Thanks for your patience! I've been busy, in part. But I also got a nasty hit of writer's block (and honestly a bit of burnout). It's still lingering so the next few chapters might take a bit, but I promise I intend to finish this story.
Before a whisper of The Apoptosis Project, when Frontline Biomedical was a dream in the mind of an Atlesian scientist, when huntsmen fought for their lives and died nameless instead of fighting for a title and fame, a beige utility van sat before the biggest house in the neighborhood. "Ruethe Mobility," it announced in proud block letters. "Home, simplified."
"This should be everything," the installation technician noted. He knocked on the arm of the fresh stair lift, and looked to the man next to him in the landing. Grey hair, wheelchair bound, twenty years old. "I gave it a couple test rides. Seems to be working right, but feel free to take a seat. Make sure it's comfortable, and at the right height and everything."
"I'm fine. How much do I owe?"
"I'll send the invoice by the end of the day. Got a couple things to plug in on the back end but it'll probably fall between 3,500 - 4,000 lien. He held a scroll down, level with his tool belt and the base of an alligator's tail. "Now, if you could sign here…"
He took the tablet wordlessly, and penned "Greyson Skye" into the blank space. He handed it back.
"I hope, uh, everything is up to your standard?"
The future headmaster glanced at the stair lift; a platform for his feet, synthetic leather seat, back, and armrests like a minimalist office chair. All running along a track at the base of the handrail. He bit down on his answer, because a month before, he was a huntsman in his prime. A maelstrom of steel and lightning that could drop a pack and a half of Beowolves solo. His "standard" would be climbing the stairs without some gods-damned machine helping. But now, the wound in his back burned. Tingled and singed up his spine. And below that, nothing.
"Everything looks great, thank you," the blue-eyed woman beside him said. Her hand rested on the back of Greyson's wheelchair. "And thank you for making this whole process so smooth."
The gator faunus flipped the bill of his cap to wipe his brow. "Our pleasure. You need anything, you have our number." And he was out the door.
The woman saw the installation crew out, and returned to the landing. She thumbed through the instruction manual the crew sent over. "So it looks like I wheel you parallel to it, then–"
"Stop." Greyson whipped his chair around, and wheeled himself beside the platform. "Let me at least do this myself."
He climbed from the wheelchair to the lift. His legs knocked his wheelchair's armrest, dragged behind. Azure started a half-step forward, thought better of it, and lowered the hands that had come up to help. He felt his back stretching, the gap in his spine burning hotter. He lurched his back onto the lift, and felt the flame wash up his back, into his chest, into his arms. He winced. Tensed his jaw, then let a shaking breath free.
A few days later, a few too many trips up the lift later, and Greyson parked his chair in front of the television. Not that he could do much else. Tasteless light poured in through the bay window, and beyond it birds performed their morning song in blissful ignorance. He heard a lawnmower. Probably the neighbor born a year after the Great War, who still preferred his news on paper and didn't yet share in Remnant's collective moment of silence.
He heard a pill bottle rattle in the kitchen. He turned the news down, though what he watched already reserved its pages in the history books. Atlas plummeting into the less fortunate twin it once hung far above.
"Greyson, love. Can I ask you something?" Azure called from the doorway. She glanced at the screen she'd been watching all morning. Pursed her lips, and back to him.
He dug his nails into his wheel. "Yes?"
"You started off with ninety pills, and the instructions say no more than three pills a day," she began. He already knew her question, and his answer. "Your last refill was Monday. Five days ago, meaning you should have at least seventy-five left. Why are you down to fifty-three?"
He wheeled himself half around with one arm. "I dropped some, couldn't get down to pick them up."
"Where? Let me know, and I can put them back in for you."
He dug his nails deeper into his wheel.
"Greyson. Where are they?"
"I got a lance through my spine, Azure."
"I know. Sweetheart, I know. And I'm sorry it turned out this way." She started to approach, and he wheeled himself back around. "These are strong. I don't want you on them forever. And I don't want to lose you before that."
Greyson's eyes fixed ahead. Dull. He wanted to spit back how little he cared, how little his chair-bound life meant to him. But it wasn't fair to her. And the children in that vision, when the lance's tip was the edge between life and death. Every time he stared down the pill bottle, imagined it empty in his limp hand, the vision would start to run, melting into streaks of color like a still-wet mural in a rainstorm.
And the anchor continued on; "though the death toll is currently unknown, from the population density in the area and the magnitude of damage, it is expected to be substantial."
