Chapter 2
Firseside Girl
Altis 2046
Ben Kerry
It was always important to keep up with one's neighbors, especially when said neighbors were murderous bandits.
Night was generally the best time to do this, the island of Altis was absolutely lousy with old NVG systems, but working batteries were in short supply, and mostly reserved for radios. Most made due with weapon-mounted flashlights or sometimes just torches. Many men just never left the relative safety of the bonfire.
This meant any man who braved the dark with just the eyes he'd been born with could do so almost uncontested, so long as he was careful to keep his eyes away from the light.
Just like Kerry was doing now.
Fine powder coated the inside of his nostrils as he took in the cool night air. The soil near the top of a peak tended to be poor and sandy. It made a stark contrast with the rich soils near the valley basins, where once farmers had tended their crops and groves.
Even after years of crawling around in the dirt, he hadn't gotten used to the taste. It was unavoidable, he had to keep low to avoid silhouetting himself against the top of the hill. To do otherwise would make him into a glorified pop-up target. The night sky could be awfully bright nowadays.
He panned his eyes across the darkness of the valley below, only for the town, Panochori, and the campfire at its center to draw his eye.
It was a small group, no more than six of them. Kerry'd made a habit of picking off the smaller bands years ago. Word had spread, and the bandits had learned. When combined with the strength inherent in numbers, most of the smaller gangs had wised up and joined larger ones early on. Not every group had, but the dumb or stubborn had mostly been annihilated or absorbed by smarter or tougher leaders. Some of those leaders had been gracious in victory; most others, less so.
Kerry hadn't expected to actually witness a beheading in his lifetime, but he'd seen a lot of unpleasant things though his rifle scope over the years. Frankly those first beheadings had been merciful, the slowness due to inexperience rather than sadism. The knives had been sharp, the executioners young and reluctant.
These men below him were just about Kerry's age, mid-thirties to early forties. All were armed with the old AAF five-five six bullpups. TRG twenty-ones, long barrels to give the small bullets a little more oomph. Each of them carried an identical wood-handled blade in a scabbard on their left hip.
He panned his scope to the boss, who was easy to identify by his beer-gut and sidearm. The grenade launcher beneath his rifle's barrel was another easy clue. Catching a glimpse of crimson at the edge of his scope, Kerry's curiosity got the better of him.
At first he thought it was another corpse, but the color wasn't right for blood, it had to be clothing.
But who the hellwore red nowadays? And all of that black had to be sweltering in the Mediterranean sun. Even after the war.
The whole outfit was just asking for trouble, hell, they might as well be cosplaying as Little Red Riding-hood. He panned his scope to the face, he did so again, then a third time just to be sure.
"The fuck?"
If the neck-length black hair wasn't indication enough, the skirt did it. He was looking at a teenage girl, the first female he'd ever seen on Altis. All of the women and children had been pulled off the island during the decade of Civil War and subsequent insurgency. With the exception of the genetic oddities, there hadn't been anybody with two X-chromosomes on Altis for at least two decades.
This was different. She wasn't some dumbass bandit or small-time thief who'd got caught. This was an innocent. More importantly, it was a teenage girl. Hog-tied and bruised in a camp full of men who'd last seen a woman on the screens of their cell-phones just over a decade ago. Kerry scanned the men in the camp again, there wasn't a one who wasn't stealing glances at her.
Kerry had played bystander to some pretty fucked up shit, but was he really just going to walk away from this?
One of these days he was going to have to learn to leave well the fuck alone, why not start today?
His soles made contact with the soil before he even knew what was happening, Kerry up and over the crest of the hill in an instant. His boots made rapid progress down the grassy slope.
The dot of firelight flickered in the distance, he could feel it tugging at his chest, pulling him in.
Kerry passed a burnt-out MRAP as he reached the edge of the town, something big had blasted most of its exterior off, fire and a decade of rusting and scavengers had done the rest. Kerry's foot kicked something from the soil and onto the road, he gave it a once-over.
