RWBY: Flame And Crimson

Chapter One: Initiation and Teams

Morning arrived at Beacon the way mornings tend to arrive before something important — too quickly, and with the particular quality of light that makes everything feel slightly more consequential than it did the night before.

Ruby Rose was already awake.

She sat on the edge of her sleeping bag in her pajamas, Crescent Rose disassembled across her lap in its compact form, running her thumb along the folded edge of the blade with the practiced absentmindedness of someone who has done this so many times that the motion has become a form of thinking. Around her, the ballroom stirred with the sounds of a hundred students preparing for the day that would define the next four years of their lives.

Ruby was not thinking about that.

She was thinking about how much she liked the way the morning light caught the silver of Crescent Rose's receiver housing. And how she'd need to recalibrate the dust feed before the initiation. And how the Dust itself had been sitting in the chamber long enough that she should probably cycle it out for a fresh load, just to be safe. And whether the adjustment she'd made to the folding mechanism last month had introduced any play into the joint, because she'd noticed a half-millimeter of wobble when she—

"You seem awfully chipper," Yang observed from her left, pulling a comb through the solar catastrophe of her hair with the ease of someone entirely accustomed to managing something magnificent.

"Hmm?" Ruby looked up. "Oh. Yeah."

"What's up?"

Ruby considered explaining the dust feed recalibration and the half-millimeter wobble. Then she considered her sister's expression.

"No more talking to new people today," she said instead, and she could not entirely keep the relief out of her voice. "No more trying to figure out what to say or how to say it or whether I'm being weird." She ran her thumb along the blade's edge again, and a small, satisfied smile found its way onto her face. "Today, Crescent Rose does all the talking for me."

Yang was quiet for a moment — the specific quiet of an older sister performing rapid calculations.

"Ruby," she said, in the tone of someone who is about to deliver news the other person does not want to receive, "we're not the only two people taking the initiation test."

"I know that."

"Which means you're going to have to talk to people eventually."

Ruby's smile flickered. "You sound like Dad."

"I sound like someone who's been to school before." Yang set down her comb and tilted her head. "What does it even have to do with fighting? You're thinking about it wrong, Rubes. What happens if you get put on a team with someone you've never spoken to?"

Ruby laughed. It was a laugh she had developed specifically for questions like this — slightly too bright, with a nervous edge she hadn't quite managed to smooth out yet. "I could always just be on your team."

Yang studied her sister for a moment with the expression of someone making a deliberate choice.

"Maybe," she said carefully, "you should try a different team."

The laugh stopped.

Ruby turned to look at her fully. "...Are you saying you don't want to be on a team with me?"

"What? No!" Yang held up both hands. "I just think it would be good for you. Help you come out of your shell a bit. Grow up."

"I don't need other people to help me grow up," Ruby said, with absolute conviction. "I drink milk."

Yang opened her mouth. Closed it. Seemed to decide this was an argument she could not win through conventional means.

"...What about Odyn, then?"

Ruby went very still. The thumb on Crescent Rose's edge stopped moving.

"...What about him?"

"He seemed nice." Yang's tone was elaborately casual. The elaborateness was doing most of the work. "I'm sure he wouldn't mind being on the same team as you. And I think he'd be able to really help you." A pause, entirely too measured. "If you know what I mean."

The warmth that climbed Ruby's face had absolutely nothing to do with the morning light.

"Yang," she said, with great dignity, "I told you before. It isn't like that between us."

"Sure, Rubes." Yang picked up her comb again. "Just keep telling yourself that."

Ruby turned away and busied herself with reassembling Crescent Rose — a process that took considerably longer than it should have, because she kept thinking about what Yang had said, and every time she thought about what Yang had said, she stopped paying attention to what her hands were doing, and every time she stopped paying attention to what her hands were doing, a small mechanism fell onto the floor. By the third time this happened, she gave up and simply held the weapon in its folded form and stared at the wall across the room.

Her gaze found Odyn before she quite decided to look for him.

He was at the far side of the ballroom, tightening the bracers on his forearms with the focused efficiency of someone running through a pre-mission checklist. He was talking quietly with Roy about something — she couldn't hear what — and whatever it was made Roy smirk and shake his head in that particular way that younger brothers develop specifically to needle older ones. Beside them, Kanna was polishing the shield mounted to her right gauntlet with a cloth, her expression concentrated and unhurried, and Baron was doing something to the cylinder mechanism of a pistol with a small tool, squinting at it with the single-minded intensity of someone who has found an entirely inappropriate moment to perform maintenance.

Ruby realized, with mild alarm, that she had been watching them for quite some time.

She made herself look away. She stared at the wall instead, which was considerably less interesting, and was therefore much safer.

I wonder who he'll end up with on his team, she thought, before she could stop herself.

Then she thought: Stop it.

Then she thought about it anyway.

