Fanfic / Arc Royale

Cover art by Curbizzle

Impatient after thousands of years of stalemates between Ozma and Salem, the Brother Gods decide to intervene. A new contest, Ozma's side against Salem's, to decide Remnant's fate. A contest requires combatants however, and what better or fairer than to pit one man against himself – against alternate versions of himself. Jaune Arc against Jaune Arc, for the fate of all worlds.

— FanFiction.Net summary

Ruby Rose is woken up early one day by her friend Jaune Arc... or so she thinks at first. Wiping the sleep from her eyes, she realizes that not only is Jaune talking in an old-fashioned manner and wearing a full suit of regal armor, but has text floating above his head. Before she (or he, as he's almost as confused) can figure out more, Yang screams and kicks another Jaune Arc out of her bed, this one appearing to be an unassuming civilian teenager. Shortly thereafter, Nora storms down to RWBY's dorm because the exact same thing just happened to JNPR, only for the group to be interrupted by Beacon's PA system telling both teams to bring Jaune Arc to the Headmaster's office.

All told, there ends up being six more Jaune Arcs than there should be. JNPR brought one wearing a white jacket who looks really annoyed with what's happening and one who seems wary of the whole group wearing a green raincoat. In the office they arrive to find Team CFVY having brought in a Jaune Arc, dressed like he slings coffee for a living, and there's one more... who is apparently dead.

While they all debate what could be going on, the Relic of Knowledge inexplicably bursts in the window and reveals Jinn, who has been given a new role by the Gods. She reveals the truth to them all: that the Gods tire of this stagnant war between Ozpin and Salem, and intend to force it to conclude through combat by champions. In interests of fairness, the main combatants will all be various incarnations of Jaune Arc. Each one is connected to a specific person, an Anchor, and if that Anchor dies then their Jaune dies as well. The side who has the last Jaune standing will be granted victory by the Gods, and the other side will be wiped out. In addition, the last Jaune will be rewarded as well: the Gods will send him back to his world, and they will grant one wish he has for his world. Now with the pieces set, the game is on, and may the best Vomit-Boy win.

The full list of Jaunes by their nickname and their Anchors include:

"Just Jaune," with no anchor. The original.

"Knight Jaune," anchored to Ruby Rose.

"Leviathan Jaune," anchored to Yang Xiao Long.

"Hunter Jaune," anchored to Lie Ren.

"Fate Jaune," anchored to Pyrrha Nikos.

"Barista Jaune," anchored to Velvet Scarlatina.

"Ghost Jaune" (for lack of an official nickname), anchored to Amber Autumn.

"Jaune Ashari," anchored to Emerald Sustrai.

"Null Jaune," anchored to Cinder Fall.

"Ash Jaune" anchored to Tyrian Callows.

"Grimm Jaune" (though he'd personally prefer "Sheep"), anchored to Salem.

"Jaune Xiong," presumably anchored to Hei "Junior" Xiong.

"Headmaster Arc," anchored to Roman Torchwick.

"Warchief Jaune," anchored to General Ironwood.

"Revolutionary Jaune," anchored to Adam Taurus.

"Agent Jaune," anchored to Headmaster Ozpin.

"Stripper Jaune" (for lack of an official nickname), anchor unknown

"Magnis Jaune," anchored to Nicholas Arc (Coeur's take on Jaune's father).

"Jaune of ARC Corp" (for lack of an official nickname), anchored to Raven Branwen.

Arc Royale is an Intra-Franchise Crossover by Coeur Al'Aran, bringing together the lead protagonists from many of his RWBY fanfics. A noted and obvious inspiration for the scenario is the Fate Series, though the specific rules of that series do not apply to this fic.

Be warned of spoilers for Coeur's other fics.

Complete as of September 3, 2022.

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Arc Royale contains examples of:

