pilot it into combat.
No one would know. It would just be an unfortunate accident of age and medicine that resulted in the delay to the scrambling of the Armored Cores of Beacon, which stood on the far side of the city of Vale from Forever Fall. He could keep his son safely out of the fight. But while he may have been willing to put the burdens and risks of combat on other warriors for the sake of his children, onto the shoulders of volunteers trained to pilot Armored Cores and take the fight to the gargantuan monsters, he was not willing to sacrifice hapless civilians to keep his son out of the fight….and if the Grimm breached the walls of the city unopposed for any length of time, innocent people would die.
No one would know. No one but himself. But if he really was dying….if this was the end for old Gil Arc….he refused to make his last act one of lethal selfishness.
"Jaune," he rasped, struggling to sit up. His son was at a side in a flash, his face stricken - the boy probably thought it was his fault, that their argument caused this. "Listen." He drew in a deep breath. "Crocea Mors. It will recognize your handprint….take it. You must hold off the Grimm."
Now Jaune looked just as startled as he did horrified. "But -"
With strength he didn't know he had left, Gil reached out and wrapped his hand around the back of Jaune's neck, pulling him close. "No time," he gasped. "Hold them off. You must." Gil took one more breath. "I never doubted that you could," he told his son. "Not once. Now go."
Gil allowed himself to sink into unconsciousness, tuning out the sounds of his wife desperately reading off their address to emergency services. He didn't know if he would wake up or not, but as he faded to darkness, he took solace that he had done the best that he could.
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Jaune swiftly raised his arm, wiping the tears off on his sleeve. It felt like a sick joke. In fact, he was pretty sure that it was a joke on the part of his father; he was pretty sure he remembered asking his father if he could pilot Crocea Mors when he grew up, to which his father had responded 'over his dead body.'
He shook his head violently. The old man wasn't dead. Stricken, yes, in danger, yes, but not dead. Gil Arc was invincible. Moreover, he had given him a task to complete, and in a Grimm attack, Gil Arc's word was as a law unto itself. His father had charged him to take Crocea Mors and protect the city, and that was what Jaune was going to do.
Most families in modern Vale owned a car, and subsequently, a garage in which to store it. As Gil was the first responder to incursions coming from the direction of Forever Fall, the Arc family household boasted of a hangar capable of storing and servicing a twenty-meter tall humanoid war machine. He punched in the password - ISABELLE - and impatiently waited as the doors automatically began to retract, darting in as soon as he was able to fit through.
There, in its place of prominence in the hangar, stood Crocea Mors, the Yellow Death, the common ancestor of all Armored Cores that followed. It stood on two legs, the lines blocky and angular, bearing thick slabs of steel armor. The other components - the arms, rudimentary head, and the especially heavily-armored core that gave the class its name - were similarly blocky, with sharp angles. The right arm held a massive rifle sized to the war machine, while its left arm bore the emitter of a plasma blade integrated into the structure of the forearm. Mounted to the back of the left shoulder was a missile launcher, while the right bore a radar unit, to compensate for the ancient and outdated electronic systems of the decades-old Armored Core. The entire machine was painted white and a deep yellow, including the twin crescents that formed the Arc family emblem, proudly emblazoned onto the right shoulder.
Jaune swiftly ascended the gantry, taking the stairs two at a time. Behind the head, protected by two rises to either side, was the entry hatch into the core. He turned the valve to pop it open, lowering himself feet-first into the cockpit and sealing it shut back after him. There was no ejection system for an Armored Core; the reasoning being that if something was throwing enough murder to slag an AC, it would also make short work of any escape pod or ejector seat that they could install. In a sense, the armored core was the escape pod, the most heavily-armored component on the machine, and the part that had the best chance of surviving a catastrophic destruction of the unit.
Gil hadn't been lying when he'd described the cockpit of an Armored Core as being cramped, and while the slight tang of cleaning agents still lingered in the air, it couldn't overwhelm five decades of sweat that had seeped into the seat.
