"So, you seem awfully chipper this morning." Yang noted from the bench she was sitting on. She and Ruby were within the locker room of Beacon Academy, retrieving their gear for Initiation, though in practice, only Yang had anything to get, as Ruby would be using Rosenkreuz as her weapon, and had 'dressed' in her Knight's Clothing, albeit with Sleipnir suppressed, instead of 'normal' combat gear.
"Chipper?" She asked, unfamiliar with the word.
"Active, happy. You're a lot happier than you normally seem to be." There was a click as the blonde brawler finished loading her gauntlets.
"Ah." The Knight nodded. "I admit to looking forward to this. I wish to test myself on the 'Grimm', and to test Rosenkreuz's Crescent configuration." The modifications made should prove… Interesting to test.
"And what about teams?" Yang asked.
Ruby froze for a moment, then turned away. A complication, honestly.
"I… Have not given much thought to that. I am… Uninterested in working in a team. I am capable of doing so easily, I have in the past, but I do not wish to be here."
I don't plan on staying too long, after all. Sooner or later, a TSAB Vessel will arrive to investigate the Archon, and retrieve its remains. And I plan on leaving with them.
"Why not?" Yang asked her, then seemed to have a moment of realization, dropping her voice down to a whisper. "You don't plan on staying, do you?" Ruby glanced back, and felt slightly guilty over the fact that the blonde brawler looked like a kicked puppy.
The Knight didn't answer back, instead turning to her assigned locker, closing it. She hadn't actually retrieved anything from it, instead using the locker as a convenient place to transform Rosenkreuz. She turned back right as the other girl began to speak.
"Ruby—"Yang started to speak again, though as Ruby turned back to her, another student interrupted her by walking between the two.
"Ridiculous! There's no way I put my gear in locker six-three-six yesterday, I would've remembered having to count that high! Why does this have to happen today?" He complained, contemplating his scroll as he continued walking down the locker room towards the higher-numbered lockers.
"Ruby—" Yang tried again once he had passed, only to be interrupted again, this time by Ruby.
"Not here. Too many prying ears." The Knight told her, tossing her head to the side, indicating the other students. "We will talk another time, just not here and now. That conversation will be had."
The blonde brawler took a few seconds to process that, before nodding slowly.
"Okay." With that, she began a final check of her gauntlets, and Ruby mentally queried Rosenkreuz.
"Any success in negating or mitigating Remnant's AMF?"
"I've had some, Meister. We should now be able to cast up to AA+ Rank spells without too much interference, and I figured out how to compensate for the magilink bonds weakening over distance, so I'd say our maximum range with spells has increased to roughly seven-hundred fifty meters!"
"Excellent. Any last-minute concerns related to your new configuration?"
"None at all!" Ruby smiled internally, strapping the Interface Bracer onto her left arm just before the wrist. Normally, she could just directly link her arm to the weapon she'd modified, but, due to not wanting to reveal her cybernetics, she'd had to settle for swapping her regular Knight's Clothing bracer for the Interface Bracer.
She brought her hand down to the small of her back, and brought Rosenkreuz around, giving the mental command to unfurl her new configuration as she did so.
The Device unfolded, barrel lengthening, handgrip sliding up into place, supports attaching to the Interface Bracer, linking with her directly, the Heads-Up Display flashing into being in her vision, and the normal feeling of her Device beginning to draw Mana from her made her smile outwardly, along with the sight. The modifications to the Formula Cannon did indeed seem to have gone as planned.
Though she wasn't too fond of the idea of being reliant on a mass weapon for her long-range capabilities, Ruby had admitted early on that she'd need one if she wanted to blend in with the Hunters of Remnant. That said, it had taken a while for her to finally get around to bother using one.
Part of her reluctance was a general Midchildan aversion to Mass Weaponry, that, despite her rather Belkan upbringing, had still been instilled in her, and part of it was simply concerns about ammunition. After all, weapons with physical ammunition could run out long before their wielder ran out of mana. On top of that, physical ammunition could be expensive, jam a weapon if made improperly, could be lost or stolen, and could go off early if exposed to the right kind of trigger.
In all, the only solid munitions weapon Ruby was at all fond of was the Formula Cannon built into the Fortress System, and that was a hybrid: She could cast with it, albeit with less range and power than with Rosenkreuz's normal modes, as well as send spikes of metal downrange, and, thanks to the weapon's ability to form its solid projectiles out of mana, she didn't have to worry about her concerns with ammunition. Thus, when she had finally acquiesced to the necessity of a mass weapon, she had set out to modify the Formula Cannon, instead of getting a standard firearm.
