The lesson we should all take from this delay is to never trust me when I promise a timeline in an author's note. In other news, I feel like being carried by Ruby's semblance would actually be pretty horrifying if you didn't see it coming.
Wilt and Scatter
Breathe in, breathe out. With every second that ticked by, Adam reminded himself to breathe slowly, evenly. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Calm within, calm without. To his immediate left, the three beowolves and one ursa sharing the bullhead's cabin weren't nearly so interested in exercising any control over themselves. Their nauseating huffs filled the air. The one closest to him kept twitching, its gaze roaming across his head like it wanted to bite his horn.
For the third time in thirty seconds, his hand caressed Wilt. Not yet, he told himself, but it was getting harder to listen with each hungry glance thrown his way. Easing that urge were the nervous faces of the five White Fang members likewise crammed into the bullhead. They were looking to him for calm, so calm he would provide. He didn't want to test the limits of Cinder's control more than he had to.
Someone in a nearby bullhead was playing a feed of Amity Arena over their radio. It was too far away for Adam to make out the words, but if he focused his aura on his ears, he could sharpen it into near-intelligibility. They were announcing the fighters for the second match.
A couple feet away from him, a faunus woman with a calico cat's tail tensed when the ursa swung its head to be closer to her. Her tail twitched and then began to lash back and forth. The end of it occasionally brushed against his leg but she was too agitated to notice. Before he could shift out of the way, his scroll vibrated and a chill ran down his spine.
Cinder's message consisted of one word: now.
As if subject to the same cue, the Grimm around him grew restless, knocking into the faunus and—in the case of the beowolves—looking moments away from howling. Adam flipped his scroll to the primary channel on the White Fang's subnetwork and brought it to his mouth.
"Launch."
As one, the dozens of bullheads scattered in the wilderness around Vale lifted into the air like flocks of birds taking flight. The cells inside the city would be leaping into action at the same time, though their roles were less obvious for the initial attack. If they'd been following Cinder's plan, anyway. Tragically, it seemed all the explosives they'd been told to set around the city had been faulty. It would take them a while to troubleshoot the issue. A shame.
Wind whistled through the hold. They weren't closing the bay doors, not with the Grimm sharing their ride. The bullheads weren't alone in the sky: nevermores and griffons likewise took flight. Where the bullheads were a coordinated flock, the Grimm were more like a swarm of locusts.
Below, forest shifted to barren ground shifted to Vale proper. They were over the city; a couple minutes from the stadium at most. A stadium to which they would not be delivering any unwanted passengers. Now that every group was in the air, he reached for his scroll to give the next signal.
There was no warning. No flare of darkness, no twitch shared across every Grimm in sight, nothing he could perceive ahead of the nearer beowolf finally giving into its base urges and opening its maw around his horn—and his entire head. Adrenaline set his veins aflame. He dropped into a crouch even as he angled Blush and fired. Wilt's hilt cracked against the fleshy underside of the beast's jaw, forcing its head up and giving him just enough room in the cramped space to flip the blade around and spear the beast through whatever passed for its brain.
The whole ship lurched.
"Keep us steady!" Adam shouted.
"Easier said than done!" the pilot shouted back, fear pushing his voice up an octave.
The ursa was rearing up—smacking into the ceiling—in preparation to crush two of the soldiers whose bullets were just angering it, so he wrenched his sword free through the disintegrating wolf's bony mask and cut the ursa's exposed hind legs down to size. As it toppled, he spun with a roundhouse that sent its corpse, and what was left of the beowolf's, out of the side of the ship. They collided with a diving griffon.
Around him, the chaos that had erupted inside the ship was dying down even as the chaos outside ramped up. The other three soldiers dealt with the remaining two beowolves even as he readied himself to help them and the wind tearing at them from the ship's evasive maneuvers was making short work of the fading bodies. Adam grabbed one of the handles dangling from the ceiling to keep from getting tossed out into the storm.
So much for getting the drop on the Grimm. Had Cinder anticipated his betrayal? Not that it mattered now. The time for examining what went wrong came after he stemmed the bleeding.
Bleeding like three bullheads riddled with nevermore feathers trailing smoke and spitting flames streaking past, the faint sounds of screams from inside reaching him just before they fell out of sight. Distant booms echoed from where they impacted. He gritted his teeth, tightly leashed fury tearing at its restraints. He hooked his weapons back on his belt and pulled out his scroll. In that time, another bloom of fire in the distance told him another ship had gone down. He didn't yet see any of Atlas's signature white mantas joining the fray.
