Hey guys, I'm back with a new chapter! So to start off I'll put some pics down below to give you an idea of what some of the characters look like, the rest I'll leave up to your imagination to figure out based on the descriptions of them.
So here you go!
Max:
Just imagine he has hair the length of Natsu's timeskip look (when he comes back after 1 year) and his hair is flame like orange, with horns like a dragon... same with the tail. His pendant is like what koga and the others use in the first half of Saint seiya Omega (the crystals) their just different colors corresponding to their element they use.
Mist:
Basic idea with the hair just not with the rest of the outfit. See last two chapters for descriptions of what the character looks like.
Anywho since Ruby is paired with Koga I'd like to see which characters you guys want to end up together. Here's a list of options:
Weiss x Kazuma
Maxwell x Yang
Blake x Shoryu
Hon'oo x Mercury
Mist x Neptune V.
Yukikaze x Jaune
Or
Weiss x Max
Yang x Shoryu
Blake x Kazuma
Hon'oo x Jaune
Shoryu x Weiss
Max x Velvet
Yang x Kazuma
Blake x Toshirou
Hon'oo x Neptune V.
Mist x Sun W.
Or
Mist x Oscar P. (Volume 5)
Yukikaze x Yatsuhashi D.
Please leave a comment, PM me, or a review on which of these pairings you'd like to see or.. if I neglected any male or female Rwby characters that could be paired with someone.
With that said I don't own Saint Seiya or Rwby and their characters, thise belong to their creators. I only own the oc's who appear in this story
Opening theme: Burn by Flow (Tales of Berseria)
Visuals: Main Cast introduced in the story so far (Dragonblade siblings, Ruby, Yang, and the Tokyoheim siblings) pans down from a calm sky towards Beacon where students some silhouetted fall down from the sky.
It then transitions to each character introduced so far fighting one grim, before the song picks up and they are seen fighting the grim together. The opening visual ends as the dragonblade siblings, silhouetted figures with Ruby and Yang then fight off an enemy presumably a villain before it pans back up to the sky.
Chapter Three: Ruby Rose & Initiation II; The Test and the making of Teams
Into the Emerald Forest
Atest tells you what a person knows.
A forest tells you who they are.
I. The Ballroom — Dawn
Kouga woke before the announcement.
This was not unusual. He had woken before most things for as long as he could remember — before alarms, before his siblings, before the light changed from black to the particular deep blue that preceded sunrise. His parents had always said it was the faunus in him; something in his blood that stayed alert even when the rest of him had let go. He had long since stopped questioning it and started using it.
He sat up from his sleeping bag, stretched the night out of his shoulders with a slow roll, and took quiet stock of the ballroom around him. Three hundred first-years in various stages of unconsciousness. Max already awake on his right, lacing his boots with the methodical patience of someone who approached preparation the way other people approached prayer. Mist still down on his left, though her tail was moving in the small, deliberate way that told him she was not actually asleep — she was listening.
He took a breath. Let it out slowly.
He had a good feeling about today. Not the anxious optimism of someone who hoped things would go well, but something quieter — a kind of recognition, as if something he had been walking toward for a long time was finally within reach.
Across the room, he could already see Ruby Rose moving through the clusters of waking students — red cloak, silver eyes, the particular energy of someone who had woken up with a plan and was already several steps into executing it. He caught the word "Yang" three times in ten seconds.
Max glanced at him. "Good morning."
"Morning," Kouga replied.
Mist opened her eyes. "The test is today."
"Yes," both brothers said, at the same time, in the same register.
Mist sat up and smoothed her hair back with both hands. "Good."
◆ ◆ ◆
II. The Locker Room — Before the Cliffs
Ruby was loading Crescent Rose with the focused affection of someone reuniting with a friend after a long absence.
"No more awkward small talk," she said, not quite to herself and not quite to anyone in particular. "No more getting-to-know-you. Today, I let her do the talking."
"That's one approach," a voice said behind her.
She turned. Kouga was leaning against the neighboring locker with his arms folded and an expression that suggested he had been there long enough to have caught at least the last thirty seconds of her monologue.
Ruby went slightly pink. "K-Kouga. Good morning."
"Good morning." He straightened. "Just remember — you won't be the only one in that forest. The test is as much about partners as it is about fighting."
"He's right," Yang said, appearing with the well-timed entrance of someone who had been waiting for an opening. "You're going to need to meet new people, Rubes."
"I meet people fine," Ruby said, with slightly more confidence than the evidence strictly supported.
"Then prove it." Yang tilted her head. "Maybe end up on someone else's team for once."
Ruby's expression went through several phases, arriving at something that resembled alarm. "Are you saying you don't want to be on my team?"
"I'm saying it would be good for you to try." Yang glanced at Max, who had arrived quietly beside his siblings. "No offense to present company — but Ruby and I already know each other's fighting styles inside out. New friction is sometimes what sharpens a blade."
"None taken," Max said evenly. "And she's not wrong. Familiarity has a ceiling."