There hadn't been many modifications required after the separation from the Fortress System, if she were to be honest. The main two had been the ability to use magazines and the addition of a large magazine port, where she could load the weapon as to not draw attention to the fact the weapon didn't actually need loading, or load specialized rounds. Given that its solid projectile mode was a railgun, she didn't need more sophisticated ammunition than steel or iron spikes, and it was even advanced enough to compensate for different size spikes, provided they were straight. She'd taken advantage of this, and, with the assistance of Rosenkreuz and Taiyang, fashioned several magazines of specialized spikes, each containing small reservoirs of Dust, to give the rounds special effects in battle.
The only other modifications even worth mentioning were the addition of heat vents so she could cover more of the weapon's internals with plating to reduce potential damage in the field and the aforementioned plating.
"I've said this before, and I'll say it again, that thing's a monster." Yang commented from the bench, gazing up at the Knight's weapon. Ruby hefted the black, red, and silver rail-cannon, turning to face her.
"This 'monster' is one of the handful of weapons I trust." She said, grinning, right hand coming around and taking a hold of the foregrip. "This is the CFW-X-02-F/M/AB Formula Cannon." She raised the 'barrel' to point at the ceiling. "I could kill an airship with this with ease, and mission-kill most armored vehicles in a single shot."
"Overkill, much?" Yang asked, also grinning at Ruby's subtle but still present enthusiasm for the weapon.
"Oh, certainly. But, to quote a source called 'Tv Tropes', 'There Is No Kill Like Overkill'."
The Blonde Brawler shook her head at that with a grin, but before she could say anything, the intercom came on.
"Would all first-year students please report to Beacon Cliff for initiation? Again, all first-year students report to Beacon Cliff immediately." Glynda Goodwitch's voice sounded, before the intercom fell silent again.
"We probably ought to get going." Ruby noted.
***
"For years, you have trained to become warriors, and today, your abilities will be evaluated in the Emerald Forest." Ritter Ozpin told the assembled students, as they all stood on the launch platforms on the cliff overlooking the Emerald Forest.
I completed my training already. Ruby mentally noted with amusement, as Glynda Goodwitch began to speak.
"Now, I'm sure many of you have heard rumors about the assignment of teams. Well, allow us to put an end to your confusion. Each of you will be given teammates… Today." The Deputy headmaster informed the crowd. Ruby caught a few murmurs from the other students.
"These teammates will be with you for the rest of your time here at Beacon. So it is in your best interest to be paired with someone with whom you can work well. That being said, the first person you make eye contact with after landing will be your partner for the next four years." Ritter Ozpin announced, taking over from Glynda again.
Wait, what? Why? Ritter Ozpin, are you just messing with us?
"After you've partnered up, make your way to the northern end of the forest. You will meet opposition along the way. Do not hesitate to destroy everything in your path… Or you will die." The elder Knight continued. "You will be monitored and graded through the duration of your initiation, but our instructors will not intervene. You will find an abandoned temple at the end of the path containing several relics. Each pair must choose one and return to the top of the cliff. We will regard that item, as well as your standing, and grade you appropriately. Are there any questions?"
Several, but none I care to ask aloud right now.
One of the other students, however, raised his hand, and as Ruby glanced over, she noticed that it was the same student who'd gotten confused about his locker number earlier.
"Good! Now, take your positions." Ritter Ozpin said, instead of actually allowing the student to ask his question. Ruby just shook her head as she set herself into a combat stance.
How, precisely, the students were sent into the forest for initiation was one of the things Taiyang and Qrow had told her and Yang, so she wasn't surprised or even startled when the platforms each student stood upon began launching the students into the air.
"Uh, sir? I've got, um… A question. So, this landing… Strategy thing? Uh, what is it? You're, like, dropping us off or something?" He asked, apparently missing the other students down the line being launched.
"No. You will be falling." The elder Knight told him, before the younger one spoke up. After all, a Knight is supposed to help people. If that means helping this idiot figure out what's going on…
"Blonde." She addressed the clueless student.
"Huh?" The student looked over at her, and she gestured behind herself.
"Learn to pay better attention to your surroundings." Ruby told him with a grin, as, judging by the "Woo-hoo!" behind her, Yang was launched into the air.
She had just enough time to note his expression of surprise mixed with shock before the platform underneath her own feet activated and propelled her into the air.
She twisted around as she flew, glancing back at the final student in line as he was launched, too. His arms were up in the air as he flailed around in confusion and apparent fear.
Ruby sighed. Why do I get the feeling he really doesn't belong here? She wondered irrelevantly, before turning her attention back to herself. She already had a landing strategy in mind, which meant she simply waited, enjoying the rush of air as she flew.
It took a surprising amount of time before she was lower than the treetops, and, glancing around, she saw no one, though she did hear the noise of something heavy impacting a tree, followed by a shouted "thank you!"
Deeming that irrelevant, as she was rather certain the person yelling couldn't hear her, she activated her own landing strategy, a remarkably simple one, in fact.
The four black wings of Sleipnir came into being, and she simply lightly touched down, Formula Cannon at the ready.
