Before you begin this chapter, I've changed around a lot of the previous chapters and added in some more scenes to them, so if you could go check them out, that'd be grand.
Main theme: Enemy by Imagine Dragons and J.I.D
Arc theme: Can't Trust Anyone by Jeff Williams
Theme: Trespass from the Destiny 2: The Witch Queen Soundtrack
AW SECURITY NETWORK:
RECORD: #342
PERSONS: ARTHUR WATTS (1), ESPER FYRE (2)
LOCATION: WISHING WELL FACILITY COMM ONE
STATUS: COMM 1 ACTIVE. VALE IN CRISIS. NO THREATS TO COMM ONE DETECTED
THREAT STATUS: RELATIVE
RECORDING:
(1.1): "Are you ready?"
(2.1): "As ready as I can be."
(1.2): "Fyre..."
(2.2): "I know, I know, I'm doing this for the cause. I ain't got any regrets about that."
(1.3): "But..."
(2.3): "But it's still hard to process, you know. Having to give my life for it. We all say that we can give our lives for what we believe in, but when the time comes for it... well, it's still not an easy pill to swallow, is all."
(1.4): "The Daughter gave the order-"
(2.4): "And what she wants, she gets. I'm happy to deliver it to her."
(1.5): "Really?"
(2.5): "Old man, for the longest time I've had nothing going for me. My life has been a roller coaster of 'What the fuck' moments, and the only way I've known how to respond to them is with violence. The Daughter was the first person in all my life to give me a home - a real home - and a purpose in my life to direct myself towards. I would be dead if it wasn't for her, and I'd give my life for the cause as eagerly as any other."
(1.6): "But..."
(2.6): "No buts. Just settling myself on that fact... okay, settled. Or as settled as I can be, I suppose."
(1.7): "It is a difficult thing to swallow, to sacrifice your life for a cause."
(2.7): "I know... but it's necessary."
(1.8): "As it is... for the Ascendant Court."
(2.8): "For the Court."
{SOUNDS OF FOOTSTEPS}
{SOUNDS OF LIFT DOOR OPENING THEN CLOSING}
{SILENCE= 0.06 SECONDS}
{LAUGHTER}
(1.9): "Stupid little girl... 'For the Ascendant Court'. What nonsense. The Daughter has no power here. This is all for me."
{SOUNDS OF FOOTSTEPS.}
{SOUNDS OF A COMPUTER}
(1.10): "Now then, I just need to perform the daily checks, and delete this little conversation from the archives, and-"
Transcript of an archived conversation, deleted from the main records but held in the backlogs behind dozens of firewalls. The log was recovered from the salvaged ruins of the Wishing Well facility
Velvet was in a daze.
Everything around her was all whistles and blurs. Smoke commingled with rain and soot and steam to obscure her vision. Her hands were warm and wet. All four of her ears were bleeding. Everything was moving in slow motion. Her entire body was numb.
As a medic/nurse/doctor-in-training, her experience in the field of care and healing allowed her to identify all the afflictions that had befallen her. The ringing in her ears was a mixture of both tinnitus and the fact that her eardrums - in all four of her ears - had burst from the explosion-
Her mind was slowly beginning to catch up with her. There had been an explosion, there had been an explosion.
-The warm trickle of blood running down her face and chin were from the fact that her jaw had been broken from the force of impact from her hitting the ground (thanks for that, Ruby). Her body felt numb because the sudden overload of pain had fried her senses and her nervous system had been shot as a result.
Her aura must've broken protecting her from the explosion. She must've barely had a moment or two to activate it. Now it was shattered but coming back to her. She was beginning to feel her nervous system stitch back together and no no no not yet now because I know what's about to happen and-
Her pain receptors were healed and switched back on.
Pain flooded over her.
She couldn't hear the blistering scream that flooded from her mouth as her aura pushed her bones back into place and welded them back together, pasting a thin wall of calcium over her shattered bones as they are wedged back into place. It was only when her aura paved over her ears, pushed out the waste blood clogging them, and healed the drums in them, that she could hear the scratchy guttural cry leaving her throat as her veins stitched themselves back together and shrapnel was pushed out of her bloody wounds. Her throat went horse and she found herself losing her voice as she turned her head forward and looked down herself.
Her clothes were torn and singed, and her skin was cut up and burnt and still smoking, blistering into different shades of black and red and everything in-between. Canyons and valleys of flayed skin and shards of bone stabbing through her flesh ran up and down her body as she writhed and moved and tried to make sense of the world around her.
Eventually, her aura did all that it could and left her on her own, leaving her lying on the floor broken and beaten and bloody and in pain.
So much pain. There was nothing but pain for her.
However, she began to fight through that pain, finding the energy within her to move her body and roll over onto her stomach. A harsh groan of agony left her as she turned her head upwards from the ground once more to see-
Panic. Fear. Madness. Confusion. Chaos.
Death.
Everyone and everything were in pandemonium. Rubble littered the ground in shards and blocks, splintering the ground and the feet who treaded over them. Smoke and steam filled the air into a thin mist, punctuated by an army of coughs and splutters leaving the mouths of those wounded and alive. The smell of sodium potassium bicarbonate invaded her bloody nose, nostrils clogged by blood trailing down her chin, as a hundred workers ran fire extinguishers over miniscule pits of flames, and bare buckets of rainwater over others. Many wounded are laying amongst the dead, tended to by an army of medics and improv doctors. Others not as critically injured were standing and sitting with the rest, making hushed and worried conversation, wandering the broken hall in shellshock (their eyes empty and hollow and dull), sitting still with their hands clasping their heads, or just curled up into balls on the floor and rocking in place, wet sobs leaving their dry mouths and broken, bloody lips.
Velvet's attention turned to the bodies on the floor. The dead and the dying. Many of them were ravaged and in pieces, missing limbs and flesh and smeared in black burns and red blood. The empty stare of a girl (a former Huntress in training) named Aqua greeted her. Her head had been severed from her body, the neck a charred stump. Over it, a sobbing frog Faunus by the name of Tessa Ansel cradled the unconscious, but still alive, form of Uma Ousel, the right side of the latter girl's body charred and missing her arm. Nearby, the body of Mini Yukari, a girl from the old Team VAKY, had lost all the flesh on its back and filled the air with the smell of cooked meat that was off date.
Were Yatsuhashi and Fox okay? What about Coco? Where was she? Where was-
Her head fell to the side, and she saw a burnt corpse, charred to the bone and left with rungs of flesh and muscle clinging to it, laying on the ground not too far away from her. On its back, which wasn't as burnt as the rest of its body, brown shards of fabric clung to what was left of the skin.
