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.

Internal

High Mana Capacity (Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.00%

An ability given to the rare few that are born with an extraordinary ability to handle mana in all its forms.

Mana-based attacks and defenses are 40% stronger.

25% less MP used for all abilities.

Greatly increases total MP.

Doubles additional MP received per level.

Improved Mana Regeneration (Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.00%

An ability given to those who are naturally able to recover mana at a tremendous pace.

Increase MP regeneration by 300%.

As expected, the first two skills were improved versions of the one's I'd received when I improved my INT to a hundred. Even so, this degree of improvement was rather amazing.

Needless to say, I was more than pleased to have my MP regeneration improved again. I'd reached the point where the gains from improving Wisdom were fairly marginal—enough so that I'd need to double my present score to make truly meaningful gains. But just by improving my INT and gaining Improved Mana Regeneration, I'd effectively tripled the restoration of my power. As I was now, I could go from zero to full in less than ten seconds, constantly enjoying the level of power I'd previously only been able to us when my MP was low and Mana Reactor activated. And if my MP dropped below ten percent, that value would only improve further, giving me an even greater amount of power to work with per second. I didn't want to interfere with what I was currently doing or cause damage with the side effects, but once I had a chance I'd be able to greatly increase my Acceleration and, through it, the growth of my other skills.

And that was before accounting for the changes to my MP. The increase to my Capacity seemed to work retroactively, increasing the slight boost to MP I'd gotten from each level as well as my general supply. Added to the cost and effect adjustments, I had once again improved my power greatly, increasing both the strength of my skills and their usability. If nothing else, I could be certain that my training would benefit from this greatly, which meant I'd be able to prepare myself more quickly for what was ahead of me. I was happy enough that it wouldn't have been a surprise if I felt weightless.

Which did not at all explain why I actually felt weightless. I noticed it the moment I began to run and it hadn't faded in the slightest—it wasn't an emotional reaction, I'd made sure of that by calming my own, and yet it wasn't a physical one, either. I could tell from the feeling of contact and my effects on my surroundings that I exerted weight and pressure and such, and I was aware of those things in my head, but I felt…light.

I was used to not feeling exhaustion or pain—or, at least, only feeling them for brief moments, before they faded away—but this was something else. My body moved easily as I ran, without any feeling of weight or strain, as if I wasn't exerting my body in the slightest even as I ran. It was something different, even subtle in its own way, but I felt at once aware and removed from things, as if my body were a construct I manipulated with my Psychokinesis.

It was odd, to say the least.

Still, I was used to weird things happening to my body and, though I noted it for future reference and research, I got used to it fairly quickly and remained focused on what was actually important.

First things first. Cloaking us in an illusion of invisibility, I guided Adam and Gou up the side of our now usual building and paused for a moment to use it as a vantage point, surveying the city carefully.

"Jaune?" Adam asked. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I replied, not even looking back at him. "I just want to make sure everything is as it should be."

Without waiting for a reply, I opened Ajna—my newfound third eye.

Ajna (Active & Passive) LV1 EXP: 0.02%

A skill obtained by those who have successfully opened the sixth chakra, Ajna. Also known as the third-eye chakra, opening it bestows the ability to perceive the truth hidden within the material.

Greatly improves the user's sensitivity and control over their own MP, allowing them to better manipulate it.

At will, the user may open Ajna to better perceive the true state of the world.

As with the other chakras, Ajna assists in the cycling, cleansing, and refining of energy within the body and improves the effectiveness of meditation.

The petals of Ajna opened wide and slid over my eyes like glasses or the scales of a snake. As they did, the city erupted into flowing currents of body, set to a backdrop of humanity. I could see the energy flowing through powerline like they were made of electricity themselves, as well as the 'cold' looking energy that I quickly realized was matter. Colors and symbols trails coated objects like paint, identifying their purpose, use, and past. I could see the comfort in a worn but favorite jacket, the love and affection that went into a carefully chosen wedding ring, the routine necessity laid into the foundation of cars. I could pick out the differences between houses and homes by what had gone into the making of them, with memories and dreams seeming as real to me as bricks and mortar.

But more than that, I could see people. I could see them in every shape and size, as they were underneath their skin when everything else was gone. Even the sleeping streets were given life by a myriad of forms, countless men and women in the shapes of everything from demons to angels. But as I surveyed them, I didn't feel anything like terror or disgust at even the most alien of forms—and wow, but the city was a freak show when you peeled everything away. Somehow, it seemed right to me, normal. Inside, people weren't defined by the faces they were born, but by who they were. The choices they made, the things they did and didn't do, what they became and believed all mattered more on this level than anything like genes or skin.

