1,344I don't own anything related to the RWBY franchise
Chapter 2 - Down the Rabbit Hole
While slowly struggling back up to his feet, Jaune made sure to cradle his recently broken nose to conceal the fact that it was already beginning to heal. He couldn't afford for his newly unlocked aura regen rate to be caught on camera. It was of vital importance to his plan that he be long gone by the time his family even suspected that his collar was broken. The problem with having to get away without any notice whatsoever was that his escape plan depended on several different uncontrollable factors and there were more than a few different unknowns.
The first unknown in Jaune's plan was whether or not he could make use of his newly freed aura to bolster his body's baseline attributes. If one were to judge him as they would any fresh off of the assembly line human being without an aura, he'd be considered one of Atlas's premier athletes. For almost five years he'd pushed his body to the limit every damned day and the results were obvious for anyone to see. He was extremely fit, sturdy of build and defined like an Olympian gymnast of old.
On the other hand, if you judged Jaune's strength based on a modern Huntsmen's standards... Well... The fight that he'd just taken part in had been extremely telling. Professional Huntsmen and Huntresses with full use of their aura abilities can and do pick up and throw cars while they dodge and deflect bullets. Without figuring out how to use his aura, there was just no way that Jaune would be able to fight any of his father's vassals. He was considered unbelievably slow, weak and clumsy without an aura and that was without factoring in his lack of offensive training. His family had very carefully kept any martial arts literature from entering Arc castle, thus, he only knew what strikes and defensive stances he'd figured out for himself. It wasn't much to work with, but unfortunately it was all that he had.
The second unknown was his destination. Every single night, Jaune found himself carefully ignoring a spot over the Arc Castle's walls, where a patch of light pollution bled into the sky. This light pollution came from the south, which meant that South was the direction Jaune would need to travel. The problem with choosing this location was that he didn't know what exactly it was or what security measures he'd encounter when he got there.
The only thing Jaune did know for sure was that he needed to make this work. He wouldn't be getting a second opportunity.
Okay. First things first Jaune. Got to get to your suite of rooms and then lock the door... While holding a very surly and sulky expression on his face, Jaune held his nose and staggered through the halls. He didn't act as if he was seriously injured, but he did act a little out of it as he moved towards his private suite of rooms. Thankfully, the sun was already setting and most of the human staff were getting ready to go to bed.
Soon enough, Jaune was in his rooms, where he made quick work of bandaging his already healing nose. With that accomplished and his regen rate hidden, he jumped under some blankets on his bed and focused on his body. He knew for a fact that he was currently on not one but two well concealed cameras, so he'd have to hide while he figured out where he stood. After adopting a meditative pose under the covers, Jaune focused on his body and the warm presence of his aura within his chest.
Woah...
His aura... It felt like the warmth of his soul, his hopes and dreams and everything else that everyone had always said it was. It made Jaune feel more whole and solid, as if he'd been hollow all this time and he hadn't even known it. Now all he needed to do was learn how to channel that power throughout his body. Should be easy enough right?
Three Hours Later...
It wasn't easy! It was hard!
Aura isn't a physical part of your body like your arm or your leg. It isn't attached to a set of nerves and synapses that receive electrical signals from your brain. What that means is that aura isn't designed to be immediately available or user friendly in any way. It's your spirit, thus it's only as useful as you can will it to be.
The more Jaune thought about it, the more it made sense that the Grimm slaying community tend to be close minded, headstrong, stubborn and even obsessive about certain aspects of their lives. Of course they were. To become stronger, they needed to hone their spirit, their very soul, into a weapon that can affect the world around them. While it made sense that this kind of training would lead to a person having far more willpower than they'd had at the beginning, it also made sense that they'd end up having far less flexibility towards new ideas or contradictory opinions...
As he continued to practice manipulating his aura, Jaune made a resolution to never become as ignorant and unhinged as the rest of his family. He could already see how a lifetime of aura training might make someone both inflexible and stubborn.
Thankfully, there was only one aspect of aura control that Jaune needed to immediately improve upon, and it wasn't what most people would've expected. Jaune was currently working on channeling his aura in and around his brain, nervous system, lungs and circulatory system. He didn't need aura bolstered strength or speed in order for his plan to work, because he didn't plan on fighting hordes of his father's vassals. Instead, Jaune wanted to sneak out of the castle in a very unexpected way, and to do that, he needed to be able to hold his breath.
