The motorbike sputtered and finally died (again) halfway through the crevasse between the canyons west of Primm. Six hopped off, salvaged whatever bits of scrap he could use from the vehicle, and collected his equipment before continuing the rest of the trek on foot. Unlike the kids who had most likely taken the long way in, he detoured through a narrow short-cut he had carved through not too long ago. With this route, he would already be in the Divide by sundown.
Once more, his Pip-boy beeped and he brought it up to see the blinking icons flashing in the corner of the screen. Another sensor triggered. Someone was messing around Hopeville. They were getting close, tripping sensor after sensor. Getting too close. And endangering everything that he had been striving hard to keep buried here.
These kids are going to be the death of me, he growled in his mind, his nails digging deep into his gloved palms. He did not mean to rip the metal doors off its hinges but he felt nothing but pent-up fury when he descended back into the accursed canyon.
Goddamn it, kids. You don't know what the hell you're doing.
Velvet was determined.
Mister Raul Tejada had caught her early that morning in the garage beside his shack, developing a functional replica of the ghoul's personal motorcycle with Light Copies. Six had already departed two hours before dawn with the other salvaged Old World motorbike. Interestingly, the other one, the mechanic's own, had been installed with some boosters salvaged from an old rocket factory near Novac. A beast like that could catch her up to the Courier and perhaps even teams RWBY and JNPR before anything bad could happen.
"Eep!"
The ghoul chuckled warmly. "Relax, hija. I won't tell."
Velvet fidgeted with her Dust-infused camera. "But you're his...friend?"
He shrugged. "Long-time associate, you could say. I've known him long enough to know that his decision making isn't the best. And in my lifetime, I've met a lot of people like him. Today's just one of those days where he's being more stupid than sensible."
"So...you're not stopping me?"
"Oh sure, I'm stopping you. Not standing in your way, watching you make your escape with my hands so far from my holsters. Completely stopping you."
"Wow. Then you're helping me. Right?"
He reached inside one of his drawers and handed her a pistol snug in its own belt and holster. "You're going to need this."
"But I—"
"For your own protection."
"I'm not that good with guns." She took it regardless and allowed Raul to buckle the accompanying holster to her waist. "So...this is the one where you slide the magazine in, right? Right here? Not the manual loading thing?"
"Si. Quick rate of fire, strong punch. Just push it up in here, pull the slide back, and you're good. Be aware of the safety switch. Won't shoot unless that's off. This gun uses forty-five ACP ammunition. Remember it. Forty-five A-C-P. Automatic Colt Pistol, in case you have to haggle with the merchants for extra bullets. ¿Comprende?"
She nodded. "Y-yes. Forty-five ACP. Automatic Colt Pistol, got it."
"Good." He handed her three loaded magazines as well as a few NCR bills and some bottle caps. "Here. Some extra money for any picky traders you come across."
Velvet pocketed the tightly taped pillars of bottle caps and the wad of NCR bills. "Thank you, Mister Tejada. Um, why are you helping me though? You're his friend, right?"
A chuckle. "I told you. Boss and I go way back. I care for his hide as much as he cares for your friends. He's too thick to admit it. And I know better than to keep you here while he does something stupid way over there."
"He seems smarter than that."
"He seems. You see, there is a limit to intelligence and a stubbornness to wisdom. Know that he is as much the prey as he is the predator. He is a victim of himself and if you ask me, I'd rather he not make the little diablos victims of his own guilt."
"I guess so... I can sort of understand where he's coming from. I think." The rabbit faunus had heard much in her short time here and had even read some of the published material offered by the traders she had traveled with. They were all NCR publications so there was no helping the bias.
"With what little you know, it's easy to assume."
"He was a Desert Ranger, a hero...right? I keep hearing good things about them. The Desert Rangers, I mean."
Mister Tejada smiled away from her, forlorn. "Heroes come and go. He's...someone else now. And as long as I'm still here, I'm not going to let him fall down the rabbit hole any further." A pause. "No pun intended."
Velvet deflated. Perhaps some of the other rumors were not just rumors. Maybe that explained why the folks in the trading caravan that rescued her were very careful with their words whenever they talked about Courier Six or how he used to work with their boss Miss Cassidy at some point in the past.
"What happened to him?" she asked.
"Another story for another day. If you can get it out of him, then better. It's not healthy for him to keep ignoring the ghosts of the old days."
"He did say a lot...when he was drunk."
