The sound of destruction became a living thing.
Each of Qrow's monstrous crow forms tore through the Grimm surgeons like living hurricanes, black feathers slicing the air with a shriek that cracked the tiles and ruptured glass. Their wings beat so fast the air appeared to turn molten, every movement trailing arcs of black and scarlet light. The titanic Grimm constructs—those warped surgeons stitched together from nightmare and bone—tried to reform, clawing and stretching their melted bodies back into shape, but the crows were merciless.
They fell upon them in a synchronized frenzy—beaks like obsidian blades, claws cleaving through limbs thick as trees. Each impact released a burst of black light that shattered what little cohesion the amalgamations had left. Within moments, what had once been towering horrors was nothing more than a writhing sea of black sludge.
The ground boiled with it. The mush churned, birthing smaller Grimm shapes—half-formed beetles, warped mantises, crawling things without faces—that screamed once before disintegrating under the shockwaves of the continued battle.
The squad huddled behind the broken remains of a wall, watching the carnage unfold. The wind pressure from the giant crows alone was enough to push them backward with every wingbeat.
Nora squinted through the swirling ash. "I can't even see where one of them ends and the next one starts!"
Weiss' hair whipped wildly across her face as she braced her rapier into the ground, creating a small barrier to steady their footing. "You shouldn't try! It's like watching a natural disaster with feathers!"
Yang leaned forward just enough to peer past the edge of broken debris that acted as a wall. Her eyes gleamed faintly amber, reflecting the chaos above. "He's seriously wrecking everything."
Ruby's hood whipped behind her in the gale, eyes wide in a mix of awe and disbelief. "That's… that's Qrow?"
"Technically six of him," Blake muttered. "And one... Raven."
True enough—the massive black raven, the one that had fought beside Qrow earlier, now hung back near the far end of the ward. Its wings folded partially as it watched the destruction unfold, a silent sentinel amidst madness. The shadowy creature didn't interfere. It simply observed, golden eyes gleaming with something too sharp, too knowing.
Ruby followed its gaze, heart pounding. The ground itself was changing. The black liquid remnants of the surgeons were spreading outward, seeping into the tile like blood. Thin veins began to branch faster across the ceiling now, pulsing faintly red with each beat.
Jaune noticed it too. "That doesn't look normal. Something is changing."
Blake gave him a flat look. "Define 'normal.'"
Before anyone could respond, the floor lurched violently.
The quake came without warning—an explosion of motion that threw them all off balance. Chunks of concrete crashed from the ceiling, and fissures tore through the ground like lightning. One of Qrow's monstrous crow bodies slammed into a far wall, wings folding as it twisted to recover, but the sound that followed wasn't one of victory.
It was a roar.
Deep. Primordial. It wasn't sound so much as force—a vibration that made every bone in their bodies shudder.
The air rippled. The black sludge covering the floor convulsed violently, bubbling in response.
Ren's voice came from above them. "Oh. That's not good."
They all snapped their heads upward just in time to see him dropping from the hole in the ceiling. The glow of his rune frame flickered faintly around him and his boots as he descended, controlling his fall with calculated bursts of recoil. He landed beside them in a crouch, brushing dust off his armor like he hadn't just jumped a thousand meters.
"Yo," he said simply.
Yang stared. "That's your grand entrance? 'Yo'?"
Ren glanced toward the chaos, then shrugged. "Seemed appropriate."
Ruby grinned despite herself, the tension breaking for only a moment before the ceiling above them groaned.
They all looked up.
From the gaping wound in the ceiling—the same one Ren had blasted open earlier—something was emerging.
The arterial veins pulsed faster now, glowing like molten circuitry beneath the cracked stone. The flesh-like black material of the ceiling convulsed outward, folding, stretching, reshaping itself as if something was being born from within.
Jaune took an involuntary step backward. "That… that's not just more surgeons, is it?"
Behind them, another presence appeared—a ripple of displaced air and the faint scent of ash.
"No," said a familiar voice.
They turned. Qrow stood there again. In human form again this time, and his expression unreadable. His face was half-shadowed by the flickering red light from above.
Ruby blinked in confusion. "Wait—weren't you—"
Qrow tilted his head toward one of his many monstrous forms still ripping into the last of the surgeon mush. "Yeah. Those ones are busy. I'm this one."
Yang just stared. "You can split yourself and multitask? That's cheating."
He smirked faintly. "You call it cheating, I call it job efficiency. Your friend over there can do the same, you know?" He tilted his head to Blake.
"Yeah, but she can't turn into Kaiju crows."
Qrow shrugged, then his tone shifted, quiet but certain. "That thing up there—the one coming out of the ceiling? That's the real body of the amalgamation. The rest was just... something like organs."
