• Published 31st Aug 2018
  • 20,312 Views, 8,842 Comments

SAPR - Scipio Smith



Sunset, Jaune, Pyrrha and Ruby are Team SAPR, and together they fight to defeat the malice of Salem, uncover the truth about Ruby's past and fill the emptiness within their souls.

  • ...
96
 8,842
 20,312

PreviousChapters Next
My Huntress Way

My Huntress Way

As the Atlesian fleet crumpled in the skies above Vale, as the dragon showed that it was the true king of the air and all of Atlas’ mechanical toys were merely inferior substitutes of no use against the real thing, seven bullheads raced towards Vale in a delta formation.

Gilda was piloting the second airship, with the High Leader herself – she hadn’t known that she had trained as a pilot, but of course she should have since she hadn’t always been a commander; there had been a time when she had fought alongside the men simply because there were so few men to fight alongside – piloting the lead craft. It was risky, what they were doing. It was incredibly risky, all it would take would be a couple of stray missiles, or for those hordes of nevermores out there to become more interested in the White Fang than in the Atlesians and this would end with them all dying, unmarked and mourned for by no one.

But it was also their best chance to get this done. The Atlesian ships were pulling out of their perimeter positions, falling back with their ground forces or trying to contain the dragon, which meant that there was a straight shot into Vale wide open for them if they had the nerve to take it.

The White Fang had nothing if not nerve.

Five of the seven bullheads were empty, aside from the pilot and co-pilot. Once they reached Blackwall Prison and freed their comrades, those empty bullheads would become filled with faunus liberated from bondage, and if the luck they were currently enjoying held then there would still be a gap in the Atlesian line that they could squeeze through to get out of Vale again.

Two of the bullheads – those piloted by Gilda and the High Leader – carried the elite troops that would actually storm Blackwall and then, reinforced by a few particular prisoners like Walter, who had been Adam’s strong right arm, they would link up with the infiltration specialist the High Leader had brought from Menagerie and take Kali Belladonna prisoner for her crimes.

Her crimes on which Gilda was still a little bit nebulous and uncertain of, to be perfectly honest. Sure, she was talking to the Atlesians, but Gilda had done that herself on occasion when she had to get things done. It didn’t make Gilda a traitor to the cause and she wasn’t sure that it made Kali Belladonna a race traitor either.

What Kali Belladonna was was the woman who paid for two passages to Menagerie, every month, to be given away in a lottery to deserving faunus who couldn’t afford the passage to paradise. Gilda’s parents had won the lottery about three years ago, packed their bags and never looked back. They lived next door to Rainbow Dash’s folks, and the letters that Gilda got from her mom and dad were full of details about how great their life was, and how they sat on the beach drinking mango juice out of coconuts with their old friends (Gilda hadn’t had the nerve to tell her parents that she was in the White Fang, instead giving them the impression that she was working construction in Vale; as a consequence, the letters she got from home were full of news about her old friend Rainbow Dash whose parents were so proud of her at Atlas and why didn’t Gilda try to get in touch now that Rainbow was in town for the Vytal Festival? It would have been embarrassing except…assuming that Dash got letters from her parents as well it was kind of sweet of her not to rat Gilda out about what she was really doing in Vale). It seemed like the Belladonnas did a pretty good job of making Menagerie a nice place for the faunus to live, and that ought to count for something, right? More than talking to an Atlesian councillor, maybe? Did they even know what they’d been talking about?

Getting people out of prison that was fine, but the other part…Gilda wished that they could go back to attacking people she could be sure deserved it like SDC executives. She would have had no problems with going after the councillor that Kali Belladonna was talking to, but the lady herself…it didn’t sit right with her. It made her feathers itch.

“Gilda?” Strongheart asked from the co-pilots seat. “Are you okay?”

I don’t know if I’ve been okay for a while, kid, Gilda thought. “Yeah,” she said, as she followed Sienna Khan’s lead. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? You looked like you might be spacing out a bit there.”

“I hope not, Sister Strongheart,” Yuma said, as he stepped into the cockpit. “With all of our lives and the success of this endeavour riding on the outcome I am sure that Sister Gilda is giving our course her undivided attention.”

Gilda shuddered. Something about this guy just creeped her out. “First, of course I am; second, I’m not your sister; third, get back in the back with everyone else and stay there until we land, you’re distracting the pilot.”

She didn’t look around but she could hear the smirk on the bat-winged killer’s face as he said, “As you wish,” and retreated back into the main compartment.

“You don’t like him, do you?” Strongheart said.

“What gave it away?” Gilda replied. “He’s a creep. Sister Gilda. He makes my skin crawl.” She’d be glad when this mission was over so that she could put some distance between the two of them.

She’d be glad when this was over so she could put it all behind her and look forward to the cause of the White Fang becoming a righteous one again. Back when they used to…murder people and…steal stuff and…

But only bad people.

Only people that you were told were bad. Like you’ve been told that Kali Belladonna is a bad person.

I…well…but I didn’t…they were oppressing us! Our enemies are keeping us down!

How is your best friend since you were kids keeping you down?

She’s joined the Atlesian military! And she…she rescued…she… Gilda tried and failed to think of a time when she had seen or heard of Rainbow Dash oppressing a fellow faunus on the orders of Atlas; only when she broadened the definition of ‘oppressing the faunus’ to ‘stopping the White Fang doing whatever it wanted to’ could she get close to an example.

Have I been the bad guy this entire time?

No. No way. I can’t have wasted my whole life like that. That would be pathetic.

But she wished that she could feel about this Kali Belladonna business.

Still, she kept a firm hand on the stick her Bullhead, and followed the High Leader in as they passed over the shattered Atlesian lines. They kept well clear of the dragon as it smashed through the Atlesian cruisers one after another, destroying them or else using them as improvised bombs to breach the defences for the grimm on the ground below.

“It’s…it’s almost sad, don’t you think?” Strongheart murmured.

“Don’t let some of those in the back hear you say that,” Gilda muttered. She looked out the window at the devastation in the skies and on the ground below. All those men fighting and dying to hold back the grimm. Dash was down there right now, she was certain of it. Dash and her human friends…but even that thought was a lot less venomous than it had used to be before she’d met a couple of those friends. Fluttershy wasn’t fighting, obviously…she was just in the city somewhere, one of those millions that Dashie was fighting to protect.

Meanwhile, I… “Yeah, it’s kinda sad,” Gilda said. “Even if they are Atlas…we shouldn’t be on the side of monsters against people, not while there are still faunus down in those cities.”

Strongheart looked as though she’d been thinking the same thing. “But we need them, right?” she said, sounding as though she wanted to be convinced. “Without this distraction we couldn’t mount this rescue.”

“I know,” Gilda said. But does that mean it’s worth it?

Her misgivings continued to dog her as the White Fang aircraft headed for Blackwall prison.


They are the darkness, and we are the light.

Those words of Pyrrha’s, spoken to Jaune as she had explained to him that the grimm, unlike every other living thing, did not have aura, echoed in Sunset’s mind in the voice of her friend.

The voice of she whom Sunset still thought of as a friend, and hoped that Pyrrha felt the same way.

They are the darkness, and we are the light.

Very nice. But what did it mean? Sunset thought about it, because giving herself an intellectual problem to chew over was better for her state of mind than spending every single passing moment that ticked along with such painful sloth worrying about her friends, about how they were faring in the battle raging outside, worrying about Beacon and the grimm and the alarms and all the rest.

And who knew, if she could come up with something useful then maybe she could be…of use, to her friends even from in here.

They are the darkness, and we are the light.

Obviously the grimm were darkness; they were literally coloured black, they were created by the god of darkness, they served a demonic entity, they existed only to-

They’re not really alive, are they?

It was so blindingly obvious that Sunset wondered how it had taken her this long to realise it. It might be because all of their training as huntsmen treated the grimm as de facto living beings, beings who had to be killed in a variety of artistic and/or brutal methods in order to end the threat they posed to humanity. Well, that last part might be true but that didn’t actually mean that the grimm were alive. All living things (all animals, at least; probably not plants or trees) had aura, or at least the latent capacity for aura, and yet the grimm had none. Why? Because they weren’t living creatures, they were…they were more like windigos than animals, embodiments of the concept of destruction.

