SAPR

by Scipio Smith

Strictly For the Birds (New)

Strictly For the Birds

Pyrrha reached down to nervously tug at her sash, only to remember that it wasn’t there. She’d given it to Jaune before he left.

Before he went off into the forest without her, with Flash Sentry to guard his flank.

It wasn’t that she didn’t trust Jaune – he really had come a long way, and she was sure that Flash was perfectly capable – but… she would have rather that she’d been with him, just in case.

It’s a good thing he doesn’t know what you’re thinking.

Except that he probably does. I just hope he isn’t offended by it.

She took comfort from the fact that Jaune had seemed a little nervous himself. Not that it was a good thing that he was nervous! He had no reason to be; he had many reasons to be confident; it was only the grimm in the Emerald Forest after all. No, what she meant was that the fact that he was nervous meant that he would probably forgive Pyrrha being nervous on his behalf.

Nevertheless, it was probably not something that she should be dwelling onup.

Which was why it was especially unfortunate that it was the only thing that she could think of.

She supposed that she possibly ought to have been concerned for her other teammates, but the fact of the matter was that not only were Ruby and Sunset both more skilled individually than Jaune, but also they were accompanied by partners whom she knew. Arslan was, physically, the strongest fighter Pyrrha had ever fought, and only Sunset had come closer to defeating her; Blake was the bravest of the brave, and her skill at arms was almost equal to her courage. Flash was the only one that Pyrrha did not know well – or at least know their abilities intimately – and he was partnered with Jaune who… who benefited from having a reliable partner.

Pyrrha tried to distract herself by wondering about who her partner might be; it didn’t really work, but it did cause her to sweep her gaze across the crowd of students – she very much hoped that she was not partnered with Cinder Fall – and as she did so, she was reminded that she was not the only student who was worried about their partner in the forest without them.

Rainbow Dash stood with her arms folded across her chest, a decidedly sour look upon her face, brow knotted, nose wrinkled, lips pursed together in a pout. If there had been a storm cloud brewing above her head, it would not have made her look any more miserable or incensed.

Of course, Twilight. Pyrrha felt rather selfish, thinking only of her own discomfort and ignoring the fact that there were others in her position.

“Excuse me, please,” Pyrrha murmured, as she made her way through the crowd of waiting teams to approach the three remaining members of Team RSPT. Ciel also looked a little concerned, although not to the same extent as Rainbow Dash; her lips were pursed together, and her mouth was tightly shut. Penny looked uncomfortable, but it seemed that that discomfort was as related to the looks and obvious attitudes of Rainbow and Ciel as it was to any worries that she might have about Twilight.

“Pyrrha!” she said, and sounded less excited and more relieved to see someone without a thunderous face. “Hello again!”

Pyrrha smiled. “Hello again indeed, Penny,. Rainbow, Ciel.”

“Hey,” Rainbow grunted, briefly glancing Pyrrha’s way with her magenta eyes.

Pyrrha kept the smile upon her face as she placed one hand on Rainbow’s shoulder. “We have to believe in both of them.”

Rainbow sucked in a sharp intake of breath. “I don’t like letting Twi go into battle without me.”

“I understand,” Pyrrha assured him. “I don’t like letting Jaune go into battle without me either. But the fact remains, we have to believe in them.”

“Are you worried?” Penny asked.

“I…” Pyrrha hesitated. “Yes, yes, I am, a little worried.”

“But why?” inquired Penny. “Isn’t this just an ordinary exercise? Isn’t this normal?”

“It’s still live fire,” Rainbow muttered. “Things can still go wrong.”

“I suppose so,” Penny admitted. “But, still… is this because Jaune… isn’t very good?”

“Penny!” Ciel reproached her. “That is not a very polite thing to say, especially behind someone’s back.”

“And you’re wrong, in any case,” Pyrrha declared firmly. “Jaune has improved a great deal; he has so much promise and potential. I’ve never seen anyone work as hard as him to get better.”

“I’m sorry,” Penny said quickly. “I didn’t mean to upset you or insult anybody.”

