FLAME AND ICE
Chapter 5 — *Initiation; First Steps; Part II
Into the Emerald Forest
---
The Emerald Forest did not wait for anyone to be ready.
It received its students the way it received everything else that entered it — without ceremony, without accommodation, with the complete indifference of a place that has existed for a very long time and intends to continue doing so regardless of what falls into it from above. The canopy was dense enough at the centre to filter the morning light into something diffuse and green, and the undergrowth was the kind that pushed back when you pushed through it. The sounds were layered — birdsong and wind in the upper branches, something larger moving in the middle distance, the particular silence beneath all of it that experienced fighters learned to read as *occupied.*
The forest had opinions about intruders. It expressed them.
---
**◈ — Odyn**
He came through the canopy in a controlled descent — catching branches on the way down with the precise timing of someone who has done this kind of landing in circumstances considerably less forgiving than a Beacon initiation, using each contact point to bleed velocity before the final drop to the forest floor. He landed in a crouch, one hand to the ground, the impact distributed cleanly through his legs.
He straightened. Listened.
The forest had already noticed him. He could feel it in the quality of the quiet — the specific absence of small animal sound that meant something larger was paying attention.
*Fine,* he thought. *Come, then.*
He closed his eyes and extended his senses in the way the Albanar clan's elders had taught — not reaching out, exactly, but opening inward in a way that made the external information more available. The forest's energies moved around him in the particular patterns of undisturbed nature and disturbed nature, and between those patterns, something familiar.
He knew that signature. Had known it since childhood, when it had been smaller and brighter and less carefully contained. He oriented toward it without opening his eyes, confirmed the direction, and opened them.
*Roy.*
He began to walk.
His thoughts settled into the easy movement of someone who thinks well in motion. The people he had met in the past two days arranged themselves in his mind with the methodical quality of someone making sense of a new landscape.
Ruby Rose: genuine in the way of people who haven't yet learned to present a version of themselves different from the actual one. The weapons fixation was unusual by any standard he'd encountered, but unusual in the direction of *deeply committed* rather than *unsettling.* He thought Roy would be good for her, in the specific way of someone steady beside someone fast — each compensating for what the other lacked.
Blake Belladonna: closed in the way of someone who has decided that openness is a liability. He recognised the posture, because he had worn it himself for years, and because he had watched it develop in people around him who had been given enough reason to adopt it. Whatever she was carrying, it was significant. He was not in a position to judge anyone for carrying significant things quietly.
Yang Xiao Long: bold the way that people are bold when the boldness comes from somewhere real rather than somewhere performed. She reminded him, in register if not in specifics, of Khanna — the ease, the directness, the quality of someone who fills a room without particularly trying. He had noticed, with the particular attentiveness of an older sibling, that Yang's eyes had briefly done something during the dock encounter that she had quickly corrected. He filed that.
And then Weiss.
He stopped walking for a moment. Not physically — his body continued at the same pace — but internally.
She was the same. That was the thing he had not been entirely prepared for: not that she was different, as nine years of separation might reasonably produce, but that the core of her was the same. Still too guarded with people she did not know. Still using sharpness where warmth might have served better. Still utterly, completely herself underneath all of the armour — he could see it in the moments when the heiress persona dropped, in the way her face had changed when she heard *princess* in his voice, in the way she had let him hold her when she was telling him about nine years of Jacques Schnee.
He would need to talk to her more. Properly. Not about anything specific — just the way they used to talk, when they were children, when talking to each other had felt like the most natural thing in either of their lives.
He was thinking about this when the first Beowolf cleared the treeline.
He had known it was coming — the forest's quality of silence had been building toward *something* for the last thirty seconds, and *something* in the Emerald Forest generally resolved to Grimm. He stepped sideways without breaking stride, the Beowolf's lunge passing through the space where his head had been, and used the creature's own momentum to redirect it into the nearest tree.
The rest of the pack revealed itself then.
Odyn drew *ArdynFangh* without ceremony.
