Chapter Nine
Best Day Ever — Food Fight?!
There is a kind of joy that exists only in the present tense —
that cannot be preserved or prepared for,
only inhabited, and only once.
I. The Beacon Cafeteria — Morning
The cafeteria had its own morning character: the specific blend of institutional food smells and thirty simultaneous conversations and the low, comfortable noise of people who had woken up and were still in the process of becoming fully themselves. Team RWBY had claimed their usual table by the east windows, where the morning light came through at a useful angle that Weiss appreciated for reading and Ruby appreciated because it was warm.
Blake was not reading.
She was looking at a notebook with the focused expression she brought to important problems, her free cat ears — still new enough that she occasionally forgot they were visible — moving slightly with concentration. Her pen had not moved in four minutes, which meant she was thinking rather than working, though the distinction was sometimes difficult to observe from the outside.
Yang appeared at her elbow with a grape she had caught from across the table without looking.
"What are you doing?"
"Going over notes," Blake said, closing the notebook with the particular speed of someone closing something they had not intended to be seen.
Yang caught another grape — this one launched from Team JNPR's table by Nora, who was operating a spoon as a catapult with the dedicated focus she brought to projects she cared about. Yang's thumb went up in acknowledgment. Nora's grin widened.
"Lame," Yang declared pleasantly, and then the binder arrived.
Ruby had been building to this. The signs, in retrospect, had been there — the slight suppressed energy of the past half hour, the way she had been watching the table like a conductor waiting for her moment. She lifted the binder with both hands and brought it down onto the table with a sound that cut through every nearby conversation simultaneously.
The cover bore the words VYTAL FESTIVAL ACTIVITIES — PROPERTY OF WEISS SCHNEE, which had been crossed out in red marker with the kind of commitment that suggested no ambivalence about the crossing out. In the same pen, underneath, someone had written: BEST DAY EVER ACTIVITIES.
"Sisters," Ruby announced, sweeping her gaze around the table with theatrical gravity, "friends." A pause, calibrated. "Weiss."
"Hey!" Weiss said, from across the table.
"Four score and seven minutes ago," Ruby continued, undeterred, "I had a dream."
"This ought to be good," Yang said to no one in particular, catching a berry.
"A dream that one day, the four of us would come together as a team and have the most fun anyone has ever had. Ever."
"Did you steal my binder?" Weiss demanded.
Ruby made peace signs with both hands. "I am not a crook."
"What are you talking about?" Blake asked, setting aside the notebook and giving Ruby the full attention of someone who has decided to inhabit the moment rather than the problem.
"I am talking," Ruby said, pointing at her, "about kicking off the semester with a bang. Classes start tomorrow. Which means today is the last day before everything gets serious again, and I have taken the time — considerable time, Weiss, very considerable time — to schedule a series of wonderful events."
"I don't know whether to be proud or scared," Weiss said, and the honesty in her voice was not entirely unaffected.
"I always kick my semesters off with a Yang," Yang said, addressing the table. "Eh? Guys? Right?"
The apple arrived from Team JNPR's direction and caught her squarely in the face. Nora's boo was heartfelt.
Yang, still glaring, picked up the apple and returned it to the universe in a direction that produced, from somewhere offscreen, a startled voice and Nora's delighted laugh.
"I don't know," Blake said, with the honesty of someone who had had an emotionally eventful two days. "I might sit this one out."
"Sit it out or not," Weiss said, and something shifted in her tone from protest to declaration — the specific quality her voice got when she had arrived at a position and was prepared to hold it, "I think however we spend today, we should spend it as a team."
It was possibly the most unambiguously warm thing she had said to the table all term. She appeared to be aware of this, and was compensating with posture.
The pie arrived before anyone could respond.
It was a direct hit, and Nora's expression as she sat back down — pointing immediately at Ren, who had his head in his palm — was the expression of someone who had done something and had already prepared their alibi. Pyrrha's hand covered her mouth. Jaune stared with the wide eyes of someone who had been at Beacon long enough to know that this was a threshold event.
Weiss stood very still with pie on her face.
Ruby looked at her.
Weiss looked at Team JNPR's table.
"Justice," Ruby said quietly, and her voice had the quality of a decision being made, "will be swift. Justice will be painful."
She picked up a carton of milk from the table. She looked at it. She crushed it in her hand.
"It will be delicious."
◆ ◆ ◆
II. The Cafeteria — The Battle of the Binder
What happened next would be described, in later accounts, in very different ways depending on who was asked. Glynda Goodwitch, when asked, would say only that it had been exactly what she expected and that her expectations had been correctly calibrated for maximum disappointment. Ozpin, when asked, would say he had been in his office and had no direct knowledge of the events. Neither of these statements was entirely accurate.
The truth was that it was magnificent.
