Fallout Equestria: Old World Dreams

by KDarkwater

Chapter 12

12

“ATTENTION. EMERGENCY. SPARK GENERATOR FAILURE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. YOU NOW HAVE TEN MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

Her eyes snapped open, instantly aware of every minute detail revealed to them—broken potion flasks, their labeling torn and wrapped amidst the shards, a bright, orange flame actively consuming the crumpled remains of a lounge couch, rippling puddles of water reflecting the dancing fire in an endless loop. Her mane, wet and flopped across the cold floor….

…Grayhawk, laid out before her in a pool of water, its matte silvery finish adorned with a pale orange hue as the light of the fire pulsed into the room….

Her precious treasure nowhere to be seen.

She shook as much water and pain free from her as she could manage in three seconds, forced herself upright on four weakened, aching legs. Taking Grayhawk into her magical grasp, she stepped forward through the door in search of what mattered most.

Family.

The darkened hallways offered a horrific visage—bodies of ponies sprawled about, bloodied and motionless, some bearing the ripped armored barding of heavily-armed security personnel. Shell casings of all kinds littered the floor—pistol, rifle, some shotgun rounds—and the walls were peppered with circular impressions from pistol and buckshot impacts, and sheared, ripped holes from the power of higher velocity rifle ammunition. But she could find only a sign or two of their attackers, in the form of wounds on their victims and the occasional splash of discolored, dried liquid splattered on wall panels and flooring.

She couldn’t imagine her night light staying in such a place as this.

She trotted past the carnage, glancing at it only long enough to make sure she didn’t step on any of the bodies. Brief, sudden strobes of light from misfiring light panels blanketed small pieces of the world at seemingly random whims. Bright orange warning lights, on the other hand, remained functional, their beams swinging across the walls in a constant, steady pulse. When combined with the malfunctioning lighting, it was enough to make her nauseous.

Or, rather, it should have. But she could only marvel at the confusing combination of colors and wonder at why the warning lights were orange. It felt as though the color was…off. Not right.

…but no. It wasn’t important. El-Tee, Windy….they were all that mattered. So she pressed on.

She found her way to a stairwell at the other end of the hall—curiously, she seemed to reach it a lot sooner than she would’ve guessed, but she wasn’t going to complain about a lucky break to her search speed. She found plenty of other things to curse at when she reached her destination at the bottom of the stairs—L15, marked in large white lettering on the wall.

The spark generator level.

“—IDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY. YOU NOW HAVE SIX MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

The massive time gap never registered—only a sense of panic prevailed as she began to gallop through the corpse-littered halls, searching frantically for her child and friend before the stable died and took them down with it. She forced herself to look at bodies that remotely resembled a pegasus or a filly, and felt no relief when each check turned up only a stranger’s face. The wounds on the dead were recent, by as much as a couple of minutes if the fresh, oozing blood was anything to go by. Whatever was killing everypony, it was very close by, and had yet to run out of ponies to play with.

Grayhawk’s bright red front sight burned hotly despite the lack of decent lighting, as if yearning to find something to shoot and destroy. She turned a corner, nearly tripping over a lifeless grape-coated mare—

—heard a burst of automatic gunfire from a room a couple dozen yards away, strangely muted despite the tight, metallic confines of the stable halls, and rushed towards it. Flashes of light spilled out into the hall from the room with each burst, an—

—and terrible, bug-like screeches caused her resolve to waver as she neared the door.

A last ring of shots pinged off of the ceiling, a pony’s screams of pain replacing them, and she stumbled through the doorway, Grayhawk in her magic field—

—an earth pony stallion, lime green, fell to the floor, a trio of filly-sized ants clambering over him and tearing into his neck and face, and before she could think to peel the bugs off of him, his screams came to an abrupt end with the tearing of his trachea from his neck.

She scrambled back out of the room, sealing it shut once back in the hall. Too late to help him. Had to save the ammunition for somepony that could be helped.

Back into the main hall, and back to her original path—towards the generator room. Windy would probably be there, trying to cover the maintenance ponies working desperately to keep the generator going long enough for survivors to get out. Light Tail would probably be there, trying to talk them into leaving with her.

After an eternity and a seemingly endless hall of death and blood, she found that nopony had left the generator room alive. The door itself was seemingly torn off with sheer brute strength, tossed aside like paper and crushing at least three souls inside. A dozen bodies lay eviscerated about the area, some splayed out over a railing on an overhead walkway, others snipped in half where they had fought.

She spotted Cloud Wind’s sky-blue body near an open vent, its grating cover nowhere in sight. The ammo belt for her battle saddle-mounted rifle was down to what looked like eleven rounds, and a shower of empty casings and metal links were piled up all around her. One of her wings had been bitten off, leaving a bloody stump behind, and part of her neck had been ripped open…

….and she was still breathing. Barely.

She cried, silently, as she crept up to the dying mare, to comfort the poor thing in her final moments…

…the pegasus’s voice croaked softly, unintelligible, and she leaned closer to her blood-caked face….

“…wh….why….”

Her crying tapered off, guilt flooding into her in its wake…

“…why…didn’t you come back….why…”

She tried to open her mouth, to say something….

…and instead bolted off for the nearest door when she heard a familiar cry through the vent, and a chorus of excited, hungry bugs closing in on a meal—

—charged back into another hall, where the cry was much louder and more terrified, and she willed herself to be at the source in the next instant and stop it—

—she was greeted by the sight of a colt when she turned the corner into a dead end, his twitching body being torn open by a pack of radroaches, his right foreleg mere inches from her as his blood smeared down the walls—

She couldn’t tell if the screams were hers or his over the sound of Grayhawk blasting the bugs into pieces, but when the fourth and final insect was blown apart, it was too late. His cold, lifeless eyes were all that remained to accuse her of failure.

“—ATELY. YOU NOW HAVE THREE MINUTES TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

She staggered away from the grisly scene, barely capable of breathing, as she sought out the only thing left in her life in the maze of chaos. “…h-honey, where are you…”

“Right here.”

Her night light’s answer startled her into a short, screaming fit as she spun around, and the sight of her child glaring back at her as though she were a stranger broke what was left of her heart.

“You left them,” El-Tee boomed at her in an accusing, resentful tone. “You left them all to die.”

Try as she might, she couldn’t come up with anything to say. Not to the truth.

“You left them to die, alone. You left Aunt C to die! You murdered her!”

The tears came fresh, and hot. This was not her night light. This was not home. This was not what her daughter had told her earlier. “I…I di…I c-couldn’t save them—”

“You didn’t even try!” “Light Tail” screamed back, still glaring at her. “You just left! All you could think about was yourself! We’re supposed to do better! All you’ve done is murder people!! Aunt C, Hoofprint—”

“I didn’t kill him!!” she squealed back, crying a virtual lake of tears now. “I wish they’d found me instead, I wish I could go back and change it! I didn’t kill him!!”

“Bullshit!” El-Tee screamed back, shocking her into submission with the ferocity of her voice. “You were just glad it wasn’t you! Or me! Everywhere you go, it’s all about you!! You wouldn’t even go back for Aunt C! You just left her alone to die with everypony else! Even now, all you see is people to murder if they get close!! You kill them without asking if there’s a better way! You laugh about it! You enjoy it! Murderer!!!”

Her senses began to crash, blinded with guilt, tears, and horror at what this monstrosity of her little girl had to say to her face. Her legs buckled and folded in on themselves, allowing her body to sink to the floor. She couldn’t find the strength to defend herself anymore.

“You should have gone back. Should have tried to save somepony other than yourself. You murdered them all without firing a shot. You’re the worst of them.”

“—OW HAVE ONE MINUTE TO EVACUATE THE STABLE—”

“…yeah, there you go. Sit there and cry, let it all end right here. It’s what you should’ve done to start with, murderer,” her facsimile daughter taunted before fading into the shadows.

Radroaches began to close in on her from all around her. She let Grayhawk clatter onto the floor rather than resist. What was the point now? Everything was gone.

“—GENCY. SPARK GENERATOR FAILURE. ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY—”

Hardened carapaces began to tingle across her back, and her mind began to think back to Windy, to Hoofprint, lying dead in their own blood…

…and all she could think of, as the pincers began to slice into her flesh, was how ashamed she was for surviving while they perished in her place….

Her body jolted as hideous teeth began to pull at her flesh, her senses suddenly showing nothing but blackness and silence. Her legs found themselves trapped in a tight, warm cloth-like cocoon, and the cold floor was replaced by a feeling of cotton-like fabric caressing her—

….her bandaged, aching body….

She felt more bandages wrapped around her head, pressing what felt like a pad over her left eye as it sent spikes of hot, searing pain into her face. The klaxons, the screaming bugs, all the sounds of the hell she’d just been in were gone. She could hear only deathly silence, broken up by the occasional wheeze of a wind breeze, and the sounds of a pony’s sleep-addled breathing….

“—ALL RESIDENTS MUST EVACUATE IMMEDIATELY—”

A warm, small package stirred against her body, as if slightly disturbed by her own echoing, fading nightmares, and settled down again without another sound, its head brushing against her bandaged chest….

…its small, child-sized head….

Hoofsteps carefully crept forward from the darkness, and before she could think to reach for a weapon of some kind, a soft, bright aura lanced out at the floor, encompassing a small area around its bearer—

A metallic flashlight was settled down onto the floor, a tiny light bulb shining at its tip, and she finally recognized as the small survival flashlight from her saddlebags that could double as a small candle-type lamp when the lens assembly was unscrewed….

“...Sling? Can you hear me?” Kite’s voice whispered as another object was set down beside the flashlight.

Sling Shot’s mind, still partially trapped in the nightmare that had torn at her mercilessly, could only mumble a soft moan in response as she tried to get her senses in order once more. It felt like she was in her sleeping bag….

“…don’t move too much,” Kite said next, slowly unzipping something in front of her. “You were shot about seven hours ago. Three slugs to the body…you may not remember it…”

Oddly enough, the moment Kite mentioned it, it managed to come back to her in a painful flash—a hot barrel, the intense sharp stings and tearing of her flesh, like red hot soccer balls being flung into her….Light Tail’s voice, crying out for help….

“….oh gods, El-Tee….is sh—”

“She’s fine, now,” Kite replied before she could finish sobbing her question. “Had to give her a sedative to get her to sleep, and even then she refused to be put more than a couple of inches from you. She managed to stuff herself into your sleeping bag with you, plush fox and all. She’s been out like a light since. Even the frying pan I dropped an hour ago didn’t wake her. Or you, for that matter.”

Her left foreleg unconsciously drew back in towards her, inevitably coming into contact with Snowy’s faux fur coat, and a further squeeze confirmed the presence of her daughter cuddled against her. With her most precious treasure seemingly safe and sound with her, her body finally allowed itself to release its tension and terror from the horrors of her dreams. “….ha…how long?”

“Seven hours,” Kite answered again, setting what looked like a box of bandages down next to the flashlight, and then a bottle of tincture of iodine and another box containing gauze pads. “I’ll make it quick, I had to pull the bullets out while you were still awake. I’m hoping the trauma was enough to make you never remember it, you barely survived it. I had to pour five healing potions down your throat, but after the third one they started having less and less effect on you. They did manage to fix up the internal damage to your organs, but…but I had to stitch up the wounds on your body when the potions stopped working. You needed a blood transfusion too. Elly was a closer match, naturally, but you needed more than her body could provide and survive it. Turns out my blood is a decent match as well, so I used mine. The stab wounds in your chest healed up without any issues. Only lucky break in the whole mess….”

Another slight squeeze around El-Tee confirmed that she was still there, sleeping soundlessly and unaware of the conversation going on in front of her. “….did she see?”

“No. I made BJ take her outside. Think they got into a fight out there when she tried to come back, I found him pinning her to the road when I was done, covering her head with his body like he was trying to block out your screaming from her ears. What was left of the last healing potion I used on you was enough to smooth over the bruises and bloody noses. That’s when I sedated her. Figured she’d had enough stress for the day.”

…oh, Luna, my poor little girl, why…

“I got just enough of a look at your eye to tell that it’s intact,” Kite went on, floating a pair of scissors down next to the gathered medical supplies. “I gave you the healing potions before I took a peek, so they may have fixed it up. Whether you’ve had any vision loss in it, though…that’s another matter. I know a doctor in the next town with the knowledge to give a proper diagnosis.”

She wasn’t sure how to feel about that. It was enough of a shock that she barely survived a live surgery she couldn’t remember going through. But in the elation of the knowledge that she was still alive, she found it a little difficult to complain about losing some vision in one eye. If all that came out of this ordeal was that she needed a monocle to see clearly for the rest of her life, she would try not to complain about it too much. Whatever scarring that was left behind on her body and face….she hoped it wouldn’t be too much more traumatic on El-Tee than today had been.

Kite’s magic began to tug at the zipper of her sleeping bag, pulling it apart and lifting the top half of it away from her body, and a chill air began to assault her mangled body. “Time to change those bandages. This might take a few minutes, you really got the shit kicked out of you.”

Sling wanted to laugh, except that it tended to hurt when she breathed, and the short snort that did manage to get through her nose caused that pain to triple in intensity. “Snnk…oh crap, don’t do that, it hurts—”

With the sleeping bag out of the way, Kite began to carefully slip El-Tee’s slumbering body away from her, and to both mares’ surprise, the filly was not the least bit disturbed by the movement. “…yeah, laughter isn’t always the best medicine, is it?”

This time a short chuckle managed to escape, intensifying the pain in ways that made her feel both aggravated and….relieved? Was that th—

“—ould see the show I put on every Wednesday evening at the diner, now that’s funny—”

Tender Mane’s voice faded from her mind, inflicting a stunned tone to her voice. “….not really….”

Thankfully, Kite chose not to press the issue, and set to snipping off the bandages and pulling the blood-stained remnants off as gently as possible. Still, she felt fiery stings assaulting her nerves with every inch of gauze padding removed, as the stitches were still fresh and just feeling them being disturbed sent quivers of fear into her haunches.

After a minute or two of poking at the stitches to make sure they weren’t coming loose, Kite’s magic enveloped the iodine bottle and began unscrewing its cap. “So what was it that woke you up like that?”

Sling tried, hard, not to remember any discreet details of the nightmare, and allowed her good eye to close and blind her to the other mare’s work. “…nothing good. Don’t wanna talk about it.”

“I’m serious,” Kite rebuked gently. “Do you feel feverish? Sweaty? Sick? Any sign at all of an infection? I disinfected the tools and wound sites the best that I could in twenty seconds, but I’m not confident about it.”

“…no, nothing like that,” she sighed into the air. “Just a bad dream…”

Another bout of silence followed…at least, until Kite started pelting her stitches with iodine droplets, and then they started to burn strongly enough that she yipped a little. “Ow ow ow shit that stings—”

“Shhh!” Kite’s voice shushed sharply, a hoof planting itself onto her mouth to halt her complaints. “Elly may be out cold, but BJ isn’t.”

The hoof remained pressed to her mouth as Kite worked the iodine up and down her body wounds, and she did her best to keep her cries of pain in her mouth or, barring that, muffled quietly into the hoof on her lips. After roughly twenty seconds, the droplets stopped hitting her wounds, and a patch of cloth began wiping away the excess as it dribbled down her side and across her belly.

“….soooo, what’s your real name?” Kite asked next when her hoof finally withdrew itself from Sling’s face.

It took several scrubs at her side before the question actually sank in (despite the fact that she’d heard it once before recently), and at first Sling wanted to dodge the question entirely and just tell her to finish her work…

…but when she thought back to that moment, hours ago, when she’d been lying on the ground, unable to even gurgle a good-bye to her little girl as she struggled to breath, and the efforts it must have taken Kite to pull three bullets out of her body and lungs without the aid of painkillers or even a decent operating surface, with nopony to help hold her down….

….after all that, that was the first thing on Kite’s mind after everything else was squared away? Her name?

“…..Bookcase,” Sling answered, slowly opening her eye and craning her neck upward a little, to give herself something other than her sleeping bag and the bottom of the flashlight to stare at. “…..my real name’s Bookcase.”

She saw Kite’s eyes wander off to the side, fixated on her hindquarters for a moment. “…fits your cutie mark better than Sling Shot. Don’t suppose there’s a story to it?”

Kite’s magic put away the tincture of iodine and began pulling out several thick, sterile gauze pads, laying them out across her body to cover the stitches. “….asked my mother about it once, when I was thirteen. She said she named me that because I was born in front of a bookcase. Went from cooking lunch to live birth in less than ten minutes, she barely had time to get out of the kitchen before the contractions hit her. She just set down in the living room and had me right there.”

Kite had to put the bandages and gauze pads down for a couple of seconds, as she somehow found that amusing enough to laugh about it. “Snnrk….cute. Think I’ll stick with Sling Shot. Won’t laugh as much.”

Sling could only mumble derisively and set her head back down, her one-eyed gaze now fixated on a slumbering Light Tail a few feet away. How odd that the pups weren’t anywhere nearby….

“Okay, serious question now,” Kite said after one last snort at her expense. “…was it really Saurus that did this?”

“—ybe that little shit of a filly instead—”

“….Saurus, and four others,” she hissed, more at the memory than the mention of his name. “Killed two, beat one unconscious….he killed the fourth himself when they started arguing about the “job” he hired them for. Not sure why he didn’t finish me off, he had me….”

Kite set the last gauze pad down onto her side, and then enveloped her in a levitation spell to hold her up in the air while she began to wrap another roll of bandaging around her body. “All I could get Elly to tell me is that she thought she hit him, but she was too busy freaking out over you to care where. Did see somepony sneaking out of the scrapyard after I dragged the kids and all the guns and equipment back in. If you’re good enough to walk in the morning, we need to get out of here. Surprised he hasn’t come back already. And whoever you let live…I hope it doesn’t come back to bite us.”

