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"You owe me big," I said to Bisque. We were watching Wenge and Jasper sprint back and forth across a small courtyard behind the bar.

"I hear you, I hear you," Bisque said. "We were sort of roped into more than we could chew."

"Between the strikes and whatever those leaders want?" I asked.

"People started looking at us like we were supposed to have answers. That's how the old White Fang got started around here. Just as union leaders and such. Now that they've been discredited and with our network people were looking at us to pick up the slack."

"So you got dragged into this, you're being strong armed into doing this operation before y'all are ready."

"By those old miner leaders. Dyne and Barret. Dyne's been around for a long ass time. Barret's newer but they're both close. Barret is backing Dyne. Which means we need to play ball too."

"Which is why you owe me. Big time. I want information. As soon as you have it. I have a list of names I'll want you to keep an ear to the ground about and if you want me to kill Taurus it'll cost you extra," I informed him. Never let it be said I was purely altruistic. I saw my edge over him and I was taking it.

He slapped a hand over his face. "No, no. Don't kill him. At least not yet if you can help it. And I'll take your list of names."

"That's just the start. I don't want Lien. I'll want any other information that you can give me when and if I ask for it. A blank check." I leaned against the wall of the bar beside Neo with my arms crossed.

"Fine. Fair enough." He rubbed his forehead hard. "We do owe you. Thanks Cloud."

"And you'll want to upgrade the fucking squirt gun you've got."

"What's wrong with my pistol?" He asked.

"It's a fucking .22."

"Hey now. It's a .30."

"Still. Those sometimes don't stop regular people. You'll want something with more kick to it. I can pick up something better from Aurum. Lasers, higher caliber, or even something magnetic accelerated so it still has as much kinetic energy as a .44 or .45. Hell, you should probably talk .50 cal if you want to stop anybody with aura and training."

"So I should go big or go home?" He asked.

"More like go big or die, bro," I said. "I knew this fifteen year old who used a .50 caliber sniper rifle. If you're really attached to something small I could get you a submachine gun."

"I'll think about it," he said.

"Think fast," I shot back.

We watched Jasper and Wenge pant and sprint in their suicides for a hard moment.

"You going to -" I was interrupted by the jingle of bells as the bar's door opened.

I was going to ask if he was going to join Jasper and Wenge who were working hard. Avalanche all had aura but having aura didn't make you good, I'd been living proof of that. Even having a semblance didn't make you good. Only training or else real combat could help with that.

I peaked around the corner and through a screen door. It was Robyn Hill in the bar. I recognized her face from the posters of her all over both towns. She had pale hair (not as snow white as Weiss's) and purple eyes, not quite as vibrant as Yangs, but she was still beautiful. Aura-hunter-beautiful.

"Bar's closed," Bisque told her. I heard through the back door entrance and window.

"Oh don't be like that. I just want to talk about the General's project."

"Not this time. You shot us down, remember. Or your agent did, Fiona was it," Bisque returned. He didn't look amused.

"I have some Lien I could offer you." Robyn said and she leaned against the counter. Her face on one palm. "Sorry we weren't about the destruction of Schnee property. But look where that got you."

"The value of money is plummeting for me recently," Bisque said dryly.

I snorted. Money only talked so loudly to hunters like Neo and I. I was willing to bet she had more millions stashed away than the ones we took from Don Corneo. But that wasn't how you kept Neo entertained. Well, drugs and alcohol helped but what she really wanted was somebody to fuck with. Even if that somebody was only me and it had to do with a night I'd gotten black-out drunk on. She was milking that for all it was worth.

"How much will that information cost me?" Hill asked. "What can I do to make you call off these strikes? Come on, work with me here. I'm listening now."

"A few hundred thousand. And we're not in charge of the strikes."

She winced at the price but sighed in a way that didn't make it seem undoable. "I'll see about getting you your money. And that's not the way I hear it. These are your strikes now."

"They're not. You're looking for Dyne or Barret."

"Dyne is irreconcilable. He's on the warpath. He wants the strikes to never end just so long as Schnee suffers. He's unreachable. And Barrett is angry. He'll stay that way for the foreseeable future. You're not, work with me here," she said again. "What will it cost? I'm willing to make all kinds of campaign promises. I'll keep them too. I'm a woman of my word. You want dust lung laws? I want them too. Why don't we start negotiating there? The strikes have to end somewhere."

