Neo walks through the dark forest hoping that she could find the original clearing with the ticking tree and where she thought the knight's body and her weapon would be. She ignores the whispering from the forest around her. Usually she would have roman with her when she was in the forest to keep her company, but right now Neo needs to keep deadly focused on where she's going so she doesn't get lost.
Neo thinks about how nice it's going to be to finally have hush back in her possession. She almost wants to start running so she can get to the clearing sooner but she has to focus right now because she can't afford to lose the flowers and get lost. The flowers started to appear while she was walking yesterday and have been leading her to what she hopes is Hush. She doesn't know for certain but when she asked for a sign that would lead her back to the original clearing after getting lost and finding herself right back on the edge of the acre again.
Neo's thoughts come back to her current situation and the mute freaks out as she realizes that she lost focus of the flowers and can't spot them in front of her. Looking around frantically the small assassin spins in circles as she looks for the flowers before she spots them again two feet away and calms herself down with deep breaths and continues on her walk making sure her entire focus is on the flowers.
Neo's walk takes a while but she ends up making it back to the clearing. Neo then combs through the clearing looking for any sign of the knight or her weapon. Damn near the whole middle of the clearing is covered in blood. Whatever the creature might be, its blood was near black in color and much thicker than the knights because she could see the difference between it and the knights. Jaune had left lighter brown and red stains mostly collected in the middle of the clearing and usually surrounded by literal puddles of the creature's.
'Whatever it was must have been massive or able to fly because its blood is all over the place.'
Neo, lost in thought thinking about what could have made such a big mess ends up tripping over something in the grass. The girl feels wet from where she hit the object and a thought of what if it's the knight crosses her mind. She gets up to her feet quickly and looks to see what tripped her. It in fact was not Jaune and was something much different.
'That is a foot.' the girl notes rather obtusely
Neo stares at the large scaled foot in front of her. It looks like it was sliced cleanly off which clearly says the knight was able to do enough damage to remove a limb of whatever he was fighting. Neo looks around some more and finds more and more blood, most of it dried up but it doesn't look like it's been there for any longer than two days at most.
With the state of the clearing you would think it was yesterday, or maybe two or three days at the longest that her and Jaune were here, but it's been close to 7 weeks now and the blood still looks fresh. The creature's blood is obviously more prevalent in the clearing but Neo definitely sees the knight's fair share of blood, along with a few small pieces of ripped up and bloodied armor most of which is concentrated on the severed foot's claws.
With how much of the knights blood was spread around the clearing she doubts he could have lived but if he died his body would be here and if he was eaten their weapons would be somewhere in the clearing because eating a sword and parasol doesn't sound like too fun of a time even for something as big as what fought in this clearing. That leads to one conclusion; he lived long enough to get out of the clearing. If she had to guess from the amount of blood lost he would be dead at most 2 minutes after getting out and that's assuming he was able to move out of the clearing as fast as possible…
Neo keeps combing through the clearing looking for any sign of her weapon in case he dropped it or any sign of where the knight could've gone. The sky has slowly turned from a bright blue of afternoon to the golden streaks of a sunset, and Neo feels like she's gotten nowhere in her search. This clearing may look small but if you walked around it with your eyes closed you would think there was enough open space here to start a decent sized settlement in any of the kingdoms. Neo shouldn't be surprised though pretty much nothing made sense in this stupid fucking place.
But still the suns are starting to set and Neo needs to get to her camp. The assassin starts her walk back towards the general area of where she came into the clearing when she spots something out of the corner of her eye. Blood, but this is different from the sticky areas concentrated around the clearing where both the knight and monster were fighting. This looks more like the trail of a dying animal bleeding out as it tries escaping its demise.
Neo starts to follow the blood trail watching as the amount of blood decreases little by little, the knight probably not having enough blood to lose after a while. It feels like it goes on forever and the clearing is starting to get darker. If Neo stayed any longer she'd lose both her chance at getting back to her camp tonight and severely heighten her chances of losing herself in the forest searching for a body that would still be there tomorrow.
