HELLO READERS I'M NOT DEAD. Life just suddenly got crazy with my job as well as my personal life. I'm in the middle of moving so thing got slow for me plus writers block and stess and i'm surprised I actually kept this in my mind. however it also never left really so it was really bothersome to actually do other things while constantly reminding myself that i'm behind. hopefully the next chapter comes sooner than the last. anyways as always let me know what you think of the chapter, characters, fight things that you liked anything. any feedback is good feedback for me, though I may send a pm to ask why you feel this way and how I can approach it better. I hope you enjoy this chapter, I do not own the rights to RWBY or Bloodborne and they belong to their own respective studios.
Bold of emphasis
Italics would be for thoughts but my writing style is mostly from the persons perspective so it would be too much I think. i'll try and maybe incorporate it better but i'm not sure. lmk if it bothers you or not.
Alaine thought human hatred was unique until the Hunter encountered Grimm, it is the kind of hatred so pure that it's irrational it can drive humans to lengths deemed impossible by their own standards.
If one learns to control it, wield hatred as a weapon against an enemy with an anchor of oneself outweighing it then there is no better motivator for perfecting the art of murder.
Perfection of a craft or the pursuit of it is considered an honor. The powderkeg's specialty is in the murder of beasts, they were good at it. Even if being a hunter was a thankless, even looked down upon job the powderkegs took pride in their craft. They may have said they took it for the coin, the access to the workshop and its resources, or as a self sacrifice so their families could live without fear.
It may have been a mixture even of those reasons, but one thing stayed the same. The workshop powderkegs hated the beasts, hated the corrupted visage of what their neighbors, friends, and family became.
Gehrman The First Hunter saw it as a release from a nightmare. The powderkegs thought much the same, though the sadness for what they had become mixed with the anger of what they had done to others.
They were the ones closest to Gehrman's way, they were the people who rose up to fight for their fellow man to put down those that threatened the rest. Their reward was damnation, death and madness. Many found all three because of the curse of kos and the smothered sin of the hamlet.
The culmination of everything good in a Hunter stood continuing her sacred work, but unlike in Yharnam, the things she hunts are not transformed shells of people. They were the enemy of humanity, and her hatred for the creatures of Grimm was only mirrored by their own unique hatred for humanity. The difference was that she controlled, wielded it instead of being consumed by it.
It was an enemy she could hate without any remorse or a second thought. It was an enemy she could kill without the slightest of hesitations. They were treated as such, greeted with steel and without mercy. The Hunter was making her way back towards the town hall. More and more Grimm kept coming for her but she was also seeing more Grimm running for the town hall.
The crescent wall of arcane fire burned away the horde coming from the mountain but the grimm were too many, spilling over the sides of that spreading inferno and towards the town hall at the center. There were also Grimm coming from the opposite side, not as many as the ones that had been attracted to the mountain and tracked them here but still a concern.
She ran down the street smashing bone masks and slicing through abominations as they came without slowing down much. Even as she faced larger and older opponents they simply couldn't keep up with her as she disabled and killed them with ever growing perfection.
The younger grimm attack much the same, boringly and mindlessly bloodthirsty. To a Hunter it was as easy as it gets, even in larger amounts all she had to do was trick her whirligig saw into the larger more monstrous form to crush and shred any of the younger Grimm for their self sacrificial hatred for humanity. Beowolves, Ursa, Boarbatusk, it didn't matter too much. Their armor could not hold up to her weapons, their savagery became their downfall, and even in groups they were no match for a Hunter in their element.
The shaded hunter progressed her way through the streets, fire slowly burning hotter and larger behind her, buildings that the people of onyx once called home burning down. Store's, houses, a market everything was turning to ruins and ash. The flames were also burning away so many grimm that to try to count how many lunged through the fires would be a meaningless action.
She jogged through, finding herself hesitating at the sound of hissing. Suddenly she found herself slowing down and letting out a growl. She remembered the venomous, parasitic snakes of the forbidden forest and the bundles of tangled up snakes. She scanned the area around her before she went on to continue her work.
She spotted a strange but not unfamiliar creature. Two snakes joined together with one head on each end. One was black with red spots and white designs painting its scales with red dotted on its eyes and the center of its flat head like a jewel. The other was white with a similar but reversed color pallet with white as the primary color and black as the secondary. It looked like another wretched snake from that accursed forest.
Sadly when she turned onto the street from a side alley the thing saw her. It would have been difficult to sneak up on it anyways. It moved strangely due to its nature, heads whipping around as it moved forward as if fighting against one another. Once it spotted her the beast pulled against its counterpart with a hiss before it bared its fangs and hissed louder with a growing intensity. Its fangs extend into a line of serrated teeth as if to add to its viscousness and defy nature.
