Chapter 36
Everything Aldric had done during his time on Remnant, he had done with the intention of saving human lives, and preventing loss of terran life. Yet here he was - having wholly failed on both accounts, so much so that he had, and would, actively contribute to both. He was going to have to kill each and every single terran he saw, because like killing Rayne, these deaths were deplorably necessary. He had to kill these people, or else risk losing just as much, if not more, as he would have lost had he let Rayne live. So much like he'd done before, he forced himself to push these thoughts from his mind as he prepared himself mentally for what was to come. Dwelling on it, thinking on it, that would have to come later.
He needed to buy Vale twenty minutes for a plan that, despite the confidence in it that he had to show, he wasn't fully certain would work.
He'd already bought three simply with the prelude, with the spectacle that caught their attention and their posturing to try and get him to give up.
He stood surrounded by hundreds of men and enough ordinance to level a large neighborhood. In raw power, they had him outclassed, outgunned, outnumbered, and surrounded, and they had said as much. But he'd based this entire plan - everything about it - around the fact that raw power was nothing compared to a far more skilled and creative mind.
So surrounded was he, yes.
Outgunned was he, certainly.
Outnumbered, definitely.
But the one frowning and shivering in fear, wasn't him.
And the ones smiling in confidence, and assured of their victory, wasn't them.
Especially when they saw a relic of fiction from their world light him up with a bright blue glow, and fill the air with its loud zhoom.
"OPEN FIRE!" He heard someone scream, after the sheer shock of seeing someone from Remnant holding a lightsaber wore off.
Aldric's grin widened as he tightened his grip on his sword, deactivating it with a flick of the button and a light 'zip', before he crouched behind his shield like a Spartan crouching beneath his hoplon, and put all of his power - every iota of strength he had - into one thing, and one thing only: A barrier. All he needed was to survive this first volley, and then have enough left over for one more spark, and then he'd be able to buy all the time he needed.
So the dockside was filled with the flashes of rifles and machine guns, of rocket launchers and tanks, the sounds of bullets blasting, rockets launching, and tanks firing. They all surged straight towards him, and for the briefest of moments before the first rocket hit and masked him in smoke and ash, one could see the bullets reaching him and then stopping dead, as though hitting a brick wall. He was surrounded by enough gunfire to liquefy any normal man, and indeed there was so much that he sensed some bullets slipping past his barriers and hitting the ground next to him, bouncing off his shield, or skipping inches past his body. He flinched and clenched his jaw tighter with every rocket and every grenade that was launched at him and exploded, and as more and more weapons-fire was practically thrown at him, the ground around him was chipped and blasted away, until he stood in the center of an ever-deepening crater.
He counted the seconds as they went by, until a solid ninety had passed, and the air around him was choked by thick smoke and ash, and the terrans firing at him could see nothing more. He heard rifles reloading and heard people shouting for updated orders, trying to discern whether or not he was dead. And to their credit, they did a decent job of trying: Aldric felt a few new wounds and injuries from shrapnel and some burns from fires, all that barely passed through his barriers. His entire body felt like a bruise and his heart was hammering in his chest, but he wasn't dead, and he'd long since established he'd been hurt by worst.
So Aldric stood to his feet and reached out with his radar, sensing each and every single soldier in his immediate area. Specifically seeking out the very thing that Atlas claimed to be their greatest and strangest strength: The sheer amount of explosives each soldier had on their person. Their bullets, their fragmentation, flash, and even smoke grenades, all of them relied on some amount of detonation, oftentimes just a single spark, in order to work as effectively as they did.
And Aldric had turned sparking a fire even without his magic into a hat trick.
So with another loud zhoom as his lightsaber ignited, and cut a bright blue swath through the choking smoke, dust and debris that surrounded him, showing them all exactly how much effect their guns had had on him, Aldric thrust his shield hand forward, the fingers splayed forward, as he grabbed ahold of all of these explosives, and with a clench of his fist, created a single spark in each and every single one of them.
And just like before, the ports were filled with the sounds of explosions, but now they were joined by panicked and pained screams, and none of those explosions coincided with rounds being sent downrange at him. His grin turned to a frown as Aldric launched himself forward, shield held in front of him and lightsaber reared high above him. He saw terrans in his immediate area scattered everywhere, and blood scattered everywhere else, and those outside of his immediate vicinity were scrambling for cover from the explosions and cooked off ammunition, leaving them completely open for Aldric's attack.
