Zebras had an old saying: “War never changes”.

We had traded with the zebras for generations, gemstones for coal; gemstones imbued with magic, the lifeblood of our world, to keep their homes safe from the wild creatures roaming their lands and compensate for their lack of innate arcane abilities; coal to fuel our newborn machines and means of transport.

Our newfound means to deliver goods all across the land boosted economy, which in turn gave birth to industry.
Industry brought us progress, progress brought us commodities, commodities brought us greed, and greed brought us ever increasing hunger for resources, and in the end, for gems and lumps of coal we went to war; unprepared, untrained and overconfident we took to the battlefields, and dismay followed the realization that our enemy was a far more skilled opponent that we ever believed, and hate grew with every battle, and every casualty.

Eventually, war changed our social structure; our economy fed on it, like flies on a festering corpse; our government embraced it and used fear and hatred as means of control: fear of losing our way of life, and hatred for those that threatened it.

The reality of war evolved, as did the ways to kill, and we changed with them, some of us becoming paragons of virtue and mercy in the face of hatred, others becoming valiant defenders of their kind, others becoming monsters in the name of “Victory”, “Science”, or “Duty”…

Or “Vengeance”.

Few in the Wasteland know the story of the great Zebra city of Salterum, a hub of culture and art whose heart was left uncorrupted by hatred, whose walls welcomed every zebra who wanted to escape the escalating madness of the war and whose scholars kept searching for means to bring peace to the warring parts.

Many in the Wasteland know the legend of the Burning City, the lifeless husk of an unnamed bastion of civilization whose streets and squares, once full of joy, laughter and life, are haunted by the screams and the cries for mercy of its inhabitants, consumed by eternal flames said to have been summoned from Tartarus itself by a pony whose heart was consumed by rage and grief at the sight of a dying Canterlot; all of them, however, know it can’t be anything more than a tale, for nopony who ever walked away in search of it came back, and no single unicorn could even have been powerful, or crazy, enough to weave magic so strong and wicked.

Darkness.

A loud ringing in my ears, as if a mortar shell had detonated a bit too close for comfort.

A headache that felt as if my horn had been torn off, and an ice pick had been driven in my skull.

General soreness and aches spread all around my limbs.

Wherever I looked, darkness. Terrible, unyielding darkness, gripping me with steel-like claws as if my eyes had been… oh, right, they’re still closed.

I looked around the large room barely lit up by emergency lights while trying to get up to my hooves through my dizziness, feeling my stomach lurch and my head spin faster than the rotor blades of a Griffinchaser Mk.5; my right foreleg gave out under my weight and back to the floor i was, still feeling like crap, but at least I had a non-moving surface under me that made all the spinning more tolerable. Good floor. Good, cold, awfully dusty floor… covered in debris… and ashes…

Adrenaline rushed through my system along with a cocktail of combat drugs administered by my implants, triggered by the sudden stress of a potentially dangerous situation (oh, the joys of being a cyberpony), and I got up with everything spinning slightly less wildly, courtesy of Mr Steady, scanning the room for any potential threats. The walls in front of me showed evident burns and cracks, but the worst of the damage seemed to be caused by an impressive explosion.

I looked around at the few broken and burned terminals and the wall behind me, completely gone, along with a good chunk of the floor close to it. Walking carefully to the gap, I was greeted by the sight of what was supposed to be a generator room housing the latest generation of Arcane Spark reactor, now nothing more than metal scraps melted together; that sight was like taking a sledgehammer to the face. I knew where I was, and with that came the realization that my last memories weren’t a dream or lucid hallucination. Equestria was dead, mortally struck by our enemies’ megaspells, Canterlot was lost in a pink haze of death along with all its population and the Princesses, and I …

The thought made me sick beyond any comprehension, and my already weakened stomach gave up and graced the small abyss below me with what was left of my lunch as my knees gave out, and I was left there screaming and crying for the loss of my Country, my people, my Princesses and the last piece of my soul, gone with the lives I had taken.

I stayed like that for hours while random memories flashed through my mind: my sister bandaging the knee I had just hurt falling from the stairs; our first day at Princess Celestia’s school for gifted unicorns; being rejected by the prettiest mare of the class only to have her fawning after me years later when we met at Miramare to defend Hoofington from the stripes; her anguished face when, two weeks later, she died in my hooves from a bullet to her lung…

Eventually I got up and headed for the door; as tempting as staying here to die was, self-preservation instincts were just a little stronger, and so I started making my way out.

The corridors of the facility were empty, save for dust and small scattered debris, and were easy to navigate. A vague feeling of wrongness hung in the air, but my mind was still too busy processing the extent of what happened and all the guilt I had accumulated in such few years to bother with it.

