Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Oh, I can't believe my baby sister is going to Beacon with me! This is the best day ever!”

“Yang,” Ruby gasps for air, “Please… can’t breathe…”

“But I’m so proud of us! It’s finally happening!”

Released from her sister’s clutches, she smooths out her skirt, a vain attempt to make herself look presentable. Aboard the airship to Beacon Academy, surrounded by dozens of new recruits, who knows how many eyes are watching? Waiting for her to take a single step out of place?

Planting herself on one of the soft, cushioned benches lining the airship, she squeezes herself into its corner, trying to make her look as small as possible. She goes unnoticed by the other humans and Faunus, all milling about, exchanging greetings and small talk and the beginnings of alliances. Yang settles next to her, keeping close. She smells nice, a familiar scent among a sea of unfamiliar people.

“…Let’s go over the plan one more time.”

Her sister gives her a flat look. “Ruby, this is the seventh time we’ve gone over the plan since we boarded.”

“I know, I know…I’m just worried.”

“Worried is an understatement,” Yang reaches over and pats her on the head, “Relax, sis, it’s gonna work out fine. No one’ll see us coming!”

Ruby jumps in place, a jittery bundle of nerves. “Shush! N-Not so loud!”

“What? Don’t want anyone to hear about our awesome plan to become the youngest Rank 1 Huntresses in Beacon?” Yang says with a wink and a nudge.

But despite her sister’s assurances, she is left unsatisfied, and decides to go over the plan once more, in her head this time.

Step one: get into Beacon. This was accomplished easily enough. The guild academy is open to applicants of all ages, provided they can pass the entrance exam, which Ruby and Yang did with ease.

Step two: reach Rank 3, and not a single step higher. They’ll be starting out at Rank 7, the bottom of the rung, and only through merit and achievement will they ascend the ranks. Rank 3 Hunters have unfettered access to Beacon’s grounds, and its records, making it the absolute minimum requirement if they want to find the relic. Any higher and they may start attracting unwanted attention to themselves. Just look at Pyrrha Nikos!

At least it’s not Atlas. Atlas has ten ranks, and only Rank 1 Hunters have full clearance to do anything. What a nightmare.

Step three: find, but do not steal, the relic. Ideally they secure a route without alerting anyone, so once they have the key it’s a simple matter of taking her directly to the relic. Which brings her to…

Step four: find and persuade the Fall Maiden to unlock the relic. It doesn’t have to be a permanent alliance, or even a truthful one, and that’s why she wants a path to the relic first. The Maiden is much less likely to change her mind — or lose her life! — the less time they spend with her. The relic’s not going anywhere. The Maiden is, which is why she comes last.

Step five: make out like bandits. If all goes to plan, they will have given away nothing, leaving Ozma utterly unaware as to who has stolen the Fall relic. Rinse and repeat for the other three. And with all four in hand, she’d finally be able to save the world!

Underpinning the entire plan, of course, is a simple yet infinitely difficult directive: don’t get caught. Not by Ozma, and definitely not by Salem. Ruby shudders at the idea of getting caught by both of them. That’s what had happened to her mother. They killed her, and nearly killed Spectre, too.

Well, that isn’t going to happen to her! From here on out, she will be the perfect Huntress. Nothing she does will arouse suspicion, she’ll make sure of it!

All across the airship, display boards flicker to life, playing a reel of local news. Ruby tunes out the gossip and weather reports until…

“And now, on to this week’s breaking news! The Rank 2 Hunter Hazel Rainart has pledged allegiance to Salem in what can only be described as a shocking betrayal of his prior declaration of unconditional support to Vale. When asked, Sir Ozma of Beacon had this to say: ‘I am saddened and disappointed at the loss of one of our most stalwart allies. I can only hope that Hazel will see sense and return to the side of righteousness before it is too late.’ Mr. Rainart could not be reached for comment.”

The recruits around them break into hushed whispers. Her hand clenches tight around her sister’s.

“Rainart? I think my neighbor knew him…”

“What’s a guy like him thinking, joining up with Salem? Some of the bottom feeders, I get, but a Rank 2?”

“That’s the third Hunter this month. Ozma’s bleeding support, huh?”

“Oogh, my stomach…”

Yang sighs, “Geez, the last thing we need is another Hunter on her side. What do you think, Rubes?”

“I-I just hope we won’t have to fight him…”

She intends to say more on the matter, but before the words can leave her, something else enters. An aroma, sickly sweet and tangy. The air is thick with all sorts of scents that Ruby has long since grown used to; the essence of nervousness and anxiety all blending into a sort of unseasoned, mushy soup of emotion, easily ignored. But this particular smell cuts through the blandness of the crowd, so strong she can almost taste it.

The smell is succulent, tantalizing, irresistible. Drool practically leaks from her mouth as she gets up and follows her nose.

“Rubes?” Her sister's voice echoes in her ear, muted. “Ruby, when was the last time you ate? Ruby!”

She ignores her sister. There’s something delicious in the air, and she wants a taste. The trail takes hers through the crowd, weaving her deftly through humans and Faunus alike, until she stops at an isolated corner at the opposing end of the airship. A hazy person-shaped blob of white stands before her, loneliness wafting gently past her like the smell of a freshly baked pie left out on a windowsill.

Taking a step forward, she immediately stubs her toe on something heavy, and trips. Her senses return to her, a strong hand snatches her hood from behind and lifts her into the air, and suddenly she’s dangling, staring face-to-face at a very angry, very pale face. An expensive, well-made dress; hair as white as snow; a braided ponytail as long as she is tall; piercing pale blue eyes, with an angry red scar over the left; and, from what Ruby can see, none too pleased with the fact that her luggage has been knocked over.

“You!” The girl says in a haughty, grating tone, “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Um.”

“Sorry about her,” Yang sets her down, in full customer service mode. “My sister was just curious about the perfume you use! Very curious.”

The girl raised her eyebrows doubtfully, “I was among the first to board this airship, and I don’t recall seeing either of you pass me by.”

“She has a really good sense of smell,” Yang nods, completely serious.

“S-Sorry…”

“Well,” the girl appears slightly mollified, taking the fallen luggage from Yang’s other hand and checking it over. “Nothing appears to be damaged. So long as it doesn’t happen again…”

“It won’t! Take care now!”

With her sister’s grip like iron over her shoulders, she’s rather forcefully pushed away like a shopping cart from the white-haired girl, heels grinding into the polished flooring of the airship. People make way for the two of them, receding into the sea of anonymity. At some point they come to a stop in their own secluded corner of the room, Yang spinning her around so they face each other.

“Ruby,” Her sister’s eyes blazed red, kind but firm. “If you need to eat, you can take from me. Don’t ever feel like you have to starve yourself for my sake.”

“B-But I don’t wanna have to rely on you all the time…”

“It’s fine. I hardly even notice nowadays.”

“But isn’t that exactly the prob–”

Above them, the intercom crackles to life. On the display boards, a live feed begins playing, showing one of her mortal enemies. She hisses quietly. Yang squeezes her shoulder.

“Greetings. My name is Ozma.”

The bespectacled immortal is beginning to show signs of age in his current body, silver hair losing a bit of its luster at the edges. He’s dressed in dark greens and blacks, a fancy well-worn suit that belies his combat ability. His hands press down on his signature cane; the imprint of a combat memory from Spectre reminds her of just how hard that darn thing can hit when he gets serious. Even this virtual image of him projects power, strength that makes her own look utterly inadequate by comparison.

“And I am Glynda Goodwitch.”

Beside him stands a tall blonde woman, hair not quite as deeply colored as Yang’s. Ozma’s current right hand. She’s as well-dressed as he — though not without her own personal flourishes. Is that a… cape? Awww, c’mon, she can’t share a fashion sense with one of her enemies!

“We welcome you to Beacon, the world’s first and foremost line of defense against the creatures of Grimm. As new recruits, you have proven yourself worthy to stand together with the finest Hunters in all of Remnant, to protect those who cannot protect themselves.”

She could almost hear Yang roll her eyes. “If only.”

“Shhh! Not now!”

“At Rank Seven, you will be assigned missions to be completed once a week. Once you reach Rank Five, you shall be free to take assignments at your own discretion. The work will be long and arduous, though not without reward. I hope you will not shy away from the challenge.”

“Bring it,” Yang cracks her knuckles, “You’ve got no idea who you’re messing with, old man.”

“Yaaang, enough,” Ruby whines. Overconfidence is going to get them killed!

“Please come to either Glynda or I, or one of our senior Hunters, if you have any questions or concerns. Now, without further ado, welcome to Beacon!”

The airship groans and shudders, making a swift descent to Beacon’s docks. Out the window she spots mission control, a massive domed structure with a pillar jutting out of its center: the main communications tower. Paved roads lead out from the front half of the circular building, towards armories, training centers, refectories, domiciles, and the academy. Somewhere among this massive complex, the relic awaits. All they have to do is find it.

There’s a light jolt as the airship lands, and the landing bay swings open. Her fellow Rank Sevens stream past her in droves, eager to begin their new lives among Beacon’s elite. She pulls out her Scroll as she strolls casually down the ramp, in no rush to take in the sights. The grand splendor of the Hunter’s guild is dampened somewhat by the fact that its leadership would mercilessly tear her from limb to limb if they ever found out who she is.

“Okay,” she says to Yang, who’s peering over her shoulder, “it says here we’re to stay in Dorm 6B. It shares a room with 6A. Our stuff should already be there.”

“Do we know who our roommate is?”

She taps away at her screen. Yang steers her away from colliding with any more luggage, bringing them closer to the domed building. “Ummm… two people. Lie Ren and Nora Valkyrie.”

“Those are Mistralan names,” her sister notes, “Wonder what they’re doing here?”

“I just hope they’re nice…”

Suddenly, she senses a presence from behind her. Queasiness, discomfort, rough and sour like chalk. She acts fast, grabbing her sister by the hand and pulling her to one side as a tall scraggly blonde man bulldozes past them, hands clamped over his mouth. A jet of vomit shoots out of the gap in his fingers as he passes by, narrowly missing Ruby by a hair. She watches in awe as he stumbles over to some nearby bushes and presumably unloads the contents of his stomach onto the poor shrubbery.

Anger, dry and spicy and savory, floods into her, her hunger sated and stuffed to bursting. Belatedly, she realizes she’s still holding her sister’s hand.

“Oh,” Yang says calmly, holding up a clump of vomit-stained hair. “Looks like he got some on me. You okay on your own while I go clean this up?”

Ruby nods, “Yep.”

“Don’t wander too far.”

And with that, she’s left alone. Big, bad Beacon, looming intimidatingly in front of her, fills her with dread. Has she already given something away? Are Beacon’s strongest Hunters mobilizing right this instant to surround her, to destroy her?

She shakes her head. Maybe she won’t go into the main building at the moment. They could go collect their first weekly mission later, after getting settled in. So instead, she explores its surroundings, careful to avoid the area around the bush where Vomit Boy had been. Maybe there’s a secret panel or something hidden on the back half of the dome.

Among the pipes and wiring and generators and air vents she finds nothing.

“Pardon me–”

“Eep!” She leaps straight up into the air, hands raised stiff. Her heart hammers heavy in her chest, muscles tensed and ready to run at the first sign of trouble.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to startle you!”

Pyrrha Nikos stands in the grass several paces away, in full combat gear, staring at her with curious emerald eyes. Ruby senses no hostility from her, and gradually lowers her hands. But she doesn’t let her guard down. Just because the Rank 1 Huntress bears no ill intent now, doesn’t mean she won’t if Ruby slips up.

“N-No, it’s okay! I mean, I shouldn’t even really be back here, I just got lost and I wanted to see if there was anything interesting behind — a-and I needed to kill time while my sister cleaned herself up, there was this Vomit Boy — and I’m not up to anything suspicious, I’m a new recruit and I just, y’know, I, I… um. Uh. Ahem. Heh.”

“You’re a recruit?” Pyrrha separates the wheat from the chaff. “How… old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“F-Fourteen?”

Pyrrha looks thoughtful. “That’s even younger than when I started. What’s your name?”

“Ruby R-Rose!” Then, remembering etiquette, she extends her hand.

“Nice to meet you, Ruby.” The older girl takes it, her grip warm and firm. “Pyrrha Nikos. But I’m sure you already knew that.” A pause. “You… have silver eyes.”

“Oh, no, they’re gray, like my mom’s. My contacts just make them look like that.”

Pyrrha nods. “I see. I’m sorry if that came off as a bit strange.”

“Not at all!” Ruby laughs nervously, “I should be getting back. Don’t want my sister to get worried!”

“Of course, I shouldn’t keep you. Feel free to reach out if you would like any assistance with your missions. Beacon likes to push its new recruits hard, and they won’t let up just because you're young.”

Her heart nearly leaps out of her throat. “S-Sure thing! I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks!”

She scurries away like a rat, feeling Pyrrha Nikos’ gaze boring a hole into her back. Only when she disappears from the elite Huntress’ sight does she let out a deep sigh of relief. That was a disaster.

“I’m back,” Yang announces, “What’d I miss?”

“I met Pyrrha Nikos.”

“Good for you, sis,” Her sister does a spit-take. “Wait, what?”

“I–” Ruby gulps down another lungful of air, trying to steady her breathing. “I think she knows something. You know how my eyes changed color after the thingy happened?”

Yang nods, “We’re lucky the two are so similar. What did she say?”

“She just made a comment like they were more than just unusual. Like they were special. Feels like we’re missing something. Don’t like it!”

“Then we’d better work fast to get to Rank 3. Maybe there’ll be something in the archives that’ll tell us why.”

“Oh, and she also offered her assistance on our missions.”

Yang stiffens. “Okay, that’s definitely suspicious.”

“Right?” Ruby nods vigorously. “I don’t know, maybe coming to Beacon was a bad idea after all…”

“Calm down, Rubes. She might be curious about your eyes, but it might be for other reasons. You said it yourself, right? It’s a recently evolved ability. One of a kind, there’s no one like you in all of Remnant! How could anyone else possibly know?”

“…I guess you’re right.” Ruby frowns a sour frown. “Let’s just be extra careful from here on out.”

The two of them make their way to the dorms. It’s a modern concrete rectangle of a building that reaches high into the sky, about ten floors from what Ruby can count. Room 6B is, interestingly enough, on the sixth floor. Rookie Hunters scurry in and out, moving furniture and belongings or hauling trash up and down stairs, or in one of the dorm’s elevators if there’s space. Ooh, what if there’s a secret floor that only the elevator can access?

Arriving at the sixth floor, she spots Room 6A and 6B immediately to her left, and further down the hall Rooms 6C, 6D, 6E, and 6F. So that’s how it’s designated, huh?

Yang takes out two cards, swiping them on the electronic lock. The door opens with a click, revealing a barely furnished interior, smaller than even her old room back on Patch. Plain, unpainted walls; a single window, tall and bright in the afternoon sun; a fluffy carpeted floor; a simple bunk bed, specially requested for a room that normally only suits one person; a dark wooden nightstand with a single lamp; and a second door leading to the room shared by 6A. What little the sisters brought from Patch sits unopened next to the bunk.

“Think our roommates have already moved in? What were their names again?”

Wordlessly, Ruby reaches for the second door, twisting it open. The shared space is much, much larger, containing a living room, a small kitchen, and a third door leading to what Ruby assumes is the bathroom. On the wall opposing her is a fourth door, with the letters ‘6A’ marked above it. A quick glance shows ‘6B’ above hers.

Then, without warning, the 6A door falls off its hinges, loudly slamming into the floor. An orange-haired girl, hands splayed and face planted flat against the shattered door, peels herself off the broken wood and waves at them, unbothered. Through the empty frame a mop of black hair and pink eyes stares back at them with a mix of exasperation and sympathy.

“Howdy, neighbor!” The girl says, chipper. “Just doin’ some remodeling, don’t mind us! 

Ruby and Yang’s jaws hang open, dumbstruck and silent. After a pause, the girl continues, spitting out a splinter the size of a tooth.

“Welcome to Beacon!”

Chapter Text

Ruby spends the next hour helping Ren and Nora rebuild their door.

This involved the lengthy and needlessly complicated process of securing a new door and accompanying frame, which the curious pair headed out to acquire while she and Yang unpacked and got their bearings. After a bit of time had passed, during which she almost chose to believe the two of them were playing an elaborate prank and were halfway out of the city by now, they returned, slowly and methodically carrying an extremely basic unpainted door.

She and her sister have experience with carpentry, given that they lived in a log cabin on Patch (a fact which thoroughly excited Nora for some reason), and so she lent a hand affixing the frame in place and installing the new door. It was a cheap rickety thing of wood composite, poorly mixed and impure. Ruby gives it roughly a week before it falls off its hinges again.

It is only after the work is done that she gets a chance to truly assess her new neighbors, free from any distractions.

The first thing she notices is how plainly dressed they are. Nora sports a white sleeveless tee that covers part of her neck and a pink skirt, belted by metal clasps that show signs of age and decay. Her boots are a faded pink, stained dark and nearly worn away at the soles. The orange-haired girl stands shorter than even Ruby herself, her arm muscles leaner than Yang’s, though still clearly defined.

Ren towers over her, but among the four Yang is still the tallest. There’s a pink streak in his long, silken hair that she hasn’t noticed until now, despite its length nearly matching Yang’s. His outfit is traditional Mistrali, but weathered and torn at the edges. The trims have lost their luster, and the main fabric of green is pale and splotchy in some areas. Like Nora, the soles of his shoes are dangerously thin. Maybe she could fix them up a replacement…

“Are you done inspecting our shoes, Ruby? Find what ya need under ‘em?”

“Um, yep!” Her head snaps up, tittering sheepishly, and she makes her way back from the shoe rack to the dining table. It’s large enough to seat four, and almost nothing else. “Soooo, Mistral…”

Ren nods, “It was a long journey. I’m just glad to have the chance to rest our feet. Tomorrow we begin anew.”

“What brought you all the way to Vale?” Yang asks, “I mean, if you don’t mind me asking?”

The two share a glance. “It’s…complicated,” Ren answers, “I’m sure the two of you have your own circumstances you’d rather not share?”

“Oh, absolutely!” Ruby nods emphatically, drumming her fingers on the table. “We stay out of your business and you stay out of ours! Great idea!”

“Ruby! Manners! Sorry, my sister’s not one for social interaction.”

Nora cackles, “She’s not the only one! Ren here can go days without saying a word! Not a peep!”

“Nora,” Ren sighs, a chastise born from deep familiarity, “You know that’s not true.”

“It feels true and that’s what matters to me!”

Despite their bickering the two wear small smiles on their faces, mustered up even through travel-weary bodies. She and Yang share a similar smile, before turning back to them.

“Well, I for one am looking forward to getting to know you better over the course of the year…”

Wait. What is her sister doing?

“Aaand, I was thinking, we could all do our first mission together?”

Ruby snaps to her feet, shaking the table as her thighs bang into it. “Aha! Ha ha ha! Good one, Yang! Excuse us for a second, please?”

She pulls her sister into their bedroom, slamming the door shut. They wait for a second, expecting the thing to tip over in a slow and dramatic fashion, but continue on when nothing happens. Whatever Nora did to her old door is beyond the realm of mortal comprehension.

“Are you crazy? A mission? With them? We’ve known them for less than a day and you want to team up with them?”

“It’ll be a good experience for you. I mean, when was the last time you worked with anyone other than me?”

“Not the point! What if they find out?!” Ruby hisses.

Yang shrugs her shoulders, confused. “Ruby, you are aware of the kinds of missions Rank 7 Hunters go on, right? Weren’t you paying attention to Dad and Uncle Qrow’s stories?”

She pauses. “Um. I might have been too focused on sipping on their nostalgia…?”

“Of course you were. Just trust me on this, ‘kay? No shot you’ll need anything but uncle’s old scythe for these missions, at least for the first few weeks. Now, ready to get back out there and apologize to Ren and Nora?”

Ruby sucks in a breath through her teeth. “Fiiine.”

They exit the room, Yang going first. “Sorry about that, we–”

“We’re in!” Nora slams her palms into the table, a devious grin on her face. “Team Yarn is gonna take Beacon by storm!”

“Yarn?”

“Y-R-R-N.” Ren elaborates, “Nora latched on to the idea after your suggestion to team up, and let’s just say you’ll have an easier time prying an Alpha Ammut off yourself than…” He stops and gestures towards Nora, who bounces excitedly in place, turquoise eyes shining. “Well.”

“C’mon, c’mon, let’s go!” Nora lunges forward, grabbing Yang by the hand and dragging her out of the room. Her sister lets out a surprised yelp as she is effortlessly pulled along against her will, feet sliding against the floorboards as though they were slick with grease.

Ruby stares at Ren nervously. “You’re not worried? I mean, what if we turn out to be total crap at this whole Hunter thing?”

The older boy simply smiles, tugging at a frayed sleeve. “You do not pry. You do not judge. That alone makes you better than most.”

The melancholy assaults her senses, bitter and fruity. She follows him out silently, contemplating his words and feelings. Are Ren and Nora… outcasts, to some degree? What was life like for them before today? Surely the ragged state of their clothes is proof of the hardship they endured, and nothing more. Not commenting on that seemed like common sense. And who cares if they come from Mistral? So does Pyrrha Nikos; there’s no rule against it! Is the bar really set that low?

The sun begins to set by the time they exit the domicile. Still the complex buzzes with life, Hunters of all Ranks moving to and fro. Some grab dinner from the cafeteria, others head in the direction of Vale, planning a night out in town. She spots a few devoted Hunters moving from mission control to the training centers; the grind never stops for them, apparently. More Hunters still flow out of the armories, weapons and armor shining like new. In spite of everything, Ruby finds herself appreciating the sight.

“Nora’s a bit much, but there’s no one I’d rather have watching my back,” Ren says, apropos of nothing.

“I get that. Sometimes my sister can be a bit of a bother,” such as now, what with forcibly including her in other people’s business, “But I don’t know where I’d be without her.”

They come up to the main building. Yang and Nora have already gone inside.

“Well? Shall we?”

Ruby glances around, making sure a certain red-haired Huntress isn’t lurking around, and steps inside. The interior of the domed building is even bigger than the outside led her to believe. It’s grand and gleaming, an open space with multiple floors visible from the ground, containing offices, conference rooms, and other rooms of unknown function. The porcelain marble floor is polished to a shine; towering spires and columns, ornately designed, support higher levels, the dome itself kept stable by virtue of its design. Ozma’s tower looms ominously at the center of it all, the strategic centerpiece of one of her greatest enemies.

Like outside, many Hunters move about with purpose and vigor. What draws her attention first is a Huntsman. Heavily armored, brown-haired and tall, with a massive black morning star slung over his back, and oozing negativity like a piece of fried chicken that’s been soaking in its own grease for too long. Just spite and insecurity and irritation. Blech. The white-haired girl from the airship is here, too, hands planted imperiously on her hips, staring up unfazed at the much larger Huntsman. Ruby hears bits and pieces of an argument, but what little she picks up is too complex and filled with legal jargon for her to even remotely understand.

Nora strides up to the reception desk, slapping a hand on the counter before leaning on it with her elbow. “One mission for Team Yarn, please!”

“Team… Yarn?” The receptionist, a rabbit-eared Faunus with an odd accent, repeats.

“The four of us,” Yang butts in, “Yang Xiao Long, Ruby Rose, Lie Ren, Nora Valkyrie. Find us something good, will you?”

“No promises,” the receptionist says, tapping away at her keyboard. “Four Rank 7 Hunters? Okaaay… let’s see here…”

Suddenly she feels a spike of irritation, and turns just in time to see the Huntsman storming up to the desk, casting them aside through sheer presence alone. The white-haired girl makes eye contact with them as she follows, but says nothing.

“Velvet! Tell this prissy little princess here that she needs to go through the proper channels if she wants anyone to take her request! I’m a Huntsman, not a damn sword-for-hire!”

“Some would say there’s no difference,” Ren mutters next to her, barely audible.

Her ears prick up, straining to filter through the cacophony of the busy command center, though she does not let it show. Did — did she hear that right? Her eyes dart to the others, searching for any sign of reaction, her Grimm senses tasting for any negative shifts in emotion. Nothing. Was it just her imagination…?

“I have neither the time nor patience to deal with your bureaucratic games, simpleton!”

“Look, Miss… Ski, was it?” Velvet the receptionist says, not looking up from her computer, “We told you before that all requests sent in through the system, except for in cases of emergencies, must be processed and reviewed by our staff before they can be put up on our mission board. A process and review that can take multiple days, or even weeks, depending on the designated Ranking of the request.”

“Weiss Schnee. Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company? And I thought I told you that this is an emergency! One that requires your utmost attention!”

“An emergency?” The Huntsman scoffs, “It’s some missing cargo. Hardly worth the effort of even the lowest Rank 7, let alone one of my caliber.”

“Listen, you fool! That ‘cargo’ is worth more than a decade's worth of your wages!” Weiss jabs a pointed finger into the Huntsman’s chest plate.

Wait. She forgot about the money. Is she even allowed to be paid for her work, being fourteen? Did Beacon follow Vale’s laws for employment, or its own?

He slaps it aside roughly, growling, “Hands off the merch, princess.”

“Enough, Cardin,” Velvet swivels in her office chair so that she faces the heiress directly. “Miss Schnee, I can try to connect you with one of my superiors, but–”

“You’ll do more than try! And you! Winchester! I hope you’re ready to–”

“I ain’t doing sh–”

Ruby watches as the receptionist groans, burying her head in her hands as the two in front of her descend into another argument. “Just a few more hours,” She hears Velvet say, “Just a few more hours and I’ll be out of here…”

Nora nudges her, “Sooo, what now?”

The four of them had been rooted in place for the entirety of the spectacle, captivated by the utter mess that had unfolded before their very eyes. But now what? From what Ruby can see of the mission boards dotting the ground floor, most available to Rank 7’s are solo missions, or at most requiring one partner. It’s why they went up to the help desk in the first place. She knows Yang will be greatly disappointed if this doesn’t work out, and she gets the feeling Nora will, too. Even knowing her and Ren for only a few hours now, there’s a desire in her not to let them down. She doesn’t know why.

The familiar clink of golden armor alerts her to a new presence, and sends shivers down her spine.

“What’s going on here?”

“Oh great, now you’ve got Nikos involved. Screw this, I’m out.” Cardin sneers, then storms off.

Ruby forces herself to calm, drawing Yang’s attention closer. The shift in demeanor does not go unnoticed by Ren and Nora, and in a surprising turn of events, they too move around to her, bodies forming a loose protective wall against the newcomer.

Pyrrha gives her a disarming nod, before stepping up to the reception. “Velvet, is there anything I can help with?”

As Velvet begins explaining Weiss’s predicament to Pyrrha, Yang leans in and whispers in her ear, “Ren and Nora are okay with leaving for now. Just say the word.”

A moment’s hesitation costs her. “I…”

“I have a suggestion. If it’s as simple as retrieving a package–”

“Finding it. I will handle the retrieval.”

“Finding a package, then why not leave it up to these four?”

Uh oh.

“And who are you? Wait, I saw you on the airship!” Weiss sneers, “As if I would allow mere Rank 7 Hunters to handle this!”

“And what if they were monitored by a Rank 1? Would the five of us suffice?”

“Oh no you don’t, Missy!” Nora rears back, pointing an accusatory finger at the gold-plated Huntress. “There’s only room for one redhead in this team, and that spot’s already taken by yours truly! And I don’t even wanna know what kinda shenanigans adding a ‘P’ in front of an ‘RN’ leads to!” Then the ginger draws a cross over her chest, fumbling the motion halfway through. “Begone, foul maiden! I command thee!”

The air stills. Pyrrha’s jaw hangs open, twitching eyes slowly sliding over to the rest of them. “I’m sorry, is there — is she quite alright?”

“Buzz off, Nikos. We’re not interested.” Yang says, stepping forward.

A gleam enters her gaze, moving past them in a long arc. “Is that so? Well, I suppose I can’t force you.”

Ruby’s head moves on a swivel, following along, dread pooling into her stomach as she realizes what has happened. A crowd of Hunters and Beacon personnel has formed around them without them noticing, watching with great interest the team that has attracted the attention of the one and only Pyrrha Nikos. If they were to back out now…

“Speaking from personal experience, though,” Pyrrha continues, “Team missions are quite rare nowadays. Especially ones for low ranking Hunters such as yourselves. Velvet?”

“Well… let’s see, mission for four, nothing above Rank… yeah, it’ll take a few weeks for me to find anything. On the other hand, I can get Miss Schnee’s request processed as a bottom-ranked team mission quickly enough — especially with Pyrrha involved — but only if she’s okay with it.”

“I…” Weiss looks to Pyrrha searchingly, “I suppose with you mentoring them it should be fine.”

Pyrrha claps her hands, clearly pleased, “Wonderful. Then it’s settled! Any objections?”

Yang tries again. “Now, hold on just a–”

“We’ll do it.”

All eyes turn to Ruby, her compatriots radiating confusion in waves.

Her reasoning is this: it is the lesser of two bad options. She isn’t going to drag Ren and Nora down with her, not if she can avoid it. And Pyrrha has already thrown down the gauntlet, so to speak, challenging them in the arena of social standing and etiquette. If there’s one thing Ruby knows about the world-famous Huntress, it is that she’s relentless to the last breath. Even if they back out now, this won’t be the end, far from it.

If she can just figure out the redhead’s intentions, she’ll gain the advantage. And the only way to do that, at the moment, is to play her game, and play it well. Well enough to keep her occupied and not get caught. She’s already deep in the belly of the Beacon. What’s one step further?

The determination in her silver eyes sends a message, and she feels the rest of Team Yarn relax.

“You heard her!” Nora barks, “We’ll find your missing cargo for you! Bring it on!”

Pyrrha nods, “Then, I shall get everything prepared. Weiss? If you could follow me?”

Weiss’s glare lands on them, cold and piercing. “You will return here tomorrow at nine o’clock sharp for a briefing. I will not tolerate tardiness for any reason!”

And with that, the two leave. With Pyrrha gone, the crowd around them disperses, leaving them alone. Velvet gets back to typing, pretending like they aren’t there.

“Well,” Yang says with uncertainty, “That was a thing.”

“The die is cast. We can only wait and see if it rolls in our favor,” says Ren.

Nora stares at her, eyes laden with concern. “You sure you’re okay with this, Ruby? I don’t know what’s going on between you and Pyrrha, but whatever it was sure as heck didn’t seem friendly!”

“I’m okay. We should get dinner, and some rest. Tomorrow’s going to be interesting.”

Her sister tousles her hair gently. “That’s one way of putting it, sis…”

Chapter Text

“Wait, so neither of you own Scrolls?”

For dinner, Team YRRN find themselves sitting at a dining table in one of the compound’s refectories. It is long and rectangular, stretching from end to end of the vast, lowered room, which leaves plenty of space for no one to come near them. That suits Ruby just fine.

“We came to Beacon with empty hands,” Ren explains as Nora tears into a chicken thigh. “Well, nearly empty. Nora carries a weapon around for self-defense, of course.”

“Issha hamma!”

“And you?” Ruby asks, curious. Then, realizing her slip-up, she adds, “I-I use a scythe. And Yang has these gauntlets.”

“Reach and power. Quite the pairing. As for me, I only have my Aura.”

Yang whistles in appreciation, “And you came all the way from Mistral just off of that? Must be some technique.”

“It is.”

Ruby picks at her food. It’s not that being part Grimm takes away the need for biological sustenance, but it does stymie her appetite a bit. Unfortunate, since eating as a normal person does tend to ease her hunger for negativity. If she’s biologically well-fed and hydrated, she can last days without feeding on someone else’s emotions. And it does have to be someone else’s. Her own brain chemicals don’t work, for whatever reason.

“Beacon didn’t give you Scrolls when you enlisted?”

“Nah, it’s cool though. Ren and I’ve got a secret signal for when we’re out in the wild! Caw-caw! Caw-caw!”

“Um.”

Ren’s stoic facade breaks momentarily into a grin. “It’s supposed to be a sloth.”

“That’s not what sloths sound like!” Yang says, “Here, repeat after me: Eep! Eeeeep!”

Nora gasps dramatically, eyes widening, her pile of food temporarily forgotten. After a moment she brings her hands together, one an open palm and the other a fist, and, with her elbows locked outwards, bows her head. “Does your sisterly wisdom know no bounds?!”

Ruby frowns. She’s at least ten percent certain her sister just made that up on the spot.

Dinner progresses all the same. After a while, she notices that Ren has stopped eating.

“Is something wrong?”

He holds his plastic fork up to his face disapprovingly, turning it over once before lowering it back down to his plate. “We’re meant to throw these away after one meal?”

“Yep. These crappy things don’t last that long anyway,” Yang bends and unbends the tip of her knife for emphasis.

He shakes his head, staring down at his utensils in despair and disbelief. “We live in excess…”

“Three cheers for excess, then!” Nora wolfs down yet another chicken thigh. “I wanna shake her hand!”

“Slow down a little, Nora. You’ll get sick.”

“Oh, definitely,” The ginger nods furiously, “But how often do you get to eat like this? Like queens?!”

