Chapter 42 – Ruby's Broken Ground

Her instincts had proven right, and the White Fang squad had chosen to break for a full night of rest before moving forward with their task of sabotaging the Schnee Dust Company's construction sites. It was fortunate that they did, for it gave Ruby a full night to beetlewalk over to the sites in question and get an early look at them.

To prevent any risk of not being able to find her body like last time, Ruby excused herself from the Faunus before leaving their company.

"I just like to sleep alone," she'd lied. "It's a, uh, coping mechanism I have ever since Adam died. A-And, you know, he wasn't there to warm my bed anymore."

The Faunus had nodded somberly, evidently unwilling to insult the memory of their martyred saint by questioning his 'widow's' flagrant bullshit excuses.

"We'll wait for you in the morning," he said. "The plan is to meet at 0800 hours sharp for some long-distance recon using the gear Bane gave us." He looked over at a crate that Venne had been carrying on the ship. "See you then?"

Ruby nodded and wandered off in search of a good hiding spot for her human body.

Wow. They get up at 8am, when the sun's already risen and the bulk of the construction crews will be awake and working. In Atlas, we were on the clock basically 24/7. I'm starting to wonder if the White Fang gave me new bloods with the intention of both me and them dying on a wild goose Faunus chase.

Hey, it was all good. The fact that these Faunus were adopting a soft and inexperienced stance on how to go about this wasn't a bad thing for her. All Ruby was supposed to do was help them to pay off Salem's debts (which the higher leadership had apparently already forgotten). Whether or not the mine and refinery encampment was destroyed in a timely fashion didn't matter in the slightest to Ruby. She could just call this a vacation and walk at a leisurely pace the whole way through.

Ruby, as Grubbie, gave her body one last once over in the hole she'd dug out. In the end, there had been no safe enough place to deposit her empty body without incurring some risk of it being come across, so she'd abandoned trying to randomly stumble upon the perfect hiding spot and had just made her own. It took an extra hour that she wasn't going to beetlewalk for, but it was a more surefire guarantee of her safety. More effort meant more reward, as long as Ruby was willing to invest the time.

The captain of the squad had handed her their maps just briefly to hold onto while he spoke to the captain of the ferry they'd rode, and Ruby had taken that moment to memorize the locations of the SDC locations and the surrounding terrain. This was nowhere near where she'd parked her airship, and she needed every bit of foreknowledge she could get her hands on.

Claws on, now, I suppose.

Ruby wondered if Grubbie was also in her Scarab head when she beetlewalked, if he disappeared from existence, or if he took over her human body while it slept. Maybe he truly didn't have a mind…maybe there were no thoughts inside his head, and Ruby's presence filled it with entirely new consciousness.

The SDC had already broken ground and finished setting up the foundations of their future mining site. It had a hastily thrown up barrack for the construction workers that was already complete, but every other building – crew quarters, mess hall, mine entrance, industry-grade drills, multi-stage onsite refinery – was still only partially formed. Some were little more than metal and wooden frameworks stuck into the ground in cement holes, while others appeared to be close enough to completion that it might take less than a week.

A fire will be enough to take out much of the utilities and personal living spaces, but the heavy equipment won't burn. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that at least one member of the White Fang thought to pack charges, so we can plant those at the key locations to bring it down. That would be the base, the engines…

You know, it's kind of creepy that I know all this.

If worse came to worst, Ruby could use her maiden powers, but she would prefer to avoid that. Every time she used them in the real world, it came with a risk that someone would see it and call it in. That knowledge, the knowledge of her possessing them, could in theory trickle down to someone who might not know how to properly interpret it, like any member of Ozpin's group who didn't know Ruby was on their side. Killing them would silence such rumors and close the leaks, but that would make her no better than Raven (a purely ethical distinction that was becoming more and more important as Ruby's body count grew).

After she'd made herself familiar with the layout of the site, its weakest points, its best evac sites, and its idea locations for cover in the event a firefight broke out, Ruby moved on to inspecting the quality of the guards that they had. Given her small size, Ruby was able to crawl up the lookout towers and right under their noses without being seen – if anyone caught a glimpse of her, they would obviously assume her a bug, or perhaps even a flickering trick of the light.

At the moment, it was the night shift, so there was only a skeleton crew keeping lookout. Their jobs were clearly to raise the alarm in the event of an invasion, for there was no way that the few men and women would be able to fight off any monster that came creeping in the night.

And that's me.

Ruby counted two active huntresses in the night shift patrol – older women, probably in their forties. They seemed the sharpest, actually keeping their eyes on the forests rather than conversing amongst one another or falling asleep at their post. There were four SDC operatives who were off in dream land, and between them and her own newbie White Fang team, Ruby was starting to wonder if every civilian was truly a closet incompetent at heart.

