Volume 3: No Truce With the Furies Chapter 1: Just Get to the Next Screen
"I'm not mad. I'm just pissed."
— 1 —
Oleander felt the kick to his ribs a moment before the pain registered. Not the kick, you understand. It was a more clinical thing. His eyes fluttered open, his cheek wet with spittle, the taste of overly bleached hospital floor on his tongue. How had this happened?
He tried to move, but simply figuring out where his hands were seemed ponderous with effort. It felt like he had been dosed up to the eyes with betathanatine, Reaper. A product of his family's company, Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie AG—IG Farben—produced during the newly formed Kingdom of Atlas' post Great War's explosion in chemical research. Designed to bring the human body as close to cold death as possible without cellular damage, with a potent and highly illegal stimulant within the compound that gave one a sense of heightened, clinical self awareness. Thermal sensors wouldn't even register you as a living being, less than even a Grimm, all the while giving you a psychopathic precision of intelligence.
It let you functionally die without the overwhelming sense of emotion or wonder that might otherwise mar the results of trying to study death as close as humans dared approach for medical purposes. To research the effects of Aura. All the while providing you a sort of acute indifference to things like pain, joy, and arousal.
Smooth, he thought, nowhere near as alarmed as this unexpected situation might imply. Reaper was one of the more high end chemicals found today on the black market, like tetrameth or synergize, though usually so diluted the effects were miniscule compared to their laboratory counterparts.
Whoever had drugged him had some deep pockets and a serious grudge. There were far cheaper and arguably more entertaining ways to drug a potential target. He would know.
Another kick.
"Get up, you cocksucker!" a boy shouted at him in a muddied accent that just felt poor.
With a cool certainty, Oleander understood exactly what was happening. He had been in this situation before after the White Fang murdered his father back in Atlas. He would have thought they were here to finish the job, but he was aware the White Fang typically preferred ransom to outright murder. If they were doing that, the betathanatine made no sense. Far too expensive.
Who, then? Communards? Those did exist in Vale. The boy sounded poor enough to plausibly be aligned with them. That was why it made no sense. Reaper this strong would cost an arm and leg on the street.
He supposed he could figure it out once he was safe.
Taking the precise, yet sluggish effects of being drugged with the betathanatine into account, he consciously thought where he hid his scalpel and brought his hand to it. The kick had come from the left. The voice had come from just over six feet up. He calculated the distance, the approximate location of the faunus' jugular. Before taking a breath and launching himself up with a burst of Aura.
Oleander miscalculated. He came up short, his chest hitting the unconscious girl his attacker was carrying. His scalpel hit the boy's Aura, itself a flickering sort of no-color yet every-color. Even without, he knew we would not have done more than knick him.
Stupid!
He blinked. Jaune Arc. Blood type A positive. Human. Hard to recognize him with the start of a beard on his face. He was carrying Blake Belladonna, blood type AB Negative. Non-registered organ donor. Faunus.
Jaune stumbled back. "Dude, whoa, whoa, holy Jesus!"
Deputy Headmistress Glynda Goodwitch (Blood Type B Positive, Registered Organ Donor, human) had brought Jaune Arc in last night. The boy had suffered some sort of seizure and burst nearly every blood vessel in his nose. Croaker had thrown his hands up at figuring out why. The blood tests had revealed the boy was completely clean. Oleander had suspected Jaune Arc was simply an undiagnosed epileptic. Then stopped thinking about things that did not matter so he could focus on finishing his book and overnight shift.
The girl Jaune Arc was carrying looked much like he had last night. Disheveled. Nose bleeding. The hairbow poorly hiding her faunus ears looked like it had been haphazardly thrown back on.
"What are you doing?" Oleander demanded, still holding his scalpel.
Jaune's eyes looked around wildly. He was still in an advanced state of hospital undress. "Dude, I dunno. I started glowing and shit got fucky, and I can't find Croaker, and why is everyone unconscious?"
Oleander rubbed his face, wiping away the bit of Jaune's spit that landed on his cheek. "What do you mean everyone is unconscious?"
"Motherfucker, I don't know!" he screamed. "Just help me fucking find the doctor!"
