Chapter 7: A New Day, Full of Opportunity

After another fight between Qrow and Winter (and another crater in the town square), a meeting with the leaders of the town named Ozpin and Ironwood, and a briefing on a lead to the first part of finding one of the vaults left on Pandora, team RWBY set off on the stolen technical into the morning sun, on the hunt for loot and adventure, Yang once again in the driver's seat and Weiss riding shotgun with a map on her ECHO device, acting as co-pilot for Yang.

"The coordinates Winter gave us are close now, just a few more miles and…." Weiss looked up and trailed off at the sight of a colossus of ramshackle walls, emplaced guns, and currently deactivated spotlights before looking to see that it matched the coordinates she received, and sighed. "Oh yay, bandits" Weiss deadpanned in obvious annoyance.

A few minutes later and the technical could not go any further without possibly entering the range of the guards on the walls, forcing Yang to park it behind a rock a fair distance away. In the shade of the rock, Ruby began drawing in the sand with a stick left in the bed of the technical, making a rough sketch of the mysterious fortress and the positions of the guards, as well as an "R", a "W", a "B", and a "Y" representing herself and her teammates.

"Alright, so I can take the guards at the front from here, but I'll need to circle around the fort to take out any other guards on the top of the wall, they'll notice and keep sending up more guards and they might send scouts out into the field too. Yang, you distract them while Blake and Weiss look for a way in, we all meet back behind this rock here and break in through the path Blake and Weiss find." Ruby listed out, surprisingly focused and scribbling out arrows to map out the plan. "Sound good?" she asked.

"Sounds great!" Yang shouted out, mounting Ember Celica onto her wrists, raring for the rush that only some explosive close up action could give her. Weiss and Blake nodded at Ruby, equipping their weapons in "gun" form, signaling that they were ready to move out.

"Alright, on a count of three. One…. Two... Three!" Ruby announced, immediately rushing inhumanly quickly between the rocks in front of the fortress, hiding behind one where she could pick off the bandits at a range their cobbled together guns couldn't hope to hit her, and gave a thumbs up to signal Blake and Weiss to move out. Weiss threw out a digistructed "glyph", propelling herself one way, and Blake seemed to stand still until her image faded away into a digitized cloud and Ruby saw her moving the other way out of the corner of her eye. Yang, no longer forced to bottle up her excitement, fired off a few shots, which even in the great distance she stood from the fortress to avoid getting shot into the ground, turned a few heads.

Or at least, Yang would have turned a few heads if Ruby hadn't put a bullet through each of them in rapid succession. Seeing the spontaneous deaths of his underlings, a heavy coated nomad sounded an alarm, and soon a horde of psychos poured out of the side of the fortress that Ruby attacked, not too different from the way an anthill pours out ants when kicked.

Yang, now executing her part of the plan, charged into the horde with a battle cry and her shotguns at the ready. As numerous as the psychos were, they still struggled in getting a hit on Yang. Her experience in hand to hand combat, from conventional training, but mostly through street brawls, combined with Ember Celica, made her a destructive whirl of fists and explosions, cutting a charred, bloody swath through the ranks of insanity addled axe wielders, ideally to convince the bandits to send more troops and leave the fort more vulnerable.

"C'mon, is that all you got?! I'm not even warmed… up…. yet…" Yang boasted, but then trailed off as she saw the little cowlick that stuck up on the top of her head flutter down in front of her like the feathers of a fallen angel. At the sight of her beloved hair damaged at the hands of the psychos, what was once a whirl became a cataclysmic rampage. Yang eschewed the few kicks she was using in favor of using her fists and Ember Celica entirely, crushing her way through the horde at an even more alarming rate. However, in her fury, she didn't notice one of the emplaced Gatling guns revving up and taking aim. Only when the gun began to indiscriminately rain bullets on the area did Yang start dodging and zig zagging, hoping the only damage would be to her shield.

Thankfully the gun didn't last for long. The withering barrage of gunfire stopped as suddenly as it began, punctuated by the sharp crack of Crescent Rose firing, leaving the gunner bereft of a large portion of his grey matter. Another crack left the gun itself without a usable set of barrels. "Got your back!" Ruby chirped through the ECHO communicator. "Good thing you did" Yang answered back, her rage induced haze clearing at the sound of Ruby's voice. "Oh? More small fries for the champ, huh? Don't mind if I do…" Yang said mostly to herself, having caught sight of a second wave of challengers, which now included the "normal", gun toting bandits. Reloading Ember Celica, she charged forward once again in an effort to draw as much attention as she could and beat down as many bandits as she could.

Meanwhile Weiss and Blake skirted the sides of the fortress, searching for a weak point, a side door, anything that might serve as an entry point. Eventually they met on the opposite end of the fort, unable to find any possible entry point at the distance they stayed to avoid the range of the Gatling guns. "We searched as closely as we could with the guns still up, it looks like the only way through is the front door. Ruby, if you can move to the sides to take out the guns we can take a closer look, but if you can't, the front door is our only option" Weiss announced through her ECHO device.

"Yeah, about that…" Ruby replied. "There's too many coming out from the front to leave Yang alone, come in from the flanks and we'll works from there" Ruby requested in between picking off especially threatening foes, such as the shielded nomads and "badass" bandits.

"WOO HOO! I FEEL ALIVE!" was Yang's response, having forgotten to turn off her ECHO device and unaware of the conversation in the midst of all the chaos.

"She sounds like she's having fun" Blake commented.

"A little too much fun, but what can you do?" Weiss replied.

