" A light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehendeth it not "

I was no stranger to fitful sleeps. The first few months after my home had been raided hadn’t contained a lot of peaceful slumbers as I was wracked by nightmares, for example. Even after the worst of those nighttime terrors had subsided, my dreams would occasionally be consumed by images of gore and death that I had either recently witnessed, or―more likely―inflicted.

Last night was a little different though. What little time my eyes managed to spend closed seemed to be very promptly co-opted by a night terror, but it wasn’t of the same brand that I had grown accustomed to. I didn’t see the maimed, screaming, corpses of the ponies that I’d killed recently. That would have been quite the trick, actually, as I hadn’t killed anypony recently since giving up my cutie mark. No, last night I had very different sorts of dreams.

They had a common theme in them though. While the details varied from one to the next, they all seemed to be built around the premise that I was content to stand passively by while pony after pony―some whose faces I recognized, and some whom I did not―were marched to their deaths. The means by which they were executed seemed to be tailored to the pony in some way, ranging from mundane hangings, beheadings, and firing squads, all the way to more disturbingly creative means that left me wondering if my subconscious might need to be sat down with a counselor for some serious therapy.

Yet, while the faces and means might have changed, the one constant factor through it all was me. I simply sat there, an uninterested expression on my face, and watched them as they were put to death. On the frequent occasion that the condemned pony of the moment would plead for me to come to their aide, I simply shrugged and pointed a pinion at my flank, and the dingey gray equals sign that lay upon it. Then they would be killed, their body cast onto an ever-growing pile, and the next pony would be brought forward for the process to repeat.

It was not a...pleasant night for me, to say the least. Emotionally anyway.

Physically, I was doing quite well. Even both of my wings were feeling perfectly functional. A revelation which prompted its own set of bittersweet thoughts. I knew full well that Arginine and I owed our good health―and indeed, our very lives―to the efforts of the striped brown Enclave unicorn. While the larger gray unicorn stallion might have slept through everything that happened last night, I hadn’t; and so I knew exactly what I had been willing to do for Minos and his sister as the townsponies of Notel had dragged her away and prepared her for death by immolation.

I had done precisely nothing. Even when Minos had elected to give up his own life rather than live a day without his dear sibling, I had kept right on doing nothing. I simply stood above it all and watched as they were very nearly slaughtered by Litany and the ponies he led. But for the timely intervention of Minos’ shipmates in a daring rescue which resulted in absolutely no loss of life, those two striped ponies would be dead.

The hollow feeling that realization left inside of me bit deeper into my soul than the loss of my cutie mark had.

Ivy seemed to sense that something was off about me, and tried to take my mind off my troubles―despite having missed the precise root from which those troubles stemmed. Her notion seemed to be that I was upset about Minos not seeing the danger that his ‘Evil Enchantress’ sister had posed to all of ponykind. To that end, she made a few dubiously ‘helpful’ comments about how there wasn’t anything that I could have said or done to convince the striped stallion to see reason.

“I’m sure that she’s had him in her trance for years,” the green mare said in resigned tones as she brought us our meals, “I don’t think anything short of divine intervention by Princess Luna herself would have been able to save him.”

It had looked to me like three ponies and an airship had been more than sufficient to save Minos and his sister. A very different Windfall from not too far in the past could probably have managed it, in fact. I very wisely did not make those comments aloud, of course. I kept my tongue in check and offered noncommittal comments that the mare seemed happy to take as avid agreements with her own assessments.

I was moving around a lot better that next day. Arginine was looking much better too. The larger genetically engineered stallion was probably recovering a decent bit faster than I was, if I was being honest. I was quite thankful for this, as it meant that the two of us would be able to take our leave of this town that day. Ivy tried to convince us to stay a little bit longer, but I wasn’t particularly willing to entertain that notion.

Neither she, nor Litany, had been very subtle about their hopes that Arginine and I would opt to settle down permanently in Notel. Granted, the older beige stallion wasn’t being quite so insistent about that issue since last night. He couldn’t simply change his position about why he secretly didn’t want me hanging around any longer than was necessary, that would have raised too many questions with the other townsponies. He was certainly a lot more sympathetic about why I wanted to leave though.
Even if I hadn’t had more pressing matters to deal with elsewhere in the valley, I couldn’t see myself remaining here. Not after what I’d seen them try to do last night.

I couldn’t even bring myself to stay a second night in this town. There were even quite a few reasonable arguments that could be made―and were made by Arginine―as to why we should have. As late in the afternoon as it was by the time I’d felt truly ready to don my barding and gear, the two of us weren’t going to get much more than a few hours of travel in by the time night came around. As short a distance as that was, we really weren’t gaining anything in the way of time by not waiting for morning, where we’d be able to get in a full day of cross-country trekking before needing to stop.

It was going to take us two nights to get to Shady Saddles either way.

I just...I really didn’t want to have stay in this place another night. Arginine didn’t completely understand why I was so determined to leave that afternoon, but he didn’t push back too hard either after making his initial counterpoints known. He buckled on his own barding and checked his weapon, grimacing slightly when he saw the heat damage that my distressed signalling had inflicted. He assured me that it was mostly cosmetic damage, and that it wouldn’t interfere with the weapon’s lethality.

We were met at the gates of the town by Litany and one of his guards. I felt an almost instinctual moment of tension as they approached, but the disinterested expression on the earth pony guard suggested that she, at least, hadn’t been advised by the town’s mayor that anything aggressive was going to occur. Either that or she had the Wasteland’s greatest poker face. That probably wasn’t likely, so I let myself relax. A little.

“You’re sure we couldn’t persuade you to stay another night?” Litany asked pleasantly enough. His heart wasn’t quite in the question. I certainly got the impression that he was a little relieved that the two of us were heading out sooner rather than later, “I wouldn’t want you to think that last night was typical for us.”

“Are you talking about the abduction, the beating of an innocent mare, or the attempted murder of the same two ponies you’d abducted?”

I probably shouldn’t have said anything and just grunted politely as Arginine and I made our departure. If it had been Ivy telling me this as I left, I probably would have. Meadowbrook’s accusation still rang loudly in my ears though regarding what Litany had done while a captive of the White Hooves. Nor could I shake the notion that he wasn’t still engaging in more of the same with the mares here. Stallion’s like him didn’t change their ways, after all. Not that I’d ever heard of.

My not so gently worded question for clarification caught both ponies off their guard. The earth pony mare at Litany’s side was certainly the most surprised by what I’d said, but she at least had the decency to look a little abashed about it too. Chances were that quite a few of the ponies here recognized the hypocrisy of former White Hoof slaves like themselves abducting other ponies to use their skills.

I noticed that they’d still done it, of course.

Notel’s mayor was not cowed, however. His own eyes hardened significantly before glancing briefly to gauge the reaction of the armed pony at his side, “I wish you safe travels,” he said in a tone that dripped with loathing. Then he nodded at the guard and turned away from us.

I watched him for only a second longer before turning northeast and marching off into the Wasteland. Arginine trotted along beside me in silence. When the two of us were safely out of earshot from anypony in Notel, he finally spoke up, “I believe there are certain details about our stay that I am not aware of.”

“The doctor that treated us was abducted by them from Shady Saddles,” I began filling in the larger gray stallion in on all that I’d seen happen while he’d been unconscious. He had very little to offer while he listened, save for the occasional request for details or clarification. When I had finally caught him up, he thought for about a minute before he spoke again.

“Perhaps I misjudged you,” he finally said. I detected the slightest hint of disappointment in his voice and glanced over at him in confusion, “it had been my observation that you were dedicated to your mission to eliminate destructive ponies. I see now that I have erred in my conclusion. I will need to refine my model accordingly in order to properly categorize your goals.”

“I’m not a killer anymore,” I replied acidly, glaring at the stallion, “besides, it’s not like I had any proof he’d done anything…”

“I will concede that the evidence presented was circumstantial, at best; hearsay, at worst,” Arginine nodded, “however, you clearly believe that an investigation to discover the truth was at least warranted.”

“Nopony there was going to help me do something like that.”

“Did you ask?”

I had not, of course, and Arginine knew that. I wasn’t an idiot; I knew what he was getting at. Yes, I wasn’t acting like myself. That was kind of the whole point of getting rid of my cutie mark though, wasn’t it? I hadn’t liked ‘myself’ very much. The less like me that I was acting, the better off I was.

That assertion would have felt a lot more uplifting if it didn’t also leave a cold ball of guilt in my gut. The truth was that I wasn’t finding a whole lot to like about my new self either. My new self didn’t care about ponies who had essentially been enslaved by a town of ponies. My new self didn’t try to stop ponies from being brutally murdered right in front of her. My new self left a rapist in charge of a town as though there wasn’t a thing in the Wasteland that she could do about it.

Old Me would have despised New Me. New Me’s complacency with what monstrous ponies did sickened me to my very core.
You know what?
Fuck New Me.

“What are you doing?”

It was somewhere around fifteen minutes later when I finally realized that Arginine had said something. At the time that he had actually spoken, I wasn’t exactly paying all that much attention to what was going on around me. My world at that moment consisted of two things: the front sight of my automatic carbine, and Litany’s head. I couldn’t have even told you how many rounds I ended up firing. It was more than one, but a little less than the entire magazine. I had certainly expended more rounds than had been needed. Even at just shy of the two hundred yards that existed between me and the older mayor of Notel, I managed to land the first to slugs on target before the recoil lifted the barrel of my weapon too high to hit anything.

Litany hadn’t even been looking in my direction when he went down. The ponies that he had been talking to scattered as pieces of his skull exploded outward. For several frantic seconds, nopony could seem to figure out where the shots had come from. Then one of the more attentive guards traced the fire back to Arginine and I and an alarm was sounded. I could only imagine what the residents of Notel had to have been thinking when they realized that the young pegasus mare that their town had just finished saving had murdered their leader on her way out.

Chances were good that I wasn’t going to be very welcome if I ever came back around this way again.

I had to give the Notel security forces some credit: they were spirited. Almost a dozen ponies took up defensive firing positions along the perimeter of the motel’s parking lot. Most of them poked their heads and guns out from around the sides of rusted abandoned wagons and carts, but a few of the more brazen were standing out in the open. Most of them were armed with pistols and shotguns, which weren’t going to pose much of threat at this range. They seemed to realize this too, as only the few ponies with genuine rifles actually opened fire on me.

Those weapons had the range, but a combination of the shoddy condition of the firearms in question and lack of expertise by their wielders ensured that most of the shots went far wide of the pair of us. Arginine erected his shield, just in case, and I noticed it flare once or twice as rounds deflected off of the magical barrier. Even those I didn’t think would actually have hurt us. The unicorn stallion looked down at me in confusion, searching for an explanation for my actions, and trying to gauge what my next move was going to be.

I think he was half expecting me to charge back in there and start taking all of them out until they stopped shooting. Those weren’t bad ponies though―so far as I had any reason to believe. Right now they were just reacting to somepony who they saw as a threat, because she had just shot the pony in charge of their town in cold blood. They were being good, loyal, defenders of the ponies living in their town.

I was the threat. I was the killer.

That cold lump in my gut doubled in size. I was the killer, wasn’t I? The blinding fury that had taken hold of me long enough to put Litany down chilled as that realization firmly set it. Rounds continued to skip off the hard scrabble around us, Arginine casting nervous looks in the direction of the ponies still shooting at us while he waited for me to announce our next move. I wasn’t paying attention to any of that though. I was looking at my flank.

Killing Litany hadn’t felt any different than killing anypony else ever had.

How could that be? I didn’t have my cutie mark anymore. I wasn’t supposed to be inclined to kill ponies! I wasn’t supposed to be good at it! The whole reason that I’d let Starlight Glimmer rip my mark from my flanks had been so that I would no longer do exactly what I had just done!

I turned away from the town, my mind in a daze as I tried to wrap my thoughts around the implications of this particular epiphany, and started walking away. Arginine kept pace at my side, most of his attention focused to our rear as he maintained the defensive barrier. The infrequency with which any of the guards managed to land even glancing hits seemed to allow the stallion to keep the spell powered longer than I had ever seen him achieve in the past. I suspected that was because there was a world of difference in terms of demand when somepony compared a few scattered rifle rounds every dozen seconds or so to a barrage of energy beams from a Steel Ranger at point blank range.

Either because they realized that their shots were less than ineffective, or because they didn’t feel inclined to waste the ammunition on foes who were clearly withdrawing, the townspony’s stopped shooting once we were beyond three hundred yards. They didn’t seem to be of a mind to chase after us either, which I was grateful for. I wouldn’t have liked to kill them if they had.

I could have though.