All the major cities had been hit, along with most of the main military facilities. That, at least, was what I remember being broadcasted throughout the military comm channels.

Once out I would need supplies, food, water, gems to keep my synthetic organs going and some barding and weapons.

First things first: barding and saddlebag.
Still staggering lightly from the last bit of my dizziness, I made my way to the locker rooms, passing by fallen and broken frames and cracked walls … weird, as strong as the explosion must have been, this side of the facility shouldn’t have been damaged so badly, and the cracks looked like they were due to lack of proper maintenance instead of external damage.

The locker rooms were a mess: everypony in there had tried taking as much of their personal belongings as possible before evacuating to safer military bunkers, or Stables, or just somewhere they hoped the bombs hadn’t struck.

After ‘requisitioning’ a couple saddlebags, I went through the lockers until I found the one bearing the ‘Lt. Blazing Wind’ plaque, opening it to retrieve my light barding and emergency gem supplies. As the door swung open I took a look at the full-length mirror behind it, facing the same greyish-white coated unicorn as always. My mane was a sweaty and ruffled mess, with a light film of dust almost covering its usual bright reddish orange and yellow highlights, my already dark red eyes were bloodshot and, somehow, even redder than usual and the scar running sideways below my left eye all the way down to my jaw stood out like a sore thumb as usual, the most prominent of her brethren, each of them marking a failure.

Fixing my mane reflexively, I scooped everything up in my telekinetic field before closing and locking the door again, a futile gesture that helped me feel somewhat almost normal again, when my eye was caught by the ‘special equipment’ door on my right.

Deciding not to take any chances once outside, I opened it, revealing a room slightly smaller than the one I was coming from. On the walls were security glass tubes roughly half a pony’s size containing foreleg-mounted computers, a military version of the popular StableTec PipBucks, outfitted with extra functionalities and specifically made for combat and high risk experiment situations.

Once placed on my left foreleg and shut closed, my vision filled with the terminal’s heads up display, complete with compass, life signs monitor and a small bar showing the charge status on the StableTec Assisted Targeting System , SATS for short, a little spell that had saved my hide more than a few times already in my years of service.

A welcome message immediately started playing, the soft synthetic female voice announcing
“Welcome to the Equestrian Military Personal Assistant and Tactical Helper Mk 4 system, Lieutenant. It has been more than 72.000 days since your last login. You have no scheduled appointments for today. The report on the Self-Propelled Arcane Resonance Chamber reactor preliminary test is over 72.000 days overdue. Have a very safe day.”.

I stared at the PipBuck’s screen while doing the math, my mouth hanging open and my eyes popping wide from the shock once I was done.

“200 years? WHAT. THE. FUCK.”

My mind ran wild, frantically searching for answers to the million bits question: what I did somehow created a tear in time-space continuum stable enough to warp me two centuries forward, but HOW did I do it?

I spent half an hour going through all the possible explanations when I started noticing the soft click-clicking coming from my PipBuck’s radiation detector; this place was as healthy as a bullet to the face, and I had to get out, postponing the search for answers to my predicament.

Barding and saddlebags, check. Complementary PipBuck with high-tech AI assistant, check. Next stop, Security checkpoint near the exit for weapons, ammo and medical supplies. As hungry as I was, the food in the Cafeteria was way past its expiration date, and I deemed it would probably kill me faster than starvation, which meant food supplies were to be retrieved outside.

Outside.

That thought chilled me.

The amount of mass destruction weapons used by the zebras had been excessive, to say the least, according to what I could hear before… that.

The outside had probably been almost sterilized by radiation, but the flesh stripping radiation levels had probably died down to survivable levels after all that time, or at least that’s what I hoped. Still, quick and painful death by radiation was more appealing than slow and painful death by radiation, starvation and dehydration, so ‘out’ was the only direction I could go right now.

I was so lost in thought, wondering what had happened to society and ponykind during my ‘absence’, that I almost hit my head on the ceiling when I jumped after hearing the warning message

“Hostiles detected. Ammunition depleted. Suggested course of action: avoid combat”

“Gee, thanks a lot. They should have named you Captain Obvious instead of EMPATH” I whispered, then let out a heavy sigh and rolled my eyes “aaaaand now I’m talking to a semi-sentient computer out of loneliness… one step closer to insanity”

Staying as low as possible, I moved in the direction of the now more-than-evident red bars on my compass, which, of course, were exactly in the direction of the exit, right beyond the sealed doors of the Security checkpoint. Inching closer to the thick steel double doors I started hearing voices from the other side, which sounded more concerned and scared each step I took.

“… find us in here. They won’t, right Des?” a mare’s voice, scared to death, apparently. I had no idea who ‘they’ were, but I had no intention of finding out, especially while unarmed and with my energy reserves way too low to engage with just combat spells an unspecified number of Celestia knows what.

