SAPR: Volume 2

[ScipioSmith]

Necropolis​

It was not the best reason; in fact, as reasons went, it was a lot worse than the fact that there was no way they could beat Atlas in a stand-up fight for finding this whole plan to be a complete nonsense, but Gilda would readily admit – at least to herself – that she just plain didn't like basing out of Mountain Glenn.

It was the world's largest tomb, and it gave her the creeps. And the fact that the creeps were giving them some space right now didn't actually help her mood very much.

From what she understood, which wasn't much, Vale had built two cities at Mountain Glenn: one up top on the surface and one below by building on all the caves that were already there to create a vast hollow under the surface that they could build a second Mountain Glenn inside. It made a kind of sense, she guessed, what with the subway tunnel that they'd built to bus everybody in and out of the city, but even in its prime, she wouldn't have wanted to live out her life here. She didn't want to be here now. It was airless, perpetually in darkness – and just because she had the eyes of a bird of prey and could see in the dark didn't mean that Gilda didn't like to see the sun, feel the warmth of it slapping her face on a hot day, feel the wind through her feathers. There could have been none of that here, even when this was a living, breathing – breathing stale air that had been trapped underground for too long, but still – city. And Gilda's discomfort was made worse by the feeling she had that the undercity would have been the place where all the faunus lived because they couldn't afford to live on the surface.

She was surprised that Atlas hadn't had the idea of doing that. It would be a big win for Robyn Hill: hey there, everyone, look how much more room there is in Mantle now! Pay no attention to the noises coming from the basement; that's just the faunus in their caves.

The fact that there were some – and there absolutely were some, and Gilda would call a liar anyone who claimed there weren't – who would say that this giant cavern was the proper place for the faunus only increased Gilda's discomfort with being here. They were not rats, to skulk in darkness, to crawl through tunnels and to hide in caves. They were men, with as much right to the sunlight and the blue sky and the wind on their faces as any human. Some of them might be born into darkness, but that didn't mean that they had to make their homes in it.

At the moment, Gilda was standing on top of what had been some kind of tower block not far from the commercial rail yard. Beneath her, she could see the Atlesian Paladins, their stolen wonder weapons that would in no way be enough to turn the tide against all of the existing wonder weapons that Atlas already had at its disposal, loading dust bombs onto the rear cars in preparation for the attack. She wasn't sure exactly when the attack would take place, but the word said that it would come soon: in the next few days, tomorrow, even today. Much sooner than originally planned. Cinder wanted to step up the timetable. She'd screwed up at Beacon, so now, the White Fang had to work harder to pick up the slack.

All around her, the lifeless crumbling city of the dead stretched as far as she could see, black stone towers rising out of the earth, climbing upwards out of the rock below to reach like so many desperate hands for the rock above. Streets that had once teamed with life now lingered silent and abandoned. Apartment blocks that had once housed hundreds of families now crumbled into dust like ants' nests after the exterminator has paid a visit, their shattered windows staring out like the eyeless sockets of blind men with only darkness visible behind. Instead of the sounds of cars, trains, motorcycles, footfalls, conversations, instead of any of the sounds of life, there was only the dim humming of the elevators the White Fang had repaired and reactivated to get all of their gear down here, the sounds of rats scurrying around amidst the ruins, and the distant growling of the grimm who lurked on the outskirts of the under-city on the off-chance that any humans should return.

Gilda's wings ruffled in the cold. Wasn't it supposed to get warmer the further down you got? Then why was it so cold down here in this vast cavern? It was as if she could feel the breath of all the ghosts upon her feathers. Or perhaps it was just the foreboding that she felt, as enormous as the under-city itself, that felt like ice upon her skin.

She felt so cold. So cold and so filled with dread it was a wonder that she wasn't attracting grimm.

Yet she was not. Nobody was. Gilda was standing on the roof of this tower as a sentinel, with the rifle that she had temporarily borrowed from Applejack in her hands – it was a really nice gun; it was going to be a real wrench to give it back, but give it back she would, or she would be just another thieving faunus – as she scanned the derelict deserted streets around her, but there was no sign of any grimm. They avoided the White Fang camp as assiduously as they avoided the old Merlot Industries complex – although what they were afraid of there, no one could say, certainly not the White Fang patrols who had been sent out to investigate but never returned; suffice to say that the White Fang also avoided the place and leave it at that.

That refusal of the grimm to trouble them in their base might be bad for the plan, considering that the whole point was that they were going to lure grimm into Vale once they busted a whole in the defences, but for right now, it was certainly good for all the vast numbers of White Fang that were mustering amongst the ruins. Prepping the train was hard enough without having to stop every five minutes to fight off grimm.

Perhaps that was why the creatures had stopped bothering them once she showed up. Perhaps they could tell that Cinder didn't want her plans to be disturbed.

That woman… the dead city wasn't the only thing giving Gilda the creeps.

She wondered if she'd been assigned watch up here to get her away from Applejack so that she couldn't interfere with whatever Cinder had planned for the Atlesian huntress. She hoped not. Not that she trusted Cinder not to be so devious, but she still hoped that Adam was better than that. How much better, she wasn't sure and wasn't prepared to bet on, but… better.

He was still good enough that he had let Fluttershy go, for no reason and for absolutely nothing in return.

And that means he'll keep Applejack alive for now.

I hope.

There was, of course, a difference that Adam had made quite clear: he had finally been won around to the idea that Fluttershy had no place in this war. Gilda would have been a little put out that it was the fact that Fluttershy liked birds that swung it rather than anything she'd said to him, but she was willing to take what she could get. Fluttershy was safe; that was what mattered.

Applejack was different… barrel of apples. Applejack was a huntress, and Adam had made it clear that a huntress was fair game.

Gilda could understand his reasoning, but that didn't mean she liked it very much.

After what she had seen last night, Gilda almost found herself – and this was something she hadn't thought that she'd ever admit to – hoping in Cinder. After all, Cinder, although she hadn't seemed to like the idea of letting Fluttershy go, had gone along with it in the end, and she hadn't even taken payment for it when she could have done. It seemed… it was almost like she had something to prove.

Gilda could relate to that. She had something to prove as well.

I still hate her guts, though.

One good deed didn't make her forgiven, not by Gilda; Gilda wasn't sure that she could ever forgive Cinder Fall for what she was about to do to the White Fang.

But perhaps she might not murder Applejack while Gilda wasn't there.

She wasn't there because someone had to keep watch, and it might as well be her. Protecting Applejack didn't excuse her from duty, after all.

But Gilda still would have rather been down there; apart from anything else, when she was down with Rainbow's friends – Rainbow's friend now, the other one having gone free – she didn't feel quite so oppressed with dread.

Down below, as well as an absence of grimm, Gilda could see the White Fang hard at work preparing for their attack: Paladins picked up dust containers and bombs that would have taken many men to move if they could be moved at all; those with engineering training worked on the train; those without any training trained with their weapons under the direction of the more experienced fighters. Adam was everywhere, giving encouragement, exhorting to effort, his red sword held aloft above his head as a symbol of strength and of defiance both.

The White Fang prepared for its attack. Its glorious, forlorn, doomed attack. Watching the preparations going on down below, Gilda couldn't escape the feeling that it was all going to end in terrible tragedy.

She rubbed her eyes with one hand. Fear would not let her sleep. It was her constant companion in this place, and it would not let slumber come anywhere near her skull. How she wished she could be out of here.

This place was made by those that are dead; let them keep it.

Gilda heard something, a scuffing sound behind her. She spun, the stolen rifle rising to her shoulder, but it turned out to be Strongheart, coming up onto the roof from inside the tower.

Gilda sighed as she lowered her gun. "You scared me there."

"Who did you think it would be?" Strongheart asked plaintively. "There's only us here."

"For now maybe. For how long?"

"Huh?" Strongheart asked as she approached. "What are you talking about?"

Gilda frowned. "I'm not sure myself. But I… I've got this feeling, you know. Like something's coming, and we're not ready for it."

Strongheart frowned. "One of the captives is gone, isn't she?"

"Yeah."

Strongheart waited for a moment. Gilda didn't say anything, so Strongheart demanded, "Did you let her go?"

Gilda snorted. "If I had, do you think I'd still be breathing?"

"That's not an answer," Strongheart insisted. "You saw Adam going in to the house where they're being held, you followed him-"

"And what do you think, that I overpowered Adam?" Gilda asked. "That I let one of the prisoners go but left the other because I didn't like her face?" She paused for a moment. "Adam let her go."

Strongheart's eyes widened. "No!"

"Yes," Gilda insisted. "And that's a good thing."

"Why?"

"Why?" Gilda repeated. "Because she wasn't a fighter, she wasn't looking for trouble, she just had the bad luck to run into Cinder on the road, she wasn't any part of this! Do you think Adam should have killed her instead?"

"My mother wasn't part of this," Strongheart whispered. "But the humans killed her anyway."

Gilda winced. "I won't defend that," she said, "I can't. But if we start killing every human we can kill, without worrying about whether they deserve to die or not, if we don't… if we don't discriminate, then where does it end?"

"In fire," Strongheart whispered. She hesitated. "Why… why did Adam let her go?"

Because Adam used to like birds, Gilda thought. That sounded strange when said out loud, so she tried to put it a little better. "Because he found a spark of kindness in himself that the world hadn't extinguished yet. Because he found that Fluttershy wasn't so different from us, even if she is a human. Because… because he recognised that it was the right thing to do. He let her go, sent her back to her friends-"

"'Her friends'?" Strongheart repeated. "They're here."

"Somewhere up top, yeah," Gilda acknowledged. "And Adam sent her back to them. Didn't ask for anything in return. Not a thing."

Strongheart was silent for a moment. "So… what you're saying is that we've been nicer than our enemy has ever been to us, but we've got nothing to show for it?"

Gilda snorted. "Sounds about our lot in life, don't you think?"

"Isn't that supposed to be what we're fighting against?"

"We're fighting for Cinder Fall now, whatever that means," Gilda replied.

"Adam-"

"She has Adam right where she wants him; he just doesn't see it," Gilda insisted. "Just like he didn't see Blake losing faith until it was too late."

"Blake betrayed us!" Strongheart snapped.

"That's my point: Adam didn't see it coming; even though he was closer to Blake than anyone, he had no idea what she was thinking."

"Adam's our leader," Strongheart declared. "He knows what he's doing; we need to trust him!"

"We don't need to follow him off a cliff, and he has no right to ask it!" Gilda snapped. "And she certainly doesn't." She rested her borrowed rifle on her shoulder. "Adam… Adam's a good leader. I still believe that. He's our lord of war. Bravest guy I've ever seen. But if he goes up against Ironwood head to head, Ironwood will crush him, and us with him." She frowned. "And I think Cinder knows that. Maybe she's even counting on it. I don't know what her plan is, but it isn't for us to overthrow Vale. Do you really want to die?"

Strongheart hesitated. She trembled, either from fear or from the cold. "No," she admitted. "But I will if I have to, for the White Fang and the faunus. Like my father did."

"We help the faunus and the White Fang more by living to fight another day," Gilda muttered. She turned away from Strongheart for a moment and wandered to the very edge of the building.

Strongheart joined her, or almost joined her. Conscious of the fact that she didn't have wings, she didn't risk a fall in quite the same way. "Why did you protect those humans? They're… they're human."

"They are," Gilda agreed. "But they can't make me the bad guy. Only I can do that."

"They wouldn't protect you if you were their prisoner."

"That's what makes them the bad guys instead of me," Gilda said.

Strongheart shook her head. "I don't get it. Adam… Adam hasn't led us wrong yet. Blake betrayed him, but that's her fault, not his; she was so… she had everybody fooled, she fooled me, how was he supposed to not be fooled by her when he loved her the most of anyone in the whole world? This is the right thing we're doing here."

"Because he says so?"

"Because we have to do something!" Strongheart cried. "We're all fighting desperately to protect the things that we care about, but what good is fighting to protect when our feelings are the only weapons we have? So what if Cinder's weird and creepy? She's got the power that we need and Adam knows it. He knows it just like he knows the way to victory for us. I'm willing to fight, even if it is dangerous, even if I die; we're all willing to give our lives for freedom. Are you?"

Gilda rounded on her. "I have scars from when my aura broke, but I kept fighting. Against Atlas, against the Schnees, against all of them. I'm not a coward."

"Then why-?"

"Because I wouldn't give a single life for a pointless victory, and certainly not for a glorious defeat," Gilda said. She sighed. "I want to trust Adam. I want to put my faith in him and in his vision. I want to believe that he's the best of us, the greatest faunus, the one who's going to lead us to the land of milk and honey. I want to trust Adam. But I can't trust her. And while she has her claws in him, that means that I can't trust him either. And this place… we should have left this place to the ghosts."

Strongheart fell momentarily silent. "So what happens now? If the enemy is here, does that mean they're going to come down after us?"

Before Gilda could answer, Strongheart was answered instead by a fusillade of shots echoing across Mountain Glenn, breaking the silence that prevailed within the city of the dead.

"I think that's them now," Gilda declared. "And they don't sound too pleased to be here."

XxXxX​

"Well, this place looks nice," Sunset said as she strode into New Street Station, her boots crunching on the broken glass beneath her feet. "Very hypermodern." She wasn't actually a fan of the style – she preferred classical architecture – but this was hardly the place for truthful opinions about construction styles. Rather, this was the time to show that, in spite of their difficulties on the way here, she was completely refreshed, with not only her aura restored – courtesy of Jaune – but her good humour as well.

"That being said," she went on, "I'm not sure that I'd recommend a visit. It's practically the only thing in this city that's not a dump. It just isn't worth coming here."

Rainbow Dash smirked as she peeled herself off the wall and walked across the empty concourse towards them. "We were wondering when you'd decide to show up, weren't we, Blake?"

Blake rolled her eyes and shook her head.

Sunset vaulted over the ticket barriers. "We might have been here sooner if your directions were better."

"Oh, I'm sorry that the safe route was a little…" Rainbow trailed off for a moment. She walked towards Sunset, leaning forward. "What's the word I'm looking for?"

"Circuitous," Sunset whispered.

"Thanks," hissed Rainbow, before she raised her voice, "I'm sorry that the safe route was too circuitous for you." She folded her arms. "Blake and I actually had to work to get here."

"Oh, you think we were just strolling along, do you?" Sunset asked. "Let me tell you something, because you didn't clear the route properly, we still had to fight our way through."

Rainbow was silent for a couple of seconds. "Was this after they started jamming communications?"

"You know about that?"

"Of course we know about that," Rainbow said sharply. "I mean, not that Twilight's drones were going to be of much use underground, but…"

"Is there a point," Pyrrha inquired politely, "at which Team Tsunami will come to aid us, if we send no word?"

"By now, they'll have reported the loss of contact to General Ironwood," Rainbow replied after a fashion. "But without a request from us or an order from the General, they won't undertake a rescue mission." She paused. "Not for another few hours, anyway."

Professor Goodwitch arched one eyebrow. "Meaning, Miss Dash?"

Rainbow managed to muster a slight grin. "Meaning… if I know Trixie, when it eventually comes down to a choice between sitting on her hands and doing something, she'll do something. Just as soon as she's talked herself round to the idea."

"Really?" Professor Goodwitch murmured. "And the rest of her team will go along with this?"

"Starlight will agree it's the right thing to do, Sunburst will go along with them, and Tempest will huff and puff, but she won't actually try to stop them," Rainbow explained. "You know, I don't think they're actually going to join the military when they graduate."

"No?" Sunset asked. "What are they going to do instead, join the Happy Huntresses?"

"Nah," Rainbow replied. "But it wouldn't surprise me if you heard about a group called the Great and Powerful Huntresses running around making noise in Atlas in a few years' time. In a legal way. Mostly."

"Is that a fact, Miss Dash?" Professor Goodwitch said softly. "That's certainly interesting to know."

Rainbow glanced at Sunset.

Sunset shrugged. "Maybe she's thinking they made the wrong choice."

Rainbow's eyes narrowed.

"I'm just saying," said Sunset.

Rainbow snorted. "So, what kind of trouble did you run into?"

"A unique kind of grimm," Sunset said. "Like an ursa, but worse. A lot worse. It was so well-armoured as to be almost impregnable, could move silently on top of that, and it could extend its neck out and let it swing around like a snake."

"We ran into some chills," Rainbow said flatly.

Sunset stared at her. "Okay, that is worse," she admitted.

"And there may be more," Blake declared, stepping away from the wall against which she had been leaning. "After all, Mountain Glenn is the perfect home for them." She hesitated.

"Blake," Rainbow said. "You don't have to-"

"Yes," Blake said. "I do, this is important." She closed her eyes and looked down at her feet for a moment. "A chill… it possessed me."

Sunset's eyes widened. Blake… Blake had been possessed? A chill had gotten Blake? Blake, they had almost lost Blake? She rounded on Rainbow Dash. "And you let this happen?"

"Sunset-" Blake began.

Sunset ignored her, jabbing a finger into Rainbow's face. "This is the last time that I leave Blake alone with you, how could you-?"

"Sunset Shimmer!" Pyrrha's voice was stern and unexpectedly loud; it sliced through Sunset's shouting like her Miló sliced through most grimm. Her eyes were hard as steel; just looking at them was enough to make Sunset's ears wilt. "I hardly think," she continued, in a voice that was clipped with anger, "that Blake needs you to turn this into some kind of competition about who cares more about her. Shame on you."

Sunset took a step backwards. Her throat felt very dry, as though a sudden heatwave had begun. "I-"

"Everyone here cares about Blake," Pyrrha said, her voice quieter now but not much softer, as she crossed the concourse to where Blake stood. Only then, as Pyrrha put her arms around Blake's shoulders, did her voice soften. "How are you?"

"I'm fine now, Pyrrha, really," Blake murmured.

"Are you sure?" Pyrrha asked. "Because if not-"

"I'm fine," Blake insisted.

"How are you fine?" Penny asked. "Chill possession is supposed to be irreversible. Even when the chill leaves the victim's body, it… it kills the victim."

"That's not true," Ruby replied. "Uncle Qrow says that you can save the victim once the chill has gone if you have the proper tools."

"It turns out you can also… exorcise the chill, for want of a better word," Blake said, "with a concentrated pulse of aura applied to the victim, as though you were-"

"Unlocking their aura for the first time," Jaune finished.

Blake looked at him. "Exactly. It's how Rainbow was able to drive it out of me. And if anyone else is possessed-"

"We can save one another the same way," Pyrrha said. "That… that's quite ingenious, Rainbow Dash; how did you devise such a strategy?"

"Uh… I didn't," Rainbow said.

"I do not remember this method being taught at Atlas," Ciel pointed out.

"No, it's not," Rainbow admitted.

Sunset's eyes narrowed. "So where did it come from?"

"You don't want to know," Rainbow replied.

Jaune frowned. "Wasn't that in Daring Do and the Adventure of the Azure Amulet?"

"You read Daring Do as well?"

"Of course!" Jaune cried. "Who doesn't?"

"Those of us who missed that reference, apparently," Ciel declared. "Rainbow Dash, you hazarded Blake's safe recovery on a method suggested by a-"

"It worked," Blake pointed out. "Here I am, still me: Blake. That being the case, I'm not inclined to look too closely at the means of my salvation. Just so long as we now know how we can save each other, if we need to."

"But let's all try and avoid getting possessed, if we can," Sunset said. "A. K. Yearling may have done her research, but I'd rather we didn't have to go around sort-of unlocking one another's auras."

"Indeed," Professor Goodwitch concurred. "That being said… Miss Dash, that was good, quick thinking on your part. Many huntsmen would have allowed the… dubious origin of such a method to sour them on the attempt. You were willing to take a chance, and because of that, you saved a comrade. I imagine James will be quite impressed."

Rainbow's back stiffened. "Thank you, ma'am."

"Is that the way down?" Sunset asked, gesturing to the hole in the wall which opened into a void of gaping blackness.

"Yep, that's the one," Rainbow said.

Sunset approached, followed by the others. "A lot of steps," she said, glancing at the sign.

"Uh huh," Rainbow agreed.

"Come with me," Sunset said, drawing Rainbow off from the rest of the group, putting one hand around her shoulder to steer her closer to the emergency stairwell. "Have you had a look down there?"

"I've taken a look, but even with my goggles on, I couldn't see much. We agreed not to go down there until everyone made it here."

"I know," Sunset said. She paused. "Thank you, for saving Blake."

"I'll always save Blake," Rainbow said.

Sunset grinned. "And I'm sorry for the way I acted before. You know… it's stuff like this that is why her ex wants to murder us both."

Rainbow chuckled. "I can live with that."

"I'd rather he didn't," Sunset muttered.

Sunset let her hand fall from Rainbow's shoulder and stared into the dark void. Adam was waiting down there, with his terrible red sword. Cinder was waiting down there, with her smiles and her cruel words and her pain and all her many schemes. The host of the White Fang was waiting down there, and a greater host of grimm besides. Everything was waiting down in the darkness. Everything they had come to fight, everything that desired to fight them, glory and good fortune, death and infamy, they were all waiting down below.

Destiny was waiting for them down those stairs.

Now is the moment to stride to our glory and to our destiny.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet, Sunset did not wish to stride, not now. She was overcome by a sudden sense of dread that chilled her spine, that froze her feet, that set her whole body trembling.

If she descended into the darkness, she would find her fate, and it would be an ill-fate.

All her pride, all her bravado, it was stripped away from her in that moment, blown away by the chill wind that seemed to issue up from out of the dark.

This was no place for her. It was made by those who were dead, and the dead kept it.

"Sunset?" Pyrrha asked softly. "Is everything alright?"

Sunset looked at her, she forced herself to look at her, and the sight of Pyrrha's fair face, her gleaming armour, the sight of her in all her glory drove away the momentary affliction that had stricken Sunset so.

She could not turn away. Everyone was counting on her. More to the point, they would not turn away, and she would not forsake them.

Now is the moment to stride to our glory and to our destiny.

"I'm fine," Sunset lied. "But I am also going first down the steps, because it's a deep dark hole, and I have a duty of care. And I will brook no argument in this."

Pyrrha was silent a moment as she stared into Sunset's eyes. "Then you shall receive none," she promised.

"Then with you behind me, I shall walk without fear," Sunset declared. That was another lie, but it sounded very grand.

The others stacked up behind her. It was the order that they had been before, except that Sunset was in the lead with Pyrrha behind her. Rainbow and Blake were left to take up positions at the rear.

After dealing with chills, Sunset was inclined to say they'd earned a break at the back.

Sunset raised Sol Invictus to her shoulder, switched on the flashlight she had tapped to the barrel – to the side of the barrel; hopefully, it wouldn't obstruct the movement of the bayonet – and cast a nightvision spell on her eyes.

The world turned green before her, and she could see a little into the blackness of the staircase.

She could not see much, but what she could see was happily devoid of peril.

Sunset took her first step, then another, then another, descending the stairs into the dark. And teams SAPR and RSPT – and Blake and Professor Goodwitch – followed her until they passed out of mortal sight.

It was not the stairs that really bothered Sunset. Yes, there were a lot of stairs, and it took some time to descend them all, but she could handle stairs. Canterlot had been a city of stairs, built as it was into the side of the mountain with no elevators of the sort that people in Remnant took for granted. No, she could handle stairs; she wasn't some cloistered scholar who only walked from one bookshelf to the next, after all.

No, it was not the stairs; it was the dark. If she had been walking up stairs that wound about the side of a mountain, or even going the other way, with the sun on her face and the wind kissing her cheeks, blowing through her hair, then she would have borne it without complaint.

But they were not rising, and there was no sun. They were descending, descending deeper and deeper into darkness, and the more steps they climbed down, the less light reached them from the sunlit station above, until they were plunged into complete darkness, with only the light of Sunset's torch to light the way and only what her magical eyes could show her else.

The dark pressed all around her, cloying, grasping, and worse than that, enshrouding; Sunset found herself reaching for the walls every so often to check that they were still there. There were times when she imagined that she might step into a void, a nothingness, with neither stair to bear her nor indeed anything for her to fall into.

She, and all her friends, had been consumed by darkness, descending towards a thing they could not see, leaving all light and hope behind.

The only sound in the whole world were their footsteps on the endless stair, echoing into the nothingness.

Then Rainbow Dash started to sing.

"Somewhere's a book,

With chapters still blank insi-i-ide,"

"Tell me she's not," Sunset muttered.

"It's the book of our lives,

And the story is ours to write."

"It would appear that she is," Ciel murmured.

"Ours to write," Penny added.

"How do you even know these lyrics?" Ciel demanded.

"I thought that was obvious," Penny replied. "Didn't you?"

Rainbow went on, her voice echoing through the darkness, in some ways seeming almost to drive back the darkness. "Some pages fade,

While others are black-"

"And whi-i-ite," Penny finished the line for her.

"And the story begins,

Again every time we try," Rainbow sang.

"Every time we try!" trilled Penny.

"Come on," Rainbow cried, "you can guess the words!"

Sunset rolled her eyes, but nevertheless, a smile pricked at the corners of her mouth as she took a less than literal stab in the dark.

"And hope shines eternal,

"And friends are all I need."

"All I need," Blake's voice was soft, but as clear as a bell.

"And hope," Rainbow joined Sunset for this line, "shines eternal."

"Shines eternal," Blake and Penny echoed.

"And the future is always bri-i-ight," Sunset sang.

"When you're here with me."

"Yeah!" Rainbow cried. "Take it away, Blake."

There was a pause, before Blake did indeed take it away with a voice like syrup being poured over pancakes.

"I've fought the darkness

And come out the other side."

"Other side," Sunset and Rainbow chorused.

Rainbow picked it up. "For the rainclouds will clear,

The way for the-"

"Sunny sky," Sunset and Blake chorused.

Sunset could hear Pyrrha taking a breath behind her. Her voice, when it came, was untrained and wobbled a little on the notes, but the fact that it was Pyrrha's voice meant that it couldn't have sounded bad even if she'd wanted it to. "I've been afraid,

And stayed through the longest-"

"Ni-i-ight." This time everyone, even Ciel, everyone except Professor Goodwitch who probably thought that they'd all lost it, took up the song, individual voices lost in a more or less harmonious melody.

Jaune's voice broke out from the others, and Sunset would have almost believed that he did have training, the way that he was hitting every single note pitch perfectly. "But morning still comes,

And with it, it brings a light."

"Yeah, it brings a light," Rainbow's voice rang out.

"And hope shines eternal." Once again, all voices joined together, chasing away shadow and fear both at once.

"And friends are all I need."

"Yeah, they're all I need!" Sunset declared.

"And hope shines eternal,

And the future is always bri-i-ight,

The future is always bri-i-ight,

Yeah, the future is always bri-i-i-ight,

When you're here with me."

They dissolved into laughter, all of them, and somehow, the stairs no longer seemed so dark any more.

"Miss Dash," Professor Goodwitch said, "I do wonder what they are teaching you at Atlas Academy."

Rainbow laughed. "Don't worry, Professor; I learned that one from my friends."

"The risk that anyone might have heard us," Sunset said, "is a lot less than the risk that… that I wouldn't have been in a fit state to do anything by the time I reached the bottom of the stairs. Thanks, Rainbow, I needed that."

And indeed, she was able to descend the rest of the way with a lighter heart by far, armed and well-prepared for whatever awaited them.

They reached the bottom of the stairs to find themselves in another concourse, darker – obviously – and more grimly functional than the one that they had left behind. The concourse above, with its glass skylight and stores on the upper balcony level, had possessed pretensions to be something more than just a train station, to be a place that could be enjoyed and, on some level, appreciated. This place, with concrete columns holding up the ceiling and grey concrete beneath the feet, seemed to aspire to be nothing more than a place people passed through on the way to catch their train.

That being said, as Sunset flashed her torch around, she could see a couple of modest coffee stores and a first class lounge for if you really couldn't bear to mingle with the commoners – and who could blame you if you didn't? There was also a sign to 'Exit this way for Lower Levels and Nightmarket.'

"Why do you they call it Nightmarket?" Penny wondered aloud.

"Probably because it is dark," Ciel replied. "Not very imaginative."

"It's a little more imaginative than calling it 'underground market,' right?" Jaune asked.

They followed the signs, leaving the subway station behind as they emerged into the Nightmarket itself. A host of stores spread out before them: media stores, candy stores, newsagents, toy stores, cards and wrapping paper stores, bookshops, pharmacists, beauticians; the map of the mall on the wall near where they came in proclaimed that there were two movie theatres in here, and supermarkets both budget and high-class, along with cafes, restaurants, and even dust and arms dealers.

If there was anything left in those last places after the White Fang had been here for a while, Sunset would be very surprised.

Her brow furrowed as she concentrated on the map. "If I remember the blueprints of the city correctly, if we head out through the west exit, then we'll have a straight shot to the rail yard."

"A direct route? Doesn't that mean we'll be spotted?" Blake asked.

"Not necessarily," Sunset replied. "And if we try and take an indirect route, we might get lost in this place."

"True," Blake murmured.

"We'll just have to watch out and avoid any patrols or guard posts," Sunset said. "We can take short detours if we have to, but following the straight line is our best shot."

Nobody demurred with that, and so, the group moved through the abandoned shopping centre, disturbing the long-settled dust with their footsteps.

There were no dead bodies here; at least, there were none that Sunset could see. Perhaps, when the undercity fell, things had been a little less panicked. Or perhaps there had simply been time to flee from the shops to die elsewhere.

She was very glad that they would not have to move down the tunnel which had connected Mountain Glenn to Vale; she could only imagine how many lost souls waited there, banging their hands upon the barrier, pleading for salvation.

Her whole body shuddered at the thought.

There were no dead here, though, only empty shops, doors still open, barriers still raised, all looking as if they were open for business, the cashiers and assistants having simply all stepped away on a break for a moment. The must-have toy sat piled in a central display in the toy store, the latest bestseller sat proud in the bookshop window, all the passing trivialities which nevertheless added up to a picture of a society extinguished, gone in a sudden flash, erased and yet left standing all the same, as though some god had simply annihilated all human life yet left all things nonhuman to stand in testament to their follies and their pride.

It was a little better than dead bodies, but that did not make it good to look upon.

There was no sign of any grimm here – until they reached the western exit, the doors they hoped to use to enter the city proper, and found a reasonably sized pack of beowolves lurking about as if on guard, rustling amongst the debris, growling and prowling but never straying far from the doors.

"Well, isn't this a coincidence," Sunset muttered.

"You think they're here to guard the doors?" Blake asked.

"I think," Sunset said, raising Sol Invictus to her shoulder, "that someone wants us to make some noise."

One or two of the beowolves raised their heads towards the group, snarling at them, signalling the rest of the pack.

Pyrrha formed Miló into rifle mode. "It seems that we have little choice but to oblige."

Rainbow Dash slung her shotgun over her back and drew her machine pistols. "Okay, let's kick these doors in and get this party started."

The beowolves charged.

They were met with fire and death.

Now all of Mountain Glenn would know they were here.

 

[ScipioSmith]

The Voice of Salem​

The Valish have sealed off the tunnels.

We cannot escape that way.

We have attempted to fortify the streets, but we cannot hold them for long. The grimm are too many – and too strong. The shadow we awakened approaches, and we have no way of withstanding it. On that, the huntsmen – those that yet live – all agree.

Even Professor Ozpin would stand little chance against it, they say, and he is not here.

If we remain, then we will die. Yes, the tunnel to Vale is sealed off, but it is not the only way to Vale. The journey will be difficult, and no doubt fraught with peril, but tomorrow, we will begin evacuating the population out through the emergency exits out of the tunnel. Those closest to Vale have been sealed already, but there are those further away. Once we are out, then we will march the remaining distance to Vale overland.

As I mentioned, it will be difficult and perilous, but it is the only choice we have.

To whomever reads this account, if you have found this and it is the last entry, then it means that I did not reach Vale.

If you have found this, then it means that we are gone.

Dead and gone.

Cinder guessed, from the fact that this account had been found in the ruins of Mountain Glenn's underground, that Crozier and his band of survivors had not even gotten so far as to emerge, blinking, into the sunlight via the emergency exits. Evidently, the grimm had moved more swiftly than he had been expecting, had broken through the defences more easily than he had feared they would, laid him and his people to waste before they could make their escape.

And thus, the final damnation, the final nemesis for their act of grave hubris. For was it not ironic that he who had complained of the hubris of his superior had, in the end, been just as foolish in believing that the grimm would allow him to escape?

Cinder heard the shots, shattering the peace of this cold, dead place.

Speaking of acts of hubris: hello, Sunset, you're… just a little early.

Cinder slammed the book shut, and deposited it on the bar upon which she had been sitting. She had read all that she cared to; she had no more need of it now. Perhaps, in days to come, if anyone else was ever bold enough to venture here, they too would find Crozier's account.

She hoped that they got as much out of it as she had.

So much that she had not known about this city, so much that she had only dimly felt but not had explained to her. Why, without that journal, she might never have known about all the extraordinary grimm that she had at her disposal.

She was saving the best for last, of course; she would not waste the shadow that had brought down Mountain Glenn to delay SAPR and RSPT, not least because it might actually have killed them, and she didn't want that.

No, that particular surprise was for Vale itself.

All the grimm were now for Vale itself.

Cinder strode out of her lair to find Emerald, Mercury, and Lightning Dust all awaiting her pleasure. Lightning was putting on her somewhat cumbersome dust delivery system; Mercury and Emerald, less encumbered, were already armed and looking well-prepared.

"It's them," Mercury said, "isn't it?"

Cinder smiled at him. "It is. Just as planned, they have come. And we will go to meet them, to buy time until our preparations are complete."

"Finally," Lightning growled. "Some real action."

"Don't underestimate our enemies," Cinder instructed them. As I have done once already, to my cost. "They are powerful, and what they lack in wit, they make up for in courage. But I have chosen you, all three of you, not only for your particular talents, but also for your spirits. You have it in your hearts to set this world ablaze and watch as the fire consumes all that has offered you nothing.

"What we do today will be the spark that will become a raging inferno that will devour Vale and spread to all the other kingdoms of the world.

"So come, quickly; destiny awaits us all." Cinder smirked. "And besides, our dear friends have come such a very long way to see us again. It would be unforgivable to keep them waiting too long."

XxXxX​

Gilda landed heavily on the ground, tucking her wings in behind her. The gunfire had ceased, but the railway yard was awash with activity, even more than it had been before the shooting started. The faunus of the White Fang were running this way and that, moving like ants after the nest is kicked, swarming around the train, ducking beneath the paladins and dodging their heavy footsteps.

Adam stepped out in front of her, "They've arrived," he said. "Blake and her… new friends. They've come down into the underworld." He paused, his expression stern. "Does that please you?"

Gilda scowled. "What kind of a question is that?"

Adam snorted. "There are times when I wonder who's side you're on, these days."

"I'm on the side of our people," Gilda said.

"There are times when I doubt that," Adam growled. "I understand now why you sought to protect the humans, but the rest? Carping, complaining, spreading doubt to me and anyone else who'll listen to you-"

"Maybe I wouldn't have to if I could get you to doubt just a little bit!" Gilda shouted. "This whole crazy plan is going to get us all killed; why can't you see that?"

"What makes you think I can't?" Adam asked.

Gilda gasped. Her eyes widened. For a moment, she was robbed of all speech; all the words that she might have said flew wordlessly out of her mouth unvoiced, even as that mouth opened and closed in silent shocked dismay. "You… I… what the hell?"

Adam took a step back, which was a good thing, as she might have taken a swing at him otherwise. "Do you think I'm an idiot?" he asked as he turned away from her. "Do you think that I don't know what's waiting for us on the other end of that tunnel? Do you think that I don't realise how many brave fighters are going to die when we enter the city?"

Gilda's mouth was dry. Her hands were shaking. Her head was awhirl with dizziness; she felt as though she might collapse at any moment. Sweat had come from out of nowhere in this cold place to make her black outfit stick to her skin. Her body armour and her weapons felt heavier than usual. "If you know all this… then why are-?"

"Because our old tactics aren't working," Adam said. "They don't accomplish anything, not on the scale we need. We need to be bigger, bolder-"

"We need to commit suicide?"

"Because Cinder has a plan," Adam said. "A plan that will set all of Vale on fire, but first, it needs a spark. And yes, that spark will be our blood, but face it, Gilda: we could fight for twenty years and spend just as many lives over that time, and it still wouldn't accomplish as much as Cinder's plans for Vale. She's going to change the world, and because of our assistance, there will be a place for our people in the new order. Isn't that worth fighting for? Isn't that worth dying for?"

"Only if it's a choice," Gilda said. "Does everyone know that they're going to their deaths? I don't think so."

"All of them are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice to achieve victory," Adam said. "The final victory and an end to our war."

"And who will be left to celebrate the end of the war?" Gilda demanded. "If we sacrifice the whole Vale chapter to bring down Vale, then what? Will the Mistral chapter have to wipe itself out to destroy Mistral, then Atlas, then Vacuo? Are the only ones left going to be the ones smart enough to retire to Menagerie and sit the fighting out?"

"Of course not," Adam said derisively. "When Vale falls – and it will fall – then a chain reaction will commence that will consume the world."

"But-"

"Enough," Adam said. "The time for discussion has passed. The enemy has come."

Right, Gilda thought. She was glad that Adam hadn't actually noticed – or hadn't cared enough to point out – the fact that she hadn't really answered his question about whether she was glad or not. She wasn't glad, at least not in the sense that she wanted to face off against Rainbow Dash again. But, on the other hand, it was a way out for Applejack, and she… well, she was kind of glad about that.

