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"Athlesian Paladin STOLEN! White Fang involvement suspected!"
I stared at the headline blankly. I had been in the middle of eating a bite of porridge when Blake came along and shoved her scroll under my nose, obviously expecting something. Don't get me wrong, we were still looking for the White Fang, but this had happened all the way up in Atlas. Unless…
"You think it's here?"
A nod. I put my spoon down.
"Why?"
"This has Torchwick written all over it, and the White Fang commander here wouldn't pass up on that kind of firepower."
Judging by the grimace, she knew the guy, or at least knew of him. This was going to be a long day, I could already tell. With a sigh, I grabbed my bowl and went to empty it in the trash.
"Come on, let's get the team together. We need to figure this out."
It didn't take long for us to assemble in the dorm. A simple message to Pyrrha and Weiss had them rushing to BASN's room. Saturday morning was a time we usually spent doing our own things, Pyrrha usually trained, Blake got a nice book and read or hung out with me, and Weiss spent her mornings on the weekend either finishing off any remaining homework or training as well.
Now though, all of us were sat on the carpeted floor of our dorm room in a rough circle, waiting for Blake to begin.
"Three days ago, an Athlesian Paladin was stolen from a facility in Mantle. The theft fits Torchwick's MO, and he wasn't active here in Vale that night."
"So, you think he went to Mantle, stole a weapon from Atlas' military and brought it back here?" Weiss asked with a raised brow. She sounded sceptical, and I had to admit, it was a little bit out there. But in the end, it wouldn't hurt to check for it, since we were planning on looking for the White Fang here anyways. And if they did have it, none of us would want them to keep it for long.
"I can't be sure, but I wouldn't put it past them." Blake admitted, and she looked more than a little pained as she did so. It couldn't be easy, seeing how low her former fellows had fallen.
"We were going to be looking for the White Fang anyways, we might as well check for the Paladin in the meantime." Pyrrha nodded along with me, leaning forward as she spoke.
"How do we start."
Blake and I began outlining how we had found them the first time. While I had been looking at articles of past crimes, bumbling around without knowing what I was really looking for, Blake had been compiling a list of possible targets. Obviously, that wouldn't work here, because we needed to find the Paladin before they put it to use. The amount of damage they could do with it in a city like Vale was ridiculous, and none of us wanted to imagine it.
"We can look for potential places they might be hiding it in and stake them out." Pyrrha suggested. It was one of many different ideas that had been thrown around, but it was the one I liked the most. Mostly because it didn't involve any direct danger like some of the other plans, much as I wanted to put a stop to the White Fang, I wanted all my teammates to live even more.
"I like it. I have to go into Vale today with Ruby to upgrade Crocea Mors, but I should be back in the evening. Maybe we can look at some maps for places they could hide it after?"
My suggestion was met with approval, and we quickly agreed on a time and place to meet for it. Then, we just had to figure out how to keep the places under watch.
"I can go and watch them overnight." I said, I didn't need to sleep anyways, so it wouldn't exactly be a big sacrifice for me. Sure, I would lose out on a couple days training, but that wasn't exactly going to be the end of the world.
"No, if we send anyone, it can't be alone." Pyrrha protested, "If you are caught out alone, you might not make it out."
"But it's not like you guys can stay awake the whole time." I pointed out, but as Pyrrha went to speak again, Weiss interrupted her.
"Jaune is right." She said, and as my partner rounded on her, she continued. "But we can do it in shifts. Jaune goes every night, and one of us goes with him. If we rotate, giving up one night of sleep every three days isn't so bad." Weiss said, grimacing at the thought of how gruelling a schedule like that would be.
Both Blake and Pyrrha seemed to realise that it wouldn't be easy, but they both nodded grudgingly. It was actually a pretty good solution, and it wasn't like I would mind the company. Sitting and watching buildings all night was bound to be boring.
"Just one more thing." I said, "If we find the White Fang, the Paladin or both, we can't go and fight them."
