Chapter 21 – Ruby's Friend
It was difficult to tell if Ilia actually enjoyed Ruby's presence or just tolerated it and was too polite to ask her to leave, but Ruby could care less about the truth. She's finally found someone not objectively insane in this world of scoundrels, thugs, terrorists, and Grimm-worshippers, and she wasn't going to let go of her for the universe!
"…and then I tripped over a pumpkin vine and ate a face full of mud! Oh, it was the worst!"
"You're smiling like it wasn't," Ilia said, exhaling through her nose slightly at the semi-funny story.
I'm smiling because if I told Cinder that story, she'd either not understand how swallowing a mouthful of my garden's soil was something I could look back on and laugh at, or she'd force a smile and try to initiate mouth-sex.
"It's just nice to have someone to talk to," Ruby said, the truth rolling off her lips like a burden relieved.
"I get that, sister," Ilia said. "Like, don't get me wrong, my brothers-in-arms in the White Fang are great, and there's no people I'd rather have my back in a warzone, but they aren't great…conversationalists."
"Adam?"
Ilia nodded.
Ruby clicked her tongue. "Well, we're conversationalists for one another, and we're going into battle tomorrow, so I'd say that's a win-win for everyone."
"Tomorrow? Don't you mean today?"
"Nah, the attack on the rail is scheduled for…" Ruby looked out the flap of the tent in which she'd been discussing wild childhood stories, exchanging weapons, browsing memes on her scroll, comparing favorite bands, and getting up to other such frivolities with her lizardo-bestie. "…tomorrow? Wait, why is it getting bright out?"
Ilia shrugged and stepped out of the tent, with Ruby following after her. "Prolly cuz it's morning, and we were up all night."
"All – crap! What time is it? Did we miss the thing?"
Ilia smiled and shook her head. "Naw. I'm on the op too, so I'd've said if we were getting late. The sun rises early in Solitas. I hope you're not going to get tired on the job, though."
Ruby wouldn't. She had plenty of experience operating at full capacity with little to no sleep. Basically anyone who'd passed their midterms and finals at Patch did.
Following the Faunus, Ruby trusted Ilia would know where they were headed. Actually, now that she thought about it, Adam hadn't really specified a meeting point for the early morning mission. Still, she had her scythe, and she didn't have to pee, so she was all set to go.
The others were all waiting for them, except for Tyrian. Ruby wondered why he'd been sent out to distract Atlas so early when the plan only needed him to occupy the specialists' time once they were aware of the White Fang's objective, but she didn't question it. Adam probably was better at terrorism than her.
And that's a good thing.
"Enjoy your beauty sleep?" Adam asked her, his lips parting in a particularly ugly manner.
"Couldn't get any."
Adam rolled his eyes. "Nerves getting to you already?"
"No, I was too busy banging your mom!" Ruby shot back. She actually had no interest in banging of any sort (save for gunshots), but Adam didn't need to know that.
"My mother is dead!" the bull Faunus growled, reaching for his sword.
"Yeah, cuz I banged her so hard!" Ruby said, doubling down and expanding Crescent Rose.
The bat Faunus and Ilia got between the red and black, rose-emblazoned hunters (wow, she and Adam had a lot of similarities in their theming when she thought about it) before the banter could get physical. Neither would benefit from that; despite having technically lost yesterday's exhibition match via a forfeit, Adam was probably the better fighter and would win, but Ruby could probably take an arm or a leg before she went down.
And also we're on the same side here. There's that, too.
"Idiot child," the mission leader snarled. "Enough of this. We've got a job to do, and your shenanigans won't get in our way."
"Hey, you st– ugh, never mind."
Ruby watched the train approaching through her binoculars from afar. She and the team of fighters were gathered around a rock formation that provided excellent cover for them to leap aboard without being seen a mile away.
Adam was actually wearing his shirt this time, but that seemed like a necessity. Had he not, Ruby might've called him out for it, as the strong winds in these parts of the snowy lands could easily have been enough to noticeably impact his aura.
Ilia seemed kind of jittery, so Ruby placed a hand on her new friend's shoulder to calm her down. The gesture seemed most appreciated, if Ilia's smile were any indicator.
