Flurry Heart brought the rifle up again and slammed the trigger with the side of her hoof. The rifle kicked into her shoulder as she worked the bolt with her magic, chambering in another round.
The glass bottle on the fence exploded.
She braced, took aim at the next bottle, and fired again. She moved down the fence, picking off stationary bottles. After three more shots, Flurry crouched and removed a new stripper clip from the pouch on her flank with a flash of magic.
“On the left!”
Flurry dropped the clip in her magic, catching it on an outstretched hoof. Her horn flashed as she pulled the revolver from the holster on her other flank and looked to the left. She brought the revolver to her eye and fired off six shots. While she fired, she rammed the clip into the bolt-action rifle and cycled it by hoof. She dropped the pistol in her magic and braced the rifle back against her shoulder, one forehoof on the open trigger and the other braced on the frame.
“Panzer on the right!”
Flurry turned and fired a blast from her horn. The tips of her short-cut mane blackened from the heat.
A glass bottle flew at her head from above.
Flurry barely brought up a shield in time. The bottle shattered a hoof from her muzzle as she stared, wide-eyed.
“Hey!” Flurry glared at the griffon hovering above her. “You didn’t call out!”
“Sometimes there is no warning, Princess,” the brown griffon shouted back down.
“Do not throw bottles directly at the Princess, Duskcrest!” Dusty shouted. “How many bucking times do I have to tell you!?”
“I do it to hear your adorable swears,” Duskcrest answered to the mare standing several hooves behind Flurry.
“You’ll hear a lot worse later!”
“Oh,” Duskcrest laughed, landing to Flurry’s left and adjusting his old forest jacket. “Is that a promise?”
Flurry didn’t have to look behind her to know Dusty was blushing.
“Besides,” he continued, “you should have stopped the Princess after her little trick with the revolver.” He looked at Flurry with half-lidded dark golden eyes and waved towards the bottles lined up on an old truck engine to her left.
Flurry dropped the shield around her muzzle and set the safety on the rifle before looking over. She scowled.
Four out of six bottles to her right were still standing on the old truck engine. They were easily within pistol range. She was in a scrapyard outside Evergreen, the largest city in the mountains. The abandoned yard had been converted into a shooting range for the town’s militia.
She picked up the revolver with her hooves and opened the cylinder, ejecting the spent cases. She brought the sights up to her eye again. “It’s not aligned right.”
“It’s my gun,” Dusty answered, walking up to Flurry’s right. She took the pistol from Flurry’s hooves with a flick of gray magic and loaded a single cartridge. She took aim down the range with the pistol in her magic. Dusty squinted, exhaled and fired.
One of the bottles shattered. Flurry was aiming at those with her rifle.
“The sights are fine, Princess,” Dusty said and holstered the pistol.
Flurry sat on her flank and crossed her hooves before lighting up her horn. The remaining bottles downrange glowed blue and shattered in her grip. Duskcrest reached out with a claw and flicked her ear.
“Yes, your horn is your greatest weapon,” Duskcrest sighed, “but it is not your only one.”
He gestured at the bottles on the engine. “You are fast, but that is nothing without accuracy. You are trying to do too many things at once.” He pointed at the sandbags around Flurry. “Use your cover and take your time.”
Dusty walked over to the metal plate propped up by some large rocks on the right. She winced and shook her graying mane. “Well, you punched through the reinforced plate and definitely killed the crew, but if there’s one panzer, there’s at least a dozen more rumbling behind.”
Flurry sighed and brushed her stubby curls aside. She had cut her mane and tail almost indecently short, if not for her white cargo pants and jacket. She couldn’t wear a helmet; the heat from her lasers would melt it to her head.
“If I had a submachine gun or an automatic rifle, I wouldn’t have to take my time,” Flurry remarked.
“I wish I had one of those too!” Duskcrest laughed. “Can you ask Blackpeak to loan us some instead of sending them to the coast guards?”
"We work with what we have, Princess," Dusty rebuked.
Duskcrest patted the alicorn's head. “You’re a better shot at fourteen than I was, and I spent my youth as a bandit in our mountains."
