“Troopers! What makes the green grass grow?” A heavily muscled NCO barked across the formation.
“Blood, blood, bright red blood!” The 143 Troopers in ODST School replied.
“What is the spirit of the ODST?”
“To kill kill kill with cold hard will!”
“There are two types of people in the world, who are you?”
“The quick!”
“Who are they?”
“The dead!”
“Let’s go troopers, assume your combat stance!” 143 bodies dropped into the same position, feet shoulder width apart, one leg dropped back about six inches. Chests were squared up with their opponent, hands opened with the one slightly leading the other. The exact position (with the exception of arm posture) used for shooting, moving, bayonet drills, and hand to hand combat. The philosophy was the less time spent thinking about where they were supposed to have their body in combat, the more time they could spend killing. So far, their track record approved of this philosophy.
Jennings faced Naber, his sparring partner, blinking back the sweat and grime that coated his face. They had been drilling endless bouts of hand to hand combat, with both sides changing periodically between offense, defense, who has a weapon, and who doesn’t. Even so, the sparring wasn’t the biggest challenge. Fighting exhaustion and dehydration consumed most of his effort, considering that he and his partner had been punching, kicking, kneeing, stabbing, and bludgeoning each other since approximately 0300. It was now well into midday, and the heat and humidity were unforgiving. Every single Trooper’s black PT uniform was soaked through in sweat, grime clinging to the uniform and the soldiers on every part of their bodies.
“Strike!” Naber snapped out his left hand, snapping Jennings in the head. Losing his balance, Jennings slammed to the ground.
“Trooper Jennings, do you love the ground?” Jumping to his feet quickly, Jennings responded in the enthusiastic manner he had been trained.
“Yes Sergeant!”
“Do you love to sweat?”
“Yes Sergeant!”
“Good! Start pushing, and tell me what your mistake was.” Jennings dropped and began pumping out pushups. Normally able to over one hundred in a go, his exhausted body got to ten before he began struggling.
“Well?” Arms shaking under duress, he replied.
“I let my guard down and got hit in the face, Sergeant?”
“You think I care if you get punched in the face? Try again, Trooper.” Jennings’ face turned beet red as he struggled to push himself up the final few inches. He paused at the top, trying to think about what he did wrong. “Did I say to stop?” He lowered himself again.
“My stance was off, Sergeant!” He tried to shout, but his voice was stifled from exertion.
“Your stance was fine,” the NCO said, distractedly. Jennings hit the low point of the pushup, and tried to reverse direction, but only succeeded in hovering.
“No excuse, Sergeant.”
“You don’t know?”
“No, Sergeant.” Jennings’ pushup was starting to slip downwards.
“You fell. I don’t give a shit if you get punched in the balls. Downrange you can get shot in the arms and legs and not give in. Keep fighting. Don’t stay down. You got punched in the face, I know soldiers who have had rounds bounce off their heads and not fall down. Stand your ground, fight back. I don’t care if they have a gun and you have a bubblegum wrapper. Find something in the environment to use as a weapon, and keep the mental edge over your opponents. Recover.” Jennings rose to his feet, gasping for air.
“Strike!” The blow glanced off his hands, hitting him in the head, wobbling him off balance.
“Trooper Jennings, drop your hands.”
“Yes Sergeant!” his hands dutifully fell to his side, grateful for a break from holding up his arms.
“Trooper Naber, you will follow my instructions.”
“Yes Sergeant!” the stocky man replied.
“Trooper Naber, punch Trooper Jennings in the face. And Trooper Jennings, I swear to god if I see your hands move to protect your face, I will not be able to be held responsible for what I do to you.”
“Yes Sergeant!” Jennings grabbed his legs to keep from involuntary flinching. The blow rocked Jennings’ head, doubling his already painful headache… but his feet didn’t move.
“See Trooper Jennings? One punch to the face isn’t that bad. Stand your ground.”
“Yes Sergeant!”
“Strike!” Jennings deflected the blow this time, returning with a grappling takedown, as he had been instructed by the Cadre.
“And one more time for the Trooper in the sky, strike!” Everything was done +1 for the trooper in the sky, and unarmed combat was no exception. While a single extra pushup or a single extra pull-up may not seem like that much to be concerned about, a single extra repetition becomes very noticeable after 1,500 four-count overhead arm claps. Especially when one person doesn’t do it, and the entire company has to start over.
