Main theme: Let You Down by Dawid Podsiadlo
Chapter Theme: Hope Searching from the New Danganronpa V3 Black soundtrack
Red and purple lines of light streaked through the sky and slammed into the city. Balls of fire and smoke blossomed and bloomed like budding flowers into the evening sky. Thin white dots leading from blunt black cylinders and leaving trails of smoke behind them slammed into the sides and fronts of Bullheads and fighters alike, detonating them in burning explosions and sending them tumbling down into the metropolis below, scattering into flaming rubble and shrapnel and raining down on the people like hot rain. Streams of blue energy and orange artillery were fired from the three massive Atlesian warships up in the air, only to be returned the same barrage of tracer rounds and plasma blasts to themselves, chipping away at their armour and slagging the metal, dripping downwards to the ground like magma erupting from a volcano, with all the flame to boot.
The Second Great War hadn't just come to Mistral: it had kicked in the door and was intent on dragging the kingdom into the conflict kicking and screaming.
A stray round hit one of the mountains holding Haven up as the massive projection of the Grimm's face in the centre of the eye flickered off. Arslan pulled Reese away from the balcony in a flash as the building shook like an earthquake, the lights flickering around them as Haven was rocked to its foundations. Running down the hallways, Reese spared one last look behind her to the balcony outside, only to see it obscured by the ashy black smoke flowing upwards from the mountain
Arslan pulled Reese out of the building and into the courtyard. Above them, a long lance of purple light flew across the sky and skimmed one of the towers aside the academy, cleaving a chunk out of it and sending the mangled tower toppling down into the valleys below.
"Everyone, prepare yourselves!" Arslan shouted to whoever could hear her, "The war has come to Mistral!"
It had been barely a day into the battle, and Reese already felt like she was dead.
"Incoming!"
A flurry of red balls of light, like comets against the second rising sun of the battle, flared down and impacted with the hastily constructed lines of gunners and workers still digging their trenches. Above them, a stream of Vetols passed by overhead, flinging down flyby strafing rounds and missile bombardments with each passing minute. Carriers hovered above and continued to spray tracer rounds over the grounds below. The air was hot and humid, chocked full of ash and soot. Everything smelt of mud and war and death.
Behind the ramshackle lines that were being formed around the edges of the city by the desperate defenders, various anti-air emplacements, fitted around the city by the Atlesians, continued to sing their militant songs, spraying the sky with lines of fire that detonated Carriers like firecrackers and split Vetols in two. What Bullheads and fighters the defenders had were already up in the air, dogfighting with the forces of the Ascendant Court. The sky was awash with a rainbow of violent light, flashing yellows and oranges and reds and whites and blacks. The sounds of explosions and cannon blasts and screams mixed into a thunderous roar that dulled her senses.
Reese looked through the smoke and fire around her, her body dirtied and muddied by muck, and saw something else. A fleet of carrier skirting through the troposphere, reaching down below the firing arch of the AA guns and flying low to the ground. Soon, they dropped to the muddy floor and transformed, shifting into Caterpillar Tanks and disgorging a flood of Grimm soldiers and the like from their innards. Not too far away, dozens of Grimm emerged from sickly black globs of Grimm matter shot into the ground, throwing rounds from guns affixed with bayonets their way. She ducked down under the barrage of bullets and red energy blasts, throwing her hands to her ears to try and block out the thunderous roar.
"Get up!" someone yelled to her, "Get up and-"
The sound of a bullet meeting bone and flesh echoed through the world around her. She looked to the side and suppressed the need to scream as the body of an Atlesian officer with a hole in the side of his head and blood and brain matter splattered all over the muddy floor fell to the ground with a thud.
She scrambled on the ground and threw herself upwards, shifting the two guns in her hands into her Syrinx hoverboard and beginning to fly through the shallow trench, avoiding the flurry of rounds flying this way and that, and through the scrum of bodies, both living and dead, that lined the edges of the city. Fire and smoke obscured her vision. Everything was a blur.
She was trying to find someone. Someone in particular. Someone close to her. Someone that she knew would be of little help in the current battle.
Arslan.
Where was she? Where was she in all of this madness? A bullet clipped her on the back. Her aura took the blow but the impact's force still sent her spinning to the ground with a cry, landing in the thick mud and pulling herself up as her hoverboard landed next to her.
"Reese!" someone cried out, and she felt herself being pulled up onto her feet by a boy her age, her eyes meeting a face half covered by dark red hair.
"Scarlet," Reese breathed out, relief flooding through her. Scarlet had been one of her closest friends outside of Team ARBN back during the scant few months of peace they had in Haven, themselves being the only two gay people in the academy (at least as far as they knew). They had spent much of their time together gushing about their celebrity crushes, gossiping about whatever news they had come across, comforting each other in the trying circumstances they had found themselves in, offering each other a shoulder to cry on as the stresses of the Second Great War piled onto them, or simply just existed around each other in silence, like a planet around its parent star (and sometimes, that was enough for the both of them.)