She could stay in the clearing but she was starting to get that feeling that something was watching her. She could use her newest creations and try searching after the sun went down, but she just couldn't shake the feeling that what might be watching her is just waiting for the cover of darkness to strike.
Neo quickly acts on her decision to leave and focuses on searching for the flowers at the edge of the forest that would help lead her to her temporary home. She finds them rather quickly and starts to follow them out of the clearing. She'd be back tomorrow and would follow the blood trail until she found her weapon.
Neo's run through the forest to her camp is much more stressful than her walk to the clearing as she races the twin suns through a path of flowers dodging trees and trying to keep her focus while the voices in the trees start to get louder. Neo's run ends with her back where she started her day, and Neo can't be more thankful that she made it before it truly got dark. In Fact… It looks like it's the exact same time that it was when she left the clearing. The twin suns still hang lazily right above the treeline like they were when she left.
'Im starting to get sick of how fucked up and weird this place is I just want to kill the knight, get Hush back and leave. Is that too much to ask for?' A loud boom is heard and Neo looks over seeing a large plume of smoke rising from one of the other sections. Neo slumps down onto her makeshift bed
'I Guess it is.'
Neo stands once again at the edge of the clearing the blood on the grass leading into the dark forest. steps through. Suddenly the forest around her is much darker than it should've been and Neo is forced to use her newest creation. An aura light, it's just as fragile as her low end constructs but it emits a bright enough glow that Neo has found great use for it recently.
She decided to stick with the white one seeing as it gave her the best view and would make it easier to spot the blood. Neo is stunned when she doesn't spot any and looks around going deeper into the forest and looking all around for any sign of the knight. A chunk of armor, a piece of clothing or even just a nick on a tree.
Neo laughs silently. Of course it wouldn't be that easy. She was stupid to think anything would be easy in a world where she ate cheese candy, and precooked meat that grew in the ground. Neo remembers fairly quickly though that it should be easy. She followed the flowers to the clearing; she could just follow them to Jaune, right?
She was wrong. No flowers grew and Neo didn't want to risk getting lost chasing down nothing. He probably wasn't even dead if she was being honest with herself. If anyone could survive getting their body shredded and bleeding out it would definitely be the one with the insane aura amplification semblance. From the files she was able to get her hands on about Reds team and her sister team the knight could pretty much recharge his aura from zero. And he didn't have a small aura pool either. If he even got a little bit of aura he would've been able to live as long as he let his body rest.
"Seems like a pretty major problem doesn't it?" Roman says from right besides her scaring the shit out of Neo. Unfortunately for her, even though she could make him on demand, every now and then the master thief would just randomly form and take about 60 percent of her aura with him when he did.
'It seems like one doesn't it.'
"How do you plan on dealing with this Neo?"
Neo really wishes that she could control his actions more directly outside of just him following her around because he seems to have a mind of his own and at times like this when she's trying to think it gets difficult. She did conjure him though and it would be a waste of aura to break a construct like him right now. That was another thing she found out recently that the smaller or weaker the construct the more aura from it would return and how much would dissipate. With things like simple non moving constructs of herself almost all the aura used would come back but for things like Roman and her more complex constructs she could lose pretty much all of the aura pumped into them. But if she was being honest that was just an excuse to not be alone in this place though.
'We are going back to the camp and I'll think about it there.'
"Why can't you just think while walking?"
'Because the flowers need my full attention. Which also means I need to get rid of you for a bit.' Neo enjoyed the company of Roman but if she kept him around too long he would manage to get on her nerves, and he was also pretty distracting which isn't a good thing when you have to focus completely on the pathway or risk losing yourself in the whispering woods.
