“Fall to your knees and beg for mercy... Or give me a sandwich, I'm pretty hungry.”

I continued walking for only about half an hour, long enough to put Wind Rider's Wagon and Freight out of sight, before I stopped and took a long look at the map stored on my pipbuck. 'South' was a very general direction, after all; and I really didn't have that great of an idea what sort of distance that I was going to need to cross in order to be out of the Neighvade Valley. I'd never gone very far in this direction before. Weapons and ammunition I had in what I hoped would be sufficient quantities to make the journey. Food, water, and medicine on the other hoof...

So, I found myself faced with a rather daunting choice before me. Old Reino and all of its horrors lay before me; but nothing would stop me from simply skirting the edge and avoiding the ruins as I made my way towards Zebrica. There was every possibility that I would come across smaller hamlets and way stations from the Old World that I could scavenge supplies from. Of course, since those options were the much easier pickings, there was also every possibility that they had previously been searched by numerous prospectors looking for valuables. Old Reino was more likely to have what I'd need to make the trip successfully; and the reason for that was the very same reason that I was hesitant to venture in.

This debate I was having with myself was largely academic, of course. I had too little in the way of provisions to risk a detour through parts of the Wasteland that were likely to have been stripped of supplies in the past. If I was careful and quick, I didn't even necessarily have to cross the whole way through the old city anyway. Go a few blocks in, find a stash, and then go back out the way that I had come. After that, I could take whatever scenic route south that I desired.

I took a preparatory breath, and then I downed half a bottle of Rad-X. My pipbuck had a rad detector, so I should be able to avoid the worst of the radiation. A couple dozen rounds for Full Stop were tucked away in the pockets of my barding, and I had at least three full magazines for my other pistol in addition to the one that was currently loaded into it. Foxglove hadn't returned my knife, but I might find another somewhere along the way. In any case, I was as prepared for this little expedition as I was going to be.

One of the first places that I came to in the city was a hardware store. Unsurprisingly, there was little food, water, or medicine to be had within. There was actually rather little in the way of tools to be found as well. There was evidence that other ponies had been there in at least the last few months. It looked like I was going to need to go a little deeper than I had hoped. Great.

Unlike most other ruins that I had walked through in my time, Old Reino was rather intact. Sure, there had been a collapse here and there where a building had fallen due simply to centuries of rot and neglect; but there was little evidence of the sort of devastating balefire blasts that one found in most of the Wasteland. It made things all the more unsettling really. I passed a couple of blocks along the deserted street that looked like ponies could still have lived there. Nopony did, of course; not for over two hundred years. It was almost easy to wonder why the ponies that had once lived here would have left.

Then my ears started twitching as a ticking sound began intruding on my thoughts. In the corner of my eye, my pipbuck informed me that I had wandered into a pocket of ambient radiation. I didn't go more than a couple of steps further before the moderate rate of exposure climbed exponentially. Quickly, I backpedaled the way that I had come until the pipbuck calmed down once more. My skin still itched from the radiation, and I wasted little time pulling out a bag of RadAway and slurping down the contents.

I grimaced. The stuff tasted like somepony had taken a piss in a bottle of Sparkle Cola and then left it sitting open in a well-used outhouse. My skin stopped itching at least. Frowning in the direction of the invisible obstruction, I noted its location on my map and started probing for its edge until I had managed to skirt around it. A block and a half in either direction. At least it was one of the smaller pockets of radiation that tended to crop up here.

My next likely target for what I was after came in the form of a cafe whose sign designated it as: 'The Feed Sack'. A smaller placard leaning up near the door invited potential customers to ask the proprietors about their soy smoothies. I was doubtful that I would find anypony within who'd be able to help me as the slate tablet suggested, but maybe there would still be something left in the cupboards.

I drew up short just before stepping inside though. A frown creased my features as I studied the information that the little relic of Stable-Tec technology on my leg was feeding me. Two blips existed within the cafe. One of them was red, which was what I fully expected any blip I came across in this place to be. However, it had a companion, and that other blip was yellow. What was even more curious was that I could hear no signs of any sort of scuffle going on within.

So, there was something in there that intended to do me harm, and something else that wasn't a threat at all; and both of them were rather close together. Slaver and a slave? Possible, but I wasn't completely satisfied with that answer. What would a lone slaver be doing in this place with their property? Monster and a friendly robot, maybe? Or an even less likely robot paired with a friendly monster...

Speculating wasn't going to get me anywhere, and I wasn't sure that I wanted to take the sort of risk that could be involved here. Whatever might be in there, it suggested that any food which may have been in there was now the property of somepony, or perhaps even something else. Best to move along since I was unsure that I could beat whatever it was.

I was just about to turn away and resume my search elsewhere when my ear twitched again. Somepony was saying something in very hushed tones to somepony else. And they were getting a response. A stallion and a mare. Well, actually, judging from the pitches involved, I was inclined to lean more towards a colt and a filly; or at least ponies not much older than that. What ponies that young would be doing all the way out in a place like this was beyond me; but that information did alter my plan of action a fair deal.

A pair of children I could definitely take on. The best part was that I could then strip them of whatever provision they had as well. All I needed to do was think best about how to approach this. One of them was a red blip, after all. I still wasn't exactly a hundred percent on how the pipbuck determined which ponies were and were not immediate threats to myself; but one of the criteria that I had picked up on was that in order for a pony or monster to show up as red, they had to intend you harm, regardless of their ability to actually inflict it. So, if I were to walk in there, somepony was going to attack me, but that didn't necessarily mean that I was actually in any genuine danger of being hurt.

I didn't know what weapon they were going to be using, which would make simply walking in a rather risky proposition. My barding would provide decent protection against smaller caliber pistol rounds; but if one of them had a rifle, or even an energy weapon, I would be in trouble. On the other hoof, we were talking about younger ponies in the middle of some deserted ruins. The reality of them having high-end ordinance was slim.

If nothing else, I could always rely on SATS to get me out of trouble.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I took a breath and leaned my head down to loosen my pistol from its holster for a speedier draw if the need arose. A hit of Dash would have been nice to have right now for that little extra edge, but those other two mares had sold off all of my good stuff.

I stepped through the open doorway into the dim interior of the cafe. My head drifted from one side to the other, taking in my surroundings just like anypony would who was delving into some ruins, completely unaware of ponies waiting in ambush. Yet, all the while, my attention remained acutely fixed on the counter where the cashier would have been standing when this place had been open for business those long centuries ago. As this was where both of the blips seemed to be hiding away at. The attack was going to come from there whenever they felt the opportune time had arrived.

If I was going to get this all over with, I was going to have to provide them with that opportune time. So, I headed over to the counter, and placed my hoof on the register, as though I were about to open it and search through its contents in the hopes for strays caps and bits. This was the moment when I would have launched an attack if I was in their place.

Credit where it was due, the young stallion had a good head for timing. His combat prowess, however, was severely lacking. Mortally so.

With a yell that was partially muffled by the rusted piece of rebar clutched in his teeth, a gray stallion wearing a worn blue jumpsuit vaulted over the counter and lunged for my head. If I had not been expecting the attack, and had not known the exact direction that it was coming from, I could very possibly have been significantly injured by the attack. I would not go so far as to say that he would have won the fight; but it would not have been an easy one for me if he'd managed to land that first blow right to my head. That initial strike would definitely have left me rather dazed, and slowed me throughout the rest of the exchange.

As it was though, I was not at any such disadvantage. On the contrary, I had the young earth pony exactly where I wanted him. SATS engaged and froze time for me to properly take in my attacker fully and plan out my next actions. He was a mangy little stallion. A few years younger than Windfall, but probably fully grown. He wasn't a raider or bandit though. Indeed, I found myself quirking a surprised eyebrow as I took in the familiar Stable-Tec jumpsuit that was commonly associated with the shelter-born ponies. It didn't fit him perfectly, as it seemed looser in some places that it was intended to be. At the same time, I doubted he had either found or stolen it; as his sunken cheeks suggested that this pony had lost a bit of weight recently.

The conclusion I drew was that he was a genuine Stable pony, or rather, he had been a Stable pony not so very long ago. He was obviously not having a very good go at surviving in the Wasteland, and probably would have starved to death in another week or so at the rate he looked to be going. In a way, I suppose then that it could be looked at as a mercy that he was going to die by my hoof here and now rather than suffering for days as he slowly wasted away.

My hoof slid behind the cash register, and I willed the pipbuck to line up a blow directly across the young stallion's face with the ancient machine. Given the size and unfamiliarity of the improvised weapon I was opting to use, the device seemed to only have the magical energy for a single strike; but that was fine. I wouldn't need a second.

The attacked keyed in, I mentally commanded SATS to execute.

Time once more resumed at its normal pace. The gray Stable pony's cry became audible once more and he continued his arc over the counter, only to have both his yell and his progress simultaneously interrupted by a register smashing across his jaw. The segment of rebar that he had been holding flew from his mouth and clattered against the nearby wall. The force of the impact dented the old register, and propelled the stallion into a wild tumbled, landing him rather painfully on the back of his neck when he hit the floor at my feet on my side of the counter.

He wasn't dead though. His jaw was broken, and it didn't look like he was too keen on getting back up any time soon, but he was most certainly still alive. My ear swiveled in the direction of the counter once more as I picked up the sound of a fearful gasp coming from what sounded to be the filly. I momentarily debated jumping over and taking her down, but she was still showing up as a yellow blip on my Eyes Forward Sparkle. She wasn't going to do anything I would find objectionable any time soon. I intended to keep an eye on her blip though in case it did ever flip over to a crimson hue. At that time I would have to dispatch her too; but in the meantime, I had a crippled stallion at my hooves, and a lot of frustrations to work out.

This poor Stable pony was going to die today, but unfortunately for him, it was not going to be a quick or painless thing.

Pulling back my lips in a sneer, I snorted down at the lame pony, “what the fuck is wrong with you?” I spat at the young stallion. I lifted my right hoof and brought it down had on his left shoulder. I both heard and felt the scapula give way beneath me as it was ground into the floor. The pony screamed and writhed with pain, finally looking up at me with frantic eyes that were filled with terror, “you don't have the faintest idea who I am, do you?” I leaned my head down until I was almost touching the pony's face.

At the angle he was at, he couldn't draw away from me, as much as I saw he desperately wanted to, “p-pwease,” he sputtered through a jaw that only barely worked, wincing with the effort, “don kul m-”

My hoof ground down on his shoulder, transforming his barely coherent words into wails of pain, “I'm sorry,” I seethed through gritted teeth, “were you about to ask me not to kill you?! You attacked me, asshole! I have every right to gut you like a fucking bloatsprite!” again I heard that gasp from the other side of the counter. Still a yellow blip. My eyes remained fixed on the stallion beneath me.

“You fucked up, kid,” I informed the young stallion who was whimpering in front of me, “you tried to kill the wrong pony; because, you see, I'm not just anypony, I'm Jackboot,” I lifted my hoof off of the stallion's shoulder, and watched him sigh with bated relief for a fraction of a second before I lashed out with that same hoof at his rib cage. His chest depressed when I struck him, and fresh screams suggested I had at the very least cracked a few ribs, “do you know what that means?!”

Of course he didn't. That was why I was going to have to spell it out for him, “it means that I'm the baddest pony to ever walk the Wasteland, that's what! I am the only begotten colt of Steel Bit, the fiercest pony to lead the glorious White Hooves! His mighty blood flows through my veins!” I delivered another kick to the quivering stallion and reveled in his screaming, “My birthright is to rule the White Hooves, and bathe the Neighvada Valley in the blood of all who do not bow before us!”

Again I leaned towards the earth pony, “so bow, mongrel,” I sneered at the Stable-pony. When he didn't immediately move in response to my command, I lashed out with my right forehoof and slammed his head into the floor, “I said BOW!”

