Penny crawled behind some of the various cogs that lay strewn atop the CCT tower, using them as cover in case Cinder started throwing more lightning around, as she and Cinder stared each other down.

Cinder, wincing in incredible pain, reached for her scroll. When she tried to open it, she found it cracked and useless.

Penny had already started a subroutine to call Mister Ironwood for help. She wanted to call Ruby, but with the CCT tower in pieces around her, the signal could never reach Atlas. In hindsight, had she thought of it, she might have come up with a plan for Ruby to pick her up before Ruby carried off Pyrrha.

"Cinder," Penny said, her face etched with concern but not a hint of pain, "Some of my friends are coming. I need you to promise not to hurt them."

"Are you serious?" Cinder gasped, glaring at the girl. The woman was ripping at her dress, and tying the scraps of cloth into makeshift bandages to slow the bleeding.

"You're injured! You might die if we don't get it treated!" Penny said.

"They'll just kill me anyway," Cinder said.

"Vale doesn't have the death penalty," Penny added.

"Doesn't matter. They need to kill me. I have what they want," Cinder replied, as if that somehow explained everything.

Penny looked Cinder over. She was bleeding pretty badly, and her legs bent in all the wrong ways. She said conversationally, as if her own injuries didn't bother her at all, "If we leave you here, it's fifty-fifty you bleed out in the next hour. And almost certain you never walk again. And that's assuming the Grimm don't get you."

"Screw you," Cinder said between ragged breaths. "I have overcome everything Vale had to throw at me, I will overcome this. I don't need your pity! So just shove your help up your ass!"

Cinder was in really bad shape, Penny suspected that in an hour Cinder's permission to send help would be a moot point. Still, as much as the woman may have been trying to kill herself, it wouldn't be right to leave her here to die. "Someone is coming," Penny said. "And you are entering shock. Either let them pick us up, or you will die."

Cinder glared at Penny between her heavy breaths, before finally deciding, "...Fine. I won't kill them."

"Sen-sational!" Penny replied, as Cinder inwardly cursed the machine's sunny smile.

VVVVVV

General Ironwood was having a really bad day. Definitely in the top ten worst days of his career.

He was hoping for a nice peaceful tournament match that would demonstrate the capabilities of project P.E.N.N.Y.

Instead he discovered that Doctor Polendina killed P.E.N.N.Y. in the most literal possible way, he had to deal with an invasion force that included his own robotic defenses being used against him, and now he had to coordinate a full retreat from Beacon Academy as it was being overrun by Grimm.

So when he picked up the phone, he knew it was not going to be plesant.

"Salutations Mister Ironwood! Could you send a bullhead to the top of the CCT?" Penny's chipper voice asked.

"Why," Ironwood said. What is Penny even doing out here? What was Ruby thinking, sending her into the middle of this?

"Cinder Fall, she murdered a huntswoman and I'm pretty sure she narrated the invasion broadcast, is injured really badly up here with me. Now we're both stuck up here."

Ironwood could already feel a headache coming on. "That is going to be difficult. The place is swarming with avian grimm, and there is a dragon holding the place down."

"Oh don't worry," Penny said, "The dragon was taken care of. Las Noches sent their men out."

"That..." Ironwood said, looking for words as he shot his 16th beowulf of the day, "That is the first piece of good news I've heard all day."

"So can you send a bullhead?" Penny asked.

"Every hospital in the city is packed," Ironwood said. "All emergency services are tied up." Or at least too tied up to pick up a mass murderer.

Penny paused, which Ironwood knew meant she was running through one of her conversation modeling algorithms. Which meant she was about to say something to change his mind, Ironwood internally groaned.

Penny finally said, "Wouldn't it look really good if Atlas captures the woman responsible for the invasion? We could use her to show that we didn't send our robots against Vale. But if she's dead, no one will believe she wasn't just a scapegoat."

Ironwood knew it. Penny always knew exactly what to say when she put her algorithms to it. "...I'll send a bullhead."

"Sen-sational!" Penny replied. Sometimes, Ironwood felt like he was spoiling the girl.

VVVVVV

Harribel looked at the crowd of cheering people. While she knew that this is what she wanted, to make the arrancar from an unknown faction to a known faction, there were more people in front of her now than in all of Hueco Mundo. A lesser arrancar might be intimidated.

"Two nights ago Vale was attacked on all sides. By terrorists, by the Grimm, and by its own machines. Beacon was nearly lost, and with it, I feared Vale would be gone as well. All because of your inability to combat the Grimm."

"Make no mistake, your hunters are supremely trained for their tasks. But the Grimm have shown their true strength that night when they called down a mountainous dragon upon your towers. No one hunter can be expected to take down such a beast."

