No Such Thing as Destiny
Chapter Five
The Beginning of the End
Weiss stepped out into the night air for a moment of privacy, and as usually happened whenever she wanted time to herself, someone came to join her.
"Hey, Weiss," Yang said. "What's up?"
"Good evening, Yang. You look like you're enjoying yourself." Which was true. Everyone else seemed to have ups and downs, but Yang coasted on a perpetual high, which was completely unfair in Weiss' book.
"What can I say? People have finished showing up. Anyone who gets here now can find the punch bowl on their own." She fell silent, and for a moment the only sound was the muffled music from inside the dance hall, which grew louder when Blake opened the door.
"Hey, guys," she said. "Are we meeting here or just … happening here?"
Yang laughed. "Oh, we are happening! How about you? Was Sun getting too hands-on for the slow songs?"
Blake looked away. "No. I just—just wanted to see how you were doing."
"Well if he does, you can always use that Planet of the Apes quote on him."
Blake gave her a flat look. "Do you not know how offensive that is, or do you just not care?"
"Hey, it's only offensive if I say it. You can say whatever you want. It's like how only Weiss can make fun of rich snobs."
"Anyone can make fun of rich snobs," Weiss said. "No one cares what we think."
"Well, whatever," Blake said. "Sun had to talk to Neptune about his crippling social anxieties, so I came out to check on you guys."
"Sun has social anxieties?" Weiss said.
"No, Neptune," Blake said. "Or something like that. I was trying really hard not to eavesdrop, which is why I came out here. Where's Ruby? I haven't seen her inside for a while now."
"To be fair," Yang said, "you were pretty distracted, what with Sun not being hands-on enough."
"I never said that," Blake said.
"She ran off with some ginger girl a while ago," Weiss said. "Snuck out through the bathroom window."
"Really?" Yang said. "Well, good for her! Never thought she'd actually do it."
"Wait, why'd she go out through the window?" Blake said. "The doors aren't guarded."
Yang rolled her eyes. "Because it's fun. Really, I feel like we're the only two people on the team who know how to have fun without being forced into it. She wasn't really getting into the fancy dance party and I was starting to get worried about her, but you know what? I wouldn't be surprised if Ruby ends up having more fun than all of us put together."
Just then, a beam of green light burst out of the tallest tower in the city and disappeared into the skyline.
"Well," Yang said after a moment. "What did I tell you?"
"Let's not jump to conclusions," Weiss said. "We have no evidence to suggest that Ruby had anything to do with that. It might be completely unrelated." She saw her teammates pulling out their scrolls to call down their lockers. "Okay, so I have hope," she said, following suit. "Is that so wrong?"
WWW
Ruby knew they had no chance of beating Cinder to the top of the tower if they took the elevator, so she went with her plan B, where she and Penny ascended with style. She grabbed onto her friend, who shot her swords into the side of the building, and they climbed the CCT like a giant, ten-legged spider with swords for hands, wires for legs, and a pair of aspiring Huntresses for a body. Alright, so maybe that wasn't the best analogy, but it was awesome.
They crashed through the window of the final floor of the Communications Tower, and found … nothing. No Cinder, no evil plot, not even an evil night janitor.
Perfect.
According to the flashing light on the wall, the elevator was coming up to this floor, and either a supervillain was coming to take part in a malevolent scheme, or Ruby was about to get in a whole lot of trouble. Trespassing, breaking and entering, corrupting Remnant's first synthetic person … that was worth at least a detention. She might even get expelled for it, ending her future as a Huntress.
But if she let Cinder have her way, everyone's future was going to end. And to risk hers for theirs, that was what being a Huntress was all about, right? So she aimed Crescent Rose at the elevator doors, and did the most Huntress-y thing she could think of.
"Ready your laser cannon, Penny," she said, "and when Cinder opens those doors, hit her with everything you've got."
"Confirmed. How will I recognize the objective?"
"I'll tell you."
She took a deep breath and waited. This has got to be the slowest elevator ever! "Hey, can I ask you something?"
"Of course, friend Ruby."
"Why did you come with me? Is it just because you're my friend and I asked you to, or do you really believe me?"
Penny tilted her head. "I do not understand the question. Because you are my friend, I came when you asked me for help, and because you are my friend I believe you." Penny turned to her, while Ruby stared straight ahead. "Ruby? Is something wrong?"