Nora had been building the table tower for longer than anyone had realized — she had that gift, of constructing things in plain sight while people were occupied with other things — and when she declared herself queen of the castle from its apex and launched the opening volley, the cafeteria entered the kind of entropy that was either a disaster or a masterpiece depending entirely on your relationship to structure.
Team RWBY's response was immediate, coordinated, and entirely consistent with their individual characters. Ruby stomped her foot on a table with the authority of someone who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity. Yang rolled to the turkey station and deployed her fists inside them with the specific practical creativity of someone who understood tools. Blake moved with the quiet efficiency of someone operating at the edge of the chaos rather than in its center.
Weiss, pie still on her face, began organizing a counterofferation with the focused precision of someone for whom even improvised warfare had structure.
At the table nearest Team RWBY, the dragon and balrog faunus had been eating breakfast with the comfortable ease of people who had survived significantly more dangerous mornings. The first flying baguette changed the character of their situation.
Max reacted with the automatic assessment of someone who had been trained to read incoming threats and make cover decisions without pausing to categorize whether the threat was a Grimm or a carbohydrate. He was behind an overturned chair before the baguette completed its arc. Mist landed beside him with the reflexive speed of someone whose combat instincts had not yet fully registered that this was not an actual engagement.
"This is incredible," Yukikaze said, with genuine appreciation, dodging a flying melon with a movement that was technically a combat sidestep and contextually something else entirely.
"It is exactly what it is," Hon'oh said, producing her notebook from somewhere and documenting the chaos with the focused calm of someone who had decided that observation was the appropriate response to situations she had not initiated.
Gwynne watched a grape arc past her with the expression of someone tracking a ballistic trajectory as a matter of professional interest. Lethe caught it. He looked at it. He put it in his mouth.
"We are not throwing food," Kazuma said, from a position of tactical elevation on a chair, watching the engagement with crimson eyes that were performing threat assessment and arriving repeatedly at the conclusion that there was no threat, there was only Nora.
"We are absolutely not throwing food," Shoryu agreed, from approximately the same position, as a piece of pie narrowly missed his shoulder.
The engagement peaked when Nora, descending from her tower with a war cry that several students would describe in their personal journals, knocked Weiss into a pillar with a direct hit that left the heiress momentarily arranged at a dramatic angle in Ruby's arms, the pillar's impact zone creating what appeared to be a crater of plaster.
Ruby held her.
"Weiss," Ruby said, with feeling. "Weiss! Don't leave me!"
"I am fine," Weiss said, from her horizontal position.
"Nooo," Ruby said.
"Ruby, I am literally looking at you."
"The drama," Hon'oh observed from behind the barricade, closing her notebook, "is truly spectacular."
The battle concluded, as these things concluded, with Team JNPR delivered to the wall with the decisive impact of a team that had fought well and lost well — their outlines remaining in the soda and food on the cracked plaster as they slid to the floor in a tableau of cheerful defeat.
Ruby stood over the field with the silver eyes of someone who had led a campaign and seen it through. Yang descended from the ceiling through a table. Nora burped.
Nobody moved for a moment. Then the laughter started, the kind that arrives all at once in a room and fills it without reservation, and the cafeteria held it with the generosity of a space that had been converted from its usual purpose into something better.
"I love these guys," said a voice from the cafeteria entrance.
Sun Wukong was standing in the doorway, absolutely drenched in soda from the slipstream of students who had stampeded out past him, grinning with his whole face. Beside him stood Neptune Vasilias, also drenched, looking at the cafeteria's condition with the expression of someone updating their understanding of what Beacon Academy was.
"Ahahahaha!" Nora laughed, from the floor.
◆ ◆ ◆
III. The Cafeteria — Afterward
The doors opened and Glynda Goodwitch entered.
The cafeteria, which had been producing the specific sound of people who have just done something and are processing it, became a different kind of sound.
She surveyed the room. She adjusted her glasses. The telekinesis began — methodical, comprehensive, and carrying the particular quality of someone who had done this before and had strong opinions about the fact that they were doing it again.
"Children," she said, with the tone of someone who had been using this word for years and had never stopped finding it accurate, "please. Do not play with your food."
The room attempted composure. The attempt was not fully successful. Nora's burp did not help.
Ozpin's footsteps were quiet behind Glynda — unhurried, with the quality of someone who had been in the building and had heard what he expected to hear and had come down at the pace the situation warranted. He placed a hand briefly on Glynda's shoulder.
"Let it go," he said.
"They are supposed to be the defenders of the world," Glynda said, with the measured exasperation of someone who had been saying this for years without it resolving anything.
Ozpin looked at the room — at Team RWBY's laughter, at Team JNPR helping each other up from the floor, at the various students whose general condition was worse for the experience and whose expressions were better for it.
"And they will be," he said. "But right now they're still children. So why not let them play the part?" He turned toward the door, his voice carrying the quality of something said not as comfort but as observation. "After all, it isn't a role they'll have forever."
