Chapter XXXI: Battle of Beacon
Hey guys! RoseSaiyan2 here, hopefully you guys are enjoying the story. Before we begin just wanted to get your thoughts on something:
When do you think Nova turns into a super saiyan?
1. upon arrival at the confrontation between Pyrrha and Cinder atop Beacon Tower
2. vs the hordes of Grimm that test his patience before he finally has enough
3. upon his eventual confrontation with Cinder
Do you think Aiko eventually falls in love with her childhood friend, Mercury Black?
1. Yes, it makes too much sense!
2. Nah, go a different route with Aiko
If no, Who does Aiko fall in love with?
1. Yatsuhashi
2. Neptune
3. Sun
4. Giblet
5. Daikon
6. Oscar
7. Jaune
8. Fox [CVFY]
9. Shallot [Giblet's brother]
Who should Scarlett fall for?
1. Sun
2. Neptune
3. Jaune
4. Giblet
5. Yatsuhashi
6. Cardin [Redeemed/ Hero route]
7. other male character
Who should Blake fall in love with?
1. Giblet
2. Shallot
3. Tarro
4. Jaune
5. Sun
6. Neptune
7. Yatsuhashi
8. Fox [CVFY]
Should Weiss and Daikon end up together?
1. Yes!
2. No
If No, Who should Weiss end up with?
1. Shallot
2. Giblet
3. Sun
4. Jaune
5. oc
6. Mercury
7. Cardin
8. other male character suggestion
Should I kill Cinder?
1. Yes
2. No, not yet
if no, when should she eventually die?
1. volume 5 in the vault against Nova
2. Volume 7 against Beerus
3. vs Rhubar and Sala in volume 8
4. against Nova and Turuk
When should Beerus train Nova?
1. sometime after the fall of beacon
2. in the timeskip while Ruby recovers after volume 3 finale
It's been hinted at, but when should the Saiyan Empire return?
1. Volume 7
2. Volume 8
3. Volume 5
4. Volume 4, latter half
5. Volume 6
6. Volume 9
okay that's enough polls, onto the story!
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Battle of Beacon
Part I — The Academy Holds
Location: Beacon Academy, Main Entrance | That Night
The first wave came from the treeline with the specific character of things that had been organized by something that understood pressure points.
Rhubar stood at the academy's main entrance and felt this with the instincts of someone who had spent thirty years learning to read the shape of threats from the inside of them. Random Grimm surges had a texture — the pressure distributed evenly, the attacks exploratory, the gaps between waves dictated by the biology of creatures that did not have strategy. What was coming at Beacon's entrance had none of that texture.
Someone is directing this.
An Ursa Major broke from the pack, and the break was not random — it came at the moment two Beowolf groups had maximized his left-side engagement, and if he had been the kind of fighter who let his left side stay maximized, it would have found what it was looking for.
He was not that kind of fighter.
He moved into the Ursa's line rather than away from it, which was the specific counterintuitive principle that separated people who had survived many fights from people who had survived fewer. The gravitational field he extended — the cosmic-enhanced ability that had developed from his years on Remnant, shaped by the specific demands of a world that fought Grimm constantly — redirected the Ursa's momentum sideways, and then he hit it, and the hit was sufficient.
The crater it made in the outer wall was approximately the size of a delivery vehicle.
"Sala," he said, without raising his voice, "the coordination pattern suggests external intelligence."
"I'm aware," Sala said, from the evacuation corridor behind the main entrance, where she was moving students with the specific combination of direction and calm that was most effective against panic. "They have detailed information about standard defensive formations. They know to attack in sequences that isolate our response capacity."
"Then we don't use standard formations."
"Already adapting."
This was the thing about thirty years of partnership — the adaptations didn't require full sentences. The shorthand had developed to a compression ratio that was sometimes faster than thought.
Three more Ursai came at coordinated angles.
Rhubar addressed them with the focus of someone who had found work to do and was doing it.
