It was not a good Tuesday to be Roman Torchwick.
Another bullet ricocheted above his head, and Roman doubled down and run like hell. The Lost Legion gave chase, and he shot back a flare from his cudgel to warn them off. He had nothing they would want anyway; that God damned woman having stolen his personal effects during the flight. Professional courtesy demanded he did the same to her, but, the problem was, that God-forsaken woman turned invisible. After crashing their rowboat into the cruiser of an intergalactic corporation, in open space. How probable was that? And now, those fine gentleman decided that he was at fault, because that thrice damned woman conveniently disappeared and left him to clean up her mess.
The corridor made a turn, and he run into an observation room without any other exits.
"Ooookay. Time for plan 'B'," he drawled, pulling out a pin from a modified grenade. It blasted thick smoke from both ends, and Roman threw it back into the corridor. The diversion won him precious seconds and made a draft, enough to find a ventilation shaft and blast away the grate.
"Didn't see that coming, did you?"
As he crawled his way into more friendly territory, a thought just couldn't leave him be; if only he had double-checked the pilot, none of this would have happened. Once again, he learned to do everything by his own two hands and not trust hired "help" to actually aid him like the name suggested. He should find someone unable of betrayal, like a robot or something. The less was said about his previous experiences with living people (and Faunus mutts), the better.
Suddenly, there was a distant explosion, but it sounded from ahead of him, not behind. His curiosity peaking, Roman sped up; there was only one other force of chaos and destruction he knew of on this ship and he would have liked to have a word with that deplorable woman before the locals became too excited and killed her with prejudice like she deserved. Finally, he spotted another ventilation opening just ahead of him. Cautiously approaching it, he peeked down at the devastation beneath.
The area looked like a Torgue arena after the tournament; nothing was left undamaged in some way, shape, or form. It seemed most of the fighting had raged right in the middle, but had since lulled and shifted to one side of the place. A rampaging thirty feet tall mech, its paint singed badly, was trying to force it's way into a ten feet door with predictable results, while a group of people with Schnee insignia looked on with amusement from the sidelines. A constructor bot had been abandoned to the other side, still executing its last order and digistructing another mech.
Roman felt a plan form; a hijack worth his name coming together. It was time to make himself (in)famous again. Course set, he quietly removed the grate and jumped down.
A bunch of dudes run in some random direction, and Scarlett made sure her invisibility suite haven't glitched out at an inappropriate moment. It would be totally embarrassing to have to kill them all because she didn't pay attention to her gear. Already, she felt deep and vast shame over the knife that broke in that Torchwick guy's back. Too much wear and tear. It's not like she expected the thief to have his Aura active when sleeping, anyway. He'd have to die too, of course, but probably later, because she had yet to replace the knife. A kitchen would be a good start for that, if she had the slightest idea where it was. Should she ask locals for directions? Nope, she saw some already and she doubted any were smart enough to actually listen to a pretty girl without resorting to some unfriendly advances or manslaughter first. Or maybe both. Both would be great, actually. Only, she deliberated too long and no locals were in sight. Pity.
Something blew up again, making the whole ship shudder. If those aboard were having fun, she definitely should be joining them, Scarlett decided. Direction picked, she drew Greed from her holster and made her way into the battle.
Of course, the term "battle" was applied very loosely, given that she was invisible. Also, given that three huge robots towering above everything else on the loading platform were more or less invincible to her pistol shots. The good news was, they were too busy aiming at each other in a truxican standoff. The bad news was, the whole area was swarming with people shooting at each other and it was a matter of time before a stray bullet uncloaked her. But the best news was, she found someone who won't try to kill her on sight, because the guy wasn't waving a gun around. Scarlett ducked behind a row of consoles and crept towards the man.
"You are outnumbered and outmatched. Stand down, and I'll grant you a quick death." Her ECHO scroll identified the voice on the loudspeaker as 'Colonel T. Zarpedon'. One of the battlesuits extended an energy sword from the back of its fist and brandished it threateningly.
"Not to rain on your parade, darling, but I'm not the greatest fan of dying. Quickly, or otherwise." Scarlett did a double-take; that couldn't have been any other than the thief she left behind. How he managed to get ahead of her and find a robot with such sexy missile rack, she had no idea.
Both mechs turned towards the third contender. A few seconds passed.
"Something on my face?" A gruff voice growled.
Apparently, that was enough of a comeback, because the mechs shifted back into an uneasy deadlock.
