Chapter Text
The city of Vale had always been loud.
Not the way it was in stories, with laughing crowds and music spilling from open doors, with the steady rhythm of airships overhead and merchants hawking Dust like it was as common as bread. Loud in a different way now. The kind of loudness made by a building that could not decide whether it wanted to keep standing.
Ruby Rose moved through the skeleton of a street she used to know by heart, boots crunching on glass and powdered stone. Her cloak was a lighter red than it used to be, sun-bleached and smoke-stained and patched at the hem with strips of whatever fabric she had managed to scavenge. The hood was up, not to hide her face but to hide the shine of her eyes. Bright things were too easy to notice in a dead world.
Crescent Rose rode her back like a promise and a weight.
Runes glimmered along the black metal in thin lines, etched deep and filled with powdered crystal. They were old marks, some carved by the hands of masters she would never meet again, some re-carved by Ruby herself in the tower’s workshop by candlelight and stubbornness. The weapon answered her like it always had, familiar even when everything else had become wrong.
The air smelled like wet ash.
She paused beside the remains of a fountain, its stone bowl cracked and dry. A statue stood in the center, head missing, arm outstretched toward nothing. Someone had painted a symbol in black tar across its chest long ago, half washed away by rain: a scorpion tail curled around a broken halo.
Ruby’s throat tightened.
Tyrian’s mark had started showing up in the months after the battle, when people still believed there were roads left to travel and cities left to save. It was always the same. A warning. A laugh. A signature.
“Don’t,” Ruby whispered to herself, and forced her gaze away.
She checked the street again, eyes sweeping the angles where rubble made shadow-caves and doorways became mouths. If there were Grimm out here, she would feel them before she saw them. Despair had a taste. Fear had a sound. It tugged on Aura like a hand trying to pull you under.
But the infected were different.
They didn’t hunt feelings. They hunted for warmth, movement, life. They hunted because the plague in them was hungry in a way Grimm never were. Grimm killed. The infected consumed.
Ruby adjusted her grip on the strap across her chest, the satchel thumping against her hip. She had a list in her head, the kind of list she used to make for missions at Beacon.
Cloth. Needle. Salt, if she found it. Candle wax. Anything that could burn without smoking too much. A spool of wire. A coil of rope. A handful of Dust crystals, even cracked ones. A jar of preserved fruit, if the universe decided to be funny. And medicine.
Always medicine.
The tower had people coughing in the lower floors again. Not the plague cough, thank the Brothers, but the cold kind. The hungry kind. The kind that came when you lived in a fortress built for messages, not bodies.
Ruby stepped over a fallen sign, letters broken into nonsense. She knew this district. She knew what used to be here.
Used to.
A shopfront had collapsed inward like a punched jaw. The old wooden frame still held the shape of a doorway, stubborn in the face of everything. A faded symbol hung crooked above it, carved into a plank: a crescent moon with a little star tucked into its curve.
Ruby’s heart gave a small, ridiculous kick. She remembered passing this place with Weiss once. Weiss had been annoyed at how long Ruby took looking at the window displays. Ruby had been annoyed back, because Weiss had called the carving “quaint” in that way she used when she was trying not to care.
Ruby swallowed hard and stepped inside.
The interior was a tumble of shelves and shattered jars, the smell of dried herbs and dust so thick it tasted like old tea. Sunlight filtered through a broken roof beam in slanted stripes. Somewhere, water dripped steadily, a patient sound.
Ruby knelt, pulling a small rune-charm from her pocket and brushing her thumb over it. The charm was a disk of copper, stamped with a simple ward. It warmed in her fingers, faintly.
A hush settled over her senses.
Not invisibility. Not really. More like… a suggestion. A whisper to the world that Ruby Rose was just another piece of debris. Emerald’s work was better. Emerald could fold sight and sound around you like a cloak. Ruby’s little charm was a cheap imitation, a tool for when you were alone and didn’t want to announce your existence to every hungry thing in Vale.