…
…
…
…
No.
No!
No...
"No..." Velvet wheezed out through a suffocatingly taunt voice as she summoned whatever energy she had left in her body to try and lift her arms and crawl over to the body of her team leader, "Co... co..."
A dry sob left her broken lips.
"Coco... Coco..."
She had never been able to take Coco up on her countless offers to go out, or make out, or even just be a little bit more than friends. Velvet had been as in love with Coco as Coco had been for her, but Velvet hadn't ever acted on it. Her religion, as a follower of Azul Primus, had never allowed her to take on Coco lest she was sure that it was a relationship that would last forever, and even then, the stresses of war had forced her to prioritise taking part in it over a relationship anytime soon.
But now, with Coco dead and gone...
"Coco..."
Velvet was regretting ever letting her go.
"Coco...!"
Velvet slammed her hand down before her. The shockwave of sharp pain sent a ripple effect through her body as her arm collapsed beneath her, blood and flakes of skin printing the ground in red beneath her, but she gritted her teeth and tried to push through it as she forced herself forwards.
The pain... it was unbearable. Overwhelming. It assaulted every part of her body, all the way to her own senses.
But she still kept pressing forwards, mumbling the name of her beloved team leader as her body frayed from her wounds and blood loss and her senses were overwhelmed by agony and the pain kept building and building and building until-
"Co... co..."
-She fell limp and slipped away into unconsciousness.
Even with her insulated armour and bodysuit, Melanie could feel the cold air of the lift shaft blowing past her as she continued to climb down rungs and pipes of its walls. The gentle sound of water drops landing on a faraway surface echoed through the pitch-black shaft, barely lit by the dim light from the opened doors high above. It was so dark that Melanie had to use her helmet's night vision mode just to see where she was placing her hands and feet. It wasn't a very good mode, being only black shapes marked by green outlines, but it was better than nothing.
"You too alright up there?" she called out to her two companions above her. Jaune was scaling down almost at her side, just a single foot between them. Ruby was further up along the wall, quickly scaling down to catch up with them.
"Ruby, don't go too quick," Jaune admonished her, "You might slip if you do."
Through her night vision, Melanie could see Ruby nod at his words. She slowed her pace and clung further to the rungs of the wall.
They continued to climb down, intent on reaching wherever the hell Watts had taken off to.
"Speed is of the essence, you know," Melanie pointed out, "Watts is eager to get somewhere. He won't stay still for long."
Jaune nodded, "You might be right."
She climbed down a rung, "I am right."
"Yeah."
Above them, Ruby sped up slightly.
Melanie spared a moment to look up to Ruby, narrowing her eyes under her helmet as she asked, "So what was that back there?" a droplet of water landed on her helmet and rolled down its cheek, but she ignored it in favour of looking up to her sister-in-arms.
Ruby paused in turn to look at her, "What do you mean?"
"That Grimm up above. The one in chains," she paused for effect, "What's its deal?"
"I don't know," Ruby quickly added. A little too quickly for Melanie's liking, "I've never met him before."
"Is that so?"
"It is so," Ruby cut in with.
"Then why was it-"
"Talking to me like he knew me?" Melanie didn't like being interrupted, but she let Ruby continue regardless, "I don't know. He was probably part of the Choir of Silver though, with the way that he was speaking. That's my best guess."
"Yeah?"
"I swear to you, Melanie, I don't know that Grimm. I've never spoken to him before. Heck, I didn't even know he existed until today."
"And yet you took a while speaking to him up there, right?"
"Only because he insisted on it."
"And what was the conversation?"
"The usual Silver-Eyed Warrior worship."
"Just that?"
"Just that."
"And nothing else?"
"Nothing at all."
"Well-"
"Melanie, stop," she paused and looked downwards to see Jaune looking up towards them further below the wall of the elevator shaft, the glare of his helmet's lens cutting through the dank darkness. She couldn't see his expression underneath his helmet, but she could tell that it was a frown, "Drop it. If Ruby says that she doesn't know the Grimm, then she doesn't know it. Simple as that."
Melanie ignored Ruby's preening at his words as she shook her head, shaking off the second droplet of water that was sliding down the lens of her helmet and going, "It's not that I don't believe her... I just worry, you know."
"Ah, I know," Jaune added as he began to climb down the walls of the dark and damp elevator shaft once more, prompting Ruby and Melanie to continue as well, "C'mon. We still need to catch up to Watts."
As before, the ascent down to the bottom of the shaft was as quick as ever, yet still felt like an eternity as they slowly but surely reached the blackened bottom-
"Jump down now."
-The three of them jumping off the edge of the wall and landing on the bottom, that being the top of the lift itself, with a hollow {CLANG}.
With a motion, Melanie reached down and pulled the top hatch off the lift, jumping into the antiquated silver and gold elevator and pulling open the sliding metal doors ahead of them as quietly as possible, letting Ruby and Jaune jump down into the lift behind them as she pushed herself through the gap in the lift doors and stepped into-
An underground hallway, one surrounded by water.
It was like she was walking through an ocean, one separated from them by an overarching plain of glass split into sections and squares by metal rungs and slits, barely lit by a series of white lights in the ceiling above. The air around them was cold and damp, accompanied by the sounds of dripping water. Behind the glass, the water was oppressively dark, obscured by the black clouds of the sky in the far distance, the little light that shone through rippled and rumbled by the constant rainfall above. Smatterings of algae and undergrowth in the surface of the ocean's bottom covered the outsides of the window, and the faint outlines of fish big and small cast shadows through the little light that they had to guide their way. Up ahead, Melanie could see the faraway end to the corridor under the water, looking through the shadows and seeing the traces of a massive dome made of glass and steel frames up above.
This had to be right underneath the Wishing Well Lake, whatever the hell this... facility was. How long had it been here? Before the Surge? Before the Initiation Massacre? How long had Watts had this place running right under the nose of Beacon?
Had the people in charge known about it all along? Had Goodwitch? Had Ozpin?
He had to have known. He had to.
"Don't turn your flashlights on," Melanie advised as they all stepped into the glass and metal hallway, all of them pulling their guns out (Melanie her dual ML-17 pistols, Jaune his ML-15A carbine in one hand and unnamed sword in the other, and Ruby her silver bracelet guns) and aiming it down the corridor, "No need to let him know we're coming."
"She's right," Jaune whispered to them, moving ahead of her as he ordered, "Guns up, lights out. Thermals and night vision only."
