"Woo!" Nora screamed as they broke through the tree tops and soared through the night sky.

They were zooming! Faster than even a lighting-and-caffeine boosted grenade-jump. The roar of the air rushing past drowned out the Grimm below. Being pressed against Yang's belly wasn't exactly how she wanted to fly, but beggars can't be choosers. Nora was on the right, one giant hand keeping her pressed close.

They leveled out far above the treetops, a bright green fireball in the night sky that pushed back against the red light coming from the city walls.

"I told you flying was great!" Yang shouted over the wind.

"Can you go faster?" Nora shouted back. Two months ago, she would've freaked, but that was in the past, all of her fears forgotten, like magic… Because it was kind of literally magic that did it.

"Not really, if you want speed, ask Ruby for a piggy-back sometime. She-" Yang rolled to the side, barely avoiding a bright red light, only reacting once it passed. "What the...?"

Nora coughed, gagging on the smoke tail.

With a powerful beat of Yang's wings, they spun around.

A rainbow of colored lights were chasing them, a barrage of missiles taller than giant Yang!

Yang dove hard enough to force Nora's stomach into her throat.

The Dust missiles turned to follow her, including the first one that had missed.

"God dammit." Yang shifted, wrapping her fingers around Nora's arm. "I hope you two have enough Aura for this because neither of you will survive getting hit by that."

"Hol-" Emerald gasped before she was flung toward the wall.

Yang hefted Nora above her head like a javelin. The city they were supposed to be going to still twinkled in the distance. Without any other warning, Nora was thrown. She shouted as the blood rushed from her head.

The world blurred around her. It was so fast, like being fired out of a cannon and... Wait a minute. She knew that she should be doing thinking about something, but-

The ground tasted like burnt pancakes and blood.

Nora hacked up a ball of blackened dirt. When she tried to open her eyes, a red light blinded her.

"Nora?" Someone familiar asked, shaking her shoulders. "Oh no…"

In a flash, the pain and fuzziness vanished. Nora blinked twice, her vision cleared between them.

A girl with red eyes was standing over her… her eyes sparkled like the night sky and… The memories finally came back when she noticed the cloak and silver rose pins. Nora leapt to her feet with a smile. "Ruby."

Ruby sighed. "At least that counted as damage Yang caused."

"What?"

"I can heal things if Blake or Yang… or the Grimm... cause them." Ruby stood back up, staring off into the distance. "How much Aura do you have left?"

Nora checked her scroll. "In the red."

"Got it." Ruby stared at her, brow furrowing. "Blake's taking over Nevermore duty. You two need to keep the walls safe from anything that gets past that line until Yang gets here."

She pointed at a line of blackened dirt that had a long skid dragging some to Nora's feet. Further away, a green fire was blazing in the sky. Missile after missile shot at Yang from one of the mountains. As soon as one got too close, it exploded.

"Is she going to be alright?" Nora knew Yang was tough, but those were big explosions.

"Either me or Blake would be out of range by now. Yang's tough, but-"

A trio of missiles exploded, green light flared even brighter in response.

"-even she can't just ignore those. They'll wear her down eventually." Ruby growled, "I should've kept Yang coming back early in mind, this messes up everything."

"So, she's screwed then? " Emerald asked as a series of Weiss' glyphs appeared in the air near Yang. Nora couldn't pick out where Weiss and Pyrrha were flying in from.

"Not if I have anything to say about it."

"Umm..." Nora made a noise. There were so many bad ways that could be done that she knew Ruby had done before. "What?"

"I'm going to stop them." Ruby fired at the Grimm breaking through. Far too many fell down for the number of shots.

What used to be a part of Nora would have been screaming at her to immediately hammer Ruby. One girl making an army to stop… that didn't work unless you had creepy Anathema mind control or were going to do a lot of killing. But, that part of her was gone now, even if Nora still remembered it well enough to guess what it might say. It wasn't entirely wrong, and they even had Weiss' word on that too. Calling out team RWBY on doing creepy stuff was something that both her and Ren were supposed to do. She didn't have him to double check her new ideas of what was or wasn't worth hammering with, but this felt like something she would've so… Nora took a deep breath and asked, "How? I mean, there's no way to do that unless you do some really bad things."

"I'll ask them nicely and break their weapons if they refuse." Ruby sounded exhausted. She continued firing way past the point where she should've reloaded. "Do either of you need anything else before I go?"

An idea came to Nora. "Do you have any more Dust? I could shoot spells at the Grimm."

