A/n:
TheLandMaster: Yep. Beatrice was as edgy as her creator. Wonder how she's doing now? I'll try my best, but I don't think I'm that good at comedy lol.
I do not own RWBY or AdventureQuest Worlds.
It seemed that the professor teaching the hero had a twisted sense of humor, as the girl saw, because the one that would teach a lesson to the young warrior was an old enemy. Memories lost in a haze, all the pyromancer could remember was the endless fires of rage.
Such was the feelings of Galanoth of the old timeline after Sepulchure had killed all of his loved ones, and those he had never known. Driven mad by grief, the dragonslayer sought to reverse time.
One must keep fighting even when doom was inevitable. Even when it was one's own fault.
The words weighed particularly heavy on the young warrior, even if he didn't understand it fully yet.
]|[
"And you think we should just follow you, why?" Said from a voice scratchy from abuse of cigars and alcohol. "You and your ilk had been a pain in our side. Too loud, too attention grabbing." It was an older man, balding, in a dress shirt and suspenders. He had a wisp of a moustache and a small goatee. He had a bored expression; his eyes nearly drooping and a heavy eyebags that made him look perpetually tired. The man idly sipped a glass of whiskey, relishing the flavor, and looking at the black haired woman with golden eyes across from the long table.
Cinder had been graciously invited to dinner by the Ruggines. Beside her were two men dressed in black suits; the elite guards of the family. Erluccio Ruggine was not a stupid man. He knew exactly the ilk of Cinder: ambitious, treacherous, and avaricious. Torchwick was a fool, Erluccio thought inwardly. The young man had styled himself as the Valean Crimelord; the top dog. He was honestly talented, with a dangerous combination of recklessness, ambition, and strength. However, he had not developed a healthy sense of paranoia in his dealings. The man had bit more than he could chew dealing with this woman.
Cinder smiled easily, swirling the glass of wine offered with her dinner. "Because I am the best choice you have in leading this town and dragging it back into order." She sipped red wine. She continued. "I had thought Roman was the wisest choice to deal with in this town, but he was careless. He picked a fight with a man he couldn't deal with, and got caught." The half-maiden stared at Erluccio. "But I also had made a mistake with him. You were the best choice for the partnership, old man Erl. I value discretion in my work, after all"
"What exactly do you want?" Erluccio stared at Cinder, unimpressed. "All the things you had done in the city had ended with a disaster. Working with you is a disaster."
"What an unfair assessment." Cinder said coolly. "Whatever had happened before had been the fault of Roman's recklessness and the irresponsible response of Beacon in handling their students. Surely you've heard of the request Beacon had made on the VPD?" The black haired woman smiled. "I know you have ears on the police, even if Atlas was controlling them now."
Erluccio could not deny Cinder's words. Beacon had regularly bailed out the students and had covered up tons of destruction made by their reckless actions. "The fight at the docks? The explosion? The battle at the VPD plaza? Even the bombings? All of them had the 'intervention' of Beacon's students. Either Ozpin is an incompetent that could not rein in his own people, or that he had been letting them run the city laissez faire." Cinder continued, adding to her point. "To what end, who knows? But I do know I can't let him do so any longer." She said with a small, knowing smirk.
"And this ties to your objective?" Erluccio insisted, conceding to Cinder his complaint. Even if it hadn't been entirely her fault, he had a sneaking suspicion that she still had encouraged the chaos that had ensued.
"I want the same thing you want: control and power." Cinder said simply, steepling her fingers in front of her. "I just have another way of doing it entirely."
"Say we do help you." Erluccio said cautiously. "What exactly do we get out of this?"
"How about I kick Atlas out of Vale?" The old man's eyes widened at Cinder's offer. "It is within my ability to do exactly that. In exchange, I just need some of your assistance to do some…tasks." She said. "With Vytal festival nearing, Atlas' presence would interfere with much of your operations that you would otherwise earn from in the festival, correct? Well, I also seek to take Beacon out of the picture in Vytal festival. This would be beneficial for the both of us."