I miss the days when we were the good guys. "What are we going to do?"

"Cinder agrees that we can't wait any longer," Adam said. "I've ordered Noah to get the train loaded up as it stands and begin the operation."

"Cinder agrees, or Cinder told you?"

"Gilda!" Adam snapped. He looked at her over his shoulder. "Let me give you a piece of advice. When you command the Vale chapter, as you probably will, command it. Don't take the amount of crap from others that you've given me."

Gilda stared, eyes boggling a little as she tried to process just what he'd said to her. "When I… command?"

"There is no room on the martyr's path for a coward," Adam declared. "But there is room in the White Fang for someone who cares about the lives of our warriors. You're not getting on the train, Gilda. Take Strongheart, and anyone and anything left after the train departs, and get them out of Mountain Glenn before Atlesian reinforcements arrive. And leave Applejack exactly where she is. Their human friends will come to collect them soon enough."

Strongheart. She might not be able to save everyone, she wasn't able to save half of the people she wanted to, but at least she would be able to save Strongheart. "Boss, I… thank you, for sparing the kid."

Adam snorted. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Oh, come on, I already know that you've got a heart. The ship sailed on me not realising that when you spared Fluttershy. "What about you, boss? Are you getting on the train?"

"No," Adam said. "I'm going to give Noah as much time to prep and start the train as I can."

"Alone?"

"Cinder's people will be doing what they can; I'll join them," Adam said. "Our fighters have already demonstrated they're no match for these huntresses, but I… I might stand a chance." He drew his red sword, shining in the darkness. "And besides, I'm the only one who can set Blake free. After all that we've shared, I owe her that."

If that's what you call freedom, then no wonder you can order this mission so easily.

Blake, do you have any idea what a number you did on him by walking away like you did? Would you even care if you did know?

"You think that you'll walk back after that?" Gilda asked quietly, though this was a question to which she thought she could guess the answer. Adam was their lord of war, the mightiest warrior the White Fang possessed, their champion in the field against all enemies, but the enemy had champions of their own, and it seemed like a few of them had come to Mountain Glenn. Yes, Adam had gotten stronger since his earlier battles against Blake's new friends, but even so…

"So long as I free Blake and take another one or two of them with me," Adam declared, "it doesn't really matter if I come back or not."

"The hell it doesn't, we need you!" Gilda yelled. "You're our captain, the Sword of our people! You can't just throw that away because… we need you. Is Cinder getting on the train?" It was another question to which she thought that she could guess the answer.

Adam was silent for a moment. "We were never meant to be friends, Gilda, but I have always admired your passion, your zeal, your commitment to help our people. The things I thought I saw in Blake, but in you, I think that I am not deceived as I was then. Perhaps, in another life… we each have our parts to play, Gilda; we each have our duties to perform. We should give them our best. There can be no argument between us there, I hope."

"N-no, boss," Gilda murmured, suddenly at a loss for words. That was something which hadn't happened recently, not when she was talking with Adam, anyway. She… she felt as though she ought to say something, to do something, let him know…

Adam was right; they hadn't been friends. Most of the time, he scared her. Quite often recently, he had exasperated her. Honestly, Gilda had often wished that Sienna had named Blake to command the chapter, instead of yielding to the preference of the rank and file for Adam.

They hadn't been friends, but he had been her captain, and he had been their inspiration.

Their light of hope, and now, that hope was about to go into the darkness, never to shine again.

And she didn't know what to say.

And he was already walking away, his crimson blade like a lantern warding off the shadows of Mountain Glenn.

"Good luck," Gilda said softly, though whether she was wishing him luck or Blake luck or something else altogether – she might even have been wishing Rainbow Dash luck – she really couldn't have said.

Why did it have to be this way? Why couldn't Blake have stuck around with Adam and helped him get back to being a better person, the way he was before? Why did she have to walk away? Why did Dashie have to be on the wrong side? Why couldn't she see that the faunus would never be allowed to stand tall in more than token numbers unless they took the right by force? Why did Cinder have to show up and trouble them with her schemes in which the White Fang were merely playthings to be used and discarded?

Why couldn't everything be the way she wanted it, huh? She would have been fine with fighting a hopeless guerrilla war provided she had her best friend by her side and a pair of leaders she could look up to.

The door at the base of the tower block on which Gilda and Strongheart had been standing when they heard Rainbow and Blake arrived opened as Strongheart – who, lacking wings, had been forced to take the long way down – emerged into the street. She looked left and right. Adam had already passed out of sight.

Probably passed out of sight for the last time.

"What's going on?" she asked.

Gilda didn't reply. She gazed after Adam, even though she couldn't see him anymore, she still gazed that way as though she might catch a distant glimpse of him, as though his semblance might suddenly light up the dark and reveal him in all his terrible glory, one last time.

It didn't. She saw nothing. Nothing but the darkness.

"Gilda!" Strongheart cried, finally attracting Gilda's attention. "What's going on, is it-?"

"Yes," Gilda replied. "Yes, it's exactly what you think it is. Blake's come for us, and she's brought her friends with her."

Strongheart's eyes darkened with anger. "She shouldn't have come. I'll-"

"You'll do nothing!" Gilda snapped. "Adam's gone to take care of it himself."

"Alone?" Strongheart said. "That's-"

"His choice," Gilda said. "The train is being prepped and loaded, Adam's gone to make sure that there is time to complete that work before Blake can stop it; I'm to lead everyone who doesn't have a place on the train and all of the remaining equipment out of Mountain Glenn. And you're to come with me."

The anger in Strongheart's eyes was joined by and mixed with confusion tinged with sorrow. "I… I'm not joining the attack? But I thought that… why not? I can fight, I'm not just some kid!"

"But you are a kid," Gilda said. "And so you're coming with me, and we're getting out of here." Along with the rest of the lucky ones.

She was tempted, she was so very sorely tempted, to tell everybody that Adam had changed his mind, the attack was off, get off the train and out of Mountain Glenn, but… this had been Adam's last command, it might even be said to be his dying wish, and as much as Gilda disagreed with it, as much as she hated it, she didn't have it in her to countermand that.

Strongheart glared at her, and for a moment, Gilda was worried that she might defy her – after all, she had no proof of Adam's orders now that he'd gone, only her word. But thankfully, Strongheart did not defy her. Though she still looked resentful, she nodded her head. "So what are we going to do?"

"What Adam told us to do," Gilda said. "We're going to save as much as we can. I want you to start spreading the word amongst the men: Adam has taken the glory road; I'm in command now. I'll join you in just a moment."

"Where are you-?" Strongheart stopped. Her face fell. "The Atlesian."

"Adam told me to leave her where she was," Gilda said. "And I'm not going to cut her loose to join her friends in fighting Adam. But she deserves to have her gun back, or at least put where she can get it."

Strongheart stared up at her. "I don't get you, sometimes."

"You will, I hope," Gilda replied. "Now go on, spread the word."

Strongheart hesitated a moment before she nodded. "Alright, I will."

As she darted off, joining the mass of White Fang running this way and that, Gilda had no fear that she would get on the train anyway. Strongheart might have been a little too keen on vengeance against any human she could get her hands on – who could blame her, really, when you considered what had happened to her? – but she was a good kid, overall. She wouldn't say she was going to do one thing and then do another.

She had promised to obey Gilda, and she would.

Gilda turned away, moving quickly – she didn't have very long – towards the house where Applejack was being held.

She forced open the door and strode quickly inside.

Applejack looked up at her. "Ah thought Ah heard shootin' just then," she said softly.

"You did," Gilda replied. "Rainbow Dash and her friends have come to get you."

Applejack watched her. She didn't take her eyes off Gilda. They were wary eyes, like an animal caught in a snare. "Is that a fact," she murmured. "And what are y'all gonna do to me before she gets here?"

"Nothing!" Gilda exclaimed. "Gods, don't you trust me yet?"

"It ain't you that I don't trust," Applejack muttered.

Gilda snorted. "Adam's last instructions were to leave you here. Cinder didn't bother to leave any instructions. It seems you're just not worth caring about now that-"

"Now that Ah've served mah purpose and lured mah best friend here to die?" Applejack suggested acidly.

Gilda said nothing as she put Applejack's rifle down by the door. "For what it's worth," she said. "I wouldn't bet against Rainbow Dash."

"Neither would I," Applejack declared. "Doesn't mean I much like bein' in this position."

"No, I suppose you don't," Gilda allowed. She paused. "Anyway, your gun is right there, and I've let your dog run free so… I don't know, you can whistle for her or something. And for what it's worth, I hope you make it out of here." She turned to the door. "See you in hell, Atlas thug."

Applejack snorted. "See you in hell, White Fang scum."

XxXxX​

The undercity was like a hive, a creation more befitting giant ants than men, a great burrow carved out of the rock and stone to dwell in. Sunset had expected… she wasn't sure quite what she'd expected; the phrase 'underground city' conjured up all sorts of wild imaginings: a mine, a network of barren tunnel criss-crossing one another like the caverns under Canterlot where Sunset hadn't been supposed to go; a functional place, a city but underground, a place where the ceiling was no higher than the highest roof; a place of struts and sturdy supports, a place of arches and halls, a place where even though the ceiling rose ever so high, you could never lose sight of what was holding it up.

None of those expectations did justice to the underground city, which, as they stood on the steps leading down from the Nightmarket, they could behold at last.

And 'behold' was the right word, for the darkness had less power here than Sunset had feared, less than might have been expected from the walk down the steps and across the concourse. For not only had Mountain Glenn been cavernously excavated, not only had the city been dug far deeper into the earth than necessary, not only was the ceiling set high above the tallest tower, with nary a single column or beam to be seen, not only all of that, but in the ceiling had been set starlight. It was probably dust, although what dust would still be giving off light after all this time, and how it was being charged, Sunset could not tell. Perhaps it was not dust, and something else dug from the earth that Sunset could not identify. Either way, they had set whatever it was in the dark ceiling like stars spread across the heavens, where the silver lights twinkled beautifully so far above them.

It was not daylight, to be sure, but it transformed what Sunset had feared would be a lightless hole into something reminiscent of a night sky.

And though it did not illuminate Mountain Glenn as greatly as might have been desired yet, it was beautiful. A night sky, brought down beneath the ground, lights not scattered at random but forming patterns by their placement. Sunset was sufficiently interested in astronomy that she could recognise some of the patterns: Monstra, the Sea Feilong, Cenitaur. Others were alien to her eyes, and it occurred to her that not all of these patterns of light need mirror the celestial lights above; who was to say they had not sought to make their own constellations here beneath the earth?

It was, to Sunset's eyes, the most impressive thing about the whole endeavour, symbolic of the nature of Vale's ambition: to make a whole new world beneath the surface.

Symbolic of the overweening ambition that had destroyed Mountain Glenn.

Yet it was beautiful, nevertheless.

"'When he shall die,'" Blake murmured, "'take him and cut him out in little stars, and he will make the face of heaven so fine that all the world shall be in love with night.'"

Sunset glanced at her and smiled, but as she smiled, she could not help but glance away from Blake and towards Pyrrha.

If anyone amongst us could make the face of heaven so fine… The way that Jaune was looking at Pyrrha suggested that he had had the same idea.

But she will not die today.

No one will die today.

Sunset did not want to tear her eyes away from the sky. She did not want to look from the majesty above them to the tomb of the dead that lay around them.

When she looked at the stars above, she could forget that this whole city was spun about with spiders' webs and that Cinder sat the centre of it all, holding court, pulling the threads as she desired.

Sunset shook her head. No time to think about Cinder, the queen in the nest; no time to think about Adam, the beast who dwelt within this labyrinth. Just time to do what they came here to do: find the White Fang base, find out what they were doing, put a stop to it.

Put like that, it sounded simple enough.

Of course, it would not actually be that simple. Not with the enemies they faced. Cinder for one, but Cinder did not frighten Sunset the way that Adam did. That red sword. She felt that she could not cease to be afeared of that sword until she had it in her possession. Only then would she have triumphed over him.

Only then would he not terrify her.

Unbidden, Sunset's hand began to stray towards her belly, towards the wound that he had given her upon the train.

Another hand caught hers before it could reach the hastily repaired hole in her cuirass that he had made. It was Blake's hand.

"Whatever happens," she said, "we'll face him together, if we have to."

Sunset's brow furrowed. "How did you-?"

"I knew," Blake said.

Sunset nodded. There was no point denying it, after all. "Are you sure? I mean, you two-"

"That's why it has to be me," Blake said. "I have to face him, after everything. And besides… I won't let you face him alone."

Sunset nodded. "Thank you."

"We should move out," Rainbow said. "I think it's that way."

Having emerged from the Nightmarket – and that name made a little more sense when you saw what was on the other side of it – they stood at the edge of a square plaza. The Nightmarket took up one side of the square, and the other was wholly occupied by a movie theatre, the fading posters advertising the blockbusters of twenty years ago. The way out of the plaza, directly ahead of them, had been barricaded up, and so, Rainbow had pointed towards the the police station on the far side of the plaza, a large and looming fortress-like structure with barred windows, the tattered remains of a Vale flag rotting away on a metal pole above the door, and what looked like neon lights that would, when lit, have spelled 'Vale Police Department' though now so many letters were missing that it was more like 'V li e part t.'

Nevertheless, that was the direction in which Sunset led the way, the flashlight taped to her gun lit and her night vision spell showing her a little of the dark deserted square over which they ran. There had once been a fountain at the centre of it, from the looks of things, but it was smashed and still by now. It looked like there had also been a statue outside the police station, but that had been smashed as well, and Sunset wasn't going to stop and look for the name on the plinth.

A couple of wrecked police cars rusting away in the dank, damp dark barred their way, but Sunset leapt over the bonnet of one of them easily, and the rest of the group followed her lead as she climbed the steps and pushed at the claw-marked door into the station house.

The door stuck. Something was wedged against it from the other side; it was barely moving. Sunset pushed again, and when it still didn't move very much, Pyrrha jogged up the steps and put her shoulder to it.

"On three?" she suggested.

"Sure," Sunset said. "One... two... three!"

They heaved against the door, pushing against it with all of the enhanced might that their aura lent them, and gradually, the door shifted backwards with a screeching sound from whatever was trapped against it and was blocking their access. It didn't want to move, but Sunset and Pyrrha pushed against it so relentlessly that it had no choice but to move until the crack in the door was large enough for Sunset to slip through.

She swept her torch around the corridor in which she found herself and leapt back with a strangled cry as the beam alighted upon a body, a skeleton now, face framed in what Sunset could only interpret as a cry of horror mirroring her own. They were dressed in the remains of tactical or riot gear, with a dust-covered shotgun lying at their side and a half-empty box of shells, the cartridges spilling out across the floor, beside them too.

Judging by the state of their vest, whoever it was had been ripped apart.

"What is it?" Pyrrha asked anxiously as she slipped through the door. She soon saw what the light was shining on. "Oh. Oh my."

Sunset shone the light somewhere else. "Just a little reminder of what happened to this place."

It turned out that they still hadn't opened the door quite enough to accommodate Jaune, who had the broadest shoulders out of all of them and the most bulky armour beside, but now that Sunset and Pyrrha were in, they were able to move the filing cabinets that had been blocking the door so that it opened completely.

"They must have barricaded themselves in here," Pyrrha murmured.

"Or tried to," Sunset replied. Obviously, it hadn't worked too well.

"Last stand," Rainbow muttered.

They found more skeletons as they traversed the station. Sunset was glad that they weren't bodies, but the fleshless, browning skeletons with their gaping open mouths were bad enough. They lay on the floor, slumped over desks or fallen back into chairs, half-propped up against the walls. Some of them had weapons lying beside them or still gripped in one skeletal hand: shotguns, submachine guns, assault rifles, simple pistols. Some nightsticks or fire axes lay nearby, but some of the bodies had no weapons at all. Some of them were children. Sunset saw one pair of bodies that looked like a mother cradling a child in her arms.

"When the grimm started to pour in, these people must have fled here hoping that the police could protect them," Pyrrha murmured.

Jaune turned and threw up. "I'm sorry," he said. "I just…"

"We understand," Pyrrha said, putting a hand on his shoulder. "This is difficult for all of us."

"Professor," Blake murmured. "Were all of these people left here to die when the grimm invaded the city? Did Vale even try to get them out?"

"They tried," Professor Goodwitch said, in a voice laced with disapproval. "But they didn't try hard enough."

Rainbow sniffed. "In Atlas-"

"Vale asked Atlas for its assistance when the grimm overran the upper city, and Atlas refused," Professor Goodwitch declared tartly. "The north has no right to lecture us, not about this."

Rainbow was silent a moment. She glanced down at the floor with all its horrors. "I… I didn't know that, Professor?"

"Why didn't we help?" Penny asked. "I thought we were supposed to be the protectors of the world."

"That… that is our… role," Ciel murmured, sounding like she was trying to explain the death of a pet to a child. "But that role has… it has not always been… universally embraced. Politics… it is a fickle business, the masses do not always choose wisely, and General Ironwood was not at that time in command. Those to whom the decision fell… they were not worthy of Atlas."

"That's… a generous way of putting it," Ruby remarked.

Ciel looked at her. "Do you have a less 'generous' way of putting it?"

"My uncle says it's because there was nothing in it for you," Ruby declared. "And you couldn't be bothered."

Ciel inhaled through her nostrils. "I was not aware that you had had such contempt for us all this time."

"I don't have contempt for you," Ruby replied. "I just don't think you're our saviours either."

"Ciel's right," Rainbow said. "Things are different now. The General is in command, and we have good people like Cadance on the Council. Atlas is better than it used to be. Whatever happened twenty years ago, we're here now. This isn't going to happen to Vale."

"No, it won't," Ruby said, and her voice had lost all of its childishness, replaced with a settled determination. "We'll stop them, no matter what it takes."

"Of course we will," Sunset said. "Penny: use it, remember? Chin up."

Penny gave a broken nod. "Right."

"We should keep moving," Sunset said. "Staying here doesn't get us anywhere. And I think we all want to be away from this as quickly as possible." If I'd thought about what we were likely to find here, I'd have suggested we circle around the building instead of going through it.

She led the way, and they soon found how the grimm had gotten past the barricades on the doors: it looked like an especially large creep or something had simply smashed a hole through one of the walls, and no doubt smaller grimm hadn't been far behind.

The police might have fought bravely, but without huntsman-tier weapons and training – without aura – they'd never stood a chance.

Keen as they all now were to get out of here as quickly as possible, Sunset headed straight for the hole in the wall and the others followed.

"Wait," Professor Goodwitch ordered.

Sunset looked back. It was unusual for the professor to actually give a command like that. "Professor?"

"Something's coming," Professor Goodwitch said.

Sunset listened. She could hear it too. A clicking sound, something that she couldn't place and hadn't heard before, but definitely getting closer to them.

Nobody needed to be told what to do. In an instant, their weapons were out, unfolding with a variety of clicks and hydraulic hisses into their desired configurations: Gambol Shroud in pistol mode, Miló in rifle form, Crescent Rose fully extended with blade bared and barrel long. Distant Thunder unfolded itself, and Rainbow cocked Unfailing Loyalty as the blades of Floating Array – folded in half for laser fire – formed a halo around Penny's head. Sunset raised Sol Invictus to her shoulder and was ready to activate the dust sewn into her jacket at the earliest need. Jaune drew Crocea Mors from its scabbard, unfurled his shield and held it before him. Professor Goodwitch stood a little behind the students, her riding crop at the ready. They stood in a rough semi-circle, a crescent facing the hole in the wall, listening to that sound, that unnatural clicking sound as it slowly, inexorably, drew closer and closer towards them.

Sunset licked her lips. Whatever this thing was, this clicking creature that she'd never heard nor heard of in Professor Port's class – would it have killed him to have told a story about a rare and unusual kind of grimm before they met it? – it was taking its sweet time to get to them.

And yet, she had no doubt that it would get to them eventually, and not only because the sound was getting closer but because it was the only sound. It had to know that they were there. It had to be coming for them.

Sunset's mouth twisted into a sneer. Let it come. They weren't the cops. They did have huntsmen tier weapons and training. Whatever this clicking thing was, it wouldn't find them such easy prey as the last denizens of Mountain Glenn.

"Please lower your weapons," a voice declared, a voice that had all of the commanding presence of Celestia but – as far as Sunset could hear – none of the warmth, or even the potential for warmth, as a pair of red tentacles tipped with spear-tips of bone appeared from below the bottom of the hole, raised like hands in surrender. "I mean you no harm."

Sunset glanced at her friends. What kind of grimm could speak? What kind of human had tentacles? A squid faunus? But a look at Blake showed that she was just as confused as they were, so clearly, she hadn't seen – or heard – anything like this before either.

Nobody shot, but nobody lowered their weapons either.

"Who are you?" Sunset demanded. "What are you? Show yourself!"

"Of course. It would be very hard for us to speak otherwise." The thing that emerged through the hole and into the precinct station house was a floating sphere, lightly encrusted with armour plating in the traditional bone-white of the creatures of grimm, with two rows of long, sharp fangs lining the bottom of the ball facing downwards. In addition to the two tentacles currently raised in a pacific gesture, there were six more of them still trailing along the ground, lifted up just enough so that they didn't touch it but otherwise utterly still as the sphere advanced upon them.

A golden light glowed within the sphere, and within the light, Sunset could perceive the shape of a woman, a bleached nightmare of a woman with eyes as red as blood and veins standing out in sharp relief upon her face, like an undead monster from one of Jaune's comics, but a woman nevertheless.

"Greetings, children," she said as the sphere rose up into the air so that she within it was looking down upon them all. "I've heard so much about you. It really is a pleasure to make your acquaintance at last."

"Who…" Jaune gasped. "Who are-?"

She laughed. "Forgive me. Where are my manners? Of course, we haven't been properly introduced. I do so hope that you overlook my discourtesy. My name is Salem. You may have heard of me."

Sunset's eyes widened. Salem? The Salem? The great enemy that Professor Ozpin had told them of, the queen in shadows, the brain that was guiding every evil hand, the hand that was tugging all the strings, the black king moving all her knights and pawns and queens… and she was right in front of them now. Or at least, a projection of her was. This was clearly magic of some sort. In spite of her shock – perhaps because of it, because it was easier to think about spells than the fact that the great enemy had shown herself to them – Sunset could deduce that this tentacled creature was clearly functioning very much like a seeing stone. She would be willing to bet lien that Salem was speaking into another such creature from wherever she actually was, the two linked together by a spell almost like the ones that had gone into making Sunset's journal to Celestia. It was an impressive piece of magic, especially for this world, so she must-

Sunset's thoughts were interrupted by a snarl of anger from Ruby as she raised Crescent Rose to aim squarely at the floating grimm. Her finger began to squeeze the trigger.

"STOP."

Ruby's eyes widened. A squeak escaped her lips. She did not fire. She did not move.

Nobody moved. Sunset found that she could not move. It was… no, it was not like a paralysis spell; it was more like… it was like her limbs were literally frozen with nerves. How could she move? How could she fire? How could she turn weapon or magic upon the Queen of Grimm? How could she even contemplate such madness? This was an enemy who could not be defeated, who would be here when the bones of Sunset Shimmer and all the rest had turned to dust. How could she even think of acting against her, of using violence against her? How could she dream of doing anything but stand... and listen?

"What…" Sunset found her tongue was yet her own. "What have you done?"

Salem did not respond to her. Rather, she looked down at Ruby with disappointment. "I am not here to fight. Much like your dear Professor Ozpin, I prefer to use others as my weapons. You cannot take my life, and I am not here to take yours. I only wish to speak with you."

"Whatever you think you have to say, I can assure you that we are not interested," Professor Goodwitch growled. Her whole body was shaking, as if she were trying to resist the enchantment that Salem had placed upon them all, though it seemed she had not broken it yet. "If you are not here to fight, then you may as well leave. We have nothing to discuss."

"'Nothing'?" Salem asked. "Nothing, Glynda, nothing at all?"

"Nothing," Glynda repeated. "What could you possibly offer me? Power? Prestige?"

"How about a life of less futility?" Salem suggested. "I was surprised to see you here, Glynda. Is this atonement? Have you come seeking the release of death, or do you simply hope to improve the average life expectancy of Ozpin's puppets by a single mission?"

"'A single mission'?" Sunset repeated. "What do you-"

"You would need a cold heart indeed to be immune to what you do," Salem went on, addressing Professor Goodwitch as though Sunset were not there. "Every year, the students come, 'teach us, Professor Goodwitch, arm us with knowledge against the terrors of the world.' They come to you, they put their trust in you, and what do you feed them? Lies and half-truths."

"What I do," Professor Goodwitch murmured. "What I say-"

"Is not enough," Salem declared bluntly. "Have you ever wondered how many of those gallant young men and women who emerge from your care go on to die because you kept the truth from them, because you concealed from them what they were really up against? Do you really think a bowl of candy on your desk is enough to make up for keeping them in ignorance and leaving them wholly unprepared to face me and my malice?"

There were tears forming in Professor Goodwitch's eyes. "No," she confessed. "No, I do not."

"No," Salem agreed. "But then, perhaps the ignorant ones are also the fortunate ones. They don't have to suffer the fates of your… your favourite students. How many boys and girls have you mentored, praised, encouraged, and then recruited? How many have joined this shadow war because they didn't want to let down the noble Professor Goodwitch who'd been so very good to them?"

Professor Goodwitch did not respond. She bowed her head as the tears fell down it.

"You call me monster," Salem said scornfully. "But I do not raise armies of the ignorant, filling the ranks with those who think they know all that they need to know and never dream they are deceived by those whom they trust most."

The grimm turned, pivoting as it floated in the air, looking first this way and then that.

"It seems you were correct, Glynda," Salem said. "You had nothing to say, after all. Very well, shall I speak next to one of the new generation, to Ozpin's latest champions? Or perhaps I should begin with James' prized protégés? I must admit, this is a new development, an Atlesian general inserting his own men into the game. Has James' grown tired of following Ozpin's lead? Or is it merely that he doesn't trust anyone he can't control?"

"Don't talk about the General that way!" Rainbow snapped.

Salem looked at her, the grimm from which she could project herself rotating in place until Salem was facing the Atlesian team leader. "Rainbow hair," she murmured. "In the north, they call that the aurora's kiss, and those who possess it are thought to be blessed. Nonsense, of course."

"Maybe," Rainbow growled. "But General Ironwood-"

"Has you deceived," Salem declared. "But then, James always had a gift for winning loyalty. His only true talent. That, and reciprocating, I admit. He is a better lord of men than Ozpin; he has some sense of how to treat his loyal servants. How else, after all, could he have convinced you that he is one of the great captains? A mediocre man who cannot even keep his own body safe, and yet, you believe that he can protect the world?"

"We'll all protect the world," Rainbow insisted. "Together, shoulder-"

"'Shoulder to shoulder, the strength of Atlas,'" Salem finished. "'Arise, arise, flowers of the north.' The only thing worse than vanity is vanity concealing weakness. Strip away your bombast and bravado, strip away the words learned by rote, take off the pride you wear like armour, and what remains?"

Rainbow did not reply. Her mouth opened, but no words flew forth. She shook her head, or tried to; it manifested in nothing but a tiny gesture, barely noticeable.

"F-friendship," Penny said. "That… that's what we have left. When everything else is gone, what we have left is one another."

"And for how long?" Salem demanded. "How long do you have one another, when hope has failed and the night never ends? And what happens when your friends start to fall, as Atlas will fall? What happens when the screams of those you thought would fight beside start to mingle with the drying groans of those you swore to protect?"

"No!" Rainbow cried, her shotgun hitting the ground with a crash as she clutched at the side of her head. "Stop it! Stop it!"

Penny let out a mewling, piteous wail of pain and started to double up, hugging herself for comfort.

What in Celestia's name is she doing to them?

Ciel glared furiously at Salem and her grimm as she began to murmur, "'Though I walk in darkness, thou art my light, for thy teachings-'"

"Did not save the Lady of the North from me," Salem declared. "Does your faith teach you that, acolyte? Does your holy book teach you that in her pride, the Lady answered a challenge from my champion of the day, rode into darkness, and was never seen again?"

Ciel gritted her teeth. "The Lady stands between God-"

"I saw the Lady's body burn," Salem informed her. "Just as I see you before me now. She thought more of her pride than she did of me, just as you do now. And she paid for her arrogance, just as you will."

"What a disappointing trio you are," she said. "I don't know why I expected more of James, but hopefully, Ozpin's new recruits will prove to be made of sterner stuff." Her grimm drifted like a cloud in Blake's direction.

"You are not my enemy," she said to Blake. "There is no reason we should come to blows. You were of the White Fang once, and the White Fang and I are friends and partners."

"'Partners'?" Blake said. "Or slaves?"

"'Slaves'?" Salem repeated. "You speak of slaves, you who have abandoned your people to their chains, while you live in carefree luxury?"

"No!" Blake cried. "It isn't like that-"

"Really?" Salem asked. "Then when was the last time that you did anything to help your people, those for whom you claim to speak and fight?"

Blake's mouth worked furiously but silently. "Well… I…"

"You know what has been done to the faunus," Salem crooned. "You know what they have suffered at the hands of men. And yet you fight for those same men, for those who speak so considerately and do nothing. What have Ozpin's pieties done to help your kind in all these years? What are James' self-proclaimed good intentions worth? What have you done, judged those taking a stand against true evil and helped to keep them down beneath the human boot?"

Blake flinched, turning away from Salem's words, wrapping her arms around her body in a self-embrace. Her look was stricken, mouth open and eyes darting back and forth, her body tensed as though she might flee at any moment.

Salem paid her no further heed. She floated along the crescent they had formed, stopping in front of Pyrrha, descending towards the ground until Salem's ghostly, desiccated face was level with Pyrrha's fair features. "What say you, Theseus' heir?" She chuckled. "I assure you, it takes more to make an empress than a touch of noble blood."

"Then… then it is a good thing that I do not desire the throne," Pyrrha declared.

"No?" Salem asked. "So easily said, but not so easily meant. Do you not desire what was stolen from your family?"

"No."

"I could help you, you know," Salem continued. "If you know anything about me, you will know that I am not without power. And I am not above using that power to benefit those who serve me well. I am not like Ozpin; I do not send my cohorts out to risk their lives for me, over and over again, without reward until I have hollowed them out and reduced them to empty shells or worse. I do not throw my servants into the fire repeatedly until they burn. A Nikos may once again sit on the throne of Mistral if you will have it so."

"I do not!" Pyrrha cried. "That is not the destiny that I desire."

"Then what is the destiny that you desire?"

Pyrrha looked their great enemy straight in the eyes. "To stand between you and those you would harm, as a huntress and a protector of the world. To be a shepherd of the people, as it was called of old."

"'A huntress and a protector of the world,'" Salem repeated, though not without a touch of mockery in her voice. "How very nobly spoken, how regal in your turn of phrase, how… mistaken. That is not your destiny, Pyrrha Nikos. Death is your destiny, abject failure is your destiny, and if you seek to oppose me, then I shall be your destiny." One of the grimm's tentacles began to reach up, as though it meant to coil itself around Pyrrha's throat. "All that you love shall turn to ashes."

Pyrrha's breathing was coming heavier now. Her hands had fallen to her sides, and it seemed that she was struggling to keep hold of Miló.

Sunset longed to speak, longed to cry out, long to unleash her magic, but her body, even her tongue, would not obey her. It was as though she was trapped inside her own mind, watching Salem menace her friend and yet be unable to do anything about it.

The temperature had dropped in the dead police station, in the cold Salem held them all frozen.

"You're wrong!" Ruby cried, her voice like a trumpet sounding men to arms. "You act as though you're all-powerful, as though you're irresistible, but if you're immortal, then the only thing that's true is that you've been resisted! Generations of huntsmen and huntresses have held you at bay, in spite of the grimm and anything else that you could throw at them! They stood together and held to their bonds and trusted one another, and they stopped you. Just like we will stop you."

Salem was silent for a moment, leaving Pyrrha behind to float across their ranks until she was above Ruby, looking down on her.

"Your mother said much the same, once upon a time," Salem observed dispassionately.

Ruby's silver eyes widened yet further. "My… mom?"

"She was very brave," Salem acknowledged. "But ultimately quite mistaken."

What happened next… Sunset had never seen anything like it, nor wished to see anything like it again. Ruby Rose, the bravest of the brave, began to sob in terror and regret, tears streaming down her face in an instant, cascading down her pale cheeks no matter how she wiped at her eyes, wiping and wiping, but there were always more tears to come.

More tears to fall from those silver eyes.

Ruby kept on sobbing, kept on weeping, and then she cried out in fear and alarm as a silver light sparked from her eyes, her orbs illuminating, seeming to turn for a moment into light itself, blinding light. A spark. A pause. Another spark, like a lightbulb that had been improperly wired or which was reaching the end of its lifespan. Ruby stumbled, swaying from side to side, until she collapsed onto her knees, clutching her face, sobbing into her hands.

Sunset found that she could move again, at least move enough to drop to her knees and put her arms around Ruby's shoulders, holding her as she sobbed.

She looked down at Ruby, who seemed so small and frail there on the floor, and then glared up at Salem in her grimm sphere. "It's magic, isn't it?" she said. "Just like your showing yourself through that grimm is magic. There is no great force in your words to bend us to your will; it's nothing but a magic spell."

"Yet spells have power, don't they, Sunset Shimmer?" Salem asked. "Else from where does your power arise?"

Sunset gritted her teeth. "I don't-"

"Do not think me ignorant, young filly," Salem said coldly. "I was there when the mirror was made. I know magic, and Equestrian magic what is more. I can smell it on you."

"Or you're plucking all you know right out of my head with some spell of your own," Sunset declared. "You have gotten into their heads, you prefer to rummage around in mine."

"Or perhaps your friends are so afflicted by my arguments because my words ring true," Salem suggested. "You know it, do you not, my little exile so far from home? You understand that serving Ozpin will bring you only death."

Sunset flinched. She could feel Salem's magic working on her. She could hear noises, discordant noises, like the screams of dying creatures. The screams of dying people. Pyrrha's scream, she could hear Pyrrha screaming in her head, and when she shut her eyes, she could see it: Pyrrha dying, her body pierced by an arrow.

"The mightiest warrior may be slain by a single arrow."

Pyrrha clutched at the wound that had been dealt to her, her whole body shook as she struggled to breathe, her scream became hoarse as she began to choke on her own blood.

Sunset scowled and shook her head. "No," she murmured. "No."

Salem spoke over her, saying, "When I was a girl, so many years ago in an age of heroes and magic beside which the current age for all its advances pales in comparison, the lord was the ring giver. He fed his faithful companions in his hall and rewarded them with silver for their faithful service. He earned their devotion through his generosity as well as through his valour leading them in battle. And he never asked anything of his loyal servants that would compromise their honour, comprehending that their worth to him lay in more than their ability to wield swords or spears.

"But Ozpin… Ozpin is no true lord. How far he has fallen from those far-off, long ago ideals he once exemplified. He demands all from those who devote themselves to him, body and soul both together, and in return, he gives not even the smallest trifle of his appreciation. He hoards his power and his relics and all else that he can acquire, reckoning his loyal followers as nothing but bodies he can throw into this pointless struggle against me.

"I have lived so long. Longer than any of you can possibly comprehend. A thousand generations and more, I have walked upon the surface of the world, and in every generation, there has been a man like Ozpin, raising up his warriors to fight against me, staying behind safely in one high tower or the next while others die for him. In every generation, men have trusted Ozpin, and at his word, they have fought against me, and where are they now? Dead, dust and forgotten. Look at the fate of Team Stark, Ozpin's last champions. They were as young as you, as talented as you, moreso. They were brave and bold and full of ideals. And where are they now? Summer is gone, the shattered dragon hides away in his log cabin, the Raven is fled… nothing remains but a dusty old Qrow with a broken heart and a broken soul.

"But that can change. You need not serve such a man as he is, such an unworthy master as he is. You need not be bound to him."

Sunset closed her eyes. It was Jaune that she could see now, Jaune that she could hear crying out as the grimm dragged him by the feet to his inevitable death. "What is the alternative?" she demanded. "To serve you?"

"I flatter myself that I do better than he does by those who pledge themselves unto my service," Salem declared. "Though few come, those who do make the journey to my side are men and women of quality, forged in the fires of hardship, inured to effort and to suffering. They come, the broken, the abandoned, and the rejected of the world, the least of these, those who are valued not by any other man, those who are not seen for what they truly are nor recognised for their worth; one by one, they come to me, and I raise them up and reward them as their worth and loyalty deserves. Power, riches, all they desire, I grant my faithful, whom I love as dearly as if they were my own children.

"I can grant your wishes," she purred. "Whatever you desire, it shall be yours. I can be your good lord, your ring-giver, your angel, and all that I ask in return is that you grant me what I desire.

"Or you may choose the fate of all those who have followed Ozpin."

Sunset's breast heaved. "Death?"

"For some," Salem agreed. "But not for you, I think. You shall be the dusty Qrow of your generation. You will watch your friends die all around you."

Pyrrha fell before Sunset's eyes, the light departing from her orbs of vibrant green, her fair skin stained with blood as red as the tattered remains of the sash that hung about her waist.

"No."

"You will be powerless to help them."

Jaune reached out in vain for Sunset as he was dragged out of sight beneath a mass of beowolves.

"I won't let that happen."

"They will be taken from you in an instant."

