A Long Year
"You really are childish!" Weiss chastised Ruby as she flicked the dirt from her rapier.
"Utterly foolish," Adam added. Whereas Weiss was loud and emotional, Adam's words were dry and stoic as he kept an eye on the trapped Grimm.
"Dimwitted!" Weiss continued. Ruby, however, was pretty sure she saw relief in her eyes. She kept her hood down to look guilty and hide the smile on her face: their words were harsh, but that sounded like two new best friends to her!
"Shortsighted." Adam adjusted his hat, trying his hardest to make sure that Ruby couldn't see the relief on his own face.
"Honestly, what would you have done without us?" Weiss leaned down to be eye level with Ruby. Suddenly, she had to wipe that smile off of her face in an instant, left stuttering with an embarrassed blush and her gaze darting to everywhere except for the heiress in front of her.
"I-I, well, uh..." Ruby couldn't get another word out before she was smothered in a bear hug from Yang, leaving her words little more than muffled.
She shot a glare over her little sister's shoulder at the two. "Hey, lay off, would you! She nearly died!"
Weiss huffed, crossed her arms and stalked off, Adam following suit. "Ungrateful brute," she muttered.
Ruby managed to lift her head up and mumble a tiny thanks. With Weiss gone, however, Yang turned her glare down at her little sister, and that crushing hug of hers suddenly became a lot less friendly.
"So, just what were ya thinking, Rubes? Showing off?" Her pleasant tone was betrayed by her burning, red eyes.
Ruby chuckled nervously and—unsuccessfully—tried to wriggle out of the death grip. "It wasn't showing off! I just..." she sighed and gave up her attempts to escape. "I wanted to show you that I didn't need to be protected."
"Yeah, good job on that, sis." Yang tussled Ruby's hair, earning a pouty whine from her. "Besides, you could be the strongest Huntress in the world and I'd still be worried about you: you're my little sister!" She squeezed Ruby one more time and jogged back to the group. Ruby might not have been entirely sure they believed in her just yet, but her fears were alleviated.
By the time they'd returned to the rest of the group, a problem was already beginning to surface.
"So... what're we going to do?" Jaune asked. "That thing is circling around, again!" He waved up at the Nevermore circling above: it looked like it was waiting for another time to strike. It was intelligent, and that didn't bode well.
"Well, our last attempts at fighting them went oh-so-well," Weiss said. "Just maybe, we should try a different strategy: we all have our pieces, don't we? Let's just go!" she suggested. Ruby, Nora and Adam held up their relics. Jaune looked hurriedly between them and then zipped off to grab one for himself and Pyrrha.
"She's right," Ruby agreed, "Our mission is to take the artifact and get back to the cliffs. There's no point in fighting the Grimm here." Ruby put it in less... bossy terms to the other half of their now eight-man team. Adam silently nodded in agreement, and Yang clapped a hand on her sister's shoulder, beaming with pride.
"Let's go, then!" Yang cheered and with Ruby at her side, the two led the rest of the team forward. Weiss and Adam remained a few steps behind, both unknowingly sharing the same thought: it was rather odd, being ordered by a fifteen year old and her sister.
"By the way, I had that handled," Weiss shot at Adam.
He scoffed. "I didn't know 'handled' meant a second away from one of you being killed."
The site the relics were on was only the beginning of the absolutely massive complex the temple took up. Even after minutes of running, the ruins of ancient buildings walled them in on both sides and left trees as their only cover. By the time they reached the foggy cliffs themselves, the trees had just run out. Always visible if only as a stretching shadow on the ground, the Nevermore followed above them, then soared high into the air and perched itself atop a grand tower ahead. Multiple stories high, this must have been the true temple.
It screeched out a challenge that shook the trees. The way forward was now neatly cut off.
"Hmph. So much for not fighting the Grimm," the Schnee grumbled.
Adam gained a wide smirk just as the forest behind them exploded into black and white: the Death Stalker was back. With a snort and shake of her head, the heiress readied her rapier.
"Of course you would enjoy this," she said with faint disdain, even though the edge of her mouth curled up.
"Don't think I can't see that smile of yours," Adam said.
Caught red-handed, the Schnee turned away.
