Biology was not her favorite subject.
It wasn't that she disliked it—life sciences were fascinating in their way, with their diagrams of cellular processes and neat categorizations of organisms—but fascination wasn't the same as attachment. Pyrrha Nikos had learned early that she had to reserve her attachment carefully. To the right things and to the right people. And the truth was, in biology class, there was little to hold on to besides a dry textbook. The teacher, Peter Port, was fun however. Then again, perhaps he was channeling his own enthusiasm from the Dream realm into his work? Apparently, that was the norm with Rank 2's.
In any case, she attended, front row as always with her notebook already open. Not because she needed the practice—her retention was excellent—but because people tended to expect it. Pyrrha Nikos was a diligent, dedicated and disciplined student. The sort of student who didn't just excel in fights, but also in classrooms. Well, not that she fought in public anymore... but that was her image. And maintaining an image was... second nature by now.
She glanced once toward the door, half without meaning to.
The last time she'd had a class with Jaune Arc was an entire week ago. Since then, she hadn't seen him here. She hadn't seen him in philosophy either. A reasonable assumption would have been that he'd dropped or switched classes—students did that, early in term. But then, down in the LUCID facility beneath beacon, the whispers had started.
An anomalous awakening.
It was Weiss that had informed her about Jaune Arc's curious circumstance. Weiss had phrased it as though Jaune were some interesting animal to be cataloged, a new toy fresh from the vault of oddities. Pyrrha had to admit that it was certainly interesting in its own way.
See, anomalies didn't happen. That was the point. The Dream had rules. Harsh rules and sometimes unfair rules, but rules nonetheless. They were mapped, charted and recorded over decades of sacrifice. There were still gaps in the map—Nightmares which slipped through, bleeding into the world when not cleared in time—but those weren't anomalies. They were probabilities and misfortunes which were foreseeable in the grand scheme.
But Jaune Arc? Him awakening at sixteen? And not even on his birthday? That wasn't mapped. That was... well it wasn't supposed to exist.
Pyrrha had thought on it more than once, usually while her fists met the weighted training dummies in the training wing, or while sweat dripped down her jaw in the simulation rooms. She hadn't known him for long—days, really—and their interactions had been limited to polite greetings and small talk.
But he hadn't known who she was.
And that, oddly enough, had left more of an impression on her than any anomalous nature of him ever could.
Almost everyone knew who she was. The girl who shattered her age bracket in MMA, who lifted trophies twice her size with an expression as calm as if she were holding a teacup. Even among LUCID, she was known as the genius who who carried her prowess into the Dream as though it were only another arena. Pyrrha Nikos, the untouchable. The unbreakable.
The Invincible.
People admired her. Idolized her and even envied her. They didn't however, approach her. Not without an agenda. Not without awe. Even here, at Beacon where she shouldn't have been as famous as she should have been in Mistral, she was still "Pyrrha."
It was exhausting.
Jaune Arc's blank expression, the faint tilt of his head when they'd first spoken—like he genuinely hadn't recognized her—had been refreshing in a way she hadn't expected. A relief.
Now, as the classroom door opened and he stepped in, Pyrrha found her eyes drawn to him without conscious choice.
He looked about the same as he had last week: blond hair a little untidy, clothes neat but not obsessive, shoulders squared as though he was trying to make himself fit more comfortably in his own skin.
Except... now, he walked with purpose, and there was something new in his step. She wouldn't have noticed it if she hadn't spent years cataloging footwork, momentum, weight distribution. He carried himself a little differently. Not quite confident, but no longer uncertain. As if the ground beneath him had firmed since she'd last seen him.
Weiss, seated beside her, noticed him too. But perhaps not the way she was analyzing him. Pyrrha caught it in the way Weiss's gaze lingered on him, as though she were dissecting a specimen under glass.
Of course Weiss would be curious. She was Schnee, heiress to the SBC, the richest conglomerate banking industry in the world. Curiosity and ambition ran in her blood. Weiss didn't look at people without calculating something.
Pyrrha kept her own expression neutral, though inside she felt a ripple of—what was it? Interest? Caution? Perhaps both.
Jaune scanned the room briefly, then caught her eye.
"Hey," he said simply, offering her a small, unassuming smile as though they were old classmates rather than near-strangers.
Pyrrha inclined her head politely. "Hello, Jaune."
