"Thank you, dear. I'll try to get your request to an admin as fast as I can. Take care, love." The elderly secretary smiled as she waved off the anxious student who had come into her office.

Corra Wynnecroft sighed, setting the student's paper right next to all the other hundred exemption request letters she had received in the past month. Every team was trying to get out of their missions now—each with their different excuses: sickness, family trouble, one team had even attempted to fake the disappearance of one of their members just to escape theirs. Nobody wanted to go face the Faunus, of course. Rumors of their hunters and their power spread around the school like wildfire:

"Did you hear? A bunch of Faunus from their forces completely massacred an entire ship's crew!"
"They tried to send in someone to assassinate the headmaster."
"I heard talk that some of them are working as spies in our own academy!"
"They can talk to Grimm!"
"They can smell your fear!"
"They can see through walls!"
"They eat people!"

As the secretary prepared to return to her work, another knock sounded on her door. With a slightly exasperated but still inviting tone, she called the person over. "Come in!"

A bent, gnarled ghoul hobbled its way angrily through the door, slamming it shut with bloodshot eyes and a broken, seared face. It came up to Wynnecroft's desk and slammed its arms down on it before fixing the woman with an accusatory finger and a rasping voice worked its way out of its broken-toothed, nearly lipless mouth: "What the devil kind of circus are you incompetent buffoons running here, Wynnecroft?!"

"Oh, lord!" the old woman yelped in shock, her hand instinctively reaching underneath her desk for her weapon.

"Oh, criminy, don't give me that: are you a professional or aren't you?!"

Suddenly, the secretary noticed he was holding a cane. There was only one student in the school who carried one around.

"Rekstum?" she questioned, her hand still gripping the handgun underneath her desk.

"Yes it's Rekstum, who else would it be? Now it's my turn to query: what in the Grimm's shadows do you people think you're doing around here?" Fajio's large, red eyes bugged forward out of his burned face like goggles, unfocused and staring liberally through and at everything but the woman in front of him.

The old woman pulled her hand back, regaining her composure. "Young man, please calm down so we may—"

"Calm down she tells me!" Fajio interrupted, throwing up his arms in disbelief. He locked her directly with his glossy eyes and all but growled at her. "I almost went the way of the cafeteria's overcooked meatloaf, I'll calm down once I've been given a damn good reason to have lost most of my outer skin cells."

"Rekstum." Wynnecroft suddenly ordered, her voice uncharacteristically strict. "Sit. Down."

Fajio sighed and then all but collapsed into the chair opposite Wynnecroft's. He rubbed his face tiredly and then winced his hand away, as if it pained him to touch it. He looked at the wall, instead, and coughed lightly. "I'm sure it's not your damned fault, Wynnecroft," he said now, tiredly, "but I'm just … I'm just so angry right now." He waved a hand at his face, at its seared, incongruent flesh. "This kind of thing happens to me often enough, but it could just have easily happened to one of my teammates." He leaned in slowly. "Are you trying to kill me?" he asked.

"Now, now," the head secretary began slowly, "I can understand that you're feeling very distressed about your past mission. If I remember correctly, it was the one dealing with Archer Ines, yes?" she said, quickly reaching into a drawer and pulling out a file. "And you reported the mission as… unsuccessful. Am I getting everything correct?"

Fajio eyed the file she was holding and frowned. Or at least tried to: it came off as a quite unnatural mouth movement. "Evegy must have filed that, I've been down for a while. But that is correct, it was unsuccessful. Does it say why?"

"That, my dear boy, is what I would like to know. There is no reason why you would come here otherwise." Wynnecroft smiled softly. "Unless you are also attempting to flee from the newer missions, of course." she added jokingly.

Fajio did not smile at this attempt at humor, but instead leaned in again and said, very low, "We were attacked by a strike team." One of his eyes had started to water profusely, and was letting tears down the side of his face. His other eye remained red and staring. "They had a stealth flyer."

Wynnecroft frowned, slightly confused by his statement. "A strike team? One of ours? That's not possible, dear, we hadn't sent anyone to that area other than your team," she said. "Do you need some tissue to help with your eyes? Have some, dear." The elderly secretary reached into her drawer again, pulling out a flower-patterned box of facial tissues for the battered huntsman and handing them to him.

Fajio took one tissue after staring at the box for the better part of ten seconds. He patted at the side of his face with it, gingerly. "Either you're just not in the loop of whatever idiot sent that thing out or I'm to believe that between Beacon, the other academies, and the human armies, there was a Faunus flyer this far inland that got in and out without so much as a flare going off." He wiped at his eye a moment and then gave up on it, settling simply for patting at it every now and again to keep it from running.

He coughed again, thinking. This all made very little sense. Fajio didn't consider himself important enough to anyone to warrant assassination, even if there were probably plenty of people that wouldn't mind hearing of him dead. Besides that, the government might be notoriously incompetent, but even it wouldn't have let an enemy flyer come in this far with all the land on high alert. Fajio couldn't make sense of it. Archer wasn't that important. Was he?

"Hm." He patted his eye again. "Wynnecroft, might I get you to send out a message for me?"

"Why of course, my boy. I can surely try my very best—in addition to looking into this supposed 'strike team'." the secretary replied.

"I need you to send word to Agent Angor Rah. He's the same one who was involved in my team's last assignment, the one into Menagerie? Tell him to meet me at the cafe. He should know which one. Tell him it's about my next assignment." He paused a moment. "I take it FEAR's to be deployed?"

"You can see for yourself," Wynnecroft said, motioning towards the file. "Of course, you could apply for exemption, which would most likely come through if your injuries as a team are severe. As for your word with Rah… consider it a favor, my dear. I will let him know now."

Fajio patted his eye again and reached out to the file, opening it. He scanned it briefly and frowned again. Practically every full team that wasn't down with injuries was to be deployed to the front, for whatever damn good it would do. "Exemption," Fajio said. "Plenty of other kids more deserving of exemption than myself are going to go out there and get gutted for a war that doesn't need fought." He closed the file and set it back on the desk, getting up. "The least I can do is play witness to their last moments here." He threw the tissue into the wastebasket and went to the door.

He stopped a moment and said over his shoulder, "I wonder you should have the heart to sentence them so. Good day, Wynnecroft." He left and shut the door lightly behind him.

Back outside, Fajio cast a thoughtful glance at some other student who had approached the door on his exit. The fellow jerked back at seeing his face but Fajio paid him no mind and hobbled past. He supposed it was just another student trying to dodge deployment. Morale throughout the campus had fallen heavily since it had come out that the Faunus had managed to pierce the barricade, against all reasonable odds that would place outnumbered islanders against a force that should have outgunned them significantly. The blame, as far as Fajio could tell, was largely to be placed on gross incompetence and mismanagement by the human strategists: blatant ignorance of the enemy capabilities, underestimation of their skill, and failure to answer their moves on the field in a sufficiently productive manner.

That didn't hold water with most of the students, though. What came to the campus were horror stories of beastmen that could tear a ship open from underneath with nothing but their ingenuity and cunning, and of pilots that could fly tight circles around the hardiest dogfighters the human aerial forces had. Anyone with a level head understood that the Faunus had just been lucky in their opening gambit; that the surprise factor of their diving under to plant mines on the human hulls only worked because the human commanders didn't think anyone was crazy enough to be swimming battle waters filled with torpedos and stray bombs from the aerial forces. As for being outmaneuvered in the air, that was a gross exaggeration and nothing more: it was that Faunus pilots were matching human ones that was the feat in itself and which had blown tales of their ability so far out of proportion.

Fajio checked the time and changed his course for the faculty dorms. He had very little hope anything good would come of this war other than an overdue and long-time-coming expression of rage from the Faunus. That they hated humans with a passion was only becoming more and more evident, and that the humans had more looked down on them as lesser creatures than actively hated them back was telling all the more horribly. Fajio grimaced as the thought passed over him: humans would very likely be more rather than less inclined to shun the Faunus after this. If it went long enough to kill a lot of people it would only exacerbate things all over the world.

He saw a pair of students go walking by recoil from his face, and he forced himself to smooth it out into something less monstrous. His faceplant into the burning tree out in the woods had burned him deep. His face might have been protected by his mask, but Dusted fire burns uncommonly hot, and it had been tantamount in the end to having his head thrust into a furnace. What he hated most of all though was that Alex had kept his mask and shackles, telling him he had to leave his face and hands open to the air with their topicals on. Fajio privately wondered why SAWW wasn't deployed yet, but he supposed they may well be on policing duty. He wondered how the citizenry was responding to these grisly horror stories and to their children being shipped off to find their own additions to that lexicon.

Fajio ran into Professor Podegard on his way to the faculty dorms. Podegard, who had seen Fajio maskless before, did not balk at his approach. "The world must be preparing to burn," he said dryly as he stopped to talk. "I can think of few other reasons you'd be walking around without your mask."

"Be careful making predictions like that," Fajio said, drumming his fingers on his cane. "Heavens forbid you end up being right."

The tall man eyed him through his huge glasses. "You're not the sort to stop and say hello. What can I help you with? If you're looking to be put on Grimm duty, I'm afraid I've already assigned as many teams as I could to that to get them out of deployment."

Fajio waved his hand dismissively, the movement unusually quick and frantic with the hand free from the weight of its shackle. "Nothing of the sort. Do you know if Mr. Ines is in?"

Podegard raised an eyebrow. Fajio knew he wasn't the most social of the faculty and didn't know too many other faculty members, and Podegard knew Fajio knew that. "The engineer?"

"Yes. Archer Ines's father?"

"Ah!" Podegard at least recognized Archer's name. "Yes, I believe he should be in his office. What would you need to see him about?" He narrowed his eyes and frowned: a particularly hawkish expression. "You're not going to ask him to show you how to sabotage the hangar are you?"

Fajio supposed he should take it as a compliment that Podegard would accuse him of doing something so impactful. "No, no. FEAR was supposed to recover Archer, but we couldn't do it. I feel like a report is due him."

Podegard shook his head. "You and your etiquette." He walked past Fajio, back on his path to wherever he had been going. "Lot of good that does a huntsman," he said over his shoulder.

Fajio sneered at the tall professor's back, thumping his cane indignantly. "Like he has any room to talk of being a proper huntsman," he muttered to himself. Still, as much of an ass hole as Podegard tended to be, he had actively helped some of the teams avoid deployment. Fajio wondered at what he meant by it.

Fajio changed his route to carry him to the workshop buildings, the smithy and crafts places, where he supposed Mr. Ines's office ought to be. Sure enough, and with only a brief moment of asking a horrified girl about the direction, he brought his ghoulish figure to a closed door, labeled with set letters at its side: "Mr. Dad Ines, Engineering."

Fajio shook his head at the name: it always bugged him. He had met a Dad once before, years ago, and it wasn't an unheard of name, but given the direction language had taken it had become quite the strange name to have. He wondered darkly how damning it would be for someone named Dad to end up being sterile, or outliving his children. He was brought back to the issue at hand: Archer dying now was a possibility, and Ines would indeed end up being just such a case. He lifted his hand and rapped at the door a few times, sharply.

"Come on in," the voice said from the other side. Dad was filing through student papers like any other day, his mind entirely at ease. He didn't have the look of a worried parent, and his demeanor was even somewhat relaxed.

Fajio entered and closed the door behind him, propping himself on his cane with both hands. "Good day, Mr. Ines. How are things?"

Dad looked up and raised in eyebrow, "Please, take a Capri Sun from the mini fridge and sit down." He said politely, "I'm sure things for me are certainly better than whatever happened to you."

Fajio lowered himself into the chair opposite Ines and laughed weakly at the understatement of his face's current state. "Probably. I'll have to pass on the drink, I'll probably trickle it all over the place anyway. Can't really feel my lips." He sat back in his chair and placed his cane in his lap, fixing his eyes on its head as he sighed. "I'm afraid my team was unable to recover your son, sir."

"Is that all?" he asked, continuing his work. His face showed no signs of displeasure and he kept his normal signature smile, "Don't worry about that."

Fajio raised his brow but said nothing more. Either that was a desperate attempt to maintain calm in the face of dreaded news or Dad and Archer didn't have the best of relationships. In any case it was none of Fajio's business. Still, he wondered about it. "He would probably have just been deployed anyway if we'd managed to bring him in, so I suppose you could take comfort in that."

Dad put his pen down and looked at the disfigured boy. "How did you get those burns?"

Fajio eyed the man sidelong. "The old ones or the new ones?"

"The new ones," he replied, leaning back in his chair. "Was that related to Archer?"

"Yes and no," Fajio said. "We were intercepted. One thing led to another and I ended up facedown on a log covered in Dusted fire." He smiled, or tried to. "That boy of yours has a knack for messing me up everytime I see him."

"I see," Dad replied, pulling his checkbook out and writing a sum on it. "I'd prefer you not refer to Archer as my boy any longer. After his actions three months ago, he has dragged my name through the dirt by quite a lot." He tore the check out and pushed it across the table to the boy in front of him: a hundred grand written on it as Dad leaned back. "I do hope this covers your medical costs, and makes up for some of the damages I'm sure he's caused."

Fajio snorted at the ludicrous check before he could quite contain himself and found he had to stand up and walk away for a moment. He wasn't sure if he should be amused or offended at such a gesture, and in any case he didn't trust himself to master his voice immediately. He faced the door and thumped his cane absently before speaking with his back to Dad. "The dynamics of the Ines family are none of my business, and with some luck I may yet be able to continue in that fashion." He coughed quietly and licked his lips, not turning to face the man at the desk and his ludicrous check. "Where my humble opinion may yet be heard, however, I would like to say that a reputation can better stand a rogue son than a hoarding of such sums whilst a war is being fought."

"You're young, so I don't fault you for being so small-minded, but wars allow people in my field to thrive." He leaned forward, "Take the check, there's no bribery or dark intentions here, I genuinely do want you and your team to be compensated."

Fajio had to swallow his first reaction to this response, and had to remind himself not only that he was talking to a superior, but also that Dad was nowhere near worth blowing his stack over. "You mistake your audience, sir," he said, instead. He opened the door and hobbled through, turning to say one last thing to the man at the desk and his ludicrous check. "When man kills man the only beneficiaries are undertakers and monsters, sir, and I no longer intend to be either. Good day to you." He left and shut the door behind him.

Fajio ended up having to wander aimlessly about the campus just to burn off the outrage of it all. The more he thought about it the more he could feel his teeth grinding in fury. It could not be borne—would not have been, were the circumstances different. Dad was an engineer, and of course he'd benefit from any armed conflict to some degree, but he seemed to be happy about it. More than that, when he had money to throw around like that it begged the question of why he would not have just hired some special group to collect Archer rather than let the college deploy a team. That he didn't much care for Archer was evident, but if it really was about his reputation, he would have acted sooner rather than later to contain the boy.

Fajio sat down angrily at one of the outside tables near the cafeteria, to fix his piercing glare onto an unlucky assortment of grass blades. He gripped his cane tight and tried to steady his breathing as he chased out the image of the man at the desk and his ludicrous check. The nerve! As if a spattering of soulless sheafs would ever simply undo an injustice.

Fajio's own expenses had been accounted for for at least a decade at this point. He boarded with Simon in the woods at no charge to himself, was attending the college under the direct involvement of Angor Rah, and had otherwise been able to coast comfortably enough on a savings account Angor had set up for him way back when he took him in. But even had he been homeless and thoroughly destitute he would have sooner spat in the man's face than accept such ill-gotten blood money.

"Goddamn heartless bastard, anyway. Fucker's lucky he's worth less than the skin I lost to those flames, even with all that useless money he has." He spat angrily to the side. "I ought to catch him alone and neuter the old prick, keep him from having any more Archers to throw away."

"Not in the best of moods, are we? Ho ho ho."

Fajio started and saw that his quick spit to the side had just barely missed the lap of Professor von Vivian. The ancient man had wheeled up to him while he had been lost in thought.

"How long have you been there?" Fajio asked roughly. And then, "Wait, why are you here?"

"Where else would I be?"

Fajio looked at the professor. He didn't seem to be aging too much. It was known throughout the campus that von Vivian was immortal and aged backwards when he was in a good mood, but with war in the air and kids going to their graves Fajio couldn't understand why someone hadn't bundled him into a box and sent him to a panda preserve or something until it all blew over. "Aren't you bothered at all?" Fajio was unsure how to phrase it. He had always thought of von Vivian as naive, but he wasn't stupid.

The old man looked at Fajio with eyes that suddenly didn't seem so full of vim and vigor. A few of his hairs fell out and withered away before he answered. "There are a lot of ways to see the world, Fajio."

It was Fajio's turn to be recoil at another person's inhuman face. He had never seen that look on the old man's face before. "What …?"

And just like that it had passed, and von Vivian was smiling and chipper again. "Ho ho ho, nothing, nothing, my boy. Now: what's gotten you so worked up?"

Fajio was leaning away from the ancient professor now. He wondered why it had never hit him before, honestly: von Vivian was so ancient now that if he got upset for any longer than five minutes he would likely crumble into a pile of dust, and he had been that way for—if the other professors were to be believed—at least a century. The man had spent a very long time joyous and happy. He had watched everyone he ever met blow away to time's tempest and had had a smile on his wrinkled face the whole time.

Professor von Vivian wasn't naive at all.

He repeated himself, urging. "Well, Fajjy, what's got ya cursing today?"

Fajio suddenly realized he was talking to someone to whom he was likely less than nothing in the grand scheme of things. "Ahm, nothing. Just the war. Stress all around."

"You were talking about someone?"

"Oh, just, uh, I just heard an opinion on the war I didn't much care for, was all. Look, I think I should probably—"

"There aren't too many opinions on war that can be cared for, hoho." He turned his head to look in the direction of the hangar as another flyer took off. His old man eyes sparkled with cataracts, but Fajio was inclined to see the sunken spots in his face less as wrinkles than pocks in a fleshy, horrible mask. "Sometimes something happens that breaks everything, Fajjy. The trick is making sure you can help fix everything back up good as new afterwards."

"Fajio!"

Fajio turned towards Evegy's voice as she came toward them and von Vivian started wheeling away. "Well have a good day, Fajjy, hoho," he said as he went so that Fajio almost didn't the old man's face out of the corner of his eye, as it stopped being human again. He wondered how often von Vivian had had that look in his eyes. Was it the war, or had they always been that way? Fajio's mask did cut off his peripheral vision, after all.

Evegy came up to him, winded as if she had been running for a while. "What are you doing out here?" she asked him critically.

