Hello everyone! Hopefully, you guys enjoyed the last chapter somewhat. We're finally going to be introduced to the main cast this chapter so things should be a bit clearer.
As for future villains... most will be original characters, but.... they'll be based on the demons from Fairy tail. I'm undecided if I should incorporate the Evil or Fallen Stars from Saint Seiya... it is possible I'm just not sure yet. The combative abilities of the main cast will be sort of a combination between magic from Fairy tail and Cosmos from Saint Seiya. Most will be based on Saint Seiya Omega.
I don't own Saint Seiya Omega, Fairy Tail, or Rwby and their characters. Those belong to their respective creators, I only own the oc's who appear in this story.
Chapter Two: Ruby Rose and the Eve of Initiation
A city is not so different from a person.
It shows you what it wants you to see first.
What it hides is always the more interesting part.
I. Vale, Three Months After Arrival
Three months is not a long time by most measures. It is long enough, however, to stop flinching at unfamiliar sounds, to begin navigating by instinct rather than by deliberate memory, and to learn which bakeries open earliest and which streets flood when it rains. The Dragonblade and Tokyoheim families had not become Vale residents in three months — but they had become something more than strangers to it.
The evening was mild and the streets of the commercial district were lit amber by shop-front lanterns and the warm glow of foot traffic winding down for the night. Three figures moved through it with the unhurried ease of young people who had nowhere to be for another hour.
The eldest of the three — Maxwell Dragonblade, Max to everyone who knew him well enough — walked with his hands in the pockets of his dark vest, golden eyes moving habitually across doorways and alleyways and rooftops in a way he had long since stopped noticing he was doing. His fiery orange hair caught the lamplight. He was his father's son in the architecture of his face and the quality of his attention, and his mother's son in the warmth he kept carefully beneath the surface of both.
To his left, Mist walked with the alert, economical grace of someone trained from childhood to occupy space efficiently. Her crimson-tipped horns framed a face that was currently composed in the mild expression she wore when she was thinking about several things simultaneously and had decided to keep all of them to herself. Her black and red striped tail moved in a slow, pendulum arc behind her — relaxed, which was telling; Mist's tail was an honest instrument even when the rest of her was not.
And then there was Kouga.
He walked on Max's right, emerald eyes bright and curious, taking in the city the way he always did — as if every street corner might be concealing something worth discovering. His horns angled forward to frame his face in a way that was uniquely his own, different enough from his siblings' to mark the fact that he had not come to this family by blood. He had come to it by circumstance, and then by choice, and then by seventeen years of accumulated evidence that some families are built rather than inherited. The difference, as far as any of them were concerned, was academic.
Their errand was a simple one: resupply. Dust vials had a way of running low faster than anticipated, and their parents — who were at Beacon now, navigating the particular bureaucratic theater of presenting themselves as unremarkable new faculty — had asked them to pick up a few extras before heading home.
The sign above the shop read: FROM DUST TILL DAWN.
Max held the door. They went in.
◆ ◆ ◆
II. From Dust Till Dawn — Vale Commercial District
The shop smelled of ozone and minerals — the particular cocktail of contained power that every Dust establishment shared, beneath whatever else they stocked. The proprietor, an old man with the careful movements of someone who had spent decades working around volatile materials, gave them a nod from behind the counter. He had seen them before. He had stopped startling at the horns.
Max drifted toward the front counter. Kouga found himself drawn to the music display near the far wall — not because he particularly intended to browse it, but because there was a weapons catalog propped beside it and the catalog had an interesting spine. Mist moved through the aisles with the quiet efficiency of someone who had a list in her head and intended to work through it.
Near the back of the store, half-hidden behind a rotating display of elemental primers, a girl in a red hooded cloak was sitting cross-legged on the floor with a weapons catalog open across her knees and small white earphones plugged firmly into both ears.
She had not looked up when the door opened.
Kouga glanced at her once, registered the silver eyes behind the dark lashes — striking, somehow, even at a distance, even in passing — and returned his attention to his catalog. He had not yet learned that this was one of those moments that would later seem, in retrospect, to have been entirely inevitable.
Ruby's perspective:
I heard the door open and glanced up out of habit. Three faunus — two with horns that curved in unusual configurations, all three with tails that moved like they were connected to something deliberate rather than just reflex. Not any faunus variation I recognized from Vale, and I had seen a fair number. Bull faunus? No, wrong shape entirely. Lizard? Closer, but still not quite right — the scale texture on the tails was too fine, and lizard faunus didn't typically have horns like that.
They all wore pendants around their necks. Crystals of some kind, though the light wasn't good enough to be certain. I filed it away and went back to my catalog.
Then the door opened again, and it wasn't faunus that came through it.
End of Ruby's perspective.
The man who entered first was the kind of person who understood that a room was a stage and had dressed accordingly. His suit was white, his hat was orange, and his cane moved with the practiced ease of an affectation that had long since become second nature. He was followed by men in black suits and red-tinted glasses who spread through the shop like a tide coming in — purposeful, unhurried, and deeply unpleasant.
The old shopkeeper's composure held better than it deserved to. "Please. I don't want any trouble. Take the money. Just — please."
The man in the white suit leaned on the counter with the ease of someone who had never once in his life needed to rush. "Relax, old timer. We're not here for the money." His eyes tracked sideways to his men with the minimal effort of someone who had given this order before. "Grab the dust."
The men in black moved to the dust tubes. One of them peeled off from the group and tapped a girl on the shoulder.
She didn't respond.
He tapped harder.
Still nothing. The earphones, small and white, were doing exactly what they were designed to do.
The thug made the universal gesture of someone trying to communicate with a person wearing headphones — tapping his ear, miming the removal of something — and the girl finally pulled one earbud out, blinking up at him with an expression that suggested this interruption was both unexpected and somewhat philosophically interesting to her.
"Hands up," the thug said. "Hand over the dust."
The girl looked at him the way a person looks at something they have been asked to identify but cannot quite place. "Are you... mugging me?"
