𝐈𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 (English)

Chapter 35

Why did so many nightmares involve children?

Was there no one in Beacon that didn't have trauma deriving from their childhood years? He was in another school, too, looking like a pre-school this time. The kind that taught children from five to ten, long before you started learning to control your aura and throw a punch. Kids were running around a concrete playground shouting and chasing one another while a blurry-faced teacher stood in the middle with their hands in their pockets, pretending to pay attention.

It could be anyone's dream. Apparently, school was a place of trauma. Go figure. All those children, few of them with anything resembling morals, running around and learning to be human while having no empathy or understanding of what they were doing. It was a breeding ground for issues carried on through your life. If there was anything Jaune had learned from his Semblance, it was that children sucked, and any place that congregated them together might as well have been a warzone.

"No Trivia," he said, scanning the heads. He didn't know if he was disappointed or relieved. Maybe both. The last dream in a school had been her, so it was what jumped to mind. "I somehow doubt this is Blake or Weiss, either. Blake was travelling protesting and Weiss... well, I doubt she went to a place as crowded or unorganised as this."

A normal school, basically.

It could be Ruby or Yang and this could be Patch, but then it could just as easily be Nora and Ren before their village fell, or Pyrrha in Mistral, but, annoyingly, it could also be just about any other student in Beacon. Most kids went to a normal school. Not everyone was a Blake or a Weiss. And thank goodness for that. It was hard enough having the two of them.

There were quite a lot of faunus around, though. Not enough to be Menagerie, but he'd say almost half the students had visible ears, and a few probably had tails he couldn't see. It was a school that was on first glance more faunus than not. Ansel hadn't had many, and none in his school, which now that he thought about it said all sorts of things about his hometown. Villages and towns outside of the major cities tended to have less balanced distribution, so this was probably a major city, and the weather didn't match what he imagined of Atlas or Vacuo, and the architecture wasn't Mistralian, so he assumed this was a preschool in Vale.

That didn't narrow it down any. Beacon was in Vale and a lot of its students were Valean.

"Grimm! Grimm! Grimm!"

The chant came from over by what Jaune assumed was the outdoor toilets in the playground, and it sounded too cheerful and rhythmic to be an actual cry of an approaching monster. There were shrieks of laughter that followed it and running kids.

Some kind of Grimm-based game of tag, maybe?

It was the only clear sounds he'd heard, so Jaune strolled over past little kids running between his legs and away giggling. There were a few others making growling sounds with their hands up, mimicking Grimm as he'd guessed and chasing after them. The idea seemed to be that when a Grimm caught a victim, they had to become a Grimm as well and join the chase. Last one standing won. At least they weren't biting one another.

"The Grimm win again!" complained a young girl. "They always win."

"Mom says that's why we moved to the city," said a faunus with dog ears.

"They wouldn't win if we had a huntsman."

"Huntress!" shouted a little girl.

"Huntsmen are cooler!"

"Nuh-uh!"

"Yuh-uh!"

"Nuh-uh!"

Jaune angled his eyes heavenward. No wonder this place bred trauma. He was already feeling his brain coming apart at the seams. A nicer person than he, Pyrrha for sure, would have shown herself as a huntress and amused the children. It'd become a photo op and everyone would look at her and say she was such a great inspiration. Pyrrha was good with kids like that. Or maybe she'd just been trained to be by her agents, and she'd actually hate every bit of it. Not that anyone would be able to tell with the quality of her poker face.