Chapter 59
Nekrad was a day's trip from Vacuo proper. RWBY and JNPR, after bidding their brief farewell to Qrow, prepared themselves for a journey into Vacuo's wastelands, and moved with purpose. Unaccustomed to the heat they would be dealing with, their journey was briefly slowed, but they never allowed their pace to be broken, and after thirty two hours, they made it to Nekdrad.
Standing in the sand dunes that surrounded the city, Ruby looked through the scope of her rifle. Even zoomed in it looked hardly any better than it did from far away: Just one great mass of smog-choked, dilapidated buildings. It was almost impossible to see more than a few meters inside the cloud, and even then all she could see with any clarity were muzzle flashes. Three great armies were currently brawling in the midst of the rotten city: The Vacuoan soldiers tasked with defending one of the four most powerful women on the planet, the Terran soldiers tasked with taking her, and the Grimm who sought only the deaths of everyone involved.
The Vacuoan soldiers were taking full advantage of their knowledge of the city, utilizing fortifications and defenses they'd had prepared well ahead of time, retreating to and attacking from places the Terrans couldn't expect or easily counter, seldom actually engaging them on the streets. The Terrans, however, were making full use of their technology and their freer maneuverability, calling down bombs from their drones and attack-runs from their rotor-wing craft, while they themselves would hide in their heavy vehicles or pile into their cars and hurtle across the streets and into flanking positions. However long they had been fighting, it was clear they had only just begun and were already at a stalemate; for every Terran the Vacuoans killed, bombs rushed in to replace them, and for every Vacuoan soldiers the Terrans killed, they were attacked from new vantage points and forced to retreat.
And it appeared that both sides were willing to use the Grimm to full effect.
The Vacuoans were using their superior positioning to fire down on the Grimm and force them to evade them, guiding them this way to the Terrans, who would be routinely slaughtered once said Grimm closed ranks and got too close for their weapons to be effective. The Terrans, meanwhile, were able to use their vehicles and shepherd them, in a way, inside the buildings the Vacuoans were fighting from, whereupon the Grimm would ascend the buildings, find, and kill them.
Perhaps worst of all, though, was that as much death and slaughter as there certainly was, Ruby knew there was only more to come. Be it from more Terrans coming to reinforce, regroup, and advance, or from Salem's forces arriving to punch through them all, things would only get worse from here on. It pained her to know this, to be watching two groups of people throwing themselves at each other, killing each other and destroying everything around them in hatred, and to know what they didn't: That they were doing it for no reason at all! Because neither side could prove that it wasn't the other that had hurt them so, they had turned to violence and war and were just killing each other. Two entire planets destroying themselves for no reason other than that they had no reason not to.
It tore at the young Rose's soul, because more than anything else she didn't know what to do. A part of her desperately wanted to help them, but what could she do? While not innocent, neither of them were really in the wrong, here, they simply had no idea what was really going on. If she saved her people - that is, the people from her world - she'd have to kill the Terrans, but if she helped the Terrans, she'd be damning her people. It was impossible for her to help them both, and it wasn't like she could just stop them from fighting, that chance had passed long ago.
Ruby suddenly felt a pain in her hand, and, looking down, realized that she was gripping Crescent Rose so tightly that her entire hand had turned white, and she could feel it digging into her palm. She forced her hand to open up, and she saw the indentation of its hilt in her now shaking palm. She turned back to the scope of her rifle, just in time to see a Beowolf tackle a terran vehicle and flip it onto its side, it tore into the vehicle's under carriage and disappeared inside, remaining half-hidden until it burst into smoke, and after a moment, one Terran, covered in blood, stumbled outside and into the smog - only to be dropped by a wayward shot, and hit the ground, dead.
Ruby now felt a hand on her shoulder, and she looked upwards. What first greeted her eyes was the red and blue stripes, and then the white star, of a shield held by a friend. For a moment she managed to forget that Ash was even dead in the first place, looking up with some small amount of hope, but that was dashed when she saw Pyrrha standing above her, a smile on her face, small, and weighed down by no small amount of sorrow and anxiety, one that was struggling to stay up, but a smile nonetheless. The prodigy no-doubt knew what was going through Ruby's mind, and Ruby appreciated her effort. She lowered her collapsed scythe, unable to meet Pyrrha's gaze any longer, a sense of shame filling her core as she knew what they would have to do.
Pyrrha gave her shoulder a pat, kneeling down. "Hey." She said, softly, her voice able to beat out the sounds of war in the distance. "We're doing the right thing." She assured the young huntress.
Ruby nodded, she knew that - she knew it - but why didn't it feel like they were? Why did she still feel as though she had to do something more? That there was something she could do despite all evidence to the contrary?
