Hunter Breach, Oil Well 6

00:21 hours

Roman's humvee rolls up next to the small building next to the entrance of a liquid dust well, a few hundred feet from the flaming pumpjack. Wreckage of human and Faunus military vehicles and corpses litter from a recent battle over the well, the surrounding landscape, eerie shadows shakily being cast by the mountainous flames in the distance.

A group of Paladins, two of them completely destroyed by rocket fire and the other three with half their wheels missing and littered with anti-tank bullet holes, are parked on the road outside of the half-destroyed chain link fence surrounding the pumpjack. Most of their occupants lie a few dozen feet into the compound, where they successfully held off five Beowolfs, the Federation's APC, its turret equipped with two 30mm autocannons and a 5.56 LMG mounted in between. The Beowulf's wounds were inflicted mostly by AT4 rocket launchers, quickly disabling them, but not before all of the Atlesians were wiped out. The few remaining Feds must have retreated by foot, but no reinforcements from either side have arrived so far.

Roman opens the humvee door and steps out. He can feel the intense heat of liquid dust burning, even from this distance. The shack is surprisingly unscathed; the windows are blown out, the furniture inside thrown about the room, bullet holes everywhere; but it's still standing.

Inside, four White Fang soldiers dig out random files from the overturned filing cabinets and feeding the papers through shredders. Four other individuals also stand in the room, all of them donning AURA; Neo, Roman's sixteen-year-old second in command, who was an orphaned street rat in the ghettos of Atlas when he found her. She has had a...peculiar past with humans, leaving her mouth in the form of a permanent smile. She carries an L85A2 and wears white and pink assault AURA. Mercury, a human mercenary that Roman hired in a job a few years ago, supervises the WF grunts. He is armed with an F2000 with dark grey sniper AURA. Cinder, the woman he talked with in Netvorville, stands in front of the door, waiting for him. She wears typical bitch pack Federation Commando gear, the same color as her stealth AURA. A muscular seven foot tall White Fang grunt, arms covered in traditional Faunus tattoos and wears a WF officer's mask painted red and bleach white demolition AURA, stands behind her. He carries a Pancor Jackhammer.

"Hell of a mess you made," Roman says, taking a look around the room. The stench of dry blood from four dead Faunus soldiers, which is plastered on the walls like a bad paint job, still lingers in the air.

"You're getting paid and the Coalition forces aren't advancing, why should you give a shit about the mess?" Cinder remarks, a frown replacing her usual cynical smile.

"My, my. What's up your bush today?" Roman asks with a smirk. Cinder flares at him.

"Neo," she commands simply. The small girl picks up a folder marked "CONFIDENTIAL" and tosses it to Roman.

"What am I looking at?" he asks.

"You can read, right?" Cinder asks. Roman rolls his eyes and opens the folder and reads the top paper.

A Faunus propped against an overturned desk, most likely shot defending the entrance when the Paladins rolled up, grunts weakly and attempts to raise his hand. Without bothering to turn his head, Roman pulls an HK P30 pistol from his coat pocket and shoots the Fed three times in the head.

"Alright, this is an inventory list for a Fed base near Netvorville," Roman says, thumbing through the other papers. "Why is it here?" Cinder walks next to him and snatches the file out of his hands.

"It was being carefully moved from the base to my superiors," she says. She selects a specific paper, listing a large range of weapons and equipments and their quantities, and holds it up to Roman's face. "What does the fifth line down say?"

"Uh, 'RCS x 10.' The fuck is RCS?"

"It's the shit the human Hunters are wearing now," Cinder says angrily. "They were prototypes that began stress testing three years ago. The Feds just informed me that they are no longer in possession of said shit."

"And...why do I care?" Cinder grabs Roman's coat collar and pulls him close.

"I gave you a blank check to wreak havoc and distract the humans while I get this war over with, now I find out that the suits mysteriously disappeared… while in a White Fang camp before being moved to a more secure location. Now the humans have our tech, and we have nothing." Roman slaps Cinder's hand away.

"You mean besides the shit you're wearing?"

"The Feds don't care about human tech. They wouldn't buy it even if they did know about it."

"Oh, so your plan with the Faunus is falling apart? I guess now you know what happens when one of your closest assets isn't included in your big master plan." Cinder glares at him. "Seriously, the fuck do you want me to do about it?"

"This Hunter threat needs to be dealt with. Vale is spearheading the project, headed by some piss poor idealist General, but we're getting reports of Minstrel Hunters and even some sightings from Vacuo Militia. There's not too many of them yet, but more and more are being trained, so we need to strike soon."

"And you want the White Fang to bomb a few civilian populations in Vale?" Roman guesses.

"Yes, but only after the Federation makes their big move."