One moment, Blake stood upon a frozen battlefield, the moonlight bright upon her, illuminating her like some ethereal creature; the next, the griffon's maw had closed upon her, and she was gone, lost to mortal sight, lost to Sunset forever.

"This isn't real."

"One by one, they all shall fall," Salem declared. "To darkness, and to me."

Ruby sat with her back to a tree, the shattered remains of Crescent Rose upon her lap. Blood spilled from her mouth, and her body was ragged and torn, shredded by many claws that had torn her to pieces, sparing only her face so that Sunset might know her. Her face which was turned away from Sunset, frozen in a rictus of pain, the horror of her passing disfiguring that face meant for smiles.

"And you will wander Remnant alone, broken-"

"I will not."

"-abandoned, forsaken by Ozpin, of no more use to him-"

"I care not."

"You will cry out for those dear to you, but they will not return-"

"I said NO!" Sunset roared, and as she roared, she rose once more to her feet. Anger, hotter than a dragon's flame, consumed her heart, and in its heat, the frost of fear that Salem had put on her melted away like morning dew. She might speak well and nobly, she might be possessed of magic, but Salem's words could compel Sunset only by making her afraid.

And right now, her words had made her angry instead.

Sunset's hands glowed green with power as she seized Salem's grimm in the embrace of her telekinesis, gripping tight and squeezing upon it.

"Now you listen to me, O Mistress of the Grimm," Sunset snarled. "Wiser princesses, more noble and more virtuous in all regards, have sought to dictate to me my fate, have sought to lay down in discourse what I may do and may not do, where I may go and may not go, what I may become and not become. I did not listen then, though I had great cause in my heart to listen; I am not minded now to listen instead to you who offer nothing but dire prophecies and the fears you reach into our heads to take!

"I will not suffer to embrace your vulgar plans for my misfortune. I will not suffer you to cut off the threads of my dear friends and take their lives before their time. I defy your maudlin predictions, and I deny you. All things that we desire, we shall have; all wishes we shall make come true out of our strength united. You demanded obedient service, well, my lady, I fear I choose defiance." Sunset grinned. "And I hope this hurts."

She squeezed; with the magic at her command, she squeezed the grimm until it shrieked in pain, until she could feel its tentacles trying to lash out wildly, to spasm like the kicking legs of a dying fly. She held it fast. She restrained every part of this thing, holding it in place as she squeezed it and squeezed it, until the glass sphere shattered and the myriad pieces of the broken grimm turned to ashes as they fell, slowly, down to the ground.

 

[ScipioSmith]

Whatever It Takes​

Sunset stood, frozen, as the ashes of the grimm descended to the floor. A cloud of dark smoke hovered in front of her for a moment before it disappeared, just as the grimm itself had.

Just as Salem had.

Except she hadn't. Not in the way that mattered, not in the way that would have helped Sunset, or at least, not in the way that Sunset wished.

She could still hear the screams. She could still hear it in her head. They mingled together like the discordant screeching of ill-played violins. And when she shut her eyes, as she momentarily shut her eyes and hoped no one could see it, she could see them dying. Pyrrha, Ruby, Jaune, Blake; even Rainbow Dash, even Twilight; she could see them dying, she could hear them crying out, and she could not stop it. She could not help them.

"You will watch your friends die all around you. You will be powerless to help them."

No. No. I deny you and defy you.

But she could not defy her fears. She could not deny that Salem's words, her visions, had taken root inside her mind. She could not deny that she feared, as she had always feared, but Salem had taken those fears and given shape to shapeless dread, had formed her misgivings and her lurking terror and dragged those new-formed qualms out where she could see them.

Where she had no choice but to look at them.

She did not turn around. She didn't want to look at any of them. She feared that if she looked at them, she would see only Salem's visions: Pyrrha choking on her own blood, Jaune devoured, Ruby torn to shreds. She feared that if they could see her eyes, then they would know how deeply fear held her in its grip.

Professor Ozpin had warned her that she might need to sacrifice the life of a friend to achieve victory. He had warned her, and she had glibly and proudly dismissed his warning, glorying in her own strength, thinking more of her own power and resolve than in the foe that waited for them here. And thus, she had ventured to this dead place, to the very dominion of death and darkness, she had led her team, her friends, into the underworld, and there… there they had met their adversary.

An adversary who prophesied the deaths of those that Sunset held dear.

Omens upon omens piled up high, foretelling death within the mausoleum.

No. No, I will not suffer it.

Words, words, words, what are words when set against Adam's terrible red sword and Cinder's all-consuming wrath?

She could not drive the visions from her mind. She could not cease to hear the voices.

It was like when she had discovered her semblance and used it on Cinder, when Cinder's own feelings and emotions had threatened to overwhelm her… except this seemed worse. Yes, she had dreamt of striking down Pyrrha then, but then, it had been only her own actions that she needed to fear; she could resolve to control herself, she could – at the last resort – stay away from the people she cared about.

But now, in this place, her fears were not of herself but of what others might do, and she could not resolve it so easily by keeping her distance.

Nor could she banish all wicked thoughts by the simple expedient of taking Ruby's hand.

Not when Ruby had her own battles to fight.

Her mother.

Unless Sunset guessed wrong, Salem had amplified the discordant note that Sunset had felt in Ruby's soul when she had used her semblance on her partner.

Sunset began to contemplate the possibility – eagerly contemplate, she could admit to herself – of aborting the mission. Of declaring that they were all too shaken to continue, their nerves too jangled to attempt a task of such great moment. Yes, they would return to Beacon as failures, with their work undone, but at the same time, they would return to Beacon safe and sound, all of them. Salem's grim prophecy would be averted for the present.

And they would not return without some useful intelligence. Cinder and Adam were both at Mountain Glenn; it was not too much to say that this was, indeed, the White Fang base.

Perhaps we should have simply reported that fact and then left last night or this morning. Let the Atlesians take over and flood the place with soldiers.

Perhaps it was merely vanity that we did not.

And look where vanity has led us now.

A groan from Rainbow Dash drew Sunset out of her thoughts – for the moment, at least. "What… what was that?"

"Magic," Sunset said, trying to keep her voice steady and free from trembling. "It was not Salem's words alone that affected us so; she… she was using magic to… to put the fear in us."

It was not a very scientific explanation for what had just happened, but at the moment and in her present state of whirling thoughts and lingering anxieties, it was the best that she could come up with.

And it did explain concisely what had just happened.

"I… I heard them," Rainbow murmured. "I heard them crying out. Twilight, Pinkie, Rarity, Fluttershy, Applejack, Scootaloo… I could hear all of them. I heard them… I saw them… I saw them-"

"Dying?" Sunset asked, in a voice barely louder than a whisper. She ventured a look at Rainbow Dash, who had confessed fears so like to Sunset's own. She saw in Rainbow's magenta eyes her own fears reflected. The fears that had taken the heart of her.

Rainbow nodded, a short, sharp gesture. "How… how?" she demanded. "How could she know that, who could she-?"

"She didn't, until she plucked it from your mind," Sunset said.

"And she can do that too?" Rainbow demanded. "How?"

"I don't know, with more magic?" Sunset snapped. "I can't explain how she did it!"

"Why not, aren't you supposed to have magic too?!" Rainbow yelled, before she gasped and covered her mouth with both hands.

Professor Goodwitch let out a weary sigh. "Relax, Miss Dash; I am already quite aware of Miss Shimmer's unique abilities. If you were trying to keep it a secret, Miss Shimmer, you were not doing a particularly good job."

"With respect, Professor, I suspect that if you didn't already know that magic existed, you might give me a different answer."

"Perhaps," Professor Goodwitch allowed. "But I do know, and I have known that you possess magic for some time, as has Professor Ozpin."

Sunset let out a ragged sigh. "I thought he might, Professor." She paused. "But my magic… it is not as Salem's is; I cannot say how she did what she did, only… only that she did it."

"How, then, can you be sure it was magic?" Ciel asked.

"She didn't deny it when I accused her of it," Sunset said. "She could have, although… it must be magic of some sort that let her project herself from her true location through that grimm, and to project a semblance so far as well? No, it felt like magic, and I… I am confident that it was magic."

That might be the only thing I'm confident in at this point.

"Then… then it wasn't real?" Penny asked.

"It was our fears," Sunset declared. Which isn't to say that they aren't real.

"These are not childish nightmares that we speak of," Blake murmured. "These fears she played upon are… it does concern me, the possibility that I might be turning away from helping my people, selling out to live in luxury and contentment."

"I saw… it was as though I stood in the Fountain Courtyard," Pyrrha whispered. "Except… except that death lay all around me, as it is here but more recent and so… so even more terrible to look upon." Her voice trembled. "The courtyard was burning. The waters were red with blood, and when I rushed from the courtyard, rushed out of the palace, I saw… I saw the whole of Mistral being devoured by flame."

"And I saw you," Jaune declared softly. "You were fighting… something. I couldn't make out what it was, man or grimm, it was wreathed in shadow; I couldn't get a proper look at it. I wasn't trying to get a proper look at it. I could only see you. I was only focussed on you because… because you were losing. It felt like I kept trying to help you, but you kept pushing me back until in the end, you… you threw me away. You threw me away because you were-"

"Losing," Pyrrha finished for him. Sunset dared to look at them, and as she looked, she saw Pyrrha reach out and take Jaune's hand. "I have given you my promise, Jaune. Whatever else I am, or whatever I am not, I should like to think that I am a girl who keeps her word." She hesitated. A shudder wracked her body and made her fair uncovered shoulders tremble. "Although," she confessed, "if I were fighting a battle I knew I could not win, I… I do not know that I would wish for you to watch me die, still less-"

"Do you think that I'd want to live after… do you think that I'd want to live without… that's exactly why I asked you to promise."

Pyrrha looked into his eyes for a moment, and then closed hers. "And that is why I shall keep it," she murmured.

Jaune kissed her, in spite of everyone who might be watching – in spite of Professor Goodwitch – and afterwards, he held her, his arms around her as he cradled her, her head pressed against his chest, her red hair falling down into his lap.

Jaune looked down at her, and then looked up at Sunset – Sunset turned away before she could meet his eyes – and then glanced back to see him sweep his blue-eyed gaze around the room.

"Can I just say something?" he asked. "I… I know that I'm not as good with words as Sunset is, so don't expect a great speech and don't expect it to sound the way that a speech should, but… but just let me say it anyway.

"Some of you have said what it was that you saw, what she showed you. Not all of you have, and that's fine; you don't have to say it. It sounds as though we mostly all saw similar kinds of stuff anyway. Like Blake said, these aren't like nightmares that we saw. She didn't show us monsters that aren't real, or anything like that. As great as Pyrrha is, I know that there's a chance… no offence."

Pyrrha chuckled. "I'm well aware of my limitations," she murmured, her head still resting against Jaune's breastplate. "Trust me."

Jaune nodded. "So I'm not going to say that there's nothing to be scared of, but… do you guys remember the fight at the docks? Do you remember what happened afterwards?"

"I believe I had some harsh words for you all, Mister Arc," Professor Goodwitch reminded them.

Jaune chuckled nervously. "Well… yes, that too, Professor, but… what I was thinking of was after that. We promised that whatever happened next, we'd face it together. Well… a lot has happened since then, but we're all still here. We're still together, and as long as we stick together, I don't see that we won't get to the next thing, just like we've gotten this far. Together.

"Blake… I don't know, I'm not a faunus, I can't tell you how to feel, but I do know that you're not sacrificing anything to live in comfort. You're putting your life on the line as much as any of us to protect the world, including the faunus. You saved Ruby's life in the Emerald Forest, you risked chills to find us a way through Mountain Glenn, you're not doing nothing. You're doing a whole lot. We're all doing a whole lot to make sure that… to make sure that none of the things that we saw, none of the things we're afraid of… we're doing it to make sure that none of that happens, right?

"And it won't, so long as we stick together, just like we have done since that night at the docks."

Pyrrha smiled, though her eyes remained closed. "Together," she murmured.

A smile tugged at the corners of Blake's mouth. "Together."

"Together!" Penny cried, pumping one fist into the air.

Ciel took a deep breath. "You are correct, of course. Our… these visions that she planted in our minds should not discourage us; rather, they should remind us of what we fight to protect. Together then, while the road lasts."

"Together," Ruby said, slowly getting to her feet, her red cape swaying a little behind her.

"Ruby," Sunset said. "Are you-?"

"I'm fine," Ruby said, wiping the tears away from her face.

Sunset's eyes narrowed a little. "Are you sure about that?"

Ruby nodded. "Really, Sunset, I'm fine. We're all fine now, right? It was all just magic, and she's gone now." She smiled. "Thanks for getting rid of her. It's… it's good that's over."

"Ruby," Sunset murmured. "You don't have to pretend that didn't happen."

Ruby was silent for a moment. "It doesn't matter," she said firmly.

"But-"

"It doesn't matter, Sunset," Ruby insisted. "I know that you worry about me, but... nothing that she said to me… I've always known that… I mean I should have known that… my mom's dead," she declared. "But it doesn't matter if she didn't manage to stop Salem; what matters is that she left a world for me to grow up in. And now, it's my turn. Now, it's all of our turn to pass that world on to the next generation the way that it was passed on to us. Whatever it takes."

'Whatever it takes'? Sunset wanted to hug Ruby and recoil from her at the same time. She was in awe of Ruby's courage, and at the same time, she was disgusted by it. 'Whatever it takes'? What if it took Pyrrha's life, or Jaune's life, or Penny's life? 'Whatever it takes'? The sacrifice of Ruby herself, the loss of the entire party, both teams wiped out, Yang bereaved, the Nikos line extinguished?

'Whatever it takes'? Ruby would say 'yes,' Sunset was sure. Yes to all of it, yes to their annihilation, yes to every sacrifice. She would see the fears that Salem had planted like weeds in Sunset's mind, and she would not flinch from any of them, not even from her own death.

Especially not from her own death.

That was what made her such a true huntress.

That was what made her such a terrible friend.

Is there anything worse than loving someone who does not, cannot think the way that you do? Sunset wondered. And knowing that the way you think, the drives that animate you, would leave them disgusted if they found them out?

If Ruby knew how afraid Sunset was right now, then she would think her a coward. If she knew some of the things that had been going through Sunset's mind since they arrived in Mountain Glenn, she would think her much worse.

All of these thoughts, Sunset kept hidden as she put on a smile and said, "Your mother had a hell of a daughter." And then she did hug Ruby, because as much as the younger girl scared the living daylights out of her sometimes, Sunset wouldn't want Ruby anywhere else but on her team.

So she wrapped one arm around her and held her close and felt the leather of her jacket crumple a little as Ruby enveloped her in turn.

"You're all so young," Professor Goodwitch said, in a voice that was wistful, soft and filled with melancholy, like a country lament. "So young and with so much ahead of you. Don't waste it."

"Professor?" Ruby asked.

Professor Goodwitch blinked. Like Ruby, she too wiped at her eyes, or at least dabbed at them. "Salem… she wasn't wrong about everything."

Sunset frowned, because even though she was minded to agree, that didn't make it any stranger to hear one of Professor Ozpin's lieutenants say so. "Professor?"

"I remember all the students that I have taught," Professor Goodwitch said. "Or tried to teach. I remember them, and I listen for news of them… and I learn of their fates. I've had so many students, and so many of them have given their lives to preserve our kingdoms, and I sometimes ask myself how many of them are remembered by anyone but me. We don't even have a memorial for them anywhere on the school grounds. I sometimes ask myself if there's more I could have done for them, or if I really did anything at all.

"There are times when it seems to me that those who do well in my class are those like Miss Nikos who need no instruction, while those like Mister Arc who require assistance do not find it in my class. And at times like that, I ask myself just what I've done, what I'm doing… whether I wouldn't have been better off going out into the field, like my team-mates did after graduation."

"Professor," Ruby said, sounding a little tremulous. "I'm sure that if she were here, she'd tell you that you don't have anything to be ashamed of."

Professor Goodwitch's gaze sharpened a little as she looked at Ruby. "Really, Miss Rose? As a teacher, I am supposed to dedicate myself to the pursuit of truth and knowledge and pass on both to my students. And yet, I have become a dealer in lies and deceptions, concealing from the students who come to me for knowledge the truth of the world that we live in, the war that we are fighting. I send them out to fight an enemy they do not even know exists."

"You send us out to fight the grimm, Professor," Pyrrha said, getting up as Jaune released her. "Just as we expected that we would when we applied for Beacon. It's true that you don't tell everyone everything, but that doesn't mean that you don't teach us what we need to know."

Ruby nodded. "And for what it's worth, I think you're a pretty good teacher."

"Really?" Professor Goodwitch said. "And what have you learnt from me, Miss Rose?"

"I can't speak for Ruby, but I've learned not to rely on my magic so much," Sunset said. "It might have taken me a while to finally get it, but you were the first to point that out. You can't teach us how to fight, Professor; we're each too unique for that. But you've got a good eye, and you can spot our weaknesses before they get us hurt, or worse. That isn't nothing."

Professor Goodwitch was silent for a moment. She pushed her spectacles back up her nose. "However much of that was sincere or not, Miss Shimmer, I thank you for it. And now, I think that we have tarried here long enough. We'd best get moving."

Sunset nodded, but she took a glance at Rainbow Dash, still kneeling on the floor, and said. "You go on ahead. I need a quick word with Rainbow; we have matters to discuss."

"Huh?" Ruby asked.

"This won't take long," Sunset assured her. She waited for the others to take their leave, scrambling through the hole in the wall. Sunset waited for them to go, and as she waited, the sights flashed before her eyes, and the sounds of the screaming rang in her ears, and she would do anything, anything at all, to make them stop.

She would do anything to ensure those awful visions would not come to pass.

Whatever it takes, Ruby had said; sometimes, you had to sacrifice someone, or you would lose everything, Professor Ozpin had said; they would die, and there was nothing she could do about it, Salem had said. To which Sunset replied 'no.' She would not admit it. It was not in boldness that she spoke, not in vanity, but in… in desperation. She would do whatever it took… whatever it took to make sure that 'whatever it takes' did not come to pass.

She loved them, and though she loved not wisely but too well, that did not invalidate her love, and for those feelings… she would do things that would make them blanch to think of.

Speaking of loving not wisely but too well, Rainbow Dash was kneeling on the floor.

Sunset's steps sounded heavy as she approached her.

"I know what you saw," she murmured.

"Of course you do, I told you," Rainbow muttered.

"I could have guessed anyway."

"Because you're a mind-reader like she is?"

"No," Sunset said patiently. "Because what do you think I saw?"

Rainbow looked up at her, mouth slightly open.

Sunset snorted. "What else would I be afraid of?"

"Being forgotten?" Rainbow suggested.

"Jerk," Sunset growled. "You think I prize fame or glory over the lives of my friends?"

"No," Rainbow murmured. "No, I guess not."

Sunset knelt down in front of her. "It's not going to happen," she said. "Your friends will not perish, nor my friends, nor your teammates. None of them."

"How can you be so sure?"

"Because I won't let it, and neither will you," Sunset declared fiercely.

Rainbow glanced down at the filthy ground beneath them. "Sunset… what you said last night-"

"Forget last night; it's not important right now-"

"I failed the entrance exam for Canterlot," Rainbow admitted. "I didn't… I didn't make the grade. Literally."

"I… I didn't know that," Sunset murmured.

"Not something I'm keen to shout about," Rainbow muttered. "I was admitted through personal recommendation."

"General Ironwood," Sunset said softly.

Rainbow nodded. "Why did I get this position, Sunset?"

Sunset blinked. "Because you're General Ironwood's golden girl."

"And why is that?" Rainbow pressed.

Sunset grinned facetiously. "Because he's a terrible judge of character?"

"Sunset," Rainbow growled, in a serious tone.

"Okay then, you tell me the answer."

"Because I saved Twilight one time," Rainbow said. "Because I was in the right place to do something when she was in trouble. I chased off a couple of small-time hoods. That's it. Everything else has flowed from that. Twilight's family took me in, I met General Ironwood, he took me under his wing, and why? Not because I passed any tests, not because I have special powers… because I was in the right place at the right time."

"Lucky you," Sunset said. "That shows that you had a stroke of political luck; it doesn't prove that you lack courage or ability."

"I'm a fake."

"I defy anyone who has seen you send Adam Taurus running with his tail between his legs to call you a fraud!" Sunset snapped. "What you have done…" She trailed off, because accomplishment wasn't really the point, was it?

"I get it," Sunset said. "Girls like us will do amazing things to be seen, won't we? My whole life… I always felt I deserved more, and you wouldn't have been in that right place at that right time for your stroke of political good fortune if you had not felt the same. We do what we must, we do whatever we can, to carve out great gilded lives for ourselves that do not humiliate us to live. And then… in this world that seems determined to ignore and to belittle us, in this world that regards us as a problem that it does not want, we enjoy such good fortune, we are so very blessed, as to find those who see us as we are and embrace us in all our flaws. And so we need to protect them. I have to protect them because they mean the world to me, and I need your help to do it."

"My help?"

"You're the only one who understands," Sunset said. "None of the rest of them understand, not even Pyrrha, but you… you understand, don't you?"

Rainbow hesitated a moment, before she said, "They could replace us so easily; they don't get that we could never replace them."

"Precisely," Sunset agreed. "So will you help me protect this great gilded space I have carved out for myself?" She held out her hand. "Will you help me, sister?"

Rainbow looked at Sunset's hand, then at Sunset herself. "Are we sisters, Sunset?" she asked. She smiled, as she took Sunset's hand. "I'd like that a lot."

Sunset helped Rainbow to her feet, and clapped her on the shoulder. "We will rescue Applejack," she promised. "And bring everyone back home safe."

Whatever it takes.

 

[ScipioSmith]

Renown​

Cinder looked down upon the abomination below her.

It had not noticed her presence, nor that of her associates or Adam. Perhaps the dead White Fang members lying strewn across the street around it – they'd been wondering where that patrol had gotten to – had sated its appetite. Perhaps it simply wasn't very observant.

Perhaps it was as simple as the fact that it hadn't bothered to look up.

It was an ungainly sight. It was something that revolted her to look upon.

It was something that might prove useful to her.

"Wh-what is that thing?" Emerald murmured, her voice trembling.

"I have no idea," Cinder admitted candidly. It looked a little like a grimm, and yet at the same time, it was not a grimm. She knew that it was not a grimm because, if it was a grimm, she would know it. She would feel, even if only a little, the song that bound the creatures of destruction together, feel their connection through the blessing that she had received.

She did not feel it. There was no connection here. This creature, however much it might resemble grimm, did not feel the song of death and mayhem. There was no connection there.

She could not command it. But she could make good use of it all the same.

Adam placed one hand upon the hilt of his sword. "How do we kill it?"

Cinder glanced at him. "'Kill it'? Why would we do such a thing?"

"Why?" Adam growled. "It killed my men!" He gestured at their remains with one hand.

And I will kill far more than any monster could, Cinder thought. She wondered how Adam would react when he figured that out. Not well, perhaps, which was why he might be better off dead within the depths of Mountain Glenn. But, on the other hand, a man like him could be manipulated despite his anger; so long as he still desired Blake or revenge or some twisted combination of the two, then Cinder would be able to wrap him around her fingers - not effortlessly perhaps, recent events had proven there were unfortunate depths to him she had not been aware of; nevertheless she would still be able to turn him to her purposes - no matter how drenched she was in the blood of the Vale Chapter.

Gilda would not prove so accommodating.

Of course, the chances were she would be done with the White Fang after today, which was why she was willing to throw Adam into the path of harm, but one never knew.

That was why she had allowed him to accompany her and her team: he was safer here than he was on the train.

"Your men," she told him, "gave their lives for the cause of the White Fang, but if you wish that cause to flourish and a victory be gained worthy of their sacrifice, then we must see the plan through to the end and not be distracted again by our personal feelings."

"How is that a part of the plan?" Mercury asked, gesturing at the creature.

"It wasn't," Cinder replied. "But now, it's a wonderful new addition to our ranks and just what we need to break up our enemies."

Although she would pit her chosen servants against most of Ozpin's lackeys any day, and although the ranks of Team SAPR and Team RSPT were padded out with deadweight like Jaune and Twilight, nevertheless, the fact remained that they were outnumbered two to one, even with Adam's presence, and those two included formidable fighters like Pyrrha, whom only Cinder herself could hope to withstand, while her one included Emerald, whose strength lay more in her semblance than in her skill in arms. It would have been… a chaotic battle, to say the least. Possibly a somewhat desperate one.

She had considered bringing in grimm to even out the scales, but now… destiny had smiled once more on Cinder Fall and provided her the means to break up the ranks of her enemies.

"Once our enemies come across this creature, they will be wary of it," Cinder declared. "They will not simply attack it head on. They'll split up, sending…" She paused for thought. She could put herself in Sunset's shoes, she could put herself in Sunset's mind, and with all that she had learned about her friend, she could practically predict what the other girl would do when confronted with an enemy like this. "They will send Pyrrha around behind it to attack it from two sides, while the Atlesians attempt to gain higher ground from which they can fire their big guns. So take up your positions, be careful not to draw that monster's attention, and wait."

XxXxX​

There was a grimm blocking their way.

A single grimm, it didn't even appear to have noticed them yet, and yet, its mere presence standing in the middle of the street was entirely halting the onward progress of Teams SAPR and RSPT.

The fact that it was so unusual in appearance might have had something to do with that.

It wasn't so much the fact that it was a type of grimm they hadn't encountered before, or even that it was a kind of grimm that hadn't been mentioned by Professor Port yet – although either of those instances would have been cause to take a moment and reflect on strategy. No, it was the fact that – and Pyrrha could only speak for herself at this point, but judging by the expressions of the others she wasn't alone – it was so far outside the bounds of what one expected a grimm to look like that was perturbing her.

It looked like a cross between a beowolf and an ursa, as though those monsters were capable of interbreeding with one another and had produced this hybrid. It had the long, almost ape-like arms, lithe-ish limbs, and nipped-in waist of a beowolf in contrast to the more solid, trunk-like form of an ursa, but on the other hand, for size, it had much more in common with the ursine creature while not possessing the markers of age – particularly the multitude of encrusted armour plates – that would have marked it as an alpha that had temporarily misplaced its pack.

But none of that was truly disconcerting about this creature that had suddenly thrown itself athwart their line of approach. Nor even was it the dead White Fang members at the monster's feet or the red blood on its teeth and claws that left no doubt as to how these warriors had died.

No, what was most strange about this beowolf – and what was giving the members of SAPR, RSPT, and even Professor Goodwitch the most pause – was, and the fact that it sounded a little absurd when stated so baldly did not make it any less true, the colour.

This grimm was green. Not all over – the bulk of its body was still the same tar black as always – the spikes upon its back that ought to have been as white as bone now glowed a luminescent green in the darkness under Mountain Glenn; in place of red eyes, a pale green light shone out of every orifice of the creature's skull, even its open mouth, as though it were one of those – rather tasteless, in Pyrrha's opinion – grimm-themed novelty nightlights that you could buy.

Green lines that had no equivalent on any grimm that Pyrrha had encountered or read about glowed up and down the creature's body as though it were filled with some unstable power or concoction that its form could not quite contain.

And so, Team SAPR, Team RSPT, Blake, and Professor Goodwitch all lurked out of its sight – and fortunately, they were also out of its sense of smell as well, the air here being still and stale in a manner that was intensely uncomfortable, but also, in this instance, beneficial – around the corner of a street of blocky accommodations, watching the strange creature, and as they watched, it bent its back and lowered its head to the ground to continue feeding upon the corpses of those faunus it had slain.

It was disgusting to watch, and yet, for the moment, they had no choice but to observe it.

"So, uh," Jaune murmured, "does anyone know what that is?"

"Nope," Ruby said.

"Never seen anything like it," Rainbow muttered.

"I don't recognise it as any grimm documented," Penny declared.

"Nor has it featured in any bestiary I have ever come across," added Ciel.

"Professor?" Sunset said. "Any wisdom to share with us?"

"Unfortunately not," Professor Goodwitch said softly. "Beyond the fact that it is clearly a grimm… I've never seen one quite like this before."

"We could probably go around it," Blake said. "We didn't come here to fight grimm, after all."

"Maybe we could, but what if it comes after us?" Sunset asked. "Do you want that thing coming up behind us while we're distracted?"

Blake was silent for a moment. "Good point."

"The enemy already knows we're here," Sunset said. "A little more shooting won't tell them anything that they don't know already. I say we kill this thing now, and we won't have to worry about it later."

She glanced around, as if she were searching for objections. Pyrrha didn't offer any; she found nothing to object to in Sunset's reasoning: just because this grimm – it was a grimm, whatever else it might be – hadn't noticed them at the moment, there was no guarantee that it wouldn't do so later, especially if the conflict of battle drew it in. If they could deal with it now, then they might as well do so, while they had nothing else to distract them.

"Rainbow Dash," Sunset said. "Take Ciel and Penny-"

"Up to the top floor of one of those houses where they can nail it from above," Rainbow finished. "I'm not perfect, Sunset, but I understand a crossfire."

As signals go, it's quite unmistakable, I suppose.

"I'll stay here," Blake added. "I'm not much of a long-range fighter. I might as well stick where I'm best suited."

Rainbow nodded. "Fine. Good luck."

"You, too," Blake replied. "All three of you."

"Indeed," Pyrrha added.

"I hope I do better than I did against that other grimm up top," Penny murmured.

"That wasn't your fault, Penny," Ruby said. "If you hadn't been protecting me from that falling debris, you'd have been fine."

"And besides," Pyrrha added, "we were caught by surprise then. Surprise is on our side now." She smiled. "It won't know what hit it when you open fire."

Penny's face lit up a little at the prospect of that, and she seemed cheered as she, Ciel, and Rainbow Dash crept their way across the street to the other side of the road. The green grimm didn't appear to spot them as they slunk out of sight, into the dark and shadowy building that lay beyond.

"Pyrrha, Jaune," Sunset said. "Go into this building and see if you can get around behind it. Once the Atlesians start shooting, we'll attack it from two sides."

Pyrrha nodded. "I understand." She tapped the button on the butt of Miló once, transforming it from its rifle configuration into the stealthier spear; with good fortune, she wouldn't have to fire – and thus alert this particularly strange grimm to her presence – until she was in position for the ambush. "Good luck."

"And you," Sunset said, with a terse nod of her own before she looked away from Pyrrha and returned her attention to the feeding grimm up the street.

Pyrrha moved, trusting Jaune to follow as she crept along the side of the tower behind which they had taken cover and searched for a way in. This wasn't a suburban home of the kind that they had slept in last night; it wasn't even a row of terraces; rather, here in the underground city, it seemed as though every building climbed upwards and climbed high; this place was a hive of dark monoliths reaching towards the surface, a place where people must have lived like ants or termites or rats, all jammed together as tightly packed as could be managed.

Pyrrha was not naïve. She knew that not everybody lived in the spacious luxury in which she had grown up and which the other wealthy families of Mistral enjoyed; she knew that not everywhere was as pleasant to live as Mistral, even for the less well-off of its citizens – Arslan had some veritable horror stories in that regard, though she seemed to find them rather amusing.

But Pyrrha couldn't understand why anyone would voluntarily live like this, packed into airless boxes, deep underground where there was no natural light, surrounded by walls of rock on either side; this city had been a prison even before the grimm had laid it to waste. There might have been life here, but Pyrrha could see no evidence that there had ever been any freedom.

It was hard not to think of the slaughter that those monsters had wrought as being but the last and most fatal of the indignities suffered by those unfortunate enough to live beneath Mountain Glenn.

She turned a corner, putting her on the opposite side of the building as the grimm, and found a door, cheap and plastic looking, but reasonably intact in the circumstances. It hadn't been blocked; at Pyrrha's slightest touch, it swung open to reveal a dusty corridor, lined with apartment doors on the left side, heading north; an elevator that didn't appear to be working any more; and a narrow staircase leading to the next floor up.

Pyrrha stood in the doorway for a moment, considering.

"Pyrrha?" Jaune said softly from behind her. "Is everything okay?"

Pyrrha hesitated for a moment. "I… I would never have broken my promise to you, no matter how much I might have wished to. You do know that, don't you?"

"I know," Jaune replied. "I know that you're not your mom, to lie to me about something like that."

"No," Pyrrha murmured. "No, I am definitely not my mother." She glanced over shoulder. "And I… I will never lie to you about anything." Perhaps that was rashly said, binding her word in a manner too extravagant, but as she said it, she could not think of any reason why she should not say it, why she should have any cause at all, at any time, to lie to Jaune.

And so, she promised with a light heart and relished the fact that this was one thing that she could do with a light heart, when all else in Mountain Glenn seemed to weigh down upon her so heavily.

Her brow furrowed a little as the unwanted memory returned, the memory of the vision that Salem had shown her: her home aflame, the very fountain choked with blood.

Her home burning because she had not been strong enough to save it.

How could she be strong enough, being as she was a mere girl blessed with some combat talent? How could she be strong enough to contend with the powers with which they were in opposition? She didn't have Sunset's magic, she didn't even have Ruby's silver eyes; all that she had was her renown, half of it hard-won in the arena, true, but the other half inherited nearly without effort from the line of her ancestors.

She had always told herself that her fame as the heir to the throne would have been as nothing had she not also shown herself prodigiously talented in the arena, but even if that hopeful analysis were true… the Invincible Girl was just a name; it did not convey upon her any power.

There was only one individual in Remnant who could truly be called invincible, and she was their enemy.

The Invincible Girl, the Princess Without a Crown, the Pride of Mistral, the Evenstar… these names were baubles, every bit as much as her tournament trophies and the spoils that she had dedicated in the Temple of Victory.

She had accepted the great honour that was done to her by Professor Ozpin, she had embraced the destiny that she had always believed was hers.

Yet now, she feared that she was unequal to it.

She had thought it her destiny to save the world. Which, by her own conception of destiny, meant nothing more nor less than that she would choose to save the world, as though its salvation was entirely in her gift, and she would only need to decide to do so and apply herself to that great task and all would be as she desired.

How proud, how vain, how arrogant. What hubris on par with the ambition that had built this silent tomb.

She could only pray that her arrogance would not cost as many lives as this monument to excess pride.

"Pyrrha?" Jaune said. "You looked like you were kind of spacing out a little bit."

"Sorry," Pyrrha said, a little more loudly than she needed to. She laughed nervously and looked at him. Looking at Jaune, looking into his blue eyes, definitely helped. His very presence was like a wind, blowing away her misgivings. The memory of his arms around her, of his kiss, of the tenderness of his touch, banished the memory of Salem's vision and her words.

Even if it did make her feel a little flustered as a trade-off.

More to the point, Jaune reminded her of something that – in yet more arrogance – she might have been inclined to forget otherwise: she was not alone. She did not have to worry about being strong enough to defy Salem and all her power by herself because she was not fighting by herself. She had her friends to fight beside her.

And Jaune, whom she had promised to never send from her side, though it cost him his life to remain.

That… that would grieve her. Even in death, she thought; if it was her fate to die, her destiny unfulfilled, if it was her lot in life to depart in anger down to the shades, then she would not have Jaune so swiftly follow her down. If they could not live and love amongst the living in the living world, then she would not accept an unlife spent together in the afterlife as recompense. Rather, if the gods decreed that she would die, she would have Jaune live on and dry his tears and find what happiness he could in the arms of another. Ruby, perhaps; she was warm and caring and believed in Jaune wholeheartedly; she had been his friend from the start. Certainly, she was a better choice for him than Sunset, without any offence to Sunset.

No, Ruby… Ruby would be good for him, if need be. Perhaps Pyrrha ought to write her a note, as Sunset had- no, no that was not a very good idea, Pyrrha thought to herself as she remembered how embarrassed she and Sunset had been after she, Pyrrha, had found Sunset's note. How much worse would it be if Ruby found such a note from Pyrrha?

And besides, there were limits to Pyrrha's generosity, and writing to encourage Ruby to… she scarcely knew how to describe it, but she thought that it might well breach those limits.

And besides, she intended to try quite hard not to die.

For her sake, for Jaune's, and for the sake of everything that she hoped to share with him in the future that she hoped so very much lay ahead for them.

There were some superstitious folk who believed that writing a will tempted fate. The same, it seemed to Pyrrha, might be said of writing a letter to be opened in the event of your death.

Salem might be immortal, but there were only men and grimm here under Mountain Glenn, and she could handle men and grimm alike.

"I'm sorry," she apologised again. "We should move."

They entered the house, moving past the elevator and down the dusty corridor; they ignored the stairs; since they were not going to engage the grimm from higher ground, there would be no point in going up unless the way forward were blocked. It was not so.

At least, that was what Pyrrha thought before one of the apartment doors that lined the corridor swung open to partially bar their path.

Cinder Fall stepped daintily around the door, her ankle bracelet swaying slightly back and forth as she walked with the silence of a thief and the grace of a lioness.

Her glass blades were in her hand, and her smile seemed almost like another blade, one fused to her face, a grin that was almost manic in its intensity.

"I'm glad it's you," she purred. "I hoped it would be you, Pyrrha. Long have I desired to match my skill against you."

Pyrrha breathed in, and out. "You could have sought me out in combat class," she pointed out.

Cinder chuckled. "Without- no, that is not true, I do mean to offend you, I am afraid – please forgive me – but I have always found that sparring in class or fighting in the arena is rather… boring. Sanitised. It lacks the frisson of excitement that comes from lives on the line, from knowing that nobody is going to stop the match when your aura gets into the red. From knowing that your aura is all that stands between you and oblivion."

