Remnant is under siege. The last dredges of humanity cling to life within the arcologies - cramped cities struggling to make ends meet - as the Grimm and worse draw close. Life is cheap, and the sacrifices are many. Jaune Arc was just a private, Engineering Corps, 412th Division, when a mission gone wrong threw him into the death sentence that is Beacon Academy. Remnant Invicta.
— FanFiction.Net summary
Remnant Invicta
is a RWBY Alternate Universe Fic written by Coeur Al'Aran.
Completed as of September 19, 2023.
This fanfiction provides examples of:
- Adaptational Badass:
- Jaune starts the story with military training and a brief education in combat engineering, rather than... nothing. That still means he's pathetically weak compared to just about anything he's expected to fight, but that's mostly because the standard set by the enemy is correspondingly higher.
- Beowolves, one of the most basic and throwaway Grimm in canon, have intentionally been evolved by Salem to be far more dangerous. A squad of soldiers could probably shoot a Beowolf to death in the show — here, one tears a swath through Jaune's squad, crushing some to gibs with strength alone and almost ignoring their gunfire, only going down when a whole munitions crate is detonated in its face. Later, a squad of six Huntsman trainees fight some in the field. They can comfortably fight one Beowolf without being in serious danger, but don't manage to kill it even after nearly a minute of combat and are forced to flee when another handful show up. By contrast, the very first thing viewers ever saw of RWBY was an entire swarm of Beowolves getting cut down by one hero without breaking a sweat.
- Adaptational Heroism:
- Blake here doesn't have her canon history of having perpetrated acts of terrorism.
- This version of Raven stayed and fought for humanity before dying in the line of duty.
- Adaptational Jerkass: Velvet. A shy, nervous doormat, she ain't — rather, she's a brutal hardass who Jaune considers a giant bitch by the end of their first interaction.
- Adaptational Job Change: Suffice it to say that not a lot of people have the opportunity to pursue mundane passions at their own pace like their canon counterparts...
- Unlike canon, where he conned his way directly from aimless teenager to superpowered monster-fighting, Jaune starts off having enlisted in the military normally, specifically the Engineering Corps, which if all went well would have eventually put him in a role away from the front lines.
- Just about every character who is training to be a Huntsman or Huntress, who in canon were basically freelance mercenaries and not directly controlled by the government, are instead part of the overall military chain of command with regular soldiers and officers. They're closer to Atlas's Special Operatives than canon Huntsmen in general.
- Junior hawks homemade moonshine as a hobby, but is implied to have a respectable job in administration rather than organized crime or even actual bartending.
- Weiss and Winter aren't Huntress-trained, and their family and company aren't business magnates in the private energy sector. Rather, they're scientists working on wartime R&D for the government.
- Adaptational Wimp:
- Conversely with being more trained and competent, characters who aren't Huntsmen or Huntresses in this setting do not have Aura, making them less physically powerful than they were in canon. Cardin, Sky, and Jaune (at first) are/were examples of Huntsmen being retooled as regular soldiers and ending up weaker than they would have been. Weiss and Winter don't have Aura or any training and can't threaten normal soldiers at all.
- Jaune is noticeably weaker with Aura than he was in canon. While a novice at first, he was shown to have extraordinary capacity and be a natural at controlling it (rendering most combat into Amusing Injuries), compared to here where he wasn't recognized for exceptional aptitude while others were and can't fully get the hang of it even after weeks of instruction.
- Salem herself ends up undergoing this. She may have been alive for a long, long time, but she has devolved into something more akin to a semi-intelligent monster and Hive Queen than the cunning villain she was in canon. And as the last two chapters prove, she isn't immortal either, as Project Terminus manages to kill her for good.
- Adaptation Relationship Overhaul:
- Most of the main characters seem to have the same parentage as canon, but since they were gestated by machinery and born directly into military service, there's no actual family relationship, just a genetic one. None of them know their parents personally, and never will as most of them are dead.
- Sun is a student at Beacon Academy instead of Mistral, due to how Vale and Atlas are the only two arcologies left standing by the time the story starts.
- Adapted Out:
- Throughout the story, there's no indication that Ozpin is a host of Ozma or that Ozma is active at all, even when readers get his own narration. His absence may be part of the reason the situation on Remnant has gotten so bad. Or, as the whole story is his own writing for the public, he intentionally omitted that aspect of his identity, but either way there's no evidence.
- All the main student characters have counterparts in this story, but a version of Pyrrha is conspicuously never identified (unless she was the unnamed young red-haired ace pilot who flies them out for one of their missions).