Ruby and Melanie nodded, and the two of them flipped up their helmet's alt-modes of sight. Melanie's vision became a murky swamp of blacks outlined in green, constantly pinging out in waves around her as they moved forward.
And then, through her helmet's advanced noise sensors, she heard voices up ahead.
Before the kingdoms, there was the Dark Age. Not to be confused by the Dark Times, of course. The Dark Age was a millennia-long period of time in which no law had ruled the world, no kingdoms, and no governing body at all to safeguard the people. How humanity survived that period of time was still a debate for historians and philosophers of all walks to this day, but it was commonly believed that man endured through tooth and claw and sword, as it always did.
But before that, before the Dark Age and the Kingdoms and all that came with them, there was the Age of Apostles, where the Twelve Faiths ruled the world and forged their fiefdoms and dynasties out of word and scripture and pure belief in those higher than themselves.
Much of the history of this age of time was lost to them, and the only known surviving faiths, both major and minor, to survive this time were the Church of the Brother Gods and its Brotherhood of Two offshoot, the faith of Azul Primus, and the belief in the Animal God, as well as a few other beliefs here and there, but the rest of the religions that had once ruled Remnant's past had been lost to time, gone and forgotten.
This age of history was marked not by the power of kingdoms, but the power of faith. Science was overwritten by superstition. Armies went off not on wars, but on crusades. Priests and their disciples dictated the way of the world. Churches and cathedrals were where these people gathered to speak and discuss. It was a time where the belief in Gods held sway over the people in any and every aspect of life, where religion mixed with political policy, and the tenants of each theology were the rules that governed each household.
It was also a time where man was most divided, it's armies of crusaders regularly duelling each other, crying out the names of their deities and demanding glory and honour to pass on with into their afterlives as they died. Great statues of worship were raised in this time, some of them piercing through the clouds and reaching upwards to the sky. Entire cities of churches and mosques and cathedrals dotted the landscape, and their peoples lived by the way of their faith in these theocracies, spending their lives going out on pilgrimages, either spreading the world of their gods out through word and pieces, or through sword and war.
It was as much a time of peace as it was for war, and all of them were fuelled by the power of the divine.
And then it all came to a thunderous end.
What brought about the end of the Age of Apostles and the coming of the Dark Age over two thousand years ago is not well documented, but according to legend a faith by the name of the Seven Sons, a violent cult that worshipped the Creatures of Grimm and the seven deadly sins, and were led by eight figures, that being seven representations of the seven sins, and the last being their leader and the representation of sin itself. They raised their own armies of crusaders, seven in total, and waged a violent and bloody war against the Twelve Faiths, bringing their grand statues tumbling down and burning their cathedral cities to the ground.
It was said that when the last cathedral was turned to ashes that the last of the Seven Sons' number, the representation of sin, took to the field. Legend described him as less of a Human or Faunus, and more of a maw, a swirling mass of pure evil that was both formed and formless at the same time. It was described as eating the sins of the people that it encountered, draining their wills and remaking them into its own, creating entire armies of crusader slaves in its name to ravage the world and bring the planet itself to heel.
Eventually, the Seven Sons' rampage across the world would be brought to the end as what was left of the Twelve Faiths banded together into one last holy crusade to defeat them, utterly destroying them not through sword and steel, but through the power of their own belief, combining the strength of their wills to banish their evil and bring about their end.
But by then, it was too late. According to legend, what was left of the people of the Twelve Faiths only numbered in a few hundred (though legends had a tendency to conflate and murky details. Odds were that it was at least a few million people left alive in the world, scattered in various villages and so on, as about three million people would be needed to continue both Human and Faunus species (as they were both genetically compatible with each other) in order to ensure safe genetic diversity in those that came afterward), and were scattered across the world by the Grimm, allowing Remnant to sink into a Dark Age that would last for a thousand years before the noble warriors of Vale, Vacuo, Mantle, and Mistral stepped forward and established the four kingdoms.
Why was Weiss thinking about this?
Because surely the fanatical zeal that the crusaders of the Seven Sons felt had to match Esper's to the point of wanting to blow herself up.
She was on her knees on the floor of the auditorium, surrounded by smoke. Her aura had healed her injuries, but her ears were still ringing and her body was covered in soot. Her clothes were singed and burnt, her armour scorched with black pits and caverns dug out by shrapnel and flame. Her weapon was to the side, turned into a hunk of useless metal.
She was on her knees, head down, still wrapped in shellshock. The sounds of those shouting around her sounded hollow, like they had been drowned out by water, like she was at the bottom of the ocean.
Esper Fyre had exploded.
Exploded, like a bomb.
Esper Fyre was a suicide bomber.
Why? The question repeated itself in her mind. Why why why why why? Why had Esper turned herself into a bomb? Why go off in the middle of the troop inspection? Who had she been working for? What had prompted her to make such a decision? Had she been ordered to do so? Had she been forced? What could she believe in so strongly that it would compel her to kill herself and so many others in such a way.
It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense at all.
Someone shook her shoulders. She didn't react at all to it. Her eyes was still tilted down, her eyes looking at nothing at all. Everything was just a blur, even her own thoughts. Trying to put her mind to anything else other than what was happening around her was the only thing keeping her from breaking down into maddened tears right on the spot, hence the historical exposition/rant above.
Her pride as a Schnee would not allow such a thing. Her pride as a Schnee was the only thing that she had left.
Her family was broken, culled, divided, and scattered. Jacques, Willow, and Klein were dead. Winter was off in the remnants of Atlas, entertaining Ironwood's dreams of rebuilding the kingdom amongst its ashes. Whitley was in Menagerie, under the care of a Faunus family (and wasn't that ironic?) that she knew nothing about, only that Sienna Khan, leader of the House of the White Wolves, trusted them (and wasn't that even more ironic?).
And Weiss...
Weiss was still in Beacon, still involved in the war, still trying to fight for her pride as a Schnee.
Because what else was there for her?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Someone shook her shoulders again, harder this time. She finally looked up.
Ciel Soleli, her bodyguard (who had only stuck around her at this time because there really wasn't anything left for her as well) was standing before her, worming her hands under her shoulders and into her armpits and pulling her up. Her armour was as blackened as Weiss', melted at some parts and fused together like molten metal and plastic. It looked awkward to walk in.
"On your feet," Ciel ordered as she grabbed Weiss' hand, "Let's go."
Weiss didn't say anything. She couldn't. Her mind was still frayed and confused, unsure of what was going on around her.
