Chapter 25 – Missing but not Missed
With their distrustful boss missing and a slew of unseen enemies roaming about the farm, Blake is in for a long night.
"He's –"
Jaune sat up from his sleeping back with such force that his forehead nearly clipped Blake's and she was forced to lean back to avoid getting clocked.
"We don't know how it happened," Blake explained to her confused partner. "One minute, Velvet and I were chatting about corn or some stupid shit, the next moment there are flames flickering inside the house and smoke pouring out."
It wasn't the fire that gave it away; it had actually been the smoke. There had just been so much of it, pouring in a huge plume out the chimney and sneaking out the cracks in the wood like water through a broken pot. Blake had seen it first, but Velvet had noticed the oddness before she could say a word.
"We ran inside the house to check for him, but he wasn't there," Velvet said.
"That doesn't mean he died in the fire," Blake explained before Jaune could even ask. "It's still burning out of control, but there would be a charred body inside if he'd been in there."
"Sh-Should we extinguish it?" Jaune asked, fixing his sword to his belt.
"Talk as we go down the ladder," Blake said, putting her foot on the top rung and heading down.
"I think finding our missing man is more important at the moment," Velvet pointed out, following after Blake. "And besides, none of us packed Ice Dust. We've no way to put it out other than the well, and the house'll burn down before we carry up enough buckets of water to do anything meaningful."
"I was more thinking about setting ablaze the entire farm, fields, and forest," Jaune said, third down the ladder to the ground floor of the barn. "We won't be able to search in an inferno."
"An ex-boyfriend of mine had a mechshift shovel for his weapon," Velvet explained, recounting what Blake had witness moments ago. "I dug a ravine around the house with it to prevent the spread of the flames." She opened the barn door, letting in the frantic noises of the frightened livestock, to point out the trench she'd dug.
Jaune blinked a few times. "E-Ex-boyfriend?"
Velvet's whole body tensed for a second, then she swallowed uncomfortably. "N-No, he wasn't the…it was a –"
Jaune shook his head before she could say anything. "Sorry, now isn't the time. My mistake."
Both of them immediately moved on to get Jaune up to speed on Velvet's firefighting methods, but Blake couldn't help but fixate on the bizarreness of that little exchange for a minute.
Velvet's ex-boyfriend…Jaune…
Are they…? If so, that was fast.
It didn't matter. Not now, not when a man's life was at stake. Jaune was right; it was a mistake to distract themselves on the job.
"We need to split up and search the fields," Blake said, taking charge of the situation. Velvet might have been the best fighter, but only Blake had actual experience commanding others during emergency situations. "I know it sounds like a mistake, but we'd never in a million years cover the full grounds of the farm before whoever's taken Mr. Alizarin sneaks off into the night."
"I-I can't see!" Jaune shouted out. "I'm not a Faunus!"
Shit. He can search in the dark if he's too blind to recognize one row of corn crops from another.
"Velvet, take all fields to the south," Blake shouted, wasting not a minute. "Go!"
The rabbit girl scurried off.
"Jaune, you'll stay here at the farm. In the event that our guy somehow escapes or breaks free, he'll most likely come back here. Scroll out, sword drawn, secure a perimeter, lethal force authorized."
Those last three words were bitter pills to swallow, both for Blake and Jaune, but arson and kidnapping weren't the actions of someone who could be dealt with the kiddie gloves. This wasn't like the edgy bandits in Temecula. This was a real danger.
"Call the second you see or hear anything. I don't care if it's a fucking chicken clucking – you call me and Velvet."
Jaune nodded, exhaling deeply. Blake returned the nod and ran out into the northern field.
Blake's main goal was to get to the edge of the property as quickly as possible. The forest and the farm's crops were both thick, but between them was a thin line of space that she could guard. If anyone tried to kidnap Mr. Alizarin and intended to get him off property, they would need to cross that line at some point, and she would see it.
And they must want him kidnapped, or they wouldn't have just shot him rather than cart his body off.