Pyrrha's feet shuffled on the floor as she readied herself. "I do not agree with that, but I must confess that I, too, am glad. I, too, have wished to face you. And the current circumstances are ideal."

"'Ideal'?" Cinder asked.

"Sunset isn't here to get in our way," Pyrrha explained.

Once more Cinder laughed. "No," she agreed. "No, she is not." She paused, and as she paused, the booming sound of Unfailing Loyalty echoed through the city of the dead. "And by the sounds of it," Cinder went on, "nobody else will either. Your friends have battles of their own to fight, it seems."

"Then I had best finish this quickly," Pyrrha growled.

"Don't let your vanity blind you, Pride of Mistral," Cinder warned. "For I am Cinder Fall, chosen of the dark, and I will make you my factor and pluck all the renown and honours off your brow and take them for my own!" She raised her blades. "Now, show me how bright you burn, Evenstar!"

Pyrrha sprang at her, her red hair streaming out behind her like a standard as she leapt.

She had not lied. She had wanted this, and in this way, without Sunset to protest that she should hold back, or worse, to protect Cinder from Pyrrha's swift and shining spear.

That was one reason why she wanted this: she feared Cinder for her influence on Sunset more than her strength in arms. There were other reasons, of course, to seek her out: she was an enemy, she had tried to kill Twilight, she had tried to bring down Beacon, she was in league with Salem – she was, in fact, Salem's chief servant here in Vale. All good reasons why she, a huntress and a protector of the world, Professor Ozpin's spear, should seek her out in battle. But as well as all those things, Cinder had corrupted Sunset, had turned her from the light and sought to drag her back into the dark where she had been when Pyrrha met her. She had encouraged Sunset to do cruel and spiteful things, and she had left such a mark on Sunset that even the revelation of her true allegiance could not divest Sunset of all affection for Cinder.

For Sunset's sake, for the sake of the team, Pyrrha wished her dead.

And there was another reason also, one last reason why Pyrrha threw herself into this battle so eagerly: because she could win, and in the winning prove that she deserved a place in all of this, that she could be of some use to Professor Ozpin, that she was worthy to stand in this arena that was so broad and where the stakes were so high.

If she could win this battle, then she could conquer her doubts and lay them to rest alongside Cinder.

That, all of that, was why she hurled herself upon her foe with such ferocity. The corridor was cramped, but Pyrrha nevertheless found space to spin upon her toe with a ballerina's grace, her scarlet sash flowing around her like a dancer's ribbon, and fling Akoúo̱ down the corridor at Cinder.

Cinder was still smiling as she ducked aside, allowing Akoúo̱ to fly, spinning, down the corridor away from her.

Pyrrha closed the distance, wielding Miló in spear form in both hands, her spear a whirling circle of gold and red as she spun it in her grasp, thrusting it for Cinder's midriff.

Cinder turned the stroke aside with one of her glass scimitars, but she retreated a step as well. Pyrrha drove her back, unrelenting in the ferocity of her onslaught, striking at Cinder again and again like the waves that beat upon the shore. Cinder gave ground before her, but always, she was able to keep up with Pyrrha's swift strokes, for every time that Pyrrha thrust or slashed with Miló, Cinder was able to fend her off with the glass blades of Midnight.

Pyrrha's face was set like stone, her eyes as hard as emeralds as she drove Cinder back, thrusting, lunging, slashing. Cinder, by contrast, was still grinning.

Pyrrha thrust Miló forward for Cinder's face.

Cinder caught the stroke between her blades, stopping the movement of Pyrrha's spear.

She was still smiling.

The smile faltered a little as Pyrrha transformed Miló into rifle mode, with the barrel poking out from between Cinder's swords.

Pyrrha fired, hitting Cinder squarely between the eyes, hurling her backwards. Cinder converted her fall into a backflip, then another, putting a little distance between the two of them.

She was not smiling now.

As Miló formed back into spear mode in her right hand, Pyrrha raised her left and summoned Akuou back out of the murky depths of the corridor, flying straight and true and aimed for the back of Cinder's head.

Cinder caught the shield with one hand, reaching out to arrest its progress, but she could not resist looking at it, and as she looked, Pyrrha was on her once again. She slammed the shaft of Miló into Cinder's gut and then, when she doubled over, her face. She brought down the tip of the spear upon her back and raised and drew back Miló for a thrust.

Cinder threw Pyrrha's own shield back at her. Pyrrha caught it on her arm, Akoúo̱ fitting itself to her vambrace with a practiced ease. Miló switched from spear to sword as she advanced, turning aside the stroke of Midnight and thrusting for Cinder's eyes.

Cinder turned that stroke aside. Pyrrha pirouetted in place, slashing first with the edge of her shield and then with the edge of her sword. Cinder gave ground, one of her blades falling away, crumbling to shards of glass which glistened as they fell to the floor beneath her.

Cinder slammed her hand onto the outer wall of the apartment block.

The wall beneath and all around her hand began to glow bright yellow, getting brighter all the while.

"Pyrrha!" Jaune cried. "Look out!"

Too late. The wall exploded, debris blasting inwards, shards of stone and fragments of wood ripping into the corridor, tearing at Pyrrha's aura like biting fleas upon an unclean dog. Worse than the debris, however, was the steam from the pipes that had obviously been built into the wall, and which – heated again after long last – burst out into the corridor, not only burning Pyrrha's aura, not only making her cry out in pain, but blinding her as well, as all that she could see was consumed by milky whiteness.

She began to retreat, her shield held up before her chest and face.

Something erupted up from the floor, making her cry out again as it sliced into her aura.

"Something else you won't learn in the coliseum," Cinder snarled gleefully. "How to mind your surroundings!"

Pyrrha couldn't see, and couldn't hear over the hissing of the dispersing steam, and before it dissipated, Cinder had closed with her, her slashes wild but wildly ferocious, like she was carving slices off a butcher's ham.

Except it was Pyrrha's aura she was carving into as Cinder's glass sword slammed into Pyrrha's side. Pyrrha recoiled, trying to shield herself, but the next blow came in straight at her belly, powerful enough that she almost doubled over. Pyrrha slashed blindly with her sword in turn, but her stroke cut only through the empty air as Cinder's blow – how could she see while Pyrrha was blind? – struck home for Pyrrha's face and would have extinguished her eyes if her aura had not protected her.

"Behold, the Champion of Mistral!" Cinder cried, her voice somewhere between a triumphant crow and a furious snarl. "You're not the one to bring me down. You're just an old name and a pretty face!"

And a semblance, Pyrrha thought, as she reached out with Polarity to grasp the metal pipes embedded in the wall, all the pipes that Cinder had ruptured and those that she had not, all that metal lurking unseen.

I'm not the only one who needs to mind my surroundings, Cinder. Pyrrha couldn't see the metal; she could barely see her own hand, with its black outline surrounding it, but she could feel the pipes, and she could start to hear them groaning as she wrenched at them with her semblance, pulling them, commanding them. They groaned, they creaked, they screamed in protest as she wrenched at their fittings and the concrete in which they were embedded, but finally, they came, tearing through the wall, spraying cold and stagnant water, showering the corridor with fragments of debris and slamming the pipes into Cinder hard enough to push her through the other wall into the apartments beyond.

The steam was dissipating now, and Pyrrha could see again. She switched Miló into spear form-

"Pyrrha!" Jaune cried, running towards her, one hand held out. "Your aura, do you-?"

"Not yet," Pyrrha told him. She wasn't exactly sure where her aura was, but now wasn't the time to let Jaune stimulate it back into the green, not when Cinder wasn't beaten yet. All that would do was give her a sitting target.

She would win the battle first, then let Jaune work his magic.

"Stay here," she told him, before darting through the doorway into the apartment into which she had just thrown Cinder. Pipes littered the floor, crushing the coffee table which had sat in the middle of the room and wrecking the chairs besides.

Cinder was waiting for her, standing amidst the shattered pipes, a glass bow in her hands. As Pyrrha appeared, she loosed a shaft. Pyrrha swatted it aside, shattering the glass arrow in the edge of her shield. She rushed forward, spear drawn back-

Something struck her from behind. The arrow – but she had broken it? Whatever it was, the force of the impact knocked her temporarily off balance, and in that moment, Cinder counted, her glass weapon changing from bow to blades once again with a fluidity that would have done any mechashift proud, her twin obsidian scimitars slicing up to strike at Pyrrha's exposed belly.

Pyrrha grunted with pain, and with her semblance, she shuffled the broken pipes across the floor, disturbing Cinder's footing, making her stumble as Cinder had made Pyrrha stumble, and as she stumbled, Pyrrha flung her shield, striking Cinder on the forehead.

Cinder's head snapped backwards. Miló whirled in Pyrrha's hands as she brought it down.

Cinder took the blow upon her wrist, the other hand grabbing hold of Miló by the golden shaft. She was leaning backwards, knees bent, the smile gone from her expression, which was now a scowl of effort to hold Pyrrha at bay. Her arms shook as Miló pressed down upon her.

For her own part, Pyrrha was scowling too as she pushed down upon her spear, exerting all her strength to break down Cinder's guard.

She was not just an ancient name. She was not just a laundry list of airy titles. She was not just a pretty face. She was strong and well-trained in equal measure, and Cinder would feel both!

She would have pulled away and reversed her stroke, but Cinder's grip on Miló was too tight. Very well then, she would have to force her way through.

Embers began to float around her like motes of dust.

Pyrrha looked down at the floor, which was glowing a fiery yellow beneath her feet.

The smile returned to Cinder's face.

The floor exploded beneath Pyrrha before she could react. A scream tore from Pyrrha's throat as the flames washed over her, the heat engulfed her, the light blinded her, and heat and fire alike consumed her aura as she was hurled up and backwards through the air, hurled through the wall and into the next room, hurled to the floor in a heap with a thud and a crunch, her red hair pooling around her head.

The Champion of Mistral. The voice in her head sounded like mockery. Her aura hadn't broken, not yet, but-

A wordless shout from Jaune echoed in her ears.

XxXxX​

Jaune wasn't sure who he was more mad at right now.

Okay, he was more mad at Cinder, obviously, but that didn't mean he wasn't kind of upset at Pyrrha too.

She had promised. She had promised! She had just reassured him like five seconds ago that she wasn't going to break that promise, and what had she done?

Well, okay, she hadn't technically broken the promise – she hadn't left him behind or sent him away – but fighting a battle without him, didn't that count, sort of? A little?

He hadn't objected. He hadn't told her to stop. He had… he had stood there and watched and even kind of looked forward to watching Cinder get her ass kicked – God knew she had it coming – without Sunset there to get in the way. He hadn't objected until things had stopped going the way that he had thought they would go.

And now, Pyrrha was screaming. He hadn't thought that he would ever hear a sound like that. He never wanted to hear a sound like that again, and it was…

Jaune found that he wasn't nearly so angry at Pyrrha as he was at himself. She hadn't even told him to stay back until after the fight was halfway through; she hadn't told him to help, but she hadn't told him not to either. He had stayed back of his own volition because he knew that he wasn't in the same league as her or Cinder, he knew that he'd only end up getting in her way, he knew that he ought to stand aside and let her handle it.

Except that she couldn't handle it. Not on her own.

Maybe if she had a better partner…

Well, she didn't. She had him. And if he wasn't on the same level as her, if he wasn't able to stand up to Cinder Fall, then he at least could give her something else to think about.

And so, he charged, shield held before him, Crocea Mors raised above his head, howling wordlessly, crying out his anger, crying for courage, his tread heavy and thudding like a drumbeat as he rushed through the broken wall straight at Cinder.

The shield is a weapon, not something to hide behind. That was one of Pyrrha's first and most persistent lessons to him, and so, as he closed with her, Jaune sought to hit her with his shield, lashing out with it in a sideways swiping motion.

Cinder dodged it, her body moving with willowy flexibility.

Jaune slashed at her with his sword.

Cinder caught Crocea Mors in one hand, her fingers closing around the metal of the blade.

Jaune tried to pull the sword free – and hopefully take off a slice of her aura into the bargain – but it would not budge. Cinder's grip upon his weapon was too tight.

He tried again to hit her with the shield, but she grabbed that with her free hand and held that as tight and immobile as his sword.

His sword which was starting to glow. No, not glow; it was starting to heat up, the metal getting hotter and hotter, the glow of said heat spreading out from Cinder's palm up and down the venerable blade.

Jaune tried again to tug it free. It would not move.

Cinder squeezed.

And Crocea Mors, the sword of heroes, the venerable blade that his great-grandfather had carried through a hundred battles or more, the heirloom of the Arc family, shattered into fragments, shards of broken metal which fell to clatter to the floor at his feet.

Jaune was left holding a hilt with a broken stump of a blade attached.

Jaune's eyes were wide with shock. It broke? It broke? He'd broken the ancestral weapon of his family?

Now of all times?

Can I not catch a break just once?

"Oh, come on!" he yelled.

Cinder, meanwhile, was looking at him, and with undisguised irritation too. Her amber eyes smouldered angrily. "Stand still," she snapped, "and wait for orders from your betters." She hit him in the face with the palm of her hand, hard enough to knock Jaune off his feet and land him on his back. "You who are worthless, counting for nothing in battle or debate." She planted one foot upon his chest, pressing down upon him hard enough to pin him to the floor. Cinder cocked her head to one side as she regarded him.

"What does she see in you?" she asked.

There was no answer but Pyrrha's furious war cry as she rejoined the battle, her red sash flying.

XxXxX​

Pyrrha had underestimated Cinder. Or she had overestimated herself. Or both. Either way, she might not be able to best her in arms, she might not be able to finish this battle as she had wished, but she would not, by all the gods of Mistral she would not, permit Cinder to do any harm to Jaune.

Not while she lived. She would sooner die and give Jaune up into Ruby's small, pale hands than let any harm come to him while she drew breath.

She was afraid for Jaune, she was angry at herself for letting things come to this, and she was incandescently furious at Cinder for daring, for presuming, for dreaming to threaten sweet brave Jaune while Pyrrha lived.

You will deal with me first, or while I live, I'll give you cause to regret that you did otherwise!

Her fury lent her strength beyond her diminished aura as she physically collided with Cinder, wrapping her arms around Cinder's waist, hurling her off Jaune and slamming her head-first into the ground. She threw her enemy aside, hard enough to cast her out of the room, out through the broken outer wall and into the streets of Mountain Glenn beyond.

With Polarity, she summed Miló into her grip, the weapon changing fluidly to rifle form in her hands as she fired again and again, emptying the magazine at Cinder, who held out her hands to block the shots, suffering no visible hurt from them.

But damage to aura wasn't visible, was it?

Pyrrha charged out after her into the street, lashing out with tip and shaft of Miló, first one and then the other. Cinder parried with her blades of glass, but she had to be close to the end now, surely?

She had to be close to the end if Pyrrha was?

Just a little longer.

Pyrrha was distracted by the roar of the largest beowolf that she had ever seen, larger than the green creature on the other side of the street, larger than any ursa major that she had ever come across. A beowolf large enough that its head was level with the top of the apartment complex, and its fangs were each the size of a motorcycle.

And those fangs were bared as it advanced upon her, the street shaking with its tread.

Pyrrha leapt back, summoning Akoúo̱ into her off-hand, drawing back her spear.

But the beowolf was gone.

And so was Cinder.

"You are stronger than I gave you credit for, Pyrrha," Cinder's voice, insufferably smug, floated down from on high. "I hadn't expected you to give me such a challenge. We should do this again sometime."

Pyrrha looked up, her eyes darting across the dark skyline, searching above her for some – there! A flash of red, disappearing out of sight.

Pyrrha's legs bent as she prepared to leap after her. If she could gain the roof-

"Pyrrha, wait!" Jaune cried, running to join her with his shield and scabbard and his sword – his broken sword, for which she felt a punch of guilt as strong as any blow Cinder had dealt her – sheathed there. He didn't hesitate or ask her permission to raise his hand to her, a golden light spreading from his palm to spread across Pyrrha's body. "You can't just go off on your own."

Pyrrha looked at him through the spreading golden light. Ordinarily, Jaune's semblance felt so warm and gentle, an embrace of sunlight, comforting and renewing in equal measure. Now, it felt prickly, and a little cold, even by the standards of this place.

Was that because he was upset with her? Or because she was upset with herself?

"She's getting away," she said.

"We'll see her again," Jaune replied. "All of us. But right now, we shouldn't get separated, and I think… I think our friends might use your help."

All of us, because I couldn't beat her on my own, Pyrrha thought bitterly. But he was right. They had heard shooting before, and although that had stopped now… she couldn't just run off and leave everyone. "Of course," she murmured. "Jaune, I-"

"We can talk about it later," Jaune said.

"But your sword-"

"That's not your fault," he said. "And… I don't know, maybe it can be repaired or something. Either way, we should get back."

"Right," Pyrrha said, and tried to put her guilt aside as she headed back inside, to find another way out into the street and whatever awaited them there.

But the cold, hard, uncomfortable fact lingered in her mind.

She had failed.

 

[ScipioSmith]

Solid Skills​

Rainbow Dash led the way.

Once they got into an elevated position to open fire on that grimm – if it was a grimm; position to open fire on whatever it was, anyway – then Penny and Ciel, with their long-range weapons, would be in a position to do all the work.

But before that, in the tight quarters of the building itself, they would be at a disadvantage. So Rainbow led the way, Unfailing Loyalty gripped tightly in her hands. Penny was behind her, with Ciel bringing up the rear.

Rainbow's goggles were over her eyes, illuminating the darkness but doing so in shades of green.

She would have liked Blake to have come with them. She got why Blake hadn't come with them – like Rainbow herself, she'd be a little useless once Ciel and Penny opened fire on their target – but if there was anything inside…

Rainbow's ears drooped down into her many-coloured hair. If there was anything inside, she would deal with it herself.

Blake… Blake was a lot of things. Blake was smart, Blake was bold, Blake was righteous, Blake was inspiring; Blake was a lot more things than Rainbow was, but Rainbow didn't need Blake to win a fight. She could do that just fine on her own.

That was one thing that she could do on her own.

Rainbow blinked as a vision rose to the forefront of her mind and had to be forcibly shoved back.

This mission had been… fraught, so far, in a lot of ways, and there were things that Rainbow wished hadn't happened, but if she could only have changed one thing to have happened up until this point, it would have been Salem not showing her… face or whatever. Her tentacles. Salem not showing up at all would have been her choice.

Because Rainbow really hadn't needed that right now. She hadn't needed to see Atlas falling to the ground, crumbling as it descended, the tall glass towers toppling over and shattering into glittering fragments, the shadow over Low Town growing larger and larger until the ghetto beneath was obliterated by the weight of rock and metal crashing down upon it; she hadn't needed to hear Fluttershy sobbing in terror, Rarity's dying scream, Pinkie crying out for help; she hadn't needed to hear Scootaloo begging for mercy. She hadn't needed to see them die, one by one, by flames or fangs.

She hadn't needed to be reminded that she was a fake.

"If Salem wants to kill my friends – if she wants Atlas – then she's gonna have to go through me first. I'm in."

That what was she'd said in the elevator, a couple of days ago now, when General Ironwood and Professor Ozpin had told everyone the truth about all this, about Salem, about what they were really up against. That was what Rainbow Dash had said, and now… and now that she had actually come face to face with Salem, she just felt really, really stupid.

'She'll have to go through me first'? Seriously? As if that was going to be a problem for her.

Rainbow's face twitched. She swore under her breath as she realised what she was doing. She couldn't do that. She didn't have time for that. She needed to focus. Her team was relying on her, Sunset was relying on her.

Ironic, since this was partly Sunset's fault; what she'd said to Rainbow last night was mingling with the stuff that Salem had put into her mind, and it was all getting jumbled up, and she-

Rainbow swore under her breath again, more coarsely this time for extra emphasis. She really, really did not have time for this.

She had to focus. Focus on the fact that she could do this. Even Sunset had given Rainbow the credit that she was good at the things that she was good at, and this was one of them. And she wasn't going up against Salem, she was going up against… she didn't know what she might be going up against, but it was probably something mortal.

Something that would die if she shot or hit it enough times.

They reached the door in, or a door in. The building that lined the side of the street down which the green grimm stalked reminded Rainbow a lot of some of the better buildings in Low Town where she'd grown up; the construction values were arguably better, but it was the same kind of thing. She was expecting small apartments inside, not a lot of space.

She turned to Penny and Ciel behind her. "Okay, I'm going to go in first; you two are going to wait. When it's clear, I'll signal you to come in; don't move until I say it's clear."

"What if you're in trouble?" Penny asked.

"Then it's not clear yet, and you need to wait until it is," Rainbow informed her.

"But I-"

"It's going to be tight in there, Penny," Rainbow said. "Narrow corridors, small rooms; that's not what you were built for."

Penny frowned and pouted, but didn't say anything. Ciel nodded her head silently.

Rainbow turned away from both of them, holding Unfailing Loyalty in one hand as she reached for the door handle with the other.

The door opened easily at her slightest touch. That was lucky, and a little suspicious.

Rainbow left Penny and Ciel waiting outside while she darted in. A long, narrow corridor ran down the ground floor of the building to her right, while directly in front of her was an elevator with an 'out of order' sign on the door which probably predated the fall of the city.

Rainbow kind of hoped so anyway, although if it didn't… kudos to the janitors for commitment, she guessed.

There was a staircase next to the broken elevator.

Rainbow walked towards it, stepping gingerly across the tiled floor, wishing that she had a mask on against the amount of dust upon it – dust which she was stirring up.

There was no sign of anyone. There might be people in the rooms, hidden behind the closed doors on the left-hand side of the corridor, but so long as they stayed there, then they wouldn't be any trouble for RSP.

Although, just to be on the safe side, Rainbow reached into a pouch at her belt and a took out a little gizmo that Twilight had come up with; it was about the size of a large marble, and it looked like one too, a glass sphere with a coloured ribbon forming a band within. What it actually was was a short range motion detector. Rainbow pressed down on with her fingers and thumb to activate it, then used the five-second activation delay to roll it down the corridor. It rumbled a little upon the floor tiles, but not much; you could barely hear it if you weren't listening for it.

Now, if anyone would come down that corridor after they went upstairs, that sensor would start to scream the place down.

Unfortunately, she only had two to begin with, and that was one of them, so she would have to be smart about when to use the other one.

"Clear," she hissed, retreating back towards the outer doorway and gesturing for Penny and Ciel to follow.

They did so, moving silently or as close to silently as they could get. Rainbow motioned with one hand for the two of them to wait at the foot of the stairs as Rainbow began to climb up them.

The stairs were even narrower than the corridor. Rainbow could imagine what it was like trying to get luggage up and down these stairs, and she could imagine that because she could remember what it was like trying to get luggage up and down narrow staircases. It was not fun. From what she could remember, it involved a lot of turning things on their sides and hoping that all your stuff didn't break from being jangled and jumbled around.

The banister on the side of the stairs – almost unnecessary, with how tight it was; where was there to fall? – was wood, and the wood had claw marks on it. That was… something.

Still, at least that was the worst sign of any violence that they'd seen in here yet.

There was nothing on the stairs. There were no booby traps or tripwires, and when she got up onto the first floor, Rainbow checked the corridor and found, just like on the ground floor, there was nothing but a lot of closed doors on one side of the corridor as it advanced down the building.

And so it was with the second floor, as Rainbow advanced, calling Penny and Ciel to follow her once she knew that the coast was clear, until she got to the third floor, the highest floor, or at least the highest that the stairs went. There was a sign of a slope in the ceiling of the staircase, but even so, Rainbow wouldn't have been surprised if there was at least some crawlspace up above for maintenance, pipes and stuff.

Nevertheless, that wasn't somewhere they would be interested in going. This floor would be enough. From here, from one of the apartments on the left, Ciel and Penny could fire down upon the unknown grimm while being completely safe from its teeth and claws.

They just had to find a firing point now.

Probably somewhere in the middle of the complex; that would let them fire right down on it.

Leaving Penny and Ciel at the head of the stairs and rolling her second and last motion detector down the stairs to trigger if anyone started to come up after them, Rainbow moved down the corridor. She tried the first door on the left. It opened, revealing nothing but an empty room, abandoned in a hurry; the closet door had been left open, and stuff was strewn out of drawers as though people had been looking for the stuff they really wanted and leaving that which they could bear to abandon.

It was the same story with the next door. And the one after that. And the one after that. It was the same with every door which Rainbow checked: an empty room, abandoned – and abandoned in a hurry, what was more. Every room had been ditched, left in a mess as people grabbed what they could and ran.

That was the way it went when the grimm attacked. Official guidelines – at least in Atlas – said don't bring anything at all, just run: run for the shelters, run for the airships, run for wherever it was the notices were telling you to run to. But people didn't work like that: they ran, but not without grabbing a few things first. Sensible-seeming things, like lien cards, food, water, or a charge of clothes; sentimental things, like wedding photos or beloved toys for the children; things that were neither sensible nor sentimental, but which you grabbed anyway because you were out of your mind with panic and not thinking straight.

And that was your business, as long as you didn't expect anyone to risk their lives to save you because you'd gotten into difficulty thanks to your mistake.

Anyway, the rooms were as Rainbow expected them to be, with all the signs of a rushed departure.

Until she came to the door that was locked.

That was not what Rainbow had expected. Yes, she supposed it wasn't impossible that somebody had locked their apartment before they fled – people did strange things – but it wasn't common in Rainbow's experience. It was odd.

And because it was odd, it bothered her a little.

She hesitated, pondering what to do next. Not move on and ignore it. Something in her gut was telling her not to do that. Yes, it was possible the owner of the apartment had locked up before they ran away, but it was equally possible that someone had locked it from the inside. Not a grimm, but one of Cinder's guys: Emerald, Mercury, or Lightning Dust.

Well, there was one way to have a look inside.

Rainbow glanced back down the corridor, to where Penny and Ciel were waiting. Ciel was beginning to look a little impatient. Rainbow ignored that. This wouldn't take too long, and it didn't sound as if they'd engaged the grimm down in the street yet.

She thought about asking them not to look, but that would sound really stupid, so Rainbow just hoped they weren't paying that much attention as she got to work picking the lock. It wasn't a skill that she advertised; in fact, Gilda was about the only person who knew she could do this and only because Gilda had taught her how in the first place. You picked up a few things, growing up where Rainbow had; she hadn't been born in Atlas, after all.

All the same, she hoped that Ciel and Penny weren't paying too much attention to what she was doing. It wasn't exactly a respectable skill, and while Penny might not understand that, Ciel definitely would.

Not respectable at all.

But effective, Rainbow added mentally as the lock clicked and the door opened just a fraction.

Rainbow picked up Unfailing Loyalty where she had placed it down on the floor and pushed the door open with one hand. It opened silently, admitting her into a room that looked much like the others, had been abandoned much like the others, had a closet whose door was mostly shut, not quite like the others but nothing too unusual there.

Rainbow's gaze swept the room, the barrel of Unfailing Loyalty trailing right and left. Everything was covered in a layer of dust.

Everything… except for the copy of X-Ray and Vav #1 which was sitting on the table, clean and mostly dust free.

As if someone had been reading it and then-

Rainbow started to turn, bringing her shotgun to bear on the closet.

The closet door flew open as Mercury Black leapt out, his leg shooting out in a kick to knock the barrel of Unfailing Loyalty aside. The shotgun went off, blowing a hole in the wall. Rainbow growled wordlessly as she swung the butt of the weapon, hitting Mercury in the cheek with it, but as she tried to hit him, he grabbed the gun with both hands.

Unfailing Loyalty went off again, blowing some holes in the floor between their feet as they wrestled for the gun, tugging it this way and that. Rainbow headbutted Mercury, but he did not let go. He cut Rainbow's legs out from under her with a sweeping kick, knocking her to the floor.

Mercury smirked as he raised one boot to descend upon her face.

Rainbow rolled, sweeping Mercury's other leg – the one that he was standing on – aside and dumping him down on the floor next to her. Rainbow grabbed him, meaning to get him in a headlock, but Mercury's boots fired with a pair of loud bangs, and Mercury shot forward, propelled along the floor by the recoil out of Rainbow's grasp.

The two leapt for their feet. Rainbow reached for her machine pistols. Mercury jumped up into the air, levelling his legs to fire two more shots which forced Rainbow to roll out of the way, ending up back in the doorway. She knelt, using the door as cover as she drew Brutal Honesty and fired a burst of bullets in his direction.

He didn't flinch, she had to give him that; he took it on the chin – or in the chest – and barely let on that it was even denting his aura, let alone hurting him. He rushed her, though she fired again, and launched himself in a flying kick for the door that was her cover.

Rainbow rolled again, back into the room and out of sight of the corridor as Mercury's powerful kick struck the door and half turned it into the kindling as the weapon in his boot fired. He turned, moving with the grace of a dancer on the stage, spinning on his toe, arms out for balance as he aimed a spinning kick at Rainbow's head.

Rainbow hit the deck to let his leg pass harmlessly above her, before launching herself upwards to grab his leg – it felt weirdly hard to her touch – and, with all her strength, pick him and hurl him over her shoulder – his head hit the ceiling on the way – and face-first into the floor.

She aimed Brutal Honesty at him.

Mercury fired off his boots. The first one passed harmlessly between her face and her shoulder, but the second one hit her in the ankle, drawing a yelp out of her as she dropped to one knee.

Mercury pushed himself off his hands into the air, squirming there like a salmon leaping out of the river so that he landed on his feet, facing her.

There was anger in his grey eyes, but also wariness on his face as well. His first kick knocked Brutal Honesty out of her hand.

His second came for her face.

Rainbow concentrated her remaining aura – she thought she probably still had most of it left – in the palms of her hands as she caught his booted foot between them, taking the impact of the kick and the shot from his boots alike. It wasn't great, but she'd had worse. It didn't feel anything like as hard as taking Adam's sword on her arm had felt back at the docks.

Outside, Penny screamed.

XxXxX​

"Should we do something?" Penny asked, as they heard Rainbow's shotgun go off inside the room that Rainbow had just entered.

"Rainbow Dash's instructions were quite clear," Ciel reminded her, her voice cool and collected. "We are not to enter until the room has been declared clear. Sounds of fighting are evidence that the room is not clear. Ergo, we will remain here as instructed."

"'As instructed'?" Penny replied. "But Rainbow Dash-"

"Is our leader, chosen by General Ironwood himself to carry out this task," Ciel declared. "We do not always see eye to eye, but her record in combat speaks for itself. She will prevail."

"And what if she doesn't?"

"Then what makes you think you or I could fare any better in the circumstances?" Ciel asked.

Penny pouted. It wasn't fair. Even if there were things that she couldn't do, situations where she wasn't at her best, then, well… that wasn't fair either! She had been created to save the world, that was what General Ironwood had said, that was what her father had said, and even if her father had been ignorant and General Ironwood had had to lie and she couldn't literally save the world because Salem couldn't be killed, then surely she should still be able to take on most bad guys, right? If she was supposed to be Atlas's great new hope, its wonder weapon, then why did she have to stand out here like… like… she would ask Ruby or Pyrrha for some examples of people who had to stand outside in corridors later, but why did she have to stand out in this corridor while Rainbow Dash fought all by herself?

If I'm so great, why do they treat me like a baby?

And if I'm not so great, then… then what's the point of me?

She had been created to save the world, that was what they'd told her. That wasn't true. Nobody could save the world: not her, not Pyrrha, not Ruby, not all of them together and the whole Atlesian fleet. But surely, she could do something? She could fight, and she could win. She could protect those who couldn't protect themselves. She could stand alongside her friends.

Except she couldn't. Because they would never let her.

When everyone was in the forest when that exercise went wrong, Pyrrha and Rainbow Dash went to rescue Ruby and the others, but they didn't take Penny with them. No, Rainbow told her to stay behind while he took Team Tsunami with them! It seemed that she trusted the Great and Powerful Trixie more than she trusted her own teammate!

And now, she was making Penny stand outside while she fought because she didn't need Penny's help for this.

What was the point of her? Yes, there was only one of her, and something might have happened to her in the forest, but there was only one Pyrrha Nikos as well, and nobody had told her that she shouldn't go help her friends in case something happened to her! Sunset wasn't telling Pyrrha to hang back because she was too valuable or because she wasn't suited for this or that.

Because Pyrrha was the real deal, and Penny… Penny was only-

"Penny!" Ciel hissed.

Penny turned to face her. "What?"

"I think I can…" Ciel frowned. "I thought that I heard-"

A part of the ceiling just behind them exploded as a large, dark figure dropped down right behind Ciel. Ciel turned, too slowly as the figure – Lightning Dust, one of Cinder's teammates, whose height and muscular build made Ciel seem slight by comparison – grabbed the barrel of Distant Thunder with one hand – the rifle boomed out once, blowing a hole in the wall but doing nothing to Lightning Dust – and Ciel herself by the other.

Lightning rippled across Lightning's body; she was wearing a black bodysuit, with some kind of heavy backpack strapped across her chest, and from the pack emerged tubes filled with yellow liquid that bubbled away as it flowed through the tubes from the pack into her arms and legs. The yellow liquid seemed to bubble faster as the lightning crackled across her body and spread from her arms up the barrel of Distant Thunder and across Ciel, making her cry out, making her whole body spasm in shock as Lightning threw her aside, tossing her down the stairs where she fell, head over heels, crashing and thumping.

Rainbow's motion detector began to scream as Ciel landed in a heap beside it.

"No!" Penny yelled, and as she yelled, the swords of Floating Array emerged from out of her own backpack, forming a tight halo around her. There wasn't room in this tight corridor to spread them out further, but that didn't matter because she only had one target, and she was locked on!

Her swords retracted into carbine configurations as she opened up with all her lasers.

Green blasts erupted from the muzzles of her weapons, all of them leaping straight towards Lightning Dust where she stood, wreathed in lightning, which snapped and crackled as it travelled up and down her muscular body.

She smirked and raised one hand.

Lightning burst there in great intensity, a miniature storm brewing in the palm of her hand, lightning rippling out beyond her fingertips.

She stood there, one arm out and steadied by the other, as the laser beams of Floating Array descended on her like a pack of dogs.

The lightning expanded outwards as all of Penny's lasers were deflected away, bending off their established trajectories to blow holes in the walls, on the ceiling or…

Or down the stairs.

"Ciel!" Penny shrieked. She couldn't… she might have just hit Ciel with her own lasers! Lightning Dust might have just made her hit Ciel with her own lasers, and she was still standing there with that smile on her face.

Penny's swords snapped back into their blade forms, extending outwards to their full length. Penny threw out of one arm as her swords shot forwards, their wires extending.

She could do this, even in a confined space. This was just one of Cinder's lackeys; she could take them on. She had been created to save the world!

Lightning Dust leapt backwards, backflipping down the little stretch of corridor behind her, her yellow and amber tail flapping in the air before she landed, arms outstretched, and grabbed two of Penny's blades as they descended on her.

Lightning erupted from her hands, travelling up the blades and down the wires and all the way to Penny.

Penny screamed in shock as the lightning spread up and down her body, half-bypassing her aura and attacking-

ALERT: Malfunctions detected. Initiating internal diagnostic.

ALERT: Language centre compromised.

ALERT: Motor functions in left arm compromised.

ALERT: Motor functions in right leg ceased.

ALERT: Floating Array inoperable.

The blades of Floating Array clattered to the ground, their strings cut. Penny felt the same way as she dropped too, her leg giving way beneath her so that she fell onto one knee. Her left hand spasmed, and she couldn't stop it.

She tried to speak, to call for Rainbow Dash, for Ciel, but… but the words wouldn't come out; she could make sounds, but they were nonsense, gibberish, she wasn't making any sense, she couldn't express herself, she was trapped inside her own head!

A coughing sound from Lightning Dust reminded Penny that that was the least of her worries.

Lightning Dust was doubled over, coughing and spluttering. When she straightened up, there was blood coming out of her mouth. She wiped it aside and looked at it with disgust on her face.

Then she looked at Penny, and the disgust turned to eagerness.

Lightning crackled in the palm of her hand once again as she began to advance.

Penny couldn't walk. She couldn't even stand up. She couldn't move Floating Array; none of the swords would respond to command. With the hand that would still obey her, she tried to pull one of the swords towards her by the wire, but even if she did, how would she-?

Lightning raised a lightning-wreathed fist.

Ciel's pistol barked in her hand as she fired once, twice, three times as she ran up the stairs, throwing herself against Lightning Dust, pressing the pistol into the side of her black bodysuit and firing it again and again-

Lightning consumed both their bodies, spreading from Lightning to Ciel. Ciel tried to hold up against it, she kept shooting, but eventually, the pistol slipped from her hands, and she cried out in pain, her whole body shaking.

Lightning grabbed her and slammed her face into the floor.

Penny tried to cry out, but only wordless nothing emerged.

A rainbow flashed before her eyes.

XxXxX​

Penny!

I gotta end this quickly.

Rainbow pushed as she rose to her feet, not hard enough to knock Mercury down but hard enough to knock him off-balance, and as he was off-balance, she went for him.

More accurately, she slammed into him fast enough to leave a rainbow trail behind her as she bore him backwards with the force of her onslaught, carrying him before her, slamming him through the wall into the next apartment, and as she bore him back, her free hand, the hand that she wasn't holding onto him with to prevent his escape, pounded into his stomach like a hammer, again and again, until his aura broke and his whole body sagged forwards with the sudden weakness that always came from a lack of aura.

He looked up at her, his breathing heavy, his mouth opened to say something.