The grimm wasn't alone, and the further she went in the more chaotic it became. Most grimm were in front of her but she knew more would come from behind her as well. The spreading fire would get rid of most of them but some would be pushed around it and the smarter ones wouldn't blindly throw themselves through the fires.
It left the most formidable prey left.
Alaine spotted more grimm looking at her, ever since she let out those beast roars the Grimm were no longer ignoring her. Maybe they could feel her now in a similar way they felt others. No matter the case she was happy to have her presence known, it meant less work for Qrow and the militia. So, she took her numerous adversaries in stride and without complaint.
Beowolves, Boarbatusk, and even Ursa strode onto the streets and quickly rushed her with adamant bloodlust. All it took was the whirligig saw to be swiped from left to right, knocking the beowolves back brutally with serrations lining their chests and stomach. Broken and battered only in a single strike, but grimm don't stop unless their wounds are definitively mortal.
She brought the whirligig saw overhead and finished a tangled pair of beowolves before slinking under a ursa claw meant to separate her torso from her legs she brought herself up from her lowered stature with a massive swing and hit the ursa square in the side of its face making it ragdoll off to the side with a sickening crunch of bone.
She weaved through the following lunges of the boarbatusk and found herself face to faces with the double headed snake coiling around to properly face her. Alaine quickly backed up out of its range and turned around to slip to the side as the pack of boarbatusks came around again. Such simple minded and hateful creatures, she made sure that the whirligig saw crushed and sank its spinning teeth into at least one of the beasts.
The beowolves were in a miserable state, limping towards her with murderous intent but without the healthy body to back it up. She could let them shamble for now as she backed up past them as if they didn't exist.
The snake seemed to understand what Alaine was doing by keeping it at a range while dealing with the faster threats and changed its stature, coiling up and pressing the white head at the center of the coil into the ground before launching itself at a great speed towards the Hunter.
The Hunter saw her own reflection in the gem like eyes of the snake grimm as she narrowly avoided a swift death. The snake landed with almost practiced precision and then used the momentum to bound the black snake's head from the ground and around to face its prey.
The boarbatusk were coming back around and she couldn't afford to be thrown to the stones by their charge. It also meant she couldn't attack the snake yet, she was also surrounded again. Grimm didn't act like it most of the time but they hunted together in some strange and chaotic bond. Or they all just wanted her dead.
She turned her back on the snake once more and made an opening by attacking the weakest links. She easily cleaved through the previously wounded beowolves and ran past them. It forced the boarbatusks to slow down and charge their direction to try and trample her again. By dashing towards them and to the side she successfully baited them into running face first into the building behind her, demolishing it under their tusks.
It would take them at least a second to get out from the rubble but that was all the time she needed as she sprinted for the hissing double headed snake. It bared its fangs at her and they both coiled for a simultaneous strike. Alaine rushed between them and found the noose tightening around her as the snakes weaved over and under each other. It would have been a problem as they came back around with her stuck in their coiling but the whirligig saw cut through sticky tar like flesh with a wretched screech.
The snake was bisected and wailed in pain as momentum thrust their disappearing corpses past Alaine on both sides. She found herself smirking as she finally got to kill those annoying boarbatusk with calculated efficiency, crushing them one at a time and with enough force to shatter their bone armor. The last one she brought her whirligig saw behind her and tricked it into its mace form. She swatted the last wretched beast onto it's side before grabbing the carrying handle of the saw housing and slamming it down onto the boarbatusk and stabbing the mace into the housing, causing it to scream to life and grind the grimm into dust.
No time to revel in her bloodlust now.
Alaine ran the moment she was free, killing some grimm along the way. Fire slowly followed her approach, the curved half circle of fire slowly becoming more like a crescent with growing tendrils.
The fighting only got more and more intense as she ran through the streets, gunfire was louder roars and other animalistic sounds of murderous intent. She joined them, using two more quicksilver bullets to make the wretched and eerie call that pulled the ire of a number of grimm.
This is where things got trickier
This whole babysitting thing had gone from annoying to bad and then to worse in a total of four hours at most. They were just here to keep an eye on things, observe this woman who turned up out of nowhere and report back to Oz while looking into the mayor due to an anonymous tip of supplies being sub par to what they should be getting. Low priority but it gives him a reason to get to know her, get a gauge for her personality, and ability, and try and sniff out if Salem had sent her or if she really was just a woman from the middle of nowhere. He hadn't had enough time or interaction with her to figure her out.
