Chapter 8
Pyrrha caught the charge on Akouo, and quickly gave ground as the enemy brought both of his blades down for another swing. She skipped across the ground, once before she balanced herself with her semblance and allowed herself to slide the remaining distance, arms up and ready to defend herself from a long black tail. She parried the attack with Milo, and once again gave ground, as the faunus fully overcommitted to the blow.
Nora swung, trying to capitalize on the mistake. Instead of eating dirt and being blasted away, he chose to flip onto his hands. It allowed him to block Nora's hammer with his tail, and slam his feet forward with the increased momentum straight into her shield. Not expecting the sudden impact, Pyrrha tried to roll with the momentum. Instead she found herself ass in the dirt.
The man didn't let such an opening go unanswered. With casual ease, he leapt up and over her, blocking Ren's bullets as he went, his arms swinging to complete a circular motion. Pyrrha barely had the time to register the attacks before pain shot up her right leg and into her left shoulder.
He flipped through the air, and in a show of acrobatics that even Pyrrha would have a hard time performing, landed in a crouch killing all of his forward momentum at the drop of a hat. He turned, bearing his teeth in a predator's grin.
"Oh? Is this your best? I was expecting more."
Pyrrha got to her feet, flexing her semblance and targeted his gauntlets. They glowed a dark crimson as her aura settled itself on the metal. She pulled her arms apart as she commanded the two gauntlets to pull in two opposite directions.
With contemptuous ease, the scorpion tail flicked into motion, cutting the straps holding one of his weapons in place, before the gauntlet could even move his arm into prime tearing position. The faunus wheeled through the air for a moment before the second gauntlet was similarly discarded. For a moment, the madman pinwheeled through the air, his momentum spinning him like a discus.
The man landed with a crash into the pavement, kicking up a cloud of dust that obscured him from her vision. Pyrrha raised Akouo in preparation for the man to come back out, ready for the second round. She was not ready for the giggling.
As the dust settled, the unsettling giggling turned into full blown unhinged cackling as the man cracked up at some unknown humor. He gripped his torso, and bent in on himself as he tried to gather in enough air to support himself.
Pyrrha was left at a loss, and so were Nora and Ren.
Jaune's voice cut through their confusion.
"Keep Firing."
Milo twisted in on itself, revealing the barrel of her rifle, as their opponent sprung back into motion, a twisted smile still stretching across their face and an eerie laugh still echoing across the battlefield.
"So brutal. So cold. Are you really students of the wizard?"
He bounced from stall to stall, avoiding the pink explosions and dust rounds as he closed the distance.
"Well, I suppose it makes things so… FUN!"
The man leaped forward, barely dodging a pink shell as he dove headfirst into the gunfire, his purple aura flickering to life with each incoming bullet. He landed on the ground on all fours, and tail raised as he made one last leap forward, clearing the distance between him and them in an instant.
Milo complained as Pyrrha forced it to transform fast enough to parry the tail, and only barely managed to get Akouo up in time to block his hands. Crouching down, she let her shield hover in midair, as she preemptively dodged the tail coming around for a second pass.
It never came.
Instead, from the other side of her shield, she heard the man scream, the shattering of aura, and Nora's scream. Akouo dropped to the ground.
Blood and venom dripped from the tail which was now pinned to the ground by a familiar ancestral blade. Its owner laid at the base of one of the street lamps that lined Beacon's campus, a thin trail of blood leaking down from a gash in his head.
"I must be slipping. Letting a heretic so young do this to me?" The blade was removed from the ground freeing the pinned tail. He shuddered as his tail was freed, purple aura coalescing around the extra limb. He lifted the blade examining the blade. "I suppose I better return the blade to him. I'd hate for him to lose it again…"
The man turned towards Pyrrha, flashing a cruel smile at her.
"Do you think he'd lose it if I buried it in his chest, or should I make sure it's always in his mind?"
