96

Black Rose Blooms SilverCyberQueen_Jolyne

Chapter 96

Notes:

(See the end of the chapter for notes.)

Chapter Text

"I play Shock Troopers with three tokens, allowing me to activate its special ability and letting my troops move an extra six tiles. With the extra mobility my troops move within a single tile of yours and allows me to use an attack of opportunity, beginning the combat turn in my favor and allowing me to special summon three cards from my deck! With the extra cards I lay down Advantageous Terrain which gives my troops a plus three to their attack stat, and then activate Hyper Reflexes, destroying your entire outpost with overwhelming firepower with another plus six to the attack stat! And then I activate Smugglers of Wind Path, which lets me take two cards from your hand!" Penny crowed cheerfully as she utterly annihilated yet another chunk of Yang's territory and claimed yet another piece of Vacuo for Atlas. She cackled wildly for a moment, playing up the melodrama of the game before turning to Ruby and nuzzling against her with a happy little sigh- the two of them having made an alliance at the start of the game in the gayest way possible.

Meaning that Penny declared dramatically that she would conquer all of Remnant and cede it all to the brightest wishing star of her life in a move that was, honestly, just shy of her dropping to her knee and giving Ruby a ring.

Ruby, meanwhile, had done the exact same thing at the exact same time which resulted in both of them loudly proclaiming their eternal loyalty and love to each other before fiercely competing to try and win the entire game for each other.

This, naturally, was rather tilted in Penny's favor because Ruby was kind of terrible at Remnant: The Game and Penny had a running spreadsheet open in her head that let her maximize her card synergies so well that it was a miracle that Yang and Neptune were at all able to hold her back. Penny had, rather obviously, not touched any of Ruby's meager holdings, and most of Ruby's turns were spent taking small bits of unoccupied land that weren't owned by anyone.

Blake and Weiss had cheered for Yang initially, but in a cruel moment of betrayal (which was to say, they'd gotten tired of being Yang's cheerleading squad) they'd turned on the blonde bombshell and started distracting her with kisses and hugs instead, with Blake even going so far as to sit in Yang's lap and nibble at her ear while she played. 

Neptune, meanwhile, was being cheered on by Sun, Scarlet, and Sage (well… mostly Sun) as he played. He was, technically, doing better than Yang at the moment, but that was only because Penny wanted Mistral's resources first instead of Vacuo's, and Ruby was basically stuck with a bit of Sanus and most of Vale (except for a small port that Penny had established as a trade route between their nations plus a whole series of outposts surrounding Vale in the shape of a heart stretched over several hundred miles ingame. 

"Nooooo!!! My land! How could you do this to me, Pennster!" Yang cried, trying to slump dramatically as her territory was cut down even further, helpless to do anything as Penny dismantled her bit by bit, leaving her with nothing but her core territories and a few ports- and even then, the rest of Atlas was poised to take over soon anyway. "You're so cruel… Blake… avenge me… bleh."

"You've still got a good quarter of your territory left and I don't know how to play this game," Blake deadpanned, rolling her eyes as she lifted Yang's head up and kissed her cheek softly. "You're still gonna lose super hard, but Weiss and I will give you plenty of kisses afterwards to make things up to you."

"... Nice to see you have so much faith in my abilities to turn this around," Yang grumbled, shuffling the cards in her hand and huffing a little as she tried to pull together a plan from what little she had left while Neptune tried and failed to mount an attack on Vale from his position in Vacuo… only to be swifly and immediately repelled with crushing force and extreme prejudice by a combination of Ruby's stockpiled cards and Penny's overwhelming military might.

That Ruby took the opportunity to sneakily sweep a whole giant chunk of Sanus under her cape was not lost on Penny, and the gynoid lavished Ruby with praise for conquering such a large swathe in only a single turn- not that it really mattered considering that Penny's territory was the largest currently, but still. Progress! A halfway decent chance of Ruby being able to cede all her territory to Penny instead of vice versa!

"I have faith that you're good at this game. I unfortunately also know that Penny is the smartest game bot on the planet and that if she has time to read the instruction manual of any kind of strategy game then you're fucked," Blake answered, patting Yang's head gently and kissing her cheek again. "Do your best."

"Honestly, what did we expect would happen when we invited Penny to play a strategic, horribly balanced, extremely rules heavy boardgame consisting of three different parts that mesh extremely poorly to the point that no one without a running index of game rules in their heads could possibly comprehend how to play as effectively as possible?" Weiss sighed, taking her place at Yang's side and bending over so she could plant chaste kisses on Yang and Blake's cheeks, receiving them in return with a pleased hum. "I genuinely think we would have had a better chance of winning if we all played Compost King with team JNPR. At least then Penny would have had to deal with Jaune."

"He is weirdly good at Compost King," Sun mumbled, looking between the players and the board for a moment before poking at one of Neptune's cards. "Why is he so good at Compost King?"

"He had a lot of boardgames at home and seven sisters. I suspect he had to get good in order to not die ," Weiss continued speaking, seeing as the rest of the players were too busy to actually talk since they were rambling about card effects and terrain conditions and move synergies and trap cards and spell costs and wait since when did Remnant: The Game have colored mana???

