CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Gods Among Us, Part II: A Destroyer God's Trial
Part I — The Match That Had to Look Like a Match
Location: Amity Colosseum | That Afternoon
The arena reconfigured itself into rock and forest and the bones of something ancient, and Team NDTSA took their positions with the specific economy of people who had decided, collectively and without needing to discuss it, exactly how this was going to go.
"Five percent," Daikon murmured, settling into his stance.
"Generous," Scarlett said.
"Realistic," Nova corrected. "We need it to look hard. Not look easy and be hard to believe."
Across the arena, Team BRNZ took up their positions with the confident, unbothered posture of a team that had trained well and had no reason to suspect the specific category of opponent currently across from them.
The referee's hand went up.
"Begin!"
What followed had the quality of music played by someone capable of considerably more difficulty than the piece required — technically present in every note, emotionally convincing, and entirely within a range that left enormous unused capacity sitting just below the surface.
Turuk met Brawnz's clawed gauntlets with the specific calibration of someone counting force the way you counted seasoning — a little less, then a little less than that, until the collision read as evenly matched to anyone without the senses to know better.
Scarlett took to Roy with open delight, weaving through rifle fire with the fluid, generous looseness of someone enjoying herself within a box she'd agreed to stay inside.
"Is that all Shade's got?" she called, grinning, and meant it as encouragement more than mockery.
Aiko traded shots with May in what looked, from the stands, like an exceptional but believable sniper duel — her wolf-sharp hearing tracking the report of each shot before the bullet had fully cleared the barrel, her own returns landing with the specific precision of someone who could have ended this on the first exchange and was choosing, deliberately, not to.
Nova absorbed Nolan's electrical barrage on his forearms, let the current run through him without complaint, and released it back in a controlled pulse that knocked the boy backward without doing anything his aura couldn't recover from in a few minutes.
"Incredible electrical resistance!" Port's voice rolled through the colosseum, delighted. "What tactical adaptation!"
It was not adaptation. It was restraint wearing the costume of adaptation, and the costume fit well enough that nobody questioned the fitting.
One by one, Team BRNZ's aura percentages dropped below the threshold, and one by one they were called, and the crowd cheered each elimination with the genuine pleasure of people watching a well-fought match resolve the way well-fought matches resolved — decisively, but not suspiciously so.
When the buzzer sounded, Team NDTSA stood in the center of the arena breathing slightly harder than the match had actually required, which was its own kind of performance, and the crowd gave them the ovation a clean victory earned.
In the VIP section, Beerus watched all of it with the specific attention of someone cataloguing a thing that had confirmed an earlier observation.
"Calculated," he said. "Precisely enough force to win decisively. Nothing more."
"Five percent of capacity," Whis estimated, glancing at a reading only he could see. "Perhaps less."
Nova looked up at the section where the two of them sat, and felt the specific quality of an exam that had concluded its easy portion.
"Well done, everyone," he told his team, accepting the crowd's cheers with the appropriate expression. "Now comes the hard part."
Part II — The Floor Clears
Beerus stood.
The movement itself was unremarkable — a being rising from a seat — and yet the air registered it the way air registered a pressure change before weather, and every person in that arena with even a fractional sensitivity to ki felt something shift in the room's fundamental temperature.
"Whis," he said. "It's time."
"Of course, my lord." Whis tapped his staff against the floor with the cheerful efficiency of a man closing one item on a checklist and opening the next.
Nova felt it from the arena floor — the specific change that told him, before any announcement could, that his turn had arrived.
"Clear out," he told his team, and his voice carried enough weight that nobody questioned it. "This isn't the tournament anymore."
Port's voice crackled over the intercom with the strained calm of someone reading from a script he hadn't been given. "Ladies and gentlemen, an unexpected development. Please remain seated while we assess the situation."
The crowd's cheering thinned into something more uncertain. They could not have said what had changed. They knew, in the specific way crowds know things without information, that something had.