- Artificial Limbs: Ozpin lost one leg on the same doomed operation Jaune lost one of his squads in, and now has a metal replacement of some kind. Unfortunately(?) it's apparently a mundane prosthetic rather than a robot limb, meaning it isn't suitable for battle and so he's been sidelined from active duty.
- Bedmate Reveal: The morning after Jaune's welcoming party to Phoenix Squad, he wakes up hungover in bed with Ruby. After numbly wondering what that implies happened, he realizes they're both mostly still clothed, and remembers her barging in during the night so she could escape hearing Yang and Blake go at it in the same room. It happens again later after they both get hammered doing body shots, and Yang is in the middle of congratulating them on the sex (and bitching them out for drinking the whole stockpile) before they think to verify what actually happened, and learn that no, they still haven't done anything.
- Better to Die than Be Killed: Soldiers with debilitating wounds generally aren't brought to safety because they'll just become a liability to their able-bodied comrades. But being mutilated or crushed to death by Grimm is still awful, and there's the possibility they'll be overtaken by Rot, so they carry a Cyanide Pill to end it on their own terms.
- Bittersweet Ending: Every named/major character, including Jaune and Ruby in the Final Battle, ends up dying, with Ozpin being the Sole Survivor. However, they managed to save the world, with their sacrifice allowing Project Terminus to kill Salem for good. And even twenty years later, the people of Remnant are starting to rebuild, living in a world free of the Grimm, while Ozpin spends his final days content with knowing the world will be safe.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The original show was pretty light on blood, even when people got stabbed or dismembered. This fic sets the tone in the first chapter with a level of bloody violence closer to what's seen in Attack on Titan, which is one of several explicit inspirations.
- Born Winner:
- Most of the Huntsman pipeline is composed of people who had the ability to manifest and use Aura without having someone unlock it or instruct them how. That's generally a sign of high natural aptitude and strong capacity, making the long training investment worth it. The majority come from Uterine Replicators fed with material from older candidates. Jaune is an exception for being born naturally and displaying Aura aptitude much later in life.
- Yang had extra-high expectations on her from the start because of her lineage, as the Branwen siblings are/were apparently some of the strongest and most effective graduates the Huntsman program ever had. If needing special rules to protect her sparring partners is any indication, they might have been on to something.
- Brainwashed and Crazy: The Grimm Rot’s effect.
- Crapsack World: This version of Remnant doesn't have the same degree of normalcy you find in the major cities in canon. Humanity is in existential danger from an enemy that is actively dismantling their civilization, and all that's left of their lives is the struggle for survival.
- Culture Clash: There's a little bit of friction between the displaced Atlesian scientists working on Project Terminus and the military in Vale who received and is currently guarding them, which characters suppose comes from their entire lives and upbringing being so different. The scientists had historically been kept away from any danger and only interacted with people with a similar level of knowledge, meaning the level of security they have to deal with is new and irritating to them, and they have a habit of blabbing secret info thoughtlessly because they've never had to deal with people who don't already know it. Meanwhile the guards see their jobs as babysitting unruly toddlers because of how undisciplined the scientists are about procedure, and are really nervous that overhearing things they don't have clearance for will cause problems for them.
- Curb-Stomp Battle:
- Jaune's squad doesn't stand a chance against the current, improved incarnation of the Beowolf Grimm. Their weapons don't seem to hurt it and it crushes and rips them apart without even trying.
- Jaune doesn't respond well to academic Aura training... so older cadet Velvet goes the route of hard-knocks, hoping he'll instinctively activate it to protect himself. He needs to be carried away afterwards. Apparently Sun needed to go through something similar when he started out.
- Cyanide Pill: It's standard procedure for wounded military personnel to take their own lives with a pill so that their able-bodied comrades don't have to be slowed down dragging them to safety in event of a retreat. This was Cardin's fate, in one of Jaune's previous doomed squads.
- Darker and Edgier: The fanfic embodies the idea "What if RWBY was like Attack on Titan?", and Coeur does his damndest to bring it to life with horrific results. The story starts in a state just as bad as the Darkest Hour in canon, if not worse. Having to cope with it as a society means that indulging in distasteful vices has become commonplace. Look no further than Ruby, who as per canon is cute, shy, and supportive... but is here also a recreational drinker, hard drug user, potty-mouth and moonshiner and nobody bats an eye. As of Chapter 20, almost every named major character aside from Jaune and Ruby is dead.