"Yes."
There was a very brief pause, which was followed by the thug departing through the shop window at a velocity that was inconsistent with his earlier confidence. The girl — red cloak, silver eyes, a weapon that was unreasonably large for someone her size — was already through the broken glass before the frame had stopped shaking.
◆ ◆ ◆
In another part of the store, a second thug made the tactical error of approaching Mist.
She had been perfectly pleasant up until that point. She was not particularly pleasant after.
"Hand over the bag." He made a grab for the strap on her shoulder. "We know you've got dust in there."
Mist's eyes shifted. It happened in the span of a breath — pupils narrowing to vertical slits, the way a cat's do when the light changes or the mood does. She looked at the thug the way a predator looks at something that has just made a very unfortunate decision.
"Let go," she said, in the tone of someone who is offering a courtesy warning and expects it to be taken, "of my bag."
The kick that followed was perhaps slightly harder than she had intended. The thug's departure through the front door was definitive.
Mist looked at the vacancy where he had been standing, then at the door, and arrived quickly at the conclusion that she had misjudged the force. She went after him.
Kouga glanced at Max.
Max sighed the sigh of a man who had long since accepted that his family was constitutionally incapable of an uneventful evening. He turned to the shopkeeper.
"I'm sorry about the window. And the door." He reached into his jacket. "Allow me to cover it."
The old man stared at him for a moment, caught genuinely off-guard by the gesture. Then he smiled — the warm, surprised smile of someone receiving unexpected decency in the middle of a robbery. "Thank you, son. Come back when things settle, and we'll talk about it then. But I believe your friends may need some help out there first."
Max nodded and went through the broken door at a run.
◆ ◆ ◆
III. The Street — Night
The man in the white suit — who would later turn out to be Roman Torchwick, career criminal, occasional theatrical, and the kind of person who found other people's competence personally offensive — was observing the deterioration of his operation with the pained expression of a stage director watching his cast improvise.
"Get her," he said, with the clipped restraint of someone conserving his frustration for later.
His men went after the girl in red. They did not come back in the direction he had expected.
What came back instead was a small crowd of men landing in a heap at various points along the street, propelled there by Mist Dragonblade, who had touched down in front of them with her pupils still in their slit configuration and her expression wearing the particular quality of someone who has been called something they have been called before and has decided, on this particular evening, not to let it pass.
"Monster," one of the fallen men said, backing away. Several of his colleagues joined him.
Mist tilted her head. The shadow fell across her eyes in a way that was probably coincidental and felt entirely intentional.
"Monster," she repeated, in the tone of someone who has just been handed a gift they did not expect. "All right. If that's what you'd like."
She moved.
The pavement cracked. The men did not.
Roman Torchwick, watching from a safe distance, allowed himself one moment of honest assessment. Then he filed it under problems he would not be creating again and redirected his attention to the girl in red, who was by now handling his remaining crew with a collapsible scythe that she wielded with the kind of practiced ease that came from years of training and an apparent genuine enthusiasm for the work.
On the far side of the engagement, another thug had gotten around to Ruby's blind side and brought his blade down in a swing that had every intention of landing.
It did not land.
Kouga had one hand around the blade. The other was already moving to push Ruby clear of the follow-through. The blade didn't stop him — it cracked against his grip and came apart, and the thug stood for a moment holding the hilt of a weapon that had become decorative, before an elbow introduced him to the cobblestones.
Ruby found her footing and turned. Her eyes went from the broken blade to Kouga to the space where the threat had been, doing the arithmetic quickly.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
She tried to speak. Got partway through a syllable. Tried again. "Y-yeah. Thanks. I — thanks."
He grinned. It was an uncomplicated grin, the kind that had nothing behind it except the genuine satisfaction of having done something useful. "No problem," he said, and turned back toward the remaining thugs with the easy, natural pivot of someone who had never really stopped watching the room.
Ruby watched him for one more second than was strictly necessary, then shook herself back into the present.
"Ruby Rose," she said, falling into step beside him. "In case you were wondering. And — thank you. Again. I didn't catch your name earlier."
"Kouga Dragonblade." He caught a fist coming from the left, redirected it, and put its owner down without breaking stride. "Just Kouga is fine."
"Just Kouga," Ruby repeated, and found that it fit easily.
They worked back to back through what was left of Roman's crew with the unconscious, unspoken coordination of two people whose instincts happened to be complementary — his hands-first directness filling the gaps in her range-and-movement style, her speed drawing attention he could then redirect. It was not elegant. It was effective. Neither of them commented on it because neither of them had quite noticed yet.
Roman Torchwick had noticed, however. He stood at the edge of the action with the evaluative expression of a man updating a threat assessment in real time. Then he dropped his cigar, stepped on it, and drew his cane out to its full length with a familiar click.
"Impressive work, Red. And Blue." He strolled forward, unhurried, as distant sirens began their low climb toward audibility. "You've both been excellent entertainment — really, truly. Unfortunately, I have somewhere to be." He raised the cane. The base opened. A targeting reticle caught the lamplight. "Ta-ta, kiddies."
The bolt he fired was red and substantial and moving very fast. It did not hit Ruby.
It hit Max's outstretched palm, which absorbed it the way a calm sea absorbs a dropped stone — with a brief disturbance, and then nothing.
Max closed his hand. Opened it. Looked at his palm with the mild expression of someone confirming a hypothesis they were already fairly confident in.
"What have I told you two," he said, walking forward with Mist beside him, "about charging in without a contingency?"
Kouga had the grace to look genuinely abashed. "Sorry, big brother."
"You could have been hurt, Kou." Mist's voice was the particular register of older-sibling concern that comes dressed as exasperation. "Think before you move next time."
"I know. I will." He rubbed the back of his head. "I got a little — she looked like she needed help."
Max looked at him for a long moment, then reached out and ruffled his hair with a hand that was considerably gentler than his expression. "We're not angry. Just be careful."
Kouga exhaled and straightened.
