It was another school day in the life of the members of Team CVFY — named after the initials of their members, beginning with that of their leader's. The girls woke up almost a full hour before it was time for breakfast to have time for a quick morning shower followed by — mostly Coco — doing their makeup. The guys only needed ten minutes between the both of them to complete their morning routines, brush their teeth, and put on their uniforms.

After half a year of living together, the team dynamic was firmly established. Fox was the whimsical goofball, Coco was sass incarnate, Velvet was slowly coming out of her shell, and Yatsuhashi did his best to manage the chaos between the former two while backing him his bunny-eared partner.

There was never a dull moment for Huntsman in general. That went doubly so for the initiates trying to earn their license at one of the four great academies. When they weren't bonding with their team, they were either in class, training, or facilitating the rest by virtue of having to live together.

It did not help that on top of learning and getting strong enough to fight against the unending forces of Grimm, they were expected to also take on the same workload as full-time university students. Every Huntsman that graduated Beacon did so with at least Bachelor's degree as a graduation requirement.

Still, while a normal person would shrink at the thought of having to juggle all of that at the same time, dozens of teams were admitted and graduated every year. If you were good enough to get into one of the four great academies, you were probably good enough to survive the experience and thrive as much as could be expected from a profession that deadly.

After morning classes, Team CVFY were due for their lunch break. Today, they were surprised not by the fact that Lapis was present once again, but because he was surrounded by more food than the four of them planned on eating altogether… throughout the day.

"So…" Fox started the conversation, "Are you trying to bulk or something, because I'm pretty sure you're doing it wrong if that's the case."

"Hello to you too," Lapis rolled his eyes. "I'm not trying to bulk. Can't a guy just appreciate some good food without being questioned?"

"That's not— You know what? Whatever, go stuff your face if you want to. I'm sure that won't come back to bite your ass later when you go back to your afternoon workout," Coco said.

"It won't," Lapis said before starting on another plate of pasta. "You can even come see for yourself, if any of you care to have another fight with me if you have time today."

"Already looking to get your ass handed to you by Yatsu again?" Fox raised a brow.

"I have Aura now," Lapis said before he allowed the black glow of his Aura to appear around his body.

"Uh oh," Fox sarcastically responded.

"Don't worry," Lapis mimicked his tone as he said, "I won't go all out against you buddy. There wouldn't be a point to fighting if didn't make it a challenge for myself."

"Weren't you the one thanking Yatsu last time for humbling you like he did? You're acting a little too conceited just because you got your Aura unlocked, my man," Fox said.

"Maybe," Lapis offered, "but probably not. We'll see if you care to take up my offer, yeah?"

"Sure, dude. I wouldn't mind a free spar."

"Nuh uh," Coco spoke up. "I want the first fight again. If he's going to make it easier for me to beat him up, I want a shot at payback for last time."

"You make it sound like I did something terrible to you," Lapis deadpanned. "Don't get mad at me just because I beat you in a fight that you started."

"Irrelevant," Coco looked away as she insisted.

"Anyone else interested? Yatsuhashi? Velvet?" Lapis asked.

"Not to be disrespectful, but if you manage to make it past Coco and Fox after restricting yourself however it is that you plan to do so, then by all means," Yatsuhashi said.

"I don't really want to fight you, but… It would make for good practice against someone new. At this point, all the first years have sparred at least a couple of times together during Goodwich's combat class," Velvet said.

"Great. Just come find me in the gym whenever you find the time. I'll be around until four o'clock," Lapis said.

After lunch, Team CFVY had two more hour-long classes before they had a free period until 3:30 to resume their school work. It was during this free period that they all walked over to fetch Lapis.

After he finished the set he was working on when they called out to him, he let go of the bar he had been pulling to work his back. It made terribly loud sound that got Coco wondering what he had been working with.

"Fifty… Tons? That can't be right," Coco muttered as she tried using the machine without touching the weight settings. After anchoring herself to the bench, she used all her strength but the bar didn't move after going taut.

"Holy shit," Fox helpfully added when he gave it a halfhearted try himself. "Maybe you weren't looking to get your ass kicked after all."

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"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Lapis said.