The room received this in the particular way that true things were received — not with dramatic recognition, but with a brief quality of stillness in which the statement did its work before the ordinary noise resumed.
From behind their overturned chair barricade, where several of the dragon and balrog faunus had spent the battle in varying states of bemused observation and minimal participation, Kouga was quiet.
He was watching Ruby extract herself from the pile of friends that had accumulated around her, laughing at something Yang had said, her silver eyes bright with the specific quality of happiness that was entirely present, entirely now, not aimed anywhere but the moment.
"He's right," Kouga said. He said it quietly, not to anyone in particular, though Max was close enough to hear. "These moments. They matter more than we think they do."
Max looked at him, then at the room.
"Yes," he said. "They do."
◆ ◆ ◆
IV. The Cafeteria — Introductions
While the cafeteria was being restored to its approximate original configuration by Professor Goodwitch's telekinesis and by students with mops who moved with the chastened efficiency of people doing penance, Sun was wringing soda from his shirt with the cheerful energy of someone who did not particularly mind being wet.
"Ruby Rose," he announced, appearing at her side with the ease of someone who moved through social situations the way he moved through everything — without friction, "I would like you to meet my partner. Neptune, this is the incredible team I told you about."
"He told you about us?" Ruby said.
"Extensively," Neptune said.
He was attempting to restore the structural integrity of his hair with one hand while managing the dripping quality of his jacket with the other, and achieving partial success with both. He produced, despite everything, a smile that had been calibrated over some years into a specific kind of impression.
"Charmed. Though," he added, looking at the cafeteria's general condition, "your timing could use some work, Sun."
"The timing was perfect," Sun said. "We got to see the best part."
The introductions moved through the group in the natural way of people who had been brought to the same place by converging events and were finding their way to knowing each other. Sun's ease with everyone was genuine rather than performed — he had the specific social gift of people who were actually interested in whoever they were talking to, which was rarer than it appeared.
Neptune's careful cool, once you understood it as a presentation rather than a personality, had real warmth underneath it.
Kouga found himself beside Ruby during the introductions, which had happened in the natural way of things that happen without being planned. She was explaining the food fight to Sun and Neptune with the animated enthusiasm she brought to stories she was still inside — re-enacting Nora's table tower with her hands, her silver eyes bright, not looking at him.
He was not not-looking at her.
"You can close your mouth," Max said, from directly beside him, in the tone of someone who had timed a comment for maximum impact.
"My mouth is closed," Kouga said.
"It was open. It's closed now. You corrected it after I said something."
"Max."
"I'm just noting what I observed."
"Please stop noting what you observe."
Max's expression was the expression of someone who intended to continue noting what he observed and had simply chosen not to say so.
◆ ◆ ◆
V. The Main Corridor — Midday
They were gathered near the cafeteria's exit, the food fight's aftermath still audible behind them, when the group's forward motion stopped.
It stopped because Yukikaze stopped. And when Yukikaze stopped, the people immediately around her stopped, and the stopping moved back through the group in the way of a wave encountering a shore — not abruptly, but with the specific quality of something that had come to its natural limit.
Her golden eyes were fixed on the corridor ahead.
Standing at the corridor's far end, arranged with the unconscious precision of people who had trained together long enough to occupy space as a unit, were four figures.
Their bearing was different from Beacon's students — not better or worse, but differently formed, the product of a different kind of training in a different kind of place. Those who had spent time at Sanctuary recognized it immediately.
"No way," Yukikaze said, in the voice of someone for whom no way was not a negation but an expression of overwhelmed recognition.
The first figure stepped forward. She moved with the unhurried authority of someone who had no reason to assert authority because it simply followed her. Her storm-touched features — the specific quality of someone whose heritage expressed itself in the atmosphere around her — were composed with a precision that spoke of intensive training rather than ease.
Small arcs of controlled electricity moved between her fingers with the absence of effort that came from complete mastery.
Beside her, ice crystals formed naturally in the air around Tadashi Aldairhon as he breathed — not as a demonstration, simply as the passive expression of a Frost Balrog King's heritage in an environment that cooperated with it. His ice-blue horns caught the corridor's light. His expression had the dry, composed quality of someone who had been waiting for the surprise of his arrival to register and was being patient with the process.
"Tadashi," Shoryu said, and his voice had the specific quality of a word that had been waiting a long time to be said in the right context.
The third figure carried a quality that was harder to name than the others' elemental signatures — a subtle luminescence in the air around her, the ghost-suggestion of armored presences standing at her periphery that resolved into nothing when you looked directly at them.
She was an onmyouji priestess, and the goddesses she had been trained by had left their mark in the way she occupied space: with a serenity that was not stillness but the condition from which all her movement came.
Max bowed, and the bow was the formal, deep bow of someone acknowledging an authority they respected entirely.
"Your presence honors us."
"Rise, young Dragon King," Emeryll said, and her voice had the quality that voices sometimes had when they had been used for many years in the service of things larger than the speaker. "We come as friends. Not as dignitaries."
