In an abandoned old town far outside of Vale, amid forests and plants steadily retaking the scene from the ruined remains of cement and steel, a bullhead sat on a makeshift landing pad that was no more than beaten down grass and filled in tree-stump holes. Guards with big guns and bigger swords patrolled the area.

Inside the base, underneath the first floor, within a small, cordoned off room, among much stolen medical equipment, laying on a surgical table, was Bishop Beauvais. He looked like a mummy, encased almost entirely in bandages save for the places were monitors and IV's were connected to his flesh. Through the transparent respirator, one could see his mouth with lips burnd and peeled back in a facile snarl.

Faintly but steadily, a heart rate monitor beeped.

"Will he pull through?" asked one of the two people in the room. He wore the full armor of the Enclave, mask and all.

"He will," said the doctor, clad in scrubs and examining a clipboard. "I doubt anyone else could."

The man stared at his commander through his helmet's big matte-black lenses. The only indication of emotion from the tense and quiet soldier was his tightly clenched fists.

"Of course, he will be disfigured and missing an arm," the doctor continued. She flipped through her notes. "But thankfully, the situation isn't as bad as it looks. Internal damage to the organs and brain is minimal. As long as we keep him on life support here, he should recover to some extent."

"Some extent?"

"He won't die."

The two shared a solemn look.

"I suppose that makes you the one in charge now… Commander Shade."

"Acting Commander," Shade replied. He turned back to the sad figure on the operating table. "Once he pulls through, I'm sure he'll be wanting to take charge of things again… at least strategy and logistics."

"Hmm…" the doctor tapped a pan against her clipboard. "This would be bad for morale."

"It will be."

"It would be," she said, "if the rank and file were told."

Shade turned to her.

She drummed her fingers on the clipboard. "Swear all those who currently know of this to secrecy. Otherwise the plummet in morale could set us back."

"We—"

"Most people in the Enclave don't meet with the Commander regularly. We can keep this secret, you can direct orders until he recovers and most of our soldiers will be none the wiser. Work will continue as usual."

Shade's face could not be seen, but it would not be a poor guess to make that he was frowning.

"I suppose…"

"It's a duplicitous scheme," the doctor admitted, "the sort he would approve of. After all, he always put the Enclave before himself."

"Hm."

Shade looked back to his Commander reticently. Bishop's awful body was in a state he had never before seen a still-living person subjected to. He could not imagine him every moving or acting like the strong young man with bright eyes and a brighter voice full of bright ideas.

"Alright, we shouldn't stay in here for long," the doctor said. "I think it's best if he's kept in relative isolation."

"Yes… I suppose so." Shade sighed. "You think we should lie about Arthur's death as well?"

"No, a martyr is good to have," she replied coldly. "He was well-respected and well-liked. Knowledge of his death will be disheartening but also inspiring, I think. Not as excruciating a fact as Bishop's injuries."

"I guess so."

"Well," the doctor turned towards the door, "let's give him some room."

Shade followed her, lingering in the doorway to look over his shoulder just once. With a few more steps, however, he exited into the outside world and shut the door behind him. Darkness then claimed the room, broken only by the little lights spread across the medical equipment that twinkled feebly like fake stars.

However, just before he closed the door and just after he looked away, something odd had occurred. Bishop's left arm was missing up to a point just below the shoulder. For just a second, one of the bandages around the stump had twitched.

It was the second time in as many days that Jaune found himself in this situation.

"You're meat," he told the captive man. "People are just meat." The rest of the day was spent on said treatment until they got what they wanted.

Things had gone pretty quickly after they escaped Qrow. The two had gone to another safehouse Neo knew of, one which belonged to a friend of a friend who owed her. It was a room in a rundown motel which was, quite conveniently, soundproofed. It was a place intended for dark things. There they spent the night and kept swapping notes and learning all that the other knew. Well, Jaune obviously kept a great amount obscured from his new ally, although she would not have believed him even if he had tried to explain.

Both slept uneasily and woke up early. From there, they had trailed their target: the protection squad leader whom the previously treated goon had told them about. They tracked him to the usual meeting place of his squad—a small office rented out as a campaign site—and waited for the other members of the New Dawn there to trickle away as the sun set. When it was him alone, they stormed the place, kidnapped him and dragged him back to their new base of operations. They then tied up their latest catch up, threw him in the bathtub and unleashed upon him the same brutal process that Jaune had unleashed upon so many others.