Take Atlas out of the picture. That was a game changer. If she could do that to Atlas, what's stopping her from doing that to Beacon? Why does she need Erluccio's help to begin with? The old had asked so, and Cinder responded. "Beacon is rooted in the kingdom like a parasite. Unlike Atlas who will leave someday, I can't simply just get rid of Beacon like how I will deal with Atlas." Cinder smiled graciously at the old man, who stared at the woman warily. "I simply need some of your people. That's it. "
Vale was changing, Erluccio confessed to himself. Teams of huntsmen had been the bane of his family ever since Teams PERL, STRQ, and now the new upstarts that had captured the leaders of the White Fang. That's why his family had turned to more underground operations. The policemen of the VPD were easily paid off, unlike the young idealists that Beacon was churning out. Out of the spotlight, they had carved out a name for themselves. And with Atlas here in Vale, that empire was threatening to crumble out of his family's hands. Maybe it was time for some help…
"Fine." Erluccio muttered silently, and his two men had glanced to their boss in disbelief. "What are your terms?"
Old man Erl swore that Cinder's smile grew even more bloodthirsty than before.
]|[
Approaching the gates of the underground city, they notice the ground changing from the stony cave floor, to a paved brick road, lined by unlit torches. As soon as they stepped into the bricks, blue flames lit the torches, revealing the road to the city.
"Whoa." "Brothers above…" Both gaped at the scene before them. Skeletons lay along the road, much like the first one they came across in the tunnel. Other treasure hunters, spelunkers, and maybe even archeologists searching for this hidden city.
"How have I never heard about this city before?" Ella muttered. Johnny walked to one of the skeletons, looking over the things the late explorer had on them. Dressed in some loose travelling robes, the explorer had a pack slung around their shoulder. Dragging it from the skeleton's arm, Johnny took a look inside. A leather pack rolled up, with some tools for made for what seemed to be removing small debris, with some brushes and tongs inside. The inside of the pack also had some books and another journal.
"Let's see inside…" Johnny said, opening the small notebook. It was written in something he couldn't read. "Darn." He turned to Ella, holding the page of the journal up. "Can you read this?" He asked.
Ella narrowed her eyes and came closer to have a closer look. "That…looks like old Sanusian, from waaaay back. Like, before the existence of the unified tongue." Johnny raised an eyebrow, urging Ella to explain. The huntress rolled her eyes. "Ugh. Your making me remember old Barty's lessons. Wait," She raised a hand to her temple and closed her eyes trying to think of something. "You know how everybody talks the same? Like no one talks in another language?"
"Right. I mean that's not strange in one city right?"
Ella shook her head. "No, as in Remnant over." The adventurer stayed silent, and Ella continued. "So it was theorized that unified tongue was the result of cultures blending over the course of many, many eras, that people's languages eventually just, uh, homogenized, with one another."
"So do other languages still exist in Remnant?" Johnny asked.
"Yes." Ella nodded. "I mean, some languages don't disappear, just less used than unified. Mistralian is still alive and well. Unified just changes per kingdom regarding local nuances in their grammar, due to the differences in their culture."
"This," She pointed at the journal page. "Means that this place is so ancient that people before the common language was already searching for it." She turned to look at the city. "That might explain why I've never heard of this place before."
Johnny looked at the journal again. Thankfully, there were some illustrations. There were pictures of traces of the city, encircled by a great snake, holding a gem in its mouth. The following pages had elaborated on the gem as well. It seemed that it was almost as large as a small house, and that it was blue in color. Johnny whistled in appreciation. That was a substantial treasure for a city.
While Johnny was still looking over the journal, Ella was looking over the city looming before them. A high wall surrounded the city, and the step pyramid they saw from afar sat at the far end of the city. Lanterns glowing blue gave the city an otherworldly glow. Houses around the pyramid were built in bricks, having flat roofs, with some having a statue above them.
She looked at the walls of the caverns. Thousands of coffins and tombs that was carved from the walls of the cave itself, and some even that hung in chains from the ceiling of the cavern. Looking above, a large dome centered above the city.