---
He was not, by temperament, a showy fighter. Khanna was showy — she had a quality of combat theatrics that was also completely genuine and entirely effective, and it suited her. Lylah was devastating in the specific way of things that do not need to announce themselves. Odyn's own style was closer to water than to fire: it found the path of least resistance, moved around obstacles rather than through them, and was consistently where it needed to be a moment before it was needed.
The Beowolves were large and fast and reasonably coordinated for creatures of Grimm. They came at him in the overlapping pattern of a pack that has done this before — two from the front, one from each side, the rest hanging back to close on whatever opening the first four created.
He let the first two commit fully, stepped between them at the last possible moment, and the pair collided with each other rather than with him. The one from his left received the blade along its flank as he turned — a controlled cut, enough to damage — and the one from his right got an elbow in the face with the full weight of his body rotation behind it. He felt the cartilage give.
That one was finished with a blade of condensed light — a technique that the Albanar clan called *sunglass,* for reasons lost in translation, which produced focused beams of concentrated Aura through the sword's crystal that burned through organic material with the efficiency of something that has no interest in being dramatic about it.
The pack adjusted. Grimm always adjusted, which was one of the things that made them worth taking seriously — they learned, within an encounter, faster than most people credited them.
He adjusted with them.
The Ursa Majors were a different conversation. They were larger, better armoured at the spine and shoulders, and they hit with the kind of force that made clear they had not arrived to be redirected. He fought the two of them differently — more direct, more committed, accepting their terms rather than negotiating new ones, because an Ursa Major that was off-balance was still an Ursa Major and the variables multiplied unpredictably.
He sent *ArdynFangh* skyward on a controlled arc while he engaged them with his hands, the blade rising and converting — the gem at the hilt cycling through its configurations as it reached the apex of the throw — and when it came down to him some ninety seconds later, the Ursa Majors were gone and he was holding a converted spear form, which he returned to sword form and sheathed.
"Warmup," he said, to the settling forest. Then he oriented toward Roy's signature and continued walking.
---
He found him in a clearing where three trees had been recently acquainted with the business end of lightning-aspected Aura. The Grimm were dissipating — Roy finishing off the last of them with the efficient precision of someone who has been doing this since he was old enough to hold a blade and has long since stopped finding it remarkable.
He heard Odyn's footsteps a second before Odyn said anything and was already turning.
"I could've—"
"The Ursa Majors behind you." Odyn looked at the clearing. "And the birds."
Roy processed this. He was aware, in the way of someone who takes accurate information seriously, that he had not noticed the Ursa Majors or the birds. He was also aware that being unaware of them was the kind of thing that ended a fight badly.
He exhaled. "Thanks."
"Partners," Odyn said, which meant several things at once and Roy understood all of them.
They bumped fists — the private knock of their private language — and moved.
No words were needed for the direction. They both knew where they were going.
---
**◈ — Hailfire**
The clearing she found was on a gentle rise overlooking a shallow depression in the forest floor, which gave it the quality of a small stage viewed from the back of an auditorium.
What was on the stage was unusual.
The Ursa — a large one, reinforced at the joints in the way of mature specimens — charged at something in the centre of the clearing with the full, committed force of a creature that has decided this particular fight is over. What it charged at did not move. He simply stood there, one finger extended, until the moment the Ursa's face reached the end of that finger, and then he fired.
The beam was a deep, vivid red. It was narrow. It went through the Ursa's head with the precision of something that knew exactly what it was doing and had done it before.
The Ursa fell. The remaining Grimm evaporated in the sequence they always did — large to small, heaviest to lightest, the dissolution moving through the pack like an afterthought.
The figure stood in the clearing's centre in the settling quiet, and in the morning light coming through the canopy, his skin was a faint, unmistakable blue.
Hailfire stepped out of the treeline.
"I was considering helping you," she said. "But you didn't seem to need it."