The team froze.
Ruby swallowed. "Then what were those surgeons?"
"Shells or puppets," Qrow said. "Meat decoys to buy time for that."
They turned their attention back to the ceiling just as the structure burst open.
Stone and rebar gave way to black, living tissue that cracked outward in jagged lines. The veins writhed, tearing apart the last remnants of the ward's roof.
Then it emerged.
The creature unfolded itself like a nightmare made of symmetry and madness. Its head—long and triangular—was unmistakably that of a mantis, with jagged mandibles dripping with black ichor and eyes that glowed a deep, crimson red. Its torso, however, was a warped mimicry of a human's—pale flesh covered in dark plating, stitched together with surgical sutures. Four elongated arms hung from its shoulders, each ending in a surgeon's scalpel fused with chitin. And below, its body stretched into a centipede-like lower half, dozens of legs clattering against the broken edges of the ceiling as it hauled itself free.
It was huge. Far larger than even Qrow's crow forms. Its shadow covered the entire ward.
Weiss whispered, "Oh my god…"
Ruby's voice was barely a breath. "How… how big is that thing?"
"Too big," Jaune muttered.
The creature let out another screech—high, sharp, splitting the air like a blade. The entire ward shook. The residual aura shielding around them flickered from the sheer pressure.
Yang cursed under her breath. "Yeah, okay, I vote we don't let that thing touch us."
Ruby's hands trembled slightly around her scythe. "Can we even hurt it?"
Before anyone could answer, Qrow spoke again—tone calm, almost bored. "Relax."
They turned to him, incredulous.
"What do you mean relax?!" Weiss snapped. "That thing's bigger than a skyscraper!"
Qrow just adjusted his collar. "Which means it's got a big enough core for me to hit."
A grin spread across his face—sharp, dangerous, too confident.
Ruby frowned. "Are you saying—"
"I'm saying," Qrow interrupted, "there's nothing to worry about."
He looked up at the ceiling where the massive mantis-centipede hybrid had begun to unfurl its limbs fully, shaking loose rubble like raindrops.
"Because," he added, voice dropping to a low rumble that somehow cut through the chaos, "it's already in my territory."
Before anyone could question him the raven on his shoulder cawed and every light in the ward died.
The entire chamber was plunged into darkness.
And then—one by one—the red eyes of the monstrous crows in the air above reignited, circling the colossal amalgamation like bloody stars.
The battle between titans shook the world.
The colossal crows that Qrow had become dove and clashed with the mantis-like amalgamation in a storm of shadow and bloodlight. Each impact was a catastrophe—feathers sharper than blades cutting through the air, shrieks loud enough to make the ward's concrete pillars flex like breathing lungs.
The creature—the true body of the amalgamation—reared back, its chitinous claws scraping the ceiling as it tried to brace itself against the onslaught. The entire upper structure of the operating ward had already collapsed into a jagged crater. What remained looked less like a hospital and more like a battlefield suspended inside a giant, hollow skull.
One of the titanic crows slammed into the amalgamation's torso, sending a spray of black ichor across the battlefield. The creature screamed—a serrated, metallic sound that shredded the air.
Below, the team could do little but watch.
Ruby's voice came out in a whisper. "How is this even real…"
Yang crossed her arms tightly against the gale. "I don't know. But I'm not arguing with the results."
Every few seconds, shockwaves rolled across the floor. Bits of steel and stone were flung like confetti in the wake of the crows' fury. Even standing nearly a kilometer away, the force of their battle vibrated through the soles of their boots.
At the far center of the ward, the operating table—once the focal point of this hellish surgery—still stood. Somehow. Bent, twisted, but unbroken. The massive patient remained strapped to it, limbs bound by writhing Grimm tendrils that pulsed faintly red with every beat of the amalgamation's heart.
Jaune stared, jaw tight. "He's… still alive?"
The others followed his gaze. The patient—a man easily three stories tall—barely moved. His chest rose and fell in shallow, rhythmic gasps. His eyes, what little could be seen beneath layers of black film, flickered faintly with consciousness.
Jaune turned to Qrow, his voice uncertain. "Shouldn't we—help him? He's still restrained."
Qrow didn't look up. He stood a few meters ahead of them, eyes reflecting the chaos above. His human frame looked impossibly small beneath the fight of monsters, yet the shadows bent faintly toward him, as if he were their source.
"Don't bother," Qrow said. His tone was casual, almost dismissive. "If we kill the amalgamation, he'll be fine."
Jaune blinked. "He'll… be fine?"
Qrow nodded. "Everything in the Nightmare'll reset once the core's destroyed. Think of him as just another piece caught in it—like scenery. He'll just wake up thinking this was a bad dream and not even remember any of. Just the impressions of it."
