Chapter Six

Stalemate

Experience told her to expect a counterattack after they ransacked the prison but her other half in Summer quietly rejected the notion, pointing out the lack of any communication network in this desolate wasteland. Ruby contested the point with the notion that not all communication networks relied on technology, recalling the times Beacon needed to use outrider teams to scout the area around Glenn, only for Summer to blatantly gesture to the huge mountain range behind them and the vast open desert terrain surrounding the fortress. They'd spot any invading army at least two klicks out and no sizable force strong enough to challenge even one of them could move through a mountain. A small part of Ruby chastised them for their hubris, believing themselves nigh invincible, but quieted until she could chime back in with a 'I told you so'.

After the bloodbath of the courtyard that had Pyrrha coated in enough golden ichor to register on her radar shells, she blitzed through the surrounding walls and exterior area, sniping off the patrols before they realized her presence, officially ending the immediate threat to their new home for the moment. Looking completely refreshed after the skirmish, short as it was, she stilled and extended her shells until the entire fortress, underground tunnels, sections, and all, pulsed silently in her mind's eye, creating a schematic she could immediately identify weak points on and plan their expansion. The Cyclops, including the somewhat reluctant brood of Poseidon, chose to stay after briefly contemplating the miserable existence outside of the fortress that would surely demand more struggle to survive lest their die and reform somewhere else within the prison, a system of rebirth she had to test when she could find willing test subjects.

Near the banks of the river, she felt a group of Cyclops taking nourishment from The River That Sustained, Phlegethon's physical body that appeared as a mass of bright flames coiled into a humanoid shape rising from the waters to make conversation with his new guests, ecstatic his foray in establishing a connection with Ruby and Pyrrha brought about further guests to entertain him, even if their Basic, and presumably Greek, was syntactically wrong and difficult to understand. Pyrrha, her green core returning to a more gentle smolder after her heightened state, sat in the middle of that group, trading questions for answers while cleaning off the caked blood that flaked off rather easily from her skin and clothes after a good shake. The river didn't seem to care about the ichor she shed into his waters, barely turning her way when he had the Cyclops to entertain with his stories after their imprisonment.

Between the river and the fortress lay about a kilometer of flat and packed terrain she couldn't excavate to create an underground base in a similar style to Mountain Glenn for fear of water rushing into it. The four hundred Cyclops would start there, quarrying stone from the mountain to raise walls to surround a sizable area similar to Glenn with the fortress as a main base for the army she planned to command. She smiled at her fortune of finding a workforce she could exploit for her needs while she could offer the same service she did as a Commander of Remnant. To mine and move that amount of stone to wall off an area to land at least three Airships would take months, if not years, of their time.

Still, with potential immortality, time would soon lose its meaning if Tartarus kept them alive as punishment. Months and years wouldn't matter in her grand scheme to civilize the area but each day spent working towards that sustainable goal threatened to topple her plans and with their near complete lack of information on the denizens around them, they could never accurately predict what would threaten them next. She fully expected Kampê's superior, someone called Kronos, to come calling in the future when he discovered her death. Another potential headache down the line in establishing a foothold here, on top of the logistics of developing technology in this prehistoric time and the other smaller necessities it took to keep a civilization running that all depended on a rudimentary understanding of how society functioned.

Food and medicine were the problems she could erase from her checklist, The River That Sustained giving both in trade for a constant presence by his side to stave away the encroaching madness of loneliness. Ruby kept her silence on that realization, unable to comprehend what a millennium alone could do for a person when she couldn't survive six months without fracturing and birthing a cracked alter ego. Her bleeding heart couldn't ignore the kindred soul when all he craved was another to talk to while Summer cared not for the methods he resorted to for retrieving so much information about the Underworld as he called it.