“It’s alright, Penny,” Pyrrha replied, her voice softening noticeably. “I didn’t mean to snap either; it’s just that… so many people insult Jaune for the most wrongheaded reasons, I suppose it’s made me rather defensive.”

“Is that because you love him?”

Pyrrha chuckled. “I suppose it is, yes, although I like to think that I would worry about him even if we were just good friends.” She looked at Rainbow. “Speaking of friends, you know Flash Sentry, don’t you? From Canterlot?”

Rainbow nodded. “That’s right. Honestly, if he was partnered with Twilight, I’d feel a whole lot better.”

“But if Flash Sentry and Twilight Sparkle were partnered, neither of them would have headed into the woods in the first wave,” Penny pointed out.

“Even better,” Rainbow declared. “One of the few things I like about this is that Rainbow Dash has to be called pretty soon, no matter what partner I get.”

“If anyone is called next,” Ciel murmured, “it feels as though the next wave should have been ordered into their Bullhead by now.”

She had a point. Pyrrha had been under the impression that the students would be called up fairly quickly in succession. Now, it was possible that her understanding had been mistaken – Professor Port had never confirmed this face, and neither had Professor Ozpin; it was possible that they didn’t want to flow the forest with students, but rather wanted to feed them in gradually in small packets, although that risked all the grimm being killed by the first students into the forest – but nevertheless, she was surprised by the fact that the first Bullhead had returned and no new students had been named to enter the Emerald Forest in the next batch.

The fact that Professor Port and Professor Ozpin were now huddled together, looking at their scrolls, with their backs to the students, was not an encouraging sign either.

“Anyway,” Rainbow said, in the tone of someone who was intentionally trying to move the discussion back onto safer ground, “Flash… Flash is a solid guy. I trusted him to look after Twilight when Ciel and Penny and me went looking for Blake, and the fact that he then ditched Twilight to jump into a locker and fly to the docks like a madman doesn’t change the fact that he’s… he’s a solid guy. He’s not the best or anything, but he knows what he’s doing. Like I said, if he were with Twilight right now, I’d feel a whole lot better. I don’t know this Sage guy at all.”

“Sage is a cool guy,” Sun said, appearing behind them from… somewhere.

“How do you do that?” Rainbow demanded. “You’re like some kind of ninja or something.”

Sun shrugged. “You’ve got nothing to worry about; seriously, have you seen Sage? The guy’s the strongest on our team.”

“Yeah, I could see that he was big,” Rainbow said. “But is he fast? Is he agile? Is he good enough to do the work of two people?”

“Why would he need to- oh. Ohhhh, right,” Sun said. “Well… yeah. Probably. I mean, Twilight’s not completely helpless, right?”

“Thanks, you’re making me feel a whole lot better,” Rainbow said flatly. “Why couldn’t Twilight have gotten partnered up with Blake; then I wouldn’t have any worries at all.”

“None at all?” Ciel asked, raising one sceptical eyebrow.

“Okay, so I’d still have some worries,” Rainbow admitted. “But Blake’s got the mettle; we all agree on that, right? She’d get Twilight through this, no problem. This Sage doesn’t even know that he has to look out for Twilight, not the way Blake does.”

“I think we should have faith in our friends,” Penny said. “In all our friends.”

Pyrrha took a deep breath, and the smile returned to her face. “You’re quite right, Penny, and you chide us rightly. We should believe in them; it’s the least that we can do.”

“I’m sure that they’ll all set really high scores that it will be tough for us to beat,” Penny added. “But then we’ll beat them anyway. And I’ll be sure to beat your score too, Pyrrha!”

Pyrrha chuckled. “Will you now? That sounds like a challenge, Penny.”

Penny grinned. “That’s exactly why I said it.”

“Well, if you’ll forgive the cliché, I have no intention of giving up without a fight,” Pyrrha declared.

“Assuming that we are allowed to get to the fight,” Ciel muttered.

“I’m sure they’re just… they’re probably… okay, I’ve got no idea what the hold up is,” Sun admitted.

