The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryuugi. This has been pulled from his Spacebattles publishment at threads/rwby-the-gamer-the-games-we-play-disk-five.341621/. Anyway on with the show...err read.

Raising

"Father?" Autumn said, speaking her first word as she turned her head my way. Her neck creaked slightly with the motion, the green of her eyes faintly luminous even as the silver reflected my face. Her voice had an almost musical quality to it, which made sense given that the voice box I'd constructed for her was reminiscent of an instrument. It was a complicated structure currently housed in her chest, and fully capable of generating complex sounds without the need of lips or a tongue. I'd built it that way intentionally, as I had to account for the variety of forms she could assume, which included things that, logically, wouldn't have the mouthparts needed for human speech, if they even had mouths at all.

So far, there didn't seem to be any problems. Granted, I'd only just started teaching her words, voicing them aloud and then reciting the definitions and usages of them to her mentally using Floral Communion. Right now, I was just building up her vocabulary, but we'd move on to more complex areas some enough; grammar would be a tricky bitch, no doubt, because our language was an unholy mishmash of God only knows how many languages, left to stew for who knows how long. I'd never given much thought to how hard it probably was to teach to a young child, but what seemed like half of the rules had more exceptions then correct usages. It would take time for her to get used to it, to say nothing of sentence structure and the various bits that were context sensitive. Teaching her mathematics would be easy by comparison, when we got around to it.

But that was for later.

"Yes, sweetie?" I asked, looking up from my work. I'd need to be careful with that, because she was going to learn body language from me and apply it to others; I didn't want to be the cause of any misunderstandings for her. Right now, I was using Gossamer to spin thread, which I was sewing into a gift for her—a simple, white silk cloak. Depending on the choice she made, I'd likely sew her many more, most of them illustrated with Dust designs that would, hopefully prepare her for any occasion. Regardless of what decision she made, it would be some time before I like her play with Dust, but still, I better start practicing now.

Autumn stretched out a finger, pointing towards the approaching pair.

"Autumn," Gou said, trotting up to her calmly. "It is good to see you in high spirits."

Autumn's expression didn't shift—she hadn't built it to and didn't have much of a face besides—but she knelt quietly and reached out towards the dog. I cleared my throat meaningfully and she paused in the midst of the action before her hand shook slightly, barbs and thorns receding beneath the armor of her broad hands. Once I gave her a nod, she finished the motion and touched Gou, simply laying a hand on his back. She was silent for a long moment, searching for the right word before speaking.

"Soft," She murmured at last.

"Hey, kid," Adam greeted, approaching lazily as he put his sword away. "You grew up big, eh? You remember me?"

She turned her eyes towards him before remember to follow it up with another creaking turn of her head, acknowledging him and then slowly inclining her head.

"She remembers everything," I answered for her, setting a reassuring Psychokinetic hand on her shoulder. "Still, now's a good time for formal introductions. Autumn, meet Adam and Gou."

"Adam," She repeated, looking towards the man before turning her gaze back to the dog. "Gou."

"You two finished training?" I asked, glancing towards Adam.

"Mm," Adam hummed, cracking his neck. "Gou said you seemed about finished."

"I suppose I am," I mused, looking back at the cloak that was swiftly taking shape. "You think the time's right, Gou?"

"Unless you believe I shall make further progress tonight," He replied, sitting and look at me. I Observed him carefully and then nodded at him.

"Probably not," I said with a sigh. "We could probably get it higher, but we're approaching the point where it'll take days or weeks to make further progress. It's not worth the time—not when we can put it to better use training. Go ahead."

Gou nodded, status screen appearing before him. To make things easier for him, I lent him my Psychokinesis and he began to place his points where they were most needed.

Adam raised an eyebrow at me, expression inquisitive.

"I asked him to put all his points in Vitality," I explained. "It should protect him from the consequences of using my skills, or at least most of them."

"How many points does he have?" Adam asked.

"Four hundred thirty-five," I answered. "Which should bring him up to nearly five hundred."

Adam whistled, looking back at the dog.

"Damn," He said. "That's a lot of Vitality. Add Aura to the equation…"

"Not just Aura," I replied. "I can give him my Adamant Skin, too, as well as Bai Hu's Hide. Armored Shell, Cithaeron Hide, Unbroken Steel…if I wasn't so worried about what effect it might have on him, I could even let him use Metamorphosis. It should be enough."

"Enough to shrug off a heavy bombing, you mean?" Adam wondered. "That's…what? At least a thousand Vitality just from the effects of Aura, and then God knows what from the rest of your skills. He should be able to survive just about anything."

I shrugged.

"One can hope," I whispered with a slight sigh before tilting my head at my friend. "It might be a good idea for you to follow his lead, you know."

