Hey guys, I'm back with another chapter! So last chapter left off with a cliffhanger... this chapter will be covering volume 2 episodes 5 and 6. Because of the Elves and saiyans in the story certain events down the line in this story will be different. Concerning the direction of the story, it will branch off after the finale of Volume 3. I will still incorporate mistral and Atlas into the story but.. the flow of events will be different.
All that means is that circumstances surrounding their mission to Haven Academy will be different. As for Pyrrha dying vs not dying.. I have something in mind for that. All I can say is it's an option I haven't seen anyone take yet.
Before we start, which opening(s) would you guys like for volume three? Here's a few options and feel free to PM me for leave a comment on which one(s) I should use:
Option 1:
Song 4 U - Tales of Xilia 2
Option 2:
Akeboshi- Lisa (Demon Slayer- Mugen Train Arc)
Option 3:
Trails of Cold Steel Opening 1
Option 4:
Hibana- Tales of Arise
Feel free to let me know which opening you guys would like me to use or leave a suggestion for one!
Anyways, I don't own Black Clover, DBS, or Rwby and their characters. Those are property of Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation, Yuki Tabata/Studio Pierot, Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. The only characters I do own are the original characters (oc's) and I have permission from a friend to use Tarro and Daikon, those are his characters.
Insert opening: Naruto opening 8- Re:member
Visuals: Main Cast of this Story
Chapter Eleven: Painting the Town - Sovereign of the Dark Elves
Penny was looking at her hands the way someone looks at something they have made their peace with but have not stopped feeling the weight of.
"I was made," she said again, as though the word's repetition might help Ruby fully absorb what it contained. "Most girls are born. I was constructed. I am the world's first synthetic being capable of generating an Aura." She turned her palm over, showing the torn skin, the metal beneath. "I am not real - not the way you are real."
Ruby was quiet for a moment.
Then she took Penny's hands in both of hers and held them, metal and all, with the particular quality of someone who has made a decision and is communicating it through the action rather than the words that will follow.
"Penny," she said, "I have nuts and bolts inside me too. Well - not literally. But the point is - what's inside a person isn't what makes them real." She looked up at her friend's face. "You're standing here. You talked to me. You ran when you were scared and you came back when I needed you and you stopped a truck with your hands so I wouldn't get hurt. That's not nothing. That's not not real."
Penny blinked.
"Ruby is right," Odyn said. He had been letting her lead, because this was hers to lead. "What a person is made of - literally, materially - is not what defines them. The question worth asking isn't what's inside you. It's what you do with whatever you are." He met Penny's wide-eyed gaze steadily. "And what you did today was protect someone who matters to you. That is a real thing, done by a real person."
Penny looked between them.
"I don't..." She stopped. Started again. "You're both taking this considerably better than I anticipated."
"Did you think we would run?" Ruby asked.
"I thought-" Penny paused. "I thought most people would."
"We're not most people," Ruby said, and she said it with the absolute simplicity of someone stating the weather. "Right, Odyn?"
"Definitively not," he agreed.
Something shifted in Penny's expression - the specific shift of someone receiving something they had been steeling themselves to not receive, and finding that their preparation was unnecessary, and not quite knowing what to do with the surplus.
Then she grabbed Ruby, and the hug that followed had the enthusiastic completeness of someone who has been storing it.
"You're the best friend anyone could have!" Penny announced into Ruby's hair, shaking her slightly. "Oh, and you too, Odyn - I apologize, I should have-"
"It's fine," Odyn said.
"-you were very kind, and I should have included you immediately-"
"Genuinely fine," he said, with the mild patience of someone who did not require the hug.
Penny released Ruby with the beaming certainty of someone whose world has just rearranged itself into a better configuration. "Oh! I can see why my father would want to protect you, Ruby. You're like - a delicate flower, but a very brave delicate flower-"
"I'm not sure delicate is the right-"
"-and you," she continued, turning to Odyn, "are very much like what I imagined a knight from the old stories would be like, except you're real."
Odyn appeared to consider this. "I'll take that."
Ruby smiled at him. He looked at her. The specific quality of the look was the one he generally produced when she smiled at him - attentive, brief, containing something that was not in the smile's immediate response time.
"Your father built you," Ruby said, turning back to Penny. "All by himself?"
"Almost. He had assistance from General Ironwood."
