pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

Everyone knows that the first rule of warfare is to always do your fighting far from home. That way, none of the stuff you care about gets broken. The second rule was then to not fight near anything else you cared about either.

Spears and axes and swords littered the floor of the Nuckelavee's den. The soil inside was distinctly more orange than the tan-brown of the hills outside. A remnant of the rust that had come from the weapons discarded in this place. The iron rusted and leaked into the ground even from steel-Titania weapons.

I hoped there weren't actually any iron weapons beneath my feet.

Blood covered the walls too, in some places it congealed thick enough to cover the floor and weapons. It dripped and ran around in deep rivulets.

'Blood.'

I snorted.

It was Grimm goo, not blood. Fucking idiot.

"What on Remnant could possibly be funny." I turned and took in Ruby's ashen face. Narrowed eyes turn towards me with squinted nostrils. I held up my gloved hands in placation.

Dozens of arrows and layers of rusted swords over brown dirt. The thick footprints of our target were everywhere shattered weapons pushed down into the soil by its feet.

A Beowulf's skull began to rise from a particularly large puddle nearby. Ruby gave me a bit of heat and made to turn towards it.

"No let me," I intruded, and I stalked over to it. "Sorry I was… I was in my head a bit for a second there. And I was trying to get into its head too." I hopped around a mostly intact spear, careful of destroying any evidence.

I wasn't sure what was going to count as evidence later or how long I wanted to stay here, but you never knew.

"It's okay," she mumbled. "You just going to see what you can find?"

She didn't want to be in here at all. "Scout out the door. I really don't want to get cornered in here." She nodded. The place had a good line of sight down the mountain with only a few blinds. Probably because the big bad was scared of someone sneaking up on it.

Like I was now.

I pulled the bastard sword from over my shoulder and casually sank it into the Grimm.

"Got it," she pulled her rifle out and walked over to where she could easily look through the scope. A lot of movies depicted trained huntsmen who closed one eye while looking down their sight. This was not the case. Trained professionals keep both eyes open to maintain visibility and their peripheral vision.

When Ruby didn't have a person to cover her blind side, such as right now, she had a mirror she could flick out at the end of Crescent rose to let her peek around her own blind.

She was a professional.

She'd designed everything so that she could be solo if she needed to. And really, Crescent Rose was the most ideal weapon for… well, everything about her. Killing Grimm up close, and far away. It helped out with her movement, too, not that she needed it.

This was what a prodigy who had the best training all their lives looked like in action. She'd been trained and taught for this all her life and further it was well understood that aura changed your DNA. Especially after generations, powers, abilities, traits could get powerful and dynamic.

It wasn't like she didn't work hard either. She was working every moment she was awake. Usually she was working on being a better person as well as a better huntress.

That meant saving everyone in this valley that she could.

It even meant saving my soul.

"I got this Jaune." she murmured easily. She swiveled in place to survey the landscape.

I took photos of the place with my scroll and kicked dust through any splotches that I thought were too large to be ever left unattended.

I tried to reel in my feel of the place. It was out in the open, really. But it would be a bitch to fight inside of here. It only seemed to come here after it was hurt in some way. It rested for a bit and its remnants spawned more Grimm, but this wasn't the only place it stayed. This wasn't its only den or lair. It was certainly not a home. Nothing was homely about it.

The arrows and spears that lined the walls above me weren't there for decoration. Nothing in here was. It was just a place that the beast came to lick its wounds. It was a Grimm hospital, they were born here and healed here. There wasn't anything that could be called a nest or a place to sleep or even lie down. The Deathstalker I'd run into in initiation had just been standing in the dark doing absolutely nothing but waiting.

The Nukelavee didn't give a fuck about this place unless it was injured.

Until. Until it was injured.

It had been here… relatively recently. It wasn't here now and the Beowulf and anything else hadn't fully spawned. The horses had gotten too nervous to approach much further and we'd had to leave them behind to fight our way here, the Grimm population was more dense than usual.

But they hadn't finished spawning. They hadn't all left and there should have been more trickling out from this place. I rubbed my eyes.

