"We shall see how brave you are when nailed to the walls of the dam, your body facing west so you may watch your world die."

You ever have one of those dreams that’s just so vivid, and feels so real that, when you finally wake up from it, you’re not completely positive that you are not, in fact, still dreaming? Because that was me right now.

My present circumstances weren’t doing a whole lot to help convince me otherwise either. Maybe not the waking up imprisoned and tied up part. That...was actually disturbingly ‘normal’ for me, all things considered. As was returning to consciousness in unfamiliar surroundings. No, what was really doing a number on me right now was the little filly who was confronting me.

I say, “little filly”, but the reality was that she was probably only a year or two younger than I was. Then again, she might have been a little younger than that, as I was going off of her size for my estimate, and ponies from Arginine’s stable tended to be on the larger side. In any case, it wasn’t like she was a straight up foal. Likewise, the look on her face was anything but childlike.

None of which helped to dispel the serendipitous sensation that was clouding my head as I dumbly watched the young armored pony strut around before my bound form, taking obvious pleasure in my predicament, and favoring me with more than a little disdain.

Standing just behind her were two other ponies from Arginine’s stable. One was a towering stallion that I didn’t recognize. And when I say, ‘towering’, I mean that, as large as these ponies tended to be, he easily dwarfed every other example that I’d come across. Indeed, the other stallion next to him only came up to his shoulder.

That ‘other stallion’ turned out to be Arginine. I didn’t know if my brain was still working a little behind the curve as a result of whatever he’d drugged me with, but I was finding it even more difficult than usual to pierce his deceptively stoic expression in an effort to try and see what information I could glean from him about what was going on.

After all, this was not the first time that he’d ‘betrayed’ me, only for it to have turned out to be a ruse on his part. I very desperately wanted to believe that was the case right now too. Although, our last conversation wasn’t doing much to help bolster that assumption. The alternative was a lot less pleasant, however, so I decided that I’d at least hope for the best until proven otherwise. During that interim period, it was probably important either way that I pay at least some attention to what the filly was saying. For some inexplicable reason, she seemed to be the one in charge.

“...trouble that a little pissant like you has caused us. Honestly, I choose to regard it more as a rather scathing indictment of our own strategic planners’ capabilities, than due to any amount of genuine competency on your part,” the small gray armored pony sneered at me, “regardless of whatever reports that Argile here has made...”

“Arginine, ma’am,” the stallion behind her corrected.

The filly whipped her head around and glared at him, “I beg your pardon? Are you under the impression that I remotely care about what a lambda thinks?” the tone of the filly’s voice suggested that she found even conversing with Arginine distasteful, “or what its name is?” she scoffed, clicking her tongue dismissively, “they should have given your batches serial numbers and been done with it.

“The fact that my own sources have confirmed your reports that this...pony,” she managed to stress in such a way that I somehow found the designation insulting, “is responsible for leading two successful raids on facilities staffed by your defunct strain only proves just how much of a waste of resources your gene lots were. Clearly, they phased out the Iotas too quickly.”

To suggest that I was having an easy time following any of what was being said would be an abject lie; and I couldn’t blame that on whatever residual effects might still be lingering in my body from the contents of the syringe that Arginine had used to knock me unconscious. Frankly, my brain was still working really hard to figure out why I was being talked down to by a little filly. By the differential attitude that Arginine was taking with her, it was clear that she was the pony in charge―or at least the pony in the highest position where the occupants of this room were concerned. That she was wearing what was clearly combat barding suggested that her position wasn’t purely administrative either.

Almost as puzzling to me as this filly’s position of seniority, was the suggesting that Arginine had been coordinating with her for some time. ‘Reports’? How long had this been in the works exactly? Drug-addled I may still be, but I was absolutely sober enough to realize that it could not possibly be a coincidence that a force from Arginine’s stable showed up on the doorstep of Shady Saddles on the exact same day that I arrived. The timing involved in accomplishing something like that would be phenomenally impressive under any circumstance given the distances involved. Honestly, what made the most sense was that these stable ponies had already been in position a few miles from Shady Saddles for some time in order to avoid being seen by the local sentries, and had merely been staged and waiting for some signal to move in on the city.

My eyes darted to the stallion that I had long regarded as a friend and an ally. In my head, I was wracking my brain in an effort to try and figure out how long he’d been planning something like this. Yet, at the same time, a part of me refused to accept it at all. After all, I’d been in a similar situation before, hadn’t I? Arginine had been playing the role of a dutiful stable pony then too, going along with my captors and feigning a continued allegiance to them, until the opportune moment came to release me and turn on the ponies there. The deception had been complete, and the surprise at his turn total. We’d managed to carry the day largely because the augmented ponies had believed that Arginine was their devoted ally until the last possible moment.

I wanted to believe that was the case here as well.

I wanted to believe that, but…

That day in the Wasteland when he’d ‘turned’ on me had been an ad hoc plan that he’d seemed to have concocted on the spot to give us all the best chance of escaping alive. That wasn’t the case this time. He’d helped to actively coordinate this. He’d been working with the ponies from his stable, behind all of our backs, for at least a week. Perhaps even longer, honestly. If he meant this to be some sort of trap set for his stable, then he would have clued us in.

...Right?

“Hey!” my head was violently whipped to the side with enough force to roll my entire bound body over onto its side as a hoof struck the side of my face. My lip hurt especially, and a prodding with my tongue revealed the bitter taste of blood, “if I’m going to waste the breath talking to an insect like you, then you’re damn well going to listen!”

I glared at the petulant little gray filly, and received another belt across my face for my trouble. She shook out her hoof, sneering down at me, “grubs like you surfacers need to learn to show your betters the proper respect,” the unicorn snarled derisively, “if you had all been content to lay down and die like you were supposed to, they wouldn’t have had to bring me out of development so early…

“Where was I? Ah, right,” the filly snorted and resumed whatever monologue she’d been reciting when my thoughts had drifted, “I was detailing your fate. You’d do well to pay attention. I know how easily such simple creatures like you surfacers get confused, and I wouldn’t want you to freak out in your ignorance.”

Sweet Celestia, I did not like this pony…

“We’ve completely encircled the shanty-town you call a ‘settlement’,” the filly informed me dismissively, “in the morning, you’ll be taken to a gallows that we’re building in front of the southern gate. Your brave little defenders will watch as their ‘hero’ is hanged, and then we’ll put an end to to their grief by purging the place,” the little unicorn sounded quite pleased with the plan, “Arguing has informed me that the entirety of your little, ugh, ‘army’ is inside,” she sounded quite unimpressed by the notion that a force of armed surface ponies had been organized to resist their stable’s efforts, “and that wiping them out will remove any serious opposition to us in the valley.

“I am still thoroughly of the opinion that my presence is not needed for dealing with such paltry little efforts,” she sighed, “so I’m not going to be wasting my time dealing with all of this directly. I’ll be halfway to...Seattle?” she peered over her shoulder at the two stallions behind her.

“Seaddle, ma’am” the larger stallion that I did not recognize corrected in a monotone that was eerily similar, if not deeper, than Arginine’s.

“Whatever,” she rolled her eyes, “it’s going to be a smudge on the ground within the week, whatever it’s called,” she returned her attention back to me, “I won’t even be here to watch you swing. Honestly, I just came down here to confirm for myself how pathetic you truly were so that I could send over a properly scathing report back to the engineers who panicked and pulled me for this ‘assignment’ ahead of schedule,” she clicked her tongue contemptuously and shook her head.

The filly turned away, delivering a final swat across my face with her ivory tail as she strode purposefully towards the tent’s exit. She paused and glanced aside at that larger stallion, “let me know when the bulk of the forces are ready to move north,” then she looked the other way towards Arginine, “you, will collect her corpse after the battle tomorrow and return it to the stable for study. Maybe the engineers can finally get future strains some proper wings with her genetic material,” she paused, looking him over with an expression of mild disgust, “then go ahead and submit yourself to be decommissioned. You Lambda’s aren’t long for this world as it is; best to get a jump on purging the lot of you…”

With that last little derisive jab at Arginine, the filly’s horn glowed amber and the flap over the tent’s exit was pushed aside, allowing her and the armored stallion that was escorting her to leave. Now, only Arginine and I were left in the tent, with an awkward silence hanging in the air between us. I sniffed and rubbed my head against my bound forehooves, looking briefly at the thin smear of red that my bleeding lip left behind on my coat.

I cleared my throat, which was feeling very hoarse at the moment, “so...is there a plan?”

The silence lingered for several agonizing seconds until Arginine responded, “General Constance has told you the plan,” he answered in a subdued tone, even for Arginine, “as much as is relevant to you, at any rate. To lay out the details beyond tomorrow’s events would be redundant, given that you will not be in a position for them to concern you.”

“You mean because I’ll be―” my throat unexpectedly closed as I was about to say the last word. Of course, Arginine was considerate enough to complete my thought for me.

“―dead. Indeed.”

Again the tent was too quiet for my liking, “I don’t suppose that this is all secretly part of some big master plan on your part,” I ventured, trying not to let myself feel too hopeful about the prospect, “like the last time?”

“That would be a bit...hackneyed, wouldn’t it? To try the same plan twice on the same adversary.”

“If it’s stupid and it works...” I shrugged, managing to conjure up a wan smile at the stallion. Arginine held my gaze for several heartbeats, and then he looked away.

“There is no deception this time, Windfall. I will not be releasing you at the last moment in order to facilitate a grand escape.”

