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Start Chapter 33
Yang's aware of the fact that there are hot, angry tears running down her face as she blocks a blow from Tyrian coming at her from the side, and shoves a fist into his gut at speed, but she's doing her best to ignore them.
Her eyes are a shining crimson, and her hair – what little of it is left these days – is alight with fire. It's a boost in power that's not at all unappreciated, but she can't do much more than focus in on her own self in that moment.
Doing otherwise is liable to get her stabbed by a poison-barbed tail.
Because Jaune is over there, currently fighting back against her mom, Summer Rose, and that other guy – Rhodes, apparently? – while she and Raven contend with Tyrian.
She's glad she hadn't been forced to attack Jaune herself. She doesn't think she'd have been able to keep herself together.
Because it…
It just doesn't make sense! There has to be something going on. There has to be a reason that–
A stinger appears in her line of sight a moment before it's about to stab directly into Yang's eye, but her mother's blade slams it to the side before it can connect. Raven gets in front of her and easily parries Tyrian's next few blows, before forcing him backwards a ways to give them a moment to breathe.
"Get out of your own dammed head and focus!" Raven shouts back at her, snarling. "Worry about whatever the hell's going on later. Hell, capture these assholes, and you'll have plenty of time to find out what's going on!"
It… it's the truth. Gods damn it, but Raven's not wrong at all.
In fact, that should be Yang's plan. Get Jaune into an interrogation room, tell Raven the truth, and maybe fill Ozpin in, and they can have him extradited away from Atlas.
At least, assuming Hawthorne's cool with that, which, y'know, there's a decent chance he's going to be a dick about things.
Honestly, though, she's getting somewhat ahead of herself.
First, capture Jaune. She can worry about anything else after that.
That does include kicking Tyrian's ass, however, which will be nice and therapeutic.
It helps her that while she's fought Tyrian… well, technically never, but she knows his patterns, he knows absolutely nothing about her. She knows that when Tyrian runs a hand along her side, she pivots on her foot to expose the other to him. She knows that Tyrian uses his blades, largely, as feints for sneaking in far-deadlier strikes with his tail.
Tyrian, by contrast, has no information on her other than what he's gleamed in the last few minutes, which can't be much.
Her mother is… not quite flagging, but Yang's beginning to realize that this is likely the first time she's fought against anything, outside of a few spars with Summer and Tai, in eight or nine months. Ever since leaving the tribe behind. Summer, too, is nowhere near as good as Yang had expected.
Both have been out of the game for a long time, it seems.
Neither are unable to keep up, to be clear. They're both about as good as Yang and Jaune are – perhaps a tad bit better – and Tyrian is a little better than them.
She barely manages to parry one of Tyrian's blows by punching the man's wrist as it comes in to slice against her face, and forces the blade to instead whizz by her hair, cutting yet more strands of it.
It should say something about how many times that's happened recently that Yang can't even really charge her semblance off of it.
She capitalizes on the miss from Tyrian, though, kneeing him in the stomach before flipping around and kicking him straight backwards. He's launched straight through a door to the outer frame of Amity itself, and Yang curses, realizing that if Tyrian gets away without them keeping eyes on him, they're in trouble.
It hurts her to ignore Jaune as he continues to contend against Summer and Rhodes both. Yang's a bit surprised he's managing that, and even more so when she realizes that from the looks of things, Jaune's actually winning, albeit barely.
He had, to be fair, likely been the one of them to get the most training as of late. He's…
…Yang doesn't know what Jaune's been up to, but if he'd been with Salem, he'd likely been training, right?
Yang pushes a breath out through her teeth as she forces herself to stop thinking about this, and instead charges into the outer frame, following Tyrian.
She barely manages to duck Tyrian's surprise attack, but his tail catches her aura where he'd stripped it away earlier. If she hadn't known about his semblance, and been channeling aura on the spot to heal that 'rip', she'd have likely lost this fight right then and there.
Tyrian evidently thinks so, given that he's totally surprised that his stinger hasn't pierced into Yang's flesh. Yang manages to slam a fist into the side of his skull, sending him flying to the side where his head cracks concrete wall.
She goes to follow up, expecting him to be momentarily stunned, at the very least, but at the last possible moment, Tyrian ducks beneath her strike, and, with an amount of flexibility that would make an acrobat blush, he somehow manages to both bend over backwards, and get enough momentum to launch Yang straight into the frame behind her.
