"Well, I'm not convinced that a full sweep of the city is going to be possible without a fair bit of backup," Professor Naranja said, her eyes sharpening as she looked at the horde in front of her. There was not a trace of even concern, let alone fear in either her tone or expression, and it was an admirable quality. Vertiya reminded herself that Professor Naranja was a Huntress as well, and therefore she'd done training like this and most likely had fought countless Grimm in the past. On top of that, she was the resident Grimm expert at Atlas as it was the subject she taught, and from what Vertiya remembered, Grimm were attracted to feelings of negativity, especially fear, so not seeing it in her wasn't too unsurprising. Vertiya was a little cautious, slipping a green card into her hand, but she didn't let it fly yet. "Just… don't attack yet. Although they can most likely sense us being here, we don't want to unnecessarily provoke them. Swap to ranged though – if they do charge, you can probably at least pick a few of them off in the run up," Professor Naranja continued.
Yimesz flipped up his knuckledusters, revealing the revolvers underneath, and Ruzovi bent back her staff, swapping it to its bow form before taking an arrow out, nocking it in the string but not yet drawing it back.
"So, back out to a safe enough place whilst keeping an eye on the swarm, call in the aircraft above, and get extracted out until we can get a large enough team to take on the army?" Vertiya said, her eyes not flickering from the Grimm. Her hand holding the card was unsteady, however. Vertiya had never seen so many Grimm in one place at one time. There must have been hundreds.
"I was going to say call in an air strike and extract through the chaos, but that is a much more sensible idea," Professor Naranja replied, mildly surprised. "You've got a good mind, Vertiya. I can see why James – Professor Ironwood made you leader. Which way, then?"
Vertiya slowly looked around, working out possible exit routes. "By the looks of it… down this main road, directly away from the Grimm. It'll lead to the edge of the city, which would be a good place to extract, and by staying on the road, we have both a clean line of sight on the Grimm, and plenty of access to various alleyways should we need another exit strategy."
"Sounds good to me," Pluto said, Yimesz and Ruzovi agreeing with him. "So what, do we all just, like, move backwards or something?"
"Not quite. Pluto, you've got the largest gun but the slowest fire rate, you face the way we're going, in case we get anything coming to us from the other side. Ruzovi, Yimesz, either side. I'll keep an eye on the horde in case they move towards us," Vertiya said. The four of them moved into a diamond formation, each facing outwords, before Vertiya's eyes flicked up to Professor Naranja. "You wouldn't mind helping me keep an eye on the horde, would you?"
"It would be a pleasure," Naranja replied, her shield raised up as the five of them started moving away from the horde with slow, calculated steps.
The Grimm, however, were not completely stationary. Realising that the five of them were moving away, the horde were slowly moving towards them, at a slowly increasing pace. There were no screeches or cries from them yet, as was common when they were rearing for an attack.
"I don't need to be able to see that wave of Grimm to be able to hear that movement getting closer to us," Pluto said, over his shoulder. "Stick to the plan or scrap it?"
Vertiya's mind was racing. If they moved at the same speed, the Grimm wave would eventually catch up to them anyway. If they sped up, the Grimm would sense fear, and charge. There was only one option left, and although Vertiya didn't like it, there wasn't much else she could do. "Alright. Rendezvous point is at the edge of this city where this road meets the limits. Do NOT, under any circumstance, split off by yourself. And I want to stay as a group for as long as possible. Everyone clear and ready?" Vertiya said, in a commanding tone, waiting for confirmation whilst slipping both a red and a brown card into her hand. Once she had confirmation from everyone, she yelled, "Now!" before chucking the three cards at the wave.
As soon as the three cards, thrown in such a way that their paths would cross with each other mid-flight, connected, a cloud of gas appeared between the five of them, massively expanded by the effects of the brown card to the extent that it covered the entire width of the road. As soon as the gas cloud was up, Vertiya, using all the strength she could muster, followed up by throwing both a red and a pink card towards the edge of the road, which resulted in a flare firing up into the sky once they met. The five of them, seeing the flare a good distance ahead of them, ran towards it, but the shrieks of the Grimm behind them and the sudden vibration of the floor as they charged was not a welcome feeling, and Vertiya looked over her shoulder to see Grimm on the floor from the effects of the gas, but that was not the worrying part. The Grimm behind the ones piled on the floor were scrambling over the bodies, or were already over them and charging towards the group. Vertiya, realising that she'd run faster actually facing the way she was going, and as such she turned, before catching her foot on a crack in the road and hitting the floor, concussed as a green spark flew across her body.
Vertiya's vision was blurred as she lifted her head minimally off the ground. Filled with a dull, aching pain, she slowly looked towards the black shapes that were running towards her, unable to move from her position. However, as one of the black shapes got dangerously close to her, a golden-orange figure stepped over her, colliding with the black shape and hitting it with something, causing it to vanish. As Vertiya's eyes started to focus, she realised it was Professor Naranja, wrenching her shield back out of the ground.
"Hawkrest, you can carry her, right?"
