Chapter Text
The day that Ranboo was assigned the task to go out and help in one of Manburg’s battles against Pogtopia, he knew it was the last fight he would ever go into.
Ranboo had this song and dance under lock after the years he had spent training and honing his skills for something like this as his job. There was little for him to do outside of fight and be willing to die for the regime that had forced him into indentured servitude as an assassin, but even he can tell that there’s something more to this than the other battles he’s been sent into.
For one, he wasn’t given the new weapons and armour that he was usually provided. Ranboo knew that he hadn’t done anything to get it taken away, and he had long since proved that he could handle the artillery, so this was already a marker on how things would end up going.
It wasn’t so much as the fact that he deserved the weaponry than the fact that he knew he was valuable in the war. With his training and the ability to teleport, (that had been beaten into him, nearly tortured into him, honed until he could teleport into a blindspot that an enemy hadn’t even known they had with his eyes closed, weapon already at the ideal angle to kill without hesitation-) he was something that would be more painful to lose than keep around. And the armour and weapons were a marker that he wasn’t disposable, not just yet.
The second thing that tipped him off that he wouldn’t be coming back from this was the distinct lack of Quackity and Fundy when he had been ordered to go off and prepare.
Fundy had been one of the few friendly faces he had seen in his lonely career in the labyrinth of a small town under the white house. He was the one he had been patched up by when he had ended up hurt enough that he would have to succumb to medical care. Fundy was nothing if not a good medic, as well as one that looked past Ranboo’s steadily growing body count to patch him up without question, despite how he snarled when Schlatt had brought up his own.
Fundy was one of those people that Ranboo thought he would have become a worse person without. He was kind, patient, and fairly friendly with him despite the stress that Ranboo could see weighing down on him. He felt bad, knowing that some of it were because of him, despite how he would deny it, but what could he do? All he did was be grateful that he had managed to find one small light in the darkness that he could tunnel vision on when things were getting too unbearable.
Quackity, on the other hand, had been one of the people that almost always gave him orders in the first place, usually with a grimace and a crude smile on his face on the occasion that Schlatt would accompany him. He never looked too pleased, only hardened and weary whenever he would come to Ranboo with another task, another person to silence or another store to ravage for their lack of taxes.
The teen had quickly gotten used to ignoring the guilt that pounded at the back of his head when it came to thinking about what he was doing, but Quackity always looked slightly apologetic when he came back to Ranboo with another task he couldn’t pass off onto someone else. Ranboo was their best for a reason.
The last thing that told him that it was his last job was Schlatt showing up at his door to send him off.
The room that Ranboo had been afforded was not a pretty one, but it was one that he had slowly made home over the years that Schlatt had stayed president. He was pretty sure that he had been in charge for one and a half terms too long, but Ranboo never pointed it out, he simply kept his head down and minded his own business.
What was notable about his presidency was that Schlatt never let the people see his face, including Ranboo. He had almost always worn a ram’s skull overtop his head, as though it were a mockery of Technoblade’s own anatomy, though it was clear which was a real hybrid and which was a mask with the intention to be a mockery.
When Schlatt had come to assign him this job, he had done it in person and he had shown up without the skull that he usually kept overtop his face.
Ranboo remembered examining his face with a muted sense of resignation and horror. He had brown eyes, scruff on his face, flushed cheeks that indicated intoxication. He looked like a regular man, save a bit more jittery. Ranboo despised the notion a bit and wished he could pretend the man was still the faceless monster he always imagined but even he knew that the world wasn’t black and white and the same people that held a hand out to you would be the ones to try and cut it off. Ranboo knew that he had been signing his death sentence the moment he first locked eyes with the man and all he could do was nod his head and get ready to go to the battlefield.
Ranboo had known he was a means to an end since he had first been brought to Schlatt at the age of seven, torn from his home like he was worth nothing as he watched his house burn with both his parents still inside. His grandmother was in the bedroom on the second story, sick and visiting to get nursed back to health before she would go back to work at the bakery she had left in the hands of one of her younger employees. Ranboo was never close enough to hear the screams but they haunted him in the night anyway.
Ranboo had known he was a means to an end when he had been sent to train with ruthless guards that cared little for the damage they would cause their future weapon, treating him as a thing with a number rather than a person like he had demanded he was for the first month. The first month before he had been forced into submission and learned to keep his mouth shut if he wanted to make it out of this alive.
(He wondered if it was worth keeping his head down to stay alive now that they didn’t let him die.)
He was resigned as he lead the last charge of soldiers to the battlefield. They barely had to make it out of the catacombs under the white house before they had been assaulted with fireworks and enemies from Pogtopia’s side.
