Three steel drums forgot their immense weight, floating on the glowing strings of their puppeteer. Caspian took a second to assess the situation as they rattled, and produced a series of blades eight inches long along their edges. Five on one. And that one commanded three colossal sawblades. He was unfortunate enough to know being hit by one felt like being hit by a car. But still, they held a distinct advantage. If one person were to bait each weapon, especially if they stayed moving and attacked from multiple angles, she'd be open to attacks from the fourth and fifth. With her attention split three directions, she'd be an easy target at melee range. The most obvious choice would be to open it up for Snow and have her do her thing. But he wasn't sure Lilly's umbrella and rapier would hold up to a two-hundred pound hunk of steel.
And of course, they'd have to be careful of the generators. They came to the basement to get them working again, so it would be a bit counter-productive to damage them in combat.
"Snow, Lilly! Split! Laurel, find a vantage point!" Caspian commanded, pointing ahead at Python. Snow and Lilly complied, the former skirting the outside of the wall of generators to the left, the latter to the right. Laurel followed close behind Lilly, making it to the edge of Caspian's vision before she started climbing the generator. Her boot slipped from its precarious hold and knocked a dial aside as it caught again. She cursed under her breath.
"Need a boost?" Rowan asked. He knelt next to the generator, raising the flat of his blade parallel to the ground, above his head.
Laurel responded with a smirk and a nod, and stepped onto his blade. Rowan's legs glowed red with his semblance, and he lifted the faunus to her perch. He returned to Caspian, the glance darting between Python and his leader prompting instruction.
"Frontal assault with me," Caspian muttered, eyeing the disks the Red Claw's Head puppetted in circles above herself. "We'll hold her off until the rest are in position. "Go!"
Rowan dashed ahead as Undertow folded into a pistol. He heaved Sanguine Storm around to intercept the first disk, planting the tip of his weapon into the ground and standing beside it to block the second. The six-foot sawblade nearly knocked his blade into him and forced him from his feet, but he stabilized himself against the brutal impact and lashed out to fling the third attempt aside.
Python caught the first disk with her semblance, re-igniting the link between herself and her weapon. She flung it down as Caspian let his shot fly, and the dust dissipated across its face. The temporary shield turned sword. Caspian dove aside, feeling sawblades shred the air where he stood half a second before. He rolled back onto his feet and sprinted in, but was forced back by the sweep of another blade.
Hard-light flashed to life behind Python's shoulder, in tandem with a spurt of flame. Snow's volley tore into Python's back before she turned to send a disk at the android, and flame washed the arm that commanded it. Head flicking from side to side, she sacrificed one intended for Rowan and Caspian to chase Lilly down.
The faunus raised a wall of ice a foot thick as it came, but it had little effect. Shards of dust rained on Lilly as the disk ravaged her shelter, and swung back around to chase her down as she fled.
A blast echoed through the chamber, making Caspian flinch and tearing the grin off Python's lips. She staggered, semblance blinking out for a second as she clutched the spot from where a cloud of black aura rose like smoke. The blacklight ropes flashed more intense than before, bathing Laurel in light as two disks bore down on her. She dodged the first, but the metal shell of the generator bent and tore beneath the strike. She dove beneath the second one. Caspian couldn't tell from where he stood, but it looked– and sounded– as though the attack landed. The third disk knocked Rowan off balance as it passed, and rounded the corner of the generator. Another yelp of pain from the darkness behind.
Caspian's eyes flicked from where Laurel disappeared, to the android at the far end of the room. "Snow!" he commanded. He discovered why she worked so well on a team with Lazula. Just a word and a nod, and she closed in like a predator with her weapon in hand.
Python caught on too. She whipped around, pulling two disks away from Rowan and Laurel to send two toward the android as the third covered her back. Snow blinked to the side of the first, then twirled under the second and batted it into the air with Configuration C. She landed feet before her enemy and got in a single strike before the disk behind the Red Claw's Head swung around.
