AN: Only got one small thing to say, and it's that I have changed a few small things about Remnant to fit a plot outline better – most notably, the fact that Grimm disintegrate within seconds, except for their bones, which linger for a good few hours more but still disintegrate. Okay, the "few small things" is a bit of a lie, but I can't tell you how much is different without spoiling a hell of a lot of things. I can tell you that most of volumes 1~3 happen pretty much the same as in canon, albeit with a few extra things added in on top.
And some things in this chapter are going to be pretty dark. Grimdark.
Enjoy!
"It seems," remarks Ozpin, "that every day grows more dire and complex than the last."
The ghost is back again. He can see them, just over his monitor. Regal and imperious, proud and mysterious, ancient and young. The headmaster can't recall the last time he felt the same.
"Hardly any worse than it was fourteen thousand years ago." they reply. Oz is hard-pressed to disagree, even if only out of a want for them to be wrong for once.
Shaking his head, the headmaster has an answer. "You've never dealt with Space Marines before. Nor the Imperium, and its colossal war machine. They have a tendency to cause small problems to explode into much larger issues."
They snort, "Neither have you. Only ever been told by others."
He doesn't reply to that. Instead, he pointedly focuses on the monitor on his desk. It is the source of all his frustrations, and the source of all his solutions. How ironic.
At the moment, it has several images held on its holographic face. Pictures from the destroyed Midvale, sent by Team CFVY or by the CSI team or both. The burnt, broken houses. The empty guard's posts. All the now-fading bones. The funeral pyres. And, of course, the bodies.
Some are wearing White Fang uniforms, specifically uniforms that identify them as being from the Vacuo cell, but most of the bodies are civilians. Numerous guards lay dead as well. Most of the Fang corpses can barely be recognised as bodies, being broken into pieces, as if a grenade went off in their chest. A few are scorched, with a large chunk torn out of their torso. A couple more have been split so finely in two that it seems as if they simply fell apart.
Most of the townspeople are dead of wounds caused by Grimm. Many were killed by human weapons, several broken and battered by blunt force trauma, others split apart just as finely as the Fang, a handful more dead by stab wounds or gunshots.
Almost every single one of them have been identified, despite the impromptu funeral that has "suspiciously" consisted only of humans. Oz knows full-well why.
Except for a little Faunus girl named Audhild Vermillion, whose disappearance has the investigators in a near panic.
Other pieces of evidence – bolt and shotgun shell casings, mostly – also dot the screen, but the centrepiece is an amalgamation of a few recovered transcripts from Scrolls, and the four "suspected rogue Huntsmen".
He looks over them – the battered, yellow-clad and silver-armed Sanguinary Guard, the twin Scouts in void-dark, the knightly one in white and black – and begins to mutter out a long-forgotten tale from long ago.
"When the Broken Angel brings the Tyrants of the Shade and the Noble of Thorns to the Remnant, enemies awaken anew as the End walks the world. When the Old Witch breaks her bonds, the trifold Four meet at last. Thirsting gods cackle and curse as the Thirteenth comes."
The ghost stirs at that. "So. You haven't forgotten it after all."
Ozpin blinks once, and they are gone.
In their place, there comes a tap-tap-tap at his window. Turning swiftly, he reaches over to the small piece that opens separately from the rest of the tower's clock, and lets the crow in.
…
Folding, the bird quickly expands out into a man, a silvery-white long-tailed dress shirt worn loosely over his chest, a cloak of feathers hanging from his back, spiky grey-black hair and a jaw coated in a thin layer of stubble. A folded-up greatsword hangs from the base of his spine, single-edged and angular.
"Heya, Ozzie!" he says by way of greeting, winging his arms up in a mocking offer for a hug. One hand is clutching a small steel-grey flask, from which he promptly takes a long swig.
For his part, the headmaster is unreadable as always, though he twitches slightly with amusement. "Qrow." he says politely, before gesturing at the chair on the opposite side of his desk.
Taking another swig, Qrow just gives a small shrug, then slumps down into the seat. He swings his feet up to rest them on the wide desk, planted just on the top-left corner, from Ozpin's perspective. The headmaster sits down across from him, and it is straight to business.
