I've always been a little blunt, so let me speak bluntly.
Remnant sucks. It's a nightmare that pretends to be normal, like a father lying to his kids about why their mother isn't around anymore.
Oh, the cities were fine enough, I suppose. The central cities of the Four Kingdoms of Vale, Vacuo, Mistral and Atlas… those places were safe and normal, and almost resemble the cities of my home. But there was always an undercurrent running through it, a lingering trace of fear. There were alarm sirens at every corner, waiting to blare out a warning. Wide avenues, designed less for traffic and more for evacuation routes. It's like Cadia tried to pretend to be normal, but forgot to put away the bunkers.
It's the towns that give the game away. The tiny little places, the rural areas, the homes of the down-to-earth and the idealistic… at least, on Earth, that is. Here on Remnant, the small towns were for the serious, hard-eyed folks, and the cities were for the idealists and the kind-hearted citizens. Towns and settlements outside the city walls were wary, cautious places, where everyone walks armed, and mothers keep their children in sight at all times. A gun on every hip, an enemy around every shadowed corner.
Because at its fundamental core, Remnant is not safe.
Perhaps it will be one day, after the Kingdoms man up enough to napalm all the forests and burn out all the Grimm, after they manage to finally get off the ground and into space. For right now, it's a dangerous place to live – wolves in the woods, trolls under the bridges, dragons in the caves, kraken under the seas, and something big lurking in the upper atmosphere.
The continents didn't crack apart on their own, on this world. Their Moon didn't shatter of its own volition. Every time someone reaches to new heights, touches a new technology or strives to change the world for the better, they get smacked right back down by the hand of God. The Tower of Babel never got off the ground floor on this world – it was strangled in the cradle, and its destroyers still linger in the ruins.
To those who understand this truth, that the world hates them, there is but one goal: to try to live out their lives as best they can. This isn't the kind of place where a child dreams of touching the stars, or becoming President, or anything like that. Here, they dream of starting families and having warm, secure homes.
They dream of living, yes, but that is not the full truth. They dream of not being killed. Of not dying to the monsters. The children lie awake in their beds in the dark of night, and fear the thought of death, creeping through their homes.
Some of those homes happen to be outside the walls of the Kingdom, and that's where I come in.
I'm a mercenary. I fight for money, though I'll make exceptions for children with frightened faces. I escort supply shipments to wayward outposts and small settlements. Sometimes the shipments were legal, and my contract is paid for by the Kingdom of Vale or the Kingdom of Vacuo, or the like… and sometimes, I skirt alongside the edge of the law, bringing food and medicine to the enclaves of outlaws and smugglers and worse.
It's complicated. I'm a moral person, or at least I tell myself that I am, and to work for criminals irks me, like a bone-deep itch of wrong. But if I want to survive in this world, I need money, because money buys power and freedom. Once I have that power, I can get around to changing this place, to making it better.
Because you see, there's a bit of a problem with Remnant. With Vale and Mistral, and Vacuo in particular.
People don't care.
The more generations grow up behind large, protecting walls, the more they think of themselves as untouchable, as safe. And to be frank, that condition doesn't exist on this miserable pile of dirt. Safe is temporary. The Grimm were a never-ending enemy, spawning behind walls and in pits and in the dark and deep places of the world. They stride forth eternally, stalking the hairless apes of Man, until one day they finally kill the last one off, and hunt us into extinction.
And I don't like that thought.
So far as I can tell, with only the knowledge given to me by the basic Intranet of Vale with a civilian level of access, there is only one known way to prevent Grimm from spawning.
You need humans. Specifically, humans living together, in a community. Thinking that they were safe, treating the place as their home. There's never been a Grimm spawning or appearing – whatever they actually do to reproduce, that is – inside of the Cities, inside of the Walls. They have to come from outside, from the unknown, from the darkness. Even the act of thinking of something as safe, as protected, can help deter the Grimm from attacking. It's a threshold, of a sort. The longer you live there, the more 'home' the place is, the stronger the effect.
I think it's the only time I've ever been in favor of overpopulation, but damn if it doesn't fit. Let's all have a million babies, and start that slow spreading of our borders. Ba Sing Se is the ideal here – gigantic, continent spanning cities, with high and thick walls, and with the inability of any Grimm to appear within it. Build the walls, and push them steadily, slowly outwards.
Until the walls keep the monsters safe from us.
There's probably a better solution somewhere, hidden beneath a conspiracy or a government cover-up, but that's the instantly obvious solution to me. To make Remnant safe, to eradicate the Grimm, we need to increase the desire to move, to spread, to settle, and we need to increase the birthrates and get the population booming. We need, as cliché as it is, a Manifest Destiny of expansion.
That, or we die. We die in the darkness, the flame of humanity sputtering and dwindling until it snuffs out, alone and abandoned. We cannot continue like this, hiding in our homes, afraid to leave our cities.
