Chương 91: 91
"Yeah, no." Jaune denied as he fit the last of the circuitry together. "I'm not leaving."
"Son, please the rest of your siblings-."
"Dad, I can't leave. I'm the ONLY person that can reboot the MDN right now if it goes down a second time. The old system got bricked more or less. I HAD to replace it entirely, and I've even got 9S and 2B here to act as auxiliary turret controls to give us an edge. I've seen the camera feed, it's not as bad as it could be, but the thing heading the charge is HUGE and it also flies."
He plugged the last wire in as 9S gave a mechanical bark, giving confirmation that his AI Core had proper access to his systems.
Yeah. He was going to get those backup blueprints from 9S's memory banks later for details on their original specs plus their preferred tools, like that Flight Unit. He hadn't wanted to bring blueprints of weapons of war to life, but he should have just bit the bullet earlier. Accepted that he'd need it. He just… hadn't wanted to be responsible for escalating tools of warfare.
He'd been selfish. Too selfish.
He wasn't prepared at all. He'd just been slacking off and too focused on having fun. He'd maybe deserved the respite, sure, but he'd be a grown ass adult soon. He should have been getting ready.
Yeah, he'd do more. He had to. After this, he'd expand the hideout he'd made in the mountains behind Domremy. Surface scans had suggested plenty of iron veins and other minerals, as a result of the dead volcanoes. Dig deep into the crust and-
"Then… son. Promise me that if you're in danger, you'll leave. I don't want you staying and doing anything stupid like fighting to the last man." His dad placed his hands (they were heavy) on Jaune's shoulders, bending his knees to meet Jaune eye to eye. "No matter what. You can't die here."
"Of course." Jaune nodded with a promise. "I'm planning on helping, not being suicidal. Dad, I've got it under control."
2B barked from her mass of connected wires, as if assuring his dad that she'd help keep him safe.
Julius laughed, a bit of a complicated mix between satisfaction and helplessness, nodding as he did so.
"Alright, alright. Don't let your old man keep you up then. I'm going to go ready on the walls with your mother. All your sisters are posted up in the shelters, so if the worst happens, meet up with them and take them to safety."
"It won't come to that." Jaune shook his head. "I won't let it."
"Don't do anything drastic."
"I… I can't promise that. But I'll do my best?"
"...This is the best I'm going to get from ya, isn't it?"
"Pretty much. Sorry dad."
He felt his father's warm hand ruffle his hair, his ears folding under his rough and calloused palms.
"Alright. I'll leave you to it. Your older girlfriend's team's going to be protecting you, right?"
"D-dad! It's not, y'know-"
"Ha ha ha!" His dad ruffled his head a bit harder, a soft smile on his face. "Look at you. Already breaking hearts, my little man. I didn't get half your attention when I was your age, goodness. I worried all the time, with you being raised around so many girls, but somehow that worked out to help you, eh?"
It was weird having a grown adult almost twice her age (actually how old was Jaune's dad anyways?) bow to Trivia, asking her to help keep him safe.
Like, she was going to do it in the first place without ever having been asked, but it felt itchy when he thanked her like that. And somehow embarrassing. Kinda made her a bit jealous too. Even if she refused to ever admit it.
Still, she used her Semblance to flash a confident grin, hiding her blushing, as she tapped her right fist to her upper left pectoral. No better way of getting the Arc family's good side, right?
It was why she was arguing back at Jaune now.
"We can't just ignore how much you and Cinder bring to the table! Plus I'll be fine down here. Rakan and Xayah will be here, but you can literally call a thunderstorm down on waves of Grimm. Cinder too, probably."
"Jaune, don't be a brat." Cinder was on Trivia's side, at least. "Not only is it an insane idea, I… I have no experience at this Maiden stuff. Amber didn't… she didn't even tell me about any of this. She didn't trust me with-"
"Hold up, no." Jaune fired back quickly, "Cinder, keeping that magic existed making sure it stayed a secret was her job. It's too late to slam the lid back on this secret with the rest of Team CRXN, but it wasn't that she didn't trust you. The power of a Maiden goes to the last female of a certain age group they think of. And it certainly didn't go to her killer, wherever they are on Sanus. Cinder, Amber's last thought was of you despite her killer."