Reese knew Scarlet as a creature of fickle vanity. He prided himself on maintaining his appearance as much as he did his weapons, a flintlock pistol and cutlass combo that he had named Hook and Darling. She knew that some Hunters were vein about their looks, but he took it to a whole new level. He revelled in drawing as many eyes as he could with his slicked back hair, white and grey ensemble, red jacket over his shoulders like a cape and black tattoos over the parts of his body that he left exposed for all the world to see. He was proud of his complexion, resembling that of a Sky Pirate of the days of old, and he would always go out of his way to flaunt it around wherever and whenever he could.
If he hadn't caught at least ten stares in a single day, then he wasn't putting enough work into his looks as he should be.
Yet now Reese imagined that Scarlet would scream if she showed him a mirror. His hair was messy, no longer swept over his eyes, and his outfit was smeared in mud. He had lost his red jacket cloak, leaving his shoulders exposed, and a trio of long slashes had torn through the front of his shirt. He had lost his cutlass and was firing his flintlock pistol into the scrum of Grimm not too far away from them. One of his earlobes had been torn and blood smattered his chest. A long trail of crimson leaked out from his nose. How had his aura run out?
Overhead, a salvo of mortar shells arched over them from the curtain of weapon emplacements behind them and slammed into the lines of Grimm, killing many of them and sending many more flying into the air. Severed limbs and mangled bodies disintegrated before they even hit the ground. A chorus of vengeful roars erupted from the ranks of Grimm combatants.
"What the hell are you doing over here?" Scarlet loudly asked over the carnage, "You're needed over-" a rattle of artillery fire stopped his sentence, and they turned their bodies to unload their own barrage of bullets back into the enemy. Reese halved her Syrinx hoverboard back into its two revolvers and fired off round after round into the horde until they had run dry, but for every Grimm that they killed, it seemed like a hundred more took their place.
"I know, I know!" Reese cried out. When the battle for Mistral had begun, a couple of Atlesian officers had grouped up the students of Haven into random chunks and sent them off into different parts of the emerging frontline to help wherever she could. She had been lucky enough to be sent off with the rest of her team, but they had been separated during the chaos, and she just needed to know if they were all still alive and okay.
She didn't want to doubt them, but in the midst of all the death around her, she needed to make sure.
She fumbled with her guns, but found that she had run out of bullets for them. She'd been fighting for pretty much a day now. She was surprised that she hadn't run out of bullets sooner, "I just- I need to find Arslan and the others, Bolin and Nadir! I need to make sure that they're okay!"
Above them, a Verity fighter was clipped on its wing and sent barrelling down into the ground below. Its engines erupted into flame as the pilot was splattered against the windshield of the cockpit, colouring it a glossy wet red. Not too far away, an entire column of soldiers and militiamen were cut down by the firepower of what the intelligence reports shared with them by the Atlesians had called a Juggernaut, a hulking humanoid Grimm with gatling guns for hands and arms. Their bodies collapsed back into the trench that they had been firing out of. Their blood coloured the trench an ugly shade of crimson. The battlefield was a abattoir in progress. A slaughterhouse in the making.
For his part, Scarlet didn't lambast her for her actions or desires. He simply cried out, "Well I know less than you do! The last time I saw her was with you when this fight bega-"
He never got to finish his sentence. A red energy blast stretched out from beyond the lip of the trench and made contact with the side of his head.
It burst like a melon.
This time, Reese didn't suppress the need to scream as she was sprayed with a mottle of blood and gore and splintered bone. Some of it got in her mouth, which was washed out by her own vomit. Everything above Scarlet's jawline had been obliterated, leaving severed tendons and ribbons of flesh to drip downwards alongside the flood of blood and flap to the winds before the corpse of her former friend slumped down and hit the muddy ground of the trench with a wet slap.
Reese knelt down into the trench next to the body of her former best friend and began to cry. Her mouth tasted like bile and blood and stomach acid. Everything felt heavy. She felt lethargic, tired to all hell and back. A fly began to buzz around the stump where Scarlet's head used to be. She pushed her head into her own hands to try and scrape away at the blood on her. Her trousers suddenly felt wet and heavy, and an awful smell kicked into the air.
Ah, she'd just pissed and shat herself.
In a blind delirium she worked to uncouple her shoes and kneepads and wriggle out of her soiled trousers. One of her shoes landed on Scarlet's dislocated eyes and smashed it. Clamping her shoes and kneepads back on, she suddenly realised that she was naked from the waist down, her genitalia exposed to the world. It was uncomfortable and she needed to clean herself and she just couldn't help but let out a strangled laugh at the bizarreness of it all, sitting in a trench amidst a battlefield with the dead body of her best friend besides her, ass naked from the waist down at that. She laughed so hard she started to cry.
Scarlet's body began to go cold besides her.
The battle raged on.
Day two of the endless fight was much of the same.
Reese held onto the mounted machine gun as if her life depended on it (which it did), the roaring and jittering bringer of death unleashing its judgement into the enemy as the lines of battle continued to wax and wane. Not too far away, a stray artillery shell impacted the leg of a massive Grimm walker with an underslung arm (of which was referred to as a Snatcher) right in its joint, sending it toppling to the ground and slamming into a trio of advancing Juggernauts, squishing them before the Grimm machine exploded and sent fading shrapnel and burning chunks of rock and earth flying across a wide radius.
