Chapter Text
A/N: Hey there, you schmucks. Three days late, but it's here. Things are shaping up to be really funny. Now, at first, I wanted to write a Jaune and Arbiter date chapter in the style of Disco Elysium, but it'd be really confusing for those who didn't play the game, and so I ultimately gave up on that idea. That said, I'll be focusing on someone else in this chapter, so buckle up, imaginary people on my computer. I'll see you in two weeks.
The wind smelled like caramelized sugar and steam-grilled meat.
Jaune Arc sat on the cool stone lip of the grand marble fountain at the heart of the Vytal Festival, an ice cream cone precariously tilted in his hand, fighting a slow but inevitable battle against gravity and heat. Kids ran screaming through the plaza, parents half-heartedly chasing, and the air buzzed with the sounds of overlapping music from competing stages. Somewhere nearby, a Dust-powered carousel whirred, its cheerful chime melody almost drowned out by the percussion-heavy beat thundering from a dance floor to the east.
And beside him-her toes submerged in the crystal-clear water, dress trailing against the polished edge of the basin, sat she.
The goth chick.
The girl.
The one he still didn't have a name for. She hadn't offered it, and for some reason, Jaune hadn't found the courage to ask again.
Instead, he'd just… gone with it. Rolled with the weirdness. The sheer surreal joy of it all. Because somehow, against all odds, he was on a pseudo-date with this person. She had gold in her dress, real gold, he was pretty sure, and when she smiled, he felt things he wasn't sure he felt before.
"...So, yeah," Jaune said, gesturing vaguely toward the rows of merchant stalls in the distance, "that whole area used to be, like, a battleground. Back during the Great War. You wouldn't know it now, right? With the funnel cake and the rainbow popcorn and all that. But Vale, Atlas, Mistral, they all had some real messy history."
The Arbiter turned her head slightly, hair catching the breeze, and her expression, one of gentle curiosity, didn't fade. She was listening. Really listening. Her fingers curled over the edge of the fountain as she dipped her feet deeper, the water lapping at her ankles with lazy ripples.
Completely different from Weiss, who, just a few months back, would simply pretend not to hear him whenever he'd talk, not to mention the humiliation he used to face after trying his luck with her, time and time again.
Jaune couldn't tell if her legs were pale or if the water just caught the sunlight weirdly.
Or maybe it was just her. Everything about her was weird. But not in a bad way. In a cool way.
He took a bite of his ice cream to cover his nerves.
"Back then, this whole festival was about remembering that we stopped fighting each other," he continued, voice a little softer now. "Unity, peace, teamwork, all the good stuff they drill into us at Beacon. That's what the Vytal Festival is supposed to be. A symbol that even if we screwed up in the past, we can still try again. Y'know?"
The Arbiter nodded slowly. Not just a polite nod. A thoughtful one. Then, with practiced stillness, she tilted her head up, letting the breeze rustle through her hair. The sunlight caught in her dark eyes, but there was no squint, no recoil. She just watched the clouds drift by, toes wiggling ever so slightly in the water.
"Together…" she said. Her voice was lighter than he expected.
"Yeah," Jaune chuckled, scratching the back of his neck. "That's the whole idea. Each kingdom sends their best students here to compete in the tournament. It's supposed to build camaraderie, make new friendships, and learn how to beat each other into the ground respectfully."
That made her smile. Not a wide smile. But an honest one.
Jaune's heart skipped.
Gods. What was happening? This wasn't supposed to happen. He wasn't supposed to end up here, today, in the middle of the biggest event of the year, casually eating ice cream next to a girl who looked like an aristocrat. But there she was. And more than that, she looked like she was enjoying herself.
She even licked her ice cream. Delicately. Methodically.
Like she was studying it.
"Mint," she said, after a pause. "It is… cold."
"Y-yeah," Jaune nodded, a laugh escaping before he could stop it. "That's sort of the point."
Her gaze drifted back to him. "I like it," she said simply.
He liked this. This whole thing. Even if he couldn't make heads or tails of her. Even if she barely talked, and when she did it was in slow, dreamy cadence. It didn't matter.
It was nice.
Nice was rare, these days.
The Executioner of the Claw stood about eight feet away, perfectly still, arms folded behind his back, unmoving save for the occasional twitch of his long coat. Jaune had mostly tuned him out. At first, the guy had freaked him out, he looked like an Atlesian prototype, all smooth alloy and silent menace, but he hadn't done anything weird.
Just stood there. Guarding her, maybe? Atlas nobles did have security details sometimes, but she did say she wasn't from Atlas...
"Is he your… uh, assistant?" Jaune asked, gesturing with his thumb toward the statue of a man behind them. "Or, uh, bodyguard?"
The Arbiter turned her head slowly, following the gesture.
She blinked once.
"No," she replied, her voice calm, lips still glossed with a sheen of melting mint. "He is my shadow."
Jaune frowned.
"Like… metaphorically?"
Her eyes returned to his, unblinking.
"Yes."
He laughed, awkward and unsure, then took another hurried bite of ice cream to cover the pause. "Right. Got it. Cool metaphor."
The Executioner did not move. He might have blinked, but Jaune doubted it. He didn't even know if the guy could blink behind that mask-helmet of his... If it even is a mask.
"Anyway," Jaune continued, eager to fill the space, "the tournament itself is happening up in the arena over there, see that big tower with the glass top? That's where the team rounds are going to happen... It should start soon. You're… not from around here, right?"
She tilted her head.
"I am not."
Jaune nodded, ice cream now reduced to a soggy cone in his palm.
"Well, you picked a good time to visit. The Vytal Festival's kind of like a world fair mixed with the Olympics, except with more explosions."
"I see."
"And more Dust-based food."
"I like food."
That made Jaune grin.
"I like food too."
Another pause. Not uncomfortable. Just present.
The wind shifted slightly, carrying the scent of fried noodles and some kind of sugary drink. Children squealed as bubbles from a toy machine drifted into the air like shimmering motes of joy. Somewhere nearby, a flute solo played from a live bandstand. The chaos of the world carried on in full color, and Jaune sat at its center with a stranger in the shape of a mystery, and for once, just for once, he wasn't worrying about anything.
Not the tournament. Not the future. Not his teammates. Not Pyrrha.
He glanced down at her bare feet in the water. They barely rippled. Her toes were pale. Perfectly still.
"Do you…" Jaune started, unsure what he was even trying to ask, "Do you go to one of the other academies? Haven't seen you around Beacon."
She turned to him, her voice light.
"I do not belong to any academy."
"Oh. Uh… exchange program?"
"No."
"…Tourist?"
She tilted her head again.
"Perhaps."
Jaune laughed again.
Gods, he was bad at this. She wasn't even mocking him. That somehow made it worse.
Where was she from anyway? Not Atlas, not one of the main academies, then where?! Bemaia and those two hid away when she approached, and she did seem interested in Bemaia's restaurant... Did she come from the same place as them?
He didn't know.
