Hey guys, RoseSaiyan2 here, back with another chapter! Last chapter was a bit on the shorter side, but that was mainly to add some foundational groundwork for Odyn x Ruby, our story's main pairing. I'll actually be sprinkling in shorter chapters like this between major events going forward to give more substance and development to each of the central pairings featured in this story: Roy x Yang, Baron x Flare, Hailfire x [Spoiler], Kanna x Mercury, Sybryh x Tarro, Daikon x Weiss, and Jaune x Pyrrha (plus a [Spoiler] pairing!).
Since this story is trending heavily toward exploring the deep-seated animosity between Elves and Humans, the overall flow of the narrative will shift a bit as we establish that complex dynamic first. I'll do my absolute best to make sure it all makes organic sense to you readers before pushing the plot further forward. That said, Volume 1 is really just about establishing the core friendship between Odyn and Ruby-it's still a little too early for them to be catching mutual romantic feelings just yet... at least openly!
Enough of my blabbering, though-let's dive straight into the story!
Disclaimer: I own nothing other than the original characters. Dragon Ball Z/Super, Black Clover, and RWBY and all of their respective characters belong entirely to Akira Toriyama and Toei Animation, Yuki Tabata and Studio Pierot, and Rooster Teeth and the late Monty Oum, respectively.
Opening- Rising Hope (Irregular at Magic Highschool)
Chapter SIX: The Stray and Hidden Truths
The Vytal Festival arrived in Vale the way grand celebrations always seem to sweep over cities that have spent months waiting for them-slowly at first, through quiet rumors and shipping crates, and then all at once. Within days, brilliant red, gold, and green streamers claimed every lamppost. Elaborate banners written in the native scripts of all four kingdoms stretched across broad avenues, and shopfronts competed with the manic, artistic fervor of people given official permission to be wonderfully excessive. Even the docks-usually the gritty, utilitarian pulse of the city-acquired a breathless air of anticipation that not even the heavy, familiar scent of brine and diesel could entirely suppress.
Kanna had summarily dragged everyone out for the afternoon. This was how Odyn found himself wandering down the bustling commercial sector on a sunny Friday alongside eleven other people with zero specific agenda-which ranked dead last on his list of preferred ways to spend a Friday.
He had asked her why. She had told him it would be good for him. He had pointed out that wasn't an actual answer. She had calmly replied that it was the only answer he was going to get. He had followed her because, in his extensive experience, complying immediately was the most efficient response to Kanna when she locked into a particular brand of stubborn determination.
At the front of the sprawling group walked Weiss, smiling in a way Ruby had never witnessed before-shedding her usual guarded, public-facing armor for something bright, genuine, and completely unguarded. It was the radiant expression of someone living out a day they had dreamed of for years.
It was, Ruby privately admitted to herself, a little unsettling to watch.
"The Vytal Festival," Weiss proclaimed, spinning around to face the group while walking backward, her arms spread wide. "A celebration of international culture, of peerless artistry, of global cooperation-"
"Of ruthless competition," Daikon dryly interjected from the rear of the pack.
Weiss snapped a finger at him. "Nobody asked you, Daikon."
"You also want to scope out the competition," he continued in the exact same flat, informational cadence. "Which is the actual, unvarnished reason we're out here."
"That is not-" Weiss caught herself, visibly reining in her irritation. "That is not our primary motivation."
"Still a motivation."
"I-hush."
"You do realize," Odyn observed with the seasoned patience of someone who had watched this exact intellectual sparring match a dozen times, "that if you two would actually listen to each other instead of arguing, you'd realize you agree on almost everything."
Both Weiss and Daikon shot him matching glares that made it abundantly clear they found his observation profoundly unwelcome.
"Anyway," Yang chirped brightly, sliding effortlessly between them with the social grace of someone born to manage moving crowds, "why are we wandering down toward the docks specifically?"
Roy opened his mouth to speak.
Yang narrowed her eyes at him. "That was rhetorical."
"I was merely going to say-"
"I already know what you were going to say."
"You couldn't possibly-"
"Roy," Yang said, pitching her voice into that specific register she reserved exclusively for him-warm, dripping with amusement, and inherently dangerous, like sunlight focused through a magnifying glass-"I promise I will make it up to you later. Whatever you want."
Roy visibly paused, executing a rapid mental calculation weighing the reliability of Yang's promise against the social cost of finishing his sentence.
"Whatever I want?" he tested, which wasn't an outright surrender, but certainly sketched its silhouette.
Yang's smile blossomed with the terrifying satisfaction of a tripwire springing shut. "Whatever you want."
Roy glanced sideways at Odyn.
Odyn steadfastly stared into the middle distance.
"I think I'll... remain quiet," Roy decided.
Walking right beside Odyn, Ruby clamped her lips together hard to swallow a laugh.
Odyn glanced down at her, caught the amusement dancing in her eyes, and a swift, wordless communication passed between them-the kind that says are you seeing this? and yes, I am, without requiring a single syllable.
Clearing her throat with authoritative dignity, Weiss attempted to regain control of the outing. "In any case, student delegations from Vacuo are scheduled to arrive by ship today. As a proud representative of Beacon Academy-"
"She wants to spy on the competition," Daikon repeated helpfully.
An invisible bolt of static electricity visibly snapped between Weiss's glare and Daikon's impassive face.
"I could actually be watching them dock right now," Roy noted aloud, "if certain individuals hadn't insisted we were only here for profound cultural enrichment."
"Roy," Yang warned playfully.
"I stayed silent for a full two minutes," he defended. "I feel that was a remarkably generous contribution."
The crime scene appeared before any of them fully registered what they were looking at.
It was a small Dust boutique, its storefront window completely shattered into a glittering carpet of glass across the pavement. Yellow police tape was strung tightly across the doorway, framing the eerie, methodical stillness of an investigation well past its initial chaos. Ruby stopped dead in her tracks, causing the group to telescope and compress behind her.