She moved deeper, careful. The floor was half collapsed near the back, but a side counter still stood, drawers intact. Ruby opened one and found a tangled mess of thread and needles and small metal clasps.
“Okay,” she breathed, relief sharp enough to sting. She stuffed what she could into her satchel. A second drawer held candles, most snapped in half but still usable. A third held small glass vials with cork stoppers, empty but precious.
A faint sound pricked at the edges of her hearing.
Not the drip.
A scrape.
Ruby froze.
She listened again, slowing her breathing. Aura hummed in her chest, the instinct to flare it up strong. She kept it leashed. Aura was armor, and Aura was life, and Aura was also the thing the plague wanted most.
The scrape came again. Closer. Then the soft, wet click of teeth.
Ruby’s hand slid to Crescent Rose’s haft. The rune-lines along the weapon shimmered faintly as if waking.
She eased toward a gap between shelves, peering through.
A figure stood in the doorway she’d entered, head tilted. The light caught the edges of a face that might have once been familiar. The skin looked… wrong. Tight and pale, stretched over bone as if it had forgotten how to be alive. The eyes were clouded, but not empty. The thing’s Aura was shredded. Ruby could feel it, like torn fabric, practically see it in some places, flickering in the air, dark black and red at the edges. It sniffed the air.
Her charm was doing its best. The drone’s head turned slowly, like a hound catching the tail end of a scent.
Ruby’s stomach dropped.
One drone meant more. They traveled in loose packs. They followed trails, they learned routes, they remembered where prey had been before. If she was very unlucky, they’d have a commander, some unfortunate civilian or fallen huntsman who had once had the magic of semblance before being infected. Ruby backed up, careful not to knock anything. The drone’s head snapped toward her anyway, mouth opening with a gurgling hiss.
It lunged.
Ruby moved.
She yanked Crescent Rose free and snapped her wrist, thumb brushing the primary rune. The weapon unfolded with a familiar clack and hiss, black metal sliding, gears turning not by mechanics but by enchantment. The scythe blade flared into being with a thin red line of crystal-light along its edge. Ruby spun as the drone hit the shelf, sending glass raining.
She didn’t aim for the head. Not because she couldn’t. Because she remembered. Because sometimes the drones still wore someone’s scarf, someone’s boots, someone’s ring.
The blade bit through its shoulder and deep into its chest, severing what should have been vital. The drone didn’t even slow. It grabbed for her with fingers that ended in torn nails and blackened skin.
Ruby hissed and kicked it back, then blurred.
Her semblance, her magic, was useful here, too, raw movement woven through the world’s rules. A burst of petals, a whisper of wind. She became a scatter of red drifting through the sunbeam, re-forming behind a broken pillar.
The drone whirled toward her, too fast for something that should be dead.
Ruby slipper her hand along another rune.
Crescent Rose shifted again, the scythe blade folding, the haft thickening, two curved metal plates in the side extending out with string thicker than her little finger. It was a compact ballista, a brutal thing with a rune-strung armature and a channel for Dust-bolts.
Ruby’s fingers dipped into a small pouch on her belt, pulling out a Dust crystal no bigger than her thumbnail. Clear as ice, shot through with faint blue: Lightning Dust.
She pressed it into the bolt’s socket. The runes drank it greedily, glowing brighter.
The drone charged.
Ruby braced, planted her feet, and loosed the bolt.
The ballista snapped with a thunder crack, the bolt a streak of blue-white. It struck the drone center mass and detonated in a spiderweb of lightning that crawled over its body. The drone convulsed, mouth opening in a sound that wasn’t quite a scream.
It fell.
For a moment, it didn’t move. Ruby stayed frozen, the bolt already half loaded again. She had learned the hard way not to trust mindlessness, or stillness. The drone twitched, Its fingers flexed, reaching.
