Velvet summoned hard-light replicas of Fox’s weapons and recalled Fox’s fighting style as she ran past her friends, toward the buried wagon.

“Uh, Velvet? Where you going?” Fox sent. “Could use a little help here.”

It was hard to pretend you didn’t hear someone when they spoke in your head.

“Be right there,” Velvet said. I hope.

She ran alongside the tunneling mole crab, struggling to keep up with it. It was hard enough to run on sand without its surface swelling and swirling in the creature’s wake. Then the front half of the monster burst from the desert.

So they do get bigger, she thought. If those other crabs were babies, this could be their parent, easily three times their size, and three times as angry.

Velvet pushed herself to go faster, cutting ahead of the crab as its forward end dropped to the ground, practically on top of her. She looked up and saw the claws preparing to grab her.

Velvet quickly dove forward onto her hands, then pushed off and back. Her feet slammed against the bottom of the crab and she fired bullets from the tonfa blades on her forearms away from it. Her momentum and the recoil from the gunshot blasts carried her and the crab back up off the ground.

When she kicked off of the creature’s underside, it tipped up onto its rear legs, while Velvet landed clumsily on her hands and knees.

The giant mole crab balanced precariously above her, waving its claws almost comically. Velvet gave herself a running start and launched herself at it again, this time face-first. As she flew through the air, she twisted her body into a corkscrew and locked the arm blades forward, all while shooting at the crab’s soft belly.

The bullets started the job, and the spinning blades finished it, spewing briny fluid and guts everywhere.

Everywhere.

The crab’s shrieks set Velvet’s teeth on edge. It fell backward, already dead by the time it hit the ground. Velvet felt the body’s tremors still as she climbed out of the hot, gory mess she had made of its belly, trying not to gag on the awful stench. The hard-light arm blades faded away.

She jumped off the carcass and surfed down a crest of sand, skidding to a halt in front of the now half-exposed wagon.

- RWBY: After the Fall, Prologue