“Great,” Flurry replied sarcastically.
Colonel Duskcrest backed the attempted coup just before the Great War. Nova Griffonia long depended on local militias instead of a professional army. The general he followed, Erwin Highhill, rallied the underpaid militias in the mountains, promising them reform and appreciation. He flew down from the mountains and took the provisional government by complete surprise, but failed to take the capitol building in Weter and was arrested on its steps.
The struggling Republic couldn’t afford to arrest and disband all of the soldiers that followed Highhill as the war between Equestria and the Changeling Hegemony raged at their southern and western border. The provisional government instead returned them to the mountains to help the massive amount of pony refugees settle in their homes. They demoted the commanders and lent them no support to deal with the influx of ponies.
Flurry guessed that the government wanted the exiled griffons to get distracted squabbling over their homes with the ponies, and it had worked for several years. Ponies formed competing militias to defend themselves against banditry and extortion.
Flurry Heart’s arrival changed that. Her tours and interest in the mountains gave her ponies hope, and that hope began to spread to the griffons that lived uneasily beside her ponies before radiating out to the militias. Militias of ponies and griffons merged and began to work together as violence between the races died down. The economists in Weter saw the beginning of slow economic growth and sighed with relief, ignoring the root of the issue.
Of course, none of the government money went to the griffons and ponies in the mountains. President Blackpeak and the Republicans were focused on the coast, reinforcing it against the Reich. They were content to let Flurry play with her ponies, placating them and ensuring that they paid their taxes as good citizens. Her ponies were still poor, but they were poor together with the frontier griffons.
Duskcrest had first attended Flurry's birthday party when she turned thirteen, presenting her with a silver-plated revolver. "For my nephew, he would have died of Feather Flu," he had solemnly declared.
Flurry Heart had heard that an epidemic was sweeping through several mountain towns, affecting pegasi and griffons alike. Weter had stockpiled medicine for the major cities, but there were few doctors inland, even among the ponies. There was a simple spell to relieve the worst symptoms, but even the strongest unicorn couldn't cast it several times a day, everyday. Flurry made an emergency trip to the mountains, dragging along a unicorn doctor to learn the spell.
She did not sleep for three nights, teleporting and flying from town to village, outpacing her desperate guards and Thorax. She dragged herself into the last village, bleeding from the nose. It was an all-griffon town halfway up the highest peak on the Nova Griffonian side of the border.
Flurry looked bad enough that the griffons assumed she was dying of the flu herself and avoided her. She stumbled into the schoolhouse, then a makeshift clinic, and lit up her horn. She didn't quite pass out, but Thorax's changelings had no problems subduing her and dragging her back to Weter when they finally caught up to her.
It took her a month of bedrest to recover, then another three months before she was allowed outside her room. But the death toll was in the single digits when it could have been in the thousands. She had prioritized her ponies, but she came for the griffons when no griffon from Weter would. There were a lot of stereotypes about griffin greed, but they would pay back a debt.
Flurry had waved a wing at the silver revolver when Duskcrest offered it. "Give it to your nephew and teach him to use it."
"As you command, Princess," he replied. The griffons that arrived with him to the party nodded.
Her griffons, she thought with a smile as she shrugged at Duskcrest. "I'm glad to hear I'm a better shot than a fourteen-year-old, filthy bandit." On paper in Weter, he commanded a force of five hundred. In practice, he led a combined militia of five thousand, and held the loyalty of a two dozen smaller militias all over the Crystal Mountains.
He laughed. “Highhill was a fast shot, but he was too reckless. Speed didn’t save him from the noose.” He passed Flurry a canteen, pouring a bit of water into his beak in front of her. She took it in her magic. Flurry trusted him, but she appreciated the gesture.
Dusty walked around the yard and squinted at the setting sun. “One more hour, Princess, then back to Evergreen.”
Flurry nodded. A few bat ponies and griffons patrolled overhead as she drank from the canteen.
Officially, she wasn’t here; she was in Weter. Every month, Flurry Heart would travel into the mountains for two days to practice while Falx imitated her voice from her room if anypony came by. Thorax knew, of course, and it drove him crazy trying to organize the guards.
