Red Moon Rising

by MasterofMasyaf9000

The beating of a butterfly's wings can lead to the whipping of a tornado. A world of bloody evolution is forever changed with the most minute of choices: What if Adam Taurus had never joined the White Fang?

11. Moonlit Melee

From the crooked timber of humanity, a straight board cannot be hewn."

---

Chapter 11: Moonlit Melee

---

The sun had set maybe half an hour ago; the cloud-cover shrouding whatever discernible horizon there was left in hues of grey and black leaving only a pale moon, a wraith-silver fractured salver hanging in the lonely sky, to illuminate the line of steel carriages hurtling along a mountain track, under a midnight blue sky toned to a near-black glacial presence.

Adam himself, watching the broken mass ascend into the sky, had no idea what the actual time was now; his damned Scroll still wasn't working, and he'd long since given up attempting to manipulate the charger into compliance.

It had been barely more than a full day since he had learned of the death of his most hated enemy, and almost all he'd been able to do was bask in that sense of satisfaction, despite how petty he knew such sentiment was. As was the desire to take a round trip to Menagerie to take a leak on his festering remains.

It hadn't been an easy fight— the small part of him that was still Evelyn Taurus , that had recoiled at the idea of celebrating his end, that he had died a brutal such death at all, before being promptly stamped out by the realization that while Adam's desire for revenge may have ultimately been pointless, Belladonna's shit had still caught up with him. The bill had come due and he had finally choked on his own snake oil. It felt so right; fitted neatly into those dark and jagged gaps inside his heart and soul, in a way that nothing had in so very very long. She could- would have shown forgiveness. She could show sorrow and even shed a tear or two on Belladonna's grave, as she was wont to do for any loss of life. But Adam could not. He would not. He simply didn't have the capacity to do so. Not for him, not for his family, not even in his fading nightmares.

His waking hours however, had been filled with Valkyrie's endless stream of chatter and Ren's more reserved words. Adam, to his own utter lack of surprise, had very little to say and while at first he quietly feigned attention to their conversations, the topics of discussion inevitably turned to her stories that mostly involved 'some dream she had once' and made extremely little sense with his lack of context, and he tuned them out.

He'd been half-dreaming, sitting in his seat, and avoiding the soul searching questions that clasped at him until the faraway sound of thunder surged through his skull, pulling him closer to wakefulness. He was jolted from his thoughts finally, by a gentle nudge. Ren was attempting to gain his attention.

"Are you sure this is okay?" the pink eyed boy asked tentatively, for the umpteenth time, already having started to tentatively move food into his mouth. Politeness didn't matter to some as much as hunger apparently did, and Nora, after some initial skittishness, had shovelled down food as though Adam might somehow change his mind, and take away her meals at any moment.

"It's fine. Eat."

"Bu-"

"I'm not saying it a third time."

The boy flinched, dropping the question and his eyes to his plate. Adam stayed impassive, attempting to maintain his scowl and sitting back in his chair. Valkyrie kept on enjoying every bite, seeming to know Adam was still scowling and reacted with oblivious exuberance, humming to herself purely to get on his nerves, no doubt. He kept himself reserved, and looked at the window, deciding this was the best thing to do till she finished up.

Despite his annoyance, Adam couldn't fault him for his skepticism. He certainly wouldn't have been better had their positions reversed. The boy was no doubt questioning why a stranger had made the offer to feed them. He still wasn't sure why he'd done it himself. He supposed he could say he had been in a better than usual mood at the time. That and the idea of having to listen to Valkyrie's growling stomach for the entire journey, on top of her tendency to try and see how fast she could beat her gums to death, could possibly be a bridge too far.

That aside, he supposed he tolerated them, rather akin to a man who might tolerate a tapeworm in his digestive tract, but tolerance nonetheless. At another time, he might have had a little pride in himself for that. He could at least deal with humans overall now, in their insistent existence within his personal space, as much or as little as he needed to; that much he had learned in Kuchinashi. Even if the act of so much as looking at most other faunus still made him want to fight down a veritable cornucopia of murderous impulses. Progress was progress.

His tolerance however, had limits, and it had all the more brittle yesterday for his having been awoken as unpleasantly as he had, by the sound of Valkyrie screaming hours earlier.

---

"Leave us alone!"

Upon opening his eye, he caught a glimpse of something orange and pink in his peripheral vision. Her skin was pale. She was biting down on her lower lip so hard that he expected she must've been tasting blood. Something was pulling her hair; as his vision cleared, he realized she was biting down on another scream. Fright practically consumed every cell in her body, swelling them with terror. With every second she practically felt the rise of her blood pressure, but she knew that this was the least of her worries.

It had nothing to do with Adam. It did not affect him. But his turbulent emotions made him rash.

"Oh no you don't, thief! No one leaves till we get this sorted out." It was a train marshal; a frumpy looking woman with an overbearing sense of self importance. "What's the rush? You wouldn't be trying to hide something, would you, you worthless little urchin?" She said, arrogantly, attempting to look imposing, her grip on Valkyrie's hair tightening as the girl tried to pull away.

Violence slid into his eye like vapor behind glass.

He didn't know the full story. Valkyrie really could have been a budding kleptomaniac. What he did know, was that he wanted his damned sleep, and that this woman was in his way.

She ineptly shuffled as Adam stood, towering over her by a significant margin. His dark red aura shrouded his body, leaking from his body like smoke. Unbeknownst to him, his eye glowed with murderous scarlet, and his skin was beginning to darken.

"Leave."

The woman gasped, her dark eyes wide. "W-What?"

Adam repeated himself.

"Get. Out."

The woman began to back away, letting Valkyrie go and bumping into the doorframe. She began to babble something, wringing her hands together. Her panic clogged her words. Fear morphed to anger, nostrils flaring and threatening to come forward towards him. The man just ignored her, returning to a stare of contempt briefly. It stopped her dead in her tracks.

What stood there was not human. That wrathful grimace, that piercing sapphire glare, that clenched jaw bearing glowing fangs, that killing intent that presaged imminent doom and destruction; none of that could possibly belong to a mere faunus, let alone a human.

Her body wobbled and trembled, her previous arrogance had been banished by a far more terrifying presence.

A pair of thoughts wrestled for control inside her mind: to drop down and beg for forgiveness or to make a mad sprint away from certain death. Unfortunately for the woman, both options seemed equally hopeless, and her mind wasted the few invaluable seconds without being able to decide.

Adam wordlessly drove his fist hard into her fat-padded stomach. She choked and gagged, doubling over. He didn't bother to catch her, just stepped aside to let her sprawl on the thin carpet, as she hit the ground with a dull thud, his back already turned as he prepared to return to his slumber.

'Spineless worm.'

As he sat, he felt his aura vanished, unwittingly leaving only the lightning patterned scorch marks on the ceiling of the train car as the only proof of their past existence.

Energy seeped out of him, his demonic miasma faded, and he slumped his shoulders, feeling hollow.

Then there was a sharp exhale. His eyes flicked to its source; two pairs of incredulous eyes in the parallel seat, currently fixed on him.

"For fuck's sake..."

---

Those three words were the first thing to come across Adam's mind in that moment, when he had seen Valkyrie and Ren staring at him with a mix of incredulity and terror.

The awkward (and embarrassing) silence had been ended abruptly by Valkyrie's growling stomach. Seeing an opportunity, Adam had hastily withdrawn a few hundred lien from his pockets, palming it none too gently into Ren's hand, before asking, or rather demanding that they use the money to treat themselves to food in one of the dining cars. Valkyrie at least, had been helpful at last, dragging off her cohort without another word, regardless of his sputtering.

Once he'd rid himself of the witnesses, he had been free to panic at his leisure.

The attendant's absence would be noted in due time, though with any luck, it would be in a day or so once they arrived at their destination, when he was no longer on the train. As a precaution, he had quickly bound her wrists to her ankles with the cord of her radio, removing the circular battery from its plastic casing. After that it was simply a matter of dragging her heavy body into the train toilets.

Though by some miracle, he wasn't seen hunched over and dragging it down the corridor, it was far from the end of his problems. The water closet he'd decided to stash her in didn't even have a proper door, just a sliding plastic screen that hadn't seen much attention by the staff, at least as far as he'd been aware. Worse still it didn't lock from the outside, for obvious reasons, and he didn't have the luxury of locking her in another compartment. He already knew that most of them were occupied, and even if he wasn't seen, dragging the deadweight looking for one was more trouble than it was worth.

As an afterthought, he took a roll of toilet paper, wadding it into thick balls and stuffed as many of them into her mouth as would fit. He shut the closet as best he could, but despite a full twenty minutes of his best efforts, there was a tell-tale bulge where the woman's bulk rested. He'd given up after that. It would have to do. Removing a nearby 'Out of Order' sign, he had managed to wedge it between the handle and the lock, forming a useful makeshift barricade against the space.

It would buy him some time. How long was anyone's guess. With any luck she'd stay knocked out, or wake up with short term memory loss. That was the adrenaline talking, he supposed. He'd never been lucky.

There had been a followup; an assistant had attempted to approach their compartment later in the day, though he seemed a little more cautious than his superiors. It hadn't lasted long; largely on account of the train attendant immediately crumpling like paper once he'd caught sight of Adam's own weapons; the gleam of his blade in one hand, a pistol in the other (he'd been preparing to clean the latter), and with Adam himself , being looking very intimidating no matter how one looked at him. That had been the last time any of the staff had bothered him, or his acquaintances.

Putting the events of yesterday aside, Adam restrained a sigh, internally frustrated with himself. A twinge of annoyance resurged as he remembered how little control of his semblance he'd had in that moment. His power answered his call instinctively now, but it seemed to come at the cost of his control, and using it to its full potential as he had…seemed to drain him. That was unacceptable, to the ever impatient faunus, and had he any control of his surroundings, he would be training right at this second. Or at the very least meditating.

His never-ending training would have to be postponed for a while, it seemed. At least not without dealing with the interlopers. The idea of complacency, even a temporary kind, irritated him something fierce.

As for how to deal with that particular problem…

He tended to move without thinking – it was more often than not, the easiest and often most efficient way to do things. The problem was, his instincts never really compensated for the more… social adverse effects of his actions.

The reasons behind that were legion; He didn't care, he hated most, if not all people, anyway, it was usually the quickest and effective way to get results from species who primarily consisted of incorrigible scumwads who were such conniving moral hypocrites, it was a wonder the gods hadn't simply wiped them all from the face of the wretched planet with plagues and pestilence; so on, and so forth.

But there was one, chief above all.

It had been a lesson that he had been repeatedly forced to learn via the circumstances of his birth; that human society and their expectations did not cater to him in the slightest – from the viewpoints of most of them, his mere existence was 'violent' and 'brutish'. From his viewpoint, life was just irritatingly complex regarding problems and how they were supposed to be solved.

It was also one of a great many reasons he preferred to be left the hell alone by the wider population of Remnant at large. He didn't want to fit in, if it meant having to constantly deal with people like that. The way he would have phrased it involved a lot more expletives, but he didn't feel up to it at the moment. Most irritatingly of all, he didn't even know why he'd intervened on behalf of human children. It was none of his business. He could have simply feigned sleep until it was over, and enjoyed his solitude again. Maybe Belladonna's timely misfortune made him feel more charitable of late. He smirked to himself.

Some humanitarian.

The gist of it was, he didn't feel especially apologetic for his actions, so why the hell did he feel so weird about it? He only hoped that the brats would be frightened enough to leave him in peace now, some vain hope that the situation could still be salvaged. The fallout from his loss of control however...

That was another thing.

The boy, Ren, Adam thought his name was, at least, had been wary of him ever since. The boy was paranoid and thought there was a catch to everything...smart, even if that wasn't that case. A healthy dose of paranoia never hurt anyone.

Adam was surprised to acknowledge that he didn't know how he felt about that yet. For a human, he had been a welcome refresher, and a small part of him might even have grown to enjoy his company to some degree. Provided he found his spine.

Valkyrie on the other hand… had grown substantially more annoying. While she clearly did not lack for sheer brazen courage, she had no idea how to read a room. The girl was more persistent than his own shadow. Everywhere he went, there she was, asking him questions and invading his personal space. And worse still, as he had discovered already: There was only so far he could run.

All in all, he just didn't know what to make of them.

He was relatively certain by now that neither had an ulterior motive for being curious about him, but that didn't change the fact that they were interested. Going along with whatever madness she harboured in that empty skull of hers was inviting a million chances to do exactly what he'd just resolved not to – chances to send those two fragile connections running and screaming. There was no way this would end with him in a better position than he'd be otherwise. And it wasn't as if he didn't have enough on his mind.

"So Captain…"

Speak of the Grimm…

He groaned mentally; trying to remind himself that she was just a girl. A child.

Nora took Adam's silence as a good signal, and sidled towards him, with a wide, toothy smile.

It was only because she happened to be on Adam's good side that his singular eye caught the girl lifting her chin to attract his attention. The ginger's eyes beamed at him with a blank expression. Not that it disturbed him, (well, to a level that he would be prepared to confess to anyway) but it felt like having a ferret stare him down. A ferret with an opium habit. He could see it in her eyes; she wanted to say something to him.

They'd been in each other's presence for less than two full days. He'd all but threatened her, and she'd acted like he was some kind of novelty. She'd seen him punch a random civilian into unconsciousness, using force that most others would have thought far exceeded both normal and necessary and she'd been... cheerful.

Why couldn't she react like a normal person? What was wrong with her?

…Nobody had ever called him cool, before, either. Especially not a human.

'And it would only be a matter of time,' he thought with another mental groan, 'until the pressure valve that was Valkyrie's vocal cords broke on its own, and a stream of conversation was once more assaulting his auricular senses. Maybe it was best to take a proactive approach. She could at least have the decency to swallow before she talked though.

"Go away." Adam's response was sudden, as he fixed her with his best glare.

That… hadn't been the response he'd planned on. They had been instinctive; the first words to leave his lips. A twinge of unwelcome regret came and went as he saw her expression. Still, they served their purpose…. Hadn't they?

