The Trouble With T
A/N: Oh, you were expecting a chapter on Monday. Nope. Now we're working with a Friday schedule until further notice.
Disclaimer: Seriously, how do other people keep doing this? I mean, nor I or my associates that made the story own RWBY or any part of Rooster Teeth. All rights and registers go to Rooster Teeth and Monty Oum.
Two hours after Chapter 5…
Adam was quick to jump out of the Bullhead as soon as the hatches opened and the airship touched down upon the pavement of the abandoned industrial sector of Mistral. His joint base-of-operations with Cinder had changed since the last one was destroyed, and now he sought her out with a broiling fury.
The Faunus ignored the greetings his fellow White Fang members sent him and caused those that had questions for him to hold their tongue from one look at his impatient, heavy pace towards one of the warehouses – where he would most likely find Cinder.
He didn't even bother to refresh himself before he began his search for the ash-haired woman, more out of frustration than actual concern that Cinder had made it paramount that they find T, and anyone who caught wind of the boy needed to report to her directly.
After having searched the compound to no avail, he was about to call the woman on his Scroll just as an airship slowed to a hover above the concrete pavement outside the warehouse Adam was in, swooping in out of nowhere on this dark night, the abyss-black sky only lit by the broken moon in its half-phase.
The red-haired Faunus watched as the airship land along with a crew of White Fang repairmen, ready to perform any necessary maintenance or repairs on the airship. Turning to see that a few other members of the organisation had stopped to observe the Bullhead, Adam took a certain amount of satisfaction from yelling at them and telling them to get back to work, reassuring himself that the carefully structured system he had built would certainly fall apart without him.
Adam's attention was brought back to the airship as a familiar pair of Human delinquents he was being forced to work with stepped out of the airship, bickering as always. The Faunus' feet carried him to the two, where he caught their attention by clearing his throat.
The boy, Mercury, turned his head first to see who it was, before an annoyed scowl graced his features. "And what do you want?"
"I'm looking for your boss." He spoke sternly, sword hand ready should one of them choose to attack him. Despite working alongside them, Adam's instincts always told him to be wary around Humans – especially the ones closest to him. It may have just been paranoia, but he wasn't going to give them the satisfaction of taking him by surprise.
Emerald thumbed towards the Bullhead. "Still in there. Why, something up?" she asked as she quirked an eye brow. "If you're busy, I could always-"
"No, I need to tell her directly." He cut her off, receiving a scowl from the green-haired girl.
"Tell me what?" Cinder asked as she stepped off the airship.
Huffing at the woman, he gestured for her to follow him. "You're late."
"We had a run in with Atlas security." She said with an annoyed eye-roll. "For all their shining armour and badges, it's all just a coat of polish to cover up how weak they really are."
Adam allowed a scoff at that. "I thought you had that covered with that new boy you brought in." he remarked, with the intent to sting at her method of recruitment.
"He had promise." Cinder replied, facial expression remaining neutral. "However, T somehow knew what we were doing and gave the authorities a generous amount of information about our whereabouts."
Immediately halting himself, Adam looked at Cinder through his mask with a mixture of disgust and disbelief. "Are you suggesting that one of my men is working with that traitor?"
"I'm not suggesting anything." Cinder snapped back with a glare. "I'm just open to the possibility. After all," a sly smirk began to grow across her face. "-didn't one of your close operatives recently turn their back on you?"
His hand flew to his sword hilt and drew it at an incredible speed. It was already at Cinder's throat before her two companions even had time to recognize what was happening. "You will not speak of her again, ever." He said through gritted teeth and barely restrained anger.
The rest of the White Fang soldiers in the area took notice of the brewing conflict and raised their weapons at the three Humans, who subsequently had their weapons pointed at Adam.
Although, Cinder didn't look nearly as fazed by the confrontation, instead raising a hand to slowly lower the blade against her neck as she raised an eyebrow. "Do you really want to do this again?"