A-H

• Accidental Pervert:
  • Most of the heroes' Jaunes apparently appeared in bed with their Anchors. Yang and Team CFVY immediately assume perverted intent before they learn what's happening.
  • Raven's iteration appeared while she was in the bath. His only response was to cock an eyebrow and ask whether she kidnapped him. She wasn't amused.
• The Ace: Knight is the heaviest hitter on the heroes' side, boasting extremely high physical stats as well as logic-bending RPG abilities that no one else is prepared to face. Only Leviathan in his element could do more damage. On Salem's side there is Ashari, who is likely the most dangerous Huntsman on the planet without counting magic and doesn't have any deficiencies or weaknesses like some of the gimmick Jaunes.
  • After The Reveal of Fate's sandbagging, he shows himself to be a Master of All - with an emphasis on all, as the thousands of years he's had has made him an expert actor, a master fighter with training in every weapon, and a better hacker than Watts.
• Actually Pretty Funny: Even Fate and Knight laugh when Hunter cracks a joke about how many of the iterations have hooked up with a Blake.
  Hunter: Unlike the other versions of myself here, I'm not trying to get into your pants.
• Adaptational Secrecy Downgrade: Due to the plot-triggering Intercontinuity Crossover caused by the Brother Gods' intervention throwing the entire post-Volume 1 canon course of events out the window, Team RWBY and JNPR learn the truth about Salem, Ozpin's true identity, the eternal war between the two immortals and the Brothers' existence, a lot earlier than they did in canon.
• Adaptational Villainy: Fate may have done quite a number of terrible things to quite a number of people, but he always had certain principles to anchor him, and he did them under the impression that his actions have no permanent consequences. But now, finally, he's been given a win condition to escape his hell, and with victory in sight for the first time he's not going to let a little thing like morality stop him. Even knowing this world will continue on without him and the people here will have to deal with the fallout, he still compromises his ethics by doing the one thing he'd never do — killing one of his True Companions — because he sees no other way to get what he's been fighting for all his life.
• Adapted Out: In-Universe. Null has done his research on the setting Remnant after he arrived and discovered that Chivalric Arms from his native story doesn't exist in this world, leaving him uncertain of just what caused such a massive difference between the two worlds.
• Affably Evil:
  • Headmaster Arc is just as friendly and warm as he was in his home story, even to his enemies, but he's also utterly ruthless in his pursuits, uncaring about Leviathan's death and happily turning Atlas and Cinder against each other. Even after causing a blackout in Beacon that causes an all-out war between the sides to break out, he still peacefully goes to Ozpin's office and continues to view the entire war as a teaching exercise.
  • Xiong isn't rude when he doesn't need to be, but he's still a completely willing crime lord who is fully willing to take any measure he needs to get what he wants. He murders the leaders of Vale's underworld in a brutal fashion, but he still leaves the poor waiter who saw it a generous tip, and while he threatens to expose the war and incite mass panic in order to get the heroes off his back, he does give them some of his information as compensation.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Leviathan’s death is played for as much tragedy as possible, as he has to be put down by his own side when it becomes clear that his mere existence makes him a threat to the entire Kingdom of Vale. Ren even notes that Leviathan has enough to time to snap back to humanity and grieve his loss before he disintegrates.
• All for Nothing: In the end, none of the game's participants gain anything from it. The game itself ends in a draw thanks to Headmaster (so no one gets the wish they were so desperate for), Cinder's faction is annihilated (with the exception of Emerald, who lost the only person who ever loved her), Atlas's reputation is stained due to their failure and several of them are dead, Ozpin is dead and Beacon is severely damaged, and the students are left both traumatized and faithless due to the Gods' callousness. Even the one big consolation, that Salem is no longer immortal, is diminished by the fact that she's still alive, and so the students have to prepare themselves for the day she'll eventually make her final attack. The only person who could be said to have "won" is Xiong, who got to screw over Cinder in revenge for what she did to him, but he gets sent back to his world with no memories, so he doesn't get to treasure his victory for long (though he'd get to experience it again later in his own fic).
• Alternate Self: Part of the premise, with most of the characters being bonded to alternate versions of Jaune. Though it is only after Knight explains his RPG-like abilities that the main group realizes just how different some of these other realities are.
• Alternate Universe Fic: The universe which this fic is set in is identical to canon up until the interim between Volume 1's ending and Volume 2's beginning^note Blake's friends know about her White Fang past, but Cinder and her team haven't yet moved from Haven to Vale. Then the Brother Gods, having chosen this universe as the setting for the battle royale, drop iterations from Coeur Al'Aran's other AUs in on the heroes' and villains' locations and the new war is announced by Jinn, naturally causing the timeline to go in a completely different direction from canon. At the fic's end, the Remnant that the events of this fic took place on is left in a markedly different overall state to canon.
• Always Someone Better: Fate is very unsettled when he learns Agent Rat was able to tail him without his knowledge. In turn, Agent is frustrated to find all his main strengths in combat useless against Fate, just based on Fate being better than him at everything he tries.
• Ambiguous Situation: It's deliberately left unclear how much of Headmaster's strategies are genuine long-term gambits and manipulations versus his typical habit of making it all up as he goes. Coeur revealed in Chapter 18 that this ambiguity is why Headmaster doesn't receive a POV segment, and even when he does, it's still never stated whether or not he intended for absolutely everything to go the way it did. By the time he's gone from this universe and Ironwood can actually stop to consider all of his actions, even he can't decide if Headmaster was a genius or an idiot, and even then trying to figure it out is useless now.
• And This Is for...: Emerald dedicates impaling Cinder through the chest to Ashari. She dedicates shooting Cinder's brains out to Mercury.
• Anti-Villain: Null is easily the most villainous of the Jaunes, being willing to murder anyone in his way of the prize and taking sadistic glee in torturing Ruby. He's also got one of the most sympathetic motives of the bunch; he just wants to see his family again, but since two of them (his parents) are dead and the rest were kidnapped, the wish is his only chance, and we even see that his specific wish is to erase Chivalric Arms from his universe entirely, which would save countless people beyond his family.
• Anyone Can Die: Jaunes start dropping left and right from very early on, most notably Leviathan in chapter eight, and several anchors only barely escape death, making it clear very quickly that no one is safe.
• Apologetic Attacker:
  • Knight apologizes profusely to Leviathan after striking the killing blow.
  • Fate says that he's sorry to Ruby as he moves to murder her in cold blood, swearing that he's only doing it to save his own Ruby and that he wishes there was another way.
• Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: Team RWBY, but especially Yang. They have a bad habit of trying to use force in every situation, before getting that thrown back in their face. They also overlook Leviathan's incredibly powerful abilities in favor of focusing on Knight being the physically strongest Jaune. After this ends up getting them trounced and Leviathan is killed, they begin reevaluating this approach; Yang for instance initially bursts into a bar with the others behind her, before recalling her earlier rashness and thus catches herself, and RWBY ultimately manage a successful negotiation with Nicholas Arc that curbs any needless bloodshed.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: Miss Goodwitch hauls the wayward Fate back to the group after he'd left them all to go have fun. Blake incredulously asks if that's a cigarette he has in his hand, and he pointedly pauses to take a long puff from it before deadpanning "No".
• Badass Boast: Both Knight and Ashari make the proclamation that they've killed their own versions of Salem, though Knight's mention of this is just a casual statement of fact to Ozpin. Ashari, who managed to do so twice thanks to time travel, uses it as an outright threat when speaking directly to Salem herself.
• Badass Normal:
  • Compared to most of his alternate selves, Jaune Xiong doesn't have any outstanding powers or combat abilities, instead being an incredibly cunning crime boss with an extensive information network. The heroes are forced to allow him to continue his work as an unaffiliated party when he threatens to expose the entire war to the City of Vale and incite mass panic unless they leave him and his gang alone.
  • This is also the case with Rat. He doesn't have a fancy Semblance or flashy combat abilities, but he's also been trained to be a secret agent. He's so far the only person who's managed to fight Null on even ground and strike a crippling blow, even figuring out ahead of time how his Semblance works and the tell of when it activates.
• Bait-and-Switch: When the group rescues Revolutionary, his backstory seems rife for him to be yet another Jaune who ended up with Blake, prompting her to go on a mini-rant where she assumes they're dating and she's pregnant with his babies. He then quietly confirms that she actually hates his guts.
• Batman Gambit: Xiong leaks the location of the enemy Jaunes' hideout to the heroes, expecting them to make a show of it with no regard for subtlety, so that Vale's authorities will be too preoccupied with that highly-public military operation to pay attention to how badly he plans to shake up the criminal underworld.
• Berserk Button:
  • Fate has a few. Divine beings screwing around with his life is the first to come up. When he's face to face with a representative of two such beings, who has just told him he's been made into a plaything again, his attitude goes from irritated to frothing rage. Another prominent one is anyone claiming they have even a slight understanding of what he's been through in his time loops. Ozpin trying to relate to his immortal nature rouses actual anger, and later it's only being physically strapped to a hospital bed that keeps him from outright attacking Regular Jaune for even trying to imagine what he'd do in Fate's position.
  • Leviathan is outraged after Ozpin explains what Aura is, believing that they were using their soul as fuel and throwing it away afterwards, only calming down once it is explained that Aura is a regenerating resource in this universe. The misunderstanding and anger comes from his world's Cinder doing what he described, using other people's souls to expand her power.
  • Ashari threatens to go three-for-three on killing Salem when the latter threatens Emerald to get him to cooperate.
  • Roman reveals that when he insinuated that he didn't care if Ruby died, Headmaster threw him against a wall with his cane over his neck and his sword at his ribs so fast that Neo couldn't even stop him, with Roman genuinely thinking that he was about to die.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Agent manages to save Ruby's life when Fate tries to kill her during the battle, getting between them before he can deliver the final blow.
  • Hunter returns just in time to help Team JNPR escape Ashari by firing spore arrows at him.
• Birds of a Feather: Ashari and Grimm both get the chance to bond over being forced to participate in a fight to the death with people they don't want to serve against people they don't want to kill.
• Bittersweet Ending: On the one hand, no one gets the wish, including several Jaunes like Leviathan and Null who we would want to have it, Ozpin is dead, Beacon is severely damaged, and the students are left facing the reality that while Salem may not be immortal anymore, she's still alive, so she's going to make her final, desperate attack at some point in the future. On the other, Cinder's forces are annihilated, Emerald has redeemed herself, Beacon is being rebuilt better than ever, Jaune has gained his self-confidence and vows to live up to the standard Magnis and others have set, and he and Blake have gone on a date that appears to have gone very well, so there's still plenty of hope for the future.
• Black Comedy: Fate talks about his deaths in a manner that makes it clear he genuinely finds some of them hilarious, singling out one of the times he died from the fall in Initiation and he covered Weiss in his gore. Pyrrha is horrified, but Fate points out that his options are to either find the humor or go insane from the trauma.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: The very first line of the story says that Gods can't be held to human morality and the Brother Gods prove this every time they appear. They simply have no understanding of morality whatsoever beyond what they want most in the moment, seemingly incapable of understanding why some of the iterations wouldn't want to take part in a fight to the death or would rebel against the leaders of their "sides".
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Warchief Jaune is noted to not be strong independently, but Ironwood notes he is a natural strategist and leader. This is something that Ozpin finds very encouraging.
  • Magnis is a Huntsman and that's pretty much it. On the one hand, he's not as strong as Knight or fast as Ashari (Fate calls him as good as Qrow but no more than that, and Jaune notices that unlike with Knight, Magnis's Aura takes some hits), but a Huntsman is still one of the strongest and most skilled fighters in the world and Magnis himself is a survivor of one of the most dangerous events in any Remnant's history, and he's still able to curb-stomp Winter Schnee with little problem. He also has the same natural leadership that most canon-adjacent Jaunes have, so he's able to sit in on the meetings with the adults and contribute his insights.
    Magnis: That's the big difference between us, Jaune. Age. No special bullshit, no gimmicks, just a crap tonne of blood, sweat and tears.
  • Emerald thinks this of Ashari in comparison to Null or Grimm; yes, he can't shut down Aura or summon legions of monsters, but he has decades of experience and knowledge of various weapons, both of which leave him the most skilled iteration on their side, a fact Cinder overlooked in favor of Null's and Grimm's more obvious abilities.
• Break the Haughty:
  • Teams RWBY and JNPR, especially Yang (though obviously not Jaune), think they're hot shit, and to be fair they are, at least at Beacon. Even after being toyed with by Knight in spars, they don't have high expectations for the enemy side's Jaunes or for the level of danger they're likely to face participating in this death game. At the docks, they confidently challenge Ashari, only to have Knight get neutralized in moments and themselves prove useless when they enter the fray. Ruby gets seriously wounded by Null, Yang's partner Leviathan becomes the first hero Jaune to die... and then he rises again as an eldritch horror, lashing out in despair at everyone as Yang desperately tries and fails to talk him down from trying to murder her loved ones. After such a disaster of an excursion, all the students are left reeling at how badly they screwed it up by refusing caution or surrender.
  • Cinder begins the story believing that she is an unstoppable genius who can steal the game out from under the Gods. As her plans continually go up in flames, she gradually unravels and releases the insecure, petty coward that she truly is, reduced to getting beaten to a pulp by the weakest of the Jaunes (the baseline one) and being forced to flee with her tail between her legs - right up until she gets abruptly killed by Emerald, the former pawn of hers that she dismissed as useless.
• Bystander Syndrome: As the battle in Beacon starts getting bad, the students can't help but rage that there must be dozens if not hundreds of other Huntsmen-in-Training on the campus at that very moment, yet the battle has come down to two teams of first-years, of which one of them isn't even qualified to be there in the first place.
• Call-Back: Once again, Headmaster Arc is utterly outmatched in a fight against someone atop Beacon Tower, except this time it's against Ozpin rather than Cinder. And once again, he turns the tides of the battle by ramming an airship into the top of the tower.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You:
  • Fate is banking on this when he makes his move during the battle at Beacon. By the end, he expects at least most of the other iterations will be taken out, and that if any of Salem's faction remain, the heroes will need to keep him around and help him win because they'd have no other options to save their own world. He's on the money, as the only other Jaune left on their side is Hunter, and they grudgingly leave him alive even though he turned traitor and tried to assassinate Ruby.
  • While the others have half a mind to kill Headmaster when he's in large part responsible for the war going to shit, he gets them to hold off because they need every chance they can get, no matter how big a gamble, to prevent Salem's side from winning uncontested.
• Can't Live Without You: The alternate Jaunes will be out of the game if their Anchor dies. Each are bonded to someone who was significant to them in their home stories, which can range from emotional connections (Knight is bonded to Ruby due to her being his closest friend and later, legal wife, in that story) to circumstantial ones (Ghost Jaune, or rather his corpse, ended up with Amber because his story ended with him permanently inhabiting Amber's body).
• Character Development: Regular Jaune gradually learns his self-worth over the course of the game and as such becomes far more confident, willing to make independent choices and actively participate in the decision-making with his teachers. By the end of the war, he's challenging the Gods to their faces for everything they put him and his world through.
• Chekhov's Gun: Just before the attack on Beacon, Headmaster looks at the Atlas airship and reminisces about his "special move". Readers of his home story know he's referring to crashing it into the Headmaster's tower to take Cinder out, a move that he repeats here to survive his fight with Ozpin.
• The Chessmaster: Headmaster is this as in his home fic, but unlike there, it is deliberately left ambiguous how much of his actions are genuine long-term plans and which are him making things up as he goes. This ambiguity leaves the entire cast guessing at his motives and plans, and it's to the point that when Grimm is about to commit his Mutual Kill with Knight, he doesn't dismiss the idea that Cinder's plan was actually planted by Headmaster long before his betrayal to defeat Grimm.
• Combat Breakdown: The deciding fight in the death game, after the most impressive showings from both sides are expended, comes down to a particularly tough amateur (Jaune) against a thoroughly battered and exhausted expert (Cinder). Jaune himself muses that by any technical standard the fight isn't a good one, and that any of the other students present could put on a better display.
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Fate, as always, doesn't give a shit about official sparring rules. When Jaune tries to fight him, he swipes two of Nora's grenades and hits him with them, breaking all of the rules in the process but knocking Jaune out in one move.
  • Once again, Ashari is never interested in playing fair, with everything from using tear gas on unsuspecting targets to tricking them into committing friendly fire being fair game.
  • In his brief fight with Null, Rat makes use of his environment to dart around the former, as well as smoke bombs, armored kneecaps, and a hidden knife to keep his opponent off-balance. Later on, during his fight with Atlas soldiers, he uses such underhanded tactics as ambush tactics, having the soldiers target each other (forcing them to hold their fire), and even tranquilizer darts.
  • When we last saw him, Magnis was coming into himself as a warrior, and now we see the fruits of his labor. He not only forces himself into Winter's guard so that her allies can't fire without putting her at risk, but his shield is basically a second weapon, as every time she blocks one of his strikes, he just bashes her with the shield instead.
• Commonality Connection:
  • The one time Fate doesn't seem to put down regular Jaune is when he makes a decision that Fate would've made: disobeying Winter's orders to attack Magnis in order to continue providing token fire support from far away from the battle.
  • In Chapter 16 Magnis tries to help Jaune out of his increasing insecurity about his worth and ability because — unlike the other Jaunes who seem to be so much better than him and either hate or ignore him — the former's experience as a student was closest to Jaune's own and Magnis is actually friendly with him. Also, in having no special "gimmick" from his reality in either combat or his love live, Magnis's current state is something that seems actually achievable for Jaune rather than an impossible ideal, especially since Magnis offers to help him train.
  • Implied by Word of God to be the case for Headmaster Arc and Xiong, as two people thrust into leadership positions with no qualifications.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Jinn isn't allowed to give information on the other side's Jaunes, beyond that this trope is in effect. That is, the side with more Jaunes will get weaker ones on average to keep things fair. Ruby later notes that this had the unfortunate side effect of causing her side to underestimate the average strength of the Jaunes they'd be encountering.
  Knight wasn't the only strong iteration in this war. They should have expected it to be honest, but Knight seemed so out of the ordinary and Barista, Hunter, Fate and Xiong hadn't done anything to convince them the standard of Jaunes was going to be that high. They were all mostly normal – different backgrounds, but not that much above her friend's fighting level and definitely not in the same bracket as Knight or this Ashari guy.
• Continuity Nod:
  • The Jaune that appeared next to Amber was already dead, with Jinn noting that his soul oddly appears to be anchored elsewhere before shrugging it off as a moot point considering Amber herself is already dying. That's because this is the Jaune hailing from the fic From Beyond, and only his body showed up because his soul is already anchored to Blake in his home universe.
  • Knight's instant apprehension towards receiving the wish, despite his willingness to go along with the game, references a reveal from late in his story, where it turns out the charm that allowed him to disguise his true class was a gift from Salem.
  • Fate once again refers to the time he managed to sleep with Winter; it was Sex for Solace after Weiss was killed in one of the timelines. He goes further and mentions that what pushed her over the edge was seeing what was left of Weiss's corpse at a closed casket funeral.
  • After causing a city-wide blackout, Headmaster looks at the Atlas battleship in the sky and gets nostalgic, remembering an "old strategy" of his that he also calls his "special move". Xiong changes the topic, but readers of his home story know he's remembering crashing the airship into Beacon's tower while trying to take Cinder out.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Pyrrha, Yang, then all of RWBY try sparring with Knight. Pyrrha lasts about three seconds, and it doesn't get much more even from there.
