Fate. Destiny. Luck.
These are the concepts humanity has struggled with since the goddamn dawn of time, desperately trying to explain away their complete and utter lack of control over their own lives. They trip over a rock and break their nose? Bad luck. They find a twenty-lien note on the ground? Good luck. They meet someone who ruins their entire life? Fate.
They try to bundle up their endless strings of good or bad experiences into neat little packages, labeling it all as some unfathomable plans that they are just helplessly strapped into. It's an invariably foolish notion. A coping mechanism for the weak-minded who can't handle the fact that they are free. Free to ruin their own life, or others free to ruin theirs.
Here is the truth of the matter: nothing is truly predetermined. Nothing is truly set in stone.
A single change in the past can ripple into a catastrophic tsunami in the future. In the end, what we call "The Present" is nothing more than a loose, chaotic collection of situations pulled from an infinite kaleidoscope of variables that just happen to build up to the "now."
I am Jonathan Arc. Jonah for short. I'm the twin brother of Jeanne d'Arc, the rookie up-and-coming Huntress-in-training.
I'm also the tacked-on fifth member of her team, a leader surrounded entirely by women. And this is how the change of a single, seemingly insignificant person twists the present into a completely unrecognizable mess for you.
---
Beacon Academy. 12:24 PM. Break.
I stretched hard in my seat, my joints popping in quiet protest as Professor Port finally shut his mouth. Another hour and a half gone, totally wasted listening to his endless, exaggerated tales of how badass he supposedly was when he was young. The man was a walking, talking embodiment of peaked-in-high-school energy, but at least he had finally dismissed us.
As I dropped my arms and looked around at my classmates packing up their shit, an undeniable fact—one I knew firsthand, burned into my brain through sheer repetition—couldn't help but spring to the forefront of my mind.
Women.
These creatures called "women" never bring anything good.
I shifted my gaze to Pyrrha Nikos. My sister's partner. The "Invincible Girl." She was standing near the front row, talking to Jeanne , both of them giggling together about some trivial bullshit or another. Pyrrha had that picture-perfect, sickeningly sweet smile plastered on her face, her red hair swaying just perfectly as she laughed at whatever dumb joke my sister had just made.
Everyone idolized her. Everyone thought she was this flawless goddess of kindness and skill.
I don't know about all that. But at the very least... I know she wasn't that.
I can't look at that perfect smile and see anything other than a mask of what I had seen lay behind
Suddenly, an arm wrapped securely around my neck from behind, practically putting me in a damn chokehold.
"Ah, woohoo! Pyrrha-chan is sooo cuuute..." Neptune swooned loudly, his entire body weight hanging off me like a parasite.
I didn't even flinch. I just rolled my eyes, grabbing his arm and shoving it off my shoulder. "Hmph... Pyrrha? Are you stupid? What's so good about a woman like that?"
Neptune regained his balance and gave me a massive stink eye, looking at me like I had just kicked a puppy. "What the heck do you mean 'like that'?!" he demanded, his voice pitching up indignantly. Then, an annoying, shit-eating smirk spread across his face. He leaned in close, poking my shoulder. "Besides, you were looking right at her too, weren't you?"
I leaned back quickly, putting as much distance between myself and his stupid, grinning face as the desk would allow. "I just happened to be looking in her direction. My eyes have to rest somewhere, asshole."
"Tsk, tsk, tsk..." Neptune shook his head slowly, clicking his tongue a few times as if he simply couldn't believe what a massive heathen I was being. "No, Jonah. Pyrrha-chan is definitely cute! Super, undeniably cute! Nothing can beat that cuteness, right?! She's way better than even some professional idols!"
"Stop saying 'chan', 'chan', it's creepy as hell," I said flatly, grabbing my bag and finally standing up from my seat to escape his personal bubble.
"Aaahhhh... Pyrrha-chan, have a date with me~" Neptune completely ignored me, taking my recently vacated seat and slumping into it, staring up at the ceiling as he swooned into his own pathetic, thirsty imagination.
