I am honestly surprised that nobody made any comments on Eris being a Templar.
Huh.
/
It is only in Darkness that you may see the Stars.
-Fallen Rose-
Angie dematerialized her mask and hood as she walked through the doorway that led to the floor of the abandoned office building that Summer had set up their equipment on.
"Hi Summer." Angie greeted, doing her best to sound like she had not just met Summer's biological daughter that morning.
"Hi, Mom!" Summer greeted cheerfully, as she fiddled with one of her guns, as she so often did, using a spotlight as the sun had dipped below the horizon an hour ago.
"So how was your day?" Angie asked.
"Oh, you know, met a mobster, beat up his club, got us this hideout, fought a huntsman, landed the ships and then set up the gear." Summer gestured vaguely to the objects around her, not looking up from her work.
"That's nice dear." Angie smiled, not at all surprised at what Summer had just said. Honestly, she was slightly surprised that she didn't do anything more outrageous. "I met some lovely young girls training to be huntresses, and an android girl.
"Ooh, didn't know they had those here."
"I must admit, she was quite good. I wouldn't have believed it myself if I hadn't scanned them." Lantern added, popping into existence. "They even have an Aura!"
"Ooh, show me the data!" Drei uncharacteristically mimicked his guardian, not moments earlier.
As the ghost continued to prattle theories to one another, Angie sat down on the blue tarp next to summer, contently looking out over the city through the missing window.
"Sometimes I don't even think it's real, Summer." Angie sighed. "A whole world, untouched by the horrors of our own dying system. A darkness that has barely sprouted, and good people willingly deciding to fight against it."
Angie could feel Summer slow her work down to a stop.
"Yeah… I'm pretty sure the old me liked it here." Summer replied with a tint of sadness in her voice.
"Hey," Angie said as she turned around to give Summer a four-armed hug, "Just because you lost one life here, doesn't mean you have a new one now. Just think, if you had never died, I would have never met you and gotten a delightful little daughter."
Summer, despite the emotions she was feeling, chuckled at her mother. "Yeah… yeah. I know." Summer said as she turned to face Angie. "It's just that I can't help thinking; who was I here? Was I just another 9 to 5 worker or was I, like, some kick-ass huntress?" Summer turned her head so that she was facing the brightly illuminated Vale city. "Did I have a family…?"
A lump formed in Angie's throat. Oh, by the Traveler, she did not want to do this so soon.
"Hey, have you already forgotten what I just said? I'm your family now." Angie carefully avoided dropping a bombshell. "And, if you really do have any family out there," she waved an arm to the city, "We'll find them, together."
"…thanks, Mom." Summer sniffled.
"And hey, if you do have any family, I don't want to be missing out on any grandbabies, you hear me?!" Angie wagged a large finger at Summer, whose only response was to laugh, leaving all worry behind her. Angie smiled at her daughter, a weird sight for an eliksni to preform, but nevertheless, she did. "So, are we feeling better?"
Summer nodded, a certain melancholy about her.
"Well, that's good," Drei announced as he and Lantern floated up, "Because we just got a distress signal."
-Fallen Rose-
'Mayday, Mayday! This is huntress in training Coco Adel of team CFVY! We need immediate extraction! The huntsman we were shadowing is dead, and I'm not sure how much longer we can hold out!'
'Copy that, team CFVY. An extract will be there in thirty minutes.'
'Thirty minutes?! We don't have thirty fucking minutes! These... these things...! They're not Grimm! They almost look like people, but they've got claws, and a bunch of them have four arms. A few of them are huge, too! And, oh Oum, we saw some of them eating babies like they were some sort of fruit!
'Understood, we'll be there as soon as we can.'
Angie gripped the ship controls so tightly that Summer worried that she was going to snap it. The message finishing for what was the fifth time since the two had gotten into Death to Kells and beelined it for the signal's origin.
Angie teeth could be heard grinding against one-another.
Summer gulped down a lump in her throat. "Mom, are y-"
"Of course it's them!" Angie snapped, interrupting Summer. "No, wasn't the hive or the vex, who were the most likely to crack the portal first, but it was those cutthroats who were able to make it through the gate first!"
