Chapter Thirty-Seven
Resolve
Blake jumped up to the ceiling, sticking with the sheer power of her claws and comedy, when a knife pierced the door of JNPR moments after she knocked, sticking out partially. Whatever adrenaline Weiss helped quell with a six hour game of tag reared its head with a vengeance and sent her heartbeat skyrocketing. She managed to persuade a few of the night patrols to help organize a game of hide and seek after the first hour, but Blake cheated accidentally when her clones joined in without her consent and caused everyone to team up against her.
They all lost hilariously.
Weiss summoned a glyph to her palm and shoved the knife back into the room, peeking through the hole. No one on their sister team incorporated knives in their combat, at least according to the last time she read Blake's report on their training. Ren liked his pistols and ice pick hand combat, Nora smashed… a lot, Jaune tanked and shield bashed, and Pyrrha excelled at everything though she vastly preferred her xiphos and shield combination.
She tried the doorknob right after, and upon finding it still locked, knocked again in the hopes of getting a real response. No knife came flying through the door and she waited a few more moments until Pyrrha opened the door in her pajamas, rubbing the sleep from her eyes and stretching this way and that. A bead of sweat formed on the back of her head when she noticed yet another knife clenched in her hands.
"It's seven-" Pyrrha yawned widely, eyes still mostly clocked and barely registering the weapon in her hand, "o'clock. I have sleep to catch up on so I'll do my training later."
"Summer vacation only applies to B-ranks and below so get dressed and stop whining." She snapped her fingers and Blake crawled down the wall and handed over a packet of papers, still upside down and digging deep furrows in the drywall. She smartly chose not to comment on her shenanigans and thumbed over the top sheets of the papers, checking over to make sure everything was in order. "Your official promotion papers as an A-rank under Beacon's command. Congratulations."
"Eh!?" That wiped away the remnants of sleep from the woman and she grabbed the papers without hesitation, staring confused at the sudden appearance of a throwing knife with them.
"You already had that in your hands when you opened the door, and you also probably threw the one at the door." She pointed it out and Pyrrha screwed her face in confusion, glancing back at her bed. Weiss poked her head in right after and spotted the set of knives on the bookshelf and then immediately popped out to look at Blake, recognizing it anywhere. "Why does she have a set of your knives?"
Blake dropped from the wall and flipped forward, ears slowly dropping from their alert attack position and eyes dilating. Both of her arm ribbons touched the floor, the slight glint of the enforced steel scrapping the hardwood. She took careful note of the three other rapidly awakening Hunters and then noticed the same thing Weiss did, sighing and tapping a message on her scroll for her clones.
Apparently, some of my clones thought her woefully unprepared and gifted her a set. Weiss translated on the fly, entirely ignoring the groans from the rest of the team and the occasional whine to shut up. Pyrrha turned red to match her hair but calmly picked up the fallen weapon to join the one in her hand back in the pouch. She welcomed the gift wholeheartedly, especially after the late night date, but her instincts might've skewered Ren, who frequently woke her, and already had mutilated a poor door.
"Can we not talk about that please?" Pyrrha asked with a desperate plea, shoving the memories of last night aside, and they obliged, Weiss thumping Blake for the entire screw-up. Silently, she let her know that whatever incident she engineered or stumbled upon actually gave the woman some spine for the inevitable slaughter coming their way next week. Every A-rank would have to claw their way through Grimm and Fang, regardless of their predilection for human combat. "And I thought I had therapy today?"
"Which is why you should hurry up if you want a dress to the dance. Chop chop." Weiss relished the look of shock she got, inwardly cackling.
"But I have a dress." Pyrrha protested, grabbing a set of casual wear anyways as she fully expected Blake to kidnap her if she resisted. She fully understood the gap between them after Blake decimated through a Fang capture squad. Weiss stopped her from disappearing into the bathroom the moment she started shaking, tears welling in her eyes. She hugged her and let her ride out the episode, ignoring the lack of a visible trigger for it.
Pyrrha clung to her incredibly tight and she winced as the pressure of her nails against her shields. She got crushed against the woman's chest and did her best to console her with the limited amount of movement she had, Pyrrha hiding her face in her hair. Another pair of hands pushed them from the room and into the adjoining bathroom, Blake sparing them the inquisitive looks of Jaune, Nora, and Ren.
