Getting into the meat of the climax of Atlas! Hope you're looking forward to it!
Start Chapter 32
The world comes crashing down, as it always seems to.
Jaune takes a step back, swearing below his breath, even as Yang looks back and forth between him and Rhodes.
"Jaune?" Yang looks to him, confused. "What's going on? Who's he?"
Jaune can't really answer, though that option is taken from him entirely when Rhodes draws his weapons – his maces, a pair of them – from off of his back, and takes a battle stance.
"Do you know this man!?" He asks of Yang.
"Yeah, he's a friend of mine." Yang seems ready to go to bat for him, glaring over at Rhodes, and Jaune almost wants to laugh. She's always been like that; fiercely loyal.
"He's a criminal! He abetted a murderer!"
That has Yang's eyes widening. She turns to Jaune as if to ask what this guy's deal is, but…
There must be something about his expression that tells her there's some truth to what the man is saying.
"Jaune, can you fill me in here?"
She still trusts him. Through it all, regardless of what the man's just said, Yang trusts him instead of believing someone she's never met.
"Things… are complicated at the moment." He regrets that he has no true ability to answer.
"Yes, they are indeed, aren't they, Jauney-boy?"
The voice is one that Jaune's been dreading potentially hearing for a while now. It sounds out from behind him, and he watches as Yang's eyes widen. Rhodes doesn't seem shocked, per se, but he turns his stance to face the new addition.
Tyrian stands right beside him, smirking over.
Jaune just glares back.
"Jaune!?" Yang is now much less trusting. Jaune cannot blame her for that at all. "You're with Tyrian!?"
"It's–"
"Oh? You know me?" Tyrian tilts his head to one side, before letting out a gleeful little laugh and clapping his hands together. "How interesting. That's not once, but twice now that's happened. I have no idea who you are, but you know me! And you clearly know Jaune. How curious!"
Yang clams up immediately, but the damage has been done. Yang's been added to Tyrian's 'list of intriguing people', and unfortunately for her, that's not something one gets to leave.
And Tyrian wastes no time.
He blitzes forward, drawing his weapons, and causing a few civilians behind them to shout and yell out in terror, before running in the opposite direction. Instantly, Jaune knows that their window for getting to Ruby has already closed. At this point, the best they can hope for is to get out.
Then again, perhaps that window had closed the moment that Rhodes had spotted him. It's not like he'd wanted to make it to Ruby, anyhow.
But Cinder…
…He can think about that later. He's not about to back Tyrian up, but he needs to keep the bastard alive.
He won't let him hurt Yang. No matter what. He'll protect her even if it costs him his life.
Tyrian is fast, even as Rhodes goes to meet him. It's clear immediately that Rhodes simply isn't in the same league as any of them. He's decent, but Jaune's pretty confident he could beat the man without expending much energy at all, and Tyrian's better than he is, even if not by much.
Tyrian knocks one of Rhodes' maces away, before kneeing him in the ribs and then kicking him into the wall behind him. He slumps down it, but will probably be back up in just a moment.
That hadn't been his objective, though.
No, he's gunning right for Yang.
Yang's aura primes itself on her body; that same vibrant gold that he's always known it to be. She cocks Ember Celica, and prepares to intercept Tyrian.
But before she can…
A red and black portal swirls to life between them, and Tyrian is buffeted backwards.
He lands beside Jaune, his eyes wide, but with a feral grin on his lips.
"Ohoho!" He yells out, even as two figures step through the portal that…
That Jaune recognizes.
Raven Branwen, and…
He's never seen her before, but she looks just like Ruby. She's her spitting image, almost. Her hair's longer, and her cape is white instead of red. Her weapon is an axe, and she draws it in front of her and slams it into the ground beneath.
This is Summer Rose.
"Ah, Summer Rose, and Mrs. Branwen!" Tyrian cackles. "Two of Ozpin's best! It's been an awfully long time since I have seen either of you! I was beginning to think you were out of the business!"
Raven cracks her neck with one hand as she places the other on the handle of Omen. "And I was hoping you'd been killed, and left to rot in a ditch somewhere, but we can't always get what we want, can we?"
Tyrian cackles. "Ah, I'd forgotten how fun you were to spar with, both verbally and otherwise. Come, then, girl. Let us dance!"
