Hey guys, Rosesaiyan2 here. I'm back with another chapter! Last chapter was abit on the shorter side, but that was mainly to add some foundation to Odyn x Ruby, our story's main pairing. I'll be doing shorter chapters in the future in between events to give more substance/foundation to each of the pairings featured in this story: Roy x Yang, Baron x Flare, Hailfire x Spoiler, Khanna x Mercury, Sybryh x Tarro, Daikon x Weiss, Jaune x Pyrrha/Spoiler.
Since this story is trending towards depicting the animosity between Elves and Humans, the flow of the story will be different as there's a dynamic that needs to be explained first. I will do my best to have it make sense to you readers before I go forward with this. That said, Volume 1 is more so establishing the friendship between Odyn and Ruby, it's a little early for them to be having feelings for each other... at least mutually.
Enough of my blabbering though, onto the story!
A/N: I own nothing other than the OC's. Dbz/DB Super, Black Clover, and Rwby and their characters belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation, Yuki Tabata/ Studio Pierot, and Rooster Teeth/ Monty Oum respectively.

A/N: This opening just with the cast of this story lol.
Opening- Rising Hope (Irregular at Magic Highschool)
Chapter Seven: The Stray and Hidden Truths
The Vytal Festival arrived in Vale the way celebrations always arrive in cities that have been waiting for them — gradually at first, and then all at once, until the decorations were simply part of the landscape and it became difficult to remember what the streets had looked like without them.
Red, gold, and green streamers claimed the lamp posts. Banners went up between buildings in languages that corresponded to all four kingdoms. The shop fronts competed in their arrangements with the particular energy of people who have been given a sanctioned reason to be excessive about something. And the docks — usually the most utilitarian part of any city — had acquired an air of anticipation that even the smell of brine and diesel couldn't quite suppress.
Kanna had dragged everyone out, which was how Odyn found himself walking down the commercial quarter on a Friday afternoon with eleven people and no particular agenda, which was not how he generally preferred to spend his Fridays.
He had asked her why. She had told him it would be good for him. He had said that wasn't an answer. She had said it was the only answer he was going to get. He had followed her because, in his experience, this was the most efficient response to Kanna when she was operating on a particular kind of determination.
Weiss was at the front of the group, and she was smiling in a way that Ruby had never seen from her before — not the careful, controlled expression she wore in public settings, but something more genuine and slightly unguarded, the smile of someone who is in the middle of something they have been looking forward to for a long time.
It was, Ruby privately admitted, a little unsettling.
"The Vytal Festival," Weiss said, turning to face the group as she walked backward, arms wide. "A celebration of culture, of artistry, of international cooperation—"
"Of competition," Daikon said, from the back of the group.
Weiss pointed at him. "Nobody asked you."
"You also want to scope out the competition," he continued, in the same flat, informational tone. "Which is the actual reason we're here."
"That is not—" She stopped. Composed herself. "That is not the primary reason."
"But it's a reason."
"I— hush."
"You realize," Odyn said, with the particular patience of someone who has observed this dynamic enough times to have formed opinions about it, "that the two of you are going to end up agreeing with each other most of the time if you ever actually listen to what the other one is saying."
Both Weiss and Daikon looked at him with expressions that suggested they found this observation unwelcome.
"Anyway," Yang said brightly, sliding between them with the practiced ease of someone who has become very good at redirecting energy in motion, "why are we at the docks specifically?"
Roy opened his mouth.
Yang looked at him. "That was rhetorical."
"I was going to say—"
"I know what you were going to say."
"You couldn't possibly—"
"Roy," Yang said, in the tone she appeared to reserve specifically for him — warm and slightly dangerous at the same time, like sunlight through a magnifying glass — "I promise I will make it up to you later. Whatever you want."
Roy appeared to perform a rapid calculation involving the reliability of this promise against the wisdom of completing his sentence.
"Whatever I want?" he said, which was not quite agreement but was the shape of it.
Yang's smile had the quality of a trap that has closed. "Whatever you want."
Roy looked at Odyn.
Odyn looked at the middle distance.
"I'll... stay quiet," Roy decided.
Ruby, walking beside Odyn, pressed her lips together against a laugh.
Odyn, who had been doing the same, glanced down at her, and the expression that passed between them was the quick, wordless kind — the one that says are you seeing this and yes, I'm seeing this without requiring either thing to be said aloud.
Weiss cleared her throat with the authority of someone who would prefer everyone refocus. "In any case," she said, "students from Vacuo should be arriving by ship today. As a representative of Beacon—"
"She wants to spy on the competition," Daikon said again.
The line of electricity that formed between Weiss's expression and Daikon's face was nearly visible.
"I could actually see them competing," Roy noted, "if certain people hadn't insisted we were only here for the cultural enrichment."
