Author's Note:
Hey everyone, RoseSaiyan2 here. My apologies for not updating for several weeks. I didn't forget about this story—it's been on my mind to update, and I'm just now getting to it. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed the last chapter. With these next two chapters, we will officially come to the end of Volume 1 of the RWBY story.
I might toss in some extra stuff to make this chapter the normal length, though! These next two chapters will cover episodes 15 and 16 of Volume 1, and then it's onto Volume 2. This story's first main villain will be appearing either towards the end of Volume 2 or I may just save his debut until the extra mission I have planned for Ruby and the gang in Volume 3.
Also, Tarro's dialogue with Nova will be quite a bit earlier than in the original FanFiction.net story; I'm thinking somewhere in the middle of Volume 2. What do you guys think?
Yes (mid Volume 2)
No (stick with the original timing and have that be in Volume 3 before the craziness surrounding the tourney)
Anyways, that's all for now. Feel free to vote either yes or no for the Tarro poll question. Onto the story!
CHAPTER SIX: The Stray
Part I — Vale in Festival Colors
Location: The Streets of Vale | Afternoon
The entire city had been dressing itself all week in that infectious, high-spirited way cities do when a major municipal milestone is on the horizon and they want every piece of stone and mortar to know it.
Festive streamers in brilliant shades of crimson, gold, and forest green stretched across the broad avenues of lower Vale, woven between antique lampposts and canvas shop awnings with the hyper-organized enthusiasm of a local government that took its celebrations deadly seriously. Brightly colored clusters of balloons anchored the corners of brick buildings. Just down the block, an elderly shopkeeper was carefully tensioning a massive, freshly painted cloth banner across his storefront that boldly declared: WELCOME TO VALE! in lettering large enough to be easily legible to a Nevermore cruising at high altitude.
Weiss Schnee strode at the head of the group with her arms held at a subtle, elegant angle, wearing the serene expression of someone who felt deeply validated by an aesthetic that successfully met her rigorous structural standards.
"The Vytal Festival," she announced with the profound, hushed reverence of a girl paying homage to an institution she considered genuinely sacred. "This is simply magnificent."
Ruby, strolling alongside her, tilted her head with mild skepticism. "I honestly don't think I've ever seen you smile this much." She squinted up at Weiss's face. "It's actually kind of unnerving."
"How could anyone not smile?" Weiss spun around on her heel, gesturing broadly at the vibrant, decorated thoroughfare around them. "A global festival dedicated to celebrating the rich cultures of every kingdom—the traditional dances, the magnificent parades, the world-class tournament! The logistical complexity behind an event of this scale is genuinely breathtaking. Do you have any remote idea how many steering committees must be—"
"And there it is," Yang chimed in from behind them, hands laced casually behind her neck, wearing the amused grin of a spectator watching a high-speed train casually derail itself. "You managed almost four whole sentences before pivoting to bureaucracy."
"Hush, you."
"Whatever you say, Ice Princess."
"Stop calling me that!" Weiss whirled back around, pinning Yang with the sharp, acidic glare she reserved for things she found deeply objectionable. "Whoever originally coined that atrocious nickname should be—"
"Nova's team," Ruby interrupted, her voice dropping a register.
Both older girls froze, blinking at her. Ruby was staring intently through the plate-glass window of a cozy, crowded bookshop they were currently passing, her head tilted slightly as she verified the visual data before opening her mouth.
"Nova is in there," she murmured. "Right inside the bookshop."
Yang's expression instantly shifted into something loaded with subtext. "Oh, really?"
"It's just... a funny coincidence, that's all. I didn't know he—" Ruby cut herself off mid-sentence, catching the dangerous glint in Yang's eye. "Don't."
"Don't what? I didn't say a single word."
"Your face said it for you."
"My face is completely neutral." Yang offered an angelic, serene smile—the look of a person who had won an argument purely through tone and considered the matter closed. "Well, I suppose we should pop in and say hello, right? Seeing as we're already here. By pure, unadulterated coincidence."
Weiss instantly adopted an expression of icy, clinical neutrality. "I suppose a brief, utilitarian detour wouldn't completely derail our afternoon schedule."
Blake slowly lowered her current reading material, glancing from her teammates to the bookshop window, and back again. "Why is everyone suddenly staring at me?"
"Do you object to stopping in?" Yang asked innocently. "To say hi to your brothers?"
Blake considered the question with characteristic deadpan gravity. "Why on Remnant would I object?"
"We didn't want to make assumptions."
"It's a bookstore, Yang. I am constitutionally incapable of objecting to a bookstore." She marched straight toward the double doors. "Frankly, I remain deeply confused by the subtext of this entire exchange."
Ruby trotted in right behind her, securing the honor of being first through the threshold—which meant she instantly had to school her features into the picture of utter nonchalance.
The interior possessed the rich, comfortable density of an establishment that had steadily accumulated literature over decades, cheerfully defying any organizing principle that didn't serve the books' own comfort. Shelves wound through the floor plan at irregular angles, suggesting organic, sprawling growth rather than interior design. The ambient light was a warm, inviting amber.
Team NDTSA was scattered across the aisles in the relaxed posture of people with absolutely nowhere else to be. Scarlett stood near the back, holding an open spine with the critical eye of a girl weighing whether the literary merit justified the cover price. Aiko stood right beside her, turning pages with the meticulous, unhurried focus of someone for whom browsing was a sacred duty. Daikon was deeply engrossed in a dense manual, maintaining the statuesque stillness he brought to most activities, while Turuk had managed to claim a battered armchair.
And Nova was tucked away in the back-left corner—the music and comics section—standing quietly with a publication held open, wearing the thoughtful expression of a guy who had just stumbled onto a narrative thread he hadn't expected to find compelling.
Ruby navigated the mazelike aisles via a route that was objectively longer than the straight line, which she rationalized as casual browsing.
He looked up the exact second she closed the distance to a range where ignoring her would have required active effort.
"Ruby." He tilted his head slightly. "Didn't exactly expect to cross paths with you here."