  • To even call the spar between Jaune and Fate a fight is generous. Even though Fate is unarmed and seemingly uncaring, he wins within seconds; stealing two of Nora's grenades without anyone noticing and throwing them directly into Jaune's face after easily goading him into blindly attacking.
  • Once he neutralizes Knight with a flashbang and tear gas, none of the other heroes present are a threat to Ashari. He doesn't even need a weapon to show how poorly they compare to a real Huntsman. Then Leviathan gets an opening, and turns it all around, coming within seconds of killing him.
  • Magnis utterly manhandles Winter Schnee when she picks a fight with him, barreling through everything she throws at him until Warchief defuses the situation.
  • Knight fights Cinder's entire faction (sans Headmaster, Roman, and Neo) along with the White Fang. He slaughters the Fang, disarms Ashari (literally), and kills Mercury. The only reason anyone gets away from him is because he gets dogpiled by Grimm.
  • Agent holds the line against Fate to allow Ruby to escape. That's literally all he's able to do, as Agent's only advantages in a fight are better equipment and fitness. Anything Agent is good at, Fate can do better in his sleep, and Fate spends the whole battle taking him apart, monologuing, and not being injured at all for it.
• Darkest Hour: Chapter 37 has the heroes lose all of their iterations except for Hunter, a pacifist without Aura, thanks to Cinder, Null, and Fate's machinations. As the heroes are left lamenting why the fate of the world has fallen on the shoulders of two teams of first years instead of the small army of Huntsmen that are on the campus at that moment, Cinder kills Ashari as well, leaving only Hunter, Null, and Headmaster left for the iterations. Headmaster tries to get the heroes to launch a counterattack, but thanks to Cinder, none of them have any morale left to continue fighting, leaving only him and Winter.
• Dark Horse Victory: The last Jaune standing is ultimately the original one, after the final two iterations were killed in the same instant. By the established rules he was excluded from the game and shouldn't count, but to resolve the draw he proclaims victory anyway. It isn't that simple however, as the Gods don't just hand him the win by default, but allow him to volunteer for a separate tie-breaker contest against Cinder.
• David Versus Goliath: Even knowing a little about his capabilities, Yang is still flabbergasted to see Knight take on Leviathan's massive true form, fighting it in a battle of strength that could reasonably go either way (if only because Leviathan chooses not to command the ocean to wipe out the whole city).
• Death by Adaptation: Mercury is the first of the canon cast to die, getting killed offscreen by Knight in Chapter 25. By the fic's end, Ozpin is permanently dead, and Cinder has also died.
• Death Is Cheap: Death for them means being sent back to their worlds with no memory of anything that happened in the story. Arc Corp!Jaune exploits this by killing himself rather than participating in the tournament, much to Raven's annoyance. Cruelly subverted for Leviathan since death for him means going back to a life of total isolation due to how his story ended.
• Defiant to the End: Even when he knows he's about to die, Xiong reveals that he couldn't care less because he's already accomplished his goal of screwing over Cinder's plans by getting the Fall Maiden out of Beacon. Cinder burns him to death in rage, but Xiong simply laughs in her face even while being disintegrated.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Emerald hates Ashari because of his distrust and antagonism towards Cinder, mostly because the latter has started pushing her away since Emerald became an anchor. Over time however, as the two interact more and Ashari consistently provides her with unconditional affection, she opens up to him more. After he loses his right arm to Knight, Emerald treats his injury and cries into his shoulder about Mercury's death.
• Dirty Coward: As per canon, Raven. She wants no part in the war against Salem even though the entire world is at stake, and she's not swayed at all when Qrow points out her daughter is currently on the front lines of said war.
• Dissonant Serenity:
  • Ashari beats down Teams RWBY and JNPR at the docks with a massive smile on his face. Ruby compares it to when Qrow would train her and Yang, with him viewing it as having fun with them, but Blake and Jaune both found his smile disconcerting, with the latter feeling like Ashari could flip between friendly and hostile at a moment's notice.
  • Xiong sits in a nice restaurant eating a steak dinner with some classical music playing, all in the same room in which he just murdered the leaders of the Vale syndicate and their bodyguards, complete with a waiter who witnessed it and clearly thinks he's about to be executed.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Emerald's toxic one-sided dependence on Cinder versus Ashari's efforts to turn her away from Cinder. The situation is reminiscent of a concerned parent or other elder trying to get through to a loved one who's been brainwashed and alienated from them by groomers and/or an other, Abusive Parent.
• The Dog Bites Back: Emerald finally gets revenge on Cinder for everything she's been put through by killing Cinder as she flees her final duel with Jaune, calling her out for everything she did in Cinder's name before executing her on the spot.
• Doppelgänger Gets Same Sentiment:
  • Even upon learning that this Ruby is different from the one he knows, Knight hovers protectively around her anyway and tries to comfort her when the day's events leave her upset and uncertain.
  • Despite not being Anchored to her, Ash made it clear that he was fully devoted to Cinder, just like he was to his own timeline's version of her. Of course, him being both manipulable and weak made him an easy target for a Cinder who has neither investment in him nor underwent any of the character development his version did.
  • Grimm acts outgoing and familiar with Salem, insisting on calling her "mother" despite Salem constantly asking him to stop. He later reveals that the main reason why he doesn't just run to Ozpin's side is the fact that he can't help but see his own mother in her despite the differences, and he believes that Salem needs someone like him to fill the void like his father did for her in his world.
  • Ashari is not happy about the people he now has to work with, but is extremely protective of Emerald, who in his timeline (due to time travel) was his adopted daughter. However, Emerald is not exactly receptive to the attention she gets from someone who is, from her own perspective, a total stranger. Emerald, who is still loyal to Cinder, angrily rejects his fatherly treatment. Nevertheless, he's determined to see the best in her because of this, and is patient with her even when she lashes out at him with physical violence or shows him horrific imagery with her Semblance.
  • It takes a bit to get through his caustic exterior, and he immediately puts the act back up when it's pointed out, but Fate accidentally lets himself start bantering Like an Old Married Couple with Weiss, showing that his efforts to think of the doppelgangers as unimportant are about as successful as they were in his own fic. He and Pyrrha later discuss this concept when he manages to predict her feelings about Ironwood forcing him to fight, as he points out that while she's not his Pyrrha, she's still a Pyrrha, and he knows her like the back of his hand.
  • The Adam inside Revolutionary's head seems to be shaken up by what his counterpart does to Revolutionary as a prisoner, leading to him apologizing. Revolutionary, averting this trope, tells Adam that "he's not you" to show that he's not holding this Adam's actions against his own. Later on, Revolutionary starts getting headaches when he talks to Blake, indicating that Adam's feelings for her carry over to this world.
  • Null relishes in the opportunity to indulge his thirst for revenge by not only targeting Ruby, but deliberately acting as a psycho killer so she'll feel maximum fear before she dies. When things have calmed down, though, Null privately admits that this version of RWBY has done nothing to him and it isn't fair to take out his personal issues on them — not that it'll stop him from killing them if it's the right decision to win the death game. He later has a very hard time combatting Nicholas Arc, as even though he realizes that the Nicholas he's fighting isn't actually his father, he just misses his own dad so much that the thought of losing him again hurts just as bad.
  • Headmaster Arc interacts with this Neopolitan just like he would his own, sitting down right next to her and massaging her neck, and within minutes she's come to accept his presence and fall asleep on him. Roman watches this happen in nothing short of shock and awe, as Neo never lets anyone get that close to her, much less touch her, and he did both without blinking an eye. In that same chapter, it's stated that when Roman previously implied that he wouldn't be too upset if Ruby died during the war, the Headmaster threatened to run him through for even expressing the idea, even though it's not his Ruby.
    If Roman hadn't believed from the crazy blue lady that the guy knew them, he would have from this. The man navigated Neo like he had a god-damned instruction manual.
  • Xiong shows downplayed relief when he finds out Qrow isn't an anchor. The latter is one of his closest friends in his own world.
• Do Wrong, Right: When Ashari gets to talk to Emerald, he points out that none of Cinder's tactics for taking down the Fall Maiden make sense. Rather than needlessly instigating a battle that they only barely won, she could've just planted a mine Amber couldn't see or hold Amber in Emerald's Semblance and have Cinder slit her throat. The only explanation is that Cinder is such a prideful idiot that she would rather risk her life, her subordinates, and her entire plan failing just to prove her own superiority over a stronger enemy.
• Dramatic Irony:
  • The only thing that makes Leviathan's attempt to drown Vale to kill all the Jaunes even worse is that we the audience know that it wouldn't work; Rabbit and Adam are still somewhere outside the Kingdom and Warchief is still in Atlas, so even if he did manage to kill all the Jaunes in the Kingdom, he still wouldn't win the contest.
  • Yang constantly teases Blake about how often she's a love interest for Jaune in alternate universes, which comes to a head when they meet Magnis and learn of his children. Unknown to her, she ended up with Jaune in two different universes (not counting Fate's) - she ended up with him in both The Entertainer (though that Jaune is already dead) as well as in White Sheep, the latter of which not only produced children but also ended up including Ruby by the end. Not to mention how insistently her Professor/Headmaster Arc counterpart prusues Jaune.
  • This trope is why there is never a section from Headmaster's perspective, according to the author's notes in Chapter 18. One of the main points of his home story was that we always knew which of his plans were legitimate badassery and which were on-the-spot bullshitting, but now we're finally seeing him the way that everyone else sees him - a borderline unstoppable genius who's always ten steps ahead - and we're left guessing which of his plans are genuine long-term strategy and which are making it up as he goes.
  • Revolutionary's biggest ally and enemy in his home story were Adam Taurus and General Ironwood respectively, as his Adam is stuck in his head helping him morph the White Fang into something good while Ironwood is dead set on capturing him. In this reality, Adam tortures him for weeks out of nothing but racist greed, while Ironwood, while very heavy-handed, is at least willing to rescue him.
  • The Fate iteration is revealed to be a traitor, and his actions and behavior throughout the story were all an attempt to isolate himself from everyone else so he can focus on winning and finally breaking his time loop cycle. Readers familiar with his story, however, know he is from the final loop, meaning win or lose he'd get his wish anyway.
  • During the battle at Beacon, Fate tries to kill Ruby in order to take Knight with her, only for Rat to intervene and cause a fight between the two of them that Rat admits he is likely to lose. None of them realize that the entire confrontation is pointless because Knight is already dead and they just haven't heard yet.
  • The heroes never learn much about Ashari except for his name and his supposed allegiance to Cinder, so a lot of the speculation around him ends up being off the mark. In particular, when he introduces himself as Jaune Ashari-Schnee, everyone (including Regular Jaune) assumes that they've finally found a Jaune who got with Weiss, unknowing that it's actually Winter he's married to.
  • In Chapter 32 Jaune and especially Ruby finds the resolve to not solely rely on Knight and the other iterations anymore, coming to the conclusion that they needed to fight to save their world themselves after an angry Rousing Speech from Jaune accuses them all, himself included, of standing by and letting others do most of the work. Ironic that Agent and especially Knight, who they initially planned to wait for, are already dead at that point while the others are occupied, meaning they have no choice but to rely on themselves anyway.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • Headmaster muses to Roman that Ozpin is lucky Knight was summoned to his side; he's certain that if Knight had been on Salem's side, he would have killed himself immediately.
  • The iteration summoned to Raven Branwen's side, after confirming that those killed would go back to their own worlds with no memories, immediately steals her sword and kills himself rather than work with her or fight in the war.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him:
  • During a period of downtime when nobody thinks to expect it, Barista is abruptly killed offscreen by an explosive booby trap planted in Team CFVY's dorm.
  • Mercury is unceremoniously cut down by Knight.
• Dumbass Has a Point: Cinder may be a prideful idiot who nearly screwed over her own plans out of a desire to show her superiority, but she, Null and Grimm come off as the smart ones when they question Salem's plan to just have her side's Jaunes show themselves to the world and draw a reaction from Ozpin without knowing anything about his side's Jaunes' abilities on top of leaving them with a home advantage.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: In the first few chapters, the iterations are shown to disappear almost immediately when they are killed, with Ash and Leviathan lasting only for a few seconds at most once they die. Once the fight comes to Beacon, it becomes a plot point that the bodies don't disappear right away, as Fate uses Warchief's corpse as a distraction to take out Ironwood and the heroes realize how much trouble they're in by discovering Magnis's corpse.
• Enemy Mine:
  • Downplayed; unknown to the heroes, Grimm helps to contain Leviathan’s chaos by pacifying his Grimm. While they’re too eldritch for even him to outright control, he’s at least able to halt their aggression while the heroes kill Leviathan.
  • After Fate's treachery is discovered, this is his relationship with RWBY and JNPR; whether they like it or not, his anchor is Pyrrha, and he and Hunter are the only iterations left on their side. If they want to save Remant, they need to work with him. None of the heroes are happy about this, but they don't have a choice.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Ashari reintroduces himself to JNPR as Jaune Ashari-Schnee, prompting surprise from JNPR that he ended up with Weiss. Except he didn't, because Ashari actually married Winter.
• Epic Fail:
  • The Gods tried to bring Ghost Jaune and anchor him to the comatose Amber, forgetting that he's already anchored to a soul in his home setting. The end result is his corpse being unceremoniously dropped into Beacon's basement, and the heroes seemingly down one fighter right from the start.
  • RWBY, JNPR, and their Jaunes learn of another Jaune being seen at the docks and go to bring him in, by force if they must. They provoke a fight with Grimm, Ashari, and Null, and in the end not only do they all get their asses handed to them, but they end up losing Leviathan in the process.
  • Ironwood brings in the full might of the Atlas military to even the odds of the war, including hundreds if not thousands of ground units and the airship. Not only does it not end up contributing anything, but they get taken out of the war pitifully easily; all it takes is Neo and Roman taking out the airship at the same time Ironwood gets incapacitated to cause a complete communications breakdown, and they end up contributing absolutely nothing to the final battle.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones:
  • Downplayed with Emerald and Mercury. The former admits to hating the latter, but when he dies, she's the only one who mourns him, crying into Ashari's shoulder about it. As Ashari puts it, even if Emerald hated him, Mercury was still a part of her life, and no one likes something comfortable being taken away.
  • Null is a vicious and sadistic murderer, but his entire motivation is based around getting the wish so that he can resurrect his own deceased parents. He convinces Cinder to spare the Nicholas of this world because he can't bear to watch him die again, even threatening to take himself (and Cinder by extension) out of the war if she kills him.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • Based on the dialogue from Revolutionary after the horrific treatment he endures as Adam Taurus's prisoner, even the Adam inside Revolutionary's head is disgusted by his counterpart's actions and apologizes for it. He is later so disgusted by this Adam's willingness to throw away the lives of his soldiers that he takes control of Revolutionary's body to kill him himself.
  • Fate is willing to kill the Ruby of this world if it means saving his own, but he clearly doesn't enjoy doing so and even deliberately targeted Barista first so that his friends would have a chance to stop him first.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: Grimm is one of the nicest iterations summoned and despises violence, preferring to talk things out rather than fight. Even so, when the topic of Raven Branwen comes up, he shows clear disgust and admits he would have few issues killing her himself. The underlying unspoken reason can be traced back to White Sheep: he's in a relationship with Yang there, and so resents Raven for abandoning the woman he loves.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Grimm may be willing to work with Salem out of loyalty to his mother, but he finally gives up on her when she orders him to create a Grimm army to attack Vale just to draw Knight out. He finally gives up on her and the competition as a whole, resolving to simply get back to his universe as soon as possible.
  • Winter is naturally opposed to Emerald since she's a member of Cinder's team, but when she finds Emerald grieving over Ashari's body and pieces together that Cinder tried to kill her and he took the bullets instead, she comforts her as much as she can using her knowledge of his love for her.
• Evil Me Scares Me: No one is more heartbroken and angry over the madness of Adam Taurus than the Adam Taurus inside Revolutionary's mind. The other Adam isn't just disappointed in the fact that this is likely how he could've turned out, but that he's perverted the White Fang cause so much just to satiate his own personal grudge against humanity, most of whom haven't even harmed him directly. The other Adam even takes control of Revolutionary's body to fight the main Adam to the death, taking himself out of the game in the process but hopefully letting the White Fang get back to what it was meant to be.
• Experienced Protagonist: Most of the Jaunes summoned have already experienced many of the events in their home stories, though whether this helps them is another matter. For example, Leviathan, Knight, Magnis, and Ashari are all powerful characters coming from the ends of their respective stories, with the first two even being among the strongest entities in their worlds by that point. Meanwhile, Barista also comes from the end of his story, but is little more than a civilian who can make a good cup of coffee. Fate's thousand-year experience, however, is explicitly pointed out as an advantage since he has not only learned to fight with every kind of style and weapon he'd been exposed to, he has also picked up numerous esoteric skills over his lifetimes that he has completely mastered.
• Extraordinary World, Ordinary Problems: By stories end, there are still Grimm, the protagonists still have to attend classes and live their lives. The story ends with Blake going on a date with Jaune to see why so many versions of her did, sleeping with him, and feeling super awkward over it.
• Face Death with Dignity:
  • Knight and Grimm's mutual kill has both of them accepting their fate with as much grace as they can, with Grimm happy that he at least accomplished something for his mother and Knight hoping that Ruby and her friends will be able to finish the war without him.
  • Magnis shows no fear in the face of his impending execution, simply staring Null down and making him promise that no harm will come to Nicholas.
  • Revolutionary dies taking down the other version of Adam, but before he disappears, he calls Team RWBY and JNPR to let him know he won and makes Winter promise to give amnesty to any of the White Fang on the campus. After Winter agrees to that promise, he finally dies.
• Fascist, but Inefficient: Ironwood has good intentions, but his solution to any problem is to throw the full might of the military at it and this war is no exception. Immediately after his arrival, he puts the students through rigorous military programs, forces the independent Jaunes to fight under threat of presumed torture, and outright invades a village to capture a Jaune. It results in no one in Beacon trusting him, the civilians they encounter presuming they're under attack, Hunter actually fleeing entirely, and Winter instigating a needless fight with Magnis that would've killed her if he wanted to. Notably, even in the face of Ironwood's aggression, it's RWBY and JNPR's peaceful ideas that bring Magnis and Nicholas Arc to their side willingly. Just as a kick in the teeth, it all ends up being pointless; Headmaster effortlessly takes the entire military out of the final fight, leaving it up to the students anyway.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: Ashari muses about sufficiently powerful strikes cutting through aura like it isn't there a couple of paragraphs before losing his arm to such a blow from Knight.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Early on, Ozpin attempts to unlock Leviathan's Aura, only to find out that thanks to the different types of magic between their worlds, he can't do it. Leviathan's lack of Aura means that he's the first Jaune on the heroes' side to die, as all it takes is a single sniper shot to kill his first body.
  • Just about the only thing shown to give Knight pause is the idea of being drowned to death in a hypothetical fight with Leviathan, because even he needs to breathe. Sure enough, that very weakness he was concerned about is what does him in, though it's not water that suffocates him, but instead a swarm of insect Grimm invading his mouth.
  • During the visit to Headmaster's neutral ground discussion of Jaunes, Fate is unnerved to find that Agent managed to sneak up on him and Jaune completely undetected by him despite his thousand-year experience and paranoia. This saves Ruby's life when Fate attempts to kill her during his betrayal and Agent is able to blindside him before he can deliver the finishing blow.
• Friendly Enemy:
  • Ashari greets all of Teams RWBY and JNPR like the old friends that they are, chuckling at their various quirks and never losing his smile even while he's pounding them all into the ground. Ruby recounts later that it reminded her of when Qrow would train her, as he viewed it more like he was messing around with them rather than beating them to a pulp.
    Nora: He was enjoying the fight. Not because he was beating us up, but like... like he was having fun playing with us.