She wrenched Pyrrha's clothes from her and had her stripped before she knew what was happening, her victim reacting before realizing they'd both seen everything, and more, already. Blake clicked her tongue in irritation when she needed help wrestling her pajamas down, Pyrrha gently removing her hands and doing it herself. She made another noise and inspected her, Pyrrha spinning around at her behest, apparently satisfied with the ratty pair of jeans and white linen shirt.
Weiss shamelessly noted the light material let her dark bra peek on through, Pyrrha sighing sarcastically when she noticed, warm and satisfied from the appreciation from her girlfriend.
Lover.
Whatever.
She understood why labels sucked.
"You okay?" Weiss asked, rubbing her arm when she flinched, again the memory of her encounter with the Fang washing through her. The scent of disturbed earth and blood invaded the bathroom, the silent swish of knives cutting through the air echoing against the tiles, the explosion of Blake's frighteningly small caliber bullets drowning the exhaust fan. She came to reality after a sharp pain on her forearm interrupted the terror, forcing her to look down at the small magical cut that appeared from nowhere. Weiss wiped a knife on her white jeans, staining her thighs with two crimson marks. "Pain breaks illusions of the mind pretty effectively."
"Can we not talk about it here?" They both nodded sagely, aware she might not have wanted the traumatic experience aired for her team to pry into. She pushed through them and almost ran out of the room, ignoring the stares of her team. They followed her, Pyrrha leading them to the public landing pads until Blake nudged her to the side towards the hangars. She complacently followed, Weiss grabbing her wrist and tugging her along.
She missed entering the hangar cum workshop until Weiss pushed her onto one of the cargo netting seats and strapped her in, fiddling with the straps until she had secured her. One word from the heiress had the craft lurching into the sky with the soft hum of turbines rapidly spinning around her. She heard the brief seal of air into the compartment got one strap undone before the thrusters kicked in and she gripped her seat tightly, settling in until they ascended to cruising speed.
"You're now isolated a few thousand meters above Vale." Weiss came about and pried her grip free, helping her untangle the mess of straps holding her tight. "Now talk or I start tickling." Pyrrha just stared up at her in confusion, quite willing to test the threat and see how far she'd take it until a new voice interrupted from the cockpit entrance.
"She will tickle you into submission," Yang confirmed her suspicions, leaning against the set of beds sequestered into the fuselage. She instantly relaxed until a hiccup wracked her body, causing her to jump at the sudden change, frowning at the embarrassing happenstance. Weiss set her free from her looming presence, throwing herself to sit across from her.
"Hug?" She asked, sticking her arms up childishly with a look of innocent want beaming across them. Yang couldn't resist the offer, pulling her up and squeezing her tight. She didn't know why she wanted one but she'd be damned if she didn't help give her some peace after her first of possibly many traumatic battles. "Hugging you is different from hugging Weiss. You're much taller."
Yang had to stare up at the red amazon warrior, slightly snubbed that her freakishly tall stature got blown over with the few centimeters. The Pyrrha from their first dimension never seemed to enjoy her high height, paradoxically turning in on herself to appear more normal, especially when compared to Nora. Yang and her were the rare females who broke the imperial 1.8-meter ceiling. She never had a problem with it except for the boys she tried to date in Signal.
Tried being the operative word.
"What's up tomato?" Weiss snorted at that nickname, descending into a set of giggles at the nickname. Pyrrha looked over to Blake but found her busy with a book while reclining in her bed. Her ears swayed here and there denoting her interest. She then stared down at Yang, face scrunching as she toyed with the nickname before deciding she didn't like it, shaking her head. "Eh, I'll figure out a name for you eventually."
"What's wrong with my name?" Pyrrha asked immediately, causing Yang to turn her frown on her, recognizing the deflection of her question. She sighed deeply, collecting her thoughts and trying her best to remember how she dealt with the less violence inclined Hunter during their first war. She fixed her a glare, keeping her from looking away by cupping her cheeks until she leaned forward and rested her head against her shoulder. "I'm having… flashbacks."
Yang spun them around to look over at Weiss who replied with a more in-depth answer. "She flashbacked to that moment when we woke her and she fought instinctively with Blake's gift knives."
