CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Gods Among Us
Part I — The Match That Wasn't
Location: Amity Colosseum | Three Days After the Imperial Confrontation
The arena had the specific quality of a place that was trying very hard to be what it always was, and mostly succeeding.
Banners from all four kingdoms crossed overhead. The crowd was enormous and genuinely happy and entirely unaware of the particular category of morning their world had recently survived. The commentators were doing the thing commentators did — providing a soundtrack of competent enthusiasm for people who were having too good a time to require much from the soundtrack.
Ruby was having an interesting experience.
The interesting experience was: she was fighting Cardin Winchester, and she had approximately three percent of her attention on him, and he was losing badly while remaining convinced he was doing well, and she was spending the other ninety-seven percent managing the gap between what she could do and what she was allowing herself to do.
Cardin's mace swung at her. She watched it come from far enough away in her perception that she could have read the manufacturer's marks on the head of it. She moved at the speed of someone who was working very hard to look like they'd barely gotten out of the way, which was considerably more demanding than simply getting out of the way.
If only you knew, she thought, without particular malice. You're fighting someone who flew this morning. On purpose. For eight and a half seconds.
She timed her counter to look effortful.
It didn't feel effortful.
It felt like typing with one finger on a keyboard she could have used all hands for.
Across the arena, Nova was doing the same thing with Sky Lark, and she could see the specific quality of his restraint in how he moved — the fractional delays, the calibrated responses, the careful management of momentum so that each exchange looked closer than it was.
Their eyes met for a moment.
He gave her the small nod that meant I know, I feel it too.
She gave him the one that meant keep going.
Yang was having a harder time of it.
This was not because Yang was less capable than her teammates at restraint. It was because Yang's particular version of Saiyan power had a relationship with her emotions that was more direct than most — the power didn't simply respond to conscious direction, it responded to the full internal weather of Yang Xiao Long, and the internal weather of Yang Xiao Long had, since Tenkawa, become considerably more intense.
Russell Thrush landed a shoulder hit.
It was a good hit — technically sound, well-timed, the kind of hit that in a normal match would have been satisfying. In this match it was the equivalent of tapping someone on the shoulder to get their attention.
Yang's eyes went gold.
"Yang," Blake said, from three meters away, at a volume that carried exactly to Yang and not a centimeter further.
Yang put the gold back.
She made the appropriate sound — the grunt of someone who has taken a real hit and is working through it. The crowd bought it. Professor Port, in the commentary booth, described it as a "turning point moment" and speculated about whether Yang's famous resilience would be enough to carry RWBY through.
Yang stood there being apparently challenged by a fight that was not challenging her, and she thought about the morning in the amphitheater, and about what Tarro had said about something arriving, and about the specific quality of the thing she had felt building at the edge of her awareness since they'd left the arena staging area.
Something was coming.
She could feel it the way you felt weather — not with a specific sense, but with the full surface of yourself, the undeniable knowledge that the air had changed character.
She won the match anyway.
They all did.
Part II — The Office
Location: Ozpin's Office, Beacon Academy | Simultaneously
The coffee had gone cold.
This was, Glynda thought, genuinely unusual. In fifteen years of working alongside Ozpin, she had never seen him leave his coffee to go cold. She had never seen him set it down with the specific quality of someone who had forgotten it was there, which was the quality it currently had on the corner of his desk.
He was at the window.
He had been at the window for some time.
Rhubar and Sala stood behind him with the composed bearing of people who had decided that composure was not optional and were maintaining it through the specific force of that decision. Their tails were the only things betraying them — moving in the small, involuntary way of Saiyan tails when their owners were managing something significant.
"He's changed course?" Ozpin asked, without turning from the window.
"He doesn't change course," Rhubar said. "Once he's decided to visit something, it gets visited. The only question is his mood when he arrives."
"Which is determined by?"
"Many things," Sala said. "Whether he slept well. Whether he's hungry. Whether something interesting has caught his attention on the way." She paused. "Whether anything annoyed him."
"And are we likely to annoy him?"
A silence that was itself an answer.
"General Ironwood's fleet," Glynda said, for the third time, with the tone of someone who has a reasonable suggestion and keeps having it declined. "Even a defensive positioning—"
"Would read as aggression," Rhubar said. "And Beerus's response to aggression from beings below his power level is..." He stopped.
