Closing arguments: The last addresses made to the jury by the attorneys on both sides of the case in which the attorneys typically summarize the proceedings thus far and their clients' positions in one final effort to influence the jury's decision.
Chapter 29: Closing Arguments
Blake blinked spots out of her eyes. She had faced the brunt of Ruby's silver light multiple times before, but this—this was different. The light had been warm, hot—hot enough to burn. A glance at Ruby herself, who was swaying where she stood and holding her head, showed a scorch mark had bloomed across the ground beneath her.
Blake swallowed and glanced around. Every Grimm in the vicinity had been vaporized. None had been strong enough to be petrified instead. They were all just…gone.
Salem was the exception. A statue stood in her place with its face contorted in rage and with a single hand outstretched to ward off the light, her right still stuck through Clover.
There was a blur—a bird—and then Qrow was there, tear tracks glinting on his face while he brought his sword down on her arm. It burst into rubble and Clover's body fell into Qrow's waiting embrace.
Cracks raced from that point across Salem's body. Pieces flaked off. Qrow tensed and started to run, but a sigil opened its eye beneath him and Grimm arms held him fast. He lurched—
Ruby exploded.
Blake had seen Ruby's semblance plenty of times. It was just a burst of petals, a blur of red that trailed slowly drifting pieces of itself, something relatively small and contained even when split apart and easy enough to understand after the first startling reveal.
What erupted from Ruby's position was not a small, contained, easy to parse burst. It was a howling tunnel that mutated into a tornado when it crashed down on Salem's statue. Blake staggered from the shockwave that erupted out from that point and then again from the sudden wind that kicked up in its wake. She threw an arm up to shield her face from razor-sharp petals edged with ice blowing around like hail in a tempest. Lightning flashed at the tornado's base, but that wasn't Ruby, that was Harriet breaking Qrow free and getting him—and Clover's body—to safety.
"Here!" Jaune called, waving them all over to an otherwise empty looking patch of ground. Blake looked towards where Marrow had fallen to see Winter picking him up. A dozen yards away, Yang had Oscar slung over one shoulder.
Moving against the wind, they all gathered by Jaune. The moment they reached him, Blake felt a strange pressure move across her skin, and then they were all inside May's invisibility bubble. His job of getting their attention done, Jaune took charge of healing the wounded. Blake, alongside Adam and Winter, helped arrange Marrow to complete the circle of those affected.
"Please," Harriet said to Jaune, helping Qrow lay down Clover's body nearby, "you have to—"
Vine laid a hand on her shoulder. She cut herself off with a choked protest, tearful eyes falling back to his body. Elm rested her hand on Harriet's other shoulder.
"We'll avenge him," she promised with a squeeze.
"You're damn right we will," Qrow growled. He stood straight and turned back to Salem, only to freeze. "Ruby?"
Yang, who had grabbed his hand to include him in the chain of those being healed by Jaune, similarly went still when she followed his gaze. Blake, too, felt a sense of fear-tinged awe wash over her when she saw the hell being unleashed in the crater's center. Unlike the rest of them, Ruby had not pulled away from Salem. She had, instead, pressed the attack all on her own. For every moment she was corporeal and alternately hacking or shooting Salem to pieces with Crescent Rose, she spent two as a blizzard of frozen or burning petals that Salem's magic couldn't touch in any way that mattered.
This time, when lightning struck, it was not Harriet but Ruby's own power calling down the fury of the Grimm-infested heavens above. The two tempest Grimm shifted in their places in the sky, their own red-tinged lightning struggling to heed their commands.
Vaguely, Blake heard Adam ask Vine, "What happened to the other pilot?"
"His aura was broken by the explosion. I'm afraid he perished in the fall."
Ruby's maelstrom was chaos, barely controlled. Her movements were sloppier than anything Blake had seen in training. She was relying too much on power and speed to compensate for the wild unpredictability of her new powers. How long could she keep it up?
"You must stop her." Oscar's—Ozpin's—voice drew all their eyes to him as he struggled to sit up, still under the influence of Jaune's healing. "The silver eyes already put significant strain on her body, but to use them and the maiden powers like this—"
"It's killing her," Yang whispered.
"It didn't seem to bother Cinder, or Raven," Qrow protested. "Even Amber—"
"Cinder was augmented by Salem to hold more magic than any of new humanity is capable of," Ozpin interrupted. "I confess I don't know how Raven's power affects her, but Amber rarely used hers, and I know too well the toll it took on her. She did not want you to worry. But Ruby is pushing herself far beyond her limits as we speak, Qrow."
On cue, another silver flash blinded them all for a beat. Salem, cut off mid-spell, could only stare in fury as her magic dissipated and Ruby diced her into pieces. Those pieces instantly began reforming, each finger twitching to give rise to more magic that stopped Ruby from keeping them separated.
Ruby herself was coming apart. Pieces of her cape kept drifting away as petals that didn't return when she used her semblance. Blood dripped from her nose, from her eyes, but she didn't even seem to notice.
"She's using her eyes too much," Weiss said.
"She's using everything too much, and we're standing here like assholes." Yang slammed her fists together. Brief flames shot through her hair, and she glanced back at the others that had finally finished restocking their weapons and those whom Jaune was finally done healing. "I'm going."
"Hey, isn't that Grimm getting kinda low?"
