Hey y'all, so sorry this one took forever to come out. I was suffering from writer's block, then caught Covid for the first time which, despite all the time indoors, actually made things worse. And if you are yet to catch it, consider yourself lucky. That shit ain't no joke
"Ichigo! What's going on? You okay?" Caspian shouted through the band on his wrist.
"Can't talk! Running! Help!"
"Wait!" Caspian commanded before he could hang up. "Keep running South! We'll loop around the parking garage and meet you near the car rentals!"
Ichigo made a noise Caspian could only hope confirmed their plans, and the call ended.
"Change of plans," Caspian decided, eyeing the pulsing red dot inching South from the air traffic control tower. "Snow's herself again, so she can cover the South gate alone. Besides, I think if the airport was going to be attacked, it would have happened already." He closed his Holoband, and began to run. "Something's bugging me about all this. It doesn't feel like the Red Claw's work."
"What do you mean?" Moka prodded.
"Their whole M.O. is maximizing terror. Big Grimm attacks, death and destruction, all of that. It just feels too… quiet." He took a second to catch his breath. "But for now, that's a good thing. Snow will be safe alone. All the people in the airport should be, too."
Moka focused on the ground ahead of her bounding steps. "I hope so."
It only took a few minutes to make it to the far side of the parking garage, a rounded, nine-story concrete hulk with tiers nestled atop each other like a stack of gigantic dinner plates. They saw Ichigo immediately. Behind him, a tall black figure with half an arsenal strapped across his back. Caspian had seen him once before, and he'd lurked in the back of his mind since.
"Help me, please!" Ichigo pleaded, tearing past Caspian and Moka and whirling to face them. "He's trying to kill me!"
"We've got you," Moka assured. She checked the straps of her combat gauntlets one last time, and faced the figure in black.
Caspian eyed The Ambassador. His orderly steps, fast, and full of rigid purpose, matched Ichigo's run across the entire quarter of a mile between them and the air traffic control tower. He let his glance switch to Ichigo for a second, and pushed the image of Arum Ceddrak's body from his mind. "Keep running. We'll hold him off for a bit," he decided. He turned to his other side. "Moka, be careful. I've seen what he can–"
Moka was already halfway to The Ambassador, brown sparks encasing the fist she cocked behind an ear.
He raised his rifle. Caspian wanted to move, but the stone in his stomach weighed him down and stopped him from doing anything besides wince and wait for the thunderous blast.
It didn't come. The Ambassador lowered his weapon on Moka's approach, an annoyed exhale rattling through his voice modulator. He ducked under her semblance-boosted swing, twirling his rifle like a staff of heavy black steel and striking her ribs. A follow-up cracked down on her head, and a boot to her shoulder forced her back.
Caspian evened his breath, pulled Undertow from its sheath, and hoped for the best. "You're mine!" he shouted, more to call attention to himself, since his shaking voice couldn't have intimidated a child. An overhead strike met the flat edge of The Ambassador's rifle, and another kick met him square in the chest and forced the air from his lungs. A storm of five blunt strikes wracked him with dull pain across his body– one to each side of the head, one behind, one at his ribs and one at left knee. Each came so fast he couldn't see the next, and left him on shaking legs.
He heard Moka land a single jab, and looked up to see the ice protecting her arms shatter under The Ambassador's retort. She was quick on her feet– impressively so. She ducked, pushing the next swing over her head and firing a bolt of gravity dust into the ground.
The sudden shift knocked The Ambassador off balance for a fraction of a second, and with the pulse of twin gravity bolts Moka fixed hi gun to the concrete. He caught her roundhouse kick with an arm and flung her down, next to his weapon.
Caspian leapt in but his enemy took a single step back from his strike, and pulled a baton from among the dozen jagged shapes decorating his back and sides. It flashed to life beyond Undertow's blade, and the surge of electricity coursed through Caspian's weapon and into his arm. He surrendered control of his muscles to the feeling of a thousand searing pins and needles, and as he fought for his grasp on Undertow a back-handed strike across his cheek sent him to the ground.