Neo focuses on making roman disappear and slowly cracks start to form in him until his body is covered. At first Roman looks scared but as he slowly accepts his fate he gives Neo a cheeky grin and tips his hat before shattering into a million little pieces. Neo's shoulders slump slightly. As annoying as the construct could get, it always hurt a little to see him go.
'Once I find the knight I'll be able to make myself feel a little better by turning him into a pin cushion. That should satiate me until I get out of here.' Neo thinks while walking back over to the exit of the clearing…
Back at camp Neopolitan sits down thinking about what she should do, several ideas cross her mind like just finding a way out of here and having a new weapon made before searching for the young Rose but just the thought of leaving the weapon that Roman and her made together in the hands of the knight made her feel sick. Neo comes to the conclusion fairly quickly that she's just going to have to search until she finds Jaune and her weapon. The biggest question now was when she found him would he even still have Hush in his possession?
Neo pushes that thought to the side and instead focuses on where she's going to start her search. She could go back to the clearing and start from there but she might just end up walking in circles in a forest that loves to torment her. Instead Neo is going to risk going through the Dark Acre and stay along the edges and skirt through as quickly as possible and hopefully get through in less than a day because even being this close to that place feels like it's sucking the life force from her body. Neo doubts even Cinder the heartless bitch would be able to live in a place like that.
After she gets through the dark acre she'll explore until she finds the knight hopefully sooner than later. Her plan was pretty simple and relied heavily on luck but Neo had little doubt that a person like the knight could go long without making himself known somehow, and she would run into someone who would know him. She wants to find Jaune as soon as possible though so that means that the rest of her day is going to have to be spent preparing.
After spending several hours collecting several of the food roots, The assassin picks a bottle fruit off of some vines and three large seeds off the ground. Neo heads over to the nearby stream, and dips the seeds into the water. The seeds explode into cloth sacks that Neo picks up before bringing them and bottle back to her camp and placing the food into the bag and two small chunks of the giant cotton ball one for padding and the other to be a pillow that one was stuffed into the one of the other cloth sacks that will be used as a pillow case. However much Neo may hate this world it sure did have a lot of weird and useful things that made life easier down here.
Neo wakes up groggily as the suns stand above the treeline waiting for the assassin to get a move on with her day. Neo gets up and eats a large breakfast to make sure she can keep moving as long as possible without stopping for food. Neo hops off of her bed and slings the sack with her stuff across her back with a determined grimace on her face as she stares at the bridge connecting this acre and the dark acre across from her.
The girl slowly crosses the bridge making sure to stay directly in the middle and keeping as much balance as possible. Neo isn't usually afraid of heights but the unending void beneath her didn't look very inviting. The mute gets to the end of the bridge and as soon as she steps off and into the dark acre every warning sign goes off in her brain and the girl starts to get goosebumps. It isn't even cold in this place, but it isn't warm at all either. The best way Neo could describe it was perfectly empty of any feeling at all.
Neo walks quickly through the abandoned acre making sure she can see the edge at all times to ensure she doesn't get lost. Around her she passes what look like old crumbling buildings and objects, even seeing a statue of what looks like it might have been a man at some point. The left arm is gone at the shoulder while the right is still attached but missing several large chunks. The most noticeable thing about the statue though is that it's missing its head. Neo walks past the statue slowly looking for the missing head before picking the speed back up once she was far enough away from it.
A short distance away from the wandering Neo a large dark creature sleeps until the sound of laughter and then that of glass shattering slices through the silent air. The Jabberwalker opens its eyes and looks around for what made the noise and spots Neo looking around frantically. The Jabberwalker tiredly glares at the girl for a few moments longer before snorting and falling back to sleep. The girl stops walking and runs, and quickly exits the acre not even caring about the state of the bridge she was on or what lied ahead as long as she got out of this place.
