A/N: I own nothing. Licenses belong to RT and Respawn. I hope you all had a good week. hit me up with your feedback and I hope you enjoy.
Turns out that the natives of Remnant didn't take too well to looting the body of a person you just killed, not that Steele considered the salvage of useful equipment looting. He didn't get detention or extra counselling; arguably, the silence in the dorm was worse. It wasn't as judgemental as he expected, they seemed to get it at some level, that there wasn't a choice, that the other Pilot had been aiming to kill, that they had helped Steele with the killing.
Ruby was taking it far better than Steele would have thought, she was struggling with the why but otherwise was basically taking things in stride. Yang was just kind of concerned, her inner mom wanting to smother Ruby while recognizing that Steele was far to well composed for someone who had made their first kill, sitting next to Ruby and trying to act like this was completely normal. Blake was probably taking things the worst; she had done some things she wasn't proud of during her time with the Fang and seemed to be comparing those to this incident. And Wiess seemed to get it, she had simply sat down at the desk in front of the pad that Steele was using as a digital picture frame.
There had been some shouting, some arguing, and some rising tempers before Ruby put a stop to it. Blake hadn't been pleased with the would be execution and the actual shooting of a corpse; while Yang had come to his defence, her stance was that they had fought alongside him against a target that had been trying to kill him and that this was the fall out of an actual war where things were different than the peacekeeping that they aspired to.
Much to his surprise, Weiss backed him up as well; her own history with the open conflict between the Fang and the SDC. Ruby ended up caught in the middle, trying to calm everyone down and assert some sort of control before things got properly hostile. Ruby trusted that Steele had made the right call; from her point of view, it was a remnant of his war and she was sad that Steele had felt he needed to kill the other Pilot, but it wasn't anyone's place to judge him for doing so.
Weiss held up the pad, staring at the pictures. Looking at Steele. "A lot of these pictures… you're in them. You took most of these yourself, didn't you?" She had a good eye for detail, he looked different in most of those pictures, he was much younger and was in the background of most of the pictures that included him. The one she was looking at had him sitting against the side of an exo-colony in the background eating a sandwich; that had been a good fight, short but good, IMC forces had needed to be pushed off of the planet and he had been happy to health.
"Yup, if it's a picture, I took it myself or am in it; if it's a banner or a drawing, then I just collected it somewhere along the way. I tried to keep the pictures to places I've been that had significance to me, nothing from places I just had a stopover at or were places where nothing happened. That was a good one, sandwich that is. Good fight too, but man that sandwich hit the spot; first proper meat and bread I had had in… four or five months."
The whole team gave him a funny look, which Steele completely failed to notice having gone back to cleaning his weapons. Weiss spoke up again, moving to show the rest of the team the pictures. "You were… young. That's a lot of fires in the background, what happened here?"
Steele didn't have to look up to know what she was talking about, there had been a whole lot of Scorches out that day. "War crimes. War crimes happened- not that we cared about laws- IMC forces dug in deep, so we used a whole lot of fire to flush them out. Most of those fires are fuel or ammo stores that caught fire before we could salvage them, where I found the sandwich actually. We had a guy back then, Milder? That sounds right, anyway, he thought that it was important to get something physical, something we could pass on to teach the next generations once we won. He gave me a lot of the pictures that I'm in; he's the reason I started taking pictures myself, something about his philosophy. Dude was a complete ass though, spent more time in the bottle than Barker."
Blake wasn't having any of the diversion. "You didn't have to kill him! why are you taking his side? You can't just kill people!"
"Not sure you were paying attention Blake, but I literally just did. I've been doing it since I was Ruby's age, and I am extremely good at it." Steele was frankly done with Blake's shit; a former member of the White Fang should have known that life was rough, and things weren't always clean. He knew what the Fang got up to, just how nasty they could be, hypocrite.
"Enough! Stop fighting! Forrest, you did what you think you had to. Blake, you helped him even after he told you and Yang to leave. Forrest, why did you kill him, who was he?" Ruby had decided that it was time to be a leader.