"Ugh... Creepy. Creepy, creepy, creepy." I muttered, leaning back and looking at him with utter disgust.
Neptune snapped out of his little fantasy and leaned back in the chair to look up at me, tilting his head. "Eeh... Then what type of girl do you actually like anyways, Jonah? You shoot down literally every girl in this school."
...My type, huh?
I leaned my weight back against the table behind me, crossing my arms. Once more, I cast my gaze over the classroom, looking at all the women milling around me, and I actually took a second to think about his dumbass question.
My eyes drifted past Pyrrha and Jeanne , sliding over to Team RWBY, who were currently huddled together and chatting loudly at the front of the class. Ruby was waving her arms around frantically as she explained something, Yang was laughing so hard she was practically slapping the desk, Weiss looked annoyed but was still listening intently, and Blake was standing slightly off to the side, silent and unreadable.
Four completely different girls. Four completely different messes of emotional instability and hidden agendas.
Are they really the exact same species as me? I truly find that hard to believe.
...Am I being too harsh? Am I saying too much? I thought to myself, feeling a sudden prickle on the back of my neck. I shifted my focus back toward the middle of the room, and I saw Pyrrha. She had stopped talking to Jeanne and just happened to be looking directly at me. For a split second, our eyes met across the classroom.
Her lips twitched upward, offering me a quick, subtle, entirely perfect little smile just for me.
I just blanked my expression and immediately looked away, staring firmly at the blackboard.
No. I wasn't being too harsh. Nevertheless... at the very least, I know what I know.
Indeed... I know for an absolute fact that "women" never bring any good.
"Eh? Did Pyrrha-chan just look over at me and smile?! Score!" Neptune suddenly cheered, throwing his fists in the air from my old seat, completely misinterpreting the entire exchange.
I just shrugged indifferently, turning my back on him and adjusting my bag strap. "I'm going to the cafeteria," I said plainly, starting to walk toward the exit.
Neptune gasped, immediately scrambling to his feet. "Wait, wait! Me too, I'm starving!" he yelled, hurrying to catch up.
He was so busy looking back at Pyrrha that he wasn't watching where the hell he was going. He charged forward and nearly crashed head-on into Coco Adel, who was casually strolling past our row toward the main doors, adjusting her designer sunglasses.
Thankfully, Neptune had decent reflexes when it counted. He managed to slam the brakes, his shoes squeaking loudly on the floor tiles, stopping himself just inches away from plowing right into her.
Coco didn't even flinch. She just stopped, slowly turning her head. She looked at Neptune for a brief second, then her gaze slid past him and landed squarely on me. She pulled her sunglasses down the bridge of her nose just a fraction, her eyes locking onto mine with a cold, piercing intensity.
"...Be careful," she said. Her voice was perfectly level, practically dripping with that effortlessly intimidating aura she constantly carried around. She pushed her glasses back up and continued walking out the door, her hips swaying with total confidence. But she kept her head turned, looking back at me over her shoulder until she vanished into the hallway.
She didn't even speak to the guy who almost hit her. She spoke to me.
Neptune let out a massive breath he'd apparently been holding, rubbing the back of his neck nervously. "Jeez... Coco sure is damn scary at times!"
I just grunted in agreement. Scary wasn't the half of it. I didn't say anything else, wanting to just get to the food.
Suddenly, I felt someone tapping a quick rhythm on the back of my shoulder. Before I could even turn around fully, a slender finger thrust forward, pushing directly into the tip of my nose.
"Boop!"
A wide, practically manic smile greeted me. Nora Valkyrie was standing there, radiating enough raw, unfiltered energy to power the entire city block.
"Good morning, fearless leader!" she practically shouted, her turquoise eyes wide and shining as she beamed at me.
Neptune, recovering from his near-death experience with Coco, waved a hand. "Good morning, Nora." Then he blinked, checking his scroll. "Wait, morning?! Nora, this is already lunchtime. It's past noon. Did you seriously just come to class now?"
