No lyrics subtitles this time, either. Bye V4 intro song, I might miss you a bit. Certainly more than V3 intro song.
Kuroyuri is a combat zone again. Team RNJR (who all make a tumbling retreat here) have a highly dangerous and mostly unknown opponent, at least one emotionally compromised team member, and a stationary target to defend in the form of Qrow. Let the !!fun!! begin. Oh wow, that thing's roar is fit to be a sonic weapon.
I'm pretty sure the creative team set out to make this Grimm creepy, and they have
very succeeded.
Jaune repositions fast to reach Qrow, but is then stranded in the open as the Grimm charges at him (literally - it's half-horse, half-rider). Ren applies Semblance to greyscale both of them; Jaune isn't expecting that and freezes up, but the Grimm can no longer sense him or his human cargo, and Nora diverts its attention to allow their escape.
Sounds of gunfire echo in the background as Jaune deposits Qrow somewhere hopefully a little safer, slowed down by Qrow refusing to let go of his hand for a bit (not sure why, please fill me in).
Jaune returns to chaos. Ruby and Nora both try stuff and are both slapped around by the rider's extendy-arms, which I assure you look much less silly than I'm making them sound. Ren diverts the attention of both arms. Jaune, the designated strategist, sees something in how Ren did it and advises Team RNJR to continually circle the Grimm. This works. For a bit.
In the middle of this, Jaune tries to attack it with his sword, finds he doesn't have enough cutting power, and gets kicked away. (Horse kicks are no joke. They'll damn well kill you. My cousin, an equestrian professional, has been concussed enough by horses that she's had to medically retire from it in her twenties due to the high risk that the
next concussion could destroy the rest of her brain.) So he shows us the weapon upgrade he's been keeping in reserve all season: when the sword is sheathed, the sheath becomes
more sword. How simple and yet still impractical. This allows him to accomplish a bit more with his next swing.
At this point, the Grimm decides this circling thing looks like fun, and spins around with the rider's arms extended, sweeping up all of Team RNJR to knock away and disarm them.
Ren climbs a tree to direct gunfire at the rider. His are very light guns, so the rider isn't fazed at all - it just extends an arm and smashes him into the side of a building. Nora and Ruby make a team attack (bookends!) just in time to divert the other arm. The net result is that Ren is still smashed into that wall, and Nora is dangling from her hammer which is smashed into that same wall several metres sideways and up, both kept there by a Grimm hand-thing. (...how does that joke even work? Here I was thinking that combat skirts prevented it entirely.)
The Grimm retracts the hand holding Nora's hammer. Hammer and Nora go with it. The latter is bounced off the ground a couple of times; the last one breaks her Aura.
With Jaune helping divert the Grimm's attention, Ren (now enraged) can finally prise himself free and try a berserker run. It goes just as poorly, and he ends up discarded on the ground next to Nora with his Aura broken as well.
As the Grimm prepares to charge at them, Nora tackles Ren under a building, just like old times. It charges anyway, but doesn't get there - Jaune has blocked it. But turning his scabbard into a sword extension has not done wonders for its functionality as a
shield. Ruby does her best to harass from afar and keep its attention, but that's a dangerous prospect.
Ren insists on re-entering combat despite being down his weapons and Aura, to the point where Nora has to actually slap him before he sits down and listens to her. Nora is not the slightest bit impressed by Ren's new combat tactic of suicide-by-Grimm: if he goes off and gets rendered another ghost of Kuroyuri, she'll have to deal with the aftermath or follow suit, neither of which she's very enthusiastic about.
(glares at Qrow for wandering off alone, at night, in the middle of nowhere, with a mishap Semblance, while injured)
In case Nora wasn't giving off enough callbacks already, Ren (stabilised for now) still has his father's dagger from their last interaction. Rearmed, they emerge and link back up with Ruby and Jaune. Look, they're actually planning a bit, this might go better.
Ruby has figured out how to keep the Grimm's attention without being punched out. Mostly. She now baits an arm out and stabs her scythe through it, pinning it to the ground. Ren throwing the dagger diverts its attention so Jaune can do something similar to bait out the other arm; Ren, borrowing his shield, dives on the extended arm and pins it long enough for Jaune to pin it more permanently with his sword.
Now it is Nora's turn to break. Its. Legs. ...No, just its horse-head, but that's still pretty painful for it. Ren retrieves his dagger and walks around to face the rider-head,
completely unfazed by its roar, and systematically butcher the damn thing.
Kuroyuri is avenged. What can I say, sometimes you have to face your fears.
Qrow is just lucid enough to realise that the new lack of noise means the beast is slain, and conclude that Team RNJR did it.
Suddenly, air support! Two airships arrive at the ruins and collect Team RNJR+Q. In the air, the pilot explains that they saw smoke from an area uninhabited for years and figured something was worth checking on. Aren't we lucky. As Mistral (what else could it be) appears over the next mountain, Ruby finally accepts that Qrow's going to make it.
Nora and Ren sit out the side of the other airship. If you thought Amity didn't have safety railings, check these deathtraps out! Ren has his weapons, assuaging my concerns that they might have been left behind.