• Headmaster Arc holds regular Jaune hostage to save Adam from Yang, Blake, and Magnis, but frames the situation as a lesson and is nothing but affable and courteous the entire time.

• Gambit Pileup: As the war goes on and the sides start to fracture, the various Jaunes and groups begin to try to scheme their way to individual goals, creating a very odd web of goals between everyone.
  • Ozpin and Salem's sides are most focused on taking each other out no matter the cost, with the city of Vale caught in between them.
  • Within Salem's side, Null is the only Jaune actually loyal to Cinder's goal; Ashari just wants to save and redeem Emerald like in his own world, while Grimm is more concerned about making his mother happy and even then he grows sick as he realizes how vile the Salem of this world is. Cinder herself is only focused on her own goal instead of Salem, being dumb enough to think she can somehow subvert the war for her own ends.
  • Headmaster and Xiong are pursuing their own unknown goals, pitting the two sides against each other while uniting the criminal underworld under one banner. Xiong in particular is far more concerned about making sure this world's Xiong Clan is able to function once he's gone than he is about the battle, while Headmaster seems to view the whole thing as a teaching opportunity. In the end, the war goes to the two of them; Xiong accomplishes his goal of screwing up Cinder's plans and dies on his own terms, while Headmaster forcibly ends the game in a draw.
  • Fate is working on his own within Ozpin's side to undermine it, first by killing Leviathan and Barista and then by forcing the two sides to meet in Beacon so as to kill any iterations he can.
  • All throughout this, Rat and his Anchor are working in the background. In truth, given that his Anchor is Ozpin, they're truly loyal to his agenda.
• The Generic Guy:
  • Barista, to an extent; he’s a fairly plain, unflappable Nice Guy whose only function is to make great coffee and he stands out little.
  • Played less exaggeratedly with Magnis, whose being just an experienced Badass Normal Huntsman and an Action Dad makes him the most down-to-earth, stable and non-eccentric of all the Jaunes. This makes him standout less than even Warchief (mostly a skilled tactician who feels Surrounded by Idiots), but is an asset as he’s more relatable to his “main” timeline self and even other students.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Ozpin is half-considering letting up and giving Ironwood free dictatorial reign over Vale, knowing that it would likely cause long-term damage to the nation based on principle alone, in order to potentially have an edge to win his war once and for all.
  • Headmaster makes such a mess out of the game by playing the sides against each other that the Brother Gods consider personally intervening to strike him out of the game, with Light only barely holding Darkness back.
• Good Is Not Nice: Ironwood and Winter are on the heroes' side and genuinely want what's best for Remnant, but their heavy-handed approach, Ironwood's paranoia, and Winter's unapologetic jerkish personality aggravate RWBY and JNPR. In fact, Ironwood's attempt to force Hunter to fight leads him to flee Beacon, while Winter's refusal to negotiate puts the heroes into conflict with Magnis.
• Green-Eyed Monster:
  • Regular Jaune is noted to be struggling with severe jealousy issues throughout the story as the iterations keep coming out of the woodwork. As he notes, it makes no sense to be jealous of himself, but the iterations are all so special and better than him in their own ways that he can't help it, especially when they either actively put him down or just forget he's even there. He's jealous of Knight in particular, as now even Ruby, his first and best friend, now tends to look to someone else for leadership without even realizing she's leaving him behind.
  • Downplayed as she doesn't let it color her opinion or influence her actions, but Blake can't help but privately be jealous that Ruby and Yang are anchored to iterations, if only out of curiosity of what kind of Jaune she'd be an anchor to.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • Fate, in spite of his desperation for the wish, can't bear to watch Pyrrha die and takes the hits meant for her from Cinder, dying in the process.
  • Ashari saves Emerald's life from Cinder by shielding her with his body when Null tries to kill her, dying in her place instead.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: In contrast with Cinder's blatant power hunger, Headmaster and Xiong's end goal is still a mystery, and a recurring plot point with the heroes' side of the narration is that they'd love to take the time to figure it out but Cinder's more destructive plans keep having to come first. It's later revealed that Xiong just wanted to fuck up Cinder's plans in revenge for what she did to him and Hei, while Headmaster wants to force a confrontation so that his students can learn to be more proactive instead of reactive. In the end, it's still left unclear just how much of what Headmaster accomplished was actually his intention, but with him gone from this universe, there's no way to figure it out, and all the heroes can do is pick up the pieces he left behind.
• Hidden Depths: Despite appearing just as sadistic as he was at the end of his home story, when Null is left by himself, he does admit that his brutality towards this world's Team RWBY were unfair because they're not actually the ones who accidentally killed his mother. He even expresses some fear over how violently he reacted to seeing them again, despairing at the thought that he's regressing to the sadistic monster he left behind a while ago.
• History Repeats:
  • Once again, Null comes close to executing Ruby point blank before being stopped by a Deus ex Machina, in this case one of Grimm's Beowulves.
  • Yang can't help but want to like Jaune, even in situations where he makes it difficult. Just like in his source fic, Fate shows a small moment of compassion to Yang while trying to play it off, and she takes it as confirmation that his asshole behavior is an act and starts being buddy-buddy with him.
  • Cinder finds herself attracted to Headmaster Arc, finding him charismatic and clever, and convincing herself he's extremely dangerous. She even briefly laments him not being her partner, as she thinks they would work well together.
  • Headmaster once again pulls off his "special move": crashing the Atlas airship into Ozpin's office to win a fight against an opponent he can't beat.