To the side, she caught the sound of several bushes moving, and a girl she recognized stumbled out of the shrubbery, stopping dead as she made eye contact with Ruby.
Ice blue met metallic silver.
***
Stupid bushes. Weiss Schnee thought with annoyance as she stumbled through the underbrush of the Emerald Forest. Making me stumble like this.
The heiress had landed a decent depth into the forest, her landing strategy having been to leap from glyph to glyph on the way down, allowing her significantly more progress than most students would have made, though she had eventually decided to save her Aura by coming down to the forest floor and make her way through on foot.
She banished these thoughts as she stumbled into a clearing. There was, after all, someone else in the clearing. Hopefully, they'd be worth being a Schnee's partner.
Weiss glanced up, and stopped dead.
The girl she'd met just as she'd arrived stood there, the veteran, as she'd mentally catalogued her. She had dressed in some kind of black and red armored dress, carrying a massive weapon she didn't recognize which was larger than either of them, but neither of those facts are what caught her attention.
No, what made her stop was the simple fact that four small black wings extended from her back.
Faunus? Her mind sped up and her body tensed, before she realized one simple fact.
There was no conceivable kind of faunus that would have four wings, as no animal on Remnant had more than two, and every faunus had the traits of a defined type of animal.
Then why does she have wings? Something related to her Semblance, perhaps? No matter. I shall inquire later. She focused back onto the present, now regarding the girl with curiosity instead of hostility.
"I suppose we are partners for now." The girl spoke, her odd accent once again making Weiss wonder where she was from. She'd never heard any accent remotely like it, and given the wide variety of people she'd met as a result of all her father's business dealings, she'd heard nearly every conceivable one.
Focus. This is no time for idle wanderings of the mind. She chided herself, before nodding in response to the girl's earlier statement.
"It would seem so." She put her hand out, in greeting, as the rules of etiquette demanded. "Weiss Schnee."
The girl seemed to hesitate for a moment before taking the offered handshake.
"Ruby Nakajima." Sounds Mistralian, Weiss noted. Perhaps she's from an outlying village? She dismissed the thought. She had more important things to do than speculate pointlessly.
Without any preamble, Weiss turned, glancing through the forest, taking charge as a Schnee should.
"I believe our quarry is located in this direction." She stated, pointing towards where she presumed the forest temple was located. When she got no verbal response, she glanced back to the veteran—Her name's Ruby, not using someone's name is impolite, you were raised better—and noticed the girl had her scroll out, the back-blackout deactivated so Weiss could see what she was doing. Ruby had pulled up a map of some sort, and as Weiss moved closer, she realized it was a map of the Emerald Forest, with various points tagged with markers.
"According to this map, it is actually that way." Ruby pointed with her massive weapon, before collapsing her scroll and clipping it to her belt.
Well, at least she's contradicting me with logic and facts instead of simple oppositional defiance. The heiress mentally admitted, still vaguely annoyed that she'd been ignored originally, but somewhat gratified that her partner had demonstrated that she could make use of more than just weaponry and could actually think to use whatever tools were on hand, even if it was just looking up a map of the area. Wait a moment…
"What makes you sure of that? A normal map wouldn't have our objective on it." Weiss noted.
"It is an archaeological map." Ruby replied, setting off in the direction she'd indicated. "There are very few potential sites in this forest, and only one both far enough from the cliff to be a proper test, yet close enough as to not take an overly long period of time to reach and return."
Makes sense. Weiss admitted, following. She'd held rather low expectations for most of the Beacon students, believing that most of them would simply charge through the forest blindly, without a second thought, but here her newfound partner had shown none of that, instead calmly using a tool at her disposal to locate the objective, and making so clear without much in terms of disrespect.
Add to that her bearing, that of a trained warrior with confidence in her skills, and her short, to-the-point yet not disrespectful manner of speech…
At this point, Weiss was starting to get unnerved.
This girl, Ruby, is so much like Winter on-duty it's beginning to scare me.
***
"Grimm." Ruby abruptly announced after a few minutes. The two had come to a small clearing, which Ruby had stopped in the middle of, to check her map again.
Neither of them had spoken, which had both suited and put off Weiss in equal measure.
On one hand, she did want to learn more about this strange girl, but on the other, she wasn't very good with social interaction, and knew it.
"Where are they?" Weiss asked, drawing Myrtenaster, and idly spinning the revolving Dust-chamber mechanism, as was her habit.
In response, Ruby raised the massive weapon she wielded. The—barrel?—split into two halves, then the halves slid slightly apart. Blood-red lightning surged between the split barrel sections, then, with a loud lightning-bolt noise, a bolt of something too fast to see lanced from between the sections, the only indication of its passage being the blood-red trail it left behind, and the effect on the unfortunate Beowulf it hit as the Grimm emerged from the treeline.
