AUTHOR'S NOTE: (12/9/2017) Old chapter, posted before the current chapters two, three, and four. If you've already read this, the new update you're looking for is chapter four.

. . .

Chapter Seven

In Which Incompetent Assassins Look Like Theater Rejects

. . .

"Trespassing. Theft. Destruction of school property," snapped Glynda Goodwitch, glowering at him from across the table, "All in all, not a good start to your career here, Mister Arc."

Jaune shrank down into his chair, valiantly trying to become one with the woodwork. Goodwitch was quickly cementing her position as the one of the most terrifying women Jaune was acquainted with. This was quite a notable accomplishment, considering the fact that he had seven sisters who had solemnly upheld the ancient duties of sisterhood and instilled a very healthy respect for the fairer sex into their only brother.

"If it were up to me, you would be serving detention for the rest of the semester."

Jaune shrank down even further. The chair callously refused to swallow him on the spot.

"However."

Goodwitch pursed her lips, looking displeased.

"This time, the headmaster interceded on your behalf." Jaune nearly relaxed, but Goodwitch smacked her riding crop against her palm hard enough to make him jump. "Do not expect such lenience again. Is that clear?"

Jaune nodded and chirruped, "As crystal."

"Then I think it's safe to say Mister Arc has learned his lesson," came an amused, more soft-spoken voice from behind the stern professor. She let out a somewhat resigned huff and stepped to one side, half turning to face the man who had just entered the room. Something unspoken seemed to pass between them before Goodwitch gave Ozpin a rather terse nod and strode past him out of the room.

The headmaster proceeded to draw up a chair and took a seat across from Jaune. Then he placed a rather handsome wooden box on the table between them and unfolded it to reveal a chessboard with the pieces nestled neatly in foam placeholders inside.

"Do you play?" Ozpin asked casually as he began to set up the board.

"Not really," Jaune said sheepishly. He had played once, a long time ago, when one of his sisters was on a bit of a board game craze. "I don't remember how the, uh, the horse-shaped ones move."

"Those would be knights. They move two spaces in any direction, then one space to the side," Ozpin explained patiently. He finished setting up the board, turned it so that the black pieces were on Jaune's side, and then moved the white hors-er, knight over the row of white pawns. "If you wouldn't mind indulging me as we talk, I find it makes conversations like these less dull."

Jaune gawked at the board, then at the man sitting on the other side of it. He honestly had no idea where to even start. Did headmasters usually pressgang students into impromptu chess matches, or was it just him?

The headmaster waved his hands in an encouraging manner and said, "Just do whatever you think is best. There are no stakes this time, Mister Arc."

Well, might as well move his own knight before he forgot which way it moved then. Jaune picked up his piece and moved it over his own row of black pawns, leaving the two sides of the board mirrors of each other once again.

"Do you know why we place our students into teams of four?" the headmaster asked, answering Jaune's move by shifting one of the white pawns forward two spaces.

Jaune hesitantly pushed a black pawn forward to flank his knight. "Er, because," he said, struggling to juggle both the conversation and the game. "Tradition?"

Ozpin let out a soft laugh and moved his other white knight forward as well. He said, "You're not altogether wrong, but I'm afraid there's more to it than that."

Clack. Clack. They each moved another piece.

"You see, a huntsman team is more than just a collection of individuals," Ozpin continued, "They are meant to work as one unit, the whole greater than the sum of its parts."

"That makes sense," Jaune said, eyeing his side of the board before swapping his king and his rook. That was a valid move, right? He remembered his sister had done that once. He glanced up at Ozpin, who just calmly moved another piece in response, so Jaune supposed it valid after all. He picked up another pawn.

Only to nearly fumble it when Ozpin said, "It is also so that we do not have to face Death alone. To be a huntsman is to engage a constant game of wits and skill against Death. In a one-on-one match, Death is far more likely to win."

Jaune swallowed. The headmaster was only speaking in metaphor, but the conversation had taken a sudden turn down a rather uncomfortable avenue. He wasn't sure how to feel about his mentor being painted in such an adversarial light. Sure, Death grumbled about all the extra paperwork caused by huntsman who died before they were scheduled to, but it wasn't like his mentor actively wished them ill. People got themselves killed; Death was just the clean-up service.

But of course, Professor Ozpin couldn't possibly know that, so Jaune said instead, "...sorry, but, why are you telling me this, Professor?"

"Because you are faced with a unique challenge," Ozpin answered, "Beacon does not often accept transfer students. Teams, once formed, rarely change members. The more romantic among us believe that some kind of divine providence - destiny, if you want to call it that - guides the formation of a huntsman team. Who are we mere mortals to say we know better?"

Jaune frowned, partly because he didn't quite understand what the headmaster was getting at, and partly because the chessboard was beginning to get distressingly convoluted. Ozpin's moves came nearly on right top of his, giving him no time to think. Never mind any overarching strategy, Jaune was really just moving whichever piece caught his eye at this point.

"But, wouldn't it be obvious that some teammates balance each other out better than others? What if one of them, uh, really isn't cut out to be a huntsman at all?"

'Like me,' Jaune added in the privacy of his own thoughts.

"That is precisely what partners and teammates are for," Ozpin said, "to cover each other's weaknesses, so that their strengths can shine all the brighter."

"That doesn't sound very fair," Jaune said in a small voice, thinking of Pyrrha. She didn't seem to have very many weaknesses at all. Certainly not any weaknesses that Jaune would be capable of covering. Then again, he had enough weaknesses for the both of them. Maybe it was a good thing he was only a fake student who'd be out of here as soon as he found the Maiden. They were already willing to replace her partner once; maybe the next replacement would be the kind of guy she deserved.

Instead of answering, Ozpin slid his bishop forward and captured the black queen. Jaune inwardly winced, but took the other white bishop in return. Not exactly a fair trade, but hey, the fact that he was even keeping up this well was honestly quite a surprise to the blonde apprentice.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, Ozpin asked, "Do you hold your family accountable to debts they owe you? Or yours owed to them? Must every favor be repaid and every slight returned in kind?"

"What?" Jaune blinked, caught completely off guard, "No! I mean, I'm really thankful to my parents, and I want to make them proud, but...that's...not how family works. They're family."

Something tense seemed to ease behind the headmaster's eyes, and he affected a faint smile as he said, "A team is no different. Merely a family of a different kind. That is the ideal, at least, even if it does not always works out that way. It is also the reason you are here now - to heal a team that has fractured."

"Oh. That's...cool," Jaune said weakly, feeling even more like scum than before. Pretending to be a teammate was bad enough, but pretending to be family? Way, way worse. "I'll be sure to do that. Heh."

"I have complete faith in your abilities," the headmaster said.

'That makes one of us,' Jaune thought morosely.

"Which is why I am making you the leader of team JNPR," Ozpin continued, and this time, Jaune did drop one of his pieces.

The sad little black pawn bounced and rolled off the edge of the table onto the floor as Jaune screeched, "What?!"

Ozpin, unmoved by the outburst, simply reached down and retrieved the wayward pawn, placing it back on the board in its old position. He said calmly, "The dissolution of team PRWN was due to my mistake in appointing Miss Nikos as leader. I had hoped that her strength would help reign in Mister Winchester's less...admirable qualities. Now, I see that I failed in grasping the core of both of their characters."

More pieces shifted around the chessboard.

"All of the remaining members of your team are exceptional individuals," Ozpin continued, "but they lack qualities that you possess in abundance. That is why only you can bring them together. To become an extraordinary team rather than a collection of wasted potential. Your team already has skill and strength in abundance. But you, Mister Arc, must be the heart that gives it life."

The irony of that particular choice of words was not lost upon Jaune.

He hadn't signed up for any of this. Feeling like a complete fraud, Jaune croaked, "I'll...do my best."

The headmaster nodded.

"That is all I ask," the man said, then reached over and tipped the white king over. "You are free to return to them, Mister Arc." Then he stood and exited the way he came, leaving Jaune staring in bewilderment at the chessboard in front of him.

Had he...how in the world...what exactly just happened?

White was in checkmate.

Jaune had...won?

. . .

