Team BXPS was behind cover in the office as bullets sailed through the shot-open windows. The students were in less danger while they kept their heads down, but the steady drumbeat of gunfire showed that their attackers very much wanted to keep them pinned in place.
"Are you going to return fire?" said Blake to Yang.
"No, don't!" said Weiss. "Some of the cells are open and there are boxes and crates up and down the hallway! If even some of that is Dust, stray shots could blow this whole place apart!"
"Who's shooting at us?" said Yang.
Blake raised her head just enough to look over the sill before ducking back down in a burst of shadows. "It's the Fang," she said. "They didn't have enough time to change into full uniforms, but they've got the masks."
"No problem," said Yang, punching one hand into the other.
Whatever Blake would have said next was lost beneath the rev of a motor. Blake took another peek. "That's a problem," she said. "It's Banesaw. He's a lieutenant in the Fang, and he's no pushover."
There was a roar, then two impacts in rapid succession—one further down the warehouse, one from outside it.
"Our lockers!" said Weiss, seeing a ping on her scroll. "What happened?"
"I called them," Yang said.
"To the same coordinates?!"
Yang's mouth was open to retort, but she saw her mistake just as Penny did. If Yang had used the same coordinates for both lockers, well, they couldn't occupy the same physical space—which meant they'd collided at some point, throwing off their landing points.
"Weiss, your locker is at the end of the hall," said Blake. "Mine's outside. Okay, we split up. One partner with a weapon, one without—so Yang, you're with me, Penny with Weiss. Reconvene when we're all armed."
"How are we getting all the way down there?" said Weiss.
Penny smiled. "I never removed my jetpack."
"Again? What gods did I offend that you have to keep carrying me in flight?!"
"Less drama, more punch-a," said Yang. "Ready, Penny?"
"Ready," said Penny as her wings popped into position.
"Go!" shouted Blake.
Penny's back was almost parallel to the floor when she yanked Weiss into her arms and blasted off. She was over and past the blocking White Fang before they realized she was there.
"Traitor!" she heard a burly voice from that group call. A quick sensor ping showed several of the Fang, including the largest, pursuing Yang and Blake as they broke for the door, but she couldn't follow that action; the end of the warehouse was coming up fast.
Penny retracted her wings, jackknifed to a standing position, and touched down at the end of the hall. There was Weiss' locker, all right, but it had embedded itself into some machinery there.
"Oh, no," said Weiss.
"What kind of 'oh no'?" said Penny as she set Weiss on her feet.
"The "my locker is stuck in a Dust crystallizer that's still operating and has live granular Dust inside and may be about to turn in a bomb" kind of oh no!" said Weiss.
Penny would have replied, except that Tactical issued its strongest alert and overrode other concerns.
In continuous motions Penny drew both halves of Elektra, twirled, and deflected incoming bullets from several members of the Fang. Needing to protect not only herself, but Weiss and the apparently volatile machine behind her, added stress and urgency to the task.
It didn't help that at the same time, a dainty, petite woman with two-tone hair strolled up next to the members of the Fang with apparent casualness, only to break into a charge at Huntress speed.
Penny kept on deflecting bullets as much as possible with her right hand while freeing her left to ward off this newcomer. The blow came from what appeared to be a parasol, except that when Penny went to parry, the parasol danced around Penny's sword and struck home against her Aura with frightening power.
"Right side, now!" shouted Weiss. Before Penny's eyes, several glyphs sprung up in front of the White Fang gunners, briefly deflecting their gunfire. Penny backpedaled, warding off lightning-fast parasol jabs from the petite woman as she retreated behind the back-most, right-most cell in the hallway.
As Penny left the lines of sight of the gunners, the petite woman darted away rather than chase any further. That freed Penny's vision to take in that Weiss' locker was still stuck in the crystallizer, which was making increasingly alarming noises.
"Weiss," said Penny, "what will happen if that crystallizer remains in an unsafe condition?"
"What do you think?!"
Penny took in the compromised machine, the nearby open crates holding cases of Dust, the nearby open cell with crates of Dust inside, and the number of cells in the warehouse.
Thesaurus translated the resulting level of concern into its simplest possible form.
"Uh oh."
Yang and Blake broke into the open, Blake's locker just ahead of them in the road outside the warehouse.
They heard yelling and the rev of a motor behind them. "Keep going, I'll cover you," said Yang, turning to intercept instinctively.
