Snow grew heavier in his arms. Her head rolled off her shoulders, corrected for a second, slumped again. Ragged breaths caught in her throat, irregular enough he thought twice he'd heard her last. He tried to prop her back up onto feet that wouldn't catch the stone. Another last breath. As he waited desperately to be proven wrong he whimpered some desperate protest– one he didn't realize he uttered. One that fell on deaf ears. He lowered her down, to her knees then her side, and somewhere along the way he crumpled next to her. The breeze, once gentle, was bitter cold on his wet cheek. His hand rested at her chest, but he felt no whirr of reassurance. Only a profound stillness.
"It's cruel, what you did to her," Lazula muttered.
The Headmaster's voice was solemn. "I won't deny that."
Moka spoke next, her words broken. "Was it really all for nothing?"
"Yes. We can expect more androids to archive you all within the next few minutes." He folded his hands and bowed his head, as if he was giving a eulogy. Maybe he was. "Make peace. The world you know has ended."
All were silent. Only the wind spoke, echoing upon glass, into the basin Empyrean Tower's shell forged, carrying upon it the sound of the sea. A sound of nature eternal, whistling through the creation of those condemned to be forgotten. Two words interrupted.
"Fuck that."
Even the wind quieted– stunned by her transgression.
"Just because your plan failed, doesn't mean we're out of options," Lazula insisted. "The entire world is at stake and you give up? Just like that? For the longest time I looked up to you as a true huntsman from the time of Salem, and the time of Grimm. Then you kept hiding things from us, all for your 'master plan.' And this is it? We deserve better. The world deserves better." Her head flicked to Caspian, and she saw him with head bowed, holding Snow's arm. "Come on, Cas. Help me think of something."
His name struck him with a sudden clarity. One that let him blink the vision back into his eyes, take a deep breath that felt like his first. Snow lay beside him. Still. That plan had been set in motion years before, and had reached its conclusion. All he could do was ensure its purpose. To honor Snow's memory. To save a hundred and some odd million. To spite the one who held the plan secret so long.
If Snow had to die, he'd make sure it meant he could live.
He pushed his glasses up to rub the bridge of his nose. Breathed in again. "Okay," he said on exhale. "The only thing that's changed is our positioning. And the fact Griswold Baine will be expecting us, so we'll likely be on the defensive." His knees still shook, but he pushed himself upright. "We know where the Nexus is, thanks to Kraken. Ichigo, you'll be the one to lead us back down there. Assuming the control system is down there too, we should still be able to reverse The Apoptosis Project."
"You'd be passing the Central Production Facility. If I were to guess, we've got hundreds of Organds down there booting up," Midas warned. "Let's hope my permissions haven't been updated yet, and you can still lock it using the console right in the doorway. If not, it's over."
"Then let's go quickly. Before they turn on."
"I can't join you," Midas replied. He indicated the shorter of the Empyrean Towers with his thumb. "The Vestige is in that one's basement. We have to destroy it before my father can make contact with it. Normally, his cells would disintegrate before he could scream. But a hundred million souls have a way of making someone stronger." He shook his head. "It's no exaggeration to say he'd become the most powerful being Remnant has seen."
Lazula crossed her arms. "So we destroy it first?"
"I destroy it," Midas corrected. "I don't have the time to explain now. But it's likely something only I can do."
"I'm going with you. Tell me on the way. Try anything, you're dead."
"I'll need your Holoband," Caspian said. "For the lock. And if he's tracking us, it'll throw your dad off."
Midas nodded, and undid the clasp on his Holoband to comply. "I'd like someone skilled with dust too, just for extra assurance," he decided.
"Lilly."
The faunus's cheeks were flushed, eyes dull and glossed over. But she approached.
Caspian nodded. Slowly, tentatively at first, but looking to his friends and the weapons they clutched like torches in the dark, he gained confidence.
"Alright. Let's do this."
