Chapter 16, Inner Workings
"The head of the Syndicate is a man named Umber Wenge, a fact that is the worst kept secret in the entire Valean underworld. Everyone knows who he is, but he's managed to run a tight enough ship to keep the police from assembling a case against him. After that you have someone called the Merchant, a lemur faunus from Mistral that Wenge brought on board some years ago to manage their smuggling operations. We don't know much about her, but the Mistrali government wants her so she has to be very good at what she does. Last of the big three is the Accountant, he's the book keeper for the Syndicate, chances are he operates some big private enterprise to help keep the sums he deals with hidden.
"The Syndicate controls most of the illegal weapons market in the Kingdom, and has some serious play in the racketeering circles as well. If anyone is selling ordinance, or conducting financial fraud, chances are the Syndicate is either behind it or getting a cut. It's for these reasons that Syndicate members are some of the best equipped criminals in the city. They can both afford and obtain top of the line equipment straight from the major weapon makers in Atlas. It's why most of their members have Theon made guns, the same stuff used by the Atlesian military.
"Under normal circumstances, they don't have to use their own gear, usually they'll just hire out a smaller, disposable crew or gang to handle the more mundane actions they need to take to give themselves plausible deniability if and when things hit the fan. Helps that of the Four Families, the major crime lords of Vale, the Syndicate is the smallest. But since they're so much better armed and funded than their adversaries, no one dares attack them outright. They have enough firepower to give the VPD pause.
"Of the main players in the Syndicate, all three could have both good reason, and the resources to go after both of us. Hiring mercenary teams is right up the Accountant's alley, they're more reliable and professional than some scum-of-the-earth ganger and have all the same perks. Not to mention he more than has the resources to do so." She stopped talking for a moment, gathering her thoughts. "You said that this item they stole from you is a weapon of some sort, which would easily put it into the Merchant's ballpark. Truth be told, she probably has the best reasoning to be responsible. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if this Boost stuff is hers. And last but not least, Menge. Brother's only know what that scumbag thinks on a regular basis, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is all some big master plan to gain an edge over the rest of the four. Somehow. Hard to say until we get more concrete information on what they're actually planning."
Hakke sat, head resting on his thumbs as he absorbed what Cerulean was telling him. "So if we want to make any real headway, we need to figure out which of the Syndicate's brass is our main culprit. So how do we do that? I mean, besides the ongoing goal of finding the merc team that we've both run into. Where do they hang out, where are their territories, that sort of thing. Did this contact of yours give you any real information one way or the other about that?"
"They're largely in the commercial and industrial districts. Wenge has a mansion in the northwest residential district with the rest of the wealthiest citizens. Of course, he would never allow anyone inside unless he wanted them there. Knowing what little I do about Wenge, I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of the best defended locations in all of Vale, outside the governing Councilors' Hall or Beacon Academy."
"Oh nice, that only leaves most of the city for us to search."
It was late at night as the Guardian, the Ghost, and the Detective hashed out the results of their independent investigations over the last few hours. Thankfully, it seemed that Cerulean had been far more successful in her search than Hakke had been, probably due to the fact that she actually had training in this area. And she hadn't walked into one of the most blatant traps to have ever been laid out.
Hakke hadn't died immediately, somehow. Once he had hit the water, he had been aware enough to know that Magenta and her goons couldn't be allowed to get ahold of his body, so he had forced himself under the surface and out into the main current, where a combination of blood loss, general trauma, water, and a massive cavity in the side of his head had finally killed him. Callie had wisely chosen to reconstitute his body on the shore, in a small out of sight alcove next to the river.
That had always been one of the bigger mysteries to Hakke, how she was able to make him a new body on the occasions that she was unable to breathe life back into his original frame. He knew that Ghosts didn't require any remains to bring their Guardian back, seeing as he had been atomized on more than one occasion. And he also knew that the original body simply vanished after enough time had elapsed. No one he knew had ever been able to give him a satisfactory answer as to where the hell his body went or came from, so he was forced to accept the fact that it just worked.
Not his favorite.
Either way, he had made his way back over to a bigger road and hailed a cab to bring him back to roughly the same neighborhood that the garage was in. After that, he took the rooftops to the hideout itself. Even though he was fairly certain that the Syndicate now thought he was dead, there was no harm in taking extra precautions.