Reese ducked down as a wide slab of disintegrating black metal slammed down near her, spraying her in mud and leaving her rubbing her bare side as the battle raged on. She had never had the chance to find a replacement set of trousers, and was now wearing just her kneepads and shoes over her legs. Her hoodie was torn and muddied, and her skin from her face to her ankles was mired in dirt and cuts and an ugly minefield of bruises. She was pretty sure one of her teeth had been cracked and broken. Everything that had been happening over the last day or so had become a blur. Scarlet's death had ceased to be the sole invader of her mind. Now a hundred more corpses with familiar faces had joined them.
The turret blared on. Ribbons of tracer fire continued to fling themselves in every direction. The smell of blood mixed with the smoke. The sun had set and gave way to the night. The flames around them became their new suns.
Behind them the curtain of AA fire continued to hold. The battle in the sky was becoming more desperate for both sides. A Scythe bomber, its back aflame and trailing smoke, kamikazed into a line of mobile APCs/mortar trucks that had been referred to as Invaders, sending them all up in a magnificent fireball. Reese swore that she could hear the screams of all those who died in that explosion over the shockwave of the blast, both man and Grimm.
The battle showed no signs of stopping, and yet there was something happening behind the Grimm lines. Flashes of light. Detonations. Faint traces of gunfire. Someone was attacking the Grimm. But who? Atlesians? The Bandit Confederation? Whoever it was, she hoped that they kicked up their efforts soon enough. They needed all the help that they could get, and the sooner that they could get the Grimm off their backs, the better.
No time for those thoughts, though. Not now. Focus on the fight.
She decompressed the trigger to her emplacement, but there was no response. She'd run out of ammo.
As soon as she realised this, a blast of energy - from a Long-Shot - slammed into the machine gun and split it in two. A spray of shrapnel broke through her aura and embedded themselves into her face. She screamed in pain as she fell to the ground, her left side now caked in mud. Blood trailed from the shrapnel wounds and down her face. She spat out a piece that had gone through her cheek and pulled one out from her lips. One half of her vision had blurred with red. She pulled out the shrapnel that had just barely missed her eye and gone through her eyelid. Over the din of chaos around her she began to pluck out the sharp bits of metal that had made their home in her face, only to be stopped by-
"RAUGH!"
-A Grimm soldier, a Disciple, charging the line and jumping into the trench. Reese barely had enough time to roll to the side as the Disciple morphed its rifle into a sword and stabbed it into the ground, trying to kill her. Reese pulled up her hoverboard from her back (she'd run out of ammo and dust to use it a long time ago) to use as a shield, but the Grimm's sword stabbed through it and cut through the metal. Pulling the sword backwards, the Grimm wretched her hoverboard from her hands and threw it to the side, saying something in its own language and glaring at her.
On one side of the trench, a Baron Grimm had launched itself forward and jumped into the dip, pinning a Huntress in training from Haven that Reese didn't know underneath itself and firing its cannon into her face. It shattered her aura and popped it, right before the Baron picked up the fresh corpse and tossed it into the soldier next to her, before grabbing him by his two arms and ripping them off in a scream and burst of blood. On the other side, a pair of Lashers had breached the line and slashed their barbed whips into the bodies of a pair of militiamen and caught them by their eyes, tearing them to pieces and leaving the two screaming and pawing at their faces as they blindly stumbled around, right before the Lashers bludgeoned their heads in and wrapped their tendrils around their necks, the sharpened edges on them severing their heads from their bodies in a messy spray of flesh and blood.
Above her, the Grimm lifted its sword over its head and let out a shrill roar. Reese's hand clasped around something. A gun. She pulled it out of the hands of the corpse it once belonged to and aimed it up, mud from the weapon dripping onto her face as she pulled the trigger-
{BANG}
-And let it roar in turn. The bullet went right through one of the Grimm's wrists and sent its sword dropping to the ground. It screamed in pain as its hand went limb, smeared with obsidian blood, but it looked down at the girl on the floor with a narrowed eye. Reese pulled the trigger again-
{CLICK}
Fuck. All the mud in it had jammed it.
The Grimm lurched down in anger, but Reese slammed the hammer of her useless gun into its eye - a loud squishy noise, like a grape being popped, accompanying it - and sent the creature tumbling to the ground. The Disciple screamed as it clutched its face, red puss that seemed to be on fire spilling out from between its clawed and bloody fingers. In a blind fit of desperate rage, instead of running from the downed Grimm Reese picked up the smoking sword that the Disciple had been wielding and slammed it down onto it.
The Grimm seemed to be able to see or sense the blade incoming though, as it threw both its hands - the intact one and the limp bloody one - up to catch the sword and stop it from killing it. Despite the runed state of its enlarged eye, burst and liquidated and spewing steaming red puss, it seemed to glare at her with an angry stare as it roared in defiance. Reese bared her teeth and roared one of her own as they wrestled in the fat loam beneath them, twisting the blade in her grip and pushing the sharpened edge into the Grimm's hand.
The blade severed three of the Grimm's fingers on its broken hand and it screamed like a squealing pig. Reese took the opportunity to press the blade forward and through the Disciple's throat. Black blood gushed out of the wound and the six vents in its neck, pooling onto the ground and mixing with the mud, and the Grimm began to gurgle and gag on the flood of its own gore.