"Shouting is unnecessary," Oleander said calmly, looking around. There at the nurses' station, the ex-Huntress manning the desk was slumped over, face on her keyboard. Another nurse, a man straight from university out in the Kingdom of Vale, was trying to shake her awake. "Not everyone, either."
"Bitch, do we got time to argue semantics? Where Croaker at?"
Oleander pointed down the hall. "I think there has been an attack."
Jaune shoved into Oleander, using Blake as a kind of battering ram. "Take me to him. I don't know this place!"
"After all of the time you have been here?" he asked dubiously. "Are you out of your ice-picking mind?"
The boy growled. "If there done been some attack, we need Huntresses like Blake here to fight 'em off. What if the doc's fucked up, too?"
"Then he can hardly help you," Oleander said.
"Work with ya boy here, tu hijueputa! Stop being so calm about this shit."
Oleander looked down his nose at Jaune Arc. He did have to concede the boy was almost right. If there were some disaster going on, they would need all hands on deck. Not just to save some amateur student like Blake. The veterans on staff would be far more important to any fighting effort, chief among them being the Chief Physician, Croaker.
He let Jaune think he was agreeing with him just to make him shut up. Right now, he really needed a good tea.
The way Jaune was walking kept tugging at the fringes of Oleander's awareness. Every single step was the exact same distance, without the kind of uncertainty you would expect from someone claiming they were lost. His eyes were set hard in his skull, and he was holding onto Blake Belladonna tightly. It was a kind of military exactness Jaune did not possess, and half-made Oleander suspect Jaune's body came equipped with combat neurachem wetware. It would make a lot of sense for a Hunter. Except he sounded too poor to afford anything like that.
Once upon a time, machines had overtaken the human factor. You saw this during the Great War. Industry and robots and heavy metal and basic computer programming more reminiscent of steamwork If X then Y than modern systems. They had designed machines capable of doing the same jobs faster and more accurately than humanly possible. It was a machine's world out there for a while. Until the rapidly emerging biosciences of the post-war era began to catch up. Combined with the better understanding and theory of Aura necessitated by the overall shrinkage in the size of conventional armies, and suddenly the human being was at a competitive advantage once again. Since then, it had been a race of sorts between technologies and psychospiritual Hunter application for dominance. But until they somehow manage to give a robot a soul, the new and improved human flesh still had the razor's edge.
Like the old Atlas saying went, "God is a number you can count to, but you are hard-wired."
Of course, it could just as easily be a kind of thoughtful autopilot. Oleander saw that the boy cared for the girl in his arms. That happened with mixed-sex partnerships a lot. He did not really care for faunus, and mixed-race couples in particular. It would be hilarious if Jaune was not aware. Blake kept the fact hidden, it seemed, which he only learned because he had read her medical records. Speciation was incredibly relevant for certain medical procedures.
Learning the tragic truth would serve Jaune right for kicking Oleander in the ribs.
What served no one right was the position of the physician.
"Well, don't that just sink Lil Yachty's boat," Jaune said with a growl.
Croaker sat at his desk, the window open. Facedown in his paperworks, a lit cigarette in his mouth starting to smoke the medical documents. No more conscious than half the people in the hospital, even if. The fact the papers were only smoking and not actively burning meant that Croaker, and himself by extension, could not have been out long.
Whoever had done this to them all, they hadn't done it long ago. Oleander couldn't wrap his brain around any answer which made sense of the situation.
Before Jaune could block the doorway with himself and his animal girl, Oleander ducked into the room. If Croaker was dead in a terrorist attack, he was going to murder the bastards who did this. The only reason Oleander was in a nice coat here with a nice job as a medical Huntsman and not some back-alley dog's-leech out in the Valean ghetto, was because of the old physician.
He flared his Aura and pinched the cigarette dead, before hauling the big physician up to a sitting position. Quick checks and he found all vital signs normal, if a little slow. He let out a quick breath. Inconsistent with the effects of the Reaper, he thoughts distantly.
"Croaker," he said. "Wake up. There has been an attack and we need you."
The man didn't react. When Oleander opened his eyes, the dark blues just rolled around vaguely. "Do not make me get out the stimulants! I will dose you up to the eyes with tetrameth to wake you, old man. You hear me?"
