The Scent of Roses

Mydnight dug his paws into the old cobblestone road, grinding to a halt, nearly throwing the girls off of his back by accident.

"Woah!," Ambur gasped, nearly falling off of his back to the right. Olivier reached down just in time to grab her friend and keep her from falling. "Myd what the hell," she growled as she sat back up on his back, the girls looking forward to their surroundings. They saw a small, walled in town, seemingly unfinished, but not a soul around. "What? We shouldn't be anywhere near Kuroyuri yet, why is there another destroyed town out here that isn't on the map."

Mydnight seemed restless, stamping his feet several times in place and sniffing the air. "What do you smell Mydnight," Olivier asked softly as she scratched under his right ear. Suddenly however, Mydnight began running into the town, nearly tossing the girls off again, running all the way through the town to the back near the far gate before he stopped and began turning in a circle and smelling the ground near a destroyed building. "Mydnight calm down!" Olivier shouted before looking down to the ground to see a red stain in a few of the stones. "...Someones been through here," she pointed to the stain for Ambur to see. The two girls jumped down from Mydnight's back as they saw him begin to look through the gate frantically before his form began to shift. Almost before he had finished transforming he started to speak.

"It's Qrow, that's Qrow's blood on the ground. It may be dry but it's recent."

"What?" Ambur gasped, shocked as she raised her hand to cover her mouth, "Do you smell the rest of them? Are they nearby?"

"No, I can't smell them," he said, becoming a little winded. Ambur thought she saw him stumble slightly before he dropped to one knee. She crouched next to him and put her arm around his shoulder.

"Myd, are you okay?" They had been on the move for more than a day now. Ambur and Olivier had kept asking him if he needed to stop and rest but he had just kept going. At one point he had even slowed down to a walk so the girls could take a short nap on his back while he kept moving.

"I'll be fine, I just...need a minute," he managed, breathing heavily.

"Mydnight you should rest. I know you're intent on catching them but you're going to hurt yourself at this pace." As she looked around however she began to worry, "Though I must admit this doesn't seem like the best place to rest," she then looked down to the blood stain, "especially with that on the ground."

Ambur took Mydnight's arm and pulled it over her shoulder and lifted him to his feet. "Come on, we can go make camp a little up the road. If you can't smell any of them then they were in good enough health to move on from here."

The girls helped Mydnight out of the town and into the forest where he began to sniff again a few times. "Over there," he said softly. They group reached a clearing and found four logs in a square around a makeshift fire pit, with a very large rock behind one of the logs. "They were here," Mydnight confirmed as Ambur brought him to one of the logs and set him down on the ground.

"Can you tell how long ago?" Olivier asked as she began walking around the campsite looking for firewood. Ambur started unpacking their bed rolls and laying them out on the ground..

"Not exactly, but it hasn't been long. A day, tops."

Olivier dumped a pile of sticks and small logs into the fire pit and pulled out a box of matches from her back pack. She struck one and tossed it into the fire, blowing on it softly to help spread the flames. Ambur pulled out several dry snacks from her bag and handed them to Mydnight. "Thanks," he breathed, tearing into them.

"Eat as much as you need, you're the one doing all the work," she said with a smile and kissed him on the cheek. "Besides," she sat down beside him, "like you said, we are close to catching up finally. We shouldn't need too much more before we find them or get to a town that isn't destroyed."

Olivier sat down on Mydnight's other side, not before laying out her bedroll beneath herself, so as to not dirty her white jeans in the dirt. "I'm really not tired, so whenever you two are done snacking you can lay down, I'll keep watch."

"You sure?" Ambur asked.

"Ya I'm alright, I know I had a bit of a bad day the other day but I'm good."

"Okay, wake us if you need anything."

"Yup," she smiled before the other two began to get into their bedrolls side by side by their growing fire.

Mydnight woke that night to the sound of a twig cracking in the distance. His ear twitched as he began to listen and smell all around them. He quietly shifted in his sleeping bag, wiping his eyes out, trying to move as little as possible. As he looked around he found Ambur asleep beside him and Olivier sitting across from them stoking the fire. After a moment of staring into the fire Olivier sees that Mydnight is looking at her. He raises a finger to his lips to keep her from speaking and then points to his ears and begins to sniff around to see if he can pick up any scents.

Olivier started to play dumb, turning her head toward the fire but still looking around with just the movement range of her eyes and began to try and listen past the crackling of the fire. Mydnight could tell that several hours had passed. He didn't feel completely rested but he certainly felt much better than he had earlier. The moon was high in the night sky and the temperature had dropped significantly. As he continued to listen he could tell that something or someone was headed toward their camp. He motioned to Olivier that the source was behind her in the woods. She watched him hold up all the fingers on his right hand toward her, and slowly began to understand as he put his fingers down one by one.

As his last finger went down Olivier reached back quickly and pressed down on the center of her spine, activating Isenheart, the nodes quickly spreading across her limbs as she stood up and raised her fists and her aura. As she turned around she found a figure in a baggy brown poncho lunging at her. It's bronze colored metal fist connected with her guard, only a moment before Mydnight fired a shot from one of his hand cannons at the figure's head, having sprung out of his sleeping bag and straight into action.

