After the Fall

by E. C. Myers

  “Not kill.”

  “I don’t know,” Yatsuhashi said.

  “It’s not gonna hurt anything, Yatsuhashi. We can’t keep carrying him, and we can’t worry about him while we’re taking on Carmine.”

  “While I’m taking on Carmine. You’re going to keep resting and get your strength back up,” Yatsuhashi said.

  Yatsuhashi knelt by Bertilak, who was snoring loudly and coughing whenever he breathed in sand. Fox was right: He would probably wake up soon.

  He touched his fingers to Bertilak’s temples. His hands trembled and he forced them to steady. He didn’t need to be in physical contact when using his Semblance, as he’d discovered all too often, and disastrously, as a kid. But it helped him focus, would make sure he didn’t accidentally wipe Fox’s and Edward’s memories, too.

  He hated using his Semblance. His parents had seemed to forgive him for misusing it, but he had never forgiven himself. And unlike them, he remembered each and every incident. At Beacon Academy he had learned to control it, but even then he used it sparingly, and only in direct combat. In those rare instances, Yatsuhashi usually only erased a second or two of short-term memories to disorient his opponent and get the element of surprise.

  Yatsuhashi looked at Fox. “How far back should I take him?”

  Fox tipped his head back thoughtfully.

  “How about a little before he dragged me into the desert?” Edward said.

  “So, about a day,” Fox sent.

  Yatsuhashi closed his eyes. “Forget,” he whispered. He pictured a black hole, a spinning mass of darkness, and nudged Bertilak’s mind just so to temporarily block his memories from the last day. The effect took the same amount of time he was taking away to wear off, so in a day those masked memories would come flooding back to Bertilak. No doubt, he would be pissed, but hopefully he would also be in police custody.

  “Okay.” Yatsuhashi stood and brushed sand off his hands.

  “I saw what you did,” Fox sent him privately. “It was like his consciousness dimmed for a second. And its shape is different. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s like how Edward’s mind seems brighter right now.”

  “Edward, keep an eye on Fox,” Yatsuhashi said. “I’m going after Carmine.”

  “I can help,” Edward said.

  “Don’t you start, too,” Yatsuhashi said.

  “No, really. He can,” Fox said. “That’s the other reason we came to you. Edward, think you can block Carmine’s Semblance to stop that storm so Yatsuhashi can grab Gus?”

  “I think so.” Edward licked his dry lips. “Just tell me when.”

  “I’ll keep the channel open,” Fox said.

  “Good plan. I’m going in.” Yatsuhashi took off.

  When he drew closer to Carmine and Gus, Yatsuhashi slowed to creep up on them. Sneaking around wasn’t his specialty, and he was convinced she would turn at any moment and see him.

  “Maybe you should tell Gus what we’re doing so he’ll be ready,” Yatsuhashi sent.

  “I don’t want to startle him. It might get her attention,” Fox said.

  “Good point.” Yatsuhashi drew Fulcrum and prepared for the fight ahead. He didn’t have time to meditate, but he briefly closed his eyes and pictured his mother. She had taught him exercises to practice mental discipline and control, not only for his ability, but also for his emotions. It was how Yatsuhashi had worked on overcoming his fear of unintentionally hurting others, mentally or physically. Imagining her soft voice saying, “Breathe easy, Yatsu, clear your mind,” was enough to center him.

  When Yatsuhashi was just thirty feet away from the dust devil, he sent a message to Edward: “Block her Semblance now.”

  “Go!” Edward sent.

  Yatsuhashi started running toward Carmine. The dust devil dispersed, raining sand around them. Carmine looked around, confused.

  Yatsuhashi brought his sword back and swung it down toward Carmine. She spun around, bringing up her dual-sai—and caught his sword on one of the prongs. She twisted and his sword turned over, but he held on and spun with it, yanking his blade free.

  “Gus! Run!” Yatsuhashi yelled to the boy, who turned and ran. “Your grandfather is back there.” He pointed in the direction he’d come from with his sword, then brought it around toward Carmine. She parried it easily with her own weapon.

  They continued trading blows with their blades as Yatsuhashi circled her, but Carmine held her ground.

