Hey hey! Here's that "A New Set of Rules" rewrite! 60% of this chapter is literally just a copy and paste of chapter one in ANSR, but there are some elements that are changed and a new scene that is completely different from anything in ANSR which should neatly explain the premise of the story to new readers and also explain what's different to the old readers.

I've written some notes at the bottom of this story and in the last chapter of ANSR explaining why I've made certain choices in this series and the old, so if you're interested check it out.

The air was charged with a strange energy. Many events had led to this climax but even after the final blow was dealt, felling the creature who claimed to have harnessed god's powers for itself, conflicting emotions ran rampant. Nobody knew whether to cheer or cry. The young man who stood in the center of the clearing could barely register what had just happened.

On one hand, the threat was gone and humanity was saved but many lives were taken as the cost for victory. The young man morbidly noted that this small war seemed to follow the laws of equivalent exchange, just like the alchemy that had been used to end it.

He looked down at his feet to see a broken suit of armour that once housed the soul of his little brother. Alphonse had exchanged his soul so Edward could get his arm back once again. Edward was now in a frantic state of mind, thinking of all the possible ways to try and bring his brother back.

He promised Alphonse that he would never use a human soul to restore either of their bodies so the only option was to use something else. But there was nothing in the world that could be equivalent to a human life. Edward racked his brains to try and think of something that he could use.

With a spark of inspiration, he realized something that the world might consider to be even greater than a single human soul.

"May, back up," he said to the tear-stained girl who lay hunched over his brother's old body. Picking up a stick off the ground, he started to carefully draw a pattern in the dirt. He cringed a bit at the pattern on the ground, but continued with determination. Hopefully this would be the last human transmutation circle he would ever see.

Despite the shock on his friends' faces, he stood in the center of the circle and clapped his hands together. "I'll be right back," he said. He hoped that his expression was much more confident than he felt. "Here comes the Fullmetal Alchemist's final transmutation." He slammed his hands against the ground and felt the disturbingly familiar feeling of being deconstructed. He felt his body disappearing from the world and his consciousness slipping away with it.

When he opened his eyes, he saw nothing but a white silhouette of himself, sitting casually in front of a large door. "Come for your brother, eh?" The thing, "Truth" as it called itself, never seemed to talk. Edward only felt its words resonate inside him. "How do you plan to extract a human being? How will you pay? Will you offer me your entire being?"

Edward ignored its suggestion and walked past it as casually as he could. As he walked up to the door that seemed to hold all the secrets of the world, he felt his confidence gradually increase. The only thing that would be equal to a soul would be the laws of the entire world itself.

"All is one, one is all," he thought to himself.

"I've got your payment right here," Edward said, not even bothering to confirm his suspicions. "It's really big, though."

A moment of silence passed before anything happened. "The gate of truth lies within every human being. Thus, it is also the potential of those human beings to use alchemy." Edward heard the words echo through his mind. The words were mostly emotionless, but he thought he could sense a bit of surprise in them. "Will you sacrifice the power to use alchemy and simply become an ordinary human being?"

"I've always been an ordinary human. Just a little man who couldn't even save one poor girl they turned into a chimera. Someone who caught a glimpse of the 'Truth' and started over-relying on its gift only to fail again and again… It's all been one long dance."

"Are you sure you're alright with losing this?"

Edward turned around to catch a glimpse of Truth's featureless face. "I don't need alchemy as long as I've got my friends."

As Truth gave him a wide grin, Edward turned back around to face the Gate and mentally prepared himself to pay the largest toll that alchemy had to offer but Truth's next words shocked him.

"Well it looks like you're not done with your journey just yet, alchemist," he heard. It took him a second to register what it had just said. He turned around to look at Truth. Ed had never realized it until seeing it, but without the wide grin usually covered most of its head, staring at a completely blank face was an unnerving experience.

"What- what do you mean by that?" Edward asked uncertainly.

Truth gave him a shrug. A chill ran through Edward's spine.

A few seconds passed before Edward regained his senses. Shaking his head, he steeled his mind and turned to face Truth. "What the hell are you going on about?"

"I'm that I don't know how to transmute myself. You were the only human to ever try."

Edward realized exactly why Truth's simple shrug had bothered him so much. He'd never expected a being called "Truth" to be uncertain about anything.

"So is that it? Is this the end?" Edward asked, clenching his fists together until his knuckles turned white.

"No," it replied, giving Edward a spark of hope. "Probably," it continued, giving a weak chuckle as its smile reappeared on its face once again.

"I don't know how to transmute myself, but that doesn't mean that nobody knows how," it said as it pointed upwards. Edward followed the direction of the finger and looked up to the sky.

A large door. It was nearly identical to the one floating below it, but something about it made him shiver. His own Truth had never made him feel like this, even as his limbs were being torn from his body, even as the collective knowledge of the world was crammed into his mortal brain.