"Oh, we're still working with the Feds?" Roman asks, eyeing the soldier he just shot.

"As far as they know," Cinder answers. "I've organized your people into a strike force. Keep all connections open for them, they'll be dealing with the more troublesome Hunters."

"Done."

"I hope so. For your sake." Emerald, another human Roman hired alongside Mercury, enters the building through the back door. She carries a Magpul PDR and wears mint-colored assault AURA.

"Cinder," she says, then quickly corrects herself. "I mean, uh, Agent Cinder. The radioman was alive, but he wasn't able to send any messages."

"So no one's left?" Cinder asks.

"Yes, Ma'am."

"Good. Move out, people, we're torching the rest." Everyone in the room begins to funnel out, but Cinder stops Roman.

"Don't fuck up again," she hisses. Roman is uneasy at first, but then smiles.

"If I do, I'll shoot me myself," he says. Cinder rolls her eyes and walks out the door.

The soldiers pour into their own vehicles, Roman back into his humvee and Cinder's group into a Creeper, rotors already spinning up. Cinder unshoulders an M79 grenade launcher, loads an HE grenade and fires it at the remains of the shack, which explodes into a million pieces of timber, metal, and charred bodies. Their flames join the ones of the liquid dust as the chopper takes off.

Fort Beacon Firing Range

04:44 hours

Day 18 of Hunter training for RWBY Squad

Yang aims her LMG at Ruby, and opens fire, letting the bullets fly. They are immediately stopped by Ruby's AURA, which absorbs the shock of the lead and rebuilds the damaged armor plating. Yang unloads nearly half her magazine without letting off on the trigger, and Ruby barely has to react to the bullets coming within inches of her stomach.

"Yeah, these things definitely work," Ruby says, walking back to the firing line; Yang swaps out magazines, Weiss is polishing Myrtenaster's barrel, and Blake leans sits on a bench a few feet away, reading a local border country newspaper, the word "WAR" prominent on every page. "You're up, Yang."

"About damn time!" Yang says with glee, and jogs out to where Ruby was standing; bits of damaged AURA pieces and spent ammunition surround her. "Weiss, hit me with something different," Yang requests.

"Alright," Weiss replies, closing the barrel of the pistol and spinning the cylinder. "Tracer?"

"Negative, explosive."

"Uh, I don't think the armor can take that kind of damage."

"Blake's armor absorbed Ruby's sniper rifle just fine, and I have twice as thick armor."

"She did survive jumping on a landmine," Blake says without looking up.

"This isn't ordinary HE rounds," Weiss says, popping the barrel open and taking out one of the vials of dust. "This is hand-smelted and crafted explosive dust, directly from Schnee Armaments' main factory. It's not just some imported mass produced crap; this is specifically designed with a blast radius larger than-"

"Just shoot me already!" Yang says, spreading her arms out. Weiss sighs, reinserts the vial, closes the barrel, and takes aim.

"If you die, I have two witnesses that will testify that I am doing this against my better judgement," Weiss says.

"Good for you, now shoot," Yang says. Weiss pulls the trigger, and the explosive-carrying bullet flies directly into Yang's chest. Surprisingly, the AURA completely swallows and dismantles it before it can activate, and Yang only reacts by flinching a little more than normal.

"Wow!" Ruby says. Weiss stares in disbelief. "Can you shoot me next?"

"Hand crafted, huh?" Blake retorts. Weiss scowls at her teammate, who still hasn't looked up.

"What else do you got?" Yang asks, padding down the armor where she was shot. She can feel the added weight underneath.

"Incendiary, armor piercing-"

"Armor piercing!" Yang shouts. Weiss rolls the cylinder to the correct position, and fires. The bullet, coated in a form of dust that instantly hardens when leaving the barrel, strikes Yang in the shoulder, knocking off a good chunk of armor, close to where she was shot in Hunter Breach. She cries out and falls to one knee, hand on her shoulder.

"Oh shit!" Ruby says, running down range. Yang quickly holds up the OK hand signal and slowly stands up.

"Oh my god!" Weiss says, hands shaking. Even Blake stands up.

"I'm good," Yang says to Ruby. She stretches her arm and moves it around. Weiss and Blake join them.

"Did it penetrate?" Blake asks, eyeing Yang's arm. Even with a large chunk of the original armor missing, the suit has been hard at working, the new armor plating visibly being moved into position by the electric current inside the armor.

"I'm good," Yang repeats. She holds up the jacket and looks underneath the armor "It's just near an old wound. I think the AP actually almost got through to the last layer of armor before being stopped."

"Well, I guess, uh, it's a good thing it didn't," Weiss says, nervously unloading Myrtenaster. "Are you sure you're ok?"

