The Games We Play

DISCLAIMER: This story is NOT MINE IN ANY WAY. That honor has gone to the beautiful bastard Ryugii. This has been pulled from his Spacebattle publishment. Anyway on with the show...errr read.

Treatment

The plan was a fairly simple one, at least in concept. The execution…that was a bit harder, but still not complex. I was glad to have Onyx's help with this mess, truly, because it made at least that part simpler.

We were going to hide the civilians underground. Suryasta and Vulturnus had gone on ahead, slaying any Grimm they came across and clearing the area around the civilians. I'd swing by, scan them thoroughly to see if they were infected or not, and then contact them with Levant and try to direct them to the nearest safe haven. Beneath the ground, Onyx was hard at work forming large pockets to house the people below the ground which I'd further protect with barriers. The fact that they were buried should be enough to limit the number of Grimm that could attack the barriers at any given time and I'd be in contact with Onyx to notify him of any attempts below ground, which he'd deal with. Any Grimm that tried to dig down to them would be my problem, but they should be a fairly small number and easy to stop. Levant—or one of her duplicates, if necessary—would insure they had air and that it remained disease free. Finally, Ozpin would note the locations and send them on to our reinforcements, who would help dig them up after the area was deemed clean.

Assuming we didn't all die, of course.

Sure, it wasn't a perfect idea, especially with something like Crom Cruach possibly running around down there—but they were at least as safe below the ground as they were anywhere else in the city. With Conquest spreading, the Grimm rampaging, and everything else…and hell, it's not like being above ground made them safe from Crom Cruach, either. No, given what we had, that was the safest place to put them; if nothing else, it was the place that had the lowest number of ways for them to die at any given time.

And no, the Mountain Glenn comparisons were not lost on any of us. It said a lot that it was still the best we could come up with.

We got to work quickly, Onyx digging as I directed from above. I moved quickly from rooftop to rooftop, keeping Ozpin on my scroll as I travelled. The older man was hard at work on the other side of the screen, organizing things with methodical efficiency as he got everything ready over there, but honestly, it was just a little comforting to be able to see another face at a time like this. Worst case scenario, I wouldn't be alone when I died—that was more than most Hunters got.

And thankfully, everything seemed to go well, at least at first. I don't think any of us were under the illusion that that was gonna last, especially once the other taken began to move, but at least for the moment, we had time to move. In a situation where every moment counted, I welcomed the opportunity—especially when I came across some of the infected. They were easy to tell apart, even in the early stages. Dark spots formed on their skin and grew quickly to cover limbs, chests, everything but their face. Then, a mask would slowly grow into place, as well as other, less superficial changes. How the infected behaved in those early stages seemed to vary from panic and aggression to what was almost serenity and acceptance, as well as yet stranger behaviors—probably a result of whatever Conquest did to people's brains. Or maybe it was just a people thing, I don't know.

Either way, I paused to watch them from a distance once I confirmed that there were no uninfected nearby and quietly observed the disease progress on both a micro and macro scale. I wanted to act, but I held back for the moment instead, waiting so that I could learn more about my enemy. Onyx was still working on the initial site and Vulturnus and Suryasta could handle the situation nearby without me, so this gave me a chance to simply Observe.

I couldn't say I liked what I saw, especially as I alternated between my many forms of sight. It was informative, especially since I'd only seen the mostly finished results of the disease, but…informative wasn't the same as encouraging. The implications, especially as I glimpsed their Auras…

But was I right about what I saw? I honestly wasn't sure if my guess was even vaguely correct; I was far from an expert in this matter, I could be mistaken. There could still be…no, there had to be a way, even if it was hard to see. Maybe I could even…

I suppose there was only one way to find out. I couldn't very well stand her and do nothing, besides.

Waiting for another moment to pick a target, I Lunged towards one of the civilians still in the earlier stages of the disease, grabbing him and drawing him up to a rooftop in short order. His eyes—human eyes, still—widened and he tried to say something to me. Was he startled to see me? Thankful and hoping for aid? Terrified? Or did he just have no idea what was going on?

Whatever it was, he couldn't say. The diseases spread had already reached his throat and whatever words he'd tried to give voice became nothing more than choking gasps—one of the reasons I'd chosen him. With the infection so close to his brain already, he didn't have much of a chance unless something was done, and I was the only person who had a real chance of doing anything. Even if…

"Shh," I said quietly, holding him in one of the White Tiger's hands and placing another on his chest, where the infection seemed to be at its thickest. "I'm going to try and help you, Jeremy. I want to help you."

And I hope I can, I didn't say as I healed him.

The growth of the dark spots abruptly accelerated, spurs of bone sprouting along his chest and back. He struggled for a moments, tried to kick and scream—and then went limp. Above his head, his name faded. Jeremy Brown was wiped away, question marks taking its place.