A spark of golden amber flames fluttered at Cinder's eyes before fading into wisps.
Trivia also gave Cinder a light slap on the back.
It's true. Her Scroll typed out. I got mine because someone thought they'd spite Jaune, bring me into something I didn't need to be involved in. Jaune's right. He's always right. He STILL needs to rethink this a bit more though.
"No, but really. It's really sweet and I appreciate it, but having two Maidens, or any Maidens, guarding me instead of the Capital against a bunch of Grimm is illogical. I can literally have some disguises that hide you all and let you two help with the city defenses. Cinder, you can FLY now-"
"Wait, what? That's awesome." Xayah blurted, getting a laugh from her boyfriend. "How the hell do I sign up for this stuff again?"
"The point is-"
Trivia poked at Jaune's stomach through his ridiculous outfit, feeling the ridge between his bodysuit and its cute little abdominal cutout underneath the glimmering gold dress shirt.
Why does it even have that? Neo laughed, egging Trivia to wiggle her finger to tickle Jaune, It's kinda a bit hot NOW, but he's had that thing since… actually how has he not outgr… does it stretch? No it's probably magic, right? Yeah.
"The point is! It's like leaving two powerful warriors in a jail cell when the enemy is at our gates! That's crazy!"
Trivia glared at Jaune again, hands on her hips.
"Well we can't send off Cinder alone, she has no experience with her new powers. I know you said to me that it was relatively instinctive to you, Neo, but you still needed training to begin doing things comfortably, right? Well why not just focus on letting loose full power for now and worry about more fine control later? Double it up as a crash course?"
"Not that I'm taking little Jaune's side over my teammates, but… he's kind of got a point." Rakan shrugged, "Like, I don't exactly get it, but Princess has always been like crazy strong, but that was with knowing she'd been holdin' back, right? Honestly the thought of her going all out's kinda scary, but we need that kind of shit right now, don't we?"
Trivia tried to not glare, since she acknowledged her teammate had a point, but the Faunus man held his hands up anyways.
"I'm just saying, Jaune's right about the broad strokes, but is still just a little moron when it comes to a woman's heart."
"I-I'm trying!" Jaune almost looked a little teary. Shit.
That kind of made her wanna bully him a little. Just a little.
Fuck that, Neo was being absolutely no help, I kinda want to seem him fully bawling, but like, a smiling crying. What could we do for-
NOT THE POINT.
"Can we please get back on topic?"
Jaune's face was starting to turn red, suddenly looking away from Trivia as she felt herself grin, even if she was pinkening slightly as well, wetting her lips with a flicker of her tongue.
"Look, I'll even pull you to me the moment anything weird happens, ok?" Jaune turned his face back towards her with his dark blue eyes, his face still red. "No matter what, I'll pull you to my side!"
Geh! Oh, no he's made eye contact! Neo began rolling about, He's not even realizing AHHH!
Trivia saw Rakan quickly and quietly slip his hand over Xayah's mouth before she could whistle, getting her to bite his hand in retaliation.
"Please. For me?"
THE LITTLE CHEATING AHHHH!
Cinder felt her chest tighten as the bodysuit compressed around her form, feeling like there was a layer of water over her skin somehow.
Jaune called it a successful experiment, confident it'd work in the field. Said even that his little butler girl (why was she a butler?) had a prototype that they'd tested out. Oddly he was proud of it, for once.
That was rare.
Between layers of some sort of flexible cloth armor that now compressed over her body and normal clothes was what he called modified recoil gel. It was cool to the touch, though already beginning to warm up to her body temperature. Apparently it hardened when impacted, like some weird liquid armor, alongside redistributing shock and acting as insulation against electricity.
