Hey everyone, Novaflame6 here. So Not sure much of anyone will read this story cuz they may think it's boring, so I'll just decide the pairings for myself. There will be a few more characters joining the story as you'll see soon. They're not just for pairing purposes, they'll have a legitimate reason to be there.
As for Pairings: I think the best option for Weiss would be to end up with Daikon. As for the others here's what I was thinking: Odyn/ Ruby, Roy/Yang, Baron/Flare, Jaune/Pyrrha. Shallot/Hailfire, Kanna/Mercury.
If you notice how Jaune has 2 options, don't worry about it. That will sort itself out later.
P.s- I don't own Dbz/Kai/ DBS/ DBXV or Rwby and their characters. Those belong to Akira Toriyama/Toei Animation and Rooster Teeth/Monty Oum respectively. I own the oc's who appear in this story other than Tarro and Daikon, those are property of ComparedDreadx He's simply given me permission to use them in my stories.
Chapter Three: The Badge, the Burden, and the Elves
There is a particular kind of morning that exists solely to humble people who spent the previous evening feeling intensely accomplished.
It arrives well before the wake-up alarm. It arrives before the morning light has even committed to being light. In this specific instance, it arrived in the form of Ruby Rose standing rigidly beside Weiss Schnee's bed, holding a piercing metal whistle.
The first sound was the shrill blow of the whistle.
The second sound was Weiss hitting the floorboards with a startled gasp.
"Good morning, Team RWBY!"
Weiss pushed herself up off the floor and glared daggers up at Ruby, who stood over her with the maddening energy of someone who had been awake for hours and had already formed deep, critical opinions about everyone else's sleeping habits. Ruby was already fully dressed in her dark brown academy uniform, her hair perfectly tied back, with Crescent Rose leaning against the wall in its compact form at a precise, calculated diagonal.
"What," Weiss hissed, "is wrong with you."
Ruby completely bypassed this as a question that required an actual answer. "Since you're already awake," she chirped, consulting an imaginary list in her head, "we can move right along to our first order of business."
Weiss stood, brushed off her nightgown, and regarded Ruby with the expression of a woman deciding in real time whether she regretted every life choice that had brought her to this exact room.
"Which would be," she said flatly.
At that exact moment, Yang emerged from her corner of the room hauling an absurdly large armful of objects: two decorative pillows, a candle holder, a stack of brochures, and a large banner featuring the phrase THE ACHIEVE MEN printed boldly over a photograph of six athletic-looking guys in various flexing poses. She was already dressed and ready for the day. Blake followed close behind, lugging a heavy suitcase that immediately expressed its absolute rebellion against being handled by snapping open and scattering its contents across four square meters of prime floor space.
"Decorating," Yang announced with the supreme satisfaction of someone stating a profound truth.
Blake surveyed the disaster area with the calm serenity of someone who had already made peace with chaos. "We still need to unpack," she murmured, looking down at the open suitcase and then at the floor surrounding it. "And clean."
Weiss's mouth formed the shape of a word that fortunately didn't make it past her teeth before a sudden knock at the door interrupted her.
Ruby spun around and swung the door wide open.
Team OHRF was standing out in the hallway in their full academy uniforms—all four of them dressed, alert, and radiating that specific, composed energy of people who had been awake for hours and were merely waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. Odyn's uniform fit with the slight stiffness of garments tailored for standard Vale builds rather than his own frame, though he seemed utterly unbothered by it. Hailfire had her silver hair braided neatly back from her face. Roy stood with his hands tucked casually into his pockets, carrying that relaxed, watchful stillness that was just how he existed. Flare hovered slightly behind and to his right—a positioning that was equal parts habit and coincidence.
Ruby's expression cycled through three distinct emotions in rapid succession. "O-Odyn! Hi! Sorry about the absolute disaster zone, we were just—"
"Don't sweat it," Odyn interrupted smoothly. "We're heading down to class. Just wanted to give you a heads-up so you wouldn't get caught flat-footed." He glanced past her shoulder into the chaotic dorm room, which was currently in the awkward transitional phase of becoming an ambitious art project. "You might want to pick up the pace, though."
Roy offered a brief nod: "Saving you seats."
Hailfire added: "Don't take too long."
Flare looked at Roy, looked past him down the hall, and quietly offered: "We'll see you there."
Odyn raised a hand in a casual half-wave to Ruby as the four of them turned and strode down the corridor. A second later, Kanna and Baron strolled past at an unhurried walk, followed closely by Daikon, who moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who believed the correct walking pace was significantly faster than this, but was exercising saint-like patience. Note and Beat brought up the rear with the synchronized rhythm of two people who had spent most of their lives marching to the same drumbeat.
Ruby watched them turn the corner, then slowly closed the door.
She turned back to face her bewildered team.
"Aaaalright!" She thrust a fist into the air. The room was a bomb shelter of unpacked bags and misplaced beds. "Weiss, Blake, Yang, and their fearless leader Ruby have officially commenced their first mission! Banzai!"
Yang and Blake mirrored the gesture without missing a beat. "Banzai!"
Weiss slowly lowered herself back down onto the floor, staring blankly at the ceiling.
What followed over the next forty-idling minutes was a chaotic construction project that yielded, by any generous definition, a bedroom.
Yang claimed the eastern wall for THE ACHIEVE MEN, nailing the poster up with the careful, micro-adjusting precision of someone who took interior design very seriously. Weiss hung a framed print of the Forever Fall forest on her assigned section of wall, straightened it twice to the millimeter, and walked away. Blake methodically shelved her books using a system that looked deeply academic but whose underlying logic remained completely opaque to everyone else. She paused at one particular slim paperback—a title with a suspiciously worn cover that she hastily shoved spine-first onto the second shelf—and darted a glance around the room to ensure no one was watching.
