I died all those times so I could successfully get into Beacon, and I haven't attended a single class yet and instead I'm spending my time in the infirmary. This sucks.

Jaune Arc was alive. He had survived, but he hadn't gained anything for his efforts. He had just been resting in his dorm room when his teammates entered, and then as he got up to greet them, he was suddenly impaled and pinned to a wall. Before he could bleed out and retry this whole thing, his partner convinced him not to throw away this attempt.

He sighed loudly from his medical bed, but he abruptly stopped as pain shot up from his stomach, and the sutures inside his body almost made his injuries scream. He clenched his jaw and took short breaths. He couldn't react too much or else he would enter a cycle of agitation, annoyance and pain.

Yeah, I'm so fucking lucky that only my intestines were ripped up.

After he had woken up from his surgery, a doctor cheerfully informed of his injuries and then called him lucky, not only for the position of his wounds but also because the contents of his digestive tract were busy elsewhere otherwise they would have leaked out everywhere. He truly didn't need to know that part, he had enough experience vomiting, and he didn't want to imagine puke pouring out his wounds.

The flare of pain within his body eventually subsided and if it had gone on any longer, he might've requested pain killers. The reason he was currently drug free was because his Aura was at work healing his injuries, and if his mind was clogged, he wouldn't be able to do that and instead would have to wait for weeks until he could walk again. Or so claimed the female nurse he befriended yesterday.

He had been unconscious for a day apparently, so he had missed a total of three days of classes, which was the only reason he was here.

Fuck this, I have Aura now. That should be good enough to survive muggers.

The world had been scary before, but now he knew he could have magic to protect and heal himself. Now he could easily defend himself from old men. But it was almost a certain fact that the members of the White Fang also had Aura and were trained fighters, so they could still kill him rather easily.

"Yo!" Yang chirped as she entered the room with a pep in her step. "Sorry I'm late. The doctors said you couldn't have lunch and my sister wanted to eat with me." She stopped near his bed.

"Whatever." Jaune grumbled and then he hissed as he scooted up, but then his shoulder was pushed down by Yang. He held down a yelp as his body fell back down. Before he could glare at his partner, he saw that she was holding out a remote with a cord attached to it. "Oh, thanks." He muttered and grabbed the remote that controlled the recline of his bed.

"No problem, and here you go." She smiled and held out his Scroll for him.

"Thanks." He muttered again as he took the offered item. Since he couldn't attend class and was currently bed-locked, he decided he should at least learn about Aura and Semblances from the internet. Mindlessly, he entered those terms into a search bar and examined a bunch of different sites.

"So," Yang started and paused, "I heard that you aren't going to press charges against Weiss."

"Yeah." Jaune confirmed as he continued to read up on the common magic that he had somehow been ignorant of for his entire life.

"What's up with that? Aren't you angry?"

"It's too much of a hassle. I don't have the spare time for an investigation or a trial. And Goodwitch said that Weiss will have her right to wield her weapon freely revoked and that she'll have to attend a daily counseling session, so I doubt she'll attack me again."

"…Why or how could you be so calm about almost dying? Do you not care about your life, even though you're happy to be alive?"

"Well, if I died I'd just retry again, so the value of my short-term life doesn't really matter in the face of my long-term survival." He absently admitted.

"…What?"

"I'm pretty sure I'm cursed, or maybe it's a Semblance. It's hard to tell because the definitions I'm finding are confusing and contradictory." He squinted his eyes at the words on his Scroll.

The conversation lulled for a while as Jaune continued his research.

"Oh… I guess… that makes… sense." Yang spoke slowly and in a tone that didn't sound entirely convinced. "But what do you mean… exactly?"

Jaune sighed slightly. "Yang, after I die, there's a brief gap of nothing before I find myself back alive before my death. Feel free to think of it as reaching the end of a book before flipping back a few pages and seeing the characters acknowledging what you've already read. Or apply that small principle to a video. I don't really care."

"So wait, you die, like your heart stops beating and then you're just… alive again, but like back in… time? Do you reset the rest of the world? Or do you create another reality? No wait, that's beyond impossible. Is it just a mental simulation? But then you would need to know everything that could happen."