I kept his head pinned, but I could see that the pony was making an effort to comply. He was in obvious pain, and his movements were far slower that I liked. However, he did finally managed to approximate a reasonable 'bow' by raising his hind quarters into the air and tucking his forelimbs in close to his chest. It was an awkward looking affair, but the effort finally brought an amused smile to my face. It was a cold smile, and one that would have likely filled the stallion with even more fear if he had been able to see it, but it was the first smile I had had cause to wear in quite some time.

This was my right, I acknowledged. Ponies bowing to me in submission because they recognized that I was their better. This is what my life should have been. It is what I should have insisted that Windfall and Foxglove do in my presence since the beginning. Only then would I have continued to enjoy the successes that I had so richly deserved!

“Good,” I nodded approvingly at the still-humbled gray pony. Then my smile reformed into something far crueler, “now you can die like the worthless shit you are!”

I reared up onto my hind legs and prepared to descend with both of my front hooves in a strike that would have surely caved in the stallion's skull and ended this exchange in the only fashion that it could have. This is what would have happened, if not for an interruption in the form of a little yellow unicorn filly.

“No!”

Unlike her companion, this little pony had not been able to clear the counter in a single leap, and had first needed to clamber onto its surface before leaping to the floor and interposing herself in between us. Her horn glowed with a pale blue light, which had wrapped itself around the same length of ribbed steel that the earth pony had been gripping with his mouth earlier. The piece of metal hovered in the air just above her, warding me away.

I could have continued to deliver my blow and end the stallion's life, but I was rather intrigued by how the situation had altered. It's not that it was particularly surprising the filly had come out to lend a hoof to her companion. That much was to be expected. What had me interested was that, even standing there with the obvious intent to fight me off in order to save her fellow Stable-pony, this little unicorn filly's blip still registered as yellow.

It was the insistence of the Old World technology strapped to my fetlock that this little pony was not going to actually strike me with the rebar club she was wielding. Yet, there she stood, looking as though she could not possibly have any other plan of action. This was fascinating, and worth drawing things out a little longer to get to the bottom of. The unicorn was even younger than the earth pony. She was hardly any sort of threat at all, so I felt confident that I could take a few liberties.

Like the earth pony stallion still quivering behind her, this little yellow filly wore the blue and yellow coveralls of a Stable-pony. Hers were just as worn and filthy as his were, but this younger pony filled them out much better. Presumably he had been deferring much of the food that they managed to find her way. A poor choice on his part, as the hunger had made him much weaker than he should have been. I'm not saying that he could have hoped to beat me even if he had been well nourished; but how did he think he was going to keep this filly fed when he was eventually too weak to forage for the two of them any longer?

Sentiment had gotten him killed. It was going to get this little filly killed too, it turned out. Running away while I played with the stallion would have been her best course of action. I would have still run her down and killed her eventually, but she didn't know that. She should have run away and tried to survive, instead of sticking around to watch her companion die.

“We're sorry,” the filly swallowed, standing her ground, “I tried to tell him not to do it, but we're...it was wrong, and we're sorry.”

I snickered at the little filly, keeping note of her blip's color as I spoke, “sorry, huh? What was the plan? Kill me and loot my corpse?” the filly winced, but made no effort to deny the allegation. My smile returned, “so you're technically raiders then. Why should I let you live?”

The filly looked up at me with wide, desperate, blue eyes. Her horn ceased to glow and the rebar pipe was permitted to fall to the floor, “please! We're not raiders! We made a mistake, we're sorry!,” a renewed blue aura formed around a pair of bags on her back, “here, take everything we have! Just please don't kill my brother.

“Please...”

The bags floated over and set down in front of me. Idly, I flipped them open and glanced at the contents. I snorted in disgust. Magazines—the kind you read—a stuffed bear, and a half-eaten Fancy Buck Snack Cake. My eyes fell back on the filly, “is this a joke?”

She shook her head fiercely, swallowing hard to fight back her fear, “it's all we have, I swear!”

I believed her, of course. Her fear was totally and completely genuine. She probably couldn't have come up with any sort of lie even if she'd wanted to. All that mattered to her now was placating me enough to convince me to spare her stallion friend. Frankly, I was very tempted to simply kill them both and put this headache of a scuffle behind me for good.

However, I eyed the filly and my mind formulated a much more entertaining proposal.

Deftly slipping the little pony's bags into my own, as though accepting her offer, I then nodded at the yellow unicorn, “it's a start,” I lied, “but you're not telling the whole truth.”

“I am, I swear,” the filly's voice cracked, “we have nothing else!”

“You have your stable barding,” I noted, pointing at the jumpsuit that she was wearing, “those things are worth a lot in town,” they weren't, but I was wagering that this pony had no concept of what was worthless and what wasn't in the Wasteland, “yours even looks to be in good shape.

“So take it off and give it here.”

The unicorn filly nodded her head vigorously and her stable clothing started glowing around it's zippers and cuffs as she used her magic to quickly remove the garment. She floated it up in front of me, and I glanced briefly at the '137' embroidered into the collar and back of the jumpsuit before snatching it out of the air and stuffing it into my own bags. Then my eyes went to the filly once more. Small. Weak. Terrified. Didn't even have her cutie mark.

A dark shape whispered into my ear, I bet she'd cry...

It hadn't been Whiplash, but I suspected very much that the little voice was right. I could go for a little crying right about now.

“Now turn around,” I instructed the small unicorn.

“What?” the filly swallowed, lifting her hoof as though she was mentally debating to run away.

“Turn around,” I repeated, “and look at your friend there,” I insisted, “or I can just kill him...”

“No!” the little filly quailed. She hesitantly turned herself around to face the crumpled heap of a stallion that was laying nearby.

My eyes locked onto the wispy little auburn tail that was dangling in front of me now. As a measure on insurance, drew my pistol and kept it held firm in my mouth. Speaking around the grip, I gave the filly some additional commands, “now, you're going to keep still, and you're going to let this happen. Or I'm going to shoot your friend in the head. Then I'm going to finish with you anyway, and shoot you in the head too.

“Understand?”

“Wha-?” the filly tensed and glanced over her shoulder. Her ears flattened out to the sides of her head in terror, her tail snaking down between her hind legs as she saw me approach with the drawn weapon. She nearly bolted away, but a deft hop placed me over top of her; the smaller size of the filly meaning that she fit snugly beneath my body. I allowed her to see the pistol held firm in my mouth, and directed the barrel at the stallion.

“You try to run, he dies,” I reiterated around the weapon's grip.

For a brief moment, it looked like the little filly was about to try and make a break for it anyway. However, her eyes locked on the gray stallion and she seemed to rethink her action. Instead, she simply swallowed and closed her eyes tight. To me, a clear sign of resignation. Her companion voiced his own objections though.

“No, stahp,” he managed to mumble through a jaw that would barely move, “pwease, don!

“Mehwybell!” the crippled earth pony wailed, desperately trying to paw his way over to us in a pathetic attempt to stop what I was about to do.

I turned the gun on him now, grinning at his obvious physical and emotional pain, “I can kill you now so you don't have to watch?” I offered.

The filly spoke up once more, though her words were now marred by barely contained sobs, “no!” her teary eyes were focused on her friend, “stay there, Diamond Plate. It'll be okay,” it sounded like she was trying to convince herself of this more than him, "...it'll be okay."

How wrong she was.

I didn't bother to hide my derisive chuckle, keeping the weapon trained on the earth pony stallion, who had obediently ceased trying to come nearer at the unicorn's insistence. It was clear that he was still greatly upset by what he was seeing though. He hadn't seen anything yet.

Confident that I had little to fear from the pair, and that my point had been made, I placed the weapon into its holster and secured the retention strap—lest the filly get brave with her magic. Then I settled down to the task at hoof. I subtly positioned myself more comfortably over the filly, craning my head down to look at her, “now you be a good little filly and cry for Daddy,” I punctuated the statement by dragging my tongue across her cheek, relishing the bitter, salty, taste of the tears that were starting to soak her face. The unicorn cringed in an effort to escape the contact, but she was very much contained between my legs.

The lick was just the preamble though, as I opened my jaws and firmly clamped down on the filly's clavicle. Not enough to really hurt the little unicorn—though I was pleased to hear her hiss in discomfort as my teeth dug into her flesh. I just didn't want her moving too much. She was very young, and very small after all. This was going to be very painful for her. She would likely even bleed a fair bit. While making her bleed in that way wasn't something that got me going as much as her terror was, I was willing to put up with it in this instance.

I'd missed my chance with Windfall long ago, that same dark figure pointed out to me. I was going to make up for that right now.

The unicorn's eyes went wide as she felt me brush up against her, and I heard her gasp again. Tears flowed freely down her cheeks now. Faintly, I could hear her mumbling a mantra over and over to herself, “it'll be alright, it'll be over soon...It'll be alright...”

You keep telling yourself that, you fucking yellow cunt.

If she'd thought that she was prepared for what was about to happen to her, she was so very wrong. Those whimpered words were cut off by an agonizing scream the moment I entered her. Instinctively, she tried to get away in order to escape the very painful process; but my grip held her down. Upon seeing her distress, the earth pony renew his futile efforts to interdict.

I released my hold of the filly with my teeth, letting my legs and weight keep her in position while I went about my business. My eyes focused on the stallion now though, “you see this?! This is your fault!” I snarled at the mangled earth pony.

It was necessary for me to yell near the top of my lungs in order to ensure that I was heard over the pained cries of the filly suffering beneath me, but I hardly cared at all about that. My adrenaline was already pumping from the sex with the wailing little yellow unicorn, that I doubt I could have kept my words at a respectable volume under any circumstances, “so look at it, you little bastard,” I screamed at the stallion, “look at what you did to her!”

In my mind, something dark and sinister was peering over my shoulder, grinning along with me.

“Pwease stahp,” the gray pony was crying now in sympathy for the unicorn, but I was hardly at all inclined to submit to his pleas. Indeed, seeing how much my actions were affecting him merely spurred me on to thrust harder, which redoubled the little filly's screams and tears.

“I'm not doing anything,” I insisted, “this was all you! You did this to her, with all your coddling and charity,” there was no longer any mirth in my yelled words now. My tone was colored with naught but contempt and disgust for the stallion in front of me and his pathetic nature. There was a gruffness and ire that rarely colored my own words, but surely would have made my father swell with pride.

Pale blue eyes glistened, watching me intently from a distant corner of my mind. They stared in concert with a pair of red ones beside them. Both sets looked...sad. Disappointed. I ignored them.

“The Wasteland is a fuckpit of death and despair! Trying to protect her from it will just make her weak and pathetic,” I seethed at the stallion, “look at what all you've done for her is letting me do to her now! Look at it!”

I couldn't even be sure that the stallion was listening to me anymore. His attention was focused on the filly beneath me as he uttered a string of slurred apologies and assurances that everything would be alright. Jagged black teeth flashed in the back of my mind, dripping with thick green spittle. I barely paid those words any heed, continuing with my own tirade that would not be swayed, “did you honestly think you were helping her? You weren't, you little shit! All you did was turn her into my little fuck toy. I tried to stop her mother from doing this to you by throwing her in the pit. I thought I made you understand that; but I guess I was wrong,” I snarled at the gray stallion, who still wasn't looking at me, “so now I have to do this! Do you understand now, Jackboot?! Do you?!

“Sentiment will just get you killed! So I want you to remember, every night when you hear your sister screaming, that's it's all your fault; and that it's for your own good! Do you hear me, Jackboot?!”

My vision filled with the image of a massive black form, borne on translucent gossamer wings. It was cackling with abject glee as it mounted a poor little golden filly who could do nothing but wail and cry. The filly's tear-filled red eyes begged for help from anypony that she could find, but no such aid was to be found for her. I watched, recognizing the little yellow earth pony mare. Whiplash was suffering, and I was the cause. I was being taught a lesson for my own good. Steel Bit would continue to rape her until I finally learned that lesson. Then he would continue so that I never forgot.