Arc Castle was not so surprisingly... a castle. It was a castle in the traditional sense, which meant that it was a fortification first and a living arrangement second. It had tall, thick stone rampart walls, arrow slit windows and an honest to Monty drawbridge over a moat. It also contained something that is of vital importance during a siege, but taken completely for granted the rest of the time. It had a well...
In the basement of the castle near its foundations, was a deep stone lined pit that led down to an underground river. This underground river went on for miles both to the north and to the south. While the bare minimum effort had been put into exploring this water source, purely to make sure that it didn't contain any Grimm, once the area was confirmed safe and empty of life, it had been left to its own devices. It was perfect. It was also mostly submerged. If Jaune wanted to access these underground waterways, he was going to have to hold his breath for a very, very long time.
Most people believe that holding your breath immediately deprives your body of oxygen which in turn kills you. This isn't actually the case. The world record for a human holding their breath without the help of aura is twenty-two minutes, which is possible because the body stores plenty of extra oxygen and takes quite a while to run out. The real reason holding your breath is painful and can cause you to pass out is because your brain wants you to continue breathing.
When you don't breathe, the CO2 levels in your bloodstream start to outnumber your oxygen levels and your brain doesn't like that. While having more CO2 in your brain isn't immediately lethal, it isn't the ideal climate for a brain to exist in, so the human body is equipped with ways to force you to breathe. The first thing that your body does, after you spend about thirty seconds holding your breath, is cause you both anxiety and painful contractions in your throat. At about two minutes, the muscles in your diaphragm also start to contract by themselves. Eventually, if you ignore these warning signs, your body will lose consciousness, but this isn't because you're dying. You're losing consciousness because your body is forcing you to stop ignoring your body's automatic breathing functions. Once you've passed out, your body will begin breathing again all by itself, and you'll be completely unharmed.
Long story short, if you sit in your living room and hold your breath until you pass out, you'll be fine. If you hold your breath until you pass out while under water, your unconscious body will inhale the water, flooding your lungs and killing you. This is an important distinction and it's also the outcome that Jaune needed to avoid.
Within the last three hours, Jaune had slowly but surely managed to increase the time that he could hold his breath from the five minutes he'd already trained up to, to a little under half an hour. He did this by lining his lungs, heart, and brain in aura, to slow down his heart rate, relax his muscles and prevent his autonomic nervous system from rendering him unconscious. The actual biology of what he was doing was a little more complicated than he could explain even to himself. Thankfully, as it turns out, when it comes to using aura, where there's a will there's a way. Now all he needed to do was actually get to the castle's basement without getting caught.
The name of the game tonight wasn't to get away without anyone finding out. Jaune wasn't stupid enough to believe that the sun was going to rise the next morning without his disappearance being noticed. He knew for a fact that there were dozens of cameras and recording devices trained on his living area at all times. No... It wouldn't take long for his presence to be missed. For that reason, the real goal at the moment was misdirection. Jaune wanted his family and the rest of their staff to believe that he'd left the castle in a conventional way, like by using a door or even by climbing the walls. What he didn't want them to suspect was that he'd dropped down the well.
In all likelihood, it wouldn't be all that hard for Jaune to keep his family from suspecting the well. So far as anyone else in the castle was concerned, he still didn't have access to his aura, which meant escaping through an underground waterway was completely impossible. The fact of the matter was that using the well might still be impossible, but it was a risk that he was willing to take.
After mentally compiling a list of the cameras, bugs and audio equipment that he'd managed to locate over the years, Jaune took a deep breath and reemerged from under the blankets. It was time to get moving, which meant that it was time to grab the bag of tricks.
The bag of tricks was just that. It was a canvas sack filled to the brim with every poorly conceived escape tool, plan, and idea, that Jaune had ever thought of, and it was so useless that his parents had never even bothered to confiscate it. It was something of a family joke that Jaune would make yet another foray over the walls, where he'd be scooped up like a toddler by a squad of his father's vassals. The idea behind letting him keep the bag was to make it obvious that they knew about his efforts and they weren't concerned that he'd succeed. Their attitude was supposed to be demoralizing; it was supposed to break his spirit. It hadn't. It only made him focus on making his plans less transparent, with several layers of varying complexity. It also gave him a bunch of props to use as a distraction.
