Setting Things Up For Tomorrow
That was a nice reception. I'm glad so many people are excited to see Shin'en back.
I love Shin'en too.
He's cool.
Disclaimer: I don't own PJO or RWBY
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What, exactly, was the proper response to that declaration?
Oh, I'm not a Faunus. I'm actually a demigod. But actually more than a demigod, I'm two-thirds of a god.
And then prior to that declaration, this guy waltzed in with the severed head of Adam Taurus, and then proceeded to easily kill the villains you were all struggling with, and also had the Relic in his hand a few minutes after that.
Shin'en smiled, his red eyes glittering with amusement. He looked at Raven, "Speak with your family," and then he looked at everyone else, "I have business to attend to elsewhere. I will be back shortly."
He didn't even give anyone a chance to protest that, because he was suddenly gone.
Qrow stared at the spot Shin'en was just standing, and then he looked at Raven. "Well?"
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From her view of the headmaster's office through her Seer Grimm, Salem was beginning to lose patience. Where was Cinder? Hazel? Hell, she'd take Lionheart's cowardly self, or even that fanatic Adam or those young lackies Emerald and Mercury. Just someone to give her a status update, dammit!
"What do we have here?"
Salem had her Grimm turn around at the sound of the voice she didn't recognize, and where her brow cocked upward at the sight of the black-clad Faunus, her eyes widened and she sat up straight in her chair when she saw he was holding onto the Relic of Knowledge.
"What a curious creature. I'm guessing two-way audio and visual reception, meaning whoever controlling you can see and hear me. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?"
"I am Salem," the witch eventually decided to say as she leaned forward in her chair. "Who are you?"
"Ah, the supposedly unstoppable goddess," he said, smirking, "I am Shin'en Yūrei."
Salem blinked, having never heard of such a name. "Okay-"
"They're dead."
"Excuse me?"
"You're wondering why I'm here talking to you, holding the Relic, and not one of your subordinates. They're dead. I killed them all. The powers of the Fall Maiden have been transferred to Ruby Rose."
And then just like that, for the first time in a very long time, Salem was unable to speak as she stared in utter incomprehension at Shin'en. Her eyes were wide and her jaw was slack, and she just couldn't talk because she was struggling to process what she had just been told. Eventually, she settled into denial.
"I don't know who you are or what game you are trying to play with me, but I assure you, I am not amused."
Shin'en chuckled. "I'm not trying to be amusing, and I assure you: there are no games here. Cinder Fall is dead by my hand, as are the ones called Hazel, Emerald, Mercury, Adam, and, er, Leo."
The hesitance and then emphasis on "Leo" did not escape Salem. Clearly some kind of personal connection to the name, and since Shin'en was a Faunus, perhaps he was a former student of the headmaster. However, there wasn't any forlornness, bitterness, or sadness in saying the same, just awkwardness, like he was embarrassed slightly to say he had killed Leo.
Embarrassed to say Leo as in Leonardo Lionheart, or embarrassed to say he had killed someone named Leo?
Dwelling on why Shin'en would be embarrassed to say he had killed a Leo was a nice distraction from all of the unyielding fury welling up inside Salem. Maybe it was because she had to be told twice, or maybe because she actually took the time to read Shin'en's body language and appreciate the look in his eye, but now she was convinced.
Her muscle was dead, her link to the White Fang was dead, her hold on Haven was gone (not a huge loss because she was going to destroy the school and Leo anyway, but now she was deprived of that pleasure), Emerald and Mercury were dead (though not the greatest help, they were mostly loyal and mostly competent, and could've been of much better use to her one day), and the biggest, most infuriating thing of all: Cinder was dead, and her Maiden powers were given to Ruby Rose. To cap it all off, the Relic was now in the hands of this mysterious Faunus who was either so powerful he killed all of Salem's underlings by himself, or he had some kind of Semblance that gave him enough of a tactical advantage that he'd been able to prevail.
Salem was missing a lot of details here, and she wasn't happy.
She was completely livid.
