"So," Twilight finally said. "You ready to go back to Ponyville?"

Spike shook his giant, mammoth-like head. "No. Not yet."

Twilight blinked.

"I can't go back like this. Not with Rarity's house destroyed." Spike looked up at the sky. "I need to make it up to her."

"Oh, really?" Twilight frowned. "And how do you plan to do that?"

He grinned, toothily, and right then, Twilight knew that her baby brother was back. "Tell me, Twi—have you been to the gem fields lately?"

"So let me sum this up."

"Mmhm?"

"You wanted us to hike out to the gemstone fields in the middle of the night."

"Yup."

"In order to dig up gems."

"Mmhm."

"Enough gems, that is, to completely pay off any repairs needed for damage done to Rarity's shop."

Spike put a claw to his chin. "Hm...yeah. That sounds about right."

Twiight looked up at him, a small grin on her face. "Never change, Spike. Never change."

He beamed back down at her, seeming a little less gigantic now that he was walking on all four limbs, rather than bipedally as he'd done before. With his tail extending for over a dozen feet behind him, he was no less impressive, but at least this way she could actually look him in the eye.

"We're here!" he finally announced. "The gemstone fields!"

Twilight looked up, her eyebrows going up into her forehead.

These fields had never been known to be a particularly fruitful place; in fact, most plants—aside from the odd acacia tree or bit of tumbleweed—tended to stay out of the area. But now, under the chill, cold moon of the night sky, it seems like a barren wasteland. She shivered. If not for the hills and highlands that bordered the fields, she would have thought that they went on forever.

"Okay, then." Spike looked down at her. "You ready to go?"

Twilight smiled back; she couldn't help it. Spike's enthusiasm was infectious. This is what I want to do, his body language said. This is how I'm going to fix things. And judging by how infectious his optimism seemed to be, she couldn't help but believe it as well.

This will make everything okay.

She felt a little twang in her heart, but shoved it back down. Let's do this.

She nodded up at Spike. "Absolutely! Where do we start?"

Spike hummed to himself. He sat back on his haunches—causing the flat earth to tremble under his weight—and casually stroked his chin. "Y'know, I think most of the gem caches are somewhere over in that area—" he gestured off toward some point in the southwest "—so we might as well start there."

Twilight chuckled. "Well, you're the gem expert. Lead the way, Mr. Mineral."

Lead the way he happily did. Twilight could almost feel the pebbles beneath her hooves shake with each cheery bound that Spike made across the flatlands. As they approached the spot he'd pointed out, she let a bit of magic into her horn, letting the energy swirl and spark at its tip as she prepared her spell.

"Right...here," Spike announced. He gave Twilight a searching look. "Okay; you ready?"

She smirked. "You got it!"

She activated the spell.

There was little chance of matching Rarity's innate special talent—Cutie Marks were funny like that—but Twilight had managed to finagle up something that at least resembled her friend's gemstone-tracking spell. Unlike Rarity's, it was only able to track trace elements of minerals left behind by gemstone formation, but for all intents and purposes, it was enough.

Besides. Twilight's smirk deepened. Rarity's spell might be good for finding small, specific types of gemstones, but they weren't searching for a single-use diamond brooch. The more gems there were, the easier they were to track. And tonight, Twilight and Spike were looking for the motherlode.

The spell flickered to life. Instantly, she felt a magnetic pull on her horn, pulsing with each beat of her heart. She swiveled her head, searching for the source of the pull.

"There!" she shouted, raising a hoof. It pointed straight at a pile of rocks sitting innocuously off to the side. "I'm getting a pretty strong reading from that patch of dirt."

"How deep?" Spike's long tail curled around her shoulder as he stared at the space she'd pointed out.

She reminded herself that his deeper voice would still take some getting used to. Taking a moment to calibrate the spell, Twilight took her tongue between her teeth and made a quick estimate. "About...forty, fifty feet down. Plus or minus five."

"Those are error bars I'm willing to take." Spike snickered before turning and giving her a serious look. "Alright, Twi—stand back. I don't want you getting hurt."

Twilight's expression softened. With another spark at the end of her horn, she vanished before reappearing at least ten yards away. "How's that?" she hollered, a purple shield flickering into existence around her.

Spike rolled his eyes. "Smart-aleck," he muttered fondly.

And then he was off.