Snow lurched ahead, rather than be forced back. One end of Absolute Zero pulled into a refined point. Light sprouted from the other and the butt of her spear pried the incoming disk away. She tore across Python's chest before jabbing twice, one of which landed. Two shots from Undertow skimmed past her aura, and drew black static from her shoulder and hip.
Python shouted a curse into the darkness, and for a second abandoned all form and elegance. She made for Absolute Zero's handle, grappling it just long enough to fling a hook into the side of Snow's face and lash her with the side of her tail. As Snow regained her balance the nearest disk split, halves fixing themselves into place on her arms. She slammed one into the blade Rowan spun at her, and used the other to cast him into the floor.
Caspian lined up his armguard with the top of one of the generator walls, and fired off his dagger. It sunk into the corner, securing itself with a clang. Caspian hoisted himself up, boosted just enough by the retracting cable to find his way to the top. He ran around to the side Laurel disappeared behind, seeing her slow to her feet but not badly injured. He turned, and now at Python's back, let loose with a beam of hard-light.
It landed in the center of her back, right between her shoulder blades. She stumbled forward, and with a wild look flung her two free blades his direction. He dove to the cold steel shell of the generator, and flinched as her weapon shredded it, dented it three feet deep. He rolled off and landed next to Laurel as the second passed overhead. Together they ducked away from each blind and savage strike, until Caspian rolled past one and made his way to the corner with his finger tugging his trigger. The shot he let fly met the half-blade she used as a shield. He flicked his gaze aside to Snow, who sent Absolute Zero's Configuration E through the opening Caspian created for her.
Python's eyes snapped to him, and her grin had turned grimace. "I'm getting real sick of you," she spat. She lashed her hands violently toward him and two disks followed, rolling, bouncing wildly like wheels gone rogue on a freeway. He dodged the first, and the rush of air next to it nearly knocked him off his feet. He again dodged the second, and the first when it came back around– with just a couple inches to spare past his armguard.
"Why are you even trying so hard?" she screamed. "Even if we don't kill her, she's dead! Your dearie sister made sure of that!"
Talk was her go-to. She would talk to get someone's guard down, before stabbing them in the back. She talked to get out of solitary confinement– talked her way into a jailbreak. And the more Caspian thought about it, the more he was convinced Condor let her get captured, just so she could do what she did best– talk. Now, she taunted him. She taunted him because she knew she was cornered, and tried to talk her way out of a second stay in solitary.
He responded in the last way she'd expect– with a smirk, and a transformation of Undertow. He ran at her, and when she raised her sawblade-arm to his strike, he raised his shield. He tried to remember sparring Lazula, that torrent of energy swirling within himself for the first time. He took the force into his hard-light shield. But it didn't swirl through his body in the controlled current as before. It was feral. Wild, and uncontrolled. Python's attack crashed into his arm, crashed into the side of his head. It pounded and spun when he came to, and it took a second to realize he was on the other end of the room with two disks bathed in blacklight poised to kill.
Frigid winds whistled through his hair. A pillar of ice rose to block the first strike, then another for the second. Lilly stood between them, and whipped Elysian Bloom to the side. For half a second Caspian thought the lights came back on, but it was a wicked arc of lightning that bounced from one disk, to the next, into Python's arms. She shrieked, flung back and left the room in darkness. Caspian saw Snow's hard-light spear catch once, twice, on the edge of Python's arm blades before she forced the android back once again.
The two disks still embedded in ice regained their purplish glow, cracked open like jaws filled with steel teeth. They freed themselves from their prison, one lunging ahead to pin Lilly to the wall. The other bit down on Caspian, battering him against cold ground and dragging him away from the thick of it all– out a door he didn't even realize opened behind him.
With a lash of her final disk to dissuade Rowan and Snow- and send another blast from Snake Eyes rattling across the floor, she sprinted after him. She pulled all three weapons in behind herself, and a cord of blacklight energy guided an ID card to a pad on the wall. The iron gate to the side room rattled shut, cutting off his friends' screams of protest.
