Hey there everyone, hope you're doing well. Like I promised I'm back with part 2 of this little mini arc. I anticipate this mini arc being about oh... 3 to 4 chapters, then it's onto the vytal festival and the rest of Volume 3's cannon story. I'm going to introduce an opening to this story for content. Just imagine in your head, the opening having the characters of this story in it... team Rwby, NDTSA, and JNPR.
The villains I think would be silhouetted until they're introduced officially into the story. Below will be the opening for the first half of Volume 3 in the story.
Boku no Hero Academia Op 1: The Day
Just think about the main cast of this story fighting the villains of this story for the animation in the opening. The opening scene of the opening would be Ruby looking toward the back of her boyfriend, Nova, before joining him. The split screen I'm thinking would be of Ruby and a certain villain who will be introduced very soon as they clash.
Anyways just some thoughts on the visuals in the opening before we start.
Disclaimer: I don't own Dbz, DBS, or Rwby and their characters. This belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. I merely own the OC's and have permission to use two other oc's courtesy of ComparedDreadx.
CHAPTER TWENTY:
L@ost Heritage, Part II: Saiyan, Not Faunus
Part I — Group B: What the Tower Told Them
Location: Tenkawa Village | That Afternoon
The communication tower stood in the center of the village with the specific quality of something that had been built to last and had lasted, which was not the quality of the surrounding area.
Group B had been moving through the village for twenty minutes with the methodical attention of people who had been told to look for signs of life and were finding, consistently and comprehensively, that the signs were absent. Not the kind of absent that suggested evacuation — not the telling disorder of a place that had been left in a hurry, belongings still on tables, doors left open, the debris of interrupted living. This was a different kind of absent. The specific, thorough quiet of a place where nothing had been left, because nothing had been given the opportunity to be left behind.
Yang had stopped counting the things that were wrong with this village and had started simply cataloguing them.
"Tower looks intact," Turuk said, from the base of it.
He went up.
Weiss followed, her glyphs carrying her alongside the exterior with the efficient grace of someone who has used this for enough different applications that altitude is no longer a concern. Daikon floated beside her — the specific, unhurried levitation of someone who treats the ability to do this as entirely unremarkable — and the three of them examined the tower's operational status with the focused attention of people who expect to find damage and are finding something more confusing than damage.
Everything worked.
The relays were intact. The power systems were operational. The transmission hardware was functional. There was no obvious reason — no blown component, no severed connection, no damage of any kind — why this tower had gone silent.
Turuk crouched by the main panel and looked at it with the expression he used when something was declining to make sense.
"It's not broken," he said.
"Which means it didn't break," Daikon said.
"Which means it didn't send the distress signal because it failed," Weiss said, arriving at the same conclusion. "It sent the distress signal while it was still working, and then went silent afterward."
"Or someone turned it off," Turuk said.
The three of them looked at each other with the specific expression of people who have arrived at an implication and are not enjoying the destination.
They came back down.
"Grimm?" Yang asked, when they reached the others.
Turuk looked at the surrounding area. At the specific quality of the destruction — not the tearing and crushing and impact damage that grimm produced, the organic chaos of creatures that fought with strength rather than precision. What he was seeing had a different signature. The craters were too deliberate. The burn patterns were too specific. The structural damage had angles that suggested directed force rather than blunt application.
"Grimm don't make craters," he said. "Not like these."
He walked forward, and the others followed, and the village opened up in the specific way that places open up when you move further into what they're hiding.
What they found stopped him.
The smell arrived before the sight did, which was the specific mercy that situations like this sometimes offered — a moment of preparation, however inadequate, before the visual confirmation of what the smell was telling you.
Turuk stopped walking.
Daikon, behind him, read his posture and put a hand on his arm briefly — not stopping him, just acknowledging what was about to happen.
What they saw was not something that had a clean description. Bodies, arranged by forces that did not include the people the bodies had once been — contorted, burned, impaled on pieces of their own environment. The blood was everywhere. Some of it had been drawn into arrows, deliberate marks pointing upward toward something, someone, that had done this and either was still nearby or had decided that what it had already done was sufficient to the occasion.
Turuk looked at it for a long moment.
His hands closed into fists.