Adam, a step away from Blake, waited for anyone else to react to Nora's remark, but none did—they were all too distracted by Yang and, beyond her, Ruby's suicidal ploy to buy them all time to recover and, apparently, stare while the young wannabe hero got herself killed. So he jabbed Elm with the end of Blush and, when that got her attention, tilted his head towards Nora. That whole chain resulted in Elm looking up at the sky to confirm that yes, one of the tempests was absolutely flying lower, and it was only getting closer.
Elm's eyes widened. "That thing will crush us all. Vine, with me. We'll stop it."
"I'm going with you," Nora said, hefting her hammer. "That thing's covered in lightning."
Adam glanced behind him. Not out of any particular urge, but just out of a vague feeling that he hadn't done so in a minute, and a further feeling that the worsening circumstances could stand to get even worse. And so they did: Grimm, out of range of Ruby's silver eyes, were starting to converge on their position once more.
"More of Salem's forces are coming," he warned the group.
Yang clenched her hands into fists. "Fuck, we don't have time for this!"
Winter stepped forward and spoke both crisply and quickly. "Weiss, Ren, with me. We will keep the approaching Grimm away. Elm, Vine, Nora—you stop that tempest from crushing us all. May, Fiona, stay here and keep out of Salem's sight. We need those pillars to stay hidden until the very last moment. Jaune, get Ruby and bring her back here for healing. Qrow, Yang, Blake, Adam, Harriet, Oscar—Salem is yours. Distract her until Ruby is back in the fight to plant the pillars."
Said pillars emerged from Fiona's palms. She laid them carefully out with a worried glance at May, who just pressed her lips together. A bead of sweat slid down the side of her face from the strain of keeping her semblance going. In the moments when Jaune could not boost her aura, she had no choice but to endure.
"Go," Winter ordered, and their group broke apart.
The moment Blake passed through the bubble of May's semblance, she had to wrench her head to one side to avoid being struck by a stray bolt of magic. The black bolt radiating impossible rainbow colors seemed to vanish into thin air when it hit the bubble, only to emerge back into view on the other side. More bolts split the air, but in the time it took Blake and the rest to reach Salem, Ruby had once again cut her down to the point she couldn't easily form spells.
"Ruby!" Yang and Blake called. They were all close enough now to bury Salem in bullets and explosives.
Ruby heard them, hesitated—
Which was all the window Salem needed to twitch her intact finger and blast Ruby with a multicolored energy beam. It launched her back but she just split into petals when she hit the ground and reformed on her feet, Crescent Rose ready for another round but her hand shaking around its trigger.
Yang planted herself between Ruby and Salem, eyes towards Salem. Blake slid in front of Ruby and spread her arms out wide for all the good it would do if Ruby decided she wanted to go around her.
"You need to recover," Blake said. "Let us handle this for a minute."
Ruby's shoulders and chest heaved with her every breath. Blood dripped from her face in an effect Blake had to admit was pretty horrifying.
"I can keep going."
"No," Yang said over her shoulder, "you need to rest."
Past her, Qrow, Harriet, and Oscar engaged Salem. Yang stayed on defense to keep any stray shots from hitting Blake or Ruby. The instant Ruby saw the battle resume, she started to walk forward, only for Blake to catch her by the shoulders. Blake held tight until Ruby looked her in the eye.
"You are not doing this alone."
Ruby blinked. She looked past Blake to where Yang was firing a fresh volley of explosive rounds to counter the magic Salem was hurling in their direction through the others' assault. The searing light turned the edges of her hair gold.
When Blake started applying pressure to nudge Ruby towards May's bubble, Ruby let herself be pushed. And when Jaune arrived, she let him sling her arm around his shoulder and half-carry her to safety.
A dozen yards away, Adam took a bolt of magic meant for Ruby on Wilt and barely kept his balance through it. Though he could absorb the magic—it was just energy—it wasn't a perfect transfer. There was way more kinetic force getting through than he was used to, and with how quickly and often Salem was able to toss out spells powerful enough to throw someone out of the fight, Adam's arms were starting to go numb.
Qrow and Harriet blitzed Salem from opposite sides while Oscar engaged her from the front. Adam closed in alongside Oscar, filling in the gaps in Oscar's technique with stabs and slashes that left pieces of Salem drifting away in their wake.
And then Salem's mouth finally reformed, and she screamed. Instantly, Adam recoiled. The sound, repeated over itself and distorted like a hundred nevermores shrieking, drove into his ears like rusty nails and scraped all the way into his brain. His muscles locked up. His thoughts stuttered. His focus shattered. The humans fared little better, and as the sound died and Adam regained the presence of mind to thicken the aura around his ears, a tornado of black smoke erupted around Salem.
He speared Wilt into the ground and snagged Oscar by the three fingers on his left hand not occupied by Blush. The smoke flared higher, carrying Salem up into the air. Her eyes, in the brief glimpse he got of them before the smoke obscured everything, were searingly bright.
The tornado's pull increased. The petrified ground around Wilt's blade cracked. Tensing, Adam planted one foot using Wilt for leverage and hurled Oscar towards the edge of the storm. Wilt was breaking free even as he let Oscar go, and then Adam was tumbling through the air, blind and with ears still ringing from the scream. Other shadows passed by him in the maelstrom but they were there and gone before he could try to use them for purchase. His aura lit the dark, battered from all angles by debris.
And then he was tossed out into open air. Weightless, he hung for a second, taking in the sight of dozens of glowing magic balls scattered all around him. They went as high as Salem herself, flying at the top of the tornado, and as low as where Oscar and Qrow, as well as Yang and Harriet, were regrouping on the ground.
Gravity beckoned. He flipped Wilt into a reverse grip to better cover his own body, curled up, and fell.