It was easy to tell who was on what side. Manburg’s side was in uniform, neat and proper with shiny iron armour and diamond tools that made them an easy mark for the rebels to swing at. It was easier to find the Pogtopian warriors among the chaos. They were lithe, wearing browns and greens and dark colours and faces marked with black paint. They had more materials, some wearing netherite and wielding enchanted swords. Ranboo thought it was funny.
For all the taxing they had done, all they did was line the pockets of a rich man who sat on a throne of skulls he didn’t care for and they were left with the bare minimum to fend for themselves.
The one outlier in Manburg’s ranks was Ranboo himself, wearing unenchanted netherite and ridding himself of the uniform before he had left to fight, making it easy to weasel through the weak defence the rebels had made and taking out Pogtopian soldiers left and right. He ignored the fact that they looked around his age and only a bit older as he delivered swift deaths with a dagger that was more crimson than silver.
Ranboo had almost been stopped by one of their fighters who had taken notice- a woman with pink and black hair that looked far too worn out by the constant fighting- and tried to call out a warning before he had teleported behind her and slammed the hilt of his dagger into the side of her head, knocking her unconscious. Ranboo didn’t bother killing her, the horde would probably trample her before she got up in the ten minutes it would take.
(Somewhere, buried deep in his mind, was the recognition of a face that he had seen a long time ago, in a bakery that was surely gone by now.)
The assassin continued weaving his way through the crowd, taking out rebels and leaving soldiers to die equally. His orders always specified if he needed to save the people he would be going out with, and this was one of the ones where he hadn’t been instructed to protect, simply take out those he could.
His gloves grew slick with blood eventually, and when the dragonhide wasn’t enough to keep his grip on his weapons anymore, he discarded them and let himself tear his hands to shreds as he dodged and weaved and sliced. Any bodily harm that came about him now didn’t matter- this was a suicide mission under the guise of honourable duty to protect a country he didn’t care for. Ranboo wouldn’t walk out of this if he came out unscratched or with a hole in his gut, so he let himself brush off minor wounds instead of thinking about the punishment his carelessness would lead to afterwards.
Eventually, Ranboo found himself in the same haze that ended up engulfing his vision whenever he was at a job for too long. It was something that always ended up with him causing far too much bloodshed, or snapping out of it when he was at the last victim of his mindless slaughter, begging or crying or pleading or silent or resigned. Ranboo had never been able to figure out which was the worst, but after a decade, he decided it was the people who were resigned. He hated the way it made his chest squeeze in his chest with a faint stirring of sadness he hadn’t felt in a long time.
The blood on his hands turned to smoke and the rebels turned into nothing but hay bales that he had been forced to practice target practice on until his hands were bleeding. The voices turned to white noise and the people who tried to take him out themselves were nothing but flies he flicked away with a jab of another dagger, sharpened edge jagged and rough and a pain to yank back out. It was clearly one meant to tear through someone’s throat, but all Ranboo was using it on was flies, so it was okay. A faint part of his mind screamed at him to wake up but he ignored it to focus on his target practice.
His target practice quickly got disrupted when a knife got embedded in his shoulder, and all-too-suddenly, Ranboo was jolted back into the present.
His hands were warm with blood and he yanked the knife out of his shoulder to jab it into the side of whoever just shoved it there, gaining a surprised yelp for his efforts. Ranboo was pretty sure whoever stabbed him wasn’t expecting him to recover so quickly, and the assassin took that to his advantage as he quickly assessed his newfound opponent.
The man who stabbed him looked more like a teen, around his age, He was blond and wore a ratty red and white sweater that looked like it had been through quite the wringer, a black overcoat layered on top that was stained with something shiny. He looked tired but manic, stumbling back at the new wound that just grazed his side as he dodged out of his way.
Ranboo stared at him for a long moment before pulling out a sword, quickly sheathing his dagger as he stalked forward. The boy had a sword raised as well, though it was trembling slightly in his hand. Clearly not his first fight, as it seemed with the rest of the rebellion that had come out on such a day. His eyes narrowed as he stalked forward, parrying with the teen who held his own until Ranboo managed to trip him up.
He looked down at him, raising his sword to deliver a killing blow before Ranboo felt a searing pain hit his side, stumbling with the force of it as he looked to see the offending weapon. A crossbow bolt stared back at him from the weak spot in his armour, one that was hidden well and almost imperceptible. When Ranboo looked back up to see his assailant, he was quick to realize how it had been so easy to get a shot on him.
