Hey guys Rosesaiyan2 here. I hope you guys enjoyed the last chapter of this rewrite. For those of you checking this out who are from Fanfiction.net there will be some.things I will change from original story but it will mostly stay the same.
As you can tell already from the first chapter, Nova and Ruby's relationship will be more developed and fleshed out. I'll do my best not to rush it this time. Also you can see I kept Nova and Turuk's birth parents alive this time, I figured that'd be a nice change of pace. Plus they'd obviously want to meet Ruby once Nova and Ruby become romantically involved with each other, Sala especially would want to meet Ruby lol. Anyways, this was just a short note before the beginning of the chapter. Anyways, enjoy this next part!
CHAPTER THREE: New Friends — and Teams
Part I — The Morning Before
Location: Beacon Academy | Early Morning
The docks smelled of ozone, sea salt, and heavy engine exhaust—an aromatic cocktail that Ruby Rose had officially designated as the sensory signature of brand-new beginnings.
She stood near the edge of the elevated metal platform with her hands clasped behind her back, her red hood drawn down, letting the crisp morning breeze play havoc with her dark hair. She was trying very hard to pin down her exact emotional state. The honest truth hovered somewhere between violently terrified and completely unable to stand still, which meant she had settled on a compromise: standing perfectly rigid on the outside while vibrating at a molecular level on the inside.
The transport Bullhead slated to ferry the incoming first-years to Beacon was still a few minutes out. She could spot its sleek silhouette against the pale, bruised colors of the dawn sky, growing fractionally larger with every passing second.
"Ohhh, I am so excited!"
Yang materialized right beside her with her usual supernatural talent for sneaking up on people—suddenly, completely, and occupying far more atmospheric presence than her physical size had any right to command. Her radiant golden hair caught the early sunlight like she owned it. She threw a heavy arm around Ruby's shoulders and squeezed.
"My baby sister, joining me at the academy! You are going to be the absolute talk of Beacon, I guarantee it."
Ruby emitted a strained noise that fell well short of agreement.
"That's actually the part I'm kind of stressing over," she muttered, staring at the deck plating.
Yang blinked, dropping her arm. "What do you mean, stressing? You skipped two whole years, Rubes! That's legendary."
"That's exactly the problem," Ruby shifted her weight uncomfortably. "I don't want people treating me like some sort of... freakish anomaly. I don't want to walk into the courtyard and find out everyone has already formed an opinion about me before I've even done a single thing worth having an opinion about." She let out a heavy sigh. "I just want to be a normal girl with normal knees."
Yang stared down at her sister for a long, blank moment.
"Normal knees," she repeated flatly.
"Metaphorically!"
"Rubes, I love you with all my heart, but that has got to be the strangest—"
"Look, the ship's here," Ruby interrupted, pointing eagerly.
The cabin of the Bullhead was packed tight with the specific brand of suffocating tension that arises when dozens of teenagers are either vibrating with nervous anticipation or working overtime to pretend they aren't. Ruby managed to snag a window seat near the middle, pulling her knees up to her chest as the docks smoothly dropped away beneath them, swallowed by the rising altitude.
She had just reached for her headphones when a familiar flash of color caught her eye two rows ahead.
Black armor plating trimmed in green. Blue and white combat gear. Two sets of shoulders she hadn't laid eyes on since that chaotic night in Vale four months ago.
A wide, genuine smile broke across her face before her brain could veto it.
"Nova? Turuk?"
Both brothers turned in unison. Recognition flared instantly in their dark eyes—Nova's mouth curving into the subtle, familiar smirk that she had long since catalogued as his version of a grin, while Turuk offered a sharp, acknowledging nod.
"Ruby," Nova greeted, pivoting properly in his seat. "It's been a while. Four months, almost to the day."
"How have you been holding up?" Turuk asked.
"Good! Really good. Just... super busy," she babbled, kneeling on her seat and leaning over the back to look at them. "I wasn't entirely surprised to see you two, since Professor Ozpin invited all three of us that same night—but seeing you here now is still kind of surreal, if that makes sense?"
"It makes sense," Nova said smoothly.
"Who are these guys?"
Yang materialized again with her signature teleporting abruptness, leaning heavily over the back of Ruby's seat with her chin practically resting on her sister's shoulder. She scrutinized the two boys with the sharp, calculating gaze of an older sibling hunting for potential threats.
Ruby jumped slightly. "Oh! Yang, these are Nova and Turuk—we met in Vale a few months ago, remember? I told you all about them! The whole Dust-shop incident?"
"Casually," Yang corrected with a grin, extending a hand over the gap between seats. "Yang Xiao Long. Ruby's much cooler older sister."
"One year older," Ruby piped up defensively.
"Significantly cooler."
Nova reached out and shook the offered hand with the calm, unshakable composure of a warrior who took life as it came. "Nova Belladonna."
"Turuk," the younger brother added briefly.
Yang settled back into her own seat, crossing her arms as she completed a lightning-fast mental assessment. In the span of a ten-second handshake, she had quietly catalogued a half-dozen details she was definitely going to interrogate Ruby about later.
She was just about to pitch a follow-up question when Ruby let out a sudden, high-pitched gasp of pure horror.
"Yang. Your shoe."
Yang glanced down.
The ensuing thirty seconds instantly secured a spot among the most violently chaotic moments of the morning.
Near the front of the cabin, a pale, seasick blonde boy had discovered the open side door and was currently using it for a variety of digestive purposes the aircraft's engineers had almost certainly never intended. Turuk watched him for a long, quiet moment with the detached, clinical expression of a warrior who found human misery mildly fascinating rather than particularly entertaining.