"Oh, you know." She gestured vaguely at the racks of graphic novels surrounding them. "Comics. I was just... browsing. Conducting some vital research on Sequential Art."
"Naturally."
She shifted her weight from one boot to the other, squinting intently at a random book spine on a nearby shelf before snapping her gaze back to his.
"Can I ask you a weird question?"
He nodded, waiting with that absolute, unhurried attentiveness that defined his baseline listening mode.
"I never would have pegged you as a comics reader," she admitted, rubbing the back of her neck. "It just seems... I don't know. I couldn't really picture it. For you, specifically."
He turned the thought over for a second. "Is there an administrative rule against it?"
"No! No, that's not what I meant—I just meant it caught me off guard. In a good way!" She made that familiar, fluttery hand gesture she used whenever she felt the urgent need to rewind a poorly phrased sentence. "I was just curious, that's all."
"It isn't that I've collected them my whole life," he explained, glancing down at the cover—a dynamic illustration featuring a masked vigilante caught in a burst of kinetic motion. "I just heard someone mention them and thought the framework sounded interesting. Figured I'd investigate the primary source myself."
"That is—yeah, that is extremely you," Ruby said, before immediately wondering if psychoanalyzing her friend out loud was a socially graceful move.
He fixed her with a look where the corners of his eyes did something that flirted dangerously close with a smile. "You say that like you've completely decoded my psychology."
"I didn't say that."
"You heavily implied it."
"I implied that you prefer forming your own empirical conclusions rather than relying on hearsay. Which is high praise."
"I'm aware." He closed the graphic novel at his current page and let it hang loosely at his side. "You're a profoundly strange person, Rose."
"You've mentioned that before." She puffed her cheeks out into a tiny, indignant pout. "You always say it like it's a zoning violation."
"It's a neutral observation. Strange isn't a synonym for bad." He locked his gaze onto hers with that direct, unblinking intensity she was still adapting to—the gaze of someone who spoke their exact truth without padding it with social softeners. "You're consistently interesting. That's a lot rarer than most people realize."
Ruby held his amber-flecked eyes for a beat, and that strange, familiar warmth that had been dropping in unannounced over the past several months flared up again—a pleasant, slightly dizzying sensation radiating outward from her chest. She promptly shoved it into a mental filing cabinet labeled Process Later with the practiced efficiency of an elite archivist.
"We're friends, right?" she blurted out.
He blinked once. "Ruby."
"I know, I know. I just—I like saying it out loud sometimes. For operational confirmation."
"We are friends," he confirmed, adopting the patient, methodical tone of a man verifying a foundational physical constant. "We've been friends since that night in Vale. Arguably since before that."
"Since the bookshop," she nodded.
"Since before the bookshop," he corrected quietly. "I concluded you were worth knowing from the very first time our paths crossed. I just didn't have the appropriate terminology for it yet." He looked down at the comic book in his hand. "Now I'm apparently informed that you've designated yourself my best friend, having unilaterally passed that executive decision without my input."
Ruby grinned, her face lighting up. "Is that an administrative problem for you?"
"Not remotely," he said softly. "It's just very characteristic of you."
Without asking permission, Ruby reached out, plucked the comic from his hand, flipped to the exact page he'd been tracking, and leaned comfortably against the bookshelf directly beside his shoulder.
"Okay," she whispered conspiratorially, "here's the fundamental secret to reading sequential art—you have to understand the gutter spacing and panel progression first. Otherwise, you're just looking at colorful illustrations of people punching each other, which—okay, valid—but there's an entire visual language underneath it."
And for the next several minutes, she launched into an impassioned, breathless architectural breakdown of visual storytelling to a guy who hadn't asked for a lecture, but listened with the laser-focused attention of someone who genuinely found her enthusiasm fascinating—which made him quite possibly the ideal audience for Ruby Rose when she hit her professorial stride.
Meanwhile, in the adjacent aisle—precisely one shelf-width away—the gathered members of both teams had collectively transformed into statues, maintaining the profound, unnatural stillness of people straining their ears to hear every syllable while frantically pretending to browse historical texts.
Yang had both hands clamped firmly over her mouth. Her eyes were wide with a fierce, vindicated light she would have vehemently denied if cross-examined.
Turuk had been staring at the exact same paragraph of a wilderness survival manual for four solid minutes.
Daikon was making a rhythmic, repetitive sound that was technically supposed to pass for clearing his throat.
Weiss, to her absolute credit, appeared to be deeply absorbed in the back cover of an advanced Dust-theory treatise—completely ignoring the glaring detail that the heavy volume was upside down.
Blake had lowered her reading material by an inch, staring blankly up at the ceiling tiles with the expression of a ninja desperately wishing she could vanish into the shadow realm.
Scarlett leaned subtly toward her sister and whispered out of the corner of her mouth: "How many weeks do you think before—"
Aiko murmured back without looking up: "Don't. Don't jinx it."
Part II — The Docks
Location: The Docks | Late Afternoon
The group drifted out of the bookstore and back onto the bustling avenue, settling into the subtly rearranged social geometry of young people who had spent too much time in close quarters and were unconsciously recalibrating their spacing. Nova's team had zero pressing commitments demanding a return to Beacon, and Team RWBY's afternoon schedule was flexible enough to absorb an unexpected detour, leaving them to walk together in that comfortable, unstructured formation that had somehow become second nature.
Yang predictably drifted back to match pace with Turuk—a quiet habit she had fallen into with increasing regularity and seemed entirely oblivious to.
At the front of the group, Weiss had seamlessly resumed her festival-adjacent commentary, which had somehow mutated into a comprehensive, highly competitive structural analysis of the Vytal Tournament's tournament brackets. Daikon listened with the steady, detached calm of a guy who had no intention of agreeing with her premises, but found the sheer architectural audacity of her arguments genuinely entertaining.
"Remind me again," Yang called out from the rear as the heavy, briny scent of saltwater and rotting kelp began drifting up from the timberline ahead, "why on Remnant we are trekking all the way down to the docks?"
Ruby wrinkled her nose, giving an expressive little shudder. "They smell like fish."