And yet it was still fighting back. It pushed Reese onto her back and threw her into the mud. The wet earth splashed beneath her and splattered her skin and clothes. The Grimm, in one last dying act of spite, wrapped what fingers on both its hands it had left and began to try and choke her to death. Reese felt herself gag and splutter for air, right before coiling her hand around the handle of the Grimm's blade and-
{STAB}
-Thrusting it into her attacker's chest.
The Grimm howled in sharp agony, but it didn't stop choking her. Weeping ichor from the Grimm's neck painted her face a shining and smoking black. It was determined, in the face of death. There was something to respect there.
Reese pulled the sword out of the Grimm's chest and stabbed it into its stomach. The Grimm didn't stop. She stabbed it again, then again, then again. Each pierce of the blade pulled out blood and viscera, until it looked like all the organs and entrails and shards of bone in its body were spilling out onto her.
Soon enough, the Grimm's grip in her neck began to lessen. Its body began to smoke and fade. The Disciple let out one last gurgled cry before it toppled limply onto Reese, smothering her in a deep black paint.
With a gasp of strained effort, Reese pushed the fading corpse off her and scrambled to the side of the trench. She leant against it to catch her breath. Her vision was obscured by dark mist as the blood and gore that smothered her faded alongside the corpse. The blade in her hands turned into a wisp of air. A scurry of vermin ran up the end of the trench to feast on a corpse. One of the rats tried to eat at her bare leg, but in a flail of panic she slammed her shoe into its head. It let out a squeal and limped away, dying several paces away from her. It would no doubt sink into the mud some time later.
The night sky above, starry and cloudless, was obscured by smoke and the light of the fires around her. Reese felt tired and sick. Her body was covered in mud and bloody wounds. Her skin was turning pale. She could see stars in her bloody vision. Her ears were ringing. She tried to wipe her face clean, but that only ended up pushing the shrapnel embedded in her face deeper into her skin and bones.
Someone shouted something not too far away from her, "Something's up with the Grimm! They're retreating!" but she couldn't process it. Not yet. They were just words to her at the moment. No cause for celebration. She was still processing everything that had happened to her, her mind lost and wandering in the world around her.
Something hit her with force. She looked down at herself to see a hollowed head staring at her. The head of a soldier, meeting her eyes with an empty, dull gaze. Reese didn't even have the energy to scream. She just skittered away and looked up to what had thrown it.
The Baron from before, staring down at her. A cannon in one hand, a headless corpse in the other. It dropped the body and snarled at her, levelling its cannon to her own head.
All Reese could do in response was raise her hands up in a pathetic last display of self-defence and feebly let out a whimper. The words left her, betraying her need to speak. There was nothing left in her as the Grimm's gun charged up and-
{SLAM}
{CRACK}
A wet crunch of splintering bone. A fist covered in a knuckleduster, charged with a torrent of aura, had smashed itself into the side of the Baron's head. Said head exploded outwards and sprayed red puss and brain matter to the side, popping like a balloon and covering the grounds in smoking black gore. The fading corpse slumped to the ground and turned to a cloud of smoke disappearing into the air.
Reese looked up to her saviour, and saw Arslan looking down at her. Her yukata was torn and covered over with a combat vest that was one size too big for her. Two holes puckered the left side of the armoured vest. Had she been given it previously when the battle was met, or had she plucked it off some poor dead soul? Her hair was dishevelled and her skin was mired with long slashes and red-rimmed wounds. Her body, her hands most of all, were covered in viscera, both black and red. Her knuckles were patchy and raw. Her eyes looked heavy, weighed down by burden. She was heaving in deep breaths as yellow patches of glowing light covered her wounds like indicators for badges of war.
And yet, in Reese's mind, she looked like an angel of war.
Around her, the battle began to die down. The defenders cheered in jubilation, unaware of their flailing comrades that were being dragged away by the Grimm, and refusing to pay attention to the corpses that surrounded them, even if just for a moment. The guns around the city began to fall silent, even as the explosions behind the lines of the Grimm intensified.
All Reese and Arslan could do was stare at each other in shellshocked silence.
"...Where's Nadir and Bolin?" was Reese's eventual question.
Arslan faltered, withered, and then looked away.
"They're... they're gone."
…
No.
No...
Nadir... Bolin...
They were dead?
First Scarlet, and now them...
They were all...
Dead.
Gone.
Dead...
Reese finally broke down in tears as the weight of the last two days' events crashed down onto her, falling into Arslan's arms and staining her shoulders with sickly wails as the dead laid in rest around them.
Day three was silence and rest, spent in repair and recouperation.
Reese stayed by the pale window of the old home they had co-opted to form a temporary field hospital. Her face had been plucked of its embedded shrapnel. Her body had been hastily cleaned of its dirt and filth and her wounds had been drained of infections. Her aura was already sealing up those same wounds as she sat by the cracked window.
No other medical treatment - no bandages, no medicine, nothing at all - had been spared for her. They were to be preserved for those without the gift of aura. Reese couldn't fault anyone for it. People with aura could heal from nonmajor wounds on their own. People without couldn't. Simple logic.
Her wounds were almost healed already. Soon enough, she would be kicked out of the field hospice and sent back out to make room for someone else. She was going to spend that time relaxing as best as she could.