Jaune ignored it, settling into the seat and latching the crossed harness over his chest. Then he reached out and placed his palm against the touchscreen directly across from him, one of the first touchscreens ever put into production. A green light flashed over his palm, and then a rough, buzzing, and obviously computer-generated voice spoke.
"Authorized pilot detected. Beginning startup sequence."
That was when it truly struck Jaune that this was real. This was happening. He was about to fulfill his dream and pilot a real Armored Core in defense of the city.
And all he'd had to do was kill his own father.
It wasn't how he wanted it to happen. If he could take it back, if he could give up his dream to ensure that his father was healthy and well for many more years to come, he would do it in a heartbeat. The circumstances by which he came to be at the controls of an Armored Core turned whatever joy he might have felt to bitter poison.
All that was left was duty. His father had charged him to defend the city. Those could very well have been his last words to him, and Jaune would be damned if he let the old man down.
The cameras mounted into the head unit fired to life, feeding visuals to the screens in front of Jaune and to either side, approximating a typical human field of view. Radar came online, followed by technical readouts of the energy output from the generator and status checks from the unit's systems, all readings green. After a moment, the readouts vanished from the screen, and the main HUD materialized before him. On the left side of the central screen was a vertical bar, with most of it in green and the bottom red. That was the representation of the discretionary energy output from the generator. With the largely conventional weapons loadout that Crocea Mors bore, that bar would - assuming nothing malfunctioned - only deplete when he triggered the AC's jump boosters or activated the plasma blade built into the left arm.
Other handy information conveyed by the HUD included ammo counters for each of his weapons, a heat gauge, and a status icon for the AC, represented by a little green figure in the lower right corner of the central screen, which would would have parts turn red when - if - each component part of the unit took damage or was ultimately disabled or destroyed.
Jaune wrapped his hands around the control sticks built into each arm of the chair, and fit his feet to the pedals in the footwell. With a last gulp to summon his nerve, he activated the AC's combat mode and took full control of Crocea Mors.
"Crocea Mors, this is Beacon Control. We have confirmed reactor ignition. Good hunting sir," a voice crackled out over the radio.
"This is Jaune Arc," Jaune answered, fighting past the thick feeling in his throat. "My father is...unwell. He has ordered me to take Crocea Mors and fight in his stead."
Without waiting for a response, he worked the foot pedals, sending Crocea Mors into its first steps out of the hangar. After a second, the radio crackled to life once more. "Crocea Mors, this is Beacon Control. Kid, if this is a prank, I swear, you'll be in juvie until you're eighty, you understand?"
"Understood, Beacon Control," Jaune said, orienting his AC towards the red triangles on his HUD, which represented Grimm that his radar had detected. "My father suffered a heart attack when the alarm sounded."
There was another pause, during which Jaune pushed both pedals to the floor, igniting the boosters and sending Crocea Mors into a short flight. He frowned as he saw the rate at which the output from the generator was depleted. It looked like he would have to engage in the tried and true method of "boost hopping," a technique his father pioneered. By firing the boosters, letting off as it built height, then firing them again at the apex of the jump, Jaune was able to "feather" the boosters, allowing the generator to replenish the reserve during the lull and leapfrogging over distance more efficiently than attempting straight flight.
The radar units picked up Grimm coming from the direction of the forest of Forever Fall. Using his ankles to adjust the direction the foot pedals pointed, Jaune was able to alter the direction of the boosters, controlling where he leapt. As he neared the enemy, the radio crackled once more.
"This is Ozpin, Director of Beacon. I am given to understand that I am speaking with Gil Arc's son right now?"
"Yes, sir."
"And you are aware that unauthorized operation of an Armored Core constitutes a serious criminal offense?"
"Yes, sir."