"Can confirm, they smell unequivocally like fish," Turuk chimed in dryly.
"Exchange students from Vacuo are arriving by naval transport this afternoon," Weiss declared loftily from the front. "As official student representatives of Beacon Academy, it is our distinct civic responsibility to—"
"She wants to scope out the competition before the brackets are drawn," Blake muttered, never looking up from the dense paperback she had materialized from the depths of her coat.
Weiss whipped around on her heel, her eyes flashing. "You cannot possibly—"
"Am I factually incorrect?" Blake countered smoothly.
The dead silence that followed stretched on for roughly three seconds too long to ever pass as a denial.
Daikon emitted a low, rumbling noise that was technically a cough. "Just accept it, Weiss. You aren't fooling anyone with the noble-ambassador narrative."
"I don't even know what you're implying—"
"You're doing the chin thing," he pointed out mildly. "The elevated tilt. You only do that when you're trying to sound much more virtuous than your actual motivation."
Weiss spun on him with the fiery, affronted energy of a girl who had been psychoanalyzed with pinpoint accuracy and deeply resented it on principle. "That is a malicious—"
"Is he fundamentally wrong?" Ruby asked innocently.
Weiss's chin dropped approximately one centimeter—the absolute closest the heiress could ever come to a formal concession of defeat.
The rest of the group managed the heroic feat of maintaining total silence—the kind of polite quiet people offer when they've already won the debate and dragging it out any further would just be cruel.
"They'll argue like this for the entirety of the afternoon," Aiko murmured quietly to no one in particular, her eyes tracking the sparring pair. "And then he'll say something deadpan that makes her smile, and then they'll instantly go back to arguing."
"And she will inevitably keep coming back for more," Turuk added in an equally low tone.
"It's fascinating telemetry," Aiko noted.
"It really is," Turuk agreed.
The docks smelled aggressively of brine, scales, and the heavy industrial hum of steam-powered cranes hauling cargo crates from towering cargo freighters. Vessels were moored at various berths, churning the green water into white foam as longshoremen shouted orders across the gangplanks.
Suddenly, a frantic shout cut through the nautical din from the deck of a recently docked transport ship.
"Hey! Stop that Faunus!"
The entire group instinctively snapped toward the noise.
A young man was sprinting down the length of the metal gangway with the loose, frictionless stride of a guy who was actively being hunted by security and clearly found the entire ordeal vastly more amusing than his pursuers did. He was blonde, with a broad, athletic build and a long, golden prehensile tail—unmistakably simian in origin—that lashed behind him purely for balance as he reached the absolute edge of the pier. Without breaking his forward momentum, he caught a heavy iron lamppost at the corner with one hand, swung himself in a smooth, effortless arc around it, and planted himself twelve feet up in the air atop the fixture, casually pulling a fresh banana from his jacket.
"Much obliged for the lift, gentlemen!" he called out cheerfully, peeling the fruit with the unhurried grace of a tourist on holiday. "Exception to the rule—very smooth crossing!"
"You good-for-nothing stowaway!" an irate deckhand roared from below.
"A bad stowaway gets caught," the blonde corrective corrected airily from his lofty perch. "I am an elite, highly professional stowaway. There is a profound philosophical difference."
A dockside security guard reached down, snatched a loose pebble off the cobblestones, and violently lobbed his frustration upward. The boy glanced down, registered the projectile's trajectory with clinical indifference, and casually dropped his finished banana peel—managing to land it square on top of the guard's cap with uncanny, accidental precision.
The guard stared at the yellow peel plastered across his forehead.
"Get down here! Now!"
The boy blinked at them, treating municipal authority as an optional suggestion he intended to review at a later date. Then, his amber eyes dropped to the cluster of students standing on the docks—drifting over Yang, Ruby, and eventually zeroing in on Blake, who stood slightly apart, clutching her book like a shield.
He flashed her a quick, effortless wink as he kicked off the lamppost, hitting the wooden planks running at full tilt and vanishing around a corner before anyone could blink.
"Well," Yang whistled, hands on her hips. "There's your Vytal competition, Weiss. Moving at high velocity."
"Quick!" Weiss commanded, snapping into action with her arm thrust forward. "We have to intercept him before he—"
She rounded the corner at a brisk pace—which proved to be a tactical error, seeing as another human being had apparently materialized out of the maritime fog and occupied the exact spatial coordinates required for a violent, high-speed collision.
Weiss hit the pavement hard. The stranger stayed standing, though she swayed slightly as if she hadn't quite computed whether falling down was part of her current operational parameters.
She stared up at the cloudy sky with the wide-eyed fascination of someone observing a weather pattern for the very first time.
"Whoa," Yang said, trotting around the corner to catch up. She looked down at the sprawling heiress, then up at the strange girl. "Hey—are you alright?"
"I am magnificent!" the girl declared brightly from the concrete. "Thank you for inquiring!"
The combined teams exchanged a series of deeply bewildered glances.
"Do you... want a hand getting up?" Yang offered, extending an arm.
The girl considered the proposition as a deeply profound philosophical question requiring exhaustive analysis. "Yes!" She surged to her feet in a single, hyper-fluid motion that managed to be simultaneously jerky and acrobatic, landing squarely in front of them with the buzzing, erratic energy of a wind-up toy.
She possessed shock-bright green eyes and a cascade of copper-red hair, radiating the absolute, unshakeable aura of someone who was thrilled to be existing anywhere in the universe. She wore a strange, highly functional assortment of gear with clashing, non-standard color palettes.
"My name is Penny!" she announced at high volume, executing a stiff, polite bow. "It is an absolute, unadulterated pleasure to make your acquaintance!"
"Hi, Penny!" Ruby said easily, flashing a friendly grin. "I'm Ruby."
"Nova," the Saiyan added flatly.
"Turuk," Turuk said, offering a casual two-finger salute.
"Scarlett Reinhardt," Scarlett introduced herself, gesturing to her left. "And this is my younger sister, Aiko."
"H-hello," Aiko squeaked softly, shrinking back a fraction of an inch.
