And onto the fourth arc! The Jaunedice arc, even!
Let's add a wee bit of body horror into the mix as well, why don't we?
In the privacy of his room within Beacon Academy, Jaune would entertain Emerald and Mercury as they asked for his help, elaborating on their situation and what happened to them (though they kept some details, like Cinder's plans and their own motivations, to themselves). Mercury would claim that he owed them both big time for pulling his ass out of the Shopping Centre Shooting with his life. Emerald would hush him however, and both she and Jaune (whom she would continue to call Orion) would have one of the first genuine conversations in the story. Emerald would say that Mercury was right: he did owe them, big time. Especially after what happened in Tipoca…
Here, we would receive the first real details of their shared past, as we flashback to a younger Jaune standing before a burning building as Emerald stared on in angst…
Jaune would tell her off for bringing that up. Emerald wouldn't care.
He owed her. He owed her more than he could ever imagine.
The door to Jaune's room opened up, and Nana Shaula walks in. Emerald uses her semblance to disguise Mercury and herself from the armoured woman as she asks Jaune who he was talking to: she could hear him through the walls. Jaune claimed that he was talking to his family on his scroll, and upon getting a look from the disguised Emerald, he would tell her that he was heading down to Vale in the morning tomorrow.
Meanwhile, down in Vale during the night, Ilia Amitola and her specialised team of White Fang, the White Cloaks, would be brought into the city by Adam Taurus and told to keep their stockpiles of dust secure as he coordinated with his allies in the Black Hand and their benefactors. Ilia would instead split her team and a larger group of White Fang into defending both their stockpiles and the Faunus slums in downtown Vale as the police's treatment of the less fortunate began to worsen over the passing days.
Meanwhile, Commissioner Warren would be lambasted for his handling of the warehouse assault, and his deadline to catch Neopolitan and the two at the Shopping Centre Shooting. As the threat of Providence taking over the policing of Vale, he is forced to take more drastic measures in keeping the peace, increasing patrols and ordering more arrests.
When morning comes and Jaune (as well as a hidden Emerald and Mercury) move to take a Bullhead down to Vale, Penny and Baobhan intercept him, asking where he is going. Jaune lies to them and says that he's going down to Vale for a wander. In reality he is going down to help Emerald and Mercury look for Cinder and uncover who was hunting them. Baobhan tells him that it's not safe for him to go alone. Not anymore. She orders Penny to go down with him.
In Vale, Jaune and Penny move through the streets whilst Emerald and Mercury shadow them and avoid the sparse Providence patrols and growing police peacekeepers. Penny quickly deduces that Jaune is out in Vale for more than a wander, which surprises Jaune (but not the voices in his head). He tells her that he's here to try and see if he can find the people responsible for the shooting in the Shopping Centre, but she guesses that there is more to it than that. She doesn't tell him off for it or ask any more about it though: she can tell that he's being genuine about his intentions, and she wants to bring these people to justice as well.
Meanwhile, as the Xiong Family and Crown continued to swallow the Valerian underworld whole, Xaphan and the Asturias twins would reveal their new concoction: a variant of Pollen's Syndrome, a well-known and deadly disease that made the skin on the body bloom outwards like flowers, all but destroying their immune system and allowing other diseases to pour in their weakened bodies and finish them off.
However, theirs was an altered strain of the pathogen that was thought to have been cured and killed many years ago. Theirs held Grimm matter in it, made from and connected to Xaphan himself, making it infinitely more deadly than ever.
In Vale, Jaune and Penny, alongside Mercury and Emerald in the shadows, would continue to search Vale for the Shopping Centre Shooting masterminds, but soon run afoul with Melanie and Miltia once more as they find themselves being hunted down by the twins and the Xiong Family. However, during the hunt they would discover elements of the Crown moving around the city, carrying large crates of them and guarded by cloaked figures in robes covering their entire bodies.
Back up in Beacon, Nana makes contact with someone down in the city, and moves to go down and follow Jaune, leaving her own teammates behind in the academy. However, her teammates, as well as Anima and her own team, follow her down.
In the streets below, Jaune and the rest of his group continue to run from the Malachite twins and the Xiong Family, but soon come across a convoy of Crown members moving a grouping of boxes below the city streets, supported by Black Hand soldiers guarding them. However, they would spot another pair of twins – whom would identify themselves to the Crown and their Black Hand minions as Lamia and Lilith – and they would instruct the Crown and their robes supporters to move the boxes to different parts of the city.
Emerald and Mercury would be eager to hit them at that moment, but they are discovered by Melanie and Miltia, and a fight breaks out between them. The Crown and Black Hand scatter, taking most of the boxes but leaving one of them behind. During the violent brawl between Jaune's group and the Malachite twins, Jaune is able to throw Miltia into the box and smashes it, revealing the hundreds of glass vials within.
When the contents within the glass vials mixes with the cuts in her body from the glass, Miltia begins to convulse. Her skin begins to blossom and split apart like blooming flowers as bone and scabs form in the parted skin, resembling that of pollen buds, blood weeps from the pours, and even her teeth split open like roses.
A few seconds later, after wailing and screaming in pain and choking on her own blood as thin black tendrils as thin as veins and yet translucent as well wriggled out of her pours and rock-hard blisters, Miltia dies in agony, a locked scream on her face.
Melanie is angst at this, and moves to kill Jaune for what he has done, but Emerald gets to her first, jamming her gun into the white dressed twin's mouth and pulled the trigger, executing her. Both Malachite twins were now laying on the ground, dead.
