FateWeaver as
Orlan Price and
@ryukan as
Morgan RougeA Clearing in the Emerald Forest - Tuesday, Initiation
Orlan’s guess at his new companion’s identity was confirmed when he mentioned the party the previous night before introducing himself. He rolled his stiff shoulders after Morgan’s firm slap on his back. Though he had hardly felt the blow through his coat and armor, he was stiff and sore after the dynamic landing.
”Don’t worry about me, you’d have to move pretty quick to leave me behind. My name is Orlan, nice to finally meet you. I hope you brought more than just that rum last night.” smiling as he introduces himself in turn, he reaches into his ammo pouch with his left hand as he speaks. Pulling out a handful of shells, he quickly reloads Axios. The last shell loaded, and with this weapon the first to be fired, glowed icy blue and was cool to the touch.
”Shall we?” he asks a few seconds later when finished, nodding northward. Spear in hand, he takes off at a steady run.
“Fantastic, I won’t need to keep calling you step two while we’re looking for step three,” Morgan replied as Orlan introduced himself.
Following his example Morgan leaped from tree to tree after Orlan’s retreating form.
He did so practiced ease having spent most of his early years buckling swash with his family aboard the Fluffy Cloud. The sturdy limbs of the overgrown trees weren’t terribly different than the mast of a ship, perhaps a bit bushier, but to someone used to clambering atop steel masts and oiled machinery it was a far simpler task.
Smaller branches and leaves shook free from his makeshift platforms as Morgan leaped, but he kept his eyes trained forward, trusting his reflexes and balance were honed enough to keep him from tumbling down. In the meantime, he took advantage of his elevation in the meantime to scout ahead. Scanning through the overgrown and foliage covered geography of the forest was a much more difficult task than looking over a clear horizon.
“Did Ozpin ever give any more specific instructions on where our dust crystals are supposed to be?” He asked as he realized that the two of them had only the vaguest idea of where they were supposed to start looking.
Morgan slowed to a stop, perching atop another branch as his keen eyesight detected movement ahead.
“Mate, I’m seeing something on the leeward side.”“No idea,” came Orlan’s reply to the question about the instructions. All they had really been told was that there were ten crystals, and that they were hidden.
“They wouldn’t hide them just anywhere though. I’m sure we’ll know what we’re looking for when we find it.”When he heard Morgan slow down and then stop behind him Orlan slowed to a stop of his own, jogging the last few steps until he could put his back to a tree and peer around.
“Which way is leeward?” he called, searching what he could see of the forest. While he wasn’t altogether a stranger to boats, he didn’t have the familiarity his new partner seemed to.
Light flickered as Aegis came to life once again, the shield putting off a faint bronze glow in the shadows of the trees. Axios, the head whole once more for the moment, was ready for trouble in his right hand. The forest was supposed to be teeming with Grimm, even before all the crystals were to come together, and at this point Orlan found it unlikely that they had run into other students already. Besides, he was itching for a good fight.
“Leeward, towards the direction of the wind.” Morgan answered, keeping his eyes trained on the forest.
Pulling out a small silver spy glass from his belt and extending it to its full length, he peered out towards the movement he had detected. At first all he caught sight of were more trees and bushes blocking his vision and making a general nuisance of ranged detection, but a flicker of movement at the end of his telescopic sight caught his attention and he focused in on it.
Dozens of Black-furred creatures with red eyes covered in the tell-tale bone structures of Grimm came into view. A pack of them wandered far ahead of their location in various sizes ranging from barely the size of a large dog to more than twice Morgan’s height. More experienced with fighting Banshees and Skyrats than he was the more terrestrial variety of Grimm, he none the less recognized one of the most common varieties of Grimm known to man.
“Looks like a pack of beowolves.” He continued.
“We’re downwind so they haven’t caught our scent.”Morgan grinned as he glanced down and saw Orlan already prepped for a fight with sword and spear in hand.
“We could probably sneak around them,” Morgan said airily.
“But that’d be no fun.”Morgan slipped his spy glass back onto his belt and hopped off his branch and into the air.
A scarlet tentacle ripped free from the trunk of the tree behind Morgan winding itself tightly like a spring before thrusting out and throwing him rocketing through the forest towards the pack of Grimm ahead.
“Keeping up I hope!” Morgan shouted as he once again whistled through the air his voice rapidly fading off in the distance.
The blackened snout of a beowolf perked up as its wolf-like ears heard a keening noise overhead. Looking up, the Grimm had time for sharp yelp of surprise before Morgan slammed squarely onto its back with a crunch before bouncing off into a rough roll over the leafy terrain. Landing upright Morgan let the momentum carry him forward as he drew a cutlass free from its scabbard and thrust into the sturdy frame of another beowolf, which had the misfortune of finding itself in his immediate path, impaling the wolf-like monster. Morgan immediately kicked the monster back as it howled in pain and tried to make a swipe at Morgan, freeing his blade as he did so. As the beowolf reared backwards, he ripped one of Fortune’s Six’s pistols out of its holsters and cracked off three shots into the monster’s body, dropping it.
Angry growls surrounded Morgan as the rest of the pack circled around and charged. With an adrenaline filled grin, he swept his blade from side to side and fired wildly into the pack circling around.
“Don’t let me have all the fun!”As his companion rushed off, Orlan felt his lips part in a grin. He barely knew Morgan, but he could tell they would work well together just from the beginning of this one encounter. Picking his way along the ground in a stealthier manner, he followed his partner towards the oncoming Grimm. He stood aside for a moment, letting Morgan engage first and draw the attention of most of the pack. With their backs mostly turned, Orlan took his turn in handing out devastation.