Scarlett finally reached her target - a military dude who seemed busy planting a bomb. Knowing how important it was for boys to play with their toys, she patiently waited until he finished.
"Terribly sorry, but I'm rather lost and would like some directions. Do you know where the kitchen is?" Best be polite, and that question should be easy enough to answer. Well, for most people; this man was looking very confused, and Scarlett couldn't hide her astonishment. How one lived to his age without knowing where the food was?
Suddenly, he whipped out a hand in her general direction and a box teleported right under her feet.
"Chew 'em up, honey," he grinned widely. Scarlett mentally apologised for everything she said about the guy. Sharing lunch with her was one of the most touching things people did for her in her whole life. She made to unpack the box, but it opened on its own. Only, instead of food, it deployed a number of barrels and aimed a missile pod at her.
It seemed she just gained her new arch-nemesis. He'll learn in time that no one betrays her before she does it first. But later. For now, it was time to make herself scarce.
Axton watched intently as the laser pointer from his turret pivoted back and forth, tracking that peculiar invisible woman. She tried to zig and zag, but his little darling was more than a match for such tactics. He called up his storage deck unit and digistructed a Torgue rifle - gyrojets made up for low accuracy with a lot of ground covered in explosions - and added his own fire to the auto-guns spread. Suddenly, she leaped sideways and hid behind a nearby console.
A pistol shot echoed a moment later, and a man in white Schnee garb run out from the spot where the woman just disappeared, burning alive and screaming for mercy. The Sabre turret obliged, bringing him down with a bullet. A comparative silence descended as both sides decided what to do next.
"You can keep your lunch, I'm not that hungry anyway," his opponent declared and tried to run again, only to be boxed in by a missile salvo. "Seriously, I would offer you my own food if I had any on me, just forget I asked anything?" Another burst hit the back of the console, shredding it into metal ribbons. "I'm really sorry I offended your diet issues, I promise I'll never do that again?" The energy in his sweetheart ran out, and it deconstructed back into his storage subspace.
Now lacking backup, Axton silently crept forward, his senses cast forward and on high alert for an air distortion. He cautiously rounded the corner and found the nook before the console empty. Firing an explosive round inside just in case, he looked around, trying to spot her before she did something stupid again. Alas, it was not to be, as the bomb he had been arming pinged with a warning - and then exploded prematurely, triggering a chain reaction he'd painstakingly set up before the interruption. Axton cursed under his breath and run like hell towards the nearest exit, but it was too late. The support columns that held a loading platform inside the cruiser were all destroyed, and he could literally feel the floor dropping from under his own feet. Watching a forcefield spring above the platform to keep the air from escaping into space, he could only regret God ever invented Tuesdays.
Jack adjusted target priorities for the automated Dust cannon in the middle of his turbo-mansion - it seemed that Tassiter had finally abandoned his idiotic tactics of massive drops onto Pandora. Handsome Jack gleefully shot those barges down mid-flight like in a shooting range, and the Hyperion corporation at last figured out they needed to establish orbital dominance first to make any progress. They joined the rest of the fleets around the planet in a free-for-all deathmatch soon after.
"No one is touching that planet but me," Jack whispered, running the scan for any object on the approach vector towards the surface. Barring that strange dropship from the Crimson Lance that missiles refused to track for some weird reason, he managed to hold off his competitors from landing on Pandora. If all went well, Weiss and her sidekicks will get the fast-travel to work planetside soonish and the imbeciles idling in his overcrowded turbo-mansion will be able to do something useful, at last.
An alarm popped up on his holodesk, drawing his undivided attention. It seemed that the Lost Legion cruiser had tossed an object out of it's cargo bay and Pandoran gravity pull picked it up. He magnified the output from external cameras and watched in shock as two Paladin mechs and a Lost Legion battlesuit ponderously duked it out on a platform slowly rotating in space.
"What the hell? I can't believe I missed that fight." A quick estimation revealed that even if he launched in his personal shuttle right now, he wouldn't be able to catch up to the platform until it hit atmosphere. Well, at least he already had an edge in that battle - an in-depth check revealed Wilhelm manning one of the giant robots. An IFF request to another mech was answered by the middle finger broadcasted at all available frequencies. The third suit, however, was the icing on the cake - it identified itself as dear old Tungsteena, leaving Dahl fleet abandoned and disorganized. Jack snorted at the name and set his mansion cannon to target the Dahl flagship. Whatever idiocy pushed Zarpedon to abandon her post, he would make sure to capitalize on it a hundredfold.