That's rough, he thought. Some people just aren't built to handle altitude changes.
He turned his gaze away from the spectacle and looked out the side window, watching Beacon Academy slowly loom into view across the horizon—soaring spires of white and pale grey stone rising majestically from the sheer cliff faces above Vale, catching the brilliant morning light with the unhurried, quiet confidence of a stronghold that had stood long enough to stop needing to prove its power.
Up beside him, Ruby had her nose pressed flat against the cold glass.
"Yang," she breathed, her voice filled with absolute wonder. "Yang, look."
Yang, who had finally finished scrubbing down her shoe and was currently working hard to recover her lost dignity, looked out the pane.
"Yeah," Yang murmured, dropping the teasing act for a moment as a genuine, soft smile crossed her face. "There it is."
Part II — Arrival
They spilled off the transport Bullhead into the exact brand of organized chaos that occurs when a hundred teenagers, each convinced they are uniquely exceptional, land somewhere designed to systematically test that belief.
Ruby lasted roughly forty-five seconds before the weapons distracted her.
It wasn't strictly her fault—or perhaps it was entirely her fault, depending on your view of personal restraint versus terminal curiosity. The first marvel she spotted was a Dust-infused warhammer with a clever collapsible haft. Then a pair of lethal tonfas rigged with explosive propulsion. Then something that looked like a cross between a combat shield and a howitzer, which she regarded as a genuine engineering triumph.
"Yang, look at that one—and look at that one, and—oh, is that a chain scythe? Yang, it's a chain scythe—"
Nova watched her bounce on her heels with the clinical fascination of a biologist studying a rare specimen.
Is she actually like this about every weapon she sees? he thought. Yes. Apparently, yes.
He mentally filed the data under Ruby Rose: highly enthusiastic, and kept walking.
The collision happened because she had stopped looking at the ground approximately thirty seconds before it became a structural hazard.
The silver-haired girl she plowed straight into dropped her polished metal case. The latches sprang open, and its contents—dozens of vibrantly colored Dust vials, judging by the prismatic scatter across the sunlit cobblestones—shattered across a generous radius of the courtyard.
"Ow—ah, I am so, so sorry!" Ruby scrambled frantically to her knees, reaching out for the nearest rolling vials. "I wasn't watching where I was going, I completely—"
"Hmph." The silver-haired girl brushed off her skirt with the precise, controlled movements of someone trained to display cold displeasure without losing her dignity. Icy blue eyes, sharp as broken glass. A pristine white dress with a rapier resting at her hip. She glared down at Ruby the way one might glare at a sudden, deeply offensive rainstorm. "You ought to be. Do you have any concept of how to conduct yourself in polite society, or is this clumsy performance some sort of—"
"Hey!" Yang's voice snapped upward like a drawn bowstring. "She said she was sorry."
"And I noted that she should be." The girl shifted her frigid gaze to Yang without blinking. "An apology does not magically restore the clean state of my travel attire or my—"
Ruby sneezed.
It was a sudden, violent, catastrophic sneeze. And the Dust vials she was still clutching in her hands reacted the exact way volatile, unstable minerals react when subjected to kinetic force and roughly two hundred milligrams of airborne nasal debris.
The resulting detonation was minor in terms of destructive yield, but absolute in terms of aesthetic impact. It sent a glittering cloud of multi-colored, iridescent sparkling powder across a three-meter radius, coating nearby stonework, two innocent bystanders who were merely minding their own business, and roughly forty percent of the silver-haired girl's previously immaculate white dress.
The silence that blanketed the courtyard was of the profound, heavy variety that follows an event so definitive that any commentary feels utterly redundant.
The girl's expression migrated past mere displeasure into a territory that lacked a civil vocabulary.
She parted her lips to draw a breath.
Nova casually reached out and flicked her right on the center of the forehead.
It was, he freely admitted to himself later, not his most diplomatic intervention. But it was fast, precise, and completely derailed the impending lecture before a single syllable could escape.
The silver-haired girl stumbled back a half-step—less from the physical force, which was negligible, and more from the sheer, incomprehensible shock of the gesture. She stared at him with the look of a person whose entire operating system had just crashed and rebooted in safe mode.
"Ow. How dare you—do you have any idea who I—"
"Yes," Nova said smoothly, holding her gaze with absolute, unblinking calm. "You're Weiss Schnee. Heiress to the Schnee Dust Company." He didn't blink. "The girl apologized to you. More than once. You could afford to accept it with a shred of grace, considering it was an honest accident." He tilted his head slightly. "Step off the pedestal, Miss Schnee. It doesn't suit you."
Weiss's mouth snapped open. Then it snapped shut.
"Schnee?" Ruby gasped from the ground, looking up between them in sudden comprehension.
"The very same enterprise," a dry, precise voice cut in from behind them, smooth as ink pooling on parchment, "historically known for its somewhat flexible approach to labor regulations and ethical supply chains."
The girl who had just joined them had dark hair, striking amber eyes, and that distinct, immovable stillness belonging to people who absorb vastly more than they ever let on. She wore a tailored black-and-white tunic, a pair of crossed sword-pistols holstered at her lower back, and a large black bow tied in her hair that failed to soften her intensely analytical gaze.
She was looking at Weiss Schnee with zero warmth and a mountain of history.
Weiss flushed the brilliant, angry red of someone handed an unflattering mirror at the worst possible second. Her expression cycled through three distinct shades of murderous rage before she chose the only defense that required no actual engagement—she whipped around, straightened her spine to maximum military posture, and marched briskly away.
Yang dropped a reassuring hand onto Ruby's shoulder. "She'll come around, Rubes. Give her fifty years."