"I-I'm fine," Ruby said. "Let's … let's just do this thing."
Ding!
The elevator arrived, opening to reveal someone Ruby barely knew, but focused on with predatory intensity. Long black hair, a black mask, a skintight black suit, burning yellow eyes—this was the woman who broke the future.
On behalf of said future, Ruby Rose had something to say.
"Kill her!" she shouted. "Kill her with lasers!"
Cinder had one moment to look surprised before green light engulfed her. It was possibly the single most beautiful image Ruby had ever seen.
WWW
He saw a beam of green shoot out from the top floor of the Communications Tower and disappear over the horizon. It was a signal, of a sort. No, not a signal. A beacon.
He sipped his coffee.
He was not a fighter. He was not even a commander, so his pieces didn't need him to hand out orders. He was a teacher, and he taught his students everything they knew, so he knew everything they would do.
His knight was gone, stuck in a distant corner of the board, unable to act in any way that mattered. His rook would act immediately and predictably, but rooks shone in the end game, when the board was uncluttered. His bishop was present too, but she was a protective, restorative force, and would let the flame escape if it meant leaving the school unburned.
Not a terrible conclusion, he mused, but could he do better than preserve the status quo? What could his pawns do? His enemies would have studied every major piece he had and found some way to counter them, but his pawns? Their greatest strength was that they were unimportant, not worth noticing. They were wild cards, each one, and only they could break the perfect plan. He knew them by name, and he knew what they would try and exactly where they would fail.
He considered his options, the possibilities, and the eventual outcomes. He sipped his coffee, and he made his move.
WWW
The hole in the wall glowed with molten metal, dripping like blood, open to the empty night. Ruby watched, feeling … disappointed. It was ridiculous, but true. Could it really be this easy? Just a sucker punch with a laser cannon, and the future was saved?
She heard a crash, as the elevator hit the floor at the bottom of shaft. Then there was the woman, still alive, standing before the night and watching with an eye on fire.
Cinder pulled herself through the cramped space and into the room before Penny could shoot again. Ruby smiled. Of course it wasn't over yet. This was her dance, and the music had barely started. She collapsed Crescent Rose into its rifle mode and fired shot after shot at Cinder while circling around her at a distance.
Penny joined the fight, sending her swords spinning, homing in on Cinder no matter how many times she dodged—and dodge Cinder did. She didn't attack at first. Instead she moved, as graceful and elusive as a dream, weaving through Penny's swords and blocking Ruby's rounds with the palm of her hand.
Ruby watched Cinder focused entirely on defense, and thought she was winning. That was the price she paid for spending her life fighting Grimm. Grimm fought by instinct, attacking with everything they had when they chose to attack at all. They were soulless, yes, but they were without guile. Humans were far more treacherous, and Ruby didn't realize that Cinder was merely testing their abilities until she turned the tables on them.
She bolted, running between Ruby and Penny so Ruby couldn't fire without hitting her friend. Then Cinder formed an obsidian glass bow out of Dust, and aimed at Penny.
"Look out!" Ruby shouted. "Her arrows explode!"
Penny brought her swords back in front of her to block the arrows, and the explosion scattered them to the edges of the room. In a moment, she would yank them out of the walls they had embedded themselves in, but during that moment, she was defenseless.
But, like Yang always said, the best defense was the Leeroy Jenkins Gambit. "Die, Cinder!" Ruby screamed and charged, her scythe swinging. Ranged attacks were safer, but her high-caliber rifle rounds barely served to distract her opponent.
Crescent Rose slashed faster than the eye could see, but instead of jumping back, Cinder stepped forward with inhuman grace, past her scythe's threat zone. An obsidian scimitar appeared in her hand, pressed against the haft, and stopped Crescent Rose dead in mid-swing.
"Cinder?" she said. "What gave me away?"
Oh, right, Ruby hadn't used her name before, and Cinder was still wearing a mask. She tried to pull away, but her scythe was still hooked around Cinder's scimitar, and her struggles were about as effective as armwrestling with Yang. "Um, would you believe me if I told you I was from the future?"
"No, I can't say that I would."