But that still left the question of how, and in so many ways. How had they gotten past Blake and Velvet's watchful eye? Both of them had done a once-over of the house before letting Mr. Alizarin go to sleep, and they'd found no one inside. And when Blake and Velvet had charged into the burning house, aura raised and mouths covered to protect them from the smoke, how had the assassins gotten past them and escaped?
A secret entrance, perhaps? But we weren't told of any. He specifically said that the front door was the only point of entry.
A semblance? It's possible. Teleportation, invisibility, flight, burrowing…it could be anything.
If it was a semblance, then there would be virtually nothing that Team Job could do to stop this.
Jaune's words echoed around in her mind, the ones saying that perhaps Ozpin had been right about them all along, but she pushed it out for now. A Beacon-trained huntress would be just as powerless against a foe who could teleport right past them.
The further she got away from the crackling of the fires, the darker and quieter it became. Blake had trained extensively to be light on her feet, and she nimbly wove through the stalks of corn in a way that they made no sound when they flopped about. If she did run into anyone, she would hear them before they heard her.
Blake wasn't a very big fan of horror movies (or any movies for that matter), but even she knew that nighttime in the cornfields was a big staple of them. Whether it was extraterrestrials carving messages with laser beams, possessed scarecrows wielding pitchforks, or inbred axe murderers seeking vengeance for wrongs in a past life, this setting was as quintessential a trope as they came.
But unlike fiction, where the monster picked off the heroes one by one, this was reality. Splitting Team Job up was the right call, because the three of them with their aura were already more dangerous than 97% of Remnant's population – even Jaune with his minimal training was a force to be reckoned with if you were a normal person.
The light of the fire was on her side. If someone ahead of her looked back, she would be a shadowy silhouette, and they would be fully illuminated. Chasing had been the right call.
Our biggest problem is that there're only three of us. If we could have had full teams of people scouring the fields, it'd be much better, but that's no fault of Team Job's. Our client could only afford three people, and most hunters would never have even come to play private bodyguard to a lunatic.
Except he wasn't a lunatic. There had been someone out to get him, and Blake had nearly dismissed the concerns he'd been singing since the very beginning.
Thank the gods we didn't just half ass this whole thing. If Velvet and I had gone to sleep, we wouldn't have even known something was up until morning.
The trees were finally visible above the stalks of corn, meaning that Blake was nearly at her destination. If she could –
THOMP!
Something ran into her at full speed – no, someone!
As quickly as the person had appeared, they were off in the opposite direction, tracing the path Blake had just come from as they ran in the direction of the burning house.
Blake scrambled up to her feet as fast as lightning and began to continue chasing after them. Taking out her scroll would only slow her down, but Team Job's biggest advantage was their numerical superiority (assuming there was only one assassin), and she needed to utilize it.
Typing would be impossible, so Blake hit the call button and lowered the volume to the bare minimum. "Bogey coming your way, Jaune," she whispered, not keen on alerting her mark to the presence of her allies. "Velvet, converge on the farm. Cut them o–"
Instincts that had been hammered into her by years of training, instincts so second nature at this point that Blake wasn't even sure how they alerted her to danger, just that they did, told her to move out of the way, and Blake just barely managed to avoid being skewered by a Deathstalker's tail from behind her. It wasn't a big one, by any means, but it had been light on its claws and fast enough to catch up to her without her knowing.
"Shit! There's –"
There was no choice but to drop the scroll as she desperately rolled out of the way of its oncoming pincered.
They must've been attracted by the fire, Blake thought as she leapt to the underside of the Grimm and shoved her sword into the joint between its middle left leg and its carapace. I guess this is what scared our assassin back towards the farm. On the positive side, that means they aren't a hunter, or they would have just killed it and been off.
Rolling out from under it as she cut off the other two legs at the base, Blake avoided being crushed by the collapsed Grimm and continued to run in the direction of the farm. Grimm or not, her primary job was to protect her client, and the best way to do that was to catch the person who'd stolen him and find out what they'd done with him.
