• Published 25th Jun 2012
  • 2,060 Views, 101 Comments

Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams - KDarkwater



Nearly 200 years after Equestia's destruction, a stable mare and her daughter are forced to the surface in the remains of the southern prairie. Their search for a new home will change them--or destroy them.

  • ...
9
 101
 2,060

Chapter 19

Author's Note:

A YEAR between updates? Yikes, time got away from me. Gonna let this rough draft go up for now, and clean up the formatting and whatnot later. I got a lot of catching up to do...

The first time they went after a target, it was essentially a fifty-fifty chance of success, and the less they knew about the target and any potential allies and/or capabilities of said target, the more the pendulum swung towards the “fail” end of the luck bar. A lot of them figured this time would be different—sure, Rally was unusually intelligent for a fourteen-year-old smartass until she got near a MEW, but she was still just a little girl. Shouldn’t have been that hard.

Bittersweet and his crew got first take. He personally thought it was because Bitter had wanted to hump her ever since he laid his eyes on her and saw this as a chance to have his way with her. He made sure that it was understood that if Rally didn’t come back to him a virgin, Bittersweet would not go home a stallion, assuming he survived being gelded with a rusted hacksaw. Her humiliation was the boss’s alone to inflict on her.

A week later, he and four other teams had finished setting up camp by the roads around Rough Port in case the sassy little bitch got away when Bittersweet’s scout, a light gray unicorn stallion named Clover, galloped into his camp. Alone. That was when he knew that this wasn’t going to be like other hunts.

They’d gotten word of a rather interesting character from their contact in the slaver guild a couple of days prior. An actual, living stable mare, and one skilled or lucky enough to turn a hit squad into raw hamburger with pure destructive bursts of magic and very accurate gunfire. Their contact offered him a ten thousand-cap bounty for her PipBuck, and eighty percent of the profit from whoever wound up buying the mare’s little girl if they managed to catch her and get the brat to their guild handler. The method of the PipBuck retrieval was left open—it was his understanding that they didn’t care if they handed it over with the mare’s bloody stump of a leg still attached to it, as long as they got the damn thing. They didn’t say why they wanted it, and he knew better than to ask anyone from Life Tap’s guild questions on things they didn’t want to discuss. They did say that she was likely in Rough Port to recuperate from the fight in Trotpeka—the last they’d seen of her, she was barely able to stumble away, but by that point they’d had other concerns to deal with and didn’t chase after her.

Bittersweet, for once, agreed with him that a night ambush was the best way to go. PipBucks could pick up threats to their wearer’s life, so going after the stable mare when she was awake was not the best of ideas, not if she was as dangerous as their contact suggested. That alone should have tipped him off that this wouldn’t go well, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Clover reported otherwise. Gunfight in Puck’s bar, maybe a minute after they’d worked out some minor details with him, mainly compensation for his snitching on Rally’s location and managing to hold onto her long enough for them to get out here, as well as half of their cut from the sale of the filly if he was willing to hold onto her for them until things played out. Rally had somehow spotted them and was rousing someone from their slumber when Bitter’s crew went upstairs. Clover stayed downstairs in case Rally got by. Instead of a bunch of crashing and thumping, though, Clover heard a shotgun go off two or three times, and a few seconds of gunfire later he saw Terrance and Juniper trying to hightail it back downstairs, but Juniper caught a bullet to the head and didn’t quite make it to the bottom. Terrance did—he could have gotten the stable pony dead to rights, if his rifle hadn’t been jammed when the bitch leapt down after him.

Clover got out of there after that, and stayed outside just long enough to hear the short exchange of fire, then a very brief lull, and then a .357 Mag went off, and that was the last gunshot. Clover figured that Rally had shacked up with the mare and he wasn’t about to take on a pony-filly team that had just wasted his friends like a scythe slashing away at a wheat field, so he came back to the main group.

He normally killed people for cowardice, and for abandoning their team in a fight, but he had a better idea—make Clover lead the next team to try their luck. He sent the bastard northwest to the nearest town, Hayfield, and told him to take them from a distance this time if they showed up there. Clover’s new crew had an ex-Union trooper turned freelance bandit with a really good sniper rifle, and a griffon with one of the only two MEWs that the Pythons had. In all honesty, it was in better shape than the ones that Rally had fixed (and then trashed to shit), but a cache of a hundred and twenty energy weapons was the find of a lifetime. They could have pushed hard on the Runners, maybe even them pushed them all the way out into the Sandy Grave several hundred miles west. But nooooo, the little slut had to grow a conscience and break the whole lot of them, make off with roughly a dozen others.

When the other groups didn’t find any sign of them on the other roads the next day, he realized the stable mare might have just sidestepped them all and went out into the wastes proper, making her way to Hayfield without ever touching the roads with that PipBuck to tell her where to go, and had everybody regroup south of the town while he sent somebody to check on Clover. And now, as his scout poked her snout into his brahmin-hide stitched tent an hour after dawn with a sour look on her face, he already knew how attempt number two had worked out.

It hadn’t.

“Clover’s dead,” the pale lavender earth pony said bluntly—Sky Showers, he remembered a moment later. “His crew too, even that ex-trooper. All I found of him was a pile of glowing ash, she musta gotten hold of Henric’s laser rifle. How the hell are we gonna get around that? From what I saw of the combat site the trooper was turned into kitty litter from over four hundred yards away. Distance didn’t do shit for him.”

That did present something of a problem, but it was one they’d have to put up with. He had around twenty-two people to throw at this stable bitch this time and he was done being nice and subtle about this whole mess. She was too good—or too lucky—to take on in small numbers. “Figure out where they went after?”

“Got a fair clue. Saw this sign for a diner a bit north of the bodies, maybe five or six blocks away from the ambush. The way those thunderclouds were acting yesterday, they’d have been looking for shelter and that would’ve been perfect.”

“Then get everybody up and ready, we head out in twenty and finish this bullshit. All of us.”

--------------------------------------

The storm she’d been really afraid of—an angry, frustrated stable mare biting her head off for dealing with that pesky sniper without waiting for permission—never materialized. Neither did the rainstorm. The clouds just passed by, spitting lightning and bellowing thunder at everybody on terra firma, like they were taunting the world with their power to turn the roads and wasteland into impassable mud fields whenever they wanted. For some inexplicable reason, the rain simply decided it didn’t want to fall, and the randomness of the weather terrified her. If those damned winged rats up in the sky hadn’t up and left everybody down here to die, the weather would be behaving properly. It would rain when it was supposed to, and be clear and sunny when it was supposed to. It wouldn’t be doing this bi-polar mood swing shit all the time.

Light Tail, in all her precocious, child-like innocence, was absolutely mesmerized by the lightning (and not even an hour after watching her mom get a chunk of her leg nearly blown off, to boot). The little filly watched it through every window in the old restaurant for hours on end, squealing at every bolt that lashed out at the earth, and she had to admit that it was nice to be able to just sit and watch the light show from the cover of solid shelter. She’d never seen red lightning until yesterday, and the sheer number of cloud-to-cloud lightning strikes alone were almost breathtaking in both pattern and color variety. Red, blue, yellow, she swore she even saw a couple of purple flashes. Pretty cool stuff, really. The cloud-to-ground strikes were almost as impressive, and quite a bit bigger to boot. She hoped they got lucky and fried a few wandering predators in the wastes while they were at it. World could always use a few less deathclaws, geckos, and whatever else liked to eat little ponies and zebras.

Still, it came as a great relief to finally watch the filly crash and burn herself out. One minute she was zipping from window to window, trying to catch the last glimpses she could of the lightning storm, and the next minute she was slugging herself along like she was running on a dead spark battery. She barely had the energy to conduct her bedtime routine, and Rally wound up having to stuff her in her sleeping bag when the little one just plopped to the ground, ten feet short of her goal, and fell asleep where she landed. Cute, if a little annoying. At least her pups behaved themselves. They just hid under a table on the main dining floor, and watched their little master bounce about the place until they grew tired of it and went to sleep.

A couch in the break room was the best she could do for a bed, but with a couple of wool blankets she made it work, and it seemed to be enough because she couldn’t remember what she’d been dreaming about when she woke up. All that mattered when her eyes began to peel themselves open was a very powerful need to find somewhere to piss before she tossed dignity aside and went on the floor in front of everybody. She barely realized she was dragging her gun belt along with her until she’d bumped it into the doorway on her way out, and then she had trouble keeping up with it. She was still too tired to manage more than a simple levitation spell, though attempting to get the belt on with a telekinetic spell inadvertently brought more of her brain to life the more she tried it. By the time she’d stumbled out a side fire exit and into the depressing, cloud-covered outside world, she’d finally gotten it at least strapped tight to a point where her gun wasn’t pulling the thing off with its dead weight.

Only afterwards, outside, did she finally get her first clue that her morning would not be a quiet one. She hadn’t expected to find it, but a touch of magic on her gun belt ran into a pouch she didn’t remember putting on it, and a quick tug undid its attachment loops and pulled it up to her eyes. Sling’s little hygiene kit with the glorious contents of bathroom luxuries that were almost non-existent outside Union territory taunted her with its goods….and a small piece of faded paper, folded up and tucked inside a small shell loop on its front facing. Another tug pulled the paper out and unfurled it to reveal a surprisingly well-written (if brief) note inside:

“One block north of the diner. Need to talk. -SS”

Her mouth spouted off a silent, foul curse of the “F” variety, and after cleaning herself up she briefly contemplated just ducking out and hitting the road entirely, but realized she’d get maybe half an hour’s peace before something—or someone—made her regret taking off on her own. And Light Tail wouldn’t like it if she just vanished without so much as a good-bye.

…funny how that little filly she’d known maybe…three days, was already starting to hold her back on her decisions.

So she went north a block—not that anybody would be hidden away or anything. Julaya’s little diner hideaway was about the only structure still standing in this part of town, and going one block in any direction just meant passing by lots of small piles of rubble where other buildings used to stand, along with a few walls, and on occasion a wall from a multi-level building with parts of two floors still attached to it. To the north, there was just ruin and rubble, and no walls or pony-sized piles of debris—she imagined that the survivors of the Last Day, years or decades later, had pillaged through the ruins for any piece of useful scrap they could take with them, and what was left today was the useless refuse of nearly two centuries of scavenging and looting. Didn’t explain why the diner was so intact, though. Maybe it was just dumb luck, maybe it was just built better. Didn’t really matter.

What mattered was that she was getting within shouting distance of an unstable stable mare (no pun intended), who was more focused on practicing magical discharges than on what was coming up behind her, but then, she didn’t need to concentrate on that when she had a PipBuck on her leg.

“…guess you’re not a morning pony, either,” the mare said lightly, her horn ablaze in a bright indigo glow as she shaped and molded the small, bluish-purple orb of pure mana in front of her. Larger, smaller, even elongated it. Considering that a lot of unicorns could barely manage levitation or simple cantrips, what this mare was doing right now was pretty damn impressive.

Two hundred years ago, she would have probably been considered average….

“Never much of a morning worth getting up to,” she said back, coming to a stop about seven yards behind her. She didn’t want to be too close to her, in case that ball of mana went haywire or the mare decided to start shouting. “….look, if you’re gonna yell at me, get it over with so I can be on my way.”