A Nevermore resting atop a foggy temple stretching towards the heavens above and the abyss below on one side, and a vengeful Death Stalker was running at them from the other. No escape, no retreat, only victory and defeat.
Oh, how he loved a dramatic battle.
"Go!" Ruby shouted.
Nora transformed her warhammer into a grenade launcher, and brought down explosive covering fire while the teams ran towards the temple, hoping to make it to the stone bridge connecting their cliff to the rest of the complex before the Death Stalker could reach them. Unfortunately, she was too busy shooting at the Nevermore to remember that there was a Death Stalker running right for her in the first place. Ren leaped in its path but, neither as fast as Ruby nor as tough as Pyrrha, he was knocked into his partner with one swipe of its pincer, bowling them both over. If it were up to Adam, he would have left the humans there: even if they died to it, six versus a Nevermore and a wounded Death Stalker was still good odds.
Unfortunately, Weiss leaped forward to pull Nora out on one of her glyphs. Adam had no choice but to follow suit, flashing forward to grab Ren and back to the cliff in the blink of an eye. The only thing connecting them to the temple the Nevermore claimed as its own was a long, ancient bridge of stone down a flight of steps. The others were racing along it, with more than enough room to fit three of them side by side.
Adam unceremoniously pulled Ren to his feet and pushed him towards it. "Start moving," he ordered. He steadied his hand and slowly marched backwards down the steps. The Grimm advanced. An ancient Death Stalker with minor wounds while he had to attempt to not make the full extent of his skills known. Without a specialty in swiftness and single strikes, this would be a nigh-impossible battle to face alone.
Adam grinned. Unfortunately for the Death Stalker, it was exactly his specialty. "Keep going!" he shouted behind him. "I'll hold it back until you can get a position for fire support!"
"As if I'd let you get all the credit." The Schnee came up to his side, rapier forward and eyes hardened.
Adam scowled. Right. He'd forgotten about the little princess. That didn't excuse the fact that he had given an order! Adam turned to shout her down when a chunk of the bridge behind them exploded: he'd forgotten about the Nevermore, as well. Even under withering gunfire it was able to cut off their way of escape by ramming right into the path itself. Now, it was himself and the Schnee on one side and the other six battling the Nevermore.
Good odds.
Just as the pieces of the bridge crumbled away, the Death Stalker lunged onto the stairs and slammed its pincer between the two, separating them when they dodged. The Grimm was waiting for that. They were cooperating.
Not-so-good odds.
The Death Stalker's eyes focused on him. There was a gleam of recognition in its eyes and, with far more speed than anything of its size should have, it swung its claw at him.
Decidedly not great odds.
Adam rolled back and punished it with a lightning-fast swipe at its joint, causing the Death Stalker to screech and skitter backwards. Even on the back foot, however, with its speed and heavy armor, it was able to fend off the attacks of he and the Schnee both, returning every bolt of Dust or stab of a blade with a jab carrying the force of a train.
From the other side of the gap, Ruby turned away from the Nevermore to watch the other battle unfold. She spun Crescent Rose and aimed it behind herself. "We've gotta help them!" she called to Yang.
"... Do we have to?"
"Yang!" Ruby whined.
"Alright, alright, I'm coming!" With a shot from Ruby's scythe and a shotgun blast from Yang's gauntlets, the two easily made it over the gap and just in front of Adam and Weiss. The latter stumbled and found herself firing an errant ray of fiery Dust for a second time, that day.
"I told you all to stay back! Go!" Adam shouted.
"We have this perfectly handled!" The heiress punctuated her claim by raising a glyph and blocking another swing of the Grimm's mighty pincer.
"... Actually, help would be appreciated!" Adam immediately contradicted the Schnee, causing her to look in his direction in abject confusion. Thoughts and questions on how he was literally just ordering them to leave swam in her head and fell away just as quickly when she noticed the slim smirk on his face. He'd done it solely just to spite her. With a huff, the heiress went off to prove herself right on her own, rushing past Ruby and colliding rapier-first with the next strike the Grimm tried to make. Its claw didn't make her budge an inch, only serving to form a crack in its own plate.
Ruby and Yang glanced between one another: maybe Weiss was telling the truth, after all. It certainly didn't hurt that theory when the Death Stalker unleashed a torrent of acidic ichor from its torn tail at Adam in a surprise attack that should have caught any of them off-guard, but Adam only flipped out of the way, landing on Weiss' side of the bridge.