He turned toward her. His eyes were dark and sharp and held the specific quality of someone assessing something they were not entirely certain of. His tail — a long, armoured thing that moved with an independence that suggested a mind of its own — shifted slightly behind him.
"My partner, then," he said.
"That's the assumption." She walked forward until she could extend her hand without crossing awkward distance. "Hailfire Caldern. My friends call me Hail."
He looked at the hand. Then at her. Then he took it. His grip was precise — not testing, just assured.
"Zero Kazamaki." A pause, the kind that contains a question being decided. "How do you know what I am?"
Hailfire almost smiled. "The Albanar clan has archives that go back four hundred years. Arcosians appear in them. Not often, but enough." She fell into step beside him as they oriented toward the forest's centre. "We're a people who prefer to know the history of our neighbours. Especially the ones with names for the strangers."
"The dark elves," Zero said.
"The Forsaken, in the official Atlesian record," she said. "We have opinions about that name."
"I imagine so." He was quiet for a moment, his pace matching hers without apparent effort. "You said your friends call you Hail."
"They do."
"Then Hail," he said, as though testing the weight of it. "What is the dark elf word for 'partner in a situation neither of us fully understands'?"
She considered. "The closest translation would be *vethkayn.* It means something like *one who walks the same path without having been told to.*"
He absorbed this. "I've been called worse things."
"Considerably worse things, I'd imagine."
"Yes." The corner of his expression did something that was not quite a smile but was adjacent to one. "Lead on, Vethkayn."
She did.
---
**◈ — Sarai**
The Grimm came out of the undergrowth in the way they always did — believing that surprise was on their side, which it never was against someone who had been raised in the Albanar encampment and trained by Lylah from the age of eight.
Sarai had her blade clear of the sheath and fire-aspected before the first Beowolf had finished its lunge.
She called the technique *Searing Gale* — a name she had given it herself, which Lylah had received without comment and Odyn had said was accurate. The fire that moved along the blade's edge was specific: it burned what she directed it to burn, which was the product of careful training in Aura-channelling, and did not stray. She moved through the pack with the footwork she had been drilling for three weeks — the footwork Khanna had told her she was rushing, which she had corrected, which was now doing exactly what it was supposed to.
She was finishing the last of them when the foot arrived.
It came from her left, at speed, and stopped a centimetre from her temple in the specific way of someone who has both the ability and the control to do this on purpose.
She stopped her blade at the same moment, the fire dying back.
They looked at each other.
The girl who had nearly kicked her in the head was crimson-haired, crimson-eyed, and wearing the expression of someone who was equally surprised to find another person where they had expected to find empty air. The scars on her lower face and forearms were the marks of someone who had been in situations before — real ones, not practice — and the tail swinging behind her was rust-red and expressive in a way that suggested her emotional state and her tail were not always in close communication with each other.
"I wasn't expecting you," the girl said, which was the most honest possible summary of the situation.
"Mutual," Sarai said.
They both lowered their weapons. The forest settled around them.
"Scarlett Reinhardt." The crimson-haired girl extended a hand, direct and unornamented. "Sorry about the foot."
"Sarai Albanar." She took the hand. "Just Sarai, to people I know." She paused. "Those eyes and ears didn't escape you, did they."
"Pretty distinctive," Scarlett said, without any of the edge that sentence usually carried when said by people who meant *different* and were using *distinctive* as a courtesy. She said it the way someone says something they have simply noticed, which was its own kind of thing. "I'm guessing you're the other half of my team."
"That's the arrangement."
Scarlett looked toward the forest's deeper interior, then back at Sarai with the expression of someone who has made a decision in the time it takes to do so. "Then let's go." A beat. "You can tell me about the dark elves on the way. I've only read about you in old Mistralian records and they were — "
"Wrong about most things," Sarai said.
"I was going to say *incomplete.*"
"Also accurate."
They walked.
---
**◈ — Baron**
He came down through the canopy in a series of controlled drops — branch to branch, slowing his descent methodically — and arrived at the forest floor with the quiet efficiency of someone who has done this enough times to have developed an opinion on the best technique.
