Mantle Sewers
The sewers that ran under the streets of Mantle were wet, dirty, smelly, enclosed and dark, and only the last of those wasn’t a problem.
At least, it wasn’t a problem for Rainbow Dash, thanks to her goggles which had now descended from atop her head to cover her eyes. Their night-vision mode gave her a clear – if green-tinted – view of the world around her in spite of the lack of light down here, in much the same way that that famous faunus night vision meant Blake looked as comfortable down here as she had been in the street above. Rainbow couldn’t say it wasn’t a problem for Team TSSM, as they had revealed that it was spelt; Rainbow thought it was a bit of reach to get from there to Tsunami, but then, some teams were just hard to work with when it came to names. In fact, judging by the fact that Starlight, Maud, and Sunburst all had some kind of flashlight out – either in one hand or attached to their weapons – it probably was a problem for them... but then, it was just one of the problems of being down here, and the rest of the problems affected Rainbow and Blake equally with their four allies.
Problems like the fact that it smelled down here; it smelled of exactly what you would expect a sewer underneath a town that wasn’t too clean to begin with to smell of, and that smell was getting everywhere. When she got back up to the surface, Rainbow was going to have to put everything in the laundry, including her shoes, but for now, the fact that the smell was getting up her nose and into her throat was the bigger issue. It was all she could do to keep from trying to cough it back up again. Blake was looking a little queasy as well, and Sunburst actually had started coughing more than once since they descended into this underworld.
The smell was the worst – assuming you could see down here anyway – but it didn’t feel so great in the sewer either, as they splashed through liquid that Rainbow was not too keen to look down at. Forget laundering her trainers from the smell; they were probably ruined by whatever she was standing in, and the same went for whatever everyone else was wearing over their feet too. She supposed that they should all be glad that none of them were wearing the kind of heels that left your feet bare the way Rarity sometimes did. That…would not have been great down here.
The huntsmen squelched as they moved through the liquid down here, and Rainbow felt that there were times when she had stepped in something a little more solid than normal, something viscous that tried to close around her feet. She didn’t think too hard about what that might be. She didn’t really want to know.
“There’s no sign of any more grimm,” Trixie said. “So can we go now? Trixie doesn’t really want to stay here any longer than she has to.”
“We need to confirm how the grimm got into the city,” Blake said. She pulled out her scroll, opened it up, and, well, scrolled through the various apps that she had on it until she found a mapping app that displayed a schematic of the Mantle sewer system for her. As Rainbow looked at it over Blake’s shoulder, she felt it would be amazing if Blake could actually understand what she was seeing here, because Rainbow couldn’t make ears or tail of it; the whole thing was just a labyrinth of tunnels criss-crossing underneath one another, getting deeper and deeper as they went. Whose idea had it been to build a sewer system this complicated? Was everyone supposed to come down here if the grimm got in like Mountain Glenn?
Rainbow sniffed the stench that passed for air down here. No, nobody would be living down here for any length of time.
Besides, it wasn’t like Mantle was going to fall to the grimm. This wasn’t Mountain Glenn, this wasn’t even Appleoosa; Atlas had had time to dig in here, and they knew how to dig in properly in this part of the world. This sabyr incursion was not the precursor to anything big or scary or dangerous; it was a one-time thing, and soon, Rainbow and Blake were going to find out how it had been done and make sure it didn’t happen again.
Provided they could understand the schematics.
“If I’m reading this properly,” Blake said, “a lot of these pipes converge into just three much larger pipes which travel underneath the city’s defensive perimeter before dumping the city’s waste out in the wilds. That must be how the sabyrs got into Mantle.”
“But those tunnels were walled off years ago, after the war when they started routing everything through the treatment plant,” Sunburst pointed out. “They moved away from dumping waste on the tundra precisely because of the danger of grimm infiltration and the increasing population's water demands.”
“If they didn’t completely collapse the pipes, the grimm could still use them,” Blake replied.
“Maybe; except, of those three pipes, one of them comes out halfway up a sheer cliff,” Rainbow said, “and the other two have defences so that the grimm can’t come through the tunnels. It’s not like nobody ever thought of this stuff before.”
