Based on probabilistic analysis of things that had happened already, we decided that it was safe to press on. Liverpole was only ten miles away, a little further than Warreington, but still not very far. Because I'd gone and smoked out an Enclave base right under their noses that they didn't even know was there, news would somehow osmosis through to RFM and thence to Steel Rangers HQ faster than it would take to walk back there. Furthermore, there were free drinks to be had, and knowing my luck, I had a one in four chance of finding a cure for taint on this trip.

Stars had calmed down substantially from the turbo-grouchiness that had soured her demeanour for the last few days. I was starting to think that she was on drugs. Then I was reminded that I couldn't smoke weed every day because it was extinct, and that made me sad. House... I don't know what was up with House. He was just kind of following us at this point, waiting for me to get shot so he could jump in front of the bullet. My guess was that both of them had adjusted to my tempo a little, and after a few hours without me, they started to get bored. Snowy, of course, was enthralled to see absolutely fucking everything, because while you can have a simple conversation with him, he remains a dog. And Xena, being an inanimate object, kept to herself, content in the knowledge that her presence ensured our party was racially sensitive.

After an hour of walking through shitty suburban rubble, we had to slow down. We spotted a raider. I took out my gun, but Stars snatched it off me before I could open fire. We continued with discretion. We passed another few groups as we moved on. They all had red flags with logos we couldn't make out. One group was carrying a grisly standard - the remains of a coal puppy, skewered and nailed to a rusty shield in a rampant position, liberally splattered with dried blood. Snowy whimpered. I didn't care, because going on Snowy's description of how he was kicked out, the other coal puppies were assholes.

We stopped on the upper floor of a ruined building, overlooking a street where some of the groups were starting to converge. Stars squinted. "I recognise these ones. Manechester United. Only, Old Troughord is miles away from here..."

"Plot inbound!" I shouted. House slapped me around the head to be quiet.

"Which can only mean that they're here for a match."

"A match?"

"It's what the raiders here do to entertain themselves. They strap their prisoners with bomb collars, give them the crudest weapons and armour they can find, and then pit them against each other in teams in a game of extremely violent football."

House chuckled. "So, regular football then?"

"I think she means actual football, not that glorified tag team of wrestling and advertising that passes for Equestrian football."

"But the... the joke is that football is already violent."

I rolled my eyes and sighed. I looked at Stars and shook my head. She made a similar gesture. "Equestrians, eh?" House grumbled.

We tailed the groups of raiders until there wasn't a way we could proceed without being spotted. We were in the ruins of an old coffee shop opposite a park, where a structure had been built out of scrap. Stars said they used the pre-war stadiums as shells for settlements because they're not dangerous enough to play their extreme football in, and none of them feel safe going into the home ground of another tribe, so they built these arenas on neutral ground. Considering these are supposed to be base, violent barbarians, I thought this was a remarkable display of consensus-finding. Maybe these guys should have been in government before the war.

I was about to turn and leave to find another way around the throngs of raiders cramming to get into the Murderbowl (I didn't see that name anywhere because they were all illiterate, but they probably called it something like that), when Stars nudged me.

"Where are you going?"

"I was going around."

"Aren't you going to... y'know, do your thing?"

"Oh."

"'Oh', what?"

"So, when I go around being trigger-happy and impulsive it's 'ooh, Atom, you have a murder problem, stop it', but the moment I decide to take a sensible course of action, you want me to run in all gung-ho?"

"Well, maybe have a little more discretion than that..."

"Or are you trying to get rid of me? That's it, isn't it, you're trying to push me into acts so reckless that I haven't a hope of surviving?"

"But... you might actually be able to save some..."

House closed her mouth with a hoof. "Yes, that's exactly it."

"Well fuck you, I accept your challenge!" I leaned out the window to start thinking. House smirked at Stars.

"I'm not getting in."

"Why not? It was your idea that I do this in the first place." I slouched in the seat with one hoof over the wheel. The glasses were down, and I couldn't properly see Stars glaring at me from three feet outside the passenger door. I couldn't properly see anything else either.

"I told you to do something, not... this in particular."

"What, form a plan on the spot that doesn't go further than thirty seconds in front of my face in total ignorance of personal safety? I don't know what you were expecting."