Adam Taurus emerged when the first wave had spent itself against the defenders, which was when he had planned to emerge — when the landscape had been assessed and the specific quality of what he was facing had been demonstrated.
He had been told: Saiyan-level threat. Cosmic-enhanced beyond standard Huntsman parameters. Do not engage directly.
He had filed this under information provided by people who had never personally watched what the distance between here and there looks like when you're crossing it with a sword that drinks what it kills.
Rhubar looked at him across the bodies of the first wave.
"Adam Taurus," he said.
"Rhubar Belladonna," Adam said. "The man who built his family out of alien children. I'm told it's touching."
"I'm told you were once something worth becoming," Rhubar said, "and chose not to be."
Adam moved.
The distance between them ceased to be a distance.
Rhubar had been told once, by someone who had fought a great many things, that the specific quality of a person's first attack told you the entire architecture of how they understood combat. Adam's first attack was fast, angry, and precisely calibrated to look faster and angrier than it was — the specific signature of someone who had learned to use the impression of wildness as a screen for the technique behind it.
Rhubar was past the screen before Adam had finished expressing it.
"Your sword absorbs my Aura and turns it against me," Rhubar said, from Adam's left side. "Which requires landing the sword on me first."
Adam adjusted.
The fight continued.
Part II — The Students
Location: Beacon Academy, Main Halls | Simultaneously
Blake moved through the hall with the specific awareness of someone who has been trained in two different kinds of danger and is currently in both of them simultaneously.
The White Fang soldiers moved with the discipline of people who had been given a building's layout, not the improvisational character of fighters making it up as they went. Someone had given them Beacon's floor plan and Beacon's defensive timing and Beacon's personnel distribution with the precision of an intelligence operation rather than a guerrilla raid.
Someone gave them this, she thought, deflecting a blaster shot and turning the momentum into a repositioning that left her behind the attacker's guard. Someone with access and time.
She did not have time to pursue this thought to its conclusion. The attacker went down. Another came.
What troubled her more than the discipline was the smell of it — not the anger she expected, not the righteous fury of a movement that had been building toward something, but fear. Large quantities of it, beneath the surface that soldiers learned to maintain, in the specific register of people who were very much not where they wanted to be.
Half of them don't want to be here, she thought. Half of them are afraid of what happens if they don't.
This was information. She filed it for later and kept moving.
Yang was having the specific problem of restraint in a context where restraint was both necessary and extremely difficult.
The White Fang soldier who had been working on her position went down. The one behind him came up. The one after that arrived from a different angle. She handled them with the focused economy of someone who had been training hard enough and long enough that handling them did not require particularly much of her attention.
What required attention was the thing underneath — the dark quality that the Tenkawa transformation had awakened, that Beerus had named and she had not yet fully named for herself, that fed on conflict the way fire fed on air.
It was awake right now.
It was always aware when she was fighting, but right now it was present in a way she was managing the specific moment-by-moment way of someone walking along an edge.
"Yang." Blake's voice, from two positions over, with the specific note she used for I'm watching and you're doing fine, keep going.
Yang breathed.
She hit the next soldier with the portion of her that was hers, not with the dark thing, not because she was afraid of it but because she was choosing what to use and choosing to use what was actually hers first.
The soldier went down.
She moved to the next position.
Weiss had stopped thinking of the summoning as a thing she was trying to do and started thinking of it as a thing that was either going to happen or it wasn't, and the difference between those two framings was the difference between effort and intention, and it turned out that intention was what the summoning was actually waiting for.
The fragment of white energy that emerged beside her in the corridor had the specific character of something that had been called rather than constructed — small, partial, recognizable only to someone who had been looking for it, but real in a way none of the previous attempts had been.
She filed the success into the part of her mind that tracked what changed and what it had changed from, and redirected her attention to the Atlesian Paladins that had turned.
