Hey there everyone, I hope you guys enjoyed last Chapter! Back with part 3 of this mini arc. It's come to my attention that Turuk needs more screen time as I've primarily have been giving it to Nova and Team Rwby. I will be thinking of ways to give him more screen time.
And concerning the plot hole with Nova being the only one of the two to lose his saiyan name, I was planning on explaining the reasoning for that in an upcoming chapter. I also apologize if the romance still feels rushed for some of you, I really can't do much about that. But as I explained earlier, Turuk and Yang's relationship will develop a little more slowly, right now it's more of a one sided infatuation/close friendship than a romance like Nova x Ruby.
Another mistake I made, was introducing Aiko from seemingly out of nowhere according to some of you. I do apologize for that, as it wasn't thought through carefully on my part. The point about the saiyans knowing Ki suddenly, well.. I figured they would discover they had it eventually as they grew. There are points in the story I can't really fix at this point, so I do apologize for that. If some of you feel like you can no longer read this story because of plotholes or character development, or any other issue mentioned or unmentioned.. I don't blame you. My style of writing isn't for everyone and there are more talented writers on this site than myself if you feel like reading their works instead.
Those of you who like my story, despite it's flaws, I really appreciate it. I will do my best to make the story better for you guys. I'm only sticking close to rwby cannon for a little while longer. Volume 4 will go in a little bit of a different direction. Main parts of the cannon story will be there, it just won't be as close to the main story of Rwby as it currently is.
Anyways that's all I wanted to say for now, onto the story!
P.s.- I don't own Dbz/DBS or Rwby and their characters. Those belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth/ Monty Oum respectively. I only own the OC's and have permission to use two other oc's courtesy of ComparedDreadx.
A/N: insert Boku no Hero Academia opening 1- the day
Visuals: Characters of this story, along with Turles and Slug (since they're the first villains and true threat to the saiyans).
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE: Lost Heritage, Saiyan Not Faunus Part II-Against Lord Slug
Part I — The Namekian's Assessment
Location: Tenkawa Village Outskirts | That Afternoon
The figure that stood in front of Group B was conducting the specific kind of evaluation that predators performed — not the assessment of an unknown, but the categorization of a known. It had fought before. Many times. In many configurations. And it was sorting what it saw into categories it already possessed.
Two female humans. Two Saiyan males.
It looked at the weapons — the specific technology of Remnant, the dust vials, the mechanical complexity of things that were not armor and not ordinary tools and were clearly something else entirely.
What are those colored substances inside the mechanisms? it thought. Some form of Dust? An energy source?
Its eyes moved from the weapons back to the people holding them.
The humans would be manageable. The Saiyans would require effort.
It was also on a schedule, which it was not going to admit because admitting it would be a form of weakness, and Lord Slug did not acknowledge weaknesses. He was aware of them, as all competent fighters were aware of their constraints. He simply did not announce them.
He shifted into his stance.
Turuk felt it — the specific change in the quality of the air that happened when something that had been restraining itself stopped restraining itself. He had felt similar things from Nova, from Tarro, from Rhubar. The language of ki was not species-specific and he had been learning to read it for long enough that he caught the shift immediately.
"Spread out," he said. "Now."
Slug moved.
The speed of it was the specific speed of something that had been suppressing its actual velocity and was now expressing it, and the gap it covered in the fraction of a second between the decision and the arrival was not the gap anyone in the group had been calculating for.
The fist came down where they had been standing.
The ground accepted it.
The crater that resulted was the ground's honest acknowledgment of what it had received.
Yang looked at the hole. At the depth of it. At the radius.
She looked at the space where her feet had been a moment before.
"Had we stayed there," Weiss said.
"Flat," Daikon confirmed. "As a pancake. Which is a state I would prefer not to be in."
Weiss looked at him with the expression she used when she found him aggravating and was currently operating in a context where she couldn't devote full attention to expressing this. "How are you calm about that?"
"We're alive," Daikon said. "Calm seems like the appropriate response to being alive."
She made a sound that was the vocal equivalent of a closed fist and drew Myrtenaster. The argument, for the moment, was tabled. There were more immediate applications for her energy.
She went forward first.