They were not alone in beginning to find the delay inexplicable, and concerning for the fact that it could not be explained. Whispers were beginning to flow amongst the other teams; people were shuffling impatiently in place; murmurs were rising as people wondered at the cause of the delay.

The murmurs and the mutters and the whispers must have reached the ears of Professor Ozpin where he stood with Professor Port, because the headmaster turned to address them all. “I’m sure that you’re all impatient to get going and take part in this exercise,” he said genially. “However, I must ask you all to be patient. Your turn will come, even if it does not come right away.”

Rainbow raised her hand. “What’s the hold up, sir?”

“There is no hold up, Miss Dash; this was always how the exercise was planned to go,” Professor Ozpin declared. “We are giving the first wave of students a good amount of time to make headway before we send in any more students to join them.”

Then why were you and Professor Port huddled together as you had a decision to make? Pyrrha wondered. She had always regarded Sunset’s suspicions of the headmaster as being rather unfounded, based more on Sunset’s paranoia than in any facts. But now, as she watched Professor tell what she was almost certain was a lie with that bland look upon his face… for the first time, she began to wonder if there might be something in what Sunset said.

“Do you believe that?” Rainbow muttered, in a tone that suggested she didn’t believe it either.

“I… I’m not sure,” Pyrrha said, which was almost a lie in it’s own right. “But I’m sure Penny’s right: everyone will be absolutely fine down there. Perfectly, absolutely fine.”

---

Arslan squawked in alarm as her legs disappeared beneath the earth; her arms flailed for a moment as grass and soil gave way beneath her and she was dragged bodily beneath the earth.

“Arslan?” Sunset cried. “Arslan!”

She dropped her scroll – she could just about hear Blake frantically demanding to know what was going on – as she reached out for her temporary partner with one hand.

Her hand was just about to clasp Arslan’s, to try and drag her to safety, when the head of a creep, the bony skull that looked reptilian without really resembling any reptile that Sunset could name, emerged from out of the ground to clamp its jaws around Sunset’s arm.

Sunset grunted in pain and blasted the visible part of the grimm with a bolt of magic from her other hand, causing the head to dissipate in a cloud of smoke and ash.

But in the meantime, Arslan had disappeared, pulled under the earth by what was presumably another creep, or several of them.

Just like the other creeps that were starting to emerge from underground, growling and snarling.

Sunset felt something move under her leg. She teleported, just a couple of feet upwards into the air, high enough to avoid the creep that snapped its head up out of the ground and tried to grab her the way that they had grabbed Arslan. Sunset pulled Sol Invictus off her shoulder – where she had slung it again when she called Blake – and shot it, blowing its head clean off before she landed on the ground. She darted backwards a couple of steps, not wanting to stay in any one place too long; she didn’t want to get grabbed and pulled down; she wanted them to come up here where she could get at them.

In the meantime, some of them had already come up out of the ground, and they snarled as they waddled on their two legs towards her, their broad tails waggling.

Sol Invictus fired another shot, and a third, bringing down two more creeps. Sunset leapt aside as another creep pushed its snout up from the soil to try and grab her leg, then she shot that one too. It took two shots to bring down a slightly larger creep, not quite an alpha to Sunset’s reckoning but on its way there, and then Sunset’s six shots were up. She skewered another creep on the point of her bayonet, and then she shouted in anger as she reversed the rifle and brained another grimm with the wooden butt of the weapon.

She could still hear Blake’s voice, a little muffled, calling out her name from out of the discarded scroll… but then she heard the sound of Crescent Rose roaring in anger from Blake’s position, and Blake stopped calling her name after that.

Sunset would have worried, but her own troubles were far more immediate at the moment: more creeps emerged from underground with every passing moment, there were at least a dozen of them out now, and although a dozen creeps weren’t anything worry about particularly, the fact that more of them kept coming was a little bit worrying, as was the fact that Sunset couldn’t see how many of them were still under the ground, biding their time.

Like the one that managed to get the drop on her; she had stood still too long, not moved quickly enough, and the creep – this one was large enough to be an alpha – managed to close its jaws around Sunset’s booted foot and retreat underground before Sunset could do anything, dragging Sunset with it.

