PFK 29 - Painting The Town Red (Patreon)

I was still thinking along the same lines when Glynda dismissed us an hour later.

Speaking of leveling things up… I have been critically neglecting some practice I used to do all the time. I keep one of my animal buffs up constantly now, but that’s not the only thing I should be practicing. Considering I’m going to have to fight both Cinder and Salem, and the potential use in identifying the other Maidens and maybe even Silver-Eyed Warriors… As cheap as it is there’s really no excuse for me not to be flexing [Detect Magic] all the time.

I should practice my other detection skills too, but my range with [Detect Aura] and [Detect Grimm] were almost five times further than I could [Detect Magic], so that was the one I would be focusing on grinding.

I idly flicked it Active as we headed back to our dorm, and found my gaze drawn to the left. I frowned at the wall for a moment before realizing there were training halls in the next building over. I switched to [Detect Aura] for a minute and nodded as I recognized Amber’s characteristic color before switching back.

[Detect Magic has increased by 1!]

Making a left instead of the usual right, I said over my shoulder, “Y’all can head back to the room if you want. Amber has been coming up here to train this week, so I’m going to see if she’s around.”

A blur rushed past and Ruby resolved out of petals in front of me, skidding as she turned on her heel, and pointed at me accusingly. “You’re not trying to sneak off again, are you Mister?”

I didn’t reply, just stopped walking and raised an eyebrow. After a moment, Ruby flushed a little and her arm drooped.

“Sorry…” she mumbled, scratching her cheek awkwardly.

Sighing, I ruffled her hair. “You’re not my mother, and she doesn’t get to tell me where I can go either. That being said, I’m not exactly ‘sneaking off’. I told you where I’m going and why. You’re welcome to follow me if you want, but I assumed you’d be in the forge with Professor Mulberry. Didn’t you say you needed to adjust the mechshift on Crescent Rose after our training with Indigo?” I reminded her.

“Actually, I was hoping to ask you to take a look at Miló as well,” Pyrrha chimed in. “5.56 isn’t the heaviest caliber, so I want to prepare some wildcats in case we encounter stronger Grimm.”

“Oh, that sounds fun!” Ruby said, seizing on the distraction immediately. “C’mon, no time to lose!” She dashed back by me, grabbing Pyrrha’s hand and pulling her back toward the central locker rooms that doubled as our armory.

I watched, bemused, as Pyrrha stumbled, then waved over her shoulder as Ruby dragged her away. A small huff had me glancing at Blake, whose eyes were dancing with amusement. “And you? Reading, I suppose?”

Blake’s gaze dropped for a moment, but then she seemed to force herself to meet my eyes. “Actually, I was… thinking of calling my parents.”

I nodded. “It sounds like the room will be empty for a while,” I said, not offering a judgment on her decision nor how long it took her to decide to do it. She seemed to realize it, and knocked her shoulder against mine before turning right at the hallway intersection while I went left.

The training halls also abutted the locker rooms, but since I carried everything in my [Inventory] I rarely needed to go there. Instead I cut across the quad and entered through the side door,

[Detect Magic has increased by 1!]

Man the early levels really do blaze by. Do I have any other skills this low that need to come up?

The hallway was empty, so I pulled up my [Skills] list and mentally commanded it to Sort By LV, Ascending.

Fortunately, most of the LV1 skills were either things I’d just gotten, like [Pàoquán] and the governing skill [Xíngquán]; things I couldn’t train easily, like [Awaken Aura]; or else things I wasn’t eager to train, like [Acid Resistance].

Will I regret not grinding my Resistance skills the next time I get hit by an unexpected source of that damage? Probably. Am I going to sit around dunking my hand in acid to grind the skill? Hell and also No. My Semblance made me a lot of things, but I wasn’t a masochist, so there would be no meditating in storms of glass fragments for me.

[Shotgun Mastery] was also pretty low, but honestly, I felt like I didn’t need to go out of my way to practice that; just needed to remember to use Dawn Cracker when Hunting. [Giant Killer] and [Steadfast] also fell in the ‘difficult to practice’ category, at least when it came to school. I’d try to work on the latter with my sisters, or on weekend Hunts, but the former was quite difficult because it was actually quite hard to find anything outside of the Named with more HP than me.

Everything else was at least LV10, which was when the easiest gains stopped coming.