And so she attacked. With no real plan as to how to actually secure and transport the Relic, perhaps thinking in the back of her mind that she would just steal it from Ruby's group at some point, Salem screamed and commanded her Seer into action. The little octopus-like Grimm rushed forward and stabbed with his barbed tentacles, all aiming for vital areas like the eyes, throat, and spaces between the ribs to reach important organs like the heart and lungs.
Every barb, including the ones that struck directly into the eyeballs, harmlessly bounced off as if they had tried to pierce six feet of steel.
"Well," Shin'en said flatly, "that tickled."
Salem stared at the image she was seeing through her Seer. Those barbs could pierce right through Aura, and they'd just ricocheted of his eyes, a historic weak spot for any living lifeform.
"This conversation is now over. I will be keeping the Relic with me. You will never see it again unless I allow it."
Before Salem could do anything, Shin'en seemingly opened a void in reality, with a space in the air breaking apart to reveal an endless black expanse. Shin'en placed the Relic inside, his hand and the Relic disappearing from view, and when he removed his hand, the Relic was gone. The space closed back up.
Then Shin'en's eyes glowed, and the feed Salem was getting from her Seer ended.
The witch sat there, and then she started to hyperventilate, and the windows started to crack, and then she howled with impotent rage. The windows exploded, and she hurled her huge table through the wall.
Outside the doors were Watts and Tyrion, on their way in for instructions, but after hearing that scream, they looked at each other and promptly walked away. They'd come back later.
Except that Salem knew they were out there, and shouted at them to get in here.
The grown men came running in like frightened boys hearing their angry mother call to them from downstairs. They noted the windows were gone, and there was a huge hole in the wall to their right, which was presumably caused by the missing table.
Salem was a truly terrifying sight, with her glowing red eyes and miasma-like black Aura oozing around her. Speaking through clenched teeth, she addressed her remaining Inner Circle. "The Haven operation has failed. Adam, Hazel, Emerald, Mercury, Leonardo, and Cinder are all dead, Ruby Rose now has the Fall Maiden powers, and the Relic is in the possession of their killer. Some Faunus calling himself Shin'en Yūrei claims to be the one that killed him, and he has placed the Relic in some pocket space. I want you to bring me this Faunus. With haste."
Watts and Tyrion were both too scared to ask any of the hundred or so questions running through their heads at that massive influx of information, and so they just nodded and left, their next destination being Haven so they could start getting to work on capturing this Faunus that was apparently strong enough to kill Hazel and Cinder, while they were backed up by Adam, Emerald, Mercury, and Leonardo in his own academy.
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Qrow grabbed his big sister's arm. "Did you really think you could just walk away after everything you've done here today?"
Raven yanked her arm free and drew her sword, prompting Qrow to draw his own.
Vernal got her weapons out, and Yang readied her fists.
Behind them, the commotion drew everyone else's attention, and they rushed over with their own weapons.
After Shin'en had left to who knows where to do who knows what, everyone migrated into their own groups, with Qrow, Raven, Yang, and Vernal heading off to the side away from everyone to have their talk. Raven confessed that she had found the Spring Maiden before her, did her best to train her, but the girl was scared and of a weak will, wanting nothing to do with her powers or the responsibility and risk that came with them, and so Raven had done what was a mercy in her eyes, and killed the girl, taking the power for herself, meaning she was the Spring Maiden.
While that was happening, Weiss and Blake had joined Ruby, Jaune, Nora, Ren, and Oscar to swap stories, and also digest the fact that Ruby was now the Fall Maiden on top of being a Silver-Eyed Warrior. There wasn't any denial or grief, because what was the point in that? Instead, there was excitement and a little show and tell as Ruby instinctively pulled off a few minor magic tricks with little fireballs.
It seemed the Maiden powers wouldn't be that hard to utilize after all.
When asked what it felt like when she did magic, the best Ruby could explain was that it felt like her Semblance when she first unlocked it. An instinct on how to just do it, with a great deal of training ahead to really master it.
Ozpin even came out to congratulate Ruby on being the Fall Maiden, and warned that things had become even more dangerous for them now, as Salem would be funning even harder for now that she had the Maiden powers on top of having silver eyes.
Ruby had a question though. "Professor Ozpin?"