He groaned. "Yang, I don't know what's happening to me, much less the why and how of it, so I can't clarify what's occurring outside of what I could observe. I die, there's nothing, I'm alive with my memories of dying, that's all I know."

"…You're alive right here and now. You almost died in the forest, Ruby almost saw you die, Weiss got brain damage, and you barely survived, but you couldn't move your limbs. If you died, you could've changed all that."

"Yep."

"So… everything that went wrong was your fault."

"I guess." The history of Aura stretched back to the beginning of mankind and was told in the earliest of fairy tales, yet he hadn't heard of it at all. Common knowledge that even children had eluded him.

"If you weren't injured from your fall into the forest, if Weiss didn't help you and screwed up, if you didn't help her and screw up, if, if, if…" Yang chuckled under her breath. "If you died right now, you could fix everything. You could alter the outcome and redirect the past."

Jaune heard her boots hit the ground as she got closer. "Yeah probably, that's also what I thought, but well it doesn't really matter." Her steps stopped at his words.

"Why not?"

He shrugged. "I'm still weak. There's not much I could change. I'll still get injured, and sure I could probably prevent mine and Weiss' Aura Exhaustion. Those are minor differences in the grand scheme of things. So I guess thanks by the way for convincing me to keep this attempt going, at least now I don't have to die a few more times before getting into Beacon."

"…Two things probably happen after you die from other people's perspective. One, the world keeps on moving and your corpse is clearly visible to everyone else, so your killer will probably be arrested. Or two, the present is erased entirely, and everyone and everything disappears, which would basically mean your killer also dies with you."

Jaune blinked and stopped reading for a moment.

Killer? I haven't mentioned being killed by a person, so that's some leap of logic from her, or maybe she's talking about Weiss.

His partner sighed. "Anyway, it's clear that the best option is to make sure you survive for as long as possible, and prepare you so that if you do die, then you could make things better."

"That's the plan." He said, and he was a little happy that his partner - who was presumably a trained fighter - agreed with him. And although he told her about the phenomenon happening to him, he kept the part of a redheaded girl probably being responsible for it to himself. He needed more information on that girl first.

"I'm… going to get a drink." Yang sighed and began walking away. "Call me when you're able to walk. We should get started soon." She waved her Scroll as she left.

"Okay, bye." He said, while he had been exploring the features of his new device, he had found out that it was linked to his teammate's Scrolls. Left alone again, he continued sorting through flowery texts about what was apparently not magic, according to some people who were convinced magic didn't exist.

Seriously? They're seriously claiming that the manifestation of a Soul isn't magic. What's wrong with some people?

After about a few hours of frustratingly searching for a single concrete explanation of what Aura and a Semblance were, he got another visitor who wasn't just a chatty nurse checking in on him in her free time.

"Hey Jaune, how are you feeling?" Ruby Rose shuffled into his room with her hood up. "I, uh, got permission to check in on you from Miss Goodwitch. She mainly excused me because Weiss is doing her counseling thing during independent sparring class, and Yang is currently skipping. So I didn't have a sparring partner." She rambled under her breath as she slowly approached his medical bed.

"I'm fine, Ruby, thanks for asking." He plastered on a fake smile and cheerfully responded as he closed his Scroll.

"I, uh, was told you can't have snacks, so, um, I got you this instead." While avoiding eye contact, she held out a magazine with a large sword on the cover with both hands. "It's, uh, an old issue, but um, it's rated highly among blade appreciators."

"Oh wow, thanks for this." He reached out and accepted his gift. "You wouldn't believe how boring it's been in here."

At least it's something else I could read, and it probably doesn't use a bunch of confusing words from dead languages to explain away the inner workings.

With her hands now empty, she started twiddling her fingers together. "It's nothing really and, uh," she looked at the ground as she gulped loudly, "the reason I want to be Huntress is just because I love my mother. I loved how strong and kind she was. And… I'm only here to feel more connected to her. I'm not a kind person like she was or how you are. Strangers are just strangers to me. I only want to be a hero because that's what she was." As she stopped speaking, she tightly gripped the rim of her hood.

