Chapter 18 — Mountain Glenn; Promises and The Breach, Part I
The landing docks at night had a specific quality — the way docks do when the work of arrival and departure has paused and the space reveals what it is underneath the function. Vale's lights spread outward in amber constellations below. Airships moved at their slow distances, unhurried, the sky accepting them with indifference.
General Ironwood stood at the dock's edge and looked at none of this.
He was holding his shoulder with his other hand, which was the posture of someone who has tried to sleep and found that sleep has declined the invitation, and has decided that if he is going to be awake he might as well occupy a space that has the decency to be outside.
Glynda Goodwitch's footsteps arrived with the particular quality of someone who has been looking for a person and has found them and is not entirely surprised by where they were found.
"Trouble sleeping?" she asked.
"Arm was acting up," he said.
She came to stand beside him. She looked at the careful arrangement of his posture — the fully dressed figure, the strategic grip on his shoulder, the studied study of the middle distance — and she said: "Of course. So logically you got out of bed, dressed yourself completely, and decided to gaze menacingly into the distance."
He didn't answer.
"James." Her voice had lost the dry edge. "What's actually wrong?"
"I've trusted him for years." The words came out of him with the quality of something that has been waiting at a threshold. "We both have. And I keep finding myself thinking that he's—that there are things he knows that he's choosing not to share."
"You know perfectly well that we are not the ones in the dark," Glynda said.
"That's what makes it worse." His laugh was the specific kind that contains nothing humorous. "I can accept not knowing. I cannot accept knowing that he knows and is choosing to—" He stopped. "He's passive, Glynda. He's too passive. That's not who he is. Something has made him passive, and I don't know what it is, and that is the thing that keeps me standing out here at—" he checked his watch — "two in the morning."
Glynda was quiet for a moment. Then she put her hand on his shoulder — the real shoulder, the one that wasn't performing an explanation for why he was here.
"You're a good person," she said. "You have always done what you believe is right, even when the strong opinion was against you. That's not a small thing, James. But I think it means you sometimes have difficulty trusting that someone else might be acting from the same principle, even when their method looks different from yours."
He looked at her.
"Ozpin has experience that the rest of us lack," she said, simply. "I think that's worth remembering when the patience feels like passivity."
They stood in the dock's night quiet, the city below doing its ordinary living, the airships continuing their unhurried arcs.
Neither of them spoke again, which was a kind of agreement.
◈ — Mountain Glenn: The Night Watch
The moon over Mountain Glenn had the specific quality of a moon over a place that has stopped expecting anything. The ruins received its light with the indifference of things that have already received the worst they were going to receive and have made their peace with existing in the aftermath.
Ruby had Crescent Rose collapsed across her lap and was looking through the scope at a Beowolf that had appeared in the rubble below and was examining a piece of broken concrete with what could charitably be described as intellectual curiosity. She lowered the scope. The Beowolf looked up at her. She sighed. The Beowolf wandered away.
The camp had the configuration of a force that had arrived in stages and distributed itself correctly. Team RWBY occupied the central shelter with Oobleck positioned at his own watch point above them, his coffee perpetually present, his apparent slumping against the wall deceiving absolutely no one about the quality of his attention. Teams KABFL and SSGS had positioned themselves at the approach points — Khanna on the eastern perimeter with Aiko's senses extending the reach of what she could monitor, Sarai's team holding the western approach where Shallot and Giblet's capabilities provided a calibre of response that most Grimm would find unenthusiastic.
Inside the shelter, the fire had settled to the stage that fires settle to when the people tending them have also settled — smaller, steadier, requiring occasional attention rather than constant management.
Yang had stopped pretending to sleep first.
"Blake," she said, at a volume that fit inside the shelter without wanting to leave it. "Are you awake?"
"Yeah," Blake said.
"Why do you think Oobleck asked us about being a Huntress?" A pause. "Like, what was he actually getting at?"
"Maybe he was just curious," Blake said.
"You think?"
"No."
"Weiss, are you awake?"
"I am now," Weiss said, which was not quite true but was the version she chose to present. "You're both talking."
