Above ground, Yang felt a sharp awkward tug on the ribbon wound around her arm. Adrenaline flooded her system at the distinct sound of gunfire other than Gambol Shroud's coming from below. The adrenaline gave way to a lead pit of worry that dropped in her stomach when the short burst of sound ended gave way to a far larger chorus of shots, not one of them the familiar pistol rounds of her partner.
"Blake!?"
"Yang!"
Tension bled from the brawler at the almost instantaneous response. She then felt an insistent pull on Blake's ribbon, relief flowing through her when Blake herself poked her head up from the debris to clamber up and stumble into her partner's waiting arms. Blake subconsciously gripped Yang's shoulders for dear life, eyes wide with panic. The Faunus was peppered with angry red lines weeping red, each marking where a bullet had grazed past her in one too many near misses.
Yang pulled her away from the opening, still echoing with the angry roar of ceaseless gunfire. "Blake, what-" Ruby took in Blake's trace wounds and stared at the gap in the wreckage that led down to the ship. This was Chuck's plane, wasn't it? She craned her neck to see the identification markings along the side. Why was he carrying robots? Why were they firing at Blake? She asked, "Did you find Chuck?"
Blake shook her head both as an answer, and to clear it a bit, "It looked like a standard Atlesian Knight was piloting the ship - I didn't see any people down there."
That didn't make any sense. Ruby gripped Weiss's shirt a little harder. "So they sent us a ship full of security bots?"
A stray bullet tore through part of the ship's hull, falling harmless in the snow a ways off. Far up into the town, the Nevermore dove at the rooftops, its claws coming away with shingles and bits of rafter.
Ruby looked from the Grimm to the ship lodged in the remnants of the cabin. Blake still seemed spooked, and Weiss was going to be down for the count before long. Yang was good, though. And they were a team, no matter how beat-up they were. Ruby figured they could still pull off what she had in mind. "Did they send a Paladin?"
Blake nodded, pushing a bit of hair out of her face and standing a bit straighter. "Yes. its feet are currently secured to what's left of the cargo hold's floor."
An unnerving clang sounded from somewhere below. The bullets and energy shots were starting to tear through the metal with greater frequency. Ruby and Weiss scrambled back as part of the hull began to give way.
The Knights had gone insane. The heiress shot Blake a glare, "What did you do?!"
"I didn't do anything!" Blake snapped, pulling Yang along with her as they too tried to avoid the shifting debris being shot to pieces beneath their very feet. "They attacked me first!"
"Uh, guys," Ruby brought Crescent Rose up to shield Weiss as the clanging stopped. Now instead, footsteps pounded in the metal hull. The Knights were loose.
"Try to point them in the direction of Mr. Nevermore up there." The giant Grimm screeched, batting away the distant cannon fire. Crazy or malfunctioning or what, the Knights might still be useful. Ruby chambered a round, "If they're stuck on us, take them out."
Still jutting out over the wreckage of the cabin, the airship's tail began to ring with the sound of those steps even as Ruby spoke. There was barely any time for the young team leader's directions to sink in before a bladed arm thrust straight through the hull and swept in a wide arc, sending a shower of sparks raining down on Blake and Yang, who braced themselves, ready for the Atlesian Knights to push through.
They did not ready themselves for the Atlesian Paladin that exploded through the weakened metal, landing unevenly on the wreckage just in front of them.
Time seemed to slow down as the large mech suit righted itself. It stood tall, at least three times Ruby's height, dominating the relatively small area above the snow.
The suit's sealed cockpit was empty.
Time sped back up, and the Knights from below came climbing out of the hole in the air-ship's tail. The automated Paladin shifted its guns into position, strafing bullets across what was left of the cabin's roof, scattering rubble and scraps of slate shingle.
Crescent Rose flashed, deflecting the shots that neared Ruby and Weiss. Ruby grabbed Weiss's shoulder, pushing her to the edge of the roof as she yelled to the others, "Go. Go!"
Blake reacted first, crouching and leaping directly into the fray, using the Paladin as a springboard and vaulting herself directly over the stream of Knights as far towards the nevermore as she could. Just as she suspected, a good portion of them tracked her, dropping like lead into the snow surrounding the roof. For being built by Atlas, the things were surprisingly ill-equipped for snowy terrain.
Still on the roof, Yang watched as Blake skirted the surface of the snow, darting forward with short zigzagging bursts in a beeline for the nevermore. She growled when the Paladin swiveled around to track the Faunus, sending its spray of bullets to intersect Blake's path. Thinking fast, she tackled the Paladin's leg, grinning when she felt the mechanical monster lose its balance.