  She was fast. She couldn’t get in close to Yatsuhashi with her own short sword, but she wasn’t letting any of his attacks make contact, either. Perhaps he could tire her out eventually, if they were able to keep this up for a while.

  And then one of her punches landed on him, and he went flying backward.

  He shook his head and scrambled onto his feet. Bellowing, Yatsuhashi brought his greatsword back and put all his might behind it. The massive blade hit her sword and knocked it out of her hands.

  Carmine ducked under his weapon as he regained his balance, grabbed the blade between the palms of her hands, and pushed it backward. The pommel of his sword hit Yatsuhashi in the breast bone and he went down with an “Oof!”

  His chest felt like a giant bruise. He kept his balance, but now he was unarmed. Carmine was still holding on to his sword. She flipped it up by the blade and caught the handle. She tested the weight, tossing it from hand to hand.

  “Not bad. I think I’ll keep this,” she said.

  “—when you hear me let me know when you hear me let me know when you hear me,” Fox sent.

  “I hear you,” Yatsuhashi replied. He’d forgotten that in order to block Carmine’s Semblance, Edward had to block all Semblances. That explained why he hadn’t heard from Fox in a while.

  “Damn,” Fox said. “That means Edward’s not blocking—”

  Sand swirled around Carmine and her red hair rose and spread out behind her. She grinned.

  “—her Semblance,” Fox said.

  “Give up now, boy,” she said. “And maybe I’ll go easy on you.”

  “I think I can take you.”

  “You don’t even have a weapon,” Carmine said. She tilted her head. “Here, you can have mine.”

  Something knocked into Yatsuhashi’s left shoulder from behind. He grunted and dropped to his knees. He looked down and saw Carmine’s dual-sai hovering over him. The blade levitated in front of his face, and twirled dangerously with the tip pointed at his eyes.

  So that was her Semblance. Telekinesis.

  He lunged for the sword, but it darted out of the way and thwacked the top of his head.

  “We’ve sparred with Telekinetics before. And I’m willing to bet you’re not as good as Goodwitch.”

  Yatsuhashi moved fast, knocking her sai aside with his arm. It darted back toward him. He parried it again, thinking how odd it was to be having a fistfight with a flying sword. Then it zipped back to Carmine and she caught it. Now she had two weapons, and he had none.

  Sand started swirling around her again, drifting slowly like a ring around a planet. Then she waved her hand, and the ring expanded quickly. Sand blasted into Yatsuhashi, pushing him backward, stinging his face, getting into his eyes, his mouth, his armor. He brought his hands up to shield himself from the worst of it, but he was itching and blinded for a moment.

  “Look out! Above you!” Gus called.

  Yatsuhashi rubbed sand out of his watering eyes and looked up to see sand gathering over his head, a growing ball of grit.

  He tried to dodge to the side, but the ball dropped and he was buried under a ton of sand, just like that.

  Yatsuhashi roared and burst out of the pile, and another large mass of sand punched him in the side. He went tumbling away.

  I can’t do this on my own, Yatsuhashi thought.

  Yatsuhashi dug himself out of a second sand pile and zeroed in on Carmine. She spun her sword rapidly, gathering sand toward it in a spiral column, and then she pushed her hand forward and fired the sand at Yatsuhashi. He ran t
oward it and vaulted over it, but the sand blast redirected upward and propelled him high into the air. More sand gathered, like she was turning up the force on a water hose. Pushing him higher and higher. Then the sand fell away and Yatsuhashi dropped after it. He landed hard on his back in the sand and the wind was knocked out of him.

  “Hey! You started the party without me.”

  “Bertilak!” Carmine shouted.

  Yatsuhashi looked over and saw Bertilak Celadon standing ten feet away from him, holding his broken weapon—and Gus. Why had the kid come back to help Yatsuhashi?

  “Well, I’m screwed,” Yatsuhashi sent.

  “Don’t worry, Yatsu. Go save Gus. We’ve got this!” Velvet watched Yatsu drop down the side of the turtle, wishing she felt as confident as she had sounded. She didn’t want Yatsuhashi worrying about her when he had his own dangerous task ahead. But the Blind Worm heading toward them was more than a little disconcerting.

  The turtle seemed to agree. It suddenly shifted its course to the left, turning away from the Blind Worm. Velvet almost lost her balance. A few people standing too close to the edge of the wide, flat shell tumbled, but Coco and Slate caught them and pulled them back up.

