Ruby leapt through the air, from assembly machine, to conveyor belts, even off the odd flying drone. Her face wide with a bright beaming smile. Today was the day the portal opened. They'd spent the whole day previous just clearing out any bugs that were in the predicted area, and the Maker had said there were only a few hours left before the energy level reached 'critical', which sounded bad but apparently wasn't.
She'd wanted to be out in the area waiting for the portal to open, but the engineer had told her that wasn't the greatest idea. Something about how the portal might not be safe to be around when it first opened?
That and the engineer always seemed to be very paranoid, Ruby would have said over paranoid. But then a bunch of invisible bugs had attacked Her team and she hadn't even had the faintest idea they were there before one just snatched Weiss and pulled her out into a giant group of the things. Nothing even showed up on any of the sensors, just the noise of chitin on metal as they tried to pull Weiss apart.
Fighting invisible bugs wasn't something Ruby wanted to do ever again, trying to hit them was hard enough but you never knew if you'd gotten all of them or not.
Still, even if everything outside the factory kinda sucked, this place had been nice. She'd seen more weapons in an hour walking the assembly lines than she'd seen in her whole life. And in varieties she never even knew were possible. It wasn't enough that she'd want to stay, the food alone making that a non-option, but she'd at least want to visit on occasion.
But she was finally going to get to talk to her dad again! Go back to school, attend classes, see team Jnpr and all her classmates. She'd never imagined she'd miss school so much, or even just being able to see a sky without smog or giant bugs flying through the air. Or even the broken moon.
That and dust based ammunition, the engineer's rounds might hit harder but there's just something special about shooting a grimm and watching it fly away or freeze.
She could tell her team needed to get home too, Blake kept rereading weapons manuals that Balistraia had written for their suits, Yang was always going out and sparring against the robots, and Weiss was… actually doing fine now that Ruby thought about it. She might be picking over the factories layouts looking for 'inefficiencies' but Weiss seemed to like doing that. Even if Ruby was pretty sure Weiss was just taking inspiration for later, rather than actually finding flaws.
--
The actual journey to the portal site passed without much fanfare. The Engineer not having been certain just where the portal would open meant that the minds hadn't been able to build a secure site around it. Leaving them with just a large artillery outpost as static protection.
That wasn't exactly the kind of weapon you wanted to use near yourself, given the chaotic nature of a battlefield accurately predicting what your shots will hit had an unacceptable margin of error.
Not even synthetic intelligence was capable of it, at least not without more processing power than was readily available.
Dozens of airships flew through the air, armed with an excess of sensors and munitions scanned the half dozen kilometers that needed to be monitored as they slowly narrowed down just where the portal would open.
On one of the aircraft, larger and with significantly heavier armor, five humans sat. All in power armor and well armed. Prepared for the moment something happened, whether that was the ship getting swatted from the sky or the portal opening. Balistraia spoke into each of the suits comms "ETA to Portal formation three minutes" That got a nod from team Rwby, Yang and Blake stretching out their limbs as they prepared to move while Weiss once again went over her low dust stores and Ruby fiddled with her crescent rose. Now heavily modified, Lighter, stronger, and sharper with a built in shield generator to ensure the blade never dulled. Most of the teams weapons had similar enhancements, a collaborative project between Ruby and the Engineer.
Or more accurately Ruby worked on her gun and the Engineer watched, before applying what he had learned to every weapon team Rwby had, before then moving onto the drones and tanks. You didn't know terrifying until you saw a drone unfold into a turret, or into a cannon and latch onto another drone. And that was the least of the abominations the Maker had crafted, missiles that turned into drones, courier drones that morphed into cars, spidertrons legs doubling as cannons in addition to blades. Machines now capable of attaching to each other to form larger and more specialized variants for each situation.
Those were just the things now in mass production, what was resting in the engineers workshop was considered too 'complicated' for mass production. Drone armors, weapons with ten shift forms, Tanks that could turn into aircraft. Things that hadn't yet been made practical or reliable.
All of which would eventually be needed to stem the tide of bugs, but those were developments for later, as with a shudder in the fabric of reality, and a scream of rending air a shimmering tear was formed. Visible even kilometers away as it lit the night sky for a few short moments.
Immediately three convoys of tanks on standby began to route themselves toward the location, three command tanks, one hundred shield tanks, fifty scout and fifty drone tanks, and thirty spidertrons in total. An almost token force given the Maker himself would be on the field, but this location was well within their borders and the fight with the bugs had not been going well. The units had been more needed elsewhere, and three patrols being pulled for this was already straining a few fronts.
The flight of airwings was even smaller, barely thirty ships, most of which were there to scout and only had half their usual munitions to make room for the new equipment.
Said advanced sensors gave everyone on the ship a clear feed of the portal, and the Black tide flooding from it. Thousands of grimm were pouring from the portal, one that was more than three times the size of any previous ones, and it only seemed to be growing.
The aircraft sped up as the distant artillery sounded off, shots traveling well beyond the speed of sound launched by the hundreds, even the command tanks artillery turrets joined the report and the trajectories and predicted damage were highlighted for Team Rwby's convenience.
The shells only took seconds to hit, and massive chunks of the black tide were outright vaporized, it had little effect. More simply poured through, but the flow of explosions failed to stop, each turret firing two shots a second, with dozens of turrets adding to the barrage.
Gouts of flame and an ever expanding cloud of shrapnel and dust grew to block both thermal and visual sensors as the wave of devastation grew. Bugs would have stopped, forcing your way through a choke point that small was a losing proposition. At best a token force would remain waiting to ensure shells were wasted keeping them in cover.
