As soon as the dome of the Swallow-Class submersible opened, the sharp, heavy odors of smoke and gasoline filled Lazula's lungs. Port Cyrreine kept up appearances as a clean city, but the Southern edge of the bay was always covered in a half-inch thick slick of oil, its dreamy hues of pink and blue mirroring the wall of neon above. The terraced stairs up from the port to the boardwalk, usually filled with tourists, families, couples, and beggars, was empty.
Empty, aside from the trio of Ursa barreling toward the group.
Lazula raised Aegis as Snow, Laurel, and Ichigo all let loose with a rain of steel and dust. Lazula punched her shield aside with the weight of the first bear's swing, following up with a cleave across its chest. She swung back upward, tearing open its neck and jaw before slamming into the second with her full weight. She pulled Aegis aside and replaced it with a jab through the beast's neck, holding it still for a spray of shots from Snow and Ichigo. Her head snapped around as the third roared and lunged at her with arms outstretched in a malicious hug. She felt the monster's claws whip past her head as she tumbled under its attack and landed on her feet, then twisted around to cleave its back with four swings of her blade, each more savage than the last.
She panted as she watched the three beasts faded to nothingness.
The four continued up the stairs with Lazula at the helm. Snow and Laurel fired into the sky, picking off any of the flying demons that dared come too close to the bridge. Finally, they made it to street level. The conjunction of the boardwalk and the bridge was one of the city's busiest intersections, but each car not stuck on the bridge was abandoned halfway through its attempted evacuation.
"GRIMM!" a woman shrieked some distance from Lazula's ear.
She ground her teeth. "Yes, I know there are Grimm," she bitterly snapped to herself. "That's why I'm here."
Still, she figured she'd better check on the woman. She turned her head, looking to the corner she was sure she had heard the shout from.
The street, and the lifted pedestrian walkways above, were barren. The neon lights of each tower still shone in all their usual vibrance, without a single soul to cast their shadow.
"Must've been a weird ad. Or maybe the news story," Lazula forced on herself. After all, the Holoscreens hovering above each storefront and painting the side of each overpass displayed news of the attack. That simply had to be the case.
"Did you hear something?" Snow inquired.
Lazula paused, eyes flicking between the puzzled looks on each of her teammates' faces before shaking her head and stiffening her lip. "No. Nothing." She pointed ahead to the bridge. "Let's go."
As soon as Lazula, dozens of beady red eyes set upon her all at once. The Beowolves and Hellhounds- the real-life equivalent to the wolf-like animatronics her team fought during initiation, banded together to form a single savage pack.
The biggest of the pack howled, and LSLI was set upon by a horde of Grimm.
With Ichigo frozen in place, and Laurel and Snow tearing through the horde with gunshots, Lazula charged headlong into the shadows. A Beowolf leapt from the hood of a car, but instead of flesh its jaws met the edge of Aegis, and the beast was discarded across the concrete. She looked up, to more beasts tearing down the street between the lanes. She slashed and jabbed through the chest of the first, skewering the second as the first began to fade away. She ripped her blade from its chest and leapt into the air, feeling a morbid satisfaction as she tore head from neck. Another took its place. Lazula slammed Aegis down on its head, then used it to spring up and over, tearing down its back before cutting across its waist and impaling the next.
Fighting the Grimm after her match with Sterling was nearly cathartic. One after another, the dumb beasts lined up to meet their end on the tip of her blade or the edge of her shield. Each simple victory, each shadow fading from the night, eased her mind. If this is what being a huntsman was about, it was damn easy.
Snow's hard-light bullets pelted the pack of Hellhounds, smoking deep within their black flesh. Laurel split the beasts' bony heads with each thunderous shot, wrenching her gun's lever and lining up her sights over and over to thin their numbers.
"Help! Get- GET AWAY!" a woman screamed. Snow's head snapped around, to a raven-haired woman whose pocket knife did little to the muzzle of the Beowolf whose jaws locked around her ankle.