Jaune entered the room with the care of a man walking into a minefield, paying great attention to avoid bumping Blake's head on the doorframe. He was still softly glowing in a way that made it impossible to pin down his Aura's color, apparently using the extra strength to keep Blake in that undignified bridal carry.
"Lemme," he said, and Oleander scowled. "Hey, doc, if you don't wake your sorry ass up, I'mma start making more connections between your frankly sketchy interest in silver eyes and Ruby Rose. Hey, doc!"
To Oleander's angry shame, Croaker actually seemed to stir.
"Ugh. Who woke me? I'll kill you," he said without any heat, rubbing his face. Only to squint at his paperwork. "And who burned my hard copy?"
"You did, Croaker," Oleander says. "Something is wrong. Some kind of attack."
"Yeah, so we gotta help everyone KO'd, like my pardner here," Jaune interjected, selfishly focusing on him and his amateur partner.
Croaker sniffed and looked down at his hand. With a note in the back of his throat, he stood up to his full height "I feel fucked, but not dead. What happened out here? Mass casualties? Center of the attack? Who dunnit?"
Oleander folded his arms. "Do not know, to all three of those."
"It's only people with Auras," Jaune said.
Croaker scowled. "Everyone has those."
"No, I mean, can actually use it," Jaune corrected. "Only thing connecting them, I think." He shifted the girl in his arms, handling her more delicately than you needed for someone out cold like that.
At first, Oleander scoffed. But then thought back to it. The sophomores and beyond recovering from injuries, the veterans on staff, and those like himself and Blake, they were the only ones passed out. The only ones he'd seen still active were those without active Auras, the purely civilian employees here. Not a very wide sample size, but not a bad guess.
"That is silly," he said. "Are you suggesting some poison that only affects Aura users?"
Jaune grimaced, shrugging. "Iunno, man."
"The idea starts to melt with a bit of sun. There is no poison in existence that exclusively targets Aura users," Olander said patiently "There have been attempts, sure, but those were pseudoscientific theorems made during the height of the Great War. Desperate actions by desperate people."
Oleander didn't know what was going on, and it infuriated him. None of this made sense, it was almost magical, but magic is just as real as the drugs that target Aura.
"Maybe you're wrong. Do it really matter?"
Oleander frowned. "As if you would know anything about Aura, you…"
It was then that Oleander noted the Aura. Sure, he had seen it. Made note of it. But until now, he had never paid attention to it. His mind felt several kinds of foggy. Had tuned everything about Jaune out as best he could. But now seeing it, paying attention to it, it was... wrong. All of it. Aura was supposed to be uniform, a single solid color. Bright or dark. Thematic or subtle. Whatever theological nonsense claimed they were part of the incorporeal soul aside, they were a fact of reality for people like himself.
Even if you could get lost in the finer individual details, the concepts were old and well-understood. Nothing much left to surprise you.
Jaune's did. But you had to look at it, really look at it, to realize that. It had this no-color sort of look to it, a dry water stain at the edges of one's glasses. Not a blur, exactly, but easily tuned out until you started to fixate on it, and no amount of spit or polish was going to clean it off.
Once upon a time, Oleander had read a paper about how easy the human eye is to fool. Saccades, they are called, the fractional shift of the eyes from place to place. Croaker had taught him that if he ever saw someone whose eyes were perfectly still, they were likely halfway to death. Researchers were able to time the saccades of the eyes of a reader, changing the very words in front of them as they read in real time, and the reader would never notice unless told to look back.
That was what Jaune's Aura felt like. It moved like Aura did not, in a way that made Oleander doubt his own sanity. Like it were trying to screw with him in particular, shifting in ways he could not tell were real or imagined.
It made his eyes hurt.
"So let's treat the people we got on hand now and solve the mystery later!" Jaune demanded.
Oleander was too fixated on his daze towards Jaune. Too lost in himself to think the bitterly sarcastic thoughts at Jaune he would typically do. He felt like he might get knocked out again, the way he'd woken up minutes ago.