"I assume that you've heard of Midvale?" says the old wizard, raising his omnipresent coffee cup to take a sip of his own.
Frowning briefly, Qrow replies immediately. "Yeah, 'course I have. Been through there a good few times myself. Nice place. Somethin' happen to it?"
"Sadly, yes." Turning the monitor to face the operative, Qrow almost spits out his latest swig at the devastation.
Growing serious, the veteran Huntsman gains a dangerous gleam in his blood-red eyes, focusing in on the four obviously-Huntsmen, narrowing his eyes at the transcripts and statistics. "What happened there? Think those four have something to do with it?"
"Exactly what I want to know. And, unfortunately, they had almost everything to do with it."
Scratching his chin, Qrow memorises their appearances, even if the shots aren't too great. All the evidence is compiled too, even the wounds suffered by the bodies. "Want me to hunt 'em down?"
"Yes," begins his employer, "but not exactly. Find them. Get me in contact. Avoid engaging if you can. I'll be sending you with a second year Huntsman Team in the area. They're already investigating at the site."
Raising a single index finger as the veteran began to retort, he cuts off his complaints with a single sentence. "I'm aware that you work best alone. However, these four are significantly more than you can handle alone. This is not up for discussion."
Qrow sighs, long and slow, sipping from his flask again. "Fine. When am I heading out?"
"Ideally, within the next three or four hours."
…
Three Astartes and one mortal child wait deep in a forest, surrounded by immense trees spawned by uncontrolled growth.
Every one of the giant soldiers hides their face beneath a helmet. They stand or sit in silence, the only sound the whistle of wind between the super-oaks, and the snore of a dozing girl. After Alaric's outburst, Audhild buried herself back beneath her blankets, pressed up against her protector's hard chest-plate. She did not speak again, eventually drifting back into thankfully dreamless sleep.
He cradles the child gently, if awkwardly. The small part of him that recoils at her touch through the haptics desperately wants to set her down. Lay her down, and focus on something more useful, more important; something like cleaning his weapons, maintaining them with what little he still has.
But that part is small. It has no foothold in the rest of his self. Ruthless pragmatism has not held sway over his mind in almost a century. He intends to keep it that way.
His reflection is disturbed by a click in his ear, a crackle of a vox-link. Displays in his vision say it to be the young Scout – he picks out Eygil at the edge of his autosenses, to his left and away. Talos acknowledges the request for dialogue, returning the click and crackle.
"I wish to speak with you. Privately."
Talos almost turns to look at him in surprise, but keeps his reaction hidden. Whatever he has to say, it is clearly not something the Scout wishes to include his master in. Mildly worrying.
"Speak, then." he returns.
Eygil fidgets, for a moment, pacing in something that looks like a perimeter patrol, but is most likely nothing of the sort. Snipers are rather terrible for securing perimeters, unless acting as support from a range, after all.
"Something is wrong with you. Not the Sable Brand, but something like it." confesses the young Marine, "I want to know what. Resolve it."
Ice, or something like it, clutches at the Lamenter's hearts. He perseveres, regardless, but this conversation is enough to put him ill at ease.
"… I'm afraid I do not know what you mean."
A careful response. Glancing over at the Raven Guard, he wonders how much they know. Neither can know of the Twin Curses. It is clear what he must do if they know – but he cannot bring himself to bear his arms against the raven and his teacher. At the same time, he knows what must be done. That, if he cannot fall in battle, someone else must end him. And he knows that it will not happen before it is too late.
"Throne damnit, don't try playing dumb, you're not stupid enough to not notice. You fight like you mean to die, with every battle. You fly off the handle, tear into anything near enough for that axe's smile to bite, revel in the bloodshed, and then spend your time silent or brooding." Eygil says, but the Veteran is surprised at how schooled the younger Astartes' reaction is.
Talos grips his boltgun once again, and begins planning how best to execute both of them. Snapshot into Cor's back, while he's turned to the outside of their little camp. He wouldn't even see it coming. Burstfire into Eygil, ideally while he's still reeling from the abrupt shot into his old friend's spine. Set up a trap for Alaric, jury-rigged Amputator shells from Cor's munitions turned into a mine.
His preparations are cut short by the Scout's next statement.
