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.

Clubs

I sat still even as I sensed people being to move, prompted by the entrance of the seniors. Adam returned to the table and set a trey down in front of me, which I began to pick at for the sake of appearances. I wasn't hungry—I never was, anymore—but I ate a few fries and chicken nuggets anyway, focused primarily on my surroundings.

The seniors kept their distance for the moment, watching. Led by Albus, Fionn, and Cinder, they found places around the hall and I noted who they sat with carefully, but though they filled up most of the remaining seats and boxed me into the center, none of them spoke. I had a feeling they were all waiting for something and was pretty sure I knew what, but I played along for the moment and pretended I didn't know that all eyes were on me.

Across the hall, Desher released a huff that was half-amused and half-disgusted. He glanced once to either side and nodded sharply, causing a pair of juniors to rise and make their way over to my table. Emerald and Mercury looked up when they took a seat to either side of me, but Adam and I remained focused on our meals.

"You're Jaune Arc?" The one on the left—Shesep—asked.

I swallowed another chicken nugget before sliding my gaze over to the apple Adam had put on my plate. Lifting it with a thought, I focused on the image of a blade and began skinning it. An unbroken coil began to wind down from it onto my plate, gathering in a neat little spiral as I finished removing it—and then I cored it with an image of a sharpened cylinder, before splitting the remainder into six pieces by shifting the image. The pieces floated apart to let the core drop with a slight clang and then I reached for one, making it float towards my finger as I did.

The two thugs, because that was what they were to Desher, looked at each for a long, silent moment before apparently coming to an agreement.

"There's someone who wants to talk to you," Shesep continued. "Would you mind coming with us for a bit?"

At that I looked up at them and smiled.

"That's a very polite way of asking," I said, voice a touch apologetically. "But sorry; I don't talk to the help. If your boss has something to say, tell him to come and say it himself."

At that, I looked back down at my plate, bringing the apple slice to my lips.

Shesep swallowed and looked over at his friend, Kem. Neither seemed particularly enthused about having to be the bearer of bad news and slowly, almost reluctantly, they put their hands on my shoulders.

"I don't think that's possible," Shesep replied. "Or rather, he'd consider such a thing impolite."

"You two have a sucky job, boys," I answered, not looking up. "But when you say it like that…well, I wouldn't want to be rude."

I lowered my voice a touch, limiting it to the three of us with a touch of power.

"You know where this is going," I continued quietly. "I strongly suggest you stay down and out of the way."

Both of them flinched even before a pair of Psychokinetic blasts hurled them to opposite sides of the hall. I softened the blows until it was more like being hit by a pair of giant pillows, but it was still enough to make the hit the walls with a convincing crack and fall to the floor below.

At the same time that happened, my chair slide back and then flipped over the table behind it, rising in a high arc that stopped just short of colliding with Desher's table. Seated upside-down in the air opposite him, I met his eyes.

"Was there something you wanted to say to me?" I asked, five remaining apple slices spinning gently by my side. For a long moment, he was silent and merely returned my gaze steadily, looking me over. He had dark skin and even darker hair and his almost red eyes gleamed slightly as he frowned. Like me, he wore his armor instead of a uniform, but that didn't mean he wasn't ready for a fight.

"As a matter of fact, there was," He said at last, slowly returning my smile as he stood without even bothering to scoot back his chair. Where it would have touched him, the table instead began to wither and crumble to dust, revealing the Kopis beneath. As he grasped the hilt of his weapon, his Aura rose dimly around it, tinging it with the color of coagulated blood. He took a step forward and it was enough to split the table completely in half.

I watched him approach, unflinching even as I noted the effects. It was short range, as I'd already Observed, but with each step, I could feel the effect increase. When it couldn't strike at my flesh through my Aura, it struck at my Aura instead, trying to make it unravel. I felt the upkeep increase with each step, but I allowed him to approach until he was but a step away and closed my eyes as he lifted his sword. It was only when he actually swung it at me that I allowed my lips to twitch upwards.

