//------------------------------// // Outsider // Story: Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl // by Estee //------------------------------// Natural light slowly decreased, and did so even as natural colors returned. There was a delay between commitment and combat, one which involved the adjustment of the future battlefield. The shield had been opened, at least for the upper level -- or rather, it had been reshaped. The Sergeant had told her about shields: the rough percentage of unicorns among the population who could cast one, along with how they were formed. They were generally immobile structures which had to be anchored, and the most natural shape was a dome: casters really couldn't maintain them as a flat plane. In this case, somepony talented outside the rim was shifting the energies into something closer to a ring. It was a risky step, because it gave any pegasi among the protesters the chance to make a break for the center -- but there were additional fliers posted beyond the training grounds, along with unicorns who were strong enough to pull somepony out of the sky. A risky step -- but a required one. Three Guards needed full access to their own weapons, and that meant atmosphere had to resume its normal flow. It was the first time Cerea had felt an autumn breeze against skin and fur at the training grounds. (The speed trials supervised by the dark Princess had taken place on an exceptionally warm night.) The coolness did a little to soothe her aches, and it wasn't anywhere near enough -- but the breeze also made her a little more alert. And the process of opening the shield bought her time. Precious minutes in which to think about what would happen next. She couldn't win: she knew that. She wasn't sure the Sergeant was expecting her to, because it was one against nine Guards. Palimyno's attacking mob don't let them surround me had been mostly composed from civilians, with a few police officers kicked (and kicking) in. These were not only trained combatants, but the ones who had found the Sergeant's acceptance. And if he'd gone looking for ponies he could make volunteer, he would have started with some of the strongest. Nightwatch is strong... She couldn't win, and the normally-loathed ranking of second place felt completely out of reach. But she didn't want to finish in tenth. They would take her down, because it was nine against one -- but there might be a chance to thin those numbers a little. And with time available, minutes in which she could think about fighting against a herd... Cerea had some previous experience with that and as with just about everything else, it was something which had seen her lose. But she now understood more about the why. She would be attacked by magic once again -- while possessing some understanding of how that magic operated. It was possible to take the Sergeant's lessons and overlay them with the memories from Palimyno. The end product of those older attacks remained magic: it was just that she now recognized how a few of the tricks had been done. Along with why some of them hadn't been used at all. The pegasi probably won't try for major weather effects unless everypony else is clear. Using hail and heavy rain against me is going to mean targeting everypony else on the ground: a personal cloud would run out too fast and needs one pegasus directing it at all times, probably while in contact. That's another reason wind is the primary attack and even then, they might disorient their own with bad aim or if they're in the line of fire. So if they can't surround me, they might look for their chance when I'm isolated. She couldn't be near too many of them without risking an overwhelm, and she couldn't back off too far without begging for a private drenching. This seemed to suggest a need to stay in proximity to at least one pony at nearly all times, and that meant she was always at risk of being kicked... I don't know which spells the unicorns have. But if they're Guards, some of them have to be useful in combat. Even basic telekinesis is trouble. The smart ones will go for my ears, pull on one hoof: he said that. Guards are going to be smart. I need to be constantly aware of any coronas being projected towards me and move the sword to intercept. Cerea, waiting at the far end of the oval, at the greatest possible distance from the little army on the other side, silently added that to all of the other things she needed to be constantly aware of. Nightwatch is supposed to be better with wind than just about anypony else -- -- what do the earth ponies do, in a group like this? Primary close-up assault? Get me distracted fending them off, so the long-range magical attacks can start unnoticed? Nine of them. This is combat, but it's also sparring. Non-lethal attacks. ...there's still nine of them. Nine Guards huddled at the other side of the oval, making plans for dealing with her. Not that they really needed one, when it was nine of them... ...Nightwatch is wearing saddlebags. There has to be something in there. But if it was a normal weapon, like a hoofblade or razorwhip, she would have put it on already. So what is she carrying? There was a natural breeze blowing towards her: she was downwind from the herd, and the direction of the wind was a coincidence Cerea was willing to use. She was breathing deeply (and already knew that the Second Breath was just as much a lost cause as victory: adrenaline could assist her for a little while and push aside some of the aches, but she was just so tired). Memorizing, because the miasma of fear had eight identifiable components. The... anger would be easier to track. That breeze rustled through her hair: carefully-arranged pins kept it in place. She'd gone for a bun style, and the rapid growth meant she now had a back bulge which was a few weeks away from trying to match the forward ones. But stray strands could potentially be grabbed, bitten... She pictured a pony jumping onto her lower back and trying to bite the bun, getting a mouthful of hairpins. It made her worry about the consequences of having that pony swallow, just before she wondered why anypony would have even jumped onto that part of her in the first place. Besides, her lower back was one of the worst