Ruby tossed Nora an extra magazine from her belt. "That one's a mix of Ice and Lightning dust."

"Perfect." Nora pulled out one of the bullets.

"Everyone, this is Ruby Rose, we have additional ground support in zone one." Ruby collapsed her weapon. " I'm going offline until further notice. Blake's in charge while I'm away."

Nora looked back at the wall, "So where should I…"

A line of red light was streaking across the battlefield like a missile, which obviously couldn't answer her.

Nora squeezed a bullet until it cracked. Ice Dust flowed through her fingers, mixing with the cloud of pink energy that covered them. With a grunt, she hefted Magnhild over one shoulder. With her other hand, she began tracing the first glyph in the air. A circle of dull pink fog was the beginning.

A trio of Ursa Major battered their way through the gunfire, sparks flying from their masks where they were shot.

"Emerald, you have any Aura left?" Nora asked, tracing the secondary squares that she needed to keep the Dust under control. "They'll get here before I finish this."

"Barely any…" Emerald drew her blades and stepped a few feet in front of Nora. "You trust me to do this?"

"Yeah." Nora lied. She didn't really trust someone who kept arguing that Cinder Fall was right, but no one would want to get eaten by a Grimm and Nora could at least trust that. Thoughts of the Ursa faded as she focused on the most complicated part of the spell. There was only her, the Dust, and the words required. The final steps began by her own symbol in the center of the circle. If she was really good, she'd have been able to draw a line with each finger. Weiss always did that. But, what Nora needed was to be sure of the spell, so she took it slow and just used her pointer finger by itself.

First the shaft…

One of the Ursa turned around, running back toward the wave of Grimm. As soon as it was trampled, another swerved and tripped several.

Next, the head…

Emerald shot the second. Fire Dust exploded in its eyes. It tripped over another Grimm.

Last, the lightning bolt… Her own symbol of power. Just like Weiss' glyphs.

As the final line finished, her circle flashed into existence. The dull pink became a roaring surge of light.

Nora spoke three words in that weird language Weiss told her to use and grabbed Magnhild with both hands. She threw all of her weight into a swing, striking the center of the glyph hard enough to make her bones rattle.

Fist sized shards of pink ice flew from the glyph. So many shot at the Grimm that they blocked Nora's vision, but she didn't need to see when she could feel. The light of her soul screamed at the darkness surrounding them, shredding the beasts one by one.

A Boarbutusk had slipped off to the side. Now it was charging right for her.

Nora dropped to one knee, catching the strike with the handle of Magnhild.

The Grimm forced her back, twisting her hammer in her grasp and ramming its tusks into her side.

Nora grit her teeth as pain erupted and she flew through the air again.

She pulled a second bullet out, crushing it and detonating the mixture.

Lightning crackled over her skin, her Semblance supercharging every muscle in her body.

She didn't need her Aura if one hit could end them.


Ruby dashed through the forest, leaving the rest of her team behind with new orders. Her radio was silent now, her men without their commander. She would need all of her focus for what came next.

Bullets whizzed overhead as quickly as trees passed. They were too high up to be aimed at her, and too low to be going towards her team, unlike the missiles. Those soared overhead, a continuous barrage of rockets that, if she remembered the standard Atlas specs, were designed to fight Behemoths.

Fortunately, each shot left a trail of burning Dust for her to follow to their source at the mountain's peak.

She slowed down as she came to a cliff face and opened her ears to all that was around her.

"-told you to put that down!" An older man's voice sounded from above.

"We need to kill her now," A women replied over the sound of metal sliding on metal. "It's the best chance we'll ever have."

"Specialist Benton, that is not how a proper war is fought."

"Spare me your 'proper war', Lieutenant Colonel. If the General hasn't rescinded his prior orders, then I still have command here. Ready for the next barrage."

That was all Ruby needed to know to ask her question and determine her path forward. It wasn't a betrayal of all of Atlas, merely part of it. A part that would not listen to reason, only force.

With a deep breath, Ruby called upon the music of warfare. For many nights she had dreamt of a promise of power and a near forgotten poem. She had heard it only once before, played by a master so far above her that any efforts would look like a child playing with her mommy's tools in comparison.

"Once, there was a maiden…" She plucked the strings of Fate, one by one. Each note added to the prior, reverberating through the battlefield around her. Red, Burgundy, Crimson, Vermillion, Scarlet: each told her more about her foes than any words could convey. Some things did not require a master.

