Author's Note:
Chapter 7: Gruppa Krovi
In the wake of the bandit attack the town's loop had been reset back to zero as they awaited another Grimm attack, the dark cloud that settled over its people was twisted and scarred, it was just about enough to break their spirits if not for the Lion in their midst.
Her show of force and quick dealing of death to the bandits had been seen or spread to everyone who lived in Viviane.
The valiance of the Lion didn't mask the pain of betrayal however.
Kristina Leto, a retired huntress had sold the town out in some bid to thin its population and relieve the stress its weaker populace had on the survival of those still strong and capable.
Or this was the narrative told at least, the full truth wasn't something Arielle was privy to and so the Courier left it at that. She didn't care to know the reasons why the woman had betrayed her people, the outcome had been what it was either way and knowing wouldn't turn back time to stop it from happening.
Even the words of the hunter Orion she had heard at the end of the fight despite implying something greater didn't stir an interest in her, again, things wouldn't change for knowing any better.
In any case towns dwindling population had been slashed by a third with only a hundred and fifty people remaining, desperate and out of options aside from death at the hands of the Grimm many of them were preparing to make the trek to the Capital of the Kingdom- Vale City.y
The fires lit during the attack had consumed much of the town before they were put out as well due to no readily available water source further rendering them wounded, a crucial decision had to be made by not only its people but the two who had taken to being the new leaders in Kristina's stead.
The guard captain Sebastian Gaspar and Father Bonitas Sanctus having been put in the precarious situation to chart the new path.
For the Courier though?
Had she the skill with words or even a tenth of the Charisma Caesar had she would have forced her name to stand at the head of the destitute, for now she would just travel where the winds took the families and learn more about this world she'd ended up in.
She did wonder what it would look like to take charge of these people under her banner- The Lion.
'Would they even want to stand under my order? There were Legionaries who swore by me, but their devotion was without question with Caesar's encouragement…'
It had taken the man himself declaring she was worthy of respect for them to give her any ire in the first place, but once they had seen her in action they gladly followed with.
Strength spoke volumes to the men led by the Son of Mars.
In the end thoughts of her worth and a failure to see her own value as a leader drove the idea back to the pit it crawled out of, she was no Domina and doubted anyone would follow her given the choice.
A Courier only worth the packages she carried.
It was a good thing, she supposed, that the town was still in need of her services.
For now she had just finished helping put the repaired doors back on the gate while others reinforced the walls for the anticipated attack seeing as her Remnants Power Armour made things like that significantly easier her strength was requested just about everywhere by just about everyone.
"Thanks Rhea! Tell Gaspar he won't have to worry about the gate anymore." One of the guardsmen said as she turned away from the repair.
"I will." The Courier replied absently as she headed toward the church.
The two leaders- Mayors she supposed they ought to be called- had promised to pay her for the work she'd already done now that they had the source of their money gone, though Arielle doubted the ones she'd killed were the end of it there was always more.
She'd seen the corruption of paying off those threatening violence always result in the death of the payer, it was stupid to think that they would be paid off, she'd read of it happening a hundred times more in old world texts about the Roman Empire.
Generals and leaders duped into thinking money would stop barbarians from attacking let alone demanding more.
The weak willed men of a degenerate age whose desperate attempts to stave off the end were only cause to drive them toward it faster.
Arielle just hoped she hadn't arrived in time to see a new world entering its own degenerate age of collapse, things weren't looking good if Viviane was the average for small communities away from the capitals. She also hoped for their sake that it wasn't normal and it was just a case of negligence due to the lack of industry in the area after the mine shut down.
"Thanks for the help Rhea, you've been nothing short of a Maidens blessed miracle since arriving." The green eyed guard captain thanked her with a sigh.
"You're also paying me too, so don't thank me for doing my job."
"I know- I know you keep saying that, but I can't help it. You've done- you've… If it weren't for you coming here- your arrival, we'd still be looking down the barrel of being wiped out- now at least we're in a position to vote for our future." Initially struggling to find the right words Sebas rubbed his forehead.
"You said you had something for me right?" Arielle asked, pushing the conversation along.