Across the room, at a bank of lockers that occupied the ballroom's eastern wall, Weiss Schnee was preparing with the thoroughness of someone who had been preparing for this moment since roughly the age of seven.

Myrtenaster was already in perfect condition — it was always in perfect condition, because Weiss did not permit it to be otherwise — but she checked the glyph revolver's alignment anyway, and the dust cylinder's load distribution, and the grip tape's tension, and then checked all three again because checking things twice was simply how Weiss approached the world.

Pyrrha Nikos, at the adjacent locker, was considerably more relaxed about the whole affair. She went through her own preparations with the quiet competence of someone who has been through enough actual combat to understand that the difference between readiness and over-preparation is approximately three hours of sleep.

"Have you given any thought to whose team you'd like to be on?" Weiss asked, without looking up from Myrtenaster's grip tape.

Pyrrha considered this with genuine thoughtfulness. It was, Weiss had already noticed, the way she considered most things — as though every question actually deserved its answer. "I think I'll let the circumstances decide. See where things fall."

Weiss looked up at her. "I was thinking we could partner together."

Pyrrha smiled. It was a warm smile, uncomplicated, without the performance that most people Weiss's age seemed to feel was required when addressing someone of Pyrrha's reputation. "That sounds wonderful."

"Excellent."

The strategic landscape of Weiss Schnee's mind arranged itself with the quiet efficiency of someone who has been doing this since the age of seven. The pieces clicked into place. Pyrrha Nikos — four-time Mistral Regional Champion, Sanctum's top graduate, the face currently gracing the front of approximately nine million cereal boxes across three kingdoms — combined with Weiss Schnee, who had graduated at the top of her own class through a combination of talent and sheer, categorical refusal to be anything other than first. She allowed herself, just for a moment, to fully envision the possibilities.

Undefeated in tournament. Perfect combined grade average. Featured in the Beacon quarterly. Practically celebrities by the end of first semester. Nothing between them and—

"Hey! Jaune Arc. Nice to meet you."

Weiss blinked.

Jaune Arc stood between her and Pyrrha with the slightly precarious confidence of someone who has talked himself into many situations he has not thought through to their logical conclusions. He was wearing the same outfit as yesterday, which suggested either a limited wardrobe or a limited concern for first impressions. Both seemed plausible.

"...You again," Weiss said.

"Don't worry about it." He turned slightly, adopting what appeared to be a pose. "So. Teams. Been hearing some things. I was thinking you and me would make a natural—"

"There are four members per team," Pyrrha offered helpfully, raising her hand.

Jaune pivoted toward her with the immediate attentiveness of someone discovering a new avenue. "You don't say." His expression shifted into something that appeared to believe it was charming. "Well. Hot stuff. Play your cards right and maybe you could round us out."

Weiss inserted herself between them with the physical certainty of someone who has been a buffer between Jaune Arc and bad decisions for approximately fifteen minutes and already feels strongly about continuing this indefinitely.

"Jaune," she said, with the patience of someone who is not, in fact, being very patient at all, "do you have any idea who you're talking to?"

"Not in the slightest, snow angel."

Weiss inhaled. "This is Pyrrha Nikos. Top of her class at Sanctum. Four-time Mistral Regional Champion, a new record." She waited for recognition to surface. It did not. "She is on the front of every Pumpkin Pete's Marshmallow Flakes box."

Something in Jaune's expression shifted dramatically. "That's you?"

Pyrrha smiled, slightly pained. "It was a very kind gesture, yes. Though I should mention the cereal itself is—"

"So after hearing all of that," Weiss pressed on, "do you genuinely believe you are in a position to ask her to join your team?"

The pause that followed had a quality of genuine self-reflection in it. Then Jaune's shoulders dropped. "...Probably not," he admitted. "Sorry."

Pyrrha, who had been watching this exchange with the expression of someone who has been surrounded by excessive competitiveness for most of her professional life and finds sincerity rather refreshing in comparison, smiled at him. "For what it's worth, Jaune, I think you'd make a wonderful leader."

He straightened immediately. The self-reflection was gone. "Oh, stop."

"Please stop," Weiss agreed.

"Sounds like Pyrrha's on board for Team Jaune." He had somehow already moved on to the next step. "Now, I'm not supposed to do this, but if you ask nicely enough, I might be able to find a spot for—"

What happened next was, technically, Pyrrha's fault.

The flat of Miló caught Jaune in the side with precisely the amount of force required to remove him from the immediate vicinity and deposit him against the locker bank behind them with a sound like a very loud disagreement. He slid downward, coming to rest with his hood snagged on a hook, feet dangling a few inches from the floor.

"I'm sorry!" Pyrrha called, already following Weiss out of the locker room.

Jaune looked down at the ground he was not currently touching. "...Likewise," he said, to no one.

The announcement from Professor Goodwitch crackled through the intercom — all first-year students to Beacon Cliff, immediately — and the ballroom exhaled, three hundred students simultaneously deciding that whatever composure they'd managed to maintain this morning would have to be enough.

