The Games We Play - Chapter 234

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show…err read.

Ninth Interlude – Raven Branwen

Even with prior experience, the suddenness of it all still caught her by surprise. It wasn’t a gradual thing, something that built up and allowed her to grow used to it and adapt—it was like a switch being flipped, an instantaneous change that came without warning.

And the moment it did, she felt everything change. It was like a portal had opened into her heart, flooding it with liquid fire—enough that for a moment, she honestly believed she might spontaneously combust and burn to ash. Instead, it flowed through her veins, spreading its increasing warmth to her limbs. If her veins had started to glow through her skin, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise.

Then it began to solidify, taking shape as a network of power and light inside of her, pulsating in tune with her heart—and she began to change. She felt her skin harden into something besides human flesh, steady waves of energy rewriting the very fabric of her being. Energy, untold and absurd amounts of energy, gathered in her muscles, giving her strength and speed. At the same time, the world began to slow to a crawl, moments beginning to drag and stretch around her.

And then the world began to open up, as if a veil had been lifted. Where there had once been darkness, now there was a riotous calamity of light, expanding across her field of vision. For a moment, she felt like she’d been blinded—while at the same time, like she was seeing the world for the first time. Things fell away and became meaningless as visible light was revealed to be nothing but a fraction of the much broader spectrum. Colors flashed before her eyes that she had no reference for, because they were a mixture of more than just three primary colors, while the illusion of solidity was dispelled throughout the world around her as matter was broken into a billion tiny parts by her gave. The blue sky vanished, replaced by remnants of cosmic phenomena that painted broad stokes of light upon it.

It wasn’t just her eyes—or rather, her eyes became an almost meaningless part of it all. She could feel the brush of air against her skin and the very touch of light, and it was enough for her to ‘see’ by. Her senses combined and expanded until there was no practical difference between what she could hear or see or feel. It was an onslaught of sensory information, even before taking into account the fact that time had been slowed tremendously, giving her ample opportunity to take in everything.

And then there were the things that went above the normal senses, beyond them. As she cast her gaze over the battlefield, she could see traces of things left behind long ago, blurred images of men and women dying at the hands of the Grimm, of carnage and bloodshed and terror. She could see traces of Aura seared into the world around her, something at once blindingly pure and terrifyingly infectious. The lesser powers that had been unleashed throughout the battle had left its mark as well, in vague flickers and flashes, but they were nothing compared to the volcanic eruptions of light that marked traces of what had been left elsewhere.

But all that was dwarfed, literally and figuratively, by the figures that stood above it all, revealed for what they were. She saw Jaune as a towering figure, similar to the form he sometimes adopted but made distinct by his sheer size as he towered to the heavens and covered the sky with his thirty-twofold wings. Countless eyes burned like stars, brilliant even against a background of pure white, and even knowing it was just an image, she was surprised his gaze didn’t incinerate everything it touched.

Beside him was another figure, expect beside him wasn’t the right word. Adjacent to him, within him, reflecting him—it had elements of all these things, but none of them fit quite right either. Regardless, the figure that stood with him seemed like an inversion of him; made of darkness where he burned with light, gaze literally frigid, and seeming to cover the sky above and below Jaune’s wings with darkness. That must have been Jaune’s second soul, his twin and partner. Seen this way, they seemed like an angel and a devil, but also seemed united, allied despite how they appeared—and they stood in opposition to the same foe.

The final figure—who could only have been Malkuth—was a giant as well, every bit as tall as either of the twins, but distinct. The twins, though opposite to each other, were similar in that their presence was like a brand upon the world, like divinity trespassing upon the mundane. Their presence was impossible not to notice and she was sure that had anyone else possessed the senses she’d no gained, they’d have been able to spoke either of them from miles away—hundreds of miles, possible.

Malkuth was different. His true appearance was a subtle thing, seeming to bend into the patterns of the world around him. Even as colossal as he was, he seemed like a nature part of the world—a mountain that pierced the sky, perhaps, but still a mountain, a natural aspect of the world, however remarkable. Looking at him more closely than that only furthered that impression, because his form was almost like a window or, perhaps, a mirror. Looking into him, she saw the world and saw it fill with life over what must have been eons, even as she also saw the here and now, the world she was faced with and lived in.

Seeing him like that—seeing them like that—left her feeling very, very small.

Taking it all in, on top of what her own Semblance provided…her brain felt like it was overheating. Almost literally, in fact—like something was slowly breaking inside of her. But it never quite came to pain, though the sensation stopped only just short of it; as soon as it appeared like it might cross that line, the feeling dulled slightly, as if the feeling was escaping her mind. That would be Jaune’s work, she imagined—healing her before she was even harmed or something to that effect.

None of which really changed how striking the experience was. This was how he viewed the world, every day—but even just a glimpse of it was terrifying. That was the best way to describe it; the breadth of the world seen through his eyes was horrific. Seeing it this way could have—perhaps should have—driven her mad.

But she was a Huntress. She managed.

Besides—even if it wasn’t in quite the same way, having a broad view of things was something she was used to.

Taking a moment, she forced herself to calm down and focus came to her even more quickly than it usual did. Once she found that center, it was a simple matter to tap into her power—in fact, it was hard not to, especially at a time like this. Truthfully, she felt as if someone had torn the heart out of her chest and replaced it with a burning star, such was the power flowing through her—like it would incinerate her if she didn’t shed it all, though she couldn’t possible get rid of even a fraction of it.

But there was one place for her to start.

Taking a slow breath, she channeled that power, gathering it behind her right eye—and felt the world start to break.

It was like walls falling away again, the background information she had struggled for so long to master and control rushing back in through the cracks. As it had since she was a young girl, the broadening of her awareness both gave her a way out and trapped her further. With a thought, her view of the world warped and shifted elsewhere, showing her places far distant. Any place, coming upon her in a chaotic, uncontrolled rushed of images.

When she’d been younger and less experienced, it had been hard to even function after her Semblance first developed. She’d never forget that first month, when she’d been bedridden, where even a stray thought could tear her from the present and draw her mind round the world. At first, she’d tried to just blot it out and ignore it, but that had proven unfeasible in short order—it wasn’t something she could stop thinking about and it wouldn’t go away. There had been times when it almost seemed like she was in control of it, but then a single word or the sight of something unfamiliar would shatter her grip on it and she’d feel like she was somewhere else.

In a way, it had been similar to what she was feeling now, though nowhere near as bad, because the issues built upon each other, worsening matters. Where before, she could only focus on a few specific places and things, flipping back and forth routinely, now things began to flood her vision. A thousand different images, a thousand different places, a thousand different people—and she could see them all clearly, at the same time. But whatever the breadth of the problem, the solution remained the same.

Before her power could fly away with her, she tied herself down with what she could see.

Her brother had been the first, in no small part because he had been the only at that point in time. Back when she had been plagued by her power, he’d been the one to take care of her, even feeding her on the days when a particularly jarring image would make her drop dishes or shatter glasses. He’d been…himself, but that had been reassuring in its own way. She’d thought that whatever happened, at least her brother would never change—and that had been what anchored her. Whenever something happened or her power started to infringe upon her thoughts, she’d look to him as a way of self-assurance. He was still there by her side, so she was still here, not in the snowy mountains of scorching deserts or whatever else happened to spring to mind.

But she’d been young and, before she knew it, things had changed—for the better, mostly. They’d gone to Beacon and she’d been place upon a team. She’d found friendships, really friendships, and two more anchors in the process.