Had it really all been for nothing? I had sacrificed my cutie mark in an effort to keep myself from sinking deeper and deeper into the role of a killer that I had been finding myself falling into. Scratch had been a bit of a ‘wake up call’ in that department. He had been one of the first individuals that I’d ever truly ‘murdered’, and I hadn’t liked it. Usually I only killed ponies when they posed active and obvious threats to myself or others. The griffon hadn’t been that though. He’d been an asshole, and I was positive that he’d set me and Jackboot up to fall into Cestus’ trap. Anypony―or griffon, as the case may be―that worked that closely with the White Hooves were bad news, and nopony in the whole valley would have disagreed with me on that.

He’d probably ‘deserved’ to die for the things that he’d done, it could have been argued. I just...hadn’t meant to kill him at the time.

Killing couldn’t be the only way to solve the Wasteland’s problems. I didn’t know for certain that there really was a better way, but I desperately wanted there to be one. Maybe that was delusional of me; to want to be able to keep ponies safe without also leaving a swath of death and destruction in my wake. It didn’t feel like the Wasteland was built that way.

Damn it if I didn’t really wish it was right now. I wanted options. I wanted to be able to do the right thing without having to leave some pony’s brains all over a parking lot! Why was that too much to ask?!

“Are you injured?”

The question shocked me back into the present and I glanced up at Arginine, who was regarding me with what was―for him, anyway―a considerable amount of concern. I was unable to answer for a few seconds as my brain fought itself free of my private thoughts and worked on dealing with the present, “no, I’m…” I paused again as I heard myself speak.

Had I been...crying?

My nose felt stuffed up, and my eyes were burning. I wiped at my face with a wing and felt it come away with a great deal of dampness. Yes. Yes, I had indeed been crying. There was no sense in trying to hide it either, but my own sense of stubborn pride insisted that I still, futilely, try to play the whole thing off like nothing was bothering me.

“I’m fine, RG. It’s nothing,” I managed in a slightly less shaky voice even as I more thoroughly wiped the tears off of my face with the tips of my wing and snorted back all of the mucus that was leaking from my nose, “just the dust,” there was no dust, and Arginine wasn’t an idiot.

No, the only completely clueless pony out here was me. I was a young, inexperienced, stupid, filly, who naively thought that she could do a Celestia-damned thing to make the world an even slightly better place. What did I know about the world, or how to make life better for the ponies living in it? All that I knew how to do was kill. That was all Jackboot had taught me how to do, and that was all that I thought I needed to know how to do. I was just a raider who was particular about her targets. Raiders didn’t make the Wasteland a better place; that wasn’t in their nature.

That thought hurt even worse now than similar ones ever had in the past. I couldn’t even blame it on my ‘destiny’ now apparently. It wasn’t my cutie mark that was making me kill. I seemed to be perfectly good at that all on my own.

I was a raider to my very core.

I stopped suddenly and sat down hard, staring down at the ground as those words reverberated around inside my head. Arginine stopped as well, looking at me with that uniquely concerned expression of his.

“RG? Am I a good pony?”

The question seemed to surprise the stallion, “I have observed you to be quite proficient with firearms and tactics,” he began, and I felt myself sinking down even lower, “you have proven yourself as an adequate leader under stressful conditions, able to make decisions very quickly and―”

“That’s not what I mean,” I interrupted, shaking my head and still not looking up, “am. I. A. Good. Pony?”

“...what are the parameters for the quantitative measure of a pony’s ‘goodness’?”

It would have made a lot of sense for me to have an answer for that question. Somehow, I didn’t. I’d never really concerned myself so much with what made somepony ‘good’ as I had with what made a pony ‘bad’. Banditry. Murder. Rape. Everything contained within that vile little family of activities were what I looked for when deciding if a pony deserved to be put down by a bullet from my gun. If a pony didn’t check any of those boxes, then I let them be.

Was that what it took to make a ‘good’ pony, though? Could it really have been enough to simply not be a ‘bad’ pony?

I remembered that look that the crimson pegasus mare in the brown coat had given me last night. I had neither abducted, not beaten, nor tried to kill Meadowbrook or her brother; but it was obvious that Miasma would not have considered me to have been a very good pony in spite of all of that; because I was perfectly content to allow all of those things to happen to somepony else without even so much as a token protest against it. Minos’ friends on that airship, they had been good ponies. They had not only rescued their endangered comrades, they hadn’t even needed to kill anypony to do it. Those had been the sorts of ponies that both DJ Pon3 and Homily needed to be bragging about to the rest of the Wasteland. They were real heroes.

All I was now was a filly who was content to sit on the sidelines and watch terrible things happen to other ponies.

“Nevermind,” I didn’t need Arginine to answer my question anymore. The conclusion I’d reached on my own was a pretty clear one; and I didn’t much care for it, “let’s keep going.”

As predicted, we didn’t make a whole lot of progress before it was too dark to safely continue on any further towards Shady Saddles. We found the remains of an old skywagon that had ditched in a field and used it for shelter for the night. There were signs that the old wreck had served as a place that many a traveler had rested in over the centuries. We decided that we could even risk a small fire within it.

We shared a meager meal of Cram and Sparkle Cola in silence. Arginine had never been much of a talker, so there was nothing new there; but I seemed to recall having been a pony who wasn’t averse to striking up a conversation once upon a time. I just hadn’t felt all that much like talking since Notel. Not that being left alone with my own thoughts had been doing me many favors these last few hours.

It would have been nice to have Foxglove around right about now. That mare had always been up for talking with me about just about any topic that I could ever think to bring up. Jackboot had always been receptive to conversation when we’d traveled together, but as close as the two of us had been, there had been things that I couldn’t say to the older stallion; precisely because we’d been close. With Foxglove, I hadn’t felt that same reservation regarding certain topics. She had been a largely ‘uninterested party’ in a way, despite her having some very strong opinions on most of the matters that I brought up with her.

Of course, if I wanted to talk to anypony about anything right now, my options were limited exclusively to Arginine. Here was a pony with some decidedly particular opinions about the world, of which I could honestly say I wasn’t a huge fan. I also wasn’t completely sure what to make of his recent...well, I suppose it wasn’t exactly a ‘change of heart’ that he’d had. It was pretty surprising that he’d helped me out at all once he was free of the explosive collar. In his place, I―or pretty much anypony really―would have more than likely immediately turned on my captor and killed them out of hoof.

Arginine had demonstrated himself to have some decidedly...peculiar notions about the world, to put things mildly. Knowing what I did now about certain aspects of his personality, and having been a witness to his nominal emotional detachment since meeting him, I suppose that his decision to aid me made a weird sort of logical sense. He wanted what was best―to his mind―for ponykind on the whole. If some of the weeds had to be pulled out so that the rest could flourish, then he was perfectly prepared to do just that. Like he had pointed out: that had ostensibly been my goal in life as well.

I had just been thinking on a smaller scale; and with much narrower criteria regarding the sorts of ponies that shouldn’t be allowed to continue existing in the Wasteland any longer.

For now, at least, the engineered stallion seemed of a mind to help me fight his own kind. That being the case, it did leave me wondering one thing, “RG? Say that we defeat your stable; what about you?”

The larger stallion cocked a brow, “How do you mean?”

“Well, you said that if your stable wins and creates their Omega Stain or whatever, they’ll eventually kill you, right?”

He nodded, “once my obsolescence has been realized, my life will be ended. That is correct.”

“So, what if we win? What would you do for the rest of your life?”

Arginine stared at me blankly in silence for several long seconds. He didn’t even so much as blink. It was actually starting to make me a little nervous the way his eye glassed over. Then, finally, “I...do not know. Truthfully, I have not placed a high probability on the chance of the ponies of the Wasteland being able to successfully resist my kind.”

I frowned at him, “if you don’t think we can win, why are you helping me?”

“While I do not place a high probability on an outcome that you would find desirable; it is, in my estimation, still a statistically significant possibility. I am essentially testing a hypothesis, nothing more.”

That wasn’t exactly the most uplifting appraisal that I’d heard from the stallion, admittedly, but I suppose it kind of said some positive things about how capable he felt I was that he was even willing to consider the possibility that the ‘invalid’ ponies of the Wasteland had at least a chance of fending off the army of engineered ponies that his stable was getting ready to churn out. It might have filled me with a tad more confidence if he had at least considered giving a little thought to what a positive outcome for us would mean for him though. That would at least imply that he was starting to think of our victory as moving from the realm of mere possibility to genuinely likely.

“So you really have no idea what you’d do if you were suddenly the last of your kind left in the world?”

He frowned at me, “While I am highly doubtful that even a grossly optimistic scenario wherein the ponies of the Wasteland emerge victorious in the end will result in the complete extinction of my kind, I can honestly say that I have not given the matter any thought, no.”

“Well, what would you want to do?”

“I have only ever desired to improve ponykind,” Arginine replied in a soft tone after a few moments of deep thought, “doing so has been my whole purpose in life. If that were removed as a viable option for me...I suppose that I would simply elect to end my life.”

I balked at the candidly stated answer, “you’d kill yourself?!”

The stallion shrugged, “my fate would have been to be euthanized in the event that my stable was ultimately victorious. I see little reason that it should be different in the face of failure as well. After all, ultimate defeat would mean a certain kind of obsolescence. The Wasteland would not have need of a pony with my skillset.”

“That’s not a reason to take your own life,” I wasn’t sounding as adamant as most other ponies might have been in this situation. Foxglove would almost certainly have been able to affect a greater degree of sympathy for a pony contemplating suicide―though perhaps not Arginine specifically. Frankly, I wasn’t entirely certain that I had all that much of a leg to stand on when it came to trying to talk ponies out of killing themselves. I’d tried to do that very thing not all that long ago. It hadn’t been for the same reasons that Arginine was talking about, but I could still understand where feelings like that could come from.

“What reason is there in a life without purpose?” he asked simply.

“Find purpose,” I rebutted, glaring at the pony, “what do you think I did? I wasn’t raised in a stable, so it’s not like anypony assigned me some sort of job. I had to figure it out on my own...well, not completely on my own,” I amended, “I had help along the way,” much of my current path had essentially been laid out for me by jackboot, after all. He’d taught me the trade that he knew best while he’d been alive. I’d made a few changes once he was gone, but the broad strokes had remained very nearly the same, “but I’m still doing something that I want to do with my life.”

I could have wished that my last statement had sounded a bit more certain. However, I’d begun to have a lot of doubts over the past week or so, since leaving Seaddle. No matter what I did, there was this little hollow feeling inside me. I was out here in the Wasteland, doing what I had done all my life―what I had used to love doing―but I wasn’t getting the same sort of satisfaction from it. Indeed, everything I did just left me feeling even more empty. Killing Litany like that had just been the latest punch to the gut.

I had always hated killing, deep down. That was why I had made sure that I reserved it for only a particular breed of vile pony. When the killing was in the service of helping or protecting other, it was bearable. I could assure myself that the deaths had been necessary. This afternoon though, even though I knew that killing the old stallion had been just, and probably even saved some other mares from facing his abuses later on, I couldn’t avail myself to that same contentment.

The reason for this was what was most chilling of all: I didn’t care about those hypothetical mares. My instinctive reaction to thinking about what Litany had done while in the custody of the White Hooves was, ‘bad things happen to ponies sometimes’, and it sickened me to realize that. At the same time, I couldn’t help myself.

Just as I couldn’t bring myself to even try and help Meadowbrook or her brother. Just as I hadn’t thought to try and help Ramparts fight off those monsters in the MAS hub. Ever since leaving Seaddle, I just wasn’t...me anymore. I know that was the whole point of getting rid of my cutie mark, but…

I needed Starlight here. She’d know how to help me with these feelings.

“As I have said: I have given the matter little thought,” Arginine’s words interrupted my introspective thoughts, bringing me back to the conversation at hoof, “in the unlikely event that I find myself in a position to consider the question of an, shall we say, ‘alternative career path’, then I may decide differently.

“In the meantime, I believe that there are more pressing matters to consider, such as locating the others.”

He was right, of course, “I’m hoping that somepony in Shady Saddles will have seen them and be able to tell us where they went. If it wasn’t too long ago, I can probably fly on ahead and catch them before they get too far from town while you wait there.”

I hadn’t been in much of a ‘flying mood’ since leaving Notel, but everything suggested that they were very nearly good as new, thanks largely to Minos’ care. Given what RG and I had recently been through out in the Wasteland, I was giving some serious thought to trying to track down a pony with medical training to start coming along with us. Back when it had been just Jackboot and I dealing with small bands of pissant raiders, getting hurt hadn’t been a serious concern. These days though, things were getting quite a bit wilder.

Perhaps Sandy knew somepony…

“In any case,” I managed to say through a yawn that had snuck up on me, “it’s getting late. You up for taking first watch?”

“I am feeling sufficiently rested, yes,” which only made sense, seeing as how the stallion had slept through all of yesterday in Notel.