Jaune hesitated, then nodded slowly, trusting the explanation even if he didn't fully understand it.
"Now," Qrow said, his gaze lifting again. "You might want to move back."
"How far back?" Weiss asked warily.
Qrow cracked a faint smile. "Let's say… about kilometer or two. Give or take."
They stared at him, then looked back toward the fight—where two of his crow avatars had just collided with the amalgamation's midsection, producing an explosion of sound and shockwaves that made Weiss' ice barriers shatter.
No further convincing was needed.
"Yup. Back sounds good," Yang said, already moving.
The squad retreated, sprinting across the vast tiled floor until the chaos behind them was a relatively distant storm. Even then, the ground still trembled beneath each impact.
By the time they reached the far end—the enormous operating room doors that stretched taller than any building they'd ever seen—the air itself shimmered with heat and pressure. It barely even resembled an operating warm anymore of a hospital anymore. The room was too vast, too wrong and felt like the inside of a small disfigured world that was masquerading as architecture.
Jaune found himself staring at the doors, half expecting them to lead to another ward or another floor of the impossible nightmare.
Qrow, now walking casually beside them, caught the look on his face.
"You're wondering if there's more beyond this," he said.
Jaune blinked. "Yeah. I mean… this place is massive. If it's part of a hospital, it'd go on forever."
Qrow shook his head. "No. The Nightmare doesn't stretch that far. It's a construct—it folds reality around the core. If it gets too big, it collapses. Think of it like a lung—it has limits."
He stepped forward and placed his boot against the metal door. With a light kick—barely more than a tap—it groaned open. The sound echoed through the ward like thunder.
Beyond it, there was nothing.
Not emptiness, exactly. A vast, churning sea of black mist that stretched endlessly in all directions. It looked alive, pulsing faintly.
"That's the border," Qrow said, nodding toward it. "Step through, and you'll exit the Nightmare and go back to the dream realm.
Jaune nodded, both in understanding and quiet awe.
Behind them, the chaos had reached its peak.
The amalgamation monstrosity was losing. One of Qrow's crows ripped away its right arm in a single strike, another seized its midsection and tore through it, feathers slicing through flesh like chain blades. The creature's shriek shook the air—a raw, alien-like pain. Black ichor rained down, hissing as it struck the floor.
The remaining surgeons, the last fragments of the amalgamation's body, tried to reform—futilely merging into one pulsating mass. But the crows descended as one. Six black titans folding their wings, they dove in unison—a synchronized murder.
The explosion that followed wasn't light, but absence—a collapsing of everything. A sound like thunder inverted.
When the darkness cleared, the amalgamation was gone. Its limbs torn apart, its head half-swallowed by one of the crows before being obliterated entirely. The massive operating table was empty now—its restraints gone, its occupant vanishing into fading mist.
And as if on cue, the shadow raven on Qrow's shoulder that had watched the whole time let out a final, echoing caw.
Immediately, the oppressive darkness lifted. The red light bleeding through the cracks vanished. The ceiling above began to dissolve—flakes of black dust rising like embers, dissolving into the mist.
The entire operating ward was breaking down. Reality was unspooling at the edges.
Qrow stretched, yawning like he'd just finished a long shift. "Well," he said, almost lazily, "that's a wrap."
Ruby blinked. "That's—? That's it?"
"Yup."
Moments later, the world began to fade. The walls peeled away into vapor, the ground beneath them melting into shadow, and in the next heartbeat—
—they were standing on cracked asphalt beneath a starless sky, with only the broken red moon as company.
The broken city had returned and the mist that had consumed the entire block was now gone.
The Nightmare Zone had vanished.
The monstrous crows were nowhere to be seen. Only Qrow remained, standing at the center of the street in his rune frame, sword strapped across his back. Not a feather out of place.
Yang stared at him. "You—You just—"
"Handled it?" Qrow offered helpfully. "Yeah."
Ren looked around. "That was… quite efficient."
"Understatement of the year," Weiss murmured.
Ruby took a hesitant step forward, her hood fluttering in the cool night breeze. "Uncle Qrow… that was… insane."
He scratched his neck, giving a half-shrug. "Eh. Rank Two's gotta count for something, right?"
They all fell silent.
There was something surreal about it—the way he said it, like it was just another job, another casual mission. Like he hadn't just unleashed an army of himself to tear down a god-like thing inside an impossible hospital.
Jaune let out a slow breath, half-laughing in disbelief. "You're quite terrifying, you know that?"
Qrow grinned faintly, eyes glinting with tired amusement. "Yeah," he said, turning toward the fading skyline. "I get that a lot."
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon