Chapter 10: A Sin's Penance
Ten Years ago…
The capitol city was alight with festivities, fireworks being launched into the midday sky every few minutes to celebrate the crown princess's engagement to the prince of a neighboring kingdom. The union would surely bring prosperity to the citizens of Liones and of their sister kingdom of Camelot.
Every Holy Knight had already made their way to the nearest drinking establishment, partaking in the excitement that came with a future royal wedding. Drinks were a flowing, but seven particular knights were not participating in the festivities just yet, as Grand Master Ozpin himself had called them to the Watchtower on the edge of town.
"I was hoping to get in a few drinks to celebrate the engagement," Yang pouted as she led her comrades through the darkened corridors of the tower.
A figure in pearlescent white armor turned up her nose and scoffed, "You've never needed an excuse to knock them back before." The comment was made by a female voice, only it was croaking and withered like that of an old woman.
The golden-haired woman chuckled and rubbed the back of her head. "Guess you're right." she admitted.
Another figure, also female, and also clad in heavy armor, found it somewhat odd that Ozpin had called them here so suddenly. "Sounded like the Grand Master has something important to discuss." She observed, noticing how Oz had forgone celebrating with everyone else, which was not like him.
Nora, with her gleaming Warhammer slung across her shoulders, bounced forward with a giggle of glee on her face. "Maybe he wants to give us a special reward for our excellent handling of that business with the Troll Queen!"
Yang folded her arms behind her head, her ebony-iron gauntlets clanking lightly against her black and scarlet armor. "Well, it's all the same to me… let's get scolded and then go celebrate."
A tall figure decorated in shreds of dark metal around his shoulders that resembled feathers laughed, his voice groveled and slurred as if he'd already had a few drinks. "You expect a dressing-down?" he chided as they came to the grand doors that lead to the Grand Master's chambers.
Yang smirked as she shoved the heavy doors open, only to be met with a pitch-black room. The blond-haired brawler felt uneasy as she and her comrades looked into the darkness cloaking the Grand Master's chambers. He usually kept a torch lit, as a sign he was always able to be of service to his knights or his friends. Ozpin was not a man who enjoyed the inky nothingness of the dark. "Hey, we're here!" she called, her voice echoing off the walls and slithering through the eerie silence.
A thin veil of what used to be curtains fell from their stands, flooding the room in light, and forcing the seven mercenaries to gaze in horror at what laid within that room. Yang felt herself gag as the smell finally hit her, "Grand Master!"
Ozpin, or rather… what used to resemble him, was mercilessly impaled on a multitude of spears, swords, and arrows, each one dripping with blood that pooled beneath his dangling feet. The walls and floor were scarred with gashes and cracks, as if the Grand Master had put up one hell of a fight before being so violently pinned up in such a way. The stench of iron and death smothered Yang like a cloud, almost making her choke as she covered her mouth to keep her most recent meal from surfacing.
She couldn't bring herself to look away from his lifeless amber eyes, once filled with such warmth and wisdom. She did not have to look away to know the faces of her comrades matched her own.
"That's brutal…" the feathered man commented, blunt but disgusted all the same.
Nora looked as if she'd seen a ghost, her normally rosy and bright features pale and clammy. "He's a pincushion," she whimpered.
The old woman's voice, shaking with equal horror and disdain, spoke with an icy disposition. "Who would do this?"
"More importantly, why did they target the leader of the Holy Knights?" the younger armored woman wondered aloud, her voice dripping with cunning and studious questions she chose not to ask. The Grand Master of the Holy Knights is not just assassinated by some nobody from another kingdom or possibly their own, a Knight as powerful as Ozpin does not just die, and by the looks of the decimated room, he had fought valiantly to his dying breath. Just like the vows he had taken in his youth.
The feathered man knew this well, he had known the Grand Master longer than anyone, most likely longer than Yang herself. Oz wasn't assassinated, he was murdered, and by the looks of the carnage, by somebody who held an obvious grudge against him. "You're right," he muttered. "The Grand Master is the lynchpin of the kingdom's defense, he's practically a war-god… whoever killed him, is a traitor who must be plotting to overthrow Liones."
Nora clenched her fists around the handle of her Warhammer. "And they knew exactly what his death would mean."
The old woman visibly tensed, holding a hand to her temple, "I sense something!"
