'our employer wants sum info on u' Melanie messaged. My scroll was on for the reason of a lazy Saturday.
I squinted and groaned. Really? Even though his agents were caught he still wants to know something about me?
'What kinda info?' I requested. Well, in for a penny, in for a lien.
'misc info, doesnt matter' I chuckled at the vaguely personal desire to not leave(figuratively) empty-handed. Fail your job at gathering data on someone? You only if you can't learn anything about them.
Giving the details of me some thought, I got out of bed and took to taking a shower. By the time I finished up, I had thought of something that was simultaneously insignificant and worthy of note.
'I can play guitar and piano.' Melanie received. Then was asked, 'Is Miltia there?'
'shes on guard duty'
Okay. Sure.
'why, u dont wanna talk to me?' Woah, calm down.
'No, I just feel like you two would be stuck together more often. You're fine.' Insecurities surfacing or just some sort of test? Remnant might never know. 'Anything else?'
A moment of radio silence fell upon Melanie whether it be her being busy or just not wanting to continue this conversation. Regardless, she changed subjects.
'who was that girl u were with? ur gf?' Melanie grilled. I laughed.
'Ha ha, no. That was my sister.'
'she doesnt look like ur sis'
'Well she is.' What kind of argument was that? 'So that file you have has my name along with my parents'? That's it?'
'we would have more if we could get into signals database' she quickly met. 'height, weight, etc'
'Alright. When can I meet your boss?'
'not yet'
And that was the end of that conversation, much to my dismay.
"Who was that?" a dreary and drowsy Desiree whispered. Her blackish red hair was strewn all about her bed and her red eyes were half-lidded in exhaustion.
"Some girls I-" and I realized I made a mistake. Dez's eyes shot open and the drifty murmur in her voice completely vanished.
"What were their names? Are they from Signal?"
I sighed deeply and fell back into my chair.
"You'll meet them soon enough."
That might be a decision I'll regret, but at least it'll save me the trouble of saying "Oh, they were stalking me for someone else."
Believe me, hearing about how somebody wants to learn about me and remain anonymous is very concerning. I couldn't sleep thinking about that.
Have I been found out? What are their intentions?
Why are they searching for me?
Fuck.
-XXXXX-
This just in: Winter Schnee, heir-apparent to the dust conglomerate that is the Schnee Dust Company has enlisted with the Atlesian Military, rendering her status as heir null and void.
Alright, well that puts Weiss in the spotlight.
To be honest, I had forgotten that Winter had forgone her inheritance of the SDC to join the military.
Imagine how much lien I could've made if I wrote an article on that...
Dad went to work and came back with the news. Also, he's been advanced to Vale's regional director.
That was last week. Winter dropping the title of heir was more than two. School starts again in a month.
The emblem designs came back to us. Dez got patches for her plate carrier and I got some stencils for my plated armor. I took my armor to a printing shop and they put the gray insignia on my gray armor with a black border to help distinguish the emblem from the armor.
Also just in: mass bombing in a Central Vale neighborhood following anti-violent riot measures kills 8, injures 184. Initially, it was peaceful, as all protests begin.
And then someone within the crowd with a mask stabbed a state guard. The crowd cheered the man on even as armored vehicles and huntsman-level control officers pulled up. The wall of thick metal shields kept the galvanized crowd from going in and burning everything down.
It was hours of tension until a small vehicle screeched into the road and more masked assailants, armed with small arms, began to open fire on the riot control. The shields, both physical and aura, nullified the weapons and those assailants were then subdued by another huntsman-officer.
This brought him close to the subjects, who detonated themselves. Many in the crowd were injured. Six of those injured died, the state guard who was stabbed couldn't receive medical attention in time, and the huntsman was brutalized.
If not obliterated.
The worst part about it all?
All of those protestors were faunus. They protested the incarceration of a faunus minor who was going to be charged for murder as an adult. Those among the crowd thought that it was a racial issue and that court proceedings shouldn't progress in that matter.
