In a third world, on the arid island of Menagerie, a black-haired cat faunus jumped from tree to tree. It was night, yet she had no trouble seeing her surroundings.
There's still three in pursuit… Blake Belladonna thought. If I haven't been able to shake them yet… there's only one option.
Blake changed her weapon, Gambol Shroud, to its semi-automatic pistol form. In the next second, she stopped on the canopy of one tree, turned around and fired.
"Gah!" "Ouch!"
Her three pursuers were White Fang members, faunus like her but wearing black and white uniforms and Grimm skull masks. Two of them were hit by Blake's shots mid-jump and, though it didn't pierce their Auras, the momentum knocked them to the ground. The third member closed the distance and attacked with an axe, aiming for Blake's head.
Blake switched Gambol Shroud to its sword form and parried the axe. The impact still pushed her off the tree, so she twisted around in mid-air and landed softly on the ground.
The third White Fang member landed nearby and pressed the assault. He and Blake exchanged half a dozen blows, lasting until one fighter's weapon was knocked away.
"Stop this," Blake ordered, holding the point of her sword to the man's throat.
The other two White Fang members approached. Together with their defeated companion, they glared angrily at Blake.
"Why are you fighting against Sienna!?" one woman demanded.
"Because I can't agree with her way of doing things," Blake shot back, "any more than I can agree with Adam's."
"Sienna and Adam are nothing alike!" shouted the man Blake had at swordpoint. "She'd never do anything like sending Grimm at a huntsman academy!"
"That much, we can agree on," Blake said. "But that doesn't make her any more effective at helping faunus—"
Suddenly, there was a distant explosion to the north. It was followed almost immediately by panicked screams.
"What just happened?" Blake asked.
"W-We don't know!" "No one told us anything about this!" "Could it be Adam!?"
The trio of White Fang all looked genuinely shocked by the explosion. Blake came to a quick decision. She pulled her sword away.
"Alright, I don't have any way to lock you up, and I'm not going to just kill you," Blake said. "But if you three don't want to get yourself killed one day, then go back home and keep your heads down."
There was another explosion to the north. It wasn't as loud as the previous one, but it still caused the White Fang to flinch. They seemed to be relatively new recruits, unused to truly large-scale violence.
"Will you keep trying to fight me?" Blake asked. "Will you help me investigate what's happening over there? Or..."
"Fine, then," the third member said, the one who hadn't spoken until now. "You win. We'll… go home."
The White Fang trio turned and left, though not before one of them retrieved his axe.
With that sorted, Blake began running northward.
I won't know if they've really changed their minds… but there's no good options right now. And whatever's happening over there, it's likely to be more important.
...Just how has Menagerie come to this…?
For the past few months, the faunus island of Menagerie had been a warzone. Adam's faction of the White Fang had returned home from the Battle of Beacon, then Sienna Khan—the supposed leader of all the White Fang—had ordered his execution for his crimes. Even if she was prone to using violence herself, she knew that attacking a huntsman academy would just turn public opinion against faunus.
Yet Adam still had many loyal supporters, those he'd been training and fighting together with. The White Fang had thus split into two factions, and with those two factions hostile to each other…
Two months ago, a wealthy merchant who supported Sienna's faction fell ill. His condition didn't improve no matter what treatment he received, and he died three days later. An autopsy revealed traces of a deadly poison in his bloodstream.
A month and a half ago, a warehouse had been completely burnt down in a fire. Said warehouse had been one of the bases used by Adam's faction.
Three weeks ago, a boat delivering supplies to Sienna's faction was hijacked. All of its crew members were killed in the process.
And it seemed like every week that there was a drunken brawl in a bar, or a White Fang member found knifed in an alley…
And while they fight… innocents get caught in the middle and suffer.
Blake's parents, though no longer leaders of the White Fang, nevertheless had some influence. They worked to support those hurt by the White Fang's actions and also to maintain Menagerie's reputation with other countries.
But there were things that couldn't be achieved through just legitimate methods. For that reason, Blake headed out almost every night to spy, sabotage and—when necessary—fight. It wasn't what her parents wanted, but it had to be done. At least she didn't have to do it alone.
But where did Sun go? We got separated an hour ago, after that battle near Sienna's base… I just have to hope he's also heading towards the explosions.
The cheerful monkey faunus had been helping Blake during her time here. While his exuberance was annoying sometimes… well, most of the time, she never would have gotten this far without his help. He was really going above and beyond for her, despite not even being part of the same team.
...And that thought made Blake stop in her tracks, her heart seized by regret.
I abandoned them… I might be the worst teammate in history…
It would be easy to rationalise this as keeping the rest of Team RWBY safe. However, Blake knew that they'd never accept that.
I can't undo it now… I have to at least finish what I came here for.
Blake resumed moving. Less than a minute later, she arrived at a rooftop overlooking the site of the explosions.
