"Penny! Penny, just hold on, my semblance." Jaune looked on in worry as he activated his semblance on Penny to try to heal her as quickly as possible.
"No! There's not enough time to heal me...She can't get the staff and the power." Penny voiced out weakly as she knew there wasn't enough time left, as her eyes looked past Jaune.
Jaune slowly looked behind him to see what she was seeing, then saw Cinder and Weiss fighting as Weiss was buying time, and then looked back at Penny, wondering what she was planning.
"But there is something you can do," Penny said confidently as she placed her hand on Jaune's, where his sword was closely nearby.
Jaune pulled his hand away as his eyes locked onto his sword, and he quickly looked around for his other companions while trying to find another way. "I-I-I don't know where the others are, but Weiss would give us time."
"Let me choose...this one thing..." Penny spoke softly as her eyes grew tired as she reached her hand to touch the handle of Jaune's sword, making her choice, "Trust me."
shiiing
As Jaune took out his sword from his scabbard, the steel reflected his dark blue eyes...as he raised his sword up...
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"Ahhhh!!"
Jaune's eyes shot open wide as he woke up feeling terrible. He was staring at the ceiling, dressed in pajamas, his body jolted upright in bed, his chest heaving as if he had been running for miles.
"It was just a dream...Just a dream." Jaune said to himself as if he couldn't believe a dream could be so real.
Jaune rubbed his face with both hands, trying to calm the racing of his heart. His head throbbed slightly, like the memory of something just out of reach.
He had been having dreams like that for a while now.
Those strange, realistic dreams.
Dreams where he is in a school for Huntsmen and Huntresses.
Himself fighting dark monsters… Him trying to be a hero.
He and his companions team up with an immortal headmaster to take on his ex-wife.
But every time the dream reached its most important moment with that girl...Penny.
He woke up.
"…Man," Jaune muttered tiredly. "That one felt way too real."
He pushed the blankets aside and stepped out of bed, stretching his arms over his head before shuffling toward the bathroom.
The cool wooden floor tile greeted his feet as he flicked the light switch and went near the sink.
Jaune then leaned over the sink and turned the faucet, splashing cold water onto his face.
For a moment, he just stood there, gripping the edge of the sink as droplets ran down his cheeks.
Then he slowly looked up and saw the mirror, just as in his dream, with his sword, but it was just a mirror.
And that very mirror reflected a teenage boy with messy blond hair and tired blue eyes staring back at him.
Jaune Arc.
…Or at least, that's what his name used to be before he was adopted into a new family after the Great Fire of Tengu City.
Now he was Jaune Itsuka.
After the fire in Tengu City years ago, he had been found barely alive in the wreckage with no memories of who he was. Doctors called it severe trauma-induced amnesia. There had been no records of his family, no identification, nothing that could tell them where he came from.
He had been a ghost.
That's when Kotori Itsuka's family stepped in.
They adopted him.
Gave him a home.
A name.
A chance to start over.
Jaune stared at his reflection.
"…Jaune Itsuka," he muttered quietly, testing the name like he always did.
It still felt strange sometimes; it felt as if he were denying something, but he couldn't tell what.
He then grabbed his toothbrush, squeezed toothpaste onto it, and began brushing his teeth, trying to shake the lingering feeling from the dream.
Those dreams had started when spring break had begun.
Always the same fragments.
A school.
A team.
A red-haired girl with a cookie and weapon addiction.
A white-haired girl who was like a noble lady.
And an orange-haired girl who was a robot that turned human.
Battles against monsters made of shadows.
Having shields called aura that are manifestations of the soul.
Jaune spat into the sink and rinsed his mouth.
"…Just dreams," he told himself as he grabbed floss and started to floss his teeth.
They had to be.
Right?
He dried his face with a towel before stepping out of the bathroom. As he exited the bathroom and entered the hallway, he could hear the TV, which meant Kotori was awake and doing her morning routine of channel surfing for daily horoscopes and fortune-telling segments. She didn't wake him up, so she must have awakened Shido first.
