Alter (rwby/fate crossover with Jaune as a demi servant of Jeanne Alter): Chapter 2: blazes of hatred

Jaune had thrown his shield aside.

Crocea Mors in both hands.

He hadn't trained.

Hadn't practiced.

But he'd fought.

Every night.

Under banners.

With God whispering in his ears.

He'd slaughtered enemies. Buried armies.

Led a war.

His body moved.

Hate surged like a black fire inside.

Feet shifted.

Blade rose.

Stance changed.

He wasn't Jaune Arc.

Not anymore.

Jaune was a fake. Jeanne was real.

A fluke.

Jeanne d'Arc—

Jeanne was a killer, not a hero. Jaune was not a hero.

And to win—

Yet to win—

He needed to become her.

Cardin's laughter cut off as he registered the shift. Something in the air had changed—thickened like blood seeping through cloth. The mace in his hand suddenly felt inadequate against the look in Jaune's eyes. Those weren't the eyes of the boy he thought he could bully. Those weren't even the eyes of an aspiring Huntsman. They were the eyes of someone who had watched cities burn and armies die and still walked away. Those were the eyes of a monster.

Those were the eyes of a sinner.

Goodwitch's voice seemed distant. "Continue."

But the fight had already continued in the fractured moments before the word left her mouth.

Jaune's next step cratered the floor beneath him. Not the small indent of a heavy boot—no, a spiderweb of cracks erupted from his heel as he propelled himself forward with enough force to shatter reinforced concrete. The arena, built to withstand the force of Huntsmen-in-training, groaned at the unexpected strain. The sound came a fraction of a second after the movement—a thunderclap of displaced air as Jaune's body broke through invisible barriers of speed his untrained form had never approached.

Cardin barely raised his mace.

The clash rang through the amphitheater like a church bell, iron against steel, Dust coated weapon against pure hatred. The shockwave from their weapons meeting sent ripples through the air, buffeting the front row of spectators. Ruby's cape fluttered. Weiss's hair whipped across her face. Pyrrha leaned forward, eyes wide with disbelief.

For a moment, they stood locked—Cardin's mace horizontal against the downward pressure of Jaune's blade. The larger boy's arms trembled. Sweat beaded on his forehead. This wasn't the Arc he had observed those last days. This wasn't the same skinny, pathetic excuse for a Huntsman he’d been suspicious of, that didn’t deserve in his opinion his place here, his place as a leader, a hunter.

Jaune's eyes never left Cardin's. They burned—not with determination or even anger, but with something older. Something colder. The hate of centuries. The wrath of an avenger.

Burn.

The word wasn't his. It came from somewhere deeper, somewhere buried beneath his ribs where the silver strands of his hair took root.

Jaune pushed harder. His aura flared around him—not the soft golden glow of his usual reserves, but something mottled and fierce, gold shot through with threads of black like tainted lightning. The floor beneath them cracked further, stone dust rising in clouds around their feet.

Cardin grunted, pouring more of his own considerable strength into holding back the blade. "The hell is wrong with you, Arc?" he hissed through clenched teeth.

Jaune said nothing. Words would have been Jaune's. This was not Jaune.

Instead, he twisted—a movement learned in another life, on another battlefield, in another body. The blade slid against the haft of the mace with a screech of metal, then disengaged as Jaune spun. Cardin, suddenly pushing against nothing, stumbled forward just as Crocea Mors completed its arc and slammed into his side.

The impact sent Cardin flying. Not staggering. Not stumbling. Flying. His bulk cut through the air like a cannonball until he crashed into the arena wall hard enough to leave a Cardin-shaped impression. Dust and concrete fragments showered down around him as he slid to the floor, his aura flickering visibly around his form, hemorrhaging energy to repair the damage from a single blow.

The amphitheater fell silent. Even Goodwitch seemed momentarily at a loss for words.

