VI
Trust
Yang fed a magazine of shot shells into Ember Celica. As the gauntlet armed with a percussive click, she looked back towards the other tunnels that fed into the atrium and wondered if they shouldn't be covering those as well. Breathing, she figured it was the best solution they had available to them. Prepared as she could be for the coming trial, she gave Blake a steely look.
She reciprocated with a nod and cast her eyes back over the ledge.
"They're climbing," Blake said quietly, like she was afraid something would hear her. "I don't know if we'll be able to outrace them." They both knew that the most likely creature of Grimm that they'd see down here were Creeps—quick, subterranean fiends with an ease of mobility that made escape in confined locations impossible. Individually they were weak, but in large groups they were a threat. It hadn't been that long since Mountain Glenn, yet Yang hadn't forgotten the Creeps and other Grimm that chased them into Vale like a tidal wave.
After a thoughtful moment, Yang raised her gaze with a fiendish glimmer in her eye.
"You go then," she said to Blake. "I'll hang back and stall them."
Blake's eyes immediately grew wide. "That's crazy!" she yelled, forgetting her earlier caution. "You'll be overwhelmed!"
The blonde acted like she wasn't unsure of the idea, coolly testing her arm cannon's actuator. "If I position myself right, I don't have to fight all of them at once. Just one or two, if I guard that gate. You're way faster than I am, and the quicker you can get that platform loose the better off we'll both be."
Blake's ears hung listlessly, apprehension weighing on her other features. Yang took a breath, stepped up to the faunus and cupped her shoulder. She drew that electrum gaze and she smiled back with her lavender own.
"Trust me," she said. Metal fingers tapped on her scroll, its light shining. "Give me a signal if, when the way is clear and I'll be up there as fast as possible."
A loud, unnatural noise like the coupling of a crocodile and a nevermore's scolding interrupted from the abyss. After a moment of intense consideration, Blake looked to her partner and bobbed her head.
"Give me a boost."
With a full-chested shout, Yang flexed and threw her joined hands up over her head. Blake's foot planted into her fingers at the right instant and her slim form hurled through the air like an arrow, cutting into the shadow until quickly she disappeared into the black air.
A small sense of dread settled into Yang's stomach as she heard the flutter of Blake's coat disappear from earshot. Now it was just her and the oncoming adversary.
She'll be fine, she told herself. Consoled herself.
Another keening hiss bellowed out from closer below. A new one or the same one? Other growls followed close behind it. Yang took a deep breath, released it, and she armed her gauntlets as she took a defensive stance. Her hair fell like liquid gold around her shoulders as she stared into the darkness, body tense with charged explosives and eyes alight with intensity.
Besides the unknown creature in the Delirium Grotto and the King Taijitu before that, it had been a time since Yang contended with the Grimm. It was a different feeling from fighting other people. For one, she didn't have to worry about holding back—she was free to test the limits of her lethality against the soulless opponents. It was good, wholesome fun that was also a community service; pest control, in a term. And for the second, she didn't have to contend with the idea that people could be as monstrous, if not moreso, than the Grimm.
The worst of the Grimm merely want kill you. The worst of humanity would want you to suffer until you wish they had simply killed you.
One quadruplet of glowing red eyes burned in the black.
"I see you," she jeered as though the Grimm could understand her.
Two, then four, and eight and more sets glowered back up at her. Feral growls answered her sing-song taunting.
"Tough room, huh? That's okay," she said as she pounded her knuckles together. "I'm not here to joke around!"
The first challenger lunged out from the precipice, jaws open and hissing with a fetid black breath as a golden fist flew out to meet it.
Blake couldn't focus. As she traveled through the air like a missile fired from a slingshot, the wind whistling loudly in her ears and hair, her mind remained on her partner. The thought of Yang alone confronting whatever spilled out of that pit, creatures of Grimm or otherwise, made her stomach turn. Her unease was made even worse when she thought about how Yang lacked the benefits that she herself had in such an environment as this.
No night vision.
She certainly lacked the benefit of four ears.
And yet Yang elected to stay behind.
If not for the pressing time, Blake might have—would have—raised a firmer protest. But her shoulder tingled with the shortly passed memory of her partner's hand and her accompanying words.
Trust me.