Both of them seem more than prepared for such. Summer, too, ready to back Raven up. Jaune finds himself swallowing on some spittle hanging at the back of his throat.
He doesn't know much about them, but he's heard of them from Ruby, Yang, and Qrow.
They're legends, the both of them. Some of the strongest Hunters the world has ever seen. They might not be at quite that status now, but he doubts they're not at least as good as Tyrian, to have encountered him before and to have fought him, seemingly, to a standstill.
But before Jaune can draw his nameless blade…
"Wait!"
All heads in the immediate area, including Rhodes', who's just stood back up from where he'd been blasted into a nearby wall, turn towards Yang. She's panting with both worry and adrenaline. She seems shocked, barely there, but…
"Hold on. That's Jaune!" She points to him. "He's one of my– he's someone I know. Raven, he's…"
Raven looks to her, and her eyes widen. She looks back at him, and her eyes narrow.
"What's he doing with them."
Them. Salem, she must mean.
"I don't know!" Yang hisses out, sounding panicked. "Jaune, c'mon, come over here! What are you doing!?"
It's a fair question. Jaune can't exactly judge Yang for that. How best to answer? How best to go about saying that he has no other choice.
"There's…" He decides to just be honest. "There's someone I–"
"Ah-ah," Tyrian cuts him off, smiling over at him. "Not another word, Jauney boy. Let's leave them in suspense, shall we?"
He bites down on the inside of his cheek, but holds his tongue. Yang looks between them without a clue in the world, and Jaune can't give her anything.
Cinder's already going to be punished enough for their failure. He can't give Tyrian any other reason to report to Salem to punish her further.
Gods, but it hurts him to do as such.
"Jaune…" Yang grits out, before clenching her jaw and shaking her head. "Damn it!"
And then, she raises her gauntlets; prepared to fight.
/
Blake's not stopped moving in going on ten minutes at this point.
She's currently deep beneath Atlas HQ, trying to find where Eve might be located. The unfortunate truth is that she just doesn't have enough information to find her quickly.
She has a vague idea of where prisoners are kept a decade from now, but that means nothing in the here and now. She knows that Eve is here, because the guards hadn't told her that she'd been in the wrong place. No, they'd simply turned her away.
She'll find her. She has to find her.
She's finished checking the third floor, and, biting down on her lower lip, she heads deeper, further in.
The fourth floor, immediately, seems to be the exact place she'd needed to be.
This place…
It's a prison. Not quite the few isolated cells that Ironwood had had set up to house prisoners that might need to be kept at Atlas HQ in an emergency. No. This place is clearly far older than Hawthorne.
If anything, it seems to be about as old as the Headquarters itself.
Blake takes a few steps inside, and she looks around. There's no one patrolling, seemingly, and no cameras hanging up, either. There's… little anything, to be honest. A few sterile white lights shining on gray concrete cells.
This is an entire block of isolation cells, isn't it?
The kinds of places one might use for solitary confinement, intended to be used on only the most heinous of prisoners, or those who continuously broke prison rules. They are, notably, generally not used on people like Eve. She'd acted in the heat of the moment. She'd done something terrible, yes, but with a motive that'd been completely understandable.
She'd gone too far. Blake's not going to pretend otherwise.
But this…
She knows what's happening, of course. They'd just about confirmed it before; the guards, she means. They'd said that they're attempting to extract a confession, and given what they're trying to get her to confess to, that means they need to mentally manipulate Eve.
They'll look to isolate Eve from the outside world, give her no contact, say that her family's given up on her, or any other number of things. Get her off balance. Get her to doubt everything. Once that happens…
Eve might very well snap. She might very well sign anything, do anything, that they tell her to.
Blake's not going to let that happen.
She moves as quietly as she can whilst still being quick. The cells have slots she can see through to check who's inside, and though most of them are empty, some of them aren't.
Blake… she debates freeing everyone in here, but the truth of the matter is that she doesn't know if anyone down here actually deserves to be. She doesn't know the crimes that anyone but Eve – if she's here at all – have committed.
And so, even if they might be innocent, she keeps walking.
Eventually, on perhaps the third door she checks that actually contains someone, her eyes light up with recognition. On the other side of the door is Eve.