In Nova's earpiece, Ozpin's voice arrived tight and careful.
"He's coming down. Are you ready?"
"As ready as anyone can be," Nova said, "for this specific thing."
He did not feel ready. He felt the way he had felt at the edge of the trench in Tenkawa, looking at the bottom of something he was about to need to find — present, willing, and uncertain in the specific way that didn't prevent him from going forward, just made the going forward honest about its cost.
In the prep area, Ruby felt the same shift land in her chest.
"He's really going to do it," she said, finding Yang's hand.
"Nova's strong," Yang said. "Stronger than we knew, before all this."
Blake's ears were flat against her skull. "He's our little brother," she said, very quietly, to no one in particular. "How did we get here?"
Nobody had an answer that made the question smaller.
The arena emptied in the specific organized panic of officials managing a situation they did not fully understand but understood enough to take seriously. Team BRNZ was ushered out. The vast space, which a few minutes ago had held thousands of cheering voices, settled into a quiet that had its own particular weight.
Beerus arrived on the arena floor.
He did not appear to walk the distance from the VIP section so much as simply resolve himself into being there, the way certain things in stories happened between sentences rather than within them. The air around him had a thickness to it that was not heat and was not pressure and was, Nova thought, possibly just what it felt like to be near something that operated according to different physics than the ones holding the rest of the room together.
"Disciplined," Beerus said, looking at him. "Five percent in the match. Restraint is rare in young Saiyans."
"Power without control is worthless," Nova said. "I was taught that."
"Your parents teach you well." Beerus began a slow circle around him. "But restraint in competition is one thing. I want to see what's underneath it. Pushed properly."
Whis descended and produced the shimmering barrier with a tap of his staff. "There. Now nobody need worry about damaging the lovely stadium."
The crowd above, still watching, settled in with the particular fascination of an audience that believed it was about to see something even more spectacular than what had come before.
Part III — The Trial
"Transform," Beerus said.
Nova did.
The gold came up around him with the smooth, controlled quality of months of training — no flicker, no instability, the specific evenness of someone who had practiced the entry into this state until it had stopped being an event and had become a posture.
"Adequate," Beerus said, in the tone of someone noting that the appetizer has arrived. "Show me your limits."
Nova pushed.
The ground cracked beneath him. Electricity began arcing through his aura in small, bright threads. He felt the ceiling of his ordinary range arriving and pushed past it into the place that required more deliberate effort, the place that cost something to maintain.
"More," Beerus said.
The word landed exactly where Beerus had presumably intended it to land — somewhere below conscious calculation, in the specific territory of Saiyan pride that did not respond well to being told its best effort was insufficient.
Something in Nova answered before he had decided to let it.
The gold brightened, and silver-white edges bled into it the way frost crept along glass, and his power climbed in a way that surprised him as much as it apparently interested his examiner.
"Now that," Beerus said, with the specific tone of someone whose curiosity has just been rewarded, "is more like it. But can you use it?"
He moved.
Nova's reflexes caught the strike, deflected it, and the impact rang through his entire skeleton with a force that made the colosseum's foundations register a small, distinct tremor.
"Good," Beerus said. "You can react. Can you counter?"
What followed did not have a name in any vocabulary Remnant possessed for combat. To the crowd above, it was light and noise and shapes too fast to track, and the commentators reached for the language of special effects because that language was the only one available to them. To Nova, it was the most honest fight of his life — every technique he had, every angle Tarro had drilled into him, every lesson learned the hard way against Cui and Slug and Turles, all of it offered up and all of it, consistently, seen through before it landed.
He hit Beerus with blows that should have ended mountains.
They registered as something between a tap and a formality.
"Impressive technique," Beerus said, after deflecting a blast that left a scar of melted stone across the arena floor. "Considerable raw power. But—"
He was behind Nova before the sentence finished, moving at a speed that had nothing to do with anything Nova's reflexes had been built to track.
