Chapter Four
Familiarity
"Ruby, I'm going to smack you." She would too if she could turn far enough around in the slipstream. She hadn't said anything, keeping her ravenous smile as she asked Phlegethon two more questions about any established buildings near his river and then asking him for a general direction. He answered to the best of his ability, only providing a general relative direction with his entire perspective locked to the river itself. Ruby didn't seem to care too much about spending an inordinate amount of time running across the dark terrain trying to find a place that was 'within sight range' and 'along the left bank as the river flowed'.
It wasn't like they had cardinal directions in this bleak landscape or satellites to give terrain readings with a coordinate system to boot. She frowned at that, realizing that this place most likely didn't even conform to the shape of a planetoid seeing as it didn't exist in real space in the universe. For all she knew about this place, it could either be a flat plane floating in the nether somewhere or existed inside a sphere. Ruby didn't need to care for astrophysical theoretics but she sure learned enough from Yang by just standing over her shoulder and watching her tinker with her projects.
"You've spoken more words to Phlegethon than me and all I know is you want to go visit this place." She grunted out petulantly. It wasn't like she had anyone else to speak with and Neo, bless her tiny dark heart, brought them here together. She shouldn't have to compete with a god they just met when Ruby had a history of bringing them to their knees and wiping them from existence. No, Ruby didn't need to throw them from their seats of power seeing as Yang theorized she had simply wrapped Ozpin and Salem into her war against the White Fang but that potential was still there. Sure, she hadn't initially believed Ozpin was anything more than a kooky Headmaster with a penchant for esoteric and cryptic sayings while sipping cocoa, and still thought she made him disappear to a private island with tons of said cocoa, but Salem, or rather the idea of her, terrified her.
Frankly, she was entirely happy Yang and Qrow managed to sweep the entire deity business into the Vault with the emerging Council not having a clue about it. They kept Beacon isolated from their affairs of managing the country and solely focused on defending against the Grimm, rarely stepping in with a team to crush any stray cells Adam left in Vale after Blake's Supernova. She did successfully manage to save any further Hunters from learning to take a life, though she never did learn the secret as to why she forbade any team, S-ranks included, from even flying close to Cassus, much less landing on it. Personally, she suspected there was something on that continent that scared even Yang but Nora thought she was keeping the largest pancake griddle for herself in a top-secret base.
She missed the crazy girl and still wondered how in Ruby's silenced name he ever learned to manage her.
"And don't even think about court-martialing me. Qrow didn't dare contradict Yang and she was my superior for far longer than you." She said over her shoulder and received nothing for her efforts in eliciting a response, making her grunt in contempt. She had nothing to fear from her anyways, not with a complete lack of Hunter presence in this realm. Any evident presence that is with this potentially infinite landscape waiting for them to explore it. For now, and she sincerely hoped it wouldn't stay like this, the endless dark sands blended seamlessly into monotony, the curves of the river and the rapidly encroaching mountains the only sign they weren't stuck in a loop. How she wished she could see a tree again, even a little scraggly and sickly one.
Fuck, even a fern or bush would do. Anything green to break the red, orange, and black everywhere.
Ruby kept her silence as they ran into more rugged terrain where the sand gave way to packed earth and rock, easing up the Aura requirements they needed to expend to get traction on the ground. The moment she slammed her foot into the solid ground again she let loose a sigh of relief, tiny magnetic particles of some unearthly metal clinging to her feet and lower legs. The desert before them offered very little in malleable particles for her Semblance and left her bereft of a tool Ruby first gave her with that little tube of metal filings.
She stopped on a craggy hill much to Ruby's confusion and stomped heavily on a few rocks around her, breaking them into small pebbles with a few more of those and some punches to release her annoyance at Ruby. Ruby let her destroy the rocks for a few minutes, patiently observing as she broke up more and more, gathering pebbles and separating several special ones aside. She eventually had a few handfuls and nodded to herself, reaching into her core and willing her Semblance to grab hold of the metal within. A brief shower of inert material dusted around her as she excited it and extracted the pure substance, wrapping the tiny flecks around her arms in dense cables for easy access.