"To dump all my points in Vitality, you mean?"

"No, of course not," I shook my head. "Gou can manage it by focusing on nothing else, but that build works because I'm here to reinforce it and shore up his weak points. You already spread your points around some out of necessity. But…your Strength and Dexterity are already between two fifty and three hundred. You could continue to balance them, or you could pick one to specialize in from now on."

"Maybe," Adam mused. "If I did, which would you choose?"

"Dexterity," I answered immediately.

"Gotta go fast, huh?" Adam said with a slight smirk.

"Of course," I replied, returning it with one of my own. "Besides, it doesn't just cover movement speed; it handles attack speed, dodging, and even how well you can use weapons. If you've got enough Strength to deal damage and enough Vitality to take a hit—which you do—then laying on the hurt while dodging everything that comes your way is a decent way of handling things. That should work pretty well with your Iaido, anyhow."

Adam laid a hand on the hilt of his sword and mulled it over before nodding.

"Maybe," He answered. "I might do that, then. You've put some thought into this?"

"Someone's got to do your thinking for you," I joked with a slight smile before nodding, expression going serious. "Yeah. We need to build for survival here, after all. Gou's best off with a Vitality build, because again, I can hand the rest for him. You've been working under a balance of the physicals and it's worked so far, but it should go without saying that leveling up is going to get harder and harder from now on. Did that extra Wisdom help you any?"

"Some," He replied, nodding. "Makes my Aura come back faster, like you said, and it feels…smoother? It's easier to gather—or, at least, it seems that way. Maybe I've just gotten better at figuring out how to gather it, I don't know. I was going to ask you if you thought I would benefit from some more Intelligence."

"Do I think you should get smarter?" I asked, shooting him a slightly triumphant smirk as he winced, realizing his blunder. "Adam, I always think that."

"Hah," He said dryly, annoyed with himself. I could feel it and knew it was going to be a good day simply because Adam would kick himself for it for hours. "Very funny. But I'm serious. And don't say 'So am I.'"

"Heh," I answered, smiling widely at him but nodding. "Honestly, I don't know. I can use Observe to look at your skills—which isn't exactly the same as looking at your Semblance but more…seeing applications of it, I suppose? But Observing skills isn't the same as having them; the profiles don't tell me how they improve like mine would. Probably because for other people, improving something isn't as simple as putting some more points in the right place."

"Rub it in, why don't you," Adam muttered, rolling his eyes as I gave him another smirk, filling it with as much superiority as I possibly could, solely to irritate him.

"But it's like you said," I told him. "Your Wisdom increased and various things became easier for you. Intelligence might be the same way. At the very least, it should give you more MP to work with, which might allow you to charge your attacks up more, but would it let you charge it faster? I don't know. Speed is the issue here, after all. It might help you think of—or maybe even allow—other uses for your Semblance, though, so you might want to give it a shot. At the end of the day, though, I think…"

I paused for a moment, pondering how to best word it.

"I think," I began again. "That your Semblance is an expression of who you are. So you'll probably get results no matter what you focus on, it's just a matter of what results. My power works differently, simplifying and streamlining things, but for you…"

I shrugged.

Adam considered that for a moment.

"So what you mean is that my power develops the way I do?" He asked, to which I simply shrugged again.

"Along the same lines, maybe," I said. "I really don't know—I don't think this is anyone's area of expertise—but if your soul is the root of your Semblance then…maybe? It's hard to say because you're improving with the help of my power rather than in anything like the normal way, but it seems like it might be possible. You got better at quick, powerful strikes after focusing in Strength and Dexterity and Wisdom helped smooth things along. Your power didn't change or anything, but it sort of grew with you. I don't know if it means anything or if it matters, but it might. Semblances are supposed to be expressions of the self, after all. It's something to think about, at least."

"Mm," Adam agreed, mulling it over before shrugging. "And I will. What about those two?"

I followed his gaze to Autumn and Gou, the latter of which was slowly dumping hundreds of points into Vitality and shrugged in return.

"Who knows," I whispered as if I hadn't considered it. "They're both young, still—who knows how they'll grow. We'll just have to wait and see."

Adam nudged me with a foot.

"You sound like an old man," He informed me.

"Well, I was a thousand years old," I replied. "You whippersnapper."

Adam snorted at that and looked back at Gou just as he finished, looked the results over once, and closed the window, locking the points in place in the process.

The moment the window closed, Gou recoiled as if struck and then hunched low, as if a great weight had been placed on his shoulders. Realizing something was wrong, I moved to his side in an instant, shattering the sound barrier as a matter of course.

