"Glynda…"
"Surrender!"
A gunshot echoed and in response the very ground of Beacon rose to intercept the round from Atlesian hand-cannon, aimed squarely at Glynda's knee.
The same gravel formed together to shape a gigantic sword which swung down at Ironwood of Atlas, forcing the man to dodge by rolling to the side as the stone-made sword dug deep into the ground before shattering.
Glynda lifted her crop once more as the battle in front of Beacon's fourth year dorm continued all the while the sky was turning darker red and brighter yellow as dusk was approaching while the fire from the crashed Atlesian battleship was raging ever higher- even more so as the burning embers spread into the forest and started to light the top of the trees on fire.
Gunshots and distant sounds of barked orders started to ring from the direction of Beacon's main facilities, causing Glynda's teeth to grind together as she fought against the desire to break off her fight with Ironwood. She wanted to go support her students against the Atlesian troops that had landed on Beacon from the battleship just before its destruction, but as long as Ironwood was in front of her she had no choice but to fight- or try to convince the man to call off the attack. "Ironwood, you must stop this!"
"Glynda, you must surrender!" Ironwood howled back at Glynda. "Have you not done enough? You destroyed our Battleship! It was our only way to cleanse Beacon if Arc-"
"Enough about Arc! He is my student, my responsibility, I will take care of him, and you can stop ruining everything!" Glynda snapped her crop, causing a Glyph to form in front of her and send a sphere of condensed air at the man. Ironwood swapped the hand-cannon to his organic arm and used his mechanical one to punch the sphere in flight to break it before it could concuss him. "Surrender, call off your troops, do whatever, but…"
"Glynda, it is you who must surrender! I swear you will not be harmed unless you possess Arc's strain!" Ironwood growled at Glynda. "We have the upper hand and Atlas's approval!"
"What do you mean 'Atlas's approval'?" Glynda screamed at Ironwood as she propelled herself backwards, away from the man who was charging right at her as she recharged her crop-shaped Dust-caster with a refined Dust cell. "And your terms of surrender are unacceptable!"
"It is the best I can do!"
"Then your best is not enough!"
Glynda and Ironwood paused to growl at each other as the fight came to a standstill in front of the dorm's main entryway.
Ironwood's clothes had suffered battle-damage and he had a thin sheen of sweat on his brow, but other than that he seemed no worse for wear. However Glynda's clothes were in worse shape, and she was bleeding from few scratches while her legs were somewhat unsteady and her arm felt heavy.
'Dammit… My Aura fluctuates… I am using too much energy...' Glynda cursed the situation as she glanced towards the center of the dorm's front yard where a black hole-like orb floated ten or so feet off the ground. 'Jaune Arc… Maintaining Arc's prison of gravity is taxing me. But if I let him free, he's going to continue his rampage, if I maintain the grav-prison, I will lose to Ironwood because of the added strain, and prison dissipates anyway, leaving just weakened Ironwood to deal with him…'
Glynda felt as her teeth came close to cracking as she ground her teeth in frustration. "Ironwood. Why?"
"To protect everyone." Ironwood responded with calm, if a bit out of breath tone. "Every… Every commander must be ready to spend the lives of his troops wisely. I failed Winter, but her loss is not in vain as her sacrifice made me realize the gravity of the situation. The Atlesian research on Glenn was the final underline- The sudden change in Winter's behaviour after meeting Arc should have been a clear enough of a sign for me, but I foolishly ignored it- summed him just as one of Ozpin's tricks and schemes."
"You speak of Winter as if she's dead. And you still claim that Jaune is somehow responsible for Glenn? That he is a Grimm Infiltrator and could spread it to Vale somehow? I do not like him, nor do I consider him a model citizen or model student, but executing everyone he's come into contact with is a step and a hundred too far, Ironwood!" Glynda tried to buy time to come up with a strategy where she could come on top. As it was, every scenario she came up within her head ended up with either her defeated, or both her and Ironwood defeated- and with Arc on the loose. "Port assured me the Infiltrators were not…"
"Port is a fool!" Ironwood growled. "And as much as I respect and lo- As much as I respect you, you are as much a fool if you believe Port more than Atlesian research teams! Our accuracy, analys-"
"I care little for your boasting!" Glynda cut Ironwood off. "I call you as much fool as you call me, for you would sacrifice Beacon, sacrifice Vale, sacrifice your own people because of a single analysis from your precious researchers! I trust Port's professionalism as much as you trust your teams!"
"I would make the sacrifice, even if it cost the lives of my troops and myself. Even though I wear Atlesian colours, I serve humanity and ensuring our survival must take precedence over all else. This was what Ozpin told me when I joined the very same group we both belong to. And unlike you, I still follow his guideline. Everything else is secondary to ensuring our survival as a race, and this marks the first time the true enemy has used weapon like this- a insidious cancer from within rather than a enemy without. It requires a drastic change in doctrine to fight." Ironwood growled at Glynda. "The Schnee sisters… it is a pity they came into contact with Arc like they did. Weiss is beyond redemption as you must realize, you saw the creature she had became a host to after Glenn. I wish I could spare Winter of the same fate, but there is little I can do- Atlesian researchers wanted both of them alive for testing."
"And despite that, you speak of Winter as if she's already dead. And for the record, Weiss is going nowhere unless she wants to." Glynda snapped.
"She was held aboard the battleship you shot down." Ironwood's calm facade cracked. "However, by destroying the battleship, you also destroyed the original tissue samples we recovered from Glenn even if their scans were sent to Atlas already…"
"Wait, is that why you sent the battleship to escort the repair cruiser to assist in repairing the CCCT?" Glynda blinked, pretending shock to mislead Ironwood while she contemplated the situation far more calmly inside her head. "You used it to deliver troops to Glenn, retrieve Infiltrator samples!"
"...Yes. We managed to retrieve samples before Vale sent the interceptors to escort the battleship." Ironwood admitted and glanced almost sadly at the inferno in the distance where the battleship wreck burned. "Iceclad was equipped with state-of-art analysis and data transfer…"
"I care little about its specifications, Ironwood! Why?! I sent Hunters to recover samples as well, I sent copies of the scans to you-"
"Glynda, Atlas- no, we cannot trust the intel Beacon sends anymore, not when neither of us took the samples and thus has proof of their originality." Ironwood's tone was heavy and Glynda noticed the slightest shake in the man's organic arm. "The recent events regarding Cinder Fall, Ozpin… it is clear Beacon has infiltrators in its midst. Likely of both Grimm variety and a more traditional variety. Someone is feeding information to her agents."
