Ruby was perched in the tallest tree she could find, watching a nevermore through Crescent Rose's scope.

The nevermore was a mile or two away, and it was staring at her. It couldn't see her, of course, but it could sense her negative emotions. Despite this, it wasn't actually flying at her. It was the perfect age: young enough to be scared of a single student, but old enough to act on that fear and stay away.

Ruby hugged the trunk, holding as still as possible to keep the scope steady. She was already wearing earbuds plugged into her scroll, and she gently hit the play button, trying not to jostle Crescent Rose.

A home-study lecture series on linear algebra started to play. She listened to it intently, trying to follow along. It was really hard without being able to see the screen. The professor narrated as he wrote on the chalkboard, but holding all of that state in her head was mentally taxing.

After a few minutes, the nevermore started to lose interest in her. In her experience, nothing crowded out negative emotions like trying to do math in your head.

The nevermore finally looked away. It shuffled its feet, reorienting to face north-by-northwest. Ruby looked up from the scope, finding her scroll and pausing the lecture.

She had a local map of the forest, which she annotated with her best guess of the nevermore's location, and the direction it had looked after losing interest in her. Hopefully Jaune was in that direction.

She didn't have any bars, or she would have tried to call him. There was something infuriating about being within a few miles of the CCT without any signal. Not even the short range mesh network was working. Jamming the forest during initiation made sense - it would be trivial to meet up with people, otherwise - but Ruby had really hoped they would make an exception after what happened to Jaune.

After she'd landed, there had been an endless stream of Grimm to fight off. At first she'd been able to hear the blasts from Pyrrha's shotgun nearby, but they'd quickly grown fainter, the girl presumably trying to escape the swarm of Grimm.

Ruby had considered trying to follow, but had decided that the best thing she could do was try to keep the Grimm off of them. Fortunately, keeping the attention of Grimm was practically her specialty.

She'd gone to a pretty dark place, just to make absolutely sure they all flocked to her, and once the last one was gone she'd just sat on the ground and bawled her eyes out for a solid five minutes.

At least nobody was there to see it. She hated letting people see her cry. It made her feel like a kid, but more importantly, she didn't want anyone worrying about her. It was her job to worry about people.

Ruby's eyes flicked to the corner of her screen. 60% aura remaining. She'd probably burned about 20% defying physics for as long as she had, and then she'd taken a couple hits in the fight afterward.

Ruby sat glumly for a second, then shook her head, sliding down and hopping branch to branch until she reached the forest floor.

There was no point sitting around feeling bad. Honestly, it was probably a good sign the network was still jammed. Surely if a student had died, professor Ozpin wouldn't just continue initiation like nothing had happened? Last night, when he'd spoken of the student who died in the nevermore attack, he hadn't sounded like he took such things lightly.

Ruby looked at the map on her scroll, plotting a course in her head. She wouldn't be able to use the interface with her semblance active. (Not even by pushing. Or, at least, she'd never been able to push hard enough to make her scroll's processor speed up.)

Her semblance had been on a hair trigger ever since landing in the forest. It made sense; her stimulation levels were through the roof. Honestly, even without what happened to Jaune she would probably be pretty ready to go. Between the Grimm, the stakes, the excitement, the novelty, the urgency, and the little puzzles like how to find other students and the temple, this was her element.

Just thinking about it like that was enough. Her semblance tipped again, the sensation intimately familiar, and as soon as it did she took off as fast as she could toward Jaune's probable location.

While she ran through the eerily still forest, she tried to keep herself distracted. It wouldn't do to show up with a trail of Grimm behind her, which meant she couldn't let her mind linger on Jaune's bloody-

Nope. She couldn't let her mind linger on that.

Instead, she tried to think of ways they could locate the temple. Ozpin had said it was no more than a day's travel on foot. That was maybe 30 miles? Call it 100 in case he was accounting for aura?

A hundred-mile radius was way too much ground to search. There had to be a better way...

~o~O~o~O~o~

It took Ruby over an hour of tracking before she detected any sign of human life. Even with her semblance to cover distance quickly, finding Grimm that would point her in the right direction was arduous. And after all that work, all she would get was the rough direction of a moving target.

She had apparently gotten close enough, though. She heard a low boom, barely audible, but unmistakably the sound of dust. She couldn't identify the type; she was far enough away that only the low tones made it to her. Maybe a mile, with the way the forest would break up the noise?

In her current state, the surge of excitement from the noise was enough to tip her semblance all on its own, and in a moment she was off, dashing toward the sound.

