Raven and Jaune continued to move across the rooftops like blurs of shadow underneath the red moonlight.
The vantage point helped him. From atop the roofs, entire sectors of Belmont City lay exposed: crumbled apartment blocks, shattered roads, and strange haze drifting through alleyways like a living tide.
The grimm were back now.
They prowled below, in uneven clusters. Some streets had a lot and some were nearly empty. According to Raven, those empty spaces were the key.
Grimm were drawn to awakened, which meant that wherever Dragon Gang spawned from, they cleared or pulled aggro away from it.
So the places with fewer or no prowlers... were the trail they left behind.
A Rank 0 Ursa climbed a broken fire escape toward him, snarling. Without even thinking, Jaune's arm snapped out. The backhand strike connected with its jaw and the entire head simply burst. Bone and tar-like substance sprayed in a grotesque arc as the body collapsed lifelessly.
His Body stat still startled him sometimes.
Raven landed silently beside him on the next building. "Not here."
"Are you sure?" Jaune asked.
She jerked her chin toward the next street. Nearly two dozen Grimm prowled around the corner—too many for a place a group of awakened had passed through. "If Dragon Gang had moved through this lane, these would've been empty."
He nodded. "So… onward?"
Raven nodded.
Then her entire form sank downward. She plunged into her own shadow like liquid ink, and before Jaune could blink, the shadow rose—expanding, ballooning upward, feathers forming from darkness like brushstrokes of night.
Within seconds, a colossal raven, as large as a house, towered in front of him.
"Brace yourself," she echoed. Her voice warbled in the air in a way that suggested this bird form clearly did not have proper vocal cords.
"We're flying?" he said.
The awakened back at base don't even have five hours left, her voice cracked out like dark thunder. If we take too long to find their spawn point, the dream erosion will take them.
Right. No pressure.
She grabbed him with her talons. A strangled noise escaped him—the instinctual "this enormous murder-bird has me in its claws" reaction.
Wind blasted his face as she lifted into the blood-red sky, wings beating with hurricane force. Each flap sent tremors through his bones. Below them, the city sprawled under the broken moon, shadows and debris stretching for miles.
Flying made the emptiness easier to track: long, barren aisles cut through the streets like surgical scars where Grimm were strangely absent.
Raven's wings adjusted sharply. Not here either.
Jaune could sense her frustration, a form of urgency sharpening her movements into something almost reckless.
Then, suddenly, she froze mid-flight.
Her head rotated with unnatural smoothness, beak angling southward. She felt something—rather than heard it—rippling through the air around her. A signal.
Then her beak curled upward in a disturbingly chilling smile. One that shouldn't have belonged to a raven.
Qrow had found them.
Jaune's heart leapt.
"Where?" he shouted over the roaring wind.
Raven didn't answer.
She simply folded her wings tightly around him and plunged downward into a shadow on the ground.
The world vanished in a rushing smear of darkness. That darkness swallowed them whole. It was viscous and cold like plunging into a freezing lake. Jaune's lungs seized. The sensation wasn't quite drowning, but it wasn't far from it. There was no air and no sound, just weightless pressure and the distant echo of Raven's presence keeping him tethered.
Then—
Light.
Red moonlight.
Shadow exploded outward and they burst from a pool of darkness on the cracked side of a towering office building. No—not the building. It was Qrow. Or the gargantuan, monstrous avian version of him.
He was huge. Rank 2, grimm-level huge. His wingspan eclipsed half the ruined block, feathers like black blades dripping with smoky shadow. Each beat of his wings sent shockwaves through the air that shook nearby skyscrapers. Razor talons raked through the sky as he grappled with—
A man.
An older man in his fifties, wrapped in swirling ripples of warped space. Every movement distorted the air like heat haze. His edges continuously flickered—here, then there, then slightly elsewhere—as if reality couldn't decide where he belonged.
The Rank 2 Displacement user.
His presence hummed with power.
Qrow snapped at him with his colossal beak, tearing apart a chunk of distorted space that crumpled like glass. The man flickered out of existence and reappeared a dozen meters away, hurling a compressed bolt of warped distance that detonated against Qrow's chest in a vacuum-like implosion.
Raven dropped Jaune.
Just straight-up let go, no warning.
"HEY—!"
He plummeted five stories and landed with a knee bent, absorbing the impact through enhanced strength. The ground cratered beneath him, dust exploding outward.