The Paladins were a specific problem. Atlas had designed them for Grimm suppression, which meant they were good at absorbing significant force applications and returning significant force applications, and the person they were currently returning those applications to was a first-year Huntress with enhanced Saiyan abilities who was still learning how to deploy those abilities at the scale that actually mattered against a Paladin.
She deployed them at that scale.
The Paladin registered its opinion about this by ceasing to be structurally coherent.
So the scale is that scale, she noted. Good to know.
She moved forward.
Ruby was everywhere that things needed to happen.
This was not strategic. It was the specific consequence of having speed that the situations being generated tonight were not calibrating for, and a personality that recognized when something needed to happen and did not pause very long between the recognition and the movement.
She moved a student out of a collapse point before the collapse completed. She moved a White Fang soldier away from a position before the position became irreversible. She caught someone who had been struck and was going down and brought them to a point where going down was less final.
She kept moving.
Her silver eyes were doing something she had been noticing for the past hour — perceiving things slightly before they presented themselves visually, in the specific way of information that arrived through a channel she didn't have a clear name for yet.
Not seeing the future, she thought, because she had thought about this carefully. Seeing the present at a higher resolution than my other senses can process.
She used it.
She kept moving.
Aiko tracked the energy signatures the way her wolf instincts had learned to track things — not as conscious analysis but as continuous background sense, the way smell provided information without requiring active attention.
Half the White Fang soldiers were afraid of something that wasn't the battle.
She found this more troubling than the battle.
Part III — Mercury on the Rooftop
Location: An Observation Rooftop, Beacon Academy | That Night
His scroll showed Cinder's message.
Proceed to extraction point. Mission parameters unchanged.
He sat with it for a while.
The sounds of the city burning had a specific quality — not the random, explosive character of accidents, but the rhythmic, escalating character of something that had been designed to build toward a climax. Each detonation was where it needed to be. Each wave of Grimm arrived at the gap in the previous defense. Each piece of Cinder's plan was expressing itself with the composed efficiency of something that had been rehearsed.
He had been part of the rehearsal.
His phone held a second message, in the cache from earlier, that he had not deleted.
I remember the boy who saved me. He's still in there. Choose who you want to be.
He had been sitting with this for longer than the tactical situation suggested he had time for.
The airship was still operational. Roman was still in the air. The Wyvern was still approaching from the northwest, which his scope confirmed, its shadow visible against the cloud cover from this angle.
His weapon was configured.
Cinder's instruction was clear.
He looked through the scope at the airship, where he could see Ruby Rose fighting Neopolitan with the specific focus of someone who had trained for exactly this and was applying the training without reservation.
His finger found the trigger.
Found it and left it.
He adjusted.
The airship's stabilization system was located in the port engine housing, approximately two-thirds down the vessel's length, accessible from his current angle through a gap in the external plating that most targeting systems would not have identified as relevant.
He identified it as relevant.
His shot went there.
The stabilization cascade began immediately, exactly as the airship's design documentation suggested it would, which he had read at some point during the mission preparation because he read documentation about things that might be relevant.
The documentation had been relevant.
"Mercury," Emerald said, from behind him.
She had been there the whole time. He had known she was there the whole time. Her ability to maintain presence without announcement was one of the specific qualities that made her valuable and the specific quality that made living with that value complicated.
"Cinder's expecting us," she said.
"I heard," he said.
"The shot was off."
"Combat conditions," he said.
Her silence had the quality of someone who did not believe the explanation and was deciding what to do with the disbelief.
Through a channel he had not opened but had apparently been opened for him, Aiko's voice arrived.
"I saw that, Mercury. I know what you're really doing."
He maintained his professional demeanor for Emerald's benefit while the sentence landed where it landed, which was somewhere that had been empty for a long time.
She had seen it.
She had understood it.
She had built a channel to tell him so without Emerald knowing she was doing it, which meant she had anticipated the situation he was in with the specific accuracy of someone who understood how he operated now — the surface compliance and the actual activity beneath it.
He had not given her enough credit.
He had given her exactly the right amount of credit.
Promise me you won't disappear into the shadows again.