Which meant…what? What did it mean? Sunset paced up and down in her cell, listening to the sirens continuing to blare outside, listening as well to the racket that was coming from other cells as the prisoners took the opportunity to make some noise, demand to be let out, and generally remind the guards – not that Sunset had seen a human guard for a while, it was mostly androids pacing up and down the corridors, the clanking sounds of their footsteps preceding them – that they existed.

It was very distracting. Sunset had embarked upon this path in her mind because she had wanted a distraction from all the noise and all that it portended, but the sirens kept intruding into her thoughts nonetheless, and bringing with all kinds of unwelcome imaginings: her friends confronting the grimm, her friends falling to the claws of those selfsame grimm while she-

No! She couldn’t go to them, no matter how much she might want to. She didn’t deserve to be in their presence. She didn’t deserve to be in Ruby’s presence, and Ruby wouldn’t want her there anyway. She was no longer a huntress, the battlefield was no longer her place.

Focus. Focus. Do some good from inside these walls.

The sirens were drowned out by the sounds of explosions from far away. What was going on out there? Where were the grimm, how strong in number were they? Was Beacon under attack?

Focus. Focus. What did it mean to say that the grimm were not alive? What practical benefit could she gain from that realisation?

Do we have to kill them as though they were alive? Is there a more efficient way to deal with them?

Probably not for most people, how else would they be dealt with? They must be fought or they will devour and destroy all before them, and huntsmen and huntresses are already trained to despatch the grimm as quickly as possible.

But is there a more efficient way for me to deal with them? Could I…could I convert them into…without aura they are vulnerable to transfiguration, but transfiguration is actually more magically draining than mere energy projection because it involves a variety of effects, making it one of the more taxing aspects of magic. Transfiguring the grimm is possible but would not efficient.

If the grimm are like windigos then could they be defeated by emotions? In Equestria, perhaps, but I’ve seen no sign of such magic here.

If the grimm are not alive then…oh, my Celestia, that’s it!

That’s it! If the grimm are not alive then they are fundamentally different from all else on the battlefield and there is no reason why an area of effect spell could not be devised that would target all of them within said area while leaving all living things completely unaffected!

How is that going to help Pyrrha or Ruby or anyone else who doesn’t have magic?

Look, it’s this or go mad with worry, what’s it going to be?

So Sunset worked the problem. She worked the spell. It kept her mind off other things. It kept her mind off the thought of Pyrrha screaming for help as she was dragged into the maw of a King Taijitsu; it kept her mind off the thought of Ruby getting her legs bitten off by some kind of get out of my head!

She worked the problem. She worked the spell. It had always worked in the past. Work brought solace from the problems of the world. She could lose herself in magic, in how it worked, in how it filled the world around her, how it could be bent to serve her will and desires, and while she was thinking about all of that she could block out the sounds of the laughter of the other children as they played outside that was drifting up to her window; she could block out just how lonely that sound made her feel.

She could even block out the sensation that she was slipping further and further away from Princess Celestia, although perhaps if she had paid more attention to that feeling instead of shutting it out then maybe she wouldn’t have actually lost Princess Celestia, at least for a while.

But she needed to block it all out now, because if she didn’t…if she didn’t then she would go insane from worry, or else she would break her vow and with it any trust that her friends might still have in her. She had vowed to Pyrrha that she would take any punishment short of giving up her own life – and that in part because Pyrrha had already promised Cinder that she would rescue Sunset from that fate – if she broke her word so easily, even in a good cause, then how could they trust her? How could they believe that she was genuinely contrite?

And so Sunset worked the spell, drawing mental images on the walls of her spell as he worked out just how this hypothetical weapon would work. She had enough experience of the grimm that she thought that she could isolate their essence, the feel of them compared to other living creatures; it was something actually useful that they had covered in Professor Port’s class: being in the presence of the creatures of grimm brought with it a certain sensation that was quite unique, you felt around the grimm as you did not feel around anything else.

Take that sensation, that essence, and apply Starswirl’s Spell of Seeking for the tracker element.

The fact that it was a tracker – Sunset had considered other possibilities, but one were so elegant when it came to targeting grimm and nothing else – meant that this would not be a true area of effect attack; it would not be a blanket deluge of magic over an area; how could it be, realistically, if she wished to only bring down her wrath upon a particular set of beings.

Which means my best choice would actually be something like Meadowbrook’s Multiplier…if I combine that with the spell of seeking then the number of individual…bolts or threads of magic will exponentially increase for the number of grimm within the area.

However, Meadowbrook’s Multiplier was vulnerable to the law of conservation of energy, as the spell multiplied so it became weaker, that was why it was more of a party piece than a serious bit of magic, the resultant spells were rarely strong enough to accomplish much; how could Sunset prevent her spell from falling prey to that and becoming useless against the large numbers of grimm it was designed to combat?

By adding more power was the obvious answer, but that ran into the other issue of how to actually make it feasible to cast this spell without keeling over from exhaustion (at best) afterwards?

Back to the beginning. What are the grimm? They aren’t alive, and it isn’t just aura that they’re lacking. They’re also lacking any kind of…well, they’re insides are just kind of a red blob, if that, and when they die they dissolve. Which suggests that they are an unstable compound held in their form by some kind of…but then in that case how can they lose limbs and still keep fighting?

The grimm are death, but in some respects they emulate life: they die from wounds that would kill a living thing but survive those that a living thing might live through; they can survive losing a leg but not having their head cut off. That’s why they have to be fought in a way that is also applicable to living things.

But is there a way that I could disrupt their form, and cause them to dissolve prematurely? Would that be easier than brute-forcing them to death?

Theoretically perhaps, but how would I do it?

That’s about what I thought.

She would have to resign herself to the fact that this would be a spell that she could probably use only once at most, due to the amount of magical energy that it would require; honestly, before her powers started to grow in the wake of Amber’s awakening she wouldn’t have been able to cast it even once, but Sunset’s powers had started to grow; she felt so much stronger now than she had since leaving Equestria; she might even be stronger now than she had in Equestria. Certainly her stamina felt much improved, and her limit felt raised up too in terms of what she could accomplish with a single spell like this one. Once it would have felt absolutely out of reach but now it felt within her grasp, if only once in a while.

And when am I ever going to get the chance to use it?

That was the point, wasn’t it? All of this was just…displacement. Her friends were out there fighting for their lives and she was creating spells that she would never cast because…because Ruby would approve? Because it was the right thing to do? Because the law demanded it?

I have done wrong. But does that make it right that I should sit here in the dark while all those dear to me venture on the hazards of war?

Is my punishment to be that I shall live on without them?

And then she heard the roar.

Sunset had never heard a sound like that before. She was no stranger to fighting grimm now but she was a stranger to that sound, that awful sound, that infernal sound that seemed to belong in the depths of Tartarus, not in the living world. If she had heard that sound before then she might never have become a huntress – or even played at being one while ignoring everything a huntress was supposed to be and do – because that sound now robbed her courage away. It reached her even in the depths of Blackwall prison, it reached her in her cell through walls and bars and many cells between her and the source it reached her nonetheless; it jarred through her body and her bones as it was jarring through the whole building. Every cell was alive with noise as people screamed and shouted in the agony caused by that awful sound, and even Sunset cried out in alarm as she crouched on the floor, covering her ears in a futile attempt to block out that awful shrieking roar.

She closed her eyes and thought of Celestia, sunlight and a brilliant white glow, shimmering samite, the gleam of gold upon a diademed crown; soft wings and mother’s love; wisdom and compassion in equal measure; the light that always returned to drive away the darkness. The sunlight in her soul that helped her master the great fear and anguish that the roar of that fell beast – for surely it was some creature of the girmm that had struck such terror into her – had sought inculcate within herself. She got to her feet. She could not sit idle in this cell, nor leave her friends to face such monsters as this, not without knowing what it was that they were facing.

And if it turns out to be nothing I can be back in my cell before anyone knows that I was gone.

Not that I think that nothing could make a sound like that.

Still wearing her collar that blocked her aura, Sunset teleported onto the roof of Cell Block B, where she was housed. She actually overdid it just a little bit, reappearing a few feet off the surface of the roof onto which she then fell, landing on her back. She had gotten too used to aura, she decided as said back and backside both began to smart from the landing, pain throbbing in her muscles like the washing in and out of the tide.

She picked herself up. There were no less than eight watchtowers set at intervals along the perimeter wall, and each watchtower was manned by a pair of androids who didn’t – in theory – need a searchlight to spot anybody trying to escape or just being where they shouldn’t be; but from what Sunset could see it looked as though those androids had been directed to look outwards, not in.

