So, this chapter is the last one I reached while pre-writing before V9 aired and I had to do all the reconfigure-to-plot stuff. Like I've said before, I could write a fair amount of it, because I've had the basic idea for what I want down since the time I ironed out the general plot for this whole fic (and yes, there is an outline, right down to how many chapters there'll be), but the exact mechanics of how I was going to get it across and be backwards-compatible with RWBY canon wasn't obvious until I knew what the Ever After was.
That was honestly one of the writing tips I've found most useful: if you're stuck on a scene, or what have you, just stick a placeholder word or a bunch of spaces in, go on to the parts you actually want to write, and come back to the boring/writer's-blocked stuff later.
But anyway, yeah. The chapters after this will actually have been written recently, instead of begun, like, two years ago! My update schedule will once again be closer to a roulette wheel! Happy days are here again!
Less sarcastically, writing the whole chapter all at once will help prevent some of the shakier story logic that comes from me going where the fuck was I at with this? How am I supposed to connect these two scenes together in a way that makes sense? as I finish out each chapter.
The roar of the whirring chainsaw thundered off the metal walls of the train car and shrank the already tight-seeming area with its cacophonous sound as Weiss twirled and ducked around its blows. Her head rang as she struck against that bellowing weapon and the tough white material of the White Fang lieutenant's vest, trying to land her hits even more precisely than normal as she struggled to avoid hitting or even grazing the rotating teeth with Myrtenaster and having her weapon probably jerked from her hands.
She remembered this fellow's fighting style from before –wide swings, heavy blows, and a weapon that traded adaptability for simple ferocity. He was brutish and intimidating, but not an insurmountable challenge –particularly not when she herself had improved so much.
Neither of them were a particularly good match for the other, actually: Weiss's fighting style relied on precise strikes and an ever-changing angle of attack, using her Semblance to support herself and Dust to enhance her moves. When faced with a towering tree trunk of an opponent like this, she had to try and chip away at their Aura slowly –and the White Fang lieutenant was forced to try and hit an opponent constantly dancing back out of his grasp, with a weapon far too unwieldy to match her speed.
In fights like this, it came down to experience, which was what had not-quite-literally tripped Weiss up the first time. She had been keeping her eyes on that ferocious chainsaw, so when his hand shot out and grabbed her by the face, she had been fatally caught off-balance. As much as it embarrassed her to admit it now, Weiss had not been prepared for the man to fight dirty.
Of course, several years and multiple catastrophes later, Weiss had learned that there was no such thing as fighting dirty –only fighting successfully.
So she kept him in the middle of the room as she poked and prodded at his defense with her rapier, gliding out of the way of that roaring chainsaw. It might seem smarter to back him into a corner, but Weiss did not want to force him to drop his chainsaw and go for her with his bare hands. Depending on how much Aura he had left when he did that, he would be able to barrel through any defense she tried to set up with her weapon and simply seize her by the throat with his longer arms, breaking her neck like a rabbit.
With a weapon in his hand, perversely, Weiss had some measure of safety. This, at least, she could knock aside or block, and his reach did not extend past her own.
She could, of course, also use her Semblance or her Dust, but Weiss was reluctant to try. Using Dust to try and freeze the man in place was impossible: he was too bulky, and it would take too long to solidify him. If he were a Grimm she might have chanced it, but not with a living man who would understand what the ice creeping over his limbs meant.
With a combination of her Glyphs and her Dust, she could also freeze him solid down to the marrow in seconds –as she had the Sphinx's wings on that pell-mell train ride to Argus– but that would also have the distressing effect of killing him. Weiss might not have the kindest of feelings towards the White Fang as a whole, but she still did not want each and every one of them (or even most of them) dead. They were suffering under an unjust world and, rightly or wrongly, were determined to blame her family for it.
Wanting Jacques dead, she felt, was an eminently reasonable desire and not at all something one should die for.
Weiss leaped up and back as he swung for her, bending her spine and flipping as the chainsaw roared by her, missing its strike by a hairsbreadth. It was so close she could feel the vibrations of the chain, and if she hadn't had her Aura up, some of her skirt would probably have been torn away. Luckily, no such wardrobe malfunctions were in order, and she landed as the White Fang lieutenant's chainsaw slammed into the ground on his opposite side with a deafening bang and shriek of grinding teeth.
She slashed with her rapier, flicking it across his body in a long and jagged cut that would have drawn blood and ended the fight, if not for his Aura. When he dragged the enormous rumbling weapon back and tried to swing for her, a glyph shimmered into existence between them, bouncing it back with a chime as Weiss lunged forward on one foot, Myrtenaster slamming beneath his outstretched arms and into his chest in a piercing stab.
There was a vague shimmer along his skin, too faint to even show her the color of his Aura –but Weiss still smirked grimly as he reared back to gain some distance between them and she let her glyph drop.
"As I said," Weiss told her opponent as he eyed her warily in their brief pause, swishing her rapier back and forth in her hand with almost Yang-like catty smugness. "Don't assume the outcome of this battle until we're done."
Yang wasn't getting thrashed as badly as she had the first time that they fought, so that was nice.
Neo was still a tricky opponent, though, even after she'd spent all this time improving. Yang's punches were sharp and controlled jabs, scientific rather than bludgeoning, and Neo still cartwheeled around her like a butterfly, weaving between her blows and effortlessly deflecting the ones that she couldn't dodge. Yang had to remember to keep her temper, because when she kept punching and kicking and not hitting anything and Neo fluttered around her with that small, pleased smirk, it was very easy to lose control.
That was a big part of Neopolitan's usual strategy, though. Get the opponent distracted, get them angry, and then slide in for the finishing blow. Her fighting style was all feint and jab, misdirect and agility. Yang knew that. She'd certainly had enough experience on the receiving end of it.
Ideally, she needed to stay calm and pace herself through this, let Neo slowly exhaust herself with all this dodging, and then finally start counterattacking her in deadly earnest. Effortless as Neo made it look, as sharp and carefree as her smile seemed, Yang knew that this much movement and flexibility would wear Neo out eventually as she punched and Neo somehow planted one hand on her arm, using Yang's strike like a tree limb as she vaulted over the blonde in a handstand flip.
Of course, that would be Yang's strategy if this was a serious fight, and it wasn't. She and Neo were basically just killing time until the others signaled them that they were done, and fighting each other to make things look plausible. Part of Yang still itched to plant her knuckles right in Neo's face, shatter her smug façade like those illusions she always used, but it wasn't worth the effort. Probably.
Maybe.
Yang's ego would suffer a lot if she made the attempt and Neo still kicked her ass.
But as Neo's heels landed on the ground and Yang spun to face her, there was a familiar chime in the air, and they both paused. Arms still warily raised in a combat position, Yang's eyes flicked down to her own belt, and nope, it wasn't her Scroll vibrating. She looked back up at Neo, who raised an eyebrow at her, and then reached inside one pocket for her Scroll while brandishing her parasol with the other.
Wow.
Okay.
Yang was definitely going to keep attacking her, then, and she gave an infuriated scoff before lunging for Neo, slamming one fist down to bat the parasol aside. Neo spun gracefully to the side, avoiding Yang's follow-up, as she pulled her Scroll out and flicked it open with her wrist.
"Seriously?"