places to be. When it came to grips for staying mounted, even the unicorns would be down to their mouths. She could get rid of a rider, and do so much more easily than with a human. Nine of them. Sixth place: she was going to try for that. She would consider herself to be on the slightly less offensive side of failure if she could somehow manage to stop four of them. It wouldn't be enough for the Sergeant and a single night of poor sleep would show her all the things she should have done, but at least she would know she'd tried. She was trying to figure out initial moves, and knew the others were doing the same: working on their own, along with trying to predict hers. But she wondered if that was as far as they were willing to commit for an absolute list of tactics, because there was a fact of combat so basic as to have made its way into a human saying. It could generally be assumed that if humans had worked it out, then everyone had. No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy. She could think. She could create an internal list of contingencies and try to act accordingly. But once it started, she would mostly be making it up as she went along. And somehow, that felt like failure. There wasn't much sunlight left now: perhaps half an hour's worth. Cerea distantly wondered if the Sergeant had chosen any of the unicorns because their coronas were the same hue as the dimming sky, just to make things that much harder to pick out. "Waiting for me to count it down, Recruit?" It took a second for her to focus on his words. "No, Sergeant." "And why not?" "Fights start when they start, Sergeant." He never smiled. He didn't really laugh. But he wasn't bad at barking, and so that was how the sound emerged: as something with no true humor within. "HA! THIS GOES UNTIL YOU STOP THEM, THEY STOP YOU, OR I CALL A STOP! THERE IS A STEP WHICH COMES AFTER FIGHTING AGAINST GUARDS! LET US SEE IF YOU CAN REACH IT! GO!" The herd broke formation, with the pegasi moving forward and up. Horns ignited, the earth ponies took the ground lead as the fastest sprinters, almost got ahead of the first corona projections and Cerea was already drawing the sword, swatted away the first burst of violet light and saw that unicorn stagger, but there were still eight of them coming at full speed, something which was increasing and -- -- the coronas could move faster than the ponies. The same could be said for some of the wind gusts, and she could see wings weaving in patterns meant to rechannel available momentum while adding the pegasi's strength to the air: cumulative strength. She was up against a herd, one which knew how to work together. The first goal had to be surrounding her. Taking her down with sheer force of numbers, something which would be all too easy to do within the cleared terrain of the racing track. She'd thought about what that would mean for her first move. The only thing she could truly control. "Sergeant! She's retreating! She's --" and Cerea's rather unusual style of gallop allowed her to see the moment when Acrolith swallowed. "-- how is she running like that? How can anything --" The answer was not easily. Cerea wasn't sure how many centaurs were capable of it, and the fact that she'd had to be self-taught probably meant it was normally useless. But there had been a time in her life when she'd -- been planning for something, and it had required being able to watch for as long as possible. In terms of jointing, it was at least vaguely manageable. When it came to natural instincts, it left select portions of her mind screaming at the rest, and she had to resist the urge to turn her head as far as it would go because four legs were still vulnerable to one stone in just the wrong place. She had trouble looking straight down without involving some awkward twisting, going this way had even more blocking the view and no matter what she tried to tell her own form, a centaur body knew it wasn't supposed to be running backwards. Turning her head was out of the question. The corona projections were still coming, and she deflected the next one away: it had been aimed low, towards her left forehoof. She had to watch for those -- "-- IT'S NOT A RETREAT! SHE'S HEADING PAST THE TREELINE! GETTING OUT OF THE OPEN! SO WHAT ARE ALL OF YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT THAT?" It was still taking time: she couldn't move at anything close to her full speed when she was moving backwards. It was enough for two of the pegasi to have gotten their initial gusts together and that was a case where the sword seemed to have a partial effect: swinging through wind dropped it back to its natural speed, but didn't do anything about the direction. She had to use the flat of the blade to keep the lofted debris from going into her eyes, it blocked her vision for a moment, and then she saw where Nightwatch was. The little knight was fast. Something which had let her get almost all the way to Cerea, only while staying about six meters up. Her wings weren't shifting in a pattern which created magic. They simply flapped, and the lid of the open right saddlebag rippled as the black pegasus sharply twisted her head, doing so at the same time she opened her mouth and the fragile grey sphere clenched between white teeth was whipped at Cerea -- -- the centaur followed her instincts. She swung the sword, because any weapon couldn't be allowed to make contact with her body. Her aim was true. She hit the sphere. It broke against the blade, and the olfactory world shattered. The peppermint hit her first. That was followed by the sharpness of anise, and then the cross-world nature of biology stabbed her in the amygdala because she knew that some species existed in her home and here, she'd seen that and the contents of the sphere taught her that if there was a separate entity responsible for the creation of this place, it had been cruel enough to see durian as something worth duplicating. Given that attitude, the presence of corpse lily had probably just been perceived as an incidental extra. There was more than that in the sphere: an essence of excrement had been gathered from somewhere, she incidentally learned about the local existence of anteaters because that was the only way to get