That only made sense. It hadn't taken long after the proliferation of Armored Core technology that others had realized that possession of a machine capable of blasting a Grimm to smithereens meant that they could call the shots, possibly in a very real, very lethal sense. In order to prevent large-scale mechanized anarchy, strict controls were placed on who could operate an Armored Core. Legally, AC pilots had to operate under the auspices of one of the four control centers, Beacon, Shade, Haven, and Atlas, protecting Vale, Vacuo, Mistral, and the Kingdom of Atlas, respectively, and the manufacturers of Armored Core parts could only sell to those hubs. While there were some outliers - Jaune had heard of the White Fang somehow gaining the capability of mass producing ACs that, while inferior to the custom models, were still formidable war machines, and there were rumors of a bandit clan outside of Mistral somehow getting their hands on an Armored Core - for the most part, the system worked to keep the dangerous machines out of the wrong hands.
"Young man, what would possess you to do such a thing?" asked Ozpin.
"My father ordered me to defend the city," Jaune answered, his tone calm. "And no matter what, that's what I'm gonna do."
"Very well," said Ozpin. "Hold out as best as you can. Lance-Captain Taiyang Xiao Long and his two support units are inbound."
"Uh, roger that," Jaune replied, trying his best to sound like a professional. "I'll do my best."
"Good luck, Mister Arc."
As the radio fell silent once more, Jaune concentrated on his approach to the enemy. The Fire Control System, the specialized computer program built into the head that directed the firepower that Crocea Mors could put downrange, ticked off steadily before a targeting reticule appeared over the lead dark and shadowy figure that emerged from Forever Fall. The reticule switched from green to red as it entered the range of Crocea Mors' main rifle. Jaune swore.
It looked like a herd of Armadons. Most Grimm had some sort of resemblance to actual animals, albeit twisted nightmare versions scaled up to a colossal size. Jaune didn't know what sort of animal an Armadon was meant to resemble, just that he never wanted to run across one. They were vaguely reptilian in appearance, but bipedal, slow and hulking. They had beaked mouths, a single, curved horn on the tip of its nose, and a sort of boney frill at the base of the skull that protected their necks. More worryingly, they had hard shells on their backs, with further spikes of glistening white bone protruding through it, which could make hurting them more difficult. Just to complete the total nightmare package, the Armadons' main offensive weapon was a thick, clubbed mace at the end of a powerful and muscular tail, a devastating weapon that could crumble thick walls with ease, and damage or even cripple an AC if its pilot got careless.
Finally, because the world hated humanity and wanted it to die, Armadons traveled in herds, up to a dozen. Because why contend with just one murder-tank-lizard when you could tangle with eleven more?
Well, better get to it.
Jaune opened fire with an experimental shot from the rifle, the weapon sending a mech-scaled round towards the Grimm. It hit the Armadon, but with the Grimm's thick bone shell, it had little, if any, appreciable effect. Well, it had one effect, which was to get the Armadon's attention, even as more and more of its fellows emerged from the forest. The teenage pilot grimaced. His primary objective was to keep the Grimm from reaching the walls of the city, and that meant that he couldn't get caught up in duelling just one of them. He triggered his boosters, angling them to the right, and combined boost hopping with circle strafing.
A stationary AC was a soon-to-be-destroyed AC, after all.
In his younger days, before his father realized that he was genuinely serious about wanting to follow in his footsteps, Jaune had listened with rapt attention as his father had told him all about his adventures. The younger Jaune had committed many of Gil Arc's expressions and comments about piloting an Armored Core to memory. As he circled around the herd of Armadons, taking potshots at them with his rifle to keep them stirred up, he remembered a specific tactic that his father had mentioned - the stun rush.
He used the middle finger on his left hand to push a button on the left-hand control stick, switching FCS priority to the back-mounted missile launcher. Setting his sights on one of the Grimm, Jaune waited as the computer gradually pulled up first one and then a second diamond-shape, numbered indicator over the main FCS reticule, indicating that two missiles - that unit's max launch capacity - were locked on. With a pull of all the fingers on his left hand, he opened fire.
