Chapter 1: Introductions

This work is a fanfiction of the fanfiction "The Games We Play" by Ryuuji. It can be found in the RWBY archive on Fanfiction as well as on Spacebattles. This chapter was edited with the recommendation of Gossard of Spacebattles.

I've decided to rewrite this tory from the first chapter.

Despite every expectation to the contrary, Saitama was feeling quite happy with himself.

It wasn't the fact that the last of the monsters had died which exalted him, but rather that, with the last of the monsters dead, and himself on the precipice of an ever duller world with this announcement...he didn't really feel all that different. He'd hit rock bottom long ago, it seemed!

Of course, any further philosophizing on the nature of happiness didn't bother to occur to Saitama, his thoughts being focused on the primary reason for his recent mood…the upcoming sale.

A crash of blood-red wave foamed up the shoreline, seeping into the sand. Saitama followed soon after, rising out of the water line with every step until, eventually, he found himself standing on firm sand, rivuets of muddy-red fluid streaming down his body as orange-foamed waves lapped periodically at his boots.

Casting a disappointed look at the haphazardly arranged crowd of yoga mats and beachfront properties laid out before him, Saitama mentally cancelled his beach day and weaved his way through the approaching throng of vacationers, ignoring whatever calls came hesitantly in his direction and avoiding all eye contact with the tourists as he hurriedly made his way out of the beach, the gleaming skyscrapers of Capital City towering ahead as if to mark his destination.

In his wake, a gathering crowd clustered tightly at the edge of the beachfront, all of them anxious to move closer but none of them willing to step forward, lest the delicate distance between them and the blood-waters be disturbed.

Despite so much attention suddenly paid to the water, and how every person flinched and drew back their toes with every rise and crash of the waves, none turned their eyes down towards it; every gaze locked firmly on the distant horizon ahead, where cyclopian pillars of flesh stood frozen, half sunk in the ocean and outlined crisply against the morning sky, each sporting a city-sized emptiness where something vital should have stayed.

"...and you are not to initiate conversation with any of the patients. If they speak to you, everything they say is to be considered a state secret the recording, dissemination, revelation, publication or mishandeling of which by, or for, any unauthorised third parties is considered a felony punishable by law; do you understand and agree to abide by these terms, Jaune Arc?" the cold lady said with a droning, uninflected tone, pulling her attention away from the pad cradled in her arms for just long enough to look impassively at me through the top rims of her glasses

"I do," I nodded, and not a second passed before she placed her hand on my arm and warped us away.

We arrived in the center of a makeshift camp in the middle of nowhere, greeted by the hot exhaust gasses of a landing bullhead. Calling on Ereb, I cleared away the rising cloud of dust, every particle of earth suddenly dropping like a stone and hardening into the desert ground. Ignoring the curious looks, I loosed Sustrya and Vultrunus, letting them deal with the Grimm as I tended to those that attracted them.

An earthen wall lined the perimeter of the camp; a line of tents crowded along its path and left an open clearing in the center that the bullhead just barely fit into, the noise of howling engines resonating off the walls to fill the camp claustrophobically as we hurriedly moved out of the shade of the descending vehicle, who's underbelly was just at head height when we finally made it to the edge of the clearing.

Outside, the sounds of battle leaked through the stone walls as hunters clashed with approaching grimm. Forming a bubble of silence around the camp, I focused back on the landing bullhead as its cargo door lowered and a small wash of blood leaked through, streaming onto the dusty ground as a potent, metallic smell washed out into the air.

I could see several of the medical crew flinch at this, though to their credit they didn't let this this stop them from rushing in to cart out the bodies and body parts. I kept a close eye on proceedings, focusing my attention on the slowing heart rates and blood soaked figures coming from the cargo bay, ignoring the small part of me which seemed enamored with the chaos of battle outside, I had to trust in my elementals to act competently on my behalf on that front.

Saitama peered cautiously at the two brands of rice held out in each hand, his body still wet from the public fountain he'd stepped through on his way here and cool, fountain water dripped from his cape in inconsistent dribbles onto the reflective, tiled floor of the supermarket.

He bobbed one bag of rice up and down in his outstretched limb, appraising the weight while trying to calculate how its price measured up.

"Sensei, I believe the price per pound is listed on the yellow sticker," Genos spoke, leaning closely forward, the exposed metal of his body still steaming with heat, glistening chrome marred with caked streaks of burnt monster flesh.

Saitama flipped one bag, peering closely at it with squinted eyes. "This country sure is weird," he commented, continuing on, "are you sure it's a good place to shop?" skeptically.

"Affirmative," Genos replied with a mechanical nod, "I've done as much research as time allowed for our mission, with sales season ending globally, it makes sense to come to the nation with the historically cheapest food prices."

"Hello! Welcome to Food Cob, how may I increase your expenditure here today!" a store associate appeared, sporting an identifying jacket and speaking with a tone so cheerily sweet it hurt Geno's teeth to listen to. Saitama's teeth were, of course, impervious to such an assault.

