Hey there, everyone! Hopefully you guys enjoyed the last chapter and apologies for being gone in spurts, life has been a little busy lately for me so I haven't exactly had time to write. But enough with the excuses from me. Since the main two pairings of this story (Odyn x Weiss and Roy x Ruby) have been decided already, I'd like your help in deciding which other characters end up together:
Which of the remaining cast should end up becoming couples?
Shallot x Yang
Giblet x Blake
Sun x Hailfire
Scarlett x Zero
Aiko x Neptune
Baron x Flare
Lazuli x Eleryc/ Daikon
Sarai x Cardin/Mercury
Note x Beat/Mercury
Tarro x Sybrh
Let me know what you guys think. If you can think of any other Male x Female character pairings leave a comment and/or review for the story. With that out of the way, onto the story!
Disclaimer: I don't own any of the characters belonging to Dragon Ball Super, RWBY, Black Clover, or The Tales of series. I only own the oc's and have permission from a fellow writer to use the characters of Tarro and Daikon for these stories.
Opening:

Opening theme: Alive by REona (Arknights: Prelude to Dawn anime)
Visuals: : Replace the Arknights characters with the cast of this story and replace the reunion with Grimm and Atlas soldiers. The opening depicts the divide between the elves and the humans, while Huntsman and Huntresses fight off the Grimm. The chorus shows Odyn and the other elves struggle against the humans, the same with the faunus and Saiyan characters. The song ends as it zooms to a shot of Odyn and Weiss look off into the distance before the dark elf turns to look at Weiss. Weiss, noticing his gaze just smiles as the title card for the story comes up after the screen goes black.
Chapter 6 — The Emerald Forest
Above the forest, the morning had fully committed to itself.
The light that fell through the Emerald Forest's canopy was the clear, unambiguous light of a day that had decided to be bright — which made the dark patches darker by contrast, and the Grimm that moved through them more visible than they would have been in overcast conditions. This was, depending on your perspective, either useful or irrelevant. The students in the forest were not, for the most part, worried about seeing the Grimm. They were worried about each other, and about the test, and about first eye contact, and about a dozen smaller things that were all downstream of what happens next.
On the observation platform above the treeline, Glynda Goodwitch updated her tablet and did not look at Ozpin.
"The last pair has been confirmed," she said. "Nora Valkyrie and Lie Ren." A pause. "I have some concern about the pairing."
"Do you," Ozpin said.
"Ren is a composed student. Capable, measured. Valkyrie is—" She searched for the word. "Enthusiastic."
"Enthusiastic students have their uses."
"Enthusiastic students with grenade launchers have a specific and finite set of uses." She scrolled. "In any case, the pairing I'm more concerned about is Miss Nikos." She let the footage speak for itself — Jaune Arc and Pyrrha Nikos, side by side in the forest's undergrowth, Jaune gesturing in a way that suggested he was explaining something with significantly more confidence than accuracy. "His transcripts are, to put it diplomatically, inconsistent with his demonstrated ability."
Sybyrh, who had been watching the secondary feed on her own screen with the focused attention of someone cataloguing rather than spectating, spoke without looking up.
"Don't be too quick to write him off, Miss Goodwitch."
Glynda looked at her.
"I've seen people weaker than that boy become fighters you wouldn't want to face," Sybyrh said. "What he lacks in foundation he may compensate for in other ways. Given the right guidance." She paused. "Or the right partner."
Tarro, beside her, raised an eyebrow at the footage of Pyrrha and Jaune. "You think Nikos will put in the work?"
"I think Pyrrha Nikos walks into every room looking for someone worth investing in," Sybyrh said. "And I think she's found one."
Glynda returned to her tablet. She did not agree out loud, which was different from disagreeing.
"Speaking of which." She turned to Ozpin. "The relics. What did you use this year?"
The headmaster was watching a different feed — the one showing a silver-eyed girl sitting in a clearing, picking grass with the methodical distraction of someone who is waiting for a problem to resolve itself. Some distance from her, the unmistakable white of a Schnee uniform was making its way through the undergrowth toward the girl, with the careful, slightly reluctant movement of someone who has decided to do something and has not yet decided how to begin.
"Professor Ozpin," Glynda said.
He watched the screen.
She followed his gaze. Made a note on her tablet.
"Chess pieces again," she said, to herself rather than to him.
He sipped his coffee.