He was alone with her. In darkness, pinned to the wall by two dozen dagger-sized teeth. He tried to turn sideways in their grasp, heaving his shoulder in front of his chest. Cobalt haze rose from his shoulder and hip as the teeth clamped harder on his side. He heard a pounding at the gate, then a crash of heavy steel upon it. It didn't come near yielding.
She held a hand to her ear, and leaned into the door. Her tail swished and she turned around to show him her grin had returned. She moved to him with light, frolicking steps and a flit of the tail as she raised her hands like a conductor; the two-hundred pound hunks of steel floating to each side of his head her orchestra.
"You've gotta be running low on aura now, right?" she goaded. She leaned in, too close. Close enough he felt her breath on his cheek. "You really aren't so strong alone. Your little friends aren't bad, but will they even want to keep fighting once I've painted the walls a bit with your brains?"
He felt strange peace in admitting to himself she was right. He'd been training of course. With Moka, with the Sparring Team. Trying just a bit harder each Saturday exercise. But he'd really only just started his progression. Of course a renegade huntress, training for years before he'd set foot on Sentinel's campus, wouldn't have an issue with him. He'd need Snow, and Rowan, and Laurel, and Lilly. Each of their strengths, all the ways they covered each other's weaknesses.
He thought back to that Sparring Team practice. When he unlocked his semblance, thought he shared it with his sister. But Snow was right. He wasn't his sister. She had influence over him, that much was true. She influenced who he was, who he wanted to become. But so did so many others. So did Snow, and Lilly, and Rowan, and Laurel. So did Moka, and the Sparring Team. So did even the woman who clapped her hands, commanding her weapons to crush his skull.
The hard-light within his armguard burst to life, for a second holding enough strength to pry the jaws from his side. He ripped himself through them and onto the ground beneath the horrific crash that would have ended his life, the glow of his own dwindling aura lighting his path.
He ran at her. As fast as he could, so he might arrive before he thought too hard about the fact he wagered his life on a hunch. He slammed into her unceremoniously, in something mirroring a violent hug. His hand slipped to the card at her waist in the last instance before she shoved him away, slamming him flat upon the ground with the disk that pinned him a second before. One arm propped up his head and chest long enough for his spinning vision to find her. The other raised a hand to her.
His aura glowed across his palm, down to each fingertip and extended to the card on her waist. As Python puppeted all three sawblades above his head, he waved his wrist, and commanded the card toward the door.
The gate rattled open.
Snow's spear hurtled first through the gate, a cloud of inky aura obscuring the flash of impact. Two shots made Caspian's ears ring, and forced Python's hip and shoulder back as she stumbled further away. The third would have hit her too, if Rowan's energy blast didn't hurl her into the far wall. Ice first rose to protect Caspian from the weapons forgotten by their owner's semblance, then washed over the Red Claw's Head, securing her unconscious form to the wall.
His aura held at two percent. And with it, his semblance.
The maze of hexagons, stairs, and hallways ended at the twenty-ninth floor. The only way left forward was another short hall, maybe twenty feet though in the darkness Lazula could barely make out the end. The space beyond the doors was much larger. Another hexagon,this one cut in half, stretched out, and open for the highest six stories. She might have taken time to admire the view any other time. Neon poured into floor to ceiling windows that made the far wall, all from the city across the bay, from Empyrean Tower. And inside, statues waded in marble fountains, holding fruit from gardens terraced up to the walls.
But the neon was dulled by thick haze that hung in the air, and stirred between her booths with each step. From it, a static feeling that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at end, caused a creeping restlessness to scratch at the back of her mind. The atrium, a meeting space or luxurious breakroom judging by tables and chairs dispersed throughout, was silent and still as death itself.
The haze withdrew to the ground in front of her, swirling together, condensing, coalescing, into a Blackened Pool. She stopped. Impetus was already free of its sheath, and Aegis came to standby at her side. A white tendril lashed out, slapped the marble floor before sliding back into the abyss. Two hands were next, scimitar fingers clutching the edge of the pool to hoist an all-too familiar form out of the darkness. An emaciated, vaguely reptilian form armored all down its body, tar sloughing out its hollow eyes and between its teeth.