Neo pants as she stands in this new acre and places her hand on the closest thing nearby to stabilize herself. The assassin feels something slithering over her arm and her head slowly turns to see that what she put her arm on was not in fact a conveniently placed rock but instead a stack of brightly colored snakes. The girl silently yelps and rips her arm out of the pile of reptiles.
Neo wasn't usually afraid of snakes but when you're surrounded by them on all sides it's kind of hard to not be a little afraid of them. Looking at the snakes is when Neo notices something slightly off. They don't really have the signature looks of other snakes. Instead of being reptiles some of them have fur, some have feathers and some even have small wings jutting from their backs. They range in size from small pencil sized serpents to the length of the tallest trees she saw in the forest. Neo walks slowly through the acre making sure to try not to step on or bother any of the snakes.
Luckily for the minute assassin this acre was pretty small and Neo got through it in about an hour. As Neo tip toes out of the acre she feels something slither across the back of her neck. The girl shudders slightly and reaches up slowly and snatches the creature in her hands the snake tries biting the mute but her aura protects her as the foot long snake attacks and coils around her arm. The girl looks at the bright orange feathered snake and tosses it carelessly back into the acre behind her.
Neo enters the next acre and while she did see the massive cakes and lollipops the sweet smell doesn't hit her until she steps into the section and all at once Neo feels like she's surrounded by sugar which probably isn't very far off from the truth seeing as the whole area is covered in sweets outside of a small bright red brick path that disappears around a corner.
Neo follows the path for about an hour and a half before running into the inhabitants of the land, Giant ants. The girl can hear the ants chanting as they move pieces of a large cake deeper into the acre. Neo stands and waits for the line of black ants to cross the path which feels like it takes forever but eventually the ants disappear from sight and the mute takes the chance to move again before the ants come back.
Neo follows the path for another half hour before the sun starts to set and her stomach starts to grumble. Neo, wanting to stay away from the ants, scales the side of a giant gummy bear to stay above them. The assassin sits down on the large gummy and pulls her makeshift pillow, and the other piece of cotton to keep her food and other two bottles of water separated from her pillow out of the pack. The girl feels no wet spots on the bag or cotton and smiles in relief. The diminutive thief reaches into her pack and eats a couple of the roots from the bag and drinks some water. The girl decides that she might as well have a little dessert and pulls a small chunk of tasty flesh from the gummy bear.
After her dinner Neo closes her bag back up and puts her pillow down and goes to sleep. After several nightmares Neo can barely fall back asleep and wakes up several more times throughout the night. Sick of the nightmares near midnight, Neo summons Roman to keep watch and keep her company to help her sleep better. With her companion watching over her now the small assassin falls back to sleep not to be awoken until the twin suns were high in the sky.
After waking up to Roman gone more than likely dissipated after she fell into a deep sleep, Neo eats breakfast and drinks the rest of the water in the first water bottle. Neo switches the empty bottle for one of the full ones and packs her stuff back into the bag. Neo then looks to see if she can spot anything from the top of the giant gummy bear but it's hard to see what is beyond the small spaces between the mountains of cakes and candy. Neo decides she might as well just follow the path until she gets to the next section.
Neo scales quickly down the side of the gummy bear and gets back on the pathway continuing on with her search for her weapon. After a short while Neo runs into another group of the giant ants. These ones though are green and instead of holding up pieces of cake they instead just march while an even larger ant wearing a helmet in the front yells at them to keep up. Neo feels like she might still be dreaming and even pinches herself. Neo isn't surprised when she feels the slight sting seeing as she just saw another group of giant ants the evening before.
Neo once again waits the ants out and soon only a few stragglers are left. One of the remaining ants stops and looks at Neo who promptly uses her semblance to make it appear as if nothing is there. The ant walks a bit closer to the girl who starts to panic slightly before it is called back by one of the others. The ant leaves and Neo drops the illusion but waits another five minutes just in case the ant decides to come back before resuming her walk.