The glyphs came up in sequence — the specific architecture of Weiss's combat method, which built its geometry around the principle that the fight was a problem with a structure and that finding the structure was more useful than hitting harder. She laid ice shards across the approach vectors, using the glyph-summoned trajectories to drive the angle of engagement rather than simply throwing things.
Slug watched the ice come toward him with the faint smile of something that finds this charming.
He opened his palm and blasted it.
The shards detonated in a cloud of steam and ice-fragment debris that spread across the engagement space in a specific way — not randomly, but in the pattern that resulted from the angle Weiss had chosen, which was not the angle that created the prettiest display but the angle that created the maximum visual obstruction along the vector she wanted him looking.
Yang came through the smoke from the side.
The contact was direct, close range, and expressed with the full commitment of someone who had thrown themselves into the moment without reservation. The gauntlets fired at point blank with the sound of Ember Celica making its clearest possible statement.
Slug dug his heels in.
His heels drew a line in the earth.
He looked at his smoldering midsection and then at the blonde standing in front of him with the specific assessment of something that has encountered unexpected data and is revising its model.
This was a human girl.
Humans did not do this.
He righted himself and launched back, and Yang met him, and the exchange that followed had the specific quality of a conversation in which one party has decided to be more honest than they had initially intended.
He found her fist more than once.
The second time, it carried the specific quality that certain blows carry — the kind that comes from somewhere deeper than training and more immediate than calculation, the kind that is not thought about on its way to the target. It hit him clean and launched him through two trees and into a boulder, and the boulder expressed an opinion about this by shattering.
The rubble settled.
Yang stared at her fist.
The knuckles were unmarked.
"When did I—" she started.
Weiss cleared her throat with the controlled precision of someone who is managing their own surprise. "Yang. Where has that been?"
"I genuinely," Yang said, "do not know."
She meant it. She could feel that she meant it, which made it more confusing rather than less. The power had been there — sudden, available, as if it had been waiting for her to need it and had arrived when summoned without being summoned. Like the semblance, in some ways, except not like the semblance at all, because the semblance she understood. This was something that had no name in any category she currently possessed.
It felt, disturbingly, like what she felt when Turuk was fighting.
She did not know what to do with that observation.
Slug emerged from the rubble.
He was done being entertained.
The specific quality of his expression as he pulled himself from the demolished boulder was the expression of someone who has decided that the portion of the encounter dedicated to assessment was complete and the portion dedicated to resolution was beginning.
His ki rose.
It rose in the way that things rise when they have been conserved and are now being released, the way a held breath sounds different from a regular exhale, the way the specific silence before a significant thing is different from ordinary silence. The ground beneath him cracked and gave way into a concentric pattern of damage that propagated outward from his feet, and the air around him did something that air did not ordinarily do, and the group of teens readied themselves for a different category of engagement than the one they had just been in.
Before any of them could move, Turuk was already there.
He had been watching the power rise and had made his calculation while Slug was still building, and the calculation was: interrupt before the ceiling is reached.
He hit him.
The impact of two significant powers meeting at speed produced the specific environmental consequence of such meetings — ground displacement, air disturbance, a sound that was not quite an explosion and not quite a crack but contained elements of both. They pushed against each other with the sustained effort of a deadlock, each finding that the other had more structural integrity than the initial contact had suggested.
Turuk summoned more.
Slug matched him.
The air between them did things that air preferred not to do.
Debris lifted from the ground in the specific way that objects lifted when the forces in their vicinity exceeded the force that was keeping them where they were.
Then Yang hit Slug from the side while he was occupied with the deadlock.
The geometry of the situation changed in Slug's disfavor.
Turuk's ki blade found the gap that Yang's impact created, and the exchange resolved itself with Slug taking a significant X-shaped line of damage across his chest and finding himself reconsidering several of his earlier assessments about the hierarchy of this engagement.
He looked at the blonde.
He looked at the damage she had contributed to.
He was a being of considerable experience and considerable intelligence, and the pieces were beginning to arrange themselves into a picture that was not the picture he had come here with.
She isn't using it intentionally, he thought. She doesn't know she has it. Which means—
His thought was interrupted by the sound of applause.
Part II — Turles
The figure that landed between the two groups arrived with the quality of someone who has been watching from a comfortable position and has decided to engage now that the entertainment value of observation has been maximized.