Once, it had been a thriving marketplace. There were stalls everywhere selling dates from the palm tree orchards, fish and shellfish from the nearby sea, wool clothes dyed in many colours from the tailors, jewellery crafted from seashells… in her youth, Blake had spent quite a few days just wandering around and seeing what was on offer.
Now, many of the stalls were on fire or had been blown to smithereens. The only consolation was that the merchants weren't here, since it was almost midnight. The people present were two factions of the White Fang.
Sienna's faction was to Blake's left, and they were clearly at a disadvantage. Almost half of them were unconscious, possibly even dead. And several of those still standing were wounded, showing their Auras had already broken.
As for the other faction… standing at its front was a tall faunus man with short red hair and dark bull's horns, who wore black clothing adorned with red. The sight of him sent chills down Blake's spine.
Adam… and… wait, what?
The rest of Adam's faction was mostly faunus as well, when it should have been entirely faunus. Yet standing among them was a human man, notable just as much for his great size as for his lack of any animal traits.
Adam's working with humans again? Even bringing one onto Menagerie? I can't imagine what he's thinking now…
Unfortunately, Blake was so surprised that she forgot to hide herself properly. As a result, that human looked up and his eyes met hers.
Blake quickly ducked out of sight, but she was too late. Just a few seconds later, she heard Adam bark out the order, "Keep an eye on this lot, while I take care of her!"
Dammit, Sun, where are you!?
Blake turned and began to retreat, but before she could take three steps, she heard someone land on the roof behind her. With no other choice, she turned around.
"Adam…"
"Blake. I've been looking for you."
The two of them faced each other, illuminated by the stars and the flickering light of the fires.
"This has gone too far, Adam," Blake said, trying desperately to keep her legs from shaking. "Starting from that train job, it's all been nothing but killing and terror. It won't do anything to help faunus!"
"Killing and terror is how we won our rights in the first place… if you can even call this near-exile that," Adam said, gesturing around at Menagerie itself. "The humans still consider us animals, and peaceful protests haven't changed a thing."
"There's a lot of problems still," Blake acknowledged. "But how does attacking somewhere like Beacon, where those who protect humans and faunus, help at all!? How can you be on the same side as the Grimm, ADAM!?"
Adam opened his mouth, but before he could reply, a third person arrived on the rooftop. This was accompanied by surprised shouts from the White Fang down in the marketplace.
"Hazel!?" Adam growled. "What are you doing!? You should be keeping watch over—"
The human's response was to throw a strange metal device in between the feet of Adam and Blake. The device immediately flashed, creating a deep red sphere surrounding the two faunus.
"Betraying me!?" Adam said. He stabbed at the device with Wilt, his sword, yet couldn't even scratch it. "What… is this?"
"Betraying would require me to be on your side in the first place," Hazel said in a gravelly voice. "This is the real reason Salem sent me here."
Blake struck the red sphere with Gambol Shroud, while Adam sheathed Wilt in preparation for a powerful strike.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Hazel continued. "Whatever this thing is, I was told it would protect you for the trip."
"Who would listen to what you have to say, traitor!?" Adam shouted.
Then the device began glowing with white light, causing both Blake and Adam to pause and stare at it. And for some reason, Blake felt something… familiar from that light.
"I'm sorry," Hazel said, seemingly looking at Blake as he said this. "Even I wasn't told what this does."
Several White Fang members jumped up to the roof and attacked Hazel furiously, using swords, axes and spears. They presumably avoided guns for fear of hitting their own leader.
"HMPH!"
Yet Hazel knocked them all away with a few punches, seeming more like a battering ram than a being of flesh and blood.
Then there was a roaring sound from the sky. Blake looked up to see a Bullhead approaching.
"Don't let him escape!" Adam ordered. "KILL HIM!"
Then the strange device flashed once more, and Hazel, the Bullhead, the White Fang, all of Menagerie disappeared.
"What is this!?" Blake cried out, now feeling like she was in free-fall.
"I'm not sure what this is, but when I find that traitor again…!" Adam said.
The red sphere remained, but outside it seemed to be nothing but endless darkness. Blake remembered what Hazel said about the sphere being "protection", and she decided against trying to breach it.
And with nothing else to do, Blake could now take a good look at the device responsible for the sphere and everything else. It was shaped like two fist-sized spheres fused together. Both were covered in countless strange symbols, one of them recognisable as an eye. There were no buttons, dials or other things that might be used to control the device.
"What in the world is Hazel's master planning…?" Adam wondered.
"How would I know?" Blake said acidly. "You're the one who worked with him."
Adam harrumphed. "Hazel's master is a woman, and she apparently commanded Cinder as well, on top of having some sort of control over Grimm."