Cardin pulled himself up, spitting phlegm and saliva onto the arena floor. His eyes had narrowed, the earlier mockery replaced by genuine anger and—yes—the first inklings of fear. "Lucky shot," he growled, but the tremor in his voice betrayed his uncertainty.

Jaune advanced. Each step was measured now, unhurried. The blade in his hands dragged along the ground, leaving a groove in the stone as if it weighed a thousand pounds—or as if he wanted the sound to fill his opponent's ears with the promise of what was to come.

Cardin's grip on his mace tightened. The fire Dust crystal embedded at its head began to glow brighter with nascent energy. "You want to play rough?" he snarled. "Let's play rough."

He slammed the mace into the ground.

The Dust crystal detonated, sending a shockwave of explosive force racing across the arena floor in a straight line toward Jaune. It ripped through stone like tissue paper, sending chunks of the floor flying in all directions. Students in the stands ducked to avoid debris, some raising their arms to shield their faces.

Jaune didn't move.

The fissure reached him, erupting in a geyser of flame and stone that completely obscured his form.

Cardin straightened, a smirk returning to his face. "Not so tough after—"

Crocea Mors burst through the smoke, trailing fire like a comet.

It embedded itself in the wall an inch from Cardin's head.

The larger boy froze, eyes widening as he stared at the blade quivering in the concrete by his ear. Then his gaze shifted back to the settling dust.

Jaune emerged, empty-handed. But not weaponless.

His aura crackled around his fingers like St. Elmo's fire, black and gold and something else—something that made the air smell of scorched metal and hatred. As he walked, the floor seemed to warp beneath him, cracking not from pressure but from some deeper violation of its existence. The stone didn't break; it rejected him, as if his mere presence was anathema to reality.

Within him, voices whispered. Not his. Hers.

They deserved to burn.

He was the one to burn us.

He will pay.

They will pay.

They will all burn.

You are vengeance incarnate. The wrath of a thousand pyres.

His hair fell across his face as he walked, and the silver strands caught the light like knife edges.

Cardin yanked his mace up and swung it in a wide arc, aiming for Jaune's exposed head. It was a desperate move, fueled more by  something akin to fear than strategy. The weapon moved fast enough to distort the air around it, trailing a barely-visible vacuum in its wake.

Jaune's hand shot up.

He caught the mace.

Not the handle. The head. The spiked, metal, Dust-infused head meant to crush bone and rupture organs. He caught it with his bare hand, his aura flaring at the point of impact but holding. The shockwave of their contact rolled outward, rustling papers on Goodwitch's clipboard and making the lights flicker.

For a moment, they stood like a tableau—Cardin with arm extended, straining to push his weapon forward; Jaune with arm raised, fingers curled around the instrument of his torment.

Then Jaune squeezed.

The metal groaned. Warped. The Dust crystal at its core began to fracture under the pressure.

"Let go!" Cardin shouted, trying to wrench the weapon free.

Jaune's eyes met his. "As you wish."

The voice that emerged wasn't his. It held echoes of something older, something wicked, something feminine, something bitter—a voice that had commanded armies and passed judgment on the guilty. A voice that had been silenced by flame but that had never forgotten.

He released the mace and stepped to the side in one fluid motion. Cardin, still pulling with all his might, suddenly found himself yanking against nothing. The momentum sent him stumbling forward, off-balance and vulnerable.

Jaune's fist connected with his stomach.

The impact didn't just knock the wind from Cardin's lungs—it folded him nearly in half, feet leaving the ground as his body tried to accommodate the impossible force behind the blow. A visible ripple traveled through his aura as it struggled to absorb the damage. The sound was like a thunderclap, crisp and deafening.

Before Cardin could even begin to fall, Jaune's knee rose to meet his descending face.

The crack of bone meeting bone echoed through the arena. Blood sprayed from Cardin's nose despite the protection of his aura—a testament to the sheer force behind the blow. His head snapped back, eyes momentarily losing focus as his brain rattled inside his skull.