Yang punched for her head and didn't give a damn about the whole holding-back thing, but Neo spun her parasol up and deflected the blow without looking away from her Scroll, taking another step to the side to bleed off some of Yang's force. She still needed to, even when she looked so unconcerned: Yang's body mass and strength meant that she hit a lot harder than even Neo could fully deflect from a standing start.
"Are you fucking serious?!" Yang groaned, launching another attack. Neo's parasol danced and wove between them as she blocked or deflected Yang's increasingly outraged strikes, and the only thing that kept Yang from roaring and going for her in a full-blooded attack was the fact that Neo had to dodge and leap aside almost as much as she was blocking successfully. She was still, despite her pretended nonchalance, distracted by her Scroll. "You are such a fucking bitch!"
Neo leaped up over the spray of fiery buckshot as the remnants of Yang's most recent attack scorched the ground, before popping open the cover of her parasol and gliding to the side. When she landed, though, there was a definite frown on her face, and she popped her parasol shut again before turning her Scroll to face Yang.
Reluctantly, Yang lowered her fist and looked.
Oh shit.
According to the GPS alarm Neopolitan had set, they were less than ten minutes out from Vale's wall –ten minutes to arrive there, and nobody had called back with a mission success.
Without looking at Neo, Yang pulled out her Scroll and called Ruby.
"Hey, sis?" she asked uneasily as the line crackled with a bit of static. "How are you and Professor Oobleck doing?"
"Doctor!" she heard in the distance of the call, accompanied by several explosions –which meant that Ruby must have put her on speaker. A few rapid slashes and the chitter of a dissolving Creep confirmed that guess, and Yang heard Crescent Rose's gears shift before there was a gunshot and another roar of a dissolving Grimm.
"We're, uh, not doing so hot, I guess." Ruby answered a moment later, panting. "I mean, we're not doing so bad, either, so that's good."
Neo rolled her eyes in Yang's peripheral, miming slitting her own throat with her thumb. Yang offered her the bird with one hand.
"The White Fang stopped shooting at us, 'cause there's like-"
A pause, as Ruby's sniper rifle roared in several quick shots and Yang heard more Grimm howling. Gears shifted and hissed across the connection as she shifted it into scythe form, and several rapid slashes and a whir of Semblance-based movement later, Ruby picked up the line again.
"-there's like, a crazy amount of Grimm in these tunnels and they know they kinda need us to survive and stuff."
Not entirely unexpected –in fact, that was something Team RWBY had been rather counting on. Paramilitary group or not, only a few members of the White Fang had Aura and Hunter training: they were, after all, a group of local volunteers. Oh, given the exact goals of this particular cell, there were probably a lot more fighters than not, but still. The fact remained.
These people were not trained –or armed– to handle a Grimm horde the way Oobleck and Ruby were.
"We're tryin' to work our way back through the tunnels towards Vale, but-"
Another series of gunshots, a human scream to accompany the sound of other guns blazing in the distance, and a hissing frenzy of scythe-blows.
"-the holes the train's blowing in the tunnel are super-not-helping!" Ruby cried, before her attention seemed to veer off and she shouted towards someone on the other end of the call. "Climb the rocks before you get flanked, guys! There'll be Grimm coming down through the hole up ahead and we can't afford to be pinned! Uh, love you sis, gotta go!"
Her Scroll beeped off.
Yang swallowed and, before she did anything else, consciously crushed down her worry that her baby sister would be okay. Ruby had survived the Breach before when she was still only fifteen years old. She was with a graduated Huntsman, a man who had decades of experience under his belt –and the various mooks of the White Fang, who at the very least had a lot of guns. Ruby sounded concerned, rather than panicked or nervous, which meant that she saw the situation as still well within her control. She would be okay.
In the meantime, Yang had other concerns.
"We need to stop this train." she told Neo, who rolled her eyes as if to say Oh, really?
"Oh, shut up. Got any ideas on how to do this without getting the two of you in trouble?"
Neo tapped her chin thoughtfully for a moment, and then grinned.
Yang eyed that grin warily and wondered if it was too late to jump off the train to go back and help Ruby and Oobleck.
Weiss's breath rasped inside her throat as she ducked under the latest mighty swing from the White Fang lieutenant's chainsaw, slashing Myrtenaster down at his wrist. The fine hairs of her bangs and temples stuck to her skin, and her lungs ached as she danced backwards away from his return strike.
That was the trouble with this fight –her stamina did not match his, and staying out of his reach was burning her energy fast. If Weiss wasn't careful, she would have to do something drastic soon, because while she had no way to accurately measure the distance the train had traveled, she felt deep in her bones that they had been fighting too long for her liking.
Blake, of course, could handily thrash Torchwick with one hand tied behind her back, but Weiss hadn't seen the engine car this go around, and for all she knew it was Torchwick and Cinder and Salem herself standing there with Blake a smoldering corpse on the floor in front of them. Not to mention, the whole point of Blake going up there was to stop this train and disable the bomb-loaded cars, and the train was still very much in motion and headed towards Vale.
But to get to the engine car, Weiss would have to first whack this mountainous tree trunk of a man down to a manageable size, and she was finding that irritably difficult. For a moment, she almost regretted turning down Ruby's many, many offers to modify and improve Myrtenaster, because as slender and graceful and absolutely wonderful as her weapon was, a heavy implement it was not. Right now, Weiss felt strongly in need of a bludgeon. Or perhaps a battle-axe. Maybe a bazooka.
"But Weiss, what if you need heavy weaponry?!" Ruby had sobbed, waving her latest ridiculous design plan around like she was trying to flag a taxi. The words 'vent ports' and 'targeted exhaust' loomed large and ominous on the blue paper.
"I can use Dust for that, Ruby, you don't need to attach a flamethrower to my hilt-guard." Weiss muttered savagely to herself, recalling her sharp answer. Now, though, she felt strongly in need of such a thing. Perhaps even two of them.
A crate crunched and exploded as her opponent swung his chainsaw through it in a vicious arc, and Weiss ducked the spray of shards as the glyph beneath her feet sent her flying backwards, out of range of any possible Dust explosions. She had to be cautious with her feet, now, growing more so as the fight progressed and that monstrous chainsaw tore huge, gaping slashes into the floor of the shaking train car. A trip at this point would be fatal.
The chainsaw roared through the air as he followed up, however, almost deafening her as Weiss hastily brought her sword up to guard and deflected it to the side, metal screeching together as that gigantic weapon rumbled its way down the tang of her blade. She knew even as she leaped back again that she was letting him dictate her pace, making her retreat, but Weiss would much rather take being driven than being decapitated.
All her attention was on the fight, but that didn't mean that a prickle of awareness didn't ripple down her skin as a new sound rose to greet Weiss's ears, beyond the clanking of the train and the distant thuds of the detached and exploding cars down the tracks. There were other Dust explosions nearby –smaller caliber, closer together– and they were getting closer. They seemed familiar, and despite being the one to face the rear end of the train, she quickly readied Myrtenaster.
With a hiss, the door to their compartment slid open, and an explosive Dust round splashed through the gap behind the White Fang lieutenant as both he and Weiss turned to look –only for a very familiar pair of stiletto heels to jab into both of his shoulders as Neo finished her cartwheel through the air by landing atop him. Before he could do more than roar his anger, she was already leaping off again, flipping over Weiss's head as she instinctively raised her rapier.