“Oh―” my voice cracked. I swallowed hard and cleared my throat again, trying to fight back the feeling of dread that was creeping up along my spine, “do...do I at least get to know why?” I looked at the stallion, “can you give me that much? I―I thought that you believed in me, and what I was trying to do―”

“I do believe in you, Windfall,” the stallion interjected somberly, “and my faith in your personal abilities when you are dedicated to a cause have not waned. However,” I’d grown accustomed to the stallion’s stoic nature over the months. I’d even learned to read through his facade on occasion, and pick up on the otherwise extremely subtle cues to his mood. This time, however, I could see his disappointment plainly upon his face, and the sheer clarity of it struck right down to my core, “I have watched that dedication falter in recent weeks.

“You have become detached and distant, passing off responsibility to others to see your plans through. Mister Ramparts is spearheading the campaign with the mercenaries; you’ve barely coordinated with them at all. You’ve been too preoccupied with drinking and sleeping.”

“Ramparts is a soldier,” I protested, “he knows about commanding armies and stuff, not me!”

“That may be,” Arginine acknowledged, “but there is a distinct difference between seaking somepony’s expertise, and passing them complete control over an operation,” he insisted, “I have gauged and evaluated your abilities, Windfall; I have not done so for the others.

“Frankly, I do not trust them to be able to succeed; as they have not demonstrated their ability to overcome the ponies of my stable to my satisfaction.”

“So you turned on us?”

“I have never made it a secret that my desire is simply to see that better ponies win out in the end; whether those ponies are the residents of my stable or the surface does not matter to me. I will act to aid whichever side I observe to have the best chance of success. For the last several months, I have dedicated myself to aiding you, because I judged that you had the best chance of being able to provide a worthwhile challenge to my stable.

Arginine was silent for a moment, “now, I have reason to believe that I was mistaken. Your resolve and dedication were not as resolute as I had predicted. I acknowledge that the failure in that appraisal was my own, and I accept the consequences for it.”

I was shaking my head, feeling my eye burning slightly with teas that threatened to escape if I let them, “look, I know I’ve been fucking up lately, believe me; but don’t punish everypony else! Everypony doesn’t deserve to die because I messed up!”

The stallion let out a little sigh, “that is not what is happening here, Windfall. Their deaths were already foregone conclusions from the outset,” he explained, “what I was offering you was a chance to save them; because you insisted that the ponies of my stable were, in fact, not the better option for the future of ponykind. You insisted that you could rally the ponies of Neighvada and successfully resist us.

“I no longer believe that to be the case. My stable will complete the task given to us by Equestria of old, and we will finish creating a better breed of pony that can rebuild the world, and keep tragedies like the Wasteland from ever happening again.

“It is what’s best for the world.”

Arginine turned and started to leave. I opened my mouth to reply, but it closed silently after a long, wordless, moment. I wanted to scream at him. To curse him. I wanted to rant and wail and cry out at the stallion who’d betrayed me and all of my friends to our deaths. I wanted to do all of those things…

...but I couldn’t. Had it been any other pony, I certainly would have; but not Arginine. I knew the stallion too well. He wasn’t being vindictive, or malicious, or cruel. This wasn’t all being done in order to secure some sort of personal gain. Heck, from what that filly had said before leaving, it sounded like Arginine wasn’t going to be alive for all that much longer than I was when he got back to his stable.

No, he wasn’t doing any of this for any of the reasons that the typical pony might have. Arginine was simply too...honest to do something like that. Too genuine. He was doing this because, deep down, he actually believed that this was what was objectively best for ponykind as a whole. Nothing else mattered to him outside of that. It was his whole purpose in life: ensuring that the world was inherited by the ponies most likely to fix it and stop anything like the Wasteland from ever happening again. It was all that he cared about.

It had been all I cared about too―was all I cared about. How many hundreds―thousands―of ponies had I killed over the years because I was clearing out the ‘dregs’ of pony-kind in order to allow ‘better’ ponies to thrive and prosper. I’d killed those White Hooves yesterday without a second thought because their kind ‘needed to be removed’ from the Wasteland to make it a better place. It was what I did, and how I lived my life.

I’d never thought of my actions from the point of view of those raiders and tribals. Until now. Until I had suddenly become the ‘undesirable’ pony that needed to be dealt with to make way for ‘better ponies’. If I condemned Arginine for what he was doing, I had to condemn myself as well. We were doing the same things for the same reasons.

There wasn’t any reason for me to believe that we’d get different results either. I recalled the flashing visions of those terrified zebras hiding from the bombardment being launched by overflying pegasi. I saw those same figures as ponies, being burned by dragons. I remembered what I’d seen those survivors do afterwards: pick up weapons and perpetuate the fighting. They carried on with and propagated the violence, until...all that was left was The Wasteland.

Killing gangers wasn’t going to bring about the end of the Wasteland. Killing tribals like the White Hooves wasn’t going to do it. No matter how many ponies I killed, it would only be a matter of time before some other group―like, say, a horde of genetically mutated stable ponies―came along a tried to kill me and my friends. Even if Arginine’s stable won out here tomorrow, some other group would try to kill them. It would just go on, and on, and on, until the Wasteland was somehow even worse than the hellscape it was now.

Killing wasn’t going to get us anywhere, I realized. Vengeance, hatred, violence...at best, it would keep us all right where we’d been for the last two hundred years.

It wasn’t the answer. Fixing the Wasteland wasn’t as easy as killing the ‘right’ ponies. You’d think that should have been obvious after all these years. I’d thought that my lack of progress was somehow due to my not killing enough ponies. But now...I could see where I’d been going wrong. You didn’t stop violence with more violence.

You did it...by stopping.

“...I forgive you.”

The stallion paused just in front of the flap and looked back over his shoulder at me, “I beg your pardon?”

“I said: I forgive you,” I repeated, feeling those tears that had been threatening to fall earlier starting to creep out from beneath my eyelid. It wasn’t grief, necessarily, that was spurring them on though; but rather the sense that I had, in the end, just lost a close friend―and I had, in a very real sense. Arginine was a pony that I’d grown to rely on and trust with my life; and, through my actions, I’d let him down. I genuinely regretted that. But none of that changed how I felt about him―how I’d always felt about him.

“I forgive you for what’s going to happen to me,” I swallowed, “and for what’s going to happen to Shady Saddles and the rest of Neighvada...and the world, I guess. For what it’s worth, I hope you’re right too,” I added, swallowing hard, “I hope that this really will lead to a better world for not just ponies, but every race. Deep down, I don’t think it will, but you’re a much smarter pony than I am, so maybe I’m wrong.

“In fact, I sincerely hope that I am,” I added, “I hope that everything works out, and that the Wasteland gets fixed and that everypony will someday live in a new Equestria where everypony is safe, and loved, and happy. I hope that we do learn to be better ponies; even if I’m not around to see it for myself.”

I sniffed and wiped my nose on my manacled hooves before smiling as broadly as I could at the stallion, “if we really have to lose, then I want you to be right about what you’re doing. So, I forgive you, and I wish you the best of luck, RG.”

The stallion stared back at me in stoic silence for several seconds before finally nodding, “thank you. I hope I’m right too,” he once more turned to leave.

“RG!” I called out before I was even aware that I was saying anything more. Once again, the stallion stopped and looked back at me. I fidgeted for a bit, mentally arguing with myself whether what I was about to say was even worth uttering. It wasn’t like it was going to matter at all.

On the other hoof, this could turn out to be the last chance I ever got to speak with him. Whether it was going to amount to anything or not, I still felt like I needed for somepony to know―Arginine especially. I swallowed hard, feeling the weight of the gray unicorn’s golden eyes boring expectantly into me, “you’reafather,” I blurted, flinching as I took a moment to compose myself a little better.

“I mean: I’m pregnant; and it’s yours,” I sighed, “I know it’s not going to matter tomorrow and everything, but I was trying to tell you earlier; but then there was the whole druging thing…” I trailed off, prompting myself to clear my throat once more and refocus my rambling, “I just―” I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, “I guess, given the circumstances, this is the closest that I can come to ‘having a family’,” I managed a wan smile that didn’t last very long, but it had at least been something, “so, thanks, for letting me have that...before the end.”

“...”

Arginine slipped out of the tent without a word. I cringed, closing my eye and bowing my head, cradling it in my bound forelimbs. I was acutely aware of my bare neck, which no longer was adorned with the talisman that Doctor Lancet had provided for me to help sustain the life that was only tenuously growing inside of me. It was a silly thing to be concerned about. I was pretty sure that there didn’t exist a talisman in the whole world that was powerful enough to save my unborn foal from me dying.

I looked to the pipbuck on my fetlock. While I was almost certain that such an effort would be fruitless, I craned my head down and began to awkwardly nudge the buttons and dials with my nose until I managed to get the device over to its radio application. It was of little surprise to me at all that every station that I tried was met with static and silence. Of course the these stable ponies weren’t going to overlook something like a pipbuck and how it might have helped me get out a warning. They were probably jamming the whole area to keep the ponies here from getting out a warning to others in the valley.

Which meant that, not only did I have no way of trying to coordinate a rescue with Ramparts and the others, I wasn’t even going to be able to say goodbye to them. I didn’t even know for sure whether or not they were aware that I was a prisoner. I had been vaguely aware of somepony trying to reach me on the radio while I was losing consciousness, but I certainly hadn’t replied. Chances were that whatever device that these ponies were using to block my pipbuck’s radio transceiver was also hiding my pipbuck tag location.

For all that the others knew, I’d abandoned them completely. Or was passed out drunk and unreachable somewhere, more likely, I thought bitterly. Whatever the others thought, the defense of Shady Saddles was ultimately in their hooves. I wasn’t going to have any part in it.