He never got the chance to say it. There was a burst of fire from Plain Awesome, Mercury's grey jacket was suddenly reddened with blood, and Mercury's grey eyes widened with surprise as he toppled over onto the floor.

Rainbow didn't waste another glance on him. He was her enemy, and now, he was dead. She had more important things to focus on.

Like her teammates.

How did they get behind us? The motion detectors should have-

She could worry about that later.

A rainbow trailed behind her as Rainbow rushed from the room and down the corridor.

She could see Lightning Dust, wearing something on her back that looked like it was pumping her namesake right into her veins; she could see Penny on her knees, her swords lying uselessly on the ground.

She could see Ciel, disarmed, prone, and helpless.

Her team. Her responsibility.

Rainbow accelerated, moving faster and faster, the rainbow behind her growing brighter and brighter as she blew past Penny, slamming into Lightning Dust just like she had slammed into Mercury.

She didn't stop, she didn't say anything, she just hit Lightning at top speed and bore her back like flotsam on the wave.

Rainbow snarled. Lightning snarled right back at her, lightning crackling up and down her body, crackling up and down Rainbow Dash's body, tearing at her aura, biting it, ripping into it.

Rainbow could feel the pain through her aura, she could feel her aura dropping, even if she couldn't quite feel how much of it she had left. But she didn't care. She didn't stop, she didn't let go, because right now, she was more than just a huntress; she was an avenging angel!

And so she ignored the lightning that was rippling up and down her body as she bore Lightning Dust through the wall and leapt out, with her enemy, into the street.

The Wings of Harmony still worked despite the lightning; they too were protected by her aura for however long it lasted, and so, Rainbow spread her wings, the wings that Atlas had given her, and with those wings, she soared, and Lightning Dust and all her weight and all her lightning and all the way she beat on Rainbow Dash with both her fists was not enough to bring her down.

Lightning's blows seemed almost petty, like a childish tantrum of a demand to be released until she saw how high Rainbow was flying: higher and higher, closer to the ceiling with its mock stars buried in the rock, so high that the undercity seemed so small beneath them.

The lightning died as Lightning Dust looked down. She looked back up at Rainbow Dash. "Do you expect me to beg?" she demanded.

"'Beg'? No," Rainbow snarled. "I expect you to fall."

She let her go, and as she let her go, she hit Lightning Dust square in the chest with an aura boom, putting all of the remaining aura that she had, every last bit of it into an attack whose sound echoed out across the city.

Blood splashed from Lightning's mouth as she fell, and as she fell, her eyes were fixed on Rainbow Dash, and they were filled with hatred.

Rainbow didn't care. Lightning Dust could hate her all she wanted; she wasn't going to survive that drop, not after taking a hit like that.

Her whole body trembled with exhaustion as she swooped back down towards her teammates.

Exhaustion… and fear over what she'd find when she got to them.

 

[ScipioSmith]

The Badge and the Burden​

It was called Liberty Point.

It was a smuggler's cove, to all intents and purposes: a little harbour lying beneath the watch of rocky cliffs, where the waves crashed against the spurs of rock that sheltered a calm pool from the fury of the tides and rendered it a safe place for ships to harbour.

No village lay nearby. No fishermen used this place. Which meant it was ideal for the White Fang to use as a place to moor their clandestine boats, for those members of the organisation who were too recognisable and too wanted to be able to travel on commercial ferries.

It was here that Blake found Adam, standing on one of the rocky spurs that protected the bay, framed against the setting of the sun as he watched the waves crash against the rocks on which he stood.

Blake hopped lightly from rock to rock towards him, careful of her footing and keeping one eye on the waves as she went.

"Adam," she said, as she got closer to him. "I didn't think that we were expecting a ship today."

Adam glanced at her. He wasn't wearing his mask, which surprised Blake for a number of reasons: first, she would have thought that the salt kicked up from the surf would have stung the burns on his face from where the SDC had branded it; second… Adam almost never took off his mask, certainly not where somebody might see the mark.

Admittedly, they were alone out here, but still… it was unusual for him to do it nevertheless. He feared the risk too much.

He must think that we won't be disturbed.

I suppose I can't imagine who would actually come out to the water like this at this time, especially since I didn't think there was a boat coming.

"There is no boat," Adam said. "Not tonight."

Blake had reached his side by now, though she had to look up into his face. "Then why… why are you out here?"

Adam was silent for a moment. "What do you see, Blake, when you look around you?"

Blake was less interested in observing the surroundings in the dying light than she was in working out why Adam was asking this question. "I see… the shore," she said, looking out across the jagged rocks. "What they would have called a wrecking shore, in the old days."

Adam chuckled. "Yes. In the old days, before the war, before our people were set free, before airships and technology, people who lived on shores like this would light signal beacons to lure unwary ships onto the rocks to be smashed." The smile on his face died. "Some of the ships that were lured to their doom were slave ships, filled with faunus chained and shackled and packed like animals in the hold. And when their ships were wrecked… rather than struggle to shore, a lot of those slaves leapt into the stormy seas because they understood that it was better to die than to live as slaves.

"They were a lot like us, those slaves; they understood that sometimes, death is the only freedom that we have."

"Adam," Blake murmured. "Why are you talking like this?"

Adam looked away from her, turning his gaze outward across the sea. "Sometimes…" he sighed. "Sometimes, the magnitude of the task that we have set for ourselves, it… it hits me harder than usual. It closes in around me, and I think… I think about what I've gotten you involved in and how it will all end for you." He turned to her and reached out and cupped her cheek with one hand. "I don't want to see you get hurt, Blake; the thought of any harm coming to you, it… it wounds me."

Blake smiled, but she gently took his hand from her cheek and enfolded it in both her hands. "That's sweet," she said, "but I can take care of myself."

"I know," Adam said. "And when I get too afraid, I can come here and look out across the sea and remind myself that sometimes, it's better to leap into the tempest than to live in chains."

Blake stared up at him, not only the champion of their race and a hero to faunus everywhere but her hero too. Hers most of all. Her leader and her love. She would never follow anyone else into battle. She would never love anyone else. The two were entirely intertwined and combined in his one being.

"You're not going to die," she whispered. "You can't. You have to live. For my sake. I'll live for you, and you have to live for me too. We have to live for one another."

Adam looked back at her, and as he looked, his smile returned, so that his face seemed handsome, even despite the way that 'SDC' had marred it. That smile lingered for a moment, and then faded away once again.

"What's wrong?" Blake asked.

"There's… there's something that I've never told you," Adam said. "Something that I've never told anyone."

Blake waited expectantly. "You… you don't have to tell me, if you don't want to," she said, suppressing her own curiosity, now that he had piqued it so thoroughly.

"I'm half human," he said, the words falling out of his mouth as though, having decided to say them, he couldn't wait to be rid of them.

Blake's eyes widened. She could only stare at him in silence while Adam, waiting for a response from her, seemed so skittish, more afraid than she had ever seen him be in battle, as though the prospect of her reaction to this news frightened him more than facing all the might of Atlas.

"H-how?" she stammered.

Adam's jaw tightened. "My… my mother," he growled, through clenched teeth. "She was… a powerful woman. The kind of woman who is used to getting what she wants. The kind who doesn't take no for an answer.

"My father… my father was a pathetic man. He fought for chump change in some low dive in Mantle, risking his life for a handful of lien while humans made small fortunes betting on the outcome of his fights. That's where my mother saw him; she saw him, and she wanted him. And, as I said, she was used to getting what she wanted. I suppose I should be grateful she carried me to term, before discarding the fruits of her indulgence."

Blake's mouth fell open, hanging there for a moment in sympathetic helplessness, trying to find some words to say that didn't feel utterly, hopelessly inadequate. "I… I'm sorry," she murmured. "I know that's not enough, not anything like enough, but-"

"It's alright," Adam said. "I don't expect you to… you don't have to say anything; that's okay. I don't expect you to make it better; I just… I've never said it out loud before."

"You can't be the only one," Blake said.

"No," Adam said. "But all the same… if people found out… I'm a fraud, Blake, not even fully faunus. How can I lead our people to freedom if I'm not really one of them?"

"You are one of us," Blake said. "You may have a human mother, but you are a faunus. What you've done… nobody has served the faunus as well as you, not since the revolution at least, not even my father-"

"A man like me will do incredible things to be seen, Blake," Adam told her. "Those things that you say I have done, I did them as much for myself as for our people; I did them to… to carve out a life for myself that didn't humiliate me to live."

"But you did them, nonetheless," Blake told him. "Just because you wanted something for yourself doesn't erase the benefits you have brought to our people. As far as I'm concerned, no one has the right to say that you're not one of us, no one."

Adam let out a sigh of relief. "You don't know how happy it makes me to hear you say that. I was afraid… I was so afraid… I thought that you might-"

"Never," Blake said. "I'll never give up on our fight, Adam, and I'll never give up on you." She hesitated. "Can I ask you something?"

"Anything."

"Why did you tell me?" Blake asked. "You didn't have to. And you were afraid. So… why?"

"Because I don't want to keep anything from you, Blake," Adam said. "I don't want to hide anything from you because you… because you are everything to me."

XxXxX​

The sound of a gunshot shattered the silence.

It came from the building into which the Rosepetals had disappeared.

"Penny," Ruby gasped.

Rainbow Dash, Sunset thought, and cursed herself. She'd thought that there wouldn't be any enemies in the building; she'd assumed that they would have taken out the grimm themselves if they'd been around. She'd assumed, and she had well and truly been made an ass of, and now, Rainbow, Penny, and Ciel were separated from the group and under attack.

What did I say? What did I say? I said we weren't going to split up, we weren't going to get separated from one another, and then what did I do? I'm such an idiot.

She started to rise from her crouch and was about to head inside after her two stranded teammates when the green grimm lifted its head up from its brunch and let out a roar that blew down the street and gusted even into Sunset's face, blowing her hair back and chilling her ears.

It had heard the shots – there had been at least one more – and its interest was definitely aroused.

Dammit. Stay safe, Rainbow Dash.

Or just kick their asses.

Sunset strode into the middle of the street and raised Sol Invictus to her shoulder.

"Sunset, what are you doing?" Blake demanded.

"Getting its attention," Sunset said, sighting down the barrel at the green grimm's head.

"But what about-?" Ruby began.

"Rosepetal can handle themselves," Sunset said. "Who or whatever is in there, Rainbow can take care of it. But I don't think that she needs a giant grimm of unknown provenance interfering in, do you?" She had the plan now. She might be worried about Rainbow – and the others – but she had the plan nevertheless: since the grimm had the potential to smash its way through the wall and into the building much faster than they who had to go in through the door and down the corridors could reach the Rosepetals, the thing to do was kill the grimm here and now before it could get in Pyrrha's way, then go help the Atlesians out. "Professor Goodwitch, I don't want to sound like we need the help, but-"

"Of course, Miss Shimmer," Professor Goodwitch said, as primly as if they were back in a classroom at Beacon and Sunset had just raised her hand to ask a question. She pushed her glasses back up her nose as she strode – strutted, would perhaps be a more accurate description – out of cover to stand beside Sunset, her riding crop held at the ready.

Sunset hoped that she had an armour-piercing round loaded as she doubted that fire dust was going to do much to that bone mask at this range. Okay. Let's see what makes you so special. "Hey! Over here!"

The grimm, which had been slouching towards the building where the Rosepetals were fighting against who knew what, stopped and looked at her.

Sunset fired. She fired a fire dust round, which burst like a crimson fire on the grimm's green-glowing mask but didn't seem to do much more than irritate it a little bit.

At least, if the way that it threw back its head and roared into the enclosed space above them before starting to charge was any indication.

"Ruby! Let him have it!" Sunset snapped as the grimm barrelled down the street on all fours, making the road shake as its massive paws thumped down, tearing up the stone with its white claws as they dug into the road.

Crescent Rose unfolded with a series of snaps and hisses. Ruby planted the scythe blade in the road, digging a furrow into the thoroughfare as she opened fire, the thunder of her shots echoing through the listless air. Blake fired too, the snapping shots of her pistol forming the minor key to the major theme of Ruby's sniper rifle.

Shots bounced off the green spikes that covered the grimm's neck and shoulders, doing no visible damage to them; the same was true even when they appeared to be striking the black flesh that should have been soft enough to penetrate. Sunset fired again, and another fire dust round blossomed on the grimm's shoulder. She fired a third time, and this time, she must have fired an armour piercing shot, which bounced off the creature's bone mask without cracking it.

The grimm roared again as it closed on them.

Professor Goodwitch flourished her riding crop ahead of her before making a swishing motion as if she were swatting a fly. Instantly, the grimm was picked up and flung aside, swatted indeed by an invisible hand that lifted it up and tossed it back first into a tall tower just beyond the terraces into which either the Rosepetals or Jaune and Pyrrha – and the fact that neither of them had emerged at the sound of the fighting gave Sunset the uncomfortable thought that they might be having problems of their own – had ventured.

Seeing what the grimm did to the building it landed on justified in her own mind Sunset's decision to focus on the grimm before it could entangle itself with her allies: its impact was enough to shatter the side of the building and probably some of the floors as well, bringing down a pile of rubble on top of the monster as the upper floors collapsed. It lay there for a moment, in the hole that it – and Professor Goodwitch – had made, half-buried, glaring balefully at the huntresses with its unusual, luminous green eyes.

Then it began to stir, shoving the smashed bricks and abandoned debris off itself as it rose onto its hind legs, growling as it stalked out of the ruin and back onto the street.

It threw out its arms on either side as it let out a spittle-flecked roar of defiance, as if it wanted them to see that it wasn't harmed by aught that they could do to it.

And in the process, it exposed its chest, lined with those green veins.

Sunset ran forwards a few steps, and as she ran, she leapt, and as she leapt, she teleported.

There was a flash of green light as Sunset reappeared about ten feet off the ground, level with the grimm's exposed chest.

Her face twisted into a rictus snarl as she thrust Sol Invictus forwards, impaling the grimm through its vein-lined chest with the sword-bayonet.

She fired. She pulled the trigger until she had no more bullets left, pumping rounds into the black-and-green substance in front of her, and then, when the bullets ran out, she activated the spear extension to ram her blade deeper into the dark demonic substance that formed this monster.

As Sunset hung in the air, holding onto her weapon as her legs dangled above the ground, she looked up into the white, bony face of this unusual creature of grimm.

It didn't look like it was about to die, unfortunately. But it did look in some pain and quite a temper.

As the beowolf raised its left paw, Sunset tapped herself on the right shoulder of her jacket, using her aura to activate the fire dust that she had stitched into the fabric.

The fires had only just begun to burn upon her shoulder, with no time to spread onto her arm, when the grimm hit her.

The sideswipe flung her sideways; Sunset hit the ground with a solid thwack that filed away at her aura before she rolled down the black street, extinguishing her flames as she went.

Lucky I have more than one layer of dust, Sunset thought as she clambered to her feet. Sol Invictus was still lodged in the grimm's chest, a source of irritation to go along with its burnt and smoking paw. Both were making the grimm growl and snarl as it walked forward, a little more tentatively now than it had been moving just a moment ago.

It might not be dead, but it was definitely hurting. A few more good hits might be enough to bring it down. Sunset drew Soteria from its sheath over her shoulder, holding off on activating the dust infused into the metal but ready to do so if necessary. Her mouth opened to form the word, "Ru-"

Ruby didn't need telling. She had a hunter's instinct on the battlefield, and she didn't need Sunset to tell her that the grimm was hurt and vulnerable. Before her name had half left Sunset's mouth, she had launched herself into the air in a burst of rose petals, Crescent Rose trailing behind her as she soared, spinning towards the grimm.

The grimm which… raised its arms to defend itself, ducking its head so that it could cover its face and chest more easily?

What the…? Not even Alphas are that smart. Since when do grimm protect themselves?

It shouldn't have been possible, yet it was happening right in front of Sunset's face: this grimm was putting its paws up – it was even favouring the one that it hadn't burnt on Sunset's phoenix cape – like a boxer defending himself from the blows of his opponent or a kid trying to shield his face on the playground. It put up its paws, its bony protrusions protecting its more vulnerable regions, and as Ruby rematerialised from the cloud of petals, she slashed furiously, repeatedly, swiftly against the bone spur-covered paws and did… nothing. Sunset had expected to see her partner soar through the grimm, slicing it in half with a single stroke of Crescent Rose; instead, it was only sheer momentum and a degree of will that was keeping Ruby in motion as she swung her scythe at impossibly swift speeds, beating against the grimm's guard like a wave battering against the shore during a hurricane or a wind hammering a mountain and having about as much effect.

The grimm growled as it swatted Ruby aside as if she were a particularly annoying fly, one whose buzzing could cause annoyance but whose sting was nothing to be particularly concerned with.

Ruby flew backwards through the air with a squeak, her cape flapping as she flew headfirst towards the ground.

Blake caught her in a flying leap, materialising even as the clone she had left disappeared, catching Ruby in her arms before landing nimbly upon her feet, a slight smile upon her face as she set Ruby back down upon the ground.

"Thanks," Ruby said.

"Anytime," Blake replied. "But watch yourself; this thing is smarter than it looks."

"And tougher too," added Ruby.

Professor Goodwitch slashed at the air with her riding crop again, and all the rubble and debris that she had caused when she flung the beowolf into the building was now picked up and flung at the beowolf, colliding with the back of its legs and knocking it to its knees with a yelp of pain.

Blake dashed forwards, using her grappling hook to vault onto the side of the – by now half-demolished – building before leaping gracefully onto the back of the green beowolf. She planted her feet amongst the green spikes erupting from that tar-like body and swayed as the beowolf swayed, maintaining her balance and her poise to perfection as she fired three shots down into the bull neck of the grimm.

Then, as the grimm roared in angry agony, Blake leapt off its back, flipping as she went, her long and tangled, wild black hair flying all around her face as she landed before and facing the green-tinted grimm. Gambol Shroud switched to sword form as she stood, blade in one hand and sharp scabbard in the other, but both hanging by her side as she stood before the grimm, a small figure in white facing the incarnation of darkness.

I hope you've got something clever in mind, Blake, Sunset thought as she started to run forward. It was because she trusted that Blake was, indeed, about to do something clever that she ran rather than teleporting; but she ran towards her in case it was not so.

It was sometimes hard to tell with Blake.

The grimm snarled into Blake's face and raised its unburned paw to slam her into the ground.

The claws descended.

And Blake vanished, leaving behind a perfect copy of herself forged out of ice; a copy which, as soon as the grimm's middle claw touched it, exploded outwards into a block of ice that encased the grimm's whole paw within it, trapping it and leaving it straining and huffing in its efforts to get free.

The real Blake ran up the trapped limb, slashing with both her blades as she went. "Ruby!"

"Right!" Ruby cried and surged forwards in another petal-trailing charge straight at the green-hued grimm.

And this time, it couldn't bring its paw up to shield itself because its paw was encased in ice. Crescent Rose sliced cleanly through the trapped limb and scored a deep line across the beowolf's chest, revealing even more luminescent green substance within.

Ruby even managed to snag Sunset's Sol Invictus as she traced a green-blooded line across the grimm, grinning triumphantly as she tossed it towards Sunset, who sheathed her sword and used a touch of telekinesis to make the gun soar into her outstretched grasp.

The beowolf howled, throwing back its head and bellowing out its rage to the enclosed sky, but that only provided Blake an opportunity to jump athwart its mouth, one foot resting on each jaw, and fire directly down its green-glowing and blood-stained gullet with her – once more in pistol form – Gambol Shroud.

The grimm shifted; Blake lost her balance, one foot slipping off the jaw as she tumbled down into the beowolf's mouth. The jaws slammed shut on a clone of fire, exploding in the mouth of the grimm to crack its bony mask even as the real Blake leapt away clear and unharmed.

Sunset raised one hand, stretching it out as the green glow of her magic enveloped her open palm, illuminating the rubble which she picked up with her own telekinesis. Where Professor Goodwitch had used hers like a hammer, slamming it into the grimm from behind to knock him to his knees, Sunset preferred to levitate much the same mass over the grimm's head before she dumped it on top of him, knocking it flat onto its stomach with a pile of bricks and stones and rebar pipes piled up on top of it in a small mountain.

Ruby made another dash forwards, as everyone closed in around the green-eyed beowolf which, with only one forelimb, struggled to rise from beneath the weight piled onto it.

Ruby perched just behind the cracked and splintered boned mask and placed her scythe upon the face of that dread creature.

She pulled the trigger, and the scythe-blade of Crescent Rose snapped backwards, neatly dissecting the grimm's face.

Smoke began to rise from its body as Ruby flashed a V-for-victory sign.

"Good work, Miss Rose, and a fair example of cooperation amongst the three of you," Professor Goodwitch said, in the same tone that she might have used to critique their performances in sparring class, because apparently, she couldn't turn it off. "Although-" She stifled her own words, as her green eyes widened behind her half-moon spectacles. "Miss Rose!"

The dead grimm beneath Ruby's feet wasn't simply turning to smoke. It was moving. Not in a conscious way, but not in a 'dead frog kicking its legs' kind of way either. Its body was vibrating, rumbling like an indigestive stomach, the black form of the extraordinary beowolf bulging in places, shrinking in others, the layer of rubble lying on top of it rising and falling with the movements of the corpse, the green-glowing spikes burning with a greater intensity now as the grimm's black skin boiled, and the green lines became blinding in their brightness.

"Uh, guys?" Ruby murmured tremulously. "What's going on?"

Sunset stepped forward. "Ruby, get off-!"

Too late. The grimm exploded underneath Ruby's feet, throwing the rubble under which it had been buried up into the air in a fountain of debris, throwing Ruby up into the air with a startled cry as she was tossed into the dark shadow of the half-wrecked building behind her, tossing up an enormous amount of some strange green goo that must have been causing all of the green that had been so distracting and arresting about this particular grimm.

Sunset threw up a shield around herself, Blake, and Professor Goodwitch as debris and slime of indeterminate toxicity rained down upon them. She could feel both through her emerald shield, the vibrations echoing through Mountain Glenn and through Sunset via her connection to the magic.

The rubble bounced off her shield to land in a circle all around them. The green goo stuck to the magical barrier, only to plop to the ground once, the rain having ceased, Sunset let it drop.

She began to speak, "Professor, do you-?"

She was cut off by a startled cry from Ruby, coming from out of the darkness within the newly-minted ruin.

"Ruby! No!" Blake yelled, her cat-eyes seeing something that alarmed her as she ran headlong into the shadowed part of the tower that remained intact.

Sunset teleported, leaving Professor Goodwitch behind as she rematerialised inside the building, her night-vision and the light of the torch taped to the barrel of her gun sweeping through the darkness.

First, she found Crescent Rose lying on the ground.

Next, she found Ruby, disarmed and squirming in the grip of Adam Taurus.

He held her by the scruff of the neck, smiling as she beat at him futilely with fists that seemed so much smaller now than they normally did. In his other hand, he held his red sword, glowing in the darkness.

That sword. That damn sword. That terrible swift sword that haunted Sunset's dreams. That sword that had nearly taken Ruby's life once already, and now…

And now…

And now…

Sunset bared her teeth in a snarl. No. No way. No how. No way was she going to suffer this, not a second time, not ever again.

Twilight – Equestrian Twilight, Princess Twilight Sparkle – had, presuming upon the right to act as Sunset's conscience, to squat upon her shoulder like the better alicorn of Sunset's nature, counselled her against seeking the death of Adam Taurus. But Sunset's question still stood: what was she supposed to do instead? When it came down to it, when it became a question of his life against the life of one of her friends, what other choice did she have?

He had almost killed Ruby once, and now, he threatened her again.

No.

"Adam, don't!" Blake yelled as she raced towards them. But she was too slow and too far away.

Adam's lips curled into a sneer. "I have been merciful to those who did not seek this battle or this war, but this child has brought a weapon-"

Sunset teleported up into his face and brained him with the stock of Sol Invictus. She slammed the wooden butt of the rifle – and that, Ruby, is why I made it out of wood instead of something that would break as soon as I did this – into the side of his head, causing him to drop Ruby as his head snapped sideways and he began to stagger in that direction.

She used the word 'began' because, before he had taken more than half a step, Sunset had grabbed him by the arm.

She didn't look at Ruby as she teleported away again.

She was going to end this. And she was going to make sure that he didn't hurt any of her friends again by taking him somewhere far away before she did.

XxXxX​

"Sunset, wait!" Blake yelled, stretching out hand towards her before both Sunset and Adam disappeared in a burst of green light. A burst of magic.

It would have been really cool if it hadn't meant that Sunset had just disappeared before their eyes with no idea of where she was.

"Sunset," Ruby murmured, staring into the empty space where her team leader and their adversary had been. She glanced at Blake. "Where did she go? And… and why?" She had a feeling that she knew why, just like she had a feeling that Sunset wouldn't have done this if it had been Pyrrha here instead of Ruby.

If I'd been in the other building and Pyrrha had been out here, you would have stayed and let her help you fight him, Ruby thought mutinously. She liked Sunset a lot, and she thought that Sunset liked her too, but she wasn't stupid, and she knew that Sunset respected Pyrrha in way that she didn't respect Ruby, for all her affection. Sure, Pyrrha had never come close to death on any of their missions, which was unfortunately not something that Ruby could say, but still…

It's because of what happened at the docks, isn't it?

Sunset, why do you have to do stuff like this?

Would you even be Sunset if you didn't?

"She's taken Adam away… to protect us," Blake murmured. "I have to find them!"

"Miss Belladonna!" Professor Goodwitch shouted as Blake disappeared before anyone could stop her, the clone that she had left behind vanishing as the real Blake… they couldn't even see the real Blake anymore. Ruby didn't know where Blake was going or how she thought that she was going to find Adam, but as she scooped up Crescent Rose off the floor – Adam had caught her by surprise and knocked it out of her hands before she'd seen him coming in the darkness – she knew that she wasn't going to be left out. She was going to find them too.

She'd gotten all of three steps before she felt an irresistible force, almost as strong as her sister when she was in mothering, overbearing mode, yanking her backwards so hard that she fell onto her behind and skidded along the floor that way.

"Oh no you don't, Miss Rose," Professor Goodwitch said, leaving no doubt as to the source of the invisible hand that was restraining Ruby.

"But Professor-" Ruby began.

"Think for a moment," Professor Goodwitch snapped. "What Miss Shimmer has done is incredibly foolish, what Miss Belladonna has done almost as much so; should you compound the fault with more folly? What about your other teammates? What about our mission?"

Ruby looked up into Professor Goodwitch's face with wide, round eyes. "But… Sunset and Blake…"

"Once Miss Nikos and Mister Arc return-"

"Professor," Pyrrha said as she and Jaune emerged from across the street and dashed over to join them. "Ruby… where's Sunset? And Blake?"

Ruby bowed her head. "Adam… Sunset grabbed him and teleported away. Blake went after them. We don't know where they went. We don't know where Sunset went or how Blake thinks she can find them…"

Pyrrha's face was pale. More than usual. "I see," she murmured. "Then we… then we must trust in their skill, it seems, and hope."

XxXxX​

As she ran through the dead streets of Mountain Glenn, trying to ignore the devastation and all that that entailed to her feline-eyes, trying to ignore the stench of death and decay that assailed her nostrils, Blake sheathed Gambol Shroud across her back.

She had to find Sunset. She had to find her before Adam… she had to find her before it was too late.

You idiot. You stupid, thoughtless idiot! What were you thinking?

Blake wouldn't be surprised to find out that Sunset hadn't been thinking.

How can someone so smart be so consistently stupid?

She needed to find Sunset before it was too late, but… but how?

Height. If she got up high, then she could see better; the darkness was no barrier to her; she could just see what was going on, provided the buildings did not obscure her view.

Blake flung out her hook, and the trembling of her hand did not affect her aim so much that she couldn't land it where she wanted it, atop the roof of a tower, and swing upwards, letting her momentum carry her up until she could jump off another wall to land nimbly upon the roof itself.

Now she just had to- there! There, the flame in darkness! There was burning out there, on another roof, the burning of Soteria, the burning of Sunset's jacket, both of them burning in the night like beacons guiding her.

It was a way off, but she knew where to go.

Sunset, whatever you do, don't die.

XxXxX​

No sooner had Sunset materialised with Adam than he flung her away, cuffing her with one angry fist that threw her off his jacket and tossed her aside. She hit the ground and rolled away, scrambling upright as fast as she could. She kept her eyes, enhanced by the nightvision spell, fixed on Adam, but he made no move to attack her while she was prone, or even once she got up. He seemed a little confused, turning this way and that as he examined his new surroundings.

"Where are we?" he muttered.

Sunset couldn't exactly tell him. She hadn't teleported with any sense of where she was going, and so, she supposed she ought to think herself lucky that she hadn't materialised half inside a wall or something. Although that might have taken care of Adam a little easier, I suppose.

Sunset tried to hide the amount that so much rapid teleportation had taken out of her from Adam Taurus as she looked around. They were still in Mountain Glenn, not surprisingly, on top of one of the many high towers that littered the dead cityscape. She could see the plaza where they had emerged from the Nightmarket to the northwest, and she thought that she could make out activity at the railyard to the east. A lot of activity.

You're moving out, aren't you? This is all just about delaying us long enough for you to go.

Well, that was fine by her, just fine. Adam had threatened Blake, he had threatened Twilight, he had damn near killed Ruby, and she was done! He was a danger, a mad dog, and she was going to end this, here and now.

No Fluttershy, or Cinder, or anyone else was going to save him now.

Adam looked at her. "So you've brought me here so you can kill me where no one else can get in your way," he observed. "Or have you told yourself you've brought me here where I can't hurt anyone else? We both know that's not the real reason. You showed your real reasons last night. You want me dead because I threaten you, because I scare you, because I make you feel small, like I made the people who brutalised me, who burned my face, feel small. They hurt me to regain their power, as you will kill me to regain yours. Be honest with yourself." He smirked. "Or don't. Either way, don't expect me to go down without a fight."

Oh, I'm counting on it. Sunset set down her gun – it was empty – and placed one hand upon the shoulder of her jacket. At the deftest touch of her aura, the fire dust infused within the leather ignited, the flames of red and yellow – flames the same colour as her hair, blending with her burning locks as they cascaded down her back – spreading from one shoulder to the other, spreading down the jacket to her waist, consuming it until it there was not a scrap of black to be seen.

And as the jacket burned, Sunset took it off and ostentatiously tossed it aside. It lay burning on the rooftop as Sunset stood in her cuirass and tank top, in her vambraces and her wedding gloves, facing Adam Taurus.

She needed to have the jacket off for her strategy to work, but there was a part of Sunset that wished she'd kept it on. Without it, she seemed a slightly frail figure compared to the commander of the White Fang, with slender arms and an eminently breakable waist. As the scar on her belly twinged sympathetically, and she had to fight to resist the urge to touch the mark on her armour where he had run her through, Sunset thought that the flames had made her look larger, stronger, more powerful than she was.

Sunset fought to ignore such feelings, to ignore all fear and doubt, as she drew her sword. Soteria's blade was as black as everything else in this mausoleum to Vale's failure, but when she passed her hand over it, the fire dust she had imbued into the metal ignited, lighting up the space around her.

"Is that why you hurt Blake?" Sunset demanded. "To regain your power? Did she make you feel small?"

Adam's face was inscrutable behind his mask. Each red line stood out upon the white like a scar. For a moment, he just stared at her, the line of his mouth unmoving and everything else about his face invisible.

And then he raised the scabbard of his sword, pointing it at Sunset like the gun that she guessed it also was, and fired.

Sunset leapt aside, but not quite fast enough to avoid a grazing shot that scraped across her side and twisted her as she hit the rooftop, taking a sliver off her aura – already a little diminished by the hit that grimm had given her – in the process.

Adam charged, his red blade gleaming. Sunset scrambled up and rushed to meet him; she had no choice; if she stood to take it, he'd probably bowl her clean off the rooftop with the sheer force of his onslaught.

Adam charged, and Sunset ran to meet him, their blades drawn back.

Adam swung. Sunset parried, just about making it in time. Her burning sword met Adam's crimson blade with a metallic clack.

You don't have the muscle to meet force with force, Pyrrha's voice echoed in Sunset's head. You'll need to yield before greater strength and turn your weakness to your advantage.

And so, as Adam pressed against her with all his might, Sunset stepped back and, yielding before his greater strength, half-sidestepped out of his inexorable path. Adam, caught by surprise, stumbled forwards, and as he stumbled, Sunset grabbed her burning jacket with her telekinesis and hurled it into Adam's face.

Sure, Adam Taurus was a more formidable opponent than Bolin Hori, but they both needed to see to fight, and they both needed their aura to survive, and so, as Sunset's jacket embraced Adam's face, wrapping around it like a towel, Sunset felt confident that the same trick – used on two different people – would work twice.

She stepped back, retreating to the edge of the roof, and both her hands glowed green with telekinesis as she levitated Soteria out of her physical grip.

She had hoped, she could confess to herself, that Adam would be frightened. She had hoped, a cruel hope perhaps, that the flames that were presently licking his face and consuming his aura would stir some memory in him, a memory of the brand that scarred that same face, and cause him to… to lose his composure the way that Sunset lost her composure whenever he was around.

It didn't happen.

He just stood there, as though being blinded while flames burned in his face was nothing at all to him. He was still and silent, as though he had been petrified instead of blinded.

Have it your own way, tough guy.

He could play the strong, silent type all he wanted; he could act like none of it bothered him all he wanted; he could do whatever he wanted, and it didn't matter! Sunset was in control of this fight now, and she didn't have to be afraid of him anymore.

She was going to cut his aura into little pieces, and then… and then, she would banish the nightmare from her mind.

With telekinesis, she swung Soteria, the black sword wreathed in golden flames, and caught him on the hip with a solid blow.

Adam flinched but did not cry out. He barely moved, only wavering a little as the sword struck home.

Fine. Sunset wasn't one of those who needed her enemy to suffer before she killed them. She just needed him to die.

She hit him again, moving Soteria with her magic to come at him from behind, knocking him forward this time. Then she came at him from the front, then the other side, then back to the right, then behind, then forward; she waved the ancient Mistralian sword deftly in the air, striking him from a different place, from a different angle. Soteria traced fiery figures through the air as it moved, obedient to her will, higher than she could have held it, faster than she could have wielded it, and most importantly, keeping her well away from Adam Taurus as she assailed him, striking at him again and again while he had no clue-

He parried Sunset's stroke with his own crimson blade, the red tongue flickering to knock flaming Soteria aside.

Sunset stared, wide-eyed, unable to believe what she had just witnessed.

He… he…

He got lucky, that's all.

Sunset drove the sword at his back, point first. Adam turned swiftly, the red blade singing, and once more parried the stroke. Sunset lashed out at him twice more from the same direction, and twice more, Adam parried before Sunset pulled Soteria back. She guided the burning blade over his head before bringing it down upon his shoulders, but he raised his own sword, and Soteria rang off it with a great clang that echoed off the rooftop.

How the-?

"They took my eye when I was just a boy," Adam snarled. "I laboured in darkness so deep that not even the eye they left me with could penetrate it! So I learned to listen. To listen for the sound of your sword through the air." He parried Soteria again with contemptuous ease before he raised his scabbard-gun to point directly at her. "And to listen for the sound of your breathing."

He fired.

Sunset raised her hands up before her, conjuring a shield of magic which stopped the bullet harmlessly in its tracks.

But she couldn't conjure a shield and hold up a sword and jacket with telekinesis at the same time. Soteria clattered to the ground. Adam tossed his gun up into the air where it spun, lazily, as with his now-free hand, Adam ripped Sunset's jacket off his face and threw it aside.

Adam caught his gun again. "Did you think one cheap trick would be enough to finish me?"

The honest answer was 'yes,' but Sunset endeavoured to retain an impression of sangfroid as she summoned Soteria back into her hand. "Well, I thought it would be a start."

He charged at her, sword raised.

Once more, Sunset charged to meet him; once more, Sunset seemed to take his blow squarely on Soteria before attempting to slip away, to sidestep out of his path before he drove her back right off the roof.

This time, he was ready for her, seeming to let her go before he swung at her with a sideways slashing stroke. Sunset took the blow, wincing in pain as she rolled with the strength of the stroke rather than resisting it, landing on her shoulder – that hurt a little bit too – and rolling away before coming up onto one knee.

Adam raised his gun-scabbard to fire at her again.

A spark of magic leapt from Sunset's finger, even as Adam's gun barked and flared; the shot hit Sunset square in the chest, and even her breastplate couldn't prevent her being knocked backwards, just as it couldn't stop her aura from taking another hit. But Sunset's spark of magic hit too, knocking the gun out of Adam's hand and sending it sliding across the flat grey roof on which they stood.

Adam lunged for it, but as she lay on the ground, Sunset pointed her finger at the discarded gun and fired another spark of turquoise magic. Her spell struck the weapon, which turned with a flash into a plastic pink flamingo lawn ornament.

Thanks for that… singular image, Twilight.

Adam picked up the flamingo, staring at it with what Sunset – as she picked herself up – could only describe as a nonplussed expression.

Bet you've never seen transfiguration before, have you?

Then he looked back at Sunset, and as he threw the lawn ornament away, that nonplussed look swiftly turned to an expression of rage.

And now he's mad.

He came at her, his red blade swinging. This time, Sunset did not sidestep. He was ready for that now, obviously, so it was time to try something else. This time, she stood her ground, not even moving to counter charge; she merely stood her ground and hoped he didn't notice the green glow around one hand.