Yang raises a brow. “Nora, this is basic cafeteria food.”

“Like queens, I said! Don’t spoil this for me!”

The uncharacteristic intensity coming from the girl takes her aback, and Ruby remembers Ren’s words from earlier. She quickly presses two fingers into Yang’s thigh, a secret signal of their own for her sister to shut up and stop asking questions. There’s a bitterness in front of her, a deep, longing sadness so flavorful and succulent that makes the food in front of her even blander by comparison. She wants nothing more than to reach over and slurp up Nora’s sorrow like a horse with a carrot, but she controls the impulse. Maybe it is a good thing she has Yang around all the time to keep herself sated.

“We should get you two Scrolls!” Ruby says, eager to change the topic. “After this first mission, after we get paid — we are getting paid for this, right?”

She’s met with three sets of blank stares, and upon realizing their shared predicament she decides to Stop Worrying about it. Either they get paid or they don’t, that’s not really what they’re here for anyway. Even if the extra cash might come in handy later.

But at the same time, the awkward silence is becoming unbearable. She has to say something. “Semblances! In case we run into serious trouble. Oh but, it’s okay if you don’t wanna share!”

“My Semblance lets me store kinetic energy,” Yang helpfully supplies, “Then — bam! Send it back out all at once. The perfect punch!”

Nora brightens up upon hearing Yang’s description. “Mine’s kinda the same actually! Only, it’s electrical energy and — ooh! Wanna know how I found out? ‘Cause let me tell you, running around butt naked in the middle of a raging thunderstorm was not –”

“Thank you, Nora!” Ren says quickly. “I can calm people’s emotions.”

“How does that work? Is there some sort of chemical reaction, or…?”

“Frankly, I’m not sure. We never had the opportunity to check.”

There’s another lull in the conversation. Belatedly Ruby realizes that all eyes are on her, waiting for her response.

“Oh! And my Semblance lets me sense Grimm. Um, better than Aura sensing, too. Location, species, size, age, general state of… aliveness, I can even find their targets if I really concentrate!”

This is only half-true, of course. She can do all of those things, but obviously not because of her Semblance. She’s pretty sure she had a Semblance, once upon a time back when she was still fully human, but not anymore. Being part Grimm lets her interface with her ‘kin’ when they’re nearby, even out of scent and sight, most likely thanks to some sort of psychic connection.

She doesn’t know for certain. What little is known of Grimm biology — aside from the knowledge closely guarded by Salem, which is inaccessible to her anyway — says absolutely nothing about how they communicate. And even if it is known, all assumptions go flying out the window for her case, being a hybrid and all that.

“Just Grimm?” Ren raises his eyebrow, “That’s oddly specific.”

She shrugs, “It is what it is. So we got two Semblances that power up over time, and two that help control the battlefield. Um, I think we should stick to hit-and-run tactics?”

“Gorilla warfare,” Nora nods along, completely serious.

“Guerrilla warfare, Nora.”

“Exactly!”

“That’s if we run into anything we can’t handle alone,” says Yang, “Which I gotta say, isn’t all that likely. Our uncle used to tell us that real Hunter missions — the kind they show in the news and such — don’t really appear until around the fourth Rank or so.”

“You two come from a family of Hunters, then?”

Ruby begins to tune her sister out as she launches into the convoluted tale of their family history. It’s personal information given freely and willingly, owing to the past notoriety of each of their parents, which any inquisitive individual can look into on their own and put the two-and-two together. And also, questions naturally arise when two very different looking individuals run around calling themselves sisters — questions that Ruby now realizes Ren and Nora never asked. They had simply accepted the two of them without suspicion.

“And then there’s mom. Summer Rose. She’s, ah…”

“She’s dead.” Ruby finishes. Somehow the food on her plate seems even more unpalatable. She stuffs the rest into her mouth before she has second thoughts.

“Our condolences.”

She watches in silence as the rest of them finish their meals. Ren and Nora both clean their plates with prejudice, and Ren’s look of disgust as he dumps his plate and utensils in the trash does not go unnoticed by her. She wonders, briefly, what his deal is, but drowsiness is already setting in, and each of them agree that they’ve had enough for today, of both food and socializing.

The trek back to the dorms is short, and after a brief discussion and agreement over quiet hours and bathroom privileges, she and Yang retreat to bedroom 6B, prepared to turn in for the night.

What a long day! With Yang standing guard in front of the door (one can never be too careful!), she strips out of the high-collared blouse, combat skirt and stockings that consists of her hunting outfit, careful not to let the fabric get caught on her exoskeleton. Then, she slips into her pajamas with equal care, avoiding the tiny ridge-like protrusion running straight down the middle of her chest like a mountain range.

It’s a routine she’s done a thousand times over ever since the bone-like armor grew in, starting from her sternum. The growth is most pronounced there, though recently she’s noticed bumps and spikes — no larger than a grain of rice — growing along her arms and legs. Normal clothes cover all of them just fine for now, but she’s worried that one of these days she won’t be able to hide it anymore. Hence her early application to Beacon.

“You know we’re screwed if you get hurt too bad, right?” Yang reminds her for the millionth time, cheerful demeanor from earlier in the day all but gone.

“They won’t hurt me.”

“It’s not the Grimm I’m worried about.”

Wordlessly, she climbs into bed, taking the top bunk. Even with the extra weight from her bones, she’s still lighter than Yang, and if anyone walks in on them they’d have to be really tall to spot anything amiss. She wishes her sister good night as the sole lamp in the room goes out.

She sleeps soundly, dreaming of nothing. Sunlight peeks through the window when she awakes, bouncing off the white of the room and brightening her eyes. Something smells nice, and for once it’s not an emotion.

“Wakey wakey, sleepyhead,” Yang says from below, “Ren made pancakes.”

“Wha’ time issit?”

“Half past seven. Hurry up and get ready, I need to go down and retrieve our weapons.”

“M‘kaaay.”

Still a bit sleepy, she snatches her clothes from her sister’s hands, stepping into the living room. From the kitchen she sees Ren flipping pancakes on a skillet, stacks already set out for himself and her. A pitcher stands on the counter next to him, and judging by the amount of batter inside it is likely that Nora has not woken up yet.

6A’s door is ajar, granting her a complete view of the room inside. Sure enough, she spots the sleeping form of the orange-haired girl, dangling precariously over the edge of the small, singular bed occupying the room’s corner. True to Ren’s word, she doesn’t see a single piece of luggage or other personal belongings anywhere, save for an unassuming steel war hammer leaning up against the corner. Empty hands indeed.

After a quick shower and change and a casual conversation over breakfast (the pancakes are good, but not nearly as good as Weiss’s crippling loneliness) the three of them descend to the domicile lobby. Her sister waits for them, gauntlets already strapped tightly to her arms, scythe slung over her back.

Turning the weapon over in her hands, she considers the options now available to her at Beacon. Her current scythe has one mechanism built in, allowing it to shift into something more portable. But she can do better, now. Way better. And if her hunch is right, she’s not the only one.

The idea lingers in her mind as Team YRRN heads over to Beacon’s central dome. After this mission, she’ll head straight to the forges.

Velvet is not at the reception to wave them in. Someone else she doesn’t recognize instead directs them to one of the meeting rooms on the ground floor. Its walls are darkened glass, maintaining the aesthetic of the other offices without revealing what’s inside. And what’s inside, of course, is Weiss and Pyrrha.

“Everyone is present. Good.” Weiss wastes no time on pleasantries, instead opening a three dimensional projection from her Scroll, “Here’s what happened.”

Hard-light fills the room, shaping into a forest of neon blues and whites. Through this forest runs a single line of rail track, elevated above the trees, and on that track runs a railroad car, highlighted in black. Discounting the locomotive and the caboose, Ruby counts ten separate freight cars linked together in a chain.

“At five in the morning yesterday, this Schnee Dust Company line was attacked by unknown assailants, leading to the connection between cars Nine and Ten being cut.” The projection updates along with Weiss’s description. “We were able to confirm the arrival of cars One through Nine later in the morning, but Ten remains unaccounted for.”

“What, so it, like, disappeared off the railroad?” Yang asks.

“Precisely. Each car is linked to the track, which constantly broadcasts its precise location along the rail back to us. Car Ten went dark mere minutes after the attack, and we’ve yet to locate it.”

Nora speaks up next. “You sure it didn’t just malfunction? Has anyone checked in person to see if it’s just sitting there?”

“Yes. I’m sure.” Weiss shoots her a glare, and the map projection shifts once more, showing the missing train cars blinking red. Overlapping them is another train, clearly distinct from the one shown earlier. “I have reason to believe the missing car, and its contents are still somewhere within Forever Fall. Your mission will be to find it, and attach at least one of these trackers to it. Do nothing else to it! I will handle the rest.”

Pyrrha hands each of them a small disc-shaped object, chrome and featureless, saving for a single blinking light on one side. Ruby pockets the device with one hand, and raises the other.

“Speak.”

“Why do you still think it’s in the forest? If whoever did this managed to remove a whole train car from the tracks within a few minutes, then surely they’d be out of the Forever Fall by now.”

Weiss flinches, trying her hardest not to give anything away. Behind the icy mask Ruby senses apprehension, and a hint of shame. “I have my reasons. It does not matter. You will all be compensated handsomely if it turns out they have fled with the cargo beyond the reaches of the forest. Pyrrha? You had something to add?”

“Some of our Hunters recently did a sweep of Forever Fall, about four days ago I believe. There shouldn’t be too many Grimm left after the cull, so I don’t expect us to run into many problems during our search.”

“There you have it,” Weiss all but pushes them out of the meeting room. “I’ve prepared a Bullhead at the docks. You will complete your mission and return by sundown or not return at all!”

“Someone’s wound up,” Yang says as the five of them head to the docks and board the aircraft, “Would it kill her to take the stick out of her ass every once and a while?”

Team YRRN sits on one side of the Bullhead. Pyrrha sits on the other, hands folded over her lap, a polite, strained smile on her face. Ruby smells… anxiety? Why would a Rank 1 Huntress be anxious about a mission into one of the least dangerous forests in all of Remnant?

“So…” Pyrrha says halfway through the flight. “How do you four know each other?”

Yang turns her head away. Nora does too, but also sticks out her tongue in the process. Ren just stares back, making eye contact, completely expressionless.

The words escape her mouth before she can think. “Um, we’re roommates.”

“Oh! The dorms! I remember when I first started out. My second roommate ended up getting swallowed whole by a Sea Feilong…” Pyrrha’s face suddenly turns a bright tomato-red. “B-But I can assure you, it was only due to his own recklessness! You have nothing to fear, so long as you stick close to me, and follow the regulations and guidelines laid out by Sir Ozma! Nothing at all!”

“Gee, thanks. I feel better already.” Yang says dryly.

Reeking of desperation, the Huntress continues, “Besides, the Grimm of the Forever Fall are much, much weaker. Low-level Beowolves, Boarbatusks, Creeps — what was everyone’s first kill? I realized the path my life would take when I slew a lone Ursa on the outskirts of my hometown!”

“Beowolf.” Ruby and her sister say in unison. It’s all Patch has, after all. Well, all that isn’t immediately sought out and exterminated by more experienced Hunters, that is.

“Centinel,” says Nora, “It tried to sneak up on us when we first made camp.”

When it becomes clear that everyone is done talking, Pyrrha clears her throat nervously, glancing out the side of the Bullhead. “W-Well then! Looks like we’re here!”

Ruby takes a look outside, and is met with a sea of reds, oranges and yellows. The Forever Fall forest is beautiful, sure, but that’s not really what she’s focused on. There are Grimm here. Sure, their numbers have been culled in the recent sweep, but there are still far more than was available to her on Patch, and in greater varieties, too. As long as she can get everyone separated…

“We should split up,” she announces as they land near the site of the attack, “cover more ground that way.”

Pyrrha makes to interrupt, but Yang quickly hooks an arm around the older girl’s elbow, tossing Ren and Nora her Scroll. “Good thinking, Rubes! We’ve got a whole forest to explore by nightfall!”

Ignoring the redhead’s protestations, Ren looks down at the caught Scroll, then at Nora, then back at Yang. He nods, and suddenly Nora tackles the struggling pair, switching Yang’s arm out for her own. “Then this should be our formation. I… don’t know how to use this.”

“You don’t know how to use a Scroll? And what about Ruby? You’ll let the youngest of you wander off alone?”

“Ruby’ll be fine! Her Semblance’ll keep her safe!” Nora cackles, forcibly dragging their ‘mentor’ further and further away from the group. The careful facade finally breaks, and she pushes herself away from Nora, visibly frustrated.

“We move as a group! It’s safer that way!”

Yang takes her Scroll back from Ren, frowning. “You said it yourself, there are only low-level Grimm here. I mean, do you want us all to fail our first mission because we were too slow?”

Pyrrha rears back as if physically struck, glancing between Ruby and Yang. “No! I didn’t mean — I’m only — I just wanted to…!”

“Our Scrolls are linked!” Ruby says helpfully, “We’re good to go!”

“…Fine! But promise me you’ll return to the drop site at the first sign of trouble. There’s no shame in running away against a foe you can’t handle.”

“Gotcha, P-Money,” Yang gives a thumbs up, leaving the redhead utterly bewildered.

In her shock, Nora takes the chance to steal her away into the forest eastward, loudly whispering, “So, I heard that certain trees here produce this sap that tastes like syrup…”

Ruby lets out a sigh of relief. That’s her biggest obstacle gone, at least for now. Reaching out with her senses, she feels a presence to the south, along the rail line.

“You two wanna follow the rail north?”

“Ren, is that good with you?”

The older boy nods, “Be careful, Ruby.”

“I always am!”

She waits until both groups disappear among the trees before making her move. Following the tug of connection to her kin, she weaves through the forest, looking out for the missing train car in case it happens to be along the way. Leaves crunch beneath her feet loudly, but with her senses tuned to the Grimm an ambush is impossible. Not that they would attack her unprovoked, anyway. Her nature as a hybrid tends to confuse first, offend later.

Finally, she finds what she’s looking for. A lone Boarbatusk, separated from its pack. It growls, scuffing its feet against the dry patches of grass and dirt. Dipping its head, its tusks aim directly at her, but it does not charge. Alone and restless, it does not know what she is. Only that she is an outsider, and potentially, a threat.

She makes no effort to reach out, to connect with the creature, to pacify it. For her, this is a matter of survival.

The popular perception of the creatures of Grimm is that they have no soul. But that does not mean they are without essence. Like a soul, it’s incorporeal, invisible to the naked eye, and intangible to all living things, save for two. Salem can manipulate a Grimm’s ‘core’, shaping it to her liking, creating new monstrosities with each passing day. As for Ruby…

She takes a step forward, brandishing her scythe. The Boarbatusk charges.

It’s much faster than its stature leads her to believe. Tusks harder than steel clash against the snath of her scythe, overwhelming her through sheer momentum alone. Suddenly she’s laid flat on the ground, barely keeping the Grimm from crushing her with its weight alone.

With a yell, she pushes back with all her might, only just raising the Grimm up high enough to slip out from under it, leaving her scythe behind. The creature stamps her weapon into the dirt, and charges once more. She’s ready this time, leaping aside just before it can strike her.

Then the Boarbatusk begins spinning like a wheel, rolling towards her at even higher speeds. She plants her feet together and channels her Aura into the earth, leaping over the Grimm with a spring-like kick. Her control’s not nearly as good as Yang’s, but it gets the job done, sending her high above the Grimm as it spins under and past her into a tree, losing all momentum as the rebound sends it flipping through the air.

In the split second that its back lands on the ground, Ruby makes a decision. She can run over to where her scythe has fallen, pick it up, and start the fight all over again. Or, she can try and kill the creature while its belly is exposed. She chooses the latter.

To an outside observer, what happens next looks a little something like this.

Like a volcanic island rising from the ocean, a bone mask creeps out from the outline of skin on her face, covering her from her forehead down to her nose. Red markings run down the length of the mask, a pair of curved lines with sharp points branching off of them like thorns. Her silver eyes flicker and die, the sclera turning dark as an ominous red glow takes the place of her pupils.

Her jaw widens and sinks lower into her neck, teeth sharpening into rows of deadly spikes. Her tongue lengthens and turns black, the skin around her lips grow furry, clashing against the rest of her face in jagged, uneven patches. A wolf-like growl escapes her throat as she pounces, arms and knees pinning down hard, Beowolf fangs sinking into soft, unprotected flesh.

The Boarbatusk squeals and thrashes, stubby legs swinging dangerously close to her body as it rocks violently against her grip. She lets her Aura tank the blows as her fangs rip into its stomach once more, muscle and sinew pulling free with a wet snap. Over, and over, until the Boarbatusks thrashing becomes convulsing, and convulsing becomes twitching, until finally it lays lifeless in front of her.

Breathing hard, she spits out bits of gristle and viscera. The body is already beginning to dissolve, black wisps of smoke trailing into the air starting from its feet. In a matter of moments, all will be gone, from the soft fleshy bits of its insides to the bone armor protecting its back. She needs to act fast.

She plunges her hand deep into the decaying Grimm, rooting around its muscles and viscera, searching for the core. Black blood spurts out of the opening, agitated by her digging, staining her clothes. The corpse has nearly swallowed her shoulder before she grasps the essence, and suddenly the invisible and intangible becomes something else, a tiny marble, glowing and red.

Without a second to spare, she shoves the orb into her mouth. It shatters like glass with a satisfying crunch.

Then, something ripples under her skin, buzzing and humming with power. A familiar feeling washes over her, just the same as when she killed her first Beowolf, and grew its teeth. Spectre’s voice echoes, harsh and gravely yet smooth and gentle, booming yet no louder than a whisper, the chaotic, discordant voice of untold millions telling her — no, commanding her from deep within her soul. Providence in three words.

C̴o̵n̶s̵u̸m̴e̸.̶ ̴E̴v̷o̷l̴v̵e̸.̴ ̷O̵v̵e̸r̴c̸o̷m̴e̴.̴

Peeling back her sleeve, she watches as the skin on her forearm ruptures and bursts, bubbling like lava. Strands and globules of black goo spring forth from the opening, wrapping around her limb like a cast, fitting as tightly as a second skin. There’s a scratching sound of something stretching and growing within her, and soon enough stark-white surface of bone begins to protrude from the wrapping, flat and angular like an arrowhead, arranged in an overlaying pattern.

The proud plate armor of the Boarbatusk covers her arm like a vambrace. She swings it into a nearby tree, feeling the bone absorb the shock of the blow while leaving a sizable impact in the bark.

“Huh,” says Ruby, letting her Grimm biology fade to a resting state. Her mask recedes, her jaw shrinks and locks back into place, her plates shuffle back under her forearm. She blinks, pulling her sleeve up, once again seeing the world through silver eyes.

“Neat!”

Chapter Text

It’s not long after she’s hunted her prey that her Scroll goes off.

“Ruby here!”

“Yello! It’s Yang.”

“Hello again!” Pyrrha’s voice rings over the speaker. “Nora and I have come across an object of interest. Sending you the coordinates now.”

“We’re heading over. Rubes?”

“On my way!”

Well, that was fast. She’s barely had time to hunt a single Boarbatusk! Though, maybe she shouldn’t push her luck. If her battle has shown her anything, it’s that years of hunting exclusively Beowolves on Patch has left holes in her fighting style that should be, er, patched up before she takes any more unnecessary risks.

“‘Come across an object of interest’, why can’t she just say she found the dang thing?” Ruby grumbles, stashing her Scroll. The coordinates are farther east of her current location, and a bit of a ways north. Even moving faster alone, she suspects Yang and Ren will beat her there.

At least it sounds like none of them have run into any trouble. That’s a relief. She doesn’t know what she’d do with herself if Ren or Nora got hurt because they teamed up with her.

Not that they’re aware, but the whole point of infiltrating Beacon alone (or as alone as her sister would let her) is to keep as few people as possible from being dragged into her struggle. Even her father and uncle think she’s only staying with Yang — the rookie Huntress and her tagalong little sister. The loophole that let her register as a Huntress under ‘Rose’ rather than ‘Xiao Long’ was quite useful for that particular lie, and given the volume of Hunters applying to Beacon every year, it’s unlikely that they’ll ever catch on. Especially with how busy they are, chasing after a literal ghost of the past.

Meanwhile, Ozma just thinks she’s following in the footsteps of her mother, against their wishes, and has elected to keep quiet like the schemer he is. Well, he’s not wrong about that, just about which set of footsteps she’s following. Two sides of the same deception.

As she walks, the autumn leaves crunching and crackling beneath her, she ponders her newly acquired ability. On its own it’s nothing special. Bone plating to shore up the gaps in her defenses, where her weakened Aura fails her. About the same can be accomplished with regular armor, all without giving her Grimm nature away. Maybe there’s some hidden application she’s not thinking of…

Not that she’ll have the time or space to experiment with it, now that she’s at Beacon. And so her Grimm abilities remain the ace up her sleeve, rather than her primary form of combat. She adds the training halls to the list of facilities she’ll need to hit up once this mission is over, alongside the forges and probably the academy at some point.

Actually, she’s certain lower ranked Hunters are encouraged to take classes at the academy if they want to better themselves. A strong enough meathead might be able to soar through the ranks through raw effort alone, but she’s not aiming for the top. And she might as well use all the boons available to her while she still can.

Eventually she comes across a clearing. She hears her companions before she sees them, sounds of Yang and Pyrrha arguing tipping her off that she’s the last to arrive. And if she has to guess, they’re arguing about her.

Sure enough, when she arrives at the scene, the two are facing off — at a very respectful distance of, generously, about the width of a human hair. Nora stands off to the side, seeming content to stay back and let them go at it, and Ren is, well…

Ren is studying the only other thing in the clearing. A large, black metal box, much longer than it is wide, with a curved top and a light-blue snowflake insignia painted on the sides. The cargo, then. It sits on a set of wheels, now deeply sunken into the earth, with a line of tracks leading off into the forest. But then… oh, the thick carpet of leaves Forever Fall produces daily must have covered up the earlier tracks leading away from the rail line. Otherwise the initial investigation of the scene of the crime would have easily turned up this thing’s location.

She draws closer, but Yang and Pyrrha are too deeply engrossed in their argument to notice. Nora gives her a cheery wave.

“I’ve known her my entire life. You’ve known her for all of five minutes! So when I say she’ll be alright, I mean it!”

“Then where is she? You must admit it, sending our youngest off alone was foolish and short-sighted! I cannot believe I let you… badger me into allowing it to happen!”

Yang’s eye twitches red. She’s about to blow a fuse. “What do you mean ‘our’? You really think you’re one of us? Why, I oughta–”

“Hi! I’m here! Sorry I’m late!”

“Ruby!” Yang’s demeanor switches like a flip. In an instant Ruby is enveloped in her rapidly cooling embrace, sucking the anger out of her like a straw. “Did you find anything interesting?”

“Not really,” Ruby whispers back. “Catch you up later.”

Yang releases her, and turns towards the group, all smiles. “Well, the gang’s all here! Now let’s crack this sucker open and go home!”

Only Ren responds. Pyrrha just stares at Yang as if she’s suggested Beringels could fly, and Nora is looking off into the distance. “A moment, please.”

The older boy stalks around the freighter, searching it up and down. At one point he lays his hands against the flat against the metal container, nodding his head lightly. Then he checks the doors, attempting to open them to no avail. Finally, he turns towards them.

“This is the one. But, I do not think there is anything inside.”

“Nothing?” Nora says, catching Ruby’s attention. She can smell the orange-haired girl’s nervousness from a mile away.

Ren shakes his head, and she gets the feeling an entire unspoken conversation has just passed between the two in that singular moment. “It’s empty.”

“Welp, sucks for the Ice Queen,” Yang walks up and slaps a tracker onto the metal plating, where it sticks, magnetized. “But our job here is done. Great work, team!”

Suddenly, their Scrolls begin ringing all at once. Ruby answers, letting Nora look over her shoulder, still sweating with worry.

“You have found the shipment? Good. Wait there until I arrive.”

“Hold on, Weiss. There’s something you should–”

“I will be there shortly. Do not leave until then!”

Her Scroll shuts off with a beep. For a second all she can do is stare down, bewildered. Then she looks to her teammates. Nora slumps her shoulders back, tilting her head to the sky.

“Now we’ve really stepped in it…”

“Whatever do you mean?” Pyrrha asks sweetly. Or maybe that’s just how she sounds by default. Ruby isn’t so sure.

Regardless of how gently the gold-clad Huntress might have phrased it though, it has no effect on Nora. “Don’t play dumb with me, buster! You know exactly what’s about to happen, don’t you?!”

Panic grips her. “W-We’re not in any danger, are we?”

“No,” Ren answers, eyes narrowed, as if that’s a bad thing, “We aren’t.”

The spinning of propeller blades and the roar of engines from above direct her attention to the skies. Two aircrafts circle over them; one the bullhead that initially dropped them off in the Forever Fall, the other shiny white airship with the Schnee crest emblazoned on its sides. Ruby finds herself and everyone else crowded against the found cargo, making space in the clearing for both vehicles to land.

Out of the latter steps Weiss Schnee, quickly followed by a small security detail of two, as well as a man and a woman. The man carries a camera, the woman a microphone. On their vests and equipment are the letters ‘VNN’. Ruby might have spent her whole life on Patch but even she knows what that stands for. Vale News Network. But why would Weiss bring the press all the way out here?

Yang steps defensively in front of her as the cameraman snaps a candid photo. Luckily, most of his attention is on Pyrrha, and she’s almost completely obscured in a way that still looks natural. Moving fast, she grabs Yang’s arm and pulls her off to the side, away from the stolen train car — the focus of attention. Ren and Nora quickly follow suit, leaving Pyrrha behind as the redhead deals with Weiss. It seems none of them have any desire to be caught on camera.

From a distance, Ruby is unable to hear the words exchanged between the two, but the conversation looks amicable, with it ending when Weiss is allowed to step past the older girl and towards the freighter. The heiress waves her security team over, who pry open the electronically secured lock and step inside along with her.

“Here we go,” Ren growls, an unusual animosity in his voice despite the fact that she cannot smell even a hint of negativity on him. Was this his Semblance, or was he just that good at keeping a lid on it?

After a moment, the security detail steps out, making way for the heiress, who strides triumphantly into the sunlight again, holding something in her hands. She squints. Weiss begins talking and gesticulating in large, exaggerated motions. Through the flashing of camera light and the waving of microphones, and the general chaos of the charade playing out right in front of her eyes, she finally makes out what’s in the white-haired girl’s hands.

It’s a torn piece of cloth. Black as the night sky, save for a single, embroidered, curved ivory fang. The imagery flaps in and out of view as Weiss waves it around.

Then, a sentence, loudly and proudly declared, carried across the clearing on the winds. “I will not stand for these blatant acts of terror against our company!”

Realization strikes her like a lightning bolt. Why that little…! She takes a step forward. A hand blocks her.

“Ruby,” says Ren, gesturing towards the camera crew. “The world watches. Pick and choose your battles wisely.”

She hisses in protest but does not push past him. “But — but she’s lying! You said it yourself, the freaking thing was empty!”

“And in your effort to dispel the lie you will start a fight you will not be able to win. Think carefully, Ruby. We have not found ourselves in this position by accident.”

In a panic, she looks to Yang. Her sister stares back, wide-eyed and uncertain. She looks to Nora, to the orange-haired girl’s tightly clenched fists, and then back to Ren’s impenetrable, determined gaze.

“Then what do we do? We can’t let her get away with this!”

Ren shakes his head. “She already has. We lost this battle the moment we accepted the request.”

As Weiss spouts bold-faced lie after bold-faced lie into the microphone, her gaze shifts over to Pyrrha, who is standing in the background of the camera conversing with the SDC’s security detail. The Huntress looks very serious, but unlike Ren and Nora’s, there’s no fire behind the expression. Put another way, it’s about as threatening as a defanged Beowolf. What could she possibly be discussing?

Sensing her dissatisfaction with his answer, Ren continues, “We do not know for certain that the container was entirely empty.”

“But you said–”

“I know. But put yourself in the shoes of the hypothetical observer of our argument. Would you trust the word of a rookie Huntsman, who you have no reason to believe has developed an Aura sensing technique, or the physical evidence that has presented itself where you would expect it?”

Still she cannot let it go. She persists. “But to our outside observer, shouldn’t this whole situation stink of foul play? I mean, whoever’s emblem that is — they were thorough enough to clean out the entire freighter but not enough to notice their clothing has torn? Who wouldn’t notice that?”

“I suspect those particular details won’t make it into the headline of tomorrow’s news. Instead, they'll be hidden away in some intentionally obfuscating sentence of a single line of a single paragraph. And,” he speaks over her, knowing what she’ll say next, “I’m sorry, Ruby, but most people won’t care enough to seek the truth. Not with the way things are now.”

Not with the way things are now? What in the world did that mean?

While she ponders his words, mind searching for a way forward, for a way to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, Weiss has already finished speaking, directing Pyrrha over to them while she makes to leave on the airship she arrived in. The craft hovers over the site, and steel cables shoot down onto the train car below, lifting it up and away. Meanwhile, the Rank 1 Huntress walks up to them, her distress as thin and bland as sugar-free cotton candy.

“While Weiss is disappointed that the thieves appear to have made off with the contents,” Pyrrha winces under Team YRRN’s collective glare, but holds her smile steady, “She acknowledges that you four have completed the mission as agreed upon. She’ll be sending her reward over your Scrolls shortly. Congratulations, you four are one step closer to Rank 6!”

When none of them respond, Pyrrha claps her hands together. “Now then! This is where we shall part ways, for now. I have other business to attend to here, and I’m sure you’ll want to… take some time after your first mission to celebrate! I-If you’ll excuse me!”

With a clink in her step the older girl speed-walks deeper into the wood of the Forever Fall. The team, silent and sullen, boards the Bullhead, and Ruby watches as the reds and oranges of the forest fade away as they make their way back to Beacon. The four of them are seated all around the loading bay, scattered.

It is Ren that breaks the long silence. “I must apologize. To all of you.”

Nora shakes her head, “Oh, Ren…”

“What for?”

“I… had my misgivings about this mission from the start, yet chose not to voice them. Perhaps if I had this all could have been avoided.”

“She would have found someone else,” Yang tries, “And besides, we all signed off on this–”

“What made you not want to voice them?” Oops. Sorry, sis.

Hesitation. Then: “I did not think you would believe me. Frankly, I did not want to believe it myself.” He sighs, voice weary with an age beyond his years, “How pitiful. We cannot let our guards down even once…”

“Once?”

“Ren and I have experience with this sort of thing,” Nora explains, “Honestly, we should have seen this coming from a mile away. We got complacent.”

Yang scrunches an eyebrow. “What do you mean, experience? You two have been through something like this before?”

“Yes,” says Ren, “And we will in the future, no doubt. If you do not wish to associate with us, knowing this, then we completely understand.”

Something clicks into place. And suddenly, Ruby senses an opportunity. But whether or not she takes it depends entirely on what happens next.

“Walk me through it.”

Ren and Nora look up at her, surprised. “Through what?”

“Everything that felt off about this mission. Start from the beginning.”

The Mistralan pair look to each other, then back at her. “Very well,” Ren draws a deep breath, “let us start with Weiss Schnee. The heiress of the Schnee Dust Company — the richest company in the world — and yet you first encountered her on the air bus to Beacon. She came to make a request in person, and on public transportation, no less. Why do you think that is?”

Ruby thinks upon it for a minute. “Because she wanted to observe. To familiarize herself with who she’d be working with.”

“Bingo,” says Nora. “It’s easier to draw in a rookie who doesn’t know what they’re doing. Bait them in, then pressure and overwhelm them into making mistakes.”

“We may even have to consider the possibility that her argument with Cardin Winchester was a part of it as well. As was Pyrrha’s convenient appearance.”

“Hold on, Ren,” says Yang, “Isn’t that a little paranoid?”

Nora just laughs, “You think that’s paranoid? Sister, you have a lot to learn! But anyway, next is the mission itself. Ruby, you’ve already pointed out a few inconsistencies; what I want to focus on is how important it was that this was a Hunter’s mission. Think about it, shouldn’t 'Bourgeoi-Schnee' over there have enough resources to look for the dang thing on her own?”

Ruby blinks. “Uh, yeah. I guess that detail did slip past me. It was a search, not an escort mission.”

Nora taps her temple. “See? We got sucked in by their argument. It’s not paranoid, it’s smart.”

“I’m sure you are wondering why it needed to be that way,” Ren continues, “Since it was discovered far away from its original location by a third party — a third party belonging to an institution of great repute, no less — the findings must be reliable, right? Thus legitimacy is granted, and consent is manufactured on all levels, from Beacon, from the press, from the SDC, to the public.”

“Consent?” Yang asks.

“Consent,” Nora repeats, “to ‘retaliate’ against their true target. The organization using the fang emblem — Ren, do we know who they are?”

Ren shakes his head, “Unfortunately, my knowledge of Vale’s politics is… lacking.”

“Nothing a quick search online won’t turn up. Like Ruby said, we gotta get you two Scrolls! Ruby?”