She goes flying through the concrete, coming out the other side in a space that seems to consist mainly of support structs and metal beams that hold up the stadium. She lands hard on the ground, but her aura and her semblance keep her going. The latter infuses her with energy as she stands, cracks her neck, and prepares for Tyrian to follow.
He's hot on her heels barely a second later, leaping through the hole in the concrete he'd just created and leaping straight at her. She takes his fist in midair, dragging him to the ground quickly. His tail snakes behind her and stabs her in the back of the neck, but her aura keeps the blow from piercing through. She goes to swing at his head, but he's agile; more so than she'd ever imagined from hearing about her allies fighting this asshole.
She decides to keep her blows more focused; lighter. She pulls her stance in, keeps her arms beside her head; a boxer's stance. Tyrian appraises her, tilting his head to one side, before giving a giddy little laugh, and blitzing forward on all fours like some kind of dog.
Raven knocks him to the side as she enters into the fray, and while Tyrian's distracted by that, Yang slips into his guard and tries to land a blow.
Tyrian's slippery, though, and he's not afraid to run a bit to give himself a better chance later. He ducks Yang's blow, flips backwards, and uses his tail to cling to a metal beam behind him. He climbs the lattice structure, laughing all the while, as Yang swears.
"Plan!?" She questions on instinct, very much not the person who would normally come up with one.
"I'm not the planning person." Her mother grunts out, and Yang now understands where she'd gotten that particular trait from.
"Well, we need a plan."
"I'll transform into a Raven, and portal you up once I find him."
"Do you have aura in that form?"
"I do."
"Okay." She turns to Raven. "You know about his semblance, right?"
"Strips aura away in certain spots." She nods. "I know. Encountered him with Summer out on a mission, just the two of us."
Ah. That would explain how Qrow hadn't recognized Tyrian in the future, when he had saved Ruby from the man. They'd likely communicated some of the specifics – scorpion faunus, semblance that strips aura – without accurately describing him, and then, a good fifteen years later, he'd all but forgotten about him without having actually fought Tyrian himself.
But that's a thought for later.
For right now…
"Right." She nods her head.
"Let's chase him down."
/
Weiss tries not to panic. She really does.
That lasts about three seconds.
"Did you see someone come in here!?" She questions that same woman she'd just gotten information from. "Anyone suspicious?"
"W-What?" The woman seems shocked. "No, nothing. What happened? Is your daughter not–"
Weiss might normally be upset about that, but instead, she snarls below her breath, and walks right back over to the empty stall. She looks for anything that might clue her in as to Trivia's location.
Nothing by the toilet, nothing by the floor, nothing up abo–
An air vent.
Weiss feels a chill down her spine, even as she leaps into the air, grabs ahold of the air vent – she hears a few people exclaiming their shock about what she's doing, but she ignores them – and wrenches it free from the ceiling.
If she's wrong, she'll pay for it later.
She throws the broken grate to the ground, hoists herself up effortlessly, and then looks into the vent itself above.
It's narrow. Far too much so for a person to fit through it. Not even Trivia would've been able to crawl through. She's a second away from giving up, from trying to find a new lead, before she spots something.
There's a residue in the vent that strikes Weiss as odd.
She holds herself up with one arm, and with her other, runs her finger along the residue. She frowns at the viscosity of it. It feels almost like a type of slime.
…
It doesn't mean anything on its own, but…
She lets herself fall, before drawing Myrtenaster from off of her waist. She has to be somewhat secretive about this, but…
She activates her summons, and does her absolute best to keep it as small as possible. The glyph springs to life, and from out of the ether comes an Ursa small enough to fit within the palm of Weiss' hand.
She can feel her aura dip at the amount of it she'd had to use to control its size, but it's worth it to keep her lineage a secret. Exposing herself as a Schnee in the heart of Atlas would be…
Well, she's looking to avoid doing so if at all possible.
She allows the small beast to sniff the residue, and… well, she's not really sure what she's expecting.
But it perks up immediately, and though it tries to leap from her hand, she clutches onto it.
"Point me in the right direction." She tells it, and tries to communicate with it via her semblance exactly what she wants of it.
Another chunk of aura is ripped from out of her, but the creature seems to understand, and turns its head to the left.
