And here's another one!
Stepping into Darkness
(Inspired by RWBY: Dark, Reverse RWBY, Halo 5: Guardians and Destiny 2: The Witch Queen)
The premise for this story is simple: Teams RWBY and JNPR are now working for Salem, alongside the likes of Cinder's team, Watts, Tyrian, and Hazel, and it is other characters from other academies who take their roles in Beacon Academy and Vale.
The reasons as to why the likes of Ruby, Weiss, Pyrrha, and so on very differently between them. Jaune's family, including his parents, sisters, and their own friends and families as well, have been serving under Salem ever since the Great War eighty years ago. Blake Belladonna never left the White Fang and continued to serve with Adam, until being strong-armed into service by Cinder and her goons. Weiss Schnee never left Atlas and grew to hold power in the SDC, right at the same time as Watts approached Jacques earlier in canon. Nora and Ren were found by Hazel early in their lives, after Kuroyuri fell, and gained their trust by killing the Nuckelavee all by himself. Raven Branwen took Yang with her when she returned to the Branwen Tribe, and their clan of bandits became mercenaries to Salem's cause. Pyrrha's family would be part of a cult of Grimm worshippers that directly served Salem in the underworld. Finally, Summer Rose would defect over to Salem's side when she was pregnant with Ruby, and evidently brought the child with her.
This would result in Salem gaining a lot of power within the kingdoms themselves, as well as a lot of agents for her cause, but it would also mean that a lot of spaces in Beacon are now empty, and ready to be filled with new characters from other academies. The likes of Neon Katt, Octavia Ember, Sun Wulong, May Zedong, and so on would take the places of RWBY and JNPR, filling in the gaps that Beacon would have in their absence.
However, because these new teams don't have any personal ties to the likes of the White Fang, the Branwen Tribe, and the SDC, this allows their movements to go relatively unchallenged around Vale, with the only interference they suffer from Beacon being because Ozpin took notice and required his students to help him take then down, or at least delay or muddle them as best as they can.
So, during the events in Vale, several members of RWBYJNPR would be pushed into the forefront of the conflict, and given their own specific roles:
Nora and Ren would be in charge of keeping Roman and his gang loyal to their cause, mostly through making him happy and acquiescing to any demands that he and Neo had for them (This method of control would anger Cinder greatly, but they would just remind her that they were keeping him loyal, and as such she had no right to complain).
Blake, along with Adam, would rally the White Fang chapter in Vale to their side, providing the main muscle for Salem's plans.
Weiss, in her position in the SDC, would provide the funding for the operation in Vale.
And Pyrrha would serve to help silence any opposition to their plans in the underworld, wiping out entire gangs of criminals singlehandedly, and forcing the rest to join their cause.
Yang, Ruby, and Jaune would be held back, for they had no part in these plans.
Soon, the Breach would bring about the arrival of Atlas' armies, and soon after, the Fall of Beacon would begin, killing hundreds of people, and bringing down Beacon Academy, allowing Cinder to take the Fall Maiden from within, killing Ozpin and many others, and shattering the students of Beacon.
However, several complications would arise. Namely in tensions brewing between the bad guys themselves. Salem would rule her minions through fear, and fear makes for fragile alliances. Blake (Plus Adam) And Weiss would be at each other's throats all through the Vale arc, and the White Fang's relations with the various factions under Salem would be shaking as best, and continue to break down as the days went by.
Then, on the day of the Fall of Beacon, the relations between the various elements of Salem's faction in Vale broke down and turned into civil war, with rogue Atlesian droids and Grimm fighting against each other at the same time as Salem's agents turned their guns and swords on each other.
In the end, several of Salem's agents would be maimed or killed- Including Adam, leaving Blake in sole command of their faction of the White Fang- And though they had succeeded in their objective, they could not find the Relic of Choice, and would limp back to the Grimmlands, only to be punished by Salem for their petty conflict and failures.
In response to the chaotic mess that was the Fall of Beacon, Salem relegated the likes of Cinder and her goons, Pyrrha, Nora, Ren, Weiss, and Blake into secondary roles, and pushed Yang and Ruby into commanding roles for them, of which they would all chaff and feel humiliation for.
Jaune would be ignored.
And here is where we get into the characters of Yang, Ruby, and Jaune in relation to this new story, as their roles and changes in character would be based on the Hive Gods from the destiny franchise:
Yang would be based on Xivu Arath, God of War, and would dedicate herself to battle and war in the name of her tribe and sister. In the year leading up to the start of the story, Yang would challenge her mother to leadership of the tribe and kill her, tearing her to pieces and claiming the tribe as her own, before leading them to Patch to pillage and raid the island for all that it was worth, and murder her father, Taiyang, to prove to Salem and herself that she had what it took to lead the tribe in her and her sister's name. Under her rule, the Branwen Tribe would devote themselves entirely to the art of war and conflict, and they would become the most feared organisation across all of Remnant, with countless atrocities behind them.
But Yang would find umbrage in her killing of Taiyang in Summer Rose, as well as her own sister, Ruby Rose, and the two siblings would constantly come to blows over it.
Ruby would herself be based off Oryx, the Taken King, and her silver eyes would allow her to manipulate and control the Grimm around her to a natural, yet limited degree. Ruby's innocence and naïve understanding of the world would not fade with her age, and desires to create the world into an idealistic fantasy of her own making, and to do that, she wished to know all that there was about the Grimm that she could control. With the help of both Salem and the exiled doctor Merlot, Ruby would begin to create her own types of Grimm, like Husks, Nine-Tailed Foxes, Kitsunes, and so on and would work (Reluctantly) With her sister in making this dream of hers a reality, though she would have to work with Salem to do it, something that the both of them clearly dislike.