Not thinking though. Thinking would only leave her mind spiralling back to the events of the last two days. The gruelling war that she had fought, the gruesome conditions that she had been put through...
Nadir... Bolin...
Scarlet...
And the Daughter's speech.
Reese looked outside of the window. The city was puckered with war wounds and battle scars. Many buildings had collapsed under the sustained fire of the Grimm's warships and artillery fire, many more were covered in craters and punched in walls, toppled into each other or left to stand as silent monuments, sticking up out of the chaos like sentries watching over all beneath them.
As it turned out, the reason that the Grimm had retreated back during the previous day wasn't because of a sudden Atlesian counterattack like she had hoped (the first time that she had wanted the Atlesians around in a long time), but was because the Bandit Confederation had rallied and were beginning to make their own push onto the Ascendant Court. Reese didn't know why, but she didn't care. Nor did anyone else. All that they knew was that the Confederation had drawn away the Grimm and left them enough time to lick their wounds like wounded pups and recollect themselves, repairing potholes in their walls and resupply their defenders on the front, with fresh ammo and bodies to throw at the Grimm the next time they came to pick a fight.
It should be a moment of brief jubilation, but instead Reese felt a pit of anxiety growing inside her stomach.
The Daughter's speech was still rattling inside her ears. She hadn't heard it broadcast upon transmission, but when the battle had ended and the defenders that were too wounded and tired to keep fighting had retreated into the walls for rest, the transmission had been played out for them by the people inside.
And what it said, from the occupation of Atlas to the attack on all the kingdoms, the Imperium and its fall, Ozpin, and the change of Remnant to Rebirth...
It was all just so much and Reese had no idea what to think about it. Or how to think of it for that matter.
Atlas had fallen to the Grimm?
Mantle was occupied?
The Grimm that they fought, this Ascendant Court, were very real?
Those same Grimm were attacking every kingdom across the globe?
And Headmaster Ozpin from Beacon Academy had something to do with it all?
Reese didn't understand any of it. None of it made sense to her. Everything used to be so simple back before she had gone to Haven, and now... not nothing made sense at all.
Her mind thought back to her friends and family outside of Mistral, from her hometown of Jewel to all the way in Vale. Beacon had been the first to be hit in this war. Not Vale itself, but Beacon. Its children. And no word had got to her about the condition of the outside settlements - the outlying villages and towns past the boundaries of the cities.
DJ... Jaune... are you okay? Is everyone at Jewel okay...?
Her eyes started to grow heavy. Her senses began to dull. Everything felt like it was fading away around her. She wasn't dying, she was just tired. So damn tired.
She looked up at the clock. It was six thirty in the evening. How long had she been awake? Three days. How was that possible? Gods, she needed sleep. She swore she could see Scarlet in the corner of her eye, standing with Nadir and Bolin. The latter two were smiling. Scarlet's bloody jaw was flapping wildly in the space of a lack of an upper head. They were whispering to her, telling her to sleep.
Sleep. Yeah, she'd like that.
She'd like sleep.
Even if.. it was just...
For...
A little...
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
…
"...U..."
"W... k... up..."
"Wake up!"
Reese felt herself being shaken away by what looked like an orderly with pale skin and the blood of others across her sleeves. The woman looked distressed. Her eyes darted to the clock on the wall. Eight forty-five in the morning. She'd been asleep for over twelve hours?!
"What..." was her groggy first words from sleep, "What's going-"
{BOOM}
A loud echo. The windows around her cracked and broke from a sudden violent force. The ground shook like an earthquake.
"It's the Bandit Confederation!" the orderly yelled to her, "They're attacking us!"
Ah, so they hadn't come as saviours.
They'd come as conquerors.
A mortar shell slammed itself into the side of an overhead building, raining rubble and wreckage down onto the streets below.
"Keep moving! Keep moving!" Reese called out as she continued to wave her hand to the other end of the street, guiding panicking civilians down the road to relative safety within the centre of the city, down into the lower layers where the bad men lied in wait. Reese hated the idea of sending these people into the devil's pen, but what other choice was there? It was either the darkness or death. There was no other alternative.
The Bandit Confederation had arrived with force, and had no intention of leaving.
Another blast. A trio of blasts shooting over the walls and landing in the city, right in the roads. People go flying. They die in horrible, painful deaths. Screams. Tears. Everything going wrong.
More people ran past Reese. Someone shoved past her shoulder. A mother carried her wailing new-born baby in her arms, a thick line of blood trickling down her face from a weeping wound. An man stumbled through the crowds, shellshocked and missing an arm. A young teenage boy in a hoodie frantically stole a purse from an old Faunus gentlewoman, disappearing into the crowd before Reese or anyone else could get to her.
"Come on, people, let's keep moving!" not too far away, Sun welded his nunchaku/staff in hand as he pointed people down the road, "Safety lies that way!"
It was a lie, but what else was there to do?
She hissed as another person pushed past her. The jeans that she was now wearing over her legs under her kneepads were a size too small for her and they were chaffing her sides. It was distracting, and she hated it.
Stay focused.
