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It was by the very nature of his style that sparring against Ren was at times dreadful but mostly he was truly the best partner for opening me up. He stormed me with bullets until I was forced to chase him. Shielding was a losing battle and if I let him get inside my guard and step into my range then it wouldn't matter which form Crocea Mors was in. I would eat some damage and probably get knocked on my ass regardless.

It was an arduous battle between not letting him escape and not letting him open up my defenses.

I stepped up to him slowly, I placed my footwork wide and carefully. I was wary of him rapidly approaching while trying to prevent him from just turning and pacing back. I held Crocea Mors in its larger form all the way across my body to shield myself from gunfire. It was more than a foot wide at the base of it. It wasn't balanced very well. I stared through one of the gaps in the weapon where the shield plates sealed over the smaller sword.

He jumped back defensively, and I leapt forward, I swept the sword at him, but he pushed it down with both hands. Had it been a trick all along? He reached out across my blade and tried to slash at me, to grapple me and force me into a melee where I would be at an enormous disadvantage.

I would have to abandon my sword and wrestle him and his daggers. The two times he'd managed it earlier had been where I'd lost seventy percent of the aura I had lost to our entire match. Both times I'd had to tap out, too. He had mounted me twice and pinned me down and it became clear I had lost.

He was too fast for me to escape from entirely and I suffered from a series of jabs as I backed off and tried to make space. It was my turn to make some room as he forced me on the defensive. I stepped back hard like I was going to sprint back. I pivoted on both feet and put my hips and not just my arms and shoulders into this next attack. I whipped around and lashed him hard across the chest with the single edge in what was rapidly becoming a personal favorite angle for me to use.

I choked down on the handle as I did, like I was cutting fire-wood with an axe. The handle was something like fifty centimeters long in and of itself. This led up to a few inches of thick and blocky guard before becoming a wide six-foot blade. End to end it was taller than me. In fact, it only fit on my back so comfortably due to the angle my harness held it at.

Even as my hands slid down to the pommel. I threw my whole body into the swing. Turning my body, I tried to inflict as much impulse as I could. I felt his aura compress as the blade struck him and pick him up. He rolled with it, the weapon, almost as heavy as him, nearly sending him sprawling. I sprinted after him, trying to catch him again before he could regain his footing. I leapt and cast Crocea Mors in a tight arc after him. He simply rolled to the side and back to his feet.

He pantomimed shooting at me, and I was forced to take cover again, breaking off my assault.

I rolled my left wrist out and pulled slightly on the sleeve with my right thumb, my scroll's screen flared to life against my gauntlet.

Ren's aura dragged down with the bar. It was yellow-ish. I carefully noted my own off to the side and, with Ruby and Nora's scrolls all synced to mine, it showed theirs as green, too.

My own was still a bit greener but if I'd been being shot the whole time and he'd been actually using his guns to combo me around things would have been different.

The scroll was an incredibly powerful tool. These weren't the usual scroll things most civilian models used, ours were incredibly developmental. They'd been made by Vale in co-operation with the Atlesian Military. Besides the usual features such mobile devices usually had, the small holographic screens had no glass to be shattered. Instead they existed solely between the magnetically suspended 'C' shaped contacts which made up the device.

The next major feature was the combination the scrolls had with a small implant in our bodies. It was in our forearms, implanted after orientation with a needle and not even requiring anesthesia.

Normally both devices required an external power supply to recharge, but these scrolls were designed to operate off the user's Aura. Now this may seem flawed, given that the lack of aura may leave a scroll powerless, but they were also powered by a small chip of yellow dust crystal. The half-life and energy were not lethal on human lifespans but radiated enough power to supply the device for an incredibly long time.

The implants in our bodies synced to the scrolls and the biometric data was incredibly useful in the field. I could watch my team's aura from kilometers away, potentially, I could even watch them die through it.

I didn't have to imagine it very hard.

"You good?" I asked. I realized how I could be misinterpreted. "I mean you ready to hit the showers?"

He lowered the guns and breathed hard. "After our patrol."

"Right." The town was calm. Not like a calm-before-the-storm kind of calm but it seemed like a genuinely relaxed atmosphere. Some children had even come up to me and asked to see my sword and scroll and even take a look at my armor.

Ren did some slight-of-hand stuff with his weapons for them like a parlor trick.