They left the gym and moved to a sparring room. Before Coco had her shot at a rematch with Lapis, he asked her to wait as he covered one of his eyes with a black leather eyepatch. The moment he did so, Yatsuhashi let out a startled shout for them to stop as he called them over. On his scroll, which he had used to keep track of Lapis' Aura for the purposes of the spar, it showed that he only had a slight sliver of red.

"Did the eyepatch do that?" Velvet asked as she eyed the eyepatch warily.

"Right in one," Lapis smiled. "This thing is cursed or something to suppress most of my power, not just my Aura," he turned to Coco and gave her a smug smile as he continued, "so now you don't have to worry about me hitting you with several tons of force."

"Watch it," she warned.

"Instead," Lapis ignored her, "you just have to worry about me using all my other abilities and tricks." He materialized a knife out of thin air and tossed it over to the sparring platform. Before it landed or hit anything, he teleported over to it and caught it, standing where he had been before Yatsuhashi had called him over.

"Superstrength, teleportation, pulling things out of thin air. Do you have anything else you want to share with the class before we begin?" Coco asked.

"And ruin all the trump cards I have safely stored away?" Lapis mockingly asked. "Sure," he beamed at her indignation before giving away more of his abilities. "I can sense the lifeforce of living things, fly around, throw around blasts of explosive energy, heal wounds and do a couple of other things that I haven't really bothered with yet."

Unnerved but not to the point where she called off the fight, Coco told Yatsuhashi to begin the countdown before the spar commenced.

When the countdown ended, Lapis took the initiative to charge at Coco as a complete reversal of their first fight. Coco knew better than to let him get close enough to land one of his devastating punches, so she shifted her Gianduja into its minigun form before laying waste to everything it pointed at.

Unfortunately, even if Lapis was wearing an eyepatch that suppressed his power, he was still fast enough to either dodge or block bullets with his knife as he made his approach. He was decidedly more competent with a knife than without as it made up for the noticeable drop to his speed.

Coco presumed that he could no longer make use of his strange movement technique since he never used it. Even when he got close enough to make an attempt at stabbing her with his knife, he never tried the same trick that had taken her out the last time. Instead, he pulled out a different, new trick he had mentioned before now.

He decided to throw his knife away to her side. As she looked at him strangely for purposely missing, she noticed the thin trail that followed from where the knife had landed back to where it returned on his person. Before she could consider what had happened, Lapis stabbed at her and the only way to dodge was towards the rift that remained in space.

She did not want to find out what would happen if she touched the rift so she parried Lapis after shifting her weapon back to its handbag form instead. His Aura reacted and prevented him from being thrown back in his weakened state. It also gave him the opportunity to land a clean hit.

When the attack was absorbed by her Aura he looked at her apologetically and said, "Sorry" as an explosion blossomed from the palm that had struck her. Not having expected that, Coco both took a hit from the explosion as well as found herself being thrown back into the rift.

"Stop!" Yatsuhashi said Coco stepped away before the rift ate through what remained of her Aura.

"This is bullshit," she complained as she slung the handbag that was her weapon over her shoulder.

"Such is life," Lapis shrugged. He turned to Fox to see if he still wanted to spar.

The dark-skinned redhead did not say anything in response. Instead, he made his way over to the sparring platform.

After another countdown, Lapis and Fox dashed toward each other to engage in close combat. Unlike Coco, Fox was more than proficient enough to match Lapis blow for blow when fighting up close and personal. He knew enough to press a relentless assault that gave no opportunities for Lapis to catch him in one of the explosions that stumped Coco.

Unfortunately for him, even if he was a much better melee fighter, that alone was not enough to maintain the advantage after Lapis began creating rifts in space after recalling his thrown knife several times. Four rifts were enough to keep him unstable enough for Lapis to successfully stab or slash at him and after a few minutes, Yatsuhashi called the match in his favor again.

"Say… Have you guys been holding back yourselves? I haven't seen either of you use your Semblances," Lapis asked as Fox and Yatsuhashi were switching places to start the next spar.

"My Semblance doesn't help with fighting, it's Telepathy," Fox said.

"I can't risk using my Semblance in a spar. I call it Hype and what it does is amplify the effects of dust. It's good for mowing down hordes of Grimm and probably people too, but I'd rather not find out," Coco explained.