The Ambassador flung something from his belt, a carbon-fiber cable connecting a pair of steel grey nodes that glowed like a blacklight from within. The cord wrapped Caspian's ankles, and with a whirring like a pair of active beehives the nodes twisted around his body until the cords knit his legs together. As he tried to fight them off, they worked next at his wrists, securing them to his back.
Moka scrambled to her feet, and The Ambassador stood over her. Rain dribbled from his gold-tipped visor. The faunus's movements slowed until they stopped entirely. A few seconds later, with horrified eyes oblivious to the rain that pounded them, her movement was reborn as a feeble retreat, shrinking into herself and away from the shadowy figure towering above her.
She was muttering something under her breath, so shaky and quiet Caspian couldn't hear. He couldn't move his arms, or anything below his waist. But he inched around, slowly, and gracelessly, until his fingers clasped around Undertow's handle.
He lined up a shot at The Ambassador's helmet, and felt the hum of his weapon's energy mounting in his grasp. He might not be able to take him out, but he could at least figure out who, or what The Ambassador was.
He turned toward Caspian. He saw a black haze in the air, one he wasn't sure was there, or if his mind only told him it emanated from the form that stared him down. In that moment, all fell away besides him and The Ambassador. He couldn't see his enemy's eyes, or who was inside. But he knew they stared directly into his, channeling a profound abyss directly into his heart. He heard whispers. And fragments of conversations past.
"You're Lazula's brother, then?"
"It's almost sad, the difference between you two!"
"You let everyone walk all over you and apologize when they trip!"
"Whatever you think Blaise and I did, we did it. And I enjoyed every second of it– SO much more than with you!"
His vision went grey until his eyes opened again to the site of Arum Ceddrak's body. The charred, bloody aftermath of the Red Claw's assault in October. Flies swarming a rotting corpse. He could feel them on his face, in his nose, in his open eyes.
When he came to, The Ambassador perched over him, reading Ichigo's distress signal off his Holoband. He stood, and continued his pursuit. Caspian wanted to follow, but found himself paralyzed with fear. Moka must have been, too. She was yet to rise from the puddle she sat in, head tucked into the arms that folded across her knees.
"...What? Wh-Where am I?" she whimpered, at the moment Caspian regained control of his own body. She raised her head, and took a second or two to locate him. "Cas?"
"Are you okay?"
"I... I don't know," she murmured. "I looked at him, and I saw myself. It was like I was looking in a mirror and I– I aged sixty, seventy years, all over a second or two. Then it was just... over. Everything was black."
Whatever The Ambassador had put her through, it was somehow worse than the hell imposed in his own mind. The distress signal bleated again. "We're here. We're here, but we need to keep moving. Can you get me free?"
"Yeah. I think so," Moka replied. She knelt behind him, and disarmed the gravity cuffs with a pair of her own dust bolts. Caspian wriggled free of the cord as Moka worked it off of him, and discarded it. "Alright. Are we doing this?"
"Yeah," Caspian answered. He walked, and when he was sure Moka followed, continued: "But we need to be careful. Any one of those guns on his back can kill us. Not to mention whatever psychological torture he just put us through."
"Yeah..."
"Silver lining, he just told me two things. There is a person inside that uniform, and that's his semblance."
"This is one. Target escaped for now. We're treating this as an intel breach, so we need to neutralize him as soon as possible," The Ambassador ordered in the frozen timbre of his helmet's voice modulator. "Target is headed to the departures gate."
"Three and four. No anomalies here. Sending more units to Objective," a voice spoke through the tiny silver bar he held up to the side of his head. The voice was feminine, but masked just like The Ambassador's.
Another masculine voice spoke up. "Two. I'm in the area."
"Good. Intercept the target immediately. Provided the target is allied with Objective, it's best she doesn't get involved in this."
"Yes, sir."
Caspian and Moka continued their pursuit. What The Ambassador made him see, made him hear, made him feel, still rattled around at the back of his mind with each step. That look of concentrated determination had returned to Moka's face. She had either shaken the dread already, or was doing a much better job of hiding it.