"Excuse me," Ruby said, stepping up to one of the officers standing near the tape. "What happened here?"
The officer looked down at her with that detached, dismissive expression adults often default to when dealing with teenagers-not actively malicious, but entirely disconnected from the idea that a cadet deserved a comprehensive answer. "Robbery. Second Dust shop hit this week." He turned back to confer with his partner. "Whoever is pulling these off, they aren't after Lien. Left the cash registers completely untouched."
"Doesn't make any sense," the second officer muttered. "Who on Remnant needs that much raw Dust?"
"Maybe an independent craftsman building something big," the first suggested. "Or maybe someone's quietly arming a militia."
"White Fang," the second officer sighed, delivering the theory with the tired resignation of a man filling in a predictable blank.
Hearing the exchange, Hailfire stepped forward from the group. "Excuse me, officers-is this string of attacks expected to cause significant disruption to the Vytal Festival security protocols?"
Both policemen turned to look at her. The moment their eyes registered her features, a subtle, ugly shift occurred in their posture-a lightning-fast recalibration of bias.
"We've got it handled, kid," the first officer said, wrapping his words in a sickly-sweet pleasantness that held a razor-sharp edge. He looked down pointedly at her ears, offering a tight, humorless smile that didn't reach his eyes. "Why don't you leave this sort of heavy lifting to the professionals, miss? We really don't need outsiders-and especially not your kind-meddling in police business."
The entire group went dead silent.
Ruby's expression flashed through a dozen violent shades of disbelief before settling into furious outrage. "Excuse me?" she snapped.
"Ruby," Odyn murmured quietly from beside her.
"She didn't do anything wrong! She was just asking a polite question-"
"We heard her just fine," the second officer interjected, his tone hardening into an arrogant, unchallenged laziness. "Your friend with the features. Creatures like that aren't human or even true Faunus, so they can't possibly grasp how we maintain order here. Best you all turn around and let the real adults handle it."
"They understand everything perfectly!" Ruby's voice was beginning to climb, cracking with indignation. "They understand way more than you do, considering you're standing around acting like a couple of-"
A warm, steady weight settled onto her shoulder.
Ruby stopped instantly.
It wasn't a physical restraint-the contact was feather-light, a mere grounding presence rather than a hold. But it carried the profound, immovable gravity of Odyn's absolute stillness. It was the focus of someone executing a deliberate act of profound restraint, inviting those around him to share in that discipline.
She turned her head to look at him.
His profile was rigid, angled away from her and locked entirely onto the two officers. The line of his jaw was carved from stone. When his amber eyes finally met the nearest officer's gaze, they didn't flash with hot, chaotic rage; instead, they burned with the terrifying clarity of a deep fire deliberately banked behind thick iron-contained, but dangerously alive.
"We appreciate your time, officers," Odyn said. His voice was entirely civil, completely level, and utterly devoid of warmth. "Come along, everyone."
He turned on his heel.
The entire group pivoted and followed.
Ruby walked closely beside Odyn, her knuckles white, only realizing how violently her fists had been clenched once they had rounded the corner and the ugly scene faded from view.
They didn't stop until they had marched a full two blocks away, far enough from the docks for the stifling tension to finally dissipate into the open air. Odyn turned around to face them all.
"Ruby, Weiss, Yang, Blake-everyone," he said, his voice softer now, looking across his teammates and their human companions alike. "I am deeply sorry you had to witness that."
"Don't you dare apologize for that," Yang cut in, her usual cheerful exterior stripped away, replaced by raw, protective anger. "Don't you ever apologize for someone else's bigotry."
"It wasn't your fault," Ruby added fiercely, still vibrating with leftover adrenaline. "It was entirely theirs."
"I know," Odyn said quietly. "But it was an ugly thing to be subjected to, and I'm sorry you had to see it happen to us."
Blake had been standing quietly in the background, her expression carefully shuttered. "That kind of hatred," she murmured, "happens a lot more often than people realize. Against a lot of different communities."
"I'm aware," Odyn replied.
"We're well aware of it," Hailfire echoed, and the brief look she exchanged with Blake carried the heavy mutual recognition of two people spotting a familiar scar across someone else's face.
It was a fleeting moment, unremarked upon by the others, but its weight lingered in the air.
Weiss, who had been standing off to the side with her arms crossed tightly over her chest and her gaze lowered, finally spoke. "Who needs that much raw Dust?" It wasn't a casual question; it was a calculation. "They specifically mentioned the White Fang."
"The White Fang," Blake said, choosing her words with meticulous, guarded precision, "wouldn't necessarily explain a multi-site string of thefts like this on their own. They've never required stockpiles of volatile elemental crystals on this scale before."
"The White Fang are violent terrorists, Blake," Weiss countered sharply.
"The White Fang are-" Blake caught herself, swallowing hard. "They're people who reached a breaking point because they felt they had no other options left. That doesn't magically excuse the violence, Weiss. But it's fundamentally different from people being born evil."
"They want to drive humanity off Remnant-"
"Some of the extremists do," Blake interrupted, her voice tight with suppressed history. "Others joined because they watched someone they loved get treated the exact same way those officers just treated Hailfire. Those aren't the same people."
Weiss's expression twisted into a complicated knot of cognitive dissonance-caught between the rigid worldview she had been raised with and an inconvenient truth she couldn't simply dismiss.
Khanna stepped forward, breaking the heavy silence with her trademark, unflappable composure. "Weiss," she asked gently, "hypothetically... what would it take for you to physically harm an innocent person?"
Weiss blinked in sheer astonishment. "Pardon?"
"Not in a regulated combat ring. In real life. If you somehow decided-genuinely believed-that inflicting harm was the only correct course of action left... what horrific series of events would it take to drive you to that decision?"
Weiss stared at her, entirely speechless.