He checked his equipment by feel, which he could do now without thinking about it. Then he listened.
The forest was talking, in the way forests do — not in words, but in the pattern of what was present and what was avoiding being present. He had learned to distinguish between these categories during childhood training in the encampment's surrounding woodland, and what the Emerald Forest was telling him was that something nearby was fighting something, and the something doing the fighting was not losing.
He found his way to a vantage point — a slight rise behind a tree with enough canopy to make him less visible — and looked into the clearing below.
Two girls.
Back to back. Their combat coordination had the quality of long practice — the small adjustments they made for each other's attack radius, the way the shorter one's footwork extended naturally into space the taller one was already leaving, the unspoken negotiation of who took which target in real time. They had been fighting together long enough for it to feel like one thing rather than two.
What they had not accounted for was the group of Beowolves working around to the shorter girl's back.
Baron moved.
The calculations took perhaps half a second: angle of descent, likely arrival time of the Beowolves, optimal intercept point, twin blades versus massed Grimm in confined space. He was in the air and over the clearing's edge before the Beowolves had committed to their approach, and he was between them and the girl before they had processed the arrival of something new.
The twin blades were fast. They were also, in their converted configuration, somewhat louder than necessary, but that was an engineering compromise he had accepted and was now reconsidering.
The Beowolves were gone. The girl — fox ears, chestnut hair, ice-blue eyes visible above the forearms she had raised in reflex — slowly lowered her guard to find him crouching in front of her.
"You're all right?" he asked.
She looked at him. Something went through her expression — surprise, and then something that came after surprise in people who have been frightened and then aren't, and then a warm colour rising at her cheeks that she attempted to address by looking at the ground beside him rather than at him directly.
"Y-yes," she said. "I think so. Thank you."
From behind him, a voice that had the quality of someone who had been waiting to deploy a particular observation: "Sure that's all you wanted to say, Flare?"
The fox Faunus girl — Flare, apparently — raised her gaze to her companion with the expression of someone who is going to be having a significant conversation about this later and is registering the intention now.
"*Nee-san,*" she said, which carried all the weight of an elder-sibling-please-not-in-front-of-people that needed no additional words.
The other girl — taller, redish-brown hair, scientific-looking coat over a thoroughly non-scientific outfit, the gold jewellery catching the filtered light — turned her attention to Baron with the expression of someone who is very interested in him for reasons she is not planning to disclose immediately.
"Lazuli Kitsune," she said, extending her hand. "And that's my sister Flare. Thank you for the timely appearance."
Baron took the hand. "Baron Caldern."
He became aware, in the way of someone who has older sisters and has therefore developed an accurate sensitivity to certain registers of social dynamics, that both girls were now looking at him in ways that were slightly different from each other and that he probably needed to process carefully.
He focused on the practical.
"The three of us are partners, then," he said.
Lazuli considered this with the expression of someone doing mathematics in their head. "By the rules of the exercise, it would seem so. Do you know the way to the ruins?"
"Approximately." He stood. "I can get us there in reasonable time without getting anyone killed, which I think counts as 'yes' given the current circumstances."
Flare had also stood. She was attempting to look somewhere other than at him, with the dedicated focus of someone executing a strategy. "A-alright," she said. "Then... please lead the way."
Lazuli smiled, and said nothing, and followed, and absolutely had several things she was saving for later.
---
**◈ — Khanna**
She had been still for four minutes, which was longer than stillness was comfortable for her, but she had learned from Lylah that patience in the field was not the absence of motion but the presence of readiness.
The Grimm came when they came. She was already moving when the first one committed.
She fought the way she always fought — hammer in one hand, the other free for the style of contact combat that Lylah had developed over thirty years of practical application and passed on in its entirety. The hammer was *Cathraylboldr,* which meant in the First Tongue approximately *the stroke that ends the question,* and it earned the name. She used the weight of it to do what weight does — create momentum that carries, create force that doesn't require supplementing.