"..." Glynda's eyes widened while her brain was working overtime and her hand was beginning to shake from the combined strain of keeping her Semblance active and containing Arc, all the while her Aura was starting to wane and wax like candle-flame in a wind. 'Ironwood is as tired as I am, he is just hiding it well… but a infiltrator in the school? Someone else than Cinder Fall?' "What proof do you have? Wait, why haven't you told me that already?!"
"The information is fairly recent, however considering Fall's actions it shouldn't come as a surprise. Not to mention… hm?" Ironwood's eyes narrowed as he seemed to hear something, and he swung his handgun to point at the dorm's entryway. A pair of Dust-carrying shots arced from the weapon at the wall beside the main door, followed by twin explosion of combining ice and fire Dust that shattered and burst the wall.
Glynda spotted something vibrant red before it was buried in rubble… but more importantly she spotted an opportunity.
The Dust-caster was flicked once more as Glynda charged and and struck the weapon squarely on the side of Ironwood's head as he was distracted, aiming to knock the man out cold in one fell blow…
And Glynda's eyes widened.
The strike did nothing, other than causing a sharp slapping sound to echo across the grounds.
The second after the blow connected she realized her Aura had dropped to low enough that she couldn't reinforce her weapon with enough strength to overcome Ironwood's remaining Aura- which was likely far higher than she had anticipated. 'Crap. He pretended to be weakened to catch me off guard. I miscalculated.'
Ironwood grabbed Glynda's arm, twisting her wrist and causing the Dust-caster to fall off her fingers. "Glynda, rest assured, I will set you free if you are untainted. No matter what."
Glynda's eyes widened as Ironwood flicked his pistol around so he was holding its barrel in his hand almost as if the gun was some sort of club. The butt of the gun was swung at Glynda's head… and a heavy, meaty thudd rang in the fourth-year dormitory courtyard.
And almost immediately afterwards, another similar meaty thudd echoed through the grounds.
Ironwood fell forwards and flopped on the ground.
Glynda Goodwitch looked slack-jawed at Peter Port who was half-lying, half-kneeling behind Ironwood. Port was out of breath as he had whacked Ironwood in the back of his head with the flat end of the double-headed axe after jumping out of a window and landing on top of the Atlesian general. The slightly overweight man was covered in dust, ash and glass shards as he flopped down on the ground next to Ironwood. "Jolly good distracting, Glynda!"
Glynda nodded weakly before sinking on her knees, completely spent and equally confused. "Distract...ing?"
"Yup, whatever you did with the door was enough to distract Jimmy long enough to let me jump out of the window and give him a good old whack on my way down!" Port waved at the ruined dorm-front before clapping his hands together merrily, ignoring how silly it looked as the man was lying on his back. The moment passed and Port climbed up on his feet in order to take a look at Glynda. "Now, let's get him tied up and we can focus on dealing with the rest of the Atlesians. How are you feeling, Glynda?"
"I'll… I'll be alright. Wait, Peter, we need to subdue Arc as well!" Glynda struggled to get up on her feet, but Port grabbed her shoulders and pat her back down before she could try to stand up and fall over again. She glanced up at the black hole-like prison that was wobbling and fluctuating wildly, clearly indicating that it was about to break. "We need to…"
"Indeed, however, I do believe that the chance exists that we can use, how do you say this, mr. Arc's previous entourage to assume direct control over mr. Arc." A third voice entered the scene and Glynda glanced towards the ruined entrance to the dorm. She resisted the urge to sigh in relief as she saw Oobleck climbing over the ruins while carrying completely unconscious Ruby Rose on his shoulder. "I have finished excising the Atlesian presence in the dorm, and recovered the students General Ironwood's troops had attempted to capture. Regardless, if my theory holds, then seeing mr. Rose, miss Belladonna or miss Schnee or any combination of them is likely to be enough to 'calm' mr. Arc, and if not, I have formulated three hundred and sixty different stratagems which result in victory against equivalent Grimm…"
Oobleck's rambling speech ended as the gravity-sphere broke, allowing the caged, transformed teenager within to fall to the ground- except what fell wasn't exactly the shapeshifted, grotesque 'knight', but something that appeared more like mini-fied Grimm Tyrant only slightly taller than a man in its hunched shape. "Well."
"We might have a problem." Port nodded his acknowledgement. "Deploy the Rose?"
"I am prepared to make the offering." Oobleck heaved Ruby in front of him and held her like some sort of sacrifice being offered to the gods. "Hm, historically it is often said that this pose…"
"Jolly good idea!" Port cheered on, and Glynda felt as yet another vein snapped in her forehead.
"No." Glynda growled as she grabbed Ruby from Oobleck's arms and stood her up on her feet. The unconcious girl flung around like a doll with its strings cut, but the headmistress made short work of the girl's state by placing her hand on Ruby's forehead and channeling what little remained of her Aura into her Semblance and conjuring a glyph of ice… or rather, slightly frosty water as that was the best she could do with her current strength.
Ruby gasped for air as the ice-cold liquid splashed all over her face, followed by panicked sputtering and coughing as she breathed in the icy water. "A- I'm awa- cough… don't… cough…"
"Easy, miss Rose." Glynda pat Ruby's back as she blinked and looked around in complete confusion and shock. "Listen, I know this is sudden, but I must ask you to…"
A hollow, enraged roar cut Glynda off and she glared at the direction of the Grimm-thing which had spotted Ruby and let a threatening roar. However it seemed that Glynda had a moment before it could attack as it was still in the middle of growing blades out of all four of its arms.
In the background Port and Oobleck nodded to each other and prepared to receive and redirect the minified Grimm Tyrant's charge.
"Wha… But…" Ruby blinked at the Tyrant, whose blade-growth slowed as the girl's eyes were directed at it. "Whu?"
"Mr. Arc was enraged, we intercepted him, Atlas wanted him killed, but we stopped Ironwood." Glynda recounted quickly and pointed at the Tyrant who began its slowly building charge towards the trio of professors. "But all that is irrelevant right now. Can you stop him?"