Yang did not waste a minute ripping the shredded remnants of curtains from the wall, blinking twice to adjust to the sudden light, and feeling her stomach plummet at what she saw outside the Watchtower. "What…"
Hundreds upon thousands of fully armored Holy Knights waited for them at the entrance to the tower, armed to the teeth and lying in wait for their prey to emerge from the building. "We're surrounded by every knight in the kingdom!"
The others joined her, each of them reacting differently to their entrapment by the knights they had fought alongside for years, now seeing them as no-good traitors who murdered their Grand Master in cold blood. Nora gripped the handle of her hammer to try to still her trembling hands, "There are too many out there to count, what are they going to…"
The building shook with the blow of magical energy, chunks of the ceiling sprinkling down on them. The feathered man cursed, "Damn, they've started their attack!"
Yang blinked and clenched her fists, turning to her comrades and disguising her sorrow with anger. "We'll figure it out, but for now let's split up, we'll meet again later!" she commanded, lilac eyes burning with the defeat that came whenever she was forced to retreat. Now was not the time for glorious battle however, they were daftly outnumbered, and the only one willing to stand strong by their side, lay skewered to the wall.
The feathered man gave a firm nod, "Understood."
The seven knights left each other, taking different routes in order to escape the tower unscathed. Yang gave Ozpin one last solemn look, before cutting her losses and opening the secret passage in the wall, one Oz had shown her when first entering his chambers so many years previous.
While she held hope she would see her team again, they would not be the Seven Deadly Sins for a very long time.
Captain, I'm sorry…
"Those words are the last thing I remember, the rest is blank," the golden-haired Dragon Sin explained, Adam's scarlet blade still pressed into her neck. "The next thing I knew, I was waking up in a cellar somewhere… that's where I met Zwei!"
Blake's feline ears twitched. "So… you mean to tell me you didn't kill the Grand Master? You were framed?"
Yang did not meet her gaze, choosing to remain as still as possible to give Adam the impression she was cooperating with his demands. A man driven by vengeance is a very dangerous man indeed. However, Blake saw the way her lavender eyes flickered to her for a moment, before she blinked, and the look had vanished. To the untrained eye, it could've been nothing but a trick of the light, but Blake wanted to believe it was Yang silently reassuring her that yes, they were framed, and that she would never take the life of a loving leader and father like Ozpin.
Adam did not share her belief, "That makes no difference to me." He growled, pressing his blade into his target's flesh harder, and drawing a disturbing sort of joy from the droplet of dark blood that ran down her neck in a vibrant rivulet against her skin. "Rebels and traitors who plotted to overthrow the kingdom… that's all you are."
Blake's fists tightened unto they turned white, "That's enough!" she cried, desperate to somehow get through to her childhood friend. "You came all this way to bring justice to the ones who murdered your father! Now they tell a different story and you're just going to accept that?! You aren't going to question it any further?" the idea that the Adam she hoped was still inside this bloodthirsty man, would just write off Yang's plea of innocence as mere lies, instead of holding the slightest drop of truth. If he so valued the image that was the leader of the Seven Deadly Sins like he had as a child, then why kill out of blind self-righteousness instead of true justice.
"If Yang truly did murder Grand Master Ozpin, wouldn't you see through her lie?"
As passionate as her speech may have been, it did not look like Adam had heard any of it. He turned and gave her a dull look, as if he was deaf to all in the world save for the object of his vengeance. "Blake…" he whispered, an emotion laced through his voice that the princess could not identify. She had never heard him speak to her that way before. "The kingdom wants you taken into protective custody, but I haven't the slightest interest in that."
With his free hand, he reached out to caress the feline Faunus's cheek with a tenderness that made her flinch violently away from him. Whatever had happened to her friend, really had changed him, and it made Blake's skin crawl just thinking about it.
Adam sighed at her rejection of his touch, his arm burning as the coil tightened, taking back his sword and lining it up with Yang's pulse point. The blond had remained silent up until the bull man's unwelcomed touch to the princess, which made the Dragon Sin clench her jaw in irritation.
"Alive or dead, it's all the same, to me you are no more than a grain of sand on the road that is being traveled." He reached for her again, but this time he brushed his fingertips along the hem of Blake's top, the scarlet chains shattering as he did so. Disgusted, the black-haired girl roughly pushed his hand away, but this did not seem to upset him. "Go while I still have patience, the Sins and I have unfinished business."
Staring in disbelief, Blake stood in silence for a moment before she fixed him with a harsh glare. The blade of Gambol Shroud sung against the sheath as she moved to stand between Adam and the two Sins, her sword poised and ready as she refused to let him pass. "I won't let you."