"Oookay, I guess we'll take the left, then!" Ruby spun her scythe in a flashy whirl of crimson, slammed it down into the bridge and opened fire on the Grimm's massive mask. Yang followed suit, leaving eruptions of light and fire bursting to life all across the Grimm. Combined with Weiss raining down rays of ice-blue Dust and Adam lashing out with waves of crimson following every swipe, the Grimm was swiftly obscured by a shroud of fog and smoke both. The shroud was still.
"Alright, good work, girls—and Adam! Come on, let's go make sure Jaune and the others are—" Ruby's cheers and new orders were abruptly silenced by the mist exploding into action that nearly threw Adam off the bridge in an instant. Left gripping onto the bridge's edge with one hand, he swung the other over and struggled to pull himself back up just as the Grimm stormed through the fog to finish them off.
(Un)fortuntely, the Schnee brought up a forcefield of Dust strong enough to protect her from an errant swipe of its tail, only pushing her back to the edge with the rest of the four. Only a single crack was on its face: their attacks weren't getting through at all.
"None of this is working," Adam stated the obvious. "Aim for a mobility kill: start targeting its—"
"I've got a plan!" Ruby shouted over him as the Death Stalker swiped not at them, but the base of the bridge itself. One blow was all it took to make it crack. She looked at him and nodded to the Grimm as it rose its other pincer high. Adam gritted his teeth, agitated at being so quickly ignored, but he had no choice but to move: no one else besides her was quick enough to. One step and he was sliding across the bridge to intercept the next strike from the Death Stalker on his half-drawn blade. It took a significant amount of aura to keep himself on the bridge, and even more to repulse the claw in time to slash down its other.
The next thing Adam saw was Ruby soaring through the air shouting with rage... and with her weapon folded up on her back. The first word of his complaint hadn't even left his mouth before the Death Stalker whacked her with its tail, and her battle cry turned into a yelp as she was left clutched onto it for dear life. That fool! He sheathed his blade and prepared to cut the stinger down even shorter when Ruby called out behind her:
"Yang, now!" Propelled by one of the Schnee's glyphs and her shotgun gauntlets both, Yang nearly threw Adam to the ground by jumping off of his back. She reached her peak, fired her gauntlets behind her once more, and came back down on the Grimm's head fist-first. With a mighty roar, the Death Stalker recoiled and whipped its tail back with tremendous force.
Ruby let go, and was off like a crimson comet.
"I would have preferred some warning!" Adam shouted. Supported by bolts of ice Dust from the Schnee, Adam slashed at the claws trying to grab at Yang as she punched away, but, to no avail: one finally found purchase and threw her into the bridge hard enough to crack it. She flipped herself up with a confident smirk, not a hair out of place.
"Sorry, bud! A Ruby Plan doesn't have time for those!" Yang blasted the Death Stalker's claw away from the bridge once more. Enraged, it spat another stream of ichor from its stinger only to have it deflected by a glowing glyph.
"What is her plan, anyway!" Weiss called.
Where was it, where was it, where was it! Flying over the treetops and propelled by shots of her Crescent Rose, Ruby scanned the landscape for the key to her entire plan. There it was!
Embedded in the ground and surrounded by shards of melting ice was the glowing tip of the Death Stalker's stinger. Channeling all her aura into her upper body, she fired herself forward and swung her scythe into it with all her might. The jarring impact nearly threw her scythe away, but Ruby pressed on and put all of her momentum into a mighty twist that dragged the stinger out of the ground. She spun, released her blade so it could fold back, and hurled the stinger high into the skies with all the force she was once traveling.
Alright! Easy part done! And now for the... much more tiring part. With all of that speed and momentum thrown into the stinger, Ruby had to put her semblance to work to keep up, and was soon little more than a long trail of red painted onto the air itself darting between trees.
"This! Adam, gimme a lift!" Yang suddenly called and jumped towards him.