"What?" Blake, uncharacteristically animated asked.
"We can't fight them. Not as we are." I said, and I would not budge on this. "Torchwick was toying with us last time and we still lost. I don't feel like he'll be so forgiving a second time. If we find them, we call the police or the professors, but we are not fighting."
None of my teammates looked happy about it, and if I were being honest, neither was I. But I'd rather them be a little unhappy than them dying in a fight that we could have avoided and let someone else handle. Pyrrha, at least, seemed like she understood, and I was glad for it.
The mood was gone after that, and I left shortly after, making a quick stop by the locker room to grab Crocea Mors before moving out to the entrance hall. Checking my scroll, I was still a little early for my meeting with Ruby, so I opened up my browser.
'Might as well get a head start.' I thought to myself, pulling up a map of Vale's Industrial district. After a couple of moments, I closed it and found another, this one more detailed and with actual individual buildings on it. It was one of six different maps with a detailed view of the industrial district and the docks, each of one separate part in the area.
I quickly began divvying up the different sectors into smaller blocks, drawing on the downloaded map to make it more manageable. Soon enough, the first map was a patchwork of red lines that put every block into a different 'sector' which I labelled with a number from 1 to a 112. It was a lot, but we would be able to rule out plenty of those sectors immediately when we got there, since they would be mostly empty at night and the companies running them would make it blatantly obvious that there was no criminal activity there.
"Hey Jaune!" I tore my eyes away from my scroll at the call, and my eyes immediately met Ruby's. The girl was wearing her usual red cloak, but under that, she was wearing a simple black skirt and a red hoodie under a black coat. It was the same colour scheme as her combat outfit, but much more suited to the weather.
It was December, after all.
"Hey Ruby."
I got up, putting my scroll away as the girl got closer, and without saying a word, we started walking to the bullhead docks.
"So, do you know where we're going."
"Yeah, it's where I make adjustments to my baby now that I don't study at Signal anymore."
"Wait, you change Crescent Rose?" It was more than a little surprising, actually. With how much Ruby went on about her baby being perfect, you'd think she was done working on it.
"Of course I do, silly!" She slapped me on the arm. "Crescent Rose might be as perfect as a weapon can be, but there's always new stuff coming out, and I have to keep improving her if I want her to keep her top spot!"
We kept it serious for all of two seconds before the laughter set in. It was fun, to simply talk and have fun with a friend instead of worrying about thieves and terrorists. We laughed and joked all the way to Vale, my meds taking care of the motion sickness well enough that I didn't even notice it.
Taking an airship without feeling like garbage was still a novel experience to me, and I spent almost the entire ride glued to the window, looking at the passing Vale skyline while we talked.
Soon enough, we made it to the city itself. Instead of walking to whatever store we were heading for, Ruby took me to a bus stop. It was funny, actually, that I hadn't even considered taking public transport yet. Ansel was small enough that we didn't really have a need for any public transport beyond the pair of school busses that dropped kids off after class. Here in Vale, though, I could see the appeal.
Not everyone had a car, or a place to put one, so the obvious solution was a good network of busses and subways. For a moment, I wondered why none of my teammates had suggested using the public transport while we had been in Vale, but I quickly realised that it might be just as foreign a concept to them as it was to me.
Weiss was too rich to not be taken everywhere by a private chauffeur, the idea of her taking a bus anywhere was beyond funny. Pyrrha, meanwhile, was rather famous as well, and I couldn't imagine her taking public transport where everyone would keep coming up to her. Blake, I didn't know too much about her past, but I did know that she was from Menagerie. I wasn't sure how it all worked there, so maybe the idea of public transport was as foreign to her as it was to me?
Ruby, though, was a native. She might not be from Vale itself, but Patch was literally right next to the big city, and she had probably spent plenty of time here. So, instead of spending the better part of an hour walking to our destination, we hopped on a bus and got off fifteen minutes later, on the outskirts of the commercial district.