"Yeah, no one does." Ruby pulled the trigger and fired a gravity round. It missed, of course, but the force of the recoil broke through Cinder's defenses, cutting her in half just like Ruby had done with Grimm a hundred times before. At least, that was what was supposed to have happened. Instead, the shot rang out and Cinder didn't budge. Strength aside, the recoil should have overcome their total weight and slid them across the floor, but Cinder just stood there like Weiss when she combined her Semblance with Gravity Dust.
"Did Qrow tell you?" Cinder asked, with casual indifference. "Has that little black bird been singing stories about me?"
Ruby blinked. "Idiot!"
"Excuse me?"
"Uncle Qrow should have been, like, the fourth person I told, but I didn't even think of him! And he might even have believed me, too! What is wrong with me?"
"I have no idea."
Penny was ready and was even charging her laser cannon, but couldn't attack Cinder without putting Ruby in danger. "While we're stuck in this stalemate, there's something that I've always wanted to ask you about—Penny, now!"
At that moment, Ruby violated all of her training, instincts, and common sense, and let go of her scythe. She activated her Semblance and fled in a current of rose petals, leaving Cinder to be once more engulfed in Penny's green light.
WWW
Yang reached the CCT, knowing that Ruby was involved with whatever was going on, getting into trouble, and leaving her out of all the fun. Well, Yang couldn't do anything about the first two, but there was no way she was going to let the last one slide.
"Yang, stop!" Blake called out behind her.
"What?"
"Body," she said, pointing at the floor.
Yang looked down and jumped. There was a man in a security uniform lying down right in front of her. She hadn't even seen him! Sure, Blake's catvision was good for more than reading smutty ninja stories at night with the lights off, but still.
"Is he dead?" Yang asked.
Blake knelt down next to the guard. "He's still breathing."
"Good. We'll come back for him later." Yang took off at a run for the front door of the tower.
"Careful!" Blake said, following her. "You can't just charge in like—"
Yang stopped dead in her tracks when she looked inside the building, and Blake nearly crashed into her. "Holy … crap. There are a lot of dead bodies here." All over the ground floor, men in helmets and body armor lay unmoving.
Blake unsheathed and unfolded Gambol Shroud and crept around Yang. She had a prowling way of walking, and her eyes darted in every direction as she reached the closest of the fallen guards.
"No, worse," she said. "They're alive."
"Oh, aren't you just a little bag of sunshine."
She rolled her eyes. "Think about it. Do you have any idea how hard it is to knock someone out without killing them, or even injuring them?"
Yang shrugged. "We both know you take your homework more seriously than I do."
Blake gave her a flat look. "Yeah. Let's just pretend I learned this in class. Look, if you hit someone too hard, then you break through their Aura and end up breaking something else too. If you're more careful, you won't hurt them, but you'll give them time to, I don't know, sound the alarm, and if you're too gradual they'll keep standing anyway. If you want to knock them out like this, you have to tear through their Aura so quickly they go into shock, and whoever came through here did that over twenty times. So yes, Yang, this is worse."
And whoever did that was probably on the top floor, and Ruby was fighting all by herself. One of these days, little sister, you're gonna learn to share.
Weiss took that moment to catch up to them. "I hope I didn't miss anything," she said, stepping around an unconscious guard. "I figured Yang would charge into the battle without thinking and Blake would try to do everything by herself, so I decided to bring some friends."
"Hey, girls!" Sun said, coming in through the doorway. The tie he had been wearing during the dance was tied around his head like a bandana. "Blake, did you ditch me to go pick another fight with organized crime? Because I'm hurt."
"Hello ladies," Neptune said. "Is this where the party's headed? Because I have to say, you people really know how to set it up."
More people, classmates and students from other schools, squeezed in through the front door in their formal suits and gowns, weapons on hand. No teachers, though. Good. Yang didn't have time for the "It's too dangerous for you!" speech.
"Alright, boys and girls, listen up!" she said. "There are bad guys messing around on the top floor, and it's up to us to stop them. If you're afraid of getting hurt, stay out of the way because the rest of us are going up there to punch evil in the face!" With that, she slammed her hand against the elevator button.
"It's out of order," Weiss said.
"It's … what?"
"The elevator. It's out of order. Trust me, I came here just last week. When you hit the button, it's supposed to light up and go 'ding.' It didn't do either of those things."
So much for her dramatic exit. I can't have anything tonight, can I? She turned around and poked the button furiously. "Ding, dang it!"