"Roy," Yang said.
"I stayed quiet for a full two minutes," he said. "That felt like sufficient contribution."
The crime scene appeared before any of them quite registered what they were looking at.
A storefront with its window in pieces. Yellow tape across the door. The particular, organized stillness of a police investigation that was past its first hour. Ruby stopped walking and the group compressed behind her the way groups do when the person at the front stops without warning.
"Excuse me," she said, to one of the officers near the tape. "What happened here?"
The officer looked at her the way adults sometimes looked at students — not unkindly, but with the mild disconnection of someone who has not quite registered that the question deserves a full answer. "Robbery. Second dust shop hit this week." He turned back to his partner. "Whoever it is, they're not after lien. Left the cash completely untouched."
"Doesn't make sense," the second officer agreed. "Who needs that much Dust?"
"Maybe someone building something," the first said. "Or someone's building an army."
"White Fang," the second officer said, with the resigned tone of someone filling in the obvious blank.
Hailfire had been listening and stepped forward. "Will this cause significant disruption to the festival preparations, officers?"
Both policemen looked at her. Something in their expressions shifted — a subtle recalibration, the kind that happens faster than thought when a person registers something they don't like.
"We'll manage," the first officer said, with a pleasantness that had a quality to it. An edge behind the surface. He looked at her pointedly ears and smiled with his mouth only. "Why don't you leave this to the professionals, miss? Don't need civilians — and especially not your kind — getting involved in police business."
The group went very still.
Ruby's expression went through several phases rapidly and arrived at something she had no intention of managing.
"Excuse me?" she said.
"Ruby," Odyn said quietly, beside her.
"She didn't do anything — she was just asking a question—"
"We heard it," the second officer said, his tone taking on the particular laziness of someone who believes they are operating from a position of unexamined authority. "Your friend with the ears. These ones aren't human or Faunus, so they can't exactly — understand the way we do things. Best they stay back and let the grown-ups handle it."
"They understand everything," Ruby said, her voice beginning to climb. "They understand more than you, actually, considering that you're—"
Odyn's hand came to rest on her shoulder.
She stopped.
Not because the touch was restraining — it wasn't, it was the lightest possible contact, a presence rather than a hold. But because of the specific quality of his stillness, which was the stillness of someone performing a very deliberate act of will and would appreciate company in doing so.
She looked at him.
His face was angled away from her, toward the officers. The line of his jaw was very controlled. His eyes, when they met the officer's, had the particular quality of amber that reminded Ruby of something — of a fire that has been deliberately banked and has not stopped being a fire.
"We appreciate your time," he said. The words were entirely civil and entirely flat. "Come on, everyone."
He turned.
The group followed.
And Ruby followed Odyn, and it was only when they were half a block away and she could no longer see the crime scene that she registered how tightly her own hands had been closed.
They had walked far enough from the docks that the confrontation had some distance to breathe before Odyn stopped and turned around.
"Ruby," he said, "Weiss, Yang, Blake — all of you." He looked at his teammates and then at the others. "I apologize for what just happened. You shouldn't have had to witness that."
"Don't apologize for that," Yang said, and her voice had shed its usual bright edge. "Don't you dare apologize for that."
"It wasn't your fault," Ruby said. She was still holding herself slightly tighter than normal. "It was theirs."
"Yes," Odyn said. "But that was an ugly thing to witness and I'm sorry you had to witness it through us."
Blake had been quiet for a moment. "That kind of thing," she said carefully, "happens more than people think. To a lot of different groups."
"I know," Odyn said.
"We can see that," Hailfire said, and the look she gave Blake had the quality of one person recognizing something in another person's face that they have seen in their own.
It was a brief look. Neither of them commented on it. But it was there.
Weiss, who had been standing with her arms crossed and her chin slightly down, said: "Who needs that much Dust." It was not quite a question. "They mentioned the White Fang."
"The White Fang," Blake said, in the careful, contained tone of someone choosing their words with full awareness of their weight, "wouldn't necessarily explain it on their own. They've never needed that much Dust before."
"The White Fang are terrorists," Weiss said.
"The White Fang are—" Blake stopped. "They're people who felt they had no other option. That doesn't make the violence right. But it's not the same thing as being born violent."
"They want to wipe humanity off Remnant—"
"Some of them do," Blake said. "Some of them joined because they watched someone they loved get treated the way that officer just treated Hailfire. Those are not the same people."
Weiss's expression was complicated in the specific way of someone who wants to argue and has encountered an argument they can't simply dismiss.
"Weiss," Khanna said, with the even, careful patience of someone who has made a decision to try a different approach, "what would it take for you to hurt someone?"
Weiss blinked. "Pardon?"
