NOTE: I'm new to the RWBY fandom but I won't be staying long. This is a one-shot I wrote based on some ideas I've been tossing around in my head for a few weeks now. I'm sure I got some of the details wrong so feel free to correct me on that.
It all began when reality broke.
The skies over Remnant cracked and shattered before their very eyes. Like eggshells, pieces of what was once air began to flake off and fall. Massive bolts of cascading light thundered from the abyss beyond the red atmosphere like lightning: deadly and unpredictable. Those who were vaporized were the lucky ones. The rest faced the truest definition of Hell.
Vale was the first to shatter. From there, the cracks spread throughout Remnant. Creatures once docile began to run amok and the Grimm... The Grimm had gotten worse.
First, the kingdoms tried to mend the cracks. But reality had proven to be too unstable. Their armies fragmented, order shuddered, and just when civilization teetered into anarchy, the Agency came.
Vale became a landscape marred by massive fissures and dotted by gloomy military facilities where the Agency conducted their vile Project Nexus. Humans, faunus, and Grimm were all fair game to them. Nothing was spared their experiments, or so claimed by those who managed to escape from them.
"I don't know who you are or who you work for..."
"As the saying goes..."
"The enemy of my enemy is...not worth the trouble."
Patch had so far remained unoccupied by the Agency. The combined efforts of Vale's surviving scratch defenders had thwarted two major offensives and countless skirmishes against their seemingly inexhaustible horde of masked goons. But it was only a matter of time until the island would fall.
"Where did you learn to fight?"
"A place you've probably never heard of before."
The Agency came in force during the night. A coordinated land and air assault that nearly overwhelmed their primary defenses, pushing them to the line of trenches they had dug around Signal Academy. The Agency's troops showed no mercy, executing the wounded and surrendering those who surrendered to Project Nexus.
"Glynda Goodwitch, former Beacon staffer."
"Sanford."
"Deimos."
It was nothing short of a miracle that quickly turned into a bloodbath. The Agency was pounding at Signal's doors when a relief force fell on their rear flank. From behind the beleaguered academy's walls, the defenders watched as explosions ripped through their enemies. Then a pair emerged out of the smoke, one brandishing a large hook while the other lit his cigarette with his thumb.
"I take it you will be heading to Beacon. Is that the case?"
"That's all you need to know, ma'am."
They ripped through the Agency's troops like a buzz saw. It was sickening. Bodies torn apart by accurate small arms fire, limbs sent flying against the palisades, and the near endless sprays of blood that came with every deathblow. These men—their rescuers—were efficient, brutal, and merciless: the epitome of cold-blooded killers. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing did not help the defenders' morale...or their stomachs.
"Alright. We'll do it but there's no guarantees."
"We may or may not be back."
"I trust that you will return."
Sanford huffed. "Now that's optimism."
Deimos shook his head and crushed his cigarette under his boot. "I bet you fifty bucks they're still alive when we get there."
"Deal."
Shortly after they departed Signal, Taiyang confronted Glynda and demanded, "Did they wager on my daughters' lives? A damn bet?"
"If they did, what would you have done? Throw away our only chance of even knowing if they're still alive?"
"Those mercenaries... They fight like the Agency," remarked Peter Port.
"They're ruthless," Glynda admitted. "Who else is better suited to go up against the Agency than those who know how to properly fight them?"
"And win," Ozpin echoed, casting a contemplative silence on everyone else present.
When the Agency swarmed Beacon, Ruby had been one of the few students stubborn enough to disobey the order to evacuate. And she paid for it. Seeing many of her classmates getting shot up, Yang losing her arm, and the other teams nearly ceasing to exist had left her in a sea of guilt. It wasn't her idea to stay behind but she felt like it was.
She awoke tied to a gurney while needles poked incessantly at her sides. A bunch of guys in lab coats looked her over then nodded to some men in red shades and black suits. Ruby was numb as they locked her in a cell with nothing but the clothes on her back. By the time she could stand up, she was too weak to make a dent against the glass panes that kept her sealed. Whatever it was they pumped into her was effective at keeping her from using her Semblance, let alone feel her Aura.
Ruby did not know how long she stayed there. But it was brief. Because the next thing she remembered was a lot of shooting, a lot of blood, and a guy wearing a cap and a black coat shattering the glass with his automatic rifle.
"Come on, kid! Let's go!"
"Yang. We have to find Yang," she croaked.
Needless to say, when she recovered enough to draw on her Semblance, she deviated away from her savior to try to find Yang only to get dragged out of trouble again. What she saw when she wandered into those rooms were truly unthinkable. Humans, faunus, and Grimm dissected on operating tables, stored in vats, their bodies deformed and mutilated with jutting steel implants.
Ruby needed Crescent Rose. She knew they stored it somewhere. The armory, perhaps? Instead, of the armory, she stumbled into—or rather walked into—a giant with stakes rammed up his chin pointing an oversized pistol at her. It took a lot to dodge his shots and his blows until magnum rounds ripped into his face. She turned to see the man in the coat looking cross. He reached into the hallway behind him and tossed her Crescent Rose.