A quiet that was not the absence of conversation but the preparation for one.
"When I said I wanted to honour my family's name," Weiss said, with the measured precision of someone who has been thinking about something and has arrived at the version she is prepared to say, "I meant it. But not the way people assume. I'm not under any illusions about what my father has done with the Schnee Dust Company. Since he took control — since my grandfather died — the company has operated in territory that I would not call ethical."
"That's a careful way to put it," Blake said.
"It is," Weiss agreed, which was more honesty than most people offered when they had just been called out for careful wording. "The Schnee name was something before my father attached himself to it. My grandfather built something that served people. My father converted it into a mechanism for serving himself, and in doing so he attached his methods to a name that didn't earn them." She was quiet for a moment. "I didn't choose my name. But I can choose what I do with it. And what I want to do with it is make it mean something other than what he has made it mean."
Blake was quiet.
Then, more quietly: "All my life, I fought for what I thought was right. I had a partner. More of a mentor, at first. He told me, consistently, that what we were doing would make the world better for people like us. I believed him for a long time." A pause. "His idea of a perfect future turned out not to be perfect for everyone. I joined the Academy because Huntsmen and Huntresses are supposed to be the most honourable fighters in the world — the people who are always, reliably, fighting for good. But I never thought past joining. When I leave — when I'm qualified — what do I actually do? How do you undo years of having been on the wrong side of something?"
"You're not one to back away from difficult things," Yang said. "You never have been."
"I am, though," Blake said. "That's exactly what I am. When you found out I was a Faunus, I didn't stay and talk through it — I ran. When my oldest partner revealed himself as something I couldn't accept — I ran. Even my Semblance is literally a mechanism for running away. I was born with the ability to leave a shadow of myself behind, an empty copy that takes the impact while the real me moves." She stopped. "I've been running from things my entire life."
"But you came back," Ruby said, from her position by the entrance, which established that she had been listening for some portion of this conversation and had decided that being quiet about having been listening was the right call. She turned to face them. "Every time. You ran, and then you came back. That's different."
A quiet.
Yang stretched her arms above her head in the way she did when she was about to say something she wasn't sure how to say. "I've been thinking about what he asked too. Why I want to be a Huntress." She let the stretch settle. "Honestly? I don't have this — I don't have a specific thing I want to fix, or a family legacy I want to reclaim, or a past I'm trying to make right. I just want the adventure. I want to wake up and not know exactly what the day is going to ask of me, and I want to find out that I can handle it." She looked at the fire. "I want a life where tomorrow is genuinely unknown. And being a Huntress just happens to be that life. Which maybe sounds—"
"It doesn't sound like anything," Ruby said, immediately and with the specific certainty she had when she meant something without qualification.
"Ruby's always known," Yang continued. "Since she was small enough to be scared. She wanted to be the person in the books — the one who helps people without needing to be thanked for it, who runs toward the thing everyone else is running from, not because it's smart, but because someone needs to." Yang looked at her sister's silhouette in the entrance. "She trained for years before she had the technical capability to qualify for any of the combat schools. And she never once reconsidered. That's a different kind of motivation than mine."
"She's still just a kid," Weiss said.
"She's two years younger than us," Blake said. "We're all kids."
"Look where we are," Yang pointed out, gesturing vaguely at the ruined city outside the shelter, at the weapons in everyone's hands, at the watch roster and the perimeter and the night. "I mean, at some point the word stops fitting."
"It's the life we chose," Blake said.
"It's the job," Weiss said, with the precision of someone who has thought about this and arrived at the correct word. "We had a version of it in our heads — all of us, different versions, but the structure was romantic, I think. Noble, self-sacrificing, dramatically proportioned. And the real version is—" she looked at the fire — "protecting people. Specifically, actually, day after day, in whatever form that takes. Whatever else we want will have to come second to that. And I think—" she stopped. "I think that's right. I think that's actually what it should be."
Outside, Oobleck had stopped pretending not to listen. The slight smile on his face was the expression of someone who has been teaching for a long time and has heard, occasionally, the moment when a student arrives at something real.