The martial arts she used with her free hand were supplementary in the technical sense and devastating in the practical sense. A Grimm that was dealing with the hammer was not dealing with the elbow to its jaw. A Grimm that was dealing with the elbow was not dealing with the hammer follow-through.
She had cleared the field significantly before she had occasion to notice that something at the pack's rear was not her doing.
*Interesting.*
She caught *Cathraylboldr* on its return arc — she had sent it skyward as a timer and a gravitational test, an old habit — and assessed the aftermath of the clearing. The far edge of the dispersed Grimm carried the signatures of a weapon she didn't recognise.
Then the weapon's owner stepped into the clearing.
Red hair, the specific russet of wolf ears, a tail in the same colour. A naginata worn with the ease of something that was an extension of the arm rather than a tool in the hand. She moved across the clearing toward Khanna with the direct confidence of someone who had decided this situation was manageable and was proceeding accordingly.
"I came to see if you needed help," the girl said, "but it appears you didn't."
"Your timing was good," Khanna said, which was true. "I appreciate help I didn't need but might have. It demonstrates good instincts." She looked at the naginata. "Nice weapon."
"Thank you." The girl drove it point-first into the forest floor in a gesture that looked casual and was actually very controlled. "Aiko Reinhardt. I think that makes us partners."
Khanna let the name arrange itself in her memory. "Khanna." She looked at Aiko for a moment with the particular interest she reserved for people who seemed likely to be worth knowing. Something about the Reinhardt name registered at the edges of her attention — she had heard it recently, from another direction. She would think about that later. "No last name," she added, before the question arrived. "Long story."
Aiko tilted her head. "The 'it'd be a giant hassle' kind or the 'it's complicated and personal' kind?"
Khanna looked at her. "The first, primarily, with elements of the second."
"Fair enough." Aiko pulled her naginata from the ground and rested it on her shoulder with the ease of long habit. "I won't push it. Shall we?"
Khanna cracked her knuckles — not for effect, but because she always did this when she was about to move toward something, and she had long since stopped monitoring whether other people noticed. "After you, partner."
Aiko smiled, which was the expression of someone who had arrived expecting to find a difficult person and had found something different instead, and was pleased about this in a way she wasn't yet ready to say out loud.
They went.
---
**◈ — Ruby and Weiss**
Ruby Rose fell through the Emerald Forest's canopy in the way that Ruby Rose did most things: with complete commitment to the objective, some adjustments made on the way, and results that were approximately correct even when the method was improvised.
Crescent Rose caught a branch. The branch handled the speed. The ground came up at a reasonable pace and she landed in the crouch she had been practising since she was twelve, rose petals scattering around her in the brief, signature dispersal of her Semblance.
She was on her feet in the same motion.
"Gotta find Yang," she said to herself, and started moving.
The forest was dense but not impossible, and the morning light was coming through the canopy at angles that gave her enough to navigate by. She moved quickly — *Crescent Rose* in its travel configuration, the scythe collapsed to a manageable size, her hood up against the occasional branch.
She was running through a mental list of possible partners — Yang, Roy, Blake, Jaune, back to Yang, back to Roy with an uncomfortable amount of additional thought about Roy that she was firmly redirecting — when the undergrowth ended and a clearing opened before her, and in the clearing, Weiss Schnee was turning to look at her with the expression of someone who has been walking through a forest that didn't agree with her outfit and has arrived at a complicated emotional state as a result.
Their eyes met.
The moment expanded in the specific way of moments that matter before you know why.
Then Weiss turned on her heel and walked the other direction.
"*Wait,*" Ruby said, to Weiss's departing back. "We're supposed to be — we're *partners!*"
Weiss did not stop walking.
Ruby looked at the empty clearing. Then at the direction Weiss had gone. Then she kicked the forest floor in the specific way of someone who has had a worse morning than they expected and is communicating this to the universe.
Then she went after her.
---
There was a moment — brief, but real — where Ruby Rose impressed her.
