Chapter 22 – Ruby's Last Ride
"On your left!" Adam called out.
Ruby dodged out of the way, not even looking as the crab robot's leg tried to squish her. She might not trust any member of the White Fang, but when they were on a mission, listening to your allies could be the difference between life and death. Adam wasn't going to throw away the life of a valuable pawn like Ruby, and Ruby wasn't going to throw away her own life by not heeding the warning of someone who had both a better vantage point than her and a vested interest in keeping his ally from dropping.
This was the fiftieth train they'd brought down in half as many days, and Ruby was almost exhausted from the strain it was putting on her body. Atlas hadn't put any troops on the train, instead just filling it up with more and more robots in the hopes that it would wear down the White Fang, and it was working. Fighting costed Dust and aura, and those were things that would run out eventually.
A turning point had been at the end of the first week, when Atlas seemed to have realized that they didn't need to just send trains once a day. Ruby's sleep schedule had only just started to adjust to both the new kingdom's time zone and having to wake up early in the morning. Now, she could be called out at any time to fight, morning, day, or night. The trains just kept coming.
And coming.
And coming.
And coming.
Tyrian must be really causing a ruckus if they can't spare a single huntsman to stop us. Of course, they might just be assuming that throwing robots at the problem will eventually work. And they'd be right…I don't know how much longer we can keep this up.
Ilia and Trifa had taken to swapping on and off of missions, given that the former needed to scrounge together enough Dust to power her weapon and the latter's aura control was so poor that she would need extra time to recover after each train. Currently, Trifa was with them, but she'd sustained a rather nasty cut on her leg and had withdrawn, prepping the explosives to remain useful.
Ruby herself was feeling the burn, but the vision in her head of Raven bringing down a sword onto her kept her going. Complain though she may, she certainly was improving. Being forced into combat against unending hordes of enemies with computer-precise accuracy and zero second reaction times had been a trial by fire that burned away weakness.
Adam was the only one of them who didn't seem at all perturbed. Because of his semblance, the more enemies that werethrown at him, the better he fared. Ruby could truly see why the powerhouse of a young man had become an icon for the White Fang. Honestly, he might have even been able to handle these missions on his own. On a positive note, he had yet to add a second name to his list of murder victims.
"Get back!" screeched the bull Faunus in question.
Ruby flew into a leap with her semblance, just in time to avoid the strike of one of the aerial drone's missiles. Using the leap to get running along the vertical face of the wall behind her, she managed to sneak up on the last of the six crab droids that had been pestering her with its cannons and sever its rear legs while it was distracted by Adam. She'd gotten good at utilizing the weakest points in the robots' architectures, and crabs were the toughest to take down. All of those legs made them awfully sturdy, and it was only when four were completely destroyed (or three on the same side) did they go down entirely. Since they could rotate while maintaining a steady position due to their upper halves having a separate axis from their bottoms, getting the slip on them was something of a challenge…a challenge she'd gotten good at overcoming.
"Going for the last legs!" she screamed out, having lost sight of Adam but counting on him being somewhere. "Handle the birds!"
There was metallic crunching in the background as Adam swatted the aerial drones out of the sky, charging up Moonslice as he struck.
The crab bot had locked onto her, and with her aura so low, using her semblance to get behind it would be wasteful. Instead, she twirled her scythe to block its fire, imitating the movements Adam used to soak up the momentum from bullets, and dashed forward at normal human speed. It had taken some practice to get so adept at both spinning her weapon and also keeping a firm enough hold on it that the shots blow it right out of her hand, but it had paid off in dividends once she got it down.
As a machine, it could do nothing but continue to try the same tactic of shooting Ruby head on as she got closer and closer, until she was finally right up on its nose. There was no way for its guns to angle inwards and hit her, so it tried to stomp her with its legs. Ruby kicked off the first one as it flew towards her, then hooked Crescent around the seconds to swing back around. Instead of going for the legs, she decided to skip to the end and behead it, finishing the fight.
There were still some bipeds left, but Ruby left those for Adam to mop up and rushed to see if Trifa needed help with the detonators. They had won the train, but if it got too far along the rail, the military base to which it was headed might be able to send out some reinforcements.
"Trifa! Where'd you go?!"
"H-Here…"
Ruby ran over to the sound of the Faunus' voice to find her laying on the floor. She pushed the bag of explosives out to Ruby.