"All squads," he bit out into the broadcast, "this is Branch Leader Taurus. As of this moment, we are enemies to the Grimm and allies of Vale's defense forces. This includes Atlas. Stick to your established squads and destroy any Grimm in your path. Prioritize your survival and the survival of any of our people you can find. Call out established safe zones on the backup channel. Use this channel for requesting reinforcements and flagging high-priority threats." Another explosion in the distance brought a scowl to his lips. He gripped his scroll tighter. "Prove to the world our strength as faunus."
He ended the transmission and turned to the squad and pilot waiting for orders. If the Grimm had turned, then Ruby's part of the plan should've been triggered. But he wasn't going to believe that until he saw it for himself. Besides, he was overdue the chance to slit Cinder's throat. "Get us as close to Amity Arena as you can."
"I'd love to, but," the pilot yanked the ship to the right, narrowly avoiding a griffon trying to smash into the cockpit, "they're not making it easy!"
"I'll take the weapons," said the calico woman, stumbling her way to the copilot's chair. "You focus on flying."
"What do you think I'm doing?"
As their bullhead's gunfire joined the hails of bullets from every other craft still flying, Adam kept half an ear tuned to the radio chatter blaring out from his scroll. A flash of white in his peripheral vision drew his eye to a squad of mantas cutting through a wave of nevermores far overhead. Finally, Atlas was responding. Hopefully the good general had been convincing to his men when explaining that the White Fang were, in this fight, not their enemies.
"Incoming!" yelled the pilot. Adam braced himself for the roll. Halfway through, projectiles thudded into their bullhead. One tore through the wing on Adam's side, and by the sound of breaking glass, the cockpit. There was a gurgle and the faunus on the guns screamed.
"Pilot's down!"
Adam cursed as gravity took hold. Caught mid-evasive maneuver, they were now falling sideways. He used the ceiling handles like a ladder to the cockpit and pushed the pilot's feather-impaled body out of the way so he could try to pull them out of the fall. His efforts righted them somewhat but none of the engines were responding. Their Dust cell had taken a hit. A miracle that it hadn't exploded but they had no power.
He ground his teeth and, while wrestling the controls to keep their fall as close to a glide as their damaged wings would allow, tried a reset. Tried again. There was a brief flicker but that was all. A look at the altimeter showed that even if he tried again, any success would come too late.
"Brace yourselves!" he shouted over the howling wind for all the good it would do. He hoped they had aura.
The ground rushed up below. Impact came as a series of snapshots: the nose buckling, the cat faunus slamming into him; the bullhead skidding across the road while the broken console dug into his aura; slamming into a building and getting tossed out of the shattered cockpit. He hit the opposite wall and crumpled to the floor while dust and debris rained down around him. The roar in his ears slowly broke up into disparate sounds of battles waged all around them. Grimm, gunfire, screams.
After a mental check to be sure his body and aura were intact, he pressed his palms into the floor and pushed himself up. He found convenient support against the counter his ejection had launched him over. A glance around told him this place had been a diner. The bullhead had crashed through the front wall and decimated the seating area but the back wall was relatively untouched. The bullhead itself was in pieces. Beyond its darkened carcass, he could see its wing and a chunk of its tail out on the street. Leaked concentrated Dust fuel flickered with dying power as, exposed to open air, it burned itself out.
Irritating noise and flickering broke through the rest of the din from behind him. A TV mounted on the wall tuned to a news station showed a map of Vale with designated points flashing. A scrolling headline, matching the audio, repeated over and over again: GRIMM ATTACK. IF YOU ARE SAFE, SHELTER IN PLACE. IF NOT SAFE, SEEK OUT YOUR NEAREST SHELTER.
He turned his gaze back on the diner. By the blood on the floor, a few people had been sheltering in place here. One of their bodies was a couple yards away, spread over the counter and torn to pieces. Grimm had cleared this place out already. He braced himself and vaulted over the counter.
"Anyone alive?" he called. Groans reached him from the ship and, after stepping over the pilot's body—thrown clear during the crash—he jumped back into the cockpit. The calico faunus was laid out and dazed on the main console, her white aura flickering but hanging on. He could come back for her if she didn't get up soon.