“I’m sure that someone did,” Blake replied, “but since the wall hasn’t been breached, it’s the simplest alternative solution.” She lowered the hand that held her scroll but made no move to put the device away. “Since there are six of us, I think we should split up by pairs, each take a pipe and follow it through to its exit and see if there’s any sign that that is how the grimm got in.”
“Just a second!” Trixie cried. “Who put you in charge all of a sudden?”
“Mantle Command tasked us with running point investigating the grimm incursion, since we were at ground zero,” Blake reminded her.
“Yes, but Mantle Command didn’t give you command authority,” Trixie squawked in loud objection. “The Great and Powerful Trixie is in command of this team, and she doesn’t intend to give it up to some supernumerary!”
“Oh, come on, Trixie,” Rainbow said. “It doesn’t matter who’s in charge-“
“It matters to Trixie!”
Blake didn’t roll her eyes, because she had a lot of self-control like that. “Okay, Trixie, what are your orders?”
Trixie blinked. She looked away from Blake. She coughed into one hand. “Starlight, Trixie has decided that we shall split into pairs and investigate the three pipes that exit beyond the city perimeter. You go with Sunburst; Maud, you’ll come with Trixie.”
A grin played across Starlight’s face. “Understood.”
“And wipe that smirk off your face; this is a serious investigation!” Trixie declared. “You two can pair off together,” she added, waving one airy hand in the direction of Blake and Rainbow. “And you can take the…” she stopped. “What are the three pipes?”
Blake let out a very small and restrained sigh. “I’ll mark them and transmit it to your scrolls.”
“Yes, you do that, excellent work,” Trixie said. She made her own scroll appear in her hand with a theatrical flourish and waited as Blake marked the three pipes in question – tapping them to turn them red upon her screen – before sending them to Starlight and Trixie, who squinted at the schematics as though they were as incomprehensible to her as they were to Rainbow Dash. “Trixie sees,” she murmured, stroking her chin authoritatively. Eventually, she tapped the three marked pipes again, turning one blue, one green and one purple. “Starlight, you take Sunburst and check out this pipe that leads out over this cliff; Maud, you and I will take the northern pipe leading to the river; and you two can take the other.”
Rainbow didn’t know whether to give Trixie credit or not; she had given the easiest assignment – assuming the sabyrs hadn’t climbed a sheer cliff to get into Mantle – to Starlight and Sunburst, because at least she wasn’t the kind of leader who saw leadership as a way to take the soft option for herself; on the other hand, Starlight was the best huntress on her team by a way, so it was kind of a waste to send her out on the least likely option.
But it wasn’t as though Trixie and Maud couldn’t handle themselves, and the same could be said for Rainbow and Blake, so there was nothing to complain about in what she’d decided, even if it wasn’t a perfect decision.
“We should stay in touch and share what we find in our searches,” Blake said. “Just a suggestion,” she added, as Trixie bristled visibly.
“That,” Trixie said. “Is not a bad suggestion,” she conceded. “Okay, Team Tsunami, move out!”
Blake and Rainbow moved out too, picking their way through the sewage as the smell continued to assail their throats and their nostrils alike. Rainbow drew her pistols from their holsters, holding them down by her sides but ready to bring them up if need be. Blake held Gambol Shroud, also in pistol configuration, out in front of her, while in her other hand, she held her scroll with their location pinging on the map of the sewers.
“You’re getting good at this,” Rainbow observed as they half-walked, half-waded through the dark tunnel, following the direction in which the liquid flowed past their ankles, flowing towards the exits out of the city.
“Good at what?” Blake asked. “Being a huntress?”
“Yeah, because you were so bad at that before,” Rainbow muttered. “No, being a leader. Not losing your cool with the civilians, putting up with Trixie, deciding what to do; it’s kind of incredible when you think what a bad leader you were at Beacon.”
Blake glanced at her out of the side of her eyes. “You don’t know what kind of a leader I was.”
“I know your own team couldn’t wait to be rid of you,” Rainbow said. “I was there for that, remember?”
Blake winced. “Yeah, right.”