"Yes, Ms. Rose?"
"Do you think, ah, Sheen-en is telling the truth? That he really is the one who saved my mom, and that he really is—what'd he say? Two-thirds god?"
Ozpin nodded. "Yes, he did say that he was two-thirds of a god, and no, I do not know how that is possible or what that means. However, as of right now, we have no reason to doubt his claims. What we must all be mindful of…are his motives. He may have aided us in battle and kept the Relic out of Cinder and Raven's hands, but whether he is an ally to us remains to be seen."
"I hope he's not our enemy," Ruby said.
"I don't think any of us can take him if he is," Jaune shuddered as he recalled how easily Shin'en had demolished everyone.
"Uh, what'd he do?" Blake asked. She had only arrived on the scene after Shin'en had descended below.
"Well, he killed Adam Taurus," Nora started, which caused Blake to gasp in horror, which led to a lengthy debrief as to how much ass Shin'en had kicked, and how easily he had done it.
Then they heard the weapons over where Qrow and Raven were, and they rushed over to defend them from whatever altercation was taking place.
Then Shin'en returned, his voice cutting through everything like a razorblade. "That's enough."
He was descending the stairs one step at a time, hands behind his back, eyes still a soft crimson.
"Salem had a little visitor upstairs that I took care of. The Relic is still in my possession, and is safe." He looked directly at Raven. "Go. When I need you, I will be in touch."
Qrow took exception to that. "She can't just leave-"
"I have spoken."
Raven wasn't going to stay and watch how this played out, so she opened her portal and jumped through, Vernal joining her.
The portal closed and Qrow's anger spiked. "You just let my sister, that's a bandit tribe leader and also the Spring Maiden, get away!"
"You have a very peculiar tone of voice for a man who just watched me effortlessly slaughter the adversaries he couldn't even scratch."
Qrow actually took a step backwards with that verbal slap to the face, and it had the additional effect of setting everyone's hair on end. They still didn't know if this guy was friend or foe, but since he had just let Raven walk away despite having assisted in the assault on Haven, making her a criminal by all counts, and also being the Spring Maiden that had sided with Cinder, bringing to question if she would now go running to Salem, and levied an unspoked threat against Qrow, the good guys were leaning towards the latter alignment.
Shin'en saw this. "Let there not be any confusion here. As of right now, I am neither your ally, nor your enemy. I'm friendly because I have no reason not to be, but I am not your friend. Not yet, anyway, as that may change depending on you."
"Us?" Ruby asked.
"Yes. As I said, I am Shin'en Yūrei, and I am from a time over three millennia ago. The reason I have come back is because I was curious. I wanted to see what happened to the world I grew up in, and as I also said, I am displeased to see that not much has changed. Even in my time there were schemers in the shadows, and groups of passionate young people that would fight them to make the world a better place. Though I will say the racism is new. We didn't have people with animal DNA calling themselves the Faunus back then."
"Wow, really?" Blake asked.
"Really."
"What was that like?"
"Barbaric. Instead of people killing Faunus, we just had people killing people."
"There weren't any Grimm?" Weiss asked.
"No."
That one had everyone looking at each other in surprise, wonder, and amazement. Even Ozpin, still in control of Oscar, had an expression at the thought of not having to deal with Grimm.
"We just had the Tailed-Beasts," Shin'en continued. "They were much worse than any Grimm."
Ozpin furrowed Oscar's brow. "How were these Tailed-Beasts worse than Grimm?"
"Is there a Grimm that, by itself, can flatten an entire city just by laying down on it? The Tailed-Beasts were gargantuan monsters."
"Oh," Ozpin blinked. "Well, no. There aren't any Grimm currently on record that are large enough to flatten a city like that."
"Can any Grimm charge up an energy blast capable of vaporizing an entire city in one shot?"
"An entire city in one shot? We humans haven't even made a weapon that powerful," Ozpin said.
"In that case, the Tailed-Beasts have the Grimm beat."
Jaune was amazed. "How did your people survive back then if you huge monsters like that all over the place?"