I-P

• I Am Not Left-Handed: As impressive as Knight was in the docks battle, until Leviathan was unleashed he wasn't fighting at anywhere near his full potential, mostly because he had much weaker allies beside him and he was worried about escalating things or even friendly fire (not to mention being blinded for some of it). Which is why he later lays a trap for the enemy side with only himself as bait. Without anyone to get in the way, he dismantles Cinder's force and sends them packing with their tails between their legs. None of them can do anything to stand up to him.
• I Hate Past Me:
  • Fate gets the unique opportunity to tell his past self (regular Jaune) exactly what he thinks of the young dork knight, and he doesn't mince words. Unlike any of the other Jaunes present, Fate was regular Jaune, not an alternate universe version or For Want Of A Nail version — everything regular Jaune has experienced was also experienced by Fate. In a sparring match, Fate takes almost sadistic pleasure in humiliating his less experienced counterpart by blowing up two of Nora's grenades — that he had swiped earlier without anyone noticing — in his face, and then later rubbing it in just how useless the boy really is.
  • Ashari averts this, showing no dislike for his younger self, though he does get annoyed when Jaune assumes Ashari is actually his father. He also has mutual respect for Grimm/Sheep, and to a lesser extent, he makes a brief attempt to reach out to Null early on.
  • Magnis completely averts this, as his experiences at Beacon played out the same as regular Jaune's prior to the war. He's completely understanding of Jaune's frustrations and offer him good advice and training to help him out.
• Hypocrite: Adam disparages all of humanity (though especially Ironwood) as slavers, then literally enslaves and tortures his version of Jaune while calling him nothing more than a weapon.
• I Just Want to Be Normal:
  • Fate reveals to Yang (and later Pyrrha) that if he could win, his wish would be a normal life: He just wants to go home, go to Beacon, graduate with his friends, live his life, grow old, and then die. After 2,000 years of repeating the same period of his life, a normal life like that sounds like heaven to him.
  • While content with their lives, Xiong and Grimm are both curious about regular Jaune and what life in Beacon is like, as the former had his application rejected and the latter isn't fully human.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: The Jaunes on Cinder's side (Null, Grimm, and Ashari) are all familiar with video games, so they have a discussion with her about how they could potentially kill Knight by taking advantage of the mechanics of his world. The best they come up with is invoking Critical Existence Failure - while he wouldn't take any actual damage, the moment he hits 0 HP, he'll just drop over dead. It doesn't let them fare any better against him, and Grimm had to resort to mundane trickery to finish the job.
• Immortal Immaturity: The Brother Gods, as per the narration, haven’t matured much owing to their lack of self-awareness, let alone the lack of patience which sets the whole plot in motion. Naturally, the immortal entities who get caught in the brunt of their carelessness (Ozpin, Jinn, Salem, etc.) find this infuriating, and their callousness turns all of the students involved into atheists.
• Immortality Bisexuality: While in a discussion about the Jaunes' various lives, Fate confirms to them all that he's had sex with every person in the room except Weiss (and himself, obviously). After Nora asks to clarify, he further confirms that yes, that does include Ren, and it definitely wasn't the worst experience he's ever had.
• I'm Not a Hero, I'm...: Hunter isn't up to fighting in the Gods' game, because he's just a guy who can track animals to feed his family; living up to a Huntsman's standard of heroism is not his prerogative.
• Inexplicably Identical Individuals: Exploited. It's noted that the Beacon students not wrapped up in the battle must be confused about why roughly eight different Jaune Arcs are suddenly roaming the campus, but Ozpin and the faculty deal with any confusion by not saying anything at all and letting the students draw their own (incorrect) conclusions. Ruby notes that most of them probably just assume that Jaune has a lot of really similar-looking cousins.
• Innocently Insensitive: Whenever it comes to discussing the alternate Jaunes' love interests, Team RWBY (sans Ruby herself) are disgusted to learn that they've been with any version of Jaune. In particular, Yang's scream of joy when Leviathan explains that he and his Yang were just best friends, prompts all the Jaunes present to give her the stink eye. Barista is happy to avoid any similar reactions, as he's dating someone they haven't met yet, Militia.
• Instant Seduction: In the final chapter, Blake and Jaune go on a date after seeing so many versions of them getting together. Blake then calls Yang a few hours later having already slept with him.
• Ironic Nickname:
  • Fate is given that nickname by Jinn because of destiny itself being his Arch-Enemy, and the Greater-Scope Villain of his source fic. He'd more likely describe himself as Fate's whipping boy than accept being called Fate himself.
  • Knight has many potential titles, and an unprecedented number of Fantasy Character Classes (two), but the one that becomes his nickname is the one that he factually is not, and no longer wants to or can pretend to be.
  • Warchief's nickname, itself. Anyone who has read the The Beacon Civil War will know at once how enormously ironic, almost on cosmic and comic levels, that this Jaune is insured with this nickname. And more on top, from Ironwood himself.
• Irony:
  • Ashari notes how weird it is that, by far, the most agreeable Jaune on Salem's side (and unbeknownst to him, most of Ozpin's side) is the half-Grimm son of Salem.
  • After all she's learned about the various Jaunes and Blakes, this version of Blake despairingly considers it a foregone conclusion that Revolutionary, the Jaune who reformed the White Fang and worked together with Team RWBY, is an item with his own Blake. The one time she pre-emptively calls it for reasons that make all kinds of sense, she's told that version of her actually hates his guts.
• It Gets Easier: Thousand of years of dying and seeing everyone around him dying have given Fate a rather blasé view of death, especially his own. He casually talks about the many ways he's died, and he even finds some of them funny, to Pyrrha's horror.
• It Only Works Once: The first time they meet, Ashari blinds Knights with tear gas and a flashbang. The second time they meet, Knight knows to keep his eyes closed when Ashari uses his grenades, and the latter is as helpless against Knight as the rest of his group.
• It's All My Fault: Yang ends up blaming herself for Leviathan's death, as she not only encouraged Leviathan to come on the mission to the docks but then instigated the battle with Grimm and Ashari that eventually led to his death.
• Jack of All Stats: Jaune's, and Fate's, impression of Magnis is that while he isn't as strong as Knight or as skilled as Ashari, he is still a veteran Huntsman with all that implies. Fate calls him "nothing special" while Jaune calls him "the ultimate ideal of what any student in Beacon should aspire to".
• Jerkass Façade: Fate shows himself to be apathetic and lazy, with almost everything he says to his supposed teammates being insults, perverted comments, or rude statements. That said, much like at the start of his home story, he is deliberately accentuating his negative traits to avoid forming attachments with these versions of his friends. Knight is the first one to pick up on this, Yang starts to realize it after Fate comforts her after Leviathan's death, and Pyrrha realizes this when he starts talking in-depth about why he avoids actual romances in favor of one-night stands.
• Jerkass Gods: Nobody thinks highly of the Brothers for what’s going on. Special mention goes to Fate, whose enduring a "Groundhog Day" Loop for countless lifetimes makes him prickly towards omnipotent beings in general.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • Fate is a selfish dick and spends most of his time just trying to indulge his vices, but his self-awareness and knowledge mean he's frequently this as well. For example, when Weiss confronts him with the fact that even the original Jaune, whom Fate easily beat down, participated in the docks battle that went wrong, he correctly points out that the original Jaune isn't a target and thus would mostly be ignored. He and Hunter are important assets, however, and thus would've been targeted and easily killed if they'd shown up, failing to contribute anything. Knight admits that he has a point even if he's prickly about it.
  • While Ironwood is harsh and strict in his control over the Jaunes, putting capturing unknown Jaunes ahead of diplomacy, he has a point in his reasoning: the world is at stake, and if they end up trusting a Jaune who turns out to be a traitor or a spy, the outcome could be catastrophic. Blake theorizes that he gave Winter orders to sacrifice everyone if it means keeping Ruby and Knight alive since Knight is the strongest Jaune and the only powerhouse they have, so his death would effectively hand the victory to Salem on a silver platter.
• Jerkass to One: While he is extremely sarcastic, cynical, and tactless in general, Fate doesn't act like an asshole towards anyone in particular... except his past counterpart, regular Jaune, whom he repeatedly singles out with disparaging remarks and comparisons.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Fate puts down his past self constantly and stirs paranoia among the alternate Jaunes. He is caustic and rude, and everything he says is either an insult or cynical statement. Despite that, he is willing to let go of the prize of The Brother Gods' wish and remain trapped in the cycle he has been stuck in for two thousand years — asking that it instead be given to Leviathan — and there are brief moments where he accidentally shows a fondness for his current team back home, though even he tries to ignore said attachments.
• The Juggernaut: When Knight gets going, his absurd stats mean nothing can stop him.
• Karma Houdini: Roman and Neo leave the story with no punishment for their involvement with the games or their mundane crimes. Justified, as they aren't with Salem's faction and the heroes don't need another enemy.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Cinder gets Null to eliminate Ash almost immediately, despite the latter loving her even knowing she was a villain.
  • Even after he's already unambiguously beaten Jaune in their spar, Fate still takes the time to remind him to know his place, taunt him over the fact that he couldn't beat even one of his weaker counterparts, and then flick cigarette ash on him just to rub it in.
• Killed Offscreen:
  • Null kills the Entertainer offscreen shortly after he arrives in Vale.
  • Barista is killed by a booby-trap while the main cast aren't paying attention.
  • While most of Cinder's faction battles Knight, the latter kills so many people effortlessly that the former only realize he's killed Mercury after the fact.
  • Arc Corp!Jaune killed himself when he was first summoned in order to be sent back to his own world. Qrow only finds out after the fact when Raven tells him.
• King Incognito: Knight is very much okay with that moniker as opposed to his actual title of King of Vale, because claiming it would likely cause political turmoil nobody has time for. But downplaying his own authority causes Ozpin and Ironwood to overlook it. They spend the early stages of the war ordering him around like an asset and expecting him to obey, forgetting that he's used to making his own decisions and not being accountable to anyone above him. Eventually their running of the death game frustrates Knight so much that, realizing they have no actual control over him, he begins explicitly acting in his capacity as ruler of a sovereign nation to fight the war his way, and the others just have to deal with it.
• Knight in Shining Armor: Knight is referred to as one by Ruby, word for word. He lives up to the trope by protecting a seemingly-defenseless fellow Jaune without hesitation, and accepting his role in the game in a heartbeat because it's in his nature to protect the innocent by fighting evil, without a care for what he could personally get out of the deal.
• Knowledge Broker: As the leader of the Xiong Clan, Jaune Xiong's primary skill is his knowledge network that allows him to know everything important across all of Remnant, with his reach even extending to Atlas and Ironwood's personal circle of trust.
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • While Ruby originally thinks they can handle Grimm, once Ashari emerges and takes Knight down without breaking a sweat, she realizes it's time for them to get out of there; realizing both that Ashari is clearly a professional Huntsman with several years of experience while they're just students, followed by the horrifying epiphany that both he and Grimm are actually holding back for some reason. On the flip side, as soon as Leviathan shows his Grimm form, Ashari gets the hell out of there, knowing that the only thing that could potentially calm the monster down is not having an enemy to fight.
  • Null goes in confident to his confrontation with Rat, prepared to exploit his eponymous ace in the hole for an easy kill. But when Rat surprises him by knowing enough details about his power to react and counter, Null flees the scene wounded rather than try his luck again.
  • Cinder is fairly confident her entire group can take down Knight. She couldn't have been more wrong. By the end of it, all the White Fang except Adam are dead, Mercury is dead, and Ashari has lost his right arm. Knowing any victory is impossible, she orders a retreat.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Several plot points from Coeur's other fics, such as Yang's death in Unseen Hunt, Jaune becoming King in Forged Destiny, and Jaune knowing about Salem in Service with a Smile are casually referred to.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Enforced by the Brother Gods. According to Jinn, the Jaune iterations will not remember the events of the battle royale when being transported back to their own worlds so it doesn't disturb their lives.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Team RWBY's Fatal Flaw is their tendency to try to use force in every situation. This bites them in the ass when facing Jaunes who can either best them in combat (like Ashari, Grimm, and Null) or whose specialties allow them to block them from even trying to attack (like Xiong).
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • Magnis and his anchor were on their way to Beacon on their own accord, almost certainly to offer their services to the heroes. However, by this point, Ironwood and the Atlas military are in charge of their side of the death game, and they're paranoid enough that they won't allow any unknown players to approach except in prison transport. Atlas's soldiers take over a small town and demand their surrender, but Magnis refuses to be treated like a criminal by a foreign government with no actual authority. Rather than stand down, Winter tries to force the arrest anyway, and gets stomped for it. Team JNPR, knowing what happened the last time they went up against an older Jaune, wisely stay out of the fray.
    • That's also how the two of them met. Juniper Arc was very much not okay with a strange blond man apparently having broken into her house, her screaming brought Nicholas downstairs, they fought, then she started crying and made it too awkward for the Huntsmen to keep going.
  • Headmaster's plan to weaken Cinder's side is to essentially sic the Atlas military on her, having Xiong leak her location to the heroes to set up a conflict between the Jaunes of their sides.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: As bad as Raven is as the leader of her tribe, her predecessor Bosnan was infinitely worse; whereas Raven kidnaps people for ransom but does follow through on her deals, Bosnan used the prisoners for sport and pleasure. Qrow doesn't regret killing him to this day.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Even when almost all of his Remnant-shattering secrets are forced into the open, Ozpin still can't help but keep some things to himself. Agent Rat is his Jaune iteration, and has been skulking in the shadows investigating suspicious occurrences separately from the rest of the heroes' side, in a way that won't be traced back to Ozpin.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Knight is easily the physically strongest of the Jaunes, with almost nothing able to hurt him or survive his blows. However, he knows almost nothing about modern technology, which Ashari uses by hitting him with tear gas to get him out of the fight first.
  • No matter how strong or skilled you are, you still need to breathe. Leviathan manages to close the immense gap in power between him and Ashari by trying to drown him, and the otherwise unbeatable Knight is killed when Grimm asphyxiates him with a swarm of miniature Lancers.
  • Null depends on the surprise factor of his Aura-canceling Semblance to catch those whose entire training depends on Semblance off-guard and suddenly vulnerable, allowing him to kill them with mundane means. When he meets an opponent who first learned to fight without relying on his Semblance, Agent, Null finds himself at a disadvantage and has to hastily retreat. Later, when Ozpin's faction is informed about the limits of his Semblance, the lack of the surprise factor means he finds himself struggling in fights against them.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Ashari's only reaction to losing his right arm to Knight is to dully note that it happened. When Emerald treats it, he is completely calm and silent about it. Emerald is surprised at this, as she's certain that she would be screaming or crying if she suffered the same injury.
• Making a Splash: Leviathan's claimed ability is hydrokinesis. He can shape and direct bodies of water to attack his foes or support himself. Something crucial about it is that even though it's moving unnaturally, it's still just water, so most of the normal fighters can't fight back against it like they could a Grimm. For all his experience and skill, Ashari is helpless to save himself when he's targeted by Leviathan's water.
• Manipulative Bastard: Downplayed with Fate. When he and Ozpin talk, Fate reveals that he's managed to manipulate Ozpin into putting Amber's Maiden powers into everyone he possibly could across several timelines, in hopes that it would solve things. When Ozpin is shocked that Fate managed to manipulate him, Fate reveals that he never did so directly due to not knowing enough about the headmaster. He only knew that he was looking for a powerful female student, so it came down to simply manipulating events so that different girls were the second most viable option when it came time to choose, as Fate could always convince Pyrrha to reject the offer.
• Marry Them All: Downplayed. Knight reveals that while he is romantically involved with both his love interests, the only one he's actually married to (for political reasons) is Ruby. They have an arrangement with Blake on the side.
• May It Never Happen Again: After the plot-central battle royale involving the summoned alternate Jaune Arc's concludes, the dissatisfied Brother Gods manifest in person and they promptly begin deliberating a new free-for-all war involving the cast. The surviving heroes naturally want none of it after what they've been put through, and they talk the Gods into just sucking up what they got and leaving the planet alone for good.
• Mêlée à Trois: While the war itself boils down to Ozma and Salem, there are multiple sides in the conflict, with each side having their own agenda.
  • Ozpin and Ironwood are the leaders of the heroes, with RWBY, JNPR, Knight, Fate, Leviathan, Hunter, Barista, and Warchief on their side. Leviathan and Barista end up dying while Hunter runs away, though they get backup with Magnis and Nicholas Arc, and after a raid on the White Fang, Revolutionary joins their side.
  • Salem's side is led by Cinder, with her, Mercury, Emerald, Ashari, Null, and Grimm all in Vale. Torchwick and Headmaster Arc are working with them, but are later revealed to be undermining them alongside Xiong.
  • Xiong insists on remaining neutral in the war when he meets the heroes. He's actually working with Headmaster Arc and Torchwick to undermine the heroes and villains.
  • Adam Taurus and the White Fang are also part of the war, with Adam as an anchor to Revolutionary. When RWBY and JNPR raid the White Fang, Adam flees with Headmaster and Torchwick while Revolutionary joins Beacon's forces.
