Qrow's beak cracked open, a resonant, avian baritone cutting through the wounded skyline.
"Round three."
The declaration rolled across the broken sky like a herald's drumbeat. His wings flapped slowly against the heated updraft, the glow of Murder was faintly along his feathers. His smaller crow-forms circled with predatory stillness, talons curled, eyes fixed on the lone figure standing in the center of the air.
Bob stared at the siblings with an emotion of frustration. Though, resolve could be seen shining brightly within his eyes.
The motion was tiny, barely even a physical gesture—but it carried a strange gravity. Beneath his heavy expression, an ancient and unbearably old feeling stirred. Not rage or nervous tension. Rather, the steady understanding of someone unwilling to watch a tragedy repeat.
Then he nodded.
"Indeed," Bob murmured. "Round three."
The softness of his voice only made the smile that followed more unnerving. It was faint, almost polite, but built from quiet conviction and the kind of certainty that didn't need to be spoken aloud. The smile of a man who knew he was walking toward something inevitable, but a path that he would walk nevertheless. A utopia he was willing to carve out with arithmetic precision.
A utopia he believed they were too small to understand.
Qrow's stomach twisted. He had fought zealots with eyes like dead stars. He had fought men monsters who'd been broken so far past fear that the only thing left inside them was violence. But Bob was different. Bob was the kind of monster who would do everything to accomplish his goal. Even if he died in the process.
After all.... what father would leave his daughter to such a fate.
Bob's voice drifted over the ruined street once more, calm and crystalline, as if the world weren't shaking around them.
"But round three," he said, "will not be fought here."
Qrow felt his sister react before his mind could.
Raven moved with astonishing speed. The Shadow Raven that towered behind her—a vast silhouette of writhing darkness, its talons scraping against the fractured air—lunged the instant the final word left Bob's lips. The creature's shape trailed ribbons of shadow as it blitzed forward, its many arms slicing through the air like a propeller.
At the same time, Raven's human body slid back out of the monster's shadow like ink spilling across the pavement. She reappeared practically inside Bob's personal space—so fast she bypassed the concept of approach entirely. Her shadow-sword angled directly for the arterial line of his throat. Her real blade mirrored the strike, a perfect synchronized kill-intent honed by decades of killing.
It should have been perfect and it should have ended there. Bob did not dodge. He simply ceased to be.
His body fragmented, once again, not into flesh or bone, but into glittering shards of refracted distance. Like a mirror made of miles breaking apart. Pieces of the space he had occupied floated outward, glimmering with impossible depth before dissolving into nothingness.
Qrow's feathers stood on end.
A breath later, reality knitted itself together at ground level.
Bob reformed quietly in the center of the clearing where Jaune, Ruby, and Yang were still squared off against the strange awakened group. Far too close. Close enough to reach out and touch them.
"Dammit—!" Qrow snarled.
His main body folded its wings tight and plummeted. The smaller crow-forms dove too, falling like a storm of obsidian meteors, Murder pulsing in perfect synchrony.
Raven responded even faster. Of course she did. Qrow could feel it—old instincts honed from too many battles side by side. Raven's shadow had already surged beneath the kids' feet, ready to create a shield, the moment Bob's intent shifted. Every stretched silhouette from broken streetlamps and burning debris had become a shield of protection coiled in her hands.
But Bob didn't move toward the teens.
A ripple of warped distance skated under his foot.
Then—like a page in a book abruptly turning—Bob and every awakened who had followed him flickered out of existence. No sound or light. Just a gentle fold in the world as he and his entire cohort slipped cleanly between the seams.
Through their invisible link, Qrow's clone within the base notified him of Bob's group reappearing at the perimeter of the fortified gates.
"Rae," Qrow said, voice low and vibrating with dread.
Raven's red eyes snapped to him. She didn't need more than that. She already knew.
"They're at the base," Qrow finished. "Right at the damn doorstep."
Qrow's main body hit the ground hard enough to crater, feathers exploding into a burst of smoke-dark aura as he reverted to human form. Raven landed beside him, her colossal Shadow Raven dissolving upward like a bonfire's ash caught in a vacuum.
And for the first time since arriving, she looked genuinely alarmed.
"We have to move!" Qrow barked.
Qrow grabbed Jaune by the back of his rune frame with one hand, hoisting him off the ground like a piece of gear. Raven snatched Ruby with a single arm, and Yang's protest was little more than a squeak before Qrow swept her up as well.
Then they launched.
The world dissolved into speed.
The shattered street blurred into colorless streaks. Broken towers whipped past in warped smears,
"What the hell is happening?!" Yang shouted, her voice ripped apart by the wind.
"Did they retreat?!" Ruby's voice was higher, thinner, pitched with alarm as she clung to Raven's armored shoulder.
"They didn't retreat!" Qrow roared. "They're tearing through the city—straight to the Belmont base!"
