All Aboard
Wide enough to cover more than one track, the train that once carried precious SDC Dust and security machines chugged onward towards Vale. Its cargo may have been the same, but under the White Fang, its purpose was far more nefarious. Ruby and Adam took the lead, darting forward at speeds fully trained Huntsmen would have trouble keeping up with, and only with their natural agility alone. Penny soared through the air above, and Weiss sprinted just behind them, albeit not before helping Yang along with a haste glyph.
"We're not going to catch it!" Yang shouted as the train accelerated onward. The distance between it and their team was turning stagnant, then beginning to grow.
"Oh, ye of little faith." Weiss flicked her rapier, focused her aura, and laid down a winding path of glyphs. What was once merely the speed of trained Huntsmen had become unreal heights, and they gained on the train faster than any car could. As their distance halved in the span of only a few seconds, Adam narrowed his eyes: he was able to see two soldiers watching them from the balcony.
"Ruby, take the lead!" he shouted.
Ruby nodded and, with a blur of red and burst of rose petals, left the rest of RWAY and Penny in the dust. In an instant, she was twirling in front of the two soldiers with her scythe unfurled. They only had the chance to raise their rifles before she slammed the blunt end of her scythe into them and swept them clean off of the train entirely. She spun to a stop in front of the door to the caboose just in time for it to open and reveal another two with their firearms pointed right at her face.
Ruby waved, then she ducked. The hilt of Adam's chokuto shot over her and struck the first's head, its wielder followed right behind it, kneeing the second and sending him to the ground. Neither got back up. As Adam snatched his blade from the air and skid across the metal, Weiss and Yang jumped onto the train, Penny flying onto the platform afterwards. The train car was absolutely massive compared to a normal train—easily the size of two passenger trains side to side—but it was absolutely full of Dust crates. Only a path just wide enough for maybe Ruby and Weiss to stand shoulder-to-shoulder led to the next cart.
"It's looking a little cramped in here..." Ruby said as Yang dumped the two unconscious soldiers off the train.
"My combat efficiency is lowered by approximately 39% while in enclosed areas," Penny stated. "I suggest that I move to the rooftop and maintain aerial superiority!"
"Are you sure, Penny? They could field far more soldiers." Weiss crossed her arms and, with others around her, tried to hide her concern.
"It is 'no problem', friend!" Her blade 'thrusters' lit up once more and Penny snapped off a salute. "I will stay safe, do not worry!" She launched herself above, and Team RWAY was left alone. Mountain Glenn fell away in the distance as the train moved towards its top speed, and ahead lay the door of the next cart. One cart of many. Four students and a robot against an army of fanatical faunus, potentially as the only things between them and Vale itself. The four looked towards one another as the gravity of the situation set in.
"So..." Yang mustered a smile. "I guess this is what we trained for, huh?"
The tension deflated in the form of a pair of sighs and Ruby's snickering.
"Ruby, take point," Adam said. "You're the fastest of us and have the heaviest armament. If this turns into a shooting match, I have no doubts in your skills. I'll keep eyes on our rear."
"Hey now, just who is the leader, here?" Ruby huffed.
Adam raised an eyebrow.
"... Okay, yeah, I was gonna say that, but still..." She collapsed Crescent Rose into its rifle form and marched forward grumbling. It was odd, she found, that there were only two guards. Sure, most of the train cart was chock full of Dust, but how were they supposed to keep anyone from getting on-board?
"Uh, Adam, what's this?" Weiss piped up as they neared the door, peering at the only splash of color in the drab interior. That color came in the form of red and blue wires crisscrossing a device the size of a breadbox planted on the largest of the crates.
Adam stepped closer. "Hm... That's a bomb."
The three girls pressed themselves against the crates away from the explosive. With a low hum of Dust activating, a number of red lights lit across it.
"Scratch that: it's an active bomb! Start moving! I'll cut the cart loose!" His teammates were rushing out of the door before he'd even finished his sentence. Adam followed suit, sprung to the next cart, turned to slice away the connection... and stared on with Team RWAY as the cart decoupled itself and drifted away into the darkness.
"... What?" Yang voiced their shared thought.
In a blinding burst of light and rush of heat that forced them to turn away, the cart and all the Dust on it exploded, leaving only dust and black smoke behind.
"Was that some security measure?" Weiss asked.
"N~nope," Ruby replied, staring right at a second bomb beside them. The four looked to one another, then, as one, dashed to the next cart. A bomb.
The next cart: a bomb.
"They all have bombs?" Yang shouted. In the distance, another fierce rumble signaled the destruction of yet another train car. "What's the point of it? This doesn't make sense!"