He was dark-skinned, dark-eyed, with black hair that rose in a shape that suggested someone had made a deliberate aesthetic decision at some point and had committed to it. The armor was similar in style to what the other soldiers wore but better fitted, in the way that things are better fitted when they belong to someone who is in charge rather than someone who receives orders.
The tail was unmistakable.
Brown, like Turuk's. Like Nova's.
He was clapping with the leisured rhythm of someone who appreciates a performance they have already decided the outcome of.
"Having trouble with students, Slug?" he said. "You're losing your touch."
Slug's expression moved through several stages before settling on something that was approximately controlled fury.
"Turles." The name came out like a weather event. "We had an agreement about timing."
"Did we?" Turles looked at his hand as though he had mislaid the agreement and could not locate it. "I can't quite recall. I was bored, and this looked interesting." His eyes moved to Yang. Then to Turuk. Then around the engagement space with the specific attention of someone cataloguing. "More interesting than I expected, honestly. You're actually having difficulty with a human girl."
"The human girl," Slug said, through teeth that were doing significant structural work, "is not behaving like a human girl."
"No," Turles agreed. He looked at Yang with the focused attention of someone who has identified a data point they had not previously accounted for. "She isn't."
He walked forward in the specific way of someone for whom the concept of threat landscape had been categorized and found manageable.
"That sudden strength you felt, girl," he said. "Do you think it belongs to you?"
Yang looked at him. She had approximately twelve things she wanted to say, and she was running them against each other to identify which one was worth saying first.
"Don't answer," Turles said, which resolved the selection process. "The change in your blood has already begun. Whether you like what I'm about to tell you or not — you are not what you thought you were. And you haven't been for a while."
"What does that mean?" Weiss asked, because someone had to.
"It means," Turles said, still watching Yang, "that this girl is in the process of becoming a Saiyan. A dormant hybrid, waking up. The proximity to active Saiyan ki has been accelerating something that was already in her." He paused. "I suspect there's another one nearby in a similar state."
Yang felt something cold arrive in the middle of her chest that had nothing to do with temperature.
"That's—" she started. "That's not possible. I'm human."
"Are you."
He raised his hand.
The binding came from nowhere with the specific sensation of something wrapping around her from the outside — not painful, not violent, just conclusively present, the feeling of a decision being made by something external to her that her muscles had no say in.
She could not move.
She could feel, very specifically, where her body was and what it wanted to do and the complete impossibility of getting the two things to agree with each other.
Turuk moved toward her immediately.
"Relax," Turles said, without looking at him. "I'm making a point, not making a casualty. If she can break it, she's not human anymore. If she can't—" He allowed the alternative to suggest itself. "Either way, she'll know what she is."
"And if she chooses not to play your game?" Turuk said.
"The binding has a time limit after which it tightens," Turles said. "So she doesn't really have that option."
Yang looked at the invisible thing holding her in place.
She looked at her hands, which were telling her they wanted to move and finding that the telling was insufficient.
She was angry.
This was not a new condition for Yang Xiao Long, but the specific quality of this anger was — it was not the hot, combustive anger of someone who has been physically provoked or someone she loved had been threatened. It was colder than that and deeper. The anger at being told what she was. The anger at being put in a position that had no good options and had been designed by someone else to have no good options.
The anger at the specific expression on Turles's face, which was the expression of someone who already knew the ending.
Screw him, she thought.
Screw his ending.
"Yeah?" she said, through her teeth. "Well." She took a breath that was not quite a breath — it was something older than breathing, something that reached down into whatever was below the level of breathing. "SCREW YOU."
She screamed.
It was not the theatrical kind of scream. It was the sound that certain things make when they stop being contained by the space they've been occupying — when the container breaks because the thing inside it has outgrown the container's capacity.
The binding shattered.
Not came undone. Not released. Shattered, with the specific violence of something that has been overcome rather than overcome.
And around Yang Xiao Long, a clear, white aura rose — blazing like fire but structured like intention, the specific quality of ki when it belongs to someone who doesn't know they have it and is expressing it for the first time at full volume.
She landed.
The aura was still around her, flickering at the edges like a flame that hadn't decided yet how large it wanted to be.