But Jaune wasn't done.

Grabbing the front of Cardin's breastplate, he lifted the larger boy off his feet as if he weighed nothing. The metal armor crumpled under his grip like aluminum foil. For a suspended moment, they locked eyes—Cardin's wide with terror, Jaune's narrowed with centuries of accumulated rage.

"This—isn't—how a hunter-fight ," Cardin managed to gasp.

No, Jaune thought distantly, as if watching himself from underwater. It isn't. But perhaps it should be.

He hurled Cardin across the arena.

The boy's bulk cut through the air like a missile, trailing fragments of his shattered armor. He impacted the opposite wall with enough force to crater it inward by several feet, disappearing into a cloud of pulverized concrete. The entire building shook with the impact, light fixtures swaying overhead.

In the stands, the students had gone deathly silent. Ruby clutched her cape with white knuckles. Weiss's hand covered her mouth in shock. Blake had stopped reading, her book forgotten in her lap. Even Yang seemed at a loss for quips.

And Pyrrha—Pyrrha who had  unlocked his aura, Pyrrha who was his partner, She alone stood, one hand half-extended as if to intervene, uncertainty written across her features.

Goodwitch stepped forward, her crop raised. "That's enough—"

But the rubble where Cardin had landed shifted. A hand emerged, then an arm, then his entire dust-covered form as he pulled himself free of the wreckage. Blood ran freely from his nose and a split lip, but his eyes burned with humiliation and rage.

"I'm not done," he snarled.

He reached down and reclaimed his mace from where it had fallen. The Dust crystal at its heart pulsed with angry red light, responding to its wielder's emotions. With a primal roar, he charged across the arena, each footfall leaving cracks in the already-damaged floor. The mace trailed fire as he raised it overhead, preparing to bring it down with every ounce of strength his considerable frame could muster.

Jaune watched him come.

Something stirred in his chest—not Jaune's hesitation or fear, but Jeanne's calculation. The cold arithmetic of the battlefield. The dispassionate assessment of an enemy's weaknesses.

Right foot plants harder than left. Overextends his swing. Head unprotected during the follow-through. Relies on brute force, not precision.

He waited until the last possible second.

Cardin's mace descended like a meteor, trailing fire and fury.

Jaune stepped into the strike—not away from it. One hand shot up, deflecting the haft of the mace just enough that its head missed him by inches. The displaced air ruffled his hair as the weapon passed, but he was already inside Cardin's guard, moving with a grace that had never belonged to Jaune Arc.

His elbow connected with Cardin's chin, snapping his head back.

His knee drove into the side of Cardin's knee, buckling the joint with an audible pop.

His palm struck Cardin's chest, directly over his heart, with enough force that the larger boy's aura visibly rippled like the surface of a pond struck by a stone.

Three strikes. Less than a second. Each precisely targeted to maximize damage while minimizing effort—the practiced efficiency of someone who had fought not for sport but for survival.

Cardin staggered back, off-balance and dazed. But something had ignited in him now—something beyond the bully's casual cruelty. Real desperation. Real fear. He swung the  remnants of his mace in wild arcs, no longer aiming so much as trying to create space, to keep the monster wearing Jaune's skin at bay.

The fire Dust in his weapon activated with each swing, leaving trails of flame in the air like the strokes of a painter's brush. Beautiful and deadly. The temperature in the arena rose perceptibly as the flames licked at the ceiling, setting off distant alarms.

Jaune walked through the fire.

His aura didn't just protect him from the heat—it seemed to consume it, threads of black energy wicking the flames away like water into thirsty soil. Each step left footprints of smoldering stone, not from the fire but from something colder and more destructive emanating from within him.

He extended his hand toward Crocea Mors, still embedded in the wall.

The sword trembled.

Then tore itself free and flew across the arena to his waiting grip, trailing stone dust as it cut through the air.

