That fight was the single most painful beating I have ever endured. Give me a gunfight any day. First time I’ve actually regretted getting that Monocyte Breeder implant. It heals ya, but it won’t stop the pain.
The combatants had all been taken to the medical bay. The ponies there were shocked at the level of damage the stallions had received. At first they thought they had tried to catch a hydra, but when told that the biped that came with them was responsible, one of them fainted. The rest looked at him with a mix of respect and fear. They left him alone, partly because he was tending to his own injuries, mainly because they were worried he might do the same to them.
The Courier moaned in pain as he pulled the glove off his left hand. Now he could see just what damage he had done to it, he realised that it didn’t look as bad as he had first thought. Not to say it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t to the extent where only a medical professional could help him. “Wish I still had Arcade around,” he muttered. He pressed carefully on a spot on his chest, wincing as he put too much pressure on the intense bruising around his fractured rib. “Or even Usanagi.”
“That was an incredible display,” Luna said, approaching the Courier. “It has been well over a thousand years since I have seen such ferocity in combat.”
“You’re welcome.” It took a moment for everything she had said to click. “Wait. A thousand years?”
The princess nodded. “Hmm.”
He sighed and shook his head. “That really shouldn’t surprise me.” He opened a small leather bag and pulled out a frightening number of syringes. He jabbed one into his left arm and went for another. “This whole world has been nothing but strange.”
“I could say the same of what you have told me of yours,” Luna commented. “There is nowhere on this world that even compares to the violence and depravity you have hinted at.”
“You know what the sad thing is?” he asked, taking another syringe. “New Vegas is pretty peaceful and safe, compared to other places. There are whole ruined cities that are deathtraps. Old military bases filled with enough weapons to arm a small town and defended by killer robots. Super Mutants, feral ghouls, deathclaws...” He sighed. “Small miracle that Vegas is still standing, the way I see it.”
Luna looked away, retreating into her thoughts. She had never before considered that such places or things could even exist beyond the imaginings of fanciful ponies craving adventure. To not only hear that these things existed, but from someone who had seen them with his own eyes...
“If you’d ordered those guards to kill me, they would’ve succeeded, you know that?”
“You very nearly killed two of my best,” Luna responded coldly. She had seen the twisted laughter in the Courier’s eyes as he had mercilessly given them beatings that would have almost certainly killed lesser ponies. “Do not jest about such things.”
“They weren’t trying to kill me,” he answered calmly. “With their magical healing, I was able to give them everything I had. I wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in a fight to the death.”
With that statement Luna’s anger quickly gave way to curiosity. “How are you so sure of that?”
“I just spent half an hour getting the absolute crap kicked out of me. I’m just a walking bruise at the moment. I know how they fight.” He gave a shrug and winced. “Ow. Knowing your limit is important in the Wastes. I’ve seen idiots with blunt knives try to tackle Nightstalkers.” He pressed a finger against his knee and gasped. “That might be broken. Me fighting your three guards under orders to kill, it’d be a lot different than fighting them when they’re being ordered to hold back. If they went full strength I’d be deader than the Enclave.” He grabbed another syringe, this one definitely thinner than the ones he had just used. The contents rushed into his body and a look of relief came over him. “Another one of those should do it,” he said to himself before turning back to the alicorn. “You should be proud of them. I’m a cybernetically enhanced, mutated killing machine with a killcount in the thousands, and I wouldn’t stand a chance.”
No I didn’t just say that to make her feel better. Honestly, those ponies were all pulling their punches. If they were being serious, I wouldn’t be here telling you about it. Even more so if she’d put one of those unicorns against me. Radiation poisoning is not a way I want to go, thank you very much. Or ghoulification. Er, no offense.
