NOVEL NEXT Chapter 19: The Branwen Tribe Pt. 2
“I accept your challenge.”
Heh, staying out of it forever was always a pipe dream, wasn’t it? The part of him that’s Jaune Arc couldn’t stand to see people suffer for long before he stepped in and did something about it… while the part of him that was made up of the experiences of countless Grimm simply couldn’t back down from a challenge. The moment Raven Branwen made that last intimidation play, she’d pushed him to this point.
His words come before the Mistralian soldiers can throw down their weapons. Every eye in the area, from the villagers of Shion gathered up around him, to the soldiers forming a circle to try and protect them, to the wider circle of bandits penning them all in, turns on him. But Jaune is unbothered, as he stands up straight and steps forward, ropes still dangling from his wrists and ankles.
No one seems to know what to do or how to respond as he walks out of the enclosure and past the Mistralian soldiers, least of all Raven Branwen herself. She looks surprised, and altogether incredulous, and in that moment of calm before the storm, only one person tries to stop him.
“N-No! Don’t-ngah!”
Pyrrha Nikos, still pinned to the ground by her own spear, tries to lift herself up all the same. Of course, with Raven having impaled her with her own weapon and pressing a boot to the red head’s chest besides, she doesn’t get anywhere. All her wiggling does is manage to break the Branwen Tribe’s leader out of her momentary stupefaction.
With a sneer, Raven twists the spear in Pyrrha’s shoulder, and then rears back her boot and kicks the injured young woman across the face. Pyrrha slumps immediately, though Jaune picks up on the shallow breathing coming from the Lieutenant. She’s still alive, for now. But she’s most definitely unconscious.
Turning her attention away from her fallen opponent and towards him, Raven looks him up and down from behind her spectacularly intimidating Grimm mask. Well, intimidating to your average villager or private like the men and women cowering at his back… not to him, truth be told. His decision made, Jaune has wiped the fearful expression from his features. He instead faces off with the woman before him with a casual confidence and a slight smile.
After a moment, Raven scoffs.
“And who, exactly, are you supposed to be? Who sent you, hm?”
Jaune shakes his head, spreading his hands wide, the cut ropes still dangling from his wrists.
“Nobody sent me. I am little more than a world traveler, taking in all that there is to experience. I came to Shion because I wanted to see what sort of place Mistral has become. I’m beginning to think I’ve gotten a pretty good lay of the land, thanks to you and the soldiers.”
The bandits forming a perimeter around Pyrrha’s troops, and the people of Shion all laugh at Jaune, mocking and jeering in their snap judgment that he’s little more than a child playing at being a man. Which is entirely fair. He’s not exactly dressed to impress right now, is he? No, nor is he armed. And yet… Raven does not laugh. Rather, her hand drops to the pommel of her sword. A sword that she had no drawn even one time during her fight with Pyrrha Nikos.
A hush falls through the Branwen Tribe, as the bandits all notice this and go silent, one after the other. Their leader is taking him seriously, and so, quite suddenly, THEY take him seriously as well.
“… If you are a world traveler, as you say, I don’t see what business this is of yours. Leave, and continue traveling.”
How interesting. A proposal that had her men (and women) shifting from foot to foot in confusion and uncertainty. They didn’t understand why Raven was giving Jaune an out. Truth be told, he was surprised as well. Her instincts were good. Unfortunately for her, his own instincts wouldn’t let him take her up on her offer.
“But you made a challenge. You offered to let me try my luck, did you not? I’ve made my choice. Unless… you’re backing down.”
She can’t back down… not without retreating from Shion entirely. And he and her both know that would be a death sentence, at this point in time. The grip on her weapon tightens up even further, and Jaune can literally hear her teeth grinding beneath her mask thanks to his enhanced senses. Finally…
“Shay!”
The pretty boy bandit from earlier, the one who had escorted him out here in the first place, pales and straightens up, clearly recognizing that Jaune’s bid to make a nuisance of himself has in turn put Shay on his boss’ shit list, if nothing else.
“M-Ma’am?!”
“Give this idiot your gun. I won’t kill an unarmed man.”
“Ma’am!”