“Speaking of things that bite, where did the pups take off to?”

“Those little buggers? They’re keeping vigil, believe it or not,” Kite said with a grunt as she fought to keep the injured mare afloat long enough to complete her task. “They’ve taken to sniffing around outside once in a while, but they mostly hang out on a table next to a window. Already tipped me off to a couple of radhogs that came trailing after the blood trail you left, probably found the promise of fresh meat better than the dead mercs in the scrapyard. Offed one with that neat knife you found in the one-twenty-eight, think it’ll provide enough meat for the pups for a couple of weeks. Thing’s really sharp and tough, must be made of some kind of enchanted tool steel. Even feels cold to the touch, like a cold spell was cast on it during its forging.”

She’s a knife freak, Sling decided as her body was tilted slightly in mid-air. How else could she even guess at what kind of material it’s made of? “Medicine and blades? You have a rather strange skillset for an ex-slave.”

“No more stranger than yours,” Kite huffed back, still focused on bandaging her up. “’Sides, a blade doesn’t jam or run out of ammo. Just need a good set of sharpening stones and honing oil to keep it sharp. At bad breath distance it’s your best choice. Slaves naturally aren’t allowed to have weapons of any kind, but it’s easy enough to learn how to work a knife when they’re not looking. A few times BJ and I got to learn up on how to shoot a gun. Nothing like what you can do, though.”

A month’s worth of time in the wastes had taught her how foolish she was to overlook the utility of a decent knife—she’d used one to save Kite from violation, after all, not even a day after leaving the Stable. From there on, she’d seemed to need that knife at least once a day for some task or another, and she had to keep asking Kite for it since she seemed pretty intent on keeping it close. She probably knew how to handle those things a lot better, come to think of it….

“….tell you what,” Sling said, craning her neck around as she was turned upside down for a few moments, the roll of bandaging beginning to add a third layer to her body. “We get enough ammo, and I’ll teach you guys how to shoot better, if you teach me and El-Tee how to use a knife better.”

“Not hard to learn a knife, actually,” the scarred, grape-colored mare murmured absently, the tip of her tongue poking out of her mouth as the concentration needed to maintain her levitation spell began to take a greater amount of her attention. “You’ve been doing it right from the start anyway. Best way to use one is an ambush, kill your target before they know you’re there. Our magic can work weapons by just thinking about it so it’s almost second nature at times. There’s a reason there’s more of our kind than earth ponies these days. If anything, you ought to be teaching us magic.”

Sling’s chest began to grow tight with apprehension. “And what makes you think I have anything to teach? Most unicorns never learn more magic than what goes beyond their talents. Some think it’s impossible for a unicorn to learn more than a set amount of it.”

“Your cutie mark is a book with a shooting star streaking over it. If you’re not practiced in some degree of advanced magic then you have a terrible representation of your innate talent.”

….okay, she’s got me there, but I seriously doubt it was my cutie mark that gave you the idea I had something to teach….

“Which one of you found my book?” she asked carefully, trying not to sound angry or judgmental. Not towards the mare that had just saved her life hours ago….

Kite’s eyes flinched slightly, but her hold on the former stable resident never faltered as the end of the bandage roll was pressed against the right side of her body, and several metal clasps began to float away from the floor and latch onto the bandage to secure it. “….BJ thought he saw an important looking book in your possession, a week or two back. Said you guarded it pretty closely.”

“…it is important,” she sighed, shutting her eyes as her body was flipped right-side up once more before slowly lowering back into her sleeping bag. “It’s a family heirloom, a spell book. Every generation of my family has added a spell or three to it for close to five hundred years. Magic is something of an innate talent in my bloodline. It’s what I’m best at, even if my pistol shooting says otherwise.”

“So why not use it?” Kite asked next. Now that she no longer had to keep a slightly heavy mare in the air, she allowed herself a few moments to catch her breath, lying down on the floor next to the flashlight. “Save yourself some ammo and grief now and then? If you have a whole book of spells to draw from, why aren’t you using it?”

“….it…never occurred to me to use it,” she said, drawing her sleeping shut over her as the cool air began to cause her to shiver slightly. “Not in a world where ponies are beating each other to death like wild savages over the ruins left behind by a world-ending war. The few combat magics in that book take quite a lot of concentration and practice to use. And they can really drain the magic out of you if you don’t do it right, to the point where your horn won’t work afterward, sometimes for days. It’s faster and less taxing to just shoot anypony that threatens me. Most of the spells I learned are more for utility than a fight. Light, fire starter, a scrying spell I can use to track ponies or objects, I can even place runes with different effects. Used a set to censor a couple of pages out of that book El-Tee keeps diving into—”

“I saw those,” Kite remarked lightly, her horn lighting up as it enveloped Light Tail’s slumbering body in a light purple magic field and began to pull her back towards her mother. “I was rather disappointed, I remember finding a decent copy of that book in an old library a few years back. A really….hot love scene, and I’m not even into stallions. Think that was the best part, for me. Wondered who had put those stupid runes in their place…”

“That’s not something I want Light Tail reading about just yet,” Sling shot back, feeling a rush of blood flowing into her cheeks. “She’s not ready for it. She can barely handle shooting a bug, I don’t want to think of how she’s going to take coming close to killing another soul.”

Light Tail’s body quickly found itself nestled back into the sleeping bag, pressed against her bandaged body to give Kite enough room to zip the sleeping bag back shut. “….you might want to re-consider that. I had that talk with BJ months ago and I’m not sure it took. He knows the how of where babies come from….but the ‘why’? He’s spent so long hearing others ra…violate me, whenever it pleased them, that part of him thinks that’s just how it is. If you hadn’t come across us when you had, I…I think they might have tried to make him one of them. Elly doesn’t have that kind of experience yet. It’d be best if she got the ‘birds and bees’ speech now, before it can get colored or twisted by things she’s seen or heard.”

It was Sling’s opinion that BJ was halfway there already, and she’d begun to wonder how many of the savages she’d killed had started out that way—as simply an unlucky colt or filly with the misfortune to grow up in such a hostile and evil environment that it was all they knew. It was entirely likely they were as much a victim of the wastes as their “prey”….

…but such thoughts were best left to times when she was in a better mood to deal with them. Even now, the constant, sharp pain in her side and a lingering stinging on the left side of her face made it difficult to ponder anything for very long. Hours earlier she’d been bleeding out, dying…now she was alive, relatively safe, and in no danger of dying anytime soon. The sleeping bag was a poor substitute for her bed and three blankets, but it was warm enough to start causing her eye to unconsciously drift away from the ex-slave that had saved her life. Tired, in pain…

…yes, it was time to go back to sleep.

Kite seemed to sense the shift in her mood—she could hear her re-packing the medical bag even as she shifted her body a tad so that Light Tail’s head had a little more room to toss and turn in her sleep. “I’ll wake you up roughly an hour before dawn. Give you some time to get all the guns cleaned and reloaded. We’ll take stock of ammo and meds then.”

Her hooves retreated into the darkness, and only then did Sling allow herself a few quiet moments of pain as she unconsciously squeezed her filly close to her, as if trying to convince a silent part of her mind that everything around her was real and that she wasn’t going to drop off and perish in the next thirty seconds. That this wouldn’t be the last time she would see or feel her daughter’s presence.

The pain in her side robbed her of any confidence of those hopes panning out.

--------------------------------------

Morning brought an entirely new set of challenges to her day.

Light Tail, as she’d predicted, was so ecstatic to see her awake (and alive) that she seemingly turned into a filly-sized tick, latching onto her and never letting go no matter what she said or did. Only when nature’s urgings became too great to contain was she forced to dislodge herself from her mother’s side and venture outside to take care of things, and she hated to admit that she felt a great relief wash through her when the terrified thing had let go of her. She’d been afraid that El-Tee would be too terrified or scared to even think of leaving the rest station, but if she was confident (or conscious enough) to find somewhere distant to relieve herself, she would probably be okay enough to walk a few miles to the next town today.

And with El-Tee out of sight, she finally had the transparent privacy she needed to beat her mind senseless with disparaging thoughts of how badly she’d screwed things up. She had not once even considered the possibility of that scrapyard being a favored site for banditry and ambushes despite it being nearly perfect for such things. She’d never thought to turn her PipBuck’s EFS back on after they’d left Stable 128 and got back on the road, she’d never thought to even look around a minute for any sign that there had been recent visitors in the scrapyard. She’d just been too consumed by her own guilt and grief over El-Tee witnessing her burning things to death with glee and laughing over it, to the point where the child felt compelled to end their suffering by killing them. Of all the things that this cruel wasteland could have inflicted upon a soul, she didn’t think she could find one that would match that level of innocence stealing without resorting to carnal abuses. And this one was all her fault.

Breakfast was an afterthought, barely noticed in her own self-loathing as she hurriedly cleaned out every firearm that Kite had collected and dropped in front of her. Her 10mm pistol and shotgun had seen a fair bit of use yesterday and actually had near-solid black cleaning patches coming out of the barrels and slides for a minute. El-Tee’s 9mm was a little less fouled, and her lightweight revolver needed only a couple of swabs through the barrel and cylinder chambers. Within a few minutes’ time she had them reloaded, re-lubed, and ready for another fight.

The recovered collection of arms from the dead mercenaries was in far rougher shape. One 10mm SMG, with a few splotches of rust on the exterior receiver finish and three thirty-round magazines whose finish was worn down to the bare steel, but still somewhat functional and the barrel looked as though it still had a few thousand rounds left in its life, but she wasn’t willing to bet on it lasting much longer if somepony decided to do entire magazine dumps through it. One over-and-under double-barrel shotgun, 20-gauge, that looked like it had been continually repaired and used since at least the time of the megaspells—the barrels were coated in a rust-like color and seemingly held to the stock with duct tape. The receiver plate was scarred and pitted almost into obscurity, and the latch release switch looked like it was held in place by a wrong-size screw, as it stuck out enough to completely obscure her sight picture when she lifted it up and aimed it up at the ceiling. She was willing to bet that the pony that had done that had not been able to find the right sized screw and simply used the closest fitting part he/she had on hoof. And when she hit the latch release to open the barrels for an interior inspection, she saw that this particular shotgun did not eject its ammunition automatically, which would mean that shells, fired or not, had to be removed manually. But the barrels themselves, at least on the inside, were still in decent enough shape to take a few hundred shots….except that BJ had only found eleven shells on the merc that had owned it. There was a crudely made sword of sorts in the corner that had only been given a cursory glance—it looked like it had been fashioned out of a sky wagon’s engine fan, a name plate from an office door for use as a guard, and a few layers of duct tape over a shaved-down bottom portion of the fan blade, suggesting that a griffon had used it prior to it finding its way into the hooves of its departed unicorn owner. Even Kite’s war-era, military-issue combat/survival knife wasn’t in this bad a shape. The 9mm pistol of the mare she’d spared was nowhere to be seen, suggesting that her melee victim had quietly slinked off with the weapon after regaining consciousness sometime after the fight.

The pilfered ammunition was no better. The eleven 20-gauge shells looked so pale and lackluster that she had a hard time telling if they had ever been yellow in their lifetime. The 10mm ammunition—all seventy-seven rounds of it—had what looked like sickly dark green spots of mold or grease over the unjacketed lead slugs, and the brass casings looked burnished and scratched up, like they had been used at least two or three times. If this was the quality of post-war munitions, it was a wonder to her that the guns were lasting as long as they were….or perhaps it explained why the guns she was finding were in such battered conditions.

Then again, Ada and Leon’s weapons seemed fairly well cared for, and certainly in far better shape than what she’d seen elsewhere. Perhaps this side of the prairie simply lacked the resources or facilities that the other half had? Whatever the case, the 10mm rounds were not what she wanted to be using herself for fear of a case rupture ruining her own weapon. The 20-gauge rounds and their accompanying shotgun would make for a decent trade offer to a traveling merchant. The 10mm SMG? She wasn’t sure what to do with it—she’d never fired anything on full-automatic before, preferring semi-automatic, aimed shots rather than a spray of lead. And with decent ammunition seemingly as rare as a weapon in decent condition, she wasn’t sure she wanted to be using anything like an SMG at anything beyond bad-breath distance. Even BJ wasn’t fond of it.

So with the recent ammo additions filtered out of their current stock….how many rounds were left? A month ago she had over two hundred 10mms, eighty-plus buckshot shells and some slug rounds, enough 9mm and .38 Special to afford some practice shooting. Several bounty hunts had seen a small portion of those rounds used up, and then yesterday, with the alarmingly high expense in ammunition in two separate fights…

“Not quite as many as there were yesterday, are there?” Kite’s voice broke into her thoughts softly, after what seemed like a minute’s worth of just staring at the pile of ammo she’d pulled out of her saddlebags.

She welcomed the chance to focus on something other than nearly dying yesterday afternoon. “Used a bit of it the last few weeks, hunting bounties. But I must’ve shot off a hundred rounds through my ten-mil alone yesterday…lost track of the shotgun round count. Half our supply of 10mm’s gone. Maybe a hundred decent rounds left….sixty-two buckshot shells and fourteen slugs? Forty-one rounds of .357, but Light Tail still can’t handle the recoil on those just yet. Thirty-nine .44 Mag rounds left. I came out of the stable with forty-two….”

“What about the mercs’ supply?” Kite asked, her hoof sweeping briefly over the separate pile of recently acquired munitions a few feet off to their right…and Sling’s eye finally caught sight of a bloodied gauze pad tied down with bandaging, just above the leg joint. “Ammo’s ammo, right?”

…..oh…right….blood transfusion…. “Exactly how is ammunition made out here? I doubt anypony’s started up a new munitions factory in the last hundred years.”

The answer confirmed her fears about “modern-day” ammunition supply. “….I think it’s mostly salvage. Shell casings, if they’re in decent shape, there’s a group up in Stifla that’ll re-use ‘em. Reloading, they call it. Bullets, they cast out of whatever lead they can find. But nopony else on this side of the valley has their kind of access to copper or the equipment to coat the bullets with it, so….most of what’s made now isn’t as good as war-era, and what little of it that is costs a good number of caps. You probably know more about this stuff than I do.”

“Some,” she growled darkly, eying the new ammo additions in a less favorable light. “The casings can be re-used with the right equipment, but usually not more than three or four times. After that you throw ‘em out, even if they look intact. They could rupture from the repeated heat and pressure stress, or if somebody makes a mistake and puts too much powder in it you run the risk of the thing blowing up in the chamber. Ruins the gun, and maybe you with it. With the kind of shape all these guns are in, it’s a miracle that anything’s still working in them.”

“Seen that a few times, actually,” Kite whispered, her eyes rolling up as she scoured her brain for the memories locked within it. “Bark Skin….our third master, the stable-trained doctor that taught me nursing? He’d make a trip to a town now and then to ply his trade. Sometimes he’d travel with a caravan, but sometimes he’d hoof it over on his own, with me and BJ in tow. Couple of caravans we were riding with got ambushed, and a lone doctor and two slaves are pretty easy targets too. Some of the raiders, their guns were so old and worn they’d literally explode when they fired them. Saw one griffon aim a bolt-action rifle at a brahmin pulling a wagon, only for the bolt to snap off and slam into his brain through his eye when he fired. Killed him right there.”

That’s not how I’d want to go, Sling shuddered, the mental image being a bit too gruesome for her to stomach it for long. Hell, I’d rather not die at a…

“Then you won’t be too sad to see these rounds end up as trading commodities,” she said instead, when the throbbing, pulsing aches in her side seemingly grew in size from the dark thoughts in her head. “Not sure how one would go knocking the primers out of the casings, but the powder and lead are still good. Or, if someone’s willing to take the risk, they can just use ‘em as is. The double-barrel 20-gauge is what scares me the most. That gun is suffering.”

“I’ve seen guns in worse shape and still working,” Kite said in return. “Not for long, but they worked. Stand up a minute. Take a short walk around, see how much it hurts to move.”

Sling had no illusions about how that would turn out, but for the sake of it she indulged the ex-slave anyway and carefully forced her legs to stand up. That in itself, didn’t hurt much, but moving forward—even at a casual walking pace—proved more painful to her side than she’d have cared for. She took a short lap around the dining area of the rest station, then returned to her sleeping bag with a pained grunt and laid back down. Even bandaged up and pressed down, those stitches stung. They didn’t have any painkillers to spare…

“….ow,” she moaned through her teeth, trying to push the pulsating, aching waves of fire in her side out of her mind and failing. “….how many healing potions did you say you went through? Because they didn’t work.”

“They stopped working at the fifth one,” Kite reminded her sharply. “Which was almost all you had left in your bags.”

“Wonderful,” she bit back bitterly, her magic reaching out to her weapons and sliding them closer to her travelling saddle…and the three blood-stained bullet holes in the left side….

Holes that the saddlebag would cover up once she re-attached it to the saddle.

“I’ve only seen potions stop working like that once before,” Kite went on, just as Sling’s magic latched onto one of the saddlebags and pulled it up onto the saddle, hooking up its zipper lining with the zipper on the saddle. “If I had to guess, I’d say that your body is somewhat resistant to magic, which includes the healing magic in potions. When we first met, when you took on Saurus’s gang and came out with a piece of wood impaled in your leg, it took you two potions to heal the wound, when normally it would only take one. And while the five I poured down your throat healed all the internal damage and closed up the wounds on your chest, I had to stitch up the bullet holes and incisions I made. Your face got a little attention from the potions, but….it’s going to have a nasty set of scars on it in a few weeks, eyelid included. I’m just thankful the eye itself wasn’t ruptured or you’d be half-blind for the rest of your life. As it is, you might still have some vision loss in it, but I was never trained in eye care. I never got a look at your eye before the potions were used, so I can’t say if it was damaged or not.”