"Gou," I said urgently, kneeling by his side and placing my hand on his head. Already, I was focusing my senses upon him, peering through layers of flesh, blood, and bone as I searched for the problem—and even as I did, I was healing him, prioritizing that even above identifying the cause. But he wasn't hurt, as such—

Ah, I thought, calming. Gou's HP was low, but not because he'd taken any damage—rather, his health bar had simply increased greatly and was growing by the second. Ten thousand points, twelve thousand point, it simply climbed higher and higher as I watched, and I could see the changes wrought on his body in the process.

This was the nature of Vitality, the stat that covered health, damage resistance, stamina, and various other things. Such a massive increase in the stat had multiplied Gou's HP bar more than a dozen times over and his body was scrambling to respond. The stats were, after all, representations of the user's ability—and the physical stats were especially tangible. Increasing them didn't just improve the numbers on a status screen; they changed one's very body. Even I wasn't an exception to that, though the nature of my power muted the more extreme aspects; if you increased Strength or Dexterity, your body would change to match.

And abruptly, I wondered precisely how much. It wasn't a major issue for me, as my physical stats were still below a hundred, though that would soon change—still, I was fairly normal in those regards by Hunter standards. Maybe a bit exceptional for a first year student and outright ludicrous after my skills finished fucking with the numbers, but well within the norm simply going by the numbers. It was my mental abilities—and my control over my Aura that grew from them—that were insane and made more so by the various skills my power had granted me. Someone like Adam, though, who had the better part of three hundred in two physical stats…that was edging pretty firmly into outlier territory. Nothing impossible, especially when you were talking about Hunters and such, but the type of thing that would be noteworthy by anyone's standards. I gave him shit a lot, but Adam was strong enough to be a peer to Albus and Finn, easy, and though the interactions between their powers could confuse things a great deal, in a purely physical fight, he'd crush them both. The only person I'd ever Observed to have physical stats in the same ballpark as him was Penny, and even she was lagging behind a bit now.

But five hundred? I hadn't given it much thought until right this instant, but I'd never seen stats like that on anything but the mightier Grimm. Going by what I'd seen, that was well and truly outside the norm—maybe even outside what was physically possible, in most cases. Most Hunters didn't even reach level one hundred, much less go far past it, not because they don't train hard or try, but simply because there's a limit to what you were capable of, even with bodies reinforced by Aura. Some people managed to push past them anyway and Semblances threw things up in the air, but still, you could only get so strong naturally, so smart, so fast, so anything. Hunters could reach far beyond the abilities of a Human, even ignoring their more obvious powers, but they weren't limitless.

Hell, that was literally the reason I existed, according to Keter. Even for a group that had controlled the world and ruled everyone in it, there had been boundaries. Thinking about it logically, with normal training, you couldn't just dump a hundred points into one thing and leave everything else untouched; a build with a hundred Strength and ten Vitality and Dexterity wasn't just rare, it was unnatural. As you grew stronger, you built up stamina, various muscles served dual purposes, and so on. Sure, you could specialize in something and end up with Dexterity that greatly outstripped your Strength, but they were still interconnected to some extent.

My power allowed me to ignore that. Not only could I improve something instantly, I didn't even need to train it conventionally to do so. So long as I had the points, I could make myself stronger, faster, and the Gamer's Body would handle the rest—and it had worked for Adam, who'd grown stronger and faster, as expected, the structure of his body shifting to allow it. He'd already had a great deal of training before meeting me, anyway, so things were still fairly balanced, though I'd noticed a few oddities.

Gou, however…Gou was still a puppy. A young dog, if one with an Aura backing him up; his stats were far lower than Adam's had been and his change far more focused and extreme. Even beyond that, Vitality was special, because of how it played into so many basic things—HP, HP regen, stamina, defense, and God knows what else. What did it mean when those things changed, for a normal person? Assuming that when you're unhurt, you're at full health, what would abruptly being over a dozen times healthier mean? For me, it was as simple as numbers on a screen and the ability to take more hits, but for Gou…

He was changing before my eyes. As I watched, I could see matter being drawn into his body, given form by his Aura as he began to change. I could see his skin split as muscles grew, his bones crack as new material flooded in to lengthen and reinforce them. His entire body pulsed and convulsed, tearing apart his own flesh just to have room to grow and healing even as it continued. All the while, his health bar ticked quickly upwards, filling the newly created space as his body 'healed.' Between his natural Vitality and his Aura, the process would be completed in less than a minute, but…

I could tell it hurt and I acted to stop it. I pulled out all the stops and switched to Reformation, causing his entire body to be wrapped in light, hiding him completely from sight. The light held his shape for but a moment before shifting, growing in all dimensions over a matter of moments—but it still wasn't enough. I tried again and then a third time, just to be sure, making the light grow faster and faster until I was standing beside a massive hound of pure light, mouth open to reveal daggers of luminous teeth. With its shoulder of a height with my head and its body the better part of five meters in length, it was a giant beast, and still growing, if very slowly now, drawing power from me as it went.

