The more they searched, the more Ruby felt uneasy. Her heightened perception found no clue and yet she could feel danger. She tried to hide her anxiety but in the awkward silence that followed after Weiss' talk with her father. Weiss was able to spot the clues mostly because she prepared herself to repel Ruby's curiosity. It both irritated and worried her.
"Stop." she ordered her leader, "If something's bothering you, just say so."
She turned, arms crossed in her typical petulant way, though her frown was not one of anger, but worry. Nobody could convince her that Ruby didn't hear what her father said through the Scroll. She knew her leader well.
Ruby fidgeted, eyes downcast.
"I… keep having this bad feeling... thought not because of your father! Um, I mean…"
Ruby's failed attempt at damage control only ended with a frustrated sigh from the heiress.
"I apologize for making you worry so much. He can be…"
"No! It's not that! Don't blame yourself. It's… something else." Ruby gulped, "I keep feeling this scary feeling. Like, we're about to be attacked at any moment. I can't get rid of it, Weiss."
Weiss' frown faded, her arms quickly unfolding.
"The weird thing is, it comes from somewhere around here… in one of these rooms" she waved at the hallway.
"We need to get out of here, then."
"No, Weiss. You go, I'll find whatever it is and…"
"Please tell me you don't seriously believe that I'll leave my team leader, of all people, to fend for themselves while I scurry to safety."
"But it might be dangerous!"
"Yes, and? Do I need to remind you that we're training to deal with danger on a daily basis? What kind of Huntress would I be if I were to turn around and run away?"
"But, but…"
"I don't want to hear it." Weiss drew her weapon. "Whatever it is, we will handle it together."
Her reasoning defeated, Ruby led Weiss to the room that emanated the uncanny aura. They reached the white door. The door handle was missing and there were significant scratches on the door's surface, some that looked like they were made by the claws of a Beowolf. Ruby and Weiss kicked the door down with a coordinated kick. The latter walked in first, watching with a frown until her head turned right, to something Ruby couldn't see.
"Aaaah!"
Weiss' already pale skin turned paler as her eyes turned to two saucers. She jumped backwards, hitting the wall, trying to become a part of it just to avoid sharing the same space with whatever lay there. Ruby quickly ran into the room.
At the end of what was supposedly a classroom lay a small obelisk built haphazardly out of wooden planks, bricks and iron pipes, held together by two human skeletons that were hugging the structure, like two statues that gazed at the steel gray bowl on top, at a purple flame that burned eternally. The structure, this makeshift Dark Totem, was encircled by a group of tiny skeletons, each picked clean and perfectly intact, with their tiny hands holding the feet of the one in front of them, all locked in a macabre dance around the demonic construct left behind by someone unknown to the Huntresses-in-training.
Ruby's breathing hitched, backtracking to the wall behind her. Memories of Mountain Glenn came back with a vengeance. The putrid smells, the mounds of corpses, the screams of the damned and dying. Tears rushed from her eyes as she soaked in every detail of the ritual site, as if her brain tried to give her nightmares for the rest of her life.
Weiss didn't fare better. Ruby searched for her hand, squeezing it tightly, trying to comfort her friend. She was in her own world, trying to cope in her own ways. Her hand was trembling.
"What… what is that…"
Ruby had no idea who tried to speak. She was only aware of the Dark Totem. Her consciousness revolved solely around the Dark Totem. She couldn't believe that someone actually sat down, thought it through and willingly took so many lives to create something so grotesque. It finally clicked.
"It's them… They are here."
As the revelation dawned on her, Weiss found the strength to move her sight elsewhere, away from horror, and noticed how the doorway was distant, despite them moving only a meter or so away from it. She must be hysterical, she thought, because there was no other explanation. Her mind was panicking and, as a result, hallucinating impossible things.
But then she turned her head to the other side. The windows were distant, unbelievably so. They also looked bigger, taller even, stretching towards the ceiling, with a blanket of whiteness obscuring the outside world. It was, it was…
"As if the room… expanded…"
"They are here. They are here!"
