Orx of Twinleaf
Branch into Psyche
- 273
- Posts
- 9
- Years
- The Corner of Hither and Yon
- Seen Mar 12, 2023
Team FEAR
(condensed for reduction of clutter and broken in the middle for your convenience)
"It was my cross to bear. I had made the stuff; it didn't matter that I'd voted against using it. It's just … So. A lot of the students were scared to fight. They didn't want to go to war. Why would they? They were still children, really, and had spent all their training and education coming up to be Grimm-fighters, to be protectors. They didn't want to be soldiers. So, they had me working in the lab down there for months. They knew that war was coming, or they wouldn't have had me start so early. They told me it was just going to help shy students embrace Grimm combat. I should've known better. I called it 'liquid courage,' this fluid that erased someone's fear and put them into a sort of combat high. No sooner had I tested it with Team JONT's Dracruela hunt than did I catch wind of war in the air. The faculty all got together with some generals and we put it to a vote. Myself and two others were the only ones opposed. I did everything in my power to draft teams for lesser patrols and hunts, to get as many of them as I could out of deployment, because I knew what they were going to do. They drugged the first few shiploads of kids that reached the ambush point to make them fight the Faunus. No matter how many kids I managed to keep from going, I know a lot of them died because of what I made. They ran into fights they didn't need to fight, pissed off the Faunus, made the battlefield a slaughtering block. If this is the way Beacon works, if this is the way the world works, I want no part of it. We're doomed to the Grimm now, and I'm going out on my own terms."
—Excerpt from the suicide note of Dr. Swanni Podegard, quoted from Cage Cast Open: The Revolution of the Faunus
(condensed for reduction of clutter and broken in the middle for your convenience)
Spoiler:
"Damn it all anyway," Fajio muttered, struggling to his feet for the umpteenth time. No sooner had he managed to prop himself up on his borrowed musket than did the Faunus man sail by again and plant another firm kick into his chest, sending him right back into the dirt. This latest in what had been a series of wholly unnecessary attacks didn't inhibit the man from deftly parrying away Azoo's frenzied spray of punches.
The man flipped away and twirled his switchblade, watching Fajio get up as Azoo tried again to form a human shield. "You will forgive my saying so," he said, his duckbilled mouth turned up at the sides, "but I get the creeping feeling I've caught you unprepared for battle." He darted forward and Azoo threw his extra arms upward to block an anticipated leap, but the Faunus tucked into a roll and went between the big man's legs, slicing outward with his switchblade into Azoo's knee. Azoo flinched from it and was slow to grab at the man as he continued into a rolling kick that put Fajio right back down again.
Fajio hit the ground hard and took a moment to convince himself it was, indeed, worth trying again. He couldn't help but notice the Faunus wasn't slicing at him for some reason, as much as he was bullying him. Fajio wheezed a rattling cough and moved to get up again, saying, "As much as I'd like to convince you otherwise, this is our 'battle-ready' state."
The Faunus launched another rib-straining kick into Fajio's chest at this, but Azoo hadn't tried to screen this time and had stayed back. Now he loomed with all his massive arms spread and ready to snare his slippery prey. Azoo caught the man in a many-armed cage, pinning him totally. "Chest Compressor!" he bellowed as he tightened his arms. The man wormed about and managed to snake his arm out of between two of Azoo's extra arms. He reversed the switchblade in his grip and jammed it into one of the arms wrapping his chest. Azoo gasped and all his arms flew open in surprise, the stabbed arm jerking violently and then going stiff before fading away. Azoo flexed his other arms experimentally: he wasn't supposed to feel pain out of his Auric arms.
"Even should you present them in bulk," the man said, dashing away and kneeing Fajio in the mask as he went, "you should never bring fists to a knife fight."
Fajio fell back on his rump, the musket clattering to the ground again. He was getting rather tired of being toyed with; it was becoming obvious the man was stalling for some reason—likely to allow his teammates as much time with a numbers advantage against Evegy and Rimer as possible. It bothered Fajio that his own numbers advantage amounted to so little against this man. "Pfah!" he growled, the sound through his mask like an old machine skipping a gear. "To hell with it, I'm switching him!"
"Oh?" The Faunus, who had stabbed another of Azoo's arms into oblivion in response to the latter's attempt at a piledriver, ran at the bigger man and planted a foot on his shoulder, using him as a step and tumbling clear over him. He landed in front of Fajio as Fajio got ready to put his Semblance to use. The Faunus drove his switchblade into Fajio's leg—the bad one of course—and left it buried to the handle in his thigh. Fajio made a horrid noise in his mask that sounded every bit like a mower striking stones and he felt his Semblance recede. It just left him in the same way it sometimes did when his Aura was totally spent, except he could feel his Aura still up—for all the more it had mattered in cushioning the strike. Fajio tried to pull the blade out, but it was buried deep, and it felt as if it had become one with every nerve in that region. Azoo was there beside him and gave it a forceful yank. Fajio screamed but the blade didn't budge, and Azoo let go of it to face the Faunus again.
The man had produced a pair of fresh switchblades from his trench coat, and was adjusting his fedora. "I thought that was you. Fajio Rekstum, if I'm not mistaken. Bodysnatcher."
"How could you possibly have that information?" Fajio had given up trying to get up now: the pain was dizzying if he so much as thought about it. He leveled the musket's bayonet instead, to catch the man if he came at him again.
