Ciel's hands shook as they hovered over the control console for the simulator.
"I'm combat ready!" Penny repeated. She had no idea how sick those words made Ciel.
Ciel lowered her hands. "No, you're not," she said.
Penny cocked her head—and, as adorable as the gesture should have been, Ciel was getting tired of seeing it. "I have demonstrated so in the tournament already. If you recall, I did most of the damage in the team and doubles rounds…"
"Not the point. This isn't like those rounds. This is…"
"…is what?"
Ciel longed to say 'against Pyrrha', but she couldn't. She'd said that before, and it hadn't worked. But what could she do? She felt her breathing pick up; she tried to control it, to center herself, but it was galloping away as she felt Penny losing patience.
"What is so different about this round?" Penny pressed.
"The competition, and the… stakes…" Where were her words? Where, dammit? She couldn't find them in the haze of her panic.
She could see Penny reacting, so she went for broke. "You'll die if you compete tomorrow."
"I'll die? Miss Ciel, there hasn't been a death at the Vytal Tournament in its whole history, which I read about extensively in preparation for this one. There has been the occasional major injury, but…"
"But this time there are people trying to fix it," Ciel said in a rush. "You said there was a match-fixing scandal before, right?"
Penny frowned. "In the 34th Vytal Tournament, yes, but I hardly think…"
"This is like that," Ciel plowed on. "Someone's fixed it, and they want to make it so you die."
"Miss Ciel," Penny said sternly, "that is a very serious accusation. Why am I hearing this from you and not the General?"
Because the General doesn't know, only I know…
She couldn't say it. The words turned to mud in her mouth. "I only just learned about it," she said, semi-truthfully. "Doesn't what happened in the match tonight bother you? You said you thought Xiao Long was nice, you couldn't believe what happened."
Penny squirmed. "I don't recall telling you that, but yes, it's true. I have never seen anything to suggest she would act with such cruelty."
"It's related to that," Ciel said, inventing wildly. "The same people who did that to Xiao Long are setting you up to die."
Penny twisted in place. "I am trying not to think ill of you, but I do not understand. I have been with you ever since we left the arena. You have not so much as looked at your scroll except to check our schedule. There was no time or opportunity for you to find out about this."
"Well…" Ciel stuttered.
"And, if I recall," Penny said, her face starting to grow hard, "you were not nearly so sympathetic to Yang while we were on our way here."
That hit home. Ciel didn't remember what she'd said about Yang the first time. It had been only a few minutes for Penny, but three lifetimes for Ciel. She had to take Penny's word for it.
Apparently, Ciel had been unsympathetic and stupid about it.
"I'm just trying to keep you safe," said Ciel.
She knew she'd made a mistake instantly.
"'Safe'," Penny spat. Her eyes narrowed, her shoulders hunched, and she gave every indication of someone under attack. "So many people say they want to keep me 'safe'. Lieutenant Som. My father. You. The team who… is supporting this mission. 'A ship in port is safe, but that is not what a ship is for'."
"Penny…"
"No!" said Penny, holding her hands out to keep Ciel away. Floating Array spontaneously deployed from her back. Penny stepped backwards, fury and fear swirling across her face. "People keep saying they want to keep me 'safe', but what they mean is they want to keep me locked up! They will not let me go, will not let me do or live, if I cannot show I can take care of myself! That is why I must fight tomorrow! I must fight and win! If I don't, I may never get another chance! They'll lock me up for good!"
Ciel blinked, and what she saw changed completely. Penny was a force of destruction, yes, and she had the face of a young woman, sure—but she was, at her core, a child.
And children resent limits they think they've outgrown.
Words, Ciel saw, would never reach Penny—at least not Ciel's words, and certainly not those words. How could she stop her, if not with words? Was there anything else she could do? Was there anything else she could not do?
Ciel folded her arms. "I won't run the simulator for you, then."
Outrage overwhelmed fear. "That is a very petty thing for you to do, Miss Ciel."
"If that's the only option left…"
"The General told you to prepare me for the tournament."
"He told me to keep you safe and out of trouble," Ciel said, omitting the 'on-schedule' part of her instructions. "If this is what I have to do to follow his orders, this is what I'll do."
