The REDS of war

Volume Two Chapter Eleven

Rei and co, enter through a massive door, the four glancing around silently, as the door shuts behind them, Rei, now with full use of his eye again immediately sends a pulse scan, his display showing the aura levels of everyone in his squad. Oliver and Scarlet are near max, Goldie however is seemingly down to twenty percent.

"Goldie... is everything alright back there?" He asks.

"Yeah, just a cough."

"Then why is your aura so low? You're down to twenty percent."

"Wait seriously?" Scarlet asks.

Rei nods, and with a slight hand signal he orders Scarlet to defend the blonde haired girl. The team as quietly as possible walk further into the base, Rei presses a panel they pass by to grant them further access to the building.

"Greetings, and welcome to Merlot Industries, where we're building a better tomorrow... today!

Oliver glances around at the prestige walls and floor. "This just keeps getting weirder."

Rei nods. "This place is a bit creepy."

Scarlet turns, walking backwards as she admires the cleanliness. "Wow, Merlot keeps this place sparkling. I guess his robots are good for something."

Goldie spits some blood onto the floor. "I wonder if anyone else knows about this place. It's so creepy in here."

Rei quickly checks his arrow count only finding 7 arrows in his quiver. "Stay alert. This could be an ambush..."

The group walk silently, Scarlet guarding the teams rear, Rei and Oliver watching out front, while Goldie suffers silently in the middle. As they walk, Ozpin speaks to them via their radios.

"Team, in order for me to help you, I'll need to know the layout of the lab. Keep your eyes peeled for any maps, schematics, or better yet - any access terminals that would allow us to tap into Merlot's network."

The team continue their march before coming across a slightly wider room than the hallways they'd already traversed. Inside, a small squad of Grimm and robots await them. Rei sighs placing a hand on the floor he creates a glyph under all of the enemies, and raises them all to the ceiling, before suddenly switching the glyph, bringing everything crashing down with 20x the gravity that they'd be used to, instantly destroying everything.

"Making yourselves at home, I see? I want my guests to feel welcome, but my security team rarely feels the same way."

As the team travels further they enter a hallway, however, before they make it deep into said hallway a pipe bursts blocking their progress.

"Stop!" Rei orders. "We can't go through there. We'll need to shut off the steam to get through."

Goldie glances over. "Can we shut it off?"

Scarlet reaches her hand for the pipe but reels back before even making contact. "That's one piping hot pipe!"

"We can't get through here unless we turn the steam off." Oliver grumbles.

The four quickly split into smaller teams and scout for the valve to shut off the pipe, in which Rei finds it the quickest and does as such.

"We got it!" Oliver shouts out to Goldie and Scarlet.

Rei sighs. 'The steam is off. We can proceed. It should be safe to cross now."

Scarlet grins. "Sometimes you gotta let off a little steam."

"Right. That should do it!" Oliver says once the steam stops.

Scarlet leans to Rei smugly. "Y'know, Merlot oughta thank us for fixing all these broken pipes."