She gave Pyrrha another look, and the Invincible Girl seemed to recognize it, nodding once. "All we can do is go for the Maiden, Ruby. That is the only thing that can stop all of this."
Ruby swallowed through her dry throat, then nodded, and stood to her feet. She took a deep breath to steady herself as she turned around. She turned to face the remaining members of RWBY and JNPR, seeing Nora excitedly shouldering her grenade launcher, and Jaune gingerly pressing his hand to her weapon and lowering it, while Ren kept his hand on the enthusiastic woman's shoulder to prevent her from charging away. Weiss was running a cloth along her sword and watching Yang and Blake make idle conversation, all of them waiting for the two of them to return and give them the lay of the land.
"So..."Ruby began, attracting everyone's attention. "I remember what happened last time I took a lot of people to fight the Terrans." She began, quieting down the group as though a switch had been flipped. "It... Didn't really end well." She straightened up, "and then there's the fact that we can't help everyone here... Picking just one side to help will still mean we're hurting people who aren't wrong. The terrans are warring under false pretenses, and the Humans are just trying to survive. So, all we can focus on right now is finding the Maiden. We need to solve that problem first before we can work on the other ones." She paused, "right?" She looked around, seeing the others equip themselves for battle.
Pyrrha gave her a sympathetic look, nodding once as she adjusted Ash's shield on her arm. She approached Ruby and patted Ruby's shoulder before removing her hand, Ruby smiled, not needing her to speak. So now, Pyrrha turned to the assembled teams, "Dawn told us where the bunker is. We have that advantage over both the Terrans and Salem's forces. We know our goal and we know the swiftness with which we must accomplish it. If anyone needs time, it would be best to request it now, else it is time to move now."
No one spoke up, so without further conversation, Pyrrha and Ruby turned to the dead city and led their respective teams, charging down the dunes and towards the hell of bullets, bombs, beasts, and smog. They kicked up sand with each impact of their feet against the ground, they picked up speed with every passing second, growing closer and closer until, in what felt like the blink of an eye, they reached the rotten city's edge and their feet no longer beat against deep dunes but rather concrete blanketed in sand.
Instantly the acrid smell of the thick, dark, brown clouds of smog filled Ruby's nose, nearly making her retch as she ran over the city's dilapidated roads. The two teams closed ranks as their visibility dropped to mere meters, now running by memory of the maps of the city and by the sound of the battles around them, specifically trying to avoid the latter and to stick to the former as best they could. They did a good job, avoiding any kind of combat for several minutes, until they didn't, and they ran afoul of a back of Grimm eagerly running towards the sounds of negative emotions, fear, agony, anguish, and, of course, battle.
Of course, four beowolves versus eight huntsmen and huntresses, the battle was over just as it began. Pyrrha and Jaune took one down, the former stunning it with a powerful throw from her shield and the latter smacking it with the edge of his blade. Ren, Nora, and Yang took down the second, with the latter two using their explosive weapons to throw the beast into the blades of the former most, Weiss and Blake took down a third with the latter using her ribbons to catapult the former into the neck of the demon, and Ruby leapt into the air, flipped over her head, and had hers decapitated in one fluid motion.
Without even breaking stride, the groups sprinted on, keeping to the sidewalks, sidestreets, and hugging the shadows of the buildings, trying to keep as small a profile as they could in the face of the open warfare going on around them. For the most part, it worked - they only had a few interruptions from some Grimm and an encounter or two with soldiers, but they were solved as fast as the first. In ten minutes they found themselves near the bunker's entrance.
When, without warning, all of the smog in the air vanished. First being drawn to one point as though attracted and absorbed there, the air going from dark and choked by brown to as clear as day in the span of a few seconds, the change so sudden that Ruby didn't even notice it until it was done. The battles happening around them briefly paused, as the fighters tried to figure out what had happened, but they resumed quickly enough and soon everyone was killing each other again.
The two teams came to a halt in an alley, all eyes alternating from looking up to the bright, blue sky, to eachother, all faces wearing expressions of confusion.
Jaune was the first to speak up, "uh... There was a lot of smoke in the air a few seconds ago, right? I wasn't just imagining it?" He asked, tightening the grip on his blade, and swallowing nervously.
Yang spoke next, "that doesn't just happen, what was that?"
Ruby, however, felt that she knew. She turned to Weiss, then quickly spied a building with a hole in its side; "Weiss, wall-crawl!"
Weiss figured out fast enough and had gravity glyphs on the wall Ruby had singled out; the young Rose sprinted up the wall with her semblance and curved inside the dusty office building, speeding around the cubicles and over the partially rotten carpet it until she found a window she could look out of.