"Oh, uh, Herro," Saitama began, "uh, we," he began, waving the bags of rice about in an attempt at universal sign language. "Actually wait, wait," he began, setting down one of the bags to reach into the frog pouch which lay over his back pocket. From there he triumphantly pulled out a yellow handbook, titled boldly with the words, "Advanced English for Beginners: Now with a bilingual dictionary!"

Setting down the other bag of rice on a nearby shelf, he hunched over the advanced book in advanced concentration as he squinted at the water logged pages and flipped quickly through the work. "Rice, rice, where is the word," he murmured with softly moving lips.

"Where is the fucking Type-A!" the head physician next to me asked politely through the rushing mass of nurses and broken bodies that moved through the cramped quarters of the campsite. As politely as could be expected for a person asking for the fifth time, anyway.

And, as with the previous four times, his question went unheeded; the overworked nurses rushed obliviously between the various tents, none of them knowing the answer and all of them too busy to answer it anyhow.

Finishing with the last of my preparations, I felt the final strands of energy fall away from my tenuous grasp, the complex inter webbed design springing together with a taught flash, coming together in a momentary instant into the field I'd been forming around the camp.

My attention now freed, I turned my focus to the rest of the camp, which now stood in a deathly quiet. Despite their rush, the sudden atmosphere of healing and fortification crashing into existence staggered just about everybody, and I took that as a moment to act.

Psychokinetic forces converged on the bullhead, carrying bodies out on invisible stretchers as I stacked them neatly on invisible beds in the too-small tents surrounding the bull head. In a second, the cargo bay was empty, and I lifted it gently upward, hovering it over the camp walls; every head turned to follow its ponderous trajectory until it finally disappeared behind the crude, earthen walls and the movement of bodies demanded their attention once more.

Of course, turning back, they'd discovered any bodies that had been in their care were gone, having been pulled away into the quick, though gentle, swarm of bodies and body parts which flew through the air and into the various tents.

With the work on the field finished and the battle calming outside in what seemed an easy victory, there was little left for me to do other than match the bodies with their parts. It was a monotonous job once you ignored the context, sort of like those redundant puzzle games developers seemed to obsess over for some reason. The monotony of the job in this case, only left time for me to think on the situation, however.

The first thing I noticed was the Type-A blood bags, a crate full of them stuffed haphazardly in a far corner of the camp under a mound of other crates carrying medical gauze and anesthetics among other amenities.

They weren't alone in this regard, the types B and C were stuffed away in a completely separate part of the camp, piled high against the wall with leftover tent material.

Not really needing such things, I left them undisturbed, turning my attention to bodies...or what was left of them, in any case.

"Well, uh…" the cashier scowled lightly at the itemized briefcase full of coupons Genos laid out before her, "It appears that," she glared intently at her register once more, "that, once we take into account all sales and bulk deals, we owe you fifty dollars uh, Mr.,,,"

"Genos."

"Right, will you be needing any help with that, then, Mr. Genos," the cashier pointed back at the stacked pallets standing behind the pair, and the several tons of rice on top of those pallets.

"That won't be necessary."

"Ok, although it is against store policy for us to give you money, would you like to pick out any additional items worth up to fifty dollars," the cashier replied, the situation surprising enough to cause her to momentarily stop hiding her apathy.

In the meantime, Genos worked to translate the cashier's words.

"How about this spice rack?" Saitama interrupted, cradling the cherry wood item against his chest.

Shattered ribs, pulped liver, severe fracturing of the skull, several limbs missing: most likely vaporised, skin peeling away.

Distractions seemed to melt away more than usual as I analyzed the patient; still, I could feel that Gamer's mind doing something as I looked at the sight, realizing that these were all for one patient.

Here, I prepared a heal, energy building up with a soft glow as I monitored the body's condition, careful not to overcharge it with aura while it was still in such a fragile state.

Slowly and carefully I let the healing light shine out, aiding her struggling aura in it's desperate efforts to keep her heart pumping and her nervous system functioning. And, even on the brink of death and with little left of her body but some organs and an aura, I could still see...

The Traveler

LV 144

Hermaiza Shores

I didn't need my semblance to tell me much more about her. She was, like many hunters with that level of strength, a bit of a celebrity, even among the civilian population. The rest of the tent was filled with equally famous names, famous teams, twenty hunters in total and none of them dipping below level 100.

Hermaiza was in the best condition, I noted, probably losing consciousness after transporting their bodies away and only kept alive due to her aura and constitution.

This whole operation was a disaster, I noted. A casual observer might roll their eyes at such a keen deduction, but there was more to this mission than the blood and the bodies.

The general, haphazardly arranged, state of the camp came to mind. The outer perimeter walls were jagged and uneven, likely a rush job by someone with an earth semblance. The camp was packed and vastly under supplied and under staffed, and in no condition to even keep these hunters alive much less heal them in any fashion. Beyond this was the general atmosphere of unpreparedness, with nearly panicking medical staff and medical equipment dumped into any stray spot in between the tents.

