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Your spirit may be blazing but your bones ache, your muscles burn and your energy is depleted. In the end, you lower Promised Return. “Fine. Stand down, we’ll go.”
“What?!”
“Dude?!”
The faunus leaders are flabbergasted by your surrender. “We are all tired, Sun’s got a wound he’s got stitched a few hours ago, we can’t win.”
“You coward-!” Adam’s insult gets interrupted.
“Smart kid,” Carmine compliments. “Knowing when to back down is important for a leader.”
“One condition.”
“You are in no state to give demands, new blood.” Bertilak points his weapon - a mace with its linked on a chain - at you.
Carmine puts a hand up to calm him. “Sure thing, as long as it’s reasonable.”
“Leave them out of this.” You gesture to the rest of all your teams.
“Deal, we only wanted you guys anyways. Come on now, queenie gets antsy.”
Reluctantly, but motivated by responsibility, Adam comes with you. Sun gets embarrassed of being left behind and follows as well.
“You know,” Carmine says while you all follow her higher in the pyramid-like structure that is Shade. “This whole thing was totally unnecessary. The stand-off, the threats, all of it.”
If she was expecting an answer, she’s in the wrong company. Adam looks side to side to every passing student like a cornered wolf, Sun is too freaked out to speak and you are calmly calculating what to do if things go badly, your mind having entered mission mode.
“We aren’t bad guys.” Bertilak laughs at her affirmation. “We really aren’t, we are students like you, fourth years and we <span class="mu-i">are</span> the welcome committee.”
“Why act so creepy then?” Sun gathers the courage to ask.
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this, we’ve done this before with prior years, you guys were the ones who escalated.”
“We escalated because you aren’t being honest, human. Why the secrecy if you have nothing to hide?”
“Because…” Carmine struggles to find a way around the question.
“The headmaster’s a little bitch.” Bertilak takes the direct approach. “He wouldn’t like what we have to do.”
“Nothing bad!” Carmine detects the incoming battle and stops it. “Just some… extracurricular stuff.”
That final sentence remains in the back of your mind as you reach the second to last tier of the school, you are guided to a door and a room which appears to be a barrack of some sort.
It looks dirty, disorganized, but at the back of the room lies a throne, improvised by putting a wooden chair atop some big dolly cart.
Sitting there is a girl, contrasting with the rough state of the room, she looks to be around the age of Carmine, wearing white robes with golden accents, she has black hair braided into two loops on the sides of her head. She looks out of place in the room.
Carmine and Bertilak kneel before her.
