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Chapter Text

"WATTS!"

Bursting through the door of the server room, Qrow took the scientist by surprise and tackled him to the ground faster than the thin man could react, Qrow growling and almost roaring as he pinned Watts to the ground by the throat and slammed his other fist into the bastard's face as many times as he could before a sudden revolver shot to the gut threw him back and away. "GAH!"

"Tch! Annoying pest, do you have any idea how much work you almost just cost me!? Hours upon hours of toiling away at this infernal code and still no progress at all… it's as if someone designed it specifically with me in mind," Arthur Watts hissed, grimacing as he rubbed his throat and sat up again, his Scroll beeping periodically as he went through the coding interface and tried to fruitlessly access the same controls that allowed him to previously take over the base's doors and defenses the last time he'd hacked in- how had he been so careless as to retreat when the Winter Maiden's acquisition failed!? He should have stayed, kept to the shadows, made sure that whatever infernal new code base they replaced everything with was something he could infiltrate! But no, Salem ordered him to report to her when everything failed, and now they were down to nothing more but Hazel and him. No Maidens, no partial Maidens, no Spider gang, no bandit clans, nothing! 

His Queen had even been forced to take to the field herself in the face of all that was going on now! And really, what was he doing futzing about now when clearly, Atlas was going to fall anyway!? There was no point! Nothing worth doing here- not with the military base, at least. The blueprints, though… Decades of research and development, technologies that the outside world had never seen because the Atlesian council didn't want anyone knowing they had these kinds of things in their fleet… oh, sweet treasure trove. But yet- those files were still inaccessible to him, routed through the same labyrinthine method of control that the new code base used to access everything. He couldn't make heads or tails of it, and even his own viruses failed to penetrate deep enough to get anything with more than a little security clearance. 

And yet…

"You got a lotta nerve coming back here," Qrow hissed, leveling Harbinger at Watts with a heavy glare, the shotgun barrels pointing straight at the man's face as he stood and backed away from the server rack he was working on with his hands up- revolver in one hand, and many rings adorning his fingers on the other. "What, you couldn't resist another crack at Atlas after a year? Tell me, do you really think you're making it out of this alive, no matter what happens?"

"Of course I am. The real question is… are you?" Watts asked, then ducked behind a rack of servers as a thunderous shot rang out and a crater appeared in the floor- just barely missing his foot as he called out in a panic. "RAINART!"

"You called?" asked the towering, wall-like form of one Hazel Rainart, stepping through the door and catching Qrow's surprised swing with a single hand, Harbinger sparking against his Aura as he held the massive sword there without any kind of strain or trouble. "Huh. Looks like someone came after all."

"Where were you, you lumbering oaf!?" Watts huffed, brushing himself off while Qrow tugged fruitlessly at Harbinger II, unable to remove it from Hazel's iron grip. "I can't believe this ruffian managed to get the drop on me all because you decided you needed to use the toilet!"

"The body waits for no man, and Atlesian pizza is a crime against the bowels," Hazel deadpanned, both him and Qrow to shudder in mutual distaste for the crime against flavor that Hazel was referring to. Sadly, though, that moment of singular camaraderie was all that Qrow got. "Now. To deal with you…"

"Shit."

The next thing Qrow knew, he was being flung into and through the reinforced glass wall that separated the server room from the outside halls, Hazel roaring like some kind of awful beast as he swung the Huntsman around and threw him like a hammer.

"SHIT!"

Crashing to a halt through another wall and grimacing as his aura flickered badly across his entire body, Qrow grunted as he dug Harbinger II into the floor to prevent himself from flying any further, glaring back the way he came as Hazel started to stomp forward while retrieving sharpened shards of Dust from his hip pouches. He held them menacingly for a moment, eyes narrowing down at his prey before the giant of a man reached up- and stabbed his own arms with the Dust.

