The pattern that established itself in the days following Kaito's first training session with Jaune was, by any reasonable measure, completely predictable.
Cardin Winchester had apparently decided that the dining hall incident required a response, and so he doubled down on Velvet and anyone who stood in his way , on the quieter Faunus students, on anyone who presented an easy target. Kaito intervened each time with the same unhurried economy he applied to most things, appearing at Cardin's shoulder before anyone had quite registered he was moving, and the confrontation would end before it properly began. The faculty noticed. Most of them chose to notice carefully and from a distance.
Velvet Scarlatina started leaving things outside his door. Small paper bags, usually chocolates, pastries, the occasional tin of biscuits. whatever was in inside.
The rest of Beacon noticed his sweet tooth with considerably less subtlety.
Ruby Rose discovered, on a Tuesday, that an entire bag of her cookies had gone missing. She found Kaito approximately forty seconds later at a full sprint down the corridor, bag under one arm, eating them with the composure of a man who had done nothing wrong.
Ruby: KAITO
Kaito: (already rounding the corner) They were unattended.
Ruby: They were in my bag
Kaito: Practically public property.
Ruby: I will end you
He teleported. She ran. This continued for some time.
It was Cardin who pushed it to the classroom, which in retrospect was the least strategically sound decision he had made since the dining hall.
He stepped onto the stage and pointed.
Cardin: Gojo. You and me. Right now.
Kaito looked up from where he had been very productively doing nothing.
Kaito: Sure. Bring your whole team.
The room went quiet. Cardin's jaw tightened.
Cardin: Fine.
Kaito: One condition. I won't use my semblance. These hands only. Rated E for everyone, as always.
Cardin growled something that was presumably agreement. Team CRDNL spread across the stage.
What followed was not so much a fight as a sustained demonstration of the difference between power and the understanding of it.
Cardin came in first and hardest, The Executioner swinging in a downward arc with his full weight behind it. Kaito stepped inside the swing and redirected the momentum with two fingers on Cardin's forearm, letting the bigger boy's own force rotate him off-balance. The mace hit the stage floor. Cardin did not.
Dove came from the left. Kaito moved fractionally to the right and Dove's elbow connected with the space where his shoulder had been, carrying him past and into an undignified stumble. Kaito caught him by the back of the collar on the way through and set him down to the side with the practiced ease of someone returning furniture to its proper place.
Sky Lark tried to be clever about it feinting low, driving high. Kaito watched him do it . He blocked the real strike with his forearm, stepped through Sky's guard, and applied just enough pressure to Sky's wrist that the sword dropped cleanly into Kaito's free hand. He flipped it handle-first and offered it back.
Kaito: You telegraph the feint with your left shoulder. Fix that.
Russel, to his credit, hesitated. Then he charged anyway. Kaito sidestepped, used Russel's own momentum to redirect him into the mat, and stepped back.
Cardin, upright again and considerably less composed, drove forward with everything he had left.
Kaito caught The Executioner's haft with one hand and stopped it completely.
He looked at Cardin over the handle.
Kaito: You lead with anger. Every time. Against someone who can stay calm,
He released the mace, stepped back off the stage,.
Kaito: Get stronger. All four of you. The world out there won't wait for you to be ready.
He sat down. The room, which had been holding its breath, collectively exhaled.
Forever Fall — The Forest
Kaito was asleep against a tree when the scream reached him.
He was on the ground before he was fully conscious, the particular spatial awareness that never fully switched off already orienting him toward the source northeast, Jaune's aura signature, multiple Grimm signatures converging, and something else underneath all of it that was wrong in a way he couldn't immediately categorise.
He teleported.
The scene that arrived around him was worse than the aura signatures had suggested.
Glynda Goodwitch had erected a barrier across the tree line, her expression carrying the controlled tension of someone managing several emergencies simultaneously. Students were down — most of Team CRDNL motionless, several others in critical condition. Team RWBY was clustered near the barrier's edge, all four of them injured, Blake and Weiss barely upright. Yang had burns across her forearms that she was categorically not acknowledging.
And Ruby was on the ground, burning up, silver light fading from her eyes like an ember going out.
Kaito's gaze moved over all of it in approximately one second. Then it settled on Jaune.
Kaito: Situation. Now.
Jaune: (breathing hard) Cardin he went after my team with the forest honey. Everything escalated. Then this Grimm arrived it could speak, Kaito, it was giving orders — we fought it as long as we could but it was too strong. Mrs. Goodwitch got the barrier up. Most of the students are critical. (He looked at Ruby, jaw tight.) Ruby there was this silver light, and the one that could speak turned to dust, but she's been burning up since. She's exhausted.
Kaito looked at Ruby for a long moment. Then he reached up, unwound his blindfold, and folded it away.