Odyn pressed two fingers briefly to his forehead. "That does not surprise me," he said.
"No?"
"My parents have told me a great deal about the general over the years. Ironwood applies exceptional intelligence to specific goals in ways that are occasionally brilliant and occasionally-" He paused. "-this."
"Is this a problem?" Penny asked, with the genuine curiosity of someone who has not quite developed the instinct for when things are diplomatically complicated.
"Not a problem," Odyn said. "Just something to account for."
"Check down there!" a voice called, from the end of the alley.
Penny turned immediately.
"Stay hidden," she said, dropping her voice. "Both of you. Please - I don't want you to be in trouble because of me."
"Penny-" Ruby started.
"I mean it." Something in Penny's expression had the specific quality of sincerity that is not performed - the kind that understands exactly what it's asking and asks anyway. "Let me handle this. You'll only make it worse for yourselves if they find you." She paused. "Please?"
Ruby looked at Odyn.
He nodded, once. Let her do it.
"Okay," Ruby said quietly.
"Thank you." Penny stood, smoothed her coat, and turned toward the approaching footsteps with the particular composure of someone who has had to perform this specific kind of composure before.
Odyn drew Ruby back toward the dumpster - closed, for now - and they waited while Penny greeted the soldiers with her characteristic sal-u-tations and the explanation that she had been alone all day and had no idea what girl or boy they might be referring to. She hiccupped once, which was the specific hiccup of someone telling a deliberate untruth, and recovered it so quickly that only someone who had been observing her carefully would notice.
The soldiers accepted her account. They were concerned about her hands. She said it was just a scratch. They accepted this too, with the resigned quality of people who know they have limited leverage with someone whose father they answer to.
"Penny, your father isn't going to be happy about this," one of them said.
"Yes, sir," Penny said.
"Please, come with us."
"Yes, sir."
Her footsteps departed. The alley went quiet.
Ruby was looking at the space where Penny had been with the expression she had when she was feeling something she hadn't found the words for yet.
"She'll be alright," Odyn said.
"I know." A beat. "I just want to actually see her again, rather than just believing it."
"Before the tournament ends," he said, "we'll see her again. I'm fairly certain of it."
Ruby looked at him. "Are you being practically certain or emotionally certain?"
"Practically," he said. "She is competing in the tournament and we're both going to be there. The mathematics of that produce a very high probability of seeing her."
"Okay," Ruby said. "Good." She shifted her weight. "Also, you know we're still in a dumpster."
"I'm aware."
"We should probably get out of the dumpster."
"Also aware."
He was already lifting the lid when the specific sound of something small and fast with many feet made Ruby's exit from the dumpster considerably more rapid than his. The result - being entirely predictable, given the geometry of the situation - placed her in his arms again, with the lid coming down behind them.
They stood in the alley.
Ruby processed the situation in approximately the same amount of time as before, arrived at the same conclusion, and went approximately the same shade of red.
"O-Odyn-"
"Yes," he said, and set her on her feet with care and a blush that he made no particular effort to conceal. "I know. I'm sorry - I didn't think - it was reflex-"
"No, it's - it's fine - I know it was-" She was not quite looking at him. He was not quite looking at her. "Th-Thank you. For the reflex."
"Of course," he said.
The alley held the particular quality of a silence between two people who are both acutely aware of it.
"We should," he said.
"Yes," she agreed.
"Check on the others."
"Definitely."
They walked out of the alley side by side and did not discuss the position they had just been in, which was a form of discussion in itself.
Junior's Club - simultaneously
The bar was not at its best in the middle of the day, which was when bars tend to be most honest about what they actually are. Junior had done nothing wrong, technically, except operate a business that provided Yang Xiao Long with a reason to return, which was the specific kind of mistake that could not have been predicted and could not now be avoided.
She came through the door with the energy of the sun arriving through a window that was hoping to stay dark.
Roy, who had come in behind her, looked at the room - the Henchmen stocking shelves, the bear-headed DJ who appeared to be actively attempting to become part of the furniture, the expressions of approximately fourteen people who had all been quietly hoping Yang would not be back and were now processing the fact that she was - and made the assessment of someone who has learned to read rooms quickly.
He leaned toward Neptune. "Define friend for me," he said. "In the context of what we just walked into."
"I think," Neptune said, watching Yang establish her presence at the bar with the confidence of someone claiming territory, "that friend is being used loosely here."