[Detect Magic has increased by 1!]

Speak of the devil. From this close I’d have sensed her with my passive range, but that’s no reason to stop grinding.

I knocked before opening the door. The feeling of magic being cast cut off instantly, and when I stepped inside Amber was twirling Summer’s End alternately shooting measured balls of flame and blades of wind at a handful of targets.

‹The Beautiful Changes In Such Kind Ways›LV 91Amber Udá̶̲z̸̷̸̴̛̛͚̫̜̟̗̞̤̝̬̝͉̳̤̯̜͓͇̩͇̠͉͔̊͆̉̾̉̈́̈̈́̂͒̊͒̍͑͒͌͐͘̕͠HP: [‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑‑100%‑‑‑‑‑‑----]MP: [‑‑‑‑‑     27%          ]

“You’ve been pushing yourself, mon trésor.”

“Jaune!” Amber turned to me with a smile as I shut the door behind me.

“Practicing your magic, I assume? You’re running down near a quarter of your mana.” I ambled over and pulled her into a hug to trigger [Lay On Hands].

“Jaune, I’m all sweaty,” she laughed, trying to squirm away, but I was having none of it.

“You’re never more beautiful than when you’ve been working hard.” I lifted her up easily and carried her over to a bench, depositing her in my lap. “Now sit still so I can bring your MP back to a safe threshold. If you left right now you’d collapse by Thursday at the latest.”

Amber settled down, letting me touch [Gaia’s Pulse] to draw on my surroundings and the planet to boost my regeneration — and thus the amount of regen I was sharing — more than fivefold. Even so, Amber’s MP pool was so massive that it was going to take over ten straight minutes to fill back up.

“What have you specifically been working on?” I asked, resting my chin on her shoulder and looking toward the targets. “Casting speed? Power? More esoteric effects than plain evocation?”

“Mostly casting speed,” she answered distractedly. “What do you mean by ‘esoteric effects’?”

“Qrow and his sister are shapeshifters, so magic has to be capable of more than hurling the elements; we can do that with Dust,” I said. “Now admittedly, I don’t know what that other stuff would be, but Ozpin should.”

“You don’t know?” She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye, and I knew what she was implying.

“Never saw anything else different before I stopped watching,” I clarified. “But come on, it’s magic. There have to be other types of magic. Divination? Enchanting? Summoning? It’s gotta be more flexible than just making things go boom, no matter how fun that might be.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” she agreed. “What else is coming in the future?”

“Hard to say. I’ve headed some of it off, and likely caused other things due to the butterflies I’ve set off. My team composition wouldn’t exist otherwise, for instance. Several team comps, actually,” I corrected, thinking of Leo. “But unless something changed that I haven’t anticipated, the White Fang will be heisting an SDC freight ship soonish. Then a prototype Atlesian mech frame gets stolen; then… well, the team that caught it doesn’t actually exist, but the Fang are stockpiling their stolen Dust in the ruins of Mountain Glenn, loading it onto trains that they can use to blow holes in the Wall and through the sewers to the caverns underneath the city.”

“Those caverns are full of Grimm,” Amber recognized the threat immediately.

“They got caught and triggered the plan early. If that doesn’t happen, they’ll do it during the Vytal Festival and everything will be ten times worse,” I summarized.

“How much of that can we prevent?”

“Most of it. The problem is making sure that we win decisively; otherwise they’ll just back off, regroup, and come up with a new plan that I know nothing about. But she will be here before that; I expect the other schools’ delegations to arrive right after the term break. So don’t drag your feet asking Ozpin what your magic can do, hmm?”

“I won’t. And I’ll admit… I didn’t realize I was quite so low today that I wouldn’t make it to the weekend.” She turned her head to peck me on the cheek. “I guess I’ll just have to come see you in the evenings before I head home.”

I squeezed her against me a little tighter even as I heaved a mock sigh. “I suppose I can deal with that.”

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The rest of the week continued in that vein until Friday. When classes let out, I led ABRN back to the common area to find SYRN and SBLE had beaten us there and were already lounging around. Yang and Nora were playing a game on one TV with Fi watching, Weiss and Barrie were studying, and Gules was curled up in an armchair texting someone.

More importantly for my purposes, Ren and Leo were at one of the tables playing Go. “Just the men I wanted to see,” I announced, dropping into another chair at their table. “Are either of you busy tonight?”