Of course. Another Beithyr. The first she had fought freshly broken. Right after her first loss, which she'd all but forgotten when the creature's claws cut three lives short. The second, she thought, was some grand victory. Right after she'd come to terms with her loss. With the lives she watched taken. With the voices in her head.
She was naive to think that to be the end, think that to be the grand finale. When she drove her gleaming blade through the Beithyr's chest, cast a beacon of aura and energy into the sky, she still had no idea from where that energy came. Why her blade pierced so readily.
Now, she just didn't know. She didn't know where she was going. What she was doing. Why she still fought, or if she still wanted to. She thought victory in the Nikos Tournament would mean a return to form– a return to who she was, no matter how many hated that person. And yet, with her face still plastered on the screens of Sentinel Stadium, she felt nothing. Nothing, apart from some vague guilt.
"The rain just won't stop…"
"Hey, watch out!"
The voices again. She almost forgot to pay them any mind. It was one, then a second, and a third and a fourth that began talking at the same time, and didn't stop until the fifth began. In the middle of it all, another shouted something she couldn't make out. But the Beithyr flung itself toward her with a sudden burst of fury, and the congregation in her mind was once again left forgotten.
A palm of scimitars rent the air where she stood a fraction of a second before. The floor shattered beneath the attack, and the Beithyr's claws dug into the shrapnel to leverage itself for another. Lazula took the second into Aegis, and felt tempered titanium alloy tear beneath the monster's claws. She'd have to buff out a few scratches when she was done killing it.
Before the second strike left Aegis its other claw raised again for a third. Lazula's eyes flicked up to it, and almost as an afterthought she guided the force of the strike she blocked into her legs and blinked to the side. The third strike missed, and flung marble shards into her legs before the Beithyr's opposite shoulder lurched forward. From her previous battles, she knew what was to come. It spun, flinging its tail around in a maelstrom of sheer force. Statues cracked, tumbled and drowned. Tables and chairs splintered beyond recognition, and floated aimlessly on water springing from shattered fountains.
Lazula jumped as high as her thirty-pound shield and spare plates of armor would allow, and tucked her knees into her chest. She dodged the lethal jump-rope, but the tail swung back around faster than she could anticipate. On the ground, she had gravity as an ally, and the friction of her boots on concrete. In the air, she was entirely at the mercy of physics. She shot fifteen, twenty feet back before landing on her hip and rolling to a stop too close to the window for her liking.
The Beithyr remained in place, swirling and lashing a tail that cracked like thunder. The first shattered the window behind her, and a frigid wind blew rain against the back of her neck. Two. Three. Four. She'd probably go deaf after a few more. She raised Aegis, widened her stance, and leaned into the fifth. She caught it. Jumped and heaved, and watched the air ripple around her blade before letting go. The arc of force slung forward hit with all the noise of a cannon blast, leaving a crater and crack in the side of the Beithyr's neck. It wheezed in agony, rolling, writhing across the floor.
It managed to correct itself on her approach, tar dribbling out of the cleft she made. But she couldn't make it in time to pass her blade through, to separate neck from its body. The tail whipped around again, splintering the last statue still standing at the waist. Aegis raised against a rain of shrapnel, and she heard the heavy scratch of claws and a slithering body behind it. She chanced a peek above Aegis's spokes and saw the horn boring down, intent to impale her.
She skipped aside, and bracing herself against the rupturing ground, drove Impetus into one eye socket, out the other. She grabbed the flat of her blade on the far side, drove her boot into the bridge of its nose, and pulled with all of the strength that should never have been hers.
Bone split. Fractured. She and the monstrosity fell away from one another. All that remained of its head was a lower jaw, a horn, and an abyss in between, from which tar began to spew and slough in each direction as it whipped around, claws feebly scratching where its eyes had been. Its whistles and wheezes grew louder, and became an imitation of a scream. Its tail still lashed and cracked wild and blind, and she raised Aegis as an umbrella against the glass rain of what once was a floating chandelier.