"After the Fall of Beacon, I pledged to keep fighting until I or the person behind it was dead. Now, I'm still alive. Dead-fucking-weight, but alive." The fire burning in his spine flared up with his sudden signal to the television. He dug his teeth into a yelp that nearly escaped. "And this is still happening."
"You did more than your own share," Azure insisted. "The Garnetts killed thousands. And would have killed more if you didn't stop them. You can't expect to shoulder the entire world's burdens. It isn't fair to yourself."
Greyson's head bowed toward numb feet. It shook feebly.
"I just want to do more than watch."
Ships sailed through the night, by sea and by air, carrying the only hopes left for humanity's survival. Caspian laid in silence, staring at the ceiling of one of the ferry's hundred cabins, mind racing. A hundred possibilities the sunrise would bring, a thousand futures he'd miss if The Apoptosis Project succeeded, a hundred million people who would be lost if they failed. And Snow– lost if they didn't.
A knock at the door pulled him from the edge of consciousness. He flipped the covers off himself, and was at the door with Undertow in a few spare seconds. Snow offered her Holoband.
"Moka is asking for you."
"Oh– thanks," Caspian said, lowering his blade, fluffing the hair flattened by his pillow and considering, for a second, his vision of Snow in Midas's nightmarescape. He took her Holoband, and she turned away.
"I hope I didn't wake you?"
"No, no. I've… actually been having some trouble getting to sleep." The door closed behind him.
"You're not the only one. I think this whole ship's about to get a collective eight hours tonight."
Caspian chuckled, but couldn't work out a response.
"To be completely honest, I'm terrified."
"Somehow it's nice to hear you say that," Caspian replied. "Like I'm not alone."
"Of course you're not. I'm here, no matter what happens."
"And I'm here for you. I hope… I hope we both make it out of this okay."
"...Yeah. Me too."
The two fell quiet, content in each other's virtual company and comfortable in the fact that, across half a mile of open ocean, they were there for each other. Caspian felt something just past the screen, as though Moka bit the tip of her tongue to hold back a thought. Or maybe it was his own reflection. But nothing more was said, nothing more could have been said, because even in a world of Holoscreens and inextricable connection, some things were better said face to face.
After a final bid of goodnight, he settled back into his silence. Alone with no umbrella in a maelstrom of thought. As he weathered the storm he'd have visions of a tower. A garden. A great, winged monstrosity. Too many wings. A shifting black form he couldn't fathom. And he'd start, realizing he must have drifted off again somewhere along the way. Twice he stepped into the hall to meet Snow, who stood guard outside Midas's door. They kept him on a short leash– one it seemed he hadn't yet slipped.
Someone from the second ship would check in by radio every twenty minutes and change. Out of anxiety, or out of boredom when they could afford it. They clung to each other in the main cabin until the early hours of the morning, when Lilly suggested they scrounge up as much rest as they could. Come daylight, Laurel plugged in her amp and held an impromptu concert over their scavenged breakfast. But even she lacked energy, and the wail of her guitar sounded more like a requiem.
That night Lazula was constrained to her own personal Hell– stuck at arms' length from a stranger, twenty thousand feet over the ocean. And he insisted on breaking the blissful silence between radio transmissions. Unwillingly, over the course of six hours, she learned more about the stranger than she did about most of her classmates. He got his start as a pilot through a friend's dad back home in Vacuo, and two years in, met his wife at a hotel bar in Mistral. By some miracle they stayed in contact, and by some miracle they had a daughter, though doctors told his wife it would never happen. Neither of them came from money, either, so he pledged his daughter's life would be full of more opportunities than his own. That was why he flew, spent so much time away with only their picture on his dash. Now– or at least up to now– he was concerned Organds would take over his line of work. First android co-pilots, then android pilots. And he'd be out of the only job he knew.
Lazula didn't ask about any of it. Nor did she care to know, as something slightly more pressing was at the front of her mind. But she did prefer the glint of rapport to the glint of her blade at his neck, and she eventually trusted him enough to rest in the cargo hold.
They descended onto the airship carrier some time the next afternoon. A massive grey slab aloft in dark blue. Some holdover from the military days that wasn't of much use anymore. But to scrap and recycle such an immense amount of material would have been a long, expensive process, so it was more efficient to let it sit on its anchor fifty miles off of Patch, being mildly useful from time to time.
Like holding the most powerful huntress of the generation prisoner while the world ended.