Professor Naranja's voice echoed in Vertiya's ears, and she could hardly feel the arms under her back and knees, but she did feel a weightlessness as she realised she was no longer on the floor. "You need to watch where you put your feet," a deep, dull voice said which seemed to come from everywhere. "And you're bleeding quite a bit."
Vertiya was still dazed, but she managed to come up with enough words to say what she needed. "Pocket," she whispered, up to Pluto. "Pink."
Pluto, understanding what she meant, used a complicated manoeuvre to reach into Vertiya's trouser pocket, and pulled out a few cards, using one hand to shuffle through them until he had a pink card, which he gently placed under Vertiya's hair, where the ache seemed to resonate most. As the card started to work its magic, Vertiya's vision became clearer, and she could see that Ruzovi and Yimesz were kiting the Grimm, with Professor Naranja taking care of the ones closest to her. "What happened with your aura? Should have absorbed most of that hit, no?" Pluto asked.
"It most likely did," Vertiya said, pulling out her scroll. When she pulled up her aura levels, as she expected, it was on 0, but with the pink card against her head, it was slowly starting to go back up, and there was a pale green glow to Vertiya for a split second which vanished soon after. With how close they were to the now landed aircraft, there was no point of Vertiya going back to her feet, so she let Pluto carry her back into the aircraft. She was rather comfortable in his arms anyway.
Pluto put her down on one of the seats before taking one himself, with both Yimesz and Ruzovi diving in soon after. Professor Naranja was the last to get to the aircraft, but Vertiya could see full well she wouldn't be able to get on the aircraft without Grimm getting in as well. Fearing the worst, she pulled out a few red cards, able to get an angle on the closest Grimm from where she was, but Professor Naranja raised her shield up in the air, and Vertiya no longer needed to throw her cards.
As Professor Naranja's shield faced the sky, there was a break in the clouds, and through it came a blinding ray of sunlight, crashing into the ground in front of the professor. The Grimm caught directly in the beam disintegrated before their very eyes, and the ones nearby had to shield themselves from the light. In the brief moment where the Grimm were dazzled by the sudden burst of illumination, Professor Naranja jumped into the passenger bay of the aircraft and tapped the side of it, causing the pilot to immediately take off, lifting the vehicle up into the air. It was only once they were out of the range of Grimm that Professor Naranja finally rested a hand on the metal walls of the interior of the aircraft, catching a quick breather as the vault door started to close.
"Was that your… semblance?" Ruzovi finally asked, after a brief, awkward pause of silence, as the aircraft slowly climbed in the air, gaining more height.
Professor Naranja looked over to Ruzovi and nodded slowly, before pushing herself off the wall. "My semblance is that I can control, direct and angle beams of sunlight onto my enemies. It's normally more of a defensive semblance – for example, against other people, all it really does is blind them – but against Grimm, it can be fatal," she explained. "However, if it's dark, for obvious reasons I can't use it at all, and when it's cloudy like it is here, it takes more out of me to use."
"Still, that does seem incredibly useful," Vertiya said, checking her head to see if it was still bleeding. Thankfully, the wound had clotted, but she did have a red streak through her hair where the blood came from. Vertiya was not fond of it. "Can you angle it with your shield, then?"
"That's my most common method, yes," Professor Naranja confirmed, pushing her spectacles back up as they had slipped down her nose a little. "Usually, it just comes straight down from the sky where I aim it to, so if I aim it on myself, it's a simple case of angling the shield so that the beam goes towards where I want it to. I have manipulated light in the atmosphere on the way to the ground surface to essentially curve it, but that takes more out of me than is worth expending, which is why I don't normally."
Even still, Vertiya was fascinated by what Professor Naranja could do with her semblance. She'd never actually seen an adult semblance before – her father never used his, she'd never seen her aunt do anything with hers, and at Alsius, the teachers there never bothered to give a visual representation as they had said everyone's semblance was different – so to find out about one and actually see it in person was something that sparked her interest. After all, Professor Naranja had had much more time to train to be able to do more with her semblance, so the possibilities she'd be capable of were intriguing. Vertiya's primary semblance, her invisibility, was rather linear after all – she'd turn invisible, and that would be about it. However, it did make her want to train her Hylae more, because she realised she could learn to do more with it.
Vertiya did not have much time to ponder it over though, because there was a sudden jolt through the aircraft, and alarms started blaring. Professor Naranja was the first to head to the cockpit, and there were sounds of tussle before she came back out with narrow eyes.
"Nevermore," she explained, her tone still collected. "Good news, it's dead, and we don't have to worry about it. Bad news… It took out the pilot, and with it all of the flight controls," she continued.
"Well, if it counts, this brings my total number of shipwrecks to three," Pluto said, chucking his flask up in the air and catching it as the aircraft started to descend. "Are these birds able to take a crash?"
"At the height we're at, with no discernible means of bringing it down smoothly… it'd hit the floor and explode," Professor Naranja replied, punching a button on the wall near the passenger cabin door, which caused it to open up again. "You all remember the landing plans you used, back in the second stage of the initiation process? You may need to use those again."