I'm going to get some food

When it was done, that was what Neo typed on her scroll and showed him. She left the dingy motel room with its flickering lights and peeling cream-colored paint. A little convenience store across the street, the kind lit with cheap neon lights advertising beer and lotto tickets, had served them well the past day, providing a wealth of jerky, water bottles and miscellaneous energy bars to prey on.

Jaune sat down on the little couch in the living room that he had slept on the night before. Neo had claimed the bed first and he really didn't care enough to protest. The couch, despite being a foot too short for him, was better than the floor.

He sighed and looked at the blinds covering the window. He had peeked through them a couple times, and the view was actually pretty nice. From here, in the outer fringe of the more rundown part of the city, from out the window one got a nice sight of downtown with its tall buildings that twinkled with light during the night.

As it were, however, it was in his interest to seclude himself from the world and continue his gruesome but necessary work.

Jaune looked over his shoulder and into the bathroom. He had drawn the shower curtains closed to hide the grisly thing within. He now noticed, however, a trickle of blood dribbling down from behind the curtain and pooling on the tile floor. He got up, closed the bathroom door and sat back down on the couch. Its cushions were old and the wooden frame creaked as he settled in.

Jaune sighed and threw his feet up onto the coffee table, strewn across which were the copious notes that he and Neo had been taking. Their little library now included knowledge taken from two captives. He leaned over to get the most recent sheet, groaning in pain as his chest was agitated.

They had learned one most interesting thing from their latest victim. He got orders from one man specifically when it came to organizing the more militant elements of the New Dawn. He had met him only once, a spectacled and shrewd individual who wore a suit meticulously absent of wrinkles and had the somewhat off-putting habit of conspicuously licking his lips after almost every sentence.

They had closed off their interrogation with having him draw a basic sketch of the man from memory. Said sketch accidentally got a few drops of blood on it.

Neo knew somebody who might be able to help them track this guy down, and now they waited for the chance to meet him. Jaune threw the page back onto the table. The deal was that Jaune would take these notes with him and show them to the rest of his team.

Neo had raised the question of whether he was going to go back to the other hunters after ambushing Qrow the way he did. He had simply told her that he would deal with the consequences when he returned to them. It was a fast and cheap answer with no more substance than the air used to speak it.

He thought it over every moment of the day: when he ate, when he spoke with Neo, when he used the bathroom, when he reread the notes, when he sat back on the couch with his feet propped on the coffee table and stared into space. How could he go back and reconcile himself with Ruby whom he'd terrified and Qrow whom he'd attacked. How could he explain why he had said he wouldn't trust the Brotherhood again. What an idiot. Now Qrow must be harboring an intense suspicion.

He and Neo had already made good progress; keeping at this pace, who knows how long they would run out their leads in Vale. At that point, Jaune would return to his life soon.

But would he really? They would all look at him differently, all possess the same distrust that Blake had possessed ever since she saw him behead that man at the docks. And, of course, the Brotherhood of Steel would have him in their hands; was this Remnant version of the Brotherhood as generous as Lyons's, or was it as harsh as the Outcasts, or was it as strict as Sarah? How would they react knowing he had apparently run into them before?

So maybe…

The apartment door opened and in came Neo. Clad in a baggy hoodie and child-size jeans and sneakers and sporting dirty blonde hair, most anyone would be hard-pressed to recognize her. The bruises on her face didn't help either. She held two plastic bags full of essentials—cheap jerky, energy bars and energy drinks. She limped forward and winced as she used her bad ankle to kick the door closed behind her.

She threw both bags down on the floor, rooted through one and then tossed a little bottle to Jaune. He caught it and looked at the label. It was brown hair dye. He barely looked up in time to catch the second thing she threw his way. A pair of tacky sunglasses.

"Not a bad idea," he commented, setting the agents for disguise on his lap.

Neo got over to the couch and slumped down on the sunken brown cushions as well. Jaune thought it oddly interesting that they were sitting on a couch, sharing jerky and going over nefarious plans together. Certainly not how he thought things would go when he first met her on the train all the way back in Mountain Glenn.

Mountain Glenn… speaking of strange allies…

But that would be for after he and Neo split and he returned to his friends. Or could it? He could hardly contact him with the Brotherhood on his back. If only…

Neo waved her scroll in front of his face to get his attention. He had learned by now that this was her way of "talking to him" with what she typed down:

My contact agreed to a meeting. We'll head out in a few hours.

The sun had already set an hour ago, but Jaune was unsurprised that an illicit criminal meeting would happen in the middle of the night, so he simply nodded.

Then he frowned. "I still think we should rip apart the New Dawn. Or at least try. At least kidnap Fantoche and see what he knows."