“I’m not trying to make you feel bad,” Rainbow said. “I’m trying to say…you’ve come a long way. Atlas has been good for you.”
“I…I wasn’t comfortable leading Team Bluebell,” Blake said. “You can’t lead people you don’t trust. In the White Fang…things weren’t quite so bad, but at the same time…there was still a wall between me and the people beneath me. Adam saw to that.”
“And now?” Rainbow asked. She hesitated. “Listen, I know that I…I know that we haven’t seen each other much…or at all…but you know I’ve got your back, right?”
“I know you do,” Blake said. “When you’re around.”
Rainbow cringed. “I…look, I’m sorry about that, I just…I was ashamed, and I was angry at myself, and…and every time I looked at you, it just made everything so much worse, because…because you’re an ex-White Fang terrorist, okay? And I’m the Ace of Atlas Academy, one of General Ironwood’s hand-picked guys, or I was, and…and seeing you become a better soldier of Atlas than me, a model huntress of this kingdom…it made me feel even more ashamed than I already did. So I didn’t want to be around you because…because I was afraid that as well as feeling ashamed, I’d start to…feel angry.”
Blake was silent for a moment. “And now?” she asked. “Now that you know what I knew, do you still feel that way?”
“Uh, kinda?” Rainbow admitted. “You told General Ironwood everything, and he forgave you. Now I wonder why I couldn’t have done that.”
“You thought you were doing the right thing.”
“No, I was doing the easy thing by keeping my mouth shut and hoping all of this would go away and I wouldn’t have to make any hard choices,” Rainbow said sharply. “You can’t be a leader with that attitude.” She snorted. “It’s probably for the best, anyway. I was never cut out for the whole leader thing. There’s a reason Applejack was the leader in Team Jasper. I’m better at punching things than coming up with strategies.”
“There must have been a reason General Ironwood chose you to lead Team Rosepetal.”
“He wanted someone he could trust, not necessarily someone smart,” Rainbow said. “Only it turns out that I wasn’t that trustworthy so…back to punching stuff it is. I hope.”
Blake was quiet for a moment, and for another moment after that, and for a while longer as they squelched and splashed through the stinking sewer with the sound of their squelching and their splashing the only sound to be heard between them.
“You don’t have to pretend that you’re not angry,” Blake said. “I came down here to try and help you, not to make you feel like you had to push down everything you feel until it blows you up. If you don’t like me-“
“This isn’t about you,” Rainbow said. “Well, it kind of is, but not like that. Yeah, you make me feel ashamed of myself, but I don’t hate you for it. You might just be the best thing I ever do for Atlas, and that…that’s something, anyway.”
Blake smiled softly, and although it was hard to tell, Rainbow thought she might actually be blushing. “Atlas might just be the best thing that’s ever happened to me, too. So thank you for that; whatever else happens, I’ll always be grateful.”
"You don't need to be grateful to me," Rainbow said, as they splashed through the sewers, the pipe they were traversing growing larger as several pipes converged into one single, larger tunnel; by the time they reached the exit pipe, it would be large enough for a dragon to crawl down. "You just...you just gotta take care of Atlas for me, and the general."
Blake's eyes narrowed. "You're out of favour, not dying. There's no need to sound this melodramatic."
Rainbow grunted. "It's easy for you to stand there and tell me that all I have to do is do better, but it isn't so easy to actually get back to where I want to be."
"I never said it would be easy," Blake replied, "but you can do it." She stopped, her right arm - the arm in which she held the pistol-configured Gambol Shroud - tensing up a little. "What is that?"
Rainbow raised one of her own pistols cautiously as she took a step closer to the thing that Blake had seen ahead of them in the tunnel. Then, when she recognised what it was, she lowered her weapon again. "That is, or was, a sewer gator," Rainbow declared. She said "was," because it was quite clearly dead; not just dead, but killed, although it had been twenty feet long or maybe a little more, that hadn't stopped something - and Rainbow thought she knew what - from slitting its belly open and spilling its guts out into the sewer. It lay half in, half out of the murky, filthy liquid that rushed so swiftly over their feet and lapped around their legs, beached on its back, its still, unmoving eyes open and staring. Its jaws hung open just a little, making it look surprised, dumbstruck by what had happened to it. It looked as though it couldn't believe that its life had changed so much for the worse and so quickly.