Ruby’s jaw clenched. She lifted Crescent Rose, switched back to the scythe with a sharp motion, and finished it clean, the point of her scythe through the back of its head, severing the spinal column.
The body slumped, finally, finally still.
Ruby stood over it, breathing hard, ears ringing. Her Aura flickered in response, the faint shimmer of it rising under her skin. She forced it down again.
“Sorry,” she murmured, and didn’t let herself look at its face.
She didn’t have time.
The sound of movement outside answered her urgency. A low chorus of dragging footsteps, the scrape of bodies over debris. A hungry, wet murmur.
More.
Ruby moved fast, sweeping the counter for anything else that mattered. A bundle of dried herbs. A jar of salve, half full, sealed tight. A small book of rune patterns, pages singed but legible, a container half full of something crystalline and white.
She shoved them into her satchel and ran.
Out the broken doorway, down the street, over rubble. Her cloak streamed behind her like a banner that had forgotten what victory looked like. She didn’t use her semblance yet, not until she had to. Every time she did, it felt like lighting a torch in a dark room. The drone-pack poured around a corner ahead, three of them at least, heads snapping toward her movement. Then there were at least a dozen, maybe a few less, lurching around the corner, luckily, no commander. Even if she had the time, she didn't have the lightning dust to deal with that many for how little she was finding in the shops.
Ruby’s pulse spiked.
“Not today,” she said through her teeth.
She bolted into an alley, boots sliding on wet stone. The alley narrowed, choked with fallen beams. Ruby ducked under a sagging awning and leaped onto a collapsed staircase that led to a second-floor landing with no building attached. From there, she climbed, hauling herself onto the roofline. Vale’s rooftops were a graveyard of broken tiles and melted signs. In the distance, the CCTS tower rose like a spear driven into the heart of the city, its upper runes pulsing faintly through the haze. Wards crawled across its stone like veins, ward-light a pale blue that had become the closest thing the survivors had to sunrise.
Ruby ran toward it.
Below, the drones swarmed into the alley, too stupid to climb well but persistent enough to try. One of them found a broken ladder and began hauling itself upward, joints popping at angles no living body should manage.
Ruby’s grip tightened on Crescent Rose.
She didn’t want to fight them on the roofs. Noise carried. Grimm heard.
So she ran.
Across a gap between buildings, cloak snapping. Over a sagging billboard. Past the burnt husk of a watchtower where once the guards had stood with crossbows and brave smiles.
Her legs burned. Her lungs rasped.
And somewhere behind her, the drones kept coming.
Ruby pushed herself into her semblance at last, and the world stretched forward before it snapped, becoming petals. The roofs blurred, the grey and black smearing into streaks as she shot forward like a thrown rose. Wind tore at her hood. For a heartbeat, she felt weightless, like she could leave the whole world behind if she just leaned into the magic hard enough.
Then she landed, hard, on a wide stone ledge that wrapped around the lower portion of the CCTS tower.
A voice called out, sharp and urgent. “Ruby!”
The rune-ward at the tower’s outer barricade flared, lines of light snapping into a lattice.
Ruby pounded toward the gate. The barricade wasn’t just wood and metal. It was old Beacon shields repurposed into wall panels, old armor plates hammered into place, and runes carved deep into every surface. The tower had become a fortress in layers, like a turtle pulling into its shell.
The gate guards spotted her and moved fast.
Ren sat in the perch above, bow already drawn, eyes narrowed. His expression didn’t change, but Ruby saw the tightness in his jaw. Worry, disguised as calm.
Nora leaned over the wall beside him, braid swinging. “You’re late!”
“I’m alive!” Ruby shot back, skidding to a stop as the gate mechanisms clanked.
A rune-circle on the ground flared to life as she crossed it, a quick scan of aura signatures, a ward meant to catch infection. It tingled under her boots. Ruby held her breath until she was past it.
The gate slammed shut behind her with a deep boom. Runes flared, sealing.
