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.

Longshots

The airship was all but silent as it rose into the skies of Mistral—both as a result of the cutting edge technology that had gone into its design and because of the somber atmosphere within. My family was gathered in this airship, ostensibly for the sake of coming with me to Vale and cheering me one; whether that would actually happen depended on a number of factors. If things proved too dangerous, I'd shuffle them off to relative safety using Raven's portals, hopefully making it a bit harder for my enemies to find them by leading them in the wrong direction here and now. Furthermore, what happened in the coming hours could well change all of my plans, easily to the extent of causing me to blow off the tournament entirely. Sure, it was a tradition and part of our culture and something important to lots of people, but I was trying to deal with the apocalypse here; if it turned out the end of the world was scheduled for the first day of the tournament, I made no promises.

And, of course, there was the elephant in the room—I wouldn't need anyone to cheer me on if I was brutally murdered in the next few hours. Grandmother and I had shared the rough details of what I was doing, leaving out bits like the Riders and Malkuth and the general truth of things simply because that knowledge was a bitch to live with even if you were able to identify the infected. I didn't really want to burden them with the knowledge that the enemy I was no facing had already succeeded at killing me once or that he'd destroyed the world and trapped it in a seemingly endless cycle of suffering and destruction, either. Or the fact that—

Well, the point was that there was a lot of horrible shit that we couldn't do anything about. Frankly, if my soul hadn't hotwired my brain and I actually had some need for such a thing, I probably would have had a hard time sleeping at night. I couldn't bear to leave my family behind without at least telling them I was going into life-threating danger, but mentioning the stakes seemed more cruel than anything else. If I failed here, this wasn't something I wanted them to try to carry on for me or get more deeply involved in. I couldn't imagine there being many kind fates awaiting them down that particular road.

So instead, I did my best to play it off as just another horrific and dangerous mission, the types Hunters went on all the time—and, naturally, often didn't return from. As a result, they were treating the matter with a kind of grave respect, taking it seriously even if they didn't know what awaited me.

"Jaune," My mother whispered, looking at me as Mistral slowly moved further and further away. "Are you sure about this? If it's as dangerous as you say…"

"It can't be helped," I answered calmly, making sure to stay relaxed even if it was growing difficult even for me. This would be a big day, after all—it might even go down in the history books at some point. Here's hoping it was as something positive. "Ozpin thinks it's important, as does Grandmother. Someone needs to check the place out."

"But does it need to be you?" She asked, fingers twitching in odd, jerky movements. It was a nervous habit she'd picked up lately; even though the time she'd been without most of her limbs was by now far dwarfed by the time she'd spent with their replacements, it was almost as if she was reminding herself that they were still there.

Or perhaps she was just reminding herself of why she'd needed them in the first place.

I tried to make my smile reassuring as I turned to face her.

"Why wouldn't it be me?" I returned. "You know what I can do and so does Ozpin. Odds are, I have the best chance of success, no matter what turns out to be waiting for me there."

"That's what worries me," She whispered. "He wouldn't send you on a normal mission."

"Good thing I'm not a normal Hunter then," I replied. "I'll manage, Mom. I promise."

"I'll hold you to that, Jaune," Violet said, seeming more relaxed on the surface. "You better stay safe, you hear? I've been looking forward to seeing you in the tournament, you know; according to Olivia, you've been making a mess of Haven and I want to see what you can do on a public stage."

"I'd hate to disappoint," I replied, nodding at her once to show I understood the words she'd left unspoken.

"Personally, I'd prefer it if you kept things a bit neater, Jaune," Olivia interjected. As a teacher, she probably should have been back at Haven, but she was apparently going along with as a chaperone for the students who'd decided to come in early. Or something like that, at least—I didn't pay much attention to the official explanation. In reality, she was going along because Grandmother said so and nobody argued.

"That doesn't seem like it's ever going to be possible," I told her truthfully. "Quite frankly, my life is a mess. If things start breaking down around me, just blame it on who I am as a person."

"Not even bothering with excuses anymore?" She wondered, sighing to herself.

"More just not bothering to lie," I corrected. "Might as well just embrace it. The reason everything went to hell around me is because: Of who I am as a person, the choices I made in life, or because of something I did in a past life—choose one."

Olivia released a rather unladylike snort, rolling her eyes.

"Indigo," I said after another beat of silence, glancing towards my last sister where she sat wrapped in shadows—even though she was right under a light. She did that where she was worried about something. "Don't worry about me too much—I'm not much for death scenes, either."

"…Right," She said after a moment before glancing down the length of the ship where Adam was trying to pretend he didn't exist. I suspected family matters made him uncomfortable. "Keep an eye on him for me."

Adam glanced up at her and shrugged a shoulder.

"He's my best friend," He said by way of explanation. Indigo considered that for a moment and then nodded in acceptance.

My lips twitched upwards at those words before I rose from my seat. We were far enough from Vale now that unless Cinder's perceptions were significantly superior to my own, she'd have difficult looking in on us—and even then, I liked to think I'd have noticed something. Still, it didn't hurt to be cautious and so I'd waited until I thought it was safe.