What came next was easy compared to surviving just a moment ago. Aldric arced through the air - some of the tanks and vehicle-mounted machine guns tried to reorient to keep up with him, but he moved too fast, bolting right back to the ground and landing in the midst of five terran soldiers underneath a huge crane. Aldric under-handed his shield to his side to keep the three to his side busy, as he grasped his lightsaber with both hands and thrust forward to the two directly in front of him. It cleaved through the first soldier's sternum with no resistance at all, and the soldier fell to the ground limply when he wrenched it to the side and out of the soldier's back, leaving a fist-sized gap through half of the terran's upper body. Aldric spun into his next attack as the shield hit the third soldier and flew back towards him, and before his second target could react, Aldric cut through him with a single wide horizontal slash, and when his shield reached him, Aldric leapt over and kicked off of it - sending it hurtling forward to a group of soldiers behind a wall of sandbags, as he flipped behind the soldiers he'd stunned with his first shield-toss.
They didn't react nearly fast enough, and Aldric bisected one lengthwise, one width-wise at the waist, and lopped the third's head off, before he sensed guns being aimed at him from soldiers positioned in the crane's stairs. He frowned deeply and lunged backwards as the bullets began to fly, and they harmlessly struck the ground he'd been standing in as he thrust his lightsaber out to the side and dug it into the crane's stairs. He sprinted forward, cleaving through the stairs in a mess of hot metal, grinding plasma, and sparks, before he reached the crane's cylindrical center - and with a baseball swing, carved through it.
The entire crane began listing over to the side as Aldric bolted forward again; eyes were attracted to the enormous structure falling to the ground below it, and bodies falling out of it and through the air, into the harbor they had captured. When the crane hit the ground, Aldric sensed it having the pleasant side-effect of taking out several of the landing craft with soldiers still in them. Aldric landed on the ground in a dead-sprint, using his semblance to call his shield back to him as his feet pounded into the ground and propelled him forward. The soldiers were fast, but he was faster, and had far greater reaction times - all he had to do was turn their very tactic around on them: Keep up his momentum and deal so much damage, so fast, that the only way they could react would be with unbridled chaos.
So he cleaved through more soldiers, killing one with three rapid chops to the legs, chest, and then neck, before thrusting forward and piercing the heart of the man behind him. He tore the lightsaber out of the soldier's chest and then hopped into the air, bringing his foot forward and ramming it into him, sending the soldier stumbling back and into another group, and as they leveled their weapons on Aldric, Aldric landed and then flicked his free hand to the side, using his semblance to spin them all like tops, and then clenching the triggers of their rifles, causing them all to tear into eachother, just as his shield flew right past them and into Aldric's waiting hand.
Aldric felt a shotgun slug slam into his armor and it stumbled him forward, but he caught himself with his semblance and whipped around, bringing his shield to bear as he sprinted forward. The soldier began backpedaling and shrieking in fear, attracting more attention to himself and Aldric as he uselessly pelted Aldric's shield with more and more rounds, until Aldric got to him, batted the shotgun to the side with the shield, and stabbed the soldier in the stomach with his sword. He ripped the sword upwards, cutting the right side of the man's torso clean off, before he leapt into the air again to dodge another wall of gunfire.
As he arced back towards the ground, Aldric saw Vale's airships beginning to flare their powerful engines, angling towards the sky and climbing with all available haste. He grinned for a moment, but it was replaced with the frown again as he landed next to a small office building, inside of which he sensed three more terrans - these ones surrounding a table and a map. Aldric darted forward, slamming into the office's door with his shield and tearing it from its hinges, and by the time the terrans inside reacted, he was already on them - bisecting two with one swing before kicking the table into the third. It rammed into his groin and he croaked in pain, doubling over and presenting his head to Aldric, who kindly obliged him and burned a hole into by shoving his stick of plasma into the shaven scalp.
Bullets then began tearing through the walls from all directions, Aldric felt one drag across his leg before he leapt upwards and burst out from the ceiling. He gritted his teeth and fought through the pain as he launched himself towards a trio of humvees. All of them were firing at him with their mounted guns, but this was exactly as effective as when everyone else did it: They hit his raised shield, filled the air with flying sparks and the sound of metal striking metal, and did little else to impede him.