  “Grab those ropes,” Slate said. “We need to secure everyone.”

  The turtle was now racing away from the Blind Worm, but the Grimm was gaining on it. It just couldn’t swim very fast in the sand, while the worm was built for speed.

  Several of the nomads had pulled the ropes up and were using them to lash everyone together, securing them with the hooks and pitons embedded in the turtle’s shell. Velvet had the horrible image of the turtle rolling over, crushing everyone, or burrowing into the sand, dragging them down with it. It didn’t look like the turtle was prepared to fight, and unless it could shoot laser beams from its mouth or do something equally useful, it was going to be up to her and Coco to defend it and everyone on board.

  “It’s almost on us!” Coco unfolded her bag into its gun form. She looked at Velvet. “Get ready.”

  Velvet nodded. She would need some powerful weapons for this fight, and this wasn’t the time to hold back.

  The first weapon she called up was a pair of armored gloves loaded with circular saws. When the hard-light weapons formed, Coco said, “Oh.”

  There would be no replacing these. Roy Stallion was presumed killed during the Battle of Beacon—he’d last been seen in the clutches of a Nevermore. No one knew where the rest of Team BRNZ (Bronze) was, either, missing or dead.

  “Good-bye, Roy,” Velvet whispered. She raised her arms. “Ready?”

  Coco nodded.

  The Grimm worm bore down on them, and it looked even more horrific and eldritch up close. They could see its teeth rotating around its circular maw and feel its hot breath wafting over them. Coco fired her gun into its mouth, while Velvet fired the spinning saws at its eye. The worm closed its mouth and abruptly burrowed down into the sand.

  Velvet and Coco glanced at each other. “It couldn’t have been that easy,” Coco said.

  It wasn’t.

  The worm burst out of the sand and shot over the turtle. Coco fired off another round of bullets, joined by gunfire and a hail of arrows from the nomads. Nothing seemed to be able to penetrate its thick hide.

  It landed and turned around, surprisingly fast. Velvet got off another shot with Roy’s saw. Her aim was true, just as his would have been, and the razor-sharp discs struck between two of the worm’s armored segments. Something hot and green spewed from the wound; Velvet raised her shield and kept most of the splatters off her and Coco. But where it touched her uniform, the fabric burned away and her skin sizzled and blistered.

  “Ow!” Velvet said. “What is that stuff?”

  “Acid,” Slate said. “Blind Worms are nasty things. Maybe the nastiest in a desert of nasty things.”

  The worm shuddered and rolled over, spreading its green ick over the sand. The turtle shifted direction again to head in the opposite direction. This time Velvet fell over and bumped into Coco, knocking her down.

  “Sorry,” Velvet said.

  “You okay?” Coco asked.

  Velvet nodded. Her shield armored gloves disappeared and were replaced by Neptune Vasilias’s rail gun.

  Coco raised her eyebrows.

  “They’re no good to us if we’re dead,” Velvet said. She knew Coco thought she should be holding on to these pictures for emergencies, but if this didn’t qualify, then what did? She couldn’t afford to be sentimental about the irreplaceable photographs of their friends, either. Last she’d heard, Team SSSN was still out there, anyway, though no one knew where Sun Wukong had headed off to. He’d always been nice to Velvet, and she hoped he wasn’t getting into too much trouble, wherever he was.

  The worm recovered and barreled toward them again. They both fired on it. Velvet concentrated the energy blasts from Neptune’s gun on the worm’s eye, which began to burn and scar and bubble under the assault.

  But that didn’t stop it from advancing toward them. It rammed into the side of the turtle. The world tipped over, but the turtle frantically worked to right itself. And the blind worm disappeared.

  The turtle withdrew, pulling its flippers and head into its shell. It had clearly had enough. Its sturdy shell might protect it from the Blind Worm’s attacks, but everyone on the shell was exposed—and they weren’t moving anymore.

  “Should we jump off?” Velvet asked.

  “Not yet,” Coco said. “We’re still a tougher target up here. Down there in the sand, that thing could swallow us up in seconds.”

  They waited, but all seemed still.

  Velvet and Coco stood back-to-back. Velvet was ready to call up her next weapon when a target presented itself.

