Everything is very simple in War, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction which no man can imagine exactly who has not seen War.

Chapter Text

Winter’s first fight lasted all of forty seconds.

Her sparring partner was selected almost completely at random, as the teachers did not yet have enough data on their students’ capabilities to make balanced matches. Winter, as a statistical enigma, was paired with a young man from the provinces who made a show of twirling what looked like a pair of bladed boomerangs from Menagerie. He’d offered Winter a brief salute before dropping into a fighting stance, something picked up from one of Atlas’ less-than-prestigious combat academies.

In retrospect, Winter realized it shouldn’t have taken her all forty seconds.

Only the fact that this was her first real sparring match had slowed Winter down. His weapon was heavy enough that it would’ve strained Winter to block it with her sword, but she was thrice too fast for any of his blows to come remotely close to striking her. After having spent almost twenty seconds cautiously circling her adversary, sizing up a man who’s fighting style was completely unfamiliar to her, Winter slipped inside his guard and obliterated his Aura before the audience could do much more than blink.

She sheathed her sword and slowed her breaths, doing her best not to think of what all those eyes on her were thinking.

It was an old tradition - though who started it nobody seemed to remember - that the Headmasters and Headmistresses of the major Huntsmen academies all taught one class a year. Something about keeping them from becoming pure administrators was the usual explanation. Professor Ozpin of Vale was teaching second-year philosophy this semester. Profession Lionheart of Haven taught fourth-years Advanced Grimm Metaphysics, of which he was a world-renowned scholar.

James Ironwood taught first-year History. Though there was far more than History being taught in those classes.

Most students (and some faculty) rolled their eyes at this, at the prospect of a series of boilerplate lectures they would have to pay more than token attention to. Nobody relished teaching Huntsmen-in-training social sciences courses, because that was not what any of them had enrolled to learn. The students, for their part, usually powered through the ‘mandatory breadth requirements’ with an efficiency of effort that would have been praiseworthy in another context.

Not Winter, of course. She was here to graduate summa cum laude from a program that still carried a lot of prestige. And as indifferent as she might ultimately have been to Atlas Academy’s educational curriculum, she had internalized her father’s belief that Schnees were, simply, better than other people. And like hell was Winter Schnee ever going to be anything less than the best.

Winter took the same front-and-center seat she always did. Unlike other Team Leaders, Winter didn’t insist that her teammates sit beside her whenever possible. As long as they kept their grades up Winter didn’t consider it her job to hold each teammate’s hand...

….or that of the already-dozing Chalk Adel, who would inevitably come mewling for her notes. Winter had already decided that Chalk was getting a hard no on any such requests, even if the Adel could decrypt her archaic shorthand.

Headmaster Ironwood strolled into the lecture hall a few minutes before class started, paying apparent scant attention to the students as he opened up a leatherbound attaché case and unpacked a few papers from it. Winter watched him with an observant eye. His movements were smooth and controlled, the gestures of a career military officer - Winter had been around enough growing up to know the type. Interesting enough a man as Ironwood was, Winter’s expectations remained fairly low. Career soldiers tended to be fairly similar, she'd found, and doubly so in Atlas, where homogeneity and predictability were prized. Ironwood’s lectures, much like his career, would no doubt be well-delivered, technically-proficient, inoffensive, and uninspiring.

His opening remarks did little to sway her of that belief. He made the formulaic statement that he would be teaching this course just like any other professor, and that he expected his students to treat him no better or worse. An impossible feat, of course, given that he was nominally one of the most powerful men in all of Remnant, but everyone nodded in agreement at the cue. He then dove into a lecture he’d probably given dozens of times in the past. Even Winter struggled to remain engaged.

“...The most important question, the one I ask all my students at the beginning of each semester, is why do we study history. Is it-”

A hand shot up from the back of the class, and a voice followed soon after: “Because those who fail to study history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them!”

The Headmaster visibly stumbled, clearly not having anticipated anyone actually taking him up on the whole ‘treat me like any other professor’ thing. “Yes, thank you, Miss Noir,” replied Ironwood, his cadence a little uneven. “...but that is ultimately a gross simplification.”

