Man, I sure do love getting bots sending me PMs every single day offering to make art for my works - probably using AI. I know most of my students are getting spammed by them as well. Very annoying.

Chapter 23

Weiss wasn't having an easy time with the technique scroll.

The stubborn girl refused to ask him for advice and kept scanning it even when she was riding her horse and he was jogging alongside, and she occasionally huffed or mumbled to herself about something being impossible. The fact she refused to give it up was impressive on its own, but it was quickly becoming clear she didn't believe what she was reading.

"This is mystical mumbo-jumbo," she told him later on the third day, about a single morning's travel from where the Black manor ruins should lay. They could have reached it tonight but Weiss had pointed out they might not want to reach it tired if there might be enemies there. He'd agreed it would be best to camp and rest.

"Are you giving up, then?"

"No!" The idea alone seemed to offend her. "I'm not giving up; I'm saying this isn't possible. This isn't how aura works."

"Is it not?"

"No. Aura is the soul and it's within the body, that is correct, but all this talk of moving it specifically between parts of the body doesn't work." Weiss said it so confidently, as if she were teaching a student in a classroom. "You can bring aura up and have it encompass the body as a shield, and if your aura is particularly strong then it can even glow and be seen by the visible eye, but that's energy being lost as heat and light. It's a byproduct. You can't just move aura to one arm, or control how it moves around your body."

"Why not?"

"Well... Well because you just can't. It's been scientifically proven."

"By whom?"

"By every huntsman and huntress who has ever existed. We have whole academies that teach this, with the best instructors on Remnant working there. This is established knowledge gathered by generations of huntsmen. This, on the other hand." Weiss waved the scroll at him. "Is some pseudo-scientific, mystical nonsense. Really, aura flow, meridians, special techniques? The only techniques one can learn are Semblances, and those are locked to yourself or your family."

"Like yours?"

"Yes."

"The one I was able to alter?"

Weiss made to answer, then balked. "W... Well, that was unusual, I agree, but it could be that your Semblance lets you influence the Semblances of others. It's not something I've heard of but everyone knows that new Semblances with new abilities can crop up."

Jaune couldn't decide if he should feel offended or amused. It was just like Master Ren had said, huntsmen were so sure of themselves that they couldn't believe anything that didn't fit their worldview. In Weiss' defence, it was something she'd been taught. This was less her mistake and more that of her educators. A good student would trust what they were taught to be the truth, especially if the one teaching her was well-known.

"So, as an experiment," Jaune said, holding up both his hands palm upwards. "It's possible to show aura manifesting across the whole body, but it would be from every limb at once?"

Weiss nodded. "Yes. Unless it's for a specific Semblance-based attack, you can make aura show – like this." She concentrated, and the faintest shimmer of pale blue glistened across her body. It lasted for only a second, and that small effort seemed to tire her. "Did you see that?"

"Yes. It looked exhausting for you. Why is that?"

"Because it's wasted aura. And it's expelled across my whole body. That's a lot of surface area."

"I see." Jaune concentrated, guiding his aura down the meridians of his right arm, down over his shoulder, past his elbow, and then circling to his wrist. There, he allowed it to fan out down four fingers and his thumb, right to his fingertips.

Five points of light glowed, and smoke faintly wisped up from the pads.

"So, then. This is impossible, right?"

Weiss gaped. The feeling of aura trickling out his fingers was uncomfortable but not tiring – and she'd given the reason. He was expelling aura from five tiny points, as opposed to her expelling it out of every pore on her body. Though the aura smoked and glowed, it wasn't actually much use as an attack. It may have looked like fire, but it wasn't. He was wasting it, as she'd said, but expelling it from his fingers was also part of several techniques.

After all, the technique around shutting off an opponent's aura required him to inject his own into their body and disrupt their aura pathways, and that couldn't be achieved if he didn't know how to make his aura come out his body. The same went for those medical techniques Master Ren had mentioned, and the bastardised version Jaune had used on Winter to kickstart her own healing process.

But, to Weiss, what he'd done was impossible.

Because it wasn't just the fact that the aura only came from his fingers, but that his other hand remained empty.

"T—That's not..." Weiss swallowed. "Is it your Semblance? It must be. That's the only explanation."

"The only explanation? Really?"

"What else could it be?"

"That what you've been taught was incorrect. That your expert knowledge was wrong."

"Occam's razor dictates it's your Semblance. To assume that every huntsman and huntress that has ever existed got this wrong is the height of arrogance!"

"But you assuming me and my teacher got it wrong just because you don't understand it isn't?"