It was Ren who responded first, her green clad teammate placing himself between the enemy and their downed teammate. Nora lifted Magnhild, breaking the circle around the man to stand alongside Ren. Pyrrha found herself lifting Milo, pointing the tip directly at the Man's heart, an old mistrallian challenge taught to her during Sanctum.
"Oh. So the thief has some spine after all." The man cackled, raising his tail in response. It pointed at her heart. "So you think you can face the Champion of the Queen without your servant. That's quite foolish, little thief… luckily for you, you were already going to die."
That comment struck Pyrrha like a physical blow. How could she forget about Lancer?
"Lancer?"
Lancer didn't respond. Just as she instinctively tried to look in her direction, the man launched himself at her. Pyrrha barely managed to curse herself for forgetting about bringing her shield back to her before he was on top of her.
He was fast and strong, but she had faced opponents like that in the arena.
He didn't have any metal on him to manipulate, which made things more complicated, but she had handled that in the past.
He had a yet unknown fighting style, evading hits that seemed to defy physics and going for light touches with his hands before striking for that area with his tail. She had dealt with unpredictability before.
Individually, any of these problems was surmountable. It was the culmination of these factors paired with his skill that saw Pyrrha throw herself away from the tail and continue to back up step after step in rapid succession.
Nora roared in anger, swinging her hammer with all the fury of a cornered Ursa, but the man laughed, leaping over the attack, and forcing Pyrrha to roll to avoid friendly fire. Ren didn't bother firing into the melee, instead swinging Stormflower in deadly arcs that the man seemed to evade by the slightest margins. Even despite the new pressure, he pushed forward. His eyes never left her for long, and he doggedly pursued her across the lawn.
Pyrrha knew this was a losing battle. Her team wasn't a match for this man. There was only one way that she could see of winning this.
Milo swung down in a telegraphed attack, forcing the faunus to take a single step back or be hit by the descending spear. Pyrrha's weapon buried itself into the ground, and Pyrrha mentally braced herself before she manually activated the rest of her dust rounds in her weapon with her semblance.
Pain erupted across her face and torso as Milo exploded into a pile of gold scraps, sending everyone in the melee flying in different directions. Pyrrha tried to roll, but found herself colliding with a lamp post, shattering the last of her aura in the process.
She got back up on unsteady feet, looking around to see the devastation that her servant had caused first hand. The entire area was leveled; trees, displays, street lamps, and even the remains of what looked like an atlesian paladin.
In the center of the field, a battle raged. Lancer was little more than a cloud of white petals and a flashing weapon. The other was more defined, they burst around the battlefield in short bursts, stopping only long enough to block a strike here or make their own there.
It was a stalemate, and Pyrrha needed Lancer free to survive.
She looked down to her right hand. She had been told that this was limited, and that if she used all three that Lancer wouldn't be able to fight again.
It was meant only for desperate situations.
Pyrrha suspected that this counted.
"By this command seal, I order you." The battlefield seemed to charge with energy as the marks on her hand glowed red. "Win this fight."
There was a moment where nothing happened, the energy of the command seal raging through her body like fire.
"As you wish."
Silver light exploded across the battlefield as Lancer released her Noble Phantasm and Pyrrha felt as every drop of magic was being pulled from her body. Pyrrha felt the scream pulled from her lips as her nerves all fired off pain signals. Her vision was blinging, and she hoped beyond hope that she had done the right thing.
The light lasted for five whole seconds before it died away. She was still blinking spots from her eyes when she heard Lancer's voice right next to hers.
"No way. How are you still alive?"
Pyrrha tried to see what Lancer was looking at, squinting to try and reduce the dots still dancing around her vision. It took a moment, but she saw a blurry figure in the distance, smoke drifting off them like an out of control fire. They had a splotch of white in the middle of their face, and Pyrrha didn't take long to connect the dots.
Their skin was riddled with burn marks, their cloak was nowhere to be found, and their weapon was long gone, vaporized in the blast of magic. Despite looking like they had one foot in the grave, the enemy servant snarled, shifting its weight to favor one leg. It hobbled closer to them, and Pyrrha once again heard that annoying giggling.