The most he had learned was that she's lost people, not uncommon for Huntsmen, especially the seasoned ones, and huntsmen licenses were just a certification. People who lived outside the kingdoms by choice had to fight their own battles since Huntsmen were stretched so thin.
Point was it was supposed to be routine, boring, and an overall waste of his time. Instead he was fighting grimm. that got too close to the town hall while the person he was supposed to be watching over said she had a plan. Part of him thought he should go with her, another part said he should have kept her at the town hall, the last one gave her the benefit of the doubt because of the behavior she showed at the mine.
She seemed out of her element but also accepted it as it was and defended the people so they could dig. Messy work it was but after a entrance was made it was much easier to defend even without the Huntress. From inside the mine a large group came back, clearly disturbed looking but all ok. Then it was a long time before a meager looking.. brutalized group of men and women drenched in blood. They had minor wounds but it was the looks in their eyes that were the worst.
He knew what they had seen even if he hadn't seen it himself since it wasn't hard to imagine. It was longer still before he saw something that looked like the shape of Alaine but the color palette had gone from gray, brown, white, and brass to just red. She was carrying someone and dragging another, all three of them looked like walking corpses with the Huntress looking like she did the deed herself.
That's all it was, the benefit of the doubt. What he got was a front row seat to what a town looked as it fell. It brought back bad memories.
At least he wasn't the one burning it down this time.
He told the townsfolk to take calculated shots to conserve ammo. It meant that there were less beowolves but it meant that there were plenty of other larger threats. At least he wouldn't drown under grimm.
He sent messages to Oz, who was surprised that he didn't get anything from the mayor. He said help was on the way, at least they had enough resources for emergencies. The problem was it was getting eerie fast, ghostly blue fires burned in the distance and were getting closer. The Grimm were acting weirdly, he'd slice apart a group with harbinger and hear a scream that was neither human nor any grimm he had heard before. It just put him on edge, he put more distance between him and the town hall to hopefully keep his semblance in check.
He saw a couple grimm move in the opposite direction of the town hall as if their attention had been ripped away, it was another scream. This one was closer and he could see grimm bounding on top of buildings in order to go after the source. Whatever it was, it was keeping his fight light, well as light as an endless horde can be. Although he only got strays and the larger more problematic ones, not that he had problems.
Ursa, King Taijitu, Alpha beowulf, even the odd lesser nevermore weren't anything to make him sweat. It was the numbers that made him nervous, it was the feeling that this wasn't all or that's what he thought while blasting a beowulf with the short barrel shotgun form of harbinger before swapping to the greatsword form and bisecting another with a swift and brutal motion.
He had circled around the town hall multiple times at this point, getting call outs from people inside about approaching grimm. When he heard someone yell Deathstalker and some boarbatusk and more grimm in the rear he couldn't help himself
"Today must be my lucky day.."
Boarbatusk were annoying when around other grimm but a group of varied threats were much more dangerous to average huntsmen. He's not average but that doesn't mean it wasn't a pain in the ass to deal with.
He pulled the trigger of his weapon all the way and it locked in place. The gears inside the hilt whirled, clicking in place with clockwork precision. The blade split into segments and then curved into a crescent with a smooth inner edge and jagged outer edge. The handle extended out and harbinger was put into it scythe form.
Qrow grunted took a few steps, just as he was about to break into a sprint he heard that horrible screeching that had been giving him a headache for a while now. The sawmill shouldn't have been running at a time like this, and he knew he wasn't crazy to hear hallucinations so it had to be something.
What he saw next was both surprising and unsurprising at the same time. Surprising for the rapid brutality and skill displayed with speed and recklessness. Not that he couldn't do the same thing just that his semblance would probably get him killed. It was unsurprising because this woman was about as strange as people get and in the small time of seeing her he's realizing that he should expect the unexpected. Although the weapon she was wielding was insane, it was essentially a circular saw on a stick - two circular saws actually with a spacer in the middle for its internal workings.
Design wise it was crazy, at the very least unwieldy, but It didn't seem unwieldy in Alaine's hands however, each swing measured and without a wasted movement. She even seemed to carry the momentum for an even more brutal swing as a followup. Sawing through grimm in a flurry of white sparks, pitch black smoke and the gleam of steel.