Weiss looked like she'd swallowed a lemon. Setting the scroll down, she crawled over to get a look at his hand, and Jaune let the aura continue to flow. He was losing it, but at a very slow rate. As if to mock her, he started cutting off aura from one finger after another, then igniting them again, causing them to dance like fairy lights hung up in the festive season.

"That's... I... but..."

It honestly wasn't that difficult for him, since this was just aura control – something he'd been practicing for years. Jaune didn't think he'd have been able to use the Iron Limb technique so regularly, let alone the Demonic Gu Soul technique. Those were still new to him and required more active concentration.

Taking his hand, Weiss prodded and poked with her thumb, not only over his fingertips but the palm of his hand as well. Deciding to tease her, Jaune concentrated and let some aura seep out the meridian in his palm. The white light smoked and ghosted over Weiss' questing thumb, making her yelp and rock back.

"Did... Did you do that...?"

"Of course. And watch this."

Jaune held his hands up and a short distance apart, palms facing one another. This was a little more difficult due to aura's dissipation in the open air, but he was able to make the aura in his right hand shoot out and bridge to his left, to be reabsorbed back into his body. It wasn't a one-to-one transfer, about half of it being wasted in the air, but it still showed a level of active control that, to Weiss Schnee, shouldn't have been possible.

And her eyes were wide. "But... But... that's not..."

"Possible?" Jaune ended it. "I suppose it mustn't be, because your experts never found a way to do it and so decided the fault couldn't be theirs. If they couldn't achieve this, the only answer is that it was unachievable."

"It could still be a Semblance..."

"One that my teacher had, and which I also conveniently have...? One that almost every faunus on Menagerie seemingly shares as well? And presumably on top of their Semblances, too." It was a stab in the dark but Weiss' eyes widened, and he knew he had it. There was no reason some of Menagerie's forces wouldn't have both. "Wow. That is a coincidence, isn't it? But impossible, as you say, because a bunch of scientists said it was."

"Teach me!"

"Didn't I already answer that request?"

"But—"

Jaune handed her back the scroll she'd given up on. "You know my answer. Learn this and I'll consider it. Throw it away because it's not possible, and it won't matter how much I try and teach you. You simply won't learn."

Weiss snatched the scroll back with a glare.

"I will learn this!"

"We shall see. It took me time to learn to do this."

"How long?"

"About a year to learn it, but I've been practicing it constantly ever since."

"A year to learn each technique?"

"No, no, no." Jaune laughed. "The year was to learn how to move aura around my body at all. I didn't learn anything else in that time other than how to make my body fitter and some basic martial arts."

Weiss looked horrified. "A whole year to learn the basics of how to do this...? It took me less time than that to unlock and learn my Semblance – though I'm still working to master it. A good student can unlock and learn their aura in half a year. I did it in four months," she felt the need to add, with a pleased smile. "Needing a year to learn to move aura from one hand to another is ridiculous."

"Quantity over quality."

"What?"

"Your academies," he explained, quite enjoying her sour expression. Weiss evidently didn't like being seen as the quantity in the equation. "My teacher told me the academies work to mass-produce huntsmen and huntresses. The goal is to streamline your education so they can produce as many as possible who will be good enough to fight the Grimm. It's not to make you as good as you can be."

"Our kingdoms wouldn't sabotage us like that!"

"It's not sabotage. It's... economics. Economy in terms of money but also time. Can you imagine how fewer huntsmen there would be if you had to spend twenty years in education?"

"T—Twenty years!?"

"My teacher rarely referred to himself as a master. He spent his whole life learning and said there was much more to learn. I'm only a student myself. I didn't graduate; I lost my teacher to the ones I'm pursuing."

Weiss looked down at the scroll. "Then this...?"

"Is one of the things my master left me to continue my studies from. I'll thank you to treat it with care."

Weiss mumbled her assent and went back to a quiet spot of the camp to read. He didn't actually know which scroll he'd given her, other than that it was at the lower end, and he'd expected her to ask for some tips on how to control her aura. He'd shown her it was possible, but he hadn't shown her how.

Apparently, she was too proud to think of asking him.

/-/

The Black manor was a shell of its former self. The building looked to have been built from stone initially, as the firs floor remained a blackened ruin, but the upper floors had been made of wood. All that remained of those were bits of charred wood sticking out like skeletal remains. The windows were coated with soot around the outside as if blown open in a small explosion, and the door was a charred hole into the building.

"This must be the place," said Weiss, still in a bad mood after a night of trying and failing to control her aura. Jaune had told her it would take time but she was of the opinion she could learn it in an instant. "No wonder we couldn't see it from a distance, what with the upper floors being burnt down. This place is well-hidden."

"It's still a ruin."