"Pretty strange to build a city with graves all around them." Ella shuddered, looking over the tombs carved on the walls. "What a strange custom."
"I…don't think people lived here." Johnny said. HE raised the journal again. It was a picture, and it depicted people carrying a coffin down a set of tunnels, and burying the coffin in one of the houses. "Those aren't houses. They're just mausoleums." The adventurer said. He kept the journal on him as he stood up. "I told you. This is a necropolis. A forgotten tomb of a civilization long gone."
He pointed at the picture again. "This is our key to getting out of here. Take a close look." Ella peered into the picture. "The people were carrying their coffins down from somewhere. Assuming that these people also resided on the surface, it could mean that the tunnel they used to access the city might be nearby."
Johnny thumbed through the journal again. "Here." He pointed to another picture. It depicted the city, from above. It was a circular construction, with four main roads converging to the center of the city. The one nearest the pyramid however…
"That looks like it leads out of the city." Ella commented. She turned back to the city. "So that means, we just have to hike to that pyramid over there?" Johnny nodded, stepping beside the huntress.
"Right. Let's start walking. I'm getting hungry." Both walked the road lit blue by the torches. Unknown to both, something slithered within the shadows cast by the light of the flames, and eyes with slit-like pupils watched the two entering the necropolis.
]|[
Ella sighed. AS soon as they had entered the city, Johnny immediately broke into one of the gates of a nearby mausoleum, and went inside.
"Do you not have any respect for the dead?" The huntress said exasperatedly. Johnny ignored the whining from behind him and focused on searching for precious loot around the tomb. Besides gold and more useless accessories without even a hint of magic, there literally was nothing else in the tomb. Johnny sighed as he pocketed the gold, thinking he could sell more of it when they get back to Vale. Ella cringed at the blatant grave-robbing happening before her.
Johnny rolled his eyes at Ella's expression. "C'mon, not like they're using it." The adventurer said. "Pity they don't have cooler items though." He'd take any new sword or fashion piece any day!
The bones clanked behind Johnny as he rummaged through the urns nearby. Ella's eyes widened in horror as the skeleton in a dress reformed behind Johnny, eye holes glowing an ominous red. The skeleton picked up its skull cap beside its coffin, fixing it on top of its own skull. Black, smoky fog exited through the gaps between the bones of the skeleton, wrapping around the bones, and moving it like a puppet.
"Uh…" Ella tried to get Johnny's attention.
"What is it?" Johnny asked, looking back to Ella, who was looking like she had lost a lot of blood. Her face however… "You look like you've seen a ghost." The adventurer said idly, looking at the gaudy ring he had stolen from the tomb. Ella pointed to the skeleton behind Johnny. "What?" He asked.
Ella jerked her head to the direction behind Johnny. The adventurer looked behind him, and the skeleton screamed at him in rage. "Oh."
The skeleton wound up a punch and Johnny yelped as he dodged back towards the entrance of the mausoleum. "Oh, darn it!" He swore as the skeleton wrecked the wall it had punched with surprising strength.
"A walking skeleton…" Ella laughed at the absurdity of her situation. Being buried alive, finding an underground city, and now an actual walking skeleton trying to kill them. Said undead roared in their faces, and Johnny pulled his katana from his inventory. He slashed at the angry screeching undead, and the blade sliced through the bone, cutting through its shoulder blade down to its pelvis, sending the mass of bones crashing back down to the ground.
The skull chattered along the ground. The smoke tried to pull the bones together, but some pieces were already too destroyed. Johnny stomped on the skull clattering on the floor, and the smoke dissipated with an evil screech.
"What is that smoke?" Johnny muttered. "Some kind of necromantic spell keeping them alive? But why?"
"I told you." Ella said, looking shook and wide-eyed. "You disturbed their resting place, and now they want to punish you for it."
Johnny snorted. "That may be so, but that just makes me more convinced that they have something valuable here." He said, eyes shining with anticipation. "Spells that make the dead rise again, especially en masse? That requires some major effort on the caster's part. A lot of time, energy, and determination. That's why necromancers learn how to renew their energy, even at the cost of their own life force." The adventurer remembered the way he had to Infecthimself to restore some mana after raising an undead minion. Such was the strain on his reserves that it drained nearly half of what he had.
