Chapter 62 - Beginning Of The End


As Jaune came into contact with the crashed Big MT satellite, and the teleportation charge it carried engulfed him in a silver light, the energies within surged into the inactive alien teleportation homer.

And in that split second, the Sink Central Intelligence Unit, designed to be as helpful as possible, jolted from the energy surge, and would have blinked if it had eyes, as it noticed a curious fact about the unintended victim.

Namely, that while it had been asked to bring him home (Big MT), it's juiced-up scanners accidentally interfaced with the alien technology, and began indicating that the subject's home seemed to be somewhere else.

And in the end, the Sink, who had been created to serve humanity, who found the Think-Tank to be needlessly cruel and sadistic (not helped by the fact that Klein had tossed most of it's personality chips off the balcony), decided to use this loophole to attempt to save the involuntary subject before they could be brought to the Big MT and undergo lobotomization.

Unfortunately, the alien teleportation homer overloaded, and the unintended victim, already being spirited from the Mojave, ended up overshooting the coordinates of both the indicated home destination and the Big MT by a few dimensions.

Of course, Jaune Arc didn't know any of this.

In fact, for an endless moment, he didn't know much of anything.

All he knew was that, as soon as he'd touched it, it had started glowing brightly, and then he'd started to glow brightly, and then there'd been a sudden tugging sensation under his navel, before he'd been suddenly pulled, in a direction he couldn't name or describe.

The sensation of falling had overtaken him, and he hadn't had the time to even so much as flail helplessly, before it came to an abrupt stop, and he'd been suddenly thrown to the floor.

He couldn't help it.

The unexpected jerking movements triggered his motion sickness.

Dazed and confused by what had just happened, he hadn't been able to resist his nausea, and his arms barely managed to push his head and torso off of the floor before he began throwing up the Sugar Bombs he'd just eaten.

Finally, after almost a minute, it passed, and he weakly pushed himself to his feet, before taking a look around, at his surroundings.

Then he blinked, and took another look.

He clearly wasn't in a desert anymore.

Metal walls surrounded him, bathed in an ominous red glow.

And the blood and gore...

So much blood and gore coated the walls, and the floors, and the ceiling.

As nausea overtook him once again, and he doubled over, his mind frantically raced, before finally coming to a single conclusion.

... oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me...

-UAC ARGENT FACILITY, MARS-

As the Imp screeched and writhed in her grip, the Doom Slayer allowed herself a fraction of a second to glare hatefully at the demon, before she yanked, ripping it's jaw off of it's head in a shower of blood. The Argent Energy within the creature's blood spattered across the Praetor Suit, which immediately began absorbing it and using it to repair the battle damage it had sustained, before the creature's jawless corpse simply burned away into nothingness.

The Doom Slayer looked around, feeling a grim sense of satisfaction, before the voice of that annoying cyborg blared in her helmet's speakers.

That put a massive damper on her mood, and cold fury reignited within her.

Sure, she had killed thousands of demons since she'd woken up...

... but there would always be more demons to kill.

And killing them wouldn't bring all the people who'd died here back.

And it wouldn't bring them back, either.

Humanity in this dimension were idiots, she thought bitterly, as Samuel Hayden continued to blather on and on, and her fury peaked beyond any ability to express via verbal communication. At least in her original home, it had been a teleportation accident that had first brought the demons through.

Here?

Who the fuck thought it'd be a good idea to hook up the interplanetary power grid to HELL of all places?!

Really, she was doing them a fucking favor, destroying their sources of Argent energy.

It's mere presence could be corruptive (as seemed to have happened to the UAC in this reality), and it acted as a beacon across dimensions for the demons.

Now that they'd found this dimension, they'd keep coming, until they eventually overran it.

Her fist clenched, tightening around her shotgun, and she gruffly grunted and began moving, ignoring the cyborg's meaningless noise.

They'd dug their graves, and now all she could do was fill it with as many demon as she could.

As a cold fury overtook her, her hindbrain began picking up the sounds of a commotion ahead, and beneath the helmet, the Doom Slayer smiled.

Noise.

Demons.

KILL.

-TWO ROOMS AHEAD-

Jaune Arc wondered why his afterlifes had to be so complicated.

It wasn't like he'd done anything important in his original life; he'd just been a dumb kid who'd wanted to be a hero instead of a farmer, who'd run away from home with the family sword, and ended up accidentally getting partnered to the best partner in Remnant and clearing Initiation, before the Vytal Festival had happened.

