AN: Hi! This is the first story I've put up on this site, or in fact any site. So, thanks ahead of time for reading, and any feedback at all is appreciated; you know the deal. Also, don't expect anything approaching a reasonable or consistent upload schedule. Sorry about that in advance.
Disclaimer: I don't own nor claim to own anything relating to the Warhammer 40k universe, nor RWBY, or anything of the sort.
A darkening sun's rays fell upon the lands of a foreign world. Golden light stretched out from the horizon's edge, spilling over dark, autumnal leaves. Trees gently swung in a light, albeit chilling, breeze. The ground – coated in a wild layer of grass, dirt, and gravel – bore a long carpet of those same fallen red-and-yellow leaves.
It was still. A quiet, and very calm forest.
Coal-black, lupine creatures wander between the boughs. Chitinous, bony armour bedecks their forms, tough plates over their bodies and thick spines extending from their backs. Some are more ursine, far larger but no less monstrous. All of them bear glowing ember eyes, a certain cruel cunning within their gleam.
A yellow giant took careful note of that stillness, even as he watched his targets. They were clustered together, sniffing the air, searching for something. Most likely him.
Reticules and tactica in his visor highlight them, documenting the size of the pack and the age of its members. He has yet to decide which will die first. The Machine-Spirit concludes its assessment in agreement with his own.
They are like Orks, he has noted, kill the leader and their ability to be a threat evaporates.
It is just as simple to spot the leaders, too. Just like the greenskins, these creatures lead through sheer might. The largest, most dangerous of the beasts were always the Alpha, without fail.
Unlike the Orks, the shadowy creatures are vastly easier to kill, and actually less intelligent. It is quite the achievement.
Plan of battle laid out, he steps into the light, and cycles his immense suit of armour fully online. They are on him in the span of a heartbeat. His gun is firing in even less.
It is a big, bulky weapon. A relic from his own past. From a much darker time. It is a Godwyn-Ultima Pattern Bolter, and it screams its wrath into the world as it fires quick, two-round bursts. .75 calibre self-propelled mass-reactive explosive shells are spat out of the gun in pairs, flung at supersonic speeds towards their targets.
Each shot impacts with thunderous force, punching through bone and burrowing deep within. Then they detonate. Most die messily, the blast liquifying their innards but failing to take apart their organic armour, gore spraying from between its cracks and out from the entry wound.
The bigger ones survive the first shot. Some get lucky, and duck or dive in time for the shot to merely ricochet off their carapace and deeper into the forest. That is why he is firing in bursts.
He has 28 shots. By the time the first of the beasts reach him, it is cycling on empty. The pack is also notably lacking in 19 members. This does absolutely nothing to slow them down.
The boltgun is mag-locked to his right leg, and his sidearm is brought up. It is anointed in the grey matter of the first faux-wolf meets him, swung through its skull and crushing the brain-case of his first howling attacker. It is thrown aside by the blow to the side of its face. He levels the bolt pistol in the same motion that caves in its head.
It has far fewer shots than the full-sized boltgun, but 12 more shots are still 12 more dead.
Two shots fail to kill outright, and the yellow giant is forced to finish off the prey with followup rounds for both. 10 more of the pack are dead, and then they've finally reached him – very noticeably thinned out, by more than half, but that is still 18 wolves that meet him in melee.
One hand – his left – slams the pistol back into its holster at his hip, while the other tears a weapon from his back. It is long; nearly as long as he is tall, and beautiful.
Bright white is the blade, a curved axe-head atop a long haft that leant itself to one- or two-handing the weapon. Red, leathery material binds the grip, wrapped over the haft carefully. Just beneath the head and behind the "beard" of the blade sits a thrumming generator, and jutting out from the opposite side of the axe-head is a spike shaped into a wing. As soon as his fingers wrap around the grip, lightning arcs around the head, and the Axe Encarmine is torn from its holster on his back.
Right as the great weapon comes down for the first time, some of the pack are intelligent enough to recognise that they have made a terrible mistake in pursuing him as prey.
He is quite clearly a predator.
The hissing, crackling Axe Encarmine tears the first wolf in half with a diagonal swing, the weight and Power Field doing more to achieve so violent a result than the self-sharpening monomolecular edge. He follows it up with another bisecting strike, and then another after that.
His targets at range were chosen carefully, and for a reason beyond thinning them out. He picked off the wolves at the edges of their charge, forcing the pack to bunch together to avoid his wrath, and close in almost in single file. One of his first shots took the head off their leader, leaving them blind to his strategies. He is unsure if their claws could punch through his armour, and has no wish to test it – so he forces them to attack him on his own terms, and prevents them from swarming him in a great enough number to pose any significant threat. It is how he fights Tyranids.
They are neither in a large enough horde nor are they smart enough to be compared to the Hive Mind in anything other than their passing similarity in tactics.