"Looks like Kotori woke Shido up earlier than usual; it's not even six yet. I wonder why... oh yeah, today is April 10th... a Monday... great, and that means spring break is over." Jaune thought as he sighed to himself, never liking Mondays ever.
Now that he was kinda awake, Jaune remembered that their parents had departed the day before on a business trip, which was about their shared workplace, a major electronic manufacturer, which left him and Shido in charge of the kitchen, and now that he thought about the previous night, Shido had asked Kotori to be his alarm clock...Jaune felt kinda bad that he didn't warn Shido about how Kotori used to wake him up when he asked her to be his alarm clock last year.
"This is why I never asked Kotori to wake me up ever again. The last time I asked, she almost broke my ribs, and I almost vomited on my bed after she jumped on my stomach." Jaune shuddered as he remembered that memory, which was the last time he ate a late-night snack before going to bed.
As Jaune made it downstairs and into the living room, he saw Shido in the kitchen while Kotori was still changing channels. As he got closer to the living room, Shido saw him and smiled.
"Morning, Jaune."
Jaune rubbed the back of his head and yawned.
"Morning, Shido."
He walked into the kitchen and glanced at the couple of eggs he had set ready to crack them open.
"Wow," Jaune said. "You're already making breakfast this early?"
Shido chuckled.
"Well, I did beat you today at who made it first to the kitchen."
Jaune could remember that since the day both he and Shido learned how to cook, they had been competing for the kitchen over who got to cook first, but today, Jaune was kinda glad he didn't have to cook. With the nightmares going back and forth, he needed a break.
"Morning, Bro, did you have another nightmare again?" Kotori asked, but Jaune saw she didn't turn around to look at him, and he could tell something was in her mouth when she spoke, but decided to let it go.
"Morning, Kotori, and yeah, I had that nightmare again; it's been happening ever since spring break started," Jaune answered as Shido looked concerned, while he could also tell Kotori was concerned as well, even if she was hiding something in her mouth.
"Hopefully it doesn't ruin your sleep schedule since school is starting again," Shido replied as Jaune nodded.
"It'll be fine, I've dealt with these kinds of things before," Jaune answered as he wasn't lying. He dealt with exams and sleepless nights studying; he could handle it.
Before Jaune could speak more about his nightmare, the television noise caught both his and Shido's attention, which was rare if they were in the kitchen.
"Early this morning, in the outskirts of Tengu..." The announcer continued speaking as the familiar city name "Tengu" caught the attention of all three family members, gluing them to the TV screen.
"Huh? That's pretty close. Something happen?" Shido spoke as he leaned over the kitchen counter to get a better look at the TV, while Jaune also joined Shido to get a closer look at what happened.
If anything, if it were the first time Jaune had seen this, he would have been frightened and horrified at the destruction that had been caused, but after seeing this happen many times, he had gotten used to this, and he could only feel sympathy.
As the screen had shown, everything in the city had been absolutely decimated. Buildings and roadways had given way, broken down into a pile of rubble. It was a disaster on par with a meteor strike.
Jaune could see Shido's frown as he spoke, "Aah...A spacequake?" He shook his head.
The Phenomenon known as a spatial quake encompassed a broad scope of tremors. From what Jaune knew, no one knew how or why they occurred; it was impossible to predict one or know the scale of one's damage.
Spacequakes included everything from explosions to earthquakes to evanescence. It made as much sense as a giant monster destroying the city on a whim. The first occurrence of such an anomaly was observed thirty years ago.
Over the course of a night, something had gouged out the middle of the Eurasian continent in a region that included the former Soviet Union, China, and Mongolia. Jaune and Shido's generation had seen one too many photographs of the disaster in textbooks. There had been nothing left. It was as though a giant eraser had been taken to the region, leaving approximately 150 million people dead.
A disaster on this scale was a first for recorded history. In the six months following that first incident, this phenomenon occurred in areas around the world, albeit on a smaller scale.
If Jaune's memory served him correctly, Shido had told him there had been around fifty events. Spacequakes had been seen on every continent, at the north pole, in the ocean, and on smaller islands.