"We want increased safety standards. And we want an increase in minimum wage. Wages haven't kept up with inflation so the current wage is unlivable."

"Done. Please. I can't get elected under this kind of unrest. Just join my voting block, getting your people to join my block will solve both of our problems."

"I'm not sure I can do that. There's more on the way."

"What else is on the way?"

"I can't talk to you about it but we have another operation."

"Another? Like the one that kicked off these protests? Put it off." She sounded desperate. "Cancel it."

"Can't do that. Some old guard in the White Fang are insisting upon it and in the miners guild, too. They're putting pressure on me and Avalanche." Bisque crossed his arms and replied coldly.

"Who?" She demanded. "I'll convince them otherwise."

"You can't. It's Dyne and Adam Taurus."

"Taurus? And Dyne, both? You have to do this?"

"Or else I'm afraid that Avalanche will lose control over the strikes completely."

"So? Let it happen. You can't tell me you meant for things to go this far. Fiona said it was mostly symbolic."

"We'd never be a player in the unions ever again if we stood by the wayside now. We have to be willing to act as much or more than anyone and everyone else."

"Damn it. When's the operation? Will you tell me that at least?" She pleaded.

"Tomorrow night. The others want to put a fire under Jacques Schnee and prevent him from getting comfortable. They want to force him to act and capitulate to the strikes. We had this operation in mind before and one thing led to another once the others found out about it."

"I'll get your money wired to you. Tell me about the General's project with Amity." She leaned forward towards him. She was anxious to hear about it.

I watched her stick out a hand. Bisque took it. A dull lilac hue took over both their hands all the way up to the elbow. I could feel the low hum of aura from where I watched through the screen window. She was doing something.

"The General is turning the colosseum into a satellite. Getting communication back up and running between the kingdoms. It's his current number one priority."

She withdrew. "That's it? That's why he's diverting supplies from Mantle? At least as far as you know, I suppose."

"The intel is good. We had people who worked on the project come to us," Bisque said. "Cetra who were or are involved in the construction joined our union network. They reported it to us."

"That's… that's good news I suppose. But the rest you have got to find a way to settle down the protests and get them to vote for me. I'm willing to grant all your concessions once I become a council member. None of them are unreasonable or outside of my policies," Hill negotiated. She really wanted a bunch of politically active people on her side come election day. I could get that. Voter efficacy was low all too often, even back in Vale.

"I'll talk to people and spread the word. I only promise to try."

"And another thing, Fiona mentioned two other people. She mentioned Cloud Strife. What's his angle in all this? I know he's been involved in the drug game and a prison break," Hill wondered.

"He was after the same information you were. Fiona should have been able to tell you that," Bisque answered. "Now, if that's actually everything, you can wire the money over and get out of my bar. We're closed. No service at the moment. We've got a happy hour at seven. You could come back then."

"Well thank you anyways. And don't worry about your money. I'll leave, then."

He came out to me again through the screen door in the back of the bar.

"You shook her hand," I introduced. "Why?"

"She's got a lie detection semblance. It's touch based, Striker ranged," he informed me.

I raised an eyebrow. A politician that valued truth in their very soul. Not her heart or mind but in the core of her very being. You didn't find that on every street corner.

Well she had my vote. Not that I could vote. None of my identities were Atlas or Mantle citizens so I was pretty much in the same class as a felon. Not that I wasn't also a felon.

"You sure you should have told her so much about the operation. She could interfere," I told him. "If she does that's on you."

"I didn't tell her that much. And if she does interfere it might be for the best. I don't really want this op to happen. Maybe she'll be able to stop the operation, Avalanche won't have to back down, and nobody will get hurt."

"Yeah well I don't want to go to prison. Something to keep in mind. The law isn't exactly on our side," I muttered. "For all that we're standing here plotting this in broad daylight."

"Oh I wasn't aware. I'll try to keep that in mind." His tone was as dry as ice.

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I scoped out the ship I would be sinking with Neo. Or 'Mint' as she was in her disguise. She snuck aboard easily enough and took a photo of a map of the ship with her scroll. She sent it to me and I examined it closely.

I needed to figure out where we would set the charges so that the explosion would just sink the vessel and not destroy the harbor in a dust driven detonation.

The place had cameras for security and a handful of human and faunus guards. But for the most part the ship was ruled and watched over by robots. Robots I'd have no problem taking apart. It was the people I needed to lure out somehow so that they didn't die when the ship went down or similar.

