Chapter 11 – Ruby's First Mission

Ruby was going to have to kill people.

That was the only thing going through her head as she and Tyrian boarded the airship and set a course for Ovais. Nothing else could even be comprehended.

Not the excuse that she wasn't going to be the hand that ended the lives. Not the excuse that this would've happened with Tyrian supervising it alone had she not been involved. Certainly not the knowledge that a random group of the citizens of that poor, poor town were going to be spared.

If she got to that village and watched the people get massacred by the hound and did nothing but take notes for the monster who'd dispatched it, it would be no different than if she'd shot them all with Crescent.

There was always the slim possibility that something would go wrong – the hound would fail to follow its instructions, the village's resistance would be enough to repel it without massive casualties – but Ruby knew that she was grasping there. In all likelihood, she was going to have to watch a slaughter.

Except why?! I can stop this!

Sure, Ozpin gave his life to buy me his cover, but it's not like that means I have to go through with it. After all, Ozpin will be dead whether or not I chose to spare the townsfolk.

"Você pode ver o continente de Vacuo," said Tyrian.

Ruby didn't know what he was saying, but she recognized the name at the end, and looking out the window revealed the upcoming landmass.

"We're here?" Ruby asked. "So soon?"

"Não exatamente. Os Grimmlands são os mais próximos de Vacuo, é verdade, mas a cidade que procuramos fica no interior."

"What?"

Tyrian pointed out to the horizon. "Ovais fica no interior."

"The town…oh, I guess just because we're at the coast, that doesn't mean we're ready to land yet, are we."

He nodded with a snort. "As crianças nos dias de hoje."

Ruby looked at the beaches of Vacuo out the window, then out the rear viewport as they passed over them. She'd never been to this part of Sanus before, even though it was the same landmass she'd spent most of her life on.

Well, if you count Patch as a part of it. It's technically not since it's an island, but no one in their right mind would count Patch among Sanus, Solitas, and Anima.

And the Grimmlands, I guess. If it's my new home, I oughta count it as a continent.

The doggo was in the vessel with them, but it had yet to say anything other than repeating 'hunt' endlessly whenever she looked its way. It was pretty eerie, but then so was Ruby's new master and Ruby's new girlfriend.

"Acorde-me quando chegarmos lá," said Tyrian. He reclined in his pilot's seat and closed his eyes. After a brief stretch, he began to softly snore.

"W-What?"

There were no context clues for Ruby to interpret the meaning this time. Had he wanted her to take over the controls? Had he been giving some sort of important update that would be critical to their mission? Or was he just saying something random?

I don't actually know if he's saying gobbledygook, or if it's just languages I don't know and it all has meaning. Oh, what if it's gobbledygook in other languages?

With no other options, Ruby just decided to wait until their navigation systems told them they were getting closer and to wake Tyrian then. He was the senior operative on this mission, so she figured doing anything else would be overstepping.

The three of them landed tens of miles off of the town of Ovais to avoid being seen on the horizon. If everything went well, she and Tyrian would enter into the town disguised as native Vacuoans without attracting much attention, the doggo would attack, and they would watch the carnage unfold. The red-eyed or blue-haired survivors would never suspect they'd had a hand in the destruction, and the secret of Salem would be preserved. Salem had chosen a place so far off the grid for that very reason.

But when I describe that as everything going well, it's not really true.

Their party had a few hours of hiking through sand dunes ahead of them, meaning that if she intended to plan her way out of this one, it would have to be soon.

Ruby had gotten tired of walking after a quiet five minutes (she was a sprinter, not a marathon-er) and asked Tyrian if she could ride the doggo the rest of the way there, breaking their silence. He'd been ecstatic about that, going off in some incomprehensible rant that involved the word Grimm very often as well as her name. She didn't know if that was an approval of her request, but she figured that he okayed it when he picked her up by her armpits and plopped her down on the back of the hound.

"Ela finalmente está entrando em contato com sua monstruosidade interior." He wiped a tear from his eye and looked at Ruby as his bottom lip wavered. "Eu me sinto como um tio orgulhoso."

A pat on the head was the last thing she got from him before he resumed his silent trekking.

The doggo itself didn't seem to even notice her presence aboard its back at first. The added weight of one tiny huntress probably didn't phase it much. When Ruby gripped hold of its fur at one point to keep herself from falling off, she briefly worried it would respond poorly, but in the end, it just kept treading on.