The blade came to a halt when it struck my forearm—or rather, when it struck the Psychokinetic shell that hovered just above my skin. I held him off for a moment, still upside-down, and forced his blade away with my physical and mental strength, just so everyone could see that I could. Then, I opened my eyes again to meet Desher's and allowed my smile to widen.

"Is this some kind of 'speak with our fists' thing?" I asked. "Because I'm game. Let me see…ah, got it."

I lifted a hand and reached out towards him—and with a pushing gesture, smashed him with a blast of Psychokinetic force. Several of our classmates screamed and threw themselves out of the way as he cut through tables like a buzz saw, but I hit him hard enough that he wasn't near any of them for more them a moment. He slammed through the wall of the hall, his own dissolving it to the point that it could do nothing to slow his flight, nor could the next or the one after that. Between us, he flew straight to the opposite side of Haven before he could wrangle his power back under control and smash into something the old fashioned way—and when he did, he came to a halt in a decent sized crater.

Since I didn't actually need to breathe, it was pretty trivial to regulate my breathing so as to not let on that doing that had taken quite a bit of energy. Desher's power caused things to break down, even attacks directed his way, and for all that I'd turned it against him it was still a dangerous power. I'd taken it to show off—and I could tell from the reactions that rippled through the room that it had worked—but just standing nearby and then hitting him back had consumed several thousand MP. It was no surprise that he was one of the strongest in his year.

Luckily, regaining MP wasn't a problem for me. Casting away the mostly obliterated chair, I continued to float upside-down for a moment before flipping over as I ate another apple slice. Floating above everyone with one knee bent, I glanced around the room thoughtfully before turning to look back at the hole I'd made. Giving myself several seconds to catch my proverbial breath, I darted forward, pretty sure it'd evoke a reaction.

Sure enough, as I flew past one of the chairs that had miraculously survived Desher's flight, a hand stopped me.

"Hey, hey, hey," Fionn said with an easy smile, holding onto my ankle. He'd crossed the hall too fast for even me to follow and taken a seat in the formerly empty chair as I passed—but then, I guess that was to be expected of a teleporter. "That's enough, yeah? I can't say I mind seeing Desher taken down a notch, but you're making a mess."

I'd stopped flying the moment I'd felt contact, so I looked down at him for a moment, making a show of mulling it over.

"It can't be helped," I decided at last, tilting my head his way.

"Oh?" He asked. "How's that?"

"We'd have fought eventually," I said. "Because he wants to be the strongest person in the school, but the position's taken."

He laughed at that, a deep, barrel-chested sound. Though he was only a few years older than me, he was a big guy, well over two meters and his voice carried.

"Well, I can't say I don't like your style," He said after a moment, not letting go of my ankle. "But did you really have to do it before I got something to eat."

This time, I was my turn to chuckle and I let the remaining apple slices float towards his face. He glanced at them once before gobbling up all four with a single chomp.

"Sorry for the inconvenience," I answered. "It's just, if I do it now, I won't have to waste time doing it later, you know. You wouldn't want stuff like this to interfere with my studies or something, would you?"

He swallowing after several seconds of loud chewing and then sighed.

"It seems like you don't know much about Haven, huh," He mused, partially to himself.

"Oh?" I asked challengingly. "Well, I guess that's true—it is my first day, after all. Why don't you teach me, then?"

"Hm," He hummed, smile returning. "Well…I guess if I do it now, I won't have to waste time doing it later, right?"

"See?" I asked. "Now you're getting it."

He chuckled and smiled up at me before vanishing.

I was already preparing to move the moment I felt my Danger Sense react, but with the grip he'd had on me, I wasn't quite fast enough. For a disorienting moment, I felt like I was going to fly to pieces and explode in every direction, but I abruptly felt my Aura solidify in a way I'd never felt before and instead I was suddenly sent rocketing towards the ceiling. I caught myself instantly and stood with my feet on the ceiling, attention focused downwards.

