Chapter Text
Jaune’s last thought as he steps through the portal that he and the rest of his friends hope will take them to Vacuo is, ‘man, it would really suck if this didn’t take us to Vacuo.’
He’s pretty sure that, in playwright speak, that’s called dramatic irony.
There’s a sensation, then, as he enters into whatever liminal space is beyond the portal, as if his body is being ripped apart, and recombobulated, and then ripped apart again, only to be spat out, unceremoniously, onto the cold floor of a dingy supply closet.
Jaune lands on his front, slamming against the concrete and being quite winded by the whole affair. He has to take a second to both recover, and get his bearings, because as much as he’s a Huntsman – and forty-years-old, despite Alyx reverting him to his younger, twenty-or-so-year-old body – he’d really been expecting to walk out onto the dunes of Vacuo.
That has, evidently, not happened.
Jaune sits up, shaking his head as he tries to get the horrid ache that’s taken up residence there all of a sudden out.
“Ruby?” He calls out as he stands, and opens up the door to the supply closet. “Weiss? Blake? Yang?”
There’s no response. Nothing at all.
Immediately, Jaune feels something, like a coiling snake burrowing its way through his gut. He does his best to clamp down on the feeling, even as he strains to hear anything over the heating unit, making a low rumbling noise.
It feels odd for there to be a heating unit in Vacuo, but Jaune does his best not to think about that as he steps out from his position, draws the still-broken Crocea Mors, dons the rusted shield, and walks into whatever building he’s ended up in.
It’s an upper-class establishment. That much is clear from Jaune’s quick perusing. After a few seconds walking, he gets the chance to look out of the back halls, and instead peer out at the main foyer.
It’s late in the evening. Jaune catalogues that immediately. He can see darkness out of the front windows, and the streets outside are barren of people. It’s… odd. He’s always heard that Vacuo has a fairly active nightlife, with people from all walks of life out and about well past sundown.
This, honestly, reminds him more of Atlas.
The cold had been the thing to keep people inside. Especially in Mantle, the heaters that kept the city from freezing turned off during the evening so as to conserve power during the last few months Jaune and the others had been there. Thusly, it had almost had the effect of a city-wide curfew, albeit an unofficial one.
That niggling doubt – that this reminds him more of Atlas than Vacuo – stands out amongst the rest of his thoughts, even as he makes to walk out, exit out onto the street, and see if he can’t recognize some landmarks.
Except, just when he’s about to do that…
He hears the sound of weapons meeting.
It’s something almost instinctual at this point. Jaune knows the sound of steel on steel. Would recognize it just about anywhere. He moves towards it, the half-blade of Crocea Mors spinning to a reverse grip in his hand, wielded almost like a dagger; a slightly more effective usage of the neutered length.
He hears voices, but they’re distant, faint. He hears a loud crash, like someone’s been thrown into a wall, and his steps speed up. He’s closing in on the battle, on whatever it is that’s happening.
He’s close, so very close…
There’s a door, shut. He tries to turn the knob, but it’s locked.
He can hear the sounds of combat stopping abruptly, which is the opposite of a good sign. He takes a step back, channels aura into his legs and shoulder, and charges the door with all his strength.
He crashes into the room, and tries to analyze the situation as quickly as he can.
That’s a bit hard to do rationally, however, given he’s just stumbled onto a murder scene.
There are three bodies, scattered about the room. Two are younger girls, who can’t be any older than fifteen. Another is an older woman, probably thirty or so years of age. She’s staring up at the sky, unblinking. It looks like her throat has been collapsed, judging by the indentation, and bruises.
And then there are two living figures. One is a young girl, on the ground beneath the other.
That other is a huntsman.
And he is about to die.
Jaune doesn’t know him. He catalogues that immediately. He gets the vague sense he might know the girl from somewhere, but she’s younger than his body by at least five or six years, maybe more. She could be anywhere from twelve to fourteen.
What matters, though, is that the Huntsman – a man with black, graying hair, holding twin maces – currently has two swords running straight through his torso, sticking out of his back.
He’s got moments.