And Jaune?
Jaune would be based on Savathûn, the Witch Queen.
We'll get back to that later.
For now, both Ruby and Yang would be made into Salem's second-in-commands, and together, they would begin to form a plan on how to attack Haven and Mistral, and steal the Relic of Knowledge from underneath Haven at the same time...
Only for Jaune to convince Ruby to go behind the battle-hungry Yang's back, steal the Spring Maiden from under her nose, sneak into Haven, and steal away the Relic of Knowledge from the vault, all without a single drop of blood.
To say that this angered Yang and many of the commanders beneath them would be an understatement. For many different reasons, many of them had been eager to go to war with Mistral- Particularly Yang and her tribe, Blake's White Fang, Cinder, Pyrrha, Nora, and Tyrian- And were furious at Ruby for denying them the chance to slaughter as many as they could for their own goals, and even Salem was annoyed by it. She wanted to both take the Relic of Knowledge and break the back of Mistral to prevent a united kingdom from attacking her, but in the end, she had no room to complain. She had the Relic now, and as such, meant that she could turn her attention over to Atlas, and the Relic of Creation underneath its academy.
But then, further complications within Salem's faction would begin to grow. Once more, Salem would reassert her control over her minions, but those divisions just continued to grow. A growing and increasingly violent rivalry between Cinder and Pyrrha would begin to hamper their teamwork, and their own minions, in Emerald and Mercury, and Nora and Ren respectively, would begin to clash as well, each fight growing more and more violent with each day. Blake and Weiss would grow more and more hateful of each other as they disagreed on Blake's plans to take over Menagerie and use it as a platform to launch an anti-human crusade across Remnant, and Weiss' own desires to control Menagerie and turn its population into slave labour for the SDC. Yang and Ruby would violently come to blows, and in the middle of Argus, their forces would clash, and end with neither side winning at all.
And Jaune and his sisters would simply stay in the background, and manipulate them all the way, worsening the internal relations of Salem's faction by using up all the questions in the Relic of Knowledge, and spreading rumours to each faction within Salem's group that their own rivals had done it.
By the time that Salem's faction had arrived in Atlas and Mantle, everything had fallen apart for them, and were on the verge of another civil war.
All it would take was a single push for it to go over the edge.
And over the edge the Arcs would push it, by selling out their positions and plans to Ironwood and the Atlesian military, and allowing them to almost be wiped out before turning in on themselves.
And here we finally get to Jaune and his influences from Savathûn.
Suffice to say that Jaune and his sisters don't actually have any sort of loyalty to Salem. The queen of the Grimm rules through fear, but the Arcs do not fear her at all, and have been plotting behind her back for years on end.
And Salem was somewhat aware of their plans as well, or at least aware that they are plotting something, but never chased those suspicions because one, she didn't consider the Arcs to be much of a threat to her, and two...
Jaune and his siblings were just too competent for her to lose.
And that was the big trade-off for Salem. The Arc family had been the ones who delivered the Relic of Destruction from underneath Shade in Vacuo, and they had done it with minimum fuss or hassle. Whenever Salem gave them a task, they would always complete it with few problems and zero complaints, and when they returned from their tasks, they would just go back to their business as if nothing happened.
They weren't loyal to her, but they were obedient, and it didn't help that the Arc family had many contacts within the kingdoms and had a lot of political influence, and that meant that Salem couldn't afford to loose them.
But Jaune and the Arc sisters were slowly fulfilling their own ambitions. As it turned out, much of Jaune's personality hadn't been changed from canon, but thanks to the influence of Salem, he had acquired a ruthless sense of pragmatism to go along with it. Now, as he looked onto the global situation of Remnant, and the various plans of the competing factions and agents within Salem's minions, and came up with his own plan.
There was so much division and conflict within the world, and if Salem had their way, humanity would destroy itself.
So what if someone were to come along and seize power from her, and bring unity to the world themselves?
The Arcs had always been heroes, fighting for peace and to protect the world from both the Grimm and themselves. Even when they were being controlled by Salem, that never changed...
And Jaune and his sisters were eager to live up to that ideal.
And so it was for the Arcs as they instigated the civil war in Salem's forces back in Vale, and continued to aggravate Salem's minions against each other, whilst keeping themselves in the background, and slowly building up their global power across the kingdoms, all in an effort to eventually overthrow Salem as rulers of the Grimm.
When Atlas came and went, that was when the Arcs finally made their move. With most of Salem's forces dead, captured, wounded, or missing, the Arcs unleashed a new weapon of theirs onto the rest of them.
The Arc family had been working closely with both Merlot and Summer Rose in making a new species of Grimm loyal to them.
A new species of Grimm with aura and semblances.
A new species of Grimm that they called the Argenta.
And it was these Argenta Grimm that they unleashed upon what was left of Salem's forces as they took control of the Grimm and turned them to their side, and began to enforce their own rule over the kingdoms, their many political agents and followers helping to overturn the infrastructure and governments of the kingdoms to their rule, all the while their Argenta wiped out any Grimm that rebelled against them, as well as and human and Faunus insurgents, and turned their assets to their side.
Now the Arcs had superseded Salem as the biggest threat to Remnant, and both Salem and Ozpin's remaining forces are forced to work together to overthrow the family as they tighten their hold over the planet, using their Argenta to control the world, as Remnant sinks into an age of corrupted light and murky darkness...