An Ursa rushed the stationary plasma caster and covered it with its dying body so the mechanism was unable to pitch its considerable firepower to the fight. Gaige cursed under her breath and shifted to the other side of the pod, where another gun was still operational. From her new position, she could easily see the spot where Penny was demolishing rows upon rows of Grimm in wide sweeps of flying steel, facing a veritable tide of black hides and white bone and winning. Adding magnetic thrusters to the swords have weakened their frames, but greatly enhanced penetrating power, and in situations like this one the upgrade seemed to pay off. Penny channeled her Aura into the swords to reinforce their fragile structure, and the glow drew most of the attacking force towards her like moth to flame. They climbed the bodies of their fallen kin without heed, the dead not evaporating fast enough to make a clear path to their target. The Grimm never cared nor stopped, an unyielding rush of death and destruction.
Not that they completely forgot about Gaige, either. A murder of Nevermores two feet big each have swarmed out of the trees and went straight for her. She accessed an emergency compartment in the escape pod and digistructed a pistol, firing in the general direction of the swarm. The muzzle flash blinded her for a moment, and she blinked tears out of her eyes, trying to get a clear view on her sharpshooting. For some weird reason, the flock looked completely unaffected.
The pistol run empty, and her mechanical limb helpfully digistructed a replacement clip. Gaige fumbled with a thumb release for a while, but successfully loaded a new mag, just in time to see the flying Grimm being moved down by the pod autocannon in a second.
"Meh, I could have taken them." She looked around for new targets to practice on. A King Taijitu was shifting around the circle of death that was Penny, cautiously staying outside her range and ever so slowly edging towards the pod and its remaining occupant. Gaige fired a few shots to warn it off, but the beast didn't seem to notice. Frustrated, she dismissed the inadequate pistol and reached out for one of her experimental schematics, triggering the tools in her arm to whirl to life and construct a weapon the world had never seen yet. As a big, bulky tube ended with a Burn Dust crystal on one end and a handhold from the other, it was crude, it was ugly, the coolant fins sticking from the top and to the sides pretty much denied aiming, and it sapped power like nothing else. It also had enough firepower to level a house, and that was all that mattered.
Gaige pointed her creation at her chosen enemy and pressed the trigger. The crystal glowed white-hot and the whole contraption shuddered, but held together as a thin ray of light shot out, crossing the field in a moment and burrowing into the ground next to the two-headed snake.
"Eh, accuracy's overrated anyway." The Taijitu reared it's heads in her direction and coiled itself in a blur of black and white. "Test one, partial success, time for test two." She shifted a lever on her weapon all the way down, not bothering to stop at medium settings, and pressed the trigger again.
It trembled and quivered and whizzed, but reached peak capacity without exploding and shot a continuous beam of fiery death towards the Grimm, missing it by a hair and continuing on towards the forest, setting it ablaze and cutting through trees like knife through butter. Gaige shifted her aim sideways to shear the Taijitu in half, but it twisted and turned and shifted out of the way, digging itself under the ground in a matter of seconds.
"That's right, fear the cute little girl!" The coolant fins burst a stream of evaporating nitrogen. "You think you can take me? You think?" She was met with distant howls and snarls as the continuous Grimm horde pouring from the forest suddenly stopped; probably because it was on fire. "Gaige, one, uglies, zero!" No one decided to challenge her and her laser as she swiveled it to cut down even more of the forest, baptising her new invention in glorious infernal blaze. "That was totally intentional!" She decided.
Seeing all her enemies annihilasered, she finally released the trigger. The weapon groaned a sigh of relief and cooled down with another burst of steam.
"See that, Penny? I am the greatest engineer alive!" She shouted to the other girl.
"Congratulations on your initial trials, Gaige!" Penny replied, making her way over the half-decayed bodies of nightmarish beasts.
"Test two, a resounding success." She coughed as the wind shifted and covered the pod in thick smoke. Her spacesuit deployed a forcefield mask to keep the air breathable. "A few kinks to work out later, but for now, that definitely goes into the 'plus' column. And those idiots back in the Lance R&D claimed it'll blow up. Phah! Shows what they know. Freeloaders, all of them."