So what had he done to deserve all this?!

The sheer amount of world-ending threats he'd stumbled across in Skyrim, the Enclave in the Capital Wasteland, the absolute absurdity that had been the Mojave...

He'd thought he'd finally earned a break, after the Second Battle of Hoover Dam.

As it had turned out, apparently, the crashed satellite's "asset-denial protocols" had done what two different sets of nukes hadn't, and finally taken him out of the post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.

Apparently, that had been the limits of his Aura.

He just hoped Ruby Ironwood and the Courier would be okay... well, they had Sarah and House, so they should hopefully be fine.

Him, on the other hand...

His Aura screamed at him, and he reflexively jumped out of the way, as a Oum-damned ball of fire suddenly flew at the spot where he'd been.

He didn't even have time to process fully what had happened, to think about what he'd lost again.

He'd simply woken up, thrown up, gotten up, and realized that he was in a metal room that had been painted with blood.

Before he'd been able to figure out more, brown monsters with purple limbs had suddenly burned into existence throughout the room, howling and screeching around him.

The good news was that they died when stabbed or cut, and his Aura seemed to be very adept at warning him about their attacks.

But of course, there was bad news.

His Aura screamed loudly, so loudly he was almost overwhelmed by his instincts, and he spun and ducked as he raised his sword, gutting one of the monsters as it dove at him from the ceiling, claws attempting to slice his head off.

Unfortunately, he wasn't fast enough to deal with the second one, who'd used the first as a distraction, to try and rip his heart out.

It's claws scratched his armored jumpsuit, tearing through the leather and flesh with equal ease, and he winced as blood poured out of the wound.

For some Dust-damned reason, they could hit him through his Aura.

He would have guessed his Aura had just randomly decided to stop working, like how it hadn't protected him from the satellite (for some reason, despite working fine against nukes), but after a moment his Aura kicked in and healed the wound.

That was good to know.

He was in a hostile environment, surrounded by agile monsters that threw fireballs and could tear through his Aura and armor.

He needed any advantage he could get.

His Aura-enhanced instincts screamed again, and he took a step back and swung his sword out as a third creature dove past him, bisected in half by his movement, before he pulled out his pistol, mind racing.

Five more monsters, able to scale the walls and hang from the ceilings.

He needed, most of all, to go on the offensive, before one of them got lucky.

As one of them began charging up a fireball, he drove his sword into the floor.

To their surprise, ice suddenly crept out the walls and ceiling, freezing them in place.

Before they could figure out what had happened, Jaune was already aiming his pistol at them.

One.

Two.

Three.

The fourth one managed to rip it's legs out of the ice, and his next shot missed as it fell, but his last shot managed to bury itself into the creature's eye.

That left one more.

Jaune holstered his empty pistol as the last creature freed itself with a fireball, and drew his sword back as it screeched at him, flexing it's claws.

Then the door to the room burst open, as a massive eyeless creature (that looked similar to the creature he'd been fighting) was slammed into it.

His eyes widened, as he took in the ten-foot tall, thousand pound monstrosity.

Then his eyes almost boggled out of their sockets, as he heard heavy and fast footfalls behind it.

The creature's head turned up and back, back at where it had been sent flying from, and it frantically tried to get to it's feet.

It wasn't fast enough.

A massive green figure suddenly landed in front of it, driving it's fist down into the creature's head,

Jaune could hear a sick cracking noise from the giant creature's neck, as it bent in ways that made him wince, before the new figure drove another fist straight into the creature's forehead, causing it to explode.

The creature he'd been facing, which suddenly seemed small and insignificant, shrieked and leapt away, ignoring it's former prey as it tried to create some distance between it and it.

The green figure simply pulled out a shotgun from its back, and as the barrels began rotating, it sprinted at the first creature, before leaping and pulling the trigger.

The auto-shotgun began firing round after round at the creature, ripping through it's limbs and knocking it out of the air.

Amazingly, the creature was still alive as the figure landed, seemingly unaffected by the recoil of firing a shotgun in mid-air, and it shrieked and desperately tried to claw itself away.

The figure simply lifted it's boot, and caved it's skull in.

As the figure then turned to Jaune, he quickly regained his bearings, and hastily raised his shield as he studied the figure in front of him.

The figure stood taller than him, but he didn't know if that was because of the figure's armor or it's natural height.

It appeared to be in a form of power armored of some sort, though the ones he'd seen had never been so agile.

And it seemed to be human-shaped, absurdly strong, brutal, and used a shotgun...