- Dead Guy Junior: After the war, the leftover gametes donated by the Beacon cadets keep being used in the Uterine Replicators to help Remnant's population bounce back. Ozpin ends up as the adopted grandfather of Jaune and Ruby's genetic daughter, named Joan Ruby Arc.
- Death by Adaptation:
- Sky Lark is on Jaune's squad in the first chapter and unceremoniously bites it along with everyone else but Jaune. Cardin Winchester was on a previous squad of his, one of the other ones where Jaune was the only survivor.
- Jaune's father and three oldest sisters have all died in the line of duty by the time the story starts.
- Neptune Vasilias was killed in a training accident before the story begins; Jaune actually replaces him in Beacon.
- Jacques Schnee does not survive the crash landing of his family's evacuation ship to Vale, apparently suffering a heart attack or something. Whitley is nowhere to be found — it's revealed later that he willingly stayed behind in Atlas to die while the rest of them fled.
- Sun Wukong is killed in action when his squad is sent out to retrieve vital intelligence in the field. At the same time on another front of that operation, one of the many many reported casualties is Qrow Branwen.
- Raven Branwen was a Huntress and fought and died during the fall of Mistral.
- Lie Ren gets critically injured on the mission to the dust mines, is then discovered to been infected by the Grimm rot before taking his own life. Elsewhere, Glynda Goodwitch, Peter Port, and Bartholomew Oobleck all fight and die on their own missions. Blake's squad don't return from their assignment even after a week and are presumed KIA.
- Nora Valkyrie dies when the point they're guarding is destroyed by the Grimm, though the chaos means that it isn't shown when or exactly how it happened. Yang Xiao Long succumbs to wounds shortly after the battle ends.
- Ruby takes fatal wounds during the final mission and Jaune gives her his Cyanide Pill to put her out of her misery. Shortly thereafter, he is brought to Salem while under the control of her Rot, but fights off the control long enough to signal Terminus to fire. Meanwhile on Terminus, Winter, Willow, and Weiss are all gunned down by Rot-infested traitors. Weiss fires the weapon while she's still alive, but Terminus wasn't built to survive after firing, and everyone left dies as the structure falls apart in the upper atmosphere.
- Death World: Remnant. Human society is on the verge of collapse, with the last dredges of civilization hiding behind broken walls in a desperate attempt to keep the hyper-lethal Grimm out. Anyone who signs on to the army is basically guaranteeing their demise, while Huntsmen are specifically sent on suicide missions no one else could ever complete and run the risk of dying during training. Even the air is deadly due to the Rot.
- Decapitated Army: The Grimm were originally a rampaging force which could act on its own, but by making them so militarized, Salem has made the Grimm so completely reliant on her command that they become totally docile once she's dead, to the point where they cease to be a problem entirely.
- Demoted to Extra:
- Blake is still in the protagonists' circle, but only unofficially by being involved with Yang, and when their lives are so controlled and regimented by the military, that means that most of the important viewpoint stuff happens without her. She has her own team and assignments, but those are all offscreen, and she most often appears when they all have downtime.
- Weiss is a scientist from the recently destroyed Kingdom of Atlas working on a secret project to take down Salem, so she doesn’t hang with the protagonists' circle unless it is deemed necessary by the upper brass, which is quite rare.
- Distant Finale: Chapter 24 takes place twenty years after the Final Battle, with the world rebuilding after the heroes managed to kill Salem and the Grimm, and Ozpin spends his final years watching over the new world.
- Doom Magnet: By the very beginning of the story, people have seen that every squad Jaune is put in has been wiped out, and nobody wants him, whether out of superstition or concerns about unit cohesion regarding the superstitious ones.
- Drill Sergeant Nasty: Velvet, in stark contrast to the meek doormat of canon, is a brutal taskmaster who beats Jaune black and blue as training.
- Dwindling Party: Phoenix Squadron fares better than any of Jaune's assignments in the past, but only to the extent of dying one-by-one on different missions rather than all at once. By Chapter 19, only Ruby and Jaune are left. Ruby only lasts until Chapter 23, and Jaune follows her soon after.
- Ear Ache: During the same mission that Phoenix Squad recovers shipwrecked intel and loses Sun, Blake comes back alive but having lost one of her four ears. Apparently, two inches lower and it would have been her head instead.
- Eye Scream:
- During the stand to protect the launch of Project Terminus, Jaune's visor gets shattered and the shards fly into his face and one of his eyes. He's so high on adrenaline and his entire supply of combat drugs that he barely notices and even jokes about it once the violence has passed.
- Jaune and Ruby are both infected by Rot in the Hive and bound to the wall with Grimm-secretion to let the infection finish. Ruby had her eyes damaged somehow in the struggle, for a reason Jaune doesn't care to guess at but the reader probably can.