She wished she hadn't, because what greeted her was pandemonium, as hundreds of Vacuoan soldiers were simultaneously fighting a horde of Grimm, and two men. One was gigantic, a hairy bear of a man garbed in hazel clothing currently in the process of ripping a mech in two and using it to beat a soldier to death, the action appearing to take no effort at all. The other, however, was a small, frail-looking, elderly man, thinned from age, his skin hanging off of his bones, and yet he walked with a regal arrogance, his hands held behind his back as he casually strolled through the chaos. One soldier saw him and tried to charge him with the bayonet on his rifle, but the old man merely cast him a glance, and before Ruby's eyes the soldier halted, and then was compressed, as though thrown into a car compactor, his entire body soon bursting and viscera pouring out from the pressure.
Ruby fell to her knees, back pressed against the wall, eyes wide as she realized what this was, and that she'd been right: They hadn't been fast enough. Salem's Masters had gotten here before them.
But... She gulped, peering over the wall again. The Old Man was again strolling towards what looked like a subway entrance, he lazily swept a hand from one side to another and Ruby watched the world before him stretch, width-wise, a path clearing out before him now completely devoid of any enemies, who now found themselves dozens of meters away, and those few who had the wherewithal to try and run after him found themselves struggling against his power, the ground stretching in the opposite direction, making them run in place as though jogging on a treadmill going just fast enough.
Could we have time? She wondered, as a Huntsman leapt towards the Old Man, shooting at the ground at his feet with arrows that detonated in huge blue explosions, this being the first thing that made the Old Man stop his advance. I could run in there... I could find her before they get inside and get her out... There has to be other exits, right? She begged of herself, a frown growing across her face, her brow furrowing.
"Ruby, don't." She heard, prompting her to turn around and see the others approaching her, keeping low so as to not be seen from the outside.
Pyrrha was at the head of the pack, and she was the first to take a look outside. She watched the Arrow-wielding Huntsman engaging the Master, his arms a blur as he fired arrow after arrow at the Master, who moved with speed that directly contrasted his age, appearing at times to be approaching what Ruby could reach just before activating her semblance. One arrow shot at him the Master wasn't quick enough to dodge, but when it made it through his defenses he twisted his entire upper body around to catch it with his hand. This had the effect of sending him sliding several feet backwards and into the flank of a Beowolf, still carrying enough force to knock the creature of Grimm down and drag it a few feet before they both finally stopped.
"That's... That's a Master, Ruby." Pyrrha said, the sigh apparent in her voice. "We'd need all of us, and the Vacuoan soldiers, and their Huntsmen, just to have a chance of fighting him." She said, as the arrow the Master caught detonated inches from his face, but much like how he'd wiped away the smog, the smoke and soot from the explosion all coalesced into a single point in space, vanishing as though vacuumed away.
The Master was completely unharmed, showing nothing except for a glow in his eyes.
"But he's distracted..." Ruby argued, "if we could -"
"Ruby." Pyrrha cut her off, "please believe me when I say no one here wants to go in there as much as you and I do... But all they will do is slow him down." She said, nodding out to the battle as the Master wiped the back of his wrinkled hand on his face, held it up, and then the world compress in on itself, the ground folding into itself and creating an almost perfectly flat fissure as he brought his hand in to his chest. Arrow tried to evade this, leaping into the air, but was stopped barely a foot off the ground, as though he'd slammed into a unseen brick wall in the sky. When he hit the ground in a daze, he was soon brought within striking distance of the Old Man, who balled his hand up into a fist and reared it above his head.
"And..." Pyrrha gulped, forcing herself to say, "and not much at that." Old Man smashed his thin, wrinkled fist into Arrow's temple, and that one impact broke Arrow's aura and buried his face into the ground, creating a crater that stretched several feet, even curving into the new folds of the earth.
Ruby was at a loss for words, her big, wide, silver eyes shooting from Pyrrha, to Old Man, who observed his dazed prey on the ground before him, and back to Pyrrha.
It was Jaune who then said, "Pyrrha." Attracting the knight's attention. "We can't just leave without trying." He said, his voice barely above a whisper.
"I mean, I don't disagree with Vomit-Boy..." Yang said, falling from her haunches to her rear and sitting down. "But Pyrrha's got a valid point too, dude." She said, turning from Ruby and Pyrrha to Jaune. "Only two options we have are sending someone in to find the Maiden while everyone else stays out here to distract those two... Or we all go in, and inevitably have to fight them underground. Either way, we have to fight someone stronger than Ozpin had been."
Nora immediately cast her vote with, "what's stopping us from blitzing his buddy and then focusing on him?" She asked, racking the slide on her grenade launcher with a wicked grin in her eyes.
"I would think the fact that he would be just as skilled as the Master, and just as great a threat to us." Said Blake. Ruby looked to her, her eyes wide and filled with the anguished frown painting her face. Blake had the decency to look guilty as she elaborated. "I don't want to give up on this Maiden without trying, Ruby." She said, "but the fact of the matter truly is that we would only buy you... Minutes, if that." She said, "and this isn't school. He will be playing for keeps."