"Taking in air," he said defensively. "Alex told me to leave my skin open to the air, didn't he?"

"He meant in the infirmary," she said sternly. "Azoo almost flipped his top on the nurse for letting you wander off."

Fajio privately thought that was an exaggeration, and that Azoo had done little more than shrug at his absence. "I have to meet someone in town, I'll go back to the infirmary afterwards."

"No, Fajio," she said strictly, causing the ghoulish man to flinch at her tone. "You're likely to wander into the street on those painkillers."

Fajio frowned, unhappy that she should give more than half of a fuck. He was quite certain being struck by a car would be a step down from the manners of punishment he'd been subjected to. "You needn't worry yourself, I didn't take them."

She shook her finger at him, as if he were a forgetful old man being too stubborn to put on his coat and come back inside. "Then you shouldn't be out in the streets looking like you do, Fajio. You'll scare someone into shooting you."

"I have a meeting," he said, tired of her insistence. He got up to walk away but she grabbed his hand as he tried to take away his cane. He hissed at the raw contact to his burns, and at the very unusual feeling of someone else's hand on his own in a non-handshake manner.

"Then I'm coming with you so you don't teeter into traffic," she said, looking him in the eye.

Fajio scowled and darted his gaze, yanking his cane away from her and hobbling off, bothered. "Fine, but let me do the talking."

How long has it been since that fateful day? When everyone went their separate ways. Nilya, trying to help her kind. Varik, his inventions taking him places. Amane, wandering the globe. Me, just now getting out of rehabilitation. I stand by a cliff close to Vale, looking at the landscape before me. It's been so long since I've last seen the sunrise. It's a shame things haven't been so calm lately.

I stretch out my left arm out in the distance, stretching my new fingers. My family heirloom, also a claw that I use, was finally returned to me by my father. It is, however, now a part of me. Since I lost my hand, I've had it replaced with it. It's still taking a lot to get used to, but I think I'll manage. I wonder. Would things have been different if...no. I shouldn't think about what ifs. Not at this time. There are more important things at stake than the past, & what's at stake scares me to death.

Since my battle with Klaus & what I learned about Amane, I've had a...chance to think about things. It's also given me a glimpse at who Klaus truly is. I thought highly of him, even idolized him. But...things are different. He's not the same man I met months before. He's up to something big, & I need to stop him. This upcoming war is something he's been waiting for. I can't stop the war, & I can't stop him. I need to reunite with my friends. I need to tell them what's gonna happen if we don't do something. I don't know about Amane. She already has enough on her plate as it is. I don't know if she'll show up. How will Nilya & Varik react when they see her again? I wonder what I'll say to her if I see her.

It might take me a while to search for them. Luckily, my father is already at work for the war, & will give me the coordinates to my old team once he has something. "...I guess there's no avoiding this war." I grasp at the sun, lay down my arm. I head out, leaving the cliff to search for my friends. The only ones I have.

Evegy had never met Angor Rah before. From Azoo's describing the man as his grandfather, she had supposed he'd be some wrinkled old man, and from his evident role of having brought up Azoo and Fajio both she had imagined perhaps an easy-going and gnomic person given to waving things off.

The man sitting across the table from her and Fajio, though, only showed his age in the deep pits under his pale eyes. He was straight-backed in his polished suit, and the lines in his face were those of fury and hardship, not of peaceful old age. His chest and arms were thick, but in a manner different from Azoo's: more taut than bulky. Unlike Azoo or Azoo's father, who Evegy had met once at the campus, Angor wasn't bald: he had deep, glossy black hair that he wore in a tight tail that fell back below his shoulders. Like his son and grandson, though, Angor also had a beard, although his was little more than a goatee pulled into the long tails of his mustache to drape down to his faded red bow tie. His hands were huge and looked more than capable of wringing out the man beside him like a bloody rag.

This man had introduced himself as a Mr. Bramptus Frevers and evidently held some clerical position in the military. Evegy was hard-pressed to realize Frevers wasn't actually as short as he seemed to be sitting next to Angor's giant figure. He didn't seem all that much older than she was, and wore his simple uniform with a pride that glowed in his dark eyes and on his square-jawed face. From what Evegy could gather, Frevers and Fajio either had a past or else were both just in a similarly pissy mood, because they had greeted one another coolly when she and Fajio had arrived in the diner.

"Obliged was I to beggeth thy pardon for having sir Frevers along," Angor said as they sat down in a deep voice that Evegy had at first thought was a car starting up outside, "but see I thou meant not, after all, to collogue, for thou hast brought along thy own compeer."

Evegy had a hard time understanding what Angor was saying, and she had honestly never actually thought anyone still spoke in that manner at all anymore. For his part, Fajio seemed able to follow it easily enough, since he answered, "She invited herself along."

Evegy took that as a cue to introduce herself. "Uh, yes, he's supposed to still be in the infirmary, so I came to make sure he'd be okay. I'm Evegy Weqq, one of his teammates."

Angor nodded in a friendly manner, but his mouth was invisible under his facial hair, and the pits under his eyes coupled with his thick eyebrows to make his eyes little more than beady specks of light color peering out of holes in his face. "Pleased am I, that sirrah Fajio should such a feminal damsel have for handmaid." He turned back to Fajio while Evegy tried to decide if that was an insult or a compliment. "But lo! On what freak start hath thou cast off thy equipage, the gyves I gaveth unto thee that had becometh a part of thy habiliment? Hath thou become now so halt as to this fair doxy so require?"

Evegy was at least able to take solace in the fact that Frevers was also largely lost in Angor's vocabulary, if his furrowed brow and intense focus on his water glass were any indication. Fajio seemed to have taken Angor's words as an insult. "The assignments my team have been fed haven't been the smoothest for me, sir, and I mean to change that if I can."

Angor leaned back and folded his great arms. "Fain would I be to useth mine degree with the host to convinceth them thou art little more than ill-dight dandiprats, but thou first must to sir Frevers discover thy reason to levant."

Angor had said that last word with a certain heaviness, but Evegy didn't know what levant meant, and she could only guess at its implications from how Fajio warped his disfigured face and turned his attention to the military man. "Frevers," he all but growled.

"You don't have to be so short with me, Fajio," Frevers said, smiling nervously at Fajio's inhuman face, "I'm not the one that threw a burning tree at you."

"You heard about that?" Evegy interrupted, before meeting with everyone at the table turning to look at her. She regretted having spoken up.

Frevers didn't seem insulted by the interruption, though. "I'm one of the people that reviews Fajio's mission reports."

Angor nodded. "Froward though he be, sirrah Fajio's estate established has been through contract with your government. Serveth he shall the desires of his demesne, else in the bridewell he be introduced."

Fajio looked at Evegy and saw that Angor's explanation had been anything but for her. "Them and me have an agreement I have to answer to, because of how my Semblance is."

"Wouldn't want him flying off into a bad crowd with that power of his," Frevers added.

Evegy furrowed her brow. "I mean, it's kind of strange, and I guess I haven't heard of a whole lot like it, but does it warrant that?"

"They think I'll turn into a Faunus sympathizer or something, and then hijack someone important and mess everything up," Fajio said to her, scowling at Frevers.

"Dispraise them if thou must, sirrah Fajio, but if embarrass they thee so mucheth as thou claim, thy demoralization would more of an issue be, rather than thy increasing haltness." Angor drummed his big fingers on the table, but Fajio paid him no mind.

"I'm not here to talk about that right now," Fajio said impatiently. "I want to know what business the army has sending students into the front lines."

"Well," Frevers said slowly, as if Fajio were a slow child, "we're at war right now, Fajio, and huntsmen are supposed to protect humanity: not only from Grimm."

"Don't feed me that: what's BOOM doing? Or CNDR? Or YLLO? Or any of the other graduated teams? I know for a damn fact they aren't with the navy right now."

"There're a lot of pieces in this machine, Fajio, and they're all turning in their own ways. The graduated teams are all providing varying manners of support to the main body of the army. Surely you must see that if we redirected such noteworthy units as BOOM, the Faunus would probably hear about it, so we need to draft in the small fries for this counter-ambush."

"If you ask me," Fajio said, sitting back, "you ought to make obvious a heavy movement in their direction and scare them out of fighting altogether."

Frevers laughed easily. "You must remember that we're dealing with beastmen here: the only way they'd stop biting is if we knock out their teeth. They don't know any better."

Fajio's mouth twisted uncertainly and he looked away. For her part, Evegy hadn't thought much about the deployment. It had made sense to her that they'd be deployed, but now that Fajio was asking about it, it did seem strange to send students to counter-ambush Faunus huntsmen.

Fajio sat thinking for a minute or two while Frevers waited patiently for a reply. Evegy noticed that Angor had been looking at her, and tried not to ignore him. Finally, she met his gaze to see if he might say something, but the man just blinked once and said to Fajio, "Mayhap sirrah Fajio hath failed to realize that cessation of this conflict with the Faunus would placeth him beyond the pale of his present agreement." Fajio turned his head a little, listening. "Presently argue thy vulnerability to enemy pelf or propaganda the government doth. If perchance this conflict a peaceful conclusion reach, that argument shall lose its merit."

Fajio clacked his teeth idly, flexing his fingers. "Am I loose?" he asked Frevers suddenly. "If my team deploys and this ends up putting a period to the Faunus matter, am I out of under you thumb?"

Evegy had never really thought Fajio was beholden to anyone, and had always assumed his near-reclusion was self-imposed. She suspected it probably still was in some manner, but if he did have some sort of special sanction with the government, it explained an unusual lot of his behavior. She realized suddenly that nothing ever had come of his attacking her in that alley all that time ago. She had gone a long time thinking maybe no one cared enough about her to go to the trouble, but Fajio probably benefited from some sort of limited legal immunity. Thinking back on FEAR's impromptu deployment into Menagerie, she supposed that protection came with an obligation to serve that Fajio very obviously didn't like in the least. Azoo had told her Fajio had been quite aggressive in his younger years, but he evidently got out of any discipline this whole time.

But "I'm sure I've no idea what you mean," was all Frevers said to Fajio's question, albeit with a hint of a smile that said he knew exactly what Fajio was asking, but didn't want to acknowledge it.

Fajio caught it too, and was nowhere near as prepared to let it slip by without comment. "Listen here you pencil-pushing worm," he hissed nastily enough to make Frevers pull back in surprise, "I'm going to take my team out there and be present for the incident so that I can come back and tell you I did my part, and that's gonna be enough for you to drop treating me like I'm not just another student. I don't want your leash or any of the treats that come with it."

Frevers recovered and snorted, sneering. "Even if there isn't a visible enemy looming on the horizon like Menagerie, there is always an enemy of the state ready to overturn it, and we can't allow your power to fall into any such hands, so you will have to put up with our surveillance even after you do this mission, and on every other one you'll do for us." Evegy looked to see how Angor was taking this, but his face was like that of an unaware statue as he watched the exchange go down.

Fajio looked around. There weren't a whole lot of other people in the diner, but there were enough that he leaned forward so he could say low, "You'll cut me loose or I'll undo you entirely. And I'm not talking about just you, you insignificant nothing, I'm talking about the whole of the government's reputation. How do you think everyone will like to hear about how their government sent their scared children out on the front lines to deliberately have them gutted by the Faunus?"

Evegy recoiled at this jump in logic. "What?"

"Nonsense!" Frevers cried, insulted. Angor watched quietly with folded arms.

"Oh, it's no secret morale's in the gutter," Fajio went on, "so what better way to put a fire in the soldiers' breasts than to tell them the Faunus tore their kids to pieces? You'd be able to rally the citizenry to supporting the military, and then you could arm civilian bands and throw them into a 'counter-ambush' and tell the soldiers that now the Faunus had tore up their families and friends. Oh it's quite the heartless plan, I wonder how the public will take it?"

Evegy was wide-eyed at this and couldn't stop herself from jumping in against Frevers, too. "Is that true?!"

"Of course not," Frevers sputtered, but in such a manner that said that either he was lying or else he knew full-well that such a story might indeed gain traction. "You can't prove a damn thing," he said to Fajio.

Fajio's eyes darted about wildly and his teeth chattered in what Evegy supposed was an expression of triumph as he eased back in his chair. "So long as I tell it to the richest and most grieved people I can find, and get the Faunus on my side by helping set them up as an unknowing victim in it, I'm sure I won't have to prove anything."

"I'll show you your place!" Frevers got to his feet, his hand going to his hip, but Angor's inhumanly large hand closed on his with a loud cracking sound and Angor jerked Frevers back to into his seat. Frevers yelped and pulled his hand away, holding it to his chest and looking between it and Angor.

Angor clenched his fist and then put it back down before fixing Fajio with his heavy gaze. "Considereth thy request to demit we shall, but knoweth thou this: pulled entire shall all thy support be. Thou hath asked it, so thou shall receive. Better it may be, forsooth, that thy expiry be met so abroad. Go now hence, and hie, and never hither returneth. Thy last this mission shall be. Now begone."

Fajio got to his feet abruptly and started hobbling off, so Evegy had to hurry after him as he left the diner and leaned on his cane outside. "What was that all about?" she asked.

Fajio looked at her a moment and started toward the campus. "We got deployed."

Evegy looked back at the diner, but couldn't see Angor or Frevers through the window. "What else though?"

"You were there."

"Angor talks kind of strange, I couldn't keep up with him."

"He only talks like that around other people, so he can talk to me or Azoo without anyone else picking up on it."

Evegy wondered whether or not Azoo would be able to follow that sort of speech, but supposed he had been raised with Fajio, so if Fajio could do it, Azoo could probably do it, too. "So what did he say?"

"If that was any of your business he wouldn't have said it like he did," Fajio said, frowning.

Evegy pouted a little at this but didn't protest further. As they come up to a crosswalk to wait on the signal, she spoke up again. "Fajio?"

"Yes?"

"Is that why you didn't get in trouble when you messed my face up? Because they bailed you out?"

Fajio didn't look at her, but licked his lips nervously. "The short answer would be 'yes,' I suppose."

"Do you … do that kind of thing often, then?"

Fajio looked at her with his big glassy eyes, hurt. "No, no, not at all." He gripped his cane unsteadily. "That was the last time I ever attacked anyone like that, and the first time for years and years, now. I was a pretty nasty kid before I fell into my habits, Azoo can tell you about it sometime, if he hasn't already."

The signal finally came, and they crossed the street. Evegy noticed Fajio was looking pointedly away from her now. "Is there any particular reason you attacked me?" she ventured.

Fajio shook his head, agitated. "It's been so long ago, I'm sure I don't know what was going through my head at the time," he said. "Azoo wasn't there, was he?"

"No," Evegy said, confused at the relevance of the question.

Fajio seemed to think that explained everything, though. "I think it must have been his mother's birthday, then, so he had gone home that afternoon and I suppose I was angry about it. I always hated reminders of parentage and stuff."

They had made it back to the campus already, now, and were heading to the dorm to round up Azoo and Rimer. Evegy twiddled her thumbs idly as she walked. "So I just caught you on a bad day?"

"Yes," Fajio said, relieved as he saw Azoo and Rimer sitting on a bench up ahead. "Yes, that's a very good way of saying it, I think. Once my head cooled off, I regretted that I'd done it, so I've been trying to make it up to you. A bad day, that's all it was."

"Oh, good," she said. "I was worried you might like me or something."

She laughed at the face Fajio made at this, as he stumbled, sputtering. Before he could respond to this, she ran ahead, calling Azoo and Rimer over.

"What does levant mean?"

"What?" Rimer asked.

"I was asking Azoo," Evegy clarified.

The three of them were sitting in the back of a light carrier flyer, not very large compared to the airships that had left earlier loaded with students, but still nearly thrice the size of the stealth flyer they had ridden in to come back from Menagerie. They were seated with several large crates of munitions, reportedly anti-Aura rounds for what gun-toting students had already been deployed, and some others of spare Dust. Fajio had had the team placed on this supply flyer to get them out to the combat zone, since most of the dedicated airships had left already. The hold was big enough that Evegy found it almost as if she were sitting in the dorm's lounge with Azoo and Rimer. The mess of boxes occupying empty seats and the rest of the hold only did very little to dispel the effect: the carrier didn't have but one small window on either side back in the hold.

Fajio had sat in the co-pilot's seat to talk with the pilot about something. Evegy couldn't remember what Fajio had said his name was, something like Phostryo or Phonthonyr, but she recognized him from the back of one of her classes: a stilt-limbed, ratty-haired ghost of a man with a wickedly-bayonetted musket. His team was apparently all accomplished pilots, having been following the course plan that would put them into military service rather than policing or general Grimm control, and so all four of its members were flying carriers or transports instead of fighting. The flyer was large enough that Fajio and the pilot were out of earshot and on the other side of a sort of a smallish hallway that led into the cockpit, so Evegy felt comfortable in talking about Angor's dialogue.

Azoo, who had been sitting with arms folded and eyes closed didn't immediately respond to her question, but he finally said without opening his eyes, "No one uses that word anymore." He cracked an eye at her and added, "And it's pronounced levant," saying the second syllable as ant rather than like ont as Evegy had.

"So you do know what it means?"

Azoo closed his eyes again. "It means to leave a situation without paying off your debts."

Rimer, sharpening the Gut-Grinder's chain, repeated the word to himself a few times, curiously. "Hahaha, that's a weird-ass sounding word. Where'd you hear it at?"

"Angor used it at the diner, and it seemed to rub Fajio the wrong way."

"Grandpa says a lot of strange things," Azoo said, looking at her and reclining in his seat. "Sounds like it means more than it actually does."

"Yeah, hahaha," Rimer said, now. "I think Angor's probably a little senile, myself. No offense Azoo, haha, but I don't even think he's speaking English!"

"You've met him?" Evegy asked Rimer.

"Once or twice, haha." He finished sharpening his chain and slid the file away into a slot under the saw's bar. "Fajio always gets pissed when he's around, heh."

Evegy furrowed her brow at this. She had never seen Angor near the campus before, even before she had properly met Fajio or Azoo. She would have remembered seeing someone like him, he was quite the imposing figure. She supposed it might have something to do with the cabin out in the woods that Fajio and Azoo always went to every night. "Azoo," she asked, "what kind of situation are you and Fajio in with the government?"

Azoo stroked his beard and gave her a strange look, as if trying to decide if she was qualified to hear it. Or maybe he was just thinking about whether or not he wanted to talk that much. "Rimer never told you?" he asked, finally.