~o~O~o~O~o~

It wasn't Jaune.

After a few subjective minutes of running, with one semblance reactivation in the middle, she finally emerged into a large clearing, the source of the noise clearly visible in the very middle.

It was the small girl with white hair that had caught her staring on the airship ride over. There were a handful of boarbatusk bodies scattered around her, unmoving but still in one piece. That made sense, actually. Ruby could see now that the girl was holding a rapier. They were probably full of tiny holes.

Standing in front of the girl was a yawning black chasm. An ursa, when she blinked and looked again. It was big, bigger than any Ruby had ever seen, but not truly ancient. The gnarled white bones that pierced out through its hide were too rough and messy. An ancient ursa, god forbid, would have a more complicated pattern, with more regularity. She'd heard that the oldest of Grimm could look beautiful, in a perverse sort of way, just from the intricacy of their bonework.

The beast's feet were trapped in a jagged patch of ice. That must have been the sound Ruby heard. It was a nasty piece of work, covered in wickedly sharp spikes that stuck out at odd angles. Ruby watched as the ursa slowly, ever so slowly, strained against its prison, the spears of ice drawing small trickles of blood as it pressed against them.

The trap didn't look like it would hold much longer.

The girl had her rapier pointed at the ursa, her mouth set in a hard line, but her face otherwise stoic.

Ruby felt her semblance start to slip. She had maybe thirty seconds?

She jumped toward the abomination, something in the back of her mind roaring in approval even as she dispassionately considered how best to disassemble it.

The bone structure on its head was too well-developed to lop the whole thing off in a single strike. The creature's mask had grown back toward its shoulders in interlocking plates, even as the spikes on its back had curled forward into a crude cage around its neck.

Grimm bones were no joke. Ruby didn't want to cut through that unless she had to.

Its eye sockets were big enough that she could drive her entire scythe blade straight into its head, avoiding the skull entirely, but she'd been warned that wasn't always enough to stop older Grimm, and it would take time to line it up. She didn't want to be near it when her semblance wore off.

She was thinking about this wrong. She wanted to end the horrible thing so badly, it was distracting her from her actual goal. What could she do to make sure it didn't maul anyone while her semblance was down?

Her eyes darted to the creature's paws. They were overdeveloped, too, but the exposed bones had grown into spikes and extra claws instead of defensive structures. The joints of the wrist were mostly unprotected.

Ruby deployed Crescent Rose as she closed the distance, trailing him behind her. She ducked under the ursa's arm and drew Crescent Rose across her body as she passed, sliding the blade directly into the delicate junction between paw and forearm.

Grimm didn't have souls, and so there was no aura to resist the brutal physics of a razor-sharp scythe blade hitting its flesh at superhuman speeds. The hide, fur, and muscle parted like overripe fruit, and then Crescent Rose was digging into bone.

The bone was harder. The thing's internal skeleton must have been more developed, too, because Crescent Rose started to slow as she dragged him through the dense bone, finally stopping a little over halfway through.

Ruby considered using a gravity shot to finish the cut, but she only had twelve left. Instead she held onto Crescent Rose as tightly as she could, jumping up like a pole vaulter going backward over the bar, and kicked the ursa's claw as hard as she could with both feet.

That did it. The bone gave with what would probably be a sickening snap to anyone hearing it in real time.

That had taken longer than she'd hoped. She could probably get to the other arm before her semblance collapsed, but she didn't want to risk it.

Ruby was in the air from her kick, which was unfortunate. Her semblance didn't make gravity affect her any more strongly than normal, so leaving the ground meant she'd be stuck floating in the air for a while. It was one reason she'd settled on such a long weapon, all those years ago.

She used Crescent Rose like a push pole, shoving herself off the Ursa. She sent herself to the side, toward the tree line.

Time started to speed up again just as she left the creature's range, and by the time she'd skidded to a halt on the dirt, the world was back.

The ursa roared in pain, impossibly loud, the sheer volume forcing her back a step as it began to thrash. The ice at its feet groaning ominously.

The white-haired girl unleashed a blast of energy from the tip of her rapier, but jerked as she did so, her head turning to follow Ruby and throwing off her aim. The activated ice dust went wide, mising by several feet.

They both stared at each other for a second. Ruby was wondering how in the hell that girl was getting activated ice dust to cohere over that kind of distance, and the girl was presumably wondering exactly what had just happened.

The girl gathered her wits first, to her credit, frowning and jerking her head back toward the struggling ursa. Ruby got the message, but there wasn't much she could do. She didn't want to get anywhere near that thing without her semblance up.

