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(Weiss PoV)
I sparred with my sister. She sent her Beowulf at me. It pranced along the generated training ground terrain at me. A bunch of prismatic cubes with glowing blue edges.
It entered a room of my glyphs and I used my pseudo-telekinesis to slam it around against each black glyph until it dissolved.
Winter tried to summon something else but I made my knight little and had it sweep her leg. Knocking her to the floor before she could try anything else.
I let a little giggle escape me.
Winter had never seen it coming. She looked down at my little knight in shock.
Big things weren't always the best application of my semblance. It reminded me a little of Jaune who sometimes held onto his own semblance just for the speed and strength improvements rather than spending it in a flashy display.
I let my little knight dissolve. And Winter rose back to her feet. She whipped her scimitar at me.
I flew at her. Launching myself towards her using a spiraling glyph behind me. I thrust my rapier at her stomach. She leaned to the side. I slashed the narrow tip of Myrtenaster at her stomach where I perceived a hole in her defenses.
She blocked it with her scimitar. It was a wide sweeping gesture that forced me to take a step back. Her weapon unfused and became two, one in each of her hands.
She twirled as she brought the weapon around her body. I ducked the first and met the second. My rapier was slightly longer than her cutlasses. It gave me an edge I didn't squander as I forced her to take a step back using three quick thrusts.
She spun and tried to sweep my lead leg with a low kick. I turned my knee inwards and met the blow at the same time I push-shuffled closer to her and put her off balance with my shoulder. My center of gravity was lower than hers. I capitalized on that with a brutish, inelegant shoulder check. The sort Jaune would have had no qualms about using against me or Yang.
Winter stumbled back and I tore a chunk of her aura away from her with a thin slash of my weapon, cutting through it as she stepped back.
Point me.
"That was unrefined of you." Winter seemed to scold me.
I shrugged. "It's only unrefined if it doesn't work," I returned.
"If I would have known you were going to do something like that I could have capitalized on it."
"But you didn't know. Couldn't have known. That's what made it a good tool. The element of surprise. Besides you over extended with that kick. You lost accordingly because I was able to punish it. If I let you get away with those sorts of attacks without punishing properly, I'll lose."
"That's what made it a good tool," she echoed my words.
"Not good enough," I shot back.
She lowered her weapons at me in response. "Your inelegance will only take you so far. Sloppiness is not the path to victory."
I stayed silent. I'd do what I had to do to win. That was the real path to victory. If Winter was bound up by strings like worrying about how elegant she looked doing what she did, then she would lose. I would emerge victorious because I was willing to do whatever was necessary. Even if that meant being a touch brutish. That's how Jaune leveraged his edge over me. He was willing to be brutal.
My sister spun as she came at me and I met the first scimitar, then I transitioned my blade sideways to meet the second. Then I made the Titania edge vertical but to the side to meet the next.
She meant to keep me in block the entire time while she rained precise blows against my defenses.
It might work too, she had multiple blades to bring to bear and it felt a touch like all I would be able to do is narrowly keep up.
My chance would come, however. If I stayed patient. There. A gap, perhaps an artificial one but still an opportunity I couldn't slip by me. I thrust my blade forward and she caught it on both of hers and attempted to disarm me with a subtle twist of both her weapons at the same time.
I countered by stepping in closer and sliding my weapon against both of hers straight up at her face. She stepped back rather than get hit, and freed my weapon up once more.
I twirled and slashed at her, high, low, high. She blocked each attack in turn.
I stepped back and I waved Myrtenaster. Pinpricks of light emerged from it and raced towards Winter. She shattered the light easily with a motion of her blade.
Our weapons collided and she slid down my weapon towards my wrist. I twisted vertically up and out of the way, using the guard on my weapon to my advantage. Her weapon slid over and past my wrist without colliding with me. One of them did at least. Her off hand weapon slipped under and into the aura of my stomach. She spun with it, slicing upwards as it bit into my aura.
Point her.
It was mostly because she had two weapons to my one but that was no excuse to not concede the point.
"You've improved by wide margins," She said. "And you're only getting better all the time. You're making such sloppy attacks work for you."