Having been in a military unit, Adam's body had already moved before he could even think on why: he brought his sheathed blade up and the second Yang dropped her foot onto the hilt, fired Wilt and sent all that energy into Yang. Adding her own shotgun gauntlets into the mix, she was sent flying up into the skies towards some glowing object spinning in the air. Instinct told him he needed to move at the same time he realized it was the Death Stalker's stinger. Snatching Wilt from the air, he backflipped over a barrage of gleaming rays of Dust-borne energy aimed right for the Grimm's deadly pincers. When they struck, however, they did not deal any damage to the being: instead, they formed massive, glowing rings that locked it in place.
With all the force—and noise, for that matter—of a bomb, Yang hammered the stinger down into the Death Stalker's head at the peak of her jump. With nowhere to go and no way to move, it could only screech in rage as its armored head nearly buckled from the force. Unfortunately, the destruction spread to the bridge, as well: deep cracks webbed across its entirety. The bridge was on its last legs.
Above, the crimson comet returned, unfurling when it passed Yang in midair for a high-five before the two struck the ground: Yang in safety behind the Death Stalker and Ruby skidding to a halt right beside him and the Schnee. Panting, the heiress pressed the tip of her rapier towards the ground, lighting up the crumbling path with glyphs just as the Death Stalker shattered its bonds. A final, massive one in black formed itself just behind the Grimm, and Adam could feel its pull: Gravity Dust.
He looked towards the freed, furious and certainly still dangerous Grimm, then turned to Weiss. "Ladies first," he said with a bow.
The Schnee didn't even look at him, instead turning the cylinder on her weapon until it began to glow red. Smirking, she let the glyphs take her away, those on the ground speeding her up until she was only a white blur. The explosive impact not only pierced through the Death Stalker's head entirely, but destroyed its faceplate in an blast of flame. Using her rapier as leverage, the Schnee flipped herself onto a glyph and flew back towards Yang.
Ruby was next, barely visible moving even to Adam: one second the girl was there and the next, her scythe, turning straight and into a true polearm, had run the Death Stalker's head almost all the way through. She curled up around her weapon, folded it back into a scythe, and with a last wave to Adam, fired herself off to safety as well.
Pieces broke away from the bridge and fell into the mist until the only signs entire sections even existed were the glyphs hovering over them. Adam let out a huff: surprised as he was at how devastating those three girls could be, it didn't make it any less annoyed to be left with scraps. How cruel. However, that didn't mean he couldn't make it flashy! Pushing all of his aura into his blade and his own natural speed, Adam crouched down, slowly unsheathed his blade—
The world turned red, and Adam was silhouetted on the other side, blade still trailing black from where it'd cut entirely through the weakened Grimm. He whipped the dark ichor away and slowly began to sheathe his blade once more, not as much seeing as feeling the wound across the Death Stalker's form glow and burn away into his signature wilting flowers.
Yang whistled. "Well, that was a thing!"
Wilt locked itself in place with a satisfying click and, just on time, a veritable geyser of rose petals burst out from the scorpion's mortal wounds, some fluttering and scattering in the breeze, others soon turning black and falling into the mist. The bridge fully collapsed with it, and the world regained its color.
"And I thought Ruby was the show-off." The Schnee just had to ruin it for him.
"The art of dramatic timing is no laughing matter," Adam huffed. He'd spent months of training and gathering experience just to perfect it! Indulgent? Yes. Wasteful? Yes. Worth it? Absolutely. But, he supposed, not everyone could appreciate the fine arts.
Adam sighed and turned to face the rest of what he supposed he could temporarily call his 'team'. The three looked more... shocked, than anything, that they had even won the battle in the first place. And with barely a scratch. Basking in the glow of victory, the group had briefly even forgotten that there was a second battle raging just behind them.
Ruby finally broke the silence by clearing her throat and asking, "Soooo, uh... should we go help Jaune and his friends?" As if to answer her, a great peal of thunder erupted form above, and the ancient Nevermore was sent crashing through the entirety of the temple tower like it were made of plywood. Nora's cackling filled the air shortly after.
"They'll be fine," the Schnee dryly replied.
Adam supposed it could be worse.
He was wrong.
He was so wrong.
Without the adrenaline and anger guiding him that night, reality was crashing down on Adam like a bucket of ice-cold water. He stared blankly up at the ceiling, moonlight slipping through the curtains into his dormitory. His dorm shared with a Schnee, the boisterous blonde, and her—as he quickly learned—fifteen year old sister. Who was now the leader of Team Rua, or 'Team RWAY'.