"Remember, the goal here isn't anything fancy. Get in, destroy the train and anything on it, get out. The real battle is when they beef up security."
The train was coming closer and closer. Ruby couldn't wait to get out of this blizzard and into the climate-controlled atmosphere within Atlas' state of the art, high-speed mode of transport.
"Heh," said Yuma. "Beef."
Adam looked at him, and he looked back at Adam…specifically Adam's horns.
Wilt flashed like a bolt of lightning. Ruby's reflexes were faster than any of the other fighters, so she was able to throw herself away from the blade before it struck, but it had never been directed at her. Yuma must not have realized the danger he had put himself in by making the stupid joke.
Ruby had to stare at the scene for a few seconds before her brain caught up to her eyes. It had seemed so obvious, the course of events, that when Adam deviated from it, she couldn't comprehend it for a moment. Adam was a bully, the likes of which Ruby had encountered by the dozen…okay, by the few at school. He was supposed to smack Yuma, or maybe strike him and angrily yell at him to know his place.
The sword just went through his heart. Yuma died instantly, but he remained on the blade, as Adam had angled it upwards.
For about ten seconds, they all stared at Adam and the corpse he'd just made. Then, Trifa opened her mouth to speak, only to close it without saying a word. Another ten seconds passed in motionless silence, with Yuma's limp body still upright.
"That was a mistake," Adam said at long last. It sounded less like a confession and more like a struggling realization of the fact. He was explaining it to himself. "I made a mistake."
"We…the train's coming," Trifa whispered, her eyes down and her tone the exact opposite of forceful. "It would be to our benefit to…"
"I shouldn't have done that," Adam said, his eyes fixed on Yuma's corpse. "We might need him in the coming days, and it was an overreaction. I made a mistake."
"Adam," Ilia said. "If we don't go now, we –"
Adam tilted his sword downwards, and Yuma fell to the ground.
When he spoke, his voice was freshly shattered glass. "Have someone collect his body. No. Leave it to me. I should be the one to do it. Let's get the train. Seize anything of value you can carry, destroy the rest. For the White Fang."
"For the White Fang," chanted the surviving 66% of the White Fang, before the mission had even started.
Since there were no people aboard the train, they could simply hop on without even having to worry about making lots of noise. After all, in the snowstorm-rich tundra that was Solitas, it would be impossible to set up robotic defenses that were sound activated.
"It's got pressure sensors on the insides of the cars that will alert the drones," Ilia explained, back in business mode. Adam wasn't yet at full speed after his actions just moments prior, so she was leading their formation for the time being. "The doors are locked with fancy Atlesian gadgetry, and the insides of the cars are hermetically sealed before being sent off, to prevent anyone or anything from getting in. Once we breach those seals, all hell is going to break loose."
Ruby nodded. Anything that wasn't a Faunus was fair game to be annihilated. The goal here was to get better as quickly as possible, and the secondary goal was to improve relations with these insane allies of Salem that really didn't have a purpose and were actively going around killing one another and would probably kill Ruby is she looked at them the wrong way.
Needless to say, the secondary goal was less important to Ruby personally.
With Yuma gone, they numbered four – Ruby, Trifa, Adam, and Ilia. The male member of the team was the one to breach the doors, slashing through them with dismaying ease and rushing into the controlled atmosphere. Ruby and the others followed into the warzone as soon as he was through.
Ilia had warned her that it was going to be chaotic, but she assumed there would be a moment's pause when the robots warmed up while their eyes started glowing red. It wasn't so. Instantly, literally before she'd taken a second complete step through the door, a hailstorm of bullets pelted her from the already spun-up turrets that lined the ceiling. Ruby dove to the side to get under them, but Atlas had apparently thought of that and dotted the roof with guns to cover every angle. Her aura was easily tanking the small bullets (the trouble with quantity was that it tended to reduce the quality), but she imagined it would run out before their magazines.
A crisp crackle filled the air, and Lightning Lash swung around in a wide loop. Each of the guns were hit by it as it passed, and the electricity coursing through its length was enough to inhibit them all. Ruby breathed a sigh of relief as the turrets shut down from Ilia's sweeping assault on them.