I wish I was someone a little more imposing, to be saying these things. It's one thing for the great Emperor of Mankind to declare that Humanity will never fall to the Alien, or for someone like the Avatar to balance the Spirit World and the Human World, but I'm just some random guy. I've been given no higher purpose, no bint lobbed a scimitar at me, and I didn't find a flaming bush or some carved tablets.
I'm just your average guy, stuck in a world the Brothers Grimm would have shuddered at. If I'm ever going to retire, or live to old age, or go home, then things need to change around here. This sense of contentment needs to go. The people need to be enraged, and need gear up for War – they need to exterminate the soulless abominations that infest their world. They need to be motivated. They need a fire in their hearts.
And that's not going to come easily. This is the kind of world where the nail that sticks up gets hammered right back down – conformity is desired, despite this weird obsession with individualized names based on colors. It's a lofty goal, and I'm not gonna be able to jump to it right away.
But I'm from a construction family, at my core. My brother builds buildings. My father did before him, and his father before him. One day, when I was a boy, my father drove me to another city, seventy seven miles away, with no fear of monsters or demons or wolves, and showed me a building that my great-uncle had built, some ninety years ago. That great-uncle, having just arrived in his new country, decided to put his family name on the building, to show that his family, like the building itself, would be there forever – that we would stand tall and strong, and last throughout the ages.
That building is still there, and our name still hangs above the door, in blocky stone letters. It's coming up on one hundred years old, and someone still works in that building. It's still making someone money, serving as a home to their business. Battered and old… but still strong. Still serving its purpose, doing its job.
My grandfather, though I never knew him, had a saying about concrete: 'Do it right or do it wrong, it'll be there for a hundred years.' Foundations, be they literal or metaphorical, are slow to shift, and will be there for centuries… until they are pried up and ripped from the earth itself. Until they are cast aside, and a new one is laid in their place.
The foundation of the Kingdom of Vale is slow and stagnant. It is shaped for consistency, for stability, and for lasting through the storm of the Grimm. It has conceded the initiative, and stands ready to defend, but never attack. Whatever expansionist thoughts it had died in the ruins of Mountain Glenn.
It's about time that someone changed all of that. The Kingdom of Atlas is trying its best, and needs no help. The Kingdom of Mistral is too far away for me to help them, and the Kingdom of Vacuo is relaxed and happy - a lost cause by this point.
No, it will have to be Vale.
But you can't just wake up one morning, and construct a building in a single day. You need to lay the foundation first. You need to level the ground, smooth it out, and get it ready for the concrete foundation, for the slab. And after you do that, you can build the frame, and then the roof, and then the walls, step by step by step, until you look up one day, and see a building before you, tall and strong and proud.
Like anything in this world that is worth the effort, it will take years, if not decades of work. But that doesn't change the inevitable.
Upon this rock, I will build my house.
For right now, I lived in a room beneath a bar. I paid my rent by taking out the trash, in both ways, and spent my days hanging out in the bar and looking tough, when I didn't have a job to do. It had taken me all of the last eight months to get to this point: going from a penniless stranger to a decently competent Aura-capable Huntsman-for-hire.
But now, after all that time, I was finally on my way up. I had a stable apartment to live in, a bunch of savings from my jobs, and the beginnings of a good reputation as a hard worker, a trustworthy merc. I had a foundation, now.
I don't like to think back to my arrival here. It was a terrifying time for me. For all that I'd faced hardships and struggle before, back on Earth, I'd never been homeless before I arrived here. I'd had nothing but the literal clothes on my back, and found myself stuck in a rural slum town, stuck facing the wail of sirens and alarms as the Grimm attacked.
I thought I was in a nightmare, and that I could just force myself to take control of the dream, to change it to a happy dream instead of a scary one.
That belief lasted me for about a minute, and I still had the scars from the Beowolf that had found me. Still had the marks on my hands from where I had plunged my fingers into the wolf's eyes, from punching its throat, from that horrifying minute of rage and fear.
Aura was the light of the Soul, they said. The embodiment of that raw, distilled essence of who a person was. I guess my Soul didn't want to die, not like that.
They say there's nothing that sharpens a man's thoughts more that the knowledge that he will be hanged in the morning. I'd respectfully disagree; I think there's nothing that sharpens those thoughts more than staring at the rope as you march to your death. And as it turns out, my stupid luck can occasionally result a minor miracle or two. The first would be my Aura awakening as the Grimm tried to eat my face off, and the second would be the Huntsmen who showed up to defend the town, saving all of us from getting overrun, killed, chewed, digested, and possibly crapped out as more Grimm - or however those things repopulated.
The way I figure, you've only got to see true evil once or twice before you really understand why people fight it. There's no moral ambiguity about fighting the Grimm; no thoughts that maybe the Grimm were just defending themselves, or that they could possibly have the moral high ground. They were killing in swathes, and I wasn't okay with just standing by and letting that shit happen. I'd picked up my Axe alone the way, and I'd never looked back.