Meanwhile, Weiss fell off the roof. She shrieked, arms flailing back as Ruby accidentally toppled her over the edge. Ruby snapped a glance at the heiress-sized hole in the snow, "Whoops."
A shadow crossed her. The Paladin loomed up, stumbling to find footing on the slate. Gritting her teeth, Ruby slid her hands to grip her scythe just right and leapt up at the robot, intending to carve a way into the driver's seat.
Below, Weiss spat snow and kept her head down, fighting through the black that rimmed her vision.
Don't pass out. Don't pass out. The incessant ringing in her ears subsided and she tried to look around. Apparently she'd tumbled through the drift onto a disjointed piece of the cabin's porch, the snow cushioning her fall. Firewood was scattered everywhere and the front door hung at a crazy angle from one of its hinges. Up above, the clash of metal and energy fire sounded.
If only she had Myrtenaster... or her Dust supply. Weiss focused on the cabin door. Her luggage must have survived. At least, they hadn't been blown sky high by her collection of Dust, so that was a good sign. She pushed herself up to her hands and knees. Maybe she could get to it.
The Knights that found themselves sunk in the drifts struggled for a moment before shifting modes. A white panel scrolled open, allowing compact twin Dust-propulsion engines to extend from where the robots' shoulder blades appeared.
The steady, rising hum was all the warning Blake had before the mechanical soldiers burst from the snow, the engines at their back and in the soles of their robotic boots propelling them after the fleet-footed Faunus.
Blake did her best to outrun them, her feet barely making contact with anything solid each time she surged forward, leaving afterimages standing atop the snow like ghostly shadows, but for all the effort, she knew her semblance wasn't built for raw speed, and she could hear the Knights gaining ground faster than she'd predicted. She didn't need to look behind her, she could hear four separate sets of engines speeding around her, blocking her sight with the clouds of snow they were kicking up in their wake.
The Faunus shot to her left without warning, Gambol Shroud flashing as she caught the first Knight off guard, her blade catching just where the android's helmet met its neck, severing its head clean from its shoulders. It was nice to see certain weaknesses in their design hadn't been remedied even in these upgraded models. One down. Before she could sink into the powdery top layer of snow, Blake used the downed Knight as a springboard, her sword already converting to pistol form as she leaped high into the air and whipped her weapon at the Knights beneath her. Two more went down in quick succession, and she aimed her descent at the one remaining Knight.
As soon as she dropped back into the shrinking cloud of kicked up snow, a heavy rush of wind nearly threw her off course, but she adjusted midair, noting the way the Knight tracked her instead of the shadow clone she'd left behind - these things had to have thermal vision. It didn't matter though, she ran Gambol Shroud straight through its face, jumping from its quickly slumping shoulders back into the air.
A round of cannon-fire from the miners whizzed overhead, drawing Blake's eyes behind her. It hadn't been wind. The Nevermore had blown past her overhead, angled in a steep dive, its blood-red eyes peering directly at the Paladin wrestling with the sisters, drawn to that polished metallic body catching the sun's rays, bright and irresistibly shiny as it spun its entire torso around, backhanding Yang straight down through the wreckage of the roof and trying valiantly to dislodge Ruby from its face.
Crescent Rose's blade sliced a neat line across the surface of the bullet-proof plate glass. It was tough stuff. Ruby kicked off one of the mech's arms and dragged her weapon up, re-sinking it in a steel panel atop one of its shoulders, hoping to expose some of its wiring.
Down below, Weiss dropped to the floor of the porch, shielding her head from the chunks of wood and slate as Yang came crashing through, tearing the door off its hinges on her way.
"Watch it," she chided, coughing and brushing splinters from her hair.
"Weiss?" Yang sputtered, brick and mortar sliding off her like pebbles as she pushed herself to her feet. Her outline had already started to take on a golden shimmer. "How did you-" an ear-splitting screech cut the brawler's question short, and she looked up just in time to see a dark shadow obscure the hole she'd just fallen through, followed seconds later by the cringe-worthy sound of twisting, warping metal as the Nevermore's talons gripped and crushed, grasping all they could of the Paladin's shoulders.
Yang thought she could see a flicker of red somewhere in the ensuing chaos of movement above, and her worry for Ruby doubled as the Paladin began to shoot wildly, bullets ripping up through the air at the Nevermore, out across the snow, and down into the weakened cabin debris.
She looked like she was about to throw herself back up into the fray. Weiss caught the bandana around her leg, twisting it hard to get her attention, "Yang, get my suitcase."
Ruby clung to the back of the Paladin, trying to get a foothold while the bot swung around, firing in all directions. Sparks showered from the ruined scraps of circuitry in its shredded torso.