In the cargo hold, two of the remaining White Fang were picking themselves up unsteadily on the slanted floor. The last was still down. Adam crouched next to him and checked his pulse. Nothing. He rolled him over and saw why easily enough: a piece of shrapnel had pierced his chest. The kind of wound aura might've saved him from if he'd had enough to matter. He rested a hand on the man's chest for a moment. Their burials would have to wait. Them and the tens or hundreds of others who'd already perished, and the thousands who would die before the day was over.
"Your sacrifice won't be in vain," he promised, then stood. All three of the survivors had joined him on their feet in the hold. "We make for the nearest established safe zone."
They nodded and followed as he jumped down. Glass crunched under his boots as he crouch-walked through a small gap between the collapsed front wall and the bullhead. When he straightened on the other side, he did so to the sight of encroaching hell. The sky was black with smoke and Grimm, punctuated by explosions as stars and the occasional white flash of an Atlas craft. There were precious few bullheads still up in the air.
At ground level, fires from errant shots, crushed cars, and destroyed Dust lines raged. As repeated warnings to shelter in place blared from speakers spaced along every street, civilians ran screaming from where they'd been trying to do just that, chased by monsters and flames alike.
"Where's the safe zone?" asked the calico faunus, holding her rifle up and ready. Her trigger finger was shaking.
Adam spent a second orienting himself and then set off down the street. "This way. Stay close."
It was a superfluous order: the Grimm came in such numbers and so viciously that they had no choice but to stick together unless they wanted to die. Adam took point while they offer supporting fire from behind. They picked up a few stragglers on their way—faunus, of course. No human would approach a White Fang squad and expect any better treatment than they'd get from a squad of Grimm. The hell around them just got worse as they pushed farther from the crash site. More than once, they came across a knot of Grimm picking at the corpses of those too slow to find safety.
"So much for Atlas's protection," snarled one of the bullhead's survivors. Adam glanced by his feet, where the head of one of those white knights rolled lifelessly, a hole punched through its mask courtesy of whatever Grimm bit into it. There were more dismantled machines scattered around. If they'd taken any Grimm with them, and he was sure they did because their numbers were marginally thinner in this area, that evidence had already scattered on the wind.
They were a block from the safe zone when the bone-aching thunderclap of a flagship firing momentarily drowned out the cacophony of everything else. When the faunus around him shouted and cursed in surprise, he decapitated a lunging beowolf and turned his gaze skyward. For a second, he didn't understand what he was seeing: one flagship turned towards another, that second ship blown nearly in two and falling fast. Mutiny? Betrayal?
It hit the ground and he stumbled from the quake that tore across the earth. A shockwave blew by a second later. The Grimm were likewise jarred but didn't recover as quickly and so made easy targets for the spray of bullets loosed upon them. He got his scroll in hand and gestured for his group to pick up the pace. The comms were chaos, even more than before. After two attempts to speak, he shouted:
"Can anyone tell me what's going on?"
The unintelligible chaos raged for several more seconds before one voice broke through: "Sir! Atlas's forces have been hacked! They're firing on—AGH!"
"Get to cover!" Adam snapped. Fuck, giving a sitrep wasn't more important than his life.
While he was on comms, they reached the safe zone. It was just a bunch of wrecked cars piled up in a loose circle to make a defensive perimeter while tents and blankets had been set up in the heart. It was full to bursting with injured but the sky was too dangerous to use one of the two parked bullheads for evac. Where would they even evac to?
Adam gestured at the ranked faunus who broke from the group manning the wall to greet them, but held his tongue when another—shakier—voice came through the comms.
"This is Sharu, Mitchel's gone. The robots don't care about the Grimm anymore. Even the paladins. They're—they're targeting us and civilians!"
A wave of fear washed over the faunus close enough to overhear or have comms of their own. Even the paladins? He glared down at his scroll like it could answer for the shitshow this plan had become. A new plan. They needed a new plan. Another new plan. He raised his scroll. "All forces, treat Atlas's paladins as you would a goliath. Do not engage unless you know you can win. I want our own paladins establishing and holding perimeters around any safe zones."
If those had been hacked, someone would've said so. He turned his attention to the nearby faunus, whose expressions—for the masked ones, what he could see of their mouths—were grave. They were all looking at him. To him.