"Not in combat. In life. If you decided — genuinely decided — that harming someone was the right thing to do. What would it take for you to arrive at that decision?"
Weiss was quiet.
"Most people don't arrive there," Khanna continued. "Until they've been hurt enough, for long enough, without anyone intervening, that the hurt becomes something else. I'm not saying that excuses violence. I'm saying that understanding why something exists is different from endorsing it."
The silence that followed was the kind that means something has landed.
It was broken — as silences at the Vale docks tended to be broken — by shouting.
The monkey Faunus came off the boat at a dead run, leaped onto a lamppost with the easy, unthinking athleticism of someone for whom height is simply another axis of movement, and paused at the top to peel a banana. He did this with the expression of a person who is genuinely enjoying himself, which under the circumstances took a specific variety of self-assurance.
The detective who was not on the ground recovering his dignity launched a pebble at the lamppost. The monkey Faunus dropped his banana peel, which found its landing spot with impressive accuracy.
Then he was gone, sprinting down the street and past the assembled group in a blur of blond hair and golden tail, and the wink he delivered to Blake on the way through was so precisely timed that it left the impression of someone who had rehearsed it, which he probably hadn't.
"There goes your competition, Weiss," Yang said.
Weiss straightened up. "After him."
What followed was a brief chase that ended, as chases often end, with the pursued party having already vanished and the pursuing party arriving at a corner to find an unrelated obstacle.
The obstacle was a girl.
She was lying on the ground where Weiss had apparently intersected with her trajectory, and she was looking up at the assorted teenagers gathered above her with an expression of complete contentment, as though being knocked over by a white-haired girl who had been running after a monkey Faunus was simply the natural way to spend a Friday afternoon.
"Sal-u-ta-tions!" she said.
Her name was Penny.
This was the first thing she told them, and she told it to all of them separately and then to the group collectively and then again to Odyn specifically, who received this information with the attentive gravity of someone who had decided that anything said with that much sincerity deserved a proportional response.
"It is very nice to meet you, Penny," he said.
Penny appeared to find this delightful.
What followed was the standard exchange of names, during which Penny catalogued each of them with the particular attentiveness of someone who was very good at this specific thing and knew it. When Khanna finished the introductions, Penny announced that it was a pleasure to meet all of them, and Weiss pointed out that she had already said that, and Penny agreed that she had.
"So you're here for the tournament?" Yang asked.
"That's correct! I'm combat ready!" Penny said, with a nod of absolute conviction.
Weiss looked her over with the appraisal of someone running a professional assessment. "You hardly seem the type."
"Yeah, I don't want to hear that from the girl in the dress," Khanna said.
"It is a combat skirt—"
"Yeah!" Ruby had appeared at Weiss's side with a low-five that Weiss accepted before either of them quite decided to. They both registered what had happened simultaneously and looked at each other with the mild surprise of people discovering a consensus they hadn't planned.
Ruby went back to her position.
Weiss smoothed her skirt.
Penny, during this, had turned to look at the group with the particular quality of attention that registers everything while appearing to register nothing, and her gaze had moved from face to face and then settled for a moment on the space between Ruby and Odyn — on the three inches of distance between them that had a quality to it, the specific quality of three inches that has been maintained unconsciously across a considerable portion of a long afternoon.
She smiled at nothing in particular.
"Do you know the boy from the boat?" Weiss asked, holding up a sketch that was — charitably — a loose interpretation of the individual she was describing.
Penny looked at it. "The who?"
"The filthy—" Weiss stopped as Khanna's expression redirected her. "The—" She tried again. "Him. The Faunus with the tail who ran past us."
"Weiss," Blake said.
"I was not—"
"You were about to say something."
"I was about to describe him accurately."
"The accuracy," Blake said, "was going to be the problem."
Something in Blake's voice had acquired a quality it didn't usually have — the thin quality of something held very close to a limit. Weiss registered it and seemed, for once, to also register the source.
"He's a person," Blake said. "Whatever else he is, he's a person. Would it be so difficult to start from that?"
"Why is this—" Weiss started, and then, because she was intelligent enough to hear the end of her own sentence before she finished it, she stopped. "I'm not—" She tried again. "I've experienced what they're capable of. What the White Fang is capable of. Directly. My family has been—"
"Targeted," Blake said. "I know." Her voice had gone quieter, which somehow made it more present. "I know, Weiss."
"Then you understand why—"
"Yes," Blake said. "I understand exactly why. Which is also why I know that categorizing every Faunus by the White Fang is the same reasoning that Cardin uses about every species he doesn't like. And you're better than Cardin."
Weiss opened her mouth.
Closed it.
The afternoon held this for a moment.
Then she walked forward, and the conversation was — not resolved, not concluded, but suspended in the careful way of something that will need to be returned to, which was, perhaps, the most honest kind of ending.