For a brief moment, Yang could have sworn she saw Adam's hand tremble around the handle of his sword, almost like he was afraid, but then the shake was gone, almost as if it was never there to begin with.
His entire arm was scorching with venomous fire, spreading through his veins like liquid hell as it traveled from the ends of his fingers to where his heart beat in his chest. Adam could feel his grip around his sword shake slightly as he tried to ignore the pain, but it was near impossible now. The tighter the snake became on his wrist, the more his blood burned; only cooled by the blood of another adversary coating his body like the armor he wore.
Before his hand could falter, he swung his free arm, striking Blake across the face in an ugly clap that echoed throughout the forest. She fell with a startled cry, crumpled, as her weapon lay useless beside her. Yang and Nora called out to her, one voice showing more anger than the other, but his strike had rendered her unconscious.
"Now that we've dispensed with that… interruption…"
Yang fixed a glare on him that burned far worse than the venom inside him ever could, furious at his raising his hand to the princess. However, despite his horrific mistakes, Yang still wanted to believe the boy who wanted to be a knight was still there. Somewhere. "Come on Addy… you sure you wanna do this?" she asked, her eyes locked on Adam as she fought to control her worry for the downed Faunus girl. "In the old days, you ever were able to beat me… Remember?"
His lips curled into a smirk, and though Yang hoped to catch a glimpse of the playfulness he once held, his smile held only a cruel malice. "But that was a long time ago…" he leaned in close to her, looking into her eyes with his mocking grin. "I am now more powerful than any of the Seven Deadly Sins."
The woman shrugged, "I don't know, maybe you're right… but you could be wrong too."
His gloved hand tightened around his sword as he drew back into a fighting stance. "Then we should find out, first I'll release your bonds." He raised his free hand to break her chains, but she turned her head away, effectively stopping him.
"Well, I appreciate that… but I got it."
Yang sucked in a breath, expanding her chest and thrusting her arms out, shattering Adam's chains into useless shards of metal scattered on the ground. Electric sparks spotted across the chains containing Nora, breaking with ease as she melted them with her magic. "We could've escaped whenever we felt like it."
Yang spared a glance at Blake, the princess still unmoving on the forest floor with her ebony hair fanned out around her head like a dark halo. She briefly wondered if she could wake her with a kiss like it said in all the stories, but she doubted the girl would appreciate it, she wasn't an over affectionate person anyway.
The horned Holy Knight did not flinch or cower in her presence, now that she was free to do whatever she wished to him. Just how he liked it, a hindered enemy is not worthy enough to be called an enemy at all. "Just know, that if I felt like it, I could annihilate you instantly."
The blond had enough arrogance within her to snicker, "Kinda doubt that."
Adam raised his sword, bowed into a fighting stance as he looked up his old mentor with nothing but bitterness and hate. "I shall use my sword to kill you."
Yang only smiled, this one warmer and kinder than her teasing smirk. "Right back at you, big guy." She waved a hand to her demigod comrade, as if dismissing her ethereal power in favor of fighting the red-haired Faunus one on one. "Don't interfere, 'kay Nora?"
The ginger pouted, "Aw… you get all the fun."
Adam sneered, "Don't want to risk my defeating you both at once?" his foot slid back into a lunge, but Yang's boot landed with a puff of dust beside him, blocking his stance from falling into what it needed to be for a proper strike.
"Can't you tell when your elder is trying to be nice?"
Their gazes were locked, until lilac orbs fell into a determined expression, and the man's sharp teeth grit in anger. They both prepared their weapons, and attacked. Adam's sword oozed its crimson power as he swung to decapitate Yang, but the woman raised her arms into an X to absorb his strike into her gauntlets. His eyebrows furrowed as he realized his attack did not connect, but was quick to move to the side as the woman came from his flank with a punch that was too slow to connect.
"Like I said, right back at you, remember that?"
"And I told you…" Yang let out a small gasp as she heard his voice beside her ear. "You'll be dead!"
Before he could slice into her neck, she swung her arm back, blocking with her gauntlet once more but not actually attacking to do him harm. "Come on!" he edged.
Adam lunged for her, but Yang stepped back and jumped away as more of his chains emerged from his aura in attempt to keep her still long enough to land a blow but to no avail, she was too fast. "I've got to admit, you've really improved over the years." She quipped, leaping to land above him on a mangled branch.