"The odds are against us," he acknowledged. He tipped his chin towards the rest of the city and the sea of Grimm pouring in through its outskirts. "Against Vale. But we are faunus. The odds are always against us. We fight not only for ourselves but for those who cannot take up arms to fight at our side. Down here are thousands of our brethren stuck in their homes or running in the streets, fearing for their lives and praying for rescue. The huntsmen won't save them."
He raised Blush. "We will."
His words were met with a resounding shout of agreement. He left splitting up the squads to the squad leaders; his attention was back on his scroll, where a call from Ruby had lit up the screen. He answered but had barely drawn breath to ask for an explanation on what had gone wrong when Ruby's voice crackled through the line, barely audible through the static-ridden sound of howling wind.
"ADAM!"
Wincing, he held his scroll a little farther from his ear. "Ruby. What's—"
"CINDER'S GETTING AWAY ON A GIANT NEVERMORE FLYING SOUTH FROM AMITY!"
Giant nevermore. Flying south—his eyes sought Amity in the sky. Thankfully, none of Atlas's ships had been made to fire on it. He'd ended up south of the arena, so he searched for a nevermore amid the utter bedlam in Vale's airspace. He swiftly gave up the effort; there was too much going on to parse from ground level.
"I'll intercept," he said, but he'd barely gotten two syllables out before the line went dead. No doubt Ruby was doing something singularly reckless. He wouldn't let her do it alone.
"I need a bullhead," he told the safe zone leader.
She was in way over her head. That was the only thought Ruby could spare to think between dodges and deflections. Arrows arced towards her face; she ducked. A black spear lunged for her throat; she fired and let the recoil shove her out of the way—right onto a swirling nexus of orange and yellow that blasted a column of fire upward.
Skidding across the nevermore's bony back, she couldn't even spare a second to pat out the smoldering parts of her cape or mourn the pieces that had been immolated when her semblance carried her out of that explosion. Cinder, one eye ablaze, shot forward to close what little distance she'd gained and rob Ruby of the time she needed to reload.
Ruby was fast but Crescent Rose, lacking the boost its recoil provided, was not. For every one of Cinder's dual swords she deflected, another slipped past her guard and cut another burning line into her aura. The wind ripped at her cape, her skirt, her hair. Every time she threw herself into her semblance, she fought not just momentum but that same wind, and it slowed her down.
High, low, jump the leg sweep and collapse Crescent Rose into a rifle as a shield against the twin-bladed thrust that hurled her towards the nevermore's tail. Redeploy her scythe and dig it into the Grimm's flesh, swing, and surrender to her semblance to avoid the flaming broadsword that tries to cut her in two—but leave Crescent Rose behind. Reform on Cinder's other side, grab the end of her scythe, and rip it free. Feel the blade cut into Cinder and focus her aura on her arms to throw her over the edge.
Panting, Ruby watched her opponent fall out of sight. It wasn't that easy. It couldn't be. It was obvious now, but Cinder had been holding back in the arena. Whether because of the audience or because she just didn't want to show all her cards, it didn't matter.
She reloaded and scanned the sky, but all she saw was a distant bullhead getting blown up and, past that, one of the Atlas flagships firing way off into the distance. The next attack didn't come from below but above: a pair of griffons diving down while the flagship's shockwave buffeted both Ruby and the nevermore below. She stumbled out of the way of the first's dive and put a new hole in its head. The second twisted out of the way and loosed an ear-ringing shriek while its maw angled for Ruby's face.
She twisted Crescent Rose and, abs aching from the strain, impaled the monster from below. Her eyes widened at the orange light reflecting off her blade. Its source was behind her—but the Grimm weighed her weapon down and that split second of delay to activate her semblance cost her dearly. She tumbled out of her semblance, whole body burning, smoke rising from her shoulders and aura flickering.
Cinder alighted on the nevermore's back, the flames under her feet sputtering out, and casually brushed off her stomach like Ruby hadn't nearly bisected her. She looked none the worse for wear despite several straight minutes of fighting.
Ruby got to her feet and admitted the truth to herself: she wasn't just in over her head, she was losing. Stall. She had to stall while she figured out a way out of this.
"Why are you doing this?" she shouted over the wind. "What is there to even get out of this? All you're doing is hurting people!"