So he cuts them apart with impunity, each terrific arc of the axe tearing another in half, spraying him in vibrant red blood that the Power Field fails to disintegrate in its limited time of contact.
Not one of them realises how he has manipulated them into killing themselves, and he is soon left with only the three ursine monsters and the pack's sub-leader; their second most intelligent, the Beta to their Alpha. It is smaller than its three surviving comrades, but the flicker in its eyes betray an emotion beyond unending hatred – fear. It has realised that it is going to die. That it is going to die violently.
The yellow giant savours that fact, even as he meets the bears with his blade.
They come at him as one. He sidesteps one charge and slams a knee into the other's skull-mask, crumpling it on impact, simultaneously bringing the axe around in a heavy swing into the third right as it comes around its concussed comrade. Unlike the first one to taste its bite, its solid edge actually plays an important role: so great was the ursine creature's mass that it very nearly got stuck in its flubber.
But, completing the swing only mildly slowed, the beast was sawed clean in half at the waist. It was inevitable – the weapon was designed to kill Astartes. A single faux-bear barely slowed the blade.
The first one's retaliatory swipe glanced off his pauldron, raking the metal but failing to break through its ceramite.
He rotates with the blow, bringing his blade with him – this time, in one, swift movement, the Axe is forced into a brutal downwards chop, tearing the beast nearly clean in two down the middle. It tears down, and out through its stomach, the beast's halves slumping over as the Axe finally completes its visceral duties.
Turning again, he is struck before the blade can be brought to face. A pitch-dark mass slams into him, an animal's cry of rage on its lips and teeth bared for his throat.
The Beta had tackled him.
He rolls with the impact, tumbling to the ground with a wolf atop him. Using the motion to his advantage, the yellow giant kicked out, slamming his sabatons into its stomach, and knocking it clear. At once, he rolled back to his feet, relic-weapon raised and ready for the next attack.
The Beta struck again slashing out with a clawed hand. This time, the swing was parried. Claws scrabbled along the side of the head, sent soaring off-target by the deflection, trailing ashes.
In the same moment, that wing-spike slams into the extended limb, and there is an all-too-loud crunch of bones breaking as it slams home, only slightly cutting open the flesh as it punches in – but the limb is rendered useless nonetheless.
It pulls back at the pain, and tries to retreat. In doing so, it left itself vulnerable; the spike comes crashing down once again, shattering the Beta's left leg just above the knee. Crying out again, the wolf collapses to the ground. So too is its opposite leg broken, and then the last arm bearing claws.
Immobilised, thinks the giant, excellent.
He slides his axe back into its sheath, and steps over the fallen Beta's broken body. His helmet is removed with a hiss. Gauntleted fingers come down, and grip tightly to its scalp. Both hands hold its skull, hold it by its dome.
Fingers force their way under the bone mask it wears, and he tears it off. The wolf screeches in pain at the motion. Before progressing any further, the giant slips it onto a loop at his hip; there are already 9 others on it, a wire passing through the eye-holes in the masks.
With a crunch and a tear, its skull is broken open. Fragments of it spray the dirt, and it ceases its struggling and its yowling.
One hand grabs the organ in its skull – to call such a thing a brain would be sorely mistaken – and pulls it free. It is rapidly shovelled into the giant's mouth, and swallowed almost whole.
Then he freezes up, and he twitches slightly. His face is twisted into a grimace, and he winces with every slight twitch, his eyes unfocused and his vision hazy. For a time, he simply stands there.
"Hmph." he grunts out as the moment ends. The helmet, its face twisted into a permanent snarl, is slid back over his head, and releases another hiss as it locks in place. Inside the helm, his chin taps against a pad at the helm's bottom, releasing a double-click. A single-click response comes back in half a second.
"Last pack cleared out," he begins to speak into his vox, "members cut down with minimal losses. Forty bolt shells expended. Fifty two slain. Returning from patrol now."
His voice is deep, but smooth, flowing. Were it significantly higher, one might be able to call it lyrical.
Another voice filters into his ears, only slightly muffled by static. It is similarly deep, but grizzled, baritone. The transmission is a single word. "Acknowledged."
The giant casts one last careful look over the field of battle, and notes that the corpses have already begun to dissipate. They are breaking down, disintegrating, fading into a mist that in turn vanishes into the air. So too is all the gore. Even the blood on his person and the flesh stuck on his armour. All that remains are the bones.
And then he turns, marching away from the former scene of carnage.
…
It is night by the time he has returned.
Pale moonlight falls upon the canopy, halted from reaching the ground below, and bathing the world beneath the trees in shadow. Small spaces – gaps, really – in the overgrowth reveal the drifting celestial body in high orbit.