Ruby hoisted Crescent Rose up against the window curtain, wedging it at the exact angle where the morning sun would catch the razor-sharp edge of the blade without posing an immediate decapitation hazard.
When they finally stepped back to admire their handiwork, they noticed one minor flaw: the beds were still piled haphazardly in the dead center of the floor, taking up all available walking space.
All four girls stared at the beds. The beds offered no constructive feedback.
"This layout is completely untenable," Weiss noted flatly.
"It's a bit of a squeeze," Blake agreed.
"Maybe we just throw out half our stuff?" Yang offered helpfully.
Ruby looked at the beds, then straight up at the high ceiling. A familiar, dangerous spark ignited in her eyes—that intense, hyper-focused look that meant she was either about to propose a stroke of tactical genius or suggest something that would compel Weiss to use the word liability in a formal sentence.
"Or," Ruby said brightly, "we replace the beds with a custom bunk system."
Weiss opened her mouth to object.
"Super-awesome!" Yang cheered instantly.
"Genius," Blake added.
Weiss snapped her mouth shut, reopened it, and pinched the bridge of her nose. "I would like it formally entered into the record that this sounds—"
"Vote's already unanimous," Ruby declared.
Weiss looked at Blake's supportive thumbs-up, looked at Yang's double-handed fist pump, looked down at her own completely immobile hands, and rapidly did the math.
"Fine," she sighed, which wasn't enthusiastic agreement, but was close enough for construction to commence.
The sounds echoing from the dorm room over the next half-hour were not the sounds of refined furniture assembly. They were the distinct, terrifying sounds of a project undertaken by teenagers with boundless enthusiasm, zero technical blueprints, and enough collective stubbornness to bend physics to their will. When the dust finally settled:
Weiss's bed remained flat on the floor—mostly because she had wisely excused herself from the project during the load-bearing phase.
Blake's bed sat neatly beside her bookshelves, elevated off the ground by a sturdy foundation of heavy hardcover novels stacked with the structural integrity of load-bearing bricks.
Yang's bed was hoisted above Blake's on a makeshift wooden framework that somehow, miraculously, held its weight.
And Ruby's bed hung suspended entirely from the ceiling by an intricate system of heavy-duty rope and knots that violated several basic laws of civil engineering. A dark blanket draped carelessly over the edges turned it into a hybrid between a canopy bed and a pirate's tent, which Ruby inspected with profound, unbridled satisfaction.
Weiss surveyed the towering architectural monstrosity with the deadpan expression of a girl who had spent years learning how to cope with total loss of control. "That is... violently unsafe."
"Nah, it'll hold!" Ruby declared.
She did not look like someone who had bothered to check the tensile strength of the plaster ceiling.
"Aaaallrighty then!" Ruby scrambled cross-legged onto her suspended bed, a thick notebook sliding open in her lap. "Next order of business—"
She nearly tipped the mattress over, catching herself just in time as a schedule fluttered down onto her lap.
"Classes!" She brandished a pencil like a wand. "We've got several shared periods today. First up, at nine o'clock, we need to be in—"
Weiss had been casually checking the wall clock. Her entire body instantly went rigid.
"Ruby," she said in a voice dangerously devoid of pitch.
"Yeah?"
"What time did you just say it is?"
"Nine o'clock, we've got to—"
"It is currently," Weiss stated, channeling the cold, terrifying precision of a ticking time bomb, "eight fifty-five."
Ruby looked at the clock.
Ruby looked back down at Weiss.
Ruby looked back at the clock, squinting as if willing the hands to magically reverse themselves.
They refused.
"Oh. Oh."
"That," Weiss said, her voice dropping into a register of pure, concentrated fury, "is why the other teams already left. They actually know how to read a clock, you absolute—"
She was already moving toward the door, realizing shouting was a luxury she didn't have.
The door flew open. Weiss shot out into the hallway at a pace that was technically walking, but functionally defied human speed limits.
Ruby stared at the empty doorway for half a beat. Then: "To class!"
She scrambled down from her floating bed and bolted through the threshold. Yang and Blake were right behind her, a blur of red, yellow, and black.
Down the hall, another door abruptly banged open. Jaune Arc, who had been leisurely lacing his boots with zero awareness of chronological reality, caught the panicked word class echoing down the corridor and experienced the sudden, cold sweat of a man realizing he had miscalculated his entire morning. He lunged for the exit, instantly colliding with Nora, Pyrrha, and Ren, who were bursting out of their own room. The resulting pile-up resolved itself through sheer kinetic momentum.
"We're going to die!" Jaune yelled, scrambling to his feet.
Down in the sunlit courtyard below, Professor Ozpin stood by the archway, calmly watching both teams sprint across the academy grounds at velocities completely incompatible with formal academic dignity. He took a slow sip from his coffee mug.
Glynda Goodwitch checked her pocket watch, frowning sharply.
Ozpin took another leisurely sip.
Professor Port's Jurisprudence
Professor Peter Port had been teaching at Beacon for long enough to cultivate a distinct philosophy on education, and he had a pronounced, unyielding fondness for expressing that philosophy through the medium of his own extensive autobiography. The chalkboards behind him displayed a detailed taxonomical survey of Grimm species—King Taijitu, Deathstalker, Beowolf, Boarbatusk, Nevermore, Ursa—all rendered in careful, textbook illustration. He stood before them with his signature blunderbuss, Blowhard, slung over his shoulder, wearing the radiant expression of a man who had been waiting a long time to share this wisdom and intended to savor every single syllable.
"Monsters!" He let the single word expand and echo across the tiered lecture hall. "Demons. Prowlers of the dark. The creatures of Grimm carry many names—but I simply refer to them as prey! Ha-ha!"