The spheres lit up. Multicolored magic beams arced between and through them at lightning speeds. Each one Adam couldn't intercept knocked him into more. One hit his ribs and drove the air from his lungs. He couldn't tell if the spots in his eyes were from lack of air or the lights. He tried to use Blush to shoot out some of the magic nexuses before they fired, but there were too many for it to matter.
When the ground loomed in his limited vision, Adam braced for a bad landing—only for a bubble of green light to encase him, slow his fall, and deflect the last of the magic bolts. Oscar, inside another bubble shielding the others and breathing hard, nodded at Adam, who nodded back more on reflex than anything while he caught his breath.
He wished Oscar had done that sooner. Sure, Adam had a lot of aura, but that didn't mean getting half of it shaved away in one go felt pleasant.
The protective shields dropped. Salem, fully reformed, enraged, and ten yards into the air at the top of her cyclone, released another salvo of spheres with yet more larger ones lingering around her releasing bolts strong enough to pulverize the ground rather than scorch it. Sigils bloomed across the ground, releasing an army of grasping Grimm hands.
Adam dodged what he could and cut through what he could not. With two feet on the ground, he was fast enough to catch nearly every bolt thrown his way. Those that got through only did so when he was forced to deal with a sigil.
He ended up back-to-back with Qrow, whose scythe was little more than a silver blur. Back-to-back but not stagnant; they both moved, constantly, a kind of dance to keep their footwork in sync as they sheared through sigils and their spawn as often as they deflected the magic coming from every other angle.
It wasn't sustainable, but it didn't have to be. Blake flew in out of nowhere. Harriet shot across the storm, grabbed her, and threw her at Yang at four times the speed. While Oscar played defense, Yang sank into a ready squat with her fists raised and ready. Blake flipped, her feet landed on Yang's fists, and then Yang was uncoiling like a spring and launching Blake into the air with a shout and twin blasts from her gauntlets.
Blake flew. Adam and Yang spared what bullets they could in the chaos to thin the legions of magic spheres; the rest was up to her. She kicked off the spheres around her. Each point of contact caused her aura to flare around her feet.
She got close. Salem scoffed and waved a hand; tens of spheres combined into one massive sparking ball that swept towards Blake.
It hit, but not Blake—a shadow. Ice bullets rained down on Salem to slow her down. Her limbs indisposed, Salem summoned a sigil on her own chest and grasping hands reached out. Blake bailed with another shadow, but unlike the first, this one, red and hot and unstable, stayed. The instant the nearest Grimm hand made contact, it exploded.
The wind stilled. The magic spheres vanished. The sigils closed.
Yang leaped to catch Blake and Salem plummeted towards the ground. Qrow and Adam went to intercept. Wilt carved through Salem's neck while Qrow's scythe took her waist. Scowling, Salem flicked her wrist. Adam and Qrow leaped back to avoid a bolt of crimson lightning, then kept moving to avoid the rest.
Blake, released from Yang's grip, traced the lightning back to its source: one of the two falling tempests, the one closest to the ground. Vine had his arms, which apparently weren't conductive, pressed against its surface. Judging by the scorch marks on the creature's dome, Elm and Nora had tried and failed to break it. Now Elm was rooting her feet to the ground and readying herself to catch the creature as Vine's arms buckled.
"Go!" she shouted at Nora. "We will—"
One of Vine's arms wrapped around Elm, lifting both her and chunks of the ground she'd tried to grip. It had already knocked Nora clear.
"You will both go," he said.
"No, you will all fall," Salem snarled, the hand that Qrow had just cut off turning and twitching in the air. The tempest let out an ear-piercing cry, its trailing, ribboned tentacles waved, and it went from falling to diving. With only one arm braced, Vine was unprepared.
"No!" Oscar called, but when he tried to summon more magic, it couldn't reach far enough to protect them.
Elm, caught in Vine's grip and well in crushing range, screamed. Nora screamed. Blake's breath caught in her throat—
And everything under the tempest was lost to a cloud of dust and debris when it crashed down. An explosion detonated an instant later, someone's Dust munitions cracking, destabilizing, and blowing the smokescreen away and over the rest of them.
"ELM!" Harriet screamed. "VINE!"
"NORA!" her friend's name tore up Blake's throat from the force behind it, and its sound was echoed in the voices of all her friends, none louder than Ren.
Salem used their distraction to slam Harriet with an energy beam strong enough to shock her aura into view and send her flying halfway across the crater. The rest of them were forced on the defensive under a rain of weaker—but still dangerous—energy blasts pouring from spheres that hovered in a defensive wall around her while her body recovered.
Adam could catch the attacks on his sword, and he did. He watched Blake flip and dodge the ones pointed her way, several shadows aiding her evasion. And then they were back on the attack, for all the good it would do when there was a second tempest hurtling down while the first choked the air with its disintegrating corpse.
That smoke turned Adam and everyone else into shadows. Light punched through the haze with little warning, chipping at his aura as he read silhouettes to avoid targeting allies.
There was a scream, a crack, and then a shockwave blew away the Grimm matter. Blake and Oscar flew past Adam, both of their auras flickering while fragments of the disintegrating whale bone Salem had just used her magic Grimm hands to uproot and hurl punched through the air around them.
"Blake!" Yang cried.
"Behind you!" Adam yelled, seeing another bone—a rib—on its way, sticky tendrils guiding its path and increasing its speed as it went.