The zipper flashed across to the right, re-attaching the saddlebag to the saddle, and she slowly re-did the loop-and-buckle latches at the bottom to secure the bag in place so it wouldn’t move around. She usually left them undone, but she didn’t want them moving around and making her pain any worse. “….how many stitches?”

“Eighteen,” Kite answered flatly. “Six per wound, plus the incisions. Got lucky, none of the slugs broke up on entry, but they went deep. You, uh….you didn’t need to use the restroom anymore when I was done….”

Despite having no memory of yesterday beyond the point where she’d been shot and left to die, she couldn’t help but feel a rush of blood flow into her cheeks out of shame. Twice in a day…. “…oh…”

Kite, however, was far more dismissive of it than she’d expected. “…don’t worry about it. You were shot, dying, being worked on with no painkillers or drugs of any kind. I would have been surprised if that didn’t happen. Would’ve made it a lot easier on me if you’d just fainted from the pain, but you didn’t. Like some part of you was afraid that if you did, that you wouldn’t make it through. You only passed out after I cleaned you up and started stitching the wounds. And like I said last night, Elly didn’t see a thing. BJ wouldn’t let her. All she knows is that you were screaming in pain for the better part of twenty minutes, which will be traumatizing enough. Sedative gave her a good night’s rest, but we can’t do that every night. She’ll have to work through it, and that may mean several restless nights and night terrors. Both of you, actually….”

She wanted to say that Light Tail was stronger than that. Stronger than her, even. She wanted to believe that her filly would come through this none the worse for the experience….

…but when the front door softly creaked open, she chanced a look up and saw a filly that barely resembled her little girl at all. Her frizzled mane, her bloodshot, weary eyes, her seemingly lifeless trot back towards her mother…for the life of her, Sling Shot could not find even one sign of the care-free child she’d been raising for the last ten years.

And when El-Tee came to a stop at the pile of guns laid out on the floor, and wordlessly collected the 9mm and .357 revolver from the floor to stuff them into their holsters on her filly-sized travelling saddle, Sling began to believe that the wasteland might have already taken away the most precious treasure she had left in this world.

And the wasteland’s only response to such a tragedy was, “Tough luck.”

“….BJ, get your pack together,” Kite called out to the other side of the decaying rest station. “We’re leaving soon.”

“Been waiting for thirty minutes, Mom,” the eternally disinterested colt called back, his voice moving across the floor as he spoke, indicating that he was already making way for the exit. “Faster we get going, the better.”

“We move as fast as Sling can manage, and no faster,” Kite barked back sharply. “You’re going to have to pick up some slack this time—”

Sling’s magic wrapped itself around her bloodied PipBuck and hastily flipped the “EFS” switch on, filling her one-eyed vision with a compacted, green-tinted overlay displaying, among other things, directional compass and the EFS’s threat matrix, which had already marked El-Tee, Kite, and BJ as friendly tags. “Leave him be, I’m the one who screwed up. If I’d had this damn thing on yesterday I’d have seen them coming and none of this would’ve happened in the first place. I won’t be making that mistake again.”

Neither of the ex-slaves seemed to have anything worthwhile to say about that, and BJ quickly showed himself out the door and on lookout duty. Even Kite was at a loss for words, and who could blame her? She’d probably thought she’d been smart enough to make full use of her PipBuck at all times.

Kite’s traveling pack was likewise already packed and ready to go, and she quietly retrieved it from the floor before turning towards the exit. “Elly, where are the pups?”

“….outside,” Light Tail answered in a low, sullen voice, her attention focused on getting her travelling saddle on and her three spare 9mm magazines stuffed into a pair of pouches on the right side. “Don’t think they wanna stay here much longer.”

“….don’t take long,” the scarred mare said, her hooves making way towards the door. “Those bodies in the scrapyard done attracted one pack of radhogs, others could be sniffing them out right now.”

Sling had only seen a radhog once, two weeks back, when she’d been tracking down a caravan robber in the uninhabited ruins of Syrup Mound’s northwestern corner for a bounty job, and she’d found it to be an aggressive animal. Charged her on sight, and if not for the PipBuck’s S.A.T.S. matrix it might have torn her up really bad. As it was, it took two shotgun slugs to the body to bring it down, and she had no desire to face down more than one at a time if she could help it. With a pained huff she hurriedly re-attached the other saddlebag to her harness, and was in the process of rolling up her sleeping bag when Light Tail finally stood up, her travelling saddle strapped on and secured to her person—

“….Kite, wait,” the filly spoke up loudly, her voice quivering slightly as she turned around and began trotting towards the other mare.

The grape-coated female stopped in her tracks, turning to face down the filly closing in on her. “…what is it—“

Without warning, Light Tail broke in a gallop to cover the last four steps, leaping up and grabbing Kite around the neck in a tight hug and a quick nuzzle across the crest—

“…t-thank you,” El-Tee croaked, barely able to speak the words as she squeezed and tightened her grip on the visibly stunned mare. She lingered for only a couple of moments after that, and then slowly released her hold and dropped back down onto the floor, making her way back to her mother and leaving the violet-eyed mare to stumble out the front door in something of a dazed stagger, her apple red tail swaying slightly with her movements.

Sling allowed herself a short-lived tear from her eye as she turned back to her sleeping bag, hastily rolling it up and tying it off. The wastes had worn both of them down already, tried to break them. She was sure it had broken her. But it hadn’t taken her night light. Despite all the psychological trauma no doubt pressing upon her even now, she was, deep down, still Light Tail.

And if she had any say in the matter, Light Tail would stay that way until the day she died.

--------------------------------------

Her brain was nowhere near ready to work again. Yesterday was just too much.

Abandoned stable with a few scruffy-looking vagrants barely eking out a living in this wasteland. A field filled with giant cow-sized ants, some of which burped fire when the mood struck them, who all had a murderous taste for pony flesh. That mean griffon Saurus….and her mom, bleeding, shot….

…dying….

After that, her brain sorta just…broke. A good deal of things that happened after that were something of a blur to her. She could remember screaming for Kite, screaming for Mom to not die and leave her all alone, she could remember Kite screaming at her to go back outside and leave her alone with Mom on a dirty, old dining table in the rest station….

….she could remember BJ dragging her outside by the tail when she wouldn’t budge….and remember the short hoof-fight she lost trying to get past him…

…and all she could remember after that, was Mom’s screaming, and her own crying as she tried to block it all out. She thought BJ was also crushing her with his body, but Mom’s screams weren’t nearly as loud as she thought they should’ve been. She hadn’t cared so much then, but now that she had a few calm hours to think about it, it was beginning to look like he’d done it on purpose, like he was using himself as a pair of earmuffs. Or something.

She could remember Kite coming out a while later, when the screams had died out….and after that, nothing. Just a big blank. She’d been in such a deep sleep that she couldn’t even remember falling asleep at any time yesterday.

Probably for the best. What she woke up to was far better than any dream she might’ve had. Mom was somewhat awake, in pain, and bandaged up all over her body and face…but she was alive. Whatever Kite had to do, it had worked. Mom was alive. She wasn’t going to die.

She had to keep telling herself that all through the morning before she started to believe it.

The next town—Maize, Kite called it—showed up like Syrup Mound had, a blur of rough rectangular shapes in the far distance, roughly three hours after they’d left the rest station (and at a rather slow pace). And while Mom had to stop for a few minutes several times in that time frame, at the end of the long walk she didn’t seem to be any worse off than she was when they’d left. She wasn’t panting or having trouble breathing, wasn’t coughing up blood, and only cussed at her pain once every thirty minutes (which was usually when she would stop and lie down). At that point, she began to worry less about Mom and more about the new town they were walking into.

Like Syrup Mound, and that first settlement in the ruins she took to calling “Lome” after that faded welcome sign at the city limits, Maize was a crumbling, ruined shell of its former life as a center of pony civilization, and didn’t have any tall, towering buildings like Syrup Mound did. There were ponies and griffons on guard at the main road into the town, and on the rooftops, and they were far better armed than the guards she’d spotted at Lome. She was guessing that it had something to do with the massive cow pen that was the very first building they passed by—most of the two-headed cows were hitched up to wagons, or the warped, worn out husks of old rubber-wheeled, ground-bound “motorized” wagons that had engine housings in their rear, and she could see ponies and griffons loading them up with various boxed or barreled goods. Each group of wagons seemed to be separate from the rest—one was guarded primarily by griffons, while another was staffed almost entirely by earth ponies. A third had a mixture of unicorn and earth ponies working them, and a fourth had a mix of all three species.

But what drew her attention most was the herd of two-headed cows in the pen, and the ponies who were tending to the animals and the pen conditions….because every pony inside the pen had those metal exploding collars around their necks, and very few of them would stare at anything other than the animals or their work.

Slaves.

BJ’s voice crept into her left ear with a soft, subtle warning. “Elly, stop staring, don’t give the guards a reason to come out.”

With a slight shudder, she tore her eyes away from the pen and returned to continually looking around her in every direction. After yesterday, she wasn’t willing to risk any more trouble with anypony, ever again. Mom was still hurt, and needed help that Kite couldn’t give her.

They quickly passed by the caravans and continued onward into the town’s well-protected center, where the majority of its market was established. Here, most of the buildings were largely intact, with only a couple of them missing portions of a wall or roof, and many of them sported hoof-made and painted signs tacked over the original, war-era signboards to signify the new owners and their wares. One rose-red brick building, two stories high and with bare concrete window sills, was labeled “GREASE JOINT’S JUNK”, and through an open window she could indeed see all manner of twisted, gnarled junk metal piled up in stacks of crates, as well as a couple of shelves behind a counter with broken display cases stuffed end to end with more intact-looking objects—toasters, desk fans, a couple of roll pins for a kitchen, a coffee maker, stuff like that. Another store, in a run-down grayscale brick-and-mortar building that she suspected was once a flower shop, had a sign over its front door reading “FORELORN REPAIR”, but all its windows were boarded up with old plywood or sky wagon doors.

Neither Kite or Mom paid any attention to any of these stores and their wares, but continued to weave their way through the crowd of ponies in search of a very specific place—

“There,” Kite called it out roughly two minutes later, squeezing her way through a group of uncooperative stallions that seemed more interested in their conversation than in getting out of an injured mare’s path. “Five blocks down, left side. Overdose’s Clinic.”

“That’s a comforting name for a medical pony,” Mom huffed, her horn briefly coming to life and not-so-gently shoving the stallions aside. She thought she saw one turn around to give her grief over it, but the second Mom met his gaze and took hold of her massive revolver, they both backed off and found a quieter corner of the street to be at.

“He’s one of the only three doctors in the Union’s territory that can diagnose eye problems,” Kite explained, one of her forelegs pointing to a marble-faced stone building with quaint-looking pillars decorating its front doorway. “We’ll get him to take a quick look at your eye, see if there’s any damage to it, then we’ll hit up the inn a few blocks from here and find us a room to hold up in for the next coupla of weeks.”

“Two weeks?” Mom protested with a pained gasp, glancing back at her and BJ to make sure they were still there before continuing forward. “We can’t stay that long, th—”

“It took us over three hours to cover ten miles in your current condition,” Kite cut her off. “That’s not even counting the five times we stopped to let you rest for a few minutes. We should’ve already been here and been done with this. We need to stay put until you’ve recovered. Or would you rather face down Saurus again the way you are now?”

That shut Mom up, for once. Her only response was a wordless grumble as she trotted onward in Kite’s wake, being careful to avoid stepping on Max when the strangely protective pup took up space by her side and refused to go away.

For that matter, both pups were being weird. They didn’t do this yesterday, but…

….but nopony was hurt either…at least, not ‘till Saurus showed up…it’s like they know Mom’s hurt and needs help…

…were those fuzzballs really that smart?

Her initial answer was a hesitant yes—when they reach the clinic doors and pushed their way through, Max immediately began barking and yipping at the air above him, which predictably attracted the attention of the dark tan unicorn stallion hunched down behind an old desk in the far right corner of the room—

“Dammit, third time this mo—” he huffed angrily in a husky voice, coming up from behind the desk with what looked like a double-barreled shotgun in the grasp of his horn magic—

He changed his tone and manners almost immediately the moment he saw what was in front of him, and put the gun back down behind the desk. “……ooornneeeeng what medical services do you require?”

She couldn’t help but notice that this might’ve been something she’d have laughed at if she were in a far better mood. As it was, all she could muster was a tap against Max’s ear with a brief burst of telekinesis, and that seemed to be enough to get him to stop barking and come back to her.

“I hear the doctor here is pretty decent at eye care,” Mom answered carefully, never sitting on her haunches or taking her eye off of him.

The stallion’s voice didn’t sound nearly as old as his gray mane might have suggested, and he seemed very physically fit, more so than Mom. “You do appear to be having eye troubles of late, yes. And I am inde….wait, who is that behind you?”

“It’s just me, OD,” Kite replied somewhat sheepishly, though she seemed more embarrassed than afraid of him. “…new owner and all….”

OD’s face literally brightened up, no longer bored or studious, and he promptly leapt over his desk and quickly galloped to meet the scarred mare on a much more personal level. “Kitey!!!! You devilish girl, you show up in all manner of odd places!! But if this is your new owner, I doubt you’ll be in good hooves for long, she’s such a mess—”

“Yes, oddly enough, that’s why we’re here,” Kite said quickly, rearing up lightly as she backed away from the oddball stallion. “She ran into Saurus and lived. I did what I could, but I don’t know about her eye. Told her that you could help with that.”

OD’s brief shower of joy and playfulness died instantly, and he turned back to Mom with a far more discerning eye than he’d shown before. “….this scruffy thing? Little pudgy around the belly.”

“That would be the five layers of bandaging keeping pressure on the gauze pads over my eighteen stitches,” Mom snarled back, as if she took some offense to being called “pudgy”. And she was, kinda. At least, she was when they left the stable. She’d thinned out a bit since. “And Kite is exaggerating a little. I wouldn’t have lived if she hadn’t been there to pull the slugs out of me. If you can help with the eye, great, I’d like to get it over with. Otherwise we’ll be on our way.”

“No no no, I think not,” OD rambled quickly, and suddenly zipped away from her and into a cramped hallway on the left side of the room, pulling his shotgun along with him. “If you shot at Saurus and lived, he won’t leave you alone until you’re dead. Can’t have you trying to fight back half-blind. Come along, dear, we’ll get your post-surgery examination done with and see about that eye. I suspect it’s not severe or you wouldn’t be here.”

OD had barely disappeared around a corner in the hall when Mom glared back at Kite through her uninjured eye. “…is he even all there in the head?”

“….he’s odd, yes, but he’s good,” Kite admitted, her ears flattening slightly. “…a-and he’s one of the few decent stallions I’ve met in my life. Taught me a few things when Bark Skin owned me, things that saved your life yesterday.”

Mom glared at her still, but after a moment she turned away and hobbled her way around the desk, and they reluctantly followed close behind. The short, thin hallway spilled out into a larger central room, complete with old bench seats resting against nearly every bare wall, a set of stairs to a second floor, and what looked like a set of teller windows along a wall on the left. The room itself had two halls of its own, one leading off to the left, and another to the right, and a quick look around revealed the “clinic” to be formerly another building, one that seemed very dull and official-looking judging by all the name plates she saw beside every door. Things like “TREASURER”, “TAX ASSESOR”, “RECORD KEEPING”, and such.

A small, tiny spark of curiosity finally began to come to life within her cloud of despair. “….wait, this ain’t a clinic….”

OD’s hearing was a lot sharper than she’d expected. Even with a twenty-foot lead on them, he seemed to have heard her as clearly as though he were right next to her. “It is now, by necessity,” he laughed lightly. “But before the end of the war, I suspect that this building actually used to be the local courthouse building. The actual clinic on the north end of town was destroyed long ago, either in the war or by the decades of age and decay afterward. I imagine many of the townsfolk went south to Syrup Mound for serious medical care anyway, so this quaint little town wouldn’t have had a complete facility available. Courtroom itself is upstairs, but it’s mostly a storage space for us here. Speaking of which, you kids may remain here while Kitey and miss….er…wait, you never did tell me your name…”

“Sling Shot,” Mom answered dryly. “…how long will this take?”

“Depends,” OD replied as he continued down the hall. “I have an eye solution that may or may not enable me to perform a proper eye exam, depending on how your eye responds to it. The children will be fine, I keep a military-grade Mister Handy ‘bot on the premises. Pain in the hindquarters to keep repaired, but even Saurus won’t take it on. He found out why the hard way. It’s out running a quick errand for me, but it should be returning shortly. It won’t harm you unless you shoot at it.”

Wh…does Saurus hate everybody? El-Tee wondered silently, watching OD, Mom, and Kite grow further and further away from them, eventually slipping through a door somewhere in the middle of the hallway and closing it behind them. More to the point, if he’s that violent to everybody, how is it that nopony’s killed him by now?

Left alone with a colt more interested in the air than her, she silently moved towards a cushioned bench seat to their right, near the hallway leading back into the front lobby. A quick hop landed her in the middle of the bench, and he followed her up, dropping down beside her as settled herself down into a comfortable position. The pups were content to take up some space in front of the bench and behave themselves, for once.

After a short lifetime of silence (or probably just ten seconds), he surprised her for a second time by deigning to start a conversation with her.

“….umm….ss….s-sorry….’bout yesterday….bustin’ your nose and stuff….”

Nothing else in the world could have delivered as strong a shock to her system as what she felt right then (except maybe a repeat of yesterday afternoon), and she had to look at him for several seconds before she believed that those words had actually come from him. “….o-oh…sure….’s fine…I wasn’t really…me, right then…”

“…no, I’m pretty sure it was you. You hit like a girl.”