While making sure to avoid being seen on any of the cameras that he was aware of, Jaune began picking every lock for every security door between him and the rest of the building. As he moved, he destroyed audio recording devices, barred choke points with furniture, and just generally made a mess of the castle's security. He didn't go so far out of his area of the castle that his father's vassals would swarm him, but he did create several different avenues of escape that they'd need to repair. Taking advantage of his familiarity with the camera rotation timing and guard patrol schedules, Jaune went out of his way to throw at least three grappling hook ropes over the walls, unlock at least two secret passageways into less travelled areas of the castle and acid burn his way through at least one sewer grate leading towards the moat.
Ten extremely nerve wracking minutes later, when he was finally finished dropping a wide variety of red herrings in just as many different locations, Jaune very carefully snuck his way down into the basement, making sure to re-lock all of the doors behind him.
With the closing of one last recessed cellar door, Jaune found himself in the catacombs that make up the castle foundation and the storage rooms that are kept within. A lot of stuff that would never be used was kept down here, and Jaune would've liked to browse if he'd had the time. He didn't. Within the next few minutes, he was going to be swimming his way through a fully submerged cave system. Even if he were to find a full set of armor or a sword in one of these crates, he'd be forced to leave it behind. With that in mind, Jaune made a beeline for his actual destination.
In the lowest area of an empty room built to contain just one thing, was a stone lined pit. This room only existed in case of emergencies as the cobwebs lining the walls and ceiling could attest to. Suspended over the circular pit was a metal frame holding a large bucket on a rope and pulley system. While it would've been nice for Jaune to just use this rope to scale his way down the pit, he knew very well that to do so would be a mistake. He couldn't afford to leave any evidence of his presence whatsoever, which meant that he was going to have to climb down the hard way. Thankfully, the stones lining of the walls of the well were pitted and uneven, which offered his fingers plenty of purchase.
At first Jaune planned on performing some quick stretches and even a little bit of meditation to slow down his heart rate. As it turns out, he didn't have the time. Somewhere up above Jaune's head, a warning klaxon started warbling through the stone, indicating that his absence had already been noticed. With a deep breath and a sigh, Jaune sat on the edge of the well and looked down into the darkness below. He couldn't see where the pit ended, but he knew that it was a long, long way down. He also knew that the well chute opened up at the bottom into a larger underground basin of some kind, which meant that he wouldn't be able to just climb back up.
It didn't matter. Jaune was committed and it was time.
After tying his crowbar sword to his shoulder using some rope from his bag of tricks, Jaune slipped off the edge, turned around and hung off the lip of the well. Then, with his fingers clawing into cracks between the various stones, he began inching his way down into the dark.
Less than half a minute later, Jaune was deep enough into the well that he no longer had any light to work with. On the one hand he'd already known that this was going to happen, on the other hand, he hadn't anticipated just how much anxiety being blind would cause him. It couldn't be helped though. Jaune had been too afraid of revealing his real intentions to try and steal a waterproof light or something. No. Any light that he might have tried to bring with him would only have notified his parents that he wanted to go somewhere dark. It was a risk that he wasn't willing to take, so he was just going to have to suck it up. Slowly but surely, Jaune moved by feel alone and eventually he found himself calming back down.
At some point, Jaune suddenly realized that he had no idea how long he'd been hanging by his arms. All he knew for sure was that his fingers were starting to hurt like hell, his knees were bruised, and he was filthy from top to bottom. He was also pretty sure that he was beginning to hallucinate. He was beginning to catch small motes of light floating in the air all around him, where they were flickering in and out of existence.
Since Jaune was well aware that he was over fifty feet below the earth and not in an RPG fairy field or anything, the small motes of light didn't make any sense. Nevertheless, the motes of light weren't going anywhere, and they were bright enough that he was having an easier time seeing where he was going. All in all, things were on the up and up, even as Jaune continued to go down and down. Then it finally happened. Jaune stuck his right leg further down, seeking to find a jagged piece of stone to leverage his toes into, only to find nothing but open air instead. He'd made it, he was there.