Many more guards were slumbering peacefully in the same barracks as the construction workers and suited businesspeople, and Ruby fully expected to see those men during the day, awake and active. Strangely, she saw no sleeping hunters.

I guess it's just the two. Huntresses are probably more safety conscious than the others, and I'd bet they can't sleep knowing that an enemy ambush could pop up at any time. I certainly wouldn't. This isn't a village, so there's no walls to protect them. If they let their guard down and relied on the few lax normie guards who are awake right now to keep them safe, they'd be risking everything – their lives, the others' lives, and all the construction work.

If their entire huntress detail was awake at night, they probably slept during the day, when the larger body of guards was awake and could reasonably be counted on to protect them all from Grimm or White Fang.

We could strike when the huntresses are asleep, but that would mean there are more eyes watching. No, it would be best to go in at night. If I could ambush and knock out the two women, there would be no other real resistance. The White Fang could plant the explosives, and I could start a couple of fires using my maiden powers just before we leave. The plant goes down, no one needs to die, and my objective is complete.

With her plan in mind, Ruby began to scuttle back to her body. The whole excursion had taken her just until sunrise, meaning that she had a few hours before the White Fang awoke.

Ruby had decided that she would let them do their own reconnaissance during the day and come to the same conclusions as her. She could mention her beetlewalking, but that would be the same as revealing Salem's existence, so any knowledge found then was essentially a secret. Calling it semblance like astral projection during sleep would work, but Ruby wanted to keep her 'semblance' hidden in case she used her maiden powers. It would be so much easier to explain spontaneous flame powers if she did.

There, Ruby though, looking down on her sleeping form in the hole she'd dug out. Time to wake up.

Hmmm…actually, she had a few hours, and she could already feel her thoughts straying from having beetlewalked the entire night. That whole thing where she became a lot like a Grimm in terms of her thought processes was closing in, meaning that Ruby was on the verge of gaining perfect memory and enhanced logical deduction. It came at the cost of her human emotions, but she was right next to body. Last time, she'd been on the verge of losing herself only because Hazel had taken her away.

If she stayed close and just went back into her own arm when she started to go crazy, she could probably squeeze a little bit more out of her beetlewalking.

If I think about something, my memory forms complex chains of thoughts, and I figure things out 10 times faster and with 100% efficiency. I can deduce anything…I can deduce why…why...

…why Salem wanted her. Why Salem was obsessed with those silver eyes.

It was a problem Ruby had thought about over and over but couldn't solve. Salem saw Ruby as Ozpin's prized pupil despite their being no evidence of that, and it had something to do with the color of her pupils. If Ruby could figure this out, if she could finally get closer…

The risks would be worth it.

Okay. At the first sign of me losing touch with my compassion or empathy, I crawl right into my own arm.

Her thorax bristled.

It's go time.

It wasn't as though she actively 'did' anything. All Ruby had to do was just stay out longer than a full night, and she would gradually start to get more and more like a Grimm as her human mind hardwired itself into Grubbie's Grimm thought processes.

She didn't feel it begin at any certain time, but when the sun was fully risen, Ruby was already starting to get stray thoughts and random images from her younger day popping up randomly in her brain.

And so it began.

Okay. Silver eyes. I just need to think about silver eyes, and my head will do the rest.

Silver eyes. Ruby had been able to remember that her silver eyes had done something to Salem last time. It had been when the queen was having a temper tantrum over Ruby bringing up the Brother Gods in casual conversation, who apparently Salem was bitter about over –

Salem had brought up the Gods when she'd tortured Ruby. The painful memory shot to the forefront of Ruby's head, dragged up by its relation to what she was thinking about now. That was how Grimm thought worked; it pulled related memories out of the corners of Ruby's brain when something her current stream of consciousness contained bore similarity to them.

The Brother Gods and their creation myth was off topic – Ruby wanted to know about her silver eyes. Sadly, she couldn't control her Grimm mind other than gently nudging it, so she was forced to let the thoughts progress naturally. That included an unfortunate religious folklore tangent that Ruby did her best to ignore.

Back to the important stuff, though, she was going somewhere: Ruby remembered something about silver eyes that was probably essential. Back when Ozpin first met her in that police station after she'd tried to bust Roman Torchwick and only succeeded in stopping him from getting away with his ill-gotten goods, he'd specifically mentioned her silver eyes. It was such a small observation that she had essentially forgotten about it entirely, chalking the exchange down to the headmaster wanting to sound like an eccentric and zany teacher, but it now felt a lot more important. That was good; already, she was making tangible progress.