….okay, that sounds more like BJ… “….gee, thanks…”

“You should thank me,” he huffed back. “Now that you know, you can work on hitting like a boy.”

“…I think I liked you better when you were quiet.”

“I think I like you better when you’re quiet too.”

“Pffft, you would. You hardly say nothin’.”

“Still better than being enough of an airbag to fly a kite.”

A seemingly alien noise burst through her nose from her throat, which she recognized a moment later as a….

…a laugh?

…could she still find something to laugh at, after…after yesterday? Was it right to laugh at things so soon?

“…how you can stand to just sit there and watch everything go by and not care beats the heck outta me.”

“Beat you? Okay,” the colt laughed with a slight, sadistic mirth, and promptly locked a foreleg around her neck while he proceeded to rustle and mangle her mane with the other. “Should be easier than scrambling eggs for a griffon’s breakfast, not much up there—”

Ironically enough, his attempts to belittle her or irritate her just wound up making her laugh out loud in earnest—his hoof found a ticklish spot right at the back of her neck, and before long she was at his mercy, her hind legs kicking at the air as she tried to squirm her way out of his grasp. “H-he-he-hahaa hey stoppit—”

“What was that? I can’t understand a thing yer sayin’—”

His hoof began to rub a little harder at her neck, and now she forced herself onto her side to try and orient the back of her neck away from the offending limb. “Eeeeaaaaaaaahhhahahahaha nooo stop stoppit please I give—”

“Give? Give me what?” he feigned in mock ignorance, and a brief touch of magic began to scratch at her spine in search of a second ticklish spot—

“I give up!!” she shrieked in laughter when he found that spot just behind her shoulder blades and started torturing it to the point where she could barely fight back anymore. “I give I give stoppit hehahahaa seriously stoppit before I pee myself—”

In truth, she was nowhere near that tickled, but just the threat was enough to make him stop and let go of her neck, and she quickly rolled away from him for a couple of feet before coming to a rest on her back. And still she couldn’t stop laughing. Probably wouldn’t for at least a few more seconds…

…but she felt so much better now than she was when was just moping around on a couch, crying at all the bad things that had gone down yesterday…

…better….

….o-oh Luna, was that what he was doing….

“There,” BJ’s voice broke into her stunned thoughts, confirming that sneaking, tear-inducing revelation in her head. “Even with all that bad crap that went down, you can still laugh at the good when you find it.”

Her chuckles died in her chest as she rolled back over onto her belly, no longer regarding him as a clueless, emotionless husk of a colt that had no business wearing a pony’s coat. “….yo….you….you can think?”

She almost regretted blurting that out, but to her great relief he didn’t seem the least bit bothered by it. “I ain’t been encouraged to. If….if you knew half the crap I saw…you’d shut yourself out too. It’s…it’s just easier to get over it if I don’t think about it, and just shut everything and everypony out. Always gettin’ traded off to some new master or another…ya never know where yer gonna end up or how long you’ll stay there. Don’t help to get to leanin’ on folk if you know you won’t be there later. Gotta learn to look after yourself.”

A well of pity and regret began to stir inside her. Despite knowing he’d been a slave all his life, she’d not often thought about the kinds of things he might have had to suffer—only that such a life had made him too silently obedient for his own good. She’d never thought to consider that his distant, detached demeanor could have been meant to shield his feelings from an uncaring world.

“…..why this…why now, and not two weeks ago?”

“….t-that coulda been my mom yesterday,” he sighed into the air. “…I never seen anypony I knew break down like you did…I don’t really know why, myself. I just…felt I oughta do somethin’. Got too used to you being all hyper and talkative and dumb that I don’t know how to deal with you when you’re like me…even if I prefer the quiet…”

She didn’t feel pity now. She felt sad. Sad that maybe for the first time in his life, he had what some folk would consider a friend, and he had no idea what it meant or why he might have been feeling so….different.

“…ya never had friends, did ya?”

“Don’t know that I’d know it if I did.”

“….I think you just proved it, actually. Back home, when my friends were sad or depressed, I’d try to cheer ‘em up, make ‘em less mopey, make ‘em remember that just ‘cause they just had a rough time over somethin’, that they weren’t alone. It…it kinda helps when you know ponies that care about how you feel, that won’t abandon you or stay away just ‘cause you’re not in the mood to play and have fun. Friends stick with each other through bad and good. It’s…I guess it’s how we weather the bad without losing it completely…”

If anything she’d said had stirred or touched any latent feelings of warmth or friendliness in him, his face showed no sign of it—only that same distant, unmotivated stare that he offered the world as his mask. But she knew he was more of the type to say what he felt or meant, rather than show it. “….so is that what we are now….friends?”

“Probably….not the kind of friend I’m used to…but….”

He finally groaned in disappointment, burying his head in his forelegs as if seeking escape from an increasingly uncomfortable subject. “….aaah, crap. Shoulda kept my mouth shut, now you’re gonna bug me forever.”

…well, if that’s what he expects, I’d better not disappoint him!

“Bug you? Okay!” she shouted back, her face breaking into a mad grin at the promise of payback for his “ticklish” assault. “Do you know that you tend to hang close to me when we’re on the road even though my mom’s got the biggest guns—”

His head snapped up, eyes widened in what looked like a dawning realization that he’d just walked himself into a trap from which there was no escape. “Oh shit no—”

She went right along without missing a beat—he’d even given her something to roll with! “And you keep cussin’ like Mom and Kite, ya oughta quit that, it ain’t nice but now that I think about you could probably tell me what some of that stuff means—”

“Shut up, Elly—”

The pups below began to stir from their mild nap, Mona even poking her head up over the bench seat out of curiosity. “Like this one f-word my mom blurted yesterday, when I asked her what it meant she acted like she knew she wasn’t supposed to say it around me and told me to start shootin’ at Saurus—”

BJ began to rouse up from his lying position, his legs unfolding and pushing his body up off the ground. “I mean it, shut up—”

“—or that s-word, she says that like, all the time when she thinks I can’t hear it, and it must mean somethin’ bad or somethin’ ya don’t like—”

“Ya mean like blabbermouth little fillies that don’t know the meaning of ‘shut up’?” he growled loudly—

“Hey, wait, is it anything like ‘crap’? ‘Cause I think I know that one means and Mom never yells at me for sayin’ i—”

—he suddenly leapt towards her from his side of the bench and slung his forearm around her neck once more, trapping her head against him as he began to assail her neck and mane once more—

“—iiiieeeaaaaha ha ha ha ha haAAAA oh Luna not this agaaaaainnn HAHAHAHAA—”

With her head forcibly tilted off towards the far hallway where Mom and Kite had gone, she could no longer see Mona or Max staring at them as though they’d just lost their minds. In fact, she couldn’t see much of anything. Her eyes were already welling up with tears, and her hind legs were starting to kick at the wall—

Their impromptu playing was brought to a sudden, ignominious halt by the rude—but lively—interruption by a third voice, one she’d not heard in over a month but had already managed to remember. “Awwww, that’s so cute, you gonna kiss her or what, little dude?”

BJ’s body jolted so hard that he wound up falling off of the bench—and with his forelegs wrapped around her, he ended up pulling her down with him. The both of them landed on the cold, hard floor with a meaty THUMP!, and BJ was practically flying away from her before the sound of their impact had faded—

“Gah whatthehell don’t be gross—”

El-Tee just kept laughing as she rolled back upright, but she was having trouble getting herself to stand up without collapsing into the floor, she was laughing so hard. “Hehahahahaaaa oh Luna you got him good Ada—”

“Hey, his fault for letting his guard down,” Ada’s voice chuckled, her sharp-tipped talons grabbing hold of her and lifting her back up onto the bench. “And I hate to break it to ya, but if you guys stopped here looking for meds, Doc Overdose don’t sell much of his stock. Unless….you’re here ‘cause you need them…”

Between BJ’s tickling and Ada’s teasing of him over it, she couldn’t find it in her to be depressed or hurt by Mom getting shot, bad as that moment had been, but just remembering it was enough to kill her laughter. “…hehehe….ahh, I mean…yeah….Mom….she got hurt yesterday, real bad. Kite…she saved her, but she still can’t move too good, took us three hours to walk ten miles. Her face is wrapped up good too…Kite said the doc here could help, soo…”

Ada’s feathered face lost its cheerfulness, and her body seemingly slumped and deflated within her spotted-tan armored barding. “…this have anything to do with those bodies Leon and I found at that old service station down south? Because we found a few wrappings that looked like your stable rations in a trash can, inside the station. Better to bury your trash, that sticks out too much.”

…o-oh crap, I didn’t think about that… “…y-yeah….it was Saurus, and some goons of his….”

At the mention of Saurus, Ada’s eyes suddenly cleared up…but what Light Tail saw was not joy, or excitement.

She saw rage. A quiet, reserved rage, bottled up and ready to blow. Like Mom, almost.

“….where’s your mom at, squirt?” the large griffon asked next, her voice curt but noticeably controlled.

El-Tee looked back down the hall that Mom and Kite had gone down, to point her in the general direction—

—Kite’s body had already begun to slow to a gentle trot, apparently having heard her and BJ playing around and coming out to see what was going on, and her eyes were fixated solely on Ada as she trudged into the central room. “….what’s going on out here? You were making a lot of noise.”

“They’re just playin’ around, like kids ought to,” Ada answered for her, to her relief… and a slight mischievous smirk of her beak gave away the rest of her answer before she could give it. “…think your boy wants to kiss her, too.”

BJ’s shriek of rage was unmistakable, and El-Tee couldn’t help but laugh at his misfortune. “I do not!!” he howled with embarrassment, trying to hide behind the other side of the bench. “Jeez, I do one favor for ya and this is what I get?!”

“Yer welcome!” El-Tee laughed back.

“We’ll talk later, son,” Kite promised him darkly regardless, keeping her focus on the griffon. “And you’d better have a damn good explanation for why you and your partner can’t seem to find the slaver that has no trouble with finding us. He was waiting for us at a rest station ten miles south of here, you stup—”

“I’m sorry,” Ada sputtered back, her voice faltering for a slight moment. “…we did track him to a mercenary company here, but lost him when he went back out into the wastes four days ago, heading northeast. Went through a slaver’s guild pen and a Union checkpoint on the freeway junction leading out to Stifla, then hooked south around a fissure and went into the ruins of Grainville. Lost his trail at the fissure, didn’t find his campsite outside Grainville until yesterday. Took us a day to follow the new trail out here….and we spotted him in town, back at that merc company he hired his new hands from. Found some ration pack wrappers labeled “115”, thought you guys might’ve come this way to take care of injuries.”

Kite’s aggressive posturing—and El-Tee’s sense of safety and security—died an inglorious, silent death, and fear began to take root in the both of them. “…o-oh shit, no…no no no, Sling’s in no shape to fight anybody—”

“She won’t have to fight anyone,” Ada assured them, getting back up on all fours and taking a quick glance down the hall that Kite had emerged from. “Pretty sure Saurus already knows you guys are here, I spotted one of the mercs on the street a few blocks down, watching this clinic with a pair of binoculars. Took off before I could get a good look, so I don’t think he knows that I’m here, yet. I wanna to talk to Sling first though, make sure I’m not missing anything. Something about this feels off.”

Whatever anger or distrust Kite had for the griffons, she didn’t let it get in the way of their finding a way out of this increasingly terrifying mess. This was supposed to be a safe place…. “Sixth door on the left, down that hall. But what about the front door?”

El-Tee had figured on Leon being close, seeing as he and Ada never seemed to go too far apart from each other for very long, and she was somewhat comforted by the sound of his voice coming from the hallway leading towards the front lobby. “Front door’s covered. Make it fast, A.”

Ada took the warning to heart and promptly bolted away from them, into the hall and towards Mom and OD, leaving the three of them somewhat alone for the immediate future.

And with nothing else to take her budding frustration with the griffons out on, Kite began to focus on the next most important thing on her list. “….so what’s this about a kiss, son?”

BJ flailed his forelegs up over his face and ducked back behind the bench in a vain attempt to hide from his mother, unknowingly drawing a quiet giggle out of the filly he’d tormented moments earlier. “Oh, for Luna’s sake, kill me now….”

--------------------------------------

Kite’s tail had barely slipped out through the door when Overdose turned back to her, as though nothing at all had interrupted his work. “Any ill feelings or symptoms? Nausea, upset stomach, chills, feverish—”

“Nothing of the sort,” she bit back through a brief flare of pain in her side as his magic poked at her exposed stitches. “Just a lot of friggin’ pain OW watch it that really stings.”

“That’s good,” he muttered back, his nose nearly touching the blasted stitches and their iodine-soaked threading. “Kitey got you stitched up almost perfectly, I don’t see these coming loose provided you don’t run. Could take a few days, or ten to twelve, but eventually these will be snipped out as the wounds fuse shut. How’s the eye?”

When the doc mentioned the eye he’d doused with some sort of cold, sharp-smelling liquid, she’d begun to wish she’d just had stitches to complain about. The cuts running across the left side of her face began to burn as droplets of the solution leaked out of her left eye, which in her opinion did not make up for the rapidly clearing vision she was being granted by the stuff. Moments earlier, when the bandaging had been removed, her clear, if slightly offset vision, had been given a blurry “overlay”, mixing up into a confusing swirl of clear details and fuzzy masses of color. But with the eye solution freshly applied, it was rapidly clearing up to a point where her vision was almost picture perfect once more. “….it feels better than the rest of me….”

“Vision clearing up?”

“Quickly. What is this stuff?”

“A prototype spell-treated solution I found in a smashed clinic in Trotpeka, years ago,” Overdose mumbled as he began to scrutinize her eye with the use of a slightly cracked, head-sized magnifying glass device of some sort that she couldn’t identify…or ever remember seeing in Stable 115’s infirmary, for that matter. “There was an R&D lab under the ground floor, escaped much of the war’s end and its terrible destruction. Several crates of the stuff survived inside a climate-spell controlled vault. Long story short, this solution clears up any temporary blindness or blurriness that might arise from extended periods of eye closure when one is awake. Should let us get a quick eye test done. I take it by the PipBuck on your leg that you’re the latest wanderer from the one-one-five, do you happen to remember the results of your last eye exam?”

She’d long ago learned to be less than surprised when someone deduced her origins by the presence of her PipBuck and its bright white “115” on its outer casing, which to date she had not been able to remove or deface by means of magic, scraping tools, or unhealthy amounts of old (and likely useless) paint thinner. “20/15. Used to be nearly 20/10, but about three years ago my eyes got splashed with some manner of chemical in the infirmary during a scheduled physical. Don’t know what it was, just that it damaged my eyes a bit. Still better than average vision.”

“Oh wow,” Overdose marveled in slight awe. “Well, hopefully there isn’t too much loss, vision like that is exceedingly rare in this hell of a world. Most possess good 20/20 vision, but…well, suffice it to say I’ve only met one pony with superior eyesight before today. Sit upright, if you would, and look ahead at the chart on the wall over there while I get the lights.”

With a deep sigh of resignation, she did as he asked and re-positioned herself into a sitting position on her hindquarters as the lights dimmed and a large, metal instrument suspended by a mechanical arm swung towards her. She recognized it within a couple of seconds as a phoropter instrument for eye examinations, but knew little else about it other than the fact that the front of the thing was seemingly covered in numbered dials and lenses. Having been through an eye exam at least once a year for as long as she could remember, she already had a fair idea of what lay ahead for the next quarter hour or so.

They’d hardly been at it a minute, however, when the door opened once more and allowed an explosion of light to flood the room and obscure the eye chart roughly twenty feet away from her—

“So what was that racket out there?” Sling asked lightly, her eyes scanning down the chart all the way to the second-smallest line, “F D P L T C E O”, at which point those letters began to blur ever so slightly.

Just like last year.

The voice that answered her question was not Kite’s. “Just kids bein’ kids, for once.”

Sling’s horn tingled with magic, quickly shoving the phoropter out of the right half of her face long enough to make sure that she wasn’t hearing things, and th—

It’s her, she snarled, dark thoughts beginning to cloud her mind as Ada’s body obscured the doorway in that mottled-tan body armor and boonie hat, with at least two long guns strapped over her back.

“Ada,” Doc Overdose said politely, gently shoving the phoropter back over Sling’s face once more. “If you’re going to occupy the room, close the door behind you so I can continue my test.”

The griffon’s tail complied with the request and quickly snapped the door shut, filling the room with darkness once more, save for the projection of the eye chart on the wall.

“Good. Sling Shot, can you read out the bottom line?”

“Not clearly,” she snipped back curtly.

A click later, the bottom line cleared up. “How about now?”

“Yes.”

“Read it?”

“P, E, Z, O, L, C, F, T, D.”

Another click—and a noticeable switch of lenses through the machine—and the bottom line blurred slightly. “How about now?”

“Slightly fuzzier, but still readable.”

A third click, and with the swish of a faint, gray blur that was a lens, “P E Z” grew harder to discern. “And now?”

“Worse. Pez, olec, frag this dude, if you’re wondering if I can see it.”

A fourth click later, the line was obscured enough that she could no longer read it. “And now?”

“No dice, doc.”

“Good.”

As the lenses switched back to their original setting, Ada finally found a moment to inject herself into Sling’s world. “El-Tee and Kite say Saurus roughed you up pretty bad.”

Sling’s fore hooves pressed down into the stiff, cushioned examination bed beneath her out of a barely suppressed rage. “If Kite hadn’t been there, they’d be burying me right now.”

Doc Overdose seemed to care little for her having a conversation with another being…or he knew better than to get in the path of an angry, armed mare. He simply carried on as though Ada wasn’t even there, and she seemed content to return the favor. With another series of clicks, her right eye suddenly saw nothing but pitch black. “Start again from the top of the chart, and move down until you can’t read it anymore.”

