A/N: This chapter will likely be lower quality than most others, considering how I wasn't really feeling it at all at the time of writing.
"Fillies and Gentlecolts! We here at the Equestrian Airfleet Recruitment Division are glad that you decided to attend today's event!"
"Oh, bugger," Steel said, leaning on her hooves as she listened to the announcer's annoying voice. Even from where she sat with her crew in the cargo hold of the Katyusha, she could hear the loud, pestering voice quite clearly. She despised her current position; being forced to listen to such an annoying voice for potentially hours just in order to not be kicked out of the competition. Thankfully, the announcer spoke quickly.
"The rules for today's contest are simple. A mock-battle will be held. Your weapons, ammunition, and everything else that could be dangerous have all been enchanted for safety. Any shots - or slices, for those of you who prefer melee combat - will result in a simple flash of light and, if it was an attack on a pony, an ejection from the arena or, for ships, immobilization and inability to fire weapons.
"No aircraft besides ships will be allowed to participate in today's battle. While there are no carriers here anyway, we've had some... incidents in the past. Of course, pegasi will be allowed to fly, as they will not go down in flames if shot.
"There are two teams for this combat; an offensive team and a defensive team. The offensive team's goal is to simply take control of the flag. There is no need to run it back to friendly territory; if they can capture and hold the flag for two minutes, they win the battle. The defense's goal is to protect their flag. If the flag is kept uncaptured for three hours or if all the offense is eliminated, the defense wins."
"Papers are being delivered to each ship now, detailing what team they will be on. Once you get your paper, move to the southwest corner of the map if you are offense, or the northeast corner if you are defense. The game will begin in ten minutes from now."
Steel looked up just in time to have a paper drop on her face. Shrugging, she pulled it off with a hoof and looked at it. It only had one word printed on it.
Offense.
The battle began with a roar. Both sides had respectable amounts of ships - nearly thirty each, generally between ten and sixty meters long. Many of them were armed to the teeth, floating platforms of annihilation launching torrents of hellfire at any hostile unit that crossed their path. Bright flashes filled the sky as shots connected with their targets, from artillery shells hitting ships to plucky pegasi dropping bombs onto their targets to some of the strands of tracer fire in the forest of light hitting their targets.
The Katyusha was no exception. Her 40mm cannon swiveled as it tracked its targets, letting loose short bursts before switching to another. Almost invariably, the target it shot at was engulfed by a flash of light, rendering it no longer a threat. It skirted the battlefield, staying far enough away from the center of the action to avoid much notice, for almost two hours. It was quite obvious by that point that the offense was losing; they were down to only eight ships, and had barely advanced a quarter of the map beyond the original halfway point. The defensive team, on the other hand, had nearly double that number, with half their original fleet left.
A flash of light erupted from one of the offensive ships. Seven. Another, from a different ship. Six. Two flashes erupted out of opposite sides of one of the enemies, but it was not enough to curb the flow. It was a losing battle, and everypony knew it.
But the Katyusha wasn't about to lose.
"Alright!" Steel said from the piloting cabin. "I'm going to crash-dive us, to about five meters above the treetops!" she shouted to her crew, most of whom were gathered on the deck of the Katyusha, listening intently. "Lysander, I need you to fly forward and try distract them as long as you can while we cap the flag. Don't worry if you get knocked out; it's only an exercise." She turned to Cross. "Cross, see if you and Sefe can put up some kind of shield or - even better - cloak around the ship. Basically, just do your best to make us harder to kill." She turned to Rosebud. "Hold your fire until you know we've been detected, they open fire on us, or they're close." Finally, she turned to Broadhoof. "Broadhoof, since Sefe's going to be using his magic to do whatever, I need you to be down in the engine room. Tell me if anything's breaking."
A chorus of approval rose from the deck of the ship as the ponies moved to their positions. Soon, the Katyusha was steaming towards the flag, barely avoiding the tops of the coniferous trees that covered the rolling hills of the battle-zone. It was surprisingly quiet at such low altitude; Steel presumed that meant that her remaining allies had been eliminated. She looked at the clock in the piloting cabin; there were roughly forty-five minutes left in the game. Plenty of time to capture the flag, if the ship could get there undetected.