Max and Mist turned toward Ruby then, and their expressions shifted into something warmer. They had only just met this girl, but she was the kind of person who made a favorable impression quickly — honest in her reactions, composed under pressure in a way that sat interestingly beside her obvious youth.
"We apologize if our brother caused you any trouble," Max said.
Ruby waved both hands emphatically. "No, no — he helped me. He actually kind of saved my life, so." She paused. "Thank you. All of you."
The three siblings smiled at her in the easy, unhurried way of people who had grown up in a household where warmth was not considered a vulnerability.
Kouga's head came up. His nostrils flared slightly — a small, almost imperceptible thing, easily missed.
"Kou?" Mist asked.
"That man. Torchwick." He turned and pointed up the street toward a building whose fire escape was occupied by a retreating white suit. "He went that way."
The shopkeeper, who had come to stand in his broken doorway to assess the damage, met Ruby's questioning look with a nod. She was already moving before Roman reached the second landing.
◆ ◆ ◆
IV. The Rooftop
They found him on the roof, almost at the bullhead, and they might have had him — except that Roman Torchwick had not survived as long as he had by being catchable.
"Still with me? You're persistent, I'll give you that." He looked at the foursome with the mild interest of a man assessing an obstacle. "Red. Blue. And... Orange, was it? And Pink?"
Mist's eye twitched fractionally. "Fuchsia."
"And we're only here to make sure he doesn't get into more trouble than he can handle," Max said, gesturing toward Kouga.
"Right." Roman produced a red Dust crystal from his breast pocket, turned it once between his fingers, and tossed it lightly to their feet. He raised his cane and fired, and the crystal detonated in a concussive bloom of scarlet light that drove the rooftop debris sideways and billowed smoke across the open air.
Roman laughed — genuine, delighted, the laugh of a man who had just bought himself thirty seconds — and turned toward the open hatch of the waiting bullhead.
He stopped laughing when the smoke cleared.
Standing between the dissipating blast and two very unruffled teenagers was a woman in a long purple cape, one hand extended, a geometric shield of light already dissolving from around them as it completed its work. Her wand was in her other hand. Her expression conveyed, with considerable efficiency, that she was not impressed by any of this.
Ruby made a sound that was entirely involuntary and completely unguarded.
"A Huntress," she said, in a voice that had forgotten to be composed.
Glynda Goodwitch moved her wand in a precise, practiced arc. The sky overhead began to darken in a very specific way — not the diffuse dimming of approaching weather but the focused, intentional darkening of gathered aura channeled into the atmosphere like a lens focusing light. Roman cursed, scrambled for the bullhead's controls, and narrowly missed a hailstone the size of a fist as the storm she had summoned began to make its opinion of his aircraft known.
Max had gone very still. Not from fear — from the instinctive attention of someone who was watching something they wanted to understand. Mist stood beside him, reading the same thing he was.
"Wait," Max said softly, his arm moving to block his siblings when Kouga and Mist both shifted forward. "Let her work. I want to see how she does this."
Glynda's arrows of gathered force struck the bullhead in sequence, precise as punctuation. The woman at the hatch — fire in her hands, something deeply wrong in the way her silhouette moved against the smoke — answered each volley with blasts that shattered and scattered the constructs, only to have Glynda pull the fragments together and reform them mid-air with the unhurried certainty of someone who had practiced this particular conversation many times.
Ruby switched Crescent Rose to rifle configuration and opened fire on the figure in the hatch. The shots were blocked. The fire the woman summoned in response coiled toward them in streaks of displaced heat — and Max stepped forward and took it.
He spread both hands, and the fire ran up his arms and into his palms like water running downhill, and then it was gone. He examined the residual warmth on his skin the way someone examines an interesting puzzle.
Glynda had turned at the motion. For a fraction of a second, something crossed her face — surprise, sharp and genuine — before the professionalism snapped back into place. She could not afford to think about that yet. The hatch had closed. Roman was pulling the aircraft into a banking climb.
The bullhead escaped into the dark above the city. Glynda watched it go with the calm, controlled expression of someone filing an unfinished task for later.
Then she turned.
Ruby was already looking at her with the expression of someone who had completely forgotten that they had nearly been blown off a rooftop and was primarily interested in obtaining a signature.
Glynda blinked. "This girl," she thought, with more exasperation than she entirely felt, "almost died. And she looks like she's at a fan event."
She cleared her throat and turned to Max instead, which was slightly easier for her composure.
"Young man. What exactly was that back there? You could have been seriously injured."
Max met her eyes without difficulty. "I made a judgment call, ma'am. As the eldest here, keeping my siblings safe is my responsibility. And I have an affinity for flame — I can absorb fire that isn't my own without harm. I should have consulted you before acting, and I apologize for that."
The apology was not what she had expected. It was the correct apology — specific, honest, not defensive — and it was delivered with the easy deference of someone who respected authority without being cowed by it. She filed this away next to the note about the fire absorption, which she was going to need to think about later.
"Ahem. In any case." She addressed all four of them. "There is someone who would like a word with you."
"All of us?" Ruby asked.
"All of you. If you'll follow me."
Max glanced at the others. Nodded once. "Lead the way, ma'am."
Mist reached for her scroll and typed a quick message to their parents as they fell into step behind the Huntress. Max leaned over slightly.
"Tell them we might be late."
"Already did," Mist said.
◆ ◆ ◆
V. Beacon Academy — Professor Ozpin's Office
The room they were shown into was dark except for the cone of white light coming from above the table, which was the sort of lighting arrangement that seemed less like an accident and more like a deliberate choice made by someone who had conducted a great many of these conversations and had opinions about how they should feel. Ruby sat beneath it with the expression of a person reviewing the last hour of their life and finding it mixed. Kouga sat beside her and had the good grace to look appropriately contrite.
Glynda moved around the table with the tablet in her hand and the posture of someone who had given this particular lecture before and did not find it any less warranted for its familiarity.