  “I never wanted to come here,” Velvet said quietly.

  “What?” Coco said.

  “I didn’t want to come to Vacuo. I wanted to stay in Vale,” Velvet said. “We never should have left Beacon.”

  “It was a lost cause,” Coco said. “It was unsafe.”

  “I thought we don’t believe in lost causes.”

  “You should have said something.”

  “I tried. But your mind was already made up. And the boys were on your side.”

  Coco pursed her lips. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to leave Vale, either, but I thought this was the best thing for us. I think we … I needed to get away for a while. It was hard to stay there, without our friends, with the place destroyed like that. All those Grimm.”

  “But, like, Vacuo?” Velvet said. “This desert? You really thought this would be better? At least we had a home there.”

  “I needed to protect you … and Yatsu and Fox. After we lost that family in Lower Cairn—after we lost Roy and Penny and Pyrrha and Ozpin—I couldn’t lose you, too. I couldn’t bear it,” Coco said, closing her eyes against the desert wind. She breathed in slowly. “We’ll get back there one day, I promise. And when we do, we’ll be ready to win it back. That’s the reason we’re here. To become better Huntresses. To save our home.”

  The sand rumbled and Velvet looked down in time to see the Blind Worm launching straight up the side of the turtle shell toward her and Coco. The shell shuddered and she felt herself pitch forward. Then someone grabbed her from behind and she was spun around to safety. She glanced back as she flew toward the center of the shell and saw Coco tumble backward over the side. The worm rose up past the side, hung in the air for a moment, and then fell back down.

  Velvet rushed to the edge to look for Coco, but she was gone. The worm had swallowed her.

  A typical school day for a second-year student at Beacon Academy:

  7:30 a.m.—Breakfast

  8:00 a.m.—Plant Science, Professor Thumbelina Peach

  9:45 a.m.—Military Strategy, Professor Peter Port

  11:15 a.m.—Weapon Crafting and Upkeep, Professor Harold Mulberry

  12:30 p.m.—Lunch

  1:30 p.m.—Stealth and Security, Professor Ann Greene

&nbs
p; 2:15 p.m.—Legends of Remnant, Professor Dr. Bartholomew Oobleck

  4:00 p.m.—Combat Training, Professor Glynda Goodwitch

  5:00 p.m.—Sparring, Self-Directed

  6:00 p.m.—Dinner

  A typical school day after the Fall of Beacon:

  5:00 a.m.—Breakfast

  5:15 a.m.—Fight Grimm, Dr. Bartholomew Oobleck

  12:00 p.m.—Lunch

  1:00 p.m.—Fight Grimm, Professor Peter Port

  6:00 p.m.—Rebuilding, Professor Glynda Goodwitch

  7:30 p.m.—Infirmary

  8:00 p.m.—Night patrol, Self-Directed

  The best thing about Beacon Academy, what made it stand out above the other major Huntsmen training academies, was its emphasis on practical education. They sent more students on supervised missions than Atlas, Haven, and even Shade, and they gave them more one-on-one time with their teams and trained Huntsmen. Add in the fact that Vale was beautiful year-round and a cultural center with a diverse population, and it was no wonder that it was the first choice for students from all over Remnant.

  That was before it was destroyed and taken over by Grimm. After that terrible night of fire and devastation and so much loss, life at Beacon became one never-ending training mission—only, training was over, and lives were at stake.

  “We aren’t making a dent here,” Coco said wearily. She and Velvet, Yatsuhashi, and Fox were eating ration packs in a classroom building on the perimeter of Beacon’s campus—as close as they’d been able to get to the Academy, and one of the few areas they had been able to secure from Grimm … for the moment. It was looking more and more like they would have to fall back farther from school grounds.

  “They just keep coming.” Yatsuhashi lifted his head from his hands. He didn’t have much of an appetite these days. He didn’t like to take even this short break from clearing out the city. The last few weeks had been grueling for them, a constant cycle of sleeping, eating, fighting. They were among only a dozen students who had remained there—the rest being Third- and Fourth-years—and the endless battle was taking its toll on them.

  They hadn’t been able to say good-bye to most of their friends before they had scattered in the chaos or gone home or retreated to the temporary shelters in Vale, waiting to see whether there was any hope for Beacon.