Qrow, Ruby, and Yang had been sweeping the eastern sprawl of Belmont for a little while, scouring sector by sector. It was the same search pattern that he used with Raven on particularly... eclectic and volatile nights. The goal was simple, find areas where Grimm presence dipped unnaturally, because such vacuums never happened without a reason. They were either killed or drawn away. And since the LUCID operatives were all holed up at the base, the only people that could have done it was the Dragon Gang members.
The pattern finally led them to a neighborhood whose streets were located in a spiral, converging toward a shattered cul-de-sac. Grimm density was practically non-existence here.
"Eyes open," Qrow warned. "They're very likely to be here, if not close by."
Yang cracked her knuckles, a low roll of fire rippling through her gauntlets. "About time. I was getting bored."
Qrow didn't bother responding. The moment they reached the end of the slope, they saw them—dozens of awakened perched across rooftops, blocking the skyline with their silhouettes. A whole cluster of Rank 1s, shamelessly exposed and waiting.
And among them, was an older man. He had a head of greying hair, late fifties or sixties.
The Rank 2 displacement user.
Qrow didn't hesitate.
A sharp cry cut through the air as he clenched his fist and punched out with his arm. From his sleeve, a large amount of feathers exploded in a shotgun-like spray of razor-sharp deadly pinions. They arched forwards toward the rooftop crowd.
The Rank 2, sensing danger, reacted instantly.
Space twisted in front of him, collapsing inward to form an invisible shield. It looked as if space itself was being compress into a a single geometric plane, distorting the light from the broken moon above. The sheer force of it was astounding. His feathers smashed against the barrier and vaporized harmlessly, as if erased into nothing.
"Tch." Qrow hated fighting space-types. Everything about them was slippery.
The Rank 2 didn't give him time to reorient. He tapped his feet and stepped through folded space—appearing directly in front of Qrow as though he had always been there. His arm snapped forward, palm flattening, fingers compressing into a spear-like blade of warped dimension. It shot toward Qrow's chest with lethal precision.
Qrow was already shifting.
His body stretched and his bones reformed, feathers erupting from his skin as he surged into his Monster Crow form—massive wings snapping open, talons forming, black silhouette blotting out half the street. The air gusted violently as his transformed body forced the spear-thrust aside, scraping sparks from the distortions around it.
Ruby reacted instantly. She grabbed Yang's wrist, rune-frame glowing bright red, and triggered her Accel rune, stacking it twice in an instant. The two blurred backward in a streak of color.
But they didn't need to.
Because the Rank 2 saw he wouldn't land a clean hit and smoothly redirected his intent—his arm shifting from a spear to an open grip. Space folded like a trapdoor, and his hand clamped down on a small portion of Qrow's wing joint.
And then—
Qrow's stomach dropped.
His vision spun.
Space shattered.
He and the Rank 2 were gone.
They reappeared miles above the city in the span of a heartbeat. Air blasted past Qrow's feathers in a frigid torrent, the ground a distant smear far below them. The Rank 2 held onto him as if weight didn't exist, eyes sharp, expression almost maddeningly calm.
Below, far smaller than they should have looked, Ruby and Yang launched into the rooftop awakened, scattering them like startled birds.
Qrow didn't have the luxury of watching. The Rank 2 twisted space again, attempting to drag him through another displacement—one that would shred Qrow's form if he entered it half-transformed.
Qrow screeched and slashed, a wing-blade carving along the distortion, disrupting it with raw force. The Rank 2 shifted his footing in midair, kick off the air like it was solid ground, and prepared another folded-space strike.
Then a vast shadow poured out of Qrow's wings.
Not a normal shadow—Raven's.
She emerged like ink flowing out from between feathers, dragging a bewildered Jaune Arc with her under her wings. The kid looked shell-shocked from the displacement jump Raven had used to reach Qrow, eyes scanning the sky in panic before he spotted the Rank 1s descending below.
Raven dropped Jaune off the side of Qrow's wing.
The wind caught him, his rune frame flaring as he stabilized his fall enough to hit the street with something less than terminal velocity. After a few seconds of him helping both of his nieces, both Ruby and Yang converged on him and the three formed a defensive triangle amid the chaos.