Crocea Mors' missiles were on the smaller side, for AC-scaled munitions, but there were plenty of them stocked up in the launcher, which would be to Jaune's benefit if he wanted to use that particular tactic repeatedly. With smoking contrails following them, the two missiles streaked towards the target Grimm, both striking it in the chest. Jaune had kicked his boosters on just after firing the missiles, hovering just above the ground and zipping towards the Grimm like a skater on the surface of the ice. While the Grimm was staggered from the dual explosions that had burst against its chest - the eponymous "stun" of the stun rush - Crocea Mors reached the Armadon.
With his left thumb, Jaune pushed the button on top of the left control stick, and in response, a gout of yellow plasma in roughly the shape of a blade erupted from the emitter built into the left forearm of Crocea Mors. Pushing the left control stick forwards resulted in Crocea Mors plunging the plasma blade deep into the exposed chest of the Armadon, searing away its grotesque essence with incandescent death. Jaune hit the boosters again, sending the AC straight up, with the embedded plasma blade effectively bifurcating the Grimm from the chest up, a maneuver that Gil Arc had dubbed a "Climhazzard."
Jaune didn't know where that name came from, or what it meant, but he supposed it didn't matter. As he reached the apex of his jump, he winced at what the combined stun rush - Climhazzard combination had done to his energy reserves. The bar was dangerously low, just above the red block that indicated the emergency level. Fortunately, firing the rifle didn't tax the generator at all, so even as Crocea Mors fell, Jaune took a shot at another Grimm, directing its attention onto him, not the city. Of course, attacking from above was the worst angle from which to attack an Armadon, but the rifle wasn't getting through anyway, so Jaune figured that he'd harass the creatures to keep them focused on Crocea Mors.
One Grimm down, only eleven more to go, and all it cost him was ten rounds, two missiles, and most of his energy reserves. He ran Crocea Mors on foot, circle strafing once more to keep the Armadons from being able to strike with those deadly tail clubs, even as the green bar of his energy reserves slowly began to refill.
Despite the situation, Jaune felt confident. He had successfully slain a Grimm, and hadn't wrecked Crocea Mors in the process.
He could do this.
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Lance-Captain Taiyang Xiao Long was an experienced Armored Core pilot, a veteran who had fought in numerous sorties, both in city defense missions and in seek and destroy expeditions to thin Grimm numbers before they could threaten inhabited areas. While not an everyday occurrence, Grimm incursions near the city, especially from Forever Fall, were common enough that scrambling from Beacon to finish off whatever ol' Gil Arc hadn't killed himself was near routine.
This time, though, this time was different.
It wasn't even that he was taking a pair of rookies out with him either, as he'd done that before. This was, however, the first time that he was entering live combat with his daughters backing him up.
On his left was an unstoppable war machine of headbutting destruction, along with Ember Celica, the Armored Core she piloted. His eldest daughter, Yang, preferred to mix things up close and personal, with dual pile bunkers - powerful explosive-driven spikes mounted onto the forearms of her AC - and a pair of rear mounted linear cannons, essentially shotguns upscaled to artillery. Yang's AC, painted a cheerful and gaudy bright yellow, was classed as middleweight, and she relied on her armor and powerful boosters to shrug off damage and rush the enemy for an up-close beatdown. She was highly ranked in the simulator arena, having honed her skills in virtual combat before Director Ozpin had judged her competent for live combat.
Tai wasn't actually all that worried about Yang, strangely enough. She was a warrior born, much like her birth mother, and had been chomping at the bit to get some real experience under her belt. Even his highly-tuned Dad Instincts couldn't deny her obvious skill and readiness for the fight. No, what really worried Taiyang was the pilot flanking his right, his youngest, Ruby Rose.
Her age was a sore spot for him. Two years younger than her half-sister, Ruby was only fifteen, but an absolute prodigy as both a pilot and an engineer of Armored Cores. The sole reason that Yang's Ember Celica was able to rushdown the way it could was because Ruby had custom tuned the generator and boosters, and had designed and built an entirely new radiator for her sister's Armored Core to handle the excess heat. Ruby was talented, sure, but Tai would have been much more comfortable with her going through the full term of pilot school, and he knew Sum agreed with him.