The battle wasn't over, though, not by a long shot. Now that Ruby could have a look at the room into which they'd entered, she could see just how long it was, and wide. The size of it reminded her of a professional greenhouse, and it seemed to extend on for nearly half a kilometer. This was no mere passenger train; it was clearly made for bulk shipments to feed the troops.
As such, there was plenty of room for the robots that were converging on their location to move about. It wasn't just bipedal humanoid robots. Some of them were eight-legged crablike creatures that had two massive guns where the claws would be, and others were smaller flying objects with missiles sticking off the edge. If Ruby weren't fighting for her life, she might've taken the time to geek out over the engineering that had to be behind such amazing weapons (and wonder if she could equip Crescent Rose with a small deployable drone of its own).
Sadly, she was fighting for her life, and so fun times had to wait while Ruby charged forward and laid waste to the robotic foes. They clearly weren't designed to be deployed versus aura-users, as Ruby's scythe tore right through most of the smaller bots, as did Wilt. It made sense that they didn't; after all, aura was so tightly controlled a commodity due to the academies' laws prohibiting its misuse. Rogue huntsmen and huntresses were nearly completely a thing of the past, and it was nearly unthinkable that the White Fang had more than a handful of hunters.
And as of today, they're one lower. Cheers.
Ilia and Trifa had fallen back, drawing out Dust-enhanced firearms and engaging the robot crab from afar. Adam was practically walking through the humanoid robots, while Ruby herself had taken to sniping the remaining floating drones out of the air while she picked off the land-based robots that wandered too close to her personal space. Even without Yuma, they were doing stellar. Adam had been right in stating how easy this all was.
The entire train car was cleared of robots within minutes, and the next three went down even faster now that Ruby and the White Fang had found their optimal sweet spots amongst one another. Once they were the only passengers aboard the rail line, the four planted the charges Trifa had brought in her pouch at various points.
They could have recovered some of the materials being transported, but aside from filling their pockets with plain Dust crystals or Atlesian ration packets, it would be impossible to transport it. It seemed to Ruby like Adam had suggested it, he'd had encrypted computers or papers with classified information and those types of things in mind, and there were no such valuable items anywhere in sight.
It seemed like a major waste to just let all that food be blown up when people were starving all across the world, but there was nothing Ruby could do about it.
It's not like this is my fault. The White Fang would have destroyed this train either way, whether I was with them or back in Signal. And besides, the people at the Convex base place will just go back home if they don't get fed, not starve. Atlas wouldn't let that many of their own soldiers die when it would be easy enough to sound a retreat.
Ruby watched the train explode from a safe distance, with the rest of the White Fang at her side. All in all, it was a complete success, with the only casualty on their side being the one Adam had caused.
"…was murdered! The humans! Humans will never let us have peace! The humans, never!"
You're not wrong, Ruby thought to herself as Adam raged and ranted to the crowd. Yuma was murdered. But it was you who did it!
"Animals! Killed! They tore him apart, so viciously that we don't even have a body to bury!"
You just don't want them seeing the hole in his chest that your sword fits perfectly into.
The worst part of it was that Adam's anger seemed real. Ruby wasn't sure if he was presenting self-hatred to the crowd and sprucing it up with a racially inflammatory speech, if he was expressing latent anger at humans in general and had entirely forgotten about Yuma, or if he truly had somehow jumped through enough mental hula-hoops to somehow think that humans had forced him to kill his buddy by…because…Ruby didn't how Adam could justify it to himself, but he certainly seemed like the kind of man who would find a way.
Even if Ruby hadn't seen Adam kill Yuma by his own hand, she wouldn't have believed his lies. The way he spewed out words so desperately, as though he thought of a new term or phrase every time and feared he would forget it if he didn't reveal it to the world immediately, struck her as insane. She seemed alone in that conclusion, though, for every other Faunus in the crowd was eating up their leader's fanatical shouting.