She looked at it.
"Weiss," she said.
"I see it," Weiss said.
"Can you explain it?"
"I cannot," Weiss said. "Not even a little."
Turles looked at the aura with the expression of someone who has had a theory confirmed and is experiencing the specific satisfaction of empirical validation.
"There it is," he said.
Turuk grabbed her shoulders before she could start processing this in whatever direction alone processing would take it.
"Yang."
She wasn't responding — her eyes were on her hands, on the aura, on the specific reality of what she had just done and what it suggested about what she was.
"Yang," he said again.
Nothing. The dark hole of shock was deeper than shouting could reach.
He did what Yang had done for him.
He pressed his forehead to hers.
"Yang Xiao Long." He said the full name, both words, in the tone of someone who is calling something back from a distance. "Look at me."
The impact of forehead against forehead produced the same result it always produced when applied to this specific situation, which was the abrupt end of the internal spiral and the beginning of an awareness of the immediate and physical world.
"Ow," she said. "What — Turuk, what—"
"You're here," he said. "You're standing. You're not in the hole anymore."
She grabbed her head. "That really hurts."
"I know." He was already offering his hand. "I'm sorry."
She looked at him. At the hand. At his face, which was doing the expression it did when he had done something he thought was necessary and was hoping she agreed.
She took the hand.
"That's twice now," she said.
"I know," he said again.
"I'm counting."
"I know."
She pulled herself to her feet and looked at him with the specific quality she had when something had happened that she was still too close to to process fully but which she was going to process very thoroughly later.
"Turuk."
"We have to deal with that first," he said, looking at Turles.
"After," she said.
"After," he confirmed.
She almost smiled. And then she looked at Turles and the almost-smile became something else, something that had the quality of someone who has just found out what they are and has decided that finding out is going to have consequences for the person who thought that knowledge would be paralyzing.
Part III — The Rest of the Board
Daikon and Weiss had been managing Slug's soldier population with the specific efficiency of two people who have been arguing with each other for long enough that their combat partnership has developed its own rhythm independently of whether the arguing has resolved anything.
"On your left!" Daikon said, dispatching a soldier on his right.
"I see it," Weiss said, dispatching the one on her left that he'd been about to mention.
"Good."
"I didn't need you to tell me."
"I know. I was confirming."
"You were telling me."
"I was confirming what you'd already identified."
She made the sound. He did not respond to the sound because responding to the sound was what it wanted, and he had learned, over months of working with Weiss Schnee, that the sound was frequently better left to dissipate than engaged with directly.
Three soldiers converged on her from different angles.
He was between two of them before they reached her, ki blade dispatching one while his elbow addressed another, and his foot found the third before it had finished committing to its approach.
She looked at the space where the three soldiers had been.
"Thank you," she said.
"No problem, princess."
"Don't—"
"Weiss."
She stopped.
He looked at her with the expression he used when he was being genuine rather than teasing, which she had learned to distinguish because the genuine one didn't come with a smirk. This one didn't.
"There are too many of them," he said. "We need the others."
She looked at the field of incoming soldiers. At the two significant threats beyond them — Slug, who was regrouping; Turles, who was watching Turuk and Yang with the patient interest of someone who is not in a hurry because they are confident of the ending.
She thought about the specific quality of that confidence.
"We need Blake's group," she said.
"We need all of them," he agreed.
They did not have to wait as long as they feared.
Ruby came in from overhead — specifically, from a landing angle that resulted in her boot introducing itself to Slug's face at a velocity that expressed the full weight of the introductory sentiment.
"Back off!"
She landed beside Weiss with Crescent Rose in hand and the specific expression of someone who has assessed the situation in the process of arriving at it and has already identified the priority targets.
Nova was a breath behind her.
Jaune and Pyrrha came in from the ground, adding their force to the engagement perimeter.
"More soldiers," Nova said, looking at the field.
"They really don't quit," Ruby observed, which was approximately the same assessment.
He looked at her. She looked at him.
They slipped into the back-to-back configuration without discussing it, which had become the specific posture of two people who have trained together long enough that the positioning has its own gravity.
The soldiers learned, again, about the gravity.
