//------------------------------//
// Game, Part 2 
// Story: Pericynthion 
// by Skystrider 
//------------------------------//

From: jackandthegiant@hushcom.nl
To: demosthenes@hushcom.nl
Subj: So it begins.
Encryption Alg#: 3104815378*IYAIDYABD

        Demosthenes,

        We corresponded only briefly before you left, but though you might not recognize this address, you know who I am. I was one of your brother’s inner circle. I’ll leave it to your powers of deduction and knowledge of fairy tales to discern which one.

        Your brother gave me an e-mail address before he left, one that would reach him through the ansible, even as you both traveled through relativistic space. I have now tried reaching him four separate times and can only come to the conclusion that his communications are being blocked. For us, it has been six months since your colony ship’s departure. While I know that you are barely on the fifth day of your voyage, I also know that your brother would not casually ignore a message from me, especially considering the code words I used.

        Things have gone bad here. Now that the Formics are gone, the nations of Earth are gearing again for war, and the children your brother trained are the most dangerous weapons at hand. Save myself, every member of the jeesh has been kidnapped, and I know who is behind it. Though I sorely miss his insight and support, the only good part about this whole mess is that your brother is not involved in it. We have you to thank for that.

        I am considering turning to your brother… your older brother. Yes, I know what he is, and what he is capable of, but believe me when I say that our enemy is much worse. Locke at least wants to be seen as a good person. Imagine what he would be like if he didn’t care.

        Now make him ten times worse. That is the kind of person we’re up against. Desperate times/desperate measures, the lesser of two evils, and all that.

        I need to know how to handle Locke - how to use him to open the doors I need opened. Relativity will not be our friend: entire battles could be fought in the time it takes you to relay this letter to your brother. I am sorry to put this burden on you, but I have no other choice. At least from your perspective, it will all be over quickly, for better or for worse.

        I’m burning this identity after this message sends. My new address will be the number of soldiers in my toon followed by cold stew’s nickname for me. Your brother will know it. I can only hope your mail is not being intercepted either.

☽

        The princess is right, I need to start from the beginning.

        The gears in Ender’s head clicked as he assembled his argument. While one part of his mind stepped through the monumental task of explaining his actions to beings who might not possess the perspective to understand them, another worked frantically to quell the rising tide of anger and resentment at his situation. Hostility would only seal his fate, of that he was sure. Clamping down on the burning fire inside, Ender refocused it on something productive: analyzing the creatures that were analyzing him.

        The soldier knew fear when he saw it: fear of the alien and fear of the unknown. Now that he really looked, Ender saw that even Celestia, though she spoke and acted from a position of power, showed signs of trepidation. He had seen enough of the alicorn to know that momentary pauses, meant here to look like careful consideration, were not natural to her. She was working very hard to control her emotions.

        Fear he understood. Fear he could use. Fear made even the most rational beings irrational, and unless you wanted outright confrontation, calm, steady measures and maybe a little distraction were the only ways to alleviate it.

        I can suffer the ignominy of having my memories put on display if it gives me a way to humanize myself in their eyes. The boy chuckled inwardly for a moment. Or, I guess in this case, de-humanize myself.

        A sobering thought occurred to him. How many lives would have been saved if the buggers could have done this? Or if we could have?

        Ender really did not want to think about that.

        Viewed from another light, this memory spell of Luna’s was a powerful tool, if not a double-edged one. Yes, the others could catch any lie or obfuscation, but like the data from an all-seeing surveillance camera, the spell lent incontrovertible truth to his words. Now that he thought of it, a suitably motivated investigative reporter with access to Battle School surveillance records could probably give Celestia all the answers she wanted. Most of his life was a matter of public record - Graff’s trial had demonstrated that. At least this way, he could control the way the information was presented.

        Truth was perspective, after all.

        Taking a deep breath, Ender steeled himself, and plunged forward.

A loud roar startled the ponies as Ender remembered the launch from Earth. Twenty boys comprised his launch group, some of them destined to become just as famous as he. Had Alai really been at the end of his row? Of course he had been on the shuttle - Ender just hadn’t known him then. 

        “This was when it all started,” he explained. “We left Earth - our name for our world - not long after Graff came to my home.”

        Now all seven sets of eyes were locked over his head. Even Fluttershy looked up, entranced. Wonder, Ender realized. Maybe he could foster that emotion and use it to soften some of the harsher blows he would have to deliver.

        The image in his head flipped as Ender remembered his first mental experiments with gravity orientation.

        “Whoa!” Rainbow Dash exclaimed. “What happened?”

        “In orbit, you are in continuous freefall because you are flying high enough, and fast enough, that the Earth curves away from you at the same rate you are falling.” It was a highly simplified description, but Ender didn’t want to get mired in irrelevant details. “From your own perspective, there is no gravity. I had just realized that up and down were a matter of choice.”

        Celestia looked at him suspiciously. “I may have said ‘the beginning,’ Mr. Wiggin, but you look much younger here. What connects this memory to the one we just saw?”

        “This.” Ender closed his eyes, bringing the intended recollection to the fore. Not minutes after he had discovered the trick with re-orientation, Graff had emerged from the pilot’s cabin, crawling along the ladder backward. Backward, at least, from orientation the launch group used on the ground. He then “stood up” at a perpendicular angle, his feet hooked on the ladder. While that change in perspective had been too much for some of the others, causing them to retch, Ender found it funny and laughed.

        Graff had accosted him for laughing in front of the other launchies. It was the standard military gruffness Ender expected after years of watching war vids. He had expected a tongue lashing, but what he received had been much worse.

        “To you I suppose it is funny. Is it funny to anybody else here?” the colonel asked the other boys.

        “No, sir.”

        “No, sir.”

        “No, sir!” The rest murmured assent.

        “Well why isn’t it?” Graff turned on the rest. “Scumbrains, that’s what we’ve got in this launch. Pinheaded little morons. Only one of you had the brains to realize that in null gravity directions are whatever you conceive them to be. Do you understand that Shafts?”

        Shafts. Ender had completely forgotten about him. He idly wondered what happened to the boy. Wasn’t he in Rabbit? Did he graduate with the rest? Did he even graduate at all?

        Shafts nodded to Colonel Graff.

        “No you didn’t,” Graff replied. “Of course you didn’t. Not only stupid, but a liar too. There’s only one boy on this launch with any brains at all, and that’s Ender Wiggin. Take a good look at him, little boys. He’s going to be a commander when you’re still in diapers up there. Because he knows how to think in null gravity, and you just want to throw up.”

        “Well!” Rarity huffed, interrupting Ender’s train of thought. The memory dispersed above him. “While I don’t approve of such harsh language directed at children, at least he gave you proper recognition. I don’t think I would have made such an observation at that young of an age.”

        “No, he didn’t…” Twilight said quietly before Ender could replied. She looked on with dismay.

        She understands, the soldier realized. Before he had only suspected that she would be his greatest ally. Now Ender was sure.

        He looked up at the white unicorn. “Your friend is right, watch.”

        Cognizant of the other ponies’ sensitivities, he consciously held back the sound to the rest of the memory. Watching the loathing stares and snide expressions of the other boys would be enough. Bullying seemed to be a touchy subject with Fluttershy.

        “Graff’s intent wasn’t to praise, but rather to foster isolation by turning the others against me.”

        “That’s terrible!” Applejack chimed in. “Why would he do that to ya?!”

        “His goal was to foster in me absolute self-reliance, and his methods caused other events that contributed to this… turmoil Luna found. Princess Celestia is right: to explain that, I need to start at the source, and this is it.”

Ender tried to stop the memory before Bernard’s attack, but the warmth sat heavily in the back of his mind, forcing him to continue. Apparently, he had the freedom to pick and choose which memories he showed, but Luna was taking some measures against self-censorship.

        His audience murmured discontentedly as they saw Ender repeatedly struck in the back of the head by the boy sitting behind him. Ender-that-was remained still, taking the abuse.

        “Are all human children this… abusive?” Rarity asked. The hits continued.

        “No,” the soldier replied, “Bernard was just particularly nasty.”

        “He was in the bathroom with the other one, wasn’t he?” Fluttershy asked.

        “Bonzo.” Ender nodded. “Yes, he was there. That was much later, though.” The hits continued in his memory.

        “Why ain’t that Graff fella doin’ anything about it? That just ain’t-” Applejack was cut off by the collective gasps of the other ponies as Ender-that-was reached up and grabbed onto Bernard’s arm as he struck and pulled down on it. He had meant to trap it, forcing the boy into the back of his seat and maybe knocking the wind out of his chest, but the momentum had launched Bernard up and out of his seat. The boy sailed into the opposite wall and careened wildly about the cabin. Ender may have been playing the memory silently, but the ponies needed no sound to read the pain etched across Bernard’s face as his body smashed his mis-positioned arm into a bulkhead, breaking it. He howled wordlessly as Graff emerged within seconds and dragged him back to his seat.

        “Graff was there the entire time?!” Twilight was shocked. “Applejack was right, he could have stopped it - why didn’t he?”

        The warmth released its hold and Ender put a stop to the memory. “Again, self-reliance. Had he rescued me, I would have counted on his doing so again. He wanted me to believe that no matter what, I had to solve my own problems.”

        “Even the ones he created?” Rainbow Dash had sat down again, her shoulders slumping.

        This was a better road to take, Ender thought as he relaxed inwardly. Maybe they would understand after all.

“Especially the ones he created. That was only the first of many.”

        “To… to what purpose?” Twilight asked.

        The soldier suppressed a smile. Curiosity and engagement meant investment, and hopefully a little support.

        “That’s what I’m getting to.”

        The soldier recalled his early days as a Launchy in Battle School. Images of the Launchy Barracks, the mess hall, the obstacle course, gym, and the many uniform corridors of the space station blended together in his projected memories. He pictured his bunk on that first day. The shuttle incident drove the other boys to band together, forcing him to the worst spot in the room: the bottom bunk by the door.

        Ender may have started as a pariah, but he had no intention of staying that way.

        “Bernard had natural charisma. That, coupled with an unusual accent and attention from the shuttle incident gave him everything he needed to become an early ringleader in our group. Like Stilson, he was also a bully and drew like-minded kids into his inner circle. For the average Launchy, staying on his good side meant staying out of trouble.”

        The soldier recalled a myriad of little torments for the ponies’ benefit: trips and shoves in the hallways, the theft of some personal items, as well as shunning and isolation in class and at meals.

        “All this for… the thing on the shuttle?” Twilight asked. “Didn’t you ever apologize to him?”

        Ender laughed to himself. “Of course I did, but he wasn’t the sort who cares about an apology.” Twilight opened her mouth to object, but the soldier continued, cutting her off. “His broken arm just made me a convenient target, but Bernard was a sadist - he would have eventually chosen someone for his cronies to pick on.”

        “Wait, what was that?” Rainbow Dash looked up in surprise. Glancing around, Ender saw a similar look on the other ponies’ faces.

        “What was what?” Ender asked.

        “I-I think the translation spell completely dropped. I think we heard your natural language for a moment,” Rarity replied, looking at the others for confirmation.

        “The word… say, saaaayyyyd…” Twilight struggled to mimic Ender’s natural pronunciation of Common.

        “Sadist?”

        “That one.” The unicorn nodded.

        So much for reaching common ground. This isn’t going to be fun to describe. Ender grimaced.

        “It means someone who enjoys inflicting pain on others,” the boy explained.

        His audience looked back and forth at one another with expressions of shock and disgust. Celestia finally took the initiative.

        “Is this… is this a common trait among your people?” She looked genuinely worried.

        Ender shook his head. “Thankfully, no. I’ve just been unlucky to have known quite a few.” An image of his brother Peter flashed through his mind. The boy was sure it was visible to the others and hoped they wouldn’t ask.

        Pressing on before they could, Ender continued.

        “As I said, apologies didn’t matter. The only way to deal with someone like Bernard is either through fear and intimidation, or ridicule and humiliation. I was not about to repeat what happened with Stilson, so my only recourse lay in taking away his power to abuse others. My opportunity came when he started messing with another Launchy.”

        “I hate to sound like a broken record,” Rarity interrupted, “but couldn’t you have simply told a teacher?”

        Ender shook his head again. “I had already seen that, at least in my case, they didn’t care. Lieutenant Dap, our primary instructor and caretaker, knew exactly what the others did and never made any motion to stop it.” The young man flashed into Ender’s mind. “I thought it was simply a part of Graff’s specific push to isolate me, but when Bernard continued to go unpunished after he started targeting others, I realized that all of Battle School was like that. They wanted us to solve our own problems.”

        Rarity was abashed. “I simply cannot conceive of a school that does not look out for the welfare of its children!”

        Rainbow Dash was also upset. He wings flared angrily and she started to speak, but Applejack beat her to the punch.

        “Yeah!” she cried. “What in tarnation were they thinking?!”

        Ender paused, stilling his thoughts so the projection would stop and they would look at him. His audience was clearly missing a very important point.

        “Please realize,” he said plainly, “that Battle School served one function, and one function only: to produce humanity’s finest officers and military commanders. Anything else was extraneous, even the academic program to some degree.”

        “The classes were extraneous?” Twilight wondered aloud. She never raised her eyes, making the boy unsure if she was really asking the question.

        Rarity was far more forceful. “So they didn’t care if you were hurt?”

        “Oh, there were rules against fighting and all sorts of other things, but even the best supervision has its limits, and a dedicated mind could found a way around them. So long as you weren’t overt, you could get away with all sorts of things. In the end, I’m sure that was part of the program too. Subterfuge is an important part of warfare.”

        Ender paused, seeing if there were any more questions.

        “As I was saying, I got a chance to change things for the better when Bernard started messing with another kid, Shen. Shen had a bit of a funny walk, which earned him the nickname ‘Worm.’”

        He let Bernard himself take over. The boy’s voice echoed through the throne room as Ender recalled that particular memory.

        “...because he’s so small, and because he wriggles. Look at how he shimmies his butt when he walks.”

        The smaller boy, Shen, stormed off amid the laughter of Bernard and his cronies. The Launchy group was in math class, not that they were paying much attention. Everyone had long since mastered calculus, though the Indian and Chinese boys dutifully poked and prodded the equations floating above their desks in spite of their obvious boredom. The instructor hardly looked back towards the class, busying himself instead with the massive instructional holodisplay on the far wall as he presented the material. Ender never knew if the inattention came from simple neglect or careful design, though neither would surprise him. Either way, it left the group free to chat and message each other through their desks. Bernard didn’t exactly have to laugh quietly.

        Ender-that-was glanced down as Shen passed.

        “I didn’t reach out to him directly because that would have only made him more of a target,” Ender narrated. “Instead, I saw a chance to rob Bernard of some of his power. Those desks, the surfaces projecting the equations and such, could message each other silently. Under normal circumstances, the system would attach your name to the end of each message, but by then I had found a way around that.”

        The boy remembered catching Shen’s eye before he sent the message. Within seconds he laughed, followed quickly by the rest of the classroom. The text was set to vanish quickly, so it took a few repetitions before Bernard caught on. “Who did this?!” he shouted, drawing the teacher’s attention down upon himself.

        The words “COVER YOUR BUTT. BERNARD IS WATCHING. - GOD” marched around every students’ screen.

        “He never could prove who did it, and I never admitted it, but Bernard had to re-establish his dominance,” Ender continued as the memory shifted from the classroom to the hallways and eventually the showers. He was pushed and shoved even more brutally, and a trip in the shower ended with a knee to the gut from one of Bernard’s circle. “There was nothing he hated more than laughter directed at him.”

        “So the bully couldn’t take it? Big surprise.” Rainbow Dash huffed.

        Ender smiled. “They usually can’t. I set the coup de gras to go off later that day, when I wasn’t even in the room.” The rows of beds in the Launchy barracks appeared in his mind. Bernard was raging about, kicking over desks and yelling at everyone as Ender returned.

        “I didn’t write it! Shut up!” he shouted.

        “I LOVE YOUR BUTT. LET ME KISS IT. -BERNARD” danced in the air over every desk in the room, and this message wasn’t going anywhere.

        After a few minutes the commotion finally summoned Lieutenant Dap. The officer shut down the situation but Bernard, not knowing when to stop, accosted the man and demanded to know who sent the message. Dap’s dismissive response left the room in laughter.

        “Yesterday someone sent a message that was signed GOD,” cried Bernard.

        “Really?” asked the lieutenant, “I didn’t know he was signed onto the system.”

        “After that,” Ender finished, shutting down the memory, “Bernard’s power over the room was broken. A few stayed with him, but the rest of the boys were free to do as they wanted… and I had earned my first friend.”

        Twilight muttered something, but the only word Ender could make out was ‘letter.’

        “Who’s God?” Fluttershy asked innocently, her breath moving the mane away from her eyes slightly.

        Ender blinked. That wasn’t a question he expected.

        “He is… not relevant to the story. If you’d like to talk theology, ask me later.”

        Assuming there is a later, the soldier grimaced.

        “Point being, this was my first major success against Graff’s efforts to isolate me, and it laid the foundation for a number of other events - one of which Princess Luna discovered alongside the incident with Stilson.”

        Celestia nodded and motioned for him to continue. Ender shifted, his knees beginning to ache.

        Ender’s mindscape opened on the battle room, drawing gasps of the ponies looking on. The sight still sent a shiver down his spine, though he found it odd to see Launchy colors on flash suits. Had he grown so accustomed to the gray-orange-gray of Dragon?

“They showed us the battle room for the first time not long after the desk incident. This is the game I mentioned earlier,” he began. “I should clarify: it wasn’t intended for recreation, though some of us did enjoy it. Rather, the battle room was a combat simulation designed to teach us the basics of three-dimensional warfare and test our abilities in a controlled environment. It was the core of the Battle School curriculum,” he said, glancing at Twilight, “not the classes.”