Rainbow knew the feeling.
"A sewer gator?" Blake repeated, as though the words were unfamiliar to her, as though Rainbow had suddenly started speaking in a foreign language.
"You never heard of a sewer alligator?" Rainbow asked. "You know, where a kid gets a little baby alligator for their birthday and isn't it cute until it gets bigger and it’s not so cute anymore, so the parents flush it down the toilet; then it grows from eating rats and stray dogs until they get-"
"That big?" Blake suggested.
"Even bigger," Rainbow said with relish in her voice. "They say that some of these alligators grow so big that they could swallow a whole ursa major in one bite."
"Really?" Blake said, with undisguised scepticism.
"I don't know if any of them really grow that big," Rainbow admitted. "I just think scary stories like that are cool." Some people thought that was weird, as though just because the world was a scary place, it meant that you shouldn't want to be scared any more than you were already, but that was kind of the point. There was a difference between being scared by a cool ghost story and being scared because a lagarto had almost eaten Rarity, and sometimes, you needed the first kind of scare to calm you down after the second.
Blake seemed to get it, or at least she nodded as though she got it. "Clearly, there's some truth to it, anyway," Blake said. "Although, who buys their child a baby alligator as a pet?"
"Pinkie's got one," Rainbow said. "She won't flush Gummy away, though; I don't know what she'll do with him once he gets this big, but she'll figure it out. Pinkie always does."
"Hmm," Blake murmured. "Do you think it was the grimm who killed this one?"
"I can't think who else it could be," Rainbow said. "I mean, if it had been eating sanitation workers, then maybe a huntsman would have been hired to take care of it, but I haven't seen a mission like that on the board lately."
"Me neither," Blake said softly. "Which suggests we're on the right track." With her thumb, she dexterously switched apps in her scroll from the schematics of the sewers to call Trixie and Starlight. "Guys, we've found a dead sewer alligator down here; we think it was killed by the sabyrs."
"Do you want us to come to you?" Starlight asked.
"No, it's not definitive proof that we're onto the right tunnel," Blake said. "We should all keep searching. I just wanted to keep you informed."
"Understood," Starlight said. "Good luck."
"Nobody get cocky," Trixie said. "We all have to be careful down here."
"We are, Trix," Starlight replied, before hanging up the call. Trixie did likewise.
Blake flicked back to the tunnel map with her thumb. "So we keep going?"
Rainbow nodded. "We keep going."
And that was what they did: keep going, following Blake's tunnel map towards the point where the oldest sewers in Mantle converged upon one of three great pipes to dump the city’s waste out into the wilds beyond the walls. And as they walked, through the smell and through the sewage, they found no sign of any more grimm lurking under Mantle, for which Rainbow was very grateful.
"So," she said, as they waded through the labyrinth. "How was the thing with your mom?"
"The treaty signing?" Blake asked, slightly surprised.
"Yeah, that," Rainbow said. She glanced at Blake, to find Blake glancing at her in turn. "Don't look at me like that. Just because I'm not as smart as Twilight or Rarity doesn't mean that I don't know what's going on."
"Sorry," Blake said. "I just...I wasn't sure if you were paying attention. Or interested. But I suppose I did underestimate you."
"Your mom got away okay?"
"Yes," Blake said. "To tell you the truth, it wasn't until she was gone that I realised just how worried I was that something terrible was going to happen to her while she was here, or on the flight out."
"But it didn't, right?"
"No," Blake replied. "No, my mom is fine, the treaty was signed, and everything is on track. So what do you think about it?"
"I think it's a terrible idea," Rainbow said.
"What?"
"Putting a CCT on Menagerie, connecting it to the network?" Rainbow said. "Do you have any idea how much harder my life is going to get once my parents can just call me from their home on Menagerie whenever they feel like it?"
Blake's shoulders shook a little as she laughed. "I'm glad your sense of humour is coming back."