He sent a message through the channel. It said nothing directly. It said everything in what it didn't say, which was the specific mode of communication he had been using his entire professional life and which, it turned out, worked in both directions.
"We need to move," Emerald said.
"Yes," he said.
He began moving in the direction that was not Cinder's extraction point.
Emerald followed him, which was the specific choice that it was, and he did not acknowledge it because acknowledging it would have required either of them to say what it meant, and what it meant was too large for the current moment to hold.
They moved.
Part IV — Yang
Location: Team RWBY Dormitory | That Night
The dorm room was quiet in a way that rooms were not quiet when the world outside them was not quiet — a specific, deliberate quiet that existed because two people in it had made an agreement, without saying so, not to import the exterior noise.
Yang sat on her bed with her hands in her lap.
The dark quality that had been running underneath everything since Tenkawa was present in a way she was managing, which was the accurate description of where she was right now — managing, not resolved, not suppressed, just managing, which was different from all of those things.
Turuk was in the desk chair Blake usually occupied, facing her, which was the position of someone who had chosen to be present rather than useful, which was a distinction Yang had not previously thought to make but now considered significant.
"You should be out there," she said.
"Nova's handling the acute threats. My parents are coordinating the perimeter." He looked at her directly. "You needed someone who knows what actually happened."
"Knowing what happened doesn't change what the footage shows."
"No," he agreed. "It doesn't. But it changes what I know, which is what matters right now."
Yang's hands moved slightly in her lap. The dark energy that flickered at the edges of her aura was doing what it did when she was feeling things strongly — organizing itself around the feeling, finding the shape of it, waiting to see what she was going to do with the shape.
She had been having a long conversation with it, in the background of everything else tonight, about what it was and what it was for and whether it was hers or whether she was its. The conclusion she kept arriving at, which was not a comfortable conclusion, was that the answer was both, and that both meant she had to be the thing doing the choosing rather than the thing being chosen.
"I can feel it," she said. "The demonic part. It's not like your Saiyan ki. It doesn't feel like — it doesn't feel like something I grew. It feels like something that was always there, waiting."
"It was," Turuk said.
"That's not reassuring."
"I know. But it also means it's yours. Not something done to you. Something you have." He looked at her with the specificity of someone who has been paying close attention to a particular person for a significant period of time. "The question is whether you trust yourself with it."
"I don't know the answer to that yet."
"I know," he said. "That's a reasonable place to be."
Yang looked at him.
The specific quality of his face right now — present, calm, not performing calm but actually calm, genuinely sitting here in the middle of a city under siege because he had decided this was where he needed to be — was the quality that had been making its way past her usual defenses for months, in the specific gradual way of things that get in not through any dramatic entry point but through accumulated presence.
She had been keeping it at the level of teasing because teasing was safe.
Teasing had a clear perimeter. You knew where teasing ended and something else began. The perimeter was comfortable.
The perimeter had stopped being comfortable sometime around the third time he'd headbutted her back to herself.
"I love you," she said, and heard herself say it, and did not take it back, because taking it back would have been a lie and she was very tired of the things she had been doing instead of the thing she had just done.
Turuk was quiet for a moment.
Not the quiet of surprise — she checked his expression and it did not carry surprise. It carried the quality of someone receiving something they had been anticipating and were now taking seriously.
"I love you too," he said.
He said it the way he said things that were simply true — without preamble, without theater, with the specific flatness of absolute sincerity.
"I've been watching you pretend you didn't," he added, "for longer than was probably fair to you."
"You could have said something."
"You weren't ready."
"How did you know?"
"You stopped being annoyed when I did something unexpected," he said, "and started being embarrassed instead. That's a different thing."
Yang looked at her hands.
The dark energy was still there.
It was not consuming anything right now. It was present, patient, waiting to see what she would do.
"I don't know what this looks like," she said. "Being what I am, with what I have inside me. I don't know what the future of this looks like."