I closed my eyes and swore quietly under my breath. It was as I'd feared. I'd seen the colors in their Aura, dark patches growing in almost a mirror of their changing flesh. I'd hoped that was all they were—the Aura showing signs that the body had been infected and trying to fight it. But I wasn't so fortunate.

This was a disease of both the body and the soul, sending invading tendrils of sickness throughout their Aura even as it invaded the cells. Looking at it like that, I could understand how it worked, somewhat. The nature of one's Aura was to return on to a predefined state—one's normal body, generally. But like a disease could do to a cell, Conquest was hijacking that process, turning one's own Aura against them. It wasn't the Grimm cells that were mutating these people, at least not wholly. They were being forced to mutate themselves.

Which meant…what? I had no idea. If I hadn't been able to see it happening before my eyes, I wouldn't have believed such a thing was possible. Changing someone else's Aura like this…no, even beyond that, causing such extreme physical changes should probably be lethal in and off themselves. As the disease progressed, the infected mutated more and more, growing armor plates, spikes, claws, and even larger things…where was the matter for such changes even coming from? Logically, they would need to take that mass from the body itself, but for something of this extent…

And how did I stop it, I thought. How did I fix…this? Was there a connection—was he invading the soul through the body? Or was this some kind of two-fold sickness? Where the cells being altered somehow to allow Conquest to touch something he didn't have himself? How was I supposed to stop this? There had to be a way, I just…I couldn't tell what was even happening. Conquest was right—I didn't know how this worked. If I did, maybe, but…

Then I had no choice but to think things through and try to come to an answer on my own. I thought about what I knew and what I could maybe guess.

Killing the Grimm cells wouldn't be hard, in much the same way that killing cancer cells really wasn't all that hard. There was this whole built up image of diseases, especially the truly famous ones, as if they were this giant monster that healers and doctors were facing with these tiny toothpick swords, but that really wasn't the case. In fact, the problem was pretty much the opposite; the nature of diseases were that they were tiny, tiny things, mixed in amongst the trillions upon trillions of cells that made up a person's body. It's as if someone covered every floor of a building with ants and then added a bucket of slightly different looking ants into the mix and told you to kill the latter without harming the former. But since ants are significantly larger then cells, imagine that your only tools were a broadsword, an ax, a flamethrower, and a tank.

I could kill Conquest's cells, no problem. I could burn them, blast them with radiation, electrocute them, probably even expose them to a vacuum. Given time, I might even be able to nab something sufficiently poisonous that even the Grimm wouldn't like it or something acidic or any number of other things. The problem wasn't killing the disease—it was not killing everything else. Because while Conquest wouldn't enjoy prolonged exposure to an intense flame or radiation, neither would anyone he was inside of.

Complicating that matter further were two things. To go back to the previous analogy of cells as ants, that works for normal infections. But Conquest was as far above normal diseases as other Grimm were above normal animals. That didn't make him invincible by any means, since it was just a relative increase in durability, but if normal cells were ants, Conquest was a Rhinoceros Beetle. Durable as all hell in comparison, though still just a bug…but whatever was enough to kill it was probably going to kill a bunch of ants, as well.

Secondly, there was the issue of Aura. So long as he was inside someone, he was protected by their Aura. Normally, that wouldn't be a problem since that was true of any disease—but usually their Aura would also be fighting the invasion, doing its utmost to kill the sickness. That's how my healing could cure illnesses; they could assist that process, empowering someone's Aura enough that it could easily fight off most any illness or defend it while the body's immune system wailed on the disease with impunity. But for an infection like Conquest, their Aura was the problem. He'd turned their own life energy against them somehow and empowering it would just worsen things and accelerate the process. That must be why none of those healers had managed to cure the taken; as far as their Auras were concerned, there wasn't anything wrong. I could see their HP bars but they weren't going down, they were growing. The infected were becoming stronger, faster, healthier in every way beyond the fact that they were turning into monsters. Giving them more HP just…

It just helped the process. Somehow, I had to bypass that, get past all the issues to strike past the symptoms and attack the disease itself.

Yeah, I thought with a bit of chagrin. It sounds so simple when I thought of it like that; I wonder why we didn't live in a world free of sickness when it was so easy.

Perhaps I shouldn't think of it as a disease at all, then. Maybe I should consider it a status effect of some kind. I mean, diseases were status effects, but they were part of a larger category and while Soulforge Restoration could cure that specific subset of status ailments, the rest it could only touch second hand. I might be able to address the fact that Onyx was missing a leg, for instance, but if so, it would be by giving him a different status effect that countered the first—in this case, Regeneration. He had a wound that wouldn't normally heal as one status effect, I gave him vastly improved healing as another status effect, ideally they should cancel one another out eventually.