Evegy started at this, surprised, and then gave Rimer an accusatory glare. Rimer threw his hands up, letting the Gut-Grinder fall over into the seat next to him. "She never asked!" he said defensively.

Azoo nodded casually and then said, "Fajio benefits from free attendance at Beacon, and leeway when he messes up with the law."

"In return," Rimer picked up, "he's gotta do what they say when they say it, haha, and has someone watching him all the time to make sure he doesn't get any funny ideas."

"Someone watching him? But I thought him and Azoo were the only ones that go out to that old man's house all the time."

There was a moment of silence while Rimer looked at her incredulously, as if she had just asked whether or not birds laid eggs. Azoo was the one to break it. "I'm the one watching him," he said.

Evegy was inclined to be surprised at this, but she supposed it did make sense to some degree, even if it did totally reverse her understanding of Azoo's relationship with Fajio. Rimer picked up the explanation while she pondered the implications. "Azoo's granddaddy is the one that used to watch Fajio, haha, but now that Fajio don't live with him no more he told Azoo to do it for him. If Fajio ever gets too far out of line ..." Rimer rammed his fist into his hand for effect, giggling.

Evegy didn't think Azoo beat Fajio at all, and when she asked Azoo if he did he scoffed and said, "Of course not, I just told Grampa I'd do it. Fajio doesn't need anyone to discipline him and it wouldn't work anyway. He only got worse when Grampa smashed his face in the forge for acting up."

"That's why he looks like that?"

Rimer shrugged as Azoo nodded. Rimer hefted the Gut-Grinder and checked its oil. "I can believe it," he said, not smiling as deeply as he had been.

Azoo said, "It's in the past now, Grampa's just got a really old-fashioned idea of discipline. Fajio's gotten over that by now, that happened way long ago." He sat forward, now, and raised his eyebrow at Evegy. "Why should you care what Grampa was saying to Fajio?"

Evegy blinked at this change of direction in the conversation, just when she had been starting to hear more about Fajio. "Well," she said, "it sounded kind of like whatever agreement Fajio and the government has is gonna be cut after we get back from deployment."

Azoo cocked his head. "Really?" He leaned back and shifted his weight a little bit. "We'll see."

"Well that's real interesting and all," Rimer said now, his pointed teeth bared in something that Evegy wasn't sure was totally a smile, "but it ain't none of our business, Evegy." He put the Gut-Grinder in the seat next to him and strapped it in, evidently finished with his maintenance. "What're you gonna do after this?"

Evegy found she wasn't totally able to answer this question. Classes had been very close to over when the war broke out, so they would likely just be bumped to graduation on returning from deployment, or very nearly anyway. While there were some teams that kept together after graduation, like Team SAWW that Rimer's sister was in or Team BOOM that Azoo's dad led, it was quite commonly known that most teams disbanded for any number of reasons. Sometimes the members simply had different long-term career goals, or sometimes some of the members went into completely different walks of life, dropping the huntsman angle completely, although Evegy privately always wondered why they'd go so far to be trained and then not do anything with it. Rimer's asking that question already implied an answer to her own, but Evegy couldn't keep from asking it anyway: "Is FEAR gonna disband, then?"

Azoo shrugged at this question and closed his eyes again, losing interest. Rimer, though, laughed lightly to himself and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Hard to tell, haha. If Fajio's taking orders now, he probably always will be, but none of us are really under that obligation, or we won't be after graduation anyway, haha. We had to go to Menagerie that one time, but after graduation, there's nothing making us stick together. I kinda figured you'd want to go do something else, was all, haha, I didn't think you'd want to stick around Fajio."

"Well I wouldn't just be 'sticking around Fajio,' wouldn't you guys be around too?"

"Haha, it depends. My dad wants to put me into policing, like he is. I don't think Fajio'd be up for that, though, haha, so I might end up having to leave to go do that. I guess Azoo'd be around though, haha."

Azoo nodded. "As long as Fajio's in the position he's in, my Grampa wants me hanging around him, and I'd stick with him anyway. I don't really have anything else I feel like doing. Well," he said looking away thoughtfully, "it would be nice to settle down and be done with all the fighting and stuff, maybe help out Simon out at his place." He shook his head. "But I guess I didn't go to Beacon to be a farmer."

Evegy rubbed her legs nervously. She hadn't thought that far ahead, and had privately just hoped FEAR would keep together afterwards to, if nothing else, save her having to make the choice for herself. If Rimer was going to leave, though, and the only thing that apparently kept Azoo at his post was a want to help Fajio with his situation, the team would surely disband. Especially if Fajio's "situation" was dispelled by this deployment. She didn't think Azoo would ditch him, but he'd certainly be less inclined to do anything huntsman-y and Fajio himself had never seemed all that big on fighting, either. She had no doubt they probably would go into the woods to live with that old man, Simon, in such a case. She supposed she could follow Rimer into policing, if for nothing else than just to have a familiar face around, but she knew SAWW was a policing team and would surely work alongside them, and she'd probably have to put up with Widao a lot, which was something she wasn't sure she wanted to do. Widao really didn't seem to like her for some reason Evegy couldn't pin down.

Evegy didn't have the confidence to go off into some other branch on her own without someone there to support her. Even if she did manage to find some group of other graduates going into military support or Grimm control or something to hang around with, she was still a member of one of the least-liked teams on the campus, and had a particularly bad reputation since her incident with Fajio. Her parents had expressed a distaste in her at that point, too, and even though she was sure they'd still support her if they had to, she knew they wouldn't like it in the least. Evegy hadn't quite understood the isolation she had taken on: without FEAR she had very few favorable options in the world.

Azoo had noticed she had fallen silent and opened his eyes to look at her. "Simon's got a pretty nice place, there should be room there if you've got nothing else to do. He's a nice guy, and he'd really like the help."

It was an earnest offer on his part, but Evegy could well imagine how hard of a hit her already-ravaged reputation would take if she went to live in the woods with three men. At this point, though, she wasn't sure if that really mattered very much to her. "We'll see what happens," was all she said.

"We won't be touching down for a while yet," Fajio called from up front. His voice was metallic again: he had put his mask back on despite doctor's orders. "Phosthyon says it'll be alright for you to crack open one of the ration crates and eat something, and I think you should take him up on it."

Rimer undid his seat belt and moved past the first row of munitions crates before returning with a smaller cardboard box. He gave it to Azoo before buckling himself back up and Azoo tore through the tape before handing Rimer and Evegy some jerky and water, and taking some out for himself.

Azoo and Rimer began eating with no further thought, but Evegy undid her seat belt and got up. "Here," she said with an hand extended toward Azoo," I should take some up to them."

Azoo gave her a pack of jerky and a water bottle and told her, "Fajio won't eat this, here's some for the pilot."

Evegy held her hand out again. "Give me some for Fajio anyway."

Azoo looked at her with a rather strange look but handed her some more food and water before returning to his own meal. Evegy walked up toward the front of the flyer carefully: the carrier had been flying extremely smoothly but she was still nervous of sudden turbulence, as flyers were wont to encounter from time to time. She came upon the cockpit in time to hear Fajio finish saying something about good recon pilots always having a place regardless of whether or not there's a threat of war. He turned to see her out of the corner of his shades and said, "You shouldn't be moving around, my dear. Phosthyon's a good pilot but flyers still buck sometimes."

She braced against the back of Fajio's chair as the flyer did, indeed, shake slightly as it moved through a smallish cloud. "I thought you guys might want something to eat."

Phosthyon had his eyes fixed out the windshield, but shook his head and waved his hand at her before answering in exactly the sort of voice as would be expected of such a lanky character from Team RASP. "Thank you, but I already ate. I don't like to eat while I'm flying, anyway." He nodded as he returned both his hands to the controls. "Thanks though," he said again.

Evegy looked between him and Fajio and found she couldn't really blame herself for having mistaken the man as a member of Fajio's team before she had met Timereaux. At that, she wondered what Timereaux was doing. He was likely already deployed and was on the field right now. She realized of a sudden that most of her classmates were deployed: she'd known it but it only just now hit her. She pictured the in-fighting Team WUMP and the nervous Hunsley girl from her astronomy class and the two-man Team GO and the weak-hearted Lloyd from her Grimm species class all out there in the press of a war. She pictured all the members of the teams she had been in, all three of her old leaders, in the line of fire. She was suddenly very scared.

Fajio felt her grip tighten on the back of his chair and turned to look at her. She had quite the peculiar look in her eyes, and she had dropped the jerky and juice pouches she'd brought up. "Miss Evegy, are you alright?"

She blinked and came back to reality with the very harsh realization that they were all flying into a war zone. "We're … We're going to war," she said quietly.

Fajio inhaled nervously. He didn't know how to handle this manner of anxiety, and Phosthyon had apparently decided this was a personal interaction and one he shouldn't get involved in. "My dear, it is no different from what we have done before. There is no need to worry."

Evegy seemed to have started on a downhill slide, though. She wrapped her arms around herself and shuddered. "I can't kill anyone, that's why we failed our mission in Menagerie. I can't do it, even if they are Faunus." She fell back against the inside of the hallway and slumped to the floor. Fajio unbuckled himself and got up, clacking his cane on the metal floor.

"Give a holler when we come up, Phosthyon," he said aside to the pilot quietly, "I have to deal with this." Phosthyon nodded silently and Fajio approached the girl on the floor. Azoo and Rimer were watching him from the hold, curiously chewing on their jerky. He waved his hand at them, and they turned away.

Fajio stood over Evegy awkwardly, his hands on his cane. He hadn't put his gauntlet back on yet, as it would've been in the way to sit in the co-pilot's chair with it on, so he nervously fumbled both his hands on the head of his cane, unable to let one of them drape away under a shackle's weight. "All you need to do is follow orders," Fajio said hesitantly, quietly. "It's no different from any other mission."

She wasn't looking at him and had drawn her knees up to bury her face in, hugging them tightly. Fajio thumped his cane idly and glanced over toward the hold, where Azoo discretely signaled him over. Fajio bent down and picked up the dropped jerky and juice. "I'll … go put these back," he said.

He limped into the hold with Azoo and Rimer to Rimer's whispered greeting of, "It's supposed to be post-traumatic, Fajio, haha, what did you say to her?"

"I didn't say anything," Fajio answered low, "she's just scared of the deployment."

Azoo shook his head. "Maybe, but she's probably also scared there's nothing left to come home to afterwards."

Fajio looked at his bearded friend incredulously, but through his mask it came off as a soulless stare. It was good to have his mask back on again, really. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"If FEAR disbands she don't got nothing to do," Rimer whispered, pulling the Gut-Grinder in closer so it could partake in the quiet conversation as well.

Fajio tapped his muzzle meditatively, thinking. He knew Rimer was going into his father's line of work, and that Azoo would stick around with him and Simon. This mission would see him out of under the government's nosy meddling, and he hadn't thought much of what that meant. He'd supposed he and Azoo would just go live with Simon, but he was now very vividly recalled to his negligence of Evegy's future. He felt he still owed her much more, as he had been the one that had scarred her and smashed her reputation and spirit, but he had forgotten to take into account that FEAR wouldn't last forever, and that she still had many years ahead of her.

He turned back toward the cockpit after nodding to Azoo, Rimer, and the Gut-Grinder, and approached Evegy again. She hadn't moved. Fajio took a deep breath and lowered himself roughly to sit beside her, although the awkwardness his leg gave him ended up having him ram his head into the wall with a loud enough sound to get her attention. She looked at him with teary eyes as he settled himself against the wall and laid his cane across his legs, trying hard not to rub at his head where it had hit. He looked at her through his mask but found he couldn't find any words: her handkercheif had slid down off her face, showing off all her crooked and deep scars and reminding Fajio of just how badly he had hurt her.

She looked away first, frowning and burying her face again. Fajio supposed it must certainly be a very hard position to be in, to have to answer to the person who'd messed her up so thoroughly. Fajio might have to answer to Angor after the old man put him in a mask, but Fajio had gotten over that a long time ago, and had brought that upon himself besides. Evegy might have been mean and nasty with him, but that had been no reason to attack her the way he had when he had stomached much worse from others. Fajio had only been in a bad mood at the time: he had ruined her for no other reason than simply because he had been agitated. He had spent a lot of time trying to make up for it, but it felt as if he were trying make up for killing a man by paying for his funeral: too little too late and its own flavor of inappropriate besides.

He looked down at his lap and sighed deeply, with a shudder that dispelled the metal effect his muzzle had on his voice. It was a decidedly human sound. "No amount of apology or recompense will ever make up for what I did to you, and on some level my insistence to provide such seems to make matters worse. I ..." He drummed his fingers on his cane. "I don't know how to make up for it, or to seem genuine. I grew up with Azoo and Angor, and the occasional military man or policeman, I just don't know how to be nice to you." She looked at him and he had to face away to keep talking. "I've messed up a lot of things, but that was all when I was young and ignorant. I'm old enough to know better, and to be able to control myself, but I ended up attacking you anyway. I suppose this whole time, this trying to make it up to you has just been me trying to prove to myself that I am stable and able to take responsibility. But," he stopped a moment and rubbed at his bad thigh absently. "But I'm just not. I try to be aloof and smart, but it's just not working for me."

He pawed at his mask slowly, bowing his head. "I'm not strong like Azoo, or fast like Rimer, and I've never been and never will be. All I had going was my head, my level thinking, my ability to talk around things and plan through them, but I never had that either. If I had a level head I wouldn't have attacked you, and if I were any good at strategy or foresight I wouldn't have fucked everything up all these times. I tried to go asking your old teammates about you to try and see if I could find a way to get through to you, and I fucked that up and ended up getting my leg messed up by Lucinder. And then I tried to spearhead our mission in Menagerie, but I went too hard with my Semblance and couldn't be there when you all needed me. Then Archer shows up, and I tried to talk him down, and I fucked that up and got myself, Azoo, and Rimer all shot. I think he shot at you too, but he missed."

He was clawing at his shades now, frustrated. "I try to lead us out to bring in Archer and end up face down in a fire!" He looked in Evegy's direction, angrily, and she winced from his sudden movement. He took a deep breath and rubbed his thigh again. "I thought bringing you into FEAR would amend the problem, try and bring you back up proper, but FEAR's a joke and always has been with me in charge. It'll be a wonder if I don't get us all killed today."

"Don't say that," she said. "I mean, you might get hurt a lot but none of us tend to, really." She blinked as she realized how that sounded and added, "And you have your moments, too."

Fajio shook his head glumly. "I'm so fucking backwards that in trying to cheer you up I end up having you trying to cheer me up." He put up his hand to interrupt whatever she might have said in answer to this and sighed. "My help's been anything but for you for a long time. I think the best thing for you would be to find some steady employment that takes you far away from us. I can talk to Angor and—"

"No," she said sternly.

He looked at her, surprised. "We might talk rough with one another but Angor and I are still on good terms, I can—"

"No," she repeated. "I don't want to be something you feel like you have to take care of to make up for screwing up. I, might be"—she took a shuddering breath—"broken, but so are you. Don't talk to me like you can fix me when you can't fix yourself."

Fajio was at a loss for words: he hadn't expected her to bite back in such a manner. He clacked his teeth uncertainly, the sound coming through his mask like a clock's ticking. Before he could even begin to formulate a response, though, Evegy went on. "I know you do a lot to try and make things better for me, and for the others too, and I know it doesn't come naturally to you, but you give yourself too much credit. There were a lot of things wrong with my life before you showed up. You didn't wreck things all by yourself. You might think you can fix me since you're the one that broke me, but there were a lot of breaks you never knew about, and even though I've watched you get torn up all this time over our missions, Azoo's let me know that there were a lot of breaks in you, too, before you came to Beacon, that he doesn't think anyone will fix."

"My wounds are too deep and too old," Fajio said, shaking his head. "I've given up on mending them. But you can find somewhere that can let you mend—"

But she cut him off again. "Don't do that. If you're a lost cause so am I, but since you don't think I am, you aren't either. Azoo knows a lot about you, but he's always talking to me about what he doesn't know deep down. He knows there's more wrong inside you, but he respects you too much to pry." She frowned at him, her scars warping in a curiously intricate fashion, like a cracked pane of glass. "I don't though, so I have no qualms about looking right in on your deepest being. So that's what we're going to do." She reached over and closed her hand over his before he could pull away. "I'll show you my breaks and you'll show me yours, and we'll try and fix them together. Got it, Rectum?"

Fajio tried unsuccessfully to pull his hand away and looked everywhere but at her face. "I-I cannot approve of such ..." He trailed off as she leaned in and forced him to look at her directly.

He had never quite noticed just how exotically-pattered her scars were. "That means 'yes.' " Azoo said from the hold to Rimer's cackling. Evegy smiled but didn't back off until Phosthyon took the opportunity to chime in himself with, "I don't wanna spoil the mood, but you guys should really be wearing your seat belts."

As Lauren bolted from her sleep, awoken by a nightmare involving the figures of

Nilya, Nara, and Gareth ran for the safety of the mines. Nilya did her best, with the help of the surveillance drone overhead, to dodge human hunters in the area but it was getting more difficult without much cover to hide in. Looking back at her sister Nilya felt her heart drop, the other fox faunus? face was a pale as her hair as she ran. Nara?s eyes showing her thoughts were elsewhere, and not focused on the task at hand. It would be okay as long as. Suddenly Nilya felt a powerful force punch into her armored mask and a loud ?ping? sound filled her ears. The electronic dispays **** off as the glass viewpoints cracked. Nilya felt a hand suddenly drag her to the ground. Pulling off the useless mask Nilya?s eyes grew large as she stared at the massive dent left by a bullet round right between the eyes of the mask. A chill went down the faunus? spine when she realized she had almost been killed.

?Sniper has spotted us it seems, and they have friends coming to flush us out. You have any sort of plan Nilya?? asked Gareth from his spot next to Nilya in the shallow ditch that offered just enough cover to not be shot by the sniper if they laid low.

?We have to let them get in close and fight them in close proximity while keeping them between us and their sniper cannot shoot at us without the risk of shooting one of their allies,? replied Nilya snapping her out of her thoughts.

?Not the best plan,? replied Gareth as he began to focus energy in each of his hands.

?You have anything better?? shot back Nilya.

Gareth did not reply to Nilya?s question so Nilya turned her attention to Nara who was curled up in the muddy trench. She was in no condition to fight so it was two versus four in the open. They would need a miracle to survive this.

