Chapter Thirty-Six

Wrong

Weiss ran from the room after forwarding her damning documents, slamming the window hard enough to crack the panes. She crashed through the leaves and landed hard against the trunk, the bark scraping against her hands and knees when she wiped the growing tears from her eyes.

"Fuck." The tree took the brunt of her anger but so did her knuckles when her shields collapsed from her rampaging emotional control. They flickered back on after a moment of concentration, a rush of Aura dulling the pain, and she fell from the branch to land heavily on the ground. She walked off the pain, groaning when her knees protested at the rough treatment.

A rustle of leaves sounded above her again and she almost mistook it for the wind. Spreading another load of Aura across her body rocketed her away from the building while a set of glyphs detonated prematurely above her, her control too scattered to attempt the prototype railgun correctly. Too many attempts had blown up catastrophically even with almost perfect Aura control but to get rid of the clone she'd abuse the complicated and still theoretical concept.

Blake kept a close tail after avoiding the glyph explosions, keeping to the high ground while her prey attempted to escape on the ground. Weiss turned around when she skated across the courtyard and detonated a glyph in Blake's path after she leaped into the air between the buildings. She expertly phased from a clone and used it to bounce above the glyph, another clone throwing her forward to keep pace.

It still vexed her that she still knew less than nothing about Blake's techniques other than her ability to make clones. She hadn't used any during their assassination of Jacques and she knew nothing of how she secured her labor camp other than using her cat ninja skills to get inside and then dispatch the guards. To shorten her train of thought before a retaliatory knife skewered her, she knew what Blake could do but not how.

An instinctive glyph blocked the second knife hidden in the shadow of the first and she launched off a stationary glyph to meet Blake at her level, hovering in front of her briefly before a cocoon of glyphs surrounded her. Blake's eyes widened vastly, the first stage of Weiss' absolute control forcing her to abandon this body and scramble away from the forming glyphs denoting her second stage.

Another set of glyphs cut off her immediate path to the ground, flashing a dangerous black to keep her stuck the moment she landed on them. She grimaced and formed another clone, pulling on the reserves of Dust within Gambol's sheath to preserve her Aura. The clone served as a barrier when she moved free of it, jumping off her back and continuing her freefall until she landed in the courtyard.

Weiss didn't immediately follow up on the attack, patiently watching through the slowly rotating glyphs of her absolute defense. With no high ground surrounding her this time and no preparation, breaking the glyphs wasn't an option from this range. She'd only tested Weiss' Semblance with touch contact, disrupting the fractal pattern within the usual white glyphs. Black glyphs might've worked on an entirely different concept behind them and she loathed testing a theory on such a slim chance when Weiss could freely escape and run from her problems for at least half a day before her network found her.

Weiss wasn't Ruby.

Letting her stew in isolation at such a critical time boded nothing good. After this entire debacle, she could break down, cry, scream, and disappear from the public Hunter scene to her heart's content but until then Beacon needed her air supremacy to help support the naval fleet.

You're running. She signed, bouncing on the balls of her feet in preparation for any glyphs spawning to capture her. Yet another clone ate up a Dust cartridge and watched her back, eyeing the errant Hunter team prowling about the campus. I saw your will.

"So what?" Weiss replied, taking a seat in her cocoon, deeming the threat against her negligible. "You've signed my wills before, only this time you're not a beneficiary. I can't afford to leave everything I own to people equally in the line of fire."

No, you dolt. Weiss gained a twitch above her eye at her usual term of affection reserved for Ruby. I don't care where your vast wealth goes. You, however, don't get to choose when you die without Yang's order.

"What're you talking about you paranoid cat?" She furrowed her brows in confusion. "My will is a safeguard for the Tournament. Ruby made me realize we're not the immortal gods our forces needed us to be. We lived up to their expectations but even we can die. Yang has almost died more times than I can count but it didn't hit me until Ruby actually did."

Either way, Yang issued an ultimatum in the case both of us die where she will die too.

"I don't want to die." Weiss corrected her line of thought. "I would've killed myself during our stay at my castle. If I was the last of the team, maybe I would've gone through with it." Blake quirked her head to the side cutely whenever she saw or heard something that violated a belief or introduced a new piece of the puzzle. "Or did you make a mistake?"

Blake refused to answer, avoiding Weiss's accusatory gaze and looking anywhere else. The guilt and shame of misreading the will ran through her unabashed. Weiss laughed at her derisively, channeling the full might of the Schnee heiress abandoned so long ago. Memories of a different Weiss flooded in, from a time where her family all but hunted the Faunus in name and she looked down on Blake all because of the fake power her family name granted her.

