"OKRA! Form up!" Bartholomew shouted as he flicked his telescoping mace down to the side. The shaft of the weapon extended to about the length of his arm, before a series of deadly spikes pushed out from within the steel ball at the end. "I would advise each team concentrates on a single target, and each gives up one member to handle the fourth!"
"I'll branch off!" Kali offered as she ran forward and fired off an explosion from her extra limbs, boosting herself high into the air and past the tunneling myrmidons.
"I'll join her!" Taiyang offered as he whirled his trident and pressed the shaft against his back at a diagonal.
Sage merely nodded and fell in beside Taiyang, taking up a defensive position as he held his massive sword out before himself, the blade shifting to a bubbling purple as his glyph ticked over to the next section.
"And I'll provide support as needed!" Willow clarified as she took a step back and raised her rapier, watching the scene unfold. As the leading myrmidon veered off to the left, Willow summoned up a glyph and erected a giant wall of ice from beneath the dunes. The creature impacted the wall with a resounding crash, resulting in the wall shattering and raining shards of ice down upon it as it tried to rise up and out of the sand. "Now!"
"Get in there, BASS!" Ghira ordered as he rushed forward. He paid no mind to STRQ and OKRA moving in to engage their own targets, or Kali luring the grimm at the back of the procession away from the other groups as Sage and Taiyang worked to attack it from behind. "Vel! Up top!"
"Got it!" the rabbit faunus called as she ran up to her leader.
"Hare Raiser!" Fox called with a knowing grin as he began to run around their target's side.
"How many times do I have to tell you not to call it that…" Ghira grumbled to himself.
The faunus' sleeved arm began to turn a bright red as he crouched down and put his palm out. Velvet was quick to step into the offered hand, and Ghira let out a grunt as he flung his arm and teammate forward effortlessly. Velvet flew through the air, manifesting a copy of Ghira's armored pauldron as she went. Just as the sleeve extended down and over her fist, she reached the myrmidon's face. Using her momentum, Velvet threw a hard punch for its approaching maw and managed to knock the creature's head to the side.
The myrmidon quickly whipped its head back toward Velvet's direction and opened its mandibles as she landed unsteadily in the sand. Before it could close its jaws upon the faunus, Ghira ran in and threw his arms out to the sides, the flesh of his limbs turning a bright red. He caught the mandibles and held them open, his arms shaking with effort as he tried to find his footing.
"Thanks for the save!" Velvet called as her hard light gauntlet disappeared into thin air. Immediately afterward, she called forth a long spear. "Hold it for just a moment!"
"Doing what I can!" Ghira replied, his teeth clenched. Suddenly, the crushing pressure of the mandibles let up slightly as the beast screamed in pain. Ghira looked to the side to see his other teammate slide out from under the beast's stomach, where several gaping slashes were seeping ash. "Thanks, Fox! Finish it!"
Velvet let out a battle cry of her own as she thrust the hard light spear directly into the beast's throat. The myrmidon abruptly stopped moving, its thrashing limbs falling limp as it became dead weight atop the girl's weapon. Just as quickly as she had struck, Velvet let go of the weapon and let it dissolve while stepping back. Both the grimm and the implement went up in contrasting clouds of dust, one a deep black and the other neon blue.
"Easy," Fox proclaimed as he dusted off his palms and approached his comrades. "How are the other team's lookin'?"
"It would appear that they have it mostly under control," Ghira observed. "Come! Let us regroup and provide support as needed!"
A gout of flame spewed from the tip of Pearl Phoenix as Summer kept the staff pointed at the rear of the partially burrowed beast. The myrmidon began to thrash and roar as it was set alight, before it crashed its head down into the sand and began to tunnel through the dunes. Qrow was a second too late with his descending slash, his razor-shaped sword impaling itself in nothing but sand as the grimm began a hasty retreat.
"Damn it!" Qrow cursed as he wrenched his blade free from the desert's grasp. "Where's it going!?"
"It's headed for Kali's crew!" Raven called as she pointed her sword far off into the distance, where their faunus friend had lured the straggling myrmidon.
"It's fast," Summer observed. "But we're faster. Raves, do your thing!"