If there were Grimm lingering in lairs around the mountains, then when the first few villages were destroyed, and the news spread, and they got drawn out then there would be a wave of destruction across the valley.

All the villages.

Potentially.

All it would take was a sudden shift in equilibria to get the ball rolling. Even if the Black-Out-Day panic hadn't brought the villages down, something else could. The bandits, the news of one village being destroyed, or anything. Maybe something else outside the valley could cause it too.

I really had no idea, but, with this in mind, when we made camp I could look over the maps, maybe I'd get a sense of where it was. In the end I'd have to guess based on the pattern of destruction.

I worked fast, regardless of my new paranoia. If it retreated here, I didn't want it to get better here. I walked up to Ruby.

"Anything?" She wondered at me.

I got to work at her feet. Working through some of my pockets of gear. I dug a small pit and began to lay down a mechanical and electrical switch. "Maybe something. I don't think it's been here in a bit, but maybe if we find the next destroyed village I can find out."

She breathed hard and nodded. The thought would kill her, but it was what it was. "What's that?"

"Landmine, small one. If it comes back, I want it to not feel comfortable here, or in any of it's other lairs." I breathed.

"You know how to set explosives?" She glanced out of her scope towards me. "Huh, I didn't know that about you."

I looked down at my feet. "Yeah… Pyrrha taught me?"

She cocked her head at me and to be honest I just looked right back because for a moment I somehow thought that maybe she would provide me with the answer. This… whole plan of rooting out its lairs and driving it out was dependent on the crystals I had and my ability to set traps with them.

But I don't ever remember her teaching me.

Ruby turned back to look out through her scope. "She taught you that, but not how to shoot."

"Hear me out…"

She snorted. "The nearest big village is… two days or two weeks, depending on your definition of big. You think if we go as fast as we can, we can make it to one of them."

"Jaune do you think we can save it if we run really fast?"

"No Ruby, if the Grimm accumulated here and rushed them they're gone, especially if there's banditry involved. They're dead as shit."

"Jaune what the Hell-"

I mean what was the alternative?

I nodded and glanced upwards. "Hand me a crystal," I requested with an outstretched hand.

She reached behind her and gave me a yellow one. It was big enough to fit in the palm of my hand. A large even faced object of bright yellow.

It was in its raw form, purely destructive. Hopefully destructive enough to maybe blow off a limb of this nuckelavee. Especially if it was retreating here while it was already injured.

I held it in the light for a moment before trying to look through the crystal. Before I remembered the futility. Light behaved oddly with dust due to the strange electrodynamics properties the substance had. You could look inside the crustal, as though it was clear as glass from one side, but then the opposite side of the crystal only reflected a certain index of light.

In this case, all I could see was yellow, no matter how I held it. I rotated it in the light for a second before refocusing and burying the crystal.

The geometry inside caused some violation of the Magic-Wand-Theorem and light seemed to exit into my eyes without ever having entered the crystal at all. The meta material that made up the crystal interacted with light oddly as a result of the energy inside. Some electromagnetic interaction but it was all based on optics somehow. It was a bit like relativity, though, there was energy in that, and there was energy inside this, too. It relied on that geometry for storage using something called 'Mang-Yills Theory.'

I didn't get the math behind it, but I didn't really understand how my scroll worked too well either. What was enough for me, though, was that there was energy inside, and a lot of it. Enough to kill even a creature like this with just a palm-full.

"Set," I said standing up. "Don't step there."

"Got it. We're clear to move, I think I see something, though. It's just a trailer marker, cloth on a stick to catch the wind." I frowned at that. "Should we check it out?"

I squinted out. The area she was pointing to was on an opposite mountain face. We'd need to climb down the pass we'd started on into a book-shelf and then back up again. I could barely make it out. Ruby shuffled and handed me the sight off of Crescent Rose.

I just shook my head, turning down the assistance and frowning at the waving white cloth. "You can see it from here?" She wondered. I glanced over and saw her try and squint at it while stilted on her toes.

"Uh yeah." I wondered. "Anyways… I think we should. The implication is that whoever set that marker could have seen this cave." It was out in the open, relatively speaking. Being in this same set of peaks meant you could see this den.