  • Finally, Rat and his unknown anchor are also working in the background. It's eventually revealed that his anchor is Ozpin, meaning he was on the heroes' side from the beginning.
• Militaries Are Useless: For all that Atlas is far superior technologically, Ironwood and his forces end up not being very useful in any of their battles. Their fight against Cinder's forces end with Grimm curb-stomping them singlehandedly (with the only reason anyone survives being that Grimm doesn't want to kill them), and Winter's insistence on military action against Magnis only ends with her getting manhandled. During the final battle of Beacon, the entire military gets completely taken out of commission by four people (Headmaster, Roman, Neo, and Fate) when Headmaster's allies hijacking the airship and Fate taking out Warchief and Ironwood leads to a complete communications breakdown, leaving the students entirely on their own.
• Mirror Match: Revolutionary vs. Adam is this, as the former has his world's Adam in his head take control for their fight.
• Mirthless Laughter: When Knight demonstrates a little of his ability, and the others on Ozpin's side start revealing how weak they are by comparison, Fate just starts laughing at how one-sided it is and how little chance any of them have to survive at all, much less win, when they're competing against Knight and others like him.
• Mistaken for Badass: Zig-Zagged with Warchief. His origin story, The Beacon Civil War, is a memoir where Jaune claims that he's this trope, having got by mainly on luck and circumstance. However, his anchor (Ironwood) confirms through multiple simulations that Warchief really is a great leader and tactical genius; he simply doesn't recognize his own skills. He is so good that Ironwood gives him control of some of Atlas's resources.
• Morton's Fork:
  • Revolutionary being Anchored to Adam Taurus puts his entire status in the game in limbo. Adam's insanity means that he's not willing to work with anyone and will willingly doom Remnant if it means getting revenge, something that Revolutionary doesn't want, but for him to get the wish, Adam has to survive to the end, thus dooming Remnant. Luckily, Revolutionary doesn't particularly care about the wish, and he's happy to contribute to the war by taking Adam out even if it dooms him in the process.
  • Null is put in the worst possible situation when Nicholas and Cinder confront each other to the death. As Cinder and Nicholas are both Anchors and Cinder is specifically his, he has two choices: he can either let Nicholas die once more in order to secure the wish to save his family, or he can save his father and doom his chances, leaving his own family dead.
• Mr. Exposition: Jinn, as is her nature, but for the Jaune deathmatch the Gods have altered her purpose. She is no longer bound to the limit of three questions, but will seemingly only answer questions relevant to the game (and won't if the answer would give an unfair advantage, like selling out the strengths and weaknesses of enemy Jaunes). Half of the first chapter is Jinn giving an info dump to the characters about what the story is going to be.
• Mr. Fanservice: Blake's first impression of Magnis is how well he fills out a tight gray shirt, with a chiseled face, pectorals "that could withstand an anti-tank missile", and broad shoulders. Her narration describes him "Jaune to the extreme".
• Mundane Utility: During downtime, Leviathan uses his hydrokinesis to drink without picking up his cup, just coiling the liquid through the air to his mouth as if through an invisible swirly straw.
• Mutual Disadvantage: Null's power renders himself just as vulnerable as everyone else. The main advantages he has are that nobody expects such a power the first time, and that he controls when everyone becomes powerless while they have to react. Null wisely aborts his scuffle with Rat when he realizes that Rat both knows about his Semblance, and knows the visual tell for it activating, which he used to strike a crippling blow before Null could.
• Mutual Kill: Knight fatally wounds Grimm, but in the process the latter is able to secure the former's death in turn.
• Mythology Gag: Even in another world, people still think Professor Arc is too dangerous to fight in battle.
• Nay-Theist:
  • Knight doesn't particularly care about getting the Gods' promised reward, as his experiences have taught him to be wary of asking for boons from so-called "gods". Meanwhile, Fate actively hates any divine being, as one has made his life an unending hell for its own whims, and he refuses to participate in the Gods' game partly out of spite.
  • By stories end, every one of the protagonists and many side characters know that the brother gods are real, but undeserving of any worship or praise. Yatsuhashi explicitly states his intention to no longer be religious.
• Nerves of Steel: Despite being substantially weaker than him, Xiong shows no fear when confronted by Knight, which impresses the latter. As Xiong puts it, he can't stop Knight if he wants to kill him, so he sees no point in worrying about something he can't change. Even when he is being burned to death by Cinder, Xiong shows no fear; he just laughs in victory at ruining her plans.
• Never My Fault: It's indicated that Winter blames Team JNPR for her utter failure to take down Magnis and thus her humiliation in the face of Ironwood, even though it was her bad and arrogant decisions that led her into a fight she couldn't win and all they did was refuse to get themselves killed too.
  • Fate suggests that the heroes blame the Brother Gods for his treacherous actions against them — actions which include sabotaging the war effort, killing half their iterations, and attempting to kill Ruby just as a guarantee that Knight falls before him. All because he refused to trust that any of them would really have let him have the wish (as all on their side save for Leviathan genuinely had no desire for it). Everyone is disgusted by this but have no choice but to work with him because he’s one of the last iterations left.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Ironwood and Ozpin's attempt to force Fate and Hunter to work for them under the (likely) threat of death drive Hunter to flee their side entirely. Later on, Winter's attempt to bring in Magnis with force turns what could've been a peaceful negotiation into a borderline hostage situation.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: The three Salem-aligned Jaune iterations who directly accompany Cinder's team to Vale. Grimm, despite what he is, is the most moral member of them all; refusing to seriously risk any innocent lives and erring on diplomacy, on top of only sticking with the villains out of sympathy for an embittered alternate version of his mother (Nice). Null is murderous, completely ruthless, and will kill anyone including his own allies in an eyeblink if he thinks it necessary to his goals (Mean). Ashari is more brutal and snarky than Grimm, but unlike Null, he still has staunch limits to how far he'll go to win on top of sharing Grimm's motivation of only staying with the villains to redeem a villainous alternate version of his loved one (Inbetween).
• Nice to the Waiter: After Xiong kills the leaders of the Vale syndicate inside a restaurant, he leaves the poor waiter that had to see that a very nice tip.
• No Body Left Behind: Ash's body disintegrates into motes of light when Null kills him.
• Non-Action Guy:
  • Barista really doesn't know what he can contribute when it comes to a battle for the fate of the world, but he's happy to make some coffee and cake to calm everybody's nerves.
  • Jaune's status as this eventually means he is the one to convince teams RWBY and JNPR to fight despite the power of the iterations: He is the only one there who is used to being weaker than everyone else so the challenge doesn't cause him to lock up.
• No-Sell:
  • When Ashari backtalks Cinder, she fights back by having Emerald get in his head. Although whatever she shows him is so traumatizing that he bites his lip until it bleeds, his only response when it is over is to poke her on the forehead and complain that she shouldn't be rude.
  • Knight has no aura to protect his body — he's just plain tougher than anyone else by sheer weight of abstract statistics. Null, who can normally bypass any person's durability and kill them with a simple bullet, tries that very thing to end the fight when the villains' ambush turns against them. He does draw blood with his gun... but Knight gives no indication of having noticed the injury and just continues tearing his way through the villains.
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond:
  • This trope hits Yang over the head after being curbstomped by Ashari and when she sees Knight fight Leviathan's Grimm form evenly. Teams JNPR and RWBY are skilled combatants, but at the end of the day, they are only first-year students. In contrast, the various Jaunes, but especially Knight, Ashari, and Leviathan, all have much more experience and strength than them, to the point JNPR and RWBY can't even do anything to phase them. Yang's realization of this is to the point that when Headmaster Arc shows up, her first response isn't to challenge him, but to beg him not to hurt Ruby.
  • After Knight curbstomps Cinder's group, including disarming Ashari, all of the other heroes get hit by this as well. Knight is one of the strongest people in his world, but everyone in that world operates on the same scale as him, meaning any gaps in skill and strength could be overcome with enough time, effort, and luck. But when put against the canon cast, Knight's stats put him on a level no one on Remnant can match.
  • Interestingly, Knight himself is a heavily downplayed example. While he is legitimately one of the strongest heroes in his setting, he is much slower than speedy fighters like the Blake or Ruby of his world, to the point that he's teased for being a Mighty Glacier. But thanks to his stats putting him far above anyone on canon Remnant, he's an unstoppable Lightning Bruiser by comparison, a fact that isn't lost on him.
• Not Enough to Bury: Fate describes Weiss's funeral as one of these in one of the repeats where she died, stating that it was a closed casket because there wasn't much left of her.
• Nothing Is Scarier: We don't see whatever images Emerald makes Ashari see, but whatever it is, it makes Ashari bite his lip until it bleeds.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: A lot of the Jaunes don't particularly care about the wish or how the battle will affect Remnant. Ashari just wants to redeem his daughter Emerald, Hunter doesn't care about anything, Grimm wants to redeem his mother (though once that goes south, he settles for going out while taking Knight with him), Revolutionary doesn't want Adam to win, Barista just finds the whole thing interesting, and Xiong wants to fuck Cinder over for what she did to him in the other world.
• Not Me This Time: Cinder tells her team that she doesn’t know who shot and killed Leviathan, but she doesn’t deny that whoever did did them a huge favor.
• Not So Above It All: At the Jaune soiree, even Agent, without saying a word, admits that he's interested to hear Regular Jaune's story because he's intrigued by the prospect of him ever having a "normal" life.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • During a trek through the Emerald Forest, Ashari points out to Emerald that Ash clearly loved Cinder in both his world and the new one, and that love made him assume that Cinder loved him back. Naturally, Emerald realizes that Ash's situation isn't much different from hers - and if Cinder was willing to have Ash killed in spite of that, that speaks volumes about how Cinder feels about her.
    Emerald: I'm loyal. I love her.
    Just as Ash had, as he died on the floor while Cinder watched.
  • During his angry rant, Grimm angrily tells Salem that for all her delusion of moral superiority, being willing to sacrifice her own child just to get a victory of Ozma proves that they're not that different after all. Salem angrily repeats that he's not her child, but Grimm only retorts that he's the child she could have had if she hadn't been so consumed by vengeance and hate.
• Omnicidal Maniac: Adam is perfectly content fighting the war on Salem's side even though he knows that winning it for her will doom every human and Faunus on Remnant.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse: With some Jaunes confirmed as seemingly independent and making moves under the radar, Ironwood and Ozpin don't think they can allow Fate and Hunter to sit things out any longer. Ironwood doesn't have to make any specific threats (Fate, who's been the victim of the General's bad side, explains the gist), but he makes it clear they will either join the effort or be treated as obstacles. Ironically, this also backfires on them with Hunter leaving Beacon on the first chance he got after Barista's death^note Though the real reason is that Hunter figured out Fate's true goals, while Magnis, and eventually Knight, refuse to follow their orders explicitly, especially as their plans are putting more lives at risk as the war drags on.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: By the time we learn Roman and Neo were put in charge of hijacking the Atlas airship, they've already done it, putting a severe dent in Atlas's ability to combat Cinder's forces.
• One-Man Army: In one corner, Knight, all alone. In the other corner, almost everything the enemy side can throw at him. The belt goes to Knight. A challenger appears in the ring... over one million Creatures of Grimm. Knight proceeds to kill most of them, and would have killed more or even the whole horde if not for the Grimm changing their strategy to exploit his one weakness.
• One-Steve Limit: The characters come up with nicknames for the alternate Jaunes to avoid this. Regular Jaune, who's supposed to be here, gets to keep his name.
• On Second Thought: When the group freaks out at the sight of Ghost Jaune's corpse, Ozpin assures them that he was dead when they found him before realizing that's probably even more cause for alarm.
• Other Me Annoys Me: Every other Jaune gets a negative impression of Fate for his generally toxic, spiteful, and crass attitude. For his part, Fate dislikes every other Jaune and treats them all with disdain, especially the canon Jaune.
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • The very scenario itself threatens to throw the status quo into complete anarchy, but Knight in particular displays it most obviously from the get-go. He's one of several Jaunes who comes from a completely different setting from canon RWBY and so has totally different powers, and flabbergasts Ozpin by claiming to both know about magic and to have killed his version of Salem. The latter of which only Barista knows the significance of, which throws everyone off all the more.
  • On a more mundane level, as previously established in Xiong's story The Self Made Man, the Vale underworld runs on a system of trust and respect, with conflicts between gangs being kept under wraps and outright bloodshed being rare. Xiong throws all of that right out the window and immediately begins a bloody campaign to bring order to the underworld by killing everyone in his way, starting with the people at the top.
• Overshadowed by Awesome:
  • The Jaune of this universe was already having this issue since he snuck into Beacon with no training, but with the sheer amount of Jaunes arriving, all of whom seem better than him, his self-esteem is even more trashed than it already was. In particular, while he admits that seeing his other versions go through so many unique lives is cool, he also notices that none of them seem to have become regular Huntsmen like he's trying to, which is not a good sign for his own future, at least until he meets Magnis.
  • Ashari and Grimm are superhuman and quite powerful within the context of Remnant, but neither of them can remotely stand up to Knight in a physical contest. When Grimm blocks one of his strikes, his Crocea Mors bends almost in half and his shoulder is injured. Ashari neutralizes that physical superiority by disrupting his senses, but Knight's own blind parry sends Ashari's blade flying out of his hands. When Ashari tries a similar block against a proper attack from Knight, his sword shatters and his arm flies off, and he doesn't even think his block slowed down the strike at all.
• Papa Wolf: The one time Roman ever saw Headmaster Arc drop his jovial manner is when he implied he wouldn't mind Ruby being killed. Headmaster's reaction was to pin Roman to the wall with his sword and cane faster than Neo could stop him, and Roman was genuinely frightened he might die.
• The Paragon: Knight had already grown into this by the end of his story, and maintains this attitude here by agreeing to participate in this new conflict.
• Pet the Dog:
  • Fate, of all people, ends up comforting Yang after Leviathan's death, genuinely telling her that it wasn't her fault. He plays it off as trying to get into her pants, but Yang easily sees through it.
  • Headmaster negotiates for Revolutionary's freedom during his hostage trade of Adam, noting that Adam clearly doesn't know how to properly treat his iteration. He keeps up his threatening persona, but given what we know of him from his home story, he's almost certainly genuinely trying to protect the torture victim.
  • Though Winter has no reason to like Emerald, she still takes pity on her when she realizes Cinder killed Ashari while trying to kill her and comforts her with her knowledge of Ashari's love for her. It's part of what motivates Emerald to come back and kill Cinder during the final battle.
• Playing Both Sides: Headmaster Arc’s first appearance has him giving Yang a first aid kit to heal her injuries during the fight with Leviathan, then turning around and allying with Cinder and her team after the fight is over. It's later revealed that he's working with Xiong to weaken Cinder's side as well, and he is somehow responsible for the docks confrontation that got Leviathan killed.
• Playing with Fire: One of Knight's Skills lets him generate forging levels of heat from his hands. With it, he's one of the only characters on either side who can do anything at all to counter Leviathan's hydrokinesis, by superheating the water into steam.
• Power Nullifier: Null's eponymous power renders all surrounding aura inactive when he uses it. Cinder is very excited to be partnered with a Jaune who can kill anyone with a simple blade or bullet no matter how powerful they are (as far as she knows), and is perfectly willing to do so.
• Pragmatic Villainy: When Headmaster invites Jaune to a gathering of the iterations so they can talk things out and learn more about each other, Jaune asks how he can trust Headmaster won't just take him hostage again. Headmaster points out that Jaune is literally the one person on Beacon's side that he'd gain nothing from harming, as he's not a contestant nor an anchor, and all it would do is bring Beacon on his head.
• Production Foreshadowing:
  • The Jaune iteration anchored to Raven is not one readers had seen before, and drops some slightly cryptic references before removing himself from the war entirely. This was a teaser for Arc Corp, which had not come out at the time of the chapter's release.
  • Xiong's master plan is revealed to be getting rid of the Fall Maiden to ensure that Cinder can't get it, knowing full well she'd probably kill him in return but getting to laugh at her misfortune. Several months after this was revealed, his plan in The Self Made Man was revealed to be the exact same one, and he ends up succeeding there too.
• Psychological Projection: Headmaster believes that Fate's utter contempt for all other versions of himself boils down to this, with Fate projecting his deep-seated self loathing on all the other Jaune's, especially Regular Jaune since he is who Fate was before experiencing the time loops.
• Punch Catch: Knight defends Leviathan from a pissed-off Yang by effortlessly stopping her Semblance-enhanced fist.
• Put on a Bus: Hunter flees Beacon entirely following Ironwood's threats and hides in the Emerald Forest. Ashari and Emerald are later able to find evidence of his presence, but they don't find him before the conflict makes its way back to Beacon.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Downplayed, as it's just a simple bet. When Jaune and Fate spar, Yang and Weiss bet on who will win, with Weiss badmouthing Jaune and putting her money on Fate. The "fight" has Fate slam two of Nora's grenades straight into Jaune's face and tear what remains of the boy's self-confidence to shreds while everyone uncomfortably looks on, leaving Weiss wishing she lost the bet.