Outside, the drones hit the barricade, claws scraping against wood and metal. Their moans filtered through the warding like bad dreams. Inside, the air smelled like sweat and soup and candle smoke. Ruby sagged forward, hands on her knees, catching her breath. Her satchel felt twice as heavy now, as if the weight of what she’d dragged home had finally decided to settle.
“Did you get anything?” Nora demanded, already climbing down the ladder in a way that made Ruby’s ribs ache just watching.
“Yeah,” Ruby managed. “And I only… sort of… woke up half the street.”
Ren shot her a look. “Ruby.”
Ruby lifted a hand in surrender. “I know, I know. But I got a salve. And candles. And needles. And a rune book, and some herbs, and…” She shifted the satchel. “Maybe some salt if I didn’t accidentally grab sugar.”
Nora brightened instantly. “Sugar!”
Ren pinched the bridge of his nose.
Ruby straightened, wincing as her muscles protested, and started toward the tower’s inner doors. That was when she saw Emerald. Emerald Sustrai leaned against a stone pillar just inside the courtyard, arms folded, posture casual in the way of someone pretending she hadn’t been waiting. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy tie. A thin scar cut through one eyebrow, new enough that Ruby didn’t remember it being there before the world ended. Her eyes met Ruby’s, and the tightness in Ruby’s chest eased. Just a fraction. Just enough to breathe.
“You’re bleeding,” Emerald said, voice flat, like she was accusing Ruby of forgetting to bring milk.
Ruby blinked, then glanced down. A thin line of red ran along her forearm where a piece of glass must have caught her. It didn’t hurt. Not yet. “Oh,” Ruby said. “Hi.”
Emerald’s mouth twitched. Not quite a smile. Not quite not. “Hi,” Emerald echoed, and pushed off the pillar.
Ruby’s heart did something stupid. Emerald crossed the space between them, hands already reaching for Ruby’s arm. Her fingers were warm. They always were, even in the cold. Ruby had learned that in the worst nights, when the tower wind howled through cracks they couldn’t seal and everyone slept in shifts to keep watch.
Emerald’s gaze flicked up, sharp. “You went alone again.”
Ruby tried for light. “It was supposed to be quick.”
Emerald’s eyes narrowed. “And was it?”
Ruby hesitated. Emerald’s fingers tightened gently around her wrist. Not a squeeze. Not a threat. Just a reminder. I’m here. Don’t make me imagine you not coming back.
“I ran into a few drones,” Ruby admitted. Ren and Nora hovered nearby, pretending they weren’t listening. They were bad at pretending.
Emerald’s jaw set. “How many?”
“Enough,” Ruby said. “But I didn’t let them touch me. I didn’t get close. I used Lightning Dust, and I got out.”
Emerald’s shoulders eased by a hair. She glanced toward the sealed gate, where the moaning had already begun to fade, the drones frustrated by warding they couldn’t understand. “You’re going to give Jaune a heart attack.”
Ruby huffed a laugh, more breath than sound. “Jaune’s heart is basically armor at this point.”
“Ruby.”
Ruby’s grin faded. Emerald’s voice wasn’t angry. It was… tired. Fear-worn. The kind of fear that never got to finish being fear, because you had to keep moving or die. Ruby lifted her free hand and, on impulse, touched Emerald’s cheek. Emerald stilled, surprise flashing across her face so quickly Ruby almost missed it. Ruby’s thumb brushed a smudge of soot near Emerald’s jawline.
“You’re dirty,” Ruby said softly.
Emerald’s eyes flicked to Ruby’s mouth, then away. “You’re bleeding.”
Ruby’s lips twitched. “You already said that.”
“And you didn’t answer,” Emerald replied, but her voice was quieter now.
Ruby let her hand drop, but not before her fingers caught Emerald’s for a second, an accidental brush that didn’t feel accidental at all. Emerald looked down at their hands like she wasn’t sure what to do with gentleness. Then she sighed, and instead of pulling away, she laced her fingers with Ruby’s for the briefest moment.