Directly below Jaune was the basin where the underground river met the well. Now all he needed to do was figure out how large the drop was and how deep the water was. It'd be a waste to make it this far only to break his back on a rock at the bottom.
Craning his neck, Jaune looked down and saw that the flickering motes of light were illuminating a lot of the area. The problem was that they were illuminating what looked like a ten meter drop to the inky black water below. There was no way to tell for sure how deep the water was, which was a problem because he wasn't the type to take his chances. Whenever possible, Jaune liked to have a backup plan B and a fallback plan C for when that plan failed. With that in mind, Jaune started thinking of ways he could decrease the risk of what he was about to do. He needed a landing strategy of some kind...
The idea of creating a landing strategy made Jaune smile, because it felt like he was finally moving in the right direction. He was going to be a Huntsman. He was going to help people and be the master of his own destiny. Now, what he needed to do most was figure out where his skills lay... So far, it seemed that Jaune was pretty good at manipulating his aura throughout his own body. While it had taken him three hours just to figure out the very basics, Jaune knew that most people trained their auras for years before they saw noticeable amounts of improvement. On the other hand, at no time since the moment that he first freed his aura, had Jaune experienced some kind of Eureka moment regarding his Semblance. Having an offensively powerful or useful Semblance would've been a game changer for sure, but of course Jaune wasn't expecting his life to be that convenient.
The textbook definition of a Semblance is an aura fueled ability that's almost always unique to an individual and usually has a lot to do with their character as a person. Olivia, Jaune's twin sister, could create blades of energy that protrude from any part of her body. Several of his sisters had explained that Olivia was extremely shy and standoffish when she first met new people, so having a prickly Semblance wasn't too much of a surprise. While Olive's Semblance was seriously badass, it wasn't even the most powerful amongst his sisters...
Petunia, Jaune's eldest sister, could more than septuple (X7) the gravity being applied on any object or person that she desired within a three meter-wide radius of her body. What this meant was if you let her get close enough, she could make it so that just staying on your feet felt like you were trying to carry a thousand pounds, give or take a couple hundred. Needless to say, Petunia Arc very rarely had to actually use her physical weapons on anyone at all. All she really had to do was close the distance and bam her opponent hit the floor.
Jaune liked to think that his eldest sister had that particular Semblance because she liked to impose her will on the people around her (him being a prime example). It was an unkind and inaccurate judgment to make, because the members of the Arc family were generally both kind and generous. Truly, if Jaune's family had allowed him the personal freedom to make any of his own decisions, they'd have been just about perfect. As things stood however, their specific brand of 'devotion' felt more like the out of control fanaticism of a cult.
Well... Jaune had no idea what his Semblance was yet, but he did know that he could make use of his Aura. He'd had some success bolstering different parts of his body such as his lungs, heart and brain, so now all he had to do was focus on doing the same with his legs and back. Over the next fifteen minutes, Jaune hung there on the wall as his breathing slowed, and he focused on his aura. Soon enough, he could feel the warmth of his soul gathering around the bones of his back and legs, and he knew that it was time to act. Without a second thought, he let go of the wall and dropped down towards the water below.
Splash!
The water was deep and cold, and there were no signs of back breaking rocks in any direction. No matter. Jaune still considered his earlier efforts a good use of time. He had every intention of learning different ways to manipulate his aura, and learning by doing was an efficient way of going about it.
After swimming back up towards the surface, hindered somewhat by the metal crowbar hanging on his back, Jaune began treading water as he looked around the room. The well basin was quite pretty all things considered. The walls and roof of the cave were covered in a bioluminescent moss of some kind, and this moss was the source of the light motes. It had the effect of making the room a vibrant, if a little bit eerie, greenish blue color. To Jaune's right was a tunnel entrance heading North, and the direction that the water was coming from. To the South was yet another tunnel where the water was leaving the room. Both of these tunnels were pitch black after just a few feet due to the fact that they were almost entirely submerged under water. They were also only a little larger than a meter in circumference.
Yikes... The trip down that tunnel was going to be a very, very, tight fit.