Nova glanced past Ruby's shoulder toward Turuk and Yang, and then at Turles, and then at Slug, and then back at the immediate situation, which was the soldiers in front of them and the necessity of addressing the soldiers before the more significant problems could receive the attention they deserved.
He thought about Tenkawa, and the bodies, and what Scarlett had told him about the second significant power she'd been sensing, and he opened the mental link.
Blake.
The response came with the specific quality of someone who had been expecting this call.
I felt it, Blake said. We're already coming.
Bring everyone, Nova said. All of it.
We know, Scarlett said, which meant she had been in the link the whole time. Nora is going to be very happy about this.
How long?
Minutes.
He closed the link.
"They're coming," he said, to Ruby.
She nodded, which was the nod of someone who had already assumed this and was glad to have it confirmed.
"Until then," she said.
"Until then," he agreed.
They kept moving.
Slug watched the new arrivals engage his soldiers with the specific expression of someone recalculating the parameters of a situation they had believed to be resolved.
He had been planning to let them exhaust themselves on the soldiers and then address them when they were diminished.
This was becoming a more extended plan than he had anticipated.
He watched the dark-haired boy and the silver-eyed girl work through his forces with the economy of people for whom this had already been assessed and categorized, and he thought about what Turles had said — dormant hybrid, waking up — and he thought about the girl's silver eyes, which were a color he associated with something he couldn't quite place, and he thought about the specific quality of power he could feel building at the edge of his awareness from the direction of the forest to the northeast.
More of them.
He looked at Turles.
Turles was looking at the forest.
"Your timeline," Turles said, without looking at him, "is shorter than you thought."
"I'm aware," Slug said.
"Adjust accordingly."
Slug felt the vein in his head make its familiar structural complaint and ignored it, because there were more immediate things requiring his attention than Turles's commentary, and because acting on the vein's complaint would result in a fight with Turles that would solve nothing and waste time he did not currently have.
He turned back to the engagement.
He would have to be efficient.
Part IV — What Was Coming
Location: Tenkawa Forest | Simultaneously
Group C had been moving through the forest with the focused attention of people following a trail that was getting louder rather than quieter — a trail made of ground vibrations and displaced birds and the specific quality of the air when something significant has been happening nearby for long enough that the environment has absorbed the fact of it and is expressing this absorption in the only language environments had available.
Blake was tracking the ki signatures.
She had been tracking them since the first vibration, since the specific quality of the second tremor had told her something she recognized as her brother's particular signature at a higher output than she had felt from him before.
"He's angry," she said.
"He's fighting," Scarlett corrected. "Angry is a secondary condition. The fighting is the concern."
"What are we heading toward?" Ren asked.
"At least two significant threats," Scarlett said. "One of which I've been tracking since we arrived. The other appeared more recently."
"How significant?" Ren asked.
Scarlett considered this. "Significant enough that I'd like to arrive before they become an emergency."
"BATTLE!" Nora said, which was not a question and was not a concern and was the specific expression of someone whose relationship to the concept of significant threat was one of enthusiasm rather than apprehension.
"Yes," Scarlett said. "Battle. Let's be thoughtful about it."
"CAN WE NOT BE THOUGHTFUL AND JUST RUN?"
"Let's be both," Aiko suggested, which resolved the disagreement by incorporating both positions.
They ran.
The forest edge opened onto the village outskirts with the specific clarity of a view that told you everything about what had been happening while you weren't watching it.
The soldiers were extensive.
The craters were extensive.
The two significant figures at the center of things — one green, one the specific dark skin of someone whose ki signature Blake had been tracking and who was not who she expected to find when she found the second source — were extensive in the way that things are extensive when they are significantly above the ambient level of concern in a situation.
Nora looked at all of this.
"Oh," she said.
Then: "LET'S GO!"
Magnhild answered the call.
From the edge of the treeline, a figure in a mask watched.
The battle below had acquired the specific quality that battles acquired when they reached the stage of having enough participants that the outcome ceased to be simple to predict.
She watched the blonde girl with the blazing aura.
She watched Turuk position himself between Yang and Turles.
She watched Nova and Ruby work through the soldiers with the specific coordination of two people who had been shaped by the same training and had found each other in it.
Her hand was on her sword.
The sword was not drawn.
Not yet.