Ruby's expression suggested she wasn't buying it, but she appreciated the sentiment.
Nova glanced sideways at the black-haired girl, who was already turning away to slip back into the crowd.
"Weren't you going to say hello?" he asked.
She froze.
Slowly, she turned back around.
The irritation flickering across her face had the distinct texture of someone who had already run the math and realized she'd been cornered by her own family.
"Ugh." It was a groan more resigned than hostile. "What in the world are you two doing here?"
"Same thing you are, sis," Turuk chimed in from behind Nova, carrying the serene, unbothered aura of a boy who loved dropping stones into quiet ponds just to watch the ripples.
Ruby's head snapped up. Yang's eyes narrowed into slits. Both of them whipped around to stare at the brothers, then back at the newcomer.
"Did they just—" Yang started.
"—say sister?" Ruby finished, her jaw slack.
Blake Belladonna's cheeks dusted with a mortified, pink flush—the specific, high-efficiency brand of embarrassment only siblings could manufacture. "You cannot possibly be—" She cut herself off, glaring. "Ozpin actually let both of you into this school?"
"He did," Nova confirmed, a faint, dry amusement dancing in his dark eyes. "Seemed pretty deliberate about it, too. Besides, it's been way too long since we sparred properly." He offered a rare, genuine smile. "Just like old times, right? Big sis."
The deep crimson rush that flooded Blake's face was, under the circumstances, immensely satisfying.
"Nova," she hissed through her teeth, adopting the tone of a person trying very hard to maintain public composure while dying inside. "Please stop talking."
"Mm."
"I am entirely serious."
"I know you are."
Yang and Ruby were still standing side by side, their brains visibly trying to reassemble themselves.
Blake let out a long, heavy sigh—the universal exhale of someone who had grown up with these impossible boys and had long since accepted her lack of peace—and turned sharply toward the main academy gates.
"We are going to be disgracefully late for the initiation ceremony," Blake announced, marching ahead, "which is the sole reason I am choosing to end this conversation right now."
"Fair enough," Turuk agreed pleasantly.
And together, they walked on.
Part III — What the Teachers Knew
Location: Beacon Academy Gymnasium
The gymnasium was vast enough to swallow the massive new student body with room to spare, which also meant it contained the concentrated, volatile energy of a hundred aspiring Huntsmen and Huntresses—thick with restless nerves, bravado, competitive anxiety, and the raw ambition of teenagers who had trained their entire lives for this exact milestone.
The faculty stood rigidly lined up on the elevated platform at the far end of the hall. Professor Goodwitch stood with her riding crop resting against her thigh, wearing the practiced expression of a woman who had already identified seventeen distinct safety hazards in the room and was mentally prioritizing which one would detonate first. Several other instructors were arranged beside her—some familiar to the student body by reputation, others complete unknowns.
Two of them, standing near the far end of the faculty tier, caught Nova's eye and held his attention far longer than accidental curiosity warranted.
Turuk gave his brother a subtle nudge.
"Yeah," Nova murmured quietly, answering the unvoiced question. "I see them."
He didn't know who they were—he was certain of that, as their faces weren't in any database or memory he possessed, and his retention for features was sharp. Yet there was an inexplicable resonance—a frequency, like feeling the subsonic thrum of a heavy engine vibrating through the floorboards before you actually hear it. It carried the vague, nagging certainty of something deeply familiar rather than newly learned.
He mentally filed it away. Pulling at that thread without more data was pointless.
Before he could stare any longer, Ozpin stepped forward to the center of the stage, and the chaotic room instantly subdued itself.
He was not a man who commanded space through physical size or raised volume. He moved with the quiet, unhurried certainty of a person who had never needed a room's permission to control it. He let the silence settle completely before he spoke.
"You came here expecting to be taught," Ozpin began, his voice carrying effortlessly across the hall. "And you will be—though perhaps not entirely in the ways you anticipate." He paused, scanning the sea of young faces with the genuine, analytical curiosity of a scholar studying a rare phenomenon. "What I see when I look at this room is raw energy. Immense energy. Energy that, left without direction, without challenge, and without a purpose worthy of its weight, is nothing more than noise." A brief beat. "We intend to change that. You will work harder here than you ever have before. You will be tested by standards your previous training did not prepare you for. And we will hold you to expectations that will, at times, feel entirely unreasonable." A ghost of a smile flickered across his features—not warmth, exactly, but its structural ancestor. "I have always found that unreasonable standards tend to produce remarkably capable people. That is all."
He stepped back.
Goodwitch stepped forward.
"Your orientation schedules will be active tomorrow morning," she announced, cutting through the air with the sharp crispness of someone who viewed ambiguity as a personal insult. "Tonight—rest."
In a quiet stone corridor just behind the gymnasium, far from the noise of the dispersing students, one of the newer faculty members was decidedly not resting.
Sala stood with her back pressed firmly against the cool masonry, her arms crossed tightly over her chest in the defensive posture of someone attempting to fake absolute calm while processing a hurricane of complicated emotions. Her breathing was steady—she had forced it into rhythm through sheer willpower—but her eyes shone with a fierce intensity that had nothing to do with the hall's lighting.
Rhubar stood right beside her, his large hand moving in slow, reassuring circles between her shoulder blades.
He had seen their faces during the assembly. Both of them—Nova, dark and composed, wearing the exact same quiet stillness Rhubar possessed, only mirrored in a younger man; and Turuk, carrying his mother's architectural lines in the sharp set of his jaw. They had grown. Naturally they had grown—sixteen years was an ocean of time, and Saiyans didn't develop gently. But tracking their progress from afar through the faint, distant pulse of their ki had been one thing. Seeing them walk into a room in the flesh was entirely another.