"If it's broken, getting angry at it won't fix anything."
Yang gritted her teeth, pried the elevator doors open, and peered inside. A pile of wreckage lay about two floors beneath her. "Well what do you know, it is out of order."
"Please never pursue a career in medicine."
"Okay, new plan! We're going to take the stairs up to the top, and then punch evil in the face."
Weiss looked at her in shock. "Do you have any idea how tall the CCT is?"
Yang shrugged. "A little exercise never hurt anyone with low blood pressure." And running shoes. She pulled off her heels.
"Forty-four. There are forty-four floors in the Communications Tower."
"I'm not going to ask you how you know that."
"I was here last week! And there's a floor plan on the wall," she added, pointing.
"Then we better get started!"
"Wait!" someone else said. She had tan skin, green hair, and red eyes. Yang didn't know her. "The first thing we should do is get the injured to safety."
Yang glanced down at the guards. "They're safe where they are."
"Yeah, but for how long?" the green-haired girl said. "Am I the only one who saw the explosions upstairs? If that terrorist attack or whatever this is brings the building down, these people aren't going to wake up."
"She's right," Pyrrha said. "Our first priority as Huntresses is always to protect those who cannot protect themselves."
"Right!" Jaune said. "Be careful moving the bodies. Anyone who doesn't know first aid, grab someone who does. I'll call an ambulance, just in case they haven't seen this from the other side of Vale."
And like that, Yang had lost them. The other students started gathering around the fallen, and Yang punched a hole through the wall in frustration.
"Yang," Blake said softly. "That girl Ruby ran off with, Weiss called her ginger. Was she the same one who was with her that night at the docks with Torchwick and the White Fang?"
Yang snapped her fingers. "I knew I've seen her before! What was her name? Pepper? Pepsi? Penny!"
Blake nodded. "I recognized the laser."
"The … laser?"
She nodded again. "Her weapon shoots lasers. She took out the entire group of White Fang and several Bullheads before Ruby had time to join the fight."
"Before she had time to join the fight?" Yang repeated. She remembered that night, and she remembered the weirdo that had started tagging along, but she and Weiss had arrived too late for the action. "I know how fast she is, Blake. She doesn't take time to join a fight."
Blake nodded a third time. "If they're still together, I don't think Ruby needs any backup."
Yang weighed her options. "Logically I know you're right and I shouldn't worry, but screw logic, I'm going anyway."
"Figures. I'm going to stay down here and keep an eye on things. Something seems off about all this."
Yang grinned. "Yeah, you just don't want to charge up forty flights of stairs with me."
"Don't take it personally. I don't want to charge up forty flights of stairs with anyone."
She laughed and kicked open the door to the stairwell. Oh, man this is going to take forever. Why couldn't you have picked a fight in the park like everyone else?
After a few stories, she heard someone coming up behind her. Blake? Weiss? No, it was some guy, silver hair. Yang recognized him as the Mistral boy who got his butt handed to him by her little sister. Mario or something.
"Hey Blondie," he said. "So I have the bedside manner of a grumpy undertaker and I could use some exercise. What's the plan?"
Yang grinned. "The plan is that we're going to get some exercise and beat someone up. You in?"
"Sure thing. Lead the way."
WWW
The force of Penny's lasers didn't cut through Cinder or knock her down, but it pushed her back. That stopped when the floor exploded, throwing Penny into the ceiling.
Cinder took a deep breath, and the heat—either from Penny's attack or her own anger—warped the air around her. When she looked at Ruby, Ruby saw that her right eye was wreathed in flame.
"If you already know who I am," she said, her eye on fire, "then I have no more reason to keep secrets."
Ruby swallowed. "Um, I didn't know you could do that."
"Then we simply cannot wait to get to know each other much more closely. First, though, I have to incinerate someone." Her black clothes burned orange like glowing embers, and the floor beneath where Penny had landed did too.
"Look out!" Ruby shouted, but it was too late. The explosion knocked Penny into the ceiling again, which also exploded, bouncing the girl around the room like a human pinball. Cinder launched herself into the fray, and in a flash of obsidian against steel, it was all over.
In the beginning, the room had been full of organized rows of desks, stools, and computer hardware. In less than two minutes, any semblance of order had been buried under a mess of broken furniture and exposed wires. Joining that wreckage were ten sword with cut strings and a severed robotic arm.