"—you're still thinking like a mortal."
The blow that followed put Nova on his knees.
His transformation flickered. He felt his consciousness do the specific dimming that preceded losing it entirely, and he held on to the dimming the way you held a door against wind.
"Your control is exceptional," Beerus said, and his voice had shifted — less an evaluation now than something closer to instruction. "Your technique shows real promise. But you fight as though power is finite. As though combat is a puzzle with a correct answer rather than an expression of will."
Nova looked up at him. There was gold at the corner of his mouth where it shouldn't have been.
"Then how should I fight?" he asked.
For the first time since arriving on Remnant, Beerus's expression did something that was not evaluation.
"That," he said, "is the right question. Most mortals never think to ask it."
He extended a hand and pulled Nova to his feet — a gesture so unexpected that an audible reaction moved through the watching crowd, who had no idea what they were responding to and responded anyway.
"Your evaluation is complete," Beerus said. "Power. Control. And — more rare than either — the willingness to ask the right question when you've been beaten." He paused. "This world has proven entertaining enough to preserve."
Nova's knees, already unsteady, found a new reason to be.
"However," Beerus continued, "I'll be watching your development. Don't disappoint me."
Part IV — What the Gods Offered
Whis drifted closer with the particular brightness of someone who has thoroughly enjoyed an afternoon.
"That silver energy threaded through your transformation," he said. "Quite remarkable. I don't believe I've seen divine energy manifest in a Saiyan in quite that configuration before. Do keep exploring it — I suspect it leads somewhere interesting."
"Thank you," Nova said, his voice carrying across the silent arena. "For the test. And for everything else."
"Don't thank us yet," Beerus said. "Today was an introduction. The real tests are still ahead." He began to rise. "Master the form you touched during our exchange. The full-powered variant — green hair, deeper foundation. It will give your silver energy somewhere stable to grow from."
"The green-haired form," Nova repeated, remembering the door he had felt and held closed in Tenkawa, the depth below the blue that he had not yet let through.
"Trust your instincts," Beerus said. "Your nature knows the path even where your conscious mind doesn't."
Whis's attention drifted to the arena entrance, where Team RWBY had gathered, and his expression sharpened with renewed interest.
"Actually," he said, floating toward Ruby and Yang, "I believe the same invitation extends to you both."
Ruby's breath caught. "To — to us?"
"Most certainly. Ruby — a human transformed into Saiyan physiology, carrying silver energy that even Lord Beerus finds compelling. Remarkably rare adaptability." His gaze moved to Yang. "And you, my dear, are perhaps the more singular case. Human, Saiyan, and an old demonic inheritance, harmonizing rather than tearing each other apart. I haven't observed a stable fusion of that particular kind in a very long time."
Yang's hands curled, gold sparking faintly between her fingers. "The demon part. Should I be worried about it?"
"Quite the opposite," Whis said. "Your human side gives balance. Your Saiyan nature channels constructively. The demonic heritage adds depths most beings never touch at all. The key is integration, not suppression."
Beerus drifted nearer, his gaze moving between the two sisters with the unhurried attention of something that did not need to hurry.
"The choice is yours," he said. "But power left unguided tends toward problems. Better to learn the shape of it now."
Ruby looked at Yang. Then at the two beings hovering above them with the casual ease of things for whom gravity was an opinion rather than a law.
"We have responsibilities here," she said. "Teams. School. People who need us."
"Naturally," Whis said. "We wouldn't dream of interfering. Consider it supplementary, for whenever you're ready to take the next step."
"How will you know when that is?" Yang asked.
Beerus's expression carried something close to amusement. "When beings of your potential are ready, the universe tends to notice. We'll find you."
Nova, still steadying himself from the fight, found enough voice for one more thing. "Lord Beerus. Lord Whis. Thank you. For the chance."