Their eyes met. Crimson fury filled Yang's, fury at her own inability to protect her sister, Blake, Nora, and everyone else. That fury set her hair ablaze. She turned, stomped one foot forward, drew her arm back, and slammed her fist into the bone with a roar that shook the air.
The rib all but disintegrated. The surviving shards, molten, blew back towards Salem and perforated her flesh. Yang chased after them, her battle cry motivating the rest of them to do the same.
"Adam!"
He caught Blake's thrown Gambol Shroud and wrenched her forward. The extra momentum let her land a hit to Salem's unprotected back before any Grimm hands could catch her. Adam was a second behind, Wilt's glowing edge cutting away Salem's leg. Qrow's scythe took the other, but they were all forced back when Salem combined all of the magic spheres around her into one massive orb that she promptly detonated.
"She blew herself up?" Oscar panted.
"It won't stick," Harriet snarled, returned from her detour to see Jaune. Her eyes had dried, leaving nothing but rage to glitter in the choked moonlight.
It didn't. Their attack continued, but it was marred by the second tempest looming ever larger over all of them. Red lightning tore up the ground, frying any Grimm caught in its path and forcing them all to dodge more than just Salem's attacks. They had seconds before it hit the ground, no one could get close—
And there was Oscar, hands shaking on the grip of his cane, a glow in his eyes and fear on his face.
"NO!"
That voice shocked the whole battlefield. Oscar froze. The last of the smoke cleared and, through the lightning, stood a single person under the falling Grimm.
Nora.
Her clothes were torn and stained. Her weapon was gone. But there she stood, alive, gaze burning a hole through Oscar.
"Don't you dare," she snarled, and though her voice didn't carry, Adam read her lips just fine.
Her next words were for herself: "You can do this." She raised her arms. Lightning arced down to her fingers. She flinched, twitched, squeezed her eyes shut and clenched her teeth. "Be strong. Be—"
More lightning came down. Dozens of blinding red bolts coalesced into a single strike powerful enough to tinge the air with ozone.
Ren cried out. With him distracted, the Grimm team's faltering defense only held up when Marrow erupted from May's bubble, fingers already snapping to stem the tide. But those out of his semblance's range broke through.
In the center of the blinding storm of lightning, Nora was invisible. The tempest's shadow had consumed them all and its form had blotted out the sky. If Adam leaped and extended his hand, he could almost touch it. The creature's ribbon-like tentacles began to curl around its dome as gravity pulled it inexorably down.
But the dome itself moved no farther. It was stopped mere feet from the high point where Nora stood. No lightning shot across its surface; all of its energy was concentrated at that single point.
And as Adam watched, stunned, the very edges of the light where red bled through gained a purple tint. The storm weakened, breaking up into its component bolts that danced like prison bars around Nora.
Nora, who was, somehow, still alive. Down on one knee with her upraised palms taking the weight, clothes smoking, exposed skin ripped through with Lichtenberg figures, and teeth bared in defiance, Nora Valkyrie held up the sky. She bowed her head, squeezed her eyes shut, and screamed. Bit by flickering bit, purple consumed the crimson around her. Cracks in the dome spread from where her palms were pressed against it, each of them leaking purple light. That light punched through the dome's translucent surface, growing brighter and brighter as the cracks spread and multiplied. More Lichtenberg figures to match Nora's raced up the Grimm's flesh, but these were alive with power and tore apart everything they touched.
In one final, spectacular rush of power, the tempest exploded. Nora, abruptly unburdened, surged to her feet. She stood there a moment, shoulders heaving, skin quite literally steaming, overloaded aura breaking.
She found Ren through the wreckage raining down. She tried a smile but didn't make it before her eyes rolled up in her head and she collapsed—or would have, had a blur of red rose petals not flown through the obstacles in its path and resolved into Ruby just in time to catch her.
Ruby picked up Nora in a bridal carry, then blurred into another blob of petals, this time tinged with a tarnished pink. Adam had no more time between attacks to watch her; Salem had recovered from her self-inflicted wounds, seen her tempests destroyed, and redoubled her efforts accordingly.
But Adam had been using his semblance sparingly relative to how much power she'd given him, and so he repaid her for her renewed assault with a slash that took out the entire right side of her body. His focus on attack cost him, though: a nevermore's feather cut into his back, staggering him.
Salem's remnant turned its hateful gaze on him. Her side was still wasting away, but she didn't need both arms for her magic. A brightness to her eyes and a twitch of her right hand were his only warnings before a glowing red circle bloomed to life beneath him. The eye at its center opened and black tendrils shot out, grabbing his limbs and yanking him down before he could fully escape the circle's reach.
"Adam!" Blake cried. Ice Dust rounds crashed into the tendrils, freezing and snapping some of them, but more kept coming. Salem's eyes narrowed.
"Blake!" Adam shouted, but his attempts to free himself to aid Blake with the tide of Grimm descending on her from above were in vain. His semblance couldn't work fast enough to get him free.
"Minds that have fallen to the dark in the past," Salem intoned, raising her intact hand, "are all too easy to drag back down in the present."
What—
New tendrils latched onto his face and their burning agony tore out of him a scream the likes of which he'd never heard himself make, echoed by another voice several yards away. It all came from a distance, from down a tunnel, from behind a sudden veil of darkness. He was falling, spiraling, his mind divorced from his own body. And still he could feel the tendrils pushing further, pushing deeper, until they latched onto the shadows in his mind and began to pull.
Wave after wave of rage-soaked memories flooded through him faster than he could understand them all. His branding, his parents' deaths, his escape, his first failed mission, his last argument with Ghira, Blake leaving, Blake lying—the singular fury behind them all crested and tore through his thoughts until all he could see was red.
