Ruby awoke with a groan as she looked up at the forest’s canopy groaning as she felt a headache coming on and her vision went blurry for a slight moment. The dirt felt so comfy, and she quite loved the comfort after Cinder had managed to beat them all - wait a minute!

Ruby immediately shot to full alert, sitting up and checking the area for her friends and her Uncle Qrow, who had somehow knew where they were...

She shrugged that question off for the time being, she needed to ensure her friends were okay!

A high pitched groaning coming from a bush answered her before she could call out for anyone as she ran over to the suspicious shrubbery, poking it curiously as a mop of messy blond hair slowly rose out of it, followed by the familiar form of her friend as he held his head. “Ugh...Ruby, what happened?” Jaune struggled to his feet and leaned against a tree trunk. “I remember Cinder attacking us and your Uncle Qrow, and then…” His eyes widened, noticing what Ruby had. “Where’s everyone else!?” He asked, setting aside his confusion to search for his team and friends. “Nora!? Ren!?” He yelled out, a slight desperate tinge coloring his tone.

“Here!” A Bubbly voice called from behind Jaune, causing him to jump in shock and whirl around, where he promptly face palmed upon seeing Nora.

“Good, now where’s Ren?” Jaune muttered to himself as he took a deep breath, scanning tree branches for his stealthy teammate, and not spotting him. “Ren!” Jaune called out once again, followed by Ren showing up shaking his head as if to clear it of any confusion. “Good, is everyone here okay?” He got nods from all three, some more exuberant than others, causing him to sigh in relief. “Oh thank Goodness” he said lowly, glad his team was okay.

‘Or what was left of them’ He shook his head.

‘Inner voice, why must you torment me now!? I have a team to lead through an unknown, and frankly, incredibly creepy forest, can we save the breakdown for later!?’ It didn’t respond.

Smiling inwardly at the victory against...himself, Jaune shook his head and took a deep breath to calm down as he looked around his new surroundings.

They were in a horribly untamed looking forest, which really wasn’t saying too much considering they were just in another horribly untamed forest a few hours ago, but this one felt more inherently… malevolent. Whereas the forest they had been hiking through not too long ago had the same undertone of unease and weariness, this forest just seemed to exude it in multitudes, as if the trees themselves were telling them to leave. Jaune decided to take the forest’s advice and begin looking for a way towards civilization. He turned to his team (and Ruby) to tell them his plan, but was surprised when a crow alighted onto Ruby’s shoulder, where it nipped her ear before leaping off and transforming mid air into Ruby’s uncle, Qrow Branwen. He gave them a slight smirk before addressing them in his signature slurred speech.

“Hello kids, little lost aren’t we?” He asked, causing a raised eyebrow from Ren, a head tilt from Nora, a hug from Ruby, and a sheepish nod from Jaune. “Well, while you four were taking a nap, I performed some recon and found a small village to the south” he pointed behind him. “Fair warning though, it seems exceedingly colorful.” He added in a stage whisper. Jaune nodded confusedly.

“Well, let’s move out you guys, we’ve got a village to get to!” His team plus Ruby nodded their assent and began following Qrow, who was walking cautiously through the underbrush, a carefree look on his face, but anyone could see the alertness in his eyes. They walked for what felt like hours before Qrow stopped ahead of them, holding a hand up to cease the other’s movements.

“Do you hear that?” He asked in a slurred whisper, pulling his weapon from his lower back in a well practiced maneuver, allowing it to unfold into its sword configuration as he held it in an offensive position. This action caused his four younger companions to draw their weapons as well as they began watching the brush with trepidation. Or...happy anticipation in Nora’s case.

Sure enough, Qrow hadn’t been hearing things, as a few seconds after they had been stopped, an ominous growling sounded throughout the clearing. The Huntsmen quickly jumped into formation, Qrow at the front, Ruby and Ren flanking him with Nora and Jaune watching their rear. As they began intently searching the brush for any signs of Grimm, ten pairs of glowing yellow eyes surrounded them, and as if on some unseen signal, their enemies leapt out of the brush and began circling them. However, they weren’t exactly what they had been expecting.

Instead of pitch black monsters with white bone armor like they’d been anticipating, their foe instead looked as if was made of wood. Their bodies looked as if the forest had simply cobbled together a pack of monsters to protect it from trespassers, their wooden, splintery teeth bared at the trespassers. “What are those?” Jaune asked nervously.

“I don’t know, but they don’t look friendly.” Ren replied in his usual stoic tone, watching and waiting for his opening.

“I’m sure they die just like any other Grimm!” Ruby replied positively, causing Nora to nod excitedly in agreement.

As if their wooden adversary could understand them, the wolves quickly jumped at them, hoping to end the fight preemptively, their thorn-like claws swiping at the group of humans in front of them.