The ice at the ursa's feet finally gave, and then it was after her.

Ruby had been expecting it. Grimm always went after her first. When she'd been younger, she'd thought it was because of her mother. Pure narcissism, in retrospect. But it had been easy to believe, as a child, that nobody else's grief could possibly compare to hers.

For a while they'd thought that it was her semblance; that the negative emotions she felt while accelerated built up somehow, and proved irresistible once she was thrust back into normal time. But the effect didn't seem to get stronger or weaker based on how much she used her semblance. And in any case, it wasn't like the Grimm were detecting her from farther away, like they would if she was giving off strong negative emotions. They just tried to kill her first, if they could.

For now, all she was sure of was that the Grimm hated her as much as she hated them.

The ursa lumbered at her, shockingly fast even with its awkward three-legged gait. Ruby had put herself very close to the edge of the clearing, and she took off running into the trees. She was fast even without her semblance, but the ursa was faster; she needed to put some obstacles in between them.

The monster was maybe thirty feet behind her when it entered the forest. It slammed into the trees like a bowling ball the size of a cottage, bending or toppling them as it ran, barely slowing.

That wasn't good. Ruby's heart started to pound. She'd underestimated its raw physical strength and speed. Nothing natural could bulldoze through trees like that, even at that thing's size.

Safety first, then resource conservation. When she realized the thing was still closing, she fired a gravity round straght down, flinging herself into the air.

Even the oldest ursas couldn't fly. Gravity rounds were a foolproof way to buy time for her semblance to recharge against grounded Grimm.

Or at least, they always had been. The ursa below her didn't even hesitate. It swiped out with its intact paw and ripped a thirty-foot tree from the ground, roots and all, flinging it at Ruby like a spear.

Ruby's eyes widened. That was impossible. It shouldn't have enough articulation in its paws to hold objects. And throwing things with any accuracy required specific primate musculature that a Grimm patterned after a bear shouldn't have.

The tree flew past her, missing by several feet, but the ursa was already grabbing another. This time it threw the tree sideways, so a larger surface was coming at her, although it still looked like it would miss.

Ruby didn't wait around to see what it thought up next. She fired another gravity round, aiming herself back toward the clearing.

Her semblance still wasn't up. Sometimes it was back in seconds, sometimes it took over a minute. She'd never managed to work out a pattern.

She landed hard in the clearing, rolling to break her fall but unwilling to spend another gravity round to slow down.

The white-haired girl was still standing there, rapier out in front of her, pointed at the hole in the tree line where the ursa had barreled through.

She wasn't even looking at Ruby, just staring intently at the toppled trees and torn-up ground.

Sure enough, the ursa hurtled out of the same hole bare seconds later. It was already running more smoothly on its injured leg.

The girl let out another burst of activated ice dust, straight at the beast, but the monster banked hard and dodged it. Ruby had no idea how she'd caught it before. Maybe the same way, and it was too smart to be caught out twice.

Her uncle had told her, he'd told her, that older Grimm were dangerous because they were so much more intelligent. She'd believed him, of course, but she'd believed him on a rational level. She was quickly acquiring a visceral understanding that she needed to treat this thing like a real opponent.

The ursa was charging at her again. 200 feet. 150. She breathed deep and readied Crescent Rose. She'd use more gravity shots if she had to.

The girl flourished her rapier, and an impossibly intricate pattern of glowing white lines materialized in the air behind her. An instant later, she was flying forward, a white blur. Another glyph appeared under her once she was between Ruby and the ursa, her speed vanishing the instant she touched it.

The ursa reared, surprised but not caught off-guard, and swiped at her with its enormous claw.

No! screamed a voice in the back of Ruby's head. Her semblance still wouldn't activate, but she sprinted forward anyway, determined to do what she could.

As the ursa's paw descended, the girl brought up her thin rapier, and another glyph appeared, this one colored blueish green. The Ursa's claw slammed into it and bounced off. The creature was thrown off balance, tumbling to the girl's side and rolling over and over on the dirt until its momentum was exhausted.

Ruby didn't quite believe her eyes. That was cyan dust, it had to be. Nothing but a cyan energy shield could take a blow like that without moving even a millimeter. But that was the sort of tech you saw on Atlassian dropships, not the kind of thing a teenage girl could produce on demand in the middle of a forest.

What was this girl's deal?

The ursa was struggling to find its feet. The girl turned, her face still locked in that neutral mask, and after a few seconds of buildup issued another ice burst.