“Sorry.” She snaps out of her daze, “I just… I’m having trouble wrapping my head around this. And you two say you’ve been in situations like this before? When?”

Nora gives a wry smile. “It’s a little too early in the story to be telling you about our tragic pasts, don’tcha think?”

“Back to the point at hand,” says Ren, “knowing all this, do you still wish to…?”

Her sister locks eyes with her. They have their own little unspoken conversation, and then Yang speaks: “Of course. Team YRRN forever!”

Nora gasps, eyes shimmering. “Big sis…!”

“Hey, only Ruby gets to call me that!”

Like they’ve known each other all their lives, the two fall into playful bickering. Ren eyes Ruby carefully, trying to read her expression. But she keeps a cool, calm face; though she has plenty to hide, she knows that — at least on this front — they are aligned. The way Ren just spoke of Beacon, of Hunters, tells her that her ears did not fool her, hours earlier back at Beacon’s central hub. On some level, he despises them.

That raises the question of what he and Nora are even doing here in the first place, but nevertheless, it means one less potential enemy to worry about in the future. And one less potential ally on Ozma’s side…

Chapter Text

The rest of Ruby’s first week at Beacon plays out a little something like this.

One day after her first mission, she takes Nora over to Beacon’s forges. It took some convincing of the ginger — who was somehow satisfied with the most basic of basics — but after much begging and pleading she acquiesced. Perhaps Ruby’s a bit biased, being a living weapon herself, but she can’t understand how anyone can settle for such a boring weapon. It doesn’t even have a single mechanical component!

The heat licks at her skin long before they even reach the building, a tall, stocky rectangular thing of concrete, metal and smoke. With her is her scythe, Nora’s hammer, and the last of the money from the Schnee job, just in case. No one’s brought the events of yesterday up since their discussion on the Bullhead, but Ruby’s certain it isn’t over, whatever ‘it’ is. Not entirely.

Anyway, as the two of them step inside, she’s immediately struck by how much nicer the facility is compared to the one she’s used to back on Patch. So much so that she’s almost intimidated. But she can’t show fear now — not when she’s finally someone’s senior!

And so, taking Nora by the hand, she leads the older girl deeper into the forges. The walls and floor are polished to a gleam, brightly illuminated from lights embedded high above them. Blast door after locked blast door they pass, down to the room she’s reserved for the day. When she waves her ID against the card reader, the door slides open smoothly, revealing a circular room.

It’s comparatively modest — they are only Rank 7, after all — with the smithing station placed in the back such that it’s the first thing you see when looking in. All around the circumference are tool stations, waste chutes, storage cabinets, and metalworking equipment. Placed in the center are a few packages, requested by Ruby after she made the initial reservation. She had to shell out most of her reward money for it, but it will be worth it in the long run.

“Let’s do yours, first. I can be here all day!” She says, dragging a hesitant Nora into the smithy.

“Listen Ruby, I appreciate you doing this for me, but I still have no clue what I need out of a new weapon…”

“That’s why we’re here, silly!” Hanging her scythe on one of the weapon’s racks, she takes the Extremely Boring Hammer from Nora, and examines it more closely. For all of, like, five seconds. There’s not much there, just simple iron and wood. Well made, at the very least. “So, anything giving you trouble lately?”

“Capitalism.”

“Huh?”

“Nevermores, mostly,” Nora answers, “The little creeps won’t ever come within hammerin’ range! When Ren and I run into one we usually just wait it out under cover until it gets bored and leaves.”

Ruby sets down the hammer and runs over to the tool station. It's a modular wonder of modern technology, attached on a large horizontal disk protruding from the wall. At the swipe of her fingers, the disk and station retracts. The faint whirring and humming of machinery sings in her ears, and before long the desk returns, now fully equipped with fresh blueprint paper and accompanying tools.

“Okay! Some way to deliver fire at a long distance, then. Nevermore feathers are flammable, I think.”

“You think?”

“It says so on my dad’s old notes. But I… haven’t actually fought one.”

Nora sidles up to her, looking at the empty canvas from over her shoulder. “Not a lot of birdies on Patch?”

“Not a lot of anything,” Ruby shakes her head, “Just Beowolves, and the occasional sea monster. Sea Feilong. Cephalossi.”

“Cepha-wha?”

“Oh! Um, the Cephalossus, it’s a big fat squid Grimm. With like a bajillion extra tentacles. And teeth, lots and lots of teeth. Used to swallow entire ships whole, back in the day. Apparently the only way to kill one is to shoot a bomb down its mouth, to shred it from the inside — a-anyways, what were we talking about?”

A small, amused smirk creeps up Nora’s lips, “Setting birds on fire with a gun?”

“Right, right! So, a flamethrower’s effective range won’t be good enough for a Nevermore, which means we’ll either have to rely on Dust bullets, or explosives. Anything that can be propelled a long way, really. Now for bullets, it’ll probably take a few shots to burn off enough feathers to make an impact, so your aim’s gotta be real good if you wanna go down that route. Grenades, shells, rockets can all work well without the need for a direct hit, but it can be tricky getting the flames to stick with a slower rate of fire and higher recoil. I’d recommend it if you’ve got ammunition to spare. Didja get all that? I’m not going too fast, am I?”

“I…” Nora blinks, “I think so? My aim’s no good, but I think I can handle any amount of recoil just fine.”

“Okay, cool.” says Ruby, her hands a blur as she sketches out a preliminary design.

Her first instinct is to place the grenade launcher in the head of the hammer, to explosively increase its striking power. But that greatly increases the risk of clogging up the barrel with debris, and a shutter mechanism may add a potential extra point of failure that can blow up in Nora’s face. Literally. Sooo…

A thought occurs to her. She takes another look at the old war hammer, with its flat, broad head. “Say, Nora? How do you typically handle Grimm?”

“Oh,” says Nora, her smile brightening at the fond memories, “I usually just hit them with the hammer until they stop moving.”

“Um. Right. And how do you get around, for example, the armor of a Deathstalker?”

“…Hit it until it breaks?”

Ruby feels her face flush red, “Look, basically, a war hammer should have two sides — a flat end to distribute force through a surface, and a spiky end to concentrate it at a single point — yours only has one, the flat, so you’ve been doing extra work where you really shouldn’t have to!”

“I guess that makes sense,” Nora gets into a stance, flexing her muscles, “No wonder I always get tired after the first few hundred swings.”

“E-Exactly! So here’s what I was thinking…”

The process of explaining her ideas to Nora goes slowly, passing time in the blink of an eye as she ends up spending the whole day building Nora’s knowledge up from zero; it’s clear that the ginger has never handled anything more complex than a crossbow. When questioned, Nora can only explain that she never had the opportunity to. So Ruby teaches the older girl the very basics of modern weaponry, of the principles of mekashift functions and of the foundations for any proper hybrid weapon. By the time they move out of theory and into her practical ideas for converting the Extremely Boring Hammer into something cooler, it’s already dinner time.

Deciding that her roommates has had enough for one day, she calls it. Nora’s grateful enough to bring her a meal, which she eats by the heat of the forge. Bidding the other girl goodbye, she shifts focus to her own weapon as she crams the burger down her throat, and the ideas spring forth once more.

Nora isn’t the only one with a range issue.

Two days after her first mission, she decides to attend one of Doctor Oobleck’s lectures with Ren. And instantly regrets it.

Not because of Ren, of course. But the lecture is somehow too fast and too slow at the same time. The doctor speaks with the speed and fluidity of raging river, but the subject matter — a history of Vale — is soooo boring. She can hardly bring herself to pay attention for more than five seconds, even though coming here was her idea in the first place.

It doesn’t help that she stayed up past midnight yesterday in the forges, and only left when the staff kicked her out because her paid-for session had expired. She wants to nod off for a nap, and the desk and her notes look oh so comfy…

A poke to the ribs jolts her awake. Mildly Aura reinforced, in such a way that the touch reverberates across her entire body. Ren must have plenty of experience wrangling Nora, if she had to guess.

“If you do not know where you’ve come from,” Ren whispers the proverb to her, stoic, “You do not know where you’re going.”

Making an effort not to let the older boy down, she squares her shoulders, focuses her eyes and ears on the lecture, engages all 100% of her brain muscles and — ha ha ha, yeah no. Back to doodling weapon designs in her notebook.

She hears a small sigh of disappointment from Ren beside her, but the prodding ceases. With one ear kept open, filtering for keywords in Oobleck’s history lecture, she passes the time sketching. All is well, the skies are clear, the sun is shining, and then…

“And that brings us to Mountain Glenn. A ruined city brought to ruin by the creatures of Grimm! A reminder of our flaws, our weakness, that we may never forget them! Nor shall we forget the threat looming just beyond our walls!”

A genetic memory rises up from within her, unbidden. Spectre knew of Mountain Glenn, intimately; it was there when the city fell to Grimm. The details flow into her in concert with Oobleck’s lecture, filling in when he skips over and correcting where he errs, intentionally or unintentionally.

“Ruby, are you all right?”

She clutches her head, the rapid influx of information pounding at her skull. “I think I’m allergic to history.”

“Do you want to…”

“No, no,” she says quickly, “I’m fine. Really!”

Sure enough, the headache fades, and as the lecture progresses past Mountain Glenn, she’s left to process the cold hard facts. The ones left out of the history as it is presented, intentionally or unintentionally.

One: Mountain Glenn was already failing before the Grimm came. Its principal export was mining; the extraction of raw materials from the mountain to be sent and processed in Vale proper. It was a mining town, just on a larger scale, but with the same poor conditions and even poorer management. They didn’t even have proper walls and defenses in place before moving people in, much to Spectre’s disbelief.

Two: Mountain Glenn was understaffed. Even on Patch alone there is at least one high ranking Hunter available for every dozen civilians, not to mention all the others. But by Spectre’s remembrance of Mountain Glenn when it fell, only a handful of them were left to defend the scores upon scores of innocents; at one point it witnessed a single Hunter attempt to ward off a pack of Beowolves and a King Taijitu from an entire train car’s worth of civilians, with just his weapon and a dwindling supply of ammunition.

Three: Mountain Glenn was a stupid location to build a settlement. It should have remained a remote mining outpost, due to its lack of natural water sources and unfarmable soil. Then there was the tunnel, the singula r point of connection between it and Vale, where it imported supplies necessary for continued living. Even Ruby can understand why that was a bad idea, without Spectre’s input.

So yeah, Grimm did bring Mountain Glenn to ruin. But Vale did most of the heavy lifting for them. Not that that fact changes much about her ultimate goal, though.

At some point Doctor Oobleck finishes speaking, and Ren leads her out of the lecture hall. Aware of her faults, she tries to apologize for her behavior.

“It’s fine,” Ren replies, “To tell you the truth, I found some of the later subject matter rather distracting as well.”

“You did?”

“I did. For example, the section on Mountain Glenn. I suspect there is more to the story than what Doctor Oobleck gave us.  I’m afraid I shall have to do some research on my own, later.”

…Huh. Did Ren also have the remnants of an ancient Grimm inside him feeding him firsthand information? “What makes you say that?”

“It was framed as if Mountain Glenn fell solely because its defense could not hold up against the onslaught of Grimm,” Ren says, and she begins to taste a faint whiff of grief on her tongue, “But the fall of an entire city, the destruction of its whole population, is rarely so clean. So easily explained away on just one thing. Trust me.”

Then, something unexpected happens. Another genetic memory of Spectre's surfaces, this time reacting to the smell of Ren’s grief. And upon her lips dances a name. Kuroyuri.

Nodding, she keeps silent, and receives a grateful nod in return. They make their way out of the academy, alone, together. She’d ponder the meaning of the word another time, away from Ren’s watchful eye.

Three days after her first mission, Yang takes her to a training center to develop her Aura and fighting skills. She’s spent after her sister shoulder throws her for the fifteenth time in a row, and so she lies flat on her back against the mat, pondering her life’s choices that led her here.

“C’mon sis, don’t tell me you’re done already!”

“Argh,” she groans dramatically, “Yang. Dying.”

Why, oh why did being part Grimm weaken her Aura capabilities so much? Gosh, it’s like the creatures of darkness don’t have a soul of their own, or something!

“Up and at ‘em, Rubes! I know you got one more in ya!”

“I really don’t,” she complains, but rolls to her feet regardless. The Aura exercise they are practicing is supposed to root her to the ground, making it harder for external forces to move her. It’s how many Hunters pull off so many physics-defying moves with all their awesome weapons.

“Ready?”

She nods, and her sister lunges, grabbing her by the arms. She pools her Aura at the bottoms of her feet, reaching, extending, grasping like roots for a connection with the floor below. She finds none.

“Wa-oof!” Ruby bounces off the mat once more, “Okay, I think I’m doing this wrong.”

Yang tilts her head. “You feeling for a connection like I toldja?”

“Yang, no offense, but never become a teacher. You’re awful at this.”

“Hah! Don’t I know it! Well, maybe we can ask Ren for tips?”

Someone else steps up on the mat. “Pardon me for interrupting–”

Yang turns around defensively, and Ruby springs to her feet. “Oh great, it’s you,” her sister growls, “What do you want?”

“I couldn’t help but notice that your sister is having trouble manipulating her Aura,” Pyrrha says with a frown, “And I was hoping I could lend a hand.”

“Really? And why should I trust anything you have to say, after what happened three days ago?”

“Y-Yang…”

Pyrrha’s frown deepens, “Look, I’m sorry. You probably won’t believe me, but I didn’t know what Weiss was planning either. Just know that we’ll be looking into requests made by the Schnee family with a bit more scrutiny from now on.”

“Then why strong-arm us into this mess to begin with?” Ruby asks.

“I…” Hesitation stitches the redhead’s lips shut. Then, “I’m sorry. It was wrong of me to do that. I just wanted to get to know you better, to find out why you decided to become a Huntress at such a young age, and I didn’t know how to do that besides…”

“Besides manipulation.” Yang finishes with damning finality.

Pyrrha hangs her head in shame, “…Yes.”

Time slows. She can feel her sister about to say something, and opens her mouth first. “Show me how to do it.”

“I beg your pardon?” Pyrrha says at the same time that Yang looks back at her, alarmed.

“You said you could help. Show me how it’s done.”

“Oh! Of course!” The Rank 1 Huntress takes her place against Yang on the mat. “You’ve been reaching out with your Aura like grasping roots, right?”

Pyrrha lifts her heel, manifesting her Aura in tendrils. Her control is so fine that the shape is legible to the naked eye, dangling gently in the air like leaves on a branch. Ruby smells the envy coming off of Yang in waves.

“You are spreading yourself too thin when you do this. See how each individual ‘branch’ is thin and separate? Yang, if you would?”

“Gladly.”

Her sister lifts Pyrrha off the ground in a tense, jerking motion, but Ruby can still see how each tendril of Aura thins out and snaps one by one. With a roar, Yang throws Pyrrha on the mat with extreme prejudice. The older girl rolls to her feet, unfazed.

“You’ve been visualizing it wrong. Trees have the advantage of being very heavy and large. Your Aura must be compact. Dense. Like an anchor.”

“Or a coil, or rope,” Ruby nods along. “I think I get it. Sis?”

“You got it, Rubes!”

This time, when Yang grabs her, she doesn’t reach out for the ground. Instead she slams her Aura into her heels, concentrated into a point, and knows that the overextension will hit the floor one way or another. And as luck would have it, when Yang begins pulling, she’s met with resistance.

It doesn’t last, of course, but when she looks up after kissing the mat once more her sister’s face is beaming with pride. “I actually had to put some effort into that one. Good job, sis!”

"Thanks!"

Pyrrha helps her up. She smiles. “And thank you, Pyrrha.”

“Of course. Always happy to help.”

And with that, the redhead leaves. Once she’s out of earshot, Yang whispers, “I still don’t trust her, you know.”

“I know,” Ruby responds, “I don’t either. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ever accept help from her. We just gotta be careful.”

"I'll follow your lead, Ruby. So, wanna go again?"

She ends the day sore all over, but satisfied. From there she falls into a comfortable rhythm, helping Nora with her weapon, designing her own, looking for holes in history with Ren, and training with Yang. Time passes all too quickly.

From Ren and Nora, to Pyrrha and Weiss. That is how her first week at Beacon goes. It’s already left a daunting impression in her mind, and she’s only just begun. She can only hope that she’s strong enough to face the challenges ahead, hope that she’s discerning enough to fool anyone that crosses her path, hope that she’s brave enough to keep going.

At the start of the next week, Ruby finds herself once again standing in the center of her enemy’s base of operations, staring up at the mission board with grim determination.

Let the battles begin.

Chapter Text

As far as missions went, Ruby’s second one was not nearly as eventful as her first.

That isn’t a bad thing, of course, but any joy she might have found at culling the local Grimm population in the Emerald Forest was undercut by the constant expectation for something unusual to happen, for a villain to swoop in and attack her out of nowhere. When everything went as planned, she was left breathing a sigh of relief and feeling foolish for expecting anything in the first place.

And of course, the assumption that she could be surprised at a moment’s notice coupled with the fact that many other rookies were spread out in the forest with her meant that she couldn’t harvest any more abilities from the local Grimm population of King Taijitu and Ursai. She did not dare to try, so close to Beacon.

What a shame that was. Acquiring her Boarbatusk armor was like coming up for fresh air after being trapped in a dank, musty cellar for years. A limit to her power is that she cannot take from the Grimm more than one of their aspects; despite having cut down hundreds of Beowolves on Patch in her earlier years she is limited to just manifesting their teeth. The same can be said for the Boarbatusk. No claws or horns for her, at least from either of them!

In any case, things are progressing smoothly. Yang, Ren and Nora were all able to fill their weekly quota as well, leaving the team with plenty of time for self-improvement. She’s taken Nora to the range to practice her marksmanship ahead of the creation of Magnhild (yes, they’ve already decided on a name!), allowing the ginger to get comfortable firing rocket-propelled artillery. Magnhild’s final form is still a ways off from completion, and the two chip away at its design at every opportunity.

But she can’t always be working. Even the diligent Ren takes time off to meditate or engage in his hobbies, whatever they are — he still hasn’t shared, and Nora won’t tell her. So here she is, in the heart of Vale, having a leisurely wander through the city, in no real hurry to find a Dust shop or bookstore. Books and magazines were always her go-to to keep herself occupied on Patch, whenever she was confined to her room.

The streets are foreign to her, having spent her entire life on that little island off the coast. But they do not scare her, walking them alone. She can smell ill intent from a mile away, after all. So she savors this rare moment away from everyone, while it lasts. Once Yang returns from helping Ren and Nora pick out their Scrolls, who knows when the next chance may come?

In broad daylight she walks through main streets and back streets alike, taking in the sights and scents of a city in constant bustle. No one flavor of negativity is enough to stand out to her, and the general population is so widely dispersed across the concrete jungle that it’s impossible for her to follow any of them anyway. She avoids places like bars and churches on principle — they aren’t busy at this time of day, but even then lingering resentments inside can sometimes set her off if she’s not careful. She avoids the industrial district like the plague.

As she squeezes into a particularly narrow alleyway, making a game of it in the process, she hears something. Not a person, or a Grimm, but an animal. A cat.

From pipes and railing above it slinks down, landing gracefully on a row of metal barrels lining the wall. Ruby’s no expert on cat breeds, so all she can say about the kitty is that it has soft, black, fuzzy fur and amber eyes. It stares at her, unblinking.

“Kitty-cat!” She tries to approach it gently, intent on giving it as many scritches as she can. But as she steps closer, it turns, fluffy black tail swishing back and forth as it walks out of the alleyway.

It waits for her at the corner and meows cutely, tilting its head as if beckoning her to follow.

“Ummm, okay?”

Why not? She shrugs her shoulders, inching out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. The cat takes off, strutting regally, and meowing every so often as if its voice is the dangling carrot for Ruby to follow along. She has absolutely no idea where they are going; she only knows that the sheer novelty of being led somewhere by a cat is enough to make her whole afternoon. Perhaps the whole day if she gets to give it scritches afterwards!

At some point the two of the breeze past a Dust shop. She makes a mental note to double back later, and pulls out her Scroll to check her location. They’re still in the heart of the commercial district, though the cat doesn’t seem to be leading her circles at least. After a few winding twists and turns, and maybe a few odd stares from the passersby too, she finds herself walking down 27th Street. The black cat stops in front of a store. Tukson’s Book Trade.

Ruby gasps, “Good kitty! How did you know I was looking for a bookstore?”

It turns its head to the side as if to dismiss her, then runs through the catflap built into the solid wooden door of the shop. After letting Yang know where she is, she turns the handle and lets herself in.

The interior of the bookstore is dimly lit, front-facing windows bring a damp light into the fore, but leaving the back half of the store wreathed in shadow, cast by rows upon rows of shelves, each lined to the brim with books. Above, ceiling lamps operating at minimum power shine tiny little spotlights upon patches of open floor, never touching the shelves. It strikes her as a bit odd, given that this a bookstore and that people need to read the bindings to find the books they want, but maybe they’ll crank up the lights for her when she needs it.

“Welcome to Tuckson’s Book Trade, home to every book under the sun. Can I help you with anything?”

Behind the singular counter of the bookstore leans a girl, maybe about Yang’s age, maybe a bit older, wearing a black buttoned vest over a sleeveless white undershirt, bottom half obscured by shadow. She stares at Ruby with piercing amber eyes, and the black cat ears atop her head twitch as she un-leans from the counter, letting her arms fall to her sides.

“There, there was a black kitty…”

A pause. Ruby feels herself sweating under the girl’s scrutinizing gaze, standing in the sole spotlight created by the shop’s dismal lighting. Then:

“You mean Asmodeus?” The girl clicks her fingers and makes a noise with her teeth, and suddenly from behind the counter leaps the kitty, trotting imperiously across the counter until it sits near the cash register. “Odd. He doesn’t like humans.”

Ruby swallows nervously, “I, uhm, ah…”

“Relax,” The girl exhales lightly, smiling and shaking her head, “Not trying say anything. Besides,” her gaze turns downwards, “Aeshma likes you plenty. I’ve never seen that little one treat anyone so well, human or Faunus.”

To Ruby’s surprise, a second cat has curled up at her feet, rubbing its head so gently against her that she may not have even noticed it was there had the other girl not pointed it out. Save for its white coat and blue eyes, it looks identical to the black cat that had led her all the way here.

She stoops gently, knees bundled together, running the back of her hand across its soft fur. “Good kitty.”

As she glances a side-eye back to the girl behind the counter, she notices that the girl also begun petting her own kitty. For a moment, the only noise filling the book shop is that of Asmodeus and Aeshma purring softly. This goes on for ten, maybe thirty seconds before the backroom door slides open, sending both cats slinking back into the darkness of the shelves.

A muscular man with crazy looking sideburns steps out, back first, carrying a stack of books. As he sets them down on the counter, he says, “Blake, have you — oh, I didn’t realize we had a customer. Welcome to Tukson’s Book Trade, home to every book under the sun!”

The middle-aged man — who she assumes is Tukson — wears his emotions much more openly than his employee. A thirteen-spice blend of apprehension and ennui and many more, as opposed to Blake’s salt and pepper of… well, actually, she can’t quite tell despite being this close. And she’d be lying if she said that didn’t make her even a bit curious.

“She followed Asmodeus in,” Blake says, taking a book off the pile and flipping through it rapidly before setting it down, “Out of curiosity, I assume?”

“Yep! Oh, but I guess I was also looking for a book, so,” Ruby laughs nervously.

“Then you’ve come to the right place. Whatever you’re looking for — Blake can help you out. I’ve got shelves to sort.”

Tukson grabs books by the armful, and somehow a man of his stature disappears among the shelves of the bookstore. She’s beginning to think this place is haunted, but steps up to the counter nevertheless. Asmodeus rematerializes, seemingly from nothing, and flops on his back, four paws in the air; she coos, delighted, feeling the cat rumble like an engine as she runs her hand across his belly.

“He really likes you,” Blake muses, “You… wouldn’t happen to be looking for Third Crusade, would you?”

Ruby frowns, a bit confused, “No, never heard of it. Is it good? I mostly read fantasy and sci-fi, so…”

“It’s historical nonfiction,” says Blake, and her face softens upon seeing Ruby’s reaction, “Well, we always keep a few copies stocked in case you’re ever interested. As for fantasy, I’d recommend Howling at the Moon, and for sci-fi, any book from the Malus Chronicles will do you just fine.”

A series of books plop themselves down in front of her. Dang, Blake works fast!

Ruby lets the black-haired girl ring them up at cash register, swiftly placing the stack of books into a bag for her to carry. In total, four books that don’t cost her nearly as much as she expects.

“You’re always welcome to come back whenever you want,” Blake says with a small smile, “I’m sure these two will be happy to see you.”

“You got it! Thanks!” Ruby chirps, practically skipping out the door. Wow, that went so much better than she expected! And on her first outing to Vale, no less! She got to pet two very cute kitties, and picked up enough books to last her at least a month, judging by how much free time she has. Can this day get any better?

Aaand she’s gone and jinxed it.

Once again, Ruby smells her before she sees her. She’s starting to think that all of her encounters with Weiss Schnee are going to start this way. Following the cotton candy-like scent down the street and around the corner, she stumbles upon some sort of gathering at a small park. In the center of the park is an elevated stage, and upon the stage sits a podium against a large SDC backdrop. Banners hang from the trees, hard-light projections of the company logo, and she spots several employees mingling among the crowd, handing out pamphlets and goodies to passersby.

There’s a man in a fancy suit on stage behind the podium, yacking about something or other, flanked left right and center by other SDC employees. Offstage and out of the spotlight, Weiss and a small contingent of security guards stand, observing and taking notes.

Her mouth waters. She quickly checks her Scroll. Yang is still with Ren and Nora at the store, sooo, might as well…

Skirting around the edges of the crowd, she creeps closer and closer to the side of the stage, completely undetected. Everyone’s attention is on the man at the podium, a presentation of some new sort of synthetic Dust going right over her head as the scent grows stronger and stronger. She will have a taste!

And then, as she reaches out to touch the heiress, her world explodes in a great white fire of ecstasy. Sweetness, savory loneliness burns through her veins like a wildfire, leaving her adrift in the empty void of self-obliteration. For a moment, she ceases to be Ruby Rose. She is one with the universe and none with the universe all at once.

It’s only after her hand brushes against Weiss’s, only after the loneliness floods her like a bursting dam, that her mind clears and she realizes what she’s doing.

“Um. Hi?”

And suddenly, something sharp presses against her throat. She can feel her face break out in a chickenpox of laser sights, as Weiss and her security detail turn their weapons on her. The heiress wields a silver rapier with an intricate design at its hilt; some sort of revolving Dust mechanism, at first glance.

Then, the pressure lifts.

“At ease. I know this one. Let me guess. My ‘perfume’ again?”

“Um,” she repeats, at a complete loss for words.

“You did well, sneaking past my security detail with such ease,” Weiss half-compliments, half-glares at the masked soldiers around them, “In recognition of your abilities, I will let this minor transgression go. This time. Now leave.”

“W-Wait!” She says before the embarrassed guards can shoo her away, “I have something to say!”

“Then say it. I’ve no time to waste on pointless chatter.”

“Why did you do it?”

Weiss narrows her eyes. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“You know what I’m talking about! The shipment was empty!”

“Of course it was. The White Fang stole everything inside.”

Ruby flushes red. “And how did they do that without opening the freaking thing?”

“They wouldn’t be a criminal organization if they didn’t have their ways. Unless you mean to suggest that our company would spend precious resources shipping an empty train car across the continent? Well?”

“That’s exactly what I’m saying!”

Weiss gives a cruel, devilish smile. “Do you have any proof to back up such a bold claim?”

“I…” Aw, beans! “I mean, um — it was… we — that doesn’t answer why you felt the need to fabricate evidence!”

“Oh, please,” Weiss scoffs, turning her attention back to the stage, “those scoundrels are the only ones with the gall to sully our company’s good name. They’re dangerous, Ruby Rose, trust me when I say this from personal experience; they’re violent, they cannot be reasoned with, and they won’t stop until the Schnee family is completely destroyed!

“Attacks on our supply lines! Billions of Lien in damages! Our personal lives made public, our addresses leaked online, terroristic threats left at our front door! Assassination attempts, for goodness sake! If it was your loved ones, your future peace and security under threat, would you hesitate to act?”

“Well, no, but–”

“Then you have your answer. Now, I really have no time left to entertain your… delusions. Leave or be removed. Your choice.”

As she’s directed away from the park — rather roughly, in her opinion — she fumes, mind a jumbled mess of half-formed ideas and panic. She does not know much about the White Fang, but some yet unnamed feeling inside her is screaming from the rooftops of her soul that she’s not being given the entire picture. A part of her wants to say it is another memory from Spectre, but that doesn’t make any sense. This conflict is between people, between humans and Faunus, a subject matter which she is woefully under-informed in. History wasn’t exactly a priority for her in the past, and now it’s coming back to haunt her.

She sucks in a breath, stalking away from the park and along the streets back to her team. There must be a connecting thread. To find it, she’ll need to… what, exactly? The history taught at Beacon is entirely Hunter-centered, and while the people there aren’t fully aligned on the side of the Schnees, they will definitely favor them more than these supposed criminals in the White Fang.

Wait.

What if she just found these White Fang members herself? She already knows of the SDC’s, of Weiss’s willingness to resort to foul play, which should ingratiate her to them in spite of her status as a complete outsider. If she can get both sides of the story straight from the source(s), maybe this feeling inside her will reveal itself. And then… and then…

Well, she isn’t certain what’ll happen next. And frankly, that alone should be enough to turn her away from this conflict, to return focus solely on her original mission at Beacon. If she’s caught consorting with a criminal organization, Yang would never let her hear the end of it, let alone what it would do to her status as a Hunter. She may as well kiss the relic goodbye at that point.

Yeah, better to leave it alone, for now.

The doors of the Scroll shop slide open, revealing her sister emphatically arguing with the store’s manager, hair ablaze. The manager, surprisingly, holds his own against Yang, composure refusing to buckle under the fiery girl’s heated words. Ren and Nora stand awkwardly off to the side, but wave Ruby in as she approaches.

“Did I miss anything?”

“Yang is trying to get us a better deal. Not that either of us know what that means,” says Nora.

“Truthfully,” says Ren, eyeing the argument critically, “I’m not certain she does, either.”

“I see you found what you wanted, though,” says Nora.

Ruby nods enthusiastically. “I did! Got to pet two kitty cats while I was at it, too.”

“Bookstore cats?! Tell me more!”

“Nora, not so loud, please.”

“Sorry, Ren!”

Ruby obliges. But she’s careful to leave out the bits with Weiss at the park, and her short-lived idea of seeking out the White Fang, which she decides in the moment to fully abandon. Time is a luxury she can scarcely afford, now, and as much as it hurts to admit it, this isn’t her fight. She's got enough to worry about as is.

Chapter Text

“I believe I may have found our next team mission,” says Ren one day, completely unprompted.

The four of them are cooped up in their dorm room, with Ruby and Nora occupying the table while Yang is stretched out on the couch, and Ren occupies the kitchen. In the short time that they’ve lived here the two sisters have spruced up the living space dramatically, decorating its once sparse floors and walls with posters, paintings, potted plants, and p…ortable shelves, one to carry Ruby’s books and one in the bathroom for Yang’s long line of hair care products.

Today she wears a light gray top with puffed sleeves and a high neck, along with a pair of sweatpants that absolutely do not match, which she tolerates begrudgingly for lack of any other options at the moment. At least they cover all of her bumps and ridges perfectly. She puts down Howling at the Moon — Blake’s recommendation is turning out well so far — and gives Ren her full attention.

Yang drops from the couch like a stone, peels her face off the wooden floor, and sways to her feet. “Whatcha got for us?”

“It’s an extermination mission. A Grimm that’s been terrorizing a village in the eastern deserts of Anima as of late. Transportation fully provided, as well as assistance with handling any and all Grimm outside of the target. It’s open to all ranks, there is no deadline, and the client is expecting a team. All things considered, it sounds like the perfect mission for us.”

“I’m sensing a ‘but’ here…” says Nora.

“Two, actually. But the client is anonymous. We’ll only meet them if we choose to accept the mission. And the Grimm is Unhunted.”

Ruby perks up, “A new type of Grimm?” She says at the same time that Yang says, “The client would have to be pretty shady to put up an anonymous mission available to all ranks…”

“Yes.” Ren nods to the both of them, “But, I have a reason for suggesting this, despite all of the unknowns: the eyewitness reports detailing the Grimm’s abilities.”

Nora raises her hand, “Oh! Oh! Can it keep fighting for long periods of time without stopping?”

“Yes.”

“Does it burrow beneath the desert sand to hide and stalk prey?” Nora continues.

“Yes.”

“Does it rely on Grimm senses to navigate while burrowed?”

“Yes.”

“And does it sometimes shoot lightning when it attacks?”

“Yes.”

“I get it,” Yang snaps her fingers, “Sounds like the perfect Grimm for Team YRRN!”

“Too perfect,” Ruby says, “Are we sure it’s not another trap?”

“Our enemies would have to be near-omniscient if that were the case.”