It meant you could see me, too.

"What do you think it is?" I shivered. "Jaune?" She wondered. The movement had been enough to wrack my spine and visibly bend me

I wanted to draw my weapon and move but my aura gave me nothing. It was, for a terrifying moment, like all of God's attention was on me. I straightened and lifted my hand to my weapon only for Ruby to catch it between hers. "What do you feel?" She wondered.

She pressed close to me and I focused on reaching out with my senses. "I feel…" I tried to get a grip on what I meant. "I'm not sure. We shouldn't stay here." I put my weapon away and Ruby relaxed. "Sorry." The feeling had passed. I felt nothing. "Let's check out that marker." I cemented before I could change my mind.

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

I wish that I had changed my mind.

When we came up to the marker, I wasn't sure what to expect, but Ruby nearly vomited at the sight.

We had to fight our way up. I'd wondered where the Grimm had gone from the den, now I knew at least in part. These centipedes harassed us near the base and we cut them in half easily. Our senses assuring us what reason was enough to let us know.

We would have to carry our weapons out and ready through the whole hike and be ready to fight. Again. It was past mid-day already and it would probably be night by the time we got back.

"We might need to take two attempts at this." I gestured with my sword up the hill.

Ruby disagreed. "We have to do this now, right. Plus, GaiLong and Higanbana could be next and we need to go back there, right?" She marched ahead of me and I followed as she buried the longest edge of Crescent Rose in the armor of a beetle.

I nodded. It had been nearly three weeks since I had last been in contact with them. Besides trying to figure out if they were still there, I wanted to know if anything else was gone.

I was completely out of the loop.

Ruby bounced back towards me and split a carapace in two. "Yuck, are they all bugs?"

For a moment I almost wondered about it. But trying to understand the why's of the Grimm was maddening. The how's and where's were mine but that was most definitely not. "No idea."

There were a lot of bug Grimm, though.

I struck one and I heard a strange whooshing noise that made me jump. It was my semblance, it just activated out of nowhere. I sighed. I'd been started by my own semblance.

"Woah," Ruby wondered. "Look at that."

She walked up to me and I glanced around. There seemed to be a lull anyways and she paced up to me and looked at the swirls of light. I tried to keep an eye out but when she put her hand through it and touched me I got distracted.

"What happened?" She wondered. "Did you get hit?"

I shook my head before frowning. "I don't think so."

"Hmm." She continued to analyze me. "Well what do you think happened?"

"I'm not sure," she looked, well, not disappointed but patient and tried.

"Well I think it makes you faster."

I blinked. "You do?"

She nodded. "When we fight, I think you can move better while it lasts."

I hadn't felt anything like that. "I'm not sure." I sighed.

"Well I hope you decide soon."

"I don't think it works that way." She rolled her eyes at me and turned around and walked away from me.

I looked away from her as she began to climb again and watched the glow until it faded. The light around me, already dim to see in the sun, disappeared completely. I bit my cheek a little. I glanced up and restarted my gait behind her, resuming my marching up the face of the mountain.

On our way up we started finding piles of stones with those sticks and markers all leading somewhere. We chose the direction we thought would take us up and climbed.

When we reached the peak, we found a flattened area of earth in a way that I was sure could only have been done by people. A solid trail had formed near the end of the markers and it transitioned to actual stone. "Jaune, I don't like this."

"Grimm?" She shook her head. I glanced across the small stone pavilion. It had four pillars at each of the ordinates and was raised to a middle section with a dais at the top as though the mountain was a whole ziggurat leading up to this pyramid.

"It feels so sick up here."

I wondered about that. Her senses about it were better than mine. "Like the villages?"

"No." She shuddered. "Not the same."

Okay.

I resigned myself.

"Do you want me to go on ahead?" I wondered. The path bent here and went up around a small pine tree. She was out of breath but even after the few Grimm we'd encountered and the steep hike she should have been fine.

Her cardio was fantastic, I would know.

I watched her throat as she swallowed hard. Pink lips drawn tight over something a step above a grimace. Or as much of a grimace as she could manage.