Before Lauren could extensively finish those thoughts, Tilki alerted her to the sight of three humans nearby, who have yet to spot her in pursuit of their targets, which Lauren could see as non other than Nara, Nilya and Gareth. She could see a sniper pinning the two into a corner, and the humans were ready to strike. Lauren instructed Tilki to lay low and intervene in case things got too out of hand for the attack. Lauren focused on the sniper and promptly struck with a swift arc of water to knock the sniper clean off their post and off the trio?s trail. She followed up with an attack with her trident, clearly having the upper hand with strength and the element of disorientation and surprise on her side for once.

The sniper was knocked from the tree branch and hit the ground hard right as Lauren struck hitting him in the shoulder with her trident. Instinctively he yelled for help as he tried to pull a pistol from its holster on his right hip to defend himself.

?Not so fast, bub.? Lauren disarmed him of his pistol and stabbed his arm with her trident. The three humans? attention was focused on the newcomer to the fight. A female of the group rushed to the sniper?s aid, while the other two remained to fight the Inaris. Lauren took up a guarded stance to prepare for the woman?s strike.

Both Nilya and Gareth moved out of the cover to fight the two humans still trying to attack them. Gareth unleashed a pair of orbs of chaotic fire that corkscrewed around each other other and impacted the closest human causing them to stop in their tracks as his energy flowed over his body inducing pain. Nilya took the man?s pain as opportunity and struck out at him, slicing a gash across his chest before hopping back to defend against the second human. The sniper meanwhile scrambled toward the pistol with his remaining one good hand.

Lauren exchanged blows with the other woman?s longsword, with Lauren realizing that her trident was outmatched. She played defense, deflecting the blows without getting an inch in herself. Before Lauren had the chance to let her opponent use their semblance, she immediately conjured razor sharp icicles that materialized without warning and pierced the woman?s chest. The downed sniper had by this point picked up the pistol and started firing shots, barely missing Lauren and grazing her on the shoulders. She cried out at the grazing and whipped the pistol far out of his reach with a water tendril and for good measure threw her trident like a javelin and pinned him against the tree, impaling him.

Gareth unleashed a burst of energy on the wounded enemy before reaching down and touching his chest gently with his right index finger. The man began to convulse violently as blood burst from his wound. Seconds later his ribs pulled themselves out of his chest looking like a trapdoor spider emerging from its lair. The violent display continued as a bones pulled themselves completely out of his chest and moved toward the nearby human, the bones held together with muscle and mutated organs. Nilya jumped back in horror as the spawn charged her opponent and jumped on his leg, driving the once ribs into the man?s leg covering him in color shifting blood. The man then realized what was happening and he panicked. Screaming curses at Gareth he called for his team mates to escape the faunus monsters as he sliced at the monster with his sword. Despite the leg injuries, the man fled with incredible speed, motivated by horror.

Horrified at the carnage around, Lauren gasped and stood in shock, before addressing Nilya and Nara. ?L-looks like I got here just in time.? Tilki came out of hiding and walked up to them

Nilya looked up at Lauren for a second before turning around and saying, ?We need to get to the mine quickly before more arrive.?

Nara for the first time stood up from her hiding spot in a shallow ditch, and looked Lauren over while Nilya started to walk toward the mine. ?Why are you here? What happened to your friend?? asked Nara her voice soft and filled with fear.

Gareth admired his work for a bit and then followed after Nilya, listening for Lauren?s response.

Lauren replied, ?Nevermind about her for now. She's asleep and safe away from here. What's important is that I cover you guys right now. I'd love to chat, but we gotta get going.?

Tilki added, ?Now that I'm here, I can give you guys some additional cover. How should I do so??

Nara looked down and said in a subdued tone, ?I don?t like her? but thank you for coming back.?

?As Nilya is more reliant on darkness for her power I would recommend you creating illusions to hide us from sight Tilki. Also may I recommend we make for the outskirts of the battlefield and find cover there instead of a signature landmark like the mines,? said Gareth.

?There are Grimm out there, and last I saw they were beginning to grow in number,? replied Nilya quickly

?Exactly? Grimm are not the targets of the humans. They will not seek them out, plus Grimm are much more predictable. We have been lucky to fight pathetic humans, but it's only a matter of time until they send hunters of real skill after us. The mine also only has one way in and out. I do not like the idea of being trapped in there,? replied Gareth calmly.

Tilki nodded. He closed his eyes and enshrined the five of them in darkness, being undetectable visually. ?We can still see out and each other, but no one can see us.? Lauren saw the mine ahead and guided her other compatriots in towards the mine.

?I do not like the idea of the mine. They could trap us in there. Yes Nilya?s powers will be boosted, with Tilki and Lauren here now that is not needed as much,? added Gareth as they moved toward the mine. ?If they close off the entrance we will be trapped inside.?

?Ok, ok, then let's get out of the war zone and fight off the Grimm.? Lauren changed course and led further away from the action.

Nilya frowned and said, ?I can protect everyone with ease in the darkness.?

?That will not matter if they just blow up the entrance and bury us within the mine,? replied Gareth before he looked at Lauren, ?I see your desire to be a leader has returned. I prefer this version of you to the one drained of focus by that human leech. For your sake I hope you never return to her side.?

Ignoring Gareth?s words to focus at the task at hand, she pressed onwards and reassured Nilya. ?Tilki can provide you with some form of darkness for the time being. I'll be able to provide cover for offense.? The group drew close and at last saw some Grimm.

?It is just uncomfortable,? replied Nilya. She hesitated a few seconds before she adding, ?The stronger my power over darkness becomes the more dependant I am on it. Thus being exposed in the direct sun light makes me feel weak, and this is not somewhere I want to be weak.?

Lauren replied, ?I know, but we will be no good trapped under a mine to our possible deaths.?

Tilki reassured Nilya. ?Trust me, I can provide you with the darkness you need. It's a simple manner of dimming the lights in places, if you get what I mean.?

?You can dim the sun?? asked Nilya as they moved carefully away from the fight. Suddenly Nilya stopped and she pointed in the distant. Several Grimm were ahead of them just waiting in areas of shade, or pacing back and forth as if waiting for something. ?They are waiting? but what for? Their numbers to grow or for us to kill enough of each other off. Or both??

Gareth locked his eyes on a large Nevermore that was standing on a rock and said, ?I need everyone?s assistance. I need help realizing my dream and goal.?

Lauren glared at Gareth. ?What the hell are you talking about? We need to knock these guys to kingdom come.?

?One last experiment Lauren, the last piece to the puzzle is that Nevermore. Anyway when have my experiments ever been non fatal?? replied Gareth. ?All I need is you all to make sure I do not get attacked while conducting the experiment, and for you not to interfere no matter how bad it appears. Would you all be willing to do this?? asked Gareth politely.

Very irritated at Gareth, having some residual anger from his encounter with her and Star, she barked, ?This is no time to be conducting experiments, Gareth! This is a battlefield not a science lab. If you wanna do it so badly wait another damn time.?

?There is no better time, knowledge is power and this experiment, when I am done, will be worth the minor inconvenience. You still get to kill all these Grimm, just I will not be focused on the Nevermore. I am sure you four can handle these other pests,? replied Gareth calmly.

Unwilling to argue further, Lauren spat, ?Fine.? She told the three fox faunus, ?C?mon.?

Nara felt uneasy with the situation, and Nilya looked over at Lauren and said, ?If he distracts the Nevermore that will be helpful? Are you okay??

Lauren huffed. ?Sorry, my nerves are shot being here on the battlefield. Let?s just go.? She walked briskly towards wherever it was Gareth was going to lead them.

Nilya nodded at Lauren?s response and replied, ?Let us focus on surviving and deal with the other problems later.?

As the group moved toward the tree line Tilki?s illusion hid them. As they got closer the Grimm began to sense the faunus? emotions, and became more alert and restless as they tried to figure out where these emotions were coming from. ?I will take on the Nevermore, I need you all to insure none of the other pests bother me. Also no matter what happens, even if the Nevermore seems to be killing me, do not interfere. If you do my plan is doomed to fail.?

Nilya focused on the other grimm not interested in Gareth?s path. Thankfully the Nevermore was the most threatening one there, and Gareth was obsessed with taking it on alone so his plan at least worked in the group?s benefit. ?We should try to stick together so we can support and protect each other. They outnumber us but it is mostly weaker Grimm. Perhaps if we attack quick enough from the illusions we take them off guard and thin their numbers before they can counter attack,? whispered Nilya.

Lauren nodded, ?Ok, let?s do it.? She lurked, waiting for an opening for attack. She found that opening and took it, signalling to the other fox faunus to give her some cover while she assaulted a Grimm. She used her trident to aim a blow at one of the Grimm, wrestling for control with the creature as Lauren sought an opening with the beast to use a water attack.

Nilya moved forward her blade drawn as she approached an Ursa that was standing on all four legs that was distracted by Lauren?s sudden arrival. Nilya charged upto the Ursa then lept into the air, and on the creature?s back. Wrapping her blade in darkness, Nilya drove it into the back of the Grimm?s neck delivering a fatal blow before it could react to its attacker. Hopping to the ground Nilya found herself in the shade of a tree that proved her with enough darkness to form an additional tail as two beowulves and a boaratusk prepared to attack her.

Gareth moved out into the open and pulled out his tome as he began to focus on harnessing all his power. Taking out his bottle of ink he quickly spread its contents on the ground as he infused the black liquid with a hint of his semblance. As the ink it the ground it seemed to start burning with an unnatural flame. The result was a burning star with nine points he stood in the middle of. Strange symbols had been drawn at the point of each arm of the star. Placing his vast tome on the hard earth Gareth flipped through it until the book had been opened to a specific page, which he read as he created a brilliant blue sphere of energy.

Gareth suddenly launched the orb toward the Nevermore that was watching Nilya and Lauren like a vulture waiting for its chance to strike. The orb it the massive Grimm drawing its attention toward Gareth as it spread its vast wings to take flight. However the faunus? strange display also caught the attention of a trio of beowulves that started to charge toward the raven faunus? right side.

After taking out the Grimm she ambushed, Lauren focused on the three beowulves and attempted to ambush it, but with the element of surprise wearing a bit thin, one of them struck Lauren from behind, knocking her down. Scrambling to get footing back, she stumbled into another fighting stance to take both of them on with two jets of water knocking them back, allowing her distance to kill the third beowolf.

A sudden burst of light hit the two knocked back Beowulves dazing the pair. The two seemed confused where it had come from since Nara was still being hidden by Tilki?s powers. The Nevermore took flight and swooped down toward Gareth. The Grimm was massive and when it landed in front of the raven faunus it towered over him as Gareth looked back up at the Grimm with a smirk. The interaction was strange to watch as the two stared at each other for several seconds before the Grimm?s head suddenly reached down and swallowed Gareth in a split second. Strangely the faunus did not flinch or try to prevent himself from being devoured by the monster.

Quite confused, Lauren asked Nilya, ?This isn?t part of the plan, is it??

Nilya dodged out of the way of the charging boaratusk as she sent a wave of dark energy at a beowulf. ?I would imagine getting eaten would not be part of anyone?s plan, but he is strange,? replied Nilya as she spun to face the boaratusk as it tried to recover from its attack.

The nevermore just stood there trying to move but the ground seemed to be holding it in place. It started to try to fly, but the ground would not release its grip on the large grimm. Suddenly the grimm stopped all movement, and its body started to shake then it seized.

?Something is happening to the nevermore,? warned Nara as she watched the creature as it began to bleed from its chest and shoulder.

Lauren herself stood in awe for a moment, before backing away from the seizing creature, having no idea what was going to happen knowing Gareth and his crazy antics. The dolphin faunus could only watch, keeping guard to see if the Grimm would attack them.

The bird like Grimm?s feathers started shifting in color from black to a bluish hue as it suddenly let out an unearthly screech that seemed to drill into one?s head. Even the Grimm seemed affected as they stopped in their tracks to see what was happening. Suddenly its body went through a violent change as two long thin feather covered arms tore out of its upper breast. Its head began to melt and reshape before suddenly splitting into two almost identical heads. The rest of its body twisted and changed until a new monster appeared in its place. Strange robes seemingly formed around the monster?s body as it reached out and touched a nearby tree. The tree twisted and reformed instant to the creature?s right hand until it had reformed into an intricate staff it quickly use to brace itself in a standing position as its left hand scooped up Gareth?s tome that had been laying on the ground.

Several nearby grimm decided to attack this new abomination and they broke off their attack on Lauren and Nilya to charge this monster. The creature?s twin heads were still looking around at the world around it, seemingly unaware of the charging Grimm until they were almost on top of it. One head slowly looked down as the Grimm leapt toward it, and it waved one of his arms in a dismissive manner creating a wall of blue and purple flames that the Grimm ran into. Instantly their bodies seemed to melt then burst into flames, before fading out of existence. The monster?s heads then looked down and locked their gaze on Lauren and Nilya.

?Wh-what the hell,? Lauren exclaimed. ?Nilya, I don?t give a damn about his experiment anymore. That thing is looking for our blood!?

The heads laughed in unison, but each with a different tone. The left head with the eyes of a Grimm laughed a harsh mocking tone with sinister undertones, but the right laughed as of Lauren had told a joke. Then they spoke, both heads at once each saying different things.

?Why would I destroy those who helped me achieve this greatness? You are no more use to me, but there is no gain in killing you. You have proven useful despite your shortcomings,? spoke the right head its booming voice sounding a lot like an excited Gareth.

?Your blood, we do not hunger for blood! Power, knowledge, the arcane! Darkness, water, light? Bah! We have no use for that perhaps the soul of an illusionist would serve us. No? Then we do not hunger for your power,? hissed the second head as it seemed to consider Lauren?s words.

Nilya just stared at the monster and whispered to Lauren, ?I do not think we should provoke it. It has Gareth?s powers and I do not want to risk experiencing that type of torment.?

---

?What the hell is that?!? muttered Dostya as she looked at the video feed from the drone overhead Nilya?s position.

Blair looked up at the human from her control seat, and said, ?I have Worse news that... thing seems to be attracting an army of grimm. Cadi just finished the refuel I don?t think he will be able to extract them before the grimm reach them.? The faunus motioned to another screen to her right showing a map with numerous yellow dots moving toward a marker marking Nilya?s location.

?Damn it? we should not hide this from Varik any longer,? muttered Dostya looking at the screen Blair had motioned to. ?Get the Endless Horizon in the air, and put the squadrons on alert. Also see how long it will take Cadivus to get to the location at full speed, stealth be damned. I will go talk to Varik,? ordered Dostya as she turned around to walk over to a different terminal. Pressing a button she took a deep breath and called up Varik.

The man answered with a distracted look on his face, ?Dostya can this wait? We are in the middle of an important test.?

Dostya met the man?s eyes on the screen and said in a calm but strong tone ?No Varik, this is about Nilya. She is in great danger??

---
Lauren could only stammer a reply in response, ?G-get away from us.? She edged away from the creature.

Tilki, for one of the few times in his life, seem similarly repulsed and followed Lauren?s suit.

?Disappointing that you cannot understand the greatness standing in front of you. Perhaps your mind is too small to realize what I have achieved,? replied the right head its sharp teeth filled beak frowning.

?Let it scamper off to be that weak human?s pet. It does not deserve to even be devoured by us!? hissed the second head as the other spoke.

The dolphin faunus shouted at them, ?I don?t give a damn what you think! I may have made many mistakes, but I am not going to just up and leave my team! Leave!.?

?You do not want my help you shall not have it,? replied the Gareth sounding head as the creature spread its wings.

?Our gifts are best used elsewhere,? hissed the other head as the right one spoke. The creature then flapped its wings and took flight. It then headed off toward the battlelines its desire to use its newfound powers driving it toward battle.

?Well so that is what he wanted?? asked Nara not sure what to say about what just happened.

Lauren, still high strung, growled, ?Whatever, I?m just glad he?s gone.? She sighed deeply, adrenaline still coursing through her. ?I sure as hell don?t need his help, for all the good it?s done.?

Fajio had been manhandled by humans and Faunus alike. He had been struck with at least thirty-seven different varieties of bladed weapon, twenty-two varieties of bludgeoning tools, and eight sorts of ammunition. He had been throttled by eleven different Grimm species, and mangled by three others. He had had his face smashed down on a hot forge and had holes drilled into his skull, but he had to admit nothing had ever been quite like being in a bisected flyer.

Phosthyon, the pilot, had just gotten on the radio to tell the other flyers that the Grimm had built up considerably around the ambush point, and they had been passing over that black, moving border only ten or so minutes from a safe landing zone when the flyer had bucked and the mighty talons had breached the hull. Phosthyon, bless him, had held onto the controls, shouting into the radio, telling the other flyers about unsafe airspace. Fajio could still hear his rasping voice: "Rocs in the airspace, repeat Rocs in the airspace, reroute all flyers," said with commendable calm as his long fingers probed and jabbed at the controls, trying to coax the flyer's one functioning wing to soften the landing that was coming up on them.

Fajio and Evegy had been in the hall connecting the cockpit to the hold where Azoo and Rimer were strapped in. There had been a shrill sort of screaming noise, and then the Roc's serrated beak pierced through the roof and the flyer cracked in the middle like a great metal egg. Fajio had seen the hold fall away, Azoo and Rimer hurriedly undoing their seat belts, and then it dipped and spilled its contents downward at the ground far below. Fajio had pulled Evegy back from where she had shouted their names out the tear as the Roc beat away and a mess of small Nevermores tried to flood into the cockpit.

Evegy had drawn the New Moon and swatted away the pests as Fajio had gone to check on their pilot, who was, against all ingrained understanding Fajio had accrued of handling a crash, not actually pulling up. He was pumping one of the levers madly and pounding at the dashboard of switches as the ground below began to show more detail: they were falling at an angle, but falling nonetheless. Striking the ground was sure to throw Fajio and Evegy both through the windshield, and there was only the copilot's seat belt still available.

Fajio had gone back to the gaping opening that was at the end of the hall, where the Nevermores had pulled back to let the flyer crash proper and Evegy had only just sheathed her weapon.

"Jump!" he had said over the blaring warning alarms and the rushing wind.

"What?!" They were still easily a hundred feet up.

"You can make it, use your Semblance and port away onto the ground," he was pointing madly at the green earth only some eighty feet down.

"But, what about—" She was taking too long.

He took her by the shoulders and shook her. "Get off this deathtrap! That's an order, dammit!"

"I don't—" a Griffon had decided to hurry up the scene and was harrying the flyer's roof angrily.

"Dammit," Fajio said. Sixty feet. He pulled her to him in a brief hug and then nodded at her before shoving her off the flyer.