I groaned as I rolled out of bed, dismissing those lingering thoughts as I rose, dressing myself in my worn, familiar clothing. A glance at my scroll said that it was late afternoon, and so I went out into the bar to see if anybody needed a hire a Huntsman.
The man hiring today is sallow and thin and wears a dark jacket, and his eyes fixated on me immediately, staring at me without hesitation or deviation. It's not his behavior that set him apart in the bar, keeping his table isolated despite the crowded club around him, and nor was it the bodyguard flanking him, a pale-skinned man with one hand resting on the pistol underneath his coat.
The bartender grunted as I passed him, and his eyes flicked to the sallow man, as if in warning.
The signs were all there, if you know what to look for. Which, let me tell you, is pretty fucking weird to say, especially in this case.
The bodyguard was the best disguised in theory, but he couldn't act for shit, and his very posture gives the game away. He was resting a hand on a pistol beneath his jacket, for feth's sake. Hungry eyes from the crowd watched him, waiting to see what the poorly disguised Faunus would do.
By contrast, the man sitting at the table didn't appear to care in the slightest about anyone in this bar. His eyes were a greenish-yellow, with slit pupils of pure black cutting them in half, and his forked tongue occasionally flicked out, tasting the air.
Now, I'm no bigot… but snakes were generally bad news. The snake was the deceiver, the trickster, the betrayer waiting in the grass for the right moment to rise up and strike at those walking above him. And to be fair to Mr. Snake Guy, those were all the implications that I had brought from Home, from Earth – the world of Remnant had never heard the story of the Garden of Eden.
No, to Remnant, snakes had a different kind of danger attached to them. The King Taijitu, the giant snake of black and white, was a fearsome Grimm that had a reputation for slowly advancing, looming over terrified villagers and snapping them up in one swift bite.
Snap. Gulp. No more villager.
'Will you come into my parlor?' was not a question that the Spider asked on this world. It was the question of the Snake.
"Nick," the Snake said, as I approached him.
"That's me," I replied, nodding politely. "What can I do for you, Mr…"
"Siva," the Snake said, as he gestured at the seat opposite from him.
I glanced at the bodyguard, but he didn't twitch, so I sat down at the table, and set my Axe down on top of it. The now identified 'Siva' took a moment to inspect my weapon, and then nodded, apparently judging it to be adequate.
"Hunting, guarding, or carrying?" I asked.
That's all it really came down to, in the end. Sometimes, they tried to hire me for other kinds of jobs, but… well. Let's just say that I had registered my disapproval, and that people stopped asking me to do those kinds of jobs. I put the word out very simply: if you want someone to do a morally bankrupt action, then I am not the mercenary to ask. It'd save time and money to simply ask someone else, rather than try to force me to accept a job that I do not want to do.
The major problem right now, really, wasn't the work. It was who I was doing the work for.
That's the problem with being hired by a Faunus, as horrible as it is to say: you always have to wonder if you're actually just a tool being used by the White Fang. And unfortunately, that was a real risk to me, and to the rest of the mercenary Huntsman community, because if you get hired by the White Fang, you're usually about to either be lead into a trap and executed for the crime of being a Human, or you're about to be led into an assault on a Schnee Dust Company facility, usually as the first wave.
Like everything I had encountered so far on Remnant, I once tried to look at the White Fang from the perspective of Earth. Were they like any civil rights group, in the United States? Perhaps they started off like anti-apartheid protestors, and it just kept getting more and more violent? If I looked hard enough, I thought once, I could try to figure out how it had all gone wrong, how nonviolence and peaceful protest had turned into such vehement and aggressive combat. Sure, the leadership could be blamed to an extent – what I recalled of the series, from seasons one and two that I had seen, Adam Taurus had appeared to be a bit of a prick – but that didn't explain how swiftly the organization had gained ferocity, how even the common members seemed perfectly okay with the idea of simply exterminating the humans and leaving them to rot.
Honestly, I just don't know. I'm tempted to say it's just a cycle of violence, but a single change from oppressed to terrorist didn't signify a continuous cycle, and I fucking hate people who try to label something by their own biases, judge that they were correct, and then simply never consult the issue again. I just don't know what to think about the White Fang.
And in the meantime, the shadow of their bombings and their murders and their thefts continued to lurk. Here I was, an honest mercenary for hire, talking to a hopefully honest Faunus, and I couldn't help but wonder if it was a trap. That's how vast the weight of the White Fang is, that it could be felt from anywhere, at any time.
"A bit of the first two," Mr. Siva said, as he matched my gaze. "A small town has had some recent bad luck, and the Grimm has increased their predations. They had guards, but they have a few vacancies to be filled."
"I don't do long term, Mr. Siva," I said, putting careful emphasis on my words. "Extermination of the Grimm, and guarding the village while I'm off-duty, that I can do."