I wanted to believe that my friends, the mercenaries we’d hired, and the organic defenders of the town would be enough to repel the augmented ponies from Arginine’s stable. I genuinely wanted to believe that. It was just…

...Arginine sure didn’t think so; and I very much doubted that the ponies who appeared to have so easily devastated the greatest threat to the Neighvada Valley―the White Hooves―would be the sort of force that could be turned back by a rag-tag ‘army’ that had been cobbled together a week ago. This wasn’t where the fight was supposed to happen either. We were supposed to trap them in their stable where they’d have a limited avenue of approach. Right now, we were experiencing the exact opposite of that. They had to have the whole town surrounded, which meant that they could attack from every side all at once.

It was impossible for me to know the numbers that we were dealing with, but I could imagine that even the most conservative estimate for the size of an army that was being specifically built to wipe out every pony in the whole Wasteland had to number in the thousands. The filly―Arginine had called her ‘Constance’, right?―had said that she was going to take the bulk of it on to Seaddle while leaving a smaller detachment here to finish off the town. If even a tenth of such a force were left here, they’d have us at least matched pony-for-pony; and if all of their ponies were as big as that behemoth in the barding that had been standing next to Arginine, those were odds that decidedly did not favor us.

I just...I couldn’t see a way for us to win this. These stable ponies had the numbers, the equipment, the positioning, and they’d seized the initiative by moving in and surrounding the town before we’d even suspected that they were in the area. They simply had every conceivable advantage. The only trump card that we could possibly have played was off in McMaren. While Moonbeam might have even been able to get here by morning easily if she could be reached, I had every reason to believe that it wasn’t merely my pipbuck whose radio was being jammed. There was no way to get a message to her.

We were done for, before we’d even managed to truly begin.

I let out a defeated sigh and lay my head across my hooves.

I’m sorry, everypony...I fucked up, and I’m sorry…

It appeared that ‘morning’ referred to the crack of dawn with these ponies, as I was led out of the tent into a Wasteland with a sky that was only just beginning to lighten from. While the land was still quite dark, I was able to finally get a look around at the enemy’s encampment as I was escorted through it. The sturdy plastic-encased steel rope binding my wings down remained, but the manacles on my fore and hind legs had been swapped out for two sets of hobblers that let me walk, but kept my gate short and slow. If nothing else, I had plenty of time to look around as me and the quartet of large gray ponies walked through the camp.

Most of the pristine plastic and canvas structures appeared to be sleeping tents designed to hold some number of the soldiers present. It was hard for me to judge an accurate number, honestly. The tents could have comfortably slept a couple dozen ponies my or even Ramparts’ sizes, but these genetically engineered beasts were substantially larger, so maybe only a half dozen or so of them would fit. Those tents appeared to ring the entirety of Shady Saddles.

There were other small collections of tents as well that didn’t look like they were being used as quarters. I could peer into a couple of them, and saw that they contained plastic and metal crates of various shapes and sizes. Supply depots, I guessed. There was a larger tent complex nearby as well, that looked like several tents had been connected to one another. Just outside of it was a simple radio tower of some sort that I suspected they used to keep in contact with their stable.

Perhaps whatever they were using to squelch my pipbuck’s transmitter wasn’t as all-encompassing as I originally thought. Not that it did me much good to know that there might be a way for somepony to get signals out of this place. Without the ability to examine exactly how these ponies were blocking the signals and then getting around that block, I had to wonder if even Foxglove had been able to find a solution last night. Not that I was convinced that being able to call for help would have done us much good against the force we were facing.

I took the sign that the little filly general hadn’t shown up for one last round of gloating over my inevitable demise to be an indication that she’d made good on her promise to have been well on her way to Seaddle with the bulk of her stable’s forces. That being the case, it certainly looked like quite the force had been left behind to complete their sacking of Shady Saddles. I could see what must have been well over a hundred ponies just along this side of the town’s southern wall. I suspected that at least as many were positioned along the other three as well.

My eyes wandered to the wall in question, sitting about two hundred yards distant from the edge of the camp. It was a tantalizingly close distance, honestly, that seemed like it was designed to further demonstrate the sheer contempt that these engineered ponies had for the denizens of the surface world. Any worthwhile pony with a properly sighted rifle could have scored reliable hits on the ponies in the camp, and I suspected that there had to be a significant number of qualified marksmares among both the town’s usual defenders and the mercenaries that we’d recruited.

Of course, there was also little doubt in my mind that, the moment the first such shot was fired, these stable ponies would have launched their assault immediately. A night assault wouldn’t have favored the defenders any, so instigating the attack would have served to gain the ponies of Shady Saddles nothing. They were forced to just sit there all night as these augmented invaders sat here taunting them with their proximity. Was it really not enough that they were going to grind us all under their hooves with ease, they had to take every opportunity to rub our noses in our hopelessness all the while?

I thought these ponies were supposed to not feel strong emotions or whatever? That General Constance had sure seemed to be full of all sorts of overt emotions last night.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t going to get the chance to ask Arginine for an answer about that. My gaze drifted from the wall, where there were a scattering of pony silhouettes of the defenders, to the gallows that I was being steadily marched towards. There wasn’t much to them; little more than a wood-framed base, a pair of upright beams, and the crossbar between them. A nylon noose was already set and waiting.

Lights had been positioned all around the platform, focused so as to illuminate the center stage for the main event. I found myself idly wondering if the lights might not have been set up rather early on in the process so as to allow the defenders of the town to watch every step of its construction and wonder as to its purpose. Those lights would certainly make it rather easy for the ponies on the wall to easily identify who it was that was going to be hanging there, assuming they hadn’t managed to figure it out already. Even in the dimness of early dawn and at this distance, a petite white pegasus mare had to stand out when compared to these overbearing gray monstrosities; and it wasn’t like ponies matching my description were a dime a dozen…

I was walked up unto the platform. I glanced down, feeling the slight give of the trap door in the center of it as my hooves stepped upon it. Idly, I tried to move my wings, but there was absolutely no give to their restraints. I felt my lips twist into a tiny little mirthless smile as I pondered the absurdity of a pegasus essentially dying because of a fall.

The hoop of rope, which was glowing with a golden magical aura, deftly slipped itself around my neck, the knot slipping down until the cord was snug against my neck. I noted that there wasn’t nearly as much slack at the end connected to the gallows as there should have been. The idea was supposed to be that the noose would allow me to fall far enough that the sudden jerk as I reached the end would snap my neck and kill me. As it was now, I was almost certainly going to simply strangle to death over the course of several minutes.

That seemed unnecessary.

“I would like to take this moment to apologize,” I stiffened and quickly looked to the side, surprised to find Arginine standing on the ground nearby, “but I requested avoiding traumatizing your brain stem and spinal cord unnecessarily,” the stallion continued in a low voice, not meeting my gaze, “the autonomic system of a pegasus is not something that our engineers have had many opportunities to study up close. Keeping yours as intact as possible will be of a great benefit to my stable.”

I closed my eye and let out a long sigh, “that...I probably won’t forgive you for,” I muttered to the stallion, “but thanks for being here, at the end, I guess.”

“I am on hoof to collect your body after the assault is complete,” the unicorn replied simply, “I am the only pony here with any training on how to properly preserve specimens for transport back to the stable.”

Despite myself, I felt a hollow snort escape me, “nice to know that somepony’s gonna care what happens to me,” I muttered before turning my attention from the stallion and facing Shady Saddles. I caught a brief flash of something shiny in the dim light in connection to what looked to be a rifle. Probably a scope or some sort. If somepony along the wall had indeed recognized who I was and what was about to happen to me, I might find myself lucking out and they’d be merciful enough to shoot me and spare me the agony of a slow and grueling death by strangulation.

I just hoped that it wasn’t going to be anypony I knew doing it. I didn’t want Ramparts to have to spend his last hours alive thinking about he’d been the one to ultimately kill me.

This did all feel eerily familiar though. My mind flashed back to my experience in the White Hoof camp. It hadn’t been a hanging that awaited me there, of course. In retrospect, I had to wonder if being stung to death and ripped apart by monstrous radscorpions wouldn’t have been a significantly cleaner death compared to hanging like I was about to.

There wasn’t a screaming and jeering throng of tribals clamouring to watch me suffer though, so there was that. In fact, the camp was almost chillingly quiet. These large engineered ponies didn’t even seem to be idly chatting with each other. I wasn’t saying that I wanted them to be gathered about taunting me as I was about to die; all of this was perfectly depressing enough as it was. It would have just been a little more encouraging to get the sense that the ponies who were about to inherit the Wasteland and rebuild Equestria were a lot more...like normal ponies, is all.

Ugh...I can’t believe that this was what I was going to spend my last moments thinking about! I mean, I guess I’d already gone through all of my more maudlin thoughts last night as I thought back about Jackboot and my family and the life that I’d never had. All that was left to ponder now were these ponies who were about to kill me, and the fact that there looked to be a lot fewer ponies on the defensive walls of Shady Saddles than I would have thought.

Honestly, I should have been able to see nearly a hundred ponies along the southern wall that I was facing, considering all of the mercenaries and such. Heck, the town should have rallied every able pony with a firearm to the defenses, given what was at stake! But I only counted just shy of twenty silhouettes at the moment. So where was everypony else?!

I closed my eye and shook my head. Yeah, that a girl, Windfall; spend your final conscious thoughts criticising the last minute plans made by desperate ponies who were suddenly surrounded by an overwhelming army just before nightfall. That’s time well spent right there! Couldn’t you at least have thought about―!

“Release.”

It barely even sounded like a command, but a moment later the hatch beneath my hooves gave way and I was falling. Although, ‘falling’ was greatly overstating what the result was thanks to the shortness of the noose around my neck. The rope almost instantly tightened, sealing my throat shut as my hind end swung down. The whole weight of even my lithe body was now being supported entirely by the cord wrapped just below my chin. Panic set in immediately, even though I’d been fully expecting this. My brain very quickly realized that my body could no longer draw breath, and my subconscious began to engage in every futile effort it could conceive of to fix the problem; which amounted to a lot of spasms and fruitless flailing of my bound limbs.