Later, in the dormitory —
Darkness settled over Beacon in the way it settled over institutions that have been lit by the same light for long enough to have become the dark's architecture — by degrees, by familiar shapes, by the specific silence of several hundred people who have been inside all day and are now in the final stages of deciding to be horizontal.
The argument that had been suspended since the docks had not, it turned out, remained suspended.
It had simply waited.
"I don't understand why this is causing such a problem," Weiss said, from her position near the window. The conversation had found them here, in Team RWBY's dormitory, with Odyn and his team present as witnesses and, occasionally, as reluctant referees.
"That," Blake said, from across the room, "is the problem."
What followed was the kind of argument that has no clean resolution because it is not, at its core, about a fact that can be checked. It was about two people who had been hurt by the same conflict from opposite sides, and who were each right about their own experience and therefore wrong about the whole picture, and who had arrived at the dormitory at the end of a long day with less composure than either of them generally preferred to operate with.
Weiss's voice rose. Blake's voice went colder. The content narrowed to an exchange of positions that both of them had already stated and restated without the other one quite hearing it, because that is what happens when two people are both trying to be understood rather than understanding.
And then Blake said: "Maybe we were just tired of being pushed around."
The silence was absolute.
Weiss stepped back as though the sentence had physical mass.
Blake looked at her own hands.
She looked around the room — at Ruby's expression, at Yang's, at Odyn's careful, still face — and she understood, with the particular clarity that arrives in the moment after you've said something that can't be unsaid, what she had done.
She moved before anyone had time to respond.
The door opened and closed, and the room held the echo of her departure.
Ruby was on her feet instantly.
"Blake—"
The hallway was empty.
She stood in the doorway and looked at the space where her teammate had been, and then looked at Odyn, who had followed her to the door. He put his hand on her shoulder — the same gesture, the same quality of steadiness it always had.
"She needs to move," he said, quietly. "Not away from you. Just — through it. There's a difference."
"I should have—"
"You couldn't have stopped it," he said. "It needed to happen. Not pleasantly. But it needed to happen." He looked at her. "We'll find her in the morning."
Ruby looked at the empty hallway for another moment. Then she let out a breath that had been held since the docks, and turned back into the room.
Yang was already sitting on the floor. Roy had joined her. Flare was beside him and Hailfire was beside her, and the arrangement had the particular ease of people who don't need to explain why they're sitting on someone else's dormitory floor.
Weiss was at the window, looking out at the academy lights, with the expression of someone who is in the beginning stages of understanding something they don't like.
Ruby crossed to Odyn and, without entirely deciding to, hugged him.
He went still for half a second — surprised, she thought — and then his arms came up and settled around her with the careful warmth of someone who doesn't do this often and means it when they do.
"Thank you," she said, into the vicinity of his shoulder. "For today. All of it."
"Of course," he said.
She felt, rather than heard, the quiet exhale that meant he meant it.
The next morning —
The text arrived at something that Ruby's scroll identified as 7:43 AM and that Ruby's consciousness identified as an unreasonable hour. She surfaced from sleep, located the scroll through the ambient sense of where she had left it, and opened the message.
Morning. How are you holding up? Last night was hard on everyone.
She looked at the message for a moment.
She looked at the ceiling.
She looked at Blake's empty bunk, which had not been slept in.
She typed: Better now. Still sad about Blake. I keep thinking I should have done something differently. She paused, then added: Thank you for checking on me. She sent it.
The reply came while she was still looking at the screen.
You couldn't have stopped it. What happened needed to happen. The question now is what comes after. A pause, then: Do you want help looking for her?
Yes, she typed immediately. Then: Can we meet in Vale at eleven? I'll bring Yang and Weiss.
I'll be there. I'll try to reach Khanna and her team but they may be with Professor Arkham today.
Okay. Thank you, Odyn.
A longer pause this time, and then: You don't have to thank me for that.
Ruby smiled at her scroll in her pajamas in the quiet dormitory at 7:43 AM, which was — she recognized — the kind of thing that would be extremely useful ammunition for Yang if Yang were awake to see it. Yang was not awake. Blake's bunk was empty. Weiss was a motionless shape under her covers. The room was very quiet.
Ruby kept smiling anyway, because she was in a space where it was permitted.
She got up and went to the bathroom and closed the door and started the shower, and the ordinary morning sounds of getting ready wrapped around her and the day began.
Vale, midmorning —
Ruby arrived at the meeting point exactly four minutes late, slightly out of breath, with Yang and Weiss a half-step behind her.
"What gives, Rubes?" Yang said. "You're never late."
"I overslept," Ruby said, which was technically true and also entirely insufficient as an explanation, but she was committed to it.