Of course, I didn't blame the Vacuo government too much. Secret missions which called for several teams of elite hunters didn't come without danger, but they were also the kinds of missions the public didn't get to know about...not immediately, anyway. It would cause too much panic when an entire team of hunters was massacred, hence why many of the more public teams often enjoyed an uncelebrated "retirement" every now and then, as hunters like to joke.

So, in light of this, it made sense why a medical facility was being erected in the middle of a desert surrounded by Grimm. And it also made sense why a teleporter showed up at my door with a confidentiality waiver at what was essentially the eleventh hour.

And of course, it also explained why the camp was in such a sorry state. The Councils weren't stupid, they knew every mission was a gamble, and sending several top teams into one showed they didn't underestimate the danger of this one. So I had no doubt that they accepted failure as a very real option. What they didn't expect, however, was for the Hunters to fail and then return alive.

Well, I suppose it might have been a stretch to call these hunters alive, per se. In fact, I was sure they could have dropped down at the steps of the Atlas National Medical Center and half of them would be declared legally dead, and the others practically so. As far as anyone knew, there were no modern methods that could deal with trauma of this degree.

Well, no methods except mine.

Finishing the preparations, I could feel each body stabilizing, heart beats synchronizing as a wave of power built up like static in the tent, like a crashing wave tottering at its apex, waiting for just the right moment…

The dry, tent air flashed like burning film, a fiery heal collapsing through the space and leaving the patients blinking as the hunters lay pristinely in their invisible cots. Some of them regained consciousness, groaning in suppressed pain as they moved whatever limbs they had left.

Hermaiza was the first to notice me.

Blurred feet paddled over open water, an exploding wave following in their wake as Saitama and Genos stepped over the calm waters, precarious pallets of rice balanced atop their shoulders as they respectively ran and rocketed over the ocean surface.

"So, that was cheap!" Saitama announced with a beaming smile, holding tightly in one hand the spice rack with its labelled ingredients.

"Fuck!" Hermaiza swore through gritted teeth, watching helplessly as the character on her scroll screen fell into a chasm for the fourth time.

Tossing away the device with a disgusted expression, she turned her attention back to my work, by this point sufficiently convinced in my ability that she could bear to train her eyes on the meticulous efforts weaving her body back together.

"So, you're the new wiz kid." she turned her eyes to me, feeling a certain tension as her eyes told her of damage she couldn't feel and the all-too-calm quiet seemed to amplify every sound as the rest of her team slept peaceably nearby, fully healed and under several fields of comforting warmth.

She was the last of the group I'd gotten to, the entire process taking several hours from beginning to end. Of course, I could've just layed down an area heal and blasted them into okayness within ten seconds of their arriving here. But healing was a far subtler process than that, as I'd grown to appreciate. Casting a heal wasn't like casting a fireball or punching someone in the face. It was a far more mentally taxing process, one that was different for every incident and involved thousands of critical steps carried out across the minutest of spaces and timescales. And, more than that, while healing someone's body was all well and fine, shocking what was basically a corpse back into a fully aware and suddenly healthy body was...not ideal, to put it lightly. So, considering my circumstances, I took my time. Slowly and gradually I resuscitated everyone, keeping close and letting them aware of my presence, even if only through aura contact. At the same time, I stacked whatever calming mental status effects I had in my arsenal, keeping those who were capable aware enough to observe the process and take comfort in having some agency over their bodies, in any case.

And Hermaiza, as the least injured, was the last of my patients, and the most talkative.

"I'm just a healer; I-"

"Oh, don't give me that bullshit!" she interrupted suddenly, waving her arms about emphatically. "What? Did you actually let Doctor Deliverance scare you into talking like a bureaucrat on her behalf?" she said with an irreverent scoff.

"Maybe a little," I answered with a humored expression. "Mostly, she just told me about the need for secrecy on orders of the Vacuo Counci-"

"The Vacuo council can bite me, and this desert can go to hell, maybe it'll find some company," she drew her arms closer with a huff that seemed to be a dying laugh. "Seriously, they're lucky they pay me exactly enough for this bullshit," she seethed through gritted teeth, anxious to talk and looking for an excuse to do so.

I was happy to oblige on that front.

"What happened?" I asked after an interminable pause, tilting my head as if seeking answers only she could provide. "What kind of Grimm...?" I left the question unfinished.

As It happened, I asked this just as I reattached her lower body, and a pitched laughter escaped her as an almost painfully giddy sensation sprung up in her gut with the reattachment of her spinal cord. Although, I was sure there was more to the reaction than the sudden feeling in her legs.

"Grimm?" She laughed yet more uncontrollably, her hollow laughter ringing out through the dry heat of the tent, seeming almost solid in the diffuse light that filled the space underneath the translucent canopy. "You think Grimm did this?" she asked, as if finding the proposition genuinely funny, barely able to speak it without collapsing into yet more enraptured laughter.

"What else could have?" I asked.

She slowed in her laughter, a sudden formality to her tone as if she were preparing a report. "It wasn't a what that did this," her eyes narrowed.

"Then who?"

She paused, taking half a breath. "You've heard of The White Tiger?" she asked me.

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