"There were only nine of them, the One-Tail up to the Nine-Tails, and they actually didn't bother humans much until humans decided to try and tame them to use as weapons of war. That went over about as well as you think. We managed to pull it off in a sense, in that we used, shall we say, magic, in order to seal the Tailed-Beasts into people. We called them Jinchuuriki." Shin'en smiled slightly. "That word means human sacrifice."
There were many gasps and recoils at the revelation.
"It's even worse when you appreciate that the Jinchuuriki were made as such typically when they were children, so their developing bodies could handle the huge influx of power that came with hosting a Tailed-Beast. After that, they were trained to be weapons of war. Like I said, barbaric times. Though these don't appear much better considering I'm surrounded by kids that have been trained to be warriors."
No one could really argue that, since all the "kids" in question were currently what appeared to be humanity's best hope against Salem and her Grimm.
It really said a lot about the times when the best defenders of mankind weren't even in their 20s yet.
Ozpin stepped forward. "Mr. Yūrei, if you don't mind my asking, you said that even in your time there were schemers in the shadows and passionate young people that fought against them. Which were you?"
"Both," Shin'en answered without missing a single beat, and without an ounce of shame. "I was a passionate young person who schemed from the shadows to make the world a better place."
"Was?" Nora blinked. "You barely look older than any of us!"
"I am much older than I look. However, I stopped keeping track a long time ago."
"You're immortal?" Ren asked.
"Practically," Shin'en answered. "My cells age much slower than yours, which has resulted in a very slow aging process. That's why I only look like I'm about 25. My immune system is so powerful that I haven't so much as gotten allergies for as long as I can remember. As for physical injuries, such as taking my head, that is so difficult it might as well be impossible. Environmentally, such as extreme cold or heat, or the vacuum of space, I am extremely resistant to temperature, and I can survive in space for prolonged periods. My metabolism is slow, so dying of hunger and thirst is off the table, as is suffocation. I will not say that I am unkillable, as we're all going to die someday, but I will say that none of you can kill me."
"That is certainly a very impressive claim, Mr. Yūrei," Ozpin said. "Would you be willing to answer me if I asked you what your scheme was so long ago to make the world a better place?"
The side of Shin'en's mouth quirked upwards into a sideways smile. "Not yet. I know you're all brimming with questions about who I am, what my motives are, and certainly about what life was like three thousand years ago, but I have questions of my own that I want answered, and I would like for them to come from all of you, instead of a history book. Therefore, this will be our arrangement: you will teach me the history of the world as it became after I left. Dust, technological advancement, the Grimm, Faunus—everything. In return, I will answer the questions you have of me at my discretion."
Weiss furrowed her brows. "That's not a very fair arrangement. We have to answer all of your questions, but you get to pick and choose?"
"It doesn't have anything to do with fairness," Shin'en said, "but the fact that I can destroy all of you with no more effort than it took to destroy the others. Then I'll go get a history book."
Despite the threat, the short, deadpan one-liner had Ruby releasing a short giggle.
"But we will not be having such a long conversation on the stairs in the lobby," Shin'en continued. "We will continue this in the morning. Get some rest. You will need it for tomorrow."
With a turn on his heel that was so smooth and seamless that it looked practiced, Shin'en ascended up the stairs and vanished into the corridors of Haven.
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Later that night, Team RWBY found a room to crash in, as did the remaining members of Team JNPR, and Oscar, and Qrow. The questions all parties were asking each other was whether Shin'en could be trusted and believed, to which the common conclusion was that they didn't have much choice.
He straight-up annihilated everyone, and he made it look easy.
He wasn't necessarily on their side, in his own words, but he wasn't against them, either. He'd also admitted that his alignment way back then was that he'd been a schemer in the shadows fighting to make the world a better place, and he'd also revealed that back then, when it came to the Tailed-Beasts, they were somehow sealed away inside of children, and then those children were trained to use the power of the Tailed-Beast inside them as a living weapon. He'd also described the distant past as a barbaric time in which people killed people, which was less shocking and more disheartening, because people were killing people even today.
There was a lot of mystery to Shin'en Yūrei, and many weren't sure they were going to like the answers.