For a moment, Nora's smile seemed to fade, and for five seconds that seemed like eternity, his glare burnt through her soul and mind, and made her think that, perhaps, bothering him wasn't a wise idea.

The guilt grew incrementally stronger. "Is there something bothering you?" Adam tried again suddenly, his right foot tapped the floor of the train car impatiently.

Then, as if it had never happened, she lit up once again, bright as ever.

Progress!

"Where ya from?"

Adam growled, a long and low sound. Why didn't people just ignore him? Hadn't she clued in yet that he wanted nothing to do with her? Was it that hard to reciprocate? If she wanted to make friends, why in the name of the gods had she come to him? And now discomfort was mingling with his irritation, because some small part of his brain was whining that she had been trying so hard to be agreeable, and that was quite honestly, worse than any other transgression she could have made. He preferred when people were unfriendly. It made dealing with them so much easier. Some people had way too much time on their hands. Nora, for her part, didn't flinch; just gazed back at her most recent companion expectantly, almost akin to a puppy. Ren, for his own part, looked mortified.

Adam speared his own food, not inelegantly, and bit into it, chewing slowly so as to not to have to answer. He stared out of the window, waiting for the sensation of her green eyes to stop burning into the side of his head as his mind turned inward, working. Nora, however, simply waited for him to finish chewing. It took her a few moments longer to realize that he wasn't going to answer her, and a second longer than that to decide to keep pushing. Before she had a chance however, he cut her off at the knees.

"If I tell you, will you leave me alone?"

"No promises~"

He restrained the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. She and Charlotte must never be allowed to cross paths. Under any circumstances.

"I'll tell you that when you tell me when you tell me why you stowed away on this train."

From the twinge of panic that spread across her friend's face at his harsh tone, he knew he'd hit a sore mark. In truth, Adam hadn't actually cared for an answer. In fact, he had every intention of counting on her silence, hoping the question was personal enough to stun her into silence. "Since we're apparently sharing secrets."

Unfortunately, Ren chose then to speak.

"We're going to Argus. We were… hoping to get into a Huntsman Academy."

Adam raised his head, sizing them up. "Seem a little young for it, don't you think?" It was difficult to keep the revulsion from his voice.

Nora at least, seemed indignant, and he sensed that he had challenged her pride.

"Hey! We're plenty old enough!.. I think."

She stopped mid-tirade, the fire in her eyes flickering out in an instant. "Renny, is fourteen old enough to be a Huntress?"

"Given the skill deficit of most grown Huntresses, I'd be hard pressed to see much difference combat wise." Adam muttered to himself, though the ginger girl seemed to have overheard, and was now beaming down at him in delight at the perceived compliment.

"Renny" to his credit, did not deign to respond to Nora's original outburst. "Long story short; we're planning on taking the junior combat academy exams."

Adam raised an eyebrow. "With no weapons? Bold."

In response, Ren slowly extracted a pair of emerald green, curved daggers from his jacket. They were well kept, yet, and yet, Adam could see the scuffs and scratches that spoke to the wear and tear that came with battle. An impressive pair. He leaned back in his seat again, glancing over at Nora, who was suddenly writhing and struggling with her bagpack. She was tugging frantically at a metal handle that appeared to be caught on the fabric of the zip.

For the briefest of moments Adam considered proffering help, but thought better of it.

"Kuchinashi."

It was an easy lie. Whether that was because it was the technical truth, or because of his desire to forsake the past for good, he wasn't prepared to let Menagerie's cursed name pass from his lips, now, or ever again as far as he could help it. Let what lay there, die there. The same could be said for Solitas. And beyond those places…. he didn't really have anywhere else to call home. With the last piece of his past dead, he supposed he had been reborn; the Adam who had come to Kuchinashi was not the man who had left it. So in it's own way, it was the truth. Not that he thought the full truth would satisfy Valkyrie anyway, but it was all she was getting so she was going to have to deal.

Eventually she gave up, slumping down into the seat next to him and folded her arms with a pout, and the compartment was once again filled with blessed silence.

"You. Child." He fixed the boy in front of him with a stare. "How often do you train?"

"I…don't know." Came the soft reply, fraught with nerves.

"Hmph."

It was hard to keep the distaste from his voice as he spoke. The boy hadn't confronted him yet about his explosive display of violence but even Adam, for all his deficiencies in social etiquette, could still see the signs. They weren't anything new to him, but it was almost admirable how well he was holding up so far.

Almost.

"Either speak or stop staring. Pick one." Adam half growled, half whispered, irritated.

The boy gulped. That eye… it seemed to be promising agony and death if he so much as breathed on him. At least he hadn't drawn for his sword. Yet.

"Are you really a Huntsman?"

Adam's scowl melted into a slightly less defensive and more confused scowl. "What?"

"You're a huntsman," the boy repeated, with a calm that did not match his eyes. His tone spoke volumes: Fear, barely restrained curiosity, a tone of judgement and that accusatory push that tried to make someone feel guilty. Adam could have laughed. He could see how the theory would have made sense, and yet, it was so wildly off the mark. Still, there was no reason to let him know that.

"And if I was?"

"I was just wondering where your team was, that's all." Ren amended hastily. "Are you close to them?"

"Relying on others to protect you is a common trait of the weak. It's one I do not have."

Ren frowned, visibly confused.

"But… don't you need teammates?"

Adam could have laughed. Though he was not the most sociable person by any stretch of the word, he was very skilled at discerning intent and emotions based on body language, tone of their voice and even their way of breathing and blinking. It was a very practical skill for a fighter, though it had the disadvantage that it could trivialize what otherwise would be hard fought battle. The boy's naivety was amusing, if more than a little insulting. But the more he considered his words, the more the humor became lost on him. He leaned forward, still meeting the younger boy's startled gaze, before speaking again, in a cold and serene voice that rooted Ren to his seat. "Where I walk, I walk alone. Where I fight, I fight alone. I do not need others to fight my battles for me. Anyone who would choose to live that way is a fool and a coward."

The faunus sighed, closing his eye, before leaning back and folding his arms in front of his chest. "This world is not a kind one, and it's people are , for the most part, even less so. If you wish to survive, find the will to grow stronger, and learn to rely solely on your own strength. Because in your most desperate hour, it is the one thing that will not fail you."

It would be the only kindness he would give him; the advice that Adam had learned at the edge of a burning brand all those years ago, that had carried him this far. If one desired to survive in this world, one had no choice but seek strength, for it was the ultimate truth. For power ultimately ruled supreme over all, and to think he or anyone else could decide fate or change the world without it was utter foolishness. If one was weak, then it was their obligation, their duty to seek their own strength, lest you find yourself crushed underfoot by the overwhelming hordes of vermin that populated the world. Vulnerability attracted vultures, and the weak could do nothing but suffer. Adam thought of Charlotte for a brief moment, and how she had proven herself counter to the belief he carried at his core, but that was quickly overridden. If his adventures had proven anything, it was that she was an exception not the rule. Virtually every other person he had ever met had exploited him in some way, and even Charlotte had herself, as kind as she had been to him.

But none of it would have ever happened if he hadn't been so weak. So reliant.

And as much as he wasn't sure he liked either of the brats…. maybe he'd keep them from making his mistake.

He could see the younger boy frown at his words, pursing his lips. Any tentative reply was lost as the conductor announced the train was about to pass into a tunnel. His voice came off as jovial, despite a clear lack of appreciation for his job. The moonlight and scenery were swallowed up by an all encompassing darkness. Adam could see Ren tense in his seat, as though something unpleasant had been thrown into his lap.

"Wonder ...you'll...one…."

The voice wasn't Ren's. Adam felt a cold chill run through him, as if his entire body had been doused in frozen water.

The train hurtled around a bend to the right, jolting Nora into Adam's shoulder as the tunnel curved and emerged once more into the moonlight.

As he turned to address Ren again, a blurred movement caught his eye; an unfamiliar shadow materializing and evaporating as quickly as it had come. He squinted, brow creasing, turning his attention fully towards the window.

The mountains in the distance were covered with a rug of trees, but their bare tops were scarfed and beribboned with patches of snow. From carved rocky outcrops, and in the fields he could see the silver glint of rivers and the occasional mirror-like flash of a mountain lake. Everything was as it should have been.

But then loud, plodding vibrations thundered through the car, mixed with the sound of.., something. Metal scraped painfully against metal.

It was probably the train being hit by some debris from the bridge. A fallen rock or two, maybe; shoddy brickwork was hardly surprising with the day Adam had been having. Judging by the look on Ren's face, he must have come to the same conclusion.

All of a sudden, a thunderous sound exploded across the small and crowded space.

And then the screams started.

---

They had walked out into chaos.

Adam hadn't bothered digging around in his bag for extra ammunition; he'd taken his two bootlegged pistols and Wilt, Blush already being in its holster. He'd intended only to see what was going on. However, there were… complications.

Firstly, people were screaming and running, and Adam was hard pressed to avoid the inevitable crush as they all pushed to the back of the train in unison. As though that would keep them safe. Idiots. 'And speaking of which…'As if to prove his point, Adam was quickly forced to grab his two unwanted charges and drag them backwards out of the way as a black missile smashed into the plate glass of one of the windows. The stench of carrion was almost overwhelming as it passed, the rush of open air in the carriage heavy with the stink of it.

Others (train staff as far as he figured) were yelling and trying to move the other civilians back into their compartments and out of the aisles, to little avail. Screams filled the corridor, heads ducked for cover, and glass dropped to the ground, as the creature attempted to right itself, the wails of the desperate drowning out the crunch of it being trampled underfoot. Adam fought his way through the crush of people, whacking a panicking civilian in the stomach with his sheathed weapon and was rewarded with a spray of gastric fluid. He batted aside the others who got too close, snarling and snapping all the while. People. Collateral damage. Right. A few dozen idiots without the common decency to either drop dead or get out of his way.

The door right next to the winged creature swung open and an uniformed, angry, man in a dark blue uniform, with dark hair and eyes shot out. In one hand, he held what looked to be some kind of wrench and he had looked ready to use it. His voice died in his throat as he saw what it was.

It swivelled its head to survey the man. Despite the hunched posture and the short legs, its raised wings ensured that it was actually the same height as its would-be victim.

Another impact from the roof made the train lurch suddenly, breaking apart the waves of people and nearly rocking his balance. Men and women fled in terror.

And then the inevitable happened.

The man tried to duck back into the door he'd stepped out of, only to be stopped as it rose up, using its wings to propel itself upwards like a flying fish and driving a maw of curved and hooked teeth bite hard at the man's shoulder, tearing through the feeble shirt of the uniform and ripping open a chunk of flesh.

The voices and screams became ever louder; the reason evidently apparent.

It was... like feeding time at the zoo. Fangs closed in on human flesh and dug in with gusto, tearing and swallowing.

Or at least it would have.

No sooner had it taken a single bite when something flew through, punching through the black shape and sticking into the wall in a shower of sparks. the creature burbled in response, spitting a foul black liquid from its mouth. Clearing the last few metres, and callously stepping over writhing bodies, Adam tugged on the hilt of his sword and it came free, splitting its monstrous head in two. Immediately the space was bathed in darkness- he must have cut an electrical wire or two- the panicked shouts of the idiots around him raising in both pitch and volume soon afterwards. He'd been lucky—he hadn't known the throw would be so accurate, especially with how unstable the environment was. At best, he'd hoped to startle the Grimm off the idiot, before getting close to finish it. Now that it was dead, he re-sheathed his sword, moving to the door of the carriage. From there, he was sure he could find a way to reach the roof. As his hand landed on the release latch, the man staggered to his feet, and ventured from the doorway, cringing with a stray flicker of electricity missed his ear by inches.

"What are you doing?!" The injured mad grasped Adam's shoulder with his good arm."You can't just-"

Adam hit him.

Hard.

The injured man sprawled back into the ground as the faunus' closed fist backhanded him across the face with enough force to buckle his knees under him.

The man didn't move again.

The darkness had made the panicking rabble even more rowdy, and none of them.

Cowardly dogs. All of them. The very sight of them made him sick.

Amidst the chaos, Adam spared the unconscious man a contemptuous sneer, watching the sucking chest wounds whistle in and out as his massive chest heaved. The faunus refused to even acknowledge him with words, not bothering to hide the disgust on his face. The fool was alive; whether or not he lost his arm was his own problem. He stepped over the body, only to have his arm grabbed again by Ren.

"You can't just leave him there! He'll die!"

"That's between him and the gods." Adam remarked coldly, wrenching his limb free and stepping away. "If you feel so raw about it, put in a prayer for him."

More heavy thuds echoed through the car and huge dents appeared randomly in the walls and ceiling as the car raced faster and faster.

His hand had just clamped around the emergency release to the door, when a dreadful sound rang out, louder even than the cries of the headless sheep. The next few seconds were a mix of shattering glass and crunching metal followed by the smell of rot and smoke. A new creature had begun to rip apart the ceiling. It growled and hissed as it tried to force its head through the opening to reach the unfortunate occupants.

As he retraced his steps along the car, he found Nora already in front of him, doing the same as the sounds of snarling reverberated through the room over the screams.

Where in hell's name had she managed to get a hold of a sledgehammer?

He shook his head.

It was no matter.

If people wanted to get themselves killed, that wasn't his problem; he wasn't responsible for anyone's lack of self-preservation. But while the ginger human girl committing assisted suicide by Grimm would admittedly make his life easier in the immediate short term, he couldn't help the slight sliver of respect that trailed down his spine as he looked on, watching with a muted sense of confusion and morbid amusement, as Valkyrie simply… hit it.

Pink lightning of all things, shrouded her body, sending the creature's face back through the hole, ripping away from the car into the sky.

As it rocketed upward, he could see it begin to disintegrate, it's wings and body tearing away into dust,as the girl ascended upwards, yelling an unintelligible war cry that shook the entire train car and made at least half the train wobble and shudder on its tracks. Adam barely kept his balance, bracing himself against the door as what few passengers were still standing and stupid enough to still be apart of the throng of lemmings were violently thrown to the ground.

