"Yo, Kaneki,"
the sound of Yang's voice called out to the snowy-haired half ghoul, breaking him out of the reverie he had accidentally fallen into.
"There something wrong?"
The blonde asked, tone concerned beyond belief.
"You've been staring at those ruins for a full minute now."
"No," he replied with a slight shake of his head, clenching his fists so tightly that they started to bleed.
He did his best to not let the dread he was feeling leak into his voice as he spoke,
"Everything's fine. I'm just having a hard time trying to wrap my head around the situation, is all."
The answer was a weak one that he doubted would fool anyone, but uttered it anyways.
It didn't take a lot for him to figure out Yang didn't buy the answer, but another voice - one that was completely unfamiliar to the half ghoul - stopped her dead in her proverbial tracks.
"There you four are,"
a voice that was much more masculine-sounding came from somewhere behind him,
"and I'm guessing that you're the young man they found unconscious in the forest."
The black-clad young man in question glanced over his shoulder towards where the voice came from and found that two people, one being a middle-aged man with silver hair and the other was a similarly-aged woman with blonde hair, had decided to join their little group of four standing in the clearing.
The two were staring at him with observant eyes, seemingly strengthened by years of wisdom. Studying him like he was a stray dog they just found on the street.
'They're probably looking to see if I'm going to be dangerous or not'
the artificial half ghoul speculated,
'but why do I feel like there's something more to it than just that? '
"Don't you worry your sweet little head about them, short-stuff ...They're with us."
Yang told him while roughly placing her hand onto his shoulder, an act that forced him out of his thoughts almost immediately.
To say Kaneki the sudden contact surprised him would've been a major understatement, she was lucky that she had spoken up before she did so because otherwise, he would've attacked on instinct alone.
"Really, Ms. Xiao Long? You've just met the boy less than an hour ago and you're already giving him a pet name?"
the middle-aged woman asked the girl, she shook her head disbelievingly while holding the bridge of her nose between two dainty fingers.
He fought hard to stop the blush that was threatening to creep onto his cheeks, but unbeknownst to him, a small tinge of red did manage to sneak its way onto his features as he replied,
"I-it's nothing like that."
His attempt at reassuring her came out way too flustered for his liking as well,
"She just gave me that nickname because she didn't know what my real name was."
"About that,"
the older man with the silver-hair spoke up suddenly.
"Your name is Kaneki, am I correct?"
The half ghoul in question gave a nod before asking.
"And who might you two be?"
"Ah, my apologies, we completely forgot to introduce ourselves, I am Professor Ozpin, Headmaster of Beacon Academy."
the silver-haired man began politely, but with very little emotion to it
"And my name is Glynda Goodwitch, I'm in charge of teaching the students of Beacon how to fight effectively against the creatures of Grimm."
the older woman with blonde hair added once Ozpin finished.
Both of their introductions troubled Kaneki greatly. When he had first heard Weiss talk about the Grimm, he thought it was a problem that was confined to this forest and to this forest only, but to have an entire section of a school's curriculum dedicated to learning how to fight them meant one thing. That the situation with the Grimm was serious and widespread enough for people to take action against them. It also probably meant that they had been a problem for quite sometime.
An idea suddenly popped into his head then.
'Why are they teaching teenagers how to fight something that's obviously dangerous? '
Kaneki asked himself.
To him, that meant that this Beacon Academy's entire purpose was teaching teenagers how to fight things like the Grimm, because he highly doubted that any self-respecting high school had an optional class for that sort of thing.
The levels of dread inside the artificial ghoul rose to exponential levels as he realized what that implicated. He definitely wasn't in Japan and he was beginning to doubt that he was even in the same world anymore.
His reasoning?
First off, the six around him spoke of the Grimm like they were this place's equivalent to ghouls, which basically meant that they spoke about the subject calmly even though they knew that they were obviously dangerous. It wasn't just that though.
From the way the spoke, they sounded like they were expecting him to know about the Grimm, which meant that having knowledge about the subject was commonplace here, wherever he was. So why did he have absolutely no knowledge about the subject then?
Kaneki knew that he didn't know about everything under the sun, but he knew how the world worked. If something was even remotely dangerous to humans, the media would jump on it eventually. That, or the government covered up, but based on how liberally the six around him spoke of the subject, that clearly wasn't the case.
Nothing, and he meant absolutely nothing, could've proven his point of more than the celestial object that was now hung just a little over the treeline of the Emerald Forest.
It was the moon as he remembered it, but with a giant gash on its side causing it to remain its crescent form as its broken parts hung loosely next to it.