"But the soldiers of Hueco Mundo can. Grimmjow the dragonslayer can. And I can. For that is the strength of Hueco Mundo!"

"We will harness power that transcends life and death, and feast on the hordes posed against this world. We will force the Grimm to bow their heads to us, and if they do not? We will crush their skulls beneath our heels as we devour their comrades before them! We shall make them our prey, and they shall know fear, and they shall hide from us, or they shall be consumed by us. For that is our way!"

"Now who among you will join us!" Harribel shouted into the crowd, finishing her speech at it's climax to the cheers of the hundreds invited to this press conference.

And although Harribel steeled her eyes, she allowed herself a smile behind her high collar.

VVVVVV

Epilogue

VVVVVV

"Are you sure this is a good idea?" Pyrrha asked Dr. Polendina.

"It's either do it now in a controlled environment, or have you rampage in an uncontrolled environment later," Dr. Polendina replied, bolt cutters in hand. "Ruby, get ready."

"Right," Ruby said with a nod.

Polendina looked at Pyrrha and explained, "As discussed, this is going to hurt a lot. I do not have a painkiller that works on souls and hollows. Are you still ready for that?" Pyrrha nodded. "Bite on this," Doctor Polendina said, handing Pyrrha a mouth guard. He then took the bolt cutters, and snipped into the last chain link on Pyrrha's chest.

Pyrrha groaned in pain, and the doctor quickly snipped the other half of the chain link, dropping the chain to the floor.

Then, he ran for the door with Ruby, as Pyrrha and her cries of pain dissipated into the room.

"She should reform as a hollow in the next 10 to 20 seconds!" the doctor shouted. "Don't worry, I painted the room in dust to keep her from escaping, just, hold her down!"

"Got it!" Ruby said, entering her ressureccion moments before they heard howling start coming out of the room. Ruby rushed in first, pinning the minotaur that her friend had become in a full-nelson with all here werewolf strength as the doctor brought in his electric bonesaw and his cauterizing burn dust solution.

But the moment he brought the bonesaw to Pyrrha's face, the hollow wailed out in a feral fury, and the saw was telekinetically hurled from the doctor's hands.

"Her semblance!" the doctor shouted, ducking his head as the circular saw swirled around the room. "It must have carried over! Ruby, I need you to rip off her mask by hand!"

Ruby was thrown off of Pyrrha, who was now staring Dr. Polendina down as the doctor slowly backed away. As the minotaur lunged at the doctor, Ruby sonido'd in front of it, grabbed Pyrrha's mask in both claws, and pulled as hard as she could through the minotaur's slashes, until she was able to rip off the whole thing.

"Ruby?" Pyrrha said.

"Pyrrha!" Ruby gladly replied.

"Out of the way, I need to finish the procedure." Doctor Polendina said, painting his caustic flamedust solution to the ripped edges of the already-reforming mask before it could heal, while Pyrrha winced. Once he was finished, only the horns of the mask remained as Pyrrha shredded her hollow traits. Literally shredded, there were huge clumps of hair falling off of her and dissolving on the floor. Once the hair cleared itself, all that was left was a simple spear and some mask fragments.

Gasping for breath, Polendina shouted "Success!" before collapsing into the nearest chair.

"Mirror?" Pyrrha asked, to which Ruby offered Pyrrha her scroll.

Pyrrha... looked pretty normal, except for boney horns. Although the hollow hole spot was weird.

"Huh, weird place for a hollow hole. Why the heel?" Ruby asked.

"When I was fighting Cinder, I was shot there," Pyrrha explained. "She shot me in the heart right after."

"Huh," Polendina huffed. "I'll have to look into whether odd hollow hole locations indicate previous wounds," Polendina said between huge breaths of air. "Most arrancar don't remember their past lives well enough to verify, for various reasons," he continued between ragged breaths. "You'll want the spear, it's for your release."

"Release?" Pyrrha asked.

"Oh yeah, now you get magic transfomation powers," Ruby said. "You know, like that show with the high school girls using magic, except instead of changing clothes, the transformation changes your skin."

"4 out of 5 human arrancar has a ressureccion, according to the notes I got from Doctor Granz," Doctor Polendina added. "The fifth will have never left their ressureccion in the first place."

"So it's like Ruby's werewolf thing," Pyrrha said.

"Exactly!" Ruby replied.

The 3 spent the rest of the afternoon going over the details of arrancar daily life, Grimm eating, and checking out Pyrrha's ability to transform into a seven-foot-tall minotaur person.

VVVVVV

Author's Note: Yeah, I might write more later, maybe I'll clean this up but I'm going to leave this for now. It was a pleasure writing for you all!