Nora ignored his question completely, opting instead to just laugh loudly for a solid five seconds, a bright, bubbly sound that completely masked whatever the hell was actually going on in her head.
I sighed, pinching the bridge of my nose. "I finally have to ask. Did you seriously sleep in again, even through the alarms Ren and I set up for you? We made, like, ten of them. Set them for every five minutes. Ren is gonna be pissed at you, you know."
"Hmm..." Nora placed her index finger on her cheek, looking up at the ceiling in exaggerated, cartoonish thought for a moment. "Nah, the alarms did wake me up! Right after you guys left for the first period. But then..." She lowered her hand, her smile widening into something slightly less bubbly and slightly more intense. "...I just kept watching TV while eating cereal."
She took a half-step closer to me, leaning in. The manic energy seemed to dial back, replaced by a strange, sharp focus.
"Hey, Jonah. Did you see the news?" she asked, a strange, small smile playing at the corners of her lips.
I raised an eyebrow at the sudden shift in topic. "...No, I missed it. What was it about?"
Nora shook her head rapidly. She threw her arms out, pointing dual finger-guns directly at my chest, her smile turning impossibly bright. "They just found the latest victim of 'Vale's Serial Phantom Killer!'"
Neptune physically recoiled, his eyes going wide with shock. "Whoa, seriously?! There's another one?" He wrapped his arms around himself, playfully shivering. "Scary~ How many victims are there already?!"
"Four..." Nora started, tapping her chin before shaking her head. "No, I think this one makes the fifth. Yeah, fifth, I think!" she answered, tilting her head to the side in a sickeningly cute pose that completely contradicted the subject matter she was so eager to discuss.
"Hey, hey, hey! What the hell have the police even been doing?!" Neptune complained loudly, throwing his hands up. "We've got Huntsmen all over the damn city, and this psycho is still just grabbing people?!"
"That's all I've been watching since this morning..." Nora said, completely ignoring Neptune's outrage. She did a little hop, landing to balance perfectly on one foot, posing cutely with her hands behind her back. "So, that's why I'm late to class. Sorry, fearless leader!"
Before I could process her awful excuse, she dropped her foot and shimmied over to my side, sliding right into my personal space until our shoulders were brushing. She looked up at me, her face inches from mine.
"But hey, Jon-jon!" she whispered, her voice dropping an octave, though her smile remained perfectly intact. "It's scary, huh? It's just so, so dangerous out there, huh!" Her eyes searched mine, glinting with a weird, excited, almost hungry kind of light.
The case of Vale's Serial Phantom Killer. I thought to myself, looking down at her bubbly face. It sounded so stale. So cheap. Like the title of some trashy, late-night crime drama that only insomniacs and bored housewives watched.
However, it was true. And it was very real.
It had started more than half a year ago, right here in the heart of Vale. A string of brutal, messy serial murders that had the entire city on edge. There were already five victims now, counting the poor bastard they found this morning.
They were killed completely without discrimination. Men, women, Faunus, humans, rich, poor. The only connecting thread was the sheer brutality of the act. All of them, completely gutted and stabbed with a knife. Multiple times. Frenzied. Messy.
...And the culprit?
I kept my face perfectly neutral as I looked into Nora's overly cheerful smile. She grabbed my arm tightly, beginning to physically drag me out of the classroom and toward the cafeteria, humming a happy little tune under her breath.
She had yet to be caught. No leads. No witnesses. Just bodies left bleeding out in alleyways and abandoned apartments.
I watched Nora's ponytail bounce as she happily towed me down the hallway, chatting idly about the pancakes she was going to demand from the kitchen staff.
I take back what I said earlier.
Be they women or not... strange people are just strange.
That's the kind of deeply messed up, totally unpredictable world this is. You can sleep in the same dorm as someone, eat with them, train with them, and might never have a single clue what kind of twisted shit is rotting behind their eyes.
--- After Classes ---
Indeed. For example... just take this girl, right here.