For a split second, Weiss wasn't sure which of them to face as the White Fang lieutenant's arms bunched and he raised his chainsaw to belatedly swipe above his head –Neo was nominally on their side, of course, but she wasn't supposed to show that, and it still raised Weiss's hackles to have her back to her– but then Neo was dashing her way along into the next car without a backwards glance. Weiss jumped back again as the chainsaw came crashing down, but then her heart leapt as a familiar and beloved voice reached her ears.
"BITCH!"
Weiss's eyes went above her opponent's shoulder as Yang charged into their train car, a beat behind Neo. She seemed to be frothing with rage, her face red and her fists clenched as Yang bared her teeth in a furious snarl –but Weiss couldn't help but notice that Yang's eyes were still their calm and controlled lilac color.
Those eyes flicked from Weiss to the White Fang lieutenant, and then even as his chainsaw was scraping against the ground in a lift and he was angling his body to meet this new foe, Yang was behind him, her fist flying straight and true as a Dust capsule roared and his leg buckled in an explosion of yellow flames. Weiss brandished her rapier with new energy, a Gravity Glyph spinning into existence below his feet as his struggles to rise were immediately caught dead.
"Heh." Yang pulled her arms back and grinned, leaning out of the way as the pinned White Fang lieutenant roared and lashed out with his thundering weapon. She punched down, digging the jagged blade into the floor as sparks flew and metal whined briefly, before punching again when he brought it up as the chain buckled and snapped, whipping out from the rotating –and warped– blade.
The chainsaw stuttered to a halt with an unpleasant crunching sound, and Yang shifted her stance, digging her heels into the ground as she brought her fists up and grinned even wider.
Weiss laid her blade cold and still under the man's chin before he could lash out again, like a sharp icicle against his pulse.
"Surrender." she said, and dark eyes flashed at her beneath his mask as the White Fang lieutenant turned to glare at the hated Schnee.
"Never." he hissed in ponderous, guttural rage.
Yang and Weiss looked at each other above his head, and Yang shrugged.
"Cool." she said. "Cool, cool, cool. Hey, look over here a sec?"
For one reason or another, he looked, and received a series of swift, fire-wreathed punches to the head and chest as a reward. His neck snapped back, and it only took a few moments before his Aura broke like a sheet of salt and Yang's latest punch to the face knocked the towering giant of a man out cold.
Weiss sighed as she brought her rapier back before the Auraless man could cut himself, watching his body slump to the floor with a weighty thud.
"Was that really necessary?" she asked. Hitting someone in the face, especially when they were already disarmed and pinned, was a bit much. Yang looked at her and pointed in the vague direction of her own nose, looking innocently confused.
"What? He was wearing a mask."
Weiss sighed the very long sigh of the terminally disappointed.
"In any case, how are we doing?" Weiss asked as they both turned to the cars up ahead, sparing a moment to freeze the White Fang lieutenant's arms to the ground with ice. If this car made it out of the crash intact, then he wouldn't be able to flee or harm law enforcement before he was arrested.
"Ruby and Oobleck are in the tunnels, the White Fang down there have pretty much called Grimm's law on them."
Grimm's law –with comparatively little relation to the dreaded Murphy's law– was one of the unspoken rules of civilized combat. The spirit of it ran, roughly, that if you were engaged in a confrontation and got threatened by more Grimm than you could handle, with Hunters being nearby for any reason –up to and including the Hunters being the ones you were fighting– all hostilities would be called off until said Hunters dealt with the problem.
Grimm made no distinctions between sides. It didn't matter one jot that the White Fang in the tunnels had probably been turning their guns towards Ruby and Oobleck less than ten minutes ago –when faced with an overwhelming horde of Grimm like this, they would bite down on their animosity and call an effective ceasefire. Ruby and Oobleck were trained to deal with this sort of problem –and, more to the point as far as the White Fang were concerned, the two Hunters could probably outstrip them in a retreat very easily, wait for the Grimm to tear the White Fang apart, and then return to mop up what little resistance remained at their leisure.
Not that Ruby would ever even consider that course of action, but still.
"They're working their way back towards the city, obviously, but I don't think they'll reach us anytime soon." Yang continued. "You, me, n' Blake will need to sort out the train on our own."
The corner of Weiss's eye twitched.
"And you left Blake up in the engine car to fight those two on her own?!" she squawked, whacking Yang over her curly head with Myrtenaster. "Or did you forget that Neopolitan passed us on her way to the front!? Come on!"
They raced for the door.
"I'm not going to kill you." Blake said as the train rocked and rumbled gently beneath them. "But we need to stop this train, now, and I don't trust you with a weapon. Drop the cane and let's solve this reasonably."
Torchwick clicked his tongue against his teeth and grimaced.
"Ooh, yeah… see, I'd like to." he said. "But the thing is, I'm kinda on the hook with my employer, and if I botch this operation up, well. Let's just say I'll get a pink slip with some extra red on it, you know?"
Not my problem, Blake wanted to say, except that was a little cold-blooded even for her tastes. And also, she couldn't afford to let Neo hear such a thing.
"If you carry this operation through successfully, a lot of people are going to die." she responded instead. "And I know you probably don't care, but I do. And I'm the one who's got a knife to your throat right now."
Torchwick's immaculate eyebrows rose.
"I thought you said you weren't gonna kill me."
"I'm not." Blake replied, before her ears slowly folded back. "But that doesn't mean that I can't do a lot of damage."
"Huntress brutality." Torchwick said. An uneasy grin flickered on and off his face. "Bit hypocritical for you to sharpen your claws on me during an arrest, isn't that right, kitty-cat?"
Blake's eyes narrowed to venomous slits, and her hand shook slightly on her weapon. Then, though, her ears stood straight upright as she heard the familiar tink of heels clicking rapidly along the metal floor of the train.
Only one person on her team wore heels –and Weiss always wore wedges while out on a mission.
Blake immediately pulled Gambol Shroud back from Torchwick's throat, shifting it to kusarigama form –and unloaded a rapid series of shots directly into his face. He shouted and tried to cover himself with his only free arm, but the Dust rounds still hit him point-blank, bleeding off his Aura at breakneck speed as Blake saw an orange glow quickly flicker around the edges of his skin. A moment later, and it broke, and she reared back to slam the blunt edge of Gambol Shroud's cleaver against his skull, dropping him like a sack of bricks.
In the same swift movement, she spun, aiming her pistol outwards and strafing the area around herself with gunfire. The bullets pinged harmlessly against the soot-streaked ground for the most part, but a little distance away and towards the door, the air suddenly rippled and burst into sparkling glass shards as Neopolitan was revealed mid-charge. Rather than hold her position, Blake pitched herself forward to somersault away from Torchwick, rolling to her feet with her cleaver magnetized to her back again and her shifted gun in both hands.
"He's not dead." she said as Neopolitan skidded to a stop in front of her partner, the Dust-proof canopy of her parasol spread and her glare fierce as she snarled over the lace at Blake. Knowing what was important, Blake kept her eyes on Neo as she shifted muscle by muscle so that she was standing between the two criminals and the only door out of the train car. "I just knocked him out, it's fine."