Now, to understand why Templar Vanguard Angela SixtySix was so angry right now, one needed to know what she hated most.
Number 3 was oysters.
Number 2 was Summer being hurt.
Number 1 was Fallen.
Now, it may seem ironic that what an eliksni hated most was other eliksni, but Angie drew a clear line between them and fallen. Fallen may genetically be eliksni, but Angie regarded them as anything but such. To her, they were but a stain preventing the restoration of the Eliksni name.
And to know they were in Remnant, her own precious daughter's home?
Now that wouldn't do at all...
-Fallen Rose-
Team CFVY was sent to a small settlement outside of Vale to exterminate the increasing Grimm population there. It was a simple extermination mission that they have done many times before, but none of them was prepared to what would greet them.
The buildings were either crumbling, burning or a combination of the two. The streets were littered with the dead bodies of the village's inhabitants, horribly brutalized and limbs missing. There was no short supply of corpses and burnt skeletons wherever they went.
Whatever attacked the village had no care for age, gender or species as they saw, elderly, human and Faunus alike sprawled lifelessly across the village, the only thing missing was children. And the way they were lying face down, gaping holes and punctures on their backs told the team that the villagers were cut down as they tried to run.
And it wasn't the Grimm.
Coco Adel, the leader of Team CFVY, was not ashamed to admit that she threw up after seeing a dead mother cradling her just as dead son, one's eyes glassy and lifeless, the other's missing.
"Oh god," Coco gasped in horror after dispelling her lunch, "What kind of monsters would do such a thing?"
Her teammates had no answer to that question. The rest of Team CFVY were just as horrified as her. The rabbit ears on the Faunus in the group twitched, detecting a disturbance that the others couldn't with their human ears.
"Guys, I hear something!" Velvet immediately alerted her teammates, pointing towards a building.
Team CFVY immediately went on guard as they waited for what was behind the building. They were greeted with a man running out from behind it and into the streets. The man's eyes were delirious and looked like he had been running for hours, which might be why he survived in the first place.
Good. He might be able to tell Team CFVY what happened here.
The man spotted them, his face morphing into surprise and shock.
"Hey!" Coco called out to the man, "Hey! Can you tell us wh-"
"Get out!" the man interrupted.
"What?" Coco faltered.
"Get out! They're still here! They-"
Whatever the man was about to say was cut short by a sudden spurt of blood erupting from his chest.
There was complete silence on the street.
Then, the man's corpse unnaturally slumped to the side, whilst some of the blood continued to float in the air. A moment later, the light behind the man bent and curved, shimmering until it shifted into... something.
It wore dirty plated armour, a tattered scarf, a pointed helmet, and some sort of a rebreather, almost hiding its four glowing eyes. In its hands, two of its four anyway, were twin cutlasses, one stained with the man's blood.
"Pyura! Valm! Roubo mechot eh chon rohg!" the creature cried out in a muffled voice, raising a cutlass to the sky. And, to the sheer horror of CFVY, more of the creature's kind, some smaller and some with only two arms began appearing out of ruined houses or on roofs.
"You bastards!" Coco shrieked in rage as she unleashed her Gatling gun on the man's killer. This only caused the creatures to quickly scuttle out of the torrent of dust, and shelter inside the nearby houses.
"Coco look out!" Yatsuhashi shouted a warning before quickly tackling his leader to the ground. And not a moment too soon, either, as a blue beam flew right through where Coco had just been.
And then all hell broke loose.
-Fallen Rose-
Half an hour later, team CFVY were hunkered down in the town hall, Coco providing suppressing fire, with Velvet when the latter was able too. Their primary escape option was destroyed soon after all the creatures began firing energy weapons at them or rushing them (invisibly) with spears and cutlasses.
The team of second years hunched down when another explosion, courtesy of one of the creatures' rocket-launcher type weapon, rocked the building.
Yhatsuhashi did his best to cut down any of the melee wielding creatures, by he was often shot by the longer-ranged ones whilst doing so or wasn't fast enough to block a strike from their third or fourth swords.