She turned at the sound of footsteps and her expression did the thing that certain expressions do when they are reacting to a person rather than a situation — immediate, specific, slightly warmer than the situation strictly required.
"Hey, Odyn! Over here!"
Weiss raised an eyebrow with the precision of someone filing evidence.
Yang's smirk was surgical.
"So," Yang said, to no one in particular, "what's the story there, Rubes?"
"There's no story," Ruby said, with the specific emphasis of someone who has said this before and expects to say it again. "He offered to help look for Blake. The more people we have, the better the chances of finding her."
"And you just happened to be texting him at eight in the morning."
"I was not—" Ruby stopped. "How do you know about that?"
"You're smiling the same way you were this morning when you thought no one was watching."
"I wasn't — Yang—"
Odyn reached them before Yang could complete her tactical operation, which was either good timing or mercy, and possibly both. He had Roy, Hailfire, and Flare with him, and they fell into the configuration that had become familiar over the past weeks — the easy parallel of two groups that had been spending enough time together to have started moving like one.
"Weiss," Odyn said, as they started walking.
She looked at him.
"When we find Blake — and we will find her — I'd ask that you listen to what she has to say before you respond. Whatever she tells you, let her finish telling it."
Weiss was quiet for a moment. "I know," she said. "Hailfire said as much yesterday."
"I'm not repeating it to lecture you. I'm repeating it because you're going to want to respond before she's finished and it's going to take effort not to, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to decide in advance."
Weiss looked at him for a longer moment. "That's—" She seemed to be deciding something. "That's actually rather considerate."
"Don't sound so surprised," Hailfire said.
They walked.
The search occupied the middle part of the day in the way that searches do — with periods of calling and looking and finding things that were not what you were looking for, until the city had been thoroughly mapped by the particular anxiety of people walking through it while wondering about someone who was not with them.
Penny appeared twice, once from behind a display of silk scarves and once from no discernible direction at all. She was unfailingly cheerful. She was also, Odyn noted with the private attentiveness he applied to things that didn't quite fit their context, impossible to sense before she appeared. He had been tracking the ambient presence of everyone in the group since the docks — a habit so deeply embedded that he had stopped registering doing it — and Penny registered as nothing. Not faint. Not distant. Nothing. As though the usual quality that a living person carried was simply not present.
He filed this.
He said nothing.
He smiled when she offered to help and watched her move and filed what he observed, and told himself that there would be time to think about this when there were not fourteen other things requiring attention.
When Yang and Weiss had peeled away with Roy, Hailfire, and Flare to search the shopping district, and Khanna's group remained unreachable, Odyn found himself walking with Ruby and Penny through the quieter eastern streets, which was — he would admit privately — not the worst configuration the day had produced.
"She's been gone since Friday," Ruby said.
"Blake's capable," Odyn said. "Whatever she's working through, she's working through it somewhere safe."
"You don't know that."
"No," he agreed. "But I know her well enough to know she doesn't put herself in danger carelessly, and I know that the kind of thing she said last night — that came from somewhere she's been carrying for a long time. People don't run when they're panicking. They run when something finally breaks open and they need space for what's inside it."
Ruby looked at him. "Is that from experience?"
"More or less."
Penny, walking between and slightly ahead of them, turned to Ruby. "If Blake is your friend, she'll come back when she's ready. And when she comes back, she'll come back to you — not to the argument."
Ruby looked at Penny. "That's actually really wise, Penny."
Penny appeared pleased. "I have good teachers."
"Do you like Odyn?" Penny asked, turning to Ruby suddenly.
Ruby tilted her head, caught off guard. "Yeah, he's my friend."
"No, I mean—" Penny smiled with the cheerful precision of someone who has decided to be direct about something. "Do you like him."
Ruby's face arrived at red in the time it takes to blink. "Penny—"
"It's just that you look at him differently than you look at your other friends," Penny observed. "I notice things like that."
"It's not — we're — he's—" Ruby made a brief, comprehensive gesture that expressed the situation without resolving it. "We're friends," she finished.
"Friends look at each other the way you look at him?"
"Yes," Ruby said, with more conviction than accuracy.
Penny considered this. "I think I would like to have a friend I looked at that way."
Odyn, who had been walking slightly ahead and had the quality of someone who is concentrating very hard on the middle distance, said nothing.
Ruby, who was fairly certain he had heard all of that, also said nothing.
They walked.
The docks, evening —
The explosion was the kind that doesn't feel like an explosion at first — it feels like a pressure, a sound that the air makes before the sound registers, a vibration in the bones preceding the noise reaching the ears.
Ruby turned toward it. Odyn was already facing it.
"That's the cargo district," he said.
"Blake," Ruby said.
They were moving before she finished the word.
What met them at the docks was the particular organized chaos of a situation that had been someone else's plan until approximately three minutes ago. Roman Torchwick was present, which was — Ruby recognized — a name from months ago, from a robbery in the rain, from a night that felt considerably further away than it was. White Fang soldiers in their masks. Three Bullheads and their searchlights. And Blake, on the ground, getting back to her feet with the controlled urgency of someone who has just narrowly avoided something and has filed the proximity for later.
Sun Wukong was doing the specific things that a person who has been trained to fight and has decided that style and efficiency are not mutually exclusive does with a collapsible staff, which was impressive enough that Ruby registered it even through the cognitive load of a dockside battle at night.
Roman looked at the rooftop.
He looked at Ruby. He looked at Penny. He looked at Odyn.
Something in his face changed when it reached Odyn.
Ruby had seen this before — in the officers' expressions at the crime scene, in Cardin's expression in the forest, in the various moments when someone encountered the specific quality of what Odyn carried and their body registered it before their mind caught up. The crook's professional confidence underwent a very brief but very visible recalculation.
Then he smiled. "Well, hello, Red. Isn't it past your bedtime? And who are—" The sentence lost some of its momentum as he reached Odyn. He recovered it, but it cost him something.
Penny stepped forward beside Ruby.
"Ruby, get back—" Ruby started.
"I'm combat ready," Penny said, with the absolute confidence of someone who has said this before and has found it to be true.
Ruby turned to Odyn. His expression was the expression of someone managing several simultaneous inputs and directing them toward the most efficient response.
"If she needs backup," he said, and snapped his fingers.
The blades came into being around him the way light comes into being — not emerging from a source, but simply present, where they had not been a moment before. Seven of them. The quality of the light they carried was not the quality of Dust-light but something older, a luminescence that had the particular warmth of intention behind it.
"Odyn," Ruby said, and her voice had dropped to the quiet register she used when something mattered. "If you use that, they'll see what you are."
"I know," he said.
"They'll—"
"I know, Ruby." He looked at her. "I know what it costs. But you and the others are in this, and that's not a calculation I'm willing to make any other way."
She looked at him.
He looked back at her with the steady, clear quality of someone who has already decided.
The blades shifted around him, waiting.
She turned to the fight.
What followed was the kind of combat that happens when the people doing the fighting have significantly different reasons for being there.
Roman fought because he wanted to survive the evening with his operation intact, and when it became clear that this was not achievable, he switched to simply surviving the evening. The White Fang soldiers fought because they had been told to. Sun fought because it seemed obviously correct to him, and because he had the particular fighting style of someone who has decided that enjoyment and effectiveness are complementary qualities.
Blake fought because she was trying to prove something to herself, which is both the best and the most dangerous reason to fight.
Penny fought in a way that none of them were prepared for.
The swords emerged from the case on her back with the quality of something that had been waiting — not the deliberate, human quality of drawing a weapon, but something mechanical and precise and considerably larger in scale than the rest of her frame suggested. Seven blades, then more, hovering with the particular stability of things that are held in place by something other than hands. The light she gathered and discharged through them had a quality that was also not quite Dust — too coherent, too precisely directed, without the variable dispersal that Dust in combat always produced.
Odyn watched this.
He added it to what he was already filing.
He moved forward into the fight when the Bullheads multiplied and the White Fang numbers increased, and he moved with the controlled economy of someone who knows exactly what they're doing and has decided to do as little of it as necessary while achieving the required outcome. The light blades worked in coordinated arcs, and the White Fang soldiers who encountered them found that the light left no burning — only impact, only the clean conclusion of a force directive.
Roy arrived from the south before the second wave fully closed, with Hailfire behind him and Flare covering their approach. The look Roy exchanged with Odyn as he drove Roman's cane aside and stepped into the crook's guard was the look of two people who have trained together long enough to communicate combat geometry without words.
"Took your time," Odyn said.
"You weren't specific," Roy said, redirecting Roman's follow-up blow with the flat of his blade and delivering the kind of measured knockback that is designed to end an engagement rather than extend it. "I filled in the rest when I saw the smoke."
Roman hit the crate wall behind him with feeling and considered his options.
Across the docks, Penny gathered her blades into a formation that produced a coherent beam of green light that opened the first Bullhead from stem to stern with the particular efficiency of something that is very good at exactly this specific thing. Then the second. Then she pulled the third down by its own chassis, using the blade-wires as tethers, and the pilot made a decision to leave.
Roman made a decision to leave also.
He was in the air before the last White Fang soldier had finished the process of concluding that the evening had not gone as planned. Odyn tracked the escaping transport, produced one of the light blades, and threw it with the particular accuracy of someone who has been doing this for years — it caught the hull of the Bullhead at an angle, scored it, and let the craft continue. He could have done more. He chose not to.
We know you're here now, the partial damage said. Go.
He watched the craft become a point of light and then nothing, and then he lowered his hand and turned back to the docks.
The aftermath of a fight has its own quality — the specific quiet that follows when everyone who has been moving fast has stopped, and the bodies need a moment to accept that the moving fast is over. The police arrived, as police tend to arrive, after the situation had resolved itself, and occupied the docks with the organized bustle of people claiming authority over a conclusion they hadn't participated in.
Ruby and Blake found each other in the gap between the containers.
They didn't say very much. Ruby opened her arms and Blake, who had been standing with her arms at her sides and her expression the expression of someone who has been through something and hasn't decided yet what it has cost them, looked at her for a moment, and then the careful, held quality of her posture broke and she let herself be held.
"You're okay," Ruby said.
"I'm okay," Blake agreed.
Yang arrived with the particular force of someone who has been worried for an extended period of time and has converted the worry into forward momentum. She caught Blake in a hug that had considerably more structural integrity than Blake had expected and that Ruby had to sidestep to avoid being incorporated into.
"We looked everywhere," Yang said.
"I know," Blake said.
"Twelve hours," Yang said, which was the number she had apparently decided to lead with.
"I know," Blake said, and she did something that was quieter and more significant than crying — she laughed, a small, surprised laugh, the kind that means someone has just recognized that they have been cared for and are not yet sure what to do with that.
Weiss arrived last, which was a deliberate choice that everyone present recognized as deliberate.
She stood in front of Blake and appeared to be organizing herself.
"I want you to know," she said, with the particular precision of someone who has rehearsed this and is choosing the rehearsed version over the impulsive one, "that I don't care. About your history. Not in the way I was caring about it yesterday." She paused. "What I care about is whether you're going to talk to us when something this large is happening instead of—" she made a brief gesture at the general concept of running away into a dangerous port district, "this."
Blake looked at her. "I was going to explain, and you told me you didn't want to hear it."
"I know," Weiss said. "I was wrong about that." The four words appeared to cost her an amount that she was willing to pay. "What I want now is for you to come to us first. Not the person from the boat."
Sun, who was nearby, raised a hand slightly.
Weiss looked at him. "I'll get back to you."
Sun lowered his hand.
"Okay," Blake said. "I can do that."
Weiss nodded, in the manner of someone concluding a negotiation that has gone the way they needed it to go.
Then Ruby said: "Yeah! Team RWBY is back together!"
And Yang grabbed Blake from one side and Ruby launched herself from the other and the resulting reunion contained enough force to briefly displace Weiss from her carefully chosen position, which she managed by grabbing Blake's sleeve to avoid being knocked sideways, which technically made her part of it.
She appeared to register this fact.
She chose not to comment on it.
Later —
Odyn found Ruby at the end of the dock while the others were handling the various procedural requirements of a post-fight scene. She was sitting on the edge with her feet hanging over the water, watching the reflections of the harbor lights on the dark surface.
He sat beside her.
"She's okay," Ruby said.
"She is."
"And they're okay. All of them."
"Yes."
She looked at the water for a moment. "The blades," she said. "Light Magic: Light Blades of Conviction. I heard you say it. What does that — where does it come from?"
"It's a form of magical discipline," he said. "Every Arkynorean who develops the ability chooses — or is drawn toward — a particular element that becomes their primary affinity. Light is mine."
"And Hailfire?"
"Flame. Roy works primarily through Ki rather than formal magic — our fighting traditions overlap in different ways for different people." He looked at the water. "I told you I'd explain more when there was time."
"There's time now," she said.
"There is," he agreed.
He talked, and she listened, and the harbor lights moved on the water, and the city made its harbor sounds around them — cranes and cables and the distant movement of ships — and the conversation was the kind that has no agenda except the two people having it, which is the best kind.
At some point she said: "Why did you say it wouldn't matter? Before the fight — when I said they'd see what you are."
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because," he said, "there are things that are worth revealing yourself for. And the people worth protecting are the most obvious of those things." He looked at her. "That's not complicated."
"It is, though," she said. "You spent weeks being careful. You have a whole people who need you to be careful. And you were going to just—"
"Yes," he said.
"Why," she said, and it was the kind of why that already knows the answer and is asking anyway.
He didn't answer immediately. He looked at the water for a while.
"Because it wouldn't be the first time I failed someone I should have protected," he said, "and I've decided not to let that number increase if I can prevent it."
She looked at him.
He looked at the water.
"Sarai," she said.
"Yes."
The harbor was quiet around them for a moment.
"I'm sorry," she said, and meant it exactly the way it is possible to mean it — not as an erasure, not as a fix, but as a presence. I hear you. I am here. The weight you're carrying doesn't disappear but I see it.
"Thank you," he said. "For that."
She bumped her shoulder against his very lightly, the way people do when they want to say something that doesn't need words.