Sunset teleported, and this time, she didn’t just teleport off the ground but into one of the trees that stood on either side of the path, appearing amidst the stout lower branches that were thick enough to support her wait.

More creeps burrowed up from out of the ground, turning their bony faces upwards as they growled.

They had no eyes, Sunset noticed, or at least not eyes the way that beowolves and ursai had eyes; they had only slits on their bone masks that might be for seeing or might just be the scars of battles long ago.

Sunset’s hand glowed as she grabbed her scroll in the grip of her telekinesis and levitated it up into her outstretched hand before the creeps could eat it. Fortunately, it didn’t look too damaged for being dropped. Unfortunately, Blake had hung up on her.

Judging by the sound of shooting from the south – Gambol Shroud and Crescent Rose – it sounded as though Blake and Ruby had troubles of their own.

Then there was another sound, a sound that was at once a boom and a hiss both at once, and it was accompanied by a bright glow of light that erupted in the corner of Sunset’s eye.

That wasn’t something she recognised from Gambol Shroud or Crescent Rose, unless either Ruby or Blake had been doing upgrades without telling her. And besides, she could hear them elsewhere. All the noise was coming from the south, but from different directions with that.

Jaune and Flash don’t use guns, which means it must be Sage… or Twilight.

The emergence of the alpha creep – an alpha creep, at least – reminded Sunset that she had her own situation to think of first. Surrounded by grimm, with no partner-

There was a stirring underground; the earth shifted, bucking upwards, forming a mound that bulged up and out in first one direction then another.

Another creep? That one must be even bigger than the first alpha!

The ground erupted; Sunset had just enough time to see a creep being punched upwards before the punch destroyed it, and Arslan Altan, a savage smile upon her face, laughing a fierce warrior’s laugh, emerged through the smoke and the ash as her leap carried her upwards beyond the grimm which snarled and snapped at her.

Sunset grabbed her in her telekinesis, enveloping her temporary partner in a green haze and levitating her into the tree next to Sunset.

“Thanks,” Arslan said. “I’m not sure I’d want to land straight in the middle of that lot.”

“You’re welcome,” Sunset said, snapping Sol Invictus open to reload. “I thought you were done for.”

“Please, it’ll take more than… whatever these are-“

“Creeps,” Sunset supplied.

“Right, it will take more than creeps to finish off the Golden Lion of Mistral,” Arslan braggedsaid. “I mean, I’ve got so much to live for. I haven’t even beaten Pyrrha yet.”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “Even so, you did get dragged underground by a grimm which had already bitten you once.”

Arslan ran one hand through her mane of pale blonde hair, shaking loose some of the dirt that was stuck there. “Not my first time.,” she said.

Sunset glanced at her but decided to hold off on asking for the details of that particular story until they were both safely out of this predicament. She finished reloading her rifle and snapped it shut once more.

She could still hear Gambol Shroud and Crescent Rose firing off to the south.

“You don’t mind if I take care of this quickly, do you?” Sunset said. It would cost her a bit of magic, but it would enable them to double back to the others in case they needed help that much sooner, which was worth it in her opinion.

Arslan made an ‘after you’ gesture. “Be my guest.”

“Thank you,” Sunset replied as she laid Sol Invictus on her lap and held out both her hands, her fingers spread out.

Fortunately, creeps were far from the toughest of grimm.

Sunset’s fingertips glowed with a soft green light for a moment before miniature blasts of magic, smaller than her palm blasts, only minute in diameter, began to leap down from those same fingertips to strike the grimm like thunderbolts. They were smaller blasts, and weaker than those she shot from her palms, but they flew faster by far, they flew at a rate of fire that would have done credit to at Atlesian rotary cannon, they flew so fast that Sunset’s fingers began to burn from the rate of her fire, they flew fast enough that the creeps could not escape her power by fleeing underground again. They were too slow, and her magic was too fast, and it was powerful enough to deal with their ilk.

The alpha took several blasts to kill, the others only one or two, dying as they howled, as they bit at the tree and tried in vain to bring it down, as they tried to burrow back beneath the earth.