A boulder of a man was barreling at Yang, an absurdly large weaponized chainsaw roaring in his hands. Yang shadow boxed at him to fire off several long range shots from her gauntlets, trying to angle around his weapon at the squishy bits. One flare connected, bursting unimpressively against his Aura, while he deflected the other two with his weapon. Yang silently cursed not having cluster ammo loaded even as she realized that the strength of this "Banesaw's" Aura meant he wasn't some mook. The size and decorations on his mask were another clue: this was no loaner mask. Banesaw had been in the Fang for a while and had a combat record to match.
Yang thought all of this even as Banesaw took a mighty sweep and his chainsaw came tearing through the air at her.
Yang backpedaled around his swing back out of range, then retreated again to dodge a second horizontal swing going the other way. After his third miss, she thought she had a feel for the speed and arc of his attacks, and after his fourth she saw her chance and danced inside.
Her punches were true, but he turned his body to take them on arm and shoulder rather than anything vulnerable, so his Aura didn't have to do much work to soak it. A low kick to his leg did a little better, causing him to stagger, but kicks were not Yang's forte and she had no follow-up. Instead, Banesaw threw a backhand her way and followed with the butt of the chainsaw.
The backhand connected, but Yang was easily fast enough to dodge the combo; she didn't even really mind taking the first hit. She felt her blood warming up at the impact, and now she knew his strength.
Rallying, Yang closed once more for a punch combo to the chest. Banesaw was an endurance fighter like her, though, and he powered through the hits to plant a meaty hand on her bicep. Before he could take advantage, Yang jerked out of his grasp with the aid of the recoil from her gauntlets.
Yang's confidence was soaring. Banesaw was like a bigger, lamer Penny, and she liked that matchup. He was tough, but Yang was tougher. He was strong, but she was stronger. He had reach, but she had speed. This was in the bag for sure-
The chainsaw was coming at her again.
She just barely got away this time, rapidly backpedaling to restore balance and range. As Banesaw looked to chase after her, he instead had to raise his weapon defensively as pistol shots plinked off the flat of his chainsaw.
Blake touched down beside Yang, blade and sheathe in either hand.
"Traitor," said Banesaw in a voice as rough and growling as the motor of his weapon. "You traitor!"
"Traitor to what, exactly?" said Blake.
"Traitor to the Fang, to the Faunus, and to Leader Taurus!" roared Banesaw.
"You only got one of those three things right," said Blake scathingly, "but that is about your batting average, isn't it?"
"Hey, nice one!" said Yang.
"Leader Taurus is so eager to see you again," said Banesaw; Yang felt rather than saw Blake's flinch. "I'm going to beat you down and drag you back to him… after I slaughter the Schnee you mingle with these days."
"In your dreams," said Yang, her heart pounding loudly in her ears.
Banesaw hefted his namesake weapon. "I've got no problem chopping you down first."
Before Yang could spit back a retort, probably something terrifically witty about the guy with a chainsaw chopping things down, there were sliding and banging sounds to her right. The slide-panel van they'd tracked here was opening to reveal another group of White Fang grunts. These ones were in full uniform, having used the time Banesaw had bought them to gear up, and they were fully armed as well.
"That's a lot of guns," said Yang.
As Banesaw charged the ladies with a battle roar, those guns opened fire.
"I understand your plan," said Penny.
"On three," said Weiss. "One, two, three!"
Weiss raised her hand to draw a glyph; at her command, the white shape blossomed into being across the hall from them, at an angle, a little below the ceiling. Penny launched herself into the air at it; the White Fang gunners didn't see her until she was already moving too fast to shoot.
Flipping about in midair just like Weiss would do, Penny planted her feet against the glyph. Her whole body complained at the huge amount of stress the maneuver placed on her robotic joints, so much that her Aura had to kick in to hold her together. She launched herself with even more power back towards the ground, aiming for the middle of the hall where the gunners were. She saw shocked faces for an instant before she landed in their midst with the force of a meteorite; concrete shattered beneath her feet.
She twirled with her swords before the Fang could so much as blink.
And cleaved nothing.
There was a sound like shattering glass and the gunners seemed to break apart like funhouse mirrors. Even as Penny's eyes lingered on the rapidly evaporating shards, her other senses alerted that the gunners were there, after all: on either side of the hallway, in between cells, in perfect ambush position.
Weiss and Penny had been played, and played hard.