It was all about Ruby's eyes. Something about their color or their special power was drawing in the attention of every key figure in this dark, underside of the world where both the heroes and villains operated out of the shadows. Ruby needed to figure out what was so special about silver eyes.

The meeting at the police station reminded Ruby's half-Grimm brain about a protest from the White Fang that she'd seen on TV, a time she'd seen a girl with similar white hair to Ozpin in Signal's library, and a visit to the optometrists she'd had as a kid. The last one had shown up the last time Ruby had beetlewalked for too long, which was encouraging, as she hadn't been able to extract all of the useful information out of it before going back into her own arm. Maybe this time, Ruby might be able to finish her train of thought.

The sun was now steadily on the rise, but Ruby couldn't get distracted and end up on a tangent about the solar system by thinking about it. Focusing everything she had on her eyes, Ozpin, and Salem, she tried her best to remember.

C'mon, Ruby, c'mon! The answer has to be in there. It's just up to me and Grubbie to deduce it.

Now she was thinking about the hound, for some reason, and it felt really, really important. Ruby wasn't sure what it had to do with anything, but it had somehow been connected to her eyes, so she let the memories wash over her eagerly.

The first time I saw it, where I nearly tripped over myself when it talked after I tried to feed it.

The sight of the hound tearing the arm off of the Summer maiden, saving me from imminent death and ensuring my seizure of her powers.

The Summer maiden's lake, glistening in the sun.

Eating fruit salad.

The hound, slaughtering villagers at Ovais with Tyrian, and Salem declaring Ruby's first real mission a victory.

Getting punched in the tummy by Yang's ex-girlfriend but not feeling it because I had aura and she didn't.

Mom tapping me on the nose as a newborn, saying how those cute little eyes of mine were like looking in a beautiful, baby-shaped mirror.

Wasting expensive Gravity Dust rounds at the gun range without realizing the target paper wasn't properly secured until I'd already shot fifty.

That…That wasn't…

Ugh, I've lost it.

Ruby noticed that she'd already begun to inadvertently crawl out of the hole and decided that enough was enough. There was nothing to be gained from going through old memories of overly sugary raspberries and Yang pummeling her ex to avenge Ruby's honor. All of the potentially useful ones of the hound were far too graphic to look back on with anything but disgust anyways.

Moving herself to the top of her hand, Ruby crawled into her own flesh. It might've sounded odd, but Grubbie's innate Scarab instincts took over at that point, and Ruby's own eyes usually automatically closed (not that she would want them to be open, mind you). There was nothing left to be gained from going through memories, and the sooner she got up, the sooner she would shake off her beetlewalking stupor and be ready to work with the White Fang.

The memories were beginning to get blurrier and blurrier as Ruby's mind switched back into human mode, with its non-photographic memory. Maybe in the future, when she had more time on her hands and fewer pressing commitments in the real world, she could go back in and figure out the rest of the secrets about her silver eyes, which now somehow included the hound.

Ruby opened her human eyes and stretched out her arms, snapping her neck once in both directions to shake off the discomfort that came with sleeping in a hastily dug out dirt hole. She'd had the foresight to lay down a blanket, so at least there wasn't soil all over her –

"You're smart enough to know that my protectiveness over you was not out of some misplaced maternal…huh, maternal desire to safeguard you."

That…

Something.

That was something. Something important, that was.

It was the final memory her mind dug up for her on the topic of silver eyes, coming from a few minutes after she'd just finished beetlewalking the first time. Hazel had been freshly tortured at Salem's hands over presumably letting Ruby be injured while under his care, and Salem had exploded at him like there was no tomorrow.

As she'd clarified, it wasn't out of human compassion (like pain, Ruby figured that Salem had learned ways to overcome that 'weakness' over the years), but something about the phrasing was enough to tip off Ruby to more going on there. The point wasn't what had happened or why – the event didn't even matter. It was the way Salem had just laughed in the middle of it, without there being a joke. Not even a full laugh, really, just a chuckle. A half chuckle. The kind of thing you might do when you watched a funny video of a cat faceplanting on RemnTube or Remnstagram – no serious humor, but it made your nose exhale.

She'd found something mildly amusing.

About not wanting to save me? No, that's not it.

Torturing Hazel? She went and apologized for that right after.

What did Salem laugh about?

She was a human once more, and so her beetlewalking superlogic was gone, but that didn't mean she'd lost her capacity for solving mysteries. Ruby could figure this out if she thought hard enough.

She laughed and repeated the word maternal.

She found that funny? The word 'maternal?'