They all died all the same, and in a brief space of time, there was nothing left of them.

Sunset winced a little at the burning pain in her fingers, which felt as though they were about to start smoking, as well as throbbing achingly to demand her constant and unceasing attention. She wished that she’d brought a canteen of water to cool them down with, for what little good it might have done.

She looked down to make sure that she had gotten all of the creeps. There was no sign of any more of them crawling up from out of the ground, fortunately.

“Neat semblance,” Arslan said. “Very versatile.”

“So I’ve been told,” Sunset grunted. “Now, once we get down, we need to head south again.”

“'South'?” Arslan repeated. “What do we want to head south for?”

“Can you not hear the gunfire?” Sunset demanded.

“Do you not remember this is supposed to be a test?” Arslan replied. “Of course they’re in a fight; we’re all supposed to be in fights.”

“We agreed to keep in touch so that we could help each other if we needed it.”

“They haven’t called to say they need it.”

“It’s a little hard to do when you’re fighting for your life,” Sunset said tartly. “If it’s nothing to worry about, the worst that happens is that we have to spend just a little longer in this forest; now I don’t know about you, but I’d rather that than abandon my friends.”

Arslan sighed. “Sure, whatever. Let’s go check on everybody else. Maybe we’ll meet them halfway coming to check on us.”

“That would be lovely,” Sunset said. “We’ll start with-”

The shrill shriek of a nevermore split the sky.

Sunset got up, balancing upon the branches of the tree, to see the avian grimm swooping through the air towards them. It was definitely at the larger end of the scale for its type, with black wings as wide as the Beacon docking pads and talons large enough to pick up an ursa in each one. Four red eyes burned in a bone mask covered in markings as red as blood. It cried out again as it dived towards them.

Sunset raised the palm of her hand, a bolt of magic leaping up to strike the nevermore upon its black-feathered breast. The grimm shrieked but did not deviate from its course.

It fell on Sunset, talons outstretched.

Sunset leapt from the tree, but too slow, or else the nevermore was too swift, for its black claws closed around her, pressing against her cuirass, squeezing her back as it carried her upwards into the blue above the forest, as though Sunset were a tortoise and the nevermore were an eagle which meant to drop her to the ground to smash her shell.

A knife flew out of the tree which had lately been Sunset’s perch, burying itself in the nevermore’s thigh as it ascended. The nevermore let out a harsh, croaking cry of pain and banked away, but as it flew, it carried Arslan with it, desperately clinging to the rope descending from her knife, bobbing up and down in the air as the wind ruffled through her wild mane and made her sashes flutter like streamers on a kite.

Arslan shouted something up to Sunset, but her words were snatched away by the air, and Sunset didn’t hear them.

“What?” Sunset yelled back.

“BOLIN!” Arslan roared. “BOLIN!”

Shamefully, it took Sunset a moment to realise what she meant, and when she realised, she was even more ashamed for not having come up with it herself.

Give me a break; I haven’t been here long.

Her hand glowed as she sought to draw Soteria with telekinesis. It was wedged a little bit, stuck thanks to the way to that the nevermore was holding her so tight, but with a little wriggling and writhing in its grasp – the grimm took no notice; it probably just thought she was trying to escape – she was able to free the venerable black blade, holding it in the grip of her magic, carrying it along beside her but never bearing it into her hand.

She had different plans in mind.

Just as she had with Bolin, just as Arslan had suggested, Sunset wielded the blade with magic, not with her hands, and with her magic, she wielded the sword far beyond her own reach, guiding it, swathed in green telekinetic glow, upwards to where the nevermore’s right wing beat against the air.

Sunset slashed at the wing where it metmade the grimm’s body, slicing at those black feathers, slashing at them, hacking at them. The nevermore screamed and weaved from side to side, but if its aim was to throw off Sunset, it was grievously disappointed. Sunset’s grip, her magical grip, was not disturbed, and this sword, this blade of heroes, this artiefact of an older and a nobler world, clove through the wing slowly but with a relentless certainty.