"Most people never reach that point," Khanna continued evenly. "Not until they have been broken down, hunted, or humiliated for long enough, by enough people, without a single soul stepping in to help, that the pain curdles into something else. I am not excusing violence, Weiss. I am simply pointing out that understanding why a monster is created is entirely different from endorsing what it does."
The silence that settled over the group afterward was absolute-the heavy, echoing quiet of a profound truth finally landing where it belonged.
The Arrival
The heavy stillness that followed Khanna's words was shattered-as silences at the Vale docks inevitably are-by the sound of boisterous shouting.
A young monkey Faunus came careening off the incoming cargo ship at a dead sprint, leaped onto a nearby lamppost with the effortless, unthinking athleticism of someone who treated three-dimensional space like a playground, and paused at the top to casually peel a banana. He did this with the radiant, beaming expression of a person genuinely enjoying a public spectacle, which under the tense circumstances required a very specific brand of brazen self-assurance.
A frustrated detective, still recovering his dignity after the morning's chaos, lobbed a loose pebble at the lamppost. The monkey Faunus dropped his banana peel, which struck the ground with surprisingly accurate defiance.
A second later, he vanished in a blur of blond hair and a flashing golden tail, sprinting down the alleyway past the assembled teenagers. As he blew past, he shot a wink so perfectly timed it felt like a choreographed stunt, though it was entirely spontaneous.
"Well," Yang declared, crossing her arms with a grin. "There goes your competition, Weiss."
Weiss snapped out of her stupor. "After him!"
What ensued was a chaotic, brief pursuit that ended the way most frantic chases do: the quarry had already vanished into thin air, and the hunting party arrived at a blind street corner only to crash straight into an unrelated obstacle.
The obstacle was a girl.
She was currently flat on her back where Weiss had accidentally bowled her over, looking up at the towering semicircle of teenagers with an expression of boundless, serene contentment-as though being plowed down by an aggressive, white-haired huntress-in-training was simply the most delightful way to spend a Friday afternoon.
"Sal-u-ta-tions!" she chirped brightly.
Her name was Penny.
This was the very first piece of data she offered, reciting it to each of them individually, then to the collective group, and finally looping back to repeat it specifically to Odyn. He received this information with the attentive, unblinking gravity of a man who firmly believed anything delivered with that much unadulterated enthusiasm deserved a respectful response.
"It is very nice to meet you, Penny," Odyn said smoothly.
Penny beamed, appearing to find his solemn courtesy utterly delightful.
What followed was the customary round of introductions, during which Penny scanned each of them with an intense, mechanical level of data collection disguised as friendliness. When Khanna finished rattling off names, Penny cheerfully announced that it was a pleasure to meet all of them-prompting Weiss to point out she had already said that, and Penny to happily agree that she had.
"So, are you here for the Vytal Festival tournament?" Yang asked, leaning in.
"That is correct! I am completely combat ready!" Penny declared, giving a sharp, military nod of absolute conviction.
Weiss looked her up and down, executing a professional, critical appraisal. "You hardly seem the type."
"Yeah, well, I don't really want to hear fashion critiques from the girl wearing a frilly dress," Khanna retorted dryly.
"It is a tactical combat skirt-"
"Yeah!" Ruby materialized instantly at Weiss's side, throwing up a spontaneous low-five. Weiss automatically slapped it before either of them processed what they were doing. Both girls froze, looking at each other with the mild, bewildered shock of two people who had accidentally stumbled into an unplanned bipartisan consensus.
Ruby immediately retreated back to her original spot.
Weiss primly smoothed down her skirt.
During this brief exchange, Penny's sharp green eyes drifted across the group with that peculiar, hyper-focused attention that seemed to register every micro-expression while appearing totally innocent. Her gaze lingered on the small gap between Ruby and Odyn-specifically the three inches of empty air separating them, a space maintained unconsciously and steadily throughout the entire afternoon.
A knowing, secret little smile touched the corners of Penny's mouth.
"Excuse me," Weiss said, holding up a crude, charcoal sketch that-charitably speaking-was a wild, abstract interpretation of the monkey Faunus. "Do you happen to know this boy from the boat?"
Penny tilted her head, examining the paper. "The who?"
"The filthy-" Weiss cut herself off mid-word as Khanna shot her a withering glare. "The-" She tried again, gritting her teeth. "Him. The Faunus with the tail who just ran past us."
"Weiss," Blake warned quietly.
"I wasn't going to-"
"You were about to use a descriptor."
"I was merely going to describe him accurately."
"The accuracy," Blake said, her voice dropping into a dangerous, razor-thin register, "was going to be the problem."
Something in Blake's tone suddenly shifted, stretching taut like a high-tensile wire near its snapping point. Weiss blinked, caught off guard, and for the first time seemed to genuinely perceive the underlying source of her teammate's distress.
"He's a human being," Blake stated quietly, her words cutting cleanly through the dockside air. "Whatever else he is, whatever tricks he pulls, he is a person. Would it really be so difficult to start your worldview from that baseline?"
"Why is everyone making a big deal-" Weiss started defensively, but even as she spoke, she heard the harsh, prejudiced echo of her own sentence and ground to a halt. "I'm not trying to-" She swallowed hard. "I have lived through what they are capable of. What the White Fang does. Directly. My family has been-"
"Targeted," Blake finished softly. "I know. I know all too well, Weiss."
"Then surely you understand why I-"
"Yes," Blake interrupted, her voice dropping into an intimate, piercing quiet that commanded total attention. "I understand exactly why you're angry. Which is precisely why I also know that sweeping every Faunus under the broad brush of the White Fang is the exact same lazy, hateful logic Cardin uses against anyone he doesn't understand. And you are so much better than Cardin."
Weiss opened her mouth to argue back.
Then she closed it.
The heavy, humid afternoon air seemed to freeze around them.
Without another word, Weiss turned her face away, her shoulders stiff. The argument wasn't resolved, nor was it magically concluded; it was simply suspended, laid aside with the fragile care of a delicate glass object that would inevitably need to be picked up again. And perhaps, in its own complicated way, that was the most honest kind of pause they could manage.