Half a dozen tendrils unfurled from the sludge that still leaked from its ruined head. They wrapped Lazula's leg to the knee, swelling and twisting to climb further up. She tried to heave out of their grasp but they only clutched tighter, and pulled her toward the liquid abyss. They bound her thighs now, keeping her in place for the horn of the terror that somehow found the tenacity to drive its horn at her again.
In one swirling motion she cleaved tendrils from her legs, and rose Aegis to block its immense weight. Nothing she couldn't handle. She used some of her semblance to jolt aside, and a little more to stop herself. The rest she let free through Impetus, which tasted the abyss that peeked out of a crack in bone armor. The blade tore through, cleaving neck from body.
She hunched over to catch her breath as the Beithyr's claws vacantly scratched at marble. The ruined head and battle-scarred neck began to dissolve into the darkness, but the body remained.
A ridge of bone stirred within the blackness between shoulders, from which more tar began to pour. She took a step back. First was another horn. Then twin abysses that turned to her as the neck extended behind them, and a jaw lined with chattering razors. Two more protrusions, two more heads. Black sludge leaked from each hole, splattering into pools that stirred themselves before her.
Lazula watched them emerge from the tar with Impetus in hand.
"...Of course it can do that."
The middle head, first to emerge, opened its jaw her way. Her eyes flashed wide and she threw herself to the ground as a blast of energy shredded the floor– red lightning crackling around a six-inch ray of pure darkness. The wake of smoking stone fragments traced Lazula's side with a foot and a half to spare.
The next set of jaws opened. Still on the ground, Lazula hid as much of herself behind Aegis as she could, and felt all the force of a speeding train slam her shield. It flipped her over her shoulder, but luckily Aegis caught the blast again as she flipped instead of her body. Barely on her feet she again leapt out of the way of the third beam, which splintered a window to dust and screamed out into the night before fizzling out somewhere past the city.
The Beithyr gave up its assault for a second to swing its tail at her instead. She blocked one, dodged the second, and readied herself for the third. Again the crack of bone on her shield, and the ringing that followed, threatened to deafen her. But she twisted beneath the attack, and guided her semblance-enhanced blade through a half-inch wide gap in the armored tail to leave it hanging by a thread of tar. All three heads sang as a choir of agony.
She found her footing, and moved forward.
All three sets of eyes turned to her on approach. The middle reared up, and with a hollow screech its horn drove toward her. She widened her stance. Plunged Impetus into its sheath, just in case she needed a second hand beneath her shield. She didn't. The force threatened to split her arm, tear it from her shoulder, but she held it. It rolled down her body, down her legs and into her boots before bouncing back much, much stronger. The shockwave shattered the Beithyr's horn like glass, fractured the skull and left it to fade.
She wasn't done. Two heads still remained, and she saw the tips of two more ready to burst from the darkness. She swatted the head to her left aside when it tried to clamp down on her, and used the impact to propel herself just a little faster. Impetus left its sheath again, and drove into the swirling darkness between the two necks. Rather than flesh, her blade met resistance as it disappeared– as though it sunk to its handle in thick, impossibly black liquid.
Its back arched and its lithe figure went rigid. Front claws grasped the concrete, scratching, losing their grip, and clutching again. It tried to shake her off, but she in turn drove deeper. The monstrosity's tail thrashed and whipped hard enough the last thread keeping it attached gave out and it began to fade somewhere beyond the creature's body.
She twisted her blade, shifted one foot in front of the other. And heaved the blade over her shoulder. She heard armor split halfway down the Beithyr's spine, and watch the necks fall limp to each side of her. She backed up as she sheathed her blade, away from the tar that spilled from each open jaw and the gap between each neck. But it, and the monster that had created it, began to disappear.