Smirking, Cinder opened her mouth to answer, only to pause as her smirk shifted into a smile. A chill ran down Ruby's spine in the same moment a distant roar washed over her and she looked over her shoulder back to where that flagship had fired. There was something flying from there—from Mountain Glenn. Something massive. And the nevermore was turning toward it.
She looked back to Cinder, whose smile had turned patronizing. She'd let Ruby take that look, let her feel that dread, and hadn't even bothered taking advantage of the opening. Ruby squeezed Crescent Rose, shame burning high on her cheeks. Cinder didn't even see this as a fight.
Fine. If she underestimated Ruby, then fine. Everyone did, and they regretted it after. Cinder would feel that regret too, once Ruby put a stop to her. She wasn't going to fail. She couldn't. Beyond Cinder, past the nevermore's head, the black stain that was the wyvern appeared intermittently between swarming Grimm. And Ruby had her plan.
"Why," she said one more time, just to get Cinder talking.
"Come now, isn't it obvious? The higher something is built, the more tempting it is to see it fall."
"Normal people don't think like that. Good people don't think that."
"So eager to draw lines. Tell me, when you were playing vigilante, where were—"
Ruby's scythe, behind her, did not appear to the uninformed observer to be in any kind of attack position. Quite the opposite: what good was a weapon behind its wielder? The uninformed, of course, didn't stay that way for long. Not after the first trigger pull.
Attacking mid-sentence was underhanded but Cinder deflected her first slash like she'd expected it. The knee to her jaw, though, caught her by surprise. Another trigger-pull bounced a bullet off the aura on Cinder's foot and launched Ruby above her. A third and a burst of petals brought her to the nevermore's neck, which was considerably less bony than the rest of it. Cinder's fire-coated hands stilled, recognizing the risk.
If Cinder could fly on her own for any longer than a few seconds, she wouldn't bother with the nevermore. Which meant, if Ruby took down their ride, she'd probably throw a wrench into Cinder's plan, whatever it was. As Crescent Rose's proud mechanic, she was more than familiar with wrenches, and the throwing of them.
So, grinning at Cinder, she twirled Crescent Rose and buried the scythe up to its haft in the nevermore's spine. The Grimm loosed an ear-splitting shriek and lost its smooth glide through the air; Cinder staggered and Ruby held tight to her weapon to keep her feet. The moment was short-lived, as Cinder recovered her balance and, deciding her ride was already a lost cause, formed and hurled a fireball hot enough to dry Ruby's eyes even before it struck.
On the Grimm's neck, there was nowhere to go. She braced herself for a desperate semblance rush over to a wing, where she could hopefully grab feathers and climb back up before Cinder torched those too—
"Duck!"
The sharp order cut through the noise and Ruby obeyed instantly. A black blur whooshed over her head and into the fireball, detonating it early. The thing—a griffon, she realized as she straightened—disintegrated instantly, but three arrows broke through its misty remains. Another shadow dropped from where it had jumped off—kicked away from—its steed and straightened with a red blade already arcing to intercept.
The arrows shattered. Adam landed, found his balance, and straightened.
Ruby stared, shock at his abrupt entrance and relief at no longer being alone out here bubbling up her throat until what came out was, "That…that was so cool!"
He glanced back at her as he flourished his blade to dispel lingering Grimm matter, eyes hidden behind his mask but lips twisted in a severe scowl directed not at Ruby but the entire situation. "I would've preferred my bullhead not going down in flames, but it got me close enough. Take a moment to catch your breath."
His sword slid into its sheath and he faced Cinder. Every bit of red on his person pulsed with violent promise, none more obviously than the crimson rose splashed over his back. "She won't escape me again."
His heart raced with adrenaline. His veins sang with it. His hands, though, were steady as he readied them around Wilt and Blush. They had been steady when he abandoned his damaged bullhead for a nearby griffon, steady as he stabbed the creature and used his embedded sword to steer it, and steady as he saw those arrows flying towards a Ruby too distracted by the fireball to see them coming.
"Adam," Cinder greeted, voice barely reaching him over the wind. She had a black glass bow in hand and more arrows arranged between her fingers, arrows that grew steadily brighter with heat.
"Cinder." Unlike her, he could let the wind carry his words. "I've waited too long for this."
Her eyes flared with hate. "So have I."