The Nevermore screeched at it, its massive claws fumbling for a grip on the energy gun set in the mech's arm to stop the hail of bullets. Pieces of its steel plating tore off and fell clattering among the wreckage.
"Thank you!" Ruby called out as she slid into the cockpit through the gaping hole in the suit's crushed and mangled armor. Light poured through the hole. Her silver eyes assessed the damage. The holographic view screens were either malfunctioning or offline. Red lights flared across the status panel as the Nevermore buffeted the Paladin with its wings. She strapped in, heart pounding in her throat, Crescent Rose propped close at hand as she caught the controls. Sparks showered over her head, forcing her to duck. She hit the black switch to cut off autopilot.
The entire suit powered down, stopping mid-swing as the Nevermore attempted to drag it across the wrecked airship.
Yang threw a look at Weiss, silently asking if she was insane, but it was quickly replaced by one of understanding in the half-second it took to remember that one of Weiss's many suitcases was packed with highly volatile vials of pure dust. The brawler made a quick scan of the wreckage around them, frowning at the layer of debris that littered the floor. She openly grimaced at where the airship had crushed the stairs. "Please don't tell me it was upstairs."
"They were just inside the front door," Weiss released Yang so she could look around. She tried to gather herself to stand, but wound up resting her head down on her arms to dizziness at bay.
Yang immediately glanced down at the door she'd leveled, grinning when she caught sight of a solid corner of white peeking out from underneath the splintered oak. "Well I'll be," she muttered, dragging the case out from its hiding place, pleased to find it without a single scratch - the thing was probably made of weapons grade materials or something.
Just as she was bringing the case over to Weiss, the grating crunch and snap of metal sounded above, followed an instant later by a deafening crash as one of the Paladin's arms fell through what was left of the ceiling. Yang dropped the suitcase, leaping to intercept the falling twisted hunk of metal, bodily diverting its direct course towards Weiss, and landing in a heap with it a few feet away.
The brawler sprang back up not a moment later, dashing to crouch over Weiss, checking her for any new injures, and breathing a sigh of relief when there were none. "OK. Ooookay, not safe here," she stole a glance at the quickly weakening ceiling, then back down at Weiss, torn between protecting her still-recovering teammate, and simply heading back into the fray to remove the threat altogether.
In the chaos above, the Nevermore flapped as hard as it could, slowly lifting its newly lightened prize into the air, even as the remaining Knights converged beneath it to fire everything they had all at once at the half-scrapped Paladin - at the huntress inside. One of them jumped, firing the jets in its legs and feet for the added height as it reached out to grasp the Paladin's dangling leg. It made it roughly half-way to its target before being unceremoniously yanked back to the ground by Gambol Shroud, smashing into another unsuspecting Knight, leaving the two in a crumpled, sparking pile.
The rest of the Knights turned to face their attacker, only to find a shadow clone dissipating into nothingness.
All of a sudden, the lights on the Paladin flickered to life. Its arm cannon swung upwards, flush with the Nevermore's leg. A charge of white energy gathered at the end of the barrel.
CRACK! The kick from the shot tore the Paladin from the giant bird's talons. Ruby yanked the controls, jamming the auto-righting mechanism to get the suit's legs under itself as it clanged down hard into the airship, sliding backwards into the cabin wreckage.
When the suit responded, she was thrilled. She was a kid just given 500,000 lien's worth of candy. The stupid grin on her face could have made her poster child for Stupid-Grins-R-Us.
Atlesian Knights swarmed over the ship, raining down bullets. Ruby ignored the warnings of left-arm failure and critical systems damage for now. There were gaping holes in the glass and armor, so she didn't need the view screens anyway.
"Bet you wish you were on my team," the tip of her tongue poked out the side of her mouth as she focused and brought the Paladin's guns to bear on the much smaller, much less-armored Knights.
Between the falling debris and Yang's statement of a very obvious fact, Weiss had managed to half crawl, half lunge the two feet to her suitcase. She punched in a patterned code on a silver panel near the luggage's handle, and the latch snapped open.
"Take ice. The Knights-" she struggled lifting the lid of the case from her position. Inside were a number of jars, plus an array of crystals set in hollowed spaces in the foam interior. Unfortunately, Weiss's vision was going black, like she was going to faint. She shut her eyes and put her head down on the cold metal rim of the suitcase, sucking in air through her teeth as she fumbled for a shard of ice crystal to show Yang. She gave up, growling, "Just figure it out."