Her target slammed its paw into the ground, throwing up a screen of dust and rocks. It really didn't want to be trapped again, apparently. The ice blast impacted the cloud of debris, solidifying early and falling to earth as an enormous spiky snowball.

The ursa turned its attention back to Ruby, finally getting its feet under it. They made eye contact, and the creature's eyes flared a noxious yellow-red, so bright it made her eyes burn.

Ruby realized she was still running straight at the beast, and exactly how stupid that was. She had over half her aura, enough gravity rounds to get out of its range, an ally, and her semblance coming back online any second now - but in that moment of eye contact, she wondered, just for a second, if she was going to die.

The beast bared its teeth at her, and some utterly irrational feeling in the back of her mind told her it was smiling at the thought.

Maybe that was the push she needed, or maybe her semblance's inscrutable timer was just up, but Ruby felt her fear and anger mix into the calm stream of thoughts from the part of her mind that was still trying to figure out how to win this fight, the conglomeration washing over and through her, the world slowing down to a pace she could handle.

It wasn't the strongest surge she'd ever felt, but it was pretty darn good.

She probably had a few subjective minutes. She had to end this now.

She waded through the thick air until she reached the nearly-stationary Grimm, and began to take it apart with surgical precision.

First she removed its other paw, knowing ahead of time that she'd need to kick it off.

Next she leaped into the air, driving the point of crescent rose deep into its left eye socket.

It got less than six inches in before stopping.

This thing had bones in its brain?

Ruby withdrew the blade and started the chamber in Crescent Rose rotating, swapping out her gravity rounds for something more appropriate.

While that happened, she ducked underneath its bulk, running toward its hindquarters while drawing Crescent Rose along its underbelly.

When she made it to the legs, she swung Crescent Rose in a vicious arc, driving his point straight into the back of the creature's left knee.

It sank in easily, not managing to pierce the kneecap, but doing a lot of damage. She twisted it as she drew it out, leaving behind a gory mess of torn muscle and severed ligament. She did the same to the other knee.

She glanced down at its feet, but the thing's legs were almost twice the diameter of its arms. Not worth the effort.

She made sure to cut another gash in its underbelly as she returned to the creature's front. They might end up having to bleed it out.

Crescent Rose's chamber finished rotating, explosive rounds ready to fire.

She had a little extra time, so she hopped up on top of it. The armor around its neck and head looked close to impenetrable, but there were a few patches of plain black near the middle of its back.

She swung Crescent Rose like a pick, driving the point as deep as she could into any spot of black she could see, trying to hit the spine. One of them felt like it might have connected.

She decided not to double-check. Her semblance was still holding, but she didn't want to push her luck. She ran back to the beast's front, leaping off its mask, and planting herself a ways away, facing it head-on.

It might have been her imagination, but it seemed like the world was moving just a little bit faster.

She drove Crescent Rose into the ground, using the scythe blade to stabilize the barrel, and looked down his sights at the beast's mask. Wrong, wrong, wrong a voice in the back of her head cried as the creature's face filled her entire vision. It's wrong for it to be here.

She pushed her semblance, just the tiniest bit, enough that she could squeeze off three shots in rapid succession without internal friction foiling her. A handful of rose petals fluttered out of her barrel in the wake of each shot.

Her aim was almost perfect. The first bullet hit the beast's left eye, passing through effortlessly. The resulting explosion had already started to ricochet around inside whatever messed-up bone-filled skull the creature had when the second bullet reached it. The movement from the explosion screwed up her aim a little, but the right eye was big enough that the second bullet still passed inside.

The third had been aimed down its gullet, but the head had moved enough by the time it got there that it ended up hitting the lower jaw instead.

Yup, the world was definitely speeding up. Ruby started Crescent Rose rotating back to gravity rounds, in case she needed to make a quick escape, then dashed back, putting herself about two hundred feet from the creature, directly away from the girl in white.

If she'd underestimated this thing again, and it charged at her, maybe the other girl could catch it from behind with one of those blasts.

Time snapped back to normal. The creature roared again, its vocal cords straining until it was almost a screech, as its body erupted in a dozen sprays of blood. Its back legs crumpled, driving it to the ground, where it thrashed mindlessly.

The ursa was still moving, but either it was too hurt to function, or Ruby had managed to knock out its higher brain functions with her explosive rounds.