"Follow me and don't stray," he growled then lit the cigarette in his mouth only his thumb.
A file they later found revealed that Yang Xiao Long, Nora Valkyrie, and Lie Ren had been transferred elsewhere along with the other teams.
Jaune was screaming as he repeatedly smashed the loose pipe against the vat. Inside, in a liquid solution floated a nude Pyrrha. She looked tranquil as she slept despite the hideous visor over her chin and the hoses running from the cuffs on her arms and feet. The glass was starting to crack. A few more swings and...
A gunshot rendered him frozen. The vat shattered, spilling the room with chemical preservatives. Jaune dropped the pipe to catch Pyrrha in his arms. He turned his head behind him to see a hook slice through the cranium of one of those damn masked Agency soldiers.
"Stay back!" the blonde hollered hoarsely, reaching for the bent pipe.
"Easy, kid. Your girlfriend alright?"
"She's...she's not my girlfriend."
The man with the shades shrugged as he pulled the hook off the dead man's head with a sickening crunch. "Be careful when you pull the tubes out of her."
"I..I got it. Thanks."
"Here. Let me help."
Jaune was apprehensive but the stranger was decent enough to respect Pyrrha's modesty. When the cuffs fell off and the hoses came undone, Pyrrha had the same scars on her wrists and ankles as he did. Unlike her, the blonde had managed to free himself of his restraints and escape his captors before he could be stuffed into a test tube. If this was just a taste of Project Nexus...
He shuddered.
"You carry her. Find her some clothes, too."
Jaune nodded as he followed the man with the hook down a hallway full of corpses with a comatose Pyrrha in his arms. All the while, he tried to keep his stomach from retching at the sight of all the dead.
"I can't believe we got roped into this shit," Sanford groused.
"You agreed to it," Deimos snarked.
"I agreed to a retrieval. Not a damn rescue mission."
"That Goodwitch played you good, huh."
Sanford eyed his partner who had his hands on the wheel of the cargo truck they had commandeered for their exfiltration from Beacon. "You bought her shit, too, you know."
"Well, I wasn't negotiating with her back at the fucking island." The truck bounced hard against a speed bump but kept cruising smoothly over the cobblestones. "Damn. Didn't see that one."
Sanford peeked through the eyehole above the upholstery behind them. The former students of Beacon were busy rubbing their backsides from where they landed. "You kids okay back there?"
Groans chorused back at him and he slipped back to watch the road.
"You owe me fifty bucks, by the way," Deimos chimed.
Sanford unclasped his hook as the lights from a checkpoint flashed through the evening mist. "I'll pay you later. We still got to get to the docks."
It was an interesting sight, to be sure. Sanford and Deimos had already eviscerated three platoons of agents when out of the truck burst Beacon's finest. That Ruby kid using her scythe-gun, that blonde Jaune swinging his sword-turned-shield-thing, and a bunch of other stuff that would have existed in a fantasy story all came crashing against the waves of Agency troops that rushed them.
When the fight was over, most of agents were either out cold or blasted several miles away. Sanford tapped Deimos on his shoulder after he summarily executed a few stragglers. The kids were mortified.
"Was that necessary?" asked a shaky Jaune.
Deimos sighed and stepped over the rest of the unconscious agents. "Fine. Whatever helps you sleep at night."
By the time they had secured viable transport to Patch, Sanford and Deimos noticed that the students were keeping a good distance from them. If they dealt with those Grimm freaks on a daily basis—or so they were informed—then it didn't make sense that they couldn't comprehend with all the carnage that seemed so normal to them. Then again, this wasn't Nevada.
"You mentioned something about retrieval," that cat-girl Blake said after a long silent while.
"What?"
"Retrieval. You didn't come to Beacon to rescue us, didn't you," she pressed, a menacing glint flashing in her eyes. "What were you looking for back at the academy?"
"Should we tell them?" Deimos asked, pulling a fresh cigarette out of his packet and lighting it with his thumb.
Sanford shrugged, his hands occupied with piloting the bullhead just above the altitude and effective range of the Agency's choppers. Not that there were any were after them. "Fuck it. The cat's already out of the bag. Besides. Patch looks like a nice place to branch out."
"It was a retrieval-slash-search-and-destroy mission," Deimos prattled. "The facility needed to go. Some lady named Goodwitch told us there could be hostages that needed rescuing, though."
"We honestly didn't expect any of you to still be alive," Sanford added nonchalantly.
A quiet minute followed with nothing but the humming of the bullhead's engines.
"Who are you?" Pyrrha asked.
"Same thing I'd like to ask you people," Deimos replied with a puff of smoke. "Didn't think a place like this existed. Guess Nevada isn't the only part of the world that got fucked up."
"Nevada? What's Nevada?" inquired Ruby.
"Where we come from," Sanford answered.
"Where the Agency comes from, don't they," bunny-girl Velvet added.