Ruby blinked in complete confusion and it didn't seem Glynda's words truly registered in Ruby's head.
"Well, I suppose we have to entertain him for a while?" Port asked Oobleck as he swung his axe on his shoulder, striking a pose like some sort of lumberjack eyeing his next tree as he moved to intercept the Grimm shapeshifter. Oobleck nodded as he finished restraining Ironwood (or rather, detached his mechanical arm with a whack of his weapon and tied the man's organic hand against a visible support beam in the half-collapsed dorm-front).
"The restraint should hold for a while, but we need to employ one of our own Aura-restraining devices in order to hold Ironwood for long duration or put him in a cell." Oobleck nodded again at Port as he walked beside the jolly professor, and nodded for the third time for good measure. "Atlesian devices must have some sort of failsafe or identification unlock in ther restraining devices to prevent it being used against them…"
A third and final roar cut Oobleck off and the pair became far more occupied with parrying and dodging the charge of the mini-Tyrant as it reached the pair and almost skewered Oobleck with two of its blades. The professor chose to counter-attack rather than parry as he fired his weapon in its flamethrower configuration to the Tyrant's face, causing the strikes to miss as the creature's inhuman face caught on fire.
'Crap, crap, crap…' Glynda thought as she observed the fight while she tried to pat Ruby's cheek gently in order to try to get more sense into the girl, but her efforts were quite ineffective. At least the fact the girl was conscious and was looking at the Tyrant was making the creature- or rather, Jaune hesitate and slow down.
Glynda used the time to check on her Scroll and try to contact Vale, to start coordinating response towards the remaining Atlesian troops, but she resisted cursing out loud as she saw that the local Scroll network was being jammed, likely with Ironwood's personal air-cruiser's electronic warfare systems.
She realized that her decision to use the Beacon's tower-guns against the battleship had been made at the last possible moment, as the cruisers had engaged their disruptors mere minutes after the beginning of the invasion to deny Beacon the early warning and to disrupt their communications. The jamming also meant that if Glynda wanted to use the tower-mounted guns again, she'd need to get access to a physical node, that being her office in Beacon Tower or the data-core underneath the tower. And more importantly, while the Scroll network was down, she couldn't use her Scroll to issue orders to boost the tower's signal strength remotely in order to overtake the disruption from the air-cruiser (which would eventually lose in terms of raw power) which in turn would re-enable Scroll based communication. The real damage of the communication loss would come in stages though, as Glynda had no idea how wide the disturbance was... and if using it so close to the Beacon Tower meant that the disruption also affected the rest of the kingdom or if the disruption was restricted to just the local area Scroll network.
However, to make matters worse, Glynda realized one person was missing from the scene. "Wait, where did Penny go?"
"Hm, hmm-hmhm…" A cheerful humming accompanied sharp footsteps on stone floor while electronically locked doors opened in front of the neon green-lined shape stalking through the Beacon's halls.
Penny Polendina adjusted her route to avoid detection by a group of students who were charging at Atlesian fireteam. The team was overwhelmed in few seconds, but a crossfire from two supporting fireteams forced the students to flee and drag one of their comrades with them as the boy's Aura had failed during the charge and had led to a chain of gunshots in his stomach.
Penny didn't miss a step as she stepped over a body of a Atlesian bot. Her mission was not to catch the students nor was it to help the Atlesian troops take control over Beacon's facilities- or even help Ironwood apprehend Arc. The amount of troops the Atlesian battleship managed to launch before its destruction would have to be enough in suppressing the populace before a organized resistance could be mustered, and Penny had to assume that Ironwood knew Glynda Goodwitch well enough to persuade her to order her troops to stand down- or take her out of action until the rest of the Atlas, or rather, Penny could secure and lock down Beacon. Since the battle had escalated out of the dormitories, Ironwood had used his neural implant to order Penny to disengage from the fight, relay Ironwood's orders to the battleship, and then make her way to the Beacon Tower.
According to Penny's calculations, once she reached the CCCT, the core of Beacon Tower which also served as the facility's data-infrastructure hub, she could hack in and disable Beacon's gun batteries and override the lockdown that had clamped down Ironwood's personal air-cruiser and the repair transport ship to the air-dock, both of which would hold reinforcements that were currently boxed into their ships. At the same time Penny could assume direct control over Beacon's defensive weapons to use against potential threats- while Beacon had made their own modifications to the guns and the cannons, they were originally designed and made in Atlas, giving Penny a backdoor into the systems once she gained physical access to the central interface.
Thus, the lockdown that had taken Atlas by surprise would be turned around to contain Beacon's personnel, and the potential Grimm Infiltrator infiltration that set off the whole chain of events would be, according to Penny's calculations, contained to the Beacon's grounds at least for the moment. Granted, the report sent from Atlas detailed that the Infiltrators discovered in Glenn could spread by physical contact, so it would be necessary to spread the lockdown to Vale City as well once the purity of Beacon was verified and then move on to the rest of the kingdom.
Containing the Grimm Infiltrator infection would be a challenge as Beacon didn't have walls which would naturally contain people attempting escape on foot. The near-cliffside location of the facility made such defensive structures both waste and difficult to build, and instead it had focused on extensive camera- and locator network covering the facility and the surrounding areas including the Emerald Forest. When the surveillance tech was combined with the precise long-range artillery batteries, it would be simple to deter and 'remove' potential escapees in somewhat literal sense.
Having avoided most of the fights and conflicts that sparked across entire Beacon, Penny finally reached the root of Beacon Tower and the main elevator leading upwards to the Headmistress's office, and downwards to the 'hidden' underground facilities where the main controls, servers, data-banks and interfaces of the tower were.
Unfortunately there had been a group of first-and second year students guarding the elevator (or attempting to find the Headmistress in order to ask what the ruckus was about as the Scroll network was being jammed by combined power of the two Atlesian cruisers in trapped in the dock), and Penny had been forced to take down the students in order to continue her mission as it didn't seem that the students were going anywhere anytime soon. She avoided killing blows as Ironwood had ordered the Atlesian personnel to avoid killing, unless the presence of a Grimm Infiltrator could be verified in the combatant or killing was necessary in order to win the fight.