Winter blinked, slightly surprised at the avoidance of safe banality, but the Headmaster barreled onwards. “What lessons can be learned from the antebellum conflicts which comprise the majority of our course? I don’t think any of us are going to make the mistake of launching an army into eastern Vale without non-perishable supplies…. again." That earned him a few chuckles. "We are unlikely to respond to the Plague of Sneewittchen with bloodthirsty crusades as our ancestors did. Nor are we likely to fall under the sway of the Cult of the Grimm Resplendent, as occurred during the Witches’ Schism. The world of Remnant today is too dissimilar to that of pre-modern times for one to be an approximate analogy for the other. Certain lessons can be learned, I will readily concede, but there is a danger to always looking to the past for precedent and answers. We risk falling under the sway of false comparisons, of making our evidence fit pre-existing patterns, if we pursue that truism too vigorously.”

The Headmaster turned his back on the class, strolling back and forth in a comfortable form of pacing. “Some of my colleagues would disagree with me, but I would argue that, for the most part, the value of studying history as a military officer is learning how to think. When most of you think of history you no doubt groan at the prospect of memorizing an endless list of names and dates.” He smiled softly to himself. “There will be some of that, of course, but only so much as is required to understand the context and narrative of events."

“So, wait, there will still be dates on the test?” another student whom Winter was considering decapitating called out.

“Yes, Mister Rosa, there will still be dates. But as both a professor and an officer, I am far more interested in reviewing how you process information. Can you explain why events unfolded the way they did? Identify causal factors, if any can be teased out? That is what I expect you to take away from this course.”

Winter leaned back in her chair. She stared down at her notepad a moment later, blinking in surprise when she realized she hadn’t put pen to paper for the entirety of his digression.

Her second fight last longer, and was more satisfying, but it was a difference of a few degrees. Her adversary that time was another team leader, a spry woman with a quarterstaff who barely broke five feet. She knew how to use her Semblance, too - Winter didn’t know the exact mechanics, but it selectively increased the woman’s ability to absorb a blow, and rendered her completely immobile in the process. Something she actually used to her advantage to defy the laws of momentum with her staff.

It took Winter almost four minutes to take her down.

It was strange, fighting against someone with a completely unknown combat style (and who was actually competent with it). Heretofore Winter’s sparring partners had all been chosen by her father: reputable, retired Huntsmen who'd fought in the conventional manner she might expect an attacker off the street to employ. Experienced though they were Winter inevitably learned the patterns of their motions, the movements of their techniques, the intricacies of their little tricks. Those tutors had held very little of interest for Winter by the time she left for Atlas Academy.

Sparrow was different. She moved not like anyone Winter had ever fought, but like no woman she had ever heard of. It took Winter a long minute to realize that Sparrow seemed to be able to redirect her momentum at will, to spin and gyrate and dive at angles that defied Newtonian physics. Sparrow - consciously or otherwise - exploited Winter’s familiarity with conventional dueling exchanges, weaving and flowing in a way that Winter found maddeningly difficult to anticipate. The smack of the quarterstaff against her body was the penalty for her lethargy.

Winter’s Aura had dropped to below 40% by the time she figured Sparrow out. The devilish woman, for all her trickery, still needed to know where she herself was going. With years of training she might have figured out how to exploit her unpredictability to its maximum, but then and there, she relied on predictable vectors as crutches. Those Winter was able to deduce quick enough, and Sparrow was not a particularly skilled defensive fighter.

Sparrow turned at an angle that once again defied all the laws of momentum, only to find Winter’s swords already waiting for her. Sparrow was used to being overpowered - beaten by attacks she had no possibility of dodging or absorbing - but being out-maneuvered was something of a shock.

Winter’s breaths came fast and heavy as the siren that ended the match was sounded. She wiped the sweat from her brow and the smile from her face. It wouldn’t be proper to show just how much Winter Schnee enjoyed a good scrap.

A piece of what looked like scrap metal was laid across the desk at the front of the classroom.

At first Winter thought it was some bizarre prank, some bored students from the Engineering Corps fulfilling an Initiation requirement, or something. But the Headmaster strolled in, punctual as an Atlesian hyperloop, and took in the wreck of metal with one approving nod.

“For those of you who haven’t looked me up in the Encyclopædia Valencia, my background was originally in Engineering,” began Ironwood, in that soft-yet-formal tone of his. Winter had looked up far more than just his biographical article. “One of my first assignments was on the airship Vikare.” He paused, waiting for his audience to take that in. Despite it having happened decades before they were born, the destruction of the Vikare was still burned into the collective psyches of the youngest generations. “Yes, that Vikare. Before you ask any questions, let me tell you now that there were far fewer romantic liaisons in the engine bay then the movie would have you believe.”