Ruby looked between all of them with the expression of someone being outflanked by very reasonable people. She retrieved her weapon, clutched it to her chest, and set her jaw. "Fine. I'll be open to it. That's all I'm agreeing to."
Kouga smiled. Small, genuine, and making no comment on anything.
Nearby, Weiss Schnee had located Pyrrha Nikos and was making her case with the quiet intensity of someone who considered social arrangements a form of tactical planning. Pyrrha listened with the patient attention she brought to everyone, which was occasionally mistaken for agreement. The conversation was interrupted by Jaune Arc, who arrived between them with the breezy confidence of someone who had never learned to read the temperature of a room. What followed was brief: Pyrrha's apology came slightly after the spear. Jaune's trajectory ended against the far wall at a height that left him cataloguing his options.
"He's going to be a problem," Mist said.
"He's going to be interesting," Honoo corrected.
Glynda Goodwitch's voice filled every room in the building with measured finality. "All first-year students report to Beacon Cliff for initiation. Immediately."
Honoo extended a hand to the wall where Jaune was thinking things over. "Up you come."
"Do people get launched like that often here?" Jaune asked, accepting the hand.
"I suspect more than the brochure implies," she replied.
◆ ◆ ◆
III. Beacon Cliff — The Launch
The cliff overlooked the Emerald Forest with the frank, unadorned honesty of a precipice: here the land ended, there the trees began, and between the two was a very significant amount of nothing. The morning air was cool with altitude, the kind that made breathing feel deliberate.
Professor Ozpin stood at the edge of the stone platform with his mug and the unhurried quality of a man who had presided over this particular morning many times and found it instructive every time. Glynda stood to his left with the expression of someone who had also presided over this morning many times and was choosing professional preparedness over serenity.
The first-years assembled across the silver launch tiles, facing outward over the drop. Nora Valkyrie, in the third row, leaned toward Ren with the expression of someone who had been vindicated. Ren regarded the drop below with the calm of someone who had made peace with it.
Ruby was doing the mental arithmetic that Ozpin's words had triggered, and the arithmetic was not coming out well.
"The first person you make eye contact with after landing will be your partner for the next four years."
The expression that crossed her face had the quality of glass under stress — holding, for the moment, but visibly changed by the pressure.
Kouga leaned close enough that his voice did not carry. "Breathe. In, and out. It'll come together."
She looked at him. He was not offering reassurance as a performance — he was stating what he believed to be true, and she could tell the difference. She took the breath. Let it out. The arithmetic did not change, but the weight of it shifted slightly. "Thank you," she said.
He nodded once and returned his attention to the forest below.
Max met Mist's eyes across the row. A small, mutual acknowledgment. Whatever the forest gave them, they would work with.
Yang donned her aviators, bounced once on the balls of her feet, and grinned at the drop below with the expression of someone who had been waiting for this moment since childhood. "Woo-hoooo!" She was launched on the word.
Kouga caught Ruby's eye in the last instant before his own platform fired. "See you on the other side." Then he was gone — a streak of crimson against the morning sky — and Ruby was next, and the forest opened up below like a held breath released.
Jaune discovered the answer to his parachute question empirically.
◆ ◆ ◆
IV. The Emerald Forest — First Encounters
Max hit the canopy and went through it without slowing. He had done this before — not in this forest, but in others, in places that had asked harder questions. The impact crater at the base of a broad-trunked oak was roughly the diameter of a cartwheel. He considered this acceptable.
He stood, cracked his knuckles, and listened.
The forest had the layered quiet of a place that was not actually quiet. He turned east and began to walk, golden eyes tracking the treeline the way a compass finds north — not urgently, just persistently.
He was aware of the Grimm before he heard them. A subtle shift in air pressure, the particular quality of silence that fills the space around something that has decided to be still. He kept walking.
"I'm going to count to three," he said conversationally, "and when I reach it, you should have made up your mind."
Undergrowth rustled. A Beowolf stepped into the path twelve meters ahead. "One." Two more emerged from the left. "Two."
He sighed — the specific, performative sigh of someone whose prediction has been confirmed and who finds it more disappointing than threatening. "Three."
The first Beowolf charged. Max sidestepped it with a half-step that moved less than it needed to and exactly as much as it had to, caught the creature's forward momentum with a redirecting palm, and drove it face-first into the earth. The impact left a divot in the soil. He glanced at it, then at the flanking creatures, and reached a conclusion about the morning's likely difficulty. "Disappointing."
He moved through them with the economic precision of someone who trained not to look impressive but to be effective — a distinction that takes years to achieve. When he snapped his fingers, the burst of white light struck the remaining creatures simultaneously and they dissolved before the echo finished traveling through the trees.
He heard the second fight before he saw it.
Black flame was a specific color — not orange-red, not the white he was accustomed to generating, but a deep cold black that absorbed the light around it. It rose in pillars from the forest floor twenty meters ahead, accompanied by the sound of multiple Grimm ceasing to exist and one voice expressing impatience at the pace of the whole affair.