In the front row, the assembled members of Team OHRF occupied four consecutive seats with the absolute, disciplined stillness of students who had been drilled to pay razor-sharp attention regardless of whether the speaker was making it easy for them. Odyn had his notebook open, pen gliding across the paper. Roy sat with his hands neatly folded and his expression entirely neutral. Hailfire tracked the diagrams on the boards with the analytical precision of someone taking silent inventory. Flare kept her pencil moving rhythmically in the margins of her own notes.
Behind them—and then, with zero warning, not behind them, but bursting through the classroom door at terminal velocity and arranging themselves in a brief, graceless pile of limbs on the floor—Teams RWBY and JNPR made their grand entrance.
Professor Port raised a single, magnificent eyebrow.
Ruby untangled herself from the bottom of the heap and offered that specific, disarming laugh of someone who had rehearsed an apology for this exact contingency. "Sorry, Professor! Won't happen again!"
Jaune, slowly extricating himself from beneath Nora, groaned, "Lost track of time, sir."
Port regarded them both with the benevolent, unhurried deliberation of a man weighing several options. "As it is the first day of the term, I shall be lenient." He paused for dramatic effect. "Try not to make a habit of it, Miss Rose, Mister Arc. Now—take your seats."
Team RWBY scrambled to their feet, navigating hurriedly to the front row and dropping into the four empty seats directly beside Team OHRF. Hailfire obligingly shifted an inch down the bench to make room. Ruby collapsed into the seat beside Odyn, chest heaving as she fought to catch her breath.
During the brief lull, her eyes drifted downward—possessing that involuntary curiosity of someone not looking for anything in particular, yet instantly spotting it. Odyn's heavy leather-bound notebook was flipped open to a page entirely covered in dense handwriting that bore zero resemblance to any script she had ever laid eyes on.
It wasn't merely unfamiliar. It was fundamentally, architecturally alien. The characters hooked and jagged in directions English simply didn't move; they were tight, deliberate, and undeniably practical. The same page featured complex tactical diagrams in the margins, heavy underlining, and parenthetical equations, but the written language itself belonged to another world entirely.
She stared at it for a long, quiet moment.
He didn't seem to notice her looking.
I'll have to ask him about that later, she thought, before Professor Port's booming voice dragged her violently back to the present.
"—my grandfather, despite smelling strongly of cabbages, possessed the wisdom of the ancients—"
Ruby hastily picked up her pencil and started scribbling.
It would be fundamentally unfair to label Professor Port an ineffective educator. He possessed vast, invaluable practical knowledge accumulated over decades of brutal, frontline fieldwork, and he delivered it with roaring, infectious enthusiasm. He had simply developed a pedagogical style that required him to recount the entire epic saga of his formative boyhood before arriving at any actual academic point—and since his youth had been remarkably eventful, the arrival could take quite a while.
The class coped with this narrative marathon in their own distinct ways.
Weiss was taking notes with the fierce, industrial focus of a girl committed to extracting every ounce of academic value from the lecture.
Yang sat upright, maintaining an expression of polite attentiveness that suggested she believed sustained eye contact with the instructor constituted full participation.
Blake listened with that quiet, immovable stillness that didn't require any particular posture to prove she was absorbing every word.
Ruby, on the other hand, had stopped listening roughly twelve minutes in and had seamlessly transitioned into sketching.
Odyn, seated just to Ruby's left, quietly monitored the room with his baseline vigilance. At some point, he noticed that Weiss's frantic pen had abruptly stopped moving. Following her fixed line of sight, he saw that her gaze was locked firmly on Ruby. Ruby was currently leaning over, proudly showing Yang and Blake a newly minted caricature of a small, spherical creature with stubby limbs bearing a striking resemblance to Professor Port, complete with exaggerated stink-lines radiating from it and the caption Professor Poop printed in neat capital letters underneath.
Yang pressed a fist tightly over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.
Blake's face twitched as she fought back a laugh.
Weiss's expression cycled through five distinct stages of sheer mortification before hardening into something she hoped looked appropriately disdainful.
Professor Port cleared his throat with seismic force.
"Ah-heh-hem."
The classroom instantly reassembled its collective attention.
Port waited until he had absolute silence, then continued with the smug satisfaction of a man returning to a point he had never intended to abandon.
"In the end," he bellowed, "the vile Beowolf was no match for my sheer, unadulterated tenacity! I returned to my village with the beast chained in captivity and my head held high, celebrated by all as a hero of the realm!"
He struck a dramatic, sweeping bow, sweeping Blowhard through the air.
Beside Odyn, Hailfire leaned in a fraction of an inch, her eyes locked straight ahead on the podium. "She's going to snap."
Odyn murmured back, his gaze steady. "Any second now."
On the opposite side of the lecture hall, Kanna had analyzed the exact same social dynamic and reached the same conclusion with the blunt certainty of someone who had watched this specific archetype play out in various forms all her life—the privileged prodigy with an unyielding conviction of her own superiority, colliding with a world that refused to validate it, heading inevitably toward a very public, very ungraceful meltdown.
Kanna didn't look forward to the spectacle, but she recognized it instantly.
Professor Port scanned the rows, chest puffed out. "And now... who among you believes themselves to possess the fortitude to embody these noble traits?"
Roy, seated on Odyn's other flank, tilted his head by precisely two degrees.
"Aaaannnd," he muttered quietly to the empty air in front of him, "here it comes."
Weiss's hand shot straight up into the air with the speed of a striking viper.
A collective, involuntary ripple passed through the Arkynorean students. It wasn't theatrical or performed; it was the visceral, shared exhaustion of people who had dealt with this specific breed of inflated pride across borders and battlefields alike, and held very strong opinions about it.
Kanna sighed a row behind them, loud enough to carry. "Ugh. Every single time."
She said it quietly, but not quietly enough to miss the offended glares of several Vale students nearby. She didn't blink an eye.