“I don’t believe so,” Ren answered, while Leo just shook his head, carefully placing a white stone to capture two of Ren’s.

“Then what do you say the three of us hit the town?” I suggested. “As the only men in our cohort, we need to stick together, do some male bonding, paint the town red.”

“What about CRDL?” Ruby wondered, vaulting the couch to sit next to her sister. “Dibs on next game.”

“What about CRDL?” I asked flatly.

“He did say ‘men’, not ‘boys’,” Gules murmured without looking up from her Scroll.

“Ha! Savage!” Yang crowed.

I glanced around the room. “The rest of you can have a girls’ night and paint your nails and try on clothes and talk about cute boys,” I offered, earning a laugh from Yang, a scoff from Weiss, and a raised finger each from Barrie and Gules. “Or whatever. Come on, guys’ night. It’s on me. What do you say?”

“Have fun, Renny!” Nora called without looking away from her game.

“I guess that’s a yes,” said Ren with his usual dry humor. “When would you like to leave?”

“Let me grab a shower and I’ll meet you by the airpad,” I offered, and Ren hummed an agreement. “Leo?”

“I… Yeah, sure. That sounds nice,” he gave a faint smile.

“Good man.” I patted his shoulder, and he flinched briefly before nodding.

Mental note, don’t touch him again, I decided. Blake had taken up a seat by the window, already reading her latest book, while Pyrrha joined a smiling Barrie and a preening Weiss for a study session, so I went to shower and change into my Nice armor set, with the gold-filigreed silk shirt I’d bought in Atlas. This one has been serving pretty well, but I should get another nice shirt.

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“So you and Nora aren’t dating?” Leo asked Ren as he poured himself some tea. We’d sat down at a café in the city after a bit of debate, deciding to eat before we did anything else tonight. “I mean, I know she always says you’re–”

“‘Not together-together’,” Ren finished. He shrugged. “Nora is… she’s the most important person in this world to me. We’ve never tried to define it beyond that. It was only us for a long time, until we got to Vale.”

“Why not Mistral?” I asked, having always wondered. “You guys could have tested into Haven easily.”

“I’ve visited, but I never cared for the city, and Haven is right in the middle of it,” he hummed. “Then Nora decided she wanted to come to Vale, so here we are.”

“You’re not from the city, then?” I asked to change the subject. I knew the answer, but I hadn’t heard it from him before.

“No, I was born in the village of Kuroyuri south of Lake Matsu,” Ren replied. He offered me tea, which I declined.

I blinked. “I didn’t realize it had a name besides ‘Sea of Monsters’.”

Ren shrugged. “I grew up with the traditional name from the Konpaku subcontinent. A long time ago, it was the oceanic coast, before the ‘dragon’ of Psyche rose from the sea and enclosed it to form the Anima of today. ‘Sea of Monsters’ is a translation of the Northern name.”

“I Thálassa ton Teráton,” said Leo. When I looked at him, he ducked his head. “That’s the name in Old Mistrali. Because it used to be open ocean, there are some very old and terrifying Grimm trapped or dormant on the bottom. That’s why it was named that.”

I nodded slowly. Not one of the Named, according to Ozpin’s recitation of their locations, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be scary. “Something you learned growing up?”

“Yeah,” Leo agreed, dropping his eyes to the table. “I actually am from the city. I moved to Vale for… personal reasons.”

“Eh, Mistral’s kinda uptight but it’s not as bad as Atlas,” said Sun, before sipping the tea he’d poured himself from Ren’s pot.

Leo jumped. “When did you get there!?”

“For that matter, who are you?” Ren added.

‹Steel Muscles, Iron Bones›LV 28Sun Wukong

Sun puffed out his chest, clearly about to make a pompous introduction for a laugh, so I decided to cut him off.

“His name’s Sun Wukong, he’s a Haven student here for the Vytal Tourney, and he sat down while we were talking about the Sea of Monsters.”

Sun slumped. “Man, why you gotta do me like that?” Then he tilted his head curiously. “Actually, how’d you know all that?”

Smirking, I puffed my chest and gave a pompous introduction of my own. “I’m Jaune Arc. I have approximate knowledge of many things.” I held the smug face for a moment before laughing and holding out my hand.