Ruby’s chest warmed. A small joy. A fragile one. A dangerous one. But real.
“Come on,” Emerald murmured. “Before Nora steals your sugar.”
Nora’s voice floated from behind them, utterly unrepentant. “I heard that and I will!”
Ruby laughed, and for a second she almost remembered what it felt like when laughing didn’t hurt afterward.
They headed into the tower.
The Cross Continental Tower of Scrying had once been a marvel, built of pale stone and old magic, its core a spiraling column of rune-carved crystal that shimmered with stored light. In the old days, you could step into a scrying chamber, touch a rune panel, and see across the world through linked channels. Messages. Faces. News. Beacon announcements. Pyrrha’s tournament interviews. Yang’s stupid grin when she waved at the camera. Weiss’s stiff posture. Blake’s quiet half-smile.
Now the network was a flickering ghost.
On good nights, the tower could reach as far as Patch, sometimes even Mistral if the storms weren’t bad and the channels didn’t sputter. On bad nights, it could barely reach the next district.
They had barricaded every lower floor, drawn wards across stairwells, sealed windows with wood and rune-braced metal. People lived in clusters now, rooms turned into dorms, hallways turned into gardens under stolen sun-crystals. The higher you climbed, the colder it got. The top floors were mostly empty, too exposed, too close to the broken sky.
Ruby and Emerald stepped into the main hall, where lanterns hung from the ceiling like captured fireflies. The sound of voices echoed softly. Someone was playing cards on a crate. Someone else was sharpening a blade. A child, too thin, chased another child around a pillar until a tired adult caught them by the collar and muttered something that made both kids giggle.
Life. Small. Stubborn.
Jaune stood near the central crystal column, armor scuffed and patched, sword at his hip. His hair was longer now, tied back in a way that made him look older than he had any right to, aided by the rather dignified beard as well. His eyes turned the moment Ruby entered, and relief hit his face so hard it made him look briefly furious.
“Ruby,” he said, and the word was both greeting and reprimand.
Ruby lifted her satchel like an offering. “I brought stuff.”
Jaune’s gaze flicked over her, checking for wounds, for pallor, for anything that would hint at infection. His semblance, his magic, whatever you wanted to call it, hummed faintly around him like sunlight trapped under skin. It was the only thing they’d found that could mend Aura in a way the plague couldn’t gnaw through. He could bolster it, stitch tears, sometimes even burn the sickness out if it hadn’t sunk deep yet.
He exhaled slowly. “You’re hurt.”
“It’s a scratch,” Ruby said quickly.
Emerald’s hand tightened around Ruby’s again, as if to keep her from darting away from consequences.
Jaune’s expression softened, but his voice stayed firm. “I’m still checking.”
Ruby made a face. “You sound like my dad.”
“Someone has to,” Jaune replied, and there was a flicker in his eyes that almost looked like humor, until it turned into something heavier. “Sit.”
Ruby sat on a low bench near the crystal column. Emerald stayed standing beside her, close enough that Ruby could feel the warmth of her leg through fabric. Jaune knelt, took Ruby’s arm gently, and closed his eyes. The air around his hands brightened, a soft golden wash. It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet, like a hearth in winter. Ruby felt her Aura respond, rising like a shield she didn’t have to force into place. The scratch on her arm tingled, then eased. More than that, the constant ache in Ruby’s bones, the fatigue that never fully went away, shifted as if someone had loosened a knot inside her.
Jaune’s semblance always did that. Made you feel… held together.
He opened his eyes after a moment, and the glow faded. “No signs,” he said, his relief plain.
Ruby’s shoulders sagged. She hadn’t realized how much she’d been bracing until the brace was released.
Jaune looked up at her, and for a second he looked like the boy he’d been at Beacon, the one who had tried so hard and failed so often and kept showing up anyway. Then the tower flickered with distant thunder, and the world reminded them what it was.
