A/N: There is something so much fun about writing ridiculous action scenes.
HUGS,
D
The shot was the signal.
High up on the canyon ridge, there was a crunch of snow, lost in the cacophony of howls and gunshots below, and a rush of cold, night air as Weiss Schnee leapt from the icy ledge, clearing the wide gap in a graceful arc and sticking a landing on the Goliath's shoulders.
The massive Grimm either didn't notice or didn't care about its new passenger. It didn't break stride as it plodded into the writhing mass of Beowolves, crushing more than a few beneath its feet as it made its way to the glowing yellow huntress that had caught its eye.
"'Oh, yes, let's fight on the ground right in the path of one of the largest Grimm known to man. I'm sure nothing will go wrong'," breathing hard, Weiss growled her impression of Yang and Blake as she balanced up the creature's shifting shoulders to the crown of its head. It had a slick, bristly sort of coat that didn't provide her snow boots much traction. She gripped Myrtenaster, its chamber spinning to blue, "We'll just ride that good idea all the way to Beacon."
With her last word, she thrust her rapier through the thick tissue of the Grimm's upper eyelid, flash-freezing the entire right quarter of its face.
As the surface of its flesh and one of its eyes solidified, the Goliath's interests shifted. Letting loose a low shuddering grunt, the massive Grimm reared up, swinging its entire body towards the mountainside and smashing its head into the rocky crags, shattering the ice that encrusted it like so much glass.
Boulders falling from the impact dropped like shadowed meteors into the blood-frenzied pack of Beowolves below, narrowly missing the bright burning light that was slowly gaining potency.
Weiss clung to the thick bristles behind the Goliath's bone mask on the non-rock-smashing side of its neck, cringing as fist sized chunks of rock and ice cascaded over her. She strained to catch hold of one of the massive spikes that ran along its spine and haul herself back up.
"Yang Xiao Long," she yelled, mostly because it felt good to shout the blonde's full name, "if you and Blake don't both get up here I swear-"
Crack.
The shot came from much closer this time, along the ridge level with the Goliath's head. A Beowolf with its teeth almost in Yang's leg spilled sideways in the snow.
Weiss and Ruby were here. They were fine and they were here and the sheer relief of that single thought kept Yang swinging through her exhaustion. "Kind a busy here princess!" She shouted right back, punching a lunging Beowolf so hard it flew head over heels through the air and bounced like a ragdoll off of the Goliath's brow.
"Yang, get out of there!" Blake had already appeared right beside Weiss, trying to use the Goliath's height to get a better view of her partner's location. From this angle, the burning point of reddish yellow storming in and around the pack of Beowolves was nearly impossible to miss.
"Come on, guys..." Ruby sighted through Crescent Rose from her new vantage point, a hundred yards closer to the fighting. She moved her focus from Yang in the middle of the boiling mass of shadow and bone - the individual Beowolves were hard to distinguish in the moonlight - to Weiss and Blake in position on the Goliath, up to the precarious ledge of snow and ice overhanging the steep canyon pass.
There was more than enough to bury even the biggest Grimm till spring.
Weiss held on as the Goliath lurched, trying to dislodge its riders, "Lead it into the canyon!"
Blake nodded, waiting until the Goliath was between grunts to call to her partner over the din of the battle. "Yang! About face! Head to the canyon!"
The brawler did just that, whipping around and flaring the surplus semblance she'd been building, incinerating everything in her path. She ran full tilt, evading rather than punching the occasional Beowolf that somehow made it through her wall of fire. There wasn't much she could see past the light afforded by her own flames, but if nothing else, the single glowing red eye of the Goliath gave her something to aim for.
Weiss hauled herself up, short of breath. Yang's blaze of fire had ruined her night vision and the Goliath seemed like it was turning in circles, scraping its sides against the cliff walls in an attempt to smash her and Blake. She scrubbed her sleeve across her eyes, shouting to her Faunus teammate, "As soon as we're in, we'll have to catch Ruby on the sled."
"On the what- Yang! Hard right!"
A thundering crash shook the ground as the Goliath's foot smashed down into dirt, snow, and Beowolves, right where Yang would have been had she not changed her trajectory. Dust and grit kicked up from the impact sizzled against the brawler's barrier of flames as Blake's rapid-fire directions led her in and around the massive Grimm's attempts to trample her.