“Change positions, strike!” Naber didn’t have the same problems that Jennings did in performing the exercise, having entered the course with significant martial arts experience. They completed the ten iterations plus one without many difficulties. One Trooper broke a bone when he was dropped and his partner dropped a knee onto unfortunate Trooper’s tibia.
“Troopers, are you ready for the next exercise?”
“Yes Sergeant!” 142 voices sounded in unison.
“Troopers, watch my high-speed demonstrators show you how to react when your enemy grabs on to your arms.” The two Cadre struggled momentarily before one launched himself at the other, knocking them to the ground. “Now, does anyone have any questions? Good! Strike!” Naber latched onto Jennings’ forearm. The two pulled for a bit, before Jennings launched himself towards his opponent, landing two blows before the repetition ended.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“And you’re sure you can take care of it?” Mayor Mare asked Twilight, observing the sleeping figure of Jennings on a bed inside the library.
“Of course, Mayor. I’m the town’s foremost expert on foreign studies.”
“But you don’t know anything about it, it could be dangerous!” the Mayor protested.
“I am sure I would have seen some indication of that by now. We haven’t even found a weapon on it, with the exception of that small knife. Were it a dangerous, it would undoubtedly carry a weapon like a broadsword or spear.”
“What about the strange devices we found inside?”
“We’ll just ask it when it wakes up.”
“Twilight, as long as you know what you’re doing, I’m fine. The second you think it might be too much to handle, you let me know.”
“Sure thing, Mayor!” Twilight showed her the door, and moved back towards her subject to make some more observations.
“Status: unchanged. Subject still shows signs of reaction to outside stimuli, but has yet to awake. Stencils on the bulky clothing may indicate name: Jen-ning-s.” Twilight grabbed a small needle, prodding the exposed skin on the hand. No response.
“While the subject responds to changes in external habitat like temperature, light, etc., it appears to not respond to mild pain impulses. Perhaps the subject cannot feel something that small, due to anatomic differences between us and it. Beginning with touching a larger surface area, to see if that has any impact,”she said, grabbing forearm.
Jennings launched upwards and sideways towards his attacker. Still thinking he was in the combat pit, he got in two solid strikes with his free hand before landing on his opponent in the mount.
Purple.
Horse.
The hell?
Jennings blinked, trying to take in what he saw before him.
“Ow, what the hay was that for?” Twilight said, wiping her now bloody snout. Talking purple horse.
“Uh…”
“I mean seriously, is that any civilized way to greet a pony?” Talking purple horse.
“You know, I didn’t realize that you would wake up so rapidly, to such a simple stimulus. I should make a note of that,” Twilight said, already moving past the abrupt assault and on to science. I mean come on, there are priorities.
“Um…”
“Can you speak? Can you understand what I’m saying?”
“Uh, yeah, I can.” Talking horse! That’s purple!
“Oh good, I have plenty of questions for you. Starting with: can you get off of me?” Jennings looked down, noting that he was still in the mount, with an arm cocked to land another blow.
“Oh yeah, uh, sure,” he said, trying to stand up, but immediately tumbling onto his side.
“You are probably still weakened from the injuries you sustained when your vessel crashed.” He propped himself up on his elbow, clawing at the edge of where he had been laying, and pulled himself up onto the horizontal surface, opting instead to sit back against the tree instead of laying down.
“So, where am I?” He asked.
“Why in Equestria, of course.”
“Equestria.”
“Yes.”
“And where is that? Do you have grid coordinates for it?”
“Grid coordinates?”
“Never mind,” he said with a sigh.
“So…” ventured Twilight, “do you have a name?”
“Sergeant David Jennings, serial number 554609802-016, 105th Division,” Jennings rattled off stiffly.
“I’m sorry, you’ll have to say that again, this time a little slower. I have to write all this down,” Twilight explained. Jennings repeated the information that had been seared into his brain.
“And the ‘one-oh-fifth,’ what’s that?”
“My unit, Ma’am,” his customs and courtesies were beginning to return as his began to settle down.
“Your unit?”
“Yes Ma’am.”
“So, you’re in the military,” she said as more of a statement than a question.
“Yes Ma’am.”
“You don’t have to call me ‘Ma’am,’ my name is Twilight, that’ll do fine.”
“Yes Ma’-, I mean thanks, Twilight.”
“No problem!” she said cheerily. “So, what do I call you? Sergeant?”