Neo narrowed her eyes… but slowly, reluctantly, she straightened up, still holding her parasol between her and Blake. In response, Blake shifted her weapon again, straightening Gambol Shroud back out into katana form and lowering it a moment later. She would've sheathed it and held her hands up, but neither of them trusted the other that much just yet. Especially not when Blake didn't have her team.
Thankfully, Torchwick chose that moment to groan softly and twitch, which made Blake's shoulders relax. She had been pretty sure that she hadn't killed him… but unloading her pistol directly into someone's head to drain their Aura was a risky move, because if she judged her timing wrong, his Aura would break and he would still catch a Dust round to the face.
Neo's expression changed slightly, and she finally lowered her parasol, furling the canopy once more. Blake, reassured, slid Gambol Shroud into the sheath on her back and turned towards the engine, stepping quickly across the room.
"All right, how close are we to Vale?" she asked as her hands drifted over the controls, memories welling up in her fingertips. She'd done more than her fair share of train robberies, after all, back when she had been with the White Fang –and Adam.
"Too close." said Neo's Scroll. "Punch it, now."
"Aren't there still explosive cars still attached?!" Blake snapped, her ears folding back. "It's bad enough when you pull the emergency brake at this speed, I'm not having cars weighted with tons of Dust slamming into the back of the engine!"
"You want it to hit Vale?"
The door behind them hissed open, but even as Blake stiffened and turned, she saw it was just her teammates.
"Talk to me, Blake." Yang said as Weiss eyed Torchwick's unconscious form with disfavor. "What are we lookin' at here?"
"Bad." Blake said succinctly, already turning back to the control panel and starting to pull levers. Below them, the train rumbled and groaned as it began to slow. "We're getting too close to the wall for comfort, but I can't hit the emergency brake with all those Dust-loaded cars still attached."
"It's only one or two at this point."
"Trust me," Blake said. "-when I say that's still enough."
"She's right." Weiss said, pulling out her own Scroll and using the zoom function on some kind of map as she walked towards the engine. "Under ideal circumstances, we could've slowed the nearly-complete train to a stop and then let the bombs detonate all at once and bury it, but we're too close to Vale's wall to safely stop now –not with the bomb-loaded cars still attached."
"Well, how about unsafely?" Yang asked, putting one hand on her hip as she watched Weiss join Blake at the control panel, setting her Scroll down to angle the map between them. "Can't we jackknife off the tracks or something?"
"I'm never riding with you on your motorbike again." Weiss muttered under her breath, beginning to twist the complex series of valves to shut off the flow of Dust to the engine.
"We could, maybe, but that'd almost certainly block the tunnels behind us." Blake answered Yang more directly. "And since Ruby's back there-"
"That's a no."
"Mmm." Blake agreed. Her mind raced, calculating the speed of the train, their proximity to the walls of Vale, and how many bomb-loaded cars were still remaining. She glanced to the side, meeting Weiss's eyes, and they shared a nod.
"We need to limit damage." Weiss said, already pulling away from the controls, but leaving her Scroll behind with Blake.
"I can stop the train before we hit the walls, but the Dust back there is rigged to go off anyway." Blake replied, and glanced over her shoulder. "The bombs are on a timer, right?"
Neo nodded.
"Then if we just stop now, they'll all go in the same spot and probably bury us in the cave-in, not to mention block off the tunnels behind us. If you guys disable the bombs, we can stop the train before it hits Vale, then blow a smaller hole to get everyone out of here before the Grimm catch up."
They all shared a swift nod, and Yang and Weiss ran for the door leading back to the rest of the train. Neo remained where she was for a moment, staring at Blake, and tilted her head towards her partner.
"I don't care what the two of you do after." Blake said, her hands clenching with impatience on the latest lever. "We're going to stop the Breach and arrest Cinder –fit into that however you think is best."
Neo gave a short, terse nod, then ran after the other two. With her insider knowledge of where each bomb was planted and how it had been constructed, they would be far quicker in disabling each of them. Hopefully they'd be able to deactivate all of the ones still attached to the train before they reached the walls…
Blake was caught in a delicate balancing act as she continued to do her best to slow –but not stop– the train's rushing progress towards Vale. The Dust-loaded cars were programmed to detach, then explode, and the slower she went, the more tightly-clustered those explosions would be. The general idea of Torchwick's original plan had undoubtedly been to leave them far, far behind as the train powered onward towards Vale, leaving a safe margin between each exploding car and the next, but with the train's drastically lessened –and ever-decreasing– speed, they would need to be careful.
Her heart pounded behind her teeth, Blake's breath shaky and tight as she got the train to what she guessed was the best speed, slow enough that pulling the emergency brake wouldn't doom them all, but still not so slow that any cars that detached before Yang, Weiss, and Neo could get to them wouldn't set off a chain reaction when they blew right next to the actual train. She waited for their report with one hand on the emergency brake, her palm damp with sweat.
There wouldn't be time to call or type out a report with each bomb they disabled. Given the speed the train was supposed to have been going at this point, the cars might be detaching every thirty seconds, with the bombs going off soon after. Yang and the others would need to bolt pell-mell through the remaining parts of the train just to reach the bombs, and then stop and disable each one as they reached it. Their progress would be slow…
Those minutes as Blake waited lasted forever, and yet slipped away like sand trickling through her fingers, each grain a moment of wasted time. They were taking forever, her trembling heart chanted, and yet her reason and the other side of her fear clenched and buckled, knowing that their precious time was running out and everything was moving much, much too fast.
At last, at last Weiss's Scroll chirped.
"Last bomb done, punch it!" Yang's voice cried through the speakers, and before her partner's voice even finished shaping the final syllable of done, Blake was yanking down on the lever as the whole train shuddered. Metal groaned as wheels and pistons shrieked against each other, steam hissing like a horde of dragons, and Blake almost slipped forward and crashed against the control panel as the train's forward momentum abruptly slowed. A yelp from the Scroll as it slid up to the base of the wall confirmed that the others had been equally unprepared, but Blake felt limp with relief despite the sudden jolt as the train came to a halt.
They'd done it.
The Breach had been thwarted.
Shocked euphoria soared through her as she almost buckled against the control panel, her eyes wide and her breathing rapid as Blake clenched the edges of it.
They'd done it.
For the first time in a long time, one of their plans had actually worked –they had actually saved people, changed the way that things would have been. Stopping Cinder from planting a virus in the CCT had been nothing compared to failing to capture the woman red-handed; converting Neo to their side had been a forgone conclusion once she had seen Jinn's vision; but this… this time, it had worked. This time, everything had gone according to plan, and disaster had been not only partially, but fully averted.
Blake's hands trembled, and the thought of is this right…? rose like a dizzy shout within her. Was it possible that they had actually succeeded so unequivocally, for once? What if this was some trick, or some kind of illusion?
Distant rumbling down the tunnel made her ears prick up, another sound fluttering against her mind. It was so distant, so faint, that she couldn't even make out whether the voices were human, animal, or Grimm… but she heard cries along with that distant groan of rock and metal.
Right. First part of the Breach, done.
Now they had to deal with the Grimm and the White Fang.
Snatching Weiss's Scroll from the dash and turning away from the engine, Blake headed for the exterior door. When she tried the handle, she found it locked, and she unsheathed Gambol Shroud with a growl of annoyance, clicking it into kusarigama form. She shot where the latch met the doorframe, then turned the handle and shoved with her shoulder, forcing the thick metal door to groan open.