In an instant, Raven has taken back control of the narrative, her bandits all cracking grins and hooting and hollering as Shay regretfully pulls his pistol out of its holster and tosses it through the air where it’s destined to land at Jaune’s feet. Instead of letting that happen, Jaune quick steps forward and catches it on its downward arc, looking the weapon over for a moment.
Pretty shoddy craftsmanship, this. It’s a six-shooter… with some brass knuckles and a blade at the bottom. He can see how one might use the blade in melee combat, but the brass knuckles are ill-positioned for any sort of use, given the barrel of the gun. Meanwhile, the barrel itself has clearly been damaged several times, with scratches all over it.
It’s an all around terrible weapon, but then, Jaune hadn’t expected to be fighting with one either way. After a moment of checking it over, he loops his fingers through the holes of the brass knuckles all the same and looks over to Branwen, who appears tense with anticipation.
“Are you ready to die, ‘world traveler’?”
He can tell immediately that she means it. He’s pissed her off… and thus set her off. But more than anything, she can’t afford the show of weakness here. He will die if she has her way about things, because for him to live is to weaken her in the eyes of her bandits. Jaune can’t imagine that a bandit tribe, even one that’s quite literally named after its leader apparently, is based all that much on loyalty and respect, instead of fear.
Smiling thinly, Jaune nods his head and lifts the pistol.
“I’m ready to fight, Raven Bran-!”
She doesn’t even let him finish throwing her name back in her face. In a display of frankly lightning fast speed, the swordswoman dashes forward, drawing her blade in the same moment. Her weapon is an interesting one. A single-edged, one-handed sword… with a red blade that Jaune immediately recognizes as solid dust.
As she slices across, making an attempt at cutting his head from his shoulders right then and there, Jaune… sways back out of the way, his spine arching as he dodges the decapitation strike. At the same time, he brings the pistol up, point blank at her chest, and pulls the trigger.
He supposes he shouldn’t really be surprised, when Shay’s shoddy weapon jams on him. It doesn’t misfire at least, but it also doesn’t shoot Raven Branwen in the chest like he’s trying for. The moment of slowed time passes, and Raven jolts, the bandit leader realizing she almost take a bullet to the chest. But she doesn’t let it stop her. She keeps on swinging, forcing Jaune to continue dodging backwards.
To those looking on, it probably looks like he’s frantically backpedaling away from her sword as the red blade flies through the air, back and forth in a dizzying display of prowess and swordsmanship. It might even look like he’s panicking, trying to escape certain death and losing ground with every step.
But Jaune is completely calm, and totally in control. He allows Raven to gain on him more and more, until they both know his only choice is to block instead of dodge. As he brings up Shay’s pistol to do exactly that, he’s not exactly surprised when Raven’s solid dust blade shears through the damaged revolver with ease.
Vaguely, he’s aware of Shay’s dismayed cry off to the side, but Jaune barely pays it any mind. He’s already moving, pushing into Raven’s guard as he catches the blade from the destroyed pistol in his other hand and brings it up in an upward arcing slice… straight through Raven’s Grimm mask, cutting it in two.
He could have buried the blade in her throat instead, just beneath her chin. He could have pinned her tongue to the roof of her mouth and watched her choke and bleed out beneath that mask. But he doesn’t. Call it what you will. Mercy… him playing games… just not wanting to stain his hands with her blood when she’s still something of a stranger to him.
Regardless, he cuts her mask off instead, and though the knife at the end of Shay’s pistol was shitty as well, it’s sharp enough for this much at least, shearing right through the bone white material that makes up Raven’s mask.
At the same time, Raven’s solid dust blade explodes halfway through cutting Shay’s pistol in twain, the bullets jammed in the six-shooter combusting with the fire dust that Raven’s blade is made of.
The explosion buffets Jaune’s body, flinging the both of them clear for a moment, but does no actual damage to him. It would take a lot more than that, to hurt him. Indeed, it would take a lot more than that to damage the illusionary spell that Salem had cast upon him. You needed magic to beat magic, after all, and none of the humans in Mistral should have had the capacity to wield magic, or so his Queen told him.