- Friends with Benefits: Even though in this setting they regularly bang, and apparently stick to only each other, Ren and Nora still insist they aren't "together together", and Yang and Blake "keep it casual" and have a rule about "no relationships". Nobody's fooled, probably not even them, but it helps to keep up a pretense of emotional distance (however flimsy) to keep attachment to a minimum.
- From Bad to Worse: Civilization has been in decline for ages by the present, and only a short time ago Vale attempted a disastrous operation that wasted a massive chunk of their total manpower. Very quickly into the story, the biggest city left, Atlas, is wiped out, and the mission to save the fleeing refugees costs most of their remaining Huntsmen, including Qrow Branwen, the oldest active-duty Huntsman and famous war hero. The situation has so rapidly and drastically turned for the worse that the news has to be fully suppressed, or else public morale will be unsalvageable.
- Game Changer: Humanity has been slowly and steadily ground down and choked out by Salem's siege since before anyone can remember. Mistral has already fallen years ago, and Atlas is broken very shortly into the story, leaving Vale as the biggest significant bastion of humankind left on the planet. But Salem breaks from her established M.O. to destroy Atlas and tries to ensure nothing escapes to Vale, only to fail. Atlas had been working on something, a weapon meant to be capable of killing Salem, and when she got wind of its existence she could not allow it to be finished. In spite of her efforts, most of the minds behind the project reached safety in Vale to continue development. Humanity has a glimmer of hope to turn the war around, but they'll have to survive a redoubled onslaught as Salem tries to stop that from happening.
- Gargle Blaster: Junior's moonshine has a meteoric alcohol content that still can't cover up the fact that besides the alcohol it's practically urban runoff. Jaune's first thought on tasting it is that it could kill a Grimm.
- Girl on Girl Is Hot: Yang has a habit of attaching her face to Blake's whenever they're together, public or not. Junior says go ahead, since a show brings in more customers. Sure enough, when Blake arrives Yang does just that, and that very thing happens.
- Gratuitous Latin: The fact that the phrase “Remnant Invicta” exists in a world without Latin is lampshaded in the author’s notes.
- Gutted Like a Fish: After Terminus launches and the Grimm pull out, Jaune finds Yang having to hold in her own entrails. She finishes bleeding out moments later.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Sun Wukong winds up being torn apart when a skyhook yanks him into the air while a Grimm has a grasp on his lower half.
- The Hero Dies: As good a track record Jaune has for survival, even he doesn't make it out of the Final Battle, being the one to call down Terminus on his own location. The author considers that the least-shitty ending Jaune could get.
- Highly-Conspicuous Uniform: Justified, since camouflage doesn’t work on the Grimm anyways, military fatigues are in strange bright colors that don’t exist in nature so that it’s easier to identify another human.
- Historical Hero Upgrade: In the epilogue, Jaune, Phoenix Squad and the rest of their peers have been morphed by pop culture into more classically heroic and upstanding figures, glossing over the fact that they were Child Soldiers who pushed every method of teenage rebellion and unhealthy hedonism they could get away with to lash out against the Crapsack World they were trapped in. This pisses Ozpin right off, enough so that he writes his own memoir to make sure that the essence of the real story survives.
- Hopeless War: The five major and several minor populations in the show have been whittled down to three, then two of the major ones only. The enemy controls most territory on the planet and regularly conquers more. Human civilization has become a military dictatorship so that they can lose the war more slowly. In short, the canon setting already qualifies, but here humanity is extra fucked. When the story begins, things are already at the stage where blowing up Salem with humanity's death throes out of spite is a far more realistic outcome than survival or victory.
- How Do I Shot Web?: Jaune and the rest of the rank-and-file don't have Aura training, only those in the Huntsman pipeline do, and testing for that happens at age eleven. The extra training investment isn't seen as worth the effort, unless a candidate is naturally gifted with the power. After Jaune's latest disaster in the field, however, detailed medical testing shows signs that he unconsciously used Aura to survive. With no other prospects left, that meager qualification sees him dropped into Beacon with Huntsman cadets who were noted for their high potential and have been getting specialized training to develop it for six years already. Jaune will have to learn to fully control his Aura, and learn fast, or else he isn't likely to survive the curriculum, much less the level of combat he's meant to face when he's finished it.
- I Just Shot Marvin in the Face: Neptune was killed when another Huntsman trainee neglected to properly check his weapon and unexpectedly discharged it without meaning to.
