SAPR

by Scipio Smith

Truth to Power (New)

Truth to Power

The sunglasses were cheap plastic. Gilda had found them in a store – not in someone’s house; she wasn’t a ghoul – not long after they moved in. She wouldn’t ordinarily have needed anything like this – the sunshine in Vale wasn’t all that, not even in summer – but after spending a lot of time underground, when you came up for air, you found the light was a little hard on your eyes. So Gilda wore the cheap sunglasses.

And, honestly, even if they were cheap and plastic, they still made her look pretty cool, if she said so herself.

Gilda adjusted the rucksack on her back and flapped her wings experimentally to make sure that she could move them properly without the backpack getting in the way. She stood just outside the personnel elevator up from the railway yard to the surface, not far from the massive cargo elevator that they used to move their supplies and vehicles between surface and underground.

She had just come up, and absent her sunglasses, the light would have been blinding. As it was, the world was tinted in dark blue colours, appropriate for a dead city.

Fortunately, there wasn’t too much evidence of death – the White Fang had cleared away the bodies from any areas they had made their homes, because nobody wanted to see bones all the time – but unfortunately, just because you couldn’t see actual bodies in the streets didn’t mean you could forget what this place was. There was an unearthly quiet in the air, a lack of any sort of city sounds, that forcibly reminded you that this was a place from which humanity had been forcibly cast out.

It wasn’t the crumbling buildings, or the half-constructed buildings, or even the rusting cars that you saw on the streets. Gilda had grown up in Low Town underneath Atlas, where it had been almost as dark sometimes as it was in the underground, and she was no stranger to places crumbling to bits because they couldn’t be maintained. But this quiet… even in Low Town, there had been noise, always noise, even if it was just a low hum of background noise from people shooting the breeze with their neighbours. There was none of that here.

There wasn’t even a lot of natural noise to replace it. It was as though, even once the people were gone, nature wasn’t too keen to move in after them. You didn’t hear any birds; you didn’t see many animals, not even rats. There was nothing here… nothing but the grimm.

There was an extent to which Gilda would have welcomed hearing a grimm growl sometimes; thinking about the reasons you barely saw or heard from them gave her the creeps.

She wasn’t the only one to feel that way, but unfortunately, the only person whose opinion really mattered didn’t feel that way, so that was that. All they could do was get on with it and maybe pick the right moments to fight the battles all over again and hope for a different result.

Gilda’s hope was wearing out a bit on that score.

Which left getting on with it, which was just what she intended to do.

Gilda spread her wings and kicked off the ground, flapping furiously to bear herself, and the weight of the rucksack on her back, into the air. She flew into the blue sky, cloudless and almost offensively free from worry compared to how miserable it was down on the ground. From up above, flying over the abandoned houses, the half-built or half-fallen towers, Mountain Glenn didn’t seem so bad. She might have been looking at a new build under construction and not a monument to the arrogance of men. It helped that you wouldn’t expect to hear anything above a living city, so the quiet didn’t seem so bad.

Although, when flying, it was the emptiness that got to you, the fact that in all these streets, there was nothing to see, nothing but the packs of grimm roaming the avenues and alleyways, giving the White Fang a wide berth but claiming the rest of the dead city for their own.

Gilda took her eyes off them. She didn’t need to look down all the time to find her way; she knew it by heart by now.

As the only one of Adam’s lieutenants who wasn’t either dead, in jail, or a turncoat, Gilda didn’t need to go on supply runs to the outlying sentry posts, but she did it anyway because it gave her an excuse to get out of the underground and into the sun.

It gave her an excuse to fly.

She spread out her arms on either side of her as she flew, and sure, she couldn’t swoop or dive for the hell of it while she was carrying a load, but that didn’t matter because she was in the air, away from it all, with all her troubles falling away to the ground below. Up in the air, she was free. Free from humans, free from Cinder, free from her misgivings, free from all of it and all of them.