Then, quite unexpectedly, my world was awash in a sea of cyan light. Somepony had their hooves wrapped around me. My brain was still very much in a state of frenzy though, so I wasn’t processing much of what was happening. All I knew was that there had been a light, and the sensation of being touched, and a lot of lavender in my vision. There was a voice too, I think, that said something along the lines of: “hold still!” not that I was in any state to comply if that is indeed what the vaguely familiar voice of a mare had said to me.

The loud crack of a rifle shot I recognized despite my death throes, thanks to a lifetime of exposure to firearms and battle. I felt some of the pressure around my neck slacken in that same moment, but the rope was still completely constricting my throat and preventing me from drawing even a wheezing breath, so that sensation was of little comfort to me.

Then there was another blue flash of light.

I hit the ground hard, smashed beneath the weight of a pony significantly larger than I was. That bulk was quickly removed though, and then I was aware of several other ponies around me moving in from all sides. A knife appeared from somewhere and began sawing. An agonizing collection of seconds later, I felt the pressure on my throat vanish. The gasp that escaped me was so loud that it drowned out the voices of the ponies around me, and my body was in such a rush to get fresh air into it that it felt like I was in danger of over-inflating my lungs.

I was reduced to a hacking a coughing fit for several long moments as my body struggled to make up for the oxygen that it had been deprived of. Only after spending the better part of a minute recovering was I finally cognizant of my surroundings.

The first thing that I noticed was that I was no longer on the gallows, which was a wonderful revelation. In fact, it was very soon apparent that I wasn’t even on the ground. I could see the adobe and wood construction beneath my hooves, and recognized it as belonging to the walls that encircled Shady Saddles. Indeed, looking out in front of me, I could see the buildings of the town spread out below.

Though it was the frenzied sounds from behind that soon drew my attention. Screaming, gunshots, the whines of magical energy weapons, and even a few thunderous explosions were rolling over from beyond the wall. I clambered up on unsteady legs, shoving ponies away who tried to stop me and ignoring their pleas for me to hold still. I hobbled my way to the battlements of the wall and propped myself up along them so that I could peek over at the source of the cacophony beyond.

It was a full on melee.

Ponies of all shapes and sizes swarmed over one-another. The massive white-armored forms of the stable ponies were not alone. Smaller equine forms dressed in all manner of barding and armed with a wide variety of weapons writhed among them as the two side fought in a chaotic brawl. To my left and right, ponies armed with rifles carefully marked their targets and fired in support of their brethren engaged in close-quarters-combat. Stunned, and still not quite comprehending what was going on, I plodded my way towards one of the other walls on hobbled hooves.

Sure enough, I saw an identical scene before me. Ponies who were very clearly those defending Shady Saddles were on the ground and fighting with the force of stable ponies. Yet, it was more than that. The bulk of the town’s forces looked to be concentrated behind their larger and monochrome foes, pinching the stable ponies between the Wastelanders and the city walls filled with discerning marksmares.

“How…?” I heard myself say aloud in a word that was barely more than a soft croak as my ragged throat decried any attempt to speak. I winced and awkwardly massaged my larynx as I continued to look on in stunned silence. Then my gaze finally fell upon the explanation: holes.

The landscape around the town was ringed with holes; scores of them! It was like somepony had perforated the Wasteland around Shady Saddles, just beyond the edge of the stable ponies’ encampment. On a hunch, I stumbled my way to the inward facing side of the wall and glanced down. Sure enough, I spied several additional holes that clearly led into tunnels running beneath the surface. Even now they were being utilized to drag back the wounded and for fresh reinforcements to enter the fray.

Something was tugging at my hooves. I looked over, still dazed, to see a violet unicorn with an auburn mane tied back in a loose bun. Her horn was glowing with emerald green light as she telekinetically manipulated both my hobblers and her eldritch lance’s ignited tip; albeit on its faintest setting. A few deft swipes with the tool was all that it took for the mare to uncuff and remove the restraints from my legs. Another swipe released my wings from their own bindings, and I felt myself sigh in relief as my pinions fanned out in appreciation of their newfound freedom.

I was then summarily glomped by a bawling Foxglove, “oh, Celestia, Windfall! I thought―,” she hiccuped in between sobs, “I thought you were dead! Oh, thank Celestia you’re alright!” she immediately pulled back a little and began to pat down and quickly inspect every part of my body, “you are alright, right? Are you hurt anywhere? Are you okay?!”

My mouth opened to respond, but I couldn’t managed to get out much more than a choked gag as my still recovering throat rebelled against further utterances. I winced, instead descending into a fit of coughing while trying to bravely nod my head in the affirmative.

“Oh dear, let me see,” the mare bent down and looked beneath my chin. I heard her sharp intake of breath, “oh, that looks bad; let me get you a healing potion,” she whipped her head over her shoulder, “I need a healing potion!”

A young earth pony colt appeared only seconds later, galloping along the town’s battlements. He had a pair of yellow, butterfly-emblazoned, medical cases strapped to his sides like improvised saddlebags. As soon as he reached us, he popped open one of the cases and tossed Foxglove a healing potion from within. As she caught it in her telekinesis, he was already cantering away further down the wall towards where somepony else was yelling for a potion. I noticed that the colt wasn’t alone in this duty either. Many other smaller figures of young colts and fillies were visible scampering along the walls, doling out medicine and ammunition where it was needed as the older ponies continued to engage the attackers.

Foxglove had uncapped the vial and was holding it to my lips, all but force-feeding me the potion in her ernest haste to treat my savaged throat, “here, drink it,” and I somehow managed to do so without coughing most of it back up. It helped that the purple fluid served to almost immediately soothe my very sore throat even as it dribbled into my mouth. In a matter of seconds, the pain ebbed and both the act of breathing and speaking got immeasurably easier.

“Thanks,” I managed to finally say with only the slightest note of hoarseness. All that remained of my injury now was a faint, lingering, itch in the back of my throat that itself was already noticeably fading with every passing minute, “and thanks for the save, too. I assume that Starlight did her teleport thing?” I ventured, glancing around to try and figure out where the other unicorn mare had gotten off to. It wasn’t hard to pick her out from among the other defenders, as she was one of the very few who wasn’t armed and firing. Instead, it seemed like Starlight was applying herself to a more defensive role, generating protective barriers for the other defenders to shield them from incoming fire.

Though, I noted that that fire was a lot lighter and more sporadic than I would have predicted from the number of attackers that I’d seen in the camp while being taken to the site of my foiled execution. It didn’t take any sort of expert to figure out why that was, of course. Those same ponies were far too busy dealing with the surprise assault coming at them from their rears to focus much of their attention on Shady Saddles.

I once more turned my attention outward, looking back over the wall at the fighting that was raging on down below. It was still something of a mystery to me how the townsponies had managed to pull off the whole thing. Surely this place hadn’t always possessed such a tunnel network? No, that couldn’t be it. I could plainly see the piles of freshly-churned dirt surrounding the openings inside the town walls. Those tunnels had been recently dug, there was no doubt of that. Though I was having some difficulty believing that such a network could have been created from scratch over the course of a single night!

Foxglove was standing at my side, protectively, her posture suggesting that she was quite aware that being at the edge of the town’s walls was not exactly a safe place at the moment. While the larger stable ponies were obviously primarily concerned with fighting the Wasteland denizens who’d suddenly appeared in their midsts, more than a few of them found the opportunity to engage the defenders on the walls, and bolts of pale green magical energy burned sporadically through the air around us.

“Yeah,” the mare responded, “she teleported in to get you, while I shot the rope.”

My eye widened in surprise and my head whipped around to look at the mare, “you made that shot?” I immediately winced, not having intended to sound quite that incredulous. It was just that I remembered quite clearly how bad a shot the mare had once been with a rifle. Then again, it wasn’t like I’d always been a ‘crack marksmare’ early in my career either.

Fortunately, Foxglove seemed to have been sufficiently self-aware to chuckle in response to my abject surprise, “yeah, well, I was pretty motivated to not miss,” she said, pressing herself against me, seemingly as much to reassure herself that I was really there as well as to offer a playful nudge, “besides,” her expression darkened slightly as her eyes stared out across the fighting, “Ramparts wasn’t available.”

“He’s down there?”

The violet unicorn nodded soberly and I turned to follow her gaze.

I’d been baptized in blood early on in my life. My formative years, leading into my―budding―adulthood, had been spent fighting a killing. I wasn’t a stranger to violence by any stretch of the imagination. Yet, at the same time, looking out over the brawl going on below, I couldn’t help but feel taken aback by the sheer scope and...brutality of it all.

While I’d seen―and participated in―innumerable fights during my lifetime, this wasn’t like any of those. This wasn’t a ‘fight’, this was a battle. The prelude to what could only be described as a war with the ponies of this stable.

Hundreds of ponies, more than I’d ever seen engaged in combat with one another at one time, were fighting tooth and hoof. Gunshots were crackling so frequently that the popping sounds almost seemed to blend together into a singular saturated drone of white noise. My nose itched from the acrid smell of the gunsmoke that hung in the air. So much of it was being generated, in fact, that I could see a bluish gray haze hovering over the town wall and the brawling ponies below.

The color of that blue-tinted smoke contrasted with the decidedly crimson tint that the Wasteland’s surface was taking on. At first, I thought that it was some phenomenon of the early dawn light that was doing it. However, much to my own horror, I soon realized that it was no trick of the light that made the ground look red: it was blood. Gallons upon gallons upon gallons of spilled blood, running over the parched and dry hard scrabble ground of the Wasteland that was simply incapable of absorbing liquids fast enough to keep up with how much of the vital life-sustaining fluid it was being drenched with to keep it from spreading outward from the periphery of the fighting itself.