"That makes sense. I had to deal with a lot of the same growing up," Scarlet mused, rubbing his chin a little before shrugging. "Much less, though. I only had to deal with three sisters. And a brother. I kinda wish I'd slugged him one good before I left considering he put a damned rubber snake in my luggage and scared the hell out of me when I got to Haven."

"You and me both. I hate snakes," Sage muttered with a slight grimace, then looked back at the board. "Eyes up Nep, she's going for your mines." 

"No, not the mines! I need those for resources!" Neptune wailed, frantically dueling Penny in a bout of rapid card exchanges that left the entire table staring and watching in awe as they rapidfire babbled out card effects that canceled each other out, Ruby playing dramatic card game music from her scroll in support of her girlfriend as Neptune focused as he had never focused before…

And lost the exchange.

"NOOOOOOO!" Neptune cried out dramatically, losing an even bigger piece of Vacuo than before as Penny refocused on Yang, Ruby continuing to do her thing unmolested as she continued grabbing more of Neptune's former territory before Penny could get to it- Penny completely unwilling to do anything to her girlfriend's lands other than continue placing outposts in the shape of hearts all over the rose huntress' territory.

It'd be cute if Neptune and Yang weren't getting fucking annihilated. 

"Stay strong Neptune, we'll get through this together!" Yang commiserated with Neptune, placing a hand on his shoulder and crying tears of pure defeat as Penny and Ruby's combined efforts wore them down- mostly Penny, with Ruby throwing raw numbers of grimm cards at them because of course she had her own specialized grimm deck that she'd custom made for the purpose of being able to essentially throw wild Beowolves at her problems. "She can crush our bodies and our land but she won't crush our spirit! We'll win in the end, no matter how many rematches it takes!"

"You don't think you guys can pull it back?" Sun asked, then looked at the board again. "Actually nevermind you guys are fucked."

"If someone pulls off a miracle, it'd save us all," Yang sighed, wiping her overly dramatic crocodile tears with her sleeve as she snuggled Blake for support, with Weiss just rolling her eyes at the idiocy on display. "It'd take a miracle like… WITCH QUEEN OF THE WICKED WEST!"

"GASP! THE CARD THAT SENDS ORGANIZED FORCES INTO DISARRAY THE MORE CONTROL CARDS THAT YOU HAVE IN YOUR DECK!? THE GREAT EQUALIZER CARD THAT DESTROYS FORWARD MOMENTUM!" Penny shouted at just barely an acceptable volume for the library, reeling back in pure shock as Yang pulled a trap card more or less out of her ass (well… her sleeve, really) and held it aloft with the gravitas of pulling out the mythical sword in the anvil, slapping it down with such holy force that the wind it produced utterly annihilated Penny's rigid troop formations and precision planned outpost locations, shattering her lands and sending her territory reeling as she was forced to send the bulk of her forces into the graveyard. "Nooooo! My masterful takeover of Remnant! Thrown into utter defeat by- Holy Silver Warrior!"

"Shit!"

"Nooooo…" Neptune groaned, clutching his head in his hands as he slammed his forehead into the table as the holy warrior righted what was thrown into disarray, with Penny cackling as she restored the majority of her holdings in an instant… and due to the turn order Ruby defended her beau with a cry of-

"CRIMSON TYPHOON!"

"What does that one even do!?"

"Noooo!!! We banned that from home three years ago! It's such a broken deck effect!"

"We're not at home, Yang! My supremacy reigns! Ahahahahahaha!"

".... This is… stupid," Weiss muttered, watching as the four way card duel board game descended into back and forth deus ex machina cards, with Yang literally pulling the bullshit out of her ass and Penny sliding cards from her bow while Neptune lost everything and was utterly crushed into dust as Ruby annexed Vacuo and spawned cards into her hand from the depths of her inky black grimmstuff. "This is the dumbest thing we could have done."

"Second dumbest. Team JNPR is still LARPing as Farmers vs Aliens using Compost King figures and cards," Blake deadpanned, pointing over to where the aforementioned JNPR was putting on a show that somehow actually drew the attention of some of the theater nerds at Beacon, a heart wrenching tale of forbidden love and war between two factions playing out even with only four people, a handful of cheap plastic figurines, a children's board game backdrop, and some dramatic lighting courtesy of the manual controls inset into the table that controlled the lights over that area.

Weiss sighed, pinching her brow as she sat down in a free seat so she could use Yang for free heat whilst checking her independent stock portfolio separate from all of her SDC holdings (currently held under the name Schwarz Feuer, but she also had Bleiss Snow as a second backup… the names were Yang's fault, of course) "... Why are we, the future defenders of the world, doing this again?" 

"Because we're still technically some form of children, and Professor Ozpin made it school policy that we have time to enjoy life instead of just becoming an army of faceless soldiers to throw into the meatgrinder… kinda like they do with the Atlesian Military," Blake answered, flicking her ears casually as she pulled a book from nowhere and started reading. "Really, I'm just enjoying the time we have together. It's nice."

"... It… really is."

"... We're all ready for the White Fang thing next week, right?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"Good."

Notes:

Some bit of fluff and feel good stuff because we're heading into slightly more serious waters soon