Up at the front, Professor Port was already gesturing triumphantly toward the heavy iron-barred cage at the back of the room, where something massive, red-eyed, and violently unhappy was pacing back and forth, slamming its claws against the metal.
"Step forward," Port invited with booming, theatrical delight, "and face your opponent!"
The Line in the Dust
What followed was a live combat assessment, which Professor Port regarded as the natural, theatrical extension of his lecture, while the rest of the class viewed it as a deeply welcomed relief from it. Weiss had swapped back into her standard combat uniform and now stood poised in the center of the cleared, pit-like arena at the front of the room, Myrtenaster gleaming in her grip, while her new teammates clustered in the front row in various expressions of eager support.
Yang cupped her hands around her mouth, booming, "Gooo, Weiss!"
Blake produced a small, neatly stitched flag bearing the emblem of Team RWBY from nowhere in particular, waving it gently.
"Represent Team RWBY!" Ruby added with genuine, unbridled feeling.
Weiss lowered the tip of her rapier. She turned her head.
Ruby, instantly registering the frigid look in the heiress's eyes, shrank back slightly. "Oh—um. Sorry."
She looked down at her desk. The bright, enthusiastic smile she'd been wearing pulled inward, folding up the way an expression does when it's desperately trying to decide whether to stand its ground or tuck tail and retreat.
Beside Ruby, Odyn's jaw set hard. He planted a heavy hand on her shoulder—a brief, solid gesture that spoke volumes without uttering a single word—and locked his gaze on the arena floor with an expression working overtime to maintain composure, and not quite succeeding.
The match itself was undeniably proficient. Whatever else Weiss Schnee was, she fought with the immaculate precision of someone drilled relentlessly by instructors who took combat execution seriously. The Boarbatusk was a classic test—blindingly fast, heavily armored, and driven by the kind of predictable, brute-force aggression that rewards cold patience in an opponent. Weiss possessed that patience when she chose to apply it. She lost her grip on Myrtenaster once, recovered it with fluid grace, chained a sequence of glyphs that was as technically brilliant as it was visually stunning, and finished with a devastating downward thrust that drove her blade straight into the beast's exposed underside.
It was a textbook victory.
Ruby thought so, anyway. Without thinking, she opened her mouth to shout encouragement.
"Weiss! Go for its belly—there's no armor underneath—"
Weiss snapped around, her eyes flashing.
The look she leveled at Ruby was a masterpiece of condensation, containing multiple distinct criticisms neatly organized by order of severity.
"Stop telling me what to do!"
Professor Port declared Weiss the victor with a booming roar of approval. The lecture hall erupted into warm, polite applause. Weiss stood rigidly at attention in the cleared arena, composed, her breathing perfectly controlled, her rapier returned to its holster with absolute form.
Ruby sat back down, sliding her hands beneath her thighs, and said nothing more.
Odyn watched the profile of Ruby's face, his eyes dark. Then, his gaze shifted to Weiss, who was already marching toward the double doors with the brisk, dismissive purpose of someone who had secured her victory and intended to flee before the consequences caught up with her.
He stood up.
Weiss certainly hadn't expected anyone to be blocking the threshold. She registered the heavy boot planted firmly in the doorframe—not aggressively, not acting as an outright barricade, but simply occupying space in a way that made ignoring him impossible—and looked up.
The expression on Odyn's face was nothing like the one she had witnessed in the corridor the previous day, or standing atop the cliff, or deep within the Emerald Forest. It was completely rigid. It was the terrifying control of a man actively keeping a storm locked behind his teeth.
"I'm leaving," Weiss said, her voice dripping with frost.
"You just made Ruby doubt herself," Odyn stated, his voice flat, dangerously quiet. "She was trying to show support for you. All she was doing was cheering you on, and you used it as an excuse to make her feel small." He held her fierce, defensive glare without blinking. "She's your team leader, Weiss. Ozpin chose her. Before you waste your breath arguing whether he was qualified to make that call, maybe you should consider what it says about you that your immediate response to authority you dislike is to lash out at someone who has done nothing to deserve it."
Weiss drew herself up to her full height, nostrils flaring. "If anyone should be leading this pathetic team—"
"Then prove it." His voice didn't rise an octave, yet it carried the crushing weight of an avalanche. "Not by tearing Ruby down. By becoming someone actually worth following. There is a massive difference."
Kanna had quietly risen, walking up to stand a few paces behind him. Her arms were tightly crossed, and her face bore the flat, unyielding expression of someone who had witnessed this exact brand of entitled cruelty before and was utterly exhausted by it.
"We expected better," Kanna said simply.
Daikon appeared at her shoulder, characteristically blunt. "I don't care what your surname is or how many zeroes are in your family's bank account. What you just pulled in there was the behavior of a spoiled child who's never been told no. That attitude stops working real fast out in the real world."
Weiss whipped around, her face burning hot. "How dare—"
"He's right," Roy chimed in smoothly from behind her. His tone lacked Daikon's sharp edge, but carried equal gravity. He reached out, placing a brief, grounding hand on her shoulder—not unkindly, but with absolute candor. "For what it's worth: Odyn has a profound hatred for people using their status to trample others. You managed to find the exact button that sets him off. Congratulations." Roy looked her dead in the eye. "It might be worth asking yourself why it sets him off so badly."
He stepped back, effortlessly granting her space.
Flare offered a small, hesitant bow—the instinctive, earnest kind that instantly made her cheeks flush pink—and quietly followed Roy out.
Hailfire paused in the doorway. The look she cast back at Weiss wasn't laced with anger. It was something far more intricate—the haunted expression of someone who understood what it meant to be thrust into a role you never asked for, and the dangerous temptation of taking it out on the wrong people.
She said nothing at all. Then, she walked away.