She congratulated herself and practically jumped a meter in the air when Ruby responded, "My Semblance has evolved far more than I could ever predict."
"Oh, now you choose to address me?" She mustered as much of her early adult training in diplomacy and gave a response in a tone any diplomat could while smearing in the face of opposition.
"Pyrrha," Ruby droned, making goosebumps race along her spine. "We're traveling at just under the speed of sound. Any sound I make gets lost behind me, and any you make flies past me. While I could completely pressurize a shell around us, it'd be a waste of Aura when I'm more concerned about keeping the incoming air from pulverizing your body." She lectured and Pyrrha couldn't help but blush at the obvious answer that escaped her. Yang spoiled her with the modifications to the Ruby with capabilities to make sub-orbital leaps to any point in the planet within hours if not minutes. Runs across the continent became rare with the nimble craft there to move them into range of any nest. This little voyage already stretched her legs more than her last one. Maybe she really was feeling her age. Aches and creaks became increasingly common and required a constant trickle of Aura to soothe them away and augment the still healthy tissue and bones.
She resettled her circlet, releasing a few strands of her hair to fall over her eyes. She almost moved them aside absentmindedly, freezing when she noticed their vivid scarlet coloring. They should've been bone white from her age and stress of dealing with resurgent propaganda and stale fossils clinging to their ways of life. Yang rather enjoyed smacking their heads together or making them disappear altogether, and she really tried hard not to think about her and the darker sides Beacon kept tucked away from the public eye. Ruby heard the first syllable of her agitation for not informing her of her miraculous look until Pyrrha caught those black marbles attempting to bore a hole into her skull. Right... her constant living nightmare for a good decade couldn't see she had regained her youth and wouldn't have said anything even if she could.
Ruby gestured behind her with a flick of her head, making her turn around and notice a set of beige and brown blocks, towers, and walls carved from the mountain just along the river. Some odd creatures, vaguely humanoid in shape, patrolled the outskirts along the walls but for what she couldn't quite guess. They were the first creatures she'd seen in Tartarus other than the river god who stuck by them, seeing a hand of fire wave at her from the corner of her eye from the depths before fading away with the current. "Is that the objective sir?"
"Yes. This place may be a prison but it's not going to stop me from making it livable for the duration of my afterlife." Ruby pulsed her Aura aggressively after her words, the air around them vibrating in a high pitch from the energy release. A trail of dust floated down from the ceiling up above and made Pyrrha sneeze, making her cock her hips and give her the best glare she could, chiding her softly. Ruby held up a hand to make her pause and tapped the air rhythmically, evidently waiting for a blast of air to sweep over them from the direction of the fortress. "I don't know about you but I will recreate my Hunters with whatever I can scrape together and that fortress is my base of operations." Death couldn't do away with her iron will, already laying claim to the stone fortress before they could take it from whoever resided in it. "The other prisoners within Tartarus can join me, human or not, oppose me, or stay out of my way."
"You're starting to sound dangerously like a dictator." Pyrrha sweatdrop at the casual ultimatum she laid out for the Tartarian denizens and she suspected she would get her wish come hell or high water. Ruby grinned at her dangerously, reminding her of the power behind the seat of the Commander, Qrow was almost reluctant to remind Remnant of an S-rank's power, coming down in force only when the Council overstepped their bounds... and whenever Winter needed to smack her Generals around. Their charter described the process of electing a new head but with the blanket classification on the late Commanders, no Hunter actually remembered electing one, Ozpin's induction a faded memory to the surviving veterans. Ruby and Qrow both came to their positions by their predecessor's recommendation with no Hunters willing to contest them with a dearth of S-ranks to go around. He and Yang might've ruled as benevolently but that didn't change that they shared responsibilities as dictators with almost unparalleled and unilateral decision making when it came to their Hunters, interdistrict and border defense, and civil rights.