Evegy, too surprised even to scream, had seen a second Griffon start beating at the flyer while a third seemed to be trying to climb into it as it fell away. She flashed back to falling off the building in Menagerie, struck by a sniper, but there would be no one at the bottom to catch her this time. She tried to right herself in the air, to find which way was up, the air rushing about her even as everything seemed to be happening so eerily slowly. She threw a dark cloud as far as she could at the ground below and then tossed another one directly beneath her.

There was an instance of great nausea as her direction changed, and she shot out of the low cloud sideways, still a little high up, but at least at a decent enough angle that she was able to roll as she hit the ground, and was only a little scratched up after. She stood up and watched the front half of the flyer go barreling through the sky and over the plains before smashing into the ground in the distance, sending up a pillar of dirt and issuing a boom of noise.

"Fajio!" She started running toward the wreck as she saw the Griffons that had been harrying it land and try to crawl inside. She threw out one of her clouds far ahead, and as she got ready to throw another one nearby to cross that distance, something closed around her ankle and she fell flat in the grass. "What?" She kicked at it angrily and then felt her heel meet face and the grip release. She stood up, insulted, as something else stood up opposite her.

It took her until it talked to recognize it as a Faunus. "You humans thought you'd ambush us before we ambushed you, but now I've ambushed you before you could ambush us to stop us ambushing you!"

She shook her head at this nonsense and drew her weapon. He was shorter than her but as inhuman as Mr. Mammoth had been, if not more. His skin, where it was actually skin and not chitin, was an unnatural sandy color and his chitinous arms and hands were deep black. He looked at her with round, black eyes out of under a pair of long, straight hair things with bulbs on the end. There was a long, thick tail thing jutting out of his lower back, dragging the ground stiffly. He had a gauntlet on one of his hands that had a pair of huge pincers on it, but from the look of it he evidently hadn't grabbed her leg with it: it would easily have hurt much more if he had. "What are you supposed to be?" she asked, genuinely curious.

"I'm a Faunus, duh."

"I don't have time for this." She tossed a cloud to her side and jumped through it, coming out closer to the wreckage and farther from the hostile Faunus. He was shouting something at her, but she was ignoring him, throwing another cloud towards the wreckage. As she went to port to it, though, she was jerked backward violently.

She was flying through the air in quite a similar manner as just a little bit ago falling from the flyer, and she looked to see the Faunus has his hands out toward her, pulling her in, the pincers on his gauntlet gaping. She just in time managed to bring out her own weapon to catch the closing claw as she caught him on the chest with her boots and kicked away from him, wresting the blade away from his grip. "No one escapes a Myrmeleontidae Faunus," he said as if that meant anything.

She turned to leave and he jerked her back again, and this time she kicked him in the face when she broke away. "Leave me alone, I have to see if Fajio's alright!"

"Ha! So there are more of you! I knew it, because we all travel in teams, and we were told humans travel in teams, and you're a human, so you must—" She tried to bolt again and he yanked her back with what she was at this point was convinced was his Semblance. "No, no, you'll go when I say you can go, and I won't say you can—"

She slashed at his face, now, frustrated beyond reason at the bugman's persistence. "Let me go!"

Fajio had been fortunate enough to get his seat belt on in time, despite the Griffon's attempt to drag him out the back after he'd pushed Evegy off. The impact had sent every drop of his insides up against the front of his ribcage, and he sat dazed and trying to keep from vomiting inside his mask. He was certain Evegy was alright, and was rather confident Azoo and Rimer had known what to do if they had been so fast on undoing their seat belts.

He looked to see if Phosthyon was alright, and saw his limp body being ripped from the seat by a Griffon that had crowded its front half into the cockpit. Fajio fumbled with his seat belt and got up, saying something and yet not hearing himself: he realized the shock of the crash had deafened him rather heavily. And then another realization: he didn't have his gauntlet on. It had been in the hold so he could sit in the cockpit more comfortably.

He smacked at the Griffon with his leaden cane in attempt to get it to leave the pilot in his chair, but Fajio was too weak and shaken to make his blows hit home. The Griffon let go anyway, though, and tried to maneuver itself in the small cockpit to turn its head toward Fajio. Who managed to get his cane up and drive it into one of the Grimm's larger eyes. His hearing returned and he made out the thing's roaring outrage as it backed out of the cockpit awkwardly, crowding out its fellows that had been trying to come in.

In the moment of respite this confusion granted, Fajio got Phosthyon's musket off the holding rack on the other side of the cockpit and tried to get its unusually long length pointed down the hall at the oncoming Grimm. He trusted Phosthyon's readiness or forgetfulness to have left the thing loaded as he aimed it at the Griffon forcing its way at him, not the same one from before judging by the lack of a jabbed eye. Fajio pulled the trigger and a pop of noise chased the searing ball away as it lodged into the Griffon's mask. It recoiled from the impact, the shining orb stuck between its eyes, and then it roared and came on again before its head exploded is a splash of light.

The Griffon that had been trying to follow the first into the hall paused only a moment in confusion before pulling back away from the entrance and waiting for the corpse to evaporate and open the path. Fajio began fumbling with the overlong barrel trying to find some way to reload or change the ammo before realizing that he was holding a musket and that it needed muzzle-loaded with a ramrod. He glanced at Phosthyon's body and saw he had a powder case on his belt, and after feeling around, he found the ramrod slid into some sort of holster on the bottom of the musket, but Fajio couldn't remember for the life of him the order of operations to successfully load a musket and had no idea where the pan was on this thing regardless.

As the Grimm corpse evaporated more completely, Fajio leveled the musket's nasty bayonet down the passage, the blade nearly the length of the musket itself and entirely too long for Fajio, who had some trouble holding it steady as it was essentially a sword in itself suspended some four or five feet away from him on a dead musket. A second Griffon forced itself into the passage and came towards him, and evidently supposed Fajio didn't have the sturdiness to spike it. It mustered itself and pounced clumsily at the cockpit. Fajio did manage to hold the bayonet to enter the Grimm's shoulder, but he did not, in fact, have the sturdiness to absorb the bulk of its leap, and he was driven backwards through the windshield, still clinging to the musket as it stood shallowly in the Grimm's mass. They flew out over the hood and Fajio struck against the ground, managing to hold the musket stiff for only a moment, but long enough for the ground to make up for Fajio's own lack of strength. The butt of the musket braced against the earth and the Griffon's own momentum buried the bayonet to the muzzle in it.

The Griffon roared and flailed as it levered over Fajio like a pole vaulter and crashed down on its back, its wings smashing beneath it. It thrashed about, grounded and confused, and Fajio rolled to his side and felt around for the cane that hadn't come out of the flyer with him. He still had his one leaden boot on, and this was all he had as a weapon now. He braced himself on the ground and drew back his good leg and its weighted footwear before launching it forward into the Griffon's mask. It jerked, evidently having taken some damage from this attack, and Fajio shifted himself to kick at it in a stomping motion, managing as it finally rolled to its feet to crack its beak inward. The Griffon stood and swayed before collapsing again and beginning to evaporate.

Fajio tried to get up but his bad leg made sure he knew why he needed a cane, and he had to crawl on all fours to the suspended musket to try and pull it free. It was stuck fast, though, and the body was evaporating slowly. Fajio panted and tried to calm himself. He wasn't used to fighting in this manner. He usually either had his gauntlet or someone else to fight for him. "I don't have the Aura for this … At least that's the end of it."

To prove him wrong on that point, a roar came from the crashed flyer, and Fajio saw coming around the side was a third Griffon. One of its eyes was out, but the other three communicated an extremely angry temperament. Fajio pulled on the musket again, but it was still not coming out very easily.

Fajio looked at the last Griffon as it beat its wings and lifted off, circling above him and no doubt getting ready to slam him with all the additional force gravity had to muster. Fajio pulled at the musket, and it was starting to come lose, but not fast enough. He looked at the Griffon again, and then back at the flyer and its limp pilot. He coughed through his mask. "Well, this is certainly a grim situation."

Azoo had never liked seat belts. Sure, he allowed that they did indeed provide very real protection in most cases, but he couldn't help but think "bisection of the vessel in flight by Grimm" was not one of the things seat belts had been tested against. By the time he and Rimer had gotten them off, the hold had started to dip, the rotor at the tail lifting its ass-end up slightly as the whole thing started fall, and Azoo missed his chance to try and jump him and Rimer across to the cockpit. Not long after, the hold emptied itself like an upturned cornucopia. Azoo and Rimer went tumbling down with the countless boxes of supplies and munitions, their fall faster than that of the hold with its only now dying tail rotor. Rimer was clutching at his chainsaw, eyes cast downward, searching for something to land on on the trampled grassland below and the handful of Grimm scattering away from the falling cargo.

Azoo brought out his extra arms, seeing the futility in finding a cushion on the ground. "Rimer!" he bellowed to get the other man's attention. Rimer looked and understood, swimming through the air toward him. Azoo wrapped his true arms around the smaller fellow and his chainsaw, and turned in the air, bracing his other ten arms downward behind his back.

"Haha, you think you can take this fall?" Rimer said to him as they plummeted and Azoo didn't even have the luxury of seeing the ground coming.

"Think so," he grunted back. He looked past Rimer at the hold, which was falling at an angle. "I don't think the flyer will land on us. If this knocks me out, leave me out here." He knew one of them had to go help Fajio and Evegy, and he also knew that if this fall put him down Rimer would probably be unable to move him.

Rimer looked over his shoulder as best he could, constricted as he was. "Hahaha, no that thing's gonna go to the side a ways." He turned back, smiling his point-toothed grin, but immediately his smile faded. "Wait what did you say?" His eyes went wide. "Here it comes!"

Azoo roared out as his Auric cushion absorbed much of the shock and then immediately fizzled out, letting his wide back take the other half of the fall. He smashed down flat, his true arms releasing Rimer and slamming out to either side spread-eagle as the air was knocked clean out of him.

Rimer rolled free of Azoo as they came down, managing to throw some of the momentum to the side with the maneuver, but still taking a jolt through his teammate's bodily shield. Rimer got to his feet, Gut-Grinder in hand, and dodged out of the way as one of the crates that had fallen with them smashed to the ground in a spray of splinters and rations. "Haha, we need to get clear, man," he said as he started to run out of the drop zone. He looked though and saw Azoo hadn't moved from where he'd hit down.

Rimer stopped and went back for his teammate, aware that some of the falling crates that were starting to come down in force were probably packed with explosives. He tried to get Azoo up, but he outweighed Rimer by at least a hundred pounds easily and was somewhere around two-and-a-half times his size. Rimer shielded his face from a spray of splinters and jerky and slung his chainsaw over his shoulder on its bungee cord.

Rimer had never fancied curling in on himself over his personal problems the way Evegy did, or letting them worm down into his psyche so he'd end up backwards like Fajio or stoic like Azoo. Rimer still had his issues, though, but his issues were his own. As far as Rimer was concerned, questions of "is this right" or "is this wrong" weren't worth worrying over. It all came down to what someone knew to be right, deep down. Rimer knew he probably wasn't the most sane on his surface, but he also knew that he was steadier than a lot of other people. He, at least, did not have internal crises. Rimer knew Rimer, and that was all that mattered.

That's why Rimer knew Azoo was worth pulling out of this mess. Rimer had never really attached himself to too many people—a trait he blamed his sister for having driven into him. Fajio respected that though, and allowed that all Rimer had to do was follow orders, not actually be loyal. After having been through so much with the masked monster, and the bearded blockhead, and the bitchy witch, though, he couldn't help but feel some endearment.

A crate smashed down some twenty feet away and exploded in a flash of fire as Rimer got one of Azoo's legs in each of his arms and started dragging the man like a sled through the rain of falling boxes. He felt the Gut-Grinder shifting on his back, the teeth of its chain scratching a question through his vest: What are you doing? You'll never make it!

Rimer looked up and yanked Azoo forward a foot or two to keep one of the crates from landing on his face. "Haha, we wouldn't make it much farther without him either, GG."

He changed direction as a crate of water bottles splashed into splintered oblivion directly in his path. The Gut-Grinder's bar grazed the small of his back in response: True. One of us would run out of fuel eventually. There are too many empty-things here.

Rimer was making limping progress through the horrible rain, splinters digging their way into his arms as crates narrowly missed him. "Haha, you know, GG, I kind of like these guys."

Oh?

"Yeah." A box of bullets crashed just beside him and the metal pieces pelted his side painfully. He kept walking. "For some reason, I don't think I'd like to see their guts."

The chainsaw rattled its response when Rimer jerked and its chain jingled with a solemn wisdom. I would have thought you'd noticed by now that everything is essentially the same inside.

Rimer noticed the crates were coming down faster. "What do you mean, GG?" He mustered his strength and picked up his pace to a jog, Azoo's limp form dragging over the rough ground.

The chainsaw rustled with Rimer's increased pace, explaining its position. When we cut things, is it not always the same? All things can be cleaved, as we both know, but to the same end: always we separate the things the what was an inside becomes an outside. Don't you see?

Rimer did not see, especially after a metal crate crashed to his left without breaking and kicked up a cloud of dirt instead. "Hahaha! That doesn't make any sense!"

Pebbles from the dirt plume rained down, drumming the Gut-Grinder's response out against its casing. It does and you know it. You can't find someone's insides by cutting them in two, because then it's the outsides of two halves, not the insides of the whole. If you want to see inside, you can't rely on me.

Rimer had miraculously made it out of the drop zone, and Azoo's back was only a little rug burned where his shirt had rode up and the ground had eaten at his dragging skin. Rimer watched the hold of the flyer crash down a few hundred feet away, shaking the earth. "How will I see inside then, GG?" he asked.

He took the chainsaw off his back now and shook it lightly so its quiet clinking of its chain bouncing could answer him. You already can. You saw inside these three and what you saw made you pull this man out of there against your orders.

"You've been listening to Fajio too much, haha. Well okay I can't be cutting people up then, but what about you? What are you gonna do?" At that a handful of Beowulfs showed themselves, having watched Rimer's heroic effort and now ready to engage him now that he wasn't under a rain of crates.

The empty-things have no substantial insides, not like people do, the chainsaw's chain said as Rimer straightened up and held it ready. He revved it up and it roared now in a voice only Rimer had ever heard, had ever believed to be there. Let's turn their insides out, Rimer!

"Hahaha, yeah GG! Let's grind their guts! Hahahahaha!"

A small Nevermore flew about in the air above the writhing black mass that was the oncoming Grimm horde as it waited for some incommunicable signal that would drive it to tear off toward the Faunus and the humans. For now, though, it was milling about and biding its time, and in so doing adjusted course to join a group of its fellows in circling above a great roaring noise on the ground below. The Nevermore eyed the action on the ground below it, saw how a few Beowulfs were thrown backwards, and then joined two of its Nevermore fellows in plunging at the source of the noise, beaks and claws outstretched.

The Gut-Grinder caught them on its chain and ground them to black ruin as Rimer swung the great chainsaw in a defensive arc. There were yet more Nevermores overhead, but this had been the flock's potshot for now: the Beowulfs were coming on again. Rimer cackled and blocked their claws with his Gut-Grinder, turning the parry into a swing that took the lesser Grimms' arms away in a spray of dark fluids. The Beowulfs fell back snarling as Rimer chanced a glance over his shoulder at Azoo's still-unmoving form.

Are you certain he will awaken? the Gut-Grinder's bar squealed as Rimer dragged it through another group of Nevermores.

"Either that or we'll be run over," Rimer said as he was forced to bat away at more flying Grimm. The Beowulfs had stopped coming, evidently having found themselves outmatched. "Hahaha, maybe we can fight them off after all, eh, GG?"

Don't lie to yourself, he heard in its growling engine. He cut through much of the remainder of the Nevermore flock with enough precision and speed that the small bird Grimm seemed to be beginning to give up. Before Rimer could feel any sense of victory from this, though, a gargantuan black monster came driving down through the vacancy in the sky the flock had left, and he only just in time managed to roll out of the way of its car-sized talons slamming the ground.

It was very likely the same Grimm that had brought down the flier. While smaller Grimm species occasionally occurred in larger proportions, all Rocs usually stood some six stories tall, more than twice the size of the largest Nevermore ever reported. The Roc landed fully now, buffeting Rimer with hard gusts as it beat down on its immense four-jointed wings. It pivoted its armored neck to point its five-eyed head and serrated beak at the little man that could have stretched out comfortably in its mouth with room to spare.

"Ha ha!" Rimer laughed up at the giant Grimm and the numerous lilliputian Nevermores that circled about its spiny shoulders. "You ready to rock and roll, birdie?"

The Roc clattered its beak menacingly, issuing a deep croak from its chest as it held itself straight like an owl, and its five spear-headed tails slithered out along the ground to stab at Rimer. Rimer danced away from the things, each one some three or four feet thick, and tipped with brilliantly red stingers. He arced the Gut-Grinder through one as it jabbed at his chest and it recoiled, the sharp tip of its head falling away. The Roc stood watching and rumbled disinterestedly as it reassigned its wounded tail from jabbing to clubbing.

Rimer cut through the heads of two more tails before the first one swung the heavy remainder of its head at his legs and brought him to the ground. One of the uninjured tails slithered forward at the chance, ready to pin him to the ground with its wicked spike, and then all the tails together shuddered as the Roc gurgled in surprise. Azoo was there, having jumped into the air to let his Auric arms all together slam a many-fisted blow into the Roc's ankle joint. The gargantuan Grimm's wings tried to come out to catch it as it went down, but it fell too fast, and the ground shuddered as it crashed into the earth.

Rimer was quick to get to his feet and cut through each of the five tails, severing their heads. Azoo was jumping onto the monster's chest as it got back to its feet, its writhing tails withdrawing away from Rimer's cutting. He revved the Gut-Grinder and ran for its legs, but the Roc was unfurling its massive four-jointed wings and rumbling like thunder. It beat the air with one and then two mighty strokes, and Rimer was sent flying away like an ant from a leaf blower.