There was some satisfaction in knowing she'd found having to rely on his faction's strength grating. It paled in comparison to the satisfaction of finally, finally, drawing his blade against her.
He crossed the distance between them in an instant. A silhouette of himself, black and red and faster than even he could move, cut away her first arrow. A second silhouette cleaved her bow in two. He passed through both shadows and thrust Wilt at her stomach. She kneed the blade high, uncaring of the edge biting into her aura, and in a flash of fire had exchanged her bow for twin swords.
Snarling, he engaged her with a vengeance. Their clash was bloody red against firelight, hate against hate. The flagging nevermore keened with pain for every new wound dug and burned into its flesh where feathers had been seared and cut away.
Yet for all Adam's fury, for all the power he gained with every clash of their blades, he couldn't break through Cinder's defenses. Crafty and quick, she never put up a block that couldn't be better served with a deflection. Her little traps—fiery nexuses on the nevermore's back, exploding shards of glass, an ambient heat that scorched his lungs with every inhale—chipped away at his aura as quickly as he chipped away at hers.
A battle of attrition, though, he'd win. Even with his aura nearly halved by what he'd endured before starting this duel. Especially with Ruby providing support with well-placed sniper shots powerful enough to knock Cinder back when they connected.
She let them push her all the way to the nevermore's tailfeathers, which shivered and bowed under her weight. Despite the drop, she stared at him with satisfaction in her gaze. He didn't bother with Blush; at this distance, they both knew she was more than capable of deflecting its bullets.
Beneath them, the nevermore gave one last dying shriek as it succumbed to its wounds. One final pump of its wings brought them up and Adam decided to see just how much of her dominance she could exert over gravity: Wilt flashed and cut a crimson line through the tailfeathers at the base.
"She can fly!" Ruby called, too late for it to matter. Cinder, though, made no move to fly back up: she fell, smiling all the while, and then abruptly used a blast of fire to throw herself to where the wyvern had banked to get below the nevermore's final ascent.
Cursing, Adam jumped after her, legs aching from the aura he shunted into them to fuel his leap. But the wyvern, Cinder a bright spark on its back, swiftly banked away. Adam twisted and cut through a couple of griffons trying to intercept him and watched the wyvern beat its wings and carry itself clean out of his path.
He angled himself for another griffon. The odds he could pull off that piloting trick twice were laughable, but he had to try. The Grimm saw him coming and reared, wings flaring, and he—
He broke apart. Fingers to arm to chest, down to legs and up to his head, mouth and nose and ears and eyes, everything going to pieces and peeling away so fast he didn't even have time to scream before there was nothing left of him to make any sound at all. Some core concept of him was aware of motion, some other person around him, their pieces guiding his, and if he reached there was his own aura, and if he had aura he could use his semblance to—
Abruptly whole, Adam collapsed to his knees and almost vomited. All of his senses were dialed up too high and he had to flare his aura as much as he could to get things under control.
"Sorry," he heard Ruby say from his left. "There wasn't time to make it easier on you."
"Your semblance?" he guessed, getting to his feet and only staggering once, which he could attribute to the wyvern's undulating body that wavered with each beat of its massive wings. They were near the base of its tail. Cinder, by its shoulders, turned to watch the disintegrating nevermore fall past—and in the process noticed them.
"Yeah. Are you ready?"
A thin smile fueled by Cinder's scowl made it to his lips. "For this? Always. And Ruby," he spoke quickly, "even if I'm in the path of one of your shots should Cinder move, I want you to shoot anyway."
"What? But—"
He cut her off with a look he knew she recognized even through his mask. "Trust me."
She swallowed her protests. "Okay."
They didn't need a signal to launch into motion; Cinder's hail of arrows did that. And then, when the arrows proved insufficient to deter them, the fire returned.
The fire blasts she'd used so sparingly on the nevermore's back were suddenly unending. The most they did was scorch the wyvern's bony plates and the Grimm itself seemed unbothered by anything they did on its back. There would be no incapacitating this ride without first incapacitating Cinder. But their bullets never connected, either because she dodged or simply stopped them with an upraised hand.
They weaved in and out of the creature's spines, using them as cover from the worst of the barrage until they got close enough to use their blades. Cinder met their teamwork with dual blades and fury to match. They got on opposite sides of her, trading blows to a beat that sped up and slowed without rhythm but with enough reason to make keeping up possible.