The Organd crew met the ship on the pad, their sharp-lined uniforms like the robes of a doomsday cult. They circled the ship. Began their ritual. But as the cargo doors open Lazula leapt out, cutting down the first in a single flash of steel and sparks. She turned her blade through a second, over the neck of a third, and the unarmed crew began to scatter. The fourth triggered some kind of distress signal next to the bridge's door before she skewered it. She smashed the alarm with her shield, and channeled that blow into Impetus to split another android at the waist. The alarm fell silent, but Lazula suspected the damage was done. She boarded the Barricuda-Class, behind the pilot who glanced nervously at her blade's crimson shimmer.
And by the time the Barricuda touched down in Port Cyrreine an hour later, a small army of Grimm had amassed to meet her. But the streets were bare of anything with a soul, and hologram advertisements bathed empty concrete in their glow. No reason to hold back.
"Stay safe out there, okay?" bid the pilot. "Looks crazy."
Lazula nodded. "Something tells me this is the easy part."
A Deathstalker led the charge, wide as the street and longer than the city bus its claw knocked aside. Lazula leapt over a minivan-sized pincer, slid down the other side and into the second. It cracked behind Aegis, and as she turned she felt the full extent of her semblance swell and surge within her. She let it free through Impetus, and gouged the monstrous Deathstalker down the middle in a single strike. The pulse of energy continued on, through four Beowolves, through the neck of a one-armed Beringel, to split open the gut of an ogre shambling forward on mismatched legs.
Onto the back of the Deathstalker before it dispersed. Down its spine, off next to the tail. And on her way to the ground, she took the head from a Griffon. It fell, its body writhed and hemorrhaged tar. But it didn't dissolve. It had replaced a Deathstalker's tail, and only as she split its pincer in two and drove Impetus down through an eye did it fade away. She heard concrete shredding, saw the source of the noise beneath a pair of three-clawed feet. Another ogrish form bobbled clumsily upon them, wide-set eyes and a vast, downturned mouth like an anglerfish. Lazula raised Aegis. Jumped in as the maw opened. Crushing weight, darkness, rows of needle-teeth closed in upon her.
And she tore her way out the other side, somersaulting through a splatter of grime, wiping it away from her eye and dredging more from a black alligator's that scraped along on arms too skinny. Too human. A bladed tail– stitched on like a failed experiment– flicked at her. She ducked aside, and in the same movement Impetus glided into a half-inch wide gap between plates of armor. She heard a snarl. Saw the bladed tip hanging by a thread, and bashed it into the hungry jaws of something roughly canine. It halted its advance, choking and sputtering tar. Another shield bash, and she saw the blade clear the nape of its neck.
Then another sound, like a heavy sheet of fabric folding above her. The crack of a whip. Immense force rang out from a single point on her shield, and she sent it back ten times over. Billowing wings of a soaring manta ray split down the middle, and another one thirty feet above it folded and fell in the diamond dust of a skyscraper's windows.
She chanced a second to catch her breath, but something knocked it out of her from behind. It cast her into the pavement– she flipped, turned, and caught half a glimpse of it before a horn caught her between the plates of her gorget. A bull's horn. Sprouting from the same neck, the head of an eagle, and the head of a man– eyeless and screaming. Thirteen eyes sprouted from its torso, pink with film and staring blindly a hundred feet past Lazula. The tangled mass of talons and tendrils below its waist wrung the breath from her, pulled her knee backward and crushed her spine.
She freed her wrist from their grasp. Split flesh with her fingernails until she dug out her elbow. And she thrust her blade through the mouth of a raging bull, out through an eagle's eye.
Six black wings folded upon her, and began to dissolve.
She pushed the vanishing corpse from herself and stood, giving one last look at the abomination. Frontline's horrors didn't exist in the pages of her Grimm Studies textbooks. Pieces she could almost identify were stuck together with little plan and less care. And in nearly all of them, some corruption of the human form.
Condor made beasts. But Frontline made monstrosities.
At least they made Beowolves right. And the dozen that surrounded her would die as easy as any other. Claws the length of her hand scraped Aegis, and the power behind them budded in her chest, bloomed through Impetus. Three Beowolves in one swing. But the first still held her shield, crimson jaws snapping at her from above it. She punched Aegis's spines through its snout, and heaved the Beowolf to the concrete before her. She drove her boot between its eyes until they burst. Her heel twisted in black muck, and she turned to drive Impetus through a Beowolf's chest. She twisted it, threw the Grimm from her blade and in the same motion carved the head off another. Each remaining fell with a single slash.
She stood now in Empyrean Tower's long shadow, its twin spires grasping at heaven. Her Holoband pulsed for the first time in hours.