Odyn was the first of the four Elves to finish his preparations, and he waited near the door with the patient stillness of someone who has spent enough time training to have made peace with waiting as a skill in itself. He watched the room with that characteristic amber attention as the other three completed their checks.

Roy sheathed his sword, ran a thumb along the blade's guard to confirm the lock, and tied his headband off with a single practiced pull. Kanna stowed her polishing cloth, flexed the fingers of her gauntlet hand twice to test the shield's release mechanism, and looked up satisfied. Baron held one of his pistols to the light, checked the sight line down the barrel, appeared to find something he didn't like, made a minute adjustment with the tool still in his hand, checked it again, and decided it would do.

"Ready?" Odyn asked.

Roy smirked. "Born ready."

"You're not allowed to say that," Kanna told him. "We've been training for this since we were twelve. Of course we're ready."

"Doesn't mean I can't say it."

"It does, actually. It means exactly that."

"I'm ready," Baron announced, holstering the pistol and standing up. "Whenever you are, Odyn."

Odyn nodded. He turned toward the door — and then, because he had noticed Ruby standing at her locker with the particular expression of someone performing elaborate mental calculations about a situation that was not, in itself, that complicated, he crossed toward her and stopped.

He extended a fist.

"Do your best out there," he said. "I'll be at the ruins."

Ruby stared at the fist for half a second, then bumped it with her own. "Right back at you."

He smiled. Then the four Elves moved through the crowd toward the door, and Ruby watched them go with the expression of someone trying very hard not to think about something.

Yang caught her eye from across the room and raised both eyebrows.

Ruby turned away and walked very quickly in the opposite direction.

Beacon Cliff had no particular talent for understatement.

The platform jutted from the edge of the academy's eastern promontory like a declaration — a broad expanse of pale stone overlooking the cathedral-dark depths of Emerald Forest, which spread below in an unbroken canopy of ancient growth that swallowed sound and distance alike. The morning air at altitude carried a clean edge to it, the kind that made everything feel more awake than it needed to be.

The first-year students arranged themselves across the platform in the loose, self-conscious clusters of people who have been told to stand in a specific place without being told how. Some had their weapons drawn already. Some were scanning the faces around them with varying degrees of calculation. Nora Valkyrie appeared to have achieved a level of anticipatory enthusiasm that could, if improperly contained, become a public safety concern. Lie Ren stood beside her with the expression of someone who has long since made his peace with this.

Professor Ozpin stood at the platform's edge, coffee mug in hand, and regarded the assembled students the way a body of water regards the objects thrown into it — with perfect, unhurried patience, and no particular opinion about whether the objects in question had been ready to be thrown.

Glynda Goodwitch stood at his left with a tablet and the expression of someone who, if asked, could provide each student's exact projected survival odds.

"For years," Ozpin began, without preamble, "you have trained to become warriors. Today, your abilities will be evaluated in the Emerald Forest."

The forest below seemed, collectively, to make no comment about this.

"Each of you will be given teammates — today." A brief murmur moved through the students, and Glynda's stylus moved across her tablet in a way that suggested she had expected this reaction and had already noted it. "These teammates will be with you for the remainder of your time here at Beacon. The first person with whom you make eye contact after landing will be your partner for the next four years."

The murmur upgraded itself to something louder and considerably less composed.

Ruby Rose's eyes went wide.

She looked around — at Jaune, who was beginning to raise his hand and opening his mouth to ask a question that was going to go unanswered — at Yang, who was adopting the anticipatory grin of someone who has already decided she likes this arrangement — and then, without meaning to, directly at Odyn.

He looked back. His expression was steady, unruffled. He held her gaze for a moment, and then did something unexpected: he nodded. Slowly. Deliberately. As though he already knew what she was afraid of and had decided, without being asked, to do something about it.

Ruby felt the anxiety unclench, just slightly.

She breathed.

Ozpin continued, his voice carrying no particular urgency, as though launching students into an ancient forest full of homicidal Grimm was simply the logical next step in a well-considered process. "You will encounter opposition along the way. Do not hesitate to destroy everything in your path." A beat. "Or you will die."

Jaune's hand was still in the air.

"You will find an abandoned temple at the northern end of the forest," Ozpin finished. "Each pair must retrieve a relic and return. We will evaluate your choices accordingly. Any questions?"

Jaune opened his mouth.

"Good," Ozpin said. "Take your positions."

The launch pads activated down the line — silver tiles blooming upward like they had been waiting for this moment — and the first students were rocketed into the air in a succession of bright arcs and varied screaming. Nora left the platform with both fists raised and a noise that was technically a battle cry but functioned more like a declaration of personal philosophy. Weiss Schnee rose with her rapier already drawn, a perfect picture of cold competence. Yang went last from her side of the line with a "WOO-HOO!" that echoed off the cliffside and probably reached the bottom of the forest before she did.