After another 2 hours of walking Neo comes across a fork in the road, and a sign which is literally a fork in the road. Tied onto the sign are 2 pieces of wood. The top one is covered in vines and says Green Acre with an arrow pointing to her right and has a little drawing of a town etched onto it. The sign below points forward and says Lake Acre, Windy Acre, Rusty Acre, Kings Acre, and Field Acre the last of which has a warning right next to it saying beware of Punderstorms.
Neo weighs her options and decides she should probably go to Green Acre since it's closest and also showed a town on its sign which usually is a sign of living people. Then again who the hell knows what might be there. Neo takes the right turn and heads off to the Green Acre.
Another several hours pass by and Neo finally spots the green acre ahead. Whoever named it wasn't lying because all she could see was the color green from here. Neo stands at the bridge to the green acre and wonders if she should just go back and not risk her life. The bridge to the green acre is pretty worn down and is falling apart slightly. After a hearty debate involving herself and the construct of Roman that appeared and nearly scared her into jumping into the void, Neo decides she might as well suck it up since she's already this far and is going to have to get through the green acre anyways on her search for her weapon and the knight.
Neo's plan was to pretty much consisted of staying near to the rope handrail and watching her steps very carefully. Not the most complicated plan but it should work seeing as the bridge was pretty short and she should be able to get across it quickly. After a short but very stressful "walk across the bridge Neo thanks the gods when her feet hit the green grass on the other side.
Neo walks around the green acre on the edge of bright green woods and looks for a spot to set up camp for the rest of the day. Neo explores along the edge of the forest before discovering a small creek. Neo decides to set up camp there and drops off her bag, and follows the creek forest to look for food and to explore a bit. Neo finds some of the roots but also finds several traps set out for animals, and eventually comes across a fox hanging from its neck about 8 feet off the ground.
Neo feels bad for the creature but she can't cut it down and even if she could she isn't going to go out of her way to free a dead animal. Neo instead ignores it, and walks a bit deeper doing her best to avoid any traps set out. Neo stops, deciding she's gone deep enough along the creek, and collects some food roots, and a soap bar connected to one of the plants nearby to bring back to where she set her bag. Neo walks back to her camp and opens up her bag again, pulling out the pillow, extra piece of cotton, empty water bottle, and the extra bag that she brought with her and sets them down on the grass before dumping the food she collected into the bag. The girl then rips the extra bag she grabbed into one piece of cloth.
Neo takes off her clothes and cleans them in the small creek before setting them in the grass to dry before going back into the water and washing herself using the empty bottle fruit to fill with water and dump on her head so she can wet her hair better to wash it. After scrubbing herself clean Neo sits in the shallow water for a while just letting it wash over her body to relax and help with the slight aching after her uncomfortable night before.
Neo eventually finds the strength to pull herself out of the water and grabs the torn up bag to use as a towel. After drying herself off Neo sits down on the towel and practices with her semblance for a while. After a few hours Neo checks on her clothes and finds that they're dry. She puts her clothes back on cause they're already dry and there's no point in keeping them off. After getting dressed again Neo continues practicing until the sun goes down and falls asleep peacefully in the soft grass.
Neo wakes up with the sun shining almost directly into her eyes. The thief squeezes her eyes shut and rolls over and tries going back to sleep but can't seem to get comfortable again so she just gets up and packs her stuff.
After walking through the forest and avoiding traps for a solid chunk of the day Neo sees the bright light of the end of the forest. Excited, Neo jogs to the edge and sees a small city with houses and shops lined up and down the streets. The city itself is extremely green, and so were its people. Neo couldn't help but be surprised and slightly disturbed seeing the writhing faces and dark empty eyes of the inhabitants.
She's going to need to disguise herself if she wants to be able to look around uninterrupted. Neopolitan doesnt know though if the illusion will hold up because she mostly has just done humans and faunus, not a person whose face is constantly moving around randomly. After several attempts, Neo manages to come up with a semi decent disguise at the least and pulls off the illusion of constant movement as long as she's paying some attention to keeping it going.