Max came into the clearing and observed.
The boy at the center was perhaps his own age, black-haired, red-eyed, moving with the focused economy of someone who was very good at this and knew it but was not bothering to perform the knowing. He had horns and a scaly tail that moved with the controlled precision of a third limb. He fought with the absolute conviction of someone who had never seriously considered the possibility of losing.
When the last cluster of Grimm scattered, Max stepped forward and drove a burst of white light into them before they had covered three meters.
The clearing went still.
The black-haired boy turned and looked at him. Not hostile, exactly, but not warm either. The evaluating look of someone taking measure. "I could have handled those."
"I know," Max said. "I helped anyway."
A long, considering pause. The boy's expression moved fractionally toward something adjacent to amusement. He crossed the distance and extended his fist. "Kazuma Ayakashi. Just Kazuma."
Max bumped the fist and shook the hand in the same motion. "Maxwell Dragonblade. Max works."
"Flame hair, then." Kazuma turned toward the deeper forest. "Guess that makes us partners."
"Apparently." Max fell into step beside him. They walked north, toward the temple, toward whatever the forest had left to ask of them.
◆ ◆ ◆
V. The Forest — Partners by Gravity
Kouga caught a branch on the way down, used the momentum to arc wide, caught a second branch lower, and touched the forest floor in a crouch with a sound the undergrowth barely registered. He brushed pine needles from his jacket and started walking, ears filtering the ambient sounds of the canopy for the specific frequency of someone in trouble.
He found it — or rather it found him — in the form of a very large Ursa arriving through undergrowth at speed, launched from somewhere behind it. He leaped aside. The Ursa hit the earth where he had been standing and raised a divot the size of a small cart. "Look out!" someone called — a half-second too late, but with genuine timing.
He landed in a crouch, turned, and found Honoo Tokyoheim standing ten meters away with the expression of someone who had just accidentally redirected a large Grimm into her oldest friend's path and was deciding how to acknowledge this.
"Honoo." "Kouga." A pause. "Sorry about the Ursa."
Their eyes met, and the rule of the test was satisfied without either of them requiring it to be noted.
Then the growling started from four directions simultaneously, and the conversation was deferred.
Kouga let the aura gather into his fists — gold, deep and warm — and moved. He did not fight loudly. The attacks came from the ground up, carrying the full weight of his body and the precise alignment of years of practice, cutting through the Beowolves like a statement rather than a flourish.
Honoo fought differently. She was expansive where he was contained, her attacks gathering and releasing with the rhythm of something oceanic — drawing back, then crashing forward with a force that was absolute rather than aggressive. The water moved at her direction the way water moves when it has found its destination.
Between the two of them, the clearing was addressed efficiently.
Kouga looked at the forty-meter trench Honoo's final attack had carved through the forest. Still draining. "Again," he said.
Honoo looked at the trench. At the trees it had removed. Then at Kouga, building a case for plausible deniability. "It was aimed at the Grimm." "They were right in front of us." "It was a large group."
"Honoo."
"It also points directly north," she offered constructively. "Which is where the temple is. So in a sense it is also a path."
He looked at the trench. Then at the gap in the canopy. Then back at his partner. "Let's go before you have any more helpful ideas."
She fell into step beside him. They followed the direction the water had gone, which was north, which was exactly where they needed to be.
◆ ◆ ◆
VI. The Forest — The Quiet Ones
Mist had landed in the high branches and stayed there.
A deliberate choice. She had learned early that the loudest approach was rarely the best one. She heard, from somewhere to the northeast, the unmistakable sound of a forty-meter water attack removing a section of forest, and sighed. She liked Honoo. She genuinely did. But Honoo's sense of calibration when it came to the scale of her attacks was, charitably, aspirational.
She dropped silently, moved through the undergrowth toward the clearing she had identified from above, and found the broken icicles. Someone had been here. Grimm had been here. The Grimm were now in the process of ceasing to exist. She rounded the treeline and found Shoryu Tokyoheim standing at the center with ice still dissipating from his hands and the quiet, composed expression of someone ready to do the next thing.
He saw her. One corner of his mouth moved. "Took your time."
"I was being observant." "You were letting me handle it." "I was letting the situation develop naturally."
Shoryu looked at the remnants around him — particles dissolving, frost on the undergrowth, the clear evidence of a fight that had been entirely one-sided. "And you've joined the situation now that the hard part's done."
Mist shrugged. "You didn't need my help."
"I didn't," he agreed. "Partners anyway?" "Partners." She nodded north. "Temple's that way. We should move."
He fell into step beside her. They moved through the forest the way they always moved together — companionably, efficiently, each aware of where the other was without needing to check.
"How many?" Mist asked. "Seven Beowolves and two Ursa," Shoryu said. "You?"
"I didn't encounter anything on the way down."
He looked at her sideways. "The forest was quiet," she said. "The forest is never quiet." "I was being observant."