their musk, and one of the last half-firing neurons experienced a moment of gratitude that Vieux Boulogne remained a product of France alone or else that would have been in the mix too. But it was one of the only thoughts, because she was stumbling and the assault on her primary sense had pulled attention away from all of the others. She existed as a near-mindless creature whose orbitofrontal cortex had turned into a fireworks factory, and the sparks were millimeters away from burning her to the ground from within. She'd had to learn odor discrimination: the ability to block out the most noxious fumes which technology could create. It was the only way to survive in the human world, and some of the centaur exchange students had retreated back to their gaps when the act of crossing an intersection threatened to overwhelm. But she'd been in the new world for weeks, a place where nearly all of the substances were natural ones. That subconscious, constant control had found the chance to relax. A flailing arm nearly threw the sword away, because the mix of oils had spread onto the blade and she had to get rid of the source, she had to or the madness would travel with her, there were knives stabbing into her skull and she was holding the largest one, she had to escape and she was already so close to the trees, she just had to get into the trees and get rid of the sword and gallop until she left the radius of the scent bomb behind, she nearly threw the sword away because she was just barely capable of thought at all and -- -- there were ponies after her. She retained that much, plus one other thought. And so she just barely kept her grip on the hilt as she reared up, crashed down with her hindquarters shadowed by the little forest. Trying to get out of sight, desperate to find safety and a place where she could recover. She knew she had to escape. That, and one other thing. Nightwatch. The name of the only pony who could have told them to try it. The centaur, still stumbling, just barely managing to deflect the next projection, vanished into the trees. "It worked!" the other pegasus mare crowed. "Just like you said! Let's see if it dropped her!" And streaked forward, moving ahead of the herd. "If it didn't, I've got something I wanted Tirek to have, and this is my chance to --" "-- Derecho!" the little knight yelped. "Don't! Stay with --" The blue pegasus simply pulled her wings a little closer in, then flared them back into a swoop where the extended limbs had enough room to pass between the treetrunks, automatically slowing as she went into an area with more obstacles -- -- there was a sound. This was followed by more sounds. It would have been difficult for most observers to identify what had happened through hearing alone. Had there been a recording device available and endless replays for review, it might have been possible to eventually recognize the first as a sword very rapidly being placed within a scabbard, because any degree of enclosure would go a long way towards stopping the smell. Of course, this also suggested a centaur who had just disarmed herself, and so the only temporarily-conscious direct witness for the remainder of the process continued to close in. For most ponies, the next sound would have required just about as much dissection, because it was a noise which didn't normally occur on that kind of scale. Reflectively-minded Solars, who had experience with their own Princess, eventually realized that when you subtracted out everything wing-related, it had been just like the sound produced by a very large body launching into an almost purely vertical leap. There were ways in which the centaur could be thought of as being something like an earth pony and in this case, the strength increase within the lower body applied just as much to the apex of her potential launch height. Based on the followup evidence, the altitude gained had been exactly what was required for powerful arms to grab a pegasus out of the air with one free hand while yanking the helmet off with the other. (They mostly found out about the helmet when it came flying out of the treeline.) There was a crash of large-scale impact against the soil, because an airborne centaur had to come down again. And then there was one more sound, just before the galloping resumed. The remaining Guards worked out what the last one had been when they saw the results. The results had her wings splayed out across the grass. The feathers were twitching in concert with all four legs, which made the armor around equally-grounded belly and barrel pick up a few fresh stains. "Derecho?" Acrolith was the first to move in, checking on her fallen squadmate. "Can you keep going?" The blue pegasus just barely managed to raise her head. Slightly-spinning eyes appeared to give the matter some thought. "Glick," Derecho expertly considered, and vibrated for a while. "What was that?" the male earth pony asked. "What did she do...?" Acrolith examined the fallen pegasus. Spotted unfocused pupils, just before she saw the flattened fur on the forehead, located over a fast-rising bruise. "Centaurs headbutt," Acrolith groaned. "Good to know. A little late..." The next check was of the ground. "That way. She's too heavy to hide her hoofprints in this kind of dirt without slowing down. We can track her, even after the scent fades. Try to stay together. Best result is chasing her back into the open." "It's not all dirt in there," Bulkhead pointed out. "There's some rock to move on: that's true all over the mountain. If she thinks about that --" "-- she might not be thinking," Nightwatch quietly stated. "Not for a little while. And that just might make it worse. Carefully, everypony..." The first true thought naturally concerned utterly-discarded dignity, and came with an accompanying internal lecture. Not that Cerea's mother had ever found the opportunity to tell her just why a real centaur would never resort to a headbutt, but the daughter had enough experience with other lectures to construct an accurate facsimile. Most of the initial followups were about a deep wish for headache medicine. Ow seemed inadequate. Don't... don't ever try that with an earth pony. The extra bone density on the receiving end might have knocked