Ciel seemed to notice her confusion as she said, "I promised you that if things went south, I'd get you out of this school."
She clenched her hand around Weiss', and began to pull her out of the auditorium.
"And that's what I'm going to do."
"Actually, I have good news... and I have bad news."
Watts could feel Hephaestus' single eye narrow under its helmet. He felt vexed at the Grimm's irritancy with his answer. It wasn't his fault that that stupid Malachite girl had figured him out. He had been doing all that he could to protect his own identity in the school, what else was she supposed to do?
"Explain."
He suppressed the urge to growl at the hologram before him as it spoke, "Well, the good news is that-"
"Bad news first," the Grimm ordered. Watts hid his frown at the interruption, but didn't say anything. This Grimm wasn't Salem, this he knew, so he felt more indignant in being cut off by it more than he would've by the Queen of the Grimm herself, "Good news afterward salve wound."
Watts groused slightly, but kept it to himself, "Well, Esper did as she was told-"
"Said bad news first."
A silent groan of annoyance, "Ozpin... was not killed in the blast."
"...And?"
"And what?"
"Ozpin is irrelevant to plans. Was Arc and friends killed in blast?"
Watts resisted the urge to roll his eyes. Right, this idiot's fascination and desire to see the end of the Arc child over the real threat to their plans. Well, that and Watts just wanted to kill the old man for forcing him to teach the little brats that he called students. Why this inhuman fool wanted the Arc boy, of all people, dead, he would never know. Yes, he saved a few lives in Atlas, so what? He was still just a child. Watts could've done it all himself without as much hassle and drama.
"Well?"
Watts frowned, "No... neither he nor his... friends were killed. They are all alive."
There was a slight edge to Hephaestus' voice now, "So you failed... what good news?"
Watts continued, a stride of confidence filling him and his voice. Even if he hadn't been able to kill the Arc boy or Ozpin, he'd nevertheless been able to eliminate several key leading figures in the Beacon Militia, as well as multiple former Hunters and acting soldiers in high positions amongst the paramilitary organisation, and possibly members of the emerging Valerian Council on top of that. Confidence in the armed force would go down as the Beacon Militia spent time licking its wounds, and it would allow Hephaestus and himself to contact their new allies and enact whatever plans would allow him to ensure his superiority across the kingdom, and even Ozpin himself.
Ozpin, James, Pietro... all of them had looked down on his work, even from before the Paladin Incident that had almost killed him (stupid malfunctioning machines, it was Pietro's fault for not calibrating them correctly). The two of them had always favoured Pietro's ridiculous P.E.N.N.Y. project over his work, and they had always been so keen to shower him with praise over it. So what if he had made a stupid girl out of silicone and metal? So what? He had revolutionised Mantle's heating systems and Atlas' weather control networks. That had saved more lives than anything that Pietro could ever dream of making.
But did anyone care? No. It was always Pietro this, Pietro that. Apologies if Watts wasn't willing to suck the old man off as much as Ironwood and his little pet rabbit Faunus, the fowl-mouthed cur that she was, seemed all too eager to do.
(Two years later, when he would see the fate that had befallen the moronic cripple's precious 'Daughter', he had laughed for hours on end.)
When Ozpin had brought him into Beacon to 'Teach' the children, and when the Daughter had forced him into the roll, he had wanted to spit in both of their faces. Trying to get a horde of dribbling brats to understand the most basic concepts of life was beneath him, a waste of his talents. But with that came unexpected opportunities. When Ozpin had brought him into his fold (Watts had made a good show of pretending to be shocked and surprised by his words. Honestly, he had to admit that that same mask of deception he had put up so much during his years at Beacon had begun to slip in recent times as his anger at his wasted talents and hatred of the brats around him continued to grow around their presence), Watts had requested a facility under the ground to closely monitor the Summer Maiden in his care, not expecting him to actually agree with it. But Ozpin, the gullible, desperate fool that he was, had agreed to it, and Watts spent the next two years modifying the underwater base, which he had named the Wishing Well Facility, to suit his standards, running tests on the comatose Maiden in his care, and finally performing experiments on the Grimm matter that he had secretly funnelled into the facility when the Initiation Massacre came to pass, all thanks to the likes of Ozpin and the sort being too busy to notice him and too desperate for any kind of edge in the war that had suddenly come to them to turn down his offer to perform his own trials on the liquid, all to find a potential weakness in the new Grimm armies that they faced.
Merlot had stolen his thunder in his own studies of Grimm and Human/Faunus hybridisation, but Watts was not a man to be made a fool of, or one to be denied his right to glory. He would reclaim his status as the greatest mind of this generation and the acknowledgement that he deserved, and he didn't care how he had to do it.
Pietro's death (of which Watts had celebrated with gusto, though he was saddened that he wasn't able to do it himself) was just the next step into making that possible.
But now, here he was. Esper had failed, and now he was being hunted by the same brats that he had been forced to stomach for six months. Fantastic.
No matter. This was just a hiccup, a stepping stone on the path to his greatness, to his acknowledgement as the greatest mind across Remnant.
"Several of the Beacon Militia's leaders were killed in the explosion, as well as a few councilmembers and Hunters-"
"But you unable to kill Arc and cabal."
"...No."
"Then you failed."
Watts' frown stretched wider, "That was that idiot Esper's failure! She was the one that was supposed to kill them, and be that as it may be it was the agents of your allies that distracted the Arc boy with their antics, or was it not them who slit that Faunus girl's throat and left her on their doorstep?"
"That not concern, though allies be noted and reprimanded," Hephaestus retorted, "But you still fail part of mission, Watts. You made yourself fool."
"What?"
"You make yourself fool right now? Why you not upstairs in inspection? See explosion from Vale. Should be help students. Or pretend to."
He growled, "I would be if the brats above hadn't figured me out and pursued me down here."
"So exposed as well?" Hephaestus' hands clenched into fists, "Could have got much out you as hidden agent, yet you exposed. Another failure."
"That's hardly my fault."
"Doubt that," Watts went to say something, but Hephaestus continued on regardless, "You promise critical intelligence, Watts, from you and Beacon. Apparently not thing. You promise much, yet fail deliver. And now you hunted by Hunters."
Behind him, his personal army of AK-130s marched to the entrance of his facility, "My droids will stop them."
"Like they stop previous intruder?"
Watts' eyes widened, "How did-"
"I know about that? You not only one with way in computer system," it began to twirl what looked like a memory stick between its fingers as its hands unclenched, "You think I not know Techion coming in. You think others won't notice as well?"