"Hm? Oh yea, we've got a few Scrolls lying around now and since you're the travelling type and don't have one- thought you could do with it, you said that thing on your wrist is just a digital notepad right?" He asked and the Courier nodded. "Here you are then, it's not the latest model or anything but it still connects to the CCT and has access to the net and all that."
"Thank you." taking the small device from the man she looked at it awkwardly for a moment before taking off the gauntlets of the Power Armour to fiddle with it.
It was a pair of small pinky length bronze plates with three buttons on either side, after a moment she press on of the buttons and the plates pushed out away from each other with a translucent screen that displayed a light blue UI that quickly provided a similar if more compact experience to using her Pip-Boy and a Terminal.
"How do I access the CCT?" She asked the older man curiously as several icons appeared on the screen showing a text input box above them over a background image of a beach.
"See the dial icon, that lets you do calls and the spiral lets you access the Vytal-Net, it's mostly full of shit but depending what you're looking for it might be worth your time." Sebas explained, sounding a little frustrated at a past experience.
"Sounds neat," Was all the reply Arielle bothered to give as she investigated the home page of the Vytal-Net finding a directory that had a text input box/search function.
She was pretty sure it wouldn't take her long to figure it out, but doubted she'd be able to hook it up to her Pip-Boy, the device was as universal as things got but figured being on a different planet probably landed her far from the usual meaning of universal input.
"This'll make things easier… was there anything else you need or am I done for the day?" She asked as she closed the Scroll and tucked it under the chest plate of her power armour before putting the gauntlets back on.
"No we're good for now, just gotta have Dawn's lot and the guys do rotations, you're free to join them if you want, but I'd rather know you're rested if any Grimm do attack." He said dismissing her.
"Dawn?" Arielle couldn't help but ask before she left.
"Hm? Oh Orion's guys, they've been keeping an eye out on the town's blind spots- I forget you haven't been here that long, just feels like it's been a hell of a few weeks." breathing a tired sigh he arched a brow at her. "You have weeks like this often as a Courier?"
"It's pretty normal for me." Her reply made the man shake his head looking even more exhausted at the idea of having such intense weeks every week.
"Alright, you can get some rest now, I know I'm going to."
[1]
The Courier sat alone in the home she'd taken over, working her gear over stripping and cleaning her guns, replacing anything that needed it as well as reloading the awkward if perfect excessive magazines of her Calico, the sub-machine gun being something of a prized possession of hers from another time in her life.
It was a strange gun but she loved that about it, unique but there was something fun about its design that many surviving weapons didn't share.
Anyway, While she was alone she wore just a singlet and old trousers. They were her work clothes, greasy and mostly ruined, but they worked as well as she needed them to for dirty work.
It also gave her an opportunity to let her hair down, she'd been in her armour non stop since she arrived- safe as she'd felt in Viviane she hadn't trusted them enough to go around without her gear on even in the home she'd been provided.
Two weeks worth of helmet hair was nothing compared to the months of it when she was campaigning with Caesar, those had been mostly to keep the mystique of what she was around the time though. For a very long time no one knew she was a woman, her choice of clothing due to her size meant she dressed as a man at all times-
'At least it made dealing with the Legionaries easier for those first few months before Caesar revealed it.' Arielle thought with a sigh.
As she worked at cleaning her guns, not just those she'd recently used but those that had been in her Pip-Boy since she left the Big Empty, a lot of them hadn't been serviced properly as she often had to focus on her armour- she couldn't help but notice the symbol tattooed on her shoulder and it wasn't The Bull.
It was the slave brand, for a long-long time it had been a point of shame, but the Couriers who woke up in Goodsprings had just seen it as a mark of who she had once been and seen to it that it would never be forgotten even after she'd mangled the back of her hand where the other had been.
Exhaling through her nose she grimaced.
All the mark did now is remind her of a dark time she didn't want to relive even if it had been part of her reason to join Caesar aside from the man's convincing arguments.
She had to resist the urge to carve the mark off her flesh.
Clenching her fists a few times she dismissed the thoughts and got back to work.
She had better things to think about than days of being chained up and used.
'Complacency is making me weak already, this place is too peaceful even with what's going on.' Arielle thought as she looked at her reflection on the Blade of Minerva.
Rusty-bronze eyes framed by a lightly tanned face and blonde bangs stared back.