That was a bad sign it itself, as it suggested that whoever controlled the androids thought that something might be coming towards the prison from without; had the walls fallen? Surely not, but if they had…

Sunset saw it then. The darkness and the clouds had shrouded it, but when it passed in front of the moon Sunset could see its silhouette: the largest grimm that she had ever seen, a dragon as large as any in Equestria – okay, perhaps not, but only because dragons in Equestria could reach some truly ludicrous sizes if they lived for long enough; this was definitely on a level with the average fully grown specimen of that barbaric breed – and probably far more deadly.

Sunset mentally amended that to definitely, as she watched this beast larger than any she had dreamed of facing in her nightmares tear through the Atlesian defences. On the ground she could tell that the city had not fallen – the shellfire and the explosions on the outer defence line told her that both Atlas and Mistral were still battling to hold the outer defences – but in the skies the dragon was tearing Atlesian dropships and cruisers alike to shreds in its deadly rampage. When it flew over the city she could just about make droplets of something black, like a rain of tar or something, falling from the dragon’s belly down onto Vale, but Sunset didn’t know what it was and she didn’t have a lot of time to give it much thought as she watched the dragon swoop down upon the Atlesian lines, belching out fire as it did so.

Team RSPT. They would be down there somewhere, fighting alongside the Atlesian troops, and although APR would not be there – they would be on the Mistralian lines without a doubt – it could not be long until they, too, faced the fury of that monstrous grimm.

Sunset had resolved to stay in her cell, to be meek and quiet and penitent, but at that sight creature, at the memory of what the sound of its roar had done to her…she could not stay. She could not let her friends fight such a thing without her help. She could not sit idly by and see Vale threatened by that thing while she did nothing.

She would go and fight, and if Ruby wanted to put a bullet in the back of her head afterwards for escaping from prison she could do it once the fighting was won; they could hate her but they would have her help in this fight.

The entire Kingdom of Vale could hate her but it would have her help in this fight too. She would save all the Miss Quills and the Strawberry Swirls in Vale, and then submit herself once more unto their judgement.

Which means that I won’t be needing this any more. Or rather, I’ll be actively needing not to have it, she thought, as she put a hand on her collar and sent a jolt of energy through it powerful enough to short it out. She breathed in deeply as she felt her aura returning, banishing the pain of her back and renewing her strength five or ten-fold. It was something she had gotten used to, so much so that she had felt terribly weak without it even though she had merely been returned to her normal baseline.

With it she was able to rip the collar off her neck in a single strong tug, letting the shattered fragments fall to the ground at her feet.

She was about to teleport away again, a vague plan forming in her mind to try and sneak back into Beacon to get her gear, before…she hadn’t thought that far ahead yet, but in any case it was all rendered slightly immaterial as she spotted the formation of Bullheads bearing down upon the prison.

Seven of them, all flying in from…where were they coming from? It didn’t seem as though they were coming from the Atlesian line, or at least not from the Atlesian ships…and why were they heading for the prison in the middle of a battle in any case?

And then, as the Bullheads roared in, they opened fire. Machine guns in the noses of the aircraft blazed away, tracer rounds lighting up the night as they ripped through the watchtowers and blew away the androids occupying them. There were more androids in the courtyard below, the old AK-190s that Atlas was fazing out of the front-lines but which you still saw all over the place doing security work – these were slightly different to the ones that Sunset had seen before; they’d been customised with what looked like a range of non-lethal weapon options; the SDC probably manufactured variants for roles just like this – but the Bullheads swept fire down on them as well and as they swept the courtyard the side doors of two of the bullheads opened up and armed, masked figures began to leap down from the aircraft to join the fight.

Grimm masks. White Fang.

Here to rescue all the White Fang prisoners being held here, and kill anyone who gets in their way.

Alarms were blaring in the prison now, a higher pitched whine than the ones ringing in the streets of Vale but no less urgent. By now all the guards on duty would probably be rushing to the armoury to gear up, all the androids would be heading out, and maybe cops had already been summoned too. Soon this place would be swarming. Soon it would be a battlefield.

Which meant that if she was going to run away and join the fighting at the city limits she had better do it now if she wanted to do it unnoticed.

She could. She could teleport away and, in this confusion, her absence would not be noticed for some time. She could teleport away, get her weapons, find some way to make it to the fighting and ask her friends to take it on trust that she would face the consequences of her actions later.

Or she could stay here, because just look at the way in which the White Fang was so swiftly eliminating all those androids in the courtyard the defenders of the prison were going to need all the help they could get. They weren’t huntsmen, they weren’t even soldiers, they were just prison guards and yet the White Fang were coming for them with – judging by the agility that one of their number, a tiger faunus with a chain that she was using to grapple with the droids and send them flying – some of their best fighters, huntsman level at the very least.

And the closest thing this prison had to a huntsman was…Sunset Shimmer.

So she could either go to her friends, or she could do what Ruby or Pyrrha would have done without hesitation and act like a real huntress for once and defend this prison.

Which meant…there really wasn’t much choice at all.

Sunset had teleported up onto the roof, but now she kicked down the door leading down from the roof and ran down the stairs, pounding across the metal walkways leading through the cell block corridors as she headed down towards the yard. Prisoners trapped and collared in their cells called out to her, yelled about why there was a prisoner out of her cell, shouted for her to let them out, but Sunset ignored them all as she kept on running.

Sunset abruptly realised that her hands were bare. She had spent so long wearing gloves, and then of course her aura and semblance had been suppressed, but if she made skin contact with anybody now then she’d be getting their entire life story.

Probably teach me that I should have learned how control it at some point instead of just waltzing around in bridal gloves all the time. But it’s a bit late for that now.

Sunset tore off the sleeves of her beige prison jumpsuit, and wrapped the strips around her hands like a boxer. A simple transfiguration spell turned them into a pair of rough but serviceable gloves, so that she could use her hands – or her first, and considering that she was unarmed as yet it might well come to that – without fear of her semblance turning on at the most inconvenient moment possible.

Sunset resumed her run, heading towards the common area of this cell block; she came across neither guards nor androids on her run, but she could hear the thumping of feet organic and metallic up ahead, and she guessed that they were preceding her down there. Sunset quickened her pace.

There was the thunderous bang of an explosion from up ahead, from the common room just as she had predicted, and after the explosion came the sounds of gunfire and the screams of men wounded or worse.

Too late already, too late. Sunset forced herself to move even faster, teleporting ahead in short bursts as far down the corridor as she could see to save even a little time, willing herself on, to get there before the outmatched defenders of the prison were all slaughtered.

The gunfire stopped. All noise loud enough for Sunset to hear it as she pounded down the corridor, any sounds loud enough to drown out the rattle of her prison boots against the metallic walkways, ceased completely. Sunset kept running, but the silence of the guns could only mean one thing.

She was too late. She arrived above the common area – two floors above, there were suicide prevention nets strung across the balconies in case any prisoners decided to jump in the rare instances when they were let out of their cells – looking down on the recreation area and gathering space for this cell block. Long tables, reminiscent of the dining hall save that there was no kitchen anywhere here, lined the long room, while a very old and incredibly threadbare ping pong table sat in the north-west corridor, alongside a television that looked to be broken and a radio that had seen better days but was still working well enough to be quietly emitting a public service broadcast advising everyone to seek shelter and await further instructions from the government.

The White Fang had blown a hole in the wall, and proceeded to eliminate all opposition to them with a ruthless efficiency; not that there had been a huge amount of opposition, judging by the relatively few casualties of the defenders. Sunset doubted that there had been time to muster much of a response given the speed of the White Fang assault. Most of the guards were still either trying to get to whatever kind of rally points they had or else arming themselves against an incursion that was already in progress. Only one or two of the slain men down below were wearing armour, and some of them didn’t look to have been armed with much more than a pistol. There hadn’t even been many androids down there with them, judging by the paucity of shattered parts.

Sunset teleported down into the common – the suicide nets presented no problem to her – and looked around, trying to get a sense of where the White Fang had gone. It was a task made harder because she had no idea of the layout of the prison.

Someone groaned. Sunset turned, her eyes widening. One of the guards was still alive, they were making soft moaning sounds and squirming on the floor just a little. Sunset knelt down by their side, and after a moment she recognised the square, slightly lumpen face of the guard who had a nephew attending Beacon, the one who had sympathised with her frustration about being stuck here while their friends and loved ones fought for their lives and for Vale. Now they were on the ground, blood soaking their brown uniform shirt, sweat coating their face, pained sounds escaping their lips.

