Cover Art: Kirire

Chapter 104


The entire water treatment facility ended up being surrounded long before she and Jaune entered. The official story, at least for the police, was that some group had poisoned the water supply, and that no one else should enter but for the professionals. Hostiles were possible, and this might be terrorist action, hence the need for a healthy police presence.

Jaune didn't want them anywhere near the facility, however. Blake understood the concern. The seeds might not be able to burrow into their bodies but they could sure as hell infect the police if they stormed in and disturbed the whole thing. Better that they remain on the far edge of the car park, holding the chain link fence with a good hundred metres between them and any part of the building.

Oddly, Blake didn't feel too afraid as she and Jaune entered.

This was a tree by all accounts. She'd dealt with far more mobile and dangerous anomalies, and it wouldn't even be much good against Jaune when he could burn any roots or branches to ash with a touch. The more dangerous possibility was it grabbing and drowning them, but knowing that meant they were prepared for it, and neither of them were going to go near any water reservoirs.

"Don't get complacent," said Jaune, entering the main entranceway behind her and stepping over some tangled roots.

"I'm not." Blake nodded down to the floor. "These look too thin to be the main anomaly. I'm guessing everyone working here bloomed at the same time."

"Likely. I still don't see how this could have happened over a week ago and no one would have noticed. It can't be that every single person working here is a shut-in hermit with no family or friends."

"Maybe the anomaly worked on them ahead of time. Maybe it can do more than bloom, like control their bodies to have them tell people they'll be on holiday for a week."

Or maybe, she thought sadly, the Vytal Festival was just so distracting that family and friends just assumed they weren't responding because there was too much going on. Maybe family and friends had been busy watching the fights and never noticed. There were plenty of unfortunate stories about old people dying in their homes and no one noticing for a week or more.

Sometimes, it was too easy to assume anomalous effect and to forget that people could make mistakes.

"We'll look into it more fully after the initial contagion is dealt with," he said, "but I agree that these roots and branches are probably the employees. I wonder if they were caught trying to escape when it happened."

"You think the main anomaly timed it?"

He shook his head. "This might just be bad luck, really. If the anomaly manifested at a given time and spread its seeds, then it's to be expected everyone working here would be infected at the same time. Then, they bloom almost at once. Some run, panicked, but they're only minutes or seconds behind the others. A mass bloom taking everyone out not by design but by accident."

"Damn shame," she said, using Gambol Shroud to hack away some branches that had grown over an open doorway as if to block it. The trees didn't move or threaten them, however. In the end, the blockade was only in her mind. The reason the branches had grown across and blocked the door was simply because that was how they grew.

There was little to no intelligence here, and that made it easier – both in terms of not having to deal with such, but also because it meant the victims were dead and not cruelly transplanted into the consciousness of a tree.

"This is going to have to be written off as some deliberate act on the water supply, isn't it?" she asked. "We're not going to blame the White Fang again, are we? I know they're convenient but this much hatred toward faunus is going to spark riots."

"It's a fair point. I'll make sure to report that. I'm sure ARC Corp can concoct a new terrorist group to pin this on. It may even be advantageous for us to have our own so-called terrorists who go and blow up villages." He noticed her shock. "Not real, obviously. It'd be them erasing villages lost to anomalies like Blood that Feeds, except that instead of blaming the deaths on Grimm we'd blame them on this group. Specifically, a group that isn't radical faunus."

"Right. I mean, I guess that's okay. Gives people something and someone to unite against that isn't faunus for once. As long as they don't somehow get too into it, splinter off, and actually become a group of terrorists working against us."

"Fortunately, the world doesn't operate on the principles of extreme irony."

It felt like it did sometimes.

Cutting through the hallways and public areas, they soon made their way past offices each containing a tree, and back to the more industrial area of the water treatment plant where huge metal pipes and vats fed water through various treatment processes. The machinery continued to hum as water was pumped through, everything being mostly automated so that, in an event like this, Vale's water supply could continue. It'd just get progressively less clean without people to maintain and switch valves to redirect water so that older vats and pipes could be cleaned out.

Naturally, there were trees everywhere.