I was finally on my way out of the main academic building, the sun starting to dip lower in the sky and casting long, sharp shadows across the stonework. I was just about to clear the final staircase and head back to the dormitories when a voice—cold, flat, and completely devoid of any recognizable emotion—called my name from the shadows.
"Jonah... Sir."
I stopped mid-step, sighing as a familiar wave of annoyance washed over me. I turned my head, looking back toward the space under the stairwell.
She was leaning casually against the stone pillar, perfectly blended into the gloom. A girl with long, midnight-black hair, and twin feline ears twitching slowly on top of her head. She didn't wear that ridiculous, bulky black bow to cover them up anymore, not like she had when the semester first started a few months ago.
Blake Belladonna.
"...What is it now?" I said, letting every ounce of my awkward annoyance bleed into my tone. I didn't have the patience for this shit today.
For a long, agonizing few seconds, she just stared at me. Her amber eyes were totally unblinking, tracking my every micro-movement like a predator analyzing prey. Finally, she stepped out of the shadow, extending a hand.
"I have brought the book that you requested." She held out a small, worn paperback novel.
I looked at the book, then up at her totally serious, deadpan face. "Yeah... Thanks," I said awkwardly, taking the book from her grasp. I turned the novel over in my hands, thinking to myself.
Here was the issue: while this was exactly the novel I had spent twenty minutes searching the library for yesterday afternoon, finding out it was checked out... I had absolutely never, at any point, mentioned looking for it to her. I hadn't told anyone but the Library Admin. Yet here it was. Hand-delivered by her.
"...It was nothing," she said. Her voice remained flat, but her posture shifted. Her ears twitched back slightly, and she didn't make a move to leave. She just stood there, staring at me. It was painfully clear she wanted to say something else, but she was waiting for permission.
I wasn't going to give it to her. I stayed perfectly silent, clutching the book, waiting her out. We stared at each other for a solid ten seconds in dead silence, the only sound the distant chatter of other students walking across the courtyard.
"Sir Jonah," she finally broke, apparently finding the courage to speak up.
"Hm?" I grunted, giving her the bare minimum acknowledgment to continue.
Her eyes narrowed to slits, and her posture went entirely rigid. "This noon... you conversed with that woman once again. Did you not?"
The pure, concentrated venom in her voice when she said 'that woman' was as clear as a cloudless day. She wasn't asking a question; she was making an accusation.
"...You were watching me?" I asked, though I already knew the goddamn answer. Why do I even bother asking rhetorical questions at this point?
"As you feared," she said, dipping into a sudden, highly formal, perfectly executed light bow, her eyes never leaving my face. "This is mine, Blake's, sworn duty."
This girl is Blake Belladonna.
Blake doesn't have many friends. In fact, beyond the other three wildly unstable girls on Team RWBY, I'm pretty sure she doesn't have any at all. She doesn't engage in useless chatter. She doesn't hang out in the courtyards or go to the city on weekends. All she ever does is sit in the darkest corners of the library, reading thick novels and giving everyone who walks past the death glare. She is a profoundly strange girl.
Back during the first few weeks of our enrollment here at Beacon, because of some homework I had to work on, I had been forced to talk to Blake. It was nothing special. Just me asking her about some books and her pointing me to their directions.
Ever since that one interaction, we started to talk here and there. Just a brief exchange of a few words whenever we accidentally crossed paths in the halls or the cafeteria. Nothing deep. Barely an acquaintanceship.
However, one day, that entirely changed.
Apparently, back then, she was running away from her team about some drama or another about her being a Faunus that I absolutely did not want to poke my nose into. Knowing her habits, I eventually found her hiding out in the darkest, dustiest, most abandoned corner of the restricted section in the library. She looked like shit—tired, starving, and paranoid.
Because I wasn't an asshole that left a clearly starving girl on her own, I did the most basic, completely platonic, human decency. I tossed her some spare food I had in my bag and handed her a bottle of water before leaving her to rot in peace. I thought nothing of it.
