Chapter Text
Mistral at dawn. A lot of people said that it was the best time of day there because the cliffs encircled an eastern shoreline, so the entire city basked in the mango-colored rays of a fresh morning when the sun rose. It was a beautiful sight to behold, but that wasn’t why Amber Sullivan favored it. Lower sunlight meant longer shadows, and longer shadows meant easier tracking. Hell, you could practically see around entire buildings in some cases by focusing on the shadows cast from behind them.
What very few people understood about Amber was his analytical mind. They would see the soil-colored denim jacket, his crossed-revolvers symbol stitched in gold on the back, and think ‘Here’s a guy who shoots first and does everything else second.’ They’d see the holsters on each hip, one with an ebony handle sticking out and the other holding its ivory twin, criss-crossed with leather straps over yet more denim in his blue jeans and assume he practiced his quick-draws in front of a mirror. Then they’d see his face, quite handsome but still clearly boyish at his young 17 years of age, and assume he was just some kid looking to play sheriff.
Good.
Nobody ever saw it coming when “The Wolverine”, as he’d been dubbed at Beacon, seized control of the battlefield with his superior fighting tactics. By the time he had his opponent in enough of a hole that they realized their grave error in judgment, Amber was usually bored of the fight and ready for the next one. But then Beacon fell, so Amber’s hunting prowess expanded to Grimm and real-world bandits.
After the fall he had wandered east, working an occasional huntsman job if he could find one along the way. A lot of folks tried to skimp on payment since he wasn’t a licensed huntsman, making his blood boil. Honor was pitifully scarce these days, and for no reason other than a little radio silence. But once he had met Lilly a couple miles outside of Mistral City, his fortunes changed.
Lilly was a woman in her early fifties who ran a huntsman bar in downtown Mistral. She had been on a supply run when a wheel on her cart had splintered over a particularly rocky path, but Amber happened to walk by and offered to fix it for her (or at least try to). Lilly still ended up needing to buy a new cart after that incident, but Amber had revived it barely enough to get them back to Mistral. After he’d told her of his journey east, she’d offered to help with his little problem. A semi-retired huntress herself, she still had an active license and could accept jobs off the council-sanctioned huntsman job board. Given Amber’s stellar first impression, Lilly had offered to take the jobs off the bulletin board for him, let him complete them and collect the reward, and even offered to let him stay in one of the rooms above her inn, all for a 10% share of anything he made. The young man had considered it heavily, but once she kicked in complimentary breakfasts, he’d shook on it.
That was how he found himself overlooking the market district this particular morning. Lilly had scooped him up a bounty on two individuals believed to be smuggling illegal hallucinogens into the city. Before the sun completed its re-emergence from the water, Amber expected to have these two entrepreneurs in iron restraints.
The gunslinger peered over the city from a small ledge dug into one of its many cliff faces. He wasn’t terribly high up, maybe only 30 or so feet off the ground below. Amber had four or five particularly good spots like this around the city where he could perch like a gargoyle and just let his trained eyes do their work. His routine for the last few days had been to post up here, at the closest one to the city gates, around midnight. He’d sit and watch until morning broke, at which point the morning bustle began and it became less likely that any smuggling would be noticable. From there, it was on to the city’s many back alleys, just hoping he’d get lucky and stumble upon someone indulging in the products being brought in. It was a very low chance, but Amber had to keep himself busy. He’d typically head back to Lilly’s around lunch and then sleep until it was time to start all over again.
There was a low rumble as his stomach growled in complaint, so he fished into the small snack pocket he kept on his belt during stakeouts and snagged a pinch of nutty, fruity trail mix. Tilting his head up just enough to open his mouth, he tossed the tasty bits in with practiced ease. As he quietly savored the subtle tastes, a new shadow caught his eye. Peering down, he only had a fraction of a second to perceive it before its owner passed behind a building and the shaded figure disappeared. Undeterred, Amber calmly shifted his vision to the other end of the building, the police station coincidentally, and waited for the figure to emerge. It soon did, and while the person was still out of sight, their shadow said plenty. Petite, slender, long hair in a ponytail, wearing either a dress or a skirt, and…shit, was that a sword on her hip?
Amber frowned at that. Lilly had been very clear to him that the huntsmen and huntresses had been disappearing from town at an alarming rate; it was part of why they kept their deal under the table. As intrigued as Amber was by who this woman might be, she was walking at a normal, even sleepy, pace and had gone directly past the police station. It was unlikely she was a threat, so he turned his attention back to the full layout of this corner of Mistral.
A few more berries got tossed between Amber’s teeth as he kept his eye on the terrain below. Now that he wasn’t solely focused on one figure, he saw that a few other figures had begun to walk the city streets swaddled in soft light. A frustrated huff blew out of his nostrils, knowing his window of viability for finding a lead tonight was closing. He pushed himself to a standing position, stretching his dormant muscles and flexing his feet within his dusted boots, preparing for a morning of walking through the city.
His heart shot a faint beat of adrenaline through his nerves.
Amber froze, feeling goosebumps prickle the back of his neck. His eyes narrowed to find what his passive senses had clearly just picked up, settling on two shadows walking off the beaten path. Large, well built, short hair on both. Couldn’t quite make out much other than that, but he could see the head on one of the figures swiveling back and forth as they walked. It was the best lead he’d had since taking the job and he had just been preparing to lead anyway! Amber pulled a sturdy rope from his belt, looped it around a sturdy outcropping of stone jutting out from the ledge, and silently began to lower himself down.
As he lowered himself, Amber felt another, stronger beat of adrenaline course through his chest. These instinctive reactions within his body were part of his strongest tool at his disposal: his semblance, Danger Sense. Not only was it an effective tool for avoiding traps and staying alive, it provided him with very minor guidance if he was ever seeking out dangerous individuals. It was up to him to interpret its signals and act accordingly. His sense also was not all-seeing or perfect; for example, it couldn’t warn him specifically what was dangerous. The weeks leading up to the fall of Beacon, Amber had been wracked with horrible anxiety attacks. The night that the tower actually fell, as he fought alongside his classmates, his heart felt like it was going to give out after hours of constant adrenaline courtesy of all the dangerous people and Grimm flooding the school. Professor Goodwitch had been mentoring him to control the adrenaline in extreme cases and not let it grow to an overwhelming degree, but he still had a lot to learn.
Amber planted his feet on the ground, looked back up to where he had secured the rope, and gave the taught material a quick flick. The loop hopped off of the stone and fell down into his hands. Securing it back to his belt, the young huntsman dug the ball of his foot into the sole of his boot, pushed off, and began to quietly jog in the direction of the figures he had spotted. It was time to get to work, bright and early in the morning like everyone else.