"I met your grandmother, back when I was only a mere child. That sort of Semblance takes a few generations to dilute; turns out our theories about you were right on the mark." He flipped sideways from Azoo's stretching punches, and stabbed one of the offending arms into fading. Azoo decided to put his extra arms away at that, and to just let some talking buy his Aura time to recharge. "Nungerfaldt knows what he's on about, after all."
"Nonsense," Fajio said. "You'd have to be half a century old to be able to remember that far back; and I know all the Faunus they have out here are hardly any older than I am."
The man opened a flap of his trench coat, revealing a tarnished gold badge of some sort. "Fifty-six, thank you." Fajio could hardly believe that, but he supposed there were signs of age around the eyes he hadn't noticed before. Fajio didn't recognize the badge the man was showing him, but it certainly looked old, even from a distance. "We Faunus had a secret service of our own back then too, you know. When they put up this Aura school some of us went in to be instructors, but a handful of field agents like myself decided to go in for some Semblance training."
The man shrugged. A gust of wind went through the area and sent his trench coat flapping, revealing plain pants on plainer suspenders, all laden down with holsters of knives, switchblades, and a few antique-looking pistols. Fajio saw the man's flat tail for a moment before he closed his coat back up. "Your grandmother was the one who put my family on the exodus ferry personally. She was one of the only humans who I could remember as I grew up in Menagerie, and she instilled in me a sense of fear. Rekstum the Psychopomp was someone my generation checked under its beds for. I naturally took the opportunity to spy on her son once I went into the field"—Fajio twitched at this—"but Waltzur was just a man like any other. We almost didn't think to watch you at all; it is a good thing Angor decided to take you under his wing and draw attention to your Semblance."
Fajio had against all odds managed to sneak to a standing position during this speech, and was now leaning heavily on the musket. "Yeah yeah, we have mind-readers among humans too. You're not going to shake us with that manner of voodoo."
The man raised an eyebrow. "Oh, no, I'm afraid my Semblance is quite barebones: learned too late in life. All I can manage to do with it is break your Semblance when I stab you, which I'm sure you've noticed." Fajio rubbed his thigh at this reminder. It wasn't bleeding, but it honestly might have been better if it was. The man continued. "You have eyes on us and we have eyes on you, that's how espionage works. It is not as though humans are incorruptible, and many a Faunus can get away with walking around in public here with the right clothes on. Why, a chimp Faunus might even get away with nothing more that wide boots and a dedicated razor."
Azoo frowned at this remark and looked at Fajio, who decided not to acknowledge what had been a particularly-pointed statement. "Didn't the beastmen across the pond teach you to kill someone properly?" Fajio snarled. "Or are you going to stand there and see if you can get a rise out of us?"
"Now that you mention it," the Faunus said, frowning, "they do have special classes for human anatomy. But I wouldn't need some silly course to kill you two. I'm only letting Tammy play leader against your friends for a little longer. She likes to be in charge."
Fajio scoffed: he had seen something moving near the crashed flier and now wanted to keep the Faunus talking. "Fifty-year-old secret agent taking orders from a schoolgirl? And you're talking down to us?"
Azoo saw it too, and added, "Must have been a pretty lousy agent if they wouldn't make you a team leader."
The Faunus man scowled but didn't seem particularly riled. "I like to think my taunts were a little better thought-out than that. I would have thought-"
He cut himself off with a grunt as Phosthyon's long arms closed around his neck. "Nothing personal," the pilot jeered. The Faunus struggled a moment against the stilt-limbed human's grip and managed to flip the crash-battered Phosthyon over his front like a horse bucking its rider. He flipped a blade open to shove into the latecomer, but Azoo had seized the moment and tackled him backward. "Titan Rush!" Azoo shouted, tumbling over the rough wreckage-strewn ground, switchblades and spare knives flying liberally out to the sides.
Fajio limped to Phosthyon's side and gave him his musket. "Good to see you pulled through. This thing here was little more than a pike in my hands, I couldn't load the damned thing."
Phosthyon took it and fished about is his case for a ball and powder, swiftly muzzle-loading the long barrel as the Faunus managed to roll free of Azoo. Phosthyon aimed down the lug and fired. The ball lodged in the Faunus's shoulder, cushioned by his Aura to such a point that it only dug into his coat. The man looked at it and then pried it out with his blade immediately. It fell to the ground and burst in a flash of light and debris.
The Faunus had been knocked back but had held his ground. Azoo was standing up now and bringing out his extra arms while Phosthyon reloaded and handed his musket back to Fajio, who had been sinking towards the ground without a cane. The Faunus dusted himself off. "You'll have to do better than Auric munitions to get the drop on me, pup."
As a comeback, Phosthyon snorted and spat a green ball of flame that shot through the air faster than the ball had gone, catching the Faunus's arm and covering it in angry, smoke-spewing green fire. The man hurriedly stripped his trench coat away and threw it down, stamping it and covering his bill from the inky black smoke that poured off of it. Azoo took the opportunity to fire out a few of his arms and catch the man by his leg, yanking it out of under him and dragging him through the burning ruin of his coat.