"Significantly," Roy agreed.
They followed her to the bar, because there was nothing else to do.
Junior came out from behind the dividing section with the expression of someone deciding how to manage a situation that did not offer many management options.
"Blondie," he said. "You're here."
"Because you still owe me a drink," Yang said.
"I-" He appeared to consider arguing this and thought better of it. "Why are these two with you?"
"Backup," Yang said.
"I'm questioning the characterization," Roy said, "but yes."
Junior looked at him. Then at his ears. Then at the eyes. He performed the calculation of someone who has been in Vale long enough to have heard things, and who has now encountered one of those things in person and is adjusting his risk assessment accordingly.
"Right," he said. "What do you want, Yang?"
"Information," she said. "About Torchwick."
Junior sat down and put his glass on the counter. He looked at it. He looked at Yang. He looked at the far wall, which was less complicated than either of the first two things.
"I don't know anything," he said.
"How do you know nothing?"
"Because I haven't talked to him. Haven't seen him. Not since the night you first came in." He leaned forward. "He paid up front. I lent him my men. None of them came back."
Neptune leaned over Roy's shoulder. "So where did they go?"
Roy moved Neptune back with a single hand, without particular violence. "She's handling it," he said.
Neptune retreated without argument. He had, over the course of the afternoon, arrived at a fairly complete understanding of the social geometry here, and it had told him several things, one of which was that Yang Xiao Long was not presently available to be impressed by Neptune Vasilias, and that the reason for this was currently sitting approximately eighteen inches to his left maintaining a composed expression.
"They never came back," Yang said. "Which tells us what?"
"That Torchwick either disposed of them or moved them somewhere I don't know about," Junior said. "Both of which are things I'm very happy to not know about, by the way."
Yang looked at him for a long moment with the specific look of someone confirming that they have received everything available. Then she stood.
"Roy. Neptune. Let's go."
Roy was already on his feet.
Neptune started to say something to the twins at the far end of the bar. The twins produced identical expressions of absolute indifference. Neptune reconsidered.
"They're not interested," Roy said, passing him.
"I got that."
"Just confirming."
Outside, Yang put on her helmet and turned to look at the Scroll in her hand, where Blake's signal was arriving - not words, just coordinates, and in the background of the line, the specific sound of Sun Wukong encountering something large and moving.
She looked at Roy.
"Hold on," she said.
He took his position behind her, because there was no other practical option and because the Scroll coordinates were already uploading to the bike's navigation.
She accelerated.
Abandoned warehouse - the White Fang meeting
The building had the quality of somewhere that had been built for one purpose, abandoned, and then repurposed for something its architects would not have sanctioned. The White Fang moved through it with the organized efficiency of people who have done this before - crates stacked, positions established, the whole apparatus of a recruiting effort conducted with the serious energy of people who believe in what they are doing.
Blake and Sun stood in the line of new recruits with the particular stillness of people whose exit strategy has not yet fully materialized.
Baron and Flare were on the roof.
Roman Torchwick was on the stage.
This was not, Blake acknowledged, the sequence of events she had hoped for.
He was good at it, she had to admit - not to anyone, only to herself, in the specific honest privacy of a thought she would never voice. He understood the mechanics of a crowd: what they wanted to believe, what words to use to give them permission to believe it, the specific craft of making people feel that the thing they had already decided to do was not just permissible but necessary. She had watched people do this before, in the White Fang, in the years before she left. She had watched it work.
Government, military, even the schools: they're all to blame for your lot in life, he was saying. And they're all pests that need to be dealt with.
The crowd roared.
"He's heading somewhere specific with this," Sun murmured.
"I know," Blake said.
Then the curtain fell, and the Atlesian Paladin stood behind it with the White Fang's mark on its shoulder, and Blake understood two things simultaneously: what they were planning to do, and how little time was left before they did it.
"Blake," Baron's voice, quiet, arriving through the channel she had not known she had until Baron had used it for the first time and she had been very startled by the experience of hearing a voice in her head that was not her own, "we're ready. Flare has your opening whenever you need it."
"Thirty seconds," Blake thought back, which she had been told was sufficient and which she hoped was true.
She turned to Sun. "We're getting an opening. When it comes, move."
"Where?"
"Out."