"I understand," Penny said acidly. Click, clack went Floating Array as it folded back into its storage configuration. Without another word, Penny walked past Ciel.
"Now where are you going?" Ciel demanded, hustling after the very quickly moving Penny.
"I am returning to the Magnanimous," she said in clipped tones. "If you will not permit me to use the simulator, and you will not permit me to spend time with my friends, there is nothing left for me here at Beacon. I will return to the ship."
"The Manta won't be by to pick you up for another hour and a half!" Ciel protested.
"I am prepared to be patient," Penny retorted. "Wasted time on the cliffs is no different from wasted time here."
Penny was moving so quickly Ciel had to tap some Aura to keep up. In moments they were to the cliffside. That forced Penny to come to a stop and give Ciel a chance to reengage. Even as Ciel opened her mouth to do just that, Penny whirled on her.
"I have already told you that I do not want 'safety' as you describe it. I have no interest in hearing you try to convince me otherwise. If you try, I will not listen."
A stubborn child, at that. "What, you'll deactivate your aural sensors?" Ciel said.
That jarred Penny loose. "I—I do not know what you mean," Penny said, and hiccupped.
"What's with the hiccups?" Ciel said.
"There's nothing going on with the hiccups," Penny said in a rush, and hiccupped again. She shook her head and stepped closer. "What did you mean, 'aural sensors'?"
"Well, you're a robot, so I figured that term fit better than 'ears'," Ciel said brazenly.
For a moment Penny hesitated. Ciel could see this revelation do something inside the girl. Would this be what finally let Ciel reach her?
The moment passed. "First," Penny said, face hardening again, "I am not a robot. I am a gynoid. Robots are primitive things with no thoughts and no souls. I am more than that. Second, if you know what I am, then you know I cannot 'die' in a conventional sense."
"You can be ripped apart," Ciel said pointedly.
"Ripped apa—no," said Penny, and she turned away. "That is far beyond anything that has happened in any Vytal Tournament. You are trying to scare me with false dangers. This conversation is over."
"Please, Penny," Ciel pleaded, but Penny ostentatiously reached up towards her ears. There was a beeping noise that was probably for effect, and then Penny folded her arms and stared out over the cliff.
Ciel got the message. She had failed to save Penny.
Again.
"Bird strike."
"1615."
Ciel got back to her dorm room and just about fell to pieces.
Wait, she tried to tell herself; she knew that if she threw herself into bed, she wouldn't be getting out of it again tonight. Wait. One more order of business. One more thing on her schedule. Routine was a life preserver in a storm-tossed sea.
Her eyes lit on her Aura textbook. No, she thought viciously, not her essay. Screw the essay. Instead, she got a piece of paper and wrote out, as before, "I am dying and coming back to the night before my death, with the ability to change the circumstances of my death."
She nodded in affirmation. This one felt truer, in all respects. Yes, she was coming back, and yes, she could change things. Some. She didn't have to die at Beacon—but she still died. It was a horrible thought. Her stomach lurched all over again.
She shook her head and tried to focus. She wrote again. "I may have unlocked my semblance."
This one was harder to confirm. Whatever else Pavlov had been right or wrong about, he was quoting conventional wisdom when he said that semblances were tied to Aura. Squandering one's Aura on semblance usage was always a danger for Huntsmen. Neon Katt had given a textbook demonstration of this danger in the doubles round: she'd burned almost half of her Aura reserves using her semblance. This left her defenses so thin it only took Yang one good hit to put her in the red and win the fight.
Who ever heard of a semblance that didn't use Aura?
Ciel frowned in thought. Well, it wasn't as if she was an authority on semblances, and Pavlov certainly wasn't. He was no help.
No help…
Ciel's hand trembled as she forced herself to think back, to review her memories of her last death and the hours before. She remembered Pavlov and Som, Lyman and Som, soldiers and Som.
She remembered the Magnanimous being shot down, and her with it.
No wonder the Air Fleet hadn't come to the rescue in her first death. Its ships were no proof against whatever disasters were destroying Beacon on this cursed day.
And with the parochial pride of the military and her lack of rank or seniority, there was absolutely nothing she could do about that.
Her hand tried to reject the next words. No child of Atlas could write them easily. She compelled herself, one letter at a time, until the words were there in shaky, barely legible scrawl.