"I hope you understand that your actions tonight were not without consequence, Miss Rose." She paused and turned the full weight of her attention to the red-haired boy beside her. "And that applies equally to you. What exactly were you thinking?"
"Sorry, ma'am," Kouga said.
"I beg your pardon?"
Kouga sat up straighter. "Yes, Miss Goodwitch."
"They started it," Ruby offered.
Glynda closed her eyes briefly. "If it were entirely my decision," she said, with the careful, measured delivery of someone holding back the version of this sentence that would not be appropriate, "you would both be sent home tonight. With an acknowledgment of good intentions, and a firm reminder of their limitations."
She brought her riding crop down against the edge of the table. Ruby flinched back. Kouga achieved perfect stillness by means that were clearly practiced.
"However." Glynda stepped aside. "There is someone who wishes to speak with you."
Professor Ozpin came through the doorway with a mug and a plate of cookies, moving with the unhurried ease of a man who had seen a great deal of this world and had arrived at a relationship with urgency that was largely theoretical. He looked at Ruby. He looked for a moment longer than was necessary.
"Ruby Rose," he said quietly. "You have silver eyes."
Ruby, who had been expecting something more in the interrogative register, blinked. "I — um."
He set the cookies on the table between them. "Where did you learn to fight?"
"Signal Academy."
"They taught you to use a weapon like that?"
"One teacher in particular. My Uncle Qrow."
Something in Ozpin's expression shifted — recognition, briefly, before it settled back into its habitual calm. He set his mug down and leaned forward slightly.
"I've seen that style before. Only once. It belonged to someone I once called a dusty old crow."
Ruby, who had been nibbling a cookie with the self-consciousness of someone trying to appear composed while eating in front of authority, swallowed hastily. "That's my uncle! He taught at Signal — he taught me everything before I could really do anything — and now I'm like —" She made a series of gestures that suggested the enthusiasm had temporarily outpaced the language centers. Kouga, beside her, was attempting to keep his expression neutral with incomplete success.
Ozpin observed all of this with the benign patience of a man who had watched a great many young people try to convince him of their potential and had become skilled at reading the difference between performance and substance. What he saw in Ruby Rose was not performance. It was entirely sincere.
"Tell me, Miss Rose," he said. "What is an earnest young woman like yourself doing at a school that trains people for dangerous work?"
"I want to be a Huntress."
"You want to fight monsters."
"Yes. I have two more years at Signal, and then I was going to apply to Beacon." She had stopped self-editing. The sentences came quickly now, picking up velocity with the warmth behind them. "My sister's starting here this year. She's going to be a Huntress. I want to be a Huntress. Our parents always told us that if you can help people, you should — so I figured I might as well make a career of it." A pause. "The police are fine, but Huntsmen and Huntresses are — it's just, there's something about it, isn't there? It means something."
She stopped, slightly out of breath, and became aware that she had just said all of that out loud to the Headmaster of Beacon Academy, and that he was watching her with an expression she could not quite read.
"Do you know who I am?" he asked.
"Professor Ozpin. Headmaster of Beacon."
"Hello."
"Nice to meet you."
A beat.
"Would you like to come to my school?"
The expression that moved across Ruby's face at this question was not something that could be easily described in a few words. It was the expression of someone receiving, unexpectedly, the thing they had wanted most — and discovering that it felt exactly like they had always imagined it would, which is rarer than it should be.
"More than anything," she said.
Ozpin glanced at Glynda, who turned away with the body language of someone who had registered an opinion and was choosing not to speak it aloud. He turned back to the girl with silver eyes.
"Well, then."
He looked at the remaining three.
Max, Mist, and Kouga had been quiet through the exchange — not passive, but observing with the careful, measuring attention of young people who had grown up in households where reading a room was considered a practical skill. The footage Glynda had pulled up on the tablet was playing silently in the background: the three of them moving through Roman's men with a style that was, by any conventional standard, deeply unusual.
"You are faunus," Ozpin said. Not an accusation. An observation.
Mist's expression calibrated slightly. "Is that a concern?"
"Not one I anticipate." He looked at the footage again. "In all my years, I have never seen that particular approach to combat. Not in Vale. Not in Atlas. Not anywhere that trains its fighters in conventional methods. Where did this come from?"
Max answered him. "Our parents, primarily. They believed that the body itself, trained correctly, is the most reliable weapon a person can carry. Everything else — Dust, manufactured arms — these are tools. Extensions. The foundation has to be something that can't be taken from you."
"And the rest?" Ozpin asked.
"We trained with others," Kouga said. "But we can't say where or with whom. They asked for anonymity. We intend to keep it."
There was a brief pause. Ozpin absorbed this with the equanimity of a man accustomed to receiving partial answers to important questions.
"I see. The Dragonblade name carries its own answers, I suppose." He looked at them over his folded hands. "Your parents are former students of mine. They graduated Beacon alongside Taiyang Xiao Long, Summer Rose, and the Branwen twins — Raven and Qrow. The Black Dragon Lord and the Crimson Maiden." He said the titles simply, without the reverence that others tended to bring to them. "You come from remarkable lineage."
The three siblings relaxed fractionally. They had not realized, until the tension left, how much they had been holding.
"I would extend to you the same invitation I've offered Miss Rose," Ozpin said. "This applies to your companions as well — I understand the Tokyoheim children are known to you. Beacon's doors would be open to all five of you."
Mist glanced at her brothers. A small, silent conversation conducted in expressions that took less than two seconds and communicated rather a lot.
Max spoke for all three of them. "That invitation aligns precisely with what our parents sent us here to find. It was their hope — and ours — that Beacon would give us what training alone cannot. Perspective. People. The kind of experience that sharpens something in you that practice never quite reaches."
"Then it's settled." Ozpin rose from his chair. "Maxwell, Mist, and Kouga Dragonblade — welcome to Beacon Academy. I will see to the paperwork. Please inform your parents."
As the four teens made their way out, Glynda waited until the door had closed behind them before she spoke.