"Hah, I'm sure he did," the ghoul chuckled. "Up to you with how you manage all that you heard about him. If you remember any of it."
Velvet beamed. "Thank you. For your help, Mister Tejada."
"De nada, de nada," he waved. "You and I have a lot in common, after all. We are both no strangers to judgment. From that, we learn to withhold our own judgment until the truth reveals itself to us. Then we act accordingly."
Her lips curled into a smile. Ghouls would probably have had it much worse than faunus but then again, the discrimination here on Earth was a war crime compared to the hostility of the worst bigots on Remnant. With that in mind, she felt an invigorating camaraderie with him.
The ghoul leaned in to inspect her portable replicator camera and the box she kept it in. "You have a nice, eh, device there. You take pictures of things and it makes a working 3D copy like that? Madre de Dios, what I wouldn't do for a handy tool like that. You say you made this yourself?"
"Yes," she replied with a meek but prideful blush. "Took me six whole months."
A haughty laugh. "Youth these days. Ah, but you might have missed a few spots. Like that one right there..."
Mister Tejada pointed out the minute parts on the motorcycle copy to which Velvet made the appropriate adjustments. She was ready for the road in ten minutes.
"He tends to go overboard so be careful. And make sure the little diablos are in one piece," he bade as he handed her a satchel with some salted jerky, a few bottles of clean water, and a field kit containing sterilized medical supplies.
"You can count on it, Mister Tejada," she answered confidently, revving the engine in deafening cacophonies.
All she had to do was follow the highway west through South Vegas, then down to Goodsprings until she reached Primm, and from there take a detour west up to a tight crevasse between the cliffs. She was determined to find RWBY and JNPR. Though she was not very close with them, they were the only pieces of Remnant in this cruel wasteland and she desperately needed that comfort and familiar camaraderie if she were to keep her psyche intact. Because if she were to admit it at some point later on, she had considered giving herself up to the desert more times than she could count.
"And one more thing, hija. Watch for the wildlife like conejos. A lot of them on the road nowadays."
"I won't."
A mile into her trip, Velvet was distraught at having run over a stray desert cottontail. It took her another fifteen minutes to peel and scrape the roadkill off the tires. And like hell was she cooking the meat!
Their tracks on the trail were still fresh; boot marks, ashes in a pit, a damp patch of soil. Then the handful of expended cartridges laying about. Untarnished brass ranging from five-five-sixes, twelve-gauges, three-zero-eights, and a single casing the size of a fifty-caliber nestled under some rocks that were propped to hold the barrel of a sniper rifle.
The shape and smell confirmed it. Dust round. This is Hyper's bullet.
Six descended from the perch and proceeded down the all-familiar path towards the Hopeville Ballistic Defense Station. His Pip-boy pinged him to the motion sensor concealed in the ventilation shaft that had been triggered by his intrusion onto the threshold. He saw now the claw marks of the infant deathclaw they dragged along.
He passed through the six other motion sensors he installed in the underground facility until he arrived at the hydraulic doors that were annoyingly left open. God knows what could have come in here with the entrance left exposed. He sealed the doors behind him on his way out.
Down below stretched the surface compound of the defense station and beyond lay the battered highway snaking through the ruins of Hopeville proper. Tracking the kids had been easier than he anticipated; they clearly tried to push through whatever obstacle had been in their path (thanks to their Semblances and whatnot). They also failed to cover their tracks. Overconfident. Wouldn't think no one'd be keeping tabs on 'em.
Though the winds erased many of the footprints, the festering carcasses of oversized mutant insects were left exposed, acting as bait for flies and landmarks for trackers like him. Then the expended casings scattered all about. Tiny craters that weren't there before. More mutant cadavers that had been gutted up and eviscerated. And then, the festering remains of the Marked Men.
"They really put in the effort," he said to no one but himself.
The dead soldiers were lined neatly on the side of the road, their legs bunched together, arms folded over their chests, pickets and posts planted by their heads to mark where they lay. Maggots had already begun devouring the flesh but he was at least spared the odor by the fresh filters in his gas mask.
Still have enough of a conscience left to give them a good old-fashioned sky burial.
The Courier continued walking, the clouded skies already darkening, until tiny yellow dots flashed between the cracks in the ruins up ahead. He detoured to one of the trails running up the side of the canyon leading to a ramshackle overwatch position overlooking a district of Hopeville, one of many sentry nests set up and ultimately abandoned by the Marked Men. He needed neither his scope nor his binoculars to see what was sitting half a mile in front of him.