I'd rather not comment on the politicality of the trial, but one thing I can say for certain is that Adam or whoever is in charge of this White Fang cell is going to make human-faunus relations much, much worse in a matter of months.
It was shocking to say the least. Of course with that, Grimm attacks scaled up drastically.
That's not good.
-XXXXX-
So Desiree and I were received back at Signal in the same way we were received as first years. Yang hasn't changed yet, unfortunately, but Katrina has.
She's dyed her naturally orchid-colored hair into pure white. She couldn't change her correspondingly colored eyes, but she didn't fret over it. Her rationale behind this change was to be able to hide her wolf ears in her hair, or so Dez tells me.
Sure enough, the first time I saw her in the halls she minded herself with her head down. Her perky ears were pressed to her hair and she seemed jumpier than normal.
Oh and I have not forgotten the libido a teenager goes through thanks to a reminder in the form of a schoolwide assembly at an irregular hour to discuss the promotion of safe-sex habits.
Like... Okay...
This was because a female huntsman-in-training had gotten pregnant and was therefore expelled, alongside the male involved and this year's batch of passives in the freshmen class.
Second year classes involve greater lengths of time dedicated to grimm studies since we would be going on our first expedition to slay some of the monsters of pure evil. Such as,
"Beowulf, ambipedal werewolf Grimm." And,
"Creep, bipedal unique Grimm." And lastly,
"Nevermore, avian-flight capable raven Grimm."
These were all of the "low-level" examples explained to us by a certain Selene Fuller, second-year dedicated grimm studies teacher with white, gray, and black as her colors. She had an incessant drone to her voice that somehow meshed perfectly well with her counterintuitive teaching style.
"A bunch of fuckin' jokes of Grimm," she said, the class erupting into mildly confused laughter. Our first impression of her was that of "Oh, dear Gods, this is our teacher? Hell yeah!"
She constantly injected jokes and footage into her lessons, all the while going quite in-depth into their behavior,
"All of them are stupid. Except the old ones. They're slightly less stupid," she casually remarked as we were forced to watch a man get ripped apart by a beowulf. "This guy died because he didn't have aura. Sucks." She sighed and paused the video. "Never underestimate them." Her even, consistently unassuming voice was easy to listen to, but belied no emotion. It seemed almost concerning.
"Ma'am, why have you only shown us these three types?" Some random kid in the back asked. One of her eyebrows went up and she said,
"You aren't gonna find anything tougher than these in your Grimm exterminations. Your chaperones will be the ones fighting the bigger, deadlier ones that'll probably tear you up in a thought." She pulled up a diagram of a beowulf's "anatomy." It was pretty simple: aim for the head or the belly. Those were the only words scribbled onto the diagram likely due to Grimm not having any necessary organs aside from the head... for some reason.
"Your first exterminations are in three weeks. Get studying, get training, and as always," she stopped to glance at all of us once, "Get good."
Little jokes like that can only be taken in good humor because as it stands, she's possibly the most talented former huntsman in Signal. We have no evidence of it actually happening, but Mr. Taiyang had gotten close to her kill count. She is extraordinarily acrobatic and in-tune with her aura.
She also used to be the staff instructor. Her style was dropped and she was reassigned to teaching once it was discovered that she expected her pupils to be on par with her acrobatics.
Combat advice from her is nonetheless not to be taken for granted.
Selene is very shamelessly a character of dark humor. I think it's admirable how she manages to joke about the beings whose sole purpose is to kill us all. It's a clever way of distracting us from the gruesome and keeping us on our toes. Her macabre comedy is the byproduct of a lifetime of being a huntsman:
Hopelessness. The feeling that no matter what you do, you're just another drop in the ocean.
Bleak doesn't even begin to describe the feeling.
Regardless, she exemplifies the survivor. No matter the tragedy, she has seen much and pushed through.
More classes approached familiar territory. A good example would be Second-Year Combat Sciences which is like First-Year Combat Sciences, but Second-Year. Oh, and there's more subjects to cover. Mrs. Tasi Peters is in charge of that class.