- Incompletely Trained: The current years of students at Beacon will not get to complete their education and graduate normally, as the final battle to decide the war for Remnant refuses to wait until they're ready. Phoenix Squad, first years, and Jaune, barely better than a normal soldier, have to make do in conditions graduated Huntsmen are meant for.
- I Should Write a Book About This: Dissatisfied with all the pop-fiction that's come out in the years since humanity's victory, which is indistinguishable from the disingenuous propaganda that was fed to the public during the war to keep morale and self-sacrificing patriotism up, Ozpin decides to write and release his own memoir detailing the unglamorous realities of the conflict and the unfortunate, messy people who grew up and died in it. While telling the rough draft to his adopted granddaughter, he starts by reciting the opening lines of the fic.
- Just Before the End: Most of the planet has been made uninhabitable, supply chains for manufacturing and food are in shambles, the private sector is all-but gone with all significant productivity controlled by the government and channeled into the war effort, and the heroes' forces haven't ever been able to gain ground, only slowly but surely lose it. It's impolite (and possibly treasonous) to say it out loud and contradict the propaganda, but just about everyone who knows the reality of things is fully aware that there's no hope of victory, and they are likely living in humanity's last days. Sure enough, the recent events have pushed things to their tipping point — Project Terminus has spooked Salem into acting, and the cost of preserving it means that humanity will not be able to hold the line much longer. The day is now fast approaching when, one way or another, the fate of Remnant will be decided.
- Kill Sat: Project Terminus is a big deal, but conceptualizing it in a lab and deploying it in battle are two very different things. The Dust crystals all need to be aligned correctly for the weapon to work, which means either assembling the array in the ground on the spot (which in range of anything important would be impossible) or making some sort of vehicle platform to carry it. The students' first thought is an airship, but the Grimm have air superiority everywhere outside the arcologies. In reality, they're going a step further — mounting it not on an airship, but an outer-atmosphere satellite, where it can move into position out of the enemy's reach.
- Like You Were Dying: Phoenix Squad's personal philosophy is to have fun now and die later, and the rest of Beacon isn't much different. Their idea of a dorm-warming celebration for Jaune being put on the team is copious amounts of crappy moonshine, and snorting narcotics laced with smuggled Dust.
- Magikarp Power: As it turns out, canon-like Grimm still exist — Jaune and Ruby breaching the Hive encounter some, and are baffled at how weak and fragile they are compared to the nigh-unstoppable monsters they're used to fighting. Ruby speculates that Salem might have to enhance them to be stronger deliberately, and has simply refrained from doing so in this case to keep their size down in the cramped tunnels.
- The Main Characters Do Everything: Phoenix Squad is supposed to be in training, but more and more often they are sent into the field, investigating traitors, and guarding VIPs instead of attending class. They muse at times that all those jobs should probably be done by people who are actually qualified instead of by greenhorn teenagers. Goodwitch eventually explains that there isn't anyone more qualified who can do the jobs, as the state of their manpower is even worse than originally reported — they are down to single digit graduated Huntsmen in total. Vale simply does not have the people anymore to keep the cadets off the battlefield, staff the school full time, and get everything done that needs doing for the war effort.
- Military Moonshiner: Jaune's experience in the military is that there's always one guy in a barracks who makes the hard stuff and everyone either dabbles or looks the other way. Jaune was the latter, because with his engineering background he was one of the only soldiers who theoretically had a future and would benefit from avoiding bad habits... until he was kicked into Beacon. He's mildly shocked that the obligatory moonshiner in his new quarters is Ruby of all people.
- Monstrosity Equals Weakness: Implied. Salem has sacrificed more of her humanity to the Grimm affliction, apparently in pursuit of more power and control of her army, but in the process has both compromised her immortality and made her the vital linchpin of said army. By becoming the queen monster, she both made it possible for her enemies to kill her and ensured that doing so would end the threat of the Grimm forever.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Nora stays behind to protect an injured Ren when the order comes to bail on the mines, and the others disobey orders to rescue them, costing more lives and almost causing the evacuation to fail. They're barely in the air when it becomes clear that Ren has been infected by Rot from his wounds, he's already spilled secrets on Project Terminus to Salem without realizing what he was doing, and he takes his own life before the affliction fully consumes him. Phoenix Squad are forced to accept that saving Ren only made things worse and it would have been the smarter thing to leave him as ordered.
- Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Though she destroyed uncountable human lives and much of human history and culture, by going on the offensive with an army of evolved Grimm, Salem made herself vulnerable when she wasn't before and tied her own existence to the threat of the Grimm as a whole. Not only that, the soldier who called down the killing blast was brought straight to her location by her while not-yet-fully possessed.