But the quality of her grip had changed.
Part V — Nova and the Field
The soldiers were beginning to understand something about the situation that they had not understood at the beginning of it, which was that the number of them was not the variable they had believed it to be.
Numbers were a force multiplier when the individual units had relevant capability. Against the specific capability of the people working through them now — Ruby with ki and scythe and two months of training that had made her body into something her enemies did not have a category for, Nova with the efficiency of someone who had been doing this since before he had a frame of reference for not doing it, Jaune and Pyrrha with the coordinated precision of months of rooftop sessions producing visible results, Daikon with the ki blade that addressed the gaps in everyone else's geometry, Weiss with the glyph architecture that had been making fighters better than their individual components for the duration of the engagement — numbers were becoming a progressively less significant variable.
The soldiers communicated this to each other in the way that groups of people communicated things without deciding to, which was through the specific quality of their collective behavior shifting from advance to manage.
Nova noted the shift.
He noted it in the way he noted most tactical information, which was below the level of explicit thought — as a texture change in the engagement that informed what the next action should be rather than being processed into language and then into decision.
He looked at Ruby.
She caught the look.
She was already moving to the angle that the look had suggested.
They were not doing this consciously.
They had stopped being conscious about it some weeks into the training, at some point that neither of them could identify precisely because it had not been a moment — it had been a gradual change that had accumulated until one day they had both noticed that they were not thinking about it anymore, and that noticing had itself been below the level of explicit thought.
He thought, briefly, about Rhubar and Sala moving through the battle at Vale — the unconscious awareness of each other's position, the small adjustments that kept them from ever occupying the same danger simultaneously.
He did not finish the thought, because the engagement required his attention.
But he filed it.
The soldiers were down to the numbers that could be managed by the group working on them, which meant that the two significant figures at the center of the situation were becoming the center of everyone's attention.
Nova looked at Turles.
Turles was looking at him.
The look had the specific quality of a look that went between two people who had assessed each other and arrived at different conclusions from the same information.
Turles's conclusion, Nova could read: A Saiyan. Capable. Young. Interesting.
Nova's conclusion about his own conclusion he would examine later, when there was time for it. Right now there was a field with soldiers still in it and two threats that had not been addressed and a group of people he needed to keep track of.
"Ruby," he said.
"Yeah," she said.
"Stay visible to me."
She looked at him. "You too."
He nodded.
They went back to work.
★ END OF CHAPTER TWENTY -ONE ★
Next: Chapter Twenty-Two — "Lost Heritage, Saiyan Not Faunus Part IV: Revealed Heritage — Yang's Secret Origin"
Ending song: Black Clover ED 12- A Walk
Visuals: Heroes of this story (main cast)
Whew! And done! Hopefully you guys enjoyed this chapter! Sorry for taking so long to update this, I was working on some of my other stories for awhile there. Next chapter won't be as long of a wait as we'll be nearing the end of this little mini arc before the cannon events of Volume 3 of the RWBY story begin. I thought some more development between Turuk x Yang and Daikon x Weiss wouldn't hurt since I haven't really focused on them a ton so far. And.. I made a mistake in an earlier chapter that I'll do my best to correct.
As you noticed... I'm making Yang into a mixed saiyan hybrid, the origin which will be revealed later. Thought it'd be a unique little twist since most stories I write I end up turning one of the main girls into the species of the main character to match their strength somewhat lol. In case you're worried that all humans who have pairings with saiyan characters will end up becoming saiyans themselves... don't worry about that. I won't do that with every human character, that'd be a headache to write. There's only certain characters that will happen to. And by that I mean only 2.
Anyways, why don't we send things off with a couple polls?
If Blake does have a pairing in this story, who should she end up with?
A. Sun Wukong
B. Shallot (later in the story)
C. Male Faunus (volume 7 lol don't remember his name)
D. Male write in suggestion
I know I've asked this before.. but who should Aiko end up with?
A. Shallot
B. Giblet
C. Oscar Pine (volume 5)
D. Rivalry between Shallot and Giblet for Aiko's attention/love
E. Other write in scenario with another male character
Anyways that's all for now! See you guys in the next one!
Next time: Chapter 21- Lost Heritage III: Revealed Heritage; Yang's secret origin