Penny stepped over the unconscious body of a light-blue haired female student and reached to press her hand against the CCCT elevator's door control. The door panel light up, indicating that the elevator received the call to ascend to ground level from its lockdown position at the bottom of the shaft… and the door panel turned red to indicate that the lockdown was in effect, thus making the elevator unavailable to anyone with insufficient credentials. Penny nodded to indicate that the refusal was expected, and placed her hand against the door again while accessing the door's Scroll-port with her other hand- or rather, with a Scroll-type connector that extended from her palm and allowed her access the elevator system more directly.
She tilted her head to indicate her confusion as the elevator refused her credentials, and she repeated the request after a moment. The second, third and hundredth attempts of legal entry were denied, and Penny nodded, realizing and documenting that Beacon had patched up Atlesian backdoors at least to systems surrounding CCCT.
A query was sent towards the elevator's control mechanism for possible error report which would allow her a surface sweep on potential ways of circumventing the firewalls and security systems, and the query was refused because of missing credentials. The second, third, and two thousand queries in chain were also refused while Penny prodded the control panel of the elevator with her free hand's finger to indicate her desire to enter the elevator, should someone be looking, and at the same time deployed her cyber-warfare suites through her occupied hand's connector in order to force her way through the unexpectedly thick layers of security that had activated after her basic surface scan of the system. She contemplated forcing a more physical entry into the elevator shaft using her blades, but disregarded the option as the elevator shaft itself would have blast door blocks just before the underground facility entry, meaning that a forced physical entry methods would need heavy-duty tools and approximately sixty hours of time to use them.
Penny tilted her head to appear confused on the outside as she waged a war of extermination against the elevator's systems… and widened her eyes to indicate surprise as she realized she wasn't just fighting a isolated security system, but rather, something much, much more complex. Someone had connected the entirety of Beacon Tower's security systems to the elevator's control systems- and at the same time she realized Beacon's security systems were more robust than what Atlesian intelligence had estimated.
However Penny wasn't deterred by the presence or by the strength of the security system, and instead focused more computational power to her cyber-warfare tools. A firewall was met with a data-worm, a lock algorithm was met with a brute force approach, a encryption was countered with logging and decryption, and through each failed attempt Penny gained another shred of information on the system's capabilities… as did the system gain information of Penny's cyber-warfare neural networks.
Penny waved her hand at her head to indicate that she was suffering slight overheating. The physical attempt of cooling down did little to actually calm her down, just as Penny had calculated, but her doctrines decreed that she should attempt to display her 'mood' in physical ways whenever possible to make her seem more human- even if no-one was looking. However it looked like that Penny would have to override that feature, as the fact that Battleship Iceclad had been downed by Beacon's gun batteries was starting to hamper Penny's capabilities- she had been linked to the ship, allowing her to use its computational resources to aid her own. Thus she had lost a definite edge when it came to multi-tasking physical motions and active cyber warfare.
Without the ship's computational support she was starting to feel low-powered and overtasked when fighting what she now knew to be Beacon's entire cyber-warfare arsenal at once. However, she estimated that she had approximately seventy-five percent chance of breaking Beacon's security for long enough time to allow her to use the elevator, after which she could access Beacon Tower's and CCCT's systems directly, allowing her to bypass quite few security systems and allowing her easier root access to the entire system. Even if she failed to break into the system, she estimated that there was one hundred percent chance of breaking connection with Beacon's security systems without adverse effects to her as long as she maintained her current processor overclock speeds, so she had a way out even if she failed.
The simple act of a short, ginger-haired girl smiling and staring at a stubbornly red-blinking elevator button betrayed a raging data-battle between Atlesian Artificial Intelligence Penny Polendina and Beacon's main cyber-warfare defensive suite. However the battle soon took a drastic if outwardly unseen turn as the facility's neural networks responded to Penny's continued attacks by concentrating even more computing power to combat her from other processes in the facility- shutting down simulation rooms, reducing defensive weapon process cycles, logging out and shutting down public services, cutting off CCCT communication streams to remote villages and so on.
Thus, while Penny's data-core processor was state-of-the-art, she was starting to lag behind in computational cycles as the individually inferior data-processors of Beacon added their computational powers to each other, and began tracing Penny's intrusions back to her systems. The odd design clicked in Penny's systems as she matched the pattern and realized that Vale's cyber-security had been modified to follow the very same creed with which CCCT's were built-
That the entire system would stand together, or would fall together.
And was thus designed to add one part's computational power to other processes should they need it, making it exceedingly effective at countering a single, concentrated threat. Penny frowned to indicate her uncertainty and she adjusted her victory and loss percentage estimation accordingly.
And as Penny's intrusion expanded its roots to Beacon's firewalls, Beacon's firewalls learned of her patterns, adjusted their algorithms and countered her as she learned of the system's capabilities. Thus the battle was as much a fight between a fake key and rugged lock as it was a fight to see which one learned the other's capabilities faster than the other… and Penny realized that the battle was turning against her.
"And what might you be doing here...?" a arrogant, pushy voice sounded in the corridor in front of the Beacon Tower elevator entrance, and Penny registered the voice, ran a local area check for Atlesian identification, found none, and thus came to a conclusion that the voice's owner was hostile without needing to use process cycles to use her eyes- machine vision and pattern recognition to match facial features to existing data required far more computing power than just running a wireless local check.
Penny unfolded her combat-blades without further prompting.
The male voice were cut off as the green-lined blade hit the broad shape with a meaty thunk and slid off, allowing Penny to return the blade to its place behind her back.
"...Gha…. y-you thought that'd be enough…" the voice sounded again and Penny furrowed her brow to indicate her annoyance before turning to identify the male shapes properly.
"I… don't know what you're doing… cough… trying to enter tower, but… We will not allow it!" the voice of Cardin Winchester echoed in the hallway, accompanied by the cheers of his three teammates. "We will not… cough... allow you… to enter… cough!"
A quick visual analysis and even faster wireless cracking of Cardin's Scroll security told Penny that the man had lost approximately one-fourth of his Aura from the direct hit he had taken to his throat. Penny frowned as she realized that the information she had received from the boy's Scroll was too insignificant as tactical advantage that it justify using her own electronic warfare suites to punch a signal through the Scroll-disrupting weave the two Atlesian cruisers were projecting from the air-dock.