"Is what?" Glynda pressed.
"Disproportionate," he said, which was the diplomatic version of what he was describing.
Tarro entered from the stairwell with the device that nobody in Remnant would have had the reference to identify as a ki scanner, and the scanner was doing something that made his expression go very still in the way of someone receiving information they had been hoping not to receive yet.
"They're breaching the atmosphere," he said.
Ozpin turned from the window.
Through the glass, in the clear blue of the Vytal Festival sky, a point of light had appeared. It was not moving like an aircraft or a grimm or anything that Remnant had a category for. It was moving like something that was not concerned about Remnant's categories.
"Two figures," Sala said. "Lord Beerus and his attendant, Whis."
Oz pin picked up his cane.
He did not pick up his coffee.
"Divine Protocol is now in effect," he said, opening his scroll. "All faculty with briefing. No military response. No energy weapons. No gestures that could be read as threatening." He looked at Rhubar and Sala. "And nothing — nothing — that could be read as disrespectful."
Sala's tail had gone very still around her waist, which was its own kind of tension. "Nova," she said, very quietly, in the direction of the arena.
"They'll finish their match first," Rhubar said. "Let them have this one thing before the rest of the day."
Part III — The Effect of Presence
Far from Beacon, in a secluded part of the forest where secluded suited her purposes, Cinder Fall stopped walking.
She stopped because her body had made a unilateral decision to stop, which was not a thing that happened to Cinder Fall. Her body did what she directed it to do. That was the arrangement. She was the Fall Maiden; she had power that bent the world to her will; she did not stop because her legs decided stopping was the appropriate response to a feeling.
And yet.
The feeling was not like anything in her experience, and her experience was extensive. It was not fear of a specific thing — she could assess and plan around specific things. It was the feeling of something that existed at a level where specific things were not the relevant category.
Her Maiden power flickered.
The trees around her scorched.
She had not directed that.
She stood in the Emerald Forest with smoke rising from the bark of three trees she had not meant to harm, and the something pressed against the surface of everything she knew about herself, and the something was not from Remnant and was not concerned about her in the way of things that could be threats.
It was not concerned about her at all.
That was the part that was frightening.
In her fortress, which had stood for longer than most living things on Remnant could account for, Salem rose from her throne.
The Grimm scattered.
They did not advance and they did not circle and they did not do any of the things Grimm did when emotion brought them close. They fled — in the specific, undignified way of creatures that have identified something so far above them in the hierarchy of dangerous things that the proximity to it overrode everything else about their nature.
Salem stood in an empty hall, which had not been empty a moment ago.
She had survived everything. She had watched kingdoms rise and watched them fall. She had made herself into what she was through a process that had cost her everything human about herself and had given her in return the certainty that nothing could end her.
The presence arrived at the edge of that certainty and simply overwhelmed it without effort.
Not ended it. Not threatened it. Simply made it irrelevant in the way that candle flames were irrelevant to the sun.
"What is this," she said, and the words came out with a quality she had not heard from herself in centuries — the specific quality of someone who has encountered the actual edge of their own context.
The Grimm did not come back.
Part IV — Central Vale
Location: The Festival Plaza | That Afternoon
The plaza was doing exactly what plazas did on festival days — containing a very large number of people who were having a good time, arranged around the specific geography of a space designed to be full and comfortable when full.
Beerus and Whis materialized in the center of it.
The arrival produced a gentle breeze. A few banners rustled. Someone's cotton candy paper drifted sideways. Two children looked up from their game and decided that the tall man in the elaborate costume and the man with the blue skin and the interesting staff were part of the festival entertainment, which was a reasonable conclusion given the context.
"Festive," Whis observed, looking around with the pleasant attention of someone at a party they've arrived at in a good mood.
Beerus was looking at Beacon.
He was looking at it with the specific quality of attention that people brought to things that had caught an interest they hadn't been expecting to have.
"Something unusual," he said. "The Saiyan signatures are strong. But there's something alongside them." His cat ears turned slightly. "Something that resonates with old power. Very old."
The crowd around them continued its crowd activities.