Not too far away, Neptune stood outside a ransacked cocktail bar and handed out whatever water he could scavenge from inside to the fleeing refugees. Arslan and Sun stood in between the gaps in the streets alongside a dozen other people - militiamen, police, Atlesian officers, and even civilian volunteers - and helped to herd them all through the streets. Sage was elsewhere in the city. He and a dozen others had been turned into messengers between the local commanders - Olive Harper and Bram Thornmane (though why the latter was in charge of anything, Reese would never know) - and those on the frontlines when the Ascendant Court - and now the Bandit Confederation - had begun to run interference over their communication lines, making CCT calls not impossible, but difficult.
Reese sucked in a breath. At least they were getting people away from the frontlines and toward some kind of shelter, no matter how poor it was. That had to be good for-
Overhead, an Bullhead covered in Bandit Confederation markings was nailed in one of its engines by an Atlesian missile and began to spiral downwards in a ball of fire and smoke.
Right on top of them.
"Shit!" Reese didn't know who was screaming, "Get down!"
She ducked to the ground, and the burning ship flew so close over her that she could feel the heat of it alone beginning to singe her clothes and burn through her aura.
The burning ship crashed into the street and paved through the crowded funnel of people in it, dividing the masses like a bloody scythe. Blood smothered the floor as people were crushed into pieces by the Bullhead's mass. The messy fiery lump of metal crashed into the abandoned bar, rocked itself in the flaked and shattered wood, and then rested there, lazily tilting to the side.
Reese managed to pick herself up and look to the flaming wreck. It hadn't exploded, but it was close. Parts of its metal hide had peeled off and the wires underneath were sparking. Its left wing engine was slagged and burning. Its right engine was leaking dust and oil onto the ground.
Neptune had been standing there.
"Neptune!" Reese called out over the sound of burning metal and catching wood. She couldn't say that she liked Neptune, but she sure as hell didn't want him to die, "Where are you?! Are you-" then she saw him, "Oh god."
There was Neptune, screaming and weeping on the ground. His clothes were torn and burnt, his skin peeled and bloodied. His face had been mangled by shrapnel, looking as if it had been sliced up by wire, as if his flesh had been garrotted and choked before splitting up into gory chunks. His eyes had been punctured. His left leg had been pulled out of his socket. He laid in the expanding pool of dust and oil, smothering it in his own blood.
The bay door to the Bullhead was pried open, and a bloody man in bandit garb stumbled out. He stumbled and lumbered forward, his skin dripping blood from a million cuts. His eyes were wide and his hands were shaking. The ML-15A carbine that he held in his hands dripped red. He was shellshocked. There was a wedding ring around one of his fingers.
That shock seemed to leave him almost immediately though, as he looked down at the mangled boy beneath him, all the people surrounding him, and snarled.
In an instant- "Don't you dare-" -he pulled the limp and wailing Neptune up to his feet and pressed his carbine to the bloody blue-haired boy's head, "-COME ANY CLOSER!"
Reese, Arslan and the others immediately trained their weapons on the man as Neptune continued to cry in pain in his arms, "Drop him," Sun called out, "Now."
"Fuck you!" the bandit jostled the crying boy in his arms, pressing his gun into Neptune's bloody skull, "Make one move and he dies! I mean it, I fucking mean it!"
"Okay, okay!" Arslan held out her hands in an attempt to calm him, "We won't. We won't move. Just- just put him down, okay?"
"And lose my only leverage? Fuck that."
"Look, just put him down. Please. We'll give you whatever you want and you can just-"
"What I want is to go back home! I- FUCK!" the bandit screamed to himself, "I'm not going back to prison! I'm going back to my riches, to my kids!"
He jostled the body in his arms.
"And I'm taking him with me!"
Sun growled and pointed his staff at him, "Not going to happen," the worst thing that he could say at this moment.
The bandit screamed, "THEN FUCK YOU!" and sent off two rounds from his gun-
{BANG BANG}
-Right into the crowd.
They all screamed as one round went into the head of the shellshocked man, dropping him to the floor and spraying his blood over the crowd. The second went into the chest of the bleeding mother and sent her spiralling down to the floor. The baby in her arms went from crying to wailing, as if it could sense its mother's death.
Reese and the others turned back to the bandit with rage in their eyes, "You've just signed your own death warrant!" Sun roared.
"And you'll sign his if you don't back the fuck up!" the bandit pressed his gun back into Neptune's head. The latter looked like he was mumbling tongues, so delirious, so close to death.
The bandit's feet sloshed in the oil beneath him, mixing with the dust. Next to him, a panel on the broken Bullhead loosened and began to spark.
Reese noticed this, as did everyone else around her, "Hey now, don't-"
"Don't come any closer!" the bandit screeched, "I mean it! I fucking mean it!"
"I-I know, just don't-"
"Don't nothing!"
The panel sparked. Neptune whimpered.
"I'm not going to prison! I'm not going anywhere! I'm going back home-"
The panel sparked.
An ember hit the dust/oil slurry.
"-And I'm-"
"DON'T!"
{BOOM}
The slurry ignited, the Bullhead exploded, and both Neptune and the bandit are consumed.
Reese and the others were thrown back by the force, and Reese was knocked out cold.