Weiss dismounted her horse and set him up with a loose rope to graze under the shade of a tree. She then took her sword from the saddlebags and strapped it to her waist. Jaune noted it and couldn't help but ask if she expected them to be here.

"I doubt the ones you're after will be," she said. "But places like this make for wonderful outposts for bandits and deserters. Anywhere they can have some shelter from the rain is a blessing."

"Or travellers."

"Or travellers," she allowed. "But I'd rather be armed than not. Shall we go in?"

Jaune led, taking a peek through the opened doorway and glancing around – and up, this time, having learnt his lesson from Wukong. A few spiders scuttered away from him, and he thought he heard a rat in a corner, but that was a good enough sign the place was currently empty. Wildlife and humans didn't mix so well.

Coming in after him, Weiss shone the torch on her scroll around into the corners and sent more critters running. Aside from animals, there were a few signs of humans having been there, and not just the old residents. A circle of stones made for an abandoned campfire, and there was graffiti scrawled on the walls. Some was typical graffiti but Jaune caught at least one message from someone saying they were headed to a nearby village, and to follow if they saw the message. Refugees fleeing from a fallen village hoping to meet up again, perhaps.

"Can you see in the dark like a faunus?" asked Weiss.

"What? No. Why?"

"I'm just curious what happens if you can direct aura to your eyes."

"I see worse because I have aura over my eyes..."

Weiss had been plying him with questions like that while they travelled through the morning. Now that she'd accepted the possibility of aura control beyond what she'd been taught, she was curious about every which-way it might possibly be used. Some of her questions were downright bizarre, though. Like asking what happened if he concentrated every spec of aura he had in his heart.

A heart attack, probably. He wasn't about to test it.

"Then it doesn't let you see in the dark?"

"No. But I can do this." Jaune expelled aura from his palm in a tight ball, causing a small glow to emanate from his palm and light the way. It wasn't nearly as bright as Weiss' torch, but it served well enough, almost like lighting a candle. Weiss looked amazed. "And no, it's not me creating light. I'm just expelling aura the same way you can – but at a single point. That makes the light brighter and the aura loss less pronounced."

"I don't know whether I should call that incredible or incredibly wasteful."

Jaune let it drop and took out his own scroll, which General Ironwood had given him. He activated the torch like Weiss'. "Probably the latter. Just because I can do something doesn't mean I should. I was just proving a point."

"That your way is better than ours?"

"That it's different. Master Ren would have told me off if I said otherwise. The academies serve a purpose, and that purpose is to create as many people as possible who can defend the helpless against the Grimm. Our way... you'd get some of the most capable people ever, but they'd be much more finite. Every loss would be crushing, as it might take twenty or more years to replace them. And even if we're more versatile with our aura, we can't be in two places at once."

"I still don't like receiving a lesser education," Weiss said, taking a few steps deeper into the ground floor complex. They moved past the foyer and through a blasted-out door, into what looked like it might have once been a dining room. There was a long table burnt in the centre, with scratchings and engravings up and down it. "Many people have been here since it burnt down. Look at the fresh wood under these marks. Those would be burnt if these came before the place fell. This place has been actively in use."

"But is it by the ones I'm after?"

"That's the question." Weiss moved on and Jaune followed. "Why do so many from Menagerie know your techniques?"

More questions? Jaune sighed. "They don't."

"But Wukong and you fought similarly."

They hadn't. There had been many small but noticeable differences between their styles but, Jaune supposed, someone who saw his style as exotic in the first place probably wouldn't notice that. Yang was the only fist-fighter he'd met and she used a combination of boxing and kickboxing, and that was probably common across the academies.

It was easy for people without experience in it to lump all martial arts together under the title of "martial arts" and just call them one thing, without being able to tell the differences between the styles. Boxing was much more direct a style, being both easier to learn and more commonly applicable. A master martial artist could probably beat a boxer, but even an average boxer could best most martial artists. The differences were in the skill floors and ceilings, and boxing – at least the sport – was very much an endurance sport. Fights were long, messy, and exhausting, with as much focus on defending and outlasting your opponent as downing them.

"It's different," he said, not wanting to get into it all. "Trust me, the styles were very different. And they should be, because we're from different sects."

"Sects...?"

"Think of it like schools. The difference between Beacon and Haven, or Haven and Atlas Academy. Each has different styles of combat, different techniques, but also different cultures and principles. To an outsider, we might look the same, but I don't know anything about the Blackened Ribbon Sect."

He didn't know much about the Lotus Temple Sect, either.

"Do you at least know why they would have thrown their lot in with Menagerie and joined the war?"

"No. Sorry. I don't even know if they have."