"For Audhild's sake, this cannot continue." and despite himself, the Marine locks back onto the abhuman's peaceful face, remembering her presence in his arms. "So help me Corax, I'm not letting you sit there in silence as you suffer, regardless of what you want."
Swiftly, he clears the cobwebs in his mind. Targeting reticules fade and dissipate, plans for combat vanishing as fast as they appeared. His pragmatic side is forced away, torn from the forefront. He wonders how he even let it go that far to begin with.
Both Marines' voices fall to dead air. It hides the conflict raging inside the Lamenter with disturbing ease.
I will have to tell him, speaks part of Talos, Oath, the part that watches over Audhild's sleeping form. But none may know of the Curses, argues Duty. It is better that you take the secret to your grave; a single abhuman is not worth the death of Sanguinius' progeny, argues Pragmatism.
It would hardly be the first time, speaks Lament, that you have cost lives like hers.
And that is enough to convince the Veteran.
He begins slowly, hesitantly.
"Swear to me," he speaks, "that you will not speak of this to another living thing. That you will sooner die of the most depraved of tortures than tell of it. And I shall tell you."
It takes a quiet, seconds-long pause, before the Marine whispers "I do swear it. On the life and the honour of the Emperor, on the silent walk of the Primarch, I swear it."
He is sincere, Talos is sure. Astartes do not break oaths. So he tells him.
With great difficulty, he tells the younger cousin of the Angel's Flaws.
"We call it the Red Thirst." the Veteran explains. "A deep, primordial calling for blood and death, baying for us to bathe in it, to drink it from our fallen foes, anoint ourselves in the crimson fluid. Some control it better than others, but it is always there. Great, fanged jaws that snarl and gnash in our souls, begging for release. It is at its strongest in combat. Hard to ignore, though keeping the mind busy with even the most numbing of tasks is enough to distract you from it. But is is still there."
He gives a dark chuckle. "I am not very good at controlling it."
Eygil stiffens at the explanation, fingering his rifle's trigger. It is as if he now suddenly expects his comrade to draw his axe and fly into a rage at any moment. To his shame, that is an accurate analysis.
"And that is not even the worst of it, Neophyte," continues the son of Sanguinius, "for we also suffer the Black Rage. The lost psychic screams of the Great Angel's final moments, all that rage and hatred and despair and loss that still yet haunts us, coming at random, often late in life. Hallucinations of the battle against the Arch-Traitor; unwinnable, but we cannot control ourselves nonetheless. We are lost in the memories, trapped eternally fighting him, forever doomed to lose." The Scout now watches him, anxiously.
"I have begun to see the Death Visions."
Talos shuts his eyes at the close of that statement.
He sees great fields of fire, feels the press of bodies and blades. A single name is on his tongue, yet it is not one he has ever spoken before in his life. Wings not his own beat on his back for a moment, before the memory of a dead demigod collapses, replaced with one of his own, of yellow-clad Marines dying a hundred thousand different ways as innocents are lost far more often.
Blood congeals on the memory's hands, unforgettable. They shake. It is not the life-fluid of traitors or xenos. The bliss of the action is still there, lingering, though now he sees the victims more than the blood. He hears their cries, of shock, of fear, of betrayal. Faces of death, frozen in silent terror.
Faces like Sigrid's.
Opening them once more, he finds the Raven Guard Astartes not even pretending not to be focusing in on him. What expression the Scout wears goes unknown to him. For a moment, the Astartes entertains the notion that it might be pity.
A static-laced response begins to form, but it never finishes, as the rapid swish-thump of a Space Marine's sprint interrupts him. Simultaneously, something screams overhead, soaring for the town.
In an instant, they are all standing, weapons shouldered, and Alaric comes charging into their vision, pursued by a tidal wave of black and bone. His swords are drawn, beautiful in their own right if not masterfully-crafted, and he cuts through limbs that reach too close, yet never slows his stride.
The child is woken by the sudden leap to his feet, and Talos roars out a command. "Cover your ears!"
He doesn't check to see if the abhuman follows his instructions, firing his bolter one-handed into the mass of Grimm that break through the forest, carving long rents into the massive trees but still breaking around them as if a flood of liquid shadow rather than solid pitch-dark muscle.