The way Alaine moved was lethal and aggressive but also stupidly reckless. Dodging swipes and slams as close as possible before retaliating with a savage attack of her own. The margin of error she must have to handle like this would be damn near suicidal. Weaving through grimm like she was possessed by one herself. The level of experience to pull that off needed enough confidence to be considered a narcissist, a single moment of hesitation and she would lose an eye or arm at best and her life at worst. The line between that best and worst case being razor thin because of her supposed lack of aura.
A paw the size of her torso was side stepped, followed by a rush between the ursa's swinging arms. Alaine thrust the whirligig saw up against the gut and chest of the ursa without a moment's hesitation and pulled the absurdly hard to move trigger. The whirligig saw screamed to life - black goo and smoke flung from the serrated teeth as they dug in and carved the dark beast up.
The grimm tried to close its gargantuan arms around Alaine to crush her in a bear hug. What actually happened was that the whirligig saw went deeper into the Ursa's gut and chest bulging it's back out grotesquely before Alaine wrenched the weapon up, cutting and sawing through the beast cleanly. The Grimm fell to its knees with everything above its waist cut into three loose, red flabby sections before disintegrating.
Using the disappearing body of that Grimm she launched herself forward. Slamming the next grimm to the concrete and without losing her momentum pole vaulting onto the concrete where she uses that momentum to rip the whirligig saw from the ground and whip it around in front of herself to cut through a group of grimm. Either breaking their skulls or cutting through their tender tar like flesh to show their bright red insides to leave them shredded.
The deathstalker didn't even have time to turn its large body, only able to strike back at the berserk Huntress with its wicked tail dripping with venom. The tail struck the concrete after missing the sprinting huntress by inches at the most. It made cracks in the rock while the crazed woman jumped onto the top of the death stalker with her weapon under her boot. She pulled the trigger and raked forth the bone shell with the dual saws of the whirligig saw.
Bone shards were spit into the air along with spark but the screeching serrated saws were quickly coated in slick goey tar, spraying Alaine's face and her clothing with droplets while the whirligig saw spun a smoke circle. She stomped on the saw housing, pushing the spinning saws deeper before bringing it and slamming it back down to shatter the shell and gouge the grimm's insides out.
The visage was terrifying. Even Qrow was taken aback by how horrific the way she fought was but it wasn't out of dumb luck. In a way that was scarier. Whatever, it gave him a small break. The woman could be the grimm reaper itself for all he cared, as long as she was on their side. Hopefully she was.
Though one thing was bothering him. Was she smiling?
Well, her heart was pounding. The endless prey was definitely new. Yes Yharnam was crawling with beasts but this was different, they all have intent and supernatural senses. Still these fodder were dull on their own. The Grimm were more a threat with their numbers than anything. Well Alaine had her own supernatural strength so she thought bring it on. She could bear the weight of their tide of hateful darkness and return it tenfold.
She had to fight like she was in the first of the sanguine hunts, fast and ferociously instead of taking the style that had been reinforced over the age of hunters and then superseded the hunters themselves where it was methodical and singled the most dangerous prey out by picking off surrounding beasts until the original target was all that was left.
The Grimm disappeared slowly under her. The Hunter jumped down off the Deathstalkers mask and held the whirligig off her shoulder with one hand. Qrow seemed to look at her with a complicated expression, relief but also concern. "Hey'd you set those fires? Little reckless if you did."
Alaine nodded before clearing her swollen throat. "Yes, it's busy keeping the grimm from the mountains from flooding the streets." Her voice sounded hoarse and dry, quieter as if she lost her voice in the last hour somehow.
"It also puts a timer on how long we can stay here. Plus my semblance doesn't help our chances, I don't know if you took that into your display of pyromania. That said, not a bad idea but it would have been nice to let me know before jumping off the roof of this place" Qrow just had a small smirk on his face like he was reminiscing about something.
"Anyways it's back to work, give me a minute to send the message to Ozpin. Don't die in the meantime" He said that last part in a more serious tone of voice while staring down approaching grim. There were so many grimm they were crawling along the top of the buildings.
Alaine simply walked forward with her saw ready and the moon hanging overhead.. making the whirligig saw and the hilt of a silver sword gleam in its light. A flutter of grayish blue dust was shaken from the hilt of that silver sword. Her bright grayish blue eyes stared out to the approaching creatures of darkness without fear nor mercy in them. A malevolent smile spread across her hidden face as she checked stock of bullets and eyed the different grim like prey to be slaughtered.
And she began her sacred work.
Again next chapter should be faster if my house doesn't fucking explode but with how my life is going who knows I might get struck by an astroid. I'll keep writing and give you peeps what I can. I said it before I won't give up on this fic because I like doing it and don't wanna end up like the other bloodborne crossover fics that just never finished.