When Weiss and Blake returned to the front of the fort, they saw Yang brawling against a veritable swarm of bandits, psychos, and nomads alike, punching, shooting, and smashing apart the opposition. They could clearly see that the bandits were gaining ground however, as Yang could only fight off so many at a time before more took their place.

With little more than a nod to each other, Weiss and Blake sprang into action, Blake rushing into the hoard to bait them away from Yang, and Weiss cycling through the digistructed glyphs at her disposal before confirming her selection, which she projected on the area she predicted Blake would lead the bandits to. Not a few moments later, Blake came running back, a section of the horde hot on her tail, before seemingly standing still. The bandits shot and hacked at "Blake" before again, she faded away, revealing her to be standing just outside the glowing circle Weiss projected, which trapped the bandits in light constructs that forced their feet to the ground, unable to even pick them up. Smirking in self-satisfaction, Weiss then moved her hand to make the glyph implode, throwing the bandits even closer together. Blake, seeing the implosion, followed it up with a slag grenade, gathering the bandits together to be afflicted by the purple stuff before a black blur seemed to move through the slagged horde, cutting down each bandit one by one. After a brief scan for stragglers, the two proceeded closer towards the horde to help Yang directly.

If Yang were to be honest, this was getting old. She was having a blast before, but now the bandits were just winning the endurance contest because there were more of them. Annoyed, but not quite fearing for her life, Yang checked over the crowd to see Weiss and Blake hurrying towards her, Blake readying Gambol Shroud to throw. Without hesitation, Yang stuck her arm out to catch it and let herself swing around on it out of the swarm of bandits. Yang didn't know what that ribbon Blake was using was made of, but man did she love swinging around on Gambol Shroud. Soon she was starting to swing back around to the crowd, and right when she faced it, she let go of Gambol Shroud, launching herself at the remaining bandits, right fist at the ready. Almost immediately the impact sent most of them flying right into a longbow cryo field grenade, courtesy of Weiss. Within seconds the sprint the bandits made to escape slowed to a crawl, then all that remained of the initial horde were either crushed, charred, slagged, cut into pieces, missing a large part of brain, or most recently, transformed into chunks of reddish pink ice.

"Wow, Weiss! They really froze up when they saw you" Yang congratulated, still panting from her delaying act from beforehand.

"I'm… not going to even honor that with a response" Weiss replied, cradling her face in her palm at Yang's awful pun.

Their respite was short lived however, as one more set of challengers lumbered out of the fortress, a squad of heavily armored nomads with a rocket launcher in one hand and a shield in the other. Acting out of reflex, the team dived out of the way of the first salvo, regrouping behind a rock.

"Did you have a plan for this?!" Weiss asked in panic

"No, but I can make one" Ruby answered, "I can't snipe them through their shields, so I'm going in close" she concluded, unfolding Crescent Rose into its scythe form. "Cover me!" She yelled behind her, zig zagging towards the heavies. The rest of the team moved up as well, Yang charging forward again, Weiss preparing another glyph and cycling through Myrtenaster's chambers, and Blake looking for a flank.

What the nomads expected to be an easy kill turned into a surprise as Ruby appeared in front of them in the blink of an eye. Before any of them could react, one saw the blade of her scythe come dangerously close to his face as it hooked itself into the open panel of the shield he used to see through. With a shot from Crescent Rose, Ruby flew up into the air, dragging the shield out of the nomads hands with her, before launching herself away with another shot that landed in one of the other nomad's back. The nomad with the missing shield turned around in confusion before feeling a tingling, then a burning as a shock round and an incendiary round both hit him in the chest, making him collapse to the ground in shock.

Seeing an opportunity, Blake rushed into the fray as soon as Ruby left it, placing herself between two of the nomads and trying to rough them up to no avail due to their shields. The two nomads took aim at the assassin that stood between them before firing, and once again, being fooled by Blake's decoy, blowing themselves up.

All that stood were two more nomads, one reloading their rocket launcher, and another just finished, the one with the loaded launcher fired, catching Yang in the blast. They both sighed in relief at the fact that at least one of the vault hunters had gone down, only to do a double take as a plume of fire erupted from where the blonde stood, who was now sprinting forward, her roid shield broken and empowering her strikes. Her shotgun assisted punch ripped through the shield and continued into the gut of one of the nomads, sending him rocketing back with a conspicuous hole in his stomach, and the other, terrified by the sight, dropped his gear and fled. Soon after, a shot rang out and his leg began to ice over before another set of shots, one of each element, confirmed the shooter to be Weiss.

"Weiss, he was running! We didn't need to waste ammo on him!" Ruby cried, trying to hide that even though she recognized the necessity of it, and she had done it before, killing still shook her up a little.

"He would have called for help, and I am not dealing with more of this riff raff right now" Weiss responded, before shooting the debilitated nomad in the head with a corrosive round, dissolving the corpse.

"Oh, right" Ruby realized.

"So this is the place? I was expecting something more… subtle" Blake remarked, trying to divert the conversation.

"It's on the coordinates I have, this is our best bet" Weiss answered, displaying the map on her ECHO to illustrate our point.

Before that could be further discussed, Ruby appeared behind her team, Crescent Rose on her back. "Great job, team! Now let's start on finding ourselves a vault!" she exclaimed, her cape billowing in the wind as she pointed dramatically at the entrance of the fortress.

END OF CHAPTER 7

Told you I'd get em on the road! Also, to clarify, Weiss's glyphs are digistructed projections that act roughly like her canon glyphs, which include the functions of launching and ensnaring like in the White trailer and in V1 among other things.