When Ruby had told him that Director Ozpin had personally recruited her into Beacon proper, without either his or Summer's knowledge, Taiyang had exchanged certain words with his boss. Also, certain punches. When he'd gone back to his daughter to inform her, in no uncertain terms, that she wouldn't be piloting live missions at fifteen, she had turned those huge silver eyes on him and asked if he didn't believe in her.
There were a lot of people to blame for this current situation, starting with Director Ozpin, who Taiyang still wasn't on speaking terms with. A little bit of the blame rested with Summer for passing down those silvery puppy dog eyes to their daughter, though Tai knew better than to ever voice that thought aloud. But he also blamed himself, for being unable to keep from giving his daughter what she wanted. Still, he and Summer had made it clear to all and sundry that, until they, and no one else, judged her ready, Ruby would only go on live missions under the direct supervision of either her father or mother. Even now, Summer Rose stood by with her own Armored Core, Shooting Star, ready to launch at a moment's notice.
Tai tried not to linger overlong on the graphic and terrifying threats that his wife had made towards his person should anything happen to either of their girls.
Ruby's age was troubling, but what made it even worse was the AC that the girl had made. Crescent Rose was….odd. It was like no other Armored Core in the world, made entirely of custom parts designed by Ruby herself. Crescent Rose, coated in a beautiful deep rose red color with black accents, was all smoothed curves, with only slight seams at the joints, and was distressingly lightweight. Upon seeing it for the first time, Taiyang had had to fight the urge to demand that Ruby add several more tons of armor to stand between her and the Grimm. It only bore two weapons, a long-range solid-shell rifle in its right hand and an oversized, crimson plasma blade affixed to the left. Everything else had been stripped down to grant Crescent Rose one great strength overall: speed.
Taiyang had never seen an Armored Core move like Crescent Rose. The damn thing could fly for sustained distances, the combination of an overpowered generator, lightweight frame, and multiple boosters festooning the AC granting Ruby unprecedented mobility. Ruby's preferred tactic in the sims centered around softening up her target with precise, long-range shots - because of course she had tinkered with her already top-of-the-line FCS - before hitting the Overboost function and tearing the enemy apart with her enormous plasma blade. It was quite the sight to behold.
While he was undeniably proud of his daughter's genius, her tactics worried him, specifically due to how lightweight and relatively poorly-armored her machine was. To Taiyang, the whole point of an Armored Core was the Armored part, and he had warned Ruby, repeatedly, that one day, an enemy was going to get a lucky shot on her, or else she might run into an enemy she couldn't outmaneuver, and when that day came, she would be in trouble. Still, she had refused to hear it, and so all Taiyang could do was to resolve to protect her when that day came.
He had the AC for that, at least. His Sun Dragon was a heavyweight, with the heaviest load-bearing bipedal legs on the market. He'd even considered installing tank treads instead, to load up on even more armor, but had ultimately decided against it. As it was, the Sun Dragon, besides bearing the heaviest armor possible, was also bristling with heavy ordinance. It carried dual solid-shell bazookas, carrying the ordinarily shoulder-mounted weapons with one in each hand as easily as smaller Armored Cores carried single-handed rifles. On its back were two heavy plasma cannons, while multi-missile launchers adorned the shoulders. Instead of an Overboost function, the Sun Dragon's Core was equipped with two Exceed Orbit turrets, twin laser cannons that deployed from either side of the Core, hovering above and behind the head, then fired scorching laser blasts autonomously before they returned to the Core to recharge from the generator. And finally, just in case of swarming insectoid Grimm, Taiyang carried an honest-to-the-gods flamethrower in a small hangar built into the right leg, which he could deploy after exhausting his right arm bazooka munitions.