Snow whipped around Absolute Zero's handle, and its two barrels collapsed before extending into a luminous whip. It cracked at the Beowolf's knee with a flash of light, dropping it to the concrete. The woman freed her ankle and kicked at the Grimm before limping away, letting Snow's weapon sink into its back.
Snow first looked around to ensure no Grimm were near, then turned to the woman. "Are you alright?"
She looked shaken up, but mostly unharmed. "Y-Yes, I'm fine. Good thing I've unlocked my aura."
Snow nodded, before leaving the woman to strike across the chest of another wolf. She ducked under its claws and slashed in one movement, before reversing her momentum to slash once more. She turned and struck out with her handle as if to attack its disintegrating form a third time, but her blade lengthened once again to whip through the hide of an Ursa like a twirling ribbon, taking both arms before the creature finally perished.
Another of Laurel's ear-splitting shots rang out. A Nevermore flailed weakly before crashing into the guardrail and falling to the bay below. One Beowolf dropped with a shot to the head, then another.
Ichigo yelped from beside her.
His hatchet was between the jaws of a Hellhound, which shook him like caught prey. He slammed into the ground, Hack n' Slash's handle still miraculously held in his white-knuckle grip. The hellish creature leapt onto him, pinning his shoulder down with a heavy claw and snapping at his neck. Ichigo whipped his hatchet desperately across the beast's jaw. Its head snapped back, but Ichigo looked as if he was going to be sick. The beast's lower jaw hung on by a single tract of twisted black flesh, leaving behind a smear of tarry drool as it dragged across his chest.
Laurel stepped in, heaving the wolf from Ichigo's body with her axe before pulling a pistol from her belt and sinking four shots into its side.
"Saving me again, huh?" Ichigo mumbled, adjusting his glasses. "Thanks."
"You would have been fine without me," Laurel assured. "I just sped things up a bit."
Team LSLI pressed on, cutting down Grimm and clearing out the Red Claw on their march down the bridge. The squad of Red Claw members surrounding the anti-aircraft gun was taken out even easier than the Grimm, allowing for Ichigo to easily disable the massive weapon. Near the bridge's halfway point, there was a break in traffic just before a truck sitting askew across both lanes.
"What is that?!" a bespectacled man screamed, trembling arm pointing from the shattered drivers' side window of his minivan. Lazula looked behind herself just in time to see the tip of a stark, spindly tail- what must have been twenty feet long, by her guess- slither over the side. A King Taijitu? Couldn't be. With both heads meeting in the middle, they didn't have tails.
"Come on, out- out!" the man decided, flinging open his door and waving to the passenger and back seats. A woman about his age nervously followed, as well as his teenage son.
"No, please!" Lazula ordered. "Stay in your car. You'll be safer in there. I can take care of this."
"Whoa... that's Lazula Skye..." the son marvelled. He nodded. "We'll be okay."
Lazula felt an acute rumble travel from one side of the bridge to the other, accompanied by scraping and the twang of something hard colliding with the metal trusses and supports beneath the street.
An unsettling sight clawed its way back over the side of the bridge nearest Lazula. The almost sickly reptilian Grimm had what looked like the skull of a wolf for a head- a wolf that would have stood well over twice Lazula's height at the shoulder. She would have preferred a gleaming red eye in each socket, but the dark pits on the side of its head looked hollow, soulless. A single horn protruded from its forehead, meeting the spine of its long, lithe body that twisted nimbly despite its full cover of bony armor, and the two sail-like fins born at its shoulder and trailing down its back. Its long, whiplike tail was last over the bridge, settling to the ground as the monstrosity stared down Lazula.
Even the handful of Red Claw members Snow, Laurel and Ichigo held off paused in fear, and ran from the bridge.
"Good question..." Laurel noted, holding Snake Eyes close as she backed off slowly. "What is that?"
Snow stared down the aberrant beast. "It appears to be a Beithyr, a Grimm only rarely seen in the past. Native to mountains and caves everywhere besides Atlas."
Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, mattered little to Lazula. All that mattered was its place in her way, and the excitement budding up within her. The Beowolves were far too easy, after all. How could she prove herself against them when they fell with a single swing of her blade? If she ripped the monstrosity in two, saving the lives of all who watched her, surely Sterling's fluke victory would be forgotten.
She hoisted Impetus to the ready, and charged the monster.
Moka's tail flapped back and forth violently as she perched atop the bus watching the Red Claw charge forward. The bus rocked as she sprung up from her spot, flame coating her forearm as she cocked it back, and slammed into the ground with a semblance-enhanced fist. A handful of Red Claw goons, marked by their thrashed black jackets and red half-face masks painted with the jaws of a black beast, were knocked back.
A grungy-looking man with a crooked smile and a hyena's ears swung a spiked bat at Moka's head. She ducked toward him, grabbing the base of his weapon and wrenching him forward into an elbow and a backhanded swing of the bat she grappled away. She shot a bolt of gravity dust from one glove into the forehead of a charging stag, slapping another to the bat with her other and flinging it forward to let the two bolts connect.
Another masked faunus, this time with some kind of fin, swung a metal pipe as a third came at her with a knife. The pipe glinted with the light of the street as Moka hopped back, grappling the knife's owner at wrist and neck. She twisted the knife from her hand with a crack and a jolt of electricity from her gauntlet, spinning around to use the faunus as a shield against the pipe before discarding her on the sidewalk and knocking the pipe-wielder to the floor with a jab at the gut and a hook to the jaw.
Caspian paused, allowing a second to realize Moka had already knocked out four Red Claw. He aimed his gun at the grunts, sliding his thumb along the groove on the side of the barrel until it glowed a soft yellow. He squeezed the trigger, hoping each of them had unlocked their aura.
No matter the fact they were out for blood, he couldn't bring himself to do anything besides some mildly painful, but temporary, incapacitation. Moka came to mind. She was a faunus, after all. One that resented Frontline with as much bitterness as her kind heart would allow. Had she taken a wrong turn somewhere, made one wrong decision, he could be fighting her now.
Caspian's bolts of electric dust worked like a long-range taser, immobilizing the Red Claw in just a few shots each, and allowing Rowan and Moka to move forward as Lilly secured their enemies in place with shackles of ice.
A deafening bang like a crack of thunder resounded through the bay, pounded Caspian's chest and threatened to buckle his knees. A shot screamed past his head and chipped the sidewalk some distance behind him, continuing on before clanking noisily on the side of the bridge and falling into the water.
Caspian dropped down, and crawled behind a concrete barricade. "GET TO COVER!" he shouted. His heart, which had managed to settle since stepping onto the bridge, began to pound with renewed fervor. He wasn't sure his aura could hold off a sniper's bullet, and he didn't care to find out.
"I'll take care of it!" Moka offered.
"What?! HOW?"
Before issuing an answer, Moka was on top of a truck. She bounded off its side and caught hold of streetlight, hoisting herself onto an outcropping only a few inches wide. Her tail flitted as she shot a bolt of gravity dust a few feet above, and used it to propel herself up to a bar. She flipped around it like a gymnast, and landed on the sniper's perch, a platform thirty feet above the street. Before the shooter could rack another shot, Moka knocked her off the platform with a boosted right hook.
Lilly whipped Elysian bloom across the street, forming a makeshift slide out of ice. The sniper slid two Caspian's feet; knocked cold, but alive.
"Since when could you do that?" Rowan questioned as Moka returned to the street.
"I do parkour!" she proudly exclaimed. "It's a great workout if you have the stamina. Good for your back, shoulders, arms and legs, and it's cardio! Oh, and a lot of fun!"
"Huh. Cool," Rowan recognized. He pointed to the prong of silver barrels jutting a dozen feet off the bridge. "Anyway, that's the gun we were supposed to take back. Should we disable it, or have someone wait here or what?"
Caspian looked to the swirling storm of Grimm still threatening the bridge. He stepped toward the gun.