Ruby had already departed, slipping out quietly with her head down. Yang and Blake brought up the rear, moving together. Yang's face—usually an open book of emotion—was, for once, unreadable. It carried the heavy conflict of an older sister dying to tear someone apart, realizing someone else had just done it for her, and having no earthly idea how to process the aftermath.
"We can't back you on this one, Weiss," Yang said quietly as she passed.
Blake said nothing. She didn't need to.
The heavy oak doors clicked shut, leaving Weiss completely alone in the emptied classroom.
Down near the front row, Jaune Arc remained at his desk slightly longer than anyone else. He had needed a moment to process the fact that Odyn—whom he had pegged in their brief encounters as a paragon of ironclad self-restraint—had completely and deliberately lost his temper in defense of someone else, without an ounce of remorse. It left Jaune with a tangled web of complicated thoughts regarding what Ruby Rose truly meant to these strange, foreign kids.
Jaune finally stood, offered no parting words because none seemed adequate, and quietly exited.
Weiss sank slowly into a desk near the tall arched windows.
The classroom remained dead silent.
She sat there in the quiet for a very long time.
The Weight of the Badge
Ruby was sitting quietly on a low stone wall at the edge of the academy's eastern courtyard when she heard footsteps approaching. Her immediate, instinctive reaction was to straighten her posture and arrange her face into an expression that strongly suggested she hadn't been sitting there for the last twenty minutes thinking in exhausting, repetitive circles.
She stood up. She smoothed down her skirt.
To her surprise, Hailfire sat down on the wall in her place, skipping the preamble with the refreshing directness of someone who had already mapped out every word she intended to say. "He's stewing."
"Oh." Ruby blinked, caught off guard. "Is he okay?"
"He will be." Hailfire offered a brief, knowing pause. "He always gets like this when he's furious at himself. He'll hole up somewhere, stare at nothing, and convince himself he handled a situation like a complete amateur. And the only person who can actually pull him out of that headspace..." She tilted her head, a faint, private smile touching her lips. "...seems to be you."
Ruby blinked rapidly, pointing a finger at her own chest. "Me?"
"I've known Odyn for a very long time," Hailfire explained calmly. "And I can tell you that he doesn't extend the kind of quiet attention he gives you to very many people. I don't know what secret frequency you've tapped into that gets past his walls—" She shrugged with the easy indifference of someone who didn't feel the need to overanalyze the universe. "—but it works. Would you go talk to him?"
Ruby hesitated, crossing her arms defensively. "I don't want to intrude if he needs space—"
"He needs to stop drowning in his own head," Hailfire corrected firmly. "There's a massive difference." She pushed herself off the wall, brushing down her uniform. "Besides, I tried for twenty minutes and all I got was two polite nods. You'll do better." She paused, her expression softening just a fraction. "Also—he chewed her out because of you, you know. Because of the look on your face when she said those things."
Ruby stood frozen, entirely unsure what to do with that piece of information.
"Oh," she whispered, her voice dropping. "...Okay."
Hailfire walked a few paces away before stopping over her shoulder. "Oh, and—just call me Hail. It's what my friends call me."
Ruby watched her walk away, took a deep breath, and set off to find Odyn.
She found him leaning against the stone railing of the south-facing terrace walkway, his forearms resting on the cool stone, gazing out at the vast horizon with the focused, hollow blankness of a man using a scenic view as a surface to bounce his thoughts against.
Ruby slipped up beside him and said cautiously: "Hey."
He glanced over. Something in his eyes instantly softened—not quite open relief, but the quiet satisfaction you feel when company arrives just when you didn't want to admit you were lonely.
"Ruby." A short beat. "What are you doing over here?"
"Just... wandering around." She glanced down at the stone railing, then back up at him. "Mind if I...?"
He shifted, wordlessly gesturing to the empty space of railing beside him.
She hopped up, swinging her legs over and sitting on the stone ledge, looking out at the view. She had to admit, it was breathtaking. The tiered rooftops of Beacon tumbled downward toward the jagged cliff edge and the endless expanse of the sea, while the afternoon sun worked magic with the distance, painting the world in rich, complicated shades of gold and amber.
After a quiet moment, she spoke: "You think you were too hard on her."
He didn't answer right away.
"I think," he said eventually, his voice steady, "that I was entirely right about what I said. But entirely wrong about how I said it."
"Is there really a difference?"
"A massive one." He stared down at his hands, resting flat against the stone. "You can be completely right about a situation and still handle it like a fool. I've known that simple truth since I was about twelve years old, and it hasn't stopped me from occasionally forgetting it."
Ruby turned his words over in her mind. "She made me feel... small," she admitted softly, her gaze dropping. "And honestly? Some of what she said wasn't entirely wrong. I don't act like a normal team leader. I don't even know if I know how to act like one. And maybe Ozpin—"
"Ruby."
She snapped her head up to look at him.
"Ozpin," Odyn said, his tone dropping into something absolute and unyielding, "has made decisions considerably more consequential than choosing a freshman team leader, and he's been doing it longer than either of us has been alive. I think his judgment on this particular matter carries some weight." He turned his full, unwavering gaze onto her—that intense, direct stare that meant he was speaking from the very core of who he was. "You weren't chosen because of a list of skills you've already mastered. You were chosen because of who you are. Those are two entirely different things."
Ruby sat silently, letting the words settle into her chest. "What if I can't grow into it?"
"Then you'll grow into something else," he replied simply. "Though I sincerely doubt that's what's going to happen." He pushed himself slightly off the railing, shifting his weight. "The thing about being a leader—it isn't just a title you pin to your lapel. It's a weight you carry. A badge and a permanent responsibility, not just when it's convenient or useful to you. If you treat it like the first thing, the title means nothing. If you treat it like the second..." He looked straight into her silver eyes. "People will follow you anywhere."