Sanford and Deimos eyed the five students in front of them, all looking for answers. Until their gaze settled on the sixth—a girl seated in the back, her pale skin and long snow-white hair dangling over her face. Deimos nodded as he made another drag on his cigarette. "Yeah. Back there, they're called the A.A.H.W. but I think it's more of a joke name that ended up being formalized because they used it so much in their recruitment posters."
Blake folded her arms. "What does A.A.H.W. mean?"
"Association Against Hank Wimbleton."
"Against who?"
"Old man Hank," Sanford said. "That old coot's been fighting the Agency before they became the Agency."
Deimos chuckled. "So they took to naming themselves against him because he was their public enemy number one."
"Hank Wingle-steen?"
"Wimbleton." The two men from Nevada peered through the window panes. "There's Patch."
"Looks like they've been busy," Deimos remarked.
"Oh, no! Signal," Ruby breathed. "W-what happened?"
Sanford glanced at the teen, wondering if he should ask her whether she was worried about all the dead that had been piled outside the academy's make-shift bulwarks or the fact that Signal looked like it had been through an air raid. Or both.
"Come on, kids," Deimos hollered as the bullfrog descended onto the landing pad. He tapped that Schnee loner on the shoulder, earning himself a glare. "Let's go. That Goodwitch lady is expecting you."
Weiss took awhile to adjust to their new allies. The Movement, as Ozpin called them, comprised of a handful of Nevada mercenaries intent on stopping Project Nexus and, generally, dealing as much damage as possible to the Agency. Two of their best men, Sanford and Deimos, had proven to be (murderous) formidable (monstrous) fighters capable of using only their fists and whatever hardware they picked up along the way.
They even regarded Dust as...simply dust. Something to blow away in the wind. Nothing more than an eye irritant most useful in a brawl. Seriously, where did these people come from that Dust, Semblance, Aura, and everything that Remnant was founded on simply did not exist? Where was this Nevada that killing each other was so commonplace?
"Still moping, huh."
Weiss looked up to see Deimos flicking his thumb, conjuring a flame small enough to light the end of his cigarette. "What do you want?"
"I take it this isn't the first time this happened, eh?"
When reality just stopped working and everything that didn't make sense suddenly made even more sense? Weiss was in no mood to talk about it.
"Your friend Yang is in a compound east of Vale. Her and a bunch of your classmates. Thought I'd tell you."
"And I suppose Ruby wants to tag along."
"Yeah. She's feisty. Can't blame her though. Sister, right?"
"They're close."
"You're concerned."
"I'm worried."
"If you ask me, she's better off staying here. The Agency isn't some army of Grimm freaks or whatever it is you call those white-faced wildlife." Deimos turned his head away to keep the smoke from blowing into her. "They're trained killers. Professionals who are die-hard loyal to their leaders."
"I suppose you aren't the same?" Weiss wanted to point out that what they saw during their rescue mission was nothing short of a massacre. Who does that to people? How much more if they were faunus? Brutality like that had been put behind them since the Great War!
"They train you kids to hunt, right?"
"I'm a Huntress, yes."
"So you know that to track your prey, you have to be your prey."
Weiss held up her chin. "I don't stoop down to the level of Grimm."
Deimos shrugged. "If that's how you see it, good luck then."
"Have you even hunted any Grimm?"
The man made a final drag on his cigarette before tossing it into the bin. "They're a pain in the ass but killable." He then left.
Weiss later found Ruby in Signal's dormitories brooding and fuming. Jaune, Pyrrha, and Velvet had no luck calming her down. Sanford and Deimos had left with a few Movement fighters to go east where Yang and the others were being held. They all knew what was going on over there: Project Nexus.
All the horror stories from that nightmare filtered through the grapevine that it was becoming common knowledge to everyone in Remnant. Atlas's clandestine research seemed ethical compared to Project Nexus. And Weiss knew that Ruby could barely keep her mind off what fresh hell they were inflicting on her sister and everyone else. If she was in her place, she would have wanted to go on that mission.
So that night, the remnants of teams RWBY, JNPR, and CFVY boarded a bullhead and shakily flew it to Vale to help free their own. Of course, Ozpin had provided them with the coordinates to the facility but Glynda did not need to know that.
"So you think they moved the Relic there?" Sanford asked, seeing Vale's tattered landscape below through the window panes of the airship.
"It sure as hell wasn't at Beacon. Sure as hell weren't any Maidens, either," Deimos grumbled.
"You willing to bet one of those kids over there is a Maiden?"
The smoker let a small smile creep on his lips. "Thirty bucks one if them is a Maiden."
"Sixty if there's a Relic."
"Deal."
ORIGINALLY DRAFTED: January 26, 2018
LAST EDITED: January 28, 2018
INITIALLY UPLOADED: January 27, 2018
NOTE: I don't know much about RWBY but I'm no stranger to Rooster Teeth's other content (I watch them for their gaming videos). I am, however, a decade-long fan of Madness Combat.
This is a one-shot for now. I don't plan on adding any more so I'm keeping this as it is. But I will make some edits in regards to details of the RWBY universe because I'm not very well versed there. So let me know what you think. :)