Ruby, in the moment before her tile activated, looked toward Odyn one more time.

He gave her a thumbs up. His lips moved. She couldn't hear him over the wind and the shouts and the mechanical hiss of the launching pads, but she had learned, in the past twenty-four hours, that she didn't need to.

Good luck. I'll be waiting.

She launched.

The forest rushed up to meet her in a wall of green and shadow.

She was already grinning when she hit the treeline.

Odyn landed the way he did most things — without waste.

He caught a branch with one hand on the way down, used its resistance to redirect his momentum, and stepped off the rebound into a low crouch at the base of a tree with Crescent Rose — his own weapon, the long sword-halberd with its dual-phase design — already cleared from its back sheath and held low. He straightened up, listened to the forest for a long moment, and then sheathed it again.

Nothing.

The forest had its own kind of quiet — not peaceful, but watchful. The difference between silence and the absence of sound. He knew it from the mountains, from the training grounds in the cold pre-dawn, from every early-morning run through terrain that did not particularly care whether you were prepared for it.

He began to walk.

He did not have to walk far.

There was a particular quality to the air near Grimm — a sourness under the deeper smell of earth and growth, something that the body recognized before the mind caught up. Odyn had grown up reading it the way another person might read weather signs, and what the air was currently telling him was that he was surrounded.

He stopped.

He looked down at the ground for a moment, then up at the canopy, then out at the treeline to his left, where a branch was very slightly, very carefully not moving despite the wind.

He exhaled through his nose.

"Alright," he said, to the forest in general. "If you're going to do it, at least do it together. I'd rather not be here all morning."

The first Beowolf launched from the undergrowth and immediately regretted it. Odyn's hand closed around its jaw mid-leap, and the momentum he redirected downward drove the creature into the earth with enough force that its mask shattered against the root it met on the way in. It dissolved in a scatter of dark particles before the echo finished.

The rest of the pack seemed to take this as a cue.

They were not wrong to — it simply was not the cue they had intended.

What followed was brief and somewhat one-sided. Odyn moved through the grim the way water moves through a gap in a wall — not fighting the current, simply finding the path of least resistance and taking it, repeatedly, until there was nothing left to resist. A heel through a mask. Two fingers driven into a joint. The flat of his palm releasing a short, controlled discharge of fire that converted three attacking Beowolves into the memory of Beowolves in approximately half a second. His blade came free only for the Ursa Majors that were large enough to warrant it — and for those, he used the dust channel and the blade's fire-infused edge to open lines of cut through reinforced bone that shouldn't have been possible with a single weapon.

It was not a performance. He did not think of it in those terms. It was simply what needed to be done, done in the order it needed to be done, and when it was finished, the clearing was quiet again and he was standing in the middle of it with his blade resting on his shoulder and a faint coating of dispersed Grimm on the tips of his boots.

He twisted the hilt with his thumb and the mechanism engaged — the grip extended, the blade configuration shifted, and Crescent Rose's longsword became something longer and more purposeful: halberd mode, the energy lance configuration that he usually reserved for things larger than Ursa Majors. He spun it once, more habit than necessity, and continued north.

Nice warmup, he thought, which was the thought of someone who had grown up training in the Mantle mountains and had a somewhat different baseline for these things than most of Beacon's student body.

He heard the fighting before he cleared the next ridge.

It was good fighting — controlled, measured, the kind with economy behind it. Not the uneven bursts of someone running on adrenaline and instinct, but the consistent, patterned engagement of a trained combatant working through a problem. He slowed and approached the clearing's edge carefully, taking in the scene before he committed to entering it.

The girl at the center was alone, which meant she had chosen to be, because the number of Grimm she had already cleared said she was more than capable of this. She moved with an elven blade and lightning — actual lightning, channeled through the weapon's edge in controlled arcs — and the Grimm she was fighting were learning, too slowly, that this had been a mistake on their part.

She had long auburn hair, silver-gray armor over light leather, pointed ears.

Odyn's eyes settled on the ears, then on the faint amber quality of the eyes he could catch at this angle.

He had a brief, involuntary flash of Baron's face.

He looked at the situation around her more carefully. She had the Beowolves and standard Ursas accounted for — that was clear. What she did not appear to have accounted for were the two Ursa Majors moving through the tree line at her three o'clock, and the pair of King Taijitu attempting to get angles on her from above.

He moved.

The Ursa Majors went down before they cleared the treeline. The serpents he redirected with a controlled burst of fire that convinced them to find somewhere else to be. The whole intervention took less than twelve seconds, and when he stepped back, the girl had just dispatched the last of her own opponents and turned to find four fewer problems than had existed a moment ago.

She looked at him.

She was not pleased. He had expected this.

"I could have handled that," she said.

"I know," he said. "The small ones, maybe — the Ursa Majors in the treeline and the serpents from above would've complicated your next thirty seconds significantly." He tilted his head. "I just thought I'd save you the trouble. The small fry are always the annoying part."