Jaune’s moving forward, just as the girl yanks the swords out of him, and sends the Huntsman toppling to the floor.
There’s no resistance in his legs, which is not at all a good sign. Jaune’s there the moment he hits the ground, channeling his semblance, but he’s worried that he’s not going to be fast enough.
“What happened!?” He demands of the young girl, who he feels is probably not the aggressor in this situation.
She wouldn’t have been able to kill three people, and then defeat a Huntsman all on her own. No, more likely than not, she’d barely managed to fend off a rogue Huntsman herself.
He can see it in her eyes; the crazed, almost delirious look of a cornered animal. Ready to strike out against anything that might–
The girl swings at him, and Jaune directs enough aura to his face to tank the blow without having to stop channeling his semblance on the man below.
He might have poured a bit too much in, however, for as the girl’s sword connects with his face, it shatters, and sends shards scattering about the room.
The look of absolute shock on her face would be funny in almost any other scenario.
“It’s okay.” He tells her, trying to calm her down from fight or flight. She’s likely experiencing a trauma response, interpreting anyone or anything around her as a potential threat. “I’m not going to hurt you, but I need you to tell me what’s going on. Did this man attack you, or those women over there?”
There’s a moment, then, where the girl he’s looking up at seems… very familiar. He can almost make the connection, almost come to a conclusion, but before he can, the girl in front of him has let her blades – the one whole blade, and the other, just a handle with a small bit of metal still attached – slide out of her hands, and impact against the ground beneath her.
“I-I…” Her breath comes out shaky, horribly so. “I didn’t… I didn’t…”
“It’s okay,” He wants to assure her physically, offer some calming, soothing balm. “It’s going to be okay. I know this is probably terrifying for you, but please, can you tell me what happened?”
He can’t. He can’t offer that balm to her. He has to keep the man below him alive. Just in case something else is going on. Right now, he’s working off of incomplete information. If he keeps this man alive, he might be able to get answers from him.
He’s not going to fully heal him; not and risk him having the energy to start up some crazed killing spree again, but he can get him to barely alive, and keep him there.
Idly, he stops channeling his semblance in one hand, reaches down towards his scroll, and offers it out to the girl.
“Do you know how to call emergency services?” He asks her.
Her face pales. Jaune doesn’t know what to make of that.
“I-I… I don’t…” He breaths come out more as gasps, and she takes a step back, until she’s flush with the wall.
Jaune retracts his hand, shakes his head, and dials the number himself.
Usually, they pick up pretty quickly.
Except nothing happens. Nothing at all.
“…What?”
He looks down at his scroll, and…
‘This device is out of service range.’
That…
It makes some sense. Some. If Jaune’s in Vale – which would be the opposite of a good thing – then the CCT being destroyed by Cinder’s attack would be a pretty decent culprit for why he can’t contact anyone. It would also explain the absence of anyone in the streets, given that from what he’s heard, civilians have all but abandoned the city.
The problem with that, however, is that doesn’t explain why there had been so many people here, in this building, including ostensibly four civilians themselves.
He shakes his head, deciding to think about calling emergency services at a later date. He pockets his scroll, and finishes channeling just enough aura into the man beneath him that he hears his breaths begin to steady out.
He stops there, not wanting to give him anymore strength than that. He’s confident he could beat him, given he has no weapons – Jaune kicks both of his maces into the opposite corner of the room, just for good measure – and he’s got barely enough aura to survive the wounds he’s been inflicted with, but hey, better to play it safe.
With that, he stands, brushes the sweat off his brow, and turns back towards the girl.
She’s not calmed down. Not remotely. If anything, she seems to have grown even more panicked, which…
It’s sad, but it makes sense. The initial shock and adrenaline have begun to wear off, and now, she’s being faced with what happened, and having to rationalize it.
The people over there, those three women, could have very well been close with her. Perhaps family.
Jaune tries to do his best Yang impression, kneeling down in front of the girl and smiling supportively up at her. He… he still needs to know what’s happened. Needs to get the full picture.
He’ll have to ask her, despite how much such with likely hurt her.
“Please,” He makes his voice soft, and quiet, as much as he can. “What happened?”