They would have attacked from a different angle, changed strategies, or simply given up and waited for an opening. The grimm did not, caring less than little for their own lives, only the minds care not to get the portal within range of a shell's explosion allowed the grimm onto Nauvis's soil. But that availed them little, they had more than enough ammunition to keep the portal shelled for days.
But that wasn't the win condition, they needed control of the portal. To build stabilization equipment around it, and to get units through to the other side to build the same there. Simply shelling the portal until it faded wouldn't work, and that was where tanks joined the fray. Their cannons resounded as they cored through hundreds of grimm in a devastating opening barrage, drones flanking each by the dozens.
The artillery began to peter out as the tanks grew closer, the shells timed with the tanks movements to keep each vehicle just out of range of any annoying levels of shrapnel, keeping the grimm from even growing close.
At least until the tanks breached the no-fire zone around the portal, and where immediately driving through a sea of grimm, shells, lasers, electricity, and bullets arcing out to keep the tide at bay as each vehicle pushed forward. Missiles from the spidertrons and command tanks fired and controlled with precision to carve a path through the pseudo-flesh of the grimm.
The spidertrons and scout tanks leading the charge, and charging through the portal first, emerging into a land absolutely brimming with grimm. And they immediately faced the same situation that had given the grimm so much trouble. Surrounded on all sides as steel strong feathers launched themselves from the sky and claws sharp well beyond the limits of the beasts the mimicked tried to carve flesh from the fleshless.
A spidertrons serrated legs lashed out around it, carving through parody flesh and bone with only a hint of resistance to its pneumatic strength. And though no blood flowed from the wounds chunks of gore and viscera were still scattered across the ground. Smaller chunks often dissipating before they even hit the ground.
Grimm leapt upon one of the spidertrons legs, clamping down with its jaws as the razor edges of the spidertrons limbs tore into its flesh. It tugged without care for its own form, and with strength well beyond what it's form should have been capable of. Wrenching the limb out of position before it was speared by another leg, the barely intact remnants of its jaw flopping open as the spidertron continued carving its vicious path, leaving the dissolving corpse in its wake, hundreds of others joining it.
Spidertrons lasers lance out, its numerous legs spearing grimm bodies and throwing them into the chaotic melee, tanks crush a tide under their treads, spitting fire hotter than any furnace and melting flesh. Still the grimm pour out, uncaring of their own injuries or losses, a tank is swarmed under, its treads jammed with sheer mass of disintegrating flesh as its cannons fire in vain to clear the horde from itself. Its drone accompaniment is torn from the sky and ripped to shreds, and with a muted pop its shields vanish, and only the sound of sundering metal can be heard. The Humans watching the fight from the safety of an airship can't help but liken it to a scream.
The initial burst of success faced by the tanks began to dissipate, the shields now beginning to be worn down while the drones keeping the tanks from being buried under numbers were being swarmed under themselves, only the arrival of the command tanks and their drone accompaniment kept the fight from being utterly lost, but slowly and with more and more tanks and spidertrons being lost every second the fight stretched on the non-combat drones set to work, carving into the desolate dirt and stone and beginning construction, ignoring the occasional lose to stray attacks as they rapidly built defensive structures from nothing.
Soon, not even five minutes after the tanks had pushed through the portal turrets began to come online, adding their fire to the melee, clearing the skies and retaliating against everything within range. Damaged vehicles were pulled back within the ranks and sent to provide fire support from the safety of the walls as shield generators began to come online, giving the hastily assembled stone strength well beyond its appearance. Without even waiting for the fighting to die down a railway was started from the remnant side of the portal, which began to rapidly approach another rail being built towards it from the Nauvis side.
Within another two minutes the preliminary walls were constructed, tanks were still being destroyed, and the drone accompaniment had been all but annihilated, the Grimm tide not abating in the slightest as Team Rwby watched the feed in fearful horror as not even the growing moat of burning napalm stemmed the tide. Grimm simply threw themselves to their deaths.
The railway was connected, and more materials and drones were sent through to reinforce the rift, the aircraft began to land next to the rail, the Engineer beginning to get up from his seat as Balistraia spoke in the team's ears "are you ready to go home?" This caused Blake to level a steady look at the Maker's armor, it being a fair enough stand-in for the mind. "You want us to go out there? That place is actively exploding." A nod from Yang "I'm going to have to agree with my partner here, that hardly looks safe."
That got an audible snort on their comms, one not from Balistraia and every pair of eyes rocketed towards the Maker, Ruby was the first one to talk "...Did you just laugh? You can do that? I've been making jokes for weeks and nothing but you can laugh?!" The response came from Balistraia "it was more of an exhale, and his neural reading did occasionally show amusement at your jokes, his suits simply never had a microphone installed. But thats aside the point, we won't be going out on the surface. Your right, that would be very dumb" with a flicker the feed on their cameras changed to another group of drones, inside the walls, already beginning work digging out an underground bunker. "By the time you get out of the aircraft and onto the train the bunker will be finished. Though if you wish we could simply route the new communication channels through the portal though quality will be significantly lower."
Weiss nodded at that "it may be for the best to stay here, at least until the fighting dies down" she pointedly ignored the loud exhale that statement garnered. Only subtly glaring at the maker. He however simply shrugged and sat back down, looking entirely unbothered even as the continuous screams and explosions were fed into their earpieces from the still raging battle.
AN-
The engineer hears 'fighting dies down' laughs harder than he ever has before, which isn't very loud at all but its the thought that counts.
next chapter will be dialogue and maybe ozpin reaction. minds and maker reconnecting, ruby and yang talk to their dad, and Blake discovers what exactly her parents have been up to.