He took his first step toward the grand glass door of Empyrean Tower, the entrance to a giant that bathed all around it in their own insignificance. But he saw how Snow lay unceremoniously at his feet. He wouldn't leave her there, discarded, even in the precious moments after an apocalypse. He knelt down to hold her. Slipped one hand behind her knees and another beneath her shoulders. He lifted, and scanned the surroundings until his eyes caught a cornucopia of color. Deep green leaves speckled lighter, orange flowers splayed out wider than two of his hands together. A burst of mint green leaves giving rise to bursts of red, yellow, aquamarine. Nodes of glowing pink up deep purple stems. A tree that fanned out to hang solemnly, its fallen blue petals peppering the white concrete slab.
He laid Snow upon it. Rested her right arm beside her, left hand across her heart. A blue petal fell to rest between her fingers.
"We'll come back for you," Caspian pledged. "I promise."
He returned to the entrance of Empyrean Tower. Those visions from the night before again. He'd passed through the garden already. Laid Snow to rest Tower's entrance loomed ahead. But those black wings. The Vestige? Or something more?
Glass fractured. Exploded forth to rain shards on the approaching huntsmen. Caspian looked out from beneath his armguard, to the awkward shadow lurching into the light. Like a chick fresh from its massive black egg, but its first feathers were spines of bone, and its fledgling wings were scythes. Its shriek brought Caspian's hands up to his ears out of instinct, and a whip of a tongue barbed like a harpoon flashed his shield to life. He faltered a couple steps, and swatted the tip into Noxis's semblance-encased hand. He jerked the Grimm into three punches from Moka, each leaving a spike of ice through the far side of its flesh. It thrashed and pulled away, tongue following each wild movement and crashing into Sanguine Storm's flat edge. Moka ducked a scythe-swipe, catching it in a palm full of ice and cracking it with her elbow. An uppercut sent a final spike of ice through the top of its beak.
"Watch it!" Laurel called, and Caspian's eyes followed hers. Falling in glass rain, two Y-shaped bodies a dozen feet long. Their arms, the prongs of each Y, ended in five-foot cutlasses and their tails belonged on a Deathstalker.
Caspian warned Undertow's trigger as he tumbled across splintering concrete. He rolled into a kneel, aimed and let the beam splinter needle-teeth in a jaw opening far too wide. It flinched and shook before taking another in its single eye. His ears rang from two blasts from Snake Eyes echoing through the garden and tearing dark flesh, but he took its split second of distraction to close in.
Its blade warned Moka away. Its tail lunged for Caspian. But he vaulted over his hard-light shield as Undertow transformed, and he tore somewhere at its jaw or its throat. Its scream gurgled in tar that leaked from its wound, and strands of gummy flesh fought to weave themselves back together. But Moka snapped a cutlass stuck in the ground with one elbow, and a hook from her opposite fist ripped its serpent head clean.
She pulled the shard of bone from the ground before it vanished, and heaved it into the eye of the second Y-Grimm. The whole body tensed and writhed, spewing tar and an ear-rending cry, long enough for Rowan to free his blade and cleave the arm that wielded it. A whirl of crimson, he blocked the stinger with the flat of his blade, and carved the other arm much the same. Neither could hold the weight of its body any longer. Neither could defend against Noxis hammering the spike of bone deeper into its skull.
Caspian looked up. Black wings. Looked around. Black forms, rising from Blackened Pools. He folded Undertow.
"We don't have time for this," he decided, and he faced the door again. "If Organds are on their way to meet us, we have to make it down there fast."
"Should someone stay behind? Watch the door?" Rowan asked. Tentatively, as though he wanted to make it clear he wasn't volunteering.
"It's for the best if we stay together." The scream of Grimm far above him– something with the wings of a Ravager and a mud wasp's stinger. "Since everyone was archived, we don't have to worry about the Grimm attacking anyone but us. Silver lining, I guess."
They entered the Tower. Beneath catwalks and terraces, between the white stone columns supporting them. The joys and triumphs of Frontline Biomedical, preached by Holoscreens to an empty lobby. Something cracked beneath Caspian's boot. One of a hundred Holobands interrupting the marble floor. They found the locked stairwell stowed away behind reception, and descended. From the light of the lobby, into darkness. From darkness, into white. The air held a peculiar stillness, as if noise too was a kind of contagion. Unallowed, beneath Empyrean Tower. All was white. All was silent. All was sterile.