◈ — Weiss and Ruby
The clearing was small, with the filtered light of late morning coming through the canopy at an angle that made the grass look more peaceful than it had any right to be given the circumstances. Ruby Rose was sitting in the middle of it with her knees to her chest, not crying anymore but not quite not-crying either — the specific state of someone who has finished and is waiting for their face to return to its normal configuration.
She heard Weiss coming. She chose not to turn around.
"Ruby."
Ruby looked at a specific patch of grass near her left boot. It was a very interesting patch of grass.
Weiss stood behind her for a moment. Then she sat down — not next to her, exactly, but at the kind of distance that communicated proximity without presumption. Ruby registered this without acknowledging it.
"I owe you an apology," Weiss said. She said it in the way that people say things they mean but are not yet comfortable saying — careful, slightly stilted, like reading from a text she was still learning. "The things I said were wrong. Not inaccurate, in some cases — but wrong. There's a difference, and I knew the difference, and I said them anyway. I'm sorry."
The grass remained interesting.
"Normal people," Ruby said, "usually just say sorry and then act the same way again."
"I'm aware of that pattern."
"Are you going to?"
Weiss considered this with the seriousness that the question deserved. "I have a friend," she said, "who has spent a very long time pointing out to me when I'm being — as he puts it — aggressively defended. I don't always hear it when he says it. But I'm trying to hear it more." She paused. "He would tell me, if he were here right now, that you didn't deserve what I said and that I should tell you so directly."
Ruby turned her head. Weiss was looking at the trees on the clearing's far edge.
"He sounds like a good friend," Ruby said.
Weiss's expression did something that was private enough that Ruby wasn't entirely sure she was supposed to see it.
"He is," Weiss said. "The best I've ever had." Then, collecting herself back into the register she was more comfortable with: "I'd like to try. Working together, I mean. Properly. If you'll allow me to."
Ruby looked at her hand. It was extended — not confidently, not with the ease of someone who does this naturally, but with the deliberate sincerity of someone who has decided to make the gesture anyway.
Ruby took it.
"I'm sorry too," Ruby said. "I said some things that I shouldn't have said either. Not the true things — those needed saying — but the way I said them." She managed something that was almost a smile. "I'm kind of a disaster when I'm upset."
"You are somewhat disaster-adjacent in general," Weiss said. Then, before Ruby could respond: "I mean that as a neutral observation."
Ruby blinked. Then she laughed — a short, surprised sound — and Weiss's expression relaxed by a fraction into something that might, at sufficient magnification, be described as a smile.
"So," Ruby said. "Where exactly are we?"
Weiss looked around the clearing. Then at the trees. Then at the sky, which offered the same amount of directional information as it always did, which was to say not enough.
"We are," she said, with the careful phrasing of someone navigating a statement that is technically true, "in the Emerald Forest. Somewhere between the launch point and the temple. In the general vicinity of north." A pause. "Directionally."
Ruby stared at her.
"I thought you knew where we were."
"I know where we need to be," Weiss said. "That's different."
Ruby looked at the trees. The trees offered nothing. She looked back at Weiss.
"This," she said, "is going to take a while."
"Probably," Weiss agreed.
They stood, and they went, and the forest received them.
◈ — Yang and Blake
The temple announced itself through the trees — a shift in the quality of light, the canopy thinning, and then the stone itself: grey and worn and patient in the way of things built before any of them were born and likely to outlast most of them. The platforms inside the circular structure held their relics with the slightly anticlimactic presentation of things that have been waiting a long time to be collected.
Yang looked at the chess pieces on the pedestals and then at Blake.
Blake looked at them with the expression of someone who expected something more complicated and is making peace with the simplicity.
"Chess pieces," Blake said.
"Could be worse," Yang said. "Could be something we'd have to fight for."
Blake picked up the black king, turned it over in her hand once, set it back down, and picked up a different piece — a considered process that Yang watched with the interest of someone trying to understand the decision-making of a person who is deciding between chess pieces.
"You're very deliberate," Yang said.
"I prefer thorough," Blake said.
"Sure." Yang picked up the golden knight without deliberation and weighed it in her palm. "What's the difference?"
"Deliberate implies slow. Thorough implies complete."
Yang considered this. "You make that distinction a lot, don't you. The exactly right word versus the approximately right word."
Blake glanced at her. "Don't you?"
"Not really. I figure most people understand what I mean."
"Most people do," Blake said. "But meaning and saying are different things." She pocketed her relic. "I read a lot. It leaves you with opinions about language."