Her eyes returned to the Dark Totem, now retreated some twenty or so meters, seemingly without her or Ruby noticing. With her hand still holding Ruby's, she tried to lead them both to the doorway. The moment she turned to break into a run for the exit, a bright orange light blocked their only means of escape. The light formed a seal akin to those magical seals she would often see in Ruby's comics back at Beacon. It locked itself in place with an orange barrier it was, somehow, able to conjure.
"Weiss! It's them!"
Weiss turned to her leader, eyes puffy and red. Despite the emotional breakdown, she fumbled with the Crescent Rose. Seeing Ruby so distressed was a new experience for the heiress.
"Who, Ruby? Who's 'them'?"
The universe, ever cold and uncaring, answered. A purple light barrier surged from the circle of skeletons as each uncoiled from the others and began floating, like puppets floating on the strings. The room trembled for five seconds, then materialized a brown runic seal in front of the Dark Totem. It narrowed, changing into every color imaginable until it settled into fiery red. A pillar of light shot up from the seal, which plucked the atoms from the very reality it manifested in, using them as building blocks for a creature taller than Ruby and Weiss combined.
And as it began to take shape, as it latched onto the reality like a parasite, so too they could see its majestic form, made entirely out of gold, perfect in every meaning of the world, until it came to the spinning head, where all its ugliness resided in four angered faces adorned with white tusks. Once born, the seal was gone, letting the proverbial animal out of its cage. The moment it spotted the two Huntresses-in-training, it went into a fit of utter rage, howling at the sheer imperfections made flesh. The sheer force of its outrage caused its golden skin to crack all over its body, revealing the living hellfire contained inside. Willing to be worshipped all over Remnant as a god, while actually being an obedient dog tasked with protecting the unholy sanctuary, the Living Idol marched forward with killing intent. *
"Over here!"
Blake led both her and Yang towards the source of the noise, running through the hallways. A few more gunshots echoed again, making them speed up. Everything looked the same to Yang, since there were no reliable landmarks for discerning their location. Nevertheless, her feet moved, trembling at the thought that those gunshots could be Ruby's and that she wasn't there to protect her.
It was more than simple overprotectiveness, though it did play a part. In some other times, Yang was able to convince herself that Ruby was a big girl and that she could solve her own problems. But not now. Something strange was happening to Ruby, something that was crushing her and she refused to reveal it to her sister and team mates. She would get to the bottom of it no matter what.
But first, they had to deal with whatever was causing the gunshots.
"Are we there yet?" Yang asked.
Blake stopped running, almost causing Yang to smack into her.
"I… guess?"
She turned around.
"Something's weird. I keep hearing it."
"So do I."
"But, it's like we still haven't moved from our spot. I don't know how to describe it."
"What are you talking about? This must have been, what, our sixth turn?"
"Isn't it strange to you, though? The building is large, yes, but we should have reached the other side at least. My point is that I keep hearing the gunshots from the same distance even if we were supposed to get closer."
"Could it be the other team, CFVY?"
"No, no… this one's closer."
Drawn to the noise, they reached the farthest room down the hallway. It was empty, save for dust that accumulated in tiny heaps on the floor.
"Do you hear it?" Yang asked.
"Yes, it seems to come from below us."
"Then let's make a shortcut!"
"Yang, wait-"
Before Blake could protest further, Yang blasted a hole in the floor with Ember Celica, raising all the dust in the room into a thick fog. The regret settled instantly for the latter as dust began to fall on her hair, her pride and joy, which didn't help to calm her down. Frustrated with her teammate's punch-first-then-ask-later way of work, Blake dusted herself off as much as she could, then lowered her head to check what lay under them.
"…what?"
All she saw was a sea of whiteness everywhere she tried to look. The wind that blew was cold and made her skin crawl.
"Let me see… woah. Is that snow?"
"That… shouldn't be possible. We're in spring."
Shaking her head, Blake mentioned the sound of the gunshots again.
"I keep hearing it. It really comes from below us."
"You mean, from down there?"
"Yes. But it's distant."
"Again? This makes no sense."
"I think we should step away and report back what we've seen."
"Good idea. I really don't need to catch a cold after such a crappy day."
The ground trembled as they were about to leave the room. A pulsating light began to seep through the hole in the ground, expanding it by stretching the matter. The floor crumbled, throwing Blake and Yang down into the world below. Their bodies fell into the whiteness they saw with a loud poof.