"Hold on!" she warned. He crashed into her arm. Her head flicked up and around, as if she was scanning for the source of a noise. Her tail flicked twice. As she turned toward the parking garage, eyes fixed on a point a few stories above them, he heard it too.
An unsettling buzz, like static arcing off an old light. And a gurgling sound breaking into a series of clicks every few seconds. Two hands curled over the concrete face of the parking garage's fifth story. Three spindly black fingers and a thumb, each about a foot long. Its head was next. Spherical, with a triangle of red eyes glowing from within the mask of Grimm.
Caspian had seen the abomination once before, on the cargo ship as he fought the Red Claw with Rowan, Moka, and Midas. He assumed it had gone down with the ship. But it was very much alive, crawling on all fours down the side of the garage as its head stuck at an impossible angle between its shoulders to keep all three eyes on them.
Moka's fists balled. She kept her wide-open eyes fixed on it. The only part of her body that moved was her wildly lashing tail.
Caspian's finger rested on Undertow's trigger, but he hesitated to raise his gun. The abomination had disappeared into the garage's second story, aside from the tips of its fingers. "Hold on," he muttered. "It didn't attack us before. Maybe it's not–"
It shot out from the darkness, fingers entwining and hardening into scythes in the air. Caspian rolled aside, and felt the chill of an especially deep rain puddle roll down his back, and fragments of sheared concrete whip against his chest. He let his shot fly. The monstrosity stood in place, rupturing a hole in the middle of its chest to avoid the beam of hard-light.
Its head rotated, turning from Caspian to Moka as it hunched over, skin stitching around the self-made wound. It lunged at the faunus again. She ducked under its attack, bracing her legs against its weight with her semblance and holding a shoulder with one arm. The sparks shot down her legs and up again, through her core and out her other arm into a single uppercut.
For a second Caspian thought the single punch had done the trick. Its chest swelled and burst on impact. But it lurched forward, further onto her, and its body swallowed her arm. What once was its chest became a long tendril beside a newly-formed body, and it flung Moka into the concrete with a crack and a gasp for breath.
The creature skittered toward her, chirps matching the scraping of claws dragging across the pavement on limbs that were far too long. It stretched, digging its scythes into the cement four feet past Moka's head. It clicked and twitched again, before another sound rose from within. Something that started low, like a growl, but lightened into a hum. All of it sounded far too human. The hum, along with the curious rotation of its head back and forth as it looked at its prey, it was almost as if it was excited for its kill.
Underneath, Moka looked nearly too terrified to move away from the spines growing across its chest. They began to stab at her, one after another, returning to the body on a thin black stalk to do their part again.
Moka screamed, and wrenched herself back and forth in a bid to evade the strikes. Flight wasn't working. She planted her shoulders flat on the ground, and drove both boots into its chest. Its scythes dislodged from the concrete and it rose in time to meet a beam from Undertow's barrel.
The round head turned his way, and tar-like sinews began to close the grapefruit-sized hole in its chest.
It took to all fours again, and pulled itself toward Caspian on hands and feet that squelched with each movement. It was faster than the time he had seen it on the ship. And the rental armguard he had borrowed from the Sparring Team, formed of a hard plastic shell over styrofoam, was meant to block the restrained strike of another student, not foot-long claws. The first slash shredded the makeshift shield and tore it from his arm, and he felt the second across his neck before it scraped down his chestplate. He managed to block the third rake of claws with Undertow's blade. Yet as he held it off a spare tendril wrapped his chest and opposing arm, forcing the air from him before flinging him headlong into the street.
Caspian gasped to catch his breath, sputtering out the rain that had found its way into his open mouth. The abomination of Grimm reared back to its full height of eleven feet, and from its stomach another tendril erupted. He braced himself pitifully, curling up with arms in front of his head.
The jab never landed.
Moka caught the tendril a couple of feet in front of his forehead. It wrapped her forearm and halfway up her bicep, and tried to pull her to the ground next to Caspian. Yet waves of aura crackled across her body, and she held her stance. From her gauntlet she let free an open current of lightning dust. The too-humanoid Grimm trembled and twitched with each jolt that coursed through its body, a sound akin to a woman's scream breaking above the clicks and buzzes emanating from its trembling head.