Sun looked toward the stage. Roman had spotted them - she could see the moment it happened, the specific way his attention settled on a point in the crowd that did not belong to the pattern of the crowd. The calculation behind his eyes.
"Um," Sun said.
"I see it," Blake said.
She counted.
The power went out.
The resulting darkness was absolute for approximately one second and functionally useful for the two seconds after that, which was enough for Blake to move toward the window and for a slash she had not made to open it from the outside.
Baron.
They went through.
What followed was the specific quality of a chase that has too many participants and insufficient coordination, which is to say: it was chaotic in the way that only things involving a mechanized forty-ton battle suit and six teenagers on rooftops can be chaotic.
Roy arrived on the scene from the highway side, which was either well-timed or the result of Yang's motorcycle handling being exactly what it needed to be. He looked at the Paladin. He looked at Blake and Sun running across the rooftops with Baron and Flare flanking them. He looked at Yang.
"I'll slow it down," he said.
"Try not to be reckless," she said.
He jumped off the back of the bike while it was still moving.
Yang watched him go and made the expression she made when she was choosing to admire rather than criticize something.
He landed on top of the Paladin in the specific way of someone who had planned the trajectory - not recklessly, exactly, but with the calm certainty of someone for whom height is not a meaningful complication. He found the auxiliary propulsion housing, drove his blade in, and spoke the words.
Lightning is not quiet when properly channeled. It speaks with the voice of something that does not ask permission. The current that moved through the Paladin's secondary systems did so with the confidence of something that has been told exactly where to go and has gone there.
He backflipped clear before the seizure completed.
He landed behind Yang on the bike.
She gave him a look.
"You did that very confidently for someone who'd never ridden a motorcycle before last week," she said.
"I calculated the trajectory," he said.
"That's what I thought." She looked back at the road. "Thank you."
"Of course," he said.
The Paladin recovered. Of course it did. It was an Atlesian Paladin, not a practice dummy.
Neptune had his weapon out - the gun-spear configuration, which was either more versatile than it looked or simply a weapon in search of an appropriate context. He fired. Sun was airborne, doing what Sun did when he was worried, which was move and make as much noise as doing so required. Roy redirected several improperly aimed missiles with a lateral swing of his blade.
The chase moved to the highway with the general quality of a situation that has acquired its own momentum.
Weiss and Daikon arrived from the CCT direction with the Schnee data and the specific energy of two people who have been in each other's company for several hours and have arrived at a point of comfortable, productive irritation.
"She's going to ask me to do it," Weiss said, watching the Paladin through the scope of what she could see from the highway embankment.
"Yes," Daikon said.
"And I'll do it."
"Obviously."
"I'd just like to note for the record that this was not in the original plan."
"Very little of today was," Daikon said. "Are you ready?"
She rolled her rapier's revolver and confirmed the glyph alignment with the specific efficiency of someone who has been preparing for this since she picked up the weapon. "Yes."
"Then stop narrating and start doing."
She gave him the look she gave him when she found him most irritating, which was a look he had learned to recognize as the one she wore when he was most correct.
"Fine," she said.
She went.
The opening Daikon created - a short burst of compressed ki that flattened into a smokescreen at the base of the Paladin's leg - was precise and clean, the kind of assistance that says I created this space, what you do with it is yours. Weiss took the space and did exactly what she had been trained to do with it, which was use the rapier's blade as an anchor and the glyph the blade summoned as the mechanism, and let the ice do the rest.
The Paladin hit the ice wrong.
It tilted.
It fell.
Weiss was already clear of the fall line, because knowing where to be when something large goes wrong is the first practical lesson of being small.
The robot crashed off the highway ramp and landed below with the particular finality of something that has run out of its own momentum.
The group converged on the crash site the way groups converge when everyone has been doing different things in the same general direction and has now arrived at the same place.
Ruby and Odyn from the east. Weiss and Daikon from the highway ramp. Yang from the highway itself. Blake and Sun from the rooftop nearest the crash. Baron and Flare from the side-street approach. Khanna and Hailfire from the direction of the old factory district, which was a story they would tell later.
And, from the shadows of the alley mouth adjacent to the crash site, an arrow made of pure lightning that hit the Paladin's sensor array at the precise moment it was attempting to reacquire its targets.
Nobody looked for the source of the arrow. There were more immediate priorities.
The Paladin was down but not done. Roman, inside the cabin, was already running the recovery sequence with the specific frustration of someone who has done this more than once today.