        “Wow! Is everypony free… free…?” Dash asked, fumbling for the word.

        “In freefall?” finished Ender.

        “Yeah. It looks like they’re just flailing around.”

        The soldier couldn’t help but laugh. “Well, it was our first time. We got better.”

        “How did this ‘game’ work?” Twilight inquired. She tilted her head to the side as her eyes followed the children’s movements.

        Closing his eyes, Ender focused on his memory of the room. He pictured the the vast white sides of the cube from the perspective of the north wall, with one gate to the left and the other to the right.

        “Two armies, each with forty soldiers, start on opposite sides and press towards the enemy gate.” Ender pictured a battle between Rabbit and Condor armies he had seen once as a spectator. It was from the early days, so instead of shooting out of the gate like bullets, each army took its time forming up. Soon enough, lights began to flash as the formations turned towards each other.

        “Each soldier is armed with a pistol that, when fired at another soldier, would freeze an enemy’s suit depending on the severity of the hit. Hit an arm or leg, and the enemy’s suit freezes over the appendage, preventing motion. Hit the head or the chest and the entire suit freezes while the helmet clamps down over the enemy’s jaw, rendering him completely disabled and unable to communicate.”

        “Simulating injury and death, I would assume?” Twilight deadpanned as she watched the lead formations of the two armies meet with a fierce volley of laser fire. Frozen soldiers collided and spun away from each other abruptly, their bodies entangling friend and foe alike.

        “Exactly.” Ender nodded. “It added an element of realism to the game - a damaged commander could still call out orders to his soldiers, and damaged soldiers could still provide intel to their comrades. In certain scenarios, you could get away with playing dead and try to catch a sloppy enemy unawares.”

        He ended the memory of that particular battle and returned to his first experience in the battle room. Younger shouts of joy replaced the frantic orders and battle cries of the older boys. Ender-that-was drifted near one of the walls, experimenting with his gun. Looking up, he spied an Arab boy hovering nearby and pushed off towards him

        “That’s Alai,” Ender explained. “To be honest, I didn’t know what I was going to say to him - he was one of Bernard’s friends, after all. But when most of our classmates were flailing around in zero-gravity, he was one of the few who hung back and tried to understand the equipment.”

        “Ya mean they didn’t mention all that stuff about the guns and suits and whatnot?” Applejack was surprised.

        The boy shook his head. “No. I suspect they wanted to see who was smart enough to figure it out for-”

        “Here, snag my hand!” Alai called out from the past, interrupting him. The other boy grabbed Ender-that-was and helped him make a soft landing against the wall.

        “That’s good.” the younger Ender replied. “We ought to practice that kind of thing.”

        “That’s what I thought, only everybody’s turning to butter out there. What happens if we get out there together? We should be able to shove each other in opposite directions.”

        “Yeah,” Ender agreed, and the boys set about testing their theory.

        As the pair clumsily navigated across the battle room, the boy explained the reason he chose to show this particular memory to his audience, his jury.

        “Alai may not have been my first friend, but he became one of my closest, at least for a time. Most importantly, he had once been an enemy, the first of many who would eventually become allies and friends during my time at battle school.” Ender paused, noticing that he had the ponies’ undivided attention. Something he said must have sparked their interest, because they all looked at him intently. He continued hesitantly, not quite understanding what had changed. “The ability I had to win the hearts and minds of others helped me become a good leader, but at the same time it alienated the few who viewed those relationships as betrayals and subversions of old loyalties.”

        Above, the boys had regrouped on the far side of the battle room and Ender was showing Alai what he had learned about the gun.

        “The white button makes it a lamp, and the red button makes it grow warm and fire kind of like a laser…”

        “...but not,” Alai finished. “Didn’t the lieutenant say they weren’t lasers?”

        “Yeah, but then what are they?”

        “What does it do when you aim it at a person?” the Arab boy wondered.

        “I don’t know.”

        “What don’t we find out?”

        “We might hurt somebody.” The younger Ender shook his head no.

        “I meant why don’t we shoot each other in the foot or something. I’m not Bernard, I never tortured cats for fun.”

        “What?!” Fluttershy shrieked.

        Ender held up his hands. “He’s joking!”

        I think, he added silently. Bernard could have bragged about it for all he knew.

        The pony still seemed visibly disturbed. “That’s a horrible thing to joke about.”

        “There were no cats on the station, so for us it was an obvious exaggeration. Alai was just trying to make me feel comfortable by separating himself a bit from Bernard. It was his way of letting me know that doing something together was OK, even though his friend didn’t get along with me.”

        That seemed to placate her, and by the time Ender and his audience returned their attention to the scene, the boys were prodding at their now frozen legs.

        “After testing the guns on each other, we each gathered a friend - Bernard and Shen respectively - and turned on the rest of the group.”

        Sure enough, the four boys were soon firing with abandon into the defenseless mass in the center of the room. In minutes, they alone were left mobile, laughing hysterically and cheering each other’s marksmanship.

        The soldier ended the memory and looked back up at the ponies. “It may not seem like much, but that day changed things. Everyone assumed Bernard and Alai had been behind the whole thing, but Bernard knew better, and more importantly, so did Alai. It gave him confidence, and that subtle shift helped Alai became the dominant personality of the group. Bernard still acted like he was in charge, but Alai’s friendship became what mattered. Because he *wasn’t* a bully, Alai was soon able to unite the launch group, and he was soon elected as the group leader.”

        “Because of you.” Rarity chimed in.

        “Not entirely. I was just trying to reach out to another person that day, but I ended up giving him the push he needed, and it ultimately saved the group.”

        “But it made Bernard dislike you even more.” Twilight said thoughtfully.

        “I don’t know,” Ender answered honestly. “He never said anything about it to me, but it makes sense. Had things not changed, he would have continued to rule his little roost, butt-watching notwithstanding. After that, Bernard had to follow Alai’s lead.”

        Silence fell, prompting the soldier to continue.

“For a time, I was happy. Launchies don’t really have much to do: go to class, work out in the gymnasium, run the obstacle course, and learn how to fight in the battle room. Usually you get a year or so before you’re promoted to a real army and start Battle School in earnest. I only got a few months.”

        He remembered sitting on his bed and trying to open his locker as Alai came up behind him. That’s right, I was going to help him with the security system on his desk. Instead of opening, the locker flashed a warning: “Unauthorized Access Attempt.” Ender-that-was stood up in frustration.

        “Ender,” Alai said, grabbing a piece of paper from the bed and glancing at it. “Don’t you know? This was on your bed. You must have sat on it.”

        The soldier remembered the words clearly.


ENDER WIGGIN


ASSIGNED SALAMANDER ARMY


COMMANDER BONZO MADRID


EFFECTIVE IMMEDIATELY


CODE GREEN GREEN BROWN


NO POSSESSIONS TRANSFERRED


        “Just like that?!” Rarity huffed. “They wouldn’t even allow you to take your things?”

        “What would be the point?” The boy shrugged. “They issued everything I owned. Besides, a launchy uniform would be laughed at in a real army.

        “Why send you to an army so early? Didn’t you have more training, more classwork to do?” Leave it to Twilight to ask the important question.

        “Graff didn’t want me to sit idly by. I had overcome the challenges he had set out for me among the launch group, and there was nothing to be gained by letting me grow comfortable in my position. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d do this, either.”

        The unicorn didn’t relent. “But what about learning,” she hesitated for a moment, “learning how to fight? What would be the point of sending you to an army if you were a year behind everypo-everyone else?”

        Ender smiled slightly, glad that she was catching on. “That was exactly the point - the next obstacle he set out for me to overcome. It also set the rest of the stage for the memory you saw earlier. Bonzo Madrid is the big guy from the bathroom.

        The soldier purposely skipped over his the painful goodbye with Alai. Like the memories of the Mind Game he had avoided, it was far too personal and had no bearing on what Celestia wanted to know. Either Luna didn’t notice the omissions or she was being lenient. She had seen at least part of the Mind Game in his dreams… maybe she already understood that part.

        How do I introduce Bonzo? he wondered. The Spaniard had been a complex boy, not nice, but certainly not a simple villain either. Would his audience even understand the concept of personal honor as Bonzo saw it?

        Let’s see how they react to this.

        Ender-that-was stood before the open bay door of Salamander Army Barracks, watching the boys banter back and forth about some recent exploit in the battle room. The boy balked. Most everyone in the room dwarfed him; even the youngest soldiers were nearly two years older. More importantly, they interacted with a casual familiarity that was completely alien to the boy. This was more than a group of friends or schoolyard acquaintances, this was an honest-to-goodness team that had been forged through years of common experience. It would be hard enough to approach them as an equal, but as he was now? Impossible. Uneasy sounds from the ponies told Ender that they understood his predicament.

        He was accosted the second he crossed the threshold of his new home. Showing the doorguard his assignment slip, Ender held it back from the larger boy’s grasp, asking instead to see Bonzo Madrid.

        “Not bahn-zoe, pisshead,” a voice interrupted as a smaller boy came up behind the younger Ender. “Bone-so. The name’s Spanish. Bonzo Madrid. Aqui nosotros hablamos espanol, Señor Gran Fedor.”

        “I didn’t understand it then, either.” Ender pre-empted the question as a few of the ponies opened their mouths. “So I don’t think your translation spell will work. The phrase was Spanish - a different language than the Common I am speaking. Despite my time in Salamander, I never picked up more than a few phrases, and those were mostly curses.”

        “You must be Bonzo, then?” Ender-that-was asked while his older self spoke.

        “No, just a brilliant and talented polyglot. Petra Arkanian. The only girl in Salamander Army. With more balls than anybody else in this room.”

        “That’s a girl?!” Rarity exclaimed. “Poor thing, she looks just like everypony else.”

        “Mother Petra she talking,” one of the other boys continued over her interruption, “she talking, she talking.”

        “...and another thing…” Rarity continued.

        “Shit talking, shit talking…” another joked to the laughter of the room. Ender stopped the memory since it seemed like the unicorn wasn’t going to stop.

        “Did no one teach you manners at this school? Such a crude thing for a girl to say…”

        Twilight steadied her friend with a hoof on the shoulder. “Rarity, we don’t know what their cultural norms are, and besides, is that really relevant to-”

        “No, it’s alright,” Ender broke in, drawing the ponies’ eyes back to him. Minutiae like this might be distracting, but it also helped them get to know his situation and those involved. This was the much-needed context he had missed earlier.

        “I might as well talk about Petra now - she ended up becoming one of my closest friends and allies,” the boy continued. Rarity looked over at her fellow unicorn and gave a self-satisfied ‘hmpf.’ Twilight rolled her eyes.

        “No, Rarity, etiquette was not high on the list of priorities at Battle School,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “but at the same time, Petra isn’t a good example of an ‘average girl.’ She was so aggressive that the staff genetically tested her twice to confirm that she wasn’t really a boy.”

        The white unicorn was shocked. “How… how insulting!”

        “And what’s wrong with being aggressive?” Rainbow Dash demanded. “And why was she the only girl in the army? Now that I think about it, we haven’t seen any other girls at this school.”

        Ender answered each in turn. “She wasn’t insulted, Rarity. The only reason I know that fact is because Petra bragged about it more than once, usually whenever her gender came up.”

        He glanced at the blue pegasus. “There weren’t many girls in Battle School because the candidacy requirements included a level of combativeness and aggression that most females among our species don’t possess. The tests didn’t discriminate - males could be disqualified just as easily for lacking the trait - it’s just that boys are generally more aggressive. On average, one girl was admitted to Battle School for every ten boys.”

        Twilight looked thoughtful for a moment, then raised a hoof. “If that is true, then why haven’t we seen any girls before now?”

        Ender couldn’t help but laugh softly. “You have… it’s just that at six and seven, boys and girls look very much alike if you take away the different clothing and hairstyles… which is exactly what they did at Battle School.” He pictured the shaved heads and identical light green jumpsuits of the average Launchy to illustrate his point.

        “Oh…” Twilight sat back.

        “Ah still don’t get it,” Applejack looked up at the boy. “Just ‘cause they ain’t as aggressive doesn’t mean gals can’t fight. I’ve had to fight plenty of times to keep mah farm an’ family safe!”

        The soldier thought about that for a moment.

        “I’ll admit, I’ve only been here for a short time, but every guard I’ve seen has been male, at least as far as I can tell. It’s the same with us. Protecting hearth and home is not the same as fighting and dying in the cold black of space, even though the end effect may be the same. In the end, the powers-that-be set a bar for what kind of person they wanted, and it just so happened that more boys met that bar than did girls. They weren’t going to move the bar just to ensure an even mix.”

        Rarity and Applejack both opened their mouths, poised to argue, but Twilight took the initiative, shooting them both a look as she jumped in. “Though this is fascinating, I don’t think it’s very important to the story. Please continue, Ender.”

        A swell of laughter rolled through the throne room as the memory continued.  Suddenly, room grew quiet when a tall boy stepped forward. Dark eyes and aquiline features gave him a unique sense of refinement compared to the rowdy group.

        “Who are you?” The slender youth asked, his voice soft against the silence.

        Ender-that-was answered that and many more questions from the quiet boy, each more pointed than the last.

        “This is Bonzo,” Ender explained. “He could be quite charismatic when he wanted to - they didn’t make him a commander for nothing.”

        The Spaniard regarded him coolly as he finished his assessment of Ender’s skills and experience.

        “I see,” he said, raising his voice slightly so the entire room could hear. “As you will quickly learn, the officers in command of this school, most notably Major Anderson, who runs the game, are fond of playing tricks. Salamander Army is just beginning to emerge from indecent obscurity. We have won twelve of our last twenty games. We have surprised Rat and Scorpion and...”

        As the dark-haired boy continued to speak from the past, his voice rising slowly and incrementally to rouse his audience into a fervor, Ender glanced at his audience, hoping they saw what he wanted them to. True, most Battle Schoolers loved the game, but few were as devoted or single-minded as Bonzo. Twilight and the others needed to understand that, at least to him, the game was worth killing for.

        “...we are still-” Bonzo paused.

        “Salamander!” chanted the boys.

        “We are the fire that will consume them, belly and bowel, head and heart, many flames of us, but one fire.”

        “Salamander!” they roared in response.

        “Even this one will not weaken us.”

        All eyes turned to Ender, in the present as in the past.

        “I’ll work hard and learn quickly,” Ender-that-was said earnestly.

        “I didn’t give you permission to speak,” the older boy replied coldly. “I intend to trade you away as quickly as I can. I’ll probably have to give up someone valuable along with you, but as small as you are you are worse than useless. One more frozen, inevitably, in every battle, that’s all you are, and now we’re at a point where every frozen soldier makes a difference in the standings. Nothing personal, Wiggin, but I’m sure you can get your training at someone else’s expense.”

“He’s all heart,” Petra scoffed.

        Bonzo turned, almost calmly, and backhanded the girl across the face.

        The ponies gasped in shock at the casual violence.

        The commander of Salamander Army turned back without a second thought. “Here are your instructions, Wiggin. I expect that this is the last time I’ll need to speak to you. You will stay out of the way when…”

        The Spaniard’s voice was soon drowned in a wash of protests, and Ender gave up on trying to continue the memory.

        “How could she just stand there an’ take it?! I swear, I’d a…”

        “The brute! What kind of stall… er, what was… how could anypony hit…”

        The soldier could see the others reacting with distaste, but couldn’t hear them over Applejack and Rarity, who were decidedly the loudest. It took Ender a measure of self control to hide his smile. This was exactly what he needed from them.

        Holding up his hand for quiet, the boy waited until they settled down. He didn’t fail to notice that while Celestia looked upset, she remained still and withdrawn, choosing to instead observe the others.

        “Such was Bonzo’s method of leadership. As bad as it looks, it wasn’t simply an expression of cruelty. From his viewpoint, his authority was the keystone to his army’s success. Winning meant everything to him, and he would do whatever it took to maintain his authority over the others.”

        “But that doesn’t make it - “ Applejack started to object, but Celestia’s rich voice broke through her protest.

        “Did it work?” she asked.

        “To an extent, yes. His iron-clad control was Salamander’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness. Bonzo was a competent strategist, but if he missed something, or if one of his toons became isolated, his subordinates were lost without him.”

        “His toon?” Twilight wondered.

        “A smaller unit within an army. Most had four,” Ender answered.

        The princess took over again. “And this was the the boy from earlier?” When Rarity and the others noticed her insistence on moving forward, their visible signs of outrage started to slowly melt away.

        “Yes,” Ender said sadly. “This was the start of the conflict that ended in the bathroom - the memory I showed you before.”

        He moved forward briskly, showing flashes of memory where needed. Luna seemed to be granting him great latitude into what he did and did not show the others. Either she was starting to trust him, or else she was somehow watching and verifying everything the others did not see.

        “The best thing about my time in Salamander was that I met Petra. Though she was the best sharpshooter in the army, her status as the only girl made her as much of an outcast as I was.”

        Petra had come to him almost immediately after he found his bunk at the back of the Salamander barracks. An Armenian, the dark-haired girl would grow into a unique and striking look. Back then, however, her deep brown eyes and wide olive cheekbones barely differentiated her from the other Battle School children.

        “I’m a girl, and you’re a pissant of a six-year-old. We have so much in common, why don’t we be friends?” she asked Ender-that-was.

        “...and we were,” Ender continued, showing snippets of his time under Bonzo’s command. “She showed me the ropes when it came to being a rank-and-file soldier in Battle School, taught me all the things that I would have learned as a launchy, and gave me the backstory on all the armies, their commanders, and their relative place in the great game that consumed our lives. But most importantly, she taught me how to fight in the battle room.”