He let the subject rest. They walked north, and the forest was, for the moment, quiet in the specific way that meant it was deciding whether to try them again.
◆ ◆ ◆
VII. The Forest — An Odd Number
Toshiro Torugaiya had been walking for what felt like a long time.
He had dealt with the Grimm he encountered — not without effort, but without damage, which was the important part — and had been moving steadily north. His silver horns caught occasional shafts of light through the canopy. He was from Vacuo, originally, his village in the lower reaches of the desert where life was conducted in the narrow margin between what was necessary and what was possible. He had left with a specific intention: become capable enough to provide what his village could not provide for itself. It was a goal that fit on a single line and contained a great deal of weight.
He was not thinking about this when he found the girl.
She was ahead of him in a small clearing, one leg and tail pinned beneath a fallen branch, a ring of Grimm tightening around her with the patient energy of creatures that had identified an advantage and were using it. The girl had shadows gathering between her fingers and was doing the math on how many she could address before they reached her. The math was not coming out in her favor.
Toshiro hardened his arm from the shoulder down and drove his fist forward. The projectiles that came from the motion were dense and fast and found their targets with the precision of years of training. The Grimm on the forward side dissolved before the sound finished reaching the trees.
The girl looked up. Her hair was lavender and her eyes were wide. "Are you all right?" Toshiro asked. "I — yes. I think so."
More Grimm moved in from the flanks. He set his feet and began the work, but the numbers had an opinion, and the opinion was inconvenient. He was tracking the flanks and the girl's position when the bolt came down.
It hit the earth ten meters ahead with the sound of something very large being introduced to the ground very quickly. The flash illuminated the clearing in bone-white, and the Grimm it touched were reduced to smoking outlines almost before his eyes adjusted.
A girl stood at the edge of the clearing. Dark-haired, red-eyed, gold highlights in her hair, with the kind of grin that suggested she had been looking forward to that since the moment she landed. Her horns were gold and black. Her gloves were embossed with lightning bolt patterns that were either decorative or an accurate warning label — from the evidence, probably both.
She cracked her knuckles. The residual static answered.
"You looked like you could use a hand," she said. "Yukikaze Ayakashi. Just Yukikaze."
"Toshiro Torugaiya." "Gweyn Gorman," said the girl on the ground. "And I'm still stuck."
The branch came free between the two of them in a moment. Gweyn tested her ankle, concluded it was sore but functional, and attempted to confirm this by standing — possible, if reluctant.
Toshiro looked at the distance to the temple, then at the ankle, and made a calculation. "Here," he said, and crouched.
Gweyn stared at his offered back with the expression of someone who had not been prepared for this specific development. "I — that's — you don't have to —"
"It's the fastest way," he said, with the matter-of-fact practicality of someone who had thought about the problem and arrived at the answer. "And I'm not leaving you behind."
There was a pause in which Gweyn's face went through several colors, settling on a deep rose that she redirected behind her hair. She climbed onto his back with the careful dignity of someone trying very hard to be casual about something that was not casual. "Thank you," she said, mostly at his shoulder.
Yukikaze was watching this with the expression of someone filing an observation for future reference. Her grin acquired a new quality — knowing and warm and not entirely unkind. "Not to interrupt," she said, "but there's something we should sort out."
"The partner question," Toshiro said. "The partner question," Yukikaze confirmed. "I made eye contact with both of you when I came in. Which means either I've broken the test, or someone planned for this to happen."
The three of them arrived, by slightly different routes, at the same conclusion: the number of students at the initiation had been odd. Deliberately so, or coincidentally, or odd in the way that things are sometimes odd because the universe has a preference for arrangements that are interesting rather than tidy. "So we're all three partners," Gweyn said. "That's what the evidence suggests."
Toshiro considered this briefly. It was irregular. It was also, practically speaking, not a problem he needed to solve right now, in the middle of a forest, when there was a temple to find. "Then let's get moving," he said. Yukikaze fell into step beside them. "Lead the way."
◆ ◆ ◆
VIII. The Forest — Fire and Ice
Ruby did not land gracefully.
She had a plan — several rounds fired on the descent to control the rate of fall, a late transformation to scythe mode, a caught branch to swing the last twenty feet into something like a landing. The plan was good in principle. What she had not planned for was the bird. It was a small bird. It was minding its own business. The expression on its face, in the brief mutual moment of acknowledgment before she passed through the space it occupied, was the expression of a creature that had not signed up for any of this. "I'm so sorry," she said, mostly to its trajectory.
She landed in a controlled stumble that resolved into a run, shook leaves from her hood, and began moving. The thought that repeated in her head was simple and had the quality of a mantra: Yang. Find Yang. Eye contact with Yang. Not a stranger. Not someone she would have to figure out from scratch.
She was still running when time seemed to compact itself into a single moment: a clearing, a patch of sunlight, and Weiss Schnee turning to face her with her rapier already drawn. Their eyes met. The silence that followed was the silence of two people simultaneously arriving at an awareness that something has just become irrevocable. Weiss turned on her heel and walked away.