"Hmm." Weiss hummed to herself, idly tracing the glyph patterns surrounding her. They were such intricately strong constructs, becoming stronger the more concentration she put into recursing the fractal. One recurse provided a faint outline, two filled it, and three provided just enough stability to catch a falling book or knife. She usually recursed at a minimum of five times for any battlefield glyphs as even broken they could provide the support of a surprise. Her cocoon defense however had at least ten recursions and rapidly gained more the longer she floated in it if she could spare the moments needed to reinforce them. "You don't make mistakes, Blake. You make educated guesses that sometimes end up wrong."

I still thought you wanted to die in battle. She admitted, setting aside the knives in her hands. Guess I'll have to cancel the certain death party.

"The fuck's a 'certain death' party?" Weiss dropped from her sphere and slid down another series to come to a stand next to her friend. "And how'd you get anything set-up in the fifteen minutes since I uploaded it?"

Ruby liked to give suicide fireteams whatever extra alcohol or luxuries laying about Glenn a few days before their last missions, giving them a chance to say goodbye and remember. Blake answered, still bouncing with the energy of the failed standoff, practically vibrating. I'm honestly surprised you never noticed the inventory invoices.

"I only had a small part of the administration under my control. Ruby still liked to personally handle the upper tiers, and to be fair to her, she made it work." Blake nodded along with her, still flying in the dark of how exactly their late leader managed, at its peak, over five thousand jaded Hunters.

Yang's going to be disappointed. We had a bonding moment up in the tower after I overanalyzed your will. Weiss pouted at missing the occasion, stuck writing out the decidedly boring and tedious format of a will designed to cede control of the largest corporation on the planet to another. I swear I saw a tear or two.

"Oh please, Yang barely cried when Ruby died as the shock of it all prevented it, and before that, she cried over Qrow's pyre." Weiss shifted through the, what seemed like, ages of memories of the war. So far away that dimension seemed when less than a couple of years had passed since, forever locked out and left to burn under the flames of the Primordials.

Their screech rang through her and she shuddered nigh imperceptibly, Blake taking her hand and squeezing it comfortingly. No matter how much Ruby and Beacon touted them as SS-class weapons, they still crumbled against the apocalyptic Grimm.

"There's something you're not saying though." Weiss stepped up to Blake and stared up at her, pulling her chin down to meet her inquisitive gaze. "You misinterpreted my will, that part I can forgive with that dark cloud you like to keep above your pretty head and your permanent pessimism." Blake immediately shooed the forming cloud away, daring it to strike down with lightning. "But knowing is only part of the solution so you decided to plan around it. The party wasn't just for me, was it?"

Blake disappeared into a shower of Dust and Weiss sighed dejectedly at the hypocrisy of the entire situation. She, of course, got a minder whenever she went and hadn't truly been alone since Blake discovered her broken ability to never leave them out of her sight. Ruby's kidnapping saw to that.

Even asking Blake to silence out all communications only gave her a scant few hours before her autonomous clones grew restless and sought her out themselves for their peace of mind. The independent cells governed themselves much like Beacon fireteams, except they liked to not trust themselves in matters involving the team, paradoxically.

"You're afraid!" Weiss challenged the thin air, circling and scanning the rooftops of the buildings around her. A shimmer in the evening night caught her attention and she preemptively detonated a barely formed glyph, forcing a wisp of a humanoid to dash through the settling smoke and into the open.

Blake came to a stop a good distance down the flagstone path, again bouncing and preparing for a fight with the itchiest of trigger fingers playing with a pair of knives. "You're afraid of getting left alone." She stilled at the words confirming her suspicions and then instantly reevaluated what exactly Blake exuded with her body language.

Was it all a carefully choreographed scene meant to accidentally reveal a secret and drop her guard or an actual accident? A spy as meticulous and experienced as her never left anything to chance if she could influence it. Few events ever slipped by her with her most recent fuck-up being the Vale elections though, with the time she lost in isolation and the general mess the clones became after learning of their leader's fall, she easily forgave that too.

I'm always afraid. Blake signed after sheathing one knife, swaying gently with the adrenaline rushing through her system. So I planned my death. Better for Adam or Neo to die than let either live. The Vale White Fang will collapse once Adam dies and he needs to die at my hands or the Faunus would see it as more senseless human on Faunus violence. I, as his student, will see this cycle of hatred and misunderstanding finally broken. I will take his mantle and give it to Sienna.

"And Neo?" Weiss asked. "She's impossible to trace and can most likely kill us with a pinky or screw with our minds enough to beg for death."

Neo will die just as any living being can and must but whether she dies by my hands, yours, or Yang's doesn't matter. All I can do is try my best to figure out what Ruby would've wanted.

"She'd dead Blake." Weiss coarsely countered. "We already knew what the Tournament will bring. Anything further is not only up to you or Ruby but the entire team and Qrow. Yes, Adam must die. Putting a stop to his particular brand of violent fanaticism outweighs the danger of making him a martyr, but Neo has never openly moved against Beacon as a whole and has even helped us in the past."