She…
She does not look well.
Blake sets that aside for the moment, instead focusing on just how it is she's going to get into the cell itself. There's a lock on the door that seems heavy duty, and Blake doesn't exactly have the key. She does have a gun, however, and dust bullets to go along with it. She primes an ice dust bullet into the chamber, aims at the lock, and fires.
The sound is, thankfully, reduced due to Gambol Shroud's makeup. It likely won't travel above this floor. Even so, Blake needs to be quick. If the alarm goes off while she's here…
The metal of the lock warps as the ice forces it to bend and stretch. She waits until it's been frozen a half minute or so, then shoots a fire-dust round into the lock. This time, it superheats it, and warps the material even further.
She does this over and over, until, eventually, the warping is to the point that Blake can bring the blade of her weapon down on it, and sever the lock entirely. She swings the door open, and dashes inside the cell.
"Eve!"
The woman looks up at her, and Blake stills for a moment.
She's… she's not looking good.
Her face is pale. Her eyes are red, and bloodshot. Her hair is frazzled, and there are small cuts all over her face. They look… well, they're shaped like fingernails would be. Eve's own are overgrown, but more tellingly, there's long-dried blood beneath them.
Her body is gaunt. Blake can't see much of it, but it doesn't look like she's eaten since she'd been taken. It's been… more than a few days now.
"Eve…" She speaks quieter this time, inching her way into the cell. "I'm here to get you out."
Eve stares up at her, before her bottom lip begins to quiver, and she chokes on a sob. Blake closes the distance between them in an instant, and wraps her arms around Eve's body.
Her student returns the gesture, beginning to sob openly into her shoulder.
Blake… she doesn't know the specifics of what have happened, but she can tell well enough.
"I lost him…" Eve whimpers out, barely able to string words together. "He's dead! I couldn't… I couldn't protect him!"
Blake's eyes widen, and she pulls away from Evelynn to see the woman having broken down entirely. The streams of tears flowing from out of her eyes are fat and heavy, and she's shaking terribly.
"Who are you–"
"Adam!" She cries out, hugging her arms to her chest. "He's dead! He's dead and I…" She takes a haggard, horribly stilted breath. "I couldn't do anything!"
"Eve, Adam's alive!" She interrupts the woman before she can spiral. This… this is worse than she'd feared. "He's down in Mantle, he's–"
"He's dead!" She screams at a volume that causes Blake's faunus ears to flatten. "They showed me pictures! They showed me reports, and medical records, and–"
"Eve. They lied to you!" She takes the woman by the shoulders and tries to steady her. She needs to hear her. Damn herself, but she'd not thought to take a picture of Adam. She'd not thought that this might happen. Regardless, she shakes her head, and says, "I saw Adam myself. He's being taken care of in a clinic in Mantle, and he's got Sienna there to protect him. They were lying to you. He lost an eye, but he's alive!"
The look that Evelynn gives her, then, is so fraught with naked hope that it almost stuns her. She wants to believe Blake so badly; wants to have faith in her. Eventually, after a few seconds spent staring into Blake's eyes, trying to glean the truth from them, she lets out a wretched noise, half sob, half laugh, and slams into Blake's chest.
"Why… why would they do that!?" She yells, and Blake almost wants to tell her to be quiet, but at this point, either people have heard them, or they haven't.
It's… it's a question that Blake can't really begin to answer. Not really. It's something she herself has asked many times in her life. Whenever she reads a news report about someone murdering someone, or a group of people. Whenever she hears about a group of human traffickers, or a gang, and what they've done… she finds herself wondering how anyone could ever do such a thing.
And the answer Blake's come to after all that time is that she can't possibly understand. That she, as a person, is simply incapable of seeing the same things these people do.
"…Because some people are sick to their very cores." She gives out in answer. "Some people just… have nothing but hate, and darkness, and vileness in their hearts. And they cannot be understood by those of us who don't."
Eve sobs into her chest harder, at hearing that. At hearing that Blake does not have an answer. That there is no answer.
…They need to go.
She's done her best to get Eve back on her feet, but they can't stay here. She pulls Eve to her feet, feeling terrible as she is forced to break the hold that she's kept on Evelynn ever since entering into this cell to do it.