He moved to take the empty seat beside her. The lack of hesitation in it struck her. Most people would have paused, second-guessed, tried to calculate whether they were allowed to sit so close to Pyrrha Nikos. Others would have leapt at the chance, perhaps eager to make themselves more memorable.
Jaune did neither. He simply sat, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Weiss shifted slightly in her chair on Pyrrha's other side, a flicker of irritation crossing her face. Pyrrha caught it in her periphery and had to hide the small curl of amusement tugging at her lips. It seemed as if Weiss was still not a particular fan of Jaune's.
Their professor, Peter Port, began an exciting lesson about cellular respiration, marker squealing faintly on the board. Pyrrha's pen moved automatically, her notes neat and efficient, though her attention was divided.
Every so often, she let her gaze flick to her left.
Jaune was listening—trying, at least. His brow furrowed faintly as the professor launched into cellular cycles, and he scribbled something down quickly. He carried himself neither like a prodigy or even a person of import. Like didn't understand that he was someone extraordinary.
And yet, he was. By definition, an anomaly.
Pyrrha wondered what that felt like—to be thrust into extraordinariness, beyond what a normal awakened would have been, without warning, at that. She had heard that he had went alone in the Dream for a while before LUCID found him. A miracle he survived. Or perhaps skill? In any case, he couldn't have even exited the dream without killing a grimm, which meant... there perhaps was a measure of skill involved. She herself was trained until there was no line between Pyrrha the girl and Pyrrha the prodigy.
But Jaune?
He was a ripple where there should have been none.
Her fingers tightened briefly on her pen. She forced them to relax at once.
"Strange, isn't it?" Weiss comment, leaning towards her slightly with a whisper so soft that only a rank 1 awakened or above could have heard it. Her eyes were narrowed faintly as though trying to pierce Jaune's skull with her stare alone. "An awakening that breaks the rules. Either he's very lucky, or very dangerous."
Pyrrha's lips curved just slightly, though it wasn't quite a smile. "Maybe he's both?"
Weiss huffed quietly, sitting back, clearly unsatisfied with the answer.
Pyrrha's gaze drifted back to Jaune once more.
He wasn't looking at her or Weiss. He was just—here. A boy in a biology class, trying to understand mitochondria.
And for some reason, that made him more interesting than all the whispers combined.
.
.
Philosophy followed directly after biology, though Pyrrha found herself lingering behind in the emptying lecture hall.
Weiss stood beside her, tucking her pen into her bag and snapping it shut with crisp finality.
"Coming?" she asked, her tone implying the answer should be immediate.
"In a moment," Pyrrha replied smoothly, offering a polite smile.
Weiss gave her a sidelong glance. She was perceptive in her own way, though she often wielded it like a scalpel—precise and clinical, but not always warm. She studied Pyrrha for a heartbeat longer, then gave her a nod before heading towards the door. She must have figured that Pyrrha wanted to talk to Jaune.
The classroom emptied, the murmur of departing students echoing faintly against the tall windows. Pyrrha waited, sliding her notes into her satchel more slowly than usual, eyes drifting toward her left, where Jaune had been sitting.
But he was gone already.
Pyrrha's lips curved in a rueful half-smile even as her brows shot up in confusion. Of course. He didn't linger. When did he slip away?
Perhaps Pyrrha was more distracted with her own thoughts that she had realized?
Truly, an ordinary guy, Jaune was...
Except, of course, he wasn't.
That fact still nagged at her. She had intended to say something casual—How are you finding Beacon? Have you settled into the routine?—and then perhaps work her way toward the questions that mattered. Not bluntly or rudely, but carefully. How long had you survived in the Dream before LUCID found you? What did you see? What did you fight? For someone like him, someone who shouldn't have Awakened and yet was, those details could define everything.
But the moment slipped away, as they so often did, leaving her with nothing but a faint ache of curiosity.
By the time she reached philosophy, the seats were nearly filled. The teacher hadn't arrived yet, but conversation buzzed across the room, the mingling noise of dozens of students preparing for another hour of abstraction and argument. Pyrrha's gaze swept across the rows automatically—habit, more than intent—and stopped.
There.
Jaune was seated already. Third row from the front, near the windows, a shaft of daylight catching faintly on his hair. And beside him—Blake Belladonna.
Pyrrha remembered her. She was quiet and polite. Someone she had spoken with briefly during LUCID's year orientation, when the first-year group had been introduced en masse. She hadn't stood out much then, not compared to the more vibrant personalities like Yang Xiao Long, Nora Valkyrie or the poised sharpness of Weiss. Blake had been reserved, her words measured, her eyes distant. A girl who kept her own counsel.