"They must have! Look at how they fight—"

"That might not be with the blessing of the sect," he pointed out. It probably was to a degree, given Blake Belladonna was apparently the daughter of the ones who ran it, but it was no guarantee. "If the sect is based on Menagerie, then all its students are from there. And if Menagerie has gone to war with Atlas, doesn't it make sense they'd make up the majority of the army?"

Weiss didn't like that, grumbling to herself as she focused back on the manor. They explored several more rooms, most of them ransacked and vandalised by people who had come after. There may once have been more left, but the house had been picked clean by scavengers, and now there was nothing but burnt and ruined furniture left to rot.

"This wasn't an accidental fire."

Jaune's head whipped toward Weiss. "You can tell that?"

"Yes." Under her breath, she mumbled, "At least I'm good for something." Sighing, she spoke loudly again. "The way the blackened marks on the walls are arranged suggests some degree of explosive force blew the doors off. That can happen if a fire grows inside a room but the door is closed, which isn't unusual but... it's everywhere. And judging from the way they face, the fires started in multiple rooms rather than starting in one and spreading."

"So, this wasn't a case of an oven or toaster being left on too long."

"Definitely not. Several fires were started on the ground floor and spread upward, if more weren't started on the upper floor as well."

"That's interesting and all but I'm not sure if it helps me."

"No. It probably doesn't." Weiss crossed her arms in what once had been a kitchen. "But I'm not sure what you expected to find here in the first place. According to the information from General Ironwood, the only real lead is that one of the perpetrators once lived here, but I'd hazard he burnt the place down when he joined up with them." Weiss turned to face Jaune. "Can you tell me anything about him? The specific one who lived here."

"Sure. His name was Mercury Black. He has silver hair, dark eyes, and no legs."

Her eyebrows rose. "No legs?"

"Sorry, he has mechanical prosthetics. They're not obvious and he tried to hide them when he sparred with me, but I noticed them instantly because his aura didn't flow further down than his knees."

"And you can tell that on first glance, obviously."

"Ye—" Jaune cut himself off a little too late.

"Of course you can," she grumbled. "Because that's a thing, apparently. What, can you sense where people are as well?"

"No. It's not that specific."

"Then what is it?"

"Just a sense." He shrugged. "I would feel if someone with aura actively in use crept up behind me, but only if they started to use it, and I wouldn't be able to tell if they were doing so to kill me or offer me a hug."

All of this would be making its way back to General Ironwood eventually, that much was for sure, but maybe this was for the best. It wasn't like Ironwood was going to be any less interested if Jaune kept to his secrets. If Weiss delivered back news of how lengthy a time it would take to learn anything from him, then Ironwood might give up on it all. Like the academies, he didn't have time to put his troops through twenty years of training. He had a war on his hands right now.

"Right. So, that's probably our best lead right now," Weiss said. "It's possible he lost his legs in this incident, and a group of criminals wouldn't have wanted to drag a useless boy around. They'll have taken him somewhere to get his prosthetics as soon as they could. And since they hadn't done anything illegal at that point, at least to our knowledge, they wouldn't have felt the need to disguise what they were doing. That means there will be a paper trail for us to pick up."

"Us...?"

"Of course. I'm sticking with you until I learn your secrets."

"That could take twenty years!"

"It won't." Weiss sniffed imperiously. "I'm better than that."

"You're—"

Jaune froze. There was a flare of aura a short distance way, within the house itself. He wouldn't have noticed it if not for the fact it came on so sudden and so strongly. Weiss noticed his expression and tensed, hand reaching to her sword. "What is it?" she hissed.

"Someone just entered the house. I felt aura flare up."

"Flare—?"

"Like you do when you activate it." He said it as explanation, but it also answered his own question. Flaring aura was something only huntsmen did, and it was really just the term he used to represent how they activated it all at once. Aura would encompass their whole bodies, essentially seeming to his senses like a sudden flaring of it. "It's not Wukong," he told her. "He wouldn't use it so clumsily, and for no reason."

Weiss relaxed a little. "It must be someone stepping through the main doorway. We're always taught to activate our aura when entering an unknown building, and only to deactivate it when we know it's clear."

Sensible. You never knew where a Grimm might be hiding. It could have just been a regular huntsman or huntress then, someone in the area choosing to explore after seeing Weiss' horse outside. There was no reason to believe it an enemy.

And yet it was better to be safe than sorry. "They won't have noticed us yet," he said. "Maybe we should slip out and take a look."