The figure moved it's hooded head to the left, dodging the shot with ease, and jumped backward away from Olivier. The sound of the massive slug from the hand cannon woke Ambur up, her eyes shooting open in shock, sitting up in her sleeping bag before looking around and seeing her two friends in arms. She looked around, quickly finding the other figure landing back on the edge of the forest. As she stood up the figure rushed back at Olivier and she readied herself only to see Mydnight run past her, his pistols pressed together and beginning to transform into his scythe, the metal expanding and hilt shooting down out of the head of the weapon. Mydnight seemed as though he was going to swing his scythe at the figure before it would have a chance to reach Olivier, but as he wound back his swing he changed directions, swinging out much farther than where the figure was.

Olivier thought that Mydnight had simply overshot the target, but as she reached out to counter attack the in-coming blow, the figure disappeared and she heard metal hitting metal. She looked over to where Mydnight had been swinging and found his scythe parrying the figure's metallic arm. Ambur too had seen this transpire and spoke up, "Olivier back off, that's the person that was screwing with Mydnight at the dorms!"

Olivier jumped back to where Ambur was finally on her feet. The Amazon drew her blade up from the ground and the girls pressed their backs together in front of the large rock. "He could have backup, stay alert."

"Are you the one who fought Qrow back in town?" Mydnight asked, struggling to keep up the parry.

The figure chuckled for a moment before speaking up. It's voice sounded almost mechanical but discernibly male, "Even if I did, why would you care? You hate Qrow." As the figure said this the moonlight shone down on them. Mydnight could see the man start to smirk, and could tell he had long brown hair.

Mydnight considered responding with another question but instead he just smiled and reached up, pulling the ripcord on his scythe. "You know? You're right," the figure looked up to the scythe and grit it's teeth before jumping backward as Mydnight pulled the trigger and the chains revved up to speed. However as he did this he smelled another person in the vicinity and immediately recognized who it was. "Guys, she's here, I'll keep our friend busy so he can't concentrate on hiding her."

Seconds later the girls saw a blue light coming closer in the forest before it reached the clearing and the moonlight revealed Rosa walking toward them with an energy blast charging above her hand. "See, I told you something was up with the stupid wolf. He can see through your illusions. He's not just lucky."

"Ya ya, don't rub it in," the male replied, clearly annoyed.

"So do we run or what."

Ambur then spoke up, now facing her former team mate. "Run? What, are you suddenly too scared to fight us, you brat?" She laughed. "You walk around so high and mighty but now you're afraid to take us on in a fair fight?"

Rosaria grit her teeth, clearly insulted by Ambur's words, but she seemed to bite her tongue, waiting for a response from her accomplice. "If he can see through it then the two of us won't be enough to take the three of them on without one of us dying in the process, and somehow I don't think you're going to volunteer."

"You're annoying enough when you're not being a smart ass so shut up and hide us. He can't chase us both and he'll be forced to stay here and protect those two from you in case you circle back."

"I know, I know jeez," he said, clearly becoming annoyed with her. "Still don't understand how you ever dated this brat," the male said as he looked back to Mydnight before Mydnight felt the air around them shift.

The figure began to run into the woods away from them as Mydnight heard Rosa charging up her attack more and aiming it at the girls. He ran out in front of them and as she fired the shot he swung his scythe, deflecting the shot up into the air. But once he looked back to where Rosa had been he found that she was gone.

"Dammit!" he growled as his scythe changed back into his pistols and he holstered them on his belt.

"...Did he seem..." Ambur began to say quietly. "Kinda familiar to anyone else?"

"I mean...A little, I guess," Olivier replied, shrugging her shoulders.

"He did know a lot about us but Salem has clearly paired him up with Rosa so I'm sure she has told him all about us, whoever he is," Mydnight said, sitting back down in front of the fire.

"And tasked them to follow us. I can't believe they've been at our heels this entire time," Ambur grumbled.

"Well...it should be after midnight. Does everyone feel rested enough to move on? Even just for a few hours? We shouldn't stay here, the grimm should know where we are now," Olivier added.

"Ya I'm alright, but I can't carry you guys this time."

"That's fine we can all walk quickly, you've done more than enough," Ambur smiled, touching her boyfriend's cheek and kissing him slowly, one of the more passionate kisses the two had shared in recent days. Liv watched her do this and began to laugh after a moment, realizing what she was doing. Mydnight became entranced slightly, and simply accepted the loving gesture before she finally broke it off and chuckled a little to herself.

"Well, you're welcome, I guess," Mydnight breathed, a little flustered.

"Ambur you are absolutely evil," Liv laughed as she starred to pack her things up.

"Can you blame me?" Ambur asked, as she too rolled up her sleeping bag and shoved it into her backpack. "I want that bitch to be jealous if she's still spying on us."