Yang heard him almost lose the contents of his stomach and came around the corner and stopped and covered her mouth, and Weiss came around behind her and made a sound that was very small and very controlled and then went very still.
Daikon said nothing.
He had the expression of someone who has found something they were not prepared to find and is deciding what they are going to do about the person who is responsible for it.
The anger that moved through Turuk was not the hot, immediate kind. It was the colder kind — the kind that arrives when you have seen something that should not exist and the anger at its existence becomes the only thing you can feel for a moment.
He looked up.
The green-skinned figure was standing on the roof of the highest remaining structure, arms crossed, looking at them with the specific quality of something that had been expecting someone to find this eventually and is not particularly concerned about being found.
It was bipedal. Roughly humanoid in the general geometry. But the specifics were alien in the literal sense — the skin tone, the pointed ears, the two antennae that rose from its forehead. The armor it wore had no kingdom's crest on it and bore no relationship to any military tradition any of them had encountered.
Behind it, the soldiers.
Hundreds of them, arrayed with the organized patience of people who have been told to wait and are waiting.
Turuk saw them register his group and raise their weapons, and he was moving before the decision to move was fully formed — the specific speed of someone for whom the space between threat identification and response had been compressed by training into something that was less thought than reflex.
He appeared in front of Yang.
The blast hit his forearm and dissipated against his ki.
He absorbed three more, and Daikon was already moving, the two of them working the deflections with the economy of people who had done this before, each redirected blast finding a surface away from their group and announcing itself against stone or earth.
The soldiers fired again.
Turuk's ki ignited.
The white flame of it rose around him with the specific heat of something that had been stoked by what he had just seen, and the soldiers who had been advancing with the confidence of a numerical advantage made the rapid assessment that the numerical advantage might be insufficient and began to revise their approach.
They charged anyway. Orders were orders.
"Get angry, Saiyan!" the green-skinned figure called down, with the quality of someone watching something they find specifically entertaining. "That's it! Let the fury rise! When your rage has peaked, our real battle can begin!"
Yang heard this and arrived at several conclusions simultaneously.
The first was that this creature wanted Turuk angry — was deliberately feeding the anger, using the scene of massacre as fuel for something it wanted to provoke.
The second was that Turuk was giving it exactly what it wanted, and that every second he stayed in the rage was a second this thing was winning.
The third was that she was not going to let that happen.
She fought through the soldiers with the specific focus of someone who has identified a priority and is moving toward it through whatever is in the way. Weiss and Daikon covered her flanks, Weiss's glyphs creating corridors through the press of bodies, Daikon's ki blade finding the gaps that Weiss's positioning created.
They reached Turuk.
He was in the middle of the soldiers and he was dealing damage in the specific way of someone who has stopped calculating and is only feeling, and the damage he was dealing had a quality to it that Yang recognized from the night at Junior's — the specific quality of someone whose limiter has been removed, and who will regret the removal later when the cost of it becomes visible.
She grabbed his face.
She pressed her forehead against his.
"Turuk."
She said it with her teeth gritted and her eyes open and everything she had, and the impact was sufficient — the specific shock of unexpected physical contact cutting through the fog of combat-rage the way a sharp sound cuts through disorientation.
He blinked.
He was back.
He grabbed his forehead, which was making its objections known.
"Gah —"
"There you are," Yang said.
She hugged him before she had finished deciding to, pressing her face into his shoulder with the specific relief of someone who has been holding something tightly and is finally able to set it down.
Turuk went still.
He could feel her shaking slightly — not much, just the fine tremor of something that had been very controlled for a long time and was releasing by degrees.
He looked at his hands.
At the blood on them.
He thought several things about himself in rapid succession, none of them generous.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have—"
"No," she said. "You shouldn't have." She pulled back enough to look at him, and her eyes were bright in the way of someone who has been crying without making a decision to. "Don't do that again."
"I won't," he said. He meant it in the specific way of a promise rather than an intention.
He looked at her hand, took it, and guided it briefly to the side of his own face in the specific gesture of someone acknowledging that what she did was the right call and that he is grateful she made it.
"I owe you," he said.
She almost laughed. "You owe me a date," she said, which was the specific tone she used to turn serious things into manageable ones.