He never once bothers looking further than the treetops. His march is quick, deliberate; measured, but no slower for it. Whirring servomotors and hissing synthetic myofibrils resound in his ears, but go unheard. The noise is simply filtered out. The thump of his footsteps face a similar fate, but are not quite as ignored.
The giant sees them long before they do him.
Autosenses and transhuman organs pick out the gate and its wall from a great distance, piercing the gloom with ease.
Steel and primitive rockcrete are its materials, with its outside bedecked in ordered wiring that he can see faintly sparking in the darkness, long razor wire-wrapped spikes from near the top making the structure somewhat concave. Atop the wall – 5 metres tall, half that thick – walk humanoid sentries, their vision aided by fat floodlights that turn of their own accord to light up the forestry. Heavy stubbers stand nearby the sentries, manned, their gunners scanning cautiously.
Of the sentries themselves, he can see their simple flak armour-equivalents, and the overly-colourful autoguns they carry. Long, slim, blocky weapons that remind him of some lasgun patterns. Ceramic ballistic plates in tough pouches. Patrols walk in groups of four or five, all covering each other. He knows that there are many more inside the town itself.
They are utterly unready for an attack by more than one pack of the umbral monsters.
As he draws close to their gate, two of the stubber-gunners snap to track him immediately, while the two nearest patrols draw in to investigate, stocks to shoulders. It passes almost as quickly as it arrived, weapons crews relaxing and returning to scanning, while the patrols lower their weapons and stand up from their semi-crouch. One of them – to the giant's left – jogs along the wall, stopping above the gate.
"Good hunting?" She calls down to him, rifle slid into a front-mounted holster, hands scrabbling at a panel that illuminates her form for a moment. She is clad in a grey-green uniform, overlaid with flak plates and combat rigging. Only her face is exposed, even then still only barely.
Her skin is a plain, tanned bronze. Eyes the colour of the void stare out from under the helmet, while messy strands of golden hair hang out from the helm's rim. She is tall. For a mortal, anyway. Her frame is neither thinly- nor thickly-built.
Approaching the gate that has started to open, he decides to respond. "It was satisfactory."
She chuckles at the response, though he does not quite understand why. There is very little about the statement he believes to be humorous. It was spoken entirely matter-of-factly.
"Yeah, I'll bet, Talos." Her chuckling ceased quickly, but it did not solve his conundrum. "Anyway, how many Grimm didya kill? A hundred? Two?"
Resolving to figure it out later, and now passing the threshold between the (relatively) small gap in the fortifications, he answered her truthfully. "Ten packs. Four hundred and ninety two Beowolves, thirty three Ursae, two younger Deathstalkers."
The woman blinked down at him, mouthing the numbers for a moment, before finally giving her reply. "That's a lot."
"It is."
That's the last thing they say to each other, before Talos has walked beyond her natural hearing range. By now, he is within the town proper.
It is, he believes, accurately surmised as "quaint". The buildings are situated a good distance away from the main wall, surrounded by a much smaller (and weaker) wall. Unlike the main one, the secondary is still under construction, and it is plain to see; much of it is unfinished, while what will someday be the second gate has yet to even begin being made.
But the town itself is not great in size, though the Space Marine is aware that he was perhaps not the best judge of scale. Only a few hundred citizens called the village their home. Most of the housing is wooden, but still well-made. It is supposedly a popular halfway point when traveling.
He walks until he reaches the centre of town, passing by quiet homes and darkened storefronts, stopping only in front of a large, squat, reinforced concrete bunker.
The local PDF-equivalent's barracks. And the town's emergency bunker.
Talos pushes through the door, twisting to fit, but still making quite the racket as he forces his way through a doorway not designed to fit a Space Marine. But, as soon as he is through, the structure is more than large enough to comfortably allow his bulk.
The topmost layer, the building exposed to the world, is purely a defensive structure. Much alike the outer wall, there is electrified razor wire looping around its top. Small slits in the walls left murder holes for defenders to shoot through. Dotting the room are large ammunition caches, boxes full of belts of colourful bullets and double-stacked magazines.
At its centre is a stairwell, leading deeper into the ground, ending in a large metal blast-door. Just beside it, there rests a table, a surprisingly faithful recreation of the surrounding area and the town itself laid out atop it.
Another giant clad in lighter, unpowered pitch-black carapace plate stands over it. Light distorts around his form, the cloak about his shoulders warping it. An assault shotgun is slung around his torso, hanging over his stomach; similarly umbral, long and blocky, a drum magazine and a thick, suppressed barrel. His face is exposed, helmet set down on an edge of the table.
He is pale. Incredibly pale. Alabaster, nearly snow-white skin frames eyes that are the exact opposite, the colour of the spaces between stars. Long, dark hair is tied back into a tight bun. A dull grey metal ear-piece sits on the right side of his face, and a curving microphone sits in front of his mouth. Over his head hangs a small name-tag, provided by the Machine-Spirit.
Cor.