The Sun Dragon was an Armored Core built to take on an army of Grimm by itself and walk out victorious, which it had. Between that, Yang's natural punchiness, and Gil Arc's unmatched experience, Taiyang could at least take solace that Ruby would have plenty of aid on hand if things went pear-shaped. As if to affirm his thoughts, he saw the familiar shape of Crocea Mors at the edge of the Forever Fall forest, the venerable old war machine executing a textbook stun rush-Climhazard combination with its missiles, boosters, and plasma blade, neatly dispatching an Armadon Grimm before harassing its fellows with its rifle and circle strafing on foot.
Taiyang shook his head. No matter how many times he saw it, it never failed to impress him what that old codger could do with his equally-obsolete machine. Given enough time, he was sure Old Man Arc could dispatch the Grimm on his own, just as he had in the old days before more Armored Cores were built, and he had trained successor pilots. Still, that would detract from the main reason for sending the girls out with him in the first place, so he figured that he would hail Gil and let him know that he had rooks with him.
"Crocea Mors, this is Sun Dragon, along with Ember Celica and Crescent Rose. Congratulations on a successful holding action, sir. My girls are rookies, so want to step back and assess their first live-fire mission?"
After a moment, his radio crackled on. "Sun Dragon, this is Crocea Mors. I'm...I'm not my father."
If the cockpit wasn't so cramped and he hadn't been strapped in by the harness, Taiyang would have fallen from his chair in shock. Whoever the pilot was, he sounded young, no older than his girls. He shook his head. Gil had mentioned how his boy had been pestering him about wanting to follow in his footsteps. It looked like he had finally worn the old man down. Tai made a mental note to give Gil so much shit for that, given the old man's stance regarding making AC piloting a family vocation. He grinned. "Well, you're doing fine from where I'm standing. Pulled off that Climhazard so well I thought you were the old man. How'd you convince him to let you pilot Crocea Mors? I thought he'd be driving that old thing until he keeled over and died."
Ruby, having apparently tired of waiting to get in the fray, took a shot with her rifle, the red tracer round zipping directly into the eye of an Armadon, closing it and causing oily black Grimmsmoke to pour from the head wound.
There was a long silence over the radio before the kid responded. "...It looked like a heart attack." Taiyang felt his gut drop into his boots before the pilot continued. "He told me to defend the city…"
"Oh shit, Gil Arc is dead?" Yang blurted over the radio.
"He's not dead!" Crocea Mors' pilot snapped, his voice cracking.
Oh, shit. Tai felt like an utter bastard. He shook his head. "I'm sure he's not. What's your name, kid?"
"My name is Jaune," came the response.
"All right, Jaune. My name is Lance-Captain Taiyang Xiao Long. I work with your dad. Now, I need you to disengage and wait near my AC - it's the big one with all the guns, okay?"
"...Dad told me to protect the city."
"And you did," Tai assured him. "You did great, kid. You did exactly what he told you to do. Now the cavalry's here, and you can let us carry it from here."
"I...okay."
"Good," Taiyang sighed as he saw Ember Celica dash in and drive its pile bunkers into one of the Armadons, giving Crocea Mors the space to safely disengage from the fight. With the spikes embedded deep inside the Grimm, Yang's AC pulled its arms apart, swiftly ripping the Grimm damn near in two. Her linear cannons unfolded, their barrels parallel on either side of her AC's head, and she sent lead downrange towards her next victim to knock it off balance as she rushed it.
For a moment, Sun Dragon and Crocea Mors stood next to each other, their pilots silently watching the sisters in action. Ruby, having decided to mix things up in melee, ignited her Overboost. The back of Crescent Rose's Core opened up, revealing two giant jet boosters. They, along with her regular boosters, powered up with an audible whine before they set off, their red exhaust trailing after the AC in a blur. Crescent Rose rocketed forwards, leaving an afterimage in its wake as Ruby activated her plasma blade. With its size, and at those speeds, the red plasma actually curved around the body of her Armored Core, the eponymous crescent which gave the unit its name. Ruby made great, hewing slashes through the Armadon Grimm, a red blur leaving bursting clouds of Grimmsmoke in its wake. After passing through the body of the herd, Crescent Rose skidded to a stop - its great speed was, unfortunately, only controllable in a more-or-less straight line, and Ruby hadn't quite mastered stopping in a graceful manner yet - with its Overboost shutting down.