"Ozpin." Her voice was careful. "You know what they are."
"The rarest of faunus," he said simply, looking at the space where they had been. "And the most formidable." He paused. "The young Dragonblade boy — Kouga. He is something different. A variance I haven't encountered before. His origin is not the same as his siblings"."
"And that doesn't concern you?"
"Everything concerns me, Glynda. That's rather the point." He picked up his mug. "We will keep watch. That's all we can do, for now."
◆ ◆ ◆
VI. The Airship to Beacon — Four Months Later
The transport to Beacon was large, state-funded, and full of first-year students experiencing the particular emotional cocktail of someone stepping into the life they have been preparing for — excitement, nerves, the specific vertigo of a moment that has finally stopped being hypothetical.
Yang Xiao Long managed all of this by hugging her sister until Ruby made sounds that suggested her ribcage had opinions on the matter.
"Yang," Ruby said, in a voice that had lost meaningful air pressure. "Please."
"I am just so proud of you!" Yang released her, vibrating with enthusiasm that showed no signs of diminishing. "Everyone at Beacon is going to think you're incredible."
"I don't want to be thought of as incredible." Ruby straightened her cloak, reclaiming her dignity. "I want to have normal knees."
"A perfectly reasonable goal."
"It is! It really is, Yang."
Yang slung an arm around her sister's shoulders. "You got moved ahead two years. Two years, Rubes. I know you don't want to make a thing of it, but it is a thing. Let yourself have it, a little."
Ruby opened her mouth to argue — and heard a voice from a few seats back cut gently through the noise of the cabin.
"She's right, you know. Older siblings generally are, about these things. It's something of an occupational advantage."
Ruby turned and found Max Dragonblade regarding her with the mild, genuine amusement of someone who had been listening just long enough. Beside him, Mist gave a small wave. Kouga was watching Ruby with that uncomplicated quality of attention she had noticed before — present, unhurried, not asking anything of her.
"Oh!" Ruby's face opened into a smile that arrived before she had any say in the matter. "You're all here!"
"Did you think we'd miss the airship?" Mist asked.
"I didn't know when you were — I mean — " Ruby gave up on the sentence and crossed the aisle to hug Kouga instead, which surprised him enough that he went briefly still before recovering.
"This is," Ruby said into the shoulder of his jacket, then pulled back and looked up at him with a slightly pink face, "to say thank you. From before. I know it's late, but I never got to properly say it."
"You don't owe me anything." He rubbed the back of his head, exhibiting the look of a person whose equilibrium had been briefly disturbed in a way they were not displeased about. "It was just the thing to do."
Yang, watching this exchange from three feet away, developed a smile of the kind that she wisely decided not to speak aloud. Yet.
"Yang Xiao Long," she said instead, extending her hand to the siblings. "Ruby talks about you constantly, just so you know."
"Yang," Ruby said.
"It's a compliment!"
Mist shook the offered hand, and a slight flush rose in her cheeks when Yang immediately followed with: "I love your horns. And your tail. They're genuinely gorgeous."
Mist's tail offered a single, involuntary wag before she could marshal her composure. "I — thank you. That's — thank you."
"Our sister isn't accustomed to compliments about her faunus traits," Max explained, taking Yang's hand in turn with the ease of someone comfortable being introduced. "It means a great deal."
Yang looked at him.
Max looked back.
For approximately two seconds, neither of them said anything, and the air in that particular cubic foot of airship held a charged quality that neither of them acknowledged and both of them noticed.
"Right," Yang said. "Cool. Good. Thanks for looking after Ruby."
"Happy to," Max said.
Mist, with the air of someone filing information for future reference, said nothing.
The introductions continued down the row: Shoryu Tokyoheim, silver-horned and silver-tailed and easier in his posture than most people twice his age; and Honoo Tokyoheim, his sister, who had the kind of presence that arrived slightly before she did and stayed slightly after she left. Ruby looked at her for a moment the way people sometimes look at genuinely beautiful things — involuntary, startled, and slightly embarrassed about it — then shook herself back to the present with a minor internal lecture on composure.
The other male students on the transport were somewhat less successful at the shaking-themselves-back part.
A hologram bloomed to life at the front of the cabin before anyone had time to dwell on this: Glynda Goodwitch, rendered in the blue-white light of the projector, regarding all of them with the composed authority of someone who had welcomed enough incoming classes to have stopped being charmed by nervous excitement.
"Hello, and welcome to Beacon." Her voice carried the effortless projection of someone accustomed to filling large rooms. "You are among a privileged few who have received the honor of being selected to attend this prestigious academy. Our world is experiencing an incredible time of peace, and as future Huntsmen and Huntresses, it is your duty to uphold it. You have demonstrated the courage needed for such a task. Now it is our turn to provide you with the knowledge and the tools to protect our world."
The hologram dissolved.
Ruby had already stood to look out the viewport, and her face did the thing it did when she had temporarily lost the capacity for language — mouth slightly open, eyes tracking the landscape with unguarded wonder.
"You can see Signal from here," she said. "Home isn't as far away as it seemed."
"Beacon is home now," Yang said, and it was said gently, and it was true, and Ruby felt both of those things at once.
From the rear of the cabin came the sound of someone being emphatically sick, followed by a dignified silence.
"The view," Yang observed, "is apparently not for everyone."
Max noticed the problem on Yang's shoe at approximately the same moment she looked down and discovered it herself, which made his observation both accurate and briefly unnecessary. The three minutes that followed involved Yang attempting to deal with the situation, Ruby attempting to not be involved in the situation, and the other passengers providing the situation with a respectful berth while trying not to laugh. The faunus teens laughed. They were only human.

Opening: Burn (Tales of Berseria) by Flow
Visuals: Main Cast introduced in the story so far (Dragonblade siblings, Ruby, and Yang) pans down from a calm sky towards Beacon where students some silhouetted fall down from the sky.