"Neither do I," he said. "That's not a reason to not start."
Outside the window, the sounds of the battle that was consuming Beacon had not diminished. The Wyvern's shadow had passed over the building twice. The sounds from the perimeter said that her father-in-law and mother-in-law — she noticed the thought, registered it, kept it — were dealing with something significant.
Yang's golden tail, which had been wrapped tightly around her waist for the past hour, uncurled slightly.
Turuk's was already loose, because his was always loose when he was not in combat, because he had learned earlier than she had to not treat his tail as something that needed constant management.
They did not do anything dramatic.
They sat together in the deliberate quiet of a room where two people had said true things to each other and were now simply being in the same space with those true things, which was its own kind of significant.
The night continued outside.
The room held them.
Part V — Daikon and Scarlett
Location: Beacon Academy, East Wing | That Night
Daikon was running evacuation coordinates while simultaneously disabling the communication frequencies that the White Fang soldiers were using to maintain their positioning, which was the specific type of multitasking that his abilities made possible and which most other people found disorienting to watch.
Scarlett was at his left, because she had been at his left for most of this, which was the kind of positioning that happened when two people had been working together long enough to not need to discuss it.
"Weiss is in the central courtyard," Daikon said. "Engaging multiple disabled Paladins."
"I know," Scarlett said. "You've mentioned her position four times in the last eight minutes."
A pause, in the way of someone who had been tracking many things and had lost track of what they were saying out loud.
"The Paladins represent a significant threat to anyone without enhanced aura output," he said. "She has enhanced aura output but may not be fully calibrated for the application—"
"Daikon."
"—requirements of a disabled Paladin versus an active one, which are mechanically distinct in the targeting parameters—"
"Daikon."
He stopped.
"You're worried about her," Scarlett said.
"I am monitoring a significant threat near her position," he said.
"You're worried about her," Scarlett said again, with the specific patience of someone who has decided to hold a position until the other person arrives at it.
Daikon's enhanced processing, which was excellent at most things, was not the tool that the current question called for. The current question called for the tool he was less trained in, which was honesty about things that did not have tactical implications.
"Yes," he said. "I am worried about her."
"More than the tactical situation warrants."
"The tactical situation warrants significant concern."
"That's not what I asked."
He looked at a point on the wall that was not Scarlett.
"She's been — the training over the past weeks, her summoning attempt today — she's been developing in ways that suggest the Schnee Semblance and the Saiyan enhancement are producing a combination that I don't have a complete model for. I want to be present for the model development." He stopped. Found the honest sentence. "I want to be there when she does something she hasn't done before."
Scarlett's expression did not change in a dramatic way. It changed in the way of someone whose face was doing the internal version of yes, I've been watching this for a while.
"That's called caring about her," she said.
"I'm aware of what it's called," Daikon said.
"Then say it like that instead of like a mission briefing."
Daikon looked at her directly. "I care about her. In a way that exceeds tactical interest. I have been aware of this for some time."
"Have you told her?"
"I have been communicating it indirectly through sustained attention and investment in her development."
Scarlett looked at him.
"Daikon," she said, very gently, "you're going to need to use actual words at some point."
"The current combat situation does not suggest ideal conditions for—"
"No," she agreed. "But after. Use actual words."
Daikon returned his attention to the tactical display.
"After," he said.
Aiko's voice arrived through the channel.
"I need backup. Moving toward the observation rooftop."
"We've got you," Scarlett said immediately, already in motion. And then, to Daikon, over her shoulder: "After. Actual words."
He followed her, filing after alongside actual words in the part of his mind that tracked deferred actions.
The filing felt more important than most things in that folder.
Part VI — The Airship
Location: Roman's Hijacked Airship | That Night
Nova arrived the way he arrived things when the arrival needed to be unambiguous.
The golden energy that hit the airship's deck ahead of him served as a reasonable announcement, and Neo received it as such — the specific shift in posture of someone who has just recalibrated what they're dealing with.