“That’s true,” Yang agrees, “After all, none of us have used our Semblances in one place, and we’ve technically only done one mission together. Without inside knowledge, you’d need an insane leap in logic to put any of it together. That, or we have a stalker.”

At that, Nora stands, pumping her fists, her eyes shining with stars. “Enough yapping! Let’s go kill this thing already!”

“Hold, Nora. Let me send you all the details,” Ren squints at his Scroll, “If I have this right…”

Very shortly after her own Scroll lights up with notification after notification. Ren has helpfully compiled all of the finer details of the mission into a numbered list, and has included a bit of his own research into the geography of Anima’s deserts and the village they’ll be saving from the Grimm, as well as a better description of the Grimm itself than what his laconic back-and-forth with Nora had provided.

Her eyes widen as she catches the specific location of the village of Sa’ai. Or rather, what’s near it.

“This is…”

Yang whistles, “Damn, they built a settlement near that? Must be some village.”

“Uhhh,” Nora looks confused, “I don’t get it.”

“Nora, remember when we passed by Lake Matsu?”

Lake Matsu is one of the seven natural wonders of Remnant. And, like a majority of them, a hotspot for all sorts of dangerous Grimm. Off of the top of her head she recalls the one in Vacuo and the one up past Atlas as the only two that aren’t swarming with monsters at all times. Not that those two don’t have their own problems, of course.

“It’s like that.”

“Oh. Wait, but–”

Ruby looks over the rest of the details while Yang and Ren try to convince Nora that, no, there isn’t going to be a big lake floating over the deserts of Anima. The climate of the sandsea flips violently between extreme heat and extreme cold over the course of a day, and its total lack of any vegetation or shelter makes for terrible travel. Just dune after dune of exposed sand, long enough to fit the entire island of Menagerie inside. Despite that, some call the edges of the desert — where sand meets rock and shore — their home, scrounging up what little they can from nature to survive. Though, the reason they’d want to live out there rather than in one of the Kingdoms escapes her.

The Unhunted is, as far as Ruby can read, some sort of land shark, which is freaking awesome. Despite being roughly the size of a Bullhead, it swims through the sands as effortlessly as its aquatic counterpart does water, tearing through convoy and tent with razor-sharp fins and teeth. Similar to the Sea Feilong, it can breathe lightning, and even arc it off of its dorsal fin in a pinch.

She frowns. The client is clearly familiar with this Grimm’s abilities. Is the land shark — and they’re gonna need a better name for it — just that good at fleeing beneath the sands when the going gets rough?

Scrolling further down shows exactly that. The client is very thorough in describing exactly how the Grimm eludes them when wounded; it’s old and intelligent enough to have developed a sense of self-preservation, meaning that any sufficient threat to its existence basically has one chance to kill it before it catches on. No wonder the client made the request open to anyone. They’re relying on the element of surprise.

All in all, it’s a very enticing deal. Unhunted are rare, nowadays, and succeeding in this mission grants them: A, the distinction of being able to name a Grimm — within reason, of course; and B, an all but guaranteed rank-up, the first step of many. But there’s just one last thing she’s curious about before she can sign on to this…

Ren interrupts her thoughts. “Ruby, I’ve been meaning to ask, what are you wearing?”

Oh. Right.

“Look, it’s the only thing I have to wear right now, okay? All of my other clothes are stuck in the laundry, and my combat outfit is, well…”

She pushes the grenade launcher into Nora’s hands, letting the older girl turn it over in her hands. Nora ponders it, brows knit in the deep concentration emblematic of a newbie just beginning to learn the craft.

“Now, yours is probably gonna be a bit larger, since we also have to turn it into a whole war hammer,” Ruby explains, “but for the most part the weight and shape of it will feel a bit like this.”

“Right.”

Next comes the ammunition. Large, pink, pill-shaped capsules, which she hands to Nora, guiding her in demonstration of how to load them into the launcher. Each of the grenades slide into the revolver cylinder with a satisfying click.

“What kind of Dust blend is this?” She asks, as she had left Nora to her own devices for this part of the project. Experimenting in the lab is always her personal favorite part of testing, and she didn’t want to take the experience away from the ginger.

Nora sets the loaded launcher down carefully and rubs her hands together, grinning. “Fire Dust base with a bit of Wind and Gravity for dispersion. Plus a little extra surprise at the end.”

“Um. Should I be worried?”

“Hehehe, we’ll see…”

“Nora.”

“Ruby!” With a hoist the grenade launcher returns to Nora’s arms, cradled like a newborn. “I gotta say, I really appreciate you doing this for me. Wouldn’t even know where to begin, if I were on my own!”

“Don’t mention it. I like helping people.”

The orange-haired girl puffs up her chest confidently. “Well, let it be known that Nora Valkyrie never leaves a favor unrepaid!”

“T-That’s okay,” Ruby blushes, breaking eye contact and folding her hands, “It’s a gift. Y-You really don’t have to do anything in return–”

“Ooh! What’s this do?”

Her eyes widen in alarm. “Wait! Don’t touch that, that’s the–!”

“And then Nora and I had a very educational discussion about firearm safety,” Ruby says sweetly, “Isn’t that right, Nora?”

Nora’s back stiffens, and she throws up a salute, eyes wide and darting about haphazardly. “Yes, ma’am! Always keep the barrel pointed at the enemy, ma’am!”

“Eh. Close enough. Anyways, Ren,” Ruby says, interrupting his attempt to admonish Nora, “There’s one thing I’m still curious about. How the heck hasn’t this job been snatched up yet? I mean, a chance to name a Grimm?”

“I had the same thought. From what I can gather, it comes down to the client.”

“Meaning?”

Yang pipes up. “Meaning there’s some problem with them that has caused every other Hunter before us to pay the cancellation fee instead of completing the mission. I’d bet my left arm it’s got something to do with their identity. They’re probably a gang member or something.”

“Isn’t that illegal?” Nora asks.

“Nah. They introduced a clause a couple years back that allows criminals to post requests. Only extermination — since those are harder to game — and only after Beacon’s top brass approves and gives them an anonymous identity, though that part’s more for public perception than anything. Guess who fits the bill?”

“There might be some other reason. We won’t know for certain until we accept,” Ruby says, putting on a sour face, “I really don’t want to end up helping the bad guys…”

“Aw c’mon, we’re still taking a dangerous Grimm off the map! That’s gotta count for something,” says Nora.

“For some, it will count for everything. I don’t like the idea of letting a Grimm like this roam free,” says Ren, “All in favor?”

Four hands reach for the ceiling, and the rest of the day is spent preparing for a trip through the merciless desert. Ample water, emergency food and medical supplies, a second means of communication outside of their Scrolls, basic survival gear — all provided by Beacon. It surprises her every time, but the benefits of simply being a Hunter, however low-ranked, often far outstrip the benefits of any other job. It’s justified by the risk of gruesome death, she supposes.

One day later, without even a single piece of pink glitter stuck to her combat outfit, she heads out of the dorms with her team to the control center.

Just like last time, the designated meeting room is blacked out, pitch-dark windows revealing nothing of what’s inside until they step through the door. There, the four of them are greeted with an unexpected sight.

The client sits, reclined, feet kicked up on the desk in front of her, letting her red-soled heels rest as she balances her chair gently on its back two legs. One hand hovers over the katana sheathed at her hip, while the other twirls a near-empty bottle, smelling vaguely of wine. On the desk rests a large bone-white mask, lined with red, reminding Ruby of her own. Even without the burst of familial rage coming from behind her, she knows who this is. At least that answers her question about transportation.

“Children,” Raven Branwen, wanted criminal and head of the Branwen clan, rakes her eyes over them one-by-one, before stopping at her daughter. “Yang.”

“What,” Yang begins, “the actual fu–”

“No.”

“Yang.”

“I said, no.”

“Yang, come on. At least give her a chance to explain herself.”

They’re outside again. After a (very) brief excuse to Ren and Nora, her sister forcefully took her up by the shoulders and marched the two of them out of the door, all the way out of the control center until they found a secluded patch of grass to hash things out. She hopes that in the meantime Raven doesn’t leave too bad an impression on the other two members of YRRN. They might need her in the future, after all.

Now, if she can just convince Yang of that, first. Though judging by the way her sister is twitching with barely-controlled rage, that won’t be such a simple task.

“I can’t believe this. My own sister, running defense for the bitch who abandoned us!”

Ruby frowns. “I’m not defending her past actions. I’m looking at what she can do for us now. What she might be willing to help us with, if we help her first.”

“Yeah, sure,” Yang gives a derisive snort, “Expecting a deadbeat and a criminal to honor an agreement or repay a favor. You’d have better luck getting Uncle Qrow to stop drinking. Great idea, sis!”

“Yaaang, you can't say that about uncle…”

“What? Oh, come on, you know I’m right.”

“Look, I’m not saying we have to play nice. But Raven is one of the few people on this planet not aligned with either Salem or Ozma,” Ruby explains patiently, “Her Semblance is a literal get-out-of-jail-free card, and she’s as good in a fight as a Rank 1 Huntress, maybe even better! And that’s not even mentioning…”

Yang’s fury briefly ebbs away, receding in a low tide. She tilts her head, curious. “Not mentioning what?”

“…I think she knows where the Spring Maiden is.”

For a moment the stench of anger emanating from her sister is overpowering, swarming her senses, fetid and rotting yet enthralling all the same. Yang’s eyes flash red, golden mane bursting into flames as she grits her teeth and clenches her fists so tightly her Aura shimmers under the pressure.

Then, without warning, Ruby is pulled into a hug. Her body soaks up all of that anger like a sponge; she feels Yang’s body temperature cool down to normal levels, mellowing out until not even embers remain. Her head swims from overconsumption, foggy and bloated and sick, giddy and high and quite possibly glowing.

“Okay. We’ll hear her out.”

Still dizzy from the experience, she offers no resistance as Yang takes her by the hand and leads her back into the building. Miraculously, Ren, Nora and Raven are all still there. Even more miraculously, they seem to be getting along.

Nora and Raven, at least. Ren has relegated himself to a corner, nursing a headache as he watches the two Mistrali women duke it out in an arm wrestling competition. With a mighty roar, Raven brings her hand down towards her side, winning the bout and shattering the office table into a million tiny splinters in the process. As Ruby looks around the room, she notices that there are similar piles of broken wood and plastic strewn about in various places.

“Emergency best of fifteen! Come on!” Nora shouts, panting and sweating and grinning from ear to ear.

Raven looks just as worked up, red eyes locked to Nora’s turquoise, not even noticing that Ruby and Yang have returned. “Valkyrie, was it? You’d do well in the clan. If you ever get tired of the Huntress life, you’re welcome to join us. Your friend, as well; I could use another manservant at home to keep things tidy.”

“Okay!” Ruby quickly steps in, her wits returned to her, “No one is joining any criminal empires today. Or, like, ever.”

Nora pouts, “Awww…”

Raven dusts herself off, picking a stray splinter out of her hair. Glancing around, and seeing that all of the tables in the room have mysteriously been destroyed, she stands with her back to the far wall, letting her hand rest on the hilt of Omen.

“Done with your little argument?”

“We weren’t arguing,” Yang says calmly, “We were deciding whether or not we could trust you.”

“And?”

“We’re in. But try anything funny and I’ll rip out your spine with my bare hands, y’hear?”

“Duly noted,” says Raven, the threat bouncing off of her like a rubber ball, “But for the record, I wouldn’t have tried anything even if you weren’t my daughter. Not exactly worth potentially drawing Beacon’s ire just to pick off four Hunters without so much as a single accomplishment to their name, you know.”

“Gee, thanks. I feel soooo much better,” Yang says dryly. “Why’d it have to be you, anyway?”

Raven smirks, “I’m the only one who’s gotten close to the thing. Really, Yang, I’m disappointed in you. No child of mine would be so sloppy as to skip over the details before taking a mission.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m not your child, is it? Not in any way that matters.”

“If only that were true! Honestly, it’s embarrassing to think that I could ever produce such weak offspring.”

“Well Dad could bench press a mountain back in his heyday, so what does that say about you, you worthless old hag?!”

From the side, Nora leans over to Ruby, whispering, “I knew it was going to be bad, but I didn’t realize it would be this bad. Are we sure we’re still up for this?”

“She’ll behave,” Ruby replies, just as quiet. “They both will.”

As if on cue, Raven peels off from her brief spat with Yang and turns towards the rest of them. Unfolding her Scroll, the queen of banditry projects into the room a hard-light model of a vehicle. It’s an absolute monster of a dune buggy; nearly twice the regulation size, with wheels that look like they could shred concrete. The roofless frame juts outward aggressively — quite literally, with spikes and shields — while providing ample space for a team of fully decked out Hunters to maneuver around. Its engine looks like something that belongs on an Atlesian class airship freighter, rather than a measly ground vehicle.

“A little preamble, before we get this show on the road. You’ll be using this to approach its turf. I’ll have my best woman at the wheel, and the rest that are able escorting you in their own vehicles, so all you have to focus on is tracking the Grimm down. Once you do, corner it so it can’t escape. Then call me in if you haven’t already killed it.”

“Why can’t you come with us?” Ruby asks.

“It knows my scent. I made the mistake of letting it get away the first time we crossed paths, and now it flees if it senses my presence close by. Luckily,” Raven unsheathes her katana, swinging in an arc while activating her Semblance. “I’ve got you to do the brunt of the legwork. Saves making my second-in-command tag along. Any questions?”

“Where will this portal take us?”

“Our base,” Raven scoffs, “Worried you’ll be walking straight into an ambush?”

Yang’s glare turns red. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Raven shrugs. “Like I said, I’ve got nothing to gain but a headache if I hurt you people, and everything to lose if Sa’ai goes under. So come on, let’s get this over with before I come to my senses about allowing four kids try their luck at hunting something my entire clan can't.”

Without waiting for a response, she disappears in a flash of red and black. The portal in front of them hums ominously. Ruby shares a look with her team.

And steps through.

Chapter Text

The sight of the Sandspires fill her with an impossible sense of nostalgia and longing. Had Spectre been here when they first formed? How long ago could that have been? A thousand years ago? Two thousand?

From the safety of the Branwen clan’s base camp, the spires are mere pinpricks on the southern horizon, but if she closes her eyes, Ruby can still see it in her mind’s eye with excruciating detail, right down to the last grain of sand. Massive, twisting pillars of sandstone, interspersed between pits of quicksand, numbering in the hundreds over an area roughly the size of Beacon. Each one exists seemingly in stubborn defiance of physics and logic, with a diameter no larger than a birch tree at its base that grows and shrinks erratically as it reaches for the clouds. At sections along the spire where its diameter is the largest — sometimes rivaling Amity Coliseum — an endless supply of sand flows from some of the cracks and crevices in the stone, sinking into the desert below like water.

And then there are the Grimm. Almost every type of Grimm that can inhabit the desert can be found in the Sandspires, existing in uncountable swarms. Lancers, Ravagers, and Teryx blot the skies, buzzing around the spires and clinging to its larger segments to perch. Any soul unlucky enough to find themselves trapped in the quicksand on the ground below will quickly be torn apart by endless waves of Sulfur Fish, Death Stalkers, King Taijitu, Blind Worms, and many more.

Luckily for them, the land shark’s hunting grounds extend far beyond the Sandspires. They’ll fight it away from the natural phenomena, or not at all.

“Ruby? You coming?”

“Yeah, one second.”

The Sandspires make the rest of the desert seem tame by comparison. But she knows thinking like that will only hinder her. She can’t afford to fail. So no half-measures. No hesitation.

Turning away from the vista, she follows her team and climbs on to the dune buggy, pulling up with her a trunk stuffed with their supplies. “Everyone remember the plan?”

She’s met with various nods and words of assent. Their driver, a wiry young woman whose dress and general state of affairs couldn’t look more unscrupulous if she tried, just rolls her eyes and turns back to the wheel. Shea was her name, if Ruby recalls correctly.

Flanking them on all sides is a battalion of less heavily armored vehicles, manned by what Raven assures them are the best of the Branwen clan. Ruby has her own doubts about that, but at least she was allowed to inspect their munitions when they first arrived. They’ve got the firepower, regardless of skill level.

The sound of engines roaring to life deafens her as they take off. The camp is situated on a rocky bluff overlooking the north coast, which quickly fades into the distance as the buggy shreds its way across the desert. Ruby snaps on a translucent protective mask just in time as dust and sand kick up to meet them.

“You’re up, sis!” Yang shouts to make herself heard.

With a nod and a thumbs up, she concentrates, letting her connection with the Grimm extend over the vast dunes, stretching as far as she can manage. Her presence brushes over everything, from the tiniest Sulfur Fish to the longest Blind Worm, feeling them burrow and scurry about just beneath the sands. Suddenly, her head jerks up.

“I’ve got something!” The land shark reads unfamiliar in her mind, but its size and shape can, by process of elimination, belong to no other Grimm. “Nine, maybe ten miles east of here, and moving fast!”

“Where to?” Nora asks.

“South! We’re gonna have to pull it away before it gets too close to the Sandspires!”

The world lurches as their vehicle banks left, kicking up a spray of sand. Like a flock of birds, the escort follows behind in formation, war cries of the Branwen reaching her ears even above the rumbling white noise of their ride.

She’s forced to grip the sides of the chassis as they accelerate, rocking the buggy violently as they bulldoze their way up each dune and half-fly half-fall their way down. Her head throbs, partly from the rough shaking and partly from the strain of keeping her focus on the land shark. Redoubling her efforts to track the Grimm, her senses pick up another presence.

“We’ve got incoming from our left! Ravagers, Teryx, and Sulfur Fish!”

Shea sends a signal to her fellow drivers out just in time, as out of clouds and sands the Grimm appear, their numbers vastly dwarfing their small contingent of four Hunters and two dozen or so bandits. Thanks to Ruby’s early warning, the Branwens are able to reposition the mounted turrets attached to their vehicles, opening fire at the creatures of darkness before they can close the distance.

It has much less of an effect than she anticipates. The spray of bullets rip up the sands and part the skies around them, but countless Grimm still manage to slip through, either entirely unharmed or barely grazed by the gunfire.

“Great! So much for conserving our strength,” Yang shouts, engaging Ember Celica and firing blast after blast at the encroaching fliers. Sulfur Fish leap up in an attempt to swarm them, only to be swatted away by Ren and Nora. Wherever she can, Ruby takes her scythe to a stray Grimm that has slipped through, but overall keeps her efforts focused on navigation. Shea, for her part, keeps the dune buggy remarkably steady now that fighting has broken out, so at least Raven wasn’t lying about her capabilities. The other clan members, however…

She doesn’t even need to steal a glance over to see what’s happening. The smell of panic and fear, coupled with the concentration of Grimm she can sense over their positions, is enough.

“We have to help the others!”

“On it!” Yang pivots around the buggy, aiming her shots at the other vehicles. Ruby dives for the supply trunk, pulling out a grenade launcher and sniper rifle. While Magnhild and her own weapon might not be properly developed yet — any engineer worth her salt knows mekashift weaponry must be tested ruthlessly until the chances of mechanical failure are less than none — that won’t stop her from using conventional firearms when need be.

“Nora!”

Her teammate stops swinging and turns to catch the grenade launcher, gripping it with no small amount of trepidation. That trepidation blooms into anxiety as she lifts the weapon and aims poorly, grip unsteady and fearful. The sudden shift is enough to peel some of the stray Grimm towards them rather than the Branwens, and she knows they’ll be swarmed within seconds if she doesn’t do something.

Scrambling to her feet, she stumbles towards the other side of the buggy with uneven steps, catching herself on the railing. Then she plants her feet behind the older girl, drawing in close enough that she’s nearly breathing on the nape of Nora’s neck, and lines up with her back. Ruby’s hands gently snake under Nora’s, guiding them to a proper grip, a proper aim, and quickly dart to her hips or shoulders to adjust her balance before returning. Anxiety flows into Ruby from the tips of her fingers, tasting bright and fruity and a little bit sour, and she feels the older girl’s tension ease into a relaxed yet firm stance.

“You can do this,” Ruby whispers, close enough to be heard even through the screeching of Grimm. “Give ‘em hell, Nora.”

Nora’s finger closes around the trigger.

Boom.

The recoil of the first round presses Nora deep into Ruby’s chest, and she prays to whatever god is listening that the older girl is too hopped up on adrenaline to feel the outline of her exoskeleton. A beautiful pink grenade sails through the air, striking true against a Ravager in a brilliant explosion of glitter and fire. Pieces of monster fall from the skies, torn apart by force and flame, and sending the surrounding Grimm scattering for safety.

Nora fires another, and another, and another, each time recoiling less and less into Ruby’s body, until eventually she finds she does not need to hold the older girl at all. With each pull of the trigger Nora gives a battle cry, growing more emphatic with each shot until uproarious laughter takes its place, propelled by a mad rush of adrenaline, and the vacuum where fear and anxiety once stood.

“Come and get some you soulsucking little freaks–!”

The crack of Ruby’s sniper rifle briefly deafens her to the world. With her own efforts added to the fray, Grimm begin tumbling out of the skies in scores, freeing the Branwens to recuperate and rejoin the fray. Within seconds, the horde thins out to a mere handful of Sulfur Fish, which Shea and the other drivers leave in the dust as they press forward, triumphant.

She hears whoops and shouts of celebration coming from the Branwens, and steels herself. The land shark is much closer, now. They’ll only have a moment’s rest before the fighting begins again.

“Temperature check? I’m good to go!”

Nora responds first, buzzing, “Same here! You and me, Ruby, we’re finishing Magnhild when we get back! We have to!”

Yang pumps her arms and reloads. “All fired up! We’re close, aren’t we?”

Ren holds up a finger, panting, posture slightly bent. “Just a moment, please. You have no idea how many Sulfur Fish tried to crawl up on our driver while you were busy with the skies.”

“You’ve got about a minute. It’s close.”

The boy nods, graciously taking a flask of water to his lips. The rest of them set to work with their supplies, readying the trap that will let them successfully hunt the land shark where others have failed. Her Aura bristles against the smooth length of steel cable as she loops it around the weapon Raven so generously provided them, pulling it taut with enhanced strength. The metal harpoon is about the length of her body, and sharp enough to cut her just by looking at it.

Eyeing the horizon, she sees that the Sandspires have gotten much closer. Either they lure land shark away now, or they’ve just wasted a day trekking through the sands for no reason.

Shortly after preparations are complete, she feels herself cross a threshold. It’s one thing to be able to sense her kin, to know their location. It’s another entirely to communicate with them. And all Grimm — and her, she supposes — are capable of sending out a… distress signal? No, not quite the word for it. An alarm, maybe, alerting nearby kin of their location. That is how a skirmish with a handful of Grimm can easily turn into a horde, and a horde into an army.

And so, she silently broadcasts her position to the land shark, and feels it turn around, no doubt curious as to how people have made it this far into the desert.

“It’s coming!” She says aloud, pretending as though the Grimm had simply sensed their presence.

She sees the dust cloud it kicks up before the land shark itself. Actually, that might be all she sees, if it doesn’t stop moving. Just an amorphous blob of yellow and brown, with the odd fin or maw poking out every so often.

“Thanks, Shea!” She says as they pull to a halt, and the four of them disembark. “We’ll take it from here.”

Their driver nods, “Have fun getting yourselves killed.”

With that, their battalion pulls away, retreating into the distance. From here out, they were on their own.

“Everyone remember the plan?”

“You already asked that, Ruby.”

“I know! Just making sure.”

The sand beneath them rumbles as the land shark draws nearer, and Ruby takes point, signaling her aggression outwards. The Grimm responds in kind, making a beeline for her, and driving up massive plumes of sand into the air in the process.

Then the land shark leaps out of the sands to dive-bomb her, and, free from the clouds of dust, she finally gets a good look at it.

Despite having literally ridden in a Bullhead before, the size of the thing still shocks her. It’s huge! Covered from nose-to-tail in plate armor, it could probably crush a Hunter with its weight alone, never mind the bladed fins and rows of razor-sharp teeth. Even in its dormant state, the dorsal fin gleams ominously, occasionally sparking with electricity.

She dashes forward to perfectly avoid the end of the land shark’s arc, all those days locked away in her room studying math finally paying off on the battlefield. Its tail comes down after her, preventing a counter, but as planned her teammates step in to strike, chipping away at the creature’s tough hide. Yang blocks a stray fin with her arms, emanating a soft glow as her Semblance begins to power up.

Her teammates disappear behind clouds of sand as the land shark burrows once more. She loses track of them somehow, but assumes they are following the plan, and readies herself once more as the Grimm turns in a semicircle and charges her. This time, only its fin is visible above the sands, carving a line into the desert behind it.

It surfaces partially once in striking distance, upper teeth bared and chomping down on grains of sand as they disappear down its gullet. Twirling her scythe, Ruby leaps into the air and slashes at the Grimm’s nose, the screech of metal ringing in her ears as her blade clashes with its pockmarked armor. Physics kicks in, sending her rocketing back from the force of her own blow. Tumbling through the sands, she can’t recover in time to dodge as the land shark lifts a bladed fin out of the sands to rend her in two…

If Yang hadn’t materialized out of nowhere to deflect the attack, Aura shimmering with power. Just a little more! She just has to play bait for a little while longer!

Both Ruby and the Grimm lose track of her teammates once more. If her mind were not racing at a thousand miles a minute, she might have questioned the peculiarity affecting her senses, but instead she lets her guard loosen, pushing her Aura to the fore to show how little of it she has. The effect works as intended, and the Grimm burrows deep into the sand, and starts circling her around the dune on which she stands.

Anyone else would have lost track of it by now, obscured by the opaque desert surface. But just as the Grimm knows her exact location, so does she. And so, when the ground beneath her feet falls away, opening up to the yawning abyss that is the land shark’s awaiting maw, she jams her scythe in between its teeth, reinforcing it with the last of her Aura as she hands on for dear life.

What goes up must come down. As the world spins, the Grimm’s jaw struggles to close, finally snapping shut as Ren leaps from the ether and tackles her out of her stalemate. The land shark crashes down on the dune, its rapid flailing batting aside Yang and Nora like flies. She sees her sister’s hair ignite. It’s time!

“Go!” She shouts, scrambling to stall the land shark before it can fully submerge back into the desert. She, Ren and Nora are barely able to slow its descent long enough for Yang to come hollering in from above, battle cry reaching a crescendo as she plunges their special harpoon into the Grimm.

The full force of her sister’s Semblance manages to pierce through the side of the land shark’s bone plating — thankfully weakened from their earlier hit-and-runs — lodging itself deep into the Grimm’s body. Yang kicks off of it, steel cable in hand, skidding back and taking a knee to catch her breath as Nora takes over. A bellowing scream nearly knocks her off her feet. Belatedly, she realizes it came from the Grimm. Lashing out instinctively against its pain, its dorsal fin lights up, sending a massive charge of electricity towards the harpoon, which travels up the metal coil straight into Nora’s waiting arms.

The orange haired girl cackles, muscles bulging as electricity dances across her skin. “Oh, buster, you just made a big mistake!”

Ruby watches in awe as Nora pulls on the wire with all her might, the strength of a single human clashing in a tug-of-war against a Grimm capable of leveling buildings. Like a stubborn weed being yanked out of a garden, the land shark rises out of the sands, slowly, at first, but once it loses all purchase with the ground, it flies.

It’s a beautiful thing, seeing a Grimm the size of a Bullhead sail through the air.

It lands on its back behind her with a mighty crash, thrashing as it tries to flip itself over. Ruby does not need to issue the next command; with an Aura enhanced leap Ren takes from Nora the end of another length of cable, bringing it over top of the Grimm and into Yang’s awaiting arms. Their two physically strongest fighters pull it tight, keeping the land shark locked in place as Ruby and Ren take to attacking the body.

There’s a certain glee, she thinks as she hacks away at its armor, to rendering a once-powerful foe completely helpless. Even beyond the perfect execution of a plan, seeing such a mighty being be utterly unable to strike back against her assault fills her with the raw, unbridled joy of a predator, and in that moment she understands precisely why they call themselves Hunters. It all builds to this moment.

But the feeling doesn’t last. The Grimm shudders unnaturally as she tears into its flesh, sparking a brief feeling of fear within her. It can’t be… can it?

Despite being relatively untouched, the land shark’s two pectoral fins undulate and distend, and the sounds of shedding skin and crunching cartilage fill her ears. In a panic, she attacks harder, faster, urging Ren to do the same. But they aren’t killing the thing fast enough.

And any Grimm that survives for long enough evolves. This is simply a basic fact of their reality. It is true of Spectre, it is true of Salem, and it is true of the Grimm metamorphosing before her very eyes.

Gone are the fins on the side of its body. And from its underside, right where Yang and Nora have worked so hard to pin it, sprout a set of land-dwelling legs. Stubby though they are, the spontaneous growth is enough to push against the wire, sending the two older girls slingshotting high into the air.

She and Ren are forced back as the Grimm rolls to its feet. There’s a shift in its demeanor. Awareness. It knows they are capable of killing it. And so, it dives down once more.

“No!”

Ruby snarls with the ferocity of an enraged Ursai, leaping after it. Her scythe sinks into its exposed flesh, hooking onto muscle and endoskeleton. She only has time to hear the beginnings of panicked shouts behind her as the land shark burrows into the sands, and, pulled along by her scythe, she plunges in after it.

She holds fast against the torrent of debris, clinging tightly as they speed towards the Sandspires. When she feels her arms on the cusp of exhaustion, she drags herself closer, manifesting a set of Beowolf teeth to clamp down on the open wound. There she hangs, eyes shut tightly in concentration, as the land shark drags her through dune after broken dune, until finally a sudden lurch awakens her to an impossible sight.

They are scaling the spires. Somehow, this gargantuan beast of a Grimm is swimming up the stream of falling sand like a salmon up a waterfall. She barely has time to register the gross violation of physics before it leaps off the peak of their particular sandfall, flying in an arc across the skies.

The vertigo becomes too much for her. Squeezing her eyes shut once more, she covers herself in Boarbatusk plates and braces for impact as the Grimm falls into the quicksand pits below.

The last thing she remembers is the total absence of light, scraping of sand against hard stone, and the bite of cool, dank air against her skin.

Chapter Text

Waking up in total darkness would have been a more interesting sensation if it wasn’t accompanied by a terrible aching across her entire body. Even the very act of opening her eyelids brought with it fresh jolts of pain through her temple, a piercing needling between her eyes, and a ceaseless ringing in her ears.

It takes a while, from such a start, for her to focus on anything but the pain. Eventually when she can bear to stand, she shifts from her prone position, slowly, carefully, feeling around in the dark for any potential hazards. The sandstone alternates from smooth to rough in patches around her, rising and dipping with bumps and indentations, curving upwards along some sections of what she can only assume is a wall. The ceiling is just tall enough for her to not clonk her head against when she walks upright.

She paces a few steps in every direction, then plops back down against the cold, hard sandstone, taking stock of what is still on her person. Her scythe is gone, likely still buried deep in the land shark. As she rifles through her pouch, her fingers run over her Scroll. The device is cracked, its display damaged beyond repair; thankfully, the emergency signal is still active, as its hardware is built into the most durable part of the grip. She uses the little blinking light attached to check over the rest of her supplies.

There’s enough rations to last her a few days, but hopefully it won’t come down to that. Someone should pick up her signal soon. Then they can rescue her from…

Well, maybe she should figure out where she is, first. Her Scroll’s light shines weakly against the darkness, barely illuminating the air in front of her, and so the process of mapping out her immediate surroundings goes by incredibly slowly. Her Aura is not fully recovered yet, and taking a blow to the head or a bad slip and fall now could be really freaking bad for her. She’s lucky she doesn’t have any debilitating injuries in the first place.

Eventually she finds a wider opening in the space, and hears her footsteps echo through the cavern ahead. When she shines a light to the ground, she spots bloody hand prints — perfectly matching her own — leading towards her. Did she drag herself into this little chamber from the larger cavern before passing out?

The chamber connects to the cavern halfway up its height, forcing Ruby to half-creep half-slide her way down. When she finally does, a soft hissing sound reaches her, previously nothing more than white noise to the ringing in her ears. It’s the rattling of an hourglass, though on a much larger scale.

Drawing close to the source of the noise, her heel digs into something soft, and flowing. She quickly withdraws her foot, yelping and jumping about wildly, before shining a light back towards the source of her panic. Her eyes grow wide at the sight.

A stream of pure Grimm essence, no wider than her arm, carrying away granules of sand in its current. At once her memory snaps back into place, and she remembers exactly where she is — or rather, where the land shark had taken her. There’s a cave system beneath the Sandspires, accessible by falling through its quicksand pits!

“Gods,” she whispers under her breath, “That’s how the spires hold themselves together. The essence cycles through them, and generates tons of Grimm in the process. How many of these little rivers are there?”

Her mind runs amok with questions. Are all the seven natural wonders like this? Does each one run black with Grimm essence? Not just the obvious ones — the Dragon’s Bones in Salem’s domain and The World Basin — but all of them? And combined, did they represent the source of all Grimm in the world, or just the channels of a single origin point?