Beyond the restructuring of the prison complex into more adequate housing, the fortress was in immaculate shape without a single brick out of place. There were no random tunnels or metro systems to reinforce or block and no crumbling city infrastructure hung above a massive pit a failure of a civil engineer decided they needed to power trip on. Of course, she also couldn't forget to ask Brontes if Tartarus had mineable resources to work into metal or she'd have to figure out how to build a navy from rocks and sand. The presence of spears spoke of some metal they could extract but she needed several thousand tons of it for ships and weapons and not the pitiful amount they would gain back from smelting spears and armor. And that didn't even account for the material it would take to weave body armor or create electronics so even with a shallow copy of Beacon's vast technology stored on her scroll, they were dead in the air. She clicked her tongue in irritation, the emotion welling over her carefully constructed control and manifesting itself.

She channeled her Semblance into her body and stepped into the slipstream it created, appearing within the ramshackle camp the Cyclops created in the outer courtyard from the material they scavenged. The deep red core of Brontes sang against the other Cyclops' energy signatures of verdant green and blue and she found him tending to a smaller and younger pair riddled with healing wounds, feeding them Phlegethon's waters from a battered leather pouch. English probably had a word for it but Basic had forgotten it after not using such a device for centuries. Such as the archaic names for the twelve-month calendar based on a language called Latin that no one used since Remnant adopted a thirteen-month calendar since time immemorial. He didn't react to her presence immediately, wrapping their wounds with makeshift bandages soaked in the healing waters before bringing his attention to his patiently waiting savior, gaining several points in her favor.

Ruby relayed her questions about the resources within Tartarus and contemplated for a long while and Brontes attempted to remember the time before the current age of gods ruled from Olympus. "Certain metals such as Lunar Silver can't be harvested but most other divine metals should be scattered around the landscape. In what quantities, I can't say."

Ruby observed the towering giant with ease, betraying nothing in her stance. Her eyes never left his physical form though, avoiding his single eye to prevent him from devolving into a mush of thoughts and focusing on his energy core. Curiously, like the other Cyclops, his core didn't have a network strung across his body like how Aura and Semblance functioned, simply existing in the metaphysical plane and waiting for him to draw on it with no discernible path to the outside world.

However, that didn't mean she couldn't see how his core reacted to his every word and, while he was telling the truth, he wasn't telling all of it.

"And the metals that can be mined are?" She asked, patiently awaiting and measuring his reaction. His facial features didn't budge, a carryover from his time in the torture chamber no doubt but his core did undulate slightly as if shocked she couldn't name the most common divine metals within Greek mythology. "The types aren't important but my plans required mass quantities that I'm unsure your conventional mining methods can provide. I'm not interested in simple weaponry but in massive several hundred-ton warships as a minimum."

"The most readily available metals will be Imperial Gold and Celestial Bronze, and to a much lesser extent, Stygian Iron and Tartaric Titanium." He carefully chose his next words and she couldn't help but grow curious at his hesitation. "There exists a method of creating metal from the waters of the Styx and sulfur yet the metal created from it is cursed and can only be wielded by immortals."

"Then your information is almost useless." She replied neutrally and registered shock and fury at her words. It wasn't every day a mortal called divine metal useless and he almost forgot this woman tore through Kampê without hesitation and without so much as blinking an eye at the fearsome jailer of the Titans. The divine metal, however, other than being used to fabricate weapons such as swords, spears, arrows, and armor, would do no good and would be a colossal waste of the precious material when normal, mortal metal would do. He didn't know why she wanted metal to craft ships out of when wood was more buoyant but since those were also scarce in the Underworld, the substitute was also, in her words, useless. "Is there a way to extract or import regular metal that the Cyclops would be willing to work and mold into my specifications?"

"There are rumored tunnels leading to the mortal plane yet they are unsubstantiated and incredibly difficult to locate and traverse." He rattled off and she set aside that information for later if she ever needed an escape in the event of a total collapse of her plans. She, alone, could've traversed the route but to return with tons of metal she had no way of procuring was asking for more trouble. Even pulling the Imperial Gold for sale in trade for raw titanium would raise many questions she didn't want to answer, on top of attempting to move tons of metal back and forth through said treacherous terrain. "I don't know about any mortal metal deposits since the Cyclops have no use for it."