"Oh, what a shame it must be. Calling in assistance during our death pact, and yet still falling short."
The enemy servant growled in irritation, nevermore flocking to it as an entire flock of the grimm seemed to dissolve into its wounds, each one repairing a small patch of skin. The faunus ignored the recovering servant.
"Oh, how the depraved fail. If you wanted to watch more people die for you before you die, who am I to deny such an exquisite last wish?"
"Over my dead body." Lancer weakly leaned on her weapon, and the man burst from giggling into outright mad laughter.
"Such a scary servant. Even I, a man not blessed to be a summoned servant, am capable of finishing you off. Your time has already come. No, I'm talking to your master. After all, how am I supposed to know which of her teammates to start with?"
He pointed behind him, and Pyrrha's eyes flicked to the forms of Ren and Nora, and the small hole dripping blood in Nora's side.
"Should I finish off the girl first, or do I kill her companion… then there is the other boy to think about. I still have to return his sword to him after-".
Pyrrha watched as a familiar sword sprouted from the man's chest, right where his heart would be, in a bloody spray. The man was gasping as his purple aura tried to repair the damage, even as he was lifted up by the sword, and then slammed down into the rubble below.
The figure standing atop the faunus glowed with rust colored light as he drew the sword from the man's back with a sickening squelch, before discarding her partner's sword as soon as its bloody work was done. Blood dripped from its gauntlets, and it stood silently, challenging any to stand before it.
She felt Lancer prepare herself for her final stand, even as violence dripped from every pore of the newest servant. Pyrrha tried to stand on her own, stumbling as her legs refused to control themselves.
With a roar, the servant swung their arm down, and threw a human sized projectile ten feet to the left of where Lancer and Pyrrha were standing, intercepting a dark shape crawling across the ground. As the man's purple aura shattered in a burst of light, a new figure jumped out of the now non-existent shadow, leaping clear of the danger zone. The body crumpled to the ground in a heap, a pool of blood slowly forming beneath the dying man.
"Assassin?"
The figure who had jumped from the shadows nodded their head, identifying themselves.
"Berserker?"
The armored knight didn't bother to acknowledge the question, instead stalking past Lancer without a care in the world.
"Assassin."
Pyrrha watched in confusion as Berserker lowered himself to stand on all fours, his metal gauntlets burying themselves into the solid concrete sidewalk, like the claws of an apex predator. He growled an inhuman growl at the slowly retreating Assassin, even as the other Grimmified servant pulled a new bone spear from their body.
Pyrrha found herself being lifted to her feet by Lancer, the silver eyed warrior refusing to look away from the upcoming violence, even as blue wisps seemed to peel off her body.
"Lancer, you really need to-"
The armored servant exploded into motion, his arms providing him extra leverage as he flung himself bodily forward, his entire body coated in a shimmering rust colored aura. Assassin backpedaled and the Grimm servant catapulted itself forward as Berserker reached an open hand towards the stealthiest servant.
She had seen her previous assailant casually pull off acrobatics at an insane level, and Lancer was herself a teleporting swarm of rose petals. Berserker had neither of those things. Instead, he made up for powers and skill with raw strength and reaction time.
He grabbed the grimm servant out of the air, spinning her around his body in a hammer throw and launching the opposing servants at each other. The shadow clad assassin barely had the time to dodge their flying teammate, when with a roar, Berserker once again launched himself forward.
She watched as Berserker charged straight into the Assassin's thrown daggers with as much focus as she could devote into it, completely missing the flapping bird's wings drawing close.
"Girls. Time to go."
Pyrrha turned to face the voice, and immediately thanked her lucky stars. Tall, Dark, and Scraggly he may have been, but he was a familiar face. Lancer was the one who called out his name.
"Qrow!"
The man, Qrow, grimmaced as he stuck the landing, rolling to bleed off the momentum of his aerial transformation. His eyes flicked towards the servants battling, before turning back to them.