He didn't understand how he knew, but he knew that the second door wasn't something right. It wasn't natural. It didn't belong.

"You of all people should know that there's more than one way to see the world," it told him, the wide grin fully visible now. "Your world isn't black and white. Why would my world be so easy?"

Edward couldn't seem to tear his eyes away from the gate. He told himself that it was silly, but he couldn't help but think that he would be attacked if he dared to look away from it. He barely even heard Truth's words as something screamed at him to distance himself, but another voice in his head was much louder. A voice that had been screaming at him for his entire life.

"So if I go in there I'll get my brother back."

Though Edward kept his eyes fixed onto the second gate, he knew that Truth shrugged again.

"I don't know if it's possible in the first place," it admitted casually. "But whatever the answer to that question is, you'll learn it in there."

"Of course," Edward said grimly. "Just my luck."

The door above him opened up and Edward saw darkness within, again so similar to the darkness within his own gate of Truth, but somehow so different. He ignored the urge to turn away and simply extended a hand to the slow tendrils of darkness that creeped out.

As a tendril touched his hand, he let out a sigh of relief and finally allowed himself to turn away. Now that he was trapped, there was no way that he could give into the temptation of simply running away and abandoning his little brother for good. He turned to Truth. "Got any tips for me?" he asked.

Truth didn't drop its smile. "It's an entirely different world out there, operated by an entirely different Truth. You'll be a foreign object, so be careful about what might happen over there. Will you be eliminated by the world itself? Will you still subscribe to my Truth? Will your body assimilate to the laws of the new world? Who knows? I've never been so clueless, it's not in my nature." It shook its head though it was still grinning. "Whatever the case, have fun. Hopefully you'll see me again soon."

Edward nodded as he felt the new Gate of Truth pull him towards itself.

Then everything seemed to explode.

Whenever he entered the Gate, which was much more often than he had liked, he felt as if the entirety of his body was systematically being deconstructed. It was a painful and unnerving process whenever he felt his body simply leaving him. This Gate was different in that he wasn't being deconstructed but instead, he felt his body being overloaded with a large amount of energy. At least with his Gate, you couldn't feel the pain in an arm you didn't have. With this Gate, he had no such solace.

But it was over in an instant.

He opened his eyes to find he was lying down on his back. The ground was hard and he could feel a light breeze tickling his face. His vision was blurry, but he could see a faint white light shining down on him from overhead.

After moving around a bit, he confirmed that he was still completely there, though he still wasn't all too used to having both of him arms being made of flesh.

Despite the terror that he felt from merely looking at the gate that had swallowed him, he had to admit that it wasn't nearly as bad as he'd expected. He turned over onto his side, still too weak to actually stand up. His vision was still slightly blurry, but it was getting better now. Edward was pleased to learn that it was only temporary.

Though he gave out a big sigh, he decided to be grateful that he was alive in the first place, and that he had the opportunity to finally revive his little brother's body, even though it involved travelling so far into the unknown. He was grateful that the foreign Gate hadn't decided to kill him, and he was grateful that he wasn't killed as soon as he fell into this new world. As peaceful and empty his surroundings seemed, he had no way of knowing his exact situation, though the fact that he hadn't been attacked since he'd arrived was a good indication that things could be worse.

He was hit with the sudden realization that he could see again. It didn't seem like he'd blacked out so he didn't understand how he couldn't notice something so drastic, but in either case he decided to use his new gift of sight.

He instantly regretted it.

At the sight of someone laying down a few meters away from him, he'd had the stupid hope that it was a friendly face. It wasn't a hope he could keep for too long. It wasn't something he was proud of, but he'd been too experienced in death to not recognize a dead body when he saw one.

He sighed.

"Same old, same old," he muttered turning over onto his back once again, promptly passing out.

Somewhere nearby, a Huntsman tried to turn in the direction of the strange voice. He grunted in pain as his body protested the movement, and he conceded to it, laying back against the broken section of wall that propped up his dying body.

He sighed as well. Even if the voice hadn't been a figment of his imagination, he knew that there were no other Hunters nearby. If someone was still alive here, they wouldn't be for much longer.

Instead of focusing on things that he couldn't change, he focused on staying awake and praying to a God.

It didn't give him much comfort to pray to a God that would most likely send him to the fiery depths of hell for failing to protect the village that he'd been assigned to protect, so instead he prayed that the dead villagers would have a fulfilling life in whatever laid beyond it.

"So the next town is… uh-huh… uh-huh… We're lost."

"We're not lost. The next town is Shion. My family used to visit it all the time."

"Oh yeah. Don't you have, like, four sisters?"

"Uh, seven."

As Ruby giggled, Nora chose that moment to speak up and said, "You know, that actually explains a lot."