"We've been trying to contact you for some time," Snow said. "I hope you didn't run into trouble?"
"They tried to get me away from Port Cyrreine. Baited me out into the middle of the ocean, so I haven't had service." She looked up to the Barricuda-Class shooting over the city like an oversized bullet, out of an active warzone. "I worked it out. Hope everyone else made it alright?"
"We got separated too, but everyone is here. We're about to leave the ship and rendezvous." There was a pause, and Lazula almost hung up, but Snow continued. "We picked up Midas on the way–"
Lazula's nails dug into the skin beside her Holoband, holding it inches from her snarl. "You're with Midas? Get away. Now. And don't you dare trust him."
"Lazula, please," Midas's voice emerged from the background. Pleading, but again he could have pursued an acting career. "I'm on your side now– I promise."
"Every word you've spoken to me up to this point has been a lie. Why the hell would I trust you now?"
"He told us some things he wouldn't have if he wasn't serious," Caspian added from the back. "I don't trust him. And I definitely don't forgive him. But he's working with us for now."
Lazula slowed, looking up from her Holoband to the three figures that cut off her approach. Hulking shoulders, still visible to each side of a glowing riot shield. And a woman at each side, hard-light tonfas jutting from the arms of the left, bracers encircling the right's wrists.
"Then why's his team here to greet me?"
Behind Caspian Midas whipped his Holoband up to place, and jabbed fervently at the translucent screen. "Nikole. I need you and the others to withdraw!" Lazula heard through the right android's wrist.
Her– it's– eyes remained intent on Lazula. "You do not have authority to issue commands to this unit."
"What?" Midas snapped. He shook his head and leaned in closer. "This is Midas. Your team leader. Withdraw, now."
"Command permissions have been updated. You do not have authority to issue commands to this unit."
"Shit." He flicked the screen aside to close it, and turned to Caspian. "I still have their location. I'll back her up."
The hard-light fortress stepped forward. "Objective confirmed. Increase combat capabilities, and subdue the target."
Desmond– the wall at center– clicked a switch in hard-light circuitry, and the outer edges of his shield folded outward to train on Lazula. She stepped forward. Again. Then faster, until she sprinted at Team MDLN. The four hard-light skewers expanded into barrels, and tiny bullets of focused energy rained against Aegis. She ducked behind it as best she could, but still she felt the hot sting as they skimmed her legs below the knee.
A sharp twang from her right, and a sharp pain in her hip. Another in her chest, her arm, and her neck. She glanced down at the pain in her chest, found a steel spine like a three-inch harpoon lodged in a gap in her armor. They arrived on steel cords, as thick and as flexible as heavy fishing line. It was slack for a split second before growing taut, ripping her shield aside to open her up to Desmond's gunfire. She saw Lavender coming in from the other side, eyes wide in a hollow, simulated fervor. Then the cords that bound her glowing white-hot, vibrating, squealing out in a mosquito pitch. They dumped molten steel into her veins. Nikole strung her up like an electric puppet, and with both bladed tonfas Lavender cut her down.
Aegis and her armor clattered on the ground, and as she tumbled she fought for control of her muscles. Her arms returned to her first, and she caught herself. Then her legs, and she stood. Lavender lunged at her again. Lazula caught both tonfas, crossed, and felt the android's energy course into her blade, into her arms. It traveled the length of her body, bounced off the concrete her back heel dug into, and a rush of force sent the purple-haired android bouncing across the pavement in a haze of her EMRF.
She turned Aegis into the hard-light rain like four of Snow's guns, skipped and tumbled forward to dodge another barrage of electric harpoons. Lavender blocked her first two slashes, ducked and weaved away from three more. She lowered herself and widened her stance to brace against the last. Her hair ripped from its ponytail and a bus station twenty feet past her crumpled. But she stood. Lazula pressed on. Scored a couple of slashes, though twice as many missed. It felt like sparring Snow at 90% Combat Capability– maybe 95%. But now she faced three, and another spattering of hard-light peppered her side. She ducked away from a strike, tripped Lavender into her blade and kicked her past it to steal a vantage point on all three.
The neon light of a thousand advertisements waxed and waned upon the ridges of Lazula's armor as she caught her breath. She stared down the androids. Lavender was quick. Stronger than she looked, just like Snow. But she'd win one-on-one. Lightning dust was a cheap trick, and those harpoons stung. But Nikole would be out of options at close range. Then, Desmond. She may as well be facing a tank. In a perfect world, he'd go first.