Lazula took a second to catch her breath, and make sure the three-headed Beithyr was out of surprises. Within a minute, it was gone. She returned Impetus to its sheath, but kept her fingers on it as she made her way up the stairs skirting the atrium's walls. Her steps echoed in returned silence. She didn't know where she was going, where she would end up. But she'd so far made progress by moving forward, and up the stairs was the only way left to go. Four floors up, she found a mezzanine looking out onto the ruined battlefield. More tables and chairs, these untouched. And at the far end, a flight of stairs up to a deserted counter.
Two figures stood at the top.
Closer was Mrs. Chino. She was hunched forward, toward hands bound to the railing by carbon fiber cords. The man behind her dwarfed the wisp of a woman. Almost a foot taller, so his broad chest and face half-guarded by a beaked mask were fully visible over her shoulder. It looked as though any second, on any whim, he could snap her in half. Mrs. Chino looked like she knew.
Lazula had seen him only on a screen before. Standing over blurred-out corpses, looking into the camera with the same lifeless stare now intent on her. Great black wings rustled on a breeze she couldn't feel. Her hand found Impetus's hilt, and she strode ahead.
A shadow grew to block her path, far darker than the night beyond the window. The ground before the stairs began to morph, swell then settle, turned from stone to another puddle of tar. Uncanny shapes stirred inside– a tentacle, a long, thin and skeletal arm that reached out to her before melting back into the sludge. A crimson eye floated to the surface, blinked her way and analyzed her with a slit pupil before it ruptured.
"Ms. Skye."
"Condor."
A straight razor appeared from his sleeve, and Lazula's grip around Impetus tightened.
"From the moment I raise my blade to this woman's throat, you will have ten seconds to decide between two options," he announced. His hollow, monotonous voice, with timbre something like the cracking of ice, rattled around inside of his mask. "First, you may charge me, and engage me head-on in combat. Or, you may drop your weapons and surrender yourself willingly, and peacefully. One of these options is guaranteed to result in death for at least one person in this room."
Condor grabbed what hair remained atop Mrs. Chino's head, forcing it back and her neck exposed. He raised his blade parallel to her jawline, and the Blackened Pool a step in front of Lazula's boots evaporated.
"Ten seconds."
She was frozen, mind swirling with all possibilities. Her hand still wrung Impetus's hilt. Option one, charge him. Judging by the hunk of steel slung across his back, he was armed. But she could take him. Four hundred and sixty souls meant she could take anyone. She was stuck with them, so she'd rather put them to good use.
Option two, surrender. Surrender, and who knows what would come next. Death, probably. A quick one if she was lucky. Then the souls would be Condor's. But if she didn't, she wasn't sure she'd make it to them in time. She saw the slightest movement of his hand toward her ear; the slightest narrowing of his eyes. Her ten seconds were drawing to a close.
"Wait."
The blade paused on Mrs. Chino's skin, a single trickle of blood from a faint red crease behind it. Lazula flipped the clasp that held Impetus's sheath to her hip, and let it fall. She brought her hand up to undo all the clasps and buckles that held Aegis in place, and set it next to her blade. The Beithyr's claws left more of a mark across its face than she realized.
"I surrender," Lazula decided. "Peacefully."
She let herself breathe a sigh of relief as Condor's blade fell away, and he released the faunus from his grip. She knew it might have been her last.
"So, you've made your choice."
"Obviously."
Condor huffed, a shell of what was meant to be laughter. He reached into his jacket, and produced a black bar, three or four inches long by two wide. He set it on the flat of the rail in front of Mrs. Chino, and with a flick of his finger a timer appeared, counting down from ten minutes.
Her handcuffs rattled wildly as she scuffled away frantically, as far as the cuffs would allow. Wide, dull eyes darted between the device and its owner. "No! P-Please, don't!" she pleaded.
"When ten minutes pass, you may call for help." He turned to Lazula. "In the meantime, come, Ms. Skye. Let's leave this place."
After the fight against Python, restoring power was a simple matter of chipping the frozen ID card off Python's waist, scanning it, and flipping a lever. They waited only as long as it took a team of Organds to arrive and secure the sedated Red Claw Head before taking the elevator back up, and resuming their scan of the upper floors. They were only halfway through the fourteenth when an unrecognized distress signal pinged from the roof, and they made their way up.
