Ch 42: Aura Manipulation (2)

"Miss Rose, would you please come up and demonstrate what one at the Aura Sight level is capable of." Ray asked his twin.

"Sure." Ruby said with a smile as she almost jumped out of her seat.

Ruby took up position next to a different training dummy to first display the difference in Aura enhancement compared to the Aura Control level. Her unenhanced strike made a shallow cut into the dummy, deeper than Pyrrha's, due to the difference in the basic offensive power inherent in their weapon designs, but not too different. However, her second enhanced strike cut clean through the dummy like a hot knife through butter. As Ruby turned her back to it, its top half slid down the diagonal cut to reveal a mirror-smooth cross-section.

*Hiss* Everyone drew in a breath at the sight. Lethal!

Next, Ruby changed Crescent Rose into rifle form and aimed at a third training dummy. Her first shot was an unenhanced round, and it left a respectable hole in the dummy but didn't pierce through. Her second shot was of pure Aura, and it only left a small dent in the dummy. Not enough to do damage against a Grimm's armor plating, but if you hit the flesh instead… it would at least do some damage. Such thoughts only lasted until Ruby took her third shot, enhancing her bullet with her Aura. Her shot exploded on contact with the dummy, shattering it into broken chunks that were strewn across the arena floor.

Coco gulped as she saw the damage, [If that is what just enhancing your bullets with Aura can do, what will be the result if you added in my Hype?!] The thought was enough to get Coco breathing fast. If there was something Coco loved more than being a Huntress, it was being a Huntress and looking good while doing it. And what could look better than a fashionable Huntress with a big gun blowing hoards of Grimm to smoke and ash with every one of the 100 rounds per second she unleashed. She had to learn this!

To finish her demonstration, Ruby sat down and began to meditate with her legs crossed and her hands resting on her knees, taking slow deep breaths. At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then the breeze began to pick up. When the draft continued instead of dying down, people realized that it was not the movement of the air but the movement of Aura they were feeling. The few that were able to sense Aura could even tell that Ruby's Aura level that had depleted sharply after her demonstration was rapidly recovering.

"Thank you, Miss Rose." After Ruby finished recovering, Ray thanked her and sent her back to her seat. "The next level is called Aura Weaponization. It is not as diverse as Aura Sight and is more a measurement of how much Aura you have, how densely you can concentrate it, and how clearly you can shape it. As its name suggests, at this level, it is possible to make practical weapons out of pure Aura. Miss Xiao Long, would you please demonstrate."

As soon as Ray requested her assistance, Yang, who had been eagerly awaiting her turn to show off, charged down from the stands and dashed past the dummy that Pyrrha had cut up without deploying her weapons. As she passed it by, she swung her opposite hand in a chopping motion that should have passed by the dummy without touching it. However, as her hand would have passed it by, a blade of yellow Aura formed around and extended from her hand, creating a sword that cut easily through the dummy without slowing Yang down.

It was just one shock after another for Ray's first class. Practical weapons? That Aura blade was sharper than most real swords! This was insane, a hidden weapon that could appear without a trace in an instant to take their opponent by surprise. This was borderline cheating!

But the surprises didn't stop there. Once she was past the dummy, Yang pivoted and created a scythe of Aura and cut through the dummy again. Then again, this time with an ax. Then again, this time with a spear. Then again, and again, and again, each time with a different weapon till the dummy was whittled down to nothing. Each time Yang retracted her Aura weapon back into herself before redeploying it as a new weapon to preserve her Aura as much as possible. However, her technique wasn't perfect yet, and Yang still lost some Aura each time she created a weapon, leaving her tired and breathing hard as she walked back to her seat once she had finished.

Not that that did anything to detract from the shock, awe, and anticipation many students were feeling. But among them, one was even more eager than the rest. One whom's heart was thumping faster than a squirrel high on caffeine after this latest demonstration. Velvet Scarlatina.

Velvet's weapon was a camera that used special, very expensive, hard-light Dust to generate temporary copies of weapons she had photographed. Her Semblance was Photographic Memory which allowed her to copy any fighting style she had seen before. The two matched together almost perfectly, almost. If it wasn't for how expensive the special Dust was making it so that she only had a limited stockpile of pictures, how fragile the copies were, just letting her get off a few hits with them before they broke, and how she lost a picture every time she used it, then it would have been a perfect combination.

Suppose she could add this Aura Manipulation technique to her repertoire. In that case, she could use it to enhance her hard-light weapons' durability and power, making them comparable to the real things at the Aura Sight level. If she ran out of photos, she could just make her weapons out of Aura at the Aura Weaponization level. She would finally be able to come out of the shadows. Stop playing a primarily supporting role on her team, and show everyone what she was capable of without worrying about depleting her limited weapon supply and being caught unarmed at a critical moment during a mission.

"The final level, for now at least as this is as far as I have been able to go to date, is called the Aura Realization level. At this level, your control over your Aura is more complete. Reaching this level is less about training and more about understanding on an instinctual level of what Aura is and feeling it as a part of you more than you ever have before. I'm still not sure how to explain it better than that, but at this level, you will be more as one with your Aura than you have ever been before. The Aura that you send out will always return to you, you will constantly be in a state of absorbing the ambient Aura around you, and you will be able to shape and mold your Aura as if it is the most natural thing in the world. You will feel like a fish that has returned to the water.

I don't know if it will be the same for others once they break through to this level, but when I did, I had a revelation of sorts and was able to create my most robust defensive technique, Susanoo." For those who hadn't seen it before, Ray manifested his skeletal Susanoo around himself.

As the azure rib cage surrounded him and the skeletal arms made out of pure Aura stretched out to his sides, everyone, student and faculty alike, felt a pressure descending upon them. This was fear, an instinctual fear of something they stood no chance against, urging them to run. Ray hadn't held his Susanoo long enough during his spar with Nora for any of the students to notice it, and in the Emerald Forest, almost all of Ray's attention had been on the Grimm threatening his sister, so his friends had been spared then. But they all felt in now.

Seeing some of the students starting to sweat and the teachers and stronger students putting their hands instinctively on their weapons, Ray released his Susanoo and let the Aura flow back into his body without any waste. He gave them all a minute to adjust to the sudden release before clapping his hands to get their attention.

"So, that is what we will be learning in this class. Any quick questions before we begin?" Ray asked. No one said anything, too eager to get started and get their first taste of this revolutionary new technique to bother with the myriad of questions swirling around in their minds. They would find the answers as they learned.

"Excellent, then let's begin. First… " and so, his explanation done, Ray began to teach his first Aura Manipulation class to an arena full of eager students. Word of what they had witnessed in this first class quickly spread all across campus, and by the dawn of the next day, everyone was talking about the new technique. Though some didn't believe the rumors that it was really so amazing, almost the entire school was packed into the arena the following week to see the truth for themselves. After that, Ozpin announced that Ray would be teaching his class twice a week from now on, every Wednesday and Friday. That way, the 3rd and 4th years, who spent most of their weekends off on missions and to a lesser extent 2nd years, could regularly attend his class.

However, by dusk of the next day, Ray's name would spread across campus again for a far more infamous reason.