Vale had been hit hard. She knew that, factually, it'd be hard not to when you're watching the place get destroyed by Grimm, though admittedly her attention has been more focused on Beacon at the time. But it was one thing to know that Vale was hit hard, and another altogether to experience it.
Of course she wasn't in Vale at the time it was hit, she was in massive floating coliseum, then Beacon, then, well, she wasn't quite sure about after that. Dead seemed, simultaneously, the most likely and unlikely scenario; after all, if she had come back was she ever truly dead? Her potential mortality aside, slogging through the Residential and Eastern Commercial District to get to the Western Commercial and Industrial Districts and experiencing the sheer devastation of it all along the way really hammered home the suffering.
Burned out, abandoned, and crushed cars clogged the streets, making it near impossible to navigate them. The buildings, once proud and organized, sprawled across the sidewalks and streets in the form of rubble. Some buildings' facades remained standing, but when you peered through the empty windows you could see that all the wooden intestines of the place had been reduced to ashes. A few buildings seemed to have remained intact, save for some broken windows here and there, and evidence of tremendous forced entry as the doors lay where they broke in splintered heaps as Grimm had poured through them. But those were few and far between.
The alleyways were littered with trash and overgrowth, and no small amount of bloodstains either. All the bodies had long since been consumed, either by the Grimm or by the maggots and worms that birthed in them. But it was harder to remove bloodstains, they clung determinedly to where their owners had fallen, the only grave markers in this dilapidated ruin. And Dust, was there a lot of them. They were a faded black, indistinguishable from a wine stain save for the telltale splatter or pooling; it seemed she could hardly walk a few feet without encountering one or two, or families of them.
It made sense, she supposed, Vale was an extremely densely populated area, and everything had happened so fast. What surprised her was the lack of bones anywhere in sight, there may be piles of them in the buildings, but there were none visible on the street. She guessed that the people and hunters still clinging to life in the western side of the city had gathered most of them for a mass grave or something, that or the Grimm ate the bones as well. The first scenario, however unlikely, raised the question of exactly how long she had been...gone.
It wasn't an easy task to gather so many bones, nor would it be a quick one, especially with all the Grimm in the area. So she had to have been gone for a while for so many of them to be, she assumed, collected. That or eaten by Grimm, and they raised the most peculiar, and most frightening questions inside her.
She saw many, many, many Grimm on her trudge Westward through what remained of the city, and every time she saw one it would ignore her. Well, that wasn't entirely true: the Alphas, Majors, and Ancient Grimm would examine her curiously with that cold intelligence hidden behind their gleaming red eyes, and every time they would end with a hint of recognition and continue about their business. The smaller, younger Grimm would mostly completely ignore her, incapable of the dangerous curiosity and intellect that the older, more powerful ones possessed.
That frightened her; all through her life she had been told Grimm existed solely to destroy Humanity, and there was no evidence to the contrary. They didn't eat unless it was a human, they spent their entire lives dedicated to killing as many humans as possible, their most basic instincts drove them towards every negative emotion that humanity generated. Yet here she was, a lone human limping through their territory, and not a single one even gave a hint of aggressive behavior. Not so much as a growl.
Her mind settled on two scenarios: either something was wrong, or right depending on how you looked at it, with the Grimm, or something was wrong with her that made them recognize her as one of their own. She desperately hoped it was the former. It had to be right? She suddenly stopped in her tracks as she studied her hands with the intensity one would find in someone defusing a bomb. They were her hands, exactly as she remembered them...weren't they? They were pale in complexion and the palms were calloused from years of training, every line and scar and freckle was exactly as she remembered; they were her hands, human hands, she knew that. But still the question of "what if" ate away at her as she marched on.
The pain in her leg had receded somewhat, and she was capable of walking on it effectively, though she doubted her ability to run or fight on it. She wouldn't be helpless, but she wouldn't be at the top of her game either, in fact she'd be closer to the bottom what with whatever was wrong with her aura and all.
Wait.
She stopped moving again as she considered something: something was wrong with her aura, that much was apparent; she didn't have nearly the amount she used to, once she got her hands on a scroll she thought she could examine exactly how much, but she knew that it was significant. As if that wasn't frightening enough, she suddenly considered something that she hadn't thought of before: if something was wrong with her aura, did that mean something was wrong with her semblance as well?
In a desperate test she turned towards one of the crushed cars near her on the road to her right, reaching out her hand she willed the door to rip off its hinges and come to her; child's play next to what she could've done, did do on Beacon Tower. The door only wiggled slightly in response, she panicked, pouring all her desperation into willing her semblance to function. Please, she pleaded please please please please. But the door wouldn't budge, only wiggle and creak as if it was taunting her newfound inability. This can't be happening, please don't let this be happening.