Walking around Neo looks for any sign of the knight. She gets greeted by the inhabitants and asked questions that she has no idea how to answer even if she did have a voice back and draws more attention to herself than she would like. She realizes she probably should've thought of a method of communication before she went into this place. Neo speed walks around a corner out of view of the people, and directly into someone else. Neo falls on her butt and looks up to see exactly who she was searching for.
Jaune looks down at Neo with a concerned look on his face but with no sign of shock or recognition. Neo almost sighs in relief right then and there, but manages to hold it in. Looking at the blonde Neo can't help but notice that he's changed a bit. While obviously 7 weeks is a pretty long time it still was short in the long run. His hair is a bit longer and no longer spiked up in his stupid banana hair. It looks a bit more like his hair at Beacon and Haven, but not at the length it was and even seemed like he has a couple white hairs from the angle she's looking at him. Neo also notices that Jaune has grown a short beard, and that he isn't wearing his armor which told her he must feel pretty safe.
Neo's eyes roam down a bit and spot something more surprising than anything she's seen in this place so far.'He isn't wearing his weapon.' Neo stares down at the hip of Jaune intently as she wonders why a huntsman, even one as dumb as Jaune, would go anywhere without their weapon.
Neo's been staring at Jaunes hip for a solid two minutes lost in thought as she tries figuring out why he wouldn't have his weapon on him as Jaune stands there awkwardly with slightly pink cheeks. Having decided she's been looking long enough the knight kneels down and waves his hand in Neo's face to get her attention. Neo snaps out of her pondering, and blinks stupidly at Jaune through her disguise.
Jaune, seeing she's paying attention again, flips his hand around palm up to show her he was offering a hand to help her back to her feet. Neo quickly shakes her head, and hops to her feet on her own, and pretends to brush herself off, before giving him an awkward thumbs up and running past the knight. Jaune followed Neo with his eyes until she turned a corner and disappeared. Jaune stares in confusion for a moment wondering what just happened before shrugging his shoulders and getting on with his day.
Neo stops when she's out of view of the knight and leans against a wall as she catches her breath. Neo thinks about what to do next when she hears someone right behind her and freezes.
"That was a close one. Huh Neo?" The faux Roman says loudly. Neo jumps in fright and her illusion breaks leaving the very human girl with no disguise in the middle of a town with nowhere to hide. Neo turns to Roman with a worried look on her face and quickly makes him shatter. Hoping nobody saw, Neo looks around to see several people staring at her. Neo hangs her head in defeat as the people start to come closer to her. Before they can reach her though Neo's illusion shatters and the girl is nowhere to be seen.
Authors Notes:
Sorry for the wait, unfortunately I'm just lazy. I actually would have had this chapter done in a week but I decided to do nothing instead, and waited a month before I even started writing. Sorry again for the wait.
I love the trope of walking into the person you're looking for by accident. I find it incredibly amusing and saw the opportunity to use it here so you wouldn't have to deal with another super long chapter or two of just Neo searching all around even if it would be good just for world building purposes.
I also enjoyed and wrote this chapter much easier partially because I have had this chapter planned out since Neo escaped the clearing. I'm sorry that I haven't been spending much time on Neo. I should be focusing on her a little more from now on since she and Jaune are going to be in the same place and I don't have to worry about making two separate chapters for each character for now. Next chapter will focus on Jaune though again and will be more of a fun chapter at least I hope.
I really enjoy writing this, and enjoy that some of you like it. I don't know why some of you like it but it makes me happy to know that you do, and it hopefully shouldn't take that long to get another chapter out, but who knows I am me after all.
As always I hope you enjoyed the chapter and enjoy the story. Feel free to leave a review and tell me what you do and don't like as well as any theories or ideas you have. I love reading all of the reviews and I hope you all have a great day, night, morning or whatever time it is.