Neo rolled her eyes, typed out another message and showed it to him:

He's a vet with his aura unlocked and always has at least two hunters as guards and I don't think either of us can deal with that. Not to mention the authorities would be all over us. Plus it's just begging the Enclave to hunt us down. Right now our advantage is that everybody thinks we're dead and the city's still a total mess. Even this is probably putting them on high alert. We need to chase after the leads we have for sure right now before they shake things up and it's impossible for us to know more.

Jaune grumbled. He had already been given this dose of logic before, but that didn't mean he had to like it. For now, a somewhat more inconspicuous and mobile approach was for the best. Just kidnapping their next target, the first actual member of the Enclave it seems they would get their hands on, would ring all sorts of alarm bells. And between just the two of them, they hardly contend with the black-ops group's power.

"Alright," he said. "Who's this contact of yours?"

Neo drove them through the city's eerily quiet streets in silence. She kept her eyes on the road while Jaune scanned the streets and buildings for anything threatening.

They had taken one of the cushions from the motel couch and threw it on the driver's seat to make it a bit easier for Neo to see over the steering wheel. Jaune felt a little bad for not knowing how to drive himself, though she didn't complain; his worried that a cop would pull them over for thinking a child was driving the car. Lucky for them that all the police were more busy stopping looters or patrolling the city outskirts.

He took in the city streets which had at first filled him with wonder and fear. So many bustling people among the large, impressive buildings. So much life, so much more than anything he had ever seen or could have hoped to see back on Earth.

Now many of the building had been torched by fire or shredded by flying Grimm. He passed by a guarded truck full of inert lifeless robots and saw a couple walls that had been riddled with bullet holes by those same robots. It reminded him of home.

The pair's cold faces were intermittently lit up as the car passed under a streetlight, only for darkness to then shroud them again for several smooth seconds before they passed under another light. The passage between light and dark felt almost hypnotic. The car's humming engine and the rolling tires created a soft lull which was all either heard. Jaune yawned. Neo yawned as well a moment after.

Their sleepiness fizzled away when they reached their destination. Tense alertness seeped into their muscles and minds.

The club was, as most things in Vale were, closed. A number of people sporting the red and black of the Red Axe Gang patrolled outside of it. Figures were seen in the windows, likely with sizeable rifles just out of sight. Everybody was feeling jumpy and defensive.

Neo rolled up right in front of the entrance. Two similar looking women stood at the entrance; one wore an outfit of complete red, the other white. After Jaune got out the car and slammed the door shut, he noticed that the two were in fact twins.

Jaune and Neo didn't exactly cut the most intimidating aura as they approached. Neo wore an excessively simple outfit of a grey hoodie, black sneakers, worn jeans and a tie holding her hair back in a ponytail; Jaune sported and outlandishly normal outfit of a grey hoodie, black jeans and grey sneakers (all taken from a corpse). He also wore sunglasses to cover his distinctive burned eye; his previously impressive blonde hair was dyed a muddy, insignificant and inconspicuous brown.

The twins sized them up as they approached, stepped forward and patted them down. Jaune had to hide his pain as her hands brushed over his chest; the wound made it ache just to walk and stand up straight.

Jaune and Neo had each left their guns in the car, which now a couple other goons circled around. While he hardly liked being unarmed around the unknown, he didn't have much of a choice if he wanted to hear first-hand about their lead.

The twins held the door open for them and lead them through the club. The building's interior contrasted starkly with the dull and dead exterior. Inside what must have been the whole of the Red Axe Gang moved around crates, talked and parceled out everything from guns to bags of drugs. Normally such brazen and concentrated illegal activity would never be done, but the chaos of the city provided opportunity for rapid preparations.

They led both Jaune and Neo past it all, bringing them through the club's unglamorous back halls and into another room. This room was filled with finery, from a velvet carpet to a mahogany bench to an expensive cigar in the lips of the man who sat behind said desk in a sleek chair which rested on said carpet.

The twins left and shut the door behind them, leaving the pair alone with the mob boss.

The boss took his time breathing out another burst of smoke from his half-spent cigar, sizing up the shabby pair with his dark, intelligent eyes. "Name's Junior, worked a lot with Neo and Roman." He spoked for Jaune's benefit, but he looked at Neo.

"Yeah well we're calling in a favor," Jaune said, stepping forward and not wanting to give a single second to pleasantries or performance. "And you're the guy who knows a lot of things about a lot of people."

"I am," Junior said, putting his cigar down into an ash tray. "And what guy are you? Neo just said she's coming along with a temporary assistant."

Jaune kept his gaze firmly locked on Junior's. "I just want to kill the same people Neo wants to kill."