Yang grinned — the grin of someone who has found something they like and is acknowledging it. "Blake Belladonna, I think you and I are going to get along."
Blake didn't smile, exactly, but something in her expression moved in that direction. "We'll see."
They came out of the ruins into the open area beyond the temple and found the clearing already occupied — which was not, on reflection, surprising. Yang stopped.
The group assembled in the clearing's centre had the quality of something that had been accumulating for a while, like a conversation that had been going on in various combinations of people since before anyone arrived. She counted: Odyn and Roy against a tree, sharing some private exchange that required neither of them to use words. Beside them, the girl with the dark skin and orange eyes — Hailfire, she recalled — and next to her, the blue-skinned boy with the red eyes who had not yet been introduced to Yang's satisfaction. Farther along, Sarai and a crimson-haired girl she didn't know, sitting on a flat stone with the comfortable posture of people who have just survived something and are comparing notes. Beyond them, Khanna and a wolf Faunus girl, and a pair of dark-haired boys whose tails moved behind them with independent weight.
All of them waiting.
"They're waiting for someone," Blake said.
"Us, probably," Yang said. "Or Ruby."
"Possibly both."
Yang was deciding whether to approach when a crash of significant noise arrived from the tree line to the north — not alarming noise, but the specific noise of things breaking in sequence, which usually meant Grimm, or a person, or both.
It was both.
The Ursa crashed through the undergrowth in the last stages of its life, conducted with all the enthusiasm of something that has a rider on its back and has opinions about this. The rider — orange hair, turquoise eyes, an expression of absolute this is wonderful — had both arms raised like she was at the top of a very good roller coaster.
The Ursa hit the clearing's edge and stopped moving.
The girl rolled clear, stood up, and looked back at the Ursa with the expression of someone whose favourite vehicle has just broken down.
"Aw," she said. "It's broken."
From the treeline, at a pace that communicated long practice with exactly this type of situation, Lie Ren emerged with the expression of a man who has accepted his life.
"Nora," he said. He looked at the space where Nora had been standing a moment ago. He looked at the ruins of the temple, where Nora was now holding a golden rook chess piece above her head and dancing. "Nora."
"I'm queen of the castle!" Nora announced, to no one in particular and to everyone generally. The chess piece bounced once on her head and landed back in her hands. "I'm queen of the—"
"Nora."
She stopped. The chess piece dropped neatly into her palm.
"Coming, Ren!" She skipped back toward him, and they were reunited, and Ren's expression achieved a quality of peace that suggested either genuine contentment or the specific resignation of someone who has come all the way around to the same thing.
Blake had been watching this.
"Did she," Blake said, carefully, "ride in on top of a Grimm."
Yang started to answer.
From above — and growing louder with the specific quality of a sound that is both getting closer and also coming from a person — a scream arrived.
Yang looked up.
Weiss Schnee was hanging from a talon approximately the size of her entire body, which belonged to a Nevermore of significant proportions, which was very high up and moving at speed.
Down on the ground, where this was visible to everyone, there was a brief silence of the kind that arrives when a situation has become clear.
"Ruby," Yang said. Not a question. An assessment.
"That's my fault," Ruby's voice called, from somewhere she was not currently visible.
The silence continued for two more seconds.
Then Ruby Rose arrived from the sky on a ballistic descent, screaming with the full commitment of someone who has made a decision and is experiencing its consequences.
"Heads up — I can't stop!"
She didn't hit the ground.
The reason she didn't hit the ground was Roy Albanar, who had been watching her descent with the specific expression of someone who has calculated a trajectory and found it concerning, and who moved from standing beside a tree to airborne, arms extended in the interval between Ruby's warning and Ruby's arrival.
He caught her.
The landing was controlled — an absorbed descent, feet finding the ground at the end of it, Ruby held across both arms in the way of someone caught rather than someone carried.
Ruby opened her eyes. Found cerulean and crimson hair above her, and a face wearing the expression of someone who is both relieved and trying not to show how relieved.
"R — Roy—"
"You're fine," he said.
"I — you — how did you—"
"You were screaming," he said. "I had time to prepare."
Ruby's face achieved a warmth that had nothing to do with the forest temperature and everything to do with the fact that she was still in his arms and was becoming aware of this with increasing specificity.
"I — um — th-thank you," she managed.