"Take them. Finish the mission. Leave me here…"
"Shut the fuck up already, Trifa," Ruby said tiredly. By this point, she was getting real tired of Trifa's bullshit.
Almost everyone in the White Fang seemed to have some sort of martyr complex. If they weren't about to die on the job for some silly reason, they weren't happy. Ruby supposed that came with the territory when the average life expectancy was however long it took for a lucky bullet to meet your forehead.
Ruby grabbed the bag, took out half of the explosives, and ran down to the end. Now that there were no more threats, she could use her semblance without much fear.
Once they were placed, she ran back to Trifa, snatched the rest of the bags contents, and did the same on the other half. Adam gave her a brief nod as she passed by him both times, signaling that he would go back to recover Trifa.
All in all, a mission well done. The train was destroyed, Trifa only got out minorly hurt, and Convex Base was that much closer to falling. It was only a matter of time before the base was declared lost by Atlas, and Ruby would be able to leave these crazies.
They weren't the only ones doing things, of course. The other non-hunters at the camp had gotten busy with miscellaneous tasks. Most of them were periodically dispatched into Atlas using backdoors known only to the White Fang (Ruby suspected it was Faunus sympathizers in the police who had access to the gates) to steal supplies or complete other objectives that their High Command had deemed worthy uses of their time.
Most of this was stuff Ruby wasn't supposed to know, but lips tended to get a whole lot looser the further one was from Menagerie. There, in the heart of the White Fang, everyone observed proper procedure. Out here, it would've been utterly impractical to hide their entire operational plans from Ruby. That wasn't to say that they advertised them, but no one went to any great lengths to conceal them.
While some might have gradually become friends with these terrorists and discovered the innate personhood within all living beings, even going as far as to develop a sympathetic understanding of their reasons for rebelling against the world, Ruby didn't. She hadn't. These White Fang people…aside from Ilia, they were all scum.
As for Adam, he was an egotistical maniac who seemed to never have gotten over a woman named Blanket, and that was fitting because she seemed to be his security blanket that he used to frighten off the 'fearsome humans.' Now that she was gone, he was lashing out and expanding in every direction, seeing how far he could push and finding no resistance. Unlike Ruby and Roman, he discovered no consequences for his misdeeds, and so he was emboldened in a self-destructive spiral that was inevitably going to end in him thinking he could take on the entire Atlesian army with just his sword, his righteous rage, and his exaggerated dick.
As for Trifa, she was just as bad. She was the essence of what Ruby couldn't stand about the White Fang in general. This wasn't the first mission where she'd volunteered to bravely lay down her life in an entirely unnecessarily risk move. It would've been noble if not for the fact that one of their three fighters throwing her life away was actually harming their efforts. Ruby had to wonder if she'd seriously incurred the leg injury that inhibited her from standing during combat, or if she'd just let it happen for her to satiate her need to be a tragic victim.
As for Yuma, he was dead. Still.
Honestly, Ruby had only been able to endure the whole ordeal mentally by reminding herself periodically that she was only using the White Fang as a steppingstone to greater strength. Once she had gotten more powerful, Cinder would find Amber, and eventually they would stop Raven once and for all.
And all of Cinder and Salem's people are also just steppingstones for me to bring the powers back to Ozpin. Gods, there's so much duplicity here, I might forget who I'm truly working for.
But who was Ruby really working for?
Ozpin? Did she have any loyalty to him after he'd abandoned her and forced his own death to be placed on her conscience? With each day spent far away from her family and her real life, it was getting harder and harder to trust that he'd done the right thing. Ruby had only ever listened to him in the first place because she was distraught, and he had appeared as an authority figure in her life's most dire time of need.
Goodwitch? It was the same as Ozpin, but she hadn't even had to die for this. The reigning headmistress of Beacon was the only one who got to sit cozy in her castle while everyone else suffered.
Herself? She was just a kid! She had no clue what she was doing here!
It was chaos. There was no one in charge here. No adult making a plan, no precocious child pulling it off – pure chaos.
"How long will she be out of commission?" Ilia asked, watching the medics tend to a loudly whinging Trifa.
"Three days at least," Adam said.
"That's about ten trains, assuming they don't ramp up," Ruby said, answering Ilia's real question.
"Which they will." Ilia didn't so much say it as she groaned it.
"They will," Adam concurred with a nod. "That means both of you are going to be working full time until she's back on her feet. Ilia, I'd advise you load up on Dust and get some rest right away. We have no idea when the scouts will spot the next shipment, and we need to be ready."