Phosthyon drew a dagger from his belt and went to dive at the Faunus that had kicked loose of Azoo's grip. He thrust downward, but the Faunus rolled out of the way and threw something at Phosthyon's face. It burst in a red mist with a strong smell of pepper and Phosthyon dropped his dagger and fell to his knees coughing. Azoo flew in from the side with a mess of fists that drilled into the Faunus's ribs. The man whipped out a sort of baton and jabbed Azoo's gut with it. Azoo yelled and his arms fizzled out. He fell to his hands and knees and then the Faunus struck him hard across the small of the back, forcing him the rest of the way down. Phosthyon had gotten up, charging with the dagger again, but the Faunus pulled a pronged tool from his belt that shot its wired head into Phosthyon's chest. He spasmed violently and went down.
The Faunus dropped his stun gun and baton and whipped out a pair of revolvers to fire on Fajio, but Fajio had lined up his own shot in the meantime, and the musket ball went into the Faunus man's hip. He returned fire with two bullets that Fajio's Aura didn't totally stop from eating into his arm and then the musket ball exploded, sending the Faunus man skidding away into the wreckage.
Azoo and Phosthyon struggled to their feet slowly as Fajio shifted his grip on the musket to try and have the bayonet ready in case Phosthyon didn't reload it again. "I must apologize for having been so cross with you before, Azoo," Fajio said. "When that Mr. Mammoth fellow showed you all up I didn't realize Faunus could be so capable."
And then they were back to their stilted combat, the duckbilled man in the fedora bearing down on the three of them with his painful arsenal.
The man flipped away and twirled his switchblade, watching Fajio get up as Azoo tried again to form a human shield. "You will forgive my saying so," he said, his duckbilled mouth turned up at the sides, "but I get the creeping feeling I've caught you unprepared for battle." He darted forward and Azoo threw his extra arms upward to block an anticipated leap, but the Faunus tucked into a roll and went between the big man's legs, slicing outward with his switchblade into Azoo's knee. Azoo flinched from it and was slow to grab at the man as he continued into a rolling kick that put Fajio right back down again.
Fajio hit the ground hard and took a moment to convince himself it was, indeed, worth trying again. He couldn't help but notice the Faunus wasn't slicing at him for some reason, as much as he was bullying him. Fajio wheezed a rattling cough and moved to get up again, saying, "As much as I'd like to convince you otherwise, this is our 'battle-ready' state."
The Faunus launched another rib-straining kick into Fajio's chest at this, but Azoo hadn't tried to screen this time and had stayed back. Now he loomed with all his massive arms spread and ready to snare his slippery prey. Azoo caught the man in a many-armed cage, pinning him totally. "Chest Compressor!" he bellowed as he tightened his arms. The man wormed about and managed to snake his arm out of between two of Azoo's extra arms. He reversed the switchblade in his grip and jammed it into one of the arms wrapping his chest. Azoo gasped and all his arms flew open in surprise, the stabbed arm jerking violently and then going stiff before fading away. Azoo flexed his other arms experimentally: he wasn't supposed to feel pain out of his Auric arms.
"Even should you present them in bulk," the man said, dashing away and kneeing Fajio in the mask as he went, "you should never bring fists to a knife fight."
Fajio fell back on his rump, the musket clattering to the ground again. He was getting rather tired of being toyed with; it was becoming obvious the man was stalling for some reason—likely to allow his teammates as much time with a numbers advantage against Evegy and Rimer as possible. It bothered Fajio that his own numbers advantage amounted to so little against this man. "Pfah!" he growled, the sound through his mask like an old machine skipping a gear. "To hell with it, I'm switching him!"
"Oh?" The Faunus, who had stabbed another of Azoo's arms into oblivion in response to the latter's attempt at a piledriver, ran at the bigger man and planted a foot on his shoulder, using him as a step and tumbling clear over him. He landed in front of Fajio as Fajio got ready to put his Semblance to use. The Faunus drove his switchblade into Fajio's leg—the bad one of course—and left it buried to the handle in his thigh. Fajio made a horrid noise in his mask that sounded every bit like a mower striking stones and he felt his Semblance recede. It just left him in the same way it sometimes did when his Aura was totally spent, except he could feel his Aura still up—for all the more it had mattered in cushioning the strike. Fajio tried to pull the blade out, but it was buried deep, and it felt as if it had become one with every nerve in that region. Azoo was there beside him and gave it a forceful yank. Fajio screamed but the blade didn't budge, and Azoo let go of it to face the Faunus again.
The man had produced a pair of fresh switchblades from his trench coat, and was adjusting his fedora. "I thought that was you. Fajio Rekstum, if I'm not mistaken. Bodysnatcher."
"How could you possibly have that information?" Fajio had given up trying to get up now: the pain was dizzying if he so much as thought about it. He leveled the musket's bayonet instead, to catch the man if he came at him again.
"I met your grandmother, back when I was only a mere child. That sort of Semblance takes a few generations to dilute; turns out our theories about you were right on the mark." He flipped sideways from Azoo's stretching punches, and stabbed one of the offending arms into fading. Azoo decided to put his extra arms away at that, and to just let some talking buy his Aura time to recharge. "Nungerfaldt knows what he's on about, after all."
"Nonsense," Fajio said. "You'd have to be half a century old to be able to remember that far back; and I know all the Faunus they have out here are hardly any older than I am."
The man opened a flap of his trench coat, revealing a tarnished gold badge of some sort. "Fifty-six, thank you." Fajio could hardly believe that, but he supposed there were signs of age around the eyes he hadn't noticed before. Fajio didn't recognize the badge the man was showing him, but it certainly looked old, even from a distance. "We Faunus had a secret service of our own back then too, you know. When they put up this Aura school some of us went in to be instructors, but a handful of field agents like myself decided to go in for some Semblance training."