For perhaps the first time in his life, Jaune was thankful for his less than stellar sense of direction, because the longer he spent meandering in down all the wrong hallways searching for his room, the longer he could put off the inevitable conversation with the rest of the newly christened team JNPR. J-N-P-R, starting with 'J' as in 'Jaune', because some incomprehensible sequence of events had put him in charge of three people who could flatten him in a straight fight without even breaking a sweat.

Unfortunately, there were only so many identical hallways you could go down before you inevitably went down the right one, and Jaune found himself staring up at room 042 no more prepared to face his new teammates than he was fifteen minutes ago.

"This is it. Just play it cool. Say it like it's no big deal, and then distract them by changing the subject," Jaune said to himself. "You're a leader, even if...even if it's just pretend. You can do this!"

Pep talk complete, he opened the door and a orange-haired girl clad only in a towel dashed across the room with an entire pancake dangling from her mouth.

Jaune closed the door again. He stared up at the room numbers to make sure he hadn't read them wrong. '042' stared balefully back down at him.

"Okay, clearly, you were nervous and seeing things," Jaune told himself, and tried opening the door again, only for it to slam open on its own accord. "Gah!"

"Jaune! You're back! See, Ren, I told you he'd be okay. Goodwitch wasn't even that mad this time. She only yelled at us a little," Nora Valkyrie said, her words muffled by a mouthful of half-eaten pancake. She stood far too close for comfort, because with an entire foot of height difference between them, Jaune could almost see straight down the front of her towel. Granted, this wasn't the first time he had seen a girl in a towel, but strangely enough, his sisters had never managed to quite inspire the same feelings of simultaneous heart attack and strangulation.

"Ghrk," said Jaune.

"Nora," came Ren's familiar, weary-sounding voice, "Don't open the door in a towel."

"Whatever you say, Ren," Nora said, throwing a mock salute and bounding off towards the closet while Jaune continued quietly choking in the doorway.

"It's good to see you again, Jaune," came Pyrrha's polite greeting from where the red-haired girl sat modestly at her desk with several notebooks spread in front of her. "I'm sorry you got in trouble with Goodwitch on your first day."

With herculean effort, Jaune snapped out of the stupor of a seventeen-year-old boy facing the terrifying reality of living in co-ed dorms. It took a few swallows and an awkward clearing of his throat before his voice was in working order again.

When he could form words again, he said, "It's, eh, it's not like it was your fault. I got myself into that mess. Besides, all I got was a lecture, so no harm, no foul, right?" He offered her a lopsided smile of reassurance.

Pyrrha returned it with a small smile of her own.

Then Nora was bounding back out of the closet, clad more reasonable in a t-shirt and shorts as she asked, "Did they tell you what our new team name is? Ren thinks it's going to be P-R-J-N for Persian, but P-R-N-J for Pumpkin-Orange is sounds so much cooler."

"Er," Jaune stalled, already feeling the cold sweat beading on his brow. He had hoped to put this off for at least a little longer.

But all three of his teammates were staring at him with mild curiosity now, and he couldn't see a way out without outright lying to them, which was an option he had seriously considered before remembering that he was about as skilled at deception as he was at underwater basket weaving. Which was not at all.

Resigned, he finally confessed, "...it's J-N-P-R. For Juniper."

There was a beat of surprised silence before Pyrrha let out a surprised, "Oh! That means - "

"- you're the leader now!" Nora finished.

Ren contributed a mute nod.

"...yes?" Jaune ventured cautiously. His teammates looked surprisingly not-angry.

"That's good to hear," Pyrrha said, shooting her other two teammates a fleeting apologetic look before adding, "It's a bit of a relief, actually. I wasn't exactly the best leader."

"That's silly, you were a great leader, Pyrrha!" Nora was quick to reassure her, "Cardin was just a bad teammate. We should have just broken his legs from the start."

"At any rate, this is a good thing. We're a new team now, with a new leader, so it's like a clean slate," Pyrrha said, diplomatically choosing to turn aside the mention of their rather controversial ex-teammate.

Jaune asked, "So...you're all...okay with this?"

Pyrrha smiled warmly and said, "I'm sure you'll prove yourself to all of us in time."