The shape forcing itself on Whiplash wasn't eclipsed in shadow any longer. It was clearly visible now. Rust-color fur. Brown eyes. An earth pony with a jet black mane and tail. A black spiked horseshoe on his flank. He looked at me and grinned. I'd always want to be the one doing that to my little sister, right?

No...that was wrong. I hadn't wanted that. I'd wanted to stop it. It wasn't my fault that my father was so much stronger. I couldn't stop it. A pegasus mare was standing beside me, looking at me with her normal sad expression. I expected her to say what she always did, but I didn't hear anything from her. I didn't need to.

Whiplash wasn't there anymore. The pony I saw myself mounting had a white coat and wings. I winced away. I'd never do that. That wasn't the sort of pony I was. That had been Steel Bit. Not me.

A black shape was standing next to me again. I was my father's colt, wasn't I? I was destined to follow in his hoofsteps, in every way. See?

I was mounting a little yellow unicorn filly. She was crying. She was Whiplash again. Then Windfall. All the while, I was laughing. I was enjoying it. I wanted more.

No...no, I didn't. I swear I didn't.

Prove it.

I balked at the sudden command from Whiplash, be your own pony, you pathetic piece of shit. Be a fucking stallion for once in you life.

Everything around me shattered. I was gone, the fillies were gone. Only the black shape remained. It offered me everything I wanted: bits, mares, sex. The price was a simple one: keep doing what I was doing. After all, what had sentiment ever gotten me?

For a moment, I didn't have an answer. It was hard to come up with one. Acting for the sake of something I felt for another pony had never gotten me money, or comfort. Only cold-blooded and calculated killing had done that. So what was the point in feeling things for other ponies? All that had gotten me was...well, Windfall. A pegasus who had once respected me. Who had cared about me. A pony that had been my companion, and...my friend.

Did I need friends? Of course I didn't.

...it had felt nice to have one though.

No longer a distant thing, I could hear clearly the tearful assurances of the gray earth pony stallion as he tried to comfort the filly that was suffering beneath me. I could feel the trembling yellow form as the unicorn was wracked by waves of pain. The dampness of my groin, and the sensation that my inner thigh had become matted with something that felt a great deal like blood. The desperate sobs of the little filly, as she bawled unreservedly.

Surrounded by all of this, I froze.

Wha...what had I just been screaming? The voice had been mine, but the words...

A familiar old stallion cackled gleefully in my head.

No...I...

My head craned down, and I recoiled at the sight, pulling myself out of and away from the filly, who dropped quivering to the ground. Her flank and hindquarters were stained crimson. She had been far too young for what I had done to her. The gray stallion crawled towards her, heedless of both his own injuries and my previous threats. I watched as he gathered up the shaking filly in his arms and started to gently stroke her mane as she wept.

I watched the scene, my mouth moving as though to speak, but with not a single word coming out. In my mind, I saw not a gray stallion, but one of rusty brown with a black mane. The filly was not a unicorn, but an earth pony with red eyes. She had just been released from my father's clutches for the night...

I...couldn't be here any longer.

Without a word, I cantered out the door past the pair of ponies. Not paying the least bit of attention to where I was going, I fled into the ruined streets of Old Reino and simply kept on running.

What was I thinking?! Why would I have done that?

I wasn't a good pony; and I had never claimed to be. However, I had still held fast to one basic tenant all of my life: I would not become my father. I would not become the sort of pony that was cruel just for the sake of it. Killing was something that happened in the Wasteland, and I'd made peace with that. Stealing was hardly any sort of crime at all if you got away clean.

But raping a filly? There was no call for that. I could never justify that to myself.

So why was that exactly what I had been doing? More than that, why had I been screaming at that stallion I'd fucked up as though he were me?

Blackness, punctuated by two cyan orbs filled my vision. I screamed in surprise and stumbled, tumbling to the street and rolling at least twice as the moment from my run carried me over the pavement. With a groan, I righted myself and shook my head. What the fuck was that?

Unsteadily, I rose back up onto my hooves. My stance was still a little shaky, but it had a lot less to do with the recent fall, and a lot more to do with my attempts to reconcile what I had just done. The stallion I didn't feel so bad about. He'd attacked me and had gotten beaten for his trouble. Hardly anything to feel bad about there. Even somepony like Windfall or Foxglove would have felt justified in that instance. He wasn't the issue.

The filly was.

What I had done to her...

Why? Why had I done that?

I winced again as darkness once more dominated my sight. It passed much more quickly this time though. Again I shook my head clear. Was the madness finally winning? Was that it? The thought that I might be turning into Steel Bit was...terrifying. Genuinely so.

Wasn't there supposed to be some part of me fighting back against that darkness though? There had been in the past. Grumbling, I plunged into my saddlebags and rooted around, finally coming up with the little yellow figurine that I had found all those years ago. Yellow Bitch.

“Where were you, huh?” I demanded of the yellow pegasus mare, as though I half expected her to answer me, “where have you been?! Be kind, right? Isn't that what you're always whispering in my ear every time it looks like I'm about to cross the line? Well where the fuck were you five minutes ago when I was raping a fucking filly?!

“Where was your 'kindness' then, huh?!”

I hurled the statuette at the pavement, expecting to see the delicate looking figurine shatter into a million pink and yellow pieces. Instead, it merely bounced a couple of times and rolled around until those soft blue eyes were looking up at me. This only served to stoke my newfound rage.

“Did you see what I did to her?” I demanded of the tiny pegasus at the top of my lungs, “did you see what I tried to do to Foxglove?! What did you have to say? Nothing! Not one single word from you, you useless little bitch!” I raised up my hoof and brought it down on the statue, intending to crush it beneath my hoof as I had done to so many pony's skulls in my life.

A half dozen times I slammed my hoof upon the figurine, envisioning the warped a disfigured face that never wavered with its gentle little smile. When I peered down to revel in my destruction, I found myself taken aback. There was not the slightest little mark upon the flier's visage. It had not been for a lack of effort on my part though, as the figure had been partially embedded into the ancient asphalt by my blows. How had this little bauble managed to fair better than the street had?!

Celestia and this statue were just fucking with me now, weren't they? I growled low in my throat at the thought of the pair laughing at my futile efforts to destroy this piece of Old World garbage. This useless little piece of shit that had let me turn my back on Windfall when she needed my most.

“You let me leave her!” I screamed at the statue, “she's bleeding to death in Foxglove's arms, and you let me leave her behind like she was fucking nothing! Do you even realize how many times that pegasus has saved my life? How much I owe her? And you just let me walk away!”

I was done playing around with Yellow Bitch now. Full Stop was out and in my mouth. I trained the revolver on the little figurine and depressed the trigger. Rot in hell you piece of shit. The hammer inched back, and then fell down hard against the weapon's firing pin. The weapon bucked in my mouth as the revolver discharged one of its heavy caliber lead slugs. My aim proved true, and the statue exploded.

Gleefully, I tracked what had to have been the largest of the debris as it arced skyward and then fell back to the street a block and a half away. That had felt wonderfully cathartic, and I was moved to do it again against that surviving chunk. I trotted further down the street to where it had fallen in the middle of an intersection.

“Let's see you smile now, bitch,” I cackled around the grip, “after what you let me do to those mares and that filly, you deserve this. I'll reduce you to little...tiny...pieces...”

The gun dropped out of my mouth and clattered to the pavement. It wasn't possible, was the thought the danced around my head. Yet, the only other possibility was that my eyes were playing a grievous trick on me.

The object I had tracked was not a fragment, but the completely whole—and absolutely unmarred—statuette. Not a single sliver of the sculpted mane or tail was the least bit out of place, and he soft blue eyes and warm smile stared up at me unabashed.

My hindquarters slumped tot he ground as I stared at the figurine. Not a scratch, for all of my efforts. A pretty on the nose allegory for my life right now, frankly. Decades of work and effort, and what did I have to show for it? Barely any more than I'd had the day I left the White Hooves. The barding on my back, a little bit of food, and a couple weapons. So...nothing. I'd accomplished nothing in my life.

Well, that wasn't entirely true, I guess. I'd left a wake of misery and death. Some of those ponies had deserved it; raiders and bandits were by far the most common sorts that I'd put down in my years. There were those who had not really deserved to die though. I wasn't even talking about the merchants I'd robbed and murdered. They'd known what the risks were when they'd gone out into the Wasteland. The nature of their jobs was a defacto implicit acceptance that they could be killed by somepony like me looking to take their possessions.

It was that short list of ponies that couldn't be put in that group that bothered me. Golden Vision, who had taken her own life rather than be subjected to years of sexual exploitation by a corrupt politician. All that I'd had to do to save her from that fate had been to tell a guard that she was staying with me. I wouldn't have actually even have had to really let her stay with me; just feed a short little lie to those soldiers. Instead I had turned my back on her simply to spite my own conscience.

Then there was that little colt. He'd just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hadn't even meant to kill him at the time. Just a little colt, trying to be a good steward for the pony he'd been fostered to; and I'd snapped his neck during an argument with my own psyche.

Now I had just raped that little unicorn filly. She'd been a yellow blip the whole time; indicating that she had never once truly considered hurting me even when I was threatening her and her companion. A naive soul, no doubt, for being so reluctant to act when violence was a prudent option; but certainly not one who had deserved what I'd done.

Foxglove too. That mare had done nothing but help Windfall and I, to include saving my own life on multiple occasions. What had I done to thank her for that? Extorted sex, and then attacked and tried to rape her. There had been no call for that; and not even any sort of long or short term benefit that I could see looking back on it now. Had I really been so hard up for a little head that I had been willing to jeopardize everything I had going for me? Somewhere in New Reino was a mare who would have fucked me for the right number of caps and not breathed a word about my brand.

And Windfall...oh, Celestia, Windfall...

I'd raised that damn filly. I'd taught her everything she knew. Even when I couldn't have blamed her for putting me down, she had ultimately spared me, and given me a second chance. I'd even been giving a good go of things, I'd thought. Then I went and threw it all away. Again, for what? Sex with her? The thought of even kissing her like I'd ever kissed Saffron made me feel sick. I couldn't do that to her!

Sex with Windfall would be like...like fucking my daughter.

She wasn't, of course. At first, it had just been a convenient little story to explain why we were always together. An older stallion like me with a younger filly like her? What else could we be without raising the wrong sorts of questions from other ponies? Just a story.

I guess the thing with lies that you tell yourself over and over again though, is that eventually, you start to believe them. Never had the pegasus ever referred to me as 'Dad' in anything but a joking tone. Nor had I ever genuinely referred to her as being my daughter. Yet...how I'd started to feel for the flier...it had drifted in that direction after a time. I assume, at least.

It's not like I had ever actually been a parent, so I couldn't know what that sort of relationship felt like. Not really. All I knew was that what happened to the pegasus mattered to me; and that I felt guilty any time the thought of taking her to bed presented itself.

Or, rather, I had felt guilty. I snorted in disgust as I recalled having used the threat of abusing Windfall as a means to coerce Foxglove. There had been no hesitant thoughts then, for some reason. I had genuinely been interested in fucking the flier, and treating her like a Stable 69 whore, or worse. The thought of such a thing now made me cringe at least. Why my mind had undergone that little hiatus of thought, I doubted that I'd ever know.

What I did know was that all of that didn't matter anymore. Windfall would be dead in hours—assuming that she hadn't passed already—and there was nothing that I could do about it. Foxglove was likely to kill me on sight. Bounty hunters were prowling the Wasteland for me. All I could do was keep on running.

Right?

It does solve all your problems every time.

Does it? Has running away ever actually solved any of my problems? I didn't need Whiplash's snide remarks to know the answer to that question. I'd answered it before I'd even asked. After all, here I was with nothing to show for twenty years of running away whenever things got tough. Sister's organizing a coup? Run! Finders upset? Run! Republic knows I'm a White Hoof? Run! Bounty hunters after me again? Run! Windfall's dying? Run...

Run, run, run. It's gotten me nowhere, and nothing...

...and nopony.

