//------------------------------//
// Screw the Air 
// Story: Innavedr 
// by Imploding Colon 
//------------------------------//

	"Uhhhh... Uhhhhhhh..."  Eagle Eye whimpered as he dangled and dangled some more.  He gazed down and gulped at the distant treetops of jagged pines looming below the managlider in naked starlight.  "Uhhhhhhhh..."

"Will ya flippin' settle down?!"  Josho grumbled, coasting the craft northwest over mountaintops.  "Last time I piloted a managlider sober was before the Eastern Valley Campaign.  I bet you were too busy sucking on your tail and crapping onto your mother's backside."

"Th-This would be a lot easier for the b-both of us if I wasn't hanging off the side like a loose anchor!" Eagle Eye exclaimed.

"Like Hell I'm gonna share this seat with you!"  Josho grunted.  "I don't take kindly to the position we would need to be in.  Just rest your flank; the trouble is behind us now—"

At that precise moment, a cluster of pine trees exploded beneath them.  Chunks of wood, burning pine cones, and a screaming squirrel or two flew past them in the starlight.

"Huh..."  Josho glanced back and spotted three glinting objects roaring after them with blue manalight.  "Oh, for the love of backsweat!"

"What?!  What?!"

"Screw it."  Josho reached down with a single hoof and yanked Eagle Eye up by his bound forelimb.  "Better do this the dirty way or else it's the dead way!"

"Ooomf!"  Eagle Eye grunted, straddling the cramped seat of the managlider in front of the enforcer.  "Guh..."  He frowned.  "The heck do you mean by—"  His irises shrunk as he realized that he wasn't straddling the seat so much as he was straddling— "Oh my..."

"No ideas, or else you're gonna have no brain mush!" Josho hissed directly into Eagle Eye's muzzle, as the two stallions had little to no other luxury for mounting the craft.  He leaned over Eagle Eye's blanching face and adjusted the control instruments, now with full access.  "Keep an eye on our six!"

"On our 'six,' got it—Aaaack!"  Eagle Eye clung to Josho, trembling, as the enforcer accelerated over the forested hills, all the while bobbing and weaving to avoid the foxes' energy blasts.  The dark night lit up with blue mana as the pursuing vessels took multiple shots at their target.  With the sound of screaming engines, Josho plunged their managlider down so that they were soaring along the lines of multiple trees, attempting in desperation to throw off their enemies.

"They're still on us!" Eagle Eye shouted, pivoting his muzzle so that he wasn't screaming directly into Josho's ear.  "One of them is closing in fast!"

"Stupid... friggin' Grey Smoke tech..."

"Huh?!"

"These mana-gliders have 'Grey Smoke' written all over them!"  Josho grunted over the whipping winds and explosions of mana blasts.  "Grey Smoke ponies are good at making speedy vehicles, but they never build any damn rear-turrets into their craft!  What the foxes thought they'd get for selling these to the Xonans is beyond me!  Give me a heaping helping of Nightshade Industrial tech any day!"

"Thanks for the schoolroom lecture!"  Eagle Eye frowned.  "Uh... the foxes?"

"Get ready to lend me that shnazzy horn of yours!"

"Excuse me?!"

"Telekinesis, ya fruit badger!"  Josho twisted the controls and extended two turrets from the managlider's front.  "I'm gonna give you something to lob at them!"

"Oh jeez... oh jeez oh jeez oh jeezz—"

"Heads up!"  Josho fired into a line of trees directly in front of them.  Burning chunks of wood flew high into the stars, sailing straight at them.

Clinging to Josho, Eagle thrusted his neck forward and aimed his horn into the smoldering cloud of debris.  He caught over a dozen shards of wood, carrying them with the craft as Josho lifted them both into a steady climb.

Blue streaks of mana surged violently close to their ascending forms.

"Anyday now, kid!" Josho grunted.

"Nnngh!"  Eagle jerked his head beyond Josho's shoulder.  One by one, he flung the burning wreckage at the pursuers, pelting their crafts like a rebel flinging molotov cocktails.

For the most part, the foxes swerved left and right to avoid the materials altogether.  One or two chunks of ashen mess ricocheted off the vehicles' silver bodies, but it had no effect.

"Nothing's helping!" Eagle Eye exclaimed.

"Kid...?"  Josho cracked the joints in his neck and yerked at the controls.  "Get ready to fling all of the junk at once."

"Huh—Whoah!" Eagle Eye pressed hard into Josho's chest as the managlider soared skyward.  Josho flipped the craft about and twirled it in the opposite direction, sailing straight towards the three foxes.  Before the vehicles could swerve out of the way, Eagle Eye got the drop on them by tossing all that was left of his telekinetic debris.  Two of the pursuers dodged, but one of them took a face-full of the smoldering bricabrac.  Blinded, her failed to swerve out of Josho's line of sight.

"Eat the Queen's wrath!" Josho hollered maniacally, his hooves slapping over the trigger mechanisms.  Bright blue streams of energy flew into the one pilot's craft and ruptured the manacore from the inside.  A huge ball of fire erupted in the air, laced with screams and fox fur.  Josho flew underneath it, barely falling past the spreading bits of shrapnel.  "Hah!"  Josho yelled again, pulling the craft up in a spiraling path that banked them once more towards the northwest.  "Best fox hunt I've ever been on!"

