Sneak Peek:
The rest of the trek through the forest and up the cliff had been uneventful in the terms of monsters, however Jaune was no longer in the mood to lament upon the reality.
It seemed destiny had taken offense to his unease at the ease that his situation had unfolded with, or maybe it was because he had lost a large amount of the proper fear one should feel towards the Grimm. Whatever the reason, the large monster had successfully reinstated the fear of death in him.
Adam had helped him survive a large fall, and he saw four girls skillfully dispatch the Grimm, the notion that his adventure to become a hero would be an effortless task had begun to blossom. It had only been a seed of doubt, born from his general lack of self-confidence, that had him second guess his delusion.
And yet he had a safety net, an insurance, Adam, so the embers of his doubt had almost been snuffed out.
It was like something straight out of a fairytale, a young untrained boy who wanted to be a hero had taken in the soul of a veteran warrior. However, reality wasn't a fairytale, and he wasn't the protagonist of one.
He wanted to be a hero of legend, but he lacked strength and skill, he couldn't follow the footsteps of his family exactly, so he shifted his focus. In fairytales, anyone could be a hero, and they didn't even need to possess any sort of extraordinary talent.
He could be a fairytale hero, and all he had to do was believe that if he tried hard enough, then eventually everything would work out, and his efforts would be rewarded in the end. So, that was his plan, to embody the ideals of a fairytale protagonist and ride along the flow of his journey.
Even death wouldn't stop him, nor would he harbor doubts or suspicions for his killer. A hero was kind and trusted in the good nature of everyone, and if he was tricked, fate would balance out his misfortune sooner or later.
"Haaah." Jaune sighed and leaned back in his seat.
After ascending the paths up the cliff, his group had been told to wait in the auditorium until further notice. The room was empty, and seemed almost lifeless, rows of steel folding chairs were on ground and only eight other people were present.
They were quiet, for the most part, two people around Cardin were engaging in pretty meaningless chatter.
It was quiet as Jaune took a seat, and his body basically collapsed the moment he wasn't supporting his own weight.
Yang had expressed a dislike towards the gloomy area, and then she dragged her sister off somewhere else. Blake followed their example and also ran off, then Weiss chased after her with a huff.
Adam had gone quiet after giving control of their body back to Jaune. He could still feel the second soul within him, so he didn't feel… anything change regarding his thoughts toward him.
Jaune wasn't worried or relieved.
If reality was a fairytale, then Adam might be a devil. Not in the biblical sense, but rather in the archetypal sense. The role of a devil was to offer a deal, the terms promised wonderful benefits at a reasonable price, and yet the deal was always skewed in the favor of the devil. In the end, the devil was the only one to gain anything of value.
His boundary of fairytales and reality was rather thin, he needed to believe in the stories and yet he was aware that at the end of the day, his faith was placed in fiction. Reality didn't conform to the structure of fairytales, and yet he believed he could be a hero.
He cherry-picked his beliefs since he couldn't see the full picture of reality, he relied on his perspective as a lens to interpret what was really happening around him. He willfully ignored the risks of accepting another soul in his own body, and viewed Adam through the lens of a mentor.
It was quiet inside his mind. Left alone with his own thoughts, his brain ran at nearly twice the speed as if compensating for the currently inactive second consciousness.
He continued to be plagued by his meaningless worries, he couldn't even muster up the effort required to properly plan ahead. Yet, he couldn't even allow his mind to wander, for every time his mind strayed, flashes of freshly slaughtered cattle and a charred corpse flooded his thoughts.
When he was younger, Jaune had once made the mistake of befriending a cow near his home, and he sobbed for a week straight after it was killed. Since then, he couldn't bring himself to put down any sort of cattle, but he made up for it by working extra hard on other tasks when he helped out.
His parents had given him a rather long talk about the meaning of life and death, and now when he ate meat he did so with a prayer and a proper thanks in mind.
However, he gained nothing from the death of people, so that was something that still weighed heavily on his mind. He was only truly able to get over the charred corpse because the inhabitant of that body was currently inside his own, so Adam wasn't truly dead.
Jaune was still young, so he accepted he was rather immature when it came to matters of mortality, but he wanted to be a hero, a warrior. He would need to accept the simple fact that he could die.
It was his fear of death that was standing in his way now. He had accepted that he was weak, and he needed to get stronger, but when confronted with the possibility of death, he gave up control and fled from it. If Adam wasn't there, then his body, frozen with fear, would've been trampled. Jaune had to be saved, and he hated that.
He needed to accept the possibility and then deny that outcome. He could die, but he wouldn't, he would fight instead. He needed a strong conviction to survive by any and all means and odds.
Adam had been killed, and yet his soul escaped death, his conviction had allowed him to find new life.
Now, Jaune wouldn't factor that into his own thoughts, he hadn't ever heard of that happening to someone, so it was highly likely an event on the same scale of a miracle. He couldn't allow himself to be taken in under the allure of escaping death, he needed to accept his own mortal self.
Only the story he left behind after his death would live on after him, so he needed to ensure that it was a grand one, the kind of tale his descendants would love to read about.
In the almost empty room where chairs vastly outnumbered the current number of people, Pyrrha Nikos sat down next to Jaune Arc.
Thanks for reading! I'm always open to feedback, so please leave a review, or reply in my forum, about what you liked or hated about this chapter or the whole story. If anyone wants to be a Beta Reader, then PM me and we'll talk details.