“Good,” I crossed my hooves and settled in as comfortably as I could among my gear, “wake me in a few hours.”

“Very well,” there was a long period of silence, “Good night, Miss Windfall.”

“Just...Windfall.”

“I beg your pardon?”

A slight smile touched my lips and I cracked an eye open to glance at the larger gray stallion nearby, “call me, Windfall. You don’t need to keep saying, ‘miss’. It sounds too formal.”

“...As you wish.”

I closed my eyes, fidgeted around my saddlebags one last time, and let myself drift off to sleep.

My dreams were a little less disturbing this time, but not by all that much. I was pretty sure I did a lot of tossing and turning for the first hour before I was finally able to settle down into a much deeper sleep where no night terrors consumed me. It was a blissful feeling of unconsciousness that felt like it ended all too soon when I felt somepony nudging my shoulder. I’m sure that, deep down, I knew it was RG trying to wake me up for my shift, and I knew that I had to wake up; but I really didn’t want to. I was currently the most content that I had been in weeks, and I wanted to hang onto that feeling for as long as I could.

Eventually my sense of duty won out and I forced myself to rouse completely and open my eyes. That was when I noticed that a few minor details had changed since I’d nodded off. Really, I suppose that it was the one detail in particular that predominantly occupied my thoughts, as I was not overly concerned with the fire being out or Arginine’s energy rifle lying across his hooves, ready should the need for its use arrive.

No, what I was trying to grapple with was why I no longer seemed to be with my nearby saddlebags and barding, and was instead nestled up against the stallion’s side. It took my brain several uncomfortably long seconds to begin processing how this had come to pass. During this time of inaction, I was left staring, unblinking, up into the amber eyes of the genetically augmented stallion, very nearly touching his muzzle with my own.
For his part, Arginine merely look back impassively, “it is your turn to keep watch,” he said in his typically stoic tone.
While he clearly didn’t seem to be at all put off by our proximity, quite a few parts of my own brain hadn’t been prepared for this, and I felt myself blush rather hotly beneath my coat as a certain treacherous primal part of my subconscious noted how toned and sinewy his muscled shoulder and torso felt as I was pressed up against them. Yes, I admonished that part of me rather severely, he’s a very fit stallion. He was designed in a lab, for Celestia’s sake!
He’s also an emotionless husk of a pony who has been helping to exterminate the Wasteland!
That wayward little piece of my libido that wasn’t particularly concerned with the broader security and wellbeing of ponykind as a whole was content to note that it wasn’t his emotions that it would feel good to have―
Nope! Not thinking about that! Not with him!

I rolled away from the stallion’s side with a suddenness that took the both of us by surprise. My focus was very keenly directed at getting on my barding and readying my new carbine, which I knew full well was not necessary for me to do in the least. However, it did help to redirect my thoughts away from any idle speculation about how other parts of the stallion’s anatomy might have been purposefully sculpted. I mean, if he was supposed to be made up of all of the best physical attributes that ponykind possessed…

Did that radiation exposure mess with my brain? What is wrong with me?!

“Are you feeling alright, Mi...Windfall?”

“You’re fine―I’m fine!” I blurted. Oh, Celestia, just strike me down with a lightning bolt right here and now, please…

I took a deep breath and recomposed myself before I ended up saying something that was going to end up shifting my blush from bright crimson to something far beyond the ability of pony eyes to see, “I’m just...you should have woken me up sooner. When I rolled over onto you. I didn’t mean to do that.”

“Under most circumstances, I would have,” Arginine nodded, “however, you did not seem to be sleeping well. Upon repositioning yourself against me, you calmed noticeably. I determined that the physical contact was not bothersome enough to warrant disrupting you.”

Oh, I so didn’t need to hear that. If I got any more embarrassed, I was going to, literally, spontaneously combust, “next time, wake me up. Okay?”

“If that is your desire.”

I finished fastening my barding and headed out from beneath the sky wagon, “I’m going to do a quick fly around the perimeter,” maybe that cool night air hitting my face at a hundred miles an hour would help me focus on things that weren’t big, strapping, attractive―Stop it!

Before Arginine could say anything else, I was in the air and beating my wings as fiercely as I dared, taking my first real flight in over a week. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there wasn’t any real pain or discomfort associated with the effort. There was a small amount of stiffness, but that was very easily attributed to my wing having been confined to a sling for so long. Even that sensation didn’t last for very long, and before I knew it I was soaring through the air as though I had never suffered the injury in the first place.

This would help. Maybe my lack of air time had been the source of most of my mounting frustrations and anxieties? I was a pegasus, after all. Being remanded to the ground was tantamount to being imprisoned for a pony like me. It certainly couldn’t have been doing me any good.

Of course, I knew, deep down, that being unable to fly wasn’t the only thing that was bothering me. Those issues were too much for me to deal with right now though, and would take a lot of time and talking with several other ponies for me to finally resolve. Assuming that they could be resolved, that is. Right now, though, I was just going to let myself focus on flying through the sky.

It wasn’t really going to be much of a perimeter check, to be honest. This far out into the middle of the Neighvada Valley, away from any serious settlement, and with the thick overhead cloud cover, the darkness was very nearly absolute. Unless somepony was walking around down there with a lit pipbuck or a flare, I wasn’t realistically going to be able to spot them from up here. Not lone ponies, certainly. A trade caravan I might have a chance of catching sight of though, not that any such thing would be on the move at night anyway.

Other than that, it would have to be a significantly large group of ponies making their way through the Wasteland for me to notice them under these conditions.

...Like that one right there. What in the―?

My gaze was torn very abruptly from the unexpected sight of a dozen dark shapes scampering along the ground to several lightning flashes a few miles further away. At least, I had taken them to be lightning flashes when all I had caught them with was the corner of my eye. Looking squarely in their direction though, it was quickly obvious that those lights were not lightning at all. They were energy weapon discharges.

Brilliant, green, energy weapon discharges. I had seen that type of display once before, when assaulting the facility that RG had been working at.

They were here, and they were attacking somepony. I looked back at the pony shapes running nearby. Those were almost certainly ponies who were trying to get away while others fought a delaying action to cover their escape. My best guess was that they were heading in the direction of Shady Saddles. Depending on how long the ponies fighting the attackers from Arginine’s stable were able to hold out for, they might even be able to get enough of a head start to actually get away.

More signs of movement caught my attention. There were additional ponies running in that direction, trailing behind the front group. These shapes were significantly larger. Approximately Arginine sized, in fact. They were also gaining on the lead group.

There weren’t going to be any survivors after all.

I settled into a hover above the scene and looked on. The fleeing ponies were making a desperate run, I had to admit that, and they seemed to at least realize that they were being pursued, because they occasionally changed the direction of their run. They probably didn’t realize that their engineered attackers had pipbucks whose EFS would have no trouble at all picking them out in the blackness. All the ponies chasing them would see were some blips floating in front of their eyes, sure, but it would be more than sufficient to keep from losing track of their targets.

As one might have expected, it didn’t take very long for the faster soldiers to finally run down the fleeing non-combatants. A few of them had at least been armed, and I heard shots ring out in unison with some scattered muzzle flashes. Lances of green light were quick to answer those shots, silencing them. No further shots rang out, though I could hear a fearful cry here and there, which were also abruptly cut short with brutal efficiency. No further fighting was going on in the distance either.

Once again, I had merely sat by and watched as innocent ponies suffered. I raged at that numb feeling within me, but it changed nothing. I felt no compulsion to go and try to rescue these ponies from their genocidal attackers.

All I did was silently turn around, and glide back towards the overturned wagon that Arginine and I were sheltering in. If members of his stable were this close, it would probably be best for us to be elsewhere, in case they expanded their search for any additional runners and came across us. It would be quite interesting to see how the large gray stallion took the news that a group of his former comrades was in the area.

I alit outside the wagon and walked in, “hey, RG, you awake? We need to go. There are some―”

The rest of what I was about to say died in my throat, choked off by the sudden rush of terror that shot through me like a lightning bolt. Arginine wasn’t alone in the wagon. Two other ponies, each as large in size as he was, and possessing the same odd double-horn atop their heads, were with him. Three sets of golden eyes turned to look at me. Horns glowed, and before I knew what was happening, I was struck by a bolt of amber energy.

I couldn’t move. My legs were rooted in place, my wings glued to my sides. I couldn’t even shift my head far enough forward to manipulate the trigger bit of my carbine. That feeling of dread took a firm hold of my sensibilities as I realized that I couldn’t escape. In desperation, my wide eyes locked onto Arginine. What would he do? He had promised to help me fight his stable; would he hold to that promise?

“Is this the pegasus that you mentioned?” one of the new arrivals asked in the same monotone that Arginine possessed.

“It is,” Arginine replied calmly, “I advise against killing her. She has demonstrated herself to be worth studying in detail. I am quite eager to discover the full extent of her capabilities once we have returned to your facility.”

“Very well,” the other engineered pony said. I felt the straps securing my battle saddle loosen, along with those of my barding. In a matter of seconds, all of my equipment was lying on the ground.

This couldn’t be happening! I grunted and struggled against the powerful magical field that was keeping me held in place, but it did no good. Neither of the armored ponies holding me even seemed to notice that I was trying to resist them as one of them produced a curious looking pistol which had a vial of some sort of fluid mounted onto the side of it. I tried, vainly, to pull away as the barrel of the weapon was shoved up against the side of my neck.

“RG―!”

There was a loud hiss, and then I felt an intense jet of fluid strike my flesh.

Things got very blurry after that. Then they went dark.

I think I was getting used to waking up in strange places without remembering how I’d gotten there. I wasn’t sure how I felt about that quite yet. It probably wasn’t a good thing, but it was apparently not going to stop being the way that things went in my life anytime soon. I suppose that as long as I kept actually waking up it wasn’t quite as bad as it could be. Not that things were ever what could charitably be described as ‘great’ when I did come back around to consciousness.

As per usual, it took a little while for my brain to catch me up on the recent series of events that had resulted in my waking up wherever I was. When those memories finally became clear, that was when the panic set in. There were hints of anger and fear mingled in with it too, of course; but most of it was simple panic, I was pretty sure.

The cell―box, really―that I was confined to wasn’t much bigger than I was, and it was possessed of only the smallest mesh-covered window on one side. Everything else was solid steel that didn’t particularly seem to care how hard I kicked or hit it; it wasn’t going to buckle and let me out. I wasn’t alone though, I could tell that much. I could hear the muffled ‘thumps’ of other ponies beating on their boxes as well. There were a few wailing cries to go along with the pounding as other captives pleaded for mercy and release.

My mind kept going back to Arginine’s facility, and the horrors that I’d witnessed there. The pile of discarded corpses of those ponies who had either proved to be useless to them, or upon whom the experimentation had concluded. Everypony here, to include myself, was going to end up in a similar pile. Not before going through a torturous dissection process though. In that sense, the ‘rejects’ among us would be the lucky ones, to be spared that ordeal.

I wasn’t going to be one of those ‘lucky’ few though, was I? I remembered Arginine’s comment before I’d been knocked out. He’d flatly stated that I, specifically, was to be examined and experimented on. I could still picture the cold detachment in his eyes when he’d said it. His expressions had always seemed uninterested to one degree or another―that was just how he was wired, it turned out―but I’d never been so thoroughly chilled to my bones by anything he’d ever said as I had been right then. He’d made it sound like it was going to be him doing the actual cutting and stuff.

Would he really do that, after everything that we’d been through?

A derisive snort escaped me. ‘What we’d been through’? Did I mean the time that I’d threatened to blow off his head if he failed to save a foal born to a distressed mother? Maybe I was thinking about the time I dragged him into a fight with a bunch of Steel Rangers and basically forced him to keep me from getting killed so that he wouldn’t die too. I’d enslaved him and forced him to fight for me time and again. ‘We’ had been through nothing. I had put him through a lot, under pain of death.

Of course he was going to be the pony doing the cutting. It would only be just.

I heard movement from outside my box. I craned my head as best as I could and put my eye to the small mesh window to see what was going on. We were inside on a larger room. One of the large engineered ponies in bloodied surgical scrubs had just stepped in. He walked out of sight towards the sounds of the other struggling and pleading ponies that I could hear nearby. There was the sound of metal scraping against metal as one of the small boxes that we were being held in was removed from the rest. A moment later, both the box and the pony wearing surgical scrubs returned to view, the metal cube ensnared in his telekinetic glow.

A second of the large gray ponies appeared in the doorway now, glancing at their comrade and his burden, “is that the subject for the cardiac tests?” she asked.

Her compatriot nodded, “it is. Preliminary scans indicate that their heart can maintain nearly two hundred and fifty beats per minute for a sustained period of time.”