Azoo saw this but trusted in his partner's abilities, turning back to his own engagement with the monster. He scaled upward, his many arms allowing him to scramble up the mat of tangled fur the Roc had instead of feathers on its chest. He could feel the vibrations of its rumbling noise as it furled its wings back up. Suddenly, there was a more shrill crying coming from behind him, and Azoo was aware of a few Nevermores clawing at his back. Rather than tender from the fall earlier, though, it was more numb that anything, and his Aura allowed him to largely ignore the smaller Grimm as he scaled their larger counterpart. The rumbling took on a different tone, and then the chest was shifting and Azoo looked up to see the Roc's head bending down towards him, its serrated beak open to tear him from its chest. Azoo let go in time to fall out of the way, the beak closing on a few of the Nevermores and reducing them to a mess of feathers and limbs. The Roc clattered its beak in annoyance, turning its head to follow Azoo's fall, and then flinching as Azoo sent some of his Auric arms stretching forward like grappling hooks to plant into two of its eye sockets. There was a thunderous gurgling as the Roc jerked its head up and away, pulling Azoo along and flinging him high into the air overhead.

Meanwhile, Rimer had managed to find his footing now some two hundred feet away from the black titan, and he was running to close the gap, spinning and looping as he went to keep off the Nevermores that tried to slow his approach. Shortly, a handful of Boarbatusks came rolling from the side on a collision course with Rimer, who was unable to react in time and was blindsided. Rimer could feel his Aura draining from the Gut-Grinder's continuous operation and now the small amounts of damage he was accruing. He stood up and faced the Boarbatusks as they came around and unfurled to size him up. Rimer killed the Gut-Grinder and slung it on his back, frowning as he decided he had to preserve the Aura for now, and not waste it on these small-fries. He was still some fifty feet from where the Roc's car-sized talons were planted, and he was gauging in his mind the best way to get to it when it issued an especially loud gurgle and bucked. The Boarbatusks seemed momentarily taken aback at this sound, and Rimer took the opportunity to leap forward, cackling, and get on top of one of them.

The seized Boarbatusk snorted in confusion and bucked madly before putting down its head and bolting. Its fellows ran alongside, attempting to lash their tusks at where Rimer was sitting low on the Grimm's back and keeping his grip on it with his legs, and in doing so they inadvertently herded Rimer's mount in the direction of the Roc. The victimized Boarbatusk shortly issued a peculiar whinnying noise that made its fellows back off and then it curled in on itself and ran Rimer over, rolling forward and away to come back around. But it had been enough: the brief stolen ride had landed Rimer next to the Roc's red-clawed foot. The other Boarbatusks were there and forming a ring around him, backing him against the talons, and Rimer unslung the Gut-Grinder and fired it back up, laughing madly.

Up above, Azoo had landed on the Roc's masked face and had dug his hands into one of the eye sockets he had gouged to hold on as it shook madly to dislodge him. After a moment of inducing severe nausea in the big man, the Roc held its face steady and Azoo warily stood up to better defend himself from the screeching mess of Nevermores that threw themselves at him in an attempt to force him off the tip of the beak. Azoo felt a blunt jab go into his back and looked over his shoulder to see one of the headless tails suspending itself in all its great length to try and remove him from the Roc's face. As he watched, a second tail joined in as well and together they tried to bludgeon his legs while many of his arms swatted at the Nevermores. The Roc took advantage of Azoo's split focus and bucked its head, throwing the man into the air again and now gaping its serrated beak to catch him.

Just then, however, the Roc gurgled again and its head twitched off center enough that Azoo was able to land again on its face, right at the bridge of the beak between the eyes. Down below, Rimer had just started sending the Gut-Grinder through the tree-thick leg of the giant Grimm in time to have it jerk madly, jumping Rimer up and down and almost tearing his arms off as he kept his grip on the chainsaw. The leg came back down this time, rather than letting the Roc topple a second time, and on its way down threw Rimer off his grip and into the dirt. Rimer got up, coughing and dizzy at the sudden movement, and the Gut-Grinder, separated from his grip, stopped running and remained lodged partway in the Grimm's leg. Rimer grabbed it again and went to start it but was interrupted by a hard blunt force that bounced his face off the guard. He held his nose, cursing, and eyed the Boarbatusks behind him evilly, grabbing the chainsaw. One of the Boarbatusks moved to butt him again and Rimer levered up a leg to kick at it. He was momentarily surprised to find that he had kicked not only the Boarbatusk but the entire world away straight down, and then realized that the Roc had taken off, and did his best to brace against one of its toes and keep his grip on the Gut-Grinder.

For a moment Rimer was recalled to the issue of where Azoo had gone in all this, but the wind carried the sound of an iconic "RahrahrahrahRAHRAHRAH" from the Roc's head. Rimer opened his mouth and laughed hysterically as the air whipped around him and the ground rolled away beneath.

"You are quite slippery, yes, true, but slipperiness is my specialty!" the black-and-yellow bug Faunus said.

Evegy responded by driving the pommel of her New Moon into his his face, his inhuman black eyes squeezing shut as his gauntlet let go of her other arm. He stumbled back and then pulled her to him with his Semblance again, which she had come to expect after having traded blows with him this long. She let herself be pulled and drove her sword at his chest, but he deflected it with the thick glossy-black chitin of his forearm. She closed her hand on one of the bulb-ended antennae things dangling out of his forehead and yanked on it. The Faunus yelped and shoved her away, stumbling and swatting about as his head.

Thus removed from close combat with the bugman, Evegy made sure to keep moving and dodge the crossbow bolts that had started flying at her from the tall grasses since a few minutes after she had started combat with him. The bolts flew past her wide and the bugman seemed especially bothered by her intrusive groping: he had yet to pull her back in yet so she was free to trace the source of the bolts and throw one of her clouds at it. A panicked screaming came from it before another Faunus came running out of it hurriedly with a crossbow in its hands.

He was a small one, and very young-looking, almost completely human but for his pallid yellow-green sweaty skin and the large round shell on his back that evidently was the reason he didn't have a shirt on and had to sling his bolt case at his hip. At having escaped the cloud, the boy relaxed visibly and Evegy took the opportunity to run up on him and grab him from behind—rather awkwardly with the shell in the way—and put her sword up to his neck.

"Let me go or I'll kill him!" she called at the bugman she had been engaged with.

He looked at her and didn't say anything for a moment, frowning thoughtfully.

"You wouldn't actually kill me, would you?" the boy said in her grip.

She looked down at him and he was looking up at her with endearingly childish eyes. She felt herself becoming uncertain at the threat, and she loosened her grip. The boy turned around to face her properly while she tried to think of a way to make herself intimidate what she was beginning to think was actually a schoolkid, and she was so focused on his boyish smile she almost didn't notice his chest puckering into a wart-like mound.

She jumped backward, almost too late to dodge the foot-long spike that fired out of the boy's chest at her own. It flew out through the air before falling uselessly to the ground and melting into a mound of slime. Evegy looked at the child in disgusted surprise and the bugman farther away laughed at her expense and said, "A love dart from a Helicidae Faunus could—"

"Can't you just shut up?" Evegy asked, exasperated, blocking another bolt from the boy's crossbow. "I don't have time for this, just let me go."

"You must not know how wars work," a woman said, approaching from the side leisurely. The other two Faunus straightened up and went to flank her as she approached. She had deep black skin, black like tar, and a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth under a strange dangling thing on her forehead. "You're the enemy, little girl, and that means unless you surrender and drop your weapon you're getting shot dead."

"You're in for it now," the bugman was saying, "Tammy's gonna show you what a Melanocetidae Faunus—"

"I don't know what those words mean!" Evegy barked, shutting him up. "I don't have time to mess with you, go fight someone else."

The woman shook her head but stopped the boy from raising his crossbow. "It's okay, Rolph. Save your bolts, I have this one."

Evegy wanted to turn and walk away, she really did, but she couldn't tear her eyes from the thing on the woman's forehead. For reasons she couldn't quite grasp, the glowing thing was infinitely interesting all of a sudden. She was dimly aware of taking a few slow steps towards the woman, but that didn't seem to matter nearly as much as seeing how the strange protrusion glowed softly, and bounced ever-so-slightly in the slight wind. Evegy even found herself more concerned with finding a pattern in its bouncing than with the fact that the woman had pulled out a blue-and-black blunderbuss and was leveling it at her.

Evegy was finally able to find something more interesting than the strange light when it turned away from her, the woman and the other two Faunus looking over their shoulders surprisedly as a giant Grimm came flying low over the plains in their direction. "What is that?" she sputtered, fumbling with her blunderbuss.

The Faunus boy fired off a bolt, misjudging the distance horribly, as it was still quite far away and easily out of range of it. He loaded another bolt, backing up. "That's a big Nevermore," he said uneasily.

The bugman, though, was already running away to the side, yelling back at the others, "That's a Roc! Get away from its flight path!"

In the time it took this exchange to happen, the Grimm's massive wings had steadily swallowed more and more of the sky, and Evegy could see a cloud tearing up beneath it, the grassland fraying away under the harsh gust it left in its wake this low to the ground. The bugman, having ran a good distance to the side, turned and yanked the woman and the boy to him with the same Semblance he had used on Evegy, and then Evegy brought herself back to her senses and threw a cloud as far to the other side away from the Faunus as she could. She threw another cloud at her feet even as the Roc came close enough for her to make out something on its face. And then she ported out of the way and watched its massive form sweep past.

Azoo, hammering still into the Roc's mask with his mess of arms, noticed a bang of noise from the side. He paused in his assault while the Roc grumbled angrily and noticed they had drawn over a grassland and Evegy was down over there on the ground by one of her clouds. Rimer meanwhile had noticed the same and had also gotten to see a pitch-black woman fire from a big gun a bunch of simmering pellets that dug into the the Roc's chest and knocked a cloud of hair off of it. The Roc writhed and Rimer saw a second pair of massive fuzzy wings tear free from its sides. Using these secret appendages, the Roc spun in its flight and tightened into a corkscrew. Rimer tried to hang on to the Gut-Grinder but was surprised to find the spinning had loosened the bar in the Roc's leg. He was thrown free and tumbled liberally through the grass, managing to roll to his feet and watch the Roc continue corkscrewing as it flew off over the grassland. Rimer stood up and checked his chainsaw, grinning.

"Figures that humans would be taming Grimm," said the tar-black woman, standing some small ways away and muzzle-loading her gun. She scowled at him with a wide mouth full of needles, a strange thing dangling out of her forehead over pale eyes. There were two other Faunus with her, but they seemed intimidated to say the least at the Grimm-borne chainsawman. Evegy popped out of a cloud to Rimer's side and he smiled and showed off his own pointed teeth.

Evegy was saying something, and the one weird bug Faunus was pointing his arms at them, but Rimer laughed over all of it, revving up the Gut-Grinder. "Figures that Faunus would be picking fights they can't win, hahahaha!"

Fajio had decided that either the Griffon was toying with him or that being jabbed in the eye had severely inhibited its depth perception. It had only caught him twice in its pouncing, and Fajio wasn't the most slippery target to pin down. Especially as he was tripping over his borrowed musket trying to get it pointed in the right direction while his leg made him take too long to get up every time the Griffon knocked him down. Fajio finally managed to get the musket's bayonet pointed at the thing properly as it swiped at him again, and he managed to jab it in the shoulder, albeit shallowly. The Griffon roared in annoyance and took to the air again, apparently to try a second time at slamming down onto Fajio, after it had missed its earlier attempt. Fajio followed it with his eyes, trying to get his good leg planted firmly so he could stand the musket up in defense. The Griffon circled quickly and then came down, roaring its fury, and suddenly disappearing in a black flash that sent Fajio tumbling over the ground and the musket flying away.

Azoo was knocked off the Roc's beak as a Griffon crashed into the great Grimm's face and all three of them shared a moment of surprised grunting before he fell away onto the ground below. Azoo got up and watched the Roc go flapping away, dusting himself off. He glanced back the way it had come to see off in the distance a ways Rimer—the chainsaw was unmistakable—and Evegy—the clouds were easy to distinguish—facing off against three people. He would have gone to their aid were it not for the realization that he had landed next to the front half of the flier, and that Fajio was on the ground trying to get up.

Azoo put away his extra arms and went to him, helping him to his feet, relieved yet oddly unsurprised that his masked compatriot had made it through the crash landing. Fajio took the big man's support and looked about the crash site briefly before speaking. "Are the others alright?"

Azoo nodded. "There are Faunus," he added.

Fajio chewed on this for a moment and used Azoo's support to get over to Phosthyon's discarded musket. As he found a comfortable way to hold it as a walking stick, another voice broke the silence.

"When they sent us out here I was certain I'd be bored out of my mind." Fajio and Azoo looked to see a duck-billed man perched atop the crashed flier in an aqua green double-breasted trench coat, holding a brown fedora on his head with one of his black-gloved hands.

"I'm happy to have made your day interesting," Fajio said warily, "but I'm afraid my compatriots and I are here under orders to combat the Faunus."

The man leapt down to the ground across from them and pulled out a switchblade. Fajio caught a glimpse of some sort of flattish tail under the man's coat. "Small world, then. As it would so happen, my fellows and I are here to fight humans."

Fajio stepped back a little to let Azoo get in front of him, the big man's Auric arms unfurling. He checked the bayonet of the musket, rather unsure as to whether or not he could parry a switchblade with it. "I suppose that means we have to kill you, then."

The man's bill turned up at the sides slightly. "Rather, it means you'll have to try."

Varik glared at Dostya with fury in his eyes, "What do you mean we will do nothing to help Nilya?!"

"We cannot get there in in time, and the risk is too high," she replied calmly.

"I can supercharge a teleporter to get to her!" yelled Varik.

"No my boy, you're too valuable. She is not important to our future. I am sorry, but we have no choice. We cannot help her," replied the elderly Brackman in a calm tone. He looked around and his gaze locked on Blair who was at a nearby console controlling several of the drones remotely.

"I do not care that she is not important to you, she is important to me! She is my wife, my soulmate, my…" shot back Varik.

"A regrettable sacrifice, but we cannot expose ourselves or else we will be dragged into this war," replied Dostya as she turned back toward the various screens showing images from surveillance drones depicting the unfolding war. "I warned her, and she ignored those…"

"Blair here is single, and quite pretty," commented Brackman suddenly. Varik clenched his fists as Blair looked up looking rather uncomfortable with the suggestion. She opened her mouth to speak but did not say anything.

Varik glared at the Brackmans before haying in a venomous tone, "Fine… I guess you are right, I can just find another faunus wife." He turned around and stormed out of the room.

"I feared she would interfere with our operations. I hope he can see that the sacrifice will be worth the greatness we will achieve," said Dr Brackman to his daughter.

"I think we should keep an eye on him," replied Dostya coldly.

"I'll do it. It will be less obvious that I am there to make sure he doesn't do anything crazy," suddenly added Blair standing up from her station. Without missing a beat she quickly added, "The drones will be okay in automatic mode, and anyway I best working on charming him if I am to replace Nily." She rolled her eyes with her last comment as she darted out of the room to go after Varik.

Varik left for his room and grabbed a pre packed backpack then headed to the reactor room. There was his current project: a large jump drive that should be able to warp the high tech airship around great distances once completed. He instantly got to work with an angry look on his face as he set his plan in motion. Suddenly he heard a voice behind him, "Um… I am sorry about that. I um… that was… so what are you working on?" asked Blair struggling to find the right words.

"Perhaps if I complete this in time they will be willing to use the airship to help save Nilya," replied Varik in a cold tone.

"But you said it would not be complete for weeks," replied Blair softly.

"I needed more motivation," replied Varik his tone sharp and focused. Blair's ears stood high in the air and she fell silent for a moment as she watched him. She then looked at his pack and pulled out her scroll for a second.

"I'll leave you be then," said Blair softly before she left as she sent a message.

Varik focused his mind on the task at hand. He was quickly modifying the massive jump device to create a one way small gate that would last for several seconds before collapsing, creating a powerful singularity. Varik saw the Brackman's decision to just give up on Nilya as a betrayal. Varik knew if he just left they would hunt him and Nilya. He would strike first and remove the threat, and get to his wife's side at the same time.

Just as he was finishing up the door to the reactor room opened up again, and Blair returned with Cadivus right behind her. She was equipped with her set of mechanical arms and was loaded down with her four submachine guns. Cadivus was just dressed in his flight suit with his holstered sidearm at his side.

"We want to help you save Nilya… Cady here can fly…" announced Blair with a confident smile.

"We might not reach her in time like Dostya said, and they WILL try to stop us," replied Varik.

"I am the best pilot we…" replied Cadivus.

"This is will be quicker," replied Varik as he continued finishing up the modification.

"What are you doing?" asked Blair.

"Turning this into a small long range teleporter," replied Varik, not revealing the last part of his plan.

"I can use the Hawkeye drone over Nily to lock in the coordinates for the jump," replied Blair as she elbowed Cadivus in the side.

"Teleporting it is," sighed the pilot.

"Fine, I will need them in a minute," replied Varik his tone lighter than before as he put in the finishing touches on the teleport before walking over to the door Blair and Cadivus had just entered through. He shut it and quickly locked it down to stop anyone from getting to them quickly once the teleporter was activated. He then went over to his pack and quickly pulled out several parts and assembled his custom rifle that used magnetic rails to super accelerate solid metal rounds at incredible speeds. It also had a special energy chamber that allowed for a uniquely charged shot every time it was used.

"Got the coords," announced Blair as she offered her scroll to Varik. He looked at the device and input the information on his wrist scroll using a hologram keyboard. Varik then completed the rifle and pressed a button on his wrist as the large device came to life. The air smelled of ozone filled the air as the device focused a massive amount of energy on a point in space in the middle of the room. A bright orb of light quickly grew as a bridge was created between two points. Varik then silently walked up to the portal and without hesitation stepped through it. Blair and Cadivus followed behind him and the three instantly appeared from a similar orb that appeared in a field close by a group of friendly faunus.

"Time to kick some ***!" announced Blair as the portal suddenly and violently collapsed in on itself behind them. As she put a large pointed hat on her head that had holes cut out for her ears. She pulled down the rim of her hat over her eyes as a wicked grin grew on her face as she posed.

"Not the bloody witch hat," muttered Cadivus as he placed his hand over his face.

Back at the Cybran Industries airship the teleporter began to create random singularities that tore the parts of the ship from their current position and deposited them in random space. The teleporter destabilized the nearby reactor, which leaked power into the teleporter. This led to the teleporter further degrading to the point it tore itself apart violently creating a temporary rift in space that swallowed half the airship before the reactor exploded violently completely destroying the high tech vessel. Any crew that tried to escape with personal teleporters quickly discovered that all of Varik's teleporter technology was destroying itself just like larger teleporter. Varik never fully trusted the Brackmans and had built in a kill switch into all his teleporters' designs that he could activate remotely.