        He remembered that first day of practice, watching Petra throw a cluster of practice targets hard across the room. Seeing them ricochet every which way across the massive arena, Ender had doubted she would hit two or three. It took the girl barely two minutes to tag them all - all while in a controlled drift across the room.

        The ponies were as impressed as he had been.

        “Wow… that’s some sure-shootin’ right there.” Applejack whistled. “Still don’t know why she let that bone-guy get away with hittin’ her.”

        “She knew how to pick her battles,” Ender replied. “If it makes you feel better, Petra rose above him eventually, and her army became better than Salamander ever was.

        The boy remembered returning to his old Launchy barracks, the colors of his Salamander uniform contrasting sharply with theirs.

        “Petra was happy to help me whenever we could find time throughout the day, but insisted on using the nightly free time for her own purposes. I needed every bit of practice I could get, so I turned instead to my old group. It was unheard of for a soldier to spend time with Launchies, but the way I saw it, I was barely more than one myself. I couldn’t train alone, so we agreed to work together. I’d show them the bits and pieces I could pick up from watching Salamander train, and in return I’d get the practice Bonzo forbade.”

        Laughter drifted across the throne room as Ender recalled that first practice session with his old group. Poor Shen had become stuck in the middle of the battle room after mistimed push off another Launchy. After realizing that flailing wouldn’t get him anywhere, he resigned himself to his fate and pantomimed an exaggerated swimming motion to the delight of the others.

        “Bonzo found out about it though,” Ender continued, and the memory shifted. Ender-that-was, dressed for bed, was speaking to Bonzo in the corridor outside Salamander barracks.

        “He ordered me not to practice with my launch group anymore. This time, I had a plan and asked to speak with him privately. It was one request that all officers were supposed to honor.”

Ender stopped, letting his younger self speak for him.

“...but I’m going to practice, and I’m going to practice with the only people who will practice with me, and that’s my Launchies.”

        “You’ll do what I tell you to, you little bastard.” Bonzo stepped forward, using his height to force the smaller boy to look up at him.

        Ender was undeterred. “That’s right, sir, I’ll follow all the orders that you’re authorized to give. But free play is free. No assignments can be given. None. By anyone.”

        The Spaniard’s eyes tightened and his face grew red, but Ender-that-was pressed on.

        “Sir, I’ve got my own career to think of. I won’t interfere in your training and your battles, but I’ve got to learn sometime. I didn’t ask to be put into your army, and you’re trying to trade me as soon as you can. But nobody will take me if I don’t know anything, will they? Let me learn something, and then you can get rid of me all the sooner and get a soldier you can really use.

        Bonzo brought up a hand, but stayed it. He paused, grimacing, before he answered. “While you’re in Salamander Army, you’ll obey me,” he spat through clenched teeth.

        The younger boy didn’t even blink. “If you try to control my free play, I can get you iced.”

        Bonzo shook his head slowly, glaring daggers at Ender. He turned away momentarily, balling his free hand into a fist and moving it behind his head as if it was all he could do to resist the urge to strike out.

        “Bastard,” he growled, looking back.

        “It isn’t my fault you gave me that order in front of everybody,” Ender said. “But if you want, I’ll pretend you won this argument. Then tomorrow you can tell me you changed your mind.”

        The older boy rolled his eyes. “I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”

        Ender-that-was pressed on. “I don’t want the other guys to think you backed down. You wouldn’t be able to command as well.”

        Something broke behind Bonzo’s expression. His face remained still, but it was the paralysis of rage, not the calm of appeasement.

        “I meant to be kind,” Ender said sadly, “by giving him a way out without losing face. All I saw was the logical solution to give us each what we wanted, and to me that’s what mattered most. I mistakenly believed that once he saw it the same way, he would agree.”

The boy sighed. “Had I been older, had I known him better, I would have realized that to Bonzo, such an act was a grave insult after injury. Obedience was what mattered to him, and anything less was an assault on his capabilities as a commander. To Bonzo, it seemed that beating him wasn’t enough, that I wanted to rub it in his face in it by allowing him to treat it as a victory with the others.”

        “I’ll have your ass someday,” the Spaniard said quietly. It was a promise, not a threat.

        “Probably,” Ender replied.

        The memory vanished. “We were both right, as you saw earlier. While we were at odds from our first meeting, it was this humiliation that put Bonzo on the path of vengeance. He could not abide by such a slight against his honor.”

        Applejack scoffed. “Honor… hmpf! Was bein’ right really that important?”

        “Really!” Rarity agreed. “He had to have known he was in the wrong - he didn’t even challenge you on that. Then he had the nerve to be offended when you offered to cover for him?”

        “B-but, look how young he… they both are.” Fluttershy’s quiet voice surprised the others and she shrank back at their glance. “Oh… nevermind.”

        Twilight leaned down to encourage her. “No, what is it, Fluttershy? Go ahead - we’d like to hear what you have to say.”

        “Um,” the pegasus looked back at Ender. “To be a commander like him, didn’t it take a lot of work?”

        Ender smiled, glad that she understood if not a little surprised. “Yes. Only the best were selected to be commanders.”

        “And…” she glanced around at her friends, “he looks so much older than you, so wouldn’t he have been in that school for a long time?”

        She is getting it. The boy was impressed.

        “Almost six years. Nearly half his life by that point.”

        Fluttershy blinked. “Wow… I didn’t think of it that way.” The pegasus first looked up at the unicorn then down at the earth pony. “Rarity, Applejack… wouldn’t you feel threatened if someone challenged and insulted your skills at design or farming?”

        “Well, I… I…” Rarity sputtered.

        Applejack sat up and stomped a foreleg. “That’s not remotely the same! I’ve been farming all my life and ah’m darn good at it! This brute’s gettin’ all worked up about meaningless things!” She waved a raised hoof towards the air over Ender’s head.

        “Isn’t it the same?” Ender asked. “Being a commander meant everything to Bonzo; he effectively spent his life working to become one. I assume it’s much the same with your professions.”

        “I-” Rarity began, but she stopped, brow creased in thought. The farmer looked much the same.

        Fluttershy broke the silence. “Still, I don’t think what he did was right. He… attacked you, didn’t he?” The pegasus sat up and looked intently down at the boy. It was a welcome change from her earlier cowering.

        Ender nodded. “He did, but before we get there, I’ll explain fully why he did.”

        He remembered the early battles when he wore the green-green-brown of Salamander, his mindscape shifting from one view of the battle room to the next. From his position near the door, the only thing that really changed with each memory were the colors of Salamander’s opponent.

        “Over the next few months, I trained with Petra and my old Launchies, sat through class, and did my homework while the rest of Salamander practiced during their allotted time in the battle room. While Bonzo could exclude me from practice, he had to bring me along when Salamander was called to a real game. He had ordered me to not participate in any of the battles - to only enter and wait for it to be over. It was boring, true, but I learned a great deal from watching those early battles.”

        A view of the giant leaderboard in the mess hall came into focus. Soldiers from many different armies formed a rainbow of color below it as they marveled at an oddity, alternately cursing and laughing.

        Ender’s name topped the leaderboard in the individual rankings.

        “Almost immediately, Bonzo’s policy drew him unwanted attention. Our very first battle with me on the roster resulted in a defeat. As ordered, I had done nothing and the opposing team passed me by. I had blocked the only shot sent at me with my legs, and the soldier who froze them must have assumed he disabled me because I wasn’t firing back. When the final score came in, Salamander had 39 soldiers disabled and one damaged - a then-unheard of tally. I never said anything, but word spread about Bonzo’s order from the other Salamander soldiers, and he was treated to the incredulity of his peers.”

        The boy shook his head. “He never changed his mind though.”

        Looking back up at Celestia and the ponies around her, Ender continued. “Bonzo, much to his chagrin, also was responsible for my initial notoriety around Battle School. At first, I was just a strange fluke, a Launchy promoted well ahead of his time. After that first battle, though, the order to not do anything caused me to top the all-important leaderboard for individual stats. I had never fired a shot, so my hit rate was perfect. I had only ever been damaged and never disabled, so my survival rate surpassed the vast majority of Battle School veterans as well. It was a fluke, and everyone knew it, but it did even more to highlight Bonzo’s foolishness. For a boy who cared so much about his reputation, you can imagine how he felt about it.”

        The ponies looked at each other and nodded. Rainbow Dash murmured something knowingly.

        “It was something that Bonzo had to deal with constantly while I was one of his soldiers. Mercifully, I wasn’t with Salamander long. Not long after I turned seven and finished my first year at Battle School, my army met its match against a new commander and his unconventional army. To this day I don’t know why I did it, but right as they were about to pass through the gate and win the game, I finally disobeyed Bonzo’s orders and disabled five of them before they were able to take me down. It was just enough to force a draw.”

        “Good for you!” Rainbow Dash cheered, the lights of the laser fire from the memory flickering across her face. “Did that good-for-nothing finally come to his senses?”

        “Not quite.” Ender figured this would be a good point to show a memory in full.

        “Wiggin,” Bonzo’s voice echoed across the barracks as he stormed back to the boy’s bunk, “I finally traded you. I was able to persuade Rat Army that your incredible place on the efficiency list is more than just an accident. You go over there tomorrow.”

        Ender-that-was stood up from his bunk, coming to attention. “Thank you, sir.”

        The ponies winced as the sound of Bonzo’s open-handed slap bounced around the empty throne room. The smaller boy skidded into the metal of his bunk right as the Spaniard caught him in the gut with a closed fist. Ender-that-was went down wheezing with tears in his eyes.

        “You disobeyed me,” Bonzo said, raising his voice to the entire barracks. “No good soldier ever disobeys.”

        “Ugh!” Rarity cried in disbelief. “Please tell me somepony did something about him. I can see the rest of those boys are just as disgusted as I am.”

        Ender shook his head. “They were, but not because he hit me. That was normal for Bonzo. I saved them from defeat, and they thought he should have been grateful. It was a foolish move on Bonzo’s part, though - he was eroding the very discipline he worked so hard to create.”

        “You mean nobody stood up to him, ever?” Twilight was incredulous. “The teachers, at least, should have had some issue with what he was doing.”

        “At that time, no, no one stood up to him,” Ender replied. “That event did motivate me to enroll in hand-to-hand combat classes, though. I did not want to ever be on the receiving end of that kind of abuse again.”

        “It should have never been a possibility to begin with,” Rarity muttered.

        “Nevertheless, it was over. I reported to Rat the next day. The only downside to my departure was that I had to stop training with Petra. We might have been able to pull it off, but I asked her to stop. She already lived at the edge of Bonzo’s temperament; training with a soldier in another army might have sent him over the edge.”

        Ender wondered momentarily how to proceed. The framework he conceived earlier had seemed so clear when he started. Dealing with the ponies’ tangents and the unexpected emotions raised by these memories had muddied the waters.

        How long has it been, anyway? The boy shifted, relieving some of the tension in his knees and back. The shadows, he noted, had grown longer as the sun settled off to his right. Is it afternoon already?

        “It would be three years before the incident with Bonzo - the next memory you wanted to see. Though I wasn’t in his army anymore, other things happened that contributed to what occurred that day.”

        If Salamander barracks was the model of order and quiet military efficiency, Rat was its polar opposite. Raucous laughter drew the ponies’ attention overhead as Ender remembered his first day with his former army’s chief rival.

        “Rat was… not what I expected. They were both respected and loathed in Salamander as worthy opponents. Having only experienced Bonzo’s leadership style, I didn’t know what to make of my new home.”

        The memory played silently as Ender-that-was reported in to his new commander, a lank, dark-skinned youth who didn’t even bother to get up from his bunk. In the throne room, the soldier smirked at the sight in his head, remembering Ariel Rosen far more warmly than he expected to. Inept as the Israeli boy was by Battle School standards, he had done well after graduation, winning himself a position on the Polemarch’s staff as a junior officer. Unlike many others who had treated him poorly, Rosen had sent a letter of apology after they both had left the school. Apparently, he had followed Ender’s career and was thoroughly impressed by the younger boy’s accomplishments.

        “The boy here, Rosen, may have been the commander, but the truth was that Rat’s success came from the brilliance of one of his toon leaders: Dink Meeker.” Ender’s memory flashed forward to his first time meeting the boy who would later become one of his top lieutenants. “To say he was different than the average Battle School student would be a gross understatement. He viewed the game for what it really was: just a training tool to make us better soldiers for the real war. He didn’t really care about winning and losing - at least not for the same reasons everyone else did.”

        Dink drifted in the battle room, alone and sans flash suit. It was the day Ender had learned just how different he was.

        “Well, now you know why I’m not a commander.” Out of the past, the Dutch boy’s voice returned with crystal clarity. His memory sped forward to their conversation in Rat’s barracks.

        “I do?” he asked.

        “Actually, they promoted me twice, and I refused.”

        “I thought being a commander was what everyone wanted…” Fluttershy murmured, curious. Ender waved a hand to silence her, pointing upwards at the memory.

        “The second time they took away my old locker and bunk and desk, assigned me to a commander’s cabin, and gave me an army. But I stayed in my cabin until they gave in and put me back into somebody else’s army.”

        “But… why?” Twilight was perplexed.

        “Because he saw the bigger picture,” Ender responded, electing to explain rather than let the memory play out. “Dink knew who the real enemy was, or at least he thought he did. He saw the teachers as our adversaries, pitting us against each other while they sat back and took notes. To him, we were like rats in a cage, fighting until the victors emerged on top of the pile, only for the teachers to scoop them up and pit them against the other winners until only the most capable fighters were left.”

        “Whaaaa-” Fluttershy began to cry but Ender quickly interrupted.

        “-only a metaphor! I’m sorry, I should have used a different one. No one was making rats fight.”

        Twilight shot him a look and the meaning was clear: Then why would the expression come so easily?

        “My point, and what matters,” Ender pressed on, “is that Dink was the only student in the entire school who saw beyond the armies, classes, and games. To him it was meaningless.”

        “They why didn’t he just quit? You could do that, couldn’t you?” asked Rarity.

        The boy let the memory answer. He heard his younger self mimic the unicorn. “So why don’t you go home?”

        Dink grinned sadly. “Because I can’t give up the game. Because I love this.” 

        “Why are you telling us this?” Celestia’s richer tones cut to the heart of the matter.

        Ender looked up at her. “Because while Petra taught me how to shoot, Dink taught me how to think and how to lead.” He recalled one of his first formal practice sessions with Rat, when Dink called on him to teach some of the new techniques he had developed with his launcies to his other toonmates. They resisted at first, balking at the notion of a tiny newcomer teaching veterans, but when they saw Dink was serious, the group quickly shut up and started listening. The Dutch boy’s quiet and confident manner carried more weight than Bonzo’s bluster ever did.

        “I eventually defeated Bonzo in the arena he valued most: the battle room. That was the tipping point - the event that pushed him over the edge. To understand how we came to that point, though, you need to understand how I became a commander, and how my rise was viewed throughout Battle School. My time in Rat played a key role in this.”

        The princess nodded, indicating for him to continue.

“I didn’t agree with everything Dink said. He believed, for instance, that the Formics were no longer a threat - only a ploy for the IF to hold onto their power. Even so, his perspective broadened mine. Though I still focused on Battle School and the game, I kept the bigger picture in mind and tried my best not to destroy relationships that we would all need later in the real war, even as I fought against rivals. I stopped blindly trusting the word of our instructors and weighed everything against what little outside information I could gather. Most importantly, I learned the interpersonal skills required of a leader, and how to balance the need for strict authority with lenient understanding, and how to move between the two without seeming weak-willed or tyrannical. Command is a tightrope, and few could walk it better than Dink Meeker.”

        “But… surely your teachers wouldn’t lie to you.” Twilight seemed distressed at the notion.

        Applejack laughed. “Of course they would! Look at what that Graff fella has already done. What’s more dishonest than settin’ up Ender here for failure and making all the other kids dislike him?”

        Twilight shook her head. “But he seemed to be doing it to push him, to make him better. It may not have been fair, but he had his best interests in mind.” She pointed down at the boy.

        Ender smiled briefly. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Twilight. The teachers were lying to us, but not in the way Dink suspected. I’ll show you how in a bit.”

        Rat Army stood in front of the battle room gate as Rosen wordlessly accosted the younger Ender. As soon the gate disappeared, the younger boy launched himself through, rocketing to the other side as the enemy was forming up. He flashed nearly a dozen Centipede soldiers before they realized what was happening and froze him.

        “Rosen wasn’t happy when he found out that my standings weren’t anything more than a fluke, but when he stupidly tried to sacrifice me out of anger, we happened to stumble on a very useful tactic. Dink was brilliant enough to see its potential and build on it. Between regular practice with his toon and extra practice with my Launchies, I was able to start devising new and innovative strategies that would revolutionize the way the game was played. Of course, not everyone saw it the same way.”

        Older boys stood outside the gates of the battle room, mocking Ender’s little group as they practiced their strange maneuvers.

        “The old guard started reacting with hostility, angry that some little upstart was not only leading the standings but also acting like a commander of his own private army after hours. Fewer boys started showing up to practice, and I heard word that there were both subtle and overt threats against them.”

        “That’s mean and terribly petty, but I guess by this point I shouldn’t be surprised,” Rarity said caustically.

        “Wait, didn’t you say your standings were a fluke? Wouldn’t you have gone back to being normal once you started playing the game like everyone else?” Rainbow Dash wondered aloud. “You did get to compete when you were in Rat, right? Isn’t that what we just saw?