"I am sure after a review of combat data gathered here they will shift their opinions appropriately. Though I am afraid it will take a while for us to make it back home. The pod is inoperable at the moment." Penny effortlessly lifted off the remains of an Ursa corpse from the turret and reached through the gouges it left on the outside to reconnect the ammo feed. Gaige pulled up a status update to see if she could help with repairs, but her attention quickly drowned in the unending list of failures and warnings.
"You know what? The testing is not yet complete. We're not going back a bit longer." Ideas formed in her head, and she grinned at her own genius. "How do you feel about an upgrade, yourself?"
"Are we there yet?"
"No Weiss, we're not there yet. Yes, Weiss, walking is something people do when they need to get somewhere. No, Weiss, not every forest is equipped with an escalator. I'm sure you can figure it out without a manual for dummies."
"To be fair, it was a very good manual. And you were a very bad match to my Dust."
"If you kept it somewhere else than my face," Ruby looked back at her and pointed for effect, "that might have helped."
"What would have helped more, was you watching where you are going."
"It's not like I'm running into things." Ruby turned forward again, only to nearly run into a tree. "It's not like I'm tripping over every root and shrub," she amended.
"You try and do that in heels. I seriously dare you. But that's for later. Now, I actually want you to watch where you're going." Weiss pointed at the bright bush barring their path.
"What, you're allergic for pollen or something?"
"No. But I own a planet somewhere in the Terminus. No big deal. Visited there on a break, Hunting, and the guide said that the more eye-catching the flora, the more dangerous it is."
"Like, poisonous kind of dangerous?"
"Do I look like a botanist to you?"
"You're the one preaching about bushes." Ruby rolled her eyes and disappeared in a swirl of rose petals.
"Hey, guys?" Yang's voice rung from her scroll. "I think Blake found the beacon. We'd better hurry up and catch up with her."
With barely a thought and a flick of her sword, an icy road stretched before Weiss, weaving between trees and toppling the shrub. Another push of her will, and a glyph launched her skating forward.
"Something isn't right. Stay on your guard." Blake added.
The trees suddenly gave way to an open space with barely any life on it; the area looked like it survived an apocalyptic war. It was bounded by the river to one side and a cliff to another, but what drew her attention was a device driven into the ground across the field. If anything, it reminded her of a bird digging its claws underground and stretching its wings back, set in white and blue colors of the Schnee Dust company. A holographic sphere representing Pandora slowly spun atop of it.
"It doesn't look damaged. Wonder why it won't work?" Ruby materialised right next to her.
"Jack said the signal was blocked." Weiss checked her scroll, and found only static. She sent a snowflake into the sky to mark their position. "The problem is, there shouldn't be anyone but us here."
"Isn't there some ancient Grimm capable of… well, this?"
"Professor Port did mention one or two. He also advised to retreat if we ever come across one unprepared."
"Well, at least it won't surprise us. That should count as prepared." Ruby unfolded Crescent Rose in a whirl of blades and stepped forward.
"Wait." Blake's voice stopped her. "Anyone else feel it?"
"Feel what?"
"Tremors."
"An underground attack?" Ruby glanced back at Blake, and received a nod in return. "Weiss, we need a platform; Blake, give me a direction."
"I'm not sure. It stopped when you did."
Ruby deliberately made another step.
The ground suddenly shook as something massive moved underneath it. Weiss made a sheet of ice ten feet off the ground, and the girls jumped atop of it.
"I think it goes that way." Blake pointed at the lone Fast-travel. Suddenly, there was an inhuman screech, and a snake head thirty feet tall rose from the ground, looked around, and chomped down on the device. Not finding anything else of value, it dived back underground.
"Did... that Taijitu just ate the beacon?"
"I don't think that was a Taijitu, Ruby..."
An explosion echoed from the forest behind them, and Yang came out of it flying with an enormous grin on her face. She landed not far away from the platform and run the rest of the way by foot.
"Did I miss anything?"
"Yes, you did." The ground shook again, more violently than before, and the inhuman screech increased tenfold and reverberated across the valley, terrifying and unending. Weiss rose the platform as high as she could as soon as Yang joined them. "Because, I think, we've just run into a Typhon."
"The end."
"Wait, what?"
"You wanted me to tell you a story, you never asked for a happy ending. Scamper off, brat."
"But! But, there's so much you haven't told me about yet. The Eridians, and ancient alien artifacts, and..."
"I didn't? Oh, well, that might not have actually been the end..."