"That's better than a few Hunters," Yang explained, turning back to Pyrrha. "You're still here at least. Some Hunters during our war asked for transfers to border districts or remote outposts. You haven't attempted to instantly murder Blake so brownie point for you and you also haven't completely broken down and retired. Hmmm."
"Yang?" Weiss interrupted, her wife swinging around and smiling brightly. "This is classic PTSD. This isn't the broken victim that Ruby was or the wanton machine over there on the bunk." Blake threw her shoe at her and it conked her in the head, bouncing off her shield before she addressed Pyrrha directly. "The best thing we can do is hand you off to Monty and deal with whatever comes with the straitjacket approach."
"I thought you were supposed to be compassionate to trauma victims?" Pyrrha asked after she digested that.
"Pyrrha, we fought too many years with rationing and field training under our belt to ignore a fully stocked medical facility with experts specifically trained to handle PTSD." Yang sat her down on her lap and cradled her, keeping her still to explain part of their history not covered in the presentation after reading the notes from it. Most of what Glynda threw to the Hunters barely scraped the surface of their war, almost painting it romantically before the death tolls slapped everyone. "Ruby required drugs to manage her worst moods, stuff we spun together from scraps. If those failed then we either restrained her or attempted to kill her. We didn't have the luxury of talking her through an attack like in peacetime and I severely doubt those two methods are the best we can do for our Hunters right now, even if you'll probably get something prescribed to your, what was it, panic attacks?"
Weiss and Pyrrha nodded.
"I'm not exactly comfortable with taking drugs for such a minor thing." Everyone, including Blake somehow, groaned at the typical answer from a Hunter. A quick inspection into how the mute Faunus made the sound revealed her to be dragging her shoe down the wall near her feet, the rubber stepping in for her vocal cords. They'd have to see about getting her a wrist-mounted soundboard once all of this was over for more comedic effects and timings.
"Listen. These drugs are meant to help you and it might even turn out that they won't give you anything other than more therapy sessions." Pyrrha protested the manhandling while in her lap but a blast of warm Aura from the arms wrapped around her dissuaded any further action. "Your pride or mistrust aside, it's heaps better than the amphetamines half of our forces used to keep up with the grueling pace of the war. No one wanted to admit that we needed them but it was either that or fight on little to no sleep and potentially lose even more."
With quite a centrifuges and extractors devoted to keeping Ruby up and running at full capacity, the rest of the Hunters, without her instructions, took it upon themselves to acquire more machines and product to create forms of amphetamine and adrenaline for use in an emergency, launching a campaign among their forces to ensure proper and safe use to prevent any overdoses. It was remarkably well received, everyone appreciating the emergency aid they could call at any time instead. Most of them understood not to use the drugs too much or risk complications, and few that did fell quickly in line after a couple of class lessons. Stretched thin as they were, the ten teams willing to snipe Vale and Atlas military got priority with the teams rotating to give time for their bodies to work off the side effects. Ruby quietly ignored the campaign, only stepping in to correct dosages and deliver them if need be. Of her team, only Weiss took a packet to keep her reserves artificially high during combat, Yang tanking literal plummeting Airships and missiles to return stronger and Blake creating clones from Dust.
"You're taking this entire affair a little too far. I know I should take this help but it was one little incident. There are probably dozens of other Hunters that could use this and it's not like it's going to get anywhere as bad as it was in your timeline. You're all here and you know it's coming." Pyrrha shrank in on herself, fiddling her the ends of her hair, not meeting Weiss's gaze. Many Hunters fell into the similar trap of ignoring medical help to have others take it, and that was all good during wartime with limited resources but not when they had a private hospital that had limited patients.
"Those flashbacks aren't something anyone can ignore. They can become nightmare terrors and you have a great chance of seizing up in the middle of a battle, even against Grimm and literally anything can potentially trigger an episode. Beacon needs you whole and we can't afford one of our few A-ranks not fighting at full." Weiss leaned her hands on her knees and her chin on them, smiling serenely and hoping she could impart some wisdom to her and at least make her accept the first appointment properly. Angela would make sure she kept coming back if needed as she made Ruby come back every time… somehow. Ruby never complained and dutifully took her medicine, and maybe she did to make sure she could administer the Hunters at efficiency, or maybe Angela had her mystical ways.
Either way, Pyrrha would get better.