Ilia groaned again, and Ruby slung an arm around her shoulder before Adam could question her fitness for combat. She wasn't fit for combat, and that was obvious, but Adam wouldn't be able to take her off the mission, so it wouldn't make a difference.
"C'mon, girl. Let's get you somewhere else."
Despite being younger, shorter, and less experienced than Ilia, Ruby was the one who supported the chameleon girl back to her tent and propped a pillow under her head before she could pass out.
"Don't worry. Trifa's a dummy who got herself hurt because she wants to be revered by generations to come for dy…for being in the line of fire. The same won't happen to you because you don't want that."
"Gonna die, gonna die, gonna die, gonna die, gonna die…"
Ruby sighed and patted Ilia's head as she repeated her fears over and over again. An aura-user though she may have been, this was not a huntress. The difference was in her disposition. Ruby knew her aura would protect her, and she had enough confidence in her skills to count on it when she raced headfirst into combat without a care in the world. She'd been doing this since childhood, and she trusted herself and her baby to see her through to the dawn. Ilia must've joined the White Fang in her late teenage years, for she wasn't accustomed to life-threatening scenarios and didn't seem to have the nerve for willingly entering them.
Fear of death wasn't unreasonable, but it was a civilian thing. That was what Ilia was – a civilian who happened to have had her aura unlocked. No shame in being normal, right?
"Ilia, we're doing the same thing over and over again, train after train," Ruby said. "What're the odds you're gonna die this time when we've pulled everything off without a hitch before?"
"Gonna die gonna die, gonna die…"
Ruby sighed. "Try and get some sleep. Thing's look better when Adam and I are freshened up and you're –"
Adam's voice called from afar. "ROSE! AMITOLA!"
Withholding her growls, Ruby petted her mental health teddy chameleon companion and opened up the flap of the tent. "What?"
"Train's been spotted," said a nearby Faunus. "You're on."
"Gonna die…"
She couldn't help but laugh at the elder girl's repeated chanting. "You're not gonna die, Ilia."
Ilia didn't raise her voice, but her dismay was clear. "You can't protect me, you're bushed from the last train, Adam can't protect me, he's the one what's gonna kill me, I'm going to die today, no no no no no noooooo…"
"ROSE! WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?"
"WE'RE FUCKING COMING!" screamed Ruby back. "GIVE US A MINUTE!"
"WE DON'T HAVE A MINUTE!" he screamed right back. "THE TRAIN LAUNCHED EARLY!"
Damn it, Ruby cursed to herself. If even one train gets past us, all that work we did is going to go to waste. All our progress down the drain…then Adam might get angry, and Ilia or I might actually be killed.
"Ilia, we need to go."
She kept mumbling to herself as Ruby lifted her to her feet and handed her the whip-sword that had been lying on the ground. Ilia did manage to follow along, but it was more like she was on autopilot and susceptible to Ruby's prodding in the right direction than she had gained courage to overcome her crippling fears.
In the end, Ruby had to lead Ilia all the way to Adam.
When they jumped on this train, Ruby was at 45% aura. She'd not had nearly enough time to regenerate up to full, and although Crescent Rose was reloaded, she had no option but to fall back and let the others take point. If she criticized Trifa for throwing herself into harm's way and did the same, it would the world's finest hypocrisy.
Still, I hate to see Ilia put in danger so much, Ruby thought as she cleaved a robot in half before it could even raise its gun. And after I promised not to let any harm come to her.
It would be fine, though. As long as Ilia didn't die, Ruby would – didn't die or get hurt, Ruby would be keeping her promise. She just needed to keep a close eye on her scroll and watch for the dreaded red aura.
They were lucky in thar regard; this train actually seemed to have fewer robots on it. Maybe Atlas was running –
"Oh, shit!" Ruby cried out, not even a full ten seconds into their assault. "It's a trap!"
Adam turned to look at Ruby as she raced forward and threw herself onto Ilia, unsure of exactly what the problem was but entirely sure that there was a problem. Atlas was Atlas; it didn't run out of robotic drones to throw at the people it deemed unworthy of living.
"We need to get out of here!" Ruby screamed. "Adam!"
"NO!" he roared. "If we back down now, we lose all the progress! Yuma died for this, you stupid human!"