"Nothing more than that shall be required," Mr. Siva assured me, his voice confident and smooth. "Your job would be to eliminate the threat to the village, and to defend it until that primary task is accomplished. Nothing more."
"Payment?" I asked, a spike of dislike stabbing into my stomach as I forced myself to say the words that I hated.
"Half now, half upon completion," Siva replied. "Twenty thousand in total."
I frowned, and leaned one elbow on the table as I mulled it over.
Twenty thousand definitely wasn't bad, per se, and neither it was it suspiciously good money. But therein lies the crux: nobody will ever pay double the price of a merc just to get him to do something stupid – no mercenary worth tricking would ever fall for such a good deal. If you really want to get a merc to agree to a contract, you promise him good money, but not good enough money for him to start checking for asterisks.
Ten now, though… I had a few purchases that I wanted to make, and they were time-sensitive, before the parts got bought out by the Huntsman Academies. I could use my own savings, of course, but with twenty thousand in total, I could spend eight of that advance on the parts, bank the two, and then bank the last ten thousand afterwards.
Less of a paycheck at the end of the day, sure, but you earn bigger paychecks for more demanding jobs, and only a suicidal idiot goes into higher risk situations without upgrading their gear. It just didn't make sense.
This… this could be just what I needed. One more job, then I can see about going legit – getting jobs for the Kingdom of Vale, or see about working private gigs for the Academies as gesture lecturer, talking about the more nitty and gritty jobs for Huntsman trainees. Hell, maybe they'll even let me teach them a little bit about hand to hand combat.
"Transportation?" I asked, keeping my voice normal.
Mr. Siva smirked, and his eyes gleamed.
"An airship convoy is scheduled to make the trip in two days' time. After your job is completed, there will be transportation booked for you aboard another airship," Mr. Siva said. "If you're accepting, that is."
I gave him a smile, my lips drawn tight as I met his unyielding gaze.
Axes… they've never really been regarded as good weapons. Common, definitely. Every peasant of the old times, in this world or my home, could take up a woodcutter's axe and defend his house. They'd probably die, but it was there. It was available.
Some axes were made for war, of course. If you look long enough and hard enough, you'll find that very few things have not been modified for war, in all its various forms. The spade, the scythe, and the axe – all designed for splitting or severing, but for dirt, for wheat, for wood… not skulls. It's not hard to make them adjust, however.
It wasn't even my original weapon of choice, back when I'd first landed here. I wanted to use a sword and board, the sensible, practical choice, but no…
My Soul, it seemed, was set on the Axe.
Aura, you see, is a very curious thing. A natural extension of energy, able to manipulated in many ways by those who could utilize it; but at the same time, lacking in any origin or source. True, Aura-users could often be seen eating more than normal people, but not all of them burned through the calories. It wasn't some kind of 'natural energy from the body', and nor was it granted by gods, or rituals, or training. Oh, the training helped, but the origin of Aura is nothing less than the Soul itself.
And Souls have always been strange concepts to wrap one's brain around. What they really were, who really 'owned' them, and what they actually did.
On Remnant, the answer to the last question was simple: they let you punch through brick walls, and dodge bullets. They let you leap small buildings and afforded some measure of protection from harm. But they were not perfect, and they did not allow total freedom. Not sentient, and not bound by any code of laws or morals or any such silly, man-made constructs… but still aware, in some senses, and still capable of expressing a preference.
It was like the temperature. The humidity pressing down on you, the wind tugging at the edges of your clothes. It was like coming home after a long time away, and sighing as everything in the air just clicked, and everything in the world seemed right. Some people preferred the warm climes, and some like me preferred the chill, but Aura just felt right, in that same way.
Weapons were but the most obvious of those little catches that Aura seemed to have. Oh, any Aura-wielder could imbue certain objects with the light of their Soul, with extra strength, and extra speed, and all of that fancy stuff, but there was always a limit. Some things just seemed to resonate better with certain people. The more resonation you had with your weapon, the more… you, the weapon was. A chunk of steel began to feel like a natural part of your arm, seeming as familiar to you as the back of your hand, and you never had difficulties with those little quirks of each weapon.
I've seen a man carry a giant hammer with one hand, as if it was as light as the air, and I've seen a woman slashing her enemies with a pair of hookswords, and never once cut herself or stopped her continuous dance of blades. It wasn't quite instant expertise, but more like… a familiarity. You would fumble less, even with an unbalanced weapon. Your hands wouldn't slip on the hilt of a blade. All those fine little motor control details, the tiny tricks and habits of a veteran, would just come naturally to you, as if you'd been using that weapon for a thousand years.