Guess he’s satisfied with how both eyes work together already….

Another twenty seconds passed—with her making it all the way down to the third-smallest line—before Ada found another break through which to speak. “How’d it go down?”

“Up close. Three rounds in my left side, point blank. Ask Kite for details, all I know after I got shot is that she had to pull them out with no painkillers, no anesthesia, and whatever tools and med supplies we had on hoof.”

The lens switched once more, rendering the bottom line unreadable. “Sling, can you see the bottom line?” Overdose asked out loud.

“Not anymore.”

The lens switched again, and the “P E Z” line cleared up slightly. “How about now?”

“Not much better. Still hard to read.”

He switched the lens, this time to one that made the line readable, if still fuzzy. “Now?”

She responded by reading out the line, slowly, slightly squinting at the letters to clear them up a little when she wasn’t sure.

Afterward, he reset the machine to its original settings, and started over again. Down the chart, and another twenty seconds, this time making it all the way to the bottom—

—and then he abruptly began to focus on the larger lines near the top, but here he had to go through nearly an entire cylinder of lenses before they would even become remotely blurred. About five minutes, all told.

It was here that Ada would start to take up a little more of the conversation space.

“….point blank? In the body? Is that all he did?”

“Doc, stop a minute,” Sling called out, her magic enveloping the phoropter and gently swinging it away from her. “And turn the lights on for a second.”

Her eyes, recently adjusted to the low light of the eye chart projection, were stung as the room lights flooded her vision, but they quickly adjusted to the higher brightness. And more importantly, it gave Ada a good look at her slashed, bloody face as she snapped her left eye shut and stared back at her with the other.

The griffon’s face cringed slightly as she took in the injury in the full light. “….guess that explains the eye exam….”

“I’m pretty sure you’ve already been through that scrapyard,” she hissed back, a slight jolt of pain shooting through her face through the still-burning cuts. “They were waiting. And like a bucking idiot I left my damn PipBuck off and never knew they were there until he climbed over the wreckage and slashed my face up. Said something about it not being like clipping a wing, but that it was a start. Even threatened to r-….to hurt my little girl….”

Ada’s face was no longer willing to look at hers, and the griffon sullenly turned away and allowed her to resume the examination.

Briefly.

Within a minute—and the determination by Overdose that no amount of lens switching would make the top-two thirds of the chart unreadable—Ada did, at last, find something to swear about.

“….awww, shiiit!” she roared, a low, primalistic growl mixing itself in with her angry voice. “I don’t believe this—”

“You’d better believe it, you la—”

“No, no, this whole thing, it’s a sun-damned trap!” the griffon continued to curse, seemingly at herself, as she began to claw at her own ruffled feathers.

This degree of interruption with his work was more than Overdose was willing to tolerate, and he promptly injected himself into what had been a second side conversation inside his own examining room. “Ada, I can assure you I’ve had no contact with Saurus in two years, not after what he did to—”

“Not you! Me!” Ada clarified more angrily. “The trap’s for me!”

For a third time Sling pushed the medical instrument away from her, now thoroughly tired of this griffon and what seemed like a mountain of excuses for failing to track down a target that had no trouble finding her. “This should be good. Tell me why that raping asshole would go to the trouble to try to kill me in the hopes that you would care enough to come looking for him.”

“Because he’s here, in this town, right now, back with the gang of mercs he hired his last bunch from!” Ada snarled, more angry with herself than with whatever situation she seemed to think herself in. “Look, if he wanted you truly dead right there, he’d have put two in your brain to make sure of it. I know it.”

There you go, Sling spat back silently. You do know more about him than you let on at first…

“I’m sure you do. Since he used to run with your little gang of mercenaries.”

The expected reply—indignation, and tacit refusal of her theory—never came. Only a hateful, self-directed stare at anything other than her face. “…because’s he my brother.”

Sling felt a great deal of air being sucked out of her lungs, along with her anger towards this seemingly shrinking griffon. “…what?”

“...my family, my whole family…we’re all Runners. It’s where our ancestors came from. He was my spotter, always had been. When the war with the Union started, we were posted on the valley, sniping ghouls for ranging practice when the first Union troops tried crossing. They came right up to our hide, and his first taste of close combat…it changed him. I could see it even then, but I didn’t say anything. Like it opened up some primal hunting instinct in him. The war only made it worse. Every time he got into combat, he seemed to like it even more, it was like a chem to him. Two years in, and he got himself assigned on lurps. I didn’t see him again until after the cease-fire a year later…”

Lurps….lurps…..wait, does she mean long-rang-recon patrol? “…go on.”

“…he was almost an animal, at times, near the end,” Ada continued, her voice now an almost reverent whisper. “I think he expected the war to have gone a lot better for us, but he was out a month at a time, at the least. That left him out of touch with the rest of us. He didn’t know we’d lost at Fort Wiley ‘till after the war, when his patrol snuck back across the valley and back home. Think that finally pushed him into full-on crazy, what with all the wicked shit lurp ops could get into. Got violent. Picked up a rep for….savage lust, best way I can put it. This went on for two years, and then dad finally got fed up, had me go with him to round him up from his post at the southern end of the valley...”

“…he’d vanished?”

“…no, he was there. Using his post as a contact point with slavers from across the valley. Had a little system set up for it. Now and then when he went on patrol he’d come across some travelers on the roads. Ones he figured stood a good chance of not being missed, he captured and sold off to the slavers when they were due to come by…we happened to come in on one such meeting….whole lot of ‘em were….ummm…”trying” the poor mare out….”

She felt her mouth grow numb, and her brain, for whatever reason, began to tell her eyes to release tears, because she felt the sting of saltwater on her cuts a moment later.

“…dad started the firefight, figured it was best to take them out when they had their minds on other things. Woulda worked any other day, but that afternoon…I think seeing Saurus doing what he was threw him off real bad, couldn’t hit anything for shit, and I wasn’t much better. Only got half of ‘em before Saurus got around to our left flank…..and, he just killed dad, right beside me…his blood and brains all over me…an…and then I found out, for myself, just how true that savage rep of his was…”

Her poor, pony stomach began to churn, sickened with horror. …o-oh gods, stop—

“S-stop!” she blurted, unable to keep her voice from cracking with fear. Or grief. “Tha….that’s enough.….I…I get it…I get why you kept quiet….I…I-I’m sorry…”

When she forced herself to look up, she found a pair of avian eyes staring back at her with some degree of relief and…

….and something else. Gratitude, she’d thought.

Had she just become the first soul in that griffon’s life she’d spilled that to?

“…after that, Saurus took off with what was left of the slaver party, didn’t bother to try and finish me off, and I had more important things to see to that day. Didn’t see or hear of him again until last year, when he came back with about fifty mercs. Hit a couple towns near the valley border, made off with eighty souls and killed a number of us in the process. One of the survivors recognized him, got word back to us. I asked for the job to track him down, and I got it. Gotten close a couple of times, but…well, you’ve had better chances at killing him than I’ve gotten. And he knows Leon and I have been looking for him for a while now.”

Sling had to catch her breath—and quell her queasy stomach—before she could talk again. “…h-how does that have anything to do with me?”

Ada’s willingness to look her in the eye didn’t last long, and she returned her gaze to the floor as she began to explain her theory. “He’s savage, he’s violent….even crazy, but he didn’t survive a year’s worth of lurp ops by luck. He’s observant, crafty, quick on his feet. You messed up my shot on him a month ago, and since he was my spotter once he knows how far off I can be and still hit my target. He knows me well enough to know that I’d want to catch up to you to see how that happened. He knows that I’d want to stick with you a day or two afterward for the hell of it, so that would mean that I would naturally come looking for you if I saw some sign that you or that kid got hurt. He must have known that Kite had some skill in medicine that could save you, or maybe he thought that they would try to haul you out here to try and save you. Or bury you. Either way, you left enough signs of your presence at that station that I thought to come here to find you. Next time, bury your ration wrappers or burn them. Or better yet, keep ‘em. They make for great expedient plugs for sucking chest wounds if you run out of healing potions.”

She mouthed off a foul curse at herself, but at least this time this mistake actually turned out to be a hidden blessing. Next time, though…. “…I was bait? This whole time, I’ve been bait?”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong, he’d love to kill you and take that filly for his own sick uses just for crippling his wing. But he knows he can’t hide from me and Leon forever. And his best shot at taking us out is what he’s doing right now. I came here looking for you, hoping I was wrong about what I found, and I walked right into it. If he does this right, he can get all his problems taken care of at once and get back to his hedonistic life.”

“Then you have a problem, because I cannot have a firefight at the only decent medical clinic in this town,” Doc Overdose finally cut in, though his tone was more sympathetic than anything else. “And while my ‘bot can handle a single target, if he hires mercenaries—and I’m fairly positive that he will—they can overwhelm it in short order. Sling Shot is in no condition to fight. She needs rest, perhaps as much as two weeks of it.”

“You got a back entrance you keep blocked off, don’t you?” Ada quipped.

“With heavy furniture and cabinet drawers, yes. How does that help us?”

“I can move that crap,” Sling said, her magic flowing through her horn as her travelling saddle floated its way over to her. Whatever this eye exam could have revealed about her left eye, it would have to wait. “But if he has mercs sweeping through the alleys they’ll catch us before we can even make it out of town, and where the hell would we go even if we made it out?”

“There’s caravans at the south and west ends of town today,” Ada said, her forelimbs reaching behind her at last to unsling one of her long guns. “It’s tax week, and there’s a Union patrol making rounds, collecting tithes for their bosses. Caravans won’t go anywhere until the patrol’s done, and they won’t come running to check out a single shot….but if they hear a firefight, they may let the caravans go and come running to try and stop it. The chaos that’ll create will be your ticket out. Your best bet is to make your way to the western caravans, if you can make it before they leave you may be able to get passage to their next stop, wherever that is. Get there without being seen, and Saurus will have to start from scratch to find you again. Leon and I’ll keep him and his mercs pinned down best we can. I’m hoping he’ll start taking shots at the Union patrol if they show up…”

“…there’s a lot of “ifs” in your plan, merc. Two-way firefights are chaotic enough, bringing in a third side will shoot your plan to hell.”

“It’s the best shot you’ve got in five minutes or less. You need a couple of minutes to get your wounds re-dressed anyway.”

“….one more thing, then,” she relented, her magic pawing at her saddlebag for the 5.56mm revolver she’d found yesterday and pulling it out of the enchanted storage space. Might not get another chance to ask… “I did manage to find one of these in that stable yesterday, along with a laser pistol, Lightbringer series. Damn near mint condition, except for a crack in the cylinder and what I think is a broken focus housing chamber on the laser pistol. Do you know of anypony within thirty miles that might have replacement parts?”

As she’d expected, Ada’s talons were immediately drawn to the revolver, even taking it into her claws and giving it a once-over—barrel, motorized cylinder mechanism, sights, even the odd red lights along the underside of the bottom secondary barrel (at least, she thought it was a barrel). The larger green light on the back end of the frame seemed to change to a yellow color when the cylinder was opened up, and changed back the second it was closed again. Some sort of status indicator of the cylinder action, perhaps to warn the shooter if the cylinder didn’t lock into place?

“…damn, you get all the good luck with mint guns, first that .44 magnum and now this? I take it you never had any of these in your stable?”

Overdose’s magic began to envelop her body, dabbing her stitches and her facial cuts in some sort of antibiotic cream from her med kit in preparation for re-dressing her wounds. “None. Read about ‘em a couple of times, but nothing about how to keep it fixed up or repair it. Never thought I’d see one.”

Ada’s right talon began to test the cylinder release latch, and was seemingly disappointed with the way the crane was unlocking from the frame. “Yeah, it’s not like fixing up lower-tech guns. Power cell on this one’s a little low, the cylinder should be swinging out and back a lot faster than this. Takes any kind of spark battery cell, should fix that right up if you can get ahold of one. Cylinder’s gonna be tougher, you’ll need tools to pull the crane motor out so you can get the cylinder off. As for replacement parts…like I told you before, these things are getting harder to find in decent shape. Might have to cannibalize another pistol for parts, none of the traders I know of around here have had any on hoof or claw for close to a year now. Good thing about something this complex, most folk that own one know that they may have to fix it themselves and make sure to keep the tools they need on ‘em. Might be somebody in Trotpeka with the parts, but they won’t come cheap.”

Sling’s eyes began to stare at the 5.56mm pistol in pity and longing. Two centuries ago, that gun had probably been one of the best made—and most expensive—sidearms a soul could hope to acquire. To see this technological marvel reduced to a hoof-full of working units with no hope of ever seeing new parts surface for them….once they were all used up and broken, they’d be lost to the ages. She didn’t think anyone alive would be able to figure out how to make them again.

“…great. Finally get ahold of a weapon with some promise of armor penetration and it turns out to be a super-bitch to get working. Shoulda just kept on going down the road.”

“Awww, don’t say that,” the griffon cooed back soothingly, still playing around with her prize from the 128. “Aside from the cracked cylinder, this thing’s in impeccable condition. That’s the one part on this gun that I’ve never seen wear out from all these decades of shooting, they had to make the thing Tartarus-level tough to take the pressure of a five-five-six round long enough to be useful. Get that sorted out and you probably won’t have to worry about parts again for a long time. Snap up what you can find regardless. Power cells aren’t that common, but somepony sells a few somewhere in every town. Six or seven should be all you need to keep the motorized cylinder running for a few years. At peak power it’ll be like shooting a semi-automatic.”

She barely noticed the gauze pads and the bandaging being wrapped around her side until bandages began applying pressure to her body. “Had one before, did you?”

She finally stopped fiddling with the cylinder release and left it closed, and returned it to the saddlebag it had been stored in. “Loved it. It bought the farm a coupla years back, pretty nasty firefight with some highway gang on my side of the prairie. Fired off a cylinder, ducked back behind this big-ass coal hauler truck and reloaded, came up and got two shots off on some idiot charging stallion before the motor gave out and fried itself. Ruined enough of the internals to make it unsalvageable. Took a hit to my right side, punched through my armor. Not a fun day.”

“…what the hell would you call a fun day out here?”

Ada’s beak broke into an insidious, almost maniacal smile. “The kind of day I’m about to have in a few minutes.”

--------------------------------------

“That’s a hell of a plan, merc. A bad one, at that.”

Ada’s voice curled around the corner of the hallway, briefly stirring him from his increasingly uncomfortable crouched position as he kept his eyes—and his .45 Auto SMG—leveled on the front door. “Ain’t the best I’ve had, I’ll give ya that. But would you rather go out the front door?”

“Kite, just…just go with it,” the stable pony pleaded, her voice slightly exasperated from what had to have been a hellacious morning thus far. “I don’t know that we’re going to get a chance to come up with something better. Let’s just try and get out of here.”

The crazy-ass “doctor” seemed more than willing to help see them off on their way, if only because he didn’t want his clinic or his few med supplies to get shot up or wrecked. “Kitey, do remember to make use of the textbooks and the instruments I’ve packed into your bag once you’ve found someplace to lie low for a while. I wasn’t able to give Sling Shot a complete diagnosis, you’ll need to finish it. You have everything you need, just refer to the books. I don’t suspect a serious drop in her vision quality, but you’ll need to know regardless. Come along now, I’ll get the back way opened up for you. Once the door shuts behind you, you won’t be able to come back that way. Be sure you’re ready.”

“I’ll be heading out the same way, take another route to the street,” Ada’s voice added loudly, perhaps to make sure he heard it. And he did. “Leon, try and keep Saurus talking for a couple of minutes so I can set up a shot. Don’t think I’ll be able to get him if he uses you to block me out, but I can take out one of his mercs, give you some room to work.”

“Wilco, moving,” he roared back, finally glad to be allowed to move and get some blood moving in his hind legs again. With a flick of his off-claw he had the safety of his weapon back on, and adjusted it so that it rode across his chest on its carrying sling as he began to move forward on all fours, but capable of being taken up into firing position again with next to no effort. He already knew most of the plan—he and Ada had talked about it for a couple minutes on the walk over, and the only two things they couldn’t account for was the number of hired mercs and what Saurus planned to have them doing. Once that Union patrol came to shut down the fracas, though, everything would go to hell and they’d have to fight their way out on the fly. The Union did not take kindly to folk starting gunfights in their towns, less so on tax week. He was kind of hoping that Saurus would still be pissed off enough at them from the war to want to fight them if they came in shooting. Might give him and Ada a chance to slip out without being ID’ed as the ones who’d started the mess in the first place.

Curiously, however, OD’s damn bot had yet to show up despite the “doc’s” assurances that it was due to return shortly.

…okay, then. Three things they couldn’t account for.

He took a moment at the front door to re-adjust his weapon, and to check and make sure that his magazines were still inside their pouches on the web harness overlapping his armor. Three thirty-round mags on his left side, four twenty-rounders on his right, and a single fifty-round drum mag in its own separately shaped bag riding against his lower back…another set of six twenty-round magazines for his heavily-modified service rifle….and eight seven-round magazines for his 12.7mm pistol….his “Big Demon”, as it were. Ammo was hell to find, but the firepower was worth it. A shame his 14mm had broken last year, that thing sounded more like a shotgun than a pistol….

Shit, I’m turning into Ada, he swore at himself, shaking his head to rid himself of the unhealthy fascination with an old firearm. How that girl could nearly swoon over old firearms tech was a mystery to him—there were times when he thought she loved guns more than she did sex. She had been behaving herself lately, but….

….ever since they ran into those stable runaways she seemed almost smitten by the filly. She always did have a soft spot for kids, it was like she could speak to them at their level. Probably helped that she acted like a child half the time. Had that run-in opened up some buried maternal instinct his father had warned him about when he and Ada had set off on the hunt for Saurus? Would she want a kid at nearly…twenty-four, this coming October?