Aldric landed in the center of the three military cars and thrust both hands out, before spinning in a wide circle and letting out a loud bellow. With a powerful pulse of his semblance, he picked up each vehicle and swung them around in one full revolution before hurling them away, two landing in the harbor and one flattening itself against a nearby tank and bouncing off in a shower of broken glass and bits of metal.
This tank would be Aldric's next opponent, as it found him, took aim, and fired.
Aldric pushed himself out of the way of the first shell with his semblance, and then used it to kickstart his full-out sprint for the tank. The second shell hit his shield and gave him little else to hear but a harsh ringing, deafening him entirely, and nearly putting him on the ground were it not for the shield's abilities. He deflected the third shell, sliding it off of his shield and pushing it away with a loud, though unheard by him, grunt, as he reached the tank. Aldric reached up and rammed his shield into the tank's barrel just as it fired again, and with nowhere to go, it hit the shield and detonated, destroying the barrel and shredding its operators as the energy transferred inside, but too sending Aldric flying due to his poor footing and lack of any time to brace against the impact.
His head hit the ground with a horrible 'thud', and he was pretty sure the only reason his vision wasn't swimming was because of the machines doing all of it for him. That didn't save him from a few moments of sluggish movement, however, and he was still bleeding from both ears. He was so out of it that he didn't realize his weapons had been thrown from his hands until he felt a bullet ricochet off of his metal arm and dig across his organic one. That helped to snap him out of it enough to call his weapons back and ignite his lightsaber again. He stumbled forward a step or two before regaining his rhythm and rocketing forward in a blur of feet, hurtling straight towards a wall of sandbags and two hastily repositioned machine guns and above and far beyond them, he could see the Vale ships breaking the cloud barrier.
Without being tailed by the terran fighter jets.
Perhaps if he were a bit more lucid and had a bit less head trauma he would have had a few thoughts, or even a witty remark for how he got at least one thing he was looking for, but the best he could summon up was a nonsensical jumble of random syllables and sounds that, if he'd spoken them aloud, would have sparked concern he was having a stroke. So instead he focused all of his brain power on keeping his fighting momentum going, and with a grunt, and a pulse of his semblance, cooked the ammunition of the machine guns before they could even fire. The soldiers surrounding them were thrown by the explosion and were torn into, appearing like bloody pincushions as Aldric ambled over their sandbags, jabbed at a few of the less-injured looking soldiers as he ran by, and kept going, aiming now for another office building, inside of which he could see a few terrans frantically working on computers.
Judging that to not good at all, Aldric lunged forward, using his semblance to sail through the air, whereupon he crashed through the windows. He hit the ground and spun on one foot, his blade cleaving through three of the four engineers and wrecking their computers, before he stumbled towards the fourth and stabbed his blade from one side of his chest clear through to the other. He wrenched the blade out, killed the power to it, and fell against a wall, gasping for air and feeling outside with his semblance. At this point he'd covered so much ground and caused so much carnage that they didn't even know where he was anymore, there was even still a battle raging where he'd been initially, the soldiers there firing blindly in any direction, calling out phantom targets.
Catching his breath, Aldric pressed his hand against his chest and winced in pain.
Holy shit... Were the first few lucid thoughts since engaging the tank. When did... He felt inside with his radar pulse, and sure enough something had gone through his armor, one of his ribs was broken into bits and it had dragged across his lung.
"Fuck..." He wheezed, before hearing raised voices shout something like, 'his lightsaber! Contact in the storage room!'
Aldric needed no more prompting to flee the room, and he did so just in time to dodge six soldiers and dozens of bullets tearing through it. He landed outside with a somersault, and on the up-roll he threw the shield at the assembled soldiers, who stood in a firing-squad position as they pumped the office he'd been in full of lead. They toppled like dominoes when his shield rapidly bounced and pinged between the six of them before flying back to him, and he cooked one of their grenades with a clench of his fist to make sure they stayed down.