Ruby sat with that truth, watching the afternoon shadows lengthen across the courtyard below. Somewhere down in the quads, a lecture class was letting out, the distant, cheerful clamor of students drifting upward on the breeze.
"I'll try," she promised softly.
"That's all it ever takes to start," he answered.
She hopped down off the railing, straightened the front of her dark brown uniform jacket, and hesitated for a second, looking at him with that familiar, thoughtful expression that meant she was wrestling with something she hadn't said yet.
"Odyn. What you did back there—standing up for me. I—"
"Don't," he interrupted gently. "You don't owe me a single thing for that. I made that choice of my own free will. I'll handle the fallout."
She held his gaze for a long, quiet beat, searching his face. Then, she nodded once and turned toward the walkway leading back toward the main building.
"Thank you," she said, her back turned as she started walking.
His voice carried softly after her: "Go prove Weiss wrong. I'll be watching."
She didn't quite break into a full sprint, but the pace she set as she headed down the corridor was significantly faster than a walk.
The Northern Balcony
Professor Peter Port's relationship with the sunset was that of a man who found the hour consistently, philosophically useful. He was standing on the stone-paved northern balcony of the academy's teaching wing, watching the sky bleed orange and indigo, when the distinct echo of approaching footsteps announced the arrival of a student trying very hard to sound far more confident than she felt.
He turned around, his features immediately softening into the generous, welcoming smile of an instructor who genuinely adored teaching and was constitutionally incapable of hiding it.
"Miss Schnee! To what do I owe this fine evening pleasure?"
Weiss drew herself up, composing her posture. "I... genuinely enjoyed your lecture today, Professor."
He beamed, his chest swelling with pride. "Of course you did—you carry the blood of a true, dedicated Huntress in your veins, my dear!"
She offered a smile in return, and it was entirely genuine, though it lasted roughly four seconds before the heavy, lingering weight of why she was actually standing there reasserted itself across her features.
Port caught the shift instantly. Forty years standing at the front of a lecture hall had made him exceptionally skilled at reading the subtle currents of adolescent turmoil. He waited with the quiet patience of a man who understood that students would eventually stumble upon their own questions if given enough breathing room.
"Professor," she finally blurted out, her gaze dropping to the stone railing rather than meeting his eyes, "I... I believe I should have been appointed Team RWBY's leader."
The pause he gave her statement was brief, measured, and entirely unhesitating.
"That," Port rumbled mildly, "is quite preposterous."
Weiss snapped her head up, a flash of righteous indignation in her blue eyes. "Excuse me—"
"I have trusted Professor Ozpin's judgment for many, many years," Port said, his tone entirely devoid of malice or mockery, "and he has never once led me astray. Not a single time." He turned to face her more fully, his booming theatricality dropping away to reveal something much steadier and quieter. "Your technical skill on the battlefield, Miss Schnee, is genuinely exceptional. I do not offer empty flattery. It is simply a fact." He held her fierce gaze. "However, that brilliance is matched by a condescending attitude toward those you deem beneath you—an arrogance that, if left uncorrected, will inevitably undermine every tactical advantage your talent provides."
Weiss's hands clenched into tight fists at her sides. "That is not—"
"Which precisely proves my point," Port interrupted smoothly. "You see, the young man from Team OHRF made a remarkably similar observation earlier. Though, admittedly, with rather less diplomacy." His impressive mustache twitched in a way that might have been a suppressed chuckle. "I won't repeat his exact phrasing. But his underlying premise was entirely correct."
The stiff, defiant line of Weiss's posture held rigid for a second—and then, the way a dam holds back water before giving way—slowly collapsed. It wasn't total defeat; it was something far more difficult. It was honesty.
"It isn't entirely true," she whispered to the stones, her voice cracking slightly. "That I always get what I want."
Port regarded her with the quiet grace of a man who knew there was a deeper story underneath and was willing to let her unspool it on her own terms.
He waited.
"The family company," she confessed, staring out at the fading light. "The name. The... relentless expectations." She swallowed hard, stopping herself. "No. Not always. Not in the ways that actually matter."
Port nodded slowly, offering no easy pity or cheap validation.
"What Professor Ozpin is asking of you, Miss Schnee," he said after a long, thoughtful silence, "is not the flawless performance of a leader. He wants you to become one. And that transformation requires you to stop competing with the person who was chosen, and instead start considering why she was chosen over you." He leaned his forearms casually against the railing beside her. "Hone your combat skill. Perfect your glyphs. But do not mistake those mechanical proficiencies for the entirety of the work." He glanced at her sidelong. "Become the best version of yourself, Miss Schnee. That is the true assignment. Everything else follows in its wake."
Weiss remained dead silent for a long time, the evening wind catching the blonde lock of hair framing her face.
Then, so softly that the words seemed to dissolve into the twilight air: "...Yes, Professor."
Port smiled warmly, patted the stone railing once in quiet solidarity, and turned back to watch the sun finally slip below the distant horizon.
The Midnight Ledger
Three hours later—
The silver moon hung high and full over the spires of Beacon, casting long, sharp beams through the dormitory windows at an angle that made the cluttered room feel like a quiet sanctuary rather than a battlefield of discarded furniture and clashing personalities.
Blake was fast asleep in her elevated nest of heavy novels, one hand still resting gently on the spine of the book she had been reading before fatigue took her. Yang had claimed roughly eighty percent of her own mattress and at least a dozen cubic feet of the surrounding air, sprawled out with the expansive, unbothered confidence of someone who slept the exact same way she lived her life. The room was wrapped in that profound, heavy quiet that only settles when a group of teenagers has exhausted every ounce of emotional and physical energy in a single day.
The door clicked open.