….ponder it later. If he survived this shootout. It was a big enough deal that Ada even had her old .357 automatic revolver, “Ghost”, on her. She almost never used that thing anymore, the parts were damn near non-existent. Still had a few years left in it, and could still hold under two inches out to at least thirty-odd yards, but the mechanism was a little more delicate than most revolvers he’d seen. Had to be careful with how it was gripped during firing or it’d jam.

That she was willing to use it had him worried enough that he wasn’t going to be particularly picky with his ammo waste. They had a cache stashed away a few miles from here if need be.

With one last nudge of his .45 SMG’s stock to push the barrel away from his left forelimb, he nosed the lobby door open with his beak and made a quick scan of the ruined streets outside. A block and a half to his left, the street ended in a T-shaped intersection with a four-story building overlooking the intersection. Great view of the street, and probably where Ada would be moving to within the next sixty seconds. To his right….

….to his right, shockingly enough, was Saurus himself, with part of his heavy leather armor torn away at the left shoulder to reveal a blood-stained bandage. He was still at least two hundred yards out, but even at this distance he could see that he was being flanked by at least three mercenaries from the Black Asphalt gang. Gangs were not that terribly creative with what they called themselves, if they bothered to give their group a name, but these guys were smarter than most. Had themselves an old highway police station for an operating base, somewhere to the east, and it had just enough guns in it to give them an edge in firepower over the average raider. Tended to hire themselves out to whoever wanted them—slavers, wastelanders looking for a missing loved one or friend, sometimes the big boss of a town would need a nuisance animal taken out and send out a hired gun rather than someone from his community.

After losing three mercs to that stable pony yesterday, he didn’t think Saurus would take his chances with that low a number of bodies again. There had to be at least six to eight of them, perhaps more. Maybe stalking their way through the side alleys and adjacent streets, to cut off alternate escape routes or to try and box him in. And between him and Saurus, there were enough wrecked motorized wagons and cargo trucks littering the street to make a firefight a very prolonged affair. Plenty of cover for the mercs to fire and advance from, and at several points he’d be exposed to attack from the flanks from side alleys.

…shit, maybe that brothel girl was right, this is starting to look like a very bad idea….

Oh well. Only one thing to do when all he had was a bad idea.

Run like hell with it.

He snapped off to his right, began to saunter down the road with nary a care in the world in the hopes that any passing pedestrians wouldn’t take notice right away and try to take off and tip off the Union patrol early. But within the first twenty yards of his walk, he began to realize that it was a waste of time—most any soul with half a brain simply took a look down the other side of the street, saw at least four armed mercenaries making their way through as if they owned the place, and suddenly found themselves needed elsewhere, and galloped as far away from the looming gunfight as their hooves could take them. By the time he counted off a hundred and fifty yards in his walk, most every window that could be closed was closed—every door, every business, every street-side merchant with even a foal’s carriage worth of junk for sale had vanished.

Except, of course, for the mercs and their current paymaster.

Saurus’s left forelimb rose up when there was roughly thirty yards distance between them, and to Leon’s disappointment his shoulder wound seemed to have been healed over by a potion or two, as Saurus showed no sign of pain or impairment of movement with his forelimb. His right forelimb gripped tightly at his slung 5mm carbine, ready to shoulder it and open fire at a moment’s notice. Behind him, his three paid pony mercs—all unicorns, naturally—came to a sudden halt, keeping themselves several feet apart from each other to keep a grenade from taking them out all at once. They all carried at least one sidearm strapped across their armored, black-colored barding, and the one directly behind Saurus held a double-barreled 12-guage in his magical grasp, while the other two held a 9mm SMG and an older R-series 5.56 rifle….

Leon could feel his right talon sliding over the pistol grip of his SMG as he made a quick, cursory glance at his right, and felt a slight relief at the sight of a broad-sided building roughly a hundred feet wide. At least he couldn’t get shot at directly from the right flank just yet.

“Not like you to be up and about this early,” he called out loudly over his nearest available cover—a motorized ground wagon with what was said to be a “cockpit” for earth pony drivers to sit in and steer the vehicle. Its wheels were long gone, leaving only rusted, dying rims and a crumbling chassis. “No mares to play with this morning?”

Even five years after his desertion, Saurus’s….”tastes”, were almost legendary, as was the frequency with which he indulged in those tastes. And he never did like being called out on it, which made his comeback somewhat worrying. “Not done with this one yet. Gimme a day or two, see what happens.”

He’s here for the stable pony, he surmised, for once feeling a little concerned for Ada’s latest batch of fast friends. And no kid deserved to be in the claws of a soul like Saurus. Maybe his ex-whore too…. “Didn’t take you for one that liked to play with his food.”

Another glance, this time to his left, and he saw at least one alley, slightly ahead of him, that might offer a potential avenue for attack for whoever was inclined to use it against him. “Cute. My little sister tell you that one?”

That got his attention. Not once in the two times they’d gotten close to him had he ever mentioned anything about his blood connection with Ada. “Surprised you remember her. If I recall, you offed your own father like it was nothing. Still not sure there’s anybody home up in that skull of yours.”

“Oh, there’s plenty going on up there,” Saurus sneered back, his eyes fixating on him as though he were trying to kill him with his gaze alone—and he didn’t doubt that he would someday find a way to make it happen. “That whore of mine? The one that damn stable pony and her shit filly took in—”

Wait a sec, he knows she’s from a stable despite not having seen her for more than a minute in his entire life—

“—she’s a nurse. Stable-trained, from her third master who liked to help himself to her other “services” now and then. And my sister always had a soft spot for kids. What better way to draw her out than to pop a few rounds into the brat’s mother and see if that whore could fix her up?”

How his face managed not to show any hint of surprise or shock was a mystery to him—he was freaking out on the inside. Mother of ducks this is a trap and we walked right into it—

“…pretty lofty thinking on your part. Not like you.”

“I know my own blood,” Saurus spat. “I was her godsdamned spotter in the war, before I went into LURPs. I know how she thinks, how good a shot she is, how inviting it’s going to be for her to put a bullet in my brain for sending Dad to hell. That four-story building behind you? It’s rigged. She’ll be mincemeat in about twenty seconds, then it’s your turn, and then that stable pony gets hers for crippling my wing and taking my piece of tail from me. Maybe that brat of hers can be broken in, but that bitch dies. HARD.”

A short series of foul curses strung themselves out in his head as he took a second look around him—no harm in doing so, Ada was right, he liked to gloat when he thought he had the upper hand. No other mercs were lining up in the alleys, but they likely weren’t far behind. He hadn’t heard anything like gunshots or brief screams of pain—

“Wait, hold up a sec, you said we could take first crack at her,” the light gray shaded stallion to his right protested, as though he now viewed his current “employer” in a less than savory standing. “All the stables around here emptied out decades ago, we wanna know if hers is still intact. Tons of shit in an intact stable to be had.”

“You changin’ the contract on us mid-way through?” the shotgun-armed stallion added, though from the way he was eying Saurus’s back he was growing less fond of the griffon by the second. “’Cause that ain’t how we do things over here, birdy.”

Let them bicker, divide themselves up, he decided in an instant. If he was going to have any chance of avenging Ada’s impending death, he wanted as few targets shooting at him at possible. Turn this gloatin—

“You’ll get your time with her,” Saurus growled. “But you’re wasting your time, if there’s anything left of her stable, it’s in ruins. You think those idiots from the Stifla stable had any choice thirty odd years back?”

….wait…she said he’d gloat like this, take his time if he thought he had it in the bag…she would have to have seen something like this com—

It all came together in an instant, a brilliant, bright flash of insight and glee that, quite frankly, turned him on. Ada had seen this coming, had told him to keep him talking. Not to set up a shot from a plainly obvious sniping position that Saurus would see a mile away….

…but to keep him distracted long enough for her to sneak in at the flank and attack from ground level. Saurus was so certain she’d want revenge for the death of their father that she would do it via the method most likely to see success. It’s what he would’ve wanted to do. And for a time, he’d have said the same for Ada, but Saurus didn’t realize that she was not the same little sister he’d known in the war. She’d actually grown up since his desertion. If anything, the way he left, what he did, had done more to harden her and prepare her for life in the wastes than anything their father—or the war—had ever done. She still wanted him dead, but she valued her friends enough that she was willing to put her own desires aside to help them.

She didn’t want to kill Saurus today. She just wanted the stable pony and her filly to have a chance at getting out. And she still stood a good chance of plugging her brother in the process anyway.

By the Sisters, girl, you are getting it good tonight.

“Maybe we wanna find out for ourselves,” the bright green stallion on the far left challenged, his 9mm SMG beginning to sway dangerously closer towards Saurus instead of Leon. “It’s not like you’ve been all that forthcoming about what happened to our friends yesterday, y’know?”

Leon’s body began to tense up, subtly, sensing the changing shift of attitude and tension between his opponents as Saurus’s hired “help” began to grow less helpful with every passing second. Ada, hurry up and start laying down some fire—

“I told you, that bitch stable pony dropped ‘em, don’t even ask me what happened to your whore, she took off—”

Saurus made the single mistake of taking his eyes off of his quarry to argue with his hired guns, and that had been the only opening Ada needed. Before Saurus could finish his lie, a pair of sharp rifle shots rang out from somewhere further up the street—

—the bright green stallion’s head jolted slightly, just before a spurt of red spilled out from just below his left eye as his body simply collapsed onto the floor—

—Leon spurred his forelimbs into motion, the stock of his .45 SMG snapping into his shoulder as he squared the sights on the gray stallion to his right and settled on his rather large torso—

—a burst of four rounds, accompanied by a sharp muzzle flash, sailed into his target as the stallion bolted towards cover. With his barding absorbing much of the impact and a shot of adrenaline likely hitting his body, he didn’t seem to notice the shots at all—

—Saurus leapt over the remains of a crashed sky wagon, most of its chassis worn away and stripped bare save for its engines, while the shotgun-armed, pale blue-shaded stallion sped away to his own separate piece of cover on his left and brought his weapon up for a quick snap shot—

—another pair of rifle shots put a stop to his attack—Ada could really shoot when it mattered—and bits of the pale blue stallion’s barding seemingly jettisoned into the air as he stumbled into a rough slide behind what looked like a recently-vacated produce stand. Even with his ears beginning to ring from the harsh report of +P .45 Auto rounds, he could still make out the painful screams of the wounded stallion, indicating that Ada’s shots had hit something very important and sensitive inside the torso.

“—amned bitch, I hate that stable pony!!” Saurus screamed furiously, popping up from cover, his 5mm carbine tracking towards the sound of Ada’s rifle shots and letting loose a steady stream of fire in that general direction—

Idiot, he grinned, swinging the barrel of his SMG over Saurus’s back—

—a burst of five rounds to the back of his armored barding imparted enough force into his body to throw off his rifle fire, and the sadistic griffon stumbled back behind his cover as a chorus of gunfire began to sing on the other side of the street. He risked a quick glance down the road, spotted what looked like three or four ponies firing various weapons at an unseen target. He couldn’t tell at this distance what they were shooting, but it sounded like at least one shotgun, a rifle, and maybe a pistol or an SMG….

Every one of them had armor, though. An SMG was a poor choice for this fight.

He was back behind cover a second later, slinging the .45 SMG back across his back in favor of his modified service rifle—desert camo paint job, and a forged rail-top receiver onto which he’d put a scope taken off an out-of-service marksman carbine. He prayed it was still zeroed.

A quick tap of the magazine to make sure it was seated, and then he popped back up, cinching the stock up into his shoulder as he quickly sought out a target across the street—

—the scope’s magnified optics finally allowed him to discern, with some clarity, the identity of the weapons being leveled against his partner. An old combat shotgun, with a forward-mounted magazine drum, of all things, a bolt-action varmit rifle in the magical grasp of its unicorn owner, and a pair of .45 Auto pistols being wielded by a single unicorn, altering fire between each pistol in such a manner that he realized Ada was being shot at by three mercs, not four. He’d mistaken this bastard for two ponies, the way he was shooting—

—the scope’s crosshairs had barely settled on the dual-pistol wielding unicorn when he squeezed the trigger, the recoil jolting the scope slightly off-target—

Duck, an inner voice warned sharply, and he followed suit just as a shotgun blast erupted from the direction of the produce stand. A couple of pellets pinged against the metal shell of his cover, but he swore he could have felt a brush of air bat at the top of his head as something whizzed over him at incredible speeds.

Right, he thought grimly, grasping at his holstered, black-nickel finished pistol as he slung the rifle across the front of his body momentarily. Wounded, not dead.

He wasn’t willing to pop up and risk getting his head blown off a second time, having just narrowly avoided such a fate by sheer luck. It sounded like only one barrel had been fired from that shotgun—

“Got you now, mother fu—”

Stars alive, make it easy on me why don’t you? He smiled deviously, leveling his pistol towards the back end of the car as he waited for the wounded, gasping stallion to foolishly come around the back end for a finishing shot. No clue why he was walking out of cover, and he didn’t care. He just wanted this threat to his left flank gone.

That stupid pony came around the “car” at the beginning of “fu” and that was as far as his sentence went. Leon’s claw gently squeezed the trigger on his sidearm the moment the pony’s head whisked its way into his sights, and the 12.7mm slug ventilated his left eye and sent a spurt of blood out the back of his head. His body toppled over onto its side instantly, the magic glow surrounding his weapon dying just as quickly, and the Runner quickly turned his attention to the remaining two threats directly ahead of him before they could be drawn to the twitching corpse he’d just created.

“…bro, you all right?!” he heard the gray stallion shout, just as Saurus’s rifle unleashed another stream of rounds at Ada, and Leon felt a sharp sting in his lungs. He hated knowing anything about who he killed. “…c-c’mon, say somethin’—”

Is it any wonder that I’m starting to get tired of this shit?

“What the hell are you doing, you idiot, shoot!!” Saurus’s voice roared angrily in-between bursts of rifle fire—

….okay, he’s shooting at Ada, gray stallion is more worried about the brother I just killed—

“…sonavabitch, you damned Runners kill everybody with your bullshit!!” the lone surviving stallion wailed—really wailed, had likely just spotted his brother’s twitching body in the street. “I told Screwdriver not to take this damn job, I to—”

A short string of shots—likely three to four rounds—cut his brief fit of crying to a deathly halt, and even through the ringing in his ears Leon could still make out the tactile thud of a body slumping onto pavement, like a puppet that had just had its strings cut.

And to Leon, it felt as though he’d pulled the trigger himself.

“Godsdammit, that’s the last time I hire on any of those damn Asphalt mercs,” Saurus growled, as what sounded like an empty magazine clattered onto the broken street, quickly replaced by a fresh one. “…not bad, sis. Not bad. Not any less pissed at you, but…not bad.”

--------------------------------------

The latest spat of gunfire had hardly died before El-Tee uttered the question she was afraid of.

“….w-we’re not gonna help ‘em?”

“….honey, their whole idea was to help us,” Sling whispered, continuing to slink and slither through the alleys with her eyes practically glued to her EFS display. Enough red hash marks were popping up on it that she was starting to lose track of which ones were moving and which were stationary. “If we go back we ruin everything. Keep going.”

Light Tail’s hooves didn’t resume their trotting pace for another couple of seconds, but she did eventually start moving again.

One problem gone, for the moment. Next one was getting away from the firefight before any of the mercs spotted them. She knew at least a couple of ‘em were working their way through these alleys up ahead, judging by the two red marks that stayed close to the center of her EFS’s directional compass. If they kept coming towards them, they’d run into each other in just a few seconds, and she wasn’t confident she could even off one of them quietly—

Buck me, I’m a curse onto myself, she sneered at herself as a griffon male and an earth pony stallion emerged from around the corner of a debilitated hotel roughly thirty yards ahead. Even with the gunfight roughly four blocks behind them, she suddenly felt herself trapped into an impossible situation, with nothing but buildings as her walls and their only route of retreat was backwards…which was now out of the question, as the griffon’s eyes had already spotted them after a quick scan behind him and leveled his battle rifle directly at them—

“There you are!” he sneered joyfully (somehow), his right trigger claw tapping off the safety embedded in his rifle’s trigger guard. “Stay put, not another step forward!”

A cold chill began to spread out from her gut, freezing her breath over. O-oh fu… “…w-wait—”

“Shut up!” the earth pony snapped back, cutting her off as he drew to within twenty yards, his saddle-mounted rifle seemingly aimed at Kite as the mare froze in her tracks beside her. “Make even a move towards those guns and we drop you all where you stand, the hell with what that damn Runner wants.”

Shit shit shit—

“...a-at least let the kids go—” Kite tried to reason fearfully, to no avail.

“Contract was for all four of you,” the stallion countered coldly, his rifle’s barrel settling on Kite’s body as a target. “Dead or alive. Said nothing about wounds. Give us any trouble, and we cap your legs.”

Sling was still trying to work through her panic, to think of some method by which to either run or fight their way past these two armed mercs despite being in no such condition to accomplish it, when Light Tail dared to try and reach out to some deep, decent part of them that she thought might exist.

“W-what makes you think he’s gonna honor anything he told you?” the filly dared to ask from beneath her mother’s chest.

“Zip it, brat—”

“He killed one of your friends yesterday!” the child shouted back, and Sling felt a tear leak through her right eye. She’d silently hoped the child would never remember that. “Just for talkin’ back to him ‘bout what he told ‘em! He hurts people for fun, he…he sells them like cheap furniture! What makes you think you can trust him!?”