For a long time, it had been just her, Qrow, Taiyang, and Summer—and the rest of Beacon, of course, but she’d never been good at tying herself to places, not when she could be anywhere. People were different; she could cross from Vale to Vacuo in a second, from Atlas to Mistral in a step, but who she was with, who she stood beside? They were how she determined ‘here’ and ‘there.’ Qrow had always understood that and the others had come to as well.

Other things, it had taken them longer to realize, for which she was someone glad. Her innocence, optimism, and nativity had been short-lived after she acquired her Semblance—an unfortunate downside of being able to see what was happening behind the scenes. She couldn’t even remember when it had first started, but all it had taken was some idle musings about what the Council was doing, or some famous Hunter, or whoever else. What people did when they thought nobody was looking…well, she’d learned various things, quite a few of them things people wouldn’t have liked.

Some of them, things she herself hated. She’d dreamed of being a Huntress since she was a girl, same as most young children—but that dream began to tarnish as she grew older and learned more and more about what went on behind the scenes. Some of it had to do with the darker choices Hunters sometimes had to make and the things that were carefully edited out of the tales told to children…but mostly, it was the people who pulled the strings. So many decisions, so many plans, so many ‘necessary sacrifices.’ She’d been watching heroes die since she was a child because of what they deemed ‘necessary,’ and so much of it had seemed pointless. What purpose did it serve but to deep the lies she couldn’t help but see through? And knowing that in becoming a Huntress, she might become a sacrifice herself…that her friends might bleed and die for the wishes of some distant council…

She’d told Qrow about it, on one of the nights she’d been unable to sleep and had been completely unsurprised by his reaction—he’d decided on the spot to rise to the top, until he was the one holding the strings and could make things ‘right.’ It had made her smile, because he was always like that and always serious about what he said, but she’d wondered even then…how could they fix anything? They were Hunters; powerful, yes, but that power leant itself primarily to killing things and there were only so many ways to cause wide-spread political change with a sword. Her brother wouldn’t even consider any of them, even knowing the truth.

But she…she had. More often then she’d like to admit, she’d considered just appearing from the darkness and slipping a blade between the ribs of a few politicians.

Instead, she’d waited, allowing herself to be tied down further and further. She’d fallen in love, in time—Taiyang had been charming, kind, optimistic, and a part of her team. She’d trust her back to him without a thought and knew she wouldn’t be let down. Why not other things? It was common, perhaps even expected, for such a thing to happen, and he was one of the few people she truly trusted. They’d dated and had fun and everyone had smiled, saying they’d expected it for years.

Perhaps they had, but probably not for the real reasons. She’s been looking for something desperately, something she still couldn’t pin down precisely—something that was wholly hers, something that would change things and make it so she never wanted to fly away again. She’d found a husband, a house, romance, a career, and, in time, even a daughter.

But not what she’d been looking for.

She’d always remember the day her daughter was born, the day she’d first held Yang in her arms. She’d been beautiful, even then—precious and innocent as a only an infant could be, with her father’s hair and what she thought might have been her own features. Labor had been uncomfortable, but looking at her daughter had made it worth it, and she’d loved her from the moment she saw her. Taiyang had been on one side of her, smiling as brightly as the sun at their daughter, while Qrow had waited at the other, smile making it clear that there would be celebrations in short order. Even Summer, always so shy and afraid that fragile things might break apart at her touch, and pressed in with a smile. She’d been happy, at home among friends and family.

Meanwhile, the Right’s Revolution had been building. Atrocities were occurring throughout the Kingdoms and Menagerie, tensions bringing the beasts out of men. She’s seen it all, unable to stop thinking about it even while giving birth, while holding her daughter, while laughing with her friends. It didn’t leave her during the night, didn’t leave her in the morning, and it plagued her constantly.

Since the day she’d gotten her Semblance, she had always felt as though she should be elsewhere and it had never been stronger than when she looked at what was happening then. Even her own daughter hadn’t been enough to banish it—if anything, the feeling only grew stronger for enduring. What kind of mother would look at her daughters face and want to be somewhere else more than she wanted to stay? A bad one, no doubt.

But she had. She had never been good at ignoring what happened before her eyes, which was complicated by how she saw most things, and in the end…

She’d left. And knowing what she intended to do, the methods she intended to use…she hadn’t come back. A part of that was for their sake, to keep from drawing trouble onto them. She’d never allowed the full truth of her powers to become known outside her team, but people suspects suspected and once she began, they’d know.

The other part, perhaps the larger part, simple didn’t want to look them in the eye and admit the truth or explain it. To tell them she’d valued her self-appointed duty more than them.

Funny where that had led her.

Menagerie had only been the beginning—but she knew better than most how important beginnings were to endings. It had been a chaotic place, where the pieces of a thousand broken lives had been left to stew and stir until they boiled over. She’d known from the beginning how things would probably go, and hadn’t been surprised…but one didn’t need to be surprised to be appalled.

Most people—and, surprisingly, even most Faunus—tended to think of the Faunus race as a united whole. She had no idea why; being members of the same ‘species’ certainly hadn’t united Mankind, after all, and it hadn’t done much to historically aid the Faunus, either. While commonly considered a single species, the Faunus were composed of thousands of different groups, who’d made their homes in vastly different locals and shared very different histories. The Faunus had fought with each other as often as they had mankind, for countless different reasons; though some fight be surprised by it now, at the end of the day, a man with scales isn’t necessarily any more like a woman with cat ears than he is like a plain human, and for a long, long time those differences had mattered. Being a Faunus, or being the wrong kind of Faunus, could see you shunned just about anywhere.

Then there were the…political issues, the facts that now went unspoken. Slavery and effective slavery had been hallmarks of Faunus history, but where did those slaves come from? The modern train of thought seemed to be of humans hunting Faunus down in fields and strapping chains upon them, but such things were rare—something she’d always thought obvious, honestly. If the purpose of owning a slave was to make them work in one’s stead, could you really expect someone who owned a slave to go through all the effort of capturing and training one themselves? More often, slaves had come from wars between groups of Faunus, with the defeated being conquered and enslaved by the victors and later sold to human settlements for profit. When people think of the historical treatment of the Faunus, they tended to brush over that or assume that every group was treated the same by mankind, when the so-called Slave Kings had been seen as nobles by the men of their time.

People always seemed to forget that people—Faunus or otherwise—are more than just one thing. There had been slaves and slaves, Kings and Kingdoms, wars and sacrifices and defeats. Boundaries based on homeland, on culture, on appearance, on blood, or on ‘history.’ For all that people thought of them as being one, the Faunus were just people; varied and complicated and fractured along a million lines.

Her mother had been a slave. Perhaps not called such, but the fact remained that she hadn’t belonged to herself—she had always been another’s, for as long as she had known her. Perhaps one of those owners was her father, though all the ones she remembered had been noblewomen, keen to sell and trade the body of another; quite frankly, she’d never asked or wanted to know and she’d left before it could ever matter. When they were still children, too young to work or do much else but take up space and food, they’d been cast out and left to fend for themselves.

Neither of them had found much sympathy on the streets, not even from their own kind—they were Faunus, yes, but with traits so muted it hardly seemed to mean anything unless attention was drawn to it. When there were young, it had seen them shunned by everyone around them, caught between two sides. It had always amused her how people had cared then and never even noticed later on, but she supposed that had been for the best. After a few years, no one even knew who or what she was and so no one had sought to discriminate against her, oppress her, or force her to do anything. Not that it would have worked out for them if they had, of course, but they hadn’t even thought to try.