The cold they felt gradually turned harsher, with them quickly realizing that what they fell into was snow. So much of it, in fact, that whatever ground lay under it, could be reached only by digging.
Yang was the first to recover, being the physically stronger one.
"Where are we?"
She spun around, trying to get some kind of understanding of their surroundings. But apart from snow, and an occasional dead tree, there was nothing for miles.
"No idea." answered Blake, looking up. "The hole's gone."
"What? Oh…"
Both hugged their respective bodies, feeling the sudden cold they weren't prepared for. With the hole through which they fell gone, they were left in the middle of a frozen wasteland, with snow continuing to fall from a grayish-brown sky.
"This feels like a bad dream. It must be."
"I dunno, Blake. The cold I'm feeling is pretty real alright." she sneezed, "Gods, we need to find a way out."
"Geez, you think?"
Yang shot her a look.
"Sorry."
The tension was growing and Yang knew that. Not only they were in an unfamiliar territory, but they were also in a nightmarish predicament, without any clear explanation. The thought that they were losing their minds was one they tried their best to avoid thinking about.
But then, Blake pointed at something shiny in the distance, something golden in the middle of a white nowhere. They rushed to the object, their feet crunching the snow that was as real as they were. They stopped once they got a better look at the object of their naïve hope for a sense of normalcy.
Four people, frozen in place, knelt at a Dark Totem carved out of wood, with different faces on each side of the surface. Tiny effigies made of plush toys were held together to the Totem with ropes. A skull of a stag lay on top, held to the totem with two large nails that stuck out of the eye sockets. A golden aura surrounded the Totem, melting the snow in a circle around it. The ground was covered with eye shapes made from grounded salt.
"Straight out of a horror movie, eh?" Yang gulped, "I suggest we stay as far away from that as possible."
"Sure… it looks like a trap, though very morbid one."
"Ugh, I'm this close to losing my damn mind. Have we been drugged or something?"
Blake opened her mouth to speak when she suddenly drew her weapon.
"Something's coming!"
A soft yet thundering rumble boomed from the wasteland as mountains of snow surrounded the Huntresses-in-training. As the snow grew in height, so it fell, revealing giants made entirely out of bluish-white ice. Though they came in different body shapes, each instance had a pair of blank white eyes sitting on a face adorned with hair and beard made of ice spikes. Ranging from tall-as a-tree to bigger-than-a-house, the Hrimthursar were called through sorcery that affected the Totem.**
Their troubles didn't stop at that. Gigantic shapes began to march out of the distant fog. Covered in white fur so thick that it flapped in the wind, these mouflon-horned humanoids sneered and growled, the frozen-purple skin on their primate faces splitting back to reveal a set of teeth as big as a finger. The Yerens wished nothing more than to feast on human flesh.***
"Monsters!"
"I can see that, Blake!"
One short Hrimthurs raised the ice-overgrown club that was his left hand. Yang cocked back her fist and retaliated as soon as the frozen limb was in her range. The Shotgun gauntlet's explosion shattered the club into hundreds of shards that were flung into the air, falling like a rain. If it hurt, the Hrimthurs didn't show it. Yang jumped a few meters back to avoid being surrounded by more of them.
Behind the Huntresses-in-training, the Dark Totem began to hum quietly.
"No way this is happening."
Thinking back on her first impression years later, Coco would often question whether the events they experienced that day were real or a product of mass psychosis. Nothing could prepare her for what was about to transpire.
The entirety of team CFVY decided to rush into the room as soon as the door creaked open. Yatsuhashi's strength alone tore the damn thing off its hinges. He was also the first one to set foot into the room. She should have known, as the leader, what his sharp intake of breath meant, his eagerness to prevent Velvet from entering. It was one of the things she would always blame herself for allowing it to happen. The sharp scream she heard coming from Velvet made her push herself through, until she could see for herself.
It was the shock that almost made her scream, rather than actual horror. That came later.
Sharing the room with them was perhaps the best display of a cult's presence. A pile of bones and skulls formed a Dark Totem, like some kind of a pillar meant to represent something only a degenerate mind could comprehend. What was worse for Coco were the skeletons scattered around the room, each with a large pool of dried blood on the floor or wall under them, yet picked clean of all things flesh. The positions of each skeleton indicated that they tried to flee the premises but something caught up with them before they could do it.