She wishes Spectre had an answer for her. Way back when she first learned that genetic memories were a thing, she, of course, immediately attempted to go as far back as possible, to the moment of its birth. If only it were that simple. But her triggers are always specific, and besides that, few and far between.

Even now, standing in the pits of the Sandspires, she feels not even the slightest tug from her Grimm side. Why? She had not one, but two from a freaking Oobleck lecture just a while back! How annoying! How fickle!

Or, there’s something she’s missing. Regardless, with that particular thread spun all the way out, her mind turns back to her current predicament. Now worsened, she realizes, by the revelation of her precise location: beneath the Sandspires. What rescue party would dare brave the Grimm-infested lands above to reach her? Yang would, of course, but would the others prevent her from trying, seeing Ruby as a lost cause? Can she even count on Yang to approach the place without being completely overwhelmed by Grimm?

The answer, as much as she loves her sister, is no. She can’t count them to save her; it would be too much to ask of even a Rank 1 Hunter. So ahead of her are two options: climb her way out of quicksand and book it from the Sandspires as quickly as possible, or somehow, make it easier for someone to get to her.

She looks back down at the thin stream of Grimm essence, and an idea forms. Why not both?

It takes a bit of concentration, but soon she forms an array of Boarbatusk plates along her arms. Backing up a few steps from the stream, she kneels, punching down against the sandstone floor with vigor. To her delight, the ground cracks and breaks, and after a few minutes of labor she’s formed a depression in the cave, low and angled away from the stream.

Sweat clings to her skin as she works, digging and digging until a channel forms between her makeshift pit and the stream, diverting the flow of Grimm essence away. The black ichor begins pooling in the pit, slowly filling it up. Out of curiosity, she reaches into the tiny pool and scoops up a dollop of Grimm essence, and sticks her finger into her mouth. It tastes… bland and unordinary. She doesn’t feel any changes coming on.

Here’s what she expects will happen: when the pit overflows it will be away from its source, hopefully filling up the lower segment of the cavern before reaching the channel connected to the spires. If she recreates the effect enough times in enough caverns, she’ll lower the concentration of new Grimm being spat out by the Sandspires enough for Yang to notice, and launch a rescue thanks to the path she’s cleared!

At the same time, she’ll be exploring the cave system for more Grimm channels, so if she finds a particular cavern close enough to the surface with a low ceiling, she’ll try to escape through there. Hopefully she’s making the right assumption with how close Sulphur Fish like to swim relative to the surface, since that’s her benchmark for how deep underground she is. And speaking of active Grimm…

She extends her senses beyond just directly above her, and is rewarded with a skull-splitting headache. Okay, maybe she’s pushed herself a teensy tiny bit too far today. So, no tracking down the land shark as a bonus, even though she’s certain it's grievously injured. She needs to save her strength for digging, anyway.

She starts off in a completely random direction and gets to work.

The first day, or perhaps night — she can’t really tell the time with her busted Scroll and the utter lack of natural light — passes by fruitfully. She loses count of how many trenches she digs, but she can feel herself getting slightly closer to the surface with every cavern. When she feels tired, she finds a small alcove to crawl into, chipping away at her rations before falling asleep.

She wakes for a second time in pain, and curses her weakened Aura. Any other Hunter would have healed from their wounds by now, but instead hers have entered a sort of stasis, turning sore and bruised, missing a core component before they can fully heal. Her stomach growls, but not for lack of food.

The silence begins to get to her on the second ‘day’. To keep the loneliness at bay, she hums to herself an old tune as she works, one from millenia ago. She can’t give Salem any credit, though; she’s certain anyone else as old as her can come up with something just as good, if not better.

By the end of the third sleep — because at this point she’s better off measuring time in states of consciousness — she starts losing hope. The tunnels under the Sandspires seem endless, and no matter how high she climbs, there’s always more; her Scroll’s emergency signal will stop broadcast at any minute; worst of all, she’s so freaking hungry…

Leaving behind yet another slowly growing pool black ichor, she suddenly feels exhaustion set into her bones, and stumbles over a tiny divot in the sandstone. Her Boarbatusk plating scrapes harshly against the cavern floor, kicking up a choking cloud of dust.

No, no no no, what’s going on?

Slumped down against the rough, chalky ground, her breathing becomes labored, and her mind fogs over with fatigue. Fresh blood runs down her fingers as she drags herself forward without thinking, pulled along by an unknown force like a puppet on a string. Her limbs jerk back and forth in a tug-of-war with her unseen puppeteer, but it is a losing battle; she finds herself invariably losing more ground than she gains.

Eventually she comes to a stop at a small ledge. Her body spasms, and down the ledge she tumbles, before being lifted by invisible strings to her feet. Then, as her eyes adjust to the soft glow of red enveloping her, she sucks in a sharp breath entirely of her own free will.

In front of her is the land shark, facing her from one side with a single, baleful, crimson eye. The light emanating from it is enough to illuminate the entire Grimm, though its outline is fuzzy and lacks definition. The cavern in which the two of them stand is barely enough to fit it, though she notes the ground beneath consists of soft, loamy sand as opposed to the hard stone she’s used to.

Here, in the absolute stillness of the cavern, she sees the damage her and her team did to it in its full extent. Its once-proud armor hangs off its skin in jagged ribbons, ripped up by her scythe and shattered by Ren’s Aura technique. Speaking of her weapon, she sees it sticking out of the Grimm’s exposed flesh like a sore thumb, and in the dim lighting she barely catches the slow, steady flow of blood from monster to metal, dripping onto the sand below.

Nora’s successful fishing attempt, which landed the, er, land shark on its back, has bent its dorsal fin in painful and unnatural ways, and upon further inspection has blocked the flow of electricity from the base of the fin to its tip. The only parts of the Grimm that are undamaged are its newly evolved legs, for all the good that it has done it. As cool as they are, they aren’t essential to its survival. And at once she knows, having been trapped down here for as long as she has, the Grimm in front of her is dying. She can only guess the reason that it hasn’t died yet already is thanks to its sheer size and strength.

It opens its mouth. Ruby takes a step back.

All Grimm can talk, to a degree. The older one gets the more sophisticated it gets. Better vocabulary, better grammar, the ability to hold more complex topics in their minds; just as their physical attributes evolve, so too do their mental. There are a few exceptions to the rule, as always — newborn chatterboxes and elder Grimm only capable of communicating in grunts and roars — but no creature of darkness is utterly incapable of speech.

Of course, just because they can, doesn’t mean each and every Grimm scream a battle cry whenever they descend upon a settlement, or talk shop with each other in their downtime from ripping men, women and children to shreds. Communication between Grimm must be made with intent; it must be opened like a door or formed like a bridge. Without that connection, anything spoken just becomes noise.

With a start, Ruby realizes the connection between her and the land shark is already there. But she does not remember reaching out to the creature, nor does she remember letting it into her mind. Another option that exists is that the mental link was forced, somehow, and if that’s true, then…

Before her mind can wrap itself around the massive implications of that possibility, the Grimm speaks.

Child. Deceiver. Why do you fight?

A stiffness seizes her jaw, locking her teeth together. Noises beyond the ken of any human or Faunus escape from her throat. At best any given person might hear the snapping of wood, the crumbling of stone, or the shattering of glass. Others still might hear the rumbling of an earthquake, the roaring of a wildfire, or the howling of a hurricane. The worst among them might hear nothing at all.

“I am… unhappy. For doing this.”

The Grimm have no words for sorry, no words for remorse. Not any that she knows of.

Why do you fight? It asks again.

Ruby pauses, stuttering again where language fails. “Because I have a… prey. A prey I must… hunt no matter what.”

What are dreams, to monsters that never sleep? What do they strive for, these creatures who only live in the present?

Kin. You mistake me for prey?

“I do not. You are… competition.”

The land shark snorts, an action that only irritates its many wounds. Black ichor spurts from every opening, trickling down its cracked plate armor and pooling at its feet. Its groans of agony unsettle her; she feels it down to the very marrow of her bones, and deep down in the roots of her soul she knows she’s not standing in front of a regular ol’ creature of darkness anymore. She’s standing in front of something impossibly ancient, something that has likely seen the rise and fall of dozens of civilizations in its lifetime. Just calling it a ‘Grimm’ like the rest doesn’t feel right.

Young. Ambitious. A deadly combination. It sags, sinking into the sand, head lowered and beckoning. Ruby feels an unimaginable pang rip through her heart like a bullet. But is the grief hers, or Spectre’s?

Approach. Reap your reward.

Unwilling and unable to resist even its dying will, she surges forward, arms lunging for the land shark’s core. Blood and flesh splash against her skin as her hand closes around the orb, much larger and heavier than the past two that she’s taken. The land shark shudders violently as she pulls her arm free, plumes of smoke escaping from its body as it begins to dissolve.

As large as an apple and barely fitting in the palm of her hand, the orb is translucent, a red glass tinting a core of pitch black. A characteristic of ancient Grimm, if its physical form and behavior didn’t already tip her off. Her jaw shifts and unhinges into that of a Beowolf, letting the land shark’s core break upon her fangs.

A beat passes. She stands around, expectations slowly floundering as nothing happens. 

“Why isn’t anything — a̵a̴a̸r̶g̵h̴!̸”

The power slams into her like a wrecking ball, and she keels over, a fresh, searing pain coursing through her veins. She gasps for air, and, finding none, brings her fingers up against her throat in a desperate attempt to tear it open. It feels as though someone’s lodged a knife in her brain; doused her stomach with oil and lit it up in a great, blazing fire; weighed down her heart and lungs, her flesh and bone and skin, all with pure lead.

Writhing and convulsing on the cavern floor, oxygen finally finds its way to her, and she finally cries out.

“I̵t̶ ̶h̵u̷r̶t̸s̷!̶ ̵M̸a̴k̷e̸ ̷i̷t̵ ̴s̵t̷o̵p̷!̷”

“I think I heard something up there!” A familiar voice calls out in the darkness.

“Ruby? Ruby, is that you? Can you hear me?”

Years of muscle memory kick in, and her Grimm features recede. Her eyes sting as they adjust to the bright light suddenly filling the cavern, and her ears prick up at the pattering sound of boots against stone. Multiple pairs of boots, in fact.

Still, the pain is paralyzing. Curled up on the floor as she is, she can only bear to turn her head slightly to greet her rescuers.

“Y-Yang…? You found me… Ren and Nora too…”

“Oh my gods, Ruby!”

A flashlight clatters to the floor, and in an instant her sister is kneeling in front of her. There are heavy bags under Yang’s tearful eyes, and her hands tremble violently as they hover in front of her, unsure of how to proceed. Ruby has absolutely no clue what she looks like to them, but in their presence she finds the pain abating, a destructive tempest receding to a low, steady rainstorm. Strong, sturdy arms wrap around her, and the pain finally lessens enough for her to feel something else.

“Hang in there, Ruby,” her sister’s voice takes on a frantic, almost manic edge, “We’re getting you out of here, right now!”

“H-Hungry…” Ruby groans.

“Oh!” Yang giggles feverishly, “Duh, of course you are! Hang on, sis, just give me a… just, j-j-just give m-me–”

Her sister’s body freezes unnaturally, face twitching, as her irises start flickering rapidly between lilac and red like a broken light bulb. Anger seeps into Ruby through a clogged, rusted pipe, the once-familiar flavor turning foul and rancid on her tongue. She coughs weakly, struggling and failing to free herself from her sister’s catatonic grip.

“Yang?” Nora’s voice, though laced with concern, is remarkably steady. “You, uh, doing alright?”

Yang doesn’t get a chance to answer. Instead, a low hum cuts through the air, and Raven’s Semblance materializes next to them. The crime lord steps out briskly, grabbing her daughter by the collar and all but throwing her through the portal.

“Get in,” Raven barks out, motioning towards Ren and Nora. “I’ll carry her back.”

Ren tilts his head forward, apprehensive. “You first.”

“Fine.”

Arms close around her once more, lifting her off the ground. Her eyes feel as if they are about to roll out of her skull, but she grits her teeth and endures as Raven jostles her into something resembling a bridal carry. Her head swings back, letting her gaze settle on Ren and Nora, and the best she can manage is a bloody, lopsided grin at their worried faces.

Her voice comes out a bare whisper. “I got it, by the way. Grimm’s dead.”

The air around her shifts. The empty silence of the caverns gives way to the hustle and bustle of an active bandit camp. She’s dumped unceremoniously on a makeshift stretcher. Bones crack and skin ruptures anew, as a small, pained whimper escapes her lips.

“Congratulations,” says Raven, in response. “Mission accomplished.”

Chapter Text

It takes half an hour to convince Sa’ai’s local doctor that she doesn’t need to take off her clothes. This process was made slightly easier when Raven marched into the examination room later and simply ordered them away, leaving her alone unsupervised with a bunch of medical supplies. On the verge of keeling over, she stabs herself with a couple more Aura injectors, pops a few antibiotics, and promptly falls over on the cold, sterile bed next to her. Medically sound? No. Safer than the alternative? Probably.

The weight of the last few days’ ordeals presses down on her, and she musters up all her remaining strength to sum up her feelings on the matter in a single, near-breathless utterance.

“Ow.”

She giggles silently to herself, giddiness bubbling up through the pain like an oasis in the desert. They had done it! She had done it! Her first test, her first real test, undeniable proof that her dreams aren’t just a fairy tale, and she had passed with flying — well, a color, perhaps. And probably it was swimming at the bottom of The World Basin, but still. She passed nonetheless.

They’ll be recognized for their efforts when they return to Beacon. Nothing grandiose, of course; just a little ceremony in celebration of their takedown of the Grimm and resultant promotion to the next rank. Hopefully no one back home makes too much of a fuss over it.

Functionally, there isn’t much of a difference between a Rank 6 and a Rank 7 Hunter. They still have weekly missions to complete, and their access to Beacon’s facilities isn’t expanded in any manner. For example, her rental room in the forges will remain the same as they are now. Among Hunter subculture most regard 6’s and 7’s as exactly the same, on the social hierarchy, occupying the space of ‘small fry’ or ‘little league’ Hunters. Basically, the only real impact their first rank up will have is on the availability of missions.

But to Ruby, none of that really matters. What matters is that she’s one step closer to Rank 3. One step closer to finding her first relic.

One step closer to turning the tables on those two.

Turning her thoughts away from future matters, she rubs the ridge of bones running down her arms anxiously, noting their slight yet not insignificant growth from the last time she checked a week ago. Her Grimm side hovers just beneath the surface, itching to spring forth at a moment’s notice. Keeping it down feels like continually standing on the balls of her feet, but she endures the pressure, fearful of the torment she suffered moments before being found. Maybe she’ll feel better about it once she gets some fresh negative emotions in her.

Still laying on the hospital bed — where is she, exactly, the Branwen clan’s base of operations or the village of Sa’ai? — a small frown makes its way to her face. What had happened with Yang? It was like her sister’s brain had short-circuited right in front of her!

As if summoned telepathically, the exam room door slams open, revealing three figures. Ruby sits bolt upright as Yang rushes into the room, followed shortly by Nora and Ren.

For a moment, no one says anything. Tears glisten on the edges of Yang’s lilac eyes. Then her sister pulls her into a hug.

“Don’t ever scare me like that again.”

“I won’t.”

Yang squeezes her tighter. “Promise me.”

“I promise, sis.”

Those three words alone are seemingly enough to placate her sister, and her personal space returns. She regards Ren and Nora closely.

How much did they see? How much did they know?

Yang makes no indication that her secret’s slipped, but given her sister’s odd behavior shortly after finding her, there’s a chance she doesn’t know either.

Nora seems to be acting the same as usual, but Ren is impenetrable as ever. His stare is protracted and intense, betraying no emotion, but then again that is always how Ren looks, isn’t it? A stern expression from him on any given day has an equal chance of being from demolishing his sparring partner on the training grounds as it does from getting congee spilled all over him at lunch.

Her mind spirals with worry. The Grimm, Raven, now this? There’s so much for her to keep track of, and already she feels her focus slipping. Maybe she’ll come back to this after a good night’s sleep. But first…

“Sorry for making you guys worry.”

“What you did was exceedingly foolish,” says Ren.

“But!” Nora chimes in, “Like, seriously freaking cool. I mean, who knew there was an entire cave network hidden under the quicksand? Not Beacon, I’ll tell ya!”

Ruby yawns. “How… how did you find me?”

“Followed your signal, sis,” says Yang.

“Whatever you did down there worked. We noticed the Grimm thinning out along certain spires,” says Ren. “Really, our only difficulty was in convincing Raven to cooperate. Nothing compared to what you had to go through down there, I’m sure.”

Yang covers for her before she has to elaborate. “Here,” her sister produces a blanket and drapes it over her. “C’mon, you two, let’s all get some rest. We can talk more about this tomorrow. Sleep tight, Rubes.”

“Night.”

Finally allowed to let her guard down after days in Grimm territory, she settles into the hospital bed, still caked in sweat and grime. The lumpy, rough bed is nothing compared to hard sandstone, and as she drifts off she promises to herself at least an hour long shower the first chance she gets. And maybe a trip to the spa when they return to Vale.

She awakens to the rest of Team YRRN and Raven Branwen, all gathered in the room together. Ren and Nora are quietly conversing over something, and Yang is dozing off in a chair set up next to her bed. Raven, upon seeing Ruby, takes her scabbard and smacks Yang on the head with it.

“Ow! The hell was that for?!”

“Congratulations again on completing the mission,” says Raven, ignoring her daughter. “The village of Sa’ai offers their deepest gratitude.”

“They’re preparing a festival outside. Oh, I can’t wait to check it out!” Nora bounces excitedly on the heels of her feet.

Raven fishes out a folded envelope, handing it off to Ren. “I’ve already sent Beacon a preliminary report. Naturally, it falls to the four of you to draft a full report of everything that transpired on the mission, as well as a name for the Grimm you’ve hunted.”

“Got anything else you want to say?” Ruby asks, letting Yang help her out of bed. She’s still a little unsteady on her feet, and has to brace against her sister as she stares into Raven’s crimson eyes.

“As head of the Branwen clan, I’d also like to offer you my thanks. Sa’ai is the only known settlement located near the breeding ground of a certain kind of fish, you see. They say that each season, the fish carry precious minerals on their scales from deep in the ocean which, when extracted, can be used to create especially beautiful cosmetics.”

“Oh, well that isn’t too b–”

“The minerals can also be ground up into a fine powder and smoked, if you’re ever curious.”

Ruby throws up her hands. “Right. Don’t even know why I asked.”

“And one more thing. Here.”

Raven tosses a slip of colored paper on the table. It flutters and flips in the air, eventually landing on its back.

“Where did you get–?”

“Don’t ask where I got the money.”

Ren takes the check, examining it closely. “This is… a lot.”

“Compensation for my subordinates’ lackluster performance. And a little extra, for the brat’s scythe.”

Yang sighs, “Alright, what’s the catch?”

“There is none. You’re being fairly rewarded for your performance.” Then, abruptly, “Goodbye.”

“Wait!” Ruby stretches a hand out, but it is already too late. Raven disappears into a portal, bandana fluttering behind her. “Aw, beans!”

“I’m sure that’s not the last we’ll see of her,” says Ren, waving the slip of paper back and forth. “Yang, can you help me get this Lien processed?”

“Sure! Get out your Scroll, I’ll show you how to do it online.”

As the two occupy themselves on the device, Nora gives her a sidelong glance, nodding conspiratorially. Ruby nods back in understanding, creeping around the edges of the exam room towards the exit. At some point, Ren’s gaze momentarily flicks up towards her, but he makes neither objection nor indication of her escape to Yang, and she is allowed to continue out the door along with Nora.

The festival is in full swing by the time she steps out of the clinic. Torches along the village path light up the night sky and litter the ground with little black coals. The harsh smell of smoke and grease assails her, only to be carried away on a passing breeze. In the distance, she sees a towering pyre, and shadowed figures dancing and parading around it in a ring. Surrounding this is another ring of tables and short stools, themselves encircled by an outer ring of stalls, searing grilled meats or display the work of local artisans or hosting little festival games for the villagers’ entertainment.

Nora has already disappeared into the crowd, whooping and cheering loudly, becoming another shadow among the homogeneous mass. She follows suit before Yang and Ren can catch up.

Once ‘inside’, villagers swarm her with words of thanks and various souvenirs. She doesn’t quite walk among them, but instead is passed around like tithe box, an endless supply of charms and baubles and snacks building up into a pile in her arms. Eventually a kind vendor takes pity on her, offering to hold on to the gifts until she is can carry them unencumbered.

With her hands freed, she makes a few laps around the venue, the sight of joyous people and lively celebration more than enough a reward for her efforts. All around her, people dance to the beat of drums and woodwinds; children run by, their hands full of sweet treats and toys; shopkeepers work busily against the ever-flowing tide of customers; at some point she spots Nora running around with an entire statue of herself made of spun sugar, pupils dilated way beyond what is normal. Yang passes over her, crowd surfing. She grabs a stick of strawberry tanghulu for herself, devouring it in a few bites.

“Ah, there you are, Ruby.” Ren finds her later amidst the chaos, looking no more disheveled than before.

“Hi Ren! Enjoying the festival?”

He nods. “I am. It reminds me of the ones we once held back home.”

“Ku–” She barely catches herself, “–ool? Cool! T-This is all new to me, I’m a little overwhelmed, ha ha ha…”

Ren frowns, but doesn’t call out the slip-up. “Not too stressful, I hope?”

“Nope!”

“I’m glad. Now, I need to go find Nora before she defenestrates someone.”

“B-But we’re all outside?”

Ren maintains eye contact with her, turning slightly. “Exactly.”

Then he leaves, composed as ever, despite the ever-growing crowd of admirers surrounding him.

The details of their adventure had not been released to the public; being the smallest and least physically imposing of the four and currently lacking a weapon, most simply assume her role in defeating the Grimm to be supportive in nature, and thus do not celebrate her presence with the same level of fervor as all the others. This suits her just fine.

In fact, she’s rather appreciative of the fact that her personal space hasn’t been violated–

Something long and furry smacks right into her face.

“Ack! Pbbbth! Get off me!”

“Whoa! Sorry, didn’t see you there!”

Lifting the blonde, fuzzy mass away from her eyes, she spits out a hair and musters a weak glare at her assailant. The offending monkey Faunus looms over her with an easy smile, tail still swishing back and forth irresponsibly to the beat of the drums. In one hand, he carries three skewers, each one nestled in between his fingers. In the other, he carries a large, flat board with curved edges, painted with bright, clear colors. He’s wearing a pair of grease-stained cargo pants and sandals and nothing else.

“Here,” he hands her one of his skewers, “It’s all I got right now. Hope you don’t mind scorpion!”

“…Gee, thanks.”

“Some festival, huh?” The monkey boy carries on, oblivious, “I just got here yesterday, had no idea Mistralans knew how to party this hard. Any idea what we’re celebratin’?”

Um. What?

“I’m Sun, by the way.” His tail wraps around the remaining two skewers, and with his free hand he fishes something out of his pocket and hands it to her. A thin, paper business card that reads: ‘Great Sage Investigative Services, Inc.’ along with an address all the way in Vacuo and a Scroll number. “You won’t find a better sleuth in all the heavens!” He says with a wink.

Not quite convinced, she says, “What’s a super-sleuth like you doing all the way out here?”

“Ah, just chasing down a few leads here and there. You know how it is.”

“I don’t, actually.” She gestures his occupied arm, “Is that your weapon?”

Sun looks at the board, then back at her, then back at the board again. “…This is a surfboard.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Dude! There you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you!” A blue-haired boy comes up to them, slugging Sun in the shoulder.

“Ouch! Hey, man, what gives?” Then, looking to her, “This is my partner, Neptune. Neptune, this is… uhhh… aw jeez, I knew I was forgetting something!”

“My name’s Ruby,” she says, rolling her eyes and giving small smile.

“It’s nice to meet you, Ruby. Say, you’re part of the Hunter team that saved this village, right?”

“Yup!”

Sun’s eyes grow wide as saucers, holding out a fist. “Dude. Wicked.”

“I-I didn’t really do much…” She bumps his fist anyway.

“Still wicked. So, what’s Haven like?”

“Actually, we’re from Beacon.”

“You came all the way from Vale? That’s cool, we’re actually heading there ourselves in a few–”

Neptune elbows him. “Dude! Ix-nay on the ale-Vay sitch! You-know-who is gonna get so mad if you forget to follow protocol again!”

“Huh? Oh, right,” Sun rubs the back of his head sheepishly. “I mean, what’s a Bacon? Does it taste good?”

“Dork,” says Neptune, without a hint of venom. “It’s been a pleasure, Ruby. If you’ll excuse us…”

“Um. See you in Vale, I guess?” She waves at them as they speed away, slightly bewildered.

Time passes in a blur as she continues to enjoy the festival in its full splendor, still going strong despite the hours. She’s about ready to turn in for the night when her Grimm side picks up something.

An odd scent suffuses the air, faintly familiar, drawing her away from the town center. It’s… grief? How odd. The entire village is in the midst of joyous celebration, and to her knowledge no one had lost their lives between when they first arrived until she had subjugated the Grimm.

Following its trail like a hound, she weaves her way through unlit streets and dark corridors. Curiosity wins out over caution, and she ducks her head into a building, submerging herself in the darkness of the night. The scent wafts over her with stark contrast to her surroundings, effortlessly guiding her to a down a hall to an inner room. Her hand closes around the doorknob.

The moment she stumbles into the center of the pitch-dark room, the scent fades, as if it was never there in the first place. While her eyes struggle to adjust to the darkness, she feels around for a light switch.

The door snaps shut behind her.

“Couldn’t help yourself, could you?”

Ruby shrieks, nearly jumping out of her own skin as the overhead lamp turns on. Raven stands between her and the door, arms folded imposingly. The room itself is small, windowless, and completely empty save for its two occupants.

“I, I…” Her mind scrambles for an excuse, “I thought I heard someone crying…?”

She begins blubbering out series of lame-yet-believable excuses, but shuts up instantly when Raven simply says: “I know what you are.”

She scrambles back, putting a decent distance between her and the full extension of Raven’s sword, fists coming up defensively. Sure she doesn’t have her scythe on hand, but she can still try some of the new Aura techniques her sister’s been teaching her!

The crime lord looks thoroughly unimpressed. “Mhm. Tell me something. Do you seriously think you stand a chance of beating those two?”

Ruby laughs nervously, looking around for an escape route besides the one Raven is blocking. Maybe she can just punch through the wall with enough force? “I-I don’t know what you’re talking abou–”

“Ozma. And. Salem. And don’t try to tell me that you signed up with Beacon for the fun of it.” Raven shifts, resting her hand on her sword’s hilt.

She freezes, her mind thinking of a way out, and turning up empty. “…How much do you know?”

“I know about their four little secrets. And I know what actually killed your mother. Do you?”

Ruby clenches her fists, lip quivering. Her voice comes out breathy and shallow. “Yeah. I know.”

“Then you should know you don’t stand a chance against them,” Raven snaps, pacing around her. “Sure, they’ve left you alone for now. But once they figure out your secret, they won’t hesitate to act. You’re nothing more than an ant to them, Ruby, push far enough, and they’ll crush you like one. Oh, but it won’t stop there. The Valkyrie girl and her boytoy, do you really think they’ll just leave them alone after that? What about your uncle Qrow? Your fool of a father?”

“And Yang?”

“Why do you think we’re having this conversation? Yang is too stubborn to listen to me; I’m hoping her younger sister that she adores so much is a little more reasonable.”

“What if I’m not?”

Raven pauses, blinking, her face completely neutral. After some amount of time, she takes her hand off the hilt of her weapon, kicks the door back open, and leans against the wall away from it casually.

“How about we make a wager, Ruby Rose? If you can retrieve the Beacon relic from under Ozma’s nose, I’ll join you. Me, my crew, and the Spring Maiden.”

Ruby’s eyes narrow. “So she actually is with you? And you’re just trusting me with this information?”

“Generous, aren’t I? Honestly, you should be thanking me,” Raven smirks.

“This is some sort of trick, isn’t it? I could leak this information to Ozma, to Salem! Have all the Hunters in the world coming after the Branwen tribe.”

Raven’s smirk doesn’t leave her face. “Will you?”

“I…” Ruby hesitates, forced to admit defeat. “I won’t.”

“There you have it. In return,” Raven produces a small object, and places it Ruby’s hands, “I want you to hold on to this.”

In the palm of her hand is a circular disk of wood, about as thick as a bottle cap with an even smaller wooden ball bearing in its center, which rotates at Ruby’s touch. Forming a ring around the bearing are a series of patterns, and near the edge of the disk a red ceremonial tassel loops through a tiny hole.

“When the time comes,” Raven continues, “When you finally wake up and recognize that there is no beating those two monsters, channel your Aura into that charm. It only works once, but it’ll let me target you with my Semblance. I’ll pull you and all of your loved ones to safety.”

What goes unsaid is the rest of the wager, which does not need to be spoken aloud when both parties understand exactly the implications that would follow such an act. To use the charm is to admit defeat. To concede that neither Ozma nor Salem can be beaten. And to, in total, absolute defeat, join the side that was ‘right’ all along: Branwen clan.

 “I’ll allow you to play in your little playpen a while longer, child,” Raven waves her sword, opening a portal away from Sa’ai. “Whenever you’re ready to put away the toys and grow up, you know how to reach me.”

Then, Raven disappears, leaving Ruby alone in the room. Her fingers run over the talisman, feeling the smooth, sanded wood against her thumb. The tassel dangles over the edge of her palm, spinning gently one way, then another. As if taunting her, she can almost make out an angry, devilish face in the pattern carved into the charm.

She waits a beat. Then another.

The talisman falls to the floor, landing flat on its face. A loud, sharp, snapping noise echoes down the hall as she leaves the room.

Chapter Text

“Ruby Rose. Yang Xiao Long. Nora Valkyrie. Lie Ren.”

They are standing in a row on a raised stage, in one of the smaller amphitheaters she didn’t even know Beacon had. Possible relic hiding place? Unlikely, but it’s good to know places like these exist regardless.

“The four of you are the first to ever successfully slay the,” Glynda pauses, adjusting her reading glasses, and squints at the piece of paper in her hands, “Dreadjaw? Not what I would have chosen, but nevertheless, congratulations. You’ve managed to accomplish what hundreds of thousands of Hunters throughout all of Remnant’s history could not, and you’ve done it in spite of your age, experience, and rank. Impressive.”

Glynda Goodwitch is even more imposing in person. She towers over the four of them, the formal and academic state of her dress belying the fact that she could probably fold Ruby in half with her bare hands, and that's without her Semblance. With it? The mental image of her Grimm side being forcibly ripped out of her like a sausage out of its casing pops into her brain, and she barely suppresses a shudder. Ruby’s already met Goodwitch once before, at the funeral, but that was when she was what, like, five years old? Every stranger is tall and scary to a five-year-old; her assessment of the woman back then doesn’t count.

She shifts on her feet, stiff and uncomfortable, muttering under her breath, “I still think we shoulda gone with ‘Mr. Chompy’…”

Yang pinches her quiet. Applause rings out from the audience, scattered and muted. Being relatively unknown in the Hunter community, very few people have turned out to see the rookies that took down an ancient Grimm. She assumes most have chalked the feat up to a fluke, or to outside interference that can’t be recognized by the Kingdoms.

Among the ‘crowd’ is Pyrrha, smiling and clapping enthusiastically, and Weiss for some inexplicable reason, gaze laser-focused on her. She also spots a few old friends of her father and uncle; veteran Hunters past their prime who’re aware of her and Yang’s parentage, turning out in curiosity after catching their last names on the announcement. Oh gods, she hopes none of them have reached out to her father.

“In recognition of your strength, Beacon hereby confers upon you the status of Rank 6. Do not take this as an invitation to slack off on your duties!”

Above them, the digital display shifts, the border around their digital licenses changing shape and color. Surprisingly, some of the members of the audience have stood up, clapping louder than Ruby expects. Brightly colored confetti descends from the ceiling, the crackle and pop of streamers eclipsing the applause by a wide margin.

Taking this as a sign that the time to stand stiffly in place and be talked at is over, Yang turns to Ruby and pulls her into a hug, lifting her off the ground and spinning her in the air. To the side, she sees Nora do the same to Ren, though she swears she hears the sound of bones snapping as Nora crushes him with her arms.

Their celebration, however, is short-lived.

“Ruby Xiao Long! What is the meaning of this?!” A thunderous voice rings out from behind them in the wings.

Oh no…

Yang sets her down, immediately on guard. Storming out of the darkness, with blonde hair and a full face of beard, is their father. He levels a glare at Goodwitch, and a quicker one at the crowd below, squaring his shoulders and clenching his fists angrily. Behind him, their uncle ambles onstage, hands in his pockets, posture flippant and relaxed despite the spectacle they are causing. A flask dangles at his hip, capped and sloshing with liquor.

“Dad?!” Ruby hisses, eyes darting back and forth between her father and the murmuring crowd. “What are you doing here?”

“What am I–? What are you doing here, young lady? Glynda, what is she doing here?”

“Miss Rose is a registered Huntress at Beacon. She has been with us for well over a month, which you would have known if you bothered to check your email more than once a year!”

