Archive of Our Own ^beta

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Ruby Rose is a sweet girl.

She's pretty and kind and well liked. No one has a bad word to say about the girl except that she can be a bit of a klutz and awkward with her words.

Everywhere she goes she wears her iconic red cloak, she never parts with it.

The red colour hides it well so most people don't notice, but it's apparent to Hunters with their keen sight and keener noses that it's stained with blood. Great rivulets as is someone had died in it.

Huntresses and Huntsmen alike are known for their eccentricities and Beacon doesn't disappoint.

But Ruby Rose is an exception even within the exceptional, both in talent and in dress.

At fifteen she's the youngest student at Beacon and she's unbeaten in combat and unsurpassed in theoretical knowledge.

Few can match her and most of them are older students entering their second and third years.

The only exception is her partner Weiss Schnee with who she's very close.

Her semblance is deceptively simple but all the mall deadly for it. Most can't fight someone they can't even see move. For shear speed she rivals Oobleck at his best. All it takes is a blink before you’re collapsing to the ground, your aura in the red.

She's a veritable ghost, absolutely invisible to all but the best trained eyes. In the end even Pyrrha the four times Mistral regional tournament champion succumbs before her insurmountable speed.

Weiss is not quite as unassailable as her partner but her defence is an impenetrable lattice work of flashing steel and her glyphs and dust usage render her nigh undefeatable at any range.

She can even hold Ruby off until she invariably runs out of dust or aura. The raging fires and titanic arches of lightning she weaves around herself are impressive and succeed at keeping Ruby at bay, but they're draining over extended periods of time.

Together they form a partnership that's unparalleled by any at Beacon.

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All she can remember is grabbing Weiss and running.

She'd never really pushed her semblance to its limits as the shakiness it induced made such high speed movement dangerous and clumsy. Eventually she reached such a speed that the landscape visually warped around her.

She'd continued to run as the world continued to distort, drops of rain frozen in place where they fell, and then at the last second before the wave had hit she jumped.

It was like she was being pushed and pulled in every direction, gravitational orientation was impossibility and up and down no longer existed and everything was whirling in a convalescing mass collapsing under its own deteriorating reality.

And then, in an instant, time and space were rewritten.