And no one had so much as looked her way when the Faunus were being gathered and locked up in Menagerie. People had even come up and talked to her about it, asking her to take a side on the issue or chime in for or against the Faunus. It had been laughable in its absurdity, but she’d never been able to come up with an answer or decide how she felt. It would have been a lie to say that her race was a matter of pride to her. That wasn’t to imply that it was something she felt ashamed of, so much as it was something she felt absolutely nothing at all for. She was a Faunus and she considered that fact pretty much irrelevant to who she was.

But at the same time, Menagerie had meant something to her, even before she stepped onto its shore. Why, she wasn’t sure—perhaps it was simply the implication, the opportunity. Menagerie was the first time in recorded history that the Faunus could truly be said to be one, united in one place and, presumably, with the desire to escape. In such a situation, it should have been possible for them to work together, to change things as a group, to finally see.

She wanted to say she was surprised when instead they turned upon each other, but she really hadn’t been. It was inevitable, however disappointing it may have been; there were too many differences to be put aside, too much history to simply forget, and while Mankind may have been an enemy in a distant sense, they were trapped in a prison with a million other foes. You didn’t need to be of different races to do something horrible to one another, after all.

If it had just been that, she’d have left them all rotting there and forgotten about them—what had ‘the Faunus’ ever done for her, after all? Nothing to help her when she’d been a child on the streets. Why should she feel any loyalty to ‘her kind.’ She was loyal to her friends, to those that were loyal to her, not to groups of people she’d never met.

But even despite that, there had been a reason why she’d chosen to act—to leave her friends and home behind and enter the Menagerie. The organization that would one day become the White Fang, the dream that went with it, and the people who, despite everyone and everything, were still worth fighting for. Though no one had ever done anything for her, she was a Huntress and she had to be better than those who’d stand back and do nothing while people suffered right in front of their eyes.

With her strength and her Semblance, she’d connected the scattered pieces of her kind, giving them the purpose, focus, and power they needed to act, to change things, and too make things right. She’d found allies and they brought with them others, building upon one another to create something powerful, great. A beast of such power that even the Kingdoms had been forced to stop and take heed—and they had.

It just hadn’t mattered, in the end.

Once the walls came down and the common enemy vanished, everything she’d built faded away. For a while, she thought that might have been for the best—after the Revolution ended, things improved. The Faunus were given legal protection and things that had been common where outlawed. After the example Menagerie had created, things changed as people realized that the Faunus as a whole could resist and reject. The organization she’d created changed and refocused on bridging the ancient gap between man and Faunus, and for a time all had seemed well.

She hadn’t believed it. Unfortunately, because of how much she’d always known of the truth of things, she’d become a cynic. Even more unfortunately, Remnant was itself and cynicism usually proved itself right. While the Faunus as a whole could resist and execute change, once Menagerie was escaped there was no driving need to remain unified and centuries of history working against it. People went back to their homes and their lives and for a while, there was a hush of sorts—people’s feelings towards the Faunus hadn’t changed overnight, of course, but with a war having only just ended, they were hesitant to act.

Slowly, however, people began to test the boundaries. Minor snubs aimed towards Faunus, skipping over them when it came to opportunities, and so on. While discriminating against Faunus itself was outlawed, it was a simple thing to come up with explanations and excuses; to say they weren’t as qualified, perhaps, or to shore up the quality of another worker. If it came to trial, the court might feel inclined to lean one way, to be more excepting of a story. Laws were important, but in and of themselves they couldn’t change everything.

In short order, dissatisfaction began to grow among the Faunus, or at least groups of them. Most were still content with the change, seeing it as a huge step up from where they’d been previously, however short it may have fallen from the ideal. Some refused to accept that, fighting against it—peacefully, at first, but the Kingdoms of Remnant had always been good at brushing uncomfortable truths under the rug. There were rallies and protests and marches, and all too often they came to naught. Those who believed in the cause needed no swaying, after all, while those who laughed at it could ignore it with ease. Things grew from there and the organization she’d helped build quickly returned to its militant roots.

It would be a lie to say that displeased her, but an exaggeration to say it made her happy. As far as she was concerned, violence was just another way to accomplish ones goals—but it wasn’t the only way nor the best in every situation, and like any other method, there were limits and conditions to its use. Violence, or even the threat of violence, could change hearts and minds, but it was somewhat difficult to use it too its full effect from a position of weakness. The White Fang was a shadow of the beast that had formed during the Revolution; a vocal minority, but still a minority. Most of the soldiers who had cut their teeth in the war had found work in the Kingdoms, partially because ones race or species didn’t matter to the Grimm and partially because the Kingdoms were wise enough not to antagonize the group most likely to be able to oppose them. Those who could fight had been accepted with relative ease.

It was those who couldn’t who had the most reason to protest, but, of course, they had very few means to do so. That was the White Fang that had sprung up in the aftermath of the Revolution; those who’d been angered enough to turn to violence but lacking any means to be a true threat. By her reckoning, it was better to resist than to not, but the Kingdoms wouldn’t even notice such a thing.

In time, it had been possible to change that, but it had been harder than during the war—and, truth be told, her heart wasn’t really in it any more. She had felt committed to the path she had set out on, but seeing where it had led and knowing what had come of it was…discouraging. She aided the budding White Fang where she could, calling in a few favors and reminding several allies she’d made of their past loyalties. Though the new members were non-combatants, they could be trained and, given time, become fighters in their own right. She wasn’t convinced it would much matter, given their size relative to the power of the Kingdoms, but it had been something. But with limited enthusiasm and nothing to do but wait, she had focused on other things.

Her son, for instance.

When she’d first found Adam, she’d seen something in him that reminded her of herself and her brother; of what they could have been, perhaps, but for one another. Menagerie had done horrible things to even the best of people and it was no place for a child—and seeing one rage across the countryside, seemingly hell-bent on destroying everything in his path, himself, or both, had been…saddening. But it had also served as something of a reminder for her, of what a part of her had always dreamt of doing to all the monsters she’d seen with her Semblance. Seeing it from the outside, seeing it in the eyes of a child no older than she had been when her power first came to her…

She’d put a stop to his rampage and took him in, giving him the aid she’d only received from her brother—because he had no one and who else if not her. At first, she’d still kept her distance; she was the teacher and he was the student. It had been difficult to do so, but it had seemed wrong to do anything else; to treat Adam as her son after abandoning Yang. She’d left behind her family for the sake of duty, choosing her desires over them. Who was she to play the part of a mother, however much he may have needed one.

Ironically, it had been her reunion with her own mother that had changed all that. It hadn’t involved anything like closure, hadn’t been a heart-felt reunion after decades apart, but then it wouldn’t have been. She’d barely remembered her mother, after all, and she’d never truly considered her such. There had been circumstances and reasons, of course, and she understood that; she’d never hated her for giving them up. It would be pointless to, when she’d had no choice in the matter. But at the same time, she’d never loved her.

But she’d lied for the sake of a broken, dying woman who’d lost everything without even having a chance to decide. Said she remembered her, forgave her, and loved her, even when she hadn’t felt anything but pity.

She’d watched her mother die and simply walked away. But afterwards, she let herself treat Adam like a son, as if trying to make up for the fact that her mother had never had a daughter.

And so, she’d waited. For a long while, she wasn’t sure for what exactly—for the White Fang to mature into something greater, for Adam to grow up, or maybe just for time to pass her by. She could have gone back to her brother and her team, but she never did; it just didn’t feel like she had any right to return, knowing she’d walked away and would again. But she’d watched over them from a distance and she was pretty sure they knew she was.