Even as I watched, I could see both the significantly larger stable ponies and the more diminutive town defenders occasionally losing their footing on the slick ground. Such unfortunate ponies rarely survived long enough to get back up, their missteps upon the blood-muddied ground only serving to further add to the expanding crimson moat being formed around Shady Saddles.

This level of carnage was almost impossible for me to truly comprehend, even while I was watching it all unfold in front of me. I wanted it to stop. I wanted all of this to still be part of the dream, so that I could wake up from it and discover that it hadn’t―that something like this couldn’t―actually exist in the world. This much gore, this much death, wasn’t something that I wanted to accept as being a reality of the world, even in the Wasteland.

Of course, in my head, I knew that all of this was far too real. Indeed, two centuries past, I suspected that a confrontation like this wouldn’t have even been logged as a mere footnote in the long annals of all of the battles that occurred during the grand struggle between ponies and zebras. I tried―vainly―to imagine this sort of carnage on a scale of tens of thousands, and felt something inside my heart break.

I turned away from the fighting, slumping back against the wall. My chest was heaving as I let out wheezing breaths brought on by a sudden feeling of panic and dread. I was hugging myself tightly with my wings, wrapping myself into a little ball as I desperately tried to shake this feeling off, but I wasn’t having much luck doing so.

“Windy?!” Foxglove exclaimed, kneeling down beside me, her voice tinged with concern, “what’s wrong? Are you alright?”

I shook my head, “make it stop…” I muttered helplessly, tears creeping out from beneath my tightly closed eye, “it’s too much...there’s just too much…”

“Oh, Windy,” the unicorn sighed, and I felt her lean her head against mine in a comforting fashion as she held me for several long moments. Then she pulled back slightly and began looking around, “we should get you down from here. Come on, let’s go. There’s nothing you can do to help right now.”

Oh, how that last statement stung me, right down to my core. The Wonderbolt―the hero of Neighvada―a petulant, sobbing, mess while hundreds of ponies were fighting and dying around her. Many of those ponies were only here because I’d brought them here! They were fighting and dying because of me! I was why the mercenaries were here. Heck, I was even why those stable ponies were here, in part thanks to Arginine. This was the fight―the battle―that I’d wanted; that I’d been preparing for…

...and I was going to spend it cowering in the middle of the town somewhere, hyperventilating. Some ‘Wonderbolt’ I turned out to be…

Of course, I’d only ever been pretending at that, hadn’t I? I’d found a pretty blue jumpsuit in an old basement somewhere in the Wasteland and let the ponies in the valley call me a ‘Wonderbolt’. I knew nothing of their organization other than what I saw on decrepit recruitment posters and faded billboards. I knew even less about their most noteworthy leader during the war except that she was apparently involved in a lot of shady dealings in an effort to build a secret robot army, going so far as to experiment on little foals to accomplish her goals.

What exactly had I been aspiring to be, with a legacy like that? How was any part of that ‘heroic’?

Now look what playing at heroics had gotten not just me, but the rest of the Wasteland? I’d caused this bloodbath, and now I was going to hide away from it. A real hero would have rebuked Foxglove and flung herself into that fray.

Me? I mekely sniffed, nodded, and let her lead me off the wall. I didn’t have the words to describe the shame that I was feeling right now. I just...I wanted it to all be over. I wanted the killing to stop…

Yet still I followed my friend down off the battlements. If anypony noticed that the ‘Wonderbolt’ wasn’t taking an active role in the fighting, I didn’t hear them say anything. Then again, it looked like just about everypony had their hooves full right now. Foals scampered up and down the walls, delivering munitions and medicine. Ponies emerged from the scattered holes, dragging back wounded, screaming, ponies; many of whom were missing limbs or covered in disfiguring burns. A familiar black unicorn was darting from pony to pony in an open area where all of the casualties were being taken.

Even Sandy was there, with a few of her bar’s servers, doling out medicinal servings of grain alcohol to make up for Med-X shortages. Everypony was doing something to help, in their own way.

Except me.

“Windy?” I heard Foxglove say, that note of concern back in her voice once more, “is everything okay?”

It was then that I noticed that I’d stopped walking. I glanced down at my hooves, which had stopped mid-stride. My gaze drifted from my frozen legs to my flank, and the sword-impaled heart emblazoned upon it.

No, I corrected, the sword-shielded heart, as I’d recently come to realize in what had surely been the throes of drug-induced madness last night. While putting a lot of stock into what could only charitably be described as a ‘fever dream’ might not have been the more reasonable course of action, it had certainly felt like a cogently rational realization at the time. Looking back on the more significant moments of my life even now, I could feel the ring of truth to it all. Killing ponies had left me feeling sickened and disgusted at the end of the day, and I’d been driven to drown those feelings in alcohol to escape from them.

Saving ponies, that was what had filled me with elation. That was what had driven me my whole life.

I wasn’t a killer; I was a protector. That was what my cutie mark had been trying to tell me all of these years. I’d just been too poisoned by the Wasteland to realize it.

I glanced up, over my shoulder, towards the sounds of the raging battle beyond the wall, towards the embodiment of that ‘poison’ that was propagating this very moment. Deep within me, I could feel that...urge, that need to fling myself over to wall and do...something. I didn’t have the faintest clue what one little pegasus could do to change anything that was happening out there. Probably nothing, honestly. There was every reasonable expectation that I’d just go ahead and get myself killed, despite everything that my friends had just done to try and save my life.

Yet...I knew that I had to go. I had to try and save somepony―anypony.

It’s what my cutie mark was telling me.

Finally, I turned my head to look back at Foxglove, meeting her worried expression with an apologetic smile. For a long moment, the mechanic’s face scrunched up in confusion. Then, it looked like realization finally dawned upon her as her eyes went wide with fright, “Windfall, no! Don’t―!”

“Sorry!”

I was in the air and over the wall before the mare could even react. Not that I had any clue what I was going to do yet. All that I knew was that there were ponies out here who needed protecting, and I was going to try my best to do it. So I plunged myself into the haze of gunsmoke.

It was a grudging testament to the skills and abilities of whatever ponies in Arginine’s stable had designed these massive unicorns that, even caught as completely unaware as they had been, they were putting up a heck of a fight! Most of them were battered and bloodied despite their previously pristine combat barding, but they were still on their hooves and fighting hard. The beatings that they were taking would have easily killed any normal pony. This meant that the defenders of Shady Saddles were having to work two or three times as hard to bring down each and every one of the engineered soldiers. Without that initial moment of surprise, I found myself suspecting that the fight would have been as one-sided as that filly general had bragged that it would be.

Yet, here I was, entering this fight without so much as a pistol. Though, truth be told, there were plenty of weapons that had been discarded by the dead and dying for me to take up if I were so inclined. I was not. I was here to save ponies, not kill them. Not today.

To that end, I descended upon one of the massive stable ponies―a burly mare―currently engaged with a quartet of mercenaries who were dressed in the barding that identified them as being part of Keri’s crew. The Wastelanders looked haggard and hurt as they tried to get in close to their target, in an effort to bypass the magical shield she was maintaining that thwarted any effort they made to shoot her. In the meantime, they were forced to move frantically in order to dodge the stream of lethal magical energy being unleashed by her own weapon.

One of the mercenaries didn’t manage to move quite fast enough. The stallion caught a bolt in his shoulder, screaming out in pain. Yet, that was not the end of his plight. The weapon’s destructive magic took hold, despite his protective barding. In the span of a breath, the energy spread, consuming the earth pony stallion and reducing him to a pile of glowing green dust that was quickly absorbed into the blood-soaked ground. His three remaining companions could spare only a fleeting glance at where their slain member had been a moment ago before returning their full attention to the mare who was turning her weapon upon her next victim.

I descended.

Unlike so many hundreds of Neighvada raiders, however, these stable ponies seemed to be possessed on an awareness of their surroundings that I envied. My strike had been directed at the mare’s energy rifle, with the intent of either breaking it or knocking it free from her telekinesis. However, at the last moment, she deftly juked it aside and I sailed on past it. Not far though. While this pony might be trained to be able to sense or anticipate attacks―probably as a result of some spell or other―there was no way that they could be experienced enough fighting pegasi to know the degree of maneuverability that we possessed in the air.

While I may not have been able to land the direct hit that I had been going for, it took scant little effort to flare out my wings and flip my body around the mid-air rotational axis that they created. I halted my direction of flight less than a foot past her hovering weapon and somersaulted in the air, kicking the weapon away with an outstretched leg before she could move it again. The rifle flew free from the large mare’s magic. I completed my first full rotation and then tilted the axis of my wings as I continued on into a second flip. This time my hind hoof landed a sharp buck at the base of the mare’s horn. Even on a pony her size, that kind of hit on a sensitive area of a unicorn’s anatomy was enough to make her flinch, her glowing horn sputtering briefly as she fought to maintain her protective barrier.

Those three mercenaries weren’t slouches however, and they knew how to capitalize on an opportunity when one presented itself to them. The barrier shielding the stable pony wasn’t completely gone as a result of my strike, but it had been significantly weakened. Weakened enough that, when the three of them leveled their weapons and unleashed their own torrents of bullets and beams, it promptly shattered. Powerful rifle rounds and bolts of crimson energy bored into the stable pony’s barding, shredding it away quickly. The massive mare fell to the ground, dead, seconds later. Unlike far too many of the Wasteland ponies being slain around us, the stable mare died in an unsettlingly quiet fashion that left my spine chilled.

Not that I had much time to dwell on the phenomenon. There was still plenty of battle raging on around me. The Hacates seemed to be aware of this fact too, and spared only the most cursory of thankful nods before throwing themselves back into another fight. I was about to do the same when I sensed a shadow flashing over me. The stable ponies didn’t have any forces capable of flight, so I had a pretty good idea of the source. I glanced up.