Mydnight started to laugh as he realized what his girlfriend had just done, however he feared the gesture had gone unnoticed as he no longer smelled either of their assailants in the area.

The group finished packing up and put their fire out before they walked out of the woods, ever cautious, and onto the dirt path they had been following for weeks. The group walked into the night at a quick pace, trying to make sure that they kept making progress toward finding their younger counterparts. Now more than ever they wanted to make some real tangible progress.

"Look!" Ambur's voice rang out, breaking the silence. The sun had been covered by clouds all day and the group had recently fallen into a slower walking pace. The other two looked up to see Ambur skipping up to a fork in the road with a wooden sign sticking up out of the ground, labeled with four towns. As they got there they found that the signs said Higanbana back the way they came from, Mistral and Kuchinashi on the left path and Kuroyuri on the right path.

"Which way do you think they went?" Liv asked as she began looking down each path.

Mydnight began to look around and quickly found two sets of footprints in each direction. One set was side by side and one was single file but both sets contained the footprints of two people. "Only four people are walking at this point," he said quietly. "Two of them went up the mountain and two went to Kuroyuri. Either Qrow is too hurt to walk or he is flying along with them. Given the blood back in that ghost town" he paused, looking up to the sign, " I'd say the former is more likely at this point."

"So which way should we go? If they are carrying Qrow then they probably took him to Kuroyuri instead of up the mountain."

Mydnight glanced back at the footprints again and quickly determined that one person in each pair had much larger footprints than the other. "Well there's no way that Ruby would let Qrow out of her sight if he was this injured, so she's bound to be with him. Nora and Ren are inseparable so I'm betting that Ruby and Jaune are the ones who went to Kuroyuri. So that's where we're going. We can't split up or else that guy is gonna pick you two off, so we just have to hope that Ren and Nora meet them on the other side of this path."

"Sounds good to me," Ambur said, nodding her head and heading down the path. "Come on, we gotta be close if those footprints are that visible!" She exclaimed as she broke into a jog, the other two following behind her.

As they run down the path the brush began to thin much more and the path gradually started to include more stones than just dirt. "We're getting close!" Mydnight called out but almost instantly he started to smell something. As they continued to run down the path he pulled ahead of the girls. Getting closer to the source of the scents, he could tell that Jaune, Ren, Nora and most importantly, his little sister were alive inside the town, but he could soon hear signs of combat.

"Mydnight look! Up in the sky!" Liv shouted loudly trying to snap him out of his trance. He looked up and in the distance he could see a pair of zeppelins not far off, headed in their direction. As he saw this, the girls watched fur begin to grow out of his face and he swiftly changed into his wolf form, sprinting ahead of them, through the destroyed gates and into the town. He quickly found Ren and Nora on the ground in an embrace, and Jaune in the middle of the courtyard leaning forward with his hands on his knees trying to catch his breath. He looked around as the three younger warriors noticed him, reacting defensively at first. However they quickly realized the Wolf was not a creature of Grimm. He smelled around and headed toward the smell of Ruby and Qrow who he found behind a building. As he walked toward them, Ambur and Olivier finally reached the courtyard of the town and the three younger students noticed them, their attention leaving the massive black wolf for only a moment before all five of them looked up to see the zeppelins coming in for a landing before them in the open space in the town.

As Mydnight rounded one last corner he found Ruby staring back at him and Qrow propped up against the back of the building, falling unconscious. "Mydnight!" She yelled, running forward and throwing her arms around his front right leg, rubbing her face into his fur covered neck. "What are you doing here!?" She asked happily as she backed away. Mydnight's form slowly began to shift and change back into his humanoid state, before he was finally able to respond.

"I'll explain later, I'm just glad you're safe. Come on, we need to get Qrow on that airship," he said frantically as he moved past her and lifted Qrow under his knees and back. Ruby walked beside him and the two headed back into the courtyard to find their companions already boarding the crafts. One of the crew came out to see if they needed any help getting Qrow on board the ship.

As they all board the ship Mydnight set Qrow down and headed to the back of the cargo area and leaned up against the wall and almost fell on the way down. Ruby rushed to his side after making sure that Qrow was secure and sat down next to him, followed by Ambur onhis other side.

"Are you okay?" She asked in a small voice.

"He should be okay by tomorrow," Ambur said, as she put her arm around him and he leaned his head into her shoulder. "We've been trying to catch up to you for weeks. He woke up from his coma and we set off immediately. He's been doing most of the work so we could make up as much time as possible."

"Lucky we caught you when we did or we'd be walking to Haven while you flew," Mydnight laughed weakly, before he peacefully drifted off into a much needed nap.

Ambur smiled and kissed his forehead gently before she started to scratch the top of his head lightly, attempting to soothe him. "Luck had nothing to do with it, Myd."

As the ships flew away Rosaria and the Brown cloaked figure walked into the destroyed remains of the town and watched their targets flying away.

"She's not gonna be happy about this you know," Rosa sighed in defeat.

"She's not happy about anything, but you're right...they weren't supposed to make it in time."