The rocks beneath her feet clacked and rattled as she landed on the track, their acrid scent thick in the tight confines of the tunnel. Blake lifted Weiss's Scroll to her ear.
"I'm going on ahead, I'll try to open up the tunnels for everyone." she said, and the Scroll buzzed.
"Good luck!" Yang shouted through the speakers.
"Take some Dust with you!" Weiss snapped. "You can't open the tunnels with just your weapon."
"Right." Blake nodded, then turned off the Scroll and slid it into her ammunition pouch.
Jogging lightly back to the next car behind the engine, she leaped up onto the coupling and pulled open the door. Nostalgia ghosted around the edges of her senses as she rushed through the car, her eyes picking out which crates held what Dust. She wrenched open a container with Burn and Lightning, pulling out canisters and stacking them on the lid of another crate. A few moments later, she found a vibrantly red kit of emergency supplies and dumped it all out recklessly on the floor, replacing it with the Dust before slinging the bag over her shoulder.
She had to be careful of her balance as she landed on the loose rocks of the track embankment again, and Blake turned ahead, her eyes flashing as they tried to peer through the gloom.
In a sad memory of what should have been, the tracks were doubled up, with another line stretching away on the train's other side, heading back to Mountain Glenn. Service areas were built into the sides of the tunnel, plain concrete stretching in never-used paths and platforms across the ground. Every fifty feet or so, there was a wall, with doors for both the tracks and the service platforms built into it.
In theory, all of those blast doors could be shut during a Grimm incursion, creating compartments and safety zones inside the long tunnel to make it easier for Hunters to clear the area. In theory, those doors would remain open every other time of the year, except perhaps during an evacuation of Mountain Glenn, when only the first few doors would be sealed and the rest left open to provide a safe escape.
In practice, they had been used once and only once –to seal off the city and prevent its Grimm from entering Vale.
Evidence of the White Fang's long efforts to open up the doomed tunnels was clear, as Blake dashed past the train and into the empty stretch ahead. Each of the service doors to the sides had been left sealed, the heavy metal doors corroded shut by their locks and the long passage of years. They were neither wanted nor needed for this mission.
But each set of the larger doors that had once blocked the tracks had been forced open, opening a long-forgotten path directly from Mountain Glenn to Vale. There were blackened service panels and Dust residue on the frames of those huge sliding metal doors, proof of the determined effort to hack their way, section by section, mile by mile, through the sealed tunnels.
Each sector of the track that she reached was also clear of Grimm, although the occasional claw marks and bullet holes told her that that had not always been the case. Even if the Grimm had been sealed off inside an isolated section of the tracks, they needed neither sleep nor food, and could have gone dormant for years –decades– waiting for whoever was foolish enough to open those doors again.
These areas would also not remain clear of Grimm for long. They had stopped all of the train cars from exploding, but even then, Blake was fairly sure that over half of them had detonated and blasted holes in the tunnel roof, freeing up entry for the Grimm. Ruby and Oobleck would have done their best to clear a way, but with that many Grimm, with that many White Fang panicking and fearing and drawing the Grimm in as their plans went to dust and they were swarmed by monsters…
Blake shook her head, even as she continued to dash along the fringes of the tunnel, near the service platforms. She could not afford to turn back, and Yang and Weiss, at least, would certainly go to reinforce their leader while Neo buggered off and did whatever she planned on doing right now.
Blake was not entirely certain, but she was willing to guess that that involved waking up Torchwick, telling him how spectacularly they had failed, and dragging him towards the exit Blake was going to create. While she had no doubt that Neo would claw her way through every single Grimm in these tunnels if it meant saving him, she also knew that Neo was pragmatic. Cinder had been nearly-exposed once, and now, with this, she would have been foiled again. Torchwick and Neo might have had nothing to do with the first time, but the second?
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern.
With the stakes she was playing with, Cinder wouldn't wait for a third time. If her plans were ruined once, that would be an unfortunate slip-up. But twice? When Neo and Torchwick also somehow managed to slip away from Beacon's forces at the last second despite such colossal failure?
No.
It didn't matter whether Cinder suspected or was certain of their betrayal –she would find them and punish them all the same, just to be sure. It was part of her plan for Torchwick to be captured and held on Atlas's airship, too, just as it was also part of her plan for Neo to eventually rescue him.
If Torchwick was caught, it would, perversely, be the safest position for him to be in for a good long time –because it made this look like an honest mistake, like Cinder's plans were still progressing without exposure.
And Neo was nothing if not someone who wanted him to be safe.
Blake skidded to a stop when she finally reached the still-sealed blast doors that, presumably, opened into the now-nonexistent station of Vale. If her memory was correct, there had been a plaza built over it, so she would have to blast through several layers of rock, concrete, and steel…
Dumping out the contents of her bag, Blake called up her memory of demolitions in the White Fang and quickly got to work.
By the time they reached the fifth cave-in, the remaining White Fang –and by that Ruby meant any of the White Fang who were still alive– had gotten the hang of it. They sprayed the Grimm with a ragged barrage of gunfire, flanking the wounded or knocked-out Faunus between two lines: Ruby was helping the forward line while Oobleck covered their backs, keeping any injured or unconscious White Fang members within a ring of protection. It was awkward and slow, considering the fact that they had to climb over rubble and occasionally squeeze through tight holes, but it was manageable.
The squeezing-through-holes part was why Ruby was in the vanguard. With her Semblance, she could flicker through the cracks of the collapsed rubble when or if it reached all the way up to the ceiling and find the likeliest place for the White Fang to dig themselves through –not to mention defend them from the front while they were digging.
Slow as it may be, though, their progress was steady. The White Fang had long since abandoned their bulky Paladins and were all on foot, but they were at least listening to her and Oobleck's instructions as they fought their way towards the city. They knew they didn't have a prayer of survival without the two Hunters, after all: there were so many Grimm, with more arriving by the moment. Ruby's scythe had been in constant motion since Oobleck had ordered them all to retreat into the tunnels, and the horde didn't look to be lessening any time soon.
This was fine, though. Totally fine. Totally manageable.
The tunnels were small enough that the large groups of Grimm were actually less efficient, and the White Fangs' guns were put to good use as Ruby picked her targets and quickly swung in to chop down the ones that the Faunus missed. They were also predictable: the Grimm could essentially only come from ahead or behind, with only the occasional danger from above when they reached the cave-ins caused by the twisted remains of exploded train cars. All Ruby and the others really had to do was walk their way to Vale, cut through the Grimm on the way, and avoid leaving anyone behind.
Honestly, Ruby's biggest concern as she and Oobleck had rallied the surviving White Members and herded them into the tunnels had been that Adam guy Blake talked about. He was, like, super important in the Vale branch of the White Fang, and it wasn't unlikely at all that he'd be out here, supervising. And given what she'd heard of him, he just might throw all caution to the wind and continue attacking the two Hunters in his midst, so unwaveringly confident that he thought he and the White Fang would be able to deal with all the Grimm by themselves, or perhaps so blindly stubborn that he would rather die than accept aid from humans.
And if he saw Blake, or knew that Ruby was on her team?
Oof.
Yeah, Ruby was a little worried about that.