It is impossible to miss, but the 28 bolts are expended in an instant. The bolter barks and spits out the shells, blasting chunks out of the horde, yet fails to do much more than that. Still one-handing it, he shifts the youngling up onto his shoulders. She clings close to his helmet as she presses down low between his power-pack and his back. While she does, he reloads.
A half-second after Talos runs out of bolts in his gun again, Cor is firing. But his shotgun makes no such noise, it doesn't even flash as it sprays buckshot into the Grimm, though the massive 8-gauge shells tear the beasts to pieces where his shots land. Interspersed between the invisible buckshot come Amputator shells, massive blasts of fragments that rend apart flesh or armour as easy as Power Weapons through paper, and Wyrmbreath shells, huge gouts of liquid fire that coat swathes of the beasts in creeping flame.
Steady, slow hiss-cracks of a high-power laser weapon pick off heads from the mass of bodies, blasting apart flesh and bone with heat transfer. Big Alpha Grimm are swallowed by the horde as their headless corpses tumble to the ground, trampled into mush before they can even begin to disintegrate.
It is not enough.
Regardless, the Astartes continue to pour firepower into the rushing wave of black flesh, white bone, and vermillion blood, but they slowly trek backwards, focused entirely on gunning down the horde.
Eventually, Alaric begins to catch up with their gradual retreat. So too do the Grimm.
Their blistering display of firepower is enough to slow them, if only barely. Barely enough to let the Black Templar reach their kill-team. Barely enough to begin actually falling back.
Umbral forms still close to melee range nonetheless.
Alaric meets them. Twin lightning-wreathed blades a blur of violence, he cuts through them, elegant parries and slashes and slices and chops and stabs and cleaves, an economy of motion that seems more a dance than a fighting style. Always is he facing his foes, never does he commit too much or too little to a strike, every swing is a killing or maiming blow of some kind. Claws come close but never even scratch the heraldry of the Templars, always dodged or knocked aside at the last second before delivering a brutal riposte.
It is clear that he deserves the title of prodigy. Talos recognises that, even with experience on his side, a fight with the would-be sword saint in close range would doubtlessly result in the Lamenter's loss.
Red touches his vision anyway, as his mouth involuntarily begins to water. Something pushes him to close in, to join Alaric in the fray, and he only realises what he's doing once the axe is already in his hands.
But by then it is too late, as he is lost in the violence and nearly swallowed by the wall of black and bone, roaring a primal battlecry and baying for blood, for death, for these traitors to die, for the maddened once-brothers to fall to his blade, as he sinks it into betrayer flesh, screaming oaths of violence, howls his rage and sorrow into the sky, speaking names of the traitors, breaking open Power Armour with vengeful blows of fist and feet, sword arcing elegantly through necks and chests and limbs, one bellow of wrathful lamentation above all others-
"HORUS!" screams Sanguinius, wings broken and bloodied, sword still held high in rage and defiance, tearing through the maddened black ranks of the XVI Legion. "WHY!?"
…
Adam is many things.
A terrorist. An assassin. A leader. A freedom-fighter. A nihilist. A cold-blooded killer.
One thing he isn't is a scientist.
It's not that he's stupid. One look into his past can show that much; violent and capricious, certainly, and more than a little spiteful, but never an idiot. Well, not quite. His early days were quite dumb, even for a child and – later – a teenager, times he has long come to regret sorely.
He knows the basics, like the laws of gravity, ballistics, practical engineering, Dust sciences, enough to build his sword and maintain it. Or make a high-explosive bomb, if he ever needs to.
Which is precisely why his current orders didn't make any fucking sense.
The Faunus had been given a hefty detachment of the Valean Fang, and received his instructions digitally. A simple encoded message, sent through several proxies and hidden channels on the CCT network, before arriving on his personal Scroll.
It chafed at him to obey a human, but the threat of a swim in sapient napalm is enough to get anybody to follow your orders. It chafed at him even further to be sent to the far edge of the continent, hunting some or other "readings" that he couldn't even parse. Something to do with Dust reactions and Aura fluctuations in local flora.
Like a good little minion, Adam packed his shit, grabbed his troops, and marched off into the ass-end of the Valean wilderness, hunting down the supposed "source" of these readings.