Weiss was moving at a pace she had set deliberately, and Ruby had been behind her, and then Ruby was beside her, which was physically impossible at the rate Weiss had been walking. She turned to look at the silver-eyed girl and found her there, entirely unconcerned about having closed the distance without apparent effort.
"I'm not slow," Ruby said. "See?"
Weiss processed this. She was aware, in the objective way, that Ruby's Semblance involved speed that operated outside the ordinary parameters of travel, and that this should not be surprising. It was still, in practice, slightly surprising.
"When did you—"
"I'm trying to tell you," Ruby said, with the quiet certainty of someone who knows what they're capable of and does not often get the opportunity to say so, "that you don't need to worry about me on this. You're about to see something different from this morning's disaster, Weiss, and when it's over—"
"Ruby—"
"—you're going to think: wow, that girl is actually quite capable, and perhaps I misjudged her initial impression—"
"*Ruby.*"
She was gone, and the rose petals were settling, and somewhere ahead of them the forest had gone slightly more quiet.
Weiss waited.
Then the Grimm came.
They came from the undergrowth with the sudden, committed quality of creatures that have decided the time for patience has passed. She counted seven Beowolves in the initial assessment, drew *Myrtenaster,* and settled into the stance her father's hired instructors had given her and Winter's corrections had improved and nine years of practice had made automatic.
*Head level. Shoulders set. Right foot forward — not that far. Breathe through it. Wait.*
She waited for the right opening, the one her training said was there in every engagement if you were patient enough to see it. It came — a gap in the pack's coordination as the two lead creatures adjusted their approach — and she went through it.
And then Ruby appeared between her and the Beowolf she had selected, in a burst of rose petals and the full sweep of *Crescent Rose,* and Weiss's lunge went wide, and the dust vial she had been channelling discharged in the wrong direction, and the tree to her left was suddenly and enthusiastically on fire.
What followed involved a great deal of both of them saying things that were accurate and none of them being particularly useful in the moment.
The fire spread with the enthusiasm of fire that has found excellent material and has opinions about it. The Grimm scattered, which was the only beneficial outcome of the sequence. Weiss grabbed Ruby's wrist and they ran, and the forest behind them burned, and they were both far too out of breath to maintain the argument at full volume.
"You attacked out of turn," Weiss said. "I could have *killed* you."
"I was *helping,*" Ruby said.
"By appearing from *nowhere* between me and my target—"
"I thought you needed—"
"I did not *need* — you should have communicated—"
"How was I supposed to communicate when you were already—"
"Any number of ways! Words, Ruby! Human beings use words!"
"I know what words are!"
They were clear of the fire by now, running into the cooler, shaded portion of the forest where the canopy was thicker and the undergrowth thinner, and both of them were panting slightly and furious, which was a useful combination if the fury could be directed somewhere.
Weiss collected herself first, because collecting herself was something she had been doing out of necessity for nine years and she was practiced at it.
"Perhaps," she said, in the register of someone resuming a position that was still correct even after a messy pause, "if you had exercised any degree of caution in your approach—"
"I'm sorry you needed my help," Ruby said, which was not quite what she meant but was close enough to what she was feeling.
"I didn't need your *help,* I needed you not to—"
"Congratulations, then!" Ruby said. The words were coming out in the particular way of words that arrive before the speaker has finished deciding whether to say them. "Congratulations on being the most accomplished girl at Beacon! You must be so proud! It must be *wonderful* to be so good at everything that you don't need anyone's help and never have to—"
"I never said—"
"You implied it! Every time you open your mouth around me you *imply* it, and I'm trying, Weiss, I'm *trying,* but you make it very difficult to—"
"You're too young to be here," Weiss said. "That's simply a fact. The programme is designed for students two years older than you and—"
"I know!" Ruby's voice had changed. The anger in it had a different texture now — not hot, but the specific raw quality of something that has been carrying weight for a long time and has been pushed past the point where it can continue to pretend not to. "I know I'm young. I know I don't fit the programme. I know people look at me and see the kid who got moved up and wonder if I belong." Her hands were shaking slightly. "But I *can't* go home and try again in two years, Weiss. I can't go back to my mom and ask her if she thinks I should wait. I — *she's not—*"
Her voice stopped.
