Arc Royale [Ch. 7, Ch. 8]

"This is war!" Leviathan roared. It echoed impossibly deep, inside Ruby's very brain. Team RWBY and JNPR watched uncomfortably, able to see Ashari's struggles weakening in the water. "This is war – with a wish for the winner. And I intend to be that-"

A loud bang ripped through the night.

Leviathan jerked.

In the silence left behind after it, Ruby heard Ashari break the water and frantically gasp for air. She also heard Yang suck in a gasp, then release it in a desperate and painful cry. "LEVIATHAN!"

Her Jaune, Leviathan, turned to look their way, shock registering on his face as he looked down at himself. Blood seeped through his white shirt, slowly spreading from a dark hole in his clothing. In his body.

Leviathan didn't have aura. His world didn't have aura.

He was defenceless.

Another crack echoed and he jerked again, driven a step back with his arms flying up. Blood sprayed from his chest. He stepped back with the force of it, teetering for a moment, for one dreadful instant where his eyes met Yang's across a gulf, where Ruby could have sworn he whispered an apology to them both, before he toppled backwards into the water.

"LEVIATHAN!" Yang screamed shrilly. "NOOO!"

Ruby turned to stare at the people aligned against them in search of the one who took the shot. They looked just as surprised as she, however. The one who hurt her was disarmed and trying to help Ashari out the water. The white-coated huntsman was hacking and coughing, busy being supported between Grimm and the new one. Neither had a weapon to shoot Leviathan, and neither had been in a position to. The shot had come from high up and behind them, back in the direction of the city.

Dead. Just like that. Ruby could hardly believe it. He hadn't been the nicest of people, but he hadn't been mean either. He'd been friendly to her and Yang, even Weiss and Blake. He'd laughed with them, ate with them, slept in the same room and told them stories about his world. He'd been a real, breathing, living person.

And he was dead…

Gone.

Drip…

The sound echoed. No, it tolled. Tolled like a bell mixed with a leaky faucet. Except it was in her head and it made her feel sick to her stomach. Yang felt it too – that much she could tell from how her sister clapped a hand to her mouth and retched.

"What is…" Knight's eyes began to glow blue. "I sense something…"

Drip…

Blake had been closest to the water's edge, thrown there by the waves, and as she pushed herself up she looked down into the ocean and screamed. All eyes shot to her, catching the faunus as she fell on her back and frantically pedalled away from the edge of the docks.

Drip – Drip…

There was something in the water. Ruby could see it. She knew it. Something deep inside her told her it was so. That the water which should have only been about ten metres deep was suddenly fathomless. Bottomless.

There, deep inside it, a golden speck of light. Two. Coming closer.

Growing larger. Too large. What started as a pinprick had already become as large as a car, and it was now bigger than a lorry. And it kept coming. Ruby's heart pounded in her chest as some primal fear overtook her. Beside her, Yang began to shake and Knight's eyes glowed an even more intense hue.

"It's coming." Ruby babbled, without knowing why or what she even meant. "It's coming!"

Drip…

Drip…

The sounds paused. The third, if it had planned to come in a rhythm did not. And for a dreadful moment, Ruby thought it might be over. That the dripping, the lights and the mind-numbing terror might not come to anything.

Splash

The world shifted. The sky turned red. Jagged black light tore its way across it, forming a horrific crack in the sky itself. The moon turned purest white, seeming to spin on itself and – for a moment – to become whole again. The cracks in it that she'd known all their lives forming into a whole, circular shape. Ashari, Grimm and the new opponent backed away, and they weren't the only ones. Team JNPR were racing away from the water, while Weiss dragged Blake up and carried them away on a sheet of ice.

The ocean bubbled, steamed and glowed with yellowish light.

—Arc Royale [Ch. 7]



It happened so quickly, and yet also so slowly. Slow enough to feel the tolling of some distant bell in their bones, slow enough to see the water bubble and roil and froth, but fast enough that when the ocean's surface bulged out and up, they had no time to flee. A monstrous shape broke the surface with a deafening roar. An echoing roar. Ruby screamed and cupped her ears, and yet she couldn't hear her own voice at all. The noise, like a thousand car horns going off next to her ear, reached a pitch so wild there was a pop and then the noise dulled.

For Blake, who was so close to the dock's edge, it was enough to drive her down to her knees and have her tugging her feline ears down. Blood ran from them down her cheeks and onto her shoulders, staining white cloth red. The others were little better, staggering and stumbling around as if they were on an aircraft bucking in the air. Ren hit a cargo container and slid down it; Yang, on her way to reach Blake, tripped and fell, splashing down into a puddle of water.

Then, more water came. A huge wave not big enough to be tidal, but more than sizeable enough to smash down on them and throw them away. Ruby was sent spinning across the concrete. Knight shielded her with his body, not that it stopped them being launched away. Coming with the wave was the swell from displaced water, picking up three fishing vessels bobbing in the water and raising them high above the level of the docks themselves. They came crashing down between the two teams and the creature that had broken the surface, metal screeching and crunching across concrete as the water dyed away.

Extricating herself from Knight's hands, Ruby dared to look up and see what it was. The water, the wave and the ships had prevented her before, but now, with them gone, she could see what had come to the surface in all its terrifying glory.