All he knew was that he was sitting by a fountain, talking to a girl who had no business being this pretty and this cryptic at the same time, and for some reason, he wasn't screwing it up.
Not yet, anyway.
He looked back out over the festival grounds.
There was something magical about the way sunlight danced off the fountain's mist, how the cobblestones shimmered in patches where water had spilled, and how laughter, even from total strangers, somehow made everything feel safer. War might have been the origin of this celebration, but today was about peace.
And for the first time in a long time, Jaune Arc felt like he was exactly where he was meant to be.
He didn't know the name of the girl next to him.
He didn't know why she'd picked him to sit with.
He didn't know why her "shadow" stood so still, like a blade waiting to be drawn.
But he knew this:
He wanted to keep talking.
And she was listening.
Jaune took another small bite of his cone, really more of a damp, half-soggy bite by now, and tried to ignore the way the mint-green sheen on her lips caught the light.
"You know," he began, keeping his tone light, conversational, "I'm actually going to be fighting in the arena tomorrow. Me and my team."
The Arbiter's head turned fractionally toward him, the wet gleam of the fountain rippling behind her. Her golden eyes fixed on his face, not intense in the way of someone dissecting you, but focused like a lantern turned toward a single point in the dark.
"You fight," she said. Not a question. A statement.
"Yeah," Jaune chuckled, rubbing at the back of his neck. "I mean, it's part of the whole Huntsman-in-training deal, but at the festival, it's… different. Less about the job, more about the sport. A chance for everyone to show off what they've got, you know?"
Her toes flexed under the water, sending tiny ripples outward. He wasn't sure if it was in response to him or just because she liked the sensation.
"How is it done?" she asked.
"Oh." Jaune leaned forward a little, elbows on his knees. He'd never had to explain this to someone from this far out of the loop before. "Okay, so, it's like this. The tournament's split into stages. The first one's the team round, four versus four. That's me, Pyrrha, Ren, and Nora, all together against another school's team. You win there, you move on."
Her head tilted, a tiny motion, but enough for the sunlight to shift along her cheek. "Then?"
"Then," Jaune said, grinning a little, "the winning teams pick two of their members to fight in the doubles round, two versus two. It's all strategy at that point. You pick the pair that'll give you the biggest advantage in the matchup."
She was still watching him intently, and for some reason that made him straighten his back like he was giving an actual presentation.
"And after that," he continued, "the last step, singles. You pick one person from the doubles to represent your team, and it's one-on-one matches until there's just one winner left standing. That person gets crowned champion of the Vytal Festival."
Her gaze didn't waver. If anything, it seemed sharper now, like she was mapping the information in her head, laying out the shape of it.
"One remains," she said quietly.
"Yeah," Jaune nodded. "One remains." He gestured with his cone toward the great glass dome of the arena, towering in the distance. "It's a big deal. People remember who wins. It's not just bragging rights; it's like your name gets etched into the festival's history. Schools brag about it for years."
The Arbiter's lips curved just slightly, not a full smile, but an upward turn that was warm in its own strange way.
"And you will fight," she said again, like she was reaffirming it for herself.
"Well, yeah," Jaune said, laughing lightly. "I mean, that's the idea. But, uh, I wouldn't bet on me making it to singles or anything... That'd be Pyrrha's job."
Her eyes didn't shift away. "I would."
That threw him for a second. His grip on the cone tightened, the soft crunch of the wafer under his fingers audible over the background noise of the festival.
"You'd… bet on me?"
"Yes."
He felt his ears go hot.
A moment passed, then he cleared his throat, smiling despite himself. "Well, uh… thanks. That means a lot. And actually-uh-" He hesitated, the words catching on a sudden and inexplicable knot of nerves. "If you're… You know, not busy tomorrow, maybe you could come watch?"
The question hung there in the air, the way questions sometimes do when you realize halfway through that you really care what the answer's going to be.
For a beat, she just looked at him. The sunlight reflected in her eyes was bright enough that it almost made him look away.
Then,
"Yes," she said.
It was firm, unhesitating, not the slow, drifting cadence she'd used before. There was an edge of something almost… eager.
"Yes?" Jaune repeated, like he had to make sure.
"Yes," she said again, this time with the faintest upward inflection, and, he couldn't help it, it almost sounded excited.
And maybe it was just his imagination, but the Executioner, standing silent and statuesque a few paces away, seemed to tilt his head just slightly in their direction, as if noting her tone for later.
Jaune grinned, suddenly feeling a lot lighter. "Alright then. Guess I've got a fan in the stands."
She didn't correct him.
If anything, her toes swirled the water just a little faster.
Jaune was just starting to think he'd actually managed to make her comfortable, if the faint curve of her lips and the relaxed dip of her shoulders meant anything, when a shadow fell over the two of them.
Not the casual, passing kind you get when someone walks between you and the sun. No, this one lingered. It was heavier, like the light itself was reconsidering whether it wanted to touch the ground near them.
Jaune glanced up, squinting against the glare from the fountain's spray, and there he was.
The Executioner.
Up close, the guy looked even more like some kind of prototype Atlesian Knight, sleek where it mattered, armored in strange, interlocking plates that seemed more ceremonial than practical, only on his right arm too, and taller than just about anyone in the crowd. He stood so straight it made Jaune feel like his own posture was a crime. The faint hum of whatever powered him, or maybe it was just the wind getting caught in his armor, was constant.
He didn't look at Jaune when he spoke. His head inclined just slightly toward the Arbiter, his voice low but somehow cutting through the surrounding chatter without effort.
"Time is up."
The words weren't harsh, but there was a precision to them, like they'd been measured before being spoken.
Jaune blinked, unsure if the statement was meant for him, or her, or both.
But before he could ask, the Executioner tilted his head a fraction more, his faceless gaze fixed on the Arbiter.
"You are acting… strangely," he said, and Jaune couldn't tell if that was supposed to be an accusation or an observation. "If you wish to indulge yourself further, do so. I will complete our task alone."
The Arbiter didn't bristle, didn't argue, didn't even take her feet out of the water. She simply regarded him for a heartbeat, expression unreadable, but not cold, and then gave the smallest of nods.
Permission granted.
Jaune tried not to stare at the exchange. Tried to tell himself this was just some Atlas thing, fancy bodyguard reporting to fancy noble, but there was something about the way they moved around each other that made his skin prickle.
The Executioner lingered for another second, long enough for Jaune to feel the weight of his presence, and then he turned away.
And when he moved, he moved.
Not hurried. Not slow. Just… inevitable. His stride was long, cutting through the knots of festival-goers like they weren't even there. People parted instinctively, not even looking up from their conversations or their treats, but adjusting their paths as though guided by some unspoken rule of survival.
The crowd seemed smaller around him somehow, even as he towered over everyone, his silhouette a dark slash against the kaleidoscope of festival colors.
Jaune exhaled, realizing only then that he'd been holding his breath. He glanced back at the Arbiter, who still sat with her toes in the water, watching the ripples spread outward like nothing had changed at all.