But it seemed like most of the White Fang down here were grunts, and although there were a few higher-ranking ones, none of them had bright red hair and bull horns, or a katana-rifle mecha-shift weapon. So they were safe for now, inasmuch as Ruby could probably take each and every one of the White Fang here on her own –and probably a number of them at once– if they decided to turn on her and Oobleck. Adam was a Huntsman-level fighter, however, and even if Ruby had the unusual advantage of already knowing his Semblance and weapon, that would be a fight well worth avoiding, particularly when they were already surrounded by a great deal of Grimm and her ammunition was starting to run low.
Jerk.
If Ruby ever got the chance, though, she'd show him for cutting off Yang's arm and tormenting Blake.
In the meantime, though, her scythe was more than busy keeping the Grimm back from the White Fang as they straggled desperately along the length of the tunnels. It would take too long to crack open the service doors flanking the graveled area around the tracks: they were just running desperately along the tracks themselves, heading –ironically– through the pathway the White Fang had opened themselves for the train.
But the train was long gone, and Ruby's combat boots clinked on rubble as she climbed another shifting, seething hill left behind by the exploded car that was now twisted and tangled beneath the mound of stones. She slashed Crescent Rose across a charging Creep's face, the pointed tip of her scythe hooking behind the jaw of its mask and rending the creature's face apart, and barely had it begun to collapse into smoke and ash than she planted a foot on its dissolving forehead and jumped over it, clicking the gear change that would shift the direction of Crescent's blade as she slashed down at the next Grimm.
Behind her, gunfire blazed, and she heard shouts and metal banging as some of the faster members of the White Fang approached the twisted remains of the train car and called for survivors, beating urgently on the walls. As much as it galled her… anyone who didn't respond was going to be left behind, and that was what fueled the hysterical hope in those shouts and the desperation as some of them pulled at the metal walls, trying to see inside the car. There would be rescue teams sent back from Vale when they reached it, of course, but in that time… so much could happen, especially if the unconscious survivors were injured and woke up in enough pain to draw the Grimm.
At the head of the charge, Ruby was not able to clearly see when they found survivors and when they didn't –her world was filled with searching for movement in the darkened, dusty-grey blur of the tunnels, looking for the telltale seething surge of black and white with crimson eyes. Very, very few Grimm –even among those that were intelligent– had the patience to wait when they spotted prey. That was what made Grimm so dangerous to the untrained and unwary: their ferocity, their tenacity, their absolute focus on hunting down and destroying their prey.
Some of the White Fang flanked her, shooting at the Grimm bearing down on them from further on in the tunnels, but they weren't as agile or as quick, and Ruby was becoming the first to hit each ensuing wave. Whether or not they had Aura, the White Fang didn't have the training she did: they were tiring, and like her, their ammunition was dwindling rapidly. Ruby didn't bother with taking shots now unless she was under one of the holes, and even then, it was to snipe any of the Grimm who looked like they were about to leap down while the White Fang rushed past.
This was not sustainable. She'd run out of bullets soon, same as the White Fang, who had been firing pretty much continuously since they'd entered the tunnels. There was a reason that there had been a train to take people back and forth from Mountain Glenn –crossing this distance on foot wasn't possible, not in a timely and safe manner. And that was before you took into account all the Grimm, and the rubble choking the path, and the injured they were dragging with them.
But Ruby gulped all of that down into a pulsing knot of what-ifs that remained uncomfortably lodged in her throat no matter what she tried, hacking and slashing with Crescent as she continued to try to clear the path forward. They just had to keep going. They had to keep going, because they had no other options, not if they didn't want to die.
And she had to keep leading them, because she was a Huntress and she could do what they couldn't. She had a responsibility to protect people, even the White Fang.
The one boon of the holes blasted into the tunnel roof was that they let in light –thanks to the gaping cavities blown into the bedrock above her head every hundred meters or so, enough sunlight streamed down that Ruby could actually dimly see where she was going –enough not to trip over her own feet or miss her strikes, anyways.
But as she continued on this stumbling, nightmarish charge into the darkness, she noticed that it was getting darker. At first she was worried –and then, realizing what that meant, relieved. It was darker because less sunlight was getting in: because there were fewer holes in the tunnel roof up ahead.
There were still plenty of Grimm –Beowolves, Creeps, Ursa, Deathstalkers, even a few King Taijitu. But there were less coming from up ahead, and Ruby felt one of the countless knots of tension in her shoulders unwind, just a little. Her team had probably managed to stop the train. Hopefully without any casualties…
She was knocked out of her thoughts by a roaring Ursa, drawing her focus sharply back towards the fight as the bulky Grimm barreled towards her. Ruby responded in kind, running towards it and ducking under the massive swipe of its paw before she jumped up out of the ensuing bear-hug and landed on its shoulders. Swinging Crescent in to fit snugly under the Ursa's chin, she decapitated it in a shower of black gore, which speckled her hands and face before fading into smoke.
She jumped from those solid shoulders, but stumbled a little as she landed on the shifting rocks. Ruby spun her scythe around herself to make up for it, though, taking a deep breath and trying to straighten her shoulders back. The White Fang were taking their courage from her: she couldn't falter, not even a little. With their eyes on her, she had to appear completely practiced and at ease.
"We're almost there!" she called, trying to make her squeaky fifteen-year-old voice louder without pitching it even higher. "There's less holes up ahead, we just need to keep going!"
A few ragged cheers and whoops sounded down the line, but the White Fang were running on fumes. Ruby didn't blame them: miles at a straight run was quite exhausting enough even before you factored combat into it.
And then…
And then Ruby's hope kindled and her heart soared as she heard buckshot explosions as familiar to her as her own heart, caught a glimpse of yellow and orange fire spurting over the backs of the Grimm up ahead. There was a shimmering chime of Glyphs, and the rocks in the distance groaned as the tunnel darkened yet further.
There was a bloom of white light and then a louder, keening screech, and a ghostly Nevermore swooped suddenly down the length of the tunnel towards her. There was barely enough room for it to fly, but that just meant that the rain of razor-edged feathers it pelted the Grimm below with was even more devastating. Within moments, the flood of enemies slowed to a trickle, and the Nevermore dissipated as Weiss skated towards them on her Glyphs, flying like a spear as she lanced almost halfway to Ruby's side in one strike.
While Weiss pierced through the enemy ranks like an arrow, Yang hit them like a broadside. Dust ignited with a roar and flash of flames, briefly drowning out the Grimm, and the first wave she hit were pulped into smoke and ash within seconds. One fist planted into the eye socket of a King Taijitu made the opposite jewel-like red eye bulge and explode in a shower of gore as buckshot lacerated its brain, and as one head fell she was already turning to catch the fangs of the other. Yang grunted as she caught its strike, then strained, planting one foot on the Taijitu's lower jaw, and ripped its head in two with one heave of her body.
Suddenly split between multiple fronts, the unrelenting tide of Grimm turned into disarray, some hurling towards Yang with slavering jaws, some running for Weiss, some charging at Ruby and the White Fang's defensive line. In other circumstances, they might have been able to overwhelm them, since even students training to become Hunters sometimes struggled to deal with large hordes on their own.
But these Grimm were challenging Huntresses, and Weiss and Yang were relatively fresh.