"And you're wrong about the war," Yang added, exercising her authority as Headmaster to ignore a few rules. With how often she found Qrow's Commander paperwork on her desk, she might as well have taken his job. Monotonous and incredibly minute, she combed through literally everything from ordering foodstuff from Vale's agricultural districts to checking maintenance records on bullheads. Most of it was her duty anyways to ensure Beacon ran every day but keeping districts stocked with munitions was definitely his job. Not that she complained too much as him in charge of everything alone meant all of their budget spent on luxurious alcohol. "Even knowing what's happening isn't going to stop heavy casualties on both sides in the worst-case scenario. Of the six S-ranks Beacon can field, Hunters that can and have killed armies before, we're expecting to lose three by the end of it on top of 10,000 Atlesian droids and over 2,000 Hunters. That's not even including civilian casualties."
Blake rose from her seat while they talked, stretching from her catnap. She hadn't read anything other than a sentence before she drifted off, keeping the fuselage conversation in the back of her mind, a barely coherent string of syllables she understood just enough to listen to her name in the event she needed to throw another shoe. Padding over to the cockpit, she checked the readouts and raised their altitude, switching on the afterburners after confirming the fuel levels. These luxuries still surprised her, so used to running across landscapes and small seas instead of slotting in fire Dust rods and spinning up a ship.
A brief spout of anger dared direct itself to Pyrrha and the other green Hunters for living without the burden of war. Too many of their Hunters spat at the sacrifices of the few, lost on their zeal of destroying Grimm. In all fairness, asking them to fight in a war that none of them had signed up never sat well with any of them, but they weren't gods and even they needed help from relief forces. Hopefully, Pyrrha would live through this with the knowledge of how brutal combat could be and decide against ever warring again. She expected part of the A-ranks they'd meet before the Tournament to politely decline the engagement but stick around to defend against the Grimm.
The rumble of the afterburners switching in pushed her into the seat, the dull roar of Weiss' engines singing in harmony. She checked the clouds below them, marveling at the poofy shapes and the other immaterial fluffs created by the changing winds. They provided cover from the sun and the ground below, potentially hiding enormous entities up to Primordial size in their watery bodies. She wanted to be sad at that, comparing the daily brilliance of clouds with their military use rather than enjoy them. War made her this weapon more than Ruby ever was, her leader needing perfection to eliminate the more closeted cells and people of interest.
She ignored the occasional radar ping after automatically reaching for the chaff defenses and joysticks to roll the craft in the event of incoming missiles. Weiss had these maneuvers down pat, capable of spawning anchor glyphs on all of them in milliseconds. Pyrrha might get a bit tossed around by the time she synced a glyph to her body but better battered than dead in a conflagration of explosive Dust.
Her inner pyromaniac lit a match, watching the little flame sway vividly. Her opportunity to blow stuff to smithereens would come later. Yang commandeered her supply of incendiaries and explosives after she went a little too overboard clearing a suspected Fang base. Wasn't her fault shoddy engineering turned the concrete bunker into a rebar pipe bomb. The resulting shockwave might've destroyed a hundred kilometers of rich biodiverse forest but removing the fortified and hidden location hampered Fang movement and reinforcement.
Weiss called her name after the ship hit the open waters, interrupting her glorious lounging in the padded pilot's chair designed for long-distance trips. She stretched behind her and touched a canister full of Dust tucked into the entryway cubby, her Semblance pulling a small amount to create a clone that sat up from her body and walked over to the fuselage. Her unique disability made her a picky conversationalist with a small percentage of people able to understand her. The deaf community made up part of her information network after all.
She dozed off again, setting the console to ping whenever they entered Atlesian space, settling in for the hour nap ahead of her.
Yang and Weiss made sure to stay away from the walking ticking Blake bomb after they crossed into Mantle, pushing Pyrrha over to defuse the situation. Knowingly setting the alarm didn't help soothe her rationally and she growled at the operators when they hailed the craft, her clone preemptive pulling in Yang to help out. Beacon understood her prevalence for dots-and-dashes and shorthand but Atlas did not.
Pyrrha carefully approached the wounded animal and simply pulled her into a sideways hug, tucking her under her head and petting her just a tad too tightly to prevent her from gaining the movement necessary to maim her. The irritation in her melted away and she sank into Pyrrha's hold, enjoying the embrace before stepping back and giving her a thumbs up, thanking her afterward. The redhead responded with one of the few signs she'd picked up so far.