"Don't thank us yet," Beerus said again, though something in the repetition had less edge to it this time. "Whether your world continues to deserve what you've been given depends entirely on what you do with it."
Whis clapped once, delighted. "Well, this has been simply delightful. Take care of yourselves. Power's only as good as the wisdom behind it."
They rose.
Just before the sky took them entirely, Beerus's voice carried back down, almost as an afterthought.
"Oh — and Nova. When you've mastered the full-powered form. Add the silver to it. I expect the result will be most entertaining."
And then there was only sky.
The crowd above, who had spent the last several minutes believing they were watching the most expensive special-effects sequence in festival history, broke into applause for a show they did not know had been a verdict.
Ruby looked at her sister. At Nova, who was still finding his footing on legs that had recently been beaten into the ground by a god. At the sky, empty now, holding nothing but the ordinary blue of an ordinary afternoon that had, an hour before, been within a sentence of ending everything.
"Well," she said. "I guess our training just got a lot more interesting."
Yang laughed, a little unsteady. "Interesting's one word for it."
Nova looked up at where the gods had been.
"I think the word," he said, "is responsibility."
Part V — Debriefing
Location: Beacon Academy, Ozpin's Office | That Evening
The office had been reconfigured to hold more people than it was designed for, which was becoming, Glynda thought, a recurring theme of this particular week.
Ironwood's image on the secure feed had the specific pallor of a military man who has just learned that the most dangerous threat his fleet faced was something his fleet could not have meaningfully resisted.
"Let me confirm I understand correctly," he said. "Two beings, one of whom could have ended the planet without effort, evaluated our students and left with something resembling approval."
"That's accurate," Ozpin said. His coffee remained untouched.
"And the training offer," Sala said, her tail betraying the tension her voice was managing not to. "Gods don't extend those casually."
"Which could change the balance of power across this entire universe," Rhubar added.
Oobleck looked up from his readings. "The silver-edged transformation Nova displayed — the energy signature has no precedent in any record I have access to."
"Actual divine energy," Tarro confirmed. "Not analogous to it. The thing itself."
"And if Ruby carries the same potential," Port said, stroking his mustache, "then we have two students with apparent divine capacity and two cosmic beings interested in cultivating it."
The room sat with that for a while.
Nobody had an immediate next sentence.
Part VI — What Salem Could Not Name
Location: Salem's Domain | That Evening
Salem had not stopped pacing.
This was, in itself, notable. She had not paced in centuries — pacing was the behavior of someone uncertain, and uncertainty was a state she had spent millennia eliminating from her own repertoire.
"Impossible," she said, again, the word having become less an assessment and more a kind of anchor she was returning to because nothing else held.
Hazel watched her from a respectful distance, his human senses registering nothing of what had disturbed her, which made her distress more alarming rather than less.
"My lady," he ventured, "perhaps rest—"
"Rest." She turned on him with the specific fury of someone whose composure has been a tool for so long that losing it feels like losing a limb. "Something arrived on this world today that made my immortality feel like an inconvenience, Hazel. A temporary one."
She moved to the window.
The Grimm below were still skittish, hours later — still carrying the residue of having sensed something so far above their hierarchy of fear that the encounter had reorganized their instincts at a level deeper than training could reach.
"It came from Vale," she said. "From Beacon." The contempt in her voice for Ozpin's school was old and reflexive, but underneath it ran something genuinely new — concern, the specific flavor of concern that comes from discovering the size of the board you've been playing on was smaller than you knew.
"If he has allied himself with something like that," she said, and did not finish the sentence, because the ending of it was not something she wanted spoken into a room, even an empty one.
The Grimm did not return to her windowsill that night.
Part VII — In the Dormitories
Location: Beacon Academy | That Night
Team RWBY sat with the festival noise drifting up faint and strange through the window, the way ordinary sounds sometimes felt strange after a day had reorganized what ordinary meant.
"Do you think they're watching," Ruby asked the window, "somehow?"