The forest was very quiet around them.
"My mom died," Ruby said. Her voice had gone small — not weak, but private, the way a voice goes when it's saying something it has only said out loud a few times and is still learning how the words feel. "She died when I was young. On a mission. So I can't go home to her and ask her what she thinks." She was looking at the ground between her boots. "I hope you're happy."
Then she walked, because standing still with that in the open air was harder than moving, and she went.
The silence after her was the specific silence of a person who has just understood something they cannot undo saying.
Weiss stood in the filtered light of the Emerald Forest, alone, with the particular feeling of someone who has used an accurate fact as a weapon against a person who deserved better and is now reckoning with the fact that accurate is not the same as right.
"Ruby," she said, to the path. Then louder: "Ruby, wait. I'm—"
She went after her.
The large dark feather that drifted to the ground behind them both went unnoticed.
---
**◈ — Pyrrha and Jaune**
He was in a tree. This was Pyrrha's fault, which she had acknowledged in the form of an apology, and her offer to remove him from the tree had involved a spear angle that she had not fully thought through before executing, and now she was standing below him and apologising for that as well.
"I *am* sorry," she said, for what she estimated was the third occasion that day.
Jaune, peering down at her from his pinned position, had the expression of someone who has decided that the dignity situation is already complete and has moved on to logistics. "Do you think you could maybe — the spear is attached to the *hood,* and if you could—"
"Yes, I see. If I adjust the—" She calibrated, aimed, and extracted the spear from the hood with the precise control of someone who has four tournament titles for reasons, returning Jaune to the ground.
He landed on his feet, which was more controlled than the situation warranted, and she revised her estimate of him slightly upward.
"Thank you," he said. "That's — it's fine. I'm fine."
He had a gash on his cheekbone that he was treating with the casual indifference of someone who had either been hit in the face before or was very good at pretending it didn't hurt. She suspected both.
"Jaune, why didn't you—" She stopped. Started again with the more important question: "Do you know how to activate your Aura?"
He looked at her with the expression of someone who has realised that this question is significant but is not entirely sure why.
"I... never learned exactly what Aura is," he said. He said it the way people say things they are slightly ashamed of but have decided to be honest about anyway, which she respected. "Is that a problem?"
She looked at him. She was thinking about what she knew of him from the past two days — the confidence that exceeded his demonstrated ability, the genuine warmth that surfaced when he wasn't performing, the quality she had noticed when Weiss dismissed him and he had gone sad rather than angry, which told her something about where his confidence actually came from.
"It's a gap," she said. "One we can address." She gestured toward the deeper forest, and they walked. "Tell me — have you ever felt something that you couldn't explain? A certainty, or a sense of something nearby, or a feeling that you knew something before you could have logically known it?"
He thought. "Yeah, actually. My mom always said I had good instincts."
"That's your Aura at work," she said. "It's the expression of your soul outward into the world. It has always been there — you simply haven't been shown how to make it available to you deliberately." She paused. "I'd like to do that now, if you'd allow it."
He considered. She liked that he considered it rather than immediately agreeing or immediately refusing — it was the instinct of someone who takes things seriously even when they don't understand them.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay."
They stopped on a flat piece of ground. She faced him and put her hand against his sternum and closed her eyes, and spoke the words that her own teacher had spoken over her, which she had always understood were less about the words and more about the intention behind them.
*For it is in passing that we achieve immortality.* The Aura-transfer was a thing she could do that not everyone could — a skill of her lineage, one of the few things she had that was genuinely difficult rather than merely disciplined. She felt her own Aura thin slightly as she opened the channel toward his. *I release your soul — and by my shoulder protect thee.*
The light that came from Jaune Arc was, as she had suspected from the moment she noticed his soul through the instinctive reading she applied to everyone she met, considerably brighter than average.