None of them could take the sky from her.

There was a part of her that didn’t want to land. A part of her that just wanted to keep going, to see how far or how high she could go with the wind on her face and rustling the feathers of her wings, to see just where they would take her if she let them. She wanted to just keep flying east, as east as east could get, with the land passing beneath her with all its fields and rivers, until she reached… what? The sea? The point where the world started to curl up on itself? The end of everything? Finding out would be part of the point, wouldn’t it?

But it was not to be. She had a job to do here; she had people who were depending on her, and she couldn’t just walk out on the White Fang to pursue some crazy dream.

Maybe in another life.

For now, in this life, Gilda banked downwards and descended upon the grey stone tower that sat at the eastern edge of the city. The Valish had built Mountain Glenn with a wall to keep the grimm at bay – much good it had done them – with gates to the northwest, south, and east, with roads leading… well, the northwest road led back to Vale for people who hadn’t wanted to take the subway; the east and southern roads led nowhere. Gilda guessed that they’d planned to roll them out as they continued to expand in those directions and had the gates ready and planned.

Obviously, it hadn’t worked out that way, but Gilda had managed to persuade Adam to put small details in each gatehouse anyway, just in case. It was true that there were plenty of breaches in the walls the grimm could come through instead, but if the White Fang had to clear out in a hurry, then they could do a lot worse than leave by one of the major roads the Valish had laid out, and fleeing towards Vale didn’t seem like a great idea. If need be, they could run east or south and hope to lose the Atlesians in the wilderness.

But for that to work, they needed to know they weren’t going to run straight into a whole mess of grimm, hence the guards, there to make sure that the coast was clear.

It was on the eastern gatehouse that Gilda descended, or upon one of the two square and blocky towers that made it up, standing on either side of the sealed metal gate that occupied the gap in the wall.

Gilda landed on top of the tower to find Strongheart standing sentry on the roof, looking out across the battlements towards the wild east that lay beyond the city.

“Hey,” Gilda said, moving nimbly across the grey stone to stand beside her, “see anything?”

“See for yourself,” Strongheart said, gesturing with one hand out into the wilds beyond the wall.

Gilda saw what she meant: a herd, or whatever the word was, of goliaths moving southwards across the front of the city, a column three or four wide and so deep that she couldn’t see the start or finish of it as it passed by. And these weren’t young goliaths either, in the main – although she could see one or two little ones struggling to keep up; any more were lost in the press of the column – they were big, and being big, they were surely old too, with spikes of bone the size of pikestaffs jutting out of their backs. She hadn’t noticed it when she was in the air, but now that she had landed, she could feel the tower – and the earth itself – shaking with their stomping tread as they marched on.

“Where do you think they’re going?” Strongheart asked.

“I don’t know,” Gilda answered. “So long as they don’t bother us, they can go where they please.”

As she said this, one of the goliaths upon the edge of the herd stopped, and although it was hard to be sure at this distance, Gilda was absolutely sure that it turned its head to give her a dirty look with its burning red eyes.

Gilda found herself taking an involuntary step backwards, swallowing as her throat became suddenly dry.

She would have reached for her sword, but she hadn’t brought either of them with her; it was awkward to strap them on with the backpack.

Not that it would have done her much good, in any case. Against a grimm that size, Strongheart’s rifle wouldn’t have helped much either. Short of some of their stolen Atlesian weapons, Adam’s semblance was about the only thing she could think of that would harm them, and even that was touch and go, given he needed to charge it up first.

Thankfully, the grimm turned away, rejoining the herd as they marched southwards, trumpeting to one another as they went.

“What do you think that was about?” Strongheart asked softly, her voice trembling a little.

“I think he was sending us a message,” Gilda muttered.

“What kind of message?”

“That he knows where we live,” Gilda said. “Even if we’re not worth his time right now.” She shook her head. “We should never have come here.”

“Cinder says-“

“Cinder says a lot of crap, if you ask me,” Gilda growled. “This is a mistake.”