He had thought he was mentally prepared. He hadn't been.
Sala was actively fighting back tears in a faculty hallway, and doing a remarkably brave job of keeping it together.
"I'm sorry," she whispered, her voice rough at the edges. "I know it's silly—it was just seeing them like that, up close, so much taller than I expected—I couldn't quite—"
"You never have to apologize to me," Rhubar said softly.
She pressed her lips together into a thin line, tilting her head back to stare up at the ceiling until the stinging in her eyes subsided.
A light footstep echoed from the nearby doorway.
"Is everything alright?"
A young man stood in the corridor entrance, holding himself with the careful, hesitant posture of someone who realized they had stumbled onto a private moment and wasn't sure if they were welcome. He possessed an uncanny, unspoken familiarity that Rhubar registered instantly—the athletic build, the stance, a certain sharp line in his facial structure that didn't match anyone specific, yet felt native to a familiar tribe. A thick brown tail swayed slowly behind him with the unhurried ease of a lifelong appendage. Clipped to his tactical armor was a distinct symbol Rhubar hadn't seen before: two bold letters and a spiraling arrow.
"My wife is fine," Rhubar answered evenly. "Just a sudden wave of fatigue. It's passing."
"I see." The young man lingered in the threshold, displaying good manners. "If there's anything I can assist with—"
"You're new to the faculty this term as well," Rhubar stated. It wasn't really a question.
"As of today, yes. My name is Tarro." He stepped forward just enough to extend a hand. "I was informed there were two late additions to the instructor roster. I assume that's you."
"Rhubar," he replied, taking the hand in a firm grip. "And this is my wife, Sala."
Sala had pulled herself together enough to offer a polite, composed nod. Her sharp eyes drifted down to the brown tail, then back up to the unfamiliar emblem on his armor, a sudden, piercing focus settling over her features.
"Tarro," she repeated thoughtfully. "May I ask—are you by any chance—"
"I'm sorry." He cut her off gently, wearing the practiced expression of someone who had deflected that exact question a hundred times and deeply regretted having to do it again. "My lineage isn't something I am permitted to discuss right now. I hope you'll forgive me for withholding that. I promise I'll explain when I'm able."
Rhubar studied the young man's guarded expression for a beat, then gave a slow nod.
"There's nothing to forgive," Rhubar said. "A person's reasons belong to them until they're ready to lay them down."
Visible relief softened the tension in the young man's shoulders.
"We should get back," Rhubar added, resting a reassuring hand on Sala's arm. "Ozpin's patience for missing faculty is broad, but it isn't infinite."
Part IV — Letters and Goodnight
Location: Beacon Academy | Student Dormitories | That Evening
Ruby was writing furiously.
The letter had originally launched as a single-page greeting and was currently threatening to expand into three, a structural failure she blamed entirely on the fact that she had a lot to get off her chest and a handwriting style that was remarkably generous with white space. Across the room, Yang was watching her with the amused expression of someone who found her younger sister's intense earnestness deeply charming—an observation she fully intended to weaponize later.
"What are you scribbling about over there?" Yang asked, propping her chin on her hand.
"Writing home. For everyone back at Signal," Ruby muttered without looking up from the page. "It's super weird being somewhere brand-new where you don't know a soul. I couldn't exactly pack up my old friends in my suitcase, so... I figured I'd write."
Yang pulled her legs up onto her bunk, settling in. "You know what Dad always says."
Ruby pulled a face. "Strangers are just friends you haven't met yet, yes, I know. But that's a whole lot easier to swallow in theory than it is in practice. Plus, I'm fairly certain I made a minus-friend today with the whole Dust-sneeze catastrophe, so right now my social net is not exactly—"
"You made two solid friends today, at bare minimum."
Ruby stopped scribbling and looked up. "Did I?"
Yang's face shifted into that particular, irritating expression she wore whenever she had decided to be coy. Ruby found it profoundly frustrating.
"Those two boys," Yang said, laying it on with the heavy, studied casualness of a master architect constructing a trap. "The ones with the tails. You know them, you clearly get along with them, and they magically showed up all the way out here at Beacon on the exact same night under the exact same invitation." She paused for dramatic effect. "What were their names again?"
"Nova and Turuk. I told you like five minutes ago."
"Right." Another pause. "Nova especially. The dark-haired one. He seems—"
"Yang."
"—interesting."
"Yang, please, I'm begging you, stop."
Yang pressed a hand dramatically to her chest, oozing theatrical innocence. "I'm not doing anything! I'm just pointing out how nice it is that you have people you already know here, seeing as how you were just crying about being the center of unwanted attention." She stretched out luxuriously on her mattress. "And I'm also noting that Nova is remarkably easy on the eyes, a crucial detail you somehow failed to mention when you recapped the Dust-shop incident."
Ruby developed a sudden, violent fascination with the ink drying on her paper.
"I fail to see how his face has any bearing on the curriculum," she snapped defensively.
Yang chuckled quietly at the ceiling and offered no further commentary, which was somehow ten times more annoying than arguing.
Roughly twenty minutes later, Ruby found herself walking down the hall with a singular, terrifying purpose: she was going to hunt down Weiss Schnee.
This was not, she readily admitted to herself, the most rational way to spend her first evening at Beacon. The morning's catastrophic collision had not ended on a note that suggested Weiss was sitting alone in her dorm room, eagerly awaiting a midnight apology tour from Ruby Rose.
Still, the unresolved tension sat right behind her ribs like a jagged splinter, and Ruby had never possessed the psychological fortitude to leave a splinter alone.