"Berserker is holding them, but we have to get out. Now. As capable as he seems, he can't hold off two servants forever."
They were just going to leave this servant to deal with them? As unnerving as the servant acted, Berserker had saved Lancer, and abandoning them after that felt wrong.
"What about Saber? Surely with both of them…"
Qrow shook his head, turning towards Pyrrha's battered teammates.
"Dead. Him and Oz. We have to get out of Vale now. Grab your teammates and follow me."
With a flash, Lancer astralized herself, and Pyrrha found herself pulling Jaune's blade to herself with the last dregs of her aura before she was pushed away from the fight by the huntsman's hand.
Cinder grimaced. Ozpin and his servant were dead, and Tyrion had managed to bring the team to its knees, even as her servant had managed to survive the Silver Eyed warriors final gambit. She was only a hairs distance away from claiming the power that was rightfully hers, and killing the thief's own Lancer. She should be feeling that power coursing through her veins, the magical might that she could tell should be hers, but wasn't.
Her Lancer glared at the armored figure through her red tinted eyes, and Cinder felt the sensory information flowing into her mind.
The pungent smell of raw iron made her eyes sting as Cinder cataloged everything she could about the newest addition to the war. The servant growled out a soft animalistic growl. With his fingers digging into the rock below, he even looked like a feral animal, ready to pounce on some unexpecting prey. His armor was marred by rust, but none of it looked like the armor was flawed because of it. His visor never let the slowly retreating Assassin leave its line of sight, a pair of eerie blue lights glowing from the depths of the helm.
Animalistic, single minded, and aesthetically dirty. This was likely the war's Berserker.
The break caused by Tyrion's death and Assassin's failed attack stretched out, Vale's obliteration providing the ambiance to the moment. Cinder almost didn't see the moment that broke the tension, but with a roar that she couldn't believe that a human could make, the ground beneath Berserker shot into the air, and Assassin had leapt backward to avoid the outstretched gauntlet.
Lancer gave chase, the bone spear she had utilized during her fight with the counterfeit serving as an impromptu springboard to launch her forward. In a blur, the figure of Berserker seemed to explode into picture in the space between breaths, and she could feel the bulging muscles in her servant's arms as she prepared to strike a blow against the servant of madness.
A rusted gauntlet flashed into Cinder's vision before pain shot through their extended arm, and she felt the shared experience of skipping like a stone through three different venues, a dark figure that could have been Assassin just barely avoiding their collision course.
They landed in a ramen stall, thick viscous blood covering their back from their landing, one of the ignorant fools unable to escape Beacon cushioning their impact. Lancer growled as Assassin danced from stall to stall, trying to find some shadow to hide in, all the while Berserker's eyes glowed like azure floodlights, his rust colored aura illuminating Assassin's escape routes before Salem's servant could escape his grasp.
He roared in victory when Assassin contorted in the air only to find that his hand wasn't so empty. The rock in Berserker's hand glowed as aura was pumped to burst with aura before it was launched, a thin glowing afterimage illuminating the area, and cutting a razor thin line in the middle of Assassin's path.
Cinder widened her eyes in shock as Assassin barely managed to avoid the rock, only to find the trailing aura sharp enough to cut through skin. The servant of stealth landed uneasily on the ground, and flung themselves away as berserker continued his single minded pursuit of Assassin.
Lancer's eyes flicked to the now retreating forms of the thief and her team, and an understanding passed across their link. Lancer relaunched herself at the servant of madness, allowing Assassin breathing room to make much needed distance.
Cinder let the shared senses fall, shame burning through her. Berserker was more than Assassin could handle. Berserker might even be more than both Lancer and Assassin combined could handle at the moment. Ozpin's servant had not been kind to Assassin, and as much as she loathed acknowledging the stolen powers of her servant given form, the other Lancer had done a number on her own lancer.