The Dormitory
Darkness settled over Beacon Academy the way it always did over ancient, sprawling stone structures that had absorbed generations of light and shadow-by slow degrees, through familiar silhouettes, and by the heavy, settling quiet of hundreds of tired cadets transitioning into horizontal stillness for the night.
Unfortunately, the argument that had been suspended back at the docks had not, as it turned out, agreed to stay suspended.
It had simply been waiting for them to get home.
"I still don't understand why this is even a point of contention," Weiss protested from her position near the window, her arms crossed tightly over her chest. The conversation had inevitably bled into Team RWBY's common room, with Odyn and his team quietly present as silent witnesses and, occasionally, as deeply reluctant referees.
"That," Blake countered from across the room, her voice dangerously level, "is precisely the problem."
What followed was the exhausting, circular kind of argument that defies clean resolution because it was never about a verifiable fact or a checkable data point. It was a collision between two people who had both been deeply wounded by the same ongoing global conflict from entirely opposite trenches. They were both entirely right about the reality of their own lived experiences, and therefore entirely wrong about the sweeping scope of the bigger picture-arriving back at the dormitory at the end of a long, emotionally draining day with far less composure than either of them typically preferred to maintain.
Weiss's voice pitched upward in frustration. Blake's voice dropped into an icy, protective chill. The debate rapidly devolved into a familiar volley of rehearsed positions, neither girl truly hearing the other because both were desperately fighting to be understood rather than trying to understand.
And then, in the heat of the clash, Blake let slip: "Maybe we were just tired of being pushed around."
The entire room went dead, absolute zero.
Weiss physically recoiled a half-step, as though the words carried actual physical mass.
Blake looked down at her own hands.
She swept her gaze around the room-taking in Ruby's stunned expression, Yang's rigid posture, and Odyn's carefully unreadable, stone-still face-and understood, with the sudden, blinding clarity that only arrives the exact microsecond after you say something that can never, ever be unsaid, what she had just given away.
She moved before anyone could draw a breath to stop her.
The door wrenched open, slammed shut, and the common room was left echoing with the hollow sound of her departure.
Ruby was on her feet in a fraction of a second.
"Blake-!"
She yanked the door open, but the hallway outside was completely empty.
Ruby stood frozen on the threshold, staring blankly at the empty corridor where her teammate had just vanished, before turning her head to look at Odyn, who had followed her silently to the doorway. Without a word, he placed a steadying hand on her shoulder-offering the exact same grounded, familiar weight of reassurance he always did.
"She needs to move," he said quietly, his voice pitched for her ears alone. "Not away from you. Just... through the space. There's a vital difference."
"I should have gone after her-"
"You couldn't have stopped it," he gently countered. "It needed to happen. Not cleanly, and certainly not pleasantly. But it had to surface." He looked down into her eyes. "We'll find her in the morning."
Ruby stared into the empty hallway for another long beat. Finally, she let out a shaky breath she had unconsciously been holding since their encounter at the docks, and turned back inside the room.
On the floor, Yang had already dropped down to sit cross-legged. Roy immediately shifted to join her. Flare slid in beside Roy, and Hailfire settled gracefully next to Flare, the entire group arranging themselves with the effortless, unspoken solidarity of people who didn't need to explain why they were camping out on someone else's dorm floor.
Over by the window, Weiss stood staring out at the glowing perimeter lights of the academy, wearing the conflicted, unsettled expression of someone experiencing the painful beginning stages of unlearning a prejudice.
Crossing the floor, Ruby walked straight up to Odyn and-without consciously planning the movement at all-wrapped her arms around him in a tight, impulsive hug.
He went completely rigid for half a second, clearly caught off guard, before his arms came up to enclose her securely. He held her with the careful, profound warmth of someone who rarely offered physical comfort, but meant every single fiber of it when he did.
"Thank you," she murmured softly against the fabric of his shoulder. "For today. All of it."
"Of course," he replied.
She felt, rather than heard, the quiet, grounding exhale that assured her he meant every word.
The Search and the Quiet
The text arrived at 7:43 AM-a timestamp that Ruby's consciousness classified as a human rights violation. She surfaced reluctantly from a heavy sleep, instinctively tracked down her scroll by feel, and blinked against the screen's bright light.
Morning. How are you holding up? Last night was hard on everyone.
She stared at the words for a long moment.
Then she stared up at the ceiling.
Then she looked across the room at Blake's empty, undisturbed bunk.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard. Better now. Still sad about Blake. I keep thinking I should have done something differently. She paused, biting her lip, then added: Thank you for checking on me. She hit send.
The reply came back almost before she could drop her hand.
You couldn't have stopped it. What happened needed to happen. The question now is what comes after. A brief pause, followed by: Do you want help looking for her?
Yes, she typed instantly. Then: Can we meet in Vale at eleven? I'll bring Yang and Weiss.
I'll be there. I'll try to reach Khanna and her team, but they may be with Professor Arkham today.
Okay. Thank you, Odyn.
A slightly longer pause this time, before: You don't have to thank me for that.
Ruby found herself smiling softly at her scroll, standing in her pajamas in the quiet dormitory at 7:43 AM-which she recognized was the exact kind of high-value ammunition Yang would weaponize mercilessly if she were awake to see it. Thankfully, Yang was still dead to the world. Blake's bed remained empty. Weiss was a motionless, blanket-wrapped shape across the room. The dorm was utterly still.
Ruby kept smiling anyway, because she was in a space where it was finally permitted.
She showered, dressed, and let the ordinary, grounding rhythm of a morning routine wash over her as the day officially began.
Vale, Midmorning
Ruby arrived at the designated street corner exactly four minutes late, slightly breathless, with Yang and Weiss trailing a half-step behind.
"What gives, Rubes?" Yang drawled, arms crossed. "You're never late."
"I overslept," Ruby offered-which was technically true, though entirely insufficient as a comprehensive account of her morning. She was sticking to it anyway.