A telefrag, huh…

Fionn fell a short distance to the floor, having teleported to occupy the same space as me. He couldn't just kill someone by teleporting inside them, not with an Aura in place to protect them—but two people couldn't exist in the same position, and it seemed his power resolved that issue by forcing them violently away. And while not as instantly lethal as the alternative, I could say from experience that it hurt like a bitch.

It also wasn't something I'd expected. Most teleporters couldn't appear in occupied spaces at all and the fact that he could made him one of the most dangerous ones in the entire world. But then, I suppose that was why he had a level above eighty before even graduating.

Good, I thought as I crouched slightly on the ceiling. This wouldn't be any fun, otherwise.

"The name's Finn," He shouted up at me. "Just tell me when you've had enough, yeah?"

"Jaune," I answered. "And feel free to give up any time."

He snorted but smiled widely as he vanished again.

By definition, teleportation was the instantaneous traversal of space. There was a lot of debate in certain circles as to how anything could be instant, much less be proven such, but it was generally accepted as true. There had been a lot of experiments about it and though the nature of human error had always made things difficult—especially with the speeds in question—there was a fair amount of evidence supporting the assumption that teleportation was, at the very least, able to cover linear distances at a speed faster than light. There was even more debate about how that worked and a bunch of theories that were essentially impossible to prove.

The leading one, however, was that teleportation was able to give the appearance of moving faster than light by covering a smaller effective distance, whether through the warping of space, high-dimensional movement, or whatever else—that is, while moving faster than light was effectively impossible, if light has to move a thousand miles and you only have to move an inch, it might be possible to reach your destination before it. Bending the rules instead of breaking them, essentially.

As I got up to a fair amount of dimensional fuckery myself, I'd done some research into the subject while looking into Naraka and Raven's Semblance. In truth, as with all Semblances, I suspected the details varied—it was rather hard to come up with anything like a unified theory with what were essentially unrepeatable miracles. Some teleporters could only move themselves, some could only move other people, and while there was supporting evidence that some might have warped space, others could have used a different method. A long time ago, Mistral had possessed a famous teleporter that had earned the name Ophis by leaving skins filled with dust; tests on the shells he'd left behind had eventually lead to several scientists deducing that rather than teleporting in a conventional sense, he destroyed his body in one location and created a new one at his destination.

So I could honestly say I had no more of an idea of how Finn's power worked then I did Raven's—and I'd spent a lot of time trying to figure out how Raven's power worked. In Finn's case, I might have sensed something, but whatever it was, it either occurred in a timeframe too fast for me to notice—which was saying something—or else transported Finn somewhere beyond my perceptions and back into conventional reality at his desired locations. Or both.

The point being that even I couldn't dodge a teleport after it occurred. He reappeared the same moment he vanished or near enough that it didn't make a difference; it wasn't something I could avoid after it happened.

Which meant I'd just have to dodge beforehand instead. The moment I sensed a change in him, the moment I felt my Danger Sense alert me, I was moving. Shedding a skin, I flicked a few steps back as he appeared where I'd stood, upside-down in my place. The afterimage I'd left behind with my enhanced speed was torn apart by his reappearance, but I paid it no heed, attacking before I even stopped moving. Finn reappeared only to take a focused blast of Psychokinetic force to the back, hurling him towards the nearest wall with the force of a comet.

He surprised me again by vanishing a moment before he hit it and reappearing in the exact same place as before, but facing the opposite direction—facing me.. Though he'd been flying through the air moments before, teleporting seemed to have erased his momentum entirely. Perhaps even more than that, I was sure of it now; he could change not only his position in space when teleporting, but also the positioning of his own body.

Interesting.