Sometimes, her brother would walk into an empty room and just start talking, like he had when they were kids—speaking to her, as if she was there, which of course she was. Sometimes, it would be just a normal conversation, him talking about his day, and sometimes he’d rant and rave at her, as drunkenly insulting as he could get. Either way, the point was the same; it was an invitation to respond, to reappear and pick up an old argument or throw something at his head or bring up some factoid she’d gleaned from the other side of the planet. Sometimes Summer would sit out in the backyard of her home with plates and chairs for two, leaving her the option of reappearing and sitting down. And sometimes Taiyang would just stay up late and wait for her to come home.

She never did. Soon enough, they tried to move on and so did she, even if none of them seemed particularly sure what moving on meant. On the occasions where they talked about their own deaths and addressed the possibility, they seemed to come to an unspoken agreement that they’d die together; that that was the only way they’d ever be separated.

But life has a way of not going according to plan. Taiyang had already decided to become a teacher and Qrow had decided to follow him; both remained active, performing missions when they could, but focused primarily on preparing the next generation, to make sure they were prepared for what was ahead of them. Summer had remained an active Huntress, taking missions whenever she could, separating the team once again, but she thought that it’d be okay. She’d told herself that if it every happened, if one of them were in danger, she’d step in to save them and she kept them in the periphery, even now—not so much that they infringed upon her thoughts, but enough to notice if there was a massive change. She’d saved her brother’s life a few times that way.

But she hadn’t saved Summer. Hadn’t even noticed that something was wrong until she was abruptly gone, vanishing into the wind like she’d never been. With fully half of their team gone, Taiyang and her brother had been visibly crushed, along with her daughter and even Summer’s young girl.

And…she had been, too. Now, she thought she might know the reason, but back then? She’d wondered and worried. For her to lose track of someone that way…had she been upset? It hadn’t been long after her death that Summer approached Taiyang and pulled him out of his depression, but she’d thought she’d just accepted that—after all, she’d been the one to leave. The romance had been a quick one, but so had hers and Taiyang’s; when you’d spent over half a decade living and fighting for your life beside each other, one could usually just skip the ‘getting to know each other’ stage of romance. Even before their first date, she’d known just about everything about Taiyang, inside and out. Literally; she’d seen him naked and disemboweled.

So she’d accepted it and moved on. Or, that’s what she’d thought, but Summer’s death made her doubt. She was pretty sure it made the others doubt, too; that first month, they’d seemed to just expect that Summer would return, whether on her own or arm in arm with her. That vanishing off the face of Remnant had just meant she’d swept in to save her, like she should have. After a couple weeks went by, Qrow had even asked about Summer’s condition, speaking to her in an empty room—asking if she knew how she was, if she could find her, if she was watching. She hadn’t appeared then, either, simply because she wasn’t sure what to say. Whatever had happened to Summer, she shouldn’t have allowed it.

That was when people first started thinking she was dead, something she found morbidly amusing. She disappears for years without a word and people just shrugged, but not appearing out of nowhere to save a former teammate from danger in the middle of nowhere and they assumed death must have stopped her. She tried to be annoyed, to get pissed off by their expectations, but that’s how it should have been. Instead, Qrow stuck closer to home for several years, no longer seeming sure that she’d appear to save her team or her daughter if they were in danger.

Ironically, she’d kept a closer eye on them, too. When Yang was old enough—or perhaps, in hindsight, still too young—she’d even dropped one of the pictures she’d taken with her into her path. She’d deserved to know that much and it was a way of telling those who needed to know that she was still breathing.

But otherwise, she waited and worked behind the scenes—like her brother did, but with a further reach and less need to hide the truth. While she’d thrown off the reins of the Council and the Hunters, she still did what she thought was her duty, now and then. She’d step in to slay the Grimm now and then, stopping them before they could reach a vulnerable village and cause fear and panic to snowball into a massacre, or seeing to it that a few men and woman who’d come into power in villages at the edges of the Kingdom made their way to where they could be trained and do the most good; subtle things, mainly, light touches.

And then there were the major threats, the human ones. It had always been a fear among those who knew; that the wrong person might develop the wrong power and throw the world into chaos. Where she could, she did her part to make sure that didn’t happen, whether that meant stopping a man with a Semblance that gave him influence over minds that spread like a virus before he could go too far or killing a growing monstrosity before they shut down every machine in Vale. She was subtle then too, of course—they’d vanish and no one would even know they’d been there to begin with.

It was almost funny; she’d stopped being the Kingdom’s assassin, but hadn’t stopped being one. Even so, she made sure to hold back, to keep an eye on threats and only interfere when they proved to be a threat. None of them ever even noticed they were being watched.

Until one did.

‘Jian Bing.’ A man using the name of a historical Faunus King. She hadn’t found out about him until after the White Whale incident, when he’d exploded onto the scene without warning, and by the time she’d seen the news report, he’d already vanished. Usually, she worked backwards, tracking odd reports back to their sources, but a cursory investigation hadn’t revealed anything that pointed to a man acting on such a massive scale. She’d considered investigating more thoroughly, but seeing as her son had been involved, had decided to simply ask instead.

Surprisingly, Adam had been fairly tightlipped about him. He’d told her plenty about Jian Bing, but nothing about where he’d come from or even really how they’d begun working together, except that it was because of Blake, her maybe granddaughter—Adam seemed about as unsure about that as she had been with him, which was probably because she’d set a bad example. Regardless, it was clear he knew something and just as clear he didn’t want to be forced to say, which had been at once unexpected and familiar.

It had made it clear he thought of him as a friend, of which Adam had never had many. For that, as much as anything, she hadn’t pushed. She wasn’t one to act without investigating first anyway, and such a man was bound to cause waves.

And he had. Mere days later, he returned from his quest with a thousand Faunus refugees and the name Jian Bing was on everybody’s lips, at least within the White Fang. Some even began to speculate that he might have truly been Jian Bing reborn, though the majority laughed that thought off. Personally, she hadn’t been sure what to think and hadn’t been sure she cared. He could have been a super robot beneath a human-seeming exterior, a genetic experiment gone wrong, someone whose Semblance allowed them to transform into others at the cost of their selfhood, someone using the name for their own ends, or simply crazy—whatever the explanation, the fact remained that these things happen.

As it turned out, he was actually an ancient and possibly celestial superweapon gone wrong, now reborn as a human man who was pretending to be the reincarnation of an ancient Faunus king with the help of an exceedingly powerful Semblance—which, admittedly, was a new one for her.

Of course, she hadn’t known that at the time and instead continued to keep an eye out for him—but besides a few attempted copy cats, Jian Bing seemed to vanish off the face of Remnant as soon as his mission was done. She’d known better than to accept such a thing at face value and had continued her vigil, watching to make sure he wasn’t doing anything major, but for quite a while, he seemed content to do nothing. As if saving those particular Faunus from that particular place was all he’d wanted to do.

And then he’d reappeared in Mistral, just as the situation began to worsen, walking into a White Fang base as if he owned the place and it just didn’t know it yet. It had been coincidence more than anything that had given her that first glimpse of him—she’d been there at the same time and heard word of her arrival. But when she’d looked in to see what she could learn…she’d been spotted.

That wasn’t something that happened to her often and the occurrence immediately set her on edge. She’d grown overconfident, brushing off the possibility for how rarely it occurred, and he’d noticed her with an almost casual ease. Hardly even seeming to twitch at the knowledge he was being watched or even at the sight of her. And he’d recognized her on sight, despite her mask and long absence, and met her eyes without flinching.