She held his gaze for a moment. Then, very slightly, the corner of her mouth turned.

"...I suppose you have a point." She sheathed her blade and straightened her posture with the instinctive formality of someone whose training had built the motion into reflex. "I apologize for my tone. My name is Hailfire Caldern."

Her eyes found his as she turned, and something in his expression must have shifted, because she frowned slightly. "...What?"

"Your eyes," he said.

"I know, they're not—"

"You're one of us."

A beat. Hailfire went very still.

"You're Arkynorean," Odyn said. Not a question.

The stillness extended for another moment. Then her gaze dropped to his left eye — to the eyepatch, and to the faint, particular amber glow at its edge where the healing tissue caught the light.

"That eye," she said slowly. "The color—" She stopped. Looked up at him again, and this time there was something different in her expression — something that was not quite recognition and not quite hope and was perhaps the uneasy space between them. "Who are you?"

"Odyn Albanar."

The name landed. He watched it land — watched the pieces connect behind her eyes in the rapid, cascading way of someone who has been holding a question for a long time and has just been handed the answer.

Hailfire dropped to one knee.

"Your Highness." Her voice was steady, but only because she was working to keep it that way. "Forgive me — I didn't know. I had no idea that you—" She stopped. Gathered herself. "Is Baron... is he alright?"

Odyn looked at her kneeling in the half-light of the forest, and thought about what Baron had said at the drop point — about his sister, about their father, about the way she had been looking for someone to find her — and the weight of it settled in his chest in a way that had nothing to do with royal obligation and everything to do with something simpler.

"He's well," he said. "He misses you." He reached down and touched her shoulder. "Stand up, Hailfire. We'll find a way to get you out of this. That's a promise."

She rose. She nodded, once, with the controlled precision of someone keeping a larger emotion carefully in its container.

Then: "Shall we go?"

"We shall," Odyn agreed, and the two of them turned north toward the ruins.

Roy Albanar had been on the ground for approximately four minutes when he found the girl.

He had cleared a path through roughly thirty Grimm in those four minutes, which had been its own particular kind of warmup, and he was walking through the aftermath in the direction the compass in his head said was north when he heard it — the distinctive cacophony of Grimm, and beneath it, the specific quality of quiet that means someone is trying very hard not to make additional noise because they cannot currently move.

He found her beneath a deadfall — a collapse of branches and a heavy limb that had pinned her foot to the ground when whatever fight had scattered the Grimm through this section of forest had also scattered the tree above it. A ring of Beowolves was closing in from three sides with the patient, unhurried confidence of predators who have concluded that their target is not going anywhere.

Roy drew his sword. The blade ignited with a cold, clear blue the moment it cleared the sheath — not fire, exactly, but a concentrated luminescence that was almost too bright to look at directly in the shadow of the trees. He moved through the ring before the Grimm had time to decide whether to turn toward him, and when he tapped the deadfall's heaviest branch with the pommel, the structural tension he'd assessed as he approached released cleanly and the girl's foot came free.

She started to push herself upright, and then made a noise that was half relief and half involuntary distress.

"Careful," Roy said.

He crouched and looked at her ankle. It was bad — not catastrophic, but bad enough to make the four-mile traverse through an active Grimm forest a significantly less survivable prospect. He looked at it for a moment, then at the girl, then made a decision that he knew, objectively, was going to require an explanation.

"I can fix this," he said, "but I need you to not mention it to anyone unless I say it's alright. Can you do that?"

The girl blinked at him. She had chestnut-colored hair and matching fox ears, a tail that was doing its own alarmed thing along her spine, and deep blue eyes that were currently a mixture of pain and the particular wariness of someone who has just been rescued by a stranger and is still running their threat assessment. She was also wearing a pair of steel-gray gauntlets that had folded themselves into a compact form as she'd fallen, which told Roy quite a lot about her in a very short amount of time.

"...Okay," she said. "I won't tell anyone."

He held his open palm over her ankle, closed his eyes, and let the energy move in the direction it was needed. The golden light was quieter than his blade's blue — warmer, slower, the unhurried glow of something being knit back together rather than cut apart. He could feel the break through his palm, could feel the way the energy found it and began the conversation with the body's own processes, accelerating what would otherwise have taken weeks into something that happened in the space of ninety seconds.

The light faded.

The girl sat up and looked at her ankle. Then she stood. Then she looked at Roy with an expression that had entirely abandoned the threat assessment and moved on to something considerably more fundamental.

"How did you do that?"

"Energy transfer," he said. "I move some of my own through you, your body uses it to begin healing, I just accelerate the timeline." He helped her to her feet. "Nothing mystical. Just biology that goes faster than usual."

She stared at him for another moment. Then: "Th—thank you. I'm — um." She stopped and tried again. "Flare. Flare Osperey Kitsune. Most people use Kitsune or Osperey."