But before he could move again, a grenade landed at his feet, and Aldric shouted in fear, leaping into the air and crouching behind his shield. He was sent flying by the explosion and his back rammed into the corner of the office he'd vacated, digging into it and cracking a few ribs as he bounced off and back to the ground. It took all of his strength to scramble to his feet and flee another wave of bullets, leaping around the corner and out of the line of fire.
Aldric tried to pulse his semblance to launch himself out of the fray, but he'd used a lot of power in a short amount of time, and the best he could get was a sudden hop thirty feet to his front - inadvertently sending him careening over the dock and into the water. Some soldiers noticed this and lined up at the edge of the dock, guns aimed at the water and pouring lead into the harbor.
Aldric felt a few more bullets graze him, and one hit him in the back, before he used another pulse of his semblance to shoot him through the water and under the pier, before he surfaced, gasping for air. He wrapped one arm around a pillar to keep him afloat, as soldiers called out, seeing his blood but not his body. He gave his agonizing body a few moments rest, trying to push past the feeling of salt water seeping into his wounds, before he lunged outwards, swimming for land.
He almost didn't make it, using his semblance to launch himself out of the water and back onto solid ground. A few lucky - or unlucky, depending on one's point of view - soldiers were there to see him flop out of the water like a flying fish, and he and they had a brief, shocked staredown, before his lightsaber sparked to life with a loud zhoom and they shouldered their rifles. One swipe from right to left cleaved through the barrels and left them molten metal, and then another slice from left to right tore through stomachs and chests, sending the soldiers sprawling to the ground, coughing and gurgling in their death throes.
Aldric's head snapped upwards, his hair streaming seawater. None of the Vale ships were in the sky anymore, and there were far fewer jets than their had been, but no signs of battle above the graying clouds, a good sign: That meant the jets were running out of fuel and ammo, and because of the navy's decreased ability to service them, they weren't able to return as quickly and in as great numbers as they had earlier.
But that was all the time he had, as a huge chunk of the ground was torn away from a sniper round, barely an inch from his boot. Aldric cursed and bolted forward, shield held high as he scrambled for cover. The sniper was smarter than his friends, however, and didn't aim for Aldric's shielded chest - he fired at Aldric's legs. Aldric felt shrapnel tear through the armor and into his right calf before he wised up and crouched down, still running, but now fully shielded. The shield took two rounds before he took cover behind a forklift. The sniper bullets didn't stop coming, they kept raining down, ramming into the forklift with loud 'pings' and the sigh of sparks flying; and as Aldric hid behind cover, he both saw and sensed a mass of soldiers taking up position around him, both from afar and up close.
Oh, they're trying this again. The problem was: This time he feared it would work, he had taken too many hits and was in too much pain to try and make a shield that strong again.
But he could definitely still lift things, especially if they had so little weight as to be negligible.
So the ailing spy grinned, and with a thought, thousands of projectiles - from small bullets to large arrows, to even a suite of spears - made of solid light began to sprout from the viscuous gauntlets on his hands and spread into the air, climbing higher and higher as they multiplied every second. They all oriented and angled towards their targets, who looked up at the softly glowing, wireframe objects, as though not believing their eyes. That second of pause was even contributed to by the sniper, before Aldric snapped his fingers, and the projectiles shot forth, tearing through and impaling their targets and making the area look like a legion of archers and spear-throwers had swept through.
Now standing in the center of a huge, circular zone of destruction, Aldric pushed off of the forklift, gasping for air and feeling a pressure in his chest, no doubt from his injured lung filling itself up with blood and beginning to collapse.
Oh... This is gonna fucking suck. Aldric thought, before clenching his gut and using his semblance to forcibly vacate that blood through his wounds, his reasoning being that that blood wasn't in his veins anyways, so he might as well shunt it from his body.
He'd probably lost a little too much blood to be healthy, though, as evidenced by the fact that he giggled by the squirting sound his blood made as it was pushed out of his open wounds. He chuckled and reactivated his lightsaber, spinning it with a light flourish as he took a step forward.
"Alright... Who's -" But he trailed off as he looked up from his chest, and beheld a dark-skinned, sweat-slick soldier pointing a rifle at him, but not firing, likely due to the expression of equal parts terror and revulsion having formed on his face from having witnessed Aldric literally squirt his own blood out of his body.