Steele reached into his pocket and pulled out the Apex card, throwing it down at Ruby. "That's called an Apex card, the only people who get them are those invited to join the Apex Predators; an elite mercenary group that is known for being beyond messed up. Their leader goes by the name of Kuben Blisk, he lives by the philosophy of 'I kill you, I'm better. You kill me, you're better.' Mans an absolute maniac, and so is everyone he hires. I got that card off the body of the Pilot in the Forever Fall, that's enough for me to know that I would have killed him even if he wasn't an active threat to me; everyone is better off with him dead and gone. He was a murderer at best, I won't get into the worst he could be."
Blake looked like she was going to argue but realized that this wasn't a fight that she was going to win. Turning and leaving the room, slamming the door on her way out. Steele looked up from the reassembled Alternator, tossing it down to Ruby when he saw the look on her face as Blake walked out on them. "Let her cool off, she's going through the same shit that everyone goes through after their first kill. She'll come back in her own time, things will be rough for a few days, and then everything will go back to normal on the surface, then things will blow up again when she cant shake the moral injury, then she'll learn to live with it. play with the gun and try not to worry about things you can't change, you'll go insane if you try."
"Range, 950m. Windage, 4 knots to our 11oclock. Beaten zone adjusted, standing by for suppressing fire."
Steele and XR were laid up in a set of ruins outside of Vale, readying to ambush a White Fang agent and his escorts. Steele's efforts to disrupt the Fang's efforts had shaken some very interesting people out of the bushes, one of who was scheduled to meet with a representative of an organization of Grimm hunters that were based out of some fort beyond the walls that the Fang believed were responsible for the attacks on their operations in Vale.
XR had his rifle on its tripod on the roof of a building around 40m to Steele's right, while Steele himself had his DMR on it's bipod resting on the floor, looking through a broken section of wall and hidden by a pile of bricks. The ruins were just around a click from the meeting point that Steele was planning to interrupt. Steele was looking forwards to trying out his new high spec bullets, this would be an excellent test of their performance.
Steele was going through final checks; he was concealed, his silhouette was hidden, his colours were inline with the moss and trees, he had a piece of fabric over his scope glass to prevent shine, he wasn't moving, his shape was broken by his camo and the bricks, he was only communicating on a closed link to XR, his natural alignment was good, his breathing and heart rate were slow and even, the DMR was tight to his shoulder, and he was pushing forward on his toes to make sure he was braced. He moved slowly between the pouches containing his various mags, practicing the gestures before he had to use them for real.
A group of nine Faunus entered the clearing that Steele and XR had dialed in. he couldn't see who they were supposed to be meeting, and frankly he didn't care, there was no paycheck in tagging the rep. "go time XR. Fire on my mark, focus down the guards and ill take the target."
He made a few last second adjustments to his scope, then slowly moved his reticle over each of his intended targets. He waited for his target to step forward and begin speaking to their opposite, closing his eyes and breathing. When he opened his eyes, his target was still fully in the center of his reticle. He engaged the Smart target system, the scope couldn't auto lock out to this distance, but he could tag a target to be locked out to nearly 2km. Steele waited for the lock before sliding his finger onto the trigger. Breath in, breath out, freeze at ¾ exhalation, squeeze the trigger. Bang.
The bullet was perfect, it arrived instantly, perfectly through the temple and into the cranial vault. Next target. Breath in, out, pause, squeeze. Next target. XR fired from his flank, supressing the group and forcing them into cover, and completely annihilating anyone who didn't react quickly enough to vacate his beaten zone. Not that that really helped the others, as XR had the smart target systems as well.
Three shots from Steele, and a drum from XR was more than enough to completely exterminate the detachment from the Fang and their agent. Steele was fairly sure whoever then had been meeting was still alive, he hadn't seen anyone else and XR didn't report an extra contact. He pushed up and sprung to his feet, slinging the DMR and readying the 301 as he backed away from his hide. "Pack it up XR, nothing more for us to do here. Let's head back to Beacon before someone comes poking around. Make sure to clean up your brass, I want nothing left behind." Steele wasn't sure which of them had it easier, he had only fired three rounds. But XR had a vortex generator, while it wasn't capable of acting as a vortex shield, it was strong enough to pick up his casings.
It was the work of under 30s to clean up and vacate the hide, Steele hopped up into XR's cockpit as they made their way out. Quick and clean, the right way to complete a hit like the one they just participated in. Steele didn't like that the rep walked away, that was a loose end, but they didn't have a price on their head. His client had put up a series of bounties for him to claim as he saw fit, he hadn't had a chance to meet with his client since the incident in the Forever Fall the day before, he was hoping to see them on the coming Saturday. He just wanted answers; Why the attack when he was working with their boss, it didn't make sense. Unless they didn't know.
Luna Stella stood at the edge of the clearing in which she had been directed to meet with the White Fang, her parents had been clear that she was the closest and most trusted asset the Stella clan had in the area. The Fang were concerned about the attacks on their network inside of Vale, believing that the Stellas had finally decided to get involved; she was to make clear that he Stella clan was maintaining their neutrality and was in fact not aware that the Fang had such an extensive network in Vale.
She had been waiting for around half an hour before anything happened, her instincts telling her that things were going to go sideways; there was no way that whoever was throwing the wrench in the Fangs operations wasn't going to get involved if they had a chance.
When the Fang showed up, it was in a group of nine. The one in the middle stepped forward as his escort fanned out around him, giving them plenty of room to speak. He spoke first. "Brother Adam wants to know if the Stella Clan has finally abandoned their neutrality, bad enough that you don't join the righteous defense of our people, but this."
Luna bristled. "The Stella Clan swore to not become involved, our place has always been outside the cities, protecting the villages. We have not abandoned our oaths or our people. Carry word to your 'Brother Adam' that we will stay our course, and remind him that he is far outside the terms of our agreement, if he continues to operate inside Vale with the intent to harm the city, we will hunt down all assets belonging to the White Fang inside our forest."
The man in front of her began to open his mouth. He never managed to get a word out. His head simply exploded as a bullet ripped into its side. The bullet was unbelievably fast, only her Huntress trained reflexes allowed her to see it. The bullet was distinctive, and one she had seen before. It had fins, and it turned as it flew, adjusting for the smallest movements of it's target, its trajectory was completely flat. There was only one person she knew of who had bullets like that; Forrest Steele was the person behind the destruction of White Fang's assets in Vale.
This was confirmed by a second head exploding before anyone else had processed that they were under fire. The hail of large caliber bullets that ripped through the clearing just confirmed who was behind it. Luna dove to the ground and crawled her way to the base of a nearby tree, following the contrails back to their source; a set of ruins where she was able to make out the muzzle flash of the large caliber weapon that was firing at the clearing.
The attack lasted for only a few seconds, as she watched, she could just make out XR retrieving his weapon. but was unable to find Steele, even with having been able to follow the contrail directly to where she assumed he had been hiding. She got up and made her way to the ruins, she wanted to take a look at the site. She wasn't going to try to confront them, not when Steele had a giant ass robot to back him up.
She had had her suspicions about Forrest, she could sense just how troubled his soul was. And she had been able to pull some details of his life from him, she knew he was a killer, but that right there was clinical and completely ruthless. An ambush on what was supposed to be neutral ground, precise sniper fire on the target, covered up by a barrage of high caliber fire. it would look like the ambush it was, but it put the blame on her clan, which was completely unacceptable. She needed to write home again.
The ruins were completely clean of evidence, aside from the tracks that were left behind from XR. Not a single casing, not a single track from a human. The only thing she could find was a small group of bricks that had been disturbed and some fresh powder from where the blasts had shaken the crumbling ruins. To pull that off would have taken incredible skill and training, she hadn't seen him leave even though she was watching, and he had left basically nothing for an investigator to work with.
The clan needed to know, they needed to be prepared for the reprisal from the Fang that would inevitably occur now that their delegation had been cut down.