Red like Blood
is a RWBY/Hellsing crossover fanfic written by Jesse K and can be found on SpaceBattles.com.
Ruby encounters an odd, injured woman and tries to help her. Instead, she finds herself bitten and cursed with a dark power that she struggles to control. Can she become a Huntress while controlling her newfound vampiric urges?
According to the author, the fic is currently on hiatus.
Red like Blood provides examples of:
- Adaptational Badass: Ruby, in addition to her natural abilities from her home series, is turned into a vampire at the beginning of the story, granting her many new powers on top of that.
- Ambiguous Gender Identity: Legion has a female body, but she also tends to be referred to as "They/They're". This is because she's a manifestation of a sliver of the souls Alucard consumed (somewhere around the tens of thousands), containing countless male and female identities.
- Blessed with Suck: Ruby now has all the powers of a vampire added on to her natural abilities as a Huntress-in-training, but those abilities come with many drawbacks. She's prone to Sensory Overload since she doesn't know how to work with her enhanced senses, sunlight hurts like Hell, she frequently struggles to keep her bloodlust in check, she now has many razor-sharp canine teeth that freak anyone out when they see them, etc. Really, it's pretty accurate to call her powers a curse.
- Blood Knight: Quite literally with Ruby and Legion, as both have a sadistic urge to rip powerful enemies to pieces. While Legion is accepting of this and relishes in it, Ruby doesn't like her newfound bloodlust.
- Death by Adaptation:
- Mercury gets killed by Legion early into the story's events.
- Instead of Pyrrha dying to Cinder during the Battle of Beacon, Yang is killed via a stab through the back from Adam, and Ruby in return kills both Emerald and Adam.
- Fantastic Racism: Ruby tends to get subjected to this from time-to-time thanks to her vampiric features, which lead to many people assuming she's some type of Faunus.
- Humanoid Abomination: Legion, all the way. She's actually the physical manifestation of a portion of the souls Alucard absorbed after fighting Walter. As such, she has all the disturbing power that the No-Life King had.
- Implacable Man: Vampires, as in Hellsing, are incredibly hard to kill, and this is actually taken a step further once Aura enters the equation. It's implied that each soul they assimilate bolsters their Auras even further. Exploiting vampiric weaknesses is about the only real way to even slow them down.
- The Mentor: Legion is this to Ruby, teaching her fledgling how to properly harness her vampiric abilities.
- Outside-Context Problem: While Remnant has had vampires in the past, they've practically faded into myth to the point where almost no one knows about them by present day. As such, Ruby doesn't learn about what she is until after the battle at the docks and many just assume that she's some type of Faunus.
- Only I Can Kill Him: Or rather, her, in this case. Both Legion and Ruby want to be the one to kill Cinder, to the point they are actively preventing the other from finishing her off. It's not all to Cinder's benefit, as at one point, Ruby gets her out of Legion's grip by cutting off her arm.
- Red Eyes, Take Warning: Ruby's eyes turn red and demonic during the fight with Emerald and Adam when she starts tapping into her vampire powers. Notably, their very center remains silver, most likely due to her canon eye powers.
- Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Ruby's response to Yang's murder is about as terrifying as it is awesome.
- Scary Teeth: All vampires have these. Ruby's teeth get replaced by razor-sharp canines, and many who see them either find them creepy or think she's Faunus and treat her accordingly.
- Shout-Out:
- Hellsing Ultimate Abridged gets a few nods, and Yang directly quotes Alucard at one point.
- The mercenary Cinder employs to replace Mercury after his death is clearly based on Wolverine.
- The Stations of the Canon: Much of what happens in the first three Volumes of RWBY happens here. Because very little change happens, much of the events are skimmed over outside of the differences.
- Super-Strength: One of the main vampire powers Ruby has and makes use of. Even when she was a neophyte vampire, she was almost as strong as Yang.
- Too Dumb to Live: The Vale Council refuse to make so much as a token gesture towards Faunus rights just to spite Legion, and effectively do exactly what she publicly accuses them of in an attempt to see her defeated. This goes about as well as you'd expect it to.