Aldric stared at the soldier a moment, as his sword idly hummed. He looked down at his bloodsoaked, shredded armor, his gaze followed by the wide, bulging brown eyes of the soldier, before he looked up at the terran again, the man's jaw practically on the ground.
Aldric shrugged, "you know -" He coughed, "- not the worst thing I've done to myself." He croaked.
The soldier dropped his rifle and held his hands in the air. He shook his head, but said something in a language Aldric didn't understand.
Another cough, "smart man!" Aldric wheezed, before beaning the soldier in the face with a shield toss. "Was that Russian?" He cleared his throat, and cast a glance at Vale from over his shoulder.
Just in time to see a shower of missiles pouring down through the clouds. The jets filling the air scrambled in all directions to flee the onslaught, and Aldric sensed the soldiers in the harbor pausing their relentless hunt of him to watch as the humans rained devastation on their city, blasting everything in those few miles between the port and the line Aldric had drawn on the map with all of the bombs and bullets their few remaining ships had.
And as the bombs rained down, Aldric realized he hadn't necessarily cleared with Ozpin what he was supposed to afterwards.
Worse than that, was his lull in activity, and the lapse in judgement that implied, gave more soldiers time to surround him.
"Get on the goddamn ground!" One shouted, as Aldric turned to face him.
"Dude..." Aldric gave the man an incredulous frown, "how many have I killed in the last twenty minutes?" He asked, his voice developing a rasp. "Do you really think I'll -" And as he spoke, he used his semblance to sweep the assembled soldiers' legs out from under them, and duck behind his shield, the forklift to his back.
The assembled soldiers' rifles went off when they hit the ground and involuntarily squeezed their hands. Aldric was pinned down for a moment, before the soldiers recovered and stopped firing to adjust their aim and stop putting their allies at risk - Aldric took that moment to strike. He leapt forward, slashing at the ground with his lightsaber and separating limbs and torsos from bodies, using what little control he had remaining of his semblance to jerk the soldiers this way and that and keep them from bringing their rifles to bear, as he sprinted off into his field of arrows and spears. He ducked behind a wall of sandbags, and noticed a box of grenades to his left, and a thoroughly surprised soldier to his front.
They each looked down to the box of grenades, and then to the machine gun resting on a tripod to the soldier's right, then back at eachother. Aldric pitched his shield at the soldier and sheathed his lightsaber. He clipped it to his belt, before snatching one grenade out of the box, and then grabbing the whole box and heaving it at the recovering soldiers. The shield came back to him as the soldier behind him stumbled back to his feet, leaning against the sandbags. Aldric caught the shield as the grenades spilled out and rolled in all directions, and the still living soldiers scrambled to get away, not noticing the final grenade landing in their midst, missing its pin.
And as this grenade went off and took the others with it, Aldric spun around darted forward again, decking the machine gunner so hard he heard the man's neck break with a loud 'snap'. He ambled over the wall of sandbags as he felt flames lick at his back, and as he continued sprinting forward, he noticed a blinding light coming from the west.
Heart sinking to his stomach, Aldric leapt to the ground and shielded himself from impending doom.
But when a gigantic nuclear devastation wave didn't wash over him, he realized how stupid that assumption had been - why even bother invading Vale if they were just going to nuke it?
So he peeked over the edge of the shield as he sensed another tank rolling into position, and then realized what this light was: A giant symbol in the shape of a star, radiating red and blue fire, and glowing white in the center. Ozpin seemed to realize his lack of foresight too, and had improvised accordingly with the biggest signal flare he could imagine.
But when Aldric launched from the ground, he found himself unable to stay in the air, and he came arcing right back to terra firma. He spun wildly and wasn't able to land on his shield, knocking the wind from his lungs as he rammed into the side of a building and then fell to the ground. But he barely had any time to recover, because he heard two loud engines roaring, and sensed the humvees those engines belonged to tearing across the dock - and burning rubber right for him.
Well... Always said I could outrun cars. Aldric croaked, as he scrambled to his feet. Let's put my money where my mouth is! And as the humvees hit the road and came within three meters of him, their machine gunners spooling up the miniguns mounted to their roofs, Aldric took off like an athlete.