Wait, really?

“Wait, really?” Her dad echoes, pulling out his Scroll. Agonizing seconds pass as he slowly navigates through the device’s user interface. Ruby feels her face grow beet red as time passes. She glances into the audience. Miraculously, Pyrrha seems to have read her mind, gently yet urgently ushering people out of the auditorium in order to grant them some semblance of privacy.

While Tai checks through what must be thousands of unread emails, her uncle Qrow comes up to them. “Sorry about this, kiddos. Once news of your promotion reached our ears, there was no stopping him. Congrats, by the way.”

“Thanks, Uncle Qrow!”

“So, you two must be Yang’s fixers,” he continues, turning to Ren and Nora.

“Uncle Qrow!” Yang squawks, turning as red as Ruby.

“Kidding, kidding,” he extends a hand, “Thanks for keeping my nieces out of trouble. And it’s nice to see Ruby finally has someone other than Yang to talk to. No offense, firecracker.”

“None taken! You’re not the only one happy to see Ruby coming out of her shell.”

“Guuuys,” Ruby whines, gesturing emphatically towards her father, who seems to be nearly finished searching for the offending email. She’s summarily ignored.

Nora takes the hand. “Nice to meetcha, Mr. Branwen! I bet I can beat you in an arm wrestling match!”

Qrow grins, “You’re on, shorty! Let me bring a table out and–”

“Enough!” The crack of a riding crop brings them all to attention, and face-to-face with a very irate Glynda Goodwitch. “This ceremony is over! Everyone out. Now!”

Tai tries to interrupt, “But–”

“No buts! If you have an issue with your daughter’s affiliation with Beacon, I suggest you take it up with Sir Ozma. And you, Qrow! If I see even a splinter of wood around you anywhere on campus you’ll be leaving in a bodybag, am I understood?”

Her uncle gives her a lazy mock salute. “Whatever you say, ma’am. C’mon kids let’s get outta here. Tai, you coming?”

With no one particularly eager to continue testing Goodwitch’s patience, standing on a creaky wooden floor with a blinding, uncomfortably tepid spotlight constantly shining on them, the six of them evacuate the premises. In the shadows, she spots Pyrrha waving politely, a small, approving smile on her face. Ruby gives a discreet smile and wave back, not one to let any help go unappreciated. Even if Pyrrha Nikos is possibly/maybe/perhaps her enemy. She still isn’t quite certain where the other Huntress stands on the matter, or if she can be persuaded.

Somehow, they make it to the dorm room without a single word being exchanged on the topic of Ruby’s enlistment into Beacon. Instead, the walk back is filled with conversations about Tai and Qrow’s travels, and embarrassing recounts of Ruby and Yang’s childhoods, and pointed questions towards Ren and Nora about their past which they avoid giving straight answers for; all interspersed with tidbits of esoteric knowledge on Beacon’s facilities which she files away for later. But each passing moment they spend not talking about the Goliath in the room just causes dread to build up in her unhindered, a brambled overgrowth that chokes and constricts her heart.

She settles into one of the couch cushions, numbly listening to her father and uncle wax nostalgic about the dorm room they once shared with her mother and Raven, and of all the fun times they had at Beacon.

As a team of Hunters. Working under Ozma.

“Now as much as I’d like to sit here reminiscing about the good ol’ days, that’s not why we’re here, is it, Tai?”

Her sister sits next to her. Uncle Qrow leans against the kitchen counter. Dad is thoroughly cleaning his way through the dorm, like any truly nosy parent would. Ren and Nora hover near the door to their room, neutral.

Her gaze darts between each one of them. No one is saying anything; why isn’t anyone saying anything?

Eventually her father clears his throat, and says, “That’s right, Qrow. We’re here for a very important conversation. A very important private conversation.”

Ren blinks. “Of course. Nora, you wanted to show me the updated design for Magnhild?”

“Oh yeah!” Nora takes him by the hand, waving as the two of them make their exit. Her wide, bright smile belies the fear that Ruby can smell off of her from a mile away. “Have fun with the potentially career-ending talk and all that!”

Ren’s gaze lingers on her a second longer as they leave. A shiver runs down her spine. What was — no, not now, she needs to focus!

Her opening salvo is an age-old classic. “I can explain!”

Having finished cleaning (wow, that was fast!), Dad crosses his arms and tilts his head forward, beckoning.

“Let me expl–!”

“What Rubes means to say,” Yang quickly stands up, interrupting her, “Is that she’s already here, and she’s already Rank 6. You can’t say that it’s too dangerous for her.”

“I can and I will,” her father counters sternly, “It doesn’t matter how useful you are in a team, it’s still too risky for you to be doing regular Huntress work.”

“And when will it not be?!”

“When you become strong enough to make up for your Aura deficiency! I know it’s frustrating, but if you’d just be a little more patient and take a little more time to learn the proper techniques for managing–”

“I don’t have the time!” Ruby cries, standing up and pulls back her sleeve, “Look: they’re growing!”

Qrow is at her side instantly, gingerly taking her arm and running a hand across the tiny nubs that consist of her exoskeleton. “They’re definitely bigger than last time. Uh, when was last time again?”

Tai ignores him. “All the more reason to stay out of the public eye. Something that’ll be harder to do the higher up you rise in the ranks!”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I thought we were talking about Ruby’s aptitude as a Huntress. Where did this ‘hiding away from society’ thing suddenly come from?” Yang asks as Qrow lets go of her arm, which is immediately covered back up.

Her father stares at them, eyebrows raised. “And what was your plan for when her ‘other half’ becomes impossible to hide, young lady?”

“Um. Pretend to be a Faunus?”

Qrow sighs, “I still think we should tell Oz–”

“No!” Ruby chokes out, “No. I… I don’t — no one can know! Please.”

“Oxygen, kiddo. We won’t tell anyone without your permission. We promise.”

“Look,” says Yang, “Can we at least acknowledge that Ruby is capable enough to be a Huntress? It doesn’t really matter what you think, Dad, she’s been here for as long as I have — as long as Ren and Nora have — and hasn’t been kicked out yet. That’s gotta count for something!”

Her dad runs a hand through his messy hair. “I still have no clue what Ozma was thinking…”

“Probably the same thing I did, Tai,” says Qrow, “Ruby’s just like her mom; she’s going to find her way into the life of danger one way or another. Might as well keep a close eye on her while she does, keep her safe the best he can.”

Ahahaha. Yeah… keeping her safe. That’s definitely where the scheming old man’s motivations lie.

“That said, kiddo, maybe take your dad’s advice and tone it down for a bit. I read the report. You got lucky. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred that Grimm snaps the four of you up in one bite.”

“Even with my–?”

“Yes, even with your special abilities. Underestimate the Grimm, and you’re gonna get yourselves killed.”

“I-It wasn’t that bad…” She says, knowing fully how bad it was.

Qrow shrugs. “I’m just saying, don’t let those abilities of yours get to your head.”

“Besides,” her dad jumps in, “You may be half Grimm, but we don’t know for certain if that’s enough to keep you safe from that… thing. What if it finds you while your out alone on a mission? Decides that you pose the same threat as your mother did? What then, Ruby?”

“I…”

The words rest upon her lips, just waiting to be spoken. But she holds her tongue. After all, how can she possibly break the truth to them that the Grimm they’ve spent the past decade hunting, the one they think caused her mother’s death, is actually responsible for her current existence? And how can she, in explaining that, inevitably reveal that the true culprit leading them astray this whole time is actually the man who has spent years mentoring them, and that they have trusted for the better half of their lives?

She had been too young to understand the true state of things, back then. By the time she did, her father and uncle were in too deep, had invested too much. Now, they’re better off not knowing.

Plus, if she’s being honest, she’s terrified of getting tongue-tied during a hypothetical explanation and giving off the wrong impression. She’s already surrounded by enemies on all sides; she doesn’t need to accidentally make any more. Oh gods, what if they think the Grimm inside her has eaten her human brain, and is wearing her corpse around like a meat suit? What if they think she’s Salem’s sleeper agent, designed to turn them against Ozma? What if–?

“Ruby? You’re spiraling.”

“I swear I'm not possessed!" She shouts, falling back onto the couch dramatically.

Her family just stares at her as if she is. Oops. Probably not the best idea to blurt that out.

“We… never said you were?”

Qrow takes a swig out of his flask, then kneels down face-to-face with her. “Listen, Ruby. we know how much you want to avenge your mother’s death. Trust me, your father, your sister and I feel the exact same way. Just… keep in mind that even if this Huntress thing doesn’t end up shaking out how you wanted, there are other ways of helping.”

“None are as effective.”

Ruby shakes her head. They don’t get it. But how can they? They’re not working with the same puzzle pieces as she is.

“You might be surprised,” Dad says, clapping her on the shoulder. “But I can see that there’s no changing your mind, so how about this? Check in with the two of us before you take on any non-trivial mission. If we think it’s too much for you, we’ll negotiate to bring down the difficulty of the request to something more manageable, maybe take on part of the mission ourselves beforehand. You’ll still be able to do Huntress stuff, but with limits. Sound fair?”

She pauses, considering her options. The degree of freedom being granted to her comes as a surprise; she was half-expecting her dad to bar her from Grimm hunting forever, or become a total helicopter parent and accompany her on every outing. Viewed from that angle, this is a super great deal!

But Mom was great. Mom was super. And Mom still couldn’t beat Ozma or Salem.

“…Four.”

Yang nods, “Yeah, I was about to suggest the same thing. Only I would have said five.”

“What are you kids talking about?”

“Until Rank 4. Then I get to do what I want.”

“That’s–”

“Tai…” Qrow warns.

“–Fairly reasonable. But I need Yang to be Rank 4 too — and don’t think I haven’t forgotten about your part in all of this, young lady! Oh, and keep making more friends like Ren and Nora, in case none of us are around. Understood?”

“Deal!” Relief floods her like a broken dam, and she snaps up to her feet, pulling everyone into a group hug. “So, what now?”

“Well,” says Qrow, “We were actually in the middle of investigating a lead from Oz when your old man dragged me back here. So as much as I’d like to stick around, we’ve got places to be. Isn’t that right, Tai?”

“Ha ha ha,” Dad rubs his neck sheepishly, “Yeah…”

“Can we at least see you off at the docks?”

“Of course!”

It doesn’t take long for them to wrap up in the dorms, and move to Beacon’s transport bay. After sending Ren and Nora a text letting them know they were free to return, she and Yang spend a few minutes going through the ‘saying goodbye to your loved ones’ ritual with her family, standing under the wing of a roaring Bullhead. Then they spend another few minutes waving into the distance as the giant metal machine becomes nothing more than a blip on the slowly darkening horizon.

Then, as Yang wordlessly turns to make her way back on to Beacon proper, Ruby strikes.

“Yang, wait. Can we talk?”

“Not now, Rubes. Dinner and a shower, first.”

Ruby catches up to her sister in dogged pursuit. “I just wanna ask–”

“Whatever it is, it can wait,” says Yang, pointedly avoiding eye contact and surging ahead. “It’s been a long day.”

Okay, enough is enough. If dancing around the subject won’t work, she’ll just ask directly.

“What happened back there?”

Her sister stops at her question, still facing away from her. “Back where?”

“You know where! In the cave, when you… um. Froze?”

“…I don’t wanna talk about it.”

“Yang. Please, I’m worried.”

Ruby reaches out, brushing a hand against Yang’s shoulder, then immediately jerks back as if she’s touched a hot stove. Her sister whirls around, one eye purple and the other red, uneven patches of hair igniting in spurts, a hideous snarl etched on her face.

“Y-Yang…? What’s going on?”

“I’m not okay with lying to them, you know,” says Yang, eyes flickering. “I’m not okay with lying to our family, to Ren and Nora, to any of our friends back on Patch! I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it!”

“I–”

“But I go along with it,” Yang comes up to her, pointing a finger at her just below her chin, “Because it’s not my secret to tell. Because I won’t be the one to burn if it gets out. I promised I’d follow your lead, sis, even as these stupid lies and half-truths grow more and more out of control. Even as it seems like they’ll backfire on us at any moment! So you better make damn sure this all works out in the end. Okay?!”

Ruby blinks, her senses going haywire. She sees Yang’s burning hair, her glaring eyes, her aggressive posture; telltale signs of anger. She hears the harsh words coming out of Yang’s mouth, how blatant they are in describing her feelings on today’s events. She feels the heat of Yang’s Semblance, rolling over her skin in waves.

She smells nothing.

“…Okay. I will.”

“Great. Good talk.”

Yang spins on her heel, stomping away in a haze of heat and fire. Ruby still smells nothing.

Chapter Text

What.

What just happened?

Never in her life has she seen her sister get so… so angry. And never at her, either. Has she — has she done something wrong?

Evidently, the answer is yes. Yang’s behavior towards her seemed eerily similar to what had happened down in the Sandspires: swinging erratically towards extreme fits of rage, with physical expressions of it like her changing eyes or igniting hair, but without any emotions, no real ‘force’ propelling it. Not that she can sense, anyway.

She always thought it odd that she could take away her sister’s negative emotions with seemingly no side effects, but owing to the fact that they didn’t have many other options, she did not question it. And now perhaps they were seeing the consequences of that choice.

There’s a certain fact that had been nibbling away at her mind, for a while now. Since arriving at Beacon, she’s met so many new people. And among them, there are a few she’s taken negativity from. Nora comes to mind first, during their scuffle with the Grimm traveling through the desert. If she assumes she can only take in a certain amount of negativity (and what does that even mean, really? What is negativity measured in? Cups? Degrees?) before she’s ‘full’, then that has naturally left Yang with more of it over the past few days. And, like a Scroll with too many applications open and running, she overheated…

Or maybe it’s her that is broken? What if she’s lost her senses? Worse, what if she’s just grown accustomed to the smell and taste of Yang’s anger, and this is her body telling her she needs to pick from another source?

Gingerly, she reaches out and touches her nose. It feels like, yup, a nose. Nothing wrong with it from the outside, at least. Hmm. So many questions, and yet no answers. Emotional behavior, but no emotions. A lifetime of feeding from one source suddenly disrupted by the introduction of others. And her own rapidly developing biology, directly into completely uncharted territory…

“You!” A shout from afar lifts her out of the stew of her own thoughts. Oh gods, what now?

From the direction of Beacon, Weiss and Pyrrha approach her together, though their dispositions could not be further apart. Pyrrha wears an easy smile on her face, evidently pleased with Ruby’s promotion to Rank 6. Potentially mixed into it is a look of pride, but she doesn't know for certain since she can’t sense positive emotions like she can negative. Weiss, meanwhile, has a look on her face as if Ruby’s very existence offends her sensibilities, somehow.

“Hello again!” Pyrrha calls out before Weiss has another chance to sling what is inevitably an insult her way. “Congratulations on the promotion!”

“Thanks, Pyrrha,” she replies, head pivoting towards Weiss, “Thanks, Weiss!”

Weiss scowls, then says, “What? Oh  yes, congratulations, felicitations, and whatnot.”

The heiress pauses, and Ruby lets out a sigh of relief, having avoided–

“Witch.” Weiss spits out.

Ruby chokes on air. She bends over, hacking and coughing, as Pyrrha gives her a few firm pats on the back. “W-What did you just call me?”

“My apologies, Ruby. Miss Schn — Weiss here seems to have gotten it into her head that you’re a, erm, witch, because…”

“Because she’s cast some sort of… curse on me!” Weiss’s voice grows more shrill with each word. “Tell me what it is you are after, you fiend! Is it the company? I won’t hand it over to a lowlife such as yourself no matter how many enchantments you cast on me!”

Ruby feels a pressure building in her throat, a rising panic running under the surface of her skin. What is going on? This isn’t on her list of possible ways her cover can be exposed! She has contingencies (read: excuses) for if her exoskeleton is seen, if she’s caught wearing her mask, even if she’s seen manifesting Grimm parts, but having someone accuse her of being a witch? Wait, is she being exposed right now? What is Weiss’s actual claim?

In a panic, she looks to Pyrrha for guidance. The older girl shakes her head, chest rising and falling rapidly as if she’s laughing, only without any sound.

“Weiss, why don’t you explain what you believe Ruby has done to you? Be more specific than ‘She has hexed me!’ please.”

“Gladly,” Weiss says with a confident smirk. “It all began with an incident that occurred when I was overseeing a company event in Vale Central Square. You recall that day, do you not?”

“Ummm, yeah? I snuck past all your guards and–”

Oh.

“Aha! Already you realize your guilt. I had chalked up the fact that you managed to creep so close undetected as a fluke–” It was. “–but it is clear to me now that you could have only gotten so close with the help of magic!”

“Wait, Weiss–”

“And then!” Weiss ignores her, continuing her monologue, “Once within casting distance, you placed a curse me!”

“I… did?”

“You did, you did,” Pyrrha affirms, nodding emphatically, almost child-like in her glee observing this mess unfold.

“And…” Ruby dares to ask, “What exactly did I curse you with?”

Weiss’s face flushes red. “You know well what you did, you dastard! Since that day, I have been unable to keep your hideous visage out of my mind! My dreams, my nightmare, my every idle thought! Undo this charm at once!”

By the end of that final declaration Pyrrha is unable to hold back her laughter, breaking down into a fit of giggles, much to Weiss’s indignation. Ruby, on the other hand, barely keeps her composure, completely piecing together what exactly had happened.

Okay. Sooo maybe she took away a little too much of Weiss’s loneliness that day. But! In her defense.

She was really hungry.

But still, for her to take away someone’s loneliness, and for the effects to linger for well over, what, a week? Wouldn’t that mean that in between then and now, Weiss had no one else, no meaningful interactions to fulfil that role for her? Was Ruby really the only one to ease her loneliness, and not even in a legitimate way?

That’s… really sad, actually. Even she herself had Yang. Has Yang. Stop catastrophizing!

“Weiss. I didn’t curse you.”

“Deny it all you like! I’ve got my eyes on you now, Ruby Rose. You’ve made sure of it!”

Gods, how on Remnant can she even begin to untangle this mess? She’s not exactly a social butterfly herself, but she imagines someone like Weiss Schnee has even less experience than her. She gets the feeling if she simply suggests making connections with people or even just socializing with other people her age her point will get misinterpreted all too easily; pass through the monochrome, lifeless, soul-sucking filter of the business world, of commerce.

But she has to try. As unserious as her current situation may be, she recognizes its potential to spin into something much, much worse. One moment Weiss has her SDC spies monitoring her for witchcraft, the next her Grimm side is exposed to the largest, richest company in the world. And she does not want to see that outcome through to its logical endpoint.

“I-I’m not a witch. I’m just a normal girl with normal knees, and I have absolutely zero interest in you or the SDC. Magic isn’t real,” she takes a deep breath, briefly wonders if maybe Yang has a point with all the lies she’s burying herself under, and continues, “And my Semblance lets me locate nearby Grimm, like a radar. Whatever obsession you have with me, I’ve got nothing to do with it!”

Weiss has the gall to look hurt at her declaration, rearing back as if physically struck. A variety of emotions flicker across the older girl’s face: anger, doubt, shame, and embarrassment, among others; rationality threatens to burst that bubble of roiling emotions, and all it needs is one last push. It comes from Pyrrha.

“There, see?” The older girl says, eyes twinkling in the sunshine, “You’ve heard truth from her yourself. Plus, there really is no such thing as magic.”

The concession, from Weiss, comes as expected: with a heaping serving of self-justification. “I suppose… I have been rather busy these past few weeks. It is entirely possible that you are c-correct. The stress must be getting to me… Please accept my humble apologies.”

Weiss follows the apology with a curtsy.

“Apology accepted.”

That should be the end of it, if the dead air between the three of them is any indication. But neither Weiss nor Pyrrha make any indication of departing. So Ruby makes the first move.

“Well, if that’s everything–”

“Actually, there was something else I wanted to ask you,” says Pyrrha.

Oh gods, what now, now?

“I was wondering about your plans for the upcoming Vytal Festival? It’s in Vale this year, as you know.”

Ruby blinks. “Um. It is?”

Pyrrha’s eyes widen ever-so-slightly in surprise, but maintains her conversational tone as if she had expected the answer, “It is. Have you ever been to a Vytal Festival, Ruby?”

“…Yeeesss?”

“She hasn’t,” Weiss points out the obvious all too smugly.

“T-That’s okay! I’d be more than happy to show you around. Your sister and friends are invited too, of course!”

“That sounds good,” Ruby says offhandedly, “What’re we gonna do?”

Weiss is quick to answer, “There will be parades, dances, fireworks, games, performances; it’s a massive celebration of the various cultures of Remnant, all in one place!”

“Trust me, we won’t run out of activities by the festival’s end,” says Pyrrha, “Oh, there’s also a fighting tournament between Hunters of the four guilds, would you be interested in–?”

Ruby immediately pales at the question. “No.”

“I-I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t fight people. Not if I don’t have to.”

Pyrrha frowns, forehead creasing, “I can’t help but recall all of those times you sparred with your sister…”

“Training’s different,” Ruby insists firmly, “her Aura, it never — it’s just different, okay?”

“Of course. I understand,” Pyrrha nods, not understanding in the slightest, “I merely assumed you’d have jumped at the opportunity to raise your rank, but it seems I was mistaken.”

She doesn’t take the bait. “My friends and I are more than happy to do it the normal way, but thanks.”

“Tournament or no, there is one event you mustn’t miss,” says Weiss, “I will be performing a traditional Atlesian dance in Amity — that is to say, the main venue of the festival — on the third day. Do not miss it.”

“I see the hex is working well,” Ruby teases, causing Weiss to turn beet red.

“Fine! Do as you wish! I do not care anymore.”

The heiress storms off in a huff. Pyrrha makes to follow, but turns back to Ruby momentarily and says, “I know you’re not interested in participating in the tournament, but is my offer to show you around for the rest of the festival is still valid?”

Ruby eyes the older girl carefully, then nods. “Sure. Looking forward to it.”

The ‘it’ in question, of course, is getting closer to learning about Pyrrha’s true intentions. To get to the bottom of it, all she has to do is…

Lie.

It takes a few days, but eventually things go back to normal between her and Yang, like a spring uncompressing itself. The subject of their spat does not come up all the while, though the distance between them does not go unnoticed by Ren and Nora. She passes the hours by throwing herself fully into the development of her and Nora’s weapons, both Magnhild and Crescent Rose, the former of which is fast approaching completion.

Her free time outside of training and missions become eighty percent testing by volume, just hundreds upon hundreds run against the mekashift function, the launching of grenades, and their remote detonation. In batches of one hundred per round, if the basic functions fail even once, she returns to the drawing board. Nora is with her every step of the way, building and developing her familiarity with the weapon until swinging and firing it becomes second nature to her. Ruby is impressed by both the display of skill and dedication, even though she should know by now how exceptional both Nora and Ren are.

Meanwhile, the other twenty percent of her free time are spent reading. She’s absolutely tearing through Blake’s books, and has taken occasional trips into Vale to trade them in for more of the older girl’s recommendations. A rapport quickly builds, not just between her and Blake, but also between her and the owner of the store, Tukson. It’s odd. Coming to Beacon, she never expected to make any friends, owing to the dishonest reason for their enlistment. But now her life seems almost…normal.

All this to say, when Ruby walks into Tukson’s Book Trade to pick up her most recent order, neither Tukson nor Blake are there to greet her. Instead, standing behind the wooden counter is a woman who nearly blends in to the darkness of the back half of the store. Only the whites of her eyes — and the gray irises they contain — are clearly visible. To make matters of visibility worse, the stranger is wearing a dark blue jacket and brown pants that almost seem to absorb light, like a black hole, leaving the faint outline of a shadow where Ruby expects a person to be. Even the golden belt buckles securing the woman’s outfit seem dull and lusterless. For a moment Ruby and the woman stare at each other like two deer wearing headlights.

Ruby waits for Asmodeus and Aeshma to nuzzle up against her legs in greeting, then breaks the silence. “Hi?”

“Human.” The stranger grinds the word out like a curse. “What are you doing here?”

“Picking up my order?”

The stranger looks ready to refuse her service, and just when Ruby is ready to back away and come back another day — hopefully a day where Blake is there — she’s saved when the person in question enters from the backroom.

“Ruby,” Blake says in greeting, “Here for your order?”

The familiar face puts her at ease, and she bounds up to the counter, the cats swiftly joining her. “Yep! I really enjoyed the ending of Part Three, that entire sequence where–”

A finger seals her lips. “Shhh. Ilia here hasn’t finished it yet,” Blake gestures with her free hand to the other woman, who glares back silently.

“Oh! Sorry.” Then, remembering her manners, “Um, it’s nice to meet you, Ilia. My name is Ruby.”

“Hrn.”

“Ilia…”

“Fine. It’s, nice, to meet you too, human.” Behind Ilia, Blake shifts ever-so-slightly, causing her to stiffen. “Ruby.”

Smiling nervously, Ruby glances between the two Faunus, watching but not prying as Blake whispers something into Ilia’s ear. The woman nods, then disappears into the back of the store.

Moments after the door slides shut, Blake launches back into their earlier conversation. “So, how was it?”

“Really good!”

Eager to get her mind off of, well, everything, Ruby spends the next five — or maybe thirty — minutes excitedly going over all of her favorite scenes or plot beats from the third part of the Malus Chronicles, describing the ways her predictions played out over the course of the story, explaining how her expectations were subverted, and listing what she thinks will happen in Part Four. Blake is an excellent listener, gently nudging her along when her mind stalls and picking her up where her disorganized thoughts leave her directionless in her own recount.

Suddenly a thought pops into her head. “Oh, by the way, I’m thinking of branching out?”

“Really?” Blake says languidly, “What do you have in mind?”

“…Historical nonfiction?”

Wow. She couldn’t have made that sound more lame if she tried. Still, she sees Blake’s eyes crinkle in a way that’s not quite proud nor patronizing towards her, as the older girl’s attention fully shifts back towards her.

“Couldn’t find what you wanted on the Internet?”

“Oh, no,” Ruby scratches the back of her head, “The first few results were all just kinda… iffy? I dunno how to describe it.”

Blake nods, “Fair. What are you looking for, specifically?”

“Anything about the village of Kuroyuri.”

The shift in Blake’s demeanor is instantaneous. Even blindfolded and without her Grimm senses she would have felt it. Around her, the air feels several degrees colder, the already-meager lights above them seem to dim supernaturally; Asmodeus and Aeshma leap off the counter and flee into the shadows as if fleeing from an unseen presence. There’s a hostility in the air, though strangely not directed at her, but instead freely floating about the room like the lingering shade of a dreadful, unnameable memento long buried in the past.

“Kuroyuri? How did you hear about that place?” Blake asks calmly.

“I — it was, um,” Already frightened out of her wits, she stumbles on her words, “I heard from a — no, I mean I might have eavesdropped on… well actually, no, i-it wasn’t even like they said anyth–”

“Enough,” Blake silences her with a hand. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

Ruby hands her head, red-faced and embarrassed. “S-Sorry…”

The heavy, suffocating pressure lightens a little. “Don’t be. Wait here a moment, let me see what I can find from the back. I’ll pick up your order from there while I’m at it.”

When Blake finally returns, it’s like a lead weight has been lifted off of her chest. In the older girl’s arms are a stack of books. She picks out her original order layered at the bottom, with two very wide and thick looking books stacked on top of them.

“Here we have,” Blake heaves the pile on to the counter, and takes a deep breath, “A general history on the development of modern Mistral, and an anthology of case studies on independent settlements that fell to the Grimm. You’ll find mentions of Kuroyuri in pages 231 to 255 of the former, and the latter has an entire section dedicated to it, listed in the table of contents. I’d start with the general history — and you should read everything starting from Year 65 onwards — then move to the case study. I also know a friend who specializes in history; I’ll send you their contact details later once you’re finished and if you have any followup questions.”

“Thank you, Blake,” says Ruby as Blake gently lowers the stack into a bag, “Really, I appreciate you doing this for me.”

“You’re most welcome,” Blake says with a smile, handing her the bag. Her arms sink unsteadily against the surprising amount of weight, jostling the contents of the bag. A nagging desire to align the stack of books has her setting the bag down and reaching in, and her hands close around something light and small.

Startled, she pulls out a little black book. It’s as thin as her arm, and almost fits snugly in the palm of her hand. There is nothing printed on the hardcover, and its spine is completely featureless. She looks up at Blake, confused.

“I didn’t order this?”

“A gift for a loyal customer,” Blake winks at her.

She places the little black book back on top of the pile, lifting the bag off the floor — carefully this time — and making her way to the door. Blake calls out to her as she leaves.

“Oh, Ruby? You’re going to want to read that one away from prying eyes. Understand?”

The door swings shut on her before she has a chance to react. What was that all about?

Chapter Text

Despite being weeks away, the groundwork for the Vytal Festival was already being laid, with preparations in both Beacon and the main streets of Vale, loudly and proudly announcing their presence to all who passed with a melody of drilling and hammering. Flags were raised, signs were posted, roads were repaved and additional infrastructure was built, so meticulously designed that an outsider unaware of the coming festivities might assume they had always been there. Ruby wonders if Sun will be one of those outsiders.

In any case, said preparations brought with them an influx of people into Vale proper, and already Ruby is beginning to feel the ambient stress of deadlines and expectations and financial worries beat down on her like a muggy summer heat wave. Only, heat waves don’t typically follow her inside air-conditioned buildings, or smell faintly of seared fish.

All in all, it’s probably the worst possible circumstances for what she’s about to do: re-enter her Grimm form for the first time since the Sandspires incident. She’s held off for long enough — the buzzing in her skull successfully ignored for multiple days while she sorted out the rest of her life — any longer she thinks she may end up exploding into a puddle of Grimm goo, or something else that’s just as dramatic.

Luckily her room is the perfect space for handling such a sensitive issue, once she informed Ren and Nora of the fact. Those two always seem slow to understand matters of privacy? Must be because they’ve lived with only each other for so long.

She double-checks the locks. Then she triple-checks them. She runs over to the window, pulling the blinders down and placing a makeshift barricade against it, just in case someone wants to make a surprise entrance through the sixth-floor. But what are the odds of that? What are the odds that just outside the domicile, a circus performer here for the Vytal Festival trips over a stack of improperly stored boxes and bumps into a passing fire twirler practicing his routine, who drops his fire staff mid-twirl which sends it spinning through the air, inadvertently lighting the fuse of a cannon whose insides are currently being cleaned by a human cannonball, which just so happens to be aimed at her window?

Zero. There are zero odds.

She takes a deep breath, ready to bring her Grimm side to the fore. Three, two, one, and…

She tenses, waiting for the inevitable sound of shattering glass and screaming, eyes trained on her window which she full expects a very loud and very on fire person to come blasting through at any moment. She waits for another five seconds. Then ten. Then thirty. When a full minute passes and nothing out of the ordinary happens, the tension eases out of her, and she takes another, deeper breath.

For real this time, then. Three, two, one and…

The tingling sensation beneath her skin bursts forth, and her body spasms with shuddering breaths as power flows through her. Almost immediately she notices the screaming, burning pain return like an agitated old wound, and expecting it does nothing to lessen the intensity. Still, she holds, clutching her chest tightly and repeating a mantra in her mind.

Hold on. Hold on. Just hold on.

Agonizing minutes pass in this equilibrium; the energy runs its course through her veins, and she holds on to consciousness with everything she has. She cannot think. She can hardly see or breathe. The ringing in her ears slows, taking shape into something else.

It’s a voice.

In the beginning, there was everything.

Suddenly she’s not in her room anymore. The ground beneath has disappeared, and with it all of the familiar warmth of her dorm room. She finds herself floating in an endless void of black, so dark that she can’t even see her fingers in front of her. The pain presses against her like knifepoints across the surface of her skin, and she dares not move even an inch.

Her perception twists and folds, her senses contorting to fit within the world of the dream-like reality, for it would be unknowable and unexplainable otherwise. How can ‘everything’ be adequately expressed in sights and sounds, in tastes and smells and touch, in up and down, and left and right, and front and back, and then and now and later? Lost and adrift in the hallucination, she feels a kaleidoscope of colors bleeding into each other, listens to the way light bend around corners and bounce off of nothing, and tastes the shape of Everything which exists in the past, present and future, all at once. A thought strikes her like lightning. This truly was the beginning of everything, the primordial state of the universe before logic and limit took control.

Which then exploded.

Freed from the clutches of Everything, the pain abates, and she desperately tries to identify the voice by its characteristics. But it’s as if her mind is on an incline of grease and glass, and no matter how hard she tries she can’t find any purchase with which to grab hold. Tone, cadence, pitch, and volume all slip away from her, leaving only the words themselves behind.

The vision shifts as the entire universe blasts past her in great chunks of rock and fire. Ruby watches, awestruck, the formation of stars and planets and moons, spinning out from their origin, and like an optical illusion that only comes together when viewed at a certain angle these myriad celestial bodies slowly settle into solar systems, then themselves into galaxies. She can hardly process the grandiose majesty of creation taking place before her very eyes, and the entrenched recesses of her mind, the last part of her still grounded in reality, realizes that she isn’t. The voice in her head is doing it for her.

