Ruby didn't really think it could be considered her fault they were lost in the wilderness, how was she supposed to know the portal would close after they went through? Still that didn't change the fact that they were now lost, and none of the team could pick up a signal

It wasn't only that though, there hadn't been any signs of people or even any animals in the hours they had been walking.

The sun was beginning to go down when Ruby suggested they make camp for the night, with Ruby and Blake gathering firewood, the entire time they were rummaging through the forest floor they didn't find a single bug, just discarded leaves and sticks with nothing but the wind to disturb them.

While Ruby and Blake wer gathering firewood, Weiss was clearing the brush in the clearing while Yang was tending to a small fire, they didn’t find anything to eat and had to dig into the rations they brought along, and they only had a few days of food, a huntsman was supposed to be able to live off the land, but there was nothing here but trees.

The team were taking turns keeping watch overnight, and it was during Blakes watch that the camp was attacked, and it wasnt by grimm either, dozens of horse sized beetles ran into the clearing and charged straight at Blake and the rest of the still sleeping team, who quickly woke the rest of the team before charging towards the bugs, using her agility to cut quite a few bugs to shreds, and buying time for the rest of the team to enter the fight, with Yang jumping right into the fray alongside her, Ruby providing overwatch and sniping any bugs that flanked the 2 melee fighters, and with Weiss using her glyphs to provide the rest of the team openings.

The fight didn't last long, only taking around 10 minutes, still the corpses were not disappearing and Yang and Blake were covered with ichor and bits of bug. Grimm disappeared when they died, these didn't, not to mention that the bugs were a more earthy brown than a grimms black, white, and red.

With Blake and Yang being busy trying to clean the bits of bug out of their outfits and hair, and failing miserably, Weiss and Ruby finally took notice of the sky. It had been night for a while now, and there was still no sign of the moon.

The teams camp had been attacked twice more through the night, making the team tired and irritable, and no member of the team had managed to stay clean of bug ichor by the time the sun had risen, making the whole team tired, irritable and sticky.

They had set out again after eating a few of their rations, they had been attacked several more times by the bugs while they were walking, covering the team in yet more ichor and dirt, Yang had been knocked into a pile of leave and had been spending the last 10 minutes of the walk trying to pull the leaves out of her hair, but the blood had caused it to stick.

So the entire team was tired and low on dust when they came across a creek, and it was Yang that was the first to enter the water. If she didn't have an aura or if Blake hadn't chopped the serrated tentacle off, Yang could have lost a leg. And she was still pulled underwater for a few seconds before Blake had cut her free.

So now half the team was soaked and irritable, if slightly more clean, and the other half was just irritable and sticky.

Weiss and Ruby were beginning to think they would never actually get a signal or even find a settlement. There had still been no sign of any people or animals besides the giant bugs, and no one on the team had ever even heard of these bug creatures before, and the sky didn't have a moon at night, still no one outright said what they were all thinking, they just left the creek after carefully refilling their waters and continued searching the woods for any sign of people.

It was the second night when things got really bad though, it was Yangs watch but the entire team woke up when the forest started shaking, Ruby and Weiss were almost out of dust, and Yang was low on aura, so the team might have ran even if it was an ordinary attack by the normal sized bugs, but those bugs didn't shake the earth when they ran, and the team didn't even stick around to see what was causing it before they ran.

So the team wasn't there when the 20 meter long bugs tore through their old camp, destroying the fire before setting out in the direction the team went, following the scent of bitter blood.

The team had been running in the dark for around an hour now, and they could all still hear the skittering bugs chasing them, shaking the earth. The bugs were still far off but an enhanced aura would improve one's senses, and so each member of team rwby knew they were still being tracked.

It was Blake that pointed out that it was probably the blood the bugs were chasing, still they didn't exactly have water to scrub the blood off, and it was sticky enough that water might not even work.

It was after another ten minutes of running that Ruby came up with a solution, they just needed to cover the blood with dirt, the hardest part of that plan was getting Weiss to actually cover herself with dirt, but they were all tired and Weiss didn't have the energy to put up much of an argument.

It was after another half hour of running that the team realized covering themselves in dirt had done nothing to make the bugs lose their trail, and the time they had spent covering themselves with dirt had allowed the bugs to gain on them.