"Name's Daikon," Daikon rumbled.
"I'm Weiss," Weiss groaned, rubbing her bruised shoulder as she managed to stand.
"Blake," the Faunus said quietly.
"Are you entirely sure you didn't concuss your head in that fall?" Yang asked, before suddenly realizing she had been skipped. "I'm Yang, by the way. Sorry about the pileup."
"It is an absolute, unadulterated pleasure to make your acquaintance!" Penny repeated, utilizing the exact same intonation, pitch, and decibel level as her previous greeting.
Several members of the squad slowly turned to look at one another.
"You literally just said that—" Scarlett started.
"So she did," Weiss muttered, wincing.
"So I did!" Penny looked positively ecstatic at this realization. "Yes!"
Nova had remained entirely silent throughout the exchange, his dark eyes locked onto Penny with the cold, calculating focus of an engineer running structural diagnostics. Ruby, who had spent enough time around him to recognize his operational tells, caught the shift in his posture and slowed her breathing, edging closer to his side.
"What is it?" she whispered.
"The girl," he murmured back, keeping his voice low enough to be swallowed by the dock machinery. He was still tracking Penny's subtle micro-movements out of the corner of his eye—the rigid cadence of her limbs, the unnatural symmetry of her posture, the split-second processing pause that occurred before every single verbal response. "I believe she's an android."
Ruby's eyebrows shot toward her hairline. "A what?"
"A constructed intelligence. A mechanical organism engineered to mimic human physiology and socialization," he explained concisely, searching for a simpler analogy. "A robotic person. Manufactured rather than born."
"Oh." Ruby processed the revelation in real time. "Wait, are you guessing?"
"It's a working hypothesis based on kinetic feedback and behavioral timing. There's a fractional latency in her cognitive delivery—microseconds too fast for organic reaction, yet structured with an algorithmic delay to simulate thought. Most people wouldn't notice." He shook his head slightly. "It could be a miscalculation. People exhibit bizarre neurological quirks for any number of reasons."
"But you're leaning toward machine."
"I am." He cast a sidelong glance down at her. "I'm sharing this with you because you just claimed her as a peer, and I figured you'd want complete tactical transparency."
Ruby held his gaze for a single, quiet heartbeat. "Does it actually matter?" she asked softly. "Even if she is?"
He turned the question over in his head for a second. "No," he concluded simply. "I don't suppose it does."
"Then we're on the exact same wavelength." Ruby flashed a bright, reassuring grin and skipped back into formation alongside the group, Nova falling into step right behind her.
"Well, that girl was certifiably bizarre," Yang remarked once they had put a safe distance between themselves and the docks.
"I've encountered significantly stranger," Ruby countered airily.
"Where on Remnant?" Daikon challenged, raising an eyebrow.
"Signal Academy. There was this older upperclassman who unironically collected severed Grimm teeth in mason jars."
"That's genuinely repulsive," Scarlett shuddered.
"Wait—where did that erratic Faunus stowaway run off to?" Weiss muttered, squinting ahead down the crowded street, before suddenly letting out a high-pitched shriek and stumbling backward into Yang.
Penny was standing directly in front of her again.
"What did you call me?" Penny demanded, her green eyes locking onto Weiss.
Weiss looked frantically behind her, looked in front of her, and finally shot Yang a look screaming for immediate rescue.
Yang threw her hands up in total surrender. "She wasn't talking to you—I'm so sorry, I honestly didn't think you were in earshot—"
"No, not her." Penny casually waltzed right through the cluster of students, zeroing in on Ruby with absolute, terrifying determination, her voice dropping into an intense, dramatic register. "You."
Ruby blinked, pointing to herself. "Me?"
"You utilized a specific term." Penny's unblinking green eyes bored into her. "You called me friend. Am I? Am I genuinely, officially your friend?"
Ruby exchanged panicked glances with her teammates, who were communicating entirely through micro-expressions that clearly signaled: Deny it immediately, invoke self-preservation, and let's back away slowly. She turned back to face the android girl.
Penny's face was a portrait of fragile, aching hope.
Ruby softened. "Yeah," she said easily with a warm smile. "Sure. Why not?"
Behind them, three members of Team RWBY executed a synchronized, silent facepalm that bordered on emotional collapse, while the four members of Team NDTSA found the entire catastrophe far too entertaining to intervene. Aiko had to slap both hands over her mouth to muffle a laugh, and Turuk stared intently up at the sky as if searching for divine intervention.
"Sensational!" Penny squealed, clapping her hands together with enough kinetic force to generate a small sonic pop. "We can coordinate our nail polish, swap seasonal wardrobes, and engage in lengthy discursive panels regarding attractive young males!"
Ruby turned her head very slowly, fixing Weiss with a deadpan stare.
"Is this precisely what it felt like," Ruby asked flatly, "when you first met me?"
Weiss stared back at her with the cold, clinical detachment of a girl reliving deep trauma. "No," she replied coldly. "You were significantly less coordinated and far more obnoxious."
"She's objectively not wrong," Yang chuckled.
"Hey!"
Part III — What the White Fang Means
Location: Lower Vale | Three Streets Inland
They located the shattered Dust shop three streets inland, wedged between a bakery and a shuttered tailors.
Two front windows had been blown completely outward, their jagged frames crosshatched with bright yellow municipal tape. A bored detective was scribbling notes into an open pad near the threshold while his partner peered through the gaping doorway into the smoke-blackened interior.
"Second storefront hit this week," the first detective muttered, not looking up. "This city is turning into an absolute jungle."
"Left all the lien behind again, though," the second noted, stepping back out.
"Who needs that much raw Dust anyway?" the first asked the empty air.
"An insurgent army?" the second offered grimly.
"You reckon the White Fang?"
"I reckon I don't get paid enough to chase terrorists."
"Hmph." Weiss folded her arms tightly across her chest, hoisting her chin to the precise angle she reserved for delivering formal, unimpeachable opinions. "The White Fang. What an utterly vile collection of—"
"Weiss," Scarlett cut in. Her voice carried the quiet, razor-sharp warning of a girl who had just spotted a tripwire and was pointing directly at it.