The other girl leaped over the barrier of ice-encrusted dirt, directly at the ursa. Confusion flashed across her face as she saw the state it was in, and she created another glowing glyph in mid-air, changing her direction. She landed about fifty feet from it, pointed her rapier, and after a brief pause where nothing seemed to be happening, activated ice dust shot through the air.

The creature had no chance of dodging, and its lower body was quickly enveloped. The girl fired another blast, then another, totally encasing everything except the head.

The beast couldn't move an inch. It couldn't even seem to draw the air to bellow, its death noises shrinking to a hideous whine.

Ruby approached, cautiously.

The girl shot her a brief glance, but kept her eyes trained on the ursa. She seemed remarkably composed given the circumstances.

"What did you do to it?" she asked. Her voice was melodic and articulate, with just the tiniest hint of a whine to it. It sounded like the voice of someone halfway done growing up from a bratty kid into a refined young lady.

"Removed the other front paw at the joint, or slightly above it, mangled the insides of both knees, carved open a handful of arteries in its belly, hopefully punctured its spine, and detonated 20 grams of dirty burn dust inside its skull. Er, or the parts of its skull accessible through the eyes, anyway."

There was a pause, where neither of them seemed to know what to say. The beast continued its struggles from the head up.

"What's 'dirty' burn dust?" the girl asked, in a conversational tone.

"Burn dust with an unusually large quantity of contaminants, usually heavy metals. Not really safe to use as a propellant, but fine as a payload and slightly cheaper. Er, fine as a payload against Grimm. Using it against humans is considered a war crime under the great treaty. Nasty stuff. I salvaged a bunch of it from-"

"Fascinating." the girl interrupted her, sounding slightly annoyed.

Ruby realized she was rambling. She was a little wound up.

"What I meant to ask, though," the girl continued, "is whether 20 grams of dirty burn dust is anywhere close to as energetic as 20 grams of regular burn dust, and if so, why this thing is still moving."

"Um..." Ruby began. Things felt awkward now. "Yeah. It's a lot of energy. The inside of this thing's head is weird, though. I tried stabbing it in the eye, and I hit bone a few inches deep. I think it might have some sort of segmented brain structure. Its bone structure is fascinating, actually. It seems like it started with a normal ursa exoskeleton, but then the bones specialized as they grew. The bones on its arms grew into weapons, see, but the bones on its upper back grew into a defensive cage, even though they both started out the same. And the internal bones are larger too. I wonder if-"

The girl glanced at her again, briefly, and Ruby shut up.

"Of course," the girl said. "Obviously you had time to vivisect the damned thing. Do you think it will die on its own?"

"Er..."

Ruby had no idea, actually. You were supposed to be able to bleed Grimm out, if nothing else worked, but between the headmaster's warning yesterday and the surprises she'd already had from this thing, she wasn't prepared to assume.

Ruby briefly considered just leaving it here, trapped, but she couldn't stomach it. This thing was almost done, and something inside her demanded they finish the job.

She realized she'd been silent for an awkwardly long time.

"Well...most likely it will bleed out, but I don't think we should rely on that. This thing could kill a student."

"I agree." The girl nodded. "If you would do the honors?"

Even Ruby could tell that "honors" in that sentence meant "dirty work", but she didn't mind.

She stepped over to the thing's head, considering how best to go about it. Honestly, there was no point overcomplicating things. She had as much time as she needed to saw through the bone and decapitate it the old-fashioned way.

"Could you freeze the head, as well? I want to saw through the back of the neck."

The girl huffed. "I don't have an unlimited supply of dust here, you know. I didn't realize I was going to be going on a multi-day excursion this morning."

Ruby wasn't sure how to respond to that. After a few moments, though, the girl sighed and obligingly froze the head, leaving just the back of the neck exposed. That was an impressive amount of control. Ruby was burning to ask her about it, but...

Priorities.

She put her hand on the base of the smaller blade at the back of Crescent Rose's head, tripping the quick-release with a thought, leaving her holding a long knife. With another thought, the smooth blade retracted, and a serrated one extended instead.

She knelt down before the cage of supernaturally hardened bone and got to work.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Ruby was embarrassed to admit that the beast had surprised her one last time. After sawing through the protective bone casing and entirely removing the ursa's head from its body, it was still twitching.

Turns out the ursa's bones weren't the only things which had proliferated as it aged.

The creature's brain was segmented, like she'd suspected, divided into nodules no more than six inches across. Each nodule was surrounded by a thick wall of bone, the only opening a cavern that wound back and forth inside the wall, eventually letting a thin bundle of neural tissue pass through.