The stallion seemed to have had enough of the child’s screaming, as he began to shift his point of aim down to the small filly trembling behind her forelegs. “Told you to shut up—”

Sling had already lowered the front of her body into the stallion’s sights, intending to absorb the bullet into herself out of an instinctive, terrified act of love and motherly protection, when the griffon stayed his partner’s actions with a sharp voice. “Wait a tic, Driller! What’re you talkin’ about kid?! Saurus said you guys killed our friends!”

…o-oh my gods, could this actually work….

“…we did!” the filly sniffed, refusing to be crushed to death beneath her mother and opted to try and poke her head through a foreleg. “…a couple of ‘em, anyway. But one of ‘em tried arguin’ with him over me, or Mom, or somethin’….and Saurus just killed him…”

Driller tried, one last time, to stick to what he’d been “contracted” for and tried to quiet the filly beneath her. “Dude, stop it, we were paid to take four souls alive, not question them—”

“Never heard of a client wantin’ to try again after the first time failed,” the griffon rumbled in reply, and Sling’s hopes began to swell, slightly. “And he never did say how they got killed, just that this stable pony did it. We ain’t heard back from Long Road ‘bout what he found out there either.”

“He doesn’t want us,” El-Tee continued to cry, not wasting a breath now that she seemed to have an opening to run with, without her mother’s bidding. “He wants them.”

Driller and the griffon took a short look off to Sling’s right, seemingly scrutinizing Kite and the colt hiding behind her. “…don’t look that special to me,” Driller mumbled after a few moments of silent thought.

“They’re ponies, the same as you and me,” El-Tee shot back. “A…and Saurus kept them like pets. Hurt them. Like they were cheap chairs or somethin’. That’s how he looks at anypony’s life. You’re not worth anymore to him than they are. How can you trust anypony like that?”

Sling thought he heard the griffon mutter a curse very much like one she’d accidently slipped out yesterday afternoon. “….Driller, check their necks, quick. That Union tax collection team’s gettin’ closer every second—”

The griffon needn’t have bothered with the request—Driller was already on top of Kite, forcing her onto the ground and peeling her neck around until her mane was parted away from the strange mark along the right side. “…sonava….she’s marked! Life Tap’s guild! The colt too!”

“Shiiiit!!” the griffon hissed sharply, his body swinging around until his back was pressed against the building beside him so he could view both ends of the alley with little trouble. “You, whore! How long you been marked?!”

Sling felt a slight rise of her temper begin to boil, but Kite’s will to resist seemed to wane by the second. “…t-two years….S-Saurus…d-didn’t buy me…he shot my last master….near Lome, almost three months ago…kept me as a plaything….”

A quick plan of attack began to form in Sling’s mind. If Driller stayed where he was just another three seconds….

Now Driller began to grow just as distressed as his partner. “Ooooohhhhh, fffffuuu….w-we can’t go with through this!” he shouted out to no one in particular as he backed up and began to check every possible route from which a newcomer could stumble onto them, just as a fresh round of gunfire began to echo throughout the streets and alleys. “Decker, we gotta cut loose, let the others know we’re helpin’ a slave thief, if it’s that massacre I’m thinkin’ it is!”

“No, we gotta cut loose, period!” the griffon—or Decker, now—howled back in a mixture of terror and anguish. “That asshat gutted those two Union scouts we nearly tripped over, I watched him do it!”

“…oh, fu…f-fine…you win, kid, you convinced us, j-just…just get lost, before you find out the hard way what the Union does to those that help runaways!”

With that final, terror-hinged warning, Driller and Decker took off with a sudden burst of speed, pushing past them and towards the firefight further back into town, not giving any of them so much as a second glance....and Sling felt the release of what felt like years of tension heaving out of her lungs.

Her daughter had accomplished with a few words what she’d intended to do at the cost of two lives….

Kite did not question their sudden turn of luck, and quickly scrambled to her hooves and began to gallop down the alley the moment she was free to do so. “C-c’mon, we won’t get that lucky again!” she cried over her withers.

Muttering a curse at the fleeing mare’s back, Sling gritted her teeth in pain as she began to trot after her, ignoring the pulling, stinging sensations that flared up in her side as her muscles stretched out the stitched-up cuts. She felt Light Tail’s body scrap past her hind legs as the little one hung back for a moment, perhaps to get some room to run herself, or—

“Beige, hurry up you slowpoke—”

“Kite, wait!” Sling heard herself yell out into the alley automatically, stopping in her tracks and turning back to see what was keeping the colt back—

BJ was struggling to even force himself up with his forelegs, his hind legs shaking like leaves, and she suddenly understood why he wasn’t in any mood to be moving forward. And so did El-Tee.

“….Beige, you’re not goin’ back,” the filly’s said softly, her body unflinching in its concern for a friend despite the chorus of rifle fire that stabbed into the air just then. “Saurus won’t get his claws on you or Kite again, okay? We’re stickin’ together—”

“H-he won’t stop,” BJ whispered fearfully, and Sling saw what looked like years of…of whatever it was that had to have witnessed begin to break through that empty, lifeless shell he put out as a face. “….seen his like before. He won’t stop ‘till we’re dead or caught….”

“Don’t talk like that!” El-Tee half-cried, her own forelegs beginning to fight with the uncooperative colt as she sought to pull him up to his hooves herself. “Not after what you told me back there! C’mon, get up—”

“You were right, El,” the colt mumbled on, as if he wasn’t even listening to her. “…he’s only after us….maybe if we stayed, he wouldn’t chase you anymore….he’d treat you like my mom….or worse….”

Sling’s gut began to violently churn, knowing full well that his colt, this child, knew exactly what horrors awaited a female in the claws of such a savage monster….

She never even noticed that Kite had come back to her side until the scarred, grape-coated mare began to cry beside. “….s-son, don’t talk like that, we can’t do that—”

It was then that Sling made her first, genuinely emotional-based decision with her ex-slave charges, suddenly unwilling to allow them to be submitted to the whims and sick desires of anypony, ever again. “No one’s staying,” she said, her voice surprisingly solid, if somewhat angry. “We’re all leaving. And the minute I’m recovered, I’m going to kill him.”

Her night light’s eyes shot back at her with a growing horror, her mouth slightly ajar in shock. “….n-no, not that way—”

“As long as Saurus is alive, there’s no way we’ll get across the valley without him coming after us,” she stated flatly, trotting towards the two children and pushing them upright with a hard shove of telekinesis. “Until he’s dead, we’re not safe. I learned enough about him from Ada to know that much.”

“…Mom, that’s murder,” El-Tee continued to plead tearfully, stumbling a bit as she fought to get her hooves under her own control. “It’s one thing to kill to save yourself, but to go after a soul to kill them first…you’re better than that…”

“Saurus is not some screwed-up savage who doesn’t know any better,” she seethed back, clicking her tongue three times in rapid succession to call the pups out of hiding when a cursory glance through the alley didn’t turn up any sign of the fuzzballs. “He knows what he’s doing, and he enjoys it. He cannot be reasoned or bargained with. He will not stop chasing us, he will not stop hounding us until we’re dead, or he is. He will hunt us down with only one leg and no wings if he has to, but he will never stop. Either I kill him the first chance I get, or he kills me and takes the three of you for whatever disgusting pleasures he wants for himself, and I will not let him do these things. Not ever. Do you understand? This isn’t murder, it’s survival. And right now, our survival depends on us getting out of here. So get moving!”

She hadn’t meant to demand their cooperation like that, at the end. She’d meant to just gently nudge them along in her wake, keep them calm. But the more she talked about Saurus, the angrier she got…because deep down, she was speaking more truthfully about him than she’d wanted to admit. For better or worse, Ada’s deranged, rape-happy brother had to die.

But she did, at least, succeed in getting the two children to finally—if sullenly—start moving at a faster pace as she followed after them. Faster than she herself could manage without fear of ripping her stitches apart. She had to settle for a fairly moderate trot, and also had to weave back and forth as Max seemed intent on staying within two feet of her hooves no matter what. It was getting slightly irritating, to be honest. She hadn’t asked for a personal guide. But every burst of gunfire from the streets behind them spurred her ever onward, to ignore the tiny, yipping package of fur and teeth hounding her every step and just press on down the alley.

It was, however, a trip that quickly produced the most promising stroke of coincidence she’d ever come across. Perhaps thirty seconds into the journey, Max suddenly began attacking the ground with his nose, furiously sniffing out something that had attracted his interest, and quickly began to follow his new interest down a side alley leading into the nearby street to their left.

Oh, godsdammit, not now—

“Max, get back here!” she commanded sharply, going so far as to follow the wayward pup into the alley and preparing a telekinetic spell in her horn. “You can mark your territory on something else later—”

A putrid, barf-inducing stench began to invade her nostrils, and she promptly stopped in her tracks for a moment to fight off the urge to hurl her breakfast. Oh my gods it smells like a latrine over there! She grumbled, nearly retching as the smell seemed to touch the back of her throat. D….did someone just die he—

Max’s muzzle began to bark as he turned towards her for a moment, and then back at what looked to be the crumbled, lifeless limbs of a griffon clad in the Union’s trademark desert camouflage barding, obscured from the sight of pedestrians in the street by a pair of rust-covered dumpsters—

….right, those mercs said Saurus had killed a couple of Union troopers earlier….but why is this damn mutt leading me to it?

“Max, heel!” she tried again, hoping she wouldn’t have to unleash the spell building in her horn, and that the puppy would comply and back off of his new find. She really didn’t want to stay near this dead body for very long, if that Union patrol came by they might mistake her for this poor soul’s killer….

But the husky pup continued to yip and bark, sporadically shifting his attention back and forth between her and the body, and she was forced to move closer and began to form a spell field around the misbehaving puppy—

—and promptly allowed the spell to die a quick, flashless death as her eyes fell upon the griffon’s body, and spotted the tell-tale grip of a 5.56mm pistol poking out of a holster attached to a gear belt…

Buck me, can I really be that lucky twice so quick?! Sling cried as she quickly drew close to the bod—

Bodies, she amended quickly—as she came closer she found that the griffon’s body was lying atop the smaller body of a light pink unicorn mare, also covered in desert camo barding….except for the rear of her body...and just as lifeless and dead as the griffon. A pair of jagged, bleeding gashes across their throats made it quite clear that they’d been caught by surprise…and in the middle of enjoying each other’s personal company….

….couldn’t save it for a hotel room, could you? she admonished the dead sadly, the stench fading from her nose as she quickly chanted off a mild smell suppression spell over the bodies. At the very least, it would keep her from barfing all over them. What she was about to do was insulting enough to their corpses.

But it wasn’t like they had any need for their weapons and supplies anymore, was it?

Two service rifles stood propped against the building wall on her right, curiously left loaded, as a quick of their twenty-round magazines confirmed them to be fully loaded. It was almost as if Saurus had been in a hurry to off these two and left everything behind. She would have expected a well-experienced merc to have taken the ammunition, if nothing else. And while she had no use for the rifles themselves, she took them anyway. If nothing else, the parts would allow her to complete some freelance gun repair work in the future if needed.

It turned out that the griffon had the only sidearm between the pair, and a sergeant’s insignia on the shoulder of his barding and the presence of a lower-ranked insignia on the mare’s indicated this little rendezvous was not entirely sanctioned by whatever rules or regulations they might have been governed by, which would explain why they had gone to the trouble of hiding it in a dirty alley. An NCO getting it on with a lower-ranked enlisted? She’d read more than enough tales of such things in Stable 115’s journals to know how that turned out—a quick end to the careers of those involved.

Still, she had what appeared to be a working 5.56mm pistol from which to draw spare parts from to fix the one she had, an intact operations/repair manual and a small bag with the words “PISTOL TOOLS” stitched into its side, and enough ammunition from the two bodies to keep the weapon fed for several firefights, at least. Some faded—but intact—MRE packets gave her haunches a shudder of disgust as she begrudgingly pocketed them into her saddlebags, and the remainder of the supplies and equipment were quickly sorted out as being of little use to her, and left alone. All told, she’d spent perhaps twenty seconds stripping these two dead lovers of useful things….

…and only then did Max stop hopping back and forth and zip back into the maze of alleys, prompting her to follow along after uttering a soft prayer of apology to the bodies she’d just robbed—

—she nearly plowed Light Tail over as she rounded the corner back into the alley, not having expected anypony to have stopped and waited on her—

“H-holy crap, Mom, don’t do that!” El-Tee squealed in fright as the filly scrambled away from her before she could be trampled. “You tell me not to wander off and then you go and do it anyway?”

Fuuu…dammit, why didn’t I say anything!? Bucking idiot!! “….sorry,” she mumbled sheepishly, unable to hide her newest rifle acquisitions as she’d chosen to wear them slung across her back. “…Max took off down a side alley, had to reel him in…only…”

Light Tail was nothing if not perceptive. She needed only a glance at the rifles on her mother’s back to figure out what had happened. “….only he wasn’t running off to mark something as territory. He smelled out a dead body or two and led you to it….how else would you get two rifles like that without a fight in thirty seconds?”

A rush of shame began to wash over her as she trotted past the filly, as a new, stronger chorus of gunshots began to pepper the streets in the distance…and this time, it seemed there was no end to, and there seemed to be far more guns this time around.

“….let’s just get out of here,” she groaned as a shot of fiery pain zipped into her nerves. “Sounds like the Union patrol finally made it to the fight. We don’t have long now.”

--------------------------------------

It went to shit a lot faster than she’d expected.

Saurus wasn’t taking great aim, he was just laying suppressive fire at anything that resembled a threat—her, the mercs that had now turned on him when a pair of them came flying out of the side alley yelling for their friends to turn their guns on their employer for lying to them, Leon who was probably twenty yards behind him….

….and Saurus was winning. Even with roughly eighty yards between herself and him, he was still managing to score hits with what sounded like a 5mm assault carbine on full auto. Three of the mercs at her position were already lying prostrate on the ground, bleeding or dead, and another just got his leg drilled when an AP round tore through his cover and his armor. And now that Saurus knew that the stable pony was not the one shooting at him, she couldn’t poke her head out for more than a couple of seconds without drawing a string of fire. Two bursts had torn the concrete barrier she’d ducked behind into rubble very quickly, forcing her to a less desirable position behind what looked like the remains of an old civilian transport—a “car”, built to be used by an earth pony, of all species. What was left of it sat rather low to the ground, and its rear-mounted engine housing was quickly becoming perforated with 5mm needle-nosed rounds. She wasn’t sure it could get any worse than this.

Four minutes after she’d fired the first shot, it did.

She’d found a rare moment of opportunity to send a few rounds downrange from her custom-built service rifle, and was even elated to see Saurus’s face wide with terror through her short-range scope as the slugs came within an inch of his face. If not for the fact that she was stuck with surplus 5.56mm rounds at that moment, she could have probably tagged him right then and there, ended the fight.

So of course that damn Union patrol she was trying to avoid would come barging in from the rear after the sixth shot rang out, their hooves, paws, and talons all but announcing themselves to the misbehaving “civilians” that had dared to start a gunfight on tax collection day.

“Lay your weapons on the ground and kneel down!!!” a magically-enhanced, angry male boomed out from what sounded like the other end of town, his voice pounding its way into her head with sheer force of volume. She swore it even rattled the hundred-plus empty casings scattered all around her and the mercs. For sure it rattled the buffer tube in her rifle, somehow—thank the stars that stable pony had been able to work out the kinks in it, thing ran smooth as butter now—

“—ck me, you damned bitch, you knew they’d be coming to stop this and you opened up on us anyway?!” one of the surviving mercs screamed out at her, somewhere to her left—

—it was that griffon that had told the rest of his friends to turn their guns on Saurus and leave her and Leon alone, no matter how many of their friends they’d already killed. Grievances could be sorted out later, he’d screamed.

Guess it technically is later, now….

“Plan was for me and my partner to pull out just ‘fore they got here, let you and Saurus slug it out with the pretty boys,” Ada yelled back, turning over onto her back long enough to see how close that patrol was—

—oh wow, that guy can really shout! She grinned madly when she saw that they were still several hundred yards away. Her exceptional, eagle-sharp vision made it easy to make them out, even from a great distance. In fact, she could see what looked like a pale yellow stallion at the front of the eleven-strong patrol, his horn glowing faintly from the magic he was using to either carry his weapon or project his voice across the street. Probably both.

No griffons, though. That meant they couldn’t exactly see her, or Leon, not yet anyway. They had at least a small chance of getting out of this mess without being blamed for it.

“…think we can still pull that off, in fact,” she added, flipping back over to her previous position, and then turning onto her right side, with her rifle aiming downrange at Saurus once more underneath the “car”. Just enough of a height clearance to make it work, though she was less than happy with having shell casings hitting her in the face with every shot when they ejected into the ground and started bouncing around. Messed up her follow-up shots.

“….mind including us in the plan? Let that asshole down there deal with the pretty boy patrol?”

“Sure!” she laughed, just as she spotted Saurus’s uninjured wing poking out from behind his cover through her scope, and quickly snapped off two rounds into the chassis of the hollowed-out coal hauler he was hiding behind. The wing disappeared behind the ruined vehicle almost instantly. “Peel off, I’ll keep Saurus shooting this way for a couple of seconds!”

She rolled back up onto her hind legs, settling the rifle onto the back end of the car as a rest, and waited for the rat bastard to stick his murdering head up—

--a grayish-white blur shot up into the air, and she traced its path up, tracking it with her rifle—

“Ohhh, shiiit,” she mouthed in shock at the sight of her brother soaring into the sky on one wing. He couldn’t go that high, maybe only sixty feet or so, and his flight path was shaky at best, but he was airborne, if only briefly. If anything, it was more of a flying leap than true flight. A technique the griffons in the Runners taught and practiced, but rarely used because of the strain on the one wing tasked with generating the lift needed to haul the body into the air.