The man shrugged. A gust of wind went through the area and sent his trench coat flapping, revealing plain pants on plainer suspenders, all laden down with holsters of knives, switchblades, and a few antique-looking pistols. Fajio saw the man's flat tail for a moment before he closed his coat back up. "Your grandmother was the one who put my family on the exodus ferry personally. She was one of the only humans who I could remember as I grew up in Menagerie, and she instilled in me a sense of fear. Rekstum the Psychopomp was someone my generation checked under its beds for. I naturally took the opportunity to spy on her son once I went into the field"—Fajio twitched at this—"but Waltzur was just a man like any other. We almost didn't think to watch you at all; it is a good thing Angor decided to take you under his wing and draw attention to your Semblance."
Fajio had against all odds managed to sneak to a standing position during this speech, and was now leaning heavily on the musket. "Yeah yeah, we have mind-readers among humans too. You're not going to shake us with that manner of voodoo."
The man raised an eyebrow. "Oh, no, I'm afraid my Semblance is quite barebones: learned too late in life. All I can manage to do with it is break your Semblance when I stab you, which I'm sure you've noticed." Fajio rubbed his thigh at this reminder. It wasn't bleeding, but it honestly might have been better if it was. The man continued. "You have eyes on us and we have eyes on you, that's how espionage works. It is not as though humans are incorruptible, and many a Faunus can get away with walking around in public here with the right clothes on. Why, a chimp Faunus might even get away with nothing more that wide boots and a dedicated razor."
Azoo frowned at this remark and looked at Fajio, who decided not to acknowledge what had been a particularly-pointed statement. "Didn't the beastmen across the pond teach you to kill someone properly?" Fajio snarled. "Or are you going to stand there and see if you can get a rise out of us?"
"Now that you mention it," the Faunus said, frowning, "they do have special classes for human anatomy. But I wouldn't need some silly course to kill you two. I'm only letting Tammy play leader against your friends for a little longer. She likes to be in charge."
Fajio scoffed: he had seen something moving near the crashed flier and now wanted to keep the Faunus talking. "Fifty-year-old secret agent taking orders from a schoolgirl? And you're talking down to us?"
Azoo saw it too, and added, "Must have been a pretty lousy agent if they wouldn't make you a team leader."
The Faunus man scowled but didn't seem particularly riled. "I like to think my taunts were a little better thought-out than that. I would have thought-"
He cut himself off with a grunt as Phosthyon's long arms closed around his neck. "Nothing personal," the pilot jeered. The Faunus struggled a moment against the stilt-limbed human's grip and managed to flip the crash-battered Phosthyon over his front like a horse bucking its rider. He flipped a blade open to shove into the latecomer, but Azoo had seized the moment and tackled him backward. "Titan Rush!" Azoo shouted, tumbling over the rough wreckage-strewn ground, switchblades and spare knives flying liberally out to the sides.
Fajio limped to Phosthyon's side and gave him his musket. "Good to see you pulled through. This thing here was little more than a pike in my hands, I couldn't load the damned thing."
Phosthyon took it and fished about is his case for a ball and powder, swiftly muzzle-loading the long barrel as the Faunus managed to roll free of Azoo. Phosthyon aimed down the lug and fired. The ball lodged in the Faunus's shoulder, cushioned by his Aura to such a point that it only dug into his coat. The man looked at it and then pried it out with his blade immediately. It fell to the ground and burst in a flash of light and debris.
The Faunus had been knocked back but had held his ground. Azoo was standing up now and bringing out his extra arms while Phosthyon reloaded and handed his musket back to Fajio, who had been sinking towards the ground without a cane. The Faunus dusted himself off. "You'll have to do better than Auric munitions to get the drop on me, pup."
As a comeback, Phosthyon snorted and spat a green ball of flame that shot through the air faster than the ball had gone, catching the Faunus's arm and covering it in angry, smoke-spewing green fire. The man hurriedly stripped his trench coat away and threw it down, stamping it and covering his bill from the inky black smoke that poured off of it. Azoo took the opportunity to fire out a few of his arms and catch the man by his leg, yanking it out of under him and dragging him through the burning ruin of his coat.
Phosthyon drew a dagger from his belt and went to dive at the Faunus that had kicked loose of Azoo's grip. He thrust downward, but the Faunus rolled out of the way and threw something at Phosthyon's face. It burst in a red mist with a strong smell of pepper and Phosthyon dropped his dagger and fell to his knees coughing. Azoo flew in from the side with a mess of fists that drilled into the Faunus's ribs. The man whipped out a sort of baton and jabbed Azoo's gut with it. Azoo yelled and his arms fizzled out. He fell to his hands and knees and then the Faunus struck him hard across the small of the back, forcing him the rest of the way down. Phosthyon had gotten up, charging with the dagger again, but the Faunus pulled a pronged tool from his belt that shot its wired head into Phosthyon's chest. He spasmed violently and went down.
The Faunus dropped his stun gun and baton and whipped out a pair of revolvers to fire on Fajio, but Fajio had lined up his own shot in the meantime, and the musket ball went into the Faunus man's hip. He returned fire with two bullets that Fajio's Aura didn't totally stop from eating into his arm and then the musket ball exploded, sending the Faunus man skidding away into the wreckage.