"Easy," Nova added half a second later, matching Scarlett's tone with effortless precision.
"What is your actual problem?" Blake stopped dead in her tracks. She was staring straight at Weiss with the hyper-focused intensity of a person weighing how much of their inner monologue they were actually going to unleash.
Weiss wheeled around, looking genuinely affronted by the challenge. "My problem? I simply have zero patience for violent extremist organizations."
"The White Fang isn't just a violent extremist organization," Blake said, her voice dropping an octave. "It's a civil rights movement that has made catastrophic, catastrophic mistakes regarding its tactical methods. Those are fundamentally different concepts."
"They want to systematically eradicate humanity—"
"The radical paramilitary fringe does. That is not synonymous with every individual who has ever—"
"Misguided is an absurdly generous descriptor. The atrocities they've committed against my family's corporate assets—"
"Against your family's what?" Blake's voice sharpened into a blade. "Against the conglomerate that built its entire dynastic fortune on the systematic exploitation of Faunus labor, treating its workforce like—"
"Ruby floated Roman Torchwick's name earlier," Yang interjected smoothly, tossing the statement into the ring like a diplomatic flash-bang in the tone of someone offering a peace offering with modest expectations. "From a few months ago. We never actually verified if he's officially tied to these warehouse raids."
"That's a sound investigative angle," Nova observed quietly. He looked over at Ruby, who was nervously tracking the escalating crossfire between Weiss and Blake with the expression of a spectator trapped in a crossfire. "Blake has a valid point regarding the distinction between a broad demographic movement and a radical faction. That's a crucial variable to keep in mind."
"Blake invariably has a valid point," Yang said, before catching Blake's sudden, warning glare and hastily appending, "which I intend entirely as a compliment."
Weiss opened her mouth to resume her tirade.
Suddenly, from the direction of the nearby waterfront, a familiar, high-spirited voice rang out above the ambient street noise.
"Hey! Stop that Faunus!"
The entire group instinctively pivoted toward the sound.
Sun Wukong shot past them at a dead sprint, having apparently mapped a complete urban parkour route from one corner of the Vale docks to another in the span of twenty minutes—a feat of transit that was either an astronomical coincidence or proof that Vale was a very small city.
"Faunus riff-raff," Weiss muttered, the words slipping out more as a conditioned reflex than a conscious thought.
The atmospheric pressure in the group dropped instantly.
Nova's tail froze—going rigid in that specific, unnatural way tails go still when the body is actively suppressing a volatile reaction. Turuk's jaw clenched so hard his cheek muscles strained. Daikon, who had been half-observing the debate between Weiss and Blake, slowly turned his head to lock eyes with the heiress, his expression shifting from detached interest to cold, heavy assessment. Scarlett glanced sharply down at Aiko, while Aiko simply stared at the pavement.
Ruby parted her lips, her mind racing. Weiss, wait, don't—
"Why do you keep saying things like that?" Blake asked.
The question was dangerously quiet—stripped of volume, which made it land with the crushing weight of a falling anvil.
Weiss blinked, genuinely startled. "Like what? I'm simply making a—"
"Stop calling him riff-raff." The sheer amount of emotional control Blake was exerting to keep her voice level was staggering. "Stop calling them degenerates. He is a human being. That boy with the monkey tail is a person. Every single Faunus you look at and mentally file into a dangerous category instead of seeing an individual is a human being."
"I wasn't—"
"Would you call me riff-raff?" Blake interrupted, her amber eyes locking onto the heiress's face.
Weiss stared at her, utterly frozen.
"Would you?" Blake pressed relentlessly. "Same tail. Same Faunus biology. The only difference is I wear a black bow instead."
"That's—that's completely absurd, you're my teammate, you're different—"
"Why does being your teammate suddenly make my entire species acceptable?"
"Because I know you!"
"You knew that boy for roughly thirty seconds," Blake fired back. "And you had already categorized, judged, and dismissed him."
Weiss's jaw worked silently as she searched for a defense. "I am a direct victim of what those monsters did to my family! You cannot possibly expect me to feel neutral—"
"I don't expect you to feel neutral. I expect basic human decency extended to people who happen to look different from you." Blake's voice had dropped into a terrifying, glassy calm—infinitely worse than screaming. "Those are two completely different bars."
The argument had reached critical mass by the time they finally reached the main promenade of the docks, burning through the rest of the afternoon with the relentless, unyielding energy of an emotional boiler that had been pressurized for months and finally blown its safety valve. As the afternoon sun began to bleed into long, amber shadows, the debate had aggressively traversed the foundational history of the White Fang, the bloody tragedies of the Faunus Rights Revolution, the notoriously brutal labor records of the Schnee Dust Company, and several deeply personal grievances neither girl had ever intended to broadcast in public.
Nova's team had instinctively yielded space, stepping back to form a wide perimeter—the only logical tactical choice. There was zero constructive input anyone could offer from the outside; inserting themselves into the friction would only distort the raw, necessary truth of the confrontation.
Nova walked silently beside Ruby, who kept glancing back at her bickering teammates with the tense, helpless expression of a girl watching a localized hurricane from inside a glass house, praying the structural integrity held.
"Is there... is there anything we can actually do?" Ruby murmured, her voice laced with worry.
"Not yet," Nova replied quietly. "Sometimes things have to rise entirely to the surface before they can be lanced." He paused, his amber eyes reflecting the fading light. "It's going to get worse before it resolves. But it will resolve."
"You sound remarkably confident about that."
"I know Blake," he said simply. "And I'm rapidly learning who Weiss is." He glanced down at Ruby. "They are both women who care intensely about being right. That makes them terrible at baseline arguments, but exceptional at learning from the aftermath."
Ruby went quiet for a long beat, turning the thought over in her head. Then, looking up: "You're exceptionally good at reading people."
"My father insisted on rigorous practice," he said, his tone flat.
She felt a sudden urge to dig deeper—to ask about his family, about a father who apparently trained his sons to dissect human psychology and read rooms the way other parents taught their children alphabets—but the sharp, escalating friction from her teammates yanked her back to the immediate crisis.