There, inside one of the few standing buildings in Hopeville, through the glassless windows, were his brats. His kids. His children.
No. They're not my flesh and blood. Get that out of your system.
There was Hyper. And Blondie. Snowball and Cat-girl. To the right behind the furniture...that was Sparta and Knight-boy feeding that annoying piece of shit Syrup. Shaolin was cooking something over the fire pit while Pancake was blabbering and throwing her arms around trying to cheer up the whole group. Out here in the desolate wastes of the Divide, her optimism was falling flat.
Oh no.
Six sighed. "Shit."
He pulled out his binoculars and peered closer. If the looks on their faces were anything to go by, then he had clearly failed in one of his goals as their guardian.
Goals? Guardian? D'you still believe in the bullshit you made up that God threw these kids down to earth so you could watch over 'em? 'Cause, congratulations, asshole. Innocence finally lost. You done fucked up again, Six.
I never wanted to be their guardian in the first place.
An' here you are. Guilty 'cause their 'purity' just had to be your responsibility. A responsibility you done willingly shouldered. A 'responsibility' you knew better to ignore. A lesson you should'a done learned since Arizona.
I know. Following a quick sweep of the perimeter and a brief check on his equipment, he pressed on towards Hopeville proper. Time to end this charade.
'Bout damn time.
Be quiet, me. He was halfway to the middle of the town when the distinct pops of an automatic carbine ripped through the still air.
Velvet was shivering stiff by the time she came across the other motorbike discarded and picked apart by the side of the road. She wiped off the bugs that splattered over her goggles before sliding them off and unwrapping her shawl to dry off some of the sweat on her skin. It felt so good to breathe!
She really hated the travel. Her trip was rocky so to speak; she had to dodge some interruptions on the road (rattlesnake-coyotes, oversized venomous wasps, tweaked raiders, and—ew!ew!ew!ew!ew!ew!ew!—giant ants) and she was sure her squeals echoed across the desert all the way to those two massive statues in the distance. That and her rear was starting to hurt from constantly bouncing against the not-actually-comfortable bike seat.
"Alright, at least I'm on the right track," she told herself.
The canyon was right there. And already, Velvet could hear the shearing winds ripping through the Divide. The whistling sent shivers down her spine but she blinked away and steeled her nerves.
She peered through the doorway, seeing the rocky trail that wound down into the crevasse, through bits and pieces of debris. She turned around to get back on the motorcycle only to find...that visage had run its course; as a temporary tangible copy, the chopper fragmented the instant she got off.
It was back to being on foot.
"Oh, bugger."
Velvet's feet hurt now. Alternating between runs, jogs, and speedy walking took its toll. Not to mention her back was aching and her shoulders were locking up from the weight of her duffel bag. So many supplies. Did she really need all these? She was starting to regret packing so much.
But the view... The view was...breathtakingly dreadful. The valley was indeed an ominous place. Through her lenses, it was a massive graveyard. With a tired sigh, she plopped onto her rear without seeing where she stood only to feel something damp seep through her trousers and weave between her fingers. She brought up her hand to get a sniff. And recoiled.
"Really!?" she hissed.
Nothing like sitting on someone else's piss still wet in the middle of the desert. Quite the welcome here in the Divide.
Blake began to understand now that the flayed men were nothing short of suicidal. The rage—no, raging madness—that she saw in their eyes when she got close enough to knock them back... Their fanatical resolve brought back memories of the radicals who had been willing to throw away their own lives for the causes of the White Fang.
"Freezerburn!"
Ice encased the floor of the ruined grocery store to the cracked asphalt in the street. Blake heard Yang slam her fist into the frost, throwing up a thick mist that clouded the entire block. Perfect for disrupting the aim of their attackers.
"Checkmate!"
Blake slid across the frosted surface, the mist working to her advantage. Her coordinated tactic with Weiss worked nearly flawlessly, administering diversionary strikes intending to both disorient their foes, deny counterattacks, and defeat them from their exposed flanks. Perfect for bulky hulking Grimm, rogue battle robots, and rowdy sparring partners. Only...
...it worked well in open spaces.
In a cramped, urban ruin such as this, there was not enough space for either the faunus or the heiress to fight, let alone maneuver properly. The mist bit them back hard as it concealed junk that had been thrown around as well as the uneven fissures in the ground courtesy of the Divide's notorious earthquakes.
