“It’s almost on us!” Coco unfolded her bag into its gun form. She looked at Velvet. “Get ready.”

Velvet nodded. She would need some powerful weapons for this fight, and this wasn’t the time to hold back.

The first weapon she called up was a pair of armored gloves loaded with circular saws. When the hard-light weapons formed, Coco said, “Oh.”

There would be no replacing these. Roy Stallion was presumed killed during the Battle of Beacon—he’d last been seen in the clutches of a Nevermore. No one knew where the rest of Team BRNZ (Bronze) was, either, missing or dead.

“Good-bye, Roy,” Velvet whispered. She raised her arms. “Ready?”

Coco nodded.

The Grimm worm bore down on them, and it looked even more horrific and eldritch up close. They could see its teeth rotating around its circular maw and feel its hot breath wafting over them. Coco fired her gun into its mouth, while Velvet fired the spinning saws at its eye. The worm closed its mouth and abruptly burrowed down into the sand.

Velvet and Coco glanced at each other. “It couldn’t have been that easy,” Coco said.

It wasn’t.

The worm burst out of the sand and shot over the turtle. Coco fired off another round of bullets, joined by gunfire and a hail of arrows from the nomads. Nothing seemed to be able to penetrate its thick hide.

It landed and turned around, surprisingly fast. Velvet got off another shot with Roy’s saw. Her aim was true, just as his would have been, and the razor-sharp discs struck between two of the worm’s armored segments. Something hot and green spewed from the wound; Velvet raised her shield and kept most of the splatters off her and Coco. But where it touched her uniform, the fabric burned away and her skin sizzled and blistered.

“Ow!” Velvet said. “What is that stuff?”

“Acid,” Slate said. “Blind Worms are nasty things. Maybe the nastiest in a desert of nasty things.”

The worm shuddered and rolled over, spreading its green ick over the sand. The turtle shifted direction again to head in the opposite direction. This time Velvet fell over and bumped into Coco, knocking her down.

“Sorry,” Velvet said.

- RWBY: After the Fall, Chapter 16