"There's too few –"
She had been half expecting the entire train to explode, given that she had explosives on the mind after using so many of them. Thus, when a team of huntsmen dropped out from the side of one of the supply crates and opened fire on her, it was unexpected enough that her aura took the first three hits before she rolled herself and Ilia to cover. Adam, having not expected anything at all, ate several machinegun rounds to the stomach aura.
Atlas had had enough, and they were sending their best to flush out the White Fang subversives. Ruby recognized the white and blue of their outfits as the Specialists Corp. This was going to be the fight of her life.
"ATLAS!" Adam screamed, as though his enemy's name was his own war cry. Without a thought for his safety, he charged the unit of four sword-first.
Ruby made sure Ilia was unhurt, scanned her surroundings quickly, and checked for any other nasty surprises. The Specialists must have heard her shouting out about a trap and decided to reveal themselves before they lost the element of surprise.
"Oh my gods, we're actually going to die," Ilia said, her hands clenching her ears as she rocked back and forth in her sitting position. "This is it."
"Not if we fight!" Ruby said, peeking around the corner in time to see Adam cut down one of the huntsmen. "If you can stun one of them while Adam handles the other, I can deal with the third. They're already down one, and they were probably expecting an ambush to be their main advantage after the robots had already worn us down twice in one day. We can do this!"
"We're gonna die I'm gonna die here Mom Dad I don't wanna die…"
Ruby tried to shake Ilia out of her trance, which succeeded but also caused her to start weeping. Ilia's mind wasn't in the fight, and at this point, she would be more of a liability than an asset.
Dual wielding weapons might give her an advantage. Grabbing Lightning Lash from the floor where Ilia had dropped it, Ruby rose to her feet. Ilia grabbed at her wrist and begged her not to leave, but she had to be ignored. Adam had already stabbed a second specialist through the neck and was moving on to his third, but Ruby's scroll said he was at 10% aura.
Not enough to use his semblance, which means he's actually going to start taking damage soon…
As she charged at the soldier-huntsmen hybrids dual wielding her own and Ilia's weapon, Ruby fought not for her own life but for Ilia's. Ilia was like a…like a…how to put it…she was like a bastion of safety from the storm. Ruby had seen so many horrible things and watched so many innocent people die early, but Ilia would survive and go on to enjoy her life, and the world would be that much brighter for Ruby's influence. She had to protect her friend, because if she did, she would have done at least one good thing on this cursed mission of hers. Just knowing that Ilia was out there would be enough for Ruby to go on.
After the battle, Ruby would piece together what had happened after fight or flight firmly landed in the fight camp. After the battle, Ruby would recall how she hadn't been thinking about her numerous false allegiances or about the grand goal of Raven or about why the specialists had been dispatched in spite of Tyrian being tasked with keeping them off her hands. After the battle, Ruby would realize that she'd been prepared to kill her enemies to keep her allies alive, even though her true allies were the Specialists and her true enemy was the White Fang. After the fact, Ruby would recall a lot of things.
But during the fight, nothing was passing through her mind other than how to come out alive.
She was a blur of rage, and most of her attacks weren't even consciously done. Hell, she could barely even remember most of them the moment after they were executed. Muscle memory took over, and Ruby found herself dipping into the moves she'd practiced with Cinder back in the day at Evernight. Three hits, one with Crescent to disarm, one with Lightning Lash to break the aura, and one to – damn it, the other specialist had knocked Crescent from her hands! Damn him to hell!
No, never mind, he was dead. Adam, again, even with broken aura, three for three on the humans he hated so dearly.
Ruby focused back on her specialist. He was the last surviving member of his team, and there was fear in his eye as the human and Faunus approached him. He reached into his coat to grab what looked like a grenade, but Ruby shot him in the hand, making him drop it.
The object landed on the ground face-down, and the man's face grew into a vicious grin.
"HAH! I win!"
The doors through which they'd entered hissed shut, as did thick metal reinforcements behind them. Simultaneously, metal bars locked down over the windows in crossing patterns, trapping them inside and blocking off all means of escape.
"No. You lose. You die!" Adam stabbed Wilt into his abdomen, bursting the man's heart in a splash of blood, but he died with a smile on his face. "Damn you, and all humans!"
Ruby let out a sigh, wiped the sweat off her brow, and turned back around to see if Ilia was okay. As long as Ilia was okay, it could all be worth it.
Ilia was fine. She seemed a bit shaken, and she was holding her knees so tightly one might've thought her afraid that her legs would fall off, but she was entirely unhurt.