Azoo and Phosthyon struggled to their feet slowly as Fajio shifted his grip on the musket to try and have the bayonet ready in case Phosthyon didn't reload it again. "I must apologize for having been so cross with you before, Azoo," Fajio said. "When that Mr. Mammoth fellow showed you all up I didn't realize Faunus could be so capable."
And then they were back to their stilted combat, the duckbilled man in the fedora bearing down on the three of them with his painful arsenal.
"It was my cross to bear. I had made the stuff; it didn't matter that I'd voted against using it. It's just … So. A lot of the students were scared to fight. They didn't want to go to war. Why would they? They were still children, really, and had spent all their training and education coming up to be Grimm-fighters, to be protectors. They didn't want to be soldiers. So, they had me working in the lab down there for months. They knew that war was coming, or they wouldn't have had me start so early. They told me it was just going to help shy students embrace Grimm combat. I should've known better. I called it 'liquid courage,' this fluid that erased someone's fear and put them into a sort of combat high. No sooner had I tested it with Team JONT's Dracruela hunt than did I catch wind of war in the air. The faculty all got together with some generals and we put it to a vote. Myself and two others were the only ones opposed. I did everything in my power to draft teams for lesser patrols and hunts, to get as many of them as I could out of deployment, because I knew what they were going to do. They drugged the first few shiploads of kids that reached the ambush point to make them fight the Faunus. No matter how many kids I managed to keep from going, I know a lot of them died because of what I made. They ran into fights they didn't need to fight, pissed off the Faunus, made the battlefield a slaughtering block. If this is the way Beacon works, if this is the way the world works, I want no part of it. We're doomed to the Grimm now, and I'm going out on my own terms."
—Excerpt from the suicide note of Dr. Swanni Podegard, quoted from Cage Cast Open: The Revolution of the Faunus
Spoiler:
Rimer and Evegy had decided to attempt to pincer the three Faunus they were combatting in the field. Keeping to either flank seemed to be the only way to consistently keep the tar-black woman with the blunderbuss from getting a cheap shot on one of them: what was evidently her Semblance kept seizing the attention of one or the other and drawing it to the dangling protrusion at her forehead, but it seemed unable to catch them both so long as they stayed away from one another. The woman had snared Rimer with it just now, but Evegy managed to fight past the bugman and slash at her before she could get her shot off.
"How about I don't kill you with one spray and let you take a painful splash of shot instead then?" she snarled through needle-like teeth, swinging her blunderbuss around and swatting Evegy away.
Rimer leapt at her from behind with the Gut-Grinder held high, and the bugman's Semblance yanked him sideways out of the air, leaving the chainsaw to bite uselessly into the ground. "You think that flanking us lets you encircle us, like you're trying to do," he prattled, snapping his pincer-gauntlet out at Rimer's legs, "but we're three and you're two, and you can't circle a triangle." Rimer swung upward and cracked the bugman in the face with his hard fist. Rimer's laughing was interrupted by the introduction of a crossbow bolt into his back, courtesy of the snail boy who yet fired from low in the grass. Rimer's back and legs were pincushioned with shallow bolts slowed but not stopped by his Aura. They bled lightly, adding ribbons of red to his leather-bound visage.
Evegy was trading blows with the Faunus woman, managing to get under her opponent's clumsy blunderbuss with her own scimitar, and tearing gaping holes into her thick vest. For as much as Evegy was doing though, the woman wasn't bleeding freely and was managing to get a blow or two of her own in, striking with her heavy weapon and leaving deep, bruised pain in Evegy's shoulders. The woman pushed away, but before she could try her little lure trick again Evegy threw a small cloud of darkness at her forehead, blocking the dangling thing from view. "What the?" the woman complained, shaking her head to try and get away from it. Evegy focused and kept the cloud on her though, so that the woman disengaged to swat at her head.
The snail boy jumped in to take her place, far shorter than Evegy and still with that boyish figure. Evegy hesitated to swing at him until he flipped a switch on his crossbow that reeled in the string and snapped the whole thing open and apart. The boy's crossbow folded out into some manner of pole, with the bow arms flared into a stiff T on the end. Evegy had never seen a weapon of the sort before: it was far too light to qualify as a hammer, it wasn't bladed, and it could not have hurt very much at all to get caught in a swing from it. Even so, the weapon was long and looked rather sturdy, and the way the boy held it suggested he knew very well what he was holding.
Rimer tried again to swing the Gut-Grinder into the bugman, and again the bugman's pincer caught the bar and held it away, the chain whirring angrily through empty air. Rimer laughed and lolled his tongue out, and then let go of the saw with one hand to punch at the Faunus. The Faunus took it in his bug-eyed face and frowned before taking his own free hand and punching Rimer in the teeth. Rimer reeled, bloodied, but still his weapon and the bugman's were locked, and so they continued to trade crude blows until a blow out of turn came into the back of Rimer's head. He lost his grip on his weapon and stumbled forward as the bugman sidestepped and threw the chainsaw away into the grass, where it fell silent. Rimer chuckled softly, holding his head gingerly and looking at the jet-black woman who had brained him with her blunderbuss. Her head was free of Evegy's cloud now, but as she turned on her Semblance, Rimer reacted with an animal fervor, pouncing at the thing on the woman's forehead with his tongue flapping madly.