“Adam won’t like to hear you say that,” Strongheart said warily.

“Adam doesn’t have to like it; he just needs to hear it,” Gilda replied. “I’m his number two, with everyone else… gone. That means speaking truth to power.” She couldn’t remember where she’d heard that. It might have been something Blake had said, or maybe it had been Dashie, something she’d picked up from her fancy human friends. It was a little ironic, taking leadership advice from the person who had betrayed her or the person who had betrayed the cause, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t good advice.

Plus, it gave her an excuse to say what she thought, and that was always a plus.

Strongheart frowned. “If you’re speaking truth to power, doesn’t that mean you ought to keep it to yourself when you aren’t talking to Adam?”

“I do keep it to myself,” Gilda said defensively. “Mostly.”

Strongheart’s eyebrows rose. “Everyone knows that you’re not happy, Gilda. People are starting to talk.”

“People always talk,” Gilda said. “But what are they saying now?”

“They’re saying that if we lose, it’ll be your fault,” Strongheart explained. “Because you didn’t believe in us. You didn’t believe in Adam.”

“Oh, bollocks,” Gilda spat. If they lost, it wasn’t going to be because she – or anyone – hadn’t believed enough in the plan or the cause or anything else. What, did these people think that belief was going to repel Atlesian missiles?

Although I guess I can see why they think I’m a downer.

That didn’t change the fact that she was right, even if Strongheart was… not without a point. Blake, after all, had always kept her misgivings private; so private that everyone had been absolutely gobsmacked when she left because there’d been no hint she was the slightest bit unhappy about any of this. But even when she pushed back against Adam, even when she argued with him about strategy or tactics, she never took it outside and aired her grievances amongst the rest of them.

Of course, she had possessed some advantages that Gilda didn’t have; it wasn’t as though Gilda could stick her tongue down Adam’s throat to make him listen to her. She could try, but she’d probably lose the tongue at the very least.

He wasn’t listening to her. And she couldn’t make him listen, so she talked to other people who might listen to her, hoping… 'mutiny' was a strong word, but she wouldn’t deny that if there was a groundswell against carrying out this insanity and moving out of Mountain Glenn and severing Cinder Fall’s head from her shoulders, she wouldn’t say no.

“If this doesn’t work out, it won’t be because of me,” she insisted stubbornly. “Blake would have-”

“Blake betrayed us!” Strongheart snapped. “Blake left! If she’d run away, it would have been bad enough, but now she’s fighting for Atlas!” She turned away. “I don’t want to hear her name again.”

Gilda looked down at the ground beneath her feet. It was a sore subject with her, clearly. It was a sore subject with a lot of the old crowd… or the not so old crowd, considering the old-old crowd had mostly been whacked by Adam since the mess at the docks back in the springtime.

Still, Blake was a sore subject for a lot of people, not just the boss. Kids like Strongheart, people who had fought alongside her… you couldn’t help but look up to Blake. She was smart, proper smart, and educated too. Gilda… Gilda struggled with her reading and writing; she had to run her finger across the page and mouth the words, and even then, she didn’t get them all right – the longest word she knew was ‘explosives’ – but Blake read books for fun, and when she talked about them… she could tell the best stories, about far away places and people with lives like nothing Gilda could have imagined. And she was a damn good fighter to boot, and she seemed to care whether you lived or died on a raid she was part of. She had the High Leader’s favour, and it wasn’t hard to see why. Yeah, a lot of people had looked up to Blake, and a lot of people had taken it hard when it turned out that the Blake Belladonna they had all looked up to so much had been a fake, a lie, a mask that she’d worn to fool them all.

That was the best case scenario. The news said that she’d been an Atlas spy all along, a deep cover operative buried deep within the White Fang. Gilda didn’t believe it for a second, and Strongheart didn’t believe it, and she was damned if Adam believed it. It was just the human way of trying to save face.