The fourth figure had been watching the reunions with the composed attention of a samurai whose training had made observation a form of respect rather than detachment. When Toshiro saw her, something in his bearing changed — the careful composure cracking into something younger and more immediate.
"Little brother," Kagura said, and the warmth in it was the warmth of someone who had earned the right to the word through years of demonstrated care rather than the accident of blood. "You've grown strong."
He crossed to her in three steps and she met him, and the reunion had the specific quality of people who have been separated long enough that the evidence of time in each other is both a loss and a gift.
Teams RWBY and JNPR, standing back from the reunions with the respectful distance of people encountering something they understand is not theirs to enter, watched with varying degrees of fascination and the shared recognition that whatever was happening here was significant in ways they were still calculating.
Ruby's silver eyes moved across the four figures with the specific quality of attention she brought to things she was trying to understand — not assessing threat or power, but trying to locate the interior logic. The controlled lightning.
The goddess-light. The frost that came with the breathing. The sword at Kagura's side, which had the quality of a weapon that was an extension of its bearer rather than a tool.
"Actually," Skye said, when the immediate reunions had settled, her voice carrying the subtle resonance of distant weather, "the introductions can wait a moment longer."
Her gaze moved to Ruby with the quality of someone confirming something they had been told and were now verifying with their own observation. Then it moved away, and the quality of the look was not catalogued or commented on.
"Somewhere more private," Emeryll said gently. "The corridor is not the right place for what needs to be said."
"Training grounds," Max said, already orienting. "This hour they'll be clear."
The expanded group began to move, the two contingents finding their way into something adjacent to a single formation, the various conversations that had been begun at the corridor's end continuing as they walked.
Yang fell naturally into step beside Skye and was asking about lightning semblance applications within thirty seconds. The electricity at Skye's fingers responded to something in the conversation that was either the topic or Yang's specific quality of enthusiasm, and the sparks grew marginally more active.
Neptune, walking beside Sun, watched this. "Is it just me," he said quietly, "or is everyone here extraordinarily impressive?"
"It's not just you," Sun said. "I tried to warn you."
"Your exact words were 'be cool.'"
"That was a warning."
Neptune looked at the ceiling of the corridor, which offered no useful guidance, and continued walking.
◆ ◆ ◆
VI. The Training Grounds — Afternoon
The training grounds in the early afternoon had the quality of a space that had been used hard and was now at rest — the grass pressed in patterns from morning sessions, the targets at the range end bearing the recent evidence of various semblances, the air carrying the faint residual ozone of aura use.
It was, as Max had said, empty.
The group settled into a loose arrangement that was not quite a formation and not quite casual — something between, the natural shape of people who had come together around a shared purpose and were finding where each of them fit in it.
Ruby's curiosity, which had been operating under the specific discipline of someone who had recognized that a corridor was not the right place, produced its first question almost before they had stopped moving.
"The other concern," she said, to Emeryll, because Emeryll had used the phrase and because Emeryll was the person whose quality of authority made the phrase feel like something that had a specific meaning.
"You mentioned there were other concerns. What does that mean?"
Emeryll looked at Skye. The look between them was brief and contained a conversation that had already been had.
"There have been disturbances in the spiritual realm," Emeryll said, with the particular care of someone choosing words that were accurate without being more than the listener needed.
"Ancient seals that have been stable for centuries are showing signs of strain. We don't know the cause. We know the timing — that it coincides with the White Fang's escalation, with increased Grimm activity, and with the convergence of power that's been accumulating around this location."
"Around Beacon specifically," Tadashi said, confirming it in the flat, factual register he used for unpleasant truths.
"And whatever is straining those seals," Kagura added, her hand resting at her sword's hilt in the way of a habit rather than a threat, "has taken an interest in who is here."
Jaune raised his hand with the specific expression of someone who has a question they are fairly certain they don't want the answer to.
"When you say taken an interest — what kind of interest? General interest? Specific interest?"
"The kind that involves observation rather than action. For now," Kagura said, which was not quite as reassuring as Jaune had been hoping.
"So what do we do?" Weiss asked.
Her tactical mind had moved past the receiving of information to its application, which was characteristic.
"More training? Strategic coordination?"
"All of that," Skye said. The electricity at her fingers was calm.
"But the more important thing — the thing that training alone doesn't produce — is the capacity to operate as a single unit rather than several coordinated ones. You've all demonstrated the coordination. The food fight," she said, with the slight specific quality of someone who had been briefed on this, "was actually a reasonable test of instinctive team synchronization under chaotic conditions."
"We did pass that test," Nora pointed out, from the grass where she had settled with her legs crossed and her expression suggesting she had been waiting to say this.
"You did," Yukikaze confirmed.
"Overwhelmingly."
"The next step," Emeryll said, and the luminescence around her was gentle in the afternoon light — not display, simply presence — "is deeper than technique. It's trust. Not the trust you build in a training session, but the kind that comes from knowing each other's interior life. What drives you. What you're afraid of."