She turned sharply at the sound of approaching footsteps, and her expression instantly did that involuntary thing it did around certain people: shifting immediately, softening into something warmer than the situation strictly called for.
"Hey, Odyn! Over here!"
Weiss raised a single, skeptical eyebrow with the chilling precision of a prosecutor filing an exhibit into evidence.
Yang's smirk took on a terrifyingly surgical sharpness.
"So," Yang remarked loudly to no one in particular, "what's the story there, Rubes?"
"There is no story," Ruby fired back, emphasizing the words with defensive vigor. "He offered to help look for Blake. The more people we have on the ground, the better our chances of finding her."
"And you just happened to be text-chatting at eight in the morning."
"I was not-" Ruby caught herself. "Wait, how do you even know about that?"
"Because you're wearing that exact same stupid smile you had on this morning when you thought no one was watching."
"I was not-Yang, stop-!"
Odyn reached them before Yang could fully execute her tactical operation, which served as either perfect timing or divine mercy. He had Roy, Hailfire, and Flare with him, the group effortlessly sliding back into the familiar parallel configuration of two squads whose frequent hangouts had merged them into a single, cohesive unit.
"Weiss," Odyn said quietly as they fell into step.
She turned her head, surprised.
"When we find Blake-and we will find her-I'd ask that you genuinely listen to what she has to say before you react. Whatever she brings to the table, let her finish."
Weiss fell silent for a moment. "I know," she murmured softly. "Hailfire told me much the same yesterday."
"I'm not repeating it to lecture you," Odyn noted calmly. "I'm telling you because you are going to feel an intense urge to interrupt her before she's done, and fighting that reflex will take actual effort. I just wanted to give you the chance to decide how you'll handle it in advance."
Weiss stared at him for a long, measuring beat. "That is..." She seemed to weigh her words carefully. "That is actually rather considerate of you."
"Don't sound so remarkably surprised," Hailfire dryly remarked.
They walked.
The search consumed the middle hours of the day the way all urban searches do-punctuated by calling out names, scanning alleyways, and investigating false leads that led nowhere, wrapping the city in the anxious, singular focus of people tracking someone who wasn't there.
Penny materialized twice out of nowhere: once stepping smoothly from behind a decorative display of silk scarves, and the second time appearing from a direction that defied geometry. She was, as always, unfailingly cheerful.
She was also, Odyn noted with the silent, hyper-vigilant attentiveness he reserved for anomalies, completely impossible to sense beforehand. By habit, he constantly tracked the ambient presence of everyone in his vicinity-a sensory baseline so deeply ingrained he no longer had to think about it. Yet, Penny registered as absolute zero. Not faint. Not muffled by distance. Nothing. It felt as though the spiritual weight that every living person naturally projected simply wasn't there.
He filed the observation away.
He said nothing.
He offered a polite smile when she bounced forward to offer her assistance, quietly cataloged her movements, and told himself there would be plenty of time to dissect the mystery once there weren't fourteen other urgent priorities demanding his focus.
Eventually, Yang and Weiss peeled off with Roy, Hailfire, and Flare to scour the busy shopping district, while Khanna's team remained completely unreachable. This left Odyn walking down the quieter eastern residential avenues alongside Ruby and Penny-which, he privately conceded, was far from the worst configuration the afternoon could have produced.
"She's been gone since Friday night," Ruby worried aloud, her brow furrowing.
"Blake is resilient," Odyn reassured her. "Whatever she's wrestling with right now, she's working through it somewhere secure."
"You don't know that for sure."
"No," he agreed evenly. "But I know her well enough to know she doesn't recklessly put herself in harm's way. And the kind of outburst she had last night... that came from a place she's been carrying silently for a very long time. People don't run away because they're panicking. They run because something inside them finally shatters open, and they desperately need room for what spills out."
Ruby looked sideways at him, her eyes sharp. "Is that based on personal experience?"
"More or less."
Penny, skipping slightly ahead between them, turned back to face Ruby. "If Blake is truly your friend, she will return when she is ready. And when she does come back, she will return to you-not to the argument."
Ruby blinked, taken aback. "Penny, that's... actually deeply wise."
Penny beamed, looking extraordinarily pleased with herself. "I have excellent teachers."
Suddenly shifting her focus, Penny tilted her head and pinned Ruby with a bright green stare. "Do you like Odyn?"
Ruby stopped dead in her tracks, caught completely off guard. "What-me? Yeah, of course, he's my friend-"
"No, that's not what I mean." Penny smiled with the cheerful, surgical precision of someone who had decided to bypass social filters entirely. "Do you like him."
Ruby's face flared into a brilliant shade of crimson in the span of a single heartbeat. "Penny, seriously-!"
"It's just that you look at him differently than you look at your other companions," Penny observed innocently, tilting her head. "I notice these things."
"It's not-we're just-he's-" Ruby threw her hands up in a frantic, comprehensive gesture that explained absolutely nothing. "We're friends," she squeaked out finally.
"Do ordinary friends look at each other the way you look at him?" Penny inquired.
"Yes!" Ruby insisted with far more volume than accuracy.
Penny paused to consider this logical proposition. "I think I would like to have a friend I looked at that way."
A few paces ahead, Odyn-who had been walking with the intense, rigid focus of a man deeply invested in studying the exact texture of the pavement-remained completely silent.
Ruby, who was ninety-percent sure he had heard every single word of the exchange, also remained entirely, desperately silent.
And so, they walked on.
The Docks
The explosion didn't feel like an explosion at first. It felt like a sudden, hollow drop in atmospheric pressure-a deep, physical vibration in the marrow of the bones that arrived a full second before the deafening roar reached their ears.
Ruby spun toward the sound. Odyn was already facing it.
"That's the cargo district," he said instantly.
"Blake," Ruby breathed.
They were already sprinting before the final syllable left her lips.