As the dust clears, Jaune gets his first look at Raven Branwen’s actual face. Her red eyes are wide, as she stands there breathing a little faster than she had been before. Her weapon’s hilt is still in her hand, the blade currently missing, but he suspected she had a way of replacing that easily enough. And indeed, his suspicions are rapidly proven true.
Upon seeing him come out of the explosion completely unharmed, as well as their leader unmasked, the Branwen Bandits all gasp in shock, looking absolutely amazed by his completely uninjured state. The Mistralian soldiers and villages of Shion look just as surprised. But Jaune pays them all no mind. He only has eyes on Raven herself, as the woman immediately reacts to his unscathed appearance by shoving the hilt of her weapon back into its sheathe and twisting it.
When she draws it forth once more, the blade has indeed been replaced, this time by a solid bar of yellow dust. Lightning Dust, from what Jaune knew. It crackles, as she holds it in front of her, and the Branwen Tribe leader grits her teeth and narrows her eyes, clearly ready for Round Two.
So is Jaune, even if he’s without weapon at this point. The naked blade from Shay’s destroyed pistol has served its purpose, and so Jaune contemptuously tosses it aside and lifts his empty hands towards Raven, giving her the come hither motion and a challenging grin as he readies himself for her next charge. She’s strong, he’ll give her that, but she’s nothing he hasn’t faced a million times before. And while many of his Grimm memories were of dying at the hands of capable hunters on Branwen’s level, Jaune himself was far greater than the sum of his parts. He wasn’t going to die here, no sir.
Only, at seeing him so confident and so unconcerned, despite being seemingly unarmed, Raven hesitates for a moment… and then seems to gain a new level of resolve and determination. That’s when Jaune sees it. They’re barely wisps at the corners of her eyes, and he doubts anyone else watching notices it, but he doesn’t just see those wisps, he feels them.
And in that moment, the Grimm Prince feels… concern. Not fear, for he is still unafraid, but a little bit of worry, because this just became a lot more complicated. He only has a moment before Raven attacks, but speeding up his thought processes and inadvertently slowing down the world around him is easy enough.
Raven Branwen is a Maiden. He can feel it, can feel the magic within her. Salem had made sure to tell him all about the Season Maidens, but truth be told, she hadn’t really had to. Plenty of his Grimm memories involved dying by Maidens, just as much as they involved dying by hunters.
For this random bandit leader to be a Maiden… the Spring Maiden, if he had to guess, was surprising and also irritating beyond belief. Salem’s original plan, before he’d upended everything and taken control, had been to have Cinder absorb the power of all four Maidens, to finally end the cycle Ozma had dared to begin centuries ago.
Jaune had put a stop to that when he’d enacted his ‘live and let live’ policy with all of Remnant. He’d always known that meant the four Maidens were still out there, somewhere… but hadn’t expected to run into one within weeks of entering the human Kingdoms. Especially not in some village in the midst of a bandit attack.
And yet, here they were. To be fair, Raven was still not truly a threat. He could beat her, of that he had zero doubt. Even her Maiden Powers would not stop him from wiping the floor with her.
However… only magic could destroy magic. Put bluntly, if Raven brought out her Maiden Powers in this fight and started going at him seriously, the illusionary spell that Salem had cast over him to give him his currently human appearance, would potentially be shattered. His Grimm appearance would be revealed, and his little sojourn into human territory would almost certainly have to come to an abrupt end. To say nothing of how everyone would react if news of a living Grimm humanoid got out there. Because Jaune… Jaune wasn’t willing to kill everyone here just to keep his existence a secret.
That meant he had a choice to make, however. He COULD try and surrender. Raven had made it clear that if her opponent impressed her, she would let them live… and besides, if he tried to surrender and she still tried to kill him, that just defaulted to the other option, which was continuing the fight and likely losing his disguise.
If he backed down and surrendered, perhaps acting like it was all just some way of showing off his skills to the bandit leader, he could easily escape later on, probably. But if he chose to continue the fight, Raven’s Spring Maiden Powers would almost certainly reveal his true nature before he brought her down.
It would seem he’d been backed into a corner, with two bad decisions. But he could only accelerate his thought processes so much. The time before Raven would launch her attack was rapidly coming to an end, and he only had a moment of relative time to make a decision.