Ruby looked at Odyn.
"My team has your blind spots," he said. "Go."
She went.
What followed was the kind of fight that doesn't look like a strategy because each individual element of it looks like improvisation. Ruby with her speed. Blake with her semblance and her shadows. Yang with the specific force of someone who has been waiting for a clear target. Weiss with her glyphs - the acceleration glyph under Blake, the icicle formation under the Paladin's foot, the clockwork precision of someone who has been training for this since she could hold the rapier.
Odyn kept his promise. He moved along the fight's periphery and covered the lines that opened - the missile trajectory that would have caught Weiss in the back, the second arm that the Paladin had not, technically, lost yet and was raising toward Ruby, the ground clearance that Roy needed to get his next move into position.
He caught the arm.
His hands against the Paladin's fist, braced, the force of it distributed through his body and into the earth, which cracked in a specific radial pattern. It held for the three seconds it needed to hold.
"Now," he said, and Blake and Weiss went in.
Left arm: severed.
The robot staggered.
Yang hit it from behind.
Yang made the mistake, which was not a mistake exactly - it was the specific consequence of fighting with everything you have in the moment when you have it - of getting between the Paladin and a structural column. The robot's punch hit her with the residual force of a machine that has been fighting longer than its designers anticipated and has started applying force less precisely as a result.
She hit the ground.
Roy's expression did something that was not anger, exactly. Anger has heat. This was something colder than anger, and more deliberate.
"This ends," he said, and it was not addressed to anyone in particular.
He moved.
Khanna and Hailfire hit the Paladin from the left and the right simultaneously - Hailfire's shield catching the undercarriage, Khanna's hammer finding the joint where the right leg met the chassis with the specific accuracy of someone who has been assessing structural weaknesses since she was twelve years old and has not lost the habit. Daikon came in low, shoulder-checking the chassis to buy clearance, and departed before the counterattack could find him.
Odyn's blade took the remaining arm.
Baron, Flare, and one other presence - at a distance, in the shadow, not visible to anyone who wasn't specifically looking - delivered covering fire with the coordinated rhythm of people who know each other's timing.
Roman, inside the cabin, was surrounded by warning screens.
He was not, at this point, comfortable.
Yang came up off the ground with the specific quality of someone who has decided that being hit was the beginning of a process rather than the end of one. Her eyes were red. The fire around her was the color of something that has made a decision.
Roy reached her at the same moment.
"Together?" she said.
"Together," he agreed.
She hit the head.
He hit the body.
The overlap of the two impacts - fire and lightning, Yang's semblance and Roy's magic, each channeling something different through the same point at the same moment - produced the kind of release that the Paladin's designers had genuinely not accounted for, because they had not been designing against something like Roy Albanar in a state of focused intent, and certainly not in combination with something like Yang Xiao Long in the same state.
The robot did not explode dramatically. It simply ceased to be a coherent structural object, which was, in its way, more thorough.
Roman Torchwick tumbled to the ground with the controlled grace of someone who has survived worse and is not about to let this be the thing that changes that statistic. He landed, assessed, and looked up at the gathered group with the professional appreciation of someone reviewing an outcome he had not preferred.
"Well," he said, brushing his coat. "This has been fun-"
"We have questions," Roy said, and his sword was at a particular angle relative to Roman's face that conveyed the seriousness of the statement.
"Questions," Roman agreed, in the tone of someone who is buying time.
The girl appeared from the direction of the van - small, two-toned hair, an umbrella that was not an umbrella, and the specific quality of someone who has decided to be a complication.
She was good. Odyn assessed her in the three seconds before she shattered the glyph array with the flat of the umbrella's tip - fast, precise, efficient, the quality of someone who has been trained by someone who knew what they were doing. He noted it and filed it.
Roman made the exit.
The Bullhead was already in position.
By the time anyone could intercept, it was altitude.
The group stood in the aftermath of the fight with the particular quality of aftermath: the adrenaline beginning to resolve, the inventory of injuries running automatically, the frustrated silence of people who had almost had him.
"Again," Hailfire said.
"Again," Odyn confirmed.
Weiss, looking at the dispersing smoke, said: "Well, at least we-" She stopped. She frowned. She appeared to be constructing a pun. "I guess his plans really did fall apart."
The group looked at her.