That made Blake fall silent. The very idea of controlling Grimm, abominations hostile towards all life, still seemed impossible. Yet there was no denying what had happened during the Battle of Beacon.
"...They haven't told me much more than that," Adam continued. "From what I've seen, it's clear that their group plans to overturn the current order."
"And that makes it right to be on the same side as the Grimm?" Blake asked. "Even if they can be controlled, Grimm are still attacking people all over the world, faunus and humans!"
Adam averted his eyes and said nothing. That caught Blake off-guard, for her old partner was normally extremely stubborn.
"...We didn't want to work with them at first," Adam admitted. "But… Blake, do you remember when there were visitors to our camp, the night before the… train job?"
"I do," Blake replied uncertainly. "But I never actually saw—"
"Cinder, Mercury and Emerald," Adam said.
Blake clenched her fists at this reminder. Those three had infiltrated Beacon for months, acting just like normal students, up until they helped—in Cinder's case, led—one of the most horrific raids in Remnant's history.
"I rejected their demand then, but they returned… some time after you left," Adam said. "They hurt everyone else in the camp, so quickly I couldn't even react before they did it, and Cinder repeated her offer."
Blake had never heard Adam sound so vulnerable before. For almost as long as she'd known him, he put up a strong front to inspire the rest of the White Fang.
"...It was clear that we couldn't defeat her," Adam continued. "So… hmm?"
Blake was now looking down to see a pinprick of light, and Adam followed her gaze. It seemed they were reaching the end of their fall.
The light grew and grew, resolved into a mix of colours, and finally swallowed up the two faunus.
A lush jungle came into view. With the red sphere still present, Blake and Adam couldn't do anything to slow their fall. They could only sheath their weapons and hold out their arms to shield their heads.
Then they came to a sudden stop… but there was no pain. Even falling into a giant pile of cotton wouldn't have been as comfortable.
"What…?" "Huh?"
The red sphere disappeared. Only then did Blake and Adam hit the ground, but the fall wasn't hard enough to even weaken their Auras.
The two of them jumped to their feet and glared at each other.
"...Now's not the time to fight," Blake said.
"Agreed," Adam said. "First, we need to work out where that strange device sent us."
They looked around. There was nothing above them save the canopies of trees and a sunny sky—for the time to be different, they must have been sent to a completely different longitude of the world.
Then they looked down and spotted the device. It had broken into pieces from the fall, and those pieces were now crumbling into dust. Within seconds, it was completely destroyed.
"Dammit," Blake said. "If we'd kept it somehow, we might've been able to study it, see how it worked."
"Wait, I though I saw something fall out of it," Adam said. "Let's try digging through this leaf litter—"
Suddenly, the jungle vegetation rustled… in all directions.
Blake and Adam drew their weapons and stood back to back, without needing to exchange any words. This was something they'd done many times, but Blake had never expected to repeat it now.
Then countless strands of ivy shot towards them, like an army of green snakes.
Blake fired several bullets from Gambol Shroud. From behind her, she heard the roar of Blush, Adam's scabbard which doubled as a rifle. Fragments of plant tissue rained down on the earth.
Then the ivy got too close for shooting. Blake switched Gambol Shroud to sword form and began hacking away. With Adam at her back, the two of them managed to destroy all the ivy.
"A Semblance to control plants?" Adam said. "Where is the user!?"
"My, my," said a voice that wouldn't have been surprising from a prostitute's lips. "You're tougher than the usual weaklings around here. But can you handle this?"
More ivy shot out from the surrounding jungle. There were fewer strands than before, but they weren't harmed at all by Blake's and Adam's attacks.
This feeling! Blake jumped to the side to avoid one strand. It's like hitting solid rock—ah!?
In no time at all, the two faunus were bound hand and foot by the ivy.
"Guh—show yourself!" Adam shouted.
"Hehe… I don't obey orders from those weaker…"
The ivy tightened, causing both Blake and Adam to cry out in pain.
"...but you two do deserve to know who defeated you."
An enormous flower bud on a similarly sized stem emerged from between the trees. It stopped just in front of the two faunus, then it opened.
What… in the world…?
Sitting within the pink-petaled flower was a green woman. That didn't mean she was wearing green clothing, both her hair and her skin were literally green. She wore not a single speck of clothing, but the situation meant that was comparatively normal. Despite being inside a flower, she had another, smaller flower seemingly growing out the back of her head. Finally, her blue eyes were filled with sadistic glee.
"You…" Adam gasped. "Did your Semblance somehow… fuse you with plants!?"
"I have no idea what you're talking about," the green plant woman said. She licked her lips. "But… you both look and smell quite good…"
Something else emerged from between the trees. It looked like a massive green mouth, but there were no eyes or nostrils nearby, and the teeth were fused with the jaws—it was a gigantic Venus flytrap.
Seeing that, Blake and Adam struggled even more desperately. They would have had more luck trying to budge a mountain.