Did Salem, like, see Ruby as a daughter or something? No, the joke was that she didn't…she'd literally just said as much.

Maternal.

Maternal?

Maternal...

It wasn't about Ruby.

It wasn't about Salem.

Ruby felt like throwing up in her mouth.

The joke was about Summer.

Silver eyes could release violent blasts of some special power that hadn't affected Tyrian despite him being right next to Salem when Ruby had used them. It didn't work on humans, but it did affect Grimm. And if Grimm were destroyed by it, then Ozpin would…

Ozpin had approached her for…

Mom said that…and Salem laughed about…

So many things clicked into place, too many to count at once. Ruby could barely keep up. All of the evidence had been stacked into a neat little building-block castle by Grubbie, and Ruby just needed to back up enough to see it for its full grandeur.

Silver eyes were some kind of anti-Grimm weapon. That much Ruby knew. Thus, Ozpin's great interest in Ruby, the one Salem was aware of, was because she was going to be his next enforcer, or his next henchwoman, or whatever Qrow had been. He was the leader of a war against the Grimm queen, and he had approached her not because of her talents or her uncle – it was because she was Summer's daughter.

It truly was a case of despotism, despite what Miss Goodwitch said.

Summer had silver eyes too. Qrow worked for Ozpin, and she had too. She had been his most recent weapon against the Grimm until mysteriously dying.

Dying to Salem, that was.

It has to be. That's the only thing that makes sense.

And now, Salem was trying to rub it in. That was her interest in Ruby, the reason she saw it as the ultimate victory against Ozpin. Summer Rose herself had devoted and even laid down her life to fighting Salem on Ozpin's orders, and Salem wanted to take her daughter and switch those roles. Salem didn't have a clue that Ruby was a spy or that she was working for the enemy; she just wanted Ozpin to be defeated by his old ally's child.

She couldn't tell Ruby that, obviously, because even Salem wasn't stupid enough to admit to killing her newest sidekick's mother, but she seemed confident enough to smirk at her own little inside joke when mentioning it. Salem hadn't saved Ruby out of maternal desires to protect her.

Silver eyes – Salem wanted to destroy them, but more than that she wanted to turn Ozpin's most valued enforcers upon him as a way to twist the knife. That was why she'd made the hound. It was a powerful Grimm, an intelligent Grimm, to be certain, but not one that truly was necessary. Salem had needed to build it from the ground up, train its mind, and send it out into the world. All that work for a slightly special Beowolf…Dust, even a single Beringel was probably more of a threat than the hound, and it would never measure up to something like a Leviathan or Wyvern.

"I had such high hopes for my hound. Well, I suppose it's for the best. The template on which such things are made can be hard to come by, what with you being the very last I've seen in years."

A Grimm that spoke like a human, Ruby being the 'very last' of the hound's template that was hard to come by, Salem investing so much effort into making a single Grimm and then developing plans to use it to replace human minions…one that responded to her as instinctively as its own Grimm queen…

She wasn't sure how, and she wasn't sure who, but the hound had to be somehow built from silver eyes. Salem wanted her victory to come from a silver-eyed warrior, so her early plan had been to turn them into monsters. That, however, made the warriors unwilling, but it was the best Salem could do – until Ruby.

Now, she had a willing silver-eyed minion, one who chose to betray Ozpin and serve her. That would make her victory all the more sweet.

I'd be unwittingly aiding the woman who murdered my own mother, if she had it her way.

It would be okay, though. Ruby was going to turn it all around on its head. Salem, Ozpin – neither of them would be getting their way from Ruby, except for Ozpin.

The powers of the maidens were going to be hers. Once they combined into one person, they would be together in a single host who would transfer it to a single host, and so on, and so on, forever. Ruby would hold the powers safely in her palsm and eventually choose someone worthy, someone who would make a good choice when it was her turn to pass the maiden powers on. Salem wouldn't even get a whiff of these relics she so desperately wanted.

"Ruby?" called someone from the White Fang, evidently forgetting they were terrorists trying to hide from the law. "Where are you? It's 8:10am, and…er, 8100 hours, and we're ready to get started."

"Over here," Ruby said calmly. "And I'm ready too."

Coming Soon – Ruby's Refinery

And now, a tip from Ruby:

Ruby's Tip #922 – Save on dishwasher detergent by filling your pants pockets with forks and knives before running the laundry.

Author's Notes

I guess that's the great riddle solved. Beetlewalking serves yet another purpose, after being used at Ruby's Eleven for scouting and rescuing Pickerel, but this time it's the mental enhancement coming into play.

BTW, the errors in the White Fang grunts' lines are intentional. Just sayin'.

Happy rats, and don't do crime!