Roy looked at Yang.
Yang looked at Roy.
"I'll tell her later," Yang said.
"Please," Roy agreed.
The explanation of Hyatan arrived in the way most significant things arrived in this story: unannounced, at a moment when no one had quite prepared for it.
Valvedern came first, which was how it generally worked when the queen was moving through unfamiliar public space - he appeared at the edge of the group's awareness in his crimson armor, assessed the scene with the rapid comprehensive attention of someone who had been in active command since he was nineteen, and gave way.
Hyatan did not make an entrance. She was simply there - a woman with tanned skin and lavender hair worn in the Arkynorean tradition, wearing armor that was lighter than Valvedern's and more precisely arranged, carrying herself with the quality that Odyn occasionally carried and that, seen in her, made the origin of it immediately clear. She had the warmth of someone who genuinely likes people, and the steadiness of someone who has been a queen long enough that the steadiness has become the warmth and the warmth has become the steadiness and there is no longer a distinction between them.
She looked at the group.
The Elven students, with no particular coordination, did the same thing - they knelt, all of them, with the specific quality of a reflex that is also a genuine expression.
"Your Grace," Roy said.

Insert Black Clover Ost- Almighty Descendant Licht
"My Liege," Baron said.
Hailfire: "Your Majesty."
Khanna and Flare: the Elven salute, fist to chest.
Hyatan smiled. "You need not do that here," she said. "Not in the middle of a street, in front of everyone. Please."
The kneeling resolved itself.
Ruby was staring.
She was trying not to stare, which was producing a version of staring that was technically less overt but functionally equivalent. This was Odyn's mother. She was - Ruby ran a rapid personal inventory of every impression she had ever formed about Hyatan from Odyn's letters and Berethon's brief description and Sybyrh's passing references - she was everything she had imagined and simultaneously entirely different, in the specific way that real people are always different from the versions of them that live in other people's descriptions.
"I was looking for Berethon," Hyatan said, to Odyn specifically. "Have you seen him?"
"Only briefly," he said. "Earlier, near the plaza. I lost track of which direction he went."
She sighed, with the affection of someone who has been losing track of the direction Berethon went for several decades and has found a way to make peace with this.
"I see." She looked at him - the specific way a mother looks at a child she has not seen in some months, which is a look that performs the full inventory regardless of what expression the face is otherwise wearing. "You look well."
"I am well," he said.
"You will come by this evening. I have things to say to you that I prefer to say in private."
"Of course."
"And-" Her gaze moved to Ruby, not as a search - she had clearly known exactly where Ruby was since she arrived - but as a formal acknowledgment that the looking-at was now intentional. "You will bring Miss Rose."
The group collectively understood that this was not a question.
"I-" Ruby started.
Hyatan smiled at her. It was the specific smile of someone who has been reading letters for several months and is meeting the person the letters have been about and finding them to be precisely, perfectly themselves.
"I have heard a great deal about you," she said. "I am very glad you are here."
Ruby's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again. "I'm - I'm very glad to be here, your- ma'am - your Majesty-"
"Hyatan," the queen said. "Please."
"Hyatan," Ruby said, and the word landed with the specific sound of someone receiving a permission they had not expected and meaning the receiving of it very much.
Hyatan looked at her for a moment longer. Then she turned back to Odyn, touched his arm briefly - a touch that contained everything she had looked at him with a moment ago, and the months before it, and the worry she had not expressed because she trusted him and he trusted her - and turned to go.
"This evening," she said.
"This evening," he said.
Valvedern caught Ruby's eye on his way past and gave her, very briefly, the look of someone who has been reading those same letters and has a great many opinions about what they mean. He was polite enough not to articulate any of them.
Zero, behind him, managed a small nod.
Then they were gone, moving through the city with the quality of people who know how to be in a public space without being particularly visible in it.
The group turned.
Yang was looking at Odyn and Roy with the expression of someone who has just watched something they have a considerable number of questions about.
"Right," she said. "You all have some explaining to do."
Odyn rubbed the back of his head. Roy looked at the ground. Hailfire studied the middle distance. Baron and Flare both appeared to find their boots extremely interesting.
"We know," Odyn said.
"That was your mother," Yang said.
"Yes."
"And earlier today, that was your father."
"Also yes."
"And they're-"
"Yang," Roy said, "we should probably find somewhere to sit down first."