"Hmm… I might have one now and keep the other for later…"
-ooo-
A few hours after the mission in Menagerie, Hazel returned to the Land of Darkness, and to Evernight Castle. There, he met with his mistress.
"I've returned, Ma'am," Hazel said, walking into a certain room. "The mission—at least my portion of it—was a success."
Salem didn't react beyond a nod of acknowledgement. She was busy looking at three images projected onto the walls of the room. Each image was of a world map, though the geography certainly did not match anything on Remnant. And while the maps were similar to each other, there were still differences in the shapes and placements of the continents.
Hazel silently looked around at the maps. Two of the three had some glowing dots on them, which occasionally moved around.
One map had over thirty dots scattered all over the world. Even as Hazel watched, one of those dots disappeared from view. There had been over fifty when he'd last seen this map, three days ago.
Another map had a dozen dots that were mainly in the northwest of the central continent. Incidentally, said continent was split up into three parts, unlike its counterparts in the other two maps.
The third map had no dots.
Hazel frowned. "That one… wasn't it the intended target of…?"
"Yes, it was," Salem said, frowning slightly. "There was a marker there earlier, but it disappeared before you arrived. It seems the residents of that world—or at least in that particular area of it—are quite adept at sensing Grimm. I had to make my infiltrator there self-destruct, to prevent them capturing and analysing it. But the fact it arrived at all means the experiment worked."
Hazel said nothing. Even if much about the experimental transfer device remained unknown to him, he already knew it would include one or more Grimm to send information back to Salem. Directly back to Salem; the maps he was seeing showed just a tiny portion of the information being gathered.
Which means we know nothing about how those two are faring… and probably won't for some time. The transfer device took time to make, and when Salem makes another one, she might not target the same place.
"They're certainly better than angels," Salem continued, turning towards the map with the most markers. "So far, the angels have only found and killed the Grimm I used as distractions. They haven't even discovered the ones dedicated to espionage yet… While I've been able to observe their fighting capabilities. They may improve over time, however, so I won't underestimate them."
Communicating across worlds was a skill that most people couldn't even imagine, let alone possess. Yet after discovering those other worlds, as well as getting Arthur to hack the computer of a professor from Vale, Salem had found a way. With some advanced magic that Hazel didn't even begin to understand, she could now command and alter Grimm in other worlds. And, with tonight's experiment, she'd taken a step beyond that.
With the numbers shown here… it seems she's managed to use the few initial Grimm to create pools in those other worlds, to spawn more Grimm, Hazel thought. Or she might've come up with another method I haven't even heard of.
"I might order similar distractions here," Salem said, gesturing at the world map with a dozen markers on it. "Or perhaps not… this world is in such turmoil, it's easy enough to gather information by just watching."
"Do you need a more detailed report on my mission?" Hazel asked. "If you don't have intelligence from one of those worlds, then it might be useful."
"Yes, tell me everything you saw and heard," Salem ordered.
Hazel explained it all, starting from when he arrived on Menagerie to link up with the White Fang—supposedly to help them, though tonight's events meant they'd be bitter enemies from now on. Throughout the explanation, he couldn't help but think about the worlds those maps represented.
He'd resigned himself to his fate long ago. There was no way anyone could ever defeat Salem for good, not with her curse of immortality. He knew that through firsthand experience.
But these other worlds… even based on his limited understanding, he knew they were different from the world he'd grown up in. Magic was abundant and widespread, even so-called gods were present, so there might well be ways of killing immortals. Furthermore, these worlds had never known the terror of the Creatures of Grimm… until now. On the other hand, these worlds had their own dangers, dangers that—thanks to Hazel himself—two people would now be facing with zero foreknowledge.
Perhaps there's another way… something that was impossible before…
But even if there is… it doesn't change a thing for me, not yet. If I even look like I'm considering rebellion, Salem would replace me in an instant.
Hazel thought of Tyrian, cackling atop a mountain of corpses, and suppressed a shudder.
My hands are stained with blood… but any other agent of Salem would be worse.
AN: While writing these two chapters, I had the idea of filling them with internal similarities and differences. There's two non-combatant POV characters and two combatants, two Safina region natives who live in very different societies, two plant-based superbeings who are otherwise stark opposites, and more.
The change to events on Menagerie is a consequence of an earlier change, Beacon being cleared of Grimm (thanks to the Wyvern being destroyed instead of just petrified) and reopening. That's resulted in the world of Remnant being generally better off than canon, and Adam has less support on returning to Menagerie.
The second half of this chapter wasn't in my original plans. I added it to make things clearer, otherwise there'd be confused readers wondering what Salem and her faction are doing. Even then, there's a few things in these two chapters that are kept implicit. You might find it worthwhile to reread these chapters when you have the chance.
The next chapter will go back to the usual main cast.