“How the hell can I know! That entrance is half hidden, but we still found it, and if I don’t open this Goddesses-damn door we’re trapped in here.” stallion, roughly my age, a note of desperation in his voice. I definitely didn’t want to meet whatever these guys were running from.

I was almost at the door to the security station, meters away from the Armory when an explosion marked the breaching of the outer doors to the complex. I froze in my tracks, counting three new red bars joining the pre-existing two… and two blue bars I failed to notice before.

Muffled laughter rang to my ears, the kind of which didn’t leave much to the imagination about its owner’s intention “Well well well, look what we got here. Four meat puppets ready for slaughter” stallion, sadist and total scum bag. And I hadn’t even seen him yet.
“Ooh, ooh, can I cut them boss? Can I?” mare, with a few screws loose. Actually, make it A LOT screws loose.

I didn’t know who these guys were or what had they done to have such a psycho coming after them, but I felt a familiar fire in my gut –or whatever organic part of it was still there- that prompted me to inflict harm upon others, but this wasn’t my battle and I was still very unarmed, hungry and low on energy reserves. I would just wait it out, get whatever supplies I could from the armory and get out once the coast was clear. A coward’s thinking, but that’s survival, and I didn’t really care for those four on the other side of the door.

Until I heard a chainsaw revving up and a little voice crying out in fear.

My vision was covered by the thin red film of Rage, and without thinking twice I teleported on the other side of the door.

Fuck survival, fuck my selfishness and fuck my energy reserves, all I wanted right now was to paint the walls red with those fuckers’ guts.

A general gasp of surprise followed my appearance, from both victims and would-be executioners, as I took in the situation: four ponies, dirty, unarmed and scared were standing at my sides, a stallion and mare pair near the access terminal to my left and a mare tightly hugging a filly right behind me, all of them wearing barding that looked more like random scraps sewn together than proper clothing. Right in front of me three soon-to-be stains on the wall, two stallions and a mare, wearing outfits covered in spikes and suspicious red splotches I had no problem associating to blood; pony blood, judging by the attitude of the unicorn mare with the chainsaw standing on the right.

The whole area was pretty much completely dark, save for the dim light coming from whatever emergency lights weren’t destroyed , and covered in debris coming from sections of the walls and ceiling that had collapsed.

The stallion in the middle started speaking, taunts and threats aimed at me, most likely, but in my drug-induced fury I couldn’t make out any of it. Without a word I telekinetically grabbed the chainsaw from the mare’s weaker magic field and swung it around in an ascending arc, separating her left foreleg from the rest of her and opening a nice, long gash in the side of her belly. The earth pony stallion on the left started trailing his pistol on me while his friend collapsed to the ground screaming, but his gun fell to the ground when the chainsaw blade entered a side of his chest and poked out of the other, propelled by my magic, and then proceeded to get stuck in the floor, dragging the body along with it.

Two down, one to go.

The last one, another earth pony stallion roughly a full head taller than me, charged me. I grinned and blasted him with a lightning spell… or rather tried to, as my horn gave nothing but a few sparks and my head started throbbing. Apparently, my magic was so weakened by whatever happened to me that a blind teleport had drained it so much I couldn’t cast any other higher level spells.

Oh, and I had a massive, murderous stallion charging at me with the second most pissed off expression I had ever seen.

I tried dodging to the side, but was a split second too late as that hulking mass of muscles, rage and murderous instincts slammed into me, sending me flying into the security door.

Oh, hello mister floor, fancy meeting you here.

Without giving me time to roll onto my hooves, my opponent pinned me to the ground, his mouth going for the knife holstered on his right foreleg just as I levitated a cinderblock from the ground and smashed it into his ribcage, grinning at the sound of broken bones and his subsequent grunt of pain and managing to get my legs under him to push him aside, rolling free of his weight.

Getting back up on my hooves, still with a slight hint of dizziness, I prepared myself for his next charge levitating my improvised weapon beside me when the buck’s pistol fired four shots, all of which hit their intended target with the expected and obvious result: the head of the stallion facing me got reduced to little more than red paste. I looked at where the shots had come from to see the pink unicorn mare with black mane who I first saw standing near the terminal unloading every single bullet left in the clip into the fallen psychotic mare, screaming in rage.

I smiled and took a tentative step in her direction dropping my ‘weapon’, when the effect of both adrenaline and drugs ran out, draining any remaining strength from my legs. In my last moments of consciousness I heard the quick tapping of the filly’s steps rushing close to me, her voice barely reaching my ears

“Mister? Are you alright?"

Then a much clearer, darker voice that seemed to come from inside my mind

“Welcome to Hell, Blaze.”