With my Axe, I could feel the weight keenly – the balance at just the right point, no matter if I was carrying it with one hand or with two. I never missed with a strike, not even by an inch. I could twirl the axe around behind my back, toss it spinning into the air, and catch it perfectly. It wasn't just that the Axe felt 'better' than a sword and shield, or a hammer, or something like that – the Axe felt right, and all the others didn't. Once I had picked it up, there was no doubt in my mind that I would be using an Axe for the rest of my life.
I had some experience with Axes before, but nothing like this. I'd used simple woodaxes for splitting firewood back home, and had learned how to use the axe, the maul, and the splitter. I'd stacked cords of wood in our family basement for when the winter storms came, alongside my brother. I'd carried an axe behind the bench seat of my truck. It was normal in my rural hometown, since it was an old logging town.
But the Axe alone was… insufficient. Oh, the Axe felt amazing and all that, but it was just an Axe. Even if my skin could turn aside bullets with the help of my Aura, I didn't really have any kind of ranged option. I mean, I had, uhm, acquired a pistol, but a pistol didn't really mean much on this world. The weakest common Grimm, the giant wolves, could take multiple pistol shots without any sign of damage.
By which I mean, I had gotten into a fight and had shot a giant wolf in the head seven times, and the damn thing just kept charging and knocked me on my ass. I'd wound up kicking it to death and cursing the whole goddamn time.
So, yeah. Pistols were gonna be fucking useless to me. Maybe if I had some Dust-infused bullets, or an automatic pistol with a giant magazine, but that was even more out of reach right now. And I definitely wasn't going to use a separate Rifle, because that would involve putting down my Axe – and if I put down my Axe, then it could be knocked aside or kept away from me, and that would just be even fucking worse than not having a ranged weapon. I could almost certainly kill a Beowolf or two with my bare hands, because of Aura-enhancement, but it would take much longer, whereas I could dispatch a Beowolf with a single chop from the Axe.
Which is where all those incredibly bullshit hybrid weapons come from. Sword with shotguns on the tip, scythes that turn into sniper rifles… all manner of completely insane weapons that do not make any goddamn sense.
But those insane weapons allowed both a ranged and melee option – and since Grimm attacks usually involve a giant swarm of wolves or giant swarms of bears, or giant swarms of, well, any kind of giant animals. Having a ranged weapon in those cases allows you to keep your distance, so that you don't just charge in and get ganked by multiple Grimm at once.
With a rifle built into a sword, a decent Aura-user can kite the Grimm, thinning out the numbers of Grimm without endangering themselves by diving into melee range, and without the difficulty of swapping between two full-sized weapons while dodging claws and teeth.
I would have preferred to have some kind of heavy automatic rifle with a tough bayonet, but I was stuck with an Axe.
The simple solution was to modify my Axe, putting some kind of gun in the wooden haft of the Axe, so that I could shoot people without having to set down my Axe. Like, with the blade of the Axe pointing down from the tip of the barrel, so that I could shoulder it and fire at enemies, then easily sweep it around to strike with the Axe's blade.
Huh.
When you put it like that, it's… kinda understandable that people say that all Huntsman were crazy.
Six hours later, the bulk transport airship I was hitching a ride on pulled in for a landing at the rural town of Arcuda.
From above, Arcuda didn't look like too bad of a place to live. The trees had been trimmed back away from the settlement, which was located in a small valley of a mountain ridge that poked out of the vast forest. The town's defensive walls were built into the protective ridges, and there were clear lines of sight for about a hundred yards around them.
The buildings looked squat and square, with good arching roofs to help with the rain; which seemed to be the running theme of the place. There was an aqueduct of dark stone on the side closest to the mountain, which looked dry but was probably designed for helping with sudden floods and rushes of water sliding down from the mountain. The closer the buildings were to the mountain, the more they rose up, like the tiers of a cake. The streets were walkways of long staircases, with a smooth chute between each side of the street for the water to drain down.
The building themselves were older, and looked much less like the modern buildings of Vale or Atlas and more like the cobbled stone buildings that you sometimes saw in Europe. Some of the newer buildings, near the top of the settlement, were made of uniform blocks stacked atop each other, but most looked rougher, with irregular stones mated to some kind of cement. It was like a miniature Omashu, from Avatar, but without Earthbenders to make everything smooth and even. This was a work of centuries, of persistence and toil with tools, rather than a calculated perfection that came from magical powers. There were alleyways that seemed too thin to walk through, and spurs of streets that had no houses on them; the city had moved on, but the old structures had stayed in place.
I could see some open fields on the far side of the settlement, where the land was flatter, and wondered for a moment why the Arcudans – Arcudians? – hadn't built their airport down there, where it would've been much easier. Building the darn thing where it actually was, near at the highest point of the settlement, must have been a bitch to do. The foundation alone…
Then I blinked, and took a closer look. Stop thinking like you're on Earth, I scolded myself. Think like a local, think defense.