"Ow," he muttered. "Ow, ow, ow—okay, that's fine. I'm fine. Totally fine."
A familiar booming-blast of kinetic sound cracked just ahead—Yang's rune, Kinetic. Ruby's Accel rune flared through the air like a shooting star. Qrow's gigantic wings thundered above him, and Raven materialized behind him in her humanoid form with a ripple of darkness.
The battlefield was chaos incarnate.
Buildings groaned under the stress of the air pressure from Qrow's aerial maneuvers. The Displacement user flickered around the sky with impossible speed, bending distance into weapons. Every step he took left distortions behind, like footprints of warped gravity.
Ruby and Yang darted across rooftops far below, fighting against the Rank 1 awakened underlings with little flashes of colored light. They were holding their own, but just barely. All things considered, the Dragon Gang's elites outnumbered Ruby and Yang.
But the real threat was still the man in the sky.
A Rank 2 with a rune that could somehow function like a Rank 3's. Someone violating the natural barriers of the Dream Realm. Someone who had dragged the entire city into this nightmare using an unknown method.
Someone Qrow couldn't afford to fight alone.
Raven's voice echoed in Jaune's ear as she prepared to join the aerial battle. "Stay on the ground and support your friends. If any Rank 1s escape that perimeter, take them down."
"Right," he breathed. "Got it."
"Good." Her eyes gleamed like polished obsidian. "And don't get displaced. If he sends you halfway across the map, I'm not fetching you."
He swallowed. "…Are you serious?"
But she was already far away, joining Qrow in assaulting the elderly.
Above them, Qrow's massive raven form let out a bone-shaking caw and dove, slamming into the Displacement user in a burst of shadow-feathers that scattered like knives. Space shattered where they collided—literally shattered, fragments of warped distance raining down like broken glass.
The battle had begun.
And they were already behind... but not for long.
Jaune utilized his teleport rune and appeared in a flash of light, besides Yang, just as a Dragon Gang awakened swung a sword in a vicious arc toward her unprotected back. He shot his blades up caught the strike with an iron clang. The force rippled through his arms, but his peak Body stat barely registered it as more than a shove.
Yang whirled around in surprise, eyes widening for a fraction of a second before instinct took over. With Jaune blocking the strike, she pivoted, planted her heel into the cracked asphalt, and brought her gauntleted fist forward in a tight, explosive cross-punch.
But the attack that came out was far from "tight."
A low BOOM rippled outward—then the world in front of her detonated.
What was meant to be a controlled shockwave from Yang's Kinetic Rune expanded into a blooming sphere of heat and concussive force, a miniature sun erupting around her. The air warped. The street recoiled. A shockwave punched outward in a perfect cone of energy, shredding asphalt and pulverizing nearby garden fences. The Dragon Gang swordsman tried to brace, but he had no rune frame. The explosion swallowed him whole and launched him into the sky like a discarded rag.
The blast hurled Jaune backward as well, but he'd trained with Yang many times before and had been expecting this. He tucked his body, skidded against the asphalt, and rolled back to his feet, barely singed.
The ground around Yang was a new crater, cracked and smoking.
Yang blinked at her hands. "That was a little bigger than last time. Sorry Jaune."
Jaune didn't waste breath responding—he didn't have the luxury. His gaze swept the battlefield. Ruby was several houses down, locked in a deadly dance with a dual-dagger awakened. Even from here, Jaune could see the strange movements the man made—short bursts of blinding speed, then freezes, momentum cut unnaturally sharp, like someone was hitting pause on him mid-stride.
A speed rune, but with…some type of momentum control rune? It was certainly something that Jaune was unfamiliar with.
Ruby blocked one dagger, twisted—then the man vanished from in front of her. A heartbeat later he reappeared behind her, slashing downward. Ruby burst into crimson petals, flickering away in a swirl of light. The blades carved empty air but tracked her again instantly. The man moved like a ricocheting bullet, bouncing between micro-impacts of speed.
Ruby barely kept ahead by weaving, petals scattering behind her like a slipping illusion, but she wasn't blocking everything—not at this speed.
Jaune vanished.
His teleport rune sparked again, bringing him into existence behind the dagger wielder with a silent flash. The man had just enough time to sense danger—his body stiffened, instinct making him bringer his daggers up into a block, but it was useless. Jaune's heel connected squarely into the front of his face.