The way he dressed, carried himself, spoke, and how he casually ended lives, even if they were the bad guys, and casually threatened to end their own lives if they crossed him, set everyone on edge to varying degrees. The possible fact that he was the boy that saved Summer years ago was little indication as to whether he'd be friend or foe.
At least, that was how all but one thought.
Ruby was walking through the halls in her pajamas, a plate of cookies with two empty glasses on it in one hand, and a jug of milk in the other. The academy kitchen had plenty of food.
She didn't actually know where Shin'en was, and so she had resolved to find him, wherever he was, though the search was thankfully a not long one. There was only one other room in the academy that had an open door.
"Uh, hey," Ruby said from the doorway, seeing Shin'en instead, cross-legged on the floor like he was meditating.
"Hello. I see you brought cookies and milk."
"Yep, I did! I didn't know which ones were your favorite, so I brought a few of all that they had in the kitchen, haha."
"Thank you," Shin'en said simply.
Ruby came and sat down next to him, pouring the milk for her and him. She took her glass and handed the other to Shin'en, and raised hers for a toast.
"What's the occasion?" Shin'en asked.
Ruby became lucid. "When I was little, I always said that whenever they finally found you and brought you home, I was going to give you the biggest hug ever and we were going to a eat huge plate of Mom's best cookies with milk. Well, we're not home and these aren't Mom's, but…yeah."
"I see," Shin'en said. "Thank you, Ruby."
He clinked his glass against hers, and they ate their cookies together.
At some point, Ruby was bringing a cookie to her mouth when she felt something like a tap on the shoulder closer to the door. She looked over, thinking that maybe she'd become so engrossed in her devouring of the cookies that her sister or uncle had snuck up on her, but there was no one there. Shrugging, figuring she had imagined it, she went back to her cookies and got a huge bite of nothing.
"Where'd my cookie go!?" she exclaimed at her empty hand.
It was even still in the shape to hold a cookie!
Ruby immediately turned an accusatory glare at Shin'en, who just looked at her with a confused expression.
"What? I didn't take your cookie. You sure you didn't just cram it into your mouth and swallow it without realizing? You were pretty zoned out over there."
Ruby frowned since she couldn't discount that. There had been times where she'd been so distracted that she ate her whole dinner and didn't even notice until her utensil clanked against an empty plate. Figuring that her cookie was probably in her tummy, Ruby reached for another cookie, only for it to vanish right before her fingers touched it.
Her eyes went wide. "Hey!"
"What?"
"There was a cookie right there! And then it was just gone!"
"Wow. How could that have happened?"
Ruby looked at him, and then she glowered when she saw her cookie was halfway gone, presumably in his mouth.
Shin'en swallowed, and then, without breaking eye contact, ate the other half of the cookie. "Delicious," he said after swallowing the other half.
Ruby's eyebrow twitched. She made a move to grab the whole plate of cookies, setting them in her lap. "Ha! All mine now!"
"They are?"
Ruby looked down at the plate, and squawked at the crumbs. No cookies. She looked back at Shin'en, and saw they were all neatly arranged along his legs.
"It does appear that all the cookies belong to me," Shin'en said, his eyes twinkling with a teasing mirth.
Ruby growled. "Not for long," she vowed.
She went with a basic stab and grab, only for her wrist to receive a light smack. She reassessed her strategy, and went for a feint. Her left hand went forward, stopped, and her right hand went zooming for the cookies. Her right hand got smacked. Ruby seethed, and then went for a flurry of stabs that ended in total failure, and her in tears.
"Cookies~," she whined.
Shin'en placed one on her head, making her brighten. She reached up and wolfed it down in the blink of an eye. She suddenly felt a little bit of added weight on her legs, and looked down to see a number of cookies that hadn't been there before. She looked back at Shin'en, and saw a smaller number of cookies.
He'd split the remainder in half between them.
"Is that…magic?" Ruby asked, thinking the way he was able to move the cookies around so fast was because of that godly stuff or whatever.
"No," Shin'en said. "I'm just really fast."
"Oh! I'm really fast too! Watch!"
The cookies forgotten, Ruby turned into a red blur that shot out of the bedroom, trailing rose petals, and then she came shooting back into place before the cookies hit the floor.