“If I’d listened to myself yesterday that’s exactly what you’d have gotten,” Sling warned gently, the mana orb pulsing slightly as it began to float around in a lazy circle. “Still want to, honestly, sticking your damn head out like you did for that sniper to pick off.”

Well, surprise, let’s get this done with. “It worked, didn’t it? I didn’t hear you coming up with anything better.”

“You didn’t give me a chance to, either. Ten more seconds, I could have flooded the street with a light spell, blown it up in their faces and blinded them long enough to let us get to better cover.”

“Prove it,” she blurted before she could think to stop herself from saying it….

…and was briefly relieved when, instead of yelling at her to shut up, Sling simply increased the flow of mana in her horn and turned the orb in front of her into a brilliant, white-hot color, and then slung it off into the streets beyond and turned her head away from it—

—out of caution, Rally followed her lead, and had barely turned her gaze to the broken concrete and asphalt beneath her hooves when her eyes were stung by an intense explosion of light, like somebody shining a flashlight right into her face. But because the orb was some distance out and she wasn’t looking at it, that was the worst of it, and before she knew it the light had faded out of existence.

She made a small, mental note to never, ever dare this stable pony to do something two seconds after she claimed to be capable of it. ….well, shit….

“That griffon with the laser rifle also happened to have a couple of good smoke canisters on him,” Sling went on, turning her head back upright and forming another mana orb into life before her. “I could have popped them both and given us a smokescreen to cover our retreat. We could have used that laser rifle and picked off all the ground targets, cut through any cover they could have used, and then we’d have had all day to find a way around that sniper. Maybe even take him alive, see if we could learn anything about the rest of his little gang. And you went and threw yourself right into his sights before I could stop you.”

Maybe, could have…didn’t, what did it matter? They were alive. “It still worked. I got us out of that mess.”

“You got lucky,” Sling said, tossing a rifle cartridge back at her with a tiny flick of a separate telekinesis spell that sputtered out almost as soon as it had completed its purpose in life. “Found this on the floor next to his ash pile, with a live unfired round in the chamber. Your reckless little stunt might have worked only because the cartridge that should have killed you was a dud. But since he’s dead, there’s no way to be absolutely sure.”

Rally felt her heart skipping beats as her right hoof unlatched and caught the flung cartridge in the air, turning it the bullet over until she was staring at the bottom of the casing, and the strong, healthy dent in the primer’s center. If Sling was right, if this round had been in his rifle when she’d popped up from cover to shoot at him….

“You’ve been on your own, been your own boss, for as long as you can remember,” the mare said, when it became obvious to her that stupid Rally wasn’t going to say anything right off. “You’ve never had anyone you could depend on, you’ve had to survive on your own, and probably have plenty of memories of times when it looked like you wouldn’t make it to the next morning. You know far more about the horrors ponies commit on each other than any child should, I get that, but—”

“Do you?” she dared to challenge back, her eyes still locked on that lightly-struck primer. She wasn’t a gun person, but she knew enough about them to know when they weren’t working like they should have been, and that it wasn’t the kind of luck she wanted to be betting her life on. “Because you wanted to bite my damn head off afterward. You have, more than once. And as much as I appreciate the help, in the back of my mind I’m always aware that there’s usually only one reason why lonely adults would be interested in older kids like me.”

The mana ball in Sling’s face flickered and pulsed momentarily, as if she had lost her hold on it for an instant, and that was enough of a sign to Rally that she had struck a nerve. One she decided to push on a little harder, just to make a point. “….not just Puck, hunh.”

Aaaaaand push. “….a couple of others. A stallion in his late thirties….more than old enough to be my father. He found me huddling in the corner of a wall…five months after I got this metal leg, I think? I don’t really remember. I remember that most of the building was gone, just that wall and part of the second floor above me was all I had for shelter from the rain. I was cold, wet, starving, sick with a cold and at risk of pneumonia…yeah, I let him take me somewhere drier. For a few days it looked safe, until the cold passed and I wasn’t so weak from hunger, and then he made his move. Guess he’d figured I’d be grateful enough to…pay him back, so I did…by kicking him in the family jewels and getting the hell out of there before he could get on his hooves. Second time, a year later, was an earth pony mare and her zebra boyfriend, when I was scrounging around through Withercha. They...they got a lot closer than anybody else has. I only got away because some raiders stumbled across the camp and just started putting bullets into the tent. I got out. They didn’t. That was the last time I tried to find an adult nice enough to take me in. Miss Shine….she might have been different, but I couldn’t stay and put her life in danger if she was, because she deserved better than to get killed because of me.”

Sling’s magic ball broke apart and scattered into the winds, her horn losing its brilliant, wavy glow. “…oh fu….so stupid why didn’t I see it—”

Any other mare, in any other situation….she wouldn’t have trusted them too much, not after that night. But stable ponies, at least the four that she’d met, were a lot less….sick in the head, and at the very least she could trust them to not try to rape her, even if they were assholes. And this stable mare had just lost a friend to the ghouls in Trotpeka’s river bed, and had clearly been in no mood for anything beyond mere survival when she nudged into Puck’s bar to wait for those Runners friends of hers. No, taking advantage of a wasteland street urchin for her own sick amusement was not in Sling’s nature. She trusted her at least that much.

“Probably because you saw a little girl who needed help, the same way your friend needed help, and so you helped her if only to make yourself feel better about how she died.”

Sling didn’t dare turn around. She didn’t really blame her. But the way her body just went stone still right then…well, she wanted to strike a nerve, and she did. Now she wished she’d held back….

“….she died, because she let go,” the mare’s voice spoke hoarsely. “...she let go, and I couldn’t do anything but watch her fall….”

….oh, came the hard, crashing truth a moment later. Oh crap, I should have left it alone. Her friend died saving her and I just put my own fool head at risk of having its brains blown out.

She would thank the gods and the departed Sisters that Sling chose not to call her out on it too harshly. “….so, yes, when I see you sticking your head out where a sniper can put a bullet in it almost as fast as you could think about it, I want to scream and terrify you into never doing something that stupid again. You are not alone, you are traveling with a group, and what you decide to do can affect everyone around you. Do you think Light Tail would take you getting shot in the head well? Do you think she would have understood if I had died yesterday because I went and made myself a target out there, in the open, in the hopes that the sniper’s next bullet would be aimed at me instead of you?”

…..the key words, of course, being, “too harshly”. Still harsh, but she could have been much meaner about it. “….I….wasn’t, even thinking about any of that,” Rally heard herself mumbling softly. Until now she’d not even thought that the reason Sling went out there to kill everybody was to try and get them to shoot her and not the idiot giggling filly with a laser rifle she treated like a toy… “….or about anything besides making them stop shooting…..”

She waited for the stern, harshly worded warning not to do something so foolish or she’d be abandoned to her own whims, and Sling let off a heavy, tired sigh, like the mare was just as exhausted with this subject as she was the rest of her life. “I told you a coupla days ago, that you had a choice among several to make. That you had options. Maybe it’s time we laid them out.”

Shit, here it comes.

“You clearly know how to take care of yourself, or you wouldn’t have lived this long on your own. I told you that you could stay with me until you decide to go out on your own again. You can still do that. Don’t think El-Tee will like it, but you can go, if you want.”

“….the word “options” implies there’s more than one choice.”

Sling conjured up another orb of mana, which quickly began to take on an otherworldly appearance as it seemed to shift between exceptionally bright glowing colors of blue, white, and purple all at once. “Most of them are what you do if you decide to take off, which you’ve already thought of. Your best chance of living, if you leave, is to try and make it to Union territory. You’ve been over there, you know how the Union works, and you could probably get into a support position in their trooper corps with how well you can maintain MEW weaponry. You could try to work out your spat with the Pythons on your own, but I honestly don’t think they’ll do much more than rape you until you beg for death, and then sell you to slavers and put you through a lifetime of it. Or just rape you and kill you when they’re tired of you.”

It wasn’t hard to see what Option Number Four was. “….and if I don’t do any of that? If I decide door number four is the winning choice….”

Sling didn’t laugh, but at least she didn’t yell at her either, so that was something. “….option four. You stay with me, for keeps. But that option means you are no longer your own boss. You don’t get to take off on your own on a whim, because I won’t let you. Our stable rations won’t last forever, so get used to chomping on mil-rats now and then.”

“Shit, always a catch,” Rally blurted immediately, mostly at the military rations bit.

“Not the one I expected you to be swearing at, but that goes into the next point. Try to keep that foul language to a minimum, at least around Light Tail. I’ve said things I shouldn’t have in her presence, and she’ll actually nag you more about it then I will. I don’t honestly expect you to be perfect with it, not with the life you’ve had, but I do expect you to try.”

“…I actually do believe that. She was asking me about the ‘F’ word last night, and what it meant, and it took me a minute to figure it out ‘cause she wouldn’t say it or spell it out. When I told her it wasn’t a word for fillies like her, she got this scowl on her face that said ‘Oh, Mom said a really bad word and she knew it and won’t tell me’. Soooo…guess you’re busted.”

“…I’m more afraid what she’ll think when she finally learns what it means,” the mare moaned, her ears drooping slightly.

“…it seems like no matter what, I’m losing my freedom. The choice seems to be, lose it now, or lose it later.”

That brilliant, tri-color ball of magic began to exude what she could only describe as a shimmering mirage of itself as Sling began to move it about in small circles, like a cat playing with its prey. “…in a sense, you are. Yes, you will be controlled to a degree. You won’t be the one making decisions about where you go and when, you will not be putting yourself into a fight if I can keep you out of it, you will not be taking risks with yourself, and you will not have much choice about going anywhere by yourself for long stretches of time. I will be the one in charge of your life, and your safety, and I will do my best to provide for you and Light Tail in this wasted land but there may be times when I’ll need you to put your skills in repairing tech to use to net us some caps and food, because bounty hunting isn’t the safest way to go about it. This isn’t slavery, this is somebody willing to take on the role of your guardian because I have this ingrained and deep-rooted force called maternal instinct that compels me to keep children safe at any cost, even if they aren’t mine. I don’t mean to hurt you, and I will try my best to be patient, but you already know how that might go.”

“….a long-term foal-sitter, of sorts,” she grumbled, already growing uncertain if she was really, truly ready to just…give up the life she had and let somebody else boss her around, even if it wasn’t going to be for more than four years, tops. “…one with a talent for killing and violence, so I know she can hold her own in a fight….”

“…Rally, I know it’s hard to trust anybody, when it seems like all the world has done is shit on you for kicks all your life. You have better reasons than most to say no, given what a lot of adults have tried to do to you. You deserve a lot better than what you’ve gotten. I can do that, if you want it. But be sure that you do, because I will not let you go back to the life you’ve had afterward.”