The humvees dogged after him relentlessly, their miniguns carving open the ground behind his feet and doing their best to tear into him too. He ran in erratic patterns before ducking into a ruined building, using his shield to absorb the impact as he burst through a wall. The humvees kept at it, driving alongside the buildings and firing inside, forcing Aldric to delegate the shield to absorbing gunfire, and praying his mechanical fist would be good enough to break through walls. He was able to tackle through the walls of plaster easily enough, but when the building's outer, brick, wall came up, he braced himself and threw his fist forward - slamming it into the wall.
It exploded in a thick cloud of dust and debris and Aldric stumbled forward, but didn't recover nearly fast enough to throw a second punch to break into the next building, resulting in him running headlong into the wall of the first building's neighbor and bouncing off of it with a thud. The good news was that if he didn't see this coming, the drivers of the humvees definitely didn't - and they hurtled right on by. The bad news was that they recovered fast enough and Aldric heard tires screeching, as he hit the ground and again thanked his lucky stars that, somehow, his replacement eyes wouldn't screw themselves up if he hit the back of his head.
Worse was that he'd taken so much punishment that it took him so long to recover that one of the humvees skidded around the corner, minigun already spooled up. Aldric's head whipped up just in time for the driver to floor the accelerator and tear right after him.
Uh... Okay, dude. And Aldric lunged forward, grabbing his shield and then rolling upwards.
The shield took all of the gunfire as the car tore through the alleyway barely big enough for it to fit through, and because he was pressed so tightly against the ground, it passed right over him. The driver seemed to be confused by the lack of 'crunch', and the machine gunner was rotating around, but Aldric didn't give them any chance to figure out why he wasn't roadkill - he sprouted to his feet and sprinted back out to the devastated street.
He was met by the second humvee - it having waited for him, in case he made an escape.
Had he any air to spare, Aldric would have yelped out a curse, but instead the best he could do was continue sprinting for the other side of the street, shield raised and taking gunfire as the humvee gunned the engine and tore off after him. Aldric made it to the next alley and continued forward, curving around a corner and taking off in the direction of the orange line, but this driver seemed to have watched the Fast and the Furious too, as he also managed to skid around the building and keep up the pursuit, as Aldric sensed the earlier vehicle bursting out of an adjacent alley and taking off down the street, firing at Aldric whenever it saw him sprinting past alleys.
Even worse was that there was a larger building blocking his path forward, and he was running out of alley.
Shit - fuck! Aldric did the fist thing to come to mind and leapt, but he didn't make it to the roofs like he would have hoped.
He did crash straight through a window and into the building, however, so he took his victories where he could, and used his radar to navigate himself to a stairwell and up to the roof. It took him two minutes to ascend, and he was greeted by a drone strike - sending him flying off of this building and tumbling onto the roof of the one behind it.
Oh... Shit! Aldric groaned, laboring back to his feet. Why'd I let him talk me into this... Oh, yeah! Oktoberfest! You speak German, it'll be great! He shook his head and took off again, needing the entire roof to get up to speed so he could make the jump to the next one.
He landed with a yelp of pain and almost twisted his ankle, rolling to a halt at the edge of the roof, and seeing he was barely even at the buildings the Vale Navy had flattened. He let out a deep, agonizing breath, and collapsed, leaning against the edge of the roof and gasping for air.
What? Wormholes? Either the other side of our universe or another one entirely? Whaaaaat? No waaaaaay. He snorted out breathy laughter, sensing the vehicles on the ground below him circling the building he was resting on, no doubt working off information from their drone. Worse, was that he heard, and confirmed with a difficult raising of his head, helicopters approaching.
"Jesus fuck..." He wheezed. "At least... At least the damn city is quiet." And he wasn't wrong: Ever since the missile barrage had let up, the only sounds of battle were those focused on him!
He blinked, and saw the sky briefly flash - and then realized another drone missile was hurtling straight for him. He cursed and hauled himself over the edge of the building, using his shield to absorb the impact on the ground but still feeling the breath leave his body as he hit the ground and the missile hit the building he'd rested on. Dust and debris washed over him as he heard the helicopters and the humvees approach.
Stick to the alleys, keep cover from the choppers. Aldric scrambled to his feet and tore off deeper into the alleys, using his radar as a means to plan out his route, and his shield to block gunfire from above and from behind, as the helicopters and the humvees located him and began firing.