What was Ozpin thinking? He was more trained than even the Schnee! He'd personally helped save her life! Even according to the age on his transcripts, he was four years Ruby's elder! Without it, he'd been a major, a leader of an entire terrorist cell that struck fear into the hearts of countless humans. Now, one of those very humans commanded him? Adam Taurus, former leader and founder of the entire Vale branch of the White Fang!
And the worst part? The worst part of it all? He was certain that when he looked at Ozpin on that stage, he was smirking at him.
The Schnee sighed softly and shifted in her sleep. Nevermind. New worst part: remembering that he was in the same room as a Schnee. He could hear her breathing, hear the slight fidgeting in the cold night and know she was not just alive, but would continue to be. It was his job, now, to protect her, when it was his duty to strangle her in her sleep. His lieutenant would kill him right then and there for letting that Schnee take even a single calm breath near him.
Right now, Adam felt like he would gladly refuel and rev up that chainsaw of his for him.
His entire livelihood was given up for this: under the command of a fifteen year old so he could protect a Schnee, desperately trying to grasp at sleep held just out of his reach, no doubt brought ever higher by Yang's soft snoring or Ruby's occasional mumbling of sweets and family under her breath that were spaced out by minutes, yet in this tumultuous time felt incessant. What had Blake talked him into?
Speaking of which, the fact that Blake once again could not be reached left himself as the only person he could complain to. So, childish as it was, he did the only thing he could think of: Adam pressed his pillow against his face and tried not to scream himself to sleep. To an outsider, the room was almost completely silent. To Adam, it was a deafening choir. Simmering in his own hate, he fell into a restless sleep, listening to that choir sing to him of how this stood against everything he'd ever fought for.
Yet, why could he not bring himself to do anything about it?
Never did Adam notice Weiss curl up just a little tighter beneath the covers on the other side of the room. Such silent contempt did not escape her notice: she had suffocated from it at that dreaded home of hers for years. Ozpin claimed it would be an interesting year. Right. As far as Weiss was concerned, this was just like home sweet home, nothing 'interesting' about it. She'd come here to escape that frozen prison. To escape the loneliness. Weiss scowled.
Why did she ever think this place would be different?
The shattered moon lingered high in the night sky as renowned crime lord Roman Torchwick looked over his maps of Vale in the safety of a once-abandoned warehouse. Each shelf laid empty, but clean, waiting for the day it'd be full to the breaking point. Right now, however, only a few sparse shelves were full of various crates and boxes, each carrying a deadly payload: Dust.
In truth, this was a significant part of the civilian market. Roman, however, wasn't pleased. It wasn't nearly enough, and that was a problem. On his map laid many shops that sold Dust. Almost all of them were crossed out: a target hit or too hot to ever return to. The market was collapsing. As his new 'boss' would put it, 'just as planned.'
Just as planned. Roman scoffed and lit himself a cigar. What a load. Try as this mysterious 'Cinder Fall' might, he knew what she really wanted: the ten crystals laid out in front of him as paperweights. Yellow Dust and purple Dust, electricity and gravity, and not just any kind of yellow Dust: only the most pure of ir. Crystals pure enough to perform time dilation. He was no scientist, but, any experiment that needed to control time and space was one he didn't want near him.
Unsurprisingly, such reasons were why all of these small time shops were useless. No mom and pop store was going to sell Huntsmen-grade Dust crystals en masse, it was ludicrous! This Cinder Fall wouldn't know a good plan if it bit her!
And speaking of things that bite, Roman thought as the door behind him squealed open, here comes his next delivery!
"Took you animals long enough," Torchwick growled as he turned... then paused. Standing behind his latest Dust acquisitions wasn't the scrawny animal he was waiting for. No, this man was absolutely gigantic, with tattoos crawling across biceps that could pin an Ursa down with ease. His entire face was covered by an intricate mask bordering on being a helmet.
"... Who are you?"
"Edward Almond." His voice rumbled through the warehouse like rolling boulders. "Former White Fang Lieutenant." The moonlight glinted off of a massive chainsaw tied to his back.
"There's been a change in management."
