A/N: Redshirt Army wrote a great JNPR omake as a celebration of Chrono Trigger's 25th anniversary, which has been canonized. If you haven't read it, follow the link or click to the last threadmark (if you're an archive reader, you've already read it, and hello future people)!
The snowy wind cut across Yang's skin like a blade. Even her Aura couldn't keep the cold out completely...it prevented it from really damaging her, but that didn't stop the way it felt. After...some amount of minutes (Yang would have said it was hours, but the journey to the lab was only supposed to take an hour to begin with) she finally had enough. She took a deep breath, reaching down into that well of magic that sat in her soul. And, with that soul, she pulled at the edges of it and allowed it to flow.
As she exhaled, she felt the warmth seep out into her skin. It wasn't quite enough to make her warm, but the chill was suddenly far more bearable.
As the other girls leaned towards her, Ironwood and Winter turned towards them. A moment later, their expressions shifted into surprise.
"I see...your magic is quite subtle, it seems." Winter nodded, stepping slightly closer herself.
"Ordinarily, I would caution against huddling together. But...under the circumstances, I think the danger is minimized." As their formation closed in around Yang as the centerpiece, the group continued moving forward.
A creative use of magic.
Yang found herself smiling slightly, even as the landscape around them remained a featureless, ever-shifting whitescape.
It started subtly. A prickling at the edges of her senses – nothing concrete, just a generalized bad feeling. But the last time she'd had one of those, a Wilder assassin had melted out of an empty space and murdered a Cielan guardsman, and so Blake narrowed her eyes and glanced around. When her eyes locked with Weiss' and she saw the same suspicion on her teammates' face, she began to understand the feeling.
"Blake? Can you -"
"Feel that? Yeah. It's...not good." Her brow knit together as she tried to unpack the feeling that she only now realized was her magical senses.
Ironwood glanced back and forth between them. "What is it?"
As both girls tried to find words, Ruby took the opportunity to explain. "Weiss and Blake...their magical senses are the best of us. Guys? What's going on?"
Finally, Blake sighed. "It's...something. Something big, but it's...vague. Blurry, I guess?"
"It's difficult to define." Weiss peered into the snowstorm, as though her eyes might reveal whatever she was feeling. "It feels...empty? Like...standing on the edge of a deep cavern and staring down into the darkness."
Yang frowned. "Could it...be Obsidian? I mean, she could feel different outside of the Dream, couldn't she?"
Blake shook her head. "This doesn't feel like her. It's too...coarse? I can't describe this feeling. But it's making my skin crawl...and we're getting closer to it."
"Um...guys? The snow..." Ruby's words turned their heads towards her, and the group momentarily stopped, feet sinking slightly into the pale snow.
The last pale snow, because a few feet forward the ground began to give way to snow stained black. Fresh snow fell atop the dark fields, only to immediately begin to blacken as it was affected by whatever source had caused it.
Ironwood knelt down for a closer look, and Yang huffed a hollow chuckle. "I'm...guessing it's not supposed to be like that?"
"No." He drew a short knife from somewhere and pressed the tip of it into the snow, which parted reluctantly. He grimaced, lifting up the knife to show the snow clinging to it oddly.. "It's...sticky. Be careful. Our footing might suffer."
As she took her first, careful step forward - as her foot squelched unpleasantly in the tainted snow - Blake immediately grimaced, her core muscles tightening unpleasantly at the sensations. "...It's this. The snow. That's what we were feeling."
Weiss' hands were twitching slightly, and Ruby glanced around with eyes wide open. Winter simply frowned and drew her weapons. "Then it's even more important we press onward. Whatever they're doing..."
They nodded, and pushed forward. Blake tried to push the emptiness and hunger from her mind, and was almost successful. But as the snow grew darker and darker, her magical senses only picked up more of it.
When a dark shape loomed suddenly out of the snowstorm, each of them reacted similarly. Weapons raised and sighted, Semblances or spells half-formed...but the shape didn't move, and after a moment Blake's brain processed what she was seeing.
"What the fuck." Ember Celica rattled slightly as Yang's hands shook, still partially raised into a guard position.
Blake stared into the empty eyes of a man in an Atlesian guard uniform. Or...most of a man. His body laid atop a pile of similar shapes, each of them bearing...different scars. Different alterations. Different dark splotches of Grimm-flesh, different protrusions of white bone. Half of this man's face had been replaced with darkness and a barely-formed mask replacing his cheek. On the outside of one arm, dark fur jutted forth from his skin like wires implanted in his flesh. A dark liquid seeped gently from him and the others in the pile, sinking into the snow around them.
Blake's eye traced for details in the detached way she'd trained for even as the rest of her bristled in disgust and fury.
Ironwood's weapon swept across the horizon. "This is what they've turned this place into...?"
Haltingly, Blake stepped forward. Yang made an aborted movement, as though to stop her, but in the end she walked alongside her. Each of them advanced slowly, awkwardly, eyes occasionally flicking to one side or another, waiting for an ambush that never came.
Blake pursed her lips, suddenly and insanely glad that the weather was so harsh and so cold that there was no smell. She opened her mouth to speak, paused, and swallowed around the lump in her throat. "They're...decomposing. Around...wherever the Grimm have been...added."
"Like it's...rotting them away." Weiss' eyes were cold as ice. "Whatever madman did this..."
"We'll find them," Yang finished.
"What is...the purpose of this...?" Penny's face had fallen in a way Blake had never seen...no, that wasn't true. It brought back painful memories of when she'd first learned the world wasn't as nice as it was in the stories.
Blake stared down, unable to look away as the corpses carved themselves permanently into her memory. This is...what we're against. This is why we'll fight, no matter what.
A glimmer of red and her hand snapped to Shroud's hilt. The corpse stared at her limply, Grimm eye lit and human eye...suddenly glowing with a sickly red hue. The pupil was cloudy, but something inside...she shivered, and it had nothing to do with the cold. The half-Grimm arm twitched weakly, not even managing to move an inch. One by one, other bodies in the pile began to 'awaken', dim eyes staring up at them as though in reproach.
"They're..." Ruby couldn't find the words, and Blake couldn't blame her.
There was a click-click-click as Weiss flicked the Dust cylinder on her blade. "I'm burning them." Her Aura shimmered, and a glyph appeared below the pile of dead men.
There were no objections as the glyph erupted in flames, and the men-that-weren't burned in silence. When the flames had died down...they marched on, equally quiet, but far more tense.