Maybe she'll be thankful enough to help me on some homework one day, that was that.
I was wrong.
I don't know what the hell snapped in her brain after that.
The very next day, she hunted me down between classes. She cornered me in an empty hallway, marching right up to me with an intense, burning fixation in her amber eyes that honestly made me think she was going to stab me. Instead, she grabbed my arm, looked me dead in the soul, and said:
"Sir Jonah. You were the wise King of a small, besieged country in our previous past life. And I, Blake, was a humble Knight whose sacred duty it was to protect that King. My memories from that ancient time have fully returned to me. I have found you again, my Liege."
That is exactly what she said to my face, in broad daylight.
I had just stared at her, completely dumbfounded, wondering if she had accidentally eaten some expired milk from the cafeteria. But she was dead serious. After that insane declaration, Blake became completely unhinged regarding me. It was all loyalty this, and sacred mission that. I need to protect you from the vipers around you, my Liege. Blah, blah, yada, yada.
Any time she managed to corner me without witnesses around, she would ramble endlessly, in exquisite, suffocating detail, about the "lore" of this massive, delusional "setting" she had constructed in her head.
Yes. In short, this woman... is a deeply delusional, utterly psychotic individual. The most dangerous kind of chuunibyou.
She was at least able to act somewhat normal—if you consider being a silent, withdrawn antisocial grump "normal"—while she was around her own teammates. But the absolute goddamn second we were alone, her massive delusions sprang right back up to the surface, consuming her entire personality.
"...Nay, I believe I have humbly requested that you not interact with that treacherous woman again, not without me nearby to shield you from her malice."
I blinked rapidly, snapping back to reality as I realized she was still babbling away after I had completely tuned her out to reminisce about her mental illness.
"...You mean Nora?" I clarified, letting out an exhausted sigh. "I've told you before, Blake. It's none of your damn business who I talk to." I injected as much firm annoyance into my voice as I could muster, hoping it would penetrate her thick skull.
"You understand, do you not?!" she stressed, taking a step toward me, her hands balling into fists at her sides. Her eyes practically glowed in the dim light of the stairwell. "That one is up to absolutely no good! She reeks of blood!"
"Tsk..." I clicked my tongue loudly, glaring right back at her. "Didn't you hear a word I just said? I told you to back off, and you still dare to stand there and call yourself my loyal, pretentious knight?"
I made my voice sharp, commanding. Leaning into the delusion just enough to reprimand her.
It worked. The aggression immediately bled out of her posture. Her cat ears pinned themselves flat against her head, and she looked down at the stone floor in visible reluctance, completely crumbling under my scolding.
I just sighed again, rubbing my temples. My head was starting to throb. "Look... Nora is my teammate. She's my childhood friend too, you know? We literally share a room. I am not going to just ignore her just because you ask me to. It's not going to happen."
I shook my head, deciding this conversation had run its miserable course. I shoved the book she gave me into my pocket and began to walk away, stepping around her frozen form.
"Bye. I have to go meet someone."
"...Where are you headed, my King?" she asked instantly, her voice small but entirely persistent. I could feel her amber eyes boring into my back as I walked down the stone stairs toward the courtyard exit.
"It's none of your business," I called back over my shoulder, my voice dripping with finality. "Also... don't fucking follow me."
I said it uselessly, already fully aware that the command wasn't going to deter her in the slightest. She was going to wait exactly ten seconds, and then she was going to stalk me from the rooftops all the way across campus. It was what she did. It was her "Duty."
I pushed the heavy oak doors open, stepping out into the late afternoon air. I didn't head toward the main Beacon dormitories where my team resided. Instead, I shoved my hands in my pockets and set a brisk pace towards the eastern edge of the school grounds—towards the rented dorms.
I had an appointment to keep. And in a world filled to the brim with delusional stalkers, bubbly potential-psychopaths, and cold-blooded phantom serial killers slicing people up in the streets... the only thing you could really do was keep walking forward.
No matter what.