"I just really don't trust you to drive safely." We were a couple of buildings down from the stadium in an old multi-storey car park. There were hundreds of abandoned cars in states varying from almost-intact to 'pile of rust'. I'd just spent half an hour hot-wiring vehicles in order of size from biggest to smallest until I found one that worked as far as letting me reverse out of its spot. I'd ended up at the wheel of a pickup truck with wheels instead of hover thrusters. The tyres were completely flat, but it looked hardy enough to be able to shunt through anything big enough to give the wheels problems.

"Okay, fine, how about you ride Snowy in my wake?"

"You're going to leave a wake?"

"That's the plan. C'mon Stetson, let's go for the home run."

House quirked a brow at me as he climbed in. "That's baseball."

"It's still not football." He shut the door. The door didn't close properly, so he tried it again. The inside handle didn't work and the window wouldn't roll down, so Stars had to open the door for him and try to slam it shut. I tapped on the roof and put it into first.

As we were rolling out, I rummaged through the stuff stored around the driver's seat. I tapped on the radio in passing, but it was dead. I found some cassette tapes, but they'd probably been wiped centuries ago by electromagnetic pulses. I shoved one in the machine and pocketed the rest anyway.

"Check the glove compartment."

House frowned, and popped it open. "What for?"

"Little card. Probably with a black stripe on it."

He rummaged about a bit, then came back with the ticket between his hooves. I grabbed it with my teeth. "What... why?" I said nothing as we descended the one level to the exit.

We rolled up to the meter at the exit. I wound down the window and stuck the ticket in the machine. Reluctantly, the barrier lifted. "Someone just picked up the bill for a two hundred year parking stay."

I was surprised at how many road signs were still intact and legible. I went over a roundabout and the wrong way down a one way street to spite traffic laws, and stopped around the corner from the street the raiders had been gathering on, just out of sight. I tried the radio again.

House chuckled. "Normal priorities, then?" I kept fiddling with buttons until something came on. I heard mechanisms start whirring, followed by distorted, wobbly music playing out of the speaker on my side. Well, music was generous - someone who sounded entirely too pony to rap was gunning out rhymes over the remains of a beat. House winced. The lyrics were utterly unintelligible, but that wasn't the point. I cranked up the volume until the cracked windows started shaking. "What the heck are we listening to?" House might have said, if I could hear him. I revved the engine and started driving again.

I swore loudly at the worst traffic jam in history (the gridlock hadn't budged for years), and then went around a block to find the crowd of raiders had all filed into the arena in the time I’d taken. In my wing mirror, I could see Stars clutching Snowy by the back of the neck and looking nauseous. Out the window to my right were the letters O and I walking past in spiky armour. Stragglers. The fat one still had a large circular imprint on his front. Having heard the truck, they'd come over to investigate and were squinting to see inside. House slouched in his seat and lowered his hat over his face. I wound down the window and stuck my head out.

"Can I help you, gents?"

"What..." Stones began, but that sentence was never going to go anywhere.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" Sticks said.

"What, orange, two sets of eyewear, doing alarmingly peculiar things?"

"Yeah. Sounds familiar."

"There's actually a bunch of ponies hanging around with description like that. You'd be surprised."

Stones tilted his head. "Really?"

I grinned. "No!" I yelled, then I jammed down the gas and wound the window up. I saw them get bowled over by Snowy as he went past.

"What's your, uh... plan here?" House said as I floored it. The cabin was filling with smoke and I drove a bit too close to a parked car, knocking the wing mirror off our tetanus hazard on wheels.

"Ram it."

"Ram it? That’s it?"

"What did you think I was doing with the car?"

He looked at me with a grimace. "I've changed my mind. I'm with Stars, let me out."

"Oh, we bail out before we hit it, obviously."

"There ain't nothing obvious about anything you do, At-"

"Now!" I yanked on the inside door handle as the shadow of the stands loomed over us. The door didn’t budge. House pulled on the handle on his side, and it broke off. He stared me some daggers, let me tell you. I gave my side another thump. "Oh, bollocks." I ducked and waited for the sound of tearing, failing metal to stop.