Blake slid on her knees to avoid a winged beringel's claws. Gutting it, she got to her feet on the other side and brought up the other half of Gambol Shroud just in time to deflect a griffon's grasping talons. A lancer flew up behind her and she left an explosive shadow in her wake to buy herself a precious second to think.
"Yang!" That was Weiss's voice. What was she—"Freezerburn!"
Mist washed over the battlefield an instant later, giving Blake the cover she needed to grab Adam and drag him back in the direction of May's invisibility bubble. Blindly she carried him, exhausted limbs burning. He was complete dead weight. What had Salem done to him, to Qrow?
Inside the bubble, Jaune took over healing Adam as best he could.
"Keep holding him," he instructed, sweat beading on his brow and dripping over his eyes. "You need some help too."
"I'm fine, I—"
"It won't take long."
Blake took her gaze from Adam's flickering aura and frowned at Jaune's strained expression. "Are you—"
Adam's hand latched around her throat. Her words cut off with a strangled gasp and Adam stood, dragging her to her feet with him. His visible eye was wide, grasping black lines crawling out over his clear blue iris from the yawning dark of his pupil. His aura flared in sickly patterns, the red patches flickering like dying lights.
"Blake!"
A crossbow bolt fired from May's weapon ricocheted off Adam's horn. He snarled and threw Blake with strength he shouldn't have had. She slammed into May and then both went down in a heap. May's invisibility bubble waned but held as she shoved Blake off and dragged in air.
"Stop!" Fiona planted herself between Adam, Blake, and May with her arms spread wide. "What's wrong with you?"
Adam stared at her. His expression creased, a worm of doubt and confusion breaking through the anger—but then he shook his head and it was gone.
Fiona gave up on peace and readied her weapon. Irritation marred Adam's features. Wilt blurred in his hands; Fiona was sent skidding across the ground, a last-second shift of her staff turning the mortal blow into a jarring one. May's bubble again flickered and she froze, caught between helping Fiona and keeping them all hidden.
Blake wouldn't force her to make that choice. From the way Adam's eye tracked her when she stood, he wanted her.
So she sprinted back out into the madness beyond the bubble. Their efforts to hold back the Grimm had crumbled completely; everyone else was just trying to survive. Weiss was with Winter trying to thin the horde, Marrow had partnered with Oscar, and even Harriet was blitzing around, taking down anything she could reach, but there were just too many. Ruby and Yang were too busy trying to deal with their uncle to help.
Heart in her throat, Blake tried not to dwell on the grim reality of their situation: if they couldn't bring Adam and Qrow back to their senses, then none of them were going to survive.
His entire world was red and pulsing with his heartbeat. Blake—Blake—was a beacon among shadows, a shining crimson star amid the wastes. She, too, pulsed, simultaneously larger and smaller than her true self. Like always, she was trying to run. Like always. He couldn't let her run this time. Not again, never again—never again?
Again she danced out of his reach. He scowled and pursued.
"All you do is run!"
She winced at his shout but it only quickened her pace. Her ankle twisted on the soft ground and a nearby sabyr tried to take advantage. A shadow took its lunge in her place and she plunged her sword into its neck. It let out a frustrated whine before disintegrating. She staggered back away from it, braced for the next one—sabyrs never attacked alone—but the attack came from behind. Paws hit her shoulders like hammers and drove her into the muck of the tens of Grimm that had already died here. The air left her lungs in a gasp and the weight pressing on her ribs stopped her from dragging in more.
A massive saber tooth crept into the periphery of her vision while the beast's hot breath washed over her neck. She heaved against its weight but even with a shadow she couldn't escape the claws digging into her back.
Her lungs burned. She didn't even have enough air to scream.
A red bar in the corner of her eye, an explosion of black matter, and the beast going silent. The tar-like taste of Grimm remains leaked through her lips to taint her tongue.
"She's mine," Adam snarled, wrenching his blade aside and yanking it from the back of the sabyr's skull to send the fading corpse rolling away. Blake forced air into her lungs and scrabbled on the slick ground to get some distance. When she tried to get to her feet, a creep knocked her down—only to get a bullet through whatever passed for its brain.
Adam lowered Blush. His aura was duller now, and where it didn't cover, black smoke to match the last of the sabyr's existence rose from his skin.
He glanced down at the creep's lingering remains, then swept his gaze over the rest of the circling Grimm. "Stay out of my way."
To Blake's horror, they listened. Still on her back, she readied Gambol Shroud. Though she could breathe again, the pain in her chest would not fade.
"Adam, please."
He flourished Wilt to discard the last of the black matter staining its surface. "Plead all you want. It'll only make your silence sweeter."
"This isn't you!"
His grin was wide and terrible. "Oh, but it is. And I missed it."
She recognized the way he shifted his feet and threw up Gambol Shroud's sheath in a hasty defense. Wilt, drawn in an instant, drew sparks against that sharpened edge and dug into the gore-slicked ground. Blake lifted her legs and hooked her ankles around Adam's neck. She wrenched him over with a cry and used that momentum to get to her feet.
Adam's moment of weakness prompted a nevermore to dive for them both but before Blake could shoot it down, Blush beat her to the mark.
"I said," Adam hissed as he rose to his feet, "to stay out of my way. She's mine."
His voice was changing with the thickening of the Grimm infection, growing darker, gaining a beastly undertone that sent a chill down her spine. But with that chill came steel. Blake brandished Gambol Shroud, sheath and gun-whip both raised between her and the corruption possessing her friend.