Finally, her flames illuminated the yawning gap of the canyon pass.
The Goliath let loose a deep bellowing roar, giving a mighty full-bodied shake before storming right into the narrow pass in pursuit of the flickering flame that had evaded its feet, shoulders and sides scraping against the rock walls on either side.
Ruby had been watching for this (and also watching to make sure their racket hadn't set things rolling ahead of schedule). She palmed her single explosive round. It felt like a chunk of solid lead, but it was mostly ultra-compressed, ultra-fine red Dust, straight out of one of Weiss's cases that time she gave her limited (very limited) access to her supplies for her birthday.
That had been an awesome birthday.
When the giant Grimm made a beeline for the canyon after Yang, Ruby brought Crescent Rose up, chambering the heavy round and firing up at the base of the unstable crest of snow looming high over the narrow canyon.
She leapt to Drei, heart pounding, and clipped a lead to the harness she and Weiss had rigged up as the distant, muffled boom of impact echoed through the night, followed by a muted ripple of sound, like thunder.
"All aboard the RWBY express," Ruby gripped the side of the rebuilt and slightly modified sled and shoved off.
"Look for Ruby!" Weiss threw up an arm to deflect a tumble of ice and rock scraped from the canyon wall by the Goliath's spikes. She coughed, clinging to the Goliath's spine spikes for dear life, "I swear, if she's late-"
"There!" Blake followed the distant rapport of Ruby's shot and zeroed in on a splash of red moving against the darkness - Ruby's cape flaring out behind her as she sped along the snow-topped edge of the canyon in a sled pulled by that huge white dog. Her ears swiveled towards a low rumbling growl, heart dropping at the prospect of more Grimm to deal with. Then she spotted the looming, moving wall of snow and ice that had begun to spill into the canyon behind them. It rushed onward, continuing to spill over the lip nearer and nearer to their current position.
"Yang! Get up here, now!"
The brawler complied immediately with a running leap, pushing for extra height by sacrificing a couple of her limited explosive rounds from Ember Celica.
It was exactly what the Goliath had been waiting for. Blake nearly lost her footing on the beast's neck when it swung its massive head, its leathery trunk flashing out as if to swat a firefly. Yang's light disappeared between rock and bone, smashed against the canyon wall.
"Whoa!" Ruby shouted above, yanking Drei's harness to get him to change direction as the headlong rush of Grimm down in the canyon came to a standstill. The roar of the avalanche reached freight train levels. If they didn't move, the wall of snow and ice would reach them in a matter of seconds, around which time the rest of the mountainside would pour into the canyon on top of them. Ruby knew all that, but it didn't matter. Shuff! Drei jumped and the sled launched off the lip of the canyon.
Weiss barely had time to get her footing, much less try to see what was left of Yang, before the sled landed on the Goliath's back.
Ruby yelled, and there was a screech of tearing metal as its hull was impaled on a bone spike, and the bulk of it clipped Weiss in the shoulder, knocking her from her perch. She fell with a surprised shriek, twisting herself around to stab her sword into the Goliath's hide in a desperate attempt to halt her descent before she slid clean off and into the pack of ravenous Beowolves that surged around the giant Grimm's feet.
Sweeping in much like the shadows she embodied, Blake appeared seemingly out of nowhere, following a wide arc to snatch Weiss from the air just as Myrtenaster's tenuous purchase between two bony plates gave way, her own Gambol Shroud's ribbon carrying them both through an upswing that dropped them right between Ruby and Drei, who was scrambling in his traces.
With a solid yank to dislodge her blade from the bony neck spire she'd hastily embedded it in, Blake's hair whipped around her as she scanned the rock wall the Goliath was grinding its trunk into, chest seizing at the lack of any visible light. She whipped around to give her teammates a cursory check before going to her partner's aide and promptly froze.
Were it not for the contrast provided by Ruby sitting right behind her partner, Weiss would have been all but invisible, camouflaged against the towering wall of powdery white immediately behind them.