The truck rolled over at least once. When it stopped moving it was upright at least, and we were back in the light. I poked my head out and lifted my glasses. (I was amazed they were still in one piece.) Snowy was sitting in front of the car scratching himself. There was a cloud of dust and a pile of scrap and limbs behind him where I can only guess a stand had been. The rest of the crowd had gone quiet. I crawled out a little further and looked behind the truck. Three more stands full of confused raiders, and a box at the top of one stand with two more behind a microphone. A ball squeezed out of the rubble and bounced to the middle of the field. After a couple of seconds, one of them had a brainwave. He leaned into the mike.

"A challenger appears!" The crowd erupted. I took a better look at the floor level. Some dirty, hapless ponies carrying spikes and chains and bats and hammers all turned their gaze on me. Some of them were in red. Some others were also in red. I wasn't quite sure how the teams were supposed to tell each other apart. Maybe that was the point. There were sets of rusty goalposts at either end, and sets of painful-looking defences set up - spiked walls, barbed wire, bear traps, probably land mines too. I shrugged and cocked my gun. While I was aiming for an advancing 'player', Stars grabbed it off me.

"Atom, what are you doing? They're the prisoners! We're trying to save them!"

I ducked inside, and the player brought her crowbar down on the window. Stars dropped the gun to shield us from the shower of glass. Snowy jumped at the player, and tossed her into the stands with a swipe of his paw. I grabbed the gun again. I quirked a brow at Stars.

She rolled her eyes and sighed. "Just concentrate on the raiders..."

I ignored her and started firing to keep players away from the truck. House couldn't get out through the door so he crawled through the windshield too. I guess Stars didn't want to play, because she just shielded up the windows after him. At least it muffled the rap again.

I spent all my darts in a few seconds, which bought me a few more seconds to pick them up. "Triple kill!" shouted the commentator. Instead of doing that like a sensible pony, I lamented my limited ammunition for a moment, then turned my attention to the ball. I turned around and put it between my hind legs. Then I jumped with them to stand on my forelegs and let the ball go. Instead of a throw in the air and a powerful kick, I managed to throw the ball on to my own head and unbalance myself by kicking nothing. The combination made me fall over. With a grumble, I got the ball back and tried again. This time the ball landed on my ass, and I fell over again. I growled. Snowy jumped past me to maul a player that had closed the distance to me while I was fucking around. I tried one last time to get somewhere with the ball. Since it was muddy, my legs slipped during the throw, the ball dropped, and I clapped my legs together just in time to slip flat on my face. Looks like I wasn't going to be a star striker for United then.

House put a card in the throat of an advancing player. While he was stumbling and choking, I got up and kicked the ball on the ground. It took off with a wildly disproportionate amount of force. A curve of red light followed it as it hit him in the face. The impact relieved him of his face, leaving only bone, and the ball ricocheted into the air. When it lost its speed from gravity, the light faded. I jumped to meet the ball and give it a kick towards the goal. On target this time, it shot across the field in a gentle arc. The goalkeeper - chained by the hind legs and neck to the posts and equipped with dented paddles grafted to his forelegs - winced. The ball hit the crossbar and snapped it, before bouncing into the crowd, where it splattered some raider against their seat. With his neck freed, the goalie ducked and covered his face with the paddles. The crowd cheered and threw the ball back in.

"House, I've got an idea."

"Just do it, I'm busy!"

"Rampage!" came the announcement as he tripped a player into a bear trap. Snowy had stopped to get some lunch. I shrugged and picked up my darts. While I was reloading, a player came up behind me swinging a chain in his teeth. I stepped back to kick him in the face. He dropped the chain. Then, I fired one of my loaded darts to finish him off. I finished reloading and holstered it.

I picked up the ball and tapped Stars' shield. She lowered it on my side. "Think you can put this at a weak spot in each of the stands?"

"Unstoppable!" Substitutes charged on from the sidelines, and House detonated a mine next to the first approaching wave.

"It's a football, how is that going to do anything?"

"Watch!" I threw it up in the air (forelegs this time), floated up by two wing beats, and... missed.

"Legendary!" I didn't see what House was doing because despite herself, Stars burst out laughing at the timing. I tried the trick again and punted the ball up the field. The red trail followed its path towards the opposite goal, ending in a splatter of mud. The keeper went to get it away from his goal but it was very slightly out of the reach of his too-heavy paddles. Another player cleared it with a half-hearted kick that failed to light the ball, and only made it halfway back to us. Stars said something I couldn't hear over the terrible quality terrible rap. "Legendary!" the commentator said again.