"Thank you," I replied. I was doing well enough to match Winter. It was all that real combat experience I had against the agents of Salem that made the difference. Winter was used to fighting opponents who were her inferior. The opposite was true for me.
"That wasn't meant to be a compliment."
"We all slip up sometimes."
She laughed a little and smiled.
"You know I am always here should you need to talk."
"Whatever about?"
"Your Jaune Arc for one. The turncoat."
"I don't view him as a turncoat. Elsewise would Salem not have the relic of knowledge? Why then would she send agents to steal it from us?"
"You still haven't accepted it yet."
"And I may never. That's hardly a weakness of mine considering the facts that have been presented thus far."
"And yet you handed me his description along with that of Salem's other agents."
"In the hopes that you may find him and we can get to the bottom of this mystery. That hardly means I view him as one."
"I too was betrayed once. By a teammate no less. It took a great deal of counseling and therapy for me to come to grips with what happened. And I hardly view that as a weakness. Perhaps you require the same thing. It is something I want you to closely consider."
"I have no intention of talking to a stranger about Jaune. It doesn't feel right."
"Then consider talking to me."
"When you've already written him off? Salem doesn't have the relic. That means something. And I learned a great deal from him. About the world, about fighting, and about myself."
"I learned from my teammate as well. Just know that you aren't alone in this. I know what you're going through."
I didn't think she did. Mostly because I, myself, wasn't sure what I was going through. Between Ruby and Jaune, that is. That wasn't Winter's fault, however. I didn't blame her for it a single iota.
It just meant that what I was going through I needed to lean on Ruby to understand. Of everyone in the world she would get it. She was in the know and unbelievably empathetic besides.
I just nodded to Winter but stayed quiet and readied my weapon for another bout.
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I manned a wall of Mantle. Overlooking the frozen tundra. It was ruined by the presence of Grimm.
There had been a mine collapse and that was leading to a miner's strike across Mantle. That much negativity was drawing the Grimm in spades.
I summoned my Knight outside the wall and directed it with a wave of my hand. It met one of the elephantine Grimm and stopped it in its barrelling tracks. They wrestled for an impossible moment before my great knight flipped it over onto its back.
It let out a trumpeting call and the enormous sword was brought down through its chest, it's exposed underbelly a great weakness of black flesh rather than the white plate armor that covered it's back and sides.
I felt the elephant get added to my collection of possible summons. Another monster I had slain, if only indirectly.
I could feel the rage of the protestors behind me. I hoped that my father would compromise and meet with the strike leaders soon. I knew him and he only responded to shows of force. The sort of collective action I'd seen in the streets which bordered on riotous had to be the sort that he'd now to.
Surely.
Despite that I was unconvinced. My father always had an angle and he'd broken up strikes before. Bribing leaders, making threats, calling in the military, or making brief concessions before returning to the previous status quo. And here I was defending him incidentally.
I hated that. I reminded myself that it was Mantle and Atlas I was defending from these Grimm. Not my father and his shady business practices.
The riots felt hot at the hairs on my neck as I directed my silvery specter to wrestle with another Goliath. It felt like their breath was right behind me. I knew that that wasn't the case. Kilometers separated me and the pocket lines.
Things may not work out how I thought. Maybe my father would really give in. But there was a build up in the supply of dust. My father had been hurting for people to sell it all to. Surely he had a great deal of the energy propellant in the warehouses around both cities.
That meant he could afford to wait and eventually the fire in the belly of the strikers would die down. Then he could return to business as he had before.
The oversupply caused by the embargo would be beneficial to him in this case. I wasn't sure how much of that my teammates understood. I had been raised with proud conversations about strike breaking at the dinner table.
I cast a half dozen points of explosive light at a Chimera that hovered near the walls and it fell down. I rotated the barrel of my sword and I used dust, air and water in combination, and called up an ice storm from a glyph which pierced its hide and sent it to withering ash.
The storm I called bowled into many smaller Grimm as well. It scattered a dozen Beowulfs into charred flakes.