"You think I'm kidding, but my parents are the most embarrassing people in the whole of Remnant," Rainbow declared. "I swear, if I told them they were calling in the middle of a life or death battle, they would still want me to give them a blow by blow account of everything that happened so far." She sighed. "I don't know how I'm going to explain to them just how much I screwed up."
"Speaking of which," Blake said, "I almost forgot: my mom gave me a letter for you from Gilda."
"From Gilda?" Rainbow repeated.
Blake nodded. "She's one of my father's guards now."
"Huh," Rainbow murmured. "Better than what she was doing before, I guess. Okay, thanks; give it to me once we get out of here."
"Right," Blake replied. "So what do you really think? Seriously, about the treaty?"
"Seriously? I think it's awesome," Rainbow declared. "The CCT is going back up, a new huntsman academy, and maybe now folks will start to see that we're not the bad guys. We're the good guys, and we can help them a lot more than the White Fang can if they only give us a chance. Maybe more faunus will apply to Atlas; or even if they don't, now that we're building an academy on Menagerie... it'll be good to see some more faunus huntsmen, 'cause I don't know if you've noticed, but we're kind of rare."
"You're right," Blake said. "About the White Fang, especially; it's my hope that they'll lose their grip on the hearts of the faunus once people see that we can achieve change peacefully, through talking and holding out a hand of friendship, the way my parents always thought we could. Maybe Sienna Khan will even admit she was wrong, although I'm not counting on it."
"If Gilda can change, there's hope for any of them," Rainbow said.
"I hope you're right," Blake whispered softly. "I really hope that you're right, because the alternative... the alternative is that I'll have to kill or watch die people that I called friends, people that I looked up to, people that I cared about. I'd rather it didn't come to that. Once was enough."
Rainbow didn't really know what to say to that, because as much as it sounded like a real downer, Blake was absolutely right: either they'd realise they'd been wrong all this time and give up like Gilda, or else they'd carry on the fight and somebody would have to stop them; there wasn't much of a middle ground there, especially if Atlas was going to get more and more involved in Menagerie.
But she didn't think she wanted to be told that she was right, even if she was right and she knew she was right; and so Rainbow said nothing, and Blake said nothing further, so a silence descended upon the two huntresses, broken only by the splashing, sloshing sounds they made as they followed the onrushing current through the dark pipes of this dank sewer, until they reached their assigned egress tunnel out beyond the city.
The fact that the wall that was supposed to block this tunnel off and stop the grimm using it as an access point had been smashed down was a pretty reasonable indicator that they were on the right track.
“Guys,” Blake said, calling Trixie and Starlight on her scroll, “we’ve found the tunnel wall broken. I think this might be the place.”
“Understood,” Trixie said. “The Great and Powerful Trixie has found her wall intact, so we’ll rendezvous with you as soon as possible.”
“Same here,” Starlight said. “Don’t have too much fun without us.”
“No promises,” Blake murmured, as she and Dash continued through the broken wall and down the enormous pipe.
The tunnel was vast, wide and tall enough to accomodate the waste of dozens, maybe hundreds of sewer tunnels all flowing into and through it; it was wide enough that you could have marched a platoon down it, wide enough to fly a Skyray through it; wide enough for the giant lagarto that Blake and Rainbow found waiting in the tunnel for them when they got there.
Lagartos resembled the sewer alligator that the two huntresses had found dead in the sewer earlier, just as a grimm; they were quick, mean and vicious, and the worst part was that they liked to hide in the water so you couldn't see them coming half the time. One of their breed had turned out to be living in the lake nearby to Camp Everfree, and if she hadn't discovered her semblance at precisely the right moment, Rarity would have been a goner. This particular specimen was big, the biggest of its kind Rainbow had ever seen, which might be why it hadn't gone any further into the city: it couldn't fit into the smaller tunnels further in. It was completely armoured on top of its body with white scales, as protected there as any deathstalker, with not a hint of black skin to be seen, and although the water in the sewer wasn't deep enough for it to submerge, it was deep enough that its underbelly was concealed, and only a little black along its lower flank and the inside of its legs was visible at all. Its eyes were red, and burned like hot coals.