It was on this patrol that I found my chance to talk to Ren. Aka, grocery shopping. Ren was typically quiet if he was moving and using his semblance. It came with the focus and with the Lie Ren-ness.

Thus, I was a little surprised when he started talking. "Jaune, I wanted to apologize. I knew the nature of the Grimm we encountered, and I didn't share it."

I breathed in and out, I relaxed and tried to look at it through a rose-tinted lens. "Did Nora talk you into apologizing?"

His eyes widened as we walked through the village square, a small garden and large courtyard adorned by local stalls and shops.

"She did. How did you know?"

"There's a bit of that going around." I murmured. "You're telling me, though, right?"

He nodded. "It's a chimera but anthropoid, it has a horse-body with a human-like rider. It's smart and I-" he hesitated. "I think that it's the same one that destroyed the village that Nora and I came from."

I nodded along. "So, it's old, then." I still wasn't going to push him on it. It sounded like Nora had things under control.

Between her and Ruby I was starting to wonder who the leader of JNRR actually was. It would probably be best to assume things were RNJR until any evidence at all otherwise emerged.

He nodded and he seemed relieved with it too. "When it fought in the village all evidence showed that it was already extremely old. It's large too, and faster than one might expect. Its main weapon is its reach and claws." He explained the monster's strengths and weaknesses. "It prefers to not allow its enemies to get close and then it relies on size and armor and a healing factor to overcome projectiles."

I grimaced. It sounded pretty bad, but it could always be worse so… "It's not like – an adaptive-regenerator, is it?"

I'd heard of such creatures before. Things that couldn't be hurt the same way twice and were almost impossible to kill. These things tended to die early or not at all so if one had been here in the area for say-I didn't need thirty to make my point, so let's say, fifteen years, and it had been killing huntsmen on my level, then I probably wasn't going to even be able to bother it.

"No." I breathed a sigh of relief. "But it's hard to fool in the first place. It'll be wary of traps."

I suspected as much. I was too, but my nature would force me into some of them if they were set right. They just would. It was a Grimm and it would fall into an appropriate trap, in an appropriate location, at an appropriate time. "You know the geography around here, then?"

We'd need to find its lair. It would have one, perhaps even multiple. It was hard to make assumptions with an intelligence as alien as a Grimm but if it resided in the area for a long time, it would have places it tended to stay between ambushing travelers and destroying the occasional town when it saw the chance.

Later the two of us poured over a map, noting the destroyed villages in the area from a local archive at our request. We predicted possible locations for it and the bandits. We could hardly survey the area in an instant, so we'd need to search conventionally. That meant walking or riding everywhere. For someone who had stylized themselves a little knightley, I wasn't keen about riding a horse.

That was if unawakened horses like those around here could even carry me. All my armor and weapons together weighed in the ball-park of two hundred pounds, and I was six-foot of nearly two fifty pounds myself.

That was excluding the tent and all my other gear.

Plus searching like this might mean missing it if it rotated, too.

A Grimm like this would pursue its enemies through its territory, destroying any it believed it could so long as it could detect them. No, that wasn't quite right, it crushed any spiders it saw sprinting across the floor of its house.

Ren noted tracks from Shion, though, so with luck, we would be able to follow one or either so long as it didn't rain particularly hard until then. We would then have to choose between following the bandits and following the Nuckelavee.

It was here that the restrictions on the number of us out in the field began to chaff. If partners were out, we could find one and the other at the same time, but like this we needed to select one or the other.

"If we find the bandits, we can use them to lure the Grimm out of hiding." I voiced my reasoning to Ren with my plan. "We find them, we find both, we use them both to destroy them both."

Ren's praise sounded honest. "Perhaps the answers were before us all along."

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Things were worse than I thought and hoped, and I was suddenly rather regretful that I hadn't forced Lord Beihfing to prepare for the worst.

It wasn't the worst. Not all the villages near here had been destroyed. However, Shion hadn't been the only place the GaiLong riders had confirmed was now rubble. Two other places with a couple thousand people between them were gone, along with some smaller hamlets.

It was inevitable that with the destruction of Beacon tower, smaller, more isolated places across the world could no longer exist. A small percent of the entire world population, nearly everyone living in groups of less than a hundred, had died or become refugees.

Sure, places closer to larger ones would still be around, but a small farm in the middle of nowhere with the panic of communication not coming back was simply gone.

