In the valley on the eastern edge of the kingdom of Atlas lived three farmers. Their names were Burnie, Blaine and Brandon and they were the foulest of men.

These farmers had done well for themselves, each of them producing more food for the kingdom than any other farm. It could be said that any man, woman or child in the kingdom has eaten food provided by all three at least once. And most were fed without the farmers ever knowing about it.

Under the valley on the eastern edge of the kingdom of Atlas lived a great many faunus. To you or me, the eight families living there would be the strangest people you ever saw. People with the features of animals. Dog ears, cat ears, rabbit ears, whiskers, one even with a long striped tail! And there was one among this mismatched mob who had an appearance all his own. Sunshine yellow hair, two pointed ears atop his head, three whiskers on each cheek and a fox-like grin that gave away his species. Dressed in a ragged old brown tailcoat, this was the faunus' leader. And his name was Naruto.

Naruto was younger than you may expect. Nearing his seventeenth year of life, looking after this community of animal-like people was a great amount of responsibility. It was not as if he were the eldest there. There were some in their second decade, some their third. But these people were parents. Their own young children had to be the priority. But Naruto? Naruto was alone. No parents, no children, no siblings. No family. And because of this, Naruto decided to himself that all of these people, every single one of them was a member of his family and he would do anything to keep them safe and happy.

And this leads us to what makes Naruto the best leader that the small faunus community could ask for. When Naruto the fox decided he would do something, he followed through no matter what.

The farmers were heartless men and refused to feed the faunus no matter what was offered. Work, trade or pay the three would say as though with one voice 'NO'. They would say the next time the faunus came calling they would be met by shotguns.

That was fine by Naruto's view. If the men would not trade like civilised folk, the farmers would be the ones losing out. The faunus needed that food and they would get it.

And so, as dark would fall on the city, Naruto the fox would creep onto the farms, into the henhouses, the sheep pens, the pigsties, the wheat, corn and rice fields, and out would come a multitude of mirror images of Naruto, each carrying an animal or yield of crops.

And so it would go. For weeks, for months, the faunus would eat happily and the farmers would be none the wiser. Until one night it was ended by the roar of a shotgun blast.

Even if he hadn't heard the gunfire, Naruto would have known one of his doppelgängers was destroyed by it. The doubles that were furthest from the farmhouse ran with whatever they could carry. The closer ones made for the house to keep the enraged farmer Burnie busy.

Naruto escaped once again. But they were on to him now. They would be ready for him if he tried again.

Little did he know, this would be the least of his problems.

-(-)-

"Those ANIMALS!" Burnie yelled as he stormed into Blaine's home, slamming the door behind him.

"Swolefather who art in the iron temple, swoled be thy frame" another voice echoed around the barely furnished home, interspersed with grunts of effort. "Thy swoledom come, thy will be done, in the deadlift as well as in the squat rack."

"Blaine you meathead! Get out here! We have a problem!" Burnie yelled louder.

"I am in the middle of worship, you heathen! I knew you to be an agent of Broki!" the voice yelled back. "Give us this day our daily whey-", he continued.

"Oh, for the love of-!" Burnie hated when Blaine got like this and this might have been the worst time for it. Still, there wasn't much Burnie could do about it. The last time he tried to interrupt the musclebound farmer's 'worship' he got put through a wall. And then another wall. Instead he found his way to where Blaine was training and waited for him to finish.

"For thine is the swoledom, the power clean, and the glute ham raise. Forever and ever. Wheymen." Blaine spoke, finishing his prayer and lowering a barbell (with a disturbing amount of weight on it) to the floor. "Now, what was it you wanted?"

Through grinding teeth, Burnie told him. "I just caught one of those damn beasts stealing our livestock. Dozens of our animals gone to feed those creatures."

"Dozens?" Blaine asked with raised eyebrows. "I feel conflicted. To carry so many animals he must be a follower of the ways of Brodin like myself. Tell me, how were his delts? His traps?"

"Wha..." Burnie muttered confused. "What the hell are you talking about?! He wasn't a meathead like you! He was skinny! He just made copies of himself somehow!"