Both servants were strong, Assassin more than Lancer due to the amount of mana they had access to, but they were going into a third round of combat against a servant that was still fresh, and they needed to preserve their servants. The likelihood of another master or servant willing to follow the orders of the queen of the Grimm was slim to none. Every other master in this war would likely be against them, and the largest advantage that they had in a servant on servant confrontation was numbers.
Their largest weakness in these challengers was that they were by nature, spread across the globe. There wouldn't be a coalition of two or more servants that they needed to fight as long as they stayed spread out. The only servants that should have been teamed up would be Ozpin and his false maiden.
Cinder scowled as she commanded the grimm to harass the master and her team, the Nevermore flying in droves to capitulate to her orders. Berserker ignored the now diminished presence of avian Grimm trying to hinder him, his goal still focused on his dirty and bleeding prey, only sparing Lancer the time of day enough to force her out of the way or capitalize on the openings that guaranteed Lancer be removed from the fight for a time.
Assassin flipped through the air, and Cinder could imagine the cut in their leg splattering the roof with a trickle of blood. Berserker on the other hand lifted a wooden beam, stolen from a now broken stall, and slammed the aura reinforced timber through the entire stand. The stand blew splinters across Beacon's lawn, and obscured the battlefield from her aerial view from the Ozpin's now destroyed office.
Lancer's irritation flickered across their bond, before she felt shock and pain come across their bone, and a black and white figure was launched out of the While she couldn't provide Lancer any visual information on the enemy, she saw a blur of white and black rocket out of the cloud.
Yes, Salem's plan to win the war had made the assumption that there wouldn't be more than two servants in an alliance. Their initial plans to divide and conquer had worked. They should have won the war within the night, with the enemy too broken and scattered to put up a resistance.
And yet… They were now on the brink of losing. Lancer and Assassin were almost out of energy, and the only upside to the situation was that Berserker was spending significantly more energy to keep up this level of performance.
Whomever the servant was had a high level of Aura Burst or Aura Manipulation, based on how a rock had made an afterimage of aura so sharp that it could cut through flesh like a knife through butter. It was also how they were keeping up with two opponents, using either the Aura Burst skill like Lancer or some other aura manipulation skill to push their physicality to new heights. That meant that all Lancer and Assassin needed to do was let Berserker gas himself out.
Granted, this could only happen if nothing else unexpected happened.
Cinder let her eyes wander down to her right hand, her gloves blocking the red marks on her hand from her vision. That didn't stop the knowledge that she only had two seals remaining, another reason to curse the thief. Lancer had weathered the Silver Eyes, but she wouldn't have come out of it standing without using one. Despite her natural resistance to Silver Eyes, Lancer would still be affected by the combined power of multiple silver eyed warriors. Logically, Salem couldn't fault her for using one of her three irreplaceable tools to keep Lancer alive.
Using a second one to end this fight however might be too much. After all, if she had only one command seal, the last one would only be of use in a suicidal last attack. The thing that bound Lancer to the world would be gone, and Cinder could not allow herself to be powerless again, not when the fake was still out in the wild.
No, she wouldn't use the command seal unless Lancer would die without it.
Looking down at the battlefield, Cinder hoped that the enemy master wouldn't force her to use it with a command of their own.
Weiss felt a drop of sweat roll down her face as fire exploded out of the tip of Myrtenaster, frying the last of the creepers before sweeping her eyes over the docks.
Blake swung Gambol Shroud in large sweeping arcs, cutting a pack of Beowolves to shreds on the other side of the docks, while Yang shouted from between them, leading a group of evacuees into one of the shipping containers that was about to be loaded onto the shipping freight. Her partner on the other hand kept herself fresh, perching at the front of the boat firing bullet after bullet from Crescent Rose, her rocket locker slowly emptying from the thousands of spare rounds she had packed into it.
Weiss was glad for once that her team leader was such a gun nut, and had spent the last few months squirreling away every bit of ammunition she could get her hands on into her locker, just in case she needed to do "Extensive Testing" on her baby.