Blake saw Weiss lose her footing and completely miss her target while she herself rammed into a jutting slab of concrete before she could fully round three of the dozen or so skinless madmen. Her chin bounced against the floor, narrowly missing splintered wood and broken rebar, as her body careened hopelessly towards where they stood, Gambol Shroud clattering out of her grasp.
Immediately, a boot landed on her hand. She yelped in pain only to be cut off as another connected with her gut, sending her rolling towards a wall.
"Blake!"
She tried to get up only to be suddenly pinned against the brick and mortar by the end of a long metal rod. Her Aura flickered but still held, preventing what could have been a fatal stab. But it still hurt and she was held in place. Her assailant pushed the pipe harder against her midriff, dragging her body up from the ground, her back scraping against the wall, until her legs were flailing above the floor.
Blake focused her reserve energy to create a shadow clone but almost immediately her copy disappeared when a serrated machete nearly clipped the side of her head. There went her final chance of slipping out of this now that she was effectively locked in place. She glanced around through the mist; the silhouettes moving in them were discouraging. She could hear the pained grunts and cries of her friends, muted partly by the cacophonies from their shoddy NCR-issued guns contrasting with the volleys of gunfire coming from these...'men.'
"W-weiss!" she strained to call out, over the shoulder of the man pushing the pipe into her stomach. "Anyone! H-help!"
No answer.
Ping!
"Agh!"
"Jaune!"
"Pyrrha, watch out!"
Rat-tat-tat!
"Ruby, duck!"
"Get your hands off Ren!"
"Behind you, Nora!"
Roar. Snap. Crunch. "Syrup!"
The cat faunus heard leather flapping and was met by the barrel of a pistol over the bridge of her nose, the bloodshot irises of her would-be killer burning with what could only be described as pure unadulterated hate. Her Aura was dangerously petering out from the rod being forced into her midriff, the pain becoming unbearable enough to draw tears. She mewled and struggled, her innate animalistic survival instincts overcoming rationality. Her grip tightened on the pole; her breathing grew more and more rapid thanks to the rising pain in her diaphragm as the seconds ticked by.
No! This is not how she was going to die! She was not going to die today! She was Blake Belladonna! She will not go down this way! She—
POP!
Blake's eyes shot wide as the head of her attacker jerked to the left in a puffy red plume, the smoky barrel of a revolver resting inches to the right. Ears ringing, she traced the gun to a gloved hand attached to a covered arm connecting to a shoulder straightened over a filtered full-faced gas mask. A faint green glow shone off the fringes of his collar.
Her savior proceeded to rapidly empty four more rounds into the four other heads around them before she hit the floor.
"Six?"
Six ignored her. Five empty, smoking cartridges bounced against the marble but he was already aiming through the mist. Could he see them through that thick a fog? What if he might hit the wrong person—
POP! POP! PAP! POP! POW!
Rapid succession. Five more bodies crumpled to the ground. Blake staggered to her feet, reclaimed Gambol Shroud, and rushed close enough to see...the flayed men. Dead. Blood pooling around their eviscerated heads... She turned her head to say something only for Six to brush past her, walking directly into the cloud. His arm snapped from one unseen target to the next.
POP! PAW! POP! POP!
Four more fell out of the cloud. Dead.
Blake tried her best to keep up despite her the bewilderment. "H-how...?"
She ran through the mist, finding herself in the middle of the street, darting around to see if any of her friends were still standing. By then, Six had vanished, leaving behind expended cartridges.
"Six!" she cried out desperately. "Wait!"
Blake had long been fascinated by Six's impeccable accuracy; his ability to engage targets at distances as far as a mile and somehow managing to land a single clean (deadly) shot was proving second to none. But in this situation, if the man was just shooting at whoever happened to be in the closest proximity...
"Blake!"
The faunus whipped behind her and nearly decked her partner. "Yang! I almost clipped you!"
"I'm still in one piece. You alright? You seen Ruby?"
"I'm good. No, I haven't seen her. But I saw someone else."
"Another skinned bastard?" she seethed.
Blake pointed down the fogged road. "It's Six."
Yang stilled. "What!? H-he's here? Like right here? Right now?"
The faunus nodded. "He went that way—"
"Six? I-Is that you?" That was Jaune. Somewhere further ahead.