The girl’s face scrunches up, like she’s going to cry more, but instead, she shakes her head, and tells him, “I didn’t… I didn’t mean to but I… I was training here, training so that I could get away, a-and she leapt at me, I didn’t mean it, but they would have taken it, my sword, and if they did, I’d… they’d have punished me, and hurt me, and I didn’t want to be hurt anymore, so I swung, and… and I didn’t mean to, I didn’t, but then Mindy, she was screaming, and Madame shocked me, and it hurt so bad, and I… I just reacted, I just wanted to stop the screaming, and the pain, and–”
“Hey, hey,” He takes her by the shoulders, trying to ground her as best he can. She’s rambling on desperately. “You’re okay. No one’s going to hurt you. I promise.”
“I-I…” She’s sobbing almost uncontrollably. Big, fat tears are spilling down her face. “What have I done, what have I done, what have I done, what–”
Jaune’s head is spinning. If what this girl is saying is true, then she…
…It’s not impossible. If the three dead women had been civilians, and this girl a Huntress in training… it wouldn’t have even been terribly difficult for her to kill them.
But all of this, it… it just doesn’t add up.
Jaune keys in, then, to the fact that the girl is wearing some kind of necklace. It seems… tight. Oddly tight, for something that, by all accounts, appears decorative.
Jaune’s protective instincts, only strengthened by his time in the Ever After, flare.
“That necklace…” He speaks out, and the instant he does, the girl seems to realize she’s still wearing it.
She clenches her teeth, and, with a raging fervor, madly grasps at the article, and tears it off of her neck. Jaune’s eyes widen as he sees scar tissue beneath it, in an almost perfect mirror of the necklaces’ dimensions.
Oh.
That…
“Who did that to you?” He asks, a righteous anger rising in his breast. “Was it him, did he–”
“N-No, the…” She bites down on her bottom lip, tears not having stopped spilling from her eyes. “She did, the Madame,” she’s pointing towards the adult woman’s corpse. “She… she adopted me, and I was so happy to get out of… but she… she put that thing around my neck, and it hurts so bad… I…”
Things are getting a lot more complicated all of a sudden. The dead woman had been abusing this girl? Torturing her with a shock collar?
“Wait, wait. Please. I know this is hard for you, but I need you to give me a clearer picture here. What happened? Why did–”
“She… killed them.”
It’s a new voice, and one that has the girl he’s trying to calm once again going into a frenzy. She backs away, further, as if she’s trying to meld with the wall behind her.
Jaune turns, and sees the Huntsman from earlier barely pushing himself up into a sitting position. It looks rather painful, and Jaune thinks about trying to heal him further, but… no. Seeing someone hurt hurts him as well, but it’s better than the man trying to continue whatever fight had been happening before.
Right now, he’s confident he can keep both of them from hurting the other.
“What do you mean?” Jaune asks, trying to ignore the girl whimpering behind him.
“She killed the Madame; the owner of this establishment, and her daughters.” The Huntsman explains.
“I didn’t mean to!” The girl screams, her voice cracking, her eyes wide, and panicked. “I didn’t mean to! Please! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”
Jaune feels a knot forming in his throat. Damnit, why couldn’t things ever be easy?
“She said they were torturing her.” Jaune tells the man, gauging his reaction. “That she was adopted by them, and…”
Jaune turns back towards the girl. “What did they make you do?”
“I…” the girl’s face contorts; unhappy memories, Jaune guesses. “C-Clean the floors, and the bedrooms, and greet customers, take them to where they need to go. W-Wait on them, if they needed it. Wash the sheets, and be there when called. I-If I wasn’t, I was shocked. I… I got shocked a lot, even when I didn’t do anything wrong, and Rhodes…”
The man, the Huntsman, his expression dims. Jaune gathers this must be Rhodes, then.
“He was trying to help me, to get me out of here. But he… he attacked me!”
Jaune’s expression shifts. Had this happened tonight, then? Had Rhodes come in to bust her out, and things had gone wrong?
That still doesn’t explain why they’d seemingly fought until this girl had all but killed him, though.