"I agree," Weiss said. "This is clearly-"
"She called you Miss Rose," Yang said, to Ruby.
Ruby had been quiet since Hyatan left, with the specific quality of someone who is internally processing several things simultaneously and has paused the external outputs while the internal process completes.
"She knew my name," Ruby said.
"Yes," Odyn said.
"She called me Miss Rose like she - like she already knew who I was."
"Yes," he said again.
She looked at him.
He looked back at her with the steady, clear quality of someone who is not going to retreat from this, because there is nothing in it that requires retreating from.
"Your letters," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"Where's Sun?" Ruby said abruptly, and the speed of the subject change was so characteristic that it created its own kind of humor - the specific humor of someone who has reached the edge of something and has performed a tactical redirect.
Everyone looked around.
Sun and Neptune were, it turned out, not present. They had been present earlier. They were not present now.
"They're probably fine," Blake said.
"More than likely," Khanna said. "They're resourceful."
"Sun especially," Flare said.
"Neptune less so," Daikon observed, "but he'll be in the vicinity of wherever Sun is."
A noodle stand, somewhere in the vicinity -
The stand had six stools, a counter, and the specific warmth of a place that has been in the same location long enough to know what it is. Sun and Neptune occupied two of the center stools with the comfortable presence of people who have arrived somewhere that has asked nothing of them.
Neptune stirred his noodles.
"They're probably fine," he said.
"Without question," Sun agreed. "They've got-" He made a gesture that encompassed the general concept of several Dark Elves and a team of trained huntresses. "-all of that."
"Right."
"Definitely."
Neptune looked at his noodles. "Are we going to go back?"
Sun looked at his noodles. "In a minute."
"Right."
They ate. The city moved around them with its ordinary evening energy, gradually acquiring the glow of festival preparations as the light changed.
"That one elf," Neptune said. "Roy. He seems-"
"Very interested in Yang," Sun said. "Yeah."
"Is he aware of that?"
"Increasingly."
Neptune nodded. "Good. She's been flirting at him since the first day."
"I know." Sun finished a portion of his noodles. "He's just working out what to do about it."
"Fair enough." Neptune looked at his scroll. "We should probably head back."
"Probably," Sun agreed.
He didn't move.
Neither did Neptune.
"In a minute," Sun said.
"In a minute," Neptune agreed.
They ate.
The night came on.
End of Chapter Eleven
To be continued in Chapter Twelve: Extracurricular - Elven Royalty
The particular difficulty of meeting someone who has been reading your letters is that they already know which version of you exists when you are not performing yourself. This is, simultaneously, the most vulnerable and the most honest kind of meeting. Hyatan Albanar had read the letters. She had heard her son describe, across several months, the same silver-eyed girl in every third paragraph, unprompted, casual, simply present the way that important things become present before you have decided they are important.
She had read the letters.
She had formed her opinion.
Meeting Ruby Rose in the middle of a street in Vale, in the aftermath of a fight with a forty-ton robot, she had confirmed it.
The opinion was: yes.
She did not say this to anyone. She did not need to. Berethon would know from her expression when she found him. Valvedern already knew. Zero had known since the third letter.
There was an evening coming, and a conversation to be had, and things that would be said that needed to be said. That would be sufficient.
Ending- Demon Slayer Mugen Train Arc Ending theme
Visuals: Main cast of this story- Team OHRF, KDBNB, RWBY
Whew! That was a doozy writing this one, but hopefully you all enjoyed it! I decided it would be better if the elves human friends all met Hyatan at the same time, this will come into play later in the story in a pretty big way. Also, you all can tell where i'm going with the Khanna x Mercury pairing, i figured it would be more emotional if Mercury has no memory of her before regaining it. As for Emerald... I have no idea what I'll do with her lol. I've debated on whether to keep her evil or to go in a different direction with her. Maybe you guys can help me out with that?
Should Emerald stay evil?
A. Yes
or
B. No, go in a different direction with her.
If Ruby does end up turning into an elf, what should i name the particular Elf she becomes?
A. Silver Moon Elf
B. other suggestion
C. Write in Suggestion
If Ruby becomes an elf later in the story, what should her Elven name be?
1. Amethyst [Ame for short]
2. Jade
3. Scarlet
or
Write in suggestion
Anyways, that's all for now. I'll see you guys in the next update!