It roared as it surged out of the sewage, its long jaws snapping shut on Blake, or rather - thankfully - only on the shadow clone that Blake had left in her place as she leapt away, Gambol Shroud snapping as she fired upon the grimm. Her shots ricocheted harmlessly off its armour.
Blake landed nimbly, with only a small splash, by Rainbow's side. "I have an idea," she said. "Can you buy me some time?"
"You mean distract it?"
"Yes."
"You got it," Rainbow said, and she raised both her pistols as she charged for the lagarto, guns blazing. "Hey, ugly! Over here!"
Most of her rounds, like the shots that Blake had fired before her, bounced harmlessly off the white armour coating the lagarto’s upper half, but a few of them slammed into the unarmoured lower half where it rose out of the sewage. They didn’t really hurt the giant monster, but they got its attention. The red eyes of the grimm burned balefully as it swung its enormous snout towards her. The lagarto displaced the water of the sewer tunnel, making waves as it shuffled to bring all its weight and bulk to bear on Rainbow Dash.
Rainbow grinned.
The lagarto lunged for her, its immense maw opening wide as it scuttled down the tunnel with astonishing speed for such a huge and fat-looking creature, splashing swiftly forwards, growling as it snapped at Rainbow Dash. Rainbow leapt out of the way of those strong, snapping jaws, and as the lagarto’s mouth closed around the empty air, she shot at it some more, lest it notice Blake jumping down the creature’s side to drive her scythe-like hook deep into its dark, unarmoured flesh. The lagarto tried to catch Rainbow with a swing of its head, to knock her down where it could crush her beneath its bulk, but Rainbow simply hopped up onto the grimm’s bony-white head instead.
“Hey there,” she said, as she let the monster have it right in one burning red eye.
The lagarto roared as it closed its eye against the bullets that slammed into its head, one white and armoured eyelid descending to protect whatever exactly it was that the grimm used to see with. It roared some more as it reared its head upwards, throwing Rainbow Dash off. She backflipped as she flew through the high-ceilinged and immense tunnel, and since it was hard to skid through all the crud down here in the sewer, she did another backflip as she landed, retreating further as the enraged lagarto charged straight at her, splashing and roaring and blind to all else but the tormenting gnat with multicoloured hair.
Certainly, it was blind to Blake, who was heading the other way to the grimm’s onward rush. She leapt up, a great kick carrying her up and through the dark tunnel, her black ribbon trailing behind her. She flew through the stale air, teasing out the line behind her to the hook still buried in the lagarto’s skin, and as she flew, she loaded Gambol Shroud with a magazine of ice dust and fired it into the tunnel wall upon her right just as she reached the apex of her leap and gently – turning over and over upon herself, white coat and long black hair seeming to mingle in the spinning circle – began to fall.
The ice rounds struck the wall, coating it with frozen crystals and causing long, clear shards to emerge out of the wall, jutting like the spears thrust out of a shieldwall towards Blake, and over one of those spear-like icicles, Blake’s ribbon became caught, so that as Blake fell back towards the watery surface of the tunnel, her ribbon was like a rope harnessed to a pulley.
And Blake began to pull.
The lagarto came to a swift stop, its motion arrested by the force Blake was placing on it from the other side as she pulled with all her might upon the ribbon, trying to pull the lagarto upwards by the hook and expose its more vulnerable belly for their weapons. Blake pulled, and the lagarto stopped; as it slid back a step, it turned its head and saw what she had done. It tried to shake the hook loose, but Blake had driven it home too deep for that. It tried to round on her, but Rainbow Dash dived for one of its massive, trunk-like legs and wrapped one arm around it, wrestling with the mighty grimm to hold it in place as she kept – or regained – its attention with her other hand by emptying all of her remaining rounds into its underbelly.
Blake hauled upon her ribbon. Sweat began to stain her face. It was no good; she just didn’t have the strength to lift the massive grimm all by herself.
“Rainbow!” she cried. “I need a boost.”
“You got it,” Rainbow said, letting go of the leg of the struggling lagarto and flinging herself underneath the massive grimm before it could react; she tried not to think about what all this waste was doing to her beautiful wings as she punched upwards and hit the grimm with an aura boom.