She shook her head and her red tips swung in a hypnotic wave. So committed, she led the way forward, and I followed her up, only to get in the way as she tried to rush past me back down.

In the center of the dais were the remnants of a person. Just one... no, older bones lined the area. I could tell by the -uh- freshness of it. Ruby slunk back off and I couldn't blame her.

I listened to the sound of Ruby gasping behind me and turned around. "Rubes are you alright, you need a minute?"

"Just… give me some air, alright?" I winced and turned around. It was for me to figure this out then.

I looked through what was left of them. Whoever they were. Their rib cage was casually crushed, and I didn't see their skull anywhere, but I did see bits of things I was sure was supposed to be inside a skull a little further up on the slab and splattered on the ground where it mixed with brown dust.

The blood ran along the smooth grey tiles until it congealed. It wasn't some crazy temple where the blood ran in some rug goldberg design. It just pooled beside gross chunks of used-to-be.

It was honestly a mess and easily the grossest thing I had ever had the displeasure of being this close to.

Still, I tried to scan it over anyway. Ignoring my instinct to gag. The spine was in pieces just lining the center of the slab and most of a leg remained on the other side of the pavilion. There was some rope wrapped around where a foot was supposed to be and there was soaked cloth everywhere.

There on the slab, a whole hand was still tied in place to the side and I sighed in utter revolution and disappointment in humanity. Human sacrifice wasn't something uncommon per se. Nor was using it to manipulate the Grimm either. I mean, it had existed on every continent since as long as people could write things down.

This wasn't that old, though. Well, I don't know, it could be, but it looked like it had only been used recently. It didn't have like the bones of millennia or anything or some clue into the cause of human suffering. It just seemed to be one place where recently a really horrible thing had happened to one person.

I paced back down out of the pavilion to where Ruby was waiting. "So, uh Jaune uh how was it? Oh, I'm sorry, are you-"

I just held up a hand. "It's uh- how the bandits are luring it around, creating a horde," I explained. "They aren't laying sieges, they're setting breadcrumbs."

"So what do we do? Just follow the markers?" She wondered.

"We head to the nearest village. I suspect if we follow the markers, we'll end up there anyway and we'll find the occasional body along the way."

"And?"

"It'll be destroyed," I continued. "If I'm right." It would explain how little Grimm were in the area.

"Or maybe we can head to the second place. Try to cut off the horde and save them," Ruby tried. She started to walk swiftly away from the open space where the man had been left to die screaming.

I shook my head. "The attacks aren't linear like that, or, after Shion, they would have destroyed Higanbana."

"No." Ruby insisted. "We aren't too late, we can still save them."

"Ruby-"

"Come on. We can cut off this group, you don't know if that first place-uh…uh…" She snapped her fingers. "Chen Liu. It's called Chen Liu and you don't even know if it is destroyed or not. You're just guessing. We can make it Jaune," she begged. "We can make it."

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

"Ruby wait-" she didn't.

We'd rode hard almost as the crow flew to get here and she hardly let her horse to a stop before she dismounted. Rather than hop off or even something even more athletic she flew apart into a scatter of petals. She came apart around the horse and then back together, ending the motion into a rapid jog for her. It was a sprint to nearly anyone else. She flowed to the edge of the cliff where we could see Chen Liu burning.

She gave me a look back and her cloak wrapped around her. I thought she might have glared at me but in the low light her backwards glance was hard to measure.

The heat I felt for a moment and the distant orange glow of the town made me halt. Pulling my horse aside and gathering hers as well. I felt a cool breeze on my cheek and Ruby was gone.

She wrapped herself in her cloak like she herself was the stamen of a blossom. Her body disappeared into the red mass entirely, it was literally no longer there. She took off like a bat from the cliff, wrapping herself in crimson wings and taking off.

I sighed, but there was no way she heard me over the screech of nevermore passing overhead. I dropped down off my horse and pulled Crocea Mors.

I could do nothing but watch a scattering of petals from one of the skyward Grimm. A distant gunshot marked the nevermore's end. Ruby would tell you it wasn't hard to ride one. She'd done it once before, after all.