"Uh... thanks?" Jaune cautiously tried talking to the armored figure, who was still looking him over, wondering how to best get through to this dimension's version of Yang Xiao-Long.

-BORDER BETWEEN CITY OF VALE AND FORMER BEACON ACADEMY, THREE HOURS BEFORE THE TRIUMPH-

Cardin Winchester frowned, as he looked out over the hastily-reconstructed walls, feeling something prickling the hairs on his neck.

He, and the rest of Team CRDL, may not have graduated from Beacon or any other Huntsman academy (on account of what had happened during the Fall), but nobody in the Kingdom of Vale would call them inexperienced when it came to dealing with Grimm.

After all, they'd spent the past 4 years on the frontlines, first helping to desperately defend the city from the hordes of Grimm, and then helping to retake the parts of the city that had been overrun, block by block, until they'd finally managed to stabilize the situation into the stalemate it currently was.

In the eyes of the people of Vale, Team CRDL were heroes, shining examples of the best Beacon had to offer.

To Cardin, that description was an insult, a reminder of how immature and bigoted he'd been.

Back when he'd first entered Beacon, he'd taken everything for granted. He'd been a councilor's son, raised to believe that he was destined to be a Huntsman, a hero, and one of the greatest that there would ever be in the Kingdom of Vale. And in his arrogance and childish outlook on the world... well, if he was a hero, a good guy, then everything he did was good by default, right? Bullying the faunus? Who cared? They kept turning into terrorists anyway; he was just pre-empting the situation. Picking on the weak and scrawny? They should be proud that they were serving as stepping stones for the great and mighty Cardin Winchester!

Oum, his face still burned with shame, when he remembered how bad he'd been.

The worst thing he'd done, by far, though, had been how he'd treated Arc.

Oh, he'd hated Arc at first. He had never understood how Arc had even passed Initiation, let alone been made Team Leader. At least Rose, for her youth, had been a prodigy with a scythe and her bullshit Semblance. But Arc?

All he'd seen, as the goofy blonde dork had been almost knocked off the stage by his partner, was a lucky son of a bitch, who'd simply had the fortune to be partnered to the Pyrrha Nikos, to be carried by the rest of his team and another newly-formed team.

A slap in the face to everyone who'd made it into Beacon, and especially everyone who'd been made a Team Leader.

That had been why he'd started picking on Arc at first. He'd wanted to see if the kid who clearly didn't belong had a spine, if there was something about him that Cardin had missed.

Finding out that Arc had faked his transcripts and cheated his way in?

That had only made things worse.

He'd really gone overboard after that, deciding that the faker should be proud to at least be of some use to Cardin, before he inevitably went to Goodwitch and Ozpin with the recording of Jaune's confession.

And then their field trip to Forever Fall happened...

Arc had shown him a few things that day.

He'd shown him that he'd had the potential to be a true leader, when he'd stood up to him, refused to be used by Cardin to hurt his team.

He'd shown him what it meant to be a true Huntsman, when that Ursa Major had attacked, and his team had all ran to call for help. He couldn't blame the rest of his team; first-years still in the middle of their first semester weren't supposed to be able to fight Ursa Major, after all, and running for help had been the logical thing to do.

But when he'd been pathetically crawling away, and the Ursa's paw had swung down at him...

The only one who'd been there to save him, to block the Ursa's paw, fend off the Ursa, and kill it in one stroke, had been Jaune fucking Arc.

And then he'd helped him up, and told him to never mess with his team again.

That had opened his eyes, in more ways than one.

If Arc had been capable of that all along, and he hadn't...

If that was the kind of person Arc was...

Then, in Oum's name, what kind of a person was he, for picking on Arc so much?

After that, he'd basically stopped bullying anyone, and had instead been motivated to at least try and surpass Jaune and Team JNPR.

But that hadn't been all, though, oh fucking no.

"You're thinking about him again, aren't you, Boss?" Russel accused as he approached his partner, noticing where his gaze lay.

"Still can't believe Jauney-Boy went and one-upped me before he died." Cardin replied, with just a hint of machismo, not taking his eyes off of the top of Beacon's clocktower, barely visible in the distance.

When the Fall had initially happened, he'd thrown himself into the streets, determined to protect civilians, to be a proper Huntsman.

Dust, he'd even been so proud, when he'd killed that Ursa on his own.

And then he'd spotted Beacon's clocktower in the distance.

The explosions, the gouts of flames, visible even from Vale, the dragon landing...