"Very nice," Shin'en complimented.
Ruby beamed at the praise.
A few minutes later, all the milk and cookies were gone.
"Ahhh," Ruby sighed as she leaned backwards on her hands, and then a monstrous belch escaped her before she could stop it. She blushed. "I am so sorry-"
Shin'en belched so hard and loud that the room shook. "I win."
Ruby couldn't help but giggle. She wanted to say something, but she didn't know what, so she just grabbed the plate and the glasses, and stood up.
"Leave them," Shin'en said. "I will take them back to the kitchen. You return to your team. Get some rest. You have a big day tomorrow."
"Aren't we just gonna do a lot of talking?"
"No," Shin'en. "Just sitting and talking is quite boring for me. Instead, I have something else in mind. Don't worry about it now. Go. Get some sleep."
Ruby hesitated because there was one more thing she wanted to do, but she wasn't sure if it would be allowed. It was a bit of a personal space thing.
When Shin'en gave her a pointed look with a raised eyebrow, she blurted her desire. "Can I hug you?"
"Sure."
And Ruby did just that. Since he was still sitting, she got down on her knees and flung herself around him, burying her head into the crook of his neck with her arms around his torso.
"Thank you," Ruby said, barely whispering. "I'm so glad I finally got to meet you."
Shin'en rested his chin atop her head and moved an arm around her. "I'm glad I got to meet you too."
"Are you really going to find my mom? You said you'd look into it."
"I will find her, whatever remains."
Ruby sniffled a little, nodded her head against his neck. "Thanks."
"Of course. Now, away with you, child. Go to bed."
Shin'en gave Ruby the customary end-of-hug squeeze, and she disengaged. She wiped her eyes, and then gave Shin'en another quick hug before she vanished in a burst of red.
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In the dark of his temporary room, Shin'en allowed a sardonic, self-aware smile to grace his face as he thought back to a few hours ago.
"Shin'en!" Susano'o greeted him warmly as he appeared in the endless corridors of the Dimensional Hall.
Shin'en smiled as well and embraced his foster father. "Susano'o, how have you been?"
"Very well, thank you. Izanagi still recovers."
"Very good."
"What brings you back here, my old friend?"
"Curiosity," Shin'en answered. "It's been bugging me for a while now what you once said so very long ago about my old homeworld. Summer Rose. Remnant. How it was three millennia into the future after what I did to the planet. I want to see what's happened since my departure."
"Ah. I can certainly just tell you and save you time."
"I appreciate that, but I decline. I want to see it with my own eyes."
Susano'o shrugged. "Very well." Space shifted around them until they were standing in front of a certain door. "Would you like any kind of spoilers?"
"Only the most basic fundamental understanding."
"After you and Izanagi, we Shinto gods abandoned this particular world. You could say we put it up for adoption. A couple of new gods picked it up, and mostly remade it in their image. Is that enough or…would you like to know more?"
Shin'en's lips quirked upward at the Starship Troopers reference. "No, that is enough. I wish to find out the specifics myself."
Susano'o grinned. "Isn't this a bit mean? Leaving your wife to manage the kids while you go on vacation?"
"She is more than capable of handling them," Shin'en dismissed. "I talked to her about this already, and she is fine. Besides, I have handled the kids myself plenty of times while she went off to do her own thing."
"That's fair," Susano'o said. "Enjoy yourself, I suppose."
"Thank you. I will."
Shin'en stepped through the door, and found himself in an alley between buildings. A little bit of hydro-sensory prowess told him things were happening, and so he went to check them out. That's when he ran into Adam Taurus, one thing led to another, and now here he was, sitting in an unused dorm in this place called Haven Academy.
That was it, really.
The whole reason he had come back to the world he grew up in, lost a huge amount of his loved ones in, accidentally killed his first love while she was pregnant with their unborn twins in, was curiosity. He could certainly say it was peaked, with the Grimm, Dust, Semblances, Salem, Huntsmen, Faunus, and whoever these unknown "couple of gods" were. Sad thing was, Shin'en could satisfy all his curiosity right now.