"Wait! Where are you going? We're — aren't we supposed to be —" No answer. Ruby stood in the clearing, looked at the space Weiss had occupied, and made a decision. Partners were partners. She followed.
◆ ◆ ◆
The next stretch of time produced a fight with a Beowolf, a set-tree-on-fire, a significant argument about whose fault the set-tree-on-fire was, a second argument that preceded the first, and a third that was technically about navigation but was actually about something else.
They walked in circles neither was willing to formally acknowledge. The same marked tree appeared twice. Weiss paced. Ruby sat on a boulder and watched her partner assert the existence of a direction she clearly did not have. "You don't know where we are either," Ruby said. "I know exactly where we're going." "Then why have we passed that tree twice?" Weiss did not answer this, which was, in its own way, an answer.
The argument that broke something real open was the one that happened when Ruby lost her composure.
She had been pushed, repeatedly and methodically, in the specific direction of feeling small. Not because Weiss was cruel — Ruby was beginning to suspect she was not — but because Weiss dealt with uncertainty by asserting authority over whatever was around her, and what was around her right now was Ruby, who was younger and who was, by Weiss's current accounting, several categories of problem.
"Congratulations," Weiss had said, "on being the strongest child to sneak into Beacon."
It was the word child that did it. Not for the first time, but for one too many times. Ruby turned around with fire in her silver eyes and said what she meant without managing the edges of it first. The words were accurate, and she meant them. "You don't even know me."
She walked away, which was the correct thing to do when you had said the thing and needed a moment before saying anything else.
Weiss stood in the clearing after she had gone, looking at the space where Ruby had been. She had been spoken to in that way before. By someone who had every right to, and who had done it rarely enough that it had always landed.
Ruby was not that person. But the look in her eyes had been the same look.
Weiss had not expected that. She walked forward, and the large black feather that fell from the sky above her went unnoticed.
◆ ◆ ◆
IX. The Forest — Two Halves of the Same Coin
Yang found the forest loud and the Grimm energetic and the morning, on balance, extremely promising.
She had been moving north at the pace of someone who was enjoying the exercise, calling out Ruby's name every thirty seconds with the persistent optimism of a person who believes that if you keep looking, things eventually turn up. She registered movement to her right before she registered the person making it — a dark-haired girl emerging from the undergrowth with a blade in her hand and the quality of attention of someone who had been watching and assessing before choosing to be visible. The blade caught the remaining Ursa across the side of the neck with the economical precision of someone who had made this strike before and knew exactly how much force it required.
The Grimm fell.
Yang looked at the girl, then at where the Grimm had been. "I could have handled that." Not offended. Curious.
"I know," Blake Belladonna said. She sheathed the blade. "I was closer."
There was something in the delivery that Yang found, against reasonable expectation, appealing — not warm, but direct, carrying the quality of a person who had seen enough of the world to have stopped trying to make an impression of it.
"Partners, then." "It seems so."
Yang extended her hand. Blake considered it for a moment — not with suspicion, but with the careful consideration of someone who did not make gestures lightly — and then shook it. "Temple's north," Blake said. "Lead the way," Yang replied, and fell into step beside her.
◆ ◆ ◆
X. The Forest — The Weight of Potential
Pyrrha Nikos had been famous for long enough to have developed a complicated relationship with the attention that came with it. Fame had a way of inserting a layer of glass between you and whatever you were trying to reach — people looked at the record, at the cereal box, at the four tournament victories lined up in a row like a wall, and concluded the conversation was already over.
Jaune Arc had not done this.
He had pushed her aside in the locker room — gently, absently, the way you move something out of the way when you are trying to get somewhere else — and had not calculated anything. He had just been on his way somewhere and she had been in his path. She found, somewhat to her own surprise, that this was the most interesting thing anyone had done near her in quite some time.
They were partners by the time they reached the treeline.
The branch caught him across the face and he went down with the surprised sound of someone who had been thinking about something else. Pyrrha turned and found him in the undergrowth with a cut across his cheek that was, objectively, unnecessary.
"Why didn't you use your Aura?"
He looked up with an expression trying very hard to be casual about not knowing the answer. She sat beside him in the leaf litter and explained it from the beginning, watching his face as she talked — the way comprehension built in him slowly, not because he was slow but because he was careful, assembling things into structures he could actually stand on. There was more in him than the morning had revealed. There usually was.
"It's like a force field," he said eventually. "Something like that." She placed her hand against the side of his head and let her own Aura move in the direction of his. It came up fast — faster than she had expected, more than she had anticipated — and she had to concentrate to hold the process steady as the white light moved from her to him. She was genuinely tired when it finished.
Jaune glowed. He looked at his hands. The cut on his cheek closed like a book being shut. "Wow. So this is what that feels like."
"You have a great deal of it," she said, meaning the Aura.
"Is that good?" "It's remarkable," she replied, and she was not being generous. She was stating what she had just measured.