What met them at the docks was the dizzying, organized chaos of a massive criminal operation that had violently derailed approximately three minutes prior. Roman Torchwick was present-a familiar face from a rainy night months ago that suddenly felt like a lifetime away. Scattered around him were dozens of White Fang soldiers in white masks, three heavy Bullhead transport ships sweeping searchlights across the tarmac, and Blake, pulling herself up from the concrete with the controlled urgency of someone who had just narrowly dodged a catastrophe.
Nearby, Sun Wukong was executing a breathtaking display of kinetic acrobatics, using his collapsible staff to prove that combat efficiency and absolute showmanship could happily coexist.
Roman paused, scanning the rooftops.
His eyes swept over Ruby, lingered on Penny, and finally locked onto Odyn.
Something flickered and shifted across Roman's face.
It was a look Ruby had witnessed before-in the arrogant eyes of the Vale police officers, in Cardin's expression out in the forest, and whenever anyone encountered the distinct, heavy resonance of what Odyn carried. The criminal mastermind's polished, professional composure underwent a violent, instantaneous recalculation.
Then, he forced a smirk. "Well, hello there, Red. Isn't it past your bedtime? And who are-" The crook's voice faltered slightly as he truly registered Odyn's presence. He managed to recover the momentum, but it visibly cost him.
Penny stepped smoothly forward, planting herself beside Ruby.
"Ruby, get back-" Ruby started to warn.
"I am combat ready," Penny declared with the absolute, cheerful certainty of someone who had tested that hypothesis and found it universally true.
Ruby glanced at Odyn. His expression had settled into the razor-sharp focus of a strategist processing multiple complex variables to extract the most efficient outcome.
"If she needs backup," Odyn murmured quietly, and snapped his fingers.
Light bloomed around him-not bursting from a physical source, but simply manifesting where nothing had existed a fraction of a second prior. Seven translucent blades materialized in midair, glowing with a soft, ancient luminescence completely devoid of standard Dust signatures. It carried the undeniable warmth of pure, focused intent.
"Odyn," Ruby said, her voice dropping into the vulnerable, serious register she reserved for matters of absolute gravity. "If you use that out here, they're going to see what you really are."
"I know," he replied.
"They'll-"
"I know, Ruby." He turned his amber eyes down to meet hers. "I know the cost. But you and your team are caught up in the middle of this, and that is not a risk calculation I am willing to make any other way."
She stared up at him.
He held her gaze with the unwavering, crystalline clarity of a man whose mind was entirely made up.
Around him, the floating blades hummed, waiting for his command.
Ruby took a deep breath, turned her face toward the battlefield, and drew her scythe.
What followed was the chaotic symphony of a fight where every participant harbored entirely different motives.
Roman fought to preserve his operation and, when that proved mathematically impossible, fought purely to survive the night. The White Fang grunts fought because cruel orders compelled them. Sun fought because he genuinely enjoyed the adrenaline and believed in helping out. Blake fought because she was desperately trying to prove her own strength to herself-the most dangerous reason of all.
And Penny fought in a way that left everyone utterly unprepared.
With a mechanical shing, massive blade-housing units deployed from the pack on her back, unfitting for her delicate frame. Half a dozen gleaming swords locked into midair, suspended by unseen, stable tethers. The concentrated beams of green energy she channeled and discharged through them possessed a terrifying coherence-entirely unlike the wild, scattered dispersal of standard combat Dust.
Odyn watched her technique for a split second, quietly filing it away into his mental catalog.
When the Bullheads multiplied and the tide of White Fang reinforcements threatened to overwhelm them, Odyn moved into the fray. He moved with the terrifying, economical precision of a surgeon-expending the absolute minimum physical energy required to achieve maximum tactical disruption. His floating light blades carved clean, glowing arcs through the air; when they struck the White Fang soldiers, there were no burns or searing wounds, only the clean, concussive impact of pure kinetic force designed to end a fight instantly rather than prolong it.
From the southern access road, Roy arrived like a thunderclap, flanked closely by Hailfire and Flare. The brief, unspoken glance Roy exchanged with Odyn as he deflected Roman's cane strike was a masterclass in unspoken combat geometry.
"Took your time," Odyn noted dryly.
"You weren't specific in your instructions," Roy countered smoothly, parrying Roman's follow-up blow with the flat of his blade and delivering a measured, non-lethal shove meant to disengage rather than slaughter. "I filled in the blanks the moment I saw the smoke."
Blindsided, Roman slammed heavily into a stack of shipping crates, wheezing as he rapidly reassessed his evening's prospects.
Across the tarmac, Penny marshaled her floating blades into a focused array, unleashing a concentrated beam of green light that sliced clean through the lead Bullhead from stem to stern with horrifying efficiency. She repeated the feat on the second ship, then caught the third by its chassis using tethered wire-blades, physically dragging it down until the panicked pilot made the sensible executive decision to abandon ship.
Seeing his entire operation disintegrate, Roman made his own rapid executive decision to flee.
He vaulted into the remaining transport before the last White Fang grunt could even register defeat. Tracking the escaping craft, Odyn materialized a single light blade and hurled it with pinpoint, generational accuracy. The glowing projectile glanced off the Bullhead's armored hull in a shower of sparks, carving a deep warning scar before dissipating.
We know you're here now. Go.
Odyn watched the transport shrink into a distant dot against the night sky before lowering his hand and turning back toward his friends.
The aftermath of a violent skirmish carries a very distinct flavor of silence-that heavy quiet that blankets a battlefield the moment everyone stops running, giving the adrenaline-soaked body time to accept that the danger has passed.
In the narrow corridor between two towering shipping containers, Ruby and Blake found each other.
Words were entirely unnecessary. Ruby threw her arms wide, and Blake-who had been standing rigidly with her hands glued to her sides, processing the exhausting toll of the past twenty-four hours-hesitated for just a heartbeat before the carefully constructed armor of her posture completely shattered. She collapsed forward into the hug, letting herself be held.
