Chapter 4: Pain and Gain
"You've got to stop doing this, Jaune." Blake begged as she pulled the leather strap out of my mouth.
"I'll stop when the gains stop." I groaned while I laid naked on a rubber mat on my team's bathroom floor after another near lethal electrocution session with my teammate, Nora Valkyrie.
My existential surprise at the known canon teams forming had left me months ago with a bad aftertaste of possible predestination in my mouth, but unlike the canon teams I refused to spend a semester at a combat academy and not get better at combat. While the other teenagers began feeling the tension of their new living situation and the start of the drama that invariably arises from young adults locked in one area, I had my team at the medical center getting extensive medical and performance testing done so I could implement a roadmap for each member of my team to push their limits and leave this semester behind far better than they came in.
And there we learned about the reason I now let Nora electrocute me three times a week. Nora's incredible strength and speed, often used for humor in the show, was a side effect of her semblance. Nora's personal super power came in the form of converting electricity into physical power. This is primarily mystical in nature, but it came with a physical side effect of increasing her muscle fiber recruitment with each use. For the uninitiated, the average joe off the streets can use thirty percent of his body's muscle fibers, a world class athlete is typically between seventy five and eighty five percent recruitment. Nora at the time of testing used ninety six percent.
This doesn't mean that Nora is sixty six percent stronger than a normal person. The relation of muscle fiber recruitment to strength output is not straight line, it is a curve. The strongest muscle fibers in the body are the last to be recruited for any activity. This phenomena is why an untrained mother can lift a car off her child in an emergency. Normally the brain cannot send a strong enough signal to the body to accomplish that lift. Nora walks around with that kind of power available at any given time.
It took weeks of working with my incredibly enthusiastic teammate to get her outward projection of her semblance to stop being an electric eel impersonation and actually boost other people, but just like my own semblance Aura Amp works best on myself and loses efficacy on others, so too does Nora's. Only hers loses all its efficacy in whatever protects her from electrocution. Fortunately Aura Amp turns my passive recovery boost into a regenerative healing factor not unlike Wolverine's from the X-Men.
Thus came about the torturous pain and gain sessions I did with Nora three times a week. I tried to keep quiet about it, but Blake eventually found out what we were doing and demanded we stop. I refused. Not because I am some ultra hard core mother fucker that can take the pain. I am reduced to a crying mess every time. Not because I am so selfless that my knowledge of our need to face off against a genocidal queen of evil forced me to undergo this torture. I kept doing it because I had spent my entire reincarnated life pushing my bodies performance to it's peak and I hadn't made significant strength gains in over a year.
Near fatal electrocution isn't even the worst thing I'd ever heard of gym bro's doing to make gains. Looking right at every single one of you 'straight guys' sucking down divine proteins shakes. Just come out of the closet Connor.
After a screaming fight, Blake chose to watch every single session. It was an incredible show of solidarity, and I loved her even more for it, but as the semester came to its close I began to worry more and more about predestination. Driving my team like a gang of slaves had caused us to miss out on all the high school drama that made up season one, but the only event of significance to the plot came at the season finale and the semester's close in the form of Blake running away to track down the city wide dust thief's with Sun.
Running away for a weekend with a guy and refusing anyone's calls was excusable for single Blake, but no way in hell is it excusable for Blake in a committed relationship. I just hoped she had enough sense to run to me and not away from me should the plot go down.
In truth, Blake had been a far better girlfriend than I had been a boyfriend in the near four months we'd been together. My free time was mostly spent with my team. If wasn't leading our strength and conditioning, we were doing skill training under Pyrrha. We ate highly regulated meals together. Blake had tried to keep up with us, but commitments to her own team and the blistering pace we set had driven her away.
Any other team would have mutinied under my demanding lead, but not JNPR. Pyrrha felt right at home training at this intensity, Nora loved pushing herself, Ren would endure any hardship so long as he had Nora leading the way, and all of them adored the incredible gains we made together.
Pyrrha gained the least from the team up, having started at such a high point already, but under my diet and PT she'd thickened up in ways that made it impossible to conceal my approval when she wore yoga pants. She'd transformed from the Invincible Girl to Wonder Woman.
Nora and Ren had gained a lot from each of us. Their lives as rugged orphan survivalists had left them undernourished and undertrained, their raw talent keeping them afloat at Beacon. With direction from an absolute elite fighter like Pyrrha and someone with my extensive knowledge in body building cause them to rocket up quick. Newby gains had Ren looking like strong dependable man, and Nora now... my God. How Ren remained celibate with her nearby boggled the mind.
I made the most gains out of the lot of us. Pyrrha had taken my frankly average combat skills and polished me up till I was on par skill wise with any of the members of Team RWBY, and Nora had taken my peak specimen power and shot it up to super human.