"Ruby," Adam snarled from behind her. "Detonator…"
"We can get them in a minute," she said, using Crescent to lean on. It wasn't exhaustion that was making her so weak in the knees but the declining adrenaline. Her body was tensed up for even more fighting, but there were no more enemies.
"Rose, the human…the object he dropped was a detonator."
Ruby looked back at the downed soldier and saw that it was, in fact, true. He had pulled out some sort of button, and it had landed facedown. That explains why he was laughing.
"Why didn't it just go off immediately?" Ruby asked.
"Atlesian arrogance. They probably wanted to give any survivors among their specialists time to get off the train."
That sounded more like compassion than arrogance, but it wasn't Ruby's place to correct him.
"Why are you holding Lighting Lash?" asked Adam. He was leaning heavily on Wilt, and from the looks of it, he actually was exhausted from the fight. Ruby could spot several lines of blood and tears in his outfit that must've come at the cost of taking down a full team of specialists.
"We're trapped in here," Ruby said, looking up to the windows. "None of us would be able to fit through the grates…"
"Ruby. Answer me. Why are you holding Lighting Lash?"
"Our own explosives!" Ruby said, snapping her fingers. "If we, I dunno, cut them in half, do you think the blast might be enough to blow open one of the doors without killing us all?"
Adam coughed blood onto the floor, making no effort to cover his mouth as he thought it over. "M-Maybe. You'd be gambling on utilizing just enough Dust to compromise the integrity of the steel without setting off the Atlesian's bombs. We don't know where they are, though, or how long until the explode…"
"We don't really have much of a choice," Ruby said. She was the one with the bag, but Adam had the expertise with IEDs, so she grabbed out one and handed it to him. "I'll leave it to you."
She'd expected him to do some highly scientific procedure like disassembling the explosive casing and carefully separating the ordnance with paramilitary precision, but Adam just placed the bomb on Wilt's blade and pushed down until it was cut into two unequal pieces. The larger of the two fell to the floor and rolled away, while Adam kept hold of the smaller piece and delivered it to Ruby.
"Make haste."
She did.
Chucking it through the air toward the empty end of the train cars, she shot it at its zenith with Crescent Rose. The bullet hit the half-charge just before the half-charge collided with the doors, and the explosion that followed made Ruby's hair stand on end.
When the smoke cleared, she peeked towards the door.
"It's still sealed."
Ilia, who had broken out of her terror-induced trance to come and join them, held out the remaining larger one of the cut pieces to Ruby, having picked it up. She was keeping her other arm close to her chest as though to cradle or hug herself. "Try this. If it fails, we do a full charge."
Ruby hurled the larger explosive, lining up the igniting bullet with pinpoint accuracy.
This burst of flame and fire was much larger, and the shockwave that followed nearly knocked Ruby down. Adam's meager balance was lost when his makeshift-cane of a sword slipped from his grip, and he fell to the floor next to Wilt.
It had been about thirty seconds since the specialist had dropped the trigger, and Ruby really didn't want to see what happened when they hit another round number like a minute.
"You don't need to snipe it midair," moaned Adam from the ground. "It can be on the ground when it goes off!"
Ruby reached into her bag and pulled out a full-sized charge. Following Adam's advice, she rolled it on the floor over to the door, lined up Crescent Rose's scope, and fired.
This one's blast knocked her and Ilia down, and Adam was swept to the back of the car. Ruby was so disoriented that she had to grab hold of the edge of a large box and pull herself up with it. Her ears were ringing, and she could barely hear the world around her.
She could see, however, and the pale sunlight of the outside world pouring through the shredded metal where the doors had been was visible to her. Ruby shook her head and waited a second for her bearings to return before offering a hand to Ilia.
"We have to go," she said.
Ilia accepted the hand, nodding once as a thanks to Ruby.
As gently as she could, Ruby yanked Ilia forward towards the exit of the carriage. Assuming the Atlesians were intending to thoroughly deal with the White Fang, their own bombs would do the job of bringing down the train for them.
"Ruby, Adam can't stand."
"Leave him. He was asking about why I had Lightning Lash, insisting I tell him."
"Ruby, he's…he's hurt. He won't be able to get out if we leave him."
Ruby kept tugging Ilia, prompting her to leave. "That's kinda the point."
"Ruby, he'll die!"
"Yes. Again, the point. I promised I wouldn't let you die, and this is how."