"Done," he said.
She stared at him. "I was — you know what, fine. We're going on a date."
"Yes," he said.
"At the festival."
"Yes."
She turned away to hide the specific quality of her face, which was doing something she was not prepared to share with anyone at this particular moment.
"Don't look so smug," she said.
"I'm not looking smug," he said. "You can't see my face."
"I can hear your face."
The green-skinned figure dropped down from the roof and landed in front of them with the impact of something that has made a considered decision about where it wants to be.
"Finally back with us, Saiyan?" it said.
Turuk looked at it.
The rage was still there. He knew how to hold it now, where to put it — not in his hands, not in the air around him, but somewhere internal where it would fuel rather than consume.
"Still here," he said. "Who are you?"
Part II — Group A: Ruby and Nova
Location: Tenkawa Village Center | Simultaneously
The soldiers with the blaster gauntlets had several things in their favor when they opened fire on Group A: numerical superiority, coordinated timing, and the specific confidence of people who had done this before and found it effective.
What they did not have in their favor was Nova Belladonna and Ruby Rose.
The blasts came in sequence, and the two of them moved through them with the specific synchronization of people who had been training together long enough that the adjustments were below conscious thought — Nova deflecting the ones aimed at Ruby, Ruby deflecting the ones that arrived at angles Nova's position didn't cover, each of them occupying the gaps in the other's coverage with the automatic ease of a system that had been tested repeatedly and had stopped failing.
Jaune and Pyrrha were less comfortable with the energy-blast format than with what they'd trained for, and the first exchange cost them significant ground before they found their footing. Jaune's shield absorbed what his aura could handle, and Pyrrha's polarity found the metal components of the gauntlets and applied gentle pressure that disrupted the aim without the soldiers understanding why their shots were going wide.
"Move left," Pyrrha said, very quietly, to Jaune.
He moved left.
The blast went right.
"Nice," he said.
She didn't have time to answer because three more were already in the air.
Nova and Ruby were pressing forward through the soldiers with the combined force of two people who had trained for this specifically — not for this exact scenario, obviously, but for the general truth of it: that the space between two coordinated people was a different kind of space from the sum of two individuals, and that things operating in that space encountered a different category of problem than they had prepared for.
Ruby drove her elbow into a soldier's guard, redirected the momentum into the next one behind him, and swept both of them sideways with the footwork that Nova had spent months making into something that didn't require her to think about it.
She didn't think about it.
She felt the gap at her left and knew Nova was filling it.
She felt the pressure at her right and pivoted into it rather than away, which was the specific counterintuitive thing Nova had taught her that now lived in her body rather than her memory.
Two more soldiers went down.
She backed against his shoulder without looking. He felt her arrive and adjusted one inch, and they were back to back, and the next several seconds were the specific kind that happen when two people who have been in each other's orbits for long enough find themselves in a context that makes the orbit visible.
The soldiers learned about the orbit the hard way.
When the immediate press had thinned, Nova caught Ruby's eye.
She caught his.
"There are too many for us to address individually," he said. "I want to try something. Stay close and brace."
She nodded.
He looked at Jaune and Pyrrha. "Back up. Anchor yourself if you can."
He didn't explain further, because there wasn't time, and because Ruby was already relaying the message with the specific shorthand she'd developed for situations where the explanation came after.
"Trust him, back up, brace for something big," she said, and moved to stand beside him.
Pyrrha pulled every metal surface in the immediate area toward her shield and Jaune's, creating a barrier that she drove into the earth with enough force to serve as an anchor. Jaune dug his heels in beside her.
Nova crossed his arms over his chest.
He gathered ki the way he had been taught — not the directed, targeted kind he used for specific applications, but the expansive kind, the kind that was less a weapon than a statement. He pulled it inward until it was dense enough to feel like pressure from the outside, and then he released it.
The release was not quiet.
Group C felt it from across the village.
The ground shook — not briefly, not with the single-impact quality of an explosion, but with the sustained tremor of something that had come from a source rather than a detonation. Then the wind, which arrived with the specific character of air that has been given a direction by force rather than by weather. Then the bodies, which cleared the treeline above them and landed at distances that communicated something about the force that had launched them.