At the moment, they were on day 9 of their little hunt, and a good deal of the two companies he'd been given were already questioning his authority – not to mention his sanity. In all honesty, so is he, but he'd never admit it to anyone, least of all his underlings.
So far, they'd found nothing but Grimm, more Grimm, some actual natural wildlife, and, oh yeah, more fucking Grimm.
Sitting in his tent, leaning back in the fold-out chair, Wilt and Blush sheathed on his lap, he considered their status. Thankfully, nobody had died yet, though a good 27 grunts were still recovering from their wounds, a full 1/9th of their force. Thank the Brother Gods for Aura, he thinks. Still probably have to stop off in Midvale to resupply.
He's still clad in the black coat and pants that he's always wearing, bright red shirt below that, mask unusually missing from his face, hands still gloved. His auburn hair is the same swept-back styling it has always been, the two horns on his forehead nearly impossible to spot amidst the sea of red. His good eye is shut, head lolling back. The other eye, the mass of scar tissue under a brand bearing the letters SDC, remains no more open than it ever is.
"What am I doing?" he murmurs to himself. "What am I doing on Vacuo's border? Why am I not in Vale, tracking down that treacherous bitch, or keeping Torchwick honest? Why am I hunting godsdamned sensor ghosts and not burning down Schnee assets?"
"Why indeed, Mister Taurus?" comes a croaking, almost strangled voice, one that sort of reminds him of a parrot.
Instantly, he stands, turning, hands locking down around Wilt and Blush, knocking aside the chair in a smooth motion as he prepares to draw, single baby blue eye snapping wide open.
He comes face to face with… well, he can't quite describe it. It looks almost like a Faunus, albeit one that is very severely inhuman, to such a degree that Adam would have admired it, if not for the fact that the thing is so grotesque he couldn't imagine how it lived from day to day.
It has a vaguely humanoid shape, if one could call a bird-person humanoid. Two arms and two legs and a head on the shoulders, but that is about where the similarity ends. Scaly, thin legs hold it up, disappearing into robes coloured dirty white and inexplicably crystalline despite moving like cloth. Feathered arms clutch a staff of dark wood and bone, white smoke drifting from it, the head shaped like a ball while the smoke shaped itself into two tails, one drifting upwards and the other downwards.
Its head is a twisted mockery of a bird's, with a large, curling beak and blue feathers and glowing orange eyes.
Despite his reaction, the thing didn't even move from its position leaning on its staff.
"Who are you?" Adam barks out, still ready to draw. "How did you get in here?"
Disturbingly, it begins to make something he is hesitant to call laughter, before responding as he began to tighten his grip on his chokutō. "Oh, so suspicious. Very good. Very good."
Hobbling forwards for a moment, it steps right into his range – in fact, it stops right where his draw would end on its neck, even if he didn't move anything except his arms. Ballsy, he admits, inwardly.
"Who I am is unimportant," it crows, "but, if you need a name, you may call me Changer. I'm no enemy of yours."
Nodding at the statement, it gives an almost-bow. "What I know is much more important than I myself will ever be."
"Yeah?" mutters Adam, "what do you know that's so important, then?"
He doesn't like it. Dealing with people that can look at what they have, and decide their life is worth less than what they know. They're always dangerous, especially if they're right.
"I know you chafe at that human harlot that commands you," it begins, "and I know that all you wish for is revenge; to make the world bleed for all its injustices. I also know what you seek, even if you do not."
Reaching into its robe, it produces a small pendant, an eight-sided star made of jagged metal, an eye in the middle. Something about it sparks unease in the Faunus' stomach, and it seems to warp and bend in the light. Pulsating, almost like it's alive. But in turn… he can feel the power behind it, the sheer commanding presence condensed down into the tiny pendant. It's almost intoxicating. He can't quite look away from it, but the thought doesn't worry him – if anything, it interests him more.
"This?" asks the terrorist to the Changer. It seems to smile in agreement, before speaking once again, its beak not moving in time with its words.
"You seek power, Mister Taurus. I know where you can get it. Enough to make your dreams a reality, and plenty enough to more than match the witch in combat. And it all begins with this amulet."
Slowly, he accepts the pendant from the Changer, releasing his palm from Wilt's grip, outstretched to hold the eight-sided star…