Tubbo stared back at him, something unrecognizable in his eyes as he stalked forward and Ranboo stumbled away from the teen at his feet almost unconsciously. The scarred teen- When had Tubbo gotten so scarred when had he decided that Manburg wasn’t worth it anymore when when when- reloaded his crossbow as Ranboo’s face twisted in a grimace and he teleported away as he heard the crossbow go off again, gone before the second bolt could hit him.
The sight of Tubbo managed to rattle Ranboo, somehow, despite knowing that the teen barely cared for him and he was only ever a supervisor that Ranboo had to answer to.
Despite that, all he could think about was the anger and pain and betrayal of Tubbo’s defection nearly a year prior to this battle- this war. Jealousy and rage and everything that ever made him even close to a human that he had pushed down were coming up like bile with a vengeance that made Ranboo want to shove a knife in his thigh if just to return to the emotionless husk of a thing he had been just moments prior.
Ranboo was shaken from his thoughts by his own running, automatically following the action as something came from the skies, a dark overbearing shadow in the night as dawn slowly crept upon them. He could only watch with muted horror as the Angel of Death landed on their battlefield, one swipe of sharpened wings taking out a dozen Manburg soldiers. It was clear whose side he was on and Ranboo did not want to face him in battle, no matter how he felt.
With Death’s arrival, the tides quickly turned. Manburgian soldiers fell in dozens, almost hundreds as their numbers dwindled. The rebels grew confident and their energy returned tenfold as the rejuvenation of victory crawled down their spines. There was bloodshed and eventually, all that was left was Schlatt, drunk and unmasked, standing before the small crowd of rebels who made it out and Ranboo, hiding amongst the rubble of everything that had fallen as a result of explosions.
He was close enough to hear Schlatt’s drunken laugh and the speech that followed after.
“So, here we are, huh Wilbur?” Schlatt almost sounded taunting, despite where he was. With a jolt, Ranboo realized that Schlatt wasn’t expecting to make it out of this alive, either. “Been a good run, hasn’t it? Destroying your country to get it back from my hands and you barely even have a country to come back to.”
Wilbur, the leader of the rebellion after he had been kicked off the throne almost four years prior, scowled at him with vitriol. “I have what I need and the rest I can build up with my hands. I’ve built L’manburg once and I can do it again.” Schlatt laughed, loud and mockingly as he gestured to the lands around him.
“Build up with what?! The rubble? With the dead soldiers that were once so loyal to you? With the citizens that have nothing to their names?” He asked, voice gleeful around the slur that the alcohol tinged his words with. Ranboo felt a shiver go down his spine. He had never quite stopped fearing Schlatt, even in the state he was now.
“You have nothing, Wilbur. And I have the greatest asset in all these lands by my side.” Ranboo’s eyes widened at the words, something close to dull panic thudding in his chest alongside his heartbeat. Wilbur clearly didn’t take his words seriously. Neither did the blond by his side, who Ranboo recognized as the one that had been with Tubbo earlier.
“You have no one by your side, Schlatt.” Schlatt laughed in response, stumbling back to lean against a large chunk of rubble.
“He’s always by my side, Wilbur. Like a little dog. Ever wondered who killed precious little Sally a while ago?” Wilbur’s eyes widened from where Ranboo was watching as a hint of familiarity stirred in his gut at the name. The man almost lunged at Schlatt grabbing him by his collar and holding a dagger to his throat.
“Who?” He hissed, “Who fucking did it?” Schlatt laughed again, having too much fun drawing this out.
“He’s killed so many it’s almost funny, Wilbur. And he’s probably dead now, so you’ll never get that little bit of satisfaction. How’s it feel, knowing you’ll never know who killed her? I wonder how little Fundy feels about that.”
“Fuck you,” Came the man’s reply, venomous. Ranboo felt something in his stomach curl at the familiar voice, one he hadn’t heard in a while.
“It doesn’t matter, Wilbur,” Schlatt said with a tone of finality. “If I go down, this country goes down with me. I’ve more than made sure of it. Quackity and Tubbo are well aware just how far my influence re- reaches.” With a stutter at the end, he clutched at his shirt, the smile on his face freezing.
The blond teen next to Wilbur stepped forward, still holding the crossbow up. “Schlatt!” He called, tone angry as he fought to get the man’s attention.
With muted horror growing, Ranboo watched as the man choked on his own vomit after mumbling something he couldn’t hear from his hiding place and slumped to the ground, limp and broken like a ragdoll.
Dead, Wilbur declared after a quick check-up.
The small crowd of rebels cheered and all Ranboo could do was stare at the man who made him what he was and wonder what he was now that his only ally was gone.