Chapter Text
There is a point, Adam knows, when he hits his limit. It's not a matter of willpower, grit, determination, whatever fucking word someone thinks can stand between desire and reality. He is finite. What he can contain, finite.
His semblance, too, is finite. Absorption without expulsion is death. He cannot bank energy endlessly; eventually, it hits a limit. Training has raised that limit, but it still exists, permanent and inevitable. A hundred punches, bullets, blades; a dozen aura-enhanced blows or dust-infused attacks; one spider droid's supercharged cannon. Add them up. Hold them. And then unleash them, or be consumed by them.
Training taught him exactly where that limit is. He knows it. Plans for it. Fights around it.
This one, he hadn't known. Couldn't plan for. Can't fight.
So much has added up.
So much.
As he climbs the fire escape of this evacuated building, old rusting metal flaking off under his gloves, he fancies being able to hear the voices rising up from underground. Dozens upon dozens of them, screaming and crying and begging from a grave they don't yet see. Falling silent one by one, each of them entombed forever in the dark below the earth.
He cannot hold it anymore.
He is at his limit.
When he activates it, his aura washes over him in a crimson wave. Lingering power from the Grimm he encountered on the way here tickles at his awareness, an itch he can't scratch.
Hold, he tells himself, because that limit has not yet been reached.
His scroll rings for the umpteenth time. Lieutenants and sergeants and captains in his forces all desperate for new orders. Guidance. Leadership. They've just lost so many. Can they mount rescue efforts? Where should they start? What's next? Leader, what do we do next?
It rings and rings and rings. He has no answers for them. He has no room for answers. He is at his limit.
Real voices wash over him as he steps onto the building's flat roof. Cinder, and to her left, her two lackeys. Emerald and Mercury. Overlooking the plaza where the tomb was sealed. Enjoying the evening sun and breeze like this is just one more day in the thousands they believe are left for them.
"All in all," her voice is so calm and pleased it makes his skin itch, "I call today a success."
Emerald peers over the edge at the piles of broken machines and debris from the fighting that sprang up after the train punched up into Vale. "Those kids really made a mess of things."
"Yeah," Mercury drawls. "A lot of faunus didn't make it out of those tunnels. You still think the White Fang is gonna listen to us?"
Listen. If he sharpens his hearing with aura, Adam thinks, he might actually be able to hear those trapped faunus, not just imagined echoes.
He can't do that. There is no room for anything else. He is at his limit.
"No."
They turn at the sound of his voice. If they're surprised, they don't show it; Cinder regards him like she'd expected him to show all along. Never a chink in her armor. Never a crack in the facade. If she has limits, he doesn't know them.
Limits. Limits and limits and limits.
They're screaming, down there, even if he can't hear them. Buried alive. Waiting for death to come. What guise will it wear for them? Grimm? Starvation? Suffocation?
They screamed, down there, even when he wasn't there to hear them. They screamed and no one listened.
His heart pounds in his chest with force enough to shake his bones.
They screamed.
No one listened.
It's too easy, really. They can't see what's in his eyes, what's built under his mask and what he's kept locked behind his teeth. They let him get close. So close. One step after another, boot heels thudding against the rooftop. Each breath brings the faint scents of oil, metal, blood, and Grimm.
Cinder is so certain he's under her control. Leashed, obedient. She doesn't even have her aura activated; there's no prickling sense of potential around her. Nor around Emerald, nor Mercury.
They can sense his aura, of course. The first hint of suspicion—curiosity, really, like watching a dog trying to perform a new trick—tightens around Cinder's eyes.
There is a point, one perfect moment, when he unleashes his fully-charged semblance and achieves perfection. It is not an itch scratched but sundered. That energy scours through him like a firestorm and brings a flare of ecstasy that eclipses his whole world. It's pure adrenaline, teething bloodlust, and complete catharsis crammed into that fraction of a second when the power erupts out of him and obliterates whatever stands in his way.
He doesn't expect this to be any different.
One instant. One blink. One trigger pull. Wilt in his hands, drawn with explosive force, all of that momentum transferred to a straight thrust. His semblance concentrated at the tip, the bleeding edge, which cuts through her passive aura like it isn't even there at all.
Suspicion becomes surprise, becomes nothing at all.