The sounds of gunfire and clashing of blades picked up above them, and they could hear the stomping of boots getting closer.
"Uh, hold that thought: we've got baddies!" Ruby called as the doors opened and a trio of White Fang moved into the cramped space. Behind them, they could see more than just a few white masks.
Yang threw herself in front of the group, ducking under gunfire before bringing her fist up and uppercutting the first soldier. As gunfire from Ruby and Adam blew through the second's aura, she grabbed the final one's arm and, with a swift, sharp strike to his elbow, snapped it. Brutal, but it put him out of the fight without bloodshed.
She booted the screaming White Fang member into the train cart to disrupt the incoming reinforcements, yet still had to duck from the far heavier return fire. The air was thick with bullets from both sides, Fang soldiers having gotten entrenched, forcing RWAY to kneel behind crates and walls. The cart behind them decoupled, and their enemies' strategy became clear: wait it out.
"I love waiting for my imminent doom as much as the next girl," Weiss said as she leaned out to flick rays of immobilizing ice down the makeshift hall, "but I can't help but feel just a little bit uncomfortable getting into a gunfight surrounded by giant crates of explosive Dust!"
"And a bomb," Ruby added as she landed a well-placed shot to a grunt's knee.
"Not helping, Ruby! We need to get above them with Penny!"
Adam, blind-firing over a crate, and Yang, unable to fire at all in fear of setting off the Dust with her destructive shotgun rounds, grunted in approval.
"Got it! Ice up that door and give us cover!" Ruby called out.
Weiss spun from her crate, and with one wave of her rapier, sent a wave of ice to freeze over the door. Yang blasted the top hatch open, and Team RWAY jumped out onto the roof. Adam had pulled Yang up when he noticed Ruby staring off at the door... or, more specifically, at the three collapsed soldiers beside it.
"Ruby, we need to move!" Adam called down.
The bomb's light flickered on.
Her hands tensed around Crescent Rose. "I can't!"
"They made their choice!"
"And I've made mine!" She vanished in a burst of rose petals, and Adam grit his teeth.
Below, Ruby slammed into the wall of ice from her sheer speed and looked over the three. She latched Crescent Rose onto her back and worked on grabbing the first. It'd take some aura to boost her strength, but she was certain she could make two trips to carry all three out.
"What are you doing?"
Ruby froze, then looked up at the source of the voice: it was the one with the broken arm, watching her from against the frozen wall. He hadn't been knocked unconscious, or was he just regaining consciousness now? She found herself fumbling for words, having not actually expected them to be awake.
"I-I..." She gulped and steeled herself. "I'm saving you." This close, Ruby could see that, even with his mask, he only looked as young as her.
The soldier's lips parted, yet no words passed them. Finally, he found just one: "Why?"
"I'm a Huntress! It's kinda what we do!" She attempted to lift him up and jump to the hatch only to be harshly slammed back down to the ground. The Fang soldier cried out, and when Ruby looked back, she found the reason he hadn't tried to move before: his leg and feline tail were trapped in the ice.
"Okay, okay, don't worry, I can fix this!" Ruby tried to ignore the frown on his face as she decided to grab the other unconscious grunt first. She'd just turned around when the cart shook. They'd been decoupled. She wouldn't have enough time, not with how fast the bomb would go off after that happened. The bomb that was beginning to blink rapidly. She could break the ice wall, but she'd need her scythe for that, and then she definitely wouldn't have the time to save all of them. It was either the two who were unconscious or the one who could see her frozen in place having to make this decision. This wasn't a fair choice.
The young soldier watched her all the while. "'Ruby', right?" he spoke up, then pointed to the hatch and offered a somber, resigned smile. "Thanks for trying."
This wasn't fair at all.
The ice wall exploded inwards in a rush of fire, and a blur of black and red crashed through the remnants. Ruby noticed only now how they hadn't slowed down at all. She looked outside to see a giant, black symbol of the Schnee family on the train cart ahead of her, Weiss focusing with her eyes squeezed shut. Yang waved her on, gauntlets still smoking from firing on the frozen door.
"Ruby! Come on!" Adam shouted to her, one of the unconscious soldiers slung over his shoulder.
Ruby looked between them, grabbed the last two soldiers and grinned. There was always the third option: not make the choice alone. In a rush of rose petals, she was atop the train cart with Adam in pursuit. Weiss let out a deep breath and forced the cart back as far as she could. It wasn't enough. The explosion launched the team and their tagalongs across the cart, Yang and Adam nearly sliding off of the train altogether. They groaned and all forced themselves up, wounded soldier included.