Do you know why Ruby disliked Ozpin and Salem?

"If you're about to tell me she had another reason beyond his policy of non-interventionism then I'm going to get you spayed." A knife for her check grazed her shields and flew down the path. She never bothered finding out where she got her 20 billion knives from, if they were just clones of real knives, or if she had clones retrieve the thrown ones. Now she wanted to know that some poor student wasn't getting skewered.

No, but I firmly believe she wanted the three so-called gods and immortals removed from the affairs of Remnant. She didn't immediately respond to her thoughts, watching through narrow glacial eyes. Yes, Ruby never hid her ire about the previous Headmaster or her disdain for the grand chess game Salem played with her minions. Honestly, other than that nightmarish invasion into her personal realm that again almost cost Yang her life, Ruby a couple new scars, and her a permanent fear of the Primordials, Salem didn't have the largest impact on the war.

Sure Salem created and commanded Grimm but she enjoyed stomping on them. Beacon specifically taught combat against them in the first place and if there was anything she excelled at beyond pure theory it was slaughtering through the agents of negative emotions.

Agents of chaos were Neo's specialty.

The swap to human targets left many of her Hunters confused and hesitant so Ruby kept all of them on Grimm hunting or defense duty. Of those willing to go on the offensive against Vale's forces, Ruby authorized less than ten teams to actively respond and hunt any human violators to her isolation decree.

Less than seven teams stuck around after she massacred the battalion and only four remained to see Vale fall in the end.

"Neo isn't a priority unless she openly attacks our Hunters." Weiss conceded half a point to her love. "We're already tapped for all of our resources and we can't afford to make her an enemy. I know Ruby used her after she coerced her with ice-cream but that was a loyalty solely to her. And Adam?" She scoffed. "You killed him alone last time. Your suicide technique isn't necessary."

She hummed, practically prowling on dancer's feet, a vicious smirk unnerving the silent and stolid assassin.

"No, that's the problem though." She forced Blake to move with a slow glyph at her foot, blocking a retaliatory knife with another. "You've made peace with your death. That's why you followed me."

Another volley of knives crashed into her glyphs, a crack forming across the entirety of her body length fractal and causing her to frown. Blake smirked condescendingly this time, evidently satisfied she finally managed to at least get a reaction from a glyph at a distance. She could seal up the break in a brief moment, but the simple fact she even managed that irked her.

Ruby had the most annoying plans and ideas.

"I wasn't angry or pissed at my coming death at the Tournament." Weiss continued monologuing, bending down to inspect the three knives at her feet and finding nothing unusual about them. "I was pissed because I had to leave the two of you out of my will for the first time since I started creating them. You were happy someone else wanted out of this lifestyle so you followed to console me."

She quieted down at that, the wind carrying the bare whisper to Blake.

"You're afraid of dying alone…"

Blake disappeared at those words, leaving not a single trace of her existence. That was certainly new and warranted a couple experiments and a terrifying shine gleamed across the icy surface of her irides. Neo alone had that ability with her illusions so Blake really, really didn't need another ability to augment her already stupid clone. The small Dust residue they left behind the only evidence of their existence.

A set of arms around her shoulders freaked her out immensely and she almost threw her attacker off the cliffs a good hundred meters to her left when she felt a blade ready to sever her spine at her lower back. Her shield might've prevented it from touching her skin directly but the pressure behind it alone stretched them dangerously.

The scent of almonds caused her to relax, the nut forming one of Blake's most used poisons, and she leaned against her chest, a chin planting itself on top of her comfortingly. She remained a cuddly teddy bear in her arms for a good time, Blake nuzzling against her hair every few minutes and inhaling her scent, marking herself. The possessive action warmed her heart and she almost, almost forgave her for her freakout with her will.

"You're buying me a dress for the Dance." Blake huffed childishly, expressing her displeasure without her words. She released the hug just long enough to sign her thoughts out but Weiss batted her hand down after struggling to read them backward. "I'm not wearing my black ops kit to it."

She felt the frown against her hair.

"Pyrrha will not be happy when I tell her you're planning on wearing that." Blake cut her on her hip for that, the sharp sting instantly disappearing under her shields and Aura. She traced the injury, sending shivers and goosebump rippling through the smaller woman. "We're going shopping."

Blake spun her around and bopped her, dissipating her look of rapture. I'm technically on duty that night. Weiss scoffed at those words.

"A clone can handle watching the remote server." Weiss grabbed her hand and began pulling her along, making her way to the hangers until the anchor of a woman yanked back, sending her careening back into her arms. She simply pointed up. "What?"

Blake blinked at her, confused.