"Sorry, but it looks like this is our stop," I said to my family. "But we'll be back before you know it."

"Okay," My mother replied. "I…we'll be waiting. Good hunting."

Looking at her one last time, I remembered the talk I had with my dad before the White Whale incident—before everything started, not that I really thought about it. That time, I'd prepared for a mission without telling her what I was up to, because I was afraid of what it might cost her to try and help me. Now, I was doing the same thing for the same reason, though the situation differed.

But…even though everything had gotten so crazy, there were still things that I hadn't forgotten. The people who had my back, the home I had to come back to, and the things I had to stay alive to do…what those things were had changed a few times, but I hadn't forgotten them. I would never forget.

So I smiled at her, without hiding or faking anything, and nodded.

"Thanks," I said. "I'll be off first, then. Adam, you take the next one, okay?"

My friend nodded once and stood up, even as a swirling red portal opened up in the middle of the airship, causing several pairs of eyes to widen in shock and recognition—and then I stepped through and was gone.

The portal opened up high in the sky, far enough up that the air was frigid and thin. I could see the clouds far below me and the land further still, the world of Remnant stretching out amazingly in every direction. Mountains and forests, rivers and lakes—from this far up, everything looked small.

And far below me, I saw Jericho Falls for the first time. Like most of the places packed with the Grimm, it was deceptively pleasant looking—the place had been named, at least in part, for the majestic waterfall at the edge of the area, with hundreds of thousands liters of liters spilling over the edge every second. The surrounding area was verdant and green, filled with flora and fauna, but at the center of it all was a massive set of ruins. Even worn away by the assault of the Grimm and sheer, merciless time, it was easy to see that Jericho Falls had once played host to something amazing simply from what remained. As ruins went, it was surprisingly intact, too—or, at least, certain parts of it were, with entire sets of buildings still remaining. At a glance, one could see where people had once lived their lives, ages ago.

But now, this place was home only to the Grimm—everything from ancient dark figures to tiny, newborn monsters filled this place, waiting in the streets and the buildings and within the depths of the very ground itself, an army of monstrous servants awaiting their master's command. And near the center of it all, in an unspeakable worn palatial estate, waited the king of this land.

The Devourer of the Tree of Life

LV ?

Gilgamesh

The knowledge that he was actually here…didn't affect me in the slightest. Honestly, I just felt a bit vindicated by the knowledge that the world really was out to get me, but even that was muted—now wasn't the time to care about that. Not when I had more important things to worry about than what was really just another thing that was going to try and kill me.

Even as gravity began to pull me downwards, I scanned the ruins as thoroughly as I possibly could, looking for signs of anything important or unusual. I didn't find any mysterious glowing orbs, strangely luminous sigils, magic crystals, or anything that looked like it might have come out of a science fiction novel—on the surface, the ruins appeared to be just normal ruins.

Needless to say, I didn't stop at the surface. I looked it over again under a dozen different lenses, peering into the different ends of the spectrum to gather details. I saw the remnants of markings and paint, the leftover of things now long gone, traces in the wreckage and the rubble that gave me a rough idea of how this place had once looked. It wasn't anything on the level of the ruins Raven and I had visited when we'd been searching for clues as to Summer's fate, because that site had only been about a decade old while this one had been a ruin for millennia—but it gave me a better idea of what this place might have looked like, at one point, and I applied logic to figure out where important stuff would likely be housed, coordinating my search.

Even then, a solid second of searching turned up nothing and I changed tracks quickly. This high up in the air, it was difficult to reach out to the earth below, but I called to Ereb and had him expand into the ground, searching deeper the further I feel. His search turned up results almost immediately, but not the ones I was looking for—while it would be an exaggeration to call it intact, there were plenty of signs that an advanced civilization had once called this place their home, if you knew where to look. There were things like pipes and powerlines that, though they didn't look much like the ones I was familiar with, seemed based on the same principles. I used his results to cross-reference my search, making sure I didn't overlook anything, but I still didn't find anything that looked like a power source for the barrier.

And there was a barrier there, of that I was certain. I could see it in a way that was new to me—but then, I'd never seen Naraka from the outside before. There was a…not quite a shimmer but more of an iridescence to the world when I looked at it all, peering into the truth of things. At the same time, I could feel something somewhere between an itch and a pressure between my shoulder blades, which was something I was familiar with; Trespasser was alerting me to a barrier in my vicinity. A moment later, a window even popped up, asking me if I'd like to enter.

I clicked no for the moment and continued to stare hard at the approaching ruins, looking one last time, just to make sure.

And then I nodded to myself once, as sure as I could be. If there was any secret power source or something on this side holding the barrier in place, I couldn't see it. As I'd hoped, it seemed somehow self-perpetuating, meaning it was all but divorced from this dimension so long as no one specifically tried to break through it. And an archeological and historical wonder this place may be, but there were more important things at stake now—and hell, it was my history anyway, bad ending and all. As such, I took a brief moment to memorize every detail I could and then…

Well.

Then I destroyed Jericho Falls.