Ruby's expression when she saw him was the expression she had when something had resolved that she hadn't known was still uncertain.
"You're here," she said.
"Yes," he said.
"The academy—"
"Is Turuk's and my parents' right now," he said. "You needed—" He stopped. Found the honest version. "I needed to be here."
She looked at him with the specific look she had when she was determining whether something was logic or feeling.
He had learned, over the past months, that she did not actually make a distinction between the two.
"Okay," she said.
Neo's umbrella found the gap in his attention that his arrival conversation had created, and he let it — not because he hadn't seen it, but because Neo's ability to read the moment and execute within it was worth acknowledging. He deflected rather than absorbed, which was more honest about what the situation was, and by then his full attention was back where it needed to be.
Ruby had Neo's umbrella.
The moment of her triggering it, and Neo's subsequent and spectacular departure from the vessel in a direction she had not selected, had the quality of something that had been building for a while and was now simply expressing what it was.
Roman stared at the space where his partner had been.
Then he looked at Ruby.
Then at Nova.
He said something theatrical, because that was what Roman did, and he meant it while he said it, which was the specific quality of theatrical things that were also true things expressed theatrically.
People are sheep. Power is what matters. Good wins in stories, not in the world.
Ruby answered him.
Nova watched her answer him, which was more useful than joining the answer, because it was her conversation and she was having it correctly.
Then the Griffon arrived.
It arrived from the direction Roman had not allocated attention to, which was the specific price of a mindset that treated everything as an audience.
Nova watched Roman Torchwick end the way things ended when the things that a person's philosophy failed to account for arrived from a direction the philosophy didn't cover.
He felt nothing complicated about it.
He felt, very simply, that Roman had made many choices that led here, and here had arrived.
"Ruby," he said, and she was already moving, because she had already read the airship's remaining structural integrity and had arrived at the same conclusion he had.
They cleared the deck.
The airship completed its opinion about the evening.
The city received it in the specific way cities received things that fell out of the sky.
They landed on Beacon's main platform in a cloud of rose petals and fading gold, and for a moment they were simply standing there in the specific quiet that follows large things when the large thing is over.
"Roman—" Ruby started.
"Yes," Nova said.
She looked at him.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I don't know yet," she said. "Are you?"
"Same answer," he said.
She nodded.
They looked at the city, which was still burning in several places, and at the sky, where the Wyvern's shadow was doing something that they both read at the same moment with the same attention.
The Wyvern was not behaving like a Grimm.
Part VII — The Wyvern
Nova extended his senses toward it with the specific attention he gave things that didn't fit available categories.
The Wyvern's energy signature was wrong in a way that was precise rather than vague. It was not the malevolent-but-random signature of a creature responding to negative emotion. It was the malevolent-and-directed signature of something that had been given direction, and the direction was not arbitrary.
"The energy underneath it," Ruby said.
"Yes," he said.
"It's familiar."
"Yes."
She looked at him. "Not like what we have. Not like what we were given."
"No," he said. "Like the shape of it, corrupted. Like someone found the same source and — redirected it."
He thought about Turles, and about the specific darkness in the tree that had grown from the massacre at Tenkawa, and about the way power responded to what you fed it.
"Someone has been feeding something for a long time," he said.
"Salem," Ruby said.
It was not a guess.
They both knew what Salem was, in the way you knew things that Ozpin had been carefully and steadily revealing over months of deliberate disclosure.
"If she's found access to something cosmic," Nova said, "and has been — cultivating it—"
"Then we're not just fighting her," Ruby said. "We're fighting what she's done to it."
Nova's transformation came up around him, not explosively but with the specific quality of something settling into its proper place.
The silver was in it.
He chose to let it be there.
He was not at the threshold. He was standing in front of the door. He was choosing, clearly and consciously, to be here — present, himself, the person he had decided to be when Tarro had asked him who he was going to be with the power he had.
"Together," Ruby said.
"Together," he confirmed.
The Wyvern turned toward them.