Weiss nodded and gestured to the backdoor of the kitchen area. It was blown open like the front, so there was no risk of causing noise. They stepped out onto grass that had grown back from where it had once been scorched and crept around the back end of the building. Occasionally, Jaune noticed the aura flaring inside the building. The person was cautiously checking each room, activating their aura whenever they had to walk through a doorway. Given Weiss' horse outside, they knew someone was here, and they might have been as cautious of them as they were in return.

But any thoughts of it being a huntsman died when they peeked around the edge of the building and saw some hundred or so people arranged outside. Many of them were around Weiss' horse, with one woman with short hair pulling on its reins. The horse was not happy to follow her and kept tugging its head away. The woman grew angry and punched it in the neck, making the animal stumble.

Weiss' rapier whipped out. "How dare—"

"Calm." Jaune grabbed her arm. "There are too many."

"Who the hell are they?"

"Deserters," he replied. "Bandits. Criminals."

"How do you know?"

"Because I recognise the one with your horse. I met her in Vale terrorising a village."

And he knew the one leaving the house, the huntress with long black hair and a bone-white mask. The one that had come to challenge Master Ren and who had failed, but who had also been too much for Jaune to challenge at the time. It looked like they'd decided to abandon Vale after their embarrassing loss. No doubt the pickings in Mistral were riper, especially when the local authorities couldn't leave the frontlines to deal with them.

"Raven Branwen. This could be a problem."

"You don't say," Weiss hissed. "A hundred armed people against the two of us."

"That one is a huntress at the very least." He nodded to her, as Raven walked back to her people and spoke to them. The men and women began to fan out into the trees. "They're looking for us. They know we're here because of our supplies outside."

"Couldn't you have sensed them approaching and warned us?"

"It doesn't work like that. I can only sense aura when it's being used. Raven used it when she entered the house but not before, and the rest of them are just deserters. I was able to best a bunch at once back in Vale, but it took my master to beat her."

It hadn't been a challenge for Master Ren, but he had sixty or more years of experience. Jaune wasn't confident he could handle Raven Branwen so easily, and especially not when she would surely recognise him and take him seriously. She'd underestimated him and Master Ren before, but a sword through the shoulder would have taught her not to do that again.

"I'm not abandoning Star," Weiss whispered.

"And I'm not letting them have my master's scrolls," he replied. "But we should at least hide and let them set up camp first. They have to sleep at some point. We can deal with a few sentries better than we can a small army."

Weiss' teeth grated furiously behind him as she watched her beloved mare being stripped down of valuables and mistreated by the bandits. They were corralling it away with sharp strikes to its flanks with their weapons. The poor thing was rightly terrified, and Jaune could only hope they weren't planning to kill and eat it. Surely they'd see more value in a healthy horse than to use it as food.

"Come on." He took her wrist and gently steered her away. Furious as she was, she was intelligent enough to let him, even as she trembled with fury. "We'll come back for her and for my scrolls."

Quietly, they melted back into the forest.

/-/

"We haven't found anything, Raven. But the horse has some valuables on it. There's another pack meant for someone trekking, but there isn't much that's worth anything in it. A bunch of rolled-up scrolls with gibberish in them and a spare change of clothes."

Raven hummed. That was two people, and they were obviously still around. She'd been as quiet as she could be entering the building, but she'd had to take it slow in case of an ambush. There was plenty of time for them to hear her coming and scamper. Normally, that would be fine, but the horse was of a high-enough quality that she suspected it a huntsman's. At best, an apprentice's, but the fact there were two people might have meant student and teacher.

Not so much a problem for her, but a threat to her group.

"Bring the belongings to my test. I'll be going through them. Tell those idiots to stop trying to find them; they'll only spread themselves thin and be picked off." Deserters did not make for the best warriors. "We'll set up camp in and around the building instead and let them come to us if they want to try it."

They might just leave. A horse and some reading material wasn't normally worth risking one's life over, but Raven would rather be safe than sorry. Unconsciously, she rubbed at her shoulder, recalling a moment where she'd been foolish and let her guard down. The pain was gone, but the phantom terror she'd felt at having her aura completely shut off remained. For a huntress like her, losing control of that was like losing your ability to walk.

Her hand clenched into a fist and she pulled it away from the old wound. It had healed quickly – and easily – enough so that she'd known immediately that the old man had intended it to be so and struck in such a way as to cause as little permanent damage as possible. Never in her life had she been outclassed so thoroughly.

But I survived and I learned from it, she thought.

Vernal had, too. The girl's loss had been so humiliating that she threw herself into training to never let it happen again. Since then, the girl had blooded herself on village militia and had even cut down a huntsman apprentice from Atlas they'd caught trying to smuggle villagers out before the Branwen clan could capture them.

Let them come. She would cut them down.

Next Chapter: 17th December

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