A hand slapped against her butt, only for a brief note of pain following as somehow she felt her new outfit harden upon the impact, distributing the shock across the whole of her back somehow.
"Ow! Ok. That hardening armor of yours works, Jaune." Xayah shook her hand like a moron, "I was just gonna make a joke about how Team Mom's ass looks hot in that thing-"
"I don't know how you ever use the words 'Mom's ass looks hot' ever." Jaune interrupted Team CRXN's biggest idiot. "Stop it."
"What, not into MILFs? Most boys your age-"
"Most boys my age aren't trying to stop a Grimm Incursion." Jaune snorted, his cheeks pinkening as he handed dome-like helmets to both her and Half-Pint, "Or getting two magical girls geared in scientific armor beyond what even Atlas can produce at the moment."
Rakan began coughing heavily.
"Magical girls! Oh gods, Jaune!"
"I mean, it's kind of an accurate description."
"Can we not have this whatever it is before we go off to war against the Grimm?" Cinder sighed, wondering where her life went wrong. What the fuck was a magical girl anyways? "How do I even use this thing?"
"Oh yeah." Jaune hopped up, his feet hovering in the air (what the hell, Jaune?) as he slipped the helmet over her head, her hair already having been pulled into a tight bun. "And it clicks into the suit here and… there. Just give it a sec to boot up."
It clicked into the top of the collar that rose to her chin with a short hiss of air, a faint hum of some sort of ventilation beginning to drone ever faintly until it reduced to a silence.
He dropped to the ground, turning to help Neo with her's, being forced to give the Half-Pint 'motivation kisses' on her cheeks. Gods, Neo could be so embarrassing. She was more of a child than Jaune had been when they'd first met.
Ok maybe that wasn't fair. Jaune could always be weirdly mature, even as a kid.
Her eyes narrowed as some strange bit of light began to shine over her face in waves.
Then without fanfare, no logo, no flashy bit of boot up sequence, Cinder could suddenly see some sort of display appear over her eyes. When her gaze wandered to the edge of her vision trying to better see how well the display worked, it even opened up a small window giving her a view from the side of her head and even from behind without turning her head.
Useful, but disorienting. Turning the head just a little bit was certainly more useful, but seeing angles that couldn't be possible could still be handy.
"Alright, lemme hook you both up to my systems." Jaune pulled his Scroll from his pocket, tapping away as three little wavelength symbols with different radio frequencies popped in the corner of her vision. "Alright, instead of numbers making things complicated, the first one lets you communicate to Trivia, though her's has an AI generated voice that'll pick up on her brainwaves, uh, the details of that isn't important. While she has that helmet on, Trivia can talk."
"Is it like that collar from two years ago with all the wires? Oh, it is." A pleasant girl's voice called out, though somewhat familiar sounding. "This is convenient."
"Huh. Weirdly sounds familiar." Xayah's eyes narrowed before shrugging. "Nice to not have to squint and crouch to read your Scroll though, Princess."
"Bitch, I can just zap you. Don't think I won't." The voice was still the same, but the cadence and tone changed in an obvious way.
Less elegant and more blunt, casual, though more than decidedly still feminine.
Everyone paused as they turned to Neo. Even Jaune looked a little surprised.
"Oh. Wait, this is weird. Very odd."
"You know what? I don't even want to know." Cinder sighed, feeling her temples tense. "What are the other two frequencies?"
"Passing a message to the General that we're linking two Maidens to his personal comm line. That's number two. The third is for me. I'm going to be the man in the chair for a bit, but I'll also be calling for a bit of back up."
Jaune grinned proudly again, which was weird. Not bad, but weird.
"Y'all want to see a bit more magic?"
Pyrrha.
Her warmth echoed, gentle against his fraying senses. Keeping him together. Embarrassingly protecting him, even now, though he felt it should be his duty.
She didn't care, just pulsing with warmth, filled with mana from years of accumulation.