Ozzy peered out from around the corner, looking for any sign of the Humans. He had taken cover on the second floor if a former pharmacy, looking out through a hole Sal had accidentally blown in the wall. He could hear his Turret Pods spitting acid at targets, gunshots ringing out in the streets, shouts, whirring gears, roaring Grimm, and Sal's maniacal laugh. He pressed his ears flat against his head, trying to block out the auditory onslaught. He caught sight of one of the humans, the one wearing the massive suit of armor, stalking down the street, no doubt looking for Ozzy. He literally couldn't believe his luck, finding one human separated from the other seven, but Sal would never let him hear the end of it if Ozzy didn't take this shot.

He crouched low, his hands glowing as he manipulated the vines growing on the building. Much of his time here had been spent seeding the town, setting up Turret Pods and vines until the town looked like it had been abandoned years ago and nature had taken over. The end result was an intricate web of foliage and flora, all ready to obey Ozzy's will. If only it wasn't so exhausting to maintain...

A sharp tink startled Ozzy, his ears perking up at the sound of a zip line. A human appeared at the hole beside him, grappling up using a strange metal device. The grappling hook retracted and a sword blade took its place as the human charged toward Ozzy. The rabbit Faunus fumbled for his shovel, but before he could grab it, a bolt of bluish-white energy struck the human, electrocuting him and leaving him dazed. Reese swung in through the hole, tripping the human with his staff and knocking him back down to street level.

"You okay, little bro?" Reese asked, crouching next to Ozzy and putting a hand on his shoulder. He looked beat up, but Ozzy knew it looked worse than it was.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I'm sorry, I knew it was a trap, but I thought I could take out the armored guy." Ozzy wasn't used to prolonged combat like this, and he'd been getting sloppy the longer he stayed in the fight. Reese glanced back out the hole, seeing the human he'd stunned rising to his feet. The suit of armor ran up to him, opening up to reveal it had been empty. The human climbed inside, turning his gaze up to the pair of Faunus in the pharmacy.

"Time to go, Ozzy! Your cover's blown." Reese fired a round from his staff to blow out the opposite window, grabbing Ozzy and leaping out. He called up a stone platform, slanting it so he could slide safely back to the ground. The shadows swirled in the alley beside them, and another human stepped out of the swirling darkness, swinging a pair of daggers at Reese. Ozzy lifted his shovel, blasting the human with a shotgun blast that knocked him off balance before he could complete his attack. Reese jabbed his staff forward, and it extended to strike the man in the head. He fell back into the shadows, vanishing from sight before Reese and Ozzy could press their attack.

"Whoo, that was close!" Reese sighed in relief, but Ozzy didn't share his enthusiasm. "What's going on out there, Reese? They're targeting my plants, I can feel it. I just lost all my turrets on the west side."

Reese shook his head, half carrying Ozzy to cover. "We'd lost sight of Shadows and Armor. When Wings and Antlers broke away, I came to check on you. Looks like I showed up just in time, ya?" Rather than being reassured by this, Ozzy just got more nervous, watching the sky and twitching his ears at every sound. The sound of heavy footsteps approaching drew their attention, as the human they'd nicknamed Armor came around the corner. He raised his metal device, transforming it into a rifle as he did. Reese slammed the end of his staff into the ground, opening a hole underneath himself and Ozzy.

"Shadows" appeared at the top of the hole, his daggers shifted into shotguns. Reese swiped his hand left, pulling a sheet of stone over the hole. Shadows opened fire, his shots hammering against the makeshift cover. Reese tapped his staff against the side of the hole, digging a tunnel big enough for Ozzy to crawl through. "Get out of here, Ozzy. I'll stay and hold them off."

Ozzy pressed his hands against the ceiling, a short length of creeper held in each. The vines burrowed into the soil, snaking their way up toward Shadows. When they emerged from the ground, each ended in a large toothy maw, chomping down on his arms and getting him to let off on the bullet barrage. "See you back at the camp." Ozzy nodded to Reese, taking off down the tunnel as fast as he could crawl.

The spin-up was probably the coolest thing about the Riot Cannon's minigun mode, Sal decided. Just that second of soft, high pitched whine as the barrels spun, building anticipation until the loud roar of hot Dust pouring out drowned out all other weapons. Brooke, on the other hand, disliked the moment of reprieve it offered the humans, who took the time to bolt for new cover. She couldn't afford to take her attention off of her own humans, though. While Sal was keeping "Jumbo" pinned, Brooke had to contend with "Darts" and "Rifle". The two humans, one incredibly quick and agile, the other with an arsenal to rival Brooke's own, were keeping her pinned with their own shots.

"Sal!" Brooke yelled as Sal stopped to reload. "I've lost sight of Music Man! Do you see him?" Sal looked around the area, spotting the human in question trying to sneak up on Brooke. "Yeah! I got him!" He broke from cover, launching his Grappling Hand at Music Man, but the hand just passed through, causing the illusion to vanish. Rifle took the opportunity to take a shot, the report of his gun echoing through the square. The bullet struck Sal in the side of the head, compacting against his hard scales and dropping him to one knee. Tendrils of shadow stretched out to grasp at Sal as Darts activated her Semblance, rising from cover to shoot at him with her bow.

Brooke stepped out, swinging her Multi Tool up to fire a barrage of high speed Lightning Dust rounds at Darts. True to her nickname, Darts tried to run for cover, but even she wasn't faster than lightning. She took a few good shots to the chest, causing her to stumble as she ran. Brooke caught a glimpse of light reflecting off of Rifle's scope, blasting a scorching ray of light from her free hand in his direction. She winced as his bullet grazed her ear, ducking back into the cover provided by a bakery. She could hear Darts scramble for cover, but didn't dare step back into Rifle's sights.

Sal shook his head to clear the ringing in his ears, just in time to hear Jumbo let out a mighty shout and leap over the ruined wall between him and Sal, his giant axe raised over his head and ready to strike. Sal stood up quickly, bringing his metal right arm up to block the attack. Jumbo was big for a human, almost as big as Sal, and the sheer strength of his swing dropped Sal back to his knees. Sal swung his minigun up, unleashing a stream of Fire Dust bullets into Jumbo's stomach, but the big man's skin was hard as rock, courtesy of his Semblance. "Is that the best you can do?" Jumbo snarled, practically frothing at the mouth in his rage.

Sal let out a guttural roar as a sickly green aura surrounded him, and he forced himself to his feet. Consuming his own Aura to boost his strength, he swung the barrel of his cannon up into Jumbo's groin, eliciting a pained gasp from the man. Sal drove his fist into Jumbo's chest, draining his Aura to feed his own. Using the leverage, he hoisted Jumbo up over his shoulder, grabbing the big man's leg to keep a hold on him. Using Jumbo as a human shield, Sal rushed toward where he had last seen Darts, now that he wasn't concerned with Rifle shooting him again.

Brooke was surveying the field when she heard a loud guitar strum behind her. She immediately turned and fired, unleashing a hail of bullets into the Music Man. Or rather, another illusion, which flickered and vanished under the assault. "Come on, where are you?" She muttered, straining her ears to identify the source of the sound. Sometimes she envied Ozzy's powerful ears.

"Why, I'm right over hear!" Brooke could tell he was making a pun, and rewarded him with another burst of gunfire. Another illusion vanished. "Oops, guess not!" She could tell the human was trying to get her angry, to draw her away from Sal and the rest of his team. She grabbed a flash bomb, ready to set it off at a moment's notice, turning back toward the square. If she was right about these humans...

Music Man dramatically leapt out from cover, aiming his weaponized guitar at Brooke. With a strum on the chords, a bolt of lightning shot out of the instrument's neck, arcing toward Brooke. She turned, already breaking the flash bomb and forming the light into a stone shield. The attack thwarted, she slung her Multi Tool onto her back, drawing her improved Laser Cannon with the same gesture. She moved her shield, unleashing a searing ray of red light from her gun. Music Man managed to duck, only losing the hat off his head to Brooke's attack.

"Oh, very good!" He cried, playing his guitar faster. As he played, a purple energy formed along his Instrument of Destruction. "A light show to go with my music! Add a little razzle dazzle! Glitz and glam! Turn it all up, it's a spectacle!" The energy formed into the shape of a hand, guided by the music. The hand rushed forward, grabbing Brooke's shield and crushing it. She fired another laser at Music Man, but the hand intercepted, producing a loud discordant bass note.

Music Man winced at the noise. "Sorry, honey. My Semblance let's me turn sound into light. What makes you think I can't do the opposite? Although I'd make a nicer noise than that dreadful gun of yours." He forced the hand forward, blocking Brooke's laser. If she didn't back up, he'd grab her gun and probably destroy it like he did her shield. If she did back up, she'd find herself in Rifle's sights.

In a flash of inspiration and desperation, she stepped back a few paces, giving herself room to work, but not leaving the cover of the alley. She swapped out Dust canisters in her Laser Cannon, loading it with Ice Dust. This would produce a lower heat laser, but it wouldn't overheat the gun as quickly. She activated the secondary fire feature, deploying four smaller barrels around the main barrel. Firing again, she unleashed one continuous beam of light and four smaller rapid shot beams. Music Man moved the hand to block all the shots, again producing an off-key rumble. She brought up her left hand, creating a blinding light ray, which Music Man had to stop playing in order to block. His energy hand faded, allowing Brooke's lasers to reach Music Man, but he was able to stop them reaching him with his Semblance. He was visibly sweating from the effort, the windows of the buildings near him vibrating from the noise he was converting the lights to.

Meanwhile, Sal had been unable to draw out Darts, and Jumbo was flailing around, trying to break free of Sal's grip. Sal obliged by dropping him onto his head, then spinning around the build momentum and fling Jumbo into a nearby wall. He immediately ran for the alley where Brooke was, instantly regretting his decision when one of Rifle's shots struck him in the back. The impact almost knocked him off his feet, but he made it to cover, taking in the sight of Brooke's laser assault. He grinned as he raised his cannon, launching a fireball at Music Man that knocked the human off his feet. Brooke relented on her attack, giving Sal the chance to shoot his wrecking ball hand at Music Man. The ball struck the Instrument of Destruction, smashing through it with a loud twang.

He only had a moment to comprehend what happened before the steel ball changed into a hand, which grabbed onto his shirt and dragged him along the street as Sal retracted the chain. As his hand clicked back into place, Sal released Music Man, swinging his cannon like a heavy club and knocking the human into the wall. Brooke pulled her Multi Tool, firing a short burst of bullets into his head, which exploded into red pulp.

"He ain't getting back up." Sal grinned, still surrounded by his green aura. He didn't notice the chill run down his spine as shadows crawled up his back, until an arrow struck him, bypassing his hard scales. He let out a pained grunt, snarling in anger as he turned toward the source of the arrow. Darts stood at the open end of the alley, firing an arrow up at an arc. As it came down toward Sal, shadowy copies appeared around it, and twenty arrows struck him, bypassing his armor wherever the black mark of Darts' Semblance touched.

The barrage knocked Sal to his knees. He'd never felt pain like this before, except for the day he'd lost his arm. That uncomfortable memory triggered something in him, and an angry growl rumbled up in his chest as he glared at Darts, his pupils narrowing to reptilian slits.

"Sal, your Semblance!" Brooke commanded, concern in her voice as she aimed her weapons at Darts. "Disable your Aura Burn before you consume yourself!" But Sal either didn't hear her or didn't care, screaming in fury as he rushed toward the human archer. "Sal, no!" Brooke shouted, unwilling to take a shot with Sal in the way.

As soon as Sal left the alley, Jumbo swung his axe into his stomach, but the croc barely slowed. He grabbed the big man by the throat, lifting him and draining his Aura. His strength bolstered by the stolen Aura, he tossed Jumbo over his shoulder, where Brooke unloaded into the big man with rapid fire Lightning Dust rounds and a continuous Laser Cannon blast. The human tried to protect himself with his Semblance, but Sal had weakened it to where it couldn't withstand Brooke's full attack.

Darts looked nervous, firing an arrow into the ground in front of Sal. Shadow thorns rose up, poking into Sal's feet and slowing his progress. Rifle fired another shot from his big gun, but Brooke tossed a flash bomb out, shaping it into a stone wall with her Earth Glove. The defensive barrier shattered under the force of the bullet, but the compromised slug merely bounced off Sal's head. In his blind rage, he launched a fireball at Rifle, the cannon ejecting the empty canister as well. The cannonball exploded on impact with the roof, forcing Rifle to move as his cover was compromised.

Darts seemed to realize she was running low on options, as she turned and ran. Sal snarled in rage, chasing after her. Brooke was conflicted for a moment, as Rifle was still out there, but she couldn't let Sal go out there alone the way he was acting. It was a tough decision, but she had to put her faith in her team mate. Left alone, Rifle could take them out while they were scattered and weak. Leaving Sal to his hunt, she went into the apartment building Rifle was hiding in.

With Ozzy heading to safety, Reese prepared himself for the upcoming fight, taking several short breaths and puffing them back out. He took one deep breath, placed his hand against the ceiling of his hole and his staff an inch above the floor. He tapped the staff on the ground, opening a hole to the surface as he raised the floor, launching himself out with a jubilant whoop.

Armor had converted his weapon into a shovel, attempting to dig into Reese's foxhole. Shadows was using his daggers to cut Ozzy's carnivorous vines, prying them off his arms. Reese blasted Shadows with a stun round, causing him to lock up as the Electric Dust courses through him. Armor turned toward Reese just as the Faunus swung his staff like a baseball bat, hitting the human in the jaw. His armor protected him somewhat, but his head turned from the impact. Reese shifted his grip and swung the other way, knocking Armor's head to the other side. Reese followed with a golf swing directly into the human's chin, knocking his helmet off and toppling him onto his back.

Reese heard the click of Shadows' knives transforming into shotguns, raising a pillar under himself to propel himself to safety. He fired a shot from his staff at Shadows while in midair, but the human sank into his own shadow, dodging the blast. Reese raised another pillar, catching the edge and hanging from it one-handed as he surveyed the battlefield. He saw Armor struggle to his feet, trying to put his helmet on. Reese took the shot, the bullet slamming into Armor's shoulder and spinning him around.

Shadows appeared on top of the pillar, aiming his guns at Reese. Reese simply let go of the pillar, dropping out of Shadows' sight. He kicked off the side of the pillar, landing on top of another one that he raised from the ground. He extended his staff, aiming for where he'd been just a moment before. Sure enough, Shadows peered over the edge, getting hit in the face by Reese's staff. The hit knocked him off the pillar, but he turned into shadow, swirling around the stone and vanishing into its shadow.

Armor managed to get his helmet back on, converting his tool from shovel to rifle. He aimed at Reese, but another pillar raised under his feet, throwing his aim off. Reese had meant to toss him into the air, but that armor made him heavier than Reese thought. He fired a stun round at Armor, the metal conducting the electricity, making sparks dance along Armor as he struggled to keep his balance.

Suddenly, he heard the sound of rushing wind, turning around just in time to see the human they called Wings rushing toward him. Her nickname came from the glowing wings on her back, which she used to fly. She held her staff like a lance, striking Reese and knocking him off his pillar. He pulled a dagger in free fall, launching it like a grappling hook and hooking one of his pillars, pulling himself to safety. He clung to the side as Wings flew over to Armor, her hands glowing with white light. She laid her hand on his shoulder, the light suffusing him as Wings helped him stand.

Reese saluted her in respect, until a shadowy tendril struck the pillar next to him. The tendril was connected to Shadows, who pulled himself up next to Reese, holding a dagger in his other hand, which he tried to plunge into the monkey's heart. Reese barely had enough time to pull his dagger loose, Shadows' dagger slicing up his chest as he dropped. He kicked off the pillar, raising a slanted platform to catch himself, rolling as he landed. He struck the pillar with his staff, reducing it to rubble with Shadows still stuck to it.

Armor leapt gracelessly off his pillar, trying to crush Reese under his weight. Reese threw himself back, sliding slightly as he aimed his staff at the human. Wings landed next to Reese, slamming her staff into the ground and raising a cage of light around him. The rising bars knocked his staff from his hands, sending it tumbling across the street. Armor raised his rifle, but Reese dropped to his knees, pressing his palms to the ground and surrounding himself in stone.

He heard Armor protest loudly, upset that he hadn't gotten a hit in on Reese yet. The low hum of the cage vanished, and he heard the click of shotguns being primed. He sighed, certain he'd buried Shadows under rubble. He silently commended the human for his toughness, curling up into as small a ball as he could. He heard the shotguns go off, blowing a hole in his stone wall. "Found you!" He happily exclaimed, pressing him palms against the stone just below the hole.

The wall shattered, all the pieces flying toward Shadows, who grunted in pained surprise. Reese drew his daggers, shooting the blade up and hitting Wings, who was hovering above his pillars. The blade stuck in her stomach, and she instinctively tried to fly up. Reese jumped as he retracted his chain, pulling himself into the air rather than pulling Wings toward him like Sal would have done. Reese winced as he felt something hit his foot, looking down to see Armor holding his grappling hook. With Armor hooked to him and him hooked to Wings, Reese was suspended in midair.

Shadows let out a groan, half buried in rubble. He collapsed into shadows, which swirled and reformed outside the wreckage of the pillar. He staggered to his feet, extending a shadowy tendril to grab Reese's other foot. Wings winced as she clutched her stomach, her hands glowing with light. Reese winced at the sight, knowing she was hurting because of him. Even though they were enemies, he hated the thought of causing anyone any undue pain. He released the hook, falling to the ground as the chain retracted.

He hit the ground hard, using his Semblance to break the stone down to sand, trying to soften the landing. Shadows sank into the ground, appearing beside Reese with his daggers drawn, while Armor shifted his tool from grappling hook to sword, charging in the traditional way. Wings slowly descended, her staff transforming into a sniper rifle as she did. Reese was quick enough to block Shadows, but didn't like the odds of fighting all three at once. He had one more trick up his sleeve, something he'd been working on for a while, but he'd never had a chance to test it out. He smiled sadly, shrugging. It was now or never, it seemed.

Shadows lunged for him again, but Reese grabbed the human's arm with his tail, pulling him off balance. Reese breathed in sharply, gathering as much Aura as he could, gathering it in his core. He felt warm, and tense, like a coiled spring bathed in direct sunlight. He slammed his palms onto the ground, releasing his Aura into the earth below with a shout.