        As much as they don’t like violence, she seems enthralled by the concept of the game, Ender mused, noting the pegasus’ expression.

        “I did drop at first, but mind you I was in the best toon of one of the better armies in Battle School. Between Dink and Petra’s training, I eventually earned the top spot legitimately, holding it for the rest of my time in Battle School.”

        Rainbow whistled appreciatively.

        “I don’t say that to brag.” Ender shook his head. “But to highlight another reason why Bonzo and his friends were determined to take me down. I started there because of his clumsiness in command and I’m sure he would have enjoyed watching me fall to where he thought a disobedient soldier like me belonged. Having to see my name highlighted every single day in the mess hall would have been a constant reminder of the bad blood between us.”

        “Oh,” she said somberly. The others nodded in realization.

        The memory continued. Now the older boys were jeering, distracting the launchy group.

        “Listen to them,” said Ender-that-was. “Remember the words. If you ever want to make your enemy crazy, shout that kind of stuff at them. It makes them do dumb things, to be mad. But we don’t get mad.”

        The Launchies laughed, and turned it into a game, repeating back the insults thrown at them by the veteran soldiers. It was a simple grade-school annoyance, but it had an effect. Before long, the older boys pushed off from the student gate, ready for a fight.

        “Half of us were frozen, and even those that weren’t couldn’t move as easily as the older boys who weren’t wearing flash suits. Even thawed, our suits were stiff and we were no match for soldiers who were experts at maneuvering through the battle room,” Ender explained.

        “So just because of a few words they were going to fight you? They’re twice your size!” Pinkie piped up angrily.

        “Have you been watching this, Pinkie Pie?” Dash asked from above and behind her. “It’s what they do - lash out.”

        “Not always, but yes. They were coming to ‘teach us a lesson.’”

        Ender-that-was gathered his group into a corner while the veterans advanced, undeterred. As an opening move, he and Alai threw a frozen soldier directly into the bulk of the advancing boys. The helmeted Launchy careened into the uncoordinated mass, striking one kid in the chest. His pained cries echoed across the battle room of the past and the throne room of the present. The incensed veterans launched forward in earnest, but Ender’s attack had forced them to scatter in a confused mess.

        “At the edge of the room we had the advantage of maneuver - it’s easier to change course in zero-g when you have something to push off of. I had my group scatter around the bigger kids and rebound for the exit door while I went to rescue the kid we had thrown.”

        Sure enough, the Launchies pushed off from each other and effortlessly sped around the hapless veterans. Ender, meanwhile, shot directly towards the frozen Launchy and kicked him towards the rest of the group now assembling at the door. Unfortunately, the maneuver used up most of his momentum and left the boy drifting slowly in the middle of the room. In seconds, the older boys started to rebound towards him.

        The ponies gasped, catching on to what was happening. Fluttershy ducked again behind her hair.

        Looking down, Ender-that-was saw their faces looming larger, twisted in rage. The closest one was Stilson.

        “Wha-” began Twilight, but her voice cut out as the face shifted, to show a Salamander soldier.

        I had forgotten about that. Ender shuddered.

        “Sometimes the mind plays tricks on you. Fear did that to me sometimes.”

        As the first boys reached him, it was clear that no one knew how to fight hand-to-hand in zero-g. Punches only pushed and transferring your weight became a lot harder when there was no surface to use as leverage. Out of the corner of his eye, though, Ender saw the approaching boys make motions to each other, indicating they should grab his extremities and pull/twist to break them.

        Rainbow Dash and Twilight cringed, catching on.

        “I wasn’t about to let them get their hands on me.”

        The Launchies were forming up for a rescue attempt. “Stay there!” the younger Ender shouted at them. As one of the veterans grabbed his foot from below, the boy stomped down, tearing the attacker’s ear. He drifted free, only to face three more boys, two coming from below and one from in front. Waiting for them to grab on so he’d have leverage, Ender-that was took the one in front by the shoulders and headbutted him, breaking the kid’s nose with his helmet. Blood spurted around the group as he threw the screaming soldier into the two below who were trying to twist his legs and break them at the joints. The collision freed one leg which he then used to smash the last hold and tear free.

        Silence reigned as most of the audience watched in slack-jawed shock. Only Celestia maintained her composure, though her eyes were wide.

        Ender landed to the cheers of his group.

        “Practice is over for the day.” It was the understatement of the year.

        “They’ll be back tomorrow.” Shen looked worriedly at the furious mass of veterans, many wearing Salamander green.

        “Won’t do them any good. If they come without suits, we’ll do this again. If they come with suits, we can flash them.”

        “Besides,” Alai added, “the teachers won’t let it happen.”

        “Why did they let it happen this time?!” Twilight practically shouted. “Wasn’t there anypo-anyone around to stop such… such…?”

        Ender shook his head. “Graff had a keen interest in letting me solve my own problems, as you’ll soon see.”

        The unicorn was flabbergasted.

        “Hey Ender!” shouted a familiar voice from among the mass of older boys, drawing the ponies’ attention. “You nothing, man! You be nothing!

        “My old commander Bonzo,” said Ender-that-was. “I think he doesn’t like me.”

        “Ya think?” Applejack rolled her eyes.

        “He was involved in that?” Fluttershy asked.

        “Of course he was!” Dash responded. “Probably planned the whole thing, right?”

        “I never found out.” Ender shrugged. “Knowing him, he just took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself, but it shows what he was willing to do, even at this point. That’s the reason why I showed you this memory - again, I’m sorry for the violence, but it’s necessary context for what happened down the road.”

        “It’s OK,” Fluttershy stood up resolutely. “If you could handle it at that age, I… I should be able to now.”

        “I was scared too,” Ender admitted honestly, “but I couldn’t let it paralyze me. My story might have ended there, otherwise.”

        The others looked at each other thoughtfully.

        “After that day, other commanders either came to me directly or sent representatives to say that they approved of my evening practice sessions, and that they would take steps to make sure nothing like that would happen again. That next evening, our group doubled in size - a number of armies sent older soldiers who needed the extra practice to not only benefit from the training but also discourage any interference. You can take a wild guess which army didn’t participate.”

        The ponies nodded.

        “The years passed. I went to class. I practiced. I improved and continued to help those who chose to attend my evening practices.” As he spoke, Ender’s eyes unfocused and he saw brief flashes of his life as a Battle School soldier. Though he knew the others were watching, he didn’t bother to slow them down or sort them out. Let Luna stop him if she wanted.

        “I rose in the ranks. By nine, I was a toon leader in Petra’s Phoenix Army and we were unstoppable. My evening practice sessions still focused on helping launchies, but now included each army’s elite soldiers, those hand-picked by their respective commanders. Even a few Salamanders were willing to defy Bonzo, now a senior commander near graduation.”

        Try as he might, Ender couldn’t keep his mind from focusing on the crushing isolation he felt during those years. All the respect he earned drove a wedge between him and everyone he would have called a friend. Over and over, he saw instances of Shen and Alai becoming serious whenever he entered the room, Dink cutting off a joke when he joined the conversation, or Petra deferring to his judgment even when she had the final authority as commander of Phoenix. He knew where his thoughts were going and try as he might, he couldn’t hold back the memory of Valentine’s letter.

        Choked sobs echoed across the chamber from Ender-that-was even as the present version struggled to withhold tears. In his memory, the other boys of Phoenix Army looked away in shock as their finest soldier broke down crying.

        “What… what’s happening? ...Ender?” Twilight ventured.

        The boy paused until he was sure his voice would not break.

        “A painful memory. This has nothing to do with what you need to know. Will you believe me this time?”

        Twilight looked up at the princess, clearly lost. Celestia raised a hoof to settle her pupil and glanced towards the back of the throne room.

        Looking back, she said gently, “Ender, perhaps it would help to speak of it, whether the memory relates to this inquiry or not. If you will speak, We will listen.”

        The royal ‘we.’ Ender felt that her intonation carried significant importance, but he was too focused on controlling his emotions to analyze it.

        He appreciated the princess’ intentions and decided to at least give a conciliatory answer.

        “My sister means everything to me. She was my friend, my mentor, and my protector. My brother was far worse than Stilson, Bonzo or any of the Battle Schoolers. He was rejected from Battle School because he was too cruel and too aggressive. As smart as Valentine and I were, he could easily hide his actions from our parents. That left her as my only defender when I was too young to defend myself from his torments.”

        The boy paused, taking a shaky breath. The ponies looked at each other, a wide range of emotions crossing their faces.

        “Battle School would always stop students’ letters home, but they never told us that. They let us think that our letters went unanswered.”

        “That’s horrible!” Rarity and Pinkie Pie cried out in unison.

        “...and necessary, when training children to be soldiers. Cruel as it is, prolonged homesickness just interfered with training. Besides, nearly everything they taught us was classified - a state secret,” he added when he saw their looks of confusion. “They didn’t want us leaking it to the public.”

        “Still…” Applejack trailed off.

        “The only thing more cruel than cutting off communication was letting it through again for their own purposes. Even though I was performing beyond all expectations, I had stagnated and was no longer pushing myself or advancing. They used my sister… convinced her to write a letter that they would deliver, just to spur me on.”

        “I…” Twilight was dumbfounded. “I don’t know what to say…”

        The soldier shook his head. “You don’t have to say anything. The letter had the desired effect.” Ender held out against his related memory from the Mind Game - the very room that had defeated Nightmare Moon in his dreamscape. Mercifully, Luna allowed him to push it away and didn’t force the issue.

        One image did slip through, though. He saw it only briefly, but judging by the looks on the others’ faces, they saw it too.

        Ender and Valentine stood hand in hand before the mirror in the tower. Instead of reflecting their images, it showed a dragon and a unicorn, the latter vastly different than the ones sitting above him.

        Taking a deep breath, he continued. “I moved on. When he thought I was ready, Graff summoned me. It was the first time I had seen him in years.”

        “Dragon Army?” he heard himself ask. “I’ve never heard of Dragon Army.”

        “That’s because there hasn’t been a Dragon Army in four years. We discontinued the name because there was a superstition about it. No Dragon Army in the history of the Battle School ever won a third of its games. It got to be a joke.”

        Ender-that-was raised an eyebrow. “Well, why are you reviving it now?”

        “We had a lot of extra uniforms to use up.”

        The boy elaborated. “That turned out to be a lie. After I graduated, I checked out of curiosity. They created Dragon Army out of thin air and fabricated all the uniforms and flash suits overnight. I never could find out why, though.”

        “Everyone expected me to be promoted early to commander,” he continued, “but not this early. I was nine - it was unheard of for someone to make commander before eleven.”

        Ender saw himself walking down a corridor, following the light thread of gray-orange-gray that would lead him to his new barracks. Remembering the butterflies he felt in the pit of his stomach as he made that walk, the soldier realized something.

        Where did they find the barracks space if they invented the army overnight? Did they disband another unit? No, I would have heard of that. Maybe they simply kept extra bays available.

        He made a mental note to investigate if he ever got home.

        Spying his new barracks, Ender squared his shoulders and entered, taking command from moment one.

        “Bunking will be arranged by seniority. Veterans to the back of the room, newest soldiers to the front.” He projected his voice but was not overly loud. Even so, all conversation came to an immediate halt as his army scrambled to sort themselves out. Three out of every four was a Launchy, and the rest wore a rainbow of colors from other armies.

        Opening his eyes, the soldier silenced the memory and explained the situation to his judges.

        “Graff changed some of the rules when he gave me command of Dragon Army. First, my army was comprised of mostly launchies with a few mid-level veterans from other units, not an even mix drawn from across the school. Second, I was not allowed to make any trades.”

        “Well, that’s not fair!” Rainbow Dash pointed out. “How were you supposed to win with a bunch of newbies?!”

        Ender laughed softly to himself. “It wouldn’t be the last time the instructors were ‘unfair’ to Dragon Army. Officially, the reason he gave was that my years of private practice sessions earned me a following. If trades into and out of my unit were allowed, those soldiers would pressure their commanders to trade them into Dragon. It was a valid point, but not the real reason.”

        “What was it then?” Twilight asked.

        The boy remembered the framework from which he started, and started connecting the dots for the ponies. “At first, the colonel wanted to see how I would handle isolation. I overcame the divide in my launchy group, but at the cost of making Bernard an enemy. Then Graff wanted to see how I would deal with early advancement combined with a lack of formal training and a hostile work environment. I overcame the limits my commander placed on me and found mentors like Petra and Dink. My efforts, however, ignited Bonzo’s intense hatred while making me a polarizing figure within the entire school. I may have been doing well, and I may have been respected, but just because someone respects you doesn’t mean that they like you. Every part of this chain of events led to the memory you saw earlier - the fight in the bathroom.”

        Ender paused, judging the expressions of his audience. They all seemed to follow, and even Pinkie Pie was looking at him seriously.

        “Now Graff was evaluating how I would do when separated from the support structures I had already built. I didn’t know a single soldier in my army; none of them had ever been to my practice sessions, even though the majority were Launchies and my sessions had always been open to them. I didn’t even recognize the veterans - they were so unnoticable in their previous units that I didn’t know their names until they wound up in mine. Graff did me one favor though: inexperienced as it made them, none of my soldiers were older than I was. A group of six-to-nine-year-olds was about to take on the rest of Battle School, to include commanders that were being held back.”

        “Held back?” Twilight asked worriedly. The tone of her voice made it clear she didn’t like the concept.

        “The veterans I received from other armies had to be replaced by Launchies, above and beyond the normal number assigned each month to an army. To ‘make up for the difference in experience,’ Graff held back most of the commanders, even ones that would have normally graduated by then. Most notably, this included senior commanders like Bonzo Madrid.”

        “I’ll bet he wasn’t happy about that,” Applejack muttered.

        “And what difference would that make?” Dash scoffed. “Your team had mostly new guys.”

        Ender agreed. “Not much of a difference at all. I’m positive Graff did it to ensure I faced tough opponents: seasoned armies with seasoned commanders to lead them.” He looked at the earth pony to his left. “And while you may be right, Applejack, I don’t think Bonzo knew that he had specifically been held back for me. There weren’t graduating classes or anything… no specific date when Battle School ended. When the teachers thought you were ready, you simply received orders to one of the follow-on schools. That said, under normal circumstances, Bonzo should have been long gone by the time we faced each other.”

        The soldier’s mindscape opened up on the battle room. Dragon Army was practicing assaulting a wall feet-first, firing through their legs in a kneeling position.

        “Inexperienced though they were, my army turned out to be anything but dull. What they lacked in training, they made up in attitude and a willingness to learn. Even the veterans, who I assumed were simply cast-offs from the other armies, turned out to be great thinkers who were just misunderstood. See this kid?” He focused on Bean, the small boy at the furthest edge of the pack.

        “The little one?” Rarity asked, squinting.

        Ender nodded. “That’s Bean, the best ally I ever had in Battle School. Young, brilliant, and brash, he was as much of a challenge to me as I ever was to Bonzo. Fortunately I had learned from my old commander’s bad example, and though I was tough on him, it was for the purpose of making him better, not breaking him down.”

        He remembered his first conversation with Bean in the corridor outside the battle room: Bean against the wall with Ender’s hand clenched around the front of his uniform. It eerily mirrored his earlier confrontation with Bonzo outside Salamander’s barracks, only with the roles reversed.

        “I later learned that Bean was my replacement, in case I failed to fulfill Graff’s expectations or… didn’t make it through training. I’m not ashamed to admit that Bean was the better strategist; as good as I was at thinking outside the box and coming up with unconventional tactics, he was better. That said, I was better with people. My gift was the ability to know my subordinates, and my enemies, completely. I could then use that knowledge in battle to respectively form effective teams and exploit weaknesses. Together, our strengths made Dragon Army unstoppable.”

        Ender’s mind settled on a view of the Dragon Army barracks after the unit had begun to coalesce into a real team. Han Tzu and Fly Molo were arm wrestling while their respective toons cheered them on. Crazy Tom officiated, taking bets and changing the odds real-time as the other three toons weighed in on one side or the other.

        “4:6 against me?!” The Chinese boy blinked. “The-that math doesn’t work… eight more just placed with-”

        *Wham*

Down went his arm as Fly took advantage of the distraction. “You think too much, Hot Soup!” The Filipino laughed while his opponent fumed.

        The group’s laughter faded into the background. Ender’s voice again drew the others’ attention. “For the next three weeks, I showed them everything I knew - the result of every observation I had ever made over three years in Battle School. My unique orientation of the battle room that designated the enemy’s gate as “down,” the technique of using one’s legs as a shield against enemy fire, and many others I had picked up along the way. I even reorganized my army into five toons of eight instead of the standard four toons of ten. Some my methods were known to others in Battle School, I had discovered and implemented many of them in Rat and Phoenix after all, but Dragon Army was built with these tactics from the ground up. While everyone else was still fundamentally rooted in the old way of doing things, my group was unique. This was the core reason behind our success.”

        Practice session flowed into practice session as the ponies watched in wonder. Memory by memory, Dragon Army improved. After a few minutes, the formerly green recruits were drilling with greater precision and more flexibility than any of the veteran armies from earlier recollections.

        “Normally, a new commander is given three months to prepare his army before joining the scheduled games in the battle room. After three and a half weeks, we entered our first fight against Rabbit.”

        Five columns of Dragon Army soldiers lined up in crisp formation behind Ender, waiting for the battle gate to open. When it did, he raised a fist, delaying their exit as the opposing army poured out of their gate.

        In the throne room, the soldier explained, “The rest of the school took the wrong lesson from my suicide attack on Centipede back when I was in Rat. Everyone started jumping out of the gate to grab positions before their adversary could do the same. Now that I commanded, I intended to do the opposite: I took the time to size up my enemy’s strategy and trained my toon leaders to be flexible and intuitive to compensate for poorer positioning.”