Penny tilted her head and performed quick query on the team's status from the CCCT public network, forcing her way through the weaker, less stable firewall guarding the public data as its security had been largely rerouted to fight her intrusion on the Beacon Tower's elevator, and she found out that team CRDL had been browsing sites related to human reproduction in the CCCT's reading area. The team had checked out recently- to be exact, the check-out had happened few minutes after the battleship Iceclad reported critical failure of AI core due to physical trauma suffered upon unexpected emergency landing.
Penny furrowed her brow again as she contemplated options available her, disregarding diplomatic solution due to the urgency, due to her initial attack, and due to how she had a group of unconscious students at her feet with clear signs of broken Aura and blade-shaped bruises.
Team CRDL seemed to hesitate as Penny merely looked at them with zero apparent concern despite being outnumbered four to one, and the time allowed her to evaluate the combined data on team CRDL's combat prowess- thus she came to the conclusion that she had ninety-nine percent chance of victory if she engaged the team in direct combat, with zero point ninety nine percent chance of a stalemate and zero point zero one percent chance of losing. However the calculation was based off data where she wasn't burdened by her breach attempt against Beacon's systems, and thus there was a unknown factor- whether or not she could disable team CRDL before the reallocation of her processor cycles to physical combat tasks would allow Beacon's defensive systems breach Penny's own firewalls.
The chance of losing Penny's state-of-art Atlesian hardware to Beacon was unacceptable to both Penny's Atlesian doctrines and to Penny herself. Not to mention that there was a potential loss of credibility Atlas would face should a top-of-the-line Atlesian artificial intelligence die after attempting to hack a door, failing at it, and dying as the door hacks the AI back.
Moreover Penny didn't have a option to flash-clone her memories into the Atlesian battleship's servers, and thus her artificial body's destruction would lead to her actual death. All in all, she estimated that her chances of victory were not ideal under current circumstances.
Penny nodded to indicate that she changed her mission parameters from direct entry to Beacon's CCCT into attempting indirect entry later on. And she nodded again as her mission changed once more: General Ironwood's tracker implant informed Penny that the man's Aura suffered a critical failure and was reduced to zero, followed by a report informing Penny that the man had suffered a loss of consciousness, and finally the signal was cut off altogether. The Atlesian military signal could penetrate the wide-area Scroll-jamming caused by the air-cruiser due to having far higher frequency range than regular Scrolls, which ruled out any chance of the communicator malfunctioning because of potential friendly-fire jamming.
Thus the logical priority mission for Penny changed from seize-and-control of Beacon's systems to search-and-rescue of General Ironwood.
"What's the holdup? A… cough cough… a-afraid?" Cardin asked but chose not to wait for answer as he urged his team to attack and Penny responded by flinging her blades at the team, landing each of the strikes and launching the charging boys back to the direction where they had come from. She pulled the blades back while pulling her hands off the elevator's control panel.
The connection between Penny's system and Beacon's security system broke, freeing Penny to fight or make her getaway, and she chose the latter as attempting re-entry through the same access port would be impossible. Beacon's security system would have locked down and disabled the access port the instant Penny disconnected from it.
She flung her weapons behind her to distract her opponents while hitting the now-useless elevator control panel with one of her blades to create a large shower of sparks which would mask her escape. Penny sighed to indicate resignation as she ran quick calculation and concluded that wasting power and Aura to defeat the entire team CRDL for good measure would be inefficient when it would no longer serve a purpose, and it would be more effective to hand over the suppression duty to the Atlesian soldiers who were about to enter the Tower.
And so she shot off towards the last known location of General Ironwood, leaving the previously defeated, unconscious students lying in front of the elevator and the conscious part of team CRDL, that being its leader, charging at the patch of air Penny had occupied a fraction of a second prior.
…
Cardin Winchester resisted the urge to flee or soil himself as he saw his three teammates getting absolutely devastated by a petite, ginger-haired Atlesian girl… with all three of his teammates being defeated at the same time, in a split second, with a single attack each executed at the same exact moment.
The initial sword-blow the girl had inflicted upon Cardin's throat stung and he resisted the urge to bend over and cough, or flee in terror as he hadn't even noticed the strike before it had connected.
The Atlesian girl smiled- no, grinned at Cardin while frowning at the same time, making the girl's face appear unnatural as the upper half of her face conveyed annoyance and lower half conveyed happiness, both appearing completely natural and honest yet expressing at the same time, making the girl appear incredibly creepy. When she tilted her head to the side the unnatural outlook became even more pronounced as Cardin could have sworn a human neck couldn't bend quite so far without snapping.
The fact the girl's eyes were literally radiating neon green light which illuminated her face with eerie green glow didn't help Cardin's attempts of keeping the contents of his bowels internal instead of external. The row of incredibly sharp neon-green lined steel blades that looked like wings around the girl's back made the attempt even harder.
Cardin resisted the urge to gulp as it would convey weakness, and instead gripped his mace with numb, cold fingers while his teammates were lying on the floor, completely out cold. 'A-... A W- w- w- Winchester doesn't… f-fear… w-whatever that t-thing… is….'
Cardin let a roar (or rather, a near-panicked squeak) as he put one of his feet forwards in a valiant but shambling charge-slash-hobble… and the Atlesian she-devil let a shower of sparks as she disappeared, leaving a devastated-looking elevator door control panel behind her alongside a sizeable stain appearing in the front of Cardin's pants.
Cardin blinked as his stumbling charge came to a halt.
The silence that followed was absolute, if one ignored the sizzling from the elevator, groans from the students on the ground, small dripping from Cardin, or the gunfire and shouts from the distance. Cardin tried to keep himself from breathing to maintain the silence. 'I-is it over? Did it leave?'
He took a hesitating look around himself and saw no neon green Atlesian demons. 'I- it fled? No, escaped?'
"Y… you drove her away…" a faint, weak voice almost caused Cardin to disengage his bowel-movement based jet on power of fright alone, but he managed to recover in time. He turned towards the source of sound and saw that a blue-haired girl on the floor was slowly recovering from the trashing she had received prior to Cardin's arrival, alongside the rest of her team. "S-saved us?"