Blaine was suddenly outraged, much to Burnie's relief as he was finally acting like a normal person would. Sort of. "A true agent of Broki! Not even lifting the animals himself?! Does he not realise the sweet gains he could be making?!" The bodybuilding farmer headed towards the mantlepiece and retrieved his prized possession: his old Hunting shotmace, Earthshaper.

"It's faunus season."

"God, I hate your shitty one-liners."

-(-)-

After fetching Brandon who had remained blissfully unaware of everything up to this point, the three farmers began their search for the thieving faunus. They searched through each of their lands, through their barns and chicken coops, up and down both sides of the valley and back again.

It was Burnie who found their prey first. Carrying a pig and heading up the hill to the innermost of the outer walls, the blond fox faunus was slow and easily caught. A shotgun blast shredded the pig in his arms but the blond himself vanished in a puff of smoke. "Dammit!" Burnie yelled. "He must be around here somewhere! He was running back to his hovel! Brandon, start digging."

"Where? Look around! Their hideout could be anywhere!" Brandon whined.

"I have a solution." Blaine interjected, raising his shotmace.

Earthshaper was a brilliantly simple weapon on the face of it. Technically speaking it was the shape and size of a two-handed mace but its wielder could swing it comfortably with one. Made entirely of high-carbon steel, the shaft was thick and inlaid with designs of doves in white gold. The shaft was capable of being reconfigured into a traditional shotgun shape for easy wielding when a ranged weapon is more appropriate. The head of the mace was spherical save for the four flanges equidistant from each other and the hole at the top that served as the barrel. The handle was wrapped in leather for a more comfortable grip, interrupted only by the trigger for the shotgun mode.

Opening the shotmace's chamber, Blaine retrieved the dust rounds loaded inside and replaced them with a dust crystal of an earthy brown colour that he carved himself to fit. With a swing of his arm, he closed Earthshaper with one hand.

"And so this disgraceful cardio comes to an end." Blaine breathed as he slammed the head of Earthshaper perpendicular to the hill, burying it by sheer strength a foot into the soil. "And I can find those misguided faunus and show them the true glory of sweet gains!" Pressing down on the shaft, he aimed the barrel of the shotmace directly away from the group of farmers. Pulling back his right hand, he whispered "Brodin be praised".

And thrust forward.

As his palm impacted the handle end of the Earthshaper, the section of hill in front of the farmers appeared to vanish as a wave of sound and pressure hit them all at once. Blaine was unaffected. Brandon and Burnie, civilian through and through, were not. Both farmers were knocked off their feet, Brandon rolling down the hill before coming to a stop.

Blaine looked over his handiwork. The Earthshaper was quite well named. It did not destroy anything. Just reshaped it to its wielder's will. The effect of the Earthshaper when used with an earth dust crystal is to compress the materials in the direction the barrel is pointing, increasing the density of the surrounding area to make room for a big open space. Looking into the hollow he had created Blaine spotted something strange. Small black shapes with flecks of white... dissolving into ash.

Burnie grumbled to himself as he returned to his feet. "What the fu-", his tirade was ended before it could begin as Blaine grabbed him by the shirt.

"Go home. Now."

Burnie wasn't exactly the type to listen to orders. "Like fuck I'm goin' home until-", once again, he was stopped as Blaine let go of his shirt to grab his face and pointed it in the direction of the hole.

Where more shapes were appearing. Shapes with white masks and hateful red eyes. The blood visibly drained from Burnie's face. Blaine turned Burnie to face the muscular retired huntsman again.

"Go get Brandon. Go together to your house. Barricade as well as you can and keep your shotgun on hand. Got it?" Blaine half asked, half ordered.

Burnie nodded as Blaine let go of him and was off like a shot, picking Brandon up by the arm and running.

Blaine meanwhile, was pulling out and opening his scroll as quickly as he could. Pulling up the emergency contact feed, he input his old authorisation code and sent the message of a code Black with his coordinates. By the time he had retrieved Earthshaper and reloaded it with regular dust rounds, the alarms were already sounding.