“Easy there,” Sunset murmured. “It’s going to be o…” she trailed off, looking at the wound. He’d been shot in the left side. Memories of Professor Peach’s first aid class came to mind: if you were shot and your aura broke then you’d best hope the bullet came out the other side because if it lodged somewhere you were in real trouble.

The bullet was lodged somewhere, which was slowing the bleeding a little bit but probably wasn’t doing much for whatever it had gotten stuck in.

All that time in the library and I never picked up a book on healing magic. “Uh, okay,” Sunset said. She tapped him lightly on the side of the face. “Listen, wake up and stay with me. Look into my eyes. I need you to tell me where the doctor is…the medical wing, whatever it’s called. I need you to tell me where I take you to get help.”

The guard – the nameplate on his lapel said his name was Douglas, which Sunset should have guessed considering that was also the name of his nephew – blinked fuzzily at her. “Y…you?”

“Me,” Sunset agreed. “I’m a sight for sore eyes, I know, but contain your amazement for a second and focus: where is the hospital wing?”

Mister Douglas frowned. “Why? You’re-“

“A huntress,” Sunset said. “I’m a huntress, and saving lives is…it’s what a huntress does.” She tore off another strip from her sleeve, ripping through the beige fabric as almost her whole sleeve came away in her hand. She hoped that he was too in pain to ask too many questions about how she managed to transfigure it into a large plaster before his very eyes; bandages didn’t fix bullet holes but, Sunset thought as she applied the pressure pad to his raw and ugly gunshot wound, this would slow the bleeding until she could get him to a doctor.

Mister Douglas shook his head, if only slightly. “You…you need to go…after them.”

“And who’s going to look after you if I do that?” Sunset said. “You could bleed out by the time any more help gets here. Now come on: doctor?”

Douglas groaned. “Medical ward is…through A block, at the back, ground floor, next to the Admin Building.”

“Thanks,” Sunset said. “A Block…that’s the serial killers, right?”

Douglas nodded.

“That’ll be fun,” Sunset muttered, as she moved Douglas’ hand to cover the bandage that was even now being suffused with his blood. “Keep pressure on that, it’s supposed to help. I think.” She cast a minor anti-gravity spell on him to make him a little easier to life – aura also helped a lot with that – as she slung the big guy’s other arm over her shoulder and stood up, dragging him up along with her although his feet dragged on the floor.

She telekinetically grabbed hold of a shotgun lying on the ground – it’s previous owner was not, unfortunately, going to need it anymore – and held it in her one free hand. She wasn’t a good one-handed aim, but that didn’t matter so much with a shotgun, or at least she hoped it didn’t.

“Okay, Mister Douglas,” Sunset said. “Let’s go.”

She didn’t think about going after the White Fang. If she had arrived while the battle was still raging then she would have joined in said battle, but she had arrived too late for that. But she had arrived in time to save this one life, and right now that was all that mattered.

She started walking, as quickly as she could while carrying – or dragging – a heavyset man who was a lot bigger and heavier than she was; but with magic helping and aura taking a lot of the strain she made good time considering that it would have been impossible without it, as they moved out of the common area and into the long corridor connecting cell blocks B and A.

Douglas groaned. “You should leave me. You’re wasting your time.”

Sunset shook her head. “You’re not dead yet. And you’re not going to die tonight if I have anything to say about it.”

“You think that you’ll get credit from the judge for saving my life?”

Sunset let out a laugh. “I love how you can’t even give credence to the idea that I might be trying to become a better person.”

“A better person who’s out of her cell without permission. How did you do that anyway?”

“I’m full of surprises.”

Douglas grunted. “I’ve worked prison security for…twenty years.” He groaned. “I ain’t never met any Jaune Valjaune yet.”

“You’re well read for a prison guard.”

“Not really. Who doesn’t love musical theatre, right?”

Sunset chuckled. “Nobody, I guess.” She paused. “But listen, I may not be some inspiring story about reformation and self-improvement but I’m trying my best. I’m not doing this because I want extra credit come sentencing, or so that you can get up and tell everyone how I deserve to live; I’m doing this because…because I’m trying to live up to the ideals of Beacon Academy. To the ideals of…a good friend who’s very disappointed in me right now. Belated, I know, but better late than never, right?”

Douglas huffed. “If you want to do the right thing then you should…you should leave me and go after those guys. Before they do…”

“I don’t know exactly what they’re going to do,” Sunset said. “But I do know that if I leave you here you’re as like to die as you are to be found by anybody else.”

“So?” Douglas asked. “I’m just one guy, there could be-“

“Because I don’t believe in necessary sacrifices,” Sunset said sharply. They were approaching the end of the corridor now, approaching A Block; Sunset would be lying if she said it didn’t fill her with a little trepidation, but talking to Mister Douglas helped with that. “You…you know what I did, right?”

“Everyone knows.”

“I don’t regret saving my friends lives,” Sunset said. “I don’t regret the fact that nobody died down in that tunnel. What I regret is that I put other people’s lives at risk to save the lives of my friends. But as someone very wise once said to me: not even for the world. I thought that they were talking about someone very precious to them, someone they loved, but Celestia…there’s always a lesson with her; it always goes deeper than you think at first. I asked her if she’d sacrifice Twilight to save the world, and she said no…but I think what she was actually telling me was that she wouldn’t sacrifice anybody to save the world, ever. She’d find another way. Because there is always another way. And so I’m not going to leave you to die, just for some nebulous idea of the greater good. I am going to get you to safety and treatment, and then we can worry about all the other stuff the White Fang might be doing.”

The lights went off, plunging the corridor into complete darkness. After a moment the red auxiliary lights kicked in, shading the whole corridor in a red like blood.

“Well that’s not good,” Sunset said.

“They must…must have gotten to the control room,” Douglas said. “They can…they can turn off the lights, or they can-“

Alarms blared from both in front and behind them, as the sound of hundreds of cell doors rattling open assailed their ears.

“Or they can open the cages,” Sunset muttered. And they turned off the lights because their guys can see in the dark. “Come on, we’ve got to move faster.” She quickened her pace as best she could, closing in on the door. It was a heavy thing, painted red, with a notice saying CAUTION – EXTREMELY DANGEROUS PRISONERS BEYOND THIS POINT. As opposed all the other prisoner who were just dangerous.

“Brothers and sisters of the White Fang!” a voice, female and mature, echoed out of the speakers mounted to the walls. “This is Sienna Khan speaking. I have come to free you from the cages of your oppressors. Come quickly! Make your way to the prison yard, we have transport waiting. And if any of you who are not our brethren seek to steal our aircraft, be assured that we will defend them with deadly force. I don’t care where you go or what you do, but our transports are for the White Fang alone and for the White Fang they shall remain.”

“In the control centre,” Sunset said. “Can they turn off the collars too?”

“And the androids.”

“Better and better,” Sunset murmured.

“You should have-“

“Don’t say it.”

“But I’m-“

“No, you’re not.”

Douglas sighed. “How many people are going to die because you wanted to save my life?”

“How many people die every night in this city, do you expect me to save all of them?” Sunset asked. “Nobody can do that. But I can save the life right in front of me.” That…this might not be exactly what Ruby would do, it might not be exactly how she would play this situation, but that didn’t make it wrong, right? As a way of behaving this wasn’t unworthy of a huntress, was it? There was a life in danger right in front of her, and Sunset didn’t see that she had the right to turn away just because there might be more important things happening somewhere else.

Not even for the world.

“Now hang on,” Sunset said. “This might get a little rough.”

She kicked open the door into Cell Block A, and stepped through it into another corridor, this one with a single cell – did the really sick freaks get larger cells? How unfair was that? - to her left. A cell from which an overweight, pasty, balding man was emerging, chuckling to himself as he did so.

He looked at Sunset, and he bared his teeth at her as though she were a meal.

Sunset raised her shotgun and shot him. The shotgun barked, the first shot staggering him backwards. Telekinesis pumped the gun before she fired again, breaking his aura. Sunset tossed the shotgun into the air before hitting the other guy square in the chest with a bolt of magic from her hand. It didn’t kill him, but it did knock him out cold on his back – after it had sent him flying down the corridor.

Sunset summoned the shotgun back into her hand. She glanced at Douglas. His eyes were closed.