At this rate, the train would be derailed.

Adam growled.

If they were going to die, then let them die already. Cruel, worthless weaklings like them, sheltered all their pathetic lives from even the most trivial of dangers, deserved nothing short of a dog's death. Let them die, and accept the fate they had brought upon themselves. Because living consciously in weakness, without ever seeking strength, was the most unforgivable of sins. The idea of protecting people so unwilling to fight for themselves, rankled him something awful- made him feel used, but a split second was enough time to tamp down on his reservations.

It wasn't about them.

They were but a means to an end,

This trip had not unfolded the way he'd wanted it to, and he was hoping at least one thing would go right today-namely that he might face a worthy challenge. He definitely wasn't used to fighting with others, so much as fighting them directly, but the alternative didn't leave much choice. Besides, if that was any indication, Valkyrie might just be more than talk. And it made him…. curious.

Smiling, Adam turned and opened the latch and was immediately met by the howl of what must have been hurricane force winds, carrying the overpowering scent of rotting carrion. Another sharp shudder shook the train, almost throwing him off entirely, but he was quick to recover, using a railing to stabilize himself before leaping skyward. The cold air rushed to meet him, metal blurring beneath his feet, and then he landed, his boots struggling for a fraction of a second to maintain their purchase on the smoother surface of the roof.

Underneath the cacophony of noise, he had still been able to hear the sounds of battle. Still, something felt wrong; and in the seconds it took him to the roof and saw her, he could immediately understand why.

As such, he decided to table any queries in lieu of a more pressing engagement. Namely, the other Grimm. The air above the train was alive with a flurry of black and red skin stretched over bone. They swooped downward, diving at near impossible speeds, moving more like a liquid than a flock.

The girl looked at him, noting his approach and suddenly everything went blurry and slow. As if in a dream, Adam saw a pair of great black wings open in the humid air above her, followed by a snarl of long black claws. He called out, yanking the ginger out of harm's way, much to the vocal chagrin of the airborne Grimm, who had no doubt dead set on finishing off the human nuisance. Wilt shot up in a flash and twisted in the air, skinning the side of the swooping abomination that was forced to change its direction much too fluidly to rip them both to shreds.

As he felt it's remains rush past him, Adam managed to catch a glimpse of his opponent. Spade-like ears, spikes protruding from the creatures' backs, and a bone-like ribcage forming a kind of armor over their pitch black fur. It had red leather wings that seemed to be impossibly long, at least sixteen feet wide when fully spread. They were of skin stretched taut, almost transparently thin. Serpentine tails, scorpion pincher-like barbs waved erratically between their claws. Finally, Adam took note of it's gaping maws, filled with large gleaming white fangs that interlocked over their lower jaws.

'Bats' he realized absently. That's what they looked like. 'They must have been taking refuge in the tunnel for some reason.' Having a train come flying through your front door would get anyone's blood riled. Not that he was about to be intimidated by flying rats, even if they did have fire breath.

At the end of the day, they were as all their kin were; little more than vermin pretending to power, and for that sin, none would find mercy at his hands.

"All right," he murmured. "Come and play."

They didn't keep him waiting.

The first to attack him was wiry and lean, a juvenile, he guessed, and barely taller than he was. It wouldn't live to adulthood. He reached out and impaled it through the chest with a swift thrust, letting it pull him with it as he drove his weapon between its ribs; the metal sank into its soft flesh easily, and he pried his blade outward for good measure as he applied more force to its chest.

It managed a pitiful croak before its ribs snapped like wishbones. He twisted it once more to be sure and flicked his wrist out, tossing the crumpled disintegrating wreck impaled on his sword aside.

The remains of the corpse hit another, though it only caused it to stumble out of the air, where it found itself bludgeoned by the wild eyed ginger in short order.

Slashing with his blade again, a series of pops to his left told Adam that his impromptu partner had snapped one of the creature's spines. She threw the paralyzed Grimm to the ground with the shaft of her hammer, before sinking a heavy boot deep into the remains of its head.

The Grimm's skull was crushed beyond recognition. A steady flow of ichor streamed down its ruined face like tears, evaporating as the beast began to dissolve into dust.

Valkyrie really was starting to grow on him. Gods help them all.

That approval was stunted somewhat when he saw the extent of her latter successes; that was to say her lack thereof. Despite their size, the Grimm were as nimble in the air as the small bats they resembled, and in spite of her considerable physical strength, they were simply faster. Her swings began to grow wider and more erratic quickly, and Adam quickly realized she wasn't going to last like this.

While the Grimm were weak individually, in groups, they were proving to be... irritating. Their persistence was almost impressive, at least by Grimm standards. No matter how badly they were beaten back, the others would mindlessly charge in, uncaring about what happens to their brethren. Neither of them had ever faced foes like this before. Neither of the humans had ever had to face so many opponents at once for so long. Fatigue was slowly creeping into her body, and fast.

The faunus on the other hand, did not have the same problem. He was used to fighting against multiple opponents at once. What did concern him on the other hand, was the girl's ragged breathing and perspiration that seemed to coat her. It was too obvious that she was having trouble keeping up. This battle had to end now.

"Can't this thing go any faster?!"

"This is a train!"

"So?!"

"So, it can only go so fast before it comes off the tracks and pancakes into the mountainside!"

"Oh right. I knew that!"

Adam was beginning to wonder if Valkyrie was as intelligent as he was giving her credit for, or if she was just absolutely insane.

Ren had joined them on the roof of the carriage by now, his voice barely heard over the whipping winds and the screeches of the Grimm overhead, and as such, Nora didn't appear to acknowledge him, but the Faunus had managed to pick them up, straining his hearing as best he could. He noticed the one hovering above them, it was hard not to; it bellowed so horrifically that all of their ears went numb.

"They're Ravagers!"

A new voice entered the fray, and Adam had just enough presence of mind to realize it was the boy. That meant that either the other idiot had succumbed to his wounds, or the boy's nursemaiding had paid off, he noted with idle indifference. The crash of metal on his blind side told the faunus that he had stumbled and a quick glance told him that his assessment had been correct, watching with impatience as he struggled to his feet.

Adam fixed him with a deadly stare.

"Meaning?"

One of the creatures roared, diving its head and hurling a stream of inferno at the ground, forcing them both to leap clear as the torrent of flame melted the area of the roof where they had once stood.

"Well, they breathe fire."

'Thank you for that, Colonel Obvious.' Adam thought irritably, roughly tugging him to his feet. He readied his sword again, taking a guard position as he tried to keep track of the members of the flying horde; a difficult task with his particular field of vision, made even more so now he had to worry about two human sacks of collateral instead of the one.

'They breathed fire?'

Well that was certainly new. Would have been nice to know that before they'd nearly flambéd him. Not that it mattered, he was still going to cut them into confetti, but he supposed it was better late to know than never.

He'd never met a Grimm that breathed fire before. This might just be fun. He smirked, his eye and clothes growing with scarlet light, relishing the power of his semblance as it rolled over him. As he surveyed his situation, adrenaline washed over him, as he felt his fighting spirit burn stronger.

"Let's see if you can entertain me.."

Adam launched himself into the mass of Grimm, hacking with speed and precision. Black blood sprayed indiscriminately as he pressed his attack, as he was overwhelmed by the infernal stench of the creatures' fur. He lashed out to his right and disemboweled a Ravager that had attempted another divebomb, and followed the strike with three consecutive slashes, each so fast and devastating that the beasts were unable to land a single blow.

He cut through the horde surrounding the ginger, mowing down his opponents easily.

Eyes wide as sprays of blood and body parts flew past him in all directions, Ren could not help but admire the harmony and style of his would be ten or more coming at him at once, yet he had not once faltered, his blade doing the bidding of his body, passing behind his back as he turned or biting its razor-sharp edge into flesh and bone as he made an attack. To pit it simply, Adam appeared as if he was dancing to a song only he could hear, totally at home in using the twisted melody of screams and violence to rip his way through the blackness. One by one, the shadows fell, driven back to oblivion.

What Ren didn't know was that the man in question felt anything but in control.

"This is beginning to try my patience!" Adam growled to himself. Evasion had gone right out the window the moment he joined the fray. He was fast; he knew that, and he had the advantage of a lighter weapon compared to the ginger girl he was fighting alongside, if not her counterpart. But there were claws, wings and bursts of flame everywhere; dodging one swing just sent him right into the path of another.

In truth, these striplings were beginning to become a nuisance. They were easily swatted, true, but they were too stupid to feel fear; for each one of their brethren lost, another would fill its place. Cutting down fodder lost its appeal quickly.

"Don't be so stubborn! Be good boys and go to sleep!"

He agreed with the sentiment, though Valkyrie's battle banter left much to be desired. With another screech, he was alerted to the presence of more Grimm behind him, their heads tilting grotesquely to the side before sliding from their severed necks to crash down and roll off to the ground. Ren twirled his daggers in his palms, gleaming in the moonlight and dripping with black ichor. Adam nodded in acknowledgement. They remained motionless, heavy breaths apparent in the dead silence broken only by the turning of the gears below them.

They had a moment's reprieve, he surmised, as the monstrous rodents attempted to regroup, hovering nearby, yet at sufficient distance, no doubt figuring out a new tactic to attempt to kill them all. The remaining Grimm suddenly rushed the three of them in a pincer move, hoping to crush them with one attack.

They were… well, they sort of moved like himself, zigging and zagging at ridiculously high speeds, except with wings. At the thought of comparing these lesser vermin to himself, he scowled and slashed the nearest nuisance out of the air with a casual contempt. The thing tried to take off once more, it's broken, near, severed wing trailing behind as it tried to take to the air, but slowly... clumsily. Something was shrieking, but it was almost as if he were underwater; he was almost heedless now of noise, because several other facts had just lined themselves up in his head very quickly.

One: They couldn't move well on the ground.

Realization washed over him and his eyes rolled upward. While he'd spotted the wingspan, the teeth, and the fire breath, he'd missed something crucial. Stubby, almost vestigial legs, forced to stand on feet not meant to be used for walking. They had been twisted into scythes, each talon almost a foot long and extending out from the back of it's ankles. It might have even been comical if the things hadn't looked so sharp.

Adam's sword whirled frantically, dicing a Grimm that had approached from behind. The creatures quickly adapted to his technique and attacked en masse. Finally, he had enough. After so many strikes, it was time to try a different tack. He paused midstride – pausing in the middle of a fight was unutterably stupid, but so were the limitations that had made him do so to begin with. Breathe. There's an order to everything if you just listen. If you feel the air.

In.

He dodged a swipe, slashing downward with his sword. Two fell.

Out.

Catching another in midair on the end of his blade, he saw it open its mouth to scream, and rammed the fist of his free hand in between its jaws, closing around its tongue. Before it could close its jaws, he yanked hard, and with a scream from his victim, the fleshy muscle came away in its grip.

In.

Deep scarlet lightning trailed from his limbs as he lifted his leg high up and then brought it crashing down in an arcing motion. Adam barely felt its body crumble under his heel.

Out.

His perception of time slowed to a crawl, and gradually , a sense of clarity bled into the world – he didn't feel any less hindered, but his limbs felt lighter, and the Grimm seemed to be moving slower, to merely-human speeds.

'I know what I'm doing.'

He did; he had the knowledge, the skill, and the power. He had greater aspirations than to waste his time and his skill on mindless pathetic vermin. He was better than this. There had to be a way to end this quickly. He looked down to the one he had trodden underfoot.

The revelation slotted itself into place and almost simultaneously fired off an immediate action in his head. It was so obvious in hindsight. The beast's wings, broad as they were, couldn't possibly be used to support anything even remotely its size when not in flight. So that left one option.

Take out the wings. But how? He couldn't use his semblance on his sword from where he was; if he hit one of the overhead powerlines, he could stop the train dead in the water, turning himself, and everyone inside into a sitting duck. That, and more importantly, climbing a mountain into Mistral on foot wasn't exactly on his itinerary.

Which brought him to the second fact, one that he and Valkyrie had aptly demonstrated. Attempting ground-based melee combat as things stood, was an exercise in futility. He needed his guns. But even if he could summon up the accuracy with any of his new firearms, he didn't have nearly enough ammunition for the entire swarm. He just had to aim… and pray.

Adam whipped out his pistols, wildly opening fire. In hindsight, the shotgun was probably a better choice; the spread would have made any problem regarding precision a mere memory in theory, even more so if he risked charging his shots. He hadn't had much in the way of practice beyond his crash course at the Emporium, but if his experiences had taught him anything by now, it was that he did his best work putting techniques and theories into practice on the fly; a practical learner through and through. His shots went embarrassingly wide at first; bouncing harmlessly off the spikes and armor-plating of their assailants. The flying creatures didn't so much as twitch; the bullets were no more harmful than rain.

Adam bit down a snarl.

So much for that idea.

On the other hand, he was a little reluctant to use his expensive custom rounds on something as paltry as Grimm of all things, and with how nimble they were, there was also no telling what else he'd hit with Blush's wild spread. Namely the temporary allies with him. He gave no more attention to them. They didn't matter. What mattered was his opponent.

What mattered was making them bleed.

Taking a new stance and focusing, holding his guns close to each other in an adjacent grip, Adam charged his shots to a molten scarlet, feeding his anger and frustration into his weapons and ejecting spent casings off into the darkness. His face gained a deep-dark shade, his clothes and hair glowed, and his eye, smouldering with the selfsame scarlet gleam of his gunfire, narrowed with a wild emotion somewhere between glee and disdain. The bat-like Grimm crashed to the ground with wings cracked open, sieve-like structures, filled with enough holes that it was possible to see the moonlight above through the expanses of leather as they fell.