.
.
Jaune had no idea how long they'd been moving.
A minute? Time dissolved into the hurricane force tearing past his ears and the crushing grip of Qrow's gauntleted hand hooked under the back of his rune frame. The world was a smear—shattered buildings stretched into streaks of grey, street signs bending into warped ribbons as they tore through the district at a speed faster than anything Jaune could properly track.
Finally, he shouted over the roaring wind:
"Raven, why aren't we teleporting?!"
Qrow didn't look down. His eyes were fixed straight ahead, Murder shimmering faintly in his irises.
"Why aren't we using Raven's rune?!" Jaune repeated, louder now. "We could be at the base already!"
In Raven's shadow-arm, Ruby twisted to look up at her mother's face. Yang—dangling embarrassingly under Qrow's left arm—struggled against the gale long enough to add:
"Yeah! Raven, aren't you a teleport specialist?!"
Raven's response was a sharp, irritated exhale through her nose.
Qrow answered anyway.
"She's conserving her Aura!"
Raven snapped her gaze sideways, eyes narrowing like a blade being unsheathed. The look she shot Qrow was unmistakable: Stop telling children my business.
He ignored her.
"Teleporting across a district this big burns more Aura than most people use in a fight," Qrow explained loudly. "Rae can absolutely do it—but not for free."
Jaune blinked, trying not to choke on the wind blasting past his teeth.
"But—your shadow tunneling—"
"Not tunnels," Qrow cut in. "Shadow manipulation. It's different."
Raven rolled her eyes upward in the universal expression of someone reconsidering lifelong friendships.
Qrow continued anyway, because death was sprinting toward their home base and he no longer cared about her glares.
"Shadow," he said, tightening his grip on Jaune as the ground dipped into a ruined underpass, "is a multi-variable Rune. It's meant for manipulation, constructs, sensory expansion, stealth, solidification and binding. Teleportation is just one of its branching traits."
Ruby let out a soft, "Oooh," despite dangling like luggage under Raven's arm.
Yang deadpanned, "So she can do everything."
Raven offered no correction.
Qrow took that silence as further permission.
"If her Rune specialized in transport," he said, "like Flux, Gate, or Fold, she could move us halfway across the city without thinking about the cost. But because it's Shadow, teleporting is expensive. Long distance is even worse."
Jaune felt something cold settle in his gut.
"So you're saving her Aura," he said slowly.
"We're going into a fight with a spatial user, named Bob." Qrow replied. "Yes, we damn well are."
For a few seconds, only the wind answered. Then another question tore its way out of Jaune's throat:
"Bob? That's the displacement user's name?!"
"Don't know his real one," Qrow called back, unbothered. "Didn't ask. Needed something to call him. So Bob it is."
Jaune blinked wildly. "That's— you just named him Bob?"
"Yup."
"That's so stupid!"
"Yup."
Raven made a low, disgusted noise that sounded like agreement—for once.
"But listen closely, kid," Qrow continued, voice dropping into a harder register, one that cut even through the gale. "He hasn't used a damn thing except his Displacement Rune."
"Wait—just that one? But earlier—his people were using guerrilla tactics—"
"His people were," Qrow corrected. "He wasn't."
Jaune processed that for a breath before the meaning landed.
"He was holding back," Jaune whispered.
"Yes," Qrow said. "And any spatial user who has the capability to hold back are the absolute worst thing you can fight."
Raven's grip on Ruby shifted—barely, but Jaune saw it. Agreement.
Qrow continued, voice sharp:
"A Displacement user with no revealed secondary rune? That means he's hiding something. Maybe a big something. And we cannot afford to let him touch the base without Raven near full Aura."
Yang twisted in Qrow's hold.
"But what if he runs away again?" she asked. "If he keeps slipping around, can't he just hit us with more guerrilla crap? Wear us down? Pick places we're not expecting?"
Qrow shook his head, expression hard as iron.
"No. He's out of time."
Yang frowned. "What does that even mean?"
"It means," Qrow said, eyes narrowing, "that this is it. This is the final play. He's going all in."
The wind screamed around them. Buildings blurred into indistinct streaks. The world funneled toward a single point as the Belmont base loomed ahead like a stone heart in the cracked city.
Qrow's voice cut through the roar one last time.
"Bob isn't running anymore."
He drew a breath. Murder pulsed along his skin.
"This is the final battle."
The statement Qrow had made—He's out of time—made no sense to Jaune. Not logically, strategically or even intuitively.
Nothing in this situation fit the idea that the enemy displacement user was running out of time. If anything, the opposite seemed true. Bob had every advantage: mobility, distance control, and the ability to strike and vanish without warning. Guerrilla combat favored him entirely. So what did Qrow mean?
Jaune opened his mouth to ask.