“Chief Technician Vitas has issued an addendum for that subject: he wants to know what pharmacological doses would be required to achieve three hundred, and how long the heart can endure before complete organ failure.”

The pony wearing scrubs fowned slightly, “did he indicate why he had altered the parameters of the testing?”

“A new directive from the Stable,” was the response, “they are seeking more dramatic improvements in the Lambda Strain.”

“Even if that heart rate can be achieved, the increase in blood pressure will likely rupture blood vessels long before the heart itself fails.”

“You are authorized to use any fluid and blood replacement products that are required to maintain life functions until the final result is achieved,” the mare informed him, “other subjects are being screened for thickened arterial and venous walls that can tolerate the increase in blood pressure. Record the pressures you achieve so that they can be passed along. The previous subject to be tested tolerated a systolic of five hundred before suffering a fatal brain bleed.”

“I will keep that number in mind while conducting my own tests,” they nodded before leaving through the door, their box and the pleading pony it contained floating in front of them.

The mare did not leave with him, instead walking towards us. Well, me specifically, it turned out. She bent her head down slightly and peered through the mesh with her golden eye, “you are the pegasus, subject, correct?”

This would have been an ideal moment for a defiant witty retort that questioned either their intellect or visual acuity. Unfortunately, I was drawing a blank in that regard. The question proved to be ultimately rhetorical anyway. It seemed odd that the ponies running this slaughterhouse would bother bantering with the ponies they intended to murder. Of course, I suppose that I’d encountered more than a few raiders who weren’t shy about taunting their victims.
I was also in the habit of trying to deliver what I considered to be little witty remarks to the raiders I killed. Why did I do that? Those final snappy lines amused me personally, sure; but they must have seemed almost cruel to the ponies I was killing in those final moments. Perhaps they even bordered on being sadistic, and yet I insisted on making them. Much like just about anything that these ponies could have to say to their captives before taking them away to be cut up and dissected.
...I really hated that I kept finding ways I wasn’t so different from them.
The box I was in shifted beneath my hooves, sending me collapsing to the floor of my cramped little cell. The gray mare’s magic lifted my container out of its recess in the wall of cells and proceeded to carry me out the door without another word. I guess that she was done chatting up her next victim.
I tried to get a good look at my surroundings as I was floated through the facility’s corridors, but it was hard to get a good view of anything through the tiny opening that existed. It probably wasn’t intended for much more than ventilation to keep their occupants from suffocating while they waited. I didn’t have a lot of time either. Much like the facility that I’d raided that first time outside New Reino where I’d found Arginine, it wasn’t very large. Though it did feel at least a little bigger than the other one.

I was marched into a very familiar looking room. I had been in one very like it a few months ago not too far outside of New Reino. To add a further sense of deja vu to the experience, I almost immediately noticed Arginine sitting at a terminal on the far side. He was once more dressed in the jumpsuit of the ‘medical’ technicians of his stable. There were a few others similarly dressed in this abattoir of an examination room. They had been busy too.

Organs and vivisected corpses lay on several tables that I was guided past by the large mare who had me under the barrel of her energy weapon. Nausea battled with fear deep in my gut as I couldn’t decide whether I wanted to puke or cry. There was little doubt in my mind about the reason that I had been brought here, after all.

Arginine looked up from where he was at the terminal station and stood up. One of the ponies working near him turned his head to follow where the other stallion’s attention had been drawn to. He cocked an eyebrow, “ah. I take it that this is the mare you mentioned in your report of what happened to installation Epsilon-Three?”

“Indeed,” the pony who had been traveling with me nodded. I desperately searched his impassive features for any sign that this was all just some elaborate ruse or joke. He had promised that he would help me!

“I must admit that, from your account, I had expected her to be...taller.”

“She is quite capable, I assure you,” said Arginine, “I am confident the testing protocols I have in mind will demonstrate that adequately,” he gestured his head in the direction of one of the nearby examination tables, and the armed pony at my side guided me pointedly towards it with their weapon. Numbly, I complied.

...Celesia, please tell me that this wasn’t really happening. Please…

“Regardless of the results,” the other stallion noted, “it will be worthwhile to add to our pegasi genetic profiles. Until we can reliably ambush the Enclave patrols, pegasus DNA is at a premium.”

“It is not her wings that interest me,” Arginine said in a quiet tone. I wasn’t even completely certain that he had been talking to his companion just then.

I was marched to the table that the two stallions wearing lab coats were standing. A magical levitation field was quick to deposit me on it, at which point the guard and the pony with Arginine judiciously set about restraining my legs to its cold metal surface. My terror redoubled as my eyes noted several other corpses nearby who were similarly restrained, only they had several very essential pieces missing from them.

That was going to be me soon.

My gaze kept shifting to Arginine, whose own expression was that frustratingly impassive mask that he always wore. I couldn’t suppress my futile hope that he was suddenly going to save me. The part of my brain―a very small one at the moment―which was still capable of rational thought knew that wasn’t going to happen though. There would have been plenty of opportunities for him to have gotten me out of here before now; especially since none of the other ponies from his stable seemed to be even remotely inclined to question his ultimate loyalty.

That was the most telling part, really. Nopony was keeping Arginine under guard. He’d been given fresh clothing and seemed to have been allowed to go right back to doing his old job. As smart as these ponies all were, it was highly unlikely that they’d be stupid enough to give him all of this leeway if they weren’t sure that he was completely trustworthy.

“I’ll prepare the anesthesia while you collect the preliminary blood work,” the other stallion said, stepping over to a pair of pressurized cylinders, “pegasi generally have superior avioli over most other pony breeds. We’ll start by excising one of her lobes for examination.”

“Actually,” Arginine said, raising a hoof to stop the other technician, “if I may, there is one test that I would like see the results of before she is dismembered.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” even though Arginine appeared to still be addressing the other stallion, he kept his gaze focussed fully on me. I was unable to look away; mostly because in every other direction were dead ponies. There was something...off, about his expression as he spoke now, “you mentioned that you came across two other specimens of note during last night’s raid?”

“Hm? Oh, yes,” the other stallion was slightly taken aback by the abrupt change in topic, “two unicorn mares. We suspect that one is of stable stock. The other, unbelievably enough, may actually be a relic from pre-Wasteland Equestria. Preliminary analysis of her DNA suggests that she has had less exposure to background radiation that even ponies born in stables! We will be conducting meticulously thorough examinations of her body once the rest have been sifted for characteristics.”

I felt my heart stop. Two unicorn mares, one from a stable, and the other from a time without rampant magical radiation. Those could only be two ponies: Foxglove and Starlight Glimmer! But, how? Had they been with that caravan that was attacked? Not that it mattered how they had been captured. The evidence was clear that they had been. They were here. They were here, and that meant that they were going to be killed too. We were all going to die, and there was nopony that could possibly save us.

“I see,” Arginine continued, still keeping his attention focused on me, “I took a look through their belongings when I heard what you had found. I can confirm that they are indeed what you have hypothesized. I was even present for the revival of the mare from Old Equestria’s time. I am positive that a study of her physiology would be of incalculable benefit to our cause.

“However, I suspect that this mare will prove even more interesting,” he added in a lower tone, “with your permission, I would like to conduct my test. It should take only a few minutes.”

“Very well,” the other stallion nodded, “what equipment will you require?”

“I already acquired what I need,” he said. I saw his bags glow, and a moment later a glass jar floated into view. Within that jar was a winged heart, pierced by a sword. My eyes widened as I saw Arginine’s lip twitch ever so slightly. The magical telekinetic aura surrounding the jar suddenly evaporated and it began to fall towards the floor. At the same moment, Arginine reached out with his hoof and depressed a mechanism on the table that I was strapped to.

“Wait, what are you―?”

The jar shattered at about the same moment that the restraints binding me to the table suddenly retracted. Freed from its transparent prison, my cutie mark swooped up into the air, and promptly sought me out like some sort of homing missile. When it made contact with my body, I was overcome by a sensation of warmth, and a feeling of immense relief more powerful than any that I had ever felt before. Nearly all of my fear and my anxiety washed away right then and there.

Not all of it, of course. I was still quite keenly aware of the danger that I was in, surrounded by a small army of these genetically engineered ponies intent on wiping out the inhabitants of the Wasteland. I wouldn’t describe it as ‘fear’ though, in the same sense as those feelings that had kept me paralyzed and incapable of resisting. It was really more of a practical wariness as I acknowledged that they were an enemy that I couldn’t take too lightly. These ponies were a lot more capable than the typical raider, after all.

However, they weren’t more capable than me; and I was intent on demonstrating that fact.

“Sorry, I’m not really into the whole ‘bondage’ scene,” I snapped as I shot straight up into the air before the mare who had been escorting me was able to fully grasp what was happening. Clearly neither she, nor the others, had anticipated that Arginine would do what he had done. Honestly, I hadn’t quite seen it coming either. That was a mystery to solve later though. Right now, I had threats to deal with and ponies to save, “well, not on a first date, anyway…”

My hooves made contact with the ceiling and I rocketed away with a powerful kick, flipping through the air and delivering a fierce double-buck to the face of the armored mare. I could feel, and hear, her jaw buckling under the force of the blow. She reeled back from the strike, grunting loudly with pain. Her weapon clattered to the floor, freed from her disrupted magical hold on it, where I wasted little time grabbing it up.
“Oops, you dropped something! Let me get that for you,” having had a bit of experience with Arginine’s beam rifle, I was able to locate the trigger much more quickly this time. A trio of brilliant emerald bolts struck the mare in the chest. The third must have made contact with her in just the right way, because her entire body flashed green just before melting into a pile of steaming goo.

Red lights started flashing, and a blaring klaxon rang out at a nearly deafening volume I wheeled around to see that the stallion who had been talking with Arginine was standing at the terminal. He reached over a depressed a button near a speaker, “security to Exam Room Alpha! We had a loose subject! I repeat: we have a―”

I reduced the entire work station to a warped pile of sparking components with a series of energy blasts from the beam weapon. The stallion reeled back in surprise, “I’m sorry, were you using that? How rude of me…” He turned to face me, his horn glowing as his magic withdrew an energy pistol from the drawer of a nearby desk. He never got the chance to fire it though. The bolt that struck his head passed cleanly through it, leaving behind a charred hole. The corpse collapsed to the floor.

The weapon was trained on Arginine now, who had not even so much as twitched since dropping the jar that had contained my cutie mark. Even now, as I pointed the steaming barrel of the energy rifle straight at his head, he didn’t appear to be particularly concerned.

We were both silent and still for several long seconds. I don’t know what I really had expected him to do. Honestly, a lot of the actions that he’d taken over the past twenty-four hours weren’t making a whole lot of sense to me right now, “why?” was all I had the presence of mind to ask. More specific questions would have to come once I’d had some time to process my thoughts.

“As I explained to him,” the stallion replied, gesturing to the pony with a hole burned through his face, “I am evaluating your capabilities,” I flashed the stallion a very critical frown, “you have been acting...erratic of late. I need to know if you are still the mare I once believed was capable of creating a better breed of pony.

“I need to know if you really are better.”

I continued to glare at him for another couple of seconds. The idea that this was some sort of test didn’t exactly sit well with me, but it wasn’t like I was going to not fight my way out of here and save everypony who still alive. When this was all over with though, RG and I were going to have a very serious talk. I might even shoot him once or twice. You know, on principle.

That was all going to have to wait until the situation here had become more agreeable. Which meant dealing with the remaining armed forces. Such as the pair of armored ponies that came charging in the door just now. They appeared to make a rather quick appraisal of what was going on and immediately opened fire with their own weapons. I suspect that the blaring siren and the brief announcement that had been broadcast had helped with their lack of hesitation.

I threw myself behind one of the examination tables as the air around me was suddenly saturated with flashes of viridian light. Even Arginine took cover. The pair of guards that had arrived didn’t seem to actually be shooting at him, but their fire filled such a broad cone that there was probably a decent enough chance that he could have been struck by accident. Curious that they’d risk taking out one of the ponies on ‘their side’ in order to get at me. Of course, I guess when you could just grow a few more in a factory somewhere, you probably didn’t put a very high value on life in general, did you?

After a brief look at the rifle in my hooves, I tossed it away. With such an onslaught of fire, I wasn’t going to be able to get off any decent shots with it. I needed to get in close if I was going to take those two out. Taking a quick breath to steel myself, I darted to the side in the direction of another nearby examination table. Green bolts of destructive magical energy glanced off the metal surfaces of those tables when the angles they struck at were too oblique, or left melted craters where they hit dead on. Not being designed to withstand a lot of punishment in a fight, I wasn’t able to remain behind any one table before it was quickly reduced to glowing white slag.

Fortunately, there were well over a dozen such impromptu barricades available to me as I used them to leapfrog my way closer to the pair of armed ponies. As I reached the last row of tables, I somersaulted over its lip and up into the air as only a pegasus pony could do. Anticipating that I would use it for cover as I had all the previous tables, the guards fired low, and I cleared their field of fire before they could adjust it enough to catch me. I uncurled myself and wrapped my hind legs around the neck of the guard on the right, “hey there, gorgeous! Anypony tell you you have a very punchable face?” Looping my left foreleg around their ear to anchor myself, I proceeded to deliver a series of sharp strikes to their cheek and eye with my right hoof.

The mare was rocked by the blows, staggering under the punishment that her face was receiving from the much smaller flier that was beating her. A flicker of movement from my left signaled that her partner was about to try and remove the annoyance, “oh, you want to cut it? Sure thing!”
Just as he brought his energy rifle to bear, I swung myself around the mare’s neck as though it were a pole, placing the bulk of her body in between me and the readied weapon. Using a precisely timed flip of my wings to help add some additional angular acceleration, I twisted up and over her back, coming at the nearby stallion with my hind legs and swinging them downward on top of his head.

I was now suspended in the air between the two stunned ponies, “pony in the middle!” I bounced back and forth between them as I delivered blow after blow in the form of both punches and bucks, not giving either pony time enough to recover. They were both as large and tough as RG, so my individual strikes didn’t do all that much. However, it also meant that their heads were much larger targets as well, so it was a much simpler matter for me to deliver particularly devastating jabs to their carotids and windpipes. The mare was soon on the ground, grasping at their throat as they made some rather disturbingly silent pained expressions. This afforded me the opportunity to focus my efforts on the stallion who, in addition to the face, possessed other vulnerable areas as well.

“Finally, some alone time,” I grinned at the stallion, “how about I get things started?”

Another advantage that the size disparity between us afforded me was the ability to very effortlessly snake my way around their bulk, to include getting beneath their bellies. A well-placed buck to his genitals put the stallion on the ground with a pained shriek. These ponies might not use them, but they seemed to have retained all of the sensitivity that was present in a typical Wasteland stallion.
“Hmm. I should have mentioned I’ve never given anypony a hoof-job before,” I felt a little bad about hammering him in the head with the butt of his rifle while he was still whimpering in response to what I’d done to his kibble and a bits; but only a little.

The mare had stopped struggling by the time I looked back at her. She was completely still, her bloodshot eyes wide with fear. She wouldn’t pose a threat any longer. I hefted the rifle and directed it at the unconscious stallion in front of me. My hoof lay tense on the trigger mechanism as I leveled the sights on his head. I held the pose for several long seconds, glaring along the top of the barrel. There was a long list of perfectly cogent arguments that any sane pony would have made as to why pulling that trigger was a good idea. Just about anypony would have.

I did not.

With a frustrated grunt, I lowered the weapon, “figures he’d fall asleep before I was finished.”
I looked around the room. Nopony else was here for the moment. The lights were still pulsing red and the alert was still sounding, but other than that things seemed to had substantially calmed for the moment. I doubted very much that was a status that was likely to endure. I didn’t know exactly how many guards would eventually respond to the summons that the stallion technician had made, but I suspected that once nopony received word that the situation had been dealt with the answer would be somewhere along the lines of, “more”.

“RG!” I called out, straining to be heard over the alarm. The stallion calmly rose back up to his hooves and looked in my direction. I heaved the rifle at him, which he caught deftly with his magic, “arm up. Where are Foxy and the others?” These energy weapons were too bulky for me to use effectively if I wanted to keep capitalizing on my aerial maneuverability. That was fine with me. Getting up close and personal with these ponies was proving itself to be quite cathartic thus far. They certainly didn’t seem to be all that used to dealing with ponies who got up in their faces like I did.

I suppose that hoof-to-hoof combat hadn’t been a particularly high priority with regards to the training that they had gone through, given that their preferred method of engagement was ambushes en masse in the middle of the night in order to achieve victory through surprise, superior numbers, and firepower. I couldn’t deny that it was an effective tactic. The death toll that they’d inflicted thus far was clear proof of that.

“The subject holding area will be just down the corridor,” Arginine responded as he checked over the weapon and swapped in a fresh power pack. He retrieved a few additional reloads from the guards, “There were thirteen ponies awaiting processing when I was there an hour ago.”

I briefly wondered how many ponies had ultimately been ambushed last night before ultimately pushing that thought from my mind. What was important right now wasn’t how many had died, but how many could yet be saved if I acted quickly, “that’s where Foxglove and the others are?”

“Indeed,” the stallion confirmed. He paused for a brief moment, a thoughtful expression barely visible on his face, “I anticipate that she will be quite relieved to see you. She seemed quite anxious to learn if you were well when last I saw her.”

I hesitated in the doorway for a few seconds. Was Foxglove really that worried about me? It was a little hard to believe, I suppose, given how I had treated her recently. Nor did I feel that treatment had been wholly unjustified. After Arginine and I figured a few things out, I suppose that she and I needed to figure out where we stood with one another too.

There was going to be an awful lot of talking going on later. Hopefully Starlight and Ramparts didn’t feel the need for any pressing heart-to-hearts; I was only going to be able to stand so much of that deep personal stuff in one sitting.

“How many ponies are we up against in here?”

“Nine more are on site at the moment. Two three-pony teams are currently scouting for additional targets,” he glanced up at the pulsing lights, “an alert will have been transmitted to them by now, but I cannot give you a reliable estimate on how long it will take them to return.”

“Got it,” hopefully we wouldn’t have to tangle with all nine at once, “watch our rear; and...thanks.”

Arginine simply nodded and followed me out into the corridor beyond the examination room. As I had instructed, his attention was directed behind us as we proceeded in the direction of the holding area that I had woken up in less than an hour ago.

When I rounded a corner, I had just enough time to recognize that something pony-shaped was standing in the middle of the hall before pulses of emerald light started pouring in my direction. I snapped my wings almost on instinct and hurled myself to the far wall just as the space that I had once occupied became saturated with crackling green beams. The moment my hooves made contact with the wall, I surged forward in a frantic gallop, aiding my acceleration with several furious pumps of my wings.

The large armored pony was positioned just outside of the holding area, their hooves planted firmly as they tracked me with their hovering energy rifle. I was hoping that, while their attention was focused on me, Arginine would be able to peek around the corner and take them out; but the sound of two other whining rifles from behind me informed me that Arginine was already dealing with a situation of his own.

That was fine. I’d just finished dealing with four of these oversized raiders a little while ago; one more wouldn’t prove to be a problem.

I pushed off the wall that I was running along and dove for the floor just as the pony I was facing off against juked their rifle hard to the side in an effort to rake their fire across my body. I didn’t stay long on the floor, only a stride or two, before vaulting to the wall on the other side of the corridor. All the while the emerald lances followed in my wake as the floating weapon tried in vain to predict the movements of a pony who wasn’t a slave to the forces of gravity. As smart as they may be, they weren’t nearly as experienced at fighting in three dimensions as I was.

My hooves were in contact with the other wall just long enough for me to push off with my hind legs. My wings took over from there, rotating my torso as I drew back my left foreleg. When it finally launched forward, driving into the top of their head, the force behind it was further amplified by the angular momentum of my spin. The blow staggered them as their head was forced down by a hit that was much harder than they probably had suspected could be delivered by a filly my size. Not in the habit of giving up an advantage like this, I followed through with the hit all the way back across the hall to the wall that I had started on.

I sprung off of it and shot at the floor beneath the stunned guard, landing on my forelegs and coiling up my hindquarters. As was the nature with most barding designs, the lining along the belly was much thinner than most other places that were much more likely to be stuck by hostile gunfire. A well-targeted double-buck to their soft gut earned me a shocked gasp that was quickly followed up by a fit of coughing and the sound of their plastic rifle clattering to the floor.

“That cough sounds pretty bad,” I flipped out my wings and used a precisely angled beat to propel me into a spin as I lashed out with an outstretched hind leg, sweeping their own forelegs out from under them while they were still struggling to get their breath back. A last minute roll took me out from beneath them as the much larger pony collapsed to the floor with a groan, “you should lie down,” any potential threat they might still have represented was removed with a final substantial double-buck to their head, now that it was at a much more agreeable height, “and sleep it off.”

That threat dealt with, my attention went immediately in Arginine’s direction, where I could still hear the sounds of beam fire being exchanged, along with the occasional splash of viridian energy against the wall. The stallion clearly wasn’t dead, and I wasn’t particularly eager to get myself caught in a crossfire. My energy was better spent freeing the captives while I had these precious moments before any additional threats showed up.

I picked up the nearby discarded beam rifle and dashed into the room containing the stacks of holding crates. Dozens of them lined the far wall, and most were clearly empty. There was no way to know how many of them had been filled by the attack on the caravan last night, but I knew that it had certainly been more than were currently occupied. Nothing could be done about them though; I could only help those that were still here.

“Everypony stand back from the doors!” I yelled out before I began to systematically blast each of the locked cages with the beam rifle. Latches vaporized beneath the onslaught of emerald energy, leaving behind little more than smoke and glowing circles in most cases. The ponies inside wasted little time bucking their way out of their cramped confines and stepping cautious out. Most were clearly not quite sure if they really believed that they were being freed by the little white pegasus wielding the weapon that was comically oversized for her.

At least one pony managed to quickly overcome their surprise as a wide-eyed violet unicorn came galloping out of her cage, “Windfall, you’re alive!” she seemed to forget that I was currently firing a very lethal weapon as she charged me. Fortunately for her I managed to stop shooting just before she tackled me out of the air in a very energetic, if awkward, embrace.

“Air! Need air!” I grasped as the unicorn clutched me to her chest in a hold that was so tight I could swear I heard my spine crying.

“We thought you’d died!”

I ceased my struggling when I heard the trembling in her voice. My proximity to her face allowed me to see the damp streaks running down her cheeks too. They weren’t the product of a few seconds of excited tears, either. She had been crying for a while.

A few other ponies had taken up the task of freeing the others, I noticed, so I didn’t feel quite as anxious about being restrained by the weeping violet mare, “we saw the explosion,” she was saying through her shaky tone that sounded as though she were only a sliver away from breaking out into outright sobs again, “and you wouldn’t answer your pipbuck, and Ramparts couldn’t find your location tag! Oh, Windy, I…” she was finally forced to stop and swallow back her grief before it overwhelmed her. Even so, she still looked to be teetering on the verge of falling apart, “I was so sure I’d lost you again…”

“I’m okay, Foxy,” as ‘okay’ as I suspect I was capable of being, anyway. I certainly still had a lot of things that I needed to work out before I completely lost my mind; but that was for later. Right now, I...well, I really was feeling okay. Maybe it was the fact that I was too distracted by all the fighting and rescuing for my brain to focus on how fucked up I was deep inside. Even so, I was okay with that, “and this is really going to have to wait until later.”

As if to accentuate my statement, Arginine came barreling into the room. The nose of his borrowed beam rifle was trailing thin tendrils of smoke and his horns had acquired a patina of char. His noticeably flickering magic was only barely managing to hold the weapon in his telekinetic grasp as he looked around at the ponies who had just been freed.

There was a palpable shift in the mood of the room upon the gray stallion’s arrival, and it took me a second to realize why. After all, I was quite familiar with Arginine; these ponies weren’t. They had no way of knowing that he was actually working with me. As far as they were concerned, he was just another one of the ponies running this murder factory.

Which was the reason why the pony who had been using the beam weapon that I’d picked up to free the others was now turning it on Arginine. I only just managed to extract myself from Foxglove’s grip and fly across the room to kick the weapon away in time. The bolt of deadly viridian energy that was discharged as I struck the weapon missed the large gray stallion’s head by inches. To his credit, Arginine didn’t seemed to take the attempt to kill him personally, and merely looked mildly annoyed. Well, I suppose that was how he usually looked to most ponies; but I could tell that he was slightly more annoyed than was typical even for him.

“Woah! He’s a friend,” I assured the rather surprised looking mare who had just tried to shoot him.

“The fuck are you talking about? He’s one of them!” her horn glowed and picked up the rifle again in an attempt to finish the job that I had interrupted. Still Arginine remained still and kept his weapon pointed at the floor. Everypony else in the room was looking nervously between him and the pair of us. The large gray stallion was currently standing in the doorway, so they weren’t all that eager to try and push their way past him to leave until the matter of whether he was a threat or not was settled.

Again I smacked the beam rifle aside, “yeah, he is, but he’s helping us; and I’d explain why, but it’s kind of confusing and we don’t have a lot of time,” and the jury was still out on exactly how committed he really was. He was helping right now though, and that was enough for me, “so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t shoot the pony who’s helping us get out of here,” I fixed the older mare with a hard glare, which had to be borderline absurd from her point of view. After all, who was this teenager to tell her what to do?