Nora said, "Just think of all the new things we can come up with for the tournament now that we're jerk-free!"

Ren contributed another mute nod, but there was a warmth to his silence that wasn't there before.

"You guys, I-I don't know what to say. I really don't deserve it but...thanks," Jaune said, feeling a knot that was equal parts guilt and gratitude well up in his throat.

These people, they were the kind of people he had dreamed of being like once upon a time. Huntsmen-in-training, heroes-to-be, people who had signed up to spend their entire lives fighting against humanity's ancient foe to keep the innocent safe. As Beacon students, they were the best of the best, prodigies without exception, and yet, these people were willing to give him a chance. Him, Jaune Arc, who had never done a thing right in his life. It was a strange feeling, like a helium balloon swelling up in his chest at the same time a leaden weight squeezed down on his heart.

He was so touched that he found the words spilling out of his lips before he could stop them.

"I swear I won't let you guys down."

Jaune froze as soon as he said them, but it was already too late to take them back. Nora beamed and clapped him on the back hard enough to knock all the wind out of him, the tips of Pyrrha's ears turned pink as she smiled and looked away, and even stoic Ren's lips twitched upwards a little as the other boy gave a small incline of his head in acknowledgement.

Jaune forced a smile too and tried not to throw up on the spot.

'Nice going, self. It's not like you can't fight your way out of a wet paper bag or anything. I'm sure you'll do just fine, leading a team when you've never led so much as a tea party,' Jaune thought, 'What was it that Dad always said? An Arc never goes back on his word? Hahahaha, aaaaaaah, I am so screwed.'

Somewhere else, somewhen else, a certain Lady added a few more dice to the pool and a certain Wheel ground forward just a little more.

. . .

The slumber of the doomed was rarely peaceful, and Jaune found himself tossing and turning long into the wee hours of the morning. It didn't help that this was the first time he had slept in a room with other people since he left home for his apprenticeship, nor that Nora apparently mumbled in her sleep about pancakes, and especially not that Ren's dark hair splayed against a white pillowcase in the faint moonlight was weirdly pretty and making Jaune question things about himself that he had never questioned before.

But in the end, sheer exhaustion finally won out, and Jaune settled into fitful, but surprisingly pleasant dreams.

Someone was running their hands lovingly through his scraggly blonde hair. It was a rather nice feeling - soft, feminine fingers stroking gently along his scalp - but also oddly familiar. Unnervingly familiar. A sense of vague dread that only increased as warm lips nibbled along the lobes of his ear and hot, heavy breaths tickled the nape of his neck.

Then, without any warning, the gentle hands grabbed a fistful of his hair and yanked hard, nearly tearing out a piece of his scalp along with it.

That snapped Jaune out of his half-dreaming state and into harsh wakefulness with a pained yelp and a hard thump as he flailed out of bed and onto the floor.

"Ow, what the - ?!" Rubbing the offended patch of scalp, Jaune cracked open an eye and cranked his neck upwards, only to be greeted by the underside of a horse. A very familiar horse, chewing on a few strands of hair in a familiar shade of blonde, with the reality of this exact situation made even more familiar by the all too familiar sensation of slobber-drenched bangs sliding slowly down his forehead.

On cue, his scroll began to vibrate to the slow, mournful notes of a funeral march. Jaune let his head fall into his hands with a pained groan. With Milly's surprise arrival in his room, there was really only one person the caller could be.

With the dread of a man literally greeting his own death, Jaune hit the 'answer' button. He kept his voice at a low hiss in order to avoid waking his roommates.

"Couldn't this have waited until normal people wake up? In case you forgot, the rest of us fleshy mortals need this little thing called sleep to stay alive."

IS THAT AN OFFER TO ALTER YOUR LIVING STATUS IN ORDER TO RAISE YOUR WORK EFFICIENCY? the unmistakable, hollow voice echoed in his head rather than emanating from the scroll like a normal phone conversation.

"Actually, you know what," Jaune backpedaled hastily, "This is fine, totally a great time to call. What's up?"

HOW GOES YOUR SEARCH FOR THE MAIDEN?