Even Winter chuckled a little at that. She had watched that movie with Weiss a dozen times and still teared up whenever that famous 'Never say goodbye' line was uttered.

“Now you may have been too polite to ask aloud, but you no doubt are all wondering what this warped and blackened hunk of metal before me has to do with anything. Besides proving the structural integrity of my desk." Ironwood strolled up to his desk, one hand gently coming to a rest atop the hunk of metal. For a brief moment a sense of impropriety flickered through Winter's mind, as if she was watching a museum visitor touch a priceless artifact.

“This, as far as we have been able to determine, is all that remains of the dilithium overflow buffer from the Vikare. Those of you who are ahead of your readings for modern combat engineering” - and Winter most certainly was one of them- “will know that this is the capacitor through which all energy from crystalline Dust is ultimately processed. It is also forms the metaphorical ‘hull’ of modern airships. When we were attacked by the largest Grimm horde in twenty years, this was the piece of engineering we relied on to keep us in the air.”

He let that linger in the audience for a few long moments.

“If you're familiar with the Board of Inquiry’s findings then you'll know that, no, there was nothing defective with the buffer. No contractors cutting corners, no hubristic engineers, no damned foolish commanders.” It was clear to Winter that Ironwood was quoting someone unknown to them at the end there. “It had been thoroughly tested, both as a prototype and a finished product, against every conceivable Grimm attack we could simulate. Quite simply, the buffer failed because it was subjected to a high-resonance shockwave from a Sea Dragon-class Grimm that had never before been properly documented. We couldn’t possibly have planned for that, could not have tested or designed for it. And when the moment of truth came…”

The hulking heap of charred metal, warped and thrawn, was all the explanation he needed.

Team Battles were harder.

Winter was the Team Leader, true, but even she’d (grudgingly) admit that leadership was not her forte. She was a first-class tactician, to be sure, able to employ her teammates to the best of their abilities, but she commanded more than she lead. Winter had very little tolerance for screw-ups and slip-ups, no instinct for the gradual modulation of fighting styles required to form a coherent, capital-T Team.

She would never have made Team Leader at any of the other major Academies in Remnant, but Atlas was special for a reason. She was of noble birth, intelligent, well-spoken, and competent with technical details. She had ‘officer’ written all over her face, and in Atlas Academy, that translated exactly to ‘Team Leader’.

The relationships between the members of her Team were professional, and that was about the most that could be said. She inspired others by leading by example, by never asking anyone to do anything she herself wouldn’t... but that was it. She was not the Team Leader to talk to about a broken heart or a wounded ego. They trained, studied and fought together, functionally if not enthusiastically. Two of Winter’s teammates seemed to be drifting into a relationship with one another, and withdrawing from the rest of the team in the process. Winter felt herself unable to do anything but watch, at a loss for what if anything she was supposed to do.

Winter’s team was never defeated in any of their full-team training matches. In one semester that amounted to twelve wins, zero defeats, and one bout that was technically nullified due to a glitch in the Aura counters. In seven of those matches, Winter was the only member of her team standing when the referees finally ended things. On an individual level, that was an incredible record, the kind that started getting tossed about between the military recruiters who circled the Academy like buzzards. As a leader, however, it was very difficult to view that as anything but failure. A battle won with casualties of three-fourths of one’s force was a pyrrhic victory indeed.

Winter was at the top of every class, excelling like she had at everything she did in life and then some, driven by something deep within her psyche. She studied the hardest, trained the hardest, fought the hardest. Her Teammates were all respectable fighters in their own rights, some faster, some stronger, some tougher.

But none were better. And Winter didn’t know how to work with that. So, by and large, she simply didn’t.

“Someone more clever than myself once said that most men go through life not knowing they are cowards. While I disagree with his assumption that most men are cowards, I agree with the underlying sentiment. Most civilians, even those living beyond the walls of Remnant’s Kingdoms, will never be put in a situation where they willingly place their lives on the line. And if they do, it is because they are conscripts in an army, or pressed by their peers into a rural militia. Very few men will ever be tested to the point where their true nature is revealed. Because as was the case of the Vikare, it is all but impossible to create such a test.”