Separated from the sea of primordial chaos, the universe was now bound by physical laws, never to escape them. And yet, in the crater left behind in the transition from old to new, something remained. A remnant of what once was.

Now she finds herself standing on solid ground. Familiarity greets her as an old friend. The air smells like air, the sunshine warms the surface of her skin, the grass beneath her tickles her feet. Though her surroundings are entirely unfamiliar, she feels with every bone in her body that this is Remnant. Her planet.

This remnant contained both miracles of the new world and the old. Creatures that existed within the rules and limits of nature, and creatures that existed in defiance of it.

Animals barrel past her, and in some cases, through her. Wolves, birds, snakes, bears, and many more. Following shortly behind the stampede are a swarm of Grimm, from Beowolves to Nevermore, King Taijitu and Ursai, and countless others. Tree roots and vines and lichen grow all around her in curves, and in the space between them, Grimm essence runs black as night.

At first, those blackened creatures of old knew neither hate nor hunger, though the universe itself had rejected them. Yet, as time passed, something changed. Something that could not be easily undone. It was the–

Suddenly, her vision flickers. Static fills her ears, and around her the carefully constructed world of the past begins to fracture and shatter like glass. No! She wants to shout, but cannot even hear her own voice past the cacophony. Come back! Finish that sentence!

She falls through the window of reality and crashes back down on her bedroom floor, protestations ignored. Almost immediately pain returns, but it is a different sort of pain; it is the crackling, yawning pain of growth.

Her back curls, bending under the strain of a force desperately seeking to escape her spine. Pressure builds until it snaps like a twig, and out of the opening erupts a scaly, cartilaginous fin, the added weight of which throws her off balance. She stumbles back, her newly formed fin pressing into the wall, and she feels something vile pool in her gut, building and surging unconstrained.

She throws her head forward, fully expecting whatever it is she’s feeling rise within her to come rocketing up her esophagus and out of her mouth, but instead the feeling courses through her arms and to the tips of her fingers, as if her nerves have become a channel for raw power.

Sparks of electricity burst from her fingertips, dancing frantically as they leap from one to another. There the power hovers, thrumming with barely controlled chaos. She turns her hands outwards and lets loose…

The weak jolt that jumps from her fingertips and creates a small mark, blackened and smoking against her wall, leaves her rather disappointed. All of that buildup, for a result that even the smallest crystal of lightning Dust can easily reproduce. If it hadn’t already been made clear to her from her weird, truncated hallucinatory vision, something had gone wrong in the process of absorbing the Dreadjaw’s essence. In hindsight it had been obvious from the start.

She lets her Grimm side fade, and lets loose a sigh of relief, finally at ease with her body once more, even as her mind remains restless. That ‘memory’… was intense. Almost intense as the very first one she ever got from Spectre. Was this always going to happen around ancient Grimm?

Three knocks on the back of the door lets her sister know they’re in the clear. The door creaks open, tentatively, as if too sudden a movement might cause it to shatter into a million pieces.

“All done?” Her sister asks, “Was it, um, were there any problems?”

“I’m not sure,” she replies slowly, “I think waiting this long diminished the ability's effects.”

“That’s a good thing isn’t it? At least you didn’t explode?”

She squints at her fingers, imagining sparks of lightning dancing across them. “Maybe.”

“Well, we can worry about that later,” Yang takes her hand, leading her down the hall. “You hungry? Ren and Nora are waiting for us at the cafeteria.”

She nods, still lost in thought. “Also, there was something else, besides the new ability. I had a vision.”

“A vision? Like a particularly vivid memory, or…?”

“Yeah. I think I just witnessed the creation of the entire universe,” she mumbles, her monotone utterly failing to capture the enormity of the discovery.

“Oh. That’s cool!”

“Mhm.”

As she walks, burning questions linger on her mind. Who exactly was speaking to her? Was it the Dreadjaw? But there’s no way it was as old as creation itself, right? And what does she need to do to learn more?

“Was Joe there?”

Ruby blinks. “Joe?”

“Hi Ruby! Hi Yang!” Nora waves to them just outside the refectory. Ren just nods wordlessly.

“Sorry we’re late!” Yang explains cheerfully. “I fell out of a building.”

“I can tell! Now hurry up! I wanna see if they’re still serving those scallion pancakes!”

The four of them enter the building, and are immediately greeted with a sight. It’s Velvet, having an argument with, um, hang on… Cardin Winchester, yeah, that was his name! Even with her extra senses, she can tell the conversation has long since turned sour, judging by the way the two are standing in the center of the cafeteria with clenched fists and raised shoulders, trays of food left abandoned and forgotten on the table behind them. Their lips move rapidly and with great effort, but the rest of the place is busy as ever, so the actual content of their words remain indecipherable.

By the time Team YRRN approach within earshot, the conversation is nearly over.

“Can’t believe I ever expected someone like you to understand. You people are all the same. Useless!”

“You bloody stupid fool! I don’t understand? Were you even listening to a word I said?!”

Cardin sneers, only now noticing the ever-increasing stares the two of them are getting from the people around them, Ruby and company included. “Whatever. I don’t have to stand here and take this shit. Not like any of this is gonna matter in a few weeks anyway.”

“Cardin…”

He scoffs, then picks up his plate and walks away, the ocean of onlookers parting to give a wide berth to the man who looks one stray spark of an insult away from going off. Normalcy returns to the refectory soon enough, with people settling back into their meals as if nothing had happened. Ruby shares a look with her team, and the four of them rapidly disperse to the various stations, picking up their preferred foods and bringing them back to Velvet’s table.

“Hey there,” Yang says, “mind if we sit here?”

Velvet wordlessly signals assent with a wave of her free hand, and they settle around the otherwise empty cafeteria table in a disorderly fashion. Velvet’s tray, Ruby notices, is entirely vegan.

“Soooo…” Nora trails off after just one word.

Yang picks up after her, “You doing alright, Vels? Want my help luring Cardin into an abandoned building downtown so you and I can beat the crap out of him? That was a joke, by the way.”

“I… it’s not a big deal. He’s just going through a hard time right now. N-Not that I’m trying to excuse his behavior or anything, but…”

“But what?”

Velvet bites into her salad, chewing thoughtfully, “I mean, if my family were planning on immigrating to Salem’s domain, I’d be pretty pissed too.”

Yang nearly spits out her food. “They’re doing what?”

“Yeah. His father just told him yesterday. For the past twelve hours he’d been acting like something crawled up his arse and died, and I… called him out on it.”

“I… wow. I don’t even know what to say.”

“What rank is Cardin?” Ruby asks, “Six? Five?”

“Four, actually,” Velvet corrects, much to everyone’s surprise, “You lot were away on mission when he promoted.”

“And now, he’s gonna lose everything,” says Nora. “All that hard work, straight down the drain…”

Ruby raises her hand, then lowers it jerkily. This isn’t class; what’s wrong with her? “Can’t he just not go with? I-If it upsets him that much.”

“The Winchesters are an old, old family. I mean, there’s nothing physically stopping him, sure, but scorning of hundreds upon hundreds of years of tradition? I’m sure anyone in his position would struggle with that…”

“I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that his family even considered moving to Salem’s domain in the first place,” says Yang.

Velvet shrugs. “I mean, I can kinda see the appeal? Not having to worry about the Grimm and all that. Grants a sort of freedom.”

Yang snorts derisively, “Freedom from the Grimm? Sure. Everything else? Not so much.”

“At the very least, living in Salem’s domain is better than the wilderness outside the Kingdoms,” says Velvet. “We can agree on that, right?”

“Sounds like a scam, if you ask me,” says Nora, “C’mon, you’re telling me the ‘Queen of the Grimm’ can only control the population of Grimm inside her ‘domain’? I’ll bet my undying love of Ren’s pancakes that she’s just sandbagging!”

Ren speaks for the first time today, “To what end?”

“Dunno,” Nora shrugs, cramming more food into her mouth, “Haven’t gotten that far yet!”

“Nora…”

Ruby’s mouth moves before her mind does. “She’s not wrong, actually.”

Immediately all four heads at the table swivel towards her, three in curiosity and one in alarm. Wholly unable to unstick the foot out of her mouth, she swallows her food, and takes a deep breath.

“Salem is… cruel,” she begins, and like a dam has broken the words start tumbling out, bitter and uncontrollable, “Sh-She doesn’t care about anyone but herself. If you think she keeps her domain small on purpose, it’s probably just cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Making people m-miserable is a pastime of hers.”

“But why not just have no domain, then? Why have a safe haven from the Grimm in the first place?”

“Lots of reasons. First, just look at Cardin’s reaction. And he’s part of the family. Now imagine when the Winchesters announce this to the world at large, because they have to, eventually! Imagine what it’s like from the outside looking in. You’ve got shock and horror, sure, but you’ve also got a bunch of other things. Disgust. Envy. Hatred. A sense of betrayal, of divisiveness. Suddenly, allowing this family into your domain — and better yet, giving them a place among the upper brass — serves your best interests.

“And that’s not all of it, either. She understands what hope is. She understands that in order to take it away, it needs to be given first. Most people that move to her domain come under an illusion, I guess. There’s a… honeymoon period, a new perspective that you gain when you don’t have to worry about the Grimm, where suddenly it seems like all your other problems seem trivial by comparison. But slowly, those other problems start to build up, because — intentionally, of course — Salem doesn’t ever try to solve them. It’s like Yang said earlier: ‘freedom’ from the Grimm, and not much else.”

“You speak as if you know her personally,” says Ren, his voice low yet lacking in accusatory undertones.

Ruby raises her head, meeting his eyes and answering truthfully: “I’ve never met her. I just… it’s something I think about a lot.”

“You think about the Queen of the Grimm a lot? Freaky!”

“Nora!”

“No, no,” Ruby reddens, half-heartedly hiding her face with her hands, “Salem’s domain. And why people just… let her be. Y’know?”

Velvet frowns. “An all-out war with an ageless being who can control the Grimm wouldn’t just be impractical, it would be impossible to sustain. That she’s willing to listen to reason is a miracle in and of itself. Weren’t you paying attention during orientation?”

The pink of her face deepens to a brilliant scarlet. “J-Just forget I said anything.”

“Yeah, ignore my sister,” Yang jumps in, “Rubes likes to ask dumb questions. Her mind constantly has to be running a mile a minute!”

“Good to know,” says Velvet. “You lot are really weird, you know that?”

“Hey!”

“Nor–”

“Don’t lump me in with these three! I’m so Normal! I’m up to my knees in Normal! I’ve got Normal coming out of my ears!”

A small smile creeps up Velvet’s face. “I never said that was a bad thing,” the Faunus girl stands, empty tray in hand, “Thanks for this. It was… nice chatting with you lot. Good to know there are actually a few Hunters here who actually give a toss about their fellows. Most of them don’t care.”

“See ya, Vels! Don’t be a stranger!” Yang says, as she and the rest of them wave in farewell.

She finishes her dinner without interruption, working away at the plate of paella in front of her. When everyone finishes, she glances around for any eavesdroppers, then brings her voice low and quiet.

“So.”

“So?”

“We all agree that Salem’s domain is one of the worst places on the planet, right?”

“Yes.”

“Oh yeah, absolutely!”

“Definitely.”

Ruby nods. “Good.”

Chapter Text

The unthinkable has happened. Ruby’s unconditional love of books is starting to waver.

It isn’t her fault by any means, of course! For the longest time — sequestered away on Patch as she was in her childhood — the fantastical world of fiction was her only solace, the one place she could always retreat to, from a settlement that wanted nothing to do with the weird girl who could always tell how you were feeling. Even after she was granted a bit of freedom and joined Yang in Vale proper, her lack of connection to the place, and more importantly to its people, left her drifting inexorably back to those wonderful worlds that had drawn her in with their creative settings and wild, unpredictable plots.

But this?

“Why do history books have to be so-so-so so freaking dry? Throw me a bone here, dude! Gimme a, a careful crafted reenactment of a battle between nation-states, or sprinkle some, any amount of flowery language into the descriptions of traditional Mistrali architecture! Please! My brain feels like it’s melting!”

“Hmph. Unsurprising that a scythe-wielding brute like you cannot appreciate the intricacies of such a fine piece of historical text.”

“Intricacies? Nah, it’s pretty simple, actually. Simply boring!”

Her ‘study buddy’ for today is Weiss, for some reason. Ruby had figured that, with the weather being so great recently, she’d read through the sections of the history books Blake had provided her outside, on one of Beacon’s various picnic shelters strewn about the grassy portions of their campus. At some point Weiss had simply walked up to where Ruby was situated, sat down wordlessly on the other side of the table, and started filing some paperwork for the SDC right then and there, as if the two of them were… roommates, or something.

The situation was a little too awkward for Ruby to consider calling for help, and for once Weiss did not seem outright hostile to her general existence, so she let it slide, figuring that someone as busy as the heiress would soon leave for more moneyed pastures. But then fifteen minutes became thirty, which then became an hour, and then, two hours, and now she finds herself striking up casual, friendly conversation with someone who had, not a few weeks ago, tricked them into being a part of her twisted PR stunts in her campaign against the White Fang.

It’s not all bad, though. At least she gets to drink in Weiss’s rare brand of loneliness up close, to her heart’s content.

“Why do you care anyway, Weiss-cream? Not like the history of Mistral has anything to do with SDC.”

Weiss wags her index finger at her, an unbearably smug look resting upon her pale face, “A foolish assumption. Perhaps if you’d read the text in its entirety, instead of cherry-picking sections in service of whatever fool’s errand you’ve chosen to embark upon, you would understand.”

“Hey, these passages were hand-picked by a friend of mine! And she, um, reads a lot! Probably more than I do!” Ruby says defensively.

Weiss’s mouth curls up in a placidly mocking smile. “Yes, I’m sure she does.”

She sticks her tongue out at the older girl and gets back to reading, the heat creeping up her neck and to her face providing a fresh source of stimulus to an otherwise stagnant and boring day. With laser focus she crawls over the text, peeling off every last word and examining it for clues under a microscope. The sooner she gets done with the general history of Mistral, the sooner she can move on to that anthology of independent settlements, and finally, the little black book Blake gave to her as a ‘gift’.

There’s something about that booklet that fills her with a sense of trepidation; a mystical quality surrounds it, to the point that she’s not certain she even wants to read the darn thing until she’s gotten… more. More what? More power, more knowledge, more wisdom, and only then will she be worthy to read the words bound to its sacred parchment. Well, maybe that’s mythologizing the small collection of paper and glue and ink a bit too much, but she can’t help it. You don’t give a black, featureless book to someone searching for answers without it having some truly diabolical words written on it, at least in her opinion. Otherwise, why have the intrigue at all?

But she’s getting ahead of herself. She still has fifty pages of historical context to get through before she even reaches the section on Kuroyuri and — oh gods it’s so freaking boring!

“Hey Weiss?” She says, placing her bookmark — a small thing of colored paper cut into the shape of a sniper rifle — at her stopping point. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Speak.”

“Why do you try so hard?”

The death glare Weiss sends her could have stopped a Goliath in its tracks.

“I-I mean, don’t most rich kids, like, I don’t know, throw huge manor-trashing parties or build giant wastes of — errr, really stylish vanity projects that fall apart after about five seconds after they go up? You actually do things.”

“I will choose to take that as a compliment,” says Weiss, the faintest whiff of frustration tinging the air. “It is true; most of my cohort would rather while away their youth in pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, rather than devote themselves to more honorable endeavors.”

“And what do you do?”

“What are you–” Weiss frowns, her eyes narrowing, “Ha ha, and ha, how very amusing.”

Ruby shrugs, “Hey, I’m not the one who conned an innocent little girl into doing her dirty work.”

“Little? Quite. But your kind are far from innocent.”

She pales. “M-My kind?!”

“Yes. Hunters,” says Weiss, “What did you think I was talking about?”

“Nothing! Nothing in particular, heh heh heh…” Ruby feels her face heat up under Weiss’s dissecting gaze. “But seriously though, why? Not like the SDC is struggling or anything. I figured you’d be cruising your way into an easy inheritance, but you’re working your butt off here… for what?”

Weiss sighs, “If you must know…”

“Yes, please!”

“Then, listen closely; I shan’t repeat myself. The Schnee name has long since been synonymous with the virtues of wisdom, compassion and honesty.”

“Honesty. Uh-huh.”

“Do not interrupt me! Our family has honored these values for generations. It was the driving force behind the founding of the company! And then he married into the family and ruined everything…”

Ruby scratches her head. “Who?”

“Jacques Schnee. My father.”

Weiss spits the name out with pure venom. Ruby’s mouth waters.

“Wait, but if Jacques marrying into the family ruined everything, and you came along after everything had already been ruined, then how d’you — you know, um, how do you know how everything was ruined in the first place?”

Weiss scoffs, “Consider yourself lucky I understood any part of that incomprehensible babbling. My grandfather, Nicholas Schnee, was still in charge of the SDC when Father married into our name. I merely intended to say that our troubles only started after ownership of the company changed hands, which necessarily depended on his matrimony with Mother.

“It was Grandfather who taught me what being a Schnee truly meant. Even back when he still ran the company, he could always make room in his busy schedule to spend time with me. And when his health failed him, when all he could do was lay in bed and speak, I listened. He actually knew what it meant to lead a company. What it meant to bring honor to the family name. What it meant to act with pride, with dignity!”

There are practically stars in Weiss’s eyes as her monologue reaches a crescendo, a burning zealotry radiating outward so intensely that Ruby feels a reflexive squint coming on. It strikes her, right here and now, that this is the first time she’s seen Weiss display a positive emotion outside of her general aura of smug superiority. It feels almost… genuine.

At the same time, the contradiction in her speech sticks out like a sore thumb.

“I can’t help but notice that you’re speaking in past tense?”

The heiress’s mood darkens instantly. “I — I am well aware that I have not been living up to the values my grandfather instilled in me. Yes, I am set to inherit the company from Father, but that does not mean I can simply do whatever I wish. If he deems it necessary, he will strip me of my status as heir to the SDC.”

“Who will it go to, in that case?”

“My brother, Whitley, most likely. I cannot allow that to happen.”

Ruby frowns, “He’s still family. What’s wrong with that?”

“You don’t understand!” Weiss’s fist comes slamming down on the table, shaking its aged wood frame, and Ruby along with it. “I am the only one who can restore our family name to its former glory!”

“And that justifies all the lies and scapegoating?”

“Yes! Finally, someone understands!”

Ruby’s frown deepens, even as her tongue snakes out automatically to wet her lips, “H-Hey, come on, that’s not what I–”

“I have sacrificed everything for the future of this company,” Weiss continues on, unbothered, “And I will not apologize for my actions just because a few short-sighted fools refuse to see the bigger picture!”

“Weiss…”

Ruby knows, on some level, that she shouldn’t be sympathizing with someone as dangerous as Weiss Schnee. The heiress has already proven more than willing to resort to underhanded tactics in order to get what she wants, and Ruby doesn’t exactly have the time or wits to spare dealing with that right now. You’d have to be a real blockhead to fight a war on multiple fronts; Ozma alone poses more than enough of a threat; never mind the fact that wherever he goes, Salem is sure to follow like a predator hunting its prey. But still.

She can’t help but feel that their circumstances are at least a little bit similar. After all, is she herself not also using deception to get what she wants? Oh sure, Ruby’s acting for the good of the world, instead of the good of just one singular company, but maybe that one singular company is Weiss’s whole world. The intensity of her loneliness is more than enough to paint that particular picture in Ruby’s mind.

Then again, her own deception isn’t hurting anyone, whereas Weiss’s definitely is. Ruby isn’t totally oblivious to the ways of the world, contrary to what certain patronizing adults might like to think of her; she knows that anti-Faunus racism is a problem that hasn’t fully gone away in the wake of the Faunus Rights Revolution.

(Even if she hasn’t got a clue how to solve it.)

Weiss clears her throat, a hint of redness tinging her cheeks. “Pardon my outburst, Ruby.”

“No, no, it was great!”

Foot, meet mouth.

“I-I mean–!”

“Great?” Amusement dances across Weiss’s face. “How novel. My work takes me all around Remnant. Vale, Mistral, Salem’s domain, even to Vacuo. Yet in all my travels, I’ve never met someone quite as strange as you, Ruby Rose. Perhaps that is not such a bad thing.”

“…Thanks?”

Her brain catches back up to her.

“Wait, wait, wait. Back up. You’re doing business where exactly?”

“Shocking, I know. Certainly, the Vacuans are a contentious group, unreasonable at times, but you’d be surprised at how–”

“I was talking about Salem,” Ruby snaps, maybe a little too harshly.

Weiss is briefly taken aback, but quickly regains her composure, speaking a little more coldly now, “You did not know? Her domain contains some of the largest deposits of Dust found anywhere on the planet. It is especially rich in Gravity and Fire Dust, the concentrations of which are only beaten out by those found in Lake Matsu and The World Basin. Though I hope I don’t have to explain to you how foolish it would be to set up a mining outpost at one of those two locations, given your recent expedition to the Sandspires.”

“I know,” says Ruby, “I just thought you’d have a bit more common sense.”

“And what, pray tell, is that supposed to mean?”

“What do you mean, ‘what is that supposed to mean’? Helloooo? It’s Salem? The Queen of the Grimm? Y’know, the same Grimm that kill people?”

“Not the Grimm in her domain. Which is where we are doing business.”

Ruby throws up her hands, growing more and more flustered, “Yeah but — that’s not — just because she–”

“Is there a problem?” Weiss says serenely.

“Of course there’s a problem! I don’t care if the Dust is top quality, you shouldn’t be dealing with Salem! She’s literally pure evil!”

“Pure evil?” Weiss shakes her head, “Pure evil would not allow us to sell our Dust freely to the denizens of her domain. Pure evil would not be such an amicable trading partner to our company for the last fifteen years. Quite unlike certain… other parties.

“Tell me something, Ruby. If Salem is truly as you describe, why would she redirect a percentage of the wealth generated from her land to developing and uplifting the more impoverished sections of Mantle and Vacuo? Why would she assign members of her own army to our mining outposts, to keep us safe from the Grimm when her power wanes, and her influence over them falters?”

“That’s because — because she…!”

Ruby pauses. And takes a deep breath.

“Okay. First of all, do you actually believe she does those things out of the goodness of her heart? Yeah, didn’t think so. If she lets you do anything in her domain, it’s because it directly benefits her interests!”

“And what’s wrong with that?”

“Everything,” Ruby snarls, “Listen, Weiss, this isn’t like dealing with another company or government or whatever. This is Salem. If you’d met her in person you’d know what I mea–”

“But I have met her in person,” interjects Weiss.

Ruby blinks, “What?”

“Yes. It was… oh, let’s see… shortly after Father first negotiated the deal between the company and her domain. She invited us to a banquet at Evernight. Ah, sweet memories…”

“You–! You’ve had dinner with the Grimm Queen?!”

“I have indeed,” Weiss says calmly, “She was a most gracious host. Caring, kind; she carried herself with a nobility fitting her station — quite unlike my own… n-nevermind.”

Ruby swallows a barely suppressed gag of disgust, and thanks whatever deity is listening that Weiss didn’t finish that particular train of thought. Dead silence falls between them as she considers her next words carefully. But as it turns out, she won’t have to.

Out of Weiss’s field of view, on the gravel path leading away from the pavilion, she spots Nora. Thankful for the distraction, Ruby waves at her as she swiftly approaches.

“Hey-o Ruby, there you are! I was wondering where you ran off to, and — oh, it’s you.”

Weiss’s eyes search Nora appraisingly. “You are… one of Ruby’s compatriots, are you not? Valkyrie, if I recall.”

“What’re you doing here?” Nora narrows her eyes, “Trying to trick Ruby into doing your dirty work again?”

“Nothing of the sort. She and I were merely engaged in polite conversation.”

“She was trying to convince me that everything she does is for the ‘greater good’,” Ruby says flatly.

“And I stand by that,” Weiss declares, “Forget our little argument about Salem; frankly speaking, whatever hypothetical outcome we could have reached together does not change a thing. I will see the Schnee Dust Company restored to its former glory, no matter the cost!”

In the silence that follows, Ruby’s gaze drifts downwards towards the picnic table, where her history book still sits conspicuously opened, her bookmark sticking out like a sore thumb. She hastily closes it, hoping Nora isn’t paying too close attention to its contents. Not that she’s specifically trying to hide what she’s researching, but it would be easier to explain everything once she has a clearer picture of what, well, ‘everything’ in this scenario is.

Fortunately, Nora’s focus isn’t anywhere near her.

“Back to its ‘former glory’, she says…” Nora’s voice is laden with doubt, “What, like when Nicholas Schnee was running the show?”

“I see you know your history,” Weiss replies, “How delightfully unexpected.”

“Uh huh, uh huh. Back to the good ol’ days, am I right? When all you had to worry about were those darn Vacuans and their pesky ‘homes’ and ‘livelihoods’ getting in the way of your very important profiteering?”

For a moment it looks — and smells — like Weiss is about to lose her cool again. Instead she stands, carefully and efficiently gathering up her belongings, “This has been a rather scintillating conversation, Ruby, but I’m afraid I must be going now. Good day to you.”

“‘Good Old Saint Nick’ was anything but!” Nora yells at Weiss’s speedily retreating figure, waving a fist in the air for none to see, “Well, except for the ‘old’ part but — hey, are you listening? Why don't you stop trying to emulate history and start trying to learn from it?!”

“Uh, Nora? She definitely can’t hear you anymore.”

Nora huffs, gently lower her fist, “Sorry about that, Ruby. Old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Old habits?” Ruby tilts her head to the side, curious.

“Just some stuff Ren drilled into me when we were younger. He was pretty strict about our education after we… well, nevermind.”

On the wind, that familiar scent returns. Gods, she really needs to learn everything about Kuroyuri as soon as possible, didn’t she? If Ren and Nora don’t ever want to talk about it, she’s just going to have to find out for herself! Curiosity demands it!

With the gentle calm of the pavilion disrupted, Ruby sees no point in lingering a moment longer, and she makes to leave. Her interest in that boring old textbook has renewed, though she can afford to put it off for the rest of the day, since Nora was clearly restless enough to seek her out for a non-emergency. And a couple of hours in the forges with her doesn’t sound like a bad idea in the slightest.

“I wish you’d be a bit nicer to Weiss, though,” Ruby says, continuing a stray thought from earlier.

Nora giggles, “Be nice to the rich Atlesian? Really?”

“Nn. Not saying we should forgive her or anything, but she is being genuine about doing whatever it takes to fix the SDC. I can, um, feel it. Kinda.”

“Well, when you say it with such confidence, who am I to disagree?”

Ruby pouts. “Okay, okay. Maybe I’m trying to change her mind? I don’t know. It kinda felt like none of my points were landing.”

“Rookie mistake,” Nora snaps her fingers, “A direct argument like that’s never gonna stick in her head. That’s the deal with people who think they’re smarter than they actually are, see. You gotta trick them into thinking they convinced themselves. And trust me, sister, that’s a lot harder than it sounds.”

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. And what the heck was your little tirade against Nicholas Schnee, then?”

“Point. That was just me being petty. But listen, I really wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for someone like her to change. A big waste of time if you ask me, when you could be focusing on someone better.” Something catches Nora’s eye, and she stops. “Aw, jeez. I should have figured they’d be showing up. It is a big international festival, and all that.”

Ruby follows her gaze skyward, a gasp escape her lips as a massive shadow passes over the two of them. Obscuring the sun, the dull metal hull of its caster takes on an inky obsidian hue, making it appear like the tip of a spear of pure darkness piercing the skies. An Atlesian Flagship. But if it's here now, then surely General Ironwood must also…

Ruby narrows her eyes, her gaze never leaving the flagship as it hovers closer and closer to Beacon’s landing bay.

What on Remnant is going on?

Chapter Text

So here’s the deal. While Ruby may not necessarily be in the loop about the various Vytal Festivals that have taken place over the years, what she does know is that General James Ironwood of the Atlas Military has never ever set foot in a foreign Kingdom weeks before any festival beginning, if he even chooses to attend in the first place.

Yet before her is a flagship so large and imposing that it can only be his personal one; a symbol of status and military might wrapped up in one gigantic, unstoppable war machine. This isn’t something any old commander can seize control of and take on a joyride, no, Ironwood is here, alright, and waaay ahead of schedule.

Ruby knows this well; she must know, after all, having done her best to keep track of the public-facing movements of all of her enemies, the list of which General Ironwood ranks highly. So highly, in fact, that after the Big Two, she’s not certain who else on it outranks him in terms of threat level. And it’s not hard to see why! He’s a highly competent leader who commands the respect of all the Hunters in his Kingdom — and of freaking course Atlas has the highest concentration of Hunters out of the four, both in numbers and in proportion to their civilian population. In terms of raw physical power, the Atlesian Military under Ironwood’s command stands above all else, even above Salem and her Grimm if she’s being honest. Not that there’s even a snowball’s chance she’ll get to test that theory.

Why? Why is he here now? Something must have happened. Something big, and more importantly, something she’s not aware of!

Which is why she’s currently sprinting towards the drop zone, intent on catching a glimpse of the man in person before rumors and distorted recounts can reach even hope to reach her ears. Nora runs along side her, matching her determination pace for pace.

A small crowd has gathered by the time they reach the drop zone, an amorphous blob of people slowly taking shape into two lanes to allow passage through for the new arrivals. Heat radiates off of the flagship in waves, smacking Ruby with an unpleasant gust of hot air just as she arrives towards the tail end of the crowd, further away from the ship’s entrance. As the roar of Dust engines begins dying down, it is quickly replaced by the muttering and gossiping of the onlookers.

“I need a closer look,” Ruby tells Nora, before weaving her way through the crowd until the backs of peoples’ heads no longer block her view. She sticks to the tail end, so that she may slip away at a moment’s notice.

The flagship’s bottom hatch soon opens. Ruby hears the metallic procession before she sees it. Rows upon rows of metal people, marching in programmed lockstep, each one of them carrying their own standard Atlesian rifle in their arms and pistol strapped to their side. All in all, she counts forty AK-200s, marching in formation as the vanguard to Ironwood’s retinue.

She doesn’t get it. Why do the robots have face plates? Actually, come to think of it, why do they even have a humanoid appearance in the first place? Why are they holding guns, didn’t the older models have guns built into their arms?

If it were her designing these weapons of war, she’d take away the arms (the limbs, not the weapons); completely rework the motor function (they aren’t even omnidirectional, for starters); make the optical sensors less obvious; move the central processing unit away from the easily identifiable, least maneuverable head-shaped target, which for some reason is attached to the rest of the unit by a single, vulnerable, easily severed link (it’s the neck, she’s talking about the neck); and generally do away with this whole idea that these robots needed to at all resemble human anatomy when there were far more efficient and durable forms for raining down infinite hellfire on your enemies.

But of course, she’d never interrupt hers while they’re in the middle of making a mistake. That would just be silly!

After the admittedly soothing metallic march of perfect synchronized machines comes General Ironwood, and a small retinue of personally chosen Atlesian Hunters. There are five of them in total, outside of Ironwood, dressed in personalized uniforms, but all in the same shades of red, white, and navy blue, identifying them as Rank Two or above. Elite Hunters, all of them. This…

“Packing a lot of firepower for a ‘festival’, don’tcha think?” Nora whispers in her ear, nearly causing her to jump and scream in fright. In watching the spectacle unfold, she had almost forgotten the other girl was with her.

“Something’s gone wrong,” Ruby mumbles back, “Very wrong. We should–”

And then suddenly Ironwood turns his head to the side and looks right at her.

Oh. Oh no no no. She needs to leave. She needed to leave five minutes ago!

With a wave of his hand the entire Atlesian procession comes to a halt. The rest of the onlookers, wisely noticing where the General’s attention is directed, peel off of the two of them like a banana.

Each step he takes towards her echoes thunderous in her ears. Does she stand her ground, or retreat? By the time she comes to a decision, it’s already made for her. Ironwood stands only a few paces away, towering over her by a full head and a half. Motionless, Ruby feels her heart beating heavily in her chest.

“Ruby Rose. Word of your recent exploit has reached us all the way up in Atlas.”

“It has?!”

“Sufficed to say,” Ironwood continues, “many of us were very impressed to hear that a talented young lady such as yourself managed to slay so dangerous an ancient Grimm within weeks of becoming a Huntress. Then again, perhaps we should have expected as much from the daughter of the late, great Summer Rose — may she find peace in the afterlife.”

“Um,” she says, feeling Nora’s hand around hers (when did they start holding each other?) tighten firmly, “Thank you?”

The General nods, seeming satisfied, then opens one of his arms in a wide, sweeping gesture, while the other remains folded behind his back. He turns, ever so slightly, so that his personal guard of Hunters appear in full view, standing at attention in a perfect row. They’re fairly unremarkable, save for the single Faunus among their ranks, whose presence serves as both a surprise to her and as a reminder of her earlier conversation with Weiss.

