Chapter 20 – Ruby's Scythe
Adam was good – probably better than anyone Ruby had sparred with in her old life. Okay, maybe not Qrow, but all of the other kids at Signal and even Yang would probably have lost time him even if they teamed up.
He wasn't so much fighting her as he was pushing her scythe around the arena with his sword. For every hit she blocked, she was pushed around by the sheer momentum of his unyielding impacts.
"Show me, girl!" he growled, sparks flying as the Dust sword clanged against Crescent Rose. "Show me why!"
Their blades locked, and Ruby leaned forward with her whole body to tilt the barrel of Crescent towards Adam's head. He saw it coming a mile away, but assuming it was just an attempt to blow a bullet into his face, he did nothing to protect himself from the real attack.
When the shot fired right next to Adam's aura, the sound alone was enough to distract him momentarily, and Ruby fled backwards with her semblance almost immediately. Cranking Crescent's chamber to remove the cartridge of the last shot, she fired one at the side of his waist and another at his bare chest in rapid succession.
Adam blocked the second of the two with his sword and let the second ricochet against the aura on the side of his upper leg. Ruby couldn't help but notice a sly grin on his face as he twirled his sword.
He's up to something…
But so am I.
Ruby leapt through the air with Crescent drawn, swapping it into a war scythe as she flew. Adam blocked the quick poke she sent his way, but that was more to keep his blade occupied while she flipped over his head to land behind him. Their steel locked once more when she landed, but now Adam was smiling broadly.
A glint of light on the ground caught her eye, and Ruby chanced a quick kick to his knee to glance downwards. She saw the glowing red circle on the ground, which probably gave her a heads up against whatever Dust or semblance attack he was charging up, but it came at the cost of distracting her for a half second.
Adam punched her directly in the stomach, causing Ruby to lose both hands' grips on Crescent Rose. Spit flew out of her mouth as the heavy blow's shockwave rippled through her body, and Adam laughed mercilessly. He might not've been able to say that she was a human with the crowd listening, but the shine in his eye told her that he was hurting her for one very particular reason.
Ruby dropped to her knees, and Adam raised his sword for a decapitating blow. Ruby raised her aura and desperately reached out for him, but the hit came just the same. There was a brilliant red light as he swung down, and she was knocked right past an opening in the crowd.
She landed on her stomach facedown, groaning in pain. Back in school, it might've garnered cheers to be beaten down so humiliatingly, but this was the real world, and the White Fang was as silent as the grave.
…the grave I'm about to fill…
Adam's footsteps approached her. When they got close enough, she rolled over onto her back.
He scoffed. "You couldn't even –"
…about to fill with Adam's body.
Ruby pulled the trigger of Adam's shotgun and unloaded it as many times as she could before his sword came up.
He'd been so sure of her inferiority that he'd missed several signs of her plan, likely writing them off as 'human blunders.' For one thing, she'd intentionally shot a glancing bullet against his waist. He'd blocked the far more damaging one and assumed the other was a miss, but it nicked his belt and loosened the scabbard on his waist. Only a true weapons-obsessed nerd would have recognized it as a mechshift weapon simply from a single glancing sight, so Ruby considered herself lucky that she counted among that crowd.
The punch that had forced her to drop Crescent Rose gave her a chance to latch a hand onto the shotgun-sheath, and the special attack from his sword (the red glow indicated a semblance; Ruby was curious to learn more about it) had given her the distance she'd needed to ready her attack using his weapon.
Crescent may have been a trusty tool, but sniping wasn't useful in a head on fight, especially against a literal bull of a man who had freakin' huge pecs. Heavy artillery was needed, and Adam had been kind enough to bring it for her.
When he brought down the sword, Ruby recognized him going for his trick from before and immediately angled the shotgun down and popped him between the legs. His aura blocked it, but it still must've stung.
"Ngh…GAH!"