Weiss feels her heart surge, before pushing her way out of the stall.
There's a worker from the coliseum there, seeming rather uncertain as to what to do.
"Uhm… excuse me, ma'am–"
"No time," She brushes past him.
"Ma'am, you broke Kingdom property–"
She hisses a curse out below her breath, digs out her wallet, draws a few thousand lien, and chucks it at the man's feet. She's been saving quite a bit ever since starting to work with Qrow.
And besides, this is too important.
She ignores anything else the man tries to tell her as she pockets her wallet again, and runs out of the bathroom.
Immediately, the Ursa turns its head to the right, and Weiss goes that way as well. She doesn't exactly know what it is she's looking for – or perhaps who – but she at least has their direction. She's lucky that the stadium, and the back areas of it, are so crowded. No one is going to notice the small, white Ursa held in her palm.
She had sheathed Myrtenaster so as to not draw attention to herself, but her hand finds its way to its hilt as a form of comfort nonetheless. She has to believe she's going to find Trivia, but…
The Ursa's head slowly begins to turn as she keeps walking.
The person she's seeking is on the move themselves.
Unfortunately, she turns, and realizes that it's pointing directly at the arena in front of her. Either they're in the stands, or they're on the opposite side of the arena.
…If it's the latter, then she needs to hurry.
She takes a gamble, deciding to run all the way around to the other side. She's much less kind than she'd been before about shoving others out of the way. This is too important for her to be worried about common courtesy.
A few people swear at her, others just get out of her way. She breaks into a spring the moment that the crowd thins out, and she watches as the head of the Ursa, gradually, turns with her, like a compass still pointing north, regardless of her direction.
She's gaining on them.
She hears a guard yell out to her to stop, but doesn't so much as look back. A few people take out their scrolls to film her as she races by, but she's not worried about that. Perhaps, later, she can be concerned about people filming videos of her – with her luck, she'll go viral – but for the moment–
The Ursa suddenly lunges forward in her hand, and she's barely able to keep ahold of it. She looks up, and–
Trivia.
She's got a panicked look on her face, and she's white as a sheet. There's a man there with a hand on her shoulder, leading her forward. Seemingly, they're making their way towards the air docks, to make their way off of Amity.
…Weiss has been angry before. Furious, even. She's lost comrades in the line of duty, been stabbed, slashed at, and beaten more times than she could count. Hell, she'd had a flaming spear thrown through her stomach.
But this…
This is something different. Something that Weiss hasn't ever experienced.
She is apoplectic.
Her right hand, the one holding the Ursa, quite literally quakes with rage. She dissipates the beast now that her quarry is within sight, and moves forward, her eyes set on her target. She's going to get as close as possible before she attacks him. Otherwise, some bystanders might have time to misconstrue the situation, and take his side, thinking Weiss the kidnapper.
She moves towards them, her footfalls growing heavier, her breathing doing the same, but before she can fully close the distance…
Someone grabs her wrist.
She assumes, of course, that it's a guard, trying to stop her, but when she turns, she comes face to face with a man in a dark hoodie.
"I'd stay out of this," he tells her, a cocky smile set on his face. "Unless you want to get hurt, doll."
Weiss takes a moment to process what this man has just said.
In the next, she sends him flying into the opposite wall of the arena.
About fifty people scream, and the man who has Trivia startles, before picking her up and charging towards the air docks. For just a moment, though, Trivia's eyes roam the crowd, and they lock with Weiss' own.
And when she sees Weiss, a tiny inkling of hope starts to burn within them.
Well, subtlety has left the building.
And Weiss is not feeling particularly subtle at the moment, anyways.
She draws Myrtenaster, channels her fury, and blazes forward.
/
Idly, as Jaune tanks a blow from Summer Rose's axe, diverting it and causing it to slam into the concrete ground of Amity, he notes that this is going about as badly as it possibly could be.
Yang's seen him, and is clearly not taking that well. He's fighting not necessarily for his life, but for Cinder's as he backs away, trying to buy himself space. He doesn't even know what he's trying to get out of this; how he's supposed to escape. Tyrian's a wily one, and Jaune has full faith in him being able to just disappear somehow here in Amity.
Jaune has no such abilities. He's a heavy-duty, close-range fighter. That doesn't lend itself very well to tactical retreats. Not when his opponent is far faster than him, and far more mobile.