For a few seconds, Adam didn't move a single muscle as the snarl on his face tightened slightly to reveal the canines along his jaw. Eventually, he lowered Wilt and sheathed it back into Blush in one fluid motion. "And stay away from her; she's mine."
"Glad we have something to agree on." Cinder said monotonously as she signalled for Emerald and Mercury to relax. "Now, you had something you wanted to tell me?"
Turning to face her, Adam made sure to give her the annoyed look he had when he watched his White Fang camp get blasted apart by the explosive charges T had dropped. "I ran into your boy, T during a Dust exchange with the Vermillion kid."
He took his own private pleasure from the way Cinder's eyes widened at the mention of the Human and continued forward to the warehouse as the other three were left momentarily stunned.
A split second later, Cinder recovered from her shock and pretended to act like it was nothing. "Are you sure it was him?" she asked sceptically, though there was something else in her tone that Adam could not figure out.
Emerald and Mercury soon caught up as Adam continued. "Just like you described; metal right arm, overcoat, smelled of cowardice." He exaggerated the last part. If anything, the way the man fought indicated a degree of relentless zeal. "Though, he seems to have acquired a few new tricks since last time."
"What do you mean?" Mercury inquired from his left side.
Reaching into the pocket of his trench coat, he pulled up one half of the disc that T had thrown at him and held it in front of him. In the confusion with the Grimm, he had been able to grab only one half, though it was more than enough to figure out what it was. "He's apparently invested in explosive discs and harpoons."
"T always did have a new trick up his sleeve." Emerald muttered to herself when all of a sudden, Cinder abruptly stopped.
"Cinder, what's wrong?" Mercury asked as they slowed their pace to a stop.
Turning her head slowly, Cinder eventually turned her whole body to face the Bullhead Adam had arrived in. "Did you order your men to search the hull of the ship?" she asked, not bothering to face the rest of the group.
"No, why would I-"
"Because he planted a tracker on your ship." Cinder's tone was one of annoyance and irritation as she groaned and began marching towards the airship. "Search the hull of the ship for a tracker!" she shouted at the group of White Fang goons that were performing repairs on her airship.
The crimson-eyed woman was immediately halted in her tracks as she was spun around by Adam. "You do not have the authority to command my men as such!" he said with a snarl while Cinder rebuked it with a leer as she brushed his hand off her shoulder.
With an unsatisfied huff, the Faunus leader turned to the others who still stood idle, unsure of how to interpret the mixed messages they were receiving. Adam opened his mouth to give them a command, but stopped to consider what he had to say before actually speaking. "Do as she says."
With that, they began rushing about the airship frantically. "What are we looking for?"
"A small round device; about the size of Mercury's brain." Emerald spoke up.
"Well then it shouldn't be too hard to spot." Mercury chuckled as he wiggled his eyebrows at the green-haired girl, who rolled her eyes.
"Please; I couldn't see it if it were under a microscope." Emerald jabbed.
"Well you-"
"Focus!" Cinder snapped at the two, causing them to straighten out at break-neck speed as the woman approached. "The more time we waste the more time T has to plan his next offensive against us." She scolded while slowly approaching the two. The sounds that her heels made were like an axe hitting the stone floor at this point to the two. "If you want to be useful, then go search the ship!"
The two teens were about to rush off and do just that, when a loud clanging sound reached their ears. All three turned to the direction the noise had come to see Neo standing next to the nose of the Bullhead, having used her umbrella to hit the airship. She had been on the ship with Emerald, Mercury and Cinder, and had been the last to step off.
The multi-coloured petite held up her left hand to about neck height, where she held what could only be the tracker they had been looking for, before dropping it to the ground to crush it with the heel of her boot.
The others stood still for a moment, unsure of how to reply to Neo's action – as they had quickly learned that the mute often had something to say in every action she did, ironic enough as that may be. Eventually, it was Cinder who spoke up first.
"Excellent work Neo. However, it would seem that thanks to Adam's carelessness this base is now compromised." She said, the bite in her tone making it known that her remark towards the Faunus leader was intentional. "You know the drill."