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She didn't know how long she was unconscious for, but by the time she had woken up the fire from the Bullhead had spread out to four of the surrounding buildings, including the bar as it was engulfed in flames. She didn't see this at first, though. Her ears were ringing and her vision was blurry. It took two whole minutes for her to regain some sense of control over her senses and return to the world of the living.
Everything around her was hot and burning. Her clothes were ashy and her aura was healing the deep burns that had gone into her skin. Nearby, the corpse of the dead mother had been reduced to a limp slab of cooked meat. Its arms looked like it had been pried open. Not too far away, the teenage boy from before was helping up the old Faunus woman that she had robbed from the floor, the wailing baby in her free hand. Oh thank the gods, she had saved it. But why was she helping up the old woman that she had robbed? A change of heart? Who knows?
She rolled herself onto the side, her eyes away from the flames. She narrowed her gaze to see who was picking themselves off the ground before her. It was Arslan, groaning painfully as her aura healed her wounds and she pushed herself up from the gravelly floor. There were screams around her. Sun was pulling himself out of a wooden wall and let out a yelp of pain as he tumbled to the floor. He found his staff on the floor - broken and split in half - and used it to push himself upwards. He looked to the fire with an expression of angst growing across him.
"Nep... Neptune...? NEPTUNE!?"
No response. Only the roar of flames. Neptune had been at the epicentre of the blast. He was dead.
Reese was shocked. Horrified. Neptune was dead. Gone. Just like that. It hadn't been his fault that he'd been there, he'd just been trying to do something good, handing out water to the people who needed it the most. He didn't deserve that. He didn't deserve to die.
And neither did Scarlet, or Nadir, or Bolin. None of them deserved to be silenced so early into their lives.
So why?
Why had they all died?
Why were they all just... gone?
Reese didn't even get a chance to process everything that was happening around her, nor did any of the screaming and crying masses around her, as from a road on the side, Sage ran through, the once quiet boy screaming out something in a hoarse, panicky tone.
"They're back! The Grimm are back!"
Day five and six were much of the same. A constant slog for survival.
Explosions bloomed like flowers over and around them as streaks of rainbow light flew across the battlefield, shading the world as if it were an abstract painting. Bodies hit the floor around Reese in bursts of blood and gore, colouring the trenches around her in crimson and black viscera. The smell of death, fowl and metallic and putrid, mixed with the bitter smoke and searing heat. The air was humid because of the fire evaporating much of the water in the puddles and pools in the mud beneath them, turning into steam and mixing with the smoke and soot in the air. Everything was moist and wet and turning to mist. Mud was splashed onto the corpses around them, as well as the rats that were feasting on them.
It was snowing. The world was inlaid with a sheet of pale white. The heat melted much of the snow in the battlefield, but other parts of the trenches were freezing up with frost and ice. Many defenders found themselves slipping on the frozen puddles beneath them, spraining muscles and incapacitating them, or even aggravating the wounds that they had gained over the last five days of battle, worsening them.
Said defenders were tired, amongst the dead and the dying. They stood by the trenches and the makeshift bunkers and against the relentless onslaught, surviving both Ascendant Court and Bandit Confederation on both sides. Those same enemies were warring against each other at the same time. The fight was a three-way slog. The defenders stood their ground and moved in a fizzled knot of motion at the same time, slinging rounds of all sorts into the merciless enemy that stood against them. Many of them died in the droves, piling onto the ground in rows of desiccated cadavers. The ground was squishy with gore. Diseases began to set into the frontlines. Many soldiers were beginning to develop trench foot. Some of them wandered the trenches aimlessly, lost in their own shellshock, and a few of them even missing a limb or two. They would be shot to death soon enough. Some people speculated that they had exposed themselves willingly, wanting to join their comrades in death. Much of the defenders hadn't slept in days, succumbing to delusions and tricks on the mind. Burns and shrapnel wounds and mangled bodies were a commonplace sight.
Olive Harper was dead. Command of the defenders had fallen apart. Whatever holding actions that were taking place were reduced to a loosely connected network of bunkers and holdouts against the dark tide, a network that was fracturing more and more with each passing moment. Lines of trenches were lost one after the other. The Grimm nor the bandits didn't stop for one bit.
Behind them, the city of Mistral was being reduced to rubble. Artillery shells and mortar rounds slammed themselves into the wall surrounding the city, chipping away at it until entire sections came toppling down. Raiders and Vetols and all sorts of fighters had been performing strafing runs across the city, dropping bombs on buildings and rendering the metropolis a smouldering wasteland. Great towers of ashy smoke and embers rose upwards to the heavens themselves. The cloudless sky above was painted in a dull shade of orange, like hellfire.
Reese felt like lead. Everything was heavy. She hadn't slept in days. Her mind felt like it was in the present moment and a million miles away at the same time. Her nose was blocked up. She felt ill. Her eyes were red rimmed and smothered in blackness. Her skin was mottled with blood and muck. Her aura was constantly at work healing her wounds. Some others were too extensive to be healed. There was a chunk of flesh missing out of her leg. One of her arms had been dislocated from her shoulder. She had needed one of the shoulders next to her to force it back into place. She was amazed that she hadn't passed out from the pain alone. She was running on autopilot at this point, unloading her guns into the hordes of Grimm and then reloading, unloading her guns into the hordes of Grimm and then reloading, unloading her guns into the hordes of Grimm and then reloading, and so on, so forth.