Every time Evegy managed to get a swing under or past the boy's polearm, he ducked or turned to bounce her blade off the round shell on his back. He hadn't managed to land a blow of his own though, as far as Evegy could tell. The most he could do was catch Evegy's chest or hip with the bar of his weapon and shove. Evegy didn't consider these to be attacks; she assumed he was trying to thrust but was too weak to do it properly. All it did was push her back a few steps every time he did it, and it didn't really hurt either.
She was on the verge of maybe asking him if he wanted to just give up when she noticed she had been neatly herded back up against where Rimer and the woman were on the ground grappling, snapping at one another with their sharp teeth while the bugman tried to sneak in a pinch or two with his pincer. When the Faunus woman saw Evegy, she got her foot between herself and Rimer and pushed the thin man off of her and into Evegy. A few bolts broke off in his back, but Rimer caught himself on his feet. Evegy was sent forward into the boy's waiting arms.
His pallid green skin was slick: what she had thought was sweat was actually some gooey sort of slime. He closed his arms around her neck and hung on when she stood up, dangling from her shoulders like a slimy apron. She dropped her weapon in panic, and started grabbing at him to pull him off, but his skin was slimy and she couldn't get a grip on him. She felt his chest hardening and remembered earlier when he had fired a spike from it. "Rimer!" she yelled. "Get him off me!"
Rimer moved to assist and was yanked back by the bugman's Semblance. The bugman started saying something but collapsed into coughing after meeting Rimer's boot in his gut. Rimer turned back around and grabbed the boy's shell, which wasn't slick like the rest of him. Rimer yanked and the boy came loose with a sound like duct tape coming free. Rimer turned the boy toward him, smiling. "Hahaha, clingy babies don't need to be-"
"Rimer!" Evegy kicked Rimer's foot out of under him and he went down, tossing the boy upward in time for a foot-long spike to fire high into the air. The bugman scrambled away, watching it, and the Faunus woman stumbled and tripped onto her rump. Evegy rolled out of the way as the boy thumped to the ground with a grunt. Rimer, blinking, watched the spike come down and dig into his shin.
Rimer yelped and spasmed, getting to his feet only to fall back down again. "I've been Fajio'd, hahahahaha!" He was laughing, but his eyes were staring out at nothing, and drool was puddling in the grass next to him. Evegy ran to him and tried to get the spike out, but it was already liquefying, and all she could do was pull the top off the pillar of warm, sickening ooze that stood in the wide gouge in Rimer's leg.
Evegy felt sick to her stomach at seeing that the spike had reached down to white bone. "Rimer, are you alright?" she asked. Rimer didn't say anything, but chuckled weakly and made some sort of nonchalant hand gesture. He had broken out in a cold sweat. She was steeling herself to fish the slime out of the hole with her fingers when she was yanked backward and the bugman's pincer closed around her neck.
"You humans think you can treat us bad, because you think you're good," he said in her ear while the other two Faunus—the woman with her blunderbuss and the boy with his pole turned back into a crossbow—moved in front of her and took aim, "but we're not the monsters here, except now that you've treated us like monsters we're gonna act like monsters."
"Fajio!" Evegy saw him and Azoo out in the distance by the crashed flyer, talking to a man with a duck bill on his face.
The bugman seemed confused, the bulb things on his antennae bouncing in thought. "What's that word mean?"
Evegy threw a cloud out to the side while her captor contemplated this and then opened one directly onto herself. The other two Faunus fired into the cloud immediately, the blunderbuss coughing with a deafening boom, but Evegy emerged unscathed from the first one she'd thrown. The Faunus looked at her in confusion and then the clouds dissipated, revealing the bugman on his knees crying softly into his hands with a crossbow bolt in his shoulder and smoking pockmarks all over the front of his body. He sniffled and laid down in the grass to curl in on himself in pain. The snail boy gasped and ran to his teammate, pulling some sort of walkie-talkie from his pocket.
The Faunus woman hissed. "Shit!" She was pouring more powder into her weapon and turning toward Evegy. "Let's see how well you take it now." Evegy knew it was happening but still could not turn away from the light on the woman's forehead. Evegy couldn't bring herself to move at all, even as the woman poured a mess of balls into the barrel and chased them down with wadding. She raised the gun and leveled it at Evegy's torso.
And then Evegy was loose from the spell, but the roaring noise was not that of the blunderbuss firing. It was the familiar growl of the Gut-Grinder: Rimer had dragged himself over to it and fired her up, drawing the woman's attention—and her lure—away momentarily. Rimer hoisted his chainsaw and revved it, the sound grinding through the air. It didn't bother Evegy any more than it ever had, but the Faunus woman bent almost double in pain, and the other two Faunus in the grass both flinched. Rimer revved it again and they all yelled out in pain, the woman dropping her weapon and falling to her knees, clutching the sides of her head.
"Hahahaha!" Rimer laughed, though he was pale and sweating with pain. "You tell em, GG!"
Evegy ran and retrieved her scimitar before returning to the woman and pointing it at her. The other two Faunus were both collapsed in the grass. The pitch-black woman looked up at Evegy hatefully. "Get it over with then," she said through her teeth, scowling.
Evegy kicked away the woman's weapon and thought a moment as to what she should do. She remembered how little she had wanted to kill Mr. Mammoth, and how Fajio had refused to kill the Faunus Archer had caught out of the trees that time, on the grounds that the fight had been over.