Cinder watched Ruby's bullet miss her by hairs when she dodged, smiling thinly—until that bullet drew sparks off Wilt's blade, a blade that flared red and subsequently cut for her neck. She forced him to abandon the attack with a rush of flame but Ruby didn't let her push the advantage.
They warred on the wyvern's back, nothing but red and black blurs amid sparks and flames. Adam had the advantage of speed and offense with Moonslice, and Ruby with Crescent Rose's recoil had unmatched agility, even in the air. Cinder, though, had the firepower and reflexes to keep up even with the both of them pressing her simultaneously.
Still, he could use his semblance to carve through her glass weapons. She replaced them almost instantly, but that almost gave him and Ruby openings. And with them this close, she couldn't use the explosive firepower she was so fond of. The waves of flame remained a problem, though.
"Ruby!" Adam shouted. She launched herself with a shot from her weapon; Cinder leaned swiftly out of the way but Adam on the other side caught Ruby's outstretched hand. Her momentum launched him upward for a better angle. He called on his semblance, cloaking himself in a blazing red glow he knew Cinder couldn't ignore.
As expected, she hurled a wave of fire at him. A wave she angled high. A wave Ruby avoided easily.
In the past, he had refused to be bait. At first, it was because he hated the powerlessness of that position, the lack of control. Even after he grew strong enough to turn the tables on whoever thought they could kill him and escape the trap, it chafed. Later, being bait was beneath him.
Now, though, he could appreciate the role for its sheer utility, personal biases aside. When the fire finished washing over him, diminished by the miniature Moonslice that weakened it without draining his stores more than absolutely necessary, he was treated to the sight of Ruby's scythe—now a polearm—spearing into Cinder's stomach.
A blink and Cinder was shot into one of the wyvern's spines, cracking the bone. Her aura flickered but her flames roared. Adam landed just in time to throw himself away from a pillar of fire. Similar swirling nexuses of flame bloomed all over the wyvern's back. He and Ruby peppered Cinder with bullets as they dodged, zigzagging across the wyvern to close the distance. Any smaller Grimm who tried to interfere got caught in Cinder's fire.
Arrows flashed across the gap. Wilt flashed to cut them apart. A glimmer of unnatural light in the black glass shards was his only warning that something was different. He turned Wilt and brought it back up just in time for it to absorb the brunt of the explosion. The remainder knocked him against a spine. Ruby smacked into him, dress smoldering in a couple of places. They both coughed until the wind chased away the smoke.
"The arrows explode," she groaned.
"They do," he confirmed, and maybe that came out as a bit of a groan too.
Ruby glanced around. "She's not attacking us."
The abrupt lack of explosions and sharp objects was disconcerting. "She can't see us. The explosions masked where we went; she doesn't know where we are."
"That's what she gets for trying to blow us sky-high." Ruby went to peer around the edge but Adam yanked her back into cover by the hood. "Sorry."
"We need a strategy. Her aura is bound to be getting low by now. She sees my semblance as the greatest threat, which is why she's so desperate to keep me at a distance. And she's put herself on its head, where the spines are thinnest and she'll have the best view. Reaching her won't be easy, but if we can land a decisive blow, this fight is over."
"I have an idea."
He tipped his head in a silent bid for her to continue.
"We need to surprise her, right? So let's do that. If she'll see us coming from above, then I'll go below."
"Below?"
"You jump out and distract her while I use my semblance to go out the other way and down underneath. I'll loop around, come up behind her, and take her down."
"This Grimm is massive. The path around it is long. Can you make it?"
She bit her lip and briefly popped Crescent Rose's magazine out to count the bullets. After a beat, she nodded. "I'll have to slow down to change my angle and build momentum, but yeah, I can. I will. Can you hold her alone?"
"How's this: if you take too long, I might just take her down myself."
"No way. I'll be there before you can blink!"
"Good."
He braced himself, and—after one last nod to Ruby—darted out from behind cover. The much-missed explosions found him again immediately, throwing him off on his very first stride. But luck favored him, because the wyvern had its wings up. He kicked off its arm to get back on-course and rolled under a scorching blade of heat that would've caught him at the waist.
Getting to Cinder without Ruby there to draw some of the heat came at the cost of a good chunk of his remaining aura. But he managed, hoping that Ruby had been able to slip below unnoticed.