It helped tremendously that Arginine hadn’t so much as raised his weapon since coming in here. It was kind of hard to argue that he was any sort of active threat to any of us when he wasn’t doing anything more intimidating that just being really big.

While she clearly wasn’t happy about any of this―nopony seemed happy about anything right now―she at least stopped trying to shoot Arginine. For the moment, anyway. That was enough for me. I looked over at the large stallion, “where’d they stash our gear?”

“Next room down,” he replied, nodding his head in the indicated direction.

My eyes scanned the gathered ponies, “arm up. There should be seven...?”

“Six,” Arginine corrected.

“Six more of those big ponies around, and probably six more on their way back here. We don’t know when they’ll get here, but if we move quick, we should get away before they arrive,” I locked my eyes on the mare wielding the beam rifle, who at least had the attitude of a pony who was used to being in charge. I had no idea who had actually been leading the group of ponies that was ambushed last night, but she’d do for a temporary leader at the least, “weapons, barding, and enough food and water to get everypony to Shady Saddles. Nothing else, got it? Be ready to move out in three minutes. RG and I will keep you covered until then.”

The unicorn mare balked for a moment, but then grunted and nodded before repeating my instructions to the others and herding everypony out the door. I caught Foxglove, Starlight, and Ramparts gathering around me. Only the violet unicorn mare seemed to be feeling particularly emotional upon learning I was still alive, which I suppose was fair. Both the pink unicorn from Equestria’s past and the Republican soldier had only known me for just a few short weeks, and I wouldn’t say that any of us were particularly close. They did seem grateful for the rescue though.

“You have your cutie mark back,” Starlight noted tersely.

“RG’s doing,” I nodded my head towards the nearby stallion and shrugged.

“If you want me to take it off again, I’ll have to remind you that it won’t be as easy the second time,” the mare cautioned, “cutie mark magic is very tightly bound to ponies. Severing that bond just the once is very emotionally taxing, if you’ll remember. Doing it again, and so soon after the first time...I wouldn’t recommend it,” she frowned, “maybe in a year or two…”

“Actually,” I glanced back at the silver and red mark emblazoned on my hind quarters. Looking at it resting there once more filled me with this sense of relief that I couldn’t even really explain. It felt a lot like those first moments when I’d found my mother in the White Hoof camp. That elation at finding somepony so dear to me, before the knowledge of the sorrow we were to endure soured the moment. There wasn’t any of that darkness this time though, not really. It was just the relief and the joy, “I think I’ll keep it.”

“You’re sure?” the pink mare asked, sounding dubious, “you seemed quite eager to get rid of it before. You said it was compelling you to kill, and that you didn’t want to deal with that anymore. What changed your mind?”

The vision of Litany’s brains being smeared over the surface of the cracked and weathered parking lot outside of Notel briefly flashed through my mind, causing me to wince reflexively, “Some...things happened. I’m not so sure that my cutie mark was the problem,” I saw Foxglove’s concerned look, and waved it away, “I’m fine now. I think. I’m going to work on it.

“First, let’s get out of here,” this was not the time, nor the place, to discuss how fragile my psyche was. I looked to Ramparts, “go get our gear,” the stallion nodded and cantered out of the room after the others. I looked at Starlight, “how many ponies can you teleport at once?”

The question earned me a frown and a shake of the mare’s head, “not enough for what you’re thinking. The more I take with me, the shorter the distance I can go. Trying to take everypony here? I’d get us all of twenty feet, at best.”

“I figured it couldn’t be that easy,” I muttered. It looked like we were going to be doing this the hard way, “you can make a shield though, right?”

The question earned me a wry smirk, “of course!”

“Good. Help the others. Foxglove,” I directed my gaze at the violet mare now, “make sure everypony gets away from here. RG and I will meet up with you later.”

Her jade eyes widened in alarm, “what? No! We can’t split up again, we just found you!”

“And we’ll find each other again,” I assured the distraught mare, “after what I’ve just managed to live through in the last week, I’m sure I can handle a few armed ponies,” Foxglove didn’t seem to be particularly swayed by either my genuinely confident tone, nor my nonplused smile, “look, somewhere around here is an intact computer terminal that I bet has the location of all of the facilities like this that are operating in the Wasteland,” I glanced back at Arginine, “right?”

“There is, yes,” the stallion confirmed.

I looked back at Foxglove, “we need to get that information. Once we have it, we can take it Homily and she can get it to everypony in the valley. Caravans will know what places to avoid, and won’t get caught. The NLR will know where they need to send their troops to wipe out these places. Maybe we can even convince some of the ponies running New Reino to get involved,” they can’t be happy with this sort of thing happening to their caravans any more than the Republic is, after all.

While she obviously wasn’t happy about splitting up again, after what happened the last time, Foxglove at least recognized that getting the information was important, “we should come with you,” she began to protest.

“I need the three of you to get the rest of these ponies out of here,” I countered sternly, “I’m counting on you to do that for me. Understand?”

Foxglove gnawed her lower lip, contemplating additional rebuttals. In the end though, she seemed to decide to go along with my plan and nodded, “alright,” she reached over and gathered me up in another tight embrace, though it wasn’t quite the stranglehold that she had used earlier, “try to come back sometime today this time, okay?”

“I’ll even refrain from knocking over any buildings while I’m still inside them,” I offered cheerfully, earning a choked laugh from the violet unicorn.

“I’d appreciate that,” Foxglove gave me one last squeeze before finally releasing me. She looked up at Arginine, “you’ll keep her safe?”

“The longer she is alive, the longer I can observe her methods and appraise their viability.”

“I want to believe that means, ‘yes’, so I’ll accept it. For now.”

I cleared my throat, “I can keep myself safe, thank-you-very-much!” both ponies leveled flat looks at me. I felt my cheeks flush beneath their dubious stares, “oh, whatever, I’ve saved both your lives!” I flitted up into the air and winged my way over to the door, “come on, RG; we have a computer terminal to find!”

The corridor was milling with ponies tightening the last of the straps on their barding―most of which looked to be in rather poor condition―and performing final checks on their weapons. Ramparts and that other unicorn mare seemed to have worked out some sort of system of mutual command and control of the group. She was very clearly the pony that they all trusted, but she at least seemed willing to defer to the recommendations of the stallion and his years of military experience to help get them through this.

“Ramparts,” I called over, catching the brown stallion’s attention, “you guys good here?” he nodded.

“The exit is down the corridor, that way, the second left,” Arginine indicated, pointing behind them with a forehoof. Then he looked up at me, “we will find what we are after in the director’s office,” he nodded his head back the way that we came.

“Will the director be there, you think?” I asked, starting to float in the indicated direction as the other ponies began making their way for the exit.

“Unlikely,” the large gray stallion snorted, “as he recently acquired a pointedly fatal case of, ‘hole in head’, courtesy of your earlier efforts in the examination room.”

“Oh,” I hadn’t realized that was the pony in charge of this place, “wait. Did you just make a joke?” were the ponies from Arginine’s stable even capable of making jokes?

“It surprises you that I possess a sense of humor?”

“Considering all of the things that I’ve recently learned that you don’t have, like a conscience, moral compass, or erections? Yeah, I can honestly say that finding out you have anything that normal ponies have, is surprising to me.”

The stallion rolled his golden eyes, “a sense of humor does not adversely affect our ability to perform our duties. Quite to the contrary, there is a recognizable benefit to being able to derive a sense of joy from our accomplishments. It serves as an intrinsic source of positive reinforcement.”

I balked the moment my brain finished translating what Arginine had just said into normal words, “so, you don’t just not feel bad about what you do to these ponies; you feel good about it? You feel joy when you chop up ponies?!”

“That is not an entirely inaccurate statement,” he said, though he was frowning rather deeply, “but it is a little misleading. I, personally, feel joy when I make a notable discovery; which is typically the result of a detailed examination of a specimen,” he thought for a moment, “though I suppose that there is often a sense of…giddiness, when I begin a procedure, in anticipation of making such a worthwhile discovery.

“Are you not filled with a sense of accomplishment, elation, or even joy when you have succeeded in saving a pony from certain doom?” he asked me in return, interrupting my barely suppressed revulsion

“Well, yeah! Of course, I am,” what kind of question is that?

“Even when achieving such a result necessitates the taking of life?” I opened my mouth, but no sound came out as my stomach knotted briefly. I could see where he was going with this now, and I didn’t like that I might have to concede his point, “would it be fair for me to then make the logically fallacious leap that you derive joy from killing?”

“No,” I managed to get out in a hoarse tone.

“Then suffice it to say that there are activities that I do not find particularly enjoyable, but are an essential part of those pursuits I engage in which do serve as a source of personal fulfillment.”

Yup, just as I thought: I had to grudgingly acknowledge that he wasn’t all that much more reprehensible of a pony than I was. He truly believed that what he was doing would make the world a better place; or, more specifically, that he could make the inhabitants of the world better. If that meant that he had to get his hooves dirty, then so be it. My desired results weren’t all that far off; though I might not take precisely the same approach.

If I wasn’t so different from the ponies of Arginine’s stable...was I really all that ‘good’ of a pony in the end? Was this what good ponies had to do to fix the world; inflict more misery and death upon it until nopony was miserable or needlessly dying anymore? What kind of sense did that even make?

Honestly, it seemed really stupid when I thought about it like that.

“Also, to clarify another point: I assure you that I am perfectly capable of achieving an erection.”

“Huzza-buh-wha?!”

I was going to chalk up the stallion’s surprising comment as the reason that I was flying down the middle of the corridor the way I was without a thought to how easy of a target I was making myself. I had certainly managed to place myself in a nearly perfect position for a pair of engineered ponies that were there to meet us as we rounded the corner past the examination room I’d been in just a few minutes ago. Only Arginine’s quick reflexes saved my life.

“Chirp!” I wasn’t sure if I was more embarrassed by the fact that I’d been so careless that I’d nearly gotten myself killed like I had, or by the sound that escaped my lips when the stallion behind me snagged my tail with his teeth and yanked me out of the line of fire just before the hail of green bolts could flash-fry me. It was certainly far from my proudest moment either way.

Arginine stepped over me―I’d have described it as ‘protectively’, if I didn’t know any better―and peered around the corner for a brief moment before pulling his head back around, replacing it with the floating beam rifle he had gripped in his magic. The high-pitched whines of the enemy weapons was joined by a third as Arginine responded in kind.

I crawled forward and chanced a look of my own, keeping my head low to the ground where I suspected that they wouldn’t immediately suspected somepony to peek around. There were two of the armored engineered ponies about twenty yards down the hallway, standing side by side. Surprisingly enough, it looked to me like one of them was manipulating both of their weapons, while the other was maintaining a protective barrier to keep them shielded from Arginine’s return fire. Green bolts glanced off of the golden dome, dotting the corridor with patches of glowing hot metal which cooled quickly into sooty blemishes.

After taking in the scene, I withdrew back to cover. A trio of emerald lances struck the floor where my head had been just moments ago before rising back up once again to continue chewing away at the corner that we were leaning against, “it doesn’t look good,” I remarked to Arginine.

“I can think of significantly more ideal tactical situations in which we could have found ourselves, yes. Though, there are certainly less favorable scenarios that have occurred to me as well.”

“...yeah, I guess it could be worse, too,” I managed after pondering what he’d just said, “RG, one of these days we are going to get you to speak like a regular pony. I swear to Celestia that I am going to make that one of my goals in life.”

The stallion standing over me ceased firing to swap out for a fresh spark pack, “I am honored that you hold my articulation choices in a regard equal to that of engaging in carnal relations with a stallion and procreating,” at my blank look, he elaborated, “you once recounted to me your ‘goals in life’, and one of them was to be impregnated and carry foals to term,” I suppose that he was technically correct there; I had said that was a goal that I had set for myself. I didn’t recall putting it quite so...clinically though.
The stallion continued, “I suppose that I can endeavor to reduce my verbosity if you would find our conversations more amicable that way,” he poked the weapon back around the corner and laid down a brief barrage to fire to keep the pair of ponies we were fighting from getting too brave, “I can begin by employing contractions. That shouldn’t be too difficult.”

I blinked up at the stallion, dumbfounded. Was he…

“Are you still making jokes? Now?!”

He poured another spurt of green energy back around the corner, “stressful situations can often have the tension that they generate diffused through the application of moderate amounts of appropriate humor,” he responded in his normally calm tone, “and at this moment―” he winced and pulled back slightly further as we received an answering barrage of energy fire that tore away a sizeable chunk of the metal wall and left behind a glowing orange divot, “―I am feeling stressed.”

“Oh. Okay then. Carry on, I guess,” this whole week had somehow turned into one long protracted learning experience regarding what made Arginine tick. I didn’t even know he could get stressed. You’d certainly never know it from how he talked all the damn time. Though, I guess he had probably been pretty ‘stressed’ while we’d been falling down the side of the Old Reino Ministry of Arcane Science hub.