He didn't move away.
In a warehouse on the edge of the harbor —
Roman Torchwick had, in his professional career, encountered numerous difficult situations and had developed, across those encounters, a reliable set of metrics for assessing how badly a situation had gone. Tonight registered very high on most of those metrics.
He set down his case and looked at the three figures waiting for him.
"How very disappointing," Cinder said.
She had a way of delivering those words that made them feel like a physical thing — not loud, not sharp, but present in the room in the way that fire is present in a room, which is to say pervasively and without much regard for where you would prefer it not to be.
"The students were stronger than advertised," Roman said. "And nobody—" He pressed the point because it seemed important, and also because it was the only defense available, "—nobody told me there'd be Dark Elves in the Beacon student body."
Cinder's expression shifted by a single degree. "Dark Elves," she repeated.
"Three of them. Possibly more. The one with the dark blue hair was— the blades he produced weren't Dust-based. Not Aura. Not any kind of Semblance I've ever encountered. He—" Roman considered how to describe the particular quality of Odyn's presence in a fight. "He wasn't trying very hard, and it was still sufficient."
The figure to Cinder's left — young, male, watchful in the specific way of someone who has been trained to be still — tilted his head slightly.
"That," Cinder said, with something that was not quite pleasure but was adjacent to it, "is very interesting information, Roman." She summoned fire to her palm and let it turn slowly. "The Elves of Arcynor have been absent from the world's stage for some time. If they've chosen to send their next generation to a Beacon cohort—" She closed her hand around the fire. "Someone is expecting something."
She smiled.
It was the kind of smile that is not a good omen.
"Don't concern yourself with the Elves tonight," she said. "They'll be accounted for in time." She turned to leave. "Continue your work, Roman. Just — try not to require so much assistance next time."
Roman looked at the space she had been standing in.
"Great," he said, to no one. "That's just great."
Beacon Academy, from above —
The shattered moon was nearly full again.
It hung over the promontory in its broken, patient way — incomplete since before anyone currently walking Remnant had been born, still casting sufficient light to see by, still pulling the tides, still doing what it had always done with what it had left. Below it, Beacon's towers were lit in amber and pale green, and the students inside them were sleeping, or studying, or sitting on dormitory floors with their teammates and talking about things that mattered.
Ruby Rose was at her window.
She was not looking at the moon, particularly. She was looking at the way it caught the rooftop below her, at the shadows it made of ordinary things, at the particular quality of a night that has been difficult and ended better than it started.
She was also thinking about light blades and the people worth revealing yourself for, and about the way he had said that's not complicated in the tone of someone for whom it genuinely wasn't, and about the specific warmth of a shoulder against hers at the end of a dock at the end of a long evening.
She was not thinking about any of this romantically, she told herself, with the particular insistence of someone making this clarification for what was probably not the last time.
She was just — taking stock.
Of her team, back together. Of a city that had looked at her friends' ears tonight and found something to fear, and of how much she wanted that to change, and of what it might cost to try and change it.
Of Odyn, who had stood at the edge of a harbor fight with seven blades of light around him and said: that's not a calculation I'm willing to make any other way.
She let the breath she'd been holding most of the evening out, slowly, and the night came in around her with its clean, tidal smell of harbor water and distant rain, and somewhere down the hall her teammates were sleeping, and tomorrow would be its own thing requiring its own kind of readiness.
She pulled back from the window.
She was ready.
End of Chapter Seven
To be continued in Chapter Eight: Best Day Ever — The Food Fight
The things that break open do not always break badly. Sometimes a long-held silence breaks and what comes through the gap is something that has needed the air for a long time. Sometimes a careful disguise breaks and what is revealed is simply the truth of what was always there. The hardest part is not the breaking. The hardest part is deciding, in the moment after, what you choose to do with the light.

Battle theme- Shumatsu Koku (Black Clover)

Ending song: (don't know the name of it lol) Shonen Onmyouji ending 1
Just replace the characters with the characters of this story, the rwby characters and the OC's.
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Hopefully you guys enjoyed this chapter.. it was one of the longer ones I've written. If the fight scenes bother you or seem rushed, I tried and am still trying to get better at writing fight scenes so bear with me please lol.
As I've stated earlier, the humans and Dark Elves don't really like each other in this story, so I hope I somewhat communicated that fact. This will be delved into more as.the story progresses. I planned on having Ruby being the only one to know about Odyn & the others being dark elves but after thinking about it, I decided it'd be better if everyone in team Rwby knew. Obviously humans who are older know, which is why Roman knew what they were. Cinder has only heard of them. Anyways next chapter we begin Volume 2 of the Rwby cannon! Until then see ya!
Next time:Chapter 7- Best Day Ever; Food Fight!