Ch 19: The Emerald Forest (2)

For now, the 'something' was still too far away to be a threat. So, Ray turned his attention back to his classmates while keeping half an eye on the approaching danger. [Looks like Blake and Yang are going to be the next to meet up. Then that will just leave Ren and Nora. So sad. The fated pair that took the longest to reunite was the one to know each other the longest. Is this an example of 'absence makes the heart grow fonder'? ...Nah, I don't think so.]

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"Helloooooooooo~?" Yang calls out as she walks through the forest. "Is anyone out there? Hellooooo?" She stops for a moment and raises her arms in frustration, "I'm getting bored here!"

Hearing a rustle in the bushes behind her, Yang turns around, "Is someone there?" She parts the bushes to see beyond them, "Ruby, is that you?" and finds herself face to muzzle with an Ursa, a Grimm with the characteristics of a bear that stood twice as tall as a man on its hind legs, "Nop*e." Yang says, popping the 'p'.

Yang dives to the side to avoid the Ursa's charge and rolls back to her feet, deploying Ember Celica. Just as she regains her footing, she is forced to jump to the side to avoid being trampled by a second Ursa coming from behind her. Not giving her a moment's rest, the first Ursa rushes her again. Meeting the assault head on this time and delivering a flaming straight punch empowered by a shotgun blast to its chest Yang sends it flying back the way it came. Following close on the first's heels, the second Ursa charges and goes for a claw swipe. Stepping into the swipe, Yang delivers a fierce jumping uppercut and shotgun blast that launches the Ursa into the air. She follows it up with a mid-air kick, sending the Ursa crashing backward into its partner.

"You guys wouldn't happen to have seen a girl in a red hood, would you? Yang jokes. The Ursas' only response is a roar and another claw strike.

"You could just say 'no'" Yang continues to joke as she weaponizes her Aura to form a claw, catching the Ursa's paw and stopping it cold. "He He." The blond brawler holds the Ursa like that for a moment as it strains against her hold and chuckles before spinning into the Ursa's chest, pulls its arm over her shoulder, and shoulder-throws it bodily into the second Ursa, impaling the second on the back spikes of the first. Jumping into the air, a red-eyed Yang delivers a meteoric punch to the two Ursas lying on top of each other to finish off her bloodthirsty punching bags.

"Welp, that's that." Yang turns her back on the rising cloud of black ash that marks the end of the Grimm, her eyes returning to their usual lilac. Patting the dust off her hands as she walks away, Yang fails to notice that the second Ursa that had been impaled underneath the first had somehow survived. As it rears up to strike at Yang's undefended back, *thwak* it suddenly stops and falls back to the ground.

"Huh?" The sound of the crash causes Yang to turn around and see the second Ursa she had failed to kill beginning to disappear as Blake Belladonna pulls back her Kusarigama form Gambol Shroud from where she had embedded it into the Ursa's back.

Blake smiles at Yang as she sheathes her weapon behind her back.

"I could've taken him." Yang claims jokingly, to which Blake just rolls her eyes.

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Ren is making his way through some tall grass in the forest. Reaching the center of a clearing, he pauses and narrows his eyes. Something is watching him, and it isn't friendly. As Ren looks around, a black snake big enough to swallow a grown man whole rises from the grass behind him. It is a Grimm known as a King Taijitu.

The King Taijitu slithers around Ren, encircling him with its long body as Ren calmly drops into a fighting stance. Suddenly, the serpent Grimm lunges at Ren. The black-haired huntsman-in-training jumps backward out of the way, causing it to strike the ground instead, but the Grimm bounces off the ground to headbutt Ren while he is still in mid air.

Ren performs several backward handsprings and flips as he retreats from the Grimm's pursuit. Dirt and grass flying into the air as the monstrous serpent misses his retreating form and repeatedly strikes the ground instead, before eventually catching Ren and hitting him back down to earth. Ren stumbles but is able to remain on his feet. However, the brief gap he presented while regaining his balance gave the King Taijitu the chance to coil its long serpentine body around him.

As the walls of snakey-Grimm flesh raise around him, Ren pulls StormFlower out of his sleeves. He jumps over twice his height over the Grimm's rising coils and flips in the air to fire downward at its head. As the snake tries to take a bite out of him, Ren delivers a mid-air kick and forces it back and down.

The King Taijitu begins to raise its head back up when Ren comes charging up and delivers a one-two slash at the base of its head. Infuriated, the Grimm lunges again, but this time with too much force. And when Ren successfully dodges again, it finds its nose stuck in the ground for a second. That brief second is all the basically-a-ninja needs. Landing on top of the Grimm's head, he stabs StormFlower into the base of its skull.

Just as he is about to unleash a barrage of gunfire into the base of its neck to finish the creature off, he senses another presence behind him and remembers an important fact about King Taijitus. It has not one head, but two. A black head at one end of its body and a white head at the other. Both sentient, both dangerous. Ren pulls StormFlower out of the black end and looks over his shoulder just in time to dodge the white end's strike.

Now he must face two heads at the same time. But in the face of this danger, Ren's determination only grows. The black head's attack is the first to reach him. Ren jumps over its gaping jaws and lands on its back. Running along its body, he begins sliding and jumping around, under, and over its coils, firing StormFlower at his slithering trail continuously as he goes. Until, finally, the white head catches him and headbutts him off its body. Ren loses his grip on his weapons from the force of the impact and slams into the ground.

Just as he begins to sit up, he is met with the looming maw of the black head. "No!" he shouts, uttering his first words since the fight began.

Concentrating all his Aura into his hands, Ren blocks the King Taijitu's fangs from piercing his flesh. After a few seconds of confrontation as the pink glow of Ren's Aura pulses against the Grimm's physical strength, Ren succeeds in shoving the King Taijitu's black head back a bit. Using that minutest of gaps, he grabs its two large front fangs and rips them out with a sharp jerk.

As the King Taijitu wails in agony, reeling its head back from the pain, Ren spins to the side and impales one of the fangs into its right eye. Gathering his energy for a moment, Ren delivers a palm strike to the back of the impaled fang, driving it deeper and sending a wave of Aura through its head, causing the head to explode. Now only the white one remains. Ren charges at the Grimm, picking up StormFlower from the ground as he goes.

With the fight returned to 1v1, the conclusion is soon reached, and Ren is left standing exhausted, but uninjured, on top of the body of the King Taijitu as the last of its life force slowly fades away.

"Qrrraaww! Qrrraaww!" As Ren returns his guns to his sleeves and dusts himself off, a strange cry originates from the branches above him. Looking up, he sees Nora hanging upside down from the tree next to him.

"Heh. I still don't think that's what a sloth sounds like." Ren tells her with a small smile, earning himself a "Boop!" on the nose from his giggling childhood friend. The two just stay like that for a moment, smiling at each other, until the King Taijitu finally expires and begins to disappear beneath Ren's feet.

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Ray can't help but smile as he watched Ren and Nora's flirting before turning his attention back to the 'something'. Which now had a huge pack of Beowolves following it. It was closer now, and Ray could determine more details about it.

[What are you? You have no Aura, like a Grimm, but a bio-electric field similar to a Faunus. It can't be a Geist. They are spectral and don't have a nervous system to generate a bio-electric field. And it can't be an Apathy, they might have a bio-electric field signature similar to this, but they aren't this aggressive or fast. Some kind of humanoid Grimm I'm not familiar with? Or maybe a malnourished Beringel or midget Imp? But why does this all seem so familiar? It's almost like I'm forgetting something, but I'm sure nothing like this appeared in the original anime when they ventured into the Emerald Forest.]

Things were starting to turn from interesting towards dangerous. Any unknown threat is a severe threat in Ray's book, especially when his sisters might end up caught in the crossfire. If he couldn't get a grasp on this unknown Grimm's capabilities soon, he might just have to speed up this initiation trial a bit.