Considering the lack of arrests made or operations foiled while she was around, if Blake had been a spy, she’d done a terrible job of it.

No, Blake had been on their side… right up until she wasn’t anymore. Which was an uncomfortable thought, and one that nobody wanted to think about.

Gilda pushed that thought aside. It wasn’t important right now. What was important was that Blake would have recognised this plan for the folly it was, would have recognised Cinder for the poison she was, would have stopped it somehow.

Which meant, since she wasn’t here, that Gilda would have to stop it, or try to.

But there was no good saying all of that to Strongheart. For Strongheart, she let the matter drop, just as she let her rucksack drop to the ground to land with a sight clatter on the roof of the tower. “Never mind about her,” Gilda declared. “Never mind about the plan or any of the rest of it. You want a treat?”

Strongheart’s eyes lit up. “Do you have any Ferdy bars?”

“Let’s see,” Gilda said, kneeling down and opening up the rucksack. She wasn’t sure whether Strongheart was properly too old to want a chocolate bar shaped like a cartoon frog or too young to be carrying a gun into battle; she wasn’t sure she wanted to know what the answer was. “I think,” she said, as she rummaged around, “that we might still have a few of these left.” She grinned as she pulled one out. “Here.”

“Yes!” Strongheart said. “Thanks, Gilda.”

“I meant what I said; there aren’t many left,” Gilda reminded her. It wasn’t like they could just go shopping, after all, and the food that they had brought with them from Vale, either purchased legally or stolen from the Atlesians, wasn’t going to last forever. As ghoulish as it was, they could – and they would have to – scavenge for canned food and bottled water and the like amidst the ruins of Mountain Glenn, but any chocolate bars and stuff would have gone off years ago.

Once it ran out, they would have to do without for the foreseeable future.

“You want a drink too?” Gilda asked.

Strongheart nodded. “Tea, please,” she said, bending down to pick up a little tin cup that sat on the floor.

Gilda had two large vacuum flasks with her, one of tea and the other of coffee. The milk had already run out, and so had the sugar for that matter, so Gilda poured the black tea into the tin cup. “Something to warm you up a little bit,” she said. She hadn’t brought essentials with her because the squad had brought their Atlesian ration packs and their canned spaghetti and the like with them when they moved in, and their relief would do the same. Gilda had brought some little treats for everyone, some hot tea and coffee and some biscuits and chocolate from their diminishing stores, just to let the guys know they hadn’t been forgotten up here.

She spent an hour or in the gatehouse, longer than it took to actually give the stuff out, just hanging out with the sentry unit, seeing who laughed at her jokes and who looked at her like she was a second Blake in the making, enjoying feeling the sun on her face as it entered the tower.

As it was time to go, she returned to Strongheart standing sentry up top and joined her looking out over the battlements eastward, towards a land that was once more empty. The Goliaths had all long gone, and there was nothing before them but land and forest, grass and trees as far as the eye could see.

Gilda leaned upon the wall. “I wonder what’s out there,” she said.

“Maybe nothing’s out there,” Strongheart suggested.

“Something’s there; you can see it,” Gilda pointed out.

“You know what I mean,” Strongheart replied. “No people, nothing.”

“Sounds nice,” Gilda muttered.

Strongheart sniggered.

“You think I’m joking,” Gilda said. “But maybe we’ve got this all wrong. We shouldn’t be wasting our time fighting for equality in Vale; we should just pack up all our stuff and head out there, to free lands, just waiting for us. We could build something, like our ancestors did on Menagerie, only with-”

“More grimm?” Strongheart suggested.

Gilda snorted. “Maybe,” she grumbled. Probably. After all, if it was a good idea, someone smarter than her would have come up with it before now. “Anyway, I should be getting back. I’ve wasted enough time here.” She turned away from the view, with all its promise, and began to walk towards the centre of the roof. Her legs bent as she prepared to kick off.