All of that spoke to him being a very dangerous man and she’d put up her guard at once. Abruptly, she’d had a thousand questions and no easy way to find answers, not when he could sense her so easily. What was he doing? What else was he capable of? What was he after? She’d tried to ask Adam without letting on how concerned she was with his new friend, but doing so made it difficult to truly demand anything. A part of her wanted to do the same thing she always did when cornered—to act, to move—but she made herself wait, refusing to let such things control her as she continued to wait.

Luckily, she hadn’t had to wait for very long—though their second meeting was as jarring as the first. The news about Weiss Schnee had been unexpected and she’d been quick to act, knowing she’d need to do so before the more…extreme members of her group had a chance. That much couldn’t be helped, really; with all that the Schnee Dust Company had done, it was impossible for there to be no resentment held, and regardless of what the girl had or hadn’t done, anger like that was only rarely aimed. Those who joined the White Fang did so for a reason and if given the chance they would have killed her.

But that was an explanation, not an excuse, and so she’d prepared herself to step in, to deal with things with a cool head—until Jian Bing had chosen to interfere as well, arrive mere moments after she shifted her attention to the scene and appearing as if tearing his way through space. At first, she’d wondered if that was how he’d noticed her, if his power was somehow similar to her own—but that was only the first surprise he’d had for her.

He’d defeated the heiress, but hadn’t killed her. He’d taken what he’d needed from her necklace, but then gave it back. And he’d faced her after doing all of that, with no way of knowing what to expect or how she might react as a member of the White Fang, and still looked at her without flinching. And he’d followed it all up with offers of alliance, casual displays of power, and knowledge. He’d shown her what she’d come to expect from those in power and had taken it all in calmly, even when her own emotions started to boil over.

And then he’d told her of Babel, of the Grimm, and had spoken of the fate of the world. Of saving it together.

It was strange, after waiting so long—to finally have a mission. But strange revelations and unexpected surprises were what she soon came to expect from Jian Bing. Adventures and impossible things; he seemed to defy experience and expectation alike, telling her things that she’d never imagined and somehow making her believe them. Every time they met, he seemed to have changed, as if the break was nothing more than an opportunity to quickly refill his bag of tricks, and when they spoke again…

She’d found an answer about what had happened to Summer. Laid something to rest and found yet more goals to work towards, where before she’d spun her wheels in uncertainty. She’d found an enemy to work against, a cause to reinforce, and more. The knowledge of what they were up against had been terrifying in its own right, but for her it was the good kind of fear—the kind that prompts action instead of halting her or slowing her down. She had the power to see everything and she’d learn more in just a brief time with Jian than she had in years on her own.

But all the while, Jian Bing remained a mystery. With every question she had answered, a dozen more arose. With everything revealed, an ocean was left implied. He had staggering power and shed it as casually as the sun, but who he truly was, she hadn’t known. Every time they met, every time she looked at him, she’d wondered if she truly knew the tiger for what he really was or if she could only see the stripes. It was a question she’d wanted answer, but not one she could answer for herself.

And then he’d told her the truth.

It had been hard to believe, at first. Still was, in many ways. Some of it was terrifying enough that she didn’t want to believe it, some of it so incredible that it seemed too good to be true, some of it just nearly unbelievable. After his confrontation with Cinder—and her true capabilities been terrifying in their own right—what he’d told her, what he’d shown her…

And yet, hard as it had been to believe, she had. Or rather, she’d believed in him—that what he told her was the truth, however ridiculous or absurd it may have seemed. When he told her about his Semblance, about his past, about his true identity, about their true foe, about what she had to expect…she’d believed it. And when he told her about Summer, had shown her Autumn…

It was almost funny now, looking at how things had started to change. She still anchored herself to the world with people, but they’d begun to shift—because the people she thought of had changed, in turn. Her brother, Taiyang, her daughter and Summer’s—they were still there. But now there were others, with them. She thought of Autumn now, instead of Summer’s grave, a new life instead of one lost. When she’d first seen her, she’d been staggered, unsure what to think; had Jian found Summer somehow, saved her from the creature that had taken hold of her? Or was it something else? When he denied it, that had only added to the confusion, causing her to wonder if it was a trick or if she was truly grasping at straws. He’d shown no particular knowledge of Summer, apart from what they’d learned together, but maybe…

She’d wanted to believe. And when Autumn had spoken, giving the answer that Summer had kept so close to her heart…it had just seemed to fit. And what they’d found, what they’d done, the pieces they’d put together…

She wasn’t Summer, she knew that much. She was what came after, just like her name. But there were still pieces there, remnants and words and actions that she didn’t even think about. She wasn’t Summer, perhaps, but being with her made her think that perhaps she hadn’t failed completely—or, at least, that she could still make up for her failure.

Admittedly, she could be a touch odd at times, owing to her nature as a sapient plant-being, but it was easy to brush it off as a product of her Semblance, which it technically was anyway. She was hardly in any position to judge on that front, regardless. And she was a good student, absorbing things like a sponge despite her age and adapting to her abilities with astonishing speed. The only thing she wasn’t sure of was precisely where everything stood with her friends, family, and team, but she was starting to right that up as a lost cause after the confusion Jian had added to it. She couldn’t force Autumn into such a thing, couldn’t bring her before her once-husband, teammate, and daughters and place the burden of their expectations upon her. Autumn was young enough that she probably was entirely sure who she was, even before adding in her nature as a fallen Huntress reborn as a floral hivemind.

Then there was Adam, her son, happier now than she’d ever seen him, not that he would ever admit it. He had been in her thoughts as one of her anchors since he was a young boy, but her view of him had changed quickly over these past months. He was less cynical, less resentful, for all that he still pretended to be. Instead, there was something quietly hopeful, reassured, and confident, like he was somehow certain that things would work out—that they could get better instead of worse. He’d always been one to fight for a cause and to his last breathe, but he’d always been one to doubt if it, or even he, mattered.

He was stronger now, even if he didn’t see it. As a fighter and as a person. She’d seen the training regime he’d undergone with Jaune’s aid, the tasks he willingly took upon himself, and it was obvious that he was driven in a way he’d never been before. His swordsmanship had improved dramatically for what little time he’d had to practice, and his skill with his power and Semblance had skyrocketed, to say nothing of the benefits he’d garnered thanks to Jaune’s Semblance. As he was now, she knew he could hold his own against some of the strongest fighters she’d ever known.

Then there was Gou, in some ways the oddest addition to her new team. The nearest parallel she could draw was to Zwei, but he had never really been her pet and she’d never desired one. Instead, he had just been one of the things she focused on when she thought of home. He was still there, at times, image floating to the surface of her thoughts alongside picture frames and the house itself—a fond memory that tied to her team, of him fighting alongside Taiyang and bouncing through the house. Not a pet, but an associate of sorts, at times even a fellow warrior and ally.