"Wait, what do you mean?"

"So, what did you guys do there?" Ruby interrupted, even though she knew that an argument probably wouldn't erupt anyways.

"Oh, all sorts of stuff! Over here is a great hiking trail, and over here is where we went camping all the time. I got my own tent because I was special. Also, so my sisters would stop braiding my hair."

"Didn't like the look?"

"Yeah, they just kept doing pigtails, but personally, I think I'm more of a "warrior's wolftail" kind of guy."

"That's just a ponytail."

"I stand by what I said."

"Uh, guys?" Nora said, interrupting Ruby's train of thought as she tried to imagine Jaune with longer hair.

"Huh?" "What?" she and Jaune said, almost simultaneously.

As Ruby started to look around for Nora, something caught her attention out of the corner of her eye. At first she'd just assumed the climbing grey pillars in the sky were just dark clouds, but after a second she finally took in the sight in front of her. Not clouds. Smoke.

The map slipped away from her fingers, but she couldn't help but ignore it in favour of running forwards. Her mind drew up a blank as she followed behind the rest of her team, trusting in them to have analyzed the bodies that littered the streets for any signs of life before running past them. She tried to do it herself, but she couldn't help but tear her eyes away at the sight of mangled limbs and people who were simply missing major parts of their body.

As she saw her team pull up to a stop ahead, she joined them. "There could be survivors," she said, even though she saw Jaune and Nora already scanning the streets. She just felt like it needed to be said.

"Over here!" Ren called out, already moving deeper into the village. Ruby looked up at Jaune who gave her an uncertain look back.

They ran to Ren a second later. Ruby didn't know if she was the first to notice, but she was the first to point it out. "A Huntsman," she said. More importantly, a Huntsman that was still alive and moving.

"What happened?" Jaune asked. "Who killed all these people?"

The Huntsman coughed twice and looked up at them before speaking up with a pleading look in his eyes.

"Behind," he simply said. Ruby tensed up and almost turned to look around, but he spoke up again. "Behind me. Please."

Before she could even react, Nora had already rushed past Ren and the Huntsman, running past the broken wall and scanning around for whatever the Huntsman was talking about. She seemed to spot something and broke into a sprint before skidding to a stop a few meters away right next to a body.

"I got him," she shouted out, leaning down to pick up the body and lift it up in a princess carry. Ruby gasped as Nora brought the body closer. It was a teenage boy with long golden hair and tattered clothes, but there was an important detail that took precedence.

He was breathing.

"Is he?" the Huntsman spoke up, his voice terrifyingly weak.

"He's alive," Ruby replied. She didn't know if it was for the Huntsman's sake or her own that she needed to clarify that. "He's alive," she said again.

The huntsman started to cough again, but looking down at him, Ruby could tell that he had a weak smile on his face.

"Thank God," he said. "Thank God I could at least save one."

It wasn't to any of them that he was addressing that to. As she saw the light in his eyes completely fade away as his head tilted to the ground, she looked around. Her eyes caught Ren's for a moment before he too looked down at the ground. He shook his head.

Ren stood up and walked back the way that they had entered the village from, heading for the bag that he'd dropped on the floor before rushing to the now dead Huntsman.

"Should we bury him?" Nora asked, her voice uncertain and low.

"We should go," came Ren's distant reply. "It's not safe here. Not for us, not for him," he said, jerking a thumb towards the boy that slept peacefully in Nora's arms.

Nora looked towards Ren, then at the boy in her arms, then back up, now with a bit more determination set in her expression. She turned to follow her partner's steps.

Ruby turned to Jaune just as he lifted his hand, covering his eye with it. While as far as she could tell he wasn't crying, Ruby still placed a gentle hand on his arm.

"It'll be okay," she said, hoping that she sounded a lot more sure of that than she actually was.

Jaune sighed and lowered his hand. Though it came away dry, Jaune still kept his head down. "I'm just tired of losing everything," he said.

She smiled and looked up at him. He was looking down at her so she smiled back. "We didn't lose everything," she said, turning to look at Nora who was currently helping Ren get the boy onto a more comfortable position on his back. "Not today."

So here's my rewrite of ANSR. As I hope you've noticed, the story is no longer set near the beginning of Vol 1, but is now set in the beginning of Vol 4, specifically right in the middle of Vol 4 Ep 2.

The biggest things I get by changing the setting are:

1. It's no longer a school setting so I'm no longer forced to incorporate the school life into anything.

2. The character cast of NWNR is cut in half compared to ANSR.

3. Ed is a lot freer. While he's never controlled in ANSR, there's no question that he's forced to follow Ozpin's rules if he wants his help.

Unfortunately I lose my top three favourite RWBY characters by writing this way (unless I find some way to incorporate them back in the story), but sacrifices must be made!

With that in mind, let's get the story going.