Ilia looked back at the downed Faunus, who was gazing their way incredulously. "Ruby, we need to –"
Ruby pulled Ilia forward, essentially throwing her in front of her. Then, she slapped Ilia across the face.
"If you want to stay behind and die, or if you want to save him so he can kill you for deserting…" Ruby marched past Ilia angrily, hands at her sides. "…"be my guest."
"They killed him!" Ruby screeched. "They murdered Adam like an animal! That's how they see us Faunus!"
The crowd roared their approval. She could see Ilia guiltily averting her eyes, but she ignored it. Sending in specialists must've been Atlas' final attempt to resolve the situation, for they clearly weren't willing to expend any more effort into supplying the base after it had cost them so much. The base was being evacuated, and unnatural numbers of Grimm had already been sighted braying at the walls. Salem's influence, clearly, though Ruby couldn't say that to the crowd.
"They didn't even let us recover his body for a funeral!"
Ilia wasn't talking to Ruby anymore. Ruby was still proud of herself for keeping the one sane friend she'd made alive, and she was equally pleased with Ilia's private announcement to her that she would be returning to Menagerie and taking some time off from the White Fang, but Ilia was lost to Ruby herself just the same.
It had been the adrenaline that made her be so aggressive when convincing Ilia to leave Adam to his death. That was the truth, and it wasn't even a self-delusion. Ruby had been so hyped up, and her heart had been racing, and Adam was a monster, and…
Ilia was the one person who wanted to remain alive, the one person Ruby could protect. She was supposed to be the one good deed Ruby would be able to do. And she had the audacity to change her mind and decide she was going to become a martyr at the last minute, after all that? Ruby had seen nothing but red.
Yes, it was certainly the high-flying emotions of rage and fury from the fight that had made her do what she did…and those emotions were eventually going to fade. Certainly. They might've made giving a vengeance-themed speech to the White Fang easier, but they wouldn't last forever.
It hadn't helped that Ilia had asked what Adam had meant when he'd called her a human on their way back to the White Fang encampment, and Ruby had jumped the gun and assumed it to be an accusation. Things were said by the both of them that couldn't be taken back…mostly by Ruby, though. Only by Ruby, in fact. Ilia had just shut up, awkwardly averted her eyes, and let Ruby rant and scream at her about how ungrateful she was and how she probably hated humans.
The White Fang had a chain of command, but Ruby's sheer force of character had been enough to make her the de facto figurehead for the time being, hence her impassioned goodbye speech. Tyrian was back at the camp, his normal wily smile missing, and he'd informed her through garbled speech, hand gestures, and the like that they were going back to Salem.
Her skills at combat had improved. The White Fang's mission was complete, and their alliance with Salem was probably sturdier than ever now that Adam's martyr was associated with Ruby seeing his last mission through after he fell. The meanie bad guy was dead, and the kind, good girl was alive and leaving the terrorists that had put her in danger. Ruby hadn't even had to jeopardize her cover.
So why wasn't the anger going away?
Coming Soon – Ruby's Head
And now, a tip from Ruby:
Ruby's Tip #970 – Stop being a little bitch already.
Author's Notes
Origin Story? Shoulda called this one 'Bathuntsman Begins' with that Ras al Ghul train death. Oh, the hoops I'll jump through to avoid Ruby having to commit outright murder. For now.
I bet you thought Ilia was gonna die from the Pyrrha-esque death flags I waved. Well, you were wrong! She gets to live. Truth be told, she might be the only person who does in this Ratcrimesian hellscape of an alternate universe. Yeah, I spared Ilia, but I still managed to somehow twist it all around to hurt Ruby even further! So how's that for predicable, you whiners?
Ruby probably needs help at this point. But that's okay – she'll get it! She'll get all the help she needs in the form of no help at all from anyone, and she gets to take a two-day breather at Salem's castle before the next thing/way in which she's emotionally scarred. You see, kids? This is why you don't go on a murderous rampage and huntsmanslaughter your uncle.
So, I'm going to be taking a break from posting from this coming Friday for the next two weeks, so to smooth things over, I'll be posting ab extra chapters of Origin Story (Monday and Thursday) ahead of schedule to frontload my lost updates at ~50% (there's a cliffhanger I want to end on). There will also be an extra You, Me, and the Tuna update, and a new chapter of RWBY but Worse or two.
Happy rats, and don't do crime!