Weiss, however, countered with, "what would be more dangerous, though? To face him now, or to retreat and potentially face Cinder Fall with the power of at least two of them?"
The arguments died, however, when Ren spoke his piece. "What would Goud do?"
Everyone quieted down, then turned to him.
He remained stoic, knelt down, hands draped over his knees, pistols clenched loosely in them. "I do believe I needn't explain myself." Was all he offered up after a few moments of silence.
The silence remained after this, as everyone exchanged glances. Ren had a point, as he always did, while also making his stance clear and issuing a challenge to those who disagreed with him. Were Ash here, he already would be out there throwing down with all of them to give everyone else a chance to make off with the Maiden. Life was important, yes, but it was the nature of their job to put theirs on the line if they needed to, and to cower and kowtow about in fear of losing said life was to say they valued themselves over the good of literally everyone else. He'd said it himself: Those with power had a moral obligation to use said power in the service of a greater good, regardless of a personal cost. To think or do less would be disrespecting his sacrifice.
Even Pyrrha appeared swayed, as her eyes glazed over, and something Ash had said to her once in one of her greatest moments of need flitted through her mind.
Things aren't beautiful because they exist forever. They're beautiful because they don't. He'd said, with that damned ever-present smile of his.
She first looked at the shield strapped to her arm, the large, striped rotella with the star on its center. Then she looked outside, seeing Old Man engaged again by the bruised and bleeding Arrow, now reinforced by other Huntsmen in similar states of injury.
Then she sighed, and nodded once. "Okay." She said, conceding victory, and wondering if it wasn't for the best that she did so. "Okay." She turned to Ruby, "but how would we do this?" And, she wondered to herself, if they survived, how would they get away, and how would they explain their injuries to Qrow?
Ruby's gleeful grin suddenly dropped, as she no-doubt realized she again hadn't thought that far again. "Um..." She looked back outside, then to Pyrrha. "Well... Your semblance is polarity."
Pyrrha blinked. "Yes." She drawled, with an unsure nod.
"And we're in a city filled with concrete and metal."
Pyrrha leaned back, "Ruby, I'm not as powerful as you're suggesting I am..."
But Ruby persisted, "how do you know?" She asked, suddenly giving Pyrrha way too many Ash flashbacks than she was comfortable with. "And you all are acting like we'd be fighting them." She said, "When all we need to do is just keep them away from us."
Pyrrha frowned in thought, beginning to catch onto Ruby's train of thought.
Jaune, however, spoke up with, "what do you mean?"
By the time the two teams of rookie huntsmen and huntresses were finished speaking and planning, Old Man had gone through all four of the full-fledged Huntsmen that had gone up to bat against him, with nothing to show for it. The Vacuoans were beginning to fall back to the subway entrance, soldiers and Huntsmen alike blasting away at him, his partner and their Grimm escorts as they slowly approached, like a wave of doom on its way to destroy everything in front of it. With the Terran and the Human at the head of the pack, and a growing horde of Grimm behind them, the Vacuoans knew this was their last stand.
What they weren't expecting was for a building to suddenly begin listing over to the side with the shrieking sound of bending metal and shattering glass.
Pyrrha had been the first to sprint out of their hidey-hole, but she had been the only one to not sprint for the subway entrance. Instead she had run for the nearest, tallest skyscraper she could find. She still completely doubted that she was strong enough to do what Ruby had suggested, and this doubt colored how she went about in attempting to execute it. Because she knew she couldn't pick up an entire building and drop it on someone, but Ruby's challenge, how did she know, and how much it had reminded her of her late friend, inspired the tiniest amount of lateral thinking she'd come to admire the man for, and that lateral thinking had inspired one specific thought:
Why lift the entire building when she could just drop it?
Lumberjacks didn't cut through the entire trunk of the tree, demolition teams didn't obliterate entire structures, and fighters didn't just wail on an opponent until they fell. They chopped at the tree until it couldn't support itself, they destroyed key points in the structure, and they exploited weaknesses until such a time that the opponent could no longer fight.
Pyrrha didn't have to tear the building out of the ground, hoist it into the air, and then plant it in front of Salem's approaching horde, all she had to do was crush its support beams and drop the thing. Topple it in such a way that it would destroy the Grimm and block the Master and his partner.
So, sprinting towards the first building she could see that fit the bill, Pyrrha crashed into its lobby and, taking a few quick breaths of air, felt out with her powers. As though touching them herself, she instantly could feel the thick layers of steel pillars and girders around her making up the building's base, and the higher up she felt the more numerous they became. For now, however, she had to focus on the bottom - the building's foundations, upon which the entire skyscraper had been established. If she crushed even just half of it, it would topple over in the direction she wanted, like a lumberjack felling a tree.