Demigod dreams were powerful things. They allowed a demigod to detach their spirit and bear witness to events across space and time, so that nothing could ever be held secret form them without magical or divine effort. While usually taking place in the form of horrific nightmares that a demigod had no control over, their dreams provided for great tactical advantages as they saw the future, or key events in the past that explained the motives of their adversaries. To the point of being uncontrollable, this was not true.
It is actually canon that with enough willpower and discipline, a demigod could control their dreams, seen with Sadie Kane when she changes her astral form from a bird with her head on it to her normal human self, and with Reyna Ramirez when she has trained her dreams to only appear in the pool in the Garden of Bacchus, and even with Apollo in the form of Lester at the end of his quest against Nero. In fact, this is where it is made hard canon that a demigod can control their dreams, as stated by Luguselwa when she compares dreams to driving a chariot.
Take the reigns and take control.
And that was what Apollo did. He took control of his dreams, found where the Leontocephaline was within Nero's Tower, and the story went from there.
Essentially, this was lucid dreaming on steroids.
Demigod dreams basically boiled down to long term precognition. Obviously, a wide range of applications should come to mind, such as seeing what the answers to the upcoming exams were, lottery numbers, the cards at the poker table, and even deeper, scarier things like confirming if 9/11 really was an inside job, or if Tupac really was still alive—every conspiracy out there could actually be confirmed by a demigod through a single dream, and that was honestly a scary thing to think about.
A demigod could even see your entire browsing history.
As for Shin'en, he had long ago dubbed this basic demigod power Essence Projection, and he had mastered it at a young age. Growing up in the Shinobi World in the time after the Third Great Ninja War, training to be a shinobi himself, knowledge was too valuable not to have, and so the young Shin'en had trained himself how to detach his essence from his body, whether asleep or daydreaming, and see the secret things of the world.
What this meant for him now is that he could satisfy all his curiosity in the span of a nap.
The three thousand years of general history could be watched in mere minutes, and more specific events, and more pertinent events, in just a few minutes more. Basically, Shin'en could educate himself on everything that was canon in the amount of time it took for someone to watch an "everything explained" YouTube video.
But he didn't.
He was genuinely looking forward to tomorrow and getting to know the kids better, and learning about their world—his old world—from their perspective. He also looked forward to mentally torturing them all by giving them out-of-context answers to the Shinobi World.
Besides, if Shin'en looked into the past and present and learned all that there was to learn, there wouldn't be any story to tell. He was at level of power that made things a tad difficult to write through the lens of logic based on just how powerful he really was, and all the abilities he had.
Shin'en had become that kind of character that when placed in this kind of setting, a world of tinfoil with people made of popsicle sticks compared to him, the only plot was the plot he allowed to happen.
That didn't mean that things couldn't be fun, though.
Shin'en smiled to himself as he drifted off into a dreamless sleep. Tomorrow would be fun.
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Yeah, I mean, there's nothing to logically prevent Shin'en from just pinpointing Salem's location, teleporting to her with ether his Rinne-Sharingan or his divine water-travel, and killing her. And then just Sealing her into a scroll when he finds out that she can't be killed per the Brothers' curse on her. Likewise, there'd be nothing logically stopping Shin'en from teleporting to all the Vaults, acquiring the Relics, and summoning the Brothers to him.
Or just destroying the planet and bringing a permanent end to all of Remnant's many problems.
Remnant can't be a place of trouble and turmoil if there's no Remnant, duh.
So, yeah, a bit of that cliché trope where the uber-powerful character just kinda takes a backseat to let things develop, and then jumps in whenever he feels like it. But like I said, it can be fun when done right.
Sorry there's no action this chapter, but the talking kept coming and coming, and before I knew it, I was at 5.5k words with a whole lot more meat left to go. Considering college is still rapidly approaching, I decided to call it here.
But I did give some mouthwatering Shin'en lore.
He has a wife? And kids?
Could it be that maybe, just maybe, I let him have a happy life after all…?
Well, yeah, I did. I've known what I wanted Shin'en to be doing with his life after Armageddon even before I was writing it, because I was going to bring it into Chaos War. Though now it might appear here.
We'll see.
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