Cerea out and when it came to trying the non-tactic against unicorns, the primary problem was obvious. Find water. Wash off the sword. Scrape away as much of the oil as I can against the trees on the way. I might have to drop the scabbard if I can't find a stream in a hurry: it's contaminated. Listen for ponies... It was going to be mostly listening for a while. The olfactory world was something made from edges, and trying to pay close attention threatened to cut. At least ten, possibly twenty minutes to fully recover sensory acuity. She hadn't told the Sergeant about just how strong that sense was. Only Nightwatch had possessed some idea, and the knight had used that concept against her. Tired. Hurt. I could stop. I could just stop right now and... maybe they could give me a separate smithy in another part of the palace. It's a skill. Employable. I could just stop and... ...hurt... One possibly down: she couldn't be sure how fast the pegasus would recover. She'd promised herself that she would try for sixth place. She had to do that much just to not reflect too badly on the Sergeant. It wasn't his fault that he'd been stuck trying to train her... ...just keep going. She glanced around, listened for hooves and wings. Wings would be easiest: pegasus flight wasn't exactly silent. Hooves on dirt -- -- my hooves. I'm leaving prints. Try to find water and rock. Something I can stand on or in. And their noses aren't as good as mine, but my sword and scabbard reek. They've got to be capable of following that level of trail. Prioritize for water. The girl moved. They were fighting as a herd. That first one got ahead... For pony senses, the scent trail stopped at the end of the stream. "Sundamn it," Bulkhead muttered. "Check the other side, see if you can find her hoofprints. We could jump this, so we know she could." The large unicorn looked around. "Too many trees..." "You don't like trees?" The male earth pony, openly teasing. "Not when they're taking up this much space, Sedi. We're going to have a hard time getting a ring around her in this, wind gets broken up going through the trees..." Another check of the fast-darkening forest. "Wish Moon was full tonight. Nightwatch, do you know what her night vision is like?" "No," emerged in full neutrality. "It... didn't exactly come up." "Watch for her body heat," the senior Guard told the remaining pegasi: the orange male shivered a little. "You okay there?" "Just..." The feathered stallion forced the next breath to be steady, and did so such in a way where all could see that the force had been most of it. "...I wanted to be part of this, after Tirek. You know why I volunteered. But she's still a centaur..." "She's not Tirek," Bulkhead countered. "She's something else." Darkly, "Tirek would have had all of us down by now." Sedi's brown ears twisted. "Just playing a hunch here," the earth pony said. "But I'm not sure she would have jumped the stream." "Stayed on this side?" "Went in it. No hoof impressions left on riverbed stones." Eight Guards looked at the flow of water, and the sharp left turn it took into shadow: something which was only fifteen body lengths away. On most of them, the deepest portion would have been halfway up their gaskins: an inconvenience to push through for the larger ones, and trouble for the smaller. When it came to degree of obstacle, it was debatable as to whether the centaur would have even noticed. It was possible that the temperature might have given her more trouble: most of the streams on this part of the mountain were fed by meltwater from the snow near the peak, and autumn meant it didn't warm up all that much on the way down. "I want to check for hoofprints first," Bulkhead decided. "Following that means splitting up: half of us going upstream, half down. We need to stay together. So if there's any other trail --" There wasn't. "-- Tartarus chain it," the senior Guard muttered, and did so because in the mirth-filled opinion of both shifts, he'd given the centaur enough language lessons already. "No choice. You three --" a forehoof repeatedly jabbed "-- with me. You four, go that way. Move as quietly as possible." He took the upstream lead, staying on the right edge of the riverbank mud. He'd been in the Guard for more years than the rest of them. It was his responsibility. "Too dark," he whispered to his part of the split herd. "Getting too dark. Canopy's blocking too much, and it's darker up ahead. I can't see enough..." He didn't have pegasus sight. He had taken the lead. "Nightwatch? Anything up ahead?" The smaller mare craned her neck, looked past his flanks: the trees were too close on the right for flight. "I'm... not sure. It's just shadows. The canopy's too heavy. For heat..." She squinted. Then she blinked a few times. "...that's -- weird." And because Guards didn't leave that kind of statement hanging, "It's like the stream is rippling a little. For temperature. A fading warm spot." With a deliberately-softened snort, "Maybe she decided she needed to move faster and dumped weight the easy way." The black snout wrinkled. "That evens out in seconds." "...I'll take your word for it. Stable location?" "Yes..." Every ear rotated. "No splashing," Bulkhead decided. "So it wouldn't be an animal doing a crossing." Silver eyes widened. "Maybe --" And did so too late. Bulkhead didn't have pegasus sight, and nopony had brought any devices for seeing in the dark because nopony had anticipated that the centaur would do this. They had figured on a quick battle in the open: they would try to surround her, she would do her best to counter that, and the Guards would win. He didn't like working in the dark, because there was a centaur about and regardless of what he had said earlier, there was a learned response to being in the presence of that limb configuration. They were all nervous or worse, and he couldn't see. But he was a unicorn. It didn't mean he believed his species was superior: he'd been through his original Guard training as part of a large group, and had thus experienced the honor of having his tail kicked by everything. He just believed himself to understand that certain species were better at given things. Bulkhead freely acknowledged himself to be rubbish at flying, although