Without needing clarification, Raven sliced through the air with Omen, ripping open a crimson portal. A mere second later, what was once an oval of swirling red was instead filled with a view of active combat from the perspective of just behind a blond adolescent with a trident. She watched for only a moment as Taiyang flourished his weapon, expertly turning aside an attempted bite from the myrmidon before him. Raven rushed through the dimensional rip as she sheathed her sword, rotating the interior mechanism to select a new blade.
"Move! Ours is coming for you guys!"
Taiyang reeled the head of his trident back inward from its place embedded in the side of his targeted grimm and turned his head.
"What? Oh, shit!"
Suddenly, Taiyang grabbed Raven's arm and pulled her aside just as the tunneling myrmidon leapt from the sand, its body still smoking from Summer's assault. The pair of teens rolled through the sand to try to evade the leaping beast, only for a point of swirling aura to manifest just underneath it in midair. A loud explosion of force redirected the grimm off to the side, where the bug fell into a dune upon its back.
"I gotcha!" Kali reassured.
"Yeah, and I could use a little help!" Sage reminded as he brought down his claymore into the other grimm's shell. The blade bounced off of the bony covering as the myrmidon buried its head into the sand, the lightning on Sage's blade scattered ineffectually across its back. "Once that glyph rotates to the top, my aura's blown for a few minutes!"
"Semblance with a drawback?" Qrow asked as he emerged from the portal with Summer at his side. "I know how that goes. We've got your back!"
Summer closed her eyes, white trails of aura wisping from their edges as she tried to focus over the sounds of her teammates fighting back the myrmidon alongside Sage. Though it took her a moment to fully lose herself to her vision, the scene that manifested within her mind was crystal clear.
Taiyang's extending trident just barely missed the side of the myrmidon as it finally managed to right itself. Raven rushed in from the other side, her dashing blow deflected by the beast's shell as it once again began to burrow. The tunnel of rippling, spraying sand took off once again, speeding towa-
"Kal! Can you make an explosion underground!?"
"Yeah, why!?" the faunus replied as she continued emptying pistol rounds into the toppled grimm's stomach as it struggled to roll over.
"There! Now! Make it a big one!" Summer ordered as she pointed her staff at a seemingly random location among the sands.
Kali whirled and sucked in a tense breath as she focused on the point that Summer had identified for her. She was vaguely aware of Taiyang's trident connecting with nothing but air as the myrmidon he had chosen to attack finally flipped itself over. There was the noise of a katana scraping across a hard shell, and then the deafening crash of sand being pushed aside. Kali focused her attention elsewhere, concentrating the entirety of her aura as her extra limbs began to pulse with power. After a moment of focus, she thrust out a ghostly palm from her right side before extending an opposite arm and snapping only once.
A massive column of sand erupted from the desert as the underground explosion went off, scattering black limbs and fragments of bone up and out of the earth. A set of black wriggling legs and a half-shattered head flew up and faded to dust in midair, leaving no trace of the bloated beast that Kali had originally lured away from the group. In the place where Summer had pointed, nothing remained by a sloping sinkhole, the sand rushing downward to try to fill the new gap.
"Nice shot!" Qrow exclaimed as he turned to face the remaining grimm. "Come on, people, let's wrap this one up!"
Bartholomew's mace crashed into the dead center of the myrmidon's face, causing the giant bug to reel backward as it snapped its mandibles to keep the boy at bay. Just as the grimm found its footing once again and moved to scuttle forward, the head of a metallic cane snagged one of its bony mouth parts, holding it in an opened position.
"Not so fast, asshole!" Roman snarked.
The head of his cane had separated from the body, though a high-tension cable kept the two connected. With a quick leap, Roman managed to wrap the wire up and around the beast's other mandible. He quickly looped the shaft around the struggling jaw before engaging the mechanism to reel the hooked head of his cane back in. The motion resulted in the myrmidon's mandibles being tightly cinched together as Roman struggled to hold it in place. Bartholomew struck another blow into the vulnerable creature's face as it thrashed, though a sudden headbutt sent him falling back into the sand.