Adam's boot caught her on the side of her face, and Ruby fell down into the ground once more. This time, Adam knocked the scabbard out of her hand with a light rap to the wrist, and she was disarmed.
"That's enough for now. You've –"
Ruby leapt up and rammed her head into his stomach, knocking him off his feet. She wasn't going to fall for any tricks of Adam's, not when her grand plan to bring Raven down had only just begun. Dashing forward at normal speeds to conserve her fragile remaining aura, she dove into a somersault to scoop up Crescent Rose, switching it into a sniper when she landed.
She couldn't risk shooting him and that magic sword of his directly, so she shot the scabbard on the ground to make sure he didn't pick it up and try to use it against her.
"Enough!" Adam shouted.
"You don't say when it's enough!" Ruby nearly screamed. "It ends when it ends!"
Adam dropped his sword to the floor. "Then I yield."
Ruby's eyes darted about for tricks or traps, but nothing came into view. Adam didn't seem to have any other weapons on his person, but her aura was low enough that plain hits from his fists could probably break it. She kept her sights set on him, but as a sign of good faith, she took her finger off the trigger.
Adam held his hands up in surrender. "I yield. You may claim victory if you wish it."
"Tyrian!" she called out.
Within a second, the scorpion man was by her side. She wasn't a baby who needed an adult to help her, but she wasn't going to be lowering her weapon without the one Faunus who was on her side to watch her back.
"What's wrong with you?" said one of the Faunus in the crowd.
"He yielded! Are you crazy?" called out another.
That actually got a laugh out of Adam, and the men and women under his command turned to look at him.
"She's not crazy." A smile spread across his entire face. "She's perfect."
Ruby glared at the bare-breasted man. "I'm still not going to fuck you."
The smile immediately was replaced by a sighing frown.
When the battle was most assuredly over, Adam made some little speech about how Ruby's refusal to quit exemplified some key yada yada yada. Ruby couldn't be bothered to listen. She figured that if she had taught the lesson, she didn't need to learn it.
Tyrian had stood in for her while she took a second to catch her breath after the fight. While it had been an exhausting ordeal to duel such a vicious fighter, it was more Ruby's own reaction to it that disturbed her.
I was fighting to kill…a-and I couldn't turn that off. After Raven, I just…
Her survival instincts had gotten stuck in the on position. While Adam might have seen it as some valuable trait of not letting an enemy blindside you, Ruby had truly been prepared to kill him if it would have secured her victory. It wasn't an issue of pride but one of existence.
This is all so new to me. For most of my life, I was just play-fighting my sister and the few friends I had in Patch. Now, I've seen more people die than a lot of hunters would in a lifetime.
Two full villages. It wasn't unheard of for frontier cities to drop out of existence when the Grimm got through in higher numbers, but twice in almost a week? It was clearly affecting Ruby, if she'd been prepared to duel to the death during an exhibition spar.
"…strength, we shall be unstoppable. Rose and Tyrian's mistress is a powerful woman, and with her at our side, the White Fang shall rise to new heights!"
The Faunus all cheered, and Ruby weakly pumped a fist into the air. Go team.
"On that note, I'd like for Yuma, Trifa, and our new guests to join me in the war tent. The time has come to begin forming the plan for our next raid."
Ruby had half been expecting one of those little dioramas of the battlefield with tiny carved wooden pieces representing troop movements to be inside Adam's tent, but it was not to be. Instead, there was a hung up topographical map of Atlas, and the White Fang had set a project to display their strategies. The five of them, one of whom was the spider girl Ruby was technically impersonating, had gathered around it informally as Adam explained the situation to Tyrian and Ruby.
I bet the Atlesian military would sell their souls to the God of Darkness to see what I'm seeing here.
"We've got about a hundred men in this camp and just under three hundred total in all of Solitas, but our hunter-level fighters are limited to those in this room, as well as three at another camp and two at another. Two is the bare minimum number of hunters a White Fang encampment can operate with, or they risk Grimm breaching their perimeters. Thus, we can only count on one more aura-user to aid us."