Together, they had single handedly kept the grimm that trickled towards the docks off of the civilians they were protecting. Unfortunately, the key word in that sentence was trickled. From beyond the docks, Weiss could hear the screams, see the fires, and only imagine the horror taking place in the streets as people battled for their lives against the invading army.
Frankly, the entire situation was only salvageable because they hadn't run into anything larger than an Ursa Major. That, and some of the invaders had weapons that they could loot.
Weiss spotted the white armor first, and spun the rotating dust chamber into her selected dust. Her blade bit into the asphalt beneath her, and a thin wave of ice traveled along her current path. The automated atlesian soldiers stalled in place, their bodies frozen solid before they could even notice the last of the civilians shutting the door to their shipping container.
"That's the last of them." Ruby nodded at Yang's shout, leaving her post in a flurry of red rose petals.
"Got some more ammo over here." Blake nodded at Weiss' own call out, walking over to the frozen robots to resupply on her ammunition. Weiss shifted away from them as Blake approached, moving next to Yang to be in a better place in case another wave of grimm decided to attack.
"It's a good thing that Blake uses the same stuff as the bots."
Weiss nodded, her eyes roaming across the docks, looking around for more movement. Besides the flickering of the fires, and Blake pulling every weapon and clip from the frozen robots, the docks were eerily quiet.
"Her weapon is likely a modified automatic pistol that was taken from the Schnee Dust Company. We bought them from Atlas, and Atlas likes to keep things standardized."
"Huh. Never thought about it that way."
Yang shifted, lifting her arms up to stretch before wincing, and putting her arms back down. Her left hand instinctively fell to her stomach, right over where she had been stabbed.
"You really should be on the ship."
Yang gave Weiss a flat look, unimpressed with the insinuation of her sitting out the fall of a kingdom while she was still recovering from being stabbed. Weiss rolled her eyes in response to her teammates fully justified and not at all idiotic refusal to even discuss the topic.
"Never mind that, you gonna tell us when you picked up a new butler?"
"Knight is a Servant, not a butler, and I hospitalized myself by summoning him."
Yang rolled her eyes, as if Weiss' answer was unreasonable.
"Right… summoned." Weiss turned her full attention to her blonde partner, who raised her hands in a mock surrender. "Look, I get it. Uncle and your Servant were going on about magic and shit, so let's assume that's real. How the hell did you get dragged into this mess?"
Weiss rolled her eyes. She had thought Yang a good example of stereotypes being only skin deep, but clearly the blonde was not an exception when stressed and still recovering from being stabbed.
"What is so confusing about the fact that I summoned Knight? That's how I got pulled into this."
Yang's eyes flashed red, and she looked ready to lash out.
She didn't, instead taking a moment to take in a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, lilac orbs bore into Weiss.
"I get that, but how did you summon Knight in the first place? Wouldn't that require magic?"
"I… well…."
Honestly, she hadn't ever asked. She hadn't even thought to ask. There were other questions that had taken her attention, and even now after three days of constant explanations, she still felt as if she were barely treading water.
She didn't know what magic could do, only that servants needed it.
She didn't know how magical maidens from a bedtime story were even related to being able to summon servants in the first place.
She didn't even know why there was a Grimm queen who was waging a shadow war against humanity, or how she was related to the battle between servants.
"I don't know."
Weiss felt like a failure as she admitted how out of her depth she was. Memories of a condescending tone as she spoke to her father assaulted her. Dismissals from tutors as time and time again, she failed in some thing or another haunted her. Winter's own disappointed looks and physical reminders as she failed to meet her expectations sang their discordant feelings mixing together.
She was a burden again, a failure who needed others to cover for her deficiencies, and Weiss hated it.
She looked past her teammate, noticing the black and white figures on the far side of the docks. The Ursa roared as it spotted them. Weiss locked her eyes on the target.
"I'll handle it." Weiss flicked Myrtenaster up, using the already selected dust to make a projectile. The sliver of ice shot forward, embedding into the Ursa's mask, cracking the bone white plating. The body collapsed onto itself, billowing black smoke as it began dissolving.