She’d had this gut feeling that Sling would offer something like that. Stable ponies were pretty predictable about that “helping others” thing, if the wastes hadn’t hardened them and turned them into vicious souls. But it still put a rock in her gut, to hear it laid out, what it could conceivably mean. She was used to making her own decisions, her own way in life, and by now she had a pretty good handle on it now and then, but it was hard to say she was perfect considering she’d gotten herself into a pretty sticky situation with both the Pythons and then with Puck. In fact, if not for Sling, she’d probably be slung across a bed to be whored out to anybody willing to pay the caps for the “privilege”, or worse, in the Pythons’ clutches, where she would be beaten and violated until she broke down and gave up her weapons stash, and then beaten, violated, and murdered when they were tired of playing with her. But there was still that nagging, irresistible desire to stay the course she was on if only because it was all she’d known. She wasn’t sure if she’d be able to take having to do what somebody else told her to most of the time. She hadn’t liked it one bit with Puck…but, that was an entirely different thing, really. He was bossing her and kicking her around because he thought he owned her, in some sense that she owed him for dead brahmin he’d never told her he was going to charge her for if she failed to keep them alive.

Sling….at least so far, on appearance, was looking out for her out of a twisted guilt over the grisly death of her friend, and some strange, twisted motherly sense of wanting to look out for a kid who needed it. It wasn’t the healthiest way of coping with a loss, but it was a way, and Light Tail seemed to be coming around from the loss better than her mom with smart-mouthed Rally around. So maybe….in some symbiotic fashion, Sling’s offer of long-term protection and sustenance would end up helping all of them in the end.

Still, this wasn’t a choice she could just make right here and now. Not if Sling was serious about not letting go if she decided to stick with her, which was starting to sound like something more than what was being said. This stable pony wasn’t what she’d call an “open book” with her emotions. “….there a time limit on this deal?”

“Only if I die. Going from being your own pony, to having somebody doing most of the deciding for you….even if only for a few years, is not a small change to be making, and I expect a lot of learning and frustration from both of us to really figure out what that will be like for you. But before we do any of that, we still need to get these mercs to back off. Talking it out with them isn’t going to work too well, not after how many we’ve killed in the last two days, and they don’t seem interested in taking me alive so I’m not even going to try.”

She might have laughed if it hadn’t been so damn early in the morning. “From what I’ve seen, talking to your enemies isn’t even one of your preferred options. You seem to prefer turning them into gibby treats and holed cheese blocks.”

“Better them than me,” Sling responded with a heavy tone, and pushed her orb of arcane destruction up into the air where it burst harmlessly into thousands of glittering bits of white-blue-purple embers, and was actually a really pretty display. “Head on back to the diner, tell El-Tee and Julie I’ll be back in a bit. I’m going to check the bar, see if a water caravan came in before dusk yesterday. Should be back in about an hour.”

“And if you’re not?”

Sling’s travelling saddle—and its assortment of weapons—came floating up to the mare from its resting spot on the sidewalk nearby, its straps enveloping her body as it settled onto her back and the bolt of her black carbine racked a round into its chamber. “You’ll know long before then if something goes wrong.”

--------------------------------------

The mercs that had tried to kill Mom and take the rest of them alive were dead. She wasn’t happy that they were dead, but given what they’d just tried to take from her, roughly a week after losing Kite and BJ, she didn’t think she’d cry over it either. She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not, so she just accepted the fact that Mom was alive, the mercs weren’t, and she would rather have Mom alive than the mercs.

She’d gotten just enough of a look at the bodies (minus the one that Julaya killed, of course) to know that none of them were the ones she’d seen in the bar, but that wasn’t necessarily reassuring. It was now well into the morning hours the day after, and they had yet to show up again in any form, so she was pretty sure they weren’t with those snake ponies. If they had been, they would have come after them by now, or even back in the streets earlier today, attacking them from behind when that sniper started shooting at them. But that didn’t mean they weren’t threats either—they could have been bounty hunters, or mercs with another group.

The diner that Julaya had picked as last night’s shelter was in much better shape than most of the other places she’d stayed in overnight along the roads. She’d go a bit further and call it an actual restaurant. It had a small section that was like a diner, but then there was a lot more floor space beside it with lots of tables and booths, and there was even a big counter at the back that exposed the kitchen on the other side. There was a little lounge lobby right off to the left of the front entrance with chairs and a couple of sofas, for some reason, and the back rooms next to the kitchen were really spacious, with a decent bathroom and shower even, and a big break room that looked like it was meant to have a couple dozen ponies in it at once and had a couple of sofas and lounge chairs all over. The roof was mostly intact and had no leaks in it, most of the doors were still on their hinges and still had working locks, there wasn’t a lot of debris and junk lying around, and once Mom and Julaya had taken a few minutes to dust the place off, it honestly wasn’t that dirty.

Not that she took a lot of notice of that until this morning, because she’d spent countless hours last night watching the lightning storm pass by when she realized that the diner’s windows had a great view of the sky and all the other buildings and stuff around the diner weren’t standing in the way, because they were just piles of rubble. She never, ever got tired of watching the weather when it started freaking out and spitting lightning all over the place, and this time was really cool! She saw white lightning, blue, yellow, red, even some purple lightning! And sometimes it just stayed in the clouds and lit up the wasteland like a big lightbulb for a split second! She’d watch it from one window for a bit, then jump off the table and go find another window to see if it had a better show for her, and she was never disappointed. Rally didn’t seem nearly as enthused about it, but she did watch it with her for a bit, and it was nice to have somepony with her she could relate to a little bit. Sure, she was kind of a bit older, like…fourteen and a half, or something, but she was really smart. Smarter than her, even, if she could take MEW guns apart and fix them. And she didn’t treat little Light Tail like an annoying brat, but more like an equal of sorts, most of the time. And as long as she had Rally with her….not waking up and being able to bug BJ anymore was a little easier to take.

So of course, Rally would have chosen the exact time when she had to go out and find somewhere to pee to finally wake up and disappear, because when she came back the break room was empty, and she was left all alone with only two sleepy pups for company, and she didn’t want to wake them up just yet. But Julaya…she was always somewhere close by, and seemed always willing to stop what she was doing and humor her questions and whatever else popped into her tiny mind, like she was still a filly at heart herself.

And the zebra turned to be a much more interesting person to bug in the end. She wouldn’t answer any questions about the tribes in the wastes and she was kinda scared to ask about them again after how she pushed back against her (politely, even) last time. But she knew a lot about this side of the prairie, and she didn’t even mind explaining how she had gotten to be so athletic and swift with a sword and her four legs and everything.

In fact, she was willing to teach her a few things. Like where to hit a pony with her forehooves when she wanted to make them stop coming near her.

By letting herself be the target.

“…..you’re sure?”

“As sure as a soul can be, little tail of light,” the zebra laughed mildly, standing on all fours before her. “Zebra and pony are not so different as we appear. And I have been hurt by much worse than you and walked away afterward, so there is little chance tha—”

Well, if she was sure, then she was sure, and Julaya had just talked about striking her target at the first opportunity, and this seemed like a good time to show she’d been paying attention. So while Julie was talking and trying to reassure her that the “little tail of light” was no threat to her, she went ahead and jabbed the zebra right where she’d been shown, just below the throat, and the zebra’s legs immediately buckled and let her fall to the floor with a choked gasp.

That wide-eyed “OUCH” look on Julie’s face was just priceless, and she wound up laughing at her target as she gasped and fought the air for a share of its oxygen. “Hey, it worked just like you said it would! Where else can I hit somepony to make them fall like that?!”

One of Julie’s forelegs brushed against her throat, though that wasn’t where she got hit. “I hear good things about striking one’s ego….”

“I can’t hit that.”

“It depends on where you strike. For instance, a boy’s naughty bits. Very painful, to both body and pride.”

Her nose scrunched up slightly in disgust. That wasn’t somewhere she ever wanted to physically touch, ever, even if she knew it would work almost immediately if she had to do something like that. Then again, that was probably why Mom was so quick to threaten a stallion’s boy parts when she really wanted them to stop doing something really quick. “Eeech! That’s both gross and mean. You could really hurt somebody permanently if you hit that part of him hard enough.”

Julie’s eyes began to lose that pained, glassy look, though the sadness creeping into her jawline confused her initially until she spoke. “….then be sure such a thing is necessary before you do it.”

Hunh. She musta done somethin’ she wished she hadn’t….like a lot of people out here….

Or maybe that was why she didn’t want to talk about her old tribe….

“Sooo….what’s next?”

“…good question,” Julie groaned painfully, still rubbing at her neck. Maybe it made her feel better? “Allow me a few moments to ponder your next lesson.”

“But we just started.”

“Yes,” Julie’s voice mumbled. “....but the gods have punished me for underestimating you. I should like a few moments before tempting fate again.”

She managed not to laugh at that, even though she was kinda disappointed that Julie was giving up—even temporarily—so quickly. “Eh, should probably go check on the pups anyway. Won’t take long.”

“I should figure out how to avoid embarrassing myself further by then.”

She laughed an evil little laugh as she showed herself out of the break room, or at least she tried to sound evil, but it was hard to do that with the high-pitched voice of a little girl. Though…come to think of it, Julie didn’t sound like what she thought a zebra would sound like. Some of the old Journals of the First Ones, from her stable, told stories of chance encounters with zebras on the front lines, or more mundane and everyday interactions with the few zebras that managed to mingle within Equestrian society until things got really bad late in the war, and they all said something about how zebras had this deep, loud quality to their voices that made them stand out in a crowd even if they weren’t immediately visible. Julie, though, even though her voice had a…foreign quality to it, for all intents and purposes if she closed her eyes, she could swear she was listening to a pony and not a zebra. And instead of the more common gray and black stripes of most zebras, Julie had white and black stripes. Did that mean something in zebra societ—

Ahh, there they are, she interrupted her own musings, barely aware of how she had ended up in the dining floor of the restaurant, but she was there, and Max and Mona were right where they’d been left last night. Napping away beneath one of the table booths at the front, next to a window, and seemed content to stay there until disturbed (unwisely) by a stupid pony who should have known better. She wasn’t a stupid pony and deigned to let them stay there.

Rally, who could break a MEW gun apart and put it back together better than it was before, shouldn’t have been a stupid pony by default. But she made the near-epic mistake of slamming the diner’s front door open on her way in, and only a last second-save from a telekenisis spell burst kept the door from smacking into the wall and angering her pups….in theory. She really didn’t know what they would do if they were rudely awakened by a stupid pony, because she’d never done it. Let sleeping dogs lie, and all that.

Maybe Rally could tell her why that was so, actually….

Rally’s head turned towards the door, briefly puzzled by its sudden stop, but then she saw the electric blue glow around it and figured it out. “….pups still napping?”

“Still,” she answered in the affirmative. “Surprised they aren’t up and bothering me yet, actually.”

“I’m sure they’ll find ways to make you wish you hadn’t said that,” Rally grinned back. “Yer mom should be back in a bit. She went to see if a water merchant got into town before dark yesterday. Shouldn’t be more than an hour. I still think we’d be better off raiding all the soda machines we can find.”

As tasty as the stuff was, she didn’t like the idea of having to pee all the time after drinking the stuff, which was actually kind of weird because it was usually supposed to be water and tea that did that. “…ugh, we’d be a lot safer staying here, but if we have to, fine…”

“We might,” Rally countered. “And we’re behind everybody else in town with the same plan. I have no idea how those machines get restocked without anybody seeing it done, but they do, and they don’t stay that way for long. If we don’t get to those machines quickly enough, we might not get any.”

