Nanosuit and Soul Magic: A Crysis/RWBY crossover

chapter 31

Team Auburn got fucked. 

They seemed to be roughly on par with the girls in terms of raw physical capability, but the skill and tactical difference was just…gah. 

There was one person on their team who was pulling her weight, a dark-skinned girl in a weird half-robe thing who was brawling with Yang, and another girl with a hoverboard (not going to lie, that’s really fucking cool) that managed to stick it out with Blake for a little bit, but the other half of the team seemed to be human whack-a-mole targets for all the good they did.

Highlights include a guy flanking Ruby then quipping before an attack, which let Weiss punt him across the arena, all four team members spending their time split up and not supporting each other, hover-girl trying to pull off a midair backflip while her hoverboard turned into a pair of machine pistols, and then promptly landing flat on her ass, and then that same hover-girl falling for the most absurdly obvious trap that I’ve ever seen, which got her KO’d.

The crowning achievement in this comedy was Weiss freezing the two whack-a-moles into a giant ball of ice, the one competent fighter bailing them out (I noticed the eye-roll, but she ain’t exactly a strategic mastermind herself), which set them up for a big team maneuver from RWBY that threw Yang at the grouped-up schmucks, letting her slug all three of them at the same time with a fuckton of extra momentum.

At that point, skill bowed out to let physics take over, and the match ended.

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About fifteen minutes after that, the girls and I were back down at the fairgrounds. They were eating massive bowls of noodles (I guess they do have a jacked up metabolism, which is something that actually makes sense) with the same friends that they hung out with last time, and I was looking menacing and making sure that nobody tried to gack the damn kids.

The short redhead on Juniper abruptly looked up from her meal and stared at me. “Hey, could you grow your arm back if something blew it off?”

I took a moment to process that and formulate an acceptable answer. “What?”

“Like, your first day here you got a huge hole in your belly, but then it just sort of got better, so I’m just wondering if you can grow back arms and stuff.”

Now, I don’t really know much about any of the Juniper kids, but my impressions of Nora are at odds with the current line of medical inquiry. I didn’t really feel like she was the kind of person to think deeply about…well, stuff in general. Still, okay, rolling with it. 

Plus, I’d never actually considered asking this question myself, since I haven’t actually lost a limb before. A half-second perusal of the suit archives gave me the answer. “Well, I can’t just magic up mass from nothing, so if someone cuts off my arm I’m going to be screwed in the short term. If I get the opportunity to claim appropriate kinds of mass from the surroundings, I could eventually grow it back. It might take a day or so, all told.”

Nora seemed to brighten at this. “Okay, so you’d be cool with holding any tricky grenades I make?”

Nora’s Asian Totally-Not-Boyfriend sighed. Completely opposing her (apparently literally) explosive personality, Ren addressed her quietly. “Nora, what did I tell you about playing with volatile materials?”

“You said that I couldn’t do it because I’d blow off my arms! But Alcatraz can grow new arms, so it’s completely fine if he does it!”

Ah. So much for hidden depths.

“Wait,” Weiss interrupted. “What kind of ‘mass’ would you need to collect? Do we need to create a stockpile?”