"Damn it!" Coco seethed, "Everyone, retreat back into the hallway, pronto!"
She should have expected it to be a trap; one of many harsh judgements she would put herself through in the future. But this was their first encounter with proper paranormal occurrences. Where there was a doorway just moments ago, now stood a large stone slab with a monstrous face sneering back at them. Their immediate reaction was to jump through the window. But when they came to the nearest window, they were stopped by a sudden barrier that prevented them to interact with any window in the room.
In short, it was a cage for whatever was locked in there with them.
And they stepped right into it.
"Weapons up! Now!"
A runic seal appeared in front of them, shining bright green. Rats from every crack in the walls poured into the room and ran into the seal. They began gathering in a pile that grew by the second, with their tails tying into knots that held the collective together. At one point, a large black rat infested with green pus growths sticking out of its fur jumped into the collective, huddling itself among the smaller rats that hid its form inside the massive beast that was in the making. Before team CFVY knew it, they were staring at the birth of an Exalted; the Great Rat King.****
Before they could respond, two more Exalted barged into the contained space. Two more seals appeared behind the Dark Totem, casting a pillar of light. The one of the left spawned a centipede-like thing with a thick chitinous armor. Its cyclopean square head sported a large mouth with tiny sharp teeth. The legs that supported the body were thinner than a stick and ended in a pair of stubs. That was the Mud Runner.*****
And lastly, the last seal brought forth a giant white spider with a red skull-shaped blotch on its back. Reminiscing about old horror stories she read when she was younger, Coco realized that the spider resembled a monster known as the Eater of Pigs. ******
It was a disaster waiting to happen. Velvet looked like she was about to pass out at any moment. Yatsuhashi and Fox fared no better, acting like beasts ready to pounce the moment they felt threatened. The knowledge that she was slowly losing them hurt more than anything. If she and her team didn't do something, they would soon end up as food for those twisted creatures.
"Everyone, focus! We will get out of this trap! You need to keep your cool!"
With the Exalted rapidly approaching, Coco's doubt of her words grew. The barrels of her minigun began to spin…
The bird-like construct was something more than the Ideatic Predators; a being of pure potential and power, despite acting exactly like them. Each part emanated a mystical glow, a warmth that made Jaune shiver instinctively. What exactly it was supposed to represent? What was fueling its desire to destroy him, a lowly intruder?*******
Jaune did the first thing that popped into his mind: run.
It was pathetic and he knew that. He kept cursing himself as he barely avoided the Predators' paralyzing beams. He even kept cursing as he ran between the exotic flora, hearing the flap of mechanical wings.
The bird soared high towards the ceiling, staring down at him as he moved. Followed by a loud click, its conical beak spun and split into a star shape. A dot of colorless light grew inside the beak, increasing in volume until it grew bigger than the machine's head. It flew from the mouth in the form of a beam. Jaune could see the outline but the light and the color simply failed to register. The beam missed him by few centimeters, but that wasn't what gave him the fright of his life. It was all the things that the beam hit.
He didn't know what he was looking at. Any living thing that the beam hit simply vanished from his view, yet he could perfectly see the outlines of the damaged plants, now decrepit and drained of life. He had a feeling that, if he had the freedom to touch the stems and leaves, he would feel them, despite his eyes telling him that whatever was there had now assumed the color of dirt, walls and everything else in the vicinity, like somebody put on a blanket in a half-assed attempt to blend into the environment. By the same line of thought, Jaune assumed the plants died, yet a nagging feeling told him it was something else. Something that had no word in the existing vocabulary of this reality.
The beam kept following behind him for a few second more. The machine then stopped firing and spread its wings, flying over the hidden Jaune. With a single flap, it detached a dozen rectangles posing for feathers, all of them landing in the area. He dodged one that was close to impaling his leg. The rectangles began to hum.