But Regeneration wouldn't help with this. Neither would any of the other buffs I'd learned. Then…

I needed to know more.

"I'm sorry, Jeremy," I whispered. Then my eyes hardened and I looked up. Levant directed the sound of my voice so that Ozpin could hear every word—because I had a feeling he was going to want to listen to this as well. "Conquest, let's continue our conversation."

There was a moment of silence as the thing in Jeremy's skin stared at me with blank eyes, watching me carefully. Weighing something, perhaps? Or—

"Very well," He answered. "What would you like to talk about?"

"Tell me why you're doing all of this," I said, eyes focused on him—and on what was going on inside him. I could see layers upon layers of bacteria and infected cells, moving and reacting, but was there something there I could use? If nothing else, it didn't hurt to know a little more about what made him tick and how he used his stolen body. "This trap was for us, the Hunters, so why bother with this village? There's no reason to kill them."

"By that logic, there was no reason to leave them alive, either," He shrugged and smiled at me. "But you're wrong—there's plenty of reason to kill them. I mean, if nothing else, there's always the entertainment value, right?"

My eyes flickered to meet his and I zoomed in quickly, scanning and memorizing the changes. Bacteria in the retinas, alongside the cone cells and in—

"Is that why?" I asked, moving slightly in place to see how his eyes tracked me. "Is this fun for you?"

"It's kind of fun," He nodded. "I guess you just got here, but you should have seen this place, oh, two minutes ago? It was amazing. When they realized what was happening…you had to be there."

"No," I said, taking a step back to look at him. The infection had started on his chest and extended to the rest of his body, but it hadn't been an equal or random spread. After the initial infection, Conquest had spread upwards, towards the brain and downwards to seize vital organs. The arms were left until afterwards, as were the legs. It made sense in a systematic sort of way, taking what was most important and what the host couldn't live without—he was careful about this. But the growth of spines…it had started on his front and back. Assuming the infection had originated on contact with the front of his chest, perhaps spread by one of the other taken, then it had expanded throughout the chest cavity quickly. Had he seized the heart before heading towards the brain or had this simply been a matter of invading the bloodstream?

Did it matter? I wasn't sure.

"There's more to this," I said after a moment of silent contemplation. "I've seen you all act too deliberately to accept that you're doing this just for kicks. I don't have any problem believing you're a monster, but there's more to this. What is it you're after?"

"Oh, right," Conquest said brightly. "I was going to tell you everything about my plan, wasn't I? Sorry, I forgot—okay, step one is I roll my eyes."

He did so.

"Step two is I give you the finger."

He did so.

"And step three is I wonder if you honestly expect me to tell you that," He finished and then gave me a flat look. "Do you honestly expect me to tell you that, idiot?"

He's gotten smarmier, I noted. Is it because of the host? It would make sense, in a certain way; if he took the memories and the brain, taking some degree of the personality would make sense, too. Thinking about it, I'd thought I'd seen elements of my father in my original conversation with Conquest, but I hadn't been sure if I was just projecting on him, seeing what I hoped to be there. But was it a mask? A guise Conquest as a way to get to me? Or were there simply elements that remained after he took them?

Maybe even elements that had to remain? That was a thought. If Semblances sprang from who we were, Conquest might have needed to keep certain elements in order to access his host's power. There was the question of how much could change and yet keep the core the same, but he'd said before that he knew a great deal about how Aura and Semblances worked; was it so hard to believe there were rules for doing so? Of course, that was nothing more than conjecture, but at least it wasn't completely baseless conjecture—there had to be a reason why he was acting this way. Whether for power or to seem human…though I suppose there was always the chance he was just doing it to fuck with people, too.

The memory of texts about previous outbreaks rose in my mind, about how the taken had cried out for help and for their loved ones or how some had ranted about personal things. No, interesting as the theory was, I couldn't dismiss the thought that he might just be doing this to be an asshole. But…

"It was worth a shot," I said out loud, considering him carefully. "Very well then, let's be professional about this. You're a bacterial Grimm. From what I've seen, you draw…what, inspiration? Inspiration from various species of bacteria, maybe even a few viruses just for fun. You invade a body, rewrite it to serve your purpose and basically mutate your host into…what do you call these bodies? Hybrids? They aren't Grimm, not fully—they still have souls. You just use them as a…food source? A battery? A hive? A weapon? And who knows what else. But you need to keep your hosts alive to get what you want out of them."

"For several definitions of—"

"For several definitions of alive," I finished for him. "You said that, yes. But what does it mean? You invade the brain, obviously—that's how you get to your host's memories. But what do you do? Do you infect the brain cells? Copy them? What?"