Frankly, I was just so damned tired of running anymore. The bitch of it was, I didn't really have a choice though, did I? What was the alternative, realistically? Go back to the warehouse and let Foxglove mow me down? That hardly seemed like it would work out for me. Going back to New Reino without hardly any caps to my name short of what meager gear I'd collected over the last few hours wasn't likely to work out either. With bounty hunters doing the Republic's bidding in the area, I'd need the protection of some powerful ponies to stay off their radar.

A powerful griffon would do in a pinch, of course; but after our last exchange, I could see little reason why Scratch would lift a claw to help me out. I'd need to have something to offer him. A crack team of skilled ponies that could handle themselves in the Wasteland would have fit the bill; but I'd tried to rape one of them and left the other for dead, so...

...Zebrica it was.

“Unless you have any better ideas?” I posed to the little yellow statue laying in the crumbling intersection. Strangely enough, I didn't hear Yellow Bitch...er, Fluttershy make any sort of comment on the matter. What a surprise. She was probably going to be giving me the silent treatment for a while after all of the decidedly 'unkind' things I'd done recently.

I scooped up the little pegasus figurine and dropped her into my saddlebags. I looked back up in an effort to get my bearings and find the road that would take me south, when my eyes fell upon a curious sight: a rather large depiction of the same dead yellow pegasus, whose likeness I had just pocketed. The weathered billboard's rendering still possessed the same warm smile that the statuette did, and the delicate mane draped over half of her face. However, unlike the sculpture, the mare in the picture was wearing a pink and yellow striped dress, and one of her hooves was raised as though it were pointing at something just off to the billboard's side.

Flowing words framed the mare, stating, 'Have an Ouchie, or Know Somepony Who Does?'

My eyes drifted to the left, following her hoof. Two blocks down the street sat a large structure, its yellow paint having nearly faded completely to white. A trio of pink butterflies were carved into the masonry above the front door. Though many of the letters had fallen from above the array of glass doors that served as the front entrance to the pavement below, it was clear that the words they comprised had declared the building to be one 'Ministry of Peace Medical Center'.

A hospital from the Old World.

If there was anywhere in the ruins of Old Reino that still had any viable medical supplies left, it was probably here. Within that old, crumbling, building, could be the very thing that would save Windfall's life. All I had to do was go in and get it.

Of course, there was every chance that the pegasus was already dead; or at least would be by the time I returned to the warehouse. Even if the little white flier was still alive, Foxglove's would undoubtedly shoot me dead the moment I returned. Fuck, there were all sorts of ways for me to die just looking through that hospital. Monsters, ghouls, robots, automated defenses. High-value structures of the Old World were death traps more often than not.

Nothing justified the risks of heading in there. Windfall would probably die even if I went.

She's certainly going to die if you don't.

I found myself nodding in dour ascent with my sister's assessment. It looked like my father had been right: sentiment was just going to end up getting me killed.

You could just leave. Turn and walk away. Nopony would know.

You're wrong there, Whiplash. There was somepony who'd know; and that somepony was already walking towards the hospital.

It took me all of thirty seconds looking at the front doors of the MoP medical facility to recognize that this was a bad place. My eyes darted towards the bottom of my field of vision where the pipbuck's Eyes Forward Sparkle displayed hostile targets just to make certain that nothing new had appeared in the last two seconds since the last time I had looked. The Stable-Tec device insisted that nothing dangerous was nearby, and even the little radiation detector clicked only occasionally; but that didn't shake loose the feeling of dread that I was feeling.

The doors were locked and barricaded. Again, this was not something unheard of. There had been a war going on, after all. Perhaps the fighting had gotten close enough to warrant fortifying the area. There was even the possibility that this place had been altered in the centuries after the Great War by some group or other that had once tried to make a go of a settlement or stronghold here. Either of those theories could easily account for why huge chains had been wrapped around the door handles, and massive beams of wood propped up against them to keep the entrance from being easily forced.

However, what neither of those two scenarios addressed were any of the reasons why ponies might have erected those barricades on the outside.

They weren't there to keep threats out; their purpose was to keep something in.

It was a hospital, so the possibilities that opened were none too optimistic. A disease that had gotten out of hoof, the release of a dangerous chemical, maybe even some fearsome monster that a daring band had trapped after the war. I was not prepared for any of those things.

This was a bad idea.

I should turn around right now and leave. I should...but I can't. Not while she might still need me.

A pair of cyan eyes framed in white regarded me approvingly from the shadow's of my mind. All I could do was frown, not recognizing them as belonging to any of the other manifestations that I'd been aware of. My insanity was getting crowded.

With a resigned sigh, I looked around the entrance, taking in the extent of the barricade that had been set up. It really wasn't anything robust enough to thwart a group of ponies who were determined to force their way inside, but for a single earth pony stallion that was nominally operating on a presumably tight time table; it was more than I could deal with as quickly as I'd like if I went about things in a orderly and deliberate fashion. So, messy and haphazard it was. I retrieved a grenade from my saddlebags, one of the three that I had salvaged from the deserted caravan earlier that morning, and tucked it in between a doors and one of the beams bracing it. I pulled the pin and quickly scrambled back to the other side of the street, diving behind an old mailbox.

Half a second later, my teeth rattled as the explosion thunderer through the deserted streets. Bits of debris and dust floated down around me as I peaked around the side of the ancient metal bin to observe the results of my efforts. One of the thick wooden braces lay now in two pieces in the street. Two others were canted rather significantly. The chain which had been tying the doors together in order to keep them from being opened lay limply to either side of the door frame that had borne the brunt of the detonation. The door itself had been blasted backwards, into the dark interior of the hospital, leaving me with a rather clear point of entry.

I remained still for a good half a minute all the same, my eyes trained on that opening. If there were ghouls or something in there, they should be attracted to the sound of the explosion that I had just set off. I would much rather face those sorts of threats in the open at a distance than in the cramped confines of that building. When nothing showed up on my EFS, I took a deep breath and resolved to poke my head inside. If it was monsters, then maybe they were already long dead.

That would hopefully hold true for any loose diseases too.

Honestly, things didn't look nearly as bad as I had expected them to, given the efforts that had been taken to seal up the place. It looked to be the reception area where patients waited to be seen by the doctors that had worked here once upon a time, with a desk at the far end of the room where the pony checking visitors in would have sat. Scattered papers and clipboards mingled with overturned chairs spoke to a hasty exit by a significant number of ponies; but that was honestly a fairly common feature of most ruins in these old cities. Nothing that was particularly alarming. Maybe whatever had scared off the ponies that boarded this place up really wasn't a threat any longer.

It was very dark though, so I reached down and tapped on the light mounted in my pipbuck. A soft cone of white light spread out in front of me. Stepping carefully in case any traps or mines had been left behind by those who had barricaded the hospital were still present, I made my way over to the large steel door that was located next to the reception desk. It looked to be the only way to go deeper into the facility, save for an ajar wooden door off to the side. However, all I could glimpse through that in the dim pipbuck lamp was a stairwell. My eyes locked onto the panel set into the wall off to the side of the door, and I reached out to tap the button that should have opened it.

A rather harsh sounding double-warble informed me that I had done something improper and that the door wasn't going to be opening for me any time soon. With a frown, I tried the button once more, in case it had just been a matter of a two-centuries old electronic device being difficult. A repeated alert suggested that the door really was secured somehow, and that a procedure more invasive than simply pushing a button was going to be required to open it. I sighed in frustration and glanced around more intently at my surroundings.

I could try the stairwell and see if I would have better luck accessing the other floors, but I was doubtful. Then I spied a couple of computer terminals at the nearby desk. One of them looked to be intact, and perhaps was even operational. With few more appealing options before me, I stepped over and booted the terminal up. I was treated to a flickering screen that welcomed me to the Ministry of Peace Medical System Network, and then it asked me if I would like to resume my most recent session. With a shrug, I let the computer obligingly take me to where the previous user had left off; saving me the trouble of trying to use my lackluster hacking skills to break into the system.

It looked like the MoP wasn't much for secret keeping.

A list of directories appeared on the screen. Here I saw that some of my earlier theories were confirmed; as it looked like these directories had clearly been created by two different ponies at very different times. The dates associated with the earlier files suggested that they had been created during the days and weeks leading up to the cataclysmic end of the Great War. Meanwhile, a group of files had later been added only about thirty years ago with headings that suggested they had little at all to do with patients and medical care.

Sick ponies two hundred years long dead was of no interest to me. Records left behind by the ponies that had sealed this place up were. So I started browsing the notes that they had made. I quirked a lip as I discovered that these were not simply passing logs made sporadically by some random group of scavengers looking to make a big haul. The ponies that had come here had been a dedicated expedition launched by the Republic—or, rather, by the Commonwealth that they had once been. This was decades before Luna had returned, when the fledgling nation that had risen in the Neighvada Valley was still working on becoming a legitimate power that could rival the Enclave and the Steel Rangers. Honestly, the hadn't been all that much more significant than the White Hooves in terms of population, resources, and raw military strength at that time. Today...well, I had yet to really get a chance to appraise how well my old tribe was thriving under Whiplash's rule. She clearly had some impressive reach with her spy network, and they were still talked about with due caution by ponies that traveled the waste; but I hadn't heard of any significantly savage settlement raids in the last decade of the sort I remembered my father organizing.

In any case, I recognized that I wasn't reading some inane pony's account of things. These were detailed military logs about the progress of their mission. I wasn't about to hang around and read every dry line of all eighty-three days worth of reports, but I did skip around a skim through phrases that caught my attention. Twenty pony party of soldiers...secure medical cache rumored to be on site—that was encouraging...futility of predicting radiation spikes—less encouraging...working to bring the hospital's systems back online in order to open up basement stores...

...and that was it. The last report that was recorded on this terminal said that their technical experts had managed to get everything working again up to a reasonable standard and that all they had to do now was reactivate the system from the Administrator's Office. No other mention of what they had found had been made. Nor had anything been said of what might have gone wrong if that had been the case. There were no corpses, so it didn't look as though the team had been wiped out in some sort of surprise attack or anything.

A faint ticking from my pipbuck drew my attention to the device and I glanced at it. Trace levels of radiation seemed to be drifting into the area that had not been there a few minutes ago. One of the radiation hot zones looked to be moving into the area. It occurred to me that a particularly bad one might have been enough to chase the team away before they could finish the job. Though I didn't see why they would have boarded the place up and then never come back as a result. The counter that hovered before my eyes indicated that the levels of ambient radiation were climbing steadily. Which wasn't ideal.

I whipped out a bottle of Rad-X and downed a double dose, watching intently as the pipbuck accounted for the drug and readjusted my exposure level. It was still climbing, but at a much slower rate. That wouldn't hold if the levels kept rising though. Without knowing how powerful the pocket of radiation was going to be, and which way it was going or how long it would be hanging around, the smart thing to do was to get away from here as quickly as possible. Of course, this place could end up becoming unapproachable for days if I left; and there was no guarantee that I'd find a better location that offered a chance of finding the medical supplies that Windfall needed.

Staying here could get me killed.

Leaving would almost certainly get Windfall killed.

I took a deep breath, wincing beneath the mental image of two pairs of blue eyes watching me intently. It was my fault that the pegasus was in that state that she was; and as much as she had done for me over the years, I owed her more than a few. The least I could do was look around a little longer. This was a hospital after all, this place should be crazy with healing potions! I'd hardly need to comb the whole place.

One thing that I did not find on the computer was a way to open the sealed metal door that blocked progress further into the bowels of the facility. What I did find was a nearby directory mounted to the wall that informed me the 'Administrator's Office' was located on the third floor. That was where the ponies that had come before me had indicated a way to gain access to the whole hospital was; so I decided that I'd finish what they started and reap the rewards that they had left behind.

My eyes periodically dipped to the region of my Eyes Forward Sparkle that alerted me to nearby threats, ensuring that it continued to remain clear of any wayward red blips. I had yet to truly pin down a specific range that it was capable of detecting targets at, but I knew enough that it would show me anything that could be generously considered 'close'. So long as I remained vigilant, nothing should be able to sneak up on me. I headed for the nearby stairwell.