"Uh… yes, yes I did. It is only natural that I, Cardin Winchester, saved… uh, you." Cardin swung his mace up and rested it on his shoulder as his hands were shaking too badly to hold the weapon up in a guard stance without betraying his nervousness. He straightened his back while leaning back into a outwardly carefree but strong stance while relaxing his shoulders to assert dominance. After all, he true power of his patented 'heroic stance' was to be incredibly easy to hold while one's hands were shaking and buttocks needed clenching, while also appearing daunting and unbreakable to the outside viewer. Unfortunately his front was unsalvageable but as long as he didn't make a fuss of it, it would be easy to brush under after the fight calmed down.
The way the girl was looking at Cardin like if he had actually saved her (and by the looks of it, saved her team as well) made him somewhat uneasy though. 'However… it is only fitting. I am a Winchester after all. So it's natural and expected that I save people!'
His confidence seemed to rub off on the girl and her team, and the realization gave Cardin courage in turn to continue as he picked his teammates off the floor and slapped them awake.
And so, Cardin Winchester forgot his earlier terror in a heartbeat as he employed his truest, not-quite-hidden power in front of his grateful audience:
Boasting.
"Bwub bwub?"
"Rose!"
"Ubuh."
Ruby Rose was confused.
One moment she had been motorboating Weiss's (admittedly not very motorboatable) boobs, the next moment someone had thrown a flashbang at her, the next moment someone had handcuffed her and she had faint memories of Penny saying something, and of some Atlesian guy waving a big gun (which had coincidentally taken all of Ruby's attention when she had spotted it, alongside a internal debate whether or not she should pick up a secondary weapon because hand cannons were cool), and the moment after that Ruby had lost consciousness and woken up to Glynda Goodwitch waterboarding her with ice-water glyphs.
The string of events had thus left Ruby in a state where she struggled to put together spoken alphabets while Glynda was alternating drying Ruby and casting a icy water glyph around her head which splashed water all around the pair.
While Ruby couldn't truly appreciate Glynda Goodwitch's wet shirt contest (Ruby had a hunch Weiss might have appreciated the sight more), the act was making it clear that she needed to wake up. And after a while she had finally gathered enough of her scattered brain-cells together in her head to start forming simple sentences. "Bwub wbub?"
"Ruby Rose, this is not the time! Wake up! Please!" Glynda half growled half begged and submerged Ruby's head into the water once again. Ruby was ready this time though, and managed to breath in before her head hit the water.
"Hwaa! S-sorry m-miss Goodswittich!" Ruby stammered through clacking teeth. "I- Imh awakeh, p-please stohp, water cold, cold!"
"Ah… finally." Glynda sighed in relief. "Miss Rose, I need your aid. All will be explained later. Can you contain mr. Arc?"
"Jaune?" Ruby blinked and saw the Grimm Tyrant who was currently using Oobleck as makeshift club to try to swat at Port who was running away, only for Port to dive for cover while a what appeared to be a unfoldable bear trap clacked shut around the Tyrant's hooved ankle, snapping the relatively thin bone and ligament, and severed the hoof from the body entirely.
Oobleck was flung at the dormitory's half-collapsed exterior wall as the oddly small Tyrant fell over like a log… and twitched as Port whacked it in the neck-area with the flat of his double-bladed axe. Unfortunately the creature's armor seemed to mitigate the effect of the flat side of Port's axe, not to mention that the spot was somewhat hard to reach, and the overweight professor had to dive for cover in order to not get skewered by the Tyrant's sword-like head-spike as the creature objected to its treatment.
"Uh?" Ruby blinked at the sight, looked around, and saw the same Atlesian man who had been pointing the cool hand-cannon at Jaune was tied against the dorm-front's support beam- which was when Ruby realized that she was currently in front of fourth-year dorms while the whole area around them looked like a battlefield. "What happened? Where's Blake and Weiss?"
"They are fine. I'll explain more later. Now, suppress Jaune?" Glynda seemed to get frustrated and Ruby let a small eep as the stern and scary headmistress was apparently nearing the end of her patience.
Ruby stepped carefully out of Glynda's reach and the headmistress let her go, allowing Ruby to breath out and start staring at Jaune.
"Miss Rose…"
"I'm doing it." Ruby confirmed while staring unblinkingly at the Grimm Tyrant who seemed to start slowing down just a tiny bit. "Juuust have to stare at him a bit and he gets shy or something. We figured out that if I look at him he just kinda freezes up and stops being angry."
"...I see. Did Ozpin tell you abou- I mean, go ahead." Glynda stopped herself mid-speech and motioned for Ruby to go on. The Tyrant- or rather, Jaune looked at Ruby, and Ruby kept staring at his red-glowing eyes while trying her hardest to ignore the fact the boy's current form was just a smidge intimidating even if Ruby was fairly sure that it- he wouldn't attack her. 'Uuuh… the glowing eyes aren't helping…'
The monstrosity blinked once, paused, blinked again and finally got up from the ground as its ankle and hoof regenerated.
Ruby saw from the corner of her eye as Glynda made few sharp motions towards Port and the older professor stopped trying to aim a cleaving strike at the mini-Tyrant's sluggishly waving tail. Port looked somewhat down after being denied the right of tail-cutting or suchlike, or at least Ruby interpreted it so as the professor twirled his moustache in disappointment while walking (or rather, sulking) out from behind the frozen Jaune-rant. The professor kept himself busy by going to dig Oobleck out of the pile of rubble the Tyrant had thrown him into, all the while keeping an eye out on the beast and retreating with his axe ready.
Ruby´s face was starting to turn red from exertion as she stared at the Tyrant. After a while the beast was starting to wind down… and it flopped against the ground, seemingly as frozen as Glynda looked exhausted, which was around the same level of exhaustion as the one Ruby felt herself.
She hadn't performed demanding physical activities of late (or rather yet, anyway), but oddly enough Ruby felt like she was starting to tire from just concentrating her eyes on the Grimm-formed Jaune.
The feeling wasn't entirely new. Lately whenever she had used her eyes to calm down the boy she had started to feel a bit tired in turn- almost as if her eyes used Aura to 'power' itself, draining energy from her to function. Ruby had discarded the odd feeling as either her own delusion or just lumped it up with exhaustion from physical activities generally associated with her needing to calm Jaune down, as there was no way she would tire out merely from looking at something. But as her Aura was nearly exhausted due to Atlesian cuffs effect, the small drain her eyes caused felt much more pronounced (even though someone had removed the cuffs from her hands when she had been unconscious). She had no idea if she could have used the power in the first place if her Aura was completely out, but she didn't really want to test her theory out in a potential combat situation.