After about a half hour of nothing but Ruby's tense breathing and the hounds even panting, she decided to see if she could interact with it.

"W-Who's a good boy?"

The doggo had no response.

"A good girl?"

Nothing.

"A good Grimm?"

"Hunt."

She tentatively gave it a pat. "That's a good doggo. So, um…do you, like, take orders from me?"

"Hunt."

"You're giving me a piggyback ride – er, a Grimmyback ride. Is it because you can't be bothered to shake me off, or because you secretly enjoy my company?"

"Huuuuuunt."

Ruby petted the doggo on the head. "Well, you do you, but if I were a Grimm doggo, I'd probably rather spend time playing fetch rather than eating villages whole. I mean, Nevermore fly, Leviathans swim – Grimm may be monstrous, but they all share some behaviors with the animals they come from. There's got to be some doggo in you. You're loyal to Salem, and you were a guard dog for me for a while…"

Ruby leaned forward, wrapping her arms around its back to steady herself so she could get closer to it. "I…I have a Grimm in my arm. A beetley guy. Do you recognize it?"

In hopes that it might sense its kin, she pressed her arm closer to its hide.

"Was he a friend of yours?"

Ruby's arm started to tingle, and then her hand felt all weird. It wasn't a hurting weird or the kind of weird you get when you don't move your arm for a while and the blood flow stops; this was more like a massage chair weird, but on her arm instead of her back. She had no clue what was causing the sensation; all she had done was think about the beetle.

A red light started to shoot out of her arm, alternating between two quick pulses and a much longer one. Then, without warning, the Scarab shot out of the palm of her hand.

Ruby would've screamed, but her tolerance for unexpected and outright bizarre shiz had grown over the past few days, so she managed to hold her tongue. The beetle didn't do anything malicious; in fact, it didn't really do anything at all. At one point, it tilted its head backwards to look Ruby in the face, but that was it.

"H-Hey, buddy," Ruby eked out nervously. She had no clue if the beetle was sentient, a regular Grimm, or a part of her with all her memories. "How 'bout'cha go back in? That way, you, uh, don't get heatstroke from the sun."

The beetle retreetled into her arm. Er, retreated.

Ruby looked down at the hound to gauge its reaction to that scene.

"Ugh, still nothing?!"

She and Tyrian ditched the hound when they caught sight of some smoke in the distance, which Tyrian said meant they were close enough to the village. Well, he didn't say that, but Ruby had a feeling that "Quero colocar isso no meu salmão." meant "We're close to the village."

Ovais was a quaint little town. She'd been expecting sand streets and clay buildings, given that there didn't seem to be any resources for miles, but the town itself was the absence of materials. It had been excavated out of the bedrock of the ground, so the empty spaces were just the parts that had been carved clean.

She and Tyrian kept their cloaks wrapped around their faces tightly and generally avoided any people that came near them. It might've seemed awfully suspicious to any townsfolk, but Ruby had a feeling they would have more pressing concerns shortly.

Ruby hadn't been able to think of any ways to sneakily outsmart Salem's forces and save the village. If something went wrong, it would be fairly obvious that she was the cause of it as Salem's newest and least trusted agent. There might be an option of blaming the failure on the doggo itself, but there was no confirmation that Salem didn't have other ways of keeping track of them.

Ruby had warred with her own mind over what was the right thing to do for the entire trip over. If Salem had some way to keep watch over her doggo, she wouldn't have needed to send them…except, what if the whole thing was a ruse? What if it was all a test of Ruby's loyalty? The only way to be sure was to go through with it.

Ozpin had warned her of this. He'd told her that she would have to do horrible things (or in this case, let horrible things happen to others), and she'd thought having to kill him was the extent of that, but this feeling was far worse. These people of Ovais, they would never get to come back.

Ruby would never get to come back from this.

Zwei was a doggo. He borked, and he yapped, and he was the goodest good boi.

The Grimm that Ruby had ridden into Ovais?

That was no doggo.

The screaming began when night fell, and Ruby had to wonder if it was extreme tactical intelligence, an awareness of how to utilize human compassion against them, or just sheer luck that it did. When people let out quick cries of pain, often little more than desperate yelps at the stars for someone to rescue them, others often did. This was a small settlement, meaning that the tight knit family-like community rushed to its own aid. Within seconds, all of the townsfolk were congregated in one single place, around a cluster of dead bodies.

