So it is done

Atlas

General Ironwood was not a stupid man. In spite of the things that the rags calling themselves newspapers wrote about him, ready to throw all the blame at him for all his failures in Atlas, from a road accident to spoiled milk. General Ironwood was not a stupid man.

But regularly, day after day, he couldn't help but find himself in stupid situations. And, unfortunately, they were not the kind of silly situations one could just laugh at in the end. No, unfortunately these situations were silly because they made General Ironwood feel like a fool, a man whose experience and intelligence were simply not enough to deal with them.

Behind him was Remnant's greatest army, the lives of millions of people, hundreds of apprentices, dozens of cities and settlements, failure was not an option. Perhaps only Ozpin could grasp the weight of responsibility that lay on his shoulders, if even Ozpin could do it.

Ironwood was not accustomed to doubting his old comrade, his leader, Ozpin, but looking at him now... Could he still trust his old friend?

Ironwood had never wanted to become a General in the first place. He had graduated from Atlas' Hunter Academy as a Specialist, dreaming of something else entirely.

Ironwood did not come from an honorable family, although he was born in Atlas he was born to a soldier and a waitress parents, he was not some special child, born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Contrary to the perceptions of many, mostly those in Mantle, not everyone in Atlas was a wealthy multimillionaire, willing to throw money at each other and fill their garages with newer and more expensive cars.

Was living in Atlas like living in Mantle? No, of course not. Ironwood was forced to admit with regret that the life of the average Atlas resident was still somewhat better than that of the average Mantle resident. But this was not to lead to the macabre delusion that all of Atlas residents were better than all of Mantle residents.

There were very few rich people among the inhabitants of Atlas, the kind of families that the people of Mantle thought all of Atlas were. Maybe there are twenty or thirty families, the Schnee among the first, then the Trophy, Marigold and some more, less notable families. Perhaps two hundred people in all that are considered extremely rich.

But there are almost a million people living in Atlas. The extremely rich, as expected, are an extreme minority.

Even including all those people who could only very conventionally be classified as rich, shop managers or army captains, there wouldn't have been even a couple of tens of thousands of them. All the other people of Atlas were very ordinary, soldiers, waiters, engineers, technicians, even laborers and cleaners. Atlas might be the most technologically advanced city in Remnant, but army robots were still too expensive to try to replace people doing hard physical labor with them. Each robot cost thousands of liens, not including the cost of regular maintenance and recharging, which was simply inefficient when for just ten lien an hour, an adult-bodied man could do the same amount of work.

While one might argue the managerial load could be reduced by having a robot replacement, managing robots is still a very specialized and expensive work.

In the end, the people of Atlas were not so different from the people of Mantle. Ironwood, known by his friend back then as just Jimmy, also played games with his peers, also saw the trials his family went through, and saw the tragedies that happened here and there.

Initially, James didn't want to join the army at all, but during his school's annual testing, it was revealed that he possessed significant reserves of an already opened aura. How exactly that happened, James never knew to this day. But after that was known, his career path was sealed.