He nodded and maneuvered the beam rifle to deliver a few more shots. How much more punishment could that pony’s shield spell take before it collapsed, anyway? I chanced another brief glance to see if I could gauge how worn out they were getting. I pulled back and groaned in frustration. The beam rifles appeared to be under the control of the pony that had been powering the barrier the last time I had checked; which meant that it was now being maintained by the currently unarmed pony. They were swapping out the duty to keep themselves from being burned out too quickly by the spell. Perfect.

“I am curious,” Arginine began as he swapped out for yet another spark pack, “do my efforts to help you achieve your goal of altering my vocabulary choices make me a more, or less, desirable candidate to aid you in achieving your reproductive endeavors?”

“Wha―are you seriously―that is not funny!” I sputtered at the stallion.

“On the contrary,” he said while placing another volley downrange, “I am currently deriving significant amusement from your reaction.”

“Do I need to remind you that I am in the perfect position to punt you right in the nads and take you out of the running for any mare’s ‘reproductive endeavors’?”

“So I am in the running?”

Windfall. Think very calmly and rationally about your next action. Because, if you cripple this asshole―even if he’s asking for it―you will probably both die. I know that it feels like it would be totally worth it right now, but it’s not. Probably. Maybe.

I can settle for castrating him after we get out of here.

Of course, that meant that we’d have to find a way to deal with the dynamic duo holding down this corridor first. I had an idea of how to do that, now that I knew that only one of them was doing the shooting while the other maintained their shield, “Arginine, I need you to put a lot of fire down the left side of the corridor. Keep shooting as long as you can; but make sure you keep it on the left side until I say otherwise, got it?”

“Should I be operating under the assumption that any effort to dissuade you from taking what is doubtlessly a unforgivably reckless risk would be futile?”

“Hey, look on the bright side: at least this time if I die, there isn’t a bomb around your neck that’ll take you with me,” I had meant that to be my own little attempt to ease the tension of our situation. However, the stallion didn’t look like he’d found the comment at all amusing, “I’ll be fine. Just keep shooting and trust me.”

“Very well,” the stallion popped in his last fresh cartridge, “on your command.”

I took a deep breath to calm my nerves. He’d been right, of course: this was incredibly reckless of me. If Foxglove were here, she’d be apoplectic, and with good reason. I was about to charge right down into a particularly lethal ‘fatal funnel’ of a corridor that was currently being illuminated far more effectively by the green light of beam rifle fire than by the actual lights mounted into the ceiling. Room to maneuver and avoid being hit would be notably scarce, and I was essentially writing off half of that very limited space right off the mark by telling Arginine to fill it was deadly energy bolts. If my plan didn’t work as intended and that other pony filled up the other side…

If I didn’t do this, then I might not get the chance again to find out where the other facilities like this were. How many hundreds―thousands―of ponies would die on these tables before somepony dealt with them? I had to take this chance. I had to try and save those ponies.

“Now.”

Arginine put the rifle around the corner and his telekinetic grip depressed the trigger and didn’t let it back up. The weapon whined and protested as its already overtaxed capacitors were subjected to further harsh demands. In that same instant, I charged out and sprinted down the right side of the narrow passageway, squinting my left eye against the brilliant emerald beams that were flashing uncomfortably close to me. Ahead, those same lances of deadly energy were splattering themselves over the magical energy barrier being maintained by one of the engineered unicorn guards from Arginine’s stable. I could see them gritting their teeth and their horn’s flaring brighter as they struggled to maintain the shield spell. It was clear that it would indeed hold up, barely, even under such punishment.

It was only a single rifle, after all; and they had nothing else to divide their attention. They weren’t even looking in my direction.

Neither was the pony manipulating their own rifles. This was because Arginine’s unceasing barrage of impotent energy fire was concentrated exclusively on their side of the corridor. While none of the shots were getting through to actually strike their target, they did create all manner of dazzling light displays in front of their eyes. While not strictly blinding them, it was clearly hard for the armed pony to make out any clear details beyond the brilliant flashes of light saturating their vision.

Being that both of those ponies also ‘knew’ that nothing could harm them like this, neither seemed particularly concerned, and were completely willing to wait until Arginine inevitably had to stop and reload. At that point they would be able to respond in kind.

“Stop firing!” I yelled at the top of my lungs once I had judged that I was close enough. This was the moment when I took what was perhaps my greatest risk and didn’t wait to make sure that Arginine had heard me before leaping to the wall on my right and pushing myself off it. If the stallion hadn’t heard me, or even if he was a little slow on the uptake, I was going to even up being rendered down into green goo by the weapons fire of my own ally. However, waiting to be certain that I was clear to make the jump meant giving these ponies time to notice me and maybe even guess what I was up to.

Given that there wasn’t going to be any way to make a second go of this, tipping them off wasn’t a risk that I could afford to take.

In the end, it was a very close thing, to be sure. There was a brief heartbeat where I was certain that I’d fucked up. A sizzling emerald line of burning light sailed through the air only inches beneath me as I crossed the the far side of the corridor. I could feel the heat of it on my belly just before it wasted itself on the magical barrier protecting my targets. A fraction of a second later, my hooves came into contact with that same barrier. It felt surprisingly cool, given what it had just been subjected to.

The shimmer induced by the diffusion of the bolt’s energy faded away, leaving me standing upon the amber shield, staring into the surprised face of the pony wielding the pari’s weapons. They had been kept protectively behind the barrier while being reloaded. Now that the barrage was over with, he’d brought them back out to our side of the protective shell in anticipation of returning fire.

My presence had not been part of the equation, apparently, and both ponies hesitated.

I did not, “S’up?” I looked at the pair of rifles hovering to either side of me and directed towards where Arginine was firing from, “Oh, for me? You shouldn’t have!” my hooves detached from the energy barrier and my wing flicked out to either side, catching both hovering rifles in my outstretched pinions.

“Hey, RG? I’ve got a present for you!” I spun around, wrenching the weapons from the stallion’s telekinetic grasp and flung them down the corridor. Arginine was already out and charging down the corridor, apparently having taken the lack of immediate return fire as a good sign. He easily caught the rifles I tossed to him in his magic and arranged all three in front of him, directed at the pair of guards.

“Sorry about the regifting,” I shrugged at the disarmed pony, “I know it’s rude. I’m just really bad at shopping for other ponies” I flipped away from the barrier and landed beside Arginine. Once he saw that I was clear, the gray stallion opened fire with all three rifles.

While the shield spell being cast had very pointedly demonstrated that it was capable of standing up to whatever could be brought to bear at it from a single rifle, the combined assault of three of the deadly magical weapons very quickly proved too much. The golden barrier evaporated almost instantly. As did the pair of ponies that had been standing behind it.

I stared at the pools of glowing ooze that was all that remained of those ponies for a brief moment and then looked at Arginine. The large stallion beside me was tossing away his original weapon, which had finally burned out completely during that last barrage. He stripped the charge pack from one of the remaining pair before tossing it away as well, keeping it for the last rifle, which he slung along his back. Only then did the stallion notice my gaze.

“Yes?”

“Have you considered how many ponies from your own stable you might have to kill if you keep helping me?” maybe it was a little ungrateful of me to bring this up after he’d gone through so much to help me thus far. I just had to know if he’d be willing to see this thing through to the end, or if he was going to flip on me later on.

The stallion was quiet for a moment. Then, “when you took me captive, I knew the exact population of my stable. I doubt that it has varied too much from that number since,” his eyes went to the green puddles and he rolled his eyes, “casualties notwithstanding, of course. But, to answer your question, I suspect I know far better than you exactly how many ponies will need to die if you hope to succeed in your effort to defeat us.”

That was right. In order to save one society, I was going to have to slaughter another, wasn’t I? For the briefest of moments, I was just about to ask Arginine to tell me that number; but then I hesitated. Did I really want to hear a body count? Did I really want to be told how many ponies I was going to have to kill to end the threat they posed?

No. Honestly, I’d probably lose my nerve if he hit me with that information.

“I don’t suppose that there’s a way I could convince your stable to just...stop, is there?”

Arginine looked down at me for a long while this time in silence, considering. As good as I had become at deciphering all of the subtle little facial ticks that revealed what the stoic stallion was thinking, I was finding myself having a hard time truly identifying his expression right now. It was bordering on something akin to disappointment; but I couldn’t tell the reason for it. Was he thinking that I was losing my nerve? Did he believe he’d made a mistake in helping me?

“My stable exists for a singular purpose: to become better ponies than our forebears and ensure ponykind does repeat the mistakes of the past. We have worked towards that goal for two centuries, and our leaders have determined that inferior strains cannot be allowed to remain and threaten the perfection that we will achieve. It is not a goal we will be dissuaded from achieving easily.”

It didn’t sound like Arginine thought that there was going to be a way to do this without a lot of killing either.

Did I have it in me to commit genocide?

I didn’t know.

“Let’s go get what we came for,” I said, heading for the director’s office.

“Seven,” I said breathlessly to nopony in particular as Foxglove worked her technological wizardry on my pipbuck, with Ramparts’ assistance, “they have seven more of those slaughterhouses,” and that was accounting for the two that I had already dealt with. They were spread out over much of the valley, lying off the beaten path to avoid detection.

“Once we get this information back to the Republic, they’ll be able to dispatch strike teams to deal with them,” the brown stallion lending the use of his pipbuck to help reinitialize my own assured me, “dealing with the stable itself will be a bit tougher, but we can at least put a stop to their operations in the meantime.”

“Don’t we have to convince the Steel Rangers to stop attacking for good?” I asked, recalling why so many of the NLR’s soldiers were currently too occupied to patrol the area around Seaddle as thoroughly as they once had.

“We do,” Ramparts acknowledged, “and now that we have your pipbuck again, we can work on locating that weapons cache for Princess Luna.”

“Which we can use to leverage whatever it was that the Republic stole from the Rangers, and then give it back to them so that they’ll agree to a real peace, and maybe even help us,” though I very much doubted that last part. It was possible that I might be able to convince that one Star Paladin that RG’s stable was enough of a threat that it was in the Ranger’s best interests to help us; but having them alongside the Republic so soon after being at war with them might create a few ‘friendly fire’ incidents that could kick the fighting off all over again.

Perhaps if there was a way to have the Republic hit some of the targets in their territory while the Rangers dealt with the ones around New Reino to keep any hooves from being stepped on?

“Once we get all of these other ponies to Shady Saddles, we’ll head back to Wind Ryders and get that shipping data we need.”

Foxglove looked up from her work and shook her head, “we already tried going back through their system when we were there,” I recalled the evidence that the trio had passed through ahead of Arginine and I after our ordeal in the Old Reino ruins, “we couldn’t find anything that helped.”

I frowned. That wasn’t good, “so how are we supposed to use what we got in the MAS hub?” I was really hoping that we hadn’t gone through all of that for nothing.

It was Starlight Glimmer who provided the answer this time, “I’ve been thinking about that,” the pink unicorn mare said, “and it occurs to me that there is one other place that would have tracked flight traffic during the war: McMaren. Keeping an eye out for dragons and griffon mercenaries would have been part of the job of every ground base in Equestria. They tracked everything flying through the air, and they’d have been informed about any freight traffic so they knew what was supposed to be there and what wasn’t. They’ll have the records we’re looking for.”

McMaren, huh? Memories flooded in of my last visit there, and I felt myself flush a little despite myself. I recalled the night that a pony I had thought was Jackboot had come into my room and told me a lot of things that I’d always wanted to hear from him. It had almost seemed too good to be true when he’d leaned in to kiss me and nuzzle my cheek…

Of course, that had been because it was too good to be true. Foxglove had burst in on us only moments before things had progressed to a level of intimacy that I’d yet to share with a stallion, and she’d been dragging behind her a trussed up Jackboot of her own. Things had escalated from there, and that night had ended with a lot of death and gore.

The old military base was also where Homily and her small team had set themselves up to conduct their informational broadcasts. Broadcasts which had recently begun to include my own exploits under the identity of ‘The Wonderbolt’. She still couldn’t have any clue that the ‘Wasteland Hero’ that she was telling the whole valley about was the same pegasus who’d helped her team escape from captivity and reach the base; only to be saved a second time from those creatures posing as ponies.

This might be a good time to have a candid conversation with the unicorn and tell her to temper everypony’s expectations of me. She was building me up to the level that the Mare-Do-Well and Lone Ranger had been; or what The Stable Dweller and Security were shaping up to be, if DJ pon3’s more recent broadcasts were to be believed. I wasn’t a hero like them though. I was just a pony who helped out ponies in trouble when I was around. That was it.

Honestly, I wasn’t particularly good at it, in my opinion.