Were it so easy... She gulped, clenching her jaw and tightening her chest, as she reached out with both hands, and prayed.
Inside the brick and mortar office building, RWBY and the remainder of JNPR waited with baited breath for Pyrrha to figure something out. It took ninety seconds before they thought they noticed one of the buildings beginning to move, and then forty five seconds after that before the movement became so obvious it was impossible to miss. Soon the sound of metal shrieking and bending, of glass shattering and showering towards the ground, and the awesome sight of an entire building listing to the side and quickly gaining speed as it hurtled faster and faster to the ground, filled the air and everyone's eyes. At the size they were playing with, wind resistance began playing a huge factor, slowing it down enough that it almost appeared as though it were all happening in slow motion, only increasing in speed as it grew closer to the ground, and everyone in its path realized what was happening.
The Vacuoans, crying in terror, fled underground. The Grimm, unawares, kept moving forward. The Bear, frowning, turned to his partner. The Master, a curious tilt to his head, lifted his hand.
The building, and the glass, sand, and debris that had fallen from it, stopped.
It floated there in mid-air, unnaturally held aloft, as though it weren't a building weighing thousands of tons, but rather a projection, a painting against the sky.
"Uh -" Jaune said, as everyone, even Ren, stared at the display, slackjawed. "What?"
Ruby, snapped out of it by Jaune's speaking, acted fast and did the first thing that came to mind: The leapt to her feet, expanded her rifle, planted it on the wall, steadied it, took aim as fast as she could, and fired. The slug shot through the air, crossing the distance between her and her target in a second, buried itself into his shoulder, and evaporated into steam.
She, however, provided the impetus for the rest of the Vacuoans to open fire and try to trip the Old Man up, and soon he was being met with a wall of gunfire, some of which made it closer to him than others, and distracting him at least enough from trying to find out where the sniper had been who'd started it. The Grimm soon bolted forward to absorb the gunfire, and the Huntsman exchanged unheard words with his partner, who nodded once, turning his gaze back up to the building, still held in the air.
The building began to radiate heat, then glow white hot, and then soon it began separating into a dozen titanic chunks, all spinning into giant, superheated spears of metal and glass. They all moved until they floated overhead, and then Old Man unceremoniously dropped his hand, whereupon they began obeying gravity.
The Vacuoans, appearing to conclude that the only way to fight this monstrous master of magic was with someone - anyone - with any modicum of control over their aura, retreated behind the sudden charge of their Huntsmen, all of whom tore through the Grimm in their mad dash for the Master. Neither he nor the bear of a man next to him even budged, content to allow the giant superheated spears they'd created do their jobs for them.
So one could imagine their surprise when one of these spears was caught in a black glow and thrown off-course, colliding with another spear and, alongside it, knocking into several others and sending them careening away to land harmlessly away from the entrance to the bunker.
"Go!" Ruby called out, "go! This is our chance!" She gasped, before, alongside her allies, she hauled herself outside and dropped to the ground.
The Master gave the display a curious glance, watching as another giant spike was taken ahold of, but this one, instead of knocking others off course, compressed downwards and shot down to the subway entrance, molding around it and constricting what had once been a wide open hole in the ground to something barely the size of a person. Unfortunately, this was all Pyrrha had the time to do, as the remaining four spears fell to the ground, burying themselves several meters and causing the earth to quake and buck with each impact, sending scores of Grimm and more than a few Huntsmen flying away.
RWBY and JNPR landed on the ground and instantly rushed for the now occluded subway entrance, sprinting as fast as their feet could take them, with Ruby and Jaune at the head, the former dashing through the Grimm and stunning them so the latter could smite them with his sword. The two groups carved a narrow swathe through the horde of Grimm, circumventing the Old Man and the Bear, who soon were engaged by all of the available Huntsmen on Vacuo's side, the sheer number and power present at play even managing to occupy the man who'd torn apart a building with ease.
They made it to the subway entrance just before a huffing and puffing, exhausted Pyrrha did as well, and the two teams slid through the tiny entrance she'd left for them. Inside, however, they instantly found themselves faced down by hundreds of firearms and a lot of angry soldiers with quick trigger fingers.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa!" Yang, the loudest of them all, shouted over the rising din of soldiers telling them to freeze. "Winter, Winter!"
It took a few moments before the soldiers recognized the passphrase given to them by Dawn, and a few moments after that before weapons started lowering, and a Captain, sporting officer's bars and several gaping wounds, limped out to the front and demanded to know who they were, they weren't expecting any reinforcements period, let alone people pale enough to pass as Vale citizens.