Adam allowed a low snarl to pass his lips before he turned his attention to one of the lieutenants on duty. "Lieutenant!" he called out.
"Yes, sir!" she replied with a crisp salute.
"I want you to get the men to pack up everything and prepare to move out to Gizzard Base on my order, and I want it done it ten minutes." He barked at her, though the Faunus had little doubt that his lieutenant would follow his word to the letter.
"Yes, sir!" she repeated before turning on her heel and marching off, yelling at White Fang members everywhere to grab all their stuff.
It took Adam a few seconds to re-locate Cinder and catch up to her, but by the time he did, he found that Neo had joined the group as well.
"This is unnecessary. My men are more than capable of dealing with one man." Adam told her as they walked into the warehouse.
"Oh, is that so? And how did they fare in your last encounter?" Cinder asked, though there was a hint of rhetoric in her tone.
"He caught us by surprise." He lied. The Faunus knew full well of the advantage he had over the boy, and made a mental note to take any advantage against T when they next fought. "It won't happen again, especially since we know he's coming here."
"That's the thing." Emerald spoke up. "We don't know whether he's coming here or not."
"Where else could he hit? We've been constantly on the move, the rest of the camps have shifted about since last time, I've lost a few men in order to establish new strongholds on the outskirts of Mistral because of your insistent paranoia that we can't beat one rogue Human." Adam yelled, listing off the points on his fingers as he did.
This time, Cinder stopped to face the Faunus with a fury in her eyes. "Then what do you suppose? We wait here for T to strike first?"
"We wait, we build up our forces, we set up an ambush." He countered, trying not to sound wary of the glare she was sending him. From his time with the woman, he had learned how to better negotiate and get more say in how things were done by putting on a greater show of force than her. However, Adam needed to be sure not to be too assertive, lest she actually lash out at him.
He had already lost too much from her initial takeover and because of some pyromaniac that destroyed one of their ammunition depots. The White Fang couldn't afford to fight a war on two fronts.
Before Cinder could reply, Neo shoved her Scroll in front of his face. He grabbed it and read it out loud.
"'He'd cut off our supply and wait us out.' Well then we double our guard and stock up on supply as soon as we can." He countered, unwilling to admit his argument made little sense at all. Adam was – in reality – in agreement with Cinder, but T had slaughtered his men and decimated his camp and he swore revenge against the traitor.
"Just admit you're on the losing side of this argument, Adam." Cinder hissed as she leered at the Faunus. "Honestly, I thought you'd be smarter than this." She said over her shoulder as she walked off to the room in the warehouse she had designated as her office.
Slowly exhaling a hot breath, the red-haired Faunus decided to steer the conversation away from a physical confrontation. "And what will you do?"
Stopping, the ash-haired woman turned around to face Adam once again, this time wearing her signature smirk. "I'm going to strike at him first. Just make sure your men aren't in the way when I do."
With that she turned around to walk into the room, but stopped again to turn halfway towards Adam. "What ever became of the smuggler?"
Huffing once, Adam replied, "Last I saw of him he was crying on the ground after I killed his partner. T probably finished him off."
Cinder seemed to consider the turn of events for a moment before smiling again. "Excellent. His Gambit Protocol was due for activation anyway." Pushing open the door and walking in, she spoke in a low mutter, but Adam was able to hear her with his enhanced hearing. "I should still inform Roman, he'll be heartbroken." The last few words dripped from her mouth with a toxin that made Adam shudder ever so slightly as he turned away to oversee the evacuation process himself. At least it'll take my mind off things. He thought to himself. Fucking Humans.
As Adam walked away, Emerald's face turned into a frown that she had been trying to hold back to maintain an image around the Faunus leader. She let out an audible sigh as she slowly turned her head to face Neo, who was still staring at the door to Cinder's 'office', deep in thought.
