Peering into the gloom, Marri knew she wasn’t going to see anything but shifting colors of green standing out on sun dappled hillside, but even from there, the scent of the forest, of soil, rich with the bodies of countless fallen plants and animals, of waxy resins and candied nectars all caught on the gentle breeze, it sent a shiver down her spine. It was so peaceful, but she knew better.
Sliding up the palm-sized motion tracer from its thin, brown plastic carrying case strapped to her right leg, Marri thumbed down the silvery power-button, watching as the liquid-black screen morphed from a dull reflection of herself to a dull mossy screen, and waited. The device, compensating its backlighting for the additional sunlight, needed at least a few seconds for the 220 kHz sound waves, something she’d been assured was far above any animal’s range of hearing, to finish bouncing off the landscape and returned to parse out the ambient movement signatures likely to be a creature from those likely to be the forest.
Holding a thumb to the bottom of the screen for three seconds, the light vanished and sent out a vibration, silent, as per her specifications, down her hand and forearm. Sliding it back into the dulled casing, she briefly recalled the odd little pony responsible for it, Steam Gear. She’d heard many things about that shamrock unicorn across the mess hall. Rumors of hour-long rants against imagined slights from nobles he’d never met to arguing with voices in his head abounded, but if there was one thing everypony was quite certain of, it was his unprecedented skill in all things magi-mechanical. They would have to be. It certainly wouldn’t do to have members of engineering come to their crew chief with questions he couldn’t answer outside of permission for more funding. That was for the colts in accounting to decide. And, much to her surprise, the personal request for a portable motion sensor had proven a relatively simple feat for the, decidedly chipper, pony, who’d managed to build the damned thing himself in a single afternoon.
Descending the hill, Marri, refocusing on her objective, diverted from the trailhead, stepping directly into the dense, undisturbed foliage of the Everfree Forest. Immediately, bits of fern and low hanging branches assaulted her from all sides, no doubt disappearing any number of burs and stickers into her fur and mane that she’d be combing out for weeks to come. Taking it slow, recalling the videos and guides of the forest she’d been reviewing for the past two weeks, she paused, allowing her eyes to adjust to the seemingly perpetual twilight of the fabled woods. Chirps, squeaks, and all manner of rustling and fussing came at her from all sides, nearly overwhelming, but Marri wouldn’t, couldn’t, let that stop her. She had to do better. Had to make up for her defeat at the hands of Katsuo The Displaced.
Ears swiveling, eyes straining to catch every piece of information surrounding her, to decide how much of a threat, if any, it posed, Marri came short, a small clearing in the forest opening before her. She immediately zeroed on the infamous cluster of tiny blue flowers sparkling under the pitiful rays of what meager sunlight had stolen down from the canopy. Of course she wasn’t in any particular danger, at the moment, but all the same, she found herself holding her breath as she edged around the stationary threat, now glad of how the dense foliage stifled the air, making it that much harder for the wind to lift the cursed pollen from the prankster plants’ petals.
Moving forward, her thoughts returned to her failure. A single week of training with the commander, and that was all it took for him to eke out a win over her. Was she really that weak, or was he simply that strong? True, that last winning point-strike wouldn’t have so much as knocked the breath from a filly, but he was like the commander, a displaced. What good was she if she couldn’t defeat something like that? Had it been anything but a simple hand-to-hand sparring match, she doubted she’d have landed a hit at all.
She’d heard the talk in the mess hall. When Katsuo had “arrived”, nopony was ever any less vague than that, he’d transformed, much like a Ranger, but… different. And even before his training with Commander he’d managed to take on the whole of Alpha Squad and hold his own, quite readily if Evil Breaker’s account was to be belie-
*BZZZt* *BZZZt* *BZZZt*
‘That can’t be right,’ Marri thought, eyes scanning the brush-riddled horizon. There should have been a steady increase to the vibrations if she were approaching something big enough to send the A.M.T. into such fits it was threatening to shake out of its case.
Darting aside, she put her back to a conifer whose trunk was nearly twice as big around as she was tall, noting the strangely tropical looking trees ringing it.