"I'm already deleting all the information in the computer banks as we speak," Watts said as he began to tap away at the computer in front of him, highlighting and deleting files in mass as he smarted from the Grimm's words, "And I have an escape boat prepped and ready to meet you on the shore. Once I am out of here, I will join you in destroying Ozpin and Beacon."
"Ozpin and Beacon nothing to me. No need of them. Not help you salve ego because of failure."
Watts growled, "This is not a failure... merely a setback."
"As always."
"I will not be talked to this way!" he ignored the sounds of cutting metal behind him, "I have helped to deliver victory into your lap! I deserve respect!"
"How you helped? Your agent failed to deliver, Arc boy still alive, cover blown, facility tracked. Failure after failure. Will cost much in ally eyes. You no deserve respect."
"I am Arthur Watts! I am the greatest mind of this generation! I will not be talked to like I am a fool."
"You are fool."
"And you are an idiot!" Watts snarled back, "I will not be treated like common trash by a inhuman abomination who cannot even speak in full sentences!"
"...Oh? Is that what you think of me, Watts?"
Watts blinked, reeled his head back. The hologram of Hephaestus just scoffed.
"You have been useful for connecting to the other agents in Beacon and establishing my links to them, and that is it. I had hoped that you would prove yourself as more than just a frail man with a bloated ego, but, well, look at you now."
The hologram craned its neck.
"I dislike discarding useful equipment for my goals... but you've become a liability, and I hate liabilities."
Watts heard something behind him, and ducked down to avoid the smoking torso of an AK-130 colliding into him, letting it smash into the console before him and shatter a pair of monitor.
"So, I will let them deal with you."
He looked behind himself, to see all his AK robots on the ground in various states of disassembly, oil leaking out of their fresh wounds in splatters as smoke fluttered upwards from them. At the entrance to his facility were three figures in armour, weapons in hand.
The Arc boy, and his two pets, weapons in hand. They had followed him down into his facility.
And from his stance, the Arc boy was not happy.
"Hephaestus."
"Arc."
The dome was big and dark made of glass sectioned off by steel beams and faint white strip lights, made significant by the two glass pods in the centre of the room (coloured a deep grey that didn't allow anyone to look inside) and a giant vat of who knows what standing above them. The expansive halfsphere was all lit against the inky darkness outside only by the glow of consoles that lined the circular wall, the few lights in the roof above that flashed a constant red, the glow of the white light above the two pods in the centre of the halfsphere, the flickering sparks of light coming from destroyed droids around them, and the glowing visage in its centre.
Jaune glared at the flickering hologram of through the visor of his helmet, his hands clenching around his sword and ML-15A as he stared past the man before him and towards the flickering projection of the creature, the Grimm, who had done so much.
Hephaestus. The Tinkerer.
The Tinkerer had been there in the Sleeping City, as one of the Silver Court and answering to a fanatic by the name of Templar, the founder of the Choir of Silver. When Templar died and the Choir turned to infighting at Ruby's command, Hephaestus had taken his cruiser, the Pilgrim's Flight, and fled to Atlas, where he and his lieutenant, Malcom Croft, signed themselves off to Cinder Ella and her Imperium, becoming some of the top members in her cabal.
But after that, when the Atlesian Civil War that followed ended and the Ascendant Court's occupation of both Atlas and Mantle began, Hephaestus and Malcom had decided to cut their losses and flee Atlas, hijacking Cinder's headquarters in Amity Coliseum (Coliseum? Colosseum? Whatever) and attempting to flee when the floating kingdom fell to the ground. Jaune and the rest of his former team JNPER had been forced into a temporary alliance with the Daughter's agents in the floating building to take down Hephaestus and Malcom, only for the former to betray the latter and flee the kingdom, heading off to parts unknown and going into hiding for the next three months...
Until now.
"Would say good to see again," Hephaestus groused dismissively, "But that lie."
And it also had a habit of speaking in incomplete sentences. Wonderful.
Jaune's eyes narrowed more, "I was hoping that I'd never see you again."
"I hoped you dead."
Jaune's hands clenched around his guns even more.
He hated Hephaestus. The Grimm was probably up there, just behind the Daughter, as one of his most despised enemies. Sure, the Daughter had started this war, and waged campaigns that claimed millions of lives, but Hephaestus? He was always there, in the shadows, exploiting every opportunity that he could get his hands on. Hephaestus had been there with Templar as he had pulled Ruby's left eye out. he had been there in Atlas, helping Cinder wage her war on the Mantlian resistance and kill millions more, enslaving the twin children Jax and Gillian Asturias to their Mindbender machine and enslaving Ren with it, betraying everyone he had ever known and worked with for his own ambitions, getting the better of even the Daughter, and then fleeing the chaos without a care in the world.
And the worst part of it all... was that he had no reason for doing any of what he did.
The Daughter? She had a motivation for doing what she did. A reason for the insanity, a method to the madness. She told him so in Atlas. She wanted to remake the world because she thought it was poisoned to the core, fusing all of mankind, both Humans and Faunus, into a new species, and her Ascendant Court, and this war that they were waging, would be their way to doing so.
But Hephaestus?
He had no motivation, no reason, no point of doing anything that he did beyond simple desire.
He said so himself.
He had no reason to do the things that he did, to crave power like he did. He just did.
He wanted power, not for any real reason, but simply for power's sake.
In his words, he was a Grimm. It was simply what he did.
Jaune hated him for that. Templar, Harriet, Cinder, even the Daughter... they all had motivations for doing what they did, even if they tried to use them to justify their own actions or not. They all had their own reasons, and that made them at least somewhat understandable.
Hephaestus didn't. He had no reason to do what he did. He simply wanted to do it.
It was evil for evil's own sake, and Jaune hated him more than anything for it.
And now here he was, with Watts. He had been the one that Watts and Esper had been in contact with. He was the one who'd organised the plot for Esper to blow herself up to try and kill him and his friends. He'd been the one behind it all.
And now he was due a reckoning.
"As much as love to talk," Hephaestus began, "Have business with Watts first, no?"
Jaune blinked, and then looked down.
Watts was running to the escape craft hatch.
Keep them distracted keep them distracted keep them distract-
"Oh no you don't!"
A red blur crashed into Watts as he tried to reach the escape craft's hatch, and to the ground he fell, a pair of blades forming around his throat. He didn't give the Rose girl the chance to act on her intentions (he hadn't been a Hunter teacher for nothing) as he grabbed her by the throat and pulled out his twelve-round revolver and planted it into her chest, pulling the trigger and letting out a round right where her heart should be.