Ruby stepped forward, hurriedly saying, "we are from Vale, but Professor Dawn sent us anyways!" She said, as Jaune hurried over to Pyrrha, who was drenched in sweat and gasping for air. "He knows about those men outside, and the Terrans, he sent us to get her and get her out of here!"
The Captain frowned, briefly looking down, but another quake of the ground made his mind up for him. He rounded on his men and called out, "we've maybe about five minutes before those two get down here! If they do we've gotta give 'em hell and make sure they get that girl out of here, buy them as much time as we can, am I understood?!"
A chorus of battle cries and 'yes sir!'s met his question, and he waved the two teams through, shouting, "take exit bravo! She'll know where it is!" as they sprinted past, before he turned to his men again and helped them prepare their defenses and what, in all likelihood, would be their last stand.
RWBY and JNPR descended further into the subway tunnels, following their maps and going ever deeper underground, none of them willing to think too hard on what the soldiers must be going through as time went on and the quakes grew less and less frequent. Ruby knew they only ran for a handful of minutes, but with the way her heart was hammering in her chest and with all the thoughts running through her mind it felt like hours before they reached the sterile white lights and the stainless steel floors and walls of the bunker proper. A few guards were there, but they let them through after getting the same passphrase and being told of the situation topside. A promise to hold the line was all that was given after they shut the door behind the two teams.
Inside they discovered an armory that had hastily been emptied of everything inside, a cafeteria that appeared to have been abandoned halfway through mealtime - though with most of the food rotten beyond consumption - and dozens upon dozens of immaculate barracks left barren and devoid of life. RWBY and JNPR frantically raced through the bunker, towards the room indicated to them by Dawn, looking for the Winter Maiden.
They reached it just as the ground shook again and the lights in the bunker flickered. Ruby felt her throat go dry as she and her allies exchanged glances; the rest of RWBY and JNPR took up defensive positions. Ruby herself turned to the door and frantically twisted at the knob, shoving it open to reveal a deceptively tiny room, completely empty and void of all life.
Ruby blinked.
"What?" She breathed, looking around the sterile white room, and seeing no one inside. Not on the tiny bed, not in the dark bathroom, the room was empty. "But..." She felt her heart begin beating faster and her throat go dry as, for a moment, she wondered if the Maiden were even here at all, if they'd rushed headlong into a fight with a Master for nothing at all.
But then she saw it - just the faintest of movements underneath the bed, the shifting of its blanket. Ruby dashed over to the corner of the room, grabbed the blanket, and flipped it up, before kneeling down and looking underneath the bed.
Ruby hadn't quite known what to expect, but the six year old girl, with wide, steel-blue eyes and an expression of barely contained terror, hadn't been it.
The Maiden cried out in fear, gasping as she pressed herself as far against the wall as she could, trying to make it such that Ruby couldn't reach her, but the silver-eyed huntress held up her hands, shaking her head. "No, no, no! I'm - I'm a friend! Professor Dawn sent me, we're trying to get you out of here!"
The Maiden gave her a look of fear, but at least appeared to be willing to listen to her. "What's... What's his password?" She asked, in a high voice, shaking with the terror of a child who simply didn't understand what was going on.
Ruby squeezed her eyes shut tight for a moment, before they snapped open and she said, "the man with two souls says hello!"
The Maiden blinked her big eyes, appearing to be in shock that Ruby had passed her test, but once she recovered from it, she scrambled forward, throwing her arms out to Ruby, who secured her scythe to her back and picked the small child up. "Uh -" She stuttered, "are - are you okay? Are you hurt?" She asked, looking over the tan child, checking her torso and her sandy hair and seeing no blood or torn clothing. "What's your name - uh, kiddo?"
"Bluebell, and I'm okay. What's happening outside?" She asked, "Commander Cody just told me to get under my bed and not come out."
Ruby frowned, "okay Bell, I'm - er, I'm Ruby! So, um... Listen, I'll tell you everything once we get out of here, okay Bell?" She said, with a nervous smile. "Right now we're not safe and we need to get out of here. Some bad men are coming and if we don't move soon they'll -" But she was interrupted when the air began shaking and she could feel in her chest the bass of the gunshots suddenly filling the hallway right outside this room. "I want you to hold on tight, okay?" She requested, as Bluebell tightened her grip around Ruby's neck.
The young Huntress sprinted to the door and peeked outside, the sight making her heart drop: Old Man and the Bear were being assaulted with everything RWBY and JNPR had that they could attack from a distance with. Old Man had a hand held aloft, and all of the bullets, rockets, slugs, and shards of ice and metal were all slamming into an unseen barrier and turning into snowflakes, falling harmlessly to the ground and melting underfoot. Ren was knelt down right next to Bluebell's door, firing wildly at the approaching duo. He glanced at Ruby for a moment and, seeing the child in her hands, his eyes widened, before thinning again with determination.
