Chapter 3: Semblance Replicated
The last of the rose petals settled on the linoleum like bloody snow. The only sound was Ruby’s ragged, whimpering breaths from the bed and the soft, wet drip from Argent’s cock onto the floor. He stood by the door, naked, surveying his work.
He flexed his hand, feeling the new potential humming in his limbs, a coiled-spring sensation that hadn’t been there moments before. He focused, and his form dissolved into a cloud of crimson petals, swirling to re-materialize at the foot of the bed, right beside Weiss. She flinched, a full-body jerk, as if he’d teleported.
He hadn’t. It was pure, blurring speed. A perfect copy.
“Huh,” Argent murmured, looking at his own hands. “It’s even smoother than I expected. The muscle memory comes with it. Interesting.”
His clinical tone was the worst part. It made what he’d just done—what he was—some kind of academic exercise.
Ruby lay on her stomach, face pressed into a pillow. Her small body trembled. A slow trickle of white mixed with spots of red seeped from between her thighs onto the ruined sheets. She wasn’t crying. She was just… empty. The manufactured want had been spent, leaving a hollow vessel that only knew it belonged to him.
Yang pushed herself up onto her elbows. The chemical obedience from her forced orgasms fogged her mind, but the sight of her sister leaking onto the sheets cut through the haze with a serrated edge.
“Ruby?” Her voice was sandpaper.
Ruby turned her head. Her silver eyes were wide, distant, but they found Yang’s. A faint, placid smile touched her lips. “It’s okay, Yang. He… he knows what’s best. It didn’t even hurt. It felt… right.”
Yang felt the anger boil up, a scalding geyser. It was immediately met by the responding heat between her legs, a throbbing, slick promise of another betrayal. She choked it back, swallowing the fury until it burned a hole in her chest. She couldn’t. She physically could not protect her own sister. The mechanism of her failure was wired directly into her pleasure centers.
Argent turned his attention to her and chuckled. “You see? She’s fine. Better than fine. She’s fulfilled the first stage of her new purpose and she clearly loved doing it.”
He walked around the bed, his bare feet silent. He stopped in front of Yang, looking down at where she lay prone. “Your turn is coming, Yang. But first, we need to clean up. The game’s is officially over for tonight, but remember, you have to obey my commands whenever I give you orders," He added with a smirk.
Then he shrugged. "That said, I can see that you are still quite a bit confused and terrified so I suppose the least I can do is letting you ask me more questions. Also, Yang, just so that you can feel like you can ask questions of me more freely. I am officially suspending the previous command I gave you about getting increasingly aroused and obedient when you get angry at me but in case it wasn't clear already, no, you cannot attack me and I forbid you to ask for outside help for your current predicament," He said, willing aura and power into his words as he watched their naked bodies shiver in response.
"Now," He went on, "Ruby, sweetheart, you’ve earned your question first as the one that completed the last dare. So, ask me anything.”
Ruby blinked slowly, as if surfacing from deep water. She shook her head as she refocused, a faint, confused blush painted her cheeks. “I…” Her breath hitched, trailing off as she looked at Argent. “Did you…did you already do this? Claim someone we know?”
Her voice was thin and dazed as she gathered her thoughts. “I mean, have you…slept with anyone in our lives even if we didn't know it? Already?”
The question hung in the neon-drenched quiet. Weiss’s head lifted from her curled position. Blake’s ears, which had been flat against her skull, twitched forward. All of them, even through their shame and confusion, focused on him.
Argent leaned back, considering them. He shrugged, a casual, almost boyish gesture. “At Beacon? No. Not yet. You’re the first lucky winners.”
His smile sharpened a moment later, however, and his eyes cut to Yang specifically. “But during my travels across Anima, I came across a particular nomadic tribe. Dangerous, insular bandits. The Branwen clan.”
Yang went very, very still.
“Their leader was something else,” he continued, his tone conversational, as if reminiscing about a interesting vacation. “Incredibly powerful. A real force of nature. And her Semblance…well, you’d know it, Yang. It’s a real game-changer.”
The air grew cold. The hum of the electric fan above them sounded suddenly menacing.
“Raven,” Yang whispered. "My mother..."