It then transitions to each character introduced so far fighting one grim, before the song picks up and they are seen fighting the grim together. The opening visual ends as the dragonblade siblings, silhouetted figures with Ruby and Yang then fight off an enemy presumably a villain before it pans back up to the sky.
VII. Beacon Academy — The Courtyard
Beacon, seen from the approach, was the kind of architecture that made argument difficult. It sat on its cliff with the settled permanence of something that had not been built so much as grown — towers that had learned their proportions from the mountains behind them, archways that framed the sky with the confidence of things that expected to be looked at. The gardens were deliberate. The fountains were old.
Ruby stopped walking and looked at it, and for a moment everything that she was expecting and hoping and quietly afraid of resolved itself into the single clean fact of the place being real and her being in it.
"Wow," she said.
"The view from Vale's got nothing on this," Yang agreed.
"It's impressive," Honoo said, with the considered appreciation of someone who had seen impressive things before and knew the difference between that and this.
"It doesn't quite have Shura's character," Kouga said, with the careless fondness of someone talking about home. "Or the feel of Sanctuary. But I'll grant it remarkable."
"High praise," Mist said dryly.
"It is," Shoryu said, and meant it.
Max studied the architecture with the evaluative expression of someone who was genuinely interested in how something had been built and was making structural notes. "The engineering is extraordinary, given the site constraints alone."
Ruby had stopped listening because there was a student nearby with a collapsible staff that telescoped in a way she had never seen before, and another with a sword that appeared to generate its own fire independently of any Dust she could identify, and a third with a pair of gauntlets that were either very elaborate or very dangerous and possibly both —
Yang caught her hood before she got very far.
"Ow."
"They're just weapons."
"They are an extension of the self, Yang. They are a physical expression of individual —"
"Ruby."
" — philosophy and combat identity and I have never seen a gyroscopic dust-accelerated —"
"Ruby." Yang sighed the sigh of someone who had been having this particular argument for years and had made a separate peace with losing it. "Aren't you happy with Crescent Rose?"
Ruby transformed the weapon with the ease of someone who could do it in her sleep, which she probably could. "Of course I am. She's perfect. I just like meeting new ones. It's like meeting new people." A pause. "Actually, it's better than meeting new people, because weapons don't —" She seemed to become aware that this was something she was saying out loud. "I mean. You know."
"Still working on the people thing?" Kouga asked.
"I'm fine with people I know! It's just — new people are — you can't predict what they're —" She stopped. "You were patient with me. Not everyone does that."
"You'll never find out if you don't try," Honoo said, with the gentleness of someone delivering a truth they had some personal familiarity with.
"You might meet someone you didn't expect to like," Mist added.
Ruby made the face of someone who found this argument frustratingly persuasive. She turned to Yang for support and found Yang already absorbed into a passing group of students, departing with a cheerful wave and a whispered aside to Max that Ruby was not close enough to catch.
Max's expression suggested he hadn't known quite what to do with whatever Yang had said to him. His ears were slightly darker than usual. Mist noticed and stored this observation with the expression of someone who fully intended to return to it later.
Ruby watched her sister disappear into the crowd and felt the specific small lurch of someone who has just realized they are without their usual anchor.
Kouga looked at her.
"We're staying with you," he said, and he said it with the matter-of-fact ease of someone stating a plan rather than offering reassurance. "Yang asked us to."
"She didn't have to do that."
"No. She did it anyway."
Ruby stood in the middle of the courtyard of Beacon Academy, with five people she had known for four months and liked far better than she had expected, and allowed herself to believe, just briefly, that this was going to be all right.
Then she stepped backward into a luggage carrier, and the cases went everywhere, and a white-haired girl in expensive traveling clothes turned around with an expression that Ruby would later describe as the temperature of a glacier.
◆ ◆ ◆
VIII. The Courtyard — A Complicated Introduction
"What," said the white-haired girl, "are you doing."
It was not technically a question. It had the shape of one but the force of something else.
"I'm — I'm so sorry —" Ruby scrambled to her feet with the apologetic energy of someone who was entirely sincere and knew it would not help. "I didn't see —"
"Sorry? Do you have any idea what could have been —" The girl snatched a case from Ruby's hands before she could examine it further, snapping it open to reveal the orderly rows of Dust vials within. "This is Schnee-purified Dust, mined from the Schnee family quarry. Do you have any understanding of what that means?"
Shoryu had moved up quietly beside Ruby. His expression had the quality of someone waiting to hear a sentence completed before forming a response.
"— and I wouldn't expect a lowly faunus liz—"
She did not finish the word. Shoryu's gaze, which had been patient a moment before, turned to something that had considerably less patience in it. The temperature in that part of the courtyard dropped several degrees by entirely non-magical means.
"I'd think very carefully," Shoryu said, in a voice that was quieter than it needed to be to be effective, "about how that sentence ends."
The white-haired girl turned her attention back to Ruby with the air of someone recalibrating. The red Dust vial in her hand was waving in Ruby's direction with increasing enthusiasm, and the small cascade of particles sifting toward Ruby's face was going largely unnoticed by everyone except the five people standing far enough back to have perspective on it.
Kouga tried to interject.
"If you could maybe — the Dust — she's about to —"
Max caught his arm. "Don't. We tried. Watch the radius."
Mist took a careful step backward. Shoryu and Honoo followed. They had all of them seen this kind of thing before.
Ruby sneezed.
The column of flame, the cascade of snowflakes, and the branching arc of electricity that followed were, objectively speaking, impressive for an involuntary emission. The Dust vial completed a ballistic arc over the courtyard and came to rest at the feet of a dark-haired girl reading near the edge of the garden, who looked down at the Schnee Dust Company logo on its side and then up at the smoking tableau in the middle distance with an expression of mild but genuine interest.
A silence settled over that section of the courtyard.
Mist turned to the white-haired girl with the measured patience of someone who has decided to be the adult in the room and is not particularly happy about it.
"My brother did attempt to warn you. Several times."