"Uh," he said, hesitating before offering a lopsided smile. "So… guess it's just us now?"
She looked at him, that faint curve at her lips returning.
"Yes," she said.
Jaune rose to his feet in a single, slightly awkward motion, more the unsteady kind you do after sitting too long than the smooth, heroic kind he probably imagined it to be. His knees cracked faintly, his shoes scuffing against the pale stone lip of the fountain.
For a moment, he stood there in the warm spill of afternoon light, looking down at her. The Arbiter still hadn't moved her legs from the water. Her toes traced idle shapes beneath the ripples, sending tiny waves outward to lap at the fountain's edge.
He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to will the dryness out of his throat. "So," he began, his voice carrying just enough over the background chorus of the festival, laughter, chattering vendors, the shrill whistle of some booth announcing a winner, "if you're gonna watch me fight tomorrow, we should probably get you a ticket."
Her head tilted slightly at that. She didn't speak, just waited, the silence between them somehow comfortable instead of awkward.
Jaune stepped away from the fountain's rim, brushing the faint dust from his trousers. "The arena fills up fast, especially for the later matches," he continued, gesturing vaguely toward the amity arena that was the tournament grounds. "And if you want good seats, it's better to grab them early."
Still, no objection from her. Not even a hint of hesitation.
He tried again, flashing a smile that was half-earnest, half-nervous habit. "Come on. It'll give me a chance to, y'know… make sure you don't get stuck sitting behind some guy with a flag the size of a sail."
At that, the corner of her mouth lifted, not quite a smirk, but something alive enough to make him think she really was enjoying this.
Jaune took that as agreement. "Alright then." He offered his hand, not because he thought she needed help standing, but because it felt like the right thing to do.
For the briefest moment, her gaze dropped to it, as though weighing the gesture itself. Then she placed her palm lightly in his. Her fingers were cool, steady, the grip measured but not distant.
She stepped out of the fountain with the unhurried grace of someone entirely unbothered by wet hems or the stares of passersby. A few droplets slid from her toes to the stone, leaving faint marks in their wake, quickly lost in the foot traffic all around.
Jaune released her hand once she was balanced on the fountain's edge, and together they began to thread their way into the thick of the festival crowd.
The Claw. The executioner of the Claw, to be exact, with a hand behind his back, stood deathly still amidst the running crowd, like a boulder in the middle of a raging river; he remained still. His blank, featureless face seemed to watch the crowd.
His figure towers over the common man. Unfortunately, simply observing and discerning the many faces of the crowd won't be enough. He needs a third party to facilitate his search.
Bringing his less-augmented hand to the side of his head, his voice came out, yet it did not propagate a single strand of hair's width away from his face. "Torchwick. Do you have eyes on our targets?"
Another voice responded. "Yeah, but only on one of them. The twink." It answered back. "He'd qualify as a twink, right, Neo? Yeah, thought so."
Though the description is crude and vulgar, it was still confirmation. "I'll arrive shortly." The Claw answered back, his voice firmer this time, as if he's run out of patience. "Do not lose him."
"Sheesh, don't worry. Neo's got us covered." Torchwick replied.
Without much class, the Claw extended his claw forward, then a hologram appeared, hovering above his wrist. A few ethereal blue images formed inside the same few circular shapes. One of those shapes had the caricature of the Arbiter, another had the caricature of Torchwick. Beneath it, there is also a small label, a description of the exact location of his mark.
"Whoa! That's so cool! What is that?" The voice of a child hit him on his left.
He turned to the child, a small boy, no older than eight years of age, with blond hair, a striped shirt. The Claw did not react. The hologram was unmade, and the blue light vanished.
Turning to his main objective. Beacon Academy was Torchwick's location, somewhat far away from the festival grounds. "No matter."
Then, he began walking without much regard for the general populace. Stepping on the feet of a few, knocking over a guy, even. Even the kid was pushed aside to make his path.
Soon enough, the crowd thinned. A less populated pathway made itself known before him.
Walking to the center, the Claw observed the holograms once more, Torchwick in particular. After receiving whatever knowledge was in those holograms, he extended his right arm, moving his fingers in a way that his index and thumb made a 90 angle, then he lifted his extended right arm at a slight angle forward and upwards.
He pondered for a moment, standing there in the middle of a concrete pathway. Some gave him a slight side-eye, wondering what the hell he was doing, but soon turned their attention to he festival ahead of them.
With a slight nod of confirmation, the Claw bent his legs, let his body lean forward slightly, then jumped.
Well, calling it a jump would be an understatement.
A loud crashing sound exploded around the nearby area. The space he just occupied was suddenly replaced by a small crater, with a diameter of seven meters, and a depth of 1 meter at the very center of cracked and depressed pavement.
From it, a trail of dust leading upwards was barely able to follow, stopping mid-air ten meters up.
And the Claw soared upwards.
Nearby Atlesean ships had their short-range radars flaring up, identifying him as a foreign, unidentified object, with speeds that far exceeded even the fastest huntsman.
Air resistance halted his momentum slightly, at least it tried.
Although the scenery of Vale viewed from above was most beautiful, his gaze traced downwards, directly into a boy with straight, black hair.
After a few seconds, he began to descend. He already had his claw reeled in, locked and loaded to strike the instant he came down to he ground.
His gaze turned to the individuals surrounding his target. 38 meters away hid Torchwick, wearing a colorful hoodie and black shades, with Neo next to him, eating ice cream.
Adjacent to his target was a girl with long white hair, neatly tied in a ponytail. This one was armed with a rapier. The girl held on to a silver briefcase as well, unnecessary information.
There was another girl. Blond, long, wild hair. No noticeable weapons in sight.
Around their general vicinity stood a few atlesean knights, ranged weapons in hand. Six of them.
The rest are civilians.
"Standby for capture." The Claw spoke calmly as he began to fall towards the trio; his words were directed to Torchwick and Neo.
Torchwick's voice snapped back over the private channel, brimming with disbelief.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa- hold up. Capture? What do you mean by capture? You didn't say anything about capturing anybody! We aren't ready to capture-" His words broke off into static-laced irritation, the kind where you could almost hear the hand gestures he was making on the other end. "You can't just drop something like that on me mid-operation! There's a whole process, you know!"
The Claw didn't answer. He didn't need to.
The world narrowed to the rushing roar of air in his ears, the skyline of Vale and the distant curve of the festival grounds tilting upward as he fell, and fell, and fell, his enormous frame hurtling toward the earth like a piece of iron shrapnel dropped from the heavens. Every fraction of a second brought the target closer into clarity.
Fred.
He'd been given the description before, seen enough fuzzy, zoomed-in shots from Torchwick's photographs and older images taken whilst in the City, but there was something different about viewing the mark from above, every detail locked in his visor's crosshairs. The straight black hair, the loose posture of someone not expecting the sky itself to open and try to kill them, the faint oblivious tilt of the head as if listening to someone nearby. It didn't matter what he was doing; in a handful of seconds, he wouldn't be doing anything at all.