"Whis said they'd know when we were ready," Yang said. "That implies some kind of attention."
"The question," Blake said, from against the wall, "is whether we want that kind of attention."
"It sounds incredible," Weiss said, pacing the way she paced when a problem had too many unknowns to sit still with. "It also sounds like committing to becoming something nobody on Remnant has ever been."
"We already crossed that line," Ruby said, "the day we started turning into Saiyans. The question isn't whether we're changing. It's whether we navigate it blind or with people who actually understand what it is."
Yang looked at her hands — at the place where the gold had been, and underneath it, however briefly, something older and stranger that had answered a threat she hadn't consciously summoned it for.
"If something out there needs that kind of power to handle," she said slowly, "maybe we need to be the kind of people who have it."
Nobody argued with that.
Nobody had a better answer either.
In the room down the hall, Turuk lay with his hands behind his head, looking at a ceiling that had nothing useful to tell him.
"Brother," he said. "What does it feel like. Being called promising by a god."
Nova, reviewing the fight's footage with the same meticulous attention he brought to everything, paused the recording.
"Terrifying and exhilarating," he said. "In close to equal measure."
"The form he mentioned. Do you think we all have it?"
"Probably. Access and mastery aren't the same thing, though." Nova looked at him. "Did you feel anything, when my aura went silver-edged?"
Turuk considered this seriously. "Something answered. In my own power. Like an echo."
"That confirms something I suspected," Nova said. "We're connected by more than the transformation. Something underneath it."
"Divine potential," Turuk said, with the specific flatness of someone repeating words that still didn't sit comfortably in his mouth.
"Which brings us back to the offer," Nova said. "Do we take it. Risk becoming something we don't fully understand, for power that might be necessary."
Turuk sat up.
"The risk isn't in the training," he said. "The risk is staying ignorant of what's already growing in us while we wait to decide."
Outside, Vale's lights continued their ordinary business, entirely unaware of how close the math had run that afternoon.
Part VIII — Morning
Location: Beacon Academy, Dormitory Balcony | The Next Morning
Dawn arrived with its usual indifference to the magnitude of what had preceded it.
Ruby stood at the balcony rail and let the light find the landscape one section at a time, and she was still there when Nova joined her, his presence announced by nothing more than the specific quiet of someone who also hadn't slept much.
"Couldn't sleep either," she said. Not a question.
"Every time I closed my eyes I could feel it," he said. "The silver. Sitting just under everything. Like a song stuck somewhere you can't quite hum it."
"I dreamed about it," she said. "Mine felt... aware. Like it wanted to tell me something I wasn't ready for yet."
"Maybe that's what divine potential actually is," he said. "Not just having power. Having power with its own intentions."
They watched Vale wake up below them — lights coming on in sequence, the first vendors setting up for another festival day, the ordinary machinery of a city that had no idea what had nearly happened to it.
"Nova," Ruby said. "Whatever we decide. We do it together. All of us."
He smiled — the first real one since the trial.
"Team RWBY and Team NDTSA against the universe," he said. "I like those odds."
She smiled back, and something in her chest, which had been carrying weight since the plaza, set a portion of it down.
Part IX — The Ordinary Afternoon
Location: Vytal Festival Grounds | That Afternoon
The festival did what festivals did, which was continue, regardless of how close the world it was celebrating had come to not existing by dinner the day before.
Team RWBY had claimed a patch of grass near the food court, and Ruby sat working through a bag of popcorn with the specific distracted attention of someone who kept expecting the ordinary world to suddenly look different and kept finding that it didn't.
"I keep waiting for someone to notice," she said. "Like there should be a sign."
"Different how?" Yang stretched out beside her. "We were already part-Saiyan yesterday morning. Now we just know more of what that means."
"Not exactly comforting," Weiss said, from the nearby vendor cart, where her scroll was once again declining to process a transaction. "Could you try that again? There must be an error—"
The vendor's expression suggested there was not.