They had saved this for Beacon. It should have been for Beacon.
But somehow a tragedy had struck in an earlier Vytal Festival.
Was there even a point for him lingering anymore? To endure like this?
No.
No, he had to see it for himself. With his own eyes, see that the Fall of Beacon never happened.
That they'd been able to change the flow of history fully and completely.
That was why he didn't stop Jaune from using the Card earlier.
They had spares, but doing so would expend the years of accumulation within him. That wasn't great, no it was tragic, but they had to make sure that the fall of Remnant didn't occur even earlier than the original timeline. To make sure of it.
"Consume the Flame of Hope!
By the power of this Command Seal, Let silver and steel be the essence!
Let the shattered moon be our foundation! An oath shall be sworn here!
This I swear: I shall attain all the virtues of Heaven!
I shall have dominion of all the evils of Hell!
There is no Grail, no glory. Just the Remnants of this broken Realm!
From the Seventh Heaven! Attended by Regret!
From the salt of the earth and darkness of lost history!
I… need your help, brother Juniper.
ANSWER MY CALL! SERVANT SABER!"
Like he'd been reborn again. As if all the lethargy had been stripped away. All the clouds of fog in his mind had dissipated in a cool gust and gale.
Air filled his lungs.
"Ah." He gasped, feeling whole again. Pyrrha buzzed with power inside, ready to give her everything to him once more. "I feel awake."
Jaune grinned at him, wrapping his arms around his armored midriff with a tight hug.
"Morning, sleepyhead."
"Little brother, it's almost sunset." Juniper laughed, ruffling Jaune's hair as the Faunus boy laughed along.
"Hot." Xayah whistled, her hand snaking to grab her boyfriend's ass. "Mine's better."
Juniper rolled his eyes as Pyrrha let out a sensation of laughter within, almost audible to his ears with the excess mana they had stored away.
"Aww, thanks love." Rakan slapped Xayah's ass with a chuckle, "Yours is almost as good."
"Oi!"
Neapolitan danced around the two of them, clearly still confused, despite the helmet hiding her features.
"Holy shit. How does it all work? Nice to meet you for once, Juniper. Yes, th… thank you. For always looking out for Jaune for us."
There was no thank you, but he weirdly felt their care for Jaune leak from the simulated voices.
Cinder's form, on the other hand, was just standing ramrod straight.
"This sh-shouldn't surprise me." The voice was mostly calm, though it did stutter for some reason. "N-nice to meet you."
Cinder and Neo were his allies. What a world.
"Yes." Juniper nodded, smiling. Man wouldn't Team RWBY have been so stupefied? "Nice to fight on the same side, too."
That was something he weirdly meant genuinely. Even in his timeline Cinder and Neo were strong. Possibly stronger than they were in his own time with proper training and education.
Having them fighting against Salem and her forces, despite her immortality, was oddly reassuring.
"I can't fly like you two, but we'll all be helping Jaune out there." He held out his hand to shake, Neo immediately taking it and giving it a firm waggle. "Let's get along."
Cinder took his hand (was she trembling?) as she nodded from behind her mirrored helmet.
"L-let's."
Xayah leaned over to nudge Cinder in the ribs, only for the girl to smack her in the side.
"Last touch." Jaune leaned to his Scroll, inputting some keystrokes, "There."
Juniper watched as Cinder's bodysuit took on cherry red and white colors over the still mostly black bodysuit, while Neo's took on pink and white.
"Just for that Huntress splash of color." Jaune grinned, "It shouldn't be super obvious, since they're not your exact shades. Simple colors are pretty common, even for Huntresses."
Juniper rolled his eyes as he rubbed Jaune's head one last time, being handed an earpiece for coms. Tuned to all three at the same time, so there might be some audio overlap, but he didn't have any fancy helmet to do the work for him.
"Oh! And just in case!"
Jaune handed the three of them a Banked Crit coin each.