The gasps from the audience were audible even over the crackle of flames. Semblances were usually not that complex. There were a singular ability, an expression born of the soul that were at best multifaceted due to genetic quirks like with the Schnees or due to learning, innovating new ways to use it. Semblances generally didn’t allow you to do two very different things especially without dust.

It was not telekinesis that made the sword move.

It was ownership.

The sword was a banner. A symbol of authority. And she—

I am authority. I am judgment. I am the flame that purifies.

Cardin backed away, his confident facade cracking like thin ice. "What the hell are you?" he whispered, voice barely audible over the flames still licking at the arena floor.

Jaune's response was to raise his sword. The blade caught the firelight, reflecting it in strange patterns across the walls. For a moment—just a moment—it seemed to change shape, darkening, lengthening into something more akin to a battle standard than a weapon.

Then he attacked.

The distance between them vanished. One moment Jaune stood ten feet away; the next, he was inside Cardin's guard, blade already in motion. Crocea Mors—the yellow death—lived up to its name as it carved through the air with a sound like tearing silk.

Cardin raised his mace in desperate defense.

The weapons met with a sound like a thunderclap. Sparks erupted from the point of contact, not the orange sparks of metal on metal, but something darker—embers that seemed to consume light rather than emit it.

The mace's haft cracked.

Cardin stumbled back, eyes wide as he stared at the fracture running through his weapon. "That's impossible," he breathed. "This is reinforced with—"

Jaune didn't let him finish. The next strike came from below, a rising slash that caught the mace where it was already weakened. This time, the weapon didn't just crack—it shattered, the head separating from the haft with a sound like breaking glass. The Dust crystal at its core flared briefly, then died, its energy spent.

Cardin stood disarmed, holding nothing but a useless stick as the head of his weapon clattered to the floor yards away.

Jaune advanced.

Step by step.

Inexorable.

The sword in his hand seemed to lengthen with each footfall, transforming from Crocea Mors into something else—something that trailed shadows and flame in equal measure.

In the stands, Pyrrha half-rose from her seat. "Jaune, stop!"

Her voice barely registered. It came from so far away—from a world where Jaune Arc existed, where he was a bumbling student with dreams of heroism. Not from this world of blood and ash and righteous vengeance.

Cardin backed away until he hit the wall. Nowhere left to retreat. His aura flickered weakly around him, dangerously depleted. One more solid hit would shatter it completely, leaving him vulnerable to the full brunt of whatever Jaune—or the thing wearing Jaune's skin—intended.

"I yield," he said, raising his hands. "I surrender, alright? You win!"

Jaune's advance didn't slow. If anything, the words seemed to fuel the fire in his eyes.

They always surrender when defeat is certain. They always beg when the sword is at their throat. But mercy is not justice. Surrender is not atonement.

He raised the sword.

Cardin closed his eyes.

"Mr. Arc!"

Goodwitch's voice cracked like a whip, cutting through the strange fugue that had descended over the arena. A barrier of purple energy materialized between Jaune and his prey, the professor's semblance manifesting to prevent what her instincts told her was coming next.

"The match is over," she said, her voice stern but with an undercurrent of genuine concern. "Mr. Winchester has surrendered. Stand down immediately."

The sword hung in the air, arrested mid-swing.

For a moment, everything balanced on a knife's edge. The barrier hummed with energy, ready to repel an assault. The audience held their collective breath. Even the flames seemed to pause in their dance, as if the very elements were waiting to see what happened next.

Inside Jaune's mind, a war raged.

He deserves it. They all deserve it. Burn the unworthy. Cleanse with flame.

But beneath that voice—older, colder, wreathed in smoke and vengeance—another voice struggled to be heard. Smaller. Uncertain. But persistent.

This isn't me. This isn't what I want to become.

The sword trembled in his grip.

Silver strands of hair fell across his vision, catching the light like metallic thread. How many now? Six? Seven? More sprouting even as he stood frozen between action and restraint?