"Roy Albanar." He watched her expression sort itself out. "Would it be alright if I called you Flare?"

The color that moved through her cheeks was rapid and comprehensive and appeared to surprise her more than it surprised Roy, which said something about how often someone had asked that particular question.

"Y-yeah," she managed. "That's — yeah. Fine. That's fine."

Roy looked at her for a moment — the chestnut ears and tail, the folded gauntlets that he could see were considerably more versatile than they first appeared, the posture of someone who fights regularly and well but has learned to carry it quietly. He became aware, after a moment, that he had been looking at her for somewhat longer than necessary for the purpose of the assessment, and cleared his throat.

"We should find the others," he said. "They'll be heading for the ruins by now."

"Right!" Flare fell into step beside him, and very carefully did not mention that her face was still warm. "Right. The ruins. Lead the way."

Kanna dropped through the canopy like something that had decided gravity was more of a suggestion than a rule.

She hit a branch on the way down, used it to redirect sideways, caught another branch with one hand, swung her weight through a hundred and fifty degrees, and landed in a clearing with both feet hitting the ground simultaneously and a crack that sent a ripple through the forest floor.

She was already in motion before the dust settled.

Not because of Grimm — she had scanned the area on the way down and nothing present was worth concern — but because something else had caught her attention. The energy she could sense about thirty meters to the north-northeast was wrong in a way she had not encountered before. Not hostile. Not Grimm. Not Aura in the familiar form she'd grown up reading.

Something else. Something that moved differently than Aura, burned differently, had a different texture to it — and a different signature at its source. Compact, controlled, powerful in a way that seemed slightly too much for the container carrying it.

Ki, something in the back of her mind said, and then she wondered how she knew that word.

She found a clearing. She stopped at the treeline and watched.

The boy at the center was her age, roughly — black hair that stuck up in a pattern that appeared to have opinions about gravity, red eyes with the kind of clarity that comes from growing up looking for things to fight, a brown tail that moved with unconscious expressiveness behind him. He wore a red gi over a dark undershirt, white sash, and he was fighting with his body alone — no weapon visible — against a ring of Grimm that should, by any reasonable accounting, have been too many for one person.

It was not, apparently, too many.

He moved through them the way a current moves through obstacles — not around, exactly, but through, each strike placed with the compressed certainty of someone who has been doing this long enough to have stopped thinking about it. The Ki she could sense was doing most of the work: brief concentrations of it at impact points, short controlled bursts from open palms, a faint haze of it around his body when something large enough to warrant defense took a swing at him.

She waited. She watched. She was genuinely curious how he handled the Ursa Majors that were now converging from the far edge of the clearing.

Then she made a decision.

Kanna stepped out of the trees, picked up sufficient speed, and drove her heel into the leading Ursa Major's midsection with enough force to fold it in half before it had registered her arrival. The impact cratered the forest floor. She came off the rebound already moving, caught the second Major by its mask, and redirected its forward momentum into the ground hard enough to break the mask across the exposed root. She was standing in the center of the resulting crater, flicking Grimm residue off her knuckles, before the boy had fully processed what had just happened.

He looked at her.

She looked at him.

The remaining Grimm looked at her.

Grimm, as a rule, were not capable of fear. But they were capable of threat assessment, and the threat assessment being conducted here had apparently reached a unanimous conclusion, because they scattered. The ones she had already set alight on her way through were still burning out at the edges of the clearing.

Kanna let her hands relax.

"You alright?" she asked.

The boy was still looking at her with the expression of someone recalibrating their understanding of the situation. "I was going to ask you that," he said.

"I'm fine."

"I noticed." A pause. "I could've handled the Majors."

"Probably," she agreed. "I just figured some extra hands wouldn't hurt. The Ursa Majors are always the tedious part." She dusted off her gauntlet, checked the shield mechanism, found it satisfactory. "Kanna Andross."

He was quiet for a moment — not hostile, just... self-contained. Deciding something. "Daikon Koizumi."

She held out a hand. He looked at it for a moment before he shook it, with the slightly provisional air of someone who is extending good faith on a trial basis and reserves the right to revise their assessment.

"We should head north," she said. "The ruins are that way and the others will be getting there about now."

Daikon said nothing. He turned north and began walking.

Kanna fell into step slightly behind him, and she found, as she watched the controlled economy of the way he moved, that she was genuinely curious — about the Ki, about the tail, about the red eyes and where they came from and why something about them reminded her of people she'd grown up with, in a way she couldn't quite articulate.

She decided not to articulate it. Not yet.

Later, she thought, which was the thought of someone who is interested in a thing and knows better than to reach for it too quickly.

Baron landed soft.

He conjured enough rotation with his twin blades on the way down to generate a controlled buffet of wind that slowed his descent to something manageable, and touched down in the center of a sun-dappled clearing with a sound like nothing in particular. He sheathed both swords, looked around, and found the clearing empty.

He shrugged. North, then.