"Actually, I have an idea."
Caspian sat down in front of a silver desk littered with buttons and switches. The joysticks at right and left hand looked promising.
"...Do you know how to work that thing?" Lilly asked with a hint of apprehension.
"Nope. But the Red Claw was using it to take out police airships, so the Grimm probably won't be much harder." He pulled the right joystick, and the guns rotated left. "Doesn't look like there's any lock on the controls, either."
"Well, your father is yet to discourage you off of it," Lilly reasoned.
"Just in case though, you should probably stand back," Caspian concluded with a nervous laugh.
Caspian pulled the lever back, and the gun's twin barrels skewered the sky. He let out a deep breath, feeling the trigger beneath his finger. It took a firm grip to hold it down, and one even firmer to keep the lever secure in his hand with the vibrato of each beaming shot.
Grimm dropped from the sky; Nevermore, Griffons, and Anzuraze all dissolving before they could disturb the waters' surface. Watching the night sky thin, reclaiming the glow of the moon, was almost fun.
The Beithyr's claws scratched across Aegis like four hefty daggers. Their weight against Lazula's shield was staggering, but she corrected her bent knees to jab Impetus through a tiny slit at the base of the obscenity's armor. It let out a horrific sound more akin to a harshly whispered squeal than any roar, and twisted to fling Lazula's weapon out of its chest, and out of her hand. She leapt back to retrieve her blade and dodge a horn attack that impaled the concrete at her feet.
"Sloppy," Lazula criticized, eyes narrowing at the hilt of the blade in her hand. "This damn thing shouldn't be giving me so much trouble."
The Beithyr's claws scored the street as it neared the car, the family's muffled screams growing louder. The sound of Lazula's boots pounding the pavement drew the black dragon's gaze. It reared back, and slammed its head forward.
Lazula nearly crumpled under the weight of the blow, the force behind the bony horn like that of a speeding truck. Perfect. Lazula twirled under its chin to prepare her retort, but as Impetus whirled around, the dread of realization set in.
Her semblance was still blocked.
She felt no energy within her- she lacked the spark she knew meant her semblance was activated. As Impetus met the monster's armored chest, it didn't cleave through. No shockwave tore forth from her blade to rip the horror in two and save the three who watched her with petrified eyes.
Impetus's hilt twisted painfully in Lazula's hand as it bounced off plates of white. The Beithyr clawed her backward and its monstrous whip of a tail whistled through the air to snap on her chest with an ear-splitting crack. Stunned and breathless, Lazula was pitched across two lanes before her boots caught on the cement and she tumbled backward, stopping only when her head dented the door of a white van.
For the first time she could remember, waves of golden aura simmered around her body. Her head spun and her vision greyed at the edges. Until she saw the Beithyr's jagged palm atop the roof of the family's car, she couldn't quite remember what led up to the hit. She staggered to her feet, but after a single step forward, the beast put its full weight upon its arm, and the car was flattened.
Lazula heard the family's final screams cut short.
She dropped back to her knees, breaths jagged, uneasy. Deep red trickled through a gap at the bottom of the crumpled steel, pooling with gasoline upon the concrete. Her remnants of foolish hope died when a stray spark flickered to the ground, and the car erupted in flame.
A lake of blood pooled below her, though she couldn't feel it on her hands. All at once, a tumultuous cloud of voices coalesced at her ears. Whispers and shouts. Misplaced fragments of words and sentences, the traces of conversations long past, churned around her in a dissonant embrace. The final screams of those she had failed, and more from dead she shouldn't recognize, pierced the cloud until she could do naught besides curl up and drive her forehead to the ground until it bled, fingers scratching at her ears.
Then came the visions. Blood streaming down Impetus's tip and onto her hand, soaking her arms as its sweet, metallic odor permeated her nose. Visions of bodies plagued her mind's eye- first within the crumpled car, then of countless corpses littering an icy road. Burned, frozen, impaled, and desecrated.
The screams of Grimm surrounding her she couldn't even be sure were real.