Blake watched two soldiers impact the ground twenty meters away with the flat certainty of people who had not expected to be traveling.
She knew that specific quality of ki.
She had grown up in proximity to it.
"Nova," she said, to herself.
"Bit overboard," Scarlett said, appearing at her shoulder with the specific tone of someone who has known bit overboard from a young age and has made peace with it.
"He does that."
"He really does." Scarlett looked at the settling debris. "They're fine. Let's keep moving."
Part III — Cui's Ceiling
The soldiers who remained standing after Nova's release were the ones on the edges of it — the ones far enough out that the force had carried them backward rather than through them, and who were now reacquainting themselves with upright posture with the specific urgency of people who have just been comprehensively educated about the hierarchy of a situation.
Their scouters were giving them conflicting information.
The reading they had gotten initially was 3,000, which was the number Nova had been showing them, which was the number he had decided would be appropriate for this stage of the encounter. The reading they were getting now was something else, and then it was nothing at all, because the device had gone to its upper limit and beyond it and had stopped being a useful instrument for this purpose.
Cui looked at the soldiers.
"Idiots," he said, with the fond exasperation of someone who has been working with inadequate tools for a long time. "A Saiyan's displayed power level is never their actual power level. It is the number they have decided you should see." He looked at Nova. "The actual number is somewhere considerably higher."
"How much higher?" one of the soldiers asked.
"More than you," Cui said. "Considerably more than you. That's why you're standing back there and I'm standing up here."
He looked at Nova with the specific attention of someone who has been in this profession long enough to recognize what he's looking at.
"Sixty thousand," he said. "Average, for a Saiyan of your age and constitution. More, accounting for the specific quality of your ki." He tilted his head. "Though I suspect average doesn't quite apply in your case."
"It doesn't," Nova said, which was not a boast. Just an accurate statement.
"How refreshing," Cui said, "to meet a Saiyan who's honest about their ceiling." He dropped into a stance that was, in the specific way of people who have been trained by serious people, the kind of stance that communicated this is not the casual posture I've been using until now. "Shall we find out where yours actually is?"
Ruby led Jaune and Pyrrha away from the central area with the specific purpose of someone who understands battlefield geometry and has identified where she is not needed.
"We give him room," she said.
"You're sure?" Jaune asked.
"He handles better with space," she said. "And he won't be worrying about us if we're clear."
Pyrrha looked at the two combatants — at the specific quality of what was about to happen, which she could read the way she read most combat situations, which was quickly and accurately.
"He's been holding back," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Since we got here," Ruby confirmed.
"Why?"
Ruby considered this. "Because he wanted to see what Cui was capable of before committing. That's how he fights — he reads first, then applies what the reading tells him."
"And now he knows?"
"Now he knows."
Jaune looked at her with the expression of someone who has been friends with Ruby Rose for long enough to have revised several of his assumptions about her. "You've learned a lot about how he thinks."
"We've spent a lot of time training together," she said, which was accurate and also contained several other accurate things that she did not elaborate on at this moment.
"You like him," Jaune said.
"Jaune," Pyrrha said.
"I'm just—"
"Jaune."
He stopped.
Ruby looked at the ongoing engagement between Nova and Cui and felt the specific warmth that had taken up permanent residence in her chest since the campfire in Mountain Glenn.
"Yeah," she said. "I do."
The fight between Nova and Cui had the quality that fights between significantly mismatched opponents sometimes had — the one that was doing better was doing it with a certain quality of leisure, not out of cruelty but out of honesty, because this was the pace at which they were actually operating and there was nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise.
Cui was good. Nova had no particular interest in not acknowledging this. The alien moved with the specific efficiency of someone who had been doing this for a long time and had been good at it for most of that time, and the exchanges in the early part of the fight had the quality of a genuine assessment — two people finding out what the other was capable of before the fight proper began.
Nova matched his speed without committing to his speed.
He absorbed the exchanges without returning them at full weight.
He let Cui read him as something approximately competitive, which was the specific technique of someone who wants to know where their opponent's confidence comes from before they remove it.