The griffon terciel with the metal beak was hovering nearby. He was clutching a carbine in each of his taloned hands as he favored me with an approving smile, “glad you finally decided to join the fight!”

He tossed one of the carbines my way. I reached out and caught the weapon in my hooves, feeling the warm receiver against my fetlock. The weapon had clearly been seeing quite a bit of use. Briefly, I looked down at the carbine. It was a semi-automatic model that fired a relatively large round―perhaps a fifty caliber or just shy of it―judging by the diameter of the barrel. It was a powerful weapon, no doubt, even when employed against these tough opponents. Somepony like me could do a lot of damage with it.

I could kill a lot of ponies with a gun like this.

The griffon almost didn’t manage to catch the weapon as I tossed it back to him, gawking at me in confusion, “thanks, but I’m good,” I assured the mercenary leader, “I...kind of have my own style of fighting,” I said, smiling at him, clacking my hooved together.

He was clearly still a little dubious, but neither of us had a lot of time to hover around here debating the matter, so he simply repositioned his grip on the returned carbine and shrugged, “suit yourself,” he waved one of the weapons in my direction, “but I better still get paid even if you buy it out here!”

I rolled my eye but he didn’t wait around for my assurances that every last cap of the fifty thousand that he’d be promised would be coming his way. Assuming that we all survived this, of course.

Again and again, I threw myself back into the brawl, moving from one target to the next, serving to intervene directly or make myself a distraction, whichever proved to be the most help to the Wasteland fighters. I punched, I kicked, I flew, I rolled, and I tossed fallen weapons to ponies who lost or broke their current ones. I helped as best I could, and I fought to defend the ponies protecting Shady Saddles with everything that I had. The one thing that I didn’t do, was kill. Not directly anyway. I wouldn’t pretend that, at the end of the day, disarming the augmented stable ponies and leaving them defenseless in the face of the mercenaries I’d hired was all that far removed from being responsible for their deaths just as much as the ponied pulling the triggers were, but it did at least serve to not leave quite as bad a taste in my mouth.

Maybe I was just being a silly little filly who was trying to sooth her conscience with semantics; but it mattered to me that I not be the pony to kill them. It mattered that the focus of my thoughts and actions was on protecting ponies, and not ending lives. It was a narrow distinction on this battlefield, but it was a distinction.

I wasn’t even aware of when precisely the fighting stopped. Suddenly...there just wasn’t anypony left to fight. The persistent drone of gunfire and explosions that I’d been able to all but ignore was completely silent, leaving in its wake an almost unsettling level of quiet in the world. Though that serenity was sullied somewhat by the moans of the dead and dying that yet lingered on, wafting over the Wasteland like a foreboding wind. They were being tended to though, as best they could be. Not all of them would survive until nightfall, but most of them might.

I glanced down at my hooves, which were covered in blood, bruises, and burns. My body ached all over, and I’d been shot in my flank at least once by a stray round. A shrapnel wound on my right shoulder was oozing dark blood. Yet, as battered as I was, I knew that I’d fared much better all too many ponies today.

“Lady? You hurt?”

My body jerked in surprise. I glanced around to see a little blue unicorn filly standing nearby, balancing a yellow medical case on her back. Wordlessly, I studied the tiny little pony, noting the dark blood that was splatter all over her legs and belly, kicked up from running through the crimson mire that the area surrounding Shady Saddles had become. Her features were pale and drawn, her pink eyes dulled from the horrors that she’d seen that day. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how many dead and dying ponies she’d seen in the last hour.

Her gaze darted to my bloody shoulder and she fished a potion out of her medical case with her magic. I reached out with my wing and took the offered vial in my pinions, looking down at the small vial of purple fluid, noting that it was only half-full. It seemed that they were running low on their supply of the precious healing draught, “thanks,” I managed, but the filly was already gone, kicking up a mist of darkening blood in her wake as she galloped to the next pony in need of some help.

I put the vial up to my mouth and was about to remove the stopper, but I hesitated. Half-remembered visions about an imagined encounter with a yellow pegasus mare stirred in the back of my mind. I looked down at the wound on my shoulder, spying the sliver of heat-warped steel that was poking out of the wound. If I just drank this potion, who was to say that the piece of shrapnel wouldn’t just be sealed inside my shoulder for good? It wasn’t bleeding all that badly anyway. I could wait to have Doctor Lancet take a look at it later, when he had a free moment.

The same went for the bullet wound on my flank, which was similarly only letting out a trickle of blood. I looked around and tore off a strip from the uniform of one of the stable ponies nearby, wadding it up and using my left wing to hold the improvised bandage in place. I then turned and began to hobble my way back towards the town, passing the vial of healing potion off to a mercenary that I passed who was tending to a comrade who looked to be in much worse shape than I was.

As I limped towards the town, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would take to clear up the surroundings of Shady Saddles. There were hundreds of bodies that needed to be addressed before they began attracting hordes of bloatsprites, radroaches, and radscorpions. Though, I supposed that if whoever had managed to dig all of those tunnels in a single night was still around, they could probably dig up some graves in only a matter of hours.

I jumped in surprise as a loud explosion roared across the Wasteland. For one, terrifying, moment, I was certain that General Constance had turned the forces she’d split off around and come to finish us off. I whirled around towards the source of the detonation, just in time to see the large transmitter tower coming down. No sooner had it hit the ground than my pipbuck’s radio, which had been silent up to this moment, burst to life, “―nypony...please...please respond,” I heard the audibly broken voice of Homily pleading softly over my pipbuck’s speaker, “Foxglove, Windfall, Ramparts, somepony, let me know you’re all alive. Please…”

This wasn’t a public broadcast, I immediately realized. Homily was reaching out on a direct frequency. Hurriedly, I slapped at the pipbuck’s controls, “Homily? Homily, can you hear me?”

“Windfall?!” the relief in the mare’s tone as her voice cracked just speaking my name was palpable, “Oh, praise Celestia, Luna, and the fucking clouds above; you’re alive! What happened?! I got this garbled transmission from Ramparts last night and then nothing.”

I guess that after he couldn’t reach me, the former Republic courser had tried to get out a warning to other parts of the valley, but the signal had gotten jammed before it could be understood, “Arginine’s stable attacked Shady Saddles,” I informed the mare, immediately following it up with, “but we’re okay; we fought them off,” mostly, I amended to myself. It was hard to look across the remains of the battlefield, take in the mountains of slain ponies―a great many of whom were clearly Wastelanders―and think of this as any sort of ‘sweeping victory’ or something of the like.

Especially since, “but this wasn’t the main force,” I added, “that group’s on its way to Seaddle as we speak. They’ll be there in a matter of days.”

“I’ll get the word out,” Homily said, “the situation in Seaddle is pretty hard to read, but I’m sure I can reach somepony who’ll listen and be able to let the Republic Guard know that an attacks imminent―”

“Negative!” A familiar stallion’s voice cut in sharply. I blinked in surprise, because I had actually heard the word coming at me from two directions at once; both from my pipbuck’s speaker, and from behind me without any indication of electronic distortion at all.

I turned to see a haggard and blood-covered Ramparts walking towards me, speaking into his own fetlock-mounted device, “do not transmit a warning in the open, Homily. Stop transmitting to us too. Make your usual public broadcasts, but nothing about the stable ponies heading for Seaddle, and nothing about us being alive. We’ll contact you when we can do so securely. Ramparts, out,” and with that, the stallion shut off his pipbuck’s transmitter and motioned for me to do the same.

As relieved as I was to see that the earth pony stallion had managed to survive the battle, I couldn’t keep from being annoyed at his interruption, “what gives? She was worried about us, Ramps; and why can’t we warn Seaddle about what’s coming?”

“Because, right now, we have every reason to believe that we took these ponies by surprise, and before they could get out a signal to the rest of their forces about getting overrun,” the former courser responded, “if they knew that we survived, they’d turn their happy flanks right back around this second and be back in a matter of hours to finish us off.

“Right now, we have the initiative,” Ramparts went on, “and...I have every reason to believe that we also have an open path to their stable. What is, in all likelihood, a largely undefended stable.”

I blinked.

He was right. At least, he was right that, if this ambush from below ground had really been as surprising to the force of stable ponies surrounding Shady Saddles as it had been to me, then it was possible that they hadn’t been able to let the rest of their forces know things hadn’t gone as expected. For the moment, at least, General Constance had no reason to suspect that everything here wasn’t going exactly as planned, and that the population of the town was currently being systematically exterminated as per her orders.

I wasn’t naive enough to think that she’d go on assuming that for very long. These ponies had almost certainly been left with instructions to let her know when they were finished and on their way to meet back up with the main body that she was personally leading. However, it could still be a long while before she got suspicious that something was amiss. If we were really lucky, she might not even bother to turn back around until tomorrow morning.

What was also pretty obvious was that Arginine’s stable was finally operating openly. General Constance had suggested that their timetable had been bumped up considerably, in part due to my own activities in recent months, but that didn’t change the fact that they were indeed moving ahead with their plan to exterminate the Wasteland’s surface population. I found it difficult to believe that they’d be undertaking such a massive effort, especially if they were jumping the gun where their original timetables were concerned, and not have as many of their forces committed to the mission as possible. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I believed their stable lacked any sort of defenses at all; but whatever they’d left behind couldn’t possibly compare to what they’d deployed to the field.