Ironwood paused for a moment, surveying his audience. “And before I get an angry Scroll message from the administrators, I should clarify that everything I’ve said applies to women as well.” There were a few polite chuckles at his light-hearted jibe, mostly to diffuse the tension of the remarks immediately preceding them. But Winter couldn’t help noticing that his eyes had lingered over her as he spoke them.

“Before we go any further, I would like to make it clear that, on the whole, I consider this to be a good thing. That so few men are subjected to the crucible of combat is a sign of civilization, not feebleness, as some armchair generals might complain on late-night talk shows.

“But those of you who choose to continue with the Atlas Royal Army will be challenged, in a way that neither you nor anyone else can entirely predict. The kind of ordeal that will show if you are another Vikare waiting to happen. Our literature is filled with legendary sagas of ancient heroes, but there is a reason there are no epics about men who were never tested.” There was no missing whom his eyes were wandering over that time.

“And on the subject of tests, please power down your Scrolls. The subject for the in-class essay will appear on the screens above momentarily…”

Winter Schnee, while undefeated in sparring bouts, didn’t actually have the highest record in Academy history. It wasn’t even all that close, since sparring matches had used to comprise a much larger percentage of the Academy’s curriculum a generation or two ago. Short of a complete overhaul of the Academy’s academic doctrine, Winter would never have the opportunity to beat the 99-0-1 record that had held for the last fifty-seven years.

That wasn’t to say she wasn’t very, very good.

Students in Atlas were paired up algorithmically, unless a teacher directly intervened. The algorithm weighed a number of variables, including win/lose ratio, but also the length of the matches and the Aura remaining at the end of each fight. Within a week of sparring Winter was the top-seeded combatant in her class. By the end of the month the computers had decided that there was no 1-on-1 match that could possibly be fair, and was pitting two adversaries against her at a time.

By the end of the second month, Winter didn’t get in the ring for anything less than 4-on-1.

Jacques Schnee may never have approved of his daughters’ more romanticist fantasies, but swordsmanship had been taught to every noble since before the Great War, and that meant that Winter had had all the excuses she’d ever needed to practice. Her father might have strongly discouraged her from Summoning - he had never quite been able to overcome that bit of jealousy that came with marrying-into the bloodline - but she’d had the best tutors money could buy for just about everything else.

Team SPQR was good, or at the very least competent, denying Winter the cathartic relief of a one-sided curb-stomp. And they had their pride on the line, because whatever Winter’s standing in the rankings, nobody wanted to be on the team that lost with that large of a handicap. So they kept their heads, communicated readily, strategized, and fought with the fury of ten men apiece.

There was no longer a way of disguising the fact that Winter Schnee actually relished a good fight...

“To say simply that it was a ‘decline in the moral fiber of the people’ is a dangerous oversimplification,” said Ironwood, in that firm yet fair tone of his. “I know that it is somewhat… satisfying… to blame the fall of the Evergreen Kingdom on the declining vigor of its people-”

“-They stopped caring about war,” piped up a student near the front, sounding scornful even as he spoke.

“If anything, they cared even more about war,” corrected the Headmaster. “If you were to look at court records for the Late Kingdom period, you see that everyone down to the lowest members of the nobility had a martial rank in their title. Swords and armor were part of all ceremonial dress. Military insignias were incorporated into family heraldry. How does a society so obsessed with war, honor and glory allow itself to be overwhelmed by nomads who’d been pastoral farmers not two seasons before?”

Even Winter Schnee, her pen flowing like quicksilver over her notepad, did not have an easy explanation for that.

“It is something of an unfair question. The nobility of the antebellum Kingdoms were almost a society of themselves. Perhaps the nobles were once in touch with the peasant classes they came from, but by the Late Kingdoms era the peasantry and the nobility barely knew the other existed. The nobles paid no taxes, built no public works, were accountable to no voters. They demanded - and were granted - the right to command armies, without ever having drilled as a footsoldier. If you ever read the Court Proceedings of the Althing, you can see how fundamentally bewildered the nobles of the day were by the fact that savage horsemen refused to lay down and die on their schedule. That peasant conscripts would not throw away their lives defending manors they were never allowed to set foot in."

Ironwood's hands clasped behind his back, the Headmaster strolling pensively as he ruminated. "To return to the point I made at the beginning of the semester: history does not repeat itself." He stopped pacing, staring out at his class. " But you are aware of the political realities of the present. I'm sure many of you are following the… developments… in Haven. History does not repeat itself, but it does, on occasion, rhyme."