"Flip that if you really need to land a hit. I know it sounds-"
"Jaune. We trust you."
Jaune grinned, his white teeth flashing.
"He he. Got it. Good luck out there. I'll be on the comm if you need me and I'll send anything you might need over."
"Got it, little brother." Juniper smiled, before turning to the two girls and raising their morale with Pyrrha's Charisma Skill. "Let's go!"
The three of them dashed out of the room, Juniper leading the charge by far, Neo having to grab Cinder's hand to fly along while giving the girl a crash course, letting her fly through the hallways shakily.
"This is General Ironwood." The earpiece held firm despite his powerful movements, "Was Jaune telling the truth? Are you truly descended once more, Juniper Arc?"
That filled Juniper with an odd sensation, a lost memory. Like he was back in Atlas all those years ago, when he was still alive. Those days when he'd first gained his Huntsman license, so far ahead of the point when he'd first arrived at Beacon, lacking even Aura.
Before he'd lost his gods damned mind.
"Yes I am." He replied as they exited the bunker, the crackling of energy and hard light curling in his armored 'left arm'. "I'm going to make as large of a shield as I can. There's no way that I can defend the whole of the Mountain, but it'll let us tighten our defenses."
"You don't mind if we take data of that technique of yours, do you?"
Juniper chuckled, seeing the cloud of flying Grimm in the distance.
"If you can do it, sure. It's pretty much the same as Atlas's already existing Hard Light shields, just bigger."
It really was, just a derivative that Dr. Polendina had added to his shield. But if Juniper was being honest, it merely looked cool and had little purpose outside of giving a little more cover. The Gravity Dust effect had been monumentally more useful.
Juniper took a deep breath, feeling the overwhelming flow of mana in his Saint Graph begin to burst finally out of his body, almost threatening to tear him at the seams.
"By the sacrifice of my left arm, my shoulder protect thee! GRATIA SALUTARIS!"
Some strange force (obviously magic, and yet…) seemed to almost duplicate the number of fragments of his shield arm, the fragments of white shield flying away to the Northern side of the Singing Mountain of Mistral. His muscles tensed, feeling the veins in his neck pull to the surface as he attempted to cover as great of an area as possible feeling as if mana was erupting even from his eyes.
This wasn't Menagerie, where Kuo Kuana had been sheltered by his Noble Phantasm, but had been small considering the settlement hadn't grown much then. But Mistral had been settled for far longer, had been a bastion of mankind for far longer, to host a quarter of the world's population.
The size scale was significantly different, and it was necessary to have his defensive Noble Phantasm to maintain the same level of strength of the wall he'd made back on Menagerie.
Juniper's senses were strained, not even hearing himself roar as his eyes widened, his vision going white before color returning to his sight.
Somehow against his limits, he could see a half dome, rising even above the peaks of the roofs of Haven Academy, the glowing white tidal wave frozen in time that was his Gratia Salutaris.
Pyrrha's warmth bolstered him as his knees weakened, preventing him from collapsing fully as the mana in his body had flowed out him like a tsunami, requiring him to use his right arm to press above the knee. Either Cinder or Neo held him by the elbow, additionally helping keep him standing.
It was Cinder.
He nodded, grunted in thanks as he stood back up, Crocea Mors appearing in his grip. His fingers tensed, shamefully remembering when his Cinder had shattered that blade, even though he knew she was different from the enemy in his timeline.
Knowing she was the Fall Maiden once more filled him with a shameful sense of dread.
Pyrrha was merely thankful. Though Cinder Fall had been the one to kill her, she was better than him. More willing to let go. That filled him with enough shame that he couldn't help but to smile in embarrassment, though that was aimed at himself.
"Thank you, Cinder."
"O-oh of course, uh. N-no problem." Cinder waved her hands, her black gloved fingers shaking rapidly. "That was… amazing."
"You're a Maiden. You're be plenty great yourself."
He'd already seen it, after all. The previous Cinder had been terrible, yes, but great.