Neither Yang nor Qrow willingly trusted any other government body with enforcing equality among the people across Vale, leaving the Council to handle the country's budget, foreign trade, and social welfare. The military didn't change much, sequestered to securing trade routes and participating in war games with the other countries. Even they knew not to poke the sleeping dragon and her chaotic nightmare of a handler lest they repeat the folly their alternates tried against the Fourth Commander.
"And what happens if those living inside are innocent and use the fortress as a haven against any threats?" They WERE the threats to those inhabitants, Ruby willing to potentially rip them from the home they made in this hell to further her needs.
"Why do you think I'm not lobbing artillery at the place then, or tearing through their gates without first bothering asking questions?" Ruby posed to her partner, not waiting for a response before continuing, "There are close to four hundred souls within the confines, most of them suspiciously arrayed in a vague square pattern. It's either a prison designed to hold the worst Tartarus can offer, where we'll leave them alone, or it's a prison designed to torture the relatively good immortals that fall here. Either way, we can walk up the front gates and ask politely."
Pyrrha hesitantly nodded, afraid to give the killing machine what amounted to permission from the only person she might respect enough to bother listening to in literal hell and only due to her proximity to Yang in life. For all of Ruby's life, she was either dead or a student to the Commander that killed two gods, uprooted a terrorist network and planned its downfall, and ripped apart a corrupt and hilariously inept Council, all the while under the programming of her team to defend Beacon. Somehow and somewhere someone either really screwed up in her psychological therapy or forgot to put in a limit to how she could interpret her primary directives. Yang theorized that Ruby's flexibility came from the missing blocks they couldn't fit into her personality, the first Ruby's memories bleeding through the barrier Summer created to protect herself from the ordeal.
In her little headcanon, Ruby's Semblance gave her more than freedom of movement, unlocking the ability to think beyond mortal terms.
Ruby whisked them towards the fortress without another world, pulling her along the slipstream and forcing her to move or get dragged in a tumble. With Ruby leading the charge this time, she could focus on the inhabitants roaming about the surrounding territory, packs of humanoids of average and larger sizes stopping to watch them in visibly confusion before giving chase at much slower speeds. She stifled a groan at the sense of bloodlust emanating from those creatures, almost egging Ruby on to find a reason to engage them.
A blast of dry dirt heralded their arrival to the gates, great slabs of wood reinforced with a dark and worn metal inset into a tower with murder holes for easy sniping and a portcullis to protect it from a tank running through. Still, it was nothing against modern technology when a tank could roll up a click away and blast them apart without a worry for civilian casualties. Any of their A-ranks, hell maybe a B-rank, could blast them apart with little difficulty, and that was completely ignoring their lack of any anti-air batteries to make an aerial assault positively trivial.
A group of patrolling creatures with distinctively molded breastplates marking them female slithered up to them and leveled their spears at them. She specifically noted they 'slithered' instead of 'walking' as instead of legs they had serpentine tails in place of regular human ones. Green scales covered their bodies and red monotonous eyes peering out between pointed ears and above a fanged mouth.
They were still not the most terrifying creatures she ever saw, that one Grimm she and Yang scouted out on the shoreline of Cassus prompting a quick retreat and enough Vacuoan tequila to wipe their hardware clean and overpower her Headmaster's ridiculously high metabolism to give her her first ever hangover.
While Ruby didn't bother drawing her scythe, relying on her tremendous speed to outdraw everyone, she deactivated the plate on her back and let Miló and Akoúo̱ fall into her waiting hands, the former already in its Xiphos form. The creatures predictably reacted to her aggressive stance, hypocritically, and waved their spears threateningly at them, unaware she already had her Semblance stretched across the squad. Not all of the spears, however, were made from magnetic metals, a dull brown reflecting the faint red light from above and the orange glow of the river for those unaffected. The ones she could manipulate were gray metal, some version of iron or nickel that was extremely magnetic, much more than the version of the same element on Remnant to the point manipulating them would take little more than a flick of Aura. Some of the buckles on their one piece of leather armor were also magnetic enough to cause enough disturbance if they rapidly charged.