Out of a desire to at least be aware of the threat, however, she turned back around for just a moment, still running the whole time.
At least ten Deathstalker tails rose were sticking out from above the corn crops. The Grimm had taken to the fields.
And they were all moving towards the burning house.
Blake actually stopped this time.
This many Grimm – that was too many to handle.
Her job was to protect her client, but Jaune and Blake knew that the assassin was headed their way. What they didn't know was that there were waves of Grimm, far too many to handle, converging on their location.
It doesn't matter if we save our guy from assassins if the Grimm kill us all afterwards.
In the tall field of corn this far away form the fire, Blake was hidden, and the Deathstalkers gave away their position with those tall tails of theirs. Out at the barn and the pastures, that advantage would immediately go away.
There's too many for us to handle in a head-on fight, but I could probably thin down their numbers with the aid of the darkness. Jaune and Velvet know what they're doing; I need to trust them to their jobs while I do mine.
The hard part would be killing them all without using bullets. Dust Bullets were noisy and would announce to every Grimm, human, or Faunus in the vicinity that Blake was out in the fields. In a situation where her only tactical advantage was the fog of war – corn and darkness, in this case, Blake could not afford to lose that one advantage, not when she had two fights ahead of her.
The closest Deathstalker's tail was perfectly steady as it moved through the farm. Unlike humans or four-legged animals that bobbed up and down during walking, the six-legged scorpions were sure-footed enough to keep their upper bodies from swaying or tilting.
Blake ambushed it from the side, driving Gambol Shroud into its right eye with as much force as she could. The Grimm gripped its front claws around her when she did, pinching her tightly, but it was dead long before it got around to inflicting any severe damage on her using the limb. All Blake had to do was stay the course and keep pressing her blade into its weak point, right through the brain.
There was no time to celebrate her victory, though, for the next one had made it past her in the time it took to kill the first, and that had only been a few seconds.
Killing the Deathstalkers using surprise attacks should have been relatively easy, but killing them all before they had even gotten close to the barn had exhausted her and cost her a hefty chunk of aura. Blake was currently in the low twenties, and she was fully winded. If it came to a fight with the assassin, she would be useless.
I thought they weren't a hunter because they ran from Grimm, but even a hunter would run from that many Grimm. I still need to go and help.
Taking a second to wheeze for breath in solitude, she jogged forwards towards the still-blazing house.
Velvet's the best fighter I've ever seen, but our assassin is an unknown factor. They could be anyone – a rogue huntsman, a hitman for hire, White Fang. We don't even know if they had help or if this was a one-man job.
Blake was fairly certain that the person that had run into her was male, but it was impossible to say for sure. They had been running at full tilt right towards her, and she'd been expecting to slowly catch up on someone going in the same direction as she had been.
I wish I had my scroll to call ahead and let them know I'm coming.
Hang in there, team.
As she got closer and closer to the barn, she began to hear some words being shouted off in the distance.
"…coming…me…kill…"
It was too far to make out what was being said or who was saying it, but the frantic urgency in the voice only put more pep into her step.
"…hundreds of assassins, out there! So many I can taste 'em…"
The words were getting clearer the closer she got, and Blake started to recognize them.
Is that…?
Sure enough, it was. As Blake broke through the cover of the cornfield, she found herself briefly facing the wrong end of a Hard Light minigun. As soon as Blake's fellow Faunus teammate saw it was her, however, she lowered it.
"Thank the gods, it's you. We were really worried when you didn't come back."
Closer to the barn were Jaune and Mr. Alizarin, and the latter was talking up a storm while the former tried to calm him down. He was clad in flannel pajamas and had Jaune's hoodie draped over his shoulders as he shivered from the cold. Blake noticed that there was a certain madness in his eyes as he ranted and raved, more unhinged now than before, about his assassins.
"Where'd the culprit go?" Blake asked Velvet. "Did you catch him?"