They'd gotten up into another warzone: they couldn't even count the number of White Fang soldiers advancing on Penny. She weaved between burning lines of lead from more opportunistic shots, blades sweeping out and striking down any soldier who got near with impunity. One was yanked up by a nigh-invisible string by his leg, another blade darting out in the blink of an eye to silence him before he could even react. Still, with the number of people coming her way, she couldn't hold on forever. Team RWAY rushed off to assist, weapons drawn and firing as soon as they found targets to aim at.
And, behind them, dragging his comrades to the edge of the cart one-by-one and throwing them onto the next before it detached like the rest, the wounded Fang soldier watched. One of his unconscious allies had a pistol just small enough for him to wield with one hand while his aura recovered and, with some difficulty, he drew it from the holster. He had a perfect shot on them. A perfect shot on the intruders who were ruining everything. He raised his pistol.
A perfect shot on the human who risked her life to save him.
He hesitated and, for a moment, he let his aim dip. Then, he let the gun slip from his hand altogether.
Yang ducked and weaved around a number of soldiers' attempts to bring their blades down upon her, each one being responded to with a swift one-two: a jab to the gut to open them up further, a swipe to their jaw to knock them on their back and out of the fight. She could feel it. Exactly what Adam was talking about: sometimes she could feel a trained aura trying to push back her brutal blows enough to force her to throw another strike or two into her rapid combos, other times, that first punch faced no resistance whatsoever, and her foe crumpled in on themselves.
She was a brutal fighter, she knew she was: Junior's men didn't walk out of there without a scratch, after all, but she just couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger of Ember Celica. The White Fang grunts looked the same. There was no difference between someone who could've gone to Beacon and someone whose aura was as thin as paper until her fist hit them... and, in a way Yang wasn't used to, that scared her.
Not that she let anyone else know, of course. Even her foes, as she swept another soldier off his feet and, with a confident wink, punched him through the train car's hatch below. She was the strong one! She couldn't let the rest of her team see her down in the dumps even in a big fight like this.
It wasn't like they were having trouble holding back: Ruby blew straight past her, sweeping past entire groups and throwing them to the ground with grand sweeps of the back end of her scythe. Weiss would have them immobilized in ice and launched, one by one, into the hatches of carts further up and hopefully away from those doomed to destruction. They were a well-oiled, non-lethal machine.
Except for two of them: Adam and Penny. Opposites in every way: one's a faunus, one's a robot. One's about as dark and edgy as it got, the other didn't look like she could hurt a fly if it killed her kitten. One's a former terrorist leader, one's an Atlesian soldier.
But in their fighting? Identical. They'd make efforts to disable over kill, whether it be turning to boxing up close or aiming for limbs, but neither so much as flinched when one of their blades would cleave a faunus' arm away, or pierce one purely by accident. The closest they'd get to it was a second, swifter strike to finish the job.
What worried her was that, while Weiss made sure to avoid that carnage, Ruby, for all her attempts to save anyone who so much as slipped off the side, didn't so much as blink when someone was slain beside her. Like she accepted it. Like she was used to it. Was she like her, just keeping it stashed away for later? Or—
Her chain of thoughts were interrupted when her usual one-two was not just avoided, but earned her a slash of a blade to her side. Ignoring the blistering pain, she spun on her heels and focused on who was able to pull that off. The first thing she noticed was the soldier's weapon: a large axe with a shaft split into the two barrels of a shotgun. It wasn't like the mass-produced rifles, pistols and blades of the grunts. This one was special.
"Come here often?" Yang teased and placed her hands on her hips.
The woman, who had curling horns protruding from her hood, just rolled the axe in her hand.
"Aw, must be on the quiet car." She sprung forward and switched up her style: if straightforward wouldn't work, she'd just have to keep her guessing! A hook to the right led into her firing Ember Celica for a sudden twist of momentum to send a powerful kick crashing into her stomach. To Yang's surprise, the woman kept jumping back, not falling for her tricks no matter how many jabs and kicks Yang would throw.
"You really can't teach a human new tricks, can you?" the Fang soldier taunted her and, when Yang threw an uppercut as a reply, ducked back and unloaded both barrels into her stomach. Sent flying back, Yang rolled back up to her feet: they were almost at the end of the train, now. Another detonation filled the tunnel with light. She squinted her eyes as her opponent reloaded her weapon: this girl was countering her like she'd already known how she fought. Now that Yang thought about it, she looked kinda familiar...
The blonde jogged forward, then fired Ember Celica behind her to throw her into a wild lunge: a move she'd done countless times at Beacon. By now, it was practically her signature.