The Courier’s first night was spent in the medical bay, two beds pushed together to provide him with enough leg space. His knee hadn’t been broken, as a quick inspection of his Pip-Boy’s medical tab told him but he did know that, from the pain, running was out of the question for a few days. When he woke up, it was to the ungodly lovechild of a hangover, a mugging and a rape all mixed into one condensed package that made his entire body sing in a twisted symphony of pain. The Med-X had worn off in the night, but he wasn’t going to use any more, regardless of how tempting it was. “The last thing I need is to get addicted again,” he muttered, not moving from where he lay.
“Oh.” He rolled his head and saw a pony, he guessed it was a mare, wearing a nurse’s cap and holding a tray up in her magic. “Y-You’re awake.” The Courier, unable to understand a word she was saying, simply tilted his head in mild confusion. “I, um, brought you some food.” She carefully set the tray down and scampered away as soon the metal clinked on the floor.
The Courier blinked, not used to such treatment. He shrugged and decided not to worry about it. He picked up the tray and looked at what was on there. An apple, a strange orange-coloured orb the likes of which he had never seen and... grass? No, it was dried and brown, like tumbleweed or hay. He knew for a fact that he’d eaten far stranger things, but there were three things he would not eat: Cram, dog steak (coyote steak was fine for some reason) and grass.
Pushing the dried grass to the side, he started with the apple. It was crisp and fresh, completely unlike the ones he’d find in the Mojave, if only because it took a long time for trade caravans to get to Vegas from the farms in the NCR that grew them. It was so good that he ate it, core and all. He wasn’t one to waste food.
Next was the strange orange thing. It was the roughly the size of grenade, but almost perfectly spherical. He was tempted to just bite into it, like he had done with the apple, but something told him that he shouldn’t. He pressed his fingers into it and, by chance, pierced the outer skin.
And so it was Princess Celestia walked in to the sight of the Courier, half-clothed, sitting on his bed, staring at an orange as though it was liable to explode in his hands. It was so absurd that she was forced to stifle a laugh. “Good morning, Thomas.”
He turned to look at her and groaned in discomfort. “Good morning, princess,” he replied, rubbing his chest.
“I heard of your fight yesterday,” she said calmly, moving to the still-unmoving stallions. The Med-X had put the Courier so out of sorts he wouldn’t have noticed if someone had stolen his boots, so he was surprised to see that their faces were as perfect as they had been before the fight. “My sister told me that it was an amazing display.”
The pain was making things a little hard for the Courier, but even he could detect the tone the princess was using. “You’d rather I hadn’t,” he stated.
“From the reports I received this morning from the medical staff, Captain Thunder Strike is lucky to be alive. The scope of the injuries you inflicted on him were impressive, to say the least.”
“Please, get to the point,” Courier said as politely as he could manage. “It’s too early to dance around the subject like this.”
“Very well then,” Celestia said, turning slowly to properly face him. “If I find that you are responsible for the death of any of my subjects during your time here, I will not hesitate to punish you. I know that our magic can be fatal to you.”
To his credit, the Courier seemed completely unphased by her threats. “Been a while since I got a death threat,” he commented. “You won’t have to worry about anything like that, Celestia. I told you before, I only take lives if I have a good reason.”
“That is what I am worried about,” the alicorn sighed. “Too many times have I seen those with good intentions become twisted mockeries of their former selves, becoming the darkness they sought to destroy. Too often have I seen nothing but bad things come of the noblest of intentions. And too frequently have I seen those who declare themselves heroes become villains.” She looked at him, not in anger or indignation, but with sadness in her eyes. “Do not lose yourself in fighting evil, Courier, lest you become the evil you set out to destroy.”
He went silent, taking her words into consideration. “I made a promise to myself, a few months ago. The day I take an innocent life, the day I kill someone without just cause, that’s the day I put a bullet through my own skull.” The princess seemed relieved with his answer. “Now what the hell is this thing?” he asked, holding the orange up.
The sheer ridiculousness of the statement caught Celestia off-guard, and she burst out laughing.
Author’s Notes:
Yeah. It wasn’t so easy for him.
I don’t think they have oranges in the NCR. Seems like the sort of thing that would’ve gone extinct.
UPDATE SPREE!