The Executioner's claw snapped open in front of him, fingers spreading wide, the servos in the joint whining faintly even through the buffeting wind. The sharp digits flexed once, twice, like a predator testing the tension in its muscles before the pounce.
The wind tore at his coat, the long black fabric flaring outward like a ragged banner, seams straining. The ground surged up to meet him, festival-goers scattering in delayed, confused reaction. Shadows stretched and warped beneath him as his massive frame blotted out the sun for anyone looking up.
Then the impact came.
The Claw hit like a meteor, his outstretched claw slamming down squarely onto Fred's head, gripping it with enough force to distort the skin at the boy's temples. The world around them erupted.
Pavement fractured and curled upward in jagged plates, a deafening boom reverberating across the square as a crater formed beneath the pair. Stone dust and shards exploded outward in a choking cloud, sending people stumbling away, shielding their eyes. The kinetic shockwave rippled out in a low, stomach-turning thump that could be felt in the ribs as much as it was heard.
The brittle, crystalline crack of something giving way was followed immediately after the unmistakable sound of Aura shattering. Glass-like shards of luminous color burst away from Fred's body, dissolving into nothing before they could hit the ground.
Pinned, head-first into the newly-made crater, Fred didn't even have time to cry out.
The Executioner did not speak. His grip tightened fractionally, enough to grind the fractured remains of Aura into nothing, and the faceless helm tilted forward just a degree, enough to give the unsettling impression that he was studying a specimen under glass.
Above, the last bits of concrete dust drifted down through the sunlight, marking the end of his fall.
The moment the shockwave's last echoes rattled through the festival plaza, two figures at Fred's side moved in unison, instinct taking over before thought could catch up.
Now Playing: Insignia Decay - Lobotomy Corporation OST
Weiss was the first to react in the way only a trained Huntress-in-progress could: her suitcase hit the ground with a metallic clang, sliding to a stop on its side as she already had Myrtenaster drawn in a single, fluid motion. The rapier's steel caught the fractured sunlight that filtered through the lingering dust cloud, its barrel-like chamber clicking once as she primed the chamber for Dust. Her eyes were locked, not on Fred, not on the crowd, but on the towering figure that had just driven her fellow student into the concrete as though it were paper.
Beside her, Yang was all motion and no hesitation. She didn't even think about words, or tactics, or warnings; her hands were already curling into fists, Ember Celica shifting from its resting bracer form to full gauntlet mode with that familiar hydraulic hiss. The dust cloud still hung thick, but Yang charged straight through it, shoulder low, boots hammering the fractured pavement.
The first sound to cut through the crowd's panicked retreat wasn't shouting; it was the deep, meaty crack of metal meeting metal. Yang's punch connected clean with the Executioner's side, the kinetic shock rattling the air like a cannon blast. Her gauntlet's recoil system spat a burst of exhaust, amplifying the blow until the hulking figure actually slid backward a full meter, boots grinding against the pavement.
For a heartbeat, it looked like it might have worked.
Then the dust swirled just enough to reveal the Executioner's posture, still upright, still steady, head turning toward her with mechanical precision. There was no stagger in his stance now, no tightening of the shoulders to suggest pain. The smooth, featureless mask betrayed nothing, but the way it held her gaze, utterly silent, was somehow worse than if it had laughed.
Weiss's heels scraped against the ground as she stepped into position beside Yang, blade arm extended, the tip of Myrtenaster tracing precise arcs through the air. Glyphs began to bloom under her boots and in midair around them, pale blue circles etched with patterns that seemed to hum faintly against the background noise of the festival. The light from them refracted through the dust cloud, casting faint, shifting shapes across the Executioner's gauntlet.
That was when his head tilted.
It wasn't much, just a few degrees, the smallest adjustment, but it was enough to feel like the entire focus of that faceless gaze had shifted away from Fred entirely and onto her. The slight inclination, the fractional pause in movement, had the weight of a predator marking a new target.
The Executioner's claw, still wrapped around Fred's head, flexed once before opening completely. The unconscious boy slumped instantly, hitting the cracked pavement with a limp thud, arms sprawled where they fell. No care was given to whether he landed safely or not.
Weiss's jaw tightened, the glyph beneath her boots flaring brighter in answer. The Executioner took a slow, deliberate step toward her, boots crunching bits of loose stone underfoot, posture loose yet coiled with the potential for violence. Yang shifted her stance to intercept, teeth bared, but it was clear the creature's attention wasn't on her anymore.
Somewhere behind them, a single atlesian knight's servos whirred as it readjusted aim, but even that mechanical sound seemed distant under the weight of that gaze.
The Executioner didn't move so much as disappear.
One moment, the towering figure stood half-turned toward Weiss, the white of her glyphs dancing in the reflective black of his featureless mask, then, with no lunge, no preparatory step, not even the rush of air to herald movement, the space he occupied was simply empty.
The sound came a heartbeat later.
A single, abrupt crack, like metal being crushed between closing jaws, rang out near the Atlesean Knight stationed to their right. The armored soldier-shape had no time to react, no recoil, no defensive posture, before the Executioner's hand was inside it, fingers driven clean through the chestplate as though the armor was wet parchment. The blow was so fast, so surgically direct, that the machine's optics flickered in confusion before the signal died altogether. Sparks spilled from the wound as he wrenched his hand free, letting the inert mass collapse sideways into the dust.
His voice followed a fraction of a second after the impact, smooth, flat, and stripped of anything resembling awe or concern.
"A rudimentary construct."
Yang and Weiss both took half a step back, not out of fear, but from the sudden recalculation of exactly how dangerous this thing was. Their eyes flicked to the downed Knight, trying to trace how he had moved, but the answer came before either could ask.
Another dull clank drew Weiss's gaze over her shoulder, where a second Atlesean Knight, much farther to their left, lay in a twisted heap. At first, she thought the Executioner had destroyed it just now. Then she realized the body wasn't sparking at all. It was already dead. Its decapitated form lay crumpled like a discarded mannequin, head entirely missing.
The slow chill of realization set in.
She saw it, dangling lazily from the Executioner's clawed hand. The second Knight's head, crushed inward at the visor, wires dangling from the neck joint in frayed, curling strands. He must have taken it before striking the first, moving faster than her eyes, or even her mind, could keep pace. That meant he had been two steps ahead the entire time, dismantling their support before they'd even seen him leave his starting position.
He dropped the head without ceremony. It hit the ground with a dull metallic ring, rolling once before settling on its side. Then he straightened, his masked face turning fully toward Weiss.
"That power…"
The words were quieter now, more deliberate. His head inclined slightly, like he was trying to drink in every detail of her stance, her weapon, the pale geometric circles spinning in the air.
"The white sigils. What are they?"
The question didn't carry curiosity in the human sense; it was clinical, almost interrogative, as though her glyphs were some rare device he was cataloging before deciding whether to destroy them… or take them.