"Hell yeah," Yang says. "That was great. My shoulder feels about ten pounds heavier too."

"Remind me to never get in front of that thing," Ruby says to Weiss. "Hey Blake, you wanna try getting shot by Crescent Rose while cloaked? I want to see if it'll flicker off on a bigger caliber." Blake doesn't respond. "Blake?" Ruby turns to her teammate, and sees that she's starring in the other direction, outside the range. The rest of the squad turns to look, and turn silent too.

A convoy of Paladins and white M939s, obviously from the AA, drive through the main entrance of the base. But they're not extra security; the transport trucks are full of wounded soldiers, their blue and white uniforms covered in red blood. Many bodies are piled on top of each other from lack of space, and many aren't moving. The ones that do move cry out in agony, yell for release from the pain, flail their arms and legs. Medics step around the fallen soldiers, stabbing them with autoinjectors of morphline, and hang IV bags from the support beams in the back. There are more soldiers on top of the Paladins, a few wounded and on stretchers as well, but most are unhurt physically, but mentally they already look dead; Ruby had always read about the thousand-yard stare, saw pictures of it from the First War, but something's so unsettling seeing it in purpose; seeing the best human soldiers on Remnant, with their uniforms torn, their masks and helmets resting limply on their laps, their eyes wide and staring into space. It brings her back to Camp Signal, when this whole war started.

"Shit," Yang says, forgetting the subsiding pain in her arm. "The Feds are putting up a fight."

"This is Viktor Speeder," Blake says. "The Federation lost control of this land in the First War. They're throwing everything they have at this place."

"Yeah, I always heard about how bad the fighting was, but...I guess I never really thought about this part of combat."

"Fucking animals," Weiss mutters as the last of the vehicles rolls by. "They don't even have any official rules of engagement, not even for non combatants."

"No reason to have rules for who to shoot when they're fighting in countries that are used to getting shot at," Blake says, remembering the skirmishes the militia forces in New Tango would get into when she was a kid. Sometimes it was with local rebels, sometimes foreign mercenaries, sometimes even Feds; just depended on who wanted to be pissed off at. She remembers the summer when she learned to trained her Faunus instincts to block out the gunfire during the night.

"No surprise," Weiss scoffs. "Still just a bunch of eugenic-crazed zealots trying to raise hell on the rest of the world. We shouldn't have stopped at the borders during the First War." Blake looks at Weiss.

"You know, some of the most decorated units in the Coalition forces during the First War were all Faunus," she says. "Their advanced capabilities were extremely valuable in fighting the Feds."

"Yeah right, they segregated them because they were 'valuable'," Weiss retorts. "They did it because they didn't want any of them spying on the humans."

"You got a problem with Faunus?" Blake asks, taking a step forward. Ruby and Yang look at each other worriedly.

"Not that it's any of your business," Weiss says, crossing her arms. "But yes, I got a problem with the animals. They're a bunch of radical mutants as far as I'm concerned. They can't be trusted, not after what they did to themselves and to humanity."

"None of them asked to be Faunus," Blake says, choosing her words carefully.

"You mean besides the religious zealots that modified their own and others' genes in illegal experiments hundreds of years ago?"

"So we should punish an entire race because of the decisions of a handful of people?" Weiss points at the distant Atlesian vehicles.

"That's what Faunus are capable of, not just a 'handful' of them. An entire army of the fuckers did that. They're all like that."

"So are humans!" Blake says, raising her voice.

"Uh, guys?" Ruby says quietly. "Can we please get back to shooting each other?"

"It's getting late, I'm done for the day," Blake says, walking out the firing range. Weiss shakes her head.

"Can you believe that?" Weiss says.

"Well, she did grow up in a border country," Yang says. "Most of the population in border countries are Faunus, she probably just sees them differently."

"Yeah, she never saw them with both eyes open," Weiss murmurs. Yang looks at Ruby, who shrugs.

"Just out of curiosity, Weiss," Yang says. "Approximately how many Faunus have you met personally?" Weiss is silent for a moment.

"Enough," she answers.

"Can you give me a number?" Weiss stares at the ground for a moment, then looks up, her white eyes as cold as ice.

"How many are in the inner circle of the White Fang in the Atlas Mob?" she answers. "You know what, I think I'm done for the day too." She walks out of the range, but goes in the opposite direction of Blake.

"Definitely didn't expect that," Yang says, wondering about the white haired girl.

"No kidding," Ruby says. "Do...do you know any Faunus?"

"Not really, but I don't hold anything against the species as a whole, just Feds. You?"

"No, I'm pretty much the same." The two girls stand silent for a moment, thinking about what their squadmates have gone through.

"So," Yang says, holding up her shotgun. "You think your armor can hold up from point blank range?"

"Now we're talking."