Jaune blinked as he struggled to find the words he needed to play along with. He didn't really know enough about Red to comfort her.

"I helped you because it was what my mom would have done, and then you and Weiss, you two, both of you, couldn't move and the Grimm were getting closer. And I fought and fought, but it, but it was hard. P-part of me wanted to run a-and another part of me wanted to fight until the end, j-just like my mom. I s-should've just picked you two up and ran away, but instead I-I-I wanted to be the hero. I wanted to protect you two or die trying." Ruby was clawing at her head and panting heavily.

"Ruby?" He still couldn't think of something to say.

"I'm the team leader now. Headmaster Ozpin decided I should lead three people. Why? Why would he do that? I'm, I'm going to lead you all to your deaths. I know, Jaune. Jaune, Jaune, Jaune." She looked up with silver eyes gleaming with something dark. "You almost died. My partner almost killed you. I'm supposed to be fast but I couldn't move faster than an icicle. I failed to save you. Ah! But you're still alive!" Ruby suddenly reached out and caressed his head with her hands. "You're still here! Breathing and living, and you're also not a failure, I am, but it's okay! I'll protect your from now on, so don't worry, I won't fail again."

What the fuck? Is Yang, the one who choked me out, really the only normal girl on my team?

"Jaune, you won't die. I swear so with my life." Ruby whispered in his ear and then her body disappeared in a burst of fading red rose petals that led out his door.

"What the fuck?" He muttered to no one and then he struggled to wrap his head around what had happened with the young weapon fanatic, and now he suddenly very much preferred her hours long ramble.

As he was regaining his bearings, a cold chill washed over his body and glowing snowflakes drifted around his room before coalescing into the form of a translucent Weiss Schnee.

"What the fuck?" Jaune asked the ghostly figure.

"Hello," she greeted with a small curtsy, "and what an unexpected surprise that I would appear here." She droned out in her hollow voice. "I hope you can forgive the sudden intrusion, but since I am still adapting to my new Semblance, I believe I can't be held accountable for violating our distance prohibition."

He blinked as he recalled that she wasn't allowed within ten feet of him without a supervisor present. He didn't know if that only applied to her physical body though. "What are you doing here?"

"Ah yes, since I coincidentally ran into you, I guess we could chat briefly."

"Uh-huh," Jaune flatly agreed with her.

"Firstly, I suppose I should apologize for accidentally and unintentionally lightly harming you with injuries that you could quickly heal from. Secondly, I have to express gratitude that you chose not to pursue this matter any further, a wise decision since my father could blackmail you or bribe any legal officials to dismiss your case. He might've even produced evidence that proves you were, in fact, an assassin sent by the White Fang."

Jaune blinked like an owl. The hassle of a trial had apparently been far larger than he assumed.

"Which you aren't, correct? I doubt my testimony of a confession I gained from this Semblance would be admissible, but I'm just checking." Snow-Weiss gave a small shrug and averted her eyes.

"I have no affiliation with the White Fang or any criminal organization, and I'm definitely not an assassin, nor a killer of any kind." He clearly stated.

Snow-Weiss exhaled through her nose and her shoulders slumped slightly. "Oh well, then I guess I might've almost killed an innocent person before your time was up. As a symbol of my sorrow, how should I atone? Would you like money? Or would only my death quench your bloodlust? Very well," she did another small curtsy, "request of me what you must and I shall accomplish it at once."

"Uh, no, I don't need money or want you dead. Just, um, don't try to kill me again and we could put all this behind us."

"If that is your request, now I must go before the counselor becomes aware that my body is currently uninhabited as a result of meditation." Snow-Weiss faded away and a chilly breeze carried away the glowing snowflakes.

"Seriously, what the fuck?" He mumbled.

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.

Oops! Another chapter without any official academic content. Hopefully Jaune could stay alive to at least see what the inside of a class looks like.

So what happened in this chapter? Nothing much. Jaune dramatically revealed the truth to Yang, Ruby calmly complained, and Weiss sincerely apologized.

Thanks for all the reviews, and yeah Weiss got off lightly since Beacon is very forgiving, but Papa Schnee wouldn't have allowed any legal case to go unchallenged, so Jaune made the wise choice.