POP!
Crunch.
"Jaune!"
Blake and Yang sped through the dissipating fog. Visibility returned when the two reunited with Ruby, Weiss, Ren, Nora, and Syrup. They skidded to a halt on their heels—the infant deathclaw held back from pouncing by Nora's grip on its tail—no time to properly acknowledge each other.
In the middle of the junction cutting through Hopeville's industrial district, leaning behind a burned car, Pyrrha clutched at her bleeding leg, her Aura depleted. Jaune arched above her with his shield over them both, a dead skinless NCR soldier in patchwork armor weighing down against it. He shoved slightly, letting the corpse slide off and flop onto the ground, leaving human blood smeared all over Crocea Mors.
Blake felt the urge to adopt a defensive stance upon seeing Six standing several paces nearby, his duster rustling in the breeze, his fingers flawlessly replacing the expended cartridges in his revolver with new ones. The last of the flayed men, a grunt dressed in a tattered NCR uniform held together by strips of Legion cloth, hissed and growled rabidly under his heel.
"You," the soldier rasped up at him. "You did this to us!"
The Courier centered the barrel over his forehead. "I don't regret it."
POP!
Crunch.
Thud.
Quick, thoughtless execution. Something the White Fang rarely ever did, even with Adam spearheading the more aggressive operations in the Vale chapter. Over fifteen combatants—soldiers from two sides, united in unbridled rage, their skin ripped from their bodies—were killed in under a minute by a single man. Blake felt a weight drop into the pit of her stomach when he craned his head towards them, a pair of green glowing eyelets boring into her soul.
"Goddamn it, kids," Six growled.
Velvet had lost track of time during her journey down the side of the mountain to the valley itself. Moving alone had never felt so mind-numbingly terrifying. She had been to a few abandoned houses in her childhood and had a couple times tracked an elder Grimm to the fringes of Mountain Glenn with her team. But all that paled in comparison to walking through an empty, underground, nearly collapsed military base. The fact that the facility was still humming with electricity chilled her spine with the prospect of someone or something watching her from every nook and cranny.
Even after she had to unseal the hydraulic doors at the end just to get out back into the open, the feeling of being watched never left her. She hated to claim paranoia but she was damn well sure something was following her. Or maybe it was just the wind. The screeching, shearing, sandy wind.
Then there was the constant ticking of the Geiger counter on her hip; the noise chipped away at her calm, always reminding her that radiation—that deadly unseen plague hanging over the air—was anywhere and everywhere, waiting to enter her body and eat her up from the inside. She could only hope that she was treading on safe ground and that her clothing was sufficient to deflect these 'particles.'
"Okay, okay, calm down. You're panicking," Velvet reassured herself, catching her breath after what felt like a marathon of going through a maze. "Slow, steady breaths. Right food forward."
The Divide was a scary place. This fear was nothing new but she honestly preferred the near-sighted racist bigotry of a crowd to this unending dread. There was always a chance something would pounce out from the shadows. Her furry appendages constantly stood erect, on alert for the faintest noise while her hand rested over the holster of the pistol in her holster.
Rustling.
She flinched.
Footsteps? Rocks tumbling down the slope.
Scraping? Wind blowing against hanging sheet metal.
Pops?
Velvet stopped in her tracks. She listened again. Gunfire. Distant gunfire. Coming from further west, from the heart of Hopeville itself it sounded like. She sprinted, the pain in her soles searing up her legs but she didn't care. For all she knew, it was RWBY and JNPR fending off mutants or whatever it was that inhabited this graveyard. Or maybe Six dispatching foes.
What she came across, however, was a standoff.
ORIGINALLY DRAFTED: May 5, 2018
LAST EDITED: July 10, 2023
INITIALLY UPLOADED: May 11, 2018
NOTE (May 11, 2018): I'm not fond of writing fight scenes whether they be ranged or melee. I find it hard to read through a detailed fight scene as much as write one. I didn't want to describe every move, every detail of whatever weapon was used and the like because I feel that it takes a bit of effort to try and imagine it (but that depends on the reader, I think). A frequent comment I got from my previous stories (old fiction works that I printed copies of and gave to my friends and family) was that I was being too descriptive.
I hope it was not much of a problem in this one. Over-saturation is a constant challenge for me as a writer. But I also don't want to ignore any important details that would vitally explain certain elements of the plot.
Anyway, let me know what you guys think so far. :)