"Stories," Kagura said, simply.
"Stories," Weiss said, with the expression of someone who had been expecting a different noun.
"Because if we're going to trust each other with our lives," Skye said, and the electricity at her fingers stilled entirely, the way weather stills before something changes, "we need to trust each other with our truths first."
The afternoon held this.
Around the group, the training grounds were quiet with the specific silence of a space that has been asked to hold something important and has accepted the request.
Ruby looked around at the assembled faces — the familiar ones and the new ones, the ones who knew what they were doing here and the ones who were still finding out. She looked at Kouga, who was watching her with the expression she had not quite categorized yet.
She looked at Yang, who gave her the small nod that meant go ahead. She looked at the grass beneath her.
"I'll start," she said.
Her voice, in the afternoon quiet, had the quality it had when she was not performing anything — the directness that came from having too much to say to arrange it first.
"My name is Ruby Rose. I became a huntress because my mother was a huntress, and she died protecting people she didn't know, and I was eight years old and I understood from that day that the world needed people willing to do that, and I wanted to be one of them." A pause.
"I became a student because I wasn't ready. But I'm trying."
Another pause.
"That's — I think that's the truth of it, actually. I'm trying. Every day."
The circle was quiet.
Then Jaune said, in a voice that had been finding its way to honesty for several months and had gotten considerably better at the journey:
"My name is Jaune Arc, and I forged my transcripts, and I shouldn't be here, and I'm trying to earn the right to stay."
The stories that followed were not all confessions. Some were simpler — histories, the accumulation of events that had produced the people now sitting in the grass. Some were complicated in ways that took time to unspool. Some were things that had not been said aloud before and were changed by the saying. None of them were wasted.
The afternoon light moved across the training grounds in its slow arc, casting the long shadows of people who had chosen to sit still together in a world that gave very little time for stillness, and did not hurry them.
◆ ◆ ◆
VII. The Training Grounds — Later
Neptune had waited through the stories with the patience of someone who was genuinely moved by what he was hearing and was also genuinely curious about the electricity still occasionally visible at Skye's fingertips.
"I have to ask," he said, when a natural pause arrived.
"How powerful — I mean, I don't want to be rude about it, but the energy I've been registering from your group since we met is — I need a reference point."
"Power is relative," Hon'oh said, with the thoughtful precision she brought to generalizations she found imprecise.
"That's a very beautiful non-answer," Neptune said.
"Perhaps a demonstration is more useful than description," Tadashi said, and his ice-blue eyes had the specific quality of someone who has been waiting for this opening and has decided to take it with complete composure and mild mischief in equal measure.
"Oh, this should be good," Sun said, and moved back to give the available space the respect it deserved.
What followed was not a performance. That was the first thing, and it was the important thing — it was not arranged or theatrical, it did not have the quality of people showing what they could do. It had the quality of people doing what they did, which was different in a way that was immediately apparent to anyone watching.
Skye raised her hand and the electricity that had been present at her fingers became something larger — controlled, directed, precise streams of lightning that moved through the air without the wild scatter of unmastered power, finding their paths with the specific confidence of energy that knew exactly where it was going.
Tadashi exhaled, and the frost that rose to meet the lightning was shaped with the same precision — not a cloud, not a wave, but something designed: ice crystals that formed at the intersections of the lightning's paths and held there, sparkling with contained electrical charge, a structure that had been built in three seconds and would take three seconds to take apart.
Emeryll stepped forward and her voice began in the language that the goddesses' training had given her — harmonics that seemed to arrive from more than one source, carrying within them something that was neither sound nor light but had properties of both. The air around her shifted.
The ghost-presences at her periphery became more present — not threatening, not dramatic, simply undeniable for the duration of her speaking, armored figures that stood in the afternoon light and were seen and then were not.
Kagura drew her sword in the single motion that drew it, and the blade was already in motion. Each strike moved through the air with the specific quality of a technique that had been refined past the point of being a collection of movements into being a single continuous expression.
The light that followed the blade's path lingered in the air for several seconds after each arc, fading slowly, the way the impression of something important lingered after the thing itself had passed.
When they combined — when Skye's lightning and Tadashi's frost and Emeryll's divine harmonics and Kagura's blade all entered the same space with the same intent — the training ground produced a quality of presence that was not frightening and was not showy. It was simply, for the duration of it, the most real thing in the space.
The watching students were quiet for a long moment after it ended.
"Okay," Ruby said. She said it in the voice she used when she had just encountered something that had revised her understanding of what was possible. "How do we learn to do that?"
"You already know how," Max said. He was looking at her with the expression he wore when he was making a point that mattered.
"The food fight was perfect team synchronization. Instinctive. Unplanned. That's where this comes from — not from learning the technique. From trusting the people beside you so completely that the technique arrives on its own."