Naturally, Japan was no exception. Six months after the Eurasian disaster, a perfect circle of scorched earth had materialized over a zone south of Tokyo and north of Kanagawa Prefecture. Everything had simply been deleted. That was the very region where Jaune and the family that adopted him now lived.
"Didn't they stop for a while?" Jaune asked. "I wonder why there are more of them occurring now?"
"I dunno!" Kotori cocked her head to one side, eyes glued to the TV.
After the Kanto incident, time and space had been spared from the disturbances for some time. That was, until five years ago, when there'd been a spacequake in the redeveloped city now known as Tengu. Ever since, there'd been sporadic tremors of unknown cause, the majority of them being in Japan.
Of course, it wasn't as though humans had been twiddling their thumbs during the twenty-five years between the Eurasian spacequake and the Tengu one. The nationwide construction of underground shelters had exploded thirty years ago, beginning with the redeveloped areas. It had become possible to measure the warning signs of a spacequake in advance. Above all else, they had the disaster relief corps in Self-Defense Forces.
The corps had been formed with the objective of rebuilding the devastated facilities and roadways in the disaster zone. And somehow they worked their "magic" and managed to completely restore these ravaged towns in an impossibly short time.
If anything Jaune though how in the world do governments even afford this...Well, he knew that money was the talk of the town; if anything, it's not like they had any other objective that he could think of.
As the nature of their efforts was, of course, classified, so what actually happened behind the scenes wasn't public knowledge. Still, it did feel like witnessing a magic trick to see obliterated buildings restored to their original form overnight. However, these speedy repairs didn't make the spacequakes any less of a threat; if anything, they made what's truly going on behind the curtains feel even more terrifying.
"Don't you think there's been one too many quakes around here?" Shido inquired. "Especially in the last year."
"You're not wrong, Shido. If anything, they have been getting closer and closer; who knows how big they have been getting, at most. I hope these don't keep occurring every week." Jaune replied as the destruction from these quakes grew worse and worse.
"Hmm, I guess. Maybe faster than scheduled," Kotori said, leaning over the armrest of the sofa.
"Faster? What's faster?" Shido asked, not getting what Kotori was getting at.
When she said it like that, Jaune also felt that the wording felt off, but at the same time, there could be times when spacequakes were off-schedule, so maybe he was overthinking it.
"Mm,naafing." Kotori replied, her wording getting a bit more off as it started to get muffled.
Jaune saw Shido give Kotori a quizzical look, but could tell he finally noticed that she had been snacking on something early in the morning, as Jaune could tell he had been slacking on his observation skills a bit, as before he could notice Kotori was snacking on candy the instant she talked, but now his skills had become rusty.
Without a word, Shido went around the counter and walked over to where Kotori was sitting on the sofa, and as he approached, Kotori slowly turned her face away as she saw Jaune looking at her, as he was shaking his head, but saw a small smirk that said, "You got caught."
At the moment, Kotori wanted to kick Jaune in the shin as her eye twitched in annoyance, only to feel a hand on her head and be forced to look in Shido's direction as a strange sound escaped her throat.
"I knew it!" Shido saw exactly what he expected to see in her mouth.
Jaune knew that Kotori had been snacking on her favorite candy, a Chupa Chups lollipop. She had started eating it even before having breakfast. This time, he decided not to help Shido, as he had his own supply of those lollipops. Kotori always asks for one when she's feeling stressed or needs a sugar boost. Now that he thought about it, he realized he should probably reduce the amount of candy he shares with Kotori for now.
"C'mon! I told you: No candy before meals." Shido exclaimed, trying to yank the stick out of Kotori's mouth.
"Mm! Mm!"
Jaune could tell this is gonna either last a while, as he was watching this scene go back and forth, as Shido was yanking the stick like it was tug of war, and Kotori was trying her best not to let go, as her lips were clamped together to resist, as her face started to distort in the direction Shido was pulling.
After a couple of minutes of back and forth, Shido gave in, saying she needed to have a proper breakfast and deciding to leave the lollipop, but not before tousling her hair and heading to the kitchen.
"Yup! I love you, Big Bro!"