he did maintain that he had a certain expertise in short-term unidirectional air movement: those who had watched him get beaten a week before graduation generally reminded the senior Guard that gravity had to be credited with the assist. He couldn't fly and regardless of his build, he would never be among the strongest. He accepted that. But no unicorn who'd been through puberty ever had to worry about the dark. All he'd intended was a brief ignition of his corona, and not even at a particularly high level of lumens: he didn't want to ruin anypony else's night sight. Enough to let him get some idea of what was ahead, and then he could move on flash memory for a while. His horn lit up, and a sodden mass of padding and limbs erupted from the water. Those who remained active beyond that encounter would explain it to him later. The girl was too large to submerge herself fully below the chill liquid: her body simply didn't allow for that kind of position. But she was wearing cloth, the cold water had soaked deep, she must have splashed as much against her head as she dared before hearing their approach... It had been risking illness, when nopony had any real idea how to treat her. It was something she couldn't have maintained for much longer. But shadows and cold had given her two temporary forms of invisibility, and now the centaur was charging, Bulkhead had a centaur coming straight at him and the others were behind him on the narrow stretch of riverbank mud, they would need seconds to get around and above him, the centaur was attacking and so his corona brightened. He didn't have the raw lifting power required to levitate the centaur's mass. And there was a moment when he was about to focus his strength on a single hoof, yank on that and send her crashing into the mud -- -- the centaur's lips pulled back from her teeth. For the Guards who were part of the combat exercise on that evening, Bulkhead had more experience than anypony. He looked out for everypony with less years: the Princess came first, the relative rookies were second. It meant he had willingly faced Tirek, so that others would be safe. His Princess wasn't there and with ponies behind him, in the face of a charging, snarling centaur, he redirected his energies, building red light into the front edge of a dome wall, something which could shield them all, buy time. That was his instinct: to protect. It was an instinct which, for a moment lost in the echoes of pain produced by memory, hadn't been thinking about how shields worked. He could get the forward part of the construct together quickly enough, but the full dome took more time. It would require another second or two to harden and even then, something large and powerful had a chance to push through. His instinct was to protect, and so he tried to get the shield up at a casting speed he'd never managed. The centaur had something which cut through magic, it made a shield useless, his body was a living blockade and as it turned out, the sword never came out at all. Bulkhead was trying to put a shield up at a speed which Shining Armor would have had trouble with. It meant his corona almost instantly went to the full single layer, started to swell beyond that and at the instant it did so, the sling began to whistle through the air. There were plenty of stones in the riverbed. And by the time he fully recognized what was happening, the centaur had already used two. The second turned out to be redundant. Seven ponies were clustered around the slow-breathing form of the fallen unicorn. "Calling it," the senior Guard choked out. "Muscle pulls, left foreleg and right hind. And... yeah, there's the migraine..." The wince was beginning to take over his body. "Calling it. I'd be out. Acrolith, you've got the lead." The orange pegasus was shaking now, and every feather trembled out of tune with all the others. "This... this isn't right," he whispered. "Nopony fights like this. Nopony..." "She isn't a pony," Acrolith declared. "She knows she doesn't want to face another herd --" "-- this isn't natural, it isn't right --" "FOCUS! She galloped off after she took Bulkhead down, before the rest of us could get past him! We saw which way she went! She doesn't know this area: she's playing this blind! There's still seven of us! We just need to get her in a spot where we can go on the offensive!" It got the group moving, and so they discovered the area had a few more streams permeating it: one of the reasons the trees grew so thickly, outside the radius of the Cornucopia Effect. One wide specimen had cut a channel through rock: shallow enough to wade across, but with no guarantee of being able to make a successful jump to the other side. Especially since most of the landing zones were slick with fresh moisture. "She must have crossed here," Sedi decided. "And fumbled it. Or she's just dripping that much, because it would have taken some splash to wet all of this." He shrugged. "Better start after her. I really thought I'd be going home by now..." He was the third pony to cross, and so found his desire's fulfillment delayed. There was a cracking sound, like thin dry wood fracturing. Ears and eyes moved, trying to locate the source. It was something which took more than ten seconds, it had Sedi stop within the river in order to keep the sounds of his own movement from hurting their chances, and so he got to feel the little spheres hit two of his legs. He automatically looked down, just in time to both feel and see the gel swelling. "-- what?" He tried to pull himself free, and earth pony strength served -- but the drydust was being fed by the wealth of the stream's moisture. He got a foreleg up, found the gel rising to meet the new position, it had him temporarily locked in place and that was something one good jump would have cleared, but aiming forward would have put him onto a deliberately-slicked stone riverbank and by the time he aligned for a backwards effort, the bolas had come out of the trees. On the bright side, when viewed against other takedowns, it was arguably the softest landing in Guard training history. They pulled him free after a while. The two remaining unicorns tried to pick the gel out of his fur, and stopped after the first patch of fur