He said one word: "GO!"
Ruby hesitated, looking from Ren, to Old Man and the Bear. Pyrrha, in front of Jaune at the center of the pack, enveloped in a dark glow and tried to bury the Master and the Huntsman in the metal that made up the walls and the ceiling of the bunker, covering them in it and trying to crush them as tight as she could. The Bear, with a deep and loud growl, wrenched his body to one side, tearing through the metal covering him through sheer strength alone, before he ripped his way out of it by yanking himself to the other side and then tearing his legs out of the metal one foot at a time. Old Man, meanwhile, merely glanced down at the jagged metal immobilizing him with an annoyed look in his squinting eyes, and the metal just melted away, liquifying and running down his body until it pooled up at his feet as though it were a puddle of water.
Ruby realized she had no other choice, and she ran, dashing past her friends and around the bend in the hall with her semblance, leaving only rose petals in her wake before she continued sprinting, calling to mind the map of this place and knowing that all roads led to one of two places: The front entrance, or the emergency exit.
She barely made it thirty feet before bluebell screamed right in her ear, "Miss Ruby!" And pointed at something over her shoulder.
Ruby looked over her shoulder and saw Old Man lazily walking towards them, his arms held behind his straight back, crossing unnaturally large amounts of distance with each calm step, a determined, if annoyed, frown on his heavily wrinkled face. The hallway behind him compressed down to a point, sealing everything off behind it and appearing almost as a picture stretched out in an image editor. Ruby turned back forward and took in a deep breath before darting to the end of the hallway with her semblance.
But she didn't move an inch.
Every step she took at her greatly enhanced speed seemed to make the hallway stretch even further away, the further forward she ran the less distance she crossed. Looking over her shoulder again, Old Man wasn't even moving anymore, he was just standing there, watching Ruby effectively run in place. Gasping for breath, Ruby realized the futility of her actions and stopped trying to run. She dropped Bluebell behind her and drew her scythe, extending it fully and holding it defensively.
Old Man arced an eyebrow, then turned his gaze over his shoulder, gazing behind him a moment before turning back to Ruby. "He can't see us, little lady. Why not talk?" Ruby blinked, but didn't say a word, instead reaching behind her and pushing Bluebell such that she was shielded by her body. "Come now, please. I kill because I literally have to when I'm around him, but he's dealing with your friends right now and there are seven of them. He won't last too terribly long..." He hummed, "though they are in a hallway. Narrow paths negate advantages of numbers... Hm." He groaned as he lowered himself to the ground, the previous youthful energy to his movements vanishing and being replaced with the age so readily apparent in the folds of his skin.
Ruby felt her heart picking up as she tried to figure out what Old Man's game was, and as Bluebell tightly took ahold of her skirt. "I won't let you have her." She told him, tightly gripping her scythe.
Old Man grinned somberly, "one thing so few young people these days realize is that the operative word there is let." He said, "of course you won't let me have her... But really, what do you expect to do?" He asked, before another voice spoke up from directly behind her. "When I can do this?"
Ruby gasped and Bluebell screamed as the former whirled around and the latter was hauled into the air by the Master. The Maiden weakly pounded and kicked at his face and his chest, even as he picked balanced her on his hip, unflinching as though her assault was like being beaten by a feather. Ruby, panicked, looked behind her, and saw that Old Man was indeed gone from his original position, but then turned back forward and found him gone again. She felt her heart stop, but then heard Bluebell cry out again from behind her.
Ruby whirled around, but lost her balance when the bright lights, the sterile white walls and the gray floor of the bunker were all gone, replaced by a dark sky, hundreds of towering trees, and a grassy ground. Old Man was standing a few meters away, holding Bluebell at arms length and shaking his head.
"Oh, hush hush hush hush, little baby." He said, before balancing her on his hip again. "Remind me of my grandchild, I swear." She was squirming in his arms, but that stopped instantly when he ran his hand over her eyes, as though closing them on a corpse. She fell limp and began lightly snoring into his chest.
Ruby now held her scythe in front of her, baring her teeth as she gripped it tightly. "Give, her..." But something stumbled her, as the clouds above her parted, and revealed something she'd never seen before:
A moon with no orbiting fragments.
"Back..." She blinked, voice petering out into a whisper.
"Oh, yes, child." Old Man nodded, adjusting his grip on Bluebell. "I had quite a similar reaction when I saw your moon for the first time. Thought I'd gone absolutely fucking senile." He hummed, a fond grin on his face. "But then Hazel found me and granted me my power, and I must admit... Even when I was young, I never felt so young." He let out a long, satisfied sigh.