But Gou wasn’t a pet either, nor anything like Zwei. If anything, he was the voice of reason and stability on their team—ironic, perhaps, as he was a magical talking dog, but the fact remains. Adam was still impatient, eager to fight and change things. Autumn was young, even if it could be hard to remember how much so when she warped herself into something monstrous. She was plagued by things near and far, a thousand things fighting for attention and a need to be resolved, elsewhere even while she was her. And Jaune…

Jaune was too far from normal to have any idea what it even was. Intelligent, brilliant even, but if there was anything she could be certain of with him, it was that he probably wouldn’t react to something in a standard way. No matter how terrifying the situation got, he remained calm, never showing more than he wanted and quick to respond with some new trick, twisting space or setting stars in the sky or who knows what else. He always knew how to make ends meet, of course, but at times there seemed to be a conflict with how he understood the world and how he believed everyone else was capable of interacting to it. He’d react to things at time, things she had only recently begun to glimpse; phenomena that most people wouldn’t know existed, to the sight of things no one else could see, to the flows of energy through the world, to souls, and more besides. In an instant, his view on something would shift dramatically without his skipping a step, changed by a crucial piece of evidence he’d somehow garnered, and he’d just…know. He’d fall silent for a few seconds and in that time plot out his entire strategy, contemplating and reacting and deciding what he’d have for lunch in between the bullets. Assuming he ate food. She was pretty sure he didn’t.

It wasn’t just his mind either. His body seemed to hold no value to him—but then, he could shrug off just about anything, ignoring wounds that could kill or cripple anyone else. His fighting style was absurd on the face of it, based around that and a library of skills that gave him an answer for seemingly every situation. And if they didn’t, he’d pause for a millisecond and engineer a solution from the pieces he had and call down power out of legend, crafting displays out of literal storybooks as if they were toys made exclusively for him to play with. He’d adjust his entire style in-between moments, never stopping or worrying or even seeming to need to try.

By most standards, she was fairly certain he’d qualify as somewhere between a god and a madman. Which end of the scale he leaned towards seemed to vary from moment to moment.

And for all that, he was her best friend. Her team leader. Her partner. Jaune Arc, Jian Bing, Keter—it hardly seemed to matter. When she first met him, she hadn’t been sure what to think of him. Now that she knew him better, she still wasn’t sure what to think of him. But she knew she trusted him.

That was why she was here, after all. Why she’d come to this place, when everything she knew painted it as a death sentence. Why she hadn’t left when given the chance, until it was part of the plan—and why she’d come back after ferrying Adam, Autumn, and Gou to safety. Why she had stood before a being that by all rights, from everything she’d seen and heard and knew, should be able to wipe her from the face of Remnant with hardly more than a thought, even when she couldn’t be certain Jaune’s plan would work. Why she was about to start the fight of her life, without any guarantees.

Without looking at him, she could sense him now—where he was, how he was doing, even vague shades of more. A connection forged from the skill he’d used, keeping them aware of each other. According to him, most of his personal skills would be shared by the process and he’d be able to support her with everything else. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but she knew he was relying on her to make this plan of his work.

That was all she really needed to know, she supposed. This was her target. This was her task. Destroy everything that gets in her way.

Huntress 101.

She gestured with her sword, cutting a wide swath through the branching paths that filled the air—and portals flickered open, numerous enough to cover the sky.

“Ho…” The possessed Grimm before her mused, tilting his head up at the sky. Before he could do anything more, she swept her sword again and then turned to drive it deeply into the ground. As she did, space distorted all around her to swirl into pits. They weren’t arranged in walls, exactly, but randomly placed in the air such that it was impossible to move without touching any. At the same time, the ground seemed to drop away and more portals opened beneath their feet, covering the ground as it had the sky.

And then, with a flick of her wrist, a solid dome of portals rose to cover Jaune, encasing him in a shell of twisted space.

This was something she’d never done before, at least not on this scale—but the connection she now held with Jaune fed her power constantly, or else supercharged her own ability to generate it. She could see the barriers around them bolstering that even further, leaving her with oceans of Aura to draw from. With Jaune handling all of the effects now upon her, there were only so many ways for her to make use of that power and this…this was something she could use.

She didn’t bother counting the portals around her because she didn’t need to. She was aware of them all in a way that went beyond such things; she could feel things through them as if they were extensions of herself, sense the touch of air and light upon their surfaces in a way she’d learned to interpret as sight and sound—and they hung in her thoughts in a way she didn’t even need to consider. This point connected to that one, this distance bridge like this, and so on.

And with the senses her connection to Jaune no offered her…even this flood of information what nothing. She could literally see from them, hear through them, and feel them. They were connected to her through an extension of power that she could draw from and control, channeling things from the center to the whole. Between that and her natural ability, she had no trouble at all creating a mental image of where all of her portals were, where they led to, and what was waiting on the other side of them.

Given his own talents, Jaune shouldn’t either.

She stepped forward, leaping into a portal with all the speed she could muster—and as she was now, that was more than enough to set the air aflame and worse around her. She didn’t move in a straight line, either, flashing between points and moving from one portal to the next; a shadow that appeared briefly and skipped to another position in space. She could feel the attention on her with her Aura, keep track of when and where Malkuth lost sight of her, but knew that Jaune would be able to sense her through their connection and figure out what she was doing. Could Malkuth? She’d arranged it so that there were thousands upon thousands of possible paths for her to take, countless ways to approach him, and portals opened and closed with every second. One second she was far away, the next at mid-range, then far, close, near, far, and close again. To her, it was no different than moving in a straight line, but could he understand the route she was taking? Could he react to it?

Only one way to be sure.

In a step, she went from mid-range to right behind Malkuth’s back, and he was looking in entirely the wrong direction. His gaze flickered to the upper left, towards the entrance to a pathway she’d switched from at the last moment, and found nothing. Whatever he was doing to track her, it wasn’t perfect.

To his credit, however, he reacted fast, whirling around the instant she began drawing her blade. When it came to Iaido, she was one of the best, and with her current enhancements she could draw her sword at an absurd speed, but he still managed to turn half-way around and lift a glowing hand towards her face before firing what looked like a blood red lightning bolt at her.

But before he did, before he even moved to attack, something trembled in her like the vibration of a spider’s web. A warning of what to expect, what was to come, and at the same time a reminder that whatever physical enhancements Jaune called forth, they were but a shadow of the mental ones. A portal opened in front of her, swallowing the blast and releasing it from on positioned behind her, skipping the space she occupied. It was an almost unconscious reflex, a nearly instinctive defense for all that she’d never practiced it, and instead of striking her, the blast careened to strike a patch of ground that she briefly cleared of portals.

The earth erupted in a sudden explosion that expanded to about the size of a person and then froze for an instant. Then, the explosion seemed to reverse, sucked towards the center by some force, dust and smoke gathering into a piece of extremely dense matter no larger than a marble. It began to fall the second it form, dropping towards the perfectly smooth crater that the blast had created.

It simplified things, she mused, to simply assume anything he sent her way defaulted to absurdly lethal. If it hit her, she’d briefly regret it; ergo, she should make sure not to get hit. Simple enough.

Instead of giving it any more thought than that, she finished drawing her sword and swept it cleanly through his outstretched arm, energy gathering to help put on a sudden burst of speed as she did. The moment the blade struck his flesh, the spacial Dust activated, creating a kind of sticking effect—instead of ‘cutting’ his arm off, which she assumed would be exceedingly difficult, she separated them, an altered portal clinging to either stump. They didn’t bleed as they came apart, but the hand fell to the ground, caught in gravity’s hold, and she positioned a portal such that it ended up a fair distance away. Not a wound, technically speaking, but removing the limb all the same. Against a regenerating opponent, it tended to have more effect regardless.