        “Spread to the near stars,” the younger Ender said calmly, indicating the cube-shaped obstacles placed randomly throughout the room. “C try to slide the wall. If it works, A and E will follow. If it doesn’t, I’ll decide from there. I’ll be with D. Move.”

        Dragon Army silently followed, toon leaders and soldiers all understanding their commander’s intent. They deployed as one, only splitting as the various toons split up once under zero-g. As they exited, all forty children rotated backwards, bringing up their legs and kneeling in the direction of the enemy’s gate.

        The half-light of this particular game gave way to piercing laser fire. Flash suits on both sides started to go dark as the soldiers found their marks, but most of Dragon’s damage was contained to its soldier’s legs. Firing from between their frozen limbs, Ender’s army found their Rabbit counterparts to be easy marks. Oriented to gravity as it had been at their battle gate, their torsos were fully exposed.

        Within two minutes, C toon had torn through the Rabbit opposition and established themselves behind a star on the other side of the enemy’s formation. The confused Rabbits were torn between evicting the enemy behind them and pushing for position to flank the enemy in front. Han Tzu saw the way forward immediately and tapped Ender on the shoulder.

        “How about flipping off the north wall and kneeling on their faces?” he suggested.

        Ender explained what was happening to the audience, many of whom, he noted with a smile, watched with open-jawed amazement. “It was a good idea, basically adding additional arms to the pincer that C toon - the ones behind Rabbit - started. All I had to do was expand on it.”

        His past self took over. “Do it. I’ll take B south to get behind them.” Raising his voice, Ender-that-was directed his remaining soldiers into position then flipped down off the star to join the other group. As one, Dragon Army rebounded off the walls around Rabbit’s position, providing too many targets for them to engage at the same time. Once in position, the flanking fire cut the opposing team to shreds. The battle was over in minutes.

        “We completely froze every Rabbit while only getting one flashed and five disabled on our side. Moreover, we set a record that day for fastest win. It would not be Dragon’s first.”

        The scene shifted. The brown-gray-white of Rabbit’s flash suits gave way to the red-white-orange of Phoenix.

        “Most armies got two weeks between battles. I faced my previous commander the very next day.”

        “That’s not fair…” Fluttershy noted, “but I suppose we should expect that by now, right?”

        The boy nodded. “As I said before, almost nothing done to my army was ‘fair.’ Graff had already tested my ability to build a team; now he wanted to test my endurance.”

        It was a pitched battle, but in the end, Petra stood before Ender as he thawed her soldiers - part of the ritual for the victorious army. Anger burned in her eyes as she glared at him.

        “Petra was my toughest opponent. Phoenix flashed three of ours and disabled nine before it was all over. It was the most any army would ever score on us, but that was little consolation to her. She felt angry and humiliated, and I was worried that I had lost her as a friend. Unfortunately, she wasn’t the only one.”

        Moments flashed past of meetings with Alai, Shen, and Dink Meeker. All were cordial, polite, but it was clear that a wall of reserved guardedness had formed between Ender and his closest allies. 

        “Wait a minute!” the blue pegasus interrupted angrily. “What kind of baloney is this?!” Her term raised one of Ender’s eyebrows, but he said nothing. “Just because you’re on opposite teams doesn’t mean you can’t be friends. They should have been cheering your victories!”

        “And they would have,” Ender nodded sadly, “had they come in the usual way. Most commanders go for months before their first victory, and even then it would probably be from a very close game. When they first enter the commander’s dining room - a privilege reserved only for those who have won a match - they’re usually greeted with rousing applause. My overwhelming wins from out of nowhere shocked everyone. I was a threat, an upset to the natural order of things at Battle School. Everyone’s ego was tied up in their standings and in their armies, except for Dink’s. The effect my success had on Bonzo’s ego was an extreme case, but even my friends weren’t immune to it.”

        Ender thought for a moment, realizing something.

        “Now that I think about it, this is another factor leading up what happened in the bathroom that day - if my friends were so shaken by what was happening, imagine how my enemies felt.”

        Fluttershy looked at the others, thoughtful, but didn’t offer any other comments.

        His memories shifted from one battle to the next. The colors of his opponents’ flash suits changed, but the outcome did not.

        “After seven days, Dragon stood with a perfect 7-0 record. We defeated some of Battle School’s top armies in ways that had never been seen before. On the individual rankings, you had to go halfway down the list to find a name that didn’t belong to Dragon. In a school where the game was everything, surprise, respect and awe turned quickly to shock and fear.”

        Understanding seemed to dawn on the group. Ender hoped that the notion they earlier rejected out of hand - the willingness to kill over a game - would now at least seem fathomable to them.

        It was almost time to return to the point where he started, but Ender wanted to bring up one more memory for them to see, considering the other memories they wanted him to explain.

        The commander’s mess, with its massive, room-dominating scoreboard appeared in his mind. A small group sat eating around Ender while a much larger group sat huddled in the opposite corner.

        “Some wanted to learn from me, to attempt to adopt my strategies. Most of the commanders took the opposite course, pooling their ideas, experience, and resources into trying to find a way to finally defeat me. Dragon Army owed its success to its soldiers as much as its tactics, but our revolutionary way of fighting would only stay revolutionary for so long. Already others were adapting our techniques. I knew our edge would only last for so long, but I faced a problem - as innovative as we were, I had already learned the sum total of what could be learned from the other Battle School soldiers.”

        He recalled Bean experimenting with a deadline - a monofilament cable used for tethering astronauts in space - in the Battle Room. By utilizing varying amounts of slack in the line, the boy was able to fly tight arcs, changing direction zero-g that no untethered soldier could follow. “We tried adapting tools for other uses, like the line you see Bean using here, but those provided nothing more than flashy tricks. What I needed was tactical instruction. So I turned to our enemies, the Formics.”

        “The aliens?” Twilight was surprised. “How?”

        Ender’s mindscape shifted to the cramped vid room in the corner of the Battle School library. “There were precious few recordings of the battles outside of the carefully scripted classroom lessons. There were, however, all the propaganda vids I had grown up watching.”

        Patriotic music filled the throne room as he recalled some of the scenes he had shown earlier. “While they weren’t designed to teach anything, these videos had a few segments each that were actually useful - control panels depicting enemy formations, shots of Formic ships maneuvering, things like that. It took me a long time, but I pieced together the fundamentals of their strategy bit by bit.”

        Twilight seemed impressed. “Did you learn anything?”

        “Nothing helpful,” Ender admitted, “but what I did learn became important later. At the time, though, my back was to the wall, and the games were only going to get harder.”

        Ender’s army slogged through the corridors of Battle School, pulling on their flash suits as they jogged. Though their stoic faces presented a confident front, even the ponies could see the fatigue in their movements.

        Bean broke formation and pulled up beside Ender. He motioned for the taller boy to lean down so he could keep his voice low.

        “They really told you ten minutes ago?”

        “Yeah.” Ender nodded.

        Bean shook his head in disbelief. “Fly was right, no army has ever had two battles on the same day before. That’s bad enough… but not giving us enough warning to make it to the gate on time? What kind of kuso is that?”

        “The same kind that got us battles every day this week. They know we can’t be beaten the normal way - now they want to see how far they can bend us before we break.”

        The younger boy started to respond, but by then they had rounded the corner to the battle room complex and started up towards the gate. It was already open, but the battle room was empty.

        “My heart,” Crazy Tom said, catching his breath while leaning on the gate’s frame, “they haven’t come out yet, either.”

        Ender-that-was held a fist over his own mouth, signalling silence.

        In the present, Ender silenced the memory so he could explain the details his audience needed to know.

        “Salamander Army. Graff finally put me up against Bonzo, and he did it in one of the worst ways possible. As you heard, it was our second battle of the day, and we were intentionally given late notice so we would arrive to the battle room after the gates had opened.”

        “That’s outr-!” Rainbow Dash began, but Rarity silenced her from behind with a firm hoof on the shoulder.

        “Yes, I know it is, and it’s only going to get worse. Please understand that ‘fairness’ was never a part of Graff’s plan.” Ender’s knees were starting to ache and he sorely hoped for fewer interruptions.

        “Bonzo may have not been the best strategist in Battle School,” the soldier continued, “but there was no way even he would miss an opportunity like this. If we couldn’t see him, then it meant his army was deployed on the same wall that held our gate. The instant we went through, we’d be hit simultaneously by fire from his entire unit.”

        Twilight watched intently as Ender-that-was communicated to his army through hand gestures, having some of the larger boys kneel in an L-shape while smaller ones crouched behind them. “What did you do?” she asked.

        “Formed shield pairs,” he replied. “We flashed one bigger boy and gave his weapon to a smaller one. Throwers would deploy them with the shooter’s back towards the enemy’s gate and the shield’s front towards us so he would take most of the hits. Once they were through and Salamander was concentrating on the boys floating below them, the throwers would deploy on their wall and take them with flanking fire.”

        The unicorn nodded appreciatively at his strategy’s simplicity and brilliance. Twilight did not move her eyes from the memory above as she watched Dragon Army silently put the plan into motion. A single command broke the silence, triggering a light show that danced across the ponies’ upturned faces.

        “Move!”

        By the time Ender-that-was drifted through the door, it was all over. Forty Salamanders clung to the upward wall, frozen. Dragon’s commander barely spared them a glance as he looked south to the teacher’s gate through which a teacher was emerging.

        “That’s Major Anderson,” Ender explained, “Graff’s right hand and the designer of the battle room scenarios.”

        His past self was not nearly as calm. “I thought you were going to put us against an army that could match us in a fair fight!” he shouted, venom laced throughout his words.

        “Congratulations on the victory, commander,” the officer answered placidly.

        “Bean!” Ender called. The view snapped over to the younger boy, floating at the other side of the room. “If you had commanded Salamander Army, what would you have done?”

        The other boy had to shout to be heard across the distance. “Keep a shifting pattern of movement going in front of the door. You never hold still when the enemy knows exactly where you are.”

        Nodding, Ender-that-was turned back towards the major. “As long as you’re cheating, why don’t you train the other army to cheat intelligently?!”

        The soldier froze the memory, allowing Rarity and Twilight’s sudden intake of breath to be heard clearly across the room.

        At least those two get it.

        “That is what pushed Bonzo over the edge,” Ender said plainly.

        “That?” Dash said doubtfully. “You were angry with the teacher for making it an unfair fight! What’s unclear about that?” Twilight only shook her head. She seemed ready to respond, but Ender decided to do it for her.

        “Think about it from his perspective. Not only did I utterly defeat him when he should have had the upper hand, I ridiculed his army twice in front of both his troops and mine. Did I mean it that way? No. I was talking to Major Anderson before the fight and sarcastically asked when he’d give me an opponent who could defeat me. That’s when he informed me of our no-notice fight with Salamander. My remark was a continuation of that conversation and had nothing to do with Bonzo himself. But without knowing that, the only way Bonzo could have taken it was as a grievously personal insult.”

        The pegasus stared as she began to understand the implications.

        “My involvement of Bean made it even worse. I wanted to make a rhetorical point to Anderson, and picked Bean because I knew he’d give me the right answer. To Bonzo, though, it looked like I picked my youngest and most inexperienced soldier to publicly ridicule his plan. How could he have known that Bean was the best strategist in the school?”

        “Oh…” Applejack’s eyes were wide, suddenly comprehending the seriousness of the situation.

        Ender looked at Twilight directly. “Now can you see why he wanted to kill me?” His voice was plain.

        “I…” She trailed off as her eyes unfocused, looking through the boy and into the blood red carpet behind him.

        She did not answer, but her expression told the soldier everything he needed to know. The rest of the ponies remained silent as the sun dipped lower in the sky, casting the room in a deep orange light.

        The sound of falling water enveloped the throne room as Ender brought the ponies back to the confrontation in the bathroom.

        “We’re tired of you Ender.” Bernard again. “You graduate today. On ice.” This time, no one questioned the term.

        Ender-that-was ignored him, choosing to look at his old commander instead.

        “Bonzo, your father would be so proud of you.” Harsh words, but the boy said them softly. They got the desired reaction.

        Cruelly, the smaller boy continued. “He would love to see you now, come to fight a naked boy in the shower, smaller than you, and you brought six friends. He would say ‘Oh, what honor.’”

        Twilight squinted her eyes as her mouth moved wordlessly, a look of dawning realization spreading across her features. She sees what I was doing, or at least she’s starting to piece it together. He pressed forward, not wanting her to interrupt him. This memory had the potential to go over even harder than the fight with Stilson; Ender had to make sure it was presented in the best way possible.

        Bonzo remained silent, but the banter went back and forth between his group and Ender in much the same way as it had in the schoolyard with Stilson. Bernard and the rest of them might as well have been interchangeable. Throughout, Ender-that-was kept his eyes on the Spaniard, gauging his non-verbal reactions.

        Finally, Bonzo had enough.

        “You shut up,” he said to his boys, “shut up and stand out of the way.” The thirteen-year-old swept the others back with a long arm and, stepping forward, began to shed his green and brown uniform.

        “Naked and wet and alone, Ender, so we’re even. I can’t help that I’m bigger than you. You’re such a genius, you figure out how to handle me.” Bonzo looked back at Bernard and the rest. “Watch the door. Don’t let anyone else in.”

        Ender-that-was watched the other boy look around at his surroundings while adopting a fighting stance. Following Bonzo’s eyes, Ender’s mindscape shifted wildly as he took in the various fixtures in the shower room: pipes, valves, mounting brackets and other protruding pieces of exposed metal.

        “The others may have been along for a ride,” the soldier explained, “maybe expecting to see me roughed up a bit, but I watched Bonzo’s eyes the entire time. He was there for blood. I knew him well enough to see his plan written across his face: he was going to bounce me off of all the sharp metal in the room and bludgeon me until I stopped moving.”

        Half the ponies started to object, but the words died in their mouths. Their expressions said everything: as much as they wanted to disbelieve what Ender was telling them, they couldn’t ignore the reality they had witnessed and the situation now staring them in the face.

        “What… did you do?” Applejack asked hesitantly.

        “I analyzed him. His stance told me that I wasn’t the only one taking self-defense classes. Bonzo was bigger, stronger, and had a greater reach. Worse yet, we were fighting in a confined space. Even if I was quick enough to dodge him, I couldn’t do so for long. The longer the fight went, the better chance he had of winning. I had to end the fight quickly and decisively to have any hope, and to do that, I had to have a way to get out of his grasp.”

        The younger boy backed up, turning his showerhead to full hot and pointing it outwards. Without taking his eyes off Bonzo, he reached behind him, felt for the other controls on the same wall and did the same with the rest of the nearby faucets.

        “I’m not afraid of hot water,” the Spaniard said calmly as he advanced.

        “Stop it!” came a voice from the doorway.

        “Finally!” Rarity said. “It’s about time one of the adults did something useful. “Shouldn’t they have come when they first saw these bullies enter? They were watching, were they not?”

        But it wasn’t an adult, it was Dink Meeker. Unfortunately for Ender, he was alone, and within seconds, Bernard and his friends had the recently promoted Rat Army commander pinned to a wall.

        “Stop it, Bonzo!” he yelled, thrashing against them. “Don’t hurt him!”

        The Spaniard was amused. “Why not?” he asked casually.

        “Because he’s the best, that’s why!” Meeker spat. “Who else can fight the buggers? That’s what matters you fool, the buggers!”

        Bonzo’s face stilled in rage as silence reigned for a few moments.

        “Didn’t… didn’t he believe they were fake? Not a threat anymore?” Twilight asked, grasping at any facet of the situation that wasn’t related to the fight ahead.

        Ender smiled sadly. “He was a true friend trying to stay Bonzo’s hand, whether he believed in what he was saying or not. I never did find out how he got there before anyone else. Bean had figured it out when Bonzo and his friends didn’t show up to the mess hall, but he wasn’t able to make it in time.”

        Dink continued loudly, drawing everyone’s attention. “If you touch him, you’re a buggerlover! You’re a traitor, if you touch him you deserve to die-” the boy was silenced as they slammed his head into the door. Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie gasped as the rest quivered.

        “It’s OK - he was fine, just knocked out,” Ender reassured them. His words did not have much of an effect. “Brave as he was, Dink unwittingly sealed Bonzo’s fate and mine. The last thing Bonzo wanted to hear about was my importance. After that, he was moved past rage. I don’t think anything would have stopped him at that point, not even the teachers.”

        Steam swirled around the two boys as the others looked down at Dink and laughed. Ender-that-was backed up towards the streams of water. “Bonzo… don’t hurt me,” his voice shook, “please.”

        No emotion flickered across the larger boy’s face, not disdain, not smug victory, not even pity. The plea merely started him forward.

        “D-did you think he would really stop?” Even Dash was incredulous.

        “No, I just needed him to make the first move. Hearing fear in my voice would do the trick.”

        The pegasus’ jaw swung open. “So you weren’t really afraid?”

        Ender scoffed. “Terrified. I just didn’t let it show until then.”

        Bonzo lunged forward, making a grab for the smaller boy’s shoulders. Ender stooped low and stepped in so he would overreach. Bonzo’s hands came down hard on his back, the slick soap on his skin made them slip free, just as Ender had planned.

        Dragon’s commander skidded down in front the larger boy. Bonzo thrust his hips back, expecting a blow between the legs, but Ender stood up quickly instead, the back of his head connecting hard with the Spaniard’s nose. Bonzo staggered backward, his eyes wide and unfocused.

        Ender stopped the memory, his mindscape frozen on the boy’s lifeless eyes.