"And how do the Cyclops normally find divine metal and extract it?" She posed the question, interested in how it came into being. She highly doubted it existed in plain sight of the normal world or it wouldn't be divine metal so it had to be located in specific areas of the world. It was highly unlikely they were generated from a combination of two substances either if he was so hesitant to speak about the cursed metal created from the River Styx.

"The Cyclops have strip mines on every divine mountain and hundreds beneath the oceans." He revealed and she internally groaned at the thought of having to sound the vast and empty Tartarus landscape in search of these metals. On a relatively safe landscape, there wasn't an issue of sending a squadron of Cyclops on scouting expeditions to probable locations where metal might be found yet this wasn't a safe landscape by a long shot. If one creature in Kampê had imprisoned 400 of his brethren then a squad wasn't coming back alive. Each trip would require either Pyrrha or Ruby to go as escorts which drastically lengthened the process of potentially finding one. Once they found one, however, they could focus on securing the area and preparing for an open quarry with secure transport with a sturdy cart until Pyrrha could engineer a transport flightcraft. Maybe the Cyclops had some magic to help get around the lack of conductive metal to support electronics.

"The larger question then becomes if the Cyclops are willing to work under my banner in return for protection and if you will you stand as their representative?" Brontes paused, becoming a large statue in the middle of the courtyard and drawing the attention of his smaller brothers when he didn't move for at least a minute. Ruby didn't like making her protection a condition that relied on them working for her but they couldn't overextend herself as a singular entity, even with Pyrrha able to act in her stead. She saw how this society needed to shape up, with her and Pyrrha making up the leader and protection faction, and whatever further factions she absorbed or accepted into her future haven clamoring for a spot in her inner circle.

Unlike Remnant, she couldn't rely on her cult of personality first and had to make one to start with, relying on rumor to spread her legend to the deepest recesses of the Pit. Summer saw the value of negotiating their protection for the betterment of the society they wanted to build instead of leveraging the entirety of the project on her back alone. Together, they stood a greater chance of success against the hostile elements but she needed the two factions to work together and understand the Cyclops' survival, and her society, hinged on that cooperation.

Brontes answered slowly but not on any account of a mental deficiency, "You want our work in return for protection?" She offered him a raised eyebrow, daring him to challenge her effectiveness of dealing with the jailer and her forces. He weighed his options carefully, looking out into the dark landscape of the beaten desert and then back to the relative safety the fortress offered him. There was little doubt Ruby could throw them from this place with relative ease after she and her partner took down the defenses without so much as a scratch on them, and she wasn't asking for much when the alternatives were to survive against the Hellhound hordes and the roaming remnants of the previous era's armies. Mining, and working metal and craft again, for someone whose stated goal was to promote peace within Tartarus, was a far cry better than any other option. Her asking for representation for all the Cyclops certainly sat better than the offers of Kronos those many millennia ago. "Yes. I will accept your offer, Lady Ruby."

Ruby nodded simply, discarding the pomp and circumstance he expected with the role. She cared not for how he chose to address her and accepted the respect he placed on the title. Commanders, after all, were in the distant potential future where Grimm and humanity fought for balance on the planet, not for this world governed by deities and strange creatures. With her workforce secured for the near future, she could focus on applying them most efficiently. "Now, do you know where I can find Tartarus?"

A cold spot settled around her, making every Cyclops within ten meters shuffled away in quick fear. She frowned at their reaction and re-energized her radar shells to their maximum, seeking out any anomaly peeking its head into her domain. Nothing immediately appeared in her sensory range other than a slowly mounting Aura pressure that rose in proportion to the increasing circle of cold driving the Cyclops away from her. Near the edges of her shells she felt Pyrrha tense at the sudden and inimical change of atmosphere, abandoning the river and charging across the empty plains to help her.