Their army had been large, no doubt, but I couldn’t have been enough to wipe out every pony in the entire Wasteland. A second wave was likely in the works; and who knew how many more would be churned out after that? But that wave probably didn’t exist yet. If we launched an attack on their stable now, while their army was out in the valley well away from it, we might be able to fight our way in, and destroy it once and for all. Constance and her army would still be around, yeah, and they’d represent a huge threat for sure, but they’d be reduced to a threat that could only diminish over time as their forces were eroded away with every fight. I couldn’t guess how many surface ponies they’d manage to kill if they kept on with their campaign of genocide in spite of losing their stable, but I knew that the number had to be less than the sum total of the population of ponykind. So that was something.

It was hardly a foregone conclusion that we could pull it off, of course. Stables had been designed to be the ultimate hardened facilities, able to survive direct balefire bomb bombardments. Breaking into even the least militarized stables was a monumental undertaking; and I doubted that a place whose population was obsessed with fighting a war of genocide wasn’t going to have formidable defenses. However, Ramparts was right in at least that this would be our best possible chance to fight our way in. The stable itself would be at its weakest. If we could get in there and blow it before Constance knew what we were planning…

She was an arrogant and condescending little cunt, but if she was even a tenth as smart as she made herself out to be, then she’d have to acknowledge that, without the stable to support them, their mission could only ultimately be a failure. There was no reason for her not to listen to reason and stand down at that point, right?

Not warning the ponies of Seaddle that a threat was heading their way sure didn’t sit well with me, but Ramparts was right in that regard as well: we couldn’t afford to have Constance catching wind of those warnings and learning that we’d survived before she came to that eventual conclusion on her own when she failed to hear back from the forces she’d left to finish the assault on Shady Saddles. Besides, there was little chance that she’d make it all the way to Seaddle before reaching that conclusion. That chance fell to zero if she also had reason to believe we were, indeed, headed for her stable.

So, I nodded, “you’re right. We need all the time we can get,” I looked around the field once more as the recovery of the wounded and the scavenging of weapons and munitions continued, my gaze falling to one of the holes nearby, before glancing back at Ramparts, “good work, by the way. That was a clever ambush. How’d you pull it off though―”

As though on cue, I felt the ground beneath me quiver slightly. Startled, I took to the air, hovering just above the bloody surface as the head of a unicorn mare burst up through the ground. She shook off a few errant flecks of dirt and looked around, quickly spotting Ramparts, “there y’are! That unicorn friend of yours is looking for ya.”

Ramparts looked down at the sable mare and quirked his brow, “which unicorn friend?”

“The mare,” Marl replied simply. When the courser’s quizzical expression remained unchanged, she added, “the purple one,” still, his inquiring features persisted, “oh fuck it: she wants you keep an eye out for the Wonderbolt. She says that fool turkey’s dun gone and tried to get herself killed in the battle and she’s worried sick.”

The stallion merely shifted his gaze up from the ground-bound unicorn head to where I was hovering just above her. Curious, Marl craned her own head upwards, finally noticing me, “oh. There’y’are!” she smiled and looked back at Ramparts, “I’ll go tell her to stop her frettin’ then!”

With that, the mare’s head once more vanished below the surface and she was gone. I fluttered over and peered into the hole that she’d left behind, noting the narrow tunnel that extended below, “Marl and her crew seem to be pretty remarkable diggers,” Ramparts stated redundantly, “if I didn’t know any better, I’d think they were half hell hound. Apparently, according to her, they just come from a long line of ponies who knew a lot about rocks and how to get at them. Claims she had ancestors who could punch their way through mountains, or something like that,” he waved a hoof at the nearby tunnel openings, “considering what her clan accomplished in one night, I can’t honestly say I doubt her.”

“That’s incredible,” I said, audibly impressed, “all of this was. The ambush, the rescue, the fight...I don’t know that any of it could have gone better,” I looked back at the former Republic officer, “you did really good, Ramparts. You saved all our lives.”

The stallion snorted and shook his head, “I can’t take all the credit for this. Starlight first floated the idea of attacking them from the rear, believing that she could get enough unicorns together for them to cast a mass teleportation spell to make the mercenaries appear where we needed them,” he explained, “she went to Marl to get the gemstones that she’d need to do it. When she was explaining what the gems were for, Marl let her know that her folks could do the same thing by digging these tunnels.

“There was concern that the stable ponies would feel the vibrations from all the digging, especially as fast as it was going to need to be done, but Keri assured us he could ‘calm the earth spirits’, whatever that meant, so that nopony noticed anything. Griselda and her Razor Beaks provided ariel recon that let us plot where to place the openings so that everypony came out in the right spots.

“It also turns out that Hemlock knows quite a lot about potion making. She and some of her mares were able to supplement our healing potion supplies, while Foxglove stayed up all night supervising a team making improvised grenades.

“This,” the stallion waved his hoof around us, “this was a group effort.”

“Well, it looks like it was a pretty good group,” I noted, allowing myself to smile broadly at the stallion, “I should probably get them together so that we can talk about how to deal with the stable, huh?”

Ramparts quirked a brow, regarding me in quiet surprise for a brief moment. Then a smile began to curl his lip and the earth pony nodded, “if you want to lead a planning session, I think I can get everypony there in an hour or so. Most of Sandy’s bar is being used as an overflow infirmary, but I think there’s a room upstairs we can use―”

“Captain Ramparts!” a mare called out from nearby, drawing both of gazes in her direction. It was a unicorn mare dressed in barding that identified her as being a part of Shady Saddles’ militia. She wasn’t alone either, I immediately noted, my eye widening in surprise. There was a stallion with her. Specifically, a large, gray, stallion with a white mane and golden eyes, an easily identifiable double-horn mounted to his forehead.

If I thought that myself or Ramparts had looked a little worse for wear as a result of the recent battle, our injuries didn’t even begin to compare with what Arginine seemed to have been put through. Just from looking at him, it amazed me that he was even alive, much less standing up under his own power. He did have quite the pronounced stiffness to his gait as he trudged, his legs severely hobbled, behind the militia mare leading him. A half dozen other armed ponies from the town had formed a loose circle around their prisoner. From how freely a couple of them were still jabbing him none-too-gently with the butts of their rifles, I found myself idly wondering exactly how many of his injuries he’d sustained after being captured.

The most likely answer to that thought didn’t sit too well with me. It was all that I could do not to snap at those ponies when they brought Arginine to a halt a dozen or so feet from the pair of us and then proceeded to assault all four of his legs at once with vicious striked from their weapons, sending the stallion to the blood-soaked ground with a pained yell. It was the first time I think that I’d ever heard him cry out like that.

I didn’t like it.

“This one surrendered,” the militia pony sneered, not even trying to hide her displeasure at the notion; as though Arginine hadn’t had the right to do anything but fight to the death, “we thought about killing him ourselves,” clearly these ponies had done more than merely ‘thought’ about it, I noted, observing his swollen facial features and battered frame. The unicorn mare flashed Ramparts and myself a vicious grin, “but then we thought that you deserved to do it more. This is the stallion that betrayed you, right?”

“He is,” I heard Ramparts say in a tone that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up. I glanced over at the brown earth pony and saw the cold, unbridled, hatred in his narrowed eyes. There was no doubt at all in my mind that Ramparts would kill Arginine, right here and now.

It was an all too understandable desire. Arginine hadn’t just betrayed us, after all. He’d put the ponies of Shady Saddles in jeopardy. Hundreds lay dead now because of his machinations. He’d turned me over to the enemy to be executed. There wasn’t a community or organization in the entirety of the Wasteland, I felt, that wouldn’t sentence Arginine to death for that list of offenses.

Ramparts’ mouth moved towards the trigger bit of his battle saddle. Then he hesitated and looked over at me, “he’s yours; go head,” and the stallion passed me a pistol from a holster on his withers.

I looked at the offered weapon, a simple nine millimeter pistol. Substantially less potent a weapon than the compact forty-five I usually favored, but even one of those smaller ball rounds through the top of Arginine’s skull would have been more than up to the task of ending his life. I suppose, that of anypony out here today, I might have been the one most personally wronged by him. Whether that meant I truly deserved the dubious ‘honor’ of being the stallion’s executioner, I couldn’t say.

What I did say was, “no.”

Arginine’s ear twitched slightly at the word, but otherwise didn’t react at all. Ramparts and the other Shady Saddles ponies did though. The former courser did a double-take, as though he was certain that he couldn’t possibly have heard me right, “what?”

I extended the pistol back towards him, balanced upon my pinions, “I’m not going to kill him,” I said, following it up almost immediately with, “nopony is,” I held my gaze upon the ponies who’d brought him to us to ensure that they understood. I saw quite a few rebellious expressions looking back at me. For a while, I wasn’t certain that they wouldn’t just kill him anyway, no matter what I said. It wasn’t like I was their leader or anything; they weren’t obligated to follow any instructions that I gave them.

“You’re not serious,” the incredulity in Ramparts’ voice was both unmistakeable and understandable, “do you have any idea how many ponies died today because of this asshole?!” he snapped, waving a hoof around us, “one of them was almost you, by the way!”

I regarded the stallion evenly. While I could understand his reaction, that didn’t mean that I appreciated it any. Besides, “those ponies were going to attack this place eventually. There’s probably nothing that we could have done to ultimately prevent something like this,” I could see the grudging acknowledgement on the earth pony’s face. The residents of Shady Saddles might not have known that those stable ponies were preparing for exactly this sort of campaign, but we all had. It had only been a matter of time.

Honestly, this had probably been the best outcome that we could have hoped for, I noted. If the ponies from Arginine’s stable had shown up a few days earlier or later, Shady Saddles would have been completely wiped out and there would have been nothing that we could do the stop it. Hundreds of innocent ponies would have been slaughtered and Constance’s army would have been roaming around Neighvada without us having any notion of where they’d be heading to next. At least this way the town was safe and we knew what direction the army was headed in now.

Arginine selling us out like this had done a lot more to help us than hurt us, all things considered.

…!