If he had been afraid his qualms about his aim were unfounded; he'd barely had to aim at all now. The swarm was so thick together that the charged bullets easily tore through the flesh and armor of the creatures, passing clean through and hitting others. His confidence grew with every wail of pain, so much so that he felt comfortable firing half blind, free-aiming and firing the pistol in his right hand independently of his left, in several directions by mere sound, despite his lack of depth perception His prey dropped from the skies with ungraceful tumbles, and to his delight, the fallen ones' bodies would end up hitting their comrades, which would simply knock them into more gunfire. A war cry tore through the evening air, and from the corner of his eye, he could see Valkyrie braining one that had been unfortunate enough to fall to the roof of the train alive, hitting it clean out of the air with that oversized mallet of hers in an impressive baseball swing, and sending the disintegrating corpse sailing into the distance.

"Need some help?" Her voice, pronounced with mirth broke through the wall of noise with a dark cheer.

"If you're sticking around for the leftovers, be my guest." Adam shouted over his deafening rain of fire.

Dodging another, he caught a flash of green and the dying wails of another Grimm, and knew that Ren too had cottoned on to his plan. Daggers in hand, the boy delivered a right hook to the one on Adam's right, tearing out an eye. He followed with a left straight that took the rest of its head.

Nora crowed as a stray shot from Adam blasted through the chest of one that had been preparing to spit another fireball, pumping her fist as the resulting blast nearly wiped out the rest of the Grimm in the vast space above them, leaving only several smaller groups that the three could deal with easily. Adam could have sworn he heard himself laughing.

It wasn't to last though. He could feel his guns heating up with every bullet, the sting of their heat singing his palms through the grips. The euphoria began to drain from him. He had to stop. But if he did that—how many more shots could he make before they failed him?

Suddenly, Ren yelped out a warning. "Behind you!"

In an instant, he turned and saw a fireball racing towards him, bringing his blade up just in time to fend off the strike that would have charred his flesh on bone. The attack detonated in a cloud of black smoke, tongues of flame and what looked like bolts of scarlet electrical discharge. The light it emitted caused a blinding flash to shine out, followed by a thunderous explosion. The two humans in front of him shielded their eyes from the blast. The light faded and the explosion disappeared into the smoke. Ren opened his eyes, expecting to see smouldering wreckage.

Nora screamed. "Cap!"

The two children peered into the dense cloud, but found no trace of the faunus.

"Not bad, for vermin."

A figure loomed in the smoke. Inside of the cloud, the two children could make out a single shining red dot, staring out in palpable contempt. The smoke began to billow, and a constant crackling filled the atmosphere as if foretelling an impending attack. As it cleared, Nora let out a a gasp of awe, followed by a sigh of relief. Ren, on the other hand, was surprised. Not because the faunus survived the explosion, but that he seemed to be unharmed. Unfazed, even.

Adam said nothing, as the flames dissipated instead, sinking halfway into his body and blade before vanishing in another scarlet flash of energy. Blood red aura manifested around his body, stimulating every single muscle fibre in his body. There were no words. Just burning, and the incredible awareness of everything inside him melting and boiling and regenerating, only to burn again. It was the kind of pain that was ecstasy, just at the other extreme. It'd kill a normal man-instantly.

And it should have killed him. Instant by instant, over and over. He shouldn't have been sure if his body would keep up, but it did.

It was a game, almost. Playing chicken with death.

How much could he endure?

A question for another day.

Still, if that was their deadliest effort, then it was a C- at best, in his book. They could put up a half a fight when they tried, it seemed, but they just weren't equipped to take him down.

Didn't mean he wanted to get pinned down and used as a whetstone, though, and mobility was starting to become a problem.

So it was best he saw to that now.

"But ultimately…" the faunus continued, fixing the indignant rodent with a contemptuous stare. "Feeble."

Adam leapt into the air, using the charging Ravager as a foothold to launch himself further into space. It noticed him immediately, turning and twisting to try and sink its fangs and claws into the edges of his jacket. But he was too fast for it to make any meaningful contact.

He pulled back, slashing with the blade in a neat crescent, carving off its remaining thrashing wing. The creature screamed, its severed wing falling away in an explosion of bone and inky blood. It tried to rake him again with its long claws as it fell, but Adam twisted in the air, bashing at it with the hilt of his sword. The creature wheeled away, shrieking, and dissolved below him into the darkness, only to be replaced by more from above. He never saw them completely, only in parts, as their lithe bodies appeared and disappeared beneath him as he continued to use the bodies of his attackers to gain height.

Thinking quickly, he drove his blade deep into the mouth of another creature that flying at him with an open maw, glowing with flame. It gargled, dark blood erupting from its burning ghastly creatures now appeared united in one thing – their hatred for him. They closed in fast, ignoring the other two on the roof; their eyes harboring sinister red glows that were trained on Adam like lasers.

The air grew increasingly viscous, as though he were swimming through an ocean of mud. It became harder and harder to move.

Finally, he twisted his body lengthwise at the apex of his jump, gathering as much energy as he could.

The action seemed to draw its Grimm brethren into his wake sensing easy prey. Adam smirked. The release of the kinetic energy shot skyward, but his grip on the handle remained tight. The sheer force acted almost like a rotary propeller, transforming both blade and body into a deadly blur. He whirled like a dervish, trailing scarlet lighting in a deadly vortex of pain; his body pinwheeling in a relentless, spiralling attack. The Grimm above him were driven higher into the air and crashing into the power lines. The ones who approached him from below, were pulled in like a vacuum, shredded to pieces. He moved so quickly that the creatures had no time to flee or even counter, dicing the helpless Grimm into a black paste that splattered in the wind.

Adam landed on the roof of the final carriage, hitting the hard surface with his shoulders and rolling forwards with the momentum into a crouch. Numerous bisected Grimm fell like rain around him, their bodies hitting the metal and being thrown off into the darkness by the centrifugal force of the train, dissolving back into the shadows. He caught sight of Valkyrie and Ren—now at least two full cars north of him— , and flicked the muck off his sword before returning it to its sheath.

An ultimately boring battle… one that had ended the only way it could.

The few remaining vermin that had been fortunate to survive his display were fleeing now, screeching as they took to the horizon.

He stood, and cast one last look to the dust clouds dispersing the winds. Finally, as the sound of boots on metal grew louder, he turned away, and acknowledged the two figures crossing to meet him.

It was the boy who reached him first.

"Are you alright?"

"I was kind of hoping that would have been more of a challenge." Adam admitted.

"Really," Ren said dryly, his tone thick with amusement and an uncharacteristic show of backbone. "I'm going to have to beg to differ with you on that one, although personally, that surprises me about as much as water being wet."

Adam shrugged, barely raising an eyebrow at the sudden change of attitude. It seemed like the brat was not fully aware of it yet, but something seemed to be overriding his meek personality. Perhaps he'd finally found his spine. Even so, the faunus' mind was elsewhere. This had felt wrong…. even more so than the boredom he felt wasting his time on such incompetent striplings. Grimm, while generally being weak and pitiful creatures, were rarely so wise as to indulge in self preservation, especially not in making the judgement to flee before their betters.

It made him ill at ease to consider.

Why would they-

"Cap!"

Nora's voice snapped Adam out of his thoughts. She ran toward him with delight before wrapping him in yet another bone crushing hug. "That. Was. Awesome!" she gushed, lifting him into the air with ease and crushing his spine, before mercifully setting him down on the roof again."Your eye was all cool, your hair was all glowy and stuff, and your teeth—!" To Adam's shock, she dropped her hammer behind his back and tried to peel back his gums with her fingers.

He heard a startled yet amused sounding cough that looked suspiciously like a laugh from his left, as Nora, taking advantage of his utter shock, moved his jaw around in her hand without shame, before whining in disappointment.

"Aww, they're not glowy any more!"

"Let go!"

To his annoyance, and Nora's credit, It took a significant portion of Adam's strength to pry her digits away from his maw. She stretched out a hand into the air. He stared at it, momentarily disarmed. Presumably she wanted him to do the same. Long seconds passed instead.

And now her eyes started to look sad, and he could see Charlotte in his head eyeing him with something like reproach. Damn it. Fine. He relented and reached out. Her hand was small in his, but he still found himself surprised by the level of force she mustered for the slap. It actually hurt.

Resisting the urge to check his palm to see if there were any broken bones, Adam caught a look of what he imagined to be pity on the black haired boy's face, moments before being forced to duck under Nora's outstretched arm as she attempted to throw it over his shoulder, ignoring her squall of protest when she fell without his support. She got back up, pouting before lighting up with another smile as though it never happened.

Nora opened her mouth as if to say something else, but was forcefully interrupted by a bloodcurdling sound.

The roar that came from the north, and echoed off the surrounding cliffs brought the trio awake with a surge of adrenaline hitting their systems. In the middle of it all, his ears detected the sound of a heavy vibration under their feet, making them wobble in place uncertainly. The exaggerated vibrations made it hard to think coherently. An unexpected yelp escaped from her lips, but Adam shushed her, casting his senses into the darkness. He heard it then; over the sound of the wheels meeting the track. Something was dragging itself against the gears.

Nora went still, whatever words she had been about to speak dying in her throat.

Adam focused.

It sounded like… scuttling. And over it, growing ever louder, he heard the sound of metal squealing, bursting apart at the seams.

The roar came again, closer now, but bestial, hungry and there could be no question of whether or not it had been shaped by a human throat.

The answer, they soon found, was definitively 'not.'

An immense humanoid form rose up and unfolded itself. It stood at least twelve feet tall and almost seven feet wide. It's skin was a combination of corpse pallor grey, and an obsidian that matched Adam's own current hue. Ivory protrusions of bone highlighted its shoulders and elbows. The skin itself was; the faunus couldn't tell if it was hide, but whatever it was, it looked thick and rough, like an exoskeleton, marred by tumorous looking lumps. Both arms were hugely muscled and extremely long, with humanoid looking hands that ended with long talons. The legs were shorter, Stumpier, and seemed to have entirely too many joints, but the talons on its feet looked no less deadly.

That was where any semblance of humanity ended for the creature.

From its back grew four more spindly limbs ending in what looked like talons of bone, which were completely caked in dried blood. From its mouth grew four long mandibles, dripping green with what Adam could only assume was poison. It hunched over on all fours, two of its segmented arms on its back reaching over its shoulders and embedding themselves onto the armour plating of the train itself. The head appeared to be misshapen; too round, and too broad, and adorned with hundreds of tiny red eyes , but then, it unfurled its inhuman maw to let out a third horrifying, slavering roar, unfolding its head almost like an onion and revealing rows and rows of yellow teeth.

Its roar at such close proximity seemed to shake the earth itself, ripping across the air through the valley like thunder. A deep, rattling blast of air that made every nerve tingle. It was, quite simply, the sound of terror.

Then it leapt.

---

Lie Ren couldn't believe what he was seeing.

He would be the first to admit that the events of the past few days had been strange. Uncanny even. He and Nora had seen all manner of things in their travels, from finding broken down Atlesian mechs in village scrapyards, to giant sloth Grimm swimming in rivers made of syrup, though admittedly, the latter was more than likely a product of Nora's overactive imagination.

But the one thing he could be sure of, what the fetid stench of death and decay, and the sweat that cling to his skin told him without question,,,, was that he was not imagining this.

'Tsuchigumo, a giant, spider-like Grimm with many limbs. In some depictions of the beast, it is described as having a demon's face, tiger's torso, and spider's limbs. The people who dwell in Mistral's mountains fear the evil beast, for it is said to ensnare humans in its web before consuming them whole.'

Those were the words of his father's bestiary, one of the few things he had salvaged from the ashes of Kuroyuri. He knew little of his late former life, but as part of Kuroyuri's defense detail, his father was one of the few men in the world wise enough to make a point to keep a detailed list of Grimm he deemed troublesome; how to recognize them, their habits and weaknesses, and most importantly, how to beat them. It had saved his own life on more occasions than he could count…, until it hadn't.

With his father gone, Lie Ren had taken to his habits with religious fervour, reading the text cover to cover, night after night. It was how he had learned how to fight Grimm, and where he could not, how to exploit their weaknesses. The book's entry on the Tsuchigumo, however, was incredibly short, even more so than the dreaded Nuckalvee, with only three primary pearls of advice.

That this Grimm was incredibly rare.

Extremely intelligent.

And to avoid it at all costs.

Few had seen its face and lived.

Two things went through his mind. The first was the sheer improbability of coming face to face with one in the flesh. The second was the knowledge that, if they didn't find a way to deal with this fast, this might be the last thought he would ever have.

It was an ambush hunter, he realized. It had likely been here the whole time, waiting for the Ravagers to weaken them so it could have its choice of pickings when they were driven off.

But how had they missed it?

Lie Ren wasn't going to ask it. He didn't have the luxury of curiosity.

His lips twisted into a snarl as he charged, blades outstretched for a killing strike. It bunched its legs and leapt. Ren dug his own feet into the ground and skidded to a surprised stop as the creature sailed over him. Father's bestiary had mentioned they could jump, but he hadn't thought anything was capable of that kind of speed. Faced with close to eight hundred pounds of snarling beast hurtling towards him, he fell to his knees, slid along the metal roof and hoped that it passed him. The beast landed on top of him. Even though it hadn't hit him with its full weight, he could sense its bulk, separated from him only by his ever weakening grip on it's mandibles as he pushed its maw away from his face– and he could hear its claws gouging into the metal beneath him. He could see every detail of its hate-filled soulless eyes behind its bone mask, taste every particle of fetid flesh on its pungent breath. Most horrifyingly of all, now that he was this close, he could notice a new detail. One that chilled him to his core.

The bleached white patterning around the creature's neck was not, as he had thought, the typical bone armour that usually adorned most Grimm, and indeed covered the rest of the Tsuchigumo's body. No. What he saw, dangling around the creature's thrashing neck as it thrashed in its attempts to end his life, was unquestionably bone. Human bones. Several human skulls, dancing on a gossamer of webbing it had used to thread its "necklace" flew in every direction around its neck, and Ren noted, with even greater horror, that the size of the hollow sunken sockets of the skull over his throat were smaller than the others. There was no question that it had once belonged to a child, perhaps even younger that he himself was.