They passed what looked like a prison. A world of white– and Caspian knew with a sinking feeling it was where Snow spent the first month of her life. Two walls of stark white. One wall, a mirror, and the adjacent was glass. The door to each cell. He wondered which box they kept her in. And on they pressed, into the testing chamber that had only ever been used once. He'd seen it in flashes in Snow's fading memory.
Caspian denied it his attention. He passed to stand in the threshold of a long, dark hall, and heard the muffled drone of something monstrous further in. "Laurel. Can you see anything?"
Her eyes warmed the darkness. In their glow, slit pupils narrowed. "Androids. Shit, there's a lot of them," she warned, looking to the left wall, then the right. "Looks like they're still warming up. Not moving. That's good."
"Good. Thanks." And Caspian pressed Midas's Holoband to the console. He followed its prompts, tried to steady his finger, and as the lock symbol flashed to place on screen something heavy shifted deep in concrete, and a low thunk rattled the walls. The noise echoed deeply– far too deeply for the hall's dimensions.
His sigh echoed. Then six sets of footsteps, toward the Tower's core.
A thick, glossy column of blinding light filled most of the room. A droning, rushing noise surged and waned in tandem with its glow. Like a heartbeat in its slow, two-time rhythm. All of humanity, archived. Held immaterial in light. Every few seconds he thought he saw the ghost of a head and shoulders, or a hand, grasping for the glass. Perhaps the forms of the most resolute, apparating for one rebellious half-second. But each was consumed by the light quick enough Caspian couldn't tell for sure he saw them.
Ichigo fished for something in his back pocket for a second, pulled out a stick of black plastic the size of his finger, and slotted it in among a thousand buttons and nodes. He poked around at them for a few seconds, his eyes lost behind the light on his lenses. A Holoscreen greeted him. He poked it, it closed, then back to the buttons.
Caspian borrowed Laurel's semblance and joined her at the doorway. The air was somewhere between green and blue, darker further from the doorway. The walls were a couple shades darker. But behind them, countless crimson blots. Peanut shaped, roughly, with two larger masses connected by a red strand. Around each, a humanoid form in yellow. They were still, for now. But the red brightened slowly.
Moka arrived at his side, and he found comfort in the way her hand held his arm. He allowed himself a deep breath. He hadn't realized how tight his chest had become, or the tension in his shoulders. He let them drop, and rolled out his neck. Another breath. Moka opened her mouth to speak, but a synthetic voice interrupted her.
"Biometric scan required."
"What? B-But I…" Ichigo stammered. He adjusted his glasses with the hand that turned upward to indicate his surprise, and leaned back in. "I thought I overrode the permissions?"
"Biometric scan required."
"Oh shut up, I know!"
Noxis scoffed. "So now what do we do, kill Griswold Baine and cut his hand off?"
The roar of the machine stifled Caspian's uneasy laughter. "I'm not the one who suggested it."
"Biometric scan not provided for manual override of The Apoptosis Project," the machine insisted. "Permission denied. Dispatching."
Caspian's eyebrows stitched. "Dispatching?"
He felt the floor shift beneath him, something moving deep beneath concrete. Heard the reverberant thump of the production facility unlocking. Walls sunk into the floor.
In the strobing red alarm-light, four hundred eyes opened in tandem. Two hundred heads turned.
The lobby of Empyrean Tower's Auxiliary building was just as unabashedly garish as its twin. It had to have taken up the building's first eight floors, all to make space for a self-aggrandizing effigy of white marble and gold inlay. Angels emerged from swirling clouds and cascading water, playing harps, horns and lyres to hundreds of hands reaching up to them. And all in the lobby, every seat, desk, and door, faced them in worship. "Holier-than-thou," chiseled out of stone.
The side of it bulged, cracked, and black liquid seeped through. Midas drew Resplendence, and Lazula followed with Impetus. A surge of blackness, and the beast emerged. A domed head like the top of a skull, but held only one socket for one red eye, pulsing and swiveling madly. A three-hinged jaw below that, all guiding a serpentine body slithering from within the statue like a parasite. Lazula adjusted her fingers around Aegis and Impetus. Elysian Bloom opened, glowed, and Lilly took two steps back. Lightning sparked from Midas's armor and weapon. Behind his visor, black eyes narrowed.