They went toward it.
Part VIII — Aiko's Gambit
Location: Observation Rooftop | That Night
She had not told her team the full version of what she was planning, because the full version would have produced objections, and the objections would have been correct, and correct objections to necessary actions were still objections to necessary actions.
She moved across the rooftop with the wolf-quiet of something that had learned from childhood how to be in spaces without announcing itself.
Emerald was maintaining position. Mercury was with her. Neither of them was looking in the specific direction she was approaching from, which was not an accident — she had mapped their attention fields from three buildings away using her ears.
What she was attempting was not combat.
It was something more precise and considerably more difficult.
Emerald's semblance operated by occupying the sensory processing space of a target. The specific way it worked meant that a sufficiently strong competing signal — not stronger power, but more specific resonance — could introduce interference that made the maintained illusion unstable.
Aiko's competing signal was not a technique.
It was memory.
She stepped onto the rooftop.
"Mercury."
Both heads turned.
Emerald's semblance flared immediately, the specific defensive response of someone whose position has been identified and who is attempting to manage the situation through the only tool they reliably had.
What Emerald found, when her semblance reached for Aiko, was not something she could easily grip. The specific texture of genuine feeling — not emotional performance, not the dramatic declarations of people in crisis, but the old, patient, deeply embedded texture of someone who had known a specific person from before the person had been shaped into what they currently were — did not behave the way manufactured targets behaved.
The semblance slipped.
"I remember the boy in the storage cabinet," Aiko said, directing it at Mercury with the focused precision of someone who has identified the exact door and has the key for it. "I remember promising not to make a sound. I remember you were more frightened than I was and you stayed anyway."
Mercury's expression did the thing it did when something reached past the conditioning.
"Mercury," Cinder's voice arrived through the earpiece Aiko could hear clearly at this distance. "Maintain your position."
Mercury did not maintain his position.
He maintained his position in the sense that he did not move.
He did not maintain it in the sense that his expression was doing things that his position had required him not to do, and the things it was doing were not controllable by instruction.
"Aiko," he said.
"I know you're still in there," she said. "I'm not asking you to blow the whole thing today. I'm asking you to know that someone knows you're choosing. Someone is watching for it and sees it and isn't going to pretend they didn't."
Emerald's semblance made another attempt.
It found the same texture.
It slipped again.
The specific quality of genuine human connection was turning out to be poorly addressed by a power designed for producing perceptual hallucinations.
Emerald looked at Mercury.
She made a decision in her expression before she made it anywhere else, and Aiko was watching her expression, and Aiko saw it.
The semblance did not make a third attempt.
Mercury's conditioning and the boy he had been before the conditioning both occupied his face simultaneously, which was not a comfortable thing to inhabit and which he inhabited with the specific grace of someone who had been managing uncomfortable things for so long that grace under them had become automatic.
"When this is over," he said.
"When this is over," she confirmed.
Scarlett and Daikon arrived at the rooftop's far edge, which was where they had been since slightly before the conversation began, because Aiko had told them where she was going even if she hadn't told them the full version of what she was planning.
They had come anyway.
This was the specific quality of Team NDTSA, which was that the people in it showed up for each other even when the full version of what was happening had not been provided.
Mercury looked at them.
Then back at Aiko.
"Go," she said. "Do what you need to do. I'll be here when you come back."
He went.
Emerald, after a moment that was its own kind of accounting, went with him.
Aiko watched them go.
Her tail had been very still throughout the entire conversation. Now it moved — once, slowly, in the specific gesture that was the wolf-Faunus equivalent of setting something down.
Scarlett appeared beside her.
"Did it work?" Scarlett asked.
"He knows someone is watching," Aiko said. "That's what matters right now."
"Is that enough?"
Aiko thought about the cabinet in the dark, and the promise that had been made there, and the person who had made it.
"Yes," she said. "For now."
Part IX — The Tower
Location: Beacon Tower | That Night
Ozpin's office, from the outside, had the specific quality of a space that had become the center of something without having been designed for that function.