"You're stubborn," Cinder snarled when he got close. His answer was a Moonslice that would've caught her at the waist had she not leaped over it. Fire erupted from her feet and turned her jump into a spinning wheel of flame he caught on Wilt. Past the heel grinding against the blade was a bow drawn taut and he abandoned his defense before the arrow could detonate at his feet.
As he kept her engaged, kept her focused on him, he was all too aware of his waning reserves. Sweat beaded on the edges of his mask and his breaths were coming faster and faster. This wasn't sustainable. This wasn't—
A flicker of non-flame red was his only warning of Ruby's approach before Crescent Rose, once more a polearm so Cinder would never even see it wrapping around her, slammed clean into Cinder's spine and drove her into Wilt's welcoming edge. Adam called on his stored semblance with vicious pleasure and felt it bite into her, cutting clean through where her aura was too thin to stop it.
He intended to bisect her, but her agonized scream was bolstered by a torrent of flames that sent him and Ruby flying back. He speared the wyvern to keep from getting thrown off, Ruby doing the same, both of their auras flickering in warning. They squinted into the pillar of fire but couldn't see anything until Cinder let it fade.
Her dress was shorn through just above her belly button and blood peeled away from the inch-deep wound as wilting petals. Not fatal, but—
The flames were dying out but the sparks lingering around her were not. They weren't from the fire. They were Cinder's aura. Cinder's broken aura.
Exultant vengeance pushed him forward through the heat-distorted air. Off-balance with pain, Cinder wasn't quite agile enough to dodge. Wilt tore through her sleeve, drawing a crimson line across her bicep. She twisted and summoned a black blade to block Wilt before he could apply enough pressure to take her arm and then summoned a second to handle Crescent Rose.
Adam hesitated. He couldn't help it, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Ruby doing the same. Cinder's aura was broken, how was she still—
A shockingly swift twist of her wrists and body left Adam cutting through empty air. Her footwork let her weave through Ruby's follow-up, but her furious gaze stayed on him. The blood pouring out of her arm and stomach stained her dress's sleeve and bodice.
"Enough," she snarled, the light around her eye burning bright enough to blind, his only warning before the ground lit up under his feet with a familiar nexus of orange light. He leaped back to dodge only to realize by the steady light still below him that she'd prepared a second one where he couldn't see.
"Adam!" Crescent Rose closed in on Cinder, but it wasn't fast enough to break her focus. She tipped her head to avoid the only shot he could get off with Blush before he was blasted away.
Gaze white and ears ringing, he hit the Grimm's back hard, bounced, spun, and once again dug his sword into its flesh in a gap between plates to keep from falling off. The beast screeched in irritation, one more sound battering his brain.
Ruby's cry shot right through all of that noise. His eyes snapped to her, to the red sparks of broken aura glittering around her, to the next arrow already nocked on the bow aimed at her.
"No," he whispered, the word snatched away by the wind the instant it fell from his lips.
He had so little. So precious fucking little. On a good day he counted his name, his sword, and his branch. No family alive, no friends left. Blake, he'd lost. His branch, Cinder stole. What was left? His name and his weapon. At times they felt one and the same; who was he beyond the violence he could wield? Did it matter? In his darkest moments, the answer was no.
Ruby changed that. She thought it—he—mattered. Time and again she'd slipped right over the walls he'd built around himself like so many petals on the wind until he had no choice but to think he was more than what his enemies believed him to be. Until he had no choice but to be more.
There was fear in her eyes. Seeing it, something swelled in him. Something hot and furious and desperate. It stretched, pulled between two desperate points, and stretched more with the pleas pounding through his brain.
Not her. Not like this. Not her.
That something snapped. The world blurred. His muscles screamed; something in his legs, several somethings, tore with bright blooms of searing heat. None of that mattered. His outstretched hand closed around the cloak blown closer to him by the wind. He yanked even as he kept moving—
The bow was still tracking her, its wielder too skilled to miss at this range—
He was in front of her now, sword arcing to intercept the arrow as it had so many before—
The arrow that was breaking up into shards and reforming on the other side of his blade—
A flash of disbelief, of fear—
And then a new hot point, pain radiating out like lightning. His legs giving out as dying red sparks drifted up, faded away. Eyes dropping to his chest, the black arrow embedded in it.
Oh.