As luck (or perhaps cosmic irony) would have it, she spotted the white-dressed heiress standing in the common corridor near the main dormitory junction.
"Weiss! Hey—"
The Schnee heiress spun around, identified the source of the high-pitched voice, and performed a micro-expression so masterfully controlled it essentially translated to of course it's you without moving a facial muscle. She didn't retreat, however, which Ruby decided to interpret as a green light.
"Hi," Ruby rushed out, holding her hands up defensively. "I just wanted to—okay, look. I know today started off horribly. I know the Dust explosion was entirely my fault, and I know Nova made it a little more awkward than it needed to be—"
"He flicked me on the forehead."
"He did, yes. Very rude of him. But I wanted to say sorry again, properly. I didn't mean to ruin your favorite dress, and I really want us to clear the air if we're going to be sharing the same hallways for the next four years."
Weiss stared at her with the cool, calculating scrutiny of a person who viewed trust as a dangerous vulnerability. She kept silent for long enough that Ruby began mentally drafting an emergency exit strategy.
"Your apology is formally acknowledged," Weiss said stiffly at last, using the tone of a monarch bestowing a rare royal pardon.
From further down the hall, Turuk's voice pierced the quiet with the subtle grace of a dropped anvil.
"Would you two just shut up already?! Some of us are trying to read!"
Weiss whipped her head around toward the sound, her eyes narrowing as she prepared to unleash a scathing lecture, only to freeze when she caught sight of Turuk's face—the flat, unyielding glare of a guy who had completely run out of social patience and wasn't pretending otherwise.
Then Nova rounded the corner, stepped up beside his brother, looked straight at Weiss, and said nothing at all. Somehow, his absolute, serene silence carried more stopping power than any threat.
Weiss let out a sharp huff of disbelief. She aggressively smoothed down her skirt—which still bore faint chemical stains—and turned on her heel, marching away in a huff.
Ruby slumped, her shoulders dropping in defeat.
A warm hand settled gently on her shoulder.
"Don't," Nova said quietly.
She looked up, blinking.
"She'll come around," he continued, his voice steady and devoid of pity. "I'm not just saying that to make you feel better. I'm saying it because it's true, and because you handled that with a hell of a lot more patience than most people would have." He dropped his hand, clearly a bit awkward with prolonged physical contact. "Just give it time."
Ruby studied his face for a long moment, wrestling with an internal question. Finally, she decided that uncertainty was worse than embarrassment.
"Can I ask you something?"
"Shoot."
"We're... friends, right?" She asked it with blunt, unshielded directness. "I mean, I think we are. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't totally misreading this."
He met her gaze, his expression softening into that quiet, absolute attentiveness he reserved exclusively for her.
"Yes," Nova answered without a second of hesitation. "We're friends. And I don't particularly like watching my friends beat themselves up over things when I can do something about it. It's really that simple."
Ruby held his eyes, feeling that strange, dizzying warmth bloom in her chest again—the exact same sensation she'd been trying to categorize since that fateful Tuesday in the bookstore, sitting somewhere right on the border of comfort and chaos.
She decided, once again, to think about it later.
"Okay," she whispered, a soft, genuine smile breaking across her face. "Thanks, Nova."
He reached out and gave her dark hair a playful, slightly rough ruffle. She pouted automatically, which seemed to satisfy some quiet, unspoken requirement on his end.
"Get some actual sleep," he instructed, turning to walk away. "Tomorrow's orientation is going to be brutal."
"Goodnight, Nova!"
"Goodnight, Ruby."
She stood in the corridor for a long moment, watching the two brothers disappear down the hall, until Yang materialized at her elbow with the supernatural timing of a sibling on stakeout.
"So," Yang whispered.
"Don't you dare," Ruby warned.
"I didn't even say a word."
"Your face is being entirely too loud."
Yang grinned. "My face is simply wishing you a very peaceful night, Rubes."
Ruby retreated back to her bunk, grabbed her pen, and finished her overly long letter in eleven straight minutes—shattering her previous personal record.
Part V — Into the Forest
Location: The Cliffside Above Forever Fall | Morning
Glynda Goodwitch was not a woman prone to over-complicating straightforward directives.
"Partners are determined by the first person you make direct eye contact with after landing," she announced, stating the simple mechanics of the test. "Teams will be formed from those partnerships once you reach the objective. Make your way to the ancient ruins at the center of the forest. Secure a relic. Return." A sharp pause. "Use whatever means are at your disposal to survive the journey. The forest is not empty."
That was the politely understated version.
The launch pads gave a mechanical, whining shudder before firing—polite in the specific way systems are polite right before they launch you into a completely unpredictable environment. Cardin Winchester launched first, propelling himself and three others upward with the momentum-driven confidence of someone who mistook volume for a personality trait. Blake followed cleanly, her movements precise and controlled. Yang went next, casually donning a pair of sleek sunglasses with the theatrical showmanship of someone who had rehearsed that exact frame-rate for weeks.
Turuk rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck, and glanced over at Nova.
"See you on the other side," Turuk muttered.
"Try not to break anything too expensive," Nova replied.
Turuk took his mark. The pad violently compressed and fired, turning him into a sharp blue-white streak against the sky before the dense forest canopy swallowed him whole.
Nova turned his head. Ruby stood a few paces away, her face locked in that intense, quietly ecstatic pre-combat expression—the look of a girl who was experiencing the exact right kind of nervous thrill. He had already memorized every line of it without ever intending to.
"Good luck out there," he said.
She flashed a brilliant grin, the pale morning light catching the silver in her eyes with a brilliance that was probably just a trick of the angle.
"You too!"