"I will save you as many times as it takes," she promised.
He recoiled as through struck, hesitated, and then when his fury came rushing back Blake rushed with it. She slid under his reflexive slash, deflected the blade high when he tried to adjust, and with a flick of her wrist brought the whip that she'd thrown back around from his blind spot to wrap around his neck.
Once more on her feet, she braced herself and pulled. Adam choked and tried to dig his fingers between the ribbon and his neck to no avail.
"That's enough," she said, pulling harder when he tried to drag her closer and relieve the tension. "Come back, Adam!"
He gave up trying to remove the ribbon directly and drew Wilt, but his semblance couldn't make it through the corruption in his veins and the naked blade only bent her weapon's new and reinforced ribbon.
And then he was tackling her. Blake shrieked—he'd moved faster than even she could see and there was a lingering Grimm haze where he'd stood. Her shoulders slammed into the ground with a sickening squelch and then they were grappling. Unnatural strength that was too much for even Adam at his best let him wrench the end of the whip from her grip and finally loosen the bands around his throat.
He dragged in a desperate breath but that moment of relief left him vulnerable to Blake slamming her sheath's handle into his temple. He was sent sprawling and she recovered her weapon's other half while she got some distance.
He pushed himself up to his hands and knees. He was panting for air, his aura sicklier than ever, barely even a glimmer amid the haze pouring from him like heat waves. When he shakily rose to his full height, his right iris was all but black and the tendrils were spreading over his sclera.
"Adam?" she whispered.
His gaze stayed on the ground. The ground that would not stop shifting beneath him. There was a buzzing between his ears loud enough to drown out the roar in his veins and nausea in his belly.
What was he doing?
"Can you hear me?"
He looked up at the familiar voice, saw the bane of his life looking down on him, and remembered.
Adam's attack, though telegraphed, was fast and strong enough to put Blake on her back foot. The unstable ground slid out from under her and only a shadow let her get her balance in time to stave off his assault.
His throat was still red. His aura wasn't healing him.
Gambol Shroud's trigger clicked but nothing came out—no ammo. She'd lost count. Adam grinned, spun around her sheath's guard, and drove his elbow into her side. She let it shove her, hiding in her somersault the motion of loading the next magazine of Dust ammunition.
When Adam tried to close the distance, he found his foot frozen to the ground. Blake shot his other one too and then doubled up the icy restraints before Adam could kick his way free.
"This isn't you," she said, with a voice and resolve like iron.
He laughed. "Is that what you think?"
Before he could shoot out the ice, Blake went on the attack. Trapped, he was forced onto the defensive.
She tried above.
"Every apology!" he shouted.
She tried below.
"Every concession!"
She tried a shadow to attack from the left and right at once. A bullet dispelled the shadow before it could even make contact and then Adam was grabbing both of her wrists. A glance down showed the ice broken apart with black mist leaking from its shards.
"Every single second," he hissed, face inches from her own, the tendrils in his eye pulsing like veins, "I suffocated what I was. Who. I was. No more."
Even the Adam from the tunnels under Mantle had been more amenable to reason than this. This…this ghost was one she recognized from the train, the missions before it, the eager anticipation of casualties. It was less Adam and more all of his worst impulses personified, all of his worst emotions dragged to the forefront while everything else, everything he'd worked so hard for, was silenced.
Another shadow let her slip free but Adam caught her slash with Gambol Shroud on Wilt. Their locked blades crept towards her neck. She gathered herself and then broke free with yet another shadow, only for Adam's hand to lock around her wrist with inhuman speed and yank her back. She sought some hint of the true Adam beneath the Grimm sickness pulling him apart and saw nothing but corruption.
Ruby's voice punched through the chaos: "NO!"
The world went white and Blake squeezed her eyes shut with a cry of pain. Adam's weight behind Wilt vanished; the light faded and she realized with a start that it had been Ruby's silver eyes. After her solo act against Salem, Blake had thought them unusable.
Adam was on his knees, arms limp at his sides, single—blue—eye wide with horror. Blood leaked from it like tears.
She dropped down in front of him and cupped his face in her hands, forced him to look her in the eye. The Grimm sickness inside him, shielded by his body, had weathered Ruby's silver eyes, and its influence—though weakened—lingered as a black stain on his iris.
"Can you hear me, Adam?"
"I think you can be a good man, Adam."
For just an instant, he blinked away the haze and saw the true world: Blake, bloodied and terrified but staring straight into his battered soul, the warzone around her. The monster behind it all, the one doing this to him, with her back to them while she dealt with Oscar.
The fury roared and howled through the cracks in his control. He had moments. Tearing his eyes from Blake against the need screaming along his every nerve, he staggered to his feet. She stumbled away from him as he unsheathed Wilt and poured every trace of his wrath, every scrap of this monster roaring in his veins, into its blade.
If that witch wanted to use him, she would know the consequences.
The world fell dark, and though a thrill of fear that this was just another illusion shook his focus, it wasn't enough to stop him.
Blake flinched back to avoid the edges of Adam's moonslice. The crimson crescent ripped through the air as a silent sickle; Salem never even saw it coming. Bisected mid-spell, she still managed to flick her fingers and send Adam hurtling through the air with what energy she'd already summoned.
For Blake, time slowed. Adam flew past her, the scraps of his aura finally broke, and Gambol Shroud's hook missed catching him by hairs. He crashed into the ground and skidded for several yards, his chest smoking from the energy blast.