"Ruby!" one of the children (he didn't have the time or care to figure out which one) cried out as he tossed the girl aside, her aura and armour protecting her from the shell as the two behind her began to fire at him. A second later a ring on one of his fingers glowed, and four automatic hardlight turrets, a pair of them on the ground and the other pair in the ceiling, activated, and blue streaks of light flashed across the room from the children and the guns, bullets flying into the walls and embedding themselves in the bulletproof glass around him.
Watts scrambled back onto his feet and fired off two more rounds into the Rose girl, once more being blocked by her aura and armour, but it was enough to knock her back down onto her feet as he reached out for the hatch lock to the escape craft and-
{BANG}
A silver streak of light slammed into the lock, frying it. Watts whirled around and fired at the Rose girl once more as she shifted herself back into a ball of petals, slamming into him and carrying him across the dome's floor, slamming him into a wall before he threw her away from him and charged at the door once more. If he couldn't unlock it manually, then he just had to force it open. He could do it. He was smart enough and strong enough to figure it out.
A round flew through the air and into his leg. His aura took the blow but he still kneeled over and fell to the ground, letting off a round of his own from his revolver at one of the children firing at him and going for a run once more-
{SLAM}
"AUGH!"
-Only for him to be tackled by the Arc boy, his head slamming into the console and dazing him for a moment, ironically being broken out of it by the boy's fist slamming into his chin. He was clearly intending to knock him out.
He was stupid.
He grabbed the boy by his stupid helmet and slammed it into the console next to him. The binocular attachment to his helmet cracked and dented under the sudden hit, and the boy was dazed for just long enough for Watts to kick him off, aim his revolver at his head, and-
{CLICK}
Dammit. Out of ammo.
Watts ran again, clumsily trying to reload his gun as the children continued to both shoot at him and trade rounds with the turrets in his base, the expansive hall lit up with flashes of white and blue.
All the while, the hologram of Hephaestus watched on as blithely as ever.
"Do something!" Watts called out to the projection as a blue fireball crashed into his hands, melting the gun in his hand and forcing him to drop the slagging thing down onto the ground, the heat alone burning his hands and peeling away the layers of skin down to the bone in patches, his aura alone not enough to protect them. The smell of oxidising metal filled his nostrils.
Another fireball was frown at him, but this time Watts was able to stop it by summoning a wall of hardlight before him, dispelling it and angering the Malachite girl as she rocketed forwards, only for him to throw the hardlight wall forward and into her, sending her slamming into the ceiling above and embedding her in the glass, cracking it and leaving her to fall to the ground with a loud-
{THUD}
-The girl let out a tired groan as her aura shimmered around her, and Watts turned his hardlight wall to the side to block a series of shots coming in from the Arc boy and the Rose girl, the latter rushing towards her in a flurry of petals before he thrust the wall forward and into her, scattering the petals and forcing her to reform beside him, pulling the pair of swords from her back and slashing them at him. His aura blocked the blow as he used his hands to parry her attacks, while at the back the Arc boy pushed his aura into the Malachite girl and got her back onto her feet, the two of them shooting at the hardlight turrets around the room and knocking them out of action.
Watts growled and parried another blow from the Rose girl, the child snarling at him as she jabbed her sword at his stomach, widdling his aura down bit by bit as another blue fireball slammed into his side, followed by a sword blow and a close shot from the Arc boy, who had now joined the pummelling. His rings began to flicker as the dust in them began to run low, but he still summoned two hardlight walls to stop their attacks as he tried to turn himself towards the entrance to the escape craft hatch once more.
"For God's sake, do something you cretin!" Watts called out once more to the hologram of Hephaestus, the creature behind it tilting its head.
The creature chuckled as it fiddled with something in its hand.
"Sure."
A few seconds later, he heard the whirl of a machine and the loud clanging of clamps releasing their cargo.
Then, a flash of light from the outside the dome, as a small submersible craft jetted away from the Wishing Well Facility, only to lose power and drift away, before a soft popping noise sounded through the water, and it was consumed and torn apart by a violent flash of light.
What?
No.
The Grimm had... destroyed his escape craft?
The sudden distraction had proven enough for the stupid children to get one over him, stop him, topple him, all of them throwing sudden shots and blows at him as he was brought to his knees.
A glancing blow from the Arc boy. His aura was gone.
A fireball from the Malachite girl. The dust in his rings was gone.
A swipe of a crimson sword from the Rose Girl.
His hands were gone.
Watts didn't scream. Didn't even acknowledge the pain. Didn't even hear the words of the stupid children around him who he refused to acknowledge had beaten him. He just stared. Stared at the bloody stumps in his wrists, stared at the severed hands on the floor, stared at the sliced tendons and muscles, stared at the stained white bone poking out, stared at the blood frothing out of both ends and staining his clothes as they poured on the floor, and then stared up to the stupid Rose girl as her sword dripped with blood, looking down at him, through her helmet's visor, with an angry, hungry, vengeful silver eye that had been broken by war and demanded blood and looked so out of place and alien on a face and person that once spoke of sickening idealism and hope and want for all the things that a stupid child like her would ever want.
He just stared and stared and stared, even when the Rose girl looked away.
"Your lapdog's in our care now," the Arc boy said to the projection of the monstrous creature that had left Watts, the greatest mind on all of Remnant, to die, "And we're coming for you next, Tinkerer."
You left me to die you left me to die you left me to die
"I know," was the Grimm's coy reply, "Look forward to it."
YOU LEFT ME TO DIE YOU LEFT ME TO DIE YOU LEFT ME TO DIE
"You... left me... to die," was all that Watts could mumble out. No one heard it. This time, he spoke louder, and they heard him, "I could've given you Beacon... the Relic... the Summer Maiden..."
The Rose girl looked down at him.
"No use for Relics, or Maidens," Hephaestus responded, before finally adding, "Or you."
Then Watts remembered something that the Grimm said.
It hated liabilities.
And he was one of them.
"Time to eliminate lose ends."
Then, the world was a flash of light.
The children screamed as fire and water rushed in.
The dome fell apart.
The vat above him, filled with Grimm matter, fell onto him.
And everything.
Went.
Into.
D̶̯̄́ ̷̟͊͑Ą̶̖̖͂̏͝ ̵͕͉̅̀̋ͅŘ̶͉̤̠̇ ̵̞̋͗̌K̴͍̔̀ ̸̬̯͂͒̊N̴̢̳̣̑ ̸͙̀̂͠ͅÊ̵̱͙ ̷̛̠̽̏S̵̿͜ ̵̘͔̈́̄Ṡ̷͇̱̚͝
If Hephaestus could smile, he would.