"The Atlas Military can't save me."
The thought kept her awake all night.
Dying was traumatic enough. Dying because one of the pillars of the world was failing was so much worse.
Ciel paid attention in her history courses. She knew that Atlas, like Mantle before it, was in some ways defined by its military. Solitas was rich in Dust, and poor in everything else people needed to survive. Mantle could not exist without trade. Trade could not exist without long-haul transport, infrastructure, and transfer points and ports, all of which had to be secured—against the grimm, against bandits or pirates, against unscrupulous foreigners, even against other Kingdoms. Trade sustained Mantle, and the military sustained trade.
And yes, the union of trade and the military had resulted in the degradation of Vacuo and, according to some historians, the Great War itself, but the Atlesian consensus was that this was a too-critical reading. In any event, the basic principle remained. Even after the Great War, when most militaries were dramatically scaled back in favor of the combination of heavy local defenses and Huntsmen, Atlas was the great exception. Only Atlas had a military designed to project power, to operate outside its own borders. It was taken on faith that this was necessary.
An expeditionary military, after all, was a force that could help other Kingdoms. It could reinforce their defenses against the most dire grimm threats, and keep the peace just by existing. It maintained trade routes for the good of all, not just Mantle. There was a reason Atlesian battleships had names like Magnanimous and Benefactor and Generosity: they were, Ciel knew by rote, just another one of Atlas' gifts to the world.
But. If the Atlas Military couldn't solve a problem? If the object of so much effort and expense and hope and promise, if the receptacle of so many dreams and ambitions, couldn't answer this call…
…what hope could there be?
If the Atlas Military couldn't defend Beacon, what could Ciel dream to do?
There was a reason she'd died twice. She was hopelessly outmatched. In completely over her head. This force of grimm and White Fang and whatever else that was striking Beacon was so overwhelming she had no chance of surviving.
She would die.
She would die again.
She would die every time she dared try to take that cursed battlefield.
The only way not to die…
…was…
Unnatural thoughts were swirling around in Ciel's mind and heart. She was a Trainee, to be sure, but she'd been immersed in Huntress culture for years. Running towards danger, saving others, helping people who couldn't help themselves… those were ideas embedded deeply in her mind.
Almost as deeply as her faith in the Air Fleet.
But when one of those pillars was shaken, the others must tremble, too…
Ciel didn't know if she'd so much as closed her eyes when her alarm began to ring anew. She performed her morning routine automatically, but when it was complete, she returned to her bed, flopped down upon it, and stared at the ceiling. The weight of knowledge buried her.
She felt like she was pinned down beneath the certainty of death.
Her death… and how many others'? The crew of the Magnanimous, at least. Probably the other ships, too.
The students who rushed back to Beacon to defend it. How many of them would die, or be crippled or maimed?
"…or you can save yourselves." Ciel hadn't even considered it at first. How could she? If she failed to save Penny, she had to try and save something.
But if she couldn't save Penny, and also couldn't save anything else… if she was just charging headlong to a pointless demise…
…what good did that do anyone?
She trembled.
Dying sucked. She didn't want to do it anymore.
She didn't want this anymore.
She didn't want to watch blameless Penny die through no fault of her own, didn't want to see Pyrrha be more vicious than anyone knew she could be, didn't want to see a Kingdom come under such attack, didn't want to see the Atlas Air Fleet fail, didn't didn't didn't didn't—
Breathe. In, tick, tick, tick, out, tick, tick, tick.
Each tick was a second lost, a second closer to pain and suffering, another step in her death march.
Damn this—damn all of it. This loop had even turned her breathing against her.
She was desperate to do something. She was unable to do anything.
The morning came and went, and she did nothing. Lunchtime came and went, and she didn't eat—why would she? What good would it do? The afternoon blurred by like a waking dream. Her alarm went off, compelling her to Beacon cliff, and it was the first point all day that she was aware of the time.
Did she even have to go?
If she didn't, it wouldn't change anything. Someone else would escort Penny to her doom. Som had proved that last time.
Ciel would do it, then. She might not be able to keep Penny safe or out of trouble, but she could certainly keep her on-schedule.
She went to the docks with more obligation than conviction.
Beacon photographer Faunus.
A sky like blood.