The petite woman darted past Penny before Penny could hope to intercept; even as she yelled a warning to Weiss, the gunners on both sides of the hallway opened fire on her.
Even Penny couldn't dodge or deflect every bullet from different directions, several biting into her Aura despite her efforts, and being caught in the crossfire between the groups was keeping her from counterattacking.
Between the groups!
Penny leapt up the hall towards the crystallizer and Weiss, wholly exiting the gunners' lines of sight so that their last few shots hit each other. As Penny recovered her wits, she saw Weiss trying to evade the attentions of the petite woman. Weiss was fast, but she was the slower of the two, and was completely defensive against the onslaught of thrusts and swipes from the deceptively dangerous parasol.
And behind her, the Dust crystallizer belched smoke as its troubling moans and groans grew louder and more frequent.
The gunners were recovering from their friendly fire and turning their attentions to Penny again, but Penny couldn't mind that; Weiss' plight was more urgent. She called out to her partner, "Swap opponents!"
Weiss flew up to a new glyph and sprang high to disengage, but the petite woman matched her move-for-move, and before Weiss could escape, the petite woman looped the hook of her parasol around Weiss' ankle. Instead of completing her leap to escape and go for the gunners, Weiss face-planted on the concrete floor.
Penny had closed the distance. She swung both her swords at the petite woman, one after the other.
The woman seemed to freeze in place as the swords raced for her, still smiling as they came in contact… and shattered her image again. Penny, having seen this once, was already probing the area with her other sensors. She understood now how the illusionist used these doppelgangers to buy her time, not unlike Blake and her shadows. Penny would not be caught flat-footed twice.
So when the petite woman shot in with a lunge, a blade extended from the tip of the parasol, Penny was ready for her, binding the parasol between Elektra's blades and cutting off the attack. The petite woman had time for a flash of surprise before a sweeping kick from Penny sent her airborne.
Not that such a hit was enough to stop this minute assassin. Already she'd twisted and angled her arc to touch down on open crate. She looked down at the crate's contents, and an expression of sick glee came over her.
There were sounds of gunfire as Weiss attempted to engage the gunners even without Myrtenaster, but Penny had no time for that. The hook of the parasol had caught the handle of a carrying case and flung the case in Penny's direction… a little too far for her to easily catch.
And Penny realized, a moment too late, that those carrying cases were stuffed full of Dust.
A black glyph sprang to life in the case's path and stole its momentum as it fell; Penny was able to snatch it before it hit the ground. The distraction was costly, forcing Weiss to disengage from the gunners and fall back as bullets bit into her Aura.
"I thought these cases were shock-proof," said Penny as she gently set it aside.
"Not that shock-proof," said Weiss. She'd done her best against the gunners, but more had joined them, the petite woman was brandishing another case of Dust with a manic expression, and behind Penny the crystallizer was making more alarming noises still.
"If you throw that," Penny said in a vain appeal to reason, "and I fail to catch it, it will destroy all of us!"
The petite woman's smile grew crueler. Penny understood. Preserving life mattered more to Penny than to the petite woman, so the petite woman would count on Penny to do the right thing, and exploit her when she did.
Well, that was perverse.
Penny pinged Tactical for recommendations on how to protect Weiss, disable the gunners, ward off the petite woman, catch all the flying Dust cases, and disarm the crystallizer all at the same time.
No content. Tactical could solve one problem at a time, not five problems at a time.
The petite woman lofted the case in a high, high arc. Penny activated flight mode to catch it at its apex, but doing so exposed her to gunfire and Weiss to a rush from the petite woman. A black glyph in the woman's path slowed her enough that Weiss could disengage, but as with her spar against Penny, Weiss couldn't win a fight by running away, and time was running out.
Penny fired Elektra's rifles and then threw one sword at the mass of gunners, driving them to cover and breaking their fire for a moment. As she landed and retracted her wings, she placed the case gently on the ground and rushed to her partner's defense.
"Catch!" said Penny, throwing her other sword to Weiss.
Weiss caught it in time to parry the parasol. It was not the sort of weapon Weiss was used to, much heavier than her own sword and carrying so much of Penny's Aura that Weiss' body tried to reject it, but it was still a sword, and that was good enough in an emergency like this.
Weiss counter-attacked and drove the petite woman back. The petite woman seemed to understand this meant Penny was weaponless, because like a bullet she fired herself at Penny. A blistering array of punches, kicks, and sweeps of the parasol followed, one that Penny was only just able to stay ahead of.