Jaune winced and said, "Oh, that. It's, uh, it's going. You know, the description of 'young, beautiful, and capable of wielding powers beyond the mortal ken' would be a lot more helpful if it didn't describe literally every single female classmate I've run across at this school."

SHE ALSO HAS A FONDNESS FOR APPLES. AND CHILDREN. ALBEIT NOT FOR THE SAME PURPOSES.

"Thank you. That'll really help narrow it down," Jaune said, resigning himself to the unenviable fate of offering apples to random girls and asking if they liked kids, because that wouldn't be weird or creepy at all. "Or you could just tell me who it is."

I WILL CONSIDER IT. There was a pause. Jaune didn't even bother to let hope swell in his heart; his inner hope balloon had been punctured too many times to hold any hot air whatsoever. Sure enough, after a few moments, Death replied, I HAVE CONSIDERED IT. THE ANSWER IS NO.

Jaune pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed, "Yeah, I figured. So, is that all? Can I get back to sleep now?"

IT SEEMS YOUR TASK WILL TAKE A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME. SINCE YOU ARE NO LONGER PERFORMING THE USUAL DUTIES I PAY YOU FOR, YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE PRODUCTIVE IN OTHER WAYS.

"Wait, I get paid?"

Death ignored that entirely and said, THERE IS AN ERRAND IN VALE YOU CAN RUN, SINCE YOU ARE ALREADY IN THE AREA.

"I'm not going to like this, am I?"

MILLY WILL SHOW YOU THE WAY.

The line clicked and disconnected before Jaune could get another word in edgewise. It left him staring down at the screen of his scroll, where a rather ominous looking hourglass had popped up with a digital display overlaid on top of it. The numbers were very clearly counting down. Eleven seconds. Ten. Nine. Eight.

Jaune looked up at Milly, then down at his Pumpkin Pete footsie pajamas, then back up at Milly.

"Aw, c'mon, can't I at least get ch-"

There was a whinny, a flash of silent lightning, and then the room contained one less hapless blonde apprentice than it did before.

. . .

When you had lived as long as Old Gerson, you noticed that lots of things didn't work as well as they used to.

Money used to work properly, for instance. You could get a whole loaf of bread for a few Lien. Now, the damn cards weren't worth the plastic they were printed on. Took a whole stack just to buy the same things they used to. Damn inefficient, that's what it was. Whichever darned bigwig that had come up with this newfangled 'inflation' idea oughta be force fed all those 1-lien cards that weren't good for anything anymore except pelting those annoying young door-to-door salesmen who refused to take a hint.

Honestly, they didn't make young people the way they used to either. Always racing about, making much ado about nothing. Why, when he was young, he had actually gone out and done things. Important things. Things he couldn't remember clearly half of the time, but he was sure they had been important. Now though? All these young people seemed to have nothing to do with their lives except pester folks about buying useless things like coupon books and life insurance. As if lien wasn't worthless enough, and the only guarantee in life was a visit from the ol' Reaper at the end of it.

Hell, even the young 'uns that did decide to go out and do things went about it all wrong. The only visitors worse than those door-to-door salesmen were those poor, deluded White Fang hatchlings. Saying things like how they were at war, and it was their solemn duty to join the cause, hah! Gerson knew damn well what a proper war looked like.

He'd fought two of 'em, after all. Back in his day, you strapped your momma's best pot onto your heads, grabbed the nearest hatchet or pickaxe, and set off to fight under the King's banner for freedom and justice and all those kinds of important things that young people were supposed to care about. You followed your commander through dunes and sandstorms, uphill both ways, and started bashing people with pointy sticks until the one side cried uncle.

Now it was all picket lines and blowing up trains and robbing poor, upstanding shopkeepers. Utterly disgraceful, that's what it was - just a bunch of overgrown hatchlings throwing a tantrum. Couldn't talk sense into any of 'em.

Well, there was only one way to get through to hard-headed youngsters like them, and that was to make 'em learn lessons the hard way. If it took ratting out a couple faces he recognized to the coppers, or helping the rare hatchling who actually came back to their senses climb outta the hole they dug themselves into, then that's just how it had to be.