Jaune Arc arrived two seconds later via a different trajectory and a worse outcome, entering the scene with the full commitment of someone who is not going to be able to stop and is aware of this too late to do anything about it. He collected Roy and Ruby both and deposited them into a nearby tree.
The impact was comprehensive.
Ruby sat up in the undergrowth with the careful movement of someone checking whether everything is still attached. The stars and cartoon Beowolves that were circling her head were, as a medical indicator, concerning.
She shook them away. Then she looked at Roy, who had received the majority of the impact with the deliberate priority of someone who had decided his job was to make sure she didn't.
"Roy." She was on her knees beside him before she'd finished saying his name. "Are you—"
He was already sitting up. He rolled his shoulder once, tested his neck, and looked at her with an expression that was trying to be reassuring and was mostly succeeding.
"I've been hit harder," he said.
"That doesn't mean it doesn't hurt."
"It means it doesn't concern me." He looked at her with the specific attention of someone checking for damage they'd rather prevent than treat. "Are you all right?"
"I'm—" She registered that she was still very close to him, that his hands were still at her shoulders from the impact's aftermath, and that the blush had returned with the specific permanence of a thing that was not going anywhere. "— fine. I'm fine. I think."
Jaune's voice arrived from above them, upside-down and moderately philosophical.
"Hey," Jaune said, from his position in the tree.
They both looked up.
"Ruby," Jaune said. "Roy." He considered his situation. "Think you could—"
"Yes," Roy said, already standing.
They got him down. It took three of them, which Jaune bore with the grace of someone who has recently had his Aura unlocked and is therefore in a better mood than the situation might otherwise produce.
Yang, who had been watching all of this with an expression that was going to take a while to fully unpack, finally got to finish her sentence:
"Did my sister just fall from the sky."
Blake looked at her. "Yes."
"And land on — and then Jaune — and then —"
"Also yes," Blake said. Then she pointed, because she had been pointing for forty-five seconds and no one had acknowledged it, and what she was pointing at was now unavoidably relevant.
Weiss Schnee descended from a very large height in the graceless, white-knuckled manner of someone who has made the choice between staying on the Nevermore and falling and has chosen falling as the lesser problem.
She was not going to land well.
Jaune, who had been having a difficult morning but had maintained throughout it a persistent instinct toward doing something when something could be done, was already climbing the nearest tree.
Odyn was already moving.
The tree gave Jaune the height. The height gave him the angle. He leapt with his arms outstretched at exactly the right moment and caught Weiss with the precision of someone who had, in this specific moment, done exactly what was needed — they hung suspended together for the fraction of a second that physics allows before the conclusion becomes inevitable.
Below them, Odyn was in position.
He caught Weiss on her descent, taking her weight with the ease of someone for whom this specific type of force management was a practiced skill, and they came down together in a controlled deceleration that resolved in solid ground rather than impact.
Behind them, Jaune completed his own trajectory into the earth with a sound that suggested the ground had won.
"My hero," Weiss said, which she directed at Jaune's general direction with the dry, flat affect of someone who is unhurt and has opinions about this.
She became aware, approximately two seconds later, that she was being held and that the person holding her was not Jaune. She looked up.
Odyn raised an eyebrow at her.
"Princess," he said.
The warmth arrived in her face before she could address it. "I — I'm fine," she said. "I'm perfectly — Ahem. Thank you, Odyn."
He set her down with the quiet care he brought to everything, and she straightened her jacket with the methodical focus of someone re-establishing the terms of her composure, and he watched this with the expression of someone who has known her since she was eight and finds her entirely legible and entirely worth knowing.
"Jaune," Sarai said, appearing at the blonde knight's side with the calm energy of someone who has arrived to help and is not going to make the helped person feel worse about needing it. "My brother was going to warn you against that particular approach."
Jaune, who was face-down in the forest floor, lifted one hand.
"Noted," he said, to the ground.
◈ — The Whole of Them
The clearing held them all now.
It was a moment of stillness — brief, the kind that only arrives when a series of things has finished happening and the next series hasn't started yet. They stood and sat and leaned in their various configurations: JNPR dusting themselves off; Sarai's group close together with the ease of people who have been moving in formation for years; Khanna and her partner standing with the relaxed alertness of two people who have just fought well alongside each other and know it; Team RWBY in various states of post-sky-arrival.
Odyn took stock. He did it the way his father had taught him — not as a survey but as a reading, the way you read terrain before you cross it. Who was capable, who was rattled, who was looking at the situation as a problem and who was looking at it as a series of discrete emergencies.