And God knows I wasn't in any position to stop and stare, even if—or rather, especially because—I had a million eyes. We were all a little weird on the inside, some more than others.

But what I really noticed was that if I looked closely, it almost felt like I could stare into someone. Not in the sense that I could look at their organs and stuff—I did that all the time and while I could say with certainty that we weren't all the same on the inside, looking at people's hearts got boring fairly quickly. No, I meant that I could see them. I could see things about them, from the shape and color of their souls, things that my other senses supported and confirmed to be true. I could tell someone's emotional state at a glance, gauge their power and make rough guesses from the shape and structure, see things that set them apart…and it was strange. Not because it was something new, but because it wasn't. Instead, it seemed familiar.

It felt like I was using Observe on anything I laid my eyes upon—which, in fairness, I did anyway—only represented differently. It was something visual to me now, instead of boiled down and simplified, and I could see everything inside of people that I could tell with Observe, though it wasn't quite as clear-cut.

What did that mean, though? Were Observe and Ajna related abilities on some level? But while I'd long been aware that it was a tremendously powerful skill, I'd gotten Observe with trivial ease while Ajna had taken so much effort to acquire. Was it simply because of my Semblance? Effects like Observe were fairly common in games, after all, which is why I'd always figured I'd gotten it. But, if it was because of my Semblance, didn't that mean it was because of my nature as Keter instead? I suppose that made sense, given what I knew about Keter, but I kind of wanted to know how connected they were. Observe had always been slow to level, but when it finally got high enough to rank up—whenever that might be—what would it become? Something above Ajna or…?

More importantly than that—at least, for now—even if they were similar, there were differences. So would Ajna work on someone that was at too high a level for Observe to see clearly?

I scanned the city carefully for my target and focused on Cinder.

I found her across town, in a rather nice looking house. Or, at least, nice looking in the material realm—it was painted white and yet somehow remained pristine which required a minor miracle in Mistral. Inside, the walls were painted in calm, relaxing blues and I could tell that someone had put some effort into decorating it. Had someone walked in, they'd probably have thought it was a nice place for a small family to live in.

But my eyes told a different story. I could see grudges clinging the walls of the house as clearly as I could see the paint upon it, a deep, dry looking sludge that had festered for years and been left to solidify. I knew at once that this wasn't the result of a passing fit of anger or a few scattered arguments; it was something born of loathing that had burned steadily for years. It was impressive in a way, the amount of hatred that must have gone into it; though there were occasional spots of color where the lights of joys and precious memories shined through, it was predominant coated in vicious abhorrence.

And at the center of it all, I found Cinder, sitting alone in the living room. She was strangely untouched by the detestation that surrounded her, a pillar of cold apathy that stood apart from and above it all. To my newfound perceptions, she appeared at once different and the same, dressed up like a queen, if a somewhat alien seeming one. There was a crown and dress of crystalline metal, seeming as much like armor as clothing, and it was bound around a figure of fire and smoke, giving it definition and form. Cinder's true form was a column of fire that burnt both hot and cold, faceless and featureless as she waited.

But at the center of her chest was a black crystal that spread throughout her armor. Fragments gleamed in her crown and small gems decorated her armor, with designs spread between them like the ones I'd seen on her skin. Though it seemed to accentuate her picture, it also seemed wrong somehow, out of place—too physical, perhaps. Though she used Dust extensively, I didn't see any of it on her soul, because it wasn't truly who or what she was. Yet this crystal remained, even on this level?

There was more to it then met the eye and it made my suspicions come back to me. I didn't have anything to compare it to, having seen Conquest and War in different ways, but could this be what I was looking for?

After a moment of consideration, I took a closer look, focusing on the gem. I felt pressure build in my forehead, gathering in an area that wasn't so much inside my brain as parallel to it, and then pushed forward, opening my senses wide. I peered into her soul, noting details as I went—the color, the intensity, the composition of it—but what I wanted was settled like a stone in her heart. When I used Observe on someone, it would often give me a summarized background that touched upon the events that had determined who someone was as a person. It didn't cover anywhere close to everything, at best touching upon a few major issues, but it was usually enough to get a rough grasp of why someone was who or what they were, in a very broad sense of the turn.

As I looked at Cinder, I tried to do the same thing, but through Ajna. And as I did, I saw flickering images take shape within her soul, given shape and substance by the flames. The pictures weren't a clear as I might have liked, but it was enough to see a few details. I saw men and woman flick through the flames of her soul, some of them collapsing and fading away while others burnt more brightly and changed color. A figure at the center of the image grew as the pictures flickered and faded around her, growing from a small girl into a young woman—Cinder, I assumed. Several figures seemed to enter and exit the image with some frequency; a man and a woman that eventually faded like blown out candle flames and didn't return. Afterwards, the most common figures were a trio of…women? It was a little hard to tell when they were shaped from fire, but I thought that was right. They surrounded Cinder, burning more brightly as she seemed to dim until I thought for a moment that she would go out entirely.