Weiss and Yang approved of her handling methods, the amazon stubborn just enough to ignore the bad blood from the incident and comfort her. She'd do her good, mellowing the strung Hunter and potentially even returning her self-worth the longer their relationship thrived as she was fairly sure that if she wasn't obscenely rich, Blake would either steal all for their money or sell her body without any hesitation. She shuddered to think if they ever came to that point and she didn't want to know her answer. Her team got lucky with her ability to reshuffle money and receive contracts from Beacon for low cost to send them stockpiled weapons.
Nepotism at its finest.
Blake handed her a flash drive and pushed her from the ramp, waving goodbye and giving her clone the signal to spin back up, Yang blowing a kiss as the ramp closed. They disappeared off the edge of the landing pads, rolling over and shooting off down to the main fashion districts, a quiet scream echoing as Pyrrha clung to the netting
Though Yang had announced their arrival and Blake had properly filed a flight plan into and out of Atlas, she still received distrustful looks from the Hunters milling around the mountain base. She facepalmed hard enough to leave an echo, realizing none of them knew who she was. The white hair gave her away as a Schnee and that was it. Her title as Famine and the Angel of Vale were forgotten by the world and she only existed here as the sister of their next General, if even that.
Her black ops outfit certainly didn't endear her, the tight-fitting kevlar reinforced material with a blank face mask attached to her hip. She had a few changes of her white outfits tucked into her go-bag on the Ruby but she hadn't worn them since her time in the castle. The black outfit tricked her body into working overtime, used to wearing it during the most challenging missions, or at least that was how she chose to explain it to herself.
James didn't know she was here and she should've messaged him in flight once they reached their tower range but she'd surprise him just to hug him in front of all the Generals and show how much of a softy he was. Granted, that didn't require a surprise but she didn't want to say she got lazy and forgot to make the call or send a message.
Atlas tower sat inside the mountain at the very peak but the landing pads sat a few hundred meters below that, leading into an enormous tunnel where they stored their Airships. The dry air reminded her of Glenn, thousands of metric meters of air funneled into through vents to keep the population alive. Unlike Glenn though, space was a luxury, everything tightly packed in once she turned into a hallway. She barely managed to find the admin desk after making three wrong turns and then resorted to asking a passing Hunter.
The secretary looked at her like she was an oasis, another human stopping by to make conversation enough to break the monotony of her work. Her heart wasn't in the flirting though and she judged everything about him vainly. Too large of a forehead, eyes not bright enough, sloppily maintained uniform. She nitpicked over anything, idly tapping her fingers until she moved their conversation to Ironwood and his location. He resisted her charm as was his duty, asking her questions as to who she was or what was his business here and what her Hunter affiliation was until she dropped her pseudo-relation to their General and he instantly picked up the scroll and dialed away.
He beckoned for him to follow her after a few tense words and she smiled brightly, bouncing slightly with each step. Her demeanor startled the usually strict and uptight Hunters, all decked in Atlesian military uniforms with their affiliation to Hearth pinned on their breasts and shoulders. They all walked in tightly knit groups in step from hours of drilling but here she came in, dressed out of place and ignoring the rigor around her. How Atlas got anything done with their discipline intensive routine baffled her, Beacon prizing out of the box thinking combined with small fireteams rather than Airship sized forces dropping in. Even their extermination teams had double-digit numbers instead of the usual four.
She eventually got lead into a shockingly similar elevator complete with exactly the same tune as the one in Beacon. Once she found out where Ozpin disappeared to, she'd gleefully send him a package of glue for him to sniff. Her unwilling companion returned to his desk, leaving her to endure the musical torture alone. Her foot started tapping on its own and she admonished it sternly.
James looked up from his desk, glancing at his surprise guest. The last time she saw him he had been dressed in his immaculate uniform with a faint beard of sandpaper tying off the entire style as a respected and grizzled General. Now his suit had a faint few wrinkles as if he hadn't left for the entire day and then managed to fall and have a steel brush cling to his face. Her giggle caused him to briefly look over himself and chuckle wryly, helplessly smoothing the jacket creases and combing through his beard with his fingers.