        If they want so badly to see these memories, I’m going to make sure they get a damned good look, he thought bitterly, caught up in his emotions from that particular moment in time.

        “I didn’t know it then, but that was the instant I killed Bonzo.”

        “W-wha…?” Applejack was genuinely shocked. “You barely touched him.”

        The soldier tapped the bridge of his nose. “The bones behind our faces aren’t nearly as sturdy as yours seem to be. Break them the wrong way, and in the wrong direction, and it means instant death. It’s a million-to-one shot, even for trained and experienced fighters, but I was just lucky that day. Or very unlucky, as it were.” Ender could barely keep the venom out of his voice. Pausing, he turned away and took a breath.

“At the very least, he didn’t suffer. I was told much later that Bonzo died before he even felt the blow.”

        He let the memory continue. “But at the time I didn’t know that. I thought that I had just given him a bloody nose - something most Launchies would shake off without a second thought. I considered running when I saw him just standing there, but his friends were still blocking the doorway. It was Stilson all over again. Either they would hold me until Bonzo came to his senses and beat me into a pulp, or else I’d get away and have to worry about when and where he would find me next.”

        Ender-that-was pulled back and took a running leap at Bonzo, kicking him in the chest with both feet. It was a testament to the Spaniard’s size and bulk that he absorbed the blow with barely a stagger. Ender spun, landed smoothly, and finished by drilling his opponent between the legs.  Even his all-female audience winced at the shot.

        Bonzo collapsed into a stream of scalding water, not even flinching. His lack of response seemed to unnerve the ponies more than even Ender’s brutal attacks.

        Within seconds, the bathroom was a hive of activity. Adults appeared as if out of nowhere. Strong hands seized Ender and he turned to see Dink leading him away. Bernard and the others scrambled to turn off the hot water taps as medical personnel flooded the room and descended upon Bonzo. The memory collapsed in a cacophony of light and sound as Ender was half carried away by Dink.

        “You-you-you mean…” Twilight positively vibrated with anger, her mouth opening and closing as she sought the right words. “You mean to say they were RIGHT THERE and they did NOTHING to stop it?”

        Rarity looked at her, stunned. “S-surely they were running from somewhere, and only just arriv-” her voice cut off as she saw Ender out of the corner of her eye, shaking his head.

        “You mean THEY KNEW what was going on, and let it happen?” Twilight’s right eye twitched slightly as her voice grew shrill.

        “What about you?!” Rainbow Dash asked. “He could have killed you too. Your friend was right - you were important. Was that officer guy… Graff… didn’t Graff want to protect you?”

        “Not as much as he wanted, no… needed, to teach me a lesson,” Ender replied levelly.

        Both unicorns cried out in disbelief and frustration. The rest only stared blankly, unable to accept what they were hearing. Celestia hadn’t moved an inch since he had finished the memory, her face fixed in stone-like stillness.

        This has definitely affected her, Ender noted. She’s doing all she can to contain her reactions.

        Twilight was the first to recover. “What… POSSIBLE… lesson was worth your life, and Bonzo’s life for that matter?”

        The soldier looked her directly in the eye and drove his point home. “That no matter what I faced, I would always be well and truly alone. That no one was ever going to come and bail me out. That I would always have to devise my own solutions and be the instrument of my own salvation. Graff’s own words,” Ender added as he marked the increasing look of disbelief on the unicorn’s face. She stared back at him, unmoving.

Moments passed. Twilight finally let loose a snarl of frustration that drew everyone’s attention.

        “How is THAT even a valuable lesson, much less one worth somepony’s LIFE?!” she all but screamed. The others, even Celestia, nodded in agreement.

        “Because absolute self-reliance was something I’d need for what came next. To them, it was worth the potential life of one soldier… one more casualty in a war that had already claimed billions. They didn’t intend for Bonzo to die any more than I did, but it was a risk they were willing to take. The survival of our species was at stake.” 

        “The survival of humanity hinged on your self-reliance?” She asked sardonically.

        “It did, as you’ll see in the third memory you asked for. Are you ready to move on?” Ender replied resolutely, defiant even as he knelt in the deep amber light of the setting sun. Shades of violet touched the edges of the ceiling as night began to fall. 

        “Yes,” Celestia and her protegee answered simultaneously, the princess finally regaining her composure. Twilight looked back, deferring to her ruler, but the alicorn only nodded back, indicating that she should go ahead.

        Maybe she wasn’t trying to rein in emotion, Ender realized. The sun just set - she could have been focused on rotating the planet.

        “Yes,” Twilight repeated, turning back to challenge the soldier. “I want to see what was worth all this pain and tragedy.” 

        Her friends didn’t appear to share the unicorn’s sentiments, but they dutifully turned back to look at him, disquiet plain on all their faces save one. Pinkie Pie seemed to have checked out. She sat still, her now completely straight hair falling to the floor on either side of her face. Her ears twitched slightly when Ender started speaking again, but other than that she just sat still, ignoring the world around her.

        Ender bowed his head. “Bonzo was my second fight of the day. Just that morning, we had an excruciating match against Badger.”

        His memory opened on the battle room. The chamber’s lighting was dim for this contest, blending perfectly with the descending gloom of the throne room. As light sconces and chandeliers flickered to life in the real world, seemingly of their own accord, the ponies strained to make out the elaborate three-dimensional maze forming in Ender’s mindscape.

        “Anderson built a maddening labyrinth out of stars, and it was damn near impossible to see. We won, but it was a near thing. Midway through the fight, we realized that while our flash suits still worked the usual way, Badger’s were thawing out after a few minutes. I should have expected something like that after the first time the teachers threw out the rulebook, but it was still a cruel and surprising twist.”

        Ender’s memory shot forward, coming to a halt in the boy’s sparse, but private, commander’s quarters. He lay on his bunk, smears of soap scum and blood still evident across his chest.

        “When I came to after the fight with Bonzo, I thought it was the next day because there was another summons to the battle room waiting for me.” He sneered at the memory. “But why should I have expected leniency? The previous day had two battles - so would this one.”

        In his mind, the boy picked up the slip of paper that had been pushed under his door.


WILLIAM BEE, GRIFFIN ARMY, TALO MOMOE,


TIGER ARMY, 1900


        Ender expected some kind of outburst, but he was met with only silence. His audience stared at him numbly, merely along for the ride.

        “I can’t do this,” the nine-year-old said to himself.

        “We did do it,” Ender finished. This time, the battle room was stark white, and Dragon’s gate opened into a solid wall of stars.

        “Anderson’s set-up forced us to deploy blind, and he gave our opponents a ring of stars around their gate for cover,” the soldier narrated as he moved the viewpoint outward to what he had later seen was the configuration for the arena.

        The boy saw that the others really weren’t interested in the details. They had stopped caring about the game, much like he had by this point. He summarized, not wanting to try their patience.

        “Since the instructors had thrown out the rulebook, I decided to as well. Using tricks that weren’t outrightly forbidden, but not specifically allowed either, we managed to win.”

        A mass of boys tied into a tight block floated amidst a crushing amount of fire from the combined opposition of eighty soldiers. Suddenly, the block split apart, drawing the attention, and fire, of the other armies. Unseen, a handful of small Dragon soldiers shot towards the enemy gate and, touching their helmets to the corners, performed the victory ritual, technically winning the game.

        A spark of life showed briefly in Dash’s eyes, and she opened her mouth to say something. But, after glancing quickly at the others, she closed it again and ducked her head.

        “It was a stunning victory, but I didn’t care,” Ender commented, intentionally echoing the emotions he saw on their faces.

        His younger self walked sullenly among Dragon soldiers who were whooping and hollering loud enough to be heard throughout the entire school. Laughing, Crazy Tom grabbed his shoulder and asked “Practice tonight?” as if it was the funniest thing he had ever heard.

        “No.”

        Tom sobered a bit. “Tomorrow then?”

        “No.”

        Now the toon leader was serious, if a little concerned. “Well, when?”

        “Never again, as far as I’m concerned.”

        That brought the rest of the army to a sudden halt. Murmurs of protests started up. They fell silent instantly when Ender slammed his hand into a nearby bulkhead.

        “I don’t care about the game anymore!” His voice reverberated off the metal deck, alternately booming and fading away as it split down different passageways. Everyone stopped in the halls, even soldiers from other armies on their way to practice. Every head nearby turned in shock to look at school’s top commander.

        Ender took a breath. Though his voice was soft, it carried clearly through the absolute silence.

        “Do you understand that? The game is over.”

        The memory faded into nothing.

        “They graduated me that day, but I didn’t care. The manipulation of the game… Bonzo… I had enough. The minute Graff took me away from Battle School, I quit.”

        THAT got their attention.

        “You… you quit?!” Rainbow Dash asked incredulously.

        “Then, all that… Bonzo, Stilson… everybody and everything else was for nothing?!” There was a manic edge to Twilight’s voice.

        “You forget,” Ender shot back vehemently, “I didn’t know - then - that they were dead. All I knew was that I had hurt them badly. Graff told me himself that Bonzo was in a hospital. I never wanted to hurt anyone again. THAT is why I quit.”

        “Oh!” the unicorn deflated, realization plain on her face.

        Ender closed his eyes to calm himself. Hostility would get him nowhere. The others remained silent until he was ready. 

        “They just let you walk away?” Rarity asked when he looked up again. “I’m surprised you had the option to quit.”

        “What was Graff going to do? He said it himself: for officers they needed volunteers. How effective would I be if I chose not to lead? Even so, you were right. They couldn’t just return me to my family. I had seen too many things that they didn’t want released to the public.”

        Twilight rolled her eyes. “You think?” she said under her breath.

        “So… what did they do?” Fluttershy asked hesitantly.

        “Kept me at an IF property on Earth.” His memory settled on a picturesque white mansion overlooking a large lake. “On and off for three months, Graff and his team of psychologists and doctors tried everything to get me back on board. Eventually they just gave up and left me to my own devices, hoping I would come around. When I didn’t, they turned to the one person they knew I couldn’t turn down.”

        This time Celestia answered. “Your sister.”

        Ender nodded. “Exactly. At first, I refused their offer to bring Valentine, knowing what they were trying to do. But soon I turned ten, making it just under four years since I had seen her. I couldn’t hold out forever and they knew it.”

        The boy didn’t want to show them this memory, it was too private. But even though Luna wasn’t forcing it, the image of his sister still formed over his head. Try as he might, Ender couldn’t turn it away - he wanted to see her again now as much has he had back then.

        Ender looked up from where he floated on the lake. Bright sunlight streamed through the surrounding trees and turned the grass to a mix of dappled shadows. The raft Ender built was still tied to its dock, so his vision was relatively steady as she came down the hill towards him. The boy’s heart leapt. Though the gangly twelve-year-old before him was markedly different from the dimpled child he had left behind, it was still Valentine, his beloved confidant and protector. She smiled shyly.

        “You’re bigger than I remembered,” the girl ventured.

        “You too.” Despite his feelings, Ender’s voice came out flat, deadened. “I also remembered that you were beautiful.”

        The ponies gasped, staring in horror at the boy in front of them.

        Not even a shadow passed across Valentine’s face. “Memory does play tricks on us.”

        “No.” Ender shook his head. Try as he might, he couldn’t bring any emotion into his voice or his expression, no matter how much was bottled below. “Your face is the same, but I don’t remember what beautiful means anymore.” It had been a terribly blunt thing to say, but it was the truth, and Ender hadn’t felt the need to maintain any tactfulness during his forced vacation on Earth. He was long out of practice.

        The soldier clamped down on the memory before it went any further. As much as he wanted to lose himself in the crystal clear recollection, their discussion was nothing he wanted to share. The spell, or Luna herself, he wasn’t sure which, didn’t force the issue.

        Recovering some sense of his purpose, Ender explained, “I’m showing you this for one reason and one reason only: I chose as I did for the sake of my sister. The Formics could have burned the rest of the world for all I cared. I went with Graff to save her.” As he said this, the boy raised his head, looking Celestia and the others in the eyes. Most of the ponies nodded in affirmation. This was something they understood.

        His mindscape reopened to the lounge of a tug not unlike the one from which Nightmare Moon pulled him. Graff and Ender were chatting amicably, much to the ponies’ surprise.

        “Even with the fastest transport available, the trip to Command School took two months. On the journey, Colonel Graff and I had no responsibilities - it was amazing how much the man changed when unburdened. More importantly, now that we were on our way to the top secret base - never to return until the war’s end - Graff was free to answer any question I had. It’s hard to let military secrets slip when you have no one to tell them to.”

        Applejack blinked. “But the war had been going on for so long - what if you never came home?”

        “That was the understanding,” Ender said evenly. “As it turned out, I never did.”

        There was an uncomfortable silence as the equines looked at each other. Even Celestia had the decency to glance away.

        “As angry as I had been with Graff, my curiosity was stronger. My studies of the buggers in Battle School had only scratched the surface of what was known about them. I grilled the colonel constantly for any detail he could provide on my enemy. If I was to one day fight them, I wanted to know them as intimately as I had known my opponents in Battle School.”

        Ender imagined a map of known space. Formic worlds, marked in red, spread in a wide arc on one side while a single blue Earth sat on the other. “The most startling revelation, though, had nothing to do with the Formics.”

        He focused on Earth. “Everyone believed that the IF had deployed a massive force to the edge of the Oort Cloud, a region of space far away from Earth, as we had during the Second Invasion.” A gray speckled orb surrounded the blue dot. “They thought we were adding to it every year, sending out our newest ships with our brightest minds. ‘This time,’ they thought, ‘it will be enough to stop the Formics.’ They couldn’t have been more wrong, and the IF never corrected them. The public felt safer that way, and happier people work harder and protest less.”

        “I… guess that’s a good thing?” Twilight was confused.

        “Were they lying?” asked the orange pony.

        “Only by omission. Remember when I said that the teachers were lying to us earlier? This is what I meant.” The image skewed to the right, nearly the entire way to the red dots. Small flecks of white light fanned out towards them.

        “The size of a sphere increases exponentially the further you travel from the center,” Ender explained. “It’s basic geometry, and I should have realized the truth the second I really thought about the notion of defending a planet in space. To put any reasonable buffer between your home and the enemy, you’d have to cover an area of space that we couldn’t fill in a thousand years, much less a few decades. Even knowing the rough direction from which the attack would come doesn’t help - just a quarter or an eighth of the sphere would spread your forces too thin to be effective. We got lucky in the Second Invasion - we knew the exact attack vector and engaged them at a fraction of the distance. A competent enemy would not let that happen again.”

        The boy realized he had lost most of his audience, but at least Twilight was still following. She squinted her eyes, trying to wrap her head around what he was saying.

        “So, if you weren’t waiting for the Third Invasion...” she trailed off, her eyes widening.

        “Then we were the Third Invasion.” Ender finished. “Even as the fires from the Second cooled, we were launching ships against the furthest of the Formic worlds. As time went on, we sent progressively faster ships towards the nearer planets - the idea was for them to arrive at around the same time.”

        “You… were attacking them?” Applejack wondered. “What… what if they attacked you and your ships didn’t find them on the way?”

        “Then we would have been wiped out,” the soldier answered. “It was a huge risk, but it was the only move we could make. The Formics could afford to lose worlds, they had spread to a hundred of them after all, but one wrong move and we were finished. We couldn’t afford to fight on our home turf. By taking the war to them, we hoped to keep their focus away from it.”

        “A hundred worlds.” Celestia shook her head. It wasn’t the first time Ender had mentioned the size of their enemy’s holding, but it seemed to finally sink in for the alicorn.

        “That’s… that’s…” Twilight sat back on her haunches as she thought about it. “Those ships were traveling for decades, right? In all that time you never saw their ships coming for you?”

        Ender shook his head, confident that he knew what she was about to ask. He had asked Graff the same thing.

        “No. Are you wondering how we knew they were still fighting us?”

        “Yes.” She looked down at him intently.

        “We didn’t. But would you have risked it?”

        The unicorn lowered her eyes, not knowing what to say.

        His mind turned back towards the lounge on the tug. Ender and Graff stared at a holodisplay of the same stellar chart the group had just observed.

        “I also finally learned Graff’s intentions for me. Why he was so hell bent on getting me through school… why he felt it necessary to do the things he did.”

        Ender didn’t elaborate, but even so, a somber pall fell over the group. Twilight stiffened, reminded of her anger mere minutes before.

        “When I completed my training, I was going to be assigned as the battle commander for the invasion force.”

        “You?” Twilight said, surprised. The rest of the group echoed their sentiments.

        “I realize you far outperformed everyone else,” Rarity began, “but surely they wouldn’t turn this massive… effort,” she struggled at the word, “over to - forgive me - a child.”

        “That just don’t make any sense,” Applejack added. “It’s no question that you were great, but why would any grown-up ever listen to a young’un, especially with something like this?”

        “A fair question, and let me assure you, it was one my people struggled with for years.”

        He recalled scenes he had shown them earlier from the Second Invasion, specifically the Formics shooting through their own ships just to decimate the IF.

        “Collectively, the IF invested millions of hours of research into the problem of how to fight against the Formics and win,” the soldier explained. “At the end of the day, they are bugs. Only their queens are sentient beings, at least as far as we could tell through examination of the corpses. The enemy commanders - the queens - felt no more remorse when sacrificing a soldier than you would clipping a fingerna-” he paused, realizing the analogy wouldn’t work. “Um, shedding hair?” Ender ventured.

        Twilight nodded, understanding what he meant.

        “Point being, the way they fought was fundamentally different than the sum total of humanity’s entire understanding of war. Where every human instinct pushed for the preservation of individual life to the maximum extent possible,” the equines looked at him askance, given what they had recently seen, “the formic mind, as far as we could tell, worked the opposite way, seeking only the surest route to victory no matter the cost and independent of past strategies and tactics.”