He set off at a walk, listening to the forest with the specific attention of someone who has been trained to read it. Grimm presence, definitely — he could feel the faint wrongness of them in the air — but they were hanging back. Watching. Calculating. The Grimm, in his experience, were frequently better at this than they were given credit for.

What he did not expect was the kick.

It came from directly overhead, from someone who had apparently been in the canopy and had decided that the dark-hooded figure walking through their section of forest was a target worth investigating. Baron caught it on the crossed blades of his forearms, took the impact on bent knees, and redirected the force sideways before sliding his feet back into stance.

A second strike — a straight punch, very fast, from the person who'd been working in coordination with the first — he caught with an open palm, turned at the wrist, and the punch's energy spun past his ear instead of through it.

He looked at who had hit him.

Two teenagers. Similar builds. Similar faces. Both with dark hair, brown monkey tails, and the kind of clean, practiced form that meant they had been training since they could walk. They were staring at him with equal parts aggression and confusion, which was, he had found, a fairly common expression among people who had just tried to hit Baron Caldern and failed.

The Grimm, apparently deciding that whatever was happening in this clearing was no longer a clear tactical advantage for anyone, began to attack indiscriminately.

The three of them fought back to back without discussing it, because that was what you did when there were things trying to kill you on all sides and you had just established that the people nearest you were at least partially competent. The girl was fast and explosive, her strikes short and heavy. The boy was longer in his range and deceptively precise. Baron worked the gaps between them, the twin swords tracing clean arcs through the Grimm that tried to get into their inside distance.

When it was over, the girl was looking at him the way people look at things they can't quite classify.

"You're not a Grimm," she said.

"I'm not, no," Baron agreed, pushing back his hood. Pointed ears. Flame-colored eyes. The particular quality of dark skin that the Albanar Tribe carried like a signature.

The boy stared. "Caldern?"

The girl's thoughts appeared to have moved ahead of her expression. She looked at him with something that was almost recognition — like a name surfacing from somewhere below conscious memory. A dead race, she was thinking, or something like it. Supposed to be gone.

Well, her expression said, apparently not.

"Dark Elf," Baron offered. "It's what most people understand, when we don't want to get into the full explanation." He extended his hand. "Baron Caldern."

"Beat Ravenwing," the boy said, shaking it.

"Note Nightcrow," the girl said, a beat behind him, with the air of someone who has been thinking about something else and has remembered to reintroduce themselves to the present moment. "And... sorry about the kick."

"It was an honest mistake," Baron said. "I shouldn't have kept my hood up. That one's on me." He glanced north through the trees. "I think we should probably get moving — the others will be at the ruins soon."

Note and Beat looked at each other. The look was brief and comprehensive, the kind that two people who have known each other a very long time can have in the space of a moment.

Then they turned north.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Emerald Forest —

The experience of being Ruby Rose during the initiation could be summarized as follows: very fast, very earnest, and slightly on fire.

Not literally — though that part was coming.

She landed in the northeastern quadrant with a controlled spin of Crescent Rose's scythe blade that caught the air and slowed her enough that she hit the ground running rather than arriving at speed. She was already moving the moment her boots found purchase, the single thought forming and reforming like a mantra in her head:

Gotta find Yang. Gotta find Yang. Gotta find—

What if I can't find Yang.

What if someone finds her first.

What if I end up with Jaune— (Jaune was nice, she corrected herself quickly, but probably not great at the part where they didn't die) — or Blake, (that seemed like it would involve a lot of very careful conversation) — or—

Oh no.

Time did the thing it does in certain specific moments, where it continues passing normally for the world but slows down considerably for the person at the center of it.

Weiss Schnee was turning around at the end of a small clearing. Ruby was skidding to a halt at the clearing's entrance. Their eyes met.

The pause lasted approximately one breath.

Weiss turned on her heel and walked in the other direction.

"Wait," Ruby said, and followed. "Where are you going? We're supposed to be—"

"I am aware of what we're supposed to be," Weiss said, without slowing down, her voice carrying the particular frequency of someone who is making the best of something they would not have chosen. "I am simply not yet prepared to—" She pushed a branch aside, walked into the forest, and said "Ow" as it came back.

Ruby followed at a respectful distance, not quite sure what the plan was, but fairly confident that not having a plan was better than having the wrong one. Above them, the forest stretched in all directions with the particular indifference of somewhere that does not especially care whether you figure things out or not.

And then a Beowolf stepped into the clearing.

And then several more Beowolves stepped into the clearing.

"Ruby," Weiss said, her voice going from irritated to something crisper.

Ruby was already moving. Crescent Rose unfolded in a single practiced motion — the blade extending, the sniper configuration cycling automatically as her thumb found the release — and she covered the distance between them and the nearest Beowolf with a combination of petal-burst speed and a scythe swing that was, objectively, slightly larger than the situation required.

The Beowolf disagreed with its own continued existence, and expressed this by dissolving.