The nevermore screamed again, and as it screamed, its talons opened, and it released Sunset. The world spun around her, and then it was only Sunset’s hair spinning around her as it covered her eyes so that there was nothing in her view, nothing in her world, but a wheel of fire consuming her vision. She felt the air rushing past her, and could only imagine the ground rushing towards her, before she grabbed herself in the grip of her own magic.

She preferred to teleport, as a rule, and growing up in Equestria, she had had nothing but contempt for those unicorns who used their telekinesis on themselves to levitate and play at flight as though they were pegasi. She had always wanted to fly for real, upon real wings, and had preferred to wait for the day when she would earn such instead of playing at a second-rate imitation of the same.

But in this situation, it seemed like the best course of action.

Sunset’s hair fell out of her face as she hung, suspended, on her back as though the air beneath her had frozen solid.

Sunset had scarcely a moment to marvel at it before a cry from Arslan alerted her to the fact that her temporary partner was also falling towards the ground. Sunset gritted her teeth as she grabbed her too, holding her face down and facing the earth, and she was just about able to grab Sol Invictus and Soteria as well and pull them towards her as she gently, slowly lowered everyone and everything safely down to plant them harmlessly down on the ground.

She took a deep breath. That was… not as bad as she’d thought it would be. She kind of wished she’d taken it up years ago.

She still preferred teleporting though, as a rule.

A shrill, angry cry alerted them to the fact that the nevermore, injured by still very much alive, was descending upon them.

Actually, it might be more accurate to say that it was falling, its body wobbling a little as its damaged wing proved unequal to the task of keeping it aloft. Nevertheless, if it was falling, it was clear that it had chosen to fall towards them instead of anywhere else it might have gone, and its angry cries were directed towards the pair of them.

“Grab your sword,” Arslan told her. “With your hands.”

“Why?” Sunset asked, although she did as she was bidden and clasped the ornamented hilt of Soteria in her grasp.

“Trust me,” Arslan said.

“Why?” Sunset repeated.

The nevermore landed, crushing trees to splinters beneath its bulk, kicking up a storm of dust and wood shavings that momentarily engulfed Sunset and Arslan and made them shield their eyes against it.

When the dust storm cleared, they both beheld the nevermore, its injured wing hanging limp and useless, its red eyes burning with rage; with its talons and its one good wing, it crawled along the ground towards them.

Sunset let out a wordless squawk of alarm as Arslan grabbed her bodily around the waist and picked her up, carrying her like the ball in a game as she – Arslan – ran towards the nevermore, her moccasin-clad feet pattering along the brown earth as she charged towards the grimm in a weaving pattern, sometimes coming closer to its head and sometimes further away.

The nevermore snapped at them, its beak of black closing around the empty air as Arslan dodged aside and then, still carrying Sunset, leapt up into the air with a fierce spring that carried her beyond the nevermore’s head and over its black and feather-covered form.

“Now!” Arslan yelled as, with unerring skill, she threw Sunset head-first towards the nevemore’s neck.

Sunset thrust out Soteria like a lance and buried the blade in the nape of the neck, just at the back of the bleached white skull.

The nevermore reared up, screaming in pain, its whole body convulsing for a moment before the entire monstrous creature flopped forwards onto the ground and began to smoke, turning to ashes before Sunset’s eyes.

Sunset withdrew her sword and leapt down onto the ground. “You could have told me that was your plan.”

Arslan grinned as she landed next to her. “Be honest: it was more fun finding out that way, wasn’t it?”

Sunset huffed. “Pyrrha would never just pick me up and throw me like that.”

“No, I bet she wouldn’t,” Arslan replied, “but I’m not Pyrrha Nikos, am I?”

Sunset rolled her eyes. “I thought you were over that.” She pulled out her scroll and checked her aura. “I’m at the top end of yellow; how about you?”

Arslan checked her level on her own scroll. “Same here. Still sure that this is what you want to do with your life?”