The Atlas Army was an organization of impeccable order. Each and every soldier, human and machine alike, would be a limb of their commander. Structure, organization, cohesion: Ruby had destroyed each of those on the night when she first heard this melody. A single thread pulled, a single enemy acting as they shouldn't, and it all came crumbling down.

War was order.

Ruby let out her breath and looked to the sky. The stars above burned with all the colors of Mars. A single leap brought her above the mountain, staring down at the battalion that she must stop. Their base stretched over the peak, with a line of vehicles and men on the side facing her city. Three more missiles launched as Ruby leveled Crescent Rose at the front truck.

The thunderclap of a great explosion heralded her arrival. Men, women, and even robots dove for cover as the trio of missiles burst in front of them.

The ground was stained red by Ruby's blazing Aura as she landed on the lead truck.

"I'll gonna give you one chance to stop attacking us," She said, Crescent Rose held low.

"Anat-" One of the riflemen started shouting and raising his gun.

Ruby sighed. Before he could finish crying, she fired once. The round traced its path through the wires connecting each launcher to its vehicle.

"-hema…" The man's voice cracked as his call petered out.

"All men!" Picking out the Specialist was simple; she was one of five neither wearing a standard issue uniform nor covering from Ruby's first attack. Instead, she wore a fancy white dress with several knives slipped in a thigh holster. "This is our chance. Take her out!"

Ruby kicked off of the inoperable missile launcher and threw herself into the crowd, firing again as she sailed through the air. Her round bounced from soldier to soldier, destroying the targeting systems of their weapons.

With the enemy inside of their own formation, the soldiers hesitated. Men and women screamed as they readied rifles, the ammunition they'd been carrying to the trucks left on the ground, the robots could not risk human life by firing wildly. Lines of potential shifted around the battlefield. None of them touched her.

Bullets flew through the air uselessly as Ruby hopped onto a soldier's head and skipped to her neighbor's. A knife wiped past her ear.

Ruby took a step along the path of maximum violence. She spun as she landed, charging her Aura into her right gauntlet as the motors of her armor whirred. More Aura enhanced her mechanical muscles as she swung around, catching one of the Specialists in the back of the head as she twirled.

His head snapped down from the force of the blow, taking the rest of his body with it. A line of dirt was drawn away from her, plowed by his forehead.

A move that was equal parts Uncle Qrow and Yang. Qrow mixed a bunch of punches and kicks between weapon strikes, which was something that Ruby didn't get until she'd become Anathema. Her sister had given her understanding how to use the Gravity Dust infused gauntlets to full effect, turning a punch so weak that anyone's aura would ignore it into something dangerous.

Her darling scythe would have been too much for them. Crescent Rose was built to take out large Grimm in a single blow, no matter if she shot them or hit them. Between her new armor making each blow that much harder and the army's normal Auras, she couldn't risk it.

With said darling held loosely, Ruby met the lead Specialist's eyes. "Are you sure we can't talk about this?"

She received a pair of knives in reply. Ruby batted them away as she ducked a different Specialist's fireball.

The remaining three formed up behind their leader: a dark skinned man who held a crystal topped quarterstaff, the source of the fireball; a small woman with a buckler and short sword combo, both were simply styled; and a boy who looked a bit older than the rest of Ruby's team, who had hit tri-section spear in a white knuckled grip.

The 'smart' thing would have been to take her with a surprise strike, drop the leader to demoralize her unit. There was also an argument for taking out the weakest link. Doing anything else wouldn't make sense.

Ruby took a page from Uncle Qrow's book and took a bow. It felt so dumb.

For a moment, the fight paused. The battalion wavered in the face of Ruby leaving herself seemingly defenseless.

A machine gunner ended it.

The bullets only shredded rose petals because Ruby was already sliding into another group who hadn't put their rocket launchers down.

One shot took out all of their targeting systems. Another disarmed a squad that had drawn their rifles.

By the time the boy with the spear had reached them, Ruby had lept onto the central building and batted a missile into the sky.

Her next salvo took out the third and seventh gun in each squad, along with a Gryphon that had been bearing down from above.

War was chaos.


Deathly energy coated her sword as it slid through the Grimm. The Nevermore's wing fell free from the rest of its body.

Deathly energy drained from the wound to her soul. Her Aura was restored to what it had been before she attacked.

Deathly energy flowed into her muscles. They turned colder, harder as she fed them more power.

Blake kicked off of the falling corpse, landing on the back of another Nevermore. She swung her blades up as she ran up its back, slicing through both wings like they weren't there. Once more, her Aura fed on the destruction.