Qrow exhaled, relief momentarily loosening his tension. If Raven was on the field now, she'd keep one eye on the kids even while she fought.
Good. Because Qrow needed his entire focus on the bastard floating in front of him.
The Rank 2 tilted his head slightly, examining Raven with the faint curiosity of a man watching a magician unveil a new trick. The Shadow Raven surged outward, dwarfing even Qrow's crow form, its body a writhing mass of black feathers and void-stricken limbs.
Dozens of shadow arms unfurled from her torso, each gripping a sword the length of a building. The air flexed under the pressure of her presence.
Qrow felt a grudging swell of pride. His sister knew how to make an entrance.
The Rank 2 adjusted his stance in midair, as if counting angles.
Qrow disliked the analytical calm that was on his face. And while he pitied the man due to his situation, he didn't really know his name.
He needed to call him something.
Not "the displacement user." Too stiff and too impersonal for a man who had already tried to skewer him twice.
Qrow stared at him for half a second.
Fine. Bob. The guy was Bob now.
"Alright, Bob," Qrow growled, wings spreading. "Round two."
Bob didn't reply. He simply folded space around his fists and prepared to fight.
Qrow dove.
He didn't bother with a battle cry. His body split into three crow bodies and simply moved—one titanic crow the size of a small office building, wings blotting out the broken moon, and two house-sized crows flanking him like dark satellites. They all carried the same strength, the same brutal weight behind each movement, but the smaller ones darted like hunting raptors, weaving and spiraling through the air.
Across from them, Bob floated, space folding around his limbs with a subtle ripple. He raised one hand, palm spreading open as though brushing dust from a table.
And then distance itself bent.
Bolts of condensed space—compressed lines of "length," lethal white fissures that sizzled like burning ice—snapped into existence and fired toward them in a barrage.
Qrow's main body pulled upward sharply, wings snapping wide to catch the air. The bolts tore through the space he had been occupying, ripping trails of fractured distance that flickered and sealed back together like quivering wounds in reality.
Raven met the barrage head-on.
Her Shadow Raven form—vast, towering, a silhouette stitched from black feathers and crawling void—swung one of its many Asura-like arms. A sword of condensed shadows cut through the barrage with casual precision. Each bolt of distance she carved apart dispersed into motes of displaced geometry, evaporating like starlight.
A second arm followed, then a third—each slicing, parrying, or cleaving the distorted projectiles before they could reach any of the three Qrows.
Bob responded by raising a palm over his shoulder.
A bubble of folded space—transparent yet visibly warped—wrapped around him. It compressed, hardened, turning into a fractal shield that shimmered in jagged spirals.
Qrow's smallest crow body dove first, beak wide and talons extended. Its shadow streaked across the fractured skyline. It hit Bob's shield like a missile, beak punching forward with impossible force.
The shield cracked inward, as if Qrow's strike were biting into a glass sculpture.
His second crow slammed in from the opposite side, beak crunching against the warped barrier. The dual impact sent reverberations through the air, rippling along Bob's protections like a disturbed pond.
Qrow's main body twisted its long neck and struck downward with a bite that could have devoured a car whole.
Bob's space shield shattered.
Not in shards—shards would have obeyed physics—but in pieces of distance, collapsing into splintered geometry that fell upward, sideways, then dissolved.
Raven moved immediately.
Her Shadow Raven surged forward, a massive calamity of wings and writhing limbs. New swords of shadow erupted from her torso in a radial bloom, each blade crackling with void-saturated edge. They came down at Bob from all directions, carving a cage of annihilation.
At the same time—
Raven herself stepped out of her giant form.
She didn't dissolve it. The Shadow Raven remained intact, fighting independently like a monstrous puppet. But its mistress flowed from its wings like living ink, her physical body reforming behind Bob in the sliver of shadow cast by his own distorted body.
Her blade was already drawn.
Raven struck without hesitation, sword plunging straight into his spine. Except, when the blade passed through, Bob shattered.