I swept Myrtenaster over my head and called another great glyph to life. I rotated the barrel of my weapon again and the blade glowed yellow. A dozen lightning bolts jumped from the corners of the glyph into a group of Gryphons making their way towards the wall.
Much like the monsters before them they were dissolved by the force behind the electricity. With dust to augment my spells I may well be the strongest member of team RWBY. I was no slouch with the power of nature behind me.
It made me wonder what I would be like with the power of a maiden behind me. Would it be like I had a buffet of dust behind me at all times or would the power be entirely divorced from my semblance? Either seemed possible. Or it might be something completely different from both those options. I would have no idea until I became a maiden. If I became a maiden, that is. There was always the chance that the agents of Salem would win again. There was the possibility that I could die the next time we clashed, as Ren and Nora had.
Speaking of it was possible the agents of Salem were behind this strike. Sure it might benefit the workers, but not if we couldn't hold the wall against the Grimm.
I summoned my knight in mid-air in a spiraling glyph next to a Chimera in flight and my silver warrior brought its sword down on the Grimm mid-flight and divided it in two.
I would hold this wall. It was my duty to defend the people from the Grimm that might come this way. That was all I should be worrying about for now. I was sure of that but I couldn't help but let my thoughts wander. I was backed by a regiment of robotic troopers and Atlas security soldiers.
They lined up and with short controlled bursts they brought Grimm down which were beneath my attention. Together we moved and slowly cleared this section of the tundra of all black and white threats.
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I was watching over a patrol of machines. United, we were overlooking the protests at the mines. They'd put me in charge of a batch of machines and I was to make sure that no fighting broke out between police and protestors.
Under no circumstances was I to fire upon the crowd, however. I understood how important it was. I was here to hold the line and remind people that the Atlas Military was watching.
Protestors held signs like Dust Lung Laws Now, and Give the Scabs Nothing, and even Save Our Pit.
I stood opposite a line of people fifty persons thick. It was spilling out onto a wide asphalt street. It had brick buildings on either side and the people were marching straight down the road and shouting. "No dust! Or bust!"
There was a little faunus girl with bear ears right out in front and screaming. She couldn't have been older than nine. Was that how old Blake had been when she started out? It was a chilling thought. As emotionally abusive as my parents had been, I had been safe and sound in Schnee Manor.
Some of our family had been disappearing but that had been an abstract worry to a little girl who was being physically and emotionally abused by her parents. Even if she hadn't known it at the time. And I hadn't known it at the time.
I ordered the machines to line up against the walls of the street along the stores that made up either side. It was better to be out of the way of the marching crowd.
Someone set a trash can on fire and I watched in horror as it was thrown through an SDC storefront. Glass shattered everywhere and the people cheered as the building started to burn from the inside out. A group of machines set about moving people back from the burning building and putting out the fires.
I saw the man. A young boy really in a purple hoodie and black jeans.
"Arrest him," I ordered the machines. The boy dispersed through the crowd and the boy shuffled into it and vanished amongst the protestors. "Damn it."
I jumped high and landed on a glyph. I looked out into the crowd and saw the purple shape shuffling into the throng of people.
I blitzed forward on a wave of glyphs and landed on top of him. I held him down as people shouted around me. They booed me. I was surrounded by a mob of people set against me and firmly on the boy's side. They probably would be even more against me if they knew I was a Schnee. Someone threw a rock at me and it missed. It was the little girl with bear ears. I looked away. The machines gathered around me and took the young man into custody.
He was put into handcuffs and carried away by the blank faced robots. I watched them go and was returned to being surrounded and alone by a mob which disliked me and might hate me if they knew a little more. My glyphs weren't exactly subtle. But they were fast. I was booed as I moved about.
"Dirty Schnee."
"Money grubbing Schnee!"
"Schnee!"
I caught the words out of the mob. I was recognized, at least a little.
I bounced out on a set of glyphs to the rooftops and watched the crowd move.
The robots put out the fire and kept the swarm of people back away from the SDC storefront.
"Beat the Schnee with glee!" They shouted with fists moving forward.
I could really only watch from my vantage point and wait and see if they needed more interference.
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-WG