Even cut off from Penny's body, that arm still twitched, as though reaching for a promise that Ruby could no longer fulfill, and she realized just how outmatched she was. She had believed that fighting Cinder two against one would be a fair fight, and getting the jump on her would give Ruby a solid advantage, but Cinder wasn't just twice as strong as her; she was a whole team all by herself.
Cinder moved with Weiss' practiced grace, and landed each strike with her precision and Yang's sheer power. When compounded with Blake's cunning and Ruby's natural skill, then Ruby wasn't fighting another Huntress or even a fairytale monster. She was fighting RWBY, and that was a fight she knew she could not win.
But she picked her scythe up one last time, because that did not matter. She had known her whole life that Huntresses didn't get fairytale endings. They got Huntress endings.
Thus kindly I scatter.
She folded Crescent Rose into a rifle and burst into motion, running up the wall while shooting at Cinder in a rhythm of thunderous fire and mechanical reloads. She unfolded it again into a scythe and pulled the trigger once more to send her into a spin that came crashing down on her enemy.
Cinder caught the blade by the tip. Ruby might as well as attacked her with a butter knife.
"Where's all this violence coming from?" Cinder asked, her voice silk. "I only want—to talk!" With that, she slammed the palm of her hand into Ruby's chest and sent her flying through the air and crashing into the wall. It felt like being hit by Yang, if Yang ever stopped holding back while sparring with her.
Her vision blurred, and when she regained focus, she saw Cinder walking towards her with the graceful swagger of a runway model. "So, Ruby, let's talk."
WWW
Blake never understood how some people could trust instinctively. Maybe they really were as honest and as straightforward as they pretended to be. Maybe they had never met anyone who wasn't.
Neither applied to her. Instead, she had a healthy distrust for authority, which led her to go snooping around to see what Beacon's esteemed faculty was doing during the attack.
She found soldiers. Lots and lots of soldiers, all wearing Atlas military uniforms. They arrived in trucks and ran around like a hornets' nest. It wasn't until she reached the middle that she found someone she recognized.
"Ozpin didn't answer his scroll," Glynda Goodwitch said, "but I left a message telling him how one of your students decided to start blowing up public property."
"As I said, Atlas will pay for any and all damages done to the CCT," General Ironwood said. Goodwitch and Ironwood. Blake had seen them dancing together earlier. "We've built it before, and we can rebuild it."
Goodwitch crossed her arms. "Now, I don't mean to criticize because I know how a single student can reflect poorly on her entire school, but you told me that Miss Polendina was your best."
"At combat," Ironwood said, his hands flying across the buttons of a holoscreen in front of him. "Penny's real world experience is severely lacking, so it's possible that the stress got to her and … ah ha! We have visual!"
So Blake was right. It was Penny up there. Ironwood's holoscreen flickered to life, and if Blake had been directly in front of them or behind them, she could have seen what they were looking at. Instead, she had to make her way around them while trying to look like she wasn't spying.
"Do have all your students bugged, James?" Goodwitch asked. "Or just this one?"
"Just this one. Like I said, she's inexperienced, and there were some concerns about her psychological fortitude, so her father insisted."
As Blake edged closer, she managed to catch an image of Ruby on the holoscreen. The view shook and static flared, but it was her. Blake didn't know if she should be glad that she found her, worried that she was, once again, in the middle of everything, or amused that Ruby had found time to trade her heels for boots and was wearing her red hood over her formal dress.
She didn't recognize the masked woman with the flaming eye Ruby was fighting, but she could take care of herself, and if Penny was helping her instead of lacking "psychological fortitude," then she'd be fine.
Goodwitch and Ironwood, however, fell silent. Blake couldn't see their faces from her angle, but their already stiff postures stiffened even more. Then the camera shook too much to follow, briefly turned off entirely, and ended up pointed at the ceiling.
"That's her," Ironwood whispered. "What is she doing here?" He began barking orders into a radio. "This is General Ironwood. Call back all active personnel, and wake up the rest. Double the perimeter around the CCT, and bring in some anti-air just in case. I don't care who they are, no one gets out of the CCT unless I say so."
"Establishing martial law already, James?" Goodwitch asked.