"Useless," Salem snarled, sticky strands trying to reconnect her wilted halves.
Oscar, though, seized his chance. He slammed the end of his cane into the ground to summon a translucent green sphere around her. In the same instant, Marrow broke through the Grimm, snapped his fingers, and yelled, "Stay!"
Salem's eyes went wide with rage, but the rest of her slowed to a crawl.
"Now!" Oscar cried.
Harriet burst out from May's bubble while May herself collapsed to the ground, chest heaving from exhaustion, her semblance spent even with Jaune's support. Harriet had a column under each arm. An instant behind her, Ruby, visible only as a red blur, barreled towards Salem with bits of metallic silver laced through her petals.
"Guys, the Grimm!" Jaune cried from his spot by Fiona protecting May, jarring Blake into action.
"Blake, get Adam!" shouted Yang. She had Qrow's arm slung over one shoulder, the man dazed and doing his best to help her reach Jaune. "We'll handle this!"
Blake zeroed in on the creatures angling towards Adam; as Ruby said, Yang and the others could handle the ones that would interfere with Salem's containment. And these, once they were done with Adam, would just add to their numbers. So she went to work.
She ignored her trembling muscles. She ignored her fears for Adam. She ignored the looming fate that awaited all of them if they failed. She ignored it all, and she did what she'd trained to do. Gambol Shroud was a scythe culling wheat, its blade and ribbon charged with fire from the Dust in its magazine. Faster and faster it moved, faster and faster Blake moved with it. A lunging beowolf cut down, a swooping nevermore stripped of its wings, a rearing ursa diced into burning pieces.
Within that dance she snatched moments of opportunity to snipe at the Grimm pressing in on Yang, who had made it to Jaune and passed off Qrow to his care alongside Nora. In return, one of Yang's shells blew a sneaky centinel to pieces before it could wrap its pincers around the back of Blake's neck.
"Now!" Harriet shouted, and she and Ruby activated the pylons. Light flickered to life between them, exactly as it had in Ironwood's office. The two fastest huntresses on the field turned their attention to making sure none of the Grimm interrupted what was coming.
Oscar was still right there, though, unmoving and vulnerable while he poured his focus and magic into maintaining the sphere keeping all of Salem trapped. Salem, who had loosened Marrow's control and was pouring so much magic into breaking that barrier that her form was all but invisible in the hurricane of light raging inside of it.
Her fist broke through the side with a sound like breaking glass. Oscar flinched but wasn't fast enough to get the cane out of her reach. Salem's fingers gripped it and held it against Oscar's increasingly panicked pulls. His concentration was slipping, the sphere flickering, and Marrow was too busy fending off an entire stampede of boarbatusks to intervene.
And Blake was too far. She sent ice rounds towards the sphere but Grimm threw themselves in the way. The rest of her team tried to help, but again, the seething masses of darkness intervened. Harriet was locked down by a minefield of sigils; Ruby tried to use her eyes but the light died as soon as it was summoned and she fell to her knees with her hands over her face, blood leaking out from between her fingers.
The Dust prison wasn't ready. They needed more time. They needed—
Arms trembling from the strain of keeping his cane in his grasp, Oscar found Salem's single hateful eye in the cloud, and his panic drained away. In its place rested a resolute smile.
"Oscar, no!" Ruby cried, but when she went to stand, she collapsed instead.
His grip around the handle's trigger tightened, then loosened, and his voice carried millennia when he asked his ancient enemy, "Do you believe in miracles?"
Blake threw up an arm and squinted her eyes nearly shut against the supernova that erupted around her. For several seconds, it was too bright to see anything. Traces of green and gold interlaced with the blinding white, and as the white light began to dim and she lowered her arm, the streams of color that washed over her, through her, left her feeling almost…warm. Comforted.
And that was more disconcerting than any pain.
The world that greeted her when the last of the light faded was not the one she sliver of Salem that had seeped out from the sphere: obliterated. The sphere itself: restored. Every Grimm, every lingering trace of the great whale, annihilated. Even the black pools, stains on reality from which new Grimm had continuously formed, had evaporated to nothing. Her blade—apart from new nicks and scratches—pristine and gleaming without a trace of Grimm residue. Dirt, actual dirt and not disgusting Grimm remains, shifted under her heels.
Silver light shone down from above and Blake raised her gaze to see the moon returning her stare. The explosion had punched a hole through the clouds, creating an ephemeral eye in the storm.
Her gaze dropped down. Ruby and Harriet were holding up two of the pillars. The other two were crooked but standing. A bright blue cube hung suspended between them, shimmering, its contents a pool of black matter sloshing against its new prison. As Blake watched, the light intensified and the cube shrank until the liquid had no more room to move.
All was still.
And then Oscar collapsed. Ruby scrambled to catch him, ending up on her knees with his head cradled in her lap. The pillar she'd abandoned stayed standing when a glyph summoned by Weiss took her place. Other glyphs sprung up around the rest of the pillars.
"Oscar?" Ruby whispered as Qrow dropped down next to her and tried to wipe away the blood beginning to dry on her face. Yang joined their group, pulling Qrow into a one-armed hug while she spared the other to put a hand on her sister's back.
Oscar coughed, one hand searching the ground next to him until Qrow gingerly set the cane in his grasp. His eyes cracked open, squinted against the light, before he focused on Ruby's face. His smile was small, shaky, and weak, but it was there. "For now."
Ruby's radiant smile couldn't outshine her tears as she pulled him into a back-breaking hug. Next to them both, the pillars hummed with quiet energy.
"Did we win?"