"Aid us in what?" Ruby asked. "What's the target?"
Adam slapped a hand onto a portion of the map near the bottom, beyond the borders of Atlas. The entire sheet fluttered.
"The Southeast Convex, a military base of great tactical value to Atlas. It's far too well manned to be brought down by us and our troops, but it's also a forward base. Because of its high personnel count, Atlas needs to regularly supply it with food, medicine, Dust, and other such staples. If we can interrupt their supply lines and any replacement shipments, even for just a month, they would need to evacuate the base or risk a collapse. Then, the Grimm will handle the rest for us."
He knew of Salem's powers via his dealings with Cinder, so he probably meant that Salem had a horde of Sabyrs and other Atlas variants ready in the snowcapped hills, but the White Fang hunters must've assumed he meant that the base would gradually fall when it was abandoned.
Adam turned his back to the group and glared at the symbol on the map like it had insulted his mother. The projector was showing a moving dot along what Ruby assumed was the path of the supply line they were targeting.
"Our scouts have been scoping the route Atlas uses for a while now. The Convex is supplied by a high-speed rail with automated defenses – Jaguar turrets, Interon aero-drones, a small army of Mark IV's, and even some Mark V's."
Ruby didn't recognize the words Adam was using, but knowing Atlas, it was probably just a bunch of robots being piloted by AI or operators far away in the safety of the main kingdom. That was good. The longer she could put off killing people, the better.
"Nothing much," said Yuma. "I mean, you could cut through those on your own, sir."
"I know," Adam answered curtly. "But it's not as though Atlas will simply give up after the first shipment is seized. A replacement with twice as many heaps of scrap metal will be sent, and then another with three times, and so on. Once we make our plan clear, they'll know we want this base destroyed, and they'll throw everything they've got our way."
"Huntsmen?" Ruby asked, resisting the urge to ball up her fists.
"Atlesian huntsmen are mass-produced on an assembly line," Trifa said to her. "Unless they devote one of their speshies to us, we won't have a problem."
"W-Will they?"
"No," said Adam. "Because your friend will be keeping them busy elsewhere."
Tyrian perked up at that and began to drum his fingers together. His tongue ran along his lips once over, then quickly retreated back into his mouth like a worm and its burrow hole. "अहो, यत् शृणोमि तत् मम रोचते।."
Adam looked at Ruby.
"I think he's happy with the plan. Do you have a specific task for him, or is he just to cause general mayhem?"
Adam fixed Tyrian with an apprehensive stare. "The latter."
"अहं स्खलनं करोमि।."
Ruby sighed as the Faunus next to her began to vibrate like a ringing scroll. "I think he's really happy with the plan."
It was for the best. Trying to constrain Tyrian to mission parameters would just end up with him losing his patience and breaking free. He would fare much better with a general goal to keep in mind and the freedom to execute it however he saw fit.
Emphasis on execute, Ruby thought bitterly. She still wasn't over the things she'd seen in Ovais.
"Rose, Cinder's ally informed me you're best suited for team combat. You'll be with the hunters of the White Fang and I."
It took everything Ruby had not to correct him for saying 'and I' instead of 'and me.' Adam wouldn't appreciate it, but Ruby's sense of grammar was burning up inside.
"Got it, boss."
"Our final member, Ilia, shall be joining us from the other camp sometime tonight. Our assault will begin at 0500 tomorrow." He turned his single eye to Ruby before putting on the Grimm mask. "Be ready."
Against her better judgment, she decided to see if there was anyone to chat with in the White Fang camp before the clock struck bedtime. She wasn't normally in the business of befriending evil terrorists, but she actually was, having recently been tricked into that field by Ozpin.
Ruby was fairly certain she would go crazy if she tried to isolate herself from all of the bad guys around her at all times – rather, she would go crazy faster – and the alternative was Tyrian, so it had to be someone from the White Fang.