Weiss's grip on Myrtenaster tightened, the glyph beneath her feet flaring in response, its edges brightening as though sensing the focus of her resolve. Yang shifted beside her, but the Executioner's attention didn't waver in the slightest; it was as if, in that moment, the rest of the world no longer existed for him at all.
Weiss kept Myrtenaster leveled, the tip steady as a metronome, the pale circle under her heels humming like a held breath. Dust and sunlight braided in the air between them.
"Why the sudden interest?" she asked, cool as a blade edge. Then, without dropping the line of her arm, "And why did you attack him?"
Her gaze never left the blank mask. Her other hand, the one that had dropped the silver case a heartbeat earlier, flicked its latch with her thumb and slid along the seam. Inside, the scroll's face bloomed in a whisper of pale light. Three taps, one swipe. Send. The haptic buzz kissed her palm once and hid.
Across from her, the Executioner tilted his head by a degree, faint servos sighing. He did not look at the case. He looked at her, at the circle under her feet, at the sigils hanging in the air with their soft, rotating filigree.
"I have observed this phenomenon once," he said. The voice wasn't loud, but it carried, pared down to essentials. "White constructions. Geometric. Suspended midair. Response to will and vector."
Yang took half a step, heat shimmering around her fists. "They're called glyphs, tin man. And you didn't answer the part where you cratered my friend here."
If the Claw could have blinked then it didn't.
"I engaged," he said, simple as gravity, "because the boy is the Arbiter's objective vector."
Myrtenaster's tip did not waver. Weiss's chin did not move. Objective vector. Cold words for a person. She didn't let the flare reach her eyes.
He went on, a smooth continuation, like cataloging items for a ledger.
"I believed the white sigils were exclusive to a single individual," he said. "A property of identity. Not a discipline. Not a school." A fractional pause, a microscopic recalibration. "I was incorrect. There is at least one other."
The world narrowed to the fine ring of her glyph and the empty space behind her breastbone.
One other.
Not a clan. Not a generalized technique pooling through the academies. One.
Winter.
Of course it was Winter.
Her sister in immaculate white, heels like metronomes on Atlas steel. Winter with her glyphs as precise as orders, her summons like chess pieces brought to heel. Winter who had gone where Weiss could not yet go, done what Weiss had only trained to do. Winter who-
"It follows," the Executioner said, drawing her back by sheer, clinical cadence, "that this capability is not bound solely to a singular soul. It can be taught. Replicated. Inherited. Trained. Acquired by some vector I have not been shown." The mask angled half a degree, studying the circle whirring under Weiss's boots. "This information is of interest."
Weiss let herself blink once. It was the only concession she gave to the cold that had crept up her spine.
"You're telling me you assaulted a student," she said, tone flat with disbelief, "because you saw a shape you recognized?" A flick of her wrist turned Myrtenaster's chamber, don't look at your hand, don't look at your case, and a second glyph flared behind her shoulder, a vertical pane, just transparent enough to read as harmless, just opaque enough to be a mirror. Through it, she caught Yang's stance: weight forward, right fist cocked, jaw a hard line.
"I am telling you," the Executioner said, "that I have revised a model."
The word model should not have felt like a threat. Somehow, it did.
Yang's laugh was short, sharp. "Neat revision. Try revising you don't touch Fred again."
Weiss let the air out of her lungs slowly, count four beats. Winter. He saw Winter. The picture sketched itself whether she liked it to or not: a ship's deck raked by wind; a white coat; a black figure stepping out of nothing; a blade and a gauntlet and a fall. She forced the image to the edges. She could not afford it now.
Her eyes returned to the featureless faceplate. "You didn't answer why," she said. "Why Fred." She tipped her head, polite in a way that felt like a slap. "And why me."
At her feet, the glyph underlay brightened by a fraction, the concentric runes rotating a hair faster. She let her weight settle into the geometry; she could feel, in that strange way her family always did, the way a circle became a lever if you stood on it just right.
Behind the mask, something assessed.
"Fred.," the Executioner said, no surname, just an initial like a classification, "is a node of interest. The Arbiter permitted indulgence. I chose the quickest suppression."
"You chose wrong," Yang said, and the hiss from Ember Celica sounded like a growl.
Weiss held up one ringless hand without looking back, a conductor pausing a cymbal crash by instinct. Yang stayed where she was, vibrating with restraint.
"And me?" Weiss said, quieter. "What possible 'model' were you trying to update?"
"The white sigils." The Executioner's head turned a fraction, as if triangulating on the circle she stood in. "I encountered their counterpart in battle. A woman. She moved like frost across steel. Her marks altered gravity and speed. She persisted despite severe disadvantage. I considered the pattern singular." A measured beat. "Now I do not."
The first thought that tried to leap out of her mouth was She's alive, hungry and stupid and unprofessional. Weiss swallowed it and let her voice come out even.
"You met her," she said, not a question. The words fell into the space between them like tiles. She imagined each one clacking into place until they made a bridge she could walk across without shaking. "And you think that because you found one other, there must be a way to manufacture it."
The Claw regarded her. "There is a possibility. Bloodline, instruction, artifact, contract, trauma." Each word was weighed, filed, almost gentle in its objectivity. "I do not know. I intend to learn."
The glyph behind Weiss's shoulder trimmed its rotation, tiny adjustments fed by the hand she still had in the open case.
She nodded as if agreeing with something the Executioner had said. She took a tiny step right, the kind a dance teacher would praise for economy. It put her between him and Fred's breathing body without making a scene of it.
"Then learn this," Weiss said, and the words came out measured, the way Winter taught her to speak when she had to be the adult in a room full of men with guns. "You don't get to test theories on my friends."
A pause. The kind that felt like the whole crowd drew breath together and held it.
"Noted," he said.
Yang moved first.
A hiss of pistons, a flash of gold. She was already in motion, shoulder low, hair flaring like a banner, the recoil of Ember Celica turning each step into a hammer-blow. Weiss didn't need to say anything; a glyph bloomed beneath Yang's next footfall anyway, a pale wheel that bit the air and threw her forward, doubling the stride, tripling the torque.
The Executioner didn't brace. He didn't even square to her. A faint hiss, a three-degree tilt of the helm, and then his outline stuttered, like a frame in a bad broadcast skipping ahead two beats. Yang's first punch bit only air and the wake of something that had already moved.
"Left!" Weiss called, not loud, not panicked. A second glyph flared high and to the side, catching Yang's guard and yanking her into a new vector. Her gauntlet coughed flame; the backhand came in at temple height.
The Executioner's head jerked in micro-steps, one, two, fast-forward flickers, and he wasn't there again. Not a dodge so much as an edit. One frame, he occupied the space in front of Yang; the next, he existed two paces away, coat hem barely ruffled, as if the world had obligingly rearranged him.
Weiss's rapier chamber clicked. A pale ice rune rolled inside Myrtenaster; the circle under the Executioner's boots flowered outward with hoarfrost. Cold bit the air; the frost climbed his greaves in fine, white veins.