The inertia from Yang's initial boost started to falter to gravity. She employed her semblance and leapt from one shadow clone to another, one powerful bound following another. The ceiling, the bottom of the sealed platform, came into view.
When it was within reach, and with Gambol Shroud in hand, Blake whipped the sword from its hybrid sheath and twirled. Ribbon secured to her wrist, she threw out her blade at the fullest extension of her spin, and midflight it underwent metamorphosis before it stabbed into the elevator's wall. When her upward momentum ceased, the tether guided her to a safe landing on the wall.
She retrieved her weapon and guided herself over to the vertical tracks. From there, she climbed as fast as she could. Taking as many of the notches as she could in single bounds, it wasn't long before her muscles and lungs burned with the effort.
Yet she knew she couldn't stop. Yang had placed her trust in her, and she in Blake. It was equal parts challenge and test. Finding them an exit quickly was the objective, but the test was essentially saving them.
If she failed, they would never see their teammates again.
It was not even an option.
As Blake arrived at the effective ceiling of the shaft, she found it to be in as bad condition as she expected a century-old abandoned structure to be. For her purposes, this was good.
Steel bands framed the top part of the shaft, and the tracks terminated in large gears that had been so thoroughly rusted that it was difficult to tell them apart from the natural walls. The sound of the Mistrali wind was fairly loud in Blake's feline ears, but what really called her attention were the occasional thuds that rang out from below.
The sound of Yang's guns.
The rate at which they went off wasn't excessive, but it was frequent enough to indicate a pitched battle. They were steady, one report every few seconds, like she was methodically following a plan. Yang was claiming her pound of flesh this morning, that much was certain. Blake only wished that she could be at her side, if only to watch her back.
She shook her head free of the reverie; she had a job to do. Her focus went back to the gears. Though she could hear the wind, she couldn't see a clear weak point. Any light from the outside didn't reach whatever enclosure or cover the elevator was under, otherwise she might make out the light filtering through.
Blake thought back to Yang's cheerful boasting. What would she do? Blast her way through, clearly. If Team RWBY ever needed someone to make an improvised exit or ingress, Yang was the designated breacher. The fixtures were large and looked like they would require a considerable amount of force to dislodge.
With her off hand she gripped her weapon's sheath, what doubled as a cleaver. With a yell she hacked at the first gear in her path.
Sparks flew and illuminated the dark, the cleaver biting deeply into the ancient metal. It was brittle, but there was so much and much of it fused besides that it would be a job causing the entire assembly to release.
The muffled blasts from below began to come more rapidly.
A sense of urgency took hold of Blake, and with her newfound resolve she struck at the cog again and again. Sparks glanced off her face and grit stung her eyes, but she hewed away relentlessly until a loud groan issued from the metal. Suddenly, the cog popped free of its home in the track and fell away in pieces.
Blake barely swung herself free of the debris. One or two of her hairs weren't so fortunate, and the sudden pull left an unpleasant stinging sensation in her scalp. A small discomfort, normally, but it gave her pause knowing that that could have been her head instead. Her aura would have protected her, but she would have certainly been thrown free of her perch, and if she didn't lose consciousness she still would have lost precious time.
"One down," she sighed in relief, noting the frustration in her voice. Blake then resignedly sprang to the next track and its cog to repeat the process.
The dark and deep was not Yang's preferred venue for a brawl. But every time her mind felt like voicing a petulant complaint about her situation, the other part of her mind—the rational, oft-ignored voice in her head—quickly shushed the bellyaching, reminding her that this could have all been avoided with some warm milk and a bedtime story.
Yeah, right, she thought back doubtfully as she smashed another Creep's skull between her iron fist and the stone.
She'd lost count of the beasts she'd sent to slaughter. Some were as easy to defeat as a swift front kick back into the pit from whence they came, others were more tenacious and attacked from unexpected angles. It was almost as if there were differences between individuals and they were not all just copies of one another like some huntsmen were led to believe. Yang couldn't recall whether the Creeps had good eyesight or not, but she always assumed that she could be seen, if not heard. She was not the subtlest of combatants.
As if to prove herself, she leveled yet another two Creeps with a yell, a roundhouse heel sending one flying into the other. She stood just behind the atrium's elevator gate, and she employed it as the doorway to a disassembly line. One Grimm enters, no Grimm leaves, or it does so in pieces. It had made the blonde's task simple, if monotonous, and as she thought about the predictability of it she rapidly cast the thought from her head so as not to tempt fate.