'Since when did I look so young?' She wondered, eyeing the woman- no, the girl, looking back. 'This place must be playing tricks on me… it's been years since I looked like this.'
The image of her reflection in the mirror of the home in Boulder City came to her, the one of the worn thirty something woman with deep stress marks carved like channels into her face, the vaguely bronze tan she'd acquired.
Shaking her head and blinking a few times she rubbed her eyes, noticing how dry her lips were she pulled out a sasparilla from her Pip-Boy and started drinking it turning her attention to the guns laid out in the living room of the home.
Feeling a little uncomfortable with the silence she found some music to fill the air.
"I've got heartaches by the number- troubles by the storm- every day you loves me less, each day I love you more!" The song rang out but it couldn't distract her from the reflection.
'Maybe I always looked this way?'
In time maybe she'd come to realise nothing had changed, that she had been imagining the face of her mother in place of hers- that the girl had always been her and that the woman was the one who birthed her.
But for now it sowed doubt.
It was the kind of doubt that started to eat away at her subconscious about whether or not she could remember her own face.
[2]
A few more days passed with more work being done around Viviane to get it into better shape finally reaching a full two weeks since The Courier arrived, a lot had changed since she first arrived and as things stood the town would be coming to a consensus as to what they would be doing going forward today.
Arielle sat in her desert ranger armour at the back of the church watching the precession of Sebastian and Father Bonitas discussing how they would all continue.
"-out our things? How are we meant to just leave them behind?" A man voiced his thoughts.
"Do you really care more about having a few things that're replaceable over living to remember your wife Aaron?" The guard captain immediately replied with the man in question going quiet after that.
"What are we doing for travel anyway? We don't have any vehicles anymore- Grimm ruined them all." Someone else asked.
The priest answered this time. "Dawn's hunters found the trucks the bandits used to get here and not all of our vehicles are gone- Gaspar and the Courier found an old Great War carrier tucked away in one of the old warehouses- it's not great but it has the space to hold ten people."
"So how many of those do we have? Most of us still have to walk." A woman's voice spoke up.
"Almost everyone will be walking, we'll need to use them for food and supplies for everyone, from what we worked out there will only be one actually free to hold people so we're going to have a rotation for everyone to rest throughout the days we're travelling." Sebastian replied.
"And how long is that?"
"Three or four days of travelling to get around Glenn, two more to reach Marigold where we can decide who wants to stay there or continue on to Vale City- either way we need everyone to be on board, it ain't worth dying here- anyone remember how long its been since a Huntsman or even a Kingdom official came to check on us?" there was a resounding silence after he asked the question. "That's what I thought, they think we're dead already otherwise we'd have heard from someone."
The conversation went on like this for quite a long time, lots of questions with as many answers that slowly convinced any of the people who were against the move to be for it except for a small handful of people who were determined to stay in their homes until the very end.
At the end of the day Arielle didn't care about these people so she just watched on, apathetic to the situation, things always got worse whenever she tried to intervene anyway.
Eventually it was decided that 145 people would be leaving in five days time, everyone sent off to begin packing their bags. Then there were the other five people of the town who were playing to stay and continue living.
Author's Note:
Since most of the songs the chapters up to this point have been named after after fairly straight forward I haven't mentioned their relation or source, but with the song this chapter is named after I thought it was worth giving a little more on.
It's a song by a very popular Russian band called Kino/Кино, if you decide to listen to it then I suggest the translation posted by TK Stuff on youtube. The specific part of the song that relates to this chapter is the lyric "Wish that I won't be left to die on this grass"
Also finally The Courier is going to Vale yippee.
We'll also get a look at what fighting Grimm for her is actually like soon since scaling them is a little difficult considering a group of teens can take on what might as well be two ancient Grimm at during the initiation- but I like to imagine I've made them pretty threatening under the appropriate conditions outside of shooting them in a hallway likening it to that scene from Old Boy.
In other news occasionally sentences are going to be written wrong on purpose or emphasis something that isn't quite right to give that real mentat stealth-boy abuse(read:Arielle) experience.
Anyway, thank you for reading I really appreciate it, I hope you have a good rest of your day and that if things haven't been well I hope they get better for you.