Yang used the moment the way she used breath. She planted on a gravity sigil Weiss popped in midair, let it catch her as if it were glass, then kicked off hard, a comet of gold and fury, a straight right for the Claw's mask.
The Executioner didn't strike. He extended the empty palm of his unarmored hand and met Yang's fist as though they were shaking hands. No audible impact, just the sudden halt of a machine that had been promised motion. The armor along his right arm articulated. Yang's gauntlet trembled against that calm, then rebounded, not thrown, just… returned.
Weiss exhaled through her nose. Another circle lit under Yang's heel, speed, and a third under the Executioner's feet, ice again, deeper, colder, the kind that smokes. The frost took; a white lacquer rimed boot and stone, locked hard.
"Now!"
Yang slid in low, knee kissing the fractured pavement, came up in a rising hook that should have split the mask in two.
The Executioner's image glitched. For a sliver of time, he was both where he had been, ice up to the ankle, and a step beyond the ring's edge, frost still ghosting his silhouette like an afterimage that hadn't been told to vanish. The hook climbed into the space his head had abandoned and cracked the air with a cannon's bark. The shockwave bent pennants on nearby stalls; the fountain's spray shivered into rain.
He still didn't hit back.
He watched.
There was a sound behind Weiss, steps, three of them, disciplined and even. Three Atlesian Knights broke from the crowd's periphery, rifles shouldered, optics flaring to life as they took a wedge. They weren't shouting. No one was. The festival's noise had congealed into a watery static.
"Keep your distance!" Weiss snapped without looking. Her glyph behind Yang leaned into hard-light, sketching a clean, shimmering plane for Yang to run along. "I'll lock him-"
Her sentence never finished. A dull clank to the right made her head turn a fraction, and the farthest Knight was already a heap. Not cut. Crushed, torso compressed into its own spine, a brief confetti of amber sparks fluttering out and dying on the stone like fireflies in a jar with the lid shut. The Executioner hadn't so much as flicked his wrist.
No, that wasn't true. One moment: Knights advancing. The next: one down, another headless, helm held lightly in the claws like a toy someone had grown bored of. The third froze mid-step as a line of white glyph-light snapped under its feet, Weiss's reflexive, only for the Executioner to be somewhere else again, and the Knight to collapse in two motions, top and bottom disagreeing about where to be.
"Focus, Weiss," she told herself, and her body obeyed. Ice. Speed. Gravity. She made a lane for Yang, a constellation of circles strung like pearls across empty air, and Yang ran the sky, every step a burst, every pivot a glyph-kiss on the sole.
The Executioner let her come to him.
She opened with a feint, high, and drove the real punch to center mass. His outline stuttered again, three short fast-forwards in place, and somehow Yang's fist met his palm again, fingers and plates meeting in the quiet. He turned her wrist a degree, no pain, only reorientation, and presented her own momentum back to her. She slid, caught herself on a gravity circle, flipped, and came down heel-first. The mask tilted to examine the arc of her descent as if appreciating the form.
Weiss seeded an ice circle directly where he would have to step. Frost flowered. The Executioner's boot set down dead center and the entire ring shattered like spun sugar under a knife. The shards turned to powder before they finished falling.
"Again!" Weiss called, and Yang was already moving. Weiss bled a touch more speed into the next sigil; she could feel the drag in her forearm where the channeling lived, a subtle ache like tracing letters too long on a chalkboard. Her breathing shortened, not with fear, but with arithmetic: inputs and outputs, how much more fuel until the circles thinned, how long she could keep going.
The Knights, new ones, rushed the edge of her vision. Two this time, then four, then six, their white armor cutting the crowd like gulls. The Executioner blinked across the square in two, three, five edits, a shutter-clicks sequence that left Weiss's eyes watering. Each time he reappeared, another Knight buckled inward or tore apart in clean, surgical failures: a knee reversed, a rifle barrel kinked ninety degrees, a helmet pinched until the optics went to black and the body folded, ejecting a last pretty spray of sparks.
He never swung. He never hauled back a fist and drove it.
"Keep him busy!" Weiss's voice was thin with effort now. "I've almost-"
She didn't know what "almost" was. Freeze his feet and lock a gravity dome? Herd him away from Fred? Yes. That. Keep the guy in the corner of her eye, breathing. He was. Thank the gods.
Weiss dragged a sleeve over her temple and smeared dust and sweat into a bright streak. Her circles were a chorus now, a dozen wheels and panes singing in quiet harmony, ice under boots, speed beneath Yang, a hard-light wall should the Executioner decide to take an interest in Fred's limp body. She walked a measured quarter-step, then another, subconsciously mirroring a dance drill from a long-ago childhood lesson.
"Left-low!" she snapped, and Yang went low, sliding on a frosted plane like a skater cutting across a lake.
The Executioner's mask ticked toward Weiss instead, just that fraction of attention, and she felt it like static against her teeth. The next instant, his silhouette flickered through a fast-forward and stood a pace closer, coat dangling still though distance had been eaten. He didn't reach for her. His head angled, gentle as a curious animal, toward the glyph turning under her boots.
"Constraint?" he asked, voice almost… conversational. "Fuel?"
Weiss's answer was a blade point and a circle that brightened until it cast shadows. She permitted herself a thin smile that tasted like copper. "Worry about your footing."
Ice exploded around his boots again, thicker, layered, a lattice this time, and for the first time Weiss thought she had him. The frost took, not only around but through the treads, up into the seam lines. For a heartbeat, his weight belonged to her.
His image shivered. It was as if someone scrubbed a slider forward and back on a video: a little jump, a return, a little jump again, and then the ice held no one. He now occupied the space to her right, turned toward the empty ring he had left as though considering the design.
Yang was breathing hard, shoulders heaving, pink at the cheeks under the smudges of dust.
He still didn't hit her.
He simply refused to be hit.
Weiss felt the ache in her forearm deepen to a throb.
"This sucks," Yang panted, not to quit, but to mark the truth and put teeth around it.
Weiss kept her blade out, her circles singing, the white lines of her family's discipline bright as constellations around them. "Just because it sucks, doesn't mean it's unnecessary."
The Executioner inclined his head, as if acknowledging the line in an argument he wasn't actually having.
The Executioner's mask turned, not all at once, but in those unsettling skips, a staccato set of half-angles that made Weiss's eyes want to blink between frames. When it settled, it was looking past the blade point and onto Yang.
"The white constructions," he said, voice even. "You are not employing them."
Yang rolled her shoulders, sweat and stone-dust glittering along collarbones. "Maybe I don't need 'em."
"A hypothesis," he continued as though annotating a case file. "Insufficient instruction. Disinterest. Inability. Or the phenomenon is exclusive and non-transferable. Counter-hypothesis: you possess an analogous mechanism, a different appearance, and identical utility. Still, I know not."