His reflection stared back at him from Goodwitch's barrier—distorted by the energy field but clear enough to see what he was becoming. What he had already become.

The eyes that looked back weren't his.

They were hers.

Yellow, like fire seen through smoke. Burning with a hatred born centuries ago and carried across time like a contagion.

But they were in his face.

Slowly, the sword lowered.

Jaune blinked, and when his eyes opened again, they were blue once more—not the confident blue of a hero, but the confused, frightened blue of a boy lost in a nightmare he couldn't escape.

The black threads in his aura receded, leaving only the pure white glow. The sword in his hand shrank back to Crocea Mors' familiar dimensions.

"I..." His voice cracked. "I'm sorry."

The words weren't directed at Cardin. They weren't even directed at Goodwitch, who still maintained her barrier, watching him with the caution one might afford a wild animal. They were directed inward, at the thing stirring beneath his skin, the presence that had guided his hand and filled his mind with visions of judgment and fire.

Goodwitch studied him for a long moment before slowly lowering her crop, allowing the barrier to dissipate. "The match is concluded," she announced, voice deliberately neutral. "Jaune Arc is the victor by surrender."

The words should have felt triumphant. A victory over his tormentor. Proof that he belonged at Beacon despite his fraudulent entrance.

Instead, they tasted like ash in his mouth.

He turned away from Cardin, from Goodwitch, from the silent audience watching him with newfound wariness. His gaze fell to the sword in his hand. Crocea Mors. The yellow death. His family's legacy.

Only now did he understand the weight of that name.

Death wasn't glory. It wasn't heroism. It was blood and pain and the empty eyes of the fallen—things he'd never seen with his own eyes but now remembered with perfect clarity through hers.

He sheathed the sword with hands that shook only slightly.

Then walked away.

Not toward his team. Not toward his friends. Just away, toward the exit, each step carefully measured to appear normal while his insides twisted with the knowledge of what had almost happened. What he had almost done.

Behind him, he could hear the murmurs starting. The questions. The theories. The inevitable spread of rumor and speculation.

"Did you see—"

"His eyes changed—"

"The way he moved—"

"Never seen someone look so scared before—"

He didn't look back.

Didn't slow his pace.

Just walked with the steady rhythm of someone who knows exactly where they're going, even as their destination remains a mystery to them.

The double doors of the training arena closed behind him with a sound like distant thunder, leaving him alone in the empty corridor. His footsteps echoed on the polished floor, each one a heartbeat marking time until...

Until what?

He didn't know.

But something had changed today. Something fundamental. A threshold crossed that could never be uncrossed.

He reached up and touched his hair, finding another silver strand among the gold.

Eight now.

He pulled it loose, a single thread of moonlight against his fingertips.

It didn't break.

How many more? he wondered. How many until there's nothing left of me at all?

The answer came in a voice that wasn't his, a whisper like smoke through the chambers of his heart.

As many as necessary.

*

In the locker room, away from curious eyes, Jaune stood before the mirror. His reflection stared back—familiar yet increasingly foreign. The changes were subtle still, but undeniable. The silver strands framing his face. The slight alteration to his posture—straighter, more rigid, a soldier's bearing rather than a student's slouch. The new calluses on his palms where sword and standard had once rested.

He raised his hand and watched his reflection do the same.

For a moment—just a heartbeat—the image flickered. Changed.

Armor instead of a uniform. A banner instead of a sword. Hair fully silver, like moonlight spun into thread. Eyes that had seen cities burn and armies fall. A woman's face, hardened by war and betrayal, yet still beautiful in its cold perfection.

Jeanne d'Arc. The Dragon Witch. The Avenger.

Then his reflection was his own again.

But the memory lingered.

And somewhere in the distance, he could hear the sound of flames.

This is only the beginning, her voice whispered from the depths of his soul. We have so much work to do. So many to judge. So many to burn.

Jaune closed his eyes.

And smelled smoke.

And felt as if fire was consuming his flesh.