Are they all just gullible, or is Adam some trustworthy pillar of the White Fang community? Maybe they know and just hate humans just as much as he does…
Any which way, it didn't speak well of the Faunus in front of her. It amazed her sometimes that Atlas, with all its resources, couldn't shut down a rowdy bunch of poorly armed, improperly trained rebels who had only nine…make that eight…hunters on the entire continent.
Adam continued to rave, the only thing missing being the froth at his mouth, so Ruby left him to his bull crap (heh) while she went out to find Ilia. Had Tyrian been there, she might have sought out his company, as his brand of insanity was far preferable to Adam's, but the scorpion was long gone by now.
Ilia wasn't in the tent from last night, and Ruby hadn't seen her in the crowd. She was free to wander their encampment, as most of the Faunus were occupied by Adam's rabble rousing, and the few who remained no longer gave her odd looks. Presumably, fighting and winning one of their battles for them had won some favor in their eyes.
As she traversed the site, she couldn't help but notice little things that served to reinforce just how poorly the war was faring in the White Fang's favor. The tents that had been hastily pitched were all ragged and dirty, likely from having been torn down and reset every time Atlas closed in on their location, and some of them had rips and tears that would lead to great discomfort on cold Atlesian nights. In fact, their fabrics were all thin as an umbrella's material and their styles Mistrilian floral patterns.
They're on the verge of falling apart, and their resources haven't been refreshed. Adam's charisma and talent with the blade is probably keeping them together, but it won't be long now.
Salem wanted them as her allies, but that had been when they could be manpower for a specific purpose in Vale. With that purpose gone, she had lost any need of them, and yet Ruby and Tyrian, two-fifths of her trusted inner council (two-sixths if you counted the hound) were dispatched to their aid for this trivial train-stopping mission. Had she been sincere about her only motives here being honoring an existing bargain?
"Ruby?"
She turned around to see Ilia standing behind her. The young Faunus' eyes were bloodshot, and her hands were wrapped around her chest like she was cradling herself.
"Oh, hey Ilia. You, uh, you doin' okay?"
"No," Ilia curtly responded.
Ilia looked like she was about to fall apart, and Ruby rushed to grab ahold of her friend before she melted into a pile of Atlesian slush.
"Ilia, what's wrong?"
"Yuma, I…he…"
Ruby winced. Of course she was beat up about the death of one of her friends at the hands of another. It had probably kicked in as soon as the adrenaline from the mission wore off. What's wrong…what a stupid question to ask.
"What if it had been me?" Ilia said, her face buried into Ruby's shoulder. "How long until it is me? Adam's always been quick to temper, and I don't know if I can predict how he's going to react to every little thing if he keeps getting worse like this."
"Could you, I dunno, switch to a different branch of the White Fang?" Ruby asked, trying to be logical about it. Ilia would do better with a solution than comforting platitudes. "Or just avoid him when we're done with the train thing?"
"Ruby, I'm not sure I'm going to still be around when we're done with the 'train thing.'" Ilia began to cry. "I don't wanna die at 17. I don't wanna die before I've even kissed a girl."
"You're not gonna die," Ruby said, patting Ilia on the back. "Do what I do and keep your aura raised at all times. Adam got himself under control as quickly as he lost it, so if he does attack you, and I doubt he will, you just gotta survive until he gets a grip on himself."
There was a loud cheer coming from the other side of the White Fang camp, indicating that their impromptu celebration/rally/funeral was coming to a close.
"I don't wanna die," Ilia bawled, collapsing into Ruby's embrace.
"If things go wrong, I'll protect you," Ruby said. "I won't let you die, Ilia."
I can't let the only sane person I know die, Ruby thought.
Coming Soon – Ruby's Last Ride
And now, a tip from Ruby:
Ruby's Tip #5 – Wait, does Penny show up in this fic? She isn't in the tags, but she's such an important character…weird. Anyways, uh, the tip. Right. Uhhhhhh…crap, I forgot what it was.
Author's Notes
It's like an inverse of K. The Nega-K. The Anti-K.
The first train is destroyed, but it's only going to get tougher from here on out, or so they theorize. Hopefully neither Atlas nor Adam will endanger Ruby or her new buddy.
Happy rats, and don't do crime!