"Ημίθεων," the lead creature hissed in a similar language to the first Phlegethon tried with them and aggressively poked at them with her spear. Wait, was it proper to refer to them as females with female pronouns if she was just applying human norms to these creatures? What if this was their male equivalent or what if they were asexual and had no genders? Ugh, Grimm were such simple creatures with no genders or proper reproduction even, even if Yang gave Rei a gender and called her by the usual pronouns when she should've been a 'they' or 'it'. It was simply funny how Basic never bothered adding in a proper gender-neutral term. "Θα πεθάνεις."
She didn't quite get the direct translation she expected with them not realizing they didn't speak Greek but she got the gist of it when she and her troop reaffirmed their grips on their spears and moved forward as a unit. Their uniformed lines fell into disarray the moment she applied her Semblance, twisting those with magnetic spears into their allies and flinging those without into each other, creating a cacophony of squawks and screeches.
A boom erupted behind her as Ruby smashed through the sound barrier and appeared directly in front of the doors. She reared her fist back and smashed it forward, breaking through the steel-reinforced security bar with a thunderous crack. Thankfully, she had dropped from her supersonic flight before attacking the doors or she highly suspected she'd waste a metric ton of Aura reinforcing her joints and bones to withstand the impact. She mentally thanked her for opening up a path instead of jumping over and laying waste to the courtyard, running along after sending the creatures soaring high in the air to die on the return impact.
Screams ranged out from the parapets and curtain wall, Ruby decimating any of the forces standing in her way. Her scythe lay dormant on her back for the initial salvo, her knives singing through the air and gouging deep into the snake women and other creatures. Large heavyset humanoids with round balls to throw at her fell groaning when she slashed through their tendons. Women with one donkey and one metal leg clanked about clunkily in their attempts to avoid her, unable to see where she would drop from supersonic to throw them from the walls or slash through their throats.
All the while, Pyrrha imagined her doing so stoically without any emotion crossing her face. Disgust nor bloodlust dared flutter through her mind even as golden blood spattered across her form for a split second before erupting into dust that flaked off. The prison guards took a few seconds to react to the intruders, Ruby moving with precision and grace her disability should've hampered. Second after second, a new corpse lay disintegrating in her wake.
Pyrrha took to the carnage with much slower abandon, parrying a lumbering giant with a step into his guard before driving Miló into his gut and pulling it through his side. The expected intestines never came, a deluge of ichor flooding through the slash and disintegrating into flecks of gold. He dropped his bronze cannonball and she bemoaned the lack of the metal's viability. A squadron of those snake women came charging into the courtyard and rushed her, thinking her weak as a solo combatant in the middle of enemy territory. They met the same fate as their counterparts outside the walls, spears getting ripped from their hands to fly into archers pouring from the castle innards or thrown unceremoniously through the air to land elsewhere.
Arrows peppered her shields to no effect, strengthened through the century of combat to survive Beowolf bites and Boarbatusk charges. She almost yelled in frustration when they were also made of non-magnetic metal and wished this backward society bothered evolving to use guns and bullets with the more common steel and iron she could manipulate with ease. Turning soldiers against each other was trivial and bringing down the navy, aerial or not, made her Atlas's most hated enemy to meet when they impeded on Vale waters. She swore Winter sent the punishment platoons her way and coordinated everything with Qrow to kill two birds with one stone.
She didn't even have her usual gourd of metal fillings on her back after her resurrection to sling around and throw sharp rain about or have it infiltrate the lungs and tear from within. The small bits and pieces she wrung from the tormented soil beneath her feet barely created a protective covering around her calves. Still, it would do as she grasped the particles and sent them at a pair of one-eyed giants stomping from the main hall. Their thick skin protected them from the shrapnel quite well, barely eliciting a grunt even as she tore them back and slammed them back in. A cheeky creature attempted to blindside her with a swipe of a magnetic sword she blocked with Akoúo̱ before swinging with her own and beheading it, wrenching the offending weapon and sending it to stab into the eye of one of the cyclops.
