Welcome to another chapter. Haven't posted one of these in a while.

Last Time Around: Chapter 08: A Corpse at the End of the World

I lay on the floor and know I am dying. A familiar blade pierces my chest nailing me to the hard obsidian floor. It was placed there by the woman standing above me. She looks down at me now, eyes filled with such overwhelming hatred and fury that what little breath I can find is sucked from my lungs.

This hate. It scares me. Every time I see her, I can't help that tingle in my brain telling me to run and hide. To crawl under my bed and pray the monster doesn't find me. To run to my father and jump in his arms, even if the logical part in my brain knows he can do nothing to stop this dark creature.

She leans down until her face is scant inches from my own and stares into my eyes. I want nothing more than to look away, but I lay petrified. The baleful gaze cutting through my thin veneer of self-control and stabbing into my soul.

The primal terror this woman inspires in the hearts of man...

I don't know which was worse.

Feeling her absolute, soul encompassing ire for the first time.

Or realizing it is entirely justified.

The first night after classes I get to work.

Sneaking out once everyone falls asleep is child's play. All my teammates are years away from being able to keep up with me anyway. It's a damned miracle nobody learned about my eyes when I was a child and sent an assassin to carve them out of my skull as we slept. Once the end of the world really got going, I had to start planting traps around myself and being alert 24/7 or risk being blinded in the night.

I wasn't like Blake. She always enjoyed going about unseen and seemed to take some personal satisfaction from sneaking around. I never gained her appreciation for the nuances for stealth, learning purely for necessity's sake.

It did come in handy in more... aggressive roles though. Nothing quite matches the killing potential of a massive 50 caliber sniper rifle bullet to the head when they don't know it's coming.

Eat shit Mercury.

Gods I can't wait to kill him again.

Watching his look of surprise through a 20x optic when an explosive anti-tank round blew through his aura and tour him in half at the hip was a magical thing.

It didn't make the hollow feeling from all the friends he took from me any better though.

Best not to think about it. Back to the present.

Beacon Academy is filled to the brim with hidden cameras. Each hallway has at least a half dozen, and every doorway has cameras on both sides that record whenever the door is opened. It is virtually impossible to navigate the interior of the buildings without being recorded to some degree. I briefly considered wearing a mask like a certain fiery bitch, but a strange masked woman being caught wandering around on camera would be far more suspicious that little Ruby Rose stalking through the night halls.

After all, kids are a curious bunch.

It takes me quite a long time to "aimlessly wander" through the halls to my destination. Luckily, my destination has no security whatsoever.

The elevator to Ozpins office/apartment/penthouse is identical to every other elevator in the school other than its far greater vertical travel. What the students do not know is that it goes almost the same distance straight down as well. Due to what lies beneath most typical modern security measures, in fact most modern dust-based technology, cannot function properly.

So, I can just step through the door, input the 20-digit code to gain access to the secret floors and press the button taking me down.

My first life I never actually went down this elevator. By the time I had to return here to retrieve Destruction the entire building was in ruins and I was in the middle of a fight to the death.

He should have kept Choice here. If he did the White Fang would have been much less of a problem even if having Destruction close improved the quality of Hunters the school could produce.

Hell, the old bastard should have hidden them on Vytal like they originally planned under a thousand locks with no keys and millions of automated guns waiting to slaughter anything that approaches.

Speaking of old bastards.

The doors slide open to reveal Ozpin standing at the end of the long hallway. The has-been wizard turns slowly, cane held in a tight grip and clearly ready for a fight.

Judging from his expression, I am not who he was expecting.

"Hello Ruby, what are you doing down here?"

Every so slowly I approach the useless old man.

"Poor, old, useless Oz. Can't even keep his little girls safe from the monsters." My sing song tone of voice gets him on edge immediately.

"How do you know about this place Ruby? Are you working for her?"

He moves to stand protectively in front of the coffin like machine containing the dying maiden. I don't have a use for the woman anymore. At least as long as she is alive, she will as a distraction to keep Cinder out of my way.

I stop a few feet in front of him and force my soul up and into my eyes. To my eyes, the dimly lit room shifts from greys and browns to a pure black and white, outlining everything and allowing me to see the magic floating in the air out of the vault.

"I am here for the Relic Ozpin." I shift my aura and Crescent Rose appears in my hand out of thin air, fully extended and ready to strike. "Do not get in my way. As much as I dislike you, I would rather not see you die here."

Ozpin must know he cannot stop me. My eyes are the antitheses to both aura and magic, leaving him with only physical means to stop me.

He must really regret not designing automated defenses that can work within the demesne of a relic.

Ever the wise immortal wizard, Ozpin makes the wise decision and does nothing to prevent me from passing. Of course, Oz being Oz, he can't help asking questions all the while.

"Why are you doing this Ruby? Can't you see how dangerous this is?"

I ignore him. His idiocy, his begging and pleading. As if the thousand times I bent to his will and let him do as he pleased never happened and his hands are clean.

The vault the relic is held in opens easily. The power of Winter is not designed to open the door, but my skin with aura along with my eyes allow me to simply overpower the mechanism and retrieve the small incense burner inside.

Destruction was always my favorite. The small incense lamp glows a soft red and leaks a heavy mist that drapes across the ground. As soon as I touch it I can feel the poisonous, overwhelming, boiling power rush through my veins and fill me with the urge to crush everything around me. The first time I picked up Destruction I leveled half of Vale and rained fire from the skies for days.

This time I am significantly more in control.

I turn to leave the basement and meet Ozpins eyes.

"I am putting an end to this charade old man. The era of man is coming to an end once again."

A flash of Destruction deletes the space between me and the elevator and I step the hundred yards to it in a single step. I feel the eyes of the gods on my back, judging me, waiting for me to finally choose. "It took many tries, Gods, but I have made my decision."

I'm so sorry everyone, I can't save you all. No matter how hard I try, you will all die one way or the other. All I can do is right our great crime before it is too late.

I take a deep breath and make to leave Beacon for the final time.

"This will be the last time around."

Goodbye everyone.

Welcome to the end of the chapter.

As you can tell. Things went from slow burn to raging inferno quite quickly. I originally planned on having more chapters between Ruby arriving and steeling the Relic, along with the relic being Choice and not Destruction, but I test wrote a few chapters and nothing much came from it other than angsty bullshit since I was going to end with Ruby taking the relic anyway.

This chapter i bring out some of the random head-canon that i make up about Remnant, such as Relics having an effect on the people in the country around them. I always found it odd that the White Fang is so violent in Vale, a country that doesn't seam to have any actual noticeable racism. That mostly ties in with my continued complaints about the handling of Faunus and the magic systems in general in RWBY that I looooove bitching about in Discord.

If you are wondering why Destruction is in Beacon and not Choice... I actually forgot Choice was a Relic. For some reason in my head the 4 relics are Creation, Destruction, Knowledge, and Survival. I don't know how Survival got in their, but in all my fanfictions that is the relic that resides in Vacuo. Creation is in Atlas. Knowledge is in Mistral. Destruction is in Vale.

So in my version of the RWBY universe, Atlas is good at making things (hence the robots), Vacuo is good at surviving (they live in a desert), Mistral is knowledgeable like those stereotypical east Asian monasteries/libraries you see in games and shit, and Vale has the best Hunters because destruction makes them better at killing things. But also makes their crime more violent.

I think that is just about everything I had to say.

I hope you enjoyed, next chapter should come quite faster now that I kicked things into gear.