"Didn't he already say that?"

"Just get the ball, Atom, I don't want to be here any longer than I have to."

A couple of players went for me while I sauntered over to the ball. Interpreting this as them wanting a pass, I kicked the ball full force at the nearer of them. She botched her dodge and took the ball to the flank. The impact made a loud crack and she span a couple of times like she'd been hit with a car, and didn't get up afterwards. The ball bounced into the air and bounced a couple of times on the ground at the feet of the other player. He looked down, then looked up slowly with a grin, and then took a dart between the eyes. Only I'm allowed gloat as a free action.

I returned to Stars with the ball balanced on my head. I rolled it back and tried to hit it into the air with my back, so it would land on the front of the car, but I just dropped it. Stars shook her head and crawled out so she could target things properly. I sat back and thought for a moment while she did some funky mental calculations. Why weren't we cheese by now? Did they just forget to bring their guns? Did they have bouncers at the doors taking their shitty assault rifles to mitigate the damage of the inevitable riot? Maybe they thought we were part of the show, stand collapse and everything. I shook my head and decided not to question it further.

The ball shot across the park and dented a corner of one stand. It creaked loudly, and the cheering from that end of the stand died off a bit. A few seconds later, it caved. Was this kind of thing par for the course? I pranced over to retrieve the ball from the wreckage. Most of the audience there had been skewered on bits of rust, or were crawling away limping, or just lying there missing a limb and waiting to bleed out. I wasn't so much disgusted as plain weirded out. Maybe raiders can afford to be so flippant with their own existences because they appear from thin air as random encounters? It kind of goes back to the slave economy thing. How is it supposed to be sustainable? If these raiders are going to throw their own lives away cheaply, then there must be a staggering number of them. Then presumably all of these raiders need to be fed, and there's no agriculture and a limited supply of salvage food. Or maybe it's just the rate of raider birth? There could be a very high turnover in the raider population, which allows them to Zerg rush and basically be disposable while not really consuming much food overall. Though we should then see a disproportionate amount of children...

"Atom! Hurry up!" Stars called. I decided to think about Malthusian limits another time and kicked the ball back over to her. She caught it in the air and demolished another stand. Talk about flimsy.

"Legendary!" I liked that the commentator was just going along with it. He seemed to be running out of lines though.

I was about halfway to fetching the ball again when I stopped. There was the creaking again, but nobody had done anything. A loud crunch followed, and one end of the remaining stand tilted. I made a note not to hire any raiders as building contractors, ever. Another support beam failed, and the stand fell in a wave. It was the biggest stand by far, and the ground shook as it all came down, dousing the whole area in dust. When it cleared, there was just me, House backed up against the truck, Stars standing on the truck, Snowy cleaning his face, Xena being a token minority in my bag, and a box on some precarious stilts with two stunned commentators sitting on top.

"Ace." After this final transmission, the commentary box collapsed.

I retrieved the ball and returned to the truck. Someone had turned off the stereo. Stars was rubbing her eyes and head and generally being in shock. I couldn't fit the ball in my bag so I just bounced it on my head. "Well then! How'd I do?"

"I... didn't expect it to be so... murderous."

"You asked me to break up a game of murderball run by murderous barbarians. Were you expecting something else? I don't think talking was going to work." Seven, eight, nine...

"I thought you'd look for a balefire egg or something, not get so... personal with them." She hopped off the car. Snowy was sniffing around the ruins of the stands and peeing on a couple of things.

"I could say something about how that wouldn't be as much fun, but that's a really 'me' thing to say, isn't it?" House looked at me and nodded. My bounce count got up to fifteen. "So I'll play your game. How would bombing them from orbit be any better?" Stars looked at me in silence. Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one... "You wanted the raiders put down and I put them down. You even helped. Do you feel dirty for being pragmatic or something? You're the worst technical pacifist evFUCK." I dropped the ball at twenty-six. Stars gesticulated for a few seconds, but words didn't come. "Fuck, why am I indulging your whining? Let's just go before you go full strawman."

"What?"

"Nothing."

Level up! New perk: Grand Theft Auto

You have a chance to get ruined cars working for a short time.