A whirlwind of emotions swirled inside her: anger, sadness, desperation, panic, frustration, none of them were positive. And why should they be? Here she was, once a champion huntress-in-training, now reduced to almost civilian levels of aura manipulation and semblance use. She still had her training, her analytical mind, years of experience under her belt, but all those years had been spent training and fighting with her aura and semblance, what did it mean for her abilities, for her as a huntress, to barely be able to use them?
Her vision began to swim and her head began to feel light, her body threatening topple over. She was panicking, hyperventilating, she needed to stop. But she couldn't. What if this was permanent? What did that mean for who she was? She couldn't place names to any of her closest friends, and now she may not be able to help them in the fight. She would be left behind, useless, discarded.
Ironically, it wasn't the thought of her friends that stirred determination within her heart and calmness in her mind, but rather the thought of her enemies. The thought of the raven haired woman with burning eyes and how she would hurt her, break her. And how she would love every second of it. The aura and semblance issue was a temporary one, it had to be, and if it wasn't...well...she didn't know what she'd do, but she would find a way, train harder, fight faster, she would certainly find a way. She had come back for a reason, it was her destiny to, and her destiny now was to hurt those that had hurt the ones she cared for.
The closer she got to the Western side of the city the less prevalent the destruction seemed: the buildings here weren't as overgrown, fewer automobile corpses jammed the streets, more intact buildings on the whole remained, though, given that this was the Industrial District the place had looked like a warzone long before the Grimm had invaded. And of course that wasn't to say there was no destruction, bloodstains still coated the sidewalks and alleyways, and there were more shattered windows and blown apart doors than intact ones. Collapsed walls and roofs were still common, but less so. She was definitely getting closer to the settlement or base or whatever the inhabitants here would call it.
Even the Grimm that were so common when she first entered the city from Beacon on the East became more scattered and rare. Those she did see were all young and small, none of the older, powerful, and more cautious Grimm were near, which meant she was nearing the threat they so cautiously avoided. That was good, she had made progress, and looking at the sun that was low in the sky she figured she should find a place to rest soon. It wouldn't do well to sneak up on these people at night, especially when she had such a small amount of aura that it probably wouldn't stop any accidental friendly fire.
Scanning from left to right she tried to find a suitable building. In her immediate surroundings there were a total of three buildings that appeared like they wouldn't collapse on her while she slept. Two were warehouses, while the last seemed to be a tenement building. Feeling somewhat partial to having an actual bed again she decided on the tenement.
The lobby floor seemed remarkably intact despite the obvious claw marks and gouges in the wood that indicated where Grimm had made handholds in the wood. The stairs were less untouched, already dilapidated and low quality, the weight and rage of the Grimm had left whole landings missing, breaking through steps on their mad rush to get inside and slaughter. Her tactical side wanted a commanding view of the surrounding area; better to see your enemies before they see you and all that. The top floor would be best for such a view, she decided, leaning over the railing and looking up the tower of stairs as she did so. She certainly had a climb ahead of her, which gave her plenty of time to examine every gouge and bloodstain on the wooden surface. The seventh floor landing seemed particularly brutal, based off the damage it looked like some brave souls had tried to make a last stand, attempting to bar the Grimm from getting to their families. There was no banister left to speak of, and the wood of the landing and that of the hallway she could see was solidly soaked in a coat of dried blood with brittle flakes. She didn't think they lasted long.
The final, ninth floor was her stop. There was surprisingly little damage up here, as well as blood for that matter. The wallpaper was peeling and faded, but that was the fault of the elements not the Grimm. She even went door to door for once, not door frame to door frame. It seemed that most of the people on the top floor had tried to escape the building, and were slaughtered on the floors below or in the streets outside as the floor was almost devoid of blood.
The rooms themselves were pitifully small, as one would expect in a tenement in the Industrial District. Each one was cramped, every nook and cranny was occupied with items or shelves, and almost all of them looked just as they had when she figured their owners had attempted to flee. Some had drawers and cabinets open where they had tried to gather what provisions they had, others had clothes strewn across the floor while still ticking clocks clung to the wall. One even had a smattering of broken glass from what must've been a valuable something or other at one point. She hoped they made it, but the odds of such a thing seemed infinitesimally small.
In almost every room there were pictures and posters, windows to the lives of people she didn't know. Smiling families together dressed in threadbare clothes eminent of their housing, single photos of boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands, wives, and all the others tugged at her. Though it was the photos of the smaller children that tore at her heart the most, almost all of these people had surely died. She hoped that the pictures were from relatives far away or that they were old and the children had had a chance to enjoy their life before it was taken from them, but something told her that wasn't likely.