Seemingly realizing that they couldn't run forever, they were all tired from the lack of sleep and constant fights, the team stopped in a large clearing to try and make a stand, so it was a bit of a shock for them to see a dozen tanks ram through the trees behind them, each surrounded by dozens of robots, it was even more confusing for the tanks to just ignore them and drive in the direction of the bugs.

The team listened as explosions and screams echoed from the forest, and they could see large swaths of trees falling in the distance, and they were all suddenly glad that they hadn't needed to fight the bugs in the clearing after all.

No one in the team was really surprised when the helicopter landed in the clearing with them, it was a bit odder that no one came out to greet them, and that there was no cockpit window, still the back hatch was down and the sounds of battle were getting closer, so the team got into the helicopter.

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Balistraia was annoyed, she had been trying to catch up with the humans being chased by bugs for hours now but they each seemed to have significantly enhanced speed and agility, easily outrunning both the bugs and her own forces.

Byzantine had spotted some odd bug movements on the radar a few days ago and Balistria was sent to investigate, which led her to finding the group of 4 humans, they had seemingly angered every bug hive within kilometers of their location and had been seemingly fighting for a day before Balistraria found them, which made it all the more annoying that the humans had managed to attract a raiding parties attention, Balistraia had been maybe a few dozen minutes from arriving at their camp when they began fleeing again, necessitating the hours long chase through the forest.

Still the bugs were chasing them in a roughly straight line, so that made it simple to send some forces to come in from the other direction and head them off, which was why Balistraia was surprised that the humans stopped running, just stopping in the middle of a clearing, speeding up her scout tanks to delay the bug horde she quickly sent one of her supply helicopters to pick up the humans before the bugs could catch them.

And that was how Balistraia acquired 4 blood soaked, dirt covered, and exhausted humans.

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The first thing the team noticed about the helicopter was the lack of seating, the second was that it was full of ammunition, explosives, metal, and deactivated versions of those floating robots that had gone with the tanks. The team quickly cleared a spot to sit and yang immediately fell asleep, but the rest of the team stayed awake, quickly entering a hushed discussion about what was going on, Ruby thought it was a swarm of rogue robots, Weiss thought it was an advanced army unit, and Blake just wanted to know what they were going to do next as they were running out of ammunition, had been lost in the woods for days, and had now just boarded a random helicopter that was taking them to some unknown location.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

After a few minutes of talking and realizing they had no real plan, Blake went to take a nap, while Weiss and Ruby explored the cargo bay, Ruby immediately setting out to disassemble a robot to get to its gun, it had a focusing lens rather than a regular barrel and she didn't think the tanks would be taking cameras into battle, and Weiss started trying to find a hatch into the cockpit or even just an intercom system, she had no luck.

Ruby however had managed to pry the casing off of the drone she was disassembling, and was startled when a hatch in the ceiling dropped out another drone, who took the drone and its casing and put them back together, before putting the drone back in the pile it came from and disappearing through the hatch again.

Deciding it was best not to anger the robots apparently watching them, ruby sat down next to the sleeping yang and started doing some gun maintenance, all the blood had slightly gummed up the mechashift and was increasing shift time, she was once again surprised by the ceiling hatch opening and tightly held her gun, she wasn't letting the drone touch her weapon, even if it would make the robot swarm angry with her.

It was slightly anticlimactic then when the drone just left a small toolkit next to her before disappearing again.

The ride passed quietly from then on, with only Yang's snoring and Weiss's angry searching and complaining to break the silence. After a few hours the ship began to slow and Ruby woke Blake and Yang up, there was a dull thunk and the hatch the drone was in opened, this time 2 drones came out, and each were holding a pair of gas masks, a quick debate was held over whether they should actually put them on, but if the anyone wanted to posion them the cargo bay was airtight and they wouldn't need to use gas masks to do it.

After the team put on their gas masks the hatch on the back of the helicopter opened, showing a sprawling expanse of rail lines and conveyor belts, all leading towards a massive stone wall that was absolutely bristling with different gun turrets, and hundreds of the floating robots were ferrying resources about or doing maintenance on the various machines working around or on the walls, all of it covered in a film of smog that was pouring from the massive construction, as the group of students stared in awe they heard a loud meow from in front of them, there was a large robotic tiger standing in front of them, with large claws and a mouth full of serrated teeth, Ruby immediately started trying to pet it, and Blake preemptively slapped Yang’s arm, who then just smirked at the other girl.