Ribs split down the length of its body until they looked more like the legs of a centipede. Its mad eye darted downward to look at the scourge of Blackened liquid it retched across the floor. Then with its jaw unfurled, it lunged for Midas. The huntsman held his ground, held his chin up toward the opening abyss. It snapped shut. The air crackled with static, and Midas appeared half a dozen feet away in an instant to whirl seven lashes into the hinge of its jaw.
Lilly froze over the Blackened Pool, and surfed the path she created to the far side of the monstrosity until a pillar of stone at her boot stopped her. She twirled, and the air surrounding her glittered with diamond dust coalescing into a spear that fired into its side. It pulled away, and into three more lashes from Resplendence. But from between the centipede legs came a tendril, unfurling and splitting into two dozen smaller, which tasted the air before all striking at Lilly like the tongue of a frog. Elysian Bloom opened to shield her, glowed white-hot with flame dust. But more tendrils replaced the few that burned away, and they bulged and spread across her umbrella, around her arms and chest to incorporate her. As fast as they came, they wrenched the faunus into jaws big enough to swallow her whole.
Lazula leapt. Planted her foot on some amorphous form rising from the Blackened Pool, and shot herself into the hinge of the abomination's jaws before her girlfriend. Aegis cracked bone, shattered three teeth as she wedged it into place, and she planted her boot between two more the length from her ankle to her knee. Impetus plunged and twisted, freeing one of Lilly's arms, a leg. Lazula felt each muscle tense and strain– arms, chest, legs, core. Nearly tearing with effort. But she forced the jaw wider, and heard something crack deep within bone.
The lobby darkened for a split second, like an inverted flash of lightning. Midas appeared atop the serpent. He rushed from where it continued to emerge to the nape of its neck, lashing Resplendence back and forth between gaps of armor as he did. He kicked off the base of its skull, flipped, and ruptured its eye with his upside-down shot. He landed on one of the flying Grimm Lazula had seen in the city, just as it emerged from a Pool. Three heads, six wings, and a bundle of tendrils that pulled taut when the huntsman's halberd impaled its chest.
Lilly's rapier tapped Impetus. She managed a pained smile and a nod, just enough to clue Lazula in. She held her weapon steady, still strained against the jaws clamping shut and black sinews pulling Lilly in, but felt the subtle vibration of electricity in her blade. Its white-hot glow. She heaved Impetus through the abyss, and in an explosion of light cleaved the jaw free from its body.
The rest of the abomination, in tar and abstract fragments of bone, began to spill out from the wounds they created, as if it all only tenuously held together. It slouched and tumbled the rest of the way out of the statue, form limp, skin splitting and oozing like a salted slug.
Lazula hid her nose from the cloud of rot billowing from it. And scanned the lobby and trained her ears for more of Frontline's mutant Grimm. Midas strummed his bow twice, took down two more of the three-headed Grimm. When she was sure of their tenuous safety she sheathed Impetus and came to Lilly's side. "Are you okay?"
"Yes, I should be," the faunus returned. She straightened her collar. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be a liability."
"You're not a liability," Lazula assured. "Besides, Midas and I aren't normal. Nobody can keep up with us."
"And, if it makes you feel any better, you're our last line of defense against the origin of all Grimm," Midas added.
"Oh, joy."
"But that–" and he indicated the half-dissolved Grimm, "doesn't inspire confidence."
A black centipede skittered out of a Blackened spot. Lazula smashed it with her heel. "Why not? Besides the obvious."
"I'm not controlling them, and my brother's dead. It can only mean the Vestige was activated."
"What is the Vestige?" she asked, and scraped tar from her heel as she began to walk. "I'd prefer to know what I'm getting myself into."
"The fragment of Salem that makes this possible." He grasped toward a Blackened Pool between them, and from within rose an eyeless mask. A yawning mouth, groans gurgling on tar. He skewered it. Ripped his weapon aside, and the pool dispersed. His other hand came up to his chest, and left it as a fist. "Ten CC's, straight to the heart. It was all that remained of Salem– the single fragment that survived her annihilation. The key to her immortality. It's been kept in stasis for twenty-eight years. Tested, portioned out. But kept inert. Now it's been reactivated, there's only one way to destroy it."
His hand returned to his heart. "And only one person who can."
