RWBY Through Worlds (End)

BC102: Temptation (Baba Tribe vs. Heroes)-2

Royal has been struggling frantically to keep his head after his attempts to escape the room had all been thwarted.

At first nothing really happened except that he felt sick from the smell.

But then he began to feel less rigid after several minutes...and the smell didn't seem as bad.

And then the hallucinations started.

He knew they were hallucinations at least--that might have been the slight bit of resistance.

But they were convincing ones. An open pathway to leave...a weapon to actually fight with.

He'd almost start to move, and then realize it was fake.

But this was only the start of them. It was as if the Avarice was testing his mind to see what was the most weak part of it... Maybe the desire to escape it wasn't it.

Then it began to take on a more sinister nature.

Things like seeing his tutor Archibald, seeing his father holding out a hand to him...and his mother.

But this was too unbelievable to be real, and maybe that's why it still didn't convince him.

He closed his eyes. "None of this is real," he said to himself. "Just got to hold out till that headcase comes back...then attack her."

Not that that would work...but maybe she'd at least take him out of the room.

Or kill him... That was bad...but it was better than him becoming her puppet.

He never did like to feel like a puppet...

The hallucinations began to get darker then. He saw himself getting a chance to tell his father off once and for all. A chance to hurt other people who'd insulted him over time.

Things he didn't actually want to do, usually, but maybe everyone has had their darker moments.

Of course Cinder was part of many of the hallucinations, in and out of them, the darker ones not so much, at first...but it felt like it was slowly becoming more disturbing.

Royal might have been in more danger of snapping because of the sheer horror of what he was seeing than because of any real wish he'd have had to give into it. Perhaps his resistance to it made the Avarice work on him differently. It wasn't just a temptation... There was torture in it. [Anyone with intrusive thoughts knows what that's like.]

He wanted to save her...to do a lot of things...but why did it feel like it was getting more twisted?

It was kind of incoherent...

The Mind Grimm might have been boring into his brain. Maybe that's why it was so fuzzy now...

The air in here also wasn't good, so that part wasn't helping.

It was finally in the midst of this that Cinder appeared more sharply in the room, holding one of her glass bows.

She took one look at the Avarice plants and gasped.

She hadn't seen them before. She wasn't with that group, but Emerald had described them pretty accurately... They were disgusting.

Turning her glass into a sharp edge, she slashed through one.

It curled up like a dead bug...but another one just grew to replace it.

Cinder didn't like to press her luck.

"All right, get up." She turned to Royal. "Can you hear me?"

Royal thought this was just another hallucination...though an oddly glaring one. Her voice was making his head pound.