Once back he had met back up with Cerulean and exchanged notes, neatly leading back to the current moment. Whatever contact she had talked to had provided her with a neat summary of the criminals they were facing down. At least in a very vague sense.
Then again, vague was better than nothing.
"My contact did have more to say, but it comes with a caveat." Cerulean said. Hakke raised his eyebrow as she continued. "They want a favor in turn for more accurate information. Knowing them, it won't be pretty."
"What kind of favor?" Callie asked.
"What they wanted was access to the VPD's comm systems, which would allow them to know when the police were coming their way, which is something I am unwilling to do."
"I'm guessing it wouldn't be that hard to dig a little deeper if they had that access point." Hakke surmised. Every tech on Remnant seemed to have a staggering level of interconnectivity, especially anything that connected to a Scroll. They served as IDs, phones, game controllers, all manner of inane functions. On one hand that meant all anyone really needed was one device, on the other it meant that everything was built in such a way to allow Scrolls to actively, and easily connect to them. Any safeguard placed was done so after the fact.
It was one of the biggest exploitable weaknesses he had seen anywhere, and one he and Callie had been abusing to its fullest potential. It was hard to get ambushed when your Scroll gave your position away after all.
"Did they offer an alternative?"
"They did. They want me to take a look into a warehouse of theirs in the Industrial district, confirm whether or not the White Fang is moving into the area."
The White Fang. The name ringed a bell. It took Hakke a minute to remember who they were and where he had heard the name before.
"Those are the terrorists, right? Or, freedom fighters turned terrorist."
Cerulean bristled momentarily, before deflating. "Yeah, that's them. Years ago when they first formed, I was all for them. They were turning heads in all the right ways, damn near joined up myself. But… being a cop gave me a front row seat to their new way of turning heads."
Hakke hummed thoughtfully. He had experience with just about every flavor of bad guy at this point. Soldiers, pirates, cultists, madmen, the undead (technically), and whatever the hell you would call the Taken. The Fallen definitely were close enough to terrorists to give him some experience there, what with going out of their way to kill civilians. But domestic terrorists?
That was new.
"So, your contact just wants to know if the White Fang have set up shop in a warehouse somewhere. Doesn't sound too bad."
She eyed him. "He just wanted to know if a certain higher up was there. A bigger faunus man who goes by Banesaw. I think they have some history."
"Cool, so we have one actual direction to go in now. I may have another."
"Oh?"
"You know that painfully obvious trap that Junior gave us? Well, I acted on it. Learned some neat stuff too."
"What happened?"
"I found a book with banking info, Callie has the specifics as to what was in it, but I'm pretty sure that it belongs to one of the mercenaries we're looking for. I figure I'll go to the CCTS tower and plug Callie in there. We should be able to use that to see who's paying their fees. Might help identify which of the three we're gunning for."
"You got in and out with no trouble then? Oh thank the Brothers, That's good to hear."
He pursed his lips. "Not exactly. It was a trap. Grunts, Murex, standard really. Actually, do you know anyone named Magenta?"
The Detective stared at him, shocked. "WHAT?" She yelled.
"Relax," Hakke began. "It worked out."
"How the hell - No! The Butcher was there? And you came back? Here?"
"It's fine, she stabbed me in the chest, they think I'm dead. And they call her the Butcher?"
Cerulean stopped entirely, staring at the Warlock. She made to say something, the sounds dying in her throat. "What do you mean they think you're dead? How did you get away in one piece?"
"Hakke was run through with Magenta's sword, and fell into the Vale River before they could fully confirm that he was truly dead. I observed them for a small window after the fact, and they seemed to believe that she had managed to stab him in the heart; a fatal wound. She missed, however." Callie added, ensuring that her explanation was given as calmly as possible.
"At least this tells us how important that random detail you found was. You don't send someone called the Butcher after just anyone."
"By the Gods themselves." She hissed, giving the words an injection of pain and venom. "They're sending the Butcher after us. Okay, fine. Fine! I don't know why you are the way you are, or how the hell you can walk away from the kind of punishment you keep getting hit with, but I can use that. Is that something you can keep up?" She was shifting mentality actively before Hakke's eyes, the beginnings of a very dangerous gleam forming in her stare.