- No Social Skills: Vat babies don't have normal families to teach them how to interact from a normal society standpoint, only officers to train them how to fit into the military (and books, but not everyone reads those, and they're no substitute for the real thing). Those in Phoenix Squad are some of the most well-adjusted (and even they have their foibles, for example Ruby originally had no hangups about mixed-gender nudity), but most of the vat batches are a nightmare to wrangle because they're taught how to be soldiers first and people second.
- Not Afraid to Die: In the first chapter, as his squad is being killed around him, Jaune internally notes how little fear he feels as his own death approaches.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: A whole army got stomped just trying to reach Vale's long-abandoned outer wall. Goodwitch alone is sent on a mission to that very same place... and not only reaches it but completes the mission before going down in what could only be called a relative blaze of glory.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Salem has all the time in the world to destroy humanity, and the only reason people have survived this long at all is because she prefers to apply steady pressure to break humanity's defenses down over time, not taking many aggressive risks that her forces would need time to replenish from. The fact that she pushes her forces on Atlas ahead of schedule and does everything she can to hunt down the evacuees (rather than her normal strategy of letting a refugee crisis weaken the remaining populations) tips the soldiers off that Salem is panicking about something. They're right — Atlas was in the middle of working on something that, if completed, could change the course of the war.
- Open Secret: Most of the Huntsman cadets (and even a few officers) regularly engage in trashy debauchery with illegal substances, and everyone in the pipeline knows, but as long as it doesn't interfere with their duty then it's just politely ignored.
- Orcus on His Throne: Defied. This fic explores what the setting might be like if Salem wasn't content to sit idle beyond the borders of civilization, acting subtly through agents with almost no one on the planet knowing she exists. Here she directs the Grimm swarms into aggressive and strategic attacks, actively innovates her forces with stronger Grimm and more devastating tactics, and proclaims her status as an immortal superbeing to weaken humanity's morale.
- Overshadowed by Awesome: Jaune was at a capable level of fitness for the normal military, but finds himself lagging behind the other Huntsman cadets who have been using both Aura and steroids for years.
- Power at a Price: Just about every Huntsman cadet is put on varying levels of performance-enhancing drugs with no care for the long-term side effects. So many resources are put into them that a little more is seen as fine when they're likely to die young anyway.
- Propaganda Hero: Any Huntsman who manages to survive any length of time on the front lines is deliberately built up as a celebrity and symbol of humanity's unwavering strength and determination. By the present, the oldest active-duty Huntsman is one Qrow Branwen, and he and his peers are famous enough to be
Household Names. When he falls in combat early in the story, that alone is considered almost as serious a threat to morale as the three quarters of all active Huntsmen who fell alongside him. - Propaganda Machine: A less malignant example than most, because the enemy targeted by the propaganda really is a genocidal evil that's been killing them all for no good reason. Much of humanity's pop-culture has been reduced down to propaganda — almost all music that's been produced and broadcast for decades has been patriotic anthems about service and heroism. Half the news shown to the general public is redacted and spun to the point of barely being recognizable as reality, and the other half is basically made up. If everyone knew the full truth of how badly the war is going, and how close they already are to impending extinction, then what's left of society would surely collapse the rest of the way.
- Properly Paranoid: The arcology has multiple redundant layers of safety and security in case of infiltration by Rot-infested traitors, only one step of which is the best medical testing they can develop to detect the infection in the first place. They put every single layer of it in place to protect the VIPs and resources fleeing the destroyed Atlas, and are entirely justified in doing so, as Salem activates several sleeper agents at various echelons of the military to kill the refugees or sabotage their research, proving that the medical screening isn't advanced enough to guarantee security on its own.
- Red Shirt Army: The understanding is that a squad of normal soldiers is all going to die if they encounter a single Grimm bigger than a person in the field, and even against smaller ones it could go either way. The army doesn't even bother giving them Aura, because unless they're really good at using it then those months or years of expensive training just mean they might die slightly slower.
- Right Through the Wall: Ren and Nora bunk next door to Yang and Blake (or rather, Yang and Ruby, with Blake regularly... sleeping over) and complain about the noise, saying they at least keep it down. Yang snipes back that The Modest Orgasm is still fully audible, and she and Blake at least get it over with instead of dragging it out for an hour.
- Sacrificial Lamb: Jaune's squad in the first chapter gets names and a little bit of history and characterization (one is even a canon character), only to get brutally slaughtered in a way that is explicitly described as par for the course for the setting in general and Jaune's experience in particular.