“No, no, stay awake!” Sunset snapped at him as she started to run awkwardly down the dimly lit corridor. “Talk to me.”

Douglas’ eyes fluttered open. “So…why did you do it?”

“Huh?”

“I said I knew why you were here,” Douglas said. “You betrayed Vale. You helped the White Fang breach the defences. But…I guess…why? Why would a traitor who tried to bring down the whole city care about saving my life?”

“I didn’t want to bring down the whole city,” Sunset said. “I just…I didn’t much care at the time whether the city fell or not. I just wanted to save my friends on the train.”

Douglas was silent for a moment. “That’s it?”

“What did you expect?”

“I don’t know? I thought…I don’t know what I thought. Is that really it?”

“I’m not a supervillain,” Sunset said. “Although, there was a time when…never mind. The point is…with the grimm behind us, and the last station behind us, I couldn’t see any other way out other than to let that train smash through the defences. I…I should have looked harder. There’s always another way.”

Douglas was quiet for a moment. “You know there’s all kinds of escape hatches in those tunnels, right? For emergencies?”

Sunset glanced at him. “Really?”

“Yeah,” he said. “What, do you think if there was a fire in the tunnel everyone has to try and run to the nearest station?”

Sunset thought about it for a moment, feeling more and more like an idiot the more she did so. She sighed. “What did I tell you? Always another way if you look for it.”

They kept moving, Douglas occasionally giving her directions when she was about to make a wrong turn. Most of the psychos had already left their cells by the time that Sunset and her charge got there, but those that lingered she was, thankfully, able to deal with. The cells were larger here, and a beneficial side-effect of that was that there were fewer prisoners in this block; she supposed the authorities didn’t want to pack in the worst of the worst too tightly. Although they didn’t seem that bad from her perspective.

And then the two of them rounded another corridor to find another guard, a young dog faunus woman with terrier ears poking out of her brown – at least Sunset thought it was brown; in the red light it was hard to be sure – hair, struggling as a prisoner had her by the neck. He was lifting her off the ground, and her feet kicking at the air as she thrashed and writhed in futile effort to contest his strength.

Sunset raised her shotgun. It shook in her hand ever so slightly as she pointed it at him. “Let her go!”

The prisoner turned, putting the struggling guard between Sunset and himself. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered without appearing too muscular, with salt and pepper hair and square glasses over his eyes. He had, again as best Sunset could tell in the lack of light, a very ordinary looking face, the kind of unremarkable man you wouldn’t notice on the street.

His eyes flashed, and he smiled at Sunset. “Well, hello beautiful.”

Sunset scowled. “Let her go.”

The smile didn’t leave the prisoner’s face. “I don’t know how accurate you are with that shotgun in two hands, but I doubt that you could hit me without hitting her with that thing even if your hand wasn’t shaking.”

He was unfortunately right about that. “Why are you doing this?” Sunset asked. “Why don’t you get out while you still can?”

“They took away my collection,” he said.

“Your what?”

“Taxidermist,” Douglas murmured. “That’s the Taxidermist, shoot him.”

“He’s right, that’s what they called me when they found out: the Taxidermist. I had a store, in Vale; I stuffed animals; I made those grimm trophies that you see on the walls of blowhards.” His voice was soft, quiet, as unremarkable as his face except for the very fact of it being so calm and composed, even as he was strangling a woman – he seemed to have released her a little, she had stopped kicking at least, but he still had his hands around her throat – made it quite remarkable. “But my real collection was downstairs in the basement.”

“Faunus,” Sunset said, who found that she could suddenly guess where this was going. “You killed and stuffed faunus, didn’t you?”

“Twenty of them before anyone noticed,” the Taxidermist said. “Twenty five before I got caught. Then they took my collection away from me. So I guess I’ll have to start over.”

“Sure,” Sunset said. “But not with her. Take me instead.”

“What?” Douglas hissed. “What happened to no sacrifices?”

“No necessary sacrifices,” Sunset said, and what would shooting a guard so that she could also hit the prisoner be but a ‘necessary sacrifice’; that wasn’t who she wanted to be. That wasn’t the kind of thing that the huntress Sunset Shimmer wanted to become would do. “Come on, you said it yourself: I’m beautiful.”

“You have very lovely hair,” the Taxidermist said. He tilted his head to one side. “Drop your gun and your aura, and come slowly towards me.”

“And you’ll let her go?”

“Once you’re close enough, and I’m sure that this isn’t a trick.”

“It’s no trick,” Sunset said. “Just the right thing.” She lowered Douglas to the ground, propping him up against the wall, and kicked her shotgun away. She felt herself grow noticeably weaker as she lowered her aura. “Officer…I’m sorry, it’s too dark for me to read your name. It’s going to be okay, I promise.” She raised her hands as she began to walk wards the Taxidermist.

“I might make that your pose,” he said as Sunset advanced down the corridor towards him. “With that solemn look on your face. Or maybe…no, you have a face made for smiles.”

Sunset wasn’t smiling as she got close enough to smell his sweat. Close enough to see the panic in the eyes of the guard he was holding by the neck. “Come on. Let her go. I’m right here.”

He stared down at her, his eyes hidden a little behind glasses that hadn’t been cleaned in a little while. He said nothing. Then he threw the guard aside – she hit the wall of the corridor with a grunt of pain – and grabbed Sunset by the neck.

As he lifted her up off the floor, Sunset found that she could feel her aura any more.

He grinned. “My semblance suppresses the aura in those I touch,” he said, as his grip on Sunset’s throat tightened. “How else do you think I was able to subdue twenty five victims?”

Sunset gasped for breath. She could feel her lungs tightening for want of air, and her aura was gone as completely as if it had been ripped from her body.

Good thing semblance wasn’t all she had.

She caught a glimpse of the surprise in the Taxidermist’s eyes as her hands started to glow right before she hit him with twin beams of magic that knocked him off his feet and, more importantly, knocked his hands off her. Her aura returned in a rush as she hit the floor feet first, and she briefly glowed brightly enough to illuminate the corridor in which she stood.

The Taxidermist’s glasses had been knocked off by the impact, she could see that his eyes were black like those of a beetle, and wide as he stared at her. “What are you?”

Sunset lifted him up into the air with telekinesis out of one hand. “I’m a huntress in training,” she said, before she hammered him with a bolt of magic straight into the chest.

She killed him. She kept hitting him with magic until his aura broke and she blasted a hole through his chest. She killed him because she was filled with a righteous anger at what he’d done, and because in the brief moment before she had thrown him away, in that moment when he had cut her aura off, she had been scared that he was going to do the same thing to her. It was just like Adam, and it wasn’t right, but it was who she still was, it seemed: someone who would lash out at the people who frightened her.

But, although she thought that she maybe should have felt guilt for it, she couldn’t actually bring herself to feel any guilt for what she’d done. The man had been a monster, and the world was better off without him. Wasn’t it?

“Like I said,” Sunset said, as she dropped the Taxidermist’s body to the floor. “No necessary sacrifices.” She went to the side of the guard. “Are you okay? Can you walk?”

The guard – her name pin said her name was Garcia – looked at Sunset warily.

“I’m one of the good guys,” Sunset assured.

“She’s okay, Garcia,” Douglas murmured. “She’s…okay.”

“Can you walk?” Sunset repeated.

“I can do better than that, I can carry him,” Garcia said. “That way you can point your gun with two hands. You’re going for the medical wing, right?”

“Yeah, he’s been shot,” Sunset said.

“I’ll be right behind you,” Garcia said, as she went over to Douglas and helped him up. “Where did you learn to do that…thing?”

Sunset pulled the shotgun back into her hands. “Oh, you know. At school.”

She led the way, keeping her pace to a speed that Garcia could follow burdened with Douglas; she led the way through an A block that had already been mostly abandoned by its inmates. She could hear – they could all hear – the sounds of struggle going on elsewhere in the prison, but that was something to worry about later; she would deal with it later, before she left, but in the meantime she had a life to say and someone else to protect, and so she led through the abandoned block and was glad that they had abandoned it rather than stick around to menace her charges; they passed some of the powered down androids, and Sunset thought that if the prisoners were smart they would have smashed up these symbols of hated authority while they were powerless. But they had not done so, perhaps because they were more eager to escape, perhaps because they had other things on her mind. Either way the androids remained, dormant, heads bowed and arms folded. And all to the good, because once she had gotten Douglas to the medical wing then all she would need to do would be to get to the control centre and turn the androids back on the prison would be halfway back to being under control of the authorities.