Course, trying to teach discipline to a gaggle of hotheads in full blown self-righteous rebellion was bound to end in some kind of overdramatic backlash sooner or later. Gerson wasn't even surprised when he woke up in the middle of the night to a hooded, dark figure towering over his bedside.

"You were warned. The Fang does not suffer traitors," said the hooded figure in a stereotypically low, raspy voice, shot him in the chest, and then disappeared out the window in a dramatic swirl of ten-lien stage costume cape.

'They don't even make assassins like they used to,' Gerson thought crankily to himself as the dust bullet settled into its new home between his ribs. A proper assassin wouldn't be caught dead in such an embarrassingly cliché getup. You could always tell who was a proper professional and who was an overblown grunt with delusions of grandeur - the latter looked like Spruce Willis villains with equally bad one-liners, while the former looked like world-weary janitors right up until they put a roll of poisoned toilet paper into your favorite stall right before you had to answer the call of nature.

He had half a mind to live through the horribly incompetent assassination just on principle. That'll teach 'em not to run off half-cocked instead of finishing a job properly. He contemplated it for a moment before deciding that it was more trouble than it was worth. Damn kids made it clear they weren't interested in learning anything he had to teach, anyhow.

Might as well check out before the crummy place burned down around his ears. The new generation could clean up their own damned mess for once. Might even teach them a thing or two.

So Old Gerson rearranged his pillows, settled down into a more comfortable position to ease the strain on his aching back, closed his eyes, and waited.

Then he waited some more. The hole in his chest bled sluggishly, but other than that, nothing else changed.

He cracked open an eye.

Still nothing.

Gerson was about to get back out of bed and see what the hold-up was when there was finally a flash of lightning and a scrawny young man in the most ridiculous footsie pajamas appeared in mid-air.

"-anged?" the boy yelped before gravity reasserted its iron grip and smacked him down on hardwood floor, rump first. He looked rather green around the gills and laid still for a few moments, trying not to heave, before muttering, "Ugh...I'll take that as a no."

Rather unimpressed by this deviation from the norm, Gerson said disapprovingly, "You're late."

Then he died.

"It's not like I had a whole lot of advance notice," the young man protested, before noticing that there was no longer anyone around to hear it. He picked himself off the ground and stood awkwardly at the bedside for a moment before smacking himself on the forehead. "Dammit, I didn't even bring the..."

He trailed off because the small training scythe he hadn't had time to grab was somehow in his non-forehead-smacking hand, as if it had always been there, because there was no such thing as Death not having enough time for a reaping and the universe had corrected the oversight retroactively.

Resolving not to think too hard about things that would break his brain, the young man unfolded the weapon and stood over Gerson's cooling corpse for a moment, looking rather ill in the cold blue light glinting off the modest ten-inch blade.

"I guess I'll just," he said as he made a half-hearted swing in Gerson's general direction. The scythe passed through Gerson's torso before getting stuck somewhere between the fourth and fifth rib. The young man frowned and gave the handle a tug, to no avail. Then he sighed, wrapped both hands around the handle, and braced himself as he yanked backwards with all the strength in his gangly frame.

The soul of Gerson ripped out of the body with the sound of a champagne cork popping, and the young man tumbled back onto the hardwood floor for the second time in as many minutes.

The soul of Gerson bore the same disapproving expression as the its body had died with.

"I suppose that's that then," it echoed, before fixing the young man with a rather skeptical look. "You don't look much like a proper Death."

"Proper Death was busy," said the young man.

The soul of Gerson crossed its soul arms and said, "But you couldn't even bother to dress the part, could you? Back in my day, appearances actually meant something. Professionalism. Dignity. Self-respect."

"Look," said the young man tiredly, "I'm sorry about all this, but I'm not really in charge of how these things work. If you want, I'll pass on your complaints, and hopefully neither of us have to do this again."

"Figures," the soul of Gerson huffed, "An entire century of waiting, and then you get stuck with an intern instead of getting proper service." The outline of the soul began to grow fuzzy as bits of it broke off into motes of light that dissolved into nothingness.

"No respect at all. Why, back in my day..." its voice faded into nothingness as it finally passed on to whatever afterlife was waiting for it.