Twilight had seen plenty of things, but she'd never seen anything quite like that. She'd seen construction ponies use machines for excavation before—giant, metallic things that dug deep into clay, slashing it from the earth—but Spike was on a whole other level.

Every inch of his twenty-foot bulk was hard at work, digging, cutting, and burrowing into the ground. His tail flailed vigorously behind him with each foot he gained, digging deeper and deeper into the earth. He was like a machine, albeit the biggest one she'd ever seen. Muscles pumped, those giant, bulging abdominals soon becoming slick with sweat as his biceps swelled further and further. His wings held tightly against his back, Spike made short work of any rock or root in his way, his diamond-hard claws slicing through each of them with ease.

Soon, his titanically-broad shoulders had pushed out enough dirt to make a hole wide enough to fit ten ponies, standing side by side. Twilight's eyes only grew wider as Spike's bulk began to disappear under the dirt. It seemed almost impossible that there could exist something larger than he.

Well, there was the Ursa Minor, her logical side reminded her. Not to mention the Ursa Major. And all the other dragons. And the hydra. And—

She made Logical Twilight shut up. It was more fun to just watch Spike work, especially without second-guessing herself through the nagging of a secondary persona.

Clang!

Her eyes widened. She imagined Spike's opening wide too, his wings flaring out in surprise. With a poof of magic, she was back to standing over the now-enormous hole.

"Did you find something?" she called down.

Spike's grin was wider than she felt it had any right to be, but there was no denying the look of absolute glee on his face. "See for yourself!" He took a step to the side, pointing to one of the walls of the hole.

Twilight's jaw dropped. Sure enough, a heap of sapphires lay pooling at the bottom of the hole. In the moonlight, they glimmered a bright, eerie blue, their hues glinting off of Spike's iridescent scales. As she watched, more and more poured out. There must have been hundreds there!

"Holy crud!" She cut herself off before going into more...explicit exclamations. Even once she'd gotten herself under control again, it was still difficult to contain her newfound enthusiasm. "Do you need a hoof with that?"

Spike looked up at her, and then back down at the heap of sapphires. A few more had leaked out, and almost the entirety of the hole's floor was now covered in bright, shimmering blue. "What do you think?" he called back, snorting.

Twilight smirked.

Two levitation spells later, both Spike and the immense pile of gemstones he'd found sat by the side of the hole. She grinned up at the mound of sapphire, barely noticing that she hadn't even broken a sweat. It was probably just one of the perks of being a super-magical alicorn.

"So," she said, turning to face Spike. He was sweaty, dirty, and probably smelled worse than last week's attempt at potato stew, but his joy was palpable. "You ready to go again?"

He grinned. "Am I ever!"

Four holes and at least a ton of scattered rubies, emeralds, and sapphires later, Twilight knew they were getting somewhere.

She grinned as piles and piles of dirt flew from Spike's latest hole, occasionally landing with a piece of lapis-lazuli or topaz sticking out. It looked like Rarity really knew what she was doing when she came here: it felt like gems were leaking out at the seams!

She was just about ready to holler out to Spike if he'd found anything yet—this cache was deeper than the rest, a whole two hundred feet, and he'd been digging for over thirty minutes—when she felt a sudden weight on her shoulder. She turned around...

...and stared right into the beady eyes of a Diamond Dog.

One high-pitched yelp and a teleportation spell later, she was glaring right back at him—or her, for all she knew—with her chest heaving slowly. She hated being surprised.

"Little pony steal doggies gems." The Dog shook its head, rasping out the words with all of the sense of disappointment it could muster. "Stealing bad, yes?"

It was flanked on either side by two—much larger, Twilight realized—other Dogs, their dumb canine eyes glinting in the dim moonlight. Their coats were brown and flecked with dirt, though muscles rippled dangerously beneath that muddied fur.

When its companions didn't respond, the first Dog elbowed them in the sides. "Yes?" it hissed.

"Yes," one grunted.

"Stealing very bad," the other added in its own gravelly tones.

"Yes, yes; stealing bad," the first one whined. Its eyes narrowed, and it took a step closer toward Twilight. Instantly, her horn came up, her eyes flashing.

"But we're going to teach the pretty pony a lesson, aren't we?" The Diamond Dog giggled. "Show her that ponies shouldn't come out to steal gemstones at night."

It elbowed one of its companions again. "Yeah," it grunted. "At night."

The first Dog groaned.

"Go!" it snarled, its head snapping up as it jabbed a stubby paw in Twilight's direction. "Grab her! Teach pony a lesson!"