When Cui axe-kicked him into the ground and stood over the resulting crater and said "Is that all there is to you?" with the tone of someone who is beginning to feel they've been right about this whole thing, Nova looked up at him from the base of the crater and did a very specific thing.
He smiled.
It was not the smile of someone who is amused.
It was the smile of someone who has been waiting for this moment specifically.
He closed his eyes.
The midnight-colored aura arrived around him — the specific quality of his semblance when it was being used intentionally, the way shadows organized themselves around a person when the shadows had been asked to. Cui swiped at the position Nova had occupied and found that the position Nova had occupied was no longer where that was.
The scouter gave him nothing.
Saiyans. Impossible to track when they chose not to be.
He was still processing this when the impact arrived from a vector that should not have been available, and the ground made a new acquaintance with Cui's body, and the trench that resulted was a reasonably accurate measurement of the force that had been applied.
Cui rose from the crater.
He was beginning to understand that he had made an error. Not in the mandate — the mandate was correct. In the assessment. He had assessed a number and concluded from the number that the fight was manageable, and he had forgotten the fundamental problem with assessing Saiyans by their displayed numbers, which was that the displayed number was not the number.
He let his own ki rise. Let it build to the level that had resolved most of his previous engagements.
Nova watched it arrive and looked at it with the expression of someone watching a candle being lit in a room that had windows.
"You know," Nova said, "that's actually a good look for you. Very dramatic. Cui, right?"
"You will regret that," Cui said. "Know your place, filthy Saiyan monkey."
Nova's eyebrow moved approximately two millimeters.
This was, in the scale of Nova Belladonna's expressions, the equivalent of someone else's table being flipped.
Ruby, from a distance, identified the specific quality of this and developed a specific concern about what came next. She had learned, over months of close proximity, that there were very few things that produced that expression. The monkey comment was one of them, and she had never quite figured out why except that it was apparently connected to something deep and instinctive that predated any memory he had access to.
The thing that came next was thorough.
It had the quality that thorough things sometimes had — not dramatic in the way of a story, but comprehensive in the way of a fact being stated repeatedly and with increasing emphasis. Cui attempted to establish ground. Nova removed the ground from the negotiation. Cui attempted to find an angle. Nova was not at the angle when Cui arrived there. Cui attempted to land something significant and occasionally succeeded, which was to his credit, and occasionally found that significant was a relative term, which was to Nova's.
The final exchange had the quality of a closing argument.
Nova appeared in front of Cui with the specific stillness of someone who has stopped doing anything except the last thing.
He gathered the ki into his palm in the way that produced the specific dense, concentrated pressure of a thing that had been given a direction and intended to go there.
"Nighty night," he said.
The wave went out.
When it subsided, the space where Cui had been was empty in the specific way that things are empty when the thing that was there is no longer a matter for concern.
Nova lowered his hand.
He turned.
Ruby was there.
She ran at him and hugged him, which she did with the specific force of someone who has been watching a thing from a distance and is very glad it is over, and he put his arms around her and they stood like that for a moment in the specific quiet that follows large events when the immediate danger has passed.
"You okay?" she said, into his shoulder.
"Fine," he said.
"That looked like it hurt."
"Parts of it."
"Good." She pulled back. "Don't let him call you that again."
"Noted."
Pyrrha cleared her throat.
"Ruby," she said. "May I ask you something?"
"Sure," Ruby said, stepping back from Nova.
"How long have you been able to fly?"
Ruby blinked. Looked at her hands. Looked at the space she had been occupying, which had been approximately three feet off the ground.
"Oh," she said. "That." She thought about when to start counting. "Since Nova started training me, so — a few months? I'm still not very good at it."
Jaune and Pyrrha looked at each other.
Then at Ruby.
Then at Nova, who had the expression of someone who has processed this conversation and is waiting for it to reach a natural conclusion.
Then at each other again.
"Okay," Jaune said.
"Okay," Pyrrha confirmed.
"We should find the others," Nova said, which brought everyone's attention back to the immediate practical situation.
They moved.
Part IV — Group B: The Green Figure
Location: Tenkawa Village | Simultaneously
The soldiers were down.
