A/N: Don't usually do pre-chapter author's comments, but this is special case.
About last chapter...I knew it would be, ah, controversial let's say. That said, I got some good feedback for it, and, as such, I will probably be giving the Lancaster part of Ch. 10 a rewrite, though in what way I'm unsure.
Do let me know if you guys do not or do want that, either way is fine, and I want your honest feedback, all is appreciated!
The diameter of the Goliath's footsteps was just as long as the length of one fingertip to the other when her arms were stretched out horizontally. A grand total of five feet and two inches. She'd measured it many times, not much else to do on the slog to the ocean.
She'd yet to work up the courage to actually talk to the Goliath, part of her hated herself for that, the other was immensely relieved. The thing didn't seem eager to talk to her either, but she got the feeling that was more because it was a Grimm and therefore unused to conversation than anything else. She wasn't sure how far away she was from the ocean, but something told her she wasn't terribly far. The mountains that Vale was nestled in had given way to gentle hills and plains. The ground had begun to flatten out, the air became more humid, mist became more frequent, and she had even seen two seagulls flying above her earlier that day.
She'd guess another week or two of walking and she'd be there. But then what? How was she supposed to cross the Vytal Channel? She couldn't wave down a fisherman or ferry and ask for a ride, one she couldn't speak, and, well, two she looked like a monster. No sane human would welcome her onto their ship, even if she had a million lien on her.
Her mind emptied as she continued to trudge along behind the massive Goliath, avoiding the foot deep footprints it made every time it stepped out of the sheer inconvenience of walking in them. Absentmindedly, she began to study the monster that was her escort.
Not a single inch of its skin was without a scar, be it faded or fresh, every part of its hide that wasn't under plate was scar tissue. Its tusks were a brilliant white that bounced the sun's rays in every direction, they were scarred as well, the left one was even chipped, but that didn't diminish their remarkable hue. Every plate that coated the Grimm's body was decorated with a deep crimson trim that flowed beautifully along as if it had a mind of its own. The thing's ears were almost as large as its head, they were scratched and gouged, easily one of the most heavily scarred parts of its body. Its tail was coated in bone barbs half a foot long each, with it ending in a wicked point at the bottom. Its trunk was much the same, but the front of it was coated with articulated bone plates about three inches thick; it draped down from forty feet up at the base of its skull, and all the way to the ground.
She spoke without thinking.
How old are you? Her rasping ground to a halt when she realized that sound had escaped her mouth. Her feet stopped dead, inches from another massive footprint of the Goliath. The ground shook as the giant thing lumbered on.
In human terms? She grunted affirmingly at the the footprint before her, body locked in place.
I do not know, but I can tell you how many humans I've killed. She swallowed nervously and clinched her fists in anger all in one motion at the words.
How many?
The thing continued forward, but like the way one can hear if someone is smiling when they talk, she understood that the Goliath was happy when it spoke of the lives it stole. Well over a thousand Warriors. Her gauntleted fingers bit into the skin of her palm. About ten thousand Pathetics. Five or six hundred of those were from the fall of the Forest City. She growled unconsciously at its words, her lips pulled back in a snarl she didn't know she was wearing.
The Goliath before her stopped, its head turning slowly to meet her gaze. And that is after I became a Mind, who knows how many I killed in the years I was still Mindless. If Grimm could chuckle then this one was definitely doing so. Does that anger you, New One?
She growled at it. Her head raising to stare balefully into the red depths of the Goliath's own pair. It trumpeted again, their gazes never leaving each other. It should not. Humans are prey, and prey are made to be killed.
A flare of…something in her mind tore her eyes away from the Goliath and towards her left. She didn't know what it was, but it drew focus her towards it. It was like the smell of a fresh baked raspberry pie, or a grand and flowing piece of music, she wanted to be closer to it. Needed to be. But it was neither of those things, it was a sense she'd never felt before, an awareness she'd never had, and it excited her. If she had looked up she would've noticed the Goliath's focus snap briefly to the same direction before locking onto her form, studying her every movement.
The sense was tantalizing, enthralling even, and, without realizing it, she began to sprint towards the source. Branches snapped and leaves crunched as she crashed through the underbrush, crushing grass and bushes underfoot as she drew ever closer to the source. It was so close. She needed to know what it was, needed to see it; her mind rationalized it as a necessary exploration of a new sense, but she was single-minded and animalistic in her instinctual pursuit.
She must've been running for thirty minutes, and all the while the sense had been growing smaller yet, somehow, more intense, more concentrated. She was almost there, almost close enough to see what was teasing her like this when she heard it. A wail. A wail made of pure misery, the embodiment of loss. It tore through the chirping of the birds and the rustle of the wind with abandon, quieting all as its misery overwhelmed the forest around it.
At the same time the sense skyrocketed in its intensity, but then collapsed just as fast as a gunshot silenced the wail. Her feet had stopped, her heart beating calmly as her chest rose and fell steadily. Someone had died. She was sure of it. But who, and why? Snapping herself out of her stupor, she pumped her legs again and barreled through the trees until she was practically on top of the sense. Her footsteps slowed to a stop and she dropped to a crouch, green and red orbs glistening through a break in the shrub that hid her form.