It was so sudden that Ruby didn't even realize it had happened until the light from the ceiling made her blink. One second they were outside in a forest, the next, they were back in the bunker, right where they'd been standing. Ruby was holding Bluebell now - she didn't even remember picking her up! The weight was suddenly just there in her arms! - Crescent Rose was leaned against the wall, and both she and the man were sitting, the latter with a cup of coffee in his hand, already halfway up to his lips.
"Let me tell you, hon. I asked my powers once for 'the greatest cup of coffee', and by God they delivered." He said, after taking a sip of his drink and shivering. "You should try it, please." Ruby hadn't so much as blinked than was Bluebell back in his arms and his coffee in her hands; this time she at least had the presence of mind to shriek and throw the cup away.
It tumbled through the air, crashed onto the ground, rolled for several feet, the handle appearing to just phase through the floor, and the liquid inside not even moving an inch, before it came to a halt and then just righted itself.
"Right. Germs, my bad." He nodded once, "I guess I'll just get to the point, then: Despite what you have no doubt seen this last... Fifteen? Twenty minutes?" He shrugged, "I don't actually enjoy the killing. I simply do it because to not do so in present company would arouse more suspicion than it wouldn't. Without his presence, however, or when he isn't looking, I can quite easily spare lives, though at a cost, usually to them, sometimes to me." He ran his wrinkled hand through his thin, white hair. "And as he isn't here and there is clearly nothing you can do..." He leaned forward, "despite your rather pretty eyes... I would deign to allow you to live. This instance specifically being quite important because, for the first time, one of us has met one of you." He said, straightening his back. "Please enlighten me: Is Professor Ozpin yet alive? Or is he still in limbo, so to speak?
Ruby frowned, and that motion alone prompted Old Man to be on his feet, with Bluebell tucked up against the wall.
"I see." He sighed, "unfortunate... But as you clearly serve him, I pray you can send this message and a token of goodwill and good faith." He folded his hands behind his back, waiting for her.
Ruby looked down, seeing Crescent Rose as a rifle in her hands.
How could someone be this strong? She wondered, noticing a tremble to her hand. I... I'm... I thought... Isn't there something I can do? Qrow said she had the power to basically negate those of people like him, but neither he nor she had any idea at all as to how, and it was clear to her that, right here and right now, the only way out of this, the only way to rescue Bluebell and stand even a chance against this old man, was through her eyes.
She had to buy time, time to come up with an idea, something - anything - that would let her crack into whatever let her hurt Cinder and freeze the dragon. "What... Message is it?" She asked, suspiciously. "And... Is the token of goodwill us taking Bluebell?"
The Old Man hummed, a thin smile on his face. "I admire the gumption child, but no. There are many reasons we must take her and we must acquire the other two after her. My message is simple: The Masters you think are your enemies are not. Though our numbers have dwindled, and the best of us may be dead, so too is the worst of us, and those who remain, old as we may be, are united against Salem. We need only the opportunity to strike. As to what I can offer... It is knowledge, and an opportunity." He said, "the knowledge is twofold: Earth, and as such, we already know where the Summer Maiden is, and my German counterpart and his ally shall have her within the month, perhaps only the slightest bit longer. It depends wholly on when the Americans decide to attack Atlas. The opportunity, as a result, is for you to focus your efforts on finding Spring. To shepherd her away, hide her... Fortify her, and when we inevitably find her, you can take your chance to kill our allies who are not of Earth. Make the final battle against Salem..." He blinked, turning his head over his shoulder, "hm." He sighed, "quite bold, quite interesting." He turned back to Ruby, "as I was saying, to make the final battle against Salem less titanic. I would explain further, but it appears we are out of time..."
And suddenly Ruby was in the air, a hand clenched around her throat and cutting off her air. She looked down the arm and locked eyes with the Master, and froze, as for the first time she could actually see his, two onyx orbs appearing to absorb all light that entered them. "I promise you will feel no pain." He shook his head. "I do hope you take my offer, the lives we could spare as a result are incomparable to those that would be lost if you don't. Regardless, I wish you luck, and I promise you will recover -" And as he spoke, Ruby spied the sealed off wall shuddering violently, covered in a dark glow, slowly splitting open from its center. " - quickly."
The wall tore open, and Pyrrha, Ren, and Jaune sprinted through, the formermost right after throwing her star spangled shield so fast that it crossed the distance between her and the Master in the blink of an eye. Said Master could only frown before it slammed into the back of his neck, bouncing off and causing him to stumble forward. He dropped Ruby to the ground, and Ruby coughed, gasping for air and clutching at her throat.
"Gods, Ruby!" She heard Pyrrha call out, from what sounded like miles away.
Ruby blinked once, turning to Pyrrha, her head feeling as though it weighed a ton. She soon couldn't hold it up any longer, soon collapsing to the ground.
Where did all that blood come from?