"Hey, have you grown taller?" Pyrrha asked cheerfully.
Because of her upbringing and identity as the four-time champion of the Mistral Regional Tournament, Pyrrha had always stood taller than most girls her age. Even without her heels, she was already around 178 centimeters tall, and with them she easily reached 183. It was part of why her presence naturally stood out in a crowd.
Tsutsumi, however, had grown as well since the last time he had been in this world. He now stood around 175 centimeters, which made the height difference between them noticeably smaller than before.
"Maybe," he replied casually.
He continued walking through the halls of Beacon Academy while Pyrrha remained comfortably attached to his back, her arms loosely wrapped around his shoulders. From an outside perspective, it looked almost like she was hitching a ride.
It was somewhat awkward for her if one paid close attention, not because of the position itself but because of the number of people staring at them as they passed by. Students glanced over their shoulders, some whispering, others openly staring.
Pyrrha, however, didn't mind it that much.
In her mind, a girlfriend clinging to her boyfriend's back was perfectly normal behavior.
At least… she thought it was.
This was the first relationship she had ever been in, and there were still many things she didn't fully understand yet.
Tsutsumi, on the other hand, simply ignored the looks they received. Whether the stares came from jealous male students or equally irritated female ones made no difference to him. He walked through the academy halls without even glancing in their direction.
Eventually they returned to their dorm room.
When the door opened, the first thing they saw was Ren and Nora sleeping together in the same bed.
Nora was sprawled across the mattress with her usual careless posture, while Ren slept beside her with a calm expression. The two looked completely exhausted, as if they had collapsed the moment they returned.
After finally killing the Nuckelavee and putting the past behind them, it seemed the crushing weight they had carried for so many years had finally lifted. The tension that had always quietly lingered in their hearts had faded, leaving only deep exhaustion in its place.
Seeing them like that, Pyrrha tilted her head slightly.
"Should we also cuddle in bed together?" she suddenly asked.
She had simply noticed that Ren and Nora were sleeping while holding onto each other, and the thought came to her naturally.
"You're digging your own grave, Pyrrha," Tsutsumi murmured helplessly, already feeling a slight headache forming.
Pyrrha chuckled softly before finally letting go of him. She straightened her posture and stepped back, deciding not to push things too far. If she became too clingy, there was a real chance she might actually start annoying him.
Even if Tsutsumi often spoke harshly and acted bluntly, Pyrrha understood him better than most people thought.
From her perspective as a teammate and as the one who had trained under him, she could tell that his strictness came from a place of responsibility. He pushed them hard during training not because he enjoyed it, okay, maybe he somewhat enjoyed it, but because he didn't want them to regret their weakness when it truly mattered.
He was tough on them now so that they would survive later.
The fight with the Nuckelavee had proven exactly why that mattered. If Tsutsumi hadn't forced them to refine their teamwork from the beginning, that battle would have been far more dangerous.
Within their team, everyone had a defined role.
Tsutsumi was the leader, and more importantly, he was an all-rounder. He could shift into any position needed during a fight, adapting instantly to support the rest of the team.
Nora naturally served as their tank and frontline disruptor. She charged into battle headfirst, drawing attention, breaking enemy formations, and creating chaos for the rest of the team to exploit.
Ren acted as their assassin. Whether at close range or from a distance, he excelled at hit-and-run tactics, targeting weak points before slipping away again before the enemy could react.
Pyrrha herself filled a flexible role depending on the situation. Sometimes she supported from afar with precise ranged attacks, other times she fought alongside Nora at the front, and occasionally she operated as a defensive anchor protecting the backline.
Their team formation was incredibly well balanced. And that wasn't even counting Tsutsumi's full ability within the equation.
...
Over the next few days, Tsutsumi returned to the routine he was far more familiar with, training.
Team TNPR already had good individual strength, and their teamwork was solid enough when he was present to direct them. The problem appeared the moment he wasn't there to guide them. Without someone coordinating their movements, they had a bad habit of drifting out of formation and reacting to situations independently.
In short, the moment he wasn't giving orders during a fight, they started running around like headless chickens.
So the focus of their training sessions wasn't increasing their raw power, but improving their self-coordination. Tsutsumi deliberately stepped back during sparring exercises, forcing them to adapt and reorganize on their own without waiting for his instructions.
Ren had begun taking a more active role in reading the battlefield. Nora, after some complaints, was learning to restrain her instinct to charge the moment she saw an enemy. Pyrrha moved between the two of them, quietly reinforcing weak points in their formation.
During this time, however, something else had happened within the academy.
Team RWBY had run into a problem.
Apparently, Weiss and Blake had gotten into a heated argument, and in the middle of it Blake had accidentally revealed that she used to be a member of the White Fang. After that, things escalated quickly, and Blake disappeared before anyone could properly talk things through.
Now Ruby, along with Yang and Weiss, had come to Team TNPR's dorm room asking for help.
She stood there in the middle of the room, cloak draped behind her, nervously explaining everything while trying her best to stay optimistic.
After she finished summarizing the situation, Tsutsumi leaned back slightly in his chair.
"I seem to have missed the part where that is my problem," he said in a bored tone.
The entire room turned toward him immediately.
Ren and Nora didn't look surprised in the slightest. Yang rolled her eyes as if she had been expecting that exact response. Weiss's eyelid twitched sharply, while Ruby looked like she was on the verge of bursting into tears.
"Don't mind him, we'll help you," Pyrrha quickly said, stepping in before the situation deteriorated further. Her reassuring smile was directed at Ruby as she continued, "Team TNPR will help you search for Blake."