"Yeah, Oscar, we won. We won."
Oscar's trick—or Ozpin's—had also wiped out the Grimm in the dogfight overhead. Mantas circled their position. A flagship was breaking away from the main fleet in their direction.
It was over.
Blake swayed on her feet. Her thoughts grew distant for just a second before she grabbed them and yanked them back. A deep breath anchored her to the present moment and she reaffirmed her grip on Gambol Shroud.
Adam. She turned in place. Where was Adam?
There. A body amid the broken ground. "Adam!"
She skidded to her knees next to him. He was semiconscious, eyes glazed over and threatening to stay closed with every laborious blink. Her hands hovered over him with no idea how to help.
Blake's panicked cry reached Adam like echoes bouncing off the walls of a long tunnel. He tried to open his eyes and see her before the heavy dark pulled him under but found himself too weak to manage even that. His body was a foreign thing, its senses and pain abstracted to vague warmth growing more distant with each passing moment.
Blood was trickling from his lips and had stained the ground under his head. One of his legs was bent like it had a second knee; shards of bone stuck out from his right elbow. Every inhale and exhale bubbled deep in his throat, maybe even in his lungs. The nauseating smell of burnt flesh drifted up from his scorched chest.
"No, no," she whispered, experience telling her that these were injuries first aid couldn't render less than fatal. "I—" had no idea what to do.
Adam's chest heaved. His lips moved, but nothing came out.
He tried to repeat himself, expression twisting in agony, and she ached with helplessness as his eyes rolled back and he went limp.
Panic and fear and her own exhaustion warred to useless indecision while she watched her onetime mentor, partner, enemy, and ally slip away right before her eyes. Frustrated tears pooled in her eyes.
"JAUNE!"
Weiss's shout from behind her snapped Blake back to reality and injected fresh adrenaline into her veins. Blake whipped around to see Jaune running over, hands already aglow.
"I'm here!" he said as he dropped to his knees next to her.
"Please," Blake said, some of those tears finally breaking free to course down her cheeks. She was wearing her naked desperation all over her face and there was nothing she could do to hide it. "You have to save him."
Jaune took in Adam's injuries and set his jaw, white aura flaring before he held his hands to Adam's chest. The healing wave washed over Adam's broken body, shimmering nexuses of light concentrating where the internal damage was worst. His head was the brightest point. His chest was second. Any of a dozen other points fought for third.
"Come on," Jaune bit out. Sweat glistened on his brow. Whether he was talking to himself or Adam, Blake couldn't tell. When Adam's eyelids shifted, though, instinct had her grabbing his hand. A thrill ran through her at the touch. Not fear, not love, but a brief flare of everything she had ever felt holding his hand before.
Adam coughed, the clearest sign that Jaune's effort was pulling him out of unconsciousness. A spray of red came out with the next one, and then the several after that. His breaths finally stopped bubbling.
"Come on," Jaune bit out again.
Ren, with an unconscious Nora in his arms, finally reached them.
"Jaune," Ren said, "you need to stop."
Blake opened her mouth to protest only to see the fear on their faces. She looked back at Jaune.
His breaths came in ragged gasps, his hands were trembling, and he leaned his whole body into every wave of new light that spread from his fingers.
He was pushing himself to complete aura exhaustion.
"I can do this," he said. "I'm healing everyone, I don't care who they are. It's what I'm good at."
"It's not about that," Ren snapped. "You're going to exhaust yourself! There are medics on their way."
"He's right," Weiss put in. "You don't need to put yourself at risk like this."
Jaune shook his head, gaze fixed on Adam. "He's not stable. If I do nothing, he's going to die."
Blake held Adam's hand tighter. She couldn't ask Jaune to risk his huntsman career for Adam. Nor could she tell him to stop.
The status quo broke when Jaune's aura flickered and his eyes briefly rolled back before apparent sheer force of will grounded him again. Against the others' protests, Jaune set his jaw, tensed his shoulders, and pushed every last bit of healing power he had onto Adam.
The surge was blinding, brilliant, and brief. Blinking the stars from her eyes, Blake saw Jaune collapsed on the ground with a thin line of blood trickling from his nose. Ren fell to his knees next to him, Nora gingerly passed to Weiss while Ren listened for his breathing and checked his pulse.
Ren yelled for a medic.
Lost in blessed numbness, Adam found that tranquility shattered when the formerly comforting warmth surged and then crashed down on him in a searing tide. His eyes flew open. He clenched his jaw to contain the scream but a choked moan escaped instead.
Bent over him, Blake let out a relieved breath. Tear tracks gleamed on her cheeks. She had his left hand clutched in hers. Only now, seeing that, did he register her touch through the haze of pain permeating his every muscle, vein, and bone.
This wouldn't last; the light was fading. Darkness crept into the edges of his vision and widened the exhausted gaps between his thoughts. He battled it, but it was an enemy immune to will. Before he lost the fight, he focused his strength.
Adam's eyes were already closing again, his flare of consciousness as brief as the healing that had enabled it. Though the bleeding had stopped and his breathing no longer bubbled, his face was ashen and his bones still broken. He had to be in agony.
"The medics are almost here," Weiss said. Blake barely heard it.
"Don't leave," she whispered. "Not now. Not like this."
They had so much left to talk through, so many bridges left to rebuild. To have his life cut short here was barely better than the council's planned execution. And yet, for all her desperation, she could only hold his hand. Frustrated tears pooled in her eyes.
He squeezed her hand. Blake froze, then returned the gesture before his grip slackened completely.
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