This would be true everywhere all over the world. Different cultures would handle it differently. It was unlikely nomadic peoples would be influenced much. Such peoples did exist and whether they were bandits or much older tribes in Mantel or Vacuo, and they would notice few changes.

Small hamlets that had only been possible with the Towers in place had crumbled with it gone. Communication systems increased our carrying capacity, so intuitively without those systems our carrying capacity diminished.

Soldiers couldn't get where they needed to, neither could hunters, so people died.

I figured if I said 'bummer' and nothing else it probably wouldn't go over well. I had seen this coming evidently so now I had to have a plan. It's pretty bad for morale if the general walks out of their tent and says to the first guy they see, 'hey, I have no idea how we're getting out of this one.'

It wouldn't be that bad, but it would be close. "Nothing's changed."

Lord Beihfing's men just eyed me while the man in question didn't even look at me. "I need my friend to make rotations to all the surrounding villages, not just here. This place has the best defenses and we recently cleared the area."

No one else said anything. Uninterrupted, I marched on. "We'll have to take some of your horses." I was asking but I wasn't really asking. "Just two for my friend and his partner. They'll spend a few days in all the places with more than a thousand people."

That was only three other places besides here now in the entire valley. Not to sound like an asshole, but they'd be back within a fortnight, which wasn't bad for what things were now. Especially if they took their time.

"The other two of us will go after the bandits. Shion was the latest so we will continue there."

"When would you leave?"

"Tomorrow morning, fairly early."

There was a long beat of silence in the log cabin, the fire place was empty in the warm summer and normally the building would have its doors and windows flung open to allow a breeze. Now with nearly a dozen men and women in the room it was more than a little hot.

But they needed their 'secrecy.'

"We will prepare your horses and your rations." The old man really didn't have much choice. He flicked his hand and several of his men left with respectful bows. "When should we expect you back?"

I met Ren's eyes. "Two weeks at the latest." He gave me a slow measured nod back. He knew the plan. Trap the bandits and make them scared. Make them desperate. "If none of us are back in a month and you've received no messages from us you must assume the worst."

"What shall I do then?"

I laughed a little. "No offense, but I suppose it wouldn't be my problem, then." I shook my head. "One of us will be back. Honestly, we probably won't catch anything with this first net." The last thing I wanted to run was a multi-month-multi-township campaign across the entire valley. "There's been no Grimm and the place has been calm. Your riders all made it back, too. The bandits have all the food and plunder they can slowly sell to the villages around here for a long time. There's no reason to risk attack when they're all fed."

None of that really added up on true inspection. But I joked about my death lightly then calmly reassured them about something. That was my game plan with that. Jingle my keys.

None of this actually made sense. The timing was fast. Alarmingly so. Why destroy so many villages so quickly? It could hardly be for food or money.

All the riders made it back, too. A single rider like that? That was the easiest and the most tempting target for information.

Traitors? Maybe?

I really wanted to give each village hierarchy a surprise stress test, but I wasn't sure how I could do that without, you know, destroying them. Vibe check.

The communication here was a nightmare, even if Ren killed the bandits or any one of the gambles I was going for paid off then we still had problems. Maybe I'd consider a place that had fucking trains or something. Traditional wires, too, maybe.

Anything faster than this because I also wanted to make sure the bandits weren't just waiting for us to leave GaiLong. Lurking just long enough for us to split up and murder once again.

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I struggled to consider what I was doing right now my first date. Especially with the context that recollections of some of Pyrrha's and I's 'outings' provided.

Fuck.

Not dwelling on that.

By any other measure, a stroll through some town market with a guy and a girl who were now a thing was a date, right? Even though it was a patrol and we did basically the same thing yesterday, now it was different. Now we were 'together.'

Ruby didn't seem to mind at all, though, she flowed from place to place with her typical energy. It was as though she'd never been through these streets and past these stalls. She could just walk up to some person and talk to them.

I… I really liked that about her.

Fuck.

She called me over from some RV that seemed to be a permanent feature in the square. Some short-term-long-term food-truck-restaurant? I wasn't sure, but when she spun and called to me with a wave, I felt my jaw and was struck by the realization that I wasn't sure just how long I'd been holding my teeth clenched together.

My face ached but she made me smile anyways as I paced over to her.

She smiled right up at me and I had to look away. I really wasn't sure how I was even supposed to look at her. I almost meant that literally. Could I just, like, look at her now? Whenever I wanted?