"I'm not a failure." She had grown beyond those mistakes. She would continue to grow beyond this ignorance. She would only become a failure if she ever stopped improving herself before she wasn't a hindrance.
Weiss turned back to her blonde teammate, eyeing the extended golden gauntlets on her arms with a critical eye. Yang's eyes flashed purple before the weapons collapsed back into bracelets.
"Can't you ask Knight if he knows anything? After all, weren't you saying you could talk in each other's heads or something?"
"That's not-"
Weiss stopped herself. What was the range of their ability to communicate? She hadn't really thought to ask, nor had she the opportunity to test it, given that most of the time she had spent with Knight had been spent in the infirmary.
Now however? It was the perfect opportunity to test those limits.
"Knight? Can you hear me?"
She stretched out her mind, trying to reach towards that wall of static calm linked to her mind. For a moment, she brushed up against it, and she opened her eyes to a battle.
Rust covered armor danced across her field of vision, the matching light of his aura illuminating the battlefield. Nevermore swarmed him, sharp beaks swooping in, trying to chip away at his aura and hide a pair of figures behind a pile of their bodies.
Knight didn't allow that to happen.
She felt the impact of their bodies breaking against his armored form, and he lunged straight through them, reaching out towards the human looking one, their white mask glittering with a metallic sheen in the light. The other servant raced to meet him, a small spike of bone growing out of the front of their fist as the two servants met.
Pain shot up their arm, as they met blow for blow, strength with strength. White aura flashed into being as the grimm was knocked away, slowing down Knight's momentum as the third figure dove into another swarm of Nevermore.
Knight screamed, a non-existent rage seeming to power him as his aura spiked. With a single step, he launched himself forward, carving a path through the grimm, and throwing his fist forward.
Droplets of blood splattered against their helm as the servant dodged, a thin line on their leg bleeding profusely, the movement only aggravating the injury even as aura tried to close the wound.
Knight couldn't allow that.
He stomped, infusing aura into his legs. Weiss felt herself flinch as the ground seemed to rise up, rubble the size of bricks being launched into the air from the movement. Their arms reached out, grabbing and throwing the newly made ammunition, launching it forward.
The Human servant jumped over the wave of projectiles.
The Grimm servant ducked.
With a growl that burned her vocal cords, Knight prepared to leap forward.
Weiss gasped as she found herself back on the docks, Yang and Blake hovering over her worriedly.
"Weiss!"
Weiss took the embrace of her partner's sister with the same grace of Jaune's rejections: poorly. She toppled, her arms flailing to try and catch herself. Instead, they were caught, tangled in the blonde brawler's embrace.
"I'm fine. Just a headache."
Blake and Yang shared a look, and Weiss scoffed when they both turned their eyes back to her. She was fine. She didn't even really have a headache. She just had a lot of information to process.
"If I knew you were going to space out, I wouldn't have asked if you could talk to your butler."
"Are you sure you're Okay?"
Weiss pried Yang's arms from her, standing back up with Blake's assistance. She looked at the offending 'Helping hand'.
"I am perfectly fine. Honestly, you should be more worried about Yang."
"Hey. I'm not the one who just-"
Yang paused, as she looked behind Weiss towards the edge of the docks. She raised her arm in a wave, wincing as she did so. Despite the obvious pain it put her in, she continued to wave at the familiar figures.
"Uncle Qrow!"
She began to jog towards the figures of her Uncle and the battered forms of team JNPR. Jaune and Pyrrha leaned heavily on each other, while Nora was being hauled over Qrow's shoulder. All of them looked like they went through ten rounds of Miss Goodwitch's personal training, with Ren being the member least affected.
"Kiddo. Give me a hand."
Yang moved to assist her uncle with Nora, but Blake was faster. In a burst of speed, Weiss watched the cat faunus lift Nora's feet, switching the huntsman's hold from a fireman's carry to a stretcher carry. In defiance of her injuries, Yang stole the remainder of Nora's weight from Qrow leaving the huntsman with his arms free.