The Grimm detonated as the projectile hit it, punched through with enough force to vaporise a large percentage of the thing's body, and kept going, straight through several more Grimm, the noise of something exploding reaching Weiss's ears about the same time a very large tree behind the Beowulf pack toppled over.
The weapon's wielder winced, as Weiss stared at her partner. What the hell kind of weapon is that? So much power…
"Ich habe nicht erwartet, dass der Grimm so zerbrechlich ist… Vielleicht sollte ich die Kraft auf den Schienen senken?" Ruby wondered something aloud, albeit quietly, in a language Weiss didn't recognize. What are you saying? Or even, what language are you speaking in?
A growl reminded the heiress that a few of the Grimm had not been killed by whatever her partner's weapon was, and she turned, raising Myrtenaster as she did so, assuming a fencing stance.
"Stirb, verfluchte Kreatur." Ruby's voice sounded next to her, again in some unknown language. A clunk of metal indicated that the 'barrel' of her weapon had slid closed again.
As Weiss charged forwards at the nearest Beowulf, she was aware of Ruby moving alongside her, the strange girl wielding the massive weapon as if it were a lance.
As Weiss impaled the Beowulf she'd charged, a wet noise indicated that Ruby's weapon had found its own target, though she rapidly focused on the Beowulf before her, as impaled did not mean dead, which the creature reminded her with a swipe of its claws.
She ducked under the blow as she pulled Myrtenaster from the Grimm's chest, slashing the blade's tip through the Beowulf's throat, dropping the beast. She spun to the side, searching for more targets, and only saw Ruby pulling her hand trom the last Beowulf's chest, the other—two, huh, not very many for a Beowulf pack, even with the dead—lying dead, the bodies beginning to smoke.
"Ruby?" She asked, surprised, sheathing Myrtenaster.
"Hmm?" The other girl looked up at her. Was her hand silver there for a minute, or am I just seeing things? "Yes?"
"How did you kill three Beowulves that quickly?" Weiss asked.
Ruby hefted her massive weapon again.
"This is big enough to kill two at once." She smiled, slightly.
"Just what is it, if I may ask?" I've never seen a weapon like that before…
"This? This is the CFW-X-02-F/M/AB Formula Cannon. Her name is Rosenkreuz."
"The what?" Weiss was confused by the sudden jumble of numbers and letters. She could recognize it was a weapon's designation, but beyond that it meant nothing to her.
"A railgun firing metal spikes that can also be used as a lance or claymore." Ruby's smile widened very slightly, even as she began to walk away, continuing in the presumed direction of the Forest Temple.
"Railgun?" I have no idea what a railgun is…
"A railgun is a weapon that utilizes pulsed electromagnetic force to launch a projectile accelerated by the aforementioned pulses between two or more conductor rails."
"So it's like a coilgun but with rails instead of coils." I think I understand.
"An oversimplification with several inaccuracies, but some of the principles are the same, yes." Ruby told her.
"Close enough. And that would explain why it was so powerful…" Weiss mused. If coilguns powered by Dust were considered heavy anti-material weapons, a similar weapon, even one 'man-portable', would be overkill against most Grimm. Though, I understand the temptation for overkill where Grimm are concerned.
"A little more powerful than expected, I will admit. I may have to adjust the power output to the rails to avoid mass collateral damage, should we even find ourselves fighting in an urban environment."
Weiss winced as her partner said that. Yeah, that kind of destructive power in a city would not end well…
"This will take too much time, at our current rate." Ruby abruptly noted, changing topic quite suddenly.
"What will?"
"Walking to the presumed location of our objective. Were I alone, I would be able to move much quicker." Hey, now.
"And what's that supposed to mean?" Weiss asked, growing annoyed again. She couldn't tell if she was being insulted or not, due to the other girl's flat tone, but it still annoyed her that her partner was insinuating that she was being slowed down by the heiress's presence.
"It means…" The other girl hesitated, then asked another question.
"Do you mind heights?" Huh?
"Uh, no? Why do you—"
"Do you mind being carried?"
"Wait, what?" Weiss looked at her, confused by the questions.
"Please answer."
"Depends on the circumstances…" She trailed off in confusion.
"I shall take that as an 'I do not mind'." Ruby stated, slung her weapon onto her back—so it can compact, at least—, and walked over to the heiress.
"What are you—" She didn't manage to finish her sentence, as the smaller girl abruptly lifted her into a princess carry. "Hey! Put me down!" What the hell are you doing!
Ruby ignored her, and leapt into the air. Her four black wings began trailing red, and the two rose up into the sky.
What the hell. What the hell. We're flying. What.
"How?" Weiss asked in shock.
Ruby just gave her an enigmatic smile, before they stopped simply gaining height, and launched off in a burst of speed that made Weiss shriek and wrap her arms around the winged girl.