She stepped back, and the exhaustion was brief and manageable, and she watched the scratch on his face close and vanish with the specific satisfaction of someone who has done something they are good at in a context that mattered.
"You have a great deal of it," she said. "More than most."
He was looking at his hands. She had seen people do this before — the first time they truly felt their own Aura as a deliberately accessible thing rather than an occasional, unexplained sensation. It had a quality she couldn't describe except to say that it was genuine, and genuine things in Jaune's direction always made him worth watching.
"So this is what it feels like," he said.
"Yes."
He looked up at her. The expression on his face was open in a way she had not yet seen from him, and she understood suddenly that most of his confidence was a kind of presentation, and that underneath the presentation was a person who was quite earnest and quite uncertain and quite determined, and that these things were probably going to be more useful than the presentation in the long run.
"Thank you," he said. And meant it.
She smiled.
They walked.
---
**◈ — Yang and Blake**
Yang Xiao Long found the Ursa Major before the Ursa Major found her, which she considered to be a professional courtesy on her part.
The fight went well until the moment one of them got a handful of her hair and the hair came loose at the handful, and a few strands of golden light fell to the forest floor, and Yang went very still, and her eyes did the thing they did, and the Ursa Major discovered that the creature it was fighting had been, until approximately four seconds ago, a contained system.
The aftermath was efficient and comprehensive.
She was standing in the forest quiet, shaking the lingering adrenaline out of her hands, when she heard the sound of Gambol Shroud finding the back of the second Ursa's skull, and the Ursa came down, and Blake Belladonna was standing at the clearing's edge, cleaning her weapon with the particular calm of someone who has done this before and has opinions about doing it correctly.
"Thanks," Yang said. She was aware that she had just spent forty-five seconds on fire and that her partner had seen this, and she was deciding how she felt about that. "I had him, though."
"Yes," Blake said.
"I know how that looked."
"It looked like you had him," Blake said, in the tone of someone who is reporting what they saw and not commenting on it. "You did."
Yang looked at her. This was not the response she had expected, which meant she was already recalibrating. "You always this literal?"
"When precision is the point," Blake said.
"And when it isn't?"
"Less so."
Yang considered this. Then she fell into step beside the taller girl, because they were going to the same place and they were partners and walking beside someone was a more useful starting point than walking behind them.
"Blake," she said.
"Yang."
"This is going to be interesting."
"Most things are," Blake said.
They went north.
---
**◈ — A Quiet Observation**
On the observation platform above the Emerald Forest, Glynda Goodwitch reviewed her tablet and made notes that she would later describe, in the faculty meeting, as *preliminary assessments.* The cameras distributed throughout the forest were providing data. The data was, in aggregate, considerably more interesting than a standard initiation class.
"The dark elf students," she said to Ozpin. "The combat footage is—" She paused. "Remarkable is the word I'd use."
Ozpin drank his coffee and watched the canopy. "Yes."
"The one with the fire crystal — Odyn — his technique is specifically unusual. He's using a form I don't recognise from any published Huntsman-school curriculum."
"Mm."
"And the girl with the hammer — Khanna — her Semblance appears to be operating in a spectrum that our standard assessment equipment is—" She stopped. "Headmaster."
"Mm."
"Are you listening to me?"
"I'm listening to you," Ozpin said. "I'm also thinking about the game in three moves." He lowered his cup. "But yes, Glynda. Remarkable is the word."
Sybyrh, beside them, was watching the forest with an expression that gave nothing specific away and contained many things regardless. Tarro was reviewing footage on a secondary tablet with the focused attention of someone who was cataloguing things they would be thinking about for a long time.
The forest moved below them, full of students and Grimm and the complicated first steps of people who were going to matter.
Ozpin drank his coffee.
---
**— To Be Continued —**
*Next Time: Chapter 6 — The Emerald Forest; Part One.*
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