Unfortunately, there was no such luck. Despite being rather well camouflaged by the combined magic of her two unicorns, the ship's red hull still poked out in places, giving a hint as to where the enemy should fire. Shells started flying as the twelve remaining ships slowly began to accelerate towards the Katyusha, who was well past halfway to their flag already. Being mostly larger ships, however, the remaining ships on the defensive team were slower than the Katyusha, and had no hope of catching up or firing accurately at the quick-moving vessel.
Sure enough, as soon as the defenders started firing at the Katyusha, Lysander shot up off the deck and started beelining towards the enemy fleet. He dodged through the air, attracting most of the attention of the ship's crews by deflecting tracer fire back at the ships using his metal wing. Flashes started popping up all over the decks of the ships as he kept up his performance for nearly five minutes, flying over, under, around, and even looping over the enemy ships until a lucky strike took him out of the game. But, he managed to buy his ship enough time.
By the time Lysander had been dealt with, the Katyusha was already at the flag and was beginning to capture it. Sure enough, a voice boomed out, "Flag being captured! Two minutes until offense wins!" Steel cursed under her breath as she drove the Katyusha in lazy circles around the flagpole, watching as a strip on the side slowly changed from blue to red. The red seemed to creep up from the bottom of the stip, eating towards the top as the time passed. It wasn't hard to figure out that it was an indicator of how done the capture was.
Of course, by the time thirty seconds were left in the battle, the enemy had reached firing range. Without the ability to dodge, flee, or do much of anything for fear of losing the capture, all the Katyusha could do was vary its path slightly to allow the shells to either miss entirely or just barely bounce off the relatively thin armor that it had. With ten seconds left, the Katyusha took a solid hit to her deck. It was quite obvious to Steel that it had taken out her engines, weapons, and power core, as well as at least three of her crew, but the Katyusha was still technically in the game. With five seconds left, a shot hit the front of the ship, one that would easily have blasted off the bow had it not been enchanted. With a single second left, Steel saw a shell coming straight for the piloting cabin. Not caring about her injured wing, she threw open the door, ran across the deck, and jumped towards the flagpole just as the ship behind her exploded in a flash of light, the capture was completed, and she was teleported into a room, where she fell hard on her stomach and passed out.
A few hours water, she awoke in her bed in the Katyusha. She quickly learned the details of what had happened from Lysander; the offense had won the game right as the Katyusha was being destroyed, and since that type of situation was rare, and her reaction even rarer, there were no safeguards to prevent any damage for reasons of pure ease of use: it was far easier to teleport while keeping velocity than it was to teleport and cancel the teleported object's velocity. The shock of the teleportation combined with the blunt force of the impact against the floor of what she learned to be the holding room - where all the ponies who had 'died' in the battle waited for it to finish - had knocked her out cold before she could even claim her prize. She was escorted back to the ship with no problem, and laid to rest in her bed until she came to.
Looking out her window, she could tell that night would fall soon. Lysander trotted out of her room as she tried to sit up and get out of bed, only to fall flat on her face as she rolled. She managed to get up on her hooves next time she tried, at least, and she was shortly trotting out onto the deck.
When she got on deck, she expected nothing much. Maybe a few nurses, asking her questions about how she felt. Hopefully no one. If she was unlucky, the announcer would come to have her claim her prize in front of everypony else who participated. What she didn't expect was every single pony who had participated in the battle standing on the docks where the Katyusha was parked, maybe six hundred ponies all told. Of course, at the front of the crowd and literally on the gangplank was a pony dressed quite fancily and holding a letter. As soon as she poked her head up above the deck, she immediately felt herself dragged further out and put onto her feet by near-imperceptible magic as the pony walked over to her and hooved her the letter. She shoved it into a pocket, intending to read it later, and went out to see what was happening.
The basic gist of the meeting was that, since she had essentially single-hoovedly won the battle for her team, many of the ponies wanted to meet her, either to glean some of her methods, acquaint themselves with her, or simply congratulate her for her performance. It took nearly three hours to get through all the ponies in the crowd, and by the time they had all left, Steel was nearly collapsing from exhaustion. Ignoring her crew members, who were all trying to get her attention, she just hobbled over to her room, flopped into her bed, and almost immediately dozed off.