She had tested the effects before with a pistol and with only a few bullets she could drain the aura pools of people with large capacities. Because she used a minigun that fired thousands of rounds per minute, the window of time she had before she might inadvertently break someone's aura and then go on to swiss-cheese them was too narrow to consider using it against people.

"Besides, it's not like it would have mattered if your speed wasn't handicapped. Last time we fought, you didn't get hit by a bullet even once."

Yatsuhashi got in position to start his spar as he said, "As for me, I won't use my Semblance unless it's absolutely necessary. I can… Wipe Memories, so I have to manage that power responsibly."

"Cool," Lapis' expression was that of someone thinking, 'Not bad.' "Glad you're a friend and not a foe," he added.

Fox started another countdown before the two men dashed in to clash the terribly mismatched weapons. Yatsuhashi with his six-foot greatsword and Lapis with his less than a foot-long knife.

Below them, the ground exploded as all the force had to go somewhere and neither of their Auras wanted to absorb it. What followed was the loudest most environmentally catastrophic fight the rest of Team CFVY had ever witnessed.

Somehow. Someway… Lapis was holding his own against the heaviest hitter of all the students at Beacon. Yatsuhashi was not the strongest fighter, he had been beaten by a few upperclassmen, but he was most certainly the one with the most physical strength. Until now, no one had lasted longer than it took to parry or block one of his attacks before they decided to take evasive maneuvers to counter him.

Lapis did not seem to mind as he blocked an overhead swing and sunk a few inches into the ground that webbed and cratered around him. Yatsuhashi, similarly was unfazed when he suffered a blank point explosion after locking blades with Lapis. It had clearly become a matter of pride for the man as Lapis refused to use any of his other tricks afterwards.

This led to the fight going on for a full ten minutes before Professor Glynda Goodwich put an end to the fight herself.

"Does anyone here understand the rules of using this training room?" She asked as she ensnared both Lapis and Yatsuhashi in her Telekinetic Semblence.

"If this is about his Aura, he's purposefully keeping it suppressed like that," Fox nervously said as he watched the debris that was cast everywhere in the room seemingly go backwards through time to when it hadn't been in a damaged state.

"I'm talking about collateral damage. Specifically, only a reasonable amount is allowed in the indoor sparring rooms. If you want to blow everything up, go outside," the blond disciplinarian said.

"I didn't know that," Fox lamely said.

"It's never come up until now," Coco added.

"We're sorry," Velvet hung her head despite being the only one to not contribute to the state Glynda had found the room in.

"Noted," Lapis said before turning to Yatsuhashi. "Do you want to keep going outside, then?"

"I don't think there's any point," Yatsuhashi sighed. "The only thing that's changed is my Aura dropping down to the yellow and you haven't even pulled out the teleportation or spatial tears."

"Don't let the information on my Scroll fool you," Lapis said as he took off his eyepatch. As he did so, the Scroll in Fox's hands showed that his Aura had risen up to around 62% just barely above the threshold to be in the green; less than sixty was officially in the yellow.

"How about you Velvet? Are we still on for a fight?" Lapis asked while holding on to his eye patch.

"Maybe some other time," Velvet smiled, but it was clearly forced. "I don't think I could do anything after seeing you go toe to toe with Yatsuhashi like that. I'd rather not make a fool out of myself by thinking otherwise."

"Suit yourself," Lapis said as the eyepatch in his hand vanished into thin air. "Well, this was a fun exercise in recalibrating my strength. Maybe next time I can restrict myself to only using certain abilities or skills to make it a better form of training."

"I won't say no to kicking your ass if you swear off the teleportation and explosions," Coco said.

"It would certainly be quite the workout to see how long we could keep a rally of clashing blades going without those cutting trails you used to beat me," Fox added.

"Maybe I should start a bulk myself and see about another spar once I get stronger," Yatsuhashi thought to himself.

"Alright. You guys know where to find me, then," Lapis said before sharing goodbyes with everyone and leaving.

He couldn't have known that subconsciously, Team CFVY had already given up on the idea of any of them actually standing a chance against him. If this was him when he was suppressed so heavily, they refused to even consider what he was capable of without the eyepatch.