Jaune Arc and his friends wouldn't die. Not from this. They were too stubborn for that.
But it would make for an interesting experiment.
Water.
Water everywhere.
The oxygen filtration systems in their helmet's activated as Jaune, Melanie, and Ruby were sucked away by the sudden rushing currents, the flood slamming into them and knocking them to the ground as explosions sounded off around them, each one throwing them from side to side as the black liquid rushing out of the giant tin can reached out to them.
It was like the black water in the caves under the Emerald Forest, ungodly and abominable and something that they should never let touch them.
Ruby took hold of Jaune and Melanie - "Hold on!" she called to them over their helmet radios - and shifted them all into rose petals, bursting through the water and towards a massive shard of the glass dome that was beginning to float up to the lake's surface. They reformed next to it and she called out, "Grab hold of the shard!"
They did, their hands and arms clasping around the giant slab of glass as it pulled itself upward, the underwater life around them swimming away in panic as the underwater base exploded behind them, sending debris and shards up and around them.
The black liquid in the water expanded, convulsed, pulsated, and then sank into itself like a breath.
In what felt like an eternity later, the giant shard of curved glass that they were using as transport reached the lake's surface, and the trio of former team leaders threw themselves out of the water, clambering onto the glass as it swayed in the water, throwing their helmets off to catch their breath, only to be soaked by the endless rain falling onto them.
Melanie heaved as she took in a breath before she said, "Fuck, great... forgot about the rain."
"I think we all did..." Jaune said, looking down at the sword in his hand before going, "Fuck, I lost my gun..."
He felt something tap his chest through his armour. He looked down and to the side to see Ruby presenting her personal ML-17 sidearm to him, as a gift, "Here."
"Nah, I can't take your-"
"Take it," she tapped his chest again, "You need a gun, and I've got enough."
"...Alright then," he said as he gingerly took it from her hand and into his, "Thanks."
Melanie, who had been about to present one of her pistols to him, shoved them back into their holsters and said, "Bit of an inversion, isn't it? You used to be covered in weapons, now you've not got enough."
Jaune laughed, "Yeah, I was really compensating for something back then, wasn't I?"
"Lack of training?"
"Something like that," a tap to his chest again, "What's up, Ruby?"
No response.
"...Ruby?"
"That's not me."
Jaune blinked, and tilted his head down.
An inky black tendril poked him in the chest.
Jaune screeched as Melanie and Ruby pulled him back, the three of them thrusting their helmets back on as the misshaped limb gripped onto the floor of the giant glass shard and rocked the boat, almost tipping it over as something pulled itself upwards.
A giant black orb, pulsing like a heartbeat, broke through the lake's surface, a dozen inky limbs pulling it upright. It clambered onto the wet surface of the see-through platform as a field of detritus formed around them. It convulsed and shifted as if a dozen bodies were trapped inside, their hands pressing against the skin, begging for release. Cracks formed across the obelisk, purple puss leaking out as something inside it groaned and moaned like a dying beast, letting out inhuman wails of agony in a curdled, double voice, two people screaming at once.
At at the forefront of it, clambering up to the surface of the shard, was Arthur Watts.
Except, it wasn't. It looked like a corpse, broken and cracked and peeled, his skin pale and sickly, mottled with leeches and rot, bloated by water and puss. His eyes had been burst out of his skull, dangling out of their sockets by their cords. His mouth looked like it was filled with tar, his teeth blackened and his mouth like obsidian. His veins were coloured a deep red against his pale skin. His flesh looked like it was about to slough off his bones, so fractured into slit lines like someone had run a knife over him to designate which parts of the meat to cut off. He walked and stood like he was drunk, shambling and stumbling like every limb in his body was glass, broken, shattered into powder and held together by tape and bleeding muscle. Blood red and purple tendrils began to leak through the wounds and out of his body. Where his hands should be, thin black and red tendrils, sharp and thin like veins and severed arteries, wormed out of his wrists and coiled around each other, wriggling in the air and dripping blood.
"Oh god..." Melanie whispered out as they stood still, frozen by the monstrous abomination that stood before them.
And then, Ruby saw the thing above the walking corpse that was once Watts, and shouted. Jaune and Melanie followed her gaze up above the rotting husk to see a body of metal floating up in the surface of the giant black orb connected to Watts.
The metal was discoloured and the frame was pulled open, black rotting mass having been pulled and wormed out of it, but they could recognise the familiar looking Techion without a second glance.
"DJ..."
So that had been where he died.
The orb collapsed into Watts, pulling the corpse of DJ down with it, and the screaming body that was Watts turned inside out.
Ciel and Weiss were running, and Beacon was burning.
Towers of smoke and flame rose up into the sky. Loyal troopers and rogue droids battled in the fields and corridors. Escaped Grimm prisoners rioted in the lower levels, looking for a way out.
Everything was falling into chaos.
Over there. The echo of a voice. The two girls turned their heads to see Razor staring at them, waving them forward.
"C'mon, this way! There's a spare ship in the hanger we can take out of here!"
Weiss smiled, recognising the one friend that she had in this place, and pulled herself forward.
Ciel, reluctantly, followed.
Near them, Razor's teammates, Omega and Rancor, noticed them leaving as they shucked off their melted and slagged heavy armour, "Hey, where the hell are you going?" and ran after them, "C'mon Yang," behind them in turn, Yang looked to them, having been wanting to follow her sister after she saw her disappear into Beacon after that creepy teacher guy, before groaning to herself and deciding that, for once, she might just be safer with Jaune and Melanie than she was with her. For once, her idiot teammates needed her to look out for them more than they needed to look out for her.
And behind them all, a figure wrapped in darkness shadowed them all.
The three Hunters took a step back as Watt's walking corpse peeled open, exposing the shifting bones and organs inside as the body of DJ was pulled into it. Thick globs of Grimm matter merged with the body as it convulsed and twitched violently, growing in size as blood covered the ground and wiry cords of muscle grew and expanded around its shell, the body growing in size and form as it expanded outwards, towering over them.