It didn't matter how many unthinking Grimm they faced: the black monsters fell like so many pieces of chaff, swept aside by the fearsome precision of Weiss's rapier or blown to dust under Yang's fists. Ruby, too, hacked and sliced with new energy, and in the breathless span of a few minutes –certainly no more than ten– a ringing silence had fallen in this section of the tunnels.
The Grimm ahead of them had been utterly exterminated.
"Alright, let's keep moving!" Yang shouted, not giving any of the White Fang time to hesitate and think hey, maybe since the Grimm are gone we can eliminate the humans and not get arrested. "We've got people up ahead opening the entrance into Vale, but we've also probably got some of your people still inside the busted train cars. C'mon guys, let's move!"
Ruby nodded to her sister, collapsing her scythe with gratitude as the White Fang surged with new energy down the tunnel. You could always count on camaraderie to save the day… not getting arrested was nice, but not leaving your friends and fellow fighters to die in Grimm-infested tunnels was even better.
She wanted to stumble over to Yang and lean on her shoulder as the three of them reunited in the center of the tunnel, but no, she couldn't. The White Fang were still watching, Ruby still needed to act strong and in-charge.
"You guys okay?" she asked, and then made a face at how hoarse her voice was. The air down here was dry and thick with dust, and all the shouting and panting she'd been doing as she fought hadn't helped.
"The train is stopped, for better or worse, and Torchwick is or was unconscious." Weiss answered, pulling out a bottle and handing it to Ruby. She tipped it back and gulped the water down gratefully as they continued to walk at a more measured pace down the tunnel. "Blake's opening up some kind of exit into Vale."
"How about you, sis? You okay?" Yang asked, and Ruby nodded automatically.
"M'fine." she croaked, lowering the water bottle again. "I think my Aura's at about 60%?"
Yang nodded in relief and looked up ahead.
"We lost that Neo chick heading back here." she said, phrasing it carefully in case any of the sharper-eared Faunus could hear them talking. "Dunno where she went, but she probably won't be bothering us for a bit."
Translation: Neo got away clean, nothing to worry about on that end of the plan. Ruby's shoulders relaxed another infinitesimal fraction. Had things really gone that well that nothing had been mucked up in their plans for once?
Ruby shook her head to herself and lifted her chin. She could worry about that later: for now, focus on sweeping the tunnels ahead of them for survivors and dragging them into the light of day in Vale. Everything else could come after.
So thinking, she picked up her pace, jogging lightly with the rest as they made their way over the uneven ground. Both her team and the White Fang could move faster now, since Weiss had apparently lifted much of the rubble and then sealed it into the holes above them with Gravity and Earth Dust, respectively. Crude and probably only temporary, it was nonetheless effective in clearing the tracks of most of the fallen rocks and keeping more Grimm from digging through the ceiling.
Her spirits picked up as they got closer to the remains of the train, with the White Fang swarming over the cars they found like excited ants. Ruby wasn't able to do an accurate headcount for obvious reasons, but it certainly seemed like the majority of the White Fang grunts were alive, at the very least, even if many of them were injured and several had to be carried by their comrades –including a few who'd clearly seen the bad end of her sister and Weiss. During the original Breach… Ruby didn't want to think about how many of these people had died during the original Breach.
Surely not all of them. Nobody, no matter how fanatical they were, would follow a leader with a 100% mortality rate. Ruby didn't care how persuasive that Adam guy was, nobody was that reckless, stupid, or desperate.
But most of these people only barely had activated Aura –little to no training, enough to let them take a few hits from a Hunter, and probably no more. In these tunnels, with a far less-experienced Team RWBY and a distracted Doctor Oobleck… Ruby didn't want to think about how few of the White Fang volunteers would have made it out.
And she didn't, she reminded herself with a deep breath. That future was erased, gone as though it had never been. She needed to focus on the now.
With the more relaxed pace they set –even with searching through the train for survivors– it was inevitable that the rest of the White Fang would begin to catch up with them, and Weiss met Ruby's eyes before nodding to her, falling back to reinforce Oobleck. The rear, at least, still had to deal with Grimm, and Ruby saw several of the White Fang members realize that. Hoarse orders were shouted out by whatever commanders remained standing, sending those who still had guns and Dust back to the rear to cover their escape.
Hope tingled in the air, desperate enough to taste. They were almost there, almost to the walls, but the day had gone so abysmally for almost everyone here that Ruby doubted they'd believe they were safe until they physically stood in the plaza of Vale –and, given the looming presence of the Atlas airships overhead, perhaps not even then.
They made it to the engine, and someone pulled Torchwick out, which neatly answered the question of how Neo was-wasn't going to deal with him getting caught. Ruby had little doubt that she was around here somewhere, hidden beneath her Semblance as she watched them retrieve her boss with careful eyes.
"Everybody stick together!" Ruby called, ushering them onwards. There was tension in the air as well as hope –the White Fang knew that arrest was waiting for them as soon as they got to Vale, but between that and the tunnels, they had no choice but to press on. But as skilled as Yang and Ruby had demonstrated themselves to be, there were only two of them, and once they squeezed out into the city, perhaps at least a few of the Faunus could make a break for it and get away…
There was also, probably, the thought that since there weren't any Grimm left, they might be able to knock Ruby and Yang out and rush past them to the exit and be safe. Ruby kept one hand on her scythe and her eyes sharp, waiting to disabuse anyone of that notion as they got closer and closer to the end of the tunnels.
Light gleamed up ahead, weak and watery as it pierced through the gloom. There was a large, spiraling crack that sliced through the final wall, big enough for two or three people to move through at once, with a bit of a squeeze. Blake was already waiting for them, Gambol Shroud drawn and her amber eyes sharp in the darkness of the tunnels.
"I'll go first." Ruby announced as loud as she could when their group reached the end of the tracks, leaping up onto the service platform as she hopefully dashed any plans to rush through and make a break for it. She and Blake nodded to each other, and then Ruby passed by and began to climb. The crack in the rock was only large compared to a person: the surface was uneven, too, rubble clinking beneath her boots as she climbed and her hands scraping raw against the stone.
But the sun was growing brighter on her face, and soon enough Ruby wiggled through a crack in the pavement of one of Vale's larger plazas. It seemed like the hole was in the middle of a pedestrian road, just like before…
"Woof." Ruby sighed and collapsed onto her side, finally feeling safe enough to do so. She closed her eyes in relief, hearing rocks tumbling in the deeps below as Yang began to climb. "Made it."
Something wet swiped at her nose, and Ruby squinted her eyes open. A pair of button-black eyes regarded her from street level, sparkling hopefully.
"Arf!" Zwei greeted, clearly expecting the scritches and cuddling that were his due. Ruby's eyes traveled up.
"Hey." Jaune smiled at her, one hand out. "How's the trip?"
"Ugh." Ruby grinned and lifted her arm, letting him pull her to her feet. "I think we did okay."
"Looks like you did okay, too." Scarlet noted from where he stood with his team nearby, watching the crack in the plaza like hawks. "Good thing we were all nearby."
Ruby's eyes traveled the square. Sure enough, there was a distinct lack of screaming and panicking people and a distinct surplus of white-helmeted robots –Ironwood must have evacuated everyone once the crack showed up– surrounding the square, along with Team SSSN (no Ilia, but Ruby wouldn't have expected her) and JNPR all at a closer range, weapons out.