Oh, her mind provided dully. So that's why he called himself Leviathan…

It was giant. Monstrous. An impossibly thick worm or serpent that pierced tall out of the water, easily fifty metres tall and with more hidden beneath the choppy waves. Its skin, with water rinsing down it in waterfalls, was scaled thickly in dark and mottled tones of charcoal grey and midnight blue. It was easily fifteen metres thick, as thick as the largest Grimm she'd ever seen. Ruby doubted there existed a Grimm larger than it.

Its long neck continued up unto a flattened-out head, a fish-like snout that was pointed up toward the glowing red moon and the jagged black scar across a sky dyed crimson. Slowly, torturously, it brought its head down to regard them. As it did, twin beams of solid yellow light slammed down onto the concrete, cast from three-metre-wide eyes like beams from a floodlight. They rushed over the docks, taking everything in. When they passed over her, Ruby found herself rooted to the spot. Frozen. It wasn't fear, or it wasn't just fear. There was something heavier than that, a very real frost that crept into every bone in her body and froze it solid.

Drip – Drip…

Wrong. It was… wrong. It was impossible. It was incorrect, immutable, wrongwrongwrong! Its maw opened revealing rows and rows of teeth, all angled back and all pointed in toward its throat, within which a pale grey light shone impossibly. Air as fetid and dank as the bottom of the ocean splashed over her, dropping her to her knees. Tears ran down her face and she didn't know why. Or didn't understand why. Couldn't. It was wrong. It was so wrong that it hurt to look at and she wanted to do nothing more than curl into a ball and cry until the world made sense again.

Ruby's eyes slid upward as it continued to gaze at her. Her arms trembled, her throat clogged, and she garbled out empty sounds – choked and rasped. With a final choking sob, Ruby tumbled forward and splashed face-first onto the ground.

"RUBY!"

/-/

"I take it that's not yours."

Grimm knew it was rhetorical, but he shook his head anyway. That… thing was no Grimm. Or… it was but… it didn't… His eyes burned and he had to look away. The more he looked at it, the more his body rebelled. "I can't control it. Not in a million years."

"I'm not sure it's under control at all." Ashari said. Despite being soaked with water and nearly having drowned, the older man had the strength to haul Grimm's arm over his shoulder and support him. He'd also saved his life. "We should go."

"We should help them!" Grimm argued.

"Say that around Null or Cinder and you'll not hear the end of it. There's nothing we can do here. We stick around and we only give that thing acceptable targets. Best thing we can do is leave and hope it calms down with no enemies left." Ashari hummed. "Can you control the other Grimm? The one he's creating?"

"Barely. I'm… I'm suppressing them. It's taking a lot of focus."

"All the more reason to get us out of here." Ashari dragged him over to Null, who had been wise – or callous – enough to seek shelter and leave the two of them behind. He was soaked through as well, bruised and exhausted, and just as scared as them looking at the thing that Jaune had become.

"What the hell is that thing?" Null asked, forgetting his enmity of them for the moment. Grimm couldn't blame him.

"Apparently, it's an iteration of ourselves." Ashari said.

"That's… me? Us?"

"Seems that way. What kind of world you come from them to make that possible I don't know. We're leaving. Grimm is out, I was nearly drowned and unless you want to fight that thing-"

"No." Null shook his head. "I'm with you on this. Let's get out of here."

/-/

The water continued to froth and splash over the docks and against them. The air grew chill, the sky glowed red and Grimm dropped from above like falling snow, landing around them, away from them, some in the city itself. Distant screams echoed, but the lot of them didn't move. Couldn't. They were prey caught in the sight of an apex predator, still and silent, hoping – praying – that it wouldn't snuff out their life.

Drip – Drip

It echoed in her head. Each drop of water an echo that had her soul rippling like the surface of a lake. Cold, soft, forgiving, welcoming her, as if she could let go and sink gently down into its embrace, into the dark. Whispering in her ear that it would be like taking a nap, that it would be the softest bed she'd ever laid on, a night's sleep from which she would never have to worry again-

"YANG!" Pyrrha's voice cut through her mind like a hot knife. "Make him stop!"

"H-Him…?"

"Leviathan! It's Leviathan! Make him stop!"

Leviathan…? Yang looked up and felt a whimper deep in her throat. It didn't look like the goofy, friendly teen from another world she'd just started to get to know, that she'd just started to get to like. Leviathan was funny and chatty, giving as good as he got, laughing at her ribbing and poking back like he was a friend she'd never known she had.

This… This was a monster out of her worst nightmares, out of the desperate ramblings of a man driven to the brink of insanity. Even looking at it had her eyes watering. Blake was still hunched up in a ball, shaking and screaming at the floor as Weiss tried to pull her away. In the end, that snapped her out of it. Not courage, but shame.

Get your act together! Do something!

"L… Leviathan!" she shouted. Her voice wavered but who could fucking blame her? When it – his, she told herself – turned its gaze on her, brought those spotlights crashing down on her, she felt colder than ice. The air she breathed out came in a thick mist. "Leviathan!" she tried again. "S-Stop this."

He stared back at her. The stillness worried her. Had she been too assertive? Too commanding?

"Please," she said to be safe. "Please can… can you stop the Grimm? You… You're scaring us. C-Can't you turn back? It… It'll be okay. We… We can explain this to Ozpin."

—Arc Royale [Ch. 8]