Suddenly, it all clicked. The tiered, slowly rising levels of the town, combined with the fields down at the lower, flatter ground. It was all one big killzone – designed so that if the Grimm got through the walls, the Arcudans could pour as much fire at them as possible, while keeping their evacuation point safely defended at the back, as far as possible away from the likely point of attack. They could keep evacuating civilians while still fighting off the Grimm, and fight down to the last possible second. Hell, it even looked like they could flood all the lower fields by just blowing up the aqueduct's cistern – washing away the smaller Grimm and slowing down the larger ones.
I could imagine what it looked like, when there was a gun atop every roof, when all the tiers were firing down on the fields. A veritable wall of gunfire and Dust blazing away at one narrow chokepoint. The entire city was a defensive fortification.
Goddamn.
These people certainly don't think small, do they?
The mayor of Arcuda nodded in respect as the main gates started to rumble open. He was an older man with thick, corded arms and a speckled black-and-grey beard. His face was plain, and had some signs of smiles in the lines of his cheeks, but there were no smiles when he greeted me. He'd only said ten words to me since I landed, and seven of those were "You're the Hunter? Let's get this done."
I liked him already.
The guards atop the wall had waved as we walked in silence through the fields, just a few minutes earlier, but they hasn't come down from their posts. They looked… reassured? Well, at least they were putting on a good face to their feelings – I'm sure that plenty of them were actually nervous, but it wouldn't do to show the townsfolk that.
Because all the eyes in town were watching us. The workers in the fields had stood up, straw hats shielding their eyes as they stared, leaning on tools. The children in the streets had swarmed around us as we strode down through giant staircase of Arcuda, whispering to each other as they watched. The girls had blushed and giggled, and the boys had loudly declared that they would be just as strong 'as that Huntsman is!'
My Axe rested lightly on my shoulder, and I was painfully aware of the stares. Sure, the children were happy and excited, but the grownups had watched with expectation in their gaze. If I came back, they would probably cheer and celebrate for me… and if I didn't, they would already have packed their evacuation bags, just in case.
I wasn't exactly unfamiliar with having people watching me with that same expectation, that measuring gaze. I'd taught karate back home, and the parents had always been a constant presence to the side, watching carefully as I taught their kids how to punch and kick – always evaluating, always assessing.
But there were so many of them, now. I'd only ever had to deal with ten, maybe twelve concerned parents watching my lessons back Home, but Arcuda had around five to ten thousand people living in it, and most of them had turned out to watch. They watched me from their balconies, from behind closed doors, from the other side of the street.
I felt like a Hero of Old, walking through a medieval town on my way to slay the fearsome dragon, and for all that the mood appeared at first to be celebratory, there was a tension to every step.
If I failed…
No.
None of that, now.
"So, I'm guessing that you've scouted out where they're hiding out?" I asked the Mayor, rolling my shoulders and loosening up in preparation.
The Mayor gave me an odd look, but shrugged and pulled out a Scroll.
"Follow this map," he said, as I tapped his Scroll with mine, transferring the data over. "That's the best bet. If not, come back, rest for the night, and try the second best guess."
"Lemme guess," I sighed. "And if that doesn't work, we just keep going?"
The Mayor nodded.
"Well, at least I have a map," I pointed out. "This would be a lot harder without one. Thank you for that, boss."
"It'll still be hard," the Mayor said bluntly.
"Yeah, I wasn't gonna say that," I admitted. "It gives me a nice feeling, pretending that every job is going to be a cakewalk. Like pretending that Santa's real."
That earned me another odd look from the Mayor, who didn't say another word as he led me to the gates.
I walked out in the forest, and followed the trail as I had been told. An hour passed like that, just walking quietly along and watching the trees dance in the wind.
The woods rustled, and the smell of pine was constant. The trees were old, and enormous in size; thirty feet around, maybe more. It reminded me of the photos of pioneers in the Pacific Northwest – of ten men sitting on the stump of a leviathan evergreen tree, of the six log trucks that it took to haul just that one tree out of the woods.
This… this was Old Growth. True, pristine old growth. Never logged, never touched. The primeval forest.
I set my Axe down for a moment, and rested a hand on one of the gigantic trees. I looked up and tried to see the top, but couldn't make it out through the obscuring branches. For a long moment, it seemed like time had just frozen. Sunlight trickled through the canopy of aged branches, and the moss and ferns around me were so achingly familiar.
I blinked, and it seemed for an instant like I was just out for a walk in the woods back home, back on Earth. My familiar wool-lined coat was unbuttoned and open, showing the purple v-neck shirt beneath it, exposing my chest to the playful trickle of the wind, ever-present. My light sling-style backpack could have been carrying hiking supplies, not emergency rations. I could pretend that my Axe was just a walking stick. There was no humidity to the air, just a brisk breeze that carried the smell of the Forest.
Then there was a growl from behind me, and I couldn't pretend to be Home any longer. My clothes were all the same, but there was an Axe in my now-scarred hands.