'What the hell happened to me?'
Kaneki asked himself as he stared wide-eyed at the damaged moon before him.
'What happened to me what happened to me what happened to me what happened to me WHAT HAPPENED TO ME?!'
"Kaneki!"
the sound of Ruby's voice drew the snowy-haired half ghoul out of his thoughts almost immediately. He glanced over at the red-clad girl, who was currently standing beside him with a worried look plastered over her face, and asked her in a tone that held zero emotion in it,
"Something the matter?"
"'Something the matter'?"
he heard Weiss yell from somewhere behind him.
"You've been staring at the moon for literally three straight minutes!"
Ozpin, who had been quietly watching this "Kaneki" for the entirety of that three minutes, noticed the change in the young man's demeanor almost immediately. His once wide-eyed face suddenly became completely void of emotion in less than a second's notice.
Ozpin recognized the look instantly and was immediately struck with a wave of pity for the young man. He had only seen that look on the faces on the most veteran of hunters, which of course made the headmaster question what he had went through in his past.
"Can I ask all of you a question?"
Kaneki spoke up suddenly, voice still harboring no emotion.
"Do any of you know how far away we are from Tokyo?"
"Toe-key-yo?"
Ruby repeated, saying the syllables to indicate that she had no idea as to what he was talking about.
"That's what I thought,"
the snowy-haired young man stated, head now angled down towards the ground, which caused his snow-white hair to cover his eyes completely.
That was the moment all four members of team RWBY dawned expressions of concern, all of them wondering what had happened to cause such a sudden shift in demeanor. But before any of them could ask him what was wrong, a series of loud howls erupted from the treeline.
The reaction from the hunters-in-training was instantaneous. In a matter of moments, each of the four teenage girls equipped their weapons.
Ruby was holding her signature red and black colored, high caliber sniper-scythe that was lovingly dubbed: "Crescent Rose".
Weiss was holding her steel-gray rapier of standard-length that could shoot vials of raw dust at her enemies. A weapon that was named as elegantly as its wielder: "Myrtenaster".
Blake, in contrast to Weiss's rather practical-looking weapon, was wielding something akin to an over-sized cleaver with a gray and pink paint job that was named: "Gambol Shroud".
And last but certainly not least was Yang, who was wielding a pair of yellow dual-ranged shot gauntlets that she called: "Ember Celica".
Almost as if on cue, four hulking half-wolf, half-human beasts emerged from the trees. Their fur was pitch-black and they all had white bone-like protrusions covering their bodies, including their faces that served as a mask to cover everything but their eyes, which shined a bright red.
"Beowolves,"
Ruby spat as she prepared herself for battle.
This prompted an almost immediate sarcastic response from Weiss, "No, you don't say?"
"Alright so how we doing this?"
Yang asked before immediately suggesting,
"One wolf each?"
"Sounds good,"
Ruby answered with an affirmative nod,
"So which one…"
"Young man, what do you think you're doing?! ... Get back here and let us take care of this!"
Ms. Goodwitch demanded.
Kaneki stopped at that order and glanced over his shoulder at the woman, casting her a glare that could've rivaled the beowolves in intensity, and answered with a simple, yet effective.
"No."
After uttering that one word answer, he continued advancing towards the beowolves. Striding towards with a nonchalant feel to his step.
All four members of team RWBY opened their mouths to try and get the snowy-haired young man to stop advancing, but they were cut off by Ozpin, who simply told them.
"Don't interfere just quite yet, I want to see what he's capable of."
"But Professor Ozpin, he doesn't even have a weapon to defend himself with!"
Weiss protested, clearly outraged by the notion of letting an unarmed civilian take on four beowolves by himself.
"Yeah, Weiss is right, how is supposed to beat four beowolves on his own with nothing but his fists?"
Yang asked, backing up her teammate with little to no hesitation, though she was still very afraid for the young man's safety.
"At least let us help him so he doesn't get himself killed!"
Ruby chimed in, the amount of worry coursing through her veins now reaching amounts that rivaled the amount of blood she had in her system.
Blake could only stare at Kaneki, her gaze holding a mixture of shock and amazement at what the white-haired young man was doing. He was currently staring down a group of four beowolves without a weapon in his hands and he was acting like it was nothing but a walk in the park.
"None of you need to worry,"
Kaneki told them all, voice still completely emotionless as he spoke,
"when I told you that I was capable of defending myself, I wasn't lying…"
Cracking the middle joint of his index finger, he continued in a much darker voice,
"Now then..." .