Conquest smirked and said nothing because he was an asshole. But it was fine; silence could speak louder than words if you asked the right questions—which I hoped I was doing. And hell, at least Ozpin would hear anything we said. Assuming I didn't make it out of this alive, every little bit I could give him would help.

"I was worried you destroyed your host completely," I continued. "That you ate all their brain cells or whatever. But I don't think so—I don't think you can without losing something. You said before that we'd lost a lot of knowledge about…Aura and Semblances. And maybe that's true, but we still know a little bit. We know Semblances are unique and they arise from their wielder's personalities."

I paused and frowned as he chuckled and looked at me with a wide grin.

"It's amazing how you can say something that's correct and still sound like an idiot," He said. "But true enough."

My frown deepened for a moment before I kept going.

"The point being, I don't think you can just destroy someone's mind and personality and overwrite them with your own, not if you want to keep them useful. I think there's more to it than that. How you act when you're talking to me…I think there are remnants of your host's personality. I think there has to be. So what do you do to their minds? Are you altering their perceptions somehow? Burying them down deep inside? Taking control of their voluntary muscles? What?"

Conquest yawned—again, probably just to be an asshole—and shrugged.

"Good questions," He said. "Though an impartial observer might not you seem to have built your entire theory on ifs and guesses."

I watched him carefully for a moment and then smiled.

"Not completely," I said. "See, there is one thing I'm sure of?"

He lifted an eyebrow, the one that hadn't been covered by his growing mask yet.

"Oh?"

"You're a dick," I said. "You like to hurt people?"

"With brilliant observations like that, I fear for my species. I'm sure you'll overcome us any day now."

I ignored that, leaning forward.

"But you haven't call me son once in this conversation," I continued. "Or mentioned my mom and dad."

He met my eyes for a moment, sighed, and then gave a small chuckle.

"Maybe not completely hopeless…"

"The whole 'Grimm Hive Mind' thing has been a theory for God only knows how long, but it's not very well supported. Most Grimm are all but mindless, at least at first, and they don't act like a hive mind would. Sure, you can work together—maybe even all of you can work together—but that just means you can cooperate really well, it doesn't mean there's a single mind controlling you all. If there was, if each of you learned every time a single one of you encountered a threat…well, things would be different. Even a Beowolf could be threatening with that much experience behind it. No, it doesn't make sense for you all to be of one mind; individual Grimm learn and grow stronger by surviving battles, but you all don't. But when I saw you…"

I looked at him closely again, watched dark cells meet and separate.

"At first, I thought back to that theory," I said at last, wondering if I could use this. "There's so many of you and you're so old, how else could you do this? But then, why do you work that way and not the other Grimm? You don't. You just…you share information like bacteria do, genetic or otherwise. You're not all knowing, you just talk to yourself a lot."

"Poor communication kills," Conquest replied before smiling. "But good communication kills a hell of a lot more."

I felt a flash of triumph at that and nearly smiled. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

"That's one of the things that sets you apart," I guessed. "Unlike most Grimm, you can communicate experiences, like…like sharing immunities. Like any Grimm, you survive and learn, but you pass that information on to others like you in some twisted form of bacterial conjugation. And then a lot of you come together to…create a consciousness? Like pieces of a puzzle, made out of information and memories. Do your form tissues? Or maybe bacterial mats are a better analogy in your case."

"Hmph," Conquest snorted, but he was smiling as he watched me.

"When I remember you're based on bacteria, how you work makes a bit more sense," I pursed my lips. "And the shells…they aren't actually shells, are they? They're more like spores. But how do you…"

I was silent for a moment.

"The bodies you steal," I said at last.

"It's funny, because you don't look smart," Conquest snorted. "That's right. I do my thing, I have my fun, and when it's time I move on to the next stage and grow a shell around these bodies. You should see some of the places I've been, kid—the forests of bone."

I could imagine. Cities that fell to him, populations erased, and all that was left were fields and fields of white, boney shells waiting for the right time to open up again.

"You won't tell me anything useful," I mused, pondering him. "Not without knowing what you've already said and why. I bet you only talked to me in the first place because I knew your first name. But…I think I've learned a lot, regardless. Thank you, Conquest—and you as well, Jeremy. With any luck, I'll come back for you later. Bind."

I tied up Jeremy's body and tossed him aside, deciding to leave him on the roof for now.

"You get all that, Ozpin?" I whispered quietly, making my words carry.

"Loud and clear," The headmaster answered somberly. "I recorded it, as well. Good job, Jaune. If you can—"

"Jaune," Onyx's voice interrupted, sounding urgent. "What the hell is happening on the east side?"

I turned my head and saw a building collapse.

"Nothing good," I answered back. "I'll check it out, Onyx. Ozpin, can it wait a minute. I have a feeling we found the other Hunters. I thought this was going too well."