There were lifeboats onboard but I didn't need any more blood on my hands. I was powerful enough that I suppose I could take steps to avoid death now. I didn't need to go all out against a group of aura-lacking sentries anymore.

I could bop them without killing them now. And I knew Neo was in a similar ballpark. She just usually didn't care.

I studied the map in detail. Neo turned visible again as she paced away from the large gray vessel. It had soft blue mooring lights and a big Schnee Dust Company logo on the side.

I could see men and women and machines up on the deck at their posts. They all had smooth looking assault rifles and shotguns. The kind of heavy weaponry the SDC needed to keep their high valued assets safe. I was sure they were on decent high alert now, too. I'd scraped with some of them at the mine so they knew that wasn't just an accident.

She came up behind me on my bike and wrapped her arms around me. I turned around to spot her small smirk. She was still teasing me. At least she was still doing what I told her to do in a general sense.

She pulled herself snuggly against me and pressed her face into my back. I could feel it against my skin after a layer of clothes over armor. Maybe it was just her aura I was feeling against me like the flare of a cold burning candle.

I could feel her mischievous mood. She had no one to target but me at the moment.

"Don't be a brat, Neo." She shuffled softly against me in what I realized was mute laughter.

I revved my engine and pulled away from the ship.

"I'm thinking about setting off an explosion as a distraction. To lure the people off the ship. The last thing we want is to have to kill people and stain our unblemished records."

The wind whistled through my face as I pulled the bike into traffic.

"Maybe I'll set you loose on the guards. Harass them with illusions that get them off the ship. Would that make you happy or would you rather blow something up."

She shrugged against me unhelpfully.

"Well then we will probably do a little of column A and a little of column B. How many people can you teleport at once with you, Neo."

She tapped my chest three times. That meant I could get four of us on board. More if I flew. Just five of us to cause enough of a ruckus that we drew the living guards' attention but not so much noise that we brought the entire facility down on our heads. There was a balance to play. A particular key to strike.

I needed to draw only so much attention and it had to be the kind of attention that grabbed living beings and left the machines to mostly do their work.

I recalled the robots. They were humanoid things for the most part. They were built fast and could be destroyed just as easily by hunters like us. Their weapons would only cause a problem if I gave their targeting computers time to really line up a shot and if I gave them a chance to shoot as a group.

Not allowing them to use their strength of numbers was a good call. Don't sit still enough that they got a good solution for me. It was a good start but I needed more.

There could be more menacing machines on board. Giant spider or scorpion bots or larger humanoid mechs like the Atlesian Paladins we had fought back at Beacon's fall.

I wasn't sure how much trouble those kinds of machines were going to give me given how much stronger I had become. Plus I was loaded with dust crystals and I knew how to use them.

I needed to start a fire. Something like that would draw the human crew to the lifeboats and off the ship but would leave the machines behind.

I could also use Neo's power to get a few of us on board and get the party started.

I pulled up on a gondola for vehicles and pulled out my scroll and started looking over the ship's schematics. I say schematics but there was a small 'you are here' sign on it indicating it was really a map set up somewhere inside.

I wanted to set the charges near the front of the ship away from the cargo hold where all the dust was sitting around and waiting to explode.

That should stop a chain reaction of explosions depending on how big the explosives we used were. I had better make those myself.

I was already thinking through the designs I knew to cause a hole just large enough to rupture the exterior hull of the boat. Just enough to rock the ship and not blow up the entire harbor.

I swung by Aurum's club on a gondola for vehicles and picked up a .50 caliber pistol for Bisque who still hadn't made up his mind. So I made it up for him. I put the heavy boxes of ammunition behind me on the bike with the spare magazines for the weapon.

It was a good thing he and the others had yet to be in a real huntsman-class fight or they would have lost pretty badly.

The only thing to do from here was build the bombs and I could do that easily enough at my apartment. So that was my next stop.

I wired together several dust crystals, enough that I thought it would be able to blow a hole in the ship's exterior if it was set against it but not so much that it would spread through the rest of the boat's interior. I made two because I thought one was probably enough to do it so I might as well go all in.

Then I set them up to be able to blow from a remote source. In this case just my scroll. It was actually pretty easy. Not as easy as throwing them really hard but just about using two small arduinos, one a piece.

The only thing left to do was share the plan with Avalanche, the miners, and Taurus and hope that went off without a hitch before the plan even started.

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-WG