Not in flesh or blood, but in crystalline-like space. His body fragmented into mirrored shards of distance, where each piece reflected angles that didn't exist. They scattered like a broken kaleidoscope and blinked out.
He reformed instantly above Qrow's main crow body.
Qrow was already reacting. All three of him twisted midair, wings hammering the air in perfect synchronicity. They converged, talons raking upward, beaks lunging, wings slicing like cleavers.
But Bob folded space along his skin, slipping through Qrow's attacks like oil through fingers. Every strike passed through a distortion, every cut landed on a location he'd abandoned half a second before.
He reappeared—hands spreading apart.
Space quivered.
A building-sized sword took shape between his palms. Not a sword made of metal or light, but a blade forged entirely of distance—condensed, sharpened, and folded into a geometric edge that cut simply by existing.
Bob swung it downward.
The air cracked.
And then the sword split into dozens—scores of a hundred smaller blades. Each fragment broke off into a velocity that didn't make sense, flinging in impossible lines toward both Qrow and Raven.
Qrow pushed all three bodies in different evasive patterns.
The largest one spiraled backward, wings extended like massive shields. One smaller crow shot left, the other right, trying to bait and break the incoming trajectories.
But the sword were too fast.
One blade of distance caught the rightmost crow by the neck and it sliced clean through.
The crow's head separated from its body—and Qrow felt it.
A violent snap tearing through his mind, like a string tied to his soul being cut. He coughed in his human throat—though he wasn't in human form—blood bubbling into the air. His remaining bodies faltered for a fraction of a heartbeat.
There was backlash to one of him dying.
He'd never known killing one of his crow bodies could injure him. But then again—it had never happened before. Previously, while his Crow bodies had always gotten injured, none of them had ever died. In the event of them taking close to fatal damage, he would always unsummon them and re-summon a new one. Which meant this feeling was uncharted territory.
Murder, still felt raw and half-understood. That was the issue with meta runes. Before it reached comprehension, it had been a simple enhancement, an amplification of the bloodlust that fueled his aggression and in turn would physically make it body more stronger, at the cost of his sanity. Now, it synchronized with his Crow Rune, merging into a deeper, more monstrous scrawl of power.
A Murder of Crows—literalized.
And one had just been murdered.
Qrow shook off the pain with a guttural screech, the sound tearing across the world like a thunderclap. The remaining small crow soared upward with renewed savagery. The giant crow lunged forward, fury radiating from its every feather.
Raven didn't pause either.
The Shadow Raven surged around her, swords of darkness multiplying, its form warping into an even more grotesque silhouette. Raven used it like a hammer while she herself moved like a knife—slipping through shadows, appearing at angles Bob couldn't ignore.
Bob dropped his hands, fingers flicking. Distance quivered around him, threatening to rupture—
—but Qrow's surviving small crow slammed into him.
Bob's concentration slipped for half a second.
Enough.
Raven's Shadow Raven struck from below.
Qrow's giant body struck from above.
Bob twisted space around his torso, trying to escape through a fold—
but the fold snagged.
The Shadow Raven's sword had pierced the distortion itself, pinning it like a butterfly in a display frame. Qrow's massive beak closed around the entire bubble of warped space, crushing it inward.
Bob was forced out—spinning through the open air—and Raven was already on him, sword drawn in both hands.
She swung—
And space detonated between them.
Bob reappeared fifty meters back, panting, blood trailing from the corner of his mouth. Even displacement had limits when pushed that hard.
Qrow's two remaining bodies circled him like wolves around a wounded stag.
Raven stood below, her Shadow Raven towering behind her like a god.
Bob wiped the blood with the back of his hand.
For the first time, his expression cracked.
Anger and annoyance. The realization that he was fighting something far, far worse than he expected. But beyond his eyes Qrow saw something far more terrifying. Determination and resolve. An emotion that burned with an extreme heat. Heat so bright that it visibly caused Raven and Qrow to flinch ever so slightly.
Qrow's beak clicked. Raven and him knew the reason why. Truth be told, Evergreen was morally at fault. But... for the greater good, some things just had to happen.
Even if it sickened Qrow to do this.
"Round three," he rasped.
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon