Chapter 18

Jaune didn't as much find the situation of their departure interesting. After heavy discussion with the old man he'd been convinced it would be best to leave for a few months. Danger was best avoided. The only thing he was peeved about was missing the tournament and access to the library. He had of course taken several books he was interested in. But ones he sorted out by their unpopularity! Jaune wanted to deny the chance of reading the tomes to as little people as possible.

No, what Jaune found more interesting than the circumstances was the way they left. Zedong had made them leave the house cloaked, then they'd discarded the cloaks in a narrow alleyway and changed their hairstyle and hair colour with some alchemical substance, which worked just as well as the cloaks to hide their name and class.

The first stop they'd made was by the baker, where they brought several loaves of bread. Afterwards they changed their hair back to normal and swapped out their clothes and weapons, the items having been held in Jaune's inventory.

Running through what appeared to be the slums of Brorusalem, a part he hadn't visited yet, they gave a loaf of bread to every gang of children they encountered. It just about sufficed and they had two left by the time they reached the edge of Brorusalem's outer wall.

Jaune marvelled at the construction while Zedong spoke with some residents. Well, not as much the construction of the wall, as the numerous much-too-high houses leaning against it. It would have been more impressive if the shacks didn't look like they would break down any second.

But the impossibly complicated labyrinth of stairs that seemed to connect all the above-ground-level housing more than made up for it. The people there scurried around like ants.

Zedong finished his negotiation or whatever it was, and they were led into one of the ground floor houses. Where the apparent owner, a rogue, uncovered a tarp, under which hid a tunnel. After getting paid and glancing at something behind them ,the man exited the house. Going through the tunnel took several minutes and they didn't meet any other people. When Jaune exited he found himself quite a distance away from the city at a small oasis.

"I know you're there. Come out" Zedong said loudly, having drawn his bow.

Nothing happened. Then a blonde boy with the mage class and a staff in his hand came out from behind one of the trees, hands raised.

"Sheesh, I guess I wasn't the only one with the idea of jumping ship now that things'll go to shit." Sun said in a joking manner, trying to relax the mood.

"I think it's too much of a coincidence, meeting him here," Jaune said as he turned to Zedong. He saw Sun's face turn sheepish.

The man nodded. "It is. I don't believe he was waiting to meet us specifically, though." Zedong said, apparently slightly hesitant in his deduction.

Jaune nodded. "If I was alone I would also wait at a place where only competent people would be sure to pass and try to latch onto a group to increase my chances of surviving," Jaune explained to the others.

Sun smiled hopefully. "Is that a yes?"

"No," said Zedong, with Jaune exclaiming a "Yes" at the same time.

They looked at each other.

"Reasoning?" they once again spoke simultaneously.

"Does my opinion not matter or something…?" May mumbled.

"First, I don't know him and therefore don't trust him," Zedong said.

"And second?" Jaune queried.

"That was it, one is enough."

"I know him though, and being in a position of having been helped despite the other party not having to, I would like to return the gesture with someone else. Maybe one day it'll come full circle."

"That's naïve."

"Possibly."

"He can stay, then."

Jaune saw May drawing circles in the sand and pouting as Zedong agreed. What was she doing?

"Thank you," Sun said quietly with a grateful and, dare Jaune say it? Stricken expression. Then he immediately brightened up again and asked, "So, where are we going?"

-/-

Jaune jumped over a Boarbatusk charging at him, then pulled himself up on the rope he had tied to a rock outcropping in the valley they were in.

Once he reached a safe distance away from the now confused Grimm who couldn't find its prey, he blew up some rocks, burying the monster under a lot of stone.

The old man had shown him some interesting tricks. Experience, in the end, was king.

Jaune wondered what was more useful in the end: experience, or levels (which equated to more stats). Someone that was level 20, but had never been in a fight before, would probably lose to someone who was level 15, but had been in several. Having the experience of a thousand battles wouldn't help you if you didn't have to body to use that experience, though.

Ignoring the near impossibility of such a thing of course. One would naturally never reach level 20 without fighting, and one would never fight several battles without gaining levels.

A balance would have to be struck between the two. A combination of experience and the levels to fully utilize it.

Thinking about the issue, he started returning to the place where he'd left the others, all of them having their own task to fulfill.

Sneaking through the sparse bushland that seemed to make up this part of Vacuo, the first of his group that he saw was May. He stealthily moved up behind her, waited until he was within arm's length, and spoke. "Hey."

The girl just harrumphed and pointedly crossed her arms, not turning to look at him. "Sun already did that."

"Oh." Jaune sat down next to her standing form, and after a few moments she sat as well. "The city was interesting for the first day; by the second it was just loud and smelly," he said.

"I know." She seemed to hesitate for a few seconds before continuing. "I didn't always live there. It was a great change moving from the countryside, no matter how much more dangerous it is, to the second biggest city in Vacuo."

"Did your grandpa decide he was getting too old for the outskirts?" Jaune asked, making May snort.

"He's been living in the city since before I was born. It was me and my parents in an outskirt town called Broshu." She shrugged. "My story isn't unheard of. The town got overrun by Grimm when I was eight, mum and dad died in the defense, and after a week spent in some random orphanage Gramps came to bring me to Brorusalem where I've been ever since."

"My condolences."

May waved him off, having sometime during storytime begun to wax her bow. "If you say that to everyone who's lost their parents, you're going to run out of air eventually. Leave it. Sun doesn't have parents either."

Jaune nodded. "I suspected."

"His situation was worse than mine. At least my parents loved me before they died. His mother was the one who magically burned his face so it couldn't be healed."

"Oh." He didn't know what to think about that. He stared into the distance, vaguely making out the rooftops of the garrison they were undertaking their quest in. Mamshu was one of the places on the outer reaches of a kingdom whose sole job was to be a last point of contact with adventurers and heroes heading way out into the Grimmlands. It also served as a point of first defence against Grimm tides and had a scouting function due to the many high mountains in its vicinity.

Every one of the mountains had a big tower meant to scout out the migrations of Grimm prematurely.

"That's pretty horrible, and also explains why he hates using magic," Jaune said. "Why did she do it?"

May shrugged, "I don't know. Ask Sun."

"Ask me what?" Sun asked as he suddenly appeared behind them, the sun peeking over the boys right shoulder, a bag of loot peeking over the left.

A silence stretched itself out in the clearing they were in.

"May was telling me about how your mother gave you that scar. I was wondering why she did it." Jaune said bluntly.

Beside him May slowly let her head fall into her hands groaning while Sun stared off into the distance.

"I guess people with normal mothers wouldn't even think a mother hurting her child is a possibility," he said. May looked away and Jaune grimaced. "There is a 'disease' called afterbirth depression. A mother falls into depression due to the sudden absence of the child within her. This changes their behaviour and they sometimes kill the baby." Sun looked lost in thought.

"It's what almost happened to me, but my father saved me. My father didn't marry the woman for love. He did it because of her strength. He wanted strong children to continue his legacy of power, so to say. Therefore he wasn't willing to leave her over that little mishap." Sun shrugged. "Eventually the woman lost it, and burned me. I don't want to talk about it further."

"Is that why you don't use magic?" Jaune asked.

Sun shrugged half-committedly.

"Magic is a part of you that you will never be rid off." Jaune said quietly. "If you try to walk a path that isn't destined for you..."

Sun glared at him. "So? does it matter? I do what I want."

Jaune shrugged, unaffected. "It's annoying seeing you waste your potential." The monkey faunus' glare hardened and he whipped out his staff, dropping the bag from his shoulder.

Jaune stood up and shoved a hand in his inventory.

"OK, let's not!" May said as she stepped between the both of them, hands raised.

"She's right," said Sun. He picked up his bag and started walking towards the town.

May turned to Jaune.

"What the hell, Jaune? What is wrong with you?"

The mage stared after the leaving boy. "Nothing." He turned to leave as well.

He walked towards the garrison a few hundred feet behind Sun, who occasionally turned back to glare at him. It was weird. Looking at the other boy's swinging tail, he wondered what would become of their relationship. Then noticing that staring could be misinterpreted, he switched his gaze to Sun's hair.

Sun would not fulfil his potential if he rejected magic. People could walk roads other than the ones their class dictated. But if they wanted to be anything but below average, they couldn't step down from their main road completely.

He liked Sun. Him never using his magic would be a damn shame. Jaune himself had never even considered the idea. It was a part of him, it was the thing he played with when he was bored, his most powerful ability. One could even call it a constant companion, something... holy, even.

He wasn't a religious person. Some people worshipped the natural order, others prayed to the gods of creation. He could imagine giving homage to something as vast as magic himself.

Jaune wondered what deity Sun prayed to.

He passed the gate of the garrison, nodding to the bored soldiers who misbehaved enough to be put on guard duty. Poor souls. What was even the point? There was nothing here. Jaune looked outwards to the flat expanse of land that went on to the horizon without interruption.

Making people do meaningless tasks was considered a psychological torture. Some prisoners had gone mad from being forced to sort a small mountain of different screws by size, then the wardens throwing all of it together again and forcing the inmate to repeat the task. Interesting stuff.

It was awkward going into the room that he, Sun, May and a soldier named Bill shared. It was always weird interacting with a person you had just argued with. And he and Sun had argued. Kind of. He may have hurt Sun's feelings. He wasn't sure.

Sun looked at Jaune as he walked in, his gaze following him as he walked over to his bed, laid down and pulled out one of the books he had with him.

"Sorry," he said after a few pages of silence.

Sun dragged a hand down his face in response, peeling back his lips to comical proportions. "It's fine, just..." A pause. "Don't mention it."

"Mention what?" Jaune asked.

Damn, Jaune thought to himself. He was smooth.

-/-

"Had fun hunting today?" Bill asked as he entered the room. The odd inflection to his voice caused Jaune to look over at the soldier.

Bill seemed pretty done, sweating all over and sand sticking to various parts of his moist clothing and skin. Seeing the other boy's expression, Jaune figured out the emotion that he had felt in Bill's question.

Jealousy. While the group of heroes had been out doing some 'leisurely' hunting the soldier had probably been drilling, training, or completing some tedious task given to recruits. It was probably a given that he would feel jealous in such a situation. Or maybe he was jealous because he'd finally compared Jaune's face to his own.

Not one to be a downer, Jaune raised a hand and moved it in a so-so gesture. "You know, good company makes for fun excursions. But the Grimm kinda ruin the experience a tad."

Bill grimaced at the 'good company' part. "You were probably with May again."

Jaune nodded, "Yeah, she's nice, but when you get her going on a topic she just won't stop talking. It's like her mouth was surgically replaced with a waterfall. I'm pretty sure I've become half-deaf in my left ear." Jaune rolled his eyes. "Girls, you know how it is."

He looked up to find Bill staring at him, almost aghast. He took what he probably thought to be a discrete glance at Sun and back to Jaune. His face gained a look as if he'd solved a complicated puzzle.

"I think I'm gonna go clean up," the soldier said stiltedly and walked away just as stiltedly, his legs pressed tightly together for some reason.

"Weird guy." Jaune commented, to which Sun snorted.

Jaune had often wondered about the difference between the soldier class and the hero classes. To him, they were both kinds of combat classes, but why were they treated differently? After some closer interaction with the garrison, he'd realized why.

Soldiers were a single, uniform class. They all held themselves to the same code of conduct while drafted. They had a very small circle of naturally obtainable skills, a circle comparable in size to a marble. The term hero in comparison, was the super-category for a variety of classes. All of them had more skills to choose from than a soldier; the circle they could move in was more of a basketball.

They also seemed more variable in their pathing. A hero would only need to gain the beginner level of any skill and actively wish for it to branch out their skill trees.

Bill had revealed that the process was much harder for soldiers. Odd that the soldier caste itself wasn't made up of several classes like, for example, scout and maybe pikeman. There was only soldier.

Jaune let his left arm swing off his bed and started practising magic with it out of Sun's sight. There was no hiding the muted flashing lights though. Laying something like a blanket over it would just destroy the blanket.

"What do you think of soldiers?" Jaune suddenly asked.

Sun hummed, slightly dazed from the nap he'd been taking. "Boring," was the one word he said before closing his eyes again.

"Do you think it's possible to change your class by avoiding the skills of your original one and learning the skills of another?"

"There are not many documented cases of class changes except for the slave phenomenon."

"I see." And Jaune did indeed see.

The conversation, if you could call it that, broke off after that.

-/-

"We're gonna go outside to train hand-to-hand. Wanna come?" Sun's words roused Jaune from his sleep. Looking outside of their little window, he saw that the sun had just risen.