The delegation from Beacon appeared at the far edge of the plaza, moving with the specific quality of people who had rehearsed their approach and were executing it carefully. Ozpin at the center, his cane clicking. Glynda on his left, managing her expression with the focus of someone doing something difficult. Rhubar and Sala on either side, their tailings held formally at their waists.
The civilians, as civilians reliably did, assumed this was part of the show.
Someone started filming.
"Lord Beerus," Ozpin said, stopping at a distance that was respectful without being so respectful that it communicated fear, which was a calibration he had spent the walk over getting right. "Welcome to Remnant. I am Professor Ozpin, Headmaster of Beacon Academy."
Beerus looked at Ozpin with the brief evaluating attention of someone who has noted a thing and filed it and moved on.
Then he looked at Rhubar and Sala.
"Saiyans," he said. It was not quite a greeting. It was more like the verbal equivalent of confirming a measurement.
"Survivors," Rhubar said. "We've made new lives here."
"Your children," Beerus said, which was not really a question. "I can sense them. They're in the colosseum."
"They have a match," Sala said.
Beerus looked at her.
She held his gaze, which was either remarkable courage or the specific composure of a Saiyan mother who had decided that this was not going to be the thing that made her look away.
"A match," he repeated.
"A competitive tournament," Ozpin offered. "There's a festival. It happens every four years. The timing is—"
"Inconvenient for whom?" Beerus asked.
Whis leaned toward him slightly. "He does have a point, my lord. Watching them perform in a competitive setting first might be rather informative."
Beerus was quiet for a moment.
Around them, the crowd had thickened considerably. Several news crews had arrived, their cameras pointed at what they were broadcasting across Remnant as the most elaborate festival performance in recent memory.
"Very well," Beerus said. "They finish their match."
Ozpin exhaled one millimeter of the breath he had been holding.
Part V — What Yang Felt
Location: Colosseum Corridors | After the Match
The match was over.
Team RWBY had won with what the commentators described as "impressive resilience and strong team coordination," which was the most accurate possible description of a performance that had been primarily an exercise in maintaining a convincing performance while having access to resources that made the performance somewhat academic.
They were walking back through the corridors beneath the colosseum, and the victory was real even if the challenge hadn't been, and Ruby was wiping fake sweat from her forehead while Blake made quiet observations about which of their restraint techniques had been most convincing and Weiss was already mentally reviewing what she'd done with the power suppression on her glyphs.
And then Yang stopped.
She stopped the way she had stopped in the ruins when the portal had appeared — not a chosen stop, but the stop of someone whose body has received information that overrides the current activity.
"Yang?" Ruby asked.
Yang did not answer immediately.
The feeling was vast. That was the only word for it — not terrifying in the way of specific danger, not alarming in the way of something you could locate and respond to, just vast. Like having been in a room your whole life and suddenly understanding that the room was inside something you had not previously been able to conceive the size of.
"There's something in Vale," she said. "Something—"
"We need to move," Nova's voice, from just behind her, had the quality of someone who has been feeling the same thing and has arrived at the same conclusion from his own direction. "Now. Carefully."
His hand found her shoulder briefly — the Saiyan gesture, familiar now from training, of someone grounding another person to the present moment.
She put her feet back under her.
"All right," she said.
They moved.
The plaza was visible from the corridor exit, and even before they crossed the threshold, all of them could feel it — not with any sense they had trained or developed or grown into, but with something older, the way certain things bypassed the learned apparatus and went directly to the body's foundational knowledge about the relative scale of things.
Something here is very large, was what the foundational knowledge was saying. And large is not the word but it's the closest available word.
"Don't reach for your weapons," Nova said, and he said it very quietly but very clearly, and nobody reached for their weapons.
They crossed into the plaza.
The crowd had arranged itself around two figures at the center, and Ruby's first thought was that the crowd had very good instincts and terrible self-preservation, because if it knew what it was arranged around it would not be arranged around it.
The smaller figure — Whis, blue-skinned, carrying a staff that glowed faintly, with the general demeanor of someone who found everything pleasant and interesting — turned toward them first.
"Ah!" he said, with genuine warmth. "There they are."
The larger figure — and Beerus's eyes found Yang specifically, which Yang noticed, because having the God of Destruction notice you first was not an easy thing to not notice — looked at them with the unhurried attention of something that had seen many things and was deciding how to classify these.