“Hold on,” Jaune shakes his head. Everyone is giving him half-truths. He wants to hear the candid reality of the matter. Although at this point, that’s beginning to seem like a bit of a pipe dream. “You saw that she was being abused, then? Is that why you offered to help?”
“I did.” Rhodes notes. “I first met her a few years ago–”
“Wait, years!?” Jaune interjects, unable to rectify that. “You saw she was being abused recently, then?”
Rhodes’ expression grows somewhat more defiant. “I saw that she was being abused all the way back then, but there was nothing I could do, other than try and train her to leave when she was properly of age–”
“Nothing you could–” Jaune finds his teeth grinding together. “She was a child! You saw a child being abused and you did nothing!?”
“She was the Madame’s legal ward, to try and take her away would’ve been against the law!”
The law. Jaune almost wants to spit. Yes, because that’s the be-all end-all of ‘good’.
He turns away from the man, silently fuming, and looks over at the girl yet again. She’s cowering, fearful.
“She killed people!” Rhodes yells at him. “She has to…” He lets out a grunt of pain, then, likely from trying to move when the wounds in his abdomen haven’t fully healed. “She has to answer for her crimes!”
Jaune hears it. He really does.
He even knows that he should perhaps listen to him.
But…
He looks back into her eyes. Into those desperate, terrified eyes.
And he can’t see anything but a little girl, bereft of anything in the entire world. A little girl, who made a horrible mistake, yes, but one who hadn’t meant to. One who’d been pushed to the brink by abuse for years, and had no one truly step in and try and help her.
He’s unwilling to be the same as the man beneath him, Rhodes.
“Do you want to leave here?” He asks her.
Her eyes are as wide as saucers, and it takes her a moment to really process what he’s said, but eventually, she nods emphatically. “Y-Yes!”
He nods his head. “Can you walk?”
“I can!”
“Then come on. We’re going.” He tells her, reaching down and taking up the non-broken blade that the girl had been using, and strapping it to his belt. He’s tempted to do the same with the man’s maces, but he doesn’t know the weapons well, and for all he knows, Rhodes might have some sort of tracking device for finding them installed within.
Weiss’ Myrtenaster had held such a device. Jaune’s not willing to take the chance this man doesn’t have the same.
Rhodes, for his part, seems furious.
“You… you’re breaking the law! If you leave with her, you’re abetting a criminal!”
Maybe he is breaking the law. But he’d seen firsthand what blind adherence to the law could do to people, had watched it tear apart Atlas, and Mantle, and the Ace-Ops. Had watched good people adhere to a broken system as that place tore itself asunder.
He won’t make the same mistakes.
“Maybe.” He answers the man. “But sometimes the law protects the oppressor, instead of the oppressed. Sometimes we must do what’s right, regardless of what the ‘law’ states is correct.”
“She killed them! Murdered them in cold blood! Do you really think helping her is right!?”
“Did you see it happen?”
He hadn’t. It’s obvious he hadn’t, from the way he freezes up.
Right now, it’s the girl’s word against… well, nothing at all.
And she says she hadn’t meant to. Says she’d made a mistake, had cried in front of him, desperately begged.
He’ll take her word.
It’s a risk, he knows that. But he can’t leave her to be carted away to prison. Not when she’s been a slave for, seemingly, years, tortured day in and day out.
She deserves a chance to be free.
He leads the girl out of the building, and closes the door behind Rhodes, even as he hears the man beginning to call emergency services himself. Jaune wants to laugh, and tell him he’s not going to connect, given Jaune’s scroll hadn’t been able to, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he and the girl make their way outside of the foyer of whatever hotel they’re in – on the way out, Jaune spots a ‘We do not serve Faunus’ sign, and can’t help but feel like that had been made illegal years ago – and out onto the street.
The thing that hits Jaune immediately is the cold. He’s shivering barely five steps out the door, and when he turns around, he notes the fact that the girl behind him is in a thin, white cotton outfit.
It’s doing a lot less than Jaune’s old Ever After outfit, atop which he has his armor.