The rest of the team was a little disconcerted when the tiger bot started actually purring, before it shook Ruby’s hand off its neck and started leading the girl towards the wall, as the team got closer to the wall they could see faint etching showing up on it, from what looked like a humanoid robot, to fractals, vines, flowers, stars, and various giant bugs, making the entire outwall one giant work of art, one arguably improved by the presence of the massive guns covering it.

The metal tiger led them towards a hatch in the side of the base that was seeing numerous tiger drones in and out. Ruby squeed and ran ahead to pet them, followed by Yang, who was chased herself by Blake and Weiss, leaving the metal tiger in the dust behind them. While Yang was busy making sure Ruby didn't get bit by an angry tiger Blake and Weiss went through the hatch, entering into a dark space, which was soon lit up by overhead lights, illuminating a massive cargo bay, just as the lights turned on the metal tiger they had been following turned back up, dragging Ruby behind it, with her arm in its jaws. Blake thought the tiger looked annoyed with the girl, though she didn't know how a metal tiger could look annoyed.

It quickly lead them on a winding path through the cargo bay, and they soon arrived at another wall, this one with gold etchings of various vehicles and robots defending a building against a giant tide of bugs, Weiss absently noted that it was real gold to the astonishment of the rest of the team, even if it was just a thin layer the amount of gold needed to fill in all the etchings was absurd. And the wall was still covered in hundreds of turrets.

The next section of the building showed were the gold had come from, a wave of heat hit the students as they saw hundreds of furnaces smelting the ore from outside into metal, rivers of iron and copper flowed throughout this section, and various other metals could be seen, even what looks like hundreds of pounds of gold, all being carried on conveyor belts towards the next section.

The tiger took care not to take them too close to the furnaces, and even if their auras could handle the heat it didn't look pleasant.

The trip through this zone was even faster than the last, there was an empty conveyor belt they rode to the next wall, this one showing what looked like a man in a gasmask directing swarms of drones to build a factory, while another image showed this same man fighting off swarms of small bugs with a swarm of drones and a shotgun, he had a sword slung around his waist, and a third showing the man crawling out of a river in a shattered and torn suit of armor, holding a broken trident and sword, in the water faint outlines of eyes, tentacles and teeth could be seen, and it seemed like the water itself was staring at the group, there was even an etching of the man in the torn armor building a tiger out of scraps of metal from his own broken armor and weapons.

The entire thing was made out of precious metals and gemstones and the turrets here were incorporated into the design, though still in great numbers and the turrets there looked far more advanced than any seen before.

The next section was somehow even hotter than the last, and it was apparently were the actual products were manufactured, thousands of weapons were being manufactured, tanks, planes, missiles, guns, dozens of different drones, turrets, and hundreds of other things were being built, this one section was producing more equipment than most cities, and this was only one small part of the production layer.

The tiger lead them on a winding path through this layer, not actually taking them towards the next wall, but rather to what look like a stairwell down, still the team could see the next wall, and it was less gaudy than the outerwall, showing what looked like the man alone in a forest, surrounded by trees and vines, there were various scenes of him building and designing a base, constructing machines and building walls, all by hand.

The tiger led them down towards the stairwell and then curled up at the top of the stairs, as ruby lead the way down the path, her curiosity overcoming her caution, she found 5 doors, each but the last leading to a room with a small bed and tiny desk, and another door in the rooms leading to a bathroom, which thankfully had a shower, each of the four rooms were identical, and the last just had a larger table with chairs, with 4 sealed trays and some cups resting on the table.

The team immediately set about exploring the area, the mattress on the beds were thin, and the blankets were too, each bed had 2 soft pillows, the bathrooms had towels, scrub brush and a single thing of soap each, there was a cabinet in the kitchen with some dishes, seemingly no cameras, and the walls were covered with etchings of vines growing along fractals. And the doors to each room could lock from the inside.

Once they had each finished looking around they met up in one of the rooms, and quickly deciding that they weren't going to sleep in separate rooms they moved all the beds into the room nearest the kitchen, after once again checking for cameras they each took turns showering, even if they didn't have spare outfits getting the blood of their skin and the bits of bug out of their hair was a priority.

Once they had each finished cleaning they went to the kitchen and tried the food, about the only thing any of them managed to eat was the fish and salad, and Weiss struggled to eat that, though Blake ate more of the plant sludge than anyone else.

After deciding who would take first watch, Yang as she slept the most on the way over, the team settled in to sleep, it was the first night of uninterrupted sleep they had on Navius, with only the sound of moving machinery to disturb them.