The Beowolf came charging out of the woods at full speed – appearing around a tree and launching headfirst at me, both forelimbs lunging for me in a feline, pouncing motion.
They were strange animals, to my eyes. Oh, I'd seen giant versions of virtually every animal in videogames and fantasy books, but it was the bones that bothered me the most. They protruded like spikes of armor, and were symmetrical. I'd seen strange bodyshapes just as much as giant animals, but it was strange to see something that I would have expected from the Infested or the Flood on an animal that otherwise looked perfectly natural, if much larger than one would expect.
The bones. I always wondered where the bones came from. Did they grow on the Grimm, normally and naturally, or were they related to the size? Would an Alpha Beowolf, one of the massive pack leaders, have its own bone protrusions be larger than a normal Beowolf's simply because it was the Alpha? Or did it become the Alpha because of its larger segments of bone carapace? Was it da Boss because it was the biggest and the strongest, or was it the biggest and the strongest because it was da Boss?
I snapped up my Axe and turned to face the Grimm, stepping out into a horizontal swing like I was chopping down a tree. The Beowolf tried to step to the side, to evade, but I stepped forward as I swung, and the blade of my Axe slammed home in its side.
The Beowolf let out a cry, and collapsed to the ground, with its side partially caved in.
I stepped up to finish it off, and another howling cry erupted from the woods. Then another, and another, and another again.
Ahhh… fuck. I'd walked right into a pack of the damn wolves.
The second one came at me from straight ahead, and I slammed my Axe down on it's skull in an overhead strike, a smooth motion born from long practice. The wolf's mask of bone split in half as my Axe struck, and it fell.
My Axe was stuck, though, and I had to quickly yank it out as the third Beowolf came crashing out of the undergrowth. With a quick pull upwards on the haft, and then a quick push downwards, the blade sprang free, and I had my weapon back.
Hips and shoulders, I reminded myself. Swing the hips, rotate the shoulders, and put your whole body into the strike. Like baseball. Of course, that would probably be more helpful if I'd actually played baseball…
The fourth Beowolf roared as it bounded into sight, and then the fifth, and the sixth.
See, it's moments like this that I appreciate the simplicity of an Axe. None of that fancy 'dodge, pirouette, slash, evade' kind of garbage, where you have to make sure to keep your distance. Where you have to think about complex angles and where to jump, and how to spin, and all that nonsense.
No, no, see: Axes are simple weapons. You find the biggest enemy in your path, and you chop it into kindling. Then you find the next biggest and repeat the chopping, and so on, until you've run out of enemies.
The Axe swung across my side, crunching bone as it slammed into a Beowolf's ribs. The wolf wheezed, its hacking snarl cut short.
Huh. Must've punctured one of its lungs.
In the moment it took me to think that, another Beowolf leapt, coming in from my side and smashing into me.
My feet left the grass in a hurry, and the forest blurred as I smacked straight into one of those old trees I'd been admiring earlier. I could feel a dull throb in my left shoulder, and there was a stinging pain in my left hand.
The Beowolf didn't give me any time to inspect that pain, however. It dove straight after me, mouth open wide and dozens of razor-sharp teeth aiming straight for me.
I only had one hand on my Axe, and my left hand was screaming in pain every time I tried to clench it into a fist, so I didn't try to tackle this wolf head-on.
Instead, I ducked, dropping low to the ground and diving to the side. I rolled as I landed, and bit back a little grunt of pain as I tumbled over a couple exposed roots, banging my back.
Beowolves were fast, though, and while this one jumped over me, missing its bite, the damn thing managed to bring up all of its paws, and it landed on the side of the tree like it was flat ground – anime level bullshit, I snarled in my mind – hanging there for an instant and then jumping straight after me.
My left hand was still in pain, but I'd forced it onto the haft of my Axe all the same, and I stood tall as the beast launched forward.
The Beowolf jumped from a couple yards up on that tree, and was diving down towards me… but apparently, gravity didn't seem to agree with the wolf. Instead of accelerating as it dove towards the ground, the wolf was slowing in mid-air, as if it had jumped straight up rather than down at me.
The wolf's victorious howl trailed off, as its lightning fast lunge turned slower and slower, like there was a bungee cord tied around its leg. It almost looked cartoonish, the way its canine face shifted in confusion, its legs stretching further back as it stretched out, reaching for my face and falling just short.
I smirked.
The wolf slowed, and came to an almost complete stop right in front of my face, like it was being put on a stand for my inspection. Like putting a baseball on a tee. The Beowolf looked confused for a moment, and then my Axe came up to meet it.
The beast's head was crushed backwards into its chest, and the wolf's strange inertia snapped backwards, sending its carcass flying backwards as if shot from a cannon. One of the other Beowolves happened to be coming up behind it, and the first wolf slammed it unexpectedly, sending them both into a solid tree trunk. The two wolves fell to a heap at the base of the tree, and they didn't get up.