But first, the medical wing.

The medical wing was through A Block, but it was not actually attached to A Block; they had to step outside, into the cool air of the fall night. Sunset heard the roaring of engines as she stepped through the door that should have been locked if it, like the cell doors, hadn’t been disabled by the White Fang; she looked up, and saw the first bullhead taking off from the other side of the building. She turned away as the others started to rise up after it. Perhaps Ruby or the others would have gone after the White Fang and left the guard to die, but…if you accepted that all lives had equal value then…then all life had value, and you couldn’t turn away from a dying man just because more people might die if you stopped to tend to his injuries. If you didn’t have the right to sacrifice people for the sake of other people whom you liked better then what did you have to sacrifice them for any reason? He was a living man, and being so he was worth saving, no matter the cost.

She saw another guard who had not been so fortunate. He was lying dead in the doorway of the building that housed the medical wing and the administrative complex, the governor’s office and the floors where the administrative staff worked to keep the prison running. The fact that the guard on the door had been killed – and the door forced open, by the look of it – wasn’t a great sign.

Sunset motioned for Garcia to stay back a little as she gingerly walked inside. She could hear voices, raised and angry voices, coming from the corridor marked with a sign pointing towards the medical ward. She followed that sign, down a corridor that didn’t even have red emergency lights, that was plunged into complete darkness; she found her way to a door that was ajar, with white regular light – this building must be on a separate circuit and the White Fang hadn’t bothered with it – spilling out beyond. Sunset crept to the doorway, and peered in.

At least a score of people had been lined up against the wall; some of them wore medical scrubs, others wore suits, and a couple of them were wearing the uniforms of the guards. An old woman looked as though she might faint, while a slender young woman was sobbing into her hands. A middle-aged man, besuited and with a well-trimmed beard covering the bottom half of his face was saying something too quiet for Sunset to make out. One of his captors hit him in the stomach with the stock of a shotgun, causing him to double over in pain.

Yes, the captors. Sunset couldn’t see well enough to get a good tally on how many there were. Five? Six? More? The ones she could see all had the unfortunate facial hair choices of the goons that she had seen at Junior’s club, though it didn’t seem so laughable now that they were holding men and women at gunpoint, or fingering kitchen knives as though they meant to use them.

One man, who might be their leader or might not, was saying something, gesturing angrily as he paced up and down, holding a rifle in one hand. He suddenly pointed it at the sobbing young woman, thrusting it into her face as he raised the weapon to his shoulder.

Sunset burst in through the door, grabbing hold of every weapon she could see with her telekinesis and yanking them towards her, pulling them out of the hands of the bearded and moustachioed heavies and holding them all around her head like Penny’s swords, pointed at her enemies.

She used her same telekinesis to pull the triggers, because there wasn’t much else that she could do at this point, with no way of holding them captive. She tried to hit them in the kneecaps, or the shoulder, something that would put them down without killing them; but sad to say she didn’t succeed universally in that regard, only four of the six – it had been six, as she had guessed it might be – were still alive when she stopped shooting.

“I’m sorry that you had to see that,” Sunset murmured as she let the weapons drop to the floor. “Doctor, I’m sorry to give you so many new patients but if you could look at Mister Douglas first he’s in a bad way – Ms Garcia, could you bring him in now please?”

Garcia brought in Douglass, the latter now looking very pale and very sweaty, and Sunset helped him up onto one of the beds nearby. She looked at the white-haired doctor, staring at her in shock. “Doctor,” she said, gesturing at the injured guard.

That seemed to rouse the man, and he sprang into action, ordering his nurses as he rushed to Mister Douglas’ side. Sunset stepped back to let them work. She focussed her attention on the man with the beard who had been gut-punched not too long ago.

“Are you the warden, I presume?” she asked.

The warden stared at her. “I am. Are we your hostages now?”

“No,” Sunset said, although she didn’t sound too shocked because she could see why he might think that. “I’m going to leave you here while I head for the control room – does anyone have a map of the prison so I can find it? – and then, once I’ve reactivated all the security systems, then I would like your permission to temporarily leave the prison to join the defence of the city. I swear, on my honour, that I will return here as soon as the fighting is done.”

“You…you want parole?”

“In the old sense of the word, yes,” Sunset replied. “After the prison is secure.”

He stared at her. Everyone stared at her. “Why in the name of all the gods are you asking me for a thing like that?” he said. “You could just walk on out of here and nobody in this room could stop you?”

“I know,” Sunset said, failing to add that they couldn’t have stopped her leaving even before tonight. “But that’s why I need your permission to do it. This isn’t an escape, and if you tell me to get back in my cell and sit this out then I’ll do it, but…but my friends are fighting out there. So many brave people are fighting out there to defend this city and I think that I can help. Just like I helped your guards. Just like I can help you get this prison back under control. Let me do my part in the battle that’s upon us and then, upon my honour as…as one too proud for her own good I swear I will return to take whatever punishment Vale chooses to bestow upon me. Because there will be a Vale to bestow it.”

The warden looked into her eyes, and Sunset had the distinct impression that she was being weighed and measured. That didn’t bother her. She was confident in her good intentions and in the rightness of her cause. “What makes you think you’ll even make it to the control centre? It’s chaos out there, all the cells are open, everyone’s loose, it’s a mad house in B and C blocks. Nobody here-“

“I don’t need your help,” Sunset said. “I can make it.”

“Well, if you can…if you ask me I’d almost think you had the right to walk away, but if you want to come back after.”

“I will,” Sunset said. “I have to.” What kind of life would I have if I didn’t? A fugitive, wanted in every kingdom?

“Okay then,” the Warden said. “It’s…unorthodox, but once you turned the security back on…come back here and I’ll write you out a parole, just like in the old days. Take this scroll,” he handed her his own. “It has all the prison schematics on it.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sunset said, studying the plans, working out the route that she needed to take. “For everything.”

“And take Officer Douglas’s badge,” the warden said. “When the androids come back online they’ll recognise it, there’s a chip in it which tags you as friendly.”

“Thanks for this too,” Sunset said. She took the badge – it was slightly bloodstained – and turned away. “You might want to think about barricading this door until I’m done.”

“What makes you really think that you can do all this by yourself?” the warden asked her.

Sunset pumped her shotgun. “Because I’m finally starting to act like a huntress, and defying impossible odds is what a huntress does.”

She left the room and the building. The map on the scroll that she’d been given put the Control Room on the upper level of C Block; she thought that she might get there faster if she went around A and B rather than through them, and so she skirted around the west wing of the prison to approach from the north rather than the south.

Unfortunately, she found that although the White Fang had all departed – or at least their airships had, she couldn’t say for sure that they’d waited for all their escapees to get on first - the rest of the prisoners they had released from their cells before leaving had spilled out into the yard, or at least some of them had. A great number in fact.

The warden had been right, it was a madhouse: there was a fight going on right before her eyes; maybe it was gangs from outside settling the scores that had been allowed to fester during incarceration.

Sunset noticed a few prisoners who were not fighting, though; instead they were running towards the open gate leading out of the prison and into Vale.

I’d rather that you didn’t do that, Sunset said, and grabbed both doors of the great gate with her telekinesis, pushing at it with all the magic at her command. It was a heavy thing of solid steel, intended to be opened and closed with motors, but Sunset wasn’t about to be beaten by anything so banal as the weight of the object she was trying to push. She might have prioritised saving a life over stopping the breakout but that didn’t mean that she was just going to let these people walk out of the prison while she was standing right there.

The great creaked and groaned as it closed; if the prisoners had made a run for it then they might have slipped through the crack as Sunset closed the gate slowly, so painfully slowly, but they seemed frozen in shock, stunned by the gate closing without direction or cause, caught in indecision over what to do now that it was closing.

And the gate slammed shut with a solid thud that echoed across the yard.

Some of the prisoners stopped trying to bludgeon one another to death with the weight-lifting equipment and looked for the source of the gate’s sudden closure. Their eyes settled on Sunset. Some of the prisoners were human, and some were faunus, but as they looked at her all of their eyes had the same predatory, animalistic glint to them as though the moon was turning them all to monsters like werewolves.

More likely they were always monsters.

And they’ll sense my fear as surely as any creature of grimm. For that reason Sunset put on a brave face and a cocky smirk as she said, “I don’t suppose you’d all go back to your cells and wait quietly for the power to come back on?”