"Remember civility even in brutality," she remembered Fajio saying one of the last times they had eaten at the mess hall at Beacon together as a team, when all they worried about was homework and hunting. "If you ever subdue someone, treat them with dignity. If it were you down on the ground, beaten within an inch of your life, you'd be grateful for some respect and mercy. Give unto the fallen as you would have from he who fells you. We're huntsmen, not murderers."
Evegy turned this over in her mind. She was rather certain they had been perfectly ready to kill her just now, without so much as asking for any last words. They had treated her as they expected they would be treated because they expected no better from humans. She hadn't even been surprised at their decision: she had expected no better of the Faunus. She realized it was this mutual distrust that had ultimately led to this whole situation. If there was to be any change in the world, trust needed to be nurtured.
"Well?" the woman said, interrupting Evegy's thoughts. Rimer had moved closer to the other two Faunus with the Gut-Grinder still running, and was looking to Evegy for orders.
Evegy sheathed her weapon. "Watch over her while I bind her arms and legs, Rimer." Rimer dragged himself over while Evegy undid her hair and held the cords with which she had had it tied.
The woman frowned in surprise and tried to get up only to be shoved back down by Rimer's bony elbow. "What are you doing?!" she asked, panicked.
"Taking you prisoner," Evegy said.
"How about I don't kill you with one spray and let you take a painful splash of shot instead then?" she snarled through needle-like teeth, swinging her blunderbuss around and swatting Evegy away.
Rimer leapt at her from behind with the Gut-Grinder held high, and the bugman's Semblance yanked him sideways out of the air, leaving the chainsaw to bite uselessly into the ground. "You think that flanking us lets you encircle us, like you're trying to do," he prattled, snapping his pincer-gauntlet out at Rimer's legs, "but we're three and you're two, and you can't circle a triangle." Rimer swung upward and cracked the bugman in the face with his hard fist. Rimer's laughing was interrupted by the introduction of a crossbow bolt into his back, courtesy of the snail boy who yet fired from low in the grass. Rimer's back and legs were pincushioned with shallow bolts slowed but not stopped by his Aura. They bled lightly, adding ribbons of red to his leather-bound visage.
Evegy was trading blows with the Faunus woman, managing to get under her opponent's clumsy blunderbuss with her own scimitar, and tearing gaping holes into her thick vest. For as much as Evegy was doing though, the woman wasn't bleeding freely and was managing to get a blow or two of her own in, striking with her heavy weapon and leaving deep, bruised pain in Evegy's shoulders. The woman pushed away, but before she could try her little lure trick again Evegy threw a small cloud of darkness at her forehead, blocking the dangling thing from view. "What the?" the woman complained, shaking her head to try and get away from it. Evegy focused and kept the cloud on her though, so that the woman disengaged to swat at her head.
The snail boy jumped in to take her place, far shorter than Evegy and still with that boyish figure. Evegy hesitated to swing at him until he flipped a switch on his crossbow that reeled in the string and snapped the whole thing open and apart. The boy's crossbow folded out into some manner of pole, with the bow arms flared into a stiff T on the end. Evegy had never seen a weapon of the sort before: it was far too light to qualify as a hammer, it wasn't bladed, and it could not have hurt very much at all to get caught in a swing from it. Even so, the weapon was long and looked rather sturdy, and the way the boy held it suggested he knew very well what he was holding.
Rimer tried again to swing the Gut-Grinder into the bugman, and again the bugman's pincer caught the bar and held it away, the chain whirring angrily through empty air. Rimer laughed and lolled his tongue out, and then let go of the saw with one hand to punch at the Faunus. The Faunus took it in his bug-eyed face and frowned before taking his own free hand and punching Rimer in the teeth. Rimer reeled, bloodied, but still his weapon and the bugman's were locked, and so they continued to trade crude blows until a blow out of turn came into the back of Rimer's head. He lost his grip on his weapon and stumbled forward as the bugman sidestepped and threw the chainsaw away into the grass, where it fell silent. Rimer chuckled softly, holding his head gingerly and looking at the jet-black woman who had brained him with her blunderbuss. Her head was free of Evegy's cloud now, but as she turned on her Semblance, Rimer reacted with an animal fervor, pouncing at the thing on the woman's forehead with his tongue flapping madly.
Every time Evegy managed to get a swing under or past the boy's polearm, he ducked or turned to bounce her blade off the round shell on his back. He hadn't managed to land a blow of his own though, as far as Evegy could tell. The most he could do was catch Evegy's chest or hip with the bar of his weapon and shove. Evegy didn't consider these to be attacks; she assumed he was trying to thrust but was too weak to do it properly. All it did was push her back a few steps every time he did it, and it didn't really hurt either.
She was on the verge of maybe asking him if he wanted to just give up when she noticed she had been neatly herded back up against where Rimer and the woman were on the ground grappling, snapping at one another with their sharp teeth while the bugman tried to sneak in a pinch or two with his pincer. When the Faunus woman saw Evegy, she got her foot between herself and Rimer and pushed the thin man off of her and into Evegy. A few bolts broke off in his back, but Rimer caught himself on his feet. Evegy was sent forward into the boy's waiting arms.
His pallid green skin was slick: what she had thought was sweat was actually some gooey sort of slime. He closed his arms around her neck and hung on when she stood up, dangling from her shoulders like a slimy apron. She dropped her weapon in panic, and started grabbing at him to pull him off, but his skin was slimy and she couldn't get a grip on him. She felt his chest hardening and remembered earlier when he had fired a spike from it. "Rimer!" she yelled. "Get him off me!"