And it was wearing it as a trophy.

A surge of anger, and an even more severe degree of dead flooded through him. He should never have come here. He should have been more careful. He should have-

"Move, you fool!" Adam yelled, as the faunus leapt into the air, vaulting over its head. Just as it brought down its massive fists to crush Ren, it suddenly went stumbling off target, flicking Ren into the air as two of its rear limbs fell off the tracks below.

In an impossible blur of movement, he rushed towards the boy and grabbed him mid-air, placing him over his shoulder, before landing with a graceful somersault.

Adam carelessly dropped Ren to the roof like a potato sack and cursed. The boy, still conscious somehow, groaned in pain while clutching his stomach. He was coughing , winded as he desperately gasped for air.

"Thanks…" Adam's sharp hearing caught the boy's pitifully grateful rasp over the roar of the wind.

A sudden and visceral rush of fury tore through the faunus; his sharp canines bared before he could think of stopping himself.

It was pathetic. Did the boy feel no shame in his weakness? To be nearly killed by a mindless wretch? Or having to be protected because his skills were so lacking? Did he have no pride at all? The constant trembling in the corner of his eye only fanned the flames of his irritation. And he wanted to be a Huntsman! Yes, they were insipid glory hounds who sought to fight even weaker targets on behalf of halfwits and ingrates. But most of them at least had enough power for that. The idea that someone would seek a position that required power without a pinch of it, while doing embarrassingly little to seek it , was as absurd as it was infuriating. After a few seconds to regain his composure, Adam returned his attention to the Grimm, which was finding its feet, its many eyes locked firmly on him.

Not intimidated in the slightest, he met its glare, his calm appearance belying the cold fury that welled within. Adam was practically a beacon to the Grimm. His emotions had always burned fiercely than others, if coldly, and at that moment he had plenty to be incensed about. Negativity was an old friend to the bull faunus, but the results of this evening had pushed him over the edge.

Again, he had to remind himself that these were children. And children were inherently stupid; it came with the territory. He should know; he had the eyepatch to prove it.

"Do us both a favor and stay out of my way." He growled over his shoulder.

A shockwave of scarlet energy raced from his sword at incredible speed, cutting through through the air in a devastating slash.

It suddenly turned, faster than a creature that size should have been able to at that speed, leaving the destructive wave to carve a deep furrow in it's chest plates.

A single glowing eye swept over the monster with a calculating gleam. It was covered in thick armor, and even at a single glance, he could see that a frontal assault would gain him little but wasted time.

Even though the attack he had just landed had cracked it; as evidenced by the still glowing jagged scar that divided the sea of porcelain, the plates held. To his surprise however, he could see that it was limping.

A weakness.

He'd done some damage; that he could see. It couldn't put its weight on its injured leg. On the other hand, it seemed quite content to use the knuckles of it's massive hands, and its spider-like appendages to keep itself upright and moving even as it simply let its leg dangle uselessly off the ground. Adam had managed to cut something vital in the knee and it just didn't seem to respond well enough to take any weight.

It glanced down at its ruined leg, seeing the blood streaming down from the fresh punctures. It seemed to ponder for a moment, then bellowed in rage and pain.

He kicked off with renewed speed and slammed into the creature with feet outstretched, channeling his momentum into a brutal strike, to check its violent charge. It staggered backwards, roaring in surprise, but the gory dismemberment he'd been hoping for was sorely absent. Its hide was too tough for a blunt impact to break, and he hadn't even stunned it; he had to flip backwards to avoid a slash of foot-long claws, bone gleaming in the moonlight.

Twisting in mid air, Adam thrust Wilt through one of its hands, pinning it to the roof of the car for a moment, before ripping the blade lengthways across the increasingly flimsy metal, almost tearing off several of its sharp spindly digits with it but the Tsuchigumo, unperturbed by the comparatively minor pain of losing a few fingers, had retreated the second its hand was free, using the momentary confusion to fire a long string of webbing from its mouth with a force that would have shot him clear off the edge of the train, were it not for his quick reflexes.

It was then, Adam realised, almost too late, that it hadn't been him it was aiming for.

Before he could register what was happening, he heard a scream from behind him, and the wail of tearing metal, before catching a glimpse of Valkyrie taking a step backward, faltering, then seizing and jerking suddenly up into the air like a rag doll, now wriggling between a pair of claws that ensnared her, her warhammer falling between the train cars.

It was cutting its losses, and going for the weaker link. Even more so, it had, perhaps unwittingly used Valkyrie as a human shield, no doubt to cover its retreat in order to make off with its meal.

Smarter than he'd expected.

For that alone, he could have let it leave with her.

It wasn't his business.

Even if he decided to make it so, what could he do? If he used his semblance in his sword, chances are he'd cut both of them in half. Or more likely, just her. Which rather beat the point of trying to save her in the first place. He had no ammunition for his pistols, and he couldn't use his shotgun at that range— even if Nora had been in the way, the weapon was built for close range. It would shrug off those pellets like rain.

He was out of options.

The Tsuchigumo narrowed its eyes, before pinning the prone Ren with its stare.

The boy tried to move. He did his best. He'd had to force himself to even breathe, much less take the first step... but that was the only one he managed. The sight of Nora so helpless…Horrid flashbacks began to haunt his head and a blinding disorientation scrambled all his senses. He felt sick; unable to act coherently or even move. A finger of something resembling terror scraped at his rib from behind and it felt so real that he narrowly choked on a scream.

He was beyond his senses; his head filled with the sound of agony, of hoofbeats clapping against the ground and those piercing red eyes...

Suddenly, with a scream of metal, the train lurched around a bend.

The creature lost its balance before roaring in pain, two pieces of shining metal sticking out of its face. Its grip loosened on its victim.

And then it happened.

---

Instinct reacted far faster than his brain ever could; Adam leapt onto its shoulders, slamming his fist into its mouth, channeled his energy into the gun, and fired. Twin 12-gauge rounds infused with supercharged kinetic energy ripped through its gullet. The first explosion of sound and stench of gunpowder from the shotgun was actually startling for it's intensity. He would have flinched, but his reflexes kicked in and he held. He pulled the trigger and pulled again, sending an explosion tearing down the creature's soft throat and guts.

That however, was too much to bear. Adam grunted in pain as he felt the weapon explode under the stress of his power. White hot shrapnel bounced off his aura with enough force to make his hand numb.

Immensely strong armour and an invulnerable hide did you no good if the bullet bypassed them. If anything they made things worse, Adam mused. He imagined fragments ricocheting off of those strong bones and invulnerable hide, bouncing and rebounding inside, tearing delicate, vulnerable organs to shreds.

With a shriek of agony and indignation, the beast hurled him from its shoulders. Black blood sprayed out of the creature's mouth and it staggered, its mouth still hanging slack and open, as it stared in an expression resembling stupefied shock.

Adam hadn't been prepared for the recoil as his gun returned, along with his forearm, covered in gore, saliva and slime as he pulled back. The creature made no sound at first at having a hole driven through it, although it did display enough awareness to stumble backwards, pulling away from him. The howl tore through the air once more as a tarry mass emerged. An inhuman scream rang out in pain. The three of them moved back as it pulled itself up, hunching over and favoring its side. The trademark white mask it wore was fractured, misshapen shards of ivory embedded in what looked to be bubbling wet flesh.

If the creature was mad before, now it was furious.

Even so, as it moved its remaining limbs with renewed vigor in a failing attempt to hold itself upright, he could see it was slowing down; he rarely fought something long enough for blood loss to make a difference, but with a wound like that, he doubted it would last much longer. Every motion caused fresh blood to gush from its wound, but if it was living on limited time, it was determined to take him down with it.

It was almost admirable. Almost.

The shuriken somehow still clung to its flesh, the sharp edges still digging themselves deeper into its lower jaw with every flex of its facial muscles. A pity that Adam hadn't been able to hit one of its many eyes, easy targets that they were, but with that abysmal throw, he should probably take what he'd been able to get, all things considered. The fact he had hit it at all was a miracle, his own incompetence aside.

'A point to dwell on later,' he reminded himself with a mental shrug. No sense in drawing things out.

He dropped the remains of the shotgun at his feet and reached for his sword.

In a snarl of what could only have been desperation, it curled its remaining talons into the roof of the train, tugging with all its might. Bemused, Adam paused, watching it carefully. With a low whine, the metal came free, and the faunus tensed. Was it preparing to throw them? Was it trying to escape into the train?

Screams escaped into the wind as he caught glimpses of the people in the car below them, tripping over themselves in the urge to flee. More easy prey, and Adam was sure that it could eat at least one of the little wretches before anyone could intervene.

Were the situations reversed, it was certainly what he'd have done.

But it wasn't interested in them.

With morbid fascination, Adam watched as it lined the debris along its forearms, before carefully spitting globs of webbing. He wasn't sure what it was doing for a moment, until it raised itself again, and the faunus realized that it had made makeshift shields from the scrap metal. Once they were secured, it dragged itself upright with what could only be described as a toothy grin.

He leveled his blade in front of him in challenge, as it readied its shields.

With a defiant roar, it charged for a final time.

Adam scoffed.

In the blink of an eye, an arm abruptly flew off at the joint, severed in a matter of seconds.

Before it had realized what had happened, turning its even more misshapen head to see its flesh- along with one of its shields, fall off into the darkness, it was too late - Adam was slashing at it to ribbons in numerous horizontal and vertical swipes.

Another arm came off in a sickening squelch of flesh.

It was followed in rapid succession by another limb, and another, and another, all while the creature screamed unintelligibly in what must have been pain, but the relentless assault did not falter. Scarlet lightning flashed again, and the screams took a new tone.

One of fear.

It tried to use its remaining limbs to scuttle back, screaming a single continuous note.

Enough. Snarling, he rammed Wilt and twisted, the steel digging through whatever it could reach. He pulled, crushing down on flesh and bone and finally hit something soft.

It was a tenacious creature, but once it realized there was empty space where most of its organs should have been, it didn't have much left to do but die.

A final blow was struck, cutting the screams to a dead stop, as metal parted flesh and tendon from bone.

The keening wail finally went silent.

The misshapen head flew through the air, bouncing with heavy thuds against the roof before its remains landed at the children's feet.

Nora and Ren looked on it in unison, meeting its beady dead-eyed stare speechless, as the remnants dissolved into black mist in front of their eyes.

With a swift kick, Adam sent the last of the creature's disintegrating body over the edge of the train and turned away, flicking gore from his weapon for the final time.

It seemed he'd gotten his hopes up too far once again. The battle he longed for, was still beyond his reach.

---

"No."

"Please? Pretty please with berries and syrup on top?"

"What would I want with berries and syrup?"

"You're missing the point! This is an emergency!"

"How is my never having had pancakes an emergency?!"

"Friends don't let friends not experience pancakes! Renny! Tell him!"

Adam frowned, which only deepened when Nora gave him a thumbs-up and an encouraging smile. He wouldn't go as far to say that they were friends, not by any reasonable stretch of the definition, but he knew them and they knew him and neither of them were trying to kill each other. Yet. Not for Valkyrie's lack of trying anyway. That was more than he could say for anyone not named Charlotte. That meant something, didn't it?

Speaking of the two, it seemed they shared the same silver tongue, if Nora's shameless leveraging of how the three of them had protected the train to get free food was any indication. A Cavitica classic, if ever he'd seen one. He could absolutely never allow them to cross paths. Under any circumstances.

"Come on, Cap," Nora smiled innocently at the terminally unimpressed faunus, breaking his train of thought. "Think of how great you'll look if you take down a whole stack of pancakes! It's almost as good as going to the gym!" She bent her arm and tightened impeccable biceps, a playful grin stretching across her face.

Adam glared for a moment with his usual aloofness, but then the brooding lines around his never smiling mouth relaxed a little and he gave a slow, vibrating chuckle before he caught himself.

Unfortunately for him, the girl noticed.

"Is that a smile, Captain?"

"No."

The man who'd had a bite taken out of him had survived, thanks to Ren. He apparently had some medical prowess; though the wound was surprisingly shallow for a Grimm bite. The biggest risk would have been losing it to infection, though there seemed little risk of it now. He had much to think about; Ren had barely spared a glance, lost in thoughts as he was, when Nora had bounced past looking like a rabbit on a sugar rush, as the saying went. Adam did spare several glances at her unfortunate victim, following, or more accurately being dragged after her as though he had his own personal blood feud against the very concept of cheer. A single ice-blue eye locked on pink ones, a silent threat of death if he so much as mentioned how easily Valkyrie had manhandled him into the dining car. Uncomfortably, he ran fingers through his hair instead. The motion was awkward, jerky, unpracticed. It felt wrong.

"Aww! Don't do that, Cap! It looks good that way!"

"It does suit you." Ren chose to pipe up.

He ignored them, pulling his fingers through his hair, arranging it around his face. The door to their compartment opened, and a man stepped in, pushing a trolley carrying dirty plates and cutlery. Adam noted with some degree of annoyance, that it was the same attendant from earlier. Only his demeanor was...different. The cowardly human from before was gone. The sniveling cretin from earlier had seemingly found a spine, and in his place stood a man who moved with self-assurance. It was almost as if he had swapped bodies.

"Nice to meet you," he said disarmingly. " I'm real sorry about the fuss earlier."

"It's fine." Adam answered, Nora and Ren nodding in sync as the man reached for their empty plates. He made eye contact with the faunus again, staring at him with a look that resembled curiosity, but felt like something else.

"You certainly didn't disappoint. Can't say I was expecting you to react the way you did. Thought we were all dead."

"Kinda odd that the Grimm only attacked the rear cars though." Ren mused aloud. Silently, Adam agreed, though he chose not to voice his opinion. It was over; the 'why' didn't matter.

"Maybe..."

"Well, always glad to meet a new traveler on the road. Or tracks, as it were." He smiled, the gesture oddly sincere considering Adam's best efforts at hostility. "In any case, I get the feeling we're going to be seeing each other a lot, Mr...?"

"Taurus...and I sincerely doubt that."