Though I had seen from the outside that the hospital was comprised of three floors, and discovered from the terminal that there was a basement level as well, I was a little surprised to find that there were three flights of stairs that were leading up, and none that would take me down. Not that I really believed that getting to the basement was going to be nearly as simple as going down some stairs. My life was rarely quite so convenient as that. The extra set of ascending steps did intrigue me though. Roof access? It was something to keep in mind, I suppose.

When I reached the second floor, my confidence dwindled significantly. Where on the first floor there had been a simple wooden door that was left open, the portal connecting these stairs to the second floor was of the same type that had barred my access deeper into the hospital on the ground level. A sturdy steel barrier that likewise ignored my efforts to use the associated control panel. This building looked to be locked up rather tight. Was I going to find the same hurdle on the third floor as well?

I found that the answer was a technical 'yes', though with a noticeable caveat. It seemed as though the Commonwealth team that had been here thirty years ago had encountered a very similar lock-down situation, and had improvised themselves a solution...with high explosives. Two attempts looked to have been made. The thick metal door that barred passage from the stairwell on the third floor was severely warped and scorched, but otherwise remained as an impassible obstacle to entry. Somepony had obviously tried to blast their way through it. A testament to the solid construction techniques of the ponies of the long dead Equestria which had yielded so many devices which had endured for the centuries since the culmination of the Great War, the door had resisted the detonation with great impunity.

So the ponies had next tried their luck at breaching the nearby wall itself.

I surveyed the pony-sized hole in the wall and deduced that one could not fault the builders of this place for allowing such a bypass to occur. The wall was nearly a foot thick and jagged protrusions of the thick rebar webbing that was woven through the concrete framed the hole. Creating this opening, even with explosives, had not been any small matter. At first, I found myself rather suspicious that such sturdy construction had been lent to a mere medical facility; but then I thought about it for a little bit. In the event of a sustained assault, there would be a great number of wounded among both the military forces protecting the city and the civilian population that lived here. This would be the logical gathering point for those wounded, and so would need to be easily fortified. It would also need to be one of the structures able to best resist being outright destroyed in an attack; otherwise, where would you send injured ponies to?

Through the improvised entrance, I glimpsed what had once been some sort of patient ward. Given the flowery and colorful patterns that still remained along the walls, and the scattered bassinets, I reasoned that it had once been designed for foaling. Along one wall was an array of windows that extended nearly the entire length. All of the glass lay in shattered fragments below them on the floor. Whether a consequence of the Great War, or the breaching explosion thirty years ago, I couldn't say. In any case, between them and the open doors, it looked as though I wasn't going to find myself with many serious barriers on the interior of the hospital...

...or not. I didn't make it more then twenty feet down the hall before I spied additional reinforced doors that refused to open. The panels were lit up, and they all responded with those same sour notes that denoted a refusal to enter, so they were obviously receiving sufficient power to function, I assumed. There was just something that I was either doing, or hadn't yet done, that wasn't allowing me to get past them. Fortunately, they weren't restricting me from doing anything more than getting into the central core of the hospital. I still looked to have run of the outer offices and wards. Eventually I stumbled across a faded map of my surroundings, which I immediately scoured for clues as to my next destination.

The outer perimeter consisted of maternity wards and staff offices. The interior sections to which I had no access at the moment looked to possess specialized evaluation and treatment rooms. There was also a smaller room that bore the label, 'supply room' which I found to be encouraging. If I could reach it, then I might find what I was looking for.

Reaching it was certainly going to be the hard part. I wandered around the whole floor and found that no fewer than six of those thick steel doors barred my way deeper into the facility. Though I was confident that the interior walls were not nearly as robust as those which the Commonwealth team had needed to blast through, I was severely lacking in the explosives department. The few grenades that I had left were unlikely to fair as well against a solid, purposefully built, concrete wall as they had against piled rubble and rusted chains. I wasn't going to be bypassing these doors through any violent means.

Which meant trying to do so the same way that my predecessors had. I found my way to the Administrator's Office and peered inside. A desk stacked high with rotting folders and papers, and an active terminal. That was a good sign. I stepped around to access the computer and browse through the options that it offered. Unlike the computer in the lobby, it did not look as though the previous expedition had spent a lot of time using this terminal. It possessed a few old records that I largely ignored; my attention was primarily focused on the directory heading that read, 'Disengage Facility Lock-Down'.

I selected the option, and the screen filled with a short list of dates that seemed to be associated with when the protocol had been turned on and off. Sure enough, things lined up fairly well with what I had expected to see. For the most part anyway. There were three entries. One was dated just over two hundred years ago, during the final days of the Great War. Then was a note just about thirty years ago when the Commonwealth team opened everything back up. Lastly was when that same team must have sealed the hospital up again. What was curious was that the elapsed time between those last two entries was less than an hour.

So, the team had arrived, opened up the facility, and then closed it again within the hour. That was curious. I had thought that days would have had to have passed, at the least, before those ponies had abandoned the expedition. Once more, my mind set to wondering what it could have been that would have sent them away in such a rush. My eyes went the the still-ticking dial on my pipbuck that reminded me of the looming radioactive threat approaching the area. The level was climbing, slowly but steadily. It was best that I make my own trip into the bowels of the hospital a quick one as well. Perhaps even shorter than the hour that they had taken.

I confirmed my desire of open up all of the sealed doors in the hospital, and was almost immediately rewarded with the distant sounds of scraping metal echoing through the corridors. A few seconds later, the terminal informed me that every door was now open.

Leaving the office behind, I headed immediately for the nearest blocked hallway that I had noticed just to confirm that everything had worked out. Sure enough, where previously there had been a thick steel barrier, was now a clear hallway. Things were going well so far. I didn't blindly start prowling through the interior workings of the old hospital though. I was on a time table, and wanted to get what I was after and leave as quickly as possible before the radiation could get suddenly much worse. My efforts would be of little use to anypony if I melted in a radiation spike, or whatever it was that happened to ponies exposed to intense quantities of the magical pollution in these ruins.

Instead, I sought out the map I had found that laid out the floor plan of this level and found out where the storage room I had noticed earlier was. Even better, it was located near an interior stairwell, so I wouldn't even have to backtrack in order to get down to the ground floor and leave. This was going very well so far.

Which was probably why Celestia saw fit to throw me my first little hiccup.

I had assumed that a room in a medical facility that was labeled as holding 'supplies' suggested that it was filled with healing potions and other medicines. It turned out that such an assumption had been made in error. In point of fact, the little room was full of brooms, mops, and cleaner. Well...horseapples. So then where had they kept their healing potions? I really didn't want to have to wander through every room in this place hoping to get lucky. A place like this had to have some sort of central location where they dispensed everything from; or at least stored what they didn't yet need. It occurred to me that such a place probably wouldn't be on the top floor though. It would be either on the ground floor, or perhaps even in the basement that had been mentioned earlier.

A snort escaped my nostrils as I realized that I had forgotten once more that I should really be following in the hoofsteps of the Commonwealth team. They'd been here looking for medicine too, right? An organized group like that that had been studying this place for weeks would certainly have known a lot more about what they were after than I did. I needed to get back down to the ground floor and find the basement like they had. That was where I was going to find the medicine that Windfall needed.

I turned the corner and found the stairs leading back down. Descending two flights, I arrived at the bottom and cantered back out into the corridor. Now I just needed to find another map that would show me where the base...ment...was...

Oh. Horseapples.

There are certain things that you start to take for granted when you spend long enough wandering through the Wasteland. One of those things is bodies. You're going to find bodies, that's just an accepted fact. Not necessarily fresh corpses, I was referring to the desiccated and bleached skeletons of ponies that had died two hundred years ago when the world ended. Some of these dead ponies had clearly been caught by complete surprise while going about their normal daily routines. Others had obviously seen some hint that the end was coming and had made every futile effort to protect themselves from the impending balefire. In either case, the odd skeleton here and there was nothing to balk at.

It wasn't until this very moment that I realized how devoid of skeletons this hospital had been. Given the nature of the disaster that had befallen this city, I could understand the reasons for that. Radiation rarely killed in an instant, and was easy to detect and treat with the proper equipment. The ponies in this hospital would have been especially able to handle themselves in the face of such a disaster. An orderly evacuation could conceivably have been organized and executed with a minimal loss of life. Hence the lack of centuries old corpses.

None of that explained the three mangled bodies that I saw now though.

It was a shame really. It looked they had become trapped inside the hospital during some sort of frantic evacuation; as their remains were located where the massive steel door that had barred my entrance from the lobby had been. Just beyond them I could see the reception area and the improvised barricade beyond.

A few things stood out about them immediately. First, these bodies were not two hundred years old. Given what I knew about the history of this place, I was going to put their time of death at around thirty years ago. The brown barding that they were wearing suggested heavily that they were soldiers of the now defunct Commonwealth. I had seen that barding many times in my younger days after all.

Secondly, these were not the bodies of ponies that had been killed by radiation or in some other slow manner such as that. Their deaths had been quick, and exceptionally violent. Limbs and heads lay strewn about mangled torsos, suggesting that something had very literally ripped them to pieces. The scored and bullet-ridden nature of the surrounding walls testified that these ponies had not died without putting up the best fight that they could either.

My first though was ghouls. Those feral monstrosities that had once been ponies were known to rip apart those that wear unfortunate enough to be caught by them. Though, if that were the case, there should certainly have been a pile of ghoul corpses mingled in with the three bodies of the Commonwealth soldiers. There was no way that they hadn't killed a good deal of the creatures with all of the ordinance I saw evidence of. That implied something that was just as savage as a typical ghoul, but a lot tougher.

A hell hound? Perhaps, though I still felt some doubt about that. The massive canines certainly fit the bill as the sort to leave ponies in pieces, and they were a lot tougher than half-rotted undead equines. Honestly, they were powerful enough to have done this, and tough enough to have not taken many losses, if any; but that theory didn't sit perfectly with me either. If anything, a hell hound was too powerful to have done this. Those massive claws of theirs were known to completely shred just about any material that they came into contact with; and while I did spy a couple errant scratches in the surrounding walls, there was none of them that were of the quality expected from a hell hound. For that matter, I doubted that those steel doors would legitimately stopped a hell hound for very long. Those dogs would have ripped right through them and kept chasing after the remaining Commonwealth soldiers.

The barrier outside definitely wouldn't have stopped them.

Not ghoul ponies, not hell hounds. So then what?

Did I really want to know?

Probably not. My EFS insisted that nothing was nearby though. Thirty years was a long time. Maybe whatever had killed these ponies was long gone. I certainly hoped that was the case, since I wasn't sure what I'd be able to do to stop something that three armed and trained soldiers hadn't been able to in a confined space like this.

Get the medicine, and get out. Fast.

What I needed right now were those directions to the basement. For that I would need to find another layout of the floor somewhere. So I started wandering deeper into the interior. I poked my head into the odd examination room, hoping to find signs of medicine that had been left in there; but my luck was not holding out to quite that extent. What I did find was the occasional Commonwealth soldier that had been torn to shreds like the first three. It was hardly encouraging. There also seemed to be a very specific trail of blood and body parts winding its way through the corridor.

Please don't be leading to the basement...

I knew it would, but a pony could hope.

With a resigned sigh, I pulled out Full Stop and started following the bodies. My pipbuck insisted that there wasn't anything around, and maybe it was correct. Holding the revolver made me feel a little better all the same. I finally reached a stairway that was leading down. At the upper landing were two more bodies. All told, that was at least nine dead soldiers so far. Exactly how many of them had made it out alive? Enough to build that barricade I suppose, but I was starting to get an idea of why they hadn't immediately returned. These sort of casualties had probably made them reconsider how worthwhile a recovery expedition really was.

I was starting to feel the same way, in spite of what the Eyes Forward Sparkle was telling me.