He counted himself lucky the attack helicopter wasn't risking its missiles with the humvee trailing Aldric, but that luck ran the fuck out when he reached another dead end, and had to wall-hop up to another rooftop, putting him at immediate risk for missiles from the drones orbiting the city and the helicopters trailing him. Aldric forced his body, screaming in pain and protest as it was, to continue forward, even as the gunships' machine guns tore into the roof behind him. Then, coinciding with another explosion, but this one far above and behind him, he witnessed something beautiful.
The helicopter exploding, as one of the heavily damaged Vale Navy airships broke through the clouds, its main gun radiating heat. Aldric didn't even care to question how the hell they didn't hit him - or if the gunner who'd acquired the target even knew he was there and at risk in the first place - all he knew was that the Navy was here. The euphoria immediately melted away when he saw the other helicopters break off from him and gain altitude, and the drones begin launching their missiles not at him, but at the ship, which was already trailing thick black plumes of smoke and had enormous holes and gashes torn out of its hull.
"No!" Aldric leapt into the air and blindly reached for its landing skid.
By some miracle, Aldric managed to grab it with his cybernetic hand, and he clenched down on it so hard that he crushed the metal in his grip. He and the helicopter grew higher and higher into the air, and Aldric flicked his free wrist once - vanishing his shield as he reached down for his lightsaber. It ignited with a loud zhoom, though it was overwhelmed by the rapid beats of the helicopter's spinning blades. That only worked in Aldric's favor, however, because that meant the pilot had no fucking idea to expect a bright blue stick of plasma in his ass - which was exactly where Aldric stuck it. He used his radar to aim, and everything.
The pilot immediately lost control of the helicopter as he seized up in pain and was burned from the inside out. Aldric sheathed the saber and summoned his shield again and kicked off from the helicopter. He glided through the air for several seconds, passing well into Vale's self-made no man's land. He hid behind his shield and used his semblance to slow himself as best he could before he hit the long stretch of road that probably served as some sort of main street, or perhaps even a Remnant analogue for the interstate, back home, he didn't know. He bounced off of the ground once, twice, and then began surfing across it on his shield with a scraping noise, as the helicopter crashed behind him and then obeyed its momentum and velocity and tumbled right after him.
"Oh fuck!" Aldric coughed, lunging to the side and rolling to his feet and breaking off into a run.
The helicopter seemed determined to catch him, and he was just as determined to run from it as, above him, he actually seemed to have made a difference - as the airship let out another thunderous shot with its main cannon, destroying another helicopter, as its anti-air laser guns located the terran drones and began firing, burning them and their missiles out of the sky before they could do more damage. Aldric would have cheered, if he didn't need one hundred percent of his oxygen going right to whatever blood he had left to keep outrunning the helicopter. Fortunately the helicopter finally began obeying another law of physics, and friction began slowing it down. It tumbled to a halt, a single burning, twisted mass of metal.
But the universe wasn't done with Aldric yet - and those two goddamn humvees came flying in, one literally - having driven over a hunk of debris angled upwards and ramping it into the air. And they brought friends - big, angry, hulking, Armored Personnel Carrier-shaped friends. With no cover except his shield, and so hurt, damaged, and low on power that he couldn't deflect the bullets, Aldric could do nothing but run as fast as he could, and run he did, as the second most beautiful thing since the airship came cresting over the horizon:
The Vale defensive line - marked by huge metal barrier-walls plugging up the alleys between buildings and creating a bottleneck on the very street Aldric was sprinting down, and even better: He saw armored Vale soldiers, huntsman, a few teachers from Beacon, and Ozpin too all waving their hands and shouting towards him. When they saw the vehicles trailing Aldric, however, their cheers and shouts immediately turned into an all-out advance, as the Huntsman bolted forward, weapons at the ready, and the Vale soldiers shouldered their weapons and began firing. In response, the terran guns turned from him, to the Remnant fighters, and fired as well.
There was the briefest second of silence, the calm before the storm, before the two tidal waves of military might and gunfire collided into eachother with titanic force. The Dust ammunition slammed into and shredded the less-armored humvees and bounced off of the APC, while the approaching Huntsmen and Huntresses leveled their own more specialized weaponry and opened fire, with Ozpin at the center, swinging his cane like a baseball bat, two huge fireballs blasting out of it and arcing through the air.