“Hey, Gilda,” Strongheart called, prompting Gilda to look back at her. “It’s going to work,” she declared. “Adam’s plan, or Cinder’s, it’ll work. Adam’s going to lead us to glory.”

Gilda still couldn’t get it out of her head that Adam was most likely to lead them to their deaths, but nevertheless, she smiled and said in the most sincere voice that she could manage, “Sure he will.” Then she kicked off and took to the skies with a far lighter load upon her back than she had arrived with.

That loss of weight, and of breakable objects, gave her a greater freedom in the air, and on her way across the city, she rolled and dived and spread her wings in the most literal sense, bursting through clouds as she rose, higher and higher, up towards the sun, before dropping down like a thunderbolt towards the ground and all its troubles.

It was towards the ground, at last, that she returned, having squandered even more time amongst the sky before she finally set her feet down back where she had started from, outside the personnel elevator.

There was no one on guard here. Mountain Glenn was a secret base, and for the most part, they trusted in secrecy rather than sentries. Some people had joked that the grimm were their sentries, but Gilda didn’t find that very funny.

Not least because it wasn’t wrong.

The elevator was a cage rather than a box, a metal cage that let you see the walls of the hole on either side as you dropped into the darkness which you could also see beneath your feet, swallowing you up the further down you got.

As she descended into that great darkness, with the rocky shaft of black stone on either side of her, Gilda would have preferred a box.

It certainly didn’t help that the lights had all gone out and they didn’t have the dust to spare to illuminate the shaft. Just keeping the elevators running verged on a luxury.

And it was slow too, grindingly slow. She could have flown down twice as fast, at least if it weren’t for the elevator blocking the way.

It gave her time to think. To think about… about all the things that were making her less than popular in some quarters.

But she was right. Damn it, she knew she was right. This wasn’t going to end the way that Adam wanted it to.

She didn’t understand why he couldn’t see it.

The elevator reached the bottom, and Gilda lifted up the cage door with one hand, stepping out into the railway yard that the White Fang were using as their base. They had cleaned the rails of any debris, and the train and all its long tail of cars sat upon those rails, resting silently like some sleeping animal waiting to be woken up and put to work. The storage sheds were filled with dust; well, no, they weren’t filled any more, so much of it had been used already, but it was still where they were keeping the rest. Rows of Paladins, as still and silent as the train itself, waited in rank upon rank, arrayed like soldiers on parade. The rest of the yard had been transformed into a great camp, the darkness illuminated by the light of cooking fires, as hundreds of warriors camped and trained and slept and waited.

Gilda could hear the strain of a guitar playing some way off, voices raised in song; from the other side of the camp came the snap of gunfire as some fighters used the faces from Pumpkin Pete’s boxes for target practice.

Gilda had never known anything quite like this, in her whole time with the White Fang. They had never mustered this many troops in one place before. There might be a good reason for that, but all the same, regardless of all of Gilda’s worries and her doubts, there was a part of her that was inspired by the sight: a thousand men, more or less, come together to fight for the freedom of the faunus. Yes, most of them weren’t trained, but Gilda had barely been trained when she first came to the Fang; she’d been trained while she was here.

They could be trained, all of them. They could become more than just enthusiastic volunteers. They could all of them discover their aura, their semblances; they could become true warriors, standard bearers for the cause.

What they couldn’t do was beat the Atlesians in a stand-up fight. And it was a waste to even try.

They had the manpower here to swell the numbers of all the chapters, even to rebuild the Atlesian chapter anew. Instead, they were going to take what no other chapter had done in the history of the White Fang in raising numbers like this and just throw it all away.

If Gilda spent too much time talking about how doomed they all were, this was why: because it was such a colossal waste.

Gilda made her way across the camp, looking for Adam.

She found him just beyond the railway yard, in a secluded spot that was reserved for him and him alone, training.