In the half-second that Twilight had before the two chunks of muscle hurled themselves toward her, she had enough time to roll her eyes, buff her hooves, and teleport herself directly behind the first Diamond Dog. The larger Dogs made contact with an enormous crash, their imitation "armor" sending noise for miles across the dry landscape.

"Ugh..."

"Eurgh..."

Twilight watched with an unhealthily large amount of satisfaction as the two Dogs moaned with pain, though she personally doubted that the two brutes had enough neurons between them to feel even one iota through that thick skin.

Hearing the loud pop that had announced Twilight's arrival, the first Dog's head whipped around. It let out a shrill yelp as it saw Twilight directly behind it.

"Agh! Pony is here, not there!" Its claws scraped across its ears as its flunkies tussled on the ground. "Ack! Why does Dog have to do everything himself!"

So he was male. Huh.

With a growl, the Diamond Dog bared his teeth and leapt for Twilight, claws outstretched. She easily batted him away with a wing, barely sparing a thought.

He went sprawling. Hissing and sputtering as he got to his paws, the Dog glared daggers in her direction. "Pony—pony dare attack—"

His words died in his mouth as an enormous shadow fell over him.

"Pony dares do what?"

Twilight giggled. "A little late to the party, aren't we?"

Spike bared his fangs, towering above the downed Diamond Dog, who was now whimpering in fear. "I heard you shrieking like a little filly. I had to come check it out."

His slitted eyes slashed across the air to bore into the Dog's squashed face. "I should rephrase that. Diamond Dog dares attack pony?"

He spat on the ground. It left a sizzling droplet of boiling moisture as large as a golf ball. The Dog whimpered again.

Spike took a step forward, leaving a sizable footprint and making the earth shake beneath his weight. He was back to standing on two legs, and so every inch of his gigantic body seemed to stretch up into the heavens, far above the Diamond Dog's head. Even had it been standing, he would have been more than four times its size; lying prone, and paralyzed with fear, the dragon must have seemed larger than a mountain. The bulging muscles rippling with strength, power, and—undeniably—barely-constrained anger couldn't have hurt the effect either.

"Now," Spike boomed, his voice echoing across the empty fields. With each word, his body tensed a little more, massive biceps, pectorals, and shoulders swelling bit by bit until the poor pup was all but drowning in his giant shadow. "You're going to start off by apologizing to my sister over here, and you'd best do it before I start beating you into a pulp." He appeared to reconsider. "Or before she decides to start reading you a two-thousand page report on philosophical ethics. Your choice."

Within a second, the Dog was at Twilight's hooves, bowing and scraping. Every other word out of its mouth was either a deep, heartfelt apology, or a promise to give her more gemstones than she could carry. She thought she caught the words "untouched, lustful bitches" a few times, too. That gave her some pause.

"Enough."

The Dog quickly shut up.

She took a step forward, looming over its prone form. "You messed up. That much, we've made clear. The question becomes, what are you going to do about it?"

The Dog opened its mouth, but a spell quickly zipped it back up. The Dog whined.

"Now, I don't want any..Diamond Dog females." Twilight winced at the mental imagery. "But there might be something that you can do for me."

Somehow, the Dog managed to break free of its magical gag. "Yes!" it burst out. "Anything—anything! Pretty pony no hurt doggie—doggie help pony!"

Twilight smirked. "How kind of you. Now, from the last time we were here, I remember you lot having a whole cluster of mines beneath this field."

She glanced over her shoulder, back toward the piles of gems that were waiting for them. She thought she could hear the Dog whimper.

She turned back, grinning. "Think you have a minecart big enough to carry all that?"

"Thank you!"

Twilight waved to the pile of defeated-looking Diamond Dogs as she trotted away from the entrance to their mines. Beside her, Spike gave an amused grunt. The cart was hitched to his back, and somehow—she still marveled at his strength—he was managing to pull all several tons of gemstones that lay inside. Once or twice, she'd caught him drooling at the seemingly endless treasures there, but so far, it looked like he was keeping his monstrous appetite in check.

Off in the distance, the sun was beginning to come up. Twilight squinted, peering over the tops of the foothills as the sky turned from black to a deep crimson.

She turned to look up at Spike. "Think this'll be enough?"

His grin said it all. "Ponyville," he rumbled, the gems clanking behind him with each step he took, "here we come!"