"The hell!?" Qrow yelped, avoiding a sudden burst of speed as Hazel crashed through and nearly slammed his meaty fist into his face, the fist itself continuing through with a crackle of Lightning Dust and Wind Dust that made his punch erupt once it hit the wall into a blast of light and sound that flung Qrow away into the air. 

He flipped, gritting his teeth and trying not to lose his composure even more as he flipped Harbinger's blade down once again and began firing at Hazel as he landed, massive bursts of shotgun fire blasting against the man's torso and making him stumble back and almost throwing him to the ground.

Ruby's special blend, only for emergencies. Extremely expensive, extremely dangerous, extremely good at killing.

And somehow this monster of a man didn't seem to even feel it- his entire body rippling with his own Aura as it crackled and flared while he charged forward as though in a berserk rage.

Fuck. What a gods damned mess.

A berserker who was, to him, almost entirely unknown beside his name and what little backstory Ozpin had told him once upon a time. A bastard behind him trying to hack into Atlas' servers again for gods knew what purpose, and an army of grimm outside the city that was only barely thinning out. And that wasn't even talking about the magic battle he could hear going on in the distance despite it being several dozen miles out- it was so ferocious and intense that he could feel the vibrations against the world in his soul.  

What the hell was going on out there?

"HRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAARRRGGGHHHH!"

Questions for later.

Qrow hissed under his breath and continued firing, the grimm blackened steel of Harbinger II whirling in the tight confines of the hall as he slashed at his foe with his blade in sword mode, unable to act in his full scythe capacity despite how much he really wanted to just decapitate the guy in front of him and kill him right away. But no. He couldn't. Not without getting him into position first.

So he kept striking, stabbing and slashing as best as he could with his limited range of movement and using his own aerial mobility to keep ahead of Hazel's strikes and punches and attempted grabs, the two of them dancing around in the hallway- up until Qrow slipped on a pebble and a shot rang out, hitting Hazel right between the eyes and ruffling Qrow's hair as it passed through.

"Shit!"

"SHIT!"

"Oh for heavens'-"

Qrow whipped out and struck as he fell, spinning faster than Watts could react and slamming his fist straight into the man's gut as hard as he could, firing his shotgun behind and using the recoil to bounce up and catch the bastard with a swipe of Harbinger II whilst spinning.

"EYAAAAARGH!"

Hm.

Maybe firing the shotguns while spinning in order to strike harder had been a bit overkill, Qrow mused as he stumbled to a standing halt and watched as the two halves of Arthur Watts separated from each other and flew off in a spray of disintegrating Aura- up until the man's torso and legs splattered against the wall and thumped to the ground, wheezing and battered and soon to die if the amount of blood gushing out of his body… and the mess spilling out of his torso cavity… was any indication.

Ouch.

Qrow huffed, eyeing up Hazel again as he flicked the blood off of his blade, splattering drops of red onto the ground as he pulled up his intuitive sense of luck pulsing in the back of his mind. He'd need every last drop of skill, cunning, treachery, and sheer strength of will to survive what came next.

Hazel, meanwhile, just growled under his breath as he wiped the flattened bullet out of his forehead creases, glaring even harder as his eyes sparked with the residual energy of the dust he was injecting into his bloodstream, Aura flashing around him with the presence of a mighty bear as he slowly stomped forward.

"Gonna kill you for that," he muttered lowly, just loud enough to be heard, his voice like crashing rocks in a landslide as he withdrew more Dust from his hip pouches. "Gonna kill you real nice and slow. Queen Salem's not gonna like this…"

"Yeah, well, your queen ain't gonna survive much longer than today," Qrow huffed out breathlessly, grinning cockily with more bravado than he maybe felt as he leveled Harbinger at Hazel again, scanning around for a wide open space where he could really cut loose instead of resorting to half-assed quickdraw tactics like Raven did. "And trust me… even if you survive me… you're not surviving my niece."

"We'll see about that, Branwen."

"Then come on and find out, Rainart."