The day turned to night to day to night all over again. With each passing moment they continued to lose more and more ground to the monsters before them.
And as the night turned to day once more, the battle began to reach its end.
Another trench was overrun by a swarm of Pumas.
Another line of fighters were culled.
Another horde of Grimm inched closer and closer to the city.
But then, on the morning of the seventh day, something happened.
A message swarmed through the CCTnet. A new message amidst the confusing propaganda of both Atlas, Mistral, and the Ascendant Court.
A video. A livestream. An image of a boy with blond hair and steeled blue eyes.
A boy that Reese was very familiar with.
And he said...
Actually, Reese hadn't been paying attention to what he was saying. All she was focused on the fact that he was there, and alive.
He's alive... Jaune's alive. That must mean that... that must mean that DJ's alive too.
"I know him," the words escaped her lips without any thought.
Arslan looked to her as they sat ducked underneath the lip of a trench, the both of them previously staring up to the massive holographic projection of Reese's old friend in the middle of the city. Her team leader asked, "What?"
A trio of rounds shot over them. Without much thought Reese jumped onto her hoverboard and stole a belt of grenades from a discarded body on the ground, pulling one of them off and throwing it into a grouping of Disciples. They exploded a few seconds afterwards. That'd teach them a lesson about spacing.
Arslan followed after her and landed a blow onto the chest of a Lasher Grimm, grabbing its barbed tendrils and throwing it into a pair of Lancer Grimm. A few seconds afterwards, she called out to Reese, "You know him?"
"Jaune Arc? Met him back in Jewel," Reese confessed as a swell of energy, a shot of vigour and hope built up inside of her, "Told him that he should've gone to Haven instead of Beacon, but- Well, all's well that ends well!" at least he wouldn't have to put up with this hellhole.
"Not entirely. From what it looks like, if we had him here, then things might've been entirely in our favour instead of out of it."
Maybe, Reese thought as she flew over a trench filled with Grimm and pulled a pin on one of the grenades on the belt, before chucking the belt down and and letting the grenades on them detonate in a chain explosion, killing all of the Grimm inside of it. Letting herself drop to the ground, she disassembled her Syrinx hoverboard (patched up with metal slabs) into its two revolver pistols and fired each round from them into a Grimm's head and dropping them to the ground, But if he's up there, leading the charge against the Grimm all the way from Atlas, if the message was to be believed, and Reese had no reason to not believe it.
She spun herself to look at Arslan, sporting a winning grin on her face. Behind her, the Grimm faltered at the massive projection of Jaune Arc in the city, losing the morale that had been fueling their relentless campaign of domination.
"Ah, don't be so maudlin, Arslan! If he could survive all of this," if he could survive the literal hell that was the Initiation Massacre, and hopefully DJ as well, "Then so can we!"
Behind them, the dozens of Haven Academy students that had gathered behind them in the wide line of trenches seemed to be invigorated, and it was Sun Wukong whom stepped out of his trench and went, "Yo, she's right!"
Damn right I am.
"Come on, everyone!" he yelled as he thrust his hastily repaired wooden nunchaku staff towards the breaking lines of Grimm before them, "You want to let the Atleisans have all of the glory!"
"""""NO!""""" the students and other fighters behind them yelled out in renewed vigour.
"Then take the fight to the Grimm!"
They roared their agreement and charged forwards across the wet stratum, Reese, Arslan, and Sun amongst them. Ahead of them, the Grimm began to break and fall in the droves. A cheer of glory overtook the defenders, now the aggressors. Their morale was raised as they affixed their guns with bayonets and showed the Grimm their resolve. The monsters against them seemed to falter and wither under their gaze, and Reese swore that she could make out sweat rolling down their obsidian and crimson coloured heads.
We're going to win, Reese mentally jumped for joy, We're actually going to-
A crimson blast slammed into her Syrinx hoverboard and split it in two, sending her spiralling to the ground. Another round slammed into her shoulder and took down her aura. It went through her shoulder and severed her arm in a messy spray of blood.
Reese screamed in pain as she tumbled to the ground, blood spurting from her wound as next to her, Sun caught a round to the head. It popped like a balloon and he fell to the ground as dead as a doorknob. The charging, screaming masses around them did not notice his passing as they trampled over him in a flurry of motion. They didn't notice her either as she felt herself being pressed into the ground by the heavy boots running over her.
Pain. She felt nothing but pain. She screamed and forced herself, on her only remaining arm, to stand up. No. Not yet. Please not yet. Where was Arslan? Where was-
She never saw the shot that cut her down.
Still no reviews. Not even any comments or kudos on Ao3.
You guys are jerks.
If anyone took notice of any familiar ques in this chapter, that's because I took a lot of inspiration for the various war scenes in this little slice of Reese's life from two major sources: Eugenesis by James Roberts, and Enemy of my Enemy by Katsuhiro. Both of them are fanfictions, and one of them you may know more than the other. You should check them both out anyways, they're excellent reads.
But with all of that said and done, please, for the love of God, leave a review or comment or whatever, and I shall see you all next time!
Titanmaster 117 out!