One thing did stand out on one of the bodies here though: there was a pipbuck. It had been pretty severely damaged, which was itself surprising given what the devices had a reputation for surviving. In fact, it was damaged enough that it was no longer functional. However, upon closer examination, I did notice that there was still a holotape lodged in it. The little disks weren't very common, and I'd maybe only seen them a couple times before in my life. I was curious to learn what was on it. Perhaps a log of what the ponies had found down here?

I picked up the cassette and popped it into my own pipbuck. The device beeped as it detected the inserted media, and promptly started playing it back. Instantly, I heard the gruff voice of a middle-aged mare who sounded like she had spent her fair share of time in the Wasteland.

“Beginning recording. This is Captain Abatis of the Commonwealth's Old Reino Expedition. My team has just gained entrance into the hospital's interior. I am leading second squad inside to secure the lab,” her voice suddenly became slightly more distant, as though she were speaking to somepony else, “sergeant, move 'em out.”

Then another pony, a younger sounding stallion could be heard on the recording, “you heard the commander! Hawkeye, you're on point. Bayonet, you take rear guard. Everypony else, stay sharp!”

I continued to let the recording play, listening to the sounds of a dozen or more sets of hooves clopping down the tiled halls of the hospital, as I descended down the dark set of stairs. My eyes scanned the much narrower hallway of the basement level. A lab, huh? Was this supposed to be the sort of lab where ponies tested things, or the type that created them? If the latter, then I wondered what they would have made.

My thoughts seemed to be mirroring those of a soldier from three decades earlier, “what do you think's down there?” the voice that belonged to the sergeant asked.

“Hopefully some of that elixir the Administrator's files talked about,” came the mare, Abatis', response, “along with the notes of how to create more.”

There was an amused snort, and then the sergeant spoke again, “sounds too good to be true, you ask me. 'Better than a dozen healing potions taken at once'? Not buying it.”

“I don't know,” came the captain's thoughtful response, “those old Equestirans weren't stupid. You've heard about the sorts of things they built during the war.”

“Propaganda,” the sergeant said, dismissively, “to scare the stripes. No doubt. I mean, come on? Ships the size of Stables? Clouds that could level cities?” he was clearly unimpressed by what he'd heard of such things, “I mean, I even read a report about a robopony the size of an apartment building roaming Hoofington. Bullshit.

“I ain't never seen nothin' like any of that!”

“Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist, Fourragere,” was his commander's bored reply.

“You mean like those 'moving branches' the ponies here said they used to make those 'healing elixirs'? I ain't buying it, Cap'n.”

“You don't have to 'buy it',” was her reply, “you just have to help us look,” there was a pause, then, “we're here. Take a team left, I'll take the others right.”

I glanced around, noticing that I was standing in between two open doorways myself. Had I already managed to catch myself up to the recording? With a shrug, I stepped through the opening to my right and shined the pipbuck light around the room. In what was certainly eerie fashion, I listened to a thirty years since dead mare comment on exactly what I was seeing with my own eyes.

“Well, it looks like we found the main laboratory,” my light scanned over tables containing dozens of glass beakers and vials. Clipboards containing copiously amounts of diagrams and notes were scattered about, “looks like the ponies here left in a hurry too,” there was an obvious truth to that statement. There were still traces of liquid in some of the glassware, which suggested that the experiments had not been deliberately terminated. My light finally fell upon a cabinet, “this might be what we're looking for over here.

“Sergeant, have you found anything?” I was walking towards the cabinet, conscious that the mare I was listening to had made it just as far as I had. Which was why I was slightly concerned that the cabinet's door's were closed. I was just a few feet away, which meant that she must have been as well. So then what would have prevented her from opening it?

There was a sound much like shattering glass that crackled over the speaker's of the pipbuck. The sudden noise and its seeming proximity made me jump just before I could reach for the cabinet's doors and look back towards the doorway that I'd entered through. Which was a patently silly thing to do, since the noise that I was hearing had happened decades ago. There certainly wasn't anything happening now; the clear EFS testified to that.

“Sergeant, are you all right?” the captain asked through the recording, “what was that sound?” if she received a reply, it was too faint for her pipbuck to have picked up, “Sergeant Fourragere?

“Report!” still there was silence. I found myself looking in the direction of the open doorway still, as though I might somehow be able to see what had transpired thirty years ago. Realizing how stupid that was, I shook my head and took a deep breath; only now realizing that I had become rather tense as the recording continued to play. I knew that it wasn't going to end well for most of them. I'd seen their bodies. There was no reason for me to feel the sort of apprehension that I was about it. My Eyes Forward Sparkle had been clear ever since I entered the hospital. Whatever had killed them wasn't here anymore.

“Sweet, merciful, Celestia,” I heard the mare who had made this recording say in an almost breathless tone, “they're...gone. I can't see their blips! You two,” she directed at some of the other soldiers with her, “go see what happened,” then I heard a burst of static as the captain must have activated her radio, “Lieutenant, I've lost contact with Sergeant Fourragere and his team. Send third squad to my location, now!”

“Roger that, Ma'am,” another mare's voice responded, sounded grainy and distorted as it was filtered through several tandem electronic devices, “you heard the Commander, Third; move out! On the double!”

Once again I found myself stopping just shy of the cabinet's door and looking back the way that I'd come. The mare that I was listening to had been wearing a pipbuck. That meant that she would have been using the same EFS system that I was. She should have easily been able to keep track of the other ponies in her group using their positions on her visual overlay.

As I watched the door, I heard the sound of gunfire crackling from the recording, as well as the faint sounds of other ponies yelling. Their words were distant, and the noise from their weapons rendered what they were saying incomprehensible. All that I was able to hear clearly was the repeated demands from Captain Abatis as she asked for information about the targets that her soldiers were engaging.

“What's going on?! I have no red blips on my EFS; repeat: no red blips. What are you firing at?!”

That got my attention. She couldn't see any blips? How was that possible? I didn't pretend to know how a pipbuck's Eyes Forward Sparkle worked—I wasn't the technical sort—but I had been using it for years now; and it had never once failed to show ponies, monsters, or robots whenever they were near. For fuck's sake, it knew about their very nature! My pipbuck had been able to tell that Bivouac and her group weren't even real ponies before I'd had even an inkling that something was wrong. How could there be something that was killing Abatis' soldiers and she not be able to see it?

...what if I still wasn't seeing it?

My eyes went wide. There was a precedent. I hadn't seen that zebra bounty hunter in New Reino either!

While I didn't for a moment think that there was some zebra warrior still lurking around down here after being sealed away for thirty years, that didn't mean that there wasn't something like an invisible robot that could still be shambling around and not showing up on my EFS.

I needed to leave. Now!

“What in Celestia's name-!” the captain's words were cut off by a sudden howl that sounded nothing like the sort of noise that could have been created by a pony. What was more, I was hearing that sound in stereo. There was the fuzzy version that was coming from the direction of my left hoof, clearly being modulated by the electronic device as a reduced volume; but it was not alone. It had brought along a companion in the form of a clear, ear-piercing wail that echoed through the room and pinned my ears to the sides of my head.

My eyes were riveted to the entrance to the small laboratory, and the looming shadowy figure that I saw there, bathed in the faint light of my pipbuck. It was...like nothing that I had ever seen before. A shambling mass of jagged edges and jigsaw pieces that formed some form of quadrupedal beast. It's head was long and angular, ending in a long, pointed snout. Protrusions that looked like ears were perked up and angled directly towards me. It took several deliberate steps into the room, a steady growl rumbling from its throat. The creature's legs reminded me of those that were found on a hell hound, though I'd never seen those things lumbering around on all fours before. This thing also distinctly lacked the massive raking claws that so defined the bipedal tunnelers.

Most alarming was an impossible fact that my mind was focusing on: there was no blip.

I was looking at something that was very real, and standing only a few yards away from me; yet there was nothing registering on my EFS.

“What...is that?” the words were mine, but I heard them also echoed nearly simultaneously by Captain Abatis. There was gunfire as well. This two was of a dual nature as the clattering of assault rifles from three decades ago was joined by the high-caliber rounds of my own Full Stop in the present.

Three of the heavy slugs spat forth at that creature, and each of them struck true. Frankly, there was no way that I could possibly have missed. It was more than twice my size and standing barely ten feet away! With each strike, I saw huge chunks of the monster get blasted off; exploding outward in clouds of debris. The first round caught the thing in it's left shoulder, severing the entire leg, which disintegrated into a hundred pieces. The second round caught it in the chest, throwing dozens of chunks outwards. The last removed half of the right side of its face.

There was a pained grunt, and then the thing collapsed to the floor. I stood there, breathing heavily as I looked down at the never-before-seen beast. The recording was still playing on my hoof. There too the gunfire had died away, “cease fire! Cease fire!” the mare was screaming, “secure the area. Keep your eyes open for more of these things,” there was a horrifying thought. I gulped, as my eyes went immediately to the doorway, as though another one might leap through at that exact moment, “somepony find Sergeant Fourra-”

“Ma'am, it's getting back up!”

“What the-?!” again, Abatis and I were of the same mind as I found myself looking at almost exactly what those ponies must have been seeing. The pieces of the monster were trembling all around it. In fact, they were doing a lot more than merely trembling. The fragment that I had blasted away were sliding along the floor and reconstituting themselves back into the original shape that had had stepped through the door. Some of them floated right up off the floor and resumed their previous location on the monster's face and chest. It's leg pieced itself back together and rejoined with its shoulder.

Then it stood back up and turned its head towards me once more. Two points of amber light flared to life, staring directly into my very soul.

Oh, horseapples...

“Engage!” Abatis commanded; and I obeyed. That mare had a good head on her shoulders. Or rather, she had once had a good head on her shoulders. I was pretty sure that I hadn't seen it with the rest of her body when I'd found the pipbuck...

Full Stop bucked in my mouth three more times as I emptied the remainder of the primed chambers in its cylinder into the immortal thing standing in my way. As before, pieces flew off in all directions and it howled in what I was hoping was genuine pain and not mere annoyance. My last round caught it in the neck and popped the head right off the rest of its body. The whole form melted into a pile of debris this time. I didn't wait around to see if I had managed to actually and truly kill it though. I wasn't going to take that sort of chance when I couldn't even be sure there weren't more of these things nearby.

“Fall back!”

Way ahead of you, lady!

I leaped over the already quivering fragments and clambered into the hallway. Just as I feared, I could hear additional howls coming from the room across the corridor that I hadn't gone into, “there's more of them!” somepony else declared in the recording. No shit, genius!

Reloading my revolver on the run was going to be problematic, so I swapped out the heavier weapon for my other pistol with its deeper magazine. It wasn't like bullets really seemed to do more than slow these things down anyway. The rounds took pieces off of the creatures for a short while, but then they just seemed to pull themselves back together after a few seconds. I'd need to try using something with a little more stopping power than lead slugs.

“Covering fire! Pull back to the lobby!” Captain Abatis was yelling over the sporadic gunfire and screaming on the recording that was still continuing to play on my pipbuck. I didn't have the time to stop it right now, “Lieutenant, have third squad form a defensive perimeter and meet us near the ICU! We're coming in hot!”

“Roger that, Ma'am,” came the static infused response from her subordinate, “we'll be ready!”

I scrambled up the stairs, trying not to think to much about the sounds of those monsters on my heels. What could I hope to do against those things that a couple dozen soldiers hadn't been able to manage?! They didn't even seem to care about bullets all that much really.

They might care about grenades though...

As quickly as I could manage, I tucked away my pistol and drew out one of my two remaining fragmentation grenades. I ripped off the retaining pin and kicked the metal apple down the stairwell in my wake. That should take care of the bastards!

“Grenade out!” somepony warned in the recording.

Wait. They'd tried grenades too? Fuck.

Mirrored explosions assaulted my ears from both behind me and next to me as my grenade and the other soldier's detonated in unison. I heard the sound of aggrieved yowls from the basement and reasoned that at the very least I had bought myself a little more time to get away.