The Death Stalker announced itself by destroying three trees.
The Nevermore announced itself from above.
Yang Xiao Long had been accumulating a series of interrupted sentences for approximately eight minutes, and she addressed this by erupting briefly and completely.
"Can everyone just stop for two seconds—"
The two seconds passed. The forest did not stop.
"—thank you. Ruby."
Ruby, who had been looking at the sky, looked at her sister.
"Yeah?"
"What," Yang said, with the calm enunciation of someone who has survived several things and needs one of them explained, "happened to you."
Ruby opened her mouth.
The Nevermore cawed from its perch on the cliff pillar above them.
"Later," Ruby said. "Actually, Odyn—"
"Working on it," Odyn said.
He had been working on it since the moment the second Grimm arrived and the clearing's geometry became clear. He looked at what they had: the cliff face to the north, the ruins of the stone structures providing both cover and elevation, the Nevermore above holding a fixed position, and the Death Stalker approaching from the south with the single-minded aggression of something that had recently lost a stinger and was processing this as an inconvenience rather than a deterrent.
He looked at the people he had.
Then he spoke.
"Here's what we're doing," he said, and the clearing quieted in the way that clearings quiet when someone speaks with the specific quality of having already thought this through.
He laid it out clean and fast, the way Lylah had taught him: roles, positions, sequence, contingency. Jaune's team on the ground-level Grimm, because that's what JNPR needed — a contained objective they could execute together and build from. Sarai's group as a mobile reserve, covering what the main engagement couldn't. Team RWBY on the Nevermore, because the Nevermore needed aerial access and Ruby's Semblance gave her that.
And the Death Stalker for his own group.
"But you'll need help with that—" Ruby started.
"We have what we need," Odyn said.
Weiss, at his left, said nothing — because she knew the look on his face, had known it since childhood, and understood that when Odyn said we have what we need it was not confidence performing as certainty but certainty performing as itself.
Ruby looked at him. Looked at Weiss. Weiss gave her a small, composed nod.
"All right," Ruby said.
The clearing split into its components and moved.
◈ — JNPR and the Ground
They came from the undergrowth in waves — the smaller Grimm, the kind that compensate for limited individual threat with volume and coordination — and JNPR met them with the specific quality of four people who have not yet been a team long enough to be seamless but are already learning the shape of each other.
Jaune called a direction, and Pyrrha went there without needing it confirmed, because she had already assessed the threat from that direction and had been waiting for someone to name it. Nora fired — the pink-hearted shells detonating in arcs that converted Beowolf momentum into paralysis — and Ren followed the opening she created with the controlled precision of someone who has learned to work with Nora's chaos rather than around it.
They held.
When the larger Grimm pressed the flanks, Sarai's group came in from the sides with the efficiency of a force that has been trained since childhood to identify the moment when intervention is useful and arrive before the moment becomes too late.
The energy wave came first — a broad, horizontal cut of compressed force that parted the undergrowth and the Grimm in it simultaneously. Then a barrage of individual strikes, each named quietly by the person executing it in the way of fighters who have learned their techniques by name and speak the name to engage the technique properly. Scarlett's Crescent Scythe Barrage. Giblet's Sword Rain. Flare's Phalanyx Spear — a compressed orb of light that she punched at close range, the punch expanding the compression into a beam that cleared the tree line.
The Grimm thinned. Then they were gone.
Sarai offered Jaune her hand. He took it.
"Nice work," she said.
"You too," he said, and meant it simply, which was one of the things about Jaune that was consistently more useful than it appeared.
◈ — ORHZ and the Death Stalker
The creature was significant. That was the accurate word — not large, though it was large, but significant, in the way of things that have been alive long enough to become something other than just their size. Its shell had the quality of something that had been struck before and had learned from the experience. Its pincers moved with the specific patience of a predator that has seen rushed approaches and has an opinion about them.
Hailfire had found this out in the direct way when her shield-bash produced a result that was, if she was being objective, nothing.
"Tell me something useful," she said to Odyn, over the sound of the creature resetting for another approach.
"We've been fighting it the wrong way," Odyn said.
"I noticed."
"We've been trying to hit it." He watched the creature. "We need to think about what it does."