"Come on," Ruby said softly, quickening her pace. "We need to stay close in case it boils over."
Part IV — What Blake Said
Location: Team RWBY's Dormitory | That Evening
By the time they returned to the sanctuary of Beacon Academy, the argument had evolved into something much deeper and more consequential than its explosive origins—shifting from a debate over surface-level politics into a raw confrontation about the history carved into their identities.
The dormitory held that heavy, low-voltage tension unique to spaces where people are forced to coexist in tight quarters while a massive emotional fault line remains unresolved. Ruby sat stiffly on the edge of her mattress. Yang lounged on hers, monitoring the room with a hawk's eye. Nova had remained—he had escorted them all the way back up to the dorm and simply hadn't left, settling quietly near the open doorway with the grounded presence of a guy who had decided that walking away right now would be an operational error and was prepared to step in if things boiled over.
Weiss and Blake stood several paces apart, the floorboards between them feeling like a demilitarized zone.
"I still don't understand," Weiss said for the third time, her voice cracking with the specific, agonizing frustration of someone who genuinely couldn't wrap her head around the opposing viewpoint and desperately wanted to. "Why does this specific issue run so deep for you? It's not as though—"
"That is precisely the problem," Blake interrupted. Her voice was terrifyingly controlled, each syllable clipped and measured. "You don't understand why it matters, and you completely fail to grasp why your lack of understanding is the root of the problem."
"You do realize you are aggressively defending an active terrorist organization that has systematically—"
"I am defending the fundamental principle that an entire biological species does not deserve to be reduced to the murderous actions of a radical fringe group—a fringe group that only metastasized because of systemic oppression," Blake retorted, her fists clenched at her sides. "There is no such thing as pure, unadulterated evil, Weiss. The White Fang hates humanity because humanity spent generations providing them with every possible reason to."
"People like me," Weiss fired back, her voice dropping into a dangerous, icy register that exposed a raw nerve she hadn't intended to show. "You think I'm the architect of it."
"You perpetuate the exact same prejudice," Blake said flatly. "Whether you possess malicious intent or not."
"I am a survivor. I am a victim." The words tore out of Weiss with a raw, unexpected force that made the entire room flinch. "You want to know why I am the way I am? My grandfather built a legacy, and for as long as I can consciously remember, there has been a literal crosshair painted on everything tied to our name. Family friends vanished in the night. Board members executed. Entire freight trains loaded with volatile Dust hijacked and detonated. My father came home enraged and broken every single day of my childhood, and I didn't even understand why until I was old enough to comprehend the violence, and then I understood it, and it made everything infinitely worse."
She brought her palm down hard against the wooden shelving unit beside her, the sharp thwack echoing loudly in the quiet room.
"So do not stand there and lecture me about understanding the cost!" Weiss panted, her chest heaving. "I have been paying that blood tax my entire life."
Ruby instantly surged forward from her bunk.
"Weiss—"
"No." Weiss straightened her spine, forcing her rigid composure back into place layer by layer—rebuilding her emotional armor as an act of sheer will rather than natural calm. She locked eyes with Blake. "But I want to know. I need to understand why it matters to you on this level. Tell me."
Blake held her gaze for a long, heavy moment, the anger draining out of her to leave something much more fragile in its wake.
"They weren't always like this," Blake said softly, her eyes unfocusing as she looked into the past. "The White Fang. When it was founded, it was peaceful. Methodical. It was an organization of marginalized people who had been pushed to the absolute edges of society, trying to carve out a path to equality through legitimate means—civil protests, peaceful negotiations, legal advocacy."
She swallowed hard.
"And then the world systematically proved to them that peaceful appeals were completely ignored. And a faction within the movement decided that compliance wasn't an option anymore." Blake paused, her voice dropping to a whisper. "I understand that choice, even if I fundamentally reject it. Because I was there."
The heavy silence that dropped over the dorm lasted precisely long enough for Weiss to process the staggering weight of the admission.
"We—" Blake caught herself, cutting her sentence short.
"We," Weiss repeated, the word hanging in the air.
Blake looked slowly around the room. At Yang. At Ruby. And finally out toward the open doorway, where her amber eyes locked briefly with Nova's steady gaze before she pulled them away.
"Maybe some of us were just exhausted from being stepped on," she murmured.
The words fell onto the floor like heavy stones dropped from a great height.
And then Blake was moving—striding past Weiss, past Ruby's instinctively outstretched hand at the threshold, past Nova without looking up—and the dormitory door swung violently shut behind her. Her rapid footsteps echoed down the corridor, fading away entirely before anyone in the room could assemble a coherent sentence.
Ruby spun toward the hallway. "Blake—!"
The corridor was completely empty.
She turned slowly back into the room.
Nova was already on his feet, stepping fully into the doorway. His face had locked into that familiar, terrifying stillness—the tightened jaw, the dead-eyed focus of a warrior bottling a volatile reaction. He fixed Weiss with a look of cold, precise evaluation.
"She just shared something with you that she has never told another living soul," he said, his voice terrifyingly quiet. "Things about who she was before she ever stepped foot in Beacon." He paused, letting the weight settle. "She trusted this room with that history, and it broke."
Weiss looked as though she had been physically struck, her lips parting soundlessly.
"Nova—" Ruby was already at his side, gently laying a hand on his forearm, her tone pleading and frantic. "Please, stop."
He glanced down at Ruby's hand resting on his arm, then up into her wide, worried eyes. The icy storm behind his gaze shifted—not evaporating, exactly, but redirected, as if he were being asked to carry a heavy burden somewhere else and consciously choosing to comply. He exhaled a long, measured breath through his nose.
"You're right," he conceded quietly. "This wasn't her intentional malice. She didn't possess the context."
He turned his attention back to Weiss and dipped his head in a formal, measured bow—not out of subservience, but as the respectful acknowledgment of a combatant who realized he had aimed his hostility at the wrong target.
"I apologize," he said flatly. "I crossed a line."