Yang gleefully took advantage of the chaos left in her sister's wake, falling upon wounded or stunned Grimm and literally physically ripping them limb from limb, while Ruby, letting her generator recover for a bit, resumed taking shots with her rifle.
All in all, it was going exactly as well as Taiyang could have hoped for his daughters' first live mission. Well, except for the third rookie, who Tai was fairly sure was going mad with worry and grief in Crocea Mors' cockpit. Looking to distract the boy, he opened the radio channel once more.
"They're pretty incredible, aren't they?" he said.
"I….yeah. Yeah, they are." replied Jaune, his tone subdued.
"Well, you know how it is. I guess your father trained you himself?"
Somehow, Taiyang could feel the awkward energy emanating from the radio. "Er….not so much."
"Oh, pilot school then?" Taiyang continued, hoping to make friendly conversation. "I guess you must have used a fake name, not wanting special treatment because of who your dad is."
"Not….exactly?"
"What do you mean? There's only two ways to get AC training, you either get personal tutoring, or go through pilot school. Or both, I suppose."
"I….kind of don't have either."
A silence descended once more.
"Could you….could you repeat that?" Taiyang asked.
Jaune sounded sheepish. "Well, my dad doesn't want me to pilot an AC. Like, at all. So I didn't go to pilot school, and I didn't get personal training. I just remembered stories that he told me, and I….well, I went to the local arcade and kinda taught myself on the 'AC Attack' simulator game. I knew what the techniques were meant to look like from videos of his missions, and I just kinda fiddled with the controls until I got them to do what I want."
The silence resumed, mainly because Taiyang's jaw was hanging open.
"That actually kind of makes sense," Ruby interjected. "I mean, Crocea Mors is about as….erm….'classic' as an Armored Core gets. It set the conventions for all the other ACs that followed, so a generic, stripped-down control scheme would probably look a lot like its controls."
Jaune coughed. "You're, uh, you're not that far off. I mean, there are a couple of buttons and switches that I don't know what they do - and I'm very carefully ignoring them - but on the whole, yeah, I've got this."
"Speaking of having this," Yang's cheerful voice cut in as she bashed an Armadon to the ground on its back, planted Ember Celica's foot in its chest and then blasted its head apart with a point-blank linear cannon blast to the face. "Booyah!" she gloated. "I am the Goddess of Hellfire!"
"Hey, 'Goddess of Hellfire,' you missed one on your six," Taiyang dryly remarked. Yang yelped, struggling to turn her Armored Core around, her AC rocking as the sole remaining Armadon scored a hit on her left leg with its tail mace, putting a severe dent in the armor plating. A swift swipe of crimson plasma seared through the Grimm, and Ruby stood before her sister.
"Aw, man, that took out a servo," groaned Yang. "That's gonna come out of my pay for this gig, huh?"
"Yep," Tai remarked. "And what have we learned about showboating this evening?"
"That I should only do it when I'm sure it'll make me look really, really cool?"
"Oh yeah, you couldn't look any more cool right now," Ruby giggled at her sister's misfortune, Ember Celica limping awkwardly.
"You guys suck," Yang accused her family. "I bet the new boy thinks I looked cool. Hey, new boy, didn't I look cool?" she asked, adding a flirtatious emphasis to the last word.
"Ew, Yaaaang!" protested Ruby.
There was just a brief pause from Crocea Mors before Jaune spoke up. "That was the last Grimm, right? It was nice meeting you all, but I really need to check up on my father."
"Actually," Director Ozpin's voice interjected over the radio. "Now that the Grimm have been dealt with, you need to report to Beacon, young Mister Arc. We have matters to discuss, matters of a legal nature."
Tai grimaced. "Aw, come on, Oz. You can't cut him a little slack? Or at least hold off until he knows that his dad's okay?"