"Oh yeah. It takes more than a shanking to keep me down." It was exactly what he had been hoping to see. He had seen it play out more times than he could count on the Farm, the evac/refugee camp outside the EDZ that many Lightless Guardians and civilians had fled to when the Last City fell to the Red Legion. Constant danger and the threat of losing the ones you care about tended to manifest in one of three ways.
The first way was to collapse inwards as the stress and horror of what had happened crashed down around them. The second was those that stopped processing their surroundings, dropping into a survival based autopilot. Move now, survive now, process later. He didn't fault those poor people for losing the will to keep going. Not everyone was cut out to deal with the nightmares that the world was fond of throwing at them. The fact that they had been in that situation was not their fault. It was his job to stand between them and the Dark, to take the hits where they couldn't.
The last path was what he was seeing right now. All the pain and panic was being focused into a single, angry point. It was his favorite reaction. The very, very human desire of hitting back when pushed into a corner. The desire to, even if they couldn't win, hit their enemy so hard as to burn their names in their memory.
"Good." Cerulean was going ahead. "Magenta, Murex, they're the big guns. That confirms we're a threat to them. Or what I know is. They wouldn't waste their best soldier's time with us otherwise. And if we're a threat, that means we can hurt them, put together whatever they're planning in this city and tear it down brick by brick. These sons of bitches think threatening me, kidnapping my wife is going to do anything besides piss me off?"
"Damn straight." Hakke said, getting to his feet with a determined grin.
"I don't care how big these bastards are. I don't care what they can do. We're going to find my wife, find all the people they vanished, get your… thing, and come hell or high water we are going to rip their Syndicate apart. I'll get in touch with my contact again, tell them we'll do the job. Then, there's a clerk at the precinct I can talk to, too low on the totem pole for the Syndicate to have their claws in, have her transfer every file she can from every case I've worked to me. We'll find the detail they're so scared of."
"Now we're talking. I'll check those financial records out, see what they tell us. After that, I've got some ideas to help even the odds the next time the Syndicate shows up. We find our next clue and our next baddie, and we hit it with everything we've got. Rinse and repeat until it's done. Just like back home."
"We're going to war." Cerulean said.
"Damn straight." Hakke confirmed.
There was silence.
They stood there.
"We're going to war, tomorrow. It's midnight" Callie said.
"Right." Cerulean said. "Great. Got all psyched up for nothing."
Hakke looked around the garage. "I got an idea. You know any boxing?"
It took a handful of minutes to turn an old bag of cement mix, some rags, and a canvas sack into the world's ugliest punching bag. Hakke managed to hook a rope around a ceiling beam, and left it for Cerulean to use. This sort of thing worked wonders for Titans back home, although a Titan would absolutely disintegrate the homemade punching bag with ease. But for an Aura-less Detective, it was the perfect venting exercise.
As Cerulean released her pent up rage on the bag, Hakke and Callie sat down to have a chat.
"So." Hakke began. "We gotta sort out what happened at the docks."
"Do you remember when I talked about Semblances during your hike to Vale?" His Ghost asked.
"Vaguely. Some sort of special, unique ability some people have or something."
"I'm fairly certain we've run into two."
Hakke blinked. Two? Aura made people faster and stronger. That much he absolutely knew both from research and painful, empirical study. Semblance abilities were supposed to be unique, and intrinsic, which meant that Tank Top was disqualified, unless you could count being an idiot as a Semblance. Since it seemed that Aura was a necessary prerequisite to have a Semblance, that disqualified all the grunts he'd fought along the way. That left Murex, who he could recall had swatted incoming bullets out of the air without needing to see them. But only from Cerulean, he had needed to dodge his bullets the normal way. Some sort of extra peripheral vision or awareness maybe? So Murex was probably the first, and the next noteworthy fighter he had seen was Magenta who had managed to cut open his very high quality armored clothing like it wasn't even there.
Wait.
"What can Semblances do again?"