        Ender recalled some of the Battle School informational vids from his early days in Ground School. Boys flew about a battle room while men in white lab coats watched.

        “Countless tests and simulations showed that younger minds were more adept at this kind of warfare. We think faster, are better at adapting to unexpected changes, and are more willing to abandon previous assumptions when presented with new information. While an adult will have more experience to draw upon, that experience can work just as well against him when faced with this kind of enemy, prejudicing him towards strategies that have worked well in the past, regardless of how applicable they are in the present.” 

        The view shifted to Ender’s arrival at Command School. Admiral Chamrajnagar, the tall Indian officer in charge, had greeted him personally.

        “I, and the rest of my peers at Battle School, never thought that principle would be applied literally. We thought that by starting us young, Battle School ensured everyone, from the senior leaders at the top to the new officers at the bottom, would be able to take on the Formics when the real war came. It wasn’t until after I graduated that I learned the IF really intended to use their most able commander in the field, no matter how young.”

        “...and out of your entire military, that was you?” Twilight still had a hard time believing it.

        “Graff certainly thought so.”

        “That place looks really strange,” Fluttershy observed. “Where is it?”

        It took a moment for Ender to realize what she meant. “Oh, Eros? It was an asteroid far out in our solar system. The Formics used it as a forward operating base during the Second Invasion - that’s how we knew roughly where they were coming from. Anyhow, they were the ones that hollowed it out and designed the bulk of the layout. The interior conforms to their body type and what little aesthetic sensibilities they had. It always felt wrong to us, and that’s probably why it looks strange to you.”

        “Us?” Rarity picked up on the word.

        “While I was ‘vacationing’ on Earth, they had taken the best commanders and toon leaders from Battle School - all the ones that worked well with me - and fast tracked them through Tactical School so they could support me in Command School. I didn’t know they were there yet, but I would soon.”

        The view shifted to the simulator. Ender’s face glowed green in the dark bubble of the massive holodisplay.

        “I was a fast learner, but even so, the training was relentless. The simulator - this tiny room you see me in - was built to mimic the command stations on IF ships. As in Battle School, the teachers here could design scenarios in the simulator to teach and test me while constantly evaluating my capabilities. At first they started with a single fighter, the small ship there.” He indicated the outline in display by zooming in on it. Almost immediately it shrunk, only to be replaced by more and more. “then they started working me up to larger and larger groups. When it came time to practice with an entire fleet, I was introduced to my squadron leaders.”

        For the first time, Ender-that-was put on a set of headphones in the simulator. Almost instantly, he was greeted by very familiar voices.

        “Salaam.” The ponies heard it as ‘peace.’

        “Alai.” Ender smiled.

        “And me, the dwarf.” 

        “Bean.” The soldier’s grin grew wider.

        “And for a change of pace, someone’s who’s actually competent in battle,” came a brassy voice. Petra sounded a little deeper now than the last time Ender had heard her, but she was still easy to recognize.

        “...and many, many more,” he finished, fondly remembering his friends. “In all I was assigned thirty-six of Battle School’s best, all soldiers that I knew and respected.”

        The scene in the simulator shifted from one battle to the next. Ender-that-was talked continuously into the microphone, and while the ponies could not see his friends, they could tell by the rich timbre of his voice and the smile on his face that he was glad for their company.

        “We practiced for months, at first just learning how to work together, then adapting to increasingly difficult and more complicated battle scenarios. I never was allowed to see the others - Graff and the instructors always kept me separate - but to be honest I hardly noticed. Though they were only voices in the dark, I grew closer to them than I ever had at Battle School. We were a team, a jeesh; dozens of brilliant minds acting as one. We were invincible...” Ender sobered, “... or at least we thought we were.”

        “Why did they keep you separate?” Applejack asked. “Yeah, they’ve been cruel before, but that just seems pointless.”

        Remembering his small room within Eros, Ender saw himself approach an old man sitting serenely in the center of the chamber.

        “They wanted me to spend all my time with my teacher,” the soldier replied.

That drew Twilight’s interest. “Your teacher?”

“I met him not long before I was reunited with the other Battle Schoolers. He simply appeared one morning in my room without explanation, and I stupidly did not recognize his test for what it was.”

        Twilight stole a glance at the princess before looking back.

        Ender remained quiet, letting the memory speak for him. Failing to elicit a response from the strange elderly man, and after finding his room locked, the boy decided to start an exercise routine. When the old man had the opportunity, he grabbed Ender’s leg, flipping him to the ground with ease. Surprised, the ponies looked at each other in confusion, but remained quiet.

        The boy shot up in anger but stopped short of attacking. Shaking his head, he returned to his exercises. When Ender finally grew bored he sighed in frustration and went towards his desk, turning his back on the older man in the process.

        In a matter of seconds, the man had Ender pinned painfully to the ground, his knee pressed into the small of the boy’s back.

        “All right!” he choked out in pain. “You win!”

        The old man’s voice rasped with age, hissing with the disdain of long experience. “Since when do you have to tell the enemy when he has won?”

        He cocked his head to the side when the boy failed to answer. “I surprised you once, Ender Wiggin,” he continued, stressing the syllables of the name oddly. “Why didn’t you destroy me immediately afterward? Just because I looked peaceful? You turned your back on me. Stupid. You have learned nothing. You have never had a teacher.”

        “I’ve had too many teachers,” the boy spat, “how was I supposed to know you’d turn out to be a-”

        “An enemy, Ender Wiggin.” The raspy voice again said his name in that peculiar way. It took a moment for the boy to realize it was an accent, one he had never heard before.

        The man continued. “I am your enemy, the first one you’ve ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on, I am your teacher.”

        With that, he let the boy’s body go. It impacted the hard metal floor with an audible crack. Groaning, he rose to a kneeling position. Then, to the gasps of Twilight and the others, Ender lunged at the old man.

        They fought at a speed which was hard for the audience to follow. Ender was fast, but his elderly opponent was improbably faster. Rolling away, the boy recovered to a standing position near the door.

        The old man knelt in his original position, smiling. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

        “Better, this time, boy. But slow. You will have to be better with a fleet than you are with your body or no one will be safe with you in command. Lesson learned?”

        Ender nodded as his older self stopped the memory.

        “That was your teacher?” Twilight queried in disbelief.

        “The first adult I ever respected,” Ender affirmed, “the first who had anything to teach me, and the only one I ever called ‘teacher.’”

        The unicorn looked as if she wanted to say something, but thought better of it.

        “We spent every available moment together. Outside of the simulator, he was my only companion. I learned from him constantly, about warfare, about strategy, about the IF and its capabilities, and most importantly about the Formics.”

        “Who was he?” asked Rarity.

        “...and why wasn’t in charge instead of you?” Twilight wondered. “If he was selected to teach you, wouldn’t that make him more qualified to lead?

        Ender chose to let his memories answer instead.

        “Teacher,” he had asked that day, his cut lips red with blood as he smiled. “Do you have a name?”

        “Mazer Rackham.”

        “Wait a minute… wait just a gosh darn minute! Didn’t ya say he fought the Buggers all those years ago?” Applejack was confused.

        “I remember that too,” Rarity added. “Just how long do your people live?”

        “It varies greatly based on health, but to answer your question more accurately, no, normally there would have been no way for me to ever meet him. He should have died before I was ever born. Mazer Rackham was there only because he made a deeply personal sacrifice for the rest of humanity.”

        The white unicorn’s brow furrowed in concern. “How so?”

        “We learned many things from the Formics. Two of the most important were the Alcubierre Drive and the ansible. The former allowed us to travel at very near the speed of light. The latter enabled us to communicate instantly with one another from any distance.”

        Both Twilight and Celestia blinked in surprise. “That shouldn’t be possible,” Twilight said, awed.

        “If you told me a year ago that a living being could move planetary bodies,” he nodded at the princess, “I would have said the same thing.”

        The unicorn sat back, looking thoughtful.

        “The point is, we could. One reality of near-lightspeed travel is that time slows down from the perspective of the traveler. How, I can explain later,” he added quickly as she leaned forward and opened her mouth to ask a question, “but what’s important now is that by using relativistic speed, the IF had the ability to extend Mazer’s life so that he could teach future commanders how to fight the Formics.”

        Twilight shook her head. “So, what, he just took off in a ship and turned around to come back when you called him on the... ansible, was it?”

        “Exactly.”

        Rarity jumped in. “I don’t see what’s so difficult about that. So he took a trip.”

        “Alone,” the other unicorn realized with sudden sorrow, “and when he came back…” she trailed off, now understanding the implications.

        “Everyone he had ever known and loved had grown old and passed away,” Ender finished solemnly.

        Everyone was quiet for a moment.

        “That is an incredibly noble and selfless sacrifice,” the princess said respectfully. The soldier wasn’t sure, but he thought he heard a catch in her voice.

        “Even so,” Twilight ventured carefully, “that still doesn’t explain why he didn’t just lead the invasion. After all the trouble your people went through to keep him alive, and after he made such a large sacrifice, why not put him in charge? He had already beaten the Formics once, right?”

        Ender let his memories answer. “You’re still alive, aren’t you? Why not you?” he asked his teacher.

        The old man shook his head no.

        “Why not? You won before.”

        “I cannot be the commander for good and sufficient reasons.”

        Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes. “Well, that sure answers everything.”

        Ender couldn’t help but smile. “That was pretty much my thought as well. I’ve already told you some of the reasons, though. All of the problems adults faced when fighting formics counted doubly for Mazer at his age. Even his brilliant and insightful mind had to overcome the ravages of time. Age had made him too cautious for command in the war to come, but the experience that would have been a liability against the Formics was be a huge asset when it came to training me.”

        The boy again let his memories explain. “I will program your battles now, not the computer,” Mazer said, fixing him with steely blue eyes. “I will devise the strategy of your enemy, and you will learn to be quick and discover what tricks the enemy has for you. Remember, boy. From now on the enemy is more clever than you. From now on the enemy is stronger than you. From now on you are always about to lose.” The old man’s grin was at once terrifying and playful - the grim humor of a lifelong soldier.

        As quickly as it formed, Mazer’s smile vanished. “You will be about to lose, Ender, but you will win. You will learn to defeat the enemy. He will teach you how.”

        The old man’s face melted away, only to be replaced by the simulator again. Light vanished from the ponies’ coats as the green dots reflected off their eyes.

        “Mazer wasn’t kidding. Though the next round of simulations started off simply enough, their difficulty and complexity grew by leaps and bounds each time I came back. My jeesh and I were pushed to the limit, not just mentally, but physically as well. At first it was one battle a day, with free practice in between, but then the pace increased. Battles happened randomly - sometimes early in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, sometimes in the middle of the night. Some would be over quickly, others would drag on for hours and hours. Free practice stopped eventually - any time we didn’t spend in the simulator was used for sleeping. We never knew how much we were going to get before the next battle started. Fighting fatigue soon became harder than fighting in the simulator.”

        “But… why?” Rainbow asked, surprising Ender. He had expected Twilight to pipe up. “How can you train if you’re not even awake? You don’t gain anything from it.”

        Rackham’s voice answered the pegasus. “In a real war, boy, you don’t always get to pick when you fight! Your enemy does that just as often as not. You must always be ready to defeat your opponent, even when he thinks he has the element of surprise.”

        “You’re right though,” Ender assured her, “We really weren’t learning anything at that point. I thought he would let up eventually, but the program only became harder. They pushed us to our absolute limit, and soon we started breaking.”

        Red lights flashed around parts of the display, indicating damaged and destroyed ships. Voices called out in confusion and surprise before Ender started issuing orders, getting the situation back under control. After a few minutes the battle was over, but instead of the usual victory cheers, all they could hear was Petra crying over the comms.

        “Tell him I’m sorry, I was just so tired… please, please, please, just tell Ender I’m sorry!”

        The soldier sighed. “Petra was the first to break, and not through any fault of her own. Alai was my left hand. I could give him half my forces and an objective and know that it would be done. He was a weapon you could fire and forget. Bean was my troubleshooter. When faced with the unknown he was the best at clandestine reconnaissance. If I encountered a particularly difficult obstacle and had to direct my attention elsewhere, I could rely on him to either neutralize it or find an alternate solution before I got back. But Petra, Petra was my right arm. No matter what my top priority was in battle, she was the one I chose to execute my plans and achieve my primary objectives. She knew how I thought as well as I knew how she fought. Together, we could do more with a squadron than Alai could do with five.”

        Ender sighed. “In the end, I relied on her too much. She didn’t want to disappoint me, so she never complained, never said how much it was wearing her down. It caught up with her in the end though; Petra passed out mid-way through a battle and the rest of us didn’t catch it until it was almost too late. When she eventually recovered, she was a shell of her former self. Doubt made her too careful, robbing her of the aggression and daring that made her great.”

        The boy paused, thoughtful. The others were quiet, not sure how to respond to that.

        “Petra may have been the first, but no matter how careful I tried to be, others broke too. Even I wasn’t immune. The lack of sleep started to catch up, and eventually I began to live the nights. I dreamed of the simulator, I dreamed of Bonzo, Stilson, and the others. I dreamed of my family, but mostly I dreamed of the Formics. I don’t know how or why I saw them so clearly, but they were there next to me in my dreams, looking at me, judging me, examining my memories like so many stills on a film strip. And still the battles came.”

        The disjointed dream images flashed past as he described them, alternating with even more time in the simulator. In his memory, the boy’s face and hair became more and more haggard as time progressed. The transformation troubled the others, even Celestia. Fluttershy, who had crouched farther and farther down as Ender spoke, finally gave up and hid behind her mane again.

        Now is the moment of truth, Ender thought. Full night had fallen, and the silver light of the moon started to show through the windows. Did Luna have any inkling of what was coming? Could she look ahead in his memories? If so, what did she think? The boy felt raw, like a string plucked to the point of fraying. His knees ached, and he just wanted this to be over. Reexperiencing most of his life over the course of a single day was almost too much to take, even for someone has hardened as he.

        Ender’s mindscape opened on the simulator room. The doors to the black hemisphere lay open and waiting for him, but Mazer blocked the way.

        “One morning I awoke on my own - for the first time in over a year at Command School. My door was unlocked, and for once I could go anywhere and do anything.” He shook his head. “Not knowing what else to do, I went to the simulator room. My teacher was waiting for me, but that day was to be different.”

        A group of strangers had gathered in an observation room nearby. Graff and Anderson stood among a group of dignitaries arrayed with the bright insignia and crisp uniforms of high-ranking IF officers.

        “He told me that it was my final exam. If I won this battle, if I passed this test, I would finally graduate. It would all be over - I would join the fleet.”

        The ponies listened with bated breath. In spite of all they had heard, all that had shocked and disquieted them throughout the day, they wanted to know the outcome of the boy’s trials and tribulations.

        “Before I entered the simulator, Mazer explained that there would be one major difference with this battle: it would be staged around the planet. A true test of my prowess wouldn’t be complete, after all, unless they introduced a new element that required adaptation.”

        “Of course they did,” Rarity huffed, “after all that pressure, what’s a little more?”

        Suddenly, Ender realized that he had not explained the Little Doctor. I must be more tired than I feel, he sighed internally. How the hell did I miss a detail like that?

        The realization spurred a memory. “Does the Little Doctor work against a planet?” Ender noticed that his voice in the memory was now nearly identical to his current tone.

        “The Little Doctor?” Of course Twilight would ask.

        “Our one trump card against the Formics. After two wars spent fighting with weapons far inferior to theirs, we finally had something that, we hoped, would prove overwhelming. ‘Little Doctor’ was a nickname for the ‘Molecular Detachment Device,’ and it did exactly what the name implies. Two beams, focused together on a point in space, create a field where molecules cannot hold together. The power released from breaking apart one set of molecules in turn powers the formation of another field. That process repeats until there is nothing left to detach.” Ender paused, waiting for the inevitable question that he really did not want to answer.

        Thankfully, Twilight’s friends turned to her. “Uh…” Applejack asked. “Little help here?”

        The unicorn shook her head. “It sounds about as reasonable as the whole ‘flying nearly as fast as light’ part, but if it is true then you could destroy… well… everything.” Her voice trailed off in horror as she realized the implications of such a process. “This was… a standard weapon for your ships?”

        “Every fighter we sent towards the formic worlds was equipped with one. The weapon’s effects were more or less transparent to us in the simulator. Enemy ships tended to be too far apart for the chain reaction to spread beyond more than one or two at a time. Functionally, it was just a more effective version of the weapons we used in the Second Invasion. A ship gets destroyed by a nuclear explosion just as easily as it is pulled apart by the Little Doctor.”

        Celestia balked. “Are you telling me that you use-” The word was lost to the translation spell. Seeing Ender’s confusion, the princess tried a different term, only for it to be rendered in equine as well. Finally, as frustration started to show across her face, she finished with, “-use nuclear fusion as a weapon?!”

        The soldier nodded. “Used. Near the end of the Second Invasion, the Formics adapted one of our technologies and repurposed it to greatly reduce the effectiveness of our nukes. That was the main reason we developed the Little Doctor.”

        The alicorn was dumbstruck.

“What is it princess?” her protege asked worriedly.

        Shaking her head, Celestia answered. “One of the processes that powers the sun, Twilight. I can’t even imagine using it as a weapon, but apparently even that wasn’t strong enough for them.”

        “We may have well thrown rocks at the Formic ships for all the good it would have done. No, the Little Doctor was the primary weapon used by our fighters.”

        “So what was the test?” Twilight asked. “Did you pass?”

        Asked like an eager student. It was all Ender could do to not shake his head.