- Sacrificial Lion: Sun becomes the first major character to die after the setting of Beacon has been established, showing that things aren't going to get much easier even though all the protagonists are superpowered and better able to survive danger.
- Sex for Solace:
- Ruby suggests that this might come up when they have Jaune comfort Nora to sleep after Ren is KIA, and asks him to play along if that's what Nora needs. It doesn't end up coming to that.
- When the battle for Terminus leaves only Jaune and Ruby alive, their stress, adrenaline, grief, anguish, relief, and anger all boil over, and this is the least-destructive way they have to get their feelings out. By any standard the sex is horrible because they're both freshly injured and mentally wrecks, but they throw themselves into it regardless because physical pain is familiar and it's better than nothing.
- Shipper on Deck: In contrast to pretty much every other version of Yang, who mostly fills the role of violently overprotective older sibling safeguarding her younger sister's innocence, after a token period of getting to know Jaune she becomes increasingly confused and even disappointed that he and Ruby aren't banging yet.
- Sole Survivor:
- Jaune was the last man alive on several (though not all) of his squads. Other soldiers have started seeing him as a bad omen, to the point where no part of the normal military will accept him anymore for fear of affecting the other soldiers' morale. Sure enough, he's the last man standing in Phoenix Squad... just ultimately without the "Survivor" part.
- Ultimately, Ozpin ends up being the last named/major character to survive the story, living several years into the future after Remnant has been saved.
- Stay with Me Until I Die: Yang, disemboweled, calls anyone left in Phoenix Squad so she won't have to die alone. Jaune's the only one who can answer, and the two shoot the shit for a minute before she expires.
- Suicide Mission: The state of the war effort is such that accomplishing anything important (or trying and failing) is going to involve making lots of corpses, and they know that going in.
- Jaune and Ozpin both survived what they have no problem calling a suicide mission, if not literally then practically. Thousands of soldiers and hundreds of Huntsmen were wasted on what was heralded as the beginning of humanity's big counteroffensive, but which turned out to be a useless blunder that didn't even get close to the first of its lofty objectives.
- While the students are on their own assignment, Goodwitch is being sent to the ruins of the outer wall to retrieve irreplaceable electronics and have them sent back to the capital. This is the same objective that the above army got decimated trying and failing to fight towards. She is under no illusions that she'll be coming back even if by some miracle she completes the mission, and tells Phoenix Squad that It Has Been an Honor.
- The students are sent to various dust mines with the understanding they they must retrieve as much as they reasonably can, then throw away as many bodies as they have to to ensure their cargo escapes. The soldiers put under their command are fully aware that their purpose is to buy seconds with their lives.
- There's one last mission to do once Project Terminus is in the air: they need to find Salem in her hive and signal her location so the gun knows where to blast. Even if they succeed, it just means their current position will be blown to Kingdom Come shortly thereafter. Everybody involved is certain to die one way or the other, but they only have one shot and they need to make sure it counts.
- "Everybody involved" includes the scientists on Terminus. They only have enough Dust for one shot, and there was no reason to waste time making the satellite tough enough to fire more than once or land afterwards. Weiss, Winter, Willow, and all the other scientists go up there knowing that even if there aren't any saboteurs (which there are) then completing the mission means their deaths.
- Super Breeding Program: Huntsmen and Huntress trainees, who are generally selected for naturally having a degree of Aura ability without training, are made to donate reproductive cells at regular intervals, so that their Aura will hopefully be passed on and keep the ranks filled with strong candidates. After the war is over, though there's no more need to create superhumans, the banked genetic material from the now-dead students is used to help rebuild Remnant's population.
- Super-Soldier: Huntsmen in canon were maybe more like Super Warriors, or Super Hired Guns, being trained for the benefit of humanity but too informal and with too much individual autonomy to really qualify as Soldiers (except for some in Atlas). Here the Soldier part is emphasized more, along with other trappings of the trope that weren't present originally — they're largely raised from birth into military service, born from genetic material that's proven receptive to the training and powers, souped up with steroids, and designed specifically to take on the most dangerous roles regular soldiers couldn't hope to survive.
- Survivor's Guilt:
- By the start of the story Jaune flip-flops between feeling guilty for his survival and just being sick of it all. It's happened so many times that to him it's more tiresome than anything else, and he comes close to wishing for death just so fate will stop yanking him around already.
- Ruby can't handle being the last original Phoenix squadmate and especially outliving Yang, lashing out at Jaune before breaking down in shame and grief. She admits she's being selfish when she asks him to let her die first, because she doesn't think she could handle being the last one period.