Coco had put a distress call out ten minutes ago when the discovered that the creatures had the whole town surrounded.
As they had continued to fight the creatures, robots appeared as well. Small, flying drones with turrets affixed to them, and large spherical ones that floated around, healing the creatures.
It was almost euphoric when the roar of engines was heard.
Coco peeked out the window to see an aircraft firing at the androids from above. She had never seen that model before but that was the least of her worries at the moment.
"Guys, they're here!" the leader of Team CFVY called out to her teammates in relief. When Coco peaked back out of the building, she saw that some of the creatures had stopped firing and turned their heads upward to inspect the ship.
"Chug'c meg emo eh ealc! Yug nacg vo u ryutfg voulol!" one of the larger ones shouted, pointing at the ship.
"V-v-vag quoug yh yug yuc cho jacp lyujol...?" a two-armed one asked, seemingly shivering.
"Chug sequulja jeoc meg roubo fol yubeli gequol, mequ pyura chon!" The large one snarled back, grabbing the two-armed by the throat and tossing them aside. Then, all most of the creatures ceased firing on the huntsman team and began shooting at the ship, some still keeping the teens at bay with the occasional blast. But it wasn't enough to stop the huntsmen and huntresses in training from watching outside.
On the back part of the ship, a figure dropped out of one of the hatches that had opened up. They had a white cloak with an emblem emblazoned on the back and wore pads of armour all along their body, including a helmet completely covering their head.
Even before they landed the huntress, at least, that's what CFVY assumed they were, had drawn an SMG and began letting loose a short torrent of bullets which began chewing through the creatures like wet tissue paper.
CFVY was surprised at this. It had taken them at least ten dozen rounds to kill even the smaller four-armed ones, but this person was mowing them all down with only three to five shots.
When her first clip was done, she drew a throwing knife from... somewhere, flipped it around so that she held it by the blade, and then threw it into a creature's head, which caused a hissing sound as whatever its rebreather held escaped from its casing, appearing as a sort of gas like liquid.
With another magazine loaded, she turned her fire to one of the large four-armed and began firing. CFVY had yet to be able to take one of those down, the kind of projected aura it surrounded itself in they found impossible to break with their ranged weapons, and they had no interest to find out what would happen if they got into CQC with one.
But the huntress' weapon burnt through the shield, and to CFVY's surprise, caused a fiery explosion when it did so, taking out some surrounding grunts. The huntress used the remaining rounds to finish off the large creature, aiming for its head which exploded into a satisfying pop and hiss, leaving an outline of the creature as it toppled.
The huntress then stowed the SMG and swapped it for a rifle which she brought up to her shoulder and began firing single shots directly at the heads of the smaller and regular four-armed creatures.
When the hoard was considerably thinned out and what had been left was now taking cover, the huntress turned to where team CFVY was hiding and motioned for them to come out. Yhatsuhashi slung Fox's arm around his shoulder, helping his exhausted teammate to walk with the rest of the group.
"Thank you for saving our lives, ma'am," Velvet was the first to recover and turned to express her gratefulness as they left the building that they were taking shelter in.
"Don't thank me just yet," the Huntress replied, expelling the spent rounds before reloading her gun, "Fallen raiding parties rarely ever come in such a small group like this."
"Small!?" Coco exclaimed indignantly, gesturing to the wrecked androids that they learnt were called the Vex, "There were at least dozens of them out here! And you call that a small group!?"
"Yes. I mean, they didn't even bring a walker tank." she answered causing CFVY to pale at the mention of a tank. Their brief conversation was cut short when a screech drew their attention to more, new, fallen begin filling the streets. The Huntress pulled out a small object before throwing it to the ground, revealing it to be a smoke bomb as smoke concealed their forms.
Coco thought that something like a smoke bomb won't work on these 'Fallen' since they had been able to immaculately track them down every time they tried to hide. But, to her surprise, the androids were looking around as if confused. She looked down to see that her body was now transparent, much like the invisibility the fallen were using.