But now Adam was sure. He was sure he knew this man from somewhere.

"Do I…know you?"

The man in the black suit smiled as though Adam had made his day recognizing him. "Many people do…but yes. Yes, Adam, you know me. I know you. Quite well."

The hair on the back of his neck stood on end. "How do you know my name? Who are you?"

"Well, if I know you, wouldn't it make sense to know your name, Mr. Taurus? You know me from all over. You've forgotten me at times, or outright cast me away. But our last meeting wasn't that long ago."

He looked outside the window again, doing his best to silently end the conversation. Thankfully the man seemed to have caught on, and after collecting the last of the plates, prepared to push his cart again.

"Hey." The attendant called out from the doorway, the smile still on his face.

"...What?" He really wasn't in the mood to deal with whatever- Adam's eyes met a disgusting shade of black, thin glowing white slits running down the center of the irises that only emphasized the surreality of it.

"I don't mark just anyone, you know. It'll be interesting to see what you do from here. I'm sure it'll be quite the show."

Adam was about to ask just what the hell he was talking about when he felt a prick at the back of his head, closing his good eye as a small spark of...something sharp and frigid stabbed at his brain. His first feeling was panic, but for his second and third, something told him that it wasn't dangerous, as far as he could tell. No, this was something more akin to...familiarity. His vision flashed with an image overlaying the man's face; a hollow bleached-white skull with an elongated snout, filled with fangs set in a permanent smile, and wearing a suit and tie, dyed to a unique shade of bleak grey. Reality blinked in and out as the apparition leaned in closer, leaning over the small table, and every one of the muscles in his body went to recoil—only they didn't. 'He had nothing to fear.' That's what the gentle hissing in his skull told him. It was then that Adam noticed the small bumps—no,— horns, jutting out of the top of its skull.

They were almost like his own.

"What..are?" Adam rasped hoarsely, the words coming out of his mouth before he could fully process them. The skull opened its maw as if to yawn, and Adam's ears rung with what sounded like echoing laughter. By the time he opened his eye again, the man was gone, the door slamming shut and Ren and Valkyrie were looking at him like he was losing his mind.

Granted, that wasn't exactly new territory for their relationship for the former, but it very much was, for the latter.

"What?" Adam finally bit out, irritated. He sat stiffly nearby, fingers clenched into white-knuckled fists.

"Who were you talking to?"

"He was standing right there. Don't tell me you didn't see him."

The looks that the two exchanged with each other in response were anything but comforting.

"Was that like some sort of pirate thing or.."

Adam grimaced. "Never mind."

"Aww, don't be like that! The Captain's not supposed to keep secrets from his crew, y'know!"

"I said never mind!"

He was really hoping he hadn't turned into a schizophrenic. Those two didn't look like they were lying anyway. For now he'd chalk it up to overexposure to Compound Valkyrie. As he found himself drawn into another argument with said menace, he couldn't help but wonder:

'How much of that was in my head?'

---

The train crawled along; juddering deep through the jungle terrain. His face resting against the window, a barely conscious Adam glanced down to his right at the girl snuggled against his arm. Nora was sound asleep, her breathing deep and steady as her cheek rested on his bicep. With the gentle rocking of the passenger car, the distant chugging sound of the engine, she had comfortably slipped into a deep sleep leaning against him. Adam glared down at her serene face, so gentle and unassumingly innocent.

He supposed he should have been more incensed that Valkyrie had naturally made the decision, in lieu of respecting his personal space, to stretch out over their seats, using his lap as a pillow. Though, he supposed, after the night they'd just had, Adam couldn't bring himself to complain too much.

The pressure of her skull against his holster however, served to distract him from his budding malice, drawing his thoughts to new concerns. Or, more accurately, old ones.

He still had his pistols for now. His aim wasn't nearly as consistent as his perfectionist nature would allow. He hadn't cared for them much at first, even with Hatter's impromptu exam, but they'd more than proved their value on the train. He had the uncomfortable feeling he was going to need them. 'Especially with Blush… destroyed' They had a better rate of fire and accuracy, compared to the modified shotgun, yes. But—

That was gone now. The barrels and most of the firing mechanisms had been blasted apart, and what remained of the charred wooden grip and the twisted metal that remained… wasn't much good for anything, in his eyes. It would take a miracle to fix.

Adam quietly reached into his pockets, searching for something, before closing his hand around something solid, drawing it free and squeezing. The sharp edges bit into his palm.

Shuriken.

He'd taken to carrying them with him for a while now, almost like talismans, despite no real idea of knowing how to use them in a practical sense. He wasn't sure if it was sentiment that had spurred that odd choice, or a desire for utility, but Adam suspected it was the latter. He had entertained of late, ways that he might teach himself to use them, and now he weighed them in his hands, allowing them to slide over his palms with a dull scrape of metal.

He was two short now; two more pieces of his mother that he would never have again, crumpled under the train tracks along with that spider-Grimm's skull. That should have hurt him. Should have made him angry. But he didn't feel any of that. Instead he felt… pride? At least Adam thought it was pride. As he reflected on the night's events, reaching deeper into his feelings, it was something akin to a bizarre sense of satisfaction that emerged and burrowed itself into his flesh, stubbornly taking root in the height of his confusion.

But he couldn't pin down that ever elusive "Why?"

Was it the fact that he'd gotten in a lucky shot? That he'd given himself hope that he could train himself to use shuriken, despite his disadvantages? Or was it the fact that they; he, had saved Valkyrie's life?

He clenched his hand into a fist again, letting the sharp metal dig deeper into his flesh.

Snoring particularly loudly, Nora shifted against his thigh and nudged her head into his lap. She was warm, and her slumbering expression was very much like a sleeping child, which, he supposed, she technically was. Irritated by her open-mouthed drooling on his thigh, he shook her shoulder rather bluntly. She didn't wake. All his actions achieved in fact, was to make her almost fall face first onto the ground. Poking her harshly in the cheek only garnered him similar results. Adam glared, despite the fact that the effort was in itself half hearted. He'd never say so, not aloud, lest she pester him forever, but tonight had shown him that he had misjudged the girl. She had an… earnestness, a sense of conviction about her, one that made it very hard for even him to dislike.

What she lacked in skill, she more than made up for in instinct. Maybe that had been why he'd saved her. Even if she did have trouble keeping her mouth shut, a trait he now realized she held both conscious and unconscious.

Moving to close it, and turn her head so as to stop her infernal snoring, he was stopped by a jolt of movement from the subject of his musings. She was shivering, mouthing something he couldn't make out. He poked her again, before shaking her shoulder, but she didn't seem to calm down.

'...You had better not drool on this too." He grumbled to himself finally as he shrugged off his jacket, again being careful not to kick her to the ground. Dexterously, he draped it over her shoulders, and shortly, thereafter, the shivering stopped. The train cleared the surrounding trees for a moment, and a soft moonlight bathed the compartment in light, before being blocked again. The tap of something against his thigh brought his gaze downward again.

There in the darkness, a pair of familiar teal eyes were staring up at him, with a look he couldn't identify.

It made him uncomfortable.

She mumbled something, words that even with his enhanced hearing, he had trouble picking up.

"What?" He hissed, with the slightest tingle of irritation.

"Are you a Super Ninja?" She whispered back, louder.

Adam blinked.

"What?"

"Cause of the throwy thingies." She yawned nonchalantly, blinking with a kind of bleary innocence.

"Shuriken." The faunus corrected instantly, before catching himself and biting down on his lip, though not before he caught her satisfied smirk, still laden with drowsiness.

"I'm not a ninja." He reaffirmed, though the glint shimmering in the twin pools of teal told him he was wasting his breath.

The girl's grin grew wider. "I won't tell anyone."

"I'm not."

She had the nerve to simply hum noncommittally, which honestly got to him far more than had she simply been persistent. Was she trying to aggravate him? There was a point to this little pseudo interrogation- he knew it. But what was she getting at?

He huffed, blowing hot air through his nostrils. It hardly did his state of mind wonders that he was having this much trouble discerning the motives of a fourteen year old girl. Before his annoyance could reach his zenith, his train of thought was broken by a soft giggle.

"Thanks, Mr Ninja. For… everything." He grunted in response, but that ever irritating smile didn't fade. "You're ok, you know?"

Even though he knew she was unlikely to see it, his eyebrows furrowed into a glare. "And what that's supposed to mean?"

The ginger girl mumbled in an uncharacteristic show of shyness. "You know.." She twirled a lock of her hair. You pretend you're tough and mean but... You're not." She shrugged with a smile.

Truthfully Adam wasn't sure why he took such offence to that, but it flared in him all the same, along with yet another emotion he couldn't identify. Sick of second guessing himself and his sanity, a state of being the girl seemed to thrive in eliciting from him, he instead chose to roll his good eye, and huff.

"...Go back to sleep…Nora."

Still smiling, she closed her eyes again. He waited, listening for her telltale snoring to rise over the rumbling lull of the train. When it finally came, he leaned back again, casting his gaze to the roof.

What was wrong with him?

Had Belladonna's death thrown him off kilter that much? Had it changed him? He'd told himself that he'd move on, , but these moments of silence preyed on him with relentless abandon, his soul desperate to put a name to itself and his desires. He had to find a way to silence them once and for all, before it destroyed him.

Looking to her partner, Adam examined the sleeping boy, clutching at his rucksack as a makeshift pillow.

As if to agree with his silent thoughts, Nora seemed to nod, brushing the back of her head against one of the rough grips of Adam's , as to not disturbed her, he shifted the weapons out from under her skull, and replaced them with his duffel.

Finally he made his decision, and reached for his bag.

---

"Welcome to Mistral Central Station. Thank you for choosing the Looking Glass Line. Welcome to Mistral."

The train attendant repeated the same message to each and every passenger who left the carriages, smiling in that extraordinary fake way that only a paid employee did. Not for the first time, Adam watching from the rafters, felt himself feeling something bordering uncomfortably on empathy towards a human. His own brief stint in public service hadn't been so bad by comparison. Half the time, he hadn't needed to speak, Maybe she deserved praise for actually managing it in the first place.

But then, he supposed, it was what she was paid for.

Everyone on board the train had been helped off. A few Huntsmen, as useless as they were tardy, escorted them one and two at a time, as they stepped carefully from railroad tie to railroad tie along the narrow high track back to the station. Then the waiting for them, started. Waiting to get medical attention, waiting for the chance to call relatives, waiting for wreckage to be cleared from the tracks and personal belongings to be recovered and sorted. The cops had asked the passengers to remain available, and now they were all herded into the tiny cafeteria at the station. Despite the fact that the whole line had, according to the selfsame attendant, been shut down pending the investigation the station was still crowded with onlookers, pressing against the barricades to gawk at the damaged train.

An outcropping of ginger hair stood out to him among the gathering crowd, enough for Adam to make out Valkyrie's form amongst the others. He could see her, all but bouncing up and down on her toes in an attempt to see over the crowd. The small pink streak next to her told Adam that she wasn't looking for her human friend. Or was he her sibling? Adam never did find out. They didn't look much alike, but stranger things had doubtless happened.

Was she looking for something? Or just trying to see a way clear of the herd of ignorami?

In any case, it was none of his affair, and he was all too happy to be off the train and it's stifling atmosphere. He smiled to himself from the shadows as he recalled to himself how it was he had come to be where he was. As dawn had begun to rise, and the train had slowed for its final approach, he had gathered his belongings, and, leaving the two sleeping children behind, used the fleeting darkness to abscond through the hole in the roof of the carriage. There, he had opted to sit atop the roof in silent meditation for the last stretch of his journey, as the wind roared in his ears, before quietly leaping towards the columns.

What Adam was less happy about were the brown uniforms of Mistral's police standing around the exits. Or the familiar looking frumpy woman who was definitely not bound and gagged in the empty water closet where he had left her, pointing around impotently to said officers. Or the ones that were approaching the emerging passengers, no doubt asking very pointed questions, questions which had answers that would make his presence here that much more irritating than it already was.

He landed without making a sound, letting his knees and the balls of his feet absorb the fall.

Thankfully, the surrounding crowd would in theory provide cover, and in a display of rare social genius, he allowed the wave to carry him away from his pursuers. This was beyond embarrassing. But he couldn't let himself be arrested here—he had Charlotte to think about. There was no telling what Liu might do to her if he screwed this one up. That errant thought brought up a flare of ire, which was quickly quashed. It was precisely his poor control of said ire that had gotten him into this mess in the first place.

Some of them had their eyes fixed on their Scrolls while their fingers danced over screens. A few had brought books with them, their attention glued to the page of their thick were even, much to his annoyance , children as well, their feet sprinting on the wooden floorboards, enjoying the comfortable breezy temperature of the room through a game of tag. Two medium-sized speakers that were attached to the underside of one of the catwalks above the exit door, blared ear-splitting static, and then a woman's voice, announcing departures and delays. Adam ignored those, instead looking for signs and directions.

Food court, gift shop and mailboxes. 'And nowhere to hide.' Holographic departure boards listing trains were in the middle of the hall. Each end of the atrium was flanked by black columns, conveniently reaching from floor to ceiling. coming up the stairs and keeping his head down, Adam ducked behind one. As another officer passed. In the center of the hall was a fountain with a statue of a stylized two headed dragon. At least that's what he thought it was. He hadn't the time to examine it too closely, before he was forced to move again, doing his best to put at least five bodies between himself and the uniforms at all times .

Finally, he'd reached the exit, blessedly unnoticed. His hands in his pockets, eyes watching the ground, bag over his shoulder and his mind turning the same time, he walked quietly away, and by the time anyone had noticed his presence, he had disappeared into the crowd.

---

'Home sweet home.'

The thought that flitted through Adam Taurus' head was laced with sarcasm as he stared unhappily at his new lodgings.

There was one twin size bed and a window directly next to it. The wallpaper had a sepia tint at the peeled edges and the room itself had an auburn carpet, borderline brown. Dark enough to hide stains anyway. Adam was almost positive that a blacklight would reveal things that would mean he'd never sleep comfortably again.