The bang from her expenditure of aura echoed down the tunnel as the grimm was launched upwards, the thrust from Rainbow’s attack proving just what Blake needed to haul the creature up into the air like a fish caught on a line.
The lagarto rose, and as it rose, so it left its black and completely unarmoured underbelly exposed for the blade. Blake had pulled the monster into the air but leapt for it, swinging on her ribbon to glide gracefully around the thrashing monsters until she was descending upon its vulnerable gut, cleaver in one hand and Gambol Shroud switching from pistol to sword in the other.
Blake and Rainbow jumped at the lagarto simultaneously, yelling as they hit it with twin flying kicks that slammed the great grimm down onto its back with a splash of sewage, its legs waving helplessly in the air.
Blake buried both sword and cleaver in the belly of the grimm as she ran upwards, dragging her blades with her, slicing up the lagarto’s belly all the way to its snout as though she were unzipping a coat.
The grimm let out a last pathetic groan, and like the dead gator the huntresses had found in the tunnel, the grimm looked surprised for a moment before, unlike its cousin, starting to turn to black ashes and fade away to nothingness.
“Nicely done,” Rainbow said.
“I couldn’t have done it without your help,” Blake acknowledged graciously.
“Told you I had your back,” Rainbow said. She let out a sigh. “So, I guess we know which tunnel the grimm used to get into Mantle, huh?”
Indeed, it didn’t take them long after that to reach the end of the tunnel and find that not only had the heavy mesh over the tunnel entrance been smashed through – probably by the lagarto, with the sabyrs following behind – but the robot sentry guns that were supposed to keep the grimm from getting close to the mesh had been disabled, and most of them had been chewed up, too.
Blake frowned. “How could the defences fail so comprehensively?”
“I don’t know,” Rainbow muttered. “But we should probably be grateful that it wasn’t a lot worse than one pride of sabyrs and one lagarto too big to get any further down the tunnel." Although it occurred to her that a grimm that big would also have been smart enough to know it couldn’t move any further into Mantle; probably it was trying to hold the tunnel while it waited for more grimm to show up. Good thing the sabyrs weren’t so smart and gave the game away too soon.
They called it in and held the position in case any more grimm emerged from the icy tundra or slithered out of the ice floe-laden river passing sluggishly down below – they didn’t – until the two of them were relieved by a company of engineers, who set about repairing the defences while under guard by several specialists, a large force of knights, and Skyrays and even a cruiser hovering protectively overhead.
They had been relieved, and it looked as though everything was in hand now, but nevertheless, Rainbow and Blake did not immediately head to the surface but stuck around, watching as troops were disgorged from the descending airships, and the technicians began to repair or replace the sentry guns and proximity sensors.
And so they were still there when one particular Skyray set down upon the snow, and General Ironwood himself leapt down from the side-hatch, his boots crunching the snow beneath his feet.
He looked around, and as he looked he saw the two young huntresses, who snapped to attention as his gaze fell upon them.
Rainbow felt sweat beat upon her brow in a way that it had not done when she was fighting with the lagarto, or the sabyrs for that matter. The General hadn’t spoken to her since…since she confessed. She had no idea what she was to him now, what he felt about her.
She didn’t know whether he would ignore her or insult her.
She wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“At ease,” General Ironwood said as he strode up to them. “Belladonna.”
“Sir,” Blake said. “I wasn’t expecting to see you here.”
“Grimm entered one of our cities,” General Ironwood said. “Where could I be more important than this? You’re the one who discovered this breach in our defences?”
“We both discovered it together, sir,” Blake declared.
General Ironwood didn’t even look at her, but then he didn’t really seem to be looking at Blake either. “This shouldn’t have happened,” he murmured, more to himself than to either of them. “So how did it?”
The two huntresses, realising that this was not a question that they were expected to answer, kept silent.
General Ironwood, his hands clasped behind his back, turned away from them. “You’ve done enough for today. Get cleaned up, go home; this situation is under control.” He stopped. “And good work. Both of you.”