Zero was moving in a wide arc around the creature's right flank, firing measured ki blasts that didn't penetrate but established pattern — he was mapping its response time, which was methodical in a way that Odyn filed for later. Roy was at the creature's left, moving in and out of range with the specific timing of someone who has learned how to occupy a threat without committing to contact.
"What it does," Roy said, "is use that stinger."
"Which means the stinger is the priority," Odyn said. "Everything else is secondary until the stinger is gone."
He looked at the group. He laid out the sequence: Roy's lightning to paralyse, Zero's ki to hold, Hailfire's shield-work to tip the balance of the creature's weight, and then the stinger.
"And after the stinger?" Hailfire asked.
"You'll have it in your hand," Odyn said. "Make your own decision about what to do with it."
The creature charged.
Hailfire went forward to meet it — not to stop it, but to redirect it, her shield catching the charge at an angle that transferred force sideways rather than absorbing it directly. The creature staggered, its weight misaligned.
Roy raised his blade toward the sky and fired downward. The lightning came with the specific sound of something that doesn't negotiate, cascading across the creature's shell and finding the joints where the shell opened when it moved. The paralysis was not complete — a Death Stalker this size had too much mass for a clean stop — but it was enough.
Zero's ki settled around the creature's joints like a frame, holding the paralysis in place for the seconds it needed to be held. His expression was entirely focused, which was the expression, Odyn had noticed, that Zero wore whenever something actually required him to commit.
Odyn went in.
He went in the way water goes in — finding the path the creature's own movement had opened, using the staggered weight to get underneath and inside the creature's reach, where its pincers couldn't operate and its stinger couldn't aim. He got both hands on its frame and lifted — not purely physical, because no person lifts a Death Stalker purely physically, but Aura-assisted in the specific way the Albanar clan's elders had spent two generations developing: the force distributed through the frame, the leverage applied at the natural hinge, the weight turned against itself.
The creature left the ground.
Odyn was already clear when it came back down — wrong-side, exposed, the soft underside of its shell facing upward instead of the armoured carapace. The stinger was extended, the paralysis still active, the creature's struggle producing force without direction.
He took the stinger at the joint where it met the tail section, the blade cutting through what the shell protected by simply not being the shell. Clean. One pass.
He held it.
"Hailfire."
She was already in the air.
The downward arc was decisive in the specific way of someone who has been waiting for their moment and has arrived at it without hesitation. The stinger drove into the gap between the segments of the Death Stalker's underside with the force of a mace swing and the precision of someone who understood exactly where the gap was.
The sound the creature made was the sound of something large finishing.
Then silence, the settling kind, and the four of them in the aftermath of it looking at each other with the slightly surprised expression of people who had expected a plan to work and had been correct.
"Nice finish," Roy said.
Hailfire was breathing hard — controlled breaths, the deliberate management of a body that has been under significant strain and is now being told it can stand down. "I had good setup," she said.
Zero looked at the dispersing Grimm. Then at the group. Then he made the expression that was his version of satisfaction — contained, precise, but real. "Dark elves," he said, "are worth knowing."
Odyn smiled. "So are Arcosians," he said.
They looked north, toward where the sound of the fight above the cliff ruins was still going.
◈ — Team RWBY and the Nevermore
The Nevermore had a logic to it — a flight logic, a territory logic, the logic of something that has lived long enough to become efficient. It did not move randomly. It moved toward advantage.
Khanna had identified this in the first sixty seconds of the engagement and filed it, and had been using it to predict its movement ever since, which was why her support fire was consistently landing in useful places rather than impressive ones.
Yang and Khanna worked together with the easy adaptation of people who share a register — both of them loud, both direct, both comfortable with the scale of the problem. Khanna's flame magic hit with a different quality than Yang's Ember Celica — not hotter, but more shaped, the lion's head she expelled carrying mass and direction rather than just heat. The Nevermore was disoriented, tracking two fire sources simultaneously, and its tracking was good but not perfect.
Giblet provided the third angle — a rocket-assisted approach that ended with his fist in the side of the creature's head, which had the useful effect of turning disoriented into actively repositioning. Shallot's ki blasts from below traced the repositioning, keeping the pressure on.
Yang launched herself into the Nevermore's open beak with the complete confidence of someone who has assessed the risk and decided the calculus is acceptable, delivering a sequence of rounds into the creature's throat before dropping clear and letting it chase her back into the cliff face.
Ruby was on the columns, moving in the rose-petal bursts of her Semblance, and what she was doing had the quality of something that was being assembled rather than executed — each position connecting to the next, each firing solution building toward something that required all of them to be in exactly the right place.