"What do you mean just figure it out!?" Yang shot back, managing to grab the crystal before Weiss dropped it. "Weiss?" she tried again, gritting her teeth when there was still no response other than the heiress trying to get her breath back.
The roof above them creaked and shuddered, and Yang leaned over her downed teammate to shield her from the entire shingles and other falling chunks of debris, no doubt dislodged by the Nevermore's powerful wingbeats. "So help me I am going to carve those words on your tombstone-" Yang's griping was cut short by a heart-stopping explosion, and her head snapped up just in time to watch the one-armed Paladin crash through the airship's side and collide with the downed chimney.
Yang was on her feet in less than a second, jumping to drop into a fighting stance roughly two paces in front of Weiss, daring the slowly rising mechanical menace to take one step closer with a bright flash of her semblance - a flash which illuminated the Paladin's new, blessedly familiar pilot. "Ruby?!"
At that very moment, another familiar face crashed down through the ceiling to deftly land atop the Paladin's mangled shoulders - Blake - striking a familiar pose that registered with Yang immediately, one she'd seen countless times during practice, lithe body and arms twisted, coiled like a spring and ready to sweep both halves of Gambol Shroud straight through the visibly weakened cockpit.
"Blake WAIT!"
The Faunus halted mid-strike, surprise visibly etched onto her features when amber snapped up to meet amethyst, then snapped back down to actually look inside the Paladin. Blake barely had the chance to register the sight of Ruby grinning like she'd won the lottery when the remaining Knights began to pour through the hole Ruby had created in the airship's side, many of them singed, half-melted, or missing limbs entirely - likely from the shot the Paladin's smoking gun-arm had just fired.
A rain of ten-foot black feathers whistled into the breach, pinning one of the Knights like a bug on a cork board. Several stuck into the Paladin's armor as Ruby swung the cannon up, shielding Blake and punching buttons to get something that could take out a Grimm.
Red warnings splashed over the console as a white-hot beam of light flickered from the mouth of the cannon. The section of roof it hit turned black, then burst into flame and burned away to nothing despite being made of slate.
The controls were shot. A smoking, sparking mess of wires. The safety protocol screen near Ruby's shoulder gave a high-pitched whine and shattered, spilling glass into the hood of her cloak. Her hands were slick with sweat as she searched for a way to cut the beam off before the Dust crystal power core got overheated, because that would be bad.
Right then, the Knights pelted the suit with a bout of especially concentrated fire, managing to take out one of the Paladin's knees.
"Ack!" Ruby squeaked as the armored suit crumpled backwards, throwing her against her harness. The laser went wild, slicing through what was left of the cabin roof. It severed the tail from the crashed bulkhead. The Nevermore's screeches were drowned out by the groan of collapsing metal and wood.
Blake only just managed to leap clear of the toppling Paladin's shoulder, the tail end of her indestructible ribbon trailing fire from where it had passed through the laser. The Faunus rolled back up into a defensive stance just in time to catch Yang sprinting towards the fray she'd just barely escaped. Pieces of ceiling and shrapnel fell around them like the deadliest rain, but the brawler paused her rush long enough to grip Blake's arm, leaning close to be heard over the din of the collapsing roof, lips brushing the shell of Blake's Faunus ear with a hurried plea, "Get Weiss out of here."
Yang didn't even wait for Blake to nod before charging forward, sparks of yellow and red flying in every direction as she plowed straight into a knight fist-first, sending it flying into the laser beam still shooting through the now-nonexistent ceiling. Out of the corner of her eye, Yang saw a flicker of shadows, and breathed a quiet sigh of relief when a glance back at the porch revealed no Weiss, and no Blake. Just the case of dust - closed, no doubt thanks to her partner's keen eye - that disappeared moments later as the entire porch area was crushed beneath the airship's severed tail. On that note, Yang quickly stowed the crystal Weiss had handed her in one of her pouches, trusting the fireproof material to keep it safe.
Teeth bared in a wild grin, Yang whipped back around to face the group of Knights descending upon Ruby in the fallen Paladin. She crashed her fists together, letting a blast of white-hot fire erupt through the hollowed out cabin, transforming the wreckage into a burning, hellish inferno.
Now she didn't have to hold back.
Flames trailed in her wake as Yang shot forward, weaving around the bullets of the lone Knight that had turned to fire at her, catching it with a devastating left hook that knocked it back into one of its companions. A quick glance at the open sky lent an added bit of haste to her movements - the Nevermore was already circling back around for another assault.
"C'mon, sis!" the brawler called over the explosive crunch of her fist removing a second Knight's head from its shoulders, finally earning the attention of the other androids closest by. "You're not gonna let me have all the kills, are you?"