"There's nothing up there." She traced a few constellations, naming each one and then stopped at the North Star, the ultimate guide for their nighttime expeditions, slowly trailing off on a tangent regarding its archaic name until she stopped and her eye twitched. "You're an ass."

At least I remembered that nothing's open at 2 in the morning. She amended her statement immediately. At least not the ones you shop at.

"Sorry I don't get my clothing at second-hand stores." Weiss bantered back easily with no real bite. She never bothered even glancing at those types of bargain bin places, the remnants of her posh childhood causing an involuntary reaction of revulsion at the thought of wearing a stranger's clothes.

Blake waved her off. Any armored clothing I get from you so anything else doesn't need more than a few Lien. Jeans, leggings, a pair of shirts, a set of good sneakers. I'm frankly certain that I can't remember how to wear a dress.

"I fear for your femininity." Blake cocked her hip and flipped her a middle finger. "Just cause you got boobs and a pussy doesn't make you a chick. For fuck's sake, Yang has more feminine charm and she's the definition of a jacked tank with beautiful blonde hair."

She preemptively stopped the slew of kinetic cursing flying her way.

"And yes, while I know you have seduction down pat, Ruby kinda turned you into an androgynous stealth machine."

You say that like it's a bad thing. Blake responded immediately but the flattened ears against her head spoke louder and clearer.

"No, but you can afford to wear a dress once or twice a decade." Weiss teased lightly, remembering a more innocent Blake during their first dance. A little burdened by her history with the Fang and her revelation of it to the team, she went to the dance alone to the best of her memory. If the Schnee knife hanging over her had disappeared a tad earlier then she'd have danced with her but she'd still had to think about her image and was so deep in the closet she hadn't known she'd been in one.

This time they'd go to the dance with only the coming battle in mind. No family pressures or expectations dared ruin this night and Blake easily found a replacement partner in Pyrrha.

She took out her scroll and searched the number of a boutique her family liked to frequent. Her mother, may she forever remain in the Schnee Chateau in the mountains, took Winter and her to it whenever Jacques wanted to show off their wealth with the newest designs. Someone answered her call on her second try, remembering to route her call to bounce through her Castle so her name popped up on the caller ID.

Her 0200 call annoyed the owner only until she confirmed her name and asked if they had the time for three people to come in in the morning for dresses and suits. Blake protested and wanted a suit instead of a dress but Weiss shushed her. It might've all been Weiss' money but she'd be damned if she couldn't move in case something went wrong during the dance.

Neo sneezed.

"I'm fairly sure they can make something for you that won't cut off your movement," Weiss answered after ending the call, arranging an early morning. "Something like a bodysuit with a skirt and ornamental armor. Maybe Menagerie has a custom or style you know."

I missed the fashion trends of my home after not visiting for years. Blake deadpanned and Weiss chuckled guiltily. Blake's height of fashion extended to the button-down shirts she stole from Ren half the time and the sneakers Weiss force bought for her after duct tape couldn't keep an older pair together anymore.

Frugal was a nice way of describing her spending habits, armor and tech toys notwithstanding.

"Now I'm a little too hyped up after that chase so I'll take a patrol and file a flight plan to Hearth." Blake nodded and grinned, drawing a knife and flipping it casually, practically egging Weiss to a spar to help relieve both of them of their stress. "We can play after you get me a summary of how we'd like to use the Atlesian droids and naval fleet, a detailed plan of the Arena's proposed movement to Glenn and its evacuation, and the profiles of our S-ranks, including Neo."

Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? Blake repeated the last letter to express her curiosity.

"I've had my dress since we went into isolation so I'm gonna use this trip to brief James and his team of Generals, and hopefully circumnavigate the clusterfuck waiting for me when he learns about the pink thing. If it's a digital copy take precautions." Blake stared at her to make sure she remembered who had the most experience with black ops on the team and she knew it would all be handled by sunrise. "Since I know that another clone has been listening in on this all the time so how about we play that cat and mouse game you so like?"

Who's the third person?

"Your tall and statuesque girlfriend." Blake narrowed her eyes and untangled part of the ribbon on her arm.

You have three seconds to run.

Weiss laughed and bounded off onto the rooftops, dodging a volley of knives sent her way.

AN: A short chapter but I'm trying to stick to my once a month updates from now on and, just because I'm generous, I might make it a weekly thing for the fun of it. So shorter chapters (around 3-5k words) but more frequent options. I'm toying with a few changes to the timeline as it's literally hit me that this is CHAPTER 36. This was supposed to be less than a 30 chapter affair but it's become ridiculously long and, while some of you love the long drawn out stories with character development, I also want to move onto the sequel. Thanks for the read and drop a review, follow, and favorite. Helps me out in learning how to write better and track what is and isn't working!