"Trust is the substrate," Emeryll agreed.
"Everything else grows from it."
Pyrrha looked at Jaune with the expression that had become characteristic of how she looked at him since the rooftop — the expression of someone who had made a decision and was watching it be confirmed. He looked back at her without looking away, which was its own kind of statement.
"Well," Nora said, from where she had been lying in the grass looking at the sky throughout the demonstration with a focus that suggested she was processing rather than inattentive, "when do we start?"
Kagura smiled, and the warmth of it was the warmth of someone who had been doing this work for a long time and had not stopped finding it worthwhile.
"We already have," she said.
◆ ◆ ◆
VIII. A White Fang Warehouse — Vale — Same Evening
Roman Torchwick had a specific approach to entrances that he had developed over many years of professional necessity: arrive from an unexpected angle, make a sound before you're visible, and calibrate your first remark so that the people in the room arrive at your preferred version of the situation before they've had time to form their own.
It was the same technique he used for every interaction, applied consistently, and it had kept him alive and at liberty for longer than most people in his profession managed.
Emerald and Mercury were mid-conversation when he came up behind them.
"Oh, look!" He wrapped his arms around both of their shoulders with the comfortable, proprietary ease of someone who had decided that the appropriate response to their mutual distaste for him was maximum physical proximity.
"She sent the kids again! This is turning out just like the divorce!"
Emerald shuddered with the involuntary quality of a full-body reaction she had not authorized.
"Spare us the thought of you procreating."
They extracted themselves with the practiced efficiency of people who had done this before. Roman produced a piece of paper from his jacket with the flourish of someone who had been waiting for the right moment to produce it.
"And this," he said, holding it up, "just might tell me where you two have been all day."
Emerald's eyes widened with a speed that was its own kind of confirmation. "What—? How did you—"
"I'm a professional, sweetheart. It's worth paying attention to."
Mercury stepped forward with the measured swagger he brought to situations he had assessed and found manageable.
"We were cleaning up your problems. One of them, at least."
"I had it handled."
"Two packed bags and a ticket to Vacuo said otherwise."
Roman's temper had a specific threshold and the conversation had reached it. He began the sentence that would have communicated exactly what he thought of Mercury's editorial choices, and got three words into it.
"Do what, Roman?"
The temperature in the warehouse dropped by several subjective degrees. Not the measurable kind — not the kind that showed on instruments. The kind that came from Cinder Fall's voice arriving in a room.
She was on the elevated platform above them, standing at the lift's edge with the unhurried composure of someone who had been there long enough to have observed the conversation and had decided to intervene at the moment of maximum impact.
The lift descended with the deliberate slowness of someone who had considered the theatrical value of the descent.
Roman's bravado completed its collapse with the nervous laugh that was its final form.
"I'd, uh... not kill them?"
"Cinder!" Emerald said, and the relief in her voice was genuine in a way that none of her other expressions in the last five minutes had been.
Cinder's amber eyes moved to Roman with the specific quality they had when she was deciding how much of her attention a situation warranted.
"I thought I made my instructions about the runaway clear."
"I was going to —" Roman began.
Emerald stepped on the opening.
"He was going to escape to Vacuo. Mercury and I decided to address it."
"Some kind of cat faunus," Mercury added, with the dry economy of someone covering their story with the minimum necessary elaboration.
"Gone now."
"Quiet."
They were quiet.
Roman pointed at them with the satisfaction of someone watching a consequence arrive that he had not been able to deliver himself.
Cinder addressed Emerald with the flatness of someone delivering a correction that they expected to land and stay landed.
"Did I not specifically ask that you keep your hands clean while in Vale?"
"I thought —"
"Don't think. Obey."
"Yes ma'am," Emerald said, small and genuine. "It won't happen again."
Roman, whose vindication had been satisfying, found Cinder's gaze arriving on him with an immediacy that suggested his satisfaction had been premature.
"And you. Why was this job not completed sooner?"
"Uh—" Roman gestured at the warehouse around him — the organized stacks of stolen Dust in quantities that had required sustained effort to acquire — with the expression of someone who felt the evidence of their work should be self-presenting.
"I've been stealing every speck of Dust in the kingdom? Police at every corner, prices through the roof, and we're sitting on more product than we know what to do with? Speaking of which," he continued, his voice rising with the indignation of someone who had been patient about this for months, "if someone could fill me in on the master plan, my next string of robberies might go smoother!"
Cinder crossed to him with the specific unhurried quality that made her most effective — not rushing, because rushing implied urgency, and urgency implied that the person being approached had power over the situation.
She placed her hand against the side of his face with a gesture that was simultaneously the most intimate and most threatening action available in the current context.
"Oh, Roman," she said. "Have a little faith." Her thumb moved slightly against his cheek. "You'll know what you need to know, when you need to know it."
Roman's expression moved through several things. He looked away.
"We're done with Dust," Cinder said, already walking.