Weiss, who had been in the middle of her own opening form, had not been expecting the explosion of rose petals, the whirl of the scythe, or the presence of Ruby Rose appearing between her and her opponent with approximately zero warning. Her form redirected instinctively, the glyph revolver spinning — and the line of fire she discharged caught the base of a tree twelve feet to the left and began, with considerable enthusiasm, to spread.

Ruby looked at the burning tree.

Weiss looked at the burning tree.

"That should have been easy!" Ruby said.

"Perhaps if you had communicated your position before launching yourself at something I was already handling—"

"Well sorry that I was trying to help!"

"You nearly got both of us killed with your complete absence of coordination—"

"We're fine!"

"The forest is on fire, Ruby!"

"The Grimm are on fire," Ruby corrected, though she had to concede this distinction was perhaps insufficient. The fire was, in fact, spreading significantly beyond the original Grimm.

Weiss looked at her with the expression of someone who has been given exactly what they expected and is somehow still surprised by it.

Then she grabbed Ruby's arm and pulled.

"Move."

They ran. The fire chased them with slightly less enthusiasm than it was applying to the treeline, but enough to make the decision feel urgent. Behind them, the remaining Grimm found themselves with a more immediate problem than two students and dispersed accordingly.

They stopped at a safe distance, both breathing hard, and regarded each other in the aftermath of a first shared experience that had gone poorly in almost every way it could go poorly and still resulted in both of them being alive.

"Well," Ruby said, after a moment.

"Don't," Weiss said.

A dark feather drifted down from the canopy above them, silent and unhurried, and settled on the charred stump they had left behind.

Neither of them saw it.

The journey through Emerald Forest could be described, if one was being charitable, as character-building.

Pyrrha Nikos and Jaune Arc were making their way north through undergrowth that appeared to have strong opinions about pedestrian traffic, and Pyrrha was doing two things simultaneously: navigating the terrain with practiced ease, and explaining to Jaune what Aura was in terms that she hoped would land before they encountered something large enough to require him to have it.

"Have you ever felt you were being watched," she said, "without knowing that anyone was actually there?"

"...Yeah," Jaune said. He was looking at the branch she had just accidentally released into his face, which had left a thin line of red across his cheek. He had laughed it off, which told her something about him.

"That's Aura working at its most basic level," she continued, holding a second branch deliberately this time. "The soul projecting outward. With training, it can become a shield. It can protect you from injury, reinforce your weapons, even help you sense your opponents before they move."

Jaune considered this. "Like a force field."

"...Approximately," Pyrrha allowed. It was a reduction, but it was not a wrong one.

She stopped walking and turned to face him. She placed two fingers gently to the side of his head and watched his expression — the slight skepticism, the slight openness, the particular combination of bravado and genuine uncertainty that she had been reading in him since he'd first appeared between her and Weiss with an expression like someone who has rehearsed this scene but forgotten the ending.

"Close your eyes," she said. "And concentrate."

He complied. She closed her own, found the warm current of her own Aura, followed it outward until she could feel the edge of his — there, present, larger than she had expected, coiled like something that had been waiting for someone to explain where the door was.

She spoke the old words quietly, the ones her own mentor had used, the ones that were less instruction than invitation.

For it is in passing that we achieve immortality. Through this, we become a paragon of virtue and glory to rise above all, infinite in distance and unbound by death.

She placed her palm flat against his chest, feeling the current shift.

I release your soul — and by my shoulder, protect thee.

The light moved between them: her Aura flowing out, his Aura flowing in to take its place, filling the space the way water fills a vessel that has always been exactly the right shape for it. She felt the familiar tired weight of the transfer and allowed herself to lean forward slightly, then straightened.

Jaune's eyes opened.

He was glowing. Not dramatically — not like a weapon charging, but like something finally lit from inside. He looked down at his hands, and she watched the scratch on his cheek close itself, the skin pulling back together smoothly and without drama, as though his body had simply remembered what it was supposed to look like.

The wonder on his face was entirely unguarded, which told her something else about him.

"You have a great deal of it," she said. "More than most people I've unlocked."

He looked up at her. Then back at his hands. Then he smiled, and it was, for perhaps the first time since she'd met him, entirely without performance.

Somewhere deeper in the forest, in the tall grass where the sun did not reach, Lie Ren was holding a great serpent's own fangs with his bare hands and grinning.

And somewhere above him, upside down in a tree, Nora Valkyrie watched and made a sound. Two syllables. A declaration of affection expressed as pure onomatopoeia.

"Boop."

Ren's smile, which he had kept to himself, briefly became visible.

The forest continued in all directions, vast and green and entirely indifferent, full of young people learning what they were made of — which was, in several cases, considerably more than they'd expected.

End of Chapter One, Part One

To be continued in Chapter Two: Initiation and Teams, Part II

The forest does not care who you were when you entered it. It only knows what you do while you are there. This is, perhaps, its one honest mercy.