And the gunners opened fire once more.
More glyphs deflected the gunfire, but Penny had to wonder if the gunners had more bullets than Weiss had Aura…
A kick to the face rearranged Penny's priorities.
The blow hurt her less than it might have hurt her friends; Penny recovered before the petite woman could withdraw. Grabbing the woman's leg, she flung her at the gunners, knocking down two and scattering the rest.
A small boom came from the crystallizer; a piercing whistle followed, growing louder and higher in pitch by the second.
"I've got to shut it down now!" said Weiss.
"Go," said Penny. Weiss chucked Penny's sword back to her, leaving her with half her arsenal, against the petite woman—scowling now rather than smiling—and the recombobulated White Fang gunners. The petite woman grabbed another case, ready to throw it, and Penny could simulate how vulnerable she'd be to bullets and blades as she tried to catch it with no cover.
This would be bad. This would be…
"Is that you, Penny?"
Penny looked up the hall, past the White Fang, past the petite woman, and saw a figure with sunglasses and a red hoodie entering the warehouse.
"Oh, good, there you are!" said Garnet, and she started walking up the hall, seemingly unconcerned about all the weaponry being brandished in the hallway.
"Freeze!" shouted one of the gunners, swinging his weapon around to point at Garnet, but Garnet moved, and was standing beside Penny almost before even Penny noticed it. The White Fang backed away a few steps; the petite woman's scowl grew.
"Are you okay?" said Garnet.
"This is a combat scenario," Penny said, not vocalizing the very dangerous and low odds of survival aspect of said scenario. "You should get clear."
Garnet smiled.
It was a simple gesture, of the sort Penny had seen hundreds of times before on dozens of faces, but this smile stunned her, functioned like an interrupt command against whatever else higher consciousness had running.
The whole world seemed brighter, somehow, when Garnet smiled.
"Don't worry, Penny," said Garnet, tossing her head so her hood fell back to reveal spiky black-red hair. "It's like I told you. I'm the person who'll save the world someday. I'll start by saving you."
A strip of metal snaked over the top of Garnet's head and plugged into her sunglasses, then unfolded, mecha-shifted into a full helmet with the sunglasses as the visor. Garnet raised her arms parallel to the ground; the sleeves of her hoodie split open to reveal armored vambraces and weapons stows on her rerebraces, linked together by a powered exoskeleton that extended over her hands with a crackle. Two sticks of metal flew into her waiting hands.
"Argent Grasp, deploy," Garnet said, her smile turning dangerous.
The sticks were hilts, but that only became obvious over the next second, as segment after segment of metal stacked on to them, clack-clack-clack, by no obvious mechanism Penny could see, until Garnet was holding two segmented short swords.
Garnet had said before that she was a project. She had neglected to specify what kind of project.
Penny knew now.
Garnet was a weapons project.
"Let's go," said Garnet, and she moved again.
One of the White Fang gunners was airborne before any of them could so much as squeeze a trigger.
The petite woman, visibly redoing her threat calculations, chucked the Dust case at Penny while she turned to strike at Garnet, but Penny snatched the case out of the air as she charged in and engaged the petite woman first, forcing her on the defensive with a flurry of blows from her single sword, freeing Garnet to engage the gunners.
It was a massacre.
Both swords struck either side of one gunner, shattering his Aura but leaving him stunned in place; a simple kick sent him to the floor.
One of the swords extended, like its segments had stretched into a kind of metal whip, three times as long and infinitely more flexible than before; it seized a gunner by the ankle and flung him like a shuriken against a wall.
An upwards sweep of the swords knocked another gunner helplessly into the air; while he was still airborne, one sword extended again, wrapped around him, and yanked him to the ground. He hit with such force the floor shattered beneath him.
Penny was grateful she had other sensors than just sight, because that let her focus her vision on the petite woman while still drinking in the spectacle of Garnet's full power. It was majesty; it was grace; it was beauty. Yes—the beauty of a storm, the thunder and the lightning, overawing and terrible and amazing all at once.
One, two more swings with as much expertise and effect as the others, and all the gunners were indisposed. They hadn't managed to fire a single shot in self-defense.
That left only the petite woman, whom Penny was overpowering moment by moment. Penny was just as fast, with a sword in hand she had more reach, and for as unpredictable as the petite woman was, Penny was starting to model her style effectively, which let Penny leverage her strength better.