The flames made it hard to see the glow around the blade itself.

Adam slashed wildly. Sunset parried with Soteria, holding the blade in place with telekinesis – the fact that her fingers were still around the hilt was largely for show – and because she was matching magic against his strength, not muscle, she was able to hold him off and had one hand free to throw a punch at him.

He caught her by the wrist with his free hand.

Sunset smirked as – still holding her sword in place with telekinesis – she put her fingers to her restrained forearm and with her aura activated the lightning dust infused into the metal of her vambrace.

Adam released her, recoiling with something like a yelp of pain as the bracer sparked and spat and shocked him. Sunset fired a bolt of magic from her palm, but he blocked it with his sword, and it did him no harm.

"I've got a few new tricks since you saw me last," Sunset growled as she summoned her sword back into her hand with telekinesis.

"Clearly," Adam grunted. "But do you think that will be enough to save you?"

With my aura levels starting lower than yours, I'm honestly not sure, Sunset thought. "Maybe I just want to delay you from getting to my friends, the way you want to delay me from getting to that railyard."

"The last time we fought, you wanted to kill me."

"I still want to kill you."

Adam smiled. "You would have had more chance if you weren't alone."

"A friend taught me something," Sunset replied. "Even if it wasn't quite the lesson she intended: taking a life extracts a price from you, it puts a burden on your shoulders. A leader takes that burden on themselves; she doesn't force others to carry the weight for her."

Adam snorted. "Are you so naïve as to think that Blake has never taken a life before?"

"I'm not going to make her take more."

"You won't have a say in the matter for much longer," Adam growled, and then he came at her again.

He attacked with a furious lunge, slashing wildly but swiftly, his momentum unrelenting as he never stopped, never let up. His blade clashed with Sunset's sword; he drove her back, he beat down her guard if only for short intervals to strike at her; sometimes, he even let down his own guard to let Sunset strike at him so that she would leave herself open to a strike in turn. Their blades clashed, the blood-red sword and the black-but-burning blade striking each other, sparking off one another, each cleaving off some of the aura of the other.

Sunset wished that she had more of an idea of what state his aura was in. She wished that she could check on what state her own aura was in. She took a deep breath. She was panting a little, and sweat was making her top stick to her back and her gloves to her hands and arms. But she wasn't done, and considering it was Adam Taurus she was up against, Sunset was inclined to think that she was doing pretty well.

But judging by what she could see of his face, he didn't seem to think he was doing too badly either. In fact, he was smiling.

And as he stepped back, retreating all the way to the edge of the rooftop, Sunset could see why.

The sword in his hand was glowing so brightly. It glowed as red as blood. He had been charging it all this while.

Everything had depended on Sunset bringing him down before he reached this point, and she had failed.

And now, he was ready.

Adam's smile became something vicious to behold, and then the world turned as red as blood.

Sunset froze. She couldn't have moved even if she'd wanted to, with everything turning so slowly, but it wasn't just that. The world had turned crimson. Blood had descended over her vision. Everything was red except him; he was as black as Mountain Glenn had been just a moment ago, and he was coming straight for her, and she was frozen.

At least Ruby isn't here this time.

Adam charged her, his blade readying for a slashing stroke to cut her in half, and Sunset's eyes were drawn to him, to the black form with that deadly blade; it was like she was a rodent hypnotised by a snake, and the snake was poised to devour her.

She was so drawn to Adam that she didn't even see Blake vault up onto the roof until she had bodily slammed into Adam from the side.

The blood-red effect dissipated in the same instant that Adam's charge was disrupted, and Sunset saw Blake knock Adam off course, staggering him sideways before she leapt away from his furious counterstroke.

"Blake!" he snapped, confusion in his voice. "You… you came back?" His voice trembled with anger. "You came for her?"

Blake didn't reply, but the unwavering look on her face was answer enough.

Adam roared in anger as he charged at her, Sunset forgotten.

And as Blake leapt to meet him, Sunset lunged for her gun.

XxXxX​

Blake ducked away from Adam's first blow, leaving a shadow behind to take the slashing stroke from Wilt while she thrust Gambol Shroud up towards his side. Adam turned, too fast for her, the way he had always been too fast, parrying the thrust and slicing down at her.

His blow sliced into the ice clone that Blake had left in her place, trapping his sword in the sculpture. Blake skidded away, switched Gambol Shroud into its gun mode, and fired four times.

She couldn't miss, and he couldn't use Wilt to take the shots.

It was time to end this.

Adam, hit in the chest, staggered backwards. Blake lunged for him, kicking him backwards, slashing him with Gambol Shroud – now a sword again – knocking him backwards and onto his back. She stood over him, sword pointed at his chest.

"Do it," he said.

Blake's eyes widened. "Wh-what?"

He was smiling at her. "Do it," he repeated. "You've chosen your side, and I'm your enemy. So do it, and show Atlas what a good little dog you are."

Gambol Shroud trembled in Blake's hand. She ought to do it. She ought to strike at him, drive her blade through his aura and put an end to this. He wouldn't stop. He'd never stop. Even if he was put in prison, he'd just find a way to escape, and he'd keep killing, and he'd keep coming, and… and she didn't have any way of restraining him anyway. She ought to do it. He was a monster now. Whatever else he'd been, whatever he had been to her… he wasn't the man she'd fallen in love with. He wasn't the hero that she'd thought he was. He was wild, and he was dangerous, and he had to be stopped.

She had to stop him.

But…but she couldn't. Her sword stuck in the air as though it had turned solid all around her. She could barely move at all.

Because he'd let Fluttershy go and shown her that the man she had once known and so admired was still in there somewhere, if only she could find a way to reach him.

And because she… because he…

"It's alright, Blake," Adam whispered. "I know that you've always been weak."

He grabbed her by the ankle, his hand reaching out as swift as a striking serpent to pull her off balance. Blake cried out as she was pulled to the ground, and then Adam was on top of her, his fists flying, pummelling her face as he wrenched Gambol Shroud out of her hand.

He laughed as she raised her hands to shield herself, beating her guard away as he crouched astride her.

"Don't be afraid, my love," he snarled as he raised her own sword above his head to strike her. "I'm going to set you free."

Gambol Shroud hovered above her like a bolt of black lightning, its point aimed for her heart.

Adam's face was twisted into a snarl. "This isn't-"

BANG!

XxXxX​

Sunset was terrified. She couldn't have said what exactly was terrifying her – was it what she was doing, was it Adam, was it fear for Blake, was it some admixture of them all? – but she was terrified. She was having to use magic to keep the barrel of Sol Invictus steady, balancing it level with telekinesis so that she hit Adam instead of Blake by accident as she fired.

But she fired anyway. Her first shot broke his aura, and she kept firing. She shot him six times, six rounds booming out of her rifle as fire red blotches appeared on Adam's black jacket, blood spurting from the wounds and mingling with the red of the wilted rose on his lapel.

She fired until she'd used up all her rounds, and even then, she pulled the trigger a couple more times because she wasn't quite convinced.

Adam was still, seeming to stare at her a while as blood dripped from his mouth. Then his head dropped, his chin touching his chest. And then he fell sideways, lying still on the rooftop by Blake's side.

I take this burden on myself.

Thank you, Twilight, for teaching me that I should do that, even if it wasn't exactly the lesson you intended to teach me.

She had killed someone. She took no pleasure in that, not even when that someone was him. Sunset felt cold inside, as though it had turned to winter in her soul. She had taken a life, and she would have to live with it.

But Blake wouldn't have to live with it, and that was the important thing.

That – and to save her – was why Sunset had fired.

To spare her life and her soul both.

Blake scrambled away, getting out from under Adam's… Adam's body. There were tears in her golden eyes, and Sunset could see that she was sobbing.

"Blake," Sunset murmured.

Blake ignored her, standing over Adam's still and lifeless form, looking down upon him.

"You were everything to me too," she whispered. "Until… until you weren't the same person anymore."

Sunset approached her cautiously, warily, uncertain of what kind of reaction she would receive from her. "Blake," she said softly. "You can hate me if you want to, but-"

"Hate you?" Blake asked, looking over her shoulder at Sunset with her eyes so damp. "Why would I hate you?"

Sunset's brow furrowed. "You loved him."

"Once," Blake said. "But the man I loved died long before you pulled that trigger."

She knelt by Adam's side, removed his mask – exposing the brand that had seared his face and removed one of his eyes – and closed the other.

"Your fight is over," she whispered. "Be at peace, Sword of the Faunus."

 

[ScipioSmith]

First Duty​

Rainbow and Ciel carried Penny out into the street together. It was… not the easiest thing in all of Remnant that she'd ever done. You didn't realise how much you missed aura until you didn't have it anymore, until you had to carry a robot who was heavier than she looked down several flights of stairs without it.

Penny's arms were spread across their shoulders, with each of them having hold of one of her hands, while Penny had obligingly raised the one leg that she had control over so that it didn't drag along the ground. The other one, limp rather than locked in place, had fallen and did drag along the ground, making scraping noises as they went along.

Since they couldn't retract Floating Array back into Penny's backpack, they had resorted to wrapping the wires around her body, trussing Penny up with her own weapon like they were about to dump her body on the railroad tracks in one of those old videos that Applejack didn't know that Rainbow knew she liked.

They emerged out onto the street to find Ruby, Pyrrha, Jaune, and Professor Goodwitch waiting for them. Of Blake and Sunset, there was no sign.

Of the green grimm, there was, also, no sign; that was a good thing, to Rainbow's way of thinking. She wasn't exactly in much state to help in a fight right now, and although Ciel's aura hadn't broken, Rainbow guessed that there wasn't much in it.

"Penny!" Ruby cried, spotting the trio of Atlesians first. She rushed towards, followed quickly by Pyrrha, and then by Jaune and Professor Goodwitch. "Are you okay?"

Incomprehensible nonsense tumbled out of Penny's mouth.

Pyrrha frowned. "What happened?"

"Electric shock to the system," Rainbow said. "Half her functions are shot."

More incomprehensible nonsense fell from Penny's lips.

"Including her speech centre," Rainbow added.

"Oh, my," Pyrrha murmured, aghast. "How? Her aura-"

"The shock travelled down her cable and into Penny's systems, bypassing her aura," Ciel explained, her breathing heavy.

Ruby gasped. "Can you fix her?"

Rainbow gave her an incredulous look. Do I look like I know how to fix a robot? Okay, Ciel talks like she might, but how long has Ruby known us? "'Fix her'? Ruby, we need Twilight to even know if Penny can be fixed or if she's going to need three weeks in the shop and a load of parts stripped out and replaced."

While it wasn't Penny's fault that this had happened to her – it was Rainbow's fault; she should have… well, she probably should have insisted that Blake come with them so that she could have left Blake outside with Penny and Ciel so that someone could have fended off Lightning Dust at close quarters while Rainbow cleared the room and dealt with Mercury – but it kind of showed her limitations. Rainbow's aura was done, but she was still on her feet, and even if she'd taken an injury, her aura would work to heal it once it came back, and as long as it wasn't too serious a wound, she could walk it off until that happened. Penny got hurt, and that was that until the damage could be repaired because her aura couldn't repair her the way that it could heal flesh and bone.

She was fragile in a way that people weren't.

To be honest, the more time that Rainbow spent with her… Penny was a good kid, Rainbow liked her, Rainbow wanted to do right by her, but was she the future of warfare? Rainbow had her doubts about that, and not just because of what it took to make her in the first place.

She was coming to wonder, honestly, if Penny's father had made her more to show that he could rather than because she represented something important that Atlas had to have.

From what she knew of the guy, it wouldn't surprise her too much.

None of that, obviously, was anything that she would say to Penny out loud. Once she got able to talk again, Penny would probably start beating herself up enough without Rainbow beating on her.

I need to think of something to say to make her feel better once this is over, Rainbow thought. She was lucky that Penny couldn't talk right now; she could pretend not to understand what Penny was trying to say, when her tone was speaking volumes already, regardless of the lack of words.

Case in point, the mournful sound that came out of her mouth.

"But you can fix her, right?" Ruby asked anxiously. "I mean she's going to be okay, isn't she?"

"Yeah," Rainbow said. "Of course she will. She'll be fine, up and on her feet again in time for the Vytal Festival." She grinned. "You're not getting off that easy."

"Thank the gods," Pyrrha murmured.

"The gods have got nothing to do with it; it'll be her father and Twilight that you have to thank," Rainbow replied.

"I suppose," Pyrrha agreed mildly. "And, oh, I'm sorry, how are the both of you?"

"I've got no aura left, so Jaune, I'd appreciate it if you could lay your hands on me," Rainbow said.

"Uh, sure," Jaune said, taking a step forwards and holding up his hands, hovering over Rainbow's shoulder as his hands began to glow, spreading their rippling glow like water across Rainbow's body. It felt like taking a lukewarm and kind of underpowered shower. Rainbow, who liked powerful showers that felt like you were being shot and preferred to crank the volume all the way up or all the way down, depending on the situation, but never in between, didn't much like it. But she put up with it because she needed it right now.

"What happened to you three in there?" Jaune asked.

"Mercury Black and Lightning Dust happened," Rainbow growled. "They're dead now, but they put up a hell of a fight first."

"You can confirm their deaths?" Professor Goodwitch asked.

"I emptied a mag into Mercury's gut after his aura broke," Rainbow said. "And I dropped Lightning Dust all the way from the ceiling."

"Was her aura broken?" Professor Goodwitch demanded.

Rainbow inhaled through her nostrils. "No."

"Then it's possible she may have had a landing strategy," Professor Goodwitch pointed out.

That was uncomfortably true. "I wanted to end the fight quickly," Rainbow replied. "She'd already taken out Penny and Ciel, and I… I wasn't sure I could take her one on one after I'd already been weakened by Mercury."

"I'm not accusing you of anything, Miss Dash," Professor Goodwitch said, her tone softening. "I'm sure you made the best tactical situations you could in the moment. I'm merely pointing out the possibility that one of your enemies may have survived. However, given that they have not continued to trouble you, I would hazard that Miss Dust is in no fit state to continue the battle. For now, that is enough."

Rainbow nodded. "Thanks, Professor." She glanced at Ruby, and at Pyrrha. "What about you guys? No grimm, does that mean you took it out?"

Ruby nodded. "Me, Sunset, Blake, and Professor Goodwitch managed to deal with it."

Ruby's words drew attention to the absence of Blake and Sunset. Rainbow swallowed. "And Blake, Sunset, are they… did they…?" It couldn't have; one grimm couldn't take out Blake and Sunset, no matter how big or how weird it was. Not one grimm, not Blake.

Not after everything that we've been through. Not after everything that she had left in front of her.

"Miss Shimmer and Miss Belladonna were still alive when last we saw them," Professor Goodwitch assured her, although the assurance was undercut by the disapproval obvious in her tone.

"It was Adam," Ruby murmured. "After we were done with the grimm… he showed up. And it was my fault; he got me and-"

"It's not your fault, Ruby," Pyrrha insisted, taking Ruby by the shoulder and squeezing it reassuringly. "You were taken by surprise, and-"

"And Sunset wouldn't have left if it had been you!" Ruby shot back, a pinch of venom in her voice to go along with the hurt.

Pyrrha looked away, her hand falling from Ruby's shoulder. "Perhaps not," she admitted softly. "But perhaps she should have."

"What did Sunset do?" Rainbow demanded.

"Teleported away," Professor Goodwitch explained. "Her current location is unknown, as is that of Miss Belladonna, who went after her."

Rainbow's eyes widened, and for a moment, she wanted nothing more than to tell Jaune to hurry up and restore her aura so that she could go after them. No, scratch that; she wanted to leave right now, no matter whether Jaune was done or not; she'd take however much aura she had now and take the risk. She wanted to spread her wings, take off, and scour the whole city from the air until she found them.

"You are the worst kind of team leader."

Are you sure about that right now, Sunset?

Nevertheless, as much as she was the biggest hypocrite in Remnant right now, Sunset's remembered words reminded Rainbow that she couldn't do that. If she did that, she'd be leaving Ciel and Penny, and it wasn't even as if SAPR had a leader who could take over right now.

The opposite, in fact; there was only one leader between the two teams until Sunset got back – and she would get back, and so would Blake; Rainbow refused to acknowledge any other possibility – and that was her.

"They'll be okay," she said, and hoped it sounded convincing. Adam wasn't likely to show either of them the same mercy that he had shown to Fluttershy, but all the same… it was Sunset and Blake, and he wasn't that tough.

She couldn't worry about Blake or Sunset right now. She could only deal with what was in front of her.

"Pyrrha, Jaune, what happened to you two?" she asked.

Jaune began, "How do you know that-?"

"Ruby said that she, Sunset, Blake, and Professor Goodwitch took out the grimm," Rainbow explained. "You wouldn't have sat that out unless you had no other choice."

"Cinder," Pyrrha growled.

Rainbow winced. "Yeah. That'd do it."

"She got away from me," Pyrrha added bitterly. "I couldn't beat her."

"Don't beat yourself up about it; I couldn't beat her either," Rainbow replied.

"But-" Pyrrha started to speak.

"You said 'she got away,'" Rainbow said. "And you're here, which means she's the one who ran. I doubt she'll try again against more of us."

Pyrrha didn't look comforted by that, but at least she didn't argue against it. Rainbow understood why she didn't look comforted by it: it was never an easy thing, not being able to finish a fight, and it was even harder if the reason you couldn't finish it was that the other guy was as good as you or better, but all the same, so long as Pyrrha wasn't arguing, she'd live with that.

Maybe Sunset would have tried to pick up the pieces right there and then, but Rainbow wasn't Sunset, and she didn't have the gift for words that would make people feel better just because they left her mouth. She'd take not arguing for now.

"Ciel," she said. "Can you support Penny by yourself?"

"I believe so, yes," Ciel replied.

"Thanks," Rainbow said, releasing Penny and letting Ciel take the strain, which she did with a slight grunt of effort. Rainbow stepped half a pace away, her attention focussed on Professor Goodwitch. "Professor, can I ask you to escort Penny and Ciel back to the Skyray?"

Penny made an outraged but incoherent sound.

"What?" Ciel demanded. "You're ordering me out? My aura is-"

"Low," Rainbow said.

"Yours was nonexistent, not so long ago," Ciel retorted. "Jaune can boost my aura as well as yours, or if he has not the reserves-"

"Are we going to drag Penny into battle with us?" Rainbow demanded. "Someone has to take Penny back to the Skyray, someone has to get on the horn to Team Tsunami and get them down here on the double-"

"'Someone' need not mean me," Ciel declared.

"It does mean you," Rainbow said. "Because I am not leaving you down here while I go topside, and I am not leaving Applejack-"

"My sword was broken, fighting Cinder," Jaune pointed out tremulously. "If Professor Goodwitch is escorting us, then I could-"

"Thank you for the offer, Jaune, but I didn't call for volunteers, and this matter is not up for discussion," Rainbow said. You want a team leader, Sunset, I'll show you a team leader.

"If Jaune has no weapon," Ciel insisted, "then he is the obvious choice to-"

"Cadet Soleil!" Rainbow snapped. "Ten-hut!"

Ciel's mouth closed instantly, and she snapped to attention almost as fast, or as close to attention as she could get without dropping Penny. Her blue eyes widened in surprise.

Rainbow clenched her jaw for a moment. Maybe there were arguments against sending Ciel away, maybe she could send Jaune with Penny, but she had almost lost her entire team down here in a situation for which it was clear they were not ideally suited, and she had every right to order Ciel to retire, especially considering her injuries. Plus the fact that, as Penny's partner, it was arguably her responsibility to shepherd Penny out of the combat zone and see her gotten to Twilight for technical attention. And that was before mentioning the fact that, sword or no sword, Jaune's greatest asset was his semblance and that ordering him out would be a questionable exercise of her authority in Sunset's absence.

But ultimately, none of that mattered. Rainbow didn't have to explain herself to Ciel because she was the leader, and Ciel wasn't, which meant that Ciel would suck it up, do as she was told, and wait until she got on the command ladder to start doing things her way.

"I am ordering you," she said, "to take Penny back to the airship and to make contact with Team Tsunami by any means necessary – including retreating from the area – and summoning them to assist us here, as well as bringing Twilight to examine Penny. Once Twilight arrives, you will follow her directives to ensure that Penny is given all necessary assistance as quickly as possible. Do I make myself clear, or do I have to write you up for insubordination and disrespect?"

Ciel glared at her furiously, and the same fury that was evident in her eyes strangled her voice as she said, "I have never disobeyed a direct order. But I would like it noted in the record that I did not approve this course of action."

Rainbow nodded shortly. "Noted."

Ciel's jaw tightened visibly as she saluted with drill-ground precision.

"Professor," Rainbow said, "since Ciel has her hands full, literally, can I ask you to make sure they reach the Skyray safely?"

"And what do you intend to do in the meantime, Miss Dash?" Professor Goodwitch demanded.

"We'll continue with the mission plan," Rainbow said. "Get to the railyard, see what we can see, leaving markers for Blake and Sunset to follow on the assumption that they will come back here once they're done." She didn't question whether they would be done or whether they would be coming back. This wasn't the moment for it. "The markers will also serve to guide Team Tsunami from the landing site once they arrive. Once we make it to the railyard and see what's up, we'll know if we can afford to wait for Team Tsunami to arrive or if we need to move sooner to stop the White Fang or rescue Applejack."

Rainbow looked away from Ciel and to the professor, who looked thoughtful, as if she were weighing Rainbow's words up in her head.

"Very well, Miss Dash," she said. "I will make sure that Miss Soleil and Miss Polendina reach the airship safely, and then I will return. I strongly advise you to do no more than reconnoitre until I get back, unless circumstances make it absolutely vital that you engage immediately."

"Like I said, Professor, ideally, we'll wait for you, Sunset, Blake, and Tsunami," Rainbow replied.

"Indeed," Professor Goodwitch said. She swept her green-eyed gaze over the three members of Team SAPR who were here right now. Her expression softened. "You three should not be too hard upon yourselves," she told them. "You have made it this far, which is something that not every team of students, or every grown and graduated huntsman, could have achieved. Do not forget that and do not let the imperfections of this mission drown it out." She paused. She might have sniffed, or perhaps Rainbow had imagined that. "Take care of yourselves," she said. "Take care of one another. I expect… I do not expect to see any empty places in my class next year. And you are to tell Miss Shimmer that I said so, too."

Rainbow noticed that she too refused to admit the possibility that Sunset might not be coming back. That was… well, it made her feel a little better about her refusal to do so either.

"Don't worry, Professor," Jaune said. "You'll see us all again."

"Indeed, Mister Arc, and sooner than you seem to be implying," Professor Goodwitch declared.

Penny again tried to speak, to no avail.

Pyrrha smiled at her and placed one hand upon Penny's cheek, stroking it gently. "Farewell, for now, Penny. I am sorry that we did not get the chance to truly fight alongside one another, but the road is long, and our time will come, I have no doubt. Until then… goodbye, and get well soon, if that has any meaning for you."

Penny made a low, sad sound.

Ruby leapt forward, wrapping her arms around Penny as best she could, with the way that Penny was being held up by Ciel. "Don't worry, Penny," she murmured. "We'll see each other again, real soon."

Penny looked as though she wished that she had been created with the ability to cry. She tried to reach around and embrace Ruby, but her arm was damaged, and she could not control it, and it flapped uselessly up and down without getting anywhere near the girl in the red hood.

"Come along now, girls," Professor Goodwitch said primly. "Let's get Miss Polendina to safety as quickly as we can."

"Yes, Professor," Ciel said quietly. She sighed. "May the Lady watch over you, Rainbow Dash."

Rainbow didn't look at Ciel as they departed, or at least, she didn't look at Ciel's face. Only when their backs were to her did she look, and then she watched Ciel and Penny's retreating backs, heading for safety until they, and the professor, were out of sight.

"It occurs to me," Pyrrha murmured, "that you could have escorted Penny and Ciel back to the airship yourself."

"I could," Rainbow admitted. "If Sunset were here."

"Would you have?" Pyrrha asked. "If Sunset were here?"

"A huntress' first responsibility is to preserve life," Ruby said. "To protect those who can't protect themselves. Professor Goodwitch is the best person to make sure that Penny makes it back to the Skyray alive. That's her first duty, not to the rest of us."

"Yeah," Rainbow muttered. "That."

It's not that I refuse to go home without Applejack or anything.

"Now, I would love to wait for Sunset and Blake to get here, but we can't wait. Or at least, we can't wait here. We have to press on, but we'll mark the trail, and when they are done, Blake and Sunset will come back here, find the marks we've left, and follow them right to us." She paused. "Now, at this point, Sunset would probably give you a speech, because she seems to enjoy that part of being a leader, but I… I don't have the words. I haven't read enough books to know how to say this stuff." Something else I should probably do something about. "So I'll just say 'be proud of yourself, fight for your pride and for one another, and we'll get through this together.' Okay."

She pulled Unfailing Loyalty over her shoulder. "Let's move."

 

[ScipioSmith]

The Next Train from Platform One​

By the time that Sunset and Blake returned to the point at which they had left the others, the others had already gone.

Sunset looked around the now deserted street. "Do you think they've written us off?" she asked, keeping her tone deliberately light.

"No," Blake replied without any levity in her own voice. She gestured at a glob of white paint spread across the middle of the road. "They left us a trail so that we could catch up with them."

"Right," Sunset murmured. "I suppose they wouldn't have done that if they thought it would be Adam coming after them. Nice to know that they have faith in us, huh?" She tried to smile, but the look on Blake's face dismissed any attempt at smiles. Sunset felt her brow furrow into a frown despite itself. "You know what else is nice? Knowing that they were in a fit state to keep moving forward." She remembered how Cinder had railed against that phrase, and it checked her for a moment until she remembered that she was using it in a completely different context. "I mean, they could push on. They were… they were all able to push on."

Blake nodded absently, her eyes sweeping across the street, lingering on the ruined tower in which Adam had concealed himself.

Sunset, in turn, looked at Blake. A sigh escaped her lips. I wish that I could take your pain away; sadly, I don't think my semblance works that way. She wasn't even sure what did work that way: time, distance? Something to ask Princess Celestia about, maybe? Or maybe just get her to go and see Professor Goodwitch like Jaune had. But for herself, Sunset could say nothing, add nothing. Blake was the one who had known what to say while Jaune was in need; who could say anything to Blake when she needed help?

"We should go. We need to catch up with the others."

Blake nodded absently but made no move to actually… move. "Sunset," she said softly. "You knew, didn't you?"

Sunset blinked. "What did I know?"

"That Adam…" Blake trailed off for a moment. Her head bowed. "You knew that Adam had let Fluttershy go."

Sunset's mouth was dry. She licked her lips, but it didn't help them very much. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I knew. I was there." And it didn't stop me trying to kill him then either.

Blake rounded on her. "And you still-"

"He was going to kill you," Sunset reminded her, not raising her voice but speaking firmly, despite the quiet of her tone. "He was going to kill you. Was I supposed to ignore that? Was I supposed to let you die for his sake?"

Blake hugged herself and did not reply.

Sunset scowled. "Blake, you are going to answer this question or so help me-"

"What makes my life worth more than his?"

The fact that you're my friend. "What?" Sunset repeated. "I don't even know where to start! Your service, to Beacon, to Atlas; you stopped the robbery at the docks, you stopped the robbery on the train, you saved Ruby's life in the Emerald Forest, you saved my life just now… some people just live their lives, but you, you've made the world a better place for being in it. And that's just now, at eighteen! You have your whole life ahead of you. All in front, for years and years to come. Maybe you will go to Atlas and become General, or maybe you'll stay at Beacon and just become a first-class huntress. Either way, you've got so, so much to offer. Could Adam have said the same? A wanted man, a hated man, a killer, a criminal-"

"That's an argument for valuing the young above the old," Blake pointed out.

"Yeah, and?" Sunset asked. "That doesn't make me wrong." She ran one hand through her fiery hair. "What do you want me to say, Blake?"

"I… I don't know," Blake admitted.

"I won't apologise for saving your life," Sunset insisted. "And I won't let you blame me for this."

Blake was silent for a few moments. "You… you're not the one that I blame," she muttered.

Sunset took a step towards her. "This isn't your fault, Blake."

"But he was better!" Blake cried. "He let Fluttershy go!"

"That doesn't make him a good man," Sunset insisted. "It means… it means that he had a soft spot for Fluttershy, as so many do. It doesn't wash out his other actions. It doesn't make him… he was our enemy; he was fighting us. He didn't have to fight; he could have run away, but he chose to fight, and so… what was I supposed to do?"

"This isn't about you."

"Then what were you supposed to do?" Sunset demanded.

"Stayed, and helped him?" Blake suggested. "Recognised that the man I fell in love with was still in there somewhere? Worked to-"

"To what?" Sunset interrupted her. "To save him? To change him? To bring him back from the darkness?"

"Yes!" Blake cried. "Yes, to all of those, why not?"

"Because it doesn't work; it can't be done!"

"You don't know that; maybe-"

"You can't change someone who doesn't want to change," Sunset declared. "You can't help someone who doesn't see that they need help, who can't see anything wrong with who and what they are and what they do; trust me. The best you can do is wait for them to realise, on their own, that something has to change… and sometimes… let me ask you something, were you happy with him, at the end?"

Blake hesitated. "No," she said. "But-"

"Then you had every right to leave," Sunset said. "Even putting aside any broader philosophical differences of opinion. You weren't his therapist; it wasn't your job to put him back together. You're allowed to take care of yourself."

"Even at the cost of others?" Blake asked.

"No one has a right to demand that you sacrifice yourself for them," Sunset insisted. "Nobody."

Blake scuffed her foot upon the road. "I don't know if this would bother me so much if he hadn't… how is it that he was able to come back, for that one brief moment, after so long of… how?"

Sunset shrugged. "Fluttershy always wins."

"So I've been told," Blake muttered.

"I can corroborate, it's true," Sunset said. "Certainly where I could see. It doesn't mean… I wish that I knew the words that would make this better."

"I don't think there are any words," Blake murmured. "Not right now."

That's what I was afraid of. "So… what now?"

"'Now'?" Blake repeated. "Now… I don't blame you, Sunset," she assured her.

"I'd almost rather that than you blame yourself," Sunset replied.

Blake didn't reply to that; rather, she said, "Why… why did you leave the sword?"

"Huh?"

"Wilt, Adam's sword," Blake explained.

"Is that what it was called?"

"You left it with him," Blake pointed out.

So she had. "What else was I supposed to do with it?" Sunset asked.

Blake gave her a flat look. "I know that you wanted it for yourself."

"I wanted it as a trophy," Sunset corrected her. "I wasn't going to put Soteria aside for it, or start carrying two swords around."

"Trophy or otherwise, you didn't take it," Blake said. "You left it with him."

That she had. When it came to it, when she had found herself looking down at the red sword, that red like blood, red like roses, that intense red… she hadn't been able to pick it up. She hadn't been able to take it for herself.

She had a sword. Soteria, the sword that Achates Kommenos had carried for the Emperor at the Battle of the Four Sovereigns, the sword that the Imperial bodyguard had carried for generations before that in service to the Nikos family, the sword that Lady Nikos had given her to protect Pyrrha, sealing a bond between Sunset and the House of Nikos. She had a sword, a sword that protected life, a sword that defended crowns and kingdoms, a sword that had been forged to defend she whose life was as precious to Sunset as her own.

Adam's sword, the red sword, the butcher blade that had nearly struck down Ruby… it was a sword of death, a sword of killing, a greedy red tongue that gulped down the blood of its victims. Looking down, Sunset had felt as though… as though if she took hold of the blade, she would be taking a curse upon herself, as though… it was absurd, but she almost felt as though the day would come when that sword would say 'I was a thousand times more evil than you' and strike her down and suck her spirit dry of all its power.

That was stupid, she knew, but all the same it was… it was an evil sword.

Or perhaps she simply recognised that the way she had come by it was… less than savoury. Not evil, of course, nor even necessarily wrong, but… when she had declared that she would take the sword for herself, she hadn't really… Sunset hadn't necessarily thought about what it would mean. About what she would have to do to get it. About what Adam would look like when she did.

"It didn't feel right," she muttered. "Given the circumstances."

"No," Blake agreed. "No, it didn't." She paused. "Thank you."

"Blake-"

"We should get moving, if we want to catch up with the others," Blake declared, and rather than give Sunset a chance to say any more, she began to run, setting off down the road, following the trail of paint into the darkness.

Sunset sighed, and ran after her, the sound of her boots upon the tarmac echoing off the crumbling walls of the dead city.

XxXxX​

From a secluded spot above the streets, Cinder watched them go.

So, they had killed Adam. That was… for the best. As it was, he had wobbled once when he released Fluttershy, but who knew how often he would have wobbled afterwards if he had lived? Better he die now than risk becoming a complication later on down the line.

It did mean that controlling the White Fang had probably become impossible – Gilda was not likely to look favourably upon her, nor was whoever Sienna Khan sent out to replace Adam – the idea of Gilda being granted the command of the chapter permanently was laughable. The High Leader had, after all, already tried to replace Adam with someone who would not work with Cinder; it was unlikely that she would have softened on the idea in the meantime.

No matter. She had little need of the White Fang now. The operation was already underway; it could no longer be stopped, and once it had, once Vale had been breached and horror had been unleashed in the heart of the civilisation that thought itself so safe and so secure, that sat so cosily and so comfortably behind its walls… then there would be no more need of their assistance.

Probably.

It was a risk that she would have to take.

When it came to it, she was glad that it was Sunset walking away from the battle and not Adam. She would rather have an enemy whose actions she could predict to an ally who was… somewhat temperamental.

She was glad that Sunset was still alive.

Keep showing me that drive to survive, Sunset. Show me how far you're willing to go. Show me everything that you are willing to do.

"Cinder."

Cinder turned at the sound of her name, to see Emerald and Lightning Dust approaching her from behind. Lightning Dust looked rather the worse for wear, her face pale and haggard, her shoulders slumped, her breathing heavy. Around her mouth was stained with blood, and her arms hung limply down beside her as though she could no longer move them.

Emerald did not look so bad, as Cinder would hope, considering that she had kept Emerald out of the battle; all she had been required to do was distract Pyrrha long enough for… long enough for Cinder to get away.

Recalling that fact irked her. It irked her tremendously. She could make excuses for herself, she could say that she had not wanted to kill Pyrrha yet – she would do in the light of the sun, before the eyes of the world, where everyone could see their beloved champion, their vaunted Invincible Girl, fall before her might and prowess; she wanted the wailing to strike the sky from every house in Mistral as their Evenstar burned to ashes before their eyes – and those excuses would be true. But they would also be excuses.

She had fought without using any of her stolen power. She had fought using only her own martial skills and her own semblance, and she could not win. Now, she felt it was not overly defensive on her part to point out that Pyrrha had not defeated her either, but Cinder had not won. She had come close, and perhaps if she had not deliberately enraged Pyrrha by seeming to threaten Jaune, things might have gone differently, but… but she had not won.

She had not been strong enough.

Or Pyrrha Nikos had been too strong. Cinder, it seemed, had esteemed her valour and her skill at arms too lightly. She had thought her more a name than a challenge.

Vain and foolish of me. Watching her fight with Sunset ought to have disabused me of that.

I thought I was different. I thought I was better.

Instead, she had found that they were evenly matched, equals in speed, in strength, in courage, and in the quality of their weapons. Pyrrha was the better trained, if only because she had not been forced to train herself in secret, but Cinder fancied she had the greater situational awareness.

But it balanced. Neither of them could defeat the other.

At least, not with the skills they had matched presently.

If Cinder had used her other powers, then without doubt, things would have been different. Next time, things would certainly be different.

But it would make the victory just a little bit more hollow in consequence.

She had hoped to prove her own superiority beyond doubt; instead, she had been confronted by the fact that there was no superiority at all.

I have power she does not and will never have.

Phoebe had power that I did not once; it spoke not to her greatness.

Pyrrha's admirers certainly think it speaks to her greatness that she overpowers the mice who scurry about her feet. Wherefore, then, should I hold back out of some precious perception of fairness?

Because I wanted to prove that though she had been born better than me, she had not been born better than me.

It appears I must settle for the knowledge that we were born equals.

The fact was… annoying, to say the least.

Cinder tore her thoughts away from her personal disappointment and towards her servants. "Where's Mercury?" she demanded.

"Dead," Lightning growled, coughing a little after she said it. "Rainbow Dash got him."

"I see," Cinder murmured. Perhaps she ought to have seen that coming. After all, Rainbow had fought her a good fight; she should have expected that she would be too much for Mercury, or indeed for Lightning Dust. As for the loss itself… it was regrettable, but far from insurmountable. She hadn't even wanted Mercury on her team in the first place; it was his father, the legendary assassin Marcus Black, whom she had sought out. But Mercury had killed his father – that very day, ironically – and while she had been glad enough to take the son in the father's place, he had never been essential to her plans. The loss of a capable fighter was irksome, but her future plans did not depend too much on strength of arms. She could certainly live without him.

She asked, "Was it also Rainbow Dash who has left you in this state?"

"Dropped me from the ceiling," Lightning grunted. She coughed violently into her hands, so violently that she doubled up, spasming violently as it looked like her cough sprained a muscle somewhere. "I was lucky I had enough aura left to grab a wall before I hit the ground."