“What I want to do right now is make sure that my friends are okay,” Sunset declared. “We need to go…” She looked around, but of course the nevermore had carried them off… somewhere, somewhere with no sign of the path. “Hang on, just let me connect to the rest of my team.” She tapped away at her scroll; she could start off by linking back up to their scrolls, and then she could use that to locate them. Directory, Team SAPR-

“No,” Sunset whispered. “No, that can’t be right.”

“What?” Arslan asked.

“Ruby… Ruby’s aura’s broken,” Sunset muttered. “It’s gone.” Her hands shook as she sought to locate her partner – her real partner – via her scroll; she fumbled, she mistyped, she struggled to remember what to do because Ruby’s aura was broken, and she was out there with… with Blake. She had to remember that; Ruby wasn’t alone just because Sunset wasn’t there. She was with Blake, and Blake… Blake was made of the right stuff. Blake would keep Ruby safe until Sunset got there; there was no way Blake would let Ruby come to harm, not while there was breath in her.

That thought, that knowledge, that trust was about the only thing that let Sunset concentrate as she completed her task, manipulating the link between the two scrolls, homing in on Ruby, or her scroll at least; if she wasn’t with her scroll, then-

No. No, she couldn’t think about that. Ruby was with her scroll and Blake both, and Ruby’s scroll was – there! To the south, along the path that she and Blake had started on. It was a way, but Sunset could teleport there in leaps perhaps, jumping as far as she could see… would that leave her with enough magic when she got there?

She’d balance it out, judge it as it came.

But then there was the question of Arslan.

“Go,” Arslan said. “Tell me where you’re going, and I’ll catch up.”

Sunset sent her the location. “There,” she said. “How did you-?”

“You weren’t exactly hiding your worry,” Arslan told her. “Go. Help your friend. I’ll be right behind you.”

A mist began to creep into the clearing, a thick fog of impenetrable grey tinged with black, sweeping out of the trees, gliding towards them.

Arslan’s hands clenched into fists. “I’ll be right behind you… once I’ve taken care of whatever this is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Do you want whatever this is following you all the way back to your teammates?” Arslan asked. “Go. Save her. I’ll be fine.”

“You don’t even-”

“I am the Golden Lion of Mistral,” Arslan declared, settling into a fighting stance as the mist crept closer. “Only one person living can defeat me, and she doesn’t go around carrying a smoke machine. Now get out of here!”

Sunset didn’t need to be told a third time. “Thank you,” she said, and then she didn’t wait for Arslan to reply before she took to her heels, teleporting as far into the forest as she could see before starting to run, leaving the Golden Lion behind to face the fog.

Hang on, Ruby, I’m coming.

Comments

[Herrzog]

Nevertheless, it was probably not something that she should be dwelling onup.
Spelling mistake____________________________________________________________👆

[Mastermind4892]

Oh yeah, Rainbow Dash and quite possibly General Ironwood will be looking into this along with Ozpin. And they won’t be happy.

Especially since Phoebe used Atlesian beacons... the only one to purchase Atlesian beacons, and in bulk no less. Which will make it much easier for people like Twilight to trace.

[Sr Face Tear]

First time reading threw this and I'm loving the story so far.

[Kiue Jin]

10766681
Phoebe doesn't seem the type to think too far ahead for the consequences of her actions, but I'm guessing that she might be counting on the Grimm to locate the lures she had planted and utterly destroying them (or maybe even rigging them with explosives) to... if not completely cover her tracks, at least make it look like it might have just been a third year trying to cheat and planting a singular lure rather then it looking like murder.

[Mezilsa]

This certainly popped up on a loooooot of radars!

[Widow Peak]

Damn, I love Arslan

The Golden Lion of Mistral, yeeter of ponies.

[Scipio Smith]

10894045
I love Arslan, too, she's possibly my favourite amongst the minor characters - although Trixie and Starlight provide some competition there.

[Snowdrifter]

10767689
Phoebe believes, deep within the festering, died up, blackened , shriveled husk of a soul that remains within her - and she can manifest an Aura so believe it or not she DOES have one - that she is immune to consequences because of her wealth, social status and lineage.

Her comeuppance will be delicious.