A beowolf on the edge of the fight noticed the calm form approaching from one side, and diverted to charge at it. As it neared, claws flashing on their descent toward his shoulder, Orlan slammed his full weight behind Aegis. Smashing the beowolf’s nose with the shimmering barrier, he pushes it aside after planting his spear in its gut for a moment. His first enemy dispatched, Orlan turns to help his new friend.
Breaking into a run, he lets Aegis fade and twists the centerpoint of Axios handle. Taking a low grip on the spear with both hands, Orlan focuses his aura and takes a sprinting leap. His feet connect first with the back of one Grimm, and then the the top of another’s head. Pushing off, he drives Axios straight down with a loud battle cry. Even as the shot pushes Orlan upward in a pole vault, the dust from the charge creates a blast of freezing cold.
Several beowolves now frozen in place, Orlan reactivates Aegis and closes Axios upon reaching the peak of his several-yard-high leap. As he begins to fall, he angles his spear to drive it through the highest concentration of frozen beowolves. Suffusing himself with aura to mitigate the damage of the fall, he shatters most of the frozen Grimm outright as he crashes down.
“Good enough for you?” Orlan yells lightheartedly, setting shield and spear at the ready again. The stunt left him breathing hard with the effort, but relatively unscathed.
Morgan tilted his head in appreciation of Orlan’s feat and continued firing more shots from the pistol in his right hand at the remainder of the snarling pack as they tried to close the distance, heedless of their fallen.
“Almost.” he answered, and then sneezed sending a dusting of frost flying away from the frozen form of the beowolf he’d been in the process of impaling. Orlan’s stunt had frosted over a good number of the wolves, but ended up catching Morgan’s cutlass and his left sword arm in the process. Encasing it in a chilly block of ice attached to the beowolf’s frozen form.
“But we’re not done yet.”The ice encasing his cutlass shattered along with the body of the beowolf it was lodged in as the blade forcefully retracted and folded into Fortune Six’s pistol form. Spinning around Morgan cracked a shot off toward Orlan’s panting form. The shot whizzed toward Orlan’s head, and then past it to slam into the face of a crouched beowolf stalking towards his partner’s exposed back. The beowolf crumpled to the ground without a sound and began to fade away into a stream of black smoke.
Meanwhile, a dozen glowing red eyes perked out of the treeline as more beowolves joined stalked out of the undergrowth to replace their fallen comrades.
As if in response another black form charged at his back and tried to make dog food out of Morgan. He spun around and peppered the charging interloper with pistol fire, dropping it with a quick shot to the knee and chest before blasting off its slavering maw for good measure. Another leaped over its fallen friend only to yelp in surprise as a scarlet tentacle ripped out of the ground and wrapped itself around its torso and throwing it back into the next in line.
Leaping backwards, Morgan continued firing into charging forms of grimm coming at them, before landing beside Orlan, still firing and picking off the last of the original pack of beowolves.
It appears, Morgan thought as he fired, that the pack the two of them were facing was far larger than he’d anticipated. Between the two of them they’d easily taken down about a dozen of the black monsters, but a dozen more were crawling out of the woods attracted to the sound of gunfire and fighting.
Suddenly, a thunderous howl split through the forest and a beowolf easily the size of a pine tree ripped out of the woods, tearing apart a pair of trees in its wake as it charged towards the two hunters-in-training. The massive grimm easily dwarfed its kin by nearly five times and it sported more numerous bone-like protrusions all over its body like armor.
Orlan could not help but chuckle at his own folly as Morgan destroyed the ice encasing his arm. So his shot hadn’t been so perfect after all. The distraction lasted until Morgan fired one of his pistols in his direction, right past his ear. Turning to face the dissipating beowolf, Orlan’s grunt of appreciation turns into a groan. All around them the black-and-white forms of their enemy stalked.
Trusting his back to his ally, Orlan stares down the approaching Grimm. Just as one starts to come within reach of his spear, the entire fight seems to pause. A monstrous howl splits the air, followed by the crashing footsteps of something massive. Glancing over his shoulder, Orlan spots the gargantuan beowolf and his eyes widen dramatically.
”Morgan, we can’t fight that on our own. I vote we run like hell until we die or find help. I’ll make an opening, just be ready to go!” Despite the calm in his voice, Orlan’s hands shake with excitement and terror as he replaces the spent shell with a silvery-white high impact round from his pouch. As the huge creature bears down on the pair, he takes off at a run.
Hoping that Morgan is following him he shoves his way through a group of four beowolves with the help of Aegis, unlocking Axios and saving the weapon for the proper moment. As they neared the edge of the clearing, and the last Grimm between them and open ground, Orlan put on a boost of speed to run ahead of Morgan. Getting his shield under him, he drops into a sudden baseball slide. As he passes under the dumbfounded creature’s outstretched arms, the spread and gleaming tip of Axios darts up to strike it under the chin.
Not stopping to admire his handiwork as he rolls out of his slide and back into a run, Orlan doesn’t see the beowolf fly high into the air. At the apex of its ascent, there is a meaty impact as an airborne boarbatusk slams into it, causing both to start to dissolve before they reach the ground. Behind and unnoticed by the fleeing pair, a sparkling red crystal juts out from under one of the bony segments on the massive beowolf’s back.