With a renewed grasp on Impetus, she closed in.
And from the sharp pain in her shoulder, the high-pitched whine and glowing cord, her grasp faltered.
She coughed, gasped for breath against her spasming chest. Her vision blurred, she blinked the feeling out, focused on the war machines that surrounded her. Machines. Skilled, efficient, deadly. But lacking that drive of a cornered animal– that primal instinct to fight for their lives. She felt it inside of her. Against five harpoons in her arm, against five more in her thigh, she charged into Desmond's shield. Hard-light flashed, both stumbled a half-step back, and the magnified impact swelled within her. She turned with it.
The barbs dug deeper into her skin. But still she pulled against them, against the resistance as they pulled taut. A pop and a flash, and the cords went slack. Something landed behind her. Past it, staggering footsteps. Nikole's arms lay between them, a crimson trail and frayed wire all that connected titanium alloy bones to their socket.
She bit back her grimace. Assured herself in the android's blank face she felt no pain. Nikole's eyes flashed red. And again. But Lazula turned to the footsteps thundering toward her. She tried to shake the steel cord from her blade, couldn't free it, cracked a smirk. She pointed Impetus to the ground, and the silver fishing line followed. She ground the rubber sole of her boot into it to pull it taut and twisted her blade, tightening the cord around it. One last pull and the cord split, and Impetus flashed against Lavender's blades.
The android froze, her fingers tensing around her weapons' hilt, synthetic muscle fibers behind them pulsing and rolling. She freed her blade, slashed three times more before the android could recover. Lavender punched out in response to the last, swatted Impetus away and followed through with a jab. But her movements were awkward, jerking, and left Lazula more than enough time to ram Aegis into her fist until a steel bone split through her elbow.
She flipped the broken arm aside, turned and drove Impetus through her core. The frayed cords wrapping Impetus sparked, and the smoke rising from the wound stung with the scent of burnt blood. She dropped the android from her blade, and holding her shield to incessant gunfire, turned toward footsteps splashing through crimson puddles.
Nikole, armless, sprinted at Lazula. The red in her eyes flared faster. Faster. And as Lazula ducked behind Aegis, an eruption of light and heat swallowed her, splitting her eardrums, casting her into the concrete and back over her shoulder. Nikole was nothing above her knees. The teeth of the android's upper jaw bit pavement three feet away. Burnt silver hair fanned out behind her, camera-lens eyes dilated, vacant, their darkness swallowing the day's waning light.
Only then did she realize how much she looked like Snow.
She focused on her eyes– its colorless camera lenses, set into a steel skull. The blood pooling around it quaked, and Lazula whipped herself from her side to her back, planting her hand behind Aegis a quarter-second before the hard-light blade came down on her neck like a guillotine. Desmond had pulled his riot shield apart, and each half of it now ran the length of his forearm and two feet past the knuckle. Like Lavender's tonfas, but each the size of Rowan's blade.
He bore down further, forced Lazula's chin aside and threatened to crush her beneath her shield. Then he ran, grinding her over the pavement, through a pool of blood and over scraps of charred steel. She heaved to her side, kicked off his blade and up to her feet. Impetus arrived in the perfect position to block a follow-up swing heavy enough to jolt her wrist sideways. She recovered, rammed Aegis into the follow up and pivoted around the impact to let it free through Aegis. Hard-light flashed like lightning, and the ringing of her blade was thunder. Nikole's steel fishing line split and hurdled two dozen feet, but the android still stood.
From her sparring sessions against Snow, Lazula knew androids were stronger than their frame suggested. Considering Desmond looked halfway between a linebacker and a draft horse, the fact he held his own shouldn't have surprised her. She drove forward, amplifying each strike to force him back. But for a second she leaned too far into offense, caught a bladed elbow in her jaw and a punch in her gut that lifted her from her feet. He caught her again, cast her onto her shield across the ground, but she knocked him back as he followed and landed a pair of strikes in his chest to match him. Their fight continued; steel on hard-light, the ringing of a bell on radio static.
Then another noise– a high-pitched whine and a crackling rush that seared the air and drew up the hairs on the back of her neck. A point jutted out from Desmond's breastplate, dead center. And it glowed white with webs of lightning. The android stood rigid, tensing its jaw, working its fingers tighter around the hilt of its weapons. Then a bluish-white EMRF shuttered across its body, and with the sound of something cracking inside, it crumpled.
Behind the fallen figure, Midas lowered Resplendence. The remains of his arrow jolted and sparked in his former teammate's back.
"I ordered you to withdraw."