"'Eat the Queen's wrath?!'"  Eagle Eye stammered.

"Oh, don't you friggin' start..."

"I'm just saying, before he died, he likely only heard 'Eat the Queen.'"

"Look, we killed the bastard, okay?"

"Wouldn't Ledo be ticked off to think that you implied—?"

"What will it take to get you to shut up?!"  Josho's frown left him as two explosions of blue flak erupted on either side of them.

Eagle Eye buried his face in Josho's chest.  "Get th-them off our tail, pleeeeease!" he yelled into the obese pony's graying coat.

"Oh, buck this all to Hell."  Josho yanked back at the controls.

The two stallions' manes blew like windsocks as they climbed, climbed, climbed up towards the starlit zenith.  Flying straight skyward, Josho sought to outfly the two remaining pursuers.  The foxes proved too resilient—or too pissed off—to let the ponies go.  They spun and twirled to dodge streaming sprays of blue mana, but soon that was the least of their problems.  The air grew thin, frigid, and frosty.  The engine strained and the manathrusters began to sputter.

"Come on... Come on..."  Josho jerked and jerked at the controls.

"We're stalling!"  Eagle Eye trembled to say.

"They c-can't possibly follow us this high—"

"Look, I know enough about airflight to tell you that at this rate, we're gonna—"

For a split second, there was no gravity, and then the managlider plunged straight back.  If the two stallions could scream, they would hear their voices sailing behind them.  Instead, they heard the sputtering of two more engines, and realized that theirs wasn't the only vehicle that had stalled.  As the clouds passed and cleared, they looked on either side of them to see the foxes' gliders falling like identical stones, plummeting towards the rock-hard mountains below.

"Pull us out of this!" Eagle Eye grunted.  "Pull us up!"

"What does it look like I'm trying to—"

"Haaah!" One of the foxes pivoted his craft about in free-fall.  His lopside turrets spun around, firing madly in a blue stream.

Eagle Eye and Josho concentrated, summoning a bubble of telekinesis directly in front of them.  Two or three shots that could have connected with their bodies were instead deflected.

Stupidly, the fox pilot didn't relinguish the grip of his trigger mechanisms in time to avoid shooting past the stallions, and straight into his partner's craft on the other side.  The other creature's screams joined the thunderous eruption of his vehicle as the managlider exploded with a hellish burst.  The concussion of the blast sent Josho's and Eagle's craft falling sideways until they collided with the last pursuer.

"Guhh!"  Eagle Eye jerked and fell loose.  He dangled briefly from Josho's manacled forelimb until he got tangled up in the piloting instruments of the enemy glider.  The fox gripped his lower body and pulled out a revolver, aiming it at Josho's skull.  "Look out—" Eagle Eye shrieked above the whipping winds.

Josho jerked hard on the controls.  He tried breaking loose from the other falling craft, but the gliders' wings were locked together, so that instead of soaring towards safety, the two vehicles spun in an awkward circle.  They continued falling, all the while the fox throwing off each of the fox's pot shots.  Eagle Eye tried kicking him, but the fox held him back with a stiff leg while jerking in the opposite direction at his controls.  This caused the falling vehicles to stop spinning.  Grinning wickedly, the creature aimed directly at Josho's heart.

Josho's peripheral vision filled with the rising spires of pine trees.  They were just seconds from plunging into the earth.  Without a second thought, he flung a beam of telekinesis from his horn and into the barrel of the fox's revolver.

When the fox pulled the trigger, the bullet had nowhere to go.  His gun exploded in his grip, taking his furred hand with it.  "Gyaaaaugh!" the fox fell back against his seat, clutching the bloodied stub.

Eagle Eye bucked off the glider, knocking it loose so that the vehicle's wings untangled with the stallions.  With a desperate lunge, Eagle jumped through the air.

Josho caught him.  Slumping back in the seat, he pulled hard on the machine's instruments.  The managlider barrel-rolled away from the enemy craft, fired its thrusters, and thundered off just as the pursuer met an explosive end.  The air whizzed and whistled from flying shrapnel.  Two chunks of metal flew into the belly of the ponies' vehicle, filling the air with the smell of raw mana.

"Wh-what's that?!" Eagle Eye breathlessly stammered.

"We've taken a hit!" Josho growled over his face, struggling to grip the controls easily and hold the smaller stallion at the same time.  "I can't hold altitude!"

"Slow us down!"

"If I wanted to, don't you think I would have done that by—"  Josho's face paled.  "Oh buffalo biscuits."

"What?  What?!"

"Hold on!"  Josho yanked back, back, back at the controls, almost to the breaking point.  Eagle Eye turned to look over his shoulder at the hazard in question.  A sharp promontory loomed in front of them, barely a sneeze away from smashing them to bits.

Both ponies let loose a prolonged scream as the engine went out.  Two lasting spurts of thruster energy was all it took, and the two miraculously cleared the cliff face.  That didn't stop them, however, from ricocheting off two pine trees and grinding several feet through the soft earth.  The managlider hit a boulder at the end of its drag, and the two ponies' bodies were launched—flailing—into the jagged forest beyond.

Then all was silent.