The last wolf in the pack stopped in mid-motion, as if unsure that it had made the right choice in attacking this human.
Grimm… they're not exactly stupid. Unintelligent, sure, but like any animal, they have at least a shadow of a self-preservation instinct.
This Beowolf was a fine example of that: faced with the death of five of its fellows – packmates – and it realized that maybe, just maybe, this would not be the easiest prey in the world to hunt.
Maybe, if it had another few moments of time, it might have made the sensible decision to run away, while it still had its life.
With one swift motion, I hefted my Axe over my head, both hands sliding down to the bottom of the handle. I'd tossed a few throwing axes in my time, but those were smaller, and were meant from throwing. But I didn't hesitate, tossing the Axe end over end with a grunt of effort, whipping my arms down and throwing my back into it, sending the Axe straight at the Beowolf.
The wolf was still staring straight at me, shocked, when the Axe sprouted out of its upper chest. Like, one moment there was a wolf staring at me like I had stolen its candy, and the next moment it was wearing a decorative axe necklace.
It teetered there for a moment, then crashed down face first on the ground… which probably just drove the Axe further into its chest.
I took a calming breath, and very carefully did not collapse on the ground.
It's all the small things, I think, that bug me the most about these woods. No birds were singing, there were no squirrels in the trees, and no butterflies were winging their way through the clearing. The only sound is the rustle of the ferns in the wind, the only sight the slow dissolving of the wolf corpses.
Ah… now my Axe is gonna be covered in that oily Grimm blood crap. Wonderful.
I frowned as I looked up at the carved wood of the gigantic tree before me.
A glance down at the map confirmed that this was, apparently, the last landmark for the trail. The tree was trimmed, and had no branches on the lower half of the trunk… just carved, swirling symbols that circled around the trunk.
"The 'tree of remembrance'," I read out loud. "Huh."
It certainly fit the name. I could see everything from stick figures to Greco-styled humans walking around the circumference of the smooth, bark-less tree. Carved images of houses being built, of walls being raised, and then of the distinctive black shapes of the Grimm coming in, of blood being spilled and towns burning down.
Monuments of remembrance aren't always the happiest things, on Remnant.
"Okay…" I murmured to myself, pulling my Scroll back out and looking at the map. "Five hundred yards south of the tree of remembrance."
I took a moment to rest a hand on the tree, and wondered how the ancients had managed to get the smooth tree to remain this way, to keep it alive despite the loss of all that bark. It definitely showed care and love… the depth of the carvings showed scale and three dimensions, the angle of the cut… this was a work of many years.
The silence of the forest seemed fitting, now.
A quick glance at my Scroll's compass function, and I left, walking away quietly. It just didn't seem right to be loud, right now. Not in this place.
A couple minutes of walking later, I looked back down at my Scroll.
"It said 'south', right?" I asked the air, hoping for a moment that someone was going to step out of the woods and clarify that no, I wanted a thousand hundred yards in the other direction, away from the creepy cave.
Did I mention the cave? Because it was a pretty goddamn creepy cave.
It was a low pit dug into the side of the hill. It would've reminded me a little of a hobbit hole, if the edge of the cave hadn't been from some dark, greasy looking stone that looked like almost volcanic in origin. The light penetrated a little bit into the cave, showing me smooth stone, likely softened by the rain dripping into the mouth of the cave, all that condensation and rainwater wearing down the stone over time.
"'There is a place of great evil in the wilderness'," I quoted slowly with a mocking tone, making a face as I did. "Christ. It's gotta be a frigging cave, doesn't it?"
It did fit the signs, though. A place in which the Grimm could accumulate, building up their numbers over the years. Building until they spilled out and started attacking the walls of Arcuda, but hidden enough within the cave to be unnoticed until they had that critical mass.
The cave was perfect for that. The mouth of the cave was low, but past the opening, it looked like it was actually fairly spacious, unlike most normal cave systems. Maybe that was a product of the generally fucked-up nature of Remnant? That all the caves had to be spooky caverns, instead of small crevice-like spaces like any normal, logical world would have?
There was that emotional thing, too. I didn't really buy into it, not really, but I'd met a guy over the last year that I'd been stranded who had spoken of the idea fervently, in hushed whispers – that the Grimm weren't just supernatural, or just attracted to negative emotions, but that they were formed of those negative emotions. That they fed on them, that they came into being based on how powerful the negative emotions of the nearby humans were.
And, well, let's be honest… nothing really screamed out "do not enter on pain of horrible death" more than a scary cave in the monster-infested forest. The place had probably been the subject of local ghost stories for as long as there had been people living here.
I sighed, and tightened my grip on the Axe.
"Friggin' caves," I muttered. "Friggin' quests. Friggin' Diablo levels of spooky bullshit."
Then I dug the battered maglight out of my slim backpack, took up my axe in one hand, and stepped carefully into the darkness.