All this time spent on myself and my team had taken time from my relationship with Blake, and after the first month at Beacon I'd taken even more of it by getting Team JNPR transferred to the second year combat course. To make the morning time slot we had to switch Professor Port's Grimm Studies class to a self study, were it belonged. The only thing I learned from Port in that first month was the negative answer to an age old question. Does a glorious mustache make a man a great teacher?
In one fell swoop I cut a third of our in class time together out, and I had already set up the transfer to the combined third and forth year combat course in the second semester that would have us drop Professor Sprout's wilderness survival class to self study as well. There was no way we would ever step foot in a classroom manned by Port again, so soon Blake and I would only share half our classes together.
Ren and Nora weren't to thrilled about the second jump up considering they just got back to dominating their opponents, but dominating weaklings never taught anything of value, and Pyrrha and I hadn't had a tough fight at school yet. She out classed every opponent with skill and her over powered polarity semblance, and I smashed through opponents in athleticism, aura capacity, and the incredible synergy my massive aura capacity had with my semblance Aura Amp. Nothing screwed more heavily with the second years than when I tanked Yatsuhashi's biggest hit for a five percent drop in aura.
I felt incredibly ready to take down Salem's inner circle, but there was no way in hell I'd ever use that as a defense of why I spent so little time with Blake. I am sure all will be forgiven if I just explain that I wanted to be faster than Tyrion and stronger than Hazel so I can just kill them in combat and avoid any of the typical bullshit that comes with bad guys that always survive. Or maybe I can tell her how I plan to turn her edgy ex boyfriend into my bitch? I am totally sure that the massive blinders she has for Faunus bad guys will allow her to miss that two of the three men I want to kill outright are Faunus.
That distinction she had, the one were human villains are scum and Faunus villains are misguided (you know that very racist one), had been the source of quite a few of our private arguments. The first one started a little something like this.
"Blake, I am so proud that you left the White Fang after realizing they became a terrorist racial supremacism organization."
And the fight was on as she tried to explain that the White Fang wasn't a terrorist racial supremacism organization. No contest on my end on how it use to be a civil rights group, but she really failed to prove how it was not currently a hive of scum and villainy.
It was another fight when I explained that a romantic relationship with a member of another race does not prevent a person from having racist views. Bringing up her cognitive dissonance didn't help me much.
Fortunately for us, mind blowing sex made up for any tizzy we found ourselves in. The intense physical chemistry we shared prevented us from ever going to bed angry, and the sock on the door became a daily occurrence to let the rest of the team know I needed them to fuck off for a half hour or so. I offered them all the same curtesy, but thus far had never seen any of them take it.
In truth, Team JNPR's room house five people. Blake never slept a night in the psychotic bunk beds her team had rigged up at the start of the semester. Holding each other in bed every night led to deep intimacy between us. I'd shared everything about my current life with the girl, the good and the bad, my worst fears. I gave Blake the keys to drive my reputation of the cliffs that featured so prominently in the local geography. It was only fair considering how close to the surface her fears and dark past lay.
I thought Blake and I could go the distance. So you can imagine my surprise and burning fury when she didn't come home from her trip into the city with her team to scout out the arriving students from Haven Academy coming in for the 40th bi-annual Vytal Tournament.
CREATORS' THOUGHTS 
JManM
JManM I had a bit of a change in plan for this chapter when I was skimming through season one and noticed that Nora was increadibly superhuman even when not using her semblance. Her use of electricity is what made me think of muscle fiber recruitment and that got me thinking about the possiblity of Nora sharing that with other characters, leading to chapter 4.
Jaune is the only character capable of doing this, and Nora is never going to get to the level of control with he semblance to work with other characters.
Some of you may have noticed that we skipped the entirety of the Jaundice Arc, from Velvet getting bullied to the brutal attack Team CRDL tried to pull off at the Forever Falls. I have never seen an author tackle this arc in a satisfying way outside of the Ballad of Pyrrha Nikos and Handsome Jaune, where Jaune (the son of Handsome Jack!) makes Cardin his bitch.
I had an interesting way to head off this entire arc by having Juane invite Team CRDL to end their racist circle jerk around Velvet and come perform an oral sex buffet on his tasty teen bod.
Remnant has anti-discrimination laws on the books for Faunus, so I figured it wouldn't be top hard a sell for them to have similar laws for other protected catagories like sexuality. Basically after goading them into a fight publicly, Jaune would press charges on Team CRDL for attacking him for his sexuality and the boys would be kicked from the school. The phrase, "Just cuz you luv the pussy, don't mean you ain't gay as fuck." was tossed around.
Happy Mothers day.
Weekly Power Status
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Ranking 
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