But then something new entered the image, the only part of it that wasn't born from the flames. A tiny shard of black crystal floated into the display, resting quietly in a container of some kind. It remained in the picture for several scenes, waiting in the edges and the corners as silent discussions carried on around it, until the three figures seemed to step off the stage and only Cinder and the crystal remained, with the latter drawing closer to center stage. For just a moment, color flickered into the image, bringing it to life—as if this one scene was more important than anything that had come before it and deserving of such a thing.

There was a young girl, in her teens perhaps, and I recognized her as a younger looking Cinder, though it was hard to tell how much younger. She seemed to notice the crystal at last and grasp it in her hands, staring at it silently for a long moment before closing her eyes. She mouthed something like a prayer and the crystal glowed in her hands as if heated by the surrounding fire—and then faded into dust and circled Cinder's form as she returned to flames. A moment later, the fire woman was in her dress of steel and crystal—and then the whole thing came to an end.

I took a deep, slow breath and then exhaled slowly.

"Find anything?" Adam prompted, looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

"Maybe," I replied, trying not to let my annoyance show. I'd definitely found something, I just wasn't sure what to think about it. Mainly, I thought that Observe was more convenient and Ajna seemed to be its more artistic but less useful stepbrother, but I supposed I shouldn't complain—Observe wasn't telling me anything right now. Even so, I couldn't help but think that Observe would have spelt all this out plainly if I could only use, probably with a title or status effect that confirmed whether Cinder was or wasn't playing host to a Rider. As it was, I mainly just had even more confusing and circumstantial evidence dressed up in metaphor.

And yet…without a doubt, that black crystal was suspicious as hell. Even putting aside the fact that it shouldn't have been there at all, it was a black crystal that was hanging out in someone's soul. I'd already noticed the similarities between it and the patterns written invisibly into Cinder's skin, which was definitely making me lean towards Rider, thought that I hadn't been thinking along those lines from the beginning.

But for a moment, when I first glanced at it…I'd thought it was a Dust crystal, but there wasn't any type of Black Dust to my knowledge. Sure, the rumors about it were endless and the supposed counterpart of White Dust was literally mythical, showing up as the plot device in what must have been a thousand stories, but as far as I knew, there was no evidence of it actually existing and no one had successfully recreated it. Not that that necessarily meant anything when Mankind's scientific knowledge was periodically steamrolled by fleets of monstrous assholes, but still, if it was as powerful as it was said to be, you'd figure it would come up more often, what with thousands and thousands of people hard at work exploring the possibilities of Dust every day.

Then again, what did I know? Maybe Babel had come up with something; I'd need to run it by Keter. Thinking about it, I didn't know how the Angels or Archangels had handled Dust at all.

But even if it did exist, what were the odds that a random young girl would just happen to come across it. Though her story hadn't been particularly clear, it didn't look like Cinder had been particularly old at the time; fourteen or fifteen years old, maybe. How would she have gotten ahold of it?

Given the choice, I'd be more inclined to believe there was something more at work, which made me lean further towards the Rider explanation. Though I suppose they weren't necessarily mutually exclusive—I'd already considered the possibility that one of the Riders was associated with Dust and this might just support that idea. Given the original purpose of the Qliphoth, it would make sense; besides Aura, Dust was the only means Humanity had to touch upon the supernatural and was oftentimes more reliable. An attempt to make an artificial type of Dust crystals or to recycle existing ones might have made sense.

But what bothered me was that one clear image that had appeared, wherein Cinder had grasped the crystal and seemed to pray. There wasn't enough information to determine the context, but had she known something about it when she did it? Had she been fooled, perhaps; deceived into taking up the Rider? Or could she have, for some reason, done it willingly, even knowing what it meant?

…That couldn't be. Right? I mean, I was the king of desperate times calling for desperate measures, but things would need to be pretty damn bad before hosting an apocalyptic parasite came onto the list and I had something that protected my mind from it.

As usual, there had to be more to thing than met the eye.

"Damn it, Cinder," I muttered. "There should be a limit to being vague and mysterious unless you're me."

But…at least I had a place to start. Those figures that had been around her in those scenes had been important enough to merit mentioning in her story and I was betting they'd played a part in the ending. Had they been her family?

I suppose I'd better find out.