The world clarified in ways that were difficult to describe
cursed energy mapped across the barrier, across the treeline, across the mass of Grimm pressing against Glynda's boundary in a sustained, organised wave. Organised. That was the wrong word for Grimm, and the wrongness of it sat with him.
He walked to the barrier's edge.
Kaito: Don't worry. Everything's going to be fine now.
A beat.
Kaito: Why? Because I'm here.
Glynda: (through her teeth) Mr. Gojo, the barrier will not hold indefinitely if you do something catastrophic to the forest
Kaito: I'll try to be tidy.
He stepped outside the barrier.
The Grimm turned toward him with the collective attention of things that had learned to identify threat. He stood in the space between the barrier and the treeline with his hands loose at his sides, looking at the assembled mass of them with the expression he reserved for things that had made a significant miscalculation.
Kaito: (quietly, to himself) Normally I'd care about the property damage. But this situation has made me genuinely pissed off. So.
Flashback Ozpin's Office, The Day After The Dining Hall
Glynda: Ozpin, we need to do something about Mr. Gojo. He's arrogant, he's insubordinate, and he's a liability
Ozpin: I'm going to stop you there.
He set his mug down.
Ozpin: Have you noticed that certain Grimm have been getting stronger? That some of them have been exhibiting behaviour coordination, communication that Grimm simply shouldn't be capable of?
Glynda: I have noticed that. Yes. But what does that have to do with
Ozpin: Everything. (He turned to the window.) I was there the day Kaito was born, Glynda. And I felt it the balance shift. Something significant entered the world, and the world moved to compensate. (a pause) When a force of that magnitude is introduced into the equation, the opposite end of the scale has to adjust. More powerful Grimm. Some of them named ones, old ones beginning to wake up again. (quietly) Kaito's existence has made this world harder.
End of Flashback
Kaito stood in the open air of Forever Fall and looked at the Grimm line and turned this over one final time.
Right. Amplify the technique through reversal positive energy into the expression of positive infinity. Hold Blue in the other hand negative energy, negative infinity, the deletion of space at a point. Don't combine the forces. Combine the expressions.
What happens when you tell a point in space to simultaneously have negative distance and positive distance?
Space can't answer that. It just breaks.
He raised both hands Blue gathering in his left, the repulsive pressure of Red building in his right, each one an expression of a different kind of infinity.
He looked at the Grimm.
Kaito: Imaginary Technique.
He brought his hands together.
Purple.
The sphere that left his palms was not fire, not lightning, not any force that had a clean name. It moved through the Grimm line the way a question moves through something that has no answer and where it passed, things simply stopped being. Not destroyed. Not burned. The space that had contained them became briefly paradoxical and then became nothing, and the nothing resolved itself quietly into regular air.
The treeline beyond was gone for a distance of perhaps eighty metres, a clean corridor of absence where the forest had been, the cut edge of it perfectly geometric and entirely still.
Kaito lowered his hands.
The remaining Grimm at the edges of the blast radius held their position for a single, strange moment processing something that instinct alone could not account for and then they turned and ran, which was something Grimm almost never did.
He stood in the quiet they left behind, breathing slowly, and then turned back toward the barrier.
Kaito: (calling back, entirely even) Goodwitch. Barrier down. We need to get people to the medical wing.
A pause from inside.
Glynda: (slowly) …Yes. We do.
He walked back through the gap in the treeline, stepping over the clean geometric edge where the forest had ended, and went straight to where Ruby was lying. He crouched down beside her and put the back of his hand against her forehead.
She was burning up. Her breathing was shallow but steady, her eyes half-open, the silver light completely gone now.
Kaito: (quietly) You absolute fool. (He said it Don't do that again.
He gathered her up carefully and stood.
Kaito: (to Yang, who had taken one step forward) I've got her. Lead the others out.
Yang looked at him at Ruby against his shoulder, at the absent section of forest behind him, at the blindfold still folded in his jacket pocket and for once said nothing at all.
She turned and started moving the others toward the path.
Note team CRDNL aren't dead but in critical condition as well … I am heavily debating having the team killed off to show the conqunces
And this had me struggling on where to go mostly I kinda wanted to skip over the jaundice arc since Cardin wouldn't have found out about Jaune transcript until I was talking with my best frenodo and he did say Cardin would double down
But he suggested something else for the forever fall scene
Along the lines of Kaito being sourned by loads of Grimm. And having to use a weppon Ruby made him
Then Arving to the scene where thier be a named Grimm
But it sorta didn't set well for me to write so I came up with what we have here I wanna try and start showing that cannon will probably be hella de railed
My friend said the fall of beacon needs to happen
For the others growth and I agree with him mostly just a bit iffy on it
So when it does lead up to that part I am gonna give Kaito and valid reason for him to not be thier
He suggested something that sorta caught my interest and I believe be a good reason to be elesewehre