◈ — Before Dawn: The Disappearance
Sleep had found most of them eventually, which was the specific mercy that bodies extend to people who have been awake long enough.
Zwei had other ideas.
He woke up with the alertness of a creature for whom waking up was a transition rather than a gradual process, and he stood on the sleeping bag with the specific posture of a dog who has decided something needs to happen and is waiting to see if anyone is going to initiate it.
Ruby opened one eye.
"Zwei," she said. "It's late. Go back to bed."
Zwei moved toward the shelter's entrance.
"Zwei."
Zwei exited the shelter.
"Zwei."
Ruby followed Zwei into the ruins, which was the specific thing she always did even when she knew she was going to regret doing it, because the alternative was a dog operating unsupervised in an abandoned city that contained Grimm.
She found him in what had been, apparently, a perfectly acceptable location for his purposes.
"Zwei," she said, with the resigned tone of someone who has lost an argument they never technically entered. "This is literally a wasteland. You could have done this literally anywhere."
Zwei considered this.
"Bark," he said.
"What was—" a voice, from somewhere behind the ruins ahead. White Fang patrol configuration — two people, moving with the specific rhythm of a route they had walked enough times to have stopped paying full attention to it.
Ruby was behind rubble before the sentence finished.
"What was what?" said the second voice.
"Thought I heard something. Beowolf maybe."
"Let's finish the patrol. This place gives me the creeps."
Ruby tracked them with the scope until they reached a ruined building with metal doors that should not have been there — those were installed, not original infrastructure — and watched one of them key a code and both of them disappear inside.
She produced her scroll. Low Signal. She tried twice more. Same result.
"We need to get the others," she told Zwei.
The asphalt gave out from under her as though it had been waiting.
She grabbed the ledge on reflex, Zwei in her arm, and she got him up and over before the ledge separated from the rest of whatever was holding it, and then there was no ledge, and there was a very long distance between where she had been standing and where she was going.
She landed on a building.
She had not been expecting to land on a building.
The building was itself on another level — a second level, entirely underground, the ruins of Mountain Glenn extending downward into a cavern that the surface hadn't given any indication existed. Emergency lighting, old and irregular, suggested that this space had been used after the official sealing. More recently than it should have been.
The door nearest her opened.
"Freeze."
Ruby reached for Crescent Rose.
Crescent Rose was on the surface.
◈ — The Search
Yang had been watching the eastern approach for forty minutes when she registered the absence.
She turned around.
"Ruby? Hey — where's Ruby?"
"What?" Oobleck came to full alertness with the speed of someone who had never been not-fully-alert.
Zwei came through the entrance barking in the specific mode that was not I want attention but I am conveying information and I need you to receive it.
The alert moved through the perimeter in the sequence that alerts move when the people maintaining the perimeter are good at their jobs. Odyn had his team activated before the words fully reached him. Khanna was already redirecting from eastern patrol to assembly. Sarai's team converged from the western approach at a pace that confirmed they had been prepared for something to require convergence.
Zwei led them. This was both the obvious and the correct approach.
He stopped at the hole.
Crescent Rose lay beside it.
"Ruby's scythe," Yang said, which was not a sentence that contained observation so much as a sentence that contained implications she was not prepared to finish.
"She fell," Blake said, which was better as a statement than as a question.
"Or was pulled," Hailfire said, with the specific precision of someone who had been trained to maintain the full range of possibilities in a tactical assessment.
Oobleck looked at the hole. He looked at the ruins around them — the specific ruins, the configuration, the location. He looked at the hole again. Something assembled itself in his expression with the velocity of a mind that was very fast at certain kinds of assembly.
"Of course," he said. "Of course, of course, of course, OF COURSE—"
"Dr. Oobleck," Yang said, with the specific patience of someone who needed an answer and was working very hard not to express that through volume.