He sighs, even as he walks over to her, and uses his semblance on her. He’s somewhat surprised to feel an aura course against his own. It’s… strong. Almost shockingly so, for so young a girl.
“There, does that help?”
The girl nods a bit sheepishly.
“Alright, we’re going to find somewhere to buy warmer clothes for the both of us. Do you know anywhere around here like that?”
He’s not surprised when she shakes her head, but it does cause him to let out a beleaguered sigh.
He really hadn’t signed up for watching over another young girl a decade after the last children he’d been looking after had drugged him, and left him to die in the Ever After.
Still…
He feels like it’s the right thing to do. And in the end, isn’t that what matters?
…Jaune thinks of Alyx and Lewis; one of whom he’d failed to save. He thinks of the Paper Pleasers; of his inability to help them, of his desperate struggle to protect them, even against their own wishes…
And he thinks that this might not be so selfless a goal at all.
He looks around, though, and finds his eyes narrowing. This place… it’s odd, but it feels somewhat familiar. Like he’s been here before.
Honestly, it feels like Atlas.
Except that can’t be. Atlas had, the last time he’d seen it, been set to sink into Mantle. It wouldn’t have survived such a thing. He knows it. They’d ran projections with some help from Whitley and Weiss that had showed it wouldn’t.
So, this can’t be Atlas…
Right?
Well, one way to find out, he supposes.
“Where are we, exactly?”
The girl behind him hesitates. “I-I… I don’t know the name of the street… I’m sorry…”
“That’s fine,” He rushes to assure her. “Do you know what Kingdom this is?”
She doesn’t seem to know how to respond to that. “U-Uhm… is this… a trick question?”
“No, I’m being genuine.”
“Okay… this is Atlas.”
Jaune feels his blood run cold; colder than it already had been.
“That… how is that…” He whispers, before clamping down on his suspicions. Now isn’t the time. He can question this girl more when… well, when they’re both warm, and somewhere safe.
The real problem, however, is the fact that Jaune can hear sirens on the horizon.
His eyes widen, even as the girl flinches, and looks ready to sprint full stop in the other direction.
He wants to say it’s not possible. He’d gotten no reception in that building, and Rhodes certainly couldn’t have been able to, either. Especially if they’re in Atlas, or a ruin of it. There shouldn’t be a signal to catch, given the CCT should have been destroyed along with the rest of the place.
And yet, the sirens only grow louder.
“W-What do we do!?” She asks him.
Jaune wants to protest to the fact that the universe keeps throwing him curveballs, but really, he can’t afford to at the moment.
“Follow me,” he tells her, and then he runs.
They run for a while, long enough that the sirens begin to dissipate into the background, and the adrenaline pumping through Jaune does the same. By the time they stop, Jaune is somewhat winded, but the girl he’s travelling with is downright exhausted. Honestly, he should’ve stopped them sooner, seeing how she’s on her hands and knees, retching as she tries to catch her breath.
“Sorry about that.” He tells her, shaking his head. “But for now, we should be away from them.”
She nods her head, recovering enough to bring herself up against a nearby wall, and slide down it.
…He realizes in that moment that, aside from the fact that she’s been abused, Jaune knows almost nothing about the girl beneath him.
“So,” He clears his throat as he sits down next to her, the two of them alone in an alley off of a side street. “What’s your name, kiddo?”
It’s very clear immediately that the girl takes offense to the term ‘kiddo’, but also that she is too terrified of possible retribution to say anything about it. Jaune makes a mental note not to call her that again.
“C-Cinder.” She says, and Jaune’s heart nearly stops.
“My name is Cinder.”
And suddenly…
Suddenly it all clicks together.
The odd sense of recognition he’d had when he’d first seen the girl. His scroll not getting signal, despite Rhodes’ own being able to manage without trouble. Atlas somehow standing after everything that had happened.
“Not where…
When you are needed.”
Jaune thinks he understands, now, just what the Blacksmith had meant.
He’s been sent back in time.
And by how young the Cinder beside him is, no older than fourteen, and possibly younger than that…
“Oh.” He mutters aloud.
“Well, that’s not good.”
/
The thing that keys Blake into the fact that she’s not in Vacuo is the cold.