When Penny debarked her Manta and saw Ciel waiting for her, she hesitated. Her usual "salutations" was nowhere to be found. In its place was a more formal and distant, "Miss Ciel."
"Penny," said Ciel. Paralysis gave way as a last burst of desperation rose in her chest like a bubble.
Penny must have expected it, because she tried distraction tactics. "Shall we proceed to weapons check and registration?"
The soldiers around would make the conversation too difficult. Ciel nodded curtly and turned to walk with Penny, but the moment they were out of earshot, she started pleading her case. "Please, Penny, I'm begging you to reconsider."
"I had hoped," Penny replied, hackles rising, "that I made my point sufficiently clear yesterday. I will enter the competition today, and if I am chosen, I will fight. I will not discuss the matter further."
"This isn't just about you! When you die, the confusion and despair in the stadium—and through the Kingdom, and around the world—will set off a grimm invasion. Threat level nine. Nine, Penny!"
"You're trying to scare me now," Penny said in low, angry tones. "It won't work."
"Because you're not programmed to feel fear?" Ciel accused, made reckless by panic.
It was the wrong tack to take. The way Penny's eyes flashed made that clear immediately. "I have feelings," she shot back. "I have a soul. The people who care about me know that."
She accelerated, almost leaving Ciel behind. She said not another word to Ciel, even as Ciel's insides twisted and she writhed in silent hysteria.
She couldn't stop Penny.
Penny was doomed.
Ciel hated being right.
"What a dazzling display!"
A horrible tearing sound.
"This was not a tragedy."
"Alert: incoming grimm attack. Threat level: Nine."
"Get away from her!"
Ciel didn't summon her rocket locker this time. Why would she? When the other students hustled out, she followed at a walk. She was only just in time to hear the General telling the students, "No one will fault you if you leave."
That was her cue. As the General moved into his personal shuttle and as the students looked to commandeer one of their own, Ciel left the group. She couldn't do this again—couldn't walk to her death again.
She felt the other students' eyes on her back as she went. She burned with shame. None of them were leaving, none of them were walking away—only her.
At least she knew what she was walking away from. The others? They were walking into the open jaws of death and didn't even realize it.
She was abandoning them to that cruel fate.
She thought she'd already made her choice, that this part would be easy. It wasn't. Every step was a slog.
She took those steps all the same, coming to the end of a boarding line for another evacuation transport. One of the soldiers waving people aboard drew back at the sight of her, like he recognized her. "Weren't you one of the students competing?"
Her mouth didn't work. She walked past him without a word.
It didn't fool him. "Man, if even the Huntresses are bailing on us, we must be screwed…"
"Wait, you're a Huntress?" said one of the people packed to overflowing in the back of the transport airship.
"No," said Ciel, her face on fire. "I'm just a failure."
"But you should be out there!" the civilian said, unknowingly speaking on behalf of Ciel's guilty conscience. "Isn't this when you're supposed to be flying into action?"
"No one else will fit!" shouted the soldier directly behind her, waving off another person or two—it was hard to tell, everyone was stuffed in like sardines now. "We're full, catch the next one!"
Ciel heard the beginnings of a wail that there weren't any more transports, there wasn't going to be a 'next one', but with a hiss the airship's doors closed, and the growing scream from the dock was silenced.
They should have been onboard, thought Ciel. They were supposed to get away, not me. I'm supposed to be down at Beacon.
But she was running instead. By running, she'd killed that person as assuredly as if she'd put a bullet in their heart.
Overpowered by her guilt, Ciel pressed her face to the window, looking out to the skies around Amity. She could see flashes of movement around Amity that were probably griffons—was one of them swooping down to the dock they'd just left? Then, as the airship banked, she saw Ironwood's shuttle taking him back to the Benefactor.
She saw the shuttle's cockpit erupt in flame, saw it careen out of control.
Grief and despair struck her like thunder. No, not the General, not the General, they couldn't lose him too, not like that-
-and she was back inside Magnanimous, seeing the flash burns across her eyes, smelling that stench of burned flesh and charred plastic and scorched metal altogether, hearing the groaning of a broken hull, watching charred corpses falling around her—
She jerked with a scream, but there was nowhere for her to go, she was packed in with all these civilians and now some of them saw Ironwood's shuttle sinking and heard her screams and fear was a contagion and now they were screaming, and like a fear bomb had exploded the whole ship was full of terror, reverberating and growing in intensity with every moment, a mindless shared insanity that usurped all control and thought and…
The ship shuddered under an impact.