“These are my Ace Operatives. The best of the best, personally selected by myself to carry out only the most important missions in Atlas. It is no exaggeration to say, that without their contributions Atlas would not be the Kingdom it is today, and for that they have time and time again been handsomely rewarded. Money, prestige, power, you name it — there’s nothing I won’t provide for my best. Now, I have a question for you, Ruby Rose…

“Are you satisfied with your place here at Beacon? Do you believe that your time here is time well spent? Because when I look at you, I cannot help but see a bit of myself reflected back. That ambition, that hunger burning in your eyes… perhaps Atlas would be better suited to your needs? At your pace, why I believe it would only be a few years before you’ll find yourself by my side, next to the highest seat in all of Atlas. What say you?”

…Say what now?

Dumbfounded, Ruby’s mouth hangs half open, and it’s only when the stares of the Ace-Ops become more pointed that she remembers to close it. She’s being headhunted. By General freaking Ironwood!

She steals a glance at Nora, who looks similarly gobsmacked, but before either of them can answer, a familiar voice cuts across the landing zone, and her blood runs cold.

“Trying to steal away one my most promising new talents from under my nose, General Ironwood? I applaud your audacity, but I’m afraid Miss Rose’s heart is quite set in the service of Vale. Isn’t that right, my dear?”

The lump in her throat seems like a stone, yet she forces herself to swallow anyway, answering: “Y-Yes. I’m sorry, General, but there’s something I gotta do here that I can’t do in Atlas.”

Only after answering does she dare turn her head to the side, towards the source of the voice. There, standing in all his ‘splendor’, was Sir Ozma, head of Beacon, and de facto ruler of the world. Well, one half of the role, technically, with the other half being Salem.

The sight of him sets her mind on the past. She still clearly remembers the last time she and Ozma met, as if it had happened yesterday…

The air in the lobby was so thick with tension and suffocating that Ruby felt as if she couldn’t move an inch against it. And yet, when that solid gray door swung open, and the attendant called her name, she found herself walking towards her possible doom without a hint of hesitation.

Beacon had recruitment centers set up all around Vale, but the closest to her was always going to be the one on Patch. Naturally, this meant that her first and only option was to strike at the heart of the enemy; right smack dab in the middle of Beacon’s campus.

And being right smack dab in the middle of Beacon meant getting interviewed by the man who ran it: Ozma himself.

She told herself it was the only way. No recruiter under him would even think twice about her application before rejecting her immediately. A fourteen-year-old from the dainty little island of Patch, applying to become a Huntress? To accept someone like that into Beacon you’d need to be crazy, or simply too callous to care about endangering the lives of literal children.

Ozma was both.

The interviewing room was cold and barren, save for a single light fixture about a solitary table and two chairs. To her left was what was assuredly a one-way window, and opposite to her side of the table was another door. She took a seat and waited, fidgeting anxiously now that the ‘easy’ part of showing up and walking into the room was over and done with. One way or another, her fate was sealed.

After minutes of squirming she eventually got her nerves under control, and as if on cue the door in front of her creaked open, revealing Ozma’s loathsome face in all its glory. He was dressed in his usual business outfit, and carried with him a plate of chocolate chip cookies and a mug of coffee. She eyed the foodstuff with suspicion as the immortal man set it down in front of her and took his own seat.

The possibilities flashed through her mind. Poison? Truth serum? Hard drugs? Was he trying to get her addicted to drugs?

“Miss Rose,’ Ozma greeted her cheerfully, “What a delight to finally see you here. You’ve come a long way from that frightened little girl I had met all those years ago.”

“Thank you, sir,” she answered with what she could only hope was poise and calm. It must have had some effect on him, judging by the way his smile relaxed into something more genuine.

“Now, given your parentage, I have no reservations about signing you off and getting you accepted into Beacon’s ranks as soon as possible. But first, I hope you won’t be opposed to a short interview? Standard protocol, I’m afraid.”

This was a lie, of course. The interview process wasn’t entirely perfunctory; while the standards for what qualified as a Hunter were low — too low, in fact — there were at least a few people that could never be accepted for obvious reasons. Total psychopaths, thugs who couldn’t follow a single order to save their lives, delusional ‘superhero’ types, and the like.

That was close. She planned around being interviewed in order to build a better cover for herself, and to lower Ozma’s guard, thus making her infiltration easier. She would always have eyes on her, of course, but this way she could at least try to influence their perception of her from the outset. Regular old nepotism almost robbed her of that chance.

“Of course, sir.”

The interview did not start off how she expected.

“Are you finding the outside world to your liking? It must be quite the experience, having spent your entire life confined to Patch.”

“I…” She paused, a bolt of improvisation striking her like lightning, “I love it. The sights, the sounds, the freedom — I always thought Patch had been a bit too small, y’know? N-Not that being small is a bad thing, it’s just… there’s a whole new world out there, even beyond Vale, just waiting to be explored. What’s a tiny little island compared to that?”

Ozma chuckled. “I remember thinking the same thing, when I first found the courage to leave home. Just try not to get too distracted during your future missions, hm? And how have your father and uncle been, recently? Not too busy, I hope?”

“No, sir. Dad and Uncle Qrow always make time for the two of us.”

“Good, good. I should hope they have raised you and your sister well. Speaking of, I was quite shocked when I first saw your applications sitting next to each other on my desk. It must be a great relief to you that your sister will be joining you here at Beacon.”

“It is,” Ruby nodded diplomatically, “I’m not sure what I’d do without her.”

Satisfied, an easy smile rested on Ozma’s face. “Why do you wish to be a Huntress, my dear?”

“Because of the Grimm.”

“You wish to slay monsters?”

Ruby closed her eyes. “A monster took my mother from me.”

“You seek revenge?”

She shook her head. “I’m going to make sure it won’t ever take away anyone else.”

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t a complete lie. Her ultimate goal was to get rid of a monster — two, in fact! — just not the one he had in mind. Though she was banking on the fact that he had one mind in the first place.

“And how do you plan on accomplishing that?” Ozma said, ever one to belabor the point.

“Through Beacon,” she opened her eyes once more, knowing Ozma would always demand a full explanation. “Vale is the only Kingdom on amicable terms with all the others, meaning that no matter where it tries to hide, it won’t ever escape Beacon’s jurisdiction.”

“And what if the hunt for your quarry takes you elsewhere? What of Salem’s domain?”

Her determined expression wavered, a practiced maneuver that had cost her and Yang countless hours in front of a mirror. “I-I was hoping you’d be able to pull some strings for me, if it ever came to that. Sir.”

Ozma raised an eyebrow.

“Asking for favors already, my dear?”

“Respectfully, sir, I need to do this. How can I stand by and do nothing while others suffer at the hands of this monster?”

Ozma gave a sonorous laugh. “Your mother said those exact words to me. It heartens me to know that you’ve inherited much from her. Very well. Consider your request granted, should it ever come to that.”

“Thank you, sir.”

She let a genuine smile through. If Ozma thought he could manipulate her as yet another pawn in his everlasting game of cat and mouse against Salem, he had another thing coming…

After the interview, Ruby had excused herself and run out of the building to empty the contents of her dinner all over the back alley. And that was when she had a script to guide her through an encounter with Ozma!

She feels the fear much more strongly now than back then. The fear of being caught. It’s much more visceral now — in the heart of enemy soil, closer and closer to her ultimate goal — compounded by the fact that quite unlike the last time she saw him, he has ditched the fancy suit and dress pants for his actual combat attire. Under the loose sleeves she catches a glimpse of the muscles of his forearm, lean and hardened like steel despite his current age.

Whenever Ozma returns, he throws himself into training at the first moment he is able, augmented by the clarity of lifetimes upon lifetimes of experience. This — the knowing of exactly what his limits are and how to push them to their maximum potential — quickly snowballs, allowing the man to reattain peak conditioning within a matter of years, and keep it well beyond the point where others would slow and falter.

But Ozma’s physical prowess is far from the deadliest tool in his arsenal. No, what makes him so dangerous is his mind. It is a mind that wormed its way into the hearts of the innocent citizens of all four Kingdoms. It is a mind that convinced, at a word, her father and uncle to devote the rest of their lives in fruitless pursuit of something that did not exist. It is a mind that has almost all of Remnant believing that he is, broadly speaking, a good man.

Ozma is not a good man. A good man wouldn’t have murdered her mom.

“Ozma! I meant no offense, my old friend. I was only showing Miss Rose here another possible avenue to put her skills to use, should she find her current path lacking. After all, it’s no secret that your control over Beacon has grown rather… lax over recent years.”

Ironwood takes another step towards her.

“I don’t doubt that, my old friend. But rest assured, my young recruit here speaks the truth when she says that Beacon provides what Atlas cannot, for her. Perhaps you should take her own feelings on the matter into account, before pursuing the conversation further?”

Ozma takes another step towards her.

Ruby fumes internally as the two men stand over each side of her, sizing the other up like predators competing over the same, helpless prey. But she’s not prey, she’s poison. And she’ll shred them apart piece by bloody piece from the inside out if she has to!

The moment passes, and her mind clears, even as her pulse quickens. Too much. It’s too, too much, being this close to danger, and forcing herself to act normal about it! What about this is normal?! Nothing, nothing at all, and yet she can’t act out of turn; she can't do a single thing about it. The feeling of powerless entrapment is almost enough to drive her mad!

“Er, right,” Nora comes to her rescue, having remained stalwartly by her side the entire time, “Look, clearly me and Ruby are getting in the way of whatever weird unresolved sexual tension you two have going on here, so we’re just gonna skedaddle now, ‘kay?”

Without waiting for a response, Nora grips her hand harder than ever before and drags her away from two of the most powerful men on the planet, past the ever-growing crowd of people, and all the way past the campus’ public facilities until they’re at the dorms, on a small, shaded turf behind the building.

Well. So much for keeping a low profile.

Her knees turn to jelly, and she sinks into the ground, wilting like a flower. An indescribable pressure weighs heavily on her chest, forcing each successive breath shallower and shallower, until breathing is all she can focus on, until it takes all of her effort just to stay afloat–!

“Ruby!”

Yang, it’s Yang — when did she get here?

Tears stain her vision. Her face feels uncomfortably hot, enduring even as she claws at it to make it go away. Her entire skin feels too tight, her muscles too stiff, her throat too sore despite not speaking all that much today, and from her lips a flood of sheer emotion spills unbidden.

“I hate him," she mutters to the indistinct blob of yellow next to her, "I hate him so much. And I hate her too! I hate them for what they took from us, Yang! I wanna — oh, I want it so bad! To just–!”

“I know,” comes Yang’s disembodied voice, soft and ephemeral, “I know, sis.”

And then a hand lands on her shoulder, and all of it goes away.

She looks up, blinking her tears away in the pale shadow of a taller, lanky man. Green — black and pink, too — it’s Ren. His Semblance has something to do with emotion, doesn’t it?

Taking his offered hand, she pulls herself to her feet. “Thanks, Ren.”

“Of course.”

“Nora caught us up on what happened,” Yang informs her, “does this change anything?”

“No. Ironwood’s just early for the festival. But I…” Her gaze hardens, focusing on the distant outline of the flagship on the horizon. “I can’t be falling apart after one encounter with Ozma. I can’t. I won’t!”

A bout of vertigo hits her, and she stumbles forward. Nora catches her in an arm-bar.

“Easy there, Ruby. Here, your sister brought water.”

Yang eyes her nervously as she almost empties an entire bottle in one sitting. Wiping her mouth with her sleeve, she sighs, dejected.

“Ruby,” Ren says evenly, “is there anything you’d like to tell us?”

She dips her head, “I’m sorry. I guess I just got a little overwhelmed.”

Ren cocks his head in a manner she’s never seen before. Is he… worried? “Are you certain? You can tell us anything, you know. We won’t judge you, just as you did not us.”

“Really, you two, I’m fine. It’s not a big deal; why’re you acting like it is?”

Nora ruffles her hair aggressively, but keeps her voice light and exuberant. “Because we care about you, ya dummy! Your problems are our problems! Don’t forget that!”

A small smile creeps up her face even as her mind rationalizes Nora’s words away.  No normal person would be crazy enough to want to go up against Ozma and Salem. She wouldn’t wish her life on anyone but her worst enemies. Her problems are their problems?

If only…

Chapter Text

Lie Ren held a lot of expectations for Beacon.

He expected to be othered. He expected to be ignored. Treated as he always had been since Kuroyuri fell, like trash to be left by the wayside. He expected that he would keep his head down and his voice low; do the work of a Huntsman; get what he came here for and get out, leaving behind the lightest footprint in the sands of Beacon’s history that an outside observer would struggle to see was there at all.

Later on, of course, there would be questions, but ideally by then he and Nora would be far, far away, safe from any retribution the ruling class might visit upon them for their actions.

What he didn’t expect was Ruby and Yang. Two sisters from a lonely little island off the coast of Vale. He suspects they’re in a similar situation as him and Nora, that is to say, joining Beacon under false pretenses. There’s a particularly desperate air around them, more pronounced in Ruby than Yang, absent in the vain glory-seekers, selfishly ignorant hypocrites and cowardly thugs that comprise the general Hunter population. Normally this would be cause for concern, but from the outset of their very first meeting he had a good feeling about the two.

He enjoys Ruby’s earnest spirit, and the way she seems to have quickly developed a rapport with Nora, providing for her in ways he never can. He appreciates Yang’s kindness, how her sisterly bond with Ruby always seems to extend to them, with no strings attached. He finds more often than not she’s there to lend to hand, like when she went out of her way to set him and Nora up with Scrolls and accounts to store Lien mere days after moving in. And above all, he’s grateful for their ignorance; their treatment of him and Nora mercifully unmarred by society’s preconceived biases that have plagued them on every step of their journey here.

That was a mistake he committed far to often in the early days. Too carelessly did he mention to the village chief, innkeeper, the artisan, the coachman, who they were and where they came from. Even after learning better, the truth was often pried out of him by force, or stolen from what little they salvaged from the ruins of their old home. Regardless, the outcome was always the same: rejection. Scorn. Violence, on particularly bad days. At least it got better the further they traveled from central Anima.

He wonders if Ruby and Yang will react in the same way, if they ever find out. The stray thought lingers for a moment, then fades, leaving Ren with a dull, gnawing sense of guilt for doubting the strength of their character. But he continues to doubt. It is ingrained into him now, like a shard of metal shrapnel buried in the flesh of his psyche that his skin has long since healed over.

Nora’s dozing head sinks deeper in the crook of his neck as he raises his head to survey the living room. Recently the two sisters had some sort of argument. For emergencies, like the incident with Ozma and Ironwood a few days ago, they came together like glue, but otherwise the pair created a vortex of awkward energy in the air whenever they came together for prolonged periods of time. To remedy this — at least until bedtime when it stopped being his and Nora’s business — Yang had opted to spend the day out in town. Ruby currently stands behind the kitchen counter, her nose buried in a little black book. Literally.

A notification lights up his Scroll.

“Nora,” he nudges her awake, then shows her the mission.

Nora’s eyes go wide, “A two-person mission? You don’t even gotta ask! Oh, but I already took on a request from someone else — it’s like, super important but I’m sure they’ll understand, let me just cancel on th–”

“Nora. Please honor your prior commitments.”

Nora wilts under his stern gaze. “B-But Ren, you need a partner…”

“Ruby is right there. Ruby?”

“Huh-what?” Ruby snaps to attention, hastily shutting the little black book in her hands. Her eyes are glazed over — Ren recognizes the look as one of deep introspection, not boredom — but within a few rapid blinks awareness returns to her silver eyes. “Where am I?”

“Join me on a mission?”

“Oh, yeah! Totally forgot I don’t have anything lined up yet! Let’s do it!”

“Then, I shall send you the details now.”

The mission itself is unremarkable. Just a simple extermination mission around a small segment of Vale’s southern wall. Quite unlike their mission to Sa’ai before. That had been a horrendous miscalculation. One that nearly cost Ruby her life, and Yang’s…

Damn it all. He was not close enough to either sister to ascertain the truth behind those final minutes beneath the Sandspires, and it frustrated him. Something significant had occurred there, beyond what was visible to the naked eye, and he was its ignorant observer. Loathe as he was to repeat the mistakes of the past, the veil of the unknown left him little recourse.

What he does know is this: Ruby’s Semblance is absolutely not what she claims it is. But whether that is a matter of deception or of ignorance is something he is yet to decide.

Ruby waves her Scroll in the air, eyes wide. “Ren, this mission starts in, like, an hour!”

“Indeed. We should get going.”

They ready themselves — supplies and all — within minutes, and find themselves with half an hour to spare before their designated Bullhead arrives to pick them up. That is something he appreciates about Ruby. In spite of her general happy-go-lucky nature, she can act quite efficiently when she wishes to. And she moves like someone who knows what her time is worth.

“Hey, Ren?” Ruby pipes up after a bout of waiting in silence.

“Yes?”

“You came all the way from Mistral on foot, right? N-Not across the ocean, obviously, but aside from that…?”

“You are correct.”

“Then,” her expression wavers with uncertainty, “You must’ve come across some villages along the way, right? I mean, I can’t imagine that you and Nora camped under the stars every night.”

“We stopped where we could. Sometimes just for a day, never more than a week,” he answers carefully, and anticipating followup questions, continues, “We sold our services to the locals in exchange for food and shelter. Helping with construction, teaching math and language to the children, exterminating nearby Grimm — whatever needed doing at the time, we did.”

“That sounds–” Ruby chokes on something invisible, “That must have been tough…”

He nods. “It was. But such hardships only served to strengthen us, after all was said and done. We ended up picking up many skills that you normally wouldn’t, growing up in an, ah, normal environment.”

“…But it would’ve been nicer if you didn’t have to go through any of that in the first place.”

“Yes.”

He is content to let Ruby ponder his words in silence, but it seems she has more questions, judging by the look in her eyes. With a grunt and a nod, he bids her continue.

“How… many destroyed villages did you come across?”

Ah. Did she know? No, that was quite impossible. Just the curiosities of a sheltered girl, nothing more.

“Too many.”

Her face flushes red with mortification. “I’m sorry!”

“Don’t be,” he says, smiling gently. “Why do you wish to know?”

But the damage is done. Perhaps he should have been a little more discerning with his answers.

“I-It’s nothing,” Ruby says timidly, "Nevermind.”

Before he can push the issue further, their Bullhead arrives. The flight over to Vale’s southern wall takes place in total silence, with the two of using the time to gear themselves up for combat and table any lingering thoughts on each others’ origins. Distractions on the battlefield, no matter how trivial the battle or distraction, can and will get them seriously injured. Or worse.

They arrive at a watchtower close to a particularly thick patch of forest, still dense with foliage despite the changing season. A guard there gives them a more detailed report of the state of affairs. Apparently the Grimm in the area have been acting oddly, moving in coordinated groups and performing a series of targeted strikes against the garrison. Salem, of course, has denied any involvement.

One detail sticks out to him: the distribution of Grimm. Every guard reported seeing an alpha King Taijitu, not participating in the attack, but remaining at the rear of the group, as if only to observe the proceedings.

Ruby comes to the same conclusion as him, and after informing the head watchman the two disembark from the watchtower to begin tracking the snake down.

Which, of course, just means using Ruby’s Semblance as they slowly tread over fallen leaves and broken soil. At the same time, he switches his Semblance on and off, a ‘warmup’ of sorts.

Ruby hums some sort of tune as she walks, utterly carefree in spite of their surroundings. Well, he supposes it’s only natural.

“Are you getting anything?” He flicks his Semblance off. “Ruby?”

“Huh? Did you say something, Ren?”

“I asked if you had picked up anything yet.”

“Nope!” She chirps, “I’m doing a, whatsit, a breadth-first search!”

He has no idea what that means, but he figures if their immediate area is clear, he can take point while Ruby concentrates on the search. He activates his Semblance and jogs ahead of her.

Eventually he comes across tracks in the dirt, glaringly obvious in their presentation. Given the intelligent nature of their enemy, he doesn’t doubt for a moment that this is meant to lead into a trap, but he waits for Ruby to catch up nonetheless. Kneeling down to examine the tracks further for potential clues, he hears her light footsteps slowly behind him slowly growing louder and louder until–

“Wah!” Ruby yelps as she trips right over him, tumbling into snake-shaped groove in the earth. She clambers to her feet, rubbing her head and groaning, “Ugh, tripping over my own feet? Hopefully no one saw that…”

What.

“Ruby. What are you talking about?”

Ruby ignores him, glancing around furtively. “I wonder where Ren is? Well, his Semblance should keep him safe. Wait, what’s this? Tracks! Aha! That’ll help narrow my search!”

Ren’s eyes narrow, the beginnings of a hypothesis forming in his mind. He steps in front of Ruby’s line of sight, and drops his Semblance. Suddenly, her gaze latches onto him like a magnet. “There you are! I was just wondering where you went!”

“These tracks,” he says calmly, “do you think they lead to a trap?”

“Oh, absolutely. Give me a sec and I’ll know for certain.”

He activates his Semblance at full power again, watching Ruby’s eyes glaze over even as she stares straight into his face. She startles, as if waking from a daydream, and her gaze moves about restlessly in a panic.

“Ren? Where’d ya go? Rennnn?”

Ren carefully watches her face, growing more and more puzzled as he notices she registers his presence, but is seemingly unable to recognize him. He waves his hands, snaps his fingers in front of her, and even shouts her name a few times, but none of it lands. Or rather, it lands, but does not stick.

He lets his Semblance drop.

“Right here, Ruby.”

“Eep! Quit doing that ninja stuff, will you? I’m trying to concentrate here!”

“My apologies.”

She takes a moment to collect herself, and furrows her brow. “Whoa, okay. We’ve got packs of Creeps and Beowolves to the at our ten and two o’clock, eight and fifteen apiece, and they’re mostly facing each other. Between them is… our alpha King Taijitu, but it’s underground. So that’s the trap? Well, whatever. I’m not picking up anything in the skies, so we should be fine to sneak attack them before they sneak attack us!”

“Done?”

Ruby claps her hands together, smiling brightly. “Yep! All done!”

He flicks his Semblance on and off again, exhaling softly when Ruby doesn't react. “Shall we?”

“Yeah! Alright, let’s wrap this up and we’ll be home before dinner!”

The first part of the assault goes as expected. Coordinating with Ruby, the two of them are able to simultaneously get the drop on the two packs of Grimm, leaping in from the trees above. As Ruby’s prototype scythe — according her, Crescent Rose must be perfect before taking its first Grimm — tears through Beowolf after Beowolf, cutting straight through them as if blades of grass, his own Aura-enhanced palm strikes cave in the heads of the Creeps surrounding him before the others can react. The compact, squat things explode in showers of Grimm matter as an Aura shockwave rips through them, expanding outward with the force of a small bomb. From there, chaos erupts, but pressing his advantage lets him clean up the rest of the pack without any trouble.

Following their plan, he takes to the trees, meeting a slightly worse for wear Ruby over the King Taijitu’s tracks.

“Here it comes!”

With its ambush ruined, the alpha Grimm bursts out of the earth with an angry hiss.

“Okay… a teensy tiny bit larger than expected, but that’s no problem! Right, Ren?”

“Right.”

The two spring into action, leaping and ducking and diving past the twin-headed snake’s lunges. Despite their best efforts, the monster is careful enough with its attacks not to twist itself into a knot, and he feels his endurance flagging. Luckily, their backup plan involved weaving in blows whenever they dodged past a strike, and a quick assessment of the Grimm as he and Ruby regroup shows signs of damage on its skin.

Still, he prefers his enemies helpless, not equivalently tired as he is.

“I’m gonna run along its body and drag my scythe behind me. Cover me!”

They leap into action once more, with Ren drawing the monster’s aggression enough for Ruby to leap on its back. She sprints along its length, ripping a shallow gash along its skin as Ren loops around to meet her at the end. The King Taijitu hisses in pain, but as Ruby reaches its other head and leaps off, it bucks and undulates faster than he expects it can in its current state, catching Ruby in the whiplash.

She's sent tumbling away, and doesn’t look close to recovering as the black head of the snake closes in aggressively.

Her Aura shimmers and cracks, and Ren moves.

An Aura boosted kick ruptures the ground beneath him and places him right between the two. He brings his arms up and catches the Taijitu’s open maw with his hands, Aura shimmering violently as the Grimm shudders against his empowered grip. The twin teeth in his palms snap off with a vicious crack, and with a roar he roundhouse kicks the fangless head aside, using the momentum to drive the spiny implements in his hands straight through one of the monster’s skulls.

Then, picking up Ruby’s fallen weapon, he pitches it like a throwing axe towards the other head of the King Taijitu, expending a significant chunk of his Aura in the process. The scythe lodges itself into the side of the Grimm’s neck, and he quickly follows up with a jumping kick against the blade, driving the weapon as deep as it can possibly go. Suddenly, Ruby is in the air beside him, holding on to her weapon for dear life even as the half-dead Grimm flails wildly.

He grabs onto her ankle as he falls, and their combined weight wrenches the scythe free of the snake in a spray of Grimm matter. The King Taijitu collapses as they land, dead. As the two of them gasp for breath, with Ruby splayed out flat on her back, he sees the last of her Aura shatter entirely.

“Beowolves,” she croaks out, “four o’clock.”

Sure enough, a pair of Beowolves burst from the underbrush from Ruby’s right, scrambling over themselves to take a bite out of them. He dispatches them with an almost trivial effort, the effectiveness of their ambush rendered moot under Ruby’s warning. Rushing over to her side, he offers a hand.

“Are you alright?”

She takes his hand. Pulling her to her feet is as easy as pulling a rotten door from its hinges. “I didn’t break anything, so nothing serious. Thanks.”

“Your Semblance,” he says, shedding any sense of social etiquette, “You were able to use it despite running out of Aura.”

“Huh?” Ruby startles, as if only now noticing the contradiction. “O-Oh, yeah, I guess you’re right.”

“Hm.”

Ruby winces, “I, ummm… your guess is as good as mine?”

“I suppose.”

With their mission complete, they call for a pickup and are whisked back to Beacon. The whole ordeal did not take long; the sun has just begun to set by the time they land, there’s still plenty of time for dinner, a hot shower, and some meditation before bedtime.

“One step closer to Rank 5!” Ruby cheers weakly, vibrating in place like a hummingbird. “I’m gonna head off to the forges, seeya!”

He lets her go. Taking his time walking along the sidewalk, he finds the person he is looking for soon enough, returning from her own trip away from Beacon.

“Yang.”

“‘Sup, Ren?” The blonde chews on a stick of jerky as she flags him down. “Nora told me you and Rubes were out. I’m guessing the mission went well?”

“Actually, that is precisely what I wished to talk to you about,” he says, taking a seat and noting the way Yang tenses up in response. “Don’t worry, nothing bad happened. It’s just…”

“One sec,” Yang holds up a finger with her free hand, and finishes her snack in a few bites, then beckons for him to continue. “‘Kay. Hit me.”

“How does your sister’s Semblance function?”

“…Why do you ask?”

“She could not see me when I used my own.”

“Your Semblance,” she repeats slowly, “which dampens emotions, thus allowing you to hide from the Grimm.”

He shakes his head, eyes narrowing imperceptibly as Yang visibly relaxes. “I don’t think it’s that simple. If all it does is dampen emotions, the Grimm should still be able to perceive my physical body. ”

“You look like you’ve put a lot of thought into this,” says Yang, “What do you think happens?”

“Here is my theory. First, we know that Grimm exclusively target people, and buildings. Wolf packs or beaver dams can freely exist in the wilderness without much risk from the Grimm.”

Yang nods, “I’m with you so far. Not like the Grimm run around causing forest fires or knocking the tops off of mountains, unless there’s a person in the way.”

“Second, we know that we can extend our Aura to our clothes and weapons, and to a certain degree, the objects around us, however impractical. While there are no records in history of this occurring, I suspect that animals capable of manipulating their Aura can do the same. From this, we understand that Grimm do not target us exclusively due to our Auras.”

“Sure, sure. It’s our negative emotions, ain’t it?”

“No,” he says, “Or at least, I do not believe so. A CCT relay tower, for example, cannot feel sadness, yet the Grimm target it all the same. Surely you’ve seen ‘tower duty’ listed on Beacon’s mission boards?”

“Oh, that’s what they were? I always thought that was just maintenance.”

“In any case, what I believe is that there is a sapient aspect to our Aura. Think of it like,” he hums, searching for a Yang-appropriate comparison, “your Bumblebee. All the raw materials it is made of came from this planet; it was assembled in a factory just the same as all of its make and model, but it was only after you purchased, customized, and rode it that it truly became yours. I propose this ‘unique creative signature’ extends to all manmade things.”

Yang taps her chin thoughtfully. “Alright, you lost me. What’s this gotta do with you and Ruby’s Semblances?”

“It is simple. I believe my Semblance, in addition to masking emotions, lets me hide this signature completely. And I believe Ruby’s Semblance lets her interface through the Grimm, to see things through their eyes. That is how she determines their locations. Am I wrong?”

Yang regards him neutrally. “I don’t know. She’s not exactly… open about these sorts of things.”

“Of course,” he holds his hands up disarmingly, “Forgive me for overstepping.”

“Nah, you’re good. Just don’t go mentioning this to anyone, yeah?”

“Of course. One more thing, Yang. If Ruby can interact with the Grimm beyond what you and I know,” he places a hand on her shoulder, ignoring the way she jolts at his touch. “Please, be careful. There are plenty in this world who would stop at nothing to obtain such a power for themselves.”

Yang maintains eye contact with him for a second, then two, before she sighs, her gaze turns sharply away towards something unseen on the horizon. “Trust me, Ren. I know. I'm gonna go talk to her now.”

For a fraction of a split second, he swears he sees a flare of red in Yang’s eyes, as she shakes his hand off and spins on her heel, jogging away in the direction of the forges. A trick of the light in the setting sun, perhaps. He did not say anything too inflammatory, did he?

“Yang,” he calls out once more.

Wordlessly, she stops, but does not turn to face him.

“It’s… never mind.”

Still facing away, a quick wave of her hand is all she gets in return before she’s out of earshot. Ren’s gaze lingers on that rapidly fading mane of blonde hair, wondering if the words he left unsaid really ought to be.

After all, Yang did not outright deny his claim about Ruby’s Semblance, and with how close the sisters are he doubts Ruby is keeping some massive secret from her. But so long as his idle thoughts remain unfounded, he cannot in good conscience raise it to the realm of possibility, to speak doubt into reality. Yet it clings to him like a damp cloth. An old lesson from his teachers in Kuroyuri springs to mind: The raging river smashes into the boulder, carving it into shape. The stalwart boulder blocks the river, diverting it to another path.

Night falls on a quiet dinner, a quiet shower with Nora, and a quiet meditation session in their own room. Despite the odd turn of events of the day, he falls asleep quite easily.

A kick to the back of his calf wakes him up gently. Behind him, he can hear Nora sniffling. Her arms wrap around him; she presses gently into his back.

“Another nightmare?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it…”

“Yeah.”

He slowly relaxes the tension in his muscles, letting Nora hold him in silence. He waits patiently for her breathing to slow back down to equilibrium. The moment doesn’t come.

“Ren, do you… do you think we’re gonna have to fight them later?”

“Ruby and Yang? Not a chance,” he replies, “Everyone else? Probably.”

“Good.” Another sniffle. “I-I like them, Ren. I like them a lot. When we have to go, do you think… maybe we can get them to come with?”

He ponders the question, feeling the slightly arrhythmic rise and fall of Nora’s chest pressed against his back. “I think,” he says after a while, “It’s too early to tell. For all of us.”

Hot air tickles his nape. “Like you weren’t squaring up right there next to Yang and I when Nikos tried to rope Ruby into her nonsense.”

“Like I need another reason to mess with the poster child for the Hunters.” He shoots back.

“Oooh, what a rebel. Drop the tough guy act already, ya goof. You like ‘em. I like ‘em. They should come with us.”

“It’s not just that. I’ve been thinking on Ruby’s rather… adverse reaction to Ozma. I suspect they are much like us; here for their own agenda and nothing more. Our paths can only diverge.”

“But they don’t have to,” Nora insists, tracing a finger up and down his spine, “We should ask them about it. Directly. No dancing around with innocent questions or passively waiting for them to come to us.”

“No,” he shakes his head, “I won’t pry into what is clearly a sensitive matter. They’ve extended the same courtesy to us, after all.”

“But Ruby’s curious about us, you know. If we share, and they share, and then we all agree to help one another–”

“We are already helping one another. I don’t want to ruin the peace we have between the four of us.”

A light, harmless karate chop strikes his side. “You stubborn fool of a man! So what, we string them along with half-truths until the job’s done and then ditch them?”

“I…”

“Whatever.” He feels Nora turning over, her warmth leaving him, “I’m tired. Let’s talk about this some other time. Good night, Ren.”

“…Good night, Nora.”

His lifelong partner falls back asleep quickly enough, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

As much as he wishes to share Nora’s optimism, he can’t. Yes, their current relationship with Ruby and Yang is good. Great, even. But even from the strong bond they have now between the four of them, it would take an enormous leap of faith for him to drop the mask of who he is entirely, and even greater still for Ruby and Yang to even consider joining them after Beacon. And above all else, if, in the future, the two sisters really were okay with everything…

He doesn’t know if he can handle the possibility of losing them, too.