Last chapter I quoted a "hunted bodies". Whoops. My bad. I meant a hundred.

Cover Art: GWBrex

Chapter 30

If asked, Jaune would have been hard pressed to say what troubled him more: the smell, the sight or the implication. It was less of the latter and more of a flat-out statement, but as a young man raised in a goddess-fearing village in a rural and religious part of Vale, he wouldn't have believed the Goddess capable of such barbarism. In a way, she wasn't. This was cruelty by human hands in her name, and he didn't think it something she would condone.

"Salem has done far worse than this," said Ozma.

"Shut up," hissed Jaune under his breath. "As if you haven't as well."

"I've made my fair share of mistakes. I do not claim innocence; I only tell you so you'll understand that neither I nor Salem are as perfect as she might have us seem. We are no more divine than you, and no less prone to errors of judgement."

Humanising the Eternity Queen and the Dark Lord. Jaune laughed, though he hated himself for it when Ren looked over, eyes bloodshot. Nora shook her head and led him away; he hoped they took his laughter as a bitter, hysterical thing because that was what it was. "Why would they do this? It's unnecessary. It's-"

"We don't know what it is. These people were rebellious – Ren said so himself – and they had to know the risks of their discovery. It is cruel, I will grant you, but I will also say it is a highly effective way to warn away other dissidents."

"It can't be working well if Mistral is still in uprising."

"Breaking the spirit without breaking the body is a delicate balance," said Ozma. "Too little and your victim holds firm; too much and they expire and attain freedom that way. I should know. I have experienced it." Rather than explain that, he said, "It may not be safe here. You should talk to your guides and seek out the next course of action."

He was right. Jaune tore his eyes away from the blackened bodies and followed after Ren and Nora, finding them talking angrily and furiously off to the side. He stood on the outskirts, letting them finish before approaching and asking, "What should we do?"

"The rebellion here is dead," said Ren. "Uprooted and destroyed in its entirety. There's nothing to do."

"We could bury them," said Jaune.

"It would take over a day," said Nora. "I'm not sure we have the time. The people who did this might still be close."

"A cremation is funeral enough," said Ren, "even if it's a cruel manner in which one was held." It looked like he wanted to say more, but the young man closed his eyes and shook his head. "We should return to Kuroyuri with the weapons. There are others who can make use of them."

Having an objective helped. It was something to focus on other than the rotting smell of burnt flesh. Jaune trudged with the two of them out the village and down onto the now deserted fields, which would soon see all their crops go to waste. He wondered if the surface village of Kuroyuri had faced the same fate as this, and whether the people here had dragged down local innocents with them. At least Kuroyuri was only the rebellion; they weren't hiding under a village of people who had nothing to do with it all, but who would pay the ultimate price all the same.

They reached the edge of the woods and began moving but sounds ahead had them stop. Ren tensed to listen, but even Jaune heard the loud neighing of a horse, followed by sharp conversation. Ren waved them down and then crept forward. Someone had found their wagon with the smuggled weapons and horse, and they weren't being quiet about it. Survivors? Had some of the rebellion escaped?

"-stragglers or runaways," said a man. "Dumb of them to take so much when they could have run light, but what do you expect? Braindead locals."

"Weren't you born here?" asked another. A third snickered.

"It's not being born that makes you an idiot, dipshit. It's being stupid enough to stay when there are better options. I saw the writing on the wall and worked my ass off to escape this stinking place. Good job I did, or I'd have burned with the lot of them."

There were three of them, three men, and they were stood around the wagon – one holding the horse while the other two rifled through the back. He might have thought them bandits but for the pristine white cloaks they wore over one shoulder. It wasn't a full cloak, but a mantle of sorts, riding down their backs and fronts but always on the left side, over their hearts. There was stitching on them forming a symbol that Jaune couldn't quite make out.

"Traitors," snarled Ren.

"Schnee Deterrence Corps," explained Nora. "It's an army made up of Mistralians who are prepared to sell out their people to make their own lives better. They get to live free of the stigma of being Mistralian by signing up, but it's an elite unit. Spaces are limited and people fight and die for the opportunity to join. They're good." Nora stressed that, with a hand on Ren's elbow. "Even if it's only three of them, they'll be really strong."

They didn't look as strong as some of the people he'd seen in the tournament, nor as well armoured; they had grey leather over white and pale grey cloth, with metal armour on their thighs, arms and shoulders instead of their chests. Oddly, they all wielded two weapons, which seemed strange since he doubted they could all be ambidextrous, and even he knew using both hands wasn't as easy or as good an idea as it sounded. Two had twin swords; the third had twin axes. It was when he looked at the latter, the man's back to them, that he noticed they were bloody. A cold weight settled on his shoulders. These people had taken part in the massacre.

A hand gripped his arm. Nora's eyes were blazing. "Not you too!" she hissed.

"We can take them," said Ren. "Three on three – and we have an advantage they don't."

"How am I the voice of reason here? No, Renny, no! It's too dangerous already, and now you want to bring magic into it. An will have our heads."

"We'll be walking back if they take our wagon," said Ren. "Jaune." He looked over and then down, at the quiver at Jaune's waist. He then looked back up to his eyes and asked, "Can you guarantee a hit with that?"

Jaune looked back. Ren was asking him to shoot a man – it was something he had never done before, nor ever considered before now, but looking at the man with the bloody axes and hearing how he'd come from that village had set his body on fire. The man was bigger than a deer and stood in place. There was no wind. Jaune unslung his bow and slowly looped the string over the edge, drew an arrow and nocked it. "I can hit him."

Nora whined unhappily, but rather than argue she drew a one-handed hammer from behind her back. It was less a mace and more an over-sized blacksmith's hammer. He didn't doubt it would do a lot of damage if it hit. Ren had a pair of long knives, far longer than one would usually use for skinning an animal or cutting food.

"Try and hit two," said Ren. "Whenever you're ready."

Ozma was silent, and for that Jaune was grateful. He nocked the arrow and drew the bow up, the yew creaking faintly. He stood, rising up from the bushes they were behind for a less obstructed shot. It was comical how close they were – no more than thirty feet away – but the men had been distracted before, and two of them were still looking through the crates, and the third had his back to them. Jaune drew a breath and focused on the man's back, let the air whistle out his lips and loosed the arrow.

He'd been right to say it was too close to miss. The arrow whistled forward and smacked into the man's back, just left of his spine. He was sent forward and into the wagon with a gasp, striking the wood and bouncing off it to the grass. The other two noticed, of course, looking first to their fallen comrade and then easily seeing Jaune stood nearby.

"For Salem!" shouted the first, wrenching his swords free and leaping from the wagon.

"Death to the enemy!" roared the other.

Jaune drew, nocked and fired again, but the second shot was clumsier, and they had time to react. They'd closed the distance however, so it wasn't much. The arrow would have hit the man in the centre of his chest but lodged instead in his right shoulder as he jinked aside. It must have cracked bone with that kind of force, and yet he kept coming, howling and flashing both blades in front of him. Jaune dropped his bow, ripped his sword free and held it in front of him as Ozma had in the tournament. He took several steps back, both to put distance between them and to lure them in.

The soldiers charged him down with no regard for the world around them. They smashed through the bushes he'd been in, and that was when Ren and Nora struck. Literally. Nora's hammer smashed into the kneecap of the man on the left and ripped him from his feet, and Ren was on top of him, stabbing wildly. It wasn't a fight; it was a murder. The last, however, kept coming his way, and Jaune cursed, having expected them to take an attacker each and leave him out of it.

The two swords lunged in together and Jaune brought his sword up. He tried to imitate what Ozma had done before. The longer sword diverted one aside, but the other stabbed through and nicked his arm, cutting through cloth and skin and drawing blood. The man bowled into him recklessly, screamed into his face and brought both swords up and down on his shoulders like a pair of falling stars. Jaune was able to get his sword up to block both at once, at which point a flash of orange heralded Nora rushing up behind the man and cracking her hammer down on the back of his skull. He dropped like a rag doll, his swords clattering away.

"Salem!" shouted the third, having dragged himself up the wagon with his bloody axes in hand. He still had the feathered shaft sticking out his back. "For Salem and the Schnee!" he snarled, looked to them and then to the wagon. In a cruel and vicious move, he tore into the horse's neck and dropped the poor animal, the horse shrieking in agony as it fell.

"Bastard!" roared Ren. He rushed forward, picked up Jaune's bow and his quiver and nocked an arrow. It was a bad shot, striking the wooden wagon, but the axeman could only stagger toward them, and Ren found his aim on the second. Or the man was too close to miss. The arrow went high, burying itself in his breastbone and knocking him off his feet. It was over. Jaune let his sword dip. Adrenaline surged through him, and he was surprised at how ambivalent he felt at having been part of taking a life. His hands were shaking, but it was closer to fear than guilt.

"Far be it for me to order you around but where there are three, there might yet be more. To tarry here would be unwise."

Jaune grunted, not at all having any issues with the Dark Lord piping up if it was going to be with good advice. "We can't stay," he told Ren and Nora. "There might be more. We're going to have to abandon the weapons."

"Max…" said Nora.

"I'll deal with him," said Ren. He rushed up to the downed horse and fell to his knees, hugging its face and rubbing its snout while whispering sweet things to it. Jaune looked away as the man's knife slid into its brain and granted it a quick and hopefully painless death. "He deserved better," said Ren, standing and wiping the knife on the grass. "The village deserved better as well, and I doubt…" He shook his head. "It doesn't matter." He dropped and started tugging at the first man, while Nora took another. "Help us get the cloaks off them. The rebellion needs them."

Jaune rushed to the third and started to pull it off, deciding it'd be quicker to just do it than ask why. They might have made for good disguises, a bounty or just a way of identifying people who had been killed. He could ask later. Once he had the bundle of white cloth, stained red now, off, he wrapped it under his arm and jogged over to them. "I've got it. Are we going?"

"Yes. We travel on foot, stay low and avoid the roads."

/-/

Jaune's feet were killing him by the time Ren called a break. It had been hours, anywhere between five and six, and they were all of them beginning to slow down, and Nora had stumbled once or twice in the last hour alone.

"This is probably far enough," said Ren, breathing heavily. "We can afford to take a break. No campfire."

Nora was already down and removing her boots to massage her feet. Jaune followed her lead, sitting cross-legged. He'd done a lot of travelling since running away from Vale, all of which made this just a little easier, but if he was tired then they must have been exhausted. "How close to Kuroyuri are we?" asked Jaune.

"Not far," said Ren. "Three or four more hours. We'll take a break here and finish the journey by nightfall. There'll be food and warm blankets waiting for us."

That sounded all too good right now. Jaune leaned back and pulled out his waterskin, squeezing the last few drams out of it. He was very grateful for Ren offering his own and letting him drop a little more past his parched lips. Nora was guzzling hers.

"The SDC," said Jaune once they were done. "Are they the main enemy here? Do the Schnee have huntresses on their side?"

"The Chosen and the Church are on their side, but the Schnee don't have any authority over them," said Ren. "If they see us then they'll attack us, especially you, but they stay out of things otherwise. Mother thinks they might even be sympathetic in their own way. There have definitely been times where Chosen have ignored issues they could have intervened in and let us escape. And others where they haven't. The Schnee are technically Chosen themselves."

Their female members, Jaune presumed, and their matriarch. It answered his question all the same; the Schnee weren't in charge of the local chosen, and so this SDC must have been their only real way of controlling the populace. That would probably change now that he was here.

"The SDC…"

"What about them?"

"They seemed… determined. Crazed."

"They're fanatics," said Nora with a groan. "It's… They have five thousand at any time. Always five thousand. Those five thousand are pampered and spoiled and given just about anything they ask for. Wealth, power, women, immunity from laws. It's all there."

"In turn they are expected to die for their position," said Ren. "The reason those three charged us so recklessly was because the SDC don't allow failure. If you are sent to do something and you come back empty-handed then you are executed on the spot by your fellow soldiers."

"That sounds like a good way to end up with a lot of deserters," said Jaune. "Anyone who makes a mistake is just going to take their equipment and run."

"It happens." Ren shrugged. "But if they do run then they'll be going back to a life of poverty – or worse, because no one is going to accept them back into their village after they went and joined the SDC. They'll be hated everywhere and probably forced to live in exile in some forest or cave for the rest of their lives."

For people who had grown used to luxury, he imagined that wasn't something they could stomach the thought of. Better to fight and die rich than live poor or something – and there was always the chance a wild and reckless attack might work out. Those three had probably come from backgrounds just as harsh as Ren and Nora, but they'd decided to throw away their pride and family for the chance to crawl out of it. He didn't know if that was reasonable or disgusting, and it didn't really matter since they were dead now.

"I guess the two weapons fits into that as well?"

"Attack without regard for your life," said Nora. "It's their motto. That's why they don't wear armour over their chests. Better to die in service to the Schnee than live life without."

"It works to their advantage," said Ren. "We're not exactly well equipped ourselves, and even if you kill an SDC they'll have usually caused enough damage to you that you're bleeding out or unable to continue fighting. And they kill helpless civilians most of the time anyway. You don't need equipment or training for that."

"And people put up with that?"

"No. The SDC are hated, despised even, and everyone in them is public enemy number one for people in Mistral. It's just that you can't afford to show that if you don't want to be dragged out your home and executed for treason. The Schnee let them get away with anything, knowing they'll do anything to keep hold of that kind of power. They don't have a choice. Anyone in the SDC would be killed if we won, so they'll fight to the death to keep the Schnee in power now."

"They have to be dealt with, then?"

"Almost certainly. There can be no victory in which the SDC survives."

"He's not joking," said Nora. "We'd take a world where Salem recalls the Schnee family and frees us from them, but no one – and I mean no one – will welcome back a traitor who joined the SDC into their homes. They're monsters. Worse than Grimm."

But they weren't Grimm; they were people.

"Never underestimate the human capability to cause suffering," said Ozma. "After thousands of years, the depths to which people can fall surprise even me."

/-/

They reached Kuroyuri a little after nightfall and Ren helped him find one of the hatches leading down. "There are more," explained Ren, "but we keep the information limited in case of spies or captives. I know three. I've been told there are over twelve ways in and out."

They made their way down into the dark and then into the open cavern once more. People were coming and going, wrapped up in the same obscured blue cloth that Ren and Nora wore, and many of them going on foot. They nodded politely as they went past, and Ren stayed quiet until they were inside the main cavern.

"Nora, I'll tell mother what has happened. Can you get some food for Jaune?"

"Do you want me to save you some?"

"No." He smiled faintly. "I think I'll be eating with mother while I explain everything that happened."

"You know she'll be angry when she hears what we did."

"That's why I'm going alone. No chance for her to blame a certain someone for poisoning my mind."

He slipped away in the dark, and Nora sighed, tugging Jaune aside and toward a large tent strung up over a big fire. The tent had a hole in the top that carried up like a cloth chimney to what he assumed was a hole drilled into the cave ceiling. There were tables of cooked meats, some dried or salted for storage, and a large metal pot at which several people stirred with ladles that might as well have been oars on a rowing boat for the size of the stew. The pot was large enough to feed a hundred people and was probably filled and emptied several times a day.

No one questioned who he was, nor stepped in as he took a bowl alongside Nora and held it out toward one of the cooks. The woman brought up her giant ladle and poured a huge portion of the steaming gruel out. It was as fragrant and spicy as the curry Ren had shared with him before, and thankfully tasted much better than it looked. They were even granted half a loaf of bread and a hunk of cheese to go along with it.

"This is actually good," said Jaune, a little surprised. Nora giggled.

"It looks awful. I know. We have to make do with what we have and that's not a lot. There are certain things we can't risk growing. A field of what tends to be noticed."

"How is the bread made, then?"

"People donate what they can to the rebellion. What they can afford to, or what they think the Schnee won't notice missing. We try not to target food shipments," said Nora. "Even if they're to the city, if we attack them and steal the food then the SDC will just go back and demand more from the village that provided it."

"What's the plan, then? The big plan. How can w – you," amended Jaune. "How can you win?"

"I don't really know." Nora smiled sadly as she admitted it. "I just know I have to fight. Because if I don't then I'll just be a victim like everyone else. Maybe we have to kill the Schnee and oust the SDC. It won't stop the Goddess claiming Mistral, but if she puts someone new in charge and they saw what we did then they might decide to be kinder. If only for their own sakes."

That somehow felt like a more realistic outcome. You couldn't win against an authority that spanned every continent, every country and every person on Remnant. Trying would be like waging war on the sun and telling it not to come up every morning.

"You'd be surprised," said Ozma.

The Dark Lord didn't count – and honestly, he might as well serve as an example of what it was a bad idea. An entire eternity, forever, spent waging war on Salem without even once succeeding, or drawing close. It was proof, if he needed any, of how impossible it was.

"You believe I have never won? Not once?" Ozma chuckled in the back of his head. "There was a time, once upon a time, where Salem was an unknown monster and where I ruled peacefully over the peoples of Remnant. What you believe is impossible is only… redacted. Hidden by Salem and banished from memory. Kingdoms come and go. Empires fall. No one rules forever. Not me, not Salem, and certainly not this Schnee family."

He would say that, wouldn't he? To try and goad him into getting involved in this war.

"You're already involved, Jaune. You have the Goddess' eye; you are hunted by her Chosen and now you have killed one of the Schnee's loyal soldiers. And, lest you think it, I had no part in convincing you to do that."

"I think I'm going to catch some sleep," said Jaune, standing and setting the bowl down. "Thanks for showing me around and talking to me."

Nora looked surprised. "Um. Sure. No problem?"

/-/

Ruby hopped down from the ship's ramp and looked about the large docks that made up one of Mistral's most famous and richest shipping areas. Sailors came and went, unloading goods from Vale and loading far more up to be taken back. Money changed hands, and merchants came and went, but she couldn't help but notice that the town had a lot less people milling about than would be expected. It looked like everyone had a task, everyone was working, and there wasn't a child in sight.

"So," said Taiyang, "This is Mistral. Might want to stick close. I've heard... things about it."

"Good things?"

"And bad things. You never know which is more accurate." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Might be wise to keep quiet on why we're here as well. We're travellers, remember. Nothing more. Nothing less."

Ruby nodded and fixed her eyes ahead, to where a pair of guards were patrolling the docks. Jaune couldn't have come here and made it through, but he almost certainly had come here, to Mistral, and she was determined to find him. Dad was too, if only to pass on Raven's message (or threat) to return the Relic of Knowledge or face the Branwen tribe's wrath. It wouldn't come to that with any luck.

"Well, well. What a coincidence." The voice that spoke up was faintly familiar, though only in a distant way. The faces were much more. Red hair, a scar down one eye and horns. The other had black hair and bright yellow eyes. The faunus from the White Fang. "Fancy running into the two of you here."

"Fancy running into you here as well," said Taiyang.

"Almost like we're looking for the same person," said Blake. "Can we skip the mysticism and talk about this like adults?" Her eyes were rolling. "I think we might be on the same side here, and you'll need help if you think Mistral is anything like Vale. It's not."

Taiyang thought and then gave a quick nod. "Let's talk while we walk."

Notice: Due to an awards ceremony that I have to organise, foot questions over and chair in September, I'm going to be taking the week starting Monday 12th – Sunday 18th September off. I'll be back Monday 19th. I'd definitely rather be writing fanfiction than doing this as it's always so painful and I hate – well, it's less the public speaking and more the stress of the organisation. People call you at all hours with questions; prize winners say they suddenly can't make it; stuff goes wrong with parking; inevitable errors on Eventbrite. The usual. It's just a long, long week of stressful work so I won't have time to write.

Next Chapter: 11thSeptember

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