"I'm going to kill him the next chance I get." She said with the words directed at Neo. They had their intended effect and the girl gave her a hard glare as she typed out something on her Scroll. Turning it towards the two, Emerald let out an annoyed scoff once she finished reading it. "Well then he's going through a hell of a mood to be going around blowing up our bases."
"I'm honestly not too worried." Mercury stated in a mocking, matter-of-fact tone. "I've never lost a one-on-one with him, so if he decides to show up again I'll just beat him to a pulp."
"You weren't the one getting shot at by chain guns." Emerald muttered in spite while folding her arms.
"Hey, I was in the factory when he blew it up!" the silver-haired boy countered. "I deserve a piece of revenge as much as you do!"
At that, Emerald just rolled her eyes. "Says the guy that doesn't know how to share."
"Well last I checked he had you running for your life."
"Well I-"
Emerald cut herself off when she heard Neo snap her fingers twice, turning her ire towards the angry heterochromatic girl. Without making any other gestures, she held her Scroll out for the two to read.
Leaning back with a smirk, Mercury was the first to respond. "I really doubt that Cinder will just let him back after all he's done."
Neo's face scrunched up into a tight glare as she pointed a finger at herself twice, asserting her statement. However, Emerald was still a little sceptical. "No offense, but I really don't think you have what it takes."
Rolling her eyes, Neo quickly flipped the Scroll so that it faced her as she quickly typed another message and showed it to the two before walking off.
"Hey!" Mercury called out to her after she had walked about four metres from the two. Turning her head, she gave them a deadpanned look that could only be interpreted as 'What?'
"If you don't kill him next time we see him, I'm gonna do it myself. Figure it'd be right after all the crap that prick gave me." Mercury continued as he folded his arms.
Neo held her deadpanned look for a few seconds – blinking every so often – before she eventually shrugged her shoulders and walked off, likely to pack up her things like she recommended they do before Cinder yelled at them.
"Better watch out, Mercury." Emerald warned in a low voice.
"Watch out for Neo? She's a pushover." Mercury scoffed with a bitter laugh.
"Not her." Emerald said while she slowly shook her head. "I'm going to put a bullet through T's head, so you'd better make sure you're not in the way when I do."
"Aw, upset that he killed your boyfriend?" Mercury cooed sarcastically.
At the mention of the orange-themed swordsman, Emerald lost the constant feeling of stabbing the silver-haired boy through the neck, replaced instead by an emptiness. She slowly turned to look at Mercury with a deadpanned look in her eyes. "Tanner was my friend. If T killed him, I wanna be sure to return the favour."
Mercury developed a tight, neutral expression on his face before he eventually turned away with a "Whatever.", leaving Emerald to her thoughts as she headed in the direction of her equipment storage.
The green-haired girl had known Tanner for a long time when she was still in Atlas. He showed her around the place and she showed him how to lift wallets from unsuspecting people. Several thefts and robberies later, Emerald considered him one of her only friends in the world. Having met and become good friends with him…it was difficult for her to face the fact that he was gone.
Someone had to answer for his death, and she could think of no better person than the cyborg son-of-a-bitch that turned his back on all of them.
Same time on a Mistral-bound ship…
Pulling his hand back in pain after having received a mild electric shock, SK flung his hand about in the air to try to shake off the pain. Sitting down with his back against the cold metal of the cargo ship he had snuck aboard, he turned the helmet he had in his hands so that he faced the front of the helmet.
He stared at the white and blue helmet for a few moments, eyes peering into the vacant space inside it while a warped reflection of his face stared back at him in the polished surface of the metal visor. With a sigh, he turned it back around to try and extract any salvageable materials from the helmet. The black-haired teen had stopped feeling bad for the Atlesian he knocked out for the piece of armour since yesterday, and instead set his mind on putting it to use while he waited for the small portable holographic processor he stole to finish decoding the counter-virus that had infected the Scroll that he had plugged into the Atlas mainframe.