At least the sheets looked clean. Emphasis on "looked".

Aside from all that, the stink of cheap bleach and alcohol was an everpresent constant, a gift from the last residents of the 'humble abode' before they were doubtless kicked out for not paying their dues to the self aggrandizing slumlord that passed for the building's owner. Given the fact that a lot of their things were still here, it wasn't exactly a stretch to imagine that they were kicked out with nothing but the clothes off their backs.

Granted, Adam hadn't really wanted much. A locked door, a roof over his head - the fact that it wasn't leaking was one of the few selling points given to him... - and a modicum of privacy. On the flipside, the walls were thin and he could hear what were either rats or mice scurrying around in the walls, in addition to everything else wrong about it, but it didn't matter. The owner didn't ask questions and as long as he got paid upfront he didn't care to know what the residents were doing.

On that subject, they weren't much better either. An assorted mass of dregs, bikers, other mercenaries and whatever scum could afford to stay in this place; and given the chipping walls and vermin, that probably wasn't a hard price to meet.

Having to argue and haggle with a man who didn't know a lick of the common Valean tongue had done little to improve his mood. Were it not for the fact that Adam had what could be described as an intermediate grasp on Mistrilian; a carryover from his childhood, he never would have even made it up here at all.

A skill he would have no doubt lost entirely, considering almost no one on Menagerie spoke it, save his mother and Sienna. God forbid any other other circus chimps did something more than roll around in their own shit and thank Belladonna for the pleasure.

So now he had to add re-famaliarizing himself with a language to his to do list.

Not to mention an entirely different dialect to said language, if he didn't want to get by on hand signs and messing up adverbs. Things that would have been really nice to know before being sent out here.

[Two-faced goat fucker.] He grumbled under his breath in a spout of furious Mistrali.

The only rule he'd been given when he'd been tossed a ring of rusted keys, was that he kept any and all nasty business to himself. The owner didn't know and didn't care to know. 'Out of sight, out of mind'. It worked just fine for him. Adam made a mental note to throw those things out the window when he had the chance. On second thought, it would probably be best if he burned them; tossing them would necessitate touching them, and that was something he'd need a lot more than the ten thousand he was promised to even consider, much less do.

Which would just leave the place's conventional rot and filth, as opposed to that and whatever else its last residents put into it. He'd opened the windows, but it just replaced the stink of vomit and urine with the fragrance of mothballs and mildew. The bed had grazed the wall right back to the plaster in long grey scars. To make it even more special, the lightbulb was many watts too dim, the yellow light flickering lazily around the room,...although ironically enough the bathroom was probably the cleanest part of the place.

Even the shampoo smelled like it had been siphoned out of the anti-bacterial soap dispensers of a local backroom clinic, as well as the palm-sized block of yellowish looking soap.

He sighed, taking a seat on the couch.

Slowly he had managed to come to grips with the city, the way the shops and the houses, the sidewalks and the streets all tumbled into one another, the clammy heat, the never-ending noise and movement. There seemed to be a surprise around every corner. A cripple with withered legs, scuttling past on his hands like a giant spider. A temple sprouting out of nowhere like an exotic flower. Bald monks in their bright orange robes, moving in a quiet procession.

No one gave him more than a passing glance as he moved through the streets, hardly a soul paying him any mind. It was the most desirable way to travel.

It had taken him at least an hour and some change to get his bearings until at last he came to an opening between a restaurant—with a few plastic tables and a single glass counter displaying plastic replicas of the food it served—and what looked like a hardware store. Here at last was an escape from the main road. A soiled, narrow alleyway led down between the backs of two blocks of apartments—the apartments piled up on one another as if thrown there at random. There was a miniature altar at the entrance, the incense adding another smell to Adam's collection. Farther down, a couple of cars had been parked next to a dozen crates of empty bottles, a pile of old Dust canisters, a row of tables and chairs. A woman was sitting cross-legged in the gutter, fixing ribbons to baskets of exotic fruit.

All the apartments opened directly onto the alley, so that Adam could see straight in. There were no doors or curtains on the first floor. In one front room, a man with tusks sat smoking at a table, dressed in shorts and glasses, his huge stomach bulging over his knees. In another, a whole family was eating lunch, crouching on the floor with chopsticks. The comparison made Adam realise how lucky he was. The walls had been knocked through in his new home, giving him substantially more space than he would have otherwise had.

A violent buzzing from his Scroll, still attached to it's new charger, jarred him from his musings.

He'd bought the thing for cheap from a street vendor he'd found, after asking a couple of store owners on the street about where he could get a new battery. Trusting them for a straight answer was dicey, but so was everything else he'd been doing lately, even if it had cost him fifty lien. The important thing was, it worked now. Sighing, he pulled out the Scroll and the screen lit up, allowing him to eye the text dominating the surface.

He frowned at the name.

Blake.

You have: Seventeen new messages and… Error! Voicemail full.

What the hell?

Surprise was his first emotion, when he'd first seen the words scrolling across his screen after he'd first replaced the old battery for the new. Even more so when he came to realize how far they dated back; she'd sent the earliest ones months ago. Within weeks of him arriving in Kuchinashi in fact. Despite his best efforts, the revelation made him slightly uncomfortable. Hoping to put off the inevitable a while longer, he'd ignored them, choosing instead to call the number he'd been told to.

One of Liu's men had picked up, and having confirmed Adam's whereabouts, had given him directions to the tenements that were to be his home for the foreseeable future. The trip itself had been all downhill—literally in his case, what with the entire city being built into a mountain. He'd probably gotten quite a few dirty looks and upturned noses, but honestly, he hadn't even noticed. It was all he could do just to compartmentalize.

By the time he'd made it to the district , he'd almost forgotten entirely.

Briefly, in present time, he hovered his thumb as he stared at Blake's contact listing. He hadn't heard from her in months. All of it came rushing back. The Scroll shook in his hand. Part of him wanted to call back. Part of him wanted to shatter it. "What's done is done." Adam whispered to himself, even as he slowly pushed himself up to his feet and walked to the window. A cold breeze cut through him. He couldn't change the past; he could only carry it. The good. The bad. And move forward. That was life.

More than that, it was a matter of principle. She was, at the end of the day, an extension of a man he had despised with every fibre of his soul, and even as young as she was, she held many of the man's worst traits. In that moment, Adam realized that if he did not remain consistent in his contempt of Ghira, choosing instead to wax poetical about the endless well of mythical virtues he'd somehow convinced Menagerie he possessed, then he'd just be another hypocrite. Worse than that, he'd be Belladonna himself.

.

The very last minutiae of Adam's doubts disappeared for good as his gaze hardened. He'd never felt so stupid before for chasing his past over his present. The next decision was the easiest one he'd ever made in his life. Tapping away at the screen for a few moments, he held his thumb down over the portrait of her face. It was too little, too late.

He didn't have time for her anymore.

Would you like to delete contact? Warning! This action cannot be undone

Without a moment's thought, he pressed the green button, and snapped his scroll shut, flinging it behind him where it landed on the mattress.

"Rot in hell, Belladonna. You and your kin both."

Throwing off his boots, he leaned back against the frame of the bed and closed his eye. The cold metal springs dug into his back, though he barely paid it mind. He'd get used to it.

No sooner had he decided on catching a few hours of tentative sleep, another vibration in his pocket jolted him out of his reverie. Surprisingly enough it wasn't from , but rather an 'unknown number' with a message attached, "The hell...?" Tentatively, he clicked the button and read the message.

His smile widened.

---

"Ugh..." She collapsed onto her couch face-first, sighing in frustration and taking in the smell of fraying leather.

It had been a long day.

While her bar had been in Serpent Clan turf for years now, she'd never really had to deal with them.

She and the Serpent Clan Triad had left each other alone for most of that time. Her protection money was paid on time,and she'd didn't go poking her nose in their business beyond that. They hadn't even made a habit of turning her place into a drinking haunt—They generally preferred The Skillful— That weird-ass Huntsman bar uptown. That she definitely didn't get; their booze tasted like fucking turpentine, but she was losing the lead here. The point was, their appearances used to be rare.

Now? Now it was a miracle if they ever left at all. Be it the psycho girl, or far more often, pockets of her enforcers, they'd run off a good deal of her regular clientele, and there were always at least two that hung around after hours as she was locking up. Anyone else would take that as good news. Business was business, and with so much enemy presence, the leaderless Spiders in Kuchinashi wouldn't dare mount an attempt at vengeance. But Charlotte wasn't dim enough to miss the subtext; it was a threat. A reminder of what would happen if Adam had run out on her or she tried to skip town before he came back. If he came back.

She growled, and adjusted her place on the couch till she was looking up at the ceiling, blowing her hair out of her eyes almost absentmindedly. He would come back. So what if he hadn't checked in? CCT signals were notoriously unreliable in the wilderness, could just be that he wasn't even in the city yet. Maybe she was just overreacting. Charlotte threw the remote to the end of the couch and let out another frustrated breath, running a hand through her hair tiredly.

She turned off the TV and groaned, "...I need a drink." She shrugged off her jacket and walked to the dark kitchen, opening the fridge almost lazily and grabbing a pitcher of homemade sake from inside, not even bothering to pour a glass before lifting the entire jug to her lips. She needed it after the day she'd had.

'I guess it's true what they say about the devil you know.' She thought bitterly. Speaking of devils…

{Hey. How's your day going?}

She set the device back on the counter, staring at it and wondering if she was being a pest, if he was going to be annoyed with her for bothering him while he was working. When the device remained silent for several long moments, Charlotte turned away and shook her head, cursing herself for her impetuousness. It had only been three days since she'd heard from him. She wasn't his den mother; and he couldn't have gotten in that much trouble

She was debating whether or not she had the energy or patience to head down to check on the stocks behind the counter when her Scroll finally buzzed. She glanced down at the screen, her eyes widening slightly.

H.H: {Could be better. Staying out of trouble.}

She couldn't help the smile that spread over her face. Somehow she found that incredibly hard to believe. He'd probably started at least one fight at the minimum, assuming he hadn't amassed an angry mob at his heels. Hell, the fact he was texting instead of calling her from a cell to pay his bail was a miracle in itself. Still, she chose not to comment, despite the lingering feeling that she should dig deeper. There was a time and a place for everything, and the important thing was, that he was ok.

Her scroll buzzed again.

"{Anyway. I made it to a hotel. Resting up. People are… annoying.}

Now that sounded like him. She started typing away again. They'd made some small talk for a while after that. He was in the district of Yajū; an ethnic faunus ghetto on the lower levels of Mistral. She hadn't ever been there, but the fact that he'd been sent for lodgings there by Liu's men had given her a little more insight into Xiang's game plan. While it could have been an act of convenience—him being a faunus and all, he could, in theory, blend in a lot easier than if he'd taken up lodging somewhere else. Of course, it made things obvious that Liu didn't know him: (Adam stood out like no other, and that was far from entirely by design), but she could digress.

She suspected differently.

If she remembered, Yajū was neutral territory, not Serpent Clan territory. Liu had said he wanted to be able to cut strings easily, so maybe that explained why they hadn't asked him to stay there. Though that itself had its issues; as chances were they had at least enough pull to get him closer to Malachite territory, if not within their borders. She sighed. For every question answered, ten more took their place.

And she hated not having answers.

Her irritation evaporated when she realized that Adam had replied to her last message several minutes ago and was waiting for a response.

{You sound stressed. What's wrong, didn't get any action over there?} She teased.

Adam groaned. He had a feeling that the type of 'action' she was referring to did not have anything to do with combat.

{That was not what I was going to say!} He rapidly tapped out, scowl narrowing. {Can we drop this already?}

He could almost see her smiling over the other end of the scroll. An icon appeared, showing she was typing yet another reply.

{But Adam, we're making progress here! Admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery!}

{Charlotte.}

{But I guess the details of your lurid sex life are going to have to wait another day.}

{ . Not?}

{Sorry, Hornhead.}

And here he'd been concerned for her wellbeing.

{Are you alright? Liu hasn't hurt you, has he?}

{Pfft, who do you think you're talking to?} Her smile wasn't as confident as she might have liked. No-one got to be leader of any gang or a syndicate without having the morals of a sewer rat. For all their "codes of honor" the only one that mattered to most was that the most barbaric scum-bag ruled. Be loyal or be more savage; that was just the way of it.

He was different. The very fact that he'd even asked about her, that he was concerned at all, spoke to that.

{I'll be fine. I'm just a low end informant. I'm not dangerous enough to kill out of hand. Not like you. I stay back where it's safe.}

As she pressed send, she regretted the words almost immediately.

He hadn't been trying to get out of town to avoid the heat. She had better be careful not to imply he was, or he might head back just to prove everyone wrong, and that would get real nasty, real fast. For one thing, people would be after the pile of lien. For another… well, it didn't bear thinking about.

{You do that. On that topic….}

She breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn't caught her slip.

{What is it?}

{Have you found anything on Liu yet?}

There was a pause. The reply wasn't nearly as quick as the others had been. Just when Adam had been about to crack and send another message, his Scroll buzzed again, vibrating against the metal bed frame.

{I'll have to get back to you on that. I've got some things to look into with other people. Give me a shout if you need anything else.}

{Not a problem. I'll call if I do.}

Maybe that had been too much to hope for. Charlotte was in enough danger without poking her nose where it wasn't wanted. He needed to be patient—not a quality he'd ever really embraced at the best of times. But then that was no reason not to do a little leg work himself in the meantime. Instantly, his mind conjured images of the many fruitless months he'd spent hunting Myst, and the frustration that had brought about, and it was almost enough to make him think again.

Almost.

For now, it would be best for him to catch up on the days of training he had lost during his travel to the capital. But where would be best?

He could stay here of course; he had the space for at least some exercises. But the more he dwelt on the idea, the more restless he became. Perhaps it would be better if he found a more fitting space? Taking tentative steps around the room in an attempt to cement his bearings, he passed by the bathroom door, where something… off caught his eye.