Now, she sat beside Jaune as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
Pyrrha crossed the room with deliberate calm, scanning the rows until her eyes landed on him. Jaune Arc sat in the third row by the window, Blake Belladonna already settled at his right. An empty seat remained to his left.
Perfect.
She slipped into it, setting her notebook and pen on the desk in one smooth motion. "Is this seat free?" she asked softly as she did.
Jaune glanced over at her, his expression lighting with easy recognition. "Uh—yeah, sure, Pyrrha!"
That was all. No hesitation or awe. No scrambling to impress her like so many others tried. Just a simple greeting, genuine and unaffected, before he turned back toward the front.
It was refreshing.
Blake gave her a faint nod in acknowledgment, then lowered her gaze to her own notes. Pyrrha mirrored the gesture, though a sliver of amusement curled inside her at the faint flicker of annoyance she thought she saw in Blake's eyes. Or perhaps she had only imagined it.
"So, uh… Philosophy, huh?" Jaune commented lightly, perhaps sensing the two girls odd moods.
Pyrrha couldn't help herself. A radiant smile bloomed lightly across her feature.
The professor arrived shortly after, shuffling a stack of papers and clearing his throat before launching into the day's lecture. "The three great traditions of moral philosophy," he declared, his voice carrying across the room. "Deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics. Today, we ask: what does it mean to act rightly?"
His words filled the air, marker squeaking faintly against the board. Pyrrha's pen moved in tidy, efficient lines, capturing definitions and examples, though her mind was not wholly on the lecture.
Because she could feel it—Blake's gaze.
Not constant or particularly intrusive. But present. A glance in their direction, subtle as the turn of a page. A shift of her head as if checking the clock, only her eyes slid toward Jaune instead. Once or twice, toward Pyrrha herself.
Most would not have noticed. But Pyrrha was not most. Her Rune, once it had reached comprehension, had sharpened her senses beyond the ordinary. Awareness came easily to her now—the rhythm of footsteps in a hall, the subtle drift of weight in a spar, the nearly imperceptible focus of someone's eyes. Blake's attention was akin to a quiet pressure brushing against her awareness, like a ripple in still water.
At first, Pyrrha assumed the obvious. Blake had recognized her. That happened often enough—too often. Students staring when they thought she wouldn't notice, whispers about "the Invincible Girl." Fans who wanted to be near her, to claim some connection. She had long since grown used to it, and grown tired of it.
But then she realized—Blake's gaze lingered on Jaune more often than it did on her.
Her pen paused briefly in its neat march across the page. Interesting.
Was Blake… attracted to him? The thought wasn't absurd. Jaune was, a little charming, she supposed. He was quite approachable in a way that felt rare here. Quiet too, all things considering.
Blake was quiet herself, perhaps even a little reserved. Maybe she saw something in him that mirrored her own nature?
The idea of this curious guy being snapped up by a beautiful girl like Blake lodged an interesting emotion in Pyrrha's chest.
She inhaled slowly, pen moving again, forcing herself back into composure. No. She was leaping to conclusions. Blake's interest was likely the same as everyone else's: curiosity.
Because Jaune Arc was an anomaly.
Everyone had heard the rumors by now. An awakening that shouldn't have been possible. A boy with no training, and yet somehow alive. That kind of story drew attention like moths to flame. Of course Blake would watch him closely. Who wouldn't?
Still, the thought lingered, as stubborn as it was irrational.
Pyrrha allowed herself a brief glance at Jaune, her cheeks warming before she could stop them. His hair was slightly unruly and his handwriting was a mess compared to her own neat lines. His brow furrowed as the professor outlined Kant's categorical imperative, lips pursed in concentration.
He didn't act like someone of importance. Strong enough to change the rules of the Dream. Powerful enough to be considered an Anomaly.
And yet—he had.
A ripple in the fabric of the Dream.
Blake's gaze flickered again, subtle as ever. Pyrrha felt her fingers tighten around her pen before she willed them to relax. She would not dwell on it. She would not spiral into foolish assumptions about Blake's intentions.
Instead, she straightened, her focus shifting inward.
Blake Belladonna was not her concern.
Jaune Arc… perhaps was.
She returned her gaze to the board, filling another clean line of notes. But the words blurred, the professor's voice faded, and the same question circled back again, as inescapable as the marker scent hanging in the air:
What would become of Jaune Arc?