It was on about the fourth or fifth room that she realized a pattern, every person in the photos was a Faunus. That made sense she supposed, that this tenement would be almost solely occupied by Faunus, society didn't typically give them favorable cards in terms of job opportunities or education, nor did they give them lots of mobility. She wondered if the White Fang considered the Faunus that once lived here to be allies or not, wondered if they saw their gruesome deaths as acceptable losses for their new world order. If any had escaped the slaughter in the tenement, how much more they would be looked down upon for the White Fang's actions in Vale?
The last room was different from the others, that much was obvious from it not having a door. The inside of the room was dyed almost black from all the faded blood that stained the walls and floor, even the ceiling. The furniture was smashed, the walls scarred, and all the windows shattered. It seemed that while everyone else had tried to escape, one family, this family, had stayed behind. Whether they had a choice or not didn't seem to matter. Morbid curiosity took over as she wandered deeper into the room, she wasn't sure what exactly she was looking for, if anything at all, but still she explored.
There was a single photo in the room that wasn't shredded, it was blotched with blood so the right half was covered, but she figured there were about three or so forms on that side from what she could make out. On the left was a woman who appeared to be in her mid forties or so, with antlers erupting from the top of her matted brown hair that was streaked with grey. She smiled at the camera with that mom smile that said she desperately hoped this would be the one photo where everyone had their eyes open and smiles wide, a photo she could save on a shelf. Judging by the fact that she had found it on a shelf it seemed her wish was fulfilled. On her right she gripped the shoulders of two children, one almost rivaling his mother in height, if she counted his larger antlers, protruding through his equally brown and unruly mess of hair.
She wondered absentmindedly if Faunus counted their appendages when it came to height. She thought it would be rude to ask.
He had brown eyes, freckles, a small nose, and a forced smile that said he'd rather be anywhere else than taking a family photo. The other child the mother held before her was much smaller, perhaps only coming up to her waist in height. Her antlers were tiny, budding things, barely visible above the disheveled curls of her brown hair. Her blue eyes were brimming with excitement, and the photo seemed to have caught her mid hop. Her smile was wide and missing a few teeth, and in her arms she clutched a tiny, ragged doll with cat ears that looked ready to fall apart from the years of wear and tear only small children can provide.
Softly, she set the photo back down on the ruined shelf, wondering how many had been here when the Grimm had come; based on the amount of blood it had to have been all of them. She turned to leave the room, but before she could she spied a small ragged lump on the floor. For a brief, horrifying second she thought it may have been left over entrails or bones, but upon closer inspection it was something far more tragic. It was the little girls' doll, lying in the left corner by the door, its cotton fur crusted and dyed black with dried blood. She couldn't even tell what the thing was, it was humanoid, but the blood obscured the face, and the only distinguishing features were two small lumps atop the head, seeing as it belonged to a Faunus it made sense that doll was also made to look like one.
Her hands moved as if she were handling fire dust as she went to pick the delicate thing up. It stuck to the floor at first, and for a second the blood refused to yield, before giving in a shower of flakes that chipped and floated off. She didn't know why, but it felt wrong to leave the thing in this tomb. Careful not to tear off one of the fragile limbs, she tucked it into her sash and rushed out as quickly as she could from the tiny slaughterhouse.
Making her way to the opposite side of the floor she found the room furthest away from the tomb and collapsed on the nearest bed after slamming the door shut behind her. She sobbed. She sobbed for the little girl who couldn't have been older than nine before she was disemboweled and eaten by Grimm, she sobbed for the boy who didn't look older than her friends, she sobbed for the mother who knew her children would die and could do nothing to save them, she sobbed for the three unknown forms covered in blood who had died in there too. She sobbed for the ones who fought on the landing, she sobbed for those who died in the streets, she sobbed for herself, and for the redheaded girl with the pink bow that she knew she had done something terrible to.
Slowly her throat began to unclench, her breaths steadied, and her once taut muscles loosened. Wearily unscrewing her eyes she glanced out the window, and the blackness of the sky told her it must be night by now. She didn't know how long she cried for, and didn't really care. When her emotions finally released her and her mind returned she found herself searching the peeling white paint of the ceiling, trying to find the sweet release of sleep, but all she could see were the empty silhouettes of those that had died.
She didn't remember falling asleep, nor did she remember any dreams she may have had in the night. The light filtering in from the window that just cresting the buildings and the brilliant orange of the morning sky told her it was early. But it wasn't the early morning beams of the sun that had so quickly woken her and placed her instinctively on edge, no, it was the screech of steel on bone, the howling of Grimm in pain, and the stern shouts of command coming from below her in the tenement.
Someone was here, and they were fighting.