With little else to do for the next few minutes, she went and invited herself into the nearest table booth and sat down, and Rally made a straight shot for the seat on the other side of the table. “I’d…heard, once, that there was a bottling factory somewhere near Withercha with a bunch of robots outside of it. Could be some inside still makin’ the stuff.”

“That’s not too big a stretch, until you realize the plant hasn’t gotten a shipment of ingredients from its suppliers since the megaspells,” Rally’s said, the teen’s cyberleg clinking against the floor in stark contrast to the more hollow clomping of her three remaining organic hooves, which made her a little sad. “Or that nobody’s ever seen a ‘bot strolling about the wastes to physically re-stock the machines in like…ever?”

Somebody’s still makin’ the stuff or you wouldn’t be seeing fresh bottles ready to be slurped up,” she pointed out, sparing a look at the pups near the front to make sure they weren’t talking too loudly, and so far they were content to keep snoozing away. “So they probably got a clean water supply too, and they could do a lot more good with that than the sodas. That would be worth finding.”

“…hunh, never actually thought of that,” Rally mumbled in slight surprise. “But it makes perfect sense. It’s basically carbonated water and high fructose corn syrup. Take it all out and you’re back to basic H2O. And to still be seeing fresh soda out in the wastes two centuries after the end of the world…yeah, that’d be one hell of a water find. Would explain why it’s such a big secret, so whoever it is is doing a very good job keeping it that way.”

“So what’d you tell her?”

“Tell who what?” Rally countered, sliding into the booth seat on the other side of the table and laying her laser rifle on top of it.

“Mom said she’d ask you if you wanted to stay with us, instead of goin’ out on your own again.”

Rally’s face took on a forlorn frown, and she wasn’t nearly as excited to talk about this as she was old soda bottling plants. “…oh. That.”

“Yeah, that. She said she’d ask you this mornin’. For some reason she thought I might not want ya to, but I was like ‘oh yes please!’ and I even told her not to yell at you for stickin’ yer head up yesterday and almost gettin’ shot! She…she didn’t, right?”

“…wanted to,” Rally sighed. “Look, Elly, the way she put it…I’m starting to think she didn’t mean it the way I thought at first. I….she might have been trying to say ‘I’ll adopt you’ and not doing a real good job of it.”

If anything was going to get her to stop looking at the outside world…well, that would have been one of them. She felt something in her chest turn heavy, deep inside, but not in that scary way that she got whenever somebody started shooting at her. “….wh…wait, you mean like…adopt, as in….family? Like….”

“Yeah, like, ‘I’ll be your mom’ adopt. Which would be super-weird, but….I don’t know. I’ve been on my own for as long as I can remember. I don’t know that I could handle being told what to do instead of deciding for myself. I’ve done okay by myself….”

“Rally, if you’d done okay you wouldn’t have ended up in the mess you were in when we met. What Puck was doing to you….that was slavery, even if nobody called it that. When you told me Mom had gone to talk to him I thought she was gonna kill him for beating you up. She’s done that much to people who just threatened to hurt me. I’m surprised he and his lackey were still walking when she was done with them.”

“I’m not,” Rally muttered back casually. “…not sure I’d call Puck’s condition a “walking” one, but I would have been more shocked if she had just wasted him. He might have been a shady, shifty-eyed asshole with the way he did business with everybody, but he was still running a business in a community and it brought the town a lot of trade opportunities with travelling caravans that nobody would’ve gotten otherwise. You don’t just walk into the place and string the owner up by his entrails on a whim, even for a good reason. She did as much as she could to him without getting the town all riled up at her. Shit, the way I heard it at Miss Shine’s bathhouse they were looking to hang him for what he did to me anyway.”

“Quit cussin’,” her tongue snapped briskly, though she had no real hopes of that happening. Mom never listened, after all. “…in some ways, that’s almost worse. What she did…it’d have crippled them for life, maybe.”

“But they were still alive. Does that not mean anything to you?”

…I think I just made a mistake, said the tiny voice in her head, at a point far too late for her to be able to fix it. So all she could think to do was finish the original thought, the original argument, and see if Rally would start spitting insults at her and storm off or something. “It’s still pain. Life-long pain, that they’ll remember and have to deal with every day from that day on, well past the time when they finally realize how wrong they were to be hurting people all the time. Is that fair?”

Rally’s eyes just stared at her for a few moments, but her face didn’t get to quivering with anger or frustration, and when she finally did speak it wasn’t to accuse her of being a spoiled hypocrite of a stable pony with no courage to speak of. “There’s not much “fair” out here. What she did was a much fairer thing than if she’d just gone and killed them. And that’s a hell of a thing to do to a soul, to take away everything they got, and all they’ll ever have. You know how much that hurts people, to lose someone they care about so senselessly.”

Yeah, big mistake. Just thinking of Kite and Beige, of how empty a part of her felt knowing she’d never hear or see them again, it hurt her in a deep, intangible place that still managed to make her cry. But at least this time, all she did was leak a couple of tears. “….’s why I don’t wanna kill anybody, bad or not. I’d be hurting a lot more people than just that one. Even if I ever had to do it to save somebody…I don’t think I could live with that. I know now what it feels like to lose somebody I care about, and I don’t get how all this stupid war and death could go on for so long. How is it that nobody’s ever stopped and realized that they were all hurting each other like this?”

“I think I’m starting to see why everybody likes you so much,” Rally breathed softly. “But let me ask you this. What would you be willing to do, to save someone you loved from getting grievously hurt or killed? To keep from feeling that pain of loss at the hooves of a raider, or some sicko murderer or mare-beating savage with unkind plans for you? I’m not talking about a neighbor or some thick-headed trader trying to swindle you out of your caps, I’m talking folk who genuinely want to rob and kill you and your family, who don’t care about anyone but themselves and have absolutely no remorse or empathy for the pain they cause. People like the slavers, the raiders and bandits you’ve seen shot to pieces, and the mercs trying to kill your mom and probably me. What would you be willing to do, to keep them from hurting you and yours when talk won’t work?”

…well, at least she ain’t yelling at me, Light Tail smiled with relief inside. She was kinda surprised that Mom hadn’t tried to talk to her about this yet, given that she was the one who’d been teaching her how to shoot in case something happened to her. “I don’t wanna hurt ‘em the rest of their lives. Just make them stop. Bullets and knives tear stuff up, things that don’t always heal back the way they were before. Magic takes so much time and practice it’d be years before I could get the hang of it, so that’s out. Even hittin’ people can do some serious damage if you hit ‘em hard enough in the right place. What else could I do?”

“Nothing. And that means you risk getting hurt, or killed….or somebody you love suffering the same. That’s the crazy thing about it all. You can’t talk everybody out of violence. Just pointing your gun at them and shooting in their general direction, taking care not to hit them isn’t going to be enough sometimes. You’re gonna have to make them stop, and you may have to hurt them very badly before they do. So it comes down to one thing—can you live with standing by and watching the people you care about get hurt, or can you live with hurting your attackers enough to put a stop to it? Even if that means crippling them for a very long time, possibly for life?”

She couldn’t begin to describe how the world felt like at that moment. She’d struggled with that question for what seemed like a lifetime, from the moment she first realized that the surface world was a much more dangerous place than she could have ever imagined all those months ago when she and Mom were being backed into a corner by those ragged looking raider ponies. She wasn’t quite sure, but she thought she’d managed to pull her gun on one of them and shoot at him. She remembered shooting at several people on more than one occasion after that day, though. Those mercs that were working with Saurus, the day he nearly killed Mom….maybe she’d shot one of them without intending to, because she could remember the last one saying something about getting “drilled in the leg” before Saurus murdered him, and she also remembered that when she’d shot at him and he ducked back behind his cover, he didn’t come after her again.

Then there was that group of highway bandits who’d murdered a whole trooper squad on the highway, just to take their place and try their luck at robbing a caravan or a small group that came by. After Mom, Kite, and Beige had killed the majority of them by surprise and the last two behind that overturned cargo trailer starting shooting at them, she’d been the first one to put her gun over the top of that old sky wagon and start shooting back, if for no other reason than to try and make them stop for a few seconds. It worked, too, when Kite joined in.

…..Kite…who, five weeks later, shot and killed slavers when they got too close, or were getting up and trying to shoot them despite being in no condition for a fight…and when a second band of slavers caught up to them, starting shooting at them from across that bridge while Kite struggled to get Mom away….and when that bridge broke in half, and Kite and BJ needed some manner of help to follow them over or risk falling into those ghouls…

….she just…sat there, relatively safe, and watched Mom fail to save either of them...and then blamed her for it and outright accusing her of intentionally dropping Kite to save herself….

…god, I’m such a stupid little hypocrite…at least she tried, when all you’d do is sit there and watch…

She must have been lost and tortured in her own little world for quite some time, because the next time she looked up at anything, the seat across from her was empty and she was all alone at the table.

She reluctantly scooted out of the seat and plodded back to that little break room, but she found it a lot harder to move forward without feeling like she was lugging around a hundred pounds of stuff on her back. And she knew why. She was starting to believe what Rally was saying. That she could pull her gun on somebody, put a couple of bullets in their knees, or turn around and buck them in the face with her rear hooves, and feel okay with it if it meant that Mom or Rally or Maxie and Mona wouldn’t be hurt by that somebody. That she could see them later, laughing and playing, and feel okay that she got to enjoy their company because she’d hurt somebody to save them.

And as she trudged to a stop at her travelling saddle to take stock of her most dangerous tools—her 9mm pistol, her little .357 revolver, and the laser pistol that Rally had fixed—she found herself looking at them in an entirely different light. Before, she’d seen them as “people killers”. That little good could come of her having such deadly things, even though she’d shot at people with them on more than one occasion. Those times, though, she wasn’t trying to hit them, just trying to scare them off. Now she looked at them, thinking back to that bridge, when Mom was trying the best she could in her exhausted, powerless state to save Kite and Beige and all the little scared filly could bear to do was watch…

….now she looked at them, and took in the weight of them as she checked them over, made sure they were loaded and clean. Made certain that the revolver had .38 Specials instead of those super-loud .357s that she couldn’t handle, that the 9mm had hollowpoints and not the round-nose bullets that just went through targets without doing much damage. Made certain the laser pistol was turned on and the safety engaged, though she had no intention of actually using it unless she was out of options.

She looked at them, all the while thinking back to that bridge, that canal of hungry ghouls, and how she just sat there, watching, doing nothing, when she had the capability to try and help them….

…never again, she cried to herself, tucking them back into their holsters, no longer cringing at the unwelcome weight. Never.

--------------------------------------

The universe was out to make her life miserable. Some unseen power, some far-flung god of the stars, was intensely offended by her, or something she’d done in a past life, in another age, because the best bout of good luck she’d had all week (aside from finding a soul willing to put up with her and lead her about the wastes) had turned into a dud in a single firefight yesterday.