As he stared at the pitch-black hole in the wall of the cave, Jaune shivered from top to bottom in a moment of completely justifiable terror. Of course he was afraid. He was about to trust his fate completely to chance and hail Mary himself down an underwater tunnel to Maidens only know where. Deep down inside where his anger and insecurities lay, a part of Jaune liked the fact that if he died within the next half an hour his body would never be found. A spiteful little part of him appreciated the fact that win lose or draw, his family would always think that he'd gotten away. Pyrrhic victories weren't necessarily Jaune's style, but in the end, if it was all he could get, then he'd take it.
Shaking off the random moment of morbid satisfaction, Jaune swam to the right of the Southern tunnel, crawled up onto a conveniently smooth boulder and lay down on his back. He couldn't afford to half-ass his preparations this time. He needed to be Zen, like unbelievably Zen, when he finally entered that tunnel. His ability to remain calm would have a direct impact on how long he could keep his heart rate low and hold his breath. Closing his eyes, Jaune let his thoughts drift away as he focused on his breathing and the cool comfort of the water against his legs.
It was his focus on the water that ended up saving his life...
Just as Jaune was sliding into a really deep state of meditation, he began to feel small, gentle ripples in the water, lapping against his calves. It started feeling more like he was soaking his legs on a beach, rather than a pool of water far beneath the earth. Waves are usually caused by wind or tides or seismic activity on the ocean floor. They definitely don't just happen for no reason deep underground...
With a gasp of sudden realization, Jaune slammed his hands down into the rocks at his sides and threw himself to the right. After rolling painfully across several of the rocks lining the pool, Jaune splashed back into the water and kicked himself to the other side of the outlet tunnel. Only then did he get a chance to open his eyes and look at what he was running away from. Monty Oum! He'd just barely made it in time! As soon as he'd vacated the spot, a mostly black blur had slammed into his boulder and uncountable rows of serrated teeth were scraping a hole into the boulder. It was a Grimm. It was an aquatic Grimm of some kind. Nothing was supposed to be down here, but it was, and it was huge!
Red hot adrenaline coursed through Jaune's veins, rendering his most recent state of calm a thing of the past. Big. The Grimm was big and it was spiny and it was slippery... The Grimm was a Cthulhu type tentacle monster with a little bit of everything thrown in just for kicks. Its mask was the only white part of its entire body and was just a jagged plate of bone surrounding its glowing red eyes. While the creature's mask looked tiny on its throbbing bulbous head, its mouth completely dominated the landscape. Its mouth was a sewer grate sized sucking hole, ringed with hundreds and hundreds of undulating teeth. The Grimm was a nightmare in the deep, a true eldritch horror.
"Less than an hour of freedom and I already have an 'I told you so' coming my way," Jaune ruefully drawled out, as the Grimm spat out a massive chunk of rock and swiveled in his direction. When the beast located him again, it stared down at him with a silent and eerie form of malevolence. It seemed that this particular Grimm thought that its prey was trapped like a rat, so it was in no hurry to pounce. The beast's overconfidence was a blessing. Jaune used every second of extra time to drag his hands along the various stones lining the pool, until he caught ahold of a five or six-inch-long jagged rock. The rock wasn't the most inspiring weapon in the world, but at the moment what he needed more than anything else was a distraction. With that in mind, Jaune focused as much aura as he could into both his throwing arm and the rock itself and then he heaved it towards the Grimm with every ounce of strength that he could muster.
With a wet thud and a furious screech, the rock scored a baseball sized hole into the orbital bone of the Grimm's faceplate, sending several shards of bone and rock directly into one of its boiling red eyes. Jaune never even noticed the damage that he'd just inflicted. He was far too busy. Instead, he spent the next half a second tearing off the ropes that were holding the crowbar to his back and pulling it in front of his body. With his primary weapon now in hand and a half-baked plan forming in mind, Jaune immediately dove sideways through the air towards the Southern tunnel.
While the Grimm wasn't sophisticated enough a creature to even begin to anticipate Jaune's actions, its momentary pause made it obvious that it was at least a little bit caught off guard. Then that split second ended and the beast exploded back into action. With an outraged hiss of expelled air and spittle, the Grimm pounced down towards Jaune's still airborne body, intending to slam him against the cistern wall before he could slip away. What the Grimm didn't expect to happen was to have a sharpened bar of metal slam into the right side of its mouth, where it pierced a hole directly into the soft tissue of its jaw. Without a moment of hesitation the Grimm attempted to bite down on both the metal bar and Jaune's right arm, only to recoil in pain as the other end of the crowbar pierced into the other side of its mouth.