Luckily the effect had been enough to stun the Grimm-fied Jaune-rant (and Ruby really disliked the name Port had given to his other shape since it made the boy seem like some sort of evil warlord), meaning that the situation was effectively over as far as his rampage was concerned.
Or should have been over, except that the ground shook with impact of heavy cannon shells, and the Tyrant-form Jaune disappeared into smoke and flying gravel.
"Wha- what?!" Ruby's eyes widened and she looked up to see a pair of Bowhead assault transports flying overhead, passing the ruined dorm from above and continuing on to open fire on something above Beacon's grounds with their spinal-mounted cannons after getting shot at by something behind the Beacon Tower. A explosion rang in the area and Ruby saw as a burning Atlesian air-transport came crashing down from behind Beacon tower, its side bearing massive gaps where the cannon rounds had impacted. One of the Bowheads shook as what appeared to be anti-air missile hit its belly, originating from somewhere near the Beacon Tower, and causing the pair of aircraft curve off and disengage with one of them leaving a thick black smoke trail alongside twin streams of heatseeker-disrupting flares.
The sounds of battle seemed to intensify as the more immediate situation calmed down, allowing Ruby to take in the fact that something was going incredibly wrong in Beacon. Fortunately enough the fight was happening somewhere near the center of Beacon rather than in the dorms where the fight seemed to be over, allowing Ruby time to contemplate the situation and more importantly, allowed her to regroup with her teammates and help Jaune back to his human self. She refused to believe that the strafing run had killed the boy, but she figured that he might be hurt so she nodded to herself and put aside the need to go find and help Weiss and Blake for now in order to help Jaune.
Ruby tried to run towards the boy, but a death-grip someone had on her wrist stopped her on her tracks. She turned towards Glynda who was as pale as Ruby was, and Ruby let a small whine to try to get Glynda release her grip on Ruby's arm. The attempt was ineffective as Glynda's eyes were glued on the retreating Bowheads.
"Vale… they sent soldiers? This is... Don't tell me that they're escalating? No, they disengaged as soon as they were shot at by Atlas, after decimating the attacker according to the Valean air-to-air combat doctrine… Did Vale think that we're under attack by Grimm?" Glynda seemed to talk to herself more than to Ruby, making the girl quite concerned for the mental state of the woman as the headmistress wasn't in the habit of making idle conversation with herself. "Did they think that Grimm somehow took the battleship down? Vale must be as much in turmoil as Beacon is. Is that why they didn't they send the anti-ship interceptors? Makes sense, the interceptors would be next to useless when dogfighting flying Grimm... This is bad…"
"Bad? I can kinda tell but uh..." Ruby asked while trying to pry Glynda's hand off her wrist. She needed to go help Jaune, make sure he was alright, and the older woman's grip was also starting to cut off blood circulation in Ruby's hand. "P-please, professor…"
"...Oh. Miss Rose, you must keep Arc under control. Under no circumstance should he leave this place. Have him hide in the dorm or somewhere out of sight." Glynda seemed to snap back to reality and released her grip on Ruby's wrist after giving her orders. "Port and Oobleck already grabbed Ironwood, disabled his Scroll and communication electronics, stuffed him into a bag, and started to haul him towards Beacon Tower. I'll follow them once I have regained enough Aura to fight properly. We'll see if we can whack some sense into Ironwood, and get him to broadcast orders for the Atlesian troops to cease hostilities, get this whole situation to calm down… oh? I thought the cruiser had jammed Scroll communication..."
The headmistress's Scroll rang, and Ruby used the chance to sprint off towards the slowly settling dust cloud. The outward shape of the Grimm Tyrant- or rather, Jaune, was somewhat unharmed except for some deep holes that had burrowed into the creature's thick carapace. A quick inspection told Ruby that the creature's small size had worked to its advantage as the hits had not quite managed to connect, likely due to how the aircraft's speed had worked to hinder its aim, and thus only shrapnel managed to actually hit the shapeshifted boy.
By the looks of it, Jaune was regenerating quite quickly and Ruby realized that the food Jaune had managed to gulp down in preparation for 'other' things was working to heal him, and was likely the reason he managed to shapeshift into the mini-Tyrant form the first place.
A pair of red eyes looked at Ruby emotionlessly while she struggled to stare unblinkingly at Jaune's eyes, although the look Jaune gave back might have been more caused by how the was lying on is side with half its face buried to the ground with Ruby kneeling on top of its shoulder. "Uh… can you erm… stop being that and start being, you know, you?"
Jaune let a growl which Ruby translated as 'yes, I will definitely change back, and I love you, Ruby' despite the sound coming off more like he was about to die from thousand cuts (which, considering the amount of holes in the armor, wasn't all too far off).
Ruby nodded at Jaube and pat the creature's armor, pleased that she managed to get her message through, and that Jaune's the human side had re-taken hold of the monstrous body.
She wanted to sigh in relief, but the situation was far too weird to allow her to relax. The fact her friend, teammate and maybe-sorta-kinda-something-more-eek looked more like a mangled and horrifying Grimm monster made Ruby a bit jumpy, even if she had become sort-of used to it by now. "You know, I'm always scared that someday you shapeshift into a Grimm and lose control, but won't turn back… eu, sorry, i-ignore that, um… so uh, according to Glynda, Blake and Weiss are okay too…"
The creature's chest fell slightly, and Ruby translated it as relief. "The headmistress uh, told that we should stay in the dorm, get you inside and out of sight. Apparently there's something happening in Vale and something is definitely happening in Beacon. Actually, should we ask if we can help with whatever's happening right now?"
Before either of them had time to ponder on the issue in detail (or in Jaune's case, growl something vaguely appropriate), a crash and explosion interrupted them. Ruby turned towards the source of the sound, and… saw Penny standing over the now-unconscious headmistress who was lying on the ground, face pressed against the rubble by Penny's feet.
Ruby's eyes widened as Penny stomped on the already weakened headmistress's head, driving it deep into the ground and thoroughly breaking the woman's Aura.
