RWBY Through Worlds

165: An Apocalypse

The rest of the day passed in a blur.

Oscar hardly remembered most of it later.

He knew that they took Victoria to the medical tent, and the medics didn't look very happy about her condition.

Also that Wally found the source of the Apathy. It wasn't that far inside the tunnels. It also wasn't a river--it was more like a weird anemone-shaped Grimm that just spat out new ones.

Anyway, Wally and Shine apparently destroyed it with little trouble. It was already weakened.

The Huntresses and many Vacuo huntsmen, who were now awake, hunted down the rest of the Apathy, with some help from the B squad who hadn't gone into the kingdom before, Yang and Ren among them.

With no new Apathy coming, the other ones' influence got weaker as more of them were killed off, and even though a few might have evaded the hunt for now, they would be a minor problem without their pack and could be weeded out eventually

But the bulk of the plague was over. 

People who were too weak to get up were given as much medical aid as they could. Most of them might just need rest.

Some huntsmen with the stomach for it were also taking stock of the dead and probably too far gone.

They were at that till long after sundown.

Meanwhile the main team moved the plane with the Relics farther inside the city limits, and Glynda sealed it inside a wall of mismatched items.

They also put a guard around it.

Then Glynda and Jaune went to Shade, which Wally and some of the others had been working to move the people out of--no one who'd been asleep still inside it seemed to have been hurt by the collapse.

Theo said to bury the students among them in one of the tunnels and just seal it off. He said it was fitting that Shade students should rest by their school--and the others, well, they couldn't really do better anyway.

So many people had died that a specific memorial for each of them was impossible, but the huntsmen talked of maybe having some small ceremony in the next few days.

The citizens who'd woken up now were in great distress once they understood what happened, and there was a lot of wailing and anger all over Vacuo that night.

Shine, who was back to normal mostly, except that she was still rather shaken up, told some of them that the crying and mourning reminded her a lot of the book of Exodus, where the same thing had happened after the plague of death.

At least no one was tired after all that, physically. Emotionally, on the other hand...

Glynda, with Jaune's help, put Shade back into one piece. It really wasn't so hard--it wasn't broken into that many different ones, it was just big. It should be able to be used for shelter.

That felt weird to some of the kids, but Qrow told them that you couldn't be that picky, especially in a place where not that many people had a real house anyway. Most places, he said, if they stood long enough, had both deaths and other events in them. It didn't really make much of a difference.

But they had nowhere else they could stay anyway.

Oscar felt drained. He noticed that Winter also didn't seem to feel that much better, even though most of the others had recovered from the Apathy's effects.

He thought perhaps both of them were bothered more than the others, for different reasons.

But he didn't want to think about it yet.