Julie’s little black rifle was a lemon. It had jammed on her three times yesterday—the last malfunction being a particularly nasty double-feed that had her finishing the fight with her 10mm rather than fixing it mid-battle. She’d thought it was the magazine, until she’d unloaded them all last night and found that she’d kept the one with the weak magazine spring set aside in a rear-mounted pouch on her travelling saddle so she wouldn’t pull it by mistake. Then she went to tearing the rifle down, pulling the upper receiver off and dropping the bolt carrier out—which was surprisingly dirty after only roughly twenty-two rounds and cementing her distaste for the M-series rifle in general. But that shouldn’t have been enough to cause the gun to choke so much, so quickly. Recoil spring seemed fine—a bit weak, but not so much as to cause cycling issues. Could’ve been ammo related, but she didn’t think they were under-loaded, at least not from the recoil impulse she felt. Couldn’t rule it out completely, though, not when 5.56mm and civilian .223 measured their pressures differently and the bolt was so dirty from less than thirty rounds.

So that left the gas tube, and she was glad to be a unicorn who could fight difficult-to-remove parts with magic instead of just wishing she could. By luck, she’d had an old pipe cleaner that was sized just right for the tube and spent roughly ten minutes cleaning it out, and by the time she was done the cleaner was solid black and in need of a good cleaning itself. She didn’t think it would fix the epidemic jamming problems by itself, but it was a start.

Hence, her search for a merchant who knew firearms, or rifles at least, while she searched out potential sources of water in the town’s only real structure of worth (and the seedy dance club in the back had her doubting its value). And as she was woefully discovering, that kind of knowledge was not very common.

Or taught, even.

“….you jest, surely,” she droned to the twitchy-eyed, fidgety griffon before her, ignoring the other nine conversations going on in the bar as best she could.

“Ya wish, babe,” the black-feathered, gold-furred male huffed back. “Hell, I didn’t even know those guns had gas tubes you could clean. Or that it was that much of a pain in the ass to pull the forends off.”

An irritable swish of her tail was her only sign of displeasure at being called ‘babe’, and of the fact that she had just received her first sign that today wasn’t going to be a good one. “And you’ve been at this how long?”

“Look, stable girl, not everybody gets lucky and gets an education like you,” he spat at her. “Maybe one in three folk can read, if that. I got by okay learnin’ by error and hard luck, but there’s lots I don’t know. Gunsmiths, real ones, like you? Folk’ll be whoring themselves out to you as their payment for fixin’ their guns up right. I think yer on to somethin’ about the ammo, though. Bolt shouldn’t be that dirty from less than thirty shots. You got wasteland-made or pre-war stuff?”

“Mix of both, it seems,” she replied. “Sad thing is, with 5.56mm it can be hard to tell them apart from pre-war rounds side by side. Always hated that military-contract rounds have that discolored, dirty once-fired look to them even brand new, and wasteland rounds look exactly the same in just about every caliber. I’m afraid to pull the bullets and check the gunpowder ‘cause that’s ammo I might need later, but…”

“Yeah, no real way to tell for sure if you’re not willin’ to go that much trouble,” he agreed. “And good luck with spare parts good enough to use. Ain’t been a workin’ factory pumpin’ out fresh parts since the megaspells.”

“…I heard different,” she said, briefly recalling once that Ada had mentioned that her side of the prairie could make stuff even the Union couldn’t get. Like optics, and gun parts. Gun parts that she desperately needed. “Supposed to be an outfit or two near the big city that can make scopes or fab some gun parts.”

“Not on a regular enough schedule that you can count on it when you need it,” the griffon said with a sour note. “There was a little shop that was crankin’ out scopes, but they shut down ‘bout six months ago. Some piece of equipment finally gave out, and they can’t fix it, so they’re done for unless somebody can find ‘em a replacement. Same with the little ammo plant north of the city, they lost their access to an old copper mine some distance out, can’t coat their bullets anymore and they won’t make ammo that ain’t copper-coated. They say it keeps barrels from getting leaded up and helps ‘em last longer. But you’d know more about that me.”

“And they’re right,” she sighed, growing more disappointed with every turn this conversation took. Either Ada had been lying, or she’d been away from her home range long enough to miss out on these developments, and she was leaning towards her being gone too long. “Smokeless powder is what lets us push past the sound barrier and go super-sonic on our bullets. But at that speed, the rifling in the barrels will literally sheer lead off an uncoated bullet as it’s pushed out. Leaded barrels can have pressure and accuracy issues that are hard to fix without a good, strong cleaning solvent. But copper slides across the rifling a lot easier, lets that bullet scream out like an angry wasp. Barrel quality can have an effect on service life too. Early M-series rifles were known to have crude barrels with a lifespan of roughly five thousand rounds, even if they were chrome-lined, but a good, quality hammer-forged barrel could go for twenty-thousand. Government rifles had the crude barrels because they were easier and cheaper to make and cheaper to replace in armorer maintenance. But even a hammer-forged barrel will let go if it’s worn out and shot too much.”

“…that might actually explain what happened to a couple of burst barrels I’ve seen,” the griffon bemoaned wistfully. Hell, his eyes even glistened a little. “Two bolt-action .308s, three years apart. First one, the owner got lucky and didn’t get hurt. Second dude lost an eye. Gun was worn to shit, so the bolt didn’t hold together like it’s designed to when somethin’ goes wrong and part of it came back at him in the face. What was left of the barrel looked like it hadn’t been cleaned in years, and I remember both of ‘em havin’ cartridges they’d rolled themselves, with solid lead bullets.”

Her left eye twitched uncomfortably, flashing back to a certain griffon and a sharp claw raking across her face. “So now that you’ve crushed my hopes of getting this damn thing straightened out, did any water caravans come in yesterday afternoon?”

“One,” he answered flatly. “Got in just before dark, should be setting up down south of here, in that old lot for farm combines and tractors. They’re here to resupply the town, but they usually carry enough to fulfill a contract twice so they can sell to individual travelers and caravans they meet along the way. Should be plenty to go around for everybody, but they don’t plan on staying long.”

Her heart did an about-face, its constant beat becoming livelier even as caution and past experience reminded her of what happened the last time she’d asked around for a water salespony. “This one for real?” she huffed quickly. “Because some assholes tried to kill me yesterday, saying they were water merchants to draw me away from everybody in town, and I’m not in the mood for a second attempt.”

“So that’s what all that racket was,” he said absently, one of his talons reaching for his water canteen in front of him. “Nah, this one’s legit, got Runners guarding it. But now I’m curious who it is you got so pissed at you. Just faking the water merchant part’ll get you in deep shit with just about everybody. Hurtin’ people’s trust in the one Union-sourced good the Runners will actually protect….bad for everybody.”

“Some outfit of well-armed raiders who named themselves after an old zoo pen—”

The griffon’s mood changed almost instantly, and not for the better. “Oh shit me, Pythons,” he muttered with a startle, his body straightening up in his chair. “…whatever business you got in town, you need to finish it quick and get movin’. You don’t wanna know what they do to folk who kill a few of their friends.”

“I’m trying, believe me,” she huffed as she hopped out of her chair. “How long is this caravan staying here?”

“Long enough, if you quit wastin’ yer time with me and get to it. Hell, those Runners might even be able to sort your rifle out for ya, they use that M-series more than anybody else, ‘sides the Union. You’ll need it.”

Fuuuu—gods dammit why did you go and say that, now I’m definitely going to need it! But she managed to keep her displeasure of his untimely statement to herself, instead focusing her energy into reaching the water caravan and talking them into staying put a while longer.

Which, it turned out, was as easy as simply showing up.

As she neared the end of her five-minute journey, she recognized—or thought she did—at least two of the ponies gathered around a convoy of ten wagon carts, currently parked in that farm combine lot the town “gunsmith” had politely pointed out earlier. Light Tail had gone into fairly good detail about some ponies and griffons she’d thought were either mercs or Pythons yesterday, down to their weapons and the accruements upon them, and two of these souls seemed to match her descriptions pretty close. An earth pony mare, with a green mane and tail and a purple coat that was disturbingly familiar, and her .308-caliber battle rifle mounted in a battle saddle on the left side, was standing guard on the south side of the convoy, and a tan-colored unicorn mare with silvery mane and tail (like Julie, even, just like the squirt said) who seemed to favor a pair of 10mm pistols with extended magazines was the closest pony in sight at the front. Light Tail also mentioned that she wasn’t sure if they were mercs or just well-armed wastelanders passing through because they had no armor, but she saw within two seconds that at least six of the seventeen souls attending the brahmin and their life-preserving cargo were all wearing the Runners’ favored desert camo armored barding, and felt her fears of her next few minutes of life greatly eased. If she was lucky, one of these Runners could at least take a look at Julie’s rifle and see if they knew what manner of voodoo was afflicting it—

—the gunslinger mare at the front threw her off her initial game plan when she raised a foreleg and beckoned her closer upon sighting her, but then again, she was probably also acting as a sort of point contact for the water caravan—

—her assumption was proven correct when she came within twenty feet of the caravan. “How much you need?” the tan mare asked gently, despite the lack of proper introductions.

Not that she was offended. Folk walking up to a water caravan probably only had one thing in mind, so asking “what do you need” seemed somewhat pointless. “Enough for four ponies and two dogs for at least a week.”

“Age ranges, besides yourself?”

Wow, she’s quick with the sales. Must do this a lot. “One other adult, early twenties…two fillies, one ten and one fourteen, and the dogs are huskies, about….five months old, is my best guess. We found them in the east, without their mother or the rest of the litter, just old enough to be weaned.”

“Shit, that’s a lot to be carrying at one time,” the mare commented lightly, turning her attention to a clipboard she’d pulled out of her right saddle bag and began flipping through its attached pages—and then abruptly stopped after the second page and jerked her gaze back upward. “…wait, did you say two huskies?”

Her subconscious began pointing out the weight of her various weaponry spread across her travelling saddle—shotgun on her left side, 10mm forward of the left saddlebag, Grayhawk forward of the right saddle bag, and that sweet .223 revolver behind the right bag, with Julie’s malfunction-prone carbine hanging off of her torso by its sling. For the life of her, though, she couldn’t figure out why she was even worried about the Runners turning their guns on her. “….yeah?”

The mare’s eyes scrutinized her face for a couple of seconds, and swiftly stowed her clipboard away as they widened in some form of inner epiphany coming to life within her brain. “Sweet Luna’s cheeks, it’s you—”

Oh, shit—

“Hey, guys, up here!!” the mare yelled over her withers, turning away from her briefly. “It’s the Saurus slayer!!”

She put it together in the time it took the other five Runners to drop what they were doing and jog over to her position. Ada and Leon had probably managed to get a message or two back to the rest of their group, or at least with these six, maybe as a back-up plan in case she had to flee Rough Port before the two griffons could catch up to her. Have them keep an eye out for her, or at the very least tell them why they shouldn’t be too terribly quick to open fire on her. She should have expected as much.

But she was not expecting the reaction of seeing her in the flesh to be one of near-hero worship.

“For real?” the purple coated mare squealed (squealed!), her happy, bouncing trot giving away her level of glee and joy as clearly as a gunshot in the open air. “The one girl that raping sack of shit couldn’t wrestle to the ground is right there?!”

“Thought you’d be taller,” a griffon remarked aloud, his rifle slung across his chest as he dropped to all fours and drew closer. Pale gold coat, off-white feathers. “But shit, yeah, there’s that Phoenix .44, I’m amazed Ada didn’t hit on you to get closer to it.”