"Why do you still trust me?" he asked. "I don't know half of what I should. You've been at the top of your class since before I knew what Aura was."
Pyrrha considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. "I've met a lot of capable people," she said finally. "I've met very few who are genuinely capable of growth. Those are different things, and the second one is rarer." A pause. "I think you're the second kind."
He had no answer for that. She did not require one. They walked on through the forest, and somewhere ahead of them was a cave that contained something that was not a relic, and was going to make the next several minutes very interesting.
◆ ◆ ◆
XI. The Abandoned Temple — Convergence
The temple had the quality of a place that had been important once and was waiting for a reason to be important again. Stone platforms rose from the circular floor in concentric tiers, each holding carved chess pieces — black and white and gold and silver, the relics of whatever tradition had built this place and then abandoned it to the forest.
Yang and Blake arrived first. They stood looking at the pieces with the attentive quiet of people taking stock before acting. "Chess pieces," Blake said. "Some are missing," Yang noted. "Someone else was already here."
From the far side of the clearing, two figures emerged. Yang recognized the flame-colored hair before she recognized the face. The boy beside him she did not know — black-haired, red-eyed, moving with the kind of self-possession that did not announce itself. Max assessed the remaining pieces briefly. "White rook?" "Works for me." Max took two silver-white rook pieces, tossed one to Kazuma in a clean arc caught without looking, and the two moved to the edge of the clearing to stand with their backs to a broad oak and their eyes on the forest. They were not resting. They were waiting.
"They're waiting for the others," Blake said quietly. "Yes," Yang agreed. "I think they are."
They came in pairs and threes over the next several minutes. Kouga and Honoo, with the aftermath of a water trench visible as a gap in the canopy to the south. Mist and Shoryu, whose arrival was quiet in the way of two people who no longer need to fill silence. A trio — a silver-horned boy carrying a lavender-haired girl on his back, and a dark-haired girl with gold highlights who had the contented energy of someone who had electrocuted things recently and was pleased about it.
All of them wore a crystal somewhere on their person — pendant, bracelet, ring, earring, or woven into a hair pin. Blake filed this alongside the horns and tails and the way they fought, and decided the full picture was not yet visible but was becoming more interesting with each addition.
She picked up a black king piece and turned it in her fingers. "I think we're waiting for something else." Yang followed her gaze upward, to where the Nevermore's shadow was moving across the canopy in slow, deliberate circles. "Yeah," Yang said. "I think we are."
◆ ◆ ◆
XII. The Cave — What Jaune Found
The light in the cave was the particular gold of something that did not belong in a cave, and this should have been the first warning.
"That's it," Jaune said, with the conviction of a person who very much wanted it to be it. "I knew we'd find the relic."
Pyrrha had stopped walking. She was standing very still in the way of someone whose instincts were sending a message the rest of her was receiving. "Jaune, I don't think that's —"
The golden light moved. Jaune's hand found nothing and kept reaching. He grabbed something else — something attached to something very large — and the cave resolved its own ambiguity by revealing itself to be occupied. The Death Stalker filled the cavern the way a nightmare fills a room. Its eyes burned red, its shell ancient-looking, and Jaune was currently attached to its tail.
"This," Jaune said, "is not the relic." "No," Pyrrha confirmed, already moving toward the exit.
The Death Stalker demolished the cave entrance on its way out, depositing sunlight, stone fragments, and two teenagers onto the slope above the clearing in a manner louder and less dignified than either of them would have preferred. Pyrrha hit the ground rolling and came up in a run. Jaune hit the ground screaming and remained in the grip of the tail until physics and desperation combined to send him on a trajectory through the forest that ended somewhere beyond the treeline with an audible impact she resolved to worry about as soon as she had finished running away from the very large Grimm pursuing her.
◆ ◆ ◆
XIII. The Ruins — Everyone Arrives at Once
The clearing outside the temple had been peaceful until it wasn't.
Yang heard the crash from the ruins first. Then Jaune's voice arrived from over the treeline with the carrying quality of genuine panic. Then Nora Valkyrie arrived from a different direction entirely, mounted on an Ursa making its final philosophical contribution before dissolving into black particles, and crowed something triumphant at the sky.
"She rode that in," Blake said. "She did," Yang confirmed. "On an Ursa." "On an Ursa."
The Grimm fell. Nora dashed across its body looking for signs of continued engagement, found none, and looked bereft about this in the specific way of someone who had been hoping for more. Ren arrived at a walk behind her. "Nora. Please. Not again."
Nora had already spotted the golden rook piece and was moving toward it with focused joy. She grabbed it, held it above her head, and performed a brief, entirely sincere dance with it in the temple clearing.
Then Pyrrha arrived at a dead run from the eastern treeline, and a very large Grimm arrived shortly after her, and the morning escalated.
Ruby came out of the sky.