She approached Trifa first, hoping to talk about their upcoming mission, but she'd been blown off almost instantly. Ruby belatedly realized that it was for the best, as Trifa would be best suited to see through her Faunus disguise.
Yuma was another option, but the bat Faunus had seemed kind of really really happy when Ruby approached him, and everything about him made her want to scream stranger danger, so she suddenly remembered that she had something really important to do elsewhere when he offered to share a drink with her in his tent rather than just chat.
The unspoken rule in normal folks' society that aura-users and civilians didn't tend to mix seemed to apply just as well here, so Ruby found herself unable to make a friend amongst the normie crowd. Whenever she approached them, they either turned their backs to her, politely moved elsewhere while offering their seat to her, or asked how they could help with her upcoming mission.
That left…
"No, I don't want to be your friend, human."
Ruby bit her tongue. "I-I didn't ask to –"
"But that's what you're here for. You asked about why I joined the White Fang, but you're just lonely despite being surrounded by Faunus, and you're seeking to make idle chatter to alleviate your uncomfortable feelings. I care not for it. You may be a valued asset, but keep your distance. I'll certainly be keeping mine."
Ruby knew better than to push. Tyrian had warned her about Adam, and she was beginning to see what he had meant. She bowed politely and backed out of his war tent, only to trip over something behind her.
"Youch!"
Oh, not something, then.
"I am so sorry, miss," Ruby said, helping the young woman up. "I wasn't looking where I…w-what is that?"
The woman looked at the rod strapped to her waist and quickly backed up. "S-Sorry, I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable. I'll just –"
"It's so cool!"
Her manners entirely forgotten at the sight of an epic weapon, Ruby grabbed it right off of the girl's belt and began to fawn over the thing. It looked like it was a rapier, but then it also seemed to have these indents along the blade that…oh, it could elongate! So cool!
"Does it shoot out like a retractable spear, or is it loose like a whip?"
"I…how did…"
Ruby looked a little closer. "Oh, never mind. I see the compressible edges now – this handsome feller's a slippin' whip. Dust chamber, reinforced hilt…"
The girl snatched her weapon out of Ruby's hands before she could analyze it any further, cradling the sword-whip like it was a baby of hers that Ruby had stolen, but then she relaxed a bit. "How did you…"
"Sorry, I'm a bit of a weapons dork sometimes. It's rare that I get to see a cool one these days. Like, plain sword are nice and all, but a whip-sword? Way better!"
"I can hear you!" raged Adam from his tent. Ruby and this girl were still on his doorstep.
"I guess that counts as me being checked in with the head honcho," the girl drawled, looking away from both Ruby and the tent. "Anyhow, who're you supposed to be, and why're you so into my sword, kid?"
Ruby shoved out her hand. "Ruby Rose. Pleased ta meet'cha!"
"Oh. A spider, like…er, I mean, Ilia Amitola. I'm –"
"A huntress!" Ruby squealed, recognizing the name from Adam's briefing. "We're going to be working together. This is epic! Do you wanna see my scythe?"
"I…uh, sure?"
"Great!" Ruby hooked her arm around the other girl's and led her off in the direction of the tent she'd been given. "We're gonna be such great friends, Ilia. I can tell."
From inside his tent, Adam scoffed. "Knew it."
Coming Soon – Ruby's Friend
And now, some tips from Ruby:
Ruby's Tip #91 – Always remember to floss, or I'll find you.
Ruby's Tip #555 – Out of eggs in the fridge, but you still need them for a recipe? Go to the store and buy some eggs. Boom, problem solved. It's that easy.
Author's Notes
We're three-quarters of the way into making this a sequel to K. Please donate funds to my 𝑃𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑒𝑜𝑛 and OnlyFans so that I can get enough money to finish off that last quarter and make this fanfic into a fanfiK. Let's go, chat!
Happy rats, and don't do crime!