"Then what —"
"We're moving. Have the White Fang clear the building. I'll send coordinates tonight."
"Coordinates for what?"
She looked back over her shoulder with the smile of someone who has been patient about a secret and has reached the point where they are ready to stop being patient about it.
"Phase two," she said.
Roman reached for his cigar. His lighter was missing. He looked up to find Emerald at the warehouse's far threshold, lighter in hand, tongue out, expression conveying her feelings about the evening's dynamics with efficiency and without words.
Then the shadows took her, and the warehouse was quiet except for the White Fang moving their inventory and Roman standing at the center of it, lighter-less.
He lit the cigar off the nearest torch. He stood there for a moment.
Then he got to work.
◆ ◆ ◆
IX. Unknown Location — Night
The orb was not glass. Glass was a medium that had been created, refined, shaped to human purposes. The orb had no such history — it existed in the manner of things that have always existed, its surface catching and holding light in ways that did not follow the rules that governed light's behavior in ordinary materials.
The figure who watched through it was patient in the way that things were patient when time had ceased to be a constraint.
The image in the orb's surface showed the training grounds at Beacon as they had been several hours earlier — the circle of students in the afternoon light, the stories being told, the demonstration that had left the watching group quiet.
The figure had seen it in real time when it happened and was seeing it again, the way one returned to a problem that had developed an interesting new variable.
"The Silver-Eyed Warrior," the figure said, as the orb's image resolved on Ruby's face at the moment she had looked at the assembled group and decided to start. The specific quality of her expression — the directness, the absence of performance — seemed to hold the figure's attention.
"She's building something," said the second presence, felt in the room rather than visible in it.
"They all are." The figure's voice carried harmonics that implied age without revealing it.
"That is the point. Let them build. The structure they create will be exactly what we need it to be."
"And the Sanctuary arrivals?"
"Expected. Planned for."
A pause.
"The Storm Empress's connection to Cinder Fall is a complication that may become an asset, depending on how certain events unfold. We will observe."
The orb's surface rippled. The image shifted — not to a location but to something older than locations: glimpses of a conflict that had been running before any of the people in the orb's recent images had been born, playing out across scales of time and power that human language was not built to describe.
The figure watched this not with the urgency of someone reviewing new information but with the recognition of someone reviewing something they already knew.
"They believe," the second presence observed, "that they are preparing for a war."
"They are," the figure said.
"They are simply not yet preparing for the correct one."
A beat.
"That revelation will come in its time. For now —" the orb returned to its image of the empty training grounds, the afternoon light gone, the grass holding only the impressions of where people had been sitting — "let the children play their games of trust and preparation.
"The real game has been in motion since before any of them drew breath, and moves no faster or slower for their knowing of it."
The second presence withdrew. The orb held its surface still, showing nothing and reflecting everything.
The figure was patient. The figure had always been patient. In this regard, as in most others, time was entirely on their side.
◆ ◆ ◆
X. Beacon Tower — Late Evening
The elevator arrived at the top of Beacon Tower with the sound it always made — a soft, precise chime that carried a quality of finality, as if arriving here was always a conclusive act.
The office that received its passengers was quiet in the way of rooms that had held many important conversations and had learned to take them in without changing their character.
Glynda Goodwitch stood at the holographic display with her tablet and the expression she wore when she had data that she had organized into its most useful form and was waiting for the right moment to present it. The data was about security. It was not good.
"Seventeen intrusion attempts in the past month," she said, to Ozpin and to the four people seated across from her.
"None successful. The frequency is not consistent with opportunistic probing."
Ozpin had not touched his coffee. This was unusual enough to be a data point of its own.
Derek Dragonblade rose with the specific quality of movement that made his background evident without requiring any announcement of it — the fluid economy of someone who had been in command positions long enough that authority had stopped being something he wore and become something he was.
"The Sanctuary Council has authorized full operational cooperation with Beacon's security measures. Our children's presence here was never only about education."
"It was always also about this," Katsura agreed, from her seat.
Her Cherry Blossom colored hair caught the office's ambient light.
"The alliance that put them here is the same alliance that has to hold if what's coming is going to be met."
Reynar Tokyoheim leaned forward. His golden eyes — so specifically like Honoo's, the resemblance always precise rather than approximate — held the sharpness of someone who had been processing intelligence for years and had strong instincts about what patterns meant.
"The White Fang's operations are coordinated in a way that suggests direction from outside the organization. The coordination is too consistent, the targets too considered, to be the product of internal planning alone."
"And the spiritual disturbances," Yin Lang said, with the precision of someone who dealt in things that were real but not measurable by standard instruments, "are not metaphorical. The seals that have held certain aspects of the spiritual realm in check for generations are under active strain. Whatever is applying that strain is doing it with a purpose."
Glynda's stylus paused.
"Strain toward what, specifically?"
Derek and Reynar exchanged the look of two people who have discussed this between themselves extensively and have not arrived at an answer that satisfies either of them.