"Wait... hold it there!" Caspian shouted. He stood up, despite a driving headache. He slid his thumb across a groove in Undertow's handle, and both shots hit their mark– the wet pavement just before the Grimm's feet. Ice burst forth from the impact sites, growing up each leg to the knee, and securing both to the ground. "Now pull!" he commanded.
Moka did, and the Grimm's torso pulled thin like taffy. Caspian sprinted into the abomination, planting his feat, turning his shoulders, and swinging with both arms to tear it in two. It screeched– like a woman again, but with a strange metallic rattle that made Caspian sick. It fell to the ground in two halves. Moka went in for a high-five and a "congratulations," but stopped when she noticed he still stared at the creature, weapon in hand.
It hadn't begun to fade away.
The head trembled, each gangly limb quivering and grasping at the concrete. To each side of the wound Caspian left flesh began to bubble like boiling tar. A pair of legs sprouted from one end. From the other, a second head and a pair of arms.
Moka's tail bristled to match her wide eyes. "Oh, what the fu–"
One of the halves jumped at her, wringing her neck with one arm and swinging onto her back. Its hand stifled a scream, and it pinched her nose shut.
"MOKA!" Caspian yelled. He ran for her, but the second half intercepted him. He swung his blade and the creature's arm split, swallowing his weapon and grappling him to the concrete. Moka's arms tensed, lighting crackling around them with each attempt that did little but fix its arms tighter around her neck. "Dust... use dust!" Caspian advised, his own words strained by the half-Grimm that restricted him. He hardly realized the spines that grew from within it, grinding against the last remnants of his aura and threatening to puncture his ribs and legs.
Moka's face went red, then purple. She grasped the gummy black flesh tighter, and flame encased her hands. Caspian couldn't tell if her eyes looked angry, or horrified. Maybe both. He had to turn away. But he finally heard the creature's shriek, and Moka's gasps for breath.
The half on Moka fell to the ground, and scampered over to Caspian to rejoin itself. It lifted off of him and vaulted up the entire height of the parking garage in a matter of seconds, with all the grace of a trained gymnast. It vanished over the edge.
"What was that?" Moka asked on a desperate breath. She swallowed. "I mean, what is that thing?"
"It's... Grimm, I think," Caspian answered. His eyes still searched the top story of the parking garage, and he was yet to sheath Undertow. "But it grows at will, and it can regenerate. Thing freaked me out before I knew that."
"Me too," Moka agreed. "Are you alright, though? I saw you get hit a few times."
"Yeah, I'm fine. And you? I think you had it worse than I did."
"Good. I'm also good." She checked her Holoband and grimaced. "My aura's barely hanging on, though. And yours isn't doing much better."
"Yeah, we... we shouldn't try to confront The Ambassador like this. I can call Lazula, or maybe Mrs. Kurayami is around, someone stronger than us."
Moka bit her lip. "I hope Ichigo is okay..." she mumbled. "But, the who? Does that masked guy have a name?"
"I've seen him once before, and he introduced himself as The Ambassador," Caspian recalled. "I wasn't sure at first. But I think I know who he works for."
Ichigo glanced around the corner of the building as he slowed. All clear. He looked inside the windows. The lights were on, but everyone had either left, or was doing a good job of hiding. Drab walls, two lines of desks with a single computer to each, it looks like some kind of administrative building. He put a hand on the glass, and hunched forward to catch his breath. A finger poked at his Holoband, and he assessed his teammates' locations. With a final breath he closed it again, tightened the strap on Hack n' Slash's bag, and continued.
Another dark figure stood just around the corner. Even taller, even wider, and with a band of silvery-blue across the brow ridge. Ichigo let out a yelp, turning on his heels and sprinting the way he came.
He ran head-first into The Ambassador's chest, and was pinned to the wall by his throat.
"Good work," he told his associate, immune to Ichigo's flailing kicks at his shoulders and helmet. He turned to him. "What did you see?"