Enough to push back Team JNR and RWBY time and time again, only having lost to a Spring Maiden Raven, though the details of that fight was still lost to time, never to be known.
Cinder silently stood, her hands held behind her back. Being unable to see her face was making it hard to determine her mood.
It was necessary to hide her appearance, but it really did make reading her mood and voice rather difficult, especially with the helmet warping her voice.
Neo on the other hand, seemed to have no such issues, having lived with the young woman for almost four years now, slapping her back, her artificial voice based off of Jaune's Hornet persona cackling mirthfully.
"Shut up, Neo! Gods, you having a voice is so much worse, somehow!"
"Oh? That's quite cruel of you, Team Mom. Though you're super obviously rather smi-"
"Neo!"
His fingers tapped against the dashboard.
Mistral's leadership perishing hadn't been intended, unfortunately leaving stronger defenses as the stronger hand of the General had taken charge against the weak willed Governor of Mistral. It had muddled his experiment.
But he could still recover from these unexpected fumblings by a useless tool.
He'd even witnessed one of the magus boy's trump cards, after all.
"...that strange Huntsman from those recordings of Menagerie, but his magical relic has grown even stronger. Or perhaps he himself has instead? Feh. I cannot comprehend magic. So barbarically nonsensical and whimsical."
His fingers wove a web of script, originating from the warm pulsing stone in his hand, filled with the Queen's magic. It curled around the gemstone, again and again, wrapping in spherical layers. Though the script was magical in nature, manipulated by his Semblance, the lettering was modern, mechanical, clean.
It was but code. Pure and perfect. The only issue was that he had to weave it all perfectly in a single sitting, with no room for error, all while having had to create his own language. Luckily he'd had years to do so, though he still sought true mastery.
His Semblance Chronicle was so frustratingly exacting, though perhaps that was true of himself as well. Arthur did hold himself and others to a rather high standard, after all.
At least it was useful.
Still this was why he hadn't originally cared to discover his Semblance. They were annoying things, rarely a great enough boon to be worth the effort of pulling his genius away from more important acts. For a while the self-defense capability that Aura brought as a basis had been enough for his needs, but that had changed after his one true failure.
But now he'd not leave any usable tools for granted. His pride had been damaged, but it had been a… valuable lesson. An enlightenment.
His eyes gazed up to the curved wall of Hard Light.
"But despite it clearly having the weight of mana, it appears… modern. Its aesthetic is disgustingly Atlasean in feel, somehow. Stranger and stranger. The boy Arc has something to do with this. I can feel it."
His gloved hand reached to the side, flipping open a canvas satchel hanging off the wall in the cockpit, digging into it for a sweetened pretzel wrapped in wax paper.
"Expected a mere five minutes to impact by Grimm, but according to the extrapolated data from eight years ago, this man, nay Spirit, could only manifest for a total expected period of fifty two minutes. Perhaps he can be manifested for an hour, as such fixtures of time seem more to the limited methodology of what I've observed of magic." Arthur mused with a grin, "But this time I am here to observe and gather data."
Hovering high above even Haven, the hull of his Osprey nearly grazed against the half-dome of Hard-Light of the one armed spirit whose very body was formed of mana. The high power cameras of his ship gazed down on Mistral, like a many eyed god.
"Let me observe it. What other tricks you have, boy. And I will find every method of dragging you down to the dirt of the earth. It's more fun this way, isn't it? I've even found a stopgap to equalize my lack of magic, just to level the board. I will prove myself your better."
Mistral's leadership perishing hadn't been intended, as their survival after the attempted 'assassination' (it was doomed to fail, he was sure) of Jaune Arc should have caused an extended political fiasco that should have caught the Kingdom unawares.
Unfortunately the mishap ended up leaving stronger defenses as the stronger strategic hand of the General had taken charge against the weak willed Governor of Mistral. It had muddled his experiment.
But he could still recover from this unexpected meddling of a useless tool.
After all… information was power.
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