But, oddly enough, many of them had fallen onto their sides and grown across the floor more like fungus, and several were shrivelled husks that were so fragile their branches cracked underfoot.

"Looks like their roots weren't able to penetrate metal to find soil," Jaune said. "Given hygiene requirements, I imagine there's a lack of matter for plants to feed on once their host bodies were consumed."

"The fact that they could try and spread like fungus is worrying enough," Blake replied, kicking another tree to splinters. "Still, it makes me wonder what the main one is feeding on. Water, it'll have plenty of, but it can't have any more nutrients than these ones were getting."

"Unless it's feeding off the bacteria and nutrients in the water supply. The dirty water, I mean."

"Do you think it could be? This thing can't turn off the filtration, so if it was in the intake water then all its seeds should be filtered out or killed by the chemicals in the filtration process."

Jaune considered that. "You think it's in the outtake, then?"

Blake shrugged. "That was my assumption. That way it can just dump its seeds in water that has officially already been treated, then it's pumped out across Vale."

"We'd best check both, then. You take the outtake and I'll check the intake." He held up his scroll in a gloved hand. "We'll report in if we find anything."

Normally, she'd have disliked the idea of splitting up – especially after what happened in the bunker – but Jaune was safer than she, literally able to turn into fire to stop any plants attacking him. And even if this main plant could swing vines like whips to fight back, she was confident she could run away faster than it could reach for her.

"Fine. Don't get dragged into any water."

"Same to you. Report in five."

The trees became more of a problem in corridors cutting off sections of the water plant. There, multiple people had bloomed at once, creating a tangled web of trunks and branches akin to a jungle gym. Blake was able to cut through most of it but had to wriggle and squeeze through gaps between trunks, pressing her face right up against the bark.

There were already insects on some of them, close to her nose.

Blake hoped to any deity out there that those were natural insects and wouldn't need yet more containment. This was going to be hard enough already. Thankfully, they didn't act unusual and scurried up and down branches as normal ones might, for the most part ignoring or even running away from her.

She started counting the number of trees along the way but gave up at thirty – thirty dead people. It was a startling number, and even more so for the fact that it was but a fraction of those that worked here.

Following the pipes led her to the purification tanks where the water was being put through various filters and chemical baths to clean it. Checking inside those wasn't possible without knowing how the computers all worked, but she guessed they were fine, if only because the pipes didn't look dented like something was growing inside them, and because the employees here would have surely raised the alarm if something was detected inside the tanks. They would have sensors to scan for objects, and a whole tree wasn't going to go unnoticed if it appeared within a critical piece of machinery.

Her scroll buzzed.

"Blake here. I have nothing on my end."

"Nothing on mine either..." Jaune sounded surprised. "Then that only leaves the reservoirs outside, where all the clean water is kept."

"I'll meet you out there."

/-/

"Well..." Jaune sighed and leaned back from where he'd been gripping a railing and peering down into the reservoir tank. "There it is."

"Hmhm."

The tree was probably huge, but actually judging it was difficult because the reservoir itself was easily a hundred metres deep. Practically a tower of its own, it contained tens of thousands of litres of allegedly clean water. And, at the bottom of it all, shimmered the image of a very big tree, its outline distorted by the water.

The reservoir was so large that the tree didn't reach to its edges and thus hadn't peaked out with any branches or leaves, hence why it hadn't been detected until it was too late. Workers were almost certainly expected to check visually on this, but Blake could imagine them being half-hearted with work, distracted by the Vytal Festival, underpaid, or just shirking the task.

"I can't tell how big it is from up here," said Jaune.

"I swear I'll break your kneecaps if you suggest we swim down there."

Jaune laughed. "Yeah, no. Nothing that stupid. We'll obviously need to drain this reservoir of water – though goodness knows how long that'll take. I'm thinking we can get some submersible drones down there."

"Now you're making sense."

"I'll get on that and ask the police to shut down the water valves from this reservoir. You and I had best check the others to make sure they're clean and see if they can stay on. We'll take samples for the scientists to look over."