No way is he responsible, he thought. But then, why was Jaune the only Aura user who seemed to still be active without something prompting him? Oleander supposed one of the unpowered nurses could have woken him, but he knew for a fact that they all generally hated Jaune and would have likely just left the boy there while they made the smart call to focus on more important patients.
Croaker had not noticed. In the time it took Oleander to realize he did not know what he was looking at, the physician had gone over to Blake. "You can set her down, I don't know, on the desk or something. Nose bleeding like yours last night. Hey, Ollie, anyone else's nose—you good, kid?"
He had noticed. Of course Croaker had noticed. Even if he had not, the inelegant "I don't know" would have tipped him off. The physician knew Oleander a little too well.
"'Don't'? Fuck's gotten into you?" he asked.
"Doc," Jaune insisted. "He's fine."
But Croaker waved Jaune and his unconscious catgirl off.
Oleander simply shook his head, staring at Blake and her partner. "I—you do not see it?"
"See what?"
The boy sniffled. His nose felt a little runny all the sudden. "Maybe, uh. After effect of whatever happened. I am sorry."
"Sit your ass down in the chair," he said. "First the girl, then I'm checking you over."
— 2 —
"Just get to the next screen, Ozpin."
Once, when Beacon Academy was still figuring itself out, and half of its operation procedures were still poisoned from the days of post-war Vale's brief military dictatorship under Marshal Sergei Wojciechowski, Ozpin had gotten in trouble. A hotshot young Huntsman with a voice in his head had gone into the heart of the Catchfire ghetto on what historians would later call the last of the Eight Days in August. Three former teams of mostly faunus, White Fang adjacent Huntsmen who'd taken the prime minister hostage and were making demands of the Council. Dragging his partner Glynda Goodwitch along for the ride despite her many protests.
Just a boy trying to impress a girl and his dubious teachers with the sheer audacity that only came from being young, dumb, and overflowing with human fluids. Of course Ozpin could sort out the most volatile situation since the abdication of King Ozymandias and the Catchfire Revolution. Vale had been a hotbed of lefitst revolutionary thought since the abdication of the warrior king. The voice in his head said this New World Order was his doing. The teenager with the cane would be invincible and have all the answers.
Ozpin had barely survived. Only because Glynda had dragged him out of the artillery firestorm once the Valean Army had got tired of being sidelined while police negotiated with ex-Huntsmen. The entire district of Jamrock had nearly been leveled with napalm and corrosive gas. The Royal Airborne had jumped into that hell they made and executed both distracted Huntsmen and civilians in a bad place alike. All Ozpin did was manage to save the Prime Minister at the cost of a couple bullet wounds. In hindsight, that was probably the only reason he wasn't arrested after the fact. Prime Minister Elias Susebron owed him one, and was too busy trying to keep the Army from overthrowing the government out of frustration again.
After a stay in Beacon's hospital, Headmaster DeLaGuerre had sentenced him to twenty-one lashes while tied to a post. A public affair to cement the school's authority and reject the idea it was at all a partisan affair in the eyes of the Army and Council both. Glynda would have been guilty, too. And fighting DeLaGuerre on it, to the point of physically wrestling the ancient war veteran, had reduced her service to extreme restrictions of movement, and increased his to forty-seven.
"Just get to the next screen, kid," King Ozymandias whispered from within the bowels of his psyche. Ozpin had removed his shirt to reveal the little tattoo on his arm, revealing the Number apparently every incarnation of himself had added to to keep track of how long he'd been dying and coming back. In those days, tattoos were frowned upon by polite society.
Ozpin saw the judgemental eyes of a hundred or more students. He had stared down the student body, and smiled.
Glynda had been in the front row. The splash zone, as he'd thought of it through the haze. Of course she'd be there to grab his limp, ripped-apart body when it was over. She was always there to clean up his messes.
Not this time, Ozpin had thought sleepily. He'd gone to the school apothecary and spent what was left of his money, a few talents of Lien, to dose himself up the eyes with gnarlroot. An old-fashioned anesthetic and coagulant he learned about from the voice in his head that was rapidly becoming his own.
It was the only reason he was able to wear that smile of his as the whip ripped his back apart. Why the teacher dishing the punishment had paused to gawk at Ozpin's bloodless back. At the horrified look in Glynda's eyes.