Physical Training would be taken over by our weapon trainers, so Mr. Sonnati would be my and Sabrina's and Gwendolyne's spotter.
Civil Studies curriculum is now more focused on civilian fields of education. It isn't really out of the ordinary that Mr. Luce would be teaching that.
And lastly, Aura Fortification and Augmentation is facilitated by the severe Surya Crescente, a short, Napoleonic man with a hot head. He was the hand-to-hand trainer in one of the other of the junior huntsmen academies but later got an offer in Vale's police force which led to him moving and taking a job here in Vale. He then retired from the police force and got a job at Signal.
We're due for training all the way up to third quarter. Then we'll be taking Grimm extermination expeditions while the weapons instructors get to handle the freshmen.
Still no word from the Malachite girls.
Well, cheers to another start of the year at Signal. Good fortune and all that.
-XXXXX-
"Kick his ass, Gwendolyne!"
"Kick her ass, Gray!"
Mr. Sonnati and Sabrina watched as Gwen and I danced among the leaves. Her eloquent movements were beautifully orchestrated around my attacks, and her menacingly smart thrusts were only barely denied by my armor.
I shoved her out hard. Aside from buying me precious space to make use of, it gave me time to collect my thoughts.
She relied heavily on speed and cunning methods to isolate me from my weapon.
I caught my breath up and lowered my center of mass. She would likely coming barreling back at me in the next few seconds to try to knock me off my feet.
She came at me from the front, numbing my hands with her semblance. They seized up around Thunderstruck and I ducked.
She reverse somersaulted behind me while I was lower down and thrust at my head. Rolling my head out of her spear's path, I regained feeling in my hands and swung low at her knees.
In a fluent motion, she hopped high and stabbed down at the ground. This attack's intent wasn't to hit me, but rather get in Thunderstruck's way. My lance recoiled and shook off of hers and was stopped. The shock of the strike came reverberating back to my hand, causing a dull ache to flutter through it.
Then she jumped off of her spear and aimed straight for my face as her boots came down.
My head was rocked back by the double-heeled kick. Aura kept my neck from snapping, but it was sore nonetheless. A ringing of a whistle and the flavor of metal were terribly familiar.
Then she stepped off of my face and gathered her weapon.
"Ow... Fuck..." I groaned. I popped my neck - painfully, I might add - with a twist and laid face up on the ground.
"Did you knock him out?" Sabrina's cheerful and presently curious voice rang out.
"No, but I laid him out." That she did. Gwen's soft-spoken and calm intonation indicated no pride or disdain. "Are you alright there?"
"Ahh... Just give me a minute." I stared up into the canopy above watching as the brown leaves fell around and crunched beneath me. The wind blew across my hurt face as if to cool off the pain that the kick had stowed there.
It was a cool day: many clouds and no rain and a very good chance of calm winds. It was also an unfortunate day: Mr. Sonnati made us go outside and spar, as did many of the other instructors.
"Mr. Gainsboro, are you alright my son?" The concern was very welcome but unnecessary. I clambered up to my feet and pulled Thunderstruck to my cold hand.
Gwen's semblance is unassuming, yet easily underestimated. She can make somebody's blood warmer or cooler depending on how much blood she is targeting and how much aura she pumps into it. Her typical strategy was to make somebody's hands cold enough to numb them and then to disarm them.
She started the spar by numbing my hands and launching her spear at my lance. She had done this before, so I pulled my arm away from her weapons. Unluckily for me, this gave her enough of an opening to kick me in the stomach.
She almost lost that fight though. Her constantly numbing of my hands pulled a lot of aura out of her.
"I'm fine sir." Rolling my head around relieved some stress that built up. "Sore now, but fine."
"Okay. Now wrap it up," prompted Mr. Sonnati.
Gwen's hand was taken by mine in a handshake.
"Good fight," nodded I.
"Good fight," nodded she.
And this entire time, Desiree was watching.
"Nice job! You messed him up!" Wait, why was she here?
"Dez! Why are you here?" I yelled across the forest clearing to her. She casually approached us.