Her mouth opened up to let out a cry of panic, but an armoured hand covered her mouth before a sound could escape. The brown-haired girl turned to see the Huntress, just as see-through as her, raised a finger to where her mouth would be in a sign to tell her to be quiet. Out of the corner of her eye, Coco could see her teammates, who were also as transparent and astonished as her.
"This won't last long, so we need to move." The huntress whispered. Then, waved her arm to motion the teens to follower her, and took off at a jog away from where all the fallen were. The group got about two-thirds down the street before the cloaking expired, which was indicated by the gunshots whizzing by them more than anything else. As they ran, the huntress had pulled out a large revolver and began to take pot-shots at the fallen as they ran.
"We need to turn left at the next intersection!" the huntress declared, shooting one of the fallen's electrical grenades out of the air. The group continued running down the street and almost sighed in relief when the got to the intersection, which meant they'd be out of the line of fire even if briefly.
But then those hopes were squashed.
-(begin playing War Pigs at 1:01)-
A fallen walked around the corner as the world seemed to turn into slow-motion, the four teens trying to skid to a halt.
~Generals gathered in their masses~
It's armour and scarf were more pristine than any they had already seen, and, it wore a complete helmet instead of just a partial one and a rebreather.
~Just like witches at black masses~
It raised the four bulky revolvers it held in its hands so that they were level with the group, ready to fire.
~Evil minds that plot destruction~
Coco scrunched her eyes closed and waited for the inevitable bang of the guns and darkness that would follow.
~Sorcerer of death's construction~
*PACHING!* *PACHING!* *PACHING!* *PACHING!*
Four shots. And yet Coco felt none of them. She slowly opened her eyes and saw the smoking gun barrels of the fallen's revolvers. Then, she turned behind her to see four more fallen, all had been turned into corpses.
~In the fields, the bodies burning~
"Come on," The fallen spoke in Valian, "You all need to move. Summer will take you back to the ship." The fallen turned their head back to the other fallen, who had stopped still.
~As the war machine keeps turning~
"I will finish up here." The fallen spat the words out, their gaze not breaking from the rest of the hoard.
~Death and hatred to mankind~
"C'mon," the huntress shook the team back into reality, "Mom will take care of this, let's go." She then pulled the dumbstruck Coco and Velvet along, as Yhatsuhashi and Fox followed too.
~Poisoning their brainwashed minds~
"Wait... WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'MOM'?!" Coco yelled.
~Oh lord, yeah!~
-Fallen Rose-
Angela stood before the hoard of fallen, her hand cannons at the ready and an itch to begin firing. But, before the battle of fists came the battle of minds.
"I-i-it really is the Dusk Rider!" a dreg called out fearfully in eliksni. "We must flee before it kills us all!" it turned to run before being blasted apart by a captain's scorch cannon.
"Any of you other cowards wish to flee?!" The captain roared at the eliksni who all coward slightly.
Angela chuckled, making the captain turn back to her.
"And just what, bet, is so funny?" the captain growled.
"Well," Angela spoke in eliksni, "it's just that, I can't believe you finally admitted to all being complete and utter cowards."
The captain made to shout at Angela but cut itself off with an agonizing scream as a bullet tore through its leg, courtesy of the Royal Straight's ace.
"Uh, uh, uh! Little miss traitor was still talking." Angela mocked, slowly walking towards the captain. "You see, I've been doing my best to, as mankind says, extend an olive branch, and help our kind. To let go of our previous, barbaric ways and seek a union with mankind. But every. Single. Time. I try and get another house to, as ironically as it sounds, 'see the light', it is just slapped away." Angela now stopped before the captain. "Centuries I've tried. Ever since the battle of six fronts when I was first resurrected. I even double my efforts after Twilight Gap, seeing as it was possible with my own house. But every day, my faith grows less and less with you impudent wretches. So let me just say; you are all cowards of change and cannot steel yourselves to swallow what little pride you all have and say you want peace." Angela pressed the jack to the kneeling captain's head. "Well fear not. I will give you what you want."
A gunshot echoed through the eerily quiet town. The captain slumped to the side, the life drained from his body.
"War. Now run."
And the remaining fallen did just that, with the reaper herself giving chase