It’s a frigid, biting chill, the kind that seeps into one’s bones and eats away at their energy. Blake’s outfit had been designed for the Atlas cold, and yet, even so, this is colder than she’s ever experienced before.
Not Vacuo, then.
Perhaps, she thinks in that instant, they’d been dropped back where they’d been before? Perhaps they lurk within the fallen Atlas, amongst the death and decay, and likely, the endless hordes of Grimm?
No. Blake looks up, and her surroundings are…
Familiar.
It is Atlas; or Solitas, perhaps, would be a better way to put it. Atlas is just one small piece of that massive landmass, upon which many facilities like this one had been erected.
Blake hadn’t known, however, that there had been any SDC mining colonies left, especially after what had happened to both Atlas and Mantle. She’d have assumed they’d be entirely cut off from the world, and fade away soon after in the icy tundra.
Perhaps it still will. For all Blake and her allies know, this might be a few hours, or a few days after Atlas had fallen. This colony might not have even received the news yet.
She searches around, briefly, for the others, but she had assumed they would have made some sort of noise – especially her teammates, all of them quite loud – by this point, so when she doesn’t spot them, she is not surprised.
She is perturbed, but not surprised.
She’s tempted to call out to them, especially to Yang, always to Yang, but before then…
Before then, she hears the screaming.
It’s faint. Distant. Likely a hundred meters or so from Blake’s position. They are the screams of a woman. Agonized.
She’s crying out for someone, or something, to stop.
Blake’s moving before her mind catches up.
She knows these bases. All of them built off of a single template. She knows the winding halls, the complicated routes one needs to take. She’s broken into many in her time, liberated them from both the inside and out.
Or, well, they’d called it liberation back then. Blake still thinks it had been the right thing to do, despite how complicated she’d eventually figured out life could be.
The screams are growing louder. Blake’s legs carry her faster, farther, more quickly. She has heard screams like these before. From her comrades in the White Fang, when they lost people, when they had to cradle their dead against them and weep. From civilians, from the few Huntsman missions they’d gotten to actually do in Atlas, when they’d arrived too late to save someone.
The screams of someone having lost something irreplaceable, and desperately begging for it back.
Blake pushes open a door to the main courtyard. She’s atop one of the walls that surround the sunken-in platform in the center. Along the walls with Blake are many figures, all of them faunus. Their eyes are dark, but they burn with a cold hate.
Even so, they are not moving. They are sat, passive, unwilling to act.
Blake has seen that expression so many times. It never quite fails to make her sick.
Finally, she focuses on the source of the commotion, and when she does, she sees–
A woman – a mother, so very young to be such – trying to break free from the grasp of two men in white uniforms. A young boy, being held by another pair of guards, and a third, more finely dressed man. His is an officer’s uniform, and one that Blake would know anywhere. The old SDC chief regalia.
And in his hand is a branding iron.
The young boy beneath him, who can’t be much older than ten or eleven, cowering, with tears in his eyes, begs. He begs, and the men holding him in place sneer.
They only hold onto him harder as the chief steps forward, and rears back to use the iron upon him.
Blake acknowledges, in some far-off corner of her mind, that she should perhaps think about this. That she should… she’s not sure. Weigh the consequences of her actions before committing to them?
She does not do this. Mostly because she has never been one to allow injustices to simply happen in front of her.
Gambol Shroud arcs upwards as she erases the distance, and with a single cut, she carves the heated iron of the brand in twain.
There’s no noise, no movement, nothing at all for a good second after that. It’s a long enough pause that the other piece of the iron, launched up in the air, has time to strike the ground, metal on metal. It gives off a dull ‘clang’.
Then the second hand ticks forward, and all hell breaks loose.
She’s moving before the guards holding the boy can truly process what’s happened. She draws Gambol Shroud up, turns it towards the blunt end, and smashes it into both of their faces.
They crumple to the ground, lacking any aura with which to protect themselves. That, or they hadn’t managed to get it up in time.
Blake doesn’t particularly care.