It was long and boring work, taking numerous samples from each reservoir and then some from the definitely contaminated one to compare them to. Blake had a feeling the others would come back clean, mostly because even holding the contaminated vials up to the sunlight showed little specs of white flitting around like plankton. The others didn't have anything like that.

It took a few hours to get some submersibles, at which point the police were able to secure the site – while not entering the main building – and the various news crews were busy being contained. Journalists wanted answers, and they had none to give, though Jaune did dispatch the Council to release press releases about terrorists that weren't the White Fang attempting to stage a biological attack.

That might force ARC Corp's hands a little. Blake hoped they wouldn't be too upset about that, but she couldn't let faunus keep taking the blame. Also, the more attention on the White Fang, the higher the risk of the anomalies living there being discovered and her family being dragged into ARC Corp's bullshit.

When the drones finally did arrive, she and Jaune were able to dump them in the water and then sit with computers on their knees to watch through little cameras. The controls were easy enough, and the tree didn't attack them. It didn't even seem capable of movement.

"It's much bigger than the bloomed humans," Jaune said. "I'm reading a trunk diameter of three metres if this is accurate."

It looked easily that big up close. Blake couldn't claim to know her trees and how they looked, but this was one of those gargantuan jungle trees you heard about, except that the trunk wasn't so long because it didn't need to compete with others. It had a really wide canopy, however, branches and boughs reaching out to create a huge number of green leaves, all swaying in the still waters.

"This really should have been caught," Jaune said. "But all it takes is one employee who's meant to do his job deciding he'd rather take a smoke break. One mistake, and so many people dead."

"I think I've found something," said Blake, shifting her drone closer to an odd bulge on the tree. "Here, look."

Jaune scooted over to peer over her shoulder. The image was a little grainy but they could still make out an odd tumour-like growth on the side of the tree, just under the boughs. It was growing out the bark like a spot that had expanded from within, and there were tiny holes dotted across it.

"I think it might be the fruit," she said. "Or what counts as it. The place the seeds are dispersed out from. I don't see any traditional fruit on the branches themselves, and we know the leaves aren't infectious or we'd have way more cases than we already do."

"It might be. It won't make much of a difference, though. The tree will be set alight and then the reservoir will be filled with several metres of acid to make sure anything left is destroyed."

"Problem solved, then? Job over?"

Jaune bit his lip. "Maybe..."

"What do you mean? We've found the source and isolated it from the water supply. The problem should die out in a couple of days."

"That's true on the contamination front but we have one big question remaining. Did this anomaly simply appear inside the reservoir, or did someone – or something – put it here? Because, you have to admit, this is the perfect place for it to hide, and it's an anomaly that isn't capable of movement. Also, it's one that in every other occasion has required a human host's body to bloom."

And there shouldn't have been a human body in the reservoir.

Blake cursed angrily.

/-/

The first thing they had to do was report to ARC Corp and explain their finding and concerns. On the bright side, ARC Corp were content with their actions and willing to call off the impending talks of quarantining and potentially destroying Vale. On the other hand, they agreed with Jaune's concerns about a potential third actor.

"Paranoia is safety in this regard," said Nicholas Arc. "Better to suspect and be wrong than to not suspect at all. Conduct your investigation. The Schnee are dead and gone but that does not mean we are without enemies."

Most of those, Blake imagined, had been created by ARC Corp and their policies.

"What about Atlas?" asked Jaune. "I know you've been staying there since you had suspicions about them. Have they been on the level?"

"They have been on their best behaviour, but of course they would be while I'm here. There's no doubting General Ironwood still wishes to use anomalies in the military. I'm sure many of them do."

"I can't see them harming their allies like this," said Blake.

"It is unlikely but not impossible. Perhaps this was a distraction meant to weaken us, or perhaps it was never meant to be unleashed and something went terribly wrong. Don't write anything off."

"Including that it might just have appeared by luck?"

"Let that be the final conclusion you come to once all others are expended. I expect results."

The call ended on that, flicking off as Nicholas cut the connection. Blake sighed and leaned over the back of Jaune's chair. "And, yet again, it's achieve the impossible but we're not sending you any resources."