Ironwood clicked off the radio. "Am I overreacting?"
Goodwitch shook her head. "Just the opposite. She's going to cut through your men and machines like butter. Still, that's your responsibility, not mine. Mine's trying to get herself killed fighting a pseudo-mythological being, and I need to get her out of trouble."
Ironwood nodded. "I suppose an airstrike was out of the question from the start. Good luck."
Goodwitch started to leave, but stopped and pulled out her scroll. "Ozpin! Perfect timing. We just found the one who took out Autumn. I was just on my way to … what? You can't be serious, sir."
She fell silent, staring at her scroll. Blake couldn't see the screen from her angle, but with two sets of ears she should have been able to hear the other side of the conversation. Instead, there was nothing.
"I have to agree with Glynda on this, Ozpin," Ironwood said. "I don't know if this is a trap or just the enemy being sloppy, but it's a situation we can't ignore."
Again, silence. Were they wearing earpieces? Blake couldn't see any, but it made sense if they were discussing sensitive information. Still, how could Ironwood hear if the Headmaster had only called Glynda?
"Don't lecture me about the bigger picture!" Goodwitch snapped. "One of my students is up there in that mess! Do you think her family's going to care about the bigger picture when we send her home in a box?"
Another pause.
Goodwitch let out a sigh. "Understood." She put her scroll away, and for a moment neither spoke. "He's never led us astray before."
"I still don't like this."
"Of course not. You want to blow something up."
Ironwood stood straight and folded his arms behind his back. Military posture with extra military. "I'd rather regret a mistake than do nothing when I could have helped."
"Still, it's better to make no mistakes at all."
"But he's made more mistakes than either of us, by his own account."
"But he's had more time to make them." She fell silent for a moment. "Still, I agree with you, James. I don't like this either."
That didn't lead either of them to stage a rescue, though. As Beacon's Headmaster, Ozpin was Goodwitch's immediate superior, but it sounded like Ironwood paid him the same respect, and they were supposedly equals.
Blake didn't understand half of what was going on, and the other half made her stomach clench. Goodwitch seemed to assume Ruby was going to die, but she wasn't going to do anything to stop it. Blake considered joining Yang, but she decided against it. Information was what she needed now, and she was exactly where she needed to be.
Still, one girl within hearing of Atlas' general was suspicious. Two people, ironically, would be less suspicious, and a crowd would be nearly invisible. She considered calling Sun, but subtlety was not one of his strengths. Fortunately, there was someone nearby, a girl with green hair with her head in her hands sitting on the concrete, and Blake approached her.
She was from Mistral, Blake remembered. Emerald. She had suggested moving the injured to safety when Yang wanted to storm the tower. Her teammate, Mercury, had gone with Yang, which explained why Emerald was out here, eavesdropping on the people in charge.
Blake sat down next to her and pretended to be a naturally social person. Emerald, though, didn't respond. For a moment Blake thought that the girl was sobbing, but her breathing was too steady.
She sent a text to Weiss explaining what she had heard before speaking to Emerald. "Are you okay?"
She didn't respond, and Blake realized that Emerald's breathing wasn't just steady, it was controlled. Yang breathed like that right before she screamed. Blake put a hand on her shoulder, and Emerald lashed out at her, eyes blazing red.
But her eyes were always red, so that meant nothing. "S-sorry," Emerald said. "Bad headache."
She looked horrible. A few minutes ago, the girl had been relaxed and in control, even in a bad situation. Now her neck and jaw were taut, her eyes could barely focus, and if she tried to stand up, she'd probably fall over. Blake almost suggested that she leave in one of that ambulances that was on its way, but she knew that being even further from the action wouldn't help.
"Worried about your teammate?"
"Yeah. Not how I wanted to spend the evening."
"I think my teammate prefers it this way."
Emerald smiled weakly. "Mine too. He's always like this, charging into danger, picking fights. He thinks it's fun."
"She doesn't realize how easily people die." She kicked herself mentally for sucking at small talk. This is not how you console people.
Emerald, though, didn't seem bothered. "Yeah."
Blake continued sitting with her, hoping that Goodwitch and Ironwood would give her some good news tonight. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Emerald text a message on her scroll. NO HELP COMING.