He half-imagined what it'd be like if she were up here instead. The whip would probably destroy her bra. But the blood and screams would destroy anything sexual about that. Pure shame and public humiliation.
That was the point of corporal punishment.
The teacher cracked the whip again.
Just get to the next screen, Ozpin.
Headmaster Ozpin growled inwardly, forcing himself to his feet. It was a long way up, even using his cane, the Long Memory, for its actual intended purpose in a rare fit of sanity. Croaker might call him the old man, but he wasn't much older than most. Teachers like Professor Port were by far his senior. The life of a Huntsman aged one faster than you might expect, doubly so when you retire yourself to a life of paperwork and helping the next generation of punk teenagers realize their potential.
He screwed his eyes up at the windows, looking across Beacon. The glasses he wore were entirely for show. Born with 20/15 vision, and a keen sense for details, even the ant-looking people down at ground level struck him with an alarming sense of clarity.
So many people just laying on the ground. Some of them were flashing with Aura. Other people were running around, like kitchen roaches when you turn on the lights. Those moved too slow to be his students, and were wearing the wrong colors to be students. Janitors and other bit staffers?
He put a hand to his head and felt nothing. Moments ago, or maybe minutes or hours, his office had filled with the thousand eyes of his past lives. The scent of the Old Magic. The tattoo on his arm, the Number, hummed with warmth like it was fresh. He had collapsed afterwards, and now this.
Ozpin withdrew his scroll. Several missed calls from his secretary, a woman who was as much a feature of Beacon as the CCTS tower. No messages. She was trying to call him again.
"Ms Smiles?" he asked.
"Headmaster!" she all but shouted, hyperventilating.
"What happened?"
"I don't know!" she said. "One moment everything was fine. And then everyone started just collapsing and some were vomiting and there was bleeding and I couldn't reach you!"
He stared out the window, a pit in his gut. Once upon a time he'd been able to talk to himself better. King Ozymandias had been himself, after a fashion, but with a slightly different outlook. Every life did that. The same person under a new face once him and his successor merged. It meant every new iteration wasn't the same person, not exactly. Doubly so with the radical way the world had shifted in just his lifetime.
Old Oz might have another perspective to offer Ozpin. But they'd become the same person long, long ago.
"Are you okay?"
"I'm fine!" she said frantically. "Lots of us are fine. It's the students! And Oobleck. I was talking to him when he just collapsed with a nosebleed. Ozpin, I don't know what's going on!"
He took a deep breath, his thoughts going to the worst thing possible. She had found some weapon to use against him. It was the only rational explanation. But, an outright attack seemed unlike her. Maybe some unique invention with a dash of sorcery from Doctor Watts or Merlot. The amount he knew about her plans was more than she knew, he was convinced. You don't see the Fall Maiden nearly murdered and not make the obvious connection.
Amber!
"I'll be there shortly, Ms. Smiles," he said.
"Wait, Headmaster!"
He killed the line and entered the lift down. Press the right buttons and scan your ID and you could get places in the elevator locked off to the general public. Most of that was maintenance levels for the CCTS towers, like the control room a couple military technicians basically lived in and where Jaune would be working off his detention. The other maintenance floors were the sub-sub-basement levels.
The ride took too long, leaving him to his thoughts for too long.
Whatever had happened, his initial observations were that it only targeted people with activated Auras. Ms Smiles had always just been a civilian, as were most of the cooking and cleaning staff around the school. Professor Oobleck and the students?
Ozpin had seen the faces of the Infinite Man. He gripped the Long Memory tightly. It stunk of something wrong. Reeked of magic. Only she could have done something like this.
Ding.
He pulled on the collar of his suit jacket and walked the sub basements that guarded the school's greatest treasure. Or, well, Beacon's second greatest treasure, he coldly thought to himself.
But Amber was just the way he'd seen her last. Once upon a time, she'd been a student who trusted everything six ways till Sunday, provided he never actually told her what to do. Do that and she'll do the opposite. But once you figured that out, she'd see through entry-level reverse psychology and do whatever she wanted anyways. Amber was funny like that, following her heart instead of her head in all things. She'd become the Fall Maiden, one of the four Maidens of this world—the soul-locked vestiges of the Old Magic of his—precisely because of her heart.