"Necromancy? As in magic of death?" Ella looked at him incredulously. "There exists such a thing?"
Johnny nodded gravely. "Yes." He walked on to another crypt, looking around. "Some devote themselves to the art so much that they turn their own magic on themselves, persisting from beyond the grave as a lich." His thoughts turned to the lich that had tried to usurp Gravelyn's control of the undead armies of Shadowscythe. "Some become so corrupted, so lost in their own power, that they conspire to turn the living into undead." Sally, the little girl from Moonridge, who had helped Noxus return back to the living as a lich, had plotted to flood the world in a tide of death by mastering Necromancy and raising Vordred, in an attempt to create their own champion of darkness. "It is dangerous magic that just doesn't seem to die." Johnny smiled suddenly. "Pun fully intended."
"Why are you surprised anyway?" The adventurer returned to finding more valuables. "Didn't you tell me that there are stranger things out there in the world? Walking skeletons should be par for the course by now for you."
Ella found it in herself to roll her eyes. "There are. Not walking corpses!" The huntress exploded, unable to take the absurdity of the situation anymore. Johnny pointedly ignored her. "There are things out there that defy the limits of common sense, but not to the point of defying death itself!"
"Well, now you've seen undead. They're dime a dozen back home." Johnny said offhandedly. "You just enter some sewers somewhere, you're bound to get ganked by them bones after a few minutes." It was ridiculous. The entirety of the underground near Battleon Town were infested by the undead. Made for harvesting bone dusts and their energy really easy at times. Despite the efforts of the paladins who hung around the underground like Yara, their numbers haven't thinned at all.
As soon as he said it, the owner of the tomb rose from his grave with a bloodcurdling scream, but Johnny was prepared this time. With a wave of his hand, light bathed the skeleton, Exorcising it, and was sent hurtling back to the far wall of the tomb. The shadow shrieked before dissipating, leaving a smoking pile of bones and ashes behind.
The adventurer ignored the staring huntress, entering yet another mausoleum to try and find more valuables. Ella shook herself. "You seem…really comfortable in battling these undead." She commented. Another skeleton, another wave of the adventurer hands, making another pile of bones. "This seems much too easy for you."
"You should've seen the things the people back home had to deal with." There was a time that he had been roped into destroying hundreds upon hundreds of the undead in Doomwood, from a trial by the Legion Revenant. He had done so for so much that he was almost covered head to toe in bone dust after. "I have no idea how the paladins stomach doing this all day, every day." He muttered, remembering a certain pun-slinging paladin with a blinding axe.
]|[
There were not much in terms of treasure in the mausoleums however, and even though Johnny had been intent to visit every single resting place, even he was becoming tired. Even as he thought that, the adventurer was walking around wearing the pilfered accessories and jewelries from the mausoleums, making him look like a walking mass of gems and gold and silver.
"Let's get to that pyramid now." Ella said insistently. "I don't want to stick around this place any longer than I have to." She rubbed her hands on her arms. Even her suit was not enough for the unnatural chill of the necropolis. Johnny nodded, chains clinking from the necklaces around him as he did so.
As they entered the main street however, the shadow had pulled together the skeletons of the explorers and treasure hunters that had found the city and died. "Well, here we go." Johnny said, raising his katana, in preparation for a fight. The skeletons pulled together by the shadow let out shrieks of anger. The undead charged, swinging their fists and mining tools wildly.
Johnny blasted them back with an Explosion, crushing the bones of the skeletons so that they wouldn't have enough pieces to regenerate from. Those lucky enough to get close were quickly cut down by the katana. Ella followed closely behind Johnny, no way of defending herself with her aura still exhausted and without her precious Murakumo.