All of the sudden, the Grimm found itself trying to chomp down on both ends of a solid metal bar that was digging deeper and deeper into the soft inner lining of its mouth. Every time the Grimm attempted to force its mouth closed, it only managed to push the seemingly unbreakable metal bar deeper into its flesh, tearing at the muscle fibers and tendons within. Pain and anger were clear to see in the beast's eyes, as it sought to tear at its enemy and was repeatedly denied. Then Jaune saw the beast go into a frenzy at point blank range. As a smoky red aura enveloped the Grimm, it seemed to forget all about the fact that its mouth was jammed wide open and it was bleeding a black ichor into the water. With a deep basso bellow that shook the very air of the cave, the Grimm surged forward, slammed Jaune under the water and then began forcing him down the fully submerged exit tunnel at a completely ridiculous pace.
Jaune barely had the time to draw in just one last desperate breath as the Grimm slammed into his body and began pushing him against every surface that the tunnel had to offer. His attempts to reassure himself that things were going exactly as planned didn't get him very far, as the Grimm's razor sharp incisors sawed into the aura around his forearms and his body was slammed against the roof, the walls and the floor of the tunnel. While it was obvious that they were moving down the tunnel at fantastic speeds, Jaune's aura was being chipped away at an equally rapid rate, and he didn't have a single method of improving the situation. He also wasn't going to be able to hold his breath for even a tenth of the time that he'd intended, now that his heart was racing in his chest like a dust engine. At this rate, he wasn't going to be able to stave off unconsciousness, he wasn't going to survive the length of time that he needed to reach his destination!
As a desperate desire to do something, anything, welled up within Jaune, he found himself channeling all of his remaining aura throughout every single cell that made up his body, seeking to protect a state of being rather than any specific organ or limb. It was as if Jaune was trying to hold onto a moment in time rather than a physical object or a thing. He wanted to preserve his body as it was in that specific moment, complete with the oxygen in his lungs, the skin covering his muscles and the blood flowing within his veins. For an endless period of time that was more than likely just a single minute, Jaune closed his eyes and held on for dear life both physically and spiritually. Then, with a thunderous roar, Jaune was lifted up and out of the water and sent flying through the air like a cannonball.
He was above water. He was alive... He was airborne.
Opening his eyes, Jaune looked down at a small pond where the Cthulhu Grimm was thrashing its tentacles in an attempt to follow him up into the air. Then, Jaune saw that he was currently falling towards a stretch of tarmac on what appeared to be a Bullhead pad of some kind. Last but not least, Jaune saw that he wasn't alone. There were about a half a dozen people wearing his father's livery that were turning in his direction with looks of surprise on their faces. Well... Shit. Jaune wasn't going to be able to fight off his father's Hunter level vassals, and he knew it. Thankfully, if he played his cards right, Jaune didn't think he'd end up being anyone's primary concern. What Jaune needed most right now was a distraction, and the massive, enraged, Cthulhu Grimm, was perfect for the job.
After flipping in the air in order to point his legs towards the rapidly approaching ground, Jaune whistled and pointed at the massive Grimm that was pulling itself out of the tunnel. "That's only the first of nearly a dozen of those creatures," he yelled out, even as he crashed to the ground and rolled painfully across the concrete. Rising back to his feet, Jaune pointed back at the Cthulhu Grimm and began barking orders at his father's vassals as if he had the right to it. "This foul creature and its spawn were disturbed from their slumber when I explored the cave system! They're stampeding out of the tunnel and intend to tear us all limb from limb. Get into a defensive formation right this very second if you value your lives and continued employment."
It may have been the commanding tone of Jaune's voice, it may have been the inherent danger that the Cthulhu Grimm represented, Hell, it may even have been his threat about their continued employment, but the airfield employees immediately launched into action without a second's hesitation. Within just a ten second period of time, the group of them had created a defensive formation and were moving forward to confront the growing mass of spikes, teeth and tentacles.