"Madame- er... Mrs. Treuse released us early." Charlotte Treuse preferred to be called Madame for whatever reason. She's friendly to you if you call her that.
"Oh, I hardly mopped the floor with him," Gwen not-boasted. Upon me looking at her she amended, "I'm just kidding, Gray."
"So who's this?" The innately curious Sabrina asked. Oh. They didn't know I had a sister.
"My twin sister Desiree," I introduced. "This is Gwendolyne - with an 'e' at the end - Sang, Sabrina Waters, and Mr. Bastani Sonnati." The mentioned greeted Dez in varying ways; Gwen with a courteous "Nice to meet you," Sabrina with a pleasant "You're so pretty!" and Mr. Sonnati with a simplistic "You and your brother look so much alike."
"So what brings you over here?" Gwen rested against her spear.
"Boredom, more than anything." Desiree took Thunderstruck from me and inspected it, to my vexation. She racked the bolt and I caught the round expelled by that action. "What time is it?"
"I'm gonna dismiss 'em soon," Mr. Sonnati checked his scroll. "Do you guys want to leave now?"
And we agreed unanimously and went our separate ways. Except Desiree and I. We both went back to our room.
But then my scroll received a message.
From Miltia.
'We are here.'
I hadn't even finished reading the sentence when I received another message from the school's administrator via the mainframe.
'You have a visitor. Report to the conference room.'
Wait wait wait wait wait. They're here? At Signal? Now?!
"Uhh... I'm getting called to the... office," I excused, ducking out of the room. Briskly walking, my mind was full of panicky thoughts like "Oh shit oh shit oh shit."
Coming up to the oaken conference room door, I knocked lightly.
"Come on in," a husky voice echoed through the door. Doing as told, I came upon the sight of an enormous man wearing slacks, a white dress shirt, and a black vest over a red tie. His eyes were shielded by some sunglasses. Flanking him on either side were the Malachite girls, who... oddly waved at me in a friendly manner.
They stood at one side of the austere conference room. A large, elliptical table sat in the middle surrounded by a number of chairs. Mr. Wheaton sat across the three guests.
"There he is," said my school headmaster. "Is there anything else you need?"
The man tilted his head down respectfully and denied.
"No, but thank you."
Mr. Wheaton bowed and left the room through the door behind me. Me, awkwardly standing at the door, flinched just a tad when the giant of a man said,
"Take a seat."
I did as told. He did likewise across from me and kicked his feet away from him to stretch out. Pulling off his sunglasses revealed a pair of dark gray eyes, much darker than mine. He let out a sigh of relief and began talking.
"Alright, kid. You wanted to talk to me and I'm here. Since you did the girls a favor by not turning them in," he harshly remarked, glancing over at the twins. Miltia tucked her head down and Melanie rolled her eyes. Then he continued without missing a beat, "I could supposedly let you know something. But first," He trailed off.
"Why did you want to get into contact with me?" He leaned forward, narrowed his eyes and placed his folded hands in front of his face.
"I heard that you are an informant-"
"Okay, not so fast," he stopped me. "Do you know who I am?" I carefully considered saying yes, but said no.
"No. I don't." He rubbed the bridge of his nose and groaned in faint frustration. If I had said yes, he would have likely carried the conversation far too fast for me to handle.
"I'd rather not be called informant. Officially, I own a bar a little ways off from Central Vale." Shaking his head, he leaned back once more. "But at this point you know that I gather details on people, factions, things, et cetera. My name is Hei Xiong. Just call me Junior."
"It's safe to assume that you know my name. Call me Gray." Now it was my turn to ask questions. "Who contracted you to learn about me?"
"Truth be told, kid... I don't know." Fucking really? Well this has turned out to be fruitless. "All that I do know was that it was a she and that she wore some sort of full-face helmet and a black cloak or coat or something." His eyes turned up to the corner as if he was struggling to remember something. However, he said nothing further. Aside from, "That was your first free question. You get one more freebie, but the next ones are gonna cost you."
Of course he would.
Pondering over all the possible questions, I asked him,
"How can I contact you for later? Where exactly is your bar?" Junior narrowed his eyes just a tad.