"You're lucky that she didn't finish you off more certainly, like she did poor Mercury," Cinder observed. "Still, your efforts were not pointless; you… well, you did something to Penny, didn't you?" She didn't understand what it was that Lightning had done, except it seemed that Penny Polendina was not entirely human. What she was, Cinder had no idea, but she had not been behaving at the end as a person would. Perhaps General Ironwood had used the Relic of Creation to, well, create something? But why, and how many more such inhuman creations did he possess? Cinder did not know the answers, nor how to get them, but she knew it would be something that her mistress would wish to know.

If only she didn't have to supply said information via Doctor Watts.

"Are we just going to let them go?" Emerald demanded. "After they killed Mercury, after they killed Adam?"

"What would you propose instead, Emerald?" Cinder asked softly. "Lightning here is clearly in no state to fight another battle."

"We could go after Penny, Ciel, and-"

"Glynda Goodwitch, a huntress, one of Ozpin's chosen few?" Cinder asked. "Will you face her? To what end, Emerald, would you ask me to hazard myself?"

Emerald looked away. "I didn't mean to-"

"Then what did you mean?" Cinder demanded, advancing upon her.

Emerald shrank back before her. Lightning tried to bar Cinder's way, "Cinder-"

"Quiet!" Cinder hissed. "I want to hear what Emerald has to say."

Emerald swallowed. "I just… they killed Mercury! Sure, he was a jerk, and he was lazy, and he thought he was so great, and he read those stupid comic books all the time, but he was one of us, and they killed him! I thought… I thought we were supposed to be a family; I thought that because the world didn't want us, that meant that we had to stick together because… because all we have is one another. They killed him, and we're just going to let them get away with it?"

Cinder stared down at her. A sigh escaped her lips. "Emerald. Ah, Emerald." She reached out and gently stroked Emerald's cheek with one hand. Abruptly, that stroke turned into a sharp pinch that made Emerald wince in pain. "Never call us a family again, or I will show you what family means to me." She released the smaller girl. "Do you understand?"

"Yes," Emerald groaned, rubbing her cheek. "Yes, Cinder, I understand. I'm sorry."

Cinder fought back the twinge of guilt she felt for her behaviour as she placed a hand on Emerald's shoulder. "No, Emerald, I'm sorry. I should have been more considerate of your feelings. I know that three of you have grown close during our time together. Rest assured that there will be a time for vengeance. A time when the flowers of the north will wither in flames and Rainbow Dash will get what's coming to her… but that day is not today. Lightning is spent, and even I… even I am not at my full strength. If we let our anger, our desire for retribution, put our work in jeopardy, then we throw away everything for which Mercury gave his life. Is that what you want?"

"No!" Emerald cried. "Of course not."

"Then we will honour him by winning this war," Cinder declared. "And bringing down Vale, just as he worked to do while he lived."

Emerald bowed her head. "I understand."

"Good," Cinder replied. "I'm so glad that I can further your education, even outside of Beacon Academy." She chuckled. "The two you should get out of this city, find somewhere safe to lie low; I will find you there and instruct you on where we go next."

"You're not coming with us?" Emerald asked.

"Not yet," Cinder confirmed. "There are yet some matters that I must attend to before I leave. My business here is not concluded."

After all, Sunset hasn't even taken my test yet.

XxXxX​

They were at the railyard.

So were the White Fang, just like they had thought they might be.

The railyard was not as busy as Rainbow had expected. The White Fang were here – she could see them from where she, Ruby, Jaune, and Pyrrha were lurking behind some stacked up rusting old rails – but she'd also expected there to be more of them. With the amount of dust that they had stolen, the Paladins, she'd expected to find an army down here. Instead, while there were quite a few White Fang guys in their distinctive masks and hoods, mostly loading gear onto trucks under the direction of Gilda – Rainbow couldn't help but be impressed at how high up she seemed to be, even if she'd rather Gilda were somewhere else, somewhere they wouldn't have to fight – there weren't nearly so many as she had thought there would be. In fact, in places, the yard was almost quiet.

There was also no sign of the Paladins. Not a single sight of a single one.

The presence of a train in the yard explained both of those things.

It looked like a new train; this wasn't some abandoned engine from twenty years ago that the White Fang had found down in Mountain Glenn and painstakingly fixed up, this was a new train that the White Fang had stolen from the Cold Harbour line and gotten down here… somehow, along with the rolling stock.

Now we know why we couldn't find the train after Adam made off with it.

Rainbow had no doubt, no doubt at all, that the rest of the White Fang forces were on that train, along with the Paladins and the stolen dust.

But why? What were they going to do with a train?

Ruby opened her mouth, but before she could speak, both she and Rainbow both sensed someone – two people – approaching from behind them.

They looked around, just as first Blake - her outfit stained with an alarming amount of blood, made only slightly less alarming by the fact that it seemed to be somebody elses - and then Sunset emerged into view, both moving slowly and keeping low as they crept through the shadows, staying out of sight of the White Fang, until they reached the others.

Rainbow didn't know whether she wanted to hug Blake or punch Sunset. Actually, she did know: the answer was both, definitely both. Her relief that Blake was okay – okay, fine, she was relieved that they were both okay; she wouldn't have seriously wanted anything to happen to Sunset, but that didn't change the fact that she was mad that Sunset had done this in the first place.

She was a little mad at Blake too, but with Blake, it was more understandable because… well, because that was the kind of thing Blake did. Sunset had just had the gall to give Rainbow a lecture on being responsible last night and then to go and pull a stunt like this!

"Hello, strangers," she hissed through gritted teeth.

Sunset didn't meet her eyes. Rainbow took that to mean she felt a degree of guilt over the whole thing.

Or perhaps she knew she wasn't going to get any more sympathy from anyone else, judging by the looks on the faces of her teammates.

"How could you do that, Sunset?" Ruby demanded. "How could you just disappear like that?"

"I wanted to get him away from you," Sunset replied.

"But why?" Ruby said. "We could have fought him together, you and me and Professor-"

"You're not good against other people, and I didn't want him anywhere near Blake either," Sunset hissed. "I didn't ask her to follow me."

"And I didn't ask you to ditch me, but you did it!" Ruby snapped. "How do you think that makes me feel?"

"As long as you feel alive, I'll take it," Sunset said.

"Sunset, as much as we appreciate your concern-" began Pyrrha diplomatically.

"I don't appreciate it!" Ruby interrupted, cutting Pyrrha off. "I'm training to be a huntress, the same as you, I don't need you to treat me like you need to keep me safe; I'm fifteen, not five, and-"

"And Adam almost killed you once."

"So what? That's what I signed up for!"

"And that attitude is exactly-"

"Can you both just stop!" Blake demanded. "Please, just… please, stop, all of you. I don't… can we not talk about this? Please?"

Ruby and Sunset fell silent. Sunset had the grace to look even more ashamed of herself than before, although that seemed to Rainbow to be mostly because of Blake rather than because of what Ruby had said. Ruby too was silent; her silver eyes widened a little bit, and her mouth formed an O of surprise.

Rainbow reached out and placed a hand upon Blake's shoulder. "You know there's one question that I have to ask, right?"

Blake glanced at her. Her golden eyes were moist. "Adam's dead," she whispered.

Ah. Right. "I…" Rainbow trailed off. She didn't know what to say; she couldn't share Blake's evident sorrow – yes, he had done a good thing for Fluttershy, but it didn't erase all the bad things that he'd done or been planning to do – but now was hardly the time to express anything else. She hesitated, frowning slightly. "You know… Ciel says that in the next life, there is no racism."

Blake sniffed. "Really?"

"Uh huh," Rainbow said. "I guess we're all equal in death."

"'Equal in death,'" Blake repeated quietly. "So I should be glad?"

"No," Rainbow replied. "But… I guess I'm trying to say that maybe he's gone to a better place." Agh, that makes him sound like a pet dog, doesn't it?

Blake didn't seem to notice, thank gods. She just looked away from Rainbow and murmured. "Maybe. Thank you."

Rainbow squeezed her shoulder. "I'm just glad you're okay." I just wish I could do more. "Both of you."

"Where are Penny and Ciel?" Sunset asked.

"Penny was… damaged," Rainbow admitted. "You weren't the only one with a battle to fight. Mercury's dead, Lightning Dust is dead if I'm lucky, but they managed to damage Penny pretty badly. Ciel took a few knocks as well. Professor Goodwitch is escorting them back to The Bus."

Sunset nodded. "I'm sorry to hear that."

"Will she be okay?" Blake asked. "Will they both be okay?"

"They'll be fine," Rainbow assured her. Now wasn't the time to mention that Rainbow should have insisted Blake come with them instead of staying with Sunset and Ruby.

"What about you, Pyrrha?" Sunset asked.

Pyrrha bit her lip. "Cinder was waiting for us. She… she escaped me."

Rainbow's eyes narrowed a little as she watched Sunset trying not to seem at all happy that Cinder was still alive. "That… never mind. At least you're both in one piece-"

"She broke my sword," Jaune muttered.

Sunset winced. "I'm sorry to hear that. Do you want to borrow Soteria until this battle is over and we can look at getting your sword reforged?"

Jaune looked at her. "Are you sure?"

"I know your semblance is your biggest asset, but it wouldn't do you any harm to have a weapon. I've got my magic and my gun, so don't worry about it." Sunset said, drawing her sword from across her back and holding it out to Jaune.

Gingerly, Jaune closed his fingers around the hilt of the black blade. "Thanks. I'll take good care of it."

"You'd better," Sunset said, with a grin to show that she didn't mean anything by it. She raised her head a little to look over the stack of rails. "So, what have we got?"

"A train," Rainbow said, "Probably with a lot of White Fang troops and dust and our stolen mechs on board."

"'Probably'?"

"I can't see them anywhere else, can you?" Rainbow asked.

"It looks like they're packing up to leave," Sunset pointed out. "Maybe the Paladins already left?"

Rainbow shook her head. "That's a new train that they brought down here, and a long tail of cars. They've put a lot of stuff in that train, and they're just loading up what's left."

"They're going to attack Vale," Ruby said. "Remember, the subway tunnel goes all the way; it joins the two cities, that was the whole reason it was built in the first place!"

"But it was sealed off," Sunset replied. "The tunnel was sealed off; that's why nobody could get out, that's why everyone left in the city died underground."

"But how thick was the barrier?" Jaune asked. "I mean, with all of the dust that the White Fang and Torchwick stole, could they blow it up? Blow a way into Vale?"

"And then they'll use the train to transport their troops and mechs down the tunnel and come up to attack Vale!" Ruby cried, or at least sort of cried while still being quiet. "We have to stop them!"

"Wait a second," Rainbow said. "If they've mined the far end of the tunnel, then what do they need the train for? They could just gather all of their troops at that end of the tunnel and wait until they were ready to blow."

"You said it yourself; there aren't that many places to mass a large number of people and equipment," Sunset replied. "Why would you want to camp in a subway tunnel, where its uncomfortable and everyone is spread out and it's hard to move between the underground and the surface, when you can make camp here, where there are at least a few places with a roof over your head, there's an elevator right there, and they don't need to worry about travelling because they have a train? I think Ruby's right about this, and even if she isn't… maybe there isn't a mine; maybe they're going to ram the train through the barrier and smash it that way."

"Wouldn't the impact kill the people on the train?" Blake asked, aghast.

"With aura, I'm sure some people would survive," Rainbow said. "Look, whether it's a mine, or whether it's the train, either way, they can break the barrier, but they'll just be coming up under the guns of the General's cruisers, it's crazy!"

"They'll have surprise on their side," Sunset pointed out.

"That'll give them two minutes, three tops," Rainbow said. "If that is their plan, it isn't going to go the way they want it to."

"But how many people could they kill in those two or three minutes?" Ruby asked. "How much damage, how much fear? If they cause a panic, then that will bring the grimm. We have to stop them now."

"Sunset," Blake said. "Can you use your magic to derail the train?"

Sunset shook her head. "It's too big for me."

"I might," Pyrrha volunteered. "With Jaune's help, certainly; after all, I've done it before."

"I'm not sure that's the best idea," Sunset said. "If we derail the train now, don't they have enough stolen Paladins to just lift it back onto the tracks? And we won't be able to derail it again because we'll be under attack. Besides which, if Ruby's right, and there is a mine, then that is our real concern, and derailing the train won't do anything."

"It will slow them down," Blake insisted.

"And get us killed in the process," Sunset replied.

"I get what you're saying about the train, but we're going to have to draw them down on us anyway," Rainbow said. "You see that there? That tripod?" She pointed, as surreptitiously as she could, towards a metal tripod, with a pole rising out of it, planted in the middle of the rail yard. There was a kind of reverse tripod on top, three more metal bars, glowing bright blue on their outward faces, jutting out from the central pole. "That is-"

"An Atlesian AJ-40 CC jammer," Blake murmured.

"Exactly," Rainbow said. "It's why we suddenly lost comms with Twilight."

"Why do you even make things to jam communications?" Sunset muttered. "Aren't you supposed to be the good guys?"

Rainbow ignored that. "If we can take that out, I can get hold of Twilight and let her know what we've found out; she can pass it on to General Ironwood. Unfortunately, once we take out the jammer-"

"They'll know we're here," Sunset said.

"I'm pretty sure they already know we're here."

"They know we're in the city, but they don't know we're here here," Sunset replied. "It doesn't look like anyone's told them we were heading this way. But they'll know once we destroy that jamming device."

"Professor Goodwitch is going to come back once she's dropped Penny and Ciel off," Rainbow said. "Since we're going to draw their attention anyway, I'll find Applejack, and maybe she'll be in a state to help us as well. Plus, Ciel is going to call for Team Tsunami to back us up. With Professor Goodwitch and Applejack, we should be able to hold out until they get here, and then with their help, we can definitely hold out until the troops from our support cruisers arrive to drop the heavy end of the hammer on them." She smiled. "Who knows, maybe there'll be time for the General to get the main force out here."

A shrill whistle cut through the air of the railyard, the whistle of a train about to depart.

"Or maybe the train is about to start and they're ready to go now," Sunset muttered.

"We don't have time to wait for Team Tsunami or Professor Goodwitch," Ruby declared. "We have to do something!"

"If we stop the train now, then surely, the delay will be better than nothing?" Pyrrha said.

"No," Sunset said. "We… we… okay, here's what we do. We take out the jammer, and Rainbow gets a message out to Twilight. With the train about to leave, I don't think they'll delay moving to deal with us. The ones hanging around will shoot back, but not the rest. They'll start the train."

"Isn't that bad?" Jaune asked.

"Hang on!" Sunset snapped. "We'll get on the train before it leaves. Then, once the train is in the subway tunnel, we can make our way to the front of the train, stop it, and Pyrrha can use her semblance, amped by Jaune, to block the tunnel with the train. It'll be cramped down there; even with the Paladins, they'll have a harder time removing the block, and in that time, the Atlesian forces can come down on them. They'll take care of the White Fang, disarm any mine that might be at the other end of the tunnel; meanwhile, we'll escape using the subway stations or the emergency exit hatches and get picked up by an airship."

"You make it sound so simple," Blake observed.

Sunset shrugged. "Well, it's only a matter of fighting our way through a small army of the White Fang and then possibly surviving in a city full of grimm until our evac arrives, right?"

The slightest hint of a smile crossed Blake's face. "Sunset," she said. "All your best speeches acknowledge the real risks, even if that is because it's step two in Professor Goodwitch's formula."

"I did not learn that formula from Professor Goodwitch," Sunset informed Blake sternly.

"My point is," Blake murmured, "if we do stop that train… there's a good chance that we won't make it out of that tunnel alive. The odds are against us, and the situation is grim. But- I don't want to speak for anyone else, but… that… what I suppose I'm trying to say is that I could die a lot worse than fighting in defence of those that cannot defend themselves." She looked around at all of them, her gaze flitting from Sunset, to Pyrrha, to Ruby, to Jaune, and finally, to Rainbow Dash. "And I could certainly die a lot worse than in your company, my friends. And I'm not sure I could die better."

"That's very kind of you, Blake," Pyrrha murmured. "And we accept it in the spirit in which it was intended, I'm sure. For my own part… though it would not be my choice, the risk is a constant companion in the life of a huntress. And if it is our fate, then what is there to be done but welcome it with the courage of the heroes of old when their appointed hours arrived?" She glanced at Jaune but said nothing.

Nor did Jaune say anything either. His facial expression was grim but resolute. He seemed to tighten his grip on the sword he had borrowed from Sunset.

"If we die for Vale, then it's worth it," Ruby said. "So long as Vale survives, then anything's worth it."

"'Through my sacrifice shall the city prosper and our enemies fail,'" Rainbow muttered. Unlike the good stuff that Pyrrha and Blake had come up with, it was not an original thought to her, but rather, an Atlesian commonplace, something… something to put into words why it was all worthwhile.

Girls, I might not make it to Sugarcube Corner after all.

Sunset looked as though she was starting to sweat. "Mhm. What, um… what all of the noble hearts around me said." Her voice was gruff, as though she had something stuck in it.

Not like you to miss the chance to make a speech, Rainbow thought. Not that it really mattered; there were more important things to think of.

"Once the jammer is down, you should get on the train as soon as it starts to move," Rainbow told them. "I'll join you, but I need to free Applejack first."

"How are you going to find her?" Blake asked. "It's not like we have much time."

Rainbow looked over the barricade of rails, her gaze sweeping across the railyard. There was no sign of Applejack… but she did see Winona, scratching at the door to a little shed not far from where they were, a respectable distance from where the White Fang were working.

"Good girl, Winona," Rainbow murmured. "I know where to go, don't worry."

The whistle blew again and was followed by the low rumbling of the engine as the entire train began to shake with suppressed power, the energy of the great engine waiting to be unleashed.

"Okay, Ruby," Rainbow said. "Now!"

Ruby stood up, Crescent Rose unfolding in her hands, the long barrel extending outwards with hisses and clicks until it was its full length, and the great blade was extended.

She rested the barrel of the sniper rifle upon the stacked up rails and fired.

Her single shot destroyed the jamming device, knocking the tripod onto its side as the jammer itself exploded in a shower of sparks and debris.

Cries of alarm rose from the throats of the White Fang in the railyard. Gilda shouted something that Rainbow couldn't properly make out, gesturing in the direction of the shot and towards the train.

The sounds of the engine grew louder.

Bullets began to fly overhead as the White Fang opened fire at Ruby. Ruby fired back; Crescent Rose snapped, joined by the higher-pitched staccato crackles of Sol Invictus and Miló as Pyrrha and Sunset joined with Ruby.

The White Fang sought cover as some amongst them were knocked flat by the accurate fire of the huntresses, diving behind crates of supplies as they sprayed inaccurate automatic fire in the direction of their opponents.

Slowly, like some great beast stirring to life after a long sleep, the train began to move; it was so slow, you could barely notice it, the engine straining to get its long tail of heavily-loaded wagons moving, but it was starting.

Rainbow ran. She left a rainbow trail behind her as she ran, spraying fire from Brutal Honesty and Plain Awesome in both hands to make the White Fang keep their heads down as she crossed the open space, rounds flying around her, to reach the door to the shed at which Winona was pawing and sniffing.

Still shooting with both her SMGs, Rainbow backed into the door, pushing it open before she dived inside and around the wall, Winona leaping in after her.

Applejack, bound and gagged and secured to a chair, let out a muffled sound.

Rainbow grinned at her as bullets flew through the doorway and slammed into the far wall. "Hey, Applejack. How are you doing?"

Applejack strained at her chair, her green eyes bulging as she tried to shout through her gag.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm going to get you out," Rainbow said, holstering both her SMGs and crossing the shed to where Applejack sat bound. She uncuffed and untied her first, then took the gag out of her friend's mouth. "There, better now?"

Applejack rubbed her wrists as she stood up. "I see this ain't a subtle rescue," she observed as bullets slammed into the door.

"If you wanted a subtle rescue, you should have chosen a different friend," Rainbow said. "How are you?"

"Ah'll be fine," Applejack assured her. "Did Fluttershy-?"

"She's fine too; she's safe aboard The Bus," Rainbow told her.

"Well, that's some good news," Applejack said. She glared at Rainbow Dash. "Comin' here was reckless. Thanks."

"Any time," Rainbow said. "I'd give you a hug, but now isn't really the best time."

"No, I guess it ain't," Applejack observed, picking up her rifle from where someone had helpfully placed it in the corner of the shed. "What's going on?"

"Listen in while I tell Twilight," Rainbow told her, as she tapped her earpiece to unmute it.

"-BOW DASH, CAN YOU HEAR ME?" Twilight's voice erupted into her ear so loud that Rainbow leaned away in a futile and absurd effort to get away from it.

"Yes, Twilight, I can hear you; there's no need to shout."

"NO NEED TO SHOUT, I'VE BEEN TRYING TO-"

"Twilight!" Rainbow yelled. "I'm sorry, the White Fang started jamming communications, and we lost contact, but I need you to listen right now. I've got Applejack-"

"That's great news! Is she okay?"

"I'm not done yet, Twi," Rainbow warned her. "Can you patch me through to The Bus as well as you? And put me on speaker; Trixie and Starlight need to hear this."

"Sure, I can… is that gunfire?"

"Yes, Twilight, it's gunfire, which is part of the reason we need to make this quick," Rainbow said.

Applejack leaned around the doorway briefly to let fly with One in a Thousand, working the lever on her rifle before discharging a second shot. "There's a train out there," she observed.

"I know there's a train!" Rainbow yelled.

"What's that about a train?" Twilight asked.

"Miss Dash," Professor Goodwitch said. "I've reached your airship with Miss Soleil and Miss Polendina. I'm about to start back to you now."

"There's no time, Professor," Rainbow said. "Trixie, Starlight, can you hear me?"

"Yes," Trixie said. "I can hear you, Rainbow Dash."

"We can all hear you," Starlight added. "What's going on?"

"The White Fang are planning a full scale attack on Vale," Rainbow explained. "They've got a train loaded with troops and all the gear they've been stealing from us, and they're going to run it down the tunnel and… we don't know if they're going to ram the train through into Vale or blow up the barrier, but either way, they're going to breach the defences and pour their army right into Vale."

"With our ships overhead?" Starlight gasped. "That's suicide!"

"Sure it is, but as Ruby says, they can do some nasty damage before they go down," Rainbow replied. "The worst part is that it's happening right now; the train is about to leave. Professor, there's no time for you to get here, and there's no time for Team Tsunami to get here either. We're going to board the train with what we've got now and try to derail them in the tunnel to cut them off."

"But then you'll be stuck in the tunnel, won't you?" Twilight said.

"We'll get out somehow," Rainbow told her. Hopefully, it was true. "When we do, I'll get in touch."

Starlight said, "But you will still be-?"

"Performing an act of great gallantry," Professor Goodwitch said. "Worthy of a huntress. If you are determined to do this, then I wish you luck."

"Thanks, Professor," Rainbow said. "Twilight, I need you and Team Tsunami to head back to Vale and tell the General what's happening. He can make sure the guns are warmed up and ready when the White Fang break through. Professor, can you stay here and wait for Applejack-?"

"Hell no!" Applejack said loudly. "Ah'm not walking back to no airship all by mahself while you go pullin' some crazy stunt! My aura's come back, Ah can fight. Ah'm with you till the end of the line."

"You're not part of this team-"

"No, but Ah'm here, ain't I?"

Rainbow said, "There's a chance this could be a one-way ticket. What am I supposed to tell Apple Bloom?"

"There's always a chance that it could be a one-way ticket," Applejack grunted, shooting out the door again. "What am Ah supposed to say ta Scootaloo?"

"Uh, fine," Rainbow muttered. "Stubborn as a mule."

"That's mah line," Applejack said calmly.

"Okay, Professor, you should head back to Vale as well, get Fluttershy and Penny to safety."

"I feel aggrieved," Ciel declared, "that I am not with you."

Rainbow smiled. "I miss you too, Ciel," she said. "Now did everyone get that? Is everyone clear?"

"Understood," Trixie said, in a solemn voice. "We'll bring the news back, have no fear."

"Good luck," Professor Goodwitch said. "And I still expect to see you back in class."

"May the Lady watch over you," Ciel murmured.

"Rainbow Dash," Twilight murmured tremulously. "I-"

"Rainbow Dash!" Sunset's bellowing voice cut through the sounds of gunfire.

"I've gotta go, Twi; my train's about to leave," Rainbow said, muting the earpiece.

See you around, I hope.

Rainbow looked out the door. The train was really starting to move now, grinding its way down the rails, pulling its long tail behind it. Soon, it would be moving too fast to be caught up with, but as things stood, they might just catch the rear carriage, where Blake and all the members of Team SAPR were already waiting, returning fire with the White Fang in the yard.

"You ready to run?" she asked Applejack.

Applejack scooped up Winona and held her underneath her arm. "You bet Ah'm ready to run."

"Okay then," Rainbow said. "Go!"

Rainbow covered Applejack as she sprinted out of the shed, firing with both her SMGs to keep the White Fang on their toes and their attention away from Applejack as she ran, rifle in one hand and dog beneath the other, crossing the open ground from the shed which had been her holding cell towards the moving train. As she approached, she threw Winona into Jaune's arms, knocking the boy to the floor of the open porch at the back of the rail car, before Applejack herself leapt up, grabbing one of the metallic rails to haul herself aboard.

"Rainbow Dash!" Sunset shouted again, gesturing furiously with one hand.

"Oh, come on, Sunset, give me some credit," Rainbow said as she surged out of the shed at top speed, trailing a rainbow behind her. The air buffeted her face as though it was a high wind, but as she ran, the train seemed almost to have stopped, any speed that it had picked up disappearing.

Rainbow ran, and everything else was in slow motion, pushing through treacle while she was the only one who still moved in a world of air and freedom. The bullets from the guns of the White Fang, the train, her friends, they were all trapped, all restrained, all so, so slow.

The train had barely moved at all by the time Rainbow jumped aboard, only speeding up once more as she did so.

"I half-expected you to wait longer so you could get your wings out and fly after us," Sunset grumbled.

"I'll remember that for next time," Rainbow said, grinning as she looked back at the White Fang still in the railyard.

Her eyes fixed on Gilda, a distinctive sight with the wings emerging out from her back, her gun lowered, staring right back at Rainbow Dash.

Get out of here, G, while there's still time.

Somewhere in Mountain Glenn, a beowolf began to howl.

Then another. Then another. Howling, howling, howling, the howling of beowolves echoing through the city of the dead, drowning out all other sounds.

"What in tarnation?" Applejack muttered.

"You know how the grimm have been very quiet up until now?" Sunset asked. "Sounds like that's over."

 

[ScipioSmith]

Grimm Tide​

Cinder stood upon the highest tower in the undercity of Mountain Glenn, the city of the dead spread out before her, lifeless… save for the grimm.

She was connected to them. Salem had bestowed that… gift upon her. It was a burden that she had taken on willingly, and for the sake of her destiny, she had endured it. And now… now, she could feel them.

Not even huntsmen really understood what the grimm were, still less those who huddled behind their walls and armies and dreaded the howling of the beowolves; old, fat Professor Port, prattling about demons and creatures of the night, telling his impenetrable stories, he had no idea what he had been hunting all this time.

They were bound together, their minds conjoined, all bound back through invisible and yet unbreakable chains to Salem, their mistress. Out of darkness, the grimm were made; back to darkness, they returned; and that darkness linked them all in a great song, a rhapsody of death and destruction that echoed through the link, passed from mind to mind, echoing across Remnant.

She was a part of that song now, a violin solo playing amidst a concert of deep brass horns and booming drums and keening woodwind instruments. She was a part of them, just as they were a part of her, and as they were a part of her, they would listen. They would even, to an extent, obey; she was not just one of them, after all; she had the mark of Salem's favour on her. Plus, she was stronger than they were, and the song of the grimm valued strength amongst its apex alphas.

Whole hordes would bow before her, if she could only gather them in one place.

That was… difficult. Her connection to the grimm did not give her power over them, to move them as she would like pieces on a game board; even Salem would struggle to do thus, at this distance from Vale at least, and Cinder was not so bound to the creatures of destruction as her mistress was. She had placed the chills and the callisto in the path of Sunset and her friends, but she had done that before they had arrived, physically approaching the chills, receiving the obeisance of the callisto, directing them to where she wished them to lie in wait. She was not a general, broadcasting commands to her obedient soldiers; rather, she was more like a feudal lord, who could compel obedience but only with her physical presence.

Only one thing could she do en masse, only one command could she issue through the link, and that was to abdicate control, vest herself of power, and set the grimm of Mountain Glenn free upon their basest instincts.

She could feel them, all of them; the link was… tentative, in places, but it was there. She could feel the beowolves, she could feel the creeps, she could feel the ursai and the king taijitu, she could feel that which men had awoken in the darkness as they delved too deep; she could feel them all.

Some were patient, some were eager, some strained for release. By Salem's will, they held back, not harming the White Fang, not attacking Ozpin's agents unless she had given them previous instruction to do so, acting as blockers to deny passage through certain areas to Sunset and the rest, passively herding them where she, Cinder, wished them to go.

The time for that was over now. The train was leaving the station, literally.

Time to set the grimm free.

She closed her eyes, and through that link, she sent a simple message to all her fellow creatures of destruction.

Stay no more.

The effect was immediate and electrifying. There was so much emotion swirling about this city, so much anger, so much fear; the train that had just departed was like a beacon to the grimm, drawing them like bees to honey.

Now, the honey was headed straight for Vale, and the bees would follow and sting whatever they found there.

And die, as bees did, but how much pain would they inflict before they died?

As the howling of the beowolves began, as it tore from the throat of one grimm after another, as the song of the violence and bloodshed echoed from every crumbling wall to strike the false stars that glimmered in the ceiling, as the towers of Mountain Glenn trembled at the sound, Cinder smiled.

Now the real fun began.

XxXxX​

Gilda raised the boxy Valish assault rifle to her shoulder and fired. Once, twice, three times, the rifle roared in controlled bursts before the beowolf that had been charging towards her finally dropped dead and died about six feet away from her.

She heard someone screaming. It took her less than a moment to see someone being dragged away by another beowolf, the grimm's claws digging into the back of the rabbit faunus as it pulled him into the darkness.

Gilda gritted her teeth as she slung her rifle over her shoulder, spreading her wings and leaping forwards, gliding through the air to more quickly cover the distance between her and the desperate faunus, his fingernails digging into the earth as he tried to stop the grimm from dragging him into the darkness.

Swallow strike!

Gilda's semblance wasn't the fanciest, and it certainly wasn't the most powerful; essentially, it let her strike three times with her sword in the time it would have ordinarily taken her to strike once. But sometimes, that was all it took. Like now, when a trio of swift strikes as she fell upon them were enough to slice the offending beowolf in half.

Gilda helped the rabbit faunus to his feet as the grimm started to turn to smoke. She draped one arm across her shoulders and lifted him up. "There's a wounded man here; get him on the truck!"

Willing faunus ran to help her, and their willing hands took the injured fighter off of Gilda and helped him to one of the trucks now serving as ambulances. Already, the back was filled with injured faunus, with red and raw bite marks on their arms and legs from where the grimm had gotten them. As soon as the rabbit was helped aboard, the truck rumbled and started to roll quickly towards the industrial elevator that was their only way out of this trap.

Damn Cinder Fall and everything about her! And where was she now, anyway? She'd disappeared at a very convenient time, considering that the indulgence with which the grimm had seemingly been regarding them had now run out and they were coming under a ferocious attack. One minute, they'd only had Dashie and her friends to worry about, and the next, it was like every grimm in the city had just woken up and decided that it wanted a piece of them. What had been an exercise in quickly packing up everything that they needed was turning into a scramble to get everybody out in one piece before the creatures of grimm devoured them all.

Beowolves, creeps, king taijitu, even a few ursai were pouring out of the darkness in great waves, intent on devouring every last faunus there. Every hand that could hold a gun was shooting, every faunus that could fight was on the line pouring fire out into the darkness to try and hold their perimeter; Gilda had, in what was probably her greatest break with Adam's wishes, held back a few Paladins from the train, just in case they came in useful, and they were all coming in very useful now to bolster the defence, their great guns roaring and missiles flying from their racks. They were fighting with everything, every weapon and every faunus that remained to them, but was it enough? Could it be enough against the sheer number of grimm that were hurling themselves at the White Fang from all directions?

No. No, it wouldn't be enough, just like hadn't been enough for the humans who had tried to settle this place once before. And the White Fang should have learnt from their example.

The question was not 'could they hold the Mountain Glenn base?' The answer to that was 'no.' The ammunition would run out, the Paladins would fall – Gilda could see one of them being crushed in the coils of a king taijitu, the great serpent seeming to take no notice at all of the robotic fists hammering into it as it curled around and around the armoured body as the Paladin started crumpling under the pressure; another Paladin had been half-buried under a half-dozen beowolves led by an alpha, which were gradually ripping its armour apart with their claws – and the defences would be overrun, no matter how bravely they tried to hold them.

No, the real question was 'could they get everybody out of Mountain Glenn before this place became a tomb for the White Fang as well as for the humans who had built it?' That was Gilda's challenge, and she very much hoped that the answer was 'yes.'

A boarbatusk broke through the defensive perimeter, trampling upon a leopard faunus before charging straight for Gilda, his tusks gleaming.

Strongheart intercepted the creature on the wall, blindsiding it with her semblance and ramming it onto its side where she shot it four times to be sure. "Gilda!" she cried, running up to her even as she began reloading her rifle. "What are we going to do?"

"Whatever we can," Gilda muttered. "So long as we can hold for just-"

"Not that, the train! We have to stop them!" Strongheart yelled. "Or they'll stop the train!"

A part of Gilda knew that Strongheart was absolutely right. The train was the whole plan. The train was everything, and if Dash and her allies stopped the train, then this whole miserable experience would have been for absolutely nothing. They'd spent weeks – months – preparing the train; Adam had almost certainly given his life buying time to get the train – just about – moving before the enemy got to it. The train had most of their men and most of their equipment on board. If the train was halted, then there was no point to any of this.

But right now, Gilda couldn't honestly say that she gave a damn. She'd been sincere and honest when she told Adam that that train was rolling into a death trap, and as she watched a substantial amount of grimm break off their attack on the White Fang base to follow the train down into the tunnel to Vale, she felt vindicated already in her bleak assessment.

And what would the train get the White Fang, really? It was Cinder Fall's idea, Cinder's plan, Cinder's conjuring trick; it might be better if Dash could stop the train early and all the good faunus on it could get out before it was too late.

"There's nothing that we can do about that," Gilda said. "The guys on the train will have to defend the train as best they can. We've got our own problems." She gunned down another creep.

"So we're not going to do anything?" Strongheart demanded. "We're just going to let this happen?"

"Do you have any ideas?" Gilda asked.

Strongheart didn't reply. Not at first, anyway. "Do you… do you think they'll make it?"

"I don't know," Gilda said, and she didn't even know if she hoped it either. What she hoped for was the best chance for them to survive; she just wished she knew what that best chance was. "Like I said, we have to focus on ourselves right now."

They abandoned their equipment. The guns, the ammo, the explosives, even the dust, everything that hadn't been packed up and moved out already when the grimm attack started was left behind. None of it mattered in the face of the snarling, bestial horror bearing down on them. The White Fang wore masks to make themselves look like grimm, to become the monsters of nightmare that the humans already thought they were, but in the face of the real deal, with the real monsters howling as they surged out of the darkness to rend, tear, and devour, the White Fang were reminded that they were not monsters, but men, and just as vulnerable to fear and doubt and terror as those whom they had thought to make fear them.

Some fought, some fled, some died screaming and begging for mercy of the creatures that were wholly and utterly incapable of mercy. They retreated. They left the stolen Atlesian property that they hadn't already moved out. Some of the dust, they detonated as they retreated, some of the grenades and explosives too, turning them into improvised landmines to incinerate whole packs of beowolves in the fire, but it wasn't enough.

It was never going to be enough.

They fell back. They lost the Paladins as they retreated, the armoured titans falling one by one in the face of the flood of black and bone-encrusted death. They lost faunus too, good people, brave people, bad people, cowards; they lost them all, but the survivors managed to make it to the elevator, cramming themselves onto the platform, crushing each other tightly in their desperation to leave no one behind, knowing that this would be their only chance to get out. Winged faunus began to fly up the shaft, leaving more space for the others who pressed on, tightly together, until only Gilda remained not on the platform.

Gilda slammed her fist into the red button by the side of the elevator shaft, and the metallic mesh doors began to descend as the elevator platform began to rise.

"Gilda!" Strongheart shouted from on the now-rising platform. "What are you doing?"

"Regroup in the hills above the city. I'll find you there," Gilda said. "I'm going to get Adam's body." If he was dead – and she had no doubt that he was, because there was no way that the Sword of the Faunus would have abandoned the faunus when they needed him in the face of this grim, grimm tide – then he deserved better than to rot in the darkness, to be devoured by rats or grimm or simply left to rot. He might have been born in darkness, formed and forged and nurtured by it, but in death, he deserved to lie under sunlight, properly interred.

And so, as the elevator rose up towards the surface, Gilda spread her wings and soared up into the air, towards the ceiling of Mountain Glenn; fortunately, there were no flying grimm around, and all the beowolves and the creeps below could only roar and hiss at her in abject futility as she flew safely above their heads and beyond their reach.

Some of them clawed and tore at the mesh, but by that point, the elevator was out of their reach as well, and though some of them began to climb up the shaft, they were doing so so slowly that there wasn't much chance of them catching it, and anyway, they'd still be below the elevator platform if they did.

Which was probably why most of them turned away, roaring and howling and bellowing as they flooded down the subway tunnel after the train.

