I'm going to be honest...I don't like this chapter. I don't think its nearly as good as I want it to be, but I've been stuck on it for days now and I'm tired of it, I want the story to move, so...this is what I have for now. I apologize if it doesn't feel up to snuff, but I'm gonna work really hard on five to get back into the parts I want to!


Ruby yawned as she blinked sleepily. Blinking rapidly, she rolled out of bed, barely catching herself from slamming to the floor. Standing up, she carefully stretched, reaching up high and arching her back. With a sigh of relief, she dropped her arms back down. The bruising seemed to have faded, Ruby experimentally poking at her side where one of the largest ones was to check. Lack of pain made her grin, happy to know her speedy healing was still working just fine.

She thought about leaving her room, but instead turned towards her computer sitting in the corner. Though she'd stopped playing games on it as much, ever since she became Red Rose, her computer was still a pretty impressive piece of machinery if she did say so herself. She picked up the USB drive she'd found and turned it over in her hand. It had to contain something important, for the shadow figure to care so much about it. As she thought back to the fight she absently kept the drive moving in her hand.

Shaking her head to clear it, she decided it was time to open it up and see what it was the shadow wanted so badly. After booting her computer up, she spun up a virtual machine to check the data on the drive just in case it was dangerous. "Now what is it is you wanted so badly," Ruby mused to herself, her silvery eyes reflecting the light of the screen.


"Alright. Test...fuck it, I lost count," Weiss sighed. Cracking her neck once more to clear the residual pain from the last one, she hopped up and down, checking her balance. She moved her arms and legs one by one, checking for any sign of tearing or any resistance to her movements, but happily getting none. She flexed her fingers within the supple white gloves, checking the range of motion. Finally, she lifted the mask up and placed it on, cringing at the feel of it adhering to her skin. Within a moment, the display lit up, clearing out to give her a better view but varying icons giving her the sensory data hovering just within her sight, available at a moments notice.

"Okay, everything moves fine. Let's try something more complex," she muttered to herself. With a wave, three training robots she'd built herself activated and began trundling towards her. Weiss narrowed her eyes, taking her stance and focusing, letting her breathing even out as she prepared. She'd designed these robots with the finest materials money could buy, and they were formidable even to a well-trained fighter like herself. She'd never managed to fight off more than two (and even that was a stretch), but it was time to see what she could do with this.

As expected, the robots split off to surround her. Though it galled every instinct she had, she allowed them to, wanting to put herself in the most disadvantageous position she could. If she couldn't handle this, if her suit did not work the way she expected...well, it may be time to give up on the dream. 'No!' she hissed harshly in her mind. After last nights debacle, with someone breaking into the government building and apparently getting into a fight with Red Rose, who had stopped for a brief statement to the police, she needed to do this. The city relied too much on Red Rose. Not to mention the caped meta's habit of causing massive property damage lately.

She shook her head to clear it one final time. Now was not the time to drift off. With her mask on, she could see the overlay, scanning over each target and analyzing as quickly as possible. Her skills with coding weren't the best, but luckily she knew how to reach out to the right people to get what she needed. Sometimes it wasn't about what you knew, but about who. Huh...her analysis showed the robot in the center had a slight hitch to its left leg. She hadn't noticed that before. But there, that's the sort of advantage she was hoping the HUD could give her.

Weiss sprang into action, leaping into the air and over the robot with the hitch in its leg. Luckily, she was quite confident in how much force she could exert in this suit, but still, it left her internally gleeful at how high she leaped into the air. Well over ten feet, and she knew this wasn't even close to what it could do. She tucked herself in, flipping over to avoid the robot's reactive strike at her body. Landing in a crouch behind it, she spun back around, leg out, smashing into the leg that was hitching.

In prior combats, she never put full force into a strike, to avoid injuring herself. But she needed to see what sort of impact her suit could take, so she made certain to give it every ounce of force she had. Amplified by the suit's internal muscular augment strands, the strike that hit the robot hit with so much force the reinforced metal shattered under the force of the strike. Weiss completed the sweep, almost losing her balance as her mind reeled in shock. It was one thing to see numbers on a paper or look at projections, but it was quite another to actually feel the power of the strike that hit.

She had no time to rest though, as the robot was still active, and its brethren were closing in rapidly. Shoving off the floor she rolled forward, underneath the swings of the other two and rocketed off the ground straight up. As she went up, she grabbed the one robotic arm within her own and pulled at it. Surprised by the lack of resistance, she went to fling it into the other when she realized that she had managed...to rip the entire arm out.

'Note to self: do not use this much force on a human,' Weiss thought to herself, cringing a bit at the mental image as she decided to use the robot arm as an improvised weapon. With an internal shrug, she flipped it over and launched it like a javelin at the one still attempting to rise to its feet. The arm was impaled into the robot's chest, ripping away at wiring and exposing a gaping hole in the center of its chest. With a creaking noise, it collapsed to the ground in a pile of scrap.

Weiss had to defend herself, as the other two had split up. Though one was still down an arm, it didn't change they'd been programmed well, and if she hadn't had the suit on she'd already be down. But the suit kept her in motion, using subtle electrical pulses to note an attack incoming and where it was estimating the next strike to come from. The suit could only tell her, she still had to make the ultimate decision, but the help was bringing her to a new level of skill. She could react with the suit's signals, not having to worry about a blind spot or even about her eyesight.