"No, I cannot. Well-intentioned or not, directed to do so or not, we still had an unauthorized usage of an Armored Core within the borders of the Kingdom of Vale, a serious criminal offense."
"You can't arrest Jaune for protecting the city!" Ruby protested.
"Yeah!" added Yang, backing up her sister. "It's okay, dude," she said to Jaune. "If he throws you in jail, we'll bust you out."
"I heard that, Miss Xiao Long," Ozpin's voice responded, his tone as dry as the desert winds,
"Good. Dad's not the only one who knows how to throw a right hook."
Ozpin sighed. "Lance-Captain Xiao Long, please refrain from teaching your children to threaten authority figures."
"Well, that depends," Tai answered smoothly. "You see, Old Man Arc's a colleague, and I'd hate to see his kid thrown in the slammer for holding up the Grimm until we got there."
"I can assure you, I have no intention of having Jaune Arc arrested. We have devised a legal solution to absolve him of his transgression, but he needs to resolve this issue immediately."
Jaune spoke up. "Okay, I'm coming in. Dad always….he always said to follow your conscience, but be prepared for the consequences."
The younger Arc pilot set course for Beacon. He had slain Grimm, completed a mission without taking any damage, and had successfully carried out his father's command. He just wished that he could have done all of that without the bitter taste of misery weighing him down.
Idly, he wondered if it would ever go away.
[/]
Chapter Endnotes: And that's chapter one in the bag!
Let's see here…
Armadon is ripped from an old fighting game called Primal Rage, where it was basically a bipedal mix between a Styracosaurus and an Ankylosaurus. Because why not? Giant robots versus giant dinosaurs, for the win!
Summer is alive and well in this AU, on the grounds that I say so.
So, in the old Armored Core games, they started you off with, well, kind of a shit AC, one loaded out exactly as I described Crocea Mors here. Now, even a shit AC is still an Armored Core, and a sufficiently-skilled player can kick all kinds of ass with it, but there's a limit to how much even the most talented pilot can do with it.
Armored Cores changed in features and abilities with the different generations. Crocea Mors, as the first AC, is representative of the first generation, as typified from the original game that released back in, like, '97. Fun factoid: the reason that Crocea Mors has a plasma blade integrated into the arm, while Crescent Rose has a separate unit affixed to the outside of the arm, is because they had rendering issues with how many distinct pieces they could fit on the exterior of the model of an Armored Core on the PSX. True story.
More mid-line ACs are representative of the second generation of Armored Cores, while current top-of-the-line units like Taiyang's Sun Dragon are third gen, with their hangars, Exceed Orbit cores, and general badassery. Crescent Rose, on the other hand, is verging dangerously close to the fourth generation ACs, the infamous NEXTS, in terms of capabilities. Except that in that generation of Armored Core games, the NEXTS were powered by "Kojima Particles," which not only made them insanely powerful, verging on Gundam Wing levels of bullshit, but also granted them a sort of energy shield around them, allowing them to just trash regular Armored Cores. The downside was that the pollution caused by Kojima Particles was hideously lethal, to the extent that, within twenty years of the technology's introduction, the surface of the planet was basically uninhabitable.
We, uh, we won't be messing with Kojima Particles in this story, LOL.
The fourth generation of Armored Cores marked the high water mark of the power of an AC, but they weren't the last generation of ACs. But we don't talk about Armored Core V and Verdict Day. Well, except to point and laugh, because the ACs there shrank to, like, fifteen feet tall, which is just precious. Who's an adorable little mini-mecha? You're an adorable little mini-mecha! Now go eat your Kojima Flakes, the big girls have business to get to.
I had originally conceived of this story as yet another White Knight shipped story, but as I conceived scenes in my thinky-brain thing, I realized that I might very well end up making it a Lancaster. Which ship will it be? Hell, I don't even know. Let's find out together!
So yeah! Action! Adventure! Tragedy! Triumph! Twu Wuv! Giant friggin' robots, described in loving detail! All part of a balanced breakfast, I assure you.
This is just a fun story to write.
Mahina.