After several seconds of fighting against the far larger combatant, Roman lost his grip and fell backward as well, only to find himself kept upright by a black snowflake glyph that manifested just behind him. Mere moments later, Willow skated by on a trail of white glyphs, Myrtenaster at the ready while she rotated the dust socketed into the weapon's hilt.
"I'll pin it down if you can distract it!"
Adam was the first to move, sheathing his katana as he ran forward. Just as the grimm managed to wrest its jaws free of the tangling wire, he drew his crimson sword just enough to expose about a foot of the blade. The myrmidon's powerful mandibles clashed into Adam's weapon with great force, and a hot pink aura began to reverberate along the blade. The faunus stepped onto one of the curved protrusions of the grimm's face and launched himself onto its shell before breaking into a run and slashing wildly as he went. The energy-coated blade left scour marks all over the shell, though he didn't quite manage to cut through it completely.
"Roman, if you would!" Barty called as he tossed the other boy his weapon.
Roman caught the mace without question and spun the bludgeon while the myrmidon was distracted. Without a second thought, he raised the weapon and brought it down in an overhead swing as hard as he could, cracking off one of the myrmidon's mandibles entirely. A second phantom swing manifested in an orange burst of aura, smashing directly into the center of the grimm's face. The skull cracked slightly as Roman readied another swing, only for a glyph to open up a good ten feet above the creature as Adam leapt off the back of its carapace. A hail of boulders fell from thin air, pinning the myrmidon down beneath their weight.
"Excellently done," Bartholomew praised as Willow sank to her knees in the sand. He jogged over to meet the heiress as her aura flickered and then fizzled out, leaving her body as little more than colorful, flickering specs of energy. "Are you alright…?"
"I'm fine," Willow insisted through deep breaths. "Is it dead?"
"Grimm are supposed to disintegrate upon death, leaving only the skull behind," Adam reminded as he walked back around toward the myrmidon's head.
Without hesitation, he drew his katana once again and sank it straight into one of the grimm's eyes. The beast gave a final spasm and then burst into a cloud of ash, causing the boulders to fall a few feet into the sand below.
"Now it's dead," Roman reassured as he stooped to pick his cane up out of the sand. "Are we done?"
Bartholomew turned to survey the battlefield just in time to watch Sage cleave the head from the final remaining myrmidon. As he looked over to his right, he caught sight of the rest of Team BASS running toward him. Ghira gave a friendly nod and smile, which Bartholomew returned.
"Well… crisis averted, for now. You all seem to know what you're d-"
Almost as if on cue, another rumbling began not far from the group. Another unnatural mound rose in the sand, though it was far wider than the trails of the myrmidons. A pair of claws, each larger than any of the gathered hunters crested out of the sands, before an armor-plated body rose up after it. A glowing yellow stinger dripping with venom was the last thing to surface, curling up and behind the giant gargantuan scorpion grimm. After the new threat had pulled itself fully from underneath the dunes, it stood as tall as a two-story building and almost as wide as the beach house itself. Its claws clacked together and it let out a hiss as its eyes locked upon the assembled hunters standing only thirty feet or so away.
"…you just had to say something, didn't you?" Fox asked. "I don't need my semblance to tell me what that sound was…"
"Uh… we can't fight something like that, can we?" Roman asked as he began to back up.
"An alpha deathstalker?" Velvet asked as she, too started to backpedal. "It isn't advisable if you've never dealt with one before."
Bartholomew helped Willow to stand as they began to retreat, only for the giant scorpion to swivel in place and face them. The grimm let out another, sharper hiss, and its mate soon rose from the sands beside it, clacking its claws together and chittering. After only a few seconds, the duo of deathstalkers began to rush forward, rapidly closing the distance as they arced their tails back over themselves.
"Get everyone out of here!" Ghira ordered as he clenched his teeth and flexed his armored limb in a circle. "I'll buy you time!"
Ghira soon found himself joined by an unfamiliar companion as Adam stood beside him, his hand hovering just over the hilt of his katana.
"…not alone, you won't…"
Author's Note:
Part 2 in two weeks. The conclusion of this little fight will be… explosive.
-RD