WWW
Yang lost track of how many flights of stairs she had climbed. Ten? Twenty? Not forty-four, and that was the only milestone that mattered. She had taken her dancing shoes off before she started and moved silently, but the guy with her—Mercury, she remembered—clanged behind her each time his metal boots hit metal stairs.
She was about to tell him something encouraging along the lines of, "We're almost there," when something crashed down on her shoulder—hard. She crumpled and the stairs broke beneath her, landing on her hands and knees one story down.
Above her, Mercury stared down at her through the gap in the stairs, looking so smug Yang wanted to punch him for that alone.
"You know," Yang said, getting up and readying Ember Celica, "Ruby is a great judge of character. I really should trust her more."
Mercury shrugged. "Yeah, too bad she's dead. You know, assuming she's where you think she is. I wanted to kill her myself, but I'm fine keeping it in the family, and I'm pretty sure the boss doesn't want to be in—"
Yang fired her gauntlets at him, cutting him off. "Interrupted? Yeah, I know I should let you finish monologuing your evil plan first, but I'd much rather pound your face in and let it be a surprise."
WWW
Penny was not dead. She was not dead. Her right arm was gone, and the open circuits screamed at her until the pain sent her into shock. Yes, pain. Her father had designed nearly every robot in Atlas' military, but Penny was the only one he had built to feel pain.
She had asked him about that after she had pricked her finger. She had begged him to make it stop hurting, but Father had smiled the same sad smile he always had and told her no.
I can't, he had said. That would change you, turn you into a thing. You would be nothing more than a series of blueprints and equations like every other weapon I've had to make.
I don't understand. There was little she had understood at that time, only that her father loved her.
There is no one in all of Remnant like you, Penny, my daughter. It is a lonely life I have condemned you to, but if I were to change that, you would not have a life at all. People may call you a machine, but they are wrong. In your design, I have multiplied your sorrows and your joy. You will love deeper and hate more fiercely than anyone you will ever meet, because you must. You must be more human than any human ever born, because you are the first human ever made.
I hope, one day, you will forgive me.
On the other side of the room, she heard Ruby. "Everyone. I told everyone who would listen, and plenty of people who wouldn't. Not a whole lot of them took me seriously, but if I don't come back alive, oh boy, you can bet your flaming eyeball that's gonna change."
Right. They were in a fight. They were losing a fight. Penny didn't know much about friendship, but she had downloaded everything available about combat, and there was one way to win a losing battle.
"What did you tell them?"
"Everything."
Cinder had proven stronger than both of them combined, and Penny's analysis had revealed no exploitable weaknesses. In a fair fight, Cinder would win every time. That meant …
"Everything?"
"I know how you're going to hack all the Atlas robots into attacking everyone and team up with the White Fang. I even memorized your stupid, "Who can you really trust" speech you were going to broadcast before the attack, and I bet you haven't even written that yet!"
Chaos. In a perfectly ordered system, the stronger side won every time, but as chaos increased, the worth of strength decreased while luck took its place. Unbalance the battlefield. Implement disorder. Let probability give way to possibility, and enter a system where there are no plans, only … hope.
In her weakened state, she had no hope for herself, but Ruby though, Ruby had a chance. Penny didn't understand much about friendship, but she liked it so far. Her father hadn't known that a synthetic person would ever make friends, but he had given her a chance, and in the end, that was all that one could do.
Cinder had severed the strings on her swords. Penny wasn't sure why. They were remote controlled and had enough Dust to power them for a much longer fight. At a mental command, her ten untethered weapons floated into the air.
Penny couldn't hope to defeat Cinder. She had hit her twice at full power and Cinder fought on. But the tower was as vulnerable as Penny was. Change the battlefield. Change the system.
Hope.
Penny wouldn't be able to survive the change, but she supposed that friendship wasn't about her anyway.
"Ruby," she said, her voice stronger than she had expected it to be. "I'm going to self destruct. I'm sorry." But she wasn't going to self destruct. She was going to die. She smiled.
"You can self destruct?" Ruby asked. "That is so cool—I mean, Penny, no!"
WWW
A/n So, if you can't tell by the tone, I'm wrapping things up. I actually have an end in mind, which isn't something that happens to a lot of my stories. I couldn't have gotten this far if it weren't for everyone who took a time to leave a review, and especially for Magery for proofreading each chapter before publishing. So … yeah.