Chesed (Passive) LV1 EXP: 30.97%

The Mercy that shields the world. As thought gives way to action, Wisdom gives way to Kindness, the power of the right hand. The brother of Judgement, it accepts and shows grace, guarding the innocent from the evils of the world. This ability represents the heightened presence of Chesed within the soul of the user and through its love, gives them the power to heal and defend.

100% increase to the effectiveness of all skills that prevent or heal damage, as well as all skills that directly support the power of an ally.

100% increase to experience gained by all such skills.

At the discretion of the user, all healing skills may also negate the pain felt by the target while restoring damage, as well as suspend the damaging effects of ailments such as poison for the duration of the healing process.

And then, all at once, it stopped. The light clinging to him began to peel away, floating into the air like a swarm of fireflies before finally flickering out of existence—and when they faded, they revealed Gou in his new form.

"Gou…" I whispered, moving my hand to his head as I levitated upwards. "Are you okay?"

It was a fair question, I thought; he now resembled the dog I knew so well in only the broadest of strokes. The coloration was mostly the same, but even beyond simple size, he looked like a wholly different creature, like something out of a different era—more heavily muscles and furred, with different proportions to his limbs and snout. I wouldn't say he looked prehistoric, but mainly because I was pretty sure history had never coughed up something quite like him—not on its own, at least. His eyes were the same, at least, if writ large, and they turned towards me at once, blinking as he breathed.

At last he spoke.

"Yes, of course," He said, though he sounded so dazed I wasn't sure I believed him. He paused to collect himself and shook once, several strands of his fur scraping against my skin like they were made of steel. "I am well. What…what happened, exactly? Why is everything…?"

"I'm sorry," I answered, healing him again for good measure. "I honestly didn't expect this. Maybe I should have."

"Didn't expect—" He stopped himself, looking at me and then down at himself. "Ah. This is different."

Absently, he scrapped a paw on the ground, tearing up heavy chunks by simple virtue of his size.

"Are you…" I stopped myself as well, abruptly unsure how to finish. Was he well? What did he think of what had just happened to his body? Was he regretting this yet? I was calm, but that didn't keep me from worrying, especially since I'd been blindsided by the reminder that I still had no idea how my power worked and couldn't just take for granted that it would do what I wanted.

"I'm quite a bit bigger now," Gou mused, oblivious to my worries. "That might make housing something of a corner. Sneaking out to meet you might be a touch problematic as well, though I suppose I could just let people think what they will. Certainly, this should make fighting easier but doorways…hm."

"I'll…think of something," I promised awkwardly, making him return his notice to me.

"Ah!" He almost exclaimed, realization striking. "No need to worry about me, I was just thinking aloud. In all likelihood, Grandmother will be able to resolve this issue somehow—I was just concerned that meeting you might be more difficult from now on."

He sat and looked at me seriously—a look he pulled off a lot better now that he was larger than a car.

"Please, do not blame yourself for anything," He continued. "It is not regret that I feel, merely surprise."

I lowered my head, smiling at him uncertainly. He was telling the truth, I knew that, but…I still wasn't sure how to feel about this.

Apparently I was the only one.

"Gou," Autumn said again, approaching with slow strides and looking up at him with her silver eyes. She didn't seem to find the sudden change at all unusual, but then, she'd been a shapeshifter since shortly after she was conscious. She probably thought this was normal, an impression that hanging around me was unlikely to break. Instead, she simple extended two fingers, lengthening them until they could wrap around Gou's neck in a very loose approximation of a leash.

"Hello, Autumn," Gou said again, turning towards her. "It seems like you'll be able to ride on my back again."

Autumn didn't understand a word of that but seemed unbothered by it, choosing to hum instead. Her version of humming sounded like someone was playing with a violin, at turns musical and screeching.

"Looks like all that working out has finally paid off, G," Adam mused, approaching as well.

"One would hope," Gou answered. "Though my effectiveness in combat remains to be seen."

"Eh," Adam grunted with a shrug. "You've already won in the way that matters."

"Oh?"

Adam reached up to grab my shirt and pull me down to earth, continuing as he did.

"You're taller than Jaune," He said, smirking. "And Autumn can shapeshift, so she's taller than Jaune in spirit. Which means you're the smallest person here."

That last part was directed at me and I put aside my worries to give him a flat look.

"Really?" I asked. "You're making jokes about my height now?"

"You're right," Adam admitted. "That was beneath me. I'll try to rise above it. You know, grow as a person. Be the bigger man."

I used Levant to make sure Autumn couldn't hear and then told Adam to go fuck himself with a rake.