The chief draws a weapon; a small, low caliber Dust-pistol. Blake bends to the side, allowing the bullet to pass through where she’d been just moments prior, and then blitzes forward. The man swears, even as Blake takes him by the wrist, snaps the bones within it – oops, he’d had no aura, how silly of her – and then kicks him far harder than she’d likely needed to in the solar plexus.
He crumples to the ground, wheezing in shock and agony.
The guards holding the young woman – gods, she can’t be any older than twenty-five, and her son is at least ten – seem primed to try and use their hostage against Blake, but she’s faster. She doesn’t bother attempting to close the distance, instead drawing up Gambol, and, with deadly precision, firing rounds into both of their shoulders.
They reel back in pain, but both of them have had the time to mentally prepare themselves, and so both had their aura’s up. Still, it’s enough to let the young woman herself get free. She runs over to her son, takes him in her arms, and gets the both of them out of the way.
Blake smiles.
Smart girl.
Her expression dims back to one of icy determination in the next instant of time.
Both guards draw weapons, this time far deadlier than their chief had. Dust-SMG’s, used for culling Grimm as large as Beowolves from a safe distance. They’re powerful enough to rip through the aura of even a trained Huntsman or Huntress in seconds.
That isn’t really an issue for Blake, however, as these people know nothing about her.
They do not know her semblance, and so fall for the easiest trick in the book. Blake sets up a clone just as she dashes into shadow, and as the two unload on the clone, she gets behind them.
She slams their heads together with more force than had been perhaps necessary, and the two are unconscious mere seconds later, hitting the floor like sacks of grain.
All of that had taken Blake, perhaps, fifteen seconds.
She’s not even winded.
She can both hear and see just how shocked the Faunus on the railings above them are, who’d been furiously watching the attempted branding of that boy before. It’s clear many had wanted to do what Blake had, but none had held the skill.
A common practice, of course, by those in the SDC. This far out from civilization, there are no laws to protect oneself. The strong rule, and the weak suffer for it.
The original impetus behind the White Fang had been to stop such behavior.
Still, she sighs, shakes her head, and turns back towards the woman and her son.
“Are there any other guards in this colony?”
The woman nods her head. “T-There are seven more, I think? They’re below, in the mines. I don’t know, I don’t really–”
Blake nods her head, accepting that easily enough. These people won’t be safe until they’re dealt with, and anyone who’d worked with people like the ones that had just held a boy down to brand him…
They’ve made their beds.
Blake is just here to make sure they lie in them.
“Take your son up onto the upper platforms, and stay quiet. I’ll deal with them.”
Before the woman can argue against her, Blake is moving.
She heads into the bowels of the SDC compound, into the lower reaches, where the miners are kept, where they are often mistreated, taken advantage of; because those out of sight are also out of mind.
It makes Blake’s blood boil. This entire experience, in just a few minutes, already has that old righteous lividity churning to the surface. That same lividity that had drove her away from her parent’s passive, motionless White Fang, and towards Sienna and Adam’s more active variant.
She finds almost exactly what she’d expected to. Miners being forced to work in unsafe conditions, breathe in toxic fumes without proper equipment, and just in general work far beyond what is considered safe.
Her eyes narrow as she hears one of the SDC personnel shout, “Keep working, ingrates! You’re not being paid to slack off!”
One of the workers, a young man no older than twenty, collapses, and instantly, two guards are descending the metal steps towards him, their boots clanking on the ground.
Blake doesn’t know exactly what will happen when they reach the man.
No one ever will, though.
She wraps Gambol’s ribbon on a beam above her, jumps backwards, and uses the momentum generated by the return swing to fling herself upwards. The two guards have just enough time to see her coming, raise their weapons, and shout, before they’re slammed into the metal steps beneath them, headfirst.
Five.
She hears shouting, and then the telltale sound of a Dust-rifle sounding off just to her left.
It’s missed her, which is good. Her Aura’s up, so it would’ve only taken some of it away, but Blake would really rather lose none. She uses a clone, and takes to the shadows. She hears the exact moment when the clone disappears, and the five remaining guards begin to panic, thinking she’s disappeared.
Technically, to them, she has.