Q-Z

• Quantity vs. Quality:
  • As the war goes on, Ozpin comes to realize that this is the greater issue his side faces. His side has the quality, as they have Knight, who is easily the strongest, but all of the rest are average at best and civilians at worst. Salem has the quantity, as while Ashari, Grimm, and Null aren't as individually powerful as Knight, they have a variety of skillsets they can all rely on. This means that while Ozpin's forces can theoretically overpower Salem's just through Knight's strength, Salem's side is able to use a wide variety of tactics to get around it, and if Knight (or Ruby) gets killed, his side is almost certainly screwed.
  • Headmaster and Xiong's side is much smaller than either of the main sides of the war, but the strength of their skillsets and their willingness to get their hands dirty behind the scenes means that they make far more progress much faster than either Ozpin or Salem's side has, playing both the heroes and villains to their tune all while accomplishing their own objectives along the way.
  • Fate, despite working on his own, ends up dealing major blows to Ozpin's side in particular simply by covering up his true intentions with his hedonistic lifestyle. By hiding himself within Ozpin's side, he's able to discreetly kill two iterations (Leviathan and Barista), take advantage of the chaos to kill another (Warchief), force both sides into a confrontation that puts all of them in danger, and almost kills Ruby to take Knight with her. He then kills Agent after his cover is blown.
• Rage Breaking Point:
  • Knight eventually gets fed up with Ironwood's methods of stalling the war since Cinder won't perform a suicide attack on Beacon and will just kill innocents to draw them out - and his frustration isn't helped by the fact that they're treating him as a weapon rather than another person (and a king, no less). After giving them an ultimatum, he's able to go out into the city and deliver a Curb-Stomp Battle to Cinder's group, killing a slough of White Fang Members and Mercury, as well as wounding Null and disarming Ashari.
  • Grimm spends the story getting more and more frustrated with the world he's found himself in, especially seeing the mother he loves so dearly being such a horrific force of evil. It finally comes to a head when Cinder has Salem order him to massacre Vale and Salem acknowledges that she's sending him off to die; he grabs Cinder with his tentacles while angrily telling her all of her shortcomings, only leaving her alive because it means she gets to watch her plans go up in flames.
• Really Gets Around: In his original story, Fate used the knowledge of his various runs through Beacon to get laid. Not wanting to play along with this war, he declares his intent to do it all over again before leaving the room - by the time he comes back, he's already bedded an older student. In actuality, Fate used these encounters to steal Dust from the students, eventually taking enough to make the bomb that killed Barista - albeit he admits that it was still pleasurable in itself.
• Redemption Earns Life: Emerald redeems herself by killing Cinder after the battle is finished and is thus the only member of her Vale faction to walk away from the game alive, in contrast to Cinder, Adam, Mercury, and the White Fang all being killed for their actions.
• Redemption Rejection: During the battle against the White Fang, Blake offers Adam a chance to join their side, saying that they can fight together again and work to save humanity and Faunuskind from Salem to prevent the end of the world. Adam, having long since crossed the point of no return, rejects the offer, acknowledges that Salem's victory will end the world, and attacks them anyway.
• Red Herring: The most obvious candidate for Rat's Anchor is Dr. Oobleck, as he was Rat's handler in his home story, Captain Dragon indicates that it's possible for the VSS to exist in other stories even if they're not mentioned, and Oobleck is conspicuously absent throughout the story to play into this idea. Instead, it's actually Headmaster Ozpin.
• Refuge in Audacity: The Beacon Staff's strategy to address why there's a war going on with around eight different identical Jaune Arcs running around campus is to literally not say anything about it whatsoever, letting the students draw their own conclusions. Ruby notes that without the full context that they have, the other students probably just think he has a lot of really similar looking cousins.
• Refusal of the Call: While the prospect of getting any one thing he wants gives him some pause, Fate refuses to submit to the Gods' plan as he feels the deck was stacked against him. Hunter agrees, as world-shattering battles are neither his business nor his responsibility. Both end up going back on this idea, with Fate having played the long game to take out Ozpin's iterations one at a time, while Hunter returns to Beacon at a critical moment to help the group survive the all-out battle.
• Relationship Reset Button: As in his fic, this is the one crucial element that separates Fate's circumstances from someone like Ozpin. He spits on Ozpin's attempt at sympathy for the isolation they both must feel as immortals, saying that at least for Ozpin, all the bonds he's made over the years still happened and thus his actions have lasting consequences; for Fate, any attempt to build a lasting friendship or romance is erased as time loops back on itself after a year or so.
• The Reveal: Fate killed Leviathan and Barista, targeting Barista specifically in the partial hope that someone would sus him out before he could attack anyone else.
• Revenge: Chapter 34 reveals Xiong's motivation for the war wasn't the wish; it was to ruin Cinder's plans as payback for her murder of Hei in his world (knowing she’s technically not the same culprit but still the same person in every way that counts). He succeeds by spiriting away the Fall Maiden — into the care of Hei and the Malachite twins, ensuring Amber’s powers go to one of them — and laughing in her face when she finds out.
• Revenge Before Reason: Adam hates humanity so much that he's willing to help Salem and risk the death of every human and Faunus on Remnant before he even considers allying with Ironwood.
• RPG Mechanics 'Verse: Deconstructed. Knight tries to explain how being in his world isn't like playing a game, and that the class you are assigned determines your entire life. A non-combat class trying to become a hero is suicidal since they won't have any stats or skills that will help them. Levels also decide everything; and the nature of gaining experience means that non-combat classes are once again outstripped compared to a combat class.
• Running Gag: Blake's increasing shock and incredulity that she's apparently the most common pairing for Jaune across the multiverse, matched only by Yang's own growing amusement over it. It reaches its peak when she decides to go on a date with him once the game is over just to see how it goes, and it doesn't even take till nighttime before she's taken his virginity.
• Sacrificial Lion: Leviathan comes from one of Coeur’s more popular stories and gets a lot of characterization early on, meaning that when he dies in chapter eight, it becomes clear that none of the Jaunes are safe.
• Sanity Slippage: Fate not having his curse broken, is showing signs of this during the discussion of the alternate Jaune's abilities. When Knight demonstrates how strong he is, by effortlessly lifting Ozpin's desk, Fate breaks out Laughing Mad, stating how screwed the rest of them are and cheerfully stating how they are dead men walking.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Hunter disappears the night after Ironwood attempts to force him to fight.
• Self-Deprecation: Coeur wryly lampshades his frequent use of Blake as Jaune's Love Interest with this world's Blake becoming increasingly annoyed by the amount of times it comes up. "Canon" Jaune also sardonically notes that most of his fellow Jaunes feel like entirely different people as opposed to alternate versions of himself.
• Seen It All:
  • Fate has this attitude, having lived and died through all kinds of hell for millennia. Downplayed in that even he doesn't know how to respond to the things he learns in the first chapter. His frustration is entirely in-character.
  • Played completely straight with the Jaune that anchored to Raven, who was already very familiar with all kinds of paranormal shenanigans. He was nonplussed to learn the details of what's going on, and he even finds it convenient when Jinn confirms he can just kill himself and return home without remembering this, as it means his version of Blake won't need to do paperwork about the experience.
• Senseless Sacrifice: Agent gives his life to allow Ruby to escape from Fate's assassination attempt, doing so in order to ensure Knight's survival and thus his side's victory. Unknown to everyone involved, Knight is already dead, so Agent died for nothing.
• Sex for Solace: Fate explains how he manages to have sex with Winter when the group is discussing the alternate Jaune's love interests. Winter was overwhelmed by Weiss's death and viewing what was left of her that a distraught Winter cornered a drunk Fate for sex.
• Shapeshifter Mode Lock:
  • Grimm is normally able to choose between a human appearance identical to regular Jaune, and a Grimm-man form reminiscent of Salem. For whatever reason, here he finds himself unable to use the former and locked into the latter. As a result he cannot walk around in public without covering his face and skin, and when he reveals his appearance to the heroes it startles them into attacking.
  • As in his home story, Leviathan’s mortal form dying means that he’s stuck in his Grimm form permanently. Unfortunately, because even existing on Remnant causes Grimm to spawn and the sky to split, the heroes are forced to kill him before he can cause any more damage.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Ironwood recognizes that Fate is one, as he's seen similar behavior - smoking, sleeping around, drinking - in other soldiers who'd seen too much of war: it makes Ironwood recall a heartbreaking incident where a war veteran was spooked by an unknowing Halloween trick-or-treater^note or the Remnantian equivalent, and the ensuing PTSD attack caused the vet to reflexively shoot the child dead. Fate particularly reminds Ironwood of those who took their own lives to escape their trauma, and as Fate reveals to Headmaster, he did in fact try to kill himself before.
• Shipper on Deck: Due to being colored by Magnis telling him about his reality off screen, Nicholas assumes the native reality's Blake is likewise involved with his actual son. He thus greets Blake warmly and approvingly as "the future mother of [his] grandchildren" — to Blake's absolute mortification and Yang's great amusement at the goldmine of teasing material.
• Shout-Out: The whole fic is essentially the Fate Series but with the Jaunes of Couer's fics replacing the servants, from the reliance on someone to keep them materialized, to the way that the Jaunes turn into motes of light upon death, to them fighting to the death over one person receiving a wish from a divine source.
  • Knight specifically invokes the Saber class with his Knight in Shining Armor personality and status as the strongest iteration of Jaune keeping with the reputation of Sabers in Fate.
  • To go deeper, Fate's role in the story reads almost like a wholesale reference to Archer. Not only does his utter contempt for Regular Jaune mirror Archer's relationship with his own past self, but he is also eventually revealed to be willing to go to extreme lengths— like betrayal and murder — to win the war and use the wish to escape from his "Groundhog Day" Loop, which is similar to Archer's own actions in his desperate attempt to escape from his afterlife as a Counter Guardian. Given the confirmed reference to the Fate franchise stated above, these similarities may not be coincidental.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: While hardly the only person to curse, Fate is by far the most frequent offender.
• Skewed Priorities: Raven's iteration kills himself with her sword rather than fight in the war, but as he dies, he complains that she should have had a gun to make it less painful. Raven never even got a word in.
• Small Name, Big Ego: This is Ashari's opinion of Cinder, and he's arguably right. Cinder is strong... compared to Emerald, Mercury, RWBY, and JNPR. When compared to fighters in Ashari's league, i.e. Hazel, Tyrian, and Qrow, she falls short. He points out to Emerald that Cinder's ambush of the Fall Maiden only succeeded because Cinder had Emerald's and Mercury's help along with Salem's gifts, and that Cinder actually made it harder because she made it a fight to appease her own pride. Emerald can't really refute his claims.
• Small Role, Big Impact:
  • Ash is killed in his first appearance, but his death establishes several important things for the story: Jaunes are going to die fast, Null is unafraid to kill anyone in the way of his goal (even his alternate selves), and Cinder will happily kill even people who love her if it suits her ends, the latter of which Ashari uses to start splitting up her and Emerald. It also takes Tyrian out of the war immediately, meaning the heroes only have to deal with Cinder's faction.
  • Roman and Neo barely appear with the focus being on their iteration, Headmaster, but it's indicated that they're the ones who sabotage the Atlas airship, which, when combined with Fate incapacitating Ironwood, takes the Atlas military completely out of the final battle.
• Smug Snake:
  • Cinder, as in canon, thinks of herself as all-powerful and a cunning mastermind, but in reality she's nowhere near as strong or as smart as she thinks. When she gets Salem to force Grimm to summon an army to fight, she's at first self-assured, but when he strangles her with Remy's tentacles, it quickly becomes apparent that Grimm could kill her at any time he wants, and the only reason he doesn't is because he wants her to realize just how ineffectual she actually is.
    Grimm: You're not half as cunning as you think you are. Do you really think mother isn't aware of your treachery? You're arrogant, Cinder, and like so many people who are, you have so very little to back it up with. Power? I could crush your throat right here and now. Skill? Ashari can best you with one hand. Intelligence? Headmaster ran you around so easily you never even realised you were but a pawn in his game, and now he's left to finish his plans while you struggle to pick up the pieces.
  • This comes to a head when the game ends in a draw and the Gods arrive for judgement. Cinder, who previously thought she'd be able to subvert the war for her own ends and convince them to spare her, is given the same amount of energy as a bug under their shoe, and Jaune and Team RWBY are able to convince them to end the war on their terms instead (they even swat her away when she tries to sneak-attack Jaune during their planning). The resulting battle ends with Cinder beaten, alone, wounded, and fleeing like the coward she is, confident she can regain her strength and come back - only to get unceremoniously killed by Emerald before she gets away from the group.
• Spotting the Thread: Headmaster Arc doesn't believe Fate's reasons for staying out of the war, as he knows he won't truly die in this war and the man himself doesn't fear death because of his loops. As Roman puts it, Fate is either so broken his thoughts don't make sense, or he's lying. Headmaster agrees both are possible. Shortly afterward, Regular Jaune comes to a similar conclusion after realizing that he would do anything for the wish if he were in Fate's position. And since Fate is simply a possible future version of himself, he would do the same. To their credit, they're right on the money.
• Squishy Wizard:
  • Leviathan has no aura, not even superhuman RPG stats like Knight (whose "aura" is just his setting's term for Hit Points), and Ozpin's attempt to unlock it produces no results. He has his hydrokinesis (and it's implied some of his other abilities that he's hiding), but in his normal body he is literally the most fragile of all the Jaunes, even the weakest of whom at least have better durability than a Muggle. Entering the Leviathan's true form after getting shot subverts this.
  • Grimm is a heavily downplayed example. He's actually very physically strong compared to most other Jaunes thanks to his Grimm physiology, but against Knight, everyone is squishy. As such, the only role he can afford to play in the Docks battle is back-line support with his summoned Grimm.
• The Starscream: According to Headmaster Arc, Cinder intends to usurp Salem and utilize the war for her own ends.
• Stealth Expert: Rat, as befitting a VSS agent. He's so good that not even Fate can spot him following him.
• Stone Wall: Against anyone other than Knight, Grimm is ridiculously durable. His Grimm physiology mixed with his massive Aura reserves lets him tank most blows, and what attacks do get through just let bleed more and summon more Grimm.
• Story-Breaker Power: Some of the Jaunes summoned are far more powerful than others, so the gods have set the scales in such a fashion as to hopefully avert this trope. After Knight massacres Cinder's forces, it becomes clear that they managed to completely mess this up, with the students even taking the time to wonder how they could have accidentally stacked the deck so far in their favor in their attempt to maintain "balance".
• Strong Family Resemblance: Jaune eventually grows up to look near-identical to his father Nicholas. When Ashari, the oldest looking Jaune makes his entrance, regular Jaune's first response is confusion that he might be his dad. In turn, the heroes later confront what they assume to be another older version of Jaune, and are surprised to find it's Nicholas instead.
• Stupid Sexy Friend:
  • While Ruby's internal monologue mentions she isn't all that interested in dating or romance as of yet, finding herself waking up to a regally handsome version of her friend and having said alternate Jaune regularly pledge his devotion to protecting her just like a knight out of her heroic fantasies leaves her blushing and bashful, to the point Glynda and Opzin end up wondering whether she's actually developing a crush on him or if it's simple Hero Worship.
  • Blake is barely even friends with Jaune on a personal level, and normally doesn't have a shred of romantic interest in him, but after learning that so many versions of her have got with so many versions of Jaune, a small, treacherous part of her brain can't help but wonder if there's something she's missing. At seeing Magnis, she concedes that the various Blakes might have been on to something. By Chapter 15 she's already having trouble interacting with her own world's Jaune, and harshly tells him not to look at, talk with, and touch her to avoid the awkwardness, to the latter's confusion. In the last chapter she gives into her curiosity and not only asks Jaune out but seduces him, something she said she'd only do if someone really impressed her.
  • Jaune gets his own turn in the succeeding chapter when Magnis shows off some photos from his world, inadvertently showing Jaune his wedding photo in which Jaune thinks the older, pregnant Blake looks incredibly attractive. He bemoans that he'd probably start picturing that photo in his mind the next time he sees Blake, and even worries that if he did become attracted to Blake from then on whether those would be his true feelings or if he'd just been influenced by how many alternate Jaunes hooked up with Blakes.
  • By the end even Yang gets a moment of being flustered after seeing an intensely resolute Jaune look at her, and she's relieved when the moment passes.
• Suicide by Cop: Heavily implied with Leviathan's death. It's noted that he could have destroyed all the other participants in the war with tidal waves had he wanted to after his true form manifested in reality, but chose to fight more directly, which is what allows Knight, Ren, and Nora to kill him.
• Summon Magic: Grimm can spawn his namesake creatures by spilling his own blood on the ground. The more blood he uses, the more he can create. He goes all out for his final clash with Knight by summoning an army of over one million Grimm, a feat that requires such massive amounts of bloodletting that he can't even stand without support from his creations afterward.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Leviathan in all his horrific glory is a double-whammy — not only does he inspire plenty of regular fear just by being a giant nigh-invincible sea monster, but his sheer eldritch presence messes with the minds of surrounding bystanders. Some of the heroes simply faint in existential terror they barely understand, or curl up in catatonic shock screaming at the ground.
• Super-Strength: Knight's main combat stat is Strength, and he demonstrates it by blocking Yang's Semblance effortlessly, and easily hefting Ozpin's giant table with one hand, which Yang can barely budge with all her might and can only lift an inch working together with Blake.
• Surprisingly Normal Backstory: With so many Jaunes wrapped up in the fate of their respective Remnants, it's sort of shocking when one doesn't have a legendary background.
  • Hunter just lived his life in a rural civilian context and has only barely been exposed to the Huntsman lifestyle at all. The culture clash and the prejudice he has create some distance instantly when he's surrounded by people with more 'glorious' backgrounds.
  • Barista gave up trying to be a badass hero and pivoted to become a small business owner instead. Even then this is Downplayed, as his more mundane life still managed to drastically change the future of his world because a lot of the movers and shakers like his coffee, including Salem.
  • Magnis had a really stressful few weeks at one point in his education, but otherwise basically has a life typical of any Huntsman or Huntress to come out of an academy. He reveals this to regular Jaune to encourage him, as proof that he can become a capable Huntsman even if he has no "special bullshit" on his side.
  • Regular Jaune himself hasn't experienced any extraordinary circumstances like his counterparts (besides the death game), and is just a civilian kid who wanted to be a hero. At the Jaune soirée, many of the others in attendance are curious and fascinated about his life, since few of them know what it's like to be a normal student.
• The Symbiote: The Grimm parasite Remy was pulled to this world along with Grimm Jaune. He's an intelligent organism inhabiting Grimm's body who can complement Grimm's own abilities or just give him someone to bounce thoughts off of.
• Sympathetic Murderer: Fate killed Leviathan and blew up Barista, his own allies, but all he wants to do is save his friends in his own world after having failed to do so for well over a thousand years. Additionally, he targeted Barista specifically so that his friends would have the chance to stop him before he would have to kill them, something that even he's not desperate enough to want to do.
• Take That!: When Leviathan realizes that none of the other characters know what World of Warcraft is because none of them are from Earth, he admits that it means they're spared witnessing the evil of Activision Blizzard.
• Taking You with Me:
  • Grimm impales himself on Knight's sword to get his helmet off before swarming the man's mouth with miniature Lancers, asphyxiating him. The two die shortly afterwards.