Sun chuckled and shook it. “That’s good, I’m gonna have to use that.” Halfway through the shake, he froze. “Arc? Like… Legion Commander Arc?”

“My oldest sister,” I agreed, gently extracting my hand from his grip. “I also met your cousin Starr a few weeks ago.”

“Ah, I haven’t seen her in a bit,” Sun said. He made an effort to sound casual, but his eyes darted away as he said it. “You’re right though, my team’s gonna win the Tournament. I came ahead to scout the competition.”

“You’re just gonna admit that out loud?” Leo asked incredulously.

He shrugged. “We’re the strongest freshman team in Haven. I’ve got Shade’s number. Atlas is too uptight to worry about. That just leaves Beacon; I heard the Invincible Girl came here.”

“She did, but she hates that name,” I said. Pyrrha was too polite to say it, so I’d at least let friends know her preference.

“Really? I always thought it was badass,” Sun hummed. “Still, you guys are freshmen, right? Who would you say is the stiffest competition?”

Ren shrugged and Leo ducked his head, so I decided to match Sun’s confidence. “That would be my team. I’d place Ren’s and Leo’s tied behind us.”

“Leo’s team would win,” Ren corrected. “We still have some… coordination issues to improve on,” he explained delicately.

Sun was clearly sizing me up. “In that case, I’ve got no problem believing the Commander’s brother would be pretty tough. Are you the team leader?”

“Team ABRN,” I agreed. “I’d offer a spar, but I imagine you want to save your tricks for the tournament.”

Sun chuckled. “Heh, I’m not opposed to a friendly scrap. We’ve got six months until the tournament, it’s not like I can just not fight until then.”

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Sun ended up tagging along with us at my invitation, since Leo and Ren didn’t object.

We were heading toward the teen club I’d been recommended back before my first date with Amber, when Sun suddenly turned his head. “Do you hear that?”

Curious, I activated [Eavesdrop]. It didn’t have insane range like the active versions of my detection skills, but I could still use it to clearly hear conversations over 70 meters away, so it was definitely useful. Now, however, I heard… “An alarm?”

“Yeah; sounds like a GeléTech brand,” Sun muttered. “Ah, it’s gone. I guess it was a false alarm?”

Ignoring Leo asking why Sun could recognize an alarm’s brand just by sound, I focused harder on that direction, and overheard a smarmy voice. “Thank you, Neo. I’m glad I have at least one competent person on this job. Honestly, I don’t know why I expected anything better from you animals…”

I didn’t wait to hear any more, taking off toward the voice at a quick jog. My companions caught up quickly.

“Jaune?” Ren prompted me.

“I don’t think it was a false alarm,” was all I said as we turned a corner and spotted a Dust shop. The doors were shut and all the curtains were drawn… but there was a delivery truck idling in the shadows of the alley beside it. “Sun, Leo, can you see who’s in the truck?”

“Yeah, it’s–” Sun paused, his eyes widening.

“It’s the White Fang,” Leo finished, his hands clenching.

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Name: Jaune ArcLevel: 58 (Next: 24.56%)Title: Academy StudentRace: HumanAge: 18Job: Beacon StudentClass: PaladinSemblance: The GamerHP: 7545/7545MP: 4177/4177STR: 213 (100)CON: 261 (101)DEX: 150 (53)INT: 128 (50)WIS: 106 (52)CHA: 143 (52)Points: 97Money: 947,788LStatus: Cursed – Yellow Death [High]

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A/N: If you’re enjoying this story, feel free to check out my discord server at https://discord.gg/H6V854Fvbg

‘Wildcats’ refers to custom-made firearm cartridges, usually based on commercially-sold rounds that have been modified in some way to optimize power, size, efficiency, etc.

‘Meditating in storms of glass fragments’ is a reference to The Games We Play. My Endurance skill (which collectively handles the Resistances) doesn’t work the same way as ‘Physical Endurance’ in The Gamer or TGWP anyway; different buffs, different resists, different caps.

Monkey’s final title in the 13th-century edition of Journey To The West is Gāngjīn tiě gŭ dàshèng (鋼筋鐵骨大聖), or ‘Great Sage Steel Muscles Iron Bones’ — in the 1592 edition this title is instead given as Qítiān dàshèng (齊天大聖), the more popular ‘Great Sage Equal to Heaven’.