"You're okay," Ruby whispered fiercely.
"I'm okay," Blake murmured back.
A moment later, Yang arrived with the unstoppable momentum of an older sister who had converted twelve agonizing hours of sheer worry into raw forward velocity. She wrapped both of them in a bone-crushing hug that possessed so much structural integrity Ruby had to frantically side-step to avoid being permanently fused into the group.
"We looked everywhere," Yang scolded affectionately.
"I know," Blake said softly.
"Twelve whole hours," Yang emphasized.
"I know." Instead of crying, Blake let out a small, surprised, bubbling laugh-the sound of someone who had just realized they were profoundly loved and hadn't quite figured out how to process it yet.
Weiss arrived last, her deliberate, unhurried pace a clear statement that her presence was a conscious choice.
She stopped directly in front of Blake, her chin held high as she meticulously organized her thoughts.
"I want you to understand something," Weiss began, speaking with the deliberate precision of someone reciting a rehearsed speech over an impulsive outburst. "I don't care about your past. Not in the way I was obsessing over it yesterday." She swallowed hard. "What I do care about is whether you are going to communicate with us when something catastrophic is happening, instead of-" she gestured vaguely at the dark, dangerous port district "-pulling this stunt."
Blake met her gaze steadily. "I was trying to explain the truth to you, Weiss. And you told me you refused to listen."
"I know," Weiss admitted, the concession visibly tasting like ash in her mouth. "I was wrong." The four words cost her dearly, but she paid the price without flinching. "What I want now is for you to come to us first. Not some random Faunus from a boat."
A few feet away, Sun raised a hand awkwardly.
Weiss snapped her head around to glare at him. "I will get back to you later."
Sun slowly lowered his hand.
"Okay," Blake whispered, a genuine smile breaking through her exhaustion. "I can agree to that."
Weiss gave a sharp, formal nod, sealing the agreement like a seasoned executive closing a vital contract.
Suddenly, Ruby burst out, "Yes! Team RWBY is officially back together!"
Yang lunged forward from one side, and Ruby launched herself from the other, crashing into Blake with enough collective enthusiasm to physically displace Weiss from her carefully chosen spot. Reflexively, Weiss grabbed onto Blake's sleeve to avoid being knocked flat-technically making her an active participant in the group hug.
Weiss blinked in mild shock as she registered her compromised position.
She wisely chose not to say a single word about it.
The End of the Dock
Later that evening, Odyn found Ruby sitting at the very edge of the wooden pier while the rest of the teams managed the various tedious procedural requirements of a post-battle cleanup. Her legs dangled out over the dark water, her eyes tracking the rippling, distorted reflections of the harbor lights dancing across the surface.
He walked over and sat down beside her.
"She's okay," Ruby said softly, staring out into the dark.
"She is," Odyn agreed.
"And everyone else is, too. All of them."
"Yes."
She watched a solitary wave lap against the wooden pylons. "The blades," she murmured, turning her head to look at him. "Light Magic: Light Blades of Conviction. I heard you say the incantation during the fight. What does that actually mean? Where does it come from?"
"It's a foundational form of magical discipline from my home," he explained evenly. "Every Arkynorean who unlocks the capacity for spellcasting is drawn toward-or deliberately chooses-a specific elemental affinity that becomes their primary domain. Light happens to be mine."
"And Hailfire?"
"Flame. Roy, on the other hand, channels his power primarily through physical Ki rather than formal spellwork. Our fighting traditions overlap and intersect in different ways for different people." He paused, following her gaze down to the dark water. "I told you once that I would explain more when there was time."
"There's time now," she said.
"There is," he agreed.
And so, he spoke, and she listened. The harbor lights drifted across the water's surface, and the familiar, heavy industrial noises of the port-clanking cranes, groaning cables, and the distant, low thrum of departing ships-formed a steady backdrop. It was that rare, effortless kind of conversation that carried no hidden agenda, existing solely for the comfort of the two people having it.
After a long stretch of companionable silence, Ruby turned to him. "Why did you say it wouldn't matter? Right before the fight started-when I warned you they would see what you really are."
He fell quiet, his expression turning inward.
"Because," he said simply, "there are things in this life worth dropping your shields for. And the people standing beside you are the most obvious of those things." He turned his amber eyes to meet hers. "It isn't a complicated equation."
"It is, though," she argued gently. "You've spent weeks being so careful, keeping your head down. You have an entire culture, an entire people who rely on you to be discreet. And you were just going to throw all of that away-"
"Yes," he interrupted without a second of hesitation.
"Why?" she asked. It was that specific kind of question that already knew the answer in its bones, but needed to hear it spoken aloud anyway.
He didn't answer right away. He stared out into the dark, churning expanse of the harbor.
"Because it wouldn't be the first time I failed someone I was supposed to keep safe," he said, his voice dropping into a quiet, heavy register. "And I made a silent vow a long time ago not to let that number increase if I have the power to prevent it."
Ruby looked at him, seeing the ghosts behind his eyes.
He kept his gaze fixed on the water.
"Sarai," she said softly, testing the name like a fragile thing.
"Yes."
The harbor seemed to hold its breath around them for a beat.
"I'm so sorry," Ruby whispered, and she meant it in the truest way possible-not as an empty platitude, not as an attempt to fix an unfixable wound, but as an absolute presence. I hear you. I am right here. The weight you're carrying won't magically vanish, but I see it, and you don't have to hold it alone.
"Thank you," he said, his voice thick with a sudden, quiet emotion. "For that."
Without another word, Ruby leaned over and bumped her shoulder lightly against his-that universal, wordless gesture humans use when words are either too heavy or entirely unnecessary.
Odyn didn't move away.
The Warehouse
In a damp, abandoned warehouse on the dark edge of the harbor, Roman Torchwick stood assessing the damage. Across his long and varied professional career, he had encountered his fair share of difficult situations, developing a remarkably reliable set of internal metrics for determining exactly how badly an operation had gone off the rails.