An old bleached bone bounced moonlight back at him from the pavement. The scrap of fabric that clung to it was faded to the point where there was no telling which side it's owner had fought for. Not like it mattered. He shook his head, then resumed his course.
As he crossed an intersection Kerry ducked into a yard behind a shop. He tiptoed past piles of quietly decomposing crates and refuse on his way to a backdoor. The thing itself had been kicked-down a long time ago, it lay rotting on the floor. The cracks in the doorframe as old and desaturated as everything else was nowadays. He crossed over the threshold.
A gust of wind blew down the valley as he stepped over the creaky floorboards, there was a SLAM from behind him. Kerry jumped, rolling forwards and pointing his barrel towards the threat, he was met by the site of a peeling shutter rattling in a broken window.
The dark blue had long given way to a sickly, greenish color.
Another gust came, the shutter pulled back and bounced, racing back home with a SLAM. Now that he tuned his ears, most of the shutters in the town were doing the same.
Kerry growled and pivoted back to the side-door. The sound of his footsteps was muffled nicely by the gales. He passed through an alley and a hole in the wall of another structure. It was time for his least-favorite part of any raid.
Sentry Elimination.
The sentry in question had been found easily enough through Kerry's rifle scope, the glint of his lens reflected nicely in the firelight. If the AAF had been unprofessional, its former members were even worse. That didn't count all of the rebels and criminals that had gotten mixed in over the years.
He crept his way up the stairs, keeping close to the stone wall in hopes of preventing the creaking.
When that proved fruitless, he moved only during gusts of wind. He took a deep breath through his nose to steady himself and drew his blade. It had started its life as a mariner's knife, five inches long with a gut-hook near the end, although this one was supposedly for rope. The handle had been a blue-and-yellow synthetic rubber pattern. Kerry had wrapped it in electrical tape as soon as he'd found some. The knife itself had been an absolute boon.
The stainless steel of the knife glimmered at him from the darkness, this was too close for a suppressor. The campfire was practically beneath them, less than ten yards away. At the top of the stairs Kerry was greeted by a hallway, this was a common design on Altis, the rough layout of this floor burned into memory by harsh repetition.
If the pattern held, there would be a doorway roughly halfway down this hallway into a center-fed room. The glint of the lens had come from there. The right window, to be specific. Kerry's hand touched the cool steel of the doorknob. His memory had served him well.
He grasped and twisted, lifting up on the door to keep as much weight as possible from the hinges. It squeaked anyway, but he needn't have bothered. The man's rifle was propped-up on a bipod atop a table, some hunter's bolt-action. The sentry himself was snoozing into his hand. Kerry took a second to pinch the bridge of his nose, before he overheard a squawking from outside the window. He and the sentry jumped in unison.
Kerry grabbed the sentry's mouth and nose, the air from his nose squeaking out in surprise. Kerry's knife came down from his other hand into the sentry's windpipe, he pulled the handle to the side and yanked the man's head back over the chair. Roughly ten seconds later the struggling ceased.
With that dealt with, Kerry was free to eavesdrop to his heart's content. Even after his decade of isolation his Greek was trash, but he could parse the meaning of most of it.
"- a fucking monster! She killed at least eight of us, EIGHT! We need more men out here, I don't trust those ropes… I know but… Now don't get me wrong-" a borderline scream emanated from the radio, but the static and distance kept Kerry from getting any meaning from it.
In hindsight, those men hadn't been looking at the girl while smiling ominously, they'd been looking at her the same way people looked at unexploded ordinance.
So much as an errant sneeze, then - BOOM.
She wouldn't be useless after he helped her at least.
"-ahh, well then. We'll make due 'til dawn-" more yelling from the other end "- Yes sir… sorry sir."
Kerry peaked over the edge of the sill, the Fat one put down his walkie-talkie and ran a hand down his stubble. His other hand ran down the pockets of his vest, passing a wooden kniflehandle and a mag-pouch until he finally reached a mostly empty compartment. Withdrawing a lighter as he pulled out a bent cigarette.