She rushed through the circle of congregating Cyclops and slammed a good chunk of her Aura into her shields when the absolute freeze surrounding Ruby cranked up a notch and she collapsed. The Cyclops couldn't move from the pressure exerted from the being around them but it still had nothing on Yang at the pinnacle of her power, though she quickly amended her thought when it kept rising to pin the entirety of the liberated fortress in place. She tied in her whole Aura core to keep her moving and made it to Ruby's slumped form, turning her over and checking her over.

The reports from Monty and Yang often wrote of the mental condition Ruby and Summer created to deal with their affliction, something they all collectively termed the mindscape as an escape and measure for her to deal with the conflicting personalities. She didn't quite know what caused her to retreat inwards but it certainly explained the odd and violent changes around them. The lack of any physical presence also gave it away and she cursed her lack of prowess in any non-physical form of combat, pressing her forehead against Ruby's and willing her consciousness into hers.

She didn't feel anything and she resigned to securing the ramshackle borders of their new home, opening her eyes and instantly recoiling at the mass of darkness surrounding her. A loud and dry cackle echoed through the air and she didn't think she was in Tartarus anymore. Though if this was Ruby's mindscape, she really didn't want to know why it was a void of nothing.

"You shouldn't be here." Ruby appeared next to her in the blink of an eye and she stopped breathing, mesmerized by the heterochromatic pair of irides peeking through the black sclera ripped from the surrounding landscape and sky. From her left eye shone the silver of her heritage, bright and gleaming against the dark while her right shone with the corrupted crimson common to all Grimm, taunting her with its mere presence. "You should be outside as the only one of us able to protect the fortress."

"I wasn't going to leave you in here all alone." She snarked and avoided her gaze, wishing she could go back to avoiding the twin voids rather than deal with the pair of cataclysmic opposing forces constrained in her head.

"Ruby says 'thank you' but Summer doesn't want you in here." Her Commander remarked, staring off into the distance and making her turn.

Yes. A sibilant voice dripped and slithered through the mindscape. Who is this human that intrudes on this audience you so desperately wanted? An enormous shadowy figure grew from the darkness and she felt an overwhelming urge to run from it, its very voice projecting in her head and attempting to draw her into its form. It laughed once more and Ruby stepped in between them, shielding her from its malevolent influence but not before she could identify boots the size of coffins, claws the size of crane scoops, and a metal breastplate with monstrous faces, all protecting dark purple flesh rippling with enough muscle to put Yang to shame.

Ruby cast her back into her body and out of her mind after she started screaming, catching a face in the shadows made from a swirling whirlpool of nightmares and all evil. Everything she desperately tried to forget about the Fang Invasion: the dozens of charred bodies falling from strike craft, guns ringing in harmony in deafening percussion, the heart-crushing screech of the Railgun as it tore through the air, and the overwhelming blast of Blake's Supernova. Beyond that was the memory of the Reconciliation, the staggering effort Yang and Qrow took to crush the racist propaganda and reestablish a Council that could no longer accept lobbying efforts, had a decent and not exorbitant salary, and were public servants through and through with the threat of two insanely overpowered Hunters dangling a guillotine above them. The medieval method of execution managed to survive the ravages of history through word of mouth.

The memories of cataclysms and near apocalypses decreased in frequency after that and none of them came close to inciting the memories of battle. The supervolcano underneath Mistral came close with many scientists predicting its erupting and subsequent environmental blackout with the level of ash and heat it would spew into the atmosphere. The evacuation of half a billion people and the relocation caused many riots with the military police and Hunters deployed sparingly to keep the peace yet people rarely died. The worst memory of it came at the climax of the housing and economy crisis where the High Command team of her, Qrow, and Yang left Beacon to quell a massive rebellion against their rule and they had to fight but not kill, corralling people to and fro without causing any lasting damage in a lengthy process long enough to rival Yang's defense of the wall.