He stepped onto the pad.
The forest received him with utter, indifferent silence.
He utilized his tail instinctively on the way down—whipping it out to snag a thick pine branch, completely absorbing his terminal velocity before dropping into a fluid, controlled crouch upon a thick carpet of damp moss. For a heartbeat, there was only the hush of the woods. Then came the distant, predatory sounds of creatures that had ruled these timberlands long before academy students existed.
Find a partner, he thought, ticking off the objectives. Find the ruins. Get back.
He stood up and started walking.
His mind, incapable of sitting idle when his hands weren't occupied with combat, drifted back to the roster of people he'd spent the last twenty-four hours analyzing. Ruby—a fascinating storm of contradictions, somehow projecting a deeper sense of maturity and a more infectious joy than anyone he'd ever met, backed by an enthusiasm that could knock you off balance if you weren't braced for it. Yang, her older sister—loud with the honesty of someone who didn't feel the need to perform, yet radiating a silent watchfulness she kept hidden beneath her bright exterior. Blake, his adopted sister, stubbornly consistent—present, heavily guarded, processing three separate variables simultaneously while revealing only one.
Weiss Schnee? He was reserving judgment. High-stress introductions were data points, not final verdicts.
And the two unfamiliar teachers lingering quietly at the back of the faculty assembly.
He still couldn't crack that particular puzzle. He firmly tucked it away for later.
The sound reached his ears before he broke into the clearing—a sequence of heavy, concussive impacts moving at a terrifying tempo, punctuated by the shrill, enraged shrieks of Grimm that were rapidly discovering they weren't going to win.
He adjusted his vector and moved toward the noise.
The lone boy in the center of the clearing was a masterclass in efficiency.
Dark hair, striking red eyes, compact and relentlessly economical in every movement. He possessed the distilled muscle memory of someone who had been conditioned for brutal combat since early childhood, executing forms past the boundary of conscious thought. He had a heavy sword strapped across his back, but he wasn't even using it; his bare hands and feet were doing all the heavy lifting. A dozen snarling Beowolves and two towering Ursa Majors surrounded him, clearly operating under the delusion that sheer mass and volume could overwhelm him.
They were in the process of being brutally disabused of that notion.
Nova hung back in the treeline for precisely long enough to run a tactical assessment. The boy had the situation completely under control. However, he was also roughly fifteen seconds away from having two enraged Ursa Majors drop on him simultaneously from opposite blind spots—the kind of geometric problem that elite individual skill alone couldn't neatly solve.
Nova shifted his weight and moved.
The first Ursa caught a devastating kick to the side of its skull that sent its massive bulk cartwheeling through the timber. The second took a concentrated Ki blast at point-blank range, turning its upper torso into dispersing smoke and vapor before it could even roar. Deprived of their numerical advantage and facing entirely new variables, the remaining Beowolves let out confused, high-pitched whimpers as they collectively reevaluated their life choices.
The dark-haired boy straightened up, turning his red eyes toward Nova.
"I could have handled those," he said. His voice carried zero heat, bearing only the dry, unyielding firmness of someone stating a strict matter of fact rather than filing a complaint.
"I'm aware," Nova replied smoothly. "Still, it seemed like an opportune moment to drop by."
The boy held his stare for a beat. Something in his guarded posture subtly shifted—not warm approval, exactly, but a silent recalculation pointing in that direction. He exhaled sharply through his nose, the sigh of a pragmatist accepting an annoying reality.
"Don't slow me down," the boy warned.
"Wasn't planning on it."
They locked eyes for another second, sharing that silent, unspoken recognition that frequently passes between independent operators who realize, despite themselves, that they are built from the exact same mold.
Then, more rustling echoed from the tree line, and the conversation ended as the woods demanded their attention.
Nova had never fought alongside a total stranger and felt so instantly, flawlessly synchronized.
It was a strange detail to analyze in the absolute middle of a Grimm swarm, but he couldn't ignore it. The boy—Daikon Koizumi, as he formally introduced himself once the dust settled, carrying the reluctant courtesy of someone who viewed names as a mild administrative nuisance—moved with an architecture that mirrored his own. When Nova shifted left, Daikon instinctively covered the right without needing a command. When Daikon committed to a deep offensive push, Nova seamlessly secured the blind angles without a single wasted breath.
Furthermore, the searing energy blade Daikon had briefly manifested from the palm of his hand was something Nova had only ever heard described in old legends—recounted by his father during brutal training sessions years ago, details Nova had hoarded away in his memory much tighter than he ever let on.
He didn't mention it. There was no need.
Once the last of the carcasses dissolved into black mist, the two boys shook hands. Both lingered, studying the other with the quiet, prickling awareness of men holding an impossible question they weren't yet ready to voice.
"The ruins are supposed to be due north," Daikon noted, adjusting his collar.
"Then we move north," Nova agreed.
Part VI — The Clearing at the Heart of Things
Turuk hit the floor of the timberland running, and he found his designated partner before the echoes of his launcher had even faded.
He heard her before he actually laid eyes on her—a battle cry that was sharp, high-pitched, and entirely unconcerned with the sheer number of hostiles it was aimed at. He tore through a curtain of pine boughs into a rugged clearing where a red-haired girl in heavy, gladiator-style armor was doing something genuinely extraordinary with her bare fists against a pack of Ursa Majors that easily outnumbered her three to one.
She was good.
She was also, in roughly thirty seconds, going to be flanked on three sides instead of two—a shift in tactical geometry she probably hadn't accounted for.
Turuk accounted for it on her behalf.