A heart she'd followed straight into this steel sarcophagus of James' design. In a state of semi-undress, half her face a burned web of poorly healed scars. It had taken great effort just to seal those up, to prevent the weeping wounds that so often afflicted burn victims. One of the secrets about dying in a fire is sometimes the flames don't kill you. They rip you apart cell by cell.
Even if you survive, sometimes your body just lacks the structure to survive. The charred holes where your cells once were lose the ability to function, and leak. You effectively died of dehydration over the suffering hours.
Ozpin would know. He remembered dying like that before.
But the Atlesian medical devices reported her status was the same as last he'd checked on her. As good as they could make her. The closest to comfort they could provide a girl with only half her soul.
Ozpin locked her up tight and secure before leaving her to rot in a medically-induced coma. None of the area's security features had been tripped. They were clean of bugs and hacking. His worst fears had been blunted.
That just left confusion to replace catastrophe.
He dialed Qrow.
It took three whole dials before he answered. Better than usual, to be honest.
"Vinny's Crematorium," Qrow said in his slightly scratchy voice, slurring slightly like a man feigning sobriety. Which he probably was. "You make 'em, we bake 'em. How can I help you today sir or madam?"
"Are you in Vale or back on Patch?"
"I'm sorry, sir, but our office hours are not before eleven a.m.," Qrow said, still affecting a friendly call center voice. Ozpin heard a woman's sleepy voice, only for Qrow to shush her. "We are currently located at the corner of none of and your business. A lively neighborhood here in Vale. Would you like to place an order? We're running a two for one special right now."
The woman with Qrow laughed.
Ozpin kept heading for the elevator. "Close enough to Beacon to feel what happened?"
The line went quiet. "What happened, Oz?" he asked, the seriousness suddenly in the voice giving Oz a cold kind of joy. "Are Ruby and Yang okay? I swear to the gods I told you I'd kill you if you let them get hurt!"
Credit where it was due, the man did care about his two nieces, the biological and adopted one. It was one of the man's more endearing qualities.
"I'll find out soon," Ozpin said simply. "But for now, I'm judging whatever happened to the student body didn't go past Beacon, if you didn't sense it. That narrows it down."
"Narrows what, Oz?" he demanded. "Damnit, if I have to go there—I already told Glynda that no restraining order is stronger than my love last time I was there. I haven't had time to prep new material!"
"I'll handle it," he said.
"Oh, wow, way to make me feel good. I'll be right there."
Ozpin killed the call. Qrow was not needed right now. If anything, he'd get in the way and just cause trouble. The man did that whenever you didn't focus him towards a goal. Doubly so when he learned Ruby was going to Beacon, a fact Ozpin had been unable to hide from the man. But he supposed that was the cost of calling him. Whatever happened, it was limited to Beacon.
It put him at ease and worried him with equal measure.
There was also the fact he'd now have, in effect, two Qrows on his hands. Glynda was going to have a stroke.
Ozpin supposed it was funny, in an extremely frustrating way. There's an old saying that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. One's children resemble the parents. It's not one Ozpin has had much experience with. Usually, she finds out they exist, and kills them somewhere along the line. He saw a bit of himself in Jaune Arc. But then again, he would see at least something of himself in the great grandson of one of his old bodies. The boy even carried the old sword he crafted by hand once upon a lifetime.
Perhaps that's why he'd been so lenient with that punk brat. The boy who knew far more than he had any right to know. Whom Ozpin felt genuinely safer at night knowing he had under his thumb, his control. Until he could pin down just what exactly the kid was, it was good to know threats of school punishment and his team were enough to keep Jaune in line.
The elevator reached the main floor, and he saw just how bad the damage really was on the ground level.
a/n:
Fury, noun (countable and uncountable, plural furies)
1. Extreme anger.
2. Strength or violence in action.
3. An angry or malignant woman
Example: Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Yang Xiao Long, Indigo Arc, Coco Adele, and sometimes Shamrock. As opposed to Blake Belladonna, who is a furry.