A heavyset man with a spider’s web tattooed across his bald head started to run towards her, wielding a set of heavily weighted barbells like a club.

Sunset shot him. It blasted him backwards and broke his aura but it didn’t kill him, although the way those barbells landed on his hand might have broken a few bones judging by the pained noise he made. Sunset didn’t look concerned. She couldn’t afford to look concerned. These people were just like the grimm, they would sense her fear and if she didn’t want any trouble out of them then the only way to do that was to act so much like Queen of the Jungle that they started to believe it.

So she cast a reverse gravity spell on herself sufficiently to carry her off the ground and into the air, not too high just a dozen feet or so, as she started to form spears of energy in the air around her.

She let them watch for just a moment, gaping and gawping as the spears of green magic formed in a semi-circle above her head. Then she let them fly.

She didn’t hit anyone, that wasn’t the point although they were so densely packed in some places that she did send a few people flying across the yard. The point was to show them all what she could do, and cratering said yard and scattering the benches and the weightlifting equipment certainly did that, judging by the way that they were all cowering in fear of her.

“Let me rephrase that,” Sunset said, using a simple spell of amplify her voice a little so that it carried further, even as she conjured more spears in the air above her head. “Get back to your cells this instant and stay there until the power comes back on! Move!”

They ran. Cowards. They preyed on the weak and the helpless and the moment someone stronger than them stood up to them they crumbled. Their cruelty hid no courage beneath it. Cinder had her faults and vices, to be sure, but at least she was prepared to stand up and defy the many powers arrayed against her. All these scum were prepared to do was play the cat: devour the mice and run from the dog. She wasn’t sure if any of them would actually go back to their cells, but they ran into the cell blocks and cleared the yard, which was a start.

Sunset lowered herself back to the ground, her spears dispersing into nothing as she reclaimed the energy involved in creating them. Where was all of this magic coming from? Why did she feel so much stronger recently than had been the case before? Had Amber’s awakening released more magic into the world? No, that couldn’t be it, Sunset had been here for years – before Amber’s injury at the hands of Cinder – and she’d never felt this strong before.

Maybe when all this was over they’d let her have her journal back and she could ask Princess Celestia or Twilight about it.

Right now, of course, she had more important things to think about. Sunset crossed the now-empty and abandoned yard, approaching the doors into Cell Block C. She made her stance into a strut, mindful of the need to make the same formidable impression upon the prisoners within as she had made on those in the yard, and she pumped her shotgun as she kicked in the door.

Sunset strutted into the common area as though she was the ruler of all of Vale; her tail swished behind her as she strode into open space, dimly lit and cast in shadows red as blood. She saw a prisoner beat a guard onto the floor and straddle him, fist raise. Sunset threw him off with a flick of telekinesis, flinging him into the wall.

“Get out of here, go!” Sunset snapped at the guard. “Get to the medical wing!” He didn’t say anything, but he ran past her, heading for the door.

Sunset strode through the room as chaos reigned all around her. Prisoners were fighting, they were tearing their cells apart and throwing bedding and belongings out into the corridors, they were trying to start fires. Sunset shot someone who was about to leap on her from atop a table, knocking him off it and to the ground on the other side. A bolt of magic was sufficient to knock back a tattooed, muscular woman who charged towards her wielding a length of chain. Sunset caught sight of Mercury Black, legless and out of his wheelchair and on the ground, his arms thrashing and beating the floor while Emerald, her red eyes gleaming, tried to strangle him with a bedsheet. Sunset hit them both with magical pulses that sent them flying into different corners of the room. When Emerald tried to get up Sunset hit her with a second one.

Sunset didn’t pause, didn’t break step. She just kept walking – strutting – forward, shotgun in hand, using buckshot or magic to clear a path through the out of control prisoners, stopping anyone from actually killing anyone else – especially any of the guards who had been unlucky enough to be caught when the cells opened – but not physically stopping because the moment she stopped she would be overwhelmed. She cleared a path for herself and she walked that path, step by step, breaking auras and breaking heads of anyone who got in her way as she swept like a hurricane through the Block C common area and through the corridors and up the stairs that led to the control room.

The control room itself was on the top floor, somewhat isolated from the rest of the prison but clearly not enough. It had an armoured door, but that had been forced open to the extent that it would need to be replaced, the metal all twisted and broken by whatever the White Fang had done to it. There were a couple of dead guards inside.

I saved the life that was in front of me. I can’t save everyone. Nobody can.

Although…maybe I should have tried.

And what would have happened to the guy bleeding to the death on the floor?

No necessary sacrifices. No putting people in harm’s way. No putting lives in the scales.

Not even for the world.

She knelt, and closed the eyes of the dead men. The White Fang did this. Not me.

I’m sorry that I couldn’t save you.

She approached the control panel. The wall of the room was filled with screens showing camera fades – they were still up, at least – showing the chaos engulfing the prison. Another screen, slightly larger, rose up out of the control panel with a list of menu options.

If the White Fang had done anything to actually mess with the computer and lock it down then Sunset would have been in real trouble, but it seemed that they hadn’t actually cared enough to bother with that; their aim was simply to cause enough chaos to allow them to free their people without trouble, and having done that they didn’t care how easy it was to get the prison back online.

Which meant that it was quite easy, now that Sunset had gotten here.

“Main power: on,” Sunset said, and she could see on the camera feeds the lights turning back on, blinding some of the inmates whose eyes had become accustomed to the gloom. “Androids: on.” She watched on the cameras as the AK-190s stirred to life once again, turning their guns on the surprised prisoners as they fired what Sunset thought were probably nonlethal or tranquiliser rounds, the robots’ face-plates flashing red as they began to stalk the corridors, hunting down any inmate they saw.

“Gas? Let’s try that,” Sunset said, as she flicked a switch that released some kind of knock-out gas into the cell blocks via the ventilation system. “And in case any of you didn’t take them off: collars on.” She saw a few prisoners, those without the wisdom to remove the restraints when they had the chance, suddenly go limp as they were suddenly disconnected from their auras.

Sunset stood back and watched as the gas and the androids did their work, prisoners being knocked out either by the gas or by the rounds – tranquilisers or rubber bullets or both – being fired by the androids. She watched as guards in gas masks – where were the police? It hadn’t occurred to Sunset before but didn’t they know that there had almost been a mass prison breakout? – put collars on those who broken or removed them before hauling their unconscious bodies into their cells, while the androids watched, silent in their vigilance.

She was still watching the restoration of order when the warden found her, up in the control room; he was accompanied by three guards, all armed, who watched her as though they couldn’t quite believe that she was on their side, and were wary in case this all turned out to be an elaborate trick on her part.

“You did it,” the warden said, as he pulled off the gas mask that had allowed him to get this far. “Although I’m still not quite sure why.”

“Because, as a wise old man once told me, we always have the choice to be better than we were,” Sunset said. “And because it’s what some people I admire very much would have done.”

The warden still looked a little confused by her motivations. “All I knew about you when you came in was that you were a traitor to this kingdom, but…you’ve saved my life and a lot of other lives tonight.”

“I’d like to save more,” Sunset reminded him. “If you’ll allow it.”

“Right, that,” the warden said. He fished a piece of paper out of his pocket. It was yellow, and it had been torn out of a notepad by the look of it, but Sunset could read the words as she plucked the scrap of paper out of his hand.

I, John Russet, Warden of Blackwall Prison, do by this letter grant the prisoner, Sunset Shimmer, leave to absent herself from my custody for the duration of the fighting around Vale.

“I have a wife,” he said. “And a thirteen year old boy. If you can help them-“

“I’ll do my best, like so many others are already,” Sunset said. She snatched a pen up from the control panel and scribbled a few words below the warden’s note.

I, Sunset Shimmer, hereby give my word that as soon as the fighting is concluded I will present myself to Warden John Russet at Blackwall Prison and return to custody.

And then she signed her name.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to wear this,” the warden said, taking a collar from one of his men. “It’s not activated, so you’ll still have your aura, but it will look a little more official.”

“Plus you can turn it on when the battle is done if I’m still wearing it,” Sunset said. “You don’t trust me, Warden? Don’t answer that, I’m not sure that I’d trust me either.” She pocked the piece of paper, and put the collar on. “Thank you, for giving me this opportunity.”

“Thank you for giving me my prison back.”

“All part of the Sunset service,” Sunset said, and then she left.