Noticing that the monkey boy was still waiting for an answer, Jaune waved him off. Expect for the curiosity of why they were doing unarmed combat training now, when they hadn't done so once in the last few months here, he wasn't really interested.

He couldn't imagine that the skill would really fit into his own skillset either. He had quite a few swords taking up space in his inventory, which made getting disarmed not as big of a threat as it was to some people. Unless he was literally dis-armed. That would probably set him behind for a bit.

No matter how you looked at it, wielding a weapon was always going to be more beneficial to everyone except maybe a monk or a brawler, and even those classes still used gauntlets, which could be considered a type of weapon.

Instead of laying back and trying to go back to the shared dreamspace he pulled out a few papers on which he'd scribbled the happenings of the kingdom.

At first he had thought he would connect everything seamlessly and maybe solve the issue of the momentary upheaval. At least theoretically. But he'd given up on that after an hour of the intellectual equivalent of hitting his head against a wall.

Now he only kept the papers due to the fact that paper wasn't cheap and he still had some free space to write on, and the fact that the happenings were genuinely interesting. He still didn't know who exactly was fighting, and what they were trying to achieve. But he'd discerned several methods of the attacks used. One was the banditry, used to discredit certain trade companies, lowering their credibility and income, thus negatively impacting all who were allied with them. That form of... he didn't know if he could call it political(?) attack was the one he'd spent the most time untangling. One of his friends having been affected by it, and all.

The others were a mix of assassination and propaganda. Key figures of the government, of guilds, and even independent people with influence were dying of natural causes. The natural part being that you didn't live if you had a dagger sticking out of your ribs.

There also seemed to be so many rumours, writs, and revealed documents flying around that it was impossible to discern which ones were true.

All in all, it was chaos.

It still escaped Jaune how exactly people responsible for a country could act like this, but so was the mystery of life.

Arcane bolts flickered on and off in his two hands as he thought over the issue and wrote down some of the thoughts he was willing to waste ink on.

Peculiar events aside… there was nothing, Jaune thought. He had nothing to do or think about. After he fully exhausted his mana with arcane bolt practice, he left his room to go outside and train his sword skills.

He laughed quietly to himself as he saw Sun getting smacked around by May's grandfather. May herself was sitting in the general area of the two and watching.

He waved at her; she noticed him and waved back. Meanwhile Jaune had already arrived at his destination.

The garrison they were at was unsurprisingly not particularly big. It was simply a place where soldiers were stationed. No civilians, therefore less space was needed. This of course also meant that the training grounds were comparably small. It made the spot where Jaune usually trained swordsmanship with the soldiers directly next to the archery range and to the now on-the-ground wrestling duo of May and Sun.

One of the soldiers approached him, two wooden swords in his hands, casually throwing one to Jaune as he took up a fighting stance. There were some soldiers eager to improve their fighting ability, and it was a novelty for them to be able to try their hand at fighting a hero.

Even if the hero, or adventurer in this case, was thirteen years old.

Jaune didn't bother with any pleasantries. The other party was only a soldier after all. He simply went on the offensive. A few fast stabs at his opponent's midsection put him in an advantageous position, at least until the soldier realised that he was stronger than Jaune and also had a much longer reach due to his age. He then used this to turn the tables on the mage.

Stepping around the wild attacks wasn't a problem for him, but going back on the offensive was. You didn't win a fight just by not getting hit. In this situation it was preferable to wait though. The situation being that for once Jaune was the one who was better at using a sword. Pure physical might was only able to remain dominant up to the point until the worse swordsman of the two made a mistake that was exploitable by the better swordsman.

The soldier overextended with a wide slash that Jaune ducked under. By the widening of his eyes he knew what was coming. A stab in the stomach only made the man retreat a little, having already preemptively hardened his abdominal muscles. That didn't save him from the loss as Jaune simply stepped forward and slightly waved the sword in close proximity to the soldiers neck.

Jaune saw a mix of disappointment and anger make its way to the man's face, mostly at himself hopefully. Being angry at a sparring partner for being better than you wasn't very productive.

Jaune stepped back and once again entered a ready position. It was always more fun to go several bouts with one person, seeing the sluggish pace they improved at in comparison to his own faster one.

Invigorating.