They quickly dodged, raising their weapons into defensive positions as they ducked and jumped over their swipes before lashing out at them in kind. Their weapons easily finding purchase in their wooden bodies, cutting their foes in half, or simply smashing their heads and chests like a nut.

“Ha this is fun!” Nora exclaimed happily as she swung Magnhild into her opponent, sending it flying into a tree, where it broke into splinters and went inert. With a manic grin, Nora leapt at her next foe, quickly giving it the same fate as well.

Meanwhile Ruby and Qrow were effortlessly slicing through the wolves, cutting through even the wolves’ thickest tree like armor with surprising ease, sending them crashing to the ground, where they broke apart into splinters.

Jaune and Ren were the only two have problems with their foes, their blades neither big, nor sharp enough to slice their opponents with the ease of Ruby and Qrow, nor were they heavy enough to smash them into splinters like Nora. Seeing this, Ren had gone for a more acrobatic approach, flipping through the air before landing on their backs where he shot through gaps in their wooden hide.

Jaune had gone for his typical brute force way of fighting, bashing his shield against his opponent’s head before using their reactions to slam his sword through their unarmored eyes. He did this to the last two of the wooden wolves before sheathing his weapon and rolling his head on his neck, cracking it, and releasing a sigh of relief.

“That was easy!” Nora said as she hopped around the clearing, dancing around the remains of their foes with a grin. Ren shook his head in fond exasperation as he stowed his weapons away into the holsters in his sleeves.

“Yeah, almost too easy” Qrow said in agreement as he cast glances around the clearing. “Let’s keep moving you four, keep up, we’ve got to get to that village, there might be a more powerful opponent watching, like whoever made those things in the first place.” With that, they began their trek anew, granted, going quite a bit faster than they were before.

Meanwhile, a cyan pegasus was napping on a cloud over her friend Applejack’s farm. She was in the middle of a dream where she joined the Wonderbolts by performing a Sonic Rainboom in front of her idols. She was just about to accept her pin and uniform from Spitfire when a loud series of ear shattering bangs reached her ears, causing her to roll off of her cloud in a panic and crash into one of the many apple trees below her before she was fully awake. In a daze, Rainbow Dash shook the twigs out of her mane and spit the apple out of her mouth before looking over towards the Everfree Forest, where the sounds had come from.

“What the hay?” She asked the air, watching the forest warily. She floated in mid air for a few more seconds, debating on whether she should go look or if she should fly away to warn the town of Ponyville. She was about to choose the latter when the sounds went off again, closer than they were before, causing her to quickly decide on the former, for if they were that close to the edge of the Everfree Forest, even she might not be able to warn Ponyville in time. With her mind made up, Rainbow shot towards the creepy, unnatural forest, a polychromatic contrail in her wake.

Before sheepishly laughing to herself and flying back down towards Applejack to see if she’d be willing to tag along.

“How did they even do that!?” Jaune yelled in exasperation at the ten foot tall wooden wolf they now fought, the result of the ones they had killed earlier combining to make the monstrosity before them.

“I don’t know, but it’s totally awesome!” Nora yelled as she fired her grenade launcher at the beast, blowing a large hole in it’s side that seemed to be more superficial than anything. Nora pouted as she noticed it hadn’t slowed down in the slightest. “”That’s not fair!” She pouted up at the beast, as if it would collapse from the need to appease her.

It didn’t work.

‘Okay, need to take out a ten foot tall wooden monster that can keep moving without the majority of its hip’ Ruby thought to herself as she jumped over a low swipe by the wolf ‘Bumbl- wait, only have team JNPR.’ She internally groaned, ‘If Yang were here, this fight would be over by now!’ She could almost feel the light bulb turn on above her head as she continued on this line of thought, smiling as the plan finally came together. “Jaune!” Ruby called out to him from where he was frantically blocking the wolf’s attempt to smash him to pieces.

“Yeah?” He called out out over the large beings snarling.

“We’re going to need to focus our firepower on it’s eyes or mouth, and since Uncle Qrow flew off to see if he could find who was controlling this thing, that means…” she trailed off, leading him to finish the sentence himself.

“Flower Power?” He asked as he ducked under another swipe, and blocked the monster’s attempt at biting him in half. Ruby nodded at Jaune excitedly as she used her semblance to dodge a swipe aimed for her.

“Flower Power.” She replied in a serious tone before breaking out in a large grin and propelling herself up the monster’s body, Crescent Rose’s sniper rifle firing behind her. Jaune smiled slightly as he looked over to Ren and Nora where they were trying to use range to their advantage.

A few minutes ago...

"Rainbow, are ya sure we're headin' the right way?" Applejack asked her friend testily, they had been walking through the Everfree for the past fifteen minutes, and Applejack and Rainbow were getting more than a little bit frightened. The Everfree wasn't a natural place, and simply being in it made them feel uncomfortable.