Which was exactly why, rather than pull back her fist for a punch, she curled up and braced herself. The Fang soldier slid forward, snapped up her shotgun-axe up and fired straight up. If she'd gone for her classic lunge, it would've been a direct hit. As it was, it was just some bee stings on her gauntlets and aura as she passed overhead.
Yang rolled to her feet just at the edge of the train cart. She brushed the remnants of the crushed pellets from her clothes and kept a wary eye on this new girl. "Have we met, before?"
She rolled the axe in her hands. "Beacon."
Yang scowled, and she could feel the heat burning around her and in her eyes both. "You were with the ones that attacked with the assassin."
"I might've been around," she said with a smirk.
The two began to circle one another on the roof.
"People could've died in that attack!"
"Eh, humans would have died. Big difference."
"They fought with you! Learned with you! You knew them! How could you attack them?"
She growled and barreled forward, finally going on the offensive with an overhead swing that Yang easily caught on her gauntlets. "Spoken like a true human. You don't know the first thing about us! About our pain!"
Yang kicked her back. The fighting had long left them, and even the wounded kid Ruby saved was further up than they were. It was for a good reason: who knew when the next car would fall away and take anyone who was on it with them?
"It's not worth this! You're gonna kill that many people? For what! How can you be that screwed in the head!" Yang shouted.
"For all of us! What do you want me to do!" Frustrated, she rushed forward swung up from below, but only got her axe struck down and a jab to the face for her troubles. Sent reeling, she fired the last shell harmlessly in Yang's direction just to keep her away.
"This is the only chance we have! The only way things will change, don't you see?!"
"I see that you've lost your mind!" Yang shot off a series of opening jabs, but the former Beacon student parried and blocked each one. Yang remembered her more, now: she was one of Adam's 'students'. One of the ones who fought in the sparring ring the most. She guessed she must've been gathering information.
"I don't care what's in my way. The faunus will have their time in the light! I don't care if I have to go through you, through Adam, or through your sister to do it!" Enveloped by frustration, she leaped forward with considerable speed, axe held high.
She'd left herself open at the worst time. That threat, that simple threat to her sister, was enough to push that anger off a cliff. Tied to it was all of the fear, all the stress, all of the fury and anger at her, the White Fang, the attack on Beacon, everything.
With blazing-red eyes and a fist shrouded in flames hot enough to begin flickering blue, Yang slammed her fist into the Fang member's face hard enough to shatter her mask and aura alike. She went flying back to the ground, bouncing off of the cart's roof before falling still on the furthest of them. She twitched, but remained still. Yang was left panting, smoke flowing from between her fingers and teeth alike as she glared at the traitor.
The cart detached itself. By the time that fact truly reached Yang, it was already too far for her to try anything. The former student twitched once more, and shakily forced herself to her knees. She looked around, and Yang was able to make out the turn of her head from side to side, then down towards the growing distance between her and the train. With wide, fearful eyes, she looked up towards Yang, who stood like a deer caught in headlights. In that moment, without her mask, she'd ceased being just a faceless goon.
In the next moment, there was a flash of light, and she'd ceased being altogether.
She didn't press the trigger, nor did she set those bombs, but she put that girl—a former peer, no less—in the perfect spot to die because of it. That much was her fault and, yet, Yang didn't feel as horrid as she had expected. Ruby was crushed to the point where even she couldn't console her; yet, though her steps were slow, she could still start walking backwards. She could still act. She felt like nothing actually... changed. Did this make her a terrible person? Did she just not care as much as she should?
She took a deep breath, then threw those thoughts in the same closet as the rest of the questions she asked herself and locked it tight. Questions for later. Problems for later. Right now, there was a train to stop.
She'd just turned around when she heard the roars. They were quiet, at first, able to mix in with the rumble and shake of the train or the shuddering of the tunnels from the explosion, but Yang could still hear them. She looked over her shoulder and, in the darkness, she saw the embers that were the Grimm's eyes. Countless embers. She could make out shapes: Beowolves, Creeps, Death Stalkers and, at the horde's head, the biggest King Taijitu she'd ever seen, with eyes and spines that glowed sea-green, and a hood like that of a cobra.
Her eyes widened. It all made sense, now. The White Fang weren't just going to attack Vale where they wouldn't see it coming, they were using the bombs to draw Grimm after them and into the city. With what they had now, they'd stand no chance against a whole city's police, even if they were pretty weak. But with a legion of Grimm pouring out? Controlled by... whatever those mutant Grimm were?
This wasn't going to be a terrorist attack.
This was going to be a war.