Velvet shook her head. "No culprit."
"But I ran into –"
Throwing her thumb over her shoulder, Velvet pointed at the quaking man. "You bumped into him. There never were any assassins."
"ASSASSINS! THERE WERE! I SAW THEM! THEY'RE OUT IN THE FIELDS RIGHT NOW!"
Blake lowered her voice. "Velvet, I know he sounds crazy, but someone must have started the fire."
"He dropped a match when he was lighting up a lantern for a midnight piss," Velvet explained. "He told Jaune and me everything before he started rambling. The fire was started by accident, and when we burst in, he heard someone kicking down the door and thought he was in danger. We were the assassins, in this case."
"But how did he –"
"I'm getting to it," Velvet said with a tired smile. "He was so worried for his life that he managed to brute force climb out the chimney and run into the fields. Then, when he saw Grimm, he turned around the other way, bumped into you, and sprinted back to me and Jaune."
Jaune was currently receiving the brunt of Mr. Alizarin's paranoia, and from his defeated body language, he'd been enduring it for quite a while now.
"THEY'RE HIDING IN THE WELL! YOU CAN CATCH THEM IF YOU LOOK! CATCH THEM, QUICKLY, BEFORE THEY ESCAPE."
Velvet didn't even respond to his eager yelling, but Blake decided to give it a go. She'd dismissed him once, and it had nearly ended in disaster, so she was a little hesitant to make the same mistake again.
Peering down the well, she looked for signs of life and found none. "It's empty."
"THE GRIMM! THEY BROUGHT THE GRIMM TO MY FARM TO EAT ME ALIVE! DON'T WASTE TIME LOOKING IN THE WELL, STUPID GIRL, THEY'RE IN THE AIR! THE SKIES! THE GRASS! THE WALLS! EVERYWHERE!"
Clutching his head, he gutturally screamed. The sound wasn't new to Blake – she'd heard that kind of scream before, every time Adam had raised his sword while standing before a hostage with their wrists bound.
"It's over now," Jaune said, patting his shoulder. "T-The assassins…they ran away. You're safe." He gestured over to Blake. "My companion chased them off. It's alright."
"S-Safe?" Even though he was a good five years older than even Velvet, Mr. Alizarin couldn't have looked more like a weeping child, victim to his own nightmares, as he looked up at Jaune. "I'm…I'm safe? Is it safe now?"
"It is," Jaune said. "It's safe. You're safe. T-There was some damage to your home, but you're safe."
"Mmmmmmungggh…it's safe," Mr. Alizarin choked out. "Other things don't matter. I'm still alive, and that's…oh, thank you huntsman." He threw his arms around Jaune and gripped him in a tight hug. "Thank you for saving my life."
Jaune said nothing and just let the man continued to hug him.
Blake felt a tug on her sleeve and managed to tear her eyes away from her client's breakdown to see Velvet anxiously wringing her wrists.
"Blake, what do we do? His house is mostly burned down, and it's completely unlivable. Mr. Alizarin has nowhere to stay. Do…Do we take him to Vale?" She ashamedly lowered her head. "I'm sorry. C-Coco or the professor would always handle these things back when I was in Beacon, and I just…what do we do?"
Even if Jaune was the de jure figurehead of Team Job, Blake was its de facto commander, and she had no idea what to do here. Much of her life had been spent destroying homes, and she really wasn't sure what to do with someone who'd lost their own.
"W-We could ask what Mr.…"
The idea died before Blake could even make a fool of herself by letting it cross her lips. Their client was currently in a state of distress, and even if he emerged from it, Blake wasn't sure he was mentally competent to make the right decisions for himself anymore.
I'm going to have to make the call, aren't I?
Coming Soon: Extended Contract
With time running out before their mission ends, Team Job must decide on just how long they intend to stay on the farm.
Author's Notes
It turns out it was nothing! Hooray for noneventful twists.
Happy rats, and don't do crime!