Somepony nearby cleared their throat, drawing me out of my reverie. It was the unicorn mare the the other ponies we’d saved had been looking to for guidance. I’d never gotten her name…

She stuck out her hoof, “Name’s, Marl,” the gruff mare stated, “weren’t much of a time or place for pleasantries earlier, but I figure putting off introductions and thanks any longer after all you and yours did for us would just be rude.”
I recovered enough from my surprise to reach out and tapped the offered hoof with my own, “Windfall. And you don’t need to thank us.”

“I reckon different,” the mare retorted in a harsh tone that was softened by the warmth in her hazel eyes. I suspected that she just sounded naturally irritated and that it didn’t specifically reflect on her current mood, “I don’t doubt that if you hadn’t done what you did we’d all have been goners. The way I figure, there ain’t no proper payment I could ever offer you, but I figured I’d at least make an effort.”

The mare’s horn glowed and she withdrew an object from her saddlebags, depositing it in my outstretched hooves before I could muster up a polite way of turning her down. I’d expected caps or bits or something else that was of equally obvious monetary value, but that wasn’t the case. Instead, what I found myself looking at was a little pink statuette of a grinning pony that was of a remarkably similar style to four other little figurines that I already had. Indeed, I received the metal impression that those other four little ponies were overjoyed to see this particular trinket.

I turned it over in my hooves and peered at the inscription on the base, Awareness! It Was Under ‘E’!

“That there’s been in my family for nigh on forever,” the unicorn nodded, “as far as I’m concerned, it’s the most valuable possession my family owns. Supposed to prove that our ancestors were related to one of those ministry Mares,” she idly rubbed the back of her head, “I’m sure I should be giving you a weapon or a big ol’ bag of caps, or some such, but―”

“No,” I piped up, holding the pristine figure to my chest, “no, this is fine. Thank you. Besides, I’d rather you guys have all the guns you can get your hooves on out here; and you’ll need all the money you’ve got left to replace everything you lost when you were attacked.”

The mare seemed to relax visibly, a smile coming easily to her face, “I don’t think you quite know how true that is for us,” her expression faded for a brief moment, “we lost a lot when they hit us, and I ain’t just meaning gear, either. Some of the ponies that didn’t make it...well, they’ll be hard to replace, experience and knowledge-wise,” she sighed, “we’ll make do though. We always do.

“I’m just tickled knowing there’s more ponies out here than just The Wonderbolt looking out for us,” I caught the brief look from Foxglove, but the violet unicorn said nothing before returning to her work, “you ever need a hoof while you’re out here, put out the word,” she gestured at my pipbuck, “and we’ll come runnin’.”

“What are you doing out here anyway?” I asked, looking around at what seemed like an unusual collection of ponies for a caravan.

Marl grinned at me, “gem huntin’!”

I blinked, “you...hunt gems?”

“In a word,” the unicorn nodded, “Old Equestria was where most of the magical gems in the world came from. You couldn’t hardly plant a garden without coming across a cluster of the things, or so the stories go. They were used just about everywhere, and in everything.”

“Like spark packs and stuff?”

“Those to; although you couldn’t just toss any old stone you found into things like that and get them to work,” the slate unicorn mare nodded, “for stuff like that, you needed our ancestors. Ponies who specialized in growing magical gemstones.”

“Your ancestors farmed rocks?”

“You could say they did,” she shrugged, “but there’s more to it than that. Not sure that we have the time for a full lesson on what it takes to nurture the raw magical essence of the ground until it can come together and crystallize into a usable gemstone, but ‘grow’ is an apt enough word, I suppose.

“Since the war though, things have been thrown off too much to stay in one place and keep doing things the old way. Growing them the old fashioned way ain’t an option anymore, so instead we have to find ones that matured naturally,” she reached into her bags again and this time produced a small rock that had apparently been split open, revealing a single glittering ruby, “we sell them to talismongers and gunsmiths.”

“Huh.”

Just then my vision filled with a familiar amber overlay that startled me at first. I looked down and saw that Foxglove was disconnecting the cabling that she had used to link my defunct pipbuck to Ramparts’ and putting away her tools, “all done!” she announced, sounding pleased with herself.

I looked around experimentally, my attention on the assorted blips associated with the nearby ponies. Everything seemed to be lining up perfectly so far. Next I brought the device up in front of me and started to tabbed through all of its menus to make sure that nothing was amiss, “it feels like it’s been forever since this thing was working,” I flicked on the radio and tuned into the nearest clear station, which happened to be one of Homily’s broadcasts.

“―ayday! Mayday! If anypony can hear this, please send help!” my blood foze in my veins as I heard the crackling voice of the distant mare through my pipbuck’s speakers. Every conversation around us ceased as everypony’s attention went immediately to the broadcast, “Steel Rangers are attacking Camp McMaren! Please, somepony, anypony!” then came four words that struck me like a lightning bolt, “Wonderbolt, where are you?”

I turned the radio off. So much was going through my head right now.

Steel Rangers were attacking Homily and her companions? Why?! Star Paladin Hoplite had assured me that she’d keep her Rangers away from the Republic until I’d done what she asked...only McMaren wasn’t an NLR base, was it? Damn it! Without the war to distract them, the Rangers had gone back to doing what the normally did: seeking out Old World technology and taking it. An old military base would probably have been a prime target for them. Heck, a working radio tower would probably have been a nice little bonus in their book.

All I’d thought about was stopping the fighting between the Rangers and the NLR. I’d completely forgotten what the Steel Rangers usually did with their time. In a way, that kind of made this my fault. It was a conclusion that I didn’t feel compelled to share with Foxglove and the others because I knew they’d feel obliged to disagree; but that didn’t do much to change how I felt about it.

“Homily…” Foxglove said in a worried tone next to me, her eyes still locked on the pipbuck.

“It’ll take us days to get there,” Ramparts pointed out, the stallion not sounding at all thrilled to hear that the Rangers were causing trouble anywhere in the valley, “by then it’ll all be over.”

“Windfall can get there much more quickly than the rest of us,” all of us turned to look at Arginine, who had been the surprising source of that comment. The stallion’s golden eyes were locked on me, “and she has experience dealing with the Steel Rangers.”

Experience, perhaps. However, what I didn’t have at the moment was any worthwhile weapons or barding that I could use to fight them with, “my guns are still out of action,” I waved a hoof at the pair of submachine guns that had yet to receive any attention from our mechanically inclined unicorn, “and I don’t even have any barding! I can’t just show up like this and hope they’ll stop attacking because I ask them nicely,” even if Hoplite was there leading the attack, I wasn’t exactly her favorite pony in the world at the moment.

“Actually…” the violet unicorn mare’s horn glowed and a jade aura enveloped her bags. From within them she extracted a familiar set of blue and gold barding. Though the coloration was actually all that was familiar about it once I got a good look at the armor. The pattern was unmistakably that of the old Wonderbolt jumpsuit that I’d recovered from Wind Ryder’s, but the armored plating and reinforcements were new. As was that Gale Force rig mounted to its spine. I looked between the barding and the unicorn, not bothering to hide my surprise.

“I’ve been too worried to get much sleep lately,” she offered sheepishly, “I needed a project to keep myself distracted.”

“I...wow. Just...wow!” well, it looked like protection wasn’t going to be all that much of an issue after all. However, that still left one other matter, “but, I mean, I still wouldn’t have any guns that would be all that effective against Steel Ranger power armor,” my eyes went to the weapons that everypony around us was carrying. Even if Marl were inclined to part with most of what her ponies had, they weren’t the sort of firearms that would help against a group like the Steel Rangers.

“Power armor?” Starlight Glimmer chimed in, “you mean like the suits that the Ministry of Wartime Technology was fielding near the end of the war?”

“It’s exactly like those,” Foxglove confirmed.

The pink unicorn mare with the purple streaked mane thought for a brief moment and then looked at the rock that Marl was still holding in her magic, “do you have any sapphires?”

The slate mare nodded, “yeah.”

“How many?”

She shrugged, “sapphires? A dozen or so. Why?”

“I need all of them,” Starlight said as she withdrew one of her recently procured grimoires and starting flipping through the pages, “does anypony have any chalk? I’ll also need etching tools and silver,” she looked around and noticed that nopony was moving to comply with her instructions, “now!” several nearby ponies jerked and started rummaging through their possession to produce what she had requested.

Foxglove blinked at the Old World mare, “you’re...making spark talismans, aren’t you? Like, from scratch!”

“Yup,” Starlight replied simply, her eyes once more glued to the book floating in front of her, “very specific spark talismans too. I audited the MAS team that helped to developed the power armor, and I know a little something about how their spell matrix works; which means I can make a talisman with a charge that can take their armor offline,” she looked up from her book and peered at me, “this isn’t going to be quality work, you understand,” she gestured at our surroundings, “I’m throwing these together with odds and ends in the middle of the desert after all. You’ll have to bring them physically into contact with the armor near the matrix’s location on the left flank. If you hit them anywhere else, it won’t do much more than frazzle them for a bit. Got it?”

I nodded, still trying to really wrap my head around what was going on. Because it sounded like everypony was coming up with a way for me to be able to go in there and save Homily and the others on my own, “I...I don’t understand,” I said, looking from each of my friends to the other.

Foxglove smiled and shrugged at me, “Homily and her friends are in big trouble. Somepony’s got to help them. Plus, she did kind of ask for you by name,” she nodded at the barding I was holding.
She had, but, “do you really think it’s a good idea for me to be out there on my own?” I hadn’t been making a lot of good decisions lately.

Arginine spoke this time, “you are a capable pony, especially when you are focused on a particularly important task. Your performance should prove adequate.”

“Coming from you, that’s a pretty resounding endorsement,” I sighed and started putting the barding on, “maybe I can pull this off.”

“We’ll be right behind you,” Foxglove assured me, “but you need to get there and save them as soon as possible,” the violet mare helped me secure the last of the reinforced barding’s straps and then gave me a quick hug. When she pulled away, she produced one last item from her bags. It very closely resembled the Enclave helmet that I had picked up in Seaddle. The one which Minos had identified as having been the one he’d worn while escaping from the Enclave. Only now it had been painted in the bright blue and gold colors of a Wonderbolt, and much of the electronics had been shifted over to the left side, favoring my working eye.

Foxglove shrugged again, “I was really worried…”

Despite how nervous I was feeling, I laughed and took the helmet. It fit snugly over my head, and once it was seated firmly in place it came to life. My vision was filled with a second overlay that worked to integrate itself with the information that was usually displayed by my pipbuck. Readings for my airspeed, groundspeed, altitude, heading, and several other readouts that I wasn’t entirely familiar with flickered to life with numbers that were pretty much straight zeroes for the moment.

“Thanks, Foxy. This stuff’s pretty neat―” I stopped abruptly when I discovered that Marl and the others were all staring at me with gaping mouths, “are you okay?”

“Yer the Wonderbolt?” the slate unicorn mare asked dumbly, as though she was simultaneously realizing how ridiculous the question seemed when faced with such an obvious answer.

I glanced down at the barding, moving my leg in an exaggerated motion as I continued to acquaint myself with the feel of the new barding. It sounded like such an obvious answer, I suppose; but it wasn’t to me. I’d been grappling with a very similar question for a while now. After all, being a ‘hero’ was about more than just wearing some flashy costume that everypony could recognize at a glance. It came with expectations.

Homily had called for help. She wanted somepony to save her from danger because she didn’t believe that she could do it on her own, or with the aid of the ponies with her. Specifically, she had called for me; because, in her mind, the Wonderbolt was a reliable and capable pony who could stop whoever was threatening her. She was expecting me to be able to fighting off an undisclosed number of Steel Rangers and keep her and the others safe. That was a pretty tall order to ask of anypony, frankly.

What Marl was asking me, whether she knew it or not, wasn’t if I was just somepony who looked like a Wonderbolt and wanted to go around acting like a hero. To me, it felt like she was asking me if I really thought that I could do what Homily had been asking of me. She was asking if I could save them and fight off the Steel Rangers all on my own.

Could I do that? Probably not, in all reality. I was just one little pegasus. Still, with that in mind, there was one other little matter to consider: I was still going to try anyway. One little pegasus was going to swoop in there and do everything in her power to save a group of ponies who were asking for help. She wasn’t going to do that because she fancied herself a ‘hero’ though.

I was going to do it because once upon a time, nopony helped save me; and nopony should have to go through what I did.

“No,” I finally said, shaking my head and grinning her, “I’m just a stupid mare in some silly blue barding who thinks she can make the Wasteland a better place by helping ponies out.

“I just happen to look like a Wonderbolt while doing it!”

Footnote: Level Up!
Perk Added: Bonus Hoof-to-Hoof Attacks - Melee attacks cost 1 AP less to perform.
Unarmed Skill: 50

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