At least it gave Ruby and Tyrian a convenient excuse to come running and watch the impending carnage.

The Grimm had made its first few kills in the middle of the street, so when people crowded around the bodies and began to scream, no one was looking behind them. Just as the leaders began to take charge, it pounced from the rooftop on which it had perched itself and began to ravage the humans.

It was an absulute bloodbath.

Had Ruby thought up some plan, she would have been entirely unable to execute it, for her body simply shut down. She'd never seen so much death in one place before, not even in the censored pictures her old teacher had once shown of Mountain Glenn. The Grimm had scarcely finished slaying one of its victims when its ears perked up at the horrified yells of another, and before they were even dead it was on a third. People began to run away from the scene, but the Grimm hound pursued.

That was what it was. A hound. A beast bred to kill that was set by an uncaring hunter upon a defenseless flock of chickens or cornered fox. Never had a name been so apt.

"Ainda não encontrou nenhuma das cores escolhidas," Tyrian whispered, but Ruby wouldn't have understood it if it were the King's English. Her brain was going into shock.

She'd…She'd petted the hound. She'd thought that maybe if it could encounter some affection, some human kindness, it might soak into the poor guy and convince it not to go through with its brutish mission. As she watched it tear the throat out of a screaming child, Ruby couldn't even move. The hound didn't target her, but if it had, she would've made easy pickings.

Some of the people who'd run actually made it away, but then the vile thing that was wearing the guise of a dog reared up on two fear and leapt like a hare through the air. Its bones crunched and cracked as it hopped from rooftop to rooftop with the agility of a being half its size, outmaneuvering the fleeing humans and catching up to them in no time.

A slash cut one of them in half, but the hound halted when it looked upon a red-haired woman who'd fallen to her knees. At its hesitance, words of begging poured from her lips, and for once, the creature showed mercy. It fell back down to all fours, turned away from her, and prowled off in the direction of another victim of its senseless slaughter.

But before it left…

"Hunt."

Tyrian groaned exasperatedly next to Ruby. The two of them were surrounded by a sea of corpses, and any survivors must've thought it quite odd that the pair hadn't moved from their original spots. To be fair, there really weren't many survivors.

"Ele falou," Tyrian said to Ruby.

"W-What?" she asked.

"Grimm não fala. Eles fazem sons de feras." He growled and made a guttural roaring noise. "Mas não são palavras."

Ruby didn't make the connection until Tyrian had already shot out towards the red-haired woman and murdered the only witness.

It talked.

Grimm don't talk.

Tyrian didn't stop at the first victim, and neither did the hound. While the latter completed its mission to the letter, the former left no survivors. All red heads of hair and blue eyes were untouched by tooth or claw, but a scorpion tail quickly ensured that they would not be reporting back the existence of a speaking Grimm to the authorities. In a single night, an entire settlement was destroyed.

When they were dead, Tyrian clicked open a pair of claw-like weapons that adhered to his wrists and began to stab them into one of the dead bodies with an orgasmic look on his face, and that was the point that Ruby had to turn away. She didn't know which direction she ran, but it was away from the monstrous beasts that would surely plague her dreams for the next few weeks, so it might've been Ruby's all time favorite direction for the foreseeable future.

She collapsed to the ground and let out a sickened gasp for air when the village was about two hundred feet away. The sand was cold to the touch on her knees and elbows, but her body felt hot. Everything was warm, and the blood that was coursing through her arms and legs felt like it was about to overheat.

"Ruby?" said a voice.

Ruby just steadied her breathing, ignoring it entirely. It sounded like Salem, but it couldn't have been her.

"Please turn around," said the voice. "The Seers have such awfully small fields of view, and I wish to speak to your face, not your…posterior."

Seer…oh, it really was her.

Ruby didn't have the physical strength to turn around, though. It felt like watching the massacre had sapped all of the energy from her body, even though she hadn't actually done anything.

In the end, the Seer floated its way around the downed huntress, where Ruby got a good look at it. She could see Salem's face in the ball portion of it, like a video coming out of a screen.

"M-My queen," Ruby managed to get out. "The…The…"

"Are you hurt?"

"Hurt? What? N-No, I just…Tyrian…"

Salem rolled her eyes. "I just knew he would do something. That's why I sent you. I take it the mission was more stressful than anticipated."