"Did you know?" Weiss suddenly asked, her gaze shifting sharply toward Tsutsumi.
He tilted his head slightly. "Know about what?"
"Perhaps I need to make myself clear here," she said, her voice tightening. "Did you know she was a Faunus? Did you know she belonged to the White Fang?"
The tension in the room rose instantly.
"Weiss! Now is not the time!" Ruby shouted, clearly seeing where this conversation was heading.
Tsutsumi, however, didn't react emotionally at all. Instead, he calmly pulled a card from his pocket.
Form Ride: Blake Belladonna!
In the next instant, his body shifted before everyone's eyes.
Black hair framed his face, and a pair of cat ears appeared openly on top of his head. The transformation was flawless, perfectly replicating Blake's appearance, except he made no effort to hide the ears.
"Honestly," he said indifferently, "I'm more surprised it took her letting it slip for you three to realize she wasn't exactly human."
He reached into his pocket and produced a black ribbon bow, casually placing it on top of his head where it concealed the cat ears.
Then his ears twitched. The bow twitched with them.
"I mean, she didn't make it obvious," he continued with a small shrug, "but she didn't exactly make it hard either."
He raised one finger.
"First, she loves fish, and I mean really loves fish. We all eat together in the cafeteria, so that shouldn't be new information."
He lifted a second finger.
"Second, her bow twitched unnaturally. Wind and normal movement don't make a ribbon twitch like that. Something underneath was clearly moving."
To demonstrate, his cat ears flicked again, causing the bow to twitch in sync.
Then he raised a third finger.
"Third, she is extremely sensitive whenever the White Fang comes up. She's defended them more than once, saying they were misguided rather than purely terrorists. People don't openly defend an organization like that unless they have some connection to it, or were once part of it themselves."
He lowered his hand and glanced across the room.
"You three are her teammates. How did you miss all of those clues?"
The tension that had filled the room a moment earlier slowly drained away, replaced by something heavier.
Ruby and Yang both looked down, their expressions visibly shaken. They had believed their team was solid, that their trust in each other was strong.
But the truth was uncomfortable.
They had lived and trained together for almost half a semester, yet they barely knew anything about one of their own teammates.
Weiss felt the same sting, but her usual tsundere personality immediately redirected that uncomfortable feeling into irritation.
"Well, you could have at least told us," she snapped.
"I don't snitch on other people's secrets," Tsutsumi replied without hesitation.
He leaned back slightly again, his expression calm.
"Besides, you're misunderstanding something about my ability."
His fingers tapped lightly against the side of his head.
"My power allows me to take on the form and appearance of others. When I do that, I gain their abilities, combat experience, equipment, and the knowledge needed to use those abilities properly."
He paused briefly before finishing.
"Not their memories."
"Some knowledge I get comes from the experiences that shaped those abilities, or fragments tied to the core identity of the form I'm using," he explained. "But that's not the same as living their life."
He gave a small shrug.
"You can think of it like plugging a USB drive full of data into a computer. The computer can access the data and use it, and it might know when that data was created."
His gaze moved across the room again. "But it won't know the effort it took for that data to exist in the first place."
"I knew she left the White Fang due to the shift in the idea that the group once carried. I knew that she really wanted peace and mutual understanding between humans and faunus." He paused and slowly rose from his seat, the chair scraping faintly against the floor as he stood. "And I also knew that she was both helpless and afraid if her secret was found out, and that you three might reject her."
"But we would never!" Ruby said immediately, her silver eyes fixed firmly on the figure of 'Blake' standing before her, the conviction in her voice coming out without hesitation.
"That's what you said, but the human heart is not as simple as you think." His tone remained calm, though there was a quiet weight behind the words. "People can say one thing on the surface while thinking something completely different inside their hearts."
His gaze slowly shifted to Weiss. "You should know this better than many in this room, Weiss."
Weiss's lips parted as if she was about to respond, but she hesitated, and after a brief moment her mouth slowly closed again as the meaning behind his words settled in.
As a Schnee, of course she understood exactly what he meant.
In her world, polished smiles and polite words were often nothing more than tools. Many people could greet you warmly while already planning how to benefit from you later. Compliments could hide contempt, and courtesy could hide calculation. The surface and the truth beneath it were often two completely different things.
Her father was the clearest example of that.
When he first met her mother, he had been nothing like the man Weiss knew now. He had been charming, attentive, and polite, the kind of man who seemed dependable and respectable in every possible way. Her mother had spoken about those days before with a distant softness in her voice, remembering the man she believed she had married.
But once he secured his position as the head of the Schnee family, everything changed.
The mask came off.
The warmth disappeared from his expression, replaced by cold efficiency and relentless ambition. The gentle man her mother once described no longer existed, leaving behind someone they could barely recognize as the same person. The atmosphere in their home changed slowly but steadily as well.
Weiss had watched as her once lively and welcoming home gradually turned into a place that felt distant and suffocating. A mansion that no longer felt like a home at all.
"So even if she wanted to fully trust you guys, she ultimately couldn't," he continued, his form shifting back to normal as he spoke. "Not completely."
His gaze moved across the group again, resting on each of team RWBY members for a brief moment before he spoke once more.
"So my suggestion is simple. Accept her for who she is first before deciding anything else."
"After all, humans and faunus, no matter the slight differences in appearance, are still just living beings with a soul. They think, they feel, they fear, they laugh, they fight, and they hope just like anyone else."
He paused briefly before finishing, his voice steady.
"Not recognizing something that basic is just pure stupidity."