Bearing Arms was a fairly large building, even if the frosted glass window with a bear motif on it was rather small. We walked in with the jingle of a bell announcing us, and we were met with a… dwarf?
Okay, he wasn't quite that short, but the man that greeted us couldn't be more than five foot even and didn't look to weigh more than a hundred pounds. Not exactly what I would expect from someone running a shop with a bear as its mascot.
"Ruby! I told you last time that I would let you know when those new magazine releases came in, you don't have to come and check if I'm holding out on you every weekend." The man said, clearly familiar with the girl who had dragged me here.
As I laughed at the man's statement, Ruby went red in embarrassment, but it was short-lived as the noise made the man notice me.
"Oh, brought a friend, have you?" The man asked, sizing me up with narrowed eyes. "I've already met your team, so I know he's not one of them… You didn't bring your boyfriend to a weapon's shop for a date, did you?" He asked, and for a moment, Ruby and I just stared at one another.
And then we laughed.
"Jaune? Are you crazy? He's my BGFF, I can't date him!" "Ruby? She's like one of my little sisters!"
We both cried out at the same time, laughing all the while, and that seemed to satisfy the shop's owner as he backed off a little.
"Oh good. I was afraid that I'd have to give tall, blonde and muscly here the shovel talk." The man walked back to his counter as he said it, and the mental image almost sent me back into another fit of laughter. "So, what are you here for?"
"Jaune's here to upgrade his weapon!" Ruby plopped her sketchbook down onto the man's counter and soon enough, the both of them were muttering at the schematics and diagrams of Crocea Mors' modification, completely forgetting that I was there in the first place.
Then it all became a bit of a blur. Both Ruby and the store's owner, whose name I still didn't know since neither of them had seen fit to introduce the man, flew around the store grabbing materials left and right and plopping them down onto the counter faster than I could keep up with.
So, I just kind of stood there like an idiot while they worked.
Soon enough, they had all they needed, and they took me into the back, which was apparently where all the forging equipment was kept. There, it only got worse. I saw them take the pommel off my blade, strip the handle off of the tang and begin drilling the hole that would house the dust I was planning on using, but when they started pulling out batteries and vats of liquid, I got a little lost.
Eventually, I just pulled out my scroll and got to work on the second map of the industrial district to distract me. By the time I had the third one done, though, I noticed that the loud sounds of machines running was suddenly absent, and I found both Ruby and the store's owner standing in front of me.
Between them, they held Crocea Mors, and the blade looked amazing. Not only had it been polished and cleaned, but I could already tell some of the major and sometimes not so major differences.
The fuller, for example, was now the reddish-brown of the copper which now coated it in a thin layer. The cross guard has some subtle changes as well. Instead of the solid brass-coloured metal that used to make it up, there were now hints of silver added in the form of a pair of balls that had been embedded into the metal on both sides. The pommel was different as well, not only was it a little bigger, but they had put some ridges into it, presumably so I could grip it better when I needed to screw out the dust cell.
It was beautiful. And when I grabbed hold of it and cycled my aura into the chamber in the handle, the sparks that immediately leapt off of the blade made my grin widen so much that it split my face in two.
"How much do I owe you?"
Hope you guys enjoyed. We finally see the weapon's upgrade, and you will get a glimpse of how it works soon as well. I think this is probably the best way to upgrade weapons in RWBY while keeping Dark Souls or Elden Ring in mind. Think of it kind of like an Ashe Of War or something.
If you guys want to talk about the story and get direct responses from me, or just chat in general, you can join this Discord at: b7JaQcpuc7
You can read up to 6 chapters ahead on: (The P a treon upload for today will be later in the day. Maybe this afternoon or tonight. Have to bring my mom some stuff in the hospital (She's fine, it's just for observation and pain meds) but I thought I'd let you all know that the chapter might be late.
P a treon . com (slash) Raven991
Anyways, hope you enjoyed and have a good one!