The bright flash of silver light.

It had been Professor Port and Doctor Oobleck who'd told them what had happened, relaying what they'd learned from Professor Goodwitch.

Jaune had engaged the mastermind behind the Fall, one of the transfer students from Haven, and the Grimm Wyvern by himself, buying time for the last of the Bullheads to evacuate Beacon and Amity Colosseum, before finally falling, just before his partner, Rose, and Schnee had arrived and driven them away.

And he'd felt so proud about killing one Ursa by himself...

After he'd learned about that... how could he call himself a man, a Huntsman, a hero, a Winchester, when Jauney-Boy had done so much more, given up so much more, than the son of one of the city's councilors?!

That had been when he'd sworn to stay and protect the city, to do everything he could to honor Arc's memory, rather than leaving to further his education elsewhere.

Sure, he'd probably be a far better Huntsman, if he'd graduated from an Academy... but what kind of a Winchester would he be, if could he simply abandon the city?

"I'm sure he's looking down and laughing at that new park you're funding, Boss." Dove added, joining the rest of his team on the walls.

"He'd better appreciate it." Cardin growled jokingly. "That shit was expensive! More importantly... you guys feel it too?"

"I've already called it in." Sky Lark replied. "They're sending a Bullhead to run reconnaissance."

Cardin nodded appreciatively at his team, before sparing one last look at Beacon.

He didn't know exactly what was wrong, but his instincts were still screaming at him that something was about to happen.

"Call Port and Oobleck." Cardin finally instructed, waving them away. "Feels like something big's coming; those two won't want to miss it."


Author's Note: I know what I said in the last chapter, and I stand by what I said.

And as for the Sink's personality matrix... it is actually really helpful, having been created by Doctor Mobius and not the Think-Tank. And so, in this story, when presented with a conundrum while teleporting what it knows is a hapless victim to the Big MT to be experimented on, it attempts to use loopholes to try and subvert it's current masters' orders.

Also, just to explain a bit about Jaune... he doesn't actually know he's never died yet. He thinks his deaths are what triggers the dimensional jumps. And more importantly... he still views himself as an outsider, as an already-dead man. He doesn't really think about how his disappearances and perceived deaths are going to actually affect the people around him, since, as far as he's concerned... he was never even supposed to be there in the first place.

There's also a bit of self-centeredness there, in that, well... he's the one who died, not them. He should be the one who should be affected the worst by it, right? And since he thinks he's handling it fine, he figures that they're probably doing okay too. The fact that he isn't actually handling it fine, is not something he realizes. The main thing keeping him going is that he keeps getting thrown into insane bullshit, which stops him from settling down, from actually taking time to come to terms with everything, like a person who throws himself into work to avoid facing a problem.

As for why the demons can cut him through his Aura... well, out-of-story, I did need to challenge him somehow, In the story... they're demons. Neverborn. Predators who rip the souls from the bodies of their victims. I figured that was a good compromise. They can cut him through his Aura, but his Aura is even more sensitive to their presence than normal, and his Aura can still heal him.

Most of all, though, while even an Imp is dangerous to most people... Jaune's no longer the dorky and clumsy kid from Beacon. He's fought dragons, vampires, and the Enclave. While demons pose a unique threat because they can ignore his Aura, he can still put up a decent fight.

And this arc... will not be a long arc. With all due respect, as much as I love DOOM, and as much fun as I had playing it... it's not exactly easy to turn it into a long and compelling story. Instead, I'll pad it out slightly by tying up the loose ends, and maybe fleshing out the rest of the wider multiverse. Skyrim and Teams RWBY and JNPR have been put on a bus, but there's still other holes that need filling... I think... I hope not?

And as for the first bit of filler... I decided to go with Cardin Winchester. Why? Because I honestly feel like he's really a wasted character, and also because I do what I want. And it does help me flesh out a bit of the world of Remnant. Sure, it's probably a bit cheesy and controversial, trying to humanize what was, in the story, little more than a bully, but since when do I care?

Also, the disturbance Team CRDL is feeling is the Grimm getting riled up by Ruby visiting Ozpin's office in Beacon Academy, back in Chapter 17.

Meanwhile, here's to me not going mad as I try to figure out how to explain gameplay mechanics and work them into the story. Why do I do this to myself...

On a side note, rather than going with the combat shotgun's burst-fire mode as in DOOM, I'm going with the auto-mod as in DOOM: ETERNAL. Because... well... does anybody actually use the burst option?