Stole. The word still left a bad taste in his mouth. Every fibre of his training under the Raiders told him that it was wrong, but he always matched the argument with how he wasn't in the Raiders anymore and that he needed to do whatever was necessary for him to survive.
So far, he had been able to extract the power cell and short-range radio transmitter inside the helmet. Without any additional tools, he was unable to disassemble the helmet and didn't want to damage any of the inner-workings.
I could always steal a small tool-kit… he mused to himself as he pulled out what looked like a microchip. Groaning in frustration, he put the helmet aside to get a better look at the microchip he held in his hands, allowing his glasses to run a simple scan of the device and cross-reference it against the known database.
It took a few seconds for the process to complete, and when it did the first thing SK checked on the list of information that was displayed in his field of vision was the selling price of the component. "Well with this I could buy myself a day's worth of food…" he muttered to himself as he set it aside, making a mental note to acquire a rucksack or something of the sort to carry all of his goods now that he had more things to worry about.
At this point, he had given up trying to pry at the helmet further until he could properly dismantle it and switched his focus back to deciphering the program that had infected the Scroll he was using, as well as understanding how the virus on it worked.
Whoever created the virus was a genius who knew exactly what he was doing, in SK's mind. Once he figured out how to properly infect a device with the virus, he found that it could then be more easily spread to other devices it came into contact with. This also left the rogue with more questions than answers as he pondered over what Cinder wanted to gain out of infecting the entire Atlas network with the program. Sure, lots of people could gain from that kind of tactical advantage, but from what he had seen of her forces and assets, the woman was planning something big.
And if the person that created the virus was a genius, then the hacker that designed the counter-virus must be phenomenal. The program was very specifically designed to target and isolate the virus as it was being uploaded on the Atlas network, meaning that the other hacker must have been aware of Cinder's intentions. The black-haired boy wasn't sure what to make of all this, but one thing was clear to him; whoever created the counter-virus was already in the Atlas network, and from the looks of it knew of Cinder's intentions more than he did.
Looking over the lines of code that flooded across his offline processor, he saw that the decoding process was almost complete. Once it was done, SK would run a trace on where the virus had been sent from and hopefully track down this mystery hacker. He would have to run the risk of connecting the processor back to the global network, but he had taken several precautions to make the trace as undetectable as he could.
From there, it was just as simple as finding the hacker, heading over to their location and…
And what?
He hadn't thought about how this journey would end at all. Would he kill the person responsible for almost having him put on death row for crimes against the Kingdoms? Would he talk to them? The logical conclusion he kept coming to was that if they were against him, this mystery hacker would have to be eliminated. But why? They didn't seem to be coming after him, it was merely a hunch SK had built upon the message that they gave him.
'You Should Not Be Here.'
Why shouldn't he have been at the CCT Tower that night? What did he mean by that? In the end, it was the never-ending stream of questions that made SK want to find the hacker. Without any real destination or goal in his mind, he had to latch onto anything that he felt gave him purpose.
Soon enough, the decoding process was complete and he found the string of code that would allow him to trace where the virus originated from. The process worked very quickly, though the point of origin kept bouncing off different locations in Atlas. Taking this additional data into account, SK followed the trail of the route the code took back to its very start, which led him – conveniently – back to Mistral.
Why does everything happen in Mistral? He asked silently, looking up at the ceiling and half-expecting an answer in return as he narrowed down the map to a certain location on the eastern side of Mistral, across a large patch of inhospitable bog-lands that separated this certain part of Mistral from the rest of the Kingdom.
Though he got an uncertain feeling from the location marked, he synchronized it with the map in his glasses, placing a waypoint on his map display. Now all he had to do was wait for the ship to dock at the Mistral harbour, sneak off the rusty boat, and trek halfway across the Kingdom for a loose lead he didn't have much faith in.
In his mind, it wasn't a plan. But it was all he had to go on from, so he settled for it. Leaning back against the cold-steel hull of the ship, wrapped in his poncho and sipping from a can of People Like Grapes, he really wished he had stayed in Shade.