Yang had a brief, vivid, complicated feeling about the fact that his eyes were the same shape as a cat's.
She did not say this.
She understood that this was precisely the kind of thing you did not say.
Part VI — Yang's Heritage
"Step forward," Beerus said to Yang. Not unkindly — in the specific tone of someone who is used to being obeyed and is not particularly interested in the social scaffolding around the obeying.
Yang looked at her team.
Ruby's face was doing its signature combination of scared and absolutely not about to show it. Blake had her ears flat, which was her tell. Weiss had both hands at her sides in the specific configuration of someone who has decided that whatever happens next she is going to be ready for it even if being ready is not technically possible.
Nova gave her the small nod.
Yang stepped forward.
She felt the assessment — not invasively, not like being examined by a threat, but in the way that large things sometimes simply noticed you, the way the weather noticed you, completely impersonal and completely comprehensive.
"Transform," Beerus said.
She did.
The golden power came up around her, her hair shifting, her eyes blazing, the aura she had been carefully managing all afternoon finally released into its proper shape. The crowd, which had not dispersed despite the festival having no scheduled event in this plaza at this time, made the collective sound of people watching something they found impressive.
"More," Beerus said.
She pushed further.
The ground cracked under her. The air shimmered. Vendors' stalls at the plaza's edge rattled.
Beerus tilted his head with the expression of someone who was observing something adequate.
He moved.
It was — she understood this afterward, in the specific way you understood things that had happened faster than conscious processing allowed — the most frightening thing that had ever happened to her. Not because of what he was doing, but because of what his movement communicated about the relationship between what she was and what he was, which was the relationship between something real and something so far beyond the category of real that the same word seemed generous.
His hand was near her throat.
And something in Yang that had never spoken before said: no.
Not the Saiyan no — she knew what her Saiyan power felt like, knew its particular heat and weight and the gold of it. This was different. This was older. This came from somewhere below the Saiyan blood, from something woven into her very construction at a level that predated any of the things she knew about herself.
Dark energy rose through the gold.
It moved like something that had been asleep for a long time and was not fully awake yet but was awake enough to respond to an absolute need. Purple-black through the gold, ancient in a way that was distinct from the ancient of Saiyan legends, the ancient of something that had existed before the current order of things and remembered that existence.
Beerus's hand stopped.
The God of Destruction looked at Yang with an expression that was, genuinely, surprised.
Whis floated closer with his staff glowing and the particular quality of a person witnessing something he is going to need to record accurately.
"That," Beerus said, "is considerably more interesting than the alternative."
Yang stood in the aftermath of her own transformation with the specific feeling of someone who has been in a house their whole life and has just discovered a room they didn't know was there. The dark energy was receding — settling rather than leaving, finding its way back to wherever it lived between moments of absolute necessity.
Her hair was still gold. Her eyes were still blazing. But the traces of something else moved through the aura at its edges.
"Demonic heritage," Whis confirmed, looking at his staff's readings with the attentive clarity of someone doing good science. "Quite old. It traces back to conflicts that predate the current cosmic administration." He looked at Yang with genuine interest. "Your mother's bloodline, I would estimate."
Yang's face did something complicated.
She had spent a long time with the shape of her mother's absence. She had found the shape's edges and learned to live around them and had never quite managed to fill them. The specific texture of not knowing had been something she carried and occasionally set down in the way you set down things that were heavy enough to put down when you could.
But this was a new corner of the shape.
"She left," Yang said, because it was the truest available sentence. "When I was little. I don't know anything about her family."
"That explains the dormancy," Beerus said, in the matter-of-fact tone of someone explaining a thing they find obvious. "Without knowledge or training, bloodlines like this suppress themselves. Sometimes for generations." He studied her. "The Saiyan activation — your recent transformation — seems to have started unlocking the rest of it."
"What does that mean?" Yang asked, which was the right question and also the question she'd been asking about her mother in one form or another since she was old enough to ask questions.
"It means," Beerus said, "that you are considerably more than you thought you were. Which is either useful or dangerous depending entirely on what you do with it."
Ruby was beside Yang before she'd consciously moved, because Ruby moved toward the people she loved before she made the decision to move, and Yang was her sister, and sisters stood beside each other. Her hand found Yang's.
Yang squeezed it.