The memories of their disastrous flyby near Cassus came next, similar to the overwhelming presence this demonic being radiated but more lawful evil than chaotic evil. It was still less in magnitude compared to the island yet it was more refined and directed than the island. Together, Cassus created a bubble of malignant and corrupted Aura keeping everyone from that area of the planet. Yang kept that information to herself alone and refused to keep it in the archives. The declassification project Blake initiated before her death released everything to every Hunter across the planet, and then successfully wormed into the other CCTS Towers to declassify their records.

The Atlesian citizens finally learned how much of Mantle remained hidden underneath the surface of their capitalistic veneer after its attempted demilitarization efforts after the Great War. While the military-industrial complex dominated the spotlight of politics and social warfare, it pervaded much deeper into the ruling Council of the country to dictate their every action with even their Academy and the Generals falling to the whims of the oligarchic machine of corporations with the constant cycle of disposable droids and upgraded naval warships.

Still, nothing but the island of Cassus ever came close to leaving her reeling from the omnipotent malice the being in Ruby's mindscape evoked. Brontes managed to break through the circle of Cyclops kept at bay by the desolate freeze Tartarus released. While it didn't physically drop the temperature around them, her breath did mist over in a similar way Yang could exude her Aura pressure over a battlefield and oppress her enemies without lifting a finger, a technique Ruby perfected with her Aura's passive ability to chase away hope.

She swept a hand over her face to get rid of the sweat and dark sand her short mental escapade caused and took a shaky breath to steady herself, curling into a ball with her head tucked between her knees. Tremors shook her body and she hated herself for regressing to the coping mechanism Monty eradicated in the years following the failed Fang Invasion. She made to stand and clenched her teeth when another racked through her, fighting through it to roll to her knees and check on her leader. She didn't seem to be under duress, looking to be nothing more than sleeping peacefully.

A tremendous earthquake ripped through Tartarus and she curled protectively around Ruby, more than aware of the enormous stalactites hanging from the roof of the prison. The oppressive cold around them abated with it, cracked from whatever combat Ruby waged against the intruder to her mind. She relaxed her shields and sunk the excess Aura under her skin to protect against the mental trauma and stop the tremors of her childhood.

She cradled Ruby in her arms and cleanly leaped over the circle of spectating Cyclops, bee-lining to the robust prison that now doubled as their residence. They scattered from the zone of oppression passing over them and disappeared to find something else to do. With their temporary homes hosting their savior whom none of them wanted to be in the near vicinity for the duration of her battle with Tartarus. Prison for centuries it might've been but Ruby wouldn't care about the cramped quarters if they gave her people shelter.

Oh, she'd lambast and annoy her until she remodeled the main residence building with central air and larger rooms with common rooms and more modern accouterments though only a distant part of her worried about the technical aspects of those accouterments in a blatantly medieval world. The rest of her mind was devoted to slamming open a cell with enough strength to destroy its wheels and darting inside, placing her charge on the tattered bedroll.

Another earthquake rocked the landscape and her body betrayed her with its own tremors. She tensed all her muscles to combat it yet the primal fear of the island, the Railgun, and Tartarus, the being, dug deep into her mind to haunt her. Ruby didn't seem to suffer the same crippling effects and that didn't surprise her, the twenty-ish Commander defying many set norms to lead Beacon. A cursed groan echoed throughout the hellscape and she desperately wondered if Ruby sought to bring this afterlife to a premature and catastrophic end.

Her rotten luck chased her even after her demise, encountering this dimension's version of a god before she could get the trapping of a military organized around her. She didn't have the dues ex machina of her eyes anymore and she certainly didn't have the Railgun while battling in the confines of her mind.

She didn't particularly mind oblivion after this afterlife, if she could even call it that, but she had a duty as a subordinate to the Commander, Hunter of Beacon, and love of Yang. Yet out here, in a dingy cell within a fortress sequestered in the middle of a cursed afterlife dimension, she couldn't do much other than ensure Ruby's comfort and safety, keeping hope that she hadn't completely lost her wits and trusting she could keep Tartarus at bay.

