A/N: Hot. Fucking. Damn. Volume 7 is...unexpectedly great, and greatly unexpected.

Sometimes, it is the smallest things that cause the biggest differences. The tiniest spark can light the greatest fire. The most simple soul can incite the most drastic changes.

A butterfly flaps its wings…

And half a world away, a tornado swirls to life…

A God takes a stand…

Among the infinite depths of space, reality blinks…

And something that should have forgotten, remembers…

Kratos had a deep, bad feeling in his stomach.

Which, thinking about it, might be thanks to the violent red beams smashing into his stomach hot and hard enough to sizzle the air around him. If he could feel it, it might even concern him mildly about singing his clothes.

The beams finally cut off, and the young, panting boy in front of him glared in disbelief at the lack of even a singed hair on Kratos' stomach.

"Are you finished?"

As it so turned out, he was not finished.

Bellona hummed peacefully from her perch in a tree, stroking the wings of the relaxed, slightly bruised woman sprawled across her lap.

"And that's when I met Kratos, officially, anyway."

"Wow. He sounds remarkable."

"Sweetheart, that ain't the half of it. Now then, where was I? Ah, right, when he socked Jupiter in the nuts…"

If Kratos had a watch, he would be staring at it really condescendingly right about now.

Kids these days, just because their eyes had star-shaped pupils, were more colorful than a Vacuoan hippie and shot lasers, they thought they had a right to waste time shooting their beams off endlessly when it clearly wasn't working.

"GAAAHHH!" The younger god-born screamed his frustration, falling onto a knee, black-rooted, violet-tipped hair flopping dramatically against his soaked forehead, the rest of it trailing down his thin, loose, brown shirt, almost reaching his black shorts.

"Are you done, yet?"

The twitch in the boy's shoulder turned into a high-speed shiver, and the next set of eye-beams crashed into Kratos' nose.

"And it turns out they were roommates."

"Oh my Gods they were roommates."

"Right?! Anyways, that's when Ra showed his feathery face, and holy hell if he wasn't pissed about the whole ordeal…"

Kratos, currently being shot in the forehead, sighed and wondered if Ozpin would give him a raise if he punted this brat into the atmosphere.

He somehow doubted it.

"AHHHH! WHY WON'T YOU DIE?!"

"If this is how you thank people who save you from underground facilities, then your first lesson will be in manners."

The next beam caught him squarely in the crotch.

"-and that's the story of Me."

"Wait, so, hold on, your father-"

"Yup."

"B-But how?!"

"Mother was...forward."

"He was unconscious!"

"Very forward."

Kratos felt...on the whole neutral.

The students watching him drag a sweaty, out of breath, currently-shooting-the-back-of-his-skull with red eye-lasers probably disagreed, but he really wasn't in the mood for opinions right now.

"Right, so, Kratos-Fraana, Fraana-Kratos. Say hi, you old geezer."

Kratos paused for all of a second to glance at the winged, docile woman walking next to Bellona.

"Hi."

And then he was marching towards his office again, idly aware of team Rwby staring at him from their window as the boy being dragged by his ankle turned into a deer and tried to buck his way out of the paler God's grip.

It didn't work, but hey, the effort was what mattered.

Right up until a hoof smacked his knapsack, then the only thing Kratos could focus on mattering was not killing the freshly god-hooded teen as he thrashed him across the fighting ring.

He wasn't frustrated over Bellona getting the calm one, and he wasn't frustrated that the boy had kicked the part of his bag where he kept Atreus' arrow.

He wasn't.

A/N: Short, I know, but I wanted to finish up the 'retrieval' as it were, and update now that I've finished Volume 7.