"No." Weiss shook her head, her carefully constructed aristocratic persona completely dissolving, leaving behind a very young, very overwhelmed girl. "No, you... you were entirely correct. I knew this was a live wire. I kept stepping on it anyway." She brought both hands up to cover her face. "I need to find her."
"Tomorrow," Yang chimed in gently from her bed, offering the advice not as a dismissal, but as the wise counsel of someone reading the emotional atmosphere of the room. "Tonight, she needs absolute isolation to decompress. Tomorrow, she'll be receptive to a conversation."
Weiss sank slowly onto the edge of her mattress. The relentless armor she had worn all day finally gave way, and she buried her face in her hands, her shoulders trembling slightly as she silently absorbed the wreckage of the evening.
The room settled into the hollow, echoing quiet of people grappling with a crisis that refused a neat resolution. It was in the middle of this heavy stillness that Nova suddenly became hyper-aware of a tactile sensation against his side.
He looked down.
Ruby's arms were wrapped completely around his waist—both of them. She had stepped in close behind him, pressing her forehead directly against his shoulder blade with the blind, instinctive grip of someone acting purely on emotional reflex before her brain had time to issue a veto.
He cleared his throat.
Ruby snapped back to reality, jolting upright.
She sprang backward as if she had touched a live electrical current. Her face cycled through a rapid succession of brilliant crimson hues.
"I'm—I didn't—that wasn't—I wasn't calculating my spatial coordinates—I am so sorry, that was completely out of line—"
"Ruby," he interrupted, his voice even.
"Yes?" she squeaked at high velocity.
"It's completely fine." He delivered the reassurance with the total lack of dramatic inflection that defined his entire existence, which somehow made it intensely comforting. "Honest physical miscalculation."
"Right," she babbled frantically. "Honest. Miscalculation. Totally standard operational procedure. Happens all the time." She suddenly became intensely fascinated by a speck of dust floating in the middle distance.
He watched her with the patient, calculating gaze of a guy who had registered a massive data point and was deliberately filing it away for future processing.
Then, because the tension was palpable and he knew instinctively that a simple, grounding gesture would restore the universe to its proper axis, he reached out and gave her unruly bangs a gentle, affectionate ruffle.
Ruby immediately puffed her cheeks out into an indignant pout, swatting half-heartedly at his hand.
A ghost of a real smile touched the corners of his mouth.
"Go track down Blake tomorrow morning," he instructed softly. "She's going to need you to anchor her."
"Yeah," Ruby muttered, still standing beneath her ruffled hair, her voice softening. "Yeah, we will."
He offered a quiet goodnight to the room. At the doorway, he paused—not for theatrical effect, but with the natural hesitation of a departing guest—and glanced back at Weiss, who was still sitting hunched on her bunk.
"She knows you didn't articulate it with malice," he said quietly. "Give her the night. She'll find her way back to you."
Weiss lifted her head, her eyes shimmering. For a fleeting second, the untouchable heiress of the Schnee Dust Company looked entirely like a nineteen-year-old girl carrying far too much weight and desperately afraid of failing.
"Thank you," she whispered.
He stepped out into the hall and pulled the door shut.
Yang sat in the heavy silence for a long beat, watching her sister. Then, she slowly leaned back against her pillows, lacing her hands behind her head.
"So," Yang drawled lazily.
"Don't," Ruby warned, her voice pitching up.
"I didn't even say a single word yet."
"Your silence has a heavily implied agenda, Yang Xiao Long."
Yang smiled up at the ceiling, her eyes dancing with amusement. "Get some shut-eye, Rubes. Tomorrow's going to be a big day."
Ruby aggressively beat her pillow into submission and dove under the covers.
"Goodnight, Yang," she grumbled into the fabric.
Part V — The Weekend Search
Location: The Outskirts of Vale | Two Days Later
The weekend slipped away with an empty bunk haunting the dormitory.
Blake's bed was made with the meticulous precision of a girl who performed the task every morning out of stubborn habit rather than occupancy; her heavy paperback rested on her desk at the exact angle she had left it; and the black bow she had worn every single day since Ruby had first met her was completely gone.
Ruby stood in the threshold of the dorm, staring at the vacant mattress and feeling that cold, heavy weight of a failure that wasn't entirely her fault—the helpless anchor of being unable to prevent a catastrophe in a room where you were standing.
"She's been gone the entire weekend," Ruby muttered, keeping pace with Nova along the morning sidewalks of Vale, Team RWBY flanking one side of him while Team NDTSA distributed themselves across the perimeter.
"We'll locate her," Nova replied. He walked beside Ruby with the steady, unhurried certainty he brought to every crisis—a trait Ruby found simultaneously comforting and slightly infuriating in its absolute consistency. "She isn't permanently gone. She's processing."
"Blake is a grown woman," Weiss declared loftily from the front of the pack.
Daikon immediately halted, turned on his heel, and pinned her with a hard, flat stare.
It was a very specific look—not aggressive, exactly, but the heavy gaze of someone holding Weiss accountable to a private promise she had made to herself, enforcing accountability without uttering a single syllable.
Weiss absorbed the weight of it, adjusted her posture, and cleared her throat. "What I meant to say is—she is fully capable of handling herself. But I am deeply concerned, and consequently, we need to find her."
"Acceptable," Daikon grunted, turning back around.
"You know," Yang observed, stepping smoothly over a crack in the pavement, "you wield an astonishing amount of psychological leverage over her."
"She made a commitment to self-correction," Daikon said. "I am simply keeping the tally."
"Wait, is he officially one of our team advisors now?" Weiss called out, squinting ahead.
"Not on paper," Daikon replied. "However, she is your teammate, and you are—geographically and operationally—adjacent to our unit. Therefore, yes."
Weiss seemed to weigh this logic and found it begrudgingly sufficient.
"What I want to know," Yang said, vaulting over a low stone wall, "is whether we are executing this search systematically or if we're just blindly hoping to stumble into her path."
"Systematically," Nova said.
"So you have an operational strategy."