“Took a bit of work to get close,” Argent admitted. “But once I did, her mind wasn’t any harder to guide than yours were tonight. She’s been…wonderfully devoted ever since I made the effort to make the mind control commands I picked for her permanent. A fierce lover, and a valuable asset. Her Portal Bond Semblance is incredibly useful for logistics and ease of travel, allowing me to travel to so many places acorss the world instantaneously as long as I have bonded with the person in question on the other end of the portal...which as you can imagine, it is far easier to make such bonds faster with many people through my mind controlling semblance,” He added with a chuckle and a philosophical tone. "I just have to make them love me or at least feel immense loyalty towards me."
The name hung in the air, a poisoned dart finally finding its mark. Yang’s breath left her in a sharp, silent rush. Her eyes, which had been glazed with forced obedience, cleared into a frightening, crystalline focus. The information didn’t just land; it detonated.
“You’re lying.” The words were flat, absolute.
“I have no reason to,” Argent said, his head tilting with feigned sympathy. “Check your scroll. The last time she contacted you. A month ago, wasn’t it? The message was…unusually warm. Told you she was proud. Told you to trust your instincts.”
Yang remembered. The message had been weird. Out of character. She’d saved it, played it a dozen times, a starving girl clutching at crumbs.
The connection snapped into place with an almost audible click.
The fire that had been chemically suppressed now roared back, unfettered. The absence of the psychic trap meant the rage had nowhere to go but out.
“You son of a bitch!” she screamed, the sound raw and scraping. She surged up from the mattress, her naked body shaking with pure, undiluted fury. “You filthy, psychopathic piece of shit! You touched her? You did that to my mother?”
Argent raised his hands, palms out, in a placating gesture. His expression was one of understanding patience, which only poured gasoline on the inferno.
“Let it out, Yang,” he said, his voice a soft, empathetic counterpoint to her roar. “It’s a lot to process. I get it. The betrayal. The violation. Scream it all out. Get every ounce of that poison onto the floor between us.”
“Don’t you fucking patronize me!” she shrieked, taking a step forward but halting, her body physically prevented from lunging by his earlier, standing command. Words were her only weapon now. “You’re a disease! A cockroach! You think this makes you powerful? It makes you a weak, pathetic little boy who has to cheat to feel strong!”
She descended into a stream of profanity, her voice growing hoarse. She called him every vile name she knew, her insults painting a picture of a pathetic, insecure monster. He stood there and took it, nodding occasionally as if listening to valid grievances.
“You ruin everything you touch!” she finally gasped, her chest heaving, her throat torn. “You’re nothing! You hear me? Nothing!”
The dorm room echoed with the aftermath of her shouts. Spent, panting, Yang’s wild eyes darted from Argent’s calm face to the door. A new, colder terror seeped in. Her screams had been deafening, unholy. In the silent, late-night hallway, they would have been a beacon.
Someone must have heard. A neighbor. A passing student. Professor Goodwitch.
A sliver of hope, jagged and desperate, cut through her despair.
Argent watched the calculation flicker in her eyes. He lowered his hands.
“Worried about the noise?” he asked, his tone gently conversational, as if discussing the weather. “Don’t be.”
He took a slow step toward the center of the room, his nakedness somehow more commanding than any armor.
“Before I even knocked on your door tonight,” he explained, “I flared my Semblance. A wide-field broadcast, blanketing this entire dorm building. One very simple, very thorough command.”
He looked at each of them—Ruby’s daze, Weiss’s shame, Blake’s retreat, Yang’s dawning horror.
“For the next week,” he said, “no one will pay attention to a single sound that comes from Team RWBY’s room. Not a scream, not a shout, not a cry for help. They’ll hear it, but it will register as unimportant background noise. A faucet drip. A faulty fan. They will consciously dismiss it.”
He gave a faint, apologetic smile.
“The only way anyone intervenes is if I personally invite them in. And I’m very selective about my guests.”
The silence that followed was absolute. It was the sound of walls, real and invisible, slamming shut forever. The last possible avenue of escape, the hope of a cry being heard, was not just blocked but erased from the map of their reality.
They were, in every sense that mattered, already gone.