Rimer moved to assist and was yanked back by the bugman's Semblance. The bugman started saying something but collapsed into coughing after meeting Rimer's boot in his gut. Rimer turned back around and grabbed the boy's shell, which wasn't slick like the rest of him. Rimer yanked and the boy came loose with a sound like duct tape coming free. Rimer turned the boy toward him, smiling. "Hahaha, clingy babies don't need to be-"
"Rimer!" Evegy kicked Rimer's foot out of under him and he went down, tossing the boy upward in time for a foot-long spike to fire high into the air. The bugman scrambled away, watching it, and the Faunus woman stumbled and tripped onto her rump. Evegy rolled out of the way as the boy thumped to the ground with a grunt. Rimer, blinking, watched the spike come down and dig into his shin.
Rimer yelped and spasmed, getting to his feet only to fall back down again. "I've been Fajio'd, hahahahaha!" He was laughing, but his eyes were staring out at nothing, and drool was puddling in the grass next to him. Evegy ran to him and tried to get the spike out, but it was already liquefying, and all she could do was pull the top off the pillar of warm, sickening ooze that stood in the wide gouge in Rimer's leg.
Evegy felt sick to her stomach at seeing that the spike had reached down to white bone. "Rimer, are you alright?" she asked. Rimer didn't say anything, but chuckled weakly and made some sort of nonchalant hand gesture. He had broken out in a cold sweat. She was steeling herself to fish the slime out of the hole with her fingers when she was yanked backward and the bugman's pincer closed around her neck.
"You humans think you can treat us bad, because you think you're good," he said in her ear while the other two Faunus—the woman with her blunderbuss and the boy with his pole turned back into a crossbow—moved in front of her and took aim, "but we're not the monsters here, except now that you've treated us like monsters we're gonna act like monsters."
"Fajio!" Evegy saw him and Azoo out in the distance by the crashed flyer, talking to a man with a duck bill on his face.
The bugman seemed confused, the bulb things on his antennae bouncing in thought. "What's that word mean?"
Evegy threw a cloud out to the side while her captor contemplated this and then opened one directly onto herself. The other two Faunus fired into the cloud immediately, the blunderbuss coughing with a deafening boom, but Evegy emerged unscathed from the first one she'd thrown. The Faunus looked at her in confusion and then the clouds dissipated, revealing the bugman on his knees crying softly into his hands with a crossbow bolt in his shoulder and smoking pockmarks all over the front of his body. He sniffled and laid down in the grass to curl in on himself in pain. The snail boy gasped and ran to his teammate, pulling some sort of walkie-talkie from his pocket.
The Faunus woman hissed. "Shit!" She was pouring more powder into her weapon and turning toward Evegy. "Let's see how well you take it now." Evegy knew it was happening but still could not turn away from the light on the woman's forehead. Evegy couldn't bring herself to move at all, even as the woman poured a mess of balls into the barrel and chased them down with wadding. She raised the gun and leveled it at Evegy's torso.
And then Evegy was loose from the spell, but the roaring noise was not that of the blunderbuss firing. It was the familiar growl of the Gut-Grinder: Rimer had dragged himself over to it and fired her up, drawing the woman's attention—and her lure—away momentarily. Rimer hoisted his chainsaw and revved it, the sound grinding through the air. It didn't bother Evegy any more than it ever had, but the Faunus woman bent almost double in pain, and the other two Faunus in the grass both flinched. Rimer revved it again and they all yelled out in pain, the woman dropping her weapon and falling to her knees, clutching the sides of her head.
"Hahahaha!" Rimer laughed, though he was pale and sweating with pain. "You tell em, GG!"
Evegy ran and retrieved her scimitar before returning to the woman and pointing it at her. The other two Faunus were both collapsed in the grass. The pitch-black woman looked up at Evegy hatefully. "Get it over with then," she said through her teeth, scowling.
Evegy kicked away the woman's weapon and thought a moment as to what she should do. She remembered how little she had wanted to kill Mr. Mammoth, and how Fajio had refused to kill the Faunus Archer had caught out of the trees that time, on the grounds that the fight had been over.
"Remember civility even in brutality," she remembered Fajio saying one of the last times they had eaten at the mess hall at Beacon together as a team, when all they worried about was homework and hunting. "If you ever subdue someone, treat them with dignity. If it were you down on the ground, beaten within an inch of your life, you'd be grateful for some respect and mercy. Give unto the fallen as you would have from he who fells you. We're huntsmen, not murderers."
Evegy turned this over in her mind. She was rather certain they had been perfectly ready to kill her just now, without so much as asking for any last words. They had treated her as they expected they would be treated because they expected no better from humans. She hadn't even been surprised at their decision: she had expected no better of the Faunus. She realized it was this mutual distrust that had ultimately led to this whole situation. If there was to be any change in the world, trust needed to be nurtured.
"Well?" the woman said, interrupting Evegy's thoughts. Rimer had moved closer to the other two Faunus with the Gut-Grinder still running, and was looking to Evegy for orders.
Evegy sheathed her weapon. "Watch over her while I bind her arms and legs, Rimer." Rimer dragged himself over while Evegy undid her hair and held the cords with which she had had it tied.
The woman frowned in surprise and tried to get up only to be shoved back down by Rimer's bony elbow. "What are you doing?!" she asked, panicked.
"Taking you prisoner," Evegy said.