“Good haul?” Jaune asked, standing.
Ruby nodded and began pulling items from the satchel, laying them out like treasure: candles, thread, herbs, the salve, the rune book. Nora swooped in like a delighted vulture the moment the word “sugar” became a possibility.
Ren caught her by the back of the collar with a quiet sigh. “Nora.”
Nora pouted. “I’m not stealing. I’m… reallocating.”
Emerald snorted, a real sound, and Ruby’s heart did that stupid thing again.
Jaune thumbed through the rune book, brow furrowing in focus. “This is old.”
“Old is good,” Ruby said. “Old means it was made when people still knew what they were doing.”
Jaune’s eyes lifted to her, and the unspoken truth sat between them: and when people were alive to teach it.
Emerald shifted, leaning down slightly so only Ruby could hear. “You did good.”
Ruby’s throat tightened. She kept her eyes on the pile of supplies so she wouldn’t have to let anyone see how close she was to falling apart over three simple words.
“Thanks,” Ruby whispered back.
Emerald’s fingers brushed Ruby’s shoulder, a light touch that felt like a tether.
Above them, the tower’s central crystal pulsed once, then flickered, as if catching a signal.
Everyone froze.
The Cross Continental Tower of Scrying had moods now. Some days it was quiet and dead. Some nights it stuttered with half-messages, broken images, voices that sounded like they were speaking through water.
A faint hum rose in the air, and the rune-lines in the floor brightened in response.
Jaune turned toward the crystal column, eyes narrowing. “That wasn’t us.”
Ren’s posture straightened, alert.
Nora’s grin faded into something more serious.
Emerald’s gaze sharpened, her expression turning into the mask she wore when she was about to do something dangerous. Her semblance, her magic of illusion and suggestion, prickled at the edge of the room without fully blooming. Ruby stood slowly.
The crystal flared again, brighter this time. For a heartbeat, the tower filled with pale blue light, and an image flickered in the air above the rune circle like a ghost trying to remember its face. A landscape. Dark trees. Snow? No, ash drifting like snow. A broken road, half swallowed by creeping black vines of Grimm ichor. And a sound. Not a voice. Not words. A thin, distant note like a scream stretched into a whistle.
Ruby’s skin went cold.
She knew that sound, not because she’d heard it in this life, because she’d heard it in nightmares.
The image flickered, broke, reformed. A shape moved at the edge of the scry, too fast and too sharp. A tail curled. A glint of something like a smile.
Then the tower’s light snapped out, plunging the hall back into lantern glow.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Ruby’s hands clenched into fists at her sides. Her breath came shallow. Emerald’s fingers found hers again, tight this time, anchoring her.
Jaune’s voice was rough when he finally spoke. “Was that…?”
Ruby swallowed, forcing the air down into her lungs. Forcing the world back into focus. “It was a warning,” Ruby said softly, and hated how steady her voice sounded. Like she’d been waiting for this. Like some part of her had never stopped waiting.
Ren’s eyes were distant, as if listening to something only he could hear. “Or bait.”
Nora’s jaw set. “Or both.”
Emerald leaned in close, her voice low. “Ruby… hey. Look at me.”
Ruby did, and Emerald’s dark eyes held hers with fierce insistence. “You came back,” Emerald said. “You’re here. You’re not alone.”
Ruby’s throat tightened again, but this time she let it. She let the feeling exist, just for a second, because there were so few seconds left in the world that belonged to anything other than survival. “I know,” Ruby whispered.
Outside, beyond the wards and stone and runes, the drones moaned and the Grimm prowled and the dead city waited. Inside, in the heart of the tower, a handful of survivors gathered around a fading light. And Ruby Rose, last of her team, tightened her grip on Crescent Rose’s haft and tried to remember what hope felt like, because the world had just reminded her that monsters could still smile.