RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC45: New (Emerald &Co)-2

A couple more weeks slipped by without more news from Raven on the new mission. She decided to put off the investigating till the team had had more time to get ready together.

Emerald trained with Yang, Neptune, and some of the other team members and some people from the base.

She talked Cinder into training only after calling into question if she was rusty, but only one on one.

Cinder was surprised that Emerald could hold her own now with Cinder herself having to hold back.

"It's a lot easier when you're not magic," Emerald said, wiping her brow. "Not that you weren't tough before, but it's a fair fight now."

Cinder dematerialized her weapons. "That and you're heavier than you used to be."

"Hey!" Emerald cried.

But of course, Emerald no longer looked like a teenager, she was close to 23 now, probably. She was easily as strong as Cinder was, if not more so, since she'd spent all this time in the militia and Cinder had been working a desk job.

"Still, I'd pay for your aim," Emerald sighed. "I've never been that good a shot. Easier to cloud people's aim than to hone mine. You know, Pyrrha's been suggesting we start fighting without semblances sometimes. She thinks we rely on them too much and that Jaune leveled up a lot more because he trained for a long time without one."

"Come from the person who has one of the most powerful combat semblances in the world," Cinder snorted. 

"She did used to barely use it," Emerald said. "I mean, Shine warned us that semblances might fade in a few generations, just like magic, maybe we should be thinking ahead."

"That's too far ahead," Cidner said.

"What if even our kids don't have them?" Emerald said oddly. "It's too soon to know for Qrow and Winter's, it could be. I mean, I bet Qrow would love it if they didn't get his semblance, but the Schnee one is pretty bada--. I guess we could still be tough without them, but it would suck to lose our superpowers."

"I think we all know power corrupts," Cinder leaned on a glass pole she'd just formed and looked gloomy.

"It's so weird to hear you say that," Emerald said. "Not in a bad way," she held up her hands. "Just...like such a 180. I remember when you used to say you wanted to be feared. I guess that's out now."

"Being feared was a rush," Cinder reflected. "I still want to be sometimes, when people really should just shut up. It was easier to just threaten them into submission."

"You were good at it," Emerald winced.

Well no one would have taken Cinder seriously if not for her magical powers-- a fact she'd really known all along when she was going after them.

"I guess what shifted was thinking that it was taking the easy way out to just be feared," Cinder mused aloud. "You know how everyone was scared of the DJs after they saw what they could do? I was too. I wouldn't have admitted it, but there it was."

"They were scary," Emerald said. "I mean, I know they love us, but someone who can vibrate molecules apart and someone who can summon a sword and manipulate people into anything, that's pretty scary."

"Yeah, and they could be fearsome without even trying to be," Cinder said. "Very little of it they actually tried to frighten anyone, which puzzled me, until those Mind Grimm almost made Shine snap."

"You've never told us what really happened there," Emerald said. "Shine's only filled in part of the blanks to Oscar for his book, but it sounded intense."