Jaune chuckled nervously. "Yes, well, we're used to that by now. I'm sure they've been expecting me to fail for years. Amber is all nicely lined up to take over the Vale office once I'm gone. All that's left is for me to... well... die."

"Let's avoid that if possible."

"Yes. Don't worry, I may be loyal to the cause but I'm not suicidal."

She would have loved to say his mother wouldn't want him to throw his life away either, but she couldn't. The Juniper she'd met was one tortured for years by constant resets and deaths in Mountain Glenn. There was no telling what the original had been like, and there was always the very grim possibility that the original Juniper would have been just as callous as the rest of her family and put Jaune down herself.

"Where do we even begin on investigating this?" she asked. "I can't see the anomalies at Alistair's being behind this."

"We ask them anyway. It can't hurt. As for the rest, I'm sure the police will forward us all available evidence once the water treatment facility is cleansed. There might be security footage. At the very least, we'll find the name of the person who was supposed to check the reservoir. We start there."

"And then?"

"We hope for a clear cut case."

Blake didn't hold much confidence there.

/-/

Wheatly Miller.

That was the name of the man who had killed over a hundred people.

Not on purpose, not while realising it, not even surviving it, but Wheatly had been in charge of checking the reservoirs and had signed in as having done so for a full week, while security footage traced back showed that he hadn't once stepped inside. Instead, he'd been playing some online game on his scroll.

A hundred deaths because a man wanted to farm virtual currency to gamble on winning a premium jpeg. Blake couldn't believe it, but, of course, it was the reality of the messed-up world they lived in.

No one would ever know of Wheatly's massive failure because they had to have a good cover for the disaster. Instead, it was terrorists. Nicholas Arc had run with the idea and already had several attacks on villages attributed to the new group. Those were retroactive allocations, seeing as how the villages had actually fallen to anomalies, but releasing footage of masked men torching the remains served as good enough to fool most people.

So, with much fanfare, there was now a group known only as "Black Company" by their uniforms and helmets, who were wanted for mass-murder and suspected of a biological terrorist attack in Vale. Emphasis on the "biological" for the many trees it had created in the process.

By now, Blake was used to the casual deception, only rolling her eyes as she kicked down the door to Wheatly's apartment and stomped on in with Jaune behind her. The place was a dump, and not even because he was underpaid. The apartment was in a nice part of the city, but the guy had taken no care of it. Binbags lined the floor and empty pizza boxes were stuffed into an overflowing bin.

In a fit of boredom, Wheatly had taken to stacking empty beer cans in a pyramid, and it was at least four storeys high and also four wide, for almost a hundred cans of beer balanced atop and around one another. All without feeling motivated to take them outside or put them in a bin.

Jaune entered the bedroom and then exited. "Don't go in there," he said.

"Why? Contagion?"

"Worse. There's a body pillow with Weiss Schnee on it."

Blake grimaced. "Ewww."

"It gets worse. She has a hole where her mouth and crotch would be."

Blake hadn't needed to know that. Weiss had, of course, been a big star and pop idol before coming to Beacon, so it wasn't unexpected she'd have fans. Creepy fans at that. Blake slid toward the kitchen area, which was just as filthy and reeked, but probably – hopefully – that was the cause of food waste and not human secretions.

"So, we have an absolute slob who takes no care of his own hygiene," she said. "That fits with someone who'd fail to do his job properly. What are we looking for?"

"Honestly, I don't know. Anything. An Anomalous & Sons LLP business card would solve a lot of problems."

That'd be convenient, but Blake doubted the legal anomalous group would involve themselves in a terrorist attack. They focused on anomalies, and Wheatly had, by all accounts, bloomed. That meant he couldn't have been an anomaly or an anomalous transformation beforehand.

"His laptop is on the main table. Coda can crack it open for you."

"I don't want to check his personal computer! Who even knows what's on there!"

Jaune looked back. "I'll trade you that if you'll check the toilet."

Blake's ass hit the messy couch. "Anyway, I'm logging in. Good luck in there."

"Gee. Thanks."

Jaune opened the door and stepped in. Moments later, she heard him retching and dry heaving, which was enough to tell her she'd made the correct choice. Plugging her scroll into the device, she let Coda smash through the password lock in under thirty seconds. The AI, or rather a piece of sentient code, sent a quick text to her scroll to let her know it was done.

"It's unlocked. He's surprisingly well organised with his folders for someone living like a slob. You should see his video folder. He has every kink labelled and organised, from BDSM to MILF, to barely legal to almost legal."

"Almost legal...?"

"Fair warning, you don't want to check that folder."

Blake swore yet again. Well, they'd already known they were dealing with a monster so a few more charges thrown on top wouldn't mean anything. Wheatly was lucky he bloomed. Vale would have loved to hold him responsible for all this.

Avoiding the video folder, Blake flicked through his emails – many of which involved him pretending to be a woman to various other people who might have been women, but who also might amusingly have been men as well. There were plenty of images traded, most fortunately being of young but legal women. It was still a sordid mess of subscriptions to adult websites and furious shitposting on the Weiss Schnee official fan website.

His desktop background was literally Weiss on stage, except that the microphone she was holding to her mouth had been edited out and replaced with... well... it had been replaced with something obscene.

"Trash, trash, trash. Sheesh, how many sites is this creep subscribed to? How was he not on every watchlist on Remnant? Trash, trash, spam. Ugh."

The door to the bathroom opened and Jaune staggered out, pale in the face. "The pipes are blocked."

"Why does that not surprise me?" she quipped.

"No, you don't get it. They've been blocked for weeks. He... He used little plastic bags and... and..." Jaune collapsed on the sofa next to her and lowered his face into his hands. "How this man didn't transform into a faecal-based anomaly, I don't know. How are his emails?"

"Rated M for mature audiences."

"Can we at least find a motive?"

"Sure. A hate for every person in Remnant in a happy relationship, a burning obsession with Weiss Schnee, and... wait..." Blake searched Weiss' name in the box and found plenty of emails. None from Weiss, however. "Damn. For a moment there I wondered if this might not be caused by Weiss as vengeance for her family."

"I don't think she'd dare."

"Me neither. But it'd be a safe move for her given she has aura and is immune, and the Schnee did have lots of anomalies so I thought it best to check." Blake kept browsing. "It's... oh, hello. What's this?"

"What is it?"

"Alleged images of Weiss nude."

Jaune groaned and leaned back. "Blake!"

"Not like that," she said, rolling her eyes. "It's someone offering those images – if they even exist – in exchange for our man doing them a favour."

Blake scrolled through the emails, snorting at one actual image of Weiss in a bathtub shared as proof of there being more.

Maybe it was edited but maybe it wasn't...

Which would implicate someone who had worked at the Schnee manor previously, maybe a surviving member of staff or someone on the SDC team who had escaped the purge but still held loyalties, and a few anomalies to throw around.

"He agreed," she said. "After seeing one image to tease there being more, and a few other heavily pixellated ones, our man basically agreed to do whatever they wanted. All it says here is something about picking up a parcel."

"It's a lead," Jaune said. "Take the laptop. We're headed to Beacon."

"You want to check with Weiss herself?"

"Like you said, it's a lead. I'd rather write her off as a suspect before we continue, and she might be able to tell us who took that photo. I can't imagine too many of her maids or butlers would be allowed into the same room as her when she's having a bath. It would have to be someone she trusted."

Blake mulled that, then imagined Weiss' face when they showed her this email chain and the images included. Her frown turned into a grin. "Maybe we should snap a quick photo of that body pillow as well."

"Why?"

"To show Weiss, I mean. It may be important."

"You think so?"

"Definitely. I'll even offer to be the one who shows it to Weiss. She'll probably feel more comfortable if it's another girl."

Jaune's eyes narrowed. "Are there ulterior motives to this, Blake...?"

"Jaune! I am hurt you'd suggest such a thing!"

"That wasn't a no."

"Wounded!"

"That's still not a no."

Sighing, Jaune stood back up and approached the bedroom. "I'll take the photo. I swear, if we almost had an extinction event because of some pop idol's nudes, I'm going to kill someone..."


Next Chapter: 10th June

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