Unfiltered, of course.
The girl herself was glaring daggers at the man over her gag. There were two more sitting cross-legged on the ground by the fire, one of them roasted a small fish on a skewer. A small garbage pail sat between the girl and the flame.
Kerry moved his reticle over the fat one's head just as the ember at the end took on a glow, before lowering it down to just over his sternum.
Missing a shot this close would be embarrassing. His finger drew back gradually, despite himself he felt a rush as the trigger broke. It was going to be a good one.
The shot struck just over the plate, knocking half a decade's collected dust off of the fat-one's shirt, even as gas from the suppressor smashed the entire room like a sledgehammer, knocking yet more dust off of cracks in the mortar.
Those below him swam through corn-syrup, jumping away from the flame as if it had shot their boss. A man in a baseball cap locked eyes with him from next to the water pail. His scalp disappeared before Kerry realized he'd pulled the trigger, the man crumpling to the ground.
He saw the muzzle flashes before he heard the shots, he dove and threw himself flat facing away from the window, the rattle of rifles on full-auto tore their way up the wall and into the opening. More bursts of fire joined them.
Time to leave.
He shoved himself off the planks, the plaster dust and dirt sticking to his hand. He hopped up and barreled down the stairs; the men had been blasting rifles on automatic, noise wasn't as important now.
He kicked his foot into the base of the wall past the end of the stairs, forcing himself to swivel and spin into the room at large. He was rewarded for his aggression with the sight of a bandit framed in the doorway, backlit by the orange firelight.
Somewhere there was a sound of breaking glass, the screaming of the bandits grew louder.
The man's arm was still extended, descending in a panic towards his rifle, which had been stupidly lowered. Kerry aimed off of memory, trigger-finger blurring three shots into the bandit's plate-carrier.
The plate only really held up against the first, then the man buckled from the follow-ups.
The bandit fell into a pile just as the firelight crackled out, plunging him, the bandits, and the shell of the town into darkness.
Ruby
Ruby did not like the taste of dirt, or the smell for that matter.
Sure, she'd been knocked into it enough by Uncle Qrow during training, but that was different.
She hadn't liked most things that had happened today, but the dirt was getting real obnoxious. Second only to the heat from earlier and the sweat in her clothes.
The day had started out so well, the sun had been shining, the birds had been singing, even Weiss hadn't been trying to cut her down. In fact, they'd been getting along perfectly. She'd take Weiss's constant nagging back any day over this.
The fat bandit spoke his gobbledygook into his radio, it screeched back at him.
She hoped he was getting an earful for being so… so… urgh.
She blew a cloud of dust away from her nose in a huff.
The trip to the Emerald Forest had been a mistake. Yang had been so pushy about it, had insisted that all they needed was a team-bonding exercise and things would come together. A little walk in the woods, maybe find some more cool ruins like the ones from initiation, maybe get a little sparring in.
Ruby knew that fighting Yang was a bad idea, even if she'd won Yang just would have said she was taking it easy on her. She knew Yang just wanted to help prove herself to Weiss, but it still was dumb.
Why didn't Yang trust her to take care of things on her own? She wasn't some little girl? Heck, she was a teenager, she'd been let into Beacon two years early!
Didn't help those men earlier, did it? Whole lot of good your Fancy Combat School training did for them, eh?
Ruby cringed, wrists straining against her ropes. They were the slick, cheap plastic stuff, stretching and biting into her skin. Her teeth ground into the rough cloth gag, which itself was biting into her cheeks. She let loose another sigh.
Maybe, with a little more time, she could have stretched out her ropes and slipped out. That was probably her best shot. She gave another glance to the fat one, who'd lit up another of his disgusting cigarettes. Technically they were supposed to be called something else when they didn't have a filter, but Dad had given Uncle Qrow the Evil Eye whenever he'd said it. Some short, Mistrali term for a bundle of sticks.
Eventually he'd just quit smoking.
Uncle Qrow would have known what to do right about now, he wouldn't have killed eight people, for starters.
She bit her tongue, and suppressed a growl. Thinking like that wouldn't help anybody.
Silver eyes roamed the campsite, not far from her feet was a plastic water-bucket. Ruby wasn't sure what exactly they were worried about setting on fire around here, but she noted it anyway. Not far past the top of her head was the fat man, and she could feel as much as hear the shifting of a pair of boots behind her head.
Counting the glint of glass she's seen in the window above her, and the three other's she'd seen pacing the place, that made for six. Not bad, if Ruby could just get her feet unbound and under her she could out-run them, she hadn't seen any cars or bikes.
The smell of tobacco smoke wafted over her, Ruby raised her head to face the fat man once more, who blew a smoke cloud in her direction while staring intently.
They were looking at her awfully close for that. She was going to have to wait her turn then.
The fat man leaned back in his chair, firing yet another column of acrid smoke into the air above him.
There was a crash from behind her, like somebody had smashed a steel plate with a big rubber hammer. The fat man crumbled into his folding chair, cigarette falling out of his mouth and scattering a few glowing embers onto the sparse paving stones.
There was a sound of a man inhaling and shifting behind her, but there was a second crash and a thud from behind her as he collapsed. Machine-gun fire began to lance into the side of the building where their sniper had been.
That wasn't a smart way to use those rifles of theirs, but it also meant that their eyes weren't pointed at her, at least for now.
Okay Ruby, you won't be getting another shot at this, make it count.
Step one was freeing her hands, that was easy, they'd been bound together behind her. She simply lifted her legs and brought her arms around in front of her. Now came the… weird part.
She wasn't getting anywhere with those ropes on her legs. She turned over to face the corpse, hoping that she could improvise something with his rifle and her aura. The worn wooden knife handle poking out of his belt seemed to glow in the firelight.
The blade itself was just as crude as the handle, but it was coated in a thin sheen of oil. The ropes around her ankles seemed to part of their own accord under it's touch.
Cool. She had her legs back, and she had a knife.
The man's eyes were open wide, gazing unfocused into the clear blue sky, his tongue lolling limply into the dirt. Her eyes refused to venture further down, to see her handiwork. But eventually they slid down anyway.
Bloodied skin, then protruding ribs, then an obscene train of entrails linking his top half to his bottom.
She'd wondered why the men she'd been smacking around hadn't been getting back up, now she had her answer. There was a hollow thump from behind her in the distance… was that a grenade launche-?
Ruby shook her head for the third time in as many minutes and dropped the knife.
Her eyes leveled with the bucket, and as one of the men tried to boot-down the door to the building his friends had been shot from, she kicked it into the fire.
The last thing she saw was the door-kicker collapsing under a volley of those strange muffled gunshots.
The entire town sunk into darkness, the panicked screaming increasing in volume and intensity. One of the louder ones was a scrawny man who's been crouched behind a building.
"Gamato! Skata! Sas!"
She wondered what that meant?
One by one Ruby saw flashlights appear, weapon-lights from the looks of them, nobody she could think of had used weapon lights in at least thirty years, it was the sort of thing you'd see in old Spruce Willis movies and those cruddy third-wave action films.
It also meant she knew where they were.
The loudest was first, Ruby leaping over the coals and zipping up to the panicking man. She had never been any good in hand-to-hand, but that didn't matter.
She reached into his lapel and grasped, then sprinted to the side. The man was flung into a stone wall next to them.
One.
Another flashlight lit her up from behind. Ruby sped over the fire again, just as a burst of fire tore into the wall just behind where she'd been standing.
She sped towards the gunman, whose beam was flicking back-and forth in a desperate effort to find her, his beam finally caught up to her in the last ten feet of her sprint towards him. Her boots kicked themselves off the cobblestones just as he began to fire.
Once again, she grabbed his collar, and as her boots kicked over the both of them she grasped a handful of cloth with both hands.
By the time her boots hit the ground his had left it, when she let go he was sent spinning head-over-foot. Face-first though a window. His rifle came off the sling and bounced away, the beam coming to a rest pointing down a narrow alleyway.
Something hard and metal pressed itself against the back of her head.
"Mean k'neeshis! As'kilah!"
Ruby stamped her feet. One gunman wasn't going to do much to her at this range, not with her limbs free.
One last try at playing nice. Just one.
"For the last freaking time! I! DON'T! SPEAK! YOUR! CRAPPY! LANGUAGE!"
A third thud echoed out from the shadows. The barrel removed itself from the back of her head, it's great accomplishment amounting to only a few stuck-up hairs.
A coughing carried out through the murk, roughly from where the shot had come from a second ago.
"Are you okay? They're all gone, I can help you!"
There was a final, wet cough, and then.
"You speak English!"
There was another bout of coughing.
Ruby had never heard of English in her life, but she understood the voice, and it didn't seem inclined to hurt her, at least for now. She called out again.
"Are you hurt?"
There was a pop, then a hiss, there, standing over the body of the bandit in the doorway, was a man grasping a red road flare.
He was just about as old as the rest of the men, maybe a little older, the beard could've been throwing her. The harsh glare from the flare didn't help either.
He did look like he was trying to fight-down a smile though, just like whenever Dad was being mopey and Zwei leapt up and started licking him. There was a scuffle off to her left, the man she'd smashed-face first into the bricks stumbling to his feet, the flashlight at the end of his rifle swung about madly as he tried to get his bearings.
Thump.
His face hit the well, then smeared a red streak down it as his body fell in on itself.
Ruby flipped back around to the bearded man, his gun was different from the others. A proper rifle, instead of one of those bullpup abominations the gangsters had been carrying. A strange cylinder was attached to it's barrel. Even as she watched the cylinder lowered itself again.
There was another squawk from the radio, then more rapid-fire gobbledygook. The bearded man looked at her again. Before clearing his throat and speaking.
"We need to leave. Now."
That was rude.
"Hold up, I don't even know your name!"
He shook his head.
"Name's Kerry. Listen, we've got less than five minutes to get the fuck-" she flinched slightly "-out of here and head south, 'else we're going to be up to our…" He fumbled for a good word, Ruby decided to help him.
"Elbows?"
The voices on the radio started shouting.
"Yeah, anyways, we're screwed if we stay here."
Ruby gave a quick glance around the camp. Where is it?
"I'm not leaving here without my baby."
"You have a kid!"
The shouting over the radio had reached fever-pitch.
"Nooo, that's what I call my gun. Crescent Rose."
The man, or Kerry she guessed, sighed.
"A gun can be replaced, hell the whole island is lousy with 'em."
"Not this one." Ruby began to walk over to the dead man near the fire, she'd already gotten his knife, might as well get his gun, or at least his flashlight. Kerry grumbled and walked over to her.
"Fine, here."
He held the flare up to her.
She grasped it and sprinted over to the tents the gangsters had been using, tucked into the back lot of a set of shops. She found him buried next to the biggest tent, next to some bottles of beer. She reached a hand in and freed her scythe from its prison.
A few well-practiced flicks got it into storage mode and under her cape in no time flat, which was good, because they didn't have a whole lot more than that. Kerry stormed around the corner, trigger-finger fluttering against the guard.
"We need to leave, NOW. Reinforcements from Kavala are on the road, we're lucky they're not dropping mortars on us already."
At this a storefront behind him exploded, the flash of the explosion bathing the town in a terrifying white light. Kerry recovered fastest.
"Toss the flare into the tents and follow me, we're heading south, then up along the coast. We need to get the hills between us and them fucking yesterday."
Ruby underhanded the flare into the tent she'd just been rummaging through. Another shell dropped into the town, this time in the building Kerry had been hiding in. There was a vast shattering and rumbling, it was falling in on itself.
She gave Kerry a nod, and together they ran down the road, and into the dark of night.