"That was two questions, kid. I'll be generous and answer them both for free, though." He pulled his scroll out of his pocket and placed it on the table. "Put your number on this and I'll let the rest come through." The man scratched his beard and the girls shifted from one foot to the other. "We need to get going." Junior got up to leave.
"Thank you for your time." I also got up.
"You shouldn't thank someone who's gonna rip you off, kid." Junior left after having said that. Then the Malachite twins, in an arresting unison, said,
"We'll be seeing you." Then they left.
I went back to my dorm dejected and irritated. He didn't know who asked about me? The fact that she wore a mask and a cloak eliminated a plethora of variables and added a lot more.
The bell rang through the school and informed us that our next classes were to be attended.
Damn.
-XXXXX-
Submitted emblem designs are a permanent thing. On Remnant, huntsmen and huntresses are akin to that of celebrities: each has a unique method, expertise, and personality.
Which is why emblems emblazoned on everything a huntman owns is a symbol of ownership and responsibility. No two huntsmen/huntresses can have the same emblem. With certain exceptions.
Some of my classmates tried to make unoriginal and uninspired emblems to no avail. Common tropes are thunderbolts and fire and a snowflake.
We had been reminded before that the snowflake was an intellectual property of the SDC and that we could quite literally get sued for having it.
So that would make emblems not dissimilar to a trademark. My twin and I therefore "trademarked" our weapons. And her newest one.
I've managed to convince the younger of us to obtain a longer ranged option to supplement her sword.
Her response was to submit a design specification to a weapon designer. She got her design back and went to work the day after, using her after-school hours to forge it up.
It came back as a bolt action high caliber rifle. Very easy to make in comparison to any of the combination weapons. It was maneuverable and compact, due to it being able to break down into the barrel and then the action plus stock.
It looks eerily similar to a Halo SRS99 or more closely, a Denel NTW-20, but that might just be me. I haven't seen anything Halo since 14 years ago. You can't blame me.
She doesn't seem to want to make use of it just yet, but she'll waver soon enough. Hell, she might even drop the fencing practice to take up improvised weaponry.
Now isn't that a topic to cover. There are a lot of weapons and styles to cover in a class of about three platoons. The kicker is when all of those students must have a weapon and emblem almost completely unique to them. Eventually, a student will come up with a weapon so novel and completely individual that the current styles and methods won't match up. The more special the weapon is (i.e. the more weapons worked into a design) the higher the chance that design will end up in the improvised weapon class.
It also works the other way around: the least amount of forms a weapon has, the more creative the wielder must be. Ergo, the least special a weapon on Remnant is, the more special it is.
It's really quite ironic, but makes sense in a sort of erroneously backwards way.
Thus, I would bet some serious fucking lien that she would create a martial art for her anti-material rifle.
In the meantime, it sits in our dorm room in its two parts. I would say I'm looking forward to shooting it, but I would be lying if I didn't say I'm a little scared for when it kicks back.
So yeah. She has a nice gun.
One that she isn't taking to her first expedition. Tomorrow.
Surprisingly, Junior - that is the big guy who employed the Malachites - hasn't reached out to me over the winter break. He still hasn't, up to now with my class and the upperclassmen going on Grimm exterminations.
Our class of a good sixty or so were all broken up into eights. Each eight of us will be accompanied by two active huntsmen. Every eight is divided into four pairs.
Bruno Crocuta is my battle-buddy for the expedition. I remember him for stealing my civil studies homework last year, the cunt.
He's a vicious guy, to say a little. His weapons are a pair of bear traps essentially strapped to his knuckles. He punches something and they clamp down on it. The teeth are particularly noteworthy since he can imbue them with different dust types, though he favors earth dust to make sure that whatever or whoever his weapon bites can't just pry the jaws open. He can release them whenever he wants and can even just detach the jaws if he really needs to get away.
He's of average height and build with mostly brown accents and some black spots to match the hyena ears on top of his head. The punches he throws aren't actually powerful, but they're definitely fast. He likes engaging close and his weapons help with that.