"Mountain Glenn! An expansion of Vale — you know this, yes? Overrun, ultimately. Sealed. But before it was sealed — the transportation problem. A city outside the natural barriers needs infrastructure. So they built a subway system. Tunnels carrying citizens safely between the expansion territory and the Kingdom itself." He was walking as he spoke, his body apparently unable to conduct thought without motion. "And when the end came, when the Grimm made the surface untenable, the citizens made one last attempt — they took shelter beneath the city. In the caves they had cleared for the subway. They sealed themselves in from above."
"An underground village," Blake said.
"In the most desperate sense of the term. A sealed space under a dead city, occupied by people who had no other option. Until an explosion opened another cavern — subterranean Grimm, creatures that had been in the deep caves, suddenly with access to the population. After that the Kingdom officially sealed the whole system." Oobleck stopped. "They called it the world's largest tomb. And the White Fang has apparently been operating inside it."
The silence had a particular quality.
Khanna broke it. "Then we mount a coordinated rescue. Three teams, multiple entry points, adequate coverage of approach and retreat vectors."
"We go in prepared," Odyn said, already running the tactical assessment. The underground environment would limit some of their capabilities and extend others. Elven hearing and low-light vision would be significant advantages in a dark tunnel system. The Saiyan physical capabilities would compensate for the confined space that restricted ranged combat. Blake's stealth training would provide scouting options. Weiss's semblance, in a closed environment, would have specific uses and specific limitations.
"Team SSGS can take the northern approach," Sarai said. "Shallot and Giblet's capabilities are well-suited to confined high-resistance environments."
"Team KABFL on the eastern route," Khanna decided, her Branwen tactical instincts already laying the map. "Aiko's senses in the underground will be significant."
"Team OHFZ through the central access," Hailfire said. "We coordinate the main advance."
"Team RWBY," Weiss said, with the tone she used when she had made a decision and was not in the process of discussing it, "takes the western approach. We find our leader."
She looked at the hole.
"Whatever is down there," she said, "we find her and we bring her home."
"Yes," Oobleck said, with the tone he used when someone had arrived at exactly the right conclusion. "Precisely that. Let us move."
◈ — The Underground
The tunnels descended in stages.
The upper section was Mountain Glenn's service infrastructure — pipes and conduit and the maintenance passages that every large-scale human construction required. Below that, the subway system proper, the platform levels and track corridors that had been carved through the bedrock with the ambition of a city that expected to keep expanding.
Below that, the spaces that had been improvised.
Team OHFZ moved through the central tunnels with the specific efficiency of people who had been trained to function without good light and had discovered that elven night vision was a different category of advantage than torch-work or scroll illumination. Odyn navigated by what he could see and what he could hear in alternating awareness, his attention moving between the tactical geometry of the space and the sounds that the space contained.
"Multiple contacts ahead," Roy said, low. "Seven or eight. Positioned defensively at the main corridor junction."
"Aware of us?" Hailfire asked.
"They will be," Zero said, which was the specific assessment of someone who had evaluated the approach angle and the ambient noise and the mathematics of how far sound carried in this kind of stone.
"Alternate route," Odyn said.
Hailfire was already moving toward the maintenance passage she had identified. Her vanguard training had given her a specific kind of map-reading that operated from structural logic rather than diagram — the way buildings had to be configured, where access necessarily existed — and she found the passage because it had to be there, which it was.
The sounds from deeper in the system grew as they advanced: machinery, the specific weight of large equipment being moved, and underneath it the rhythm of organised human activity that was clearly not limited to the small-scale operation they had been briefed on.
"That's not a hideout," Roy said, his hearing giving him details the others couldn't access yet. "That's an installation."
"Large open space ahead," Zero confirmed, his analytical attention processing the acoustic signatures. "Primary terminal area. Significant human presence. And—" a pause — "heavy machinery. Large-scale."
"Paladins?" Odyn asked.
"The acoustic mass is consistent with them," Zero said.
◈ — The Terminal
When the three teams converged on the terminal, the convergence itself was almost simultaneous, which was what happened when people had been well-briefed on their approach routes and had the specific capabilities to maintain pace with each other through difficult terrain.