"We don't know the mechanism. We know the effect: barriers between the physical and spiritual realms weakening at points that correspond to what we'd call ley lines. Concentrations of natural energy. And several of those concentrations," Reynar said, touching the holographic display and highlighting a specific point, "are in close proximity to Beacon."
"The Festival," Ozpin said. He said it the way he said things when he had already thought them through and was confirming the thought against someone else's version of the same information.
"The Festival brings together the most concentrated assembly of trained huntsmen and huntresses in the world," Katsura said.
"From a tactical standpoint, it is either the worst time for an enemy to move against us — because we are all in one place with our capabilities available — or the best time, because our attention will be on the tournament and we will have assumed a public face that makes unconventional responses difficult."
"Our enemies have historically been good at identifying the moment when our attention is on the stage rather than the wings," Derek said.
A silence that was not comfortable but was shared.
"There's something else," Katsura said, in the voice she used when she was about to say something she had been deciding how to say.
"Mist has been experiencing visions. Fragmentary. Symbolic. She hasn't mentioned them to us directly — she doesn't know we're aware of them. But they're consistent enough across multiple instances to constitute a pattern."
"What pattern?" Glynda asked.
"Darkness from within trusted structures. A tower falling. And —" Katsura paused, looking at Ozpin with the specific quality of someone delivering information they know will be significant — "silver eyes standing against an ancient evil."
The silence that followed was the particular silence of a room in which everyone has heard the same thing and is processing it from different directions.
Ozpin set down his coffee cup with a care that was deliberate.
"Miss Rose."
"We believe so," Reynar said.
Outside the office windows, Vale continued. Its lights described its geography against the dark — the city that had been here before any of them and would need to be here after. It looked, from this elevation, exactly as peaceful as it always looked from this elevation. The view had never been a reliable guide to what was actually happening.
"What do we tell them?" Derek asked.
He asked it plainly, as he asked most things — not as a rhetorical question but as the actual question.
The room considered this together.
"Enough to prepare," Ozpin said finally. "Not enough to carry a burden that isn't theirs yet. They deserve to know that what's coming is real. They don't deserve to know every dimension of it before they've had time to become who they're going to be when they face it."
"There's a version of that logic that becomes condescension," Derek said.
"There is," Ozpin agreed.
"The line is whether we're protecting them from the truth or protecting them from carrying it alone and too early. I mean the latter."
He picked up his coffee again.
"We protect people from carrying weight before they have the strength for it. We don't protect people from the existence of weight."
Derek looked at him for a long moment.
"Alright," he said.
"Alright," Katsura said.
Glynda was already making notes — the practical details of enhanced protocols, discrete monitoring, the architecture of prepared response.
This was what she did with decisions: she converted them into actions, because decisions that didn't become actions were not decisions but intentions.
Yin Lang looked at the windows.
"They were good today," she said.
It was not related to the security discussion. It was related to the other thing — the thing that ran underneath all of these discussions, the thing that had made the discussion necessary.
"They were," Reynar agreed.
"They'll be better," Derek said.
"That's what tomorrow is for."
The office held its quiet. The city spread below. The shattered moon moved in its orbit above everything, patient and partial, its fractured light finding the windows at a particular angle that left long, divided shadows across the floor.
Nobody mentioned the brief flicker in the office's lighting system — the almost-imperceptible touch on the electrical grid that had lasted less than a second and had come from a distance that should have made it impossible.
Nobody had noticed it.
This was, perhaps, the first thing that had gone as intended that evening.
End of Chapter Nine
✦ Ending Theme ✦
Akeboshi
Demon Slayer — Mugen Train Arc
The ending sequence opens on the cafeteria in the immediate aftermath — the room mid-restoration under Goodwitch's telekinesis, chairs rising back to their positions, food retreating from the walls with a dignity the food fight had not afforded it.
In the middle of it all, the students: Team RWBY and Team JNPR and the dragon and balrog faunus and Sun and Neptune, soda-drenched or pie-splattered according to their fortunes, laughing with the specific quality of people who have done something together and are still inside it.
The frame dissolves to the training grounds at golden hour: the circle in the grass, Kagura's blade-light still fading in the air, Ruby looking around at the faces around her with the expression of someone who has not yet understood what they have but is beginning to feel its weight. Adjacent cut: the warehouse, Cinder in the lift's slow descent, the orb in the unknown room, the office windows with the city beyond.
The ending image holds on two things simultaneously, as if the frame cannot decide between them: Ozpin's windows, the city lights describing their peaceful geography below, and the cafeteria in the moment just before the food fight began — Ruby's hand closing around the milk carton, her face carrying the pure, present joy of someone who is entirely here, entirely now, not yet aware of what the next frame holds.
Both images fade at the same rate. The shattered moon. Then dark.
Coming Next —
Chapter Ten: Welcome to Beacon — Forces Converge