Ruby and Weiss exchanged glances as the roaring avalanche loomed, blocking the stars. Red flared along Myrtenaster's edge as Weiss drove Drei into the sled.
"Ready?" Ruby yelled to Blake, cocking back Crescent Rose. Without waiting for an answer, she fired, whipping the massive scythe clean through the bone spurs impaling the sled. At the same time, Weiss thrust her sword deep between the plates of bone armor of the Goliath's shoulder to distract if from crushing Yang.
Blake was not ready at all, but she dashed forward anyway, away from the ringing burst of red singing her heels and riding the irritated jerk of the Goliath's shoulders up into the air. The giant beast's head swung around as far as it could in the narrow pass, its trunk gunning for the pests on its back. Finally, she saw Yang - a blur of smeared reds and glowing gold embedded in the rock wall, limp and slowly leaning forward. She was going to fall.
Running on pure adrenaline, Blake threw Gambol Shroud straight into the beast's neck and angled her descent with as many dashes forward as her semblance could handle, shadow clones falling like rain in the wake of her sheer determination to reach Yang, one arm outstretched to grab the brawler steadily slipping from her rocky prison. Her weapon's ribbon was more than long enough to reach... that is, until the Goliath reared up on its hind legs, dragging her anchor along with it.
Time seemed to slow as Blake felt herself jerked upwards, stopping her inches short of reaching her target, fingertips just brushing the split ends of glowing yellow curls. Yang's face was peaceful as she fell, like she had simply gone to sleep.
"Yang!"
Crimson eyes snapped open, locking with terror-stricken amber. A flash-bang explosion of flames from her partner's overcharged semblance had Blake shielding her eyes, but she distinctly heard the sound of a metal gauntlet crunching into solid stone, followed by two evenly spaced explosive shots, each coming closer than the last. Heat crashed into her a second later, driving both of them straight up into the air, and though every one of Blake's senses were consumed by fire, she could feel a familiar arm clinging to her like a vice - Yang - and she gripped back, holding on for dear life.
Everything that came next happened in the span of only a few seconds.
The roar of the ice and snow and ice as it tipped into the edge of the canyon filled the air, drowning out everything but the Goliath's bellows and the muted crack of bullets from Crescent Rose.
The sled slammed into Blake and Yang, hands catching and hauling till they were flat on the floor. A ragged hole gaped in the sheet metal where the Goliath's spike had punched through. It could have given a heart-stopping view of the Beowolves' frenzy as the sled dropped if anyone had looked. Ruby's sights were fixed ahead, though.
"Hang on!" she yelled as they shot over the Grimm, ice and stones and splintered branches raining down on them from the avalanche.
Blake did exactly that, as she was unable to do much else with Yang pinning her to the bottom of the sled, shielding her from whatever debris her flames didn't immediately incinerate. Her partner's glowing tangle of hair in her face made it impossible to see, so she shut her eyes, trusting in Ruby's navigation.
That probably wasn't one of Blake's better decisions, given Ruby's almost complete inability to steer the airborne sled.
Ten thousand pounds of snow and ice bore down on them, blocking off the faint glimmer of starlit snow ahead at the end of the canyon. Even rocketing forward as they were, they weren't going to make it out before the snow crushed them. Below and behind, Grimm howled, some in fury, some in triumph, for even if they died they were at least certain to witness their prey's demise.
"Weiss!" Ruby roared out, using Crescent Rose to deflect a slab of ice the size of the entire sled.
From someplace between the tangle of Blake and Yang and Drei in the front of the sled, the heiress called forth a glyph in the air just in front of them. The sled shot through like an oversized bullet, shedding splinters of wood and metal as it screeched through the narrowest part of the canyon, bursting through a final wall of snow as the avalanche poured down.
The Beowolves' cries were cut off, and icy debris spilled out after the sled for another several hundred feet down the shallow grade.
The sled itself touched down, skimming the snow on its way straight into a thicket of stunted pines.
"Hang on!" Ruby yelled, unable to steer at all. The sled deflected off a sapling and slammed into a larger tree.
WHAM.
The impact threw the team high, dumping them into the deep snow.
A/N: Woo! Team RWBY is back together! Tune in next week for... a fair amount of fallout.
-Fiercesomest