𝐈𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 (English)

Chapter 63

Jaune knew he had one chance. His only other option was to hope he woke up early and could get himself knocked out again, but by that point Tyrian and Hazel might have taken him even further away.

There'd never been perfect control of his Semblance in terms of choosing who he visited but, if he had been capable, he wasn't sure who it would have been. Ozpin would have been good, but the teacher might have been awake. His teammates probably weren't asleep since they'd be looking for him, and Team RWBY would have been roped into it.

Trivia would have helped, he was sure, but she was all the way in Vale and he had no idea how close his body was to it, or how to help her navigate to where he was being taken. There was a lot of forest for one woman to scour.

General Ironwood?

He would have more capability to help, but he just might not...

Or he might decide that someone like Salem – who was apparently very real – shouldn't have a Semblance like his at her disposal. Better to kill them all with repeated airstrikes than risk a failed rescue.

It didn't matter anyway because Jaune never got a choice in who his Semblance brought him to, and he didn't now – because if he had been given a choice then it certainly wouldn't have been her.

And she looked no happier to see him.

"Arc..."

"Cinder."

They faced one another in what he presumed was the home Cinder had grown up in. She was shorter, somewhere between a child and a teenager in what looked like a school uniform except that, unlike Beacon's, it had trousers instead of a skirt. He'd entered her dream midway through to see Cinder being berated by an older woman, but the moment Cinder saw him, she realised this was a dream and became lucid. The woman was struck down ruthlessly, killed on the spot, and Cinder summoned twin swords to her hands by imagining them.

He could have whisked them away by un-imagining them if he wanted.

But that wouldn't help him.

"I must have fallen into a nap," Cinder hissed to herself. "What a clumsy way to go." She snarled and raised her voice, and her weapons, to point at him. "Well? Are you going to put your Semblance to use and kill me? They say if you kill a killer, the number of killers in the world stays the same."

Jaune couldn't resist. "But if I kill you, Emerald and Mercury then the world is down three killers and up one with me. That's still a net negative of two killers. Then I just need to keep going and I'll offset my status as a killer hundreds of times over."

Cinder snorted. "Philosophy never does work when you dig into it."

It was tempting to strike her down. She'd killed Amber, tried to kill him, and she'd planned terrible things for Beacon. And yet it was her head she ended up in. That must mean Tyrian and Hazel were skirting close to the city. Why? It would have made more sense to take him away from it in the opposite direction.

Unless that was too obvious. The sensible route was the one Beacon would assume, and Team RWBY and JNPR would be rushing that direction along with whatever reinforcements Ozpin could gather. No one would think to look toward Vale, and smuggling an unconscious body that way wouldn't be any harder from their points of view.

In fact, it might even be the clever move. They knew how his Semblance worked, so carrying him in the middle of nowhere increased the odds he could reach out and empower an ally. By bringing his unconscious body close to Vale, they cast his dream net wide. Millions of dreams he could end up in, almost all of them useless.