“Covering fire!” the order was repeated by the mare leading the Commonwealth forces, “Corporal, with me! The rest of you, fall back to the intersection!”

You should have run, you idiot. I certainly was! My hooves couldn't move fast enough as far as I was concerned as I cantered down the hallway heading for the exit. A cascade of gunfire and screaming continued to issue from my pipbuck as I ran. Most of it was unintelligible as a dozen ponies yelled over one another in the chaos of battle.

Then a blood-curdling scream pierced through the din, causing my gut to grow cold. Immediately following the words was a mare screaming, “more of them! From behi-!” her distant words suddenly morphed into a agonizing cry.

This only barely registered in my mind, as I found myself rather soundly occupied by a shambling monstrosity leaping out from an intersecting corridor and planting itself directly in front of me. My hooves skidded along the tiles floor as I forced myself into a screeching halt. What, in Celestia's name, were these things?!

Down in the pitch black basement laboratory, I hadn't been able to get a very clear look at what these monsters really were. My pipbuck's lamp wasn't particularly powerful, or have a very impressive range. I had only been able to make out vague shapes and forms. Not details. Now, in the much more abundant light that flooded the hallways of the ground floor of the medical facility, I found myself getting a much better look at what I was up against. Not that it did a lot to help me make sense of what they were.

Sticks.

I was fighting sticks. Sticks, twigs, branches, maybe even a log or two thrown in there somewhere. There was no other way to describe these things that I could think of. At this moment, I was just a scant couple of feet away from one of them, and I could make out what were very clearly pieces of broken trees and bushes which had—through some arcane sorcery—pieced themselves together into the shape of some great beast; and now that beast was growling at me! There was no sign of any true biological substance that I could perceive. No flesh, or organs, or anything like that. In point of fact, being this close allowed me to see straight through a few small gaps that existed in the creature's composition and right out the other side.

...Was I seriously nearly pissing myself because of a few piles of tinder?

Yes. Yes I was. If for no other reason that because I had been privy to several very vivid murals that had been composed of blood and viscera from nearly a dozen heavily armed ponies that had faced down these same creatures. Heck, I was currently playing audience to that exact encounter right now in the form of gunfire and screaming.

“Fight through them and get to the exit!” was Captain Abatis' suggestion.

Fuck that! I'd seen exactly how that plan had worked out, thank you very much!

In a refreshing break from the play-by-play that had been paralleling my own actions to an absurd degree, I turned about and launched myself away from the murderous kindling blocking my path, issuing a parting buck to the underside of its chin as I departed.

“We need t—ahhhh!” whatever the captain had been about to say was lost in her own pained cry. Then there was the sound of somepony else talking, “Captain! The captain's down! Somepony hel—GGRK!”

The rest of the recording was a few more seconds of distant yelling. The last sound I heard from the pipbuck was a satisfied roar from one of those monsters, and then the device issued a sharp 'click' which announced that the end of the recorded material had been reached.

Given how I had come across the disk, it wasn't as though I had expected there to be any other ending to it. All I was concerned about right now was making certain that I didn't meet a similar fate. Frankly, that was something that felt as though it was going to be a bit of a long shot at this precise moment. There were at least three of those things in this place; and obviously not all of them had confined themselves to the basement.

They didn't show up on the EFS either. Which meant there was no way of knowing if I was about to turn a corner and run right into them.

It didn't help that I was heading in the exact opposite direction that I needed to be going in order to escape, either. My only saving grace was that while these stick monsters seemed to be immortal; they could at least be delayed for short periods of time. I desperately needed a moment to organize my thoughts and come up with a way to use that to my advantage in order to get out of here!

A piercing howl from behind me served as a reminder that this was not that moment. The thundering sound of heavy beings racing along the tiled floors of the hospital announced that they were also capable of moving at speeds a good deal faster than I was capable of on top of that. I turned my head back, my semi-automatic pistol gripped tightly in my mouth. Two of the creatures were sprinting around the corner after me. The slide kicked back several times as I sprayed the corridor with rounds. The strikes that I landed with the smaller caliber weapon didn't rend loose the massive chunks that Full Stop had, but I could see some bits going flying all the same. It was at least causing the stick monsters to flinch. One of my rounds even managed to catch the nearer one in the elbow, blowing off the lower half of its leg and sending it crashing to the ground.

I mentally cheered at the small victory. Even though I knew it would only be a matter of a few seconds before the amputated leg reattached itself and the creature resumed its pursuit, I was desperate to seize onto every advantage that I could get my hooves on...

...I was suddenly tumbling through the air. I wasn't alone either. A gurney had joined me in my impromptu gyrations. It seemed that in my revelry, I had forgotten to keep my attention on exactly where I was going and had managed to collide with the discarded piece of equipment. I landed hard on the other side of it, grunting more from my own frustration with myself that with any actual pain. This was going to cost me dearly.

I rolled over onto my back, and my eyes went wide. The second branch monster had overtaken its fallen comrade and was charging me. It was going to catch me for certain in my current situation too. My eyes looked onto the gurney that I had tumbled over, which was somehow still upright, and I coked back my hind legs. With a powerful double buck born of desperation, I launched the flimsy wheeled cart at the creature, and was relieved to see it catch the beast square in its chest and propel it back the way that it had come. The gurney's wheels soon became caught up in several of the scattered timber from the fallen stick monster and flipped over. The creature that it had been carrying was sent careening into its compatriot, and the momentum sent the now tangled pair slamming into the wall where they both shattered into a pile of lumber.

“Huh,” my lip cocked in a surprised little smirk as I surveyed the results of my hasty efforts. I'd managed to take the both of them out. That should by me a little time.

I got back up onto my hooves and continued running down the hall, watchful for some route that would help me get somewhere safe. My ear twitched as I heard what sounded like dozens of pieces of wood dragging along the floor. With grim curiosity, I glanced back over my shoulder at what I expected would be the sight of the two creatures pulling themselves back together again.

It turned out that I was only half correct.

As I had seen before in the basement laboratory, the pile of sticks was inexplicably reorganizing itself into cohesive shapes once more. Only, instead of creating the two canine-looking creatures that I had just been fighting, a singular—much larger—beast grew from the pile. This monster barely fit within the confines of the hallway now, and its legs were so massive that I saw little chance of my 9mm rounds having any sort of decent chance of amputating them as I'd managed before.

This wasn't fair. It was bad enough that they weren't killable as it was; but now they could merge together to become even bigger and more dangerous?!

Fuck you, Celestia!

The reconstituted creature shook itself from its head down to its tail, smoothing out the sticks and twigs that comprised its body. Then it fixed its topaz gaze upon me and roared. I watched in horror as it coiled and then sprang forward. Its loping gate caused it to scrape along the hospital's drop-ceiling, dislodging and destroying nearly all of the lights and tiles hanging above as it careened towards me.

Fuuuuck...

I dove through the smallest door I could find, hoping that I'd manage to get through to somewhere that the now much larger creature would be unable to follow. Only it looked as though my selection may not have been wholly ideal. While the entrance into the room was considerably smaller than the stick monster that was chasing me, the room that I had selected wasn't particularly large either. Frankly, I was fairly convinced that one of the creature's legs would have sufficient reach to maul me no matter where I was in this tiny little examination room. All the same, I plastered myself against the far corner and hoped for the best.

All I needed was a little time to come up with a plan...maybe.

Before I could even start to get my thoughts in order, a massive paw composed of tightly bound branches burst into the room and slammed into the floor. Fragments of ceramic tile flew into the air, pelting my face, as the floor was shattered by the impact. I winced, and pressed myself as far back into the corner as I could. My hope that I was out of the monster's reach was very quickly dwindling. The pistol still clutched in my mouth would be the next best thing to useless against the living amalgamation of lumber, but it was all I had to fend it off with.

The limb swept to the right, devastating a set of cabinets that had been built into the wall there and destroying all that they contained. A cutting concoction of smells assaulted my nose as the contents of all of the bottles that had been contained within spread out across the floor. Iodine, turpentine, alcohol, and the odors of several other chemicals that I couldn't name saturated the small room almost instantly. Those same fluids were splattered across my face as the paw swiped across to the other side of the room and crushed a small desk that had been there. It was reduced to little more than a cloud of splinters, as was the simple lamp that had been sitting on top of it.

A pinpoint of light flashed briefly as the live wires of the lamp briefly touched and completed the circuit. It would only be a brief affair before the short tripped whatever safety features had been designed into the building's electrical system. Though a couple of sparks landed upon the limb that had wrought the destruction before that happened. I recoiled in surprise as the paw very suddenly burst into flames. There was a pained howl from outside the room, and the limb was swiftly withdrawn, tearing out a doorjamb in its reckless haste.

Not at all keen to let this opportunity to escape from the confines of the small room pass me by, I darted out of the door just behind the flaming paw. Without even sparing a curious glance, I sprinted further into the hospital in an effort to put enough space between myself and the creature so that I could find a proper hiding place. The sounds of snarling and crashing suggested that I was no longer th focus of its attention, which boded well. I took every turn that presented itself to me. Left, then right, another right, a quick left—that was a dead end, oops! Backtrack and take the right instead—no, wait, that would just take me back the way I came! Fuck! Um...in here!

I dove through a set of double doors and closed them behind me. My ear remained pressed to the door in an effort to listen for any signs that I had been immediately pursued. All that I heard was the not-nearly-distant-enough howls of that wooden beast and the sound of tiles being powdered by repeated slams of its limb. In all likelihood, it hadn't seen me run in here. Which meant that I had at least a few brief moments to ponder on my situation.

It sucked. I was trapped in the middle of the facility with no clear idea of exactly which way I needed to go to get back out, and a massive living wood pile that refused to stay dead no matter how many times I dismantled it. Sweet Celestia, those things had torn apart at least two squads of Commonwealth soldiers, who themselves hadn't been able to stop them. Oh, and on top of all that: I had somehow managed to get them to create an even bigger and more dangerous version!

At least it was flammable.

My eyes widened. It was flammable, wasn't it? The thing was made out of wood, for fuck's sake; it sure as shit better be able to catch fire. Shooting it hadn't done much more the break some the the branches, which had just magically reformed into some other arrangement that created the same original shape. But, if those sticks and limbs and whatever were burned to ash, then there wouldn't be anything left to reform, right?

It was certainly worth a shot...

First things first then: gather together as many accelerants as possible. This was a hospital, so there shouldn't be any shortage of alcohol and such to use. I just needed to get a whole bunch of it together, douse the thing, and then set it on fire and watch it go up in flames. As long as the whole facility didn't burn down around my ears as well, this was a rather sound plan in my opinion. So, I just needed to find some alco...oh, for fuck's sake. Seriously?!

Only now did I actually take a look at where I was, and my heart sank. The room was effectively empty. At one time, it had clearly been some sort of ward that was capable of holding a couple dozen patients. At regular intervals along the walls were panels containing all manner of outlets and hose connections that would have supported machinery needed to keep critically injured patients alive. However, all of that machinery was gone now. As were the bed that the patients using them would have lain upon. I spied a few cabinets, but even from where I was, I could see that they had already been thoroughly looted. In fact, the only things that looked to have been left behind were a half dozen or so large green pressurized cylinders. Presumably because they must have weighed hundreds of pounds and would have been the next best thing to worthless anyway.

For a brief moment, I entertained the notion of slipping out of the room and finding somewhere else to look for the materials that I needed for my plan. However, a brief listen at the door informed me that the creature had since dealt with the small flames on its leg and was once more on the prowl. I could hear it working its way down the hallway, destroying the occasional door. It wouldn't be all that long before it made it here; yet all the same I didn't have any burning desire to announce my exact location by making a mad dash through the corridor.

There had to be something in here that would help me!