Ozpin stood before the vault with the specific posture of someone who has been moving toward a decision for a very long time and has arrived at the place the decision lives.
Qrow was there.
Ironwood was there, via the communication array, his face carrying the specific expression of a military man who has been informed that the parameters of the conflict he is managing extend beyond the parameters he was given.
Glynda was not there, because Glynda was in the city, which was where Glynda's specific capabilities were most needed, and Ozpin trusted Glynda's specific capabilities more than most things.
"The broadcast," Ironwood said.
"Yes," Ozpin said.
"She had the archive footage. The classified documents. The Relic coordinates."
"Yes."
"How?"
"That," Ozpin said, "is a question for a less immediate moment."
Ironwood's jaw did the thing it did when he was managing something he found unacceptable. "Ozpin, if there's a mole at the highest levels of either command structure—"
"James," Qrow said, with the tone he used when interrupting Ironwood in a way that was genuinely for Ironwood's benefit rather than his own. "What she's exposed has already been exposed. The question is what we do about the situation we're in now, not the situation we were in before she changed it."
Ironwood looked at him.
"He's right," Ozpin said, in the way of someone who did not say that easily. "The broadcast has done what it was designed to do. The negative emotion it generated across four kingdoms is going to attract Grimm at a scale we have not seen in thirty years." He turned to the vault. "Which means the current situation requires resources we have been holding in reserve."
"The Relic," Qrow said.
"Not directly," Ozpin said. "But the vault's existence means certain things about the nature of this tower, and those things may be relevant to what is coming."
He turned from the vault and looked at his scroll, which was showing him the specific confluence of things currently happening at and above Beacon that the tower's sensors could track.
The Wyvern.
Nova and Ruby.
The energy signature of two people who had been touched by something vast and were using it, right now, in the way it was supposed to be used — to protect rather than destroy.
He was aware that he was watching something historic, and that the awareness felt small given the scale of what he was watching.
"Pyrrha," he said, to himself.
He did not say more.
Qrow heard it, because Qrow heard most things he was not supposed to, which was one of his most consistently useful qualities.
"She'll find her," Qrow said.
"I know," Ozpin said. "That's what worries me."
Part X — What Cinder Found
Location: Beacon Tower, Upper Levels | That Night
Cinder moved through the tower with the specific quality of someone who has prepared a path and is walking it.
The preparations had been thorough. They had been thorough in the way that thorough preparations were thorough — not comprehensive, because comprehensive was impossible, but addressing every identified variable with the specific attention of someone who had been working on a problem for years and had identified most of the variables correctly.
The variable she had not fully addressed was currently in the air above the lower city, blazing in gold and silver, doing things to a creature the size of a building with the focused economy of someone who had trained for something like this.
She watched the Wyvern and Nova for exactly as long as it took her to revise her estimate of what she was dealing with.
That is not a student, she thought. That is not any category I prepared for.
The Maiden power she carried — taken, not given, the specific quality of a thing obtained through violence rather than succession — responded to what it was perceiving by doing something it had not done before.
It flickered.
Not from her direction. Not her intention. From the specific instinctive response of power that recognized something of greater magnitude in its vicinity and was expressing an involuntary opinion about the magnitude comparison.
Cinder managed the flicker.
She had managed the flicker when Beerus arrived. She managed it now.
She kept moving.
Pyrrha Nikos was somewhere in this building, and the transfer had either happened or it hadn't, and if it had happened then the next few minutes were going to be either the conclusion of everything she had been building toward or a revision of what conclusion was available.
She had not built the plan to conclude with a revision.
She kept that in mind.
She kept moving.
The tower held her.
The night held the tower.
In the city below, the battle for Beacon continued with the specific momentum of things that had been set in motion and would not stop until they had found their resolution one way or another.
The resolution was still being written.
★ END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE ★
Next: Chapter Thirty-Two — "End of the Beginning: Nova's Awakening"