came with it. A brief debate reluctantly concluded that normal limb movement would be impossible until normal drying occurred. "She's not Tirek," the latest victim said. There were a few reluctant nods. "That's good," Sedi stated with indeterminable sincerity. "Because I wouldn't want to get the two of them confused. Not when I think I hate her more than Tirek." And the orange pegasus, the youngest Guard there, who had matched himself against something the size of a building to expected results, simply shook. "She's... she's picking us off..." It was shameful. It wasn't the sort of honorable combat which a knight should strive for, and every false victory served to remind her that she wasn't a true knight at all. Plus she'd snarled. She'd known that pulling back her lips would be seen as a sign of aggression, and she'd done it anyway. The Sergeant wanted her to use pony fear in combat, when it could make the difference between life and death. But this was just an exercise. She had been trying to frighten those whom she wanted to join. Even when they wouldn't accept me. None of them will ever -- She was shaking. She'd been in the stream too long, and the chill autumn air wasn't helping. Her natural body temperature provided a little assistance, and centaur resilience -- -- it should have been doing more than it was. She was still moving, but it was too slow. Cerea felt as if she was just barely picking out a path through the trees. She was tired (she'd been tired for days) and she hurt (the pain never seemed to fully fade) and none of this mattered because they would never welcome her into their ranks. Not that they would have the opportunity. Not when her fingers felt numb, her flanks were shaking, the cold soaked into her upper torso from the still-sodden padding and she practically squished when she moved, she felt like she squished when she breathed and there was a chill trickle running through her cleavage, she wanted to tear the padding off before the cold got any worse, she was going to be sick and -- -- why am I doing this? They won't they can't I think it was three, maybe they all got up again but it could have been three I don't think I really hurt them I don't want to really hurt them when they're all scared of me already and stop it would be so easy to just stop The thing about having two sets of ribs was that it gave her extra opportunities to get a stitch in her side. Also a choice of sides. She didn't even know when she'd taken that injury. She couldn't think of anything which had happened during the combat exercise... (It had been days ago. Strain from laboring in the forge.) And she was disoriented. She didn't know this little forest, had no true understanding of how to move within it. She'd been using every natural hollow she could find, trying to make half-insane plans work, but... it wasn't fighting the way a knight would. There was no true victory in the presence of shame. -- hooves, off to her left and coming up fast. She'd found a trail, and decided not to use it because the path was too wide: it was possible that it had twisted to parallel her position. She had just enough space to move between the trees now, and she had to move faster because a path she couldn't see might leave its users able to spot her. She was being chased, and so she ran. (She would run until the moment when she would never move again.) There was a huge bush up ahead, blocking the way: a thick coating of dead leaves hid what was on the other side. Tall enough to block her vision, but surely not thick enough that a jump would have her land in the middle of it. Bushes hardly ever came that thick, but this was a different world, a blind jump, no way to veer left or right and she would have to chance it, she forced herself to pick up speed and something in her right flank burned with the acceleration, she pushed because she was disoriented and she didn't know where she was and the only way out was forward -- -- she jumped and in doing so, began the final phase of the fight. The part where she nearly died. The possibility of death flashed though her mind as her body began to ascend, because that was when she finally recognized just how disoriented she was from cold and exhaustion and pain, enough that up had just barely registered as a direction. She hadn't been the first centaur to fly: several herd leaders had needed to attend a variety of international conferences. It was just that all of the others had used airplanes, and it suddenly felt like she could have been disoriented enough to have come up against the mountain's edge. That would have been a different kind of flight, at least until she hit the slope. There would probably be a slope, and after that -- the centaur body wasn't meant for extended tumbling. A horse could roll once, and sometimes tried it as a means of ditching an unwanted rider. A centaur had an extra torso to deal with, which gave Cerea that much more which could fracture. But she didn't find herself on the wrong side of a cliff: the shield's lowered rim still would have prevented that. She just barely cleared the bush, nearly tangling her tail in autumn-weakened branches, and landed on well-trimmed grass. The grass on the border of the racing track. She hadn't moved in a circle. She'd managed to reenter the training grounds near where the Guards had awaited the start of the exercise. That was also where the Sergeant was, and his head jerked up at the sound of her landing. There was a moment when they were simply staring at each other (although she did so on the gallop, momentum carrying her along), with his eyes taking in soaked padding and shivering body. And then she was running, she was trying to turn and get back into the trees because she was out in the open, she could see the potential exit for that avoided path a few meters away from where she'd come out and if she didn't move, if she didn't get back to some form of shelter, she was going to -- -- they emerged. Six of them emerged. (She was waiting for three more to exit behind them.) And they fanned out: two in the air and there was a blast of fear as the orange pegasus ascended, sheer terror climbing into the sky, but there were four more on the ground and they were fanning out as