He intercepted the three Beowolves trying to loop around her left flank, executing a fluid sequence of strikes that prioritized blinding speed over raw impact: a devastating knee to the first, a sharp body-rotation straight into the second's guard, and a spinning kick that utilized the third Beowolf's own forward momentum against it. He dropped into a light crouch right beside her. She didn't even flinch or look surprised, a detail that immediately told him a great deal about her combat instincts.
"Thought you could use a spare set of hands," he said casually.
"I had it handled," she replied, her tone completely flat and devoid of ego.
"Probably," he agreed with a crooked grin. "I'm Turuk."
"Scarlett. Scarlett Reinhardt."
They traded looks for exactly one second.
Then the Ursa Majors reorganized, let out a collective roar, and they went right back to work.
She wasn't at all what he'd expected—which was fair, since he hadn't bothered building an expectation. She fought like someone who had rigorously studied a classical martial art, spent years systematically tearing away the parts she didn't agree with, and kept only what worked. Her footwork was razor-sharp. Her kicks carried a concussive force that her relatively lean build didn't suggest—until she planted her heels for a heavy strike, and the lethal physics of her style suddenly clicked into place.
He watched her casually shed her heavy armor when the crowd control got complicated with a King Taijitu, noting the startled reactions of the other students arriving in the clearing, and kept his own counsel.
He could tell she was thoroughly used to people underestimating her based on appearance. He had zero intention of making that mistake.
Slowly, the clearing at the center of the ruins filled up with the rest of the scattered class.
They arrived in fragments—Blake and Yang emerging together, moving with the synchronized, effortless coordination of partners who had already decided absolute trust was non-negotiable; Nova and Daikon stepping out of the northern tree line with the calm, collected posture of guys who had just fought a war and found it mildly inconvenient; Jaune Arc somehow dropping in through a cave ceiling overhead, which was a story nobody present seemed brave enough to unpack yet. Nora rode in briefly atop a battered Ursa, followed by Ren, who wore the resigned, exhausted expression of a boy who had long since accepted Nora as an unpredictable act of nature.
And finally, Turuk and Scarlett crashed back into the perimeter, dragging a furious King Taijitu behind them that had definitely not been factored into anyone's morning briefing.
Turuk drew its focus left. Scarlett dismantled its tail-end. The Grimm, frustrated and cornered, wildly overcommitted—which was precisely what mindless monsters did when pushed—and that fatal mistake blew the fight wide open.
Then came the Deathstalker.
And then the massive Nevermore, which was already the primary topic of heated debate when Ruby and Weiss plummeted out of the sky on top of it. Their descent was absolute chaos, but beneath the frantic screaming, it clearly demonstrated the foundational architecture of genuine, hard-earned teamwork.
Yang had just opened her mouth to deliver a very specific, deeply sarcastic summary of the morning's events when the Nevermore slammed down onto the bridge.
"Can everyone just—" Yang started.
"Yang." Ruby's voice cut in, blending patience and desperate apology in the precise ratio that meant she agreed with her sister's frustration, but desperately disagreed with the timing. "The Grimm."
"I am well aware of the Grimm, Ruby."
"There's quite a few of them," Turuk noted helpfully from the side.
"I know."
She moved.
What unfolded over the next eight minutes was, depending on your vantage point, either a masterclass in controlled chaos or the definitive proof of a bond that would take years for the rest of the world to fully comprehend.
Nova and Daikon held the line on the left. Ruby and Weiss pushed toward the Nevermore on the right, operating with the synchronized purpose of two girls who had finally decided to trust each other's lives. The rest of the student body distributed themselves across the width of the bridge.
Scarlett shrugged off the last remaining pieces of her heavy armor. The stone beneath her boots visibly cracked under the sudden shift in weight.
Turuk glanced at her out of the corner of his eye, a smirk touching his lips. He had definitely chosen his partner well.
The Nevermore targeted Ruby for its final, desperate dive.
By all laws of physics and combat, it shouldn't have been able to—its wings were shredded, its momentum compromised, its body weighed down by half a dozen student attacks. But Grimm didn't always understand when they were beaten, and this one chose a particularly inconvenient moment to commit to absolute denial.
It locked onto her trajectory. She locked onto its trajectory. Those two opposing facts were about to produce one very violent outcome.
Nova blurred forward, meeting the massive bird right in the beak with an explosive uppercut that utilized the full torque of his entire body. The sheer impact violently redirected its dive into a stumbling crash, its crippled wings thrashing for air and finally opening the exact gap Ruby needed.
She was already accelerating. He could see it clearly—her Semblance igniting in a dazzling, explosive scatter of red rose petals against the grey morning mist, her massive scythe biting into the stone cliff face with the surgical precision of someone who had practiced this exact arc since she was old enough to lift steel.
"Now, Ruby!"
She didn't need the encouragement. She was already at the apex of her leap.
The crescent blade swept down. Clean. Absolute. Final.
The Nevermore dissolved into a thick cloud of black smoke that drifted harmlessly over the forest canopy below.
Ruby stood triumphantly at the edge of the cliff, her scythe planted firmly in the stone beside her, the morning sunlight breaking through the clouds at her back. For a long, breathless moment, nobody spoke, because there genuinely wasn't anything left to say that could improve on the view.
"Not bad," Scarlett muttered, crossing her arms.
Nova smiled faintly, watching the silver-eyed girl catch her breath. "Yeah. Not bad at all."
Part VII — Teams
Location: Beacon Academy Gymnasium | That Afternoon
Professor Ozpin stood behind the elevated podium, calmly looking down over the assembled students.
He held the silence for a beat longer than protocol strictly required—that particular, searching kind of stare that made everyone in the room feel less like they were being observed and more like they were being thoroughly read.