Immediately she leapt from the bed, her heart was screaming in joy, but her mind was on edge. There were people here, and her heart said that was good, fantastic even, she had been making her way towards the only evidence of living people in Vale she could find for a day now. Her mind was more hesitant, she would've liked to have seen the people she was approaching before she interacted with them, preferably from far away where they couldn't see her, she couldn't risk running into White Fang without her weapons, semblance, or aura to rely on. The sounds of battle died slowly beneath her and were replaced with the distant thudding of feet as they made their way up the stairs.
"I don't think this building has anything in it Doctor, are you sure it's worth our time?" That voice...she knew that voice. She wasn't sure from where or why, but she was certain she had heard it somewhere before. And...well it made her angry. Something about that voice stirred up anger and annoyance within her, nothing on the level of the raven haired woman, but she definitely didn't like whoever it was ascending the stairs.
"Now, now, Mr. Winchester, I think you'll find that sometimes the rarest treasures lay in the most unlikely of places, come come now! We haven't got all day, have we?" Another voice spoke.
Winchester! Her mind reeled as she processed the name, a face appearing before her with a stereotypical heroically square jawline, deep purple-blue eyes and a cruel smile. She didn't like this Winchester fellow, though the exact memories of why were still infuriatingly fuzzy and out of reach. And the other voice, the jumbled and rambling one, she knew that one as well! Dust, where had she heard it before?! She remembered an immense respect, but also mild frustration and slight boredom. Who were these people?!
"Looks like some of them tried to make a stand here, poor bastards." That was Winchester again, what did he-the seventh floor landing! They were only two floors below her! What did she do? She couldn't very well jump out the ninth floor window, but nor could she descend down the stairs, the people in the building with her were fighters, that much she knew from when she had woken up. and there must've been five of them, she remembered a team having four people, plus whoever was accompanying them with the frustratingly out of reach voice. Five on one was not good odds, but if she knew these people, and her mind told her she did, then she shouldn't have to fight them, right? What was the risk of saying hello?
"Mr. Winchester if you would take your team and search the top floor, I will be one below on the eighth, and do call me if you find something interesting this time." She froze, well looks like her mind had been made up for her on that front. The only question was how to greet them: she couldn't hide, she'd never been good at stealth like the black haired Faunus girl or the green clothed boy. She was a warri-wait. Where did that come from?! How did she remember they were good at stealth? And how did she remember the black haired girl was a Faunus? No no no, please don't fade I need to know more, what were your names?! Her mind was reeling from the overflow of information, thinking she might fall over she gripped the doorframe of her room and leaned against it heavily while clutching her head. It was because of this mental turmoil that she didn't hear the sounds of footsteps crest the landing, nor the sound of them making their way down the left side of the floor's hallway and directly to her room at the end of the hall. She didn't hear them freeze upon seeing her, or the startled and shaken gasps they loosed. In fact, the only thing that shocked her back to reality was their shouting.
"What on Remnant is that?!" She jolted upright at the sound of the unfamiliar voice so uncomfortably close to her; two boys were no more than twenty feet down the hallway, the other two must've been searching the rooms at the opposite end of the hall. The two near her were Winchester and one of his teammates with a trimmed short Mohawk. Winchester's face was different from her memories though, his hair was no longer neatly trimmed short but instead somewhat overgrown and frazzled, he had the beginnings of a beard clinging to his face in a five-o-clock-shadow sort of way. But most different of all was that the gleam of cruelty she had remembered in his eyes was gone, replaced with a deep regret and no small amount of fury. That fury grew larger as he stared at her, though exactly why she couldn't comprehend. She knew they weren't on the best of terms but this...this was hate.
"Doctor Oobleck," Winchester shouted as he drew his mace, "We found something you'll want to see."
A/N: And we've met our first person, errr…people, group, what have you! Four chapters in and we finally get some actual dialogue, about time, huh?
I'm uploading this a day early because I'm road-tripping down to see family tomorrow and don't exactly trust in my ability to proofread/upload after that.
Only one chapter away from the (admittedly quite obvious) twist! (I guess "reveal" or "confirmation" would be more apt that "twist") I bet the majority of you already know it's coming, but hopefully it's delivery will make up for my heavy-handed foreshadowing and hinting.
Finished Chapter Eleven two days ago and am now halfway through Chapter Twelve, but the two sort of go hand in hand. When I release 11 I'll probably have to update the rating; detailing the disemboweling of Grimm is all well and good, but I don't feel comfortable describing those same things happening to humans on a T rating. Do tell me whether or not you agree with that however.
In other news we're a little beneath halfway through our first arc, not in wordcount, but in chapter numbers. Chapter 9 is the end of our first "arc" as it were.
That's all for today boys, girls, and Zenyatta, have a good one!