As Shido shooed Kotori away and went back to work, he then saw Jaune sitting on the dining table eating eggs and toast, as Jaune chuckled awkwardly, as he had been caught eating a bit early.
"Sorry, Shido, but you were taking a bit too long trying to remove that lollipop from Kotori's mouth, so you left the kitchen unattended, so I had to take the kitchen into my own hands," Jaune spoke as he ate another slice of his bread while Shido sighed.
"It's alright, don't stress over it. Honestly, I probably spent too long trying to pry the candy away from Kotori. She never gives it up easily, does she?" Shido replied, accepting Jaune's reasoning, "...Oh, that reminds me. Isn't today the entrance ceremony for Junior high?"
"It should be/ Uh-huh." Jaune and Kotori replied at the same time, as both of them looked at each other, only for Kotori to stick out her tongue at Jaune.
"So that means you'll be home around noon, Kotori...Anything you want to eat for lunch?" Shido asked as Kotori would be home earlier than usual.
"Hmm." Kotori bobbed her head back and forth as she considered the question. Then she shot up in her seat. "A Deluce Kid's Meal!"
Jaune raised an eyebrow while swallowing the remains of his first bread, as he knew Shido wouldn't like it, as that item was from the children's menu offered by a local restaurant. If it were him, he wouldn't mind it, but knowing Shido, he would not like that answer, as he saw Shido snap to attention as his body inclined to exactly forty-five degrees forward.
"I'm afraid we don't offer that at our establishment." Shido instantly declined.
"What?" Kotori cried unhappily, flicking the lollipop stick from side to side.
"C'mon, Shido, at least let her have this at least once, after all, who knows when she will have another time like this, since Kotori will have more work this year in Junior High, and it is a special day." Jaune reasoned that, as he remembered all the studying and exams both he and Shido had during Junior High, he might as well let Kotori have fun at least today.
Shido thought about Jaune's answer and then saw Kotori's look as she sighed, "...Oh, fine. I guess it's a special day. How about we all go out for lunch?"
"Oh!" Kotori squealed. "Really?!"
"Sure. Meet both Jaune and I at the usual spot once school's over." Shido replied.
Kotori waved her hands excitedly. "You swear? It's a promise?! Even if there's an earthquake or a fire or a spacequake, even if the restaurant gets taken over by terrorists, you have to promise!"
Jaune couldn't help but sweat drop at Kotori's answer as he wondered why she would say that, but it's not like he would say no to her.
"Wait. If it gets taken over, they're not going to be serving food." Shido said, sweating a bit at the promise he had to make.
"Promise!" She insisted as she looked at both Shido and Jaune.
"Okay, okay, I promise," Shido replied, promising to go to the restaurant no matter what.
Kotori then looked at Jaune as he chuckled a bit, but smiled warmly at her.
"I promise...As I never go back on my word, little sister." Jaune replied, promising his adopted sister that he would meet her no matter what.
But he also wanted to say a different word when he made his promise, but he couldn't remember it, so he decided to leave it as it is.
"Whoo-hoo!" Kotori yelled out in excitement as she threw her hands up into the air. "Also, thank you, Jaune, for convincing Big bro to eat at the restaurant. I love you! "
Jaune couldn't help but smile at her as Kotori continued celebrating a bit more, as Shido, though he might be acting too nice, well, today was a special day anyway for all three of them.
"Jaune and I will be in charge of cooking for a while anyway. And today, Jaune and I will be attending our entrance ceremony while Kotori will be attending hers. And after that, we can indulge a little. Although I'm not sure how much of an indulgence a kid's meal is at seven hundred eighty yen." Shido thought as he might have to ask Jaune to help out a bit and repay him later.
"Hmm." Shido reached up to open the small kitchen window.
The sky was so clear that it almost promised a good day. Shido glanced over at Jaune, who was cleaning his plate. Shido thought he should at least set aside his "strict brother" persona for today. After all, Jaune was right, as Kotori would be very busy this year, and so would he and Jaune. Shido then shook his head and got to work in the kitchen, preparing for the day.