Unfortunately, Malkuth seemed familiar with such effects, because instead of wasting even a moment waiting for it to grow back, he made the limb glow an off-yellow color. A moment later, it simply evaporated, coming apart into a chemical cloud that she didn’t recognize but which was probably meant to do horrible things to her. She swept her sword through it, leveraging the same blade to a different effect, and what looked like a glass lens briefly formed in midair before banishing the toxic gas, switching it with a similarly-sized patch of air elsewhere. Still a portal, but meant to replace instead of move. Just in case, she moved it somewhere near enough for Jaune to deal with it and focused again on stabbing Malkuth in the face.

“Bitch, I just grew that back,” He said, sounding annoyed as he evaded her next strike. However he was communicating, it wasn’t reliant on sound, because she didn’t slow down. Telepathy? No, this didn’t have the feel of a mental effect. Some kind of energy- or Aura-based transmission that her brain interpreted as words.

It didn’t matter, truthfully, but it meant that she might have to listen to him talk as she tore him apart. Thankfully, before she had to do any more of that, she felt a shift come from Jaune’s direction and was reacting even before he fired. Portals opened all around Malkuth, moments before an extremely narrow beam of light flashed from an open space at his feet. It pierced straight through his chest and feed into another portal behind his, releasing it from another for it to tear through the elbow of Malkuth’s remaining arm and fly into another portal. In an instant, there was a cage of piercing light weaving in and out of Malkuth’s body, and the world darkened until it was the only thing visible.

Taking advantage of the opening, she sheathed her blade once more.

Except…that wasn’t quite it. It was a trick she’d used before in a pinch, now no more than an afterthought. Her revolving sheath contained dozens of different Dust blades, each designed for a specific task, and now she was creating a tiny portal at the entrance of her sheath with the other side positioned within the case itself. Putting her current sword back where it belonged was simple enough; she didn’t even really need her power for that, seeing as it was currently on the empty place. Remembering the precise location of the exact blade she needed relative to that empty space was usually a bit trickier, which was why she’d used several tricks when it came to their precise arrangement. Mnemonic things, to make it simpler; batching similar types together, ordering by color, numbering them, and more. There were several different methods, because in a battle there wasn’t always time to think through or get tricky—in those cases, she went with whatever she thought of first and made due.

Now, however, there was no need for tricks. She could literally see inside the case without even looking at it; she disconnected her current blade, reassigned the portal to what she wanted, and attached the new one in a process that took no more time than it had taken to sheath and draw her sword.

If space didn’t work, what of time?

She swung her new blade, her Aura causing the Dust to glow, and a wave of twisting power leapt from the edge to sweep across the battlefield.

The secret of using Dust is that there is no predefined way of using it. It was something that reacted to a person’s Aura and could be used as a catalyst to create something new, beyond the user’s normal ability. At the most basic level, it was easy to draw parallels between one person’s use and another’s, because Dust could simply be used to align the user’s Aura with the corresponding element. Similarly, an experienced or reckless person could simply draw the power out of the Dust, unleashing it upon the world with no restraint but their own power and will. Even then, however, there were countless possibilities hidden within Dust and just as many ways to use it. There were—and had been for as long as their records now went back—many schools of thought and practice when it came to wielding the power of Nature’s Fury. Martial arts styles, sword styles, long and short-range methods; there were even styles meant entirely for show, practiced by high-end entertainers. Once, she’d listened to a musician who used their instrument to weave a song into a story, illustrated by mobile figures of ice and fire. Those were all things that could be taught, given a willing enough student.

And then there were things that were as personal as one’s Semblance. Specifically, the ways Dust interacted with a person’s Semblance. It was, after all, a personal expression—perhaps even manifestation—of the user’s Aura. While generally static and unchanging barring…special circumstances, there was always the option of aspecting or redefining one’s power through the lens of Dust. Not all Semblances allowed that; for some, there was just no meaning to aligning their power with an element, while others were just entirely unaffected. A precog she’d once known could use Dust to sense the presence of only a specific element in the near future, but outside of rare situations, that did nothing but limit her sight. Jaune’s was like that, too, and was perhaps the most thorough example she’d ever seen, with the most basic aspects of his power left completely untouched no matter what he drew upon. He could use Dust to change the nature of some of his skills, but the Gamer itself? No.

But that was too be expected. Not all Semblances lent themselves easily to such modifications after all, nor to violence itself. Worse, because of the personal nature of it, it wasn’t necessarily something that could be taught, but which had to be discovered. A dozen different crystals might prove themselves utterly worthless to a person, while using a specific kind of Dust might yield unexpected results.

In many ways, that had been the case for her. She’d first learned how to use Dust by observation, peaking into classes and watching practices while she was just a little girl. Like most talents, Dust was something that took time and effect to master—and even more time and effort to remain a master of. Once she’d figured that out, it had become simple to find unknowing teachers and, with her power, easy to find opportunities to practice. Many of them had ended explosively, in one way or another, but in time she’d gotten a feel for it and explored the possibilities. Due to the nature of her Semblance, spacial Dust had been one of the first she’d put serious effort into learning to use and she’d found a variety of ways to do so. A ‘sticky’ portal that seemed to separate things she cut through. A sharp portal that she could use to intersect things, dividing them in truth. Portals of different sizes that could cause temporary alterations to any who moved through them, briefly turning pebbles into boulders and monsters into kittens. She’d even figured out a way to make a portal within a portal, such that anything that tried to pass through appeared to be reflected.

After tampering with space had provided so many useful results, however, she’d inevitably started to wonder about its counterpart—so, of course, she’d tried.

As it turned out, it was tricky, meddling with time. Playing with time Dust was much the same. It was costly, with even sizable chunks of the material potentially lasting only an instant, and the uses almost always short-lived in an absolute sense.

But sometimes, all you really needed was a little time.

Malkuth lifted his remaining hand even as the other began to regrow. Violently colored light wreathed it, bright enough that had she been relying on her normal senses, she might have had to avert her eyes. Instead, she stared at him silently, waiting without fear. Malkuth prepared to fire—

And abruptly staggered, a gleaming blade emerging from the center of his chest. Sparing it a brief glance, she trust her sword forward where it seemed to vanish into the air—consumed by time and space even as the blade that had stuck Malkuth disappeared.

Without hesitation, she rushed towards Malkuth, feeling a change come over her even as she did. She’d only experienced this once before, during the single trial run she and Jaune had managed to engineer, but it was as exhilarating as it was terrifying. Her flesh began to peel away, revealing something underneath as if it had always been there. She felt the mask come over her face, become her face, even as her clothes turned black as night, becoming something in-between armor, flesh, and skin. Her arms became vaguely wing-like, feathers sharp as steel. But more than any of that, she felt her gaze sharpen. Not her sight, but the view she had of the world, now coming into even clearer focus before her.

This was Sahasrara, if she remembered correctly. The skill Jaune used to bear his literal soul and draw power from it. It was good timing, though she wasn’t sure if that was because of the Dust or just Jaune. Either way, she’d happily take advantage of it while she could.

She approached Malkuth through another series of portals, flickering from place to place in moments and letting minute adjustments of time confuse the process. Even so, as she drew near her opponent, he once again reacted fast, gathering sickly green light in the center of his chest instead of his hands. It spilled forth as something between a whip, a laser, and a lightning bolt, carving a line of destruction straight for her—and then vanishing into another circular ripple of space. It didn’t reappear instantly, but she flicked her blade down and it reopened, the blast slipping through time to strike at Malkuth at her command.

It did nothing but splash over him—obviously, he’d known better then to dish out more than he could take while fighting a portal-user—but it was a distraction and that was all she really needed. She flicked the tip of her sword to the left and a silver portal opened to the left of Malkuth. Another twitch and it’s opposite point opened a moment later. Two portals, bridging not just separate points but separate times. Even with all her power, she could only cross a matter of moments, but…a moment was enough.