Weiss understood before Ruby said it. This was the thing about Weiss Schnee that most people who found her difficult did not stay long enough to discover: she was very fast. Not physically — not the way Ruby was fast — but in comprehension, in the reading of a developing situation. She saw the geometry of what Ruby was building — the columns, the ribbon, the angle, the glyph that would make it work — and she was already in position when Ruby asked.
"Think you can make the shot?"
Weiss looked at the trapped Nevermore, the geometry, the distance, the angle. She looked at Ruby, who was asking with the specific trust of someone who has decided you're capable and is checking whether you know it.
"Can I," Weiss said.
"I mean — can't?" Ruby asked.
"Of course I can," Weiss said, with the mild offence of someone who has been doubted by a person she has decided to get along with and is recalibrating the allowable range of Ruby's teasing. She turned the glyph, dialled the rotation, and launched.
Ruby went up.
She went up with the rose-petal signature of her Semblance trailing behind her like a signature, Crescent Rose firing in sequence through the white circles Weiss laid into the cliff face, each circle accelerating her into the next, the momentum accumulating with the exponential quality of something that was always building toward the final expression.
At the top, the Nevermore. In the blade of Crescent Rose, the creature's neck.
The sound of it — the rose petals and the one clean cut and the enormous, terrible weight of the creature falling away below her — carried across the cliff face and into the ruins and down to the forest floor.
Ruby landed beside the severed head.
The cape moved in the cliff wind. The petals settled.
Below her, on the forest floor, the group that had assembled from different directions and different backgrounds and different distances looked up at the girl standing at the top of the cliff, and there was a silence of the particular kind that arrives when someone has done something that required them to be exactly who they were.
Jaune said "wow" very quietly, which was accurate.
"Heh," Roy said. He was smiling in the way he smiled when something turned out to be what he believed it would be. "Well done, Ruby."
Sarai, beside him: "I knew she had it."
Khanna, from a little further: "Not bad at all." Then, lower, to herself: "Not bad at all."
Weiss, on the cliff face below, looked up at her partner with an expression that had not yet been fully translated into language — something between I knew you could and I'm sorry I doubted you and the third thing that comes after both of those, which doesn't have a precise name but is the beginning of something.
She filed it. She would address it later.
◈ — Beacon Academy Auditorium: Evening
The auditorium held them all.
It had the same quality as the previous evening — the high ceiling, the formal stage, the audience in the rows below — but the quality of what was happening was different. The previous evening had been an arrival. This was an establishment. The difference was small in the way that the difference between a seed and a root is small — you couldn't see it from the outside, but you could feel the weight shift.
Ozpin stood at the stage's centre with the expression of a man who has done this before and continues to mean it.
Team CRDL came and went — four boys who carried themselves in the manner of people who have decided that team leadership belongs to the loudest voice, which was Cardin Winchester's, which would probably be a useful lesson for them in time.
JNPR took the stage to scattered laughter when Pyrrha's congratulatory shoulder-bump sent their brand new leader straight onto the stage floor. Jaune stood back up with the instinctive recovery of someone who is going to be recovering from things for the foreseeable future and has decided to make peace with this. Pyrrha, beside him, was apologising.
"That's three," Ruby murmured, from the audience, with the warm recognition of someone who has been counting.
Team SSGS — Sarai, Giblet, Scarlett, Shallot — took the stage with the quiet ease of people who were not performing for the audience. Sarai, named as leader, received this with the expression of someone who had expected something like this and had been preparing for it regardless.
Giblet, standing beside her, wore the expression of someone who had not expected it and was going to have opinions about it later, but was keeping those opinions in their appropriate location for the moment.
KABFL was announced as the first five-person team in Beacon's history, and the auditorium received this with the energy of people who enjoy the novelty of records. Khanna Branwen, named as leader, accepted the role with the particular stillness of someone who has heard their name and is deciding whether the cover they'd arranged is still adequate.
In the audience, Yang leaned toward Ruby.
"Branwen," she said, quietly.
"I know," Ruby said.
"That's — that's the same—"
"I know."
Yang looked at the stage. Then at Ruby. Then at the stage again. "That's probably a coincidence."
"Probably," Ruby said.
Neither of them fully believed this, but neither of them had enough information to do anything with the alternative, so they left it in the comfortable ambiguity of probably and watched KABFL step down.