The scene before her was grizzly to say the least, and suddenly the sense, well, made sense. It was negativity that she was drawn to, and the sight before her positively oozed it in waves. A ruined caravan stretched before her on an ancient and overgrown road. Greenery sprouted from the cracks between the worn paving stones, and the tree canopy encircled it from above, forming a tunnel of green and brown punctuated by soft beams of light that sprinkled through the leaves. It would've been beautiful, but the gallons of blood that coated the road ruined the view.
Bodies lay strewn and broken across the road, clutching their intestines or loved ones or both as their lifeblood spread across the beige stone. Splintered wagons formed a line of destruction for five-hundred feet in both directions. Some spewed bodies where the occupants were cut down as they tried to escape, others held boxes and crates; some cracked and leaking while others held firm. Her face moved from one victim to the next, her eyes searching for any sign of life. She ignored the ones who were missing chunks of their skulls, trying to quiet the bile that rose in her throat as she did. Fires raged down the end of the left side of the caravan, and the bodies there were charred and blackened, contrasting greatly with the whiteness of their teeth and bones that she could see through the melted flesh.
Most of the victims seemed to have been killed by bullets or swords, but there were frozen families or smoking corpses here and there that indicated the use of dust.
The smell was the worst part: the scent of burnt popcorn from the charred flesh, coppery and metallic from blood, and the rancid, sewer like smell of punctured bowels that leaked their contents across the flagstones. Vomit and shit and blood and burnt popcorn combined with the smell of burnt ozone and dust from the weapons. It was sickening, but that small part, that darkness within her, felt at ease, even comforted, by the stench.
She wasn't sure if she should be more disgusted with the scene before her or with herself.
Men and women in white uniforms and Grimm masks roamed through the wreckage. Twenty or so were fighting the fires that raged in the back of the caravan, their shouts punctuated by small explosions of dust as the fire ignited containers. Ten roamed up and down the column firing single shots into the skulls of those whose corpses looked "too whole." Fifteen or so others were scavenging through the carts, off loading any boxes that contained dust and carrying them to a point opposite of the tree line she hid in where a small pyramid of crates had begun to form.
The sound of laughter from the front of the column drew her attention, the echoing happiness at such a contrast with the slaughter before her. As carefully as she could, she moved through the treeline and towards the front of the column.
There, five men and five women, all in the same uniform minus the masks, were playing a game. At the very forefront of the column, on the bench of a wrecked wagon lay a human skull, all the flesh had been boiled off, leaving it as white as the plates of her armor. Six of the ten, three women and three men, took turns lobbing shell casings and rocks at the skull in an effort to net them inside. So far none had succeeded. The other four lay off to the right, chatting and chuckling at hushed jokes around a small fire.
"This is bullshit, Amber," a man with a tabby tail shouted as his shell clanked off the upper jaw of the skull and onto the road below. "You have to have rigged this somehow."
"You're just pissy because you can't get it in," a woman with golden dog ears sticking out from her hood retorted. "But what else is new?"
Another shell casing clanked against the skull, this one off the eye socket. Simultaneously, a groan sounded from a woman with three inch canines protruding from the top of her mouth. "I'm wiff Tuna on thif one," she muttered, arms crossed on her chest as she huffed in faux indignation. "You've cheated us all."
"Maybe we do need a bigger one," a large man coated in coarse black hair stated, his voice a deep bass.
"Fine then," Amber sighed, throwing her arms up in resignation towards the sky. "Use your big-ass sword to go grab a bigger head, Dust knows you need it. But I'm not boiling the skin off this one; you get it, you clean it." She pointed a single finger at the much larger man, before stomping over to the skull in mock fury. She picked it up with a delicate touch, pulling it into her chest as she stroked the top. "Don't worry, baby, Momma still loves you." Two others laughed jovially at her antics before the group split up.
Bear Man drew a massive cleaver from his hip as he made a steady pace towards the bodies scattered on the road, scanning their heads and occasionally stopping to examine one. "Tuna" and Teeth moved towards Amber the Skull-Stroker and sat down beside her, the group chatting amicably with one another; Amber even used the skull as puppet, having whole conversations with the thing. The other two moved to the quiet group of four sitting on the side of the road, grunting and sighing as they sat down and rested their legs.
It was bizarre. Every aspect of this scene was utterly and totally bizarre. Pyrrha was full of equal parts rage, disgust, and confusion at the group's actions. How could anyone be so callous, so detached as to use a recent victim's skull as a bucket for a game? How could they have slaughtered all these people and used their bodies for entertainment? And how could they act so...so casual about it?! The more she watched them laugh and joke the more rage began to build inside her body, twisting her stomach and thoughts with darkness. Kill them. Slaughter them. Kill them all.
A beast in her mind clawed at a cage in fury, desperate to be let out and devastate. She was losing herself in her own rage when she heard a sound. A heavy and meaty thwack followed by the clang of metal on stone indicated that Bear Man had found his head. But what followed was unexpected. A soft shriek and the pitter patter of tiny footsteps combined with a despair ridden shout of "Daddy!"