- Ozpin doesn't have it in him to enjoy their victory after Terminus fires, because he feels he should have been the one fighting and dying instead of the one ordering fresh-faced children to do that while he gets to stay alive. He's felt that way for years, apparently having had a similar experience to Jaune.
- Training from Hell: Beacon's curriculum consists of this. The rule from canon and similar fics about sparring only until Aura reaches the red is deliberately revoked (except for Yang, who's likely to kill her sparring partners outright without it). Cadets are expected to fight through Aura exhaustion and further until they physically cannot anymore. Broken bones and dental damage are common and seen as just part of training rather than "accidents". The logic is their Aura will heal them just fine after it replenishes and the cadets need to get used to serious injury.
- Unluckily Lucky: Jaune somehow manages to keep surviving through happenstance even as every unit he's assigned to gets brutally massacred, and even avoids getting wounded or afflicted with Rot. That just means he gets to watch everyone he bonds with die over and over, and it eventually gets him drafted into the Huntsman pipeline, a career which has an abysmal life expectancy even by this setting's standards.
- Uterine Replicator: By the present, much of Remnant's birth rate (primarily for the military and especially for Huntsmen) is provided by artificial wombs using donated gametes, so that the realities of relationships and pregnancy don't have as much impact on productivity. Yang, Ruby, Ren, and Nora were all born from these vats, while Jaune was born naturally.
- The Virus: Salem's latest war innovation, first deployed during the breach of Vale nine years ago, is the Grimm Rot — that is, a spore species of Grimm. It fills the air and when breathed in, the spores infest the lungs, quickly growing through the body until they reach the brain, which turns them into Salem's slaves. Now on the front lines of the conflict the air is thick with the stuff. Soldiers and pilots out in the field need to wear breathing equipment and seal their vehicles perfectly or else they'll become the enemy, and even then it can fail as seen in the first chapter.
- War Memorial: There's a running tally of soldiers who've fallen in the war effort. Originally it was a giant monolith with their names carved into it, and that still exists, but it filled up decades ago and there's no more space to put another monument. Nowadays it's all kept track of in digital archives.
- Was Once a Man: By the time of the story, Salem has more fully given herself over to the Grimm essence she was afflicted by. Rather than a human with the color scheme of a Grimm, she is now a humanoid torso attached to a giant slug-like body ten times the size.
- Wave-Motion Gun: Project Terminus is something so big that it even has Salem spooked. The scientists were figuring out how to use Dust crystals as prisms to direct energy, and came up with the idea of a Converging-Stream Weapon channeling energized light through many smaller crystals into one big one, and then out in a single beam. When testing the system's proof of concept, the weapon fires at a nearby mountain and reduces the whole thing to gravel.
- We Have Reserves: Because of the current broken state of logistics, working equipment and ammunition are a severely limited resource. Soldiers by contrast are nowhere near as precious on an individual level, as all they need to make more is food and time. That doesn't mean they throw lives away stupidly (most of the time), but missions are regularly sent out to salvage from destroyed armies and convoys at considerable risk and this is seen as worth it.
- Why Isn't It Attacking?: Or continuing to attack, at any rate. After Terminus launches, the Grimm all stop mauling their way through the defensive lines and pull back. Jaune barely has time to consider why Salem deliberately called a retreat rather than finish wiping out Vale at least out of spite, before he has to see to his injured squadmate. As it turns out, Salem is hiding in a structure too large to destroy with one shot from Terminus, knows that they will have to scout it to find her so that their one shot doesn't miss, and pulled her army back to guard against those scouts.
- Will They or Won't They?: Hehehe, nope. If members of the military want to get any, they can't afford to pussyfoot around their feelings because any given day they could get sent out to die. Both the Official Couples from canon took many Volumes to finally move towards getting together... but here they've long since taken the plunge and have very active sex lives. Jaune and Ruby take a bit longer, but their whole tension subplot still only lasts a matter of months.
- You Are in Command Now: All the students at Beacon, including Phoenix Squad who were only there for months and Jaune only for weeks, find themselves given early graduations and promotions, and placed in command of platoons of more experienced soldiers, because the veteran Huntsmen who would normally be leading are all dead.
- You Should Have Died Instead: Ruby lashes out at Jaune for bringing his "curse" into their squad and getting everyone else killed like always after they accepted him as their own. She goes as far as to wrestle him to the ground and try to strangle him... before it becomes clear that she's just trying to take her self-hate and force it outwards, and she breaks down.