So low on energy that even his radar was beginning to fail him, Aldric poured everything he had left into running - even as he felt shrapnel and a few more bullets dig into the ground around him and parts of his body both armored and less so. But his radar wasn't the only thing running out of energy - he was running out of blood to pump through his body, and since his aura could only take him so far, he began slowing down.
Just enough for the humvee directly behind him to catch up and slam into his shielded back. Aldric was taken for the second ride this day, and the driver tried a few times to shoot him with his sidearm, but enough of him was covered by the shield that - holy fuck was that Srebro?
That thought alone dominated his entire mind as he recognized the gigantic buster sword-esque zweihander charging into battle, held defensively in front of the amazonian woman, it, her armor, and her semblance absorbing any of the gunfire that came her way, before she and the other Huntmsman reached the approaching terrans, and Aldric recognized the others. There was Ozpin at the center, Srebro to his right, Goodwitch to his left, the Raiden professor he'd seen on exam day to her side, Port next to him, and on Srebro's right he saw Ecru, she and her Lovely Lady both screaming with each shot she fired.
The final Huntress revealed herself when she became visible, having leapt into the air right in front of the humvee hurtling right towards her, her arms splayed out open. She hit the front of the humvee and wrapped her arms around Aldric, and instantly he felt himself sliding through the vehicle, as though it were made of smoke. They slid straight through it - the driver giving them a look that mixed confusion and lividity, before the two phased outside and hit the ground, rolling to a halt.
As Myrtle grabbed Aldric's arms and hauled him to his feet, he saw Srebro's titanic blade swinging down and cleave the humvee in two, splitting it in half down the middle and right into the path of an irate Headmaster, who blasted both halves with a powerful gust of wind and sent them flying back. The second humvee didn't fare any better, as Goodwitch used her semblance to halt it wholesale, and Raiden leapt up into the air and came down hard on the vehicle, slamming into it like a cannonball and causing it to flip end over end.
The APC took this chance to skid around to a halt, all of its guns rotating around to face the assembled Huntsmen and Huntresses, but it found itself stared down by two equally massive guns: Port's blunderbuss, and Ecru's Lovely Lady. They tore into it, bit by bit, as it tried to fire back at them - only to find its barrel bent over backwards with a flick of Goodwitch's riding crop. The resultant self destruction only helped Ecru and Port, and the combined weight of all of the defending soldiers at the defensive line, as they all collectively pounded into it, before it finally detonated in a huge, fiery explosion.
And the final vehicle's destruction, as the explosion's thunderclap traveled to the distance and faded away, heralded silence. The dead silence that only ever came in the aftermath of an enormous, cataclysmic battle. Aldric realized, however, when the assembled staff and students of Beacons surrounded him and helped Myrtle get him to his feet, that the silence was also likely due to the return of the ringing in his ears: He couldn't hear a damn thing over the ringing, or the chill in his bones - damn he was cold.
Before he had time to dwell on it, he saw Ozpin's head snap up, and then he started making quick, harsh movements, it almost looking like he was shouting. Aldric was barely able to turn his head to see what it was Ozpin was going on about, and he felt his blood run even colder. This entire time, he'd focused primarily on the terrans' air power - aircraft carriers, helicopters, the whole shebang. Not incorrectly harping endlessly on their integral nature in their offensive. But he'd absolutely failed to realize that there were other terran naval vessels out there, despite having ridden the product of one of these vessels right into Vale itself.
There were three missiles, each the size of a car, hurtling straight towards them, and Aldric felt himself roughly hauled onto Srebro's shoulders - her sword lying abandoned on the ground - as everyone began fleeing, and Ozpin stood alone, cane held in hand as the missiles arced towards the ground. Bouncing up and down on the giant woman's shoulders, Aldric watched as Ozpin reached up and then slammed the bottom of his cane into the ground, a spherical barrier growing around him - and then growing even larger, as Ozpin's shoulders tensed and began shaking as his gaze raised right up to the missiles, as though roaring out in defiance as his shield grew ever larger.
But Aldric wouldn't get to see what happened next, as his consciousness finally failed him, and he faded away, going limp on Srebro's shoulders.