I saw his lips twitch upwards once as gravity began to pull him back towards the floor but he vanished just in time to avoid the blast of force I sent his way. I flickered in the same instant, feet touching the ceiling just long enough to let me flicker several steps back as he appeared in my position once more and then immediately teleported again into the exact same place so as to face me. The ceiling shattered beneath his feet as he vanished again, but this time he appeared to the right of me instead, sword abruptly drawn and arms ready to swing. The moment he appeared, however, I aimed another wave of invisible power at his face and let loose.

He was suddenly on the other side of me, blade swinging from the opposite side of his body. I caught it this time, catching it on an invisible sword of my own just to see what he'd do, and he was suddenly behind me, blade swinging down at the back of my head. I hurled a wave of power at him without looking back and hit nothing as he was already in front of me, the tip of his sword at my throat.

This time, I didn't bother with a directed assault, but let my Psychokinetic shell expand into a growing sphere, blowing away everything around me even as I shattered the ceiling. He flickered behind me, but still caught the blast, and it flung him back hard—only for him to vanish in midair and reappear right before my eyes, blade swinging for my neck.

I'd already recreated my shell and it pulsed again, throwing him back again, but he reappeared to the right of me and tried a third only to get the same result. When that happened, he vanished again, but reappeared on the floor below, standing amidst the fallen ceiling as he looked up at me. I took advantage of the brief reprieve to rotate in place and hover upright between the ruined dining hall and the floor above. He was taking a moment to think of a new angle, but in truth, such a reprieve did nothing but help me as it gave me a chance to do the same. Though I'd been able to hit him with an omnidirectional assault, the truth was that such an attack was rather wasteful as only a small fraction of the force hit him and I needed to put enough MP into the attack that any such fraction was enough to bat him away.

In truth, I was a bit surprised at how elusive he was—even with a teleportation Semblance, the fact remained that all my attacks were invisible. I'd Observed him already and he didn't have any skills that would render my powers visible, which meant he was doing this with the same Danger Sense I was using to predict his attempts to telefrag me. While all Hunters had the skill to some extent by virtue of their Aura, his was shockingly precise if it was enough to let him predict my individual attacks in the brief moments he had to respond. I guess his level wasn't just because of his Semblance.

Still…while he may have been faster while teleporting, when it came to moving within conventional space, I had the advantage. I could Shed to quickly evade a direct attack and if he appeared near me, I was quick enough to respond. While his reaction time was exceptional, mine was better, and in a war of attrition I had an almost unsurmountable advantage. The only part that worried me were the somewhat vague descriptions of his skills and the fact that he'd yet to use several of them.

Finn cracked his neck once and looked up at me.

"Not bad," He admitted. "Ready for round two?"

"Given that I won round one, I feel like I should be asking you that," I replied even as I let myself fall to the floor.

"Hmph," He snorted. "Fair enough. But how about I show you something cool this time?"

"As long as you do it before I yawn myself to death," I replied, returning his smirk. "Weren't you supposed to be showing me the ropes?"

"In a minute, you impatient bastard," He answered, hints of an accent coloring his words as he laughed. "You watch closely now, yeah?"

I widened my eyes dramatically.

"I'll even hold my breath, if you want," I told him. "But just to make sure, if I get tired of waiting its fine if I just kick your ass instead, right?"

He clicked his tongue once and vanished. I promptly released another pulse, catching him as he appeared above me and flicking him high into the air. As appeared behind me, I reversed to course of the wave, catching him in the back even as I pulsed again, swashing him as he appeared in front of me. Watching his face closely, I made a guess and released a wall shaped blast to the left and then the right, smashing him away each time. Instead of remaining stationary, however, this time I darted forward, flying just inches above the ground and zigzagging quickly, forcing him to try and match my pace. When he appeared just a step in front of me and made to clothesline me with his blade, I darted right and slammed full force into him. He flickered, appearing in the space I'd just vacated, and I turned on a dime to barrel into him again, going back to back with him.