She did not cry, because this was not the moment and also because the God of Destruction was standing four feet away and there was a limit to the vulnerability she was going to perform in that specific context.
But the squeeze said everything the squeeze needed to say.
"After their match," Beerus said, shifting his attention from Yang to Nova with the casually redirected interest of someone turning from one exhibit to the next, "I'll see the rest of what you have."
Ozpin, who had maintained his composure through everything so far with the specific effort of someone who has been managing impossible situations for a very long time, said carefully: "Team NDTSA has a match in—"
"I know," Beerus said. "We'll watch."
Whis clapped his hands together, delighted. "How wonderful! Tournament matches are such revealing settings — the way competitors express their capabilities under genuine pressure is so much more informative than a simple demonstration."
Part VII — The Team
Team NDTSA assembled with the specific quality of people who had watched a cosmic being almost test their friend's mortality and were now being told they were up next, which did interesting things to what was usually called pre-match preparation.
Nova turned to them with the particular expression he used when he had finished processing something and was moving forward from it.
"We have a match," he said.
"We're aware," Daikon said.
"A match we need to win while being observed by a being who is deciding whether to destroy our world based on what he sees."
"That does add a certain texture to the stakes," Scarlett said. "Slightly different from the usual 'try not to embarrass the school' energy."
"I'm just saying it out loud," Nova said, "so we're all working from the same information."
"We are all working from the same information," Turuk confirmed. "We were all there for the same plaza."
"Good." Nova looked at each of them. "Normal match. Real effort. We don't hold back the way RWBY had to hold back, because Beerus specifically said he wants to see capability and holding back is not capability." He paused. "But we don't go so far that we accidentally end Team BRNZ."
"Define accidentally," Scarlett said.
"Scarlett."
"I'm asking for the parameters."
"No members of Team BRNZ experience structural injuries," Daikon said, which was his way of answering the question Scarlett had asked in a way that was both technically responsive and practically useful.
"That's a reasonable parameter," Aiko said. Her wolf ears were doing the tracking thing they did when she was monitoring multiple sound sources simultaneously. "Though I should mention that according to what I overheard in the plaza, Lord Beerus has now observed that our team contains—" she consulted her memory, "—two pure Saiyans, one mixed Saiyan, one Saiyan-Faunus hybrid, and one he described as 'an interesting genetic arrangement.'"
"Which one is the interesting genetic arrangement?" Turuk asked.
All eyes went to Scarlett.
"Obviously me," she said, and she didn't even sound offended about it. If anything she sounded satisfied. "I've been telling you for years that I'm interesting."
"In those exact words," Nova agreed.
Aiko's ears twitched. "He's watching us assemble. Whis is taking notes. I can't tell if that's good."
"Assume it's good," Daikon said. "The alternative is not productive."
Nova looked at the arena entrance.
He thought about the plaza, and about Yang's face when Beerus had told her about her mother's bloodline, and about the specific quality of the moment when Ruby had moved to be beside her before either of them had thought about it, and about what Tarro had said about what they were and what their power was for.
He thought about all the people who had been in that plaza who hadn't known anything was happening.
"We fight well," he said. "Not to impress him. Because that's what we do."
They went in.
Somewhere in the stands, Lord Beerus settled into a seat that had been quietly made available by the festival staff, who had no idea who they were seating but who had correctly identified that this was someone who should be given a good view. Whis produced a small notepad from somewhere and held his staff across his knees.
The arena filled.
The crowd cheered for Team NDTSA when they appeared, because it had been a good tournament and these students had been worth watching and the crowd had the warm, generous energy of people who were having a genuinely good day.
Beerus watched the young Saiyans take their positions.
He had seen Saiyan warriors across the span of centuries. He had seen the best of them. He had, on two occasions, been responsible for the end of them.
But he had not, in all that time, seen quite this combination of variables in one place — the specific mix of heritage and choice and bond that had assembled itself on this small world at the edge of things, which had been unremarkable enough that he'd never bothered to visit it before.
He found, to his own mild surprise, that he was curious about what they were going to do.
That was, in his experience, usually a good sign for the planet in question.
Usually."*
★ END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN ★
Next: Chapter Twenty-Eight — "Gods Among Us, Part II: A Destroyer God's Trial"