What the terminal contained was the specific kind of spectacle that arrived when criminal organisations had been left alone with sufficient resources for sufficient time: the Mountain Glenn subway terminal had been converted into a military installation with the thoroughness of people who expected to use it for something significant. Platforms had been extended and reinforced. Rail lines had been restored and loaded. White Fang personnel moved with the precision of trained soldiers, not the improvisation of opportunists.
And in the centre of it, near a train that was loaded with a quantity of material that Weiss's chemistry training registered as extremely consequential, Roman Torchwick was using Ruby as a shield with the practiced ease of someone for whom human shields were a professional tool rather than a moral decision.
"Ruby!" Yang, breaking through the western entrance, had the specific quality of Yang when she had been worried about something for several hours and had arrived at the moment where the worry converted directly into forward motion.
Odyn came in from the central tunnels and did the assessment in three seconds: Ruby, held but conscious. Roman, experienced and not bluffing. The train, loaded, pointed at the tunnel junction that connected Mountain Glenn to Vale's active infrastructure. The woman in the red dress, in the shadow near the rear rail cars, watching the assembled Huntsmen with the calculating attention of someone who has been expecting exactly this development.
"This isn't a negotiation," Roman said, which was both accurate and informative. "This is a demonstration."
Ruby's silver eyes were doing their rapid processing — taking in the terminal, the loading, the tunnel orientation, the quantity of material on the train. "You're going to drive it into the city," she said. "The tunnel connects directly—"
"Smart girl," Roman said. "Always was."
The woman in the shadow stepped partially into the terminal's emergency lighting. The resemblance to Cinder Fall was close enough that Ruby's recognition was immediate and her confusion followed just as quickly — because Cinder Fall had an alibi, a continuous one, maintained for the entire duration of the dance.
"You're not Cinder Fall," Ruby said.
The woman's smile was the expression of someone who has been found out and has decided that being found out was always part of the plan. "Appearance can be malleable," she said, "when one has the right abilities."
Roman checked his watch with the efficiency of someone for whom timing is professional rather than personal. "As much as this has been delightful — we have a schedule."
The charges that detonated throughout the terminal were not the large ones — those remained on the train, waiting for the destination they were intended for. These were chaos charges: smoke, confusion, falling debris, the lights failing in sequence, the ambient noise of a space becoming unnavigable. Roman and the woman moved through the chaos with the ease of people who had placed the charges themselves and knew exactly what path the chaos would open.
Ruby was on the train before Yang could cover the distance.
The train was moving before the smoke cleared enough to see it.
"That train cannot reach the city," Weiss said, which was not a statement as much as it was an articulation of the next several minutes of their lives.
"Then we stop it," Yang said, which was simpler and the same thing.
They ran.
◈ — The Chase
The tunnel system had a different quality in pursuit than it had had in approach.
In approach, the darkness was something to navigate. In pursuit, it was something to exceed — to move through faster than the train was moving, which required using every capability available in parallel rather than in sequence.
Blake reached the train first, which was predictable and correct, her stealth training and Gambol Shroud's ribbon function giving her an approach vector that did not require following the track. She found Ruby in the lead car with her restraints still on and the detonation timer mounted where she could see it.
"Blake!" The relief in Ruby's voice was specific and genuine.
"Working on it," Blake said, which was what she said when she was already doing the thing rather than thinking about doing it. Her eyes found the timer. She continued working on the restraints.
Yang arrived through the car's rear door with the specific force of someone who had been running at maximum Semblance activation and had not been slowing down to enter. The door expressed its opinion about this and lost.
Weiss came in through the window, which was both faster and more elegant, and her assessment of the timer was simultaneous with her assessment of the car's structural integrity and what was available for shield construction.
"Fifteen seconds," Blake said.
Odyn had positioned above the train through the maintenance level, which put him in the car through the roof access with Roy three seconds behind him.
"Ten," Blake said.
Sarai came through the same roof access.
"Everyone brace," Weiss said. "I'm going to try to contain the impact." She raised Myrtenaster.
Her Aura reserves were lower than she would have chosen for this. The ice came anyway, because the alternative was not generating the ice.