Weiss felt a warning tighten behind her teeth. "You don't get to-"
Yang lifted one gauntleted hand a fraction without looking back, the simple "I got this" gesture she used with her sister. Her grin slanted, a flash of heat under the grime.
"Do I have a trick?" she said. "Yeah."
The mask angled, that strange, patient interest. "You will tell me how it works."
"No," Yang said, and bounced twice on the balls of her feet, the exhaust ports on Ember Celica breathing like nostrils. "Buy a ticket."
The Executioner did not bristle. If anything, the weight of his attention thickened, the way fog does when you step deeper into it. "Your glyphs have constraints," he went on, politely relentless. "Fuel. Trigger. Cost. The white constructions exhibit an observable expense on the user... Breath, tremor..."
"-Shut up already!" Yang cut in, coiling. "Wanna find out the old-fashioned way?"
Weiss threaded a speed glyph under Yang's heel, another under her next likely step. The circles prickled against the soles of her boots through the stone; in the quiet places of her body where glyphs left their echo, she counted out the cost and found she could pay it a little longer.
The Executioner's image glitched nearer, a one-beat cut, then another, not closing to strike, only to stand within arm's length of Yang's reach and study her guard the way a jeweler studies a setting.
"Corollary," he said. "If analogous, it can be taken."
Yang's eyes sparked like flint on steel. "Try."
Weiss dropped an ice ring at his feet without thinking; frost flowered up the treads and seized, and for a heartbeat, the world made sense. Then the ice jittered and emptied, as if the person it held had been scrubbed out of the moment. The Claw reappeared two paces away, pivot finished, attention unapologetically returned to Yang.
He still didn't swing. He didn't even raise his arm. He simply watched the way a coastal cliff watches waves decide whether to break.
From the far side of the square, fresh Atlesian Knights arrived at last, six, then eight, white armor shouldering through the freeze of the crowd. They flanked, professional and wordless, rifles rising in clean parallel.
"Hold position!" Weiss snapped on reflex, and even before the last syllable left her mouth the tableau broke. The Executioner performed five edits in the space of a breath, here, not-here, here, not-here, here. And the Knights came apart like toys examined too hard. A barrel bent, a torso crushed to a spark-fountain, a helm pinched in the claw and dropped like an empty tin. No wind-up. No flourish. Just decisions the world complied with.
The smell of scorched circuitry and hot Dust joined sugar and meat in the air. Someone screamed belatedly. Someone else clapped a hand over that mouth and dragged it down to a whisper.
Yang eased a fraction right, never turning her back. "You sure you don't hit girls?" she said, friendly as a thrown brick.
The Executioner inclined his head, a half-degree, unreadable. "Engagement is unnecessary..."
"What, takin' notes instead?"
"I am merely observing you. You intrigue me."
Weiss almost told him to choke on his model just to feel something as simple as anger, but a ripple ran through the crowd, the kind that starts as a rumor in the ankles and becomes certainty at the throat. Heads turned.
They were here.
Francisco cut the flow like an obelisk pushed through water, bald crown catching the light, five eyes set and unblinking, glove tugged tight over the living wrongness of his left arm. Downpour rode his spine; the scabbard's Dust vials winked like a row of colored eyes. Beside him, Bemaia walked with the quiet of someone who had already weighed which part of the day would hurt most: black suit still immaculate, a single wing unfurled enough to cast an impossible shadow across the stones. The feathers were still black as lamp soot, stippled with gold eyes that opened and looked back at the looking.
Behind them, Blake ghosted along the edge of cover, the bow in her hair kept her ears flat against her skull. And Ruby, more compact and more still than usual, kept half a step off Francisco's right; the wind tugged the edge of a fresh bandage under her hood, and her good eye tracked the Claw without blinking.
"Don't," Weiss said, too low to hear, to no one in particular and everyone she loved.
The Executioner did not display surprise. He didn't need to. The tilt of the mask was acknowledgment enough. He cut a private angle with his chin.
Bemaia stepped forward with his palms open, the motion small enough to seem harmless and deliberate enough to read as a decision.
"Enough," he said, voice pitched to thread the space without rattling it. "We don't contest you. Weiss and her glyphs are nothing special. Let the girls go. We can-"
The Claw did not turn to him, It skipped.
A hum like a swallowed breath, a three-degree tilt, then the world edited. One frame Bemaia stood six paces off, hands empty, posture a diplomat's; the next frame the Claw was there, the featureless face plate filling Bemaia's sight like a closing door.
Weiss didn't think; a hard-light pane flared between them on reflex, but it had the lifespan of a soap bubble kissed by wind. The Claw's clawed hand passed through the plane and took Bemaia's face in a precise, five-point hold; cheekbone, jaw hinge, temple, temple, brow.
"I'll be with you in a moment." the Executioner said, clinically polite.
The slam was not theatrical. No roar, no haul, no hammering follow-through. Bemaia's back simply found the ground. Stone buckled and sighed under the weight transfer; dust jumped. Reliquit Custodiam clenched too late, catching only air and the idea of a retreat that had already been canceled. The wing flashed wide on instinct then winced in on itself.
Weiss's glyphs hiccuped; Yang's heel scraped as she checked a lunge she could not afford. Ruby's hand flew, a half-step toward Crescent Rose out of habit; Blake's hand seized, then released, then seized again around nothing.
Bemaia's breath came back in a long, ugly borrow. He had not reached for Honestus Finis. He lay very still because he understood that stillness was the only way he could reason with the Claw.
The Claw turned back to Weiss.
"Persistence," the Claw said, conversational again, "under expense." The blank face regarded the circle under Weiss's boots. " Interesting."
Francisco had been looking at the movement, not the man. He watched it again, in memory, the way the coat hem didn't quite get a move with him, the way the boot left a shadow a fraction after it should have.
He knew it.
He knew it from too many run-ins with the collectors he had to deal with whilst in the Index.
T-Corp. Time Track.
He heard the phrase like a cough behind his teeth. Track, as in the tape you could scrub; Time, as in what you leeched or lent. The Claw wasn't teleporting; it was fast-forwarding along its own timeline, spooling itself ten seconds deeper into the next ten seconds.
"Baldie," Ruby whispered, close enough that her breath rattled on the edge of his jaw. "How…?"
"Ten-times," he said, too evenly, five eyes narrowing on the seam where boot met stone. "Maybe twelve on the burst. You see how his coat lags? That's Track jitter. He's not here and then here, he's here ten moments from now. Bemaia just tried arguing with the recording."
Yang barked a laugh that wasn't funny. "Great. Love that for us."
"Don't swing," Francisco said.
It cost him something to say it. Ruby could hear the grit in his voice where violence usually lived like a second tongue. The glove on his left hand creaked as whatever throbbed beneath it wanted, and he clicked his jaw like a man telling a dog to heel without looking down.
The Claw ignored him. He had found a line of inquiry and would walk it until the end of the world.
"The white constructions... These Glyphs," he said to Weiss, the phrase too neat for something that wasn't his. "Useful and versatile. Yet, you seem to grow tired with use; therefore, it saps your energy, as if it is a muscle; however, that woman could also create them, but with more potency."