Callie sighed. "The sky seems to be the limit as to what they can do. There are recorded instances of elemental abilities not dissimilar to some of the more basic Light techniques. Some make you stronger, or faster, or allow you to make clones of yourself. The Schnee family of Schnee Dust Company fame are able to generate glyphs that give them a wide variety of abilities. They are as varied and as useful as the ways of manipulating Light. They are force multipliers to an extreme, especially when a fighter has been trained to exploit their Semblance to its maximum efficiency."
"Like Magenta. Who cut through my City armor like it was paper."
"No she didn't. Not fully, at least."
Hakke tilted his head. "What do you mean?"
"Your helmet. She broke it, but she didn't cut it apart. While the fabric didn't hold up against her, the actual plated armor of your helmet managed to hold itself together."
Interesting.
"Makes sense. My coat is made of ballistic weave; tough stuff, but it's not impervious and I sure didn't mod it for extra resilience. It's good at stopping bullets, not blades, and if Magenta has a Semblance that allows her to cut better… is this really what we're up against? 'I have a special ability that lets me cut good-er.' That?"
Callie tittered. "Now you know how everyone who's ever faced a Guardian feels."
He made a face. "I don't like it. How common are these things again? Ah, it doesn't matter. We've seen two in as many days. While I don't really know what one of them does, it's safe to say that we're going to see more. Alright. Just means I have another factor to evaluate on the fly. Keep an eye out for the impossible." He looked over to the metal working tools scattered throughout the garage.
"So City metal held up better. Good to know. Say Callie, how good is that metal we pulled from the Arcology?"
Shorter chapter this week, sorry fellers. This part of the story, the pivot from the frenetic freaking out of Hakke getting set up in the world to the slower moving investigation into the Syndicate has been a bit of a slog. I know where I want everything to go, but getting there in a manner I actually like is proving to be trickier than I anticipated. What this means is I would really prefer for there to be less chapters where the main characters do nothing but talk at each other in a garage, because that is dumb and boring and dumb.
On the plus side things are going to be pretty neat from here as we'll begin to unearth what the villains are actually up to. That, if nothing else, will be fun.
RangoTango
REVIEW RESPONSE TIME
Pokemon5191 - Destiny lore best lore. I dunno if the mc is going to suffer a backhand decapitation, but he certainly is going to get wrecked more than once. It gon b fun.
ThePolishSausageRoaster - Magenta is probably on par with a Strike boss, so a big-boy level threat for a relative novice like Hakke. I've been finding comparing power levels between Destiny and RWBY to be pretty damn hard, mainly because because rectifying lore from Gameplay on the Destiny side is wack, and how competent characters in combat in RWBY changes season to season (Any fight in season 1-3 compared to, say, the Haven Academy fight in season 5). It's a mess that I haven't fully worked a solution out for outside of weird mental gymnastics for this fic.
The Baz - The Wonderful Wizard of Warlocks. I actually haven't described that at all. I've been waiting for an opportunity to naturally add it in the story, but that's really never going to happen. So we're just gonna add that here now.
Prodigal Hood helmet - Tidal Hope Shader
Wing Theorem Gauntlets - Skele-Ghaul Shader (to dab on the Red Region of course)
Duster of the Cormorant Blade - Refurbished Black Armory Shader
Wildwood Boots - Warbrick Shader
Hakke's Personal Bond - Dark iron with a gray nylon strip in the middle.
Guest - This is officially death 4. First one was Magenta's MLG snipe in chapter three, two more on the hell march to Vale, and another Magenta kill here.
Master-ofmanga - Hakke's biggest problem so far is how he's been making assumptions and operating as if he can predict every trick thrown his way like could back in Sol. Semblances could be categorized in there as well, but I haven't done a good job in conveying that, and that one is one me. So far, Semblance=discount Super in his head, until he gets clapped one too many times and is forced to reevaluate his hypothesis. We're in the 'Hakke finally realizes Aura and Semblances aren't comparable to what he's dealt with before' part of the tale.
DarkMegatronXX47 - Oh god yes, give anyone else Hakke's luck and they would have died long ago. I mean, so does Hakke, but that's beside the point since he can get better. By the way, you hit the nail on the head with her Semblance. As long as she has an edged implement, she is crazy dangerous, which she needs to be. She's a central villain for this arc after all.