Even as I had the thought, I knew that it was very unlikely that I'd discover anything useful. How could I have chosen what must have been the only abandoned room in this place? Once more, my eyes flashed over every corner of the room, hoping to find something that I might have missed in my initial panicked scan. Unsurprisingly, nothing materialized during my second sweep. Though I did notice that a desk was nestled in a corner just to my left, and it contained an active terminal. Maybe there was some way to seal this room or reinstate the lookdown from here? Something to buy me just a little more time.

Quietly, I slipped behind the desk and tapped at the keyboard. The computer had been left in a standby mode similar to that of the others that I'd tried using thus far. My lips quirked in a mild frown. I wasn't complaining or anything, but I did find it odd that nothing had really been secured as so many of these things tended to be. Though I was starting to get a few hints as to why from some of the directory titles that I was seeing. Something about promising research going on down in the basement—had the doctors here created those monsters?! A chain of messages asking what the code to get into the storage room was—an idle glance over my shoulder confirmed that there was a nearby door that was secured by a keypad. If there was anything useful in there, I wasn't going to be getting my hooves on it anytime soon. The latest entry pertained to the culmination of the Great War. It seemed that New Reino had indeed avoided a direct balefire bombardment, but deadly pockets of magical radiation had nonetheless popped up throughout the city, and so they were executing an evacuation of all patients and staff.

It seemed that the plan had been to return to collect the research and anything else that had been left behind at a later time.

Obviously, that plan had not been followed through with.

None of this directly helped me out though. I was still trapped in this room with no mean by which to lock it down, and an immortal stick monster coming my way. Knowing about how 'promising the initial elixir trials were' was not something that was going to help me out here. With a disgusted snort, I pushed myself away from the terminal and brought my arm up to look at my pipbuck's screen. It looked like the only resources that I was going to have access to were whatever was on me right now; which meant that I needed to take stock.

My guns just seemed to make the thing angry, so they weren't going to be much help. The energy pistol that I'd taken from Wind Rider's desk would probably be more effective, but I didn't have any spark packs for it; so it was little more than a plastic brick at the moment. I only had the single fragmentation grenade left, and I was dubious about it performing much better than the previous one I'd thrown. Two flares, which would have been an ideal way to ignite any sufficiently volatile liquid that I might have soaked that creature with; but which I doubted was going to do a whole lot on their own. Some food, which probably wasn't going to be a lot of help either. Anti-radiation medicines. Half a bottle of bad whiskey. Those damnable little statues...

I turned my attention from the little fetlock mounted computer and dug through my saddlebags, pulling out the bottle of spirits. This would burn. There wasn't a whole lot of it, but it was something. All it really had to do was keep the thing distracted long enough for me to make an escape and get far out of its sight.

The scraping claws being dragged over the tiled floor outside was growing louder. That thing would be here in moments. I grimaced and dashed for the far side of the room. The bottle of whiskey was in my mouth, ready to be thrown, and a flare was nestled in one of the little carriers sewn into my barding. Not an ideal confrontation, to be sure, but very little about this little trip had gone the way I'd envisioned up to this point anyway. Even if this little exchange didn't completely kill that wooden abomination, it should at least be enough to distract it and let me dash past it.

My thoughts very quickly focused as I saw the double doors open inward slightly. Only a timber snout poked through at first, but it was followed shortly by the rest of the beast's head. Its amber eyes glanced around briefly, and quickly spotted me on the far side of the room. It's not like it would have been hard to pick out the lone pony standing out in the open like I was. I cocked my hoof back, waiting for it to finally get close enough so that I could be confident of a good hit.

Having spotted me, the wooden creature wasted little time in dragging the rest of itself into the empty ward, managing to rip one of the double doors off of its hinges in the process. It now took up nearly a full third of the large room. I sent the glass bottle arcing towards it, confident I'd be unlikely to miss. The tinted container shattered on its left shoulder, splattering its contents all over the joint and limb, leaving some noticeable dampness on the left side of its jaw as well. Not as much of the wooden beast had been coated as I would have preferred, but I was committed now. I pulled out the flare and struck the butt end of it on the wall behind me. The both of us were bathed in crimson flickering light.

The bottle had been largely ignored by the lumber demon. It wasn't as though much that I had done to it up to this point had been truly threatening after all. The flare though, that it took a keen interest in. I felt my lips pull back in a satisfied smirk as I held the sputtering torch in my mouth. Fire looked to be the correct course of action. The larger canine monstrosity had ceased it advance, and seemed now to be contemplating its actions with a little more care than it had before. This hesitation was the opportunity I needed though, and I had to seize on it before this creature thought up some way to counter it.

I burst forward and sent the flare hurling towards where the bottle had impacted only moments before with a flick of my head. The monster tried to avoid the scarlet flare, but this was where its great size proved more of a liability than an asset. There simply wasn't enough room for it to effectively dodge out of the way, and so the flare struck true and I was rewarded with an eruption of brilliant blue flames, which quickly adopted an orange tint.

A cheer actually escaped my lips as I saw the fire catch, a sound that was drowned out almost instantly by a pained and frightful roar of the monster before me. However, my revelry was short lived, just like the fire. A few seconds was all that it had burned for, nothing more. In its wake were tendrils of blueish-gray smoke and the faint scent of singed wood. Aside from some blackened portions of its face and shoulder, there wasn't very much visible damage. A scattering of orange beads yet remained, testifying to embers that were yet clinging to life; but they were unlikely to rekindle into anything significant.

Those embers were stubborn though. The creature shook itself in an effort to put an end to those last vestiges of fire, but the rapid motion only made them glow defiantly brighter for a few brief seconds. In the end, the beast seemed to accept that they would have to be allowed to finally die out completely in their own good time. If anything, they seemed to be a mild annoyance anyway. Those glowing eyes locked onto me once more.

Horseapples. That whiskey must have been more watered down than I thought...

The pistol was already in my mouth once more. Not that I really expected it to do all that much. It was really more the principal of the thing now: I wasn't going to die just standing there unarmed. This thing was going to have to earn its kill.

I didn't fire quickly or wildly. My shots were deliberate and aimed as I took careful steps back towards the wall behind me. Splinters of wood broke away where the smaller caliber lead slugs struck their target. The timber beast largely ignored my effort, growling low in its throat as it slowly crept towards me. While most of the debris that I shot away eventually twitched and floated back into place, the smaller bits of splintered wood simply remained inert on the floor. This suggested that with enough rounds it would have been possible to eventually mulch this thing; but I had neither those ammunition or the time to perform such an act with this little pistol.

With my attention fixed firmly ahead on the advancing monster, I didn't notice the small bit of refuse that my hind leg slipped on. It wasn't much of a falter, and I recovered as quickly, but it was enough to send one of my rounds wildly off target. The errant slug caught the regulator of one of those large green tanks. Sparks flew as the bullet ripped away the valve that would have kept the gases inside contained. A loud hiss filled the room as a white gush of the highly pressurized gas erupted forth, catching the monster before me in the face. More out of surprise than anything, the creature recoiled away, glaring at the offending tank and its contents.

Seeing the momentary shift in attention, I was about to charge forward and take my chances trying to pass by it on my way towards the exit. However, before I could even take my first step, my eyes went wide in surprise. The creature was on fire again! Those tiny moats of orange light that had refused to be snuffed out initially were now being stoked by the gas being spewed from the green tank and had rekindled into a respectable flame.

The monster howled in pain and rage and backed as far away from the tank as it could. The flames died down a little, but this time the fire would not go out completely. The creature set to shaking once more in an effort o put them out. My eyes locked onto another of the tanks that had been mounted to the opposite wall, and now was sitting just a few feet away from where it was trying to put itself out. I trained the sights of my pistol on the regulator of that tank and fired. Two round later, that tank was gushing forth its contents as well.

Just as before, the flames roared larger and hotter, and they began to spread as they were fueled by the gasses of the two tanks. Again, the beast tried to shy away from the new source of accelerant. However, I was not about to let this chance slip away from me. I ejected the nearly spent magazine and injected a fresh one into the pistol and started using the weapon to open up every tank that I could see. The flames continued to grow, spreading along the monster's back and sides even as it thrashed about in an effort to put them out.

I glanced back and found a nearby tank strapped into a mount in the wall. The aging restraints didn't put up all that much resistance as I pulled the cylinder out of its recess and let it fall to the floor with a reverberating 'thud'. I charged the burning monster now, rolling the tank as I advanced. I was going to put an end to this thing for good! As I ran past, I kicked the tumbling tank towards it. The creature didn't even seemed to notice me, having its attention being consumed with far more pressing matters. I spun to a stop near the desk and leveled my pistol at the tank that I had deposited at its feet.

“Let's see you put yourself back together after this!” I dared the wooden beast from around the grip of my pistol. Then I depressed the trigger.

In hindsight, that had all been a mistake. Sort of. I briefly recalled seeing where the round had struck the side of canister. Then there was just a massive wall of flame that was thundering towards me. I felt my hooves lift off the ground, and then I was tumbling backwards through the air. My back suddenly hurt, and I was faintly aware of more crashing sounds. Then things were very dark and fuzzy for a while.

I doubted that I'd been out for more than a minute or two, but it was hard to be certain. What was immediately clear was that I was no longer still in that same ward where the monster had been. My cramped surroundings suggested that I was in a smaller closet of sorts, and the warped and unhinged door nearby led me to conclude that I had not needed to use a key code to open up that door after all. My back and high velocities had seemed to suffice. Though I made a solemn vow to not use this specific technique again so long as I lived.

There was a brief moment of concern as to the condition of that wooden monster that had been nearby not so long ago, but a glance through the doorway prompted a sigh of relief. Scattered throughout the ward were ash and thoroughly charred sticks. A few of the thinker limbs still burned. None of them were moving or trembling. It was dead. Very. Very dead. With a relieved sigh, I rolled back onto my soar back side and allowed myself a few moments to relax and calm down. My eyes traced their way through the room, lingering on the shelves lined with gauze and bandages, as well as a dented cabinet door that seemed to have served as a backstop for my hasty entrance. Within I was able to see a half dozen familiar looking purple vials, as well as a few potions that I did not recognize.

With a grunt, I pushed myself up onto my hooves and examined those other potions. The bottled were similar to those that contained typical healing potions, and they even had the same purple coloring; except that there were also thin golden bands woven into the mixture. I quirked an eye as my pipbuck applied the label: 'Healing Elixir' to the bottles. Wait, was this the same 'elixir' that the Commonwealth ponies had been after? I pocketed them, as well as their vanilla counterparts. I also packed away a respectable stock of bandages and Med-X as well.

Then I noticed a disk that had been sitting on the shelf near the elixirs. Curious, I picked it up and popped it into the pipbuck; storing Abatis' log in my saddlebags. The pipbuck beeped as it recognized the media device and then began its playback.

“Finally, success,” an older sounding stallion's voice crackled over the little computer's speaker, “we've long know about the Tmberwolve's regenerative abilities. In a way, they rival even a hydra's, as they can completely rebuild themselves, provided that there is enough remaining material nearby.”

My eyes widened. He was talking about those things! So, the ponies here hadn't created them, they'd just been using them to do research. Timberwolves, huh?

“It seems that our earlier setbacks were due to our initial approaches: we were treating the wolves like animals, when that was wrong. It's so obvious now, but...they're not animals. They're plants. Sort of. Looking at the problem from one of working with floral samples instead of fauna finally allowed us to make real progress.

“Healing Elixirs won't let us put ponies back together again, but when the extracted material is infused into traditional healing potions, it nearly triples their effectiveness. This research represents a new era in battlefield medicine for all of pony kind.

“We'll have our notes finalized and shipped out to the Ministry of Peace within the week.”

The recording clicked and ended. Then the display hovering in front of my eyes flashed, informing me that an additional file entitled: 'elixirrecipe.txt' had been extracted and stored on the device. Ooh...I bet that was going to be worth a lot to the right pony.

It might also be exactly what Windfall was going to need too.

As long as I wasn't too late...

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Footnote:...

Next Chapter: CHAPTER 18: AC-CENT-TCHU-ATE THE POSITIVE Estimated time remaining: 50 Hours, 45 Minutes