Chapter Text
"Guh!"
Ruby dashed back, but there were just too many. Already her leggings had a hole torn in them, and her strength was beginning to flag. If she lost much more Aura, she wouldn't be able to defend herself.
"Torchwick!" she called over her shoulder, before being forced to engage in a series of desperate feints and dodges with an avian Grimm. "Plan B!"
"On it!" the criminal called back, and clapped his hands together, spreading them out as the air filled with the orange glow of his Aura. Oh, this was it. He'd been waiting for this for months –for years.
An absurdly large gun clanked down onto the landing strip of the huge Atlas battleship, complete with a ludicrous –some naysayers might even say hazardous– amount of Dust ports along both sides of the car-sized barrel. Torchwick staggered against the huge machine, using the control panel to support himself with both hands. Okay, whipping out something that big was a correspondingly huge pull on his stamina. Good to know.
"Fire in the hole!" he shouted when he recovered a moment later, and banged his fist down on the largest –and only– big red button as the Little Red Huntress zipped out of the way, darting in behind him. For a few seconds, there was nothing but the ominous sound of revving energy, before a coruscating blast of red-orange flames suddenly exploded out the end of the huge barrel and burst across the landscape, turning vast swathes of the sky into an inferno and dissolving the battleship in front of them as pieces of the titanic ship –molten, melting pieces– dropped headlong from the sky, crashing into the forest and school below.
"This was your 'final solution' plan?!" Little Red screamed from behind him, hands over her ears as the roar of flames grew louder by the moment.
"I thought you heroic types were supposed to be happy when a dream comes true!" Torchwick snapped at her, then dashed what he refused to admit was a tear from his eye as the landscape and sky ahead of them was transformed into a fiery inferno for a solid mile. "Ah, it's so beautiful!"
Neo clapped her hands enthusiastically from beside him, and Torchwick spread his arms, basking in the heady glow of success –and the intense heat from the cannon.
"They all said I was mad! They said it couldn't be done!" he laughed hysterically, 'they' meaning Neo as she gave an affectionate roll of her eyes. "But behold! The Doom Cannon is real, and it has given me victory!"
Torchwick cackled as night turned to day and the raging inferno roared on, painting the sky red in every direction –even the ones that weren't on fire.
Ruby whimpered and pulled her hood farther down over her face.
This isn't my fault!