"It killed everyone!" Ruby gasped, struggling for breath.

"Did it? Such a shame…I had such high hopes for my hound. Well, I suppose it's for the best. The template on which such things are made can be hard to come by, what with you being the very last I've seen in years."

Salem turned away in the Seer as Ruby wiped the snot from her nose and the tears from her cheeks. It was disgusting, but Ruby couldn't find it in herself to have any disgust left to spare.

Ruby had no idea what Salem was going on about, but as her sense returned to her, she realized that she'd erred. Tyrian might not make sense, but Salem could understand her, and he would correct Ruby's inaccurate report eventually. She hadn't meant to lie about the hound's actions, but everything had just been so revolting to look at, so offensive to Ruby's sense of sight, that she hadn't been able to clearly enunciate the words in her mind. Tyrian had killed the spared survivors, but Ruby hadn't been able to say more than a handful of words.

"N-No, Lady Salem. I misspoke. The hound…ghhhkkkk…didn't kill everyone. Everyone is dead, that's what I…"

"What you meant?"

Ruby nodded.

"How did those I requested to let live end up dying?"

"T-Tyrian…"

That yielded another roll of her eyes, and Ruby had to tear her face away from the Seer to avoid scowling directly into it. Those people had been murdered by a maniac, and Salem's best reaction was mild distaste at the man responsible? Like it was a minor inconvenience, something that didn't matter more than a raised eyebrow?! That…That…That bitch!

"Well done, Ruby. Your presence here was invaluable. For your next mission, I –"

"Mmmmm," Ruby interrupted, gasping unsteadily. "Not now. I can't. I'm sorry…I just need a few minutes."

"Of course."

No sooner than the last syllable had been uttered did the Seer turn back to solid black. Knowing that it could see her, Ruby didn't trust herself to lower her guard around it and did her best to keep a straight face.

I have to do this. If I had stopped that hound, I might've saved those people, but Salem would've just made more. She just said she could. It sounded difficult, but difficult still means possible. I can't let my emotions get in the way. I'm a huntress, and that means I save lives. The most lives possible.

"ROSE?" called out Tyrian "Onde você está?"

"I'm over here," she said back. The words made no sense, but it was obvious from the tone of his voice that he was asking where she'd run off to when he was busy with…hrrrrkk…the bodies.

Within seconds, Tyrian was climbing out of the carved-out pit of a city and rejoining her. His eyes caught the Seer, but Ruby was quick to wave it off.

"I talked to Salem. Told her what happened." She looked around quickly for their other companion, more a token effort than any real attempt to find him. "Where's the dog?"

Tyrian pointed to the beast as it scrambled up a sheer wall on the side of a building by digging its claws into the side like hooks. When it reached the top of the building, it rose to its feet once more and did the ungainly hopping from the rooftops over to them.

Tyrian looked at the hound, then back at Ruby. "Voc–"

"I don't wanna ride it. Get it away from me."

"Como você comanda, jovem Rose."

He made his way to the Grimm and stood between it and Ruby. While it might not have sent the dog away, the symbolic barrier was appreciated.

No. He's a killer, too. These people aren't my friends. Once I'm the maiden, I oughta come back and burn Evernight to the ground with all of them in it.

Ruby gathered herself and stood up. Brushing off as much of the sand that was on her arms and knees as she could, she took a minute to run her hands along Crescent Rose. After it had beheaded Ozpin, Ruby had tried not to take comfort for its familiar presence at her back, but right now she needed all the comfort that she could get.

She tapped the top of the Seer. "My queen? You in there?"

The image of Salem appeared once more. Tyrian fell to his knees and began to spout out what sounded like somewhere between a prayer and a toddler describing the cool stick he found in the yard to a parent.

Ruby stood to her full height. "We're ready for your orders."

Coming Soon – Ruby's Revelation

And now, a tip from Ruby:

Ruby's Tip #506 – Leave an emergency spork at your office. If you ever forget a spoon, you can just snap off the spork's tines and use it as a spoon. If you ever need a fork, you can sell it and use the funds to buy a fork (their prices are similar).

Author's Notes

For some reason, I just really wanted to include a chapter where Ruby gets to ride the hound. It's going to be a plot thing, her and the doggo, but it's also just really cute for some reason. That, and Tyrian being a proud uncle. I know I immediately had to ruin it, but it was comforting for at least a moment, right?

Happy rats, and don't do crime!