It built around the car's forward section with the speed that extreme need produces in a Semblance that has been trained rather than simply possessed — not as much as she wanted, more than she had thought she had available.
"Five," Blake said.
"Four," Ruby said.
"Three," Yang said.
"Two," Odyn said.
"One," Weiss said, and the ice was as thick as she could make it, and it was going to have to be enough.
The barrier arrived.
The mathematics of the collision were straightforward and terrible: mass, velocity, structural resistance, the limit of what Dust-infused ice could absorb before the physics of the situation simply exceeded the capacity of the people trying to manage them.
The ice held for approximately half a second. That half second was the difference between survived and did not.
The car went through the breach.
The explosion, when it came, arrived in sequence — each charge amplifying the next, the tunnel system transmitting force through stone that had not been designed to receive it, the infrastructure beneath Vale receiving the announcement of what had been released.
In the wreckage of the car, eleven people were alive.
None of them were uninjured.
All of them were conscious within the same three minutes.
The silence that followed the last of the secondary explosions was the specific silence of a space that has received an enormous amount of noise and is adjusting to the absence of it.
Odyn registered his injuries by category and severity, which was the trained response rather than the instinctive one. His instinctive response was to find Weiss. He did this before the category-and-severity assessment was complete, because the assessment was professional and the finding was necessary.
She was upright, which was the first important thing. She was conscious, which was the second. She was swaying slightly, which was the third, and it told him that the ice shield had taken her to approximately the edge of what she had available, which meant her Aura was depleted enough that the next thing that tried to affect her would find less resistance than usual.
"Weiss," he said.
She looked at him. Her eyes were doing the adjustment that eyes did when the Aura was depleted — not unfocused, but working harder than usual to focus.
"I'm here," she said, which was the answer to the question he hadn't needed to ask out loud.
"I know," he said. "I know."
The sounds came in order: first the assessment of their own condition, then the conditions of the others — Ruby, whose training had protected her despite everything, holding Yang's arm and counting aloud; Blake already standing, her ears moving beneath her bow as she mapped the space; Sarai with a cut across her forehead bleeding with the steady unhurried quality of a cut that was serious and not immediately critical; Roy and Hailfire and Zero arriving at their feet in the sequence that injuries allowed.
Then the sounds that were not theirs.
Oobleck's voice, somewhere above: "The tunnels—"
And beneath it, from the breach the explosion had opened: the specific collective sound of something that had not moved in decades beginning to move.
"Those are," Hailfire said, and stopped. "Those are old," she said, which was what she said when she meant large and many.
The first Beowolf that emerged from the smoke was three times the standard scale. Its eyes were the specific red of creatures that had spent years in darkness and had emerged into emergency lighting and found it insufficient cause for adjustment.
"They've been sealed in for decades," Blake said, watching the shapes multiply in the opening behind the first. "Growing. Adapting."
"And the tunnels connect to the surface," Zero said.
"Vale," Weiss said.
Above them, transmitted through the infrastructure of a city that had not been designed to transmit this particular information, came the sounds of the surface receiving what the tunnels were sending upward.
Ruby got to her feet.
She did not look at the Grimm. She looked at her team, and at the assembled people around her — battered, exhausted, still present.
"We get to the surface," she said. "We help defend the city."
"Ruby," Yang said.
"We get to the surface," Ruby said again, and there was something in her voice that was not the cheerful determination that people sometimes confused for naiveté. It was the specific quality of someone who has decided on something past the point of needing to decide. "And we make sure this doesn't get worse than it already is."
Yang looked at her sister.
She looked at Odyn, who was standing beside Weiss with one hand on her arm and the other on his weapon, and at the rest of the people who had come underground after Ruby and were still here.
"Together, then," Yang said.
"Together," said eleven voices, in the specific way of people who have agreed on something that doesn't need to be made into a declaration because they are already moving.
The ancient Grimm poured from the breach.
The eleven Huntsmen moved toward the surface.
Above them, Vale was doing its best to hold.
— To Be Continued —
Next Time: Chapter 19 — Mountain Glenn; Promises and The Breach, Part II.