With a slow breath, she sheathed her blade. One, two: power built within her weapon as she counted. Blake watched the lights of their city slowly approach as she fell. The Grimm approached from all around her.

Three.

She drew her blade and flickered from Grimm to Grimm. Its edge cut clean through anything in its path, whether flesh, bone, and air. A ghastly wave of purple force swept out from each arc, tearing through anything her blades pointed towards. Blake became an indiscriminate sphere of death.

She couldn't count the number of Grimm that fell alongside her when she stopped swinging.

Blake could feel blood running down her forehead. Wisps of black and purple danced across her fingers and up her arm. While she could have spent more Aura to hold the manifestations back, it would've been a bad idea. This wasn't her type of fight, it wasn't a battle where her style could do what it was best at. This was Ruby and Yang's domain, but with enough power, she could still keep the Grimm away.

With the flick of a hand, she impaled a far away Grimm and pulled on the ribbon connecting her to her blade. Blake swung through the air, slicing through any that came within arms reach and recovering Aura.

"Lady Blake?" Maple's voice came from her earpiece.

"Yes?" Blake landed on her makeshift mount, severing the head with a clean blow.

"A pack of Beringel's made it through in zone… umm.. Six."

Blake looked to the eastern side of the city, the part ruby had left with the fewest defenders. The group of ape Grimm was almost half-way to the wall. "I'm on my way."

With a burst of Aura, Blake launched herself toward them. Flying Grimm were both platforms and Aura batteries while she moved.

"Lady Blake?" Rudolph, one of her own worshipers, was next.

"Yes?" Blake took a deep breath.

"We have Creeps tunneling past the line in zone three."

Blake spared a glance to the West.

The green and silver stars floating above the battle were finally moving back towards the city, while the mountain was bathed in red. No more attacks were coming from Atlas.

Blake poured more of her Aura into her leaps.

Reinforcements were coming; she could be a little vulnerable if it meant getting to the Grimm before they reached people who couldn't handle them.


"You're just wasting your weapons and ammo!" Ruby shouted as she took out another truck. With no targeting systems, they'd be limited to close range. Enough for the Grimm, not a threat to Yang.

"Don't fear men. All of us are still standing, she can't fight forever." Specialist Benton chased after her with more knives flying. Green lines traced their paths as they homed in on Ruby's location. A single bullet destroyed each.

Ruby froze for a moment. "Do… Do you think I'm trying to kill any of you?"

"Every time you close, the squad just pushes you back."

"That isn't, at all, what-"

Danger approached from one side.

The first rounds two she dodged by leaning back.

The third never would have connected in the first place.

Four and five were caught by the shaft of Crescent Rose, mid transformation.

The sixth was sliced through.

The seventh struck true.

Ruby could have stepped outside of the world, ensuring her safety, but this wasn't a serious enough threat and she had a point to prove.

A blast of fire engulfed Ruby, the only visible effect was a small dent and missing paint where it hit. A single breath confirmed that Ruby had bruised ribs, but that wasn't too bad. The healing system she'd designed was already starting to work on them. It was nowhere near as good as the armor she'd worked on at Beacon, but it would get the job done.

"Assuming you knew they were aiming, that was a good trick." Ruby glanced at the Specialists. Three were still standing, including their leader. Each had paused halfway through their follow up strike, eyes wide and skin paling.

Crescent Rose's blade flared with red and purple energy. Ruby took one step toward them and exploded into petals. One version of her appeared behind each and drew the very tip of her scythe along each Specialist. Cloth and skin split without resistance, deep enough to hurt and bleed, but nothing a Hunter should need to worry about.

Ruby collapsed Crescent Rose, standing in the same place where she'd started.

"Demon! Monster!" The junior Specialists shouted.

"Shelly, Roy that's enough." Benton kept a knife in her uninjured hand. "You've revealed your weakness, Girl in Red, you don't have the will to do what needs to be done."

"All I want- all we want, is to be able to live in peace and work with you to take down our real enemies!"

"Work with Anathema?" She spit on the ground. "All of you are too dangerous to live."

"A few months ago, I would've agreed with you." Ruby pointed a finger at her. The Specialist hadn't gone off about demons or anything. She must have been one of the people who knew the truth. "We are very dangerous in the sense that I can do… Well, this… without any risk."

She drew a line of violence from her fingertip to every other weapon in the Specialist's reach. With a mental pull of the trigger, all of them shattered.

