This entry contains spoilers for its corresponding chapter of At the End. Be warned...

As I stated before, chapters four and five were supposed to be together, but a lack of creative inspiration and personal issues prevented me from getting the chapter out when I wanted to. I hammered it into my head that I needed to set a weekly schedule for myself, something which to compel myself to never break unless extreme circumstances, otherwise I would never be able to finish this thing. That's exactly what happened to my first and only other fanfiction, which shall never see the light of day ever again.

Now Lieutenant Chaser is a straighforward and lgical pony, but her standards on what is normal and acceptable aren't the same as the rest of her unit's. Because of that, she receives the ire of her CO when she fails to capture the Crafter and does so alone. Hold this thought for a moment.

Now that I typed that senetence, I feel the need to explain something: me using the title of Crafter instead of Miner. The word 'mine' is plastered all over Minecraft. It's in the title for Celestia's sake. So why don't i use it? The first and most shallow reason is that Crafter sounds a little cooler. the second is while most of your resources in the game are achieved through mining, the activity that consumes the most time, for me anyway, is crafting. For veteran miners like myself, mining is only a means to an end and not time consuming. We are very efficient in our activities so we can spend our time on what we want to do most: building stuff. The Crafter in At the End has had millions of years to perfect his craft (pun fully intended). While a year in minecraft pass in the blink of an eye to us, they're normal for him. He's leanred to maximize his activities in that 10 minute window every day before the sun goes down and the monsters roam.

Okay, back to plot. No, not that! Get your mind out of the gutter. Lightning Chaser(LC for short) truly is better than most of her unit. She feels confident that she could have won and I would have bet on her in a one-on-one fair fight. That doesn't mean she's not going to get chewed out if she messes up.

The fight was fun to write, but I think i made it too hard to follow. I didn't want to rewrite it because I feared I fall into the trap of perpetually rewriting material to suit my needs and whatever fans I have. I've seen webcomics fall into that same limbo, forever updating old material and not making new material. For the greater good, I polished it to the best of my abilites and left it as is.

The fight itself was one sided to begin with. LC is a soldier, trained to fight and deal with the unexpected. The crafter's alien powers would throw her for a loop, but it would guarantee a tense battle as they struggled for dominance. She would have to learn new technique from scratch to fight him and he would need to learn how to fight an opponents on equal tearms with him for the first time in his life. I'll go into more detail about him in the next commentary.

Zecora was an added bonus because she knows the Everfree Forest like the back of her hand, er, hoof. I didn't have her do much, but i got something planned for her later that makes her badass streak here continue. I always wanted to make a silent, stealthy character that doesn't need to use brawn in order ot achieve an end goal. her stealth was something that even trained warriors could help but admire.

And I'm suprised no one discovered my litle easter egg for future events hidden in this chapter. i thought I made it too obvious, but i guess it wasn't obvious enough....