Another gunner appeared—except Penny did a quick-swap to IR and recognized the illusion for what it was. Garnet didn't have IR, though…
Garnet, without looking away, contemptuously flicked one of her whip-swords at the illusion and shattered it.
…or maybe she did.
Penny crossed Elektra against the parasol, stepped forward, forced the petite woman into a clinch, and with Penny being stronger a clinch could only end one way; the petite woman gave ground, gave more as she lost her leverage, began to stumble backwards…
Garnet slapped the hilts of her whip-swords together so that the blades were parallel. The hilts seemed to fuse together, somehow, and the swords' inner edges glowed green, brighter and brighter by the moment.
Fear came over the petite woman's face as Garnet aimed her swords.
A particle beam erupted from Garnet's weapon.
The beam punched through the wall beyond, vaporizing the wall, whatever merchandise had been on that shelf, and the blades of a poorly-parked forklift.
The petite woman just managed to dodge the blast, leaping backwards in the air, but now she was hanging there defenseless on a fixed trajectory.
Penny stepped forward and swung with all her prodigious might.
The petite woman left her silhouette in the shattered ceiling.
"Nice!" said Garnet appreciatively—but then she smacked her head. "Oh, darn it, I was supposed to apprehend her! I'm gonna have to go chase her down! Glad I could help okay thanks bye!"
Garnet moved again, and Penny was barely able to track her as she sped out the way she'd come.
For the first time in minutes, quiet came over the warehouse. Oh—Weiss must have shut down the crystallizer.
"Bei den Göttern."
And now Weiss was surveying the damage.
"Who was that?" Weiss shrieked. "No—what was that?!"
"That was Friend Garnet," said Penny happily. She was still looking at where Garnet had left, hoping faintly that Garnet would come back soon, knowing that Garnet would or would not according to her own logic, logic Penny wasn't privy to.
She sighed, but it was a happy sigh. (Emotion Signifying had been waiting to try out that one.)
"Are you sure it wasn't a localized tornado?" said Weiss, taking in the broken floor, unconscious Fang, burned-out storage space, and punctured ceiling.
"That is a splendid analogy for Garnet," Penny said cheerily. "I feel like Yang did about me when I first met her, or like I felt with you. I love to have a friendly face around, especially one who can handle herself in a fight and whom I can trust to do the right thing."
Weiss' eyes were wider than ever. Analysis wondered about the wisdom of lumping Weiss, Yang, and Garnet into the same category… especially since Penny knew she felt differently about Garnet than she did Weiss or Yang.
Yang!
"Oh, right!" said Penny. "We were supposed to rendezvous with Yang and Blake!"
"They might still be in danger!" said Weiss. "Let's go!"
Penny snatched up her other sword; rather than run all the way down the hall to use the doorway, Penny ran for the closest wall and plowed through it, her strength-weight-Aura combination overwhelming the humble corrugated steel, emerging on to the loading dock in time to see a body hitting the ground.
Banesaw's knocked-out body, to be precise.
Yang, grinning cockily, wiped her mouth with one thumb; Blake sheathed her sword and replaced her sheath on her back. Strewn around them were the limp forms of White Fang grunts.
"Hope you weren't looking for leftovers," said Yang. She kicked the unmoving form of Banesaw as she looked at Penny. "Yeah, he was tough, but you're stronger and cleverer. Er." Yang frowned and started counting syllables on her fingers.
"In that case," said Penny, "I believe the area is secure."
Yang stopped counting to do a fist pump. "Hell yeah! Not a bad day's work, ladies!"
"All that's left is to wait for Vale's policemen to show up to arrest them all," said Weiss.
"About that," said Blake. "We don't want to be here when that happens."
"Why not?"
The question would be answered in most unfortunate fashion, as three cars in VPD heraldry arrived on the scene before Blake could formulate a reply. Turning on their sirens as they made their approach, the cruisers slid sideways to form a barrier around the loading dock. The police officers bailed out of their cruisers on the side away from the warehouse—and then they drew their guns at Team BXPS, while one of them yelled out, "Hands up, no sudden movements!"
Penny was flabbergasted.
She blinked and turned to her teammates. "I am not familiar with social situations like this. Are we being arrested?"
"I said, Hands up!" the cop repeated.
Weiss raised her chin defiantly; Blake shrank in on herself; Yang sighed and answered.
"Yes, Penny. We're being arrested."
Next time: Taken to Task