Blake looked up from a book she hadn't actually been reading. "You found out you're part demon yesterday, Yang. That's not a minor footnote."
"Right," Yang said. "Ancient bloodline, cosmic training offers, divine potential. Just a Tuesday."
Nova arrived with the rest of his team trailing behind him, looking marginally more recovered than he had that morning.
"Room for more?" he asked.
"Always," Ruby said. "How are you?"
"Like I got hit by a God of Destruction," he said, settling onto the grass. "Which, accurately, I did."
Scarlett dropped down beside him with the relaxed sprawl of someone who had clearly slept fine. "Anyone else have weird dreams? I fought something that looked like a mountain with teeth."
"That's oddly specific," Blake said.
"My hearing keeps catching people calling it 'the most realistic holographic effects in festival history,'" Aiko reported, ears tracking the surrounding chatter.
"Good," Daikon said. "The fewer real questions, the better."
Weiss abandoned her scroll dispute and rejoined the group, frustration intact. "Has anyone considered the practical scope of what we've agreed to? Cosmic training isn't part of a standard huntsman curriculum."
"Nothing about us has been standard since we got here," Yang pointed out. "Remember when Port's exams were the worst thing we worried about?"
Ruby's scroll buzzed. She read it and looked up.
"Ozpin wants both teams in his office after the doubles round," she said. "Recent developments."
"Joy," Turuk said. "More debriefing."
"Well, well!" A familiar voice cut through the group before anyone could respond. "Beacon's rising stars!"
Team JNPR arrived, Jaune still slightly green from a pre-match lunch he was reconsidering and Nora bouncing with the particular energy of someone who had recently won something.
"Congratulations on advancing!" Ruby called, grateful for the distraction.
"Thank you," Pyrrha said, settling onto the blanket. "Though the terrain wasn't entirely in our favor."
"Did you see Ren in those trees?" Nora demanded of no one specific. "Like a shadow!"
"I'm just glad I didn't throw up on anyone," Jaune said.
"The day's still young," Ren observed, sitting with his usual unhurried calm.
For a few minutes the conversation drifted back to the comfortable, ordinary territory of tournament brackets and opponent strategy, and the cosmic survivors found themselves grateful for the specific normalcy that JNPR carried with them like weather.
"So," Pyrrha asked Ruby, "thought about your doubles strategy?"
"Yang and I have been practicing," Weiss said, color returning to her voice now that the subject had shifted to something tactical. "Her directness complements my precision."
"I get to punch things while Weiss makes it look elegant," Yang said.
"That's one description," Weiss replied, dry.
Sun Wukong's voice arrived ahead of Sun himself, mid-anecdote and gesturing with his whole body, his tail doing most of the emotional work of the story he was telling.
"—and Sage pulls this maneuver, I'm telling you, it should not have worked, but it worked—"
"Sun!" Yang waved him over. "How'd it go?"
He bounded over and launched into the recap without breaking stride, and the group settled in to listen, the afternoon light stretching long and golden across the festival grounds.
Ruby noticed, even while laughing at the right moments, that Nova's eyes kept drifting skyward — the specific habit of someone half-expecting the sky to do something it had already done once that week. She noticed Yang's hands flicker occasionally with traces of something darker than gold. She noticed, in the surface of her own reflection in a nearby window, that her eyes caught the light a little differently than they had a few days ago.
They were still students. Still friends, at a festival, eating too much popcorn and arguing about tournament brackets.
They were also something else now — something that would need careful navigation between the two halves of what they'd become.
The doubles matches would start soon.
After that, Ozpin's office.
But for now, surrounded by the specific chaos of teenagers who had decided, collectively, to enjoy an afternoon, they could almost believe the biggest thing ahead of them was simply advancing to the next round.
Almost.
★ END OF CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT ★
Next: Chapter Twenty-Nine — "New Challengers, Training, and Shifting Shadows"