The red flesh that was once contained within Watt's body, pulled and rotting and snapped and torn in places, now covered the creature's body, its organs repurposed into muscle and meaty armour, dripping red and black blood onto the ground as shards of wires and joints and metal poked out of its new skin like spikes. Glowing purple puss leaked through each cord and dripped like acid onto the ground, smoking and steaming all the way. Its arms and legs were thin and long and gangly, and its body was wide and fat, its stomach opened up with several warts and tears - mouths, lined with jagged teeth - where thick and thin tongues made of bone and metal and wriggling flesh wormed out. Its head was large and bulbous, a massive organic eye in its centre, not red and yellow like a Grimm's eye, but white with a black pupil, its eyelids dotted with teeth for lashes. Two faces lined the sides of its head, bulging and with exaggerated proportions, one looking more like metal than the other as their mushroom like eyes darted from side to side. They looked like they had been stitched onto the sides like cloth. Shreds of clothing covered parts of its body like loincloth, embedded into the skin by each individual thread. Thin tendrils made of bone and held together by red and black cords of muscle jutted around its back like wings as the Grimm matter coalesced around its spine, expanding outward to cover the whole of its back from its neck to the end of its waist, shaped like it was a pulsating brain. Thin wires that looked like rotting purple strings of flesh wriggled out of the red and black beast and waved in the air, each end tipped with barbed bone and steel.
The three Hunters were almost sick at the sight, and Jaune was suddenly back at his first home, the First Arcadia. He was suddenly back to first meeting the Daughter and witnessing her creations, the zombie-like monsters that lurched toward him and his family and threatened to destroy them all.
The creature before them was just like them. It wasn't a Grimm, and it wasn't a Human. It was both, and neither.
A fusion. A gestalt.
A Chimera.
The monster's brain pulsed. Down below, the blood and Grimm matter merged, forming crimson Grimm chitin before solidifying and growing into black shapes, almost like monolithic architecture.
One of the faces opened its wide mouth and groaned.
The monster - the Mastermind - lurched forward.
It's all falling apart.
Ozpin stood in silence as he looked over the smoke and chaos. He was expressionless, unmoving, his unflinching body not betraying the maddening turmoil that the voices in his head were throwing him into.
He was ignored by all.
As it should be.
He wanted to fall to his knees, to clutch his head with his hands and cry, uncaring of the people and the world around him as he wept for the world that he had worked so hard to build and keep together.
But he didn't. He couldn't.
All he did was stare. Stare ahead of him and stare at nothing as his hands clutched tightly on his cane as the voices in his head laughed and laughed and laughed at him, all the while the whole world fell apart for him.
Remnant's collapse was here.
The end had begun.
And you are powerless to stop it.
Reviewer response time:
MilitiaMasker: Welp, now you know my faithful reviewer. Now you know... and are hopefully horrified by it.
Hmger: Yeah, that's a good point. Thank you for the kind words, though. It really helps.
MagusCipher: It's sad to know that I'd lost your respect with the comments that I made about Coeur, but I can't deny your claims. You raise a lot of good points, and I intend to take those words to heart. Promise.
smolhauz: Let's be fair to him, he was making a lot of good points about the things that I was saying about Coeur. You might be thinking that, but I feel like it's an honest reaction to what I said, and one that I seriously needed in order to re-evaluate what I was saying and thinking.
Guest: Thanks for pointing that out for me, I've gone back and changed that a bit.
Kolomte'49: Their armour was actually inspired by the Clone Troopers, with Ruby's in particular being a mixture of Tech, Crosshair, and Echo from The Bad Batch. Thanks for the review, by the way. It's good to see you again.
Saint Lazarus: No, actually. This story, and the Ascendancy storyline in general, was actually inspired by a combination of sources such as Destiny, Halo, Star Wars, Transformers, and a few more.
Saint Lazarus (again): We'll just have to see in the future, won't we?
It's been a hot minute, hasn't it?
Yeah, hey guys. Welcome back to Ascendancy proper. Sorry that it's been a long time to get here, folks. I've been going through a lot of stuff since the last time that I posted on this story.
Let me give you a brief synopsis:
After I posted the last chapter, I sat down and really had a long think about the things that I was writing, and about the quality of the writing itself that I was putting out. At that time, I had just gone on my intercalation from university for the year and was trying to find a job to get in the meantime, and was still stressed out, worried about everything, just not doing well mentally.
I was burnt out, in other words, tired and exhausted. Writing out my stories, Ascendancy or anything else, no longer felt like fun. It all just felt like a chore that I no longer wanted to go through, and I just needed to step away from it and take some time to myself, sort out my own issues and get my head and life back in order.
So, I took a month off. I stepped away from FF and Ao3, stopped writing anything at all, and just took November to December off. It was a long four weeks, let me tell you, and all through it I was just thinking about all of the stories that I could be writing and all the chapters that I could be getting out.
Soon enough, I was back to writing, but I couldn't find the energy to write in Ascendancy. Not the main story proper, at least. I was tapped out, to say the least. So, I took to writing other things. On this site, you'll see a few one-shot for Gundam, MHA, RWBY, all of which you can see on my page's back catalogue, as well as some updates on my MHA and RWBY Idea Pool collections. Meanwhile, on Ao3, when I haven't been copying my stories over from one site to another, I've been writing in my smut series, so that's cool as well.
But I wasn't done with Ascendancy. Not properly. So, I decided to take the idea of using Reese Chloris in my story that I had never got to do in my last phase, and made it into its own side story, thereby creating Ascendancy: A Brief Interval, a six part story following Reese's story from the beginning of the Second Great War in Haven, all the way to the end of the Surge and beyond. It helps to fill in some gaps in the story that I wasn't able to fill in, as well as adds more world building that I had enjoyed writing, so if you could go please read that and the other things that I've written over the last few months since coming back last December, that'd be awesome of you.
But now, I'm back, and I finally feel ready to continue this series proper. After adding in some scenes that I've been missing from this story, editing and rearranging other scenes, and changing a few circumstances for characters and better establishing some characters and ideas, I'm not ready to continue this story, and I don't aim to stop for a long while.
On a side note, the Chimera hybrid at the end, made from Watts and DJ and the Grimm matter, was inspired by Nezerac and the Caretaker from Destiny, some of the visceral imagery from the Ill game concept, and a dash of Shinji and the Doctor to boot. The miniature architecture that the Grimm chitin shaped itself into is inspired by the Darkness/Pyramid/Black Fleet architecture from Destiny as well. Told you this story was inspired by Destiny!
(I'll try to go my own way in places as well, don't worry.)
So with that all said and done, please favourite and follow, stay tuned, and for the love of God, leave a review. I'd love to hear your thoughts and what you have to say. With that said, stay safe, stay healthy, take care of yourself both physically and mentally, and I'll see you all next time!
Titanmaster 117 out!