Not that they would ever let the other know that of course.

"What's the matter AJ? Gettin' scared?" Rainbow replied in a taunting voice that wavered slightly as she nervously poked a bush with her hoof. "Do ya wanna run away..." Rainbow shakily smirked, "chicken?" Applejack scowled up at her friend, using on of her hooves to tip her stetson over her eyes so she didn't have to look at the infuriating pegasus as she replied.

"No, I'm not. I'm gettin' tired of followin ya through an unnatural forest for somethin' I'm startin' to believe ya made up, is all." Applejack replied, secretly glad her face was covered by her hat, otherwise even Rainbow might have caught her obvious lie. "Now, let's turn around and get outta h-" she was cut off by a loud crack as they neared a clearing, their previous thoughts forgotten as they rushed towards the noise.

"Quick Applejack, hide in here!" Rainbow called out in a whisper, waving her hoof towards her and the bush she was holding the branches apart in. Once she dove in, Rainbow followed not long after. "Let's see what's going on out there" Rainbow said as they poked their heads out of the bushes.

They promptly balked at what they saw.

"What the hay..." Applejack muttered as the two focused on the scene before them.

“Ren, Nora!” He called to get their attention, they looked towards him, seeing his small smile as he yelled out, “Flower Power!” Nora’s grin became much more feral, and Ren nodded.
Ren leapt towards Nora, prompting her to hold Magnhild upside down, allowing him to land on one side of the hammer’s head, as Nora stepped onto the other, with a grin that would have been downright terrifying to anyone not accustomed to Nora’s antics, she pulled the large trigger on her weapon’s handle, sending them towards the monster’s head with a pink explosion acting as their propulsion.

Ren waited until just the right moment before he flipped off the end of the hammer and slammed Storm Flower’s blades into the monster’s viney hide. With a quick flip of a switch, Ren activated the fire dust in the blades of his weapons and took the monster’s flinch as a chance to pull the blades out of it before running across its shoulder and leaping onto it’s cheek, using the uneven hide as stepping stones to pull himself upwards.

Nora meanwhile, had just landed on the beast’s head, slamming Magnhild downwards into it’s skull to use her momentum in a devastating strike. She grinned manically at Ren and jumped down onto the monster’s snout, firing a round from her grenade launcher into one of it’s eyes, causing it’s head to careen backwards, making Nora jump, but leaving an opening for Ruby and Ren to swing their weapons straight for it’s eyes, landing a pair of devastating blows that caused the odd green energy that glowed within its eyes to leak outwards, it’s body seemed to turn gray and rickety as the force keeping it together exploded upwards, lighting up the mid-afternoon sky in a bright flash of green that shone over the treetops. This explosion of life energy, combined with the loss of its structural integrity caused the monster to fall backwards, breaking into so much kindling as the forest floor raced up to meet it, prompting the three attackers to leap off of it and into the safety of the trees before leaping back down to the ground.

“Well…” Ruby panted as she folded up Crescent Rose and placed it on her back. “That was a thing.” And with that, she fell onto her backside, letting the adrenaline induced crash wash over her as she relaxed into the forest floor. Ren collapsed much the same as he leaned against a tree trunk, sliding down it until he was sitting down. Nora however, looked as excited and ready for action as ever. She looked at the large amounts of timber around her and pouted as she observed the carnage.

“Aww, it’s broken!”

Jaune facepalmed at his teammate’s reaction.

Meanwhile within view of the clearing where the team had just fought.

“What in tarnation are they, Rainbow?” An orange pony, wearing a brown stetson questioned her companion, a cyan pegasus who was hovering a few feet above her friend.

“I don’t know Applejack, but that was AWESOME!” She gushed, pressing her hooves against her cheeks. She coughed as she caught her friend’s incredulous glance. “I-I mean, yeah it was cool and all, but they could be dangerous” She said, quickly hiding all indicators that she had just been gushing over the strange bipedal creatures and their odd weapons. “I say we follow ‘em and see what they’re doing, we need to know if they’re going to attack Ponyville!” Applejack nodded at this, agreeing with her friend’s idea.

“That sounds like a good idea Rainbow, but wasn’t there a fifth feller they mentioned? Crow or somethin’?” As soon as she finished this sentence however, she heard a muffled yelp from above her and looked to see the missing fifth creature holding Rainbow with one arm, his other hand covering the mare’s mouth.

“Yeah, there was, and he’s trying to figure out just where they are, mind shedding some light on that?” He said, slurred voice sending a wave of intimidation down Applejack’s spine.

Author's Note

Hello everybody! If anyone is wondering about the fire dust in Ren's weapon, that's because on the wiki, Kerry said something about them being "wind and fire" blades. I just took it literally.