Gilda could only hope that her comrades on the train would be okay. And, as strange as it might sound, she hoped that Dash would be okay too. She might be the enemy, she might be a dog of the Atlesian military, she might have betrayed their friendship and not even mentioned Gilda to her new friends – what was that about? – but she was still, in spite of all of that, Gilda's friend. She deserved better than to go out that way.

Nobody deserved to go out that way.

Stay safe, she thought, as she began to search for Adam. Stay safe, everyone, even you, Dash.

It was a forlorn hope, and a stupid one at that, because there was no way that everyone was going to be safe, and if even a few survived, it would be a miracle, but as she flew, the last living person in a city once more reclaimed by death and darkness, looking for the body of a great man for whom a decent burial was the last and only way she could yet serve him well, it was the only hope she had to cling to.

XxXxX​

The train sped down the tracks, rumbling and rattling as it went.

And death followed after.

Grimm hordes – like the one that the team leaders had dealt with in the Emerald Forest, like the one that had descended on Vale after Mountain Glenn fell – typically moved slowly. They let fear and panic run before them like heralds, and in their slow, meandering progress, allowed the fear of those upon whom they bore with the inexorable nature of the tide to draw yet more grimm forth to swell the numbers of the horde.

But they could also move with thunderclap speed when the mood took them. And it had taken them now. It was only the fact that the train was barreling down the track at truly ridiculous speed that was keeping it ahead of the grimm who ran after.

To the howling of the beowolves was added snarling, growling, roaring, hissing, all the sounds that grimm could make as they swarmed after the train, pursuing it down the rails like a dog chasing a car. They swarmed down the tracks, they swarmed in from the city streets on either side, they swarmed in from the metro stations, having descended from the city above. They bared their fangs and swiped their claws and leapt at the train from the side only to rebound off the cars, and they pursued. As the train entered the long tunnel that would take it towards Vale, the grimm followed after in a great black tide.

A tide which held them captive. They were spellbound by the force of destruction which followed them, mesmerised by the darkness and the bony black masks. None of them could tear their eyes away from it.

"Was this… was this the plan all along?" Jaune asked, his voice cracking. "Was this what they meant to happen?"

"No!" Blake cried. "No, it can't be, this… everyone on this train… the grimm won't care who's White Fang and who isn't; they'll kill everyone."

"Everyone," Pyrrha murmured. Her face was pale, and her gilded adornments had lost their lustre in the darkness of this tunnel. "If the barrier is breached, if these grimm get into Vale-"

"Then Atlas will stop them," Rainbow Dash declared.

So sure? Sunset thought to herself. There are so many, and they roar so loud. What can men do against such numbers and such reckless hate?

"Are you sure?" Blake asked. "Are you sure that they can? There are so many of them-"

"And that won't help them one bit when they're stuck trying to squeeze their way through a bottleneck into the teeth of our fire," Rainbow insisted. "Once Twilight tells the General what's happening-"

"Twilight only knows about the White Fang," Blake said. "Not the grimm."

"Bullets will take care of them both," Rainbow said.

"It doesn't matter," Ruby declared. "Because neither the grimm nor the White Fang are going to get anywhere near Vale, because we're going to stop this train and block the tunnel. That will hold the grimm too, right?"

With those numbers? Sunset thought. I'm not so sure.

"For a little while, at least," Applejack said. "Until someone can come up with something else."

"Then nothing's changed," Ruby said. "We have to get to the front of the train."

"Yes," Pyrrha agreed, nodding her head as if she was seeking to reassure herself. "Yes, you're right. You're right, Ruby," she repeated, glancing down at Ruby with a faint smile upon her face. "Thank you."

"Does it strike anyone else here as a little weird that we've been allowed to stand her yabberin' on and nobody inside the train has tried to throw us off?" Applejack wondered aloud.

"Well, now that you mention it," Rainbow muttered, and as everyone turned and aimed a gun, if they had one, towards the door into the first car, Rainbow pushed it open with the muzzle of her shotgun.

It became apparent why nobody inside had rushed to attack them: because there was nobody inside. The car was bare, just an empty metal box rattling along the rails, with nothing and nobody in it.

"Huh," Applejack said. "Ah guess they didn't have time to load up every car before they left."

Blake scrambled up the ladder climbing the back wall of the car, getting up onto the roof as the train sped along. Her wild tangle of black hair flew out behind her, blasted back by the movement of the train.

"They may not have had time to load every car," she observed, "but they loaded enough of them."

Sunset teleported onto the roof to stand beside her, even as Blake cleared space for the others to climb up as well.

They could see the White Fang, hundreds of White Fang by the look of it, advancing across the roofs of the railways cars with blades and guns held in their hands, a mass of men in white masks bearing down upon them.

And beyond, Sunset thought she could see Paladins beginning to stir to life like giants slumbering beneath the earth for untold aeons.

"I guess they know we're here," Jaune groaned.

"Okay, here's the plan," Rainbow said. "Applejack, you, Blake, and Winona go through the train. Pyrrha, Jaune, and Ruby, you'll go over the train with me. Sunset, once they're committed, you can teleport behind them and get to the front of the train before they can do anything about it. We'll catch up."

"And leave the rest of you?" Sunset demanded. "No!"

"We'll catch up," Rainbow assured.

"Then why do I need to rush ahead?"

"Because the sooner we stop the train, the better, right?" Rainbow asked.

Sunset sighed. She didn't like this. She did not like this one bit.

"You will watch your friends die all around you."

"You will be powerless to help them."

"They will be taken from you in an instant."

"One by one, they all shall fall: to darkness, and to me."

Get out of my head!

She didn't like this. She did not like this one bit. But she couldn't confess just why she didn't like it, and so… and so… so she would do it.

Her words will not come to pass. They will not.

"Everyone ready?" Rainbow asked.

Blake leapt down to rejoin Applejack. "Ready," she said.

Winona barked.

"Ah'm ready, Sugarcube," Applejack declared.

Ruby cocked Crescent Rose. "Ready," she said eagerly.

"Okay then," Rainbow said. "Let's go!"

And so they charged forwards, over and through the train, into battle with the White Fang.

And the grimm horde followed them.

 

[ScipioSmith]

Defined by Choice​

Sunset teleported onto the roof of the engine, at the very head of the train, wobbling a little as it careened – somebody really had their foot on the accelerator, or whatever it was they used to get a train to speed up – down the track and down the tunnel heading for Vale.

She could hear the sounds of gunshots behind her, and she only needed to look around to see her teammates and her friends still fighting their way to the front of the train to join her. Rainbow Dash, with her wings, was closest, but all of them were still a way off yet. The White Fang were not skilled, but they were numerous, and they had deployed a lot of Paladins to keep SAPR and Rainbow Dash from reaching the engine. Sheer numbers were turning it into a slog, coupled with the sheer length of the train itself, both of which were reasons why Sunset had, in spite of her reluctance to abandon the others, teleported beyond the fighting to the engine itself.

She had taken longer to do it than she probably should have done – she had stayed in the fighting longer than literally anyone other than her had wanted her to. By the time that she had broken off to head for the front of the train, Sunset had gotten the distinct impression that it was only the fact that Pyrrha was a perfect lady that was stopping her from smacking Sunset upside the head and yelling at her to get a move on.

Of course, to Sunset, she had moved too fast, not fought for long enough. She wasn't entirely sure how long she had fought for – ten minutes? twenty? longer? – but it had been too long for her friends and not long enough for her. She had hoped that they would win through together, brush the resistance of the White Fang aside and make it here all as one.

Unfortunately, with the White Fang's numbers – and number of Paladins more importantly, and the fact that they needed to preserve at least some of Jaune's aura to boost Pyrrha enough to move the train, which meant that everyone else had to preserve their auras so they didn't need to call on him too much – meant that it was not to be. Eventually, even Sunset had been forced to admit that.

Still, she was here now, and Vale hadn't fallen yet. She was here now, and all she had to do was actually get into the engine, hit the brake, and all the plans of Cinder Fall and the White Fang would come screeching to a literal halt.

The roaring of the horde of grimm who were chasing the train echoed off the walls of the tunnel as an enormous mass of nearly every kind of grimm native to Vale chased them down the rail line.

The thought of what would happen if that horde of grimm caught up with them – as would inevitably happen if Sunset stopped the train – sent a shiver down her spine.

Yes, the plan was that Pyrrha – boosted by Jaune – could then grab the train and move it off the rails and wedge it sideways to block the tunnel, but how long would that last? It was one thing to talk about it holding back the White Fang; it was one thing to think that if they jammed it properly, even the Paladins would have a hard time freeing it, but all those grimm? Would they not simply tear through the metal, rip the engine apart with their teeth and claws, rip and bite and batter their way through that human work until they had gotten through it and could reach the people on the other side?

Sunset wasn't a coward. She was not a coward. She wasn't afraid to fight; she wasn't even afraid to die in a good cause.

But she was afraid, she was very much afraid, of losing the people who mattered to her in one fell swoop.

"You will watch your friends die all around you."

"You will be powerless to help them."

"They will be taken from you in an instant."

"One by one, they all shall fall: to darkness, and to me."

I don't want to be alone again.

Maybe it would be better to- no. No, she couldn't think that. The others… they were all so noble and determined to do the right thing no matter the circumstances, no matter the cost; there was no way they'd ever forgive her if she did something like that. There was no way that they'd ever forgive her if she even suggested it.

She would have to stop the train and take the consequences, whatever they might be.

However dire they might be.

She swung down off the roof and onto the back of the engine. The cab itself was sealed off by a pair of very solid-looking metal doors, but nobody seemed to have actually locked said doors, and they opened as soon as Sunset pushed the green button on the right-hand side.

The armoured door – the pointless armoured door, unless there was a lock and somebody had just forgotten to engage it – slid open, to reveal a single faunus, an elephant perhaps, judging by the tusks growing out of his mouth, whom Sunset was quickly able to incapacitate with a single blast from her palm as he was turning around.

She strode into the compartment, leaving the door open behind her for her allies to join her, and in a few strides had made her way to the control panel at the front of the train. There were no windows, but a monitor connected to some cameras mounted to the front showed her the monotonous tunnel before her as the train ate up the track with ravenous speed.

There was some sort of trigger sitting on top of the control panel, a black, hand-sized wand with a red button at the tip. Sunset eyed it for a moment but didn't touch it; she had no idea what it did; for all she knew, it was a failsafe that would blow up the whole train for… reasons. Best to let it alone and hope that if it was left alone, it wouldn't do anything. Ignoring it, Sunset looked down at the complex controls on the panels below, all the levers and buttons and dials spread out before her. Who knew that a train would be so complicated? She was expecting… start and stop, honestly; it wasn't as if this thing could be steered. There were a lot of readouts, speed and stability and so on, and what looked like even more indicator panels that weren't lit, possibly because nobody was in a station anywhere sending signals to the train.

Honestly, if Sunset hadn't spotted the red button marked 'EMERGENCY BRAKE,' she wouldn't have known where to begin with stopping this thing. She wasn't sure that anybody other than the absent Twilight would have had a clue.

Well, time to stop this train, I guess. Stop the train and… and take what comes.

Here goes.

Sunset's fingers moved gingerly towards the big red button on its yellow-and-black plate.

She hesitated. Her fingers stuck, trembling in place as though her fears had made manifest and grabbed her by the wrist to prevent her touch.

She didn't want to do this. She didn't want to stop this train, not yet, not without more of an idea of how they were actually going to survive once the train was stopped.

She didn't have that idea… but she had to do it anyway. She had to because… because what else was she going to do? And how would she explain it?

She had to do this for the others. Even though it was for the others that she didn't want to do it yet – or at all.

Sunset breathed in and out. I have to do this. If I don't do this, they'll never forgive me.

They won't be around to-

Look, one of them will get here themselves, then they'll push the button, so unless you want to have to explain why you stood here not pressing a button, why don't you just push the damn thing and get it over with?

It's like getting an injection. It won't hurt as much as you're afraid it will.

Sunset's fingers shifted forward millimetre by painful millimetre.

"Congratulations, Sunset," Cinder's voice oozed out of a pair of speakers mounted to the front wall and into the compartment, accompanied by the sound of some decidedly sarcastic clapping. "It took you longer than I was expecting. I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and guess that you were dawdling because you didn't want to leave your teammates to fight on without your brilliant leadership. Still, you got here in the end."

Sunset rolled her eyes. She guessed that under more normal circumstances, the speakers that Cinder was using would be part of a system to communicate between the train and either the station or some kind of HQ, and therefore, she spoke in the assumption that there was a microphone somewhere around here that would pick up her words.

"Hello again, Cinder."

"I'm sorry that I'm not here to greet you in person," Cinder said, "or to congratulate you for getting this far."

"If you wanted to see me again, you could have shown yourself in the street earlier," Sunset pointed out. "But you decided that you'd rather dance with Pyrrha instead of me. I'm hurt."

"Aren't you going to thank me for sparing her life?" Cinder asked. "I know that you'd be terribly upset if she were gone."

Sunset snorted. "'Sparing her life'?" She repeated. "The way I heard it, you ran off once you realised how outmatched you were."

Cinder was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had acquired a sharper edge. "Is that what Pyrrha told you? Did she tell you that I was outmatched by her?"

"No," Sunset said quickly; clearly, she had pricked Cinder's pride more sharply than she had intended to, angered her in ways that she hadn't meant to; that anger might be visited on Pyrrha when next they met if Sunset let it stand. "Pyrrha is very disappointed in herself that she didn't skewer you on Miló's tip. I just got the impression… I mean you did quit the field."

"As I said," Cinder pronounced, "I had no desire to cause you the pain of Pyrrha's passing. That does not mean that I was losing. As for Pyrrha's disappointment, tell her not to take it too hard… she never stood a chance of overcoming me."

"Really?" Sunset asked dryly.

"I fought that battle with one hand behind my back," Cinder declared. "As Pyrrha will discover if she is so bold as to cross swords with me again."

"I'll bet," Sunset muttered. "Listen, Cinder, I don't mean to be rude, and normally nothing would please me better than to while away the time talking to you, but I'm a little busy right now, so-"

"Oh, I know exactly what you're doing," Cinder said. "You're about to stop my train. And I put so much effort into getting it ready."

"How do you-?" Sunset stopped, looking up. There were cameras mounted in the corners of the compartment's ceiling. "Oh. Right. Did you call to beg me not to interfere with your plans?" Strange, how much easier it was to banter with Cinder about stopping her plans than it was to actually stop Cinder's plans.

Cinder chuckled. "I don't beg, Sunset, not anymore. And you do realise that the train is only the more minor element of my plan. Stopping the train does not stop my plan. For that matter, running the train does not guarantee my plan either."

"So there is a mine," Sunset said. "You've used all the stolen dust to mine the end of the tunnel, and you're going to blast a way into Vale. We weren't sure."

"Really?" Cinder asked. "What else did you think that I might have in mind?"

"We thought that you might be planning to ram the train through the barrier," Sunset explained.

"That would be rather hazardous for anybody on the train, don't you think?"

"Do you care?" Sunset asked. "After all, you're not on the train."

"I care about you," Cinder replied. "Do you think that I want you to slam into the wall in front of you at high speed?"

"You didn't know that-"

"Sunset," Cinder cut her off, in a tone that suggested Sunset was being very dense and that she, Cinder, was going to explain to her how the world worked. "I invited you here to Mountain Glenn. I allowed you to come down into the undercity when I could have buried you beneath waves of grimm up on the surface. I delayed you just long enough that the White Fang could finish getting the train ready to move… and then I allowed you to proceed onwards so that you would reach the train in time to board it. Everything has proceeded as I have foreseen."

"Apart from the way that your cover was blown, you got chased out of Beacon, and we found your virus on the CCT, so whatever you were planning to do with that isn't happening anymore," Sunset pointed out. "You didn't foresee that with your oracular wisdom, did you?"

Cinder sniffed. "Nevertheless," she said, gliding over what Sunset considered to be some excellent points on her part, "the fact remains that I wanted you on this train, and here you are. And I have no desire to bring you all this way merely to kill you on impact."

"That and the White Fang might have had some misgivings about getting on a train that was going to ram a wall with them inside," Sunset muttered.

Cinder chuckled. "There is that too. Telling them that we were going to blow a breach in the defences which would then be exploited via the train made them feel much safer."

"I take it that you didn't tell them about the grimm?" Sunset asked. "It seems to me that knowing that a horde of grimm was going to follow them up through the breach might also have caused a few misgivings." It's given me enough.

Once more, Cinder laughed. "Adam believed that the White Fang were going to emerge from out of the tunnel and overwhelm the defences of Vale with the advantage of surprise, laying waste to the city and lighting a beacon of resistance against the corrupt order of the world."

"He did know that there's an Atlesian fleet in the skies over Vale, right?" Sunset asked. "You know that, right?" She paused. "The grimm… not attacks, the… that's the thing, they didn't attack, not in Vale, not in Mistral, the grimm who were menacing the towns and villages in Anima when we were there on vacation, that was you, wasn't it? And the grimm threatening the outlying settlements in Vale, that was also your doing; you wanted to get the huntsmen out of Vale and scattered across the kingdom."

"Very good, Sunset; you're finally starting to put it together," Cinder said. "Yes, I arranged for the attacks in Anima because I wanted to weaken the city's defences. I knew that Pyrrha would be coming home for spring break, and I wanted to see her in action for myself."

"And yet, you still thought that you could take her in a fight," Sunset observed.

"I'm not going to dignify that with a response," Cinder declared airily. "And, as you have also guessed, it was also my idea to menace the settlements in Vale; not destroy them, although the grimm could have fallen upon these poor, out of the way places before any help could reach them, and doesn't that tell you something about the callousness of Professor Ozpin and the Council-?"

"Get to the point, Cinder," Sunset said tersely.

"The point is, as you've already worked out, that I wanted the huntsmen out of the way," Cinder said.

"It must have been quite annoying when the Atlesians showed up to take their place," Sunset observed.

"To an extent," Cinder admitted. "Although the idea of defeating the great General Ironwood and his vaunted army does have… a certain appeal."

"You think you can win?" Sunset asked incredulously. "You can blow a hole in the defences, but the moment the White Fang or the grimm come up through that tunnel, they're going to be under fire. We got Twilight a message, everyone is going to know that you're coming."

"Has this time in Mountain Glenn not taught you how easily a city may fall?" Cinder asked. "Has the sight of this dead city not shown to you that death and destruction will always triumph, that against the ferocity of the grimm, no wall or army can stand forever, or even for long? Have you not beheld, with your own eyes, the nemesis that will always descend upon the hubris of men?"

"Vale hasn't fallen yet," Sunset countered. "Even Mountain Glenn didn't fall in a day, and Vale and Atlas will fight to protect Vale itself much harder than they fought for Mountain Glenn." She paused. "The fall of Mountain Glenn was followed by Ozpin's Stand, where the horde of grimm was turned back and shattered because Vale will not be allowed to fall."

"If you believe that," Cinder said, "then there's no reason not to detonate the mine, is there?"

Sunset blinked. "What? 'Det-'…" Her voice trailed off as her eyes were drawn once more to the trigger sitting on top of the control panel. "That is the detonator for the mine?!"

"You sound so surprised."

"I am surprised; it's the detonator for the mine – the thing that your plan actually depends on, even more than this train; the thing which, if it doesn't go off, then everything you've done has been for nothing – and you just left it here."

"I have faith in you, Sunset," Cinder said.

Sunset's ears flattened down on top of her head. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"It's quite simple, really," Cinder explained. "I wanted you to come here. I wanted you to get on this train. I knew that you would make it to the front of the train where I have left – for you – the only detonator. You're going to deliver me my victory, Sunset; thank you, I'm so touched."

Sunset scowled. "What makes you think-?"

"Because I know you," Cinder said. "I know you, Sunset Shimmer, I know you as I know myself. Ever since the moment we met, I…" She hesitated, but when she spoke again, her voice was clearer and stronger than before. "You have a choice to make, Sunset. Before you sits the only trigger to the mine at the end of this tunnel. You can let it sit there, harmless and inert; you can destroy it; you can throw it off the train, and perhaps a beowolf will eat it. You can do as you like and my mine, all of my dust that Torchwick and the White Fang so patiently gathered for me, will sit uselessly at the end of that tunnel, and everything that I have done will be for nothing. Vale will be safe. You'll have done your duty like a true huntress! And you will die down here. And Pyrrha will die, and Ruby will die, and Jaune and Blake and Rainbow Dash, you will all perish down here in the dark, with no one to comfort you and no one to see and no one to ever find your body. Whether you stop the train or not, eventually, you will run out of rail and be left with nowhere to go, and the grimm will find you."

Sunset's tail twitched. "The emergency escape-"

Cinder laughed. "Sunset, please. I had the emergency escape hatches blocked. It turned out I had some dust left over that I didn't strictly need for the main mine."

Sunset's eyes widened. "You… you're lying."

"I wouldn't lie to you, Sunset," Cinder said, with a terrible earnestness in her voice. "Not now, not when you know the truth about me, about who I am, where I came from, who I serve. I'm not lying to you-"

"No, you're just trapping me and my friends in a tunnel with a horde of grimm, thanks a lot!" Sunset snapped.

Cinder's voice remained calm. "I've left you a way out," she reminded Sunset. "All you have to do is pick up that trigger, detonate the mine, and the way will be open to you."

Sunset's chest pushed against her cuirass; she wanted to breathe deeper than she could. "And the way… and the way into Vale will be open to the grimm."

"If you're right about the prowess of the Atlesian forces, then that won't matter," Cinder said.

"According to you, it will," Sunset pointed out.

"I could be wrong," Cinder allowed. "It has, after all, happened before. Perhaps I'm wrong now. Perhaps the gallant students of Beacon and all the flowers of the north and their technological marvels – and we mustn't forget all the king's horses and all the king's men of the Valish Defence Forces – can put a stopper in this particular breach before the tide comes in. Or not. The question is… does it matter?"

"Of course it matters!"

"Does it?" Cinder asked. "I'm sure that it matters to somebody, but does it matter to Sunset Shimmer? Does it matter to you if Vale falls or no, so long as Pyrrha and Ruby and the rest survive? Does it matter to you if people that you don't know, that you wouldn't know if you passed them in the street, die so long as your dear friends, the people you live with every day, the people who share your life, survive?

"You have to choose, Sunset. I'm giving you this choice; it is my gift to you and you alone. You can die down here, like every preening, self-righteous huntsman in history, or you can prove to me that I am not mistaken in you. Prove yourself a survivor, prove yourself worthy of life, prove yourself worthy of my interest. Prove that you belong with me, not them. And in so proving, save them all. Choose, Sunset, and in the choosing, define yourself."

Define herself. Yes. Yes, it would. Sunset could feel the truth of Cinder's words, feel the weight behind them settling upon her shoulders. She could feel… she could feel destiny hovering above her.

Ponies had… ponies had a woolly conception of destiny in many ways. They used the word imprecisely, using it to refer to a number of different things, things for which other words might have suited better. Sunset was wont to throw around 'destiny' in place of 'fate,' out of a mixture of familiarity and simple aesthetic considerations: her inescapable doom, the glory that was laid out for her, that which was promised and which would be hers… but only if she worked for it. Only if she strove for it. In that regard, although she – and she suspected that Cinder was the same way – hugged the notion of a destiny like a comfort blanket, holding to it in the dark times when glory and renown seemed so very far away – she could not escape from the more common usage of ponykind.

Every pony had a destiny, and usually one bound up in their cutie marks. It was the only one you had, it was set out for you when you were born by numinous and inescapable workings… but you had to choose it. It wouldn't fall on you from a great height, it wouldn't reveal itself to you in a moment of searing clarity imposed from without, you had to come to the realisation of your own will, of your own volition. Nevertheless, it was the only destiny that you would ever get, and although you could tarry on the road to get there, although you could waste as much time as you liked, although you could take as long as you pleased to sniff the flowers along the way, it would still be waiting for you. No other would take its place.

Like Pyrrha said, it was the final goal you worked towards.

If she did not take up the trigger, if she let the barrier stay up, if she protected Vale, then that would be her final goal, the destiny towards which she had been working ever since she arrived in Remnant.

It would be her final goal because she would get no other. The grimm would devour her down here, and all her friends besides.

And if she did otherwise? If she did as Cinder wished, if she blew the mine, if she exposed Vale to the horrors of a grimm attack… then, too, she would have chosen. She would be defined. She would have made her mark, whatever befell.

Destiny drove her on. She could feel its wings beating, feel the storm around her. But what was destiny driving her on to?

That… that was her choice.

And hers alone.

XxXxX​

Cinder paced up and down, casting her eyes down to the detonator – identical twin to the one in the railway car – in her hand.

When she had told Sunset she wasn't going to lie to her… that was not quite true. She had been mostly honest with Sunset: there really were no other ways out of the tunnel; it really was a question of die down here in the dark or blow the mine and live. The only area where she had been less than completely truthful was in the matter of Sunset having sole discretion over whether or not Cinder's plans succeeded.

She was not willing to go quite so far. While Cinder hoped, fervently, that Sunset would choose life and show Cinder that she was who Cinder thought she was, Cinder was not prepared to hazard all her plans, so patiently laid down and so quickly and – if she said so herself – cleverly adapted to changed circumstance upon the risk that Sunset might turn out to be nobler than Cinder thought, that the influence of those like Pyrrha and Ruby and Jaune Arc might prove stronger than Sunset's own inclinations – or that Cinder had misjudged Sunset completely.

She wanted to know the answer. She wanted to find out who Sunset was, she wanted to be proved right in her surmises, but there was something much bigger going on here. There were plans of a scale far greater than Sunset Shimmer or Team SAPR or any of them.

Plans greater than Cinder herself. She was not the first to stand at Salem's right hand; she was determined to be the last. To that end, she would bring down Vale and topple the towers of Haven, Atlas, and Shade in turn and lay the relics at Salem's feet, she would assume all the four powers of this world, she would gain all that she had sought and do all that she had promised, and she would not let Sunset Shimmer stand in her way.

If Sunset proved too noble. If Sunset's worry about what her friends would think of her proved stronger than her desire to live, if she did not behave as Cinder thought she would and hoped she would… then Cinder would detonate the mine anyway and open the way into Vale for her grimm horde.

She hoped, fervently hoped, it would not come to that.

Come on, Sunset. Don't make me use this. Pick up the trigger. Blow up the mine. Prove yourself.

Prove me right.

XxXxX​

Sunset stood in the centre of the cabin and stared at the trigger in front of her.

Her hands trembled, but she made no move to take up the trigger, still less to use it.

She just stood and stared at it as though it were the bomb, not the trigger, and it would explode if she took her eyes off it.

Sunset's body was still, save for the trembling, but her mind whirled within her head.

If she… if she did this, if she picked up that trigger, if she pushed the red button, then she threw the dice. She threw the dice with all of Vale at stake. Perhaps it would be alright, perhaps General Ironwood's ships would blaze fire enough to burn away the grimm, perhaps Professor Ozpin would stir from his high tower and show just why he was so admired throughout Remnant, perhaps the soldiers of Vale would show the spirit of their ancestors in the Great War and triumph over the nightmares. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Perhaps the iron might of Atlas and the courage of the students would prevail over the ferocity of the grimm. Perhaps virtue against fury would advance the fight and in the combat then would put to flight, as the Mistralian piece of doggerel went, proving the old valour was not dead nor in the hearts of men extinguished.

Perhaps, perhaps.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps the grimm would overrun Vale, just as they had Mountain Glenn, and in twenty years, the bones would line the streets, their empty sockets staring out and their tongueless mouths crying out.

"I was a carpenter."

"I was a housewife."

"I was a butcher."

"I was a waitress."

"I was a clown."

"We were those who trusted huntsmen to keep their vows."

Sunset shuddered. The dead of Mountain Glenn become the dead of Vale indeed. But Vale is not yet fallen. Vale may not fall.

If she picked up the trigger, then she threw a dice, but if she let it lie…

If she let the trigger lie, if she did not blow up the mine, then…

Then it would be the bones of her dear friends that would lie in this tunnel until they turned to dust, if indeed the grimm left bones.

If they left anything at all.

"Pyrrha has such fire in her. Such strength. I felt it from the moment she was born. I felt… drained. I knew then that I would give my husband no other children, for all the strength that was in me had passed into Pyrrha. I gave strength to Mistral… and kept none for myself. And yet… she is all I have, Miss Shimmer, and yet, she has ventured forth upon the path of a huntress, where the road ahead is uncertain."

"They looked for her coming from the White Tower, but she did not return by mountain or by sea."

The words of Lady Nikos echoed in her mind. Pyrrha was the last of her line, she carried the history of her people within her veins, in her was born again the antique valour of a kingdom, she was their Eventstar… and that star would be snuffed out, swallowed by a beowolf unless Sunset detonated this mine.

She is all that remains to her mother.

Lady Nikos gave me Soteria that I might protect her.

Sunset had promised Pyrrha that if she fell in battle, then she would carry her circlet home to her mother, but nobody would ever carry Pyrrha's circlet anywhere if Pyrrha died down here in this tunnel, devoured by the grimm.

Once again, the vision that Salem had shown her flashed before Sunset's mind, all of the visions: Pyrrha's death, Ruby's death, Jaune's death, Blake's death. And all their deaths would be so much worse, down here in the dark, down here with no one to see them die and no one to recover aught of them for mourning or for burial.

No one would carry Pyrrha's circlet home to Mistral; perhaps there would not even be a circlet left, even if there were somebody to carry it. The shattered fragments of Jaune's familial sword would lie in the darkness for all eternity, and the family that he had left behind would wonder forever what had become of their vanished son. Perhaps they would wait and wait, until the disappearance of Jaune Arc was told as a sorrowful tale long past or a ghost story to scare the children: the boy who stole and ran away from home and was never seen again, so eat your sprouts and go to bed.

And Ruby… Ruby was her mother's only child. Ruby too might be the last of her line, the last of a line of silver-eyed warriors, blessed with the magic to defend the world against the monsters, a magic that she had not yet even unlocked, still yet begun to master. If she died, if she perished down here in this tunnel, then all that promise, all that potential, would be lost.

The same could be said of Blake and Rainbow Dash: promise, potential… love. If Sunset did not blow up this mine, if Sunset condemned them all to death in the darkness, if the grimm devoured them here, then it might comfort Lady Nikos, General Ironwood, Yang and Ruby's father away on Patch, it might give them all some consolation to know that their girls died bravely, doing their duty to the end; it might give them comfort to know that those they loved gave their lives like true huntresses, following in the footsteps of Summer Rose.

Perhaps General Ironwood would stick Rainbow's picture up on These Are My Jewels along with all the other poor souls who gave their lives for Atlas; perhaps Lady Nikos would hold her head up high and tell passersby that a huntress would understand that there wasn't really a choice to make and a huntress is what she always wanted to be.

Perhaps Yang would shrug her shoulders and get on with things because that was life, after all, and wasn't that a risk they'd all signed up for?

Or perhaps Lady Nikos would sit alone in her study, surrounded by testaments to the skill of a daughter slain and sink into her grief and waste away amidst the crumbling of a house whose future had been stolen away.

Perhaps Yang would weep oceans of tears beyond counting and leap down in the empty grave in place of Ruby.

Perhaps Twilight's heart would shatter, and all the air would fly from Pinkie's hair like joy flying from her soul, and she would wait forever in Sugarcube Corner for Rainbow Dash to come in and place her usual order, and think of a joke that would make Rainbow Dash laugh… only to remember that Rainbow Dash would never walk through that door again.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

They were daughters, and they were sisters. Jaune was a son and a brother both. They were loving and beloved, beloved by those close to them and by those who knew them only by their famous names.

If they died… if they died, then the world should be lost, shattered for so many.

If Sunset picked up the trigger, then she rolled the dice for Vale, but if she did not… if she did not, then she destroyed whole worlds beyond doubt.

All of these thoughts crowded into Sunset's mind, and yet… and yet… and yet, none of them mattered.

They could have been one and all of the basest stock imaginable, they could have been detested and despised by everyone outside the contents of their own teams and yet… and yet, they would still have been beloved by Sunset, her teammates, her friends, hers and dear to her and hers to lead and hers to protect.

What was the kingdom of Vale when set against that bond? What were the people of Vale, shadowy and indistinct within her mind, mere numbers, when set against their faces emblazoned in her thoughts and in her heart?

She had promised Lady Nikos that she would fight by Pyrrha's side and protect her, inasmuch as so great a warrior required protection. She had sworn, down in the dark in the face of Salem's visions, that she would protect them not only from their enemies but from their nobler natures, their hearts so heroic that they would lead them all to early graves.

She had sworn to do whatever it took to bring everyone home safe.

Professor Ozpin had told her she would have to sacrifice one, or she would lose all. She had refused to acknowledge it then, and though she had spoken with more arrogance than wisdom, still she refused. She would not sacrifice one for all, nor all for kingdom.

She did not love the kingdom of Vale. She did not hate it, she had no personal cause to wish it ill, she was not without some little feeling for a few of those who lived within it but she did not love it. She loved them, behind her on this train, them she loved without condition.

Them she loved more than the world itself.

Whatever it takes.

XxXxX​

Cinder watched Sunset, still and silent, her expression giving no sign of what she intended.

She frowned. Had she misjudged? Had she been wrong? Had Sunset been someone fundamentally different all this time?

Her thumb began to move towards the trigger.

XxXxX​

Perhaps I love not wisely but too well, but so be it! Though it be madness, let love guide my hand!

Sunset reached out, her hand briefly glowing green as telekinesis summoned the trigger into her palm.

Her fingers closed around the wand.

She pressed down upon the trigger and rolled the dice for Vale.

Whatever it takes.

The explosion shook the tunnel, the sound of it echoing up through the dark hole, momentarily drowning out even the roaring of the grimm behind them. Fire like a yellow flower blossomed briefly in the monitors in front of her, displaying what could be seen in front of the train, and then winked out again.

Apart from that, nothing changed. It might have seemed as though nothing had happened.

And yet, something had happened. Destiny had happened. Sunset… Sunset had defined herself.

Whatever it takes.

Celestia forgive me.

"Congratulations, Sunset," Cinder said. "You've proved yourself a survivor, just like I knew you would."

Sunset bowed her head. "I did what I had to do."

"You did," Cindeer agreed. "But somehow, I wouldn't expect Ruby to agree with you."

Sunset closed her eyes for a moment. "She can hate me if she wants; she'll be alive."

"But why should you bear hatred?" Cinder asked. "Why should you endure censure, judgement, hatred from the likes of Ruby Rose? You did the right thing!"

"I don't-"

"Be honest, Sunset; if you didn't feel the same way, you wouldn't have done it," Cinder said. "You feel it too, don't you? Why should you give your life for a host of rude mechanicals and unlearned labouringmen, why should your life be held cheaper than those of the multitudes as numerous as ants? You don't belong here, Sunset, not with these huntsmen so self-righteous, not with these nagging scolds who hold that what you are is wrong, who demand that you debase yourself and mutilate your noble spirit to fit yourself into their boxes. You don't belong with them, Sunset; they don't deserve you. You belong with me, here, where I won't-"

BANG!

The gunshot startled Sunset so much that she jumped as the speaker set in the ceiling exploded in a shower of sparks and metal. Sunset turned to see Rainbow Dash, a thunderous look upon her face, stride into the cabin, her Wings of Harmony folding up behind her as she aimed one of her submachine guns at each speaker and camera in turn and, each with a single precision shot, destroyed them all. The bangs seemed as loud as the explosion of the mine in this enclosed space until Cinder's every eye and tongue in this place was blinded and plucked out.

Only then, as Rainbow holstered her weapon, did she look at Sunset.

Sunset swallowed. "Rainbow Dash, I…" Her words fell away. She said nothing further. What could she say? What could she offer to defend herself? She cared more for those on the train than those without. All else was… rationalisation, justification, excuse. All else was… scarcely worth saying.

Silently, Rainbow Dash advanced upon her, bore down upon her, cast a shadow over her.

Sunset felt her whole body tremble.

Rainbow said not a word as she reached out and plucked the trigger from Sunset's unresisting hand.

And Rainbow was still as silent as the grave as she turned away, strode almost to the door, and tossed the trigger out of it and into the darkness of the tunnel.

Sunset blinked in amazement. "Rainbow Dash?" she murmured.

"If time unwound, and you were put in the same position again, you'd do that again, wouldn't you?" Rainbow asked, in a voice surprisingly soft and free of condemnation.

"And yet, I'm not sure I have it in me to do anything else," Sunset replied.

Rainbow Dash paused for a moment. A smile that seemed almost improper at this time and in this place, fleeted across her face. "Because in this world that would rather ignore us, we're so blessed as to find people that can see us."

Sunset's brow furrowed. "It sounded better when I said it," she muttered. "But… yes. You can judge me if you want-"

"No," Rainbow cut her off. "I won't."

Sunset stared at her amazedly. "You won't?"

"No," Rainbow repeated. "Because… because it wasn't my choice to make. And although… although I hope I wouldn't have done what you just did… I can't say for sure that I wouldn't."

Sunset didn't know what to say; she had no idea how to respond. Nothing that she could say seemed adequate, let alone appropriate. So instead, she asked the only question that mattered now. "Can Atlas stop them?"

"Yes," Rainbow replied. "Absolutely."

Sunset had no idea if Rainbow was right, or if she even believed it herself. But Sunset hoped, she very much hoped, that Rainbow was right.

Because she had thrown the dice, and she would do it again.

Whatever it takes.

Celestia, forgive me.