Jaune is horrified by what he has done, but Emerald and the voices in his head to their best to console him in their own ways. Mercury, in his usual apathetic form (doing his best to hide his horrified disgust at Miltia's mutilated body) would ask about how Miltia died, and Penny would confirm it to be a case of Blossom's Syndrome, a deadly disease that was supposedly cured decades ago. However, this appears to be a more advanced strain of the virus, and more deadly as well. She theorises that Miltia had died so quickly from it because she had been in direct exposure with such an increased quantity of it.
She had no explanation for the strange tendrils, however.
Jaune forces himself not to vomit at the sight of it as he becomes traumatised at the sight of Miltia's corpse, as well as his part in her death. He tries to console himself about it – tries to justify it to himself – and when he asks Emerald how she can deal with the fact that she had killed someone, she tells him that she copes by not bothering to try and justify it.
However, none of them notice something moving behind them until it lets out a low gurgle of noise, and they look behind themselves to see the corpse of Miltia rising from the ground, the translucent black tendrils wrapping around her flesh and moving her like a zombie. The walking corpse swipes at them, but the rest of the group shoot it down, only for the thing to keep moving, attempting to bite and claw at them. They spend the good part of five minutes hacking the creature into pieces, pulling apart the body and severing its limbs, only to realise that something had grown inside of her belly.
A Grimm puppeteer, the source of all the tendrils in Miltia's eviscerated corpse, and the thing now controlling her. They stab it in the heart, killing it, and the group realise that the crates of Blossom's Syndrome had been altered and mutated to incorporate Grimm matter into them.
Coming to the conclusion that the Black Hand and Crown are trying to spread their mutated strain of Blossom's Syndrome through the water systems of Vale (seeing as Blossom's Syndrome was not an airborne pathogen), the group move to intercept them at the water treatment plant within Vale. However, they discover no one there, and realise that the Black Hand had ulterior motives for the virus.
Meanwhile, the Black Hand and Crown spread themselves out through various parts of the city, locking it down.
Jaune and his group find themselves lost in Vale, but soon meet up with Nana in the middle of the city. Asking where he has been (all the while Emerald and Mercury hide themselves in the background), she is surprised to realise that the rest of her team, as well as that of Team SSBR, had been following her down to Vale. However, Jaune tells her that there isn't any time and informs them of the situation. The group call the police department, but Warren, assuming that it is a prank call and already too stressed with his current situation and investigation, as well as the politics behind it, doesn't take it seriously. The group are forced to move about on their own.
As they move through the streets, they come across a group of Black Hand soldiers moving through the alleyways, their helmets outfitted with breathing tubes connected to oxygen tanks on their backs. With the element of surprise on their side, they jump and take down the group, but begin to theorise about the breathing equipment and oxygen tanks on them.
However, soon, they come to a horrifying realisation: they have severely underestimated their threat. The Black Hand and Crown have found a way to make their strain of Blossom's Syndrome airborne, either filtering them through the oxygen tanks on the Black Hand soldiers' backs… or finding a place to transmit them across the city.
They try to call Ozpin – or even anyone in Beacon – but find that all their signals are being blocked. Someone has disabled the communication nodes across the city, or worse shut down the CCT tower in Beacon.
Across Vale, several devices have been put around the city. Oxygen Purifiers, able to convert city pollution and fumes into breathable air. They were a gift from Atlas, and the Black Hand and Crown have taken control of each and every one of them.
In their warehouse in the lower districts of Vale, Jax and Gillian, Lamia and Lilith, and the leader of the Crown Xaphan, the Will of Flugel, gather together. Jax and Gillian celebrate their coming victory, but Xaphan quickly informs them that they still have one last part to play. As Jax's slaved minions gather, Xaphan grabs hold of the Asturias twins and shoves them into an organic machine made of Grimm matter, telling them that he had initially wanted to do some tests with controlling his new horde of monsters, but the sudden incident with Miltia Malachite's corpse had been a suitable enough test run on their abilities to control their horde. When Jax tells Xaphan that he had promised them superiority, and the ability to accomplish their dreams, the God Grimm simply laughs at them, telling them that this was never about their dreams. Only his.
His dream was to restore the will of Flugel the God Grimm and ensure that his reign continues forever more.
The Grimm machine activates, and Jax and Gillian are consumed. Jax's mindless minions begin to die, their aura leeched away by Gillian's semblance as she is forced to keep them locked in a braindead loop of life and death, feeding the harvested aura to Jax as his semblance, Mind Control, is boosted through the Grimm within the Blossom Syndrome strains and strengthening Xaphan's grip on all those soon to be infected by it.
As Jaune and the rest of his group move through the city, they find that they are too late. The Black Hand double-crosses the Crown and only give themselves the oxygen tanks needed to protect themselves from the Blossom's Syndrome, right before they either kill the Crown loyalists or throw them into the streets with the ignorant crowds below.
They then feed the crates of Blossom's Syndrome into the Oxygen Purifiers across the city, and their plan is enacted.
Lamia and Lilith look upon the city as their plan falls into fruition. The city is infested and infected, and they smile at the plague that they brought upon Vale.
And here we are, at the end of the fourth arc! Not got a lot to say, so I'll just end it here. I'm starting my postgraduate degree tomorrow, so the next chapter might be a while. Until then, if you could all leave me a cheeky little review or comment for me to tell me what you think of this would-have-been story so far, that'd be grand.
And as always, Titanmaster 117 out!