A glint of red in the peripheral of his good eye drew his attention to the bathroom mirror, where a square of fluorescent paper was neatly taped to a large broken mirror. Curiosity pulled him closer , and as he neared, he could catch the faintest trace of perfume, a scent that seemed entirely incongruous to everything else in his surroundings. With a total lack of reverence he pulled it free, leisurely scanning its contents.

'Hey Darling!'

Adam's face crinkled in annoyance as his mind made the connection as to just who the note was from, but he continued reading.

'I know you're probably bored to tears without me to keep you company, and believe me, no one's sadder about it than me. You have no idea how much I'm going to miss our playdates while the old man has you out on this boring assignment.

But if you're looking for something fun to do, the Spiders have underground prize fights all over this city. I'm sure a man like you could clean those chumps out for everything they're worth if you wanna make some extra cash. Snap a few spines for me, baby!

Kisses and Cuddles,

Mari

PS.

Since you're new to town, check the other side.

The faunus turned the note over, to see a surprisingly well drawn, if crude, map, marked with several points of interest that he could only assume were the locations she'd referenced. His first instinct was to crush it in his hand and toss it out of the nearest window, and walking back into the room he had left, he nearly did precisely that, but as he made to open the window, his fist closed unconsciously, crushing the paper before he could let it go into the street..

Mariko might be a psychotic bitch, who if Adam was blunt, honestly made him uncomfortable for all the wrong reasons, but she was a strong psychotic bitch. And while he may have had no real interest in helping one gang of dumbasses oneup another gang of dumbasses…as a training opportunity? One where he had the chance to improve his own skills, on his own terms, and earn some travel money for when he was done here? There was a phrase about stopped clocks to consider.

Maybe he'd hang onto it.

Just for now.

Sighing, he folded the note and shoved it into his pocket, before returning to his bed where his belongings lay. He'd grab some rest for now until nightfall. A few hours of meditation might help him think more clearly, and besides… It wasn't like it would kill him.

---

Or at least, so he had thought.

Adam had tried at least, putting up a token effort to stay put, but cabin fever eventually got the better of him.

Getting to know his surroundings seemed like a much more decent use of his time, especially if he was going to be here for a while. Or failing that, at least somewhere he could drink. That was his excuse, and he was sticking to it.

A few minutes on the streets quickly proved him right. The neighbourhood wasn't terrible, by slum standards, but even still it took some getting used to at night.

When he looked up, it seemed to have no sky—all the light had been blocked out by billboards, banners, electric cables, and neon signs. Strung lights dangled across buildings made of cracked plywood and faded tarps, electric wires formed a tangled spiderweb above the roads of rock and dirt, and old billboards – seemingly ready to snap at any moment – leaned precariously into the street. Radio static hissed out of a cracked windowpane. Fires whipped out of charred trash cans. Neon signs flickered in the dusty dark like fireflies; one would burst briefly with light before going dark, but there was always another one to quickly fill the void.

He'd grown comfortable on the side-streets and narrows of Kuchinashi, that Yajū almost felt like a second home. It had taken a good deal of practice, but he felt he could navigate the thick crowds of the district without being annoyed by them, without spoiling for a fight. He kept his ears open out of habit, hoping to find something he could use.

Like Kuchinashi, Law and order had no meaning in present Mistral—at least none that would make sense to any civilized being. Adam was again reminded that this was a city, indeed a country—so inured to the dogs of corruption that society itself had been reshaped by the utter lawlessness that seemed to be a byproduct of the inherent evil that seemed to thrive in humanity at large.

A form of negotiated anarchy seemed to rule here, at the bottom of the a result, the Huntsmen had less power than the police, in turn, had less power than the dark, mercenary forces that swirled at the periphery of society—hidden, yet subtly defining it.

Mistral. 'City of the Gods' indeed.

Problem was, whoever coined that title never got specific about which god they meant. The place was practically choking on them. Every other storefront held a shrine, or a statuette of an idol. Every pile of pebbles, a temple. But there was one god who ruled them all, squatting from the top of the mountain to the very bottom like smog. Opium. And Adam didn't have to look very far to find its prophets. Or it's priests. He might have been relatively new to the city, but he knew well what the packets of white powder that passed hands were, or what the dead eyed looks it's worshippers had him meant.

Few had taken to the mines well.

The area that made up his new home was made up of endless miles of row houses in various states of disrepair, pulled together out of a bizarre mixture of thatch, bamboo, corrugated metal and concrete. Most of them, he wagered, would have collapsed years ago, if they weren't all jammed together, holding each other up. Wooden bridges packed with structures lined the base of the mountain. They creaked and swayed in the wind, whipping through the banners and flags the denizens had chosen to fly. The seemingly random complexity of the slums' layout made it difficult to give chase. The density of the crowds in the evening made it difficult to keep track of others. Their volume made it difficult to be overheard. All were difficulties that while Adam generally despised, those in the darker parts of his new world relished.

He ducked into a narrow alley and exited to another wider street.

He shrugged to himself and walked to the west, feeling very much like a fish out of water. Even in what seemed like an ocean of people, he stuck out like a sore thumb. He was a head taller or more than everyone else. His red hair was in stark contrast to the black and dark brown heads that were as far as he could see. If his height and hair did not draw attention, his demeanor did.

From what little Adam had been told, the Spiders owned the most of the West side of the mountain,, some other rival clan the East, with the Serpent Clan and a few other factions having at least a minor presence in the North and South. The district of Yajū served almost like a hub, with the water main that collected from the waterfalls dragging right through the middle. All of the crime clans and syndicates mixed here, dripping out of the clubs and brothels under an unspoken truce, much like Kuchinashi, only with a much greater emphasis on the 'unspoken' part.

Speaking of which…

A pair of giggling half-naked women in beast ear were looking at him from underneath the gap-toothed neon sign on the other side of the bleak avenue,their low bodices, high slit skirts designed to draw attention. For the life of him, Adam couldn't understand it. He didn't like to think of himself as sheltered, and as weak and pathetic as he thought it was, he could understand why faunus would disguise themselves as humans. but no matter how hard he tried to rationalize it, he could not understand why humans would pretend to be faunus.

It could only be an exercise in masochism.

Now that Charlotte had demonstrated what to look for, the false features stood out to him far more than anything else. One of them had the most realistic pair of snake fangs he had ever seen, and it was only when she moved her very human tongue over her gums to adjust them that he noticed anything was wrong. Her partner on the other hand...

His stare lasted for only a couple of seconds before he forced his eyes up and looked her in the face. Her hair was violet and her skin was olive, covered in tiny rosettes, small jagged black circles resembling roses, with tawny centers that looked just a little too uniform to be natural, though whether either of the two were dyes he had no idea. Either way he wasn't really focused on that; more on the teasing smiles and the red lingerie that clung tightly to her skin. and left little to the imagination.

She winked at him salaciously before blowing a kiss.

He ducked his head down, hunching his shoulders as he tried not to pick up his pace.

"Damn woman…."

Charlotte's comment from earlier was getting to him-he wasn't in control of what was happening to him, and he felt distinctly uncomfortable.

His mind turned back to the note he had found, telling him about an underground fighting ring. If nothing else, it would provide a good place to train and hone his skills— if her words were to be believed. Or perhaps it was a hint? Somewhere to start off his investigation. His target was undoubtedly wealthy; perhaps she made money betting on the fights?

Adam was aware that he was rationalizing reasons to visit, but he'd be damned if he said it aloud. The note also conveniently housed directions, that irritatingly, was further up the mountain than he had initially anticipated. The sensation of eyes on him had the faunus tucking the note away again, glancing around at his surroundings again.

The people— predominantly faunus, he noticed or at were different too, and not just for their obvious wariness. They were more hardened than the self-absorbed masses of humanity near the summit, Menagerie or even back in Charlotte's district, refusing to wallow in willful ignorance; it showed in their cautious eyes and lean muscles, the various knives and holsters he spotted in their belts. Nobody here, he realized, was unarmed.

He couldn't really blame them.

Even so, he found himself surrounded by cars, trucks, buses, and tuk-tuks—the three-wheeled taxis that were actually nothing more than motorcycles with a makeshift cabin built on the back. As always, everyone was hooting at everyone. The heat of the evening only intensified the noise and the smell of exhaust fumes that hung thick in the air.

The stories she'd told him honestly didn't do the place justice, and he already felt wildly out of his depth. So really, there was only one thing to do.

He sighed.

The fight it was.

---

"Ren…. ."

Lie Ren sighed.

They should have been well on their way north by now; well on their way to Argus, with a day and a half to spare before the exam date. There should have been plenty of time to plan and prepare. Instead, the train had been cancelled, and they were left wandering through the streets of Mistral, looking for somewhere to stay the night. They'd gone further and further down the mountain, until finally, they'd found somewhere to hole up; a condemned district near the base of the mountain, on the South bank of the Xu Feng river and near the river mouth that connected the Kingdom to the sea.

Mistral's very own Mount Glenn.

Even Ren knew the stories.

Once upon a time, it had been a prominent Dust mining district, of the most prosperous areas in the capital. It was home to several trading companies, along with the city's Chamber of Commerce.

However, due to poor maintenance of the waterlock and the kingdom's seasonal monsoons, the gate that kept the river from overwhelming the infrastructure buckled and burst.

When the barrier broke, its residents fled, and it became a breeding ground for rats, crocodiles, alligators and of course, with all the ensuing terror, aquatic Grimm. The once beautiful city streets were now ugly, marred canals filled with dirty disease ridden, deadly water, and the Council's response was simply to wall it off so as to not spread it further. The few brave enough or desperate enough to call it home could only watch as the waters simply grew higher and higher each year covering more and more of the buildings but as Ren could see, they had adapted all the same. Makeshift boats and gondolas made their way up and down the riverways, and if what he could hear below was any indication, the Grimm here were far more nuisance than threat. The main street outside, along with the district, was entirely flooded, and most of the surrounding rooftops were patrolled by a gang calling themselves "Bloodhounds." Ren didn't know much about them, but neither he nor Nora were keen on getting in their radar.

With swimming being tantamount to suicide, several makeshift platforms and barricades had also been erected around the area, with most of the metal planks and advertisement boards being recovered from nearby rooftops to form bridges over the murky waters, bridges that the two had used to find their way around before finally taking up residence in one of the ruined and decaying buildings. It reeked of wet mould, but it would keep them warm and a roof over their heads, so it was a long sight better than any alternative. But it don't have to be that way. They'd still be on that train if they'd stopped the Grimm before they could do more damage.

They should have been stronger.

He should have.

It wasn't though he'd never fought Grimm before; he had—plenty of times, out of both desire and necessity. It had given him confidence, he knew, and it was now he realized that perhaps there was such a thing as too much confidence.

All of his training, all of his ambition to become someone worthy of his father, wasted. When the chips had come down, and he had had the chance to prove his worth…. he'd failed.

If that faunus hadn't been there…

At the thought of him, Ren flinched.

He was….weird.

That man had presented himself as a cold and extremely powerful warrior, whose sole reason for being was to hone his fighting skills by battling and destroying strong foes. He rarely displayed any sign of emotions or humanity, aside from occasional bursts of anger, and had rarely smiled. His philosophy seemed… warped, if that was the right word, and Ren would be lying if he didn't consider him to be unhinged at a bare minimum.

On the other hand… his power had spoken for itself. He hadn't allowed anything to stand in his path, to stop him doing what needed to be done. He had single handedly slain most of the Grimm on that train, and— truthfully, if Ren were honest with himself, he felt himself wondering if there was any truth to the way he thought.

"What is it, Nora?"

"Do we have any food left?"

Wordlessly he rolled over, reaching for his rucksack.

He'd never liked stealing, but a few nights of starvation in the early days had a way of amending one's moral compass. It hadn't helped that Nora had what could only be described as a supernatural talent for pickpocketing, so he couldn't even rationalize it as hurting people, and it wasn't like there were a lot of ways for two fourteen year olds with no parents and minimal combat skills to earn lien honestly. But then he'd paid for as much food as they wanted on the train, even dealing with Nora's appetite. In fact his only complaint was for Ren to stop staring at him, which with the benefit of hindsight, he could certainly see why it would annoy the older Huntsmen. But Ren couldn't have helped himself.

No one had ever done anything that kind for either of them, or fought for them when they got themselves into trouble. Not since their parents. They'd been on their own, just the two of them, but despite being angry about it, he'd done it anyway. And for the life of him, Ren couldn't work out why.

Shaking his head, he put it aside for now. He and Nora had taken advantage of their time on the train and access to the canteen, and had loaded their bags with as much food and perishables as they could get away with. Again, a part of him felt terrible about it, but he waved it away.

'It's only until we're Huntsmen. Then it can stop, and we don't have to steal anymore.'

Ren sighed again, his hand finally seizing and unzipping the main compartment. There was very little natural light in the room they'd settled in; the better to hide from the gangs, and his eyes could only adjust so far even so, the wave of alarm he felt when his hands instead of meeting food wrappers brushed something entirely unfamiliar, was nothing to sneeze at.

Nor was his (manly) yelp of surprise.

Fully awake now, he kicked his way out of his sleeping bag and, once he found his legs, stumbled his way over to the moonlight in the cracked window panes, bag in tow.

He hadn't imagined it.

There, at the top of his rucksack, sat a familiar set of twin pistols, that Ren immediately recognised.

Rifling through further, his hand brushed by magazines, ammunition, gunpowder, and even several bundles of lien. Finally, his shaking fingers brushed across a scrap of lined paper, carefully folded and placed within.

'Good Luck with your exam. These should help.'

There was no signature, but at the very corner of the note was a surprisingly intricate scribble of a thorned rose.

Even if Ren had not recognised the symbol, or the guns themselves, he knew full well where these gifts had come from. His sudden fervour had brought Nora careening out of her own sleeping bag, and she joined him now, scrambling over to peer over Ren's shoulder.

When she saw what the commotion was about, she hugged Ren tightly, smothering a giggle herself.

"I knew it!"