But Thorax does more dangerous things every week, she snorted to herself.
Thorax did more than help the government root out Changeling spies for Chrysalis. He lived in Weter to work with the black market at the port, running smuggled gems from the mountains to unicorns for dubious enchantments. The gems went to the Reich and embargoed amenities came in. He confessed to her when she was thirteen that most of the ghetto in Weter was involved. The ghetto was nicknamed ‘Ponyville’ by Weter Radio, but no one dared say the name to Flurry’s muzzle.
Flurry’s guards were funded by crime; her room was funded by crime. Technically, everything Flurry depended on was funded by crime.
Her magic tutor Far Sight made a living enchanting stolen gems. “I could work in Triton’s Armories casting spells on rifles for half as much,” he had explained when she asked him, “or I could do it for Thorax and feed my niece and nephew.” He was a mustard-yellow unicorn with a brown mane. Before the war, he was a professor from Trottingham. He still wore his tweed jacket, now significantly patched and scuffed.
“Who does Thorax work for, then?” Flurry asked, looking up from her notebook and old spell tome.
Far Sight paused for a moment too long while writing on the magical blackboard he summoned in her room. Flurry coughed, and he dispelled it and turned to her. He opened his mouth to lie, but Flurry’s glare made him reconsider.
“Thorax runs it, doesn’t he?” she asked, more as a statement than a question.
He nodded.
“Does he hurt Ponies?”
Far Sight hesitated again. “Usually not.” Flurry thought about Gunner, leaning against his truck with a bloody beak.
I questioned him thoroughly.
I thought he did it to protect me, she thought.
Her magic lesson ended early that day.
Flurry avoided the conversation with Thorax. He avoided talking to her about it as well, even though Far Sight certainly told him. Thorax lived poorly in a tenement beside ponies and changelings. He cherished what little free time he spent with her, reading a dog-eared book with poor binding or using the rare bit of chocolate to make cocoa. No matter how often Flurry hugged him and called him family, he still looked lean and tired.
This isn't something he does for fun, Flurry ultimately decided. He does it for me, and it’s killing him.
Flurry Heart had lived in Nova Griffonia for four years, and her ponies still suffered and lived like refugees and criminals. Any improvement to their lives came from her, not the government. Triton Blackpeak was two years into his second term and he had still accomplished little of his promises to them.
The remnants of the Griffonian Republic had organized into an opposing political party led by the son of their dead president. Alexander Kemerskai Junior was a decade older than Flurry. He met her only once, an accident when she arrived for a photo opportunity with Blackpeak at the Capitol Building in downtown Weter. He sneered at her in the hallway to the Rotunda, spying the golden band under her blue and pink mane.
“It is disgraceful that a proud Republic would allow you to strut about wearing that,” he scoffed with a heavy accent. Kemerskai wore a faded green camo jacket and pants with a green cap. He dressed like he was still in a command tent.
“This?” Flurry pretended not to understand, and gestured to her white dress with pink flowers and ruffles. It was stiff and made her wings cramp, but it looked nice in a photograph.
He squawked a laugh and pointed at the simple crown. “That,” he spat. “You are a shining example of the downfall of hereditary rule.”
So are you, she thought, but instead said, “Thank you for the compliment, Mister Kemerskai,” and dipped her wings in a bow. He stalked away with his entourage, still laughing at her naivety. Flurry kept her muzzle still.
Kemerskai dreamed of grinding the Reich against Nova Griffonian shores, then returning triumphantly to Griffenheim and avenging his father. He harnessed the discontent of a few native griffins that were upset about losing jobs to cheaper pony labor, but he had two more years to campaign and make promises. The next election would occur after Flurry Heart turned sixteen and was legally an adult. If Kemerskai won, he would demand she become a citizen and renounce her crown, if not worse.
Flurry had to be ready. She would not flee again. Her ponies, nearly a million strong, would stand with her. The griffons in the hills and mountains would back their pony neighbors against the government. The Aquileians had been allies to Griffonian Republic, but Kemerskai publicly blamed the war’s loss on them. Flurry Heart made overtures to them every year on her birthday, and ‘Little Flurry’ had gradually sounded more like a title than a gesture of affection from the Aquileians.