We were given a week to prepare provisions and toiletries for the week-long trip.
I followed the guide list moderately closely. Absolutely no junk food was one of the most important rules, so I packed a decent amount of trail mix and jerky. Caffeine would make us sweat, so I took fire and water dust to purify water. The MREs provided by Signal are good, but bulky, so I only took one for each day. No sleeping bags, since they are also bulky and aura could protect against the elements. Try not to bring clothes, because it's just more space taken up. Alternative fire kits for multiple uses are handy, so I took a striker and extra fire dust. A knife is always good to have, so I snapped an Atlas (Swiss) army knife to a carabiner. Perishable food is a bad idea. I followed that one to a T and brought none.
Then came the ordinance. That's what took up most of the volume and weight of my gear, but I only took a moderate amount of it.
All of it fit into a backpack.
Attendance would be mandatory and in the early morning. After the expedition, all sophomores, juniors, and seniors would be given four days to recover before class would resume yet again, followed by more expeditions at the start of the next months.
Tomorrow is going to be different, for sure. Some of us might not come home.
-XXXXX-
"Dez. Dez. Dez, wake up," prodding didn't seem to have any effect on my sister, who slept unmoving. It was still dark out, but we needed to wake up anyway.
Well, she did. I was already up.
"Desiree. Desiree Argent. Wake up." Washing my hands, I went to her and began letting droplets of water fall on my twin's face. This had the desired effect of provoking her eyes to snap open.
By this time, I had been ready to leave. She was the slower of the two of us, and only I could see that. I left her summarily after that and brought myself, Thunderstruck, and my single backpack to the platform I would depart from.
My group would be heading to the highest levels of Signal's imposing arena to take a "bullhead" VTOL dropship to our site. The landing pads on Signal's arena's tower are where we are to report.
Stepping out of the dorm, I was greeted with a gust of chilled, humid air and the sight of dark walkways barely illuminated by tall, slender lampposts. I was not the only student to be awake this early: strewn about sparsely were older students sitting on the benches that littered the area.
Making my way to the arena was easy. I ascended an elevator not to the top floor, but the second highest labeled "airway." I swallowed and allowed my ears to equalise before the doors opened.
I was the first person to the top of here it seemed. I expected the doors to open out to an unenclosed set of landing pads, but instead it rolled opened to a dim, windowed concourse with double doors that led to the exposed landing pads. On one of those landing pads was a vehicle not unlike an V-22 Osprey with jets.
Tail number: RT4742.
That's my ride.
The doors leading to it were thrown wide as I strode carefully outside.
The howling winds were eclipsed by the whirring engines of the aircraft I was headed to. A woman leaning on its side approached as I did.
"You coming with me?" Before I could even think of an answer, I was interrupted with, "Lemme see your mission itinerary." My scroll had that, so I passed it to her. "Hmm. Okay. You're with me. You know where anyone else is?" I shrugged and shook my head. "Well then. You can wait inside the terminal or inside the 'craft. If you wait in the terminal, don't fall asleep. If you wait in the bullhead, it'll be hard to sleep, if you're gonna. Your call."
"Can I wait in the bullhead?" I used to be interested in aeronautics with my best friend, Nathan, on Earth, so the engines actually sounded quite therapeutic.
Nathan looked a lot like me. A lot of our classmates thought we were brothers, but we obviously weren't. He had been rejected for an Air Force ROTC scholarship due to a color deficiency in his right eye but ironically got accepted to the Air Force Academy. We used to talk about how we would both apply to the same college after highschool. And if that didn't happen, we would both join the Air Force.
That...
I wished that happened. It's only now that I think about the life that had been stolen from me.
I clambered into the bullhead joylessly and kept track of my breathing even as the doors to the bay shut behind me.
The noisy thrusters were muted by the thick doors and I closed my eyes. I sat in the inconvenient seat with my arms crossed and my effects underneath my legs as I drifted out of consciousness.
-XXXXX-
"Even a man who has nothing can still offer his life."