Mountain Glenn had a few secrets the White Fang had not been expecting when they moved in, including some odd robots that they’d found amongst the ruins: combat robots, but bigger than the usual Atlesian models, and tougher too, as the White Fang had found out when they turned them on. They didn’t have anyone with the technical skills to reprogram them, but Adam had nevertheless ordered them all brought here, and whenever he wanted to train, he would turn a few on and let them try to kill him.

Nobody had asked what would happen if they actually did kill him; Gilda might doubt Adam’s plan, but she didn’t doubt his skill in a fight.

She found him with his shirt off, the muscles that ripped across his body gleaming with sweat, his sword glowing with a dull red light as he sparred with four of the giant, broad-shouldered robots.

Gilda watched, silently, not daring to disturb him. The robots looked like they ought to be slow, but they weren’t. Far from it. They were all armed with halberds, and they slashed and thrust with their glowing weapons, lights embedded in the blades leaving trails of light in their wake as they tried to box Adam in, tried to restrict his movement, tried to surround him and finish him. Adam didn’t give them the chance. Gilda wouldn’t have thought it would be possible for him to get better than he had been, but somehow, he had. He was stronger now, and more importantly he was faster; she couldn’t follow his movements any more, except by the red trail that Wilt left behind as it slashed through the darkness. Sometimes, he trained by turning on one of the robots with a gun and trying to block all the bullets with his blade, and by the lights, he did it too. Just like he effortlessly sliced through the robots, outmanoeuvring them, slipping and sliding away from their strokes which seemed so clumsy compared to his, Wilt slicing through their metal bodies until only scraps remained.

When the fighting was done, Adam stood in the midst of the ruin that had wrought, and although his back was to Gilda, she could still see him panting for breath a little.

“What do you think, Gilda?” he asked.

Gilda stepped out of the shadows. “How did you know I was here?” she asked.

Adam turned to face her. Though his shirt was off, he had kept his mask on; she’d never known him to take it off. “I’m not just training my speed and my strength. That Atlesian dog got the drop on me once, as well as outfighting me twice. Well, the third time will pay for all. For her, and for the other traitor to our race that Blake betrayed me for.”

Gilda could believe it. Since the last train job had gone sideways thanks to Dashie and Blake, Adam had been in continual practice. If Dashie got overconfident on the basis of what had happened last time…

Gilda didn’t know whether she’d regret that. She shouldn’t, because Dashie was her enemy, a dog of the Atlesian military; Dashie had left her behind, betrayed their friendship, pledged herself to the people who were keeping the faunus down. She should welcome Dashie’s death. But somehow, she didn’t think she would.

Not that she’d say that where Adam or anyone else could hear her.

“Did you want something, Gilda?” Adam asked.

“I want to talk about the plan,” Gilda said.

“We’ve talked about the plan enough,” Adam declared. “Too often.”

“And we have time to talk about it some more,” Gilda insisted.

“Why, Gilda?” Adam demanded. “Why do you do this to yourself?”

“I’m speaking-”

“'Truth to power,' yes, you’ve said,” Adam muttered. “Many times.”

“It’s my job,” Gilda said. “If I don’t tell you things that you don’t want to hear, then who will?”

“At what point does it become your job to shut up and do as I tell you?” Adam demanded.

Gilda shrugged. “When the bullets start flying.”

Adam stared at her, or at least, she thought he did; the mask made it hard to say. “There is no room for cowards in the White Fang,” he told her bluntly.

Gilda took a step forward, hands clenching into fists. “I’m no coward,” she cried. “But this… we have an opportunity here, Adam, a great opportunity, one that the White Fang hasn’t had-”

“I know!” Adam said, his voice rising. “I am well aware of what an opportunity this is, what an opportunity that Cinder has given to us. We have numbers, we have weapons the like of which we could never have acquired on our own, we have dust in such quantities as never before. Don’t you see, Gilda? We are no longer a group of terrorists, we are no longer a band of miscreants hiding from our enemies, we are an army!”