The small hairs on her forearms suddenly went rigid. Yang hopped back instinctively, and a large piece of deformed metal banged deafeningly over the precipice where the latest challenger was crawling up to meet her. It was obliterated instantly, bone splinters and broken black flesh fizzling away into smoke as the reverberations vanished into the abyss.
Yang flicked her lavender gaze upwards, a grin peeling back on her lips as though to cheer her partner on. In the same beat, she found herself hoping she was keeping herself safe.
None of this mattered if they both didn't make it out.
The momentary distraction almost cost her, and she tacked left as a particularly stealthy Creep crawled over a break in the chainlink gate. Yang fired Ember Celica into its flank and used the recoil to deliver a wheeling kick. It was downed, knocked off its feet, and Yang went to finish it off. More Creeps began to arrive on the ledge faster than she could attend to it. By the time she returned her full attention to the gate, several had already forced their way through.
Encircled by the dark mist that once constituted a body, Yang rose from her grim work and panted. Her rhythm was off, and her space was slowly being overtaken. She attempted to position herself as ideally as she had before, but her work became more frenetic now as she defended multiple angles.
Her metal fist punched through serrated teeth, her guns blasted passages out from inside various maws, her bootheels crumpled bony plates like eggshells, and yet she felt like she was making no headway. The massacre was on, hideous countenances and screaming teeth appearing and vanishing in strobes of Dustfire and flares, a glancing hit on her aura here and there. Yang began to rely on her sense of hearing as more of the fiends attempted to encircle her.
She was not flagging yet, but Yang felt her clothes clinging to her body, and she prayed that Blake would send the all-clear soon. She belted out a scream and destroyed the next few Creeps, easily leaping, sliding and pummeling through the bipedal lizardlike Grimm. She hoped that the extra noise would be enough to attract all the Grimm in the shaft. It was an odd thing to hope for, but their success depended on it, so she did her best to make sure that her shotgun ballet drew every single one of the hissing black-and-white bastards onto her dance floor.
As the sounds of the battle below intensified, so did Blake's work on the ancient platform. It still showed no sign of giving, but she had at this point only removed one of its anchors. The second proved much more stubborn than the first, and her cleaver did little but draw sparks from the rusted hulk. Even with dozens of deep grooves in it it did not falter, and Blake's shoulders began to burn with the exertion of striking metal repeatedly.
It was only when her last stroke bounced back at her rather than through the rust-caked metal that she stopped and despaired.
Rivulets of sweat ran down her back and her black hair matted to her face as she dangled by a single arm from one of the struts beneath the platform. It was robust and strong even in this state of neglect and decay, and it had to be considering the payloads it had once been expected to bear. That same strength was making it difficult to destroy it now that the lives of herself and her partner depended on it.
She felt a twinge of anger and bit back a curse on the humans who built this mine. Even now, this long separated from the White Fang, a lingering distrust of humanity remained in her reckoning. Enormous pockets of suffering, which in turn engendered concentrations of Grimm like the kind Yang was presently battling, were constant reminders of the fallibility of man. And if she didn't see the evidence with her own eyes, the countless books written about it would provide insight enough.
The slave laborers, the trapped miners, the despair and agony from both—injustices like it were the kind of thing that left a stain on the land like an indelible blot of ink.
Muscles straining, Blake pulled her lower body up to where she could wrap her legs around one of the support beams. She faced herself towards the source of her ire, and locked her ankles together.
Immediately she felt release in her arm and back, sinews uncoiling like compressed springs. She let out a sigh of relief, even though they still burned.
The faraway cacophony continued below, or rather above, from Blake's perspective. Her sharp hearing occasionally picked up an extended scream or curse from her partner. Each one felt like a stab to her chest. More than anything, the uncertainty was killing her, and though she had the urge to continue, her body hadn't recovered enough to give more than a pathetic rap to the barrier in their way. Worry creased her features and guilt like venom began to seep into her heart.
I'm sorry, Yang. I'm the one that couldn't be trusted, she thought bitterly.
Blake reasserted her grip on Gambol Shroud, tugging it free of its holster. With both hands on the hilt of her weapon she extended her body, arching her back, and swung at the seized cog with a shout. It took all that she had with gravity working against her, but this time her cleaver had bitten through the machinery. The beam on which she was hanging to lurched uneasily, the sudden movement sending a start bolting through her heart. When it seemed like the platform had snagged again with no risk of falling, she let out a held breath and looked for her next target.
If fate was on their side, one more anchor loosed would be enough to make the platform fall in under its own weight.
She had to believe that this was the case. Exhaustion tore at her and she fought back doubt with every ounce of her willpower. As she crawled from the support strut to the next one closest to her third target, Blake wondered if she was going about this all wrong. Brute force would absolutely be Yang's tactic of choice, and it might have been more effective here with weakened metal than densely packed rock and soil like back in the grotto.
She felt her feline ears flick as a new sound came into her awareness. The whistling of the wind was more pronounced, but it was something that she ignored because of how the platform now sat ajar due to its missing cogs.
But then she felt it. Like a cold line drawn across her cheek, the wind was coming through something directly above her.
Blake peeled her eyes and attempted to ascertain the source. After a long few seconds of searching, she saw it.
The line of a maintenance hatch.
Of course, she thought to herself. The engineers had to have had some way to work on this thing in the past.
It was slightly parted due to the way the platform seemed to be warping. Occasionally, Blake heard the worn down metal give a creak even under her relatively small weight.
Carefully, she secured herself and inverted her grip on Gambol Shroud and raised it over her head. She held the pose a moment, gathering strength, and then drove the cleaver's flat end into the loose panel.
With a bang it gave, but the hatch fell back into place.
Again!
The metal rang lowly, vibrations jarring her hands and lower arms.
Again!
The hatch flew back out of sight as though all it needed to give was her shouting to accompany the blade. Her heart leapt at the cold wind that hit her face, and the air was sweeter than anything Blake could remember. As she inhaled deeply and felt to her core that they were about to be free from this nightmarish hole, her heart dropped.
The sounds of Yang's guns had stopped.
Yang was losing ground.
The onslaught of Grimm had not stopped since the first one attacked. She had managed to push the Creeps back to the gate the way that she had set it up before, but the fiends had figured out how to access the other breaches in the gate fencing to circumvent her intended path. The Grimm were not mindless, and though it was easy to forget that, Yang tried not to let the single-minded effort they expressed confuse her to that regard. There was no lack of stories of how mighty huntsmen were laid low for underestimating a few Beowolves.
Yang swung her left fist and flexed her forearm, but instead of a satisfying blast from the gun in her gauntlet there was but a click, and a sigh of heat from the depleted chamber.
Damn! Miscoun—
Yang felt the ground leave her feet, and she hit the stone ground on her back. The air exploded from her lungs and she scrambled to reorient herself. From all directions she only saw approaching quartets of red dots. Her scroll's light danced across a half dozen grimacing, smoke-curled faces. With a curse she assumed a defensive stance and attempted to pad out the space between herself and her adversaries.
A sudden racket grabbed her attention as she looked back towards the gate. In the gloom, at the very end of her light's beam, towered an evolved form of these beasts. It went on four legs instead of the two of a typical Creep, and with its massive spikes of bony armor it wrenched what little remained of the fencing on the gate and tore through it. At the shoulder it was roughly twice the height of a normal Creep, but its face was unmistakably related, even with the extra growth of white and red plates on its face. For all she knew, this was one of the original Grimm that brought this mine's operations down.
Feeling her heart as it raced out of time, she looked towards the old foreman's office and sensed the beginnings of a plan. Imagining that her Dust reserves were running low in her arm cannon, she refrained from spending any more shots on the small fry. As one lunged, she clobbered it and sent it to the ground with a mouthful of shattered teeth.
Come on, Blake, she thought as she backed towards the old office. She didn't want to think about why she hadn't gotten the all-clear yet. The longer this went on, the less likely they were to escape from here. Granted, now that she wasn't providing as large a diversion as she wanted, the possibility that Grimm would interrupt Blake's role was significantly heightened.
Yang felt a thrumming on her chest. Her eyes darted, and she tapped on the scroll's button with shaky fingers.
[Yang! Are you okay?]
Blake came through, and she sounded exhausted, which made Yang cringe inwardly. Did she have to defend herself, and is that why it took her so long to respond?
[Yeah… I'm running low on ammo, though. Trying to save it for the trip up.]
Yang had to stop and defend herself, no doubt sending Blake a good sampling of alarming sounds and mental imagery. She heard Blake's voice calling out her name during the fracas, and Yang broke free of the small melee to jump halfway up the stairs to the mine's operations office.
[I'm here!] she answered with a hasty reassurance. [I'm surrounded, though. There's an alpha here and it shredded the gate.] She shook a stale breath and tried to refresh herself. Her muscles ached terribly now that they'd gotten a moment's rest from the continuous battling. For the last several minutes she had been going more on instinct than thought. Thinking was dangerous, she often used to joke.
[Are you trapped?] Yang couldn't help but detect the alarm in Blake's voice. The situation looked grim, she thought to herself with a rueful chuckle. But the recollection of the Blake apparition's words had gotten inside her head.
She knew it was stupid. But she also didn't want to risk more than was necessary. Blake sounded she'd just fought her own battle, and the last thing she wanted to think about was both of them having to make the climb to the top while hounded, especially when Blake had already done it once.
[No,] Yang said quickly. [I have a plan. I'm gonna lure them to the office, then I'm gonna throw myself out the windows and make a break for it.]
There was a considerable pause during which the snarling of the creatures grew closer and closer. Looking down from the top of the stairs, Yang could see a veritable sea of red pinpoints and the monstrous chief among them lumbering through the herd.
[Do you need me to meet you halfway?] Blake finally said.
[No!] Yang replied immediately. [Is the way open?]
[Yes,] came Blake's voice quietly.
[Then no use in both of us risking our lives.]
Yang felt the small office shake. The beast was at the foot of the steps.
[Gotta go!] Yang added as she stepped back towards the windows.
Yang sucked in a breath.
The alpha lunged up with a crocodilian growl and took out the staircase and part of the supports with a swing of its massive tail. Ancient planks clattered deafeningly in a chamber already filled with feral noises and howls, and the office swayed treacherously under the lost support. Her muscles twitched as she moved to keep her balance on the precarious ground.
Yang tensed herself when she saw the large Grimm rear up on its hind legs.
As it threw out its clawed forelimbs, Yang covered her face and launched herself through the side windows of the office. Glass triangles glinted in the beam of her scroll as she tumbled and landed on hands and feet. The tinkling of crystals filled her ears as glass rained behind her, followed shortly by the cacophony of the small building imploding. Without looking back, she sprinted towards the ruins of the gate and took a recoil-powered leap into the far left elevator track from where she was standing. She hit it with teeth-rattling force, but she was intent on getting as much of a head start as she could.
The alpha's bellow reverberated in her bones as it did in the atrium. The mines below fell eerily silent, and then a thrill of danger shot through her as she realized that it was likely summoning all the Grimm within the reaches of the mine to that area.
Yang felt her nerves run cold as a fresh surge of adrenaline dumped into her system. She took the grooves in the track two at a time, throwing in an occasional shot to give herself a little bit of a lead. Before too long she started hearing the keening snarls of the Creeps on her heels. If nothing more, it convinced her to push herself onward and upward through the seemingly empty space. Without being able to see, no matter how wide she willed her eyes, Yang felt like she was making no headway. It felt like she had been trapped in some kind of purgatory where effort yielded no results and there was no end in sight.
The adrenaline was beginning to wear down. Instead of ice in her veins, there was now fire. Her muscles began to quiver with lifts that she would have taken with laughable ease, and her legs started to feel like she had leaden weights tied to them.
Still there was no light to indicate the way out.
Her breath tore at her raw, dust-choked throat. Sweat ran down her arms and shoulders and it was beginning to make the grip on her left hand slick. Her eyes stung with grit and the sound of her heartbeat was thick in her ears, muffling the sounds of the terrors behind her. Before too long, she was only able to heave herself up one groove at a time. Her pace slowed to a point where she may as well have been walking versus her pursuers' easy sprint.
Yang heard the snapping of teeth in her ear.
She looked back. A Grimm's grinning face stared back at her, inches from her heel. Its muscles bunched up beneath its black exterior, gathering power, and its clawed limbs dug into the rocky earth of the unfinished walls.
Yang exhaled and brought her right arm around towards the Creep, wincing as her shoulder ached even with the light weight of the prosthetic. It felt as though even the shroud on her hidden gun was sluggish to arm.
The Creep leapt at her, its jaws beckoning.
A bullet caught it in the back of its mouth.
It went limp, mid-lunge, and dropped.
Yang dragged her eyes up as the creature fell away into the abyss. There, a few feet above, was her partner, her arm extended, Gambol Shroud's barrel hissing smoke.
"I told you," said Blake with a weak smile, stowing her weapon and offering a hand, "I'm not leaving."
Yang opened her mouth and let out a small breath, and though she was too exhausted to speak she gave a small smile of gratitude as she took the faunus' hand.
Blake demonstrated surprising strength by giving her a heave that carried her several grooves on the track. Yang caught back on when her momentum stopped, and Blake's voice rang out behind her.
"I'll hold them off!" she said between shots of her weapon. "I can see them perfectly. It's only twenty more meters up!"
Yang felt a relief she had not known for a while. She had gotten too used to watching her back, looking out for herself. Always being hyperaware, never trusting anyone or anything, even herself, exhausted her more than the climb she was on. The sound of Gambol Shroud popping and subsequent Grimm howls gave her all the encouragement she needed to push herself past the pain.
At last, Yang reached the dilapidated platform. Her mouth hung slightly when she saw the damage and started guessing at the way Blake went about it. Two of the gears were missing, and the remaining two were on diagonal sides from each other. She puzzled for a moment, but then she saw that it was done so that Blake minimized her risk at getting caught by the platform if it fell. She looked towards the rough center of the platform and saw the maintenance access, open and beckoning with freedom. Escape would be trivial but there was still the matter of the pursuing Grimm. And with the weakened platform... if they were followed out, neither of them looked to be in shape for a prolonged battle.
"Blake!" she shouted despite the burning in her lungs. "There's a big alpha down there!"
"I see it," her partner's withered voice responded. "My shots aren't doing anything to it!"
Yang could see a little clearer now. Blake had been anchoring herself to the wall using her weapon's scabbard so that she could fire with her free hand. The repositioning seemed to exact a tax on her endurance, but Blake seemed a good deal less worn out than she felt. She also hadn't been fighting Grimm for what seemed like hours.
"What are we going to do?" Blake's voice came again, this time a little closer.
Yang glanced at her prosthetic and flexed her fist. The shroud on the cannon drew back.
"Blake," she called, her plan materializing, "Get back up here!"
Yang was beneath one of the intact gear motors; the other undamaged one laid directly across the platform in the corner opposite the one she was in. Blake joined her shortly and looked at her, eyes wide and attentive.
"Hang on!" she said, and it didn't take Blake but a split-second to comply. Blake's eyes darted towards her arm cannon and the opposite side of the elevator shaft and wordlessly understood what Yang was about to do, and with an eye shut and a moment to steady her aim, Yang sent a flare whistling into the elevator's track.
The explosion easily blasted the rusted iron loose from its home and sent earth and metal spilling into the darkness. The platform groaned loudly from right above their heads, pulling both hers and Blake's attention. Yang instinctively crossed her firing arm over Blake to shield her with her body, eliciting a small gasp from the faunus. The air went tense, Blake's grip tightened on her, and that familiar sensation of danger shot up her spine like a thrill of electricity.
The metal a few feet above gave with a deafening snap, and the platform loudly pulled loose from the one remaining support it had. Yang pressed herself and her partner as far into the corner as she could as debris pelted them. As quickly as it had happened, the shadow passed over them and the air suddenly became fresher and less oppressive. Loud crashing like gongs thrown from a cliffside echoed down into the bottomless well, and the chorus of surprised Grimm caught in the falling structure vaguely reached their ears over the massive racket. Yang peered at Blake and caught her staring down into the shadows. It finally disappeared from even her observation, as she closed her eyes and let her head come to rest on Yang's shoulder.
At last the noise was gone. Everything was silent except for the wind and the sound of Blake's breath close to her ear.
Whew, that was a fun one to put together. Quite a bit late on this update because it kept going through editing, plus work hit hard along with the holidays. We can call this a late Nondescript Winter Holiday gift, right? The end is in sight, but there is still plenty of ground to cover! Please let me know what you thought; feedback is always welcome!