Still keeping watch around the small clearing, Marri slid the A.M.T. up, just to the bottom of her vision, and saw the motion ring. It was little more than a darkened distortion of the forest, sections flashing briefly red before falling back into the background noise of the surrounding plant-life, but it was closing in on her. Sliding the scanner back in place, powering the distraction off, it wasn’t going to help her anymore now, she waited, painfully aware of the deafening silence.
A whispering hiss was all the warning Marri was given before verdant streamers began exploding from the treetops. Lighting her horn, streak of violet seeping through her lionesque mane, Marri’s vision swept the squirming green floor, as long ropey strands, big around as her wrist, twined tightly back together, creaking under their own pressure.
‘Vinepers,’ Marri cursed, already moving down the list of things she didn’t have. Fire, ice, electricity, any manner of elemental spellwork would have been useful to neutralize or at least slow down the circling beasts, had she use any of them. Nearly despairing, she also noted the long, purple petals that frilled the sides of their heads. Poisonous monkshood or foxglove no doubt, though she was unwilling to take a closer look in the gloom. ‘They must have been strung up along their way here,’ she thought, slowly losing track of their full numbers as they slithered across one another, tightening the circle, ‘not that blunt-force trauma would do me any good against things that can just keep pulling themselves back together again.’
‘I’ve only,’ she thought, spellwork crafting upon her horn, ‘got one,’ vinepers rising up like a grove of misshapen saplings for the strike, ‘chance.’
All at once the orb of magic, just contained within her mane, burst. Hundreds of wiry strings twisted through the air, sending the vinepers to strike, their reedy fangs glistening with venom sap, disrupting a third of the clustering strings before they hit their mark, buying her a few precious seconds more as the magic struck the dirt. Yanking her head back, exposing her throat, the glowing strings held for a splintered second before audibly snapping back, dragging up the shadows pitched against the surrounding vinepers, trees, and bushes. No time to dull the edges, thin arcs of blue fire flared along the shadow blades edges, literally cutting through the air. Too thin to singe so much as a dust mote, they shrank, even as they passed soundlessly through the vinepers.
The light of the fires consumed the flickering shadows, the spell sputtering to an end without anything for the magic to anchor on, as Marri leapt towards the heads of the five vinepers blocking her exit. The heads fell, the meager displacement of air she created at her fore and in her wake being all it took to impart the gravity of the situation to the encircled predators.
Dashing back the way she came, branches smacking into open eyes she dared not close for fear of tripping over some unseen root or rock, Marri grunted back a sudden cough. Her stunt would only give her seven seconds tops before…
*CRACK*
‘Keep breathing,’ she thought, not allowing herself to focus on the sound of trees breaking asunder in the lightning-wake of the vinepers rage merged into one massive and angry snake. Her horn ached, sending twinges of pain coursing down her scalp and into her neck thanks to her crude spellwork, and almost missed the drop of blue in the ocean of green.
Realigning, Marri cut through the meadow, running side by side to the returning poison joke before crashing back into the forest, the keening roar of the giant vineper sending all manner of wildlife scurrying for their holes and squawking into the air. More prey for the vineper to distract itself with for all she cared, glad to hear that even other plants held a healthy fear of those flowers.
Breaching the last of the forest, Marri blinked hard, blinded by the brilliant light of the unobstructed sun, skidding to a halt as she continued to suck in more air to appease the fire in her lungs. When white in her eyes cleared, she saw the trailhead she’d left not but thirty minutes ago.
Her horn gave another twinge, shaking her from any budding thoughts of running along the edge of the forest and keeping the danger from coming to Ponyville as her ears flicked away in annoyance from the cacophony of birds’ busy shouting in the treetops behind her.
‘But if the birds are giving away their positions, then…’
She let the thought fall as her knees turned to jelly, landing unceremoniously on her rear, tail bunching up to one side. Her brown, knee length shorts and green t-shirt now, scratched as they were from her ‘surprise journey’, let in the breeze, chilling its way across her sweat stained fur. Nothing immodest, thankfully, but she would much rather nopony see her in such a trashy state.
Unhooking the water bottle from her belt loop, unscarred and unblemished from her hike into The Everfree, she began drinking her way back to some semblance of normality, plans for the next performance already under way. Though, maybe not until next month, nopony just falls into the sort of power Katsuo had after all, you had to work for it, and that meant knowing when to recuperate, and especially knowing what questions to follow up on to make sure you could perform.