I dashed off after her. It was nearly a half mile in full gear and started by sliding down the cliff after her.

I watched Ruby flick to the top of the tower as little more than flower fragments. She bounced from there off some distant nevermore and back like a maddening ping pong ball. Ruby doing Ruby things.

I dashed into the center of the village and took in Ruby's battle against some horrific combination between bear and gorilla. I watched it grab a beowulf and throw it at Ruby where she'd been taking shots at it from a roof.

"Yaah!" I heard her call out in surprise and in exertion as she had to deal with the missile. I sunk the tip of Crocea Mors into the ground and continued my charge straight at it. I slammed the edge first at a full sprint into the Bearingle's back.

It whipped around and tried to grab me by the- well- all of me? Its hands were as large as my torso. So, it tried to grab me by the everything, but like a normal person when confronted with something like that I just stepped back.

I flicked out my sword into its stomach. Then reversed it and brought it all the way down and impacted across its chest. I cut it brutally but the material was too tough for me to just bisect.

Ruby cut the Beowulf down and launched herself down towards me with a shot from her rifle. "Jaune!?"

I turned to her surprised look. She was surprised? Had she thought I would just sit back and watch?

The Bearingle hit me into a church building and I felt the whoosh of my semblance arrive. Now I was inside of a wall and glowing and in pain instead of just the first and last.

I pushed myself out of it and a wolf came up and grabbed my left arm in it's jaws and clawed it's teeth at me. I maneuvered my arm and grabbed it's neck. I threw it to the ground hard enough to bounce it and swung upwards.

It fell into four dissolving prices. A leg here. Half a torso there. I stepped out and cut down two more and looked up to the sound of gun fire. Ruby was bouncing between other minor Grimm and the larger older Bearingle.

She turned into petals and reformed beside me. "You okay?" I just nodded back. "I'm going to go low, you go and kill it." She informed me. As though it was that easy.

"Shouldn't you-" she should be the one to go high.

"Just use your semblance." She dashed off low and I was forced to sprint after her. Even if it was a bad plan, both of us doing it together would be better than us doing different things. Not that it was a bad plan, per se. She was just counting on my semblance and, by extension, me.

I had to do it though. I didn't have much choice. She… she was good at forcing me to do things wasn't she? She was already in the thick of it, depending on my arrival. All of it.

It hadn't been just here either. When she'd called me up to go to Haven, did she think that I could have said 'no' to her?

I laughed a little out loud.

Cruel of you Ruby.

"You can do it Jaune! Now!"

If I was going to do it, it had to be now, before my semblance faded. So, I had no choice but to move, to act as fast as I could.

I tried to keep up with her but she outstripped me, as always. If I was faster now than before, Ruby was an impossible benchmark to measure against. It was a little like measuring the speed of light against the speed of sound. Even if the speed of sound was fast, so what?

She dashed behind it and hooked her scythe around its legs. She pulled the trigger and the gorilla fell forward to the ground.

Or started to. I jumped and lifted Crocea Mors behind my head until it was all the way behind me. As I fell, I swung it forward over my head with all my body weight. The middle of the weapon hit clean.

The middle of the weapon connected most solidly on the brute's shoulder and sunk deep. Not enough to really cut it in two vertically but close enough that darkness began to seep upwards from it.

There was this satisfying whack too, the weapon hit clearly but the force was enough to not just cut through the Grimm's flesh, but also to crush the bone plating and rip it out. Bones cracked, flesh peeled and I stepped back to watch it dissolve into nothing. "What was that?" I wondered to Ruby.

"Well what do you think it was?"

"Did I use my semblance somehow?" I guessed. It had been a bit of a blur. I caught her grin at me. Leaning on her scythe and wrapping her hands around the handle.

She giggled a little at something. Some joke I wasn't privy to. "Yeah, Jaune. It worked, better than you know."

"Your plans are like that."

"Oh Jaune, it wasn't my idea. " She glowed for a moment at me and I felt my heart swell at her. The rush of my blood and affection made me dizzy. It only lasted a moment; she noticed me looking and turned back to the burning town. "Come on, you're always dilly-dallying."

pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq pq

-WG