Her eyes, and every pair in the group before her, snapped over to Bear Man. A little girl in torn and stained clothes had collapsed onto the recently beheaded corpse of Bear Man's target. Her eyes were wild and manic, her black, almost sack-like dress was torn and stained with blood, her hair was a deep brown that came down a foot to her tiny waist, and on the top were tiny, brown dog ears tipped with white fur. Her small hands roved desperately over the bleeding stump of her father's neck, trying the staunch the endless stream of lukewarm blood.
Bear Man was the first to recover, snatching the girl up by the scruff of her neck and holding her six feet off the ground and eye to eye as he spoke. "That was your daddy, huh?" The girl waited five seconds, body trembling before she nodded faintly. The man gave a grunt before carrying her back to the now standing group. He dropped the girl roughly on the paving stones, eyeing the rest of the group as he did.
"Her dad was a human." His words were venom, and the girl flinched in response, tiny brown ears laying flat on her head as she attempted to make herself continually smaller.
"That doesn't mean she's a human though," one of the separate four spoke up, this man with short rams horns curling out of his hood. "Look at her ears."
"She's a half-breed. She's not one of us." Teeth spoke up, glaring at Ram. He glared back.
Surprisingly, Amber was the one to mediate the disagreement, turning on Teeth and Bear as she spoke, "She's got ears so she has a right to choose." She turned her head from her perch atop the wagon bench, facing the trembling girl in black. "We're the White Fang," she spoke, the pride dripping from her voice at odds with the scene that surrounded her and the girl that had suffered. "We fight for a better tomorrow for all Faunus, even half-breeds. Do you want to fight with us, little one? Do you want a new family?" Her voice was soft now, gentle in its tone despite the skull in her hands.
At the word "family" the girl's trembling ceased, her eyes hardened and she straightened her back. She stared Amber down with fury alight in her tiny eyes. "You're monsters." Her voice was scratchy and cracking from crying, but her tone was absolute and without fear.
Amber's eyes hardened and she jumped off her perch on the wagon, drawing a utility knife from her belt as she did. "Fine. You want to act like a human," she said, flipping the knife forward in her hand and yanking the girl towards her. "You might as well look the part." She pressed her knife to the base of the girl's left Faunus ear and cut in.
The girl's scream of pain was the last straw for Pyrrha's restraint. The girl was right, these people were monsters, and it was her job as a huntress to kill monsters.
Amber's back was ten feet away from her and facing Pyrrha; without thinking she lunged, the screams of the girl masking her heavy footfalls. Before she knew it she was directly behind Amber. She picked her up by the ears - why shouldn't I kill her- bone gauntlets crushing the delicate skin -it's what she deserves. With a disturbingly satisfying crunch of bone and flesh, Pyrrha's left hand broke through the front of Amber's chest, spraying the ground before them with gore as she speared the woman's lung. She twisted her arm inside the woman, disturbed by the hint of pleasure that blossomed within her at the sound, before pulling upwards with all her might, using her bladed forearm to slice through bone, sinew, and muscle. A wet crunch followed by an eruption of blood heralded the shredding of Amber's left side as Pyrrha's arm tore free. The woman fell to the ground, very much dead. But Pyrrha wasn't done yet.
She brought all her weight down on the woman's skull in a vicious stomp, grunting as she did. Brain matter and bits of skull exploded like shrapnel as the woman's head popped like a grape under the immense pressure.
Pyrrha was furious, she was enraged, every fiber of her body was alight with the fire of animal bloodlust of the kind she'd never felt before. She was vengeance, and she was terrified. But she didn't stop.
The monsters' eyes were wide in fear and shock, some faces even stained with the blood of the woman they'd just then talking to. The skull on the bench seemed to smile in anticipation of its vengeance.
Pyrrha saw red, hot blood dripped down her mask and onto her chest, but that was not the source. Her awareness dimmed as the rage took her mind, and, with a roar embodying every shred of fury she felt, she charged them.
A/N: Ah, Chapter Eleven. This one probably went through more rewrites than any other chapter released so far (only beat by Chapter 12 in fact). A part of me wanted to go all out and super dark and shit, but at the same time, that would be rushing the character (Thanks to MrWizard70 for that feedback). So, I ended up with this, still not super satisfied with it, but I needed to get it out today and just didn't have any extra time.
Funnily enough, the skull game scene was inspired by a scene in With the Old Breed: On Peleilu and Okinawa. A US marine's memoir of the Pacific Front, very good read if I do say so myself. Anyway, there's a scene where the author's squad is using a Japanese skull with the flesh boiled off as a sort of bowl for tossing rocks in. The author is both simultaneously appalled at the callousness, yet also...used to it I guess you could say. It plays a part in the author's realization of how numb war like that will make you, how detached you get from the world, how normal death becomes when most of what you do is kill or watch people you know die around you.
The White Fang v Humanity conflict outlook I'm imagining is much like the Pacific Front, absolutely chalk full of racism on both sides, and no shortage of war crimes either. Though, of course, the Fang, as far as we know, is still a guerilla terrorist faction, not a full fledged Imperial Nation State with an entire society focused on the war effort, so the conflict itself will be very different.
That's all for today folk, have a good one!