"What–"
"We have to go." She tells her, and Eve seems to snap back to the then and there. "We're not safe here. I've got a chance of clothes for you, slip into these, but hurry."
Obviously, their chances of making it out of the front door, or of the general vicinity, are much lower if Eve's dressed like a prisoner. Currently, she's wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, and a pair of cotton pants as well. She starts stripping immediately, and Blake's glad she's seemingly able to shelve the horrors she's experienced for the moment to focus.
She'll have time to talk about what she's been through later. Blake's not going to let her go again. Hell, if she can help it, she's not going to let Eve out of her sight for the next little while after they've made it off Solitas.
Call her paranoid, but the world seems to have it out for the Taurus family.
She steps out of the cell, just to check their route, and yet, when Blake does…
Her eyes widen.
"Alright," Eve sounds out from behind her, clearly still ready to break at a moment's notice, but barely holding together. "I'm ready to–"
But she, too, stops.
Because standing in front of the stairway out – the only way out of this place – in full regalia, is none other than General Hawthorne himself.
Behind him are ten Atlesian officers, all of them holding weapons, and aiming them at the pair of them. Yet, they do not fire.
Blake's glad. It gives her a moment to try and think of something. Some silver bullet that will make it possible for her to escape from this place, even given all of this.
The worst-case scenario has happened. It's not just the general alarm, which would mean she had little time.
No, Hawthorne himself is here personally. She has no time.
She'd chosen the day of the Vytal Festival specifically to avoid something like this being a possibility, and yet… had the man truly skipped out on attending purely to try and catch her? Is he really that…
"So, the ever-elusive Black Fang shows herself." Hawthorne speaks as he takes a step forward. He makes no move to draw the massive weapon that's slung along his back – a greatsword as long as he is tall, and just about as wide as well. "Somehow, I thought pinning you down would be more difficult, but you fell for the most obvious of bait."
She supposes she had, in all truth. He'd used Eve to get to her, and the harshest thing to accept is that she's nearly certain him having Eve to use as bait at all had been a coincidence. A couple of racists down in Mantle had mouthed off, and thrown a bottle, and injured Adam. That hadn't been a part of any grand plan. No…
No, the only thing that Hawthorne had gotten there had been lucky.
Blake wishes that the world would stop rewarding the most wretched of people with good luck.
"Not going to say anything?"
"Would there be any point if I did?" She answers.
"Hmph." Hawthorne breathes out a laugh through his nostrils. "You know, I really ought to thank you. You've given me the exact ammunition I need in order to save Atlas."
Blake grits her teeth, but doesn't rise to the man's bait.
He talks on, anyways.
"After all, that woman alone wasn't going to be enough to prove anything. Just a random act of violence. I could already see the news reports. But now, a wanted insurgent breaking into Atlas HQ to rescue her? Caught on half the cameras in the building?" He shakes his head, but there's a smile on his face. "You've almost gift-wrapped this entire affair for me."
She really has, hasn't she? Yet another plan of hers that she'd made too quickly, without properly thinking it through. She should've been able to see this coming… but then, she should've been able to see the White Fang at the docks coming, and the fact that she couldn't take on the White Fang alone coming, and…
And so many other things.
Planning beforehand has never been her strongest suit.
Behind her, she hears Eve shuffling in panic, her breaths becoming labored, harsh.
She's already teetering on the edge. Blake… she doesn't want to let her get hurt.
"Stay behind me," Blake draws a knife off of her belt, and throws it back to Eve. "If you need to, defend yourself with that."
She doesn't look, but she pictures Evelynn nodding to her.
"Going to resist?" Hawthorne actually laughs this time, loud and boisterous. "Ah, truly; you really are going to give me everything I could have asked for."
She has no choice. She's not going to let them keep Eve here. Blake could handle their attempts at torture, the isolation, even the potential for physical agony, but Eve…
She won't let them hurt her any more than they already have.
And…
She's not going to let Adam grow up without a mother a second time.
Not again.
Blake places her mask on her face, primes a clip of dust ammunition into Gambol Shroud, and prepares to fight for both their lives.
End Chapter 32
Alright, that was Chapter 32!
Not a ton to say tbh. I wish I was more interesting lmao.
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