"Yet you still believe you are superior to me!" within seconds Adam was before her, his sword clashing against the black metal guarding her arms with a deafening shriek of colliding metal and magical power, strong enough to split the tree Yang was standing in in two. "I can sense it…" he hissed. "You're beginning to feel a bit of fear creeping in…"
"Am I?" her jovial response was cut short as the tree beneath their feet collapsed, the combatants leapt upwards, locked in eye contact as they waited for one or the other to strike again. Adam let loose a fierce growl as he swung and stabbed with his sword as quick as an arrow, yet every time Yang blocked his attacks.
She huffed, "Well you're persistent!" Adam backed her up against another tree, wasting no time as he moved to kill, cutting it down in one swing and disturbing the dust settled on the ground. To his annoyance, Yang emerged from the cloud unharmed, deflecting more of his chains with a smile on her face, but she was too cocky for her own good. From behind she barely had a chance to move before Adam landed a powerful hit to her stomach, knocking her back into a boulder with an ugly spider web of cracks.
"Too slow!" he declared as he attacked from above while she was weakened.
While not far from them, the thundering of their battle had jostled the unconscious princess, riling Blake to awaken with a pained groan. A horrible echo of destruction rung in her skull, as she looked out into the fog, the blond brawler nowhere to be seen.
Golden eyes narrowed. "Yang…"
Yang clenched her fists around nothing but dirt, sporting a rather nasty bruise on her cheek as well as grime from the dust floating around the forest, but despite her aching body, she let out a string of hearty chuckles from her sore belly. She pushed herself to stand on her feet once again, cracking and popping her joints. "I can't believe you've gotten this powerful…" she coughed, spitting out a mouthful of dust.
"Don't worry…" Adam growled from behind her, his sword pulsing and vibrating with the sheer amount of magic he had infused into it with his own aura. "I'll bring down the others with you soon enough."
With a roar, he stabbed his sword as deep into Yang's flesh as it wound go, her skin breaking in a gush of scarlet fluids as she let loose a silent cry and fell to the ground in a heap of bloodied blond hair.
Nora looked on in disbelief, having never seen her leader defeated before, she often questioned if Yang even bled the same blood as other human warriors. "Captain…?" she whimpered.
Instead of get back up with a smirk on her face and a pun at the ready…
Yang was still and silent…
And Adam felt nothing.
Yang lay in a pool of her own blood, lilac eyes dulled by the pain as Adam looked down upon her with nothingness in his gaze. With pure apathy in his movements, the masked Faunus man uncaringly kicked her body over so she could face him.
"Yang Xiao Long, The Seven Deadly Sins' Dragon Sin of Wrath… do you have any last words?"
Her fingers twitched as she blinked slowly, growing tired the more her blood drained from her human body. "The Sins…" she croaked. "What… happened to them…? You must've… head something… right? Where… have the other ones… gone?"
She sounded so weak, nothing like the overconfident fireball she displayed for all the world to see. Adam sheathed his sword, the sheer of metal numb in the blond woman's ears. "Very well… I'll tell you."
The Dragon Sin was the object of his hatred, revenge forged by flesh, and the very embodiment of the things he wanted so desperately to wipe from the face of the planet. Yet, he found it in him to grant her one small mercy, before she was left to die from her wounds alone. "Of the remaining five, three are still at large and are not yet accounted for… but, the other two have been dealt with." He explained.
"The Fox Sin of Greed is being kept under tight security at Baste Prison… and the Grizzly Sin of Sloth has already been slain, interred at the Necropolis."
Yang's eyes drifted shut, the news a push of hope as well as a crushing regret. Adam looked down at her with disdain, as if she were nothing more than a squashed bug on the sole of his boot. "But you needn't worry; I'll make certain they all join you shortly."
She managed a smile despite her aching body. "Thank you… Awesome!" lilac eyes sprung open, bursting with newfound energy as she leapt to her feet, as if the wound carved into her skin was nothing more than a cat scratch. Yang turned and gave Adam a playful wink, "Little Addy…"
He said nothing, as the burning behind his eyes only intensified.
Wow it's been a while! Sorry about that, been studying for tests and I joined an SAT tutoring group so that's been fun... But i'm happy to say I'm here with another chapter! Sadly though, I haven't made any progress with getting inspired for Snow White and the Stable Boy... But I will! Anyway, like, subscribe, review, all that good stuff that keeps me going! Ciao for now!