The earth shook, stopping Armor in his tracks and making Shadows stumble. Without warning, massive stones burst from the earth all around Reese. One of them came up under Armor, tossing him into the air, before he smacked into another one. Shadows jumped from one shadow to another, trying to stay clear, but more stones kept cropping up. Smaller stones burst from the large ones, like branches of a tree, one of them catching Armor as he fell. Wings tried to ascend, but stony leaves grew on the stone branches, cutting off her access to the sky. One of the branches struck her, knocking her to the ground. Shadows leapt from the shadow of one of the branches above Reese, trying to stab the Faunus from above, but a branch burst from the trunk of the tree, impaling the human. He collapsed into shadow, a gooey black mass hitting the street below before reforming into human form.

Reese held out his hand, his staff coming to him on a wave of earth. Shadows struggled to rise, still bearing his injury from the stone forest. Reese was feeling exhausted from summoning the stone forest, but knew this fight was far from over. He leveled his staff at Shadows, firing a stun round into the human. Shadows struggled, so Reese shot him with another stun round, rendering him unconscious. Even after all this, he refused to kill when he could incapacitate. Leaping from tree to tree, he found Armor amongst the branches, his weapon and helmet far below him on the ground, his armor dented and damaged, unable to be taken off without help. The human seemed almost calm, though Reese could see it was more like resignation. "Hey, better luck next time, ya?" The human looked at him, baffled, while Reese just gave him a thumbs up before leaping away.

He was starting to get nervous when he couldn't find Wings anywhere, wondering if she'd flown off after Ozzy or something. But he soon found her in the center of the forest, kneeling over Shadows. She had her hands pressed against his chest, glowing light stitching his wounds back together. In her haste, she had dropped her staff behind her, and Reese was quick to grab it as he landed. "He gonna be okay, brah?"

Wings jumped at the sound of his voice, reflexively reaching for her staff. She grimaced at the sight of Reese holding her weapon, but she squared her shoulders and faced him with dignity. "I've made him comfortable. If we go to meet the gods today, at least I can say that." Reese smiled, pointing his staff at her. "Yeah, you've got that going for you. Which is nice, but I think you should hold off on meeting the gods just yet. Enjoy your nap." He shot her in the face with a stun round, knocking her out.

With three out of three taken down, Reese wanted nothing more than to find his bros and relax. He wasn't sure what happened to Ozzy, but he knew where Brooke and Sal were, so he dropped Wings' staff and set off for the town square.

Ozzy followed the tunnel until it emptied out into the sewers. He threw a silent, frustrated tantrum, shaking his fists and stomping at the ground in adorably impotent rage. He really didn't want to be in the sewers after what happened last time. "If I see even one Snapdragon, I might just snap!" He muttered, looking for a ladder out of here.

He found his way back to the street, looking around to get his bearings. "Okay, camp is... that way! I can make it back and get reinforcements!" He breathed a sigh of relief, until his sharp ears heard the sound of... sniffing? He crouched low, holding his shovel close, straining his ears to identify the source of the sound. He heard flapping overhead, pointing his shovel up in terror, convinced Wings had found him. But to his surprise, it was just a bird. A small black bird, no bigger than a raven. He sighed in relief, watching the bird. It glanced down, and his blood ran cold when he saw the white bone mask on its face. "Not a bird!" He panicked as he ran toward the Faunus camp. "A tiny Nevermore!"

The wall beside him suddenly broke as something crashed through it, blocking his path to the camp. It was a Beowolf, and it snarled angrily as it stepped toward him. Ozzy was afraid, but his fear took a backseat when he noticed the Grimm's eyes weren't red, but green. He looked closer, noticing that the eyes themselves were still red on the very edges, but a green glow covered most of them. The Beowolf didn't give him a chance to investigate further, taking a swipe at him with its massive paw. Ozzy jumped, kicking off the offending limb to give himself some space. His hand glowed green, and a vine snaked off the building behind the Grimm, wrapping around its throat. Ozzy tightened the grip as the Beowolf struggled, the vine sprouting sharp thorns that delivered a paralytic venom into the creature's blood. The Grimm fell limp as Ozzy strangled it, until his vine sliced through the neck, decapitating the Beowolf and reducing it to black mist. Ozzy glared at the most as it evaporated, saying nothing.

"Okay, camp is that way!" He heard himself say. In shock, he whirled around, seeing the tiny Nevermore. To his surprise, it spoke in his voice. "I can make it back!" He scowled at it, like he'd seen Sal do before, pointing his shovel at the bird. He barely noticed the green eyes before he blew the Grimm away with a shotgun blast. It exploded, leaving just a pair of feet before it turned to mist.

"Whoa! Kind of overkill, don't you think?" He heard a voice behind him (again!) say. He whirled around, firing his shotgun blindly. The shot buried into the wall of the building, hitting nothing. He looked up, seeing a woman with antlers on the second floor, peering out a window. Ozzy let out his breath slowly, concerned that he'd almost hit another Faunus.

"Sorry about that!" He called up to her. "I just... really hate Grimm. Especially the canine ones." The girl nodded, pursing her lips in thought. "If you hate the canine ones, why'd you shoot the bird?"

Ozzy rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment, putting his shovel away. "It, uh... It mimicked me. I didn't want it to do that."

"Oh, you mean because the Faunus camp is that way?" She innocently asked. Ozzy nodded, becoming uneasy. The girl smiled. "Perfect. Thanks!" She pulled her head back in, accidentally knocking her antlers off when she bumped them against the window. She fumbled for them, but it was too late. Ozzy had already seen. "...shit."

"A human!" Ozzy shouted, grabbing his shovel again. Antlers' hands glowed green, and a pair of Beowolves leapt out from the ruined first floor wall, their eyes glowing green. They lunged, but Ozzy jumped 10 feet straight up, firing a scattershot shell at them and peppering both Grimm with Earth Dust pellets. He landed in front of them, his hands glowing as the seeds now buried in their skin sprouted, thin vines digging deeper into their bodies. The Grimm writhed in pain until the vines protruded from their backs, wrapping around each other and binding the two together in agony. The vines continued to grow until the two were trapped in a sphere of vines, unable to move, their pained cries muffled by the plants.

Antlers stepped back from the window in horror. "Okay, time to go..." Ozzy didn't give her the chance, loading a Fire Dust shell into his shovel, launching a fireball through the window at her. The blast knocked her on her butt, also lighting the room ablaze. She pulled a spear off her back, the head splitting open to reveal the barrel of a gun. She loaded in a Gravity Dust round, blasting a hole in the wall. She leapt out, plunging her spear downward toward Ozzy.

He leapt clear, loading a Gravity Dust slug into his shovel when he landed. The ground rumbled as Antlers' hands glowed green, and a Grimm leapt from the earth. It was a Creep, an armless dinosaur-like Grimm that literally chewed through the earth to ambush prey. It too had green eyes, and Ozzy realized that Antlers had a similar Semblance to his, only capable of controlling Grimm instead of plants. The ground rumbled again, and two more Creeps burst from the ground, flanking Ozzy. They charged at him, but he ducked, causing them to butt heads and knock each other senseless. Ozzy fired a shotgun blast into each of them, killing them instantly.

Antlers pointed her spear at Ozzy, firing another Gravity round at him while sending in the Creep. Ozzy rolled to the side, summoning his bark armor as the Creep leapt at him. It landed on him with its clawed feet, but his armor protected him. Hitting him caused his armor to release spores, which wafted up into the Creep's face. It sneezed, preventing it from biting Ozzy, then sneezed again. It kept sneezing, staggering back as the spores worked their way into its sinuses, headed for the brain.

Ozzy jumped to his feet, leaving the Creep to its fate. Antlers watched him cautiously, a hint of fear in her eyes. "What is wrong with you, little bunny man?" She and Ozzy stared each other down for a moment, then both dropped to their knees, slamming their glowing palms against the ground. "I was saving the best for your camp, little rabbit! I've just been skimming the surface so far. But now? It's time to dip deep!" Ozzy said nothing, calling upon the seed he'd planted days ago, when he'd first got here, and had been nurturing ever since.

The Creep staggered by, still sneezing.

The ground shook and cracked as a massive white face emerged from the earth, ten blazing red eyes covered in green aura. The Death Stalker, a scorpion Grimm over 20 feet long, emerged from its underground cave, ready to serve the human who had forcibly dominated it.

From the town, there came a low rumbling as the abandoned clock tower freaked and groaned, the massive plant inside forcing its way through the walls. It resembled a 30 foot tall rose, with a dozen small vines around its stem, and two long vines ending in toothy maws like a Venus fly trap. In the center of the rose bud was another tooth filled mouth, with a smaller mouth on the end of a small, extendable stalk inside. The massive plant lurched forward, its roots acting as primitive legs.

The Death Stalker turned toward the town, charging toward the Vilethorn with clacking claws. The Vilethorn reached out with its Carniverous Vines, stumbling toward the Death Stalker.

The Creep finally sneezed itself to death.

Faunus Huntsman and Human Huntress looked at their chosen champions in surprise and disbelief, then at each other. "Where did you find a Death Stalker on Vale?" Ozzy asked. Antlers shook her head. "Actually, it was on Island G. Took a lot of convincing to get them to ship it back here. Where did you find that plant?"

Ozzy shrugged. "There's a lot of fucked up stuff on Menagerie. I've been using trimmings of one of those things for my vines for a while. I only had the one seed for the whole thing, though. I hope I didn't waste it here."

"Oh, well, I'm flattered." Antlers smiled. "That you think I'm worth your Trump card like this. Honestly, I'm not anything special."

Ozzy looked at her in confusion. "But... you can control Grimm! I've never heard of a Semblance like that before!"

Antlers bit her lip, looking at the ground before meeting Ozzy's gaze again. "That's... not my Semblance. My Semblance lets me create illusions. I've only recently figured out how to make them semicorporeal, like the tiny Nevermore from earlier."

Ozzy got pale, looking at Antlers intently. "So... all those Grimm we're obeying you because...?"

Antlers blushed, looking away from Ozzy. "I covered their faces with illusionary blinders. They can't see anything most of the time, and see me as another Grimm. I have no control over them."

Ozzy let that sink in, before realizing he didn't hear any fighting anymore. He looked over, seeing his Vilethorn cut in half, its vines wriggling pathetically as the Death Stalker silently approached Antlers.

With its eyes burning red.

Ozzy jumped up, grabbing his shovel as he did. His sudden movement caught Antlers' attention, but she turned toward the Death Stalker just as it stabbed its stinger forward, directly into her chest. Ozzy fired on the Grimm with his shovel, unloading four scattershot shells into its face before he clicked empty. The Death Stalker grabbed Antlers with one claw, pulling its stinger free as it grabbed for Ozzy with the other claw. He rolled away, grabbing the spear from the ground and fumbling for the trigger. He found it, firing a Gravity round into the Grimm's face. The recoil knocked Ozzy onto his back, but he heard a crack and a squish as the high powered round broke part of the bone mask, exploding one of the Grimm's eyes. It shrieked in pain, diving back underground and dragging Antlers with it.

Still holding the spear, Ozzy slowly turned, listening for the massive scorpion. He heard the rumbling as it started digging it's way back up, jumping as high as he could at the last possible second. The Death Stalker burst from the ground, mandibles snapping shut on air. Ozzy clung tightly to the spear, the tip pointing downward as he fell toward the Grimm's face. The point struck one of its eyes, his weight driving the spear deep into the skull. It shrieked in pain, and Ozzy threw a handful of seeds into the open mouth. Leaping to the ground, Ozzy's hands started glowing, accelerating to seeds' growth into a highly toxic weed. The Grimm swallowed the sprouting seeds, having no concept of what it just ate. Ozzy strained as he made the weed grow, the Death Stalker shuddering of poison ravaged its insides, killing it from within. It crawled out of the ground and immediately tried to dig back in, making it about halfway before it started spasming, dissolving into mist as it died.

Ozzy took a moment to catch his breath, slowly reloading his shovel. Wordlessly he made his way back toward camp, wanting to just lay down for a bit.

Brooke made her way into the foyer, slinging her Laser Cannon onto her back as she ran she projected a beam of light from her hand onto the second floor, hardening it to stone with her Earth Glove. She ran up the makeshift ramp, not even caring that it collapsed behind her. She took the stairs leading up to the roof, jumping and kicking the door open to preserve her momentum. She found Rifle setting up another sniper nest behind a brick chimney, firing a short burst from her Multi Tool as soon as she saw him. He dropped the oversized rifle, drawing a six cylinder revolver from his belt as he took cover behind the chimney.

He took a blind shot, the bullet hitting Brooke in the chest, where her armor protected her. She took cover behind the door, taking a moment to calm her breathing. Her hand glowed with light, which she wrapped around herself, making her nearly invisible. She slowly stepped out from cover, moving a quietly as she could toward Rifle's position. She could hear him putting something together back there, but couldn't see him. As she approached, she saw him set up another gun, this one a nine barreled pepperbox, designed to fire all barrels at once. He scanned the area, his gaze seeming to linger on her for a moment, making her freeze. She slowly raised her Multi Tool, taking careful aim, waiting for him to make a mistake.

A loud roar came from down the street, recognizably coming from Sal. Rifle glanced away, looking toward the forest, giving Brooke the opportunity she needed. She pulled the trigger, unleashing a stream of bullets at Rifle. He fell, pulling the trigger on his pepperbox as he did. The cobbled together gun released high caliber slugs, scattershot shells, a couple explosive rounds, and even a gout of fire, all in Brooke's general direction. Her invisibility shattered under her own attack, so she dove for cover as quickly as she could, dodging the worst of the attack and only getting battered by the explosive rounds' blast radius.

Rifle popped out of cover, bruised and bloody, firing wildly with his revolver. His shots found their mark, hitting any exposed part of Brooke she hadn't managed to get behind cover. When she heard his gun click empty, she vaulted over her protective chest-high wall, blasting the gun out of Rifle's hand. He fumbled for another weapon, drawing a sword from his back. From his stance, it was obvious he never thought he'd need to use it, so Brooke closed in, transforming her Multi Tool into melee mode. He slashed at her, but she deflected his swing with her blade, doing a riposte and nicking his face.

Rifle decided to go for broke, charging at Brooke, but she blinded him with a flash of light, dodging to the side and slashing her blade across his back. He tried for a defensive stance, but a beam of light on his sword arm hardened by her Earth Glove encased his hand in stone, denying him any mobility with his wrist. She raised the Multi Tool, shifting it to ranged mode and launching an explosive Dust canister at Rifle. The blast knocked him onto his back, his sword clattering as it fell over the edge of the roof.

Brooke rushed in, taking a moment to relish her victory. Trading shots with the human had been exhilarating, but up close he was outmatched. Before she could execute him, he rolled backwards, off the roof, falling presumably to his death. Confused by his apparent sentiment of "you didn't win", Brooke stepped forward, seeing Rifle hanging from the edge by one hand. He reached up with the other to grab her ankle, attempting to pull her off. Brooke waa furious that she had fallen for that, managing to grab onto Rifle as she fell. Unable to support both of them, his hand slipped, dropping both of them three stories to the street below.

Thinking quickly, Brooke swapped to Gravity Dust rounds, firing straight down. The recoil of the gun actually slowed her fall, allowing her to roll with the impact and survive the fall, but it hurt like hell. Rifle wasn't so lucky, twisting as he fell and landing on his back, which broke from the impact.

Brooke rose slowly, noting that everything hurt. She lamented leaving the giant rifle on the roof, but she didn't have time to go back for it. She started moving as fast as she could down the road, toward the forest outside of town, where Sal had gone.

Sal chased after Darts, but was unable to keep up with her. She was fast, and he'd have given her credit for that if he wasn't so unbelievably enraged. This human had managed to hurt him, to pierce his armor, to paint him black with her Semblance! Her attack had not only injured his body, but his pride. He had chased her down an alley, but had lost her when the alley ended in a "T". He got down on his hands and knees, smelling the ground like an animal.

The street smelled of industry of traffic. There were no cities like this on Menagerie, let alone the swampland Sal was used to hunting in, but he could definitely smell human. Not sure if it was the one he was looking for or not just made him angrier. He was about to turn left when he spotted movement. Darts jumped from cover when he turned toward her, shooting an arrow at his face. Sal snapped at the arrow, biting down on the shaft and breaking it in two. He growled in annoyance, then the arrowhead exploded less than a foot from his face. The blast knocked him against the alley wall, but couldn't keep him down.

He leapt up, bellowing his anger in one loud, bestial roar. Darts turned and ran for the forest, Sal hot on her heels. He vaguely noticed her quiver was empty, do he raised his cannon, ready to take her out. The cannon clicked, and he remembered he was out of ammo as well. Switching hands, he launched his Grappling Hand at her, but she heard the clunking chain and dropped, sliding across some rocks and ducking under the hand. She threw a dagger of pure shadow at Sal, which bounced off the scales on his chest.

Stopping turned out to be a mistake, as it allowed Sal to reach her. He punched her in the face, sending her tumbling back down a hill. He threw himself at her, tackling her as she tried to stand. Sickly green mist radiated from his body as he held her down, draining the Aura from her and anything else within a 30 foot radius. He knelt on her legs, raising his metal right hand. Normally, he'd just start punching an enemy if he had them pinned like this, but Brooke had made adjustments to his Hand, giving it a new feature. Sharp spikes extended from his fingers, and the hand itself folded up into a wedge shaped drill. His drill hand began rotating on his wrist, and he stabbed the drill into Darts' heart, ending her struggle.

Sal felt his strength fade as the rage left him, no longer burning his Aura for the strength boost. He returned his hand to normal, cleaning the blood off it before he stood. He looked out at the trees, feeling a little tired and very hungry. Ever since coming to Vale, he'd been fighting (in one way or another) the whole time. Fighting boredom as they prepared the ambush, fighting with other Faunus when he didn't set something up right, and now fighting the humans. It was everything he'd ever wanted, everything he'd trained for, and now? He just wanted a break.

His existential crisis was interrupted by a low grunting noise behind him. Turning to look, he saw an Ursa wandering through the trees, as if looking for something. "And now there's Grimm, too? This day just gets better!" He loaded more Fire Dust into his cannon, shouting a wordless challenge at the Ursa. It took note of him, roaring a challenge in return, rearing up on its hind legs as it did. Sal was about to charge in when there was a sharp whoosh, and the Ursa suddenly stopped. The top half slid to the side before both halves evaporated. Sal blinked as Brooke stood there, Multi Tool in hand.

"Hey, Brooke!" He grinned, lowering his weapon. "You take care of that other guy?"

"I did." She nodded, returning the Tool to gun form. "There might be more, though. We need to regroup. Let's move."

"You got it." Sal fell into step beside Brooke, headed back toward the town and the camp.