"But, I was wrong. I was wrong about all of it." Ruby looked over her shoulder. Two men were turning fresh heavy machine guns toward her. Another shot from Crescent Rose destroyed the barrels of both. They should have more spares, so breaking them was still safeish. She needed to leave them with enough weapons to fight back. "Look around you! I wouldn't be here if you didn't attack my sister! And, need I remind you, you did this in the middle of a Grimm swarm!"

Pure venom glared back at her.

"How many of your men are going to die because I had to break so many weapons? How many of your kingdom's people have already lost their lives because a quarter of the Atlas army is laying siege to a peaceful city?" Ruby's fingers almost hurt from how hard she was squeezing Crescent Rose. "All I've been doing over the past few months is making it easier for people to fight the Grimm! The armor that I'm wearing, by itself, could make a squad of normal people into junior Hunters. And I know it's something that normal people can make because I have them hard at work on building some for themselves!"

She honestly expected something besides the faces of every soldier growing paler. This was something out of most people's nightmares, but did none of them have any passion for engineering?

"Really? It's armor; it protects you from things! I even stripped out the heads up display and targeting assistance from the mass production version so you wouldn't need to ever worry about being influenced! Also, it consumed too much of an average person's Aura to run those.."

"The fruit of a tainted tree will only sew death. Anyone who accepted your offer would be a fool. You could leave hidden messages in any of your instructions and tear Atlas apart from the inside." Benton coughed, eyes darting to a rifle just out of arm's reach.

"Yeah, I'm not going to get anywhere here." Ruby sucked in a breath through clenched teeth as she bounced the rifle away with a phantom bullet. This was ridiculous. She couldn't do that… Blake could, but Blake only used that power to stop people from being racist or help them remember Ruby. Ruby turned to the man with the fanciest uniform, who was cowering behind a broken truck. "I'm guessing you're the officer in charge, right?"

The man stood up straight, sweat dripping down his face. "Y-yes. I mean, no, Specialist Benton is-"

"Call General Ironwood up and let me talk to him."

"I-I." He stepped back. "I cannot do that. It would put everyone at risk."

Ruby sighed. Danger was building from her left. With a smooth motion, she brought Crescent Rose to her shoulder and zoomed in on the neighboring mountain. A series of scopes glinted in the red light. She loaded a Gravity Dust round and shot all seven with a single bullet.

"You know what?" She scanned the rest of that slope, putting a normal round into every other sniper rifle aimed in her direction. "I'm done trying to be reasonable. I could've just broken in from the start, but I wanted to give you a chance to be nice."

The Specialist's eyes went wide, her Aura suddenly flaring. The sound it made was harsh in a way Ruby'd never heard before. Like fingernails on a blackboard, but with the world's worst trumpet playing in the background. She fired Crescent Rose at the woman, taking lock of hair with the round, and the sound cut off. "Whatever that was, don't do it again."

Ruby called up nearby radio channels in her headset and flipped through every frequency they'd stolen information about.

"-owolves at our five-"

"-uesting resupply to One Hundr-"

"-tch shot me!"

"-neral, we need to do something about the Anathema before it kills us all. Over," An older woman shouted.

Ruby paused her search.

"Beta One, this is Command. I will not authorize an artillery barrage on our own men! Over!" General Ironwood shouted loud enough to make the speaker ring.

"Command, this Gamma Fifteen. Our attack on Theta Two has failed and it returned fire. It's range of engagement is at least twice what we suspected. Over." A young man said.

"Gamma Fifteen, this is Command. Do you have eyes on the Sixth Air-Defense Battalion? Over."

"Command, this is Gamma Fifteen. We have eyes on Theta Two and the Sixth. Many soldiers are standing, but combat has ceased despite several weapons being trained on it. I have to question whether they're our men or potential enemy combatants. Over."

Ruby flicked her mic on. "Hi everyone. This is Theta Two. I'm trying to be nice, but you're making it really hard. Also, I haven't done anything to you men besides break their weapons."

The line was silent.

"I mean. The only reason I'm here is because your guys shot my sister while she was trying to save people from the Grimm. And it sounds like that was all because one of your Specialists is really over zealous. But, that's not how anything's supposed to be done. You don't fight people while Grimm are attacking!" Ruby waited for a moment, but there was only silence. "Seriously? You too… I'm not controlling you or anything like that!"

Silence.

"Wait… Is this the radio etiquette thing? Argh! Fine! Over!"