"I don't care how you look, Dad." She spoke first, brushing aside any excuses he could give at his sloppy appearance. Ruby wore whatever she had washed at the moment, her missions often costing Glenn tons of hydrogen peroxide or bleach. More often than not she had a simple set of clothing Blake bought from a store, and on one occasion, and only one, she wore a skirt.
She had Yang annihilate it the day after, feeling too exposed with it on.
"I'm only here to brief you on Beacon's S-ranks."
"This could've been a scroll call." He straightened in his seat, observing her with suddenly sharp eyes. While S-rank information was kept hidden from the general public, and only released to the Council on their specific request, the affiliated Hunter factions actively shared roster information concerning their highest ranks. Ozpin hadn't done his job at Ruby's behest, keeping them under wraps with no way to explain how four weapons dropped from the sky onto his lap.
"I treated my team to dresses for the Vytal Dance." She started, striding over to his desk and plonking down on one of the chairs, far too comfortable in a new environment. The six knives Blake strapped to her added that extra bit of security and Myrtenaster itself peeked over her shoulder in a dark sheath. "Five of my S-ranks are all recognized in the system but the last one isn't, and you've tried to arrest her in the past."
"I've tried to arrest the younger Mrs. Belladonna the first time her name popped up in the system but Ozpin protected her," James answered, reminded of the hour-long call that ended up with both of them screaming at each other. Ozpin was fanatically certain she offered more to Beacon if she served as a Hunter rather than in a jail cell, freely providing information on her past organization. He reluctantly staved off after she entered into the intelligence division and dropped from the radar.
"Yes, but the last S-rank has successfully murdered one of your Generals and the last presumptive Fourth of Beacon." He didn't freeze as she hoped he would, simply groaning and dragging a hand down his face. Only one menace ever managed to get close enough to kill one of his and he'd personally chased her across the different mountain districts, always snatching at mirror shards whenever he thought he got close. "You know who I'm talking about then."
"Weiss, I don't know what she offered you or what you think you're playing with but she's incredibly dangerous." He stood from his desk and walked to his bar, another annoying similarity between the offices. Did every Academy's highest officer have a built-in liquor cabinet or was there a correlation with power and vices? She took her scroll and tried to remember if she kept anything personal on it, shrugging after a bit and slotting in the drive.
"We know." She pulled up the information on their S-ranks, cycling through the profiles and strengths of her, Yang, Blake, Raven, Qrow, and Neo. Yang made the call last night to exclude Tai from the list, focusing his attention on the clusterfuck of an evacuation waiting to happen. "Neo has a rap sheet long enough to leave Qrow scratching his head with what's true and what's not but my team has an… understanding with her."
"So that's her name." He remarked, handing her a drink she gingerly sipped at for the scroll. He inspected the other five profiles only briefly, marking down how they fought and how they'd be used in the coming fight but spent the longest on Neo's, swapping back and forth to her image and then to her abilities, trying to ferret anything he could from the static info. "You trust her?"
"Her full known name is Neo On but that's an anagram for No One. Everyone else seems to be under the mistaken impression that her name is Neopolitan due to her unique hair and eye coloring, even her partner, the weapons trafficker Roman Torchwick, which is how we keep tabs on her." She explained the rehearsed history of their little secret, stringing him along with it as it certainly made more sense than saying time travel and dimension-hopping. Trusting Beacon was enough of a risk and was bound to bite them in the ass but this deserved at least some level of trust due to Neo's inability to keep out of trouble. Seriously, blowing up a fountain?
Probably for shits and giggles.
"And no, we don't trust her. We simply trust her motives and we have insurance against her more destructive tendencies." James didn't know why she didn't just say 'blow shit up', but he supposed more than a decade of high society training was hard to break free of. Her crude mouth and vocabulary beyond that was a vendetta against that for all he knew.
And he'd be right.
"Yang traded away Ruby's scythe," She stopped when James shot up from his seat with an expression repressing she committed heresy and he couldn't believe it. He vented for a good five minutes before realizing she was watching him, bemused at his antics. "No, please continue. The lower levels haven't heard you yet."