She came from high enough that the angle was steep and the descent was fast and she was already reaching for something to slow it when Kouga moved. He crossed the distance from the temple platform to her landing point in a time shorter than it had any right to be, positioned himself beneath the trajectory, and caught her. The impact made itself felt up both his arms. He absorbed it and stayed upright, which was the important part, and then Jaune arrived from the treeline at horizontal velocity and the situation became complicated again. The two of them hit the base of the nearest tree and stopped.
A moment of ringing silence followed.
Ruby blinked her eyes clear and looked up. "Oh no — Kouga, are you okay? I'm so sorry —"
"I'm fine," he said. His voice was even. His tail, wedged into the tree root at an angle during the impact, was expressing an opinion he was choosing not to relay. "Just glad you're not hurt."
Her face did the thing it did when she was trying to say several things and had bandwidth for one. She settled on: "Thank you."
"You're getting better at landing," he said. It was not entirely accurate but was intended generously, and she understood this and smiled.
"Could someone possibly —" Jaune's voice came from somewhere above them. "I'm a bit —"
"We'll get you down," Max said, already moving.
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XIV. The Ruins — Division of Labor
The Nevermore was circling.
It passed over the ruins in long, deliberate arcs, its shadow moving across the stone like a clock measuring something other than time. Every pass was lower. The Death Stalker was working on the ice that had immobilized its stinger, cracking it with the rhythmic patience of something that understood it was winning.
Yang looked between the two Grimm and the assembled group — RWBY, JNPR, and the faunus teams, all of them present in the same clearing for the first time — and made the calculation the morning had arrived at. "Two of them. And we're here."
"Scorpio's ours," Jaune said. He stood with the posture of someone who had made a decision and intended to hold to it. His team was already forming up. "The Nevermore," Ruby said, looking up. Something in her expression had moved past the anxiety of the morning and arrived somewhere clearer. "That's ours."
Max looked at both groups, then at his own. "We'll clear the Grimm between you and the cliff. Keep your lines open." "Try not to rearrange the landscape too much," Kouga added, with a glance at Honoo. "No promises," she said.
They separated.
What followed was not a battle in the traditional linear sense. It was several simultaneous conversations between living things and the force of the world that wanted them gone, conducted in parallel across the ruins and open sky.
Mist was the first to address the Grimm between the teams and the cliff path. She released a crimson breath attack from a low, centered stance — a beam that removed the problem with the thoroughness of a statement made clearly. The trench it left was not Honoo's trench, but it was in the same family. "Was that strictly necessary?" Weiss asked. "Yes," Mist said, and walked forward through the still-dissipating smoke.
Shoryu froze the Grimm that came from the sides. Toshiro cut through them with a hardened edge and the calm focus of someone doing what he came here to do. Yukikaze called lightning in short, precise bursts — restrained, the output of someone who could have done considerably more. Gweyn worked the shadows between them with a quiet competence that did not announce itself.
Max and Kazuma worked the center. White flame and black flame — two colors of the same essential thing, used with the economy of fighters who had been told early that power was not a weapon until it was aimed. They did not speak. They had already worked out, in the forest, what the other needed and when.
Kouga fought the eastern flank with the gold light and the ground-up power and the patience of someone who had been fighting since before he knew that was what it was called. Honoo swept the far end of the line with water, and the bow she constructed before releasing it was enormous.
The Death Stalker was addressed by four people who had agreed on a plan. Pyrrha's shield caught the stinger at its weakest point and severed it. Nora descended from above with her hammer and the absolute conviction of someone who has aimed at something large and is not reconsidering. The stinger drove through the plated skull. The creature went down. Jaune looked at his team and felt the particular, unfamiliar warmth of having called something correctly. "Good," he said. He meant it.
Up on the high bridge, Ruby had arrived at the plan the way she always did — by deciding what she was willing to do and then finding the way to do it.
Blake's blade-wire stretched between two columns. Weiss's glyph at the pivot. Ruby's weight and speed providing the force. Crescent Rose primed.
"Can you make the shot?" she asked. Weiss looked at the calculation — distance, angle, the Nevermore's position — and arrived at her answer with the brevity of someone who does not explain herself unless asked. "Of course I can." "Good. Then let's do this."
Weiss built the ascending glyph sequence up the cliff face. The launch bent Ruby's trajectory from horizontal to vertical, and she went up the wall with her scythe catching stone at each glyph point, firing and firing, the Nevermore's neck caught in the blade's curve.
At the top, with the morning sky around her and the shadow no longer crossing the ruins below, Ruby fired the last shot.
The head separated from the body with a sound the wind carried away almost immediately. Rose petals drifted down from where she stood, caught in the updraft, and the light caught them in a way that had nothing to do with drama and everything to do with simple physics.
Below, on the ruins platform, the assembled group watched. Kouga watched the petals drift and said nothing, but the expression on his face was its own kind of speech.
"She's going to be extraordinary," Mist said, quietly.
"She already is," Honoo replied.