Jaune hid behind a bulbous yellow plant. The raspy skin that hid its contents into a bubble resembled that of a plucked chicken. Shielding his eyes as soon as the pillars began to glow white, he scratched the plant's surface by accident. A star-shaped mouth split open on top of the bubble. It spat a bright blue spherical seed high in the air which immediately began replicating into smaller versions of itself, all huddled into one larger mass. The bird machine passed by with a flap of its wings, further stimulating the seeds.
Without warning, the mass exploded, flinging the seeds in all directions with the speed of a bullet and the force of a cannonball. The tallest plants suffered the most, for their leaves and branches were shredded by the flying hazards. Three of the seeds hit the right wing and one of the cubes that made the neck of the bird, severely damaging them. The machine screeched as it crash-landed into a giant white-leaved bush.
Moreover, whenever the blue seeds came in contact with a surface, they would unleash an electric blast, before bouncing again and repeating the process for a few more times. The sheer destructiveness brought by this behavior obliterated a third of the garden's floral population while also rendering whatever functioning defensive mechanisms that remained entirely useless.
An alarm blared with all its might.
"Uh-oh. What did I do this time?"
He heard a massive gate open on the other side of the garden. Thinking he had found an exit, Jaune ran into the direction of the ear-splitting noise, not willing to deal with any kind of mechanical monstrosity anymore. The bird-like construct flung itself off the bush and took flight, landing in front of the gate to stop the intruder's escape. Behind it, the gate creaked open, displaying an ornate descending platform.
The machine roared, detaching a dozen more rectangles that fell behind Jaune in a line, forming an energy barrier between each. He couldn't escape now. Drawing his gun and shield, Jaune decided to make the first move.
PDA Biopedia:
*Entry 225: Living Idol
Type: Demonic Corruption - Hero
Faction: Legions of Hell
Description: "I always wanted to be a hero. A Huntress people could rely on. When I saw this thing, I was reminded of the countless superhero comics I used to read in my spare time. They were all this tall brave men and women, kinda like this statue. But when I saw its face I found something that troubled me. I began to think how oddly similar were all these superheroes. They were… how would Weiss put it? Idealized? Ide… Argh! Point is, they were all perfect, okay? They were all perfect and people used to wish to be like them. And some couldn't so they became supervillains…"
**Entry 226: Hrimthurs
Type: Demonic Corruption
Faction: Legions of Hell
Description: "I didn't think about it in the moment, being trapped in the middle of nowhere and all. But now that I remember, I think I felt it at the time. These giant ice people… they felt cold. I don't mean cold on touch, I mean deeper than that. As if they lost some part of them that made them alive and full of this whatchamacallit. Sounds cheesy, I know, but there's that." (Immune to Cryo damage, all attacks are enhanced with Cryo damage, extremely weak against Incendiary damage)
***Entry 227: Yeren
Type: Hellspawn
Faction: Legions of Hell
Description: "They reminded me of Faunus for a brief moment. Until I realized they were more like a crude, satirical representation of them. They were more like monsters than anything else. Where did they come from?"
****Entry 228: Great Rat King
Type: Demonic Corruption - Hero
Faction: Legions of Hell
Description: "Man, did this fucking thing bring back memories. We used to sit around a campfire and tell scary stories in the dark. This one kid used to talk about how rats would huddle together as a group and sometimes, though rare, their tails tangle up and they can't separate anymore, thus making something called a "Rat King". Don't ask why I'm reminded of it. I don't know either."
*****Entry 229: Mud Runner
Type: Demonic Corruption - Hero
Faction: Legions of Hell
Description: "From what kind of nightmare's ass did this monster crawl out of? Is this the work of a mad scientist or some shit?"
******Entry 230: Eater of Pigs
Type: Demonic Corruption - Hero
Faction: Legions of Hell
Description: "This is really turning out to be a trip down the memory lane. Yet another legend from my childhood. One about a gigantic spider that would come out at night and raid the nearest farms for pigs. When it couldn't find any, it would attack anything, including people. Of course, nobody knows about its nest or where to find it, as is often the case with monsters used to scare little kids."
*******Entry 231: Second Alternative to Death
Type: Unknown - Hero
Faction: None
Description: "Another thing on my path that I can't explain. It's at times like these that I ask why I'm the butt of some cosmic joke that apparently is happening whenever I'm around. What am I supposed to do other than accept it as a fact of life from now on?"