Tonight registered terrifyingly high on almost all of them.
He set his cane and coat case down onto a dusty crate, turning to face the three figures waiting in the shadows.
"How very disappointing, Roman," Cinder said quietly.
She possessed a distinct, chilling talent for delivering simple words in a way that made them feel like a physical pressure-not loud, not overtly sharp, but filling the room the way fire fills a dry space: pervasively, dangerously, and with absolute disregard for where you would prefer it not to spread.
"The students were considerably stronger than advertised," Roman defended smoothly, leaning heavily on his cane because it was the only leverage he had left. "And nobody-" he paused, emphasizing the point because it felt critically important, "-nobody bothered to inform me that there were Dark Elves enrolled in the Beacon student body."
Cinder's expression shifted by a single, subtle degree. "Dark Elves," she repeated, her voice dropping into a dangerous register.
"Three of them. Possibly more," Roman elaborated. "The one with the dark blue hair... the blades he summoned weren't Dust-based. They weren't tied to Aura, either. It wasn't any kind of Semblance I've ever encountered in all my years in this business. He..." Roman paused, struggling to find the right vocabulary to convey the terrifying weight of Odyn's presence in a fight. "He wasn't even trying particularly hard, and it was still more than enough to dismantle my entire perimeter."
To Cinder's left, the young man-Mercury-tilted his head, his sharp eyes narrowing with watchful, assassin-like stillness.
"That," Cinder murmured, a small, ominous tilt touching her lips, "is very interesting information, Roman." She raised a hand, summoning a small orb of fire that danced effortlessly across her palm. "The Elves of Arcynor have been entirely absent from the world stage for generations. If they've suddenly chosen to send their next generation into a Beacon cohort..." She closed her fist, smothering the flame into a wispy trail of smoke. "...then someone high up is expecting something."
She offered a slow, predatory smile-the kind that was never a good omen for anyone involved.
"Do not concern yourself with the Elves tonight," she instructed coldly. "They will be properly accounted for in due time." She turned her back, her crimson cloak swirling around her ankles. "Continue your work, Roman. Just... try not to require quite so much hand-holding next time."
Roman stared blankly at the empty space where she had been standing a second prior.
"Great," he muttered into the dark warehouse. "That's just great."
Above Beacon Academy
High above the promontory, the shattered moon was nearly full again.
It hung over the academy towers in its broken, patient way-incomplete since long before anyone currently walking Remnant had been born, yet still casting enough soft light to navigate by, still quietly pulling the ocean tides, still doing precisely what it had always done with whatever pieces it had left. Below its pale glow, Beacon's spires gleamed in warm hues of amber and soft green. Inside, tired students were sleeping, studying late, or sitting cross-legged on dormitory floors surrounded by their teammates, talking through the things that truly mattered.
Ruby Rose stood alone by her window.
She wasn't staring directly at the moon. Instead, she was watching the way its silver light caught the slate rooftops below, casting long, dramatic shadows out of ordinary stone and metal-soaking in the quiet stillness of a night that had begun in chaotic frustration and ended considerably better than it had started.
She was also thinking about floating blades of pure light, and about people who were worth revealing yourself for. She thought about the steady, matter-of-fact way Odyn had said that's not complicated-speaking in the grounded tone of a man for whom self-sacrifice genuinely wasn't a debate. And she thought about the quiet, comforting warmth of a shoulder pressed against hers at the very edge of a dark dock, at the end of a very long evening.
She was not thinking about any of this in a romantic way, she firmly assured herself, with the specific, insistent conviction of someone making that exact clarification for what was almost certainly not the last time.
She was simply... taking stock.
Taking stock of her team, whole and back together. Taking stock of a city that had looked at her friends' features with cold suspicion, and realizing just how fiercely she wanted to change that world-and what it might cost to try.
And taking stock of Odyn, who had stood at the edge of a harbor battle with seven light blades humming around him, looking down at her and declaring without a shred of doubt: That is not a calculation I am willing to make any other way.
Slowly, Ruby released the breath she felt like she had been holding for most of the evening. The crisp night air drifted in through the open window, carrying the faint, clean scent of salt water and distant rain. Somewhere down the hall, her teammates were finally at peace, sleeping soundly, and tomorrow would arrive with its own demands, requiring its own kind of readiness.
She stepped back from the ledge and gently closed the window.
She was ready.
End of Chapter SIX
To be continued in Chapter Seven: Best Day Ever - The Food Fight
The things that break open do not always break badly. Sometimes a long-held silence breaks and what comes through the gap is something that has needed the air for a long time. Sometimes a careful disguise breaks and what is revealed is simply the truth of what was always there. The hardest part is not the breaking. The hardest part is deciding, in the moment after, what you choose to do with the light.
Battle theme- Shumatsu Koku (Black Clover)
Ending song: (don't know the name of it lol) Shonen Onmyouji ending 1
Just replace the characters with the characters of this story, the rwby characters and the OC's.
Thank you all for reading this chapter. It ended up being one of the more extensive ones I've put together, so I really appreciate you sticking with it. If the combat sequences felt a bit rushed or disjointed, please bear with me-I'm still actively working on refining how I write fight scenes, so I welcome your patience as I continue to level up that skill.
As I mentioned earlier in the narrative, the tension between humans and Dark Elves is a fundamental part of the world-building here, and I hope I was able to convey that underlying friction in this chapter. We are definitely going to delve deeper into that history as the story unfolds.
Originally, I had toyed with the idea of Ruby being the only one aware of Odyn and his team's true heritage, but after some reflection, I felt it made for a much stronger dynamic if all of Team RWBY was in on the secret. It's worth noting that the older human characters who have lived through more history, like Roman, have enough experience to recognize exactly what they are, whereas characters like Cinder have only heard the legends.
We've officially hit a major milestone-the next chapter marks the beginning of the Volume 2 canon arc! I'm looking forward to diving into that with you all. Until then, see ya!