She raises Gambol, and aims at one of the guards. She takes the shot, hitting him in the leg. He screams out in pain, evidently having not had his aura up to block such, and then she disappears again.
Four.
This time, the guards are aware that she’s going to reappear, but then, knowing something’s going to happen and actually being able to do anything about it are much different things.
She comes up behind another guard, and chokes him out without the others noticing.
Three.
She moves like shadow, avoiding their lines of sight. A few of the faunus below, with their superior eyesight, are tracking her, but none of them call out, or try and sucker up to the guards by revealing her.
Silent solidarity.
Blake cracks another across the back of the head, and he hits the floor.
Two.
The last two are back-to-back, searching for her. But Blake is crafty.
She’s hanging from Gambol’s ribbon, hooked directly above them, on one of the mining instruments.
She fires two shots, one to each of their guns.
The two guards are disarmed, and shocked. They look up just in time for Blake to land on one, and then kick the other square in the chest. He buckles, and an uppercut is enough to knock him out cold.
She breaths out, before remembering that, technically, that guy she shot in the leg is probably still conscious. She makes her way over to him, dodges his attempt to shoot at her with a pistol, and knocks him out, too, with an elbow to the back of the head.
And then, finally, it’s quiet.
She takes a breath, then, a deep one. Looking up, she studies the faces looking back at her.
None of them seem to have any idea what to do.
That’s fair, Blake thinks.
“Follow me.” She tells them, and she starts for the surface.
Luckily, they do. As she opens the tunnel that leads back outside, she finds a good twenty or so figures on her tail. She nods, and makes the ascent, content in the knowledge that they’re not staying down there.
As she emerges up top, she earns another round of startled gasps, shocked exclamations.
“How did she…”
“Did she take them all out?”
“All by herself!?”
“Who is she!?”
Blake sighs out, trying to figure out what it is she’s supposed to do in a situation like this. That last part, the actual job of liberating an SDC mining camp, was something she’d done on quite a few occasions. It’s this part, the after, where the White Fang had to then deal with the logistics of relocating a good hundred people, that Blake isn’t quite so good at.
And yet, before she can truly think about that, a figure is approaching her. Blake turns, expecting a guard or some other combatant, but…
Instead, a young woman thrusts herself into Blake’s arms, and wraps her own around her. It’s…
It’s the woman from earlier.
“Y-You saved him, you saved my son!” She says, and she’s crying as she says it, unbelieving that such a miracle had occurred. “Thank you, I don’t… how could I possibly repay you?”
“You don’t need to repay me.” Blake speaks evenly, trying not to feel too awkward about all of this. Accepting praise also hadn’t been her job in the White Fang. She’d normally cleared out the moment the combat had finished. “I wasn’t going to sit around and let something like that happen.”
“Yes, but… who are you? I’ve never seen you before, did you… where did you come from!?”
All of those are good questions. Really, they are. And yet… the longer Blake stares at this woman, the more… familiar she’s beginning to look.
Her hair is long, and a crimson red. Her eyes are a pale blue.
Far more importantly, her Faunus feature is a set of black horns, sticking out of her head. They’re far longer than his had ever been, and yet…
“Before that, may I ask your name?” Blake inquires, far too curious, needing to know.
“My name?” The woman seems genuinely surprised to have been asked. Yet a moment later, she nods her head, and gives just that.
“My name is Evelynn.” She speaks. “Evelynn Taurus. Or… Eve works, as well.”
Blake does her best not to panic, or read too far into things. After all, this could just be a coincidence, or… or it could be that he’d had a long-lost sister, or cousin, that Blake had never had the chance to meet.
And yet, all of that goes out the window in the next moment.
For Evelynn calls her son over, to thank their savior, and when she does, she has him thank Blake.
“You’ll have to forgive him,” she says, chuckling as the boy hides behind his mother. “He’s a tad bit shy.”
“And…” She swallows on nothing, her throat impossibly dry.
“What’s his name?”
Evelynn smiles, not at all knowing the effect her words are about to have on Blake Belladonna.
“His name is Adam.” And Blake’s fists clench at her sides.
“Adam Taurus.”