"Cardin Winchester, Russell Thrush, Dove Bronzewing, and Sky Lark," Ozpin announced, his voice echoing smoothly off the stone walls. A brief pause. "The bronze rook pieces. Well done. From this point forward, you will be known as Team CRDL, led by Cardin Winchester."
The applause from the crowd was polite. Cardin accepted it with the swaggering posture of someone who considered validation an overdue debt.
"Nova Belladonna, Daikon Koizumi, Turuk Belladonna, and Scarlett Reinhardt."
Nova kept his exterior completely neutral. Beside him, he felt Turuk unconsciously square his shoulders.
"The silver knight pieces." Ozpin's tone carried a quiet, underlying satisfaction he didn't bother masking. "You four will be known as Team NDTS, led by Nova Belladonna."
The applause picked up in warmth. From somewhere in the audience—he automatically filed away the mental note to locate the source later—came two distinct reactions that carried far more emotional weight than standard school cheering. He deliberately kept his eyes forward.
He also successfully resisted looking over at Ruby, a feat that required a surprising amount of willpower, as he could vividly feel her clapping in the energetic, heartfelt way people clap when they actually mean it.
Team leader, he thought, absorbing the reality with the pragmatic resignation of a guy assigned a job he didn't explicitly lobby for but understood the mechanical logic behind. Fine.
"Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, and Yang Xiao Long."
Ruby looked genuinely stunned, her jaw going slack for a fraction of a second.
"The white bishop pieces. Exceptional teamwork under extraordinary duress." Ozpin offered the ghost of a smile. "From this point forward, you will be known as Team RWBY, led by Ruby Rose."
Yang's reaction was instantaneous and explosive—a triumphant whoop that caused several nearby students to physically flinch. Blake offered a small, private, knowing smile. Weiss's face cycled rapidly through a dozen distinct expressions before finally freezing into the stoic mask of someone mentally drafting a formal letter of objection to be filed at the earliest convenience.
Ruby's features rearranged themselves into that overwhelmed, radiant look she got whenever reality outpaced her preparation.
She was still standing there trying to process it when a familiar presence appeared at her shoulder.
"Congratulations," Nova said softly. "It suits you."
She spun around to look up at him, and instantly that warm, confusing sensation rushed back—the unlabelled feeling she kept shoving into the deal with this later box. It was a lot harder to ignore right now, especially with him standing so close, looking at her with that steady, unwavering intensity she still wasn't entirely used to.
"You really think so?" she asked, her voice dropping an octave.
"I wouldn't say it if I didn't."
She smiled—the real one, bright and unfiltered—and he logged the expression away with the hyper-focused attention he reserved exclusively for her.
At the very back of the gymnasium, away from the mingling crowd, two faculty members who had chosen to keep their distance watched the exchange between their eldest son and the silver-eyed girl.
Sala's expression was a complex cocktail of the emotions she'd wrestled with all morning—fierce pride, an aching pang of lost time, and something tender buried beneath both. It was the kind of deep, wordless feeling parents experience when they realize their children are finally stepping into a world they built.
"She's good for him," Sala whispered, her voice barely audible over the chatter. "I can tell."
Rhubar remained silent for a moment, his gaze fixed on the boys.
"She is," he agreed quietly.
"And he still hasn't figured out the connection with Blake." A soft breath escaped her—not quite a laugh, but close. "He's going to connect the dots eventually."
"He will. And when he does, it'll spark its own conversation." Rhubar shifted, resting a heavy, grounding hand on her shoulder. "One thing at a time."
Sala continued to watch her son stand proudly with his newly formed team. She watched him say something that coaxed a genuine, uninhibited laugh out of Ruby Rose. Then her eyes drifted slightly to the side, catching sight of her niece—grown, fierce, carrying herself with an independent grace forged in a life Sala hadn't fully witnessed yet—now anchoring a team that was already shaping up to be legendary.
Sixteen years. The vast ocean of time separating then from now couldn't be measured in any unit she knew.
Soon, she thought to herself. Not yet. But soon.
"You're right," she murmured, leaning slightly into Rhubar's touch. "One thing at a time."
Rhubar kept his hand firmly on her shoulder.
Together, from across the crowded hall, the two hidden Saiyans watched their sons step across the threshold into their next great chapter, saying nothing further because, at that exact moment, no words were required.
★ END OF CHAPTER THREE ★
Next: Chapter Four — "Weiss and Team RWBY's Dilemma"
Author's Note & Poll
Hey guys, RoseSaiyan2 here! I hope you all enjoyed Chapter 3 of this story.
Just a quick reminder in case you've lost track—this project is a complete rewrite and reboot of my older FanFiction.net story, The Legend of the Remnant Saiyans. I wanted to shake things up this time around by giving Nova (whose Saiyan birth name is Brussel) and Turuk a much more active, integrated dynamic with their birth parents being a lingering, prevalent presence right here at Beacon.
Before we dive into the next chapter, I want to pull back the curtain and let you guys help steer the plot. Below is a poll regarding a major turning point: When should Rhubar and Sala finally reveal themselves to Nova and Turuk as their biological parents?
Cast your vote by choosing one of the options below, and I'll weave your preference directly into the narrative moving forward!
Poll: When should Rhubar and Sala reveal themselves as Nova and Turuk's parents?
A: Volume 2
B: Volume 3 — During the Fall of Beacon
C: Volume 4 — When Yang meets Raven
D: Volume 5 — During the Haven Academy arc
E: Wait until Volume 6
Let me know which option you want to see happen in the comments or your next response, and I'll integrate that choice straight into the story's progression!
See You guys in the next one, peace out!