Jaune nodded both his admiration and respect towards his father's people as they pulled out their swords and guns and moved ever closer towards the threat. Then, when all of the men and women where passed him and were entirely focused on what they thought was the first wave of several ancient Grimm, Jaune slipped backwards and started moving quietly across the airfield. He didn't stop to look back at the sound of massive tentacles crushing holes into tarmac, a Huntress's yell of aggression or even a Grimm's pain fueled roar. Self-discipline was one of Jaune's only strengths, and it was being put to the test with every step that he took. He needed to keep his eye on the prize. He needed to continue moving.
Soon enough, Jaune found himself walking up under the tree trunk shaped wings of a VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) Bullhead. Interestingly enough, he technically knew how to fly one of these airships as he'd managed to study several different flying manuals over the years. Too bad no amount of theoretical knowhow could make up for his current lack of real world experience. No matter. Jaune wasn't trying to do anything as dramatic as committing Grand Theft Airship anyway. He wanted to disappear. What that meant was that he needed to continue with the distractions to buy himself as much time as possible.
Jogging to the far side of the airfield, Jaune started crashing into the surrounding woods as if he was the clumsiest hiker on the face of the planet. He needed to create a highly visible trail of broken foliage that his father's vassals could follow, so that they'd get stuck searching the entire forest for him. After smashing his way about two hundred feet into the trees, Jaune began decreasing the amount of damage that he was doing to his surroundings, until finally he was moving very, very carefully to leave as little tracks as possible.
Finally, when the light from the airfield was only visible as a grey cloud on the skyline, Jaune suddenly leapt up against the bare trunk of a pine tree and wrapped his body around its length. This particular type of tree didn't have any branches until it began sprouting needles much higher up in the tree. The tree's lack of branches was about to make it both uncomfortable and highly strenuous for Jaune to climb. Thankfully, this upcoming struggle was also going to be the reason why Jaune's trick was going to work. Very few of his father's people believed he was anything but a soft, pampered, weakling of a boy. Not one of them would believe that he'd subject himself to a pine needle hell such as the one above his head.
Well... They were wrong.
After about three frantic minutes spent climbing by hugging onto the tree trunk like a sloth, Jaune finally managed to wiggle his body up into the dense foliage level of the pine. Then, after just a few moments spent catching his breath, he launched himself through the air towards another pine tree that was growing nearby. Ouch... He'd been right. The needles pressing into his skin hurt like Hell even with his diminished aura protecting him. It was still worth it.
Even as he silently climbed higher and transitioned hand over hand to another tree, Jaune heard several footsteps and some whispering down below. It appeared that his father's vassals were finally tracking his footsteps deeper into the woods. There was no way of knowing just how good these Huntsmen and Huntresses were at following tracks or how long they'd fall for his ruse, but one thing Jaune did know for sure was that his escape attempt would be over just as soon as he was detected.
When the scattered footsteps and muttering down below finally moved on, Jaune started moving again with as much haste as he dared. Realistically, there was a fifty/fifty chance that the highly trained vassals searching the forest floor were already wise to his ploy and were just waiting for him to make some noise. If that was the case, then Jaune was basically screwed, but that didn't mean he wanted to make it easy on them. He moved carefully and quietly as he drifted from tree to tree back towards the airfield.
The return trip to the airfield took a long damned time, and it wasn't without mishap either. At one point Jaune slipped off of a particularly tree sap covered branch and just barely managed to catch himself before plummeting to the ground below. There was also the time when he somehow managed to force a pine needle directly into the eye, blinding himself and forcing his aura to heal him. Finally, after Monty only knows how long, Jaune found himself perched in a massive tree that was lining the airfield and staring down at the Bullhead below. Coincidentally, he could also see the Cthulhu Grimm's corpse slowly turning into a black mist off in the distance. Booyah! Score one for the humans.
At the moment, the Bullhead was nothing but a dark grey silhouette in the middle of an empty airfield. It wasn't time to move yet.
No one owns a Bullhead for no reason. They're difficult to buy, expensive to maintain and stored in an airfield hanger which is also expensive to maintain. There was very little chance that the Arc family owned a Bullhead that just sat around doing nothing. The problem was that Jaune couldn't just sit in this tree for half a week until this particular airship was put to use. Then, as more and more time went by, Jaune began to realize the reality of his situation. Until someone eventually came to operate that airship, he wasn't going anywhere. Settling in for the long haul, Jaune lay back across a juncture of tree branches and let his fatigue carry him to sleep.