  • Revolutionary lets Adam take control of his body so they can get revenge on the Adam Taurus of this world, knowing full well that they're not walking away alive from the fight either way (since Adam is his own Anchor). Revolutionary later tells the group that Adam is bleeding out just before he himself dies from his wounds.
  • Headmaster finishes off Null by going into the battle with enough explosives strapped to his chest to level Beacon, grabbing him as tightly as possible, and blowing himself up. It not only takes Null with him, but it ends the entire game in a draw.
• Talk to the Fist: Grimm Jaune's attempt to peacefully talk to Ozpin's group goes well until they discover that he's part-Grimm and that his full name is Jaune Salem Arc. He can barely get another sentence in before everyone goes in to attack him at once, which he had already expected would be the case based on past experience.
• Taught by Experience:
  • This trope is arguably the biggest reason RWBY and JNPR do so poorly against the various iterations. With the exception of Jaune, they are all students at Beacon at the top of their class... but they are still just first-year students with little practical experience to speak of. By contrast, the summoned iterations, with Ashari and Knight as the most notable examples, all have far more life experience than them, as well as know how to make full use of that experience. Even the iterations that aren't a physical match for them (i.e., Fate, Null, and Xiong) are able to put them on the back foot because of their greater cunning and strategy.
  • That aside, JNPR and RWBY did learn from their experience at the docks; when put into opposition with Magnis and Nicholas Arc, they work to defuse the situation and manage to get out of it unhurt and with no losses.
• Technician vs. Performer: The final battle of the Jaunes comes down to Headmaster versus Null, the two least combat capable Jaunes in the entire tournament. Headmaster has combat training from Neo, but he's never been particularly gifted in combat because he usually relies on his impeccable bullshitting. Null has no combat training whatsoever, but has been in life-or-death combat for months and, in the right circumstances, can one-shot his enemies. They fight for several minutes, with Headmaster slowly grinding down Null's Aura one tiny piece at a time, but eventually Null is able to get one shot in, and the one hit is so bad that Headmaster has to blow them both up to force a draw.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Most of Cinder's faction would rather not work with her, but they don't exactly have a say in the matter.
  • Grimm despises this world's Cinder for being a mockery of who he knows as his sister, viewing her as a petty brat who can't back up her boasts, and only serves her because he's trying to help his mother. He comes close to outright dismembering her when she pushes him too far, but he spares her so she can watch him burn down her plans.
  • Null may approve of her violent methods, but he still hates her personally since his version of her tried to kill his sister out of petty spite near the end of his story. He's well aware that her idiotic plan will only get her killed, but she's his Anchor, so he can't kill her without losing the wish.
  • Ashari gives Cinder the same amount of energy as he would to a bug underneath his boot because compared to Salem, Tyrian, or even Hazel, all of whom he defeated twice, she's basically a nonentity. The only reason he doesn't just kill her and run is that he wants to redeem this world's Emerald like he did his own, and she's too loyal to Cinder to leave with him yet.
  • Headmaster works with her as part of his endeavor to pit both sides against each other, but his talk with Roman makes it clear he finds her a pain in the ass to deal with and he takes great joy in pulling the rug out from under her.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill:
  • Hunter holds it as a point of pride that he has never used his hunting skills to kill another person, and refuses to change that. When Ozpin and Ironwood try to force him to fight in the death game, Hunter looks seconds away from decking Ironwood before conceding that he will fight but not kill. Before that is put to the test, he abandons the death game entirely rather than be bullied into fighting against his will.
  • Grimm strongly dislikes violence and would rather talk things out. Unfortunately, his appearance makes that rather difficult to pull off. When fighting Atlas soldiers and a half dozen huntsmen and huntresses, he holds back enough so that the worst injuries his opponents suffer are bruises.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: The story ends with the reveal that Jaune and Blake are going on a date and Jaune losing his virginity to Blake rather easily.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: The various Jaunes come from all over the place within their stories:
  • Knight, Leviathan, Barista, Null, Ash, and Warchief seem to have been pulled from after the end of their stories.
  • Fate's white coat and attitude dates him as coming from as early as the first semester break in his fic's concurrent and last loop.
  • Hunter's story is on hiatus and his secretive nature means he's not saying much about his life.
  • Ghost Jaune's corpse is still intact even though it had already been eaten by Grimm by the time Blake went looking for it early in her story, meaning either the Gods repaired it for the challenge or it was pulled from near the beginning of From Beyond.
  • Ashari has his new body and appearance rather than his original one and claims to have seen to the death of Salem twice, suggesting he's from his story's final few chapters but not the very end, where he was sent back to his original timeline and body.
  • Xiong's personality and ruthlessness indicate that he comes from anywhere after Laurie and Dominic attempted to kill him, but his ruining of Cinder's plans indicates that he might also come from after his story ended.
  • Grimm and Remy both acknowledge the Gods as naïve and know them enough to guess that the battle was Light's idea, suggesting that they've at least passed the climax of their story where they confronted the Gods personally.
  • Revolutionary comes from somewhere after his attempted assassination at the Vytal Festival.
  • Headmaster Arc is described to be about the same age as Ashari and he mentions that Cinder has been crowned Queen of her own Kingdom in his world, putting him at around the time of the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue.
  • Magnis, based on Nicholas's comment to Blake, is a father to at least two children, placing him at least around his Distant Finale, if not sometime after.
  • Chapter 32 confirms that Agent is the new leader of a reformed VSS, meaning he's from around or soon after the end of this story.
• Too Powerful to Live: Leviathan in his true form is by far the most destructive of all the Jaunes, boasting the power to wipe out whole cities using the ocean itself and passively spawning thousands of Grimm all across the land just by existing. Even if he wasn't trying a last-ditch effort to win the Gods' game, the heroes can't afford to let him live a second longer than they have to or else civilization will collapse under the turmoil of his Nightmare. As such, he lasts one chapter before the heroes manage to put him down.
• Tragic Villain:
  • Null is the most sadistic and cruel of the Jaunes, but just like in his home story, his only motive is trying to get his family back, especially his dead mother - and for anyone familiar with his story, he's also juggling a downright staggering amount of trauma.
  • Leviathan is only made a villain because of circumstances outside of his control - namely, being trapped in a body that creates a Nightmare just by existing - and only wanted the wish so as to escape an eternity of complete isolation in the Grimm world.
  • Fate has become so desperate to end the "Groundhog Day" Loop and the endless flow of trauma in his own universe, seeing the wish as his only chance to achieve that, that he's willing to cross the one line he would never cross in his own universe: killing his friends in the main universe to wipe out the iterations tethered to them. And much as he tries to hide it, it tears him up to do this.
• Trapped in Villainy:
  • Ashari has no reason to fight on Salem's side, except that he's anchored to Emerald, and Salem has no qualms about threatening to have her killed if he doesn't cooperate. Putting aside the fact that he doesn't want her hurt for purely emotional reasons, killing her would take him out as well, so for the moment he needs to play along with the villains.
  • This trope also applies to Grimm. When he was first summoned, his initial instinct was to flee to the heroes' side and fight with them, but when he saw how lonely Salem was, he decided to stay for her sake. He strongly dislikes his situation, and when he is ordered to fight Knight, he goes along with it so that he can finally return home.
• Underestimating Badassery: Cinder spends the story believing herself to be the most powerful member of her team, with all of the iterations wrapped around her finger. In reality, all of the iterations easily outclass her in every way that matters.
  • Cinder believes that she has Ashari trapped on her side due to her raw power, even while later conceding that he's more powerful than she thought when she curb-stomps Beacon's forces. The reality is that he could kill her in an instant if he actually bothered to, and the only reason why he doesn't is that doing so would alienate Emerald.
  • While believing herself to be a partner with Headmaster, the reality is that he's playing both sides in a way that Cinder could only dream. She believes they're working together, but she's nothing more than a pawn in his game desperately trying to make something of the pieces he leaves her in.
  • Grimm, due to his nice nature, originally goes along with all of Cinder's plans no questions asked, leaving her believing him to be a pushover. Grimm finally snaps when she orders him to massacre Vale's citizens, chokes her with his tentacles, and comes close to ripping her apart right then and there while telling her that she only gets to live so she can watch him fuck up her plans.
  • The only one on her side who has any degree of loyalty to her is Null, but not only did he already kill her in his home universe (meaning he could do it again), but even he has no respect for her and realizes that her attempt to subvert the war for herself is only going to end with her destruction. He only follows her because killing her would deny him the wish.
• Undying Loyalty: Grimm is well aware the Salem he's anchored to isn't his mother, but he can't help but want to stand by her. Even if he disagrees with her end goals, he can't give up on his family. He finally draws the line when she orders him to massacre Vale's citizens just to draw Knight out, with him and Remy finally concluding that they don't want to be on this Remnant for any longer.
• Unfazed Everyman: Barista Jaune. As his title implies, he's just a barista who owns a coffee shop, and while he did get his aura unlocked in his story, he's nevertheless an untrained civilian. However, because of the knowledge gained from the various relationships and connections he made, he's able to take everything that's happening in stride and is the only Jaune who shows up at Beacon other than Knight who knew about Salem.
  Weiss: "You did!? A barista of all people knew the truth?"
• The Unfettered: The various Jaunes have various lines they are reluctant to cross when it comes to winning this death game.
  • To the extreme is Null, who proclaims that he will do anything to get his wish, and backs it up by team-killing a fellow Jaune and murdering an innocent stripper in cold blood. His own narration betrays a much greater degree of conflict between his claims and his private thoughts, as he doesn't like the idea of degrading back into the ruthless homicidal psychopath he's begun to move past, but that does precious little to stop his actions.
  • Headmaster theorizes that Fate is secretly just as, if not more extreme than Null in this regard. He believes that Fate is actually so desperate for the wish that he's lying about not being willing to participate in the war, that he was behind the assassinations of Leviathan and Barista, and is planning to betray Ozpin's side. This is all but confirmed during Cinder's attack on Beacon when Fate attacks Warchief and his guards in the chaos.
• Unreliable Narrator: Averted. Some of the Jaunes, such as Knight and Warchief, come from stories told in the first-person. Arc Royale is told in the third person, allowing us to see such characters from unclouded perspectives.
  • Interestingly, for certain characters (specifically, Headmaster Arc), this third-person narration is less reliable, as readers lack the perspective that, in his own story, let them see the frantic Indy Ploys behind the apparent cool, long-term planning.
• Villainous Breakdown: Cinder freaks out when she realizes just how hopelessly outclassed she and her entire group are by Knight. She gets a second one when she realizes she's been Out-Gambitted by Xiong and lost her chance at claiming the Maiden powers.
• Villains Act, Heroes React: This concept is discussed heavily by Headmaster and is later revealed to be a part of his motivation in the war. In his own world, Ozpin and Salem's war lasted for so long because Ozpin preferred to largely play defense, meaning that Salem had all the time in the world to attack, retreat, regroup, and repeat for thousands of years without him making any progress. Headmaster later won the war by being willing to be proactive and putting his students on the ground, so he's now spreading this lesson to the students of this world by forcing them into a confrontation and making them realize that they need to be active in the battle or their world will perish.
• Villain Team-Up:
  • Cinder, a power-hungry sociopath willing to destroy Kingdoms, gets paired with Null, the coldest and most brutal Jaune Arc, willing to kill absolutely anyone in the way of saving his family. The two take to each other's methods easily and soon begin plotting to kill all of their competition without mercy.
  • Headmaster and Xiong are working together to weaken both the heroes and villains for their own ends, all while Xiong works to unite the Vale criminal underworld under his single banner.
• Weak, but Skilled: Fate laments that he's got all the knowledge and experience he could ask for, but none of it will do him any good when he's as weak as regular Jaune and he's up against the likes of Ashari, who is in his prime, and Knight, who is just impossibly powerful. But of course, when the opponent isn't strong enough to override his skill, like Agent, he can press that advantage for all it's worth.
• We Are Not Going Through That Again: Fate has already had more than enough of being jerked around by unfathomable cosmic forces, and declares his intention to sit out this conflict.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Fate wastes no time calling attention to this concern; though they're on the same team for the purposes of deciding the outcome of the war, only the last surviving Jaune will get his wish. This means that unless it comes down to one good versus one evil Jaune, then allies will have to kill each other to get what they want, and theoretically, they could do it at any time if they feel it won't sabotage the game for their side. Ozpin urges them to work together at least until the game is done. The first time we see Salem's side, Null and Cinder have done exactly this and transparently killed Ash just to get rid of him fast, and when Leviathan gets backed into a corner, he tries to take all of Vale with him in a last-ditch effort to take out all the other Jaunes and win.
• We Hardly Knew Ye:
  • Ash gets offed by Null before we can learn anything meaningful about him.
  • Same with the Entertainer, who is Killed Offscreen.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 7 ends with Leviathan being shot by an unknown assailant and falling in the water, leading to him transforming into his Grimm form and causing a Nightmare. The next chapter follows this up by having Leviathan being put down by his own side.
  • Chapter 16 reveals that Headmaster Arc and Xiong are working together behind Cinder's back to weaken both sides of the war at once.
  • Chapter 29: Fate's treachery turns the entire Beacon battle into a disorganized free-for-all, with Warchief dead and Ironwood out of commission; Cinder attacks Beacon with her forces to try to find the Maiden; and through it all, Ozpin is revealed to have been Agent's Anchor from the beginning, unleashing him on the chaos and giving him permission to kill any Jaune who might be hostile regardless of allegiance.
  • Chapter 30: Knight and Grimm, the two strongest and most heroic of the iterations, kill each other in their battle, crippling the heroes' forces.
  • Chapter 37: Fate and Ashari are both killed by Cinder and Null; meanwhile, Headmaster finally reveals himself to the heroes and begins a counterattack against Cinder.
  • Chapter 38: Headmaster kills himself and Null, forcibly ending the death game in a draw. When the Gods return and begin to draw up another death match, regular Jaune interrupts and declares himself the victor.
• Wham Line:
  • When the group talks to Jaune Xiong, he reveals that he'd already encountered another Jaune; a Jaune who carried a cane alongside his sword and didn't seem to know who was Beacon's Headmaster.
  • Glynda mentions that reports of a sex worker being shot were contradicted by the lack of a body, highly implying that Null has already killed the Jaune from The Entertainer.
  • When Team RWBY and JNPR encounter Magnis, they enter the bar and see what appears to be another Jaune. However, Knight shortly sits down with him and says "Hello, father", confirming instead that Nicholas Arc is Magnis's Anchor.
  • Chapter 28 ends on a doozy, when Fate breaks into Warchief's headquarters after attacking his guard.
    Warchief: You said you didn't want to fight!
    Fate: I don't. I want to win. There's a difference.
  • Chapter 38: As the Gods begin deciding to have another death match due to the way this one ended, Jaune interrupts them and declares himself the last Jaune standing, therefore he's won.
    Jaune: I won. I am the victor.
• Willfully Weak:
  • When Leviathan, in his true Grimm form, attacks the other Jaunes and anchors in one last attempt to win the war for himself, Ren notes that while he could have easily destroyed Vale in one go with tidal waves, he chose to simply use his massive body for direct attacks.
  • As Cinder and later Headmaster Arc point out, if Grimm really wanted to, he could end the war in a matter of hours by flooding Vale in an endless onslaught of his namesake without ever putting himself in harm's way. The reason he doesn't is because of his own morals and desire to avoid civilian casualties.
• With Us or Against Us: As per usual when Ironwood is around and the stakes are high. When he gets to Beacon, he and Ozpin meet with Fate and Hunter to explain to them that, with so much uncertainty about friend and foe, they cannot be allowed to just sit things out while the rest of the heroes are fighting for the fate of the world, and they can either fight for them or be treated as fighting against them. Ironically and perhaps karmically, Ironwood gets this thrown back at him with Hunter leaving Beacon on the first chance he got after Barista's death^note Though the real reason is that Hunter figured out Fate's true goals, Magnis as he refuses to be treated as a pawn despite being a fully-fledged Huntsman, and eventually Knight when he and Ozpin are letting the war drag on to get an edge over Salem's side and putting more lives at risk.
• The Worf Effect: Knight keeps showing up other characters whenever he demonstrates his abilities. His strength dwarfs Yang's even with her Semblance and gives Ozpin pause, he can beat Pyrrha in a spar before she knows what hit her, and it's only slightly more even against all of Team RWBY at once. Of course, this means that when Ashari manages to take down Knight before he even throws a punch, Ruby becomes painfully aware of just how screwed they are in a straight fight with him.
• World's Strongest Man: Knight, as a result of the rules of his world translating over to Remnant, is by far the physically strongest character in the story. Notably, he's the only character able to hurt Leviathan's Grimm form, something Yang is sure is impossible. However, Knight is by no means invincible, as Ashari is able to temporarily disable him by blinding him with tear gas.
  • He gets to prove it when he fights Cinder's faction and the White Fang on his own and he tears them apart. By the end of the fight, Mercury and most of the White Fang are dead, Ashari has lost his right arm, and the only reasons the others survive are the Grimm dogpiling Knight and Ashari's smoke grenades masking their escape.
• Worthy Opponent: Knight initially thinks Grimm is just like Salem, but when the two talk before their final battle, he realizes that Grimm is also a monarch from a peaceful world and is nothing like the Salem Knight knew. The two lament having to fight, but both do so because of their duty. Even when Grimm kills him, Knight mentally commends him for his genius move as well as for having proven worthy of the title of "Salem's champion".
• Wrong Context Magic: Knight and Leviathan come from worlds where the Aura system of canon doesn't exist; the failure of Ozpin's attempt to unlock Leviathan's aura indicates that it's incompatible with them.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Nicholas Arc’s understanding of the Alternate Universe situation initially has him assuming that, because Blake married his son in Magnis’ world, he should expect the same here — to said girl’s mortification. Some time after better understanding things, he makes another quip about her being the future mother of his unborn grandchildren but quickly reassures her that he’s aware it’s not set in stone here.
• Yaoi Fangirl: Upon hearing that Fate was supposedly in a relationship with Ren, Yang and Nora immediately demand details, to Ren's immense discomfort.
• You Can't Fight Fate: Fate discusses this with Ozpin. There is only so much one can do to impact the outcome of events, both due to random chance and the free will others possess.
  Jaune: Other people react as well. If Cinder shoots me in an alley, I can't avoid that fate by not visiting that alley because then she'll shoot me in a park.
  Ozpin: Because Cinder was following you all along. Because she watches you change your path and follows you.
• You Need to Get Laid: Grimm and Remy privately think this about canon Salem after meeting her and seeing she's perpetually angry and bitter. They're not necessarily wrong either, as the only significant divergence point between his universe and that of most other timelines is indeed that his Salem managed to rediscover love by meeting Jaune's father (and proceeding to have a very active sex life).
• Zerg Rush: Grimm's solution to dealing with Knight is to overwhelm his opponent through an unending flood of well over one million Grimm. While Knight is able to cleave through over a dozen with each swing of his sword, it's far from certain that can destroy every single Grimm before they wear him down and kill him. He does manage to kill more than half, but Grimm employs the strategy a different way to end the fight: attacking him with a swarm of insect-sized Grimm who predictably die by the thousands, but who jam themselves into Knight's mouth and down his throat, choking him to death.

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