That trust fought against the desperation to join Ruby in her mindscape to help her in her fight against the embodiment of this prison yet the constant tremors plaguing her body dissuaded her almost immediately.

Sighing dejectedly, she sat back against the wall and closed her eyes, drifting off into a nap with Ruby's hand nestled in her own. It did little to give her some stability in this strange world and eke out some comfort when she valiantly tried to forget Tartarus named her human... and not Ruby.

Ruby stretched and released her Aura shells from her core, taking in the change to her environment and finding the burning green core of her afterlife partner. Pyrrha had not taken Tartarus' intrusion into their new home well, the core pulsating with worry and terror. It was a testament to the god within this domain that it could elicit such a response from her after a century spent hardening her skills to perfection under Yang's Beacon. Very few things could ever elicit such responses and she personally eliminated one of them.

That did not matter though for the moment as her Aura shells reached far beyond the boundaries of the fortress and surged into the desolate plains. She expected her quarrel with Tartarus to have drained her yet she could feel much further than before, no doubt a side effect of challenging the Primordial.

Tartarus was a being of near complete apathy and they both knew that about each other. She made the first mistake of challenging it within its domain and drastically weakened her hold within the endless prison by taunting it. It then made the mistake of entering her mindscape, not expecting her to have one in the first place to ravage her mind beyond repair for her insult to it. For the duration of their meeting, they were equals, Ruby free to push him from her mind but unable to challenge him in the real and Tartarus unable to directly punish her but able to meet in her mind.

It was a meeting with Neo all over again.

She had a particular analogy for timeless and omnipotent beings such as them, comparing them to humans and the rest of the world as ants. They could stride where they wanted to and could build or destroy the world around them and generally cared naught for the ants beneath them save for the rare cases that dictated their involvement: anything involving mass mayhem and ice-cream for Neo, direct challenges within its domain for Tartarus, and the protection of the innocent for her.

Yet now and then, the ants caught their attention, painting their names from sugar cubes or dancing in elaborate or flashy lines, daring to taunt them or ask them for their help. In some cases, she was the human, and in some, she was the ant wherein she asked the questions or threaded carefully to avoid the boot.

The boot of Tartarus was simple, almost painfully so, and it demanded the survival of the fittest. It cared not for which faction ruled, for riches, or luxury but presided over all with an uncaring gaze. It only dared move when another dared to use its name to summon it, the being closely tied to the physical representation of its might and existence.

It was a song and dance she excelled at and Tartarus wouldn't best her. The being ruled on the same principles and she was a curiosity to it, someone who could potentially challenge it for the right to survive: that existence was the very struggle to exist. She smiled rapturously and swung up into a seat. She and her own would survive under her strength, as always.

Pyrrha's existence and training proved that.

She gathered the tall woman from her uncomfortable resting place on the floor against the wall and carefully nestled her into the bedroll with her. Terror and dread didn't affect her the same way they did those under her command and she would do what she could to quell the aftereffects of it. Pyrrha moved slightly and murmured in her sleep, nestling into the warmth she provided but didn't wake, the tremors wracking her body in her slumber lessening.

Pyrrha was in for a surprise when she awoke, much like the first time she noticed Ren trembling in his sleep from post-traumatic stress and curled up around him to provide him some comfort. She only knew and cared for her people and didn't care for the societal conventions of climbing into another's bed if it meant it could help them.

The dark domain of Tartarus shook around them, angry at her perceived misstep against its master yet she drifted off into sleep quietly, the exhaustion catching her unaware.

AN: I know that it's been a few weeks since my last update but here's the next one. I've run into some issues of laziness here and there along with work so I'll keep on chugging (as long as I keep on getting those sweet reviews that let me know how I'm doing). I do genuinely enjoy them and appreciate the criticism I get. Hope you enjoyed!