"Just that?"

"Just that."

Neo strode forward, snapping her fingers to pull attention to herself. She slid out her scroll and placed it on Junior's desk.

He picked it up and read. After the first sentence, he frowned. That frown deepened as he kept reading. When he finished, he sighed and set the scroll down.

"Not sure I can help you out with this."

Jaune scowled. "The hell do you mean?"

Neo scowled. She raised her fist demandingly.

"There are some very dangerous people in the world," Junior said. "Some people"– he picked up his cigar again –"you don't want to mess with." He shrugged. "And snitching out on people so they get killed doesn't exactly garner a lot of trust with anybody else." He chewed on the cigar again. He bit on it nervously rather than enjoy the smoke.

Neo stomped forward and furiously slammed her hand down onto the desk, growling silently and glaring daggers at Junior.

"Listen pal," Jaune said, "just give us this and we get going. You should be thanking us for being willing to take these guys on. No doubt they'd hack you all to bits if they take control."

"Nobody ever—"

"They're not nobody."

"Who the hell even are they?"

"The Enclave."

Junior pulled out his cigar and jammed it down into the gilded ashtray. "Them? What?"

"You didn't know who he was working with?"

"I know when not to ask too many questions, especially when people have the means to make you hurt for it." He looked between Jaune and Neo. "Just the two of you are trying to bring down the people who smashed Vale and Atlas?"

"Hey Neo," Jaune said, "instead of just being pissed, why not tell him a bit more of what happened?"

She threw a glare at Jaune from over her shoulder, before snatching up her scroll again and hammering away some new sentences. She slammed it back down onto the table, hard.

Only when she pulled her hand away did Junior tentatively reach out and grab it for himself. His eyes widened. He looked over the scroll and back at Neo.

His voice was hesitant now, regretful. "Roman?"

Neo nodded. She pointed at her nasty black eye.

"They…"

"Want to kill you and everybody you love," Jaune said. "That's what they want to do."

"And how do you know?"

"That's what they did to me. Everybody in the whole world who doesn't agree with them or doesn't fit into their idea of the perfect society they want to kill."

Junior looked back at the cigar now smoldering in the ash tray. The brand had been recommended to him by a man now gone. He steepled his hands and slouched back in his chair, brow furrowed in concentration. He shook his head and could not meet either of them in the eyes as he spoke again:

"You didn't hear any of this from me…"

Sarah had not expected everything to go the way it had. She had thought that her mission to Vale would be a mostly sleepy affair of providing security and forcing Maxwell—Jaune—into submission. Things had unfolded quite differently.

Now she stood on the deck of an Atlas cruiser, one of only half the ships in Atlas's expeditionary fleet that managed to survive their fight with the dragon. She remembered seeing the great Grimm's corpse fizzling away slowly among the broken and burning remains of battleships.

A revocation from Vale's council of their right to be stationed in Vale's sovereign territory now sent them back home. That move wasn't entirely unjustified, considering Atlas robots had fired on Vale's civilians.

Sarah's hand twitched, wishing to grip thinking of the way she had needed to smash several of the bots to bits. She had never trusted them. One of the Brotherhood's key tenets was to never become overly reliant on machine thinking and treat such technology with great apprehension. At best, robots had no loyalty. At worst, they become downright insidious.

Now all she could do was stand on the deck of the cruiser and watch the city of Vale recede into the horizon at the beginning of this long trek back to Atlas.

She thought not for the first time of a dangerous possibility. She saw herself striding through the ship's narrow metal halls and commandeering for herself a bullhead. Nobody would have time to ask questions as she flashed her Specialist badge and demanded what she needed. Then she would fly back to Vale, get off the bullhead outside of the city and torch everything that marked her as Atlesian. Then she would take her sword and set out in the world on her own, following leads and tearing through that festering wound of a city until she uprooted the weed that was the Enclave.

Each time she considered this, however, she crushed the idea quickly. It was ridiculous. It was her more action-oriented and angry thoughts which coalesced to present to her these absurd possibilities.

Basically, she was mad and she wanted to break things.

The Enclave in full force… the idea was intolerable. Her position in Atlas, however, was valuable. And Atlas itself now had a vested interest in destroying the Enclave. Remaining patient could possibly lend her a role in in the fight against the Brotherhood's mortal enemy. She had reported that she had previously encountered an Enclave and somebody like Bishop Beauvais; but Sarah did not count on that report being taken overly seriously or being acted upon soon even if it were. After all, the egos and red tape that always stood in the way of—

Her radio crackled.