It crumbled into agony, letting loose a horrific wail of pain that had her freezing momentarily at the ethics of them tearing into this fortress and killing any in their way. They could feel and had their own language making them far more sapient than the Grimm Beacon waged war against. Other than their willingness to attack first with no questions, making their assault on them self-defense, they had a right to survive as an intelligent species, belligerent as they were. She yanked the sword with a thought and slashed across the other's eye, picking up the other weapons scattered about the courtyard and directing them into the slaughter, dozens falling to her orchestra.
Ruby left her to handle the forces as she delved deeper into the main hall, throwing her knives at anyone crossing through her shells and then blinking forward to retrieve them. The darkness made no difference to her, the torches hung at intervals for the guards flickering away when she blitzed past. Room after room went by as she zeroed in on the largest energy source packed within the neat rows and columns containing fainting little lights in the dark. The screams of the tortured rang as she descended deeper into the prison, executing the errant guard that had the misfortune of crossing her.
The pitiful creatures in the rows of cells were larger than the average humanoid and built incredibly bulky, faintly whimpering as she crossed in front of their doors as if expecting a session of pain. She ignored them, striding onwards to the hulking creature in the center of the building where screams echoed through the tunnels. Crescent Rose transformed quickly, gears and pistons moving in tandem until the enormous scythe balanced precariously in her grip. Petals trailed behind her as she accelerated and bisected the quadruped creature with a human torso grafted to the front, slowly to a walk directly afterward and freeing the prisoner from the table. A choked cry of surprise rang from her victim and she took in the snakes for hair and scales cloaking the body along with the wings fluttering pitifully. A whip of flame sputtered away by her side, useless when it couldn't even perceive her attack.
"Εσύ την σκότωσες." The prisoner croaked in disbelief after freeing the shackles from his wrists. He tried to meet her eyes, flinching when he gazed into those black orbs. Memories of the torture sessions came back immediately until he looked elsewhere, finding the ginormous weapon his savior used to rescue him. Green blood stained the blade, sizzling as it tried to corrode through the blood-forged weapon. The tiny human, at least compared to the weapon she wielded, flicked the blood away at the nearest wall, a small noise of amusement when she registered the toxic properties of the liquid. "Σκότωσες τον Καμπέ."
"Might you speak Basic?" She asked, unwilling to learn the Greek language after Phlegethon revealed how the pantheon moved around the planet and assimilated culture while merging theirs forward. What Remnant called Basic was once known as English and was what the language was called far before the continents shift, cracked, and then crashed back together throughout several cataclysmic events. That much of pre-Remnant history was known from archaeological expeditions that connected Solitas and Anima. The giant nodded hesitantly, untrusting of the demigod that marched into the prison, killed her jailer without a struggle, and freed him. He didn't understand why she referred to it as 'Basic' instead of 'English' but he could speak the language. "Good. Why are you imprisoned and who was this?" His savior kicked the dissolved corpse of the huge monster, speeding up the process and leaving behind a pair of bronze scimitars.
"My kin, the Cyclops, have been imprisoned here since the First Titan War for our loyalty to Olympus." He enunciated, running his wrists to work away the welts left behind by the shackles. "I am Brontes, son of Gaia and Uranus. The jailer by your feet was Kampê, ally to the Titan Kronos, strongest in Tartarus."
"And your loyalty now?" She asked, cleaning her blade with a rag from his pouch. The remnants of the blood fizzed against her skin-tight shield but left no visible damage to the metal. "Olympus left you to rot in here, but I saved you and I could use you and yours to start a civilization for those seeking peace within Tartarus itself."
"It is not so simple, young demigod," Brontes shook his head. "The Cyclops are more craftsmen and weaponsmiths than warriors." Ruby didn't reveal anything, changing her plans for the two hundred or so souls within their new home. She could deal with not having an army for the moment with Pyrrha and herself as frontline warriors that could easily shred through anything Tartarus could offer to fight against them with this Kampê as the biggest threat.