I was trying not to be stressed about her of all things right now. Still, though…

"What's up?"

"They're moving people in from around the area." She explained. I cocked my head. Beihfing and I had both been united about a panic. "They started a few weeks ago. I guess after the tower fell, a lot of people moved to bigger places, weird."

Oh, maybe they hadn't all died. Huh. "It's not that weird," I disagreed, I eyed the woman Ruby had been talking to. She was twenty-five-thirty with blonde hair which made her stand out a little here, but her skin tone made her a match for some of the locals in terms of origin. "You had to run?"

"Well we couldn't order dust or anything and it was pretty scary being mostly alone." She shrugged, her casual ease with her emotions struck me. I was a total fucking stranger to her. Well, I was also a huntsman, so I didn't analyze it and just nodded. "It was a good thing too, what with the other villages."

I figured it was an open secret in GaiLong at this point, but I wasn't sure. That kind of news would travel fast until everybody knew it at which point, why bother pretending? It was common knowledge.

"What'd you need?" I asked the two.

It was Ruby who lured me in. "They wanted to pull the motor and alternator out of it and use it as a winch for other stuff. They've already pulled out all the bolts, but they don't - well, if they already had a winch then they wouldn't do this.

"So?"

She rolled her eyes, "so nobody but you can lift it."

The woman looked down at Ruby. "I'm telling you it weighs, like, four hundred pounds, easy." I walked around and looked down into the hood. It was some dust-based thing with Atlas stamps, all smooth edges. It wasn't designed to be repurposed. It was designed, perhaps, to not be able to be repurposed. Some technology was like that.

I reached down with one hand and, with a heave and a grunt, I lifted it and set it down. Ruby absolutely could have lifted it.

The woman blinked at me. "Oh uh." Her eyes flicked to Ruby and back to me. "Could you set it over here? Then? If it's not too much trouble?"

"Uh, no." I returned.

She glanced at Ruby again. "No?"

"No, it's not any trouble." I clarified or tried to. "I didn't mean… Not 'no'…" I sighed. "Where do you want it?"

Ruby was laughing at me. I could see it as I passed her, following the woman to some cinder blocks. Our reward was something which I was assured was not ice-cream but was some kind of frozen custard-yogurt-stuff with sugar in it.

To me it was good, for the time that I had it, that is. When we returned to the inn I still hadn't showered after Ren and I trained that morning. Then I made the mistake of entrusting my teat to Ruby who had already nearly finished hers.

When I got out of the shower there were only a few bites left of mine. "Ruby-"

"I left you some!" She pouted at me. I watched her take the last bite of hers from where she sat on her bed and set it daintily on the nightstand. Then she looked up and her smile never changed but she leaned forward onto her hands and stared at me.

I abruptly felt like covering myself, the towel and shorts I had on still showed off most of what I looked like. "Are you just going to stare at me?"

She blinked like I was alien. "Yeah." Fair enough. I started putting on clothes anyways as she rolled around the bed. "I mean you stare at me, too, right." I did. I had more than usual today, too, I didn't want to hide what I felt from her. She continued, though. "I mean maybe not. Maybe, you like to look at girls like Sahov more?"

"Who?" I wondered.

She tossed a pillow to my face. "The girl we were just talking to!"

"Um…" I trailed off.

She slumped down into the covers. "Forget it."

"Ruby," I started. I pulled a shirt over my head and began walking over to the bed.

"I said forget it!"

I sat down. "Rubes you know you're incredibly good looking right?"

"What?" She sat up from under the covers. "Yang's the pretty one, I'm the cute one."

"Ruby, if I didn't know you and you came up to me on the street and started talking to me, I would assume I was being pranked somehow."

"Ugh." She let me know her disgust, but she wasn't under the covers anymore and she was giving me this much sort of… sly smile.

I'd never seen that one before and it wasn't something I usually associated with her. She crawled onto my lap and turned to face me, burying herself in the crook of my neck. I hesitated for a moment but let my arms rest around her slightly.

"You really don't think I'm cute." She blushed. "I mean…"

"Oh yeah I just can't stand to look at you," I kissed her. Her bottom lip fit between my two and my ego was fed when I felt her relax in my arms. I chuckled as I pulled away.

She hit me and she was as red as I'd ever seen her. "Butt."

When I started laughing, she shut me down by kissing me again.

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-WG