A solitary portal opened in the midst of it all, the other end of it right in front of Jaune, and he didn’t need any more of any invitation to give his best shot.

What came forth was very nearly blinding to look at. It wasn’t Longinus, the space-piercing spear bound to interfere with her portals, but instead a torrent of pure light—Lux Aeterna, most likely.

Good. That served her purposes better than Longinus would have, anyway.

Malkuth lifted his arms in defense, leaning into the blow as if anticipating it—but it was pointless. The initial strike was all but meaningless in this case, at least compared to what was to come. The light washed over him, searing his flesh and pushing him back, before reaching it’s true destination and flowing into the time portal.

The moment it did—or rather, several moments before it did—the same amount of light came streaming from the opposite portal, rushing back through the intervening space and adding onto itself. She managed to close the portal at the center just in time, before that power had a chance to splash back through, and so it continued onwards, crashing over Malkuth and flowing into the time portal yet again.

And so the process repeated. Whatever entered the first portal exited the second several moments before it entered—in this case causing Lux Aeterna to retread the same path, creating a line of still-brightening light as it overlapped with its past and future self in a strange manner. The nature of entropy saw to it that the attack itself constantly lost energy, but that was nothing compared to the energy being funneled into it through the quirk in time, and so its net energy was increased by its previous iteration with each lap it took through the connected points in time and space. And being an attack made of light…well. It should go without saying that it took many, many laps.

In a way, Lux Aeterna may have been the best possible choice for this combination—enough so that she assumed Jaune had understood the nature of her attack in the moment or so of thought he’d been allowed. From what see understood, the nature of the attack was to draw in energy, condensing further as it grew more powerful. Jaune had once described it as endothermic light, and as it devoured itself endlessly and grew further and further, it stayed neatly within the pathway allowed by her portals. And as that pathway intersected Malkuth quite nicely, he got to enjoy every moment of the process.

Against anyone else, she’d say that was enough. The power gathered in that stream of light, the power being added to it every second—it was something awesome in a literal sense. Awe-inspiring, terrifying…it was one of the reasons she didn’t use this application of her powers very often. For all the potential it held, the risks should it be unleashed or go out of control way phenomenal. Under normal circumstances, with far weaker attacks in use, it was possible to cause extreme collateral damage; added onto itself enough times, practically anything could be weaponized. A flash light, a laser pointer, or any variety of weapons…once, she’d even combined it with her secret weapon and the results had nearly been disastrous. The ‘wipe nations clean of life’ kind of disastrous—and Lux Aeterna was significantly more powerful than a laser pointer. Under normal circumstances, she’d hold it in place over the target for a second and let nature take its course.

But Malkuth wasn’t a normal enemy and she knew it. She’d gone into this knowing she’d need to start with her best tricks and scale up and so that was exactly what she was going to do.

Unfortunately, while the twist in time she’d created could shatter any number of physical laws, in truth or in seeming, it remained an application of Dust—and it’s time was ironically running out. Perhaps it was the stress caused by sustaining Lux Aeterna, something Malkuth had done, or the other uses she had put it to before this, but what should have been enough to last a second or two looked like it wouldn’t even last one. Once it ran out, the portals would fade and the power gathered would take its natural course. And given the power in question, If it did that…it was entirely possible they’d lose something they couldn’t live without.

They being Mankind. And that may well be lowballing it; even with the senses granted to her by her connection with Jaune, it was hard to keep track of the precise magnitude of something that was overwriting itself at the speed of light and she’d given up before even trying.

Normally, this would be when she’d create a portal in time and space, banishing the attack utterly before it could cause too much damage—but she was reluctant to throw such a weapon away so easily, considering their foe.

Besides. There might be a better use for it that simply getting rid of it.

Sheathing her sword again, she cast it aside but kept her power flowing through it—it would waste away entirely in a few more moments, but she needed those moments.

And in its place, she brought out her trump card—a blade of purest white, the only one of its kind she had. While she could afford to carry duplicates of most kinds of Dust, there were several varieties that were too hard to come by to allow that. Thanks to her power, she had other ways of getting what she wanted, but even then, finding enough of certain kinds of dust to make an entire blade could be a challenge. White Dust in particular was a severe chore to acquire in such quantities, especially with the limits to its use. But every now and then, it proved itself worth having. In her lifetime, this was the third such blade she’d owned and the previous two had saved her life.

Hopefully, this one would live up to their standard.

Taking a deep breath, she lifted her sword and called to the power contained within it.

In an instant, there was nothing left in the world but her. Everything around her flickered once and then went black, fading utterly from her sight. The light of the portals, the sky, everything—it all just seemed to cease to be. The only thing she could see, the only thing she could sense, was herself and the blade she held in her hand—and even that was changing. The white Dust of the blade seemed to corrode, shattering and breaking apart in a matter of moments as if it were falling to…well, to dust. The physical matter that had composed her blade was gone, completely and utterly.

But in its place was something else, like a light in the darkness. It embodied the same space, held the same shape, still looked like a swords edge—but it wasn’t. Instead, this was the state her Semblance took when exposed to white Dust.

It was a portal in the shape of a sword. For a long time, she’d though that it was nothing but an opening, that there was no other side of it, but her time with Jaune had changed that. Where the portal led to, she still wasn’t certain, but it had something to do with the Light Jaune drew several of his own skills from. And now that she held that power in her hands, the only question was how to use it.

White Dust was strange. For all that it seemed to embody the element of light, it was more than that—or rather, the Light was more than that. It wasn’t just a matter of photons and illumination; it held ties to the very soul, to the core of a person. The first time she’d used it, she’d broken through limits that should have been untouchable, bisecting her opponent with a portal. The second time, she’d created a portal that drew in everything around it and another that emitted it as raw power. Two completely different uses, with the only connecting point being her.

This time, she used it differently once more. As the world came back to her, she ignored the light, though it now seemed to draw her towards it. She ignored the ignored she could sense within it as well, though she considered leveling this power towards him. Instead, she focused her light on the swirling darkness she could feel at the edge of her senses—and cut.

The still black pit that had hovered over the battlefield tried to resist that power, but it couldn’t, nor could its master. It came apart at the seams and released its prisoner—and the light assailing Malkuth gained a mind of its own.

“Thank you, Raven,” Jaune said as he strode past her, abruptly by her side. He’d probably teleported when he sensed the situation change—and change it had. Of all the possible uses for the one shot the Dust gave her, this had seemed like the safest best, even if it was also the least certain. She couldn’t be certain what would result from this, because it wasn’t her power she’d chosen to rely on this time. Instead, it was someone else’s.

She’d chosen to trust Jaune’s plan.

He stopped and looked back at her, smiling for a moment.

“Do you mind if I handle it from here?” He asked.

Already, she could feel her power and control fading—so instead of answering aloud, she simply nodded.

She smiled a bit wider and then looked at the torrent of light, now writhing as if fighting to take shape or to retain one.

“I figured none of the skills I’d learned would be enough to stop you—if it was that easy, you wouldn’t still be here. You’ve probably seen it all before, anyway. So…here’s a new trick, Malkuth,” He said. “Something I made just for you.”

His form fractured, splitting in two—and then there was light between his halves, drawn from the power gathered before him; Keter, briefly visible between the twins. Then the two sides of him came together with an explosion of force, trapping that light and energy between their reunifying mass and collapsing into itself.

But what was left was something greater than the sum of its parts.