quickly as they could, forcing a living wall which blocked her most immediate entrance to the trees. She still tried for it, because she saw it as her only chance to hold off defeat a little longer. She knew she was capable of vaulting any of them, it would take the pegasi a few seconds to get something together, she was alert for the chance of another scent bomb now and she galloped directly at Acrolith, planning a last-second swerve so the earth pony wouldn't jump into her from underneath -- -- the multi-hued mare's features tightened. Cerea, who still had trouble with pony expressions, briefly wondered if she was looking at something which her presence had been known to inspire: nausea. She'd just never seen it that intense -- -- and for six meters around Cerea, the grass died. Then it rotted. She just barely heard the Sergeant's little inhale, and it would be hours before she remembered the soft "Interesting..." Something else had the majority of her attention: the fact that she had just transitioned from galloping across normal ground to having her hooves trying to find purchase on something very much like week-old lettuce leaves. Adrenaline surged for the last time on that night (because it was night now, her body fully exposed under moonlight), something which was just enough to let her steer the skid. Falling would have ended everything, she would have had them all on top of her before she had the chance to get up, and so she steered the skid just enough to push into a jump at the end, something which sent her off to the side and left slick hooves scrambling for purchase on the landing. Her arms helplessly flailed for a few seconds as she concentrated on her legs because to have one go out from under her was risking a break, but she'd cleared the dead patch and managed to stabilize -- "I see six!" the Sergeant shouted. "Two are back in! Sedi on the way, or did she get three of you?" "He counted out!" Acrolith gasped, with the burgeoning nausea now fully audible. "Judged as dropped! She -- she doesn't fight like --" Part of the girl heard that, and was shamed anew. The rest was trying to get her arms under control, because there were six ponies who could still come for her, she needed to draw the sword and -- -- the first gust hit her, automatically forced an arm into shielding her eyes. It made her look up, and her gaze met silver. She couldn't scent the little knight, not with the pegasus above and the wind twisting. She couldn't read the expression -- -- she hates me something happened because of me and she hates me -- but the combat exercise was still going. Cerea gave up on the sword, went for the other bag of spheres. It only took a second to get the sling humming, and then whiffwing was being launched into the air. It taught her something about the difference between practice and fighting. During practice, nothing had been moving. Nightwatch deflected the first sphere with a wind gust, casually dodged the second, and didn't have to do anything about the wild miss of the third. It was effort wasted, time which had allowed the ground-based ponies to start closing in, so Cerea abandoned that target and tried to move again, she couldn't let them surround her, the sling went down and the sword came out as she charged directly for the smallest unicorn, saw the corona coming and deflected the projection. The other unicorn managed to catch her right ear and she bit back the scream as her hooves pushed, sheer strength pushing her forward and clear of the field. Still moving towards the unicorn mare, and that horn remained dark because she was just about right on top of the mare and the caster couldn't risk the backlash -- -- the caster also didn't have time to move. Cerea slashed the sword in an arc, pushing the mare with the flat of the blade. The living obstacle went away, she galloped and -- -- she only registered the presence of the little hole under her left forehoof on the subconscious level (which was mostly surprised that the training grounds had one), caught enough of the edge to keep herself from pitching forward, kept going -- -- wind blasted at her from the back. That which hit her bundled hair lost a little strength, she risked looking back and up as another earth pony started to close in -- -- they're going to surround me -- -- which meant she didn't see the next spell coming, desperately hit her own left flank with the sword to make the sudden feeling of tingling combined with dizziness go away, she didn't have time to get the sling going again and so she scooped her free hand into the bag and threw the sphere, it hit the orange pegasus and -- -- she'd reached into the wrong bag. The white wood cracked, fell to the ground. Drydust scattered across the grass. And the pegasus stallion reacted as if he'd been shot, recoiling in mid-hover, eyes wide and frantic as wingbeats went uneven. "No!" the youngest Guard yelped, legs wildly weaving under his body in a pattern she didn't understand. "No, no, no..." But she had too much else to worry about, and so her attention desperately spiraled to the earth pony whose name she did not know, just barely dodged the kick and doing so put her tail into the projected grip of the last standing unicorn, that light broke up on its own but they were closing in, Acrolith was coming and Nightwatch just kept blasting her with gust after gust, she couldn't defend everything, she was spinning and looking for a direction she could jump in, anything which would buy her a little more time and she was tired and she hurt and they were going to win because she always lost and she'd already lost she'd lost the one thing which mattered and she just wanted to stop -- -- it was the scent that reached her first, because that much of her had recovered from the burst of something so close to betrayal. A scent which traveled ahead of her death, because just about everything had a scent. Even humans on open ground were capable of picking up on petrichor: that special waft from newly-wetted soil. For centaurs, it went deeper. There were times when you could smell rain coming. Others when that warning told you to seek shelter, because Cerea could also detect ionization and -- -- she looked up. Pony expressions were still largely