Weiss set another ice circle under his feet. It formed, crisp as glass, and the Claw's outline shuddered through it in two frames, leaving only white dust and the suggestion of a footprint. Her forearm trembled once, a tiny, treacherous ache. He saw it. Of course he did.
Francisco raised his voice by a centimeter. "If you wanted us dead," he said, calm as a ledger, "we would be dead in the stall earlier today."
The mask tipped, not in disagreement but in acknowledgment that the sentence had been true before it was spoken.
"What do you want?" Francisco asked. He kept his posture loose, his empty right hand away from Downpour's hilt, his left hand's glove struggling to keep still. "Because this," he flicked two fingers at the crater, the crushed Knights, Fred's unconscious body, "-isn't murder. It's a screening."
Ruby's good eye snapped to him, then back to the Claw. Blake's shoulder settled. Yang did not settle at all.
Bemaia exhaled, a slow receipt of oxygen, and propped himself to an elbow, wing folded tight to keep the eyes from looking at the wrong thing. "Listen to him," he said to the Claw, "He's not wrong. If you intended to collect bodies, you would have."
"Collection," the Executioner said, as if correcting a tense. "Not of corpses, not yet. However, something else caught my eye." He considered Weiss without moving his head. "And the white Glyphs are a finding of interest."
Francisco nodded once. "Then let's talk."
It startled no one more than it startled him. The word rang in his mouth like he'd swallowed a coin.
"Francisco-" Yang began, stunned and ready to be angry if the next sentence demanded it.
He kept his eyes on the Claw. "You wanna know more about Weiss' glyphs? Sure, Weiss, tell him everything about it. In turn, you don't murder everyone."
The Claw performed a small, unsettling courtesy: he pondered.
"Proceed," he said.
Weiss almost said no out of spite. The word got as far as her tongue and found nowhere useful to go. She swallowed, rolled her wrist to hide the tremor, and held the blade steady over the circle that kept being hers no matter who tried to walk through it.
Francisco pointed with two fingers, not quite at the Claw, not quite away. "The skipping," he said. "It's a technology from T-Corp. You're accelerating yourself down a fixed reel. That means you're paying somewhere, spooling heat, memory wear, juice in those phials, something. I don't care where. What I care about is that you're choosing to look over it. Which proves my point."
"What point," the Claw asked, not annoyed, not curious, only aligning the ledger columns.
"That you're here to take. Not to kill." Francisco's five pupils pinpricked, then widened again, a living camera iris hunting a new exposure. "What. Do. You. Want."
The Claw considered the boy who had asked the right question in the wrong plaza. Somewhere, the faintest servo breathed.
"The Head requires recompense," the Executioner said. "Debts satisfied. Taxes that you did not pay."
Weiss's mind skipped once, Taxes, as in Taxes, as in the thing Bemaia kept saying that Maryanne person needed to pay back in the train.
"As for the white Glyphs," the Claw added, almost as an afterthought, "must be understood. If they can be replicated, they can be standardized."
Weiss felt something decisive and foolish flare in her chest. It sounded like Over my dead body and wore her sister's posture. She let the fire burn and used its heat to hold still.
"No standardization today," Francisco said, jaw easy, eyes hard. "You'll break the toy if you pull it apart in the store."
Bemaia pushed himself the rest of the way upright and dusted his lapel with two fingers as if that tiny civility could glue the moment back together. The wing at his back refolded to a patient, heavy half-moon.
"Enough," he said again, quieter, and this time it wasn't aimed at the Claw. It was aimed at the people he was trying to keep calm. He looked at Weiss, really looked; the tremor in her forearm, the whiteness at her knuckles, the tightness at the corner of her mouth that said the circles cost more than she wanted them to. "Weiss," he said, "tell him."
Weiss's chin tipped a fraction, a refusal poised.
"Tell him," Bemaia repeated, and there was no silk on the words now. "Everything."
Yang dragged in a breath through her teeth, like she didn't love the idea but loved Weiss breathing more. Blake's hand found Ruby's sleeve. Ruby's fingers tightened. Francisco did not move at all.
Weiss let the blade point dip half a degree, nothing anyone could call a concession, but enough for her wrist to stop screaming at her. She inhaled as Winter had taught her, held the air where it would be useful, and made herself speak past the part of her that wanted to say over my dead body and mean it.
"It's hereditary," she said. The word landed like something antique and unbreakable. "Our semblance runs in the Schnee line. My family can do it. Other families can't. That's the rule."
The Claw held her in its blank attention.
Weiss went on, because stopping would taste like losing, and because Bemaia had asked. "Training matters," she said. "Control matters. We learn to shape the circles, speed, gravity, hard-light, ice… Until they answer fast and clean. But the answer comes because of blood. Not because of a teacher."
"And what of the woman?" the Claw asked, the tiniest tilt at 'woman'. "The counterpart. Her glyphs were… stronger."
Weiss didn't blink. "She's a Schnee," she said. "My sister."
A sound moved through the Claw that might have been a sigh if sighs had ever been engineered in a lab: a soft venting of pressure, a servo exhale so quiet it felt like the idea of disappointment more than its performance. For the first time since he had fallen like a meteor and written a crater with his hand, he sounded a millimeter more human.
"Unfortunate," he said without pity for himself or for anyone else. "It would have been entertaining to use such technology."
The head shook, but soon returned to its former stillness. "Back to business," he said, and the square learned what business meant.
"Accounts delinquent," the Executioner continued, as if reading from a page only he could see. "Names: Fred F. Francisco D. Bemaia... Just Bemaia. Hm. Principal and penalties compounded. Tax obligations to, not only the Head, but also various workshops and defunct Wings whose debt had been bought by the Head, in arrears by unacceptable margins."
Yang made a noise low in her throat that wasn't a word. Ruby's jaw set. Blake's ears pressed flatter under the bow; her eyes didn't leave the Claw. Bemaia only straightened his tie.
The Claw went on, inexorable. "Compensation will be collected. You will return to the City as a rightful denizen. Compliant transfer will mitigate interest and-"
"Where," Weiss said, and the blade tip lifted as if the word needed steel to stand on. She did not raise her voice. She did not have to. "Where did you meet her?"
The Claw did not ask who. It did not pretend to misunderstand. The fast-forward jitter didn't come; he answered in ordinary time.
"Specify," he said anyway, because ledgers loved columns.
"My sister," Weiss said. "Winter. If I'm the second, she's the first. Where did you see her?"
The tiniest pause. A measured allotment of silence given to a question that had nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with a spine made out of a family name.
The Claw did not look away. "A flying ship," he said. "She placed white marks that altered my vector. She persisted despite disadvantage."
Weiss felt the world try to tip.
"What happened," she said.
The Claw's answer was neither cruel nor kind.
"I confronted her," he said, and the servo breath turned into nothing at all. "And left her to die, with a gaping hole in her torso."