The screaming escalated.
Another impact, and the ship was knocked thirty degrees off-axis, people were pressing in every direction, flailing, squeezing each other to jelly as they tried to stampede with nowhere to go.
There was an ear-splitting screech of rent metal. The ship shook. Another screech, directly above Ciel. She wanted to duck but she couldn't move, trapped between the mass of people and the window. Bone-white claws tore through the roof of the airship, splitting the metal to shreds, and taking a man's head with them.
A griffon pressed its beak through the gap in the ceiling it had created, looked directly at Ciel, and shrieked its bloodlust.
And she knew its presence was her fault. Her added negative emotions to this transport, amplified by her active Aura that was already a lure for grimm, plus the fear reaction that she'd started that had turned the passenger area into a cauldron of terror, an irresistible temptation…
She'd killed them all.
There was an explosion just outside the window and the transport lurched. Ciel was pressed against the wall; everyone else was pressed into her; the g-forces were intense as the airship went into a spiraling descent and there was no up or down anymore only the fall and the squeeze of the dying and the griffon's screech of perverse joy at the carnage—
Ciel lowered her Aura in the moments before—
Bright!
Ciel stumbled to the side; where there had been a wall there was only…
"Oof!"
She fell over atop someone. Someone who could only be…
"Are you okay, Miss Ciel?"
Ciel clapped her hands over her mouth, trying to keep the bile down, trying not to throw up yet again.
"Can you tell me what is wrong?"
Please stop talking, please stop talking, I can't deal with hearing your voice right now…
"You seem to have lost your balance. Has something gone wrong with your equilibrium?"
And Penny's innocent question just drew attention to the fact that as far as Ciel's brain was concerned she'd been spinning to her demise seconds ago and now she was stationary on the floor, and having that dissonance thrown in her face made her lose her battle with her stomach.
"Ah. I see."
Ciel went through the motions of cleaning up and starting Penny's practice with her simulated enemies. Her brain was too full to try and alter any part of that just yet.
As the program commenced and Penny went to work, Ciel got out her scroll with shaking hands and put it in note-taking mode. She couldn't delay until she got back to the dorms. There was too much to process. She had to write it down.
"I am dying and coming back to the night before my death, with the ability to change the circumstances of my death."
Yes.
"I may have unlocked my semblance."
Probably. If once was an anomaly and twice was a pattern, what did you call four times?
"The Atlas Military can't save me."
Her hand didn't tremble writing it. She knew it to be true no matter how much it hurt.
"I can't run away."
She looked at the last words, staring at them, as if willing them into different shapes. They didn't feel right. Why didn't they feel right? It was true, wasn't it? Even trying to run away had just made things worse.
Well, trying to run away like that had made things worse, but if she really wanted to…
…this was ridiculous. Now she knew why.
She lined out the words, over and over until they were completely obscured. She understood what she hadn't before.
"I…"
Trainee or not, Huntress or not, she hadn't been a failure until that loop. In that loop, she hadn't tried to fix things. She had let them happen, and then walked away. Not trying… that was true failure. That was worse than death. No mere rhetoric; she knew it firsthand.
"…won't…"
The scream of the abandoned civilians at Amity echoed in her soul. Shame weighed heavily upon her, like iron in her guts. She must never let that happen again.
"…run away."
She looked at the new sentence and nodded. "I won't run away." Much better.
The way to escape wasn't by fleeing. The way to escape was by winning.
She had no illusions that she could win this fight. Every time she saw Penny and Pyrrha again, it drove home just how far out of their league she was. If they could be swept away by this mystery enemy, what chance did Ciel have? That didn't matter, though. Who cared if she couldn't win the fight right now?
She was a Trainee at Atlas Academy, the finest institution of higher learning on the gods-damned planet, and she was on loan to Beacon Academy, the second-finest institution of higher learning on the gods-damned planet. And what did Trainees at schools do?
She wrote a new sentence with vicious satisfaction—short, but all the more visceral for it.
"I will learn."
Next time: Scratching the Surface