"Friend Ruby, please step away from the Grimm Tyrant and re-equip your restraining device." Penny chimed cheerfully, the contents of her words and tone of voice clashing spectacularly with her emotionless, well-practised and almost inhumanly precise movements. She lifted her hand and ten or so of her green-lined blades rose from the pair of steel wings that had formed behind her back, and the blades leveled themselves to form a deadly row arc of steel above her shoulders- clearly ready to fly off and strike at the Grimm Tyrant, at Jaune.
Ruby let out a growl that almost matched Jaune's in its ferocity. Unfortunately however, she was unarmed and her Scroll was nowhere to be seen so she didn't really have an option to call her weapons locker. Port and Oobleck were gone as well, presumably hauling Ironwood off like pig in a sack, leaving just Ruby and disoriented Jaune-rant to combat Penny.
The way Penny acted made Ruby's skin crawl in a way that sort of reminded her of her first meetings with Jaune's shapeshifting- like there was something inhuman within Penny's cheerful exterior. "J-Jaune… can you fight?"
The Tyrant gave a muted growl which Ruby translated as 'yes.'
"Right…" Ruby braced herself and turned towards Penny. "Listen, Penny, I don't know what is happening right now, but you aren't acting like yourself. C-can we all calm down and resolve the situation uh… what's the fancy word Weiss uses… uh, resolve our issues rationally?"
"Friend Ruby, you have ten seconds to re-engage your restraining device or you will be treated as hostile entity towards Atlas." Penny replied cheerfully, completely ignoring Ruby's attempt to broker a timeout. "Any offensive attempts towards this unit will be countered with lethal force due to urgency of the situation. However! I must demand that you reveal the current state and the current location of General James Ironwood of Atlas. I have lost his locator signal, but the last known position led me here. Disobeying this query will result in me deploying interrogation tools towards your person, friend Ruby!"
"Uh, what?" Ruby tilted her head in bafflement. "What?"
"Evaluating… answer is not sufficiently accurate! General Ironwood cannot be in the state of 'uh, what' and he cannot be located in 'What'" Penny chirped, and the row of blades shot off towards Ruby.
Ruby dodged, cringing as she head the blades sinking into flesh and realized that by dodging the swords, they hit had landed on Jaune. Offering a unspoken apology to the boy, Ruby charged towards Penny. "Penny, no! Don't do this!"
"Friend Ruby, I have my orders and doctrines I must obey. Please surrender!" Penny chirped as she jumped backwards to avoid Ruby's weak and clumsy charge. Ruby had trained with Yang in hand-to-hand combat when she was younger (or rather, Yang had forced her to train), but to say that she sucked at it was a dire understatement.
The low state of her Aura didn't make the situation any easier as it prevented her from using her Semblance to its fullest potential. And when she head a sharp, slicing sound come from behind her, she tried to dodge… and stumbled while biting back a cry of pain.
Ruby collapsed on the ground while holding her leg, and tried her best to stay conscious as she saw a sharp, neon-green lined blade poking through her thigh, having pierced through the entire leg after breaking through her weakened Aura. "A- Ahh!"
She tried to roll, but the blade pushed deeper while she was moving, digging the blade against the ground and sending a massive jolt of pain up Ruby's leg. "Pe- Agh! Penny, s-stop! Please!"
The ginger-haired girl's cheerful smile stayed the same. "Friend Ruby, please cease all resistance and re-equip your restraining device. In case you have discarded the device, please remain still while I fetch one."
"Nghh…" Ruby's vision swam and she glanced towards Jaune, feeling her eyes strain as she was out of Aura. She closed her eyes as she saw that the blades had skewered the boy-creature's body like they had Ruby's- except the binding was far more severe in his case, aiming for legs, tendons, muscles and pinning the Grimm form against the ground. 'Crap, crap crap… I can't look at him, I can't look at him or he can't really fight… He's still weak from being pulled back into control of that body, me looking at him is only making matters worse….'
She realized that the only way to win was thus to shove the Shadow, the ugly and violent part of Jaune, back into control of his body and have it rampage again… against Penny. 'And… something caused him to run amok the last time… Glynda said… oh.'
Ruby gulped as she remembered the flashbang in the dormroom. 'He went into a rampage-mode because we were hurt, didn't he?'
A threatening roar came from behind Ruby, signalling to Ruby that Jaune had seen her state, but at the same time she knew that it would be hard for Jaune to retaliate effectively. Few bone-darts flew at Penny and she parried them mid-flight with her remaining flying swords, and she returned fire by gathering the swords in front of her and using them to fire what appeared to be a energy beam at the shapeshifted boy.
Ruby bit her tongue to cope with the pain. 'So… if we… I get hurt again… badly… could…'
She nodded internally as she found her resolve, grabbed the blade sticking out of her leg, and with almost inhuman effort pulled it out of her flesh by the handle… and swung the blade back, aiming to throw it at Penny.
Penny's expression didn't change. The Atlesian girl opened her mouth, presumably to deliver a warning, but Ruby didn't hear it as her vision was starting to swim and her hearing had become oddly muted.
Ruby saw as Penny turned her head towards the dormitory after delivering the warning, almost as if she was talking to someone else. Seeing her chance, Ruby threw the blade at Penny and braced for the inevitable repercussion of her attack. The blade flew straight and true despite the wobbly aim and even wobblier arm that had thrown it, which didn't surprise Ruby as she had expected something like that to happen- that the the throw would be ineffective as actual attack.
Just few inches before hitting Penny, the blade slowed down mid-flight and turned around to rejoin its brethren behind Penny… and four of the blades launched themselves towards Ruby, one of them stained red with Ruby's blood and three stained black with Jaune's blood.
Ruby braced herself for pain while hoping against hope that her plan might work and that she would survive it… but the pain never came.
Instead, she heard four sharp thuds, followed by brief silence, and then two simultaneous, soft thuds.
Ruby hesitated opening her eyes, instead just taking a small glance in front of her with squinted eyes… and her eyes widened in fright and shock.
Weiss was on her knees in front of Ruby, facing towards Penny.
And there were four steel blades, each lined in red blood, the tips of each poking out of Weiss's back after skewering the girl through her stomach.
Ruby screamed.
Kept you waiting huh.
Next chapter: In few minutes.