"Just hang on a sec," Ruby's voice rose an octave or two as she searched frantically for an off switch. The Paladin's cannon arm was starting to glow red hot. She yanked open a steel panel and ripped out a handful of wires. The beam flickered but didn't die. Something on the console started beeping in a bad way. A very bad way. Ruby paled and scrambled for Crescent Rose, cutting her way out of the safety harness and bolting out the gap in the suit's armor plating. She spotted Yang at once and hurtled into her, grabbing her arm and dragging her up the sloping pile of rubble, "Hurry, run!"
"Woah, hey! What's up?!" Yang glanced back over her shoulder as she scrambled after Ruby, eyes widening at the sight of the glowing, shuddering Paladin. The brawler pulled back the flames her semblance, reached into her pouch, and chucked the shining blue shard of Dust Weiss had given her right into the center of the knights.
"Hit the deck!" Time seemed to slow as Yang threw Ruby to the ground and dropped to cover her, flaring her semblance in perfect sync with the explosion that rocked the very ground beneath them, culminating in a searing wave of super-heated fire that spewed forth from what had once been the Paladin's core, incinerating anything in its path that wasn't metal or stone in the span of a split-second.
Time sped back up when the wall of fire met Yang's semblance in a violent swirling clash of reds, oranges, yellows, and whites. Yang's eyes glowed crimson at the sight of Ruby beneath her, immune to her own flames, but not to those threatening to close in around them, and she snarled, pushing herself to her very limits, liquid fire coursing through her veins as she just barely managed to deflect the foreign flames with her own aura-fueled blaze.
But just when she'd won her victory over the first explosion, a second, much clearer and sharper explosion tore through the area, sucking all the heat from the air as it took physical form in impossibly straight spires of the purest light blue, several of which exploded in bursts of steam upon coming too close to the burning brawler. The Knights didn't stand a chance. Any android that wasn't disintegrated by the first explosion suddenly finding itself encased in or speared by the elegant eruption of dust-born ice.
"Ugh," Yang flopped onto her back, pulling in deep breaths of chilled air, "Whoever said to fight fire with fire has no idea what they're talking about."
"That was the best," Ruby propped herself up on her elbows, her face flushed and her hair all messed up. She stared up at the spires of ice. The sun hit it just right, glinting off the spikes and pieces of frozen Knights in a way that was distinctly beautiful. Especially since it meant that they weren't being shot at anymore. Abruptly, Ruby whipped around, looking for the others, "Blake? Weiss?! Where are you?"
There was no answer.
Yang rolled to her side and pushed herself into a sitting position, swiping wild tangles of blonde from her face as she scanned the area for a shock of black against the endless white. Soot and ashes from the Paladin's explosion littered the surrounding snow in a wide ring, broken only by the two hulking masses of slowly disintegrating Nevermore that had apparently been haphazardly bisected by the Paladin's laser. The miners still stood atop the roofs in the distance.
Finally, her eyes landed on a light trail atop the snow, leading away from the cabin and into the town. "I asked Blake to take Weiss somewhere safe," she glanced at Ruby, then pointed along the trail, noting that it seemed to lead straight towards the remains of the bell tower. "I think they went that way."
Ruby slumped backwards in relief. Driving a Paladin was great and all, but if it had gotten her team hurt she'd have never forgiven herself. "Okay. I guess we should go after them."
She still didn't want to move for a while after that explosion, but she pushed herself up anyway and started hunting around for something to skate over the surface of the snow on.
Yang stood as well, checking the areas opposite of her sister. "Ruby look," she tapped Ruby's shoulder, pointing to a snow drift at the very edge of the cabin's foundation.
The front half of their patchwork sled poked out of the snow, still a bit mangled, but far more in tact than the sled's other half lying a few feet away in bits and pieces, having apparently suffered a direct shot from the Paladin's laser. "It's our lucky day, sis!"
Ruby helped drag the half-sled out of the snow and dusted it off. Considering half of the rest of the wreckage that wasn't part of the giant ice sculpture was burning or in splinters or both, it looked pretty good. "Alright then. We'll regroup with Weiss and Blake and then see about scavenging whatever we can from around here."
She took another look around at the blasted, ice-encrusted rubble. Crestfallen, she amended, "... well, at least maybe we can find the rest of Weiss's Dust, or something. If we dig. For a long time."
A/N: I LOVE ROBOT FIGHTS but the cleanup is a nightmare. Tune in next time to see our team catalog exactly how many questions haven't been answered.
Also we'll figure out where Blake took Weiss. Because, wow, good job, Blake. She was just /gone/.
-Fiercesomest