There was a big cluster of nodules in the head, obviously, but there were more in a column that extended two feet down the spine. The creature clearly had trouble functioning with the head nodules destroyed, but just the spinal section seemed to be enough to keep it breathing and thrashing.

Ruby took some pictures as she worked, documenting the structure. Maybe this was a common thing among Grimm, but maybe not; she'd check with someone later just in case it was useful.

Was this why Grimm got more intelligent as they aged? Their brains metastasized inside of them, like some sort of horrible cancer, making them harder to fell, and also, purely by accident, smarter?

It took Ruby nearly half an hour to destroy the entire brain. She couldn't even use her semblance, since the work was so boring.

If Crescent Rose could transform into a drill, she would've been done in five minutes. In general it would be nice to have some way of getting through thick bone plates. Drills were impractical for most hunters, since the target needed to be stationary for them to work, but with her semblance...huh. That was a surprisingly good idea, actually. She pulled out her scroll and made a quick note of it.

When the beast finally fell still, Ruby didn't believe it for a moment. She paused in her work, holding her breath, looking for any sign of movement.

There was nothing. It was done.

Something welled up inside her, joyous and satisfied, so bright and strong she almost teared up. Hunting Grimm was always satisfying, but this, it was like...

It was like...

She sat there for a while, soaking in the feeling, every part of her down to her very soul resonating in perfect harmony with the monster's end.

Eventually, Ruby heard the sound of a throat clearing. She looked up to see the white-haired girl staring at her. The girl looked significantly more concerned right now than she had when the ursa was charging her. There was another moment of awkward silence.

~o~O~o~O~o~

Interlude: Weiss

Something was very wrong with this girl. Either she was rambling like a lunatic about things that didn't matter, or she was standing around in awkward silence. No in-between. It was unsettling.

Weiss had tried a little bit of banter, but it had all fallen flat. She'd tried poking a little fun, implying she was going to let the girl handle finishing the thing all on her own, and the nutjob had just started doing it.

She'd watched the girl saw through bone and flesh for half an hour, never pausing, except to take pictures of the damned thing, and never saying a word. Never looking unhappy, not even when she was shoulder-deep in the ursa's torso and the blood had permeated through her aura to stain her skin and clothes. Hell, she didn't even seem to notice that she was soaked. It wasn't normal.

And when she was done? She just kept sitting there, not saying anything, not making any eye contact, not a care in the world.

Weiss took a deep breath, centering herself.

She was falling into emotional thought patterns. She reached for her lessons, finding the cold clarity that Winter had worked so hard to impart.

She found the girl off-putting, but she couldn't let that strong subjective feeling dominate her decision-making.

They'd made eye contact. That was potentially problematic.

Was the girl an acceptable partner?

What did she even want in a partner?

She wanted someone strong. Check.

She wanted someone pliable. Uncertain, but the girl seemed agreeable enough, and willing to do unpleasant tasks.

She wanted someone loyal. Hard to tell beforehand, but the girl had jumped in to help. She certainly wasn't a selfish opportunist.

Everything else was negotiable. If she hated spending time around the girl, well, that was fine. She'd hate it, suck it up, and do it anyway. That was practically the Schnee motto.

The only real problem was that the girl might well be mentally unstable. Insanity was dangerous, and hard to account for, especially when it came with an aura attached.

Weiss cleared her throat, getting the girl's attention. The girl looked up at her, and Weiss searched her face, looking for anything that might be a hint.

Nothing.

This line of thought was pointless. Weiss had very real reservations about the girl as a partner, but what were her options? Withdraw her application? Attempt to strong arm the girl into withdrawing hers? They would be graded as a pair for initiation, now, so she couldn't even attempt to sabotage her.

Looking at it objectively, the girl's drawbacks as a partner just weren't severe enough to justify any of the costly methods of acquiring another partner that Weiss had available. If she was insane, well, surely Beacon had dealt with that problem before. Huntresses weren't the most stable people.

"Well," she finally said, all too aware of the hesitation in her own voice, "I guess we should introduce ourselves, if we're going to be partners."

~o~O~o~O~o~

Author's Notes:

1. The next update will also be on Saturday.

2. Weiss is probably one of the characters whose personality is going to differ most from canon. I realize this is a turn-off for some people, but I hope you'll keep reading. I promise it's going somewhere.

3. If you like or dislike the interludes, please let me know. I'm still trying to figure out the best way to do them.

4. If you liked or disliked the combat scene, please let me know. I don't usually write long combat scenes, so this is sort of new territory for me.