        Instead, he pictured his first look at the battlefield. The audience was bathed in the green light of the countless Formic ships.

        “Where… where are your ships?” Rarity asked, her eyes scanning fruitlessly back and forth.

        “Here.” Ender focused on twenty small dots at one far edge of the display.

        “Is that some kind of sick joke?” Dash was incredulous. “How were you supposed to beat all that?” She motioned vaguely at the mass of opposing ships.

         “I didn’t know,” Ender admitted. “I was tired, I was irritated, and I was sick of them continually making the game harder and harder as I went along. It was just like that final fight in Battle School.”

        “Except a hundred times worse.” Twilight was upset at the unfairness of it all.

        “More like eighty thousand - that was the closest estimate the computer could give me on the size of the enemy fleet. I thought it was a bad sign that the program couldn’t even crunch its own numbers. In all, I had eighty fighters and twenty carriers. What was I supposed to do? In the end, it was Bean who snapped me out of it.”

        From the past came the younger boy’s voice. “Remember, the enemy’s gate is down.”

        In the memory, everyone laughed... Ender included.

        “And with that,” he explained, “I didn’t care anymore. Like before, if they were going to cheat so blatantly, so was I.”

        “Against that?” Dash said incredulously.

        “I gathered my fighters, not to attack, but to traverse as much space as possible. Up until that point, I was forced to always fight a war of conservation - every ship was precious, every loss mattered. Given how the real war would play out, it was a perfectly reasonable restriction. We would only have the supplies, ships, and materials we brought with us. There was nowhere to retreat and no reinforcements behind us. Mazer, I noticed, reacted accordingly when programming the enemy. They knew they could get away with hit-and-run tactics for example, because we would never overextend our forces in pursuit.”

        Ender’s eighty fighters gathered into a tight cylinder and dove into the thick of the enemy formation.

        “Those lessons served them poorly in the end, though. They assumed that resources mattered more than objective and foolishly waited to entrap my fighters and ensure their destruction rather than simply trying to blow them out of the sky at range.”

        In the thick of the Formic cluster, the human formation suddenly broke, scattering hither and yon in seemingly random flight patterns.

        “There were countless Formic ships, but precious few queens. As close as I could tell, there were no more than five or ten commanding the enemy ships in range of mine. One mind, even a Formic mind, can keep track of four, five, maybe even six targets, but eighty? For once, their hive mind was a liability rather than an asset.  I lost most of my forces, but enough made it through to the other side.”

        Twelve of Ender’s fighters came together again, streaking directly for the planet. The Formic ships followed, but only a few were in range. One by one, the rearguard was picked off, but each ship that was destroyed blocked fire from two or three in front of it. In the end, five entered the atmosphere of the planet.

        “We were committed - I didn’t even know if my idea would work. With so few ships left, command fell directly to me since it was pointless to divide five fighters among thirty-seven commanders.”

        Ender Wiggin leaned forward and issued one final order.

        “Fire.”

        At first nothing happened, but then the surface of the planet, a green grid in the simulator’s display, began to bubble. Explosions erupted across the surface faster and faster until all at once, the entire world tore itself apart. As the last of Ender’s fighters vanished in the chaos, the view switched back to the carriers at the far edge of the battle field. The soldier looked on with fascination as the Little Doctor’s fields propagated throughout the entire Formic fleet, eventually leaving behind nothing but swirling masses of dust.

        “Ha!” Applejack cheered. “I’ll be darned. Ya did it! I guess they picked right after all. I’ll bet that Mazer fella was shocked.”

        But Ender didn’t smile. “Yes… I did it.”

        The scene brightened as Ender remembered exiting the simulator. Where he had expected solemn nods and heartfelt congratulations from the officers, he saw unrestrained exultation. Grown men were crying in joy and some were even praying. In a society where outward demonstration of religion had been banned for decades, it was a shocking sight.

        Graff, tears streaming down his face, came up and wrapped the boy in a fierce embrace.

        “Thank you, thank you, Ender. Thank God for you, Ender.” The colonel was actually shaking.

        Twilight and Celestia were still, sensing that something was off. The rest looked at each other, confused.

        “Wow,” Dash commented, “I’ve had a lot of ponies cheer for me, but they’re really happy. They must not have expected you to pass.”

        “What’s wrong?” asked Fluttershy, seeing the boy’s expression. The memory continued silently overhead as other officers came up and hugged him or shook his hand. Mazer came up, smiling, and said a few words. Ender’s unheard response took the smile from his face.

        Ender looked up at Celestia and the rest. “The third memory you wanted to see. The one at the core of it all.” He brought the sound back as Mazer knelt in front of him, looking the boy dead in the eye.

        “Ender, for the past few months you have been the battle commander of our fleets. This was the Third Invasion. There were no games, the battles were real, and the only enemy you fought was the buggers. You won every battle, and today you finally fought them at their home world, where the queen was, all the queens from all their colonies, they all were there and you destroyed them completely. They’ll never attack us again. You did it. You.”

        The soldier closed the memory completely.

        “Wha-” Celestia opened her mouth, but nothing came forth as she processed what had been said. Even Twilight was speechless.

        “Six thousand, three hundred and eleven,” Ender said. The room remained silent.

        “Six thousand, three hundred and eleven,” he repeated. “That’s how many men and women I ordered to their deaths, including the eighty fighter pilots who participated in the final assault. Every last one of them left Earth before I was even born.”

        He noticed that Rarity’s eyes were moist as they flicked back and forth, as if the edges of the room offered some kind of rationale to what she was hearing.

        “Zhang Yan, Jacob Argyris, Raina Saxena, Xu Jun, Manel Braga - the five pilots who made it to the Formic homeworld. They knew there was no going back. They even heard my voice - a child’s voice - issue the final command, and they never hesitated. I would have seen any pause, any misstep, but no, they acted as swiftly and as surely as the computer simulations I thought they were. Would you believe that no one outside the IF even knows who they are? Everyone celebrates my name. ‘The savior of humanity,’ they call me.” he snorted derisively. “But do they even bother to learn about the ones who sacrificed their lives for our victory? No - to the rest of the world they are long dead; young men and women, most of whom lost their entire families in the First Invasion, that left Earth generations ago.”

        Applejack had taken off her hat and was now looking down into it.

        Ender raised his hands, palms upward. “Stilson, Bonzo, Zhang, Argyris, Saxena, Xu, Braga, six thousand, three hundred and six other IF pilots whose names even I couldn’t even begin to memorize, and every last Formic who lived or ever will live. Those deaths are on my hands, whether I intended them or not.”

        Slowly, even the princess dipped her head.

        Twilight finally recovered enough speak. “Why didn’t they tell you? Didn’t you have the right to know?” She asked in a choked voice.

        “They needed commanders who could match the Formics - in other words, people willing to do whatever it took to win. Had I, or any of my squadron leaders known what was happening, we would have fought differently. Even with our training, we would have acted more conservatively to protect our people’s lives. We wouldn’t have taken as many risks knowing that every last fighter carried a human pilot. We would have agonized over mistakes more than we already did, and we would have destroyed ourselves with self-doubt later on.”

        The unicorn looked like she wanted to object, needed to object, but she couldn’t find fault in what he said.

        “How…” Celestia croaked. She paused, swallowed hard, and regained control of her voice. “How are there still two memories left? What could possibly be worse than this?” she asked with dread in her voice.

        Ender shook his head. “Not worse, just… important.” A courtroom appeared in his head as he recalled the vids from Graff’s trial. “The colonel was tried for what happened in Battle School under his watch,” he began.

        “Good!” Applejack looked up, putting her hat back on. She seemed to want to latch onto something, anything other than the staggering death toll. “About time he got his comeuppance.”

        “At first the rest of the IF staff tried to keep the details from me, but the very fact that they were trying to hide it told me most of what I needed to know. Applying pressure here and there, I finally got them to relent and let me watch the proceedings. That is when I learned of Stilson and Bonzo’s true fate.”

        “So you found out on top of everything else?” Pinkie Pie came out of the trance she had held for the last few hours. Ender did a double-take; her silence had made him forget that the earth pony was even there. Apparently she had been listening, at least to some of what had been said.

        Ender nodded, too worn out to even phrase a response. One memory left - it was simultaneously the least and most important of them all.

        Suddenly, Twilight turned on her teacher, startling the others with her outburst. “Princess Celestia! I can’t do it. I just…” she trailed off as the larger alicorn fixed her with an intent stare. Swallowing hard and regaining her courage, the unicorn continued. “As bad as it seems, as much death and destruction as we’ve seen today, I just can’t hold it against him. I won’t speak for the others, but I know for a fact that I will not use my ele-”

        “Wait!” the soldier interrupted. All eyes turned to him, as surprised by his interruption as they were by Twilight’s.

The unicorn blinked. “Wait… why? I’m about to..”

        Ender shook his head. “You haven’t heard everything. The last-”

        Twilight’s reaction was swift and stern. “No! I don’t care what it is, I’m not about to condemn you for something you were tricked into doing.”

        “Was I? Would you have felt the same way had it really been a simulation, then I had gone off and knowingly waged and won a war against the Formics, killing them all?”

        “Yes! No… maybe?” She wavered, frustrated. “It depends! What if they had attacked first instead? I don’t know…” She stomped a hoof, her shoulders sagging. “I don’t know.” She looked at him helplessly.

        He smiled sadly, sympathetically. “Frustrating, isn’t it? Not knowing. I’m in the same position.”

        The unicorn was utterly lost. “What do you mean?”

        “Intellectually,” Ender continued, “I can understand that, at least with all but Stilson and Bonzo, I was no more than a weapon. I was forged, sharpened, and used by the IF. They killed the Formics and I was merely their tool. I’ve come to grips with that. But what I cannot figure out is why I won.”

        Applejack was struggling to follow, but she spoke up nevertheless. “Hon, I didn’t understand most of it, but I saw it with mah own eyes. You beat ‘em fair an’ square. Heck, less than fair an square. They should have had you.”

        “Yeah!” Dash agreed. “And besides, who cares? You won!”

        “The last memory,” he began.

        “I don’t care!” Twilight stomped a hoof again. “It’s not going to change my mind!”

        “Please,” Ender replied. “This is a memory I want to share. No one, not even the old members of my jeesh have understood - but maybe that was because they couldn’t see it…” he gestured above his head. “this way.”

        Twilight looked at him in disbelief. “What could be so difficult to understand?”

        “They let me win.” Ender said, a rush of emotion discharging through him as he finally gave voice to the thought that had been haunting him for over a year. He had mentioned it to last remnants of his jeesh, those still on Eros after the others had returned to Earth, but they were all focused on their futures. What did they care of the past, especially since the Formics were dead and gone?

        “Beg pardon?”

        “What?!”

        “Huh?”

        “The last memory.” The soldier’s mindscape tore open once more. Ender-that-was, now nearly identical to the boy kneeling in the throne room, stood in the engine room of an IF colony ship. A device which could only be described as an overly large egg drifted in the center of a containment field.

        “Rank commensurate to my achievements, duties commensurate with my abilities - that’s what I was given after the war was over. So, I became an admiral with nothing to do; there weren’t any more Formics to fight. Eventually, they came upon the idea to set me up as the governor of our first  colony - it’s a long story, but what matters is that they gave me a tour of a colony ship. For the first time ever, I was shown the inner workings of an IF vessel like the ones I had commanded during the war. This one in particular had been retrofitted from the newest line of carriers.”

        A middle-aged man, dressed in a uniform much like the one Ender currently wore, was lecturing the younger boy on how the engine worked. Not impressed with his technical jargon, the boy interrupted him.

        “What you’re saying is that the field generated by this device takes all the molecules and objects it runs into in the direction of movement and uses the nuclear strong force to make them move in a uniform direction at lightspeed.”

        If the captain was shocked at the youth’s acumen, he hid it well. “Touche. But you’re an admiral, sir, and so I was giving you the show I give all the admirals.” He grinned. “Most of them don’t have a clue what I’m saying, and they’re too stuffed to admit it and ask me to translate.”

        Ender, however, wasn’t smiling. “What happens to the energy from the breaking of the molecules into their constituent atoms?” he asked seriously.

        “That, sir, is what powers the ship. No, I’ll be more specific. That’s what actually moves the ship. It’s so beautiful. We move forward under rockets, and then…” as the captain continued to speak glowingly about the capabilities of his ship, as line officers are wont to do, Ender’s eyes became unfocused, his face utterly still.

When a pause in the man’s speech told the boy he was finished, Ender asked only one question, though he was sure he already knew the answer. “And we got this from the Formics?”

The captain nodded, and began to explain how they had reverse engineered the technology from a Formic ship.

        The memory faded, but Ender remained silent.

        “Uhh,” Rainbow Dash prompted. “Think you could explain that? We’re not all eggheads here.” She looked up at Twilight.

        The “egghead,” however, seemed to understand. “It’s the same principle as the weapon you used. The Doctor… this is just more controlled, isn’t it?”

        Ender nodded.

        Twilight still didn’t understand, however. “But what does that matter? You learned a great deal from the Formics, didn’t you?”

        “We did, but I always thought the Little Doctor was different. A human invention, something that would take the Formics by surprise, circumvent all their defenses, and help us win the war. It made sense, after all. We had a mining device called a ‘glaser’ that worked in much the same way. It was extremely helpful against the Formics during the First Invasion. I had always assumed that the Little Doctor was merely an improvement on that concept.

        Realization dawned in Celestia’s eyes, but she remained silent. Twilight still did not understand. “But the weapon did all that, right? Why does it matter who invented it?”

        “Because if it was their technology,” Ender said gravely, “they - they should have recognized it the second we started using it during the Third Invasion. They may have been simple in their tactics, but the Formics were never stupid. They had to have known that our revolutionary weapon was nothing more than a retooled version of their own engines.”

        Twilight, Rarity, and even Applejack started to catch on, unease showing on their faces as they started to understand the implications of what the boy said.

        “And yet, they never once turned the Little Doctor against us. Our tactics wouldn’t have made us particularly vulnerable to it, but even so, it could have turned the war in their favor. In the final battle, particularly, they could have vaporized my fighters long before they reached the planet.”

        Ender’s back sagged as he finished airing thoughts long pent up inside.

        “Even if they couldn’t figure out how to do what we did with their technology - which I doubt - their overall strategy was self-defeating. I see it now, and have seen it ever since I learned that the battles were real.”

        Raising his head, he looked to each of them in turn.

        “The Formics fought me for every inch of their territory, but each time I beat them, they all retreated toward their homeworld. Yes, that gave them the advantage of numbers, but they had to have known that defeat was a possibility, especially as I kept winning. We had the Little Doctor and were willing to use it, and yet they gathered their remaining population on one planet. At any point, they could have spread to dozens of other star systems without even losing a tenth of their force for that final battle. Had they scattered, we would have been hard pressed to find them much less destroy them. They could have hid for however long it took to regroup and send a fleet to destroy us once and for all.”

        Twilight looked down at him silently, her face showing that she understood it as little as he did.

        “...and yet, and yet, and yet… they didn’t.” Ender strained to keep his head up, utterly exhausted. “They massed in one place, giving me the ability to kill them all. I may have won all the battles, but they lost the war, and I do not. Know. Why.”

        The unicorn’s voice wavered. She sounded lost. “But why does that matter? You won.”

        “How we win matters,” Ender heard himself say. The boy didn’t know whether it came from his mouth or his memories, and he was too tired to care. Had he said it to Graff, to Mazer? Did I say it at all? His mind spun, not sure of anything.

        “I knew them better than anyone, even better than Mazer. That’s how I beat them… no, how I destroyed them, wiping out their entire existence. I should at least understand why they did it, what they were thinking. If they can’t speak for themselves, who will speak for them? I can’t, and if not me, who?” Ender’s voice faltered as he let his head fall, staring instead at the intricately-patterned carpet between his knees.

        Frustration and resignation warred for dominance in the boy’s mind. The memory spell had left him drained and emotionally raw. Ender knew he wasn’t entirely making sense anymore but didn’t know how else to convey what he felt. He just wanted it to end.

        “So cast your judgment,” he said bitterly, his voice echoing across the cavernous throne room, “Condemn or forgive me as you wilI - it doesn’t matter. As you can see,” Ender twisted the word as he gestured above himself, indicating the spell that had opened his mind to them all day, “I can’t even forgive myself.”

        He closed his eyes, waiting for their response. Would there be some formal decree, or would they simply carry out their sentence?

        Will it hurt? Ender thought briefly of the statue garden, wondering if Twilight still wanted to spare him.

        Celestia and the others said nothing. The room was shrouded in silence, save for the slow, measured clip of steps behind him.

Metal against stone, the sound had an oddly bell-like quality.

The soldier opened his eyes, expecting to see the gold-shod hooves of a Royal Guard. Instead, an expanse of midnight blue feathers extended across the periphery of his vision as he felt a wash of warm breath over his right ear.

        “Then simply know that I forgive you.” Luna’s words carried a power that cut through him, and Ender shuddered to his core. His chest tightened and his vision became blurry, even as he felt her forehead touch his own.

        Am I crying?

        Ender had no tightness in his chest and no sobs racked his lungs, yet he felt warm trails on his face. As he looked down, the soldier could see teardrops on the back of his hands, though he couldn’t feel them. It was like he was floating, disconnected.

        Forgiveness. Being forgiven. Could it really be something so simple? Ender doubted it, but even so, he felt… not better, but it was a start. For the first time in nearly a year, he thought he could feel better. It was like balm on a wound, taking away the pain so healing could start.

        Luna’s wings closed over the boy. Darkness descended, blocking out the silvery moonlight from the windows as she whispered, “I am sorry, Ender, so very sorry.”