She teleported just outside the prison, wearing her collar and with her parole in her pocket, and began to run towards Beacon Academy. It wasn’t where the fighting was, but it was the place where her weapons and equipment were stored and it was a place where she could find out where the others were without having to search the whole of the lines for them.

The dragon passed overhead as she ran through the dark and abandoned streets, and though it did not notice her it did drop some kind of black ooze from the bottom of its belly, black ooze which landed in front of her before, in front of Sunset’s own astonished eyes, the ooze began to resolve itself into a beowolf.

Sunset took a step back as the beowolf…it looked as though it was both crawling its way out of the dark pool but also as though the dark pool was becoming the beowolf. It was like nothing that she had ever seen before, it was-

That’s it! They’re just magic, so all is needed is a counterspell!

As the beowolf looked at her, Sunset raised one hand and cast the Fail Safe spell. It was mid-tier, as counterspells went, not one of the simplest nor one of the most complex, able to deal with a wide variety of spells – and that breadth was the thing that made it the most complex to learn; Sunset had been considering it as a way of dealing with the powers of a Maiden, but now she flung it out towards the beowolf, hoping that since it was Destruction magic incarnate the counterspell would shut it down.

Judging by the beowolf popped, turning at once to ashes that scattered on the wide, it seemed to have worked.

“Yes,” Sunset murmured, allowing herself to feel a sense of satisfaction in having been right as she continued to run towards the school. Now, if she could combine it with the other spells…it probably wouldn’t work on the larger grimm…or rather since the larger the grimm then the more powerful the ‘spell’ animating the whole thing it would require more energy to deal with a larger grimm and even in her strengthened state that was power that she simply didn’t have. That dragon in the sky above, for example; the amount of magic driving it on had to be immense, and there was no way that she could counter all that. And as far as individual grimm went it was no more efficient a way of getting rid of them than shooting them, but if she could combine the spell with others then it would provide a handy area of effect attack if they were every getting swamped.

Which might be happening even now. Sunset quickened her pace, arriving sweat-stained at an empty Beacon, a school scarred by recent battle but thoroughly deserted now. There was no one to be seen, and only the fact that there were no grimm to be seen either prevented her from fearing the worst. Nevertheless, she found herself walking more slowly and more softly as she began to head towards the locker room.

“I took the liberty of bringing your locker out here, Miss Shimmer, once I saw you coming.”

Sunset jumped at the sound of Professor Ozpin’s voice. She saw him now, walking towards her from the tower, his cane tapping on the stone of the courtyard. “Professor,” she gasped. Her eyes narrowed. “How did you know I was coming?”

Professor Ozpin held up a scroll in his other hand. “Vale is a city with many eyes.”

“I see,” Sunset said. “I didn’t escape,” she added quickly, in case he got the wrong idea.

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“But I didn’t,” Sunset insisted. “Where’s everyone else?”

“Teams Sapphire and Rosepetal are fighting their way back towards the Red Line, they should end up before Gate 7,” Professor Ozpin said. “I take it that is where you intend to go?”

A locker door swung open near the statue of the huntsman and huntress, revealing her weapons and her equipment. Sunset walked quickly towards it, pulled out her cuirass and began to buckle it on over her jumpsuit. “With a horde of grimm descending on Vale and the battle in full flow?” she said. “There’s nowhere I’d rather be.”

“Of course,” Professor Ozpin agreed, some amusement in his voice. “I could use your help here…but I know better than to try and persuade you to abandon your comrades.”

“Looking around, Professor, it’s hard not to think that they need me more,” Sunset said, as she pulled on her jacket.

“Yes,” Professor Ozpin murmured. “It certainly seems that way. Miss Shimmer…”

“Yes, Professor?” Sunset said, as she pulled her rifle and sword out of the locker.

Professor Ozpin looked at her for a moment, and it seemed that he wished to say something to her…but he didn’t. He simply turned away. “Good luck, Miss Shimmer.”

Sunset frowned, wondering what it was he might have wanted to say else. But if he didn’t want to say it then this wasn’t the time or the place to pry. “Thank you, Professor. I’ll do my best. I…it’s a little late I know, but I’m finally going to act like a true huntress.”

Professor Ozpin did not reply, whatever he thought of that, and so Sunset ran to the garages to get her hybrid motorbike out, because she didn’t want to run back through Vale with the battle in full swing.

Instead she roared through the streets on the bike that she had built out of spare and unwanted parts, the engine roaring as she race down the deserted roads of Vale. She saw a few more grimm loose in the city, doubtless loosed there by the dragon, as well as evidence of efforts by the police to contain them which probably explained why they hadn’t done anything about the prison. Sunset dealt with any grimm to cross her path, using her sword from atop her motorcycle like a knight on two wheels rather than depleting her store of magic any more than she already had by using counterspell on them. She was stronger now (for some reason) but she wasn’t a bottomless well.

She struck down beowolves and creeps and even a boarbatusk from atop her bike as she drove towards the wall, and towards Gate 7.

As she drove up she could hear the sounds of fighting coming from the other side, even as Valish police in riot and tactical gear stood impassively upon the walls, looking down at the battle that Sunset could hear but not see.

The gates were shut.

They’ve locked them out rather than let the grimm in. That was the only explanation that made sense, just as the only explanation for why Ruby was kneeling on the ground, sobbing while Professor Goodwitch held her by the scruff of the neck was that Pyrrha and Jaune (and maybe Yang too) had sent her away…somehow, knowing that the gate was closed and not watching her to be caught up in their last stand.

"Yang...Pyrrha...Jaune...Penny...I'm sorry,” Ruby sobbed, as tears flowed from her silver eyes. “I'm so sorry. I only did what I thought...what I thought..."

Sunset slowed her bike to a stop, and got off. “Don’t worry, Ruby,” she said. “None of our friends are going to die tonight.”

Ruby gasped as she stared up at her. “Sunset! You…how…”

“I’m on parole,” Sunset explained. “I have a piece of paper to prove it but…better wait until later, right?” she glanced at Professor Goodwitch. “The gates are closed?”

“And they won’t be opened,” Professor Goodwitch muttered in clear disapproval.

“Sunset,” Ruby whispered. “What are you…what are you going to do?”

Sunset smiled gently, and reassuringly too she hoped. “Not what you’re thinking,” she promised. “I’ve changed, Ruby. I’m…better than that now. I’ll save our friends but I won’t spend the city to do it.”

“Really?” Twilight asked. Sunset hadn’t noticed her at first, she was so quiet compared to Ruby. “You think you can save them.”

“Or I’ll share in their fate,” Sunset said, as she bounded up the steps to the top of the wall, where a few of the cops gave her jumpsuit a second glance but none actually made a move to do anything about it.

The land beyond the wall was burning, and amidst the fires the huntsmen battled, trying to protect the Mistralian soldiers who should never come here in the first place.

Okay. Meadowbrook’s Multiplier combined with Starswirl’s Spell of Seeking combined with a basic Fail Safe spell and you get-

Pyrrha went down beyond the wall, after slaying the giant that had had Jaune in its grip she seemed stunned, too stunned to move as an alpha beowolf charged towards her.

No more time.

Sunset teleported, appearing in a flash of green light as she cast the hybrid spell that she really, really hoped worked as she had intended it too, with her other hand she cast a shield around the shrinking Mistralian position to keep away any more grimm than the ones that she was about – she hoped – to deal with. The flash of light from her casting was brighter than she had anticipated, blinding even her. She felt drained, as though a hole had suddenly been cut in the bucket of her magic and it had all just poured out of her in a single deluge.

But it was totally worth it though, because the price of expending what felt like between two thirds and three quarters of her store of magic all at once was the complete destruction of the grimm all around them. Starswirl’s Seeking sent green lightning, duplicated by Meadowbrook’s multiplier, roving out in all directions, seeking the essence that Sunset from her experience associated with the grimm and whenever it found it the Fail Safe did its work, countering the magic that sustained the monsters and obliterating them in an instant. She was lucky that there was nothing larger than an ursa to take care of, as any goliaths probably would have taken all of the rest of her magic with them.

Sunset did her best not to sag with exhaustion.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said to Pyrrha, because…because where did she even start.

“Sunset?”

Okay. This is it. Brave face. Don’t be nervous. Smile. Sunset hoped that her grin didn’t seem too unnatural as she turned to look at Pyrrha. “That’s right. I’m back. Did you miss me?”

PreviousChapters Next