When he put some distance between us, teleporting ten meters down the hall, I aimed a hammer of force at him and shattered the floor beneath his feet when he vanished. Pulsing again at his approach, I was a bit surprised when he didn't vanish, but was quickly to follow it up with a more focused blast, hurling him halfway down the hall before he vanished again. When he reappeared, I pulsed and then blasted him up into the air, and when he was suddenly in front of me, I raised a hand to hit him with a Psychokinetically enhanced punch. He went flying before reappearing ten meters away again, but this time I didn't attack.

Instead, I pinned him with an amused look.

"I want to make it clear that I know you're up to something," I stated loud enough for him to hear. "You're trying to give the impression that you're slowing down, but I know full well that you could have dodged some of those. I don't think you're stupid enough to keep trying the same old thing without a plan, either."

"Aw," Finn drew out. "I'm so glad to hear you think that much of me. And you were even polite enough to play along, too. That gets, right here."

He pounded a fist against his chest, right over his heart, and I couldn't help but smile in response.

"I guess you could think of it that way," I replied. "But, well, since I'm so much stronger then you…it's more that I'm just not worried about it, I guess? Sorry, but you haven't made much of an impression on me yet."

"Well, we can't have that," He said, flashing his teeth in an honest grin. "Why don't I show you my magic trick, then?"

I was about to say something sarcastic when he appeared in front of me and I had to release a pulse of Psychokinetic force, instead—one which he tore through like it was made of fucking paper. I raised another shield that he blasted through the exact same way before snapping my hands up to catch the blade. With the help of my Psychokinesis, pitted my strength against his and braced myself against the floor.

It barely slowed him down. My feet slid back across the floor for a moment before it abruptly shattered beneath me, but I didn't even have a chance to fall as it continued to push me back. Even trying to resist, the force of the attack was enough to draw a trench across the dining hall with my body, pushing me through stone like it was water. Finn overcame my strength and slammed his sword straight into my chest, hitting me as hard as every blow I'd landed on him combined.

Ah, I thought as understanding dawned.

When I came to a stop, there was a chasm down the length of the dining hall and I was by the doorway. His attack had passed straight through my psychic shell and left my entire body literally ringing with the impact, vibrating as if it were more steel than flesh. I got that under control after a moment but took several more to catch my metaphorical breath and allow the silence that had taken the hall to linger. Then, after healing the damage and regaining some of my power, I spoke.

"So…" I asked as I lifted my head to look him in the eye, rising against the pressure of his sword with ease. "Did you do it yet?"

Before he could reply, I slammed him with an even stronger blast, flinging him straight through the now absent ceiling before he vanished and reappeared at the opposite end of the hall. As he did, I floated upwards and smiled.

"I get it," I said, putting the pieces together. "I thought it was a little odd how you seemed to bleed off all your momentum each time you teleported—but you don't get rid of it, do you? You store it."

"Energy cannot be created or etc." He replied, absently making a rotating gesture with his hand, as if wanting to get on with this.

I hummed, wondering absently if that was a secondary effect of his Semblance or if it was it the reason he could telefrag an opponent in the first place. It didn't matter in this case, though—the impacts still hurt him, he was just able to gather up any forces acting upon him when he teleported and store them to release later. I couldn't deny that it was an interesting power; sure, there were ways around it, but…I could see why he was one of the highest levels in the school.

"Well then," I chuckled as I floated his way. "I guess the only real question is which of us can take a bigger ass-kicking."

His smile became fierce as he twirled his blade.

"Sounds like fun to me," He answered. "Shall we?"

Without another word, I darted down the hall, aiming straight for him even as I prepared an arsenal of Psychokinetic force. Finn readied his blade fearlessly and swung even as I made to attack—

And then something punched me in the heart even as I felt a shift in the room. I veered left abruptly, crashing through the wall, and saw Finn stumble as I did. Both of our HP bars took a sudden hit, his quite a bit more than mine, and I turned my attention to the source as I shook off the rubble.

"It's against the rules to fight in the cafeteria," Albus informed us, taking a seat on the edge of one of the few remaining tables.