Weiss's slender shadow stretched across the threshold. She stood there in the quiet for a moment, simply observing the room—the peaceful breathing of her teammates, the haphazard architecture of Ruby's ceiling-tent, and an empty porcelain coffee mug resting precariously on the edge of Ruby's small wooden shelf, bearing the bold stamp of BEACON in the academy's official typography.
Crossing the floor with silent steps, Weiss reached the hanging tent and lifted the heavy edge of the blanket.
Ruby was slumped face-down across her open notebooks, her fingers still loosely clutching a pencil, her dark hair fanned out across the pages in a messy sprawl that practically guaranteed a nasty paper crease across her cheek. The surrounding textbooks were splayed at weird angles, peppered with dog-eared corners. Three separate loose-leaf pages were covered from top to bottom in her chaotic handwriting—wide loops, aggressive underlines, and rambling marginal diagrams.
Weiss stared at the mess for a quiet beat.
She reached in and shook Ruby's shoulder—gently, which was a foreign concept for Weiss Schnee doing almost anything. Ruby snapped awake with the instantaneous, uncoordinated panic of someone yanked violently out of a deep study trance.
"Weiss! I was studying—I fell asleep—I'm sorry—"
Weiss instantly slapped a hand over Ruby's mouth before the volume could wake the rest of the dorm, pressing a single finger against her own lips. Ruby's silver eyes went wide with sudden understanding; she nodded frantically and quieted down.
Weiss lowered her hand, looking from the empty coffee mug back to Ruby's exhausted face.
"How do you take your coffee?"
Ruby blinked up at her, thoroughly disoriented. "I... I don't."
Weiss's expression did that familiar micro-adjustment as she mentally wrangled her own patience. "Just answer the question."
"Cream," Ruby muttered, her voice laced with sleepy alarm. "Five sugars."
Weiss absorbed this culinary crime against humanity with a twitch of her eyebrow. Ducking inside the tent, she rummaged quietly for a moment before re-emerging with a fresh, steaming mug she had evidently brewed and brought over from her own side of the room for this exact purpose.
She extended it toward her team leader.
Ruby took the mug with both hands, staring down at the dark liquid in sheer disbelief before looking back up at Weiss.
"Ruby," Weiss began, her tone shifting into something deliberate—not the sharp, aristocratic bite, nor the clipped frustration, but the voice of a girl who had swallowed a mountain of pride to arrive at this exact second and was determined to see it through. "I... I believe you have what it takes to be a genuinely capable leader."
The expression that bloomed across Ruby's face was that of a soul slowly uncurling after being forced into an uncomfortable posture all day.
"That's funny," Ruby murmured softly, a small smile tugging at her lips. "Odyn told me something very similar. Earlier today."
Weiss's face flickered—a rapid succession of defensive reactions instantly recognized, boxed up, and discarded—before settling into an expression that was thoughtful, reluctantly fond, and possibly a bit of both.
"Did he," she said quietly.
"Yeah." Ruby looked down into her coffee. "He said leadership is a badge and a responsibility. Not just a title."
"That is..." Weiss paused, swallowing hard. "...an uncommonly profound way to describe it, actually."
They sat in comfortable silence for a moment, enveloped by the warm, amber glow of the small reading light inside Ruby's tent, with the rhythmic sound of Yang breathing deeply below and Blake's stack of books shifting slightly on their shelf.
"I intend to be the absolute best teammate you've ever had," Weiss declared. The words carried a ring of raw, unvarnished conviction that surprised even her—a product of the late hour, exhaustion, and sudden, stark honesty.
"That's a pretty high bar, Princess," Ruby teased gently.
"I am well aware." Weiss turned, adjusting the immaculate hem of her nightgown. "Good luck with your studying."
She was halfway out from under the tent-flap when she froze, turned back, and tapped a finger against a diagram on one of Ruby's open pages. "That calculation is entirely wrong, by the way." She ducked completely out, her voice drifting back from the open doorway. "Ruby?"
"Yeah?"
"I always wanted bunk beds. When I was a little girl." A brief pause. "Just so you know."
The door swung shut with a soft, muffled click.
Ruby sat cross-legged inside her makeshift tent, nursing her impossibly sweet coffee, staring down at her flawed notes with a wide, genuine smile spreading across her face. It was the kind of smile that only arrives when something you feared was permanently broken turns out to be healing after all.
Outside in the corridor, Weiss stood entirely alone in the dim hallway.
She stared blankly at the stone wall. She looked down at her own hands. Her mind drifted back to Roy's parting words—you just pulled his trigger—and the dangerous, suppressed storm she had seen locked behind Odyn's eyes, and Professor Port's quiet reminder about whose substance had actually been correct.
There was one more thing left on her list. One final, incredibly difficult thing she had to do.
It was going to cost her a lot of pride.
She had already decided she was willing to pay it.
The Weight of an Apology
Morning arrived the way mornings always do when a fundamental shift has already occurred behind closed doors—with less theatrical ceremony than the decision deserved, and considerably more piercing morning light than the situation strictly called for.
Weiss found them congregated on the sprawling stone of the east walkway, both teams intermingling in that casual, unscripted way they had drifted into—not rigidly arranged or formally posed, but simply present, the way people are when they've spent enough intense hours in proximity to drop all pretense of performance. Odyn and Daikon stood slightly apart from the core group, a deliberate staging that everyone else had tacitly agreed to, pretending very hard that they didn't know this reconciliation was coming.
Weiss marched straight up to the two of them and halted.
She was acutely aware of her own team hovering anxiously behind her, of Jaune's team clustered behind them, and of the unwavering, rapt attention of approximately fifteen teenagers who were engaged in the universal art of pretending to look at anything and everything except the unfolding drama.
She locked her eyes on Odyn first.
"I was wrong," she stated, her voice clear and carrying across the quiet stone, "about Ruby. About what I said, and about how I said it. What I spoke in that classroom was beneath my station, and I am asking you to forgive it."