If it came to it, they might not fight for her, but they might not fight for Kemerskai either.
Like everything, the true challenge came down to Chrysalis. If Nova Griffonia tore itself apart during a civil war, Changeling panzers had free reign to storm in and declare victory. If the Griffonian Reich invaded, the Changelings could sweep in from the south and west. The mountains and tundra would make progress slow, but Nova Griffonia could not fight a two-front war. Her ponies would suffer first in the frontier.
Flurry Heart set the canteen down and looked at the rifle. It was an old bolt-action rifle from the beginning of the Great War; the purple paint had worn away, leaving gray smears along brown wood. She had been using it for two years. Flurry felt the magic around the rifle, the imprint left behind by previous owners. Flurry found that weapons took auras based on who held them and used them. Dusty’s pistol had killed once; she carried it since the war. It felt like loyalty bordering on stubbornness and pride.
The rifle was different. The rifle had not been fired it battle; it had not killed. There was an old aura of fear and terror around it. Flurry Heart looked back at the pants covering her bare flank. Most colts and fillies had a cutie mark by fourteen. She still told no one about her sense, not Far Sight, Dusty or Thorax. It seemed to be entirely unique to her. She closed her eyes and focused on the rifle.
A pony died holding it, alone and afraid. A filly, barely older than me, fresh out of training. She was at the front, terrified. She remembered Celestia’s voice on the radio and climbed out of the trench. A shot knocked her down. Another pony took the rifle as they ran. It traded hooves quickly-
“Princess?”
Flurry Heart snapped her head back up and glanced sheepishly at Duskcrest.
Dusty also looked concerned. "You've been staring at that rifle for a few minutes. Is something wrong?"
“Sorry, I was thinking,” Flurry deflected. “Where’s this rifle from, again?”
“You've asked that before,” Dusty commented.
“One of the old stockpiles from after the war,” Duskcrest answered easily. “Most of the militias use semi-automatics now, but these work fine in an ambush.” He wagged a wing at her. “When I’m impressed with your accuracy, we’ll upgrade.”
“You don’t want me to break your fancy guns?” Flurry asked.
Duskcrest gave an exaggerated, wide-eyed look at the smoking hole in the armor sheet across from him. “Of course not, Princess.”
Flurry giggled.
“Princess!” A green pegasus in flannel flew towards the junkyard from the direction of Evergreen. The guards flying around the scrapyard unslung their rifles and shotguns and faced him, shouting threats.
“Princess!” He waved his forelegs desperately, but didn’t stop.
Dusty drew and loaded her revolver as Duskcrest pulled out his own silver-plated pistol.
Flurry Heart summoned a bubble shield around the Pegasus, trapping him midair. He slammed against the barrier, slumping down against the bottom of the bubble. His nose was gushing blood. He continued to wave down at Flurry Heart and shout, now muffled. She drifted the blue bubble closer.
“He could have a bomb,” Dusty warned.
“It’ll have to be a bomb bigger than him to break my shield,” Flurry replied distractedly. She recognized the pegasus. He was Tree Trimmer, one of the managers of the logging company in Evergreen.
“Princess!” Tree Trimmer shouted through the shield, bowing awkwardly. A few of the patrolling griffons and ponies flapped their wings around the bubble, weapons ready.
“Princess, battle,” he gasped, voice nasally. Blood kept streaming down his muzzle. “There’s a battle!”
Flurry’s chest tightened. “Where?”
“We need to leave,” Dusty commanded. Duskcrest nodded in agreement.
He shook his head. “No, battle!” He gasped again. “Manehattan! On radio!”
Flurry blinked. She was so shocked that the bubble disappeared with a soft pop and Tree Trimmer fell twenty hooves to the ground. He didn’t flap his wings in time. He landed hard and his forelegs buckled, but he kept his eyes on Flurry.
“It’s started!” He was crying. “It started!”
Flurry seized Duskcrest and Dusty in her magic field and hugged them against her. She teleported to Evergreen with a crack.