Not all of them — enough of them that the ones still standing had arrived at a collective assessment of the situation that involved reconsidering their position in it. Turuk had come back to himself, which had required Yang headbutting him, which was the kind of thing that worked specifically because of the specific nature of Yang's relationship to the concept of subtlety.
Weiss and Daikon had covered the flanks throughout, Weiss's glyphs creating barriers and acceleration lanes while Daikon's ki blade found the gaps between the two functions and made itself useful in them.
The green-skinned figure dropped from the structure it had been watching from.
It landed in front of them.
Up close, it was taller than it had seemed from elevation — the specific way that some things are larger when the distance between you and them has been removed. The antennae moved slightly, which appeared to be autonomous rather than intentional. Its eyes were assessing the group in front of it with the focused quality of something that was genuinely evaluating rather than performing evaluation.
"Back with us," it said, to Turuk.
"Still here," Turuk confirmed.
The anger was contained now — not gone, not manageable in the way that manageable meant small, but organized. The thing that had happened to the village was still in him and was still driving things, but it was driving in a direction rather than in all directions simultaneously.
"Who are you?" he asked.
The figure smiled. It had the quality of a smile that someone practiced because they thought it conveyed something they wanted to convey, rather than a smile that arrived because something produced it.
"You don't know?" it said. "Your people didn't tell you about us?"
"My people didn't tell me much," Turuk said.
The figure looked at him with something that was, possibly, genuine curiosity. "Then this is an interesting situation," it said. "I've come here to eliminate a Saiyan population that doesn't know what it is. That's—" It paused. "Unusual."
"Eliminate," Daikon said, from Turuk's left. Not a question. Just making sure the word had been received.
"That's the mandate," the figure said. "Saiyans represent a specific category of threat. The remaining ones need to be addressed." It looked at the village — at the specific quality of what had been done to it. "I've already been thorough with the local population, who unfortunately were in the way."
Turuk's ki flared.
Yang put her hand on his arm.
Not stopping him. Just — here.
He felt it and contained the flare. Directed it.
"You did this," he said.
"The soldiers did this," the figure said. "I directed them."
"Same thing."
"Philosophically, perhaps." The figure settled into a stance that was, in the specific way of someone who had been training for a very long time, the kind of stance that communicated readiness rather than intent — the posture of someone who would fight when the fight was correct, not before.
Turuk felt the power coming off it and arrived at a rapid assessment.
It was not Cui's level.
It was considerably above Cui's level.
He also felt something else — the specific sense of a second significant power somewhere in the vicinity, not yet engaged, but present. Two threats, and they were already in the middle of one.
"Yang," he said, very quietly.
"I feel it too," she said, which confirmed she had been tracking it.
"We need to be efficient here," he said.
"Very," she agreed.
The figure across from them watched this exchange with the patient attention of someone who had time.
"Whenever you're ready, Saiyan," it said.
Turuk looked at it.
He looked at Yang beside him, at Weiss and Daikon flanking.
He looked at the village — at what had been done here, at the specific quality of it, at the reason he needed to be very clear right now about what he was and was not going to allow himself to become in this fight.
Not for anger, he thought. For the people it happened to.
"Ready," he said.
★ END OF CHAPTER TWENTY ★
Next: Chapter Twenty- One — "Lost Heritage, Part II: Against Lord Slug, the Evil Super Namekian"
A/N: This time it features the characters of each group: Group A- Nova, Ruby, Jaune, and Pyrrha, Group B: Yang, Turuk, Daikon, and Weiss, and Group C: Blake, Scarlett, Aiko, Ren, and Nora.
Hey guys, hopefully you enjoyed the chapter. I hope I did okay with the fight scenes... seeing as I'm not the best at intricately detailing them in writing lol. As you can tell by the title, the next chapter will have a larger focus on Group B and their fight with Slug.
Thought I'd add in some bonding between Turuk and Yang, just to give their relationship a little more depth before I start taking it
in the direction I envision. So yes, this will probably start Yang's attraction to Turuk. But it will take a bit so don't worry I'm not rushing it.. though it may seem so at times. I assure you, I have a plan in mind for Turuk x Yang. Aiko will have a pairing,don't worry... it's just.. later on. Have to build the ground work for it first 😆.
Anyways that's all for now, see ya in the next chapter!