The music jumps nearly as high as Nora does when Ren takes her hand. This doesn't mean she doesn't accept it.
(raucous cheering from the comments section) Even the subtitles think they're adorable.
Ruby enters a two-bed room in which Qrow is asleep. It doesn't look like a hospital room, so hopefully he's on the mend.
And here come the lyrics! Much less exciting than most situations with lyrics.
One verse later, Ruby sits down to write a letter home, evidently the latest of many. Letters, she writes, aren't reliable, but there's no CCTS to Vale any more so letters are all they've got. If she had her time again, she wouldn't just leave a note and scram, they told her it was reckless and they were absolutely right.
As Ruby continues to write (voiceover), a montage:
- Weiss makes arrangements with a cargo pilot on the less-shiny side of Atlas to get her as far along her journey as possible (in a way that the pilot can plausibly deny knowing about).
- Blake opens a treasure-chest-thing that evidently functions as Ghira's safe for White Fang mementos. She's pretty conflicted about the red-on-black flag in there.
- Yang's on a boat, with her motorbike and a photo of Team STRQ. (At this point Ruby's narrating that she's learned that Yang was right that bad things just happen, all the time. This is possibly the most saddening thing I've heard all Volume, made worse by being in Ruby's voice.)
- Tai is alone at home, with only the same photo of Team STRQ for company. Wait, he's got Zwei, how could I forget about best boy. Wait, he's got another framed photo: Team RWBY, captioned by Ruby as "NEW FRIENDS!!! ❤". (Ruby's narration is that she's out there so good things can happen to people. Go Ruby!)
- Jaune stares at his equipment. ("We've all lost something." ...) Ren and Nora return to that room, Ren conspicuously equipped with his dagger which he places with Jaune's shield, and they just coexist for a bit.
- Weiss sits on a crate and looks out the window at the passing mountain view.
- Blake gets another flag out of the box: white on blue, with fewer stylised claw marks. I assume this is a vexillographical delineation between the eras of the White Fang. Then she looks over at Sun and doesn't see either of them as a liability or dead weight. It's a start, I guess...
- Yang gets off the boat, farewelled by the same crew who were featured on Blake and Sun's trip; perhaps it's the same ship, or perhaps it's reuse of character models. She motorcycles away from the shore.
- Oscar is on a train, heading for Mistral.
- As Ruby narrates that there are too many people who will take advantage of others, Ilia drops in to report to the Albains. Ugh.
- Cinder's new training is for Emerald to illusion her opponents into her vision (this time, Ruby), and Cinder to flamethrower them. Yikes. {{Salem lurks nearby, and gets her own camera shot a bit after voiceover-Ruby mentions a hypothetical/metaphorical "unstoppable monster we can never hope to beat". (throws tomato)}}
Wait, Ruby's writing this to Yang. Yang's left the house and won't receive it. The joys of snail mail.
Ruby is overcome by emotion and has to take a slight breather. Some lines later, just after she mentions meeting Qrow, he awakens. "Hey, aren't I normally the one saving you?" Yep, he's fine. The Elder Gunscythe and Ozpin's cane are stored in the corner.
Yang motorcycles up to a fork in the road. One path is signposted Mistral; the other, formerly Kuroyuri, has been overwritten with "BANDITS". Good thing Team RNJR didn't have to do that one the hard way while moving Qrow on a stretcher. It is left unclear which way Yang turns as Ruby finishes narrating-writing.
Ruby adds a postscript as we meet the office of Professor Lionheart, headmaster of Haven Academy, Mistral. So what you're telling me is that Beacon with its tower of green lights is run by Professor Ozpin with the assistance of Glynda Goodwitch; Atlas by James Ironwood who is half-prosthetics; and now Haven by a guy named Lionheart. All we need is for the latter to be a coward and we'll have pretty much the full set of L. Frank Baum references. I must say the episode title isn't filling me with confidence.
Ruby finishes with optimism that "things are gonna start start going our way" now that Team RNJR has reached Mistral. Right on cue, here's Watts meeting with "an informant in Mistral" aka probably Lionheart. I was joking.
I was joking.
So, how's this credits song going to go?
Look, the piano intro had me fooled.
As with the title song, the credits song is much more hopeful in tone than its Volume 3 equivalent.
Initially, I thought that the first verse was about (and from the perspective of) Ruby, the second Yang, and there would be two more; but it is becoming increasingly clear that this is entirely a Yang song. With attendant terrible pun. Yeah, I bet you're armed now.
A solid seventy-five seconds remain for the post-credits scene (and new and improved Rooster Teeth post-credits outro, which has appeared after every episode of this Volume). Qrow lurks alone at a bar, as usual. Oscar enters and gets his attention. Qrow is understandably quite dismissive. Oscar eventually gets to the message he was supposed to pass on: "I'd like my cane back?" This was the password; Qrow now acknowledges him as Ozpin's reincarnation, and gives him the cane back. He'll still need a bit of practice with it, though.
Next time: A selection of sisters.