The effect was powerful.
His face crumpled upon impact. The kick had launched him in a straight line across the street, his body smashing through the side of a house, through the next one, and then through another wall beyond that. Dust and debris sailed into the red night like confetti.
"Thanks, Jaune."
Ruby reformed beside Jaune, petals collapsing inward into her physical form. Yang landed a half-second later, gauntlets steaming faintly.
Both girls raised their weapons, ready to cover Jaune or finish the man if he came back out of the rubble.
He didn't.
Jaune had already shifted his stance, scanning the wider area. His awareness expanded—reading Aura pressure, footsteps, rustling shingles. They were standing in a quiet residential neighborhood. Or rather—what used to be one. The once-peaceful cul-de-sac was now infested with awakened perched on rooftops, clustered on balconies, and prowling through the streets.
Dozens of them.
At least thirty, maybe more. Aura signatures varied in intensity—none weak, none untrained. These people were real awakened…but not LUCID. Their gear confirmed it.
Ruby whispered under her breath, "These guys are stacked…"
Jaune took a step forward, analyzing. The weapons the Dragon Gang carried were mismatched—some were mass-produced conventional blades, others were crude aftermarket mods, none anywhere close to LUCID's monomolecular edges or their specialized alloys. Their armor, such as it was, ranged from reinforced leather to outdated ballistic plating. No rune frames. No standardized dream-tech circuits. No conductive weave.
And yet…
Their presence pressed down on the street like a heavy storm.
Many of these people had trained their techniques for years. Fortunately, they were all only Rank 1. But numbers mattered and so did experience. Even the weakest of them had killer instincts that came from living outside of LUCID jurisdiction, in environments where being careless meant dying very fast.
Yang muttered, "They look like they crawled out of a scrapyard."
Ruby adjusted Crescent Rose, voice low but sharp. "Scrapyard or not, that's a lot of Aura."
Jaune didn't answer. He was too busy tracking them.
On the roof of the nearest house, five awakened crouched like wolves. Another six on the opposite side. Three more in the street ahead. And scattered among the houses—more silhouettes, shifting, preparing to strike. Their eyes were predatory. Hungry. Calculating.
Jaune exhaled.
This was a war party.
Not the full Dragon Gang. But a serious contingent, loyalists, led by the older displacement user who was fighting Qrow above.
Permanent imbuing.
The Dragon Gang wanted the secret. And they had been searching hard enough to risk a coordinated assault on multiple areas of the Nightmare Zone simultaneously.
Ruby's voice snapped him back.
"Jaune—left side!"
He teleported before he even turned.
A Dragon Gang brawler attempted to crush Ruby with a descending hammer fist, but Jaune reappeared on the man's flank, driving a shoulder into his ribcage with enough force to send him spinning off the roof.
Yang intercepted another who lunged toward Jaune, greeting him with a kinetic-charged gauntlet strike that sent him spiraling through a parked car.
Ruby sniped a third with a precise kinetic shot from her sidearm rifle, the red arc cutting through shingles and forcing the awakened to dive for cover.
Jaune braced as enemy after enemy repositioned, forming a tightening ring around the three of them.
The neighborhood felt suddenly smaller. Streets narrower. Walls closer.
All thirty awakened were locking on to the three teens.
Even for someone who was at the peak of Rank 1… Jaune felt the weight of their gazes.
Yang cracked her knuckles.
Ruby breathed out, steadying her weapon.
Jaune lowered his stance, senses sharpening, teleport rune thrumming at a low hum.
Outnumbered wasn't new.
But this?
This was the first time he had stared down an organized front of awakened criminals—people who weren't limited by rules, structure, or LUCID oversight. People who lived in the shadows, in brutality. People who knew what they wanted—and were willing to kill hundreds to get it.
Jaune's heartbeat steadied.
"Stay close," he murmured. "They're not stupid… They'll try to isolate—"
A rooftop tile shifted and a ripple of Aura tension spiked across the block. Every awakened in view moved at once.
But Jaune moved faster.
.
.
AN: Fights, fights and more fights. Also, just a heads up, there is going to be a lot of POV shifts in the next 10 chapters. Might be annoying for some of you, but just bear with it because It'll give you some insight into their actions.
Advanced chapters are available on patreon.