He's not really sure what his options are at this point.
The most likely outcome of this, at this point, is him getting captured. If that happens, he can tell everyone the truth. The problem, of course, is that Cinder will certainly be killed… or worse. It would be just like Salem to radicalize the girl; to lie to her and say that Jaune had been killed by the people of the Kingdoms, and with that lie, mold her into the perfect killing machine without mercy.
Even worse than she'd been in their original time.
And that…
Jaune can't help it; he wants to save Cinder. He wants to help her. He knows it's probably a complex of some kind, and it's not exactly healthy, but he's failed so many people.
He just… he just wants to succeed once!
Rhodes comes at him with maces drawn, and Jaune lowers his stance. He tanks the initial hit the same way he had against Summer, allowing the blow to skid down his shield, and then he slams the man's nose with Crocea's face. Rhodes staggers back, clearly stunned, and Jaune plants a foot in his gut to give himself some space.
Summer is relentless, however. She's not quite as overwhelming as Jaune would've pictured her being – then again, with a family at home, she's likely been out of the proverbial game for quite some time – but she's a helluva lot faster than he is. She hits only slightly less hard, too, and Jaune finds himself struggling to get a read on her style.
He's backing up as they fight, and as Summer slams the blade of her axe into the wall behind him, and it gets trapped in the concrete, he takes that moment to break away, searching for an exit to this scenario.
There's a door to the further-out sections of Amity, where the air docks are. He might be able to hijack a bullhead to make a clean getaway if he can make it there. That'll be his plan, then, given that he's pretty sure it's an 'every man for himself' situation.
…He wishes it had been Yang to battle against him. He could've at least told her his reasoning outside of Tyrian's line of sight.
But that's not reality.
He sprints as fast as he can down the halls just beyond where they'd been battling before, looking for where they open up to the outdoors. He hears a shot ring out, and feels it slam against his aura.
It causes him to wince, but not much more than that. Jaune's been hurt enough mentally that physical pain has really started to lose its value.
He pushes past a few people, including a few other Hunters there for security. One of them tries to stop him, raising a dust pistol, but Jaune tanks one blow on the blade of his nameless sword, then strikes the person's wrist with the flat of his weapon. They wince, and their grip on their weapon loosens.
Jaune smacks it out of their hand, and then kicks it hard, sending it spiraling off the edge of Amity. The person curses, but backs away.
Summer and Rhodes, on the other hand, are not nearly so easily rid of.
He looks back, towards the edge of the platform. Summer must've called ahead – that or his luck has held – because the airships have all flown out too far for Jaune to get near any of them.
"That's enough!" Summer Rose calls out, and he turns back to see her slam the butt of her weapon into the ground below. "You're not getting out of this. Surrender."
It makes sense. There's not exactly anywhere for Jaune to go. He's trapped himself, and already, he can see armed men and women gathering at the entrance back into Amity. If he tries to escape past Summer and Rhodes, they're going to have no problem overwhelming him with sheer numbers.
…He can't get caught here. Cinder… she's counting on him. He's done enough to protect Ruby, he thinks. Now… now he needs to go back to Evernight. He needs to be there so that he gets punished, instead of Cinder.
He only hopes that Salem will be so kind.
"Surrender!" Summer calls out again, and this time, she brings up her weapon, and points the barrel of its rifle-form right at him. "You've got nowhere to run!"
…
An idea comes to him. A frankly ridiculous idea that would be completely suicidal for anyone besides himself to think up. Even for him, this is pushing it and then some. But…
He backs away slowly, keeping Crocea's face pointed towards Summer. If she fires at him, he can use the shield to block her bullets. As he backs away, he turns his head, trying to see what's beyond and beneath him.
Below, several kilometers down, lay the snow fields just beyond Mantle. The cold of Solitas stretches out seemingly infinitely in every direction.
…
"Tell Yang and the others I'm sorry." He speaks as he looks back up at Summer, and gives her a gentle smile. "But I can't go with them. There's someone I have to protect, and this is the only way."
"What are you–"
Jaune doesn't hear the rest of what the woman has to say.
He's already falling off the side of Amity Coliseum, plummeting to the snows of Solitas below.
End Chapter 33
Jaune testing his main character powers currently; will he survive? Yeah, probably.
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