It happened quickly, set off by nothing more than a minute twist of my Aura, and then a flash of blinding white light descended from the heavens.

It was the Brahmastra.

Three Brahmastras, to be precise. It wasn't something I'd be capable of on my own, not even after a week to train it—while the Brahmastra leveled quickly relative to its usage, it was still something that I could only use once a day and I hadn't had that much time to play with it.

But just because I could only use it once a day didn't mean I couldn't store it. I couldn't put it into my Inventory, alas—attempting to put the created spear into my handy pocket dimension had simply resulted in a window telling me it would be a bad idea—but there was another way.

This was the result of Patientia and, somewhat ironically, a great deal of patience. At first, the nature of the skill had not changed in the slightest as it leveled up, but after reaching level twenty-five, one this changed—I was able to store another skill within my Aura. The same thing had occurred again at level fifty and, after a significant amount of effort in the hopes of grinding it to the next benchmark before the possibly-literal deadline hit, recently occurred again at seventy-five for a total of four 'slots.'

How I'd spent them had been a matter of great deliberation for me over the course of this week—I'd gained a fair number of new options in that time period and there were a number of tactics I could potentially exploit. In the end, however, I'd boiled it down to two main options. The first was, of course, my healing skills; at the end of the day, stuff that could keep me, or potentially someone I cared about, alive in an emergency was hard to beat. While I could easily heal myself or others in the midst of combat, some effectiveness would probably need to be sacrificed for the sake of expedience. If I had the time and power to spare to fully charge a healing skill, well…then I probably didn't really need one.

It was the type of thing I needed when I was about to die—if something broke past all my defenses, emptied the wells of my MP, and then ground me down to my last hit point and forced me to rely on Second Chance. If I could heal myself at a leisurely pace, it wasn't really an emergency, and so I'd long since promised myself to always keep at least one 'full restore' on me.

Yes, I fully intended to be one of those assholes—one of those video game enemies who make you grind them down to a single hit point and then promptly heal back to full health and make you do it all over again. I hated those guys when I was a kid. I'm pretty sure everyone hates those guys. But here's the thing; the best thing in the world is when someone really, really, really wants you to die…and you just don't.

On the other hand, there was also something to be said for really, really, really wanting someone to die and then making it happen. The Brahmastra was by far the hardest skill I had to use, simply because it's charge time was atrocious and it could only be forged once a day. In a pinch, it was possible I could use just about any other skill, so long as I was willing to burn enough Dust crystals to make it happen, but in a fight, I'd only get one shot with the Brahmastra and if it wasn't an opening move, I'd never get it off at all. Being able to store several of them got around both the charge time problem and the limit on it's use, however, and it was a truly devastating weapon.

It had been a tough call. Extra heals would have served to give me more of a life line, but dropping a Brahmastra on an enemy's head was its own reward. In the end, I'd made my choice for one simple reason; I'd only get one Second Chance. The usefulness of two full heals dropped somewhat with the knowledge that if something big hit me, odds were I wouldn't survive to use the second one. I could still use it to heal my wounds and restore MP, of course, but those weren't necessarily worth a slot. Saving my life was one thing, but in the end, killing things before they could hurt me was better than just healing from the wounds they inflicted—because they wouldn't be hurting me much when they'd been reduced to ash. As such, I spared a slot for a single full heal and, instead of using it just to practice and grind, stored the last three days' worth of Brahmastra's in my Inventory.

And I hurled all three of them into the heart of the ruins. This was, I had decided, the best time to use them—right at the very start. No one knew we were here, no one was particularly on guard, and there were a lot of Grimm that needed to die. I didn't truly believe that I'd get them all, but anyone I killed now couldn't interfere later. Adam, Autumn, Gou, and Raven would be putting their lives on the line to hold off any survivors while I clashed with Gilgamesh; the best thing I could do to help them was to do my best to limit the number of survivors. This was my best chance to take them out and it wasn't as if I could risk using the Brahmastra while my friends and family were on the battlefield. It was now or never, really.

Needless to say, the results were…impressive. As the three spears descended towards the unsuspecting ruin, they pulsed with an inner light and the process I'd set in place with their creation reached its inevitable conclusion. At the last moment, I saw some of the Grimm look upwards, but it was too late to notice now.

There was a blinding flash. A sudden rush. An annihilating, consuming heat, seemingly carried along by a force like the hand of God—and I was still far, far in the air. There was sound accompanying it, too, but I could hardly hear it; there was a brief, massive roar and then silence. For a moment, my ears burst, my eyes went blind, and the light of the Brahmastras plunged my world into darkness.

A part of me wondered if this had ever happened before. I wasn't the first person to ever wield the Brahmastra and looking into what legends remained, there were tails of the weapons clashing—but had three ever been hurl towards the same target? I didn't know.

But what I did know was the result of such a thing. As the moment passed and my sight and hearing returned, I saw what I'd done.

I'd blown Jericho Falls off the map. And I meant that as literally as I could—someone was going to have to actually redraw the map of this area at some point.

"Hello," I said belatedly.