ORHZ: Odyn, Roy, Hailfire, Zero. Named by the pieces they retrieved, led by Odyn Albanar, who received the announcement with a slight nod that contained within it something very old and very steady — the expression of someone who has been leading for a long time and understands both what it means and what it costs.
Roy, walking off the stage, caught Ruby's eye in the audience. He nodded. She responded with the fist-bump-adjacent gesture she had developed, and he returned it exactly, and several things in that exchange were left unnamed by mutual agreement because neither of them had found the words yet and neither of them had decided they were ready to.
Then RWBY.
"Blake Belladonna. Ruby Rose. Weiss Schnee. Yang Xiao Long."
Four portraits on the auditorium's screen. Four girls, centre stage. Ozpin looked at them with the expression of a man who has watched a great many teams form and has an accurate read on which of them are going to be interesting.
"Team RWBY," he said. "Led by Ruby Rose."
Weiss turned to look at her team leader, and the expression on her face was the expression of someone who is genuinely surprised and is working through what that means in real time — because she had expected the answer to be herself, had prepared for the answer to be herself, and the answer was a fifteen-year-old girl who had fallen from the sky twice in one day and had still ended up standing on top of the cliff.
Yang was hugging Ruby before the applause completed its first wave.
Odyn, off stage, said nothing to Weiss. She passed close enough that he could have, and she looked at him with the question in her expression.
"She earned it," he said.
Weiss held his gaze for a moment. Then she breathed. "I know." A pause. "I know."
"Help her lead," he said. "You're better at the parts she isn't. That's the point."
She considered this with the careful attention she gave to things that were true and inconvenient simultaneously. Then she nodded — once, small, the nod of someone who has decided to do something that does not come naturally.
"I'll try," she said.
"That's all."
The auditorium continued around them.
◈ — Roman Torchwick: That Evening
The city of Vale had a particular quality after dark — the specific brightness of a place that keeps its lights on to avoid acknowledging what moves through its darker edges. The building where Roman Torchwick received his phone calls was not in the bright part.
The call ended. He set the device down without ceremony, on a desk that held a map of Vale and its surrounding districts, with various locations crossed out in a pattern that was not random.
He held his cigar.
The masked courier arrived with the trolley and the Lien changed hands in the quiet, businesslike way of transactions that have been done before. The crowbar cracked the crate open, and the interior held Dust crystals in more varieties and larger quantities than any standard procurement justified.
He picked up a blue crystal. Held it to the light.
He had been in this work long enough to know the difference between a large problem and a small one that was becoming large, and what he was looking at was the second kind, which was more dangerous because it was harder to tell people about without sounding alarmist.
He needed men. More than he had. More than he'd planned on.
He set the crystal back and looked at the map — Vale, the districts, the crossed-out targets, and in the centre of the circled ones, Beacon Academy, sitting at the convergence of every line he had drawn.
He took a long pull on his cigar.
The smoke rose in the still air of the room, and the map held its positions, and somewhere in the city a clock was marking the evening's progress toward night.
— To Be Continued —
Next Time: Chapter 7 : The Badge, The Burden, & Complicated Feelings
Ending:
Ending theme: reincarnated as a sword ending 1
Visuals: starts with weiss as a child in her home with her hands on her knees and looking sad. She then gets up and begins running towards something, a light at the end of a dark tunnel. It is revealed to be Odyn also as a child seeing Weiss and running towards her from the opposite end of the screen before it changes to the two as young adults (in their late teens) as they meet in the middle. Odyn is seen reaching out a hand and smiling towards the girl who looks away with a blush briefly before taking his hand as they stare into the distance hand in hand before the rest of the cast join them.
And... done! Whew! That was a doozy to write! Anyways as you maybe can see, I'm writing some of the other teens a little differently this time around i.e. Flare, Aiko, and Scarlett. As you can tell Weiss will be ... different this time around, this is due to Odyn's influence on her as a child (chapter 1 if you're wondering lol). And sorry if I have Roy with different hair colors then I previously said. He will have a mix of violet hair from his mom (Hyatan) and cerulean blue from his father (Berethon).
Anyways, polls will be in upcoming chapters. And yes, Flare has a little more saiyan like powers this time around so she'll be stronger. Don't worry Daikon, Note, Beat, Jinjer, and another will come into the story just.... later. Anyways that's all for now! Until the next update!
Next time: Chapter 7: The Badge, The Burden, and... complicated feelings.