And Saurus was using it to clear over eighty yards of distance to—

—to get behind me while I’m sitting with my beak catching flies!, she shrieked at herself when he began to descend over her, quickly vaulting herself over the car and onto the other side—

—a sharp burst of gunfire from above accented the destruction of the aged, neglected asphalt she’d occupied a half-second earlier, bits of concrete and dust peppering the car’s side as she landed on her left side with a healthy thud—

—much as she hated to shoot at folk she had no quarrel with, getting the Union to firing in her general direction was about the best hope she had now. With a huff of terrified air, she straightened up, popped up with her rifle raised at the incoming patrol—

—saw with slight relief that Saurus was mid-way through a mag change out of the corner of her eye before she squeezed the trigger, but only managed two shots before the bolt slung back and locked in place inside the stock of her rifle—

—she thought she saw the lead stallion flinch slightly a couple of seconds later, even from over six hundred yards off, and hoped that meant that her rounds had hit close—

—eleven flashes of flame and light lit up from the patrol, and she instinctively ducked back behind her cover just as bullets began to slam into virtually everything around her—the ground, the buildings, their overhanging signs, abandoned road-side display stalls, the cars—

“Bitch of a sister, you got me good today!!” Saurus screamed with rage, just before turning his rifle onto the advancing, firing patrol and began to let loose with short, controlled bursts. “Get this pansies scurrying for cover first, then I’ll deal with you—”

Even with the three surviving mercs hastily beating hooves and paws into the side alleys to escape the coming chaos, Ada found it impossible to resist the opportunity that lay before her. To avenge all the wrongs he’d visited upon her and countless others in his five-year path of wanton misery.

And to make all of this rage and anger inside her worth something.

Her relic of a revolver—an automatic revolver, at that—slid out of its holster across her lower back with such practiced ease that it was in her talons and squared down on her brother’s back before she’d even thought of it, and then the weapon was bucking in her grasp as she quickly squeezed off three .357 rounds into his armored barding, almost as quickly as she could fire her 9mm, just as the sounds of gunfire from the advancing patrol began to reach their position. The impact of the rounds threw off his balance—standing on two hind legs to fire was a lot harder than they made it look, and it didn’t help having to deal with the recoil of a fully automatic weapon and the kinetic impact of a .357 slug at the same time. By the third round, he’d stopped firing, his legs beginning to stumble and lose their footing, and he was forced to throw his forelimbs out to cushion his fall—

—he bolted away from her, off to the left, as she tracked his form and loosed off a fourth shot that missed his tail by half an inch and splattered across the pavement. A fifth shot knocked off a dangling license plate from the rear of that military transport, where she lost sight of her quarry. She briefly contemplated chasing after him, to keep him on the run, but the impact of an errant slug into the car in front of her—and seven more into the street—spurred her to break off the engagement while she still had the chance. With a scowl of hatred at yet another opportunity having slipped through her claws, she slapped the pistol back into its holster and took off on all fours, down the other side of the street where she’d initially emerged from—

“HALT!!!” that screaming stallion shouted from over four hundred yards off now. Just enough time to clear the alleys before they could catch sight of her, if she was lucky—

—she slipped off to the right into the main alley, back towards Overdose’s clinic, and started a hard charge, hoping to clear at least fifty yards in the next five seconds—

—a door from the back of what looked like an ancient restaurant from Equestria That Was—El-Tee’s words, not hers, but she liked the sound of it—swung open, and that merc griffon’s ebony-feathered head poked out—

“In here, quick!” he shouted out at her rapidly approaching awesomeness.

Never turn down help from a handsome griffon! she squealed, elated at her change of fortune. Without hesitation she made a direct run for the open door, and rolled right through the doorway two seconds later—

—found herself in a backroom kitchen, where at least one of the pony mercs was already disappearing into a hidden staircase revealed from underneath a removed portion of the tiled floor. She followed him right through, heard the griffon slam the back door of the restaurant shut as she descended down the stairs and tried to warn them about Leon still being out there—

—but when she hit the bottom of the stairs, into an underground, military-bunker styled interior lit by poorly-charged light bars embedded behind wire-caged housings, she found her partner’s familiar white-feathered, pale gold body sullenly popping the straps off of his armor to pull it off, and finally allowed herself to calm down a little.

Just a little. She was still mad at him about that prank he pulled with her MRE last week. She hated beans and franks….

“….sorry you missed most of the action this time,” she jested lightly as she drew closer to him. Behind her, the sound of the staircase’s hidden entrance sliding back into place rumbled through the walls. “But it serves you right for switching my MREs up like that.”

“…godsdammit, Ada, we almost didn’t make it out this time,” he growled back, pulling the upper half of his barding up over his neck and dropping it to the floor. “Why couldn’t you just tell me we were walking into a trap when we got here?”

If she’d had pony ears, she was certain they’d be flattening in shame and despair right now. It was a good thing she wasn’t a pony….though her wings betrayed her emotions just as well, as she could feel them drooping away from her sides. “….I…didn’t figure it out ‘till I got to talking with the stable pony….knew something was off, but I had to talk to her to be sure. Saurus doesn’t leave people he hates alive unless he needs them for something…needed you to believe I was gonna snipe him from the building behind you, which I’m pretty sure was rigged to blow me to bloody bits. He might’ve seen through it if you were just trying to act…which you’re terrible at, by the way.”

His eyes looked back up at her with looked like a brief tinge of disbelief, as if he couldn’t believe she’d been that far behind in figuring out Saurus’s next move. “….seriously? You switched up the plan at the last minute because you didn’t know you needed to until then?”

“…yeah,” she sighed in defeat, slumping onto the ground in a sphinx-cat position. “Look, I already know I tossed us into a fire pit back there, it was the best I could do on short notice. I haven’t exactly been a stellar performer in tracking our target this last year.”

“I figured that part out already, but we can talk about it another time. These mercs aren’t offering their shelter for free.”

She heard the remainder of his armor slap onto the metal floor. “….somebody wanna tell us what the cost is? ‘Cause if you’re looking for a ride or three from this girl, I’ll take my chances topside.”

“Haven't decided that yet,” the dark-feathered merc griffon bellowed as he descended the stairs behind her. “You did take out at least four of us back there, and you owe us big time for that.”

“Surprised you ain’t gutting us already,” she replied with a cautious tone, raising up slightly for a better reach at her holstered 9mm, just in case….

“Yeah, well, one of those damn kids shed some light on what kind of guy that Saurus is,” one of the pony mercs mumbled from the comfort of a rolled out sleeping mat in the middle of the room. It seemed they used this place quite often…and made her wonder what kind of trouble these guys got up to when the Union wasn’t around to supervise them after curfew. “Plus he didn’t mention he was after escaped slaves. We don’t want nothin’ to do with that shit, ‘specially not if he got them by killing their last owner. Union don’t look kindly on that.”

“We’re not quite as harsh, but it depends on the circumstances,” Leon assured him darkly, the sound of his “Big Demon” pistol being unloaded and tossed onto his discarded armor, along with his rifle and his SMG. “For the record, that stable pony and her filly did take those two slaves out of his hands, and they’re better off for it. If you’d seen half the shit Saurus did to the mare, you’d have let them go without asking.”

“Whore trembled like a leaf the second we came down on them,” the pony merc sighed sadly, rolling over onto his other side, as if physically trying to escape from some unbidden image before his eyes. “….I’m out, dudes. Had enough of this shit today….you damn Runners ever see that little girl again, tell her thanks for saving most of our asses…”

A small, benign smile crept onto her beak as she stood up to stretch out her limbs. Good on ya, El-Tee. Maybe there’s something left of you ponies after all…

“And as far as making up for killing four of our own back there,” the griffon went on, coming to a stop beside her, “we get that we didn’t have the whole picture, all right? We ain’t all on top of shit like you Runners, but you still offed friends of ours. If I knew that I wouldn’t have that damn filly’s eyes haunting me in my dreams for taking you out after she warned us about him, this would’ve been settled already. As it is, I’m tempted to take some payment out of you in personal ways. Change my mind.”

“You hurt even a feather on my girl and I’ll rip your balls off,” Leon’s voice roared angrily, finally showing off that lion half that he kept hidden for good reason. “Might make you eat them, too.”

“He’ll do it,” she teased with a smile. “We ain’t above working off debts, but I draw the line at being used as a whore. You got work you want done, we’ll do it, within reason. Work with us on this. You’ll live longer, trust me.”

The merc’s boisterous threats began to wither and fade in the face of such naked aggression from a competing male, and his plumage flattened considerably. “….all right, all right. Screwdriver might have somethin’ once this shitstorm you whipped up dies out….can’t blame a guy for tryin’, though, right? Biggest damn girl I ever met and I can’t touch you…”

“Oh, I never said we couldn’t have some fun if I got to liking you enough,” she cooed into his left ear. “But you gotta work for it. Show me you’re worth it….and show me yer clean, to boot. I plan on having kids someday and I’m not about to ruin myself with STDs. You got a name, merc, or do I just call you Dark Feathered One?”

Dark Feathered One’s face began to grow increasingly uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was going. From dictating the flow to now essentially being claw-handled about like a rag-doll, he seemed uncertain with what he ought to be doing next. “….first you threaten me with your boyfriend for suggesting it, and then you go and proposition me? What the hell’s wrong with you Runners?”

“You wanted her as payment,” Leon clarified, still glaring at him (or maybe her, too) with that death stare of his. “Against her will. But if she’s willing and she thinks you’re worth it, she’ll spend a night or two with you, no strings attached or anything. I learned that three years ago, and until we finish our tour in the field and settle down somewhere, I have no problem with it. You aren’t the first one she’s hit on like this, believe me. She’s hard to keep satisfied for long.”

Dark Feathered One’s eyes began to scrutinize her in ways she couldn’t discern at that moment. “….name’s Decker. And I’m already starting to regret ever bringing it up…”

Her smile broke wider as she finally stood up fully on all fours and titled her head down at Decker’s face. “I’ll bet you fifty caps you won’t be thinking that way by the time we part company.”

--------------------------------------

The town of Maize shrank in the distance as the wagon creaked and rumbled down the road, occasionally shuddering as the wheels crossed over a crack in the asphalt or bumped into a stretch of earth and dust that had built up in one of the many potholes that had formed up through the decades. The slight stink of rarely-bathed brahmin and their earth pony handlers made it difficult to be able to doze off and sleep off the ride.

And so she just lay there, with Sling lying on her unwounded side across from her, and the kids curled up between them, and watched the town grow into a smaller blur with every passing moment…until the silence grew too much for her to bear.

“….town we’re heading to, it’s called Stonewall. It’s a few hours out, to the northwest. Might add another week to our trip down to Trotpeka, but it’s out of the way of most merc groups and raiders. Should be quiet enough to let you heal up.”

“Fine,” Sling deadpanned into the soft canvas covering beneath them, her shotgun laid out beside her, its barrel pointed out towards the back of the wagon.

“...has a working water talisman, to boot,” she added next, hoping that might get at least a stir out of either Sling or Elly. “Clean water. Heard they even have a bath house.”

“Cool,” Elly deadpanned as well, unbelievably enough. She was just content to lie there, huddled up next to her boy, and lazily stroke her pups behind their ears with soft scratches from her magic.

“….it’s the one town outside Syrup Mound or Trotpeka with a good bar and a decent food market.”

“Awesome,” BJ droned soullessly, though that was par for the course for him. Today, though….

….today, I feel like being an evil bitch, she smiled evilly. “….think it has a library with a three-quarters complete set of Daring Do books.”

This finally got the senses-shocked filly out of her depressed state of mind. That trip out of Maize had shaken the whole of them up in just a few seconds…she’d never, once in her life, ever seen BJ break and nearly cry like that, and to see it happen because he felt….concerned? For a filly he complained about half the time? And the way Sling promised them that they would not be harmed by anypony….

…like she’d begun to see them as more than just travelling partners and guides….

….was this….friendship?

And did it have to come at the price of a hyper-active filly that woke up at the slightest provocation of things that interested her and turned her into a machine of death-by-questions?

“Really!??!” El-Tee shrieked, loudly enough that it pierced her ears and made her cringe as the filly sat up and prepared to pounce on her. “Three-quarters?! Do they have the first three-quarters, the middle, or the last three-quarters?! Are they in good shape?! Do they let anypony check ‘em out or do ya have to do chores or work to get in—”

BJ’s left hoof shot up and plugged her mouth shut before her fit of excitement could draw unwanted attention. “Keep that up, and they’ll make us walk the rest of the way,” he warned tiredly. “Behind the brahmin.”

Elly’s eyes widened in horror at the thought of having to dodge the leavings of the two-headed beasts, and promptly laid back down beside him. “….you are such a killjoy.”

“It’s what I’m best at.”

“Then why don’t you have a cutie mark in it yet, blank flank?”

“That’s the awesome thing, my blank flank is the cutie mark,” he shot back. “You can’t see it ‘cause it’s, like, literally nothing. I can be anything I want.”

“And you choose to be nothing. That’s not a special talent, that’s being….lazy.”

“You’re best at making me want to kill you just to shut you up, and I don’t see anything on your butt that matches that.”

“When I find out what I’m so awesome at that I get my butt tattoo at last, it’s gonna make you wish yours wasn’t so embarrassed of you that it looks like your butt.”

The children’s playful bickering finally succeeded in getting a rise out of Sling, who simply laughed softly into her forelegs as she curled up tighter to block out the light.

And she had to admit, this time around, they didn’t seem to be arguing with each other out of spite. More like….a game.

Like they were playing with it and having fun with it.

“Except that nobody could stand to look at your cutie mark for long ‘cause they’d just get blinded by that weird ass streak in your tail. They might prefer to ponder the mysteriousness of my cutie mark, like an old painting from Equestria That Was in those big cities with their fancy art places or something.”

“If you could find even ten people that could stand to look at your butt for that long, I’d pay them like, a hundred caps out of pity and tell ‘em, ’thanks for tryin’ to find BJ’s talent of boringness and getting bored by it’.”

“It’d be caps well-earned. Better than having to listen to a certain filly shriek and scream loud enough to wake the dead in boot hill in the next town just at the mention of Daring Do.”

“And what’s wrong with Daring Do? She’s awesome, she’s smart, she’s pretty, she can fly, she’s like, a super-expert on all things ancient and decrepit and magical. She’s everything you’re not, because she tries.”

“She’s fictional, just like all that hot air you blow out your mouth.”

“She’s everything I wanna be. A mare like that can change whole worlds and make a difference. And we need somepony like that now more than ever.”

Kite felt something tug at her heart just then, eliciting a tear from her right eye that the kids thankfully couldn’t see. You poor, naïve child….this world isn’t meant for souls like yours….

“….can you start by shutting up and making a difference in how quiet the ride is?” BJ snarked back.

“What, and ruin this perfectly good bonding moment we’re having? I swear, you’ve been nicer and cooler today than you’ve been ever since we met. I think you got my cooties, you big dummy.”

“Me, the dummy? Who’s bumbling around the place like a lost puppy every time we step into a new town?”

“I got puppies to keep from getting lost. Those fuzzballs got minds of their own.”

“That’s more than I can say for you.”

“You can say something about me?”

“She who questions me twice, is a fool.”

“So what do you say?”

“Aha!” BJ shouted, finally rising up to tap her in the side. “You admit you are a fool.”

She couldn’t tell who laughed first. It could have been both of them. But right at that moment, both mares burst into a snorting fit of laughter at the joke played on the filly (who might have seen it coming and chose to walk into it anyway).

A joke they never would have thought the colt was even capable of expressing.

And when El-Tee grinned and latched onto him in a fitful, gleeful hug, they realized that she had been aiming for that reaction all along. “So there is a pony under that boring, blank flank!”

What BJ did next brought his mother to joyful tears, for the first time in her life, and she swore to herself that whatever happened to them in the end, she would never let down the souls that had finally gotten her only child to open up a little.

“....there’s a friend under that boring, blank flank,” he answered, locking a foreleg around her neck and ruffling her mane with the other hoof. “Whatever that is, or what it means, I don’t know. Can’t be that bad if I get to torture you with tickle spots for being too annoying.”

Comments

[ponyatthedisco]

I always wonder why the FOE fics are always the longest ones. This one seems interesting though. But the huge wordcount seems daunting to start. Also so few veiws. To bad you cant really advertise fanfics

[KDarkwater]

4453511

The word count may be an informal "rule" of sorts, though there are plenty that are far shorter than most. The risk with longer tales is that the author may eventually lose interest and just stop working on it. In my case, my sloth-like writing pace is as much a hindrance as anything else (World of Warcraft doesn't help any either). Now and then, though, I may have to churn out something shorter, or even one-shots entirely unrelated, to get the mental juices flowing again. I've a couple of those lying around my hard drive at the moment that I may touch on and finish off at some point this summer.

If I were doing this for the viewcount, I'd have stopped at the second chapter. I'm running with this for as long as it takes to finish it. I anticipate a project of at least another two years, if not more, given the pace that I'm going at. :\

[Deathpony]

Well at least he doesn't have mercs anymore , also glad that she didn't lose any eyesight . Good chapter again

[The Amateur]

This was a grand chapter!

One gigantic gambit stacked on another. Ada's POV. Leon's POV (with at least some personality attached now too!).

And BJ has character too. Shocking! This is shaping up to be my favorite Fallout: Equestria side-story.

[KDarkwater]

5376961

Despite the massive gap in time since the last chapter, I am indeed still at work on the project. This may be a case where no matter how much I rewrite the current chapter to try to satisfy myself that it will do, I'll just have to suck it up and put up what I've got regardless of how much better I think it could be if I worked on it just a little bit more....

....which I've been doing for six months.... >.>

It's a good thing I don't do this for a living.