"I have a directional vector. We fragment, cover maximum ground, and sweep the most probable transit corridors running from Beacon down into Vale proper. Blake walks long distances when her mind is overloaded. She would head somewhere secluded." He cast a sideways glance at Ruby. "Where does she retreat when she requires complete isolation?"
Ruby racked her brain. "The library stacks. Or the botanical greenhouses. Or—" She abruptly stopped walking. "There's a monument near the southern campus perimeter. A huntsman and a huntress on a stone pedestal. She mentioned it in passing once."
"Then someone needs to check that grid coordinate first."
They split up by unspoken instinct rather than a formal order—that effortless division of labor that develops when a group of young people have spent enough brutal hours in the same trenches to instinctively read each other's tactical movements. Ruby and Nova took the southern approach. Yang and Blake-adjacent Turuk swept toward the harbor district. Weiss and Daikon claimed the market quarter.
They found her at the monument.
Not in the conventional sense of a search party locating a target—she had already been discovered the previous evening by a blonde boy with a prehensile tail who had scaled a lamppost and possessed a wider field of vision than most. By the time Ruby and Nova rounded the corner of the tree-lined plaza, Sun Wukong was perched casually on the stone pedestal with his legs swinging, while Blake sat at the base, staring blankly at the carved stone Grimm snarling at the monument's foundation with the posture of someone who had just survived a marathon internal dialogue.
Her bow was entirely absent. In the clear morning light, her long, sensitive cat ears were fully exposed, twitching slightly toward the sound of approaching footsteps before she turned her head.
"Hey," Ruby breathed.
Blake looked up, meeting Ruby's eyes, then shifting her gaze to Nova.
"Hey," she answered softly.
"Are you holding up alright?" Nova asked.
"I will be."
"Good." He sat down unceremoniously on the cold stone base of the statue with the absolute lack of dramatic flair that defined most of his actions. "Then we'll simply wait here until you are."
Sun looked down at him from his perch on high. "You must be her inner circle."
"I'm her brother," Nova replied flatly.
Sun's eyebrows shot up toward his hairline. He glanced back down at Blake. "You neglected to mention—"
"I don't typically lead with my most complicated variables," Blake murmured.
Sun considered this with a nod. "Fair enough."
Ruby dropped down to sit directly beside Nova, effectively completing a protective semi-circle around Blake without making her feel cornered—the only effective strategy if you actually understood how Blake operated. The morning sun filtered through the surrounding oaks, casting long, flat amber beams across the plaza.
"Weiss has been tearing the city apart looking for you," Ruby said gently. "Well—all of us have. But Weiss specifically. I think she genuinely needs to apologize."
Blake remained silent, staring at her boots.
"She isn't purely defined by the worst things she said," Nova added, pitching his voice directly for Blake's ears. "You understand that. You were furious, and your anger was entirely justified—but you know she's trying to evolve."
Blake looked down at her clasped hands. "I know."
"She articulated things born out of inherited fear," he continued steadily. "You articulated things born out of generational trauma. Neither of you was incorrect in the validity of your core emotions." He held her gaze. "But you don't have to carry that entire historical weight entirely by yourself. That is precisely what a team is engineered for, correct?"
Blake let out a long, shuddering breath—the distinct exhale of a person finally releasing a grip they'd held so tight their knuckles had turned white.
"When did you become a licensed philosopher?" she asked, a faint, dry ghost of a smile touching her lips.
"I have always possessed deep philosophical insights," he said deadpan. "You simply refused to listen."
"I listen," Ruby protested, her voice laced with mild, mock offense.
"I am well aware you do," he murmured. Without breaking his stare, he reached out and gave her unruly bangs a casual, affectionate ruffle.
Ruby instantly puffed her cheeks out into an indignant pout. Sun watched the entire dynamic from his pedestal with the wide-eyed fascination of a guy who had just dropped into the middle of a massive lore dump and was desperately cataloguing the timeline.
"So," Sun clapped his hands together, breaking the tension. "Are we marching back now? Because I happen to have an elaborate working theory regarding the recent Dust heist ring that Blake found fascinating, and I feel strongly that at least seven people need to evaluate it."
"Eight," Ruby corrected, gesturing to the approaching shapes of their friends filtering into the plaza. "Plus Sun."
"Nine, then," Sun agreed smoothly.
Blake looked up, scanning the faces assembling around her—her brother sitting against a cold stone monument as if he belonged there, Ruby with her hair sticking up in three chaotic directions, and the wildly eccentric boy she had met clinging to a dockside lamppost who had tracked her down to a memorial in a foreign city. Something hard and defensive finally melted behind her amber eyes.
"Alright," Blake said softly, pushing herself up to her feet. "Let's go back."
★ END OF CHAPTER SIX ★
Author's Note:
Hey guys, hope y'all enjoyed that chapter! Decided to add some extra stuff to make it a little different. Hopefully it was enjoyable.
Did you catch the subtle pairing hints in the chapter? Everyone probably noticed the not-so-subtle Nova x Ruby moments in there—if you did, that's good 'cause that was my intent. I'm taking a little more time to develop their eventual romance than I did in the FanFiction.net story, where I rushed it. As you can probably tell, Nova and Ruby will start out simply as friends at first. Volume 1 was just to more or less establish their friendship. The earliest I picture Ruby starting to develop romantic feelings for Nova is around Chapter 7 of Volume II, which would probably be Chapter 12 of this story... unless I cram two episodes into one chapter, then it may be earlier.
If it is earlier, it'll be more developed this time around, lol. Also, there are at least two other pairings I'm hinting at within this story. Can you guess which ones? I'll leave a poll with multiple choices below:
What other pairings am I hinting at in this story? I. Daikon x Weiss II. Yang x Turuk III. Jaune x Pyrrha/Scarlett
PM me or leave a comment in the chapter about what pairings you would like to see aside from the main two of this story (those ones are untouchable). Here's a list of characters I could rework for pairings:
Mercury
Emerald
Cinder
Yatsuhashi
Oscar (Vol. 5 = 1st appearance in the series)
Velvet
Anyways, that's all for now!
Next: Chapter Seven — "Black and White"