She wanted to test that. She closed her eyes and fell into the motions, allowing the suits signals to carry her. A twinge on the left hip. She twisted just enough, feeling the rush of air as the strike barely missed her. A stronger pulse along her right arm, she brought it up just in time to intercept what felt like a kick. The suit absorbed the impact and dissipated it, allowing the force to run along and prevented her arm from taking the full brunt. She felt a smile twitching up the corner of her mouth, a giggle welling up inside her. She felt like a superhero.

It was time to end this. Opening her eyes, she crouched down beneath a pair of kicks from both sides and rocketed upwards. Triggering the hard-light generators with but a simple twitch of her fingers, a spinning white disk appeared beneath her feet, giving her a platform to stand on. She'd modeled it after an old version of the Schnee Dust Company logo, the one her grandfather had used before her father had changed it. It was unlikely anyone would recognize it, with how old it was, but even if they did it wouldn't matter.

Standing with hands on her hips, she leered down at the robots. Part of her felt...playful. It wasn't something she'd really felt before. Her whole life had been smiling, a perfect little child to play the part of the perfect heiress, but it had always been so fake to her. The only freedom she had was her talks with Blake and her training, but even that paled in comparison to this. This, this was true freedom.

Maybe a part of her, a tiny, tiny part, idolized Red Rose. She got to be a literal superhero. She was a caped crusader, something straight out of storybooks. Most Meta's became criminals, and the only way they were stopped was massive military movements. But Red Rose had chosen to save people. She was reckless, loud, funny, flirty...everything Weiss never got to be. And she was very, very, very pretty. But most of all, she looked free. And Weiss? Weiss was ready to be free.

She reached up and took off her mask to get a clear view of the room, her grin spreading even wider as she glanced down at the two robots below her. With a determined glint in her eyes, she stepped to the edge of the glyph and whistled. A loud rumbling came from around the massive garage, as over two dozen of her training robots activated. "Well, boys...time to have some fun," Weiss smirked as she replaced the mask. Weiss Schnee wasn't here anymore. Now, it was Whitewing's turn.


"Hurry it up, the boss'll skin us alive if we don't get the goods!" a short man hissed to his companion, a taller woman dressed all in black. The woman was currently focused hard on the lock to a small vault, a series of wires running from the panel on the front of it to a small device in her hands.

"Shuddap Gary, I know! But I can't make it run any faster! Bitch to the smart girl if you got an issue with it!" she replied with an equally quiet hiss.

Gary's eyes widened beneath the black mask covering his face. He backed off, waving his arms wildly. "Are you fucking crazy, Sarah?! I ain't going anywhere near that bitch! She's nearly as scary as the boss, her and her boy toy with the funky legs!"

"They ain't dating you moron! She's all over the boss. They just work together a lot," Sarah explained absently, eyes focused on the display on the device in her hand.

"Yeah well, either way, I ain't talking to her about nothing!" Gary declared.

"How about you be useful, and you go find out where everyone else is in their tasks, instead of hovering over my shoulder?!" She growled out.

Gary threw his hands in the air. "Ugh, fine! Just wanted to stay on the boss' good side," he began grumbling as he walked off. Hands shoved into his pockets, he grumbled as he walked out of the main vault. Kicking at the floor, he sighed as he kept his eyes on his shoes, frustrated at the way this job had gone.

His musings were interrupted by a wall of white standing before him, making him blink rapidly before looking up. In front of him stood a woman dressed in a form-fitting white suit, her significant musculature clearly visible. A white mask covered her eyes, a blue pair of wings emblazoned across her chest as her long white hair flowed down her back. She stood, arms crossed over her chest, glaring down at Gary. He gulped, feeling the intensity of the gaze, and even though the eyes were hidden by the mask, he could feel the sheer malevolent force behind them.

"Um," he began, before Sarah's voice interrupted him from behind.

"Who the hell are you!?" she shouted, her hand instantly dropping to her hip and drawing her gun, pointing it at the figure in white. Gary gulped again as a slow smirk crossed her face.

"Whitewing," came the reply said in a tone he could only liken to the snarl of a dangerous predator. Gary had no time to think any further on the matter, as the next thing to happen was him seeing a white covered fist headed at his face.

Sarah began firing rapidly at the figure as Gary collapsed, but to no avail. The figure dodged each and every bullet, moving with a fluidity Sarah couldn't keep up with. Her eyes were wide with panic as Whitewing approached, mind gibbering to a halt as she emptied the remaining bullets and finding herself lacking any defense. Whitewing didn't give her a chance to move, a single kick to the side of her temple launching the woman into the wall and sending her directly into dreamland.

Gazing around at her handiwork, Whitewing's eyes landed on the other members of this group she'd already disabled. Most of them either unconscious or groaning in pain, she smirked to herself as she walked to the wall. With her mask guiding her, she punched into the flimsy wood and drywall covering, reaching into it and ripping out a handful of wires from the interior. The bank was already trashed, so it wasn't like she needed to excuse this much.

She mentally hummed a tune to herself as she began waltzing over towards the short man she'd just knocked out when a small rattle got her attention. She looked around, confused until her suit suddenly pulsed the alarm sequence, near her feet. Glancing down, she saw a cylinder rolling to a gentle stop at her feet. It was a gray tube, a single small display on the side facing her with a set of single digit numbers counting down.

Her mask scanned the object within a moment and returned it analysis within a second...it was an explosive. Her suit could withstand explosions and protect her from the worst of them, dissipating force and using subtle hard-light technology to deflect the brunt of it. But she'd opted not to completely cover her face...and it was at her feet. Her eyes went wide, fear blossoming in her heart, as the timer visible on the display ticked down to zero.