As they neared the center of the city, they saw the huge tree in the middle, leaves gleaming blue from the light of the torches around the streets. The skeletons crowded even harder around the tree, making the march to the pyramid even more tedious than it had to be. An undead got lucky and snuck behind Ella, but even tired, the huntress retained her reflexes. She dodged to the side, and the wild punch missed. Ella kicked the skull off the skeleton, and crushed it when it hit the ground.
Even with Johnny cutting a swathe through the bony horde, with him having to cover for Ella, moving through the main street seemed more and more unfeasible. Sighing, Johnny pulled the Murakumo from his inventory, and tossed it to Ella, who caught it with an eager grin. "Don't make me regret this." He warned.
The huntress answered by swinging the massive claymore in a wide arc, toward Johnny. "Ack-!" The adventurer yelped, hastily ducking under the slash. The heavy sword easily crushed the skeletons sneaking from behind the distracted Johnny. Ella smirked at him, and returned to cutting her own path to the tree to the center of the city.
Johnny groaned. It seemed that she was, understandably, still sore from the stunt he pulled on her. He returned to blasting at the skeletons.
From the shadows, more and more crawled from the graves around them, and even more marched towards the city. The smoke formed tendrils around the bones, turning the skeletons into macabre puppets that turned to destroy the intruders of the city.
The shadows around the shade formed by the blue flames of the torches lengthened, and the black smoke emanated from it, permeating the entire caverns.
"That's not good." Johnny said. The smoke formed a large blob and blew across the horde of skeletons. It seemed to grab at the skeletons, adhering to them, and formed a massive hulking form. It reminded Johnny almost of a certain skull obsessed undead from Doomwood; skulls and other bones lining its body, and red eyes glaring furiously at both Johnny and Ella. "That's not good at all! What the heck is that?!"
[Vs. Shadow Skeleton Golem!]
Ella didn't mind. After being put on the backseat for much of their trek across the caves, she was itching for a good fight. Almost as if it had sensed the huntress' bloodlust, the shadow-skeleton golem roared at them in challenge, echoing around the city and shaking the caverns.
"We are in it now-!" Johnny said, as the golem charged, smashing a massive fist where the two stood, and both jumped back to dodge. From within the shadows of the golem, skeletons broke off, running at the pair. Johnny shot Fire Bolts at them, turning the skeletons to ashes, and Ella bisected those that came too close easily.
But it was a distraction. The golem swiped across them, and Ella raised her claymore to defend, sending her tumbling across the street. "Augh!" She grunted in pain, quickly picking herself up. "That smarts! My aura still isn't back!"
Johnny took the opportunity to jump at the limb that swiped at them, holding a hand to one of the bones stuck to it. Using Jigen Kogeki, he cut the limb in half, letting it fall uselessly to the ground.
Or so it seemed. A large amount of smoke was sprayed from the limb, and Johnny jumped back to a safer distance. The smoke coalesced into a familiar form, also absorbing the crushed bones from around them. Another golem roared in rage.
"Darn it! I knew that was too easy!" Johnny yelled, backpedaling down the street as he dodged the wild flailing of the new golem. The first one charged at the still recovering Ella, aiming to crush her with a massive, bony fist. Johnny turned to her in panic, arm raised with arcane energy, starting a spell to destroy the golem. But he hadn't needed to.
Steel whistled through the air, cutting through the golem, bisecting the massive beast in two, from head to toe. The golem shrieked in pain, and the two halves tried to regenerate, but a blast of light obliterated the remnants of the shadow.
"Wha-?" Ella muttered, staring at the figure before her. It was a woman, with hair as white as hers, in old, tattered robes and cape covering her form. In her hands were two straight swords, gleaming a beautiful silvery white against the oppressive dark, morose blue light of the city. The woman was unnaturally pale, and her eyes…
It was silver. Deep and cold silver.
The woman raised both her swords to the golem in challenge, and it screamed in fury. The two engaged in combat, ignoring the two who watched in the side lines.
"Hey look." Johnny pointed at the new stranger. He turned to Ella. "She looks like you!" The huntress had no answer to that, and she watched the woman continue to engage the shadowy creature in combat.
A/n: Would it really be an AQW fic if I didn't at least try to add an underground place full of skeletons?