The White Fang, bedraggled, injured, and dusty, looked more than a little bit cowed as they began to emerge from the tunnels and saw the array of both student Hunters and Atlas military waiting for them.
" 'Sup dudes." Sun said, both his teeth and his abs gleaming in the sunlight as he flashed them a cheerful grin. "Welcome to Vale."
From there, things went pretty swiftly. The White Fang were gathered, arrested, and sent to be patched up or held (depending on their injuries). Atlas's forces were gathered and mop-up units were dispatched down the crack to clear the Grimm, retrieve any remaining White Fang, and seal the tunnels more efficiently. Not a single Grimm made it into the city: not a single civilian casualty was recorded.
And Ruby and her team soon received a direct Scroll message, courtesy of General Ironwood, that Cinder Fall and her team had been arrested.
Considering his part in the action had basically been to hang around the square Team RWBY had marked with his team until something came up through the ground, Sun was feeling pretty pleased. Sure, the ground had buckled and torn sometime towards the afternoon, but he and his team and Team JNPR –who were also "conveniently" nearby– had all been there to keep people calm and usher them out in a safe and orderly manner. By the time Ironwood's bots had rushed onto the scene, there was almost nobody left to evacuate.
Considering the size of the crack –maybe about the length of a bus and the tapering width of a bookshelf– Sun was pretty sure Team RWBY had managed to stymie the train ramming headlong into Vale, which was nice. This seemed a lot like a contained Dust explosion…
And then Blake had briefly popped out of the crack in the earth to give them a short summary before scrambling back down to wait, and yup –Dust explosion, train was stalled, please standby to sweep up the White Fang when they show up.
Now Sun yawned and stretched as the dorm room door closed behind him, blocking off the cheers of Team SSSNI (and Penny) as they celebrated their victory with a raucous pizza party. He was totally down for it, of course, but they'd run out of Dr. Piper and he'd volunteered for the vending machine run. Leadership roles –he was trying, since pretty much everyone on Team RWBY and JNPR had said that leading his team was something he should work on.
Blake had said to look at it like trying to be the best friend he could be for each of her teammates, be the guy they could count on, and so far that was working out great. Scarlet had only yelled at him once this week, which was, like, a whole new record.
Whistling cheerfully, Sun sauntered his way through the halls of Beacon, heading for the shared common room and the soda machines therein. He found said common room occupied by eight people, which wasn't entirely unheard of at this point in the evening –but they were all sitting very, very still, which was unusual, especially with the TV off.
"Something up?" Sun asked as he stopped midway between the couches and the vending machines, unsure of which direction he should commit to.
"Huh?" Jaune blinked and looked up from where he had been staring at the gleaming glass surface of the coffee table between the couches. Sun arched his eyebrows expectantly.
"You guys look like your pets died, or something." he said, with a nod towards ankle-level. "I mean, is this another we're-not-telling-the-teachers-about-this-part-'cause-they'd-probably-mess-it-up thing, or…?"
"No." Weiss said, shaking her head briefly and looking at him. She tried on a brief smile, which flickered on and off like a badly-tuned radio. "No, we're fine. It's just…"
Sun tilted his head expectantly.
Weiss seemed to have lost her train of thought, though, since her eyes drifted back to the corner of the table she had been staring at as she sighed again.
Okay, so probably not something actually wrong with everybody's plans, then. Sun scratched his head with a rueful frown. Man, he wished Penny was here. She made a lot more sense –she was in love with life and everything about it, an attitude Sun could totally get. This was… weird.
He shrugged and proceeded to the vending machine, feeding in his Lien as can after can thunked down into the cavity. Rather than carry them off to his bros in triumph, though, Sun scooped the lot up into his arms and approached the table.
"You guys can be gloomy all you want, but you shouldn't be gloomy on an empty stomach." he said, beginning to set out cans in front of his frowning friends like he was dealing cards. "We got pizza back in our dorm room, I can probably grab a box for ya right now."
Nora and Ruby were the only ones to actually reach for the cans he'd set out, although Pyrrha did flash him a brief, grateful smile before her worried eyes returned to her teammates and friends.
"Thanks, Sun."
"Thanks."
"No prob!" he replied happily. He'd gotten words! They were making progress! "What's the deal on that pizza?"
"Maybe later." Blake said, and her eyes flicked back over her team. They were all doing that a lot… looking at each other, checking each other's reactions, gauging each other's moods.
Sun thought on that for a few seconds.
"Cinder's arrested, right?" he said at length, not moving out of the circle of couches where he stood.
"Yup." Nora fiddled with the tab on her drink. "Penny says she watched the whole team get dragged off by Ironwood."
"Right…" Sun nodded, and thought a little more. "Everything cool with that Torchwick guy and Neo?"
"She sent us a text saying she made it out okay." Yang answered, her voice dull.
Ah, fuck. What were they so gloomy about? Sun cracked his own can of Dr. Piper and slurped on it as he tried to search his way towards an answer. No Grimm had so much as made it into the city, all the bad guys were arrested, nobody on their side had been busted, everything had gone all according to plan…
Everything had all gone according to plan.
"Y'all are waiting for the other shoe to drop, huh?" Sun guessed as he lowered his can, and there was a unanimous flinch from the people around him. Yeesh. "When was the last time you won this big, huh?"
"I can't particularly remember the last time things went this well." Weiss replied, her voice brittle, as she finally unwound from her tense pose and reached for the Dr. Piper. There was a sharp hiss as she cracked it open, but she didn't raise it to drink. "It's…"
"It's weird." Jaune said flatly. There was a barely-perceptible tremor in his hands as he clasped them in his lap. "Everything is fine, right…?"
"My man, it is so fine." Sun told him wisely. "Ironwood's got so many soldiers camped out in the plaza there ain't a mouse getting through the tunnel from Mountain Glenn, and every single person in Team CEMM got arrested –except Mint, 'cause, you know, she wasn't here. Literally the only thing we have to worry about is the White Fang and since, like, half of 'em got arrested today, the rest ain't gonna do shit until they're sure the heat's died down and nobody's gonna bust down their door. Civilian volunteers, y'know? I'm sure a ton of those guys we caught today would take the plea bargain."
Despite how eminently reassuring his response was, the others all still seemed pensive. Pyrrha, Nora, and Ren –who had seen but not experienced the same things the others had– seemed worried more because the others were worried rather than concerned on their own, but still. It was long faces and shadowed eyes all around.
Sun sighed. Sheesh, tough crowd.
"Look," he said, setting his soda can down on the table. "Today is a win. Okay? We routed the bad guys, sideslipped telling the headmasters 'bout our spy on the inside, and stopped a bunch of Grimm from busting into the city. Yeah, okay, maybe you guys haven't had a score this big in a while, but we did it. There's, like, literally nothing else to it. You got a win, for once."
The others looked at each other, but Sun thought he detected a slight lessening of tension, and grinned.
"So!" he said, much louder, as he folded his arms across his chest and beamed at them. "Y'all wanna come get pizza and cheer about how awesome you are with us?"
It took a bit more prodding, and a bit more help from Nora –who was the first to break out of her funk at the idea of a victory party– but Sun managed to herd the entire gang back down the hallway and into the much-more-cramped dorm room, where his team was already excitedly chowing down.
Being yelled at for forgetting to get drinks for the rest of SSSNI was totally worth having everybody all together.