She pivoted slightly to face Daikon.
"And what you said," she continued, a visible wince betraying how much the words cost her pride, "was not entirely incorrect. I owe you an apology as well."
The subsequent silence stretched for a full four seconds—an eternity in teenage social dynamics.
Daikon spoke first, his tone uncharacteristically heavy.
"I wasn't entirely right, either," he admitted. The words scraped out like he was dragging them across gravel, the strained effort of someone who rarely deployed apologies and was doing so purely out of principle. "I used cruel words when simple accuracy would have sufficed." He met her gaze directly. "I'll make it right. Name your terms."
Weiss looked genuinely taken aback. She processed the concession with characteristic speed, before offering a small, measured nod: "Call me by my first name. Not Schnee. Weiss."
He nodded back. "I can manage that." His stern features softened by a fraction. "And in return, since we're keeping this mutual..."
"Daikon," Weiss tested the name, managing it smoothly on the third syllable, and looked faintly relieved to have survived the interaction without bloodshed.
They extended their hands and shook firmly. The surrounding crowd did a remarkably terrible job of looking away.
Odyn stepped forward to close the distance.
"I had no right to lay hands on you," he said plainly, stripped of all defensiveness. "Regardless of your words, regardless of my temper. I was wrong. I owe you—one favor, whatever you choose, within reason." He held her eyes with unblinking steadiness. "Name it."
Weiss paused, considering the open-ended offer. Her gaze drifted past him to Ruby, who was standing stiffly behind Odyn's right shoulder, wearing the desperate expression of someone desperately trying to melt into the sky.
"Look after her," Weiss instructed softly. "Ruby." She swallowed hard, forcing the final, painful words out: "You're the only person our age I truly trust with her. Don't let her run headfirst into recklessness. Don't let her doubt her own worth. And make damn sure she doesn't cry."
Ruby turned the exact shade of her crimson cape.
"Weiss—"
"I'm not speaking to you, Ruby."
"It really isn't like that—"
"I said, I am still not speaking to you."
Ruby looked as though she wanted to argue, but after cycling through three separate defenses, she settled for waving her arms in a frantic, circular motion that communicated absolute panic without forming a single coherent syllable.
Odyn looked down at Weiss, then glanced back at Ruby, and the corner of his mouth twitched upward.
"Reasonable," he agreed quietly. "I can manage that."
"Odyn!" Ruby spluttered, throwing her hands up.
"What?"
"You didn't have to agree that fast!"
"It's a perfectly reasonable request."
"That is entirely missing the—" Ruby searched desperately for the right vocabulary. "—the point!"
The contained pressure that had been building across fifteen pairs of lungs finally broke. Laughter erupted simultaneously from every corner of the walkway, shattering the morning quiet of Beacon Academy. Even Hailfire, who had maintained a posture of stoic granite through every single crisis that morning, clapped a hand over her mouth and completely lost the battle for her composure.
Ruby looked frantically around the circle—at Yang's face of pure, unadulterated delight, at Kanna's knowing smirk, at Flare ducking behind Roy's broad shoulder and failing miserably to hide her giggles, and at Baron's wide grin.
She looked back at Odyn, who had completely abandoned his stoicism and was openly, quietly laughing.
Finally, she looked at Weiss, who wasn't quite smiling, but whose lips had relaxed into something that, on any other face, would have been a warm grin.
Ruby Rose planted both hands on her hips, glared at the lot of them for a heartbeat, and then threw her head back and laughed.
A team is never a finished thing simply assembled by chance. It is an organism that grows slowly, scaling at the exact pace of brutal honesty and earned forgiveness—unevenly, clumsily, in the quiet spaces between monumental events. It is welded together from arguments resolved, late-night coffees brewed in secret, and doors held open in the dark.
It is, at its core, ordinary actions executed with extraordinary care.
The badge of leadership is only ever the starting line. The burden is the daily, relentless work. And that work, as they were all beginning to learn, takes years to forge—and can never, ever be rushed.
To be continued in Chapter Four: Revelation — The Legends of the Dark Elves
Author's Note
Hey guys! I hope you all enjoyed reading this chapter. I tried keeping the narrative as close to the canon rhythm as possible while sandwiching in all the original character dynamics and interactions.
As I mentioned back at the beginning of the story, the main pairings have officially been locked in. But just in case you missed the breakdown or need a quick refresher, here is how the board shakes out:
Odyn Albanar x Ruby Rose
Roy Albanar x Yang Xiao Long
Khanna[Seraphina] Albanar x Mercury Black
Baron Caldern x Flare O. Kitsune
Jaune Arc x Pyrrha Nikos / Hailfire Caldern?
Daikon Koizumi x Weiss Schnee
Shallot (?) x Sybryh Arkham / Hailfire Caldern (?)
You'll probably notice there are a couple of lingering question marks—especially regarding Jaune and Hailfire. That's mostly because I'm still torn on whether to stick to the heartbreaking canon path or pivot into uncharted territory, especially when looking ahead to how the Fall of Beacon might play out.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, so let's run a couple of quick polls for the community:
Poll 1: What should I do with Pyrrha?
I. Stay with the canon path, resulting in her tragic death at the Fall of Beacon.
II. Divert to an alternate path where Pyrrha survives the Fall of Beacon.
Poll 2: Who should Hailfire end up with?
I. Jaune Arc
II. Shallot (Dragon Ball Legends)
III. Oscar Pine (Volume 5 onwards)
IV. Yatsuhashi Daichi (A wild-card alternate option since he doesn't get much love in RWBY crossovers!)
That's all for now, everyone. Thank you so much for reading, supporting the story, and rolling with the punches even when the crossover mechanics get a little wild or confusing.
Stay tuned, because things are only going to get more interesting from here!