Oh, godsdammit, it’s always the gun with these griffons—

A yellow-coated unicorn stallion, bearing a black rifle like hers and fitted with what looked like a short-range optic and a suppressor, strolled in behind the purple mare with a quizzical look to his eyes. “She said you didn’t have a rifle, that you might need one ‘till she caught up with you but…where’d that one come from?”

“It’s not mine,” Sling answered cautiously, carefully pulling the rifle’s sling up and over her neck as she released the magazine and worked the bolt to eject the chambered round into her telekinesis field. “It’s Julaya’s. She kept it hidden away for emergencies, but it’s not working out too well.”

“So that’s how you got here without using the roads!” he said, a pale gold glow wafting off his horn as he took the rifle into his possession and promptly pulled the retaining pin out on the lower receiver. “That girl could cross the whole prairie and never once come within sight of a road to do it! So what’s the trouble with the gun?”

She watched the rifle’s upper swing off of the lower receiver on the forward retaining pin, allowing the bolt carrier and charging handle to be pulled out for his inspection, though he seemed more interested in the buffer tube inside the stock. “Had three malfunctions in a fight yesterday,” she replied, keeping as close an eye on the stallion and rifle as she could while scoping out the other two Runners drawing closer towards the growing crowd. One griffon, gold fur and stone gray feathers, possibly female judging by her more lithe build compared to the male to her right, with a modified service rifle that had been fitted with black plastic, rounded fore end guards rather than the usual triangle style she saw in the Union’s trooper corps. “Two stovepipes, last malf was a pretty nasty doublefeed that had me beating the stuck rounds out with a cleaning rod and a little rubber mallet I keep in my repair kit. When she first lent it to me I spent a couple of minutes giving it a once-through with a cleaning brush and oiling the bolt carrier, but I didn’t have time to break it down and really clean it, so I can’t rule that out. Ammo was dirty as shit, though, I was coming up with almost pitch-black patches off the bolt carrier last night and I only fired about twenty rounds.”

“Eewww, sounds like old surplus crap,” he remarked with slight disgust, putting the lower receiver up to his eyeball to get a better look into the buffer tube after illuminating it with a light spell. “Stuff will gunk up the rifle really quick and that’s about the worst ammo you can put in an M-series, the way that gas impingement blows all that junk back into the chamber. But twenty rounds shouldn’t have gotten it that dirty that quick. Buffer tube looks okay, so there’s that going for you…”

“Should be. Thing’s sealed inside the stock.”

“That doesn’t always help,” he sighed sadly. “I’ve seen some of these guns get used as a club, and the tube’s not built to take that kind of stress on a regular basis. Any misalignment of the tube can interfere with the recoil spring’s cycle and could cause the malfunctions you just mentioned, or seize it up altogether. Only fix is to rip off the tube and replace it, but I can’t tell if it’s a military or a commercial tube unless I pull the stock off.”

Up until now, she’d not thought there’d be any difference between a military contract gun and one built for a civilian customer. “There’s a difference?”

“Commercial tubes are a little wider in diameter, and the distance between the individual tracks in the threading is the same. On the mil-spec model the distance between the threads gets wider as it moves further down the tube. I work on these things a lot when I’m not wandering the wastes, and quite frankly they’re a pain in the ass once they start breaking down and wearing out. I’m sure they all worked great brand new, but we’re talking two hundred year-old guns that haven’t had fresh factory parts for just as long a time and I’m amazed when one works for a hundred rounds without a malfunction now.”

Sling’s eyes began to see Julie’s rifle in a much less kinder light. A weapon prone to epidemic jamming was almost no weapon at all. “…Julaya’s going to hate it when I tell her she got hosed when she bought it.”

Not finding anything off with the buffer tube, he went back to poking at the bolt carrier group, and this time he didn’t just look it over, he actively titled it and poked it in several key locations, mainly the bolt face and body, as well as the top of the bolt carrier itself. Probably looking for rough edges, or for signs that she might have been over-lubing it. “Doubt it was intentional, not a lot folk know much about guns, much less this model. Ada calls these crew-served weapons, and with all the work we’re putting into them to keep them going these days she’s not far off—”

—his poking and prodding of the bolt carrier finally produced a result. The gas key moved a little when he pulled at it ever so slightly. “Ah, there it is. Gas key’s loose.”

“Good or bad news?”

“Mostly bad,” he sighed. “Loose key means gas is leaking through the gaps and the carrier doesn’t cycle properly, and you start getting malfunctions no matter what else you do to correct it. Old as this gun is, there’s no telling how long it’s been running like that. I can try re-staking the gas key, but I don’t have the tools to do it here. If it really malf’ed that badly on you yesterday, you’re probably better off not using it.”

“You said you got into a fight yesterday,” the pistol-armed mare jumped back in, steering the conversation somewhat back on course. “Any idea who it was you tangled with? Nobody in town’s said anything about raiders so far today.”

Right, moment of truth, maybe they give a shit, maybe they don’t….

“….another merc group,” she answered. “Call themselves Pythons, after a zoo exhibit they live in—”

Six sets of eyes snapped back up at her, and none of them looked happy to hear what she’d had to say. “—aaaaaand who apparently bring up an ‘oh shit’ look when I say their name.”

“Who fired first? You, or them?” the mare asked next. Fair question, actually. They probably didn’t like getting dragged into fights that their “clients” started unless there was a really good reason for it.

“This isn’t our first fight,” she explained carefully. “First fight was back in Rough Port the other day. They weren’t looking for me outright, they’d come to grab this kid that wound up in indebted slavery to a jackass named Puck, and found me by accident. She says she was working on a cache of over a hundred MEW weapons that somebody had found, and she’d been brought in by the original seller to fix ‘em up to working condition while he searched out buyers. When she found out who the weapons were going to, she broke most of them and stole a few for herself. Hid them somewhere and took off, trying to get away from them. How she wound up with me is…a bit of a story.”

“….dammit, we should have picked those up when we had the chance,” the mare cursed lightly, though initially her mouth was trying to spit out fouler words. “We’ve heard some rumors about a weapons stockpile going up in flames in Withercha a while back, and that MEW cache was the first thing on our minds. We wanted ‘em, but not at the exorbitant price the seller was wanting, we’d have had nothing left afterward. But at least the Pythons didn’t get them, or most of us would be dust now. When they came for the kid, how many did you kill?”

“Four. Thought there might’ve been one or two more waiting outside, but I wasn’t eager to walk out into the dark and look around. Another group ambushed me on the west side of town yesterday, had at least one sniper that took my hind legs out, but one in the group had a laser rifle I was able to appropriate and turn on them. Nine bodies in total across the two fights. And I’m worried the next time they come at me, it’ll be with everybody they got in the area.”

“Raina, Tack, stick with her,” the pistolero barked almost immediately. “Consider the Pythons kill-on-sight. Rest of us will finish out the escort contract with the water caravan. Once they’re back in Trotpeka we’ll catch up with you back home.”

The stallion in front of her immediately began re-assembling her rifle, and had it back in one piece in roughly five seconds (including the somewhat tedious step of re-inserting the carrier and charging handle, which always gave her trouble). “Good thing you got almost as many pistols as you do hooves,” he snarked to her face as he floated it back over to her. “Got much in the way of armor-piercing hardware besides that laser rifle?”

“Eighteen rounds of black-tipped 5.56 and a motorized .223 revolver to shoot them through. My daughter’s got a Lightbringer 2000 with a modified barrel, I’m told it can penetrate just about any armor out there, but I don’t have very many power cells for it.”

“Doesn’t need many, coupla shots from an upgraded Lightbringer is usually enough,” the griffon female replied—Raina, she assumed, since the griffon was moving up as if she intended to invade her personal space. “If I know Julie all that well, she probably led you to this old diner on the west end of town. Big sign on top, an actual intact roof, right? She practically lived there for a year.”

“No wonder she was quick to point it out…”

“Lot worse spots to hide in. I’ll fly up and scout ahead, scope out the alleys and shit. We’ll probably meet up again when you’re halfway back. Tack, try to behave yourself.”

Her gut began to fill with dread at the prospect of being left alone with an amorous stallion, and latched onto her nearly forgotten business in hopes that she might end up being spared the trip. “W-wait, I still need that water—”

“You’re covered,” the gunslinger mare replied before she could finish. “Ada and Leon made like, five back-up plans in case something happened to screw up your planned rendezvous in Port. We’re plan number three, and they left us enough caps for a month’s worth of water for twelve souls. But that plan didn’t take into account you pissing off the Pythons….none of them did, actually. So we’re kinda moving into uncharted territory here. I’m sorry to say this, but you’re in a pretty shitty position and I don’t see a good way out of it. We’ll get the water sorted and set aside nearby. My suggestion is to get everyone together, come back for the water, and find a good defensible position to hold out in because that diner’s too big and too exposed. Beyond that, you’ll have to make it up as you go…like you’ve probably been doing all alo—”

A distant groan of thunder lazily made its way across the air, pulling Sling’s attention away from the Runners and towards the source of this new noise that seemed like it was a lot closer than the faintness of it sugge—

“—oly shit, that’s a big fireball!” Raina’s voice echoed from above, and even before the griffon could finish, Sling already knew in her gut what had just happened. “I think they started the party without you, stable girl!”

--------------------------------------

It had been agreed to start the ambush off hard. After spending the better part of thirty minutes temporarily blinded by that out-of-nowhere exploding light spell (he still couldn’t figure out how she knew their exact position or why she never bothered to finish them off), half the crew wanted to split and leave the stable mare alone, to hell with the twenty thousand caps Life Tap was offering for her PipBuck. The other half didn’t care as long as they got their share of the reward in the end. He was able to keep everybody onboard by adding the take from the sale of the mare’s little brat on top of their cut from the PipBuck bounty. Plenty of folk in the east were willing to pay a lot of caps for a little girl, and he wasn’t blind as to why. But as long as the money was good, he didn’t care what they did to their property afterward.

The plan was a very simple and forward affair. The PipBuck had a fairly short detection range, somewhere around fifty to seventy meters, and from the looks of it when he scoped the diner out with his binoculars, there wasn’t anybody in the dining floor at all. Made sense, really, the back rooms were better sheltered and kept squatters hidden from passing wanderers. It also meant his crew could get a little closer without being picked up right off. Say…sixty meters to the diner before they were detected, for the absolute best margin for error, and they would they break into a hard run, swarm the diner and overwhelm the stable mare before she could get her shit together. Best case scenario was that they wasted her with no casualties, and that was the scenario he laid out, but privately he was expecting to lose two to four based on how quickly she’d taken out Bittersweet’s crew the first time around even with the element of almost complete surprise. And even with her dead, those of them that survived would be looking to take their frustrations out on somebody. Like, say….Rally? He knew what he’d told Bitter, but he figured that if a few of them decided to take her aside somewhere and turn her into a mare—multiple times—before he got back with the bounty for the stable slut’s PipBuck, well, tough shit for Rally.

Ten meters before they were supposed to start running forward, a sharp fwoosh! and the sizzling of a two centuries-old rocket propellant sailed past the group in the form of an RPG, smashed into the diner front, blew the front door and the attached doorframe to bits along with about ten meters’ worth of the front wall around the blast point, and sent everybody’s ears into a ringing fit that drowned out almost all other sound in the world.

A simple, forward plan, and his hastily-gathered crew couldn’t even do that without shitting all over it! It was no wonder that stable mare was having such an easy time with them!

“Who the FUCK just did that?!”

The debris from the point of impact was just beginning to shower the empty lot in front of the diner when the culprit unwisely revealed his complicity in the questionable tactic—an earth pony stallion, light violet coat and purple-greenish mane that had everybody calling him a girl in hiding, and he’d apparently seen fit to break the rocket launcher out of storage at camp when nobody was looking. “You want that stable bitch throwing another damned spell at us?! That last one blinded us for damn near twenty minutes—”

He didn’t even notice his horn wrapping a telekinesis spell around his revolver, but it was impossible to not see the worn, scarred carbon steel .44 magnum coming up and putting two rounds into the launcher tube before the idiot could finish his sentence. The impact knocked the tube about in his grasp hard enough to make him drop the now-ruined launcher to the ground, and probably cracked the bones in his forelegs if his seething shriek of pain was accurate.

“We need that PipBuck intact and working to get that twenty thousand cap bounty!” he screamed back, re-holstering the pistol and turning his full fury onto this pleb who would probably be cleaning the latrine trenches back home with his tongue if he survived the journey back. “We need that little bitch alive and conscious if we want to find the last of the energy weapons she stole from us! We needed the element of surprise you just pissed away to get a shot at either of them without a fight, you ignorant fu—”

A bright, pinkish-red beam lashed out at the object of his rage, scoring a solid hit to the chest and momentarily engulfing his entire body in a brilliant orange glow—

“SPLIT!!” he yelled unnecessarily—everybody was already well on their way to getting out of sight of the front of the diner. He was mostly yelling because the ringing in his ears made it hard to hear much of anything clearly as he took to running himself, somewhere to the side of the diner where there weren’t any big open windows or openings to shoot through—

—at least, not for a dinky little pistol. To a laser rifle, the walls of a house or a diner was little more than a speed bump, and proved this quite harshly as another beam sliced through the side wall and came dangerously close to his face—

--his vision darkened somewhat, temporarily overloaded by the light and energy of the beam itself, but he could still see well enough to keep moving and opted to stop screaming commands and giving away his position to the shooter—

—a couple of his comrades weren’t quite that bright. He could hear them even from where he was. They’d found a side entrance, possibly a fire escape on the other side—

“Here!” a mare’s voice yelled out—sounded like Dusty Dove, one of the younger recruits they’d picked up last year in Withercha. Only half a tail, short mane, violet eyes and gray coat, and about as much sense as a street whore—which was her previous life, ironically. “Come on, le—”

He heard the laser rifle firing a quick volley of shots, four or five, depending on whether he thought he heard a fifth one or just a shifting change of tone in his ringing ears. What he did not hear was Dusty’s voice again, though he did hear a couple of other souls near there cursing and swearing at the weapon fire being directed at them.

Of particular note, however, was that the exit hole for the laser that had nearly burned him alive was a fair bit lower than he would have expected despite it nearly hitting him in the head—

—two more laser beams punched out of the wall a fair bit ahead of him, and this time he had a clear, complete look at their paths and slightly upward angle—

“Rally,” he growled angrily. The angle was about right for her height, given she would be aiming up a bit…

Fine, then. When they had her subdued and at their mercy, he’d rut her himself. To hell with what the boss wanted.

“All at once!!” he screamed to his posse, turning his body towards the closest entry point he could find—a large, glass-less window pane in the side, third one down the wall, and he’d have to climb over a table to complete his entry, but hopefully Rally would be too busy shooting at the others to take a shot at hi—

—a fourth laser bored through the wall and nearly took his left foreleg out, and he would have smacked himself for making the same mistake twice if he hadn’t been more concerned with getting into the diner, so he just pushed ahead with his goal, heading straight for that window and jumping through—

—he was surprised by how many of his guys were already inside and pushing their way through the dining floor. A dozen at the least, and if weren’t an asshole he would have been mildly proud of their restraint in refusing to shoot back despite the lethal laser fire cutting through the building like it was paper. He hoped they would stay calm a few seconds longer, they were almost to the kitchen area and the backrooms beyond—

—a frantic burst of lasers began blasting out towards his side of the diner, mostly aimed at the fire escape exit he’d noticed a couple guys ahead of him plowing through, and he thought he saw a brief flash of orange out of the corner of his eye—

“RUN!!” Rally’s voice screamed frantically amidst the laser fire, confirming his earlier suspicions but also raising a curious question. If Rally was the one doing most of the shooting and screaming out orders, was that stable bitch even here?! Had she parted company and shacked up with somebody el—

—Sky Showers’s lavender body was right at the door to the “employee only” hallway and almost made it in when it burst open seemingly of its own accord and smacked her in the face, and Showers stumbled back, stunned by both the door and the bloody nose she’d gotten from it—

—the culprit wasn’t Rally, or even the stable bitch. It was a little filly, whose coat was a lighter shade of teal blue than the mare he’d come for, and she had the same indigo mane and tail, except that her tail had this really weird and nice-looking streak of electric blue in it that stood out like a glowing light now that she was running at full speed, and even matched with her electric blue eyes. And she was gunning right for that fire exit door to his right, right into the path of two of his guys—

—no, scratch that, just one, he took a really quick look right, and saw the last embers of a pony’s incinerated outline billowing away in the light breeze flowing through the diner’s open windows, and only one other green-coated earth pony he remembered as Nail stood between the girl and her freedom, but that was enough. Kid didn’t look like she had the stones to even pull a gun on anybody. “Hold still you little sh—”

—the kid’s horn began shimmering with a soft electric blue glow, and a 9mm pistol whipped itself out in front of her and let off a single shot at Nail’s right foreleg, scoring a hit on his unprotected knee and turning his command into a shrill scream of pain as he stumbled to a half-standing stop—

—she didn’t shoot again, but she did take half a second to take a swing at Nail, just below the throat, and surprised him a second time in two seconds when the hit caused Nail to drop to the ground the rest of the way, gasping as if he’d just been slugged in the gut, and the filly dashed on past him and out of the door—

Okay, more trouble than I thought, he berated himself. “Four of you, get after that kid—”

—a pair of husky pups darted out of the swinging door to the back rooms and followed the filly’s trail almost exactly, even taking a moment to bite Nail on their way past him as he was starting to recover from the sucker-throat punch and drawing blood and screams in the process—

—he left Nail where he was and started to move forward when a black and white blurry, pony-sized ball flipped over the counter of the open kitchen area, uncurling into a zebra mare with a silvery mane and tail and ice blue eyes, and not even a moment later she simply started leaping forward, zig-zagging through all of his crew and slugging them in the throat or the face as she passed by them—

—when she reached her fourth and final victim two seconds later, she took a brief moment to snap the pin off of one of his grenades and allowed the arming handle to fly off, flipped over him and bucked him squarely in the backside to send him tumbling further into the diner as she made a quick exit out one of the front windows. He barely had time to even process what had just gone down, and if he hadn’t recognized Julaya by the sight of her eyes and her favorite sword strapped across her back, he would have been justifiably angry at his crew for failing to get a shot off. But if any one mare in the wasteland could simply leap into a crowd of heavily armed mercenaries, run and leap her way through their ranks with a few quick blows in just the right place to bring said mercs to their knees, and devise a way to keep anyone from giving chase….it would be Julaya.

“FRAG INCOMING—”

Quickest—and safest—path away from the live grenade was the back of the diner, where Rally was having herself a grand time blazing away at them and where they needed to be right then anyway. Those who could still get up and run, did so in the fastest manner possible, breaking the back hallway door down and leaping over the kitchen counter in a quick stream—

—he himself chose the hallway door, made it through and clamped his forehooves over his ears just as the grenade went off. It helped, a little bit, but did nothing for the three separate screaming voices now coming from the dining floor. He was assuming one of Julaya’s melee victims did not survive the blast…

He counted about seven bodies ahead of him as he scrambled back upright and followed behind them, and no one behind him. Nail was probably still alive but limping, and then there were the three screaming fools the grenade had wounded….subtract three more guys that Rally had dusted with her laser rifle, and he asked for four guys to try and catch that filly that had gotten past them….so it looked like more than that had gone after her instead. Seven?

…well, eight of them would be enough to get Rally. She’d probably drop two or three more of them before they got to her, but when they did….

He was starting to get a little excited at the prospect, despite the deathly violence being inflicted on them right then. Maybe if he’d let Bittersweet claim the prize he’d wanted out of her, he’d have been a lot more careful with his planning…

His guys had crowded the hall, and Rally was not stupid. She just started blasting them through the walls around the door to the break room, and felled one of them with body shots and incinerated another before they could break the door open and swarm in. The first pony through the door died halfway through it, a headshot that seared through his skull and left a sizzling, cauterized hole in the back of his head. The second pony to get through was a little luckier, in that he managed to hop past the body and get inside the room before a .357 magnum lit up the interior, and his ears started ringing from the sharp muzzle blast even from the hallway.

The third pony, a lithe little mare named Rain who’d learned the value of ducking and weaving to live long enough to get close to her prey, finally succeeded by doing exactly that. Ducking her head and body down as she rushed through, probably leaping about to avoid the two gunshots that missed her and went through the wall instead, and when he didn’t hear any gunshots after a couple of seconds he followed her and the rest of his surviving team into the break room—

—and found Rally’s pink body sprawled out on the floor, her nose leaking blood and her odd dual-colored blue and purple mane looking like a disheveled mess. Henric’s laser rifle was on the floor a few feet away from her, its spark battery chamber empty, suggesting that she’d run the battery dry and was trying to change it out when the second pony tried his luck, forcing her to fall back on her six-shot magnum. Said magnum wasn’t that far from the kid’s grasp, but Rain’s jaws were clamped down on the unicorn’s horn and keeping her from using any of her magic to get back into the fight.

That just left that pesky metal leg to deal with….

“You little piss slut,” he spat at her face, pushing the revolver aside with a foreleg while one of his guys shut the door behind them. Seemed they already had a clue what he was planning, and probably hoping they’d get a shot at her. “Been nothin’ but a pain in our ass for months, and now you’ve gone and killed half a dozen of us at least. Any chance of our bein’ lenient on you just got pissed away. Only thing you’ll get from tellin’ us where you stashed what’s left of that cache you ruined is a quick death, and you get this one chance at it. What’s it gonna be?”

Rally wasn’t one to just give up and roll over. She was too feisty and mouthy for that, and she had a habit of sometimes saying exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. This was one of those times, and he couldn’t have been happier about it. “Fuck you.”

The one eye that could see through her mane—her left eye had a good part of it hanging off the front of her face—widened fearfully at the sight of his growing, sickly grin. “Thanks for the offer, I’ll take it. Get her up on that couch.”

“Oh shi—” was Rally’s last words before Rain yanked her up on her hooves and threw her onto a dusty couch at the back of the room, and rushed in and clamped her jaws back down on the base of her horn before she could start flinging telekinetic punches at them. The two other guys that survived the rush into this room—he couldn’t remember their names aside from the fact that they had varying shades of brown coats and manes—took it upon themselves to immobilize her even further. One had her right leg pinned down with both forehooves, and the other made her sure her hind legs stayed out of the way. He even had her tail in his jaws….okay, yeah, they knew what he wanted. They’d get their turn.

“Thought the boss told us to save her for him,” the stallion on his right mumbled.

“After the shit she just pulled, she ain’t gonna live that long,” he huffed back, taking a moment to soak in the visibly trembling yearling before him. Rain had her face pressed into the couch and had managed to find herself a comfortable seat in the cushion next to her, but kept a foreleg pressing down on the kid’s withers nonetheless. “I can, in fact, clearly remember her taking her own gun to her head and blowing her little genius brains out in front of us. Don’t you?”

“Sad shit, that,” his compatriot agreed nonchalantly. “Make it quick, I want a turn.”

“Everybody’s gonna get a shot, don’t worry about that,” he promised as he drew closer to the couch, and the terrified, gasping breathing sounds she was making was delicious, as were those muffled, pained screams she was letting out into the couch. He just hoped she didn’t piss all over him while he was busy—

—the door shattered apart behind them just before he could get on top of her, and he whipped about to blast this unwelcome intrusion in the face with his .44—

--------------------------------------

For a short, brief moment, she was back in that tent, with that mangy mare and her zebra boyfriend, being pinned down as the zebra was about to begin his dark deed, and she was pretty sure she’d be pissing herself any moment now. Her only concrete, coherent thought, beyond “Oh my god no” repeated ad infinitum, was that she hoped she’d end up pissing on her rapist in the middle of the deed and make him stop, and at least then they’d just kill her out of spite and be done with it. That bitch biting down on her horn knew just where to bite down and how hard to bite to cause any attempt at casting a spell to turn into a terrible headache, and with her legs immobilized and one of the stallions holding her tail up and out of the way, she couldn’t see any other way out of this mess alive or intact. She was screwed, in literally every sense of the word, and the only thing she could do was deny them any satisfaction they’d get out of her.

Didn’t make the upcoming horror any easier. She was half-certain her own fear and terror would have her pissing the floor before he could start, and then she really would be out of options.

And then Hell walked in.

…well, no. More like she blew the door up, she could hear it shattering and snapping into pieces, and heard chunks of the door flying off and hitting the floor on the far end of the room. And even through her hearing-protected ears, she could still make out the sound of a revolver’s hammer cocking back, and then a second one almost immediately after that—

—Hell screamed, in all of her indignant rage, simultaneously becoming the most terrifying and most beautiful sound she’d hear that day. “You’re all fucking DEAD—”

She thought her .357 was loud in this room, even with that spell on her ears muffling all incoming sound, but what went off behind her was even louder than that. She could feel the concussion of the muzzle blast all the way inside her ribcage—

—the sickos pinning her to the couch all jumped off and started going for their weapons, even as that cannon went off again and spra—

…sprayed…blood and…bits of skull and flesh all over the wall? With some gray stuff mixed in…

The gun went off a third time in about two seconds, and this time she could just barely hear the thud of a body slumping to the floor, and when she finally found the nerve to look over her withers (and get her tail back down where it belonged), she saw that perpetually angry stable mare looking like she was preparing to pull this last living stallion of the group apart, limb by limb, with what looked like a half dozen separate telekinesis spells, judging by the way all four legs were held and stretched out from his body and his head and neck were being forced to look straight up at the ceiling.

The stallion that had been doing most of the talking was clearly not saying anything, ever again. He lay on the floor near Sling, his body convulsing as his head wound leaked crimson into a thick pool beneath his head. Another stallion, much of his brown coat obscured by his forest camouflaged armored barding, was missing a good chunk of the back of his skull and she didn’t want to think on how his face looked. The mare was in a very similar state, though the hole looked bigger on her smaller head.

But for some reason, Sling had yet to kill this last gang rapist, and she was half-hoping that the stable pony was saving that kill for her….

“…you okay, Rally?” Sling somehow managed to say in a far calmer, nicer voice, despite the flow of anger clearly flowing through her face right then. “Did…did they—”

“N-no,” she blurted quickly, her body still shaking and trembling, and she forced herself to lay down on the couch, her limbs folded beneath her in the hopes that staying stationary would work the shakes out, or at least minimize them to the point where she wouldn’t end up wetting herself. “…three more seconds, though, and….”

Five sharp snaps of bone pierced through her muffled hearing, in tune with the stallion’s four legs bending in directions they weren’t meant to bend and his head being shoved back hard enough to snap the vertebrae for what many believed to be an instant kill, if done right. His body was flung off to the side of the room a moment later, though the effort seemed to wind the stable mare out slightly.

Elly did not ever need to know about that part. Her bleeding heart would have conniptions over her mother casually killing somebody like that, but Rally didn’t care. Hell, she would have gone and killed the bastard herself if Sling had decided to let go of him.

With no one left to lay her righteous anger upon, Sling took to collecting as much gear and supplies off of her victims as she could, but not before gathering up the laser rifle and .357 magnum and laying them upon the couch beside her, along with the rest of her stuff. “…I’m sorry,” Sling heaved with a slight breath. “I should’ve been here, shouldn’t have left I—”

“I’m alive, you’re alive, Elly’s alive, that zebra’s alive, these guys are dead, and I’m still a virgin so let’s just leave it at that, ‘kay?” Rally’s voice pleaded of its own accord. Still too shook up to do much of anything, she just lay there and stared at the laser rifle, kicking herself mentally for not making sure the battery was at full charge when she had the time. A full battery could go for thirty shots…unless the capacitor was one of the cheaper, less efficient ones. That was the one kicker with the Mark IV laser MEWs, being able to swap out parts and components on the fly didn’t always mean that all the parts were of equal quality. And she hadn’t had a really good look at the entire weapon just yet…

“…are you good to move? I ran into some Runners willing to help me out…got some water waiting for us, we need to get out of here, get back with Light Tail and Julie and find somewhere else to shack up for a bit.”

Runners? And…wait, come to think of it, if Sling had just watched her kid fly out of the place like her tail was on fire…

“…wait, you…you came for me first? You…you saw your kid leaving and came for me first?”

Sling’s magic focused on her initial would-be rapist, ripping his gun belt and saddlebags off and tucking his revolver aside in her own bags as she rummaged through his stuff. “Julie was right behind her. And aside from that initial explosion, all the shooting seemed to be coming from you. I was assuming none of them were willing to shoot back for fear of killing you before they had a chance to ask about your MEW cache, and they didn’t seem to know if I was there or not. The seven that chased after El-Tee and Julie never looked back, so I sent the Runners to catch up with them while I came here. I was half-tempted to wait and come back once they were safe, but something told me to come here first….glad I listened to that gut instinct now….”

She meant to say something like “no effing shit!”, but what came out instead was a garbled mess that sounded like the wail of a crying foal. Her brain was still trying to process and sort everything despite the fact that she knew what had just gone down, and it was coming to a crashing halt at the part where she was about two seconds away from…

Nononononononono don’t go there don’t go there go somewhere else somewhere else

“….y’know, if you wanted to take off right now, I wouldn’t stop you,” Sling’s voice broke in solemnly. “…I said I would look out for you and I can’t even do that right….”

“Actually, you’re doing a better job than just about everybody else I met in my life, next to that Union squad that scooped me off the ground after I lost my leg. So…um…that, that deal you gave me? It’s starting to look a lot better than it did when you left, ‘cause if it had been just me…I wouldn’t be walking out of here, ever….”

“You can give me an answer when you’re not scared half to death and thinking a lot more clearly,” the stable mare rebuffed her, gently and probably wisely, so she tried not to be pissed at her and start screaming “hypocrite bitch” at her face. “I ca—”

Sling’s head snapped back up suddenly, staring out at the doorway she’d blown apart, and Rally didn’t need to guess too hard at why she suddenly found the hallway so interesting. That PipBuck, and its E.F.S….

“…those seven turned back, didn’t they?”

“…yeah, they did, shit,” Sling hissed sharply. “No idea if they saw me or if they’re just coming back to see why they heard three gunshots when the goal was to take you alive, but they’re here and they’re close. Get all of your stuff together, we have to leave.”

The highly selfish desire to avoid a repeat of what had just happened proved to be a very strong motivator—once she had her bag and her guns strapped on she practically glued herself to Sling’s path as the mare abandoned her looting and slipped on out the door. From the hallway they could either go right to a side exit, or head on to the left and take a very short hall to a fire exit in the back of the building, near the kitchen—

—Sling decided on left and walked, quickly but quietly, her head on a ball-bearing swivel as she tried to make sense of her EFS readings, but the voices in the dining floor made it a moot exercise—

“Shitfire, are we the only ones left!?” a raspy stallion’s voice howled through the walls.

“Oh, yeah, that’s what happens when YOU DON’T SHOOT BACK!!” another stallion yelled back furiously. “And nobody said anything about damn Runners being on their side, we can’t hide here long—”

“No shit asshole, hurry up and help me dig this bullet out of my leg so I can quaff that potion!!”

Hunh. Sounded like Sling’s Runner friends had taken some potshots at them, probably to “encourage” them that Light Tail and Julaya were not the enticing targets they appeared to be….

Sling’s left forehoof motioned to that little hallway up ahead, followed by a soft press to the lips, as if to say “flee quietly”—

—but she’d hardly gotten within ten feet of it when a pained stallion’s voice rose up in a groan, apparently from a position where he was able to peer into the employee entrance to these back rooms and see her—

“H-hey, movement, th-that damn stable pony—”

“Shit, should’ve have killed him on my way in,” Sling cursed softly, her shotgun sliding out of its scabbard. “Back exit, go now—”

She whipped ahead and through that doorway before Rally could protest or beg her to go back the other way, and in the next instant that shotgun started going off and making any further conversation almost impossible. Part of her wanted to forget what she’d been told and go in after her, help her, kill more of these raping Pythons with the laser rifle and the .357 th—

“—uck me she’s pissed—”

—that she’d totally forgotten to reload, she realized in the next moment. Laser rifle too. She had half a minute’s peace back there and she just sat on the couch like a terrified little filly (which she kinda was but that was not excuse) and watched Sling loot the dead and tried not to think of how close she’d been to being violated and used. And now she could only watch as Sling rushed in, diverted all the attention to herself so she could continue being a scared little girl and flee out the back with her tail tucked between her quivering haunches.

It was almost as humiliating as what they’d tried to do to her, and it was all she could to follow Sling’s instructions and go on ahead, to the left, to that back exit, without her. To kick it open with her forehooves as the gunfire’s intensity picked up and she started hearing pistols and the rapid fire of full-automatic rifles, to keep running off towards the first good piece of cover she could see in the ruined town lots behind the diner—

—flashes of light flickered through the open door behind her, just as a very strange sound began reverberating through the air, like an explosion in the water, but louder, and she turned back to the source just in time to see the diner implode on itself and begin crumbling into a dusty pile of rubble almost instantly.

With Sling still inside.

With. Sling. Inside.

The Sling Shot that had come back for her first and left her daughter’s safety to others.

She was still in there and the whole place was coming down on her and there was no way she could get out in time.

Not until that big, dead sign of a mare’s silhouette tumbled off the shattering room and lurched forward onto terra firma with a screeching crash did she snap out of her stunned state of mind and find any strength and courage to rush back.