unfamiliar to her. But there was one which she had been exposed to at the first, and so as the orange pegasus closed the last centimeters of distance to the fast-coalescing mass of blackened vapor, she recognized terror. She heard the endless chant of his denial, through the magic of the disc. Recognized it as a plea for everything to stop and as she saw hooves desperately descend towards the thunderhead, understood that it would be the last thing she ever heard. The tallest object in an open field, and a wet one at that. The electricity would seek her out. And at this distance, the time delay was practically nothing -- but the thunder would fall upon dead ears, with the last flash reflected in fast-glazing eyes. She had failed. There was a price for that and in this case, she would only have to pay it once. There was just enough time for last thoughts, and so the girl wondered where her soul would go. If her own afterlife would be able to find her, or whether there would be ponies fleeing within... She wondered what awaited ponies after death. She would never see her mother again. The household. She would -- -- Lala. She'll be here for me when I die. She promised. I'll see -- -- something dark streaked across the sky. Orange hooves slammed into the thunderhead, and lightning blasted into fur. It went into the black fur, something which gave it less than a second of sparking across the armor. It was pulled into the little knight's body, and the hovering form convulsed, wings curling in a way which seemed as if it had to drop the pegasus out of the sky, but then they flared back out and the tail went straight as the sleek head came up so fast as to toss the helmet off. She spasmed as everyone watched, as the flying stallion's expression and existence began to collapse into themselves. Her eyes shot open, and silver was lost in the glow of incandescent blue -- -- her forelegs lashed. The hooves sparked. Technically, they heard the thunder second. "YOU IDIOT!" They'd barely seen her move. The bare face was less than thirty centimeters away from the cowering orange features, and every half-spat word gave the next cloud weaving that much more to potentially work with. "It's a combat exercise! You're good enough with lightning to do a static discharge! Stunning only, Squall, or did you forget that part? Did you volunteer just so you would have the chance to forget it, or are you just that scared? Scared enough to use the real stuff, scared enough to make me use what's just about the last technique any pegasus ever wants to use, and if I'd been any slower, if -- if -- you just -- you --" It wasn't that her words really ran out: it was more than Squall's ears were now so tight against his skull as to create some question as to whether anything was getting in. She stared at him for an extra second. And then she swooped down, went into a hover in front of a new target. "AND YOU! Hours out here, hours in the forge on top of that, plus lessons and cleaning the barracks and everything else where she won't ask for help! Hours, you should have figured out how many hours she's been pushing herself, pushing hard enough to make them into days! She isn't sleeping! She's in pain, because nothing gets a chance to heal and she just keeps pushing anyway! She's shaking, she's cold, she's been in the stream and she has to warm up or she'll get sick! You're going to give her some TIME OFF! No training! No working on armor! Two days, at LEAST two days where the heaviest thing she lifts is a quill! Because if you DON'T, I'll -- I'll --" The old earth pony's head came up. Very, very slowly. "You'll what?" he calmly asked. The mare blinked. "Um," Nightwatch said. "Something. I'll... something." "Two days?" "At least." A plume of smoke drifted between them. The centaur was the only one who really seemed to notice, and most of that was because she couldn't make herself stop staring at them. She had plenty of company. "Two days," the Sergeant decided. "Status check after." "...oh." "End of exercise," he casually added. "Got most of the injured back here already, but somepony should go fetch Sedi. Then everypony goes home or on-shift. EXCEPT FOR YOU, SQUALL, BECAUSE YOU AND I ARE ABOUT TO HAVE SOME MUCH-NEEDED QUALITY TIME TOGETHER! Nightwatch, make sure the Recruit here gets properly warmed up at the palace." "Yes, Sergeant. I'll stay with her. Food. Hot bath." "Not necessarily in that order." "Yes, Sergeant." There was silence for a moment, with the exception of a not-too-distant crackle. "Um," Nightwatch said, and directed her helpless hovering stare above the hat. "Something else?" the old stallion inquired. "...I think..." Slowly, inexorably, four species turned their attention to her newest point of focus. The rising glow made it easy to pick out, and harder to look away. "...we should put that fire out first." The little knight winced. "That's the part they don't tell you about, with redirecting lightning. It has to go somewhere..." "Do that." Nightwatch flew forward. Then she thought better of it, flew up, and brought Squall along to help. Dragging him by the tail via jaw grip might have been a means of releasing extra frustration, or it could have just been the most convenient way of showing him where to go. It wasn't as if fingers were available for pointing. The other ponies followed, with Cerea staring after them. And because her mind was trying to reconcile too many things (like existing in a breathing body, which it was pretty sure wasn't supposed to be happening any more), she then found herself looking at the Sergeant. In a way, it was a pity. There had been generations of Guards upon the training grounds, and the one sapient who saw the briefest manifestation of his expression wasn't qualified to understand what it was. "Two days off," he told her. "Check to see how you're healing. More time if it's needed. Better pacing on your schedule. And if you're ready, we move to the next part. Might as well, since you already put together a snout's lead on that." "...what?" was all Cerea had left. His right forehoof came up, subtly adjusted the hat to block some of the moonlight. "The step after fighting against Guards," Emery Board calmly stated, "is fighting alongside them."