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XV. Beacon Academy — The Naming of Teams
The auditorium held three hundred first-year students in the transitional state between having done something difficult and understanding what it meant. It had the quality of attention, which is different from quiet and often more valuable.
Ozpin stood at the podium with the patient, slightly distant expression he wore when he was thinking about more than one thing simultaneously, which was, Ruby had begun to suspect, essentially always.
The names came in sequence. Team CRDL. Then Team MKKH — and Mist, watching her brother's face from across the aisle, allowed herself a small, private smile when Max's name was read as leader, which she had known it would be and which he received with the composed grace of someone who had expected it but did not take it lightly.
Then Ozpin looked up and addressed the stage with the tone of someone marking an occasion. "For the first time in Beacon's history, you are looking at a five-person team. And only the second team in this institution's history to be composed entirely of faunus. Mist Dragonblade. Shoryu Tokyoheim. Toshiro Torugaiya. Gweyn Gorman. Yukikaze Ayakashi. You retrieved the silver bishop pieces. You will work together as Team MSTGY, led by Mist Dragonblade."
"Thank you, Headmaster," Mist said. Her voice was steady and she meant it.
Team JNPR. Jaune's name as leader produced the brief collective response of a room deciding whether to be surprised, followed by the response of a room that had decided not to be. Pyrrha offered him a shoulder bump that landed harder than she had estimated and sent him to the floor in front of three hundred people, resolving the moment's tension in the direction of laughter. Jaune stood up and smiled at his own situation, which Ruby thought was perhaps the most accurate preview of his character she had seen.
And then there were four girls on a stage, and Ozpin said the name of their team, and the name of their leader, and Ruby Rose heard her own name in that sentence and went very still.
Yang's arms were around her before she had processed the sound properly. The hug was warm and honest and pressed all the air out of her lungs in the good way — the way that meant someone who loves you is glad about something. "I knew it," Yang said.
A hand settled on Ruby's shoulder, and she turned to find Kouga standing just behind Yang with the expression of someone who had made a trip across a room for the specific purpose of telling one person something true.
"Congratulations," he said. "You earned it."
She wanted to say something adequate and could not immediately locate it, so she said the simpler thing: "Thank you."
He nodded once. The moment was sufficient.
Ozpin, watching from the podium as the auditorium settled into its applause, allowed himself the small indulgence of a private satisfaction. The teams were named. The year was beginning. The people in this room were becoming something more than they had been this morning. It was, he thought, shaping up to be a very interesting year.
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XVI. Elsewhere — A Different Kind of Reckoning
The room had no windows, or rather it had windows that had been covered, which amounted to the same functional reality. Shelves lined the walls with the dense, purposeful arrangement of things in active use rather than on display. A map above the desk showed Vale and its districts with the additions of someone who had been working a problem for some time — crossed locations, circled targets, a hierarchy of priority rendered in marker and pin.
Roman Torchwick sat at the desk with a cigar and a phone and the expression of a man who had been conducting a conversation he did not enjoy and had just finished it.
He set the phone down. Looked at the map. Looked at the crate of Dust crystals opened on the table before him — orange, blue, white, red, green, a spectrum of contained energy that was never quite as much as the next step required.
He picked up a blue gem and turned it in his fingers. The light caught it. Something in its depths moved.
"We're going to need more manpower," he said, to the masked man at the edge of the room who was waiting with the patient stillness of someone who existed primarily to be told what to do next.
The man said nothing.
Roman looked at the circle at the center of the map — a thing that required more pieces than he currently had in play. He was a patient man by professional necessity. Patience was the difference between a score and a mistake. But patience was not the same as contentment.
He lit the cigar. "Get me what I need," he said, "and get me more of it than last time."
The masked man left.
Roman sat in the quiet room with his map and his Dust and his calculation, and the moon outside the covered windows moved from one position to another without caring about any of it.
End of Chapter Three
Coming Next — Chapter Four: The Badge, The Burden, and New Instructors?
Hey guys I hope you guys enjoyed this chapter! In regards to Jaune, I'm going to make him a little bit more confident and a bit smarter this time around. While there will be some of Jaune acting like he does in cannon it won't be as much. As of right now, I don't have any plans to make Pyrrha suffer the same fate as she does in the original cannon story of RWBY. But before I go... I know there are alot of added Oc's but who would you like to see them paired with?
Best option for Yukikaze:
A. Neptune Vasilias
B. Yatsuhashi Daichi
C. Fox Alistair
D. Mercury Black
E. Write in (other male character suggestion)
Who is the best pairing for Shoryu?
A. Blake
B. Coco
C. Velvet
D. Penny
E. Emerald
F. Cinder (reformed/good)
G. Mist
H. Other female character (write in)
Who will Weiss fall for?
A. Kazuma
B. Max
C. Toshiro
D. Neptune
E. Shoryu
Who do think becomes a couple (down the road) in the story first?
A. Kouga and Ruby
B. Max and Yang
C. Blake and Sun?
D. Toshiro and Gweyn?
Anyways that's all for now, see you guys in the next update!