But one glance at Qrow—jaw set, eyes forward, killing intent thinly contained—and he closed it again. Raven's expression offered even less room for inquiry; she radiated a brittle, coiled fury that warned him any question would be met with silence sharper than a blade.
So Jaune swallowed the confusion and let the wind rip it from his throat.
Even without answers, he could guess why they wouldn't talk. The permanent imbuement process. The reason the Dragon Gang was doing all of this.
Except that made even less sense.
From what Jaune had gathered, the Dragon Gang didn't have a Rank 3 awakened among them. Not even one. And that alone should've made any sane person hesitate before doing something this suicidal. A Rank 3 like Ozpin—or hell, even someone from his echelon—intervening directly would end this entire coup before it began.
Yet they were still doing it. Still willing to hit a LUCID base. Still throwing bodies, resources, and time into what was essentially a death charge.
Permanent imbuement was important, and while it was true that Evergreen had stolen it from them... did they really have to go this far? Directly assaulting a fortified LUCID stronghold? That was madness.
Even he wouldn't have gambled on something this lopsided.
But the Dragon Gang had. And that meant there was clearly something Jaune didn't understand.
Something he wasn't sure he wanted to.
A minute after that grim realization settled, they reached the periphery of the battle.
They didn't see it first, rather, they heard it.
The air ahead cracked open with a deep, pressurized boom, a shockwave that rolled down the street like a thunderclap scraping across concrete. Heat washed over them next—dry, intense, prickling Jaune's skin even as they sprinted. A moment later came the thrum of energy, rippling and distortion-heavy, vibrations that shivered in the air like someone plucking a giant metal cable.
Only then did the visuals catch up.
The sky ahead was chaos.
Qrow's monstrous Crow clone—massive, winged, and built like a predatory nightmare—was locked in midair combat with Bob, the displacement user. Every beat of its wings sent black feathers scattering like curved blades through the sky. Space warped around the two of them, reality twisting as Bob flickered and reappeared in jarring, impossible jumps.
Fighting beside the Crow was Evergreen.
Jaune stared for half a heartbeat, unsure he was seeing correctly.
Evergreen moved with measured precision, each gesture carving the air with suppositioned grace. Around him, house-sized projections of animals, massive, jade-like constructs that glowed with pale green light, manifested into existence with startling solidity. Tigers with crystalline fangs, serpents formed from overlapping emerald scales, stags sculpted from translucent stone. They ran through the sky as though gravity were a polite suggestion, their bodies leaving faint trails of green energy in their wake.
The animals weren't illusions. They were real. Summons? Constructs? Manifestations?
Jaune didn't know.
But everything Evergreen created looked like it had been carved by a master artisan and then set ablaze with some inner life. It was unreal in the most literal sense.
And the weirdest part?
The Belmont base beneath them had transformed.
What should've been just reinforced concrete and defensive barriers was now covered by a projected jungle—great sweeping canopies of shimmering green foliage, thick branches woven tightly overhead like some ancient rainforest had grown out of thin air. It shielded both the operatives on the ground, and the dragon gang members from the ongoing sky battle, acting as a protective umbrella against the debris and shockwaves erupting above.
The projected animals surged over and through this jungle canopy as though the terrain continued seamlessly upward. Tigers bounded across treetops that weren't physically real but somehow held weight. Birds made of luminous jade soared through the branches. Giant serpents curled around illusory trees, their bodies half phasing through the projection and half interacting with it.
Evergreen's Rune… whatever it was… wasn't simple.
Jaune found himself wondering what type of rune it was. Or rather the name of the rune.
He didn't get time to wonder further, however.
Because the moment Qrow and Raven touched the ground, they released the kids.
Jaune staggered a step as the superhuman momentum bled off, forcing his armored feet to skid across cracked pavement. Ruby landed beside him, followed almost immediately by Yang, who tumbled with a muttered curse.
Raven and Qrow didn't even pause to check that they'd landed safely.
Their feet had barely hit the ground before both of them launched upward again, straight toward the swarming melee high above the base perimeter. A thunderous crack split the air as Qrow propelled himself skyward, Murder's influence rippling across his limbs. Raven vanished into a swirl of shadow and reappeared midair, blade already drawn, eyes locked on Evergreen and... Bob.
Jaune barely had time to orient himself.
All around, LUCID operatives were already engaged—gunfire, rune flares, impact rings, and bursts of kinetic energy clashed with the Dragon Gang's forces. The air tasted like metal and ozone. Screams and commands mixed with the thrum of combat runes activating in rapid succession.
Above it all, Evergreen's towering jade beasts continued their assault on Bob, boxing him in, denying him escape points, coordinating with Qrow's monstrous Crows to force the displacement user into predictable patterns.
But Bob still slipped through gaps that shouldn't have existed, each teleport crackling with unnatural distortion.
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon