This thing was never going to be finished.
Reviews last year, though, and a few that popped out unexpectedly in extremely recent time, were still appearing in my associated email.
"People still read this thing?" I thought. Most of the writing doesn't hold up compared to what I can bust out these days, and it drives me up a wall. And yet, it's all telling me that eyes are still threading these lines. People want the thing to be finished. So…. I decided that a handful of chapters wouldn't kill me if I gave it a college try.
This is for everybody that remembers this from their childhood, remembers this from the early days of RWBY's launch, those that struggle to translate the amazing imagination they have into a medium they enjoy... and anybody who still spots this in a sea of nonsense and decides to roll with it past chapter 1, because god damn, is that a harsh barrier.
It was people reading this, and liking it, that ever made me keep going. Reviews pulled a ghost out of the grave. I hope you enjoy the result.
The Fall Under Beacon, Pt.7
When the wall came down, and the steel reinforcement was shot through enough for Sophia to squeeze past, the hallway beyond loomed ahead. Just narrow enough to feel claustrophobic and with dimmer lighting than there had even been in the space beforehand, she could hear a low hum through the walls emanating from the building's center, which must have been the supposed doomsday device Obaz had mentioned. A faint scent of sterility underlined how uncomfortable the space felt, but the iron tang of blood hung with it... As she found the first flight of stairs and descended, though, the halls only became less comprehensive for her. A color-coded stripe system, much like hospitals, was in use, but they referred to sectors that were numbered which told her nothing of where Obaz had gone.
She spotted the first corpse only after stepping on a pair of glasses on the floor, glancing down first then into the junction leading the way she hadn't planned to go. an obvious noncombatant, white coat and casual clothes, lying facedown in a pool of blood, sliced into a fanning shape that had diced much of one arm and left the torso in ribbons. Sophia flinched back into the wall, gagging and covering her mouth. She gripped Matenlock tightly and shuffled to the side until she could barely see the body anymore, breaking into a dead sprint the moment she could quell the shaking in her legs. The next body, a woman whose head had been spun to face backwards, waited at the end of this hall. Another was a practically unrecognizable pile around the corner.
Sophia struggled to keep hold of her focus as she felt her boots stick to the crimson on the floor stepping through the fresh carnage without any other option. She saw the two sets of footprints she wanted to track leading out of the puddle here, however, which she couldn't quite determine if it were a good or bad sign.
"The importance of this task is so great I am willing to kill for it, and..."
Obaz' words only minutes before rang out in her head. With the obvious resistance from soldiers and suit runners, it made sense, but this was something else entirely. These were people who couldn't defend themselves. Was it revenge? An extension of the work they did? A need to prevent the knowledge of Depthys from existing in surviving researchers? Was he just out of control?
Had her friend really done all this?
Sophia followed the blue stripe for another long isolated hallway before coming out into what looked like a room for holding sampling equipment, one side lined with tables adorned with glass sample tubes and the other a wall which contained cabinets and freezers filled with a clear fluid. All of the full ones, most of which were replaced with familiar maroon-colored liquid, were rigged to some kind of feeding system that led the fluids through various cables leading into whatever room lay beyond to the right. She slowed only long enough to peer curiously at the stark white room, as she spotted Obaz at long last.
He turned to face her momentarily, then scoffed and returned to looking at the feeds leading into the next room. "Smartened up, have we? Or did Laera simply walk away? That sounds more likely. She never had her heart in it. She never wanted to serve anything besides her dead lover's justice. The concept of a greater good, of something beyond fairy-tale righteousness, is beyond her." Sophia stared blankly at Obaz, catching her breath as he turned to face her.
"Well, Sophia? Are you prepared to finish this with me? Are you going to quit? Those are your options available. I do not care that you have feelings about me, or this mission, about how I have dealt with those we encountered or how I have treated our allies. This is the end. You may either help, or go fight for your home. You are a Huntress. Trust me, or your instincts, but hurry already and choose."
She swallowed hard as Obaz regarded her with cold, deadly eyes. He was gripping Effigy in one hand, strongly enough that she could tell he was prepared to use it. She blinked for a moment... no blood was on it. Only recognizable traces of battle from before now were on Obaz besides the red tainting his boots. "You didn't kill those scientists?"
Obaz tilted his head, but his answer made Sophia's heart clench. "Someone beat me to the punch. The one they call Corporal Grau... Rita is fighting him as we speak, over the life of she and Xi's benefactor. Turns out they served my purposes regardless of their intent, so all we need to do is purge DEPTHYS and leave."
"You-... Obaz." Sophia said in resignation, glaring at him. Everything Laera had said to her in the past, even things Regis had claimed... they surfaced in much more truthful meanings than she had ever hoped for. She saw what Obaz had become, the extent of the resolve he'd made to himself, and had only this moment to lament the pain of her conflicting feelings for him and the loss of their friendship. Sophia pointed her lance at him, and he squinted at her as she spoke. "I'll help you finish DEPTHYS. Then, I never want to see you again. You're right that I'm a Huntress... and that part of me will only let you get away once. If we cross paths after this, I'll be taking you down. I'll be bringing in a criminal and a murderer. You understand?"
A long pause settled between them. Obaz nodded. "Crystal clear." He turned, and motioned for her to follow him. As they walked into a much wider corridor, she recoiled as she witnessed what was within their target destination.
What she had imagined Depthys to actually be, the effects that the mutagen must have had on people, she had never really thought about it. All she had known was that it was bad... this was worse than she had ever imagined, however. Half of these hardlight cells had strange cocoons of molting flesh wriggling inside them, skin-pink and orange membranes mottled with discolorations and sparse hair... in other cells, where these had opened, were creatures unlike anything in her worst nightmares; vertebrae and organs bundled together in clusters from which segmented tendrils sprouted and entwined to either encase these exposed insides or arrange hideous limbs for them to bend and bound around on. They lashed out wildly at the walls, at the hardlight dividers, leaving scrapes and some kind of acidic burns shallowly damaging their surroundings. How they could so much as see or hear like this was a mystery.
"The Kin." Obaz said matter-of-factly. "Manufactured monsters so twisted that they are inarguably the most terrible creation of mankind. They have an extremely high metabolism, secreting enzymes that break down organic matter and absorb the resulting fluid through the Kin's epidermic layers. They eat by whipping or outright constricting a thing, melting it until it becomes nothing but bones." He glanced back at Sophia.
"These are all Faunus. Each of these things is a person who has long forgotten what it is like to be anything but a drastically aggressive, territorial creature. They had names. They could speak languages. They had families. The rest of Faunuskind would meet the same fate if we let any trace of these things remain here." For a moment, Sophia suspected that Obaz was going through this explanation as a justification of his actions to her, stating that she was wrong to be so accusatory of him. Obaz' flat expression, such a benchmark of his person, held a scorn she had rarely ever witnessed as he gazed into the cells. This was simply a telling of what he felt responsible for, she realized -and an underlining of the gravity of DeCello's sin.
Obaz pressed a button on each of the containment areas as they passed them, which released a mist into each of the cells; there were moments of increased thrashing and strange hissing noises from each, and the creatures were deteriorating one after the other. "They were misted with adrenaline during the metamorphosis period to encourage host survival within the cocoons. The biosolvent was the best means of getting rid of the existing subjects not only for complete removal, but because of the hands-off means of doing so by replacing the adrenaline. However... I lack enough, now, to inject into the primary incubation pod."
They made their way past the dying remnants of the Kin, into a wider chamber attached to the end of the corridor, built with security measures in mind. Armed cameras, bulkhead doors and gates prepared to lock in place, they all surrounded a dais with what looked like a plexiglas coffin atop it. various machines were attached the the shorter ends of the object, ones Obaz shut down as he stepped up to the elevated platform. Inside the coffin, with various clear protrusions inserted into parts of her body, was a woman who looked startlingly alike to Blake Belladonna -albeit older. She seemed in a peaceful sleep, hands crossed over her stomach and eyes closed, dressed minimally in a small blue gown.
Obaz, for a once, looked confused. "She... should look like the others. I think. This is odd." He stared uncomfortably for a moment before beginning to disengage the locks on the container, which resulted in various alarms beginning to klaxon. "It does not matter. We merely need to incinerate her remains."
As he started to lift the side of the scientific sarcophagus, Obaz used his third arm to collect a surplus of the gunpowder capsules for the Profanes, readying them to be used to ignite the body. As he threw the lid open wide with a hiss of decompression, however, he stopped for a moment. Sophia glanced at him in curiosity. "Well?"
"She is... breathing." Obaz said in awe. Sure enough, her chest rose and fell. In a second, her eyes fluttered open, startling gold, making Sophia step back in surprise. When her sight fell onto Obaz, a soft, elated expression fell over her face.
She reached up to cup his cheek in her hand, caressing it. "Ou baaz. My child."
Locked in the furthest recesses of Obaz' memory, he recalled something he forced down with more fervor than anything else in his life. His name. Or rather... the lack thereof. The meaning of what he'd mistakenly remembered as his name, something he'd been referred to constantly in the past; an old, old word referencing someone's child. What Obaz had fulfilled for Lorelei after Rita's faked death, her only coping mechanism.
Obaz' aura where the hand touched his cheek began crackling as his surrogate mother's hand attempted to digest his face.
Leaping backwards with Sophia following suit, Obaz slid into a crouch while drawing Effigy. "New plan. We kill Lorelei over again. Please stand back; you are in no condition for anything but mild support."
As Lorelei clambered out of her containment, and the alarms continued screaming overhead, her body rippled and writhed unnaturally; the features resembling human skin and limbs began to unfurl, tendrils like those they had seen before having wrapped and coiled in such ways as to imitate a human appearance. Twisting, churning, her appearance became a joke of a human or Faunus alike; walking on ribboned legs, reaching out with hundreds of digits, even her eyes losing their alignment like a bad slot machine... and still, a hardly recognizable mouth continued to chant, "Ou baaz... ou baaz... my baby. Come to me. I miss you."
Lorelei Noccio towered above the two, and crashed down upon Obaz in a wave of shrieks and acid.
As Khiver and DeCello separated yet again, circling one another in search of openings to exploit in their respective armor, DeCello stopped briefly. He lost his stance, shaking his head a bit. "What's the point, Lybel? Why-"
He cut himself off, lunging for Khiver in a feint that Khiver barely managed to avoid. DeCello continued roaring out of his helmet as he gave chase, though. "This city is imploding, the world is on the brink of war, global communications have collapsed! My creations can protect this planet, Khiver! Where Huntsmen and Huntresses have failed," He hooked Khiver's leg and pulled it out from under him, elbowing down onto his stomach and stomping him through the floor, descending after him with blades down-turned. Khiver rolled aside and fired up at DeCello's encased head, the slugs deflected with the smallest twinges of movement from his neck as each ricocheted off.
"- my suits provide the world more stable protection than Atlas's idiotic wind-up soldiers. My surgeries make men great enough to all stand against Grimm, against others with power, against those with Semblances. My Kin allow us to control where the creatures of Grimm place their attention and how they move. I've made nothing but things that benefit humanity. Why? Why are you killing me and tearing all this down?"
Khiver lurched to a kneel, coughing into the microphone of his suit. "I could walk on the good-boy road and say you're ruining humanity, that what your shit will cause in the future will make the definition of humanity not worth protecting... but we gave up on lying a long while back. I just can't let what you've made save a people at the expense of everyone that deserved mercy the most." Khiver struggled to his feet, shakily aiming his gun at Decello again.
"You're turning minorities into shark chum and kids into computers, Morty. You want that to be mankind's legacy? You want that to be how we survive a couple of scary monsters under the bed? You should be able to tell you're completely nuts. C'mon already. Don't play the hero card from that black-morality corner you got there."
DeCello walked up and slapped the revolver from Khiver's hand with one last shot ringing out, holding the larger man in the slapshod suit up by the head. The clenching of his fingers against the dull metal, dents forming at the fingertips, caused the steel to groan under pressure. "Humanity is best suited to black morality. No one ever said it would prosper without someone to suffer the short end of the stick, Khiver. I wish you were able to see that; to understand that the very nature of Man is to subsist off of the less fortunate. We're cannibalistic. Pure, unadulterated autophagy. That has, and always will be, our legacy. You helped that legacy in strides."
Khiver feared the worst would happen, seeing the display inside his helmet glitch and spark as the outer paneling gave way, but a deafening crash took place -Khiver was thrown to the side, clattering into a spinning mess on the floor as DeCello vanished and the entire building shook. Blue tongues of electricity fired up into the sky, forking indiscriminately into clouds and Grimm high above, as stucco, nails, concrete, glass, wires and even more debris swirled through the hole punched through the building. Khiver sat up to see a conical cavity driven through the center of the branch on a downward angle, having hit the floor and place he and DeCello had been standing on. Outside, one of the anti-air towers was turned to point backwards, and the dissipating body of a Griffon Grimm sat at the other side of the hole, where Cal was peering through with Helena alongside him. The arcs of lightning had ended, and the building's power had entirely ceased.
"Helena, Helena, we- we hit DeCello, Helena. We landed the shot." He swiped a hand through his hair and shook his head in abject amazement. "Holy shit."
"So you really can see through walls." The blonde girl jumped through the hole in fifteen strides, over to where Khiver was sitting. She offered him a hand up, which he took. "Still, for things to line up like that? That's some crazy luck..."
Xi was next to trek through, marveling at the destruction as she caught up from her great leap up to and down from the anti-air tower. She vaulted across the detritus leftover from the carnage, meeting the three there. As they arrived, a heavy concrete wedge shifted and grated against steel as it was pushed over. DeCello climbed free, ragged gaps shorn through his armor, his eye and a glimpse of forehead through the helmet and a portion of his shoulder which regenerated as they spoke. As he stared, though, his gaze fell to Khiver's helmet, which was ripped in half when DeCello's hand was yanked forcibly away. Both of them started to laugh at about the same time, before Khiver chucked the rest of his aside and DeCello did the same.
"This is it, then. Your big gamble. I told you what will happen, Khiver. And now these kids are in the crossfire." Khiver glanced down at Deathspark in his hand. His eyes searched and found first Helena, then Xi, and finally Cal. He sighed deeply.
"This world is full of monsters. What's one more?" He held the bead up, and as DeCello reached out and began to shout, he snapped his fingers with the Dust between it.
A tendril of pitch-black lightning, an arc of energy that seemed to absorb all light, lanced out and struck DeCello, and Khiver's arm was engulfed in it as well. Each of them, DeCello with bronze and Khiver with blue, had darkness ripple across these auras like roiling waves of teeth that sank into the men and devoured their souls. They both screamed, falling to their knees and writhing. Helena, and Xi both recoiled and stepped back. Cal lunged and grasped Khiver, the black torrents of Deathspark's release forcing him back and momentarily snagging some of Cal's own aura as it did.
Finally, the bolt of inky black that connected the two drew back from both of them, colliding between them both and winking out of existence with their lives in tow. DeCello and Khiver both lay unmoving. The silence that followed was deafening.
Cal rolled over and got to his knees, shuffling on them over to Khiver's body. He clenched his teeth as he shook his mentor. "Kh-… Khiver, hey… Khiver..."
Helena watched with a numbness to her as Cal grieved, first in disbelief, then with tears leaking from behind his goggles. Xi stared at DeCello's corpse, desiccated and chalk-white, like it might stand up any second. Finishing off DeCello, losing Khiver, it was anticlimactic. There was no speech, no aftermath. One moment they were standing, alive, the next they weren't.
That was, until Khiver's body trembled. His eyes rolled back. His mouth cracked as it opened. Cal reared his head back, watching something orange start to foam, something gray slither forth from inside. Helena snatched Cal by the hair for lack of a better handhold and dragged him back from the body as it burst, squirmed, and rolled over onto forked limbs that were growing splinters of hardened blood. Eyes coiled free, organs twisted, and what was left of Cal's friend became something beyond any nightmare he could conceive of.
"What the fuck is going on?!" Helena screamed at Xi. The suit runner was frozen.
"This doesn't… Khiver's not a Faunus, what – this is -" Xi cut herself off to jump backward, springing off her hands to escape an acidic lash scoring the ground where she'd just been. The thing that became of Khiver flexed into ribboned patterns to give chase, and Helena dragged Cal further as she and Xi fled.
The Griffons swooped through the hole in the building, and Helena lifted an arm as a flimsy shield – but five, six, seven, all of the Grimm completely ignored her. They flew right past, and swarmed the creature, digging beaks into the flesh and getting constricted into melting in retaliation. They were magnetized to him. The beasts seemed to believe he was the only thing to exist, and what was once a chaotic battleground where White Fang, OTAF forces, and Hank in a vehicular weapon had been fighting these monsters on the side, there was now a mass of retreats in the reprieve caused by Khiver's transformation. Humans and Faunus were invisible to the aggression.
DeCello's science was accurate, in the end.
Laera found herself on a nearly open-air floor of the building where once there was a sea of glass. She glanced around, looking for signs of Steven, of Helena. Of the team she left to sort their differences. When she saw the familiar plaid shirt, the minor accents of armor, she wondered for a moment why Steven thought it was a good idea to take a break like this. Some illogical part of her fished that up from the lake of her mind, and as she walked towards him, that catch was lost to the sea of red pooled beneath the boy. The stain of wine-black, the ragged hole through him, the placid expression on him. Laera took a heavy step, then another, and each one felt like the world weighed more.
She found her way to his side, and knelt beside him. There were signs of footprints, smears, in the sticky floor. She set fingers to his neck gingerly, and found no telltale pulse of blood. No warmth. Nothing waited for her here.
Obaz had lied to her only once, the only time it truly mattered, at the very end.
She'd had enough. What had she done to deserve any of this? Sophia, Regis, Obaz – there was a complete and utter upturning and destruction of her life, her attempts at becoming a Huntress, all because of them. Steven wouldn't have even been here if Obaz hadn't fed him revenge as bait. It was all just… so unfair. So wrong. She had staunchly saved them, helped them, and she had less than nothing to show for it.
Laera turned away from Steven's body with a wince, then got to her feet, heading to the side of the building. She looked down. The Grimm, they all seemed to be gone. The vast majority of people were, too. The whole place felt as dead as her friend was.
Laera looked back at the stairs, and considered going after Obaz just to kill him. Steven, ultimately, was the only reason that wasn't half as enticing as it should have been. Steven was a direct result of revenge – why should she bother with it? No. She was going to continue her exit. She was done here, as far as she was concerned. The last thing she cared about was cold and lifeless.
She made her way to the side of the branch, leaping out the missing wall and soaring down through the air, using her sword about halfway down to drag against the wall and slow her descent. Eventually, she embedded it entirely to catch her near the bottom, and leap from the wall to set down on the ground once more.
The SkyAnchor pulled up beside Laera, and Hank poked his head out of the hatch atop it. "Laera? What's the situation?"
"Fuck Obaz. That's the situation. I'm done." She began to march off, and the thoroughly batter anti-air machine further disengaged as Hank climbed out of it, hopping down.
"What's this all about?" He reached out for her, and she pulled away before he could get a hold.
"He's a killer. He's just… slaughtering people. He's not a person anymore. He's not even a machine. He's… a freak." She said, grimacing. Hank glared daggers at her, and she showed no sign of caring. "Everyone I cared about is dead, figuratively or literally. I'm getting the hell out of here."
Hank watched Laera part. The girls auburn locks, riddled with soot, swayed naturally despite it. The former student looked back to the Omeghis Branch, wondering what his next move should be.