“Just Jennings will do fine. Hell, I’ve been called everything from ‘Sarge’ to ‘Shitbird.’” Twilight eyed him carefully.
“Jennings, you know swearing only decreases your vocabulary, right? Think about all the other words you could have used in that single sentence that would have added more to the meaning!”
“You ever been in combat?”
“No.”
“Swearing is fast and accurate. That’s all you need downrange.”
“Down-wha? Never mind. But you’ve been to combat.”
“Many times.”
“Then keep the swearing there.”
“Yes Ma—er—ok. Sure thing, Twilight.”
“And how do you fight with only a tiny little knife?” Twilight said with growing curiosity, gesturing to the combat knife laying on a nearby table.
“We don’t.”
“You don’t fight?”
“We don’t use knives for combat. That’s archaic.”
“Well what do you use? Magic?”
“You don’t have to joke about it. C’mon, take a serious guess.”
“What’s not serious about magic?”
“Besides the fact that it doesn’t exist?”
“Sure it does.”
“Since when?”
“Since forever!” Jennings opened his mouth to protest the existence of magic, when he realized he was debating a talking purple horse—no check that, a purple unicorn—about the existence of magic. He decided to skip it and move on.
“We use firearms. Guns. Missiles. Rockets. Artillery. A bunch of different things.”
“What are firearms?”
“Those are firearms,” Jennings said, gesturing towards the devices on the table. Twilight wandered over to them, grabbing the Battle Rifle by the barrel, and swinging it around like a battle axe.
“How do you use it? It doesn’t seem very effective…” Jennings barely stifled laughter.
“Bring it here,” He said, gesturing a ‘come hither’ with his hands. She brought the weapon over to him. He promptly grabbed it and racked the bolt, sending a 9.5mm round into the chamber. He opened the window directly behind him.
“What are you doing?” Twilight asked him, as he flicked the weapon onto ‘semi.’
“See that potted plant?” he gestured with his left hand at a clay pot almost 100m away.
“Yeah.” Jennings squeezed the trigger, sending clay fragments high into the sky with a sharp cracking sound. Twilight
jumped at the loud report.
“You could have warned me!”
“I could have, yes,” said Jennings, chuckling like the two were old friends.
“You have to tell me how everything works,” Twilight said, leaning in towards the strange military figure with an eager expression.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Deep inside the Everfree Forest, a crashed purple ship pulsed with fading energy.
“Status report,” Lo’Vadomir growled to the unggoy below him.
“Our ship has sustained heavy damage,” the minion squeaked, afraid of the inevitable punishment.
“And where are we?”
“Unknown, something struck us as we neared The Holy Prophet’s vessel, and we are now… here. It does not look like Earth.” Lo clicked his mandibles in frustration at the statement of the obvious. Lo could think of only one explanation, that he had been struck from normal space into… this. Whatever this was. He turned his maw towards the terrified grunt.
“Tell me, what do the Prophets say about our realm?”
“That we are the chosen realm? That nothing can exist outside our realm because we are the chosen?”
“Exactly.”
“But we see life, does that mean the Prophets are wrong?” The bridge of the Phantom grew deathly silent.
“What you say is blasphemy.”
“No! What I meant was-” The unngoy wracked his brain to try to create a way where what he said didn’t mean anything blasphemous. He was unable to think of anything before a glistening plasma sword erupted from his middle. Tossing the still twitching corpse aside, Lo gathered his flight crew and soldiers, placing all of them in the cargo compartment. Lo’Vadomir began his speech.
“25 circuits ago, we waged war on the humans, for opposing the Prophets and the Great Journey. Today, we face a similar challenge. Though we have but the one compliment, this very world threatens everything we hold dear. We will kill everything in sight, before we turn its surface into glass. Today my brothers,” he said, turning to the smaller contingent of sangheili, “we fight for the honor of all those before us and all those who come after us. Let us make them proud.” The armor-clad warriors snorted, their blood beginning to yearn for combat. Each sangheili turned back to his own unit of grunts, jackals, and lower ranking sangheili, barking out various orders, sending the younger and smaller soldiers scurrying about in preparation. Finally, Lo’Vadomir’s second in command returned.
“We are ready to kill the heretics.”
“Lower the gate,” Lo ordered. The purple ramps hissed as they lowered to the ground. The covenant troops stepped into Equestria, plasma weapons humming with fresh batteries.