"Your brother — if you think I'm going to be lectured by a —"
"Mist." Honoo moved between them with the calm, inevitable quality of a tidal pattern — not dramatic, not rushed, entirely immovable. She looked at Mist with a soft authority that landed without weight. "You're reacting from love. I know. But right now you're not thinking clearly, and this isn't helping anyone."
Mist took a breath. Then another. The sharpness in her posture dissolved by degrees.
"You're right," she said. And then, to the white-haired girl: "I snapped at you. That was unbecoming of me, and I apologize. My family and my friends mean a great deal to me, and I do not react well when they're dismissed. That said, my reaction was mine and I own it."
The white-haired girl stood very still.
The cultural math she was doing at this moment was visible, if brief: a faunus, offering an apology, unprompted, without condition, and without apparent calculation. This did not match her existing framework.
"W-well," she said. "As long as you understand."
She turned back to Ruby, and her voice, when it came, was several degrees warmer than the one she'd started with — not warm, precisely, but not hostile either. She was capable of recalibration, at least.
"Aren't you a little young for this school?"
"I — well —"
"I may have overreacted," the white-haired girl said. It sounded like something she had rehearsed. "But watch where you're going. We aren't here for sparring drills. We're here to fight monsters."
"I'll remember that," Ruby said.
The dark-haired girl from the garden had approached during all of this, quiet and self-contained as a closed book. She handed back the vial.
"Weiss Schnee," she said. "Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company, one of the largest producers of energy propellant in the world."
Weiss accepted this with the instinctive pleasure of someone receiving praise, and then received the rest of the sentence.
"The same company," the dark-haired girl continued, "known for its controversial labor practices and its rather complicated relationship with the concept of accountability."
Weiss's expression covered considerable ground in a short span of time.
Ruby, admirably, managed not to laugh until after Weiss had picked up her cases and departed with the decisive energy of someone who had decided that this courtyard contained too many people they did not want to be near.
The dark-haired girl turned to leave in the opposite direction, which was when Ruby realized she had not introduced herself, or learned the girl's name, or said anything useful, and that all of those things had happened and were now over.
She stood in the courtyard for a moment with the expression of someone taking stock.
"Welcome to Beacon," she said, to no one in particular.
Kouga came and sat down on the ground next to her feet.
"What are you doing?" Ruby asked.
"Seemed like a reasonable thing," he said.
Max lowered himself to the ground. "I'm honestly tired."
"Solidarity," said Mist, sitting beside her brother.
"I've had more eventful mornings," Shoryu allowed, settling cross-legged.
"We're not going to let you be the only one lying on the floor, Ruby," Honoo said, sitting with a grace that made sitting on a courtyard floor look like a conscious aesthetic choice.
Ruby looked at all five of them — at their horns and their tails and their pendants and the easy, undemanding warmth of people who had decided, without announcement, that this was where they were going to be — and made a sound that was somewhere between a laugh and a sigh, and then she laughed properly, and they laughed too, and Kouga offered her his hand when it was time to get up.
A boy with blond hair and an expression that suggested this was not his best day either came around the corner and introduced himself as Jaune Arc.
"Aren't you the guy who was sick on the ship?" Ruby asked.
Jaune absorbed this with the stoic grace of someone who had suspected this was coming. "Is that what people are going to call me?"
"Probably for a while," Kouga said, with the honest sympathy of someone who was not being cruel about it.
"Great," said Jaune. "Great."
They walked.
◆ ◆ ◆
IX. The Amphitheater — Address to the First Years
The amphitheater was built into the hillside above the central courtyard in a curve that gathered and held sound with architectural intentionality. It was full when they arrived, first-years filling the tiered rows with the ambient noise of a gathering that had not yet decided on its collective mood.
Ruby found her sister's waving arm in the third row and made her way over. The faunus group settled into the adjacent row, close enough that the distance felt comfortable rather than pointed.
Ozpin was already on stage.
He did not command the room's attention the way some speakers did — not through volume or physical presence or the performance of authority. He simply stood at the podium and the room quieted around him, the way water finds its level. The gray of his hair and the stillness of his manner gave him the quality of something that had been in this room a very long time and intended to remain.
"I'll keep this brief," he said, and the amphitheater was genuinely quiet. "You have come here seeking knowledge. To refine what you have and to acquire what you lack. When your time here is complete, you intend to dedicate your lives to the protection of others." He paused. "But when I look out at this assembly, I do not see readiness. I see potential waiting to become direction."
A murmur moved through the seats. People always reacted this way when someone said a true thing that was not a comfortable one.
"Knowledge will not resolve this for you. Your years here will demonstrate that clearly enough. Understanding can only carry a person to the threshold." His voice was calm, unhurried, the voice of someone who had seen enough of what came next to be neither alarmist nor falsely encouraging about it. "It is you who must choose to cross it. That choice begins now. It begins with tomorrow."
He stepped back from the podium and was gone before the silence had quite finished settling.
Glynda replaced him with the brisk efficiency of someone moving a meeting forward.
"You will gather in the ballroom tonight. Tomorrow, your initiation begins. Be prepared. You are dismissed."
Yang leaned toward Ruby as the students began to rise. "He seemed... somewhere else."
"Yes," Ruby said quietly, watching the empty podium. "Like he was thinking about something that wasn't in this room at all."
◆ ◆ ◆
X. The Ballroom — Night
The ballroom at night, with sleeping bags spread across its floor and first-years arranged in the particular sprawl of people who are tired but not yet ready to sleep, had the quality of a place between things. It was not quite the world any of them had come from, and not yet the world they were moving into. It occupied an interval that felt, in the moment, strangely comfortable.
Ruby sat cross-legged in her pajamas with a journal open across her knees, writing the kind of letter that people write when they are trying to tell someone at home what a new place feels like without quite having the words for it yet.
Yang crashed into the spot beside her with the enthusiasm of someone who had excellent news about the evening.
"It's like a big slumber party," Yang announced.
"Dad would have concerns about the boy-to-girl ratio," Ruby said, not looking up.
"Dad isn't here." Yang stretched contentedly. "What are you writing?"
"A letter. For the team back at Signal." Ruby paused, then added, with the slight defensiveness of someone who has predicted the response: "I promised I'd tell them how things were going."
"That is adorable."
The pillow arrived at Yang's face with the speed of someone who was very practiced at throwing pillows at Yang's face.
"I didn't get to bring anyone with me! It's strange, not knowing anyone here."
Yang extracted herself from the pillow with the patience of someone who was not going to let this stand unaddressed. "Ruby. You are — seriously, right now — you already know six people."
"I know," Ruby said. "Koga and the others were very — they were kind to me today. I know they were."
"And you haven't decided to call them your friends yet because...?"
"Because knowing someone for a few months isn't necessarily the same as —" Ruby stopped. She was aware that this argument was losing ground in real time. "Yang."
"They sat on the floor of Beacon's main courtyard with you," Yang said. "Ruby. They sat on the floor."
The silence that followed was the silence of someone being defeated by an extremely good point.
"I suppose they did."
"And Koga," Yang continued, with the air of someone who has been waiting for precisely this moment, "who you have now mentioned twice in this conversation without being asked about him —"
"Yang, don't."
"— saved your life, stayed by your side for four straight hours, and sat on the ground with you. And you're writing a letter to people at Signal about your day at Beacon, and you haven't mentioned him once."
"I —" Ruby's pen had stopped moving. Her face had taken on a color that was not its usual color. "I was getting to that part."
"My little sister," Yang said, with tremendous warmth, "has a crush."
"I do not — it is not — he is kind and it is not the same as —" Ruby abandoned the sentence and pulled her sleeping mask down over her eyes. "Good night, Yang."
"Good niight~"
A few rows away, near the tall windows that let in the blue-dark of the Beacon night, a single candle burned and Blake Belladonna read in its light with the focused concentration of someone who had arranged herself here very deliberately and was politely but firmly unavailable.
Yang looked at her. Looked at Ruby. Made a decision.
"Come on."
"Yang, no — Yang —"
The introduction was performed over Blake's mild objections and Ruby's considerable embarrassment, and Yang's breezy refusal to find any of this awkward. Ruby managed, somehow, in the middle of it — while flustered, while wishing the floor would accept her as a resident — to ask Blake what she was reading.
Blake looked up, recalibrated, and answered her.
"A man with two souls," she said. "Each one fighting for control of the body they share."
"That sounds lonely," Ruby said, and she said it simply, without trying to be insightful about it, and Blake was quiet for a moment in the particular way of someone who has just heard an accurate thing stated without agenda.
They talked, in fits and starts, about books and heroes and the reasons people decided to do difficult things on behalf of strangers. Blake's answers were careful. Ruby's were not. Yang observed from a diplomatic distance and was on balance pleased with proceedings.
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Weiss Schnee, who had been attempting to sleep and had been defeated by the noise, and who regarded Yang and Ruby with an expression that suggested she had hoped they were someone else's problem.
They regarded her with the equivalent expression.
Before any of this could develop into something complicated, Honoo appeared at the edge of the candle's reach with the specific quality of someone who is smiling and means it and is nevertheless not interested in negotiating.
"Ladies," she said, in a voice that was very pleasant and carried absolutely no give in it. "Several people are trying to sleep. Including me, which is the relevant part."
Yang and Weiss both began to explain, simultaneously, why the other one was at fault.
Honoo's smile remained perfectly constant. It was, Ruby thought, a more effective instrument for producing silence than most things she had ever seen.
"I didn't ask who started it," Honoo said. "I asked you both to come have a very quiet conversation with me about how the rest of this evening is going to go."
The two of them went.
Ruby and Blake watched them leave, and then looked at each other, and then looked at the space where three people had just been standing.
"Is she always like that?" Blake asked.
"I've only known her since this morning," Ruby said. "But yes. Completely."
Blake nodded slowly, with the measured respect of someone updating their threat assessment.
She blew out the candle. Ruby found her sleeping bag. In the dark and warmth of the ballroom, with the sounds of three hundred students settling into the interval between one day and the next, Beacon Academy held its breath and waited for morning.
End of Chapter Two
Coming Next —
Chapter Three: Ruby Rose & Initiation II: ,The Test and the Making of Teams

Kimetsu no Yaiba- Ending 2 (Mugen Train Arc)
Visuals: replace the characters in the video with the Main cast of this story : Max, Mist, Koga, Ruby, Yang, Blake, Weiss, Hon'oo, and Shoryu along with silhouetted members still to be introduced.
Whew! That was a long chapter as it covered a whopping 3 episodes! To those who caught it, you already know who Ruby's paired with lol. But just in case no one caught it here are the pairings, some of which are subject to change:
Ruby x Koga
Max x Yang?
Kazuma x Weiss?
Hon'oo x Sun?
Shoryu x Blake?
Yukikaze x Yatsuhashi/Jaune?
Toshirou x Velvet?
Mist x Neptune?
The ones with question marks are subject to change depending on your vote. Below is a list of options for each male character in the main cast aside from Koga since he'll be with Ruby:
Who is the best option for Max?
Yang Xiao Long
Weiss Shcnee
Blake Belladonna
Velvet Scarlatina
Pyrrha Nikos
Who should *spoiler*(male oc who will be introduced in the next couple of chapters) be with?
Weiss
Blake
Pyrrha
Velvet
Who should Mist be paired with?
Sun
Neptune
Yatsuhashi
Jaune
Oscar (volume 5)
Who should Shoryu be with?
Weiss
Yang
Blake
Velvet
Pyrrha
Who should Hon'oo end up with?
Sun
Neptune
Oscar (volume 5)
Jaune
Yatsuhashi
As for what type of Faunus Hon'oo and Shoryu are that will be revealed soon. It's a cameo from a creature of a popular movie series and to this day my favorite 3 movies I've watched.
That's all for now, see ya in the next update!