He does not even glance up from the table, laying down another token of a skull in the forest. "Acknowledged." he mutters into the device, frowning. A number in the yellow-armoured Astartes' vision flickers and shifts downwards, by 23 points.
Talos glances at the table, and notes the skull-tokens, their positions focused around the western side of the town. "Their numbers are increasing," he says, "and their age, too."
It was a simple observation, albeit notable. "I know." is his comrade's response.
Now he looks up, facing the fully-armoured Space Marine. An eyebrow is raised as he takes in Talos' form, looking over the thoroughly battered war-plate. His eyes lock onto the fresh claw marks on one shoulder, and on the chest near the neck. The rest of the damage has been there longer than the Scout Sergeant has known the other Marine.
"Lamenter luck." Talos supplies in explanation.
Cor snorts at that, before returning to his previous stony expression. "I've questioned the locals about them. These 'Grimm'," he began, "and much of what I've been told is worrying."
Pointing into the woods, he continued, "Supposedly, they've been here longer than humanity, which is according to them at least a thousand years but most probably ten thousand or more."
"Equally concerning is their ability to age. Not to die of it, but grow stronger from it; smarter, larger, more resilient," he continued, crossing his arms, "which doesn't sound dissimilar to another enemy we're familiar with."
Shaking his head, he tapped at a device one of the villagers had given him, bringing up a pict-capture of one of the more common breeds, a Beowolf. "You've no doubt grown to know these beasts just as well as the damned Orks. What I find concerning is the variety of forms they can take, as well as the potential of their elders; if there are any as old as the Imperium, we simply don't have the numbers nor weapons to engage them."
Snapping the device closed and laying it down on the table next to his helmet, Cor returns to leaning over the battle-map. He looks down on it, eying the forests with intensity, as if trying to discern a pattern from the Marines' past few patrols.
"However," he spoke up again, "what's most worrying is their sheer number. Not one of the villagers could tell me where they came from, nor how they reproduce. Apparently there are so many that some towns have quite literally been drowned under an umbral tide."
Cor turns to face the bigger Marine once more, and assumes his position when speaking to a usually younger Astartes. "We cannot end this threat on our own. If the locals have been surviving for the better part of the last ten millennia, then they know far better than we do as to how to best handle these 'Grimm'."
Talos hums his assent, then adds his own piece. "They have most likely forgotten far more about them than we will ever know ourselves. More than that, we simply do not have the munitions for extended operations this far from Imperial hands. It is wise to trust in them for support in this matter."
The sergeant grunts in agreement. He checks his combat-webbing quickly, frisking through pouches and slings for his equipment, before quickly coming to a conclusion. "I have four more magazines for my shotgun, and a few flasks for my pistol," Cor says, "or approximately two hundred shells and thirty to forty blasts."
Taking this as his cue to respond, the yellow Astartes replies with "I am facing a similar situation. Fourteen more magazines for both boltguns, three hundred and twelve bolts in total."
Grimacing, the Scout didn't give any response. How he feels is clear enough regardless. Instead, he returns to scrutinising the map, knowing full well that it would not yield any solutions. He had come to accept long ago that they were almost certainly going to die on this world, forgotten by all.
He just didn't think it would come so soon.
Sighing, he lets the anger escape him. It would do him no good to feel bitter.
"One piece of good news," the Scout began, "is that their call for assistance from their Capital-equivalent has apparently been answered."
Underneath his helmet, the Veteran raises an eyebrow. "How so?"
Gesturing flippantly in a generally easterly direction, Cor answers him. "According to the locals, at least one 'Huntsman Team', at most three, as well as material aid to assist in the event of a siege. Supposedly, it should reach us within the next few local planetary hours."
Laughing slightly, he shakes his head, and continues. "And when I asked them what in the Emperor's name a Huntsman Team was, I didn't get an answer."
Talos hums in acceptance of that fact, but certainly not comprehension. It seems to him that a storm is brewing, but he cannot quite express how, nor why. Something about the speed at which the capital was responding, alongside the gradual increase in Grimm around the town, did not sit well with him. His lack of response is enough to draw the two back into silence.
"Acknowledged." suddenly speaks Cor, planting yet another token into the forest. Just alike Talos, something about the situation did not sit well with him; unlike his battle-brother, it was not borne out of a long history of sorrow, but rather out of simple skill and instinct.
Looking down at how the tokens sat in the forest, at how they have concentrated so utterly to one side of the town, and how the opposite was completely barren of any activity whatsoever, his hackles unconsciously raise.
Glancing up from the battle-map to his yellow-clad comrade, he speaks once more. "Alaric and Eygil are returning. We'll be meeting them at the gate."
And, not a moment passing from that, he marches out the door once more.
Talos watches him breeze through, luminous cyan eyepieces tracing his path, and follows a scant few seconds afterwards.