That elicited a blush from him, red peeking through the thick mess he called a beard. "I said 'traded'. Yang now holds her umbrella rapier, a weapon made of a material we can't identify. We've tested it to make sure it's not one of her illusions," And Yang had a lot of fun subjecting the weapon to all sorts of spectacular experiments, ending with her dive-bombing off their Tower and then breaking an industrial press.
Not in that order.
"With the metal defying any known characteristics, its current value is enough to buy out the Schnee R&D department and still have some change left over." That much was true and she gained nothing from keeping that piece of information hidden. Other than the rather strongly made composite material of the umbrella itself, that eventually burned under the testing, the metal resisted even Yang's annihilation, putting it firmly within the category of objects Yang couldn't destroy. "As much as her scythe mattered to us emotionally, keeping Neo pacified without her main weapon and gaining a tentative alliance outweighed keeping her as an enemy."
"An ally for you and your team, but certainly not for Atlas." He returned the scroll and sat at his desk, swiping open several folders until he entered one titled surveillance. After another search, a video still of the woman in question displayed on the holographic screen, wearing a block of mechashift on her back and standing above another woman. It certainly didn't look good for her. "Do you know who she was?"
"I assume you'll enlighten me?" Neo, if anything, was more mercenary than assassin, picking and choosing her targets with extreme care and always for a reason. Her long and exhaustive list of crimes rarely included such deaths when compared to the confusing mess of break-ins, inventions, and pranks. She promised to stop rationalizing psychopaths in their next life, both of the ones in her life leaving enough gray hairs to leave a visible patch among the snow on her head.
"This was the Winter Maiden, Glacea. She was traveling from one of our bases up north to here when her convoy was attacked and they were left stranded for hours in the cold until we could reach them. Many suffered frostbite but all returned mostly intact."
"Wa- wa- wa- wa- wait. Hold up. Time out." Weiss blew a whistle she found in her pouch for comedic effect, setting a mental note to remind her to thank Blake later. "ALL of them survive and so did your Maiden? That's not like her."
"She still did something to Glacea that we can't fix. For now, she's still in the ICU warming up from the hypothermia but none of the medics can figure out why she can't mold Aura anymore. Her core still registers on the scans, but all of her pathways have, for lack of a better term, dried up. Three weeks and she's still in a coma when her Aura should've helped heal her."
"Would this be a bad time to ask if Ozpin informed you of the death of Amber, Vale's Maiden?" She heard his neck snap very unhealthily with a vein pulsing deeply in his neck. Hmm, so Ozpin again casually forgot to mention something to the other and threw them into the frying pan.
"Weiss!" She snapped to attention almost reflexively, her left hand hanging loosely at her side while her right curled a fist over her heart. He blinked at the instinctive action and then composed himself again. "This isn't a joke anymore! Two Maidens are gone and we have no idea if the other two are okay. Do you have any idea what they can do?"
"Other than manipulate elements and unlock a bunch of dusty old Relics hidden under the Academies?" She reached into her back pouch and removed a wreath of laurels, the pale green of the leaves sparkling gently against her skin and hair. There wasn't anything special about the damn things in the first place. They weren't nukes to end the world and certainly had no control over people. Maybe together they could summon a god or some other fantastical idea, or maybe she wasn't the 'Chosen One'. "No, no idea."
James clammed up instantly, paling to match her skin and reached into his coat to cling to his pistol, quietly murmuring to himself that everything was okay and that this was all just a fever dream. Weiss huffed impatiently and smacked him with the Relic, forcing him to restart violently, gripping his desk until it cracked.
"You… actually… have one of the Relics." He whispered reverently.
"Don't really know what everyone has their panties twisted up in a bunch for." She spun the wreath on a finger, unknowingly causing him to suffer through mini heart attacks every time she threw it into the air. "Other than looking pretty and being indestructible, this one doesn't do anything."
"Weiss, the very first Commanders tasked the Academies with protecting these Relics." He stuttered a bit as he clutched his chest. "To remove it almost incites a war with the other three countries. The legends behind these are tremendous."
"I'll put it back once the Dance is done if it helps you sleep at night." She consoled him. "I only need it for my hair so I look good in my dress."
His brain officially called it quits at that, unable to process the absurd notion at removing a potentially obscenely dangerous artifact to wear it as an accent piece.
AN: OMG, a chapter within a week's time? Did he keep to his promise? WTF. Please enjoy you rabid fanatics! Favorite and Review!