“Vale has an army too,” Gilda declared. “Atlas has an army, an army that they’ve sent to Vale, and they have all the toys that we and Cinder’s friends have stolen off them and bigger and better ones that we haven’t got our hands on. I don’t know about you, but I don’t see a cruiser parked in the yard.”

“Cinder has promised to neutralise the Atlesian strength in the air,” Adam said, “and turn their automatons against them. As I’ve told you before.”

“And as I’ve told you before, boss, I don’t trust her to live up to her promises,” Gilda replied.

“She has power,” Adam insisted. “She has power the likes of which you and I cannot comprehend, the kind of power we couldn’t possibly have imagined.”

“Or she’s peed on our leg and told us it's raining,” Gilda muttered.

“Have we not survived here, these past months?” Adam demanded. “Have we not been safe from the grimm, just as she promised we would be? What is that, if not proof of Cinder’s power?”

Gilda hesitated. “She’s not one of us,” she said.

“Blake was one of us,” Adam snarled. “Blake was one of us, trusted, beloved, but she betrayed me! Betrayed all of us! Just as faunus betray their own kind all the time, betray the cause, fight for Atlas and Vale, sign up as huntsmen and huntresses! Maybe it’s time that we accepted that humans can betray their own kind as well?” He paused. “If not this, Gilda, then what?”

“Split up,” Gilda said. “Train our new recruits to fight the way that we fight, hitting the enemy where it hurts and then melting away. We have the numbers now to strike everywhere from Cold Harbour to-”

“The old way,” Adam said dismissively.

“Our way,” Gilda insisted. “The way that has kept us alive.”

“'Alive'?” Adam repeated. “Is that all that we are fighting for? To stay alive?”

“It’s better than being dead.”

“But we do die,” Adam said. “We die in every battle, and those that survive lose hope.” He turned away. “Blake lost hope,” he murmured. “She couldn’t bear the fact that we were no closer to victory than we began five years ago, and so, in her despair, she chose the easy comforts of slavery over the endless hardship of our war.”

Gilda frowned, but said nothing.

“I will not let this go on,” Adam said, his voice rising once more. “I cannot let this go on. I cannot tell these brave faunus here that the victory they expected will be denied by your caution. We are adrift, Gilda; I am tired of these games, these pinprick blows. I want this to be the final battle; I want this to be the moment when we shatter the power of Atlas and light the spark of a flame that will burn down the kingdoms of Remnant that oppress us! With Cinder’s help-”

“Even if she does all that she promised, we’ll still be going up against a battle-hardened army-”

“What we may lack in experience or numbers against our foes, we will make up with valour a hundredfold!” Adam cried. “There is no power in Remnant greater than the need for freedom, it is more powerful than armies, than Atlesian airships, more powerful than huntsmen and academies and even the Kingdom of Vale itself. When we break through, animated by that burning desire for freedom that burns in the heart of every faunus here, I promise you, we will prevail.”

Gilda was interrupted before she could reply, by the sound of swift-running feet and the arrival of a messenger.

“Adam,” she said, panting for breath. “You need to come quickly to the northwest gate. Cinder Fall has come.”

Comments

[Kiue Jin]

Considering that Cinder doesn't want to die and desires the White Fang to do what she wants, I wouldn't be surprised if she neglected to tell Adam that the plan to turn the automatons against the defenders had fallen through. Granted with the Grimm it is still possible for her to contest the air power of Altas so it's possible the opening strike isn't going to be complete suicide, but Cinder likely is banking on the White Fang being slaughtered to achieve her goals because the survivors... are not going to be happy with her being unable to keep all of her promises.

[lordhufflepuff]

I think this bit is an absolutely vital look into the headspace of Adam and why he would sacrifice everyone under him for almost nothing. I like a lot of chapters more but this makes Adam. Good shit making a dumb character that the original creators didn't really do justice into one much more believable without turning him sympathetic.

[Mastermind4892]

Cinder's return to the White Fang. This should be good.