"That is fine," Ruby answered politely. "My partner and I can defend this place as our new home and your kin are welcome to stay regardless if you choose to fight. You will not be imprisoned and we could use craftsmen to build and expand the location for those that wish to find a haven. As far as Phlegethon is aware, there is no other established society within Tartarus and we will be the first to do so. The River That Sustains is willing to negotiate access for nutrition and power to help this endeavor.
"I can speak for my direct brothers and me where we will accept your asylum but the Cyclops from Poseidon's brood may be harder to convince with their direct ties to Olympus."
"They are welcome to leave yet I will not overextend the scarce resources I have if they choose to do so. I plan to make my stay in Tartarus as comfortable and productive as possible and don't have the luxury to deal with dissidents in this hostile place." Brontes nodded, taken aback by her frank offer without any honeyed words. Kronos and his ilk had seduced his family to fight his war and overthrow their father for their joint imprisonment and had promptly thrown them back in after their usefulness ended. Zeus had freed them afterward to create their symbols of power, granting them access to work with Hephaestus until Apollo killed them and sent them back to Tartarus, never to reform again and remain trapped under Kampê's care. This he said to his still unnamed savior, filling her in on the condensed history of the Cyclops. The woman accepted it with a nod, gesturing for him to lead them out of the torture chamber.
She broke the locks on every cell door they walked by with a deft swing of her scythe, terrifying the inhabitants inside until the larger Brontes beckoned them out and explained the situation: that she had come to claim the fortress for her own, killing Kampê, and inadvertently freeing them. She specifically challenged the wording he used, that she hadn't come here to free them and was more interested in the structure. Some of the Cyclops took her words well, preferring the truth, and some, Poseidon's brood she suspected, were upset it took an unaffiliated demigod to rescue them when Olympus couldn't even spare a team to infiltrate Tartarus.
All of them, however, took her offer of residence after they came out of the tunnels and saw the carnage Pyrrha wrought across the outer courtyard. Evidently, she'd gotten bored during the short time Ruby spent inside the prison section and gathered all the spears she could easily handle and drew a big middle finger in the packed dirt. She banked on her sensory field being sensitive enough to pick up on the metal but, just in case she couldn't, she stood in front of it with both her hands raised to flip her off. Ruby got the nonverbal message of throwing her into the conflict without any warning and just throwing her into a conflict in general. She didn't know if Yang actively sought to interfere with human conflicts after the Invasion but she could extrapolate enough from Pyrrha's actions.
She felt Phlegethon waving from the banks of his river, observing the chaos with a bright smile and flare of energy that slammed into her sensory field and filled her with an overwhelming burn to abandon all limitations and tear into any that dared stand in her way, even her ally in Pyrrha. He embodied his river to the very core, breathing life into any that dare intake his waters. It wasn't just injury or disease he could chase away but also any negative emotional restraints while empowering the positive ones to a dangerous point. The tiny part of her revitalized psyche feared what giving it to a berserker like Yang and Pyrrha might do in large doses. For herself, Ruby's original psyche could perhaps heal beyond the freed fragments while Summer could ignore the call of danger and excitement.
It seems there was an upside to surviving her ordeal so at least she could monitor Pyrrha in the event of any side effects from drinking the waters. The older woman would need to first get through the effects of drinking something that was both fire and a liquid at the same time but she could just do as she did and not look at it to begin with. Save herself the headache.
Pyrrha jumped from the bottom of the fortress up to the first level with a smile wide enough for her to register her teeth and the skin she stretched to do so. Her Aura, bolstered by Phlegethon, sang and churned, burning a mind-numbing green with vivid energy stolen from the river. She stepped into her guard and wrapped her in a hug tight enough she heard her shield creaked under the drugged Hunter not able to feel her own strength. The initial test from just passively absorbing his presence promised Pyrrha to develop into a powerhouse to overtake Yang in the next couple of years.
She didn't quite enjoy when she swung her around with a soft squeal of happiness but she did enjoy that she was stuck here with another Hunter.
It took her a good minute to register the dopamine coursing through her veins actually elicited a response.