The​ Name​ Of​ The​ Game

Chapter 20: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

The Name of the Game

a RWBY/The Gamer crossover, SI.

Arc 5: Bent Penny

Chapter 20: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Smoke and shrapnel swirled around me as I stood in the middle of the swiftly falling remains of my stolen Bullhead, Air Walk holding me aloft and the brightly glowing field my my Spinning Mana Shield—now long since renamed to Kaiten—causing the smoke around me to glow faintly. A glance at my MP bar showed my MP at just over 3000—I'd used a fairly large portion breaking into the black site and throwing around high level spells, then eating two vehicles… but my regen rate had mitigated most of that. The missile, on the other hand, had broken both my Mana Shield and my A.T. Field and it was only by dumping mana into the Kaiten that I'd not taken damage to HP. The sound of the explosion had bypassed my shields and left me temporarily stunned and deafened until Gamer's Body had kicked in. I was down to just under twenty percent of my total MP, in a foreign country, and surrounded by a cloud of grimm so thick they blotted out the sun.

"I feel as though I have been denied critical, need-to-know information," I ground out, one thought standing out as I cast a glance northward, back towards the black site—a fact that hadn't truly registered until now, as mental math underscored the fact. 'Nearly a hundred miles in under 30 seconds. That's around Mach-15. Atlas has hyper-sonic missile technology. Why, why on Monty's green Remnant does Atlas need hyper-sonic missiles?'

That sort of tech was of little use against your average grimm—hell, it wasn't ideal against the big ones, either, unless they were being used to deliver a large payload warhead very quickly. No, they were put to best use exactly as Atlas had just demonstrated—swatting aircraft out of the sky before they could do anything about it. There was a gap there, though—as far as I knew, Atlas didn't have hyper-sonic craft to need missiles fast enough to catch them but the fact that the tech was there, in use, implied that someone did. There were things going on on the wider stage than I knew about, and I'd just gotten a nasty introduction to the effects of one of them.

'Massive troop transports, large numbers of ground-based mechs to act as filler mixed in with regular soldiers, AI, cybernetics, power armor, I can assume large stockpiles of munitions—Dust, in this instance…'Historically, a nation only really started building up certain technologies and resources when they were preparing for a shooting war or some other drawn out, large-scale conflict. Atlas was preparing for a shooting war.

There was no time to put further thought into it at the moment, however—I had to extricate myself from the current mess first. I dropped the Kaiten and called up my other shields, knowing this moment of respite wouldn't last much longer—as soon as the smoke cleared, the grimm would be on me. First things first—I was too low on mana for comfort, and I could have kicked myself for not taking a few minutes to sit and meditate and top it off before leaving the ID.

Opening my Inventory, I selected a mana potion, popped the stopper and downed the blueberry tasting potion in one shot. Immediately, my mana regeneration rate shot up and I gained an instant shot of MP straight to the mana bar—going from 3000-odd to over 8000. Not full, but it would give me options. There was a problem, however. As with all good things, there were apparently limits. After downing the mana potion, the first I'd ever used here in Remnant, my Semblance popped up a warning that consuming more than one in an eight hour period could be dangerous.