Weiss let Yang strain herself. After all, if she was busy carrying Nora, she wouldn't drop the injured girl to jump into a fight.
With Nora secure, Weiss turned to the rest of RWBY's sister team. Her eyes landed on one member in particular, and the stifling aura on the other side of the blonde idiot.
"Pyrrha."
"Weiss."
Weiss found it fitting, two masters meeting with all their cards on the table only after any chance of secrecy was blown out of the water. If only… no. Weiss refused to go into hypotheticals. It was unfortunate, but Weiss hadn't known any other masters until today.
They could have worked together had she known beforehand. She hadn't. No point crying over spent dust.
Her eyes turned to the only combat capable member of team Juniper. She raised her blade in solidarity. He raised his weapon in turn, and they began to shadow Yang and Blake as they moved to the nearest opened storage crate in silence.
It didn't last long.
"Ice Queen. Summon Berserker back here. I'd rather not lose him here."
Weiss thought about the battle she had witnessed, and nodded to the older huntsman. Knight had said she could call him back if they needed him, and as well as he had been fighting, she could feel the drain on her aura as he burned through his saved reserves with wanton abandon.
She breathed in, calming herself before lifting her empty right hand. Feeling her intent, red light began to glow from the broken sword etched on the back of her hand.
"Knight, I order you: Come to my side."
Assassin leapt through the air, once more dodging one of Berserker's wild swings. This time, the only difference was that the anticipated attack never came.
With a blood-curling roar, Berserker disappeared in a flash of light, leaving the ruined festival grounds behind. Assassin waited for a second, and then another. She honestly expected Berserker to pounce out of a bush or stand, ready to go for a second round of combat. It was only after that third second that the gash on her leg finally closed that she released an exhausted breath.
"Berserker has been called off, my Queen."
From across their bond, she felt the magical energy slowly dwindle as her energy pool stabilized. She felt her master's curiosity, and irritation, but none of that was directed towards her. Above Assassin, the nevermore seemed to all freeze as if listening to the collective voice in their ear.
"I have my Grimm seeking out Lancer and Berserker, but it is clear that they have found their limits. It is especially telling how the humans escaped, vanishing into thin air the moment that they ran through that building."
Assassin did not bother nodding, nor responding. Her queen knew that she was listening to her every word, just as she had in her actual life.
"The Grimm shall deal with the rest of Vale. For now, gather Cinder and her pet, and return to me. We have much to discuss."
"Yes, your majesty. What of the scientist, Watts?"
Assassin felt her master smile, her eyes being immediately drawn to the communication tower that lay untouched among the wrecked buildings of the academy.
"Watts believes that he can root out the other masters of the war. We shall see if his idea has merit. Leave him to it."
I'm back with another chapter, and this one has finally concluded the first fight between servants. I can not believe that I ever tried to mix the first two scenes of this chapter and all of last chapter into one overly long chapter. You live, you learn.
A lot happened this chapter, and I had some questions about last chapter so let me confirm some things:
*Saber is dead but Oz is still around. Saber might've survived losing Oz if he had a skill like Independent Action. Since he didn't, he chose to go down fighting.
*Hazel and Tyrion are both dead. Hazel ensured that Oz was screwed with his death (see previous), while Tyrion tried to compete with Servants and found himself lacking.
*Knight is the Rider class Servant. He is pretending to be a different class than he is. Where most servants guard their true names, Knight is guarding his class as well to eek out every advantage he can get.
*There are two Lancer servants. This is similar to the two Sabers summoned by the Edelfelt twins during the third holy grail war. Since Cinder split the fall maiden powers, both she and Pyrrha would have identical magical signatures. (Even if they are uneven in power distribution)
If you have any other questions/comments/concerns, feel free to comment or PM me and I do hope you enjoyed the chapter. Until Next Time.