The young man watched until the last motes of light disappeared, and then sagged heavily in relief. He folded up his small hand scythe, which had rather completely lost its cold blue glow, before looking around the room with his bright blue eyes.

"Er, Milly?" he called out hopefully.

Nothing happened.

"Milly?" he called out again, walking across the room and carefully skirting around Gerson's corpse to look out of the half-open window towards the empty street outside. He could see bright shattered moon above, a flickering streetlight on the corner, and in the far distance, the faint twinkle of the Beacon CCT tower from the top of the towering cliff that overlooked Vale.

There was no hide nor hoof belonging to a familiar pale horse anywhere to be seen.

He looked again at the distantly twinkling lights of Beacon Academy.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

. . .

Death was omnipresent. It didn't really need to go anywhere; it was simply there. The horse, really, was just for tradition's sake.

Unfortunately, Jaune had never quite gotten the hang of simply being somewhere without actually having to travel there, since, the last time he checked, he was still a fleshy mortal, and fleshy mortals were typically unable to be in multiple places at once. It resulted in spending several uncomfortable moments stuck in a room with a rather clearly murdered corpse, now that he had time to notice the growing bloodstain, before he mustered up enough concentration to pull off a rather poor imitation of his mentor's ability.

It involved trying to convince the universe that Jaune Arc couldn't possibly be inside a stranger's locked house on the other side of Vale when he had clearly been safely tucked away in his bed mere minutes before. Since there was no possible way he could be here, he wouldn't be.

He scrunched his eyes shut and stepped forward, hoping to reopen them and see his dorm room.

Unfortunately, while there was no possible way for Jaune Arc to be in a stranger's locked house, there were plenty of places other than his dorm room that he could have been, and he found himself sequentially shunted through a dizzying montage of a strange vault lit with green torches, the inside of a locker, the top of a rooftop, a terrifying forest full of Grimm, and then randomly five-hundred feet in the air and falling before he finally appeared in the familiar hallway outside his room.

He promptly rushed to the nearest trashcan and dry heaved. Fleshy mortals were definitely not meant to be in more than one place at once.

UGH, he groaned, before finally unwrapping himself from the wastebasket and stumbling towards the door to his room.

He pulled out his scroll to unlock the door, and found that its battery had died. Either Death's life-timer app was very energy intensive, or travelling through multiple possible locations in a single moment was hell on scroll batteries. Either way, Jaune was in the unfortunate position of being locked outside of his room.

He briefly considered simply giving up and sleeping in the hallway until Pyrrha woke up and let him back in.

No. His night had been shitty enough. He deserved a warm and soft bed to sleep in for at least the thirty-minutes he could get before dawn. A single, pesky door was not going to rob him of his well-deserved rest.

Jaune placed a hand flat against the door, and simply willed himself to pass through a time when the door had not been there. He could do this. He had gone through walls before - granted, with his mentor's help - and he could recapture that feeling. Coldness. Stillness. He was more real than the door, because the door had not always been there, whereas he would always be there. A simple locked door could not stop Death.

Jaune stepped forward confidently and promptly bashed his face against the hard, unforgivingly solid surface.

But fortunately, he bashed his head hard enough to daze himself momentarily, and managed to stumble forward a few steps while he was too dazed to remember that fleshy mortals couldn't pass through solid doors.

By the time the ringing in his skull died down, he found himself standing on the other side, and he could already see his blessedly empty bed beckoning towards him. He didn't think twice before collapsing into it and passing out.

The last thing he thought as he drifted off to sleep was, 'Weird. My pillow smells a lot nicer than I remember.'

. . .

He woke up to an incredibly unhappy and alarmingly feminine screech.

. . .

Author's Note:

The chess game being played between Ozpin and Jaune is Bryne vs Fischer (1956). Part of it is a shout out to one of my favorite underappreciated American chess players, and part of it is because my inner chess geek loves making obscure references.

Special thanks to CryptIXeeper for being an absolutely fantastic beta reader, without whom this chapter would be a train wreck of derpy typos and wall-of-text paragraphs, and the previous chapter would have been chock full of unfunny anime tropes (or, more full of it than it already is).