"N-Nothing," Ichigo choked out.
The Ambassador slowly cocked his head, and clutched Ichigo's throat tighter against the fingers that worked feebly away at his. "You will tell me."
"Someone elses's code... was in there. I don't know– whose." Then, as The Ambassador's grasp persisted: "The android's code auto-deleted! I couldn't find– anything!"
The fist didn't leave his throat. For thirty seconds The Ambassador held him, until his punches, pries, and kicks became weaker, and stopped entirely. His arms and legs hung limp.
"Please..."
The sound of a sword being unsheathed finally snapped The Ambassador's focus.
"WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING TO MY TEAMMATE?"
The Ambassador's head whipped aside, along with Ichigo's. Lazula marched into the scene, blood dribbling from the blade she held at her side. Shadows sat deep in a cleft between brows hanging low over her eyes. She scanned the two armored figures. Only two. Whoever they were, they wouldn't be a problem after the two-dozen androids she just left in bloody pieces. They pulled devices from their belts, both about the size of their longest finger. At the push of a button, blinding white haze burst from within.
Lazula could hardly see Impetus's tip in front of her. "Ichigo?" she called. "Are you there?"
Something grabbed her boot. She kicked out, and raised Impetus to strike.
It was Ichigo, curled in the fetal position with arms raised to shield his head.
"Please don't– it's me!" he sputtered.
She lowered her blade, and extended a shielded hand to him. He took it, and wrapped her in a hug.
You saved my life!" he cried out. "Thank you!"
Lazula paused for a second, before a gentle hand at his chest gave him enough hint and he backed away. She sighed, and her breath began to clear the fog. "He ran. Let's go. You're safe now."
Ichigo wrung his hands next to his collar, uneasy gaze seeking out enemies through the glass elevator of Skye Hall. He flinched at the tone indicating his arrival, and was still for a second after the doors opened. Only two stood inside the office, Mr. Hudson, and the Headmaster himself. Ichigo swallowed, and nodded his greetings as their attention fell to him.
"Hi, Ichigo," Mr. Hudson opened. "Sorry to call you in so soon after today's events, but we wouldn't have done so if it wasn't important." He leaned in. "You were able to look into an Organic Android's code today, weren't you?"
Ichigo looked between two stern gazes, and settled on the floor instead. "Yes."
"Good. What did you see?"
The shake of Ichigo's head began feebly, but grew more empathic. "I told that guy in the mask the same thing, I didn't see anything!" he claimed, with a quiver in his voice. "I saw traces of external code probably used to get in, but I didn't have time to look into it. It might've been mine, for all I know!"
Douglas sighed, but decided on a smile. "Smart kid," he commended. "But please. We can't tell you everything– anything, really. But we're not on his side. We're on yours. And if you found something, it might help us in saving the world, Ichigo."
"The world? Oh gods, I never asked for this..." he muttered. "Okay. I did see a strange program, locked deep inside its procedural network. It looked like any other executable from the outside, but the code itself was unlike anything I've ever seen. If anything, it reminded me of human genetic sequencing."
Mr. Hudson's and the Headmaster's eyes widened, met each other, then returned to Ichigo. "Could you decipher it? Or figure out anything else?" the former asked, almost obsessively.
"I... I saw a date. I don't know if it's important, but–"
"What was it?!"
"June 21st, of the coming year."
On a breath, Douglas appeared to calm entirely. "I see. Thank you, Ichigo. That's all we need from you. Be careful out there, and get some rest."
Snow was their next guest. Headmaster Skye sat at his desk, deep in work at one of the dozen Holographic screens hanging in the air. Douglas leaned against it, but stood to meet Snow on her entry.
"Hi, Snow," he greeted. His words sounded solemn, and he picked at the knot of his tie. "I believe we've discovered the definitive date for the Apoptosis Project, and Operation Ark."
Snow paused for a second. She bit back her first reply with a sidelong glance, but looked back at her father. "When is it?"
"June 21st."
Snow bowed her head.
"I see."