More and more shapes were appearing in the crater. They were easy to identify. Mohlerts. Mole-like Grimm. Almost always small in stature, they were phenomenal diggers and had been the creatures most often responsible for sabotaging human fortifications during Grimm incursions. Each paw had a half dozen shovel-like claws giving them the ability to practically swim through dirt. They were actually Blaine's specialty. He was most often used as a sapper. Capable of reshaping an area, he could crush mohlert and their tunnels with a single blast of Earthshaper in his heyday. That might even be what he had done here purely by accident. It wouldn't surprise him if the mohlert were there to create an incursion point for larger Grimm.

"It's been a long time since I had a good round of Whack-a-Mohlert..."

Unseen by both man and Grimm, a blond faunus disappeared into smoke.

-(-)-

"Mohlerts." Naruto gasped as his doppelganger's memories flowed into him. "Out. Everyone out, now!" he shouted at the gathering faunus.

"What's happening?" a female dog faunus asked as she held her children close.

"We need to leave. It's not safe in here anymore." he half-explained as he started guiding people to the exit. "Get outside and get to high ground as fast as you can and keep moving away from the outer walls."

-(-)-

"This is stupid. This is stupid. This is stupid!" Naruto chanted to himself as he headed towards the outer wall.

He had left a few doppelgangers to watch over the other faunus but he knew they would be relatively safe. If it was mohlerts, they were probably the only ones there. And if they were that many under the wall, that meant they hadn't gotten any further. Probably. Likely enough that he felt he had to do something to help at the wall. This was protecting his family too.

-(-)-

"Hahahaha!" Blaine laughed maniacally as he slammed his ridiculously heavy mace into anything that caught his eye. Sometimes it was a mohlert that had come up to attack him. More often it was a crack in the super-compact earth from one of the other times he had struck it, creating more of them. "You mohlerts are fools! Following the way of Broki with your constant dirt swimming cardio! You seek embrace within his lean, athletic bosom! BUT NOT EVEN HE SHALL ACCEPT GRIMM WITHIN HIS TREADMILL-FILLED DOMAIN!"

Really, he was having the time of his life. Which may explain how he missed the mohlert that had appeared directly behind him, ready to rip out his spine.

"Not on my watch, dirt-mouse!" a scratchy voice shouted. Blaine turned, mace raised to strike but to his surprise he found himself looking down at a mohlert getting its head crushed between two identical dropkicking faunus. Upon hitting the ground, both blond fox men burst into smoke.

Properly looking around himself for the first time since his battle started, Blaine saw something he never would have expected. Two dozen copies of the fox faunus they had been hunting were surrounding him.

And helping to fight back the Grimm.

"Temporary truce?" one of them asked, Blaine unable to tell whether it was the original or not. "You can go back to trying to kill me after we deal with this."

Blaine shook his head. He had no intention of killing the faunus. But he could explain that later. For now, there was a pest problem to deal with..

-(-)-

Mohlert (prounounced 'mole-ert'): Mole variety of Grimm. Digging near their habitats is a bad idea. Small but swarms easily. Named for the author Lois Ehlert who wrote a picture book based on a Seneca legend about a mole who refused to yield a molehill to a fox.

Naruto Fox: Obviously based on two different stories. One being the popular manga series Naruto (that just recently finished its 15 year run). The other the Roald Dahl book 'The Fantastic Mr. Fox'.

Burnie, Brandon and Blaine: Very, very loosely based on the Rooster Teeth employees Burnie Burns, Brandon Farmahini (not really, I just used his name because it started with B) and Blaine Gibson (again, not really. The B thing again and I needed a name I could rhyme with a character trait. I don't know if Blaine is in fact particularly vain).

Blaine: Based loosely on Saint David, the patron saint of Wales. A deeply religious man (snicker) whose most notable miracle was to raise the land up to form a small hill. Just to make it absolutely clear, David is Blaine's LAST name, not his first. Also, his speech pattern is based on the SwoleAcceptance subreddit. Go read it. Hilarious and kind of inspiring.

-(-)-

A/N: Oh, god I had fun with writing this. I love RWBY as a series and I had the concept for Naruto's greater backstory in my head for months. Soon as I started writing it we got a lot of the best stuff in this chapter. I freaking love Blaine in this. Hell, I'm tempted to do a side-story with him as the protagonist. He's that fun to write.

So I have no idea how often I'll update this. Those who read my other stories know that pretty well.

Thanks for reading.