The doors opened to a massacre on the twentieth floor. Caspian forced shaky steps forward while crimson splashed beneath his boots, stirring up the stench of blood. One more dead and mangled on the next floor. Five huddled in the corner, muttering about Grimm, a winged man, and the huntress that had passed through a few minutes before.
They were on the right track.
A few more floors up, the doors at the end of a dim hall rattled on a cold breeze that passed beneath them. They opened to an atrium– one that must have been beautiful once, but now tables, chairs, what was probably a marble statue, lay scattered in unrecognizable shards across shredded ground. They milled about in the atrium for some time, poking around and pondering where Mrs. Chino had gone, and who sent out the distress signal. By Snow's guess, a fight had occurred a matter of minutes before. Caspian would have guessed a bomb detonated.
Then, they heard a voice call out from above, hardly audible from four floors down. He jogged up the stairs, and when he made it, out of breath, onto the mezzanine, he saw Aegis and Impetus laid next to each other. Then, Mrs. Chino. Slumped toward hands cuffed to the railing.
"Mrs. Chino?" Caspian called out.
Her head rose, and weary eyes turned his direction.
"Mrs. Chino!" he was at the top of the stairs in a matter of seconds, working at the handcuffs. But they fell away before his fingers like dry clay, no key or code required.
"Caspian, isn't it?" she greeted weakly. "It's good to see you again."
"Good to see you, too. Safe," Caspian returned.
"Yes, safe. Thank you," she echoed. "And thank your sister, too."
"I saw her weapons. Doesn't seem like her to drop them," he noted. "Where is she?"
"I'm not sure, now…" she said. "She left with Condor."
Lilly's hands wrung Elysian Bloom in front of her. "He took her? Where did they go? What direction?"
"Up. To the roof. He was waiting for her, I think," Mrs. Chino recalled. "That bald woman took me to him, and when Lazula came for me, he raised a knife to my throat. He told her she could either attack him, or surrender. If she chose wrong, someone would die." Her patchy grey tail stirred. "He took her up to the roof, and I thought I heard an airship leaving. I-I'm sorry, I couldn't even call for help until–" her words were lost to a coughing fit.
Caspian held his hand out, to steady her though she still sat. "It's okay. That's all we needed to know." He helped Mrs. Chino up to her feet. "But, I think she's alright. She had two choices, and one would result in certain death. By simple logic, that death had to be Mrs. Chino's. I don't think Condor would risk his life on something like this. And he has to know that killing Lazula isn't a guarantee. Even ignoring her souls, she'd be hard to kill." He nodded along to his own words. "Besides, It's about five seconds from the doorway to where he stood at a full sprint. Had she decided to attack, that would have been plenty of time for Condor to… assure that death."
Lilly sighed. "I hope you're right."
Caspian poked at his Holoband, and as he waited for an answer to his call, he helped Moka's mother to her feet. She didn't answer, which didn't come as much of a surprise. He'd leave a message– force it through, so on the off chance her Holoband was nearby, she'd hear.
"Moka? It's me. We found your mom. She's alright."
A barely audible click. "Cas? Is she with you?"
"Yeah," he affirmed. He unclasped the Holoband from his wrist, straightened and stretched it to tablet form, and held it out for Mrs. Chino to hold. "But wouldn't you rather talk to her?"
In cold winds, an airship lifted from the apex of Frontline Premier Medical Center. Dust flashed to life beneath its wings, and it disappeared into the night sky over the ocean.
End of Part 3.
So, that's Part 3 done. I've been so excited for this second half of The Apoptosis Project for so long, and I've gotta say I'm pretty happy with how it all turned out. It's shocking we're already onto Part 4, the final part of my story. The Apoptosis Project will return early next year (probably about when RWBY comes back ((assuming it does yikes)))
But in the meantime, please let me know what you think trough reviews! Favorites and follows are also always welcome.
I'm gonna go ahead and rest a bit. See ya.