My eyes widened as that thought crossed my mind and I looked at Arginine. The bruised and battered stallion held my own gaze with his swollen expression that was otherwise its normally impassive self. It was a ridiculous thought though, wasn’t it? Especially in light of the conversation that we’d had last night. Either he’d been playing some weird psychological game, or this outcome hadn’t actually been something he’d planned. I had to know for myself though.

I stepped closer to him, ignoring the other ponies around me, “RG? Last night you told me that you’d lost confidence in me, and that you didn’t think the others would be able to stand up to your stable. Was that true?”

The kneeling stallion nodded his head stiffly, “it was,” he acknowledged.

My eye narrowed, “but if you hadn’t contacted your stable and told them what we were planning, then this fight wouldn’t have happened, and we wouldn’t have had this chance to beat them,” the stallion didn’t respond; which I supposed was probably because I hadn’t phrased that much like a question of any sort, “did you lure your stable here so that we could beat them?”

Arginine remained silent for a moment more, then, “I merely arranged for an opportunity to test my stable’s capabilities against those of your chosen companions,” he replied, “I had no way of knowing the ultimate outcome.”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Ramparts growled from behind me. The earth pony surged forward, and for a moment I was certain that he was going to strike the already battered unicorn. However, the courser somehow managed to restrain himself to merely snarling at our prisoner, “this was all one of your sick tests?! Ponies died here, you bastard!”

Unsurprisingly, Arginine remained unflappable, even with such an obviously furious stallion snarling only a couple inches from his face, “many ponies have already been killed by my stable, even without my intervention,” he pointed out, and followed his response up with, “and my...evaluations have previously resulted exclusively in the deaths of ponies from my own stable. I do not recall you voicing such objection at that time.”

I probably wouldn’t have blamed Ramparts if the stallion had punched Arginine right then. He did not, which probably spoke to his professionalism as a genuine soldier for many years. That wasn’t to say that he was mollified by Arginine’s response all that much. I did take the opportunity to step between them though, and Ramparts withdrew a few yards, fuming.

“Okay, so you didn’t do this because you thought we’d win,” I acknowledged, “but you did arrange for both your stable’s and our main forces to face each other, right?”

“If my stable could defeat the forces gathered here, that would have removed any meaningful obstacles impeding the planned extermination of the valley,” Arginine nodded.

“But we won,” I pointed out, waiting to see his reaction to the outcome.

“Indeed. General Constance’s underestimation of the threat that the residents of the surface posed served as her justification to divide her forces and allow for your victory today,” the stallion said, inclining his head briefly, “it was a grievous tactical blunder. Especially for a member of a strain that is supposed to be the most cunning that our stable is capable of producing,” even I wasn’t sure if I genuinely noticed the slight tug on the corner of his lip that would have indicated a satisfied smirk from the stallion.

“Demonstrating that the allegedly most brilliant tactical mind the engineers of our stable are capable of producing can be outmaneuvered by a hodge-podge army of surface ponies would significantly undercut my stable’s assessments regarding their progress in creating ‘better ponies’ thus far,” the stallion said, holding my gaze with his own.

“That filly is supposed to be the perfect general or something?” I quirked my brow skeptically.

He nodded, “General Constance is the flagship example of the Nu Strain, which are to serve as the tactical leaders of the forces charged with cleansing the surface of all other invalid strains, to make way for the eventual Omega Strains my stable will produce.”

“She sure did seem pretty ‘new’,” I agreed, rolling my eye, “why the heck is your stable putting fillies in charge like that.”

“It was never intended for Nu Strains to be deployed in an underdeveloped state,” Arginine admitted, “However, your intervention thus far has obviously prompted the leadership in my stable to accelerate their timetables considerably. Obviously, they did not feel it was appropriate to wait for the general to reach full maturity before giving her command of the forces that had been constituted thus far.”

“I’m not sure how comfortable I am with a pony like her leading those hulking soldiers of yours,” I grumbled, remembering my short but terse encounter with the haughty little filly, “what exactly are they feeding you in that stable, anyway?”

“Sorghum,” he replied simply.

I rolled my eye, “whatever. So we’ve got an army of mutant ponies being led by a psychotic filly terrorizing the valley; and no force capable of taking them on head-to-head, is that about right?” I leveled my gaze at the bruised stallion, who nodded, though he seemed to take some exception with my summary of the situation. I glanced back at Ramparts briefly, “Ramps thinks Constance’s army represents most of your stable’s defenses too. Is he right?”

“There are sentries and guards, of course,” Arginine said in response, drawing a surprised look from most of the nearby ponies―myself included―with how candid he was being with such sensitive information, “but that army does indeed consist of the bulk of my stable’s forces. What defenders remain, while certainly capable, are significantly fewer in number,” he paused briefly, considering, before addings, “unless doctrine has undergone a significant change since my departure, that is.”

“So, if we were to say, march on your stable, these mercenaries I hired would have a good chance of overwhelming those defenders and taking the facility?”

All eyes were on Arginine. The stallion held my gaze briefly, and then nodded, “if the defenses have not radically changed, I estimate that your army would have a good chance of success overwhelming them, yes.”

One of the militia ponies scowled, “there’s no way he’s telling us the truth,” she insisted, “he’s trying to lure us into attacking his stable so that we’ll be caught in an ambush! I bet he warned them to be ready.”

I frowned, “he already warned them that all of the ponies I was recruiting to attack his stable would be here; which is why their army attacked,” I pointed out to the militia mare, “Constance was certain that the portion of her army she left behind would be more than enough to destroy the whole town,” she still didn’t looked very convinced of my reasoning, however, “you didn’t get to meet their general. She thinks surface ponies like us are stupid and weak. It wouldn’t occur to her that we could have won here,” and, admittedly, without those rather brilliantly conceived surprise tactics developed by my friends, nopony would have, “and she strikes me as the kind of pony who is way too full of herself to think that she could possibly lose.

“She wouldn’t have organized a trap for us, because she thinks we’re already dead,” I glanced at Arginine for confirmation, “and I bet that she’s already made a report back to the ponies in her stable telling them that we’re all dead; am I right?”

“She would have had to justify her departure for Seaddle,” the stallion agreed.

“It’s not a trap,” I concluded.

“You can’t possibly know that,” the militia mare insisted.

“Yeah, I do.”

“How?!”

“Because Arginine may be a lot of things, but he’s never lied to me,” I quirked a smile at the battered pony on the ground, “frankly, he’s honest to a fault. Let him up.”

That didn’t go over well. Both the militia ponies that had captured him, as well as Ramparts, voiced their objections, with the courser’s being the loudest, “you can’t be serious?! Look, if you don’t want to kill your coltfriend or whatever, I can understand that,” the mention of my relationship with Arginine earned a pointed glare from myself, but the earth pony was unphased as he continued on with his objection, “but we’re not letting him go! He betrayed us, Windfall―not just you―all of us! Ponies are dead because of what he did―”

“We’re all alive because of what he did,” I snapped back briskly, drawing Ramparts up short, “now, I’m not saying that was how he intended things to go,” I acknowledged, “but the bottom line is that we faired a lot better because he arranged for this attack. If we’d met that army on the way to the stable like we were planning on doing, none of us would have survived, and you know it.”

“So, what? He gets a ‘pass’ because their general got cocky? That’s bullshit, Windfall; and you know it!”

“He gets a pass,” I seethed at the stallion, “because he thought he was doing what was best for ponykind!”

The earth pony blinked in surprise, caught off guard by my rebuke. I took advantage of his silence and further articulated my decision, “he and his stable aren’t raiders, Ramparts; they aren’t doing this because they want caps or slaves or whatever. They want to fix the Wasteland, and they genuinely believe they can do it like this.

“Are they going about it in a really fucked up way? Damn straight! Am I going to move the clouds and the earth to stop them? Duh!

“But what I’m not going to do is punish a pony who really thought that he was helping to fix the Wasteland. Especially,” I looked over at the gray stallion, “when I get the impression that he is finally starting to see that he was helping the wrong ponies. Isn’t that right, RG?”

I noticed the tug of his lip, “the data points that I have observed over the last couple of days have been...enlightening.”

Ramparts shook his head, snorting, “you can’t possibly expect us to trust him?”

“Maybe not,” I acknowledged, shrugging. Then I held the courser’s gaze, “but I’m hoping that you still trust me. I’m not your commander, Ramps. I can’t―and wouldn’t―order you to come with me any further than you’re comfortable with.

“I’m bringing Arginine with me. You can come, you can stay and help Sandy, you can go back to New Reino with Yatima, whatever you want. Whichever you choose, I won’t hold it against you either,” I assured the stallion. The two of us regarded each other for a long, silent, moment.

Then I turned to militia ponies watching over Arginine, waiting to see how they were going to react to the news. For a good while, none of them moved. Their expressions weren’t pleasant ones, and I couldn’t say that I blamed them. It had been their home that had been attacked. I had no idea how many of their friends and family members had been killed in the fighting this morning. At least one of them looked like they wanted to just shoot Arginine in the head and be done with the whole thing.

I heard Ramparts grunt behind me, and the other ponies grimaced in disgust, but stepped away from their prisoner. Silently, I approached the large, battered, stallion and helped him to his hooves. It was little more than a symbolic gesture, as there was hardly any way that a young mare of my size would have been able to support much of the larger pony’s weight if he’d actually needed my help to stand. Arginine was smart enough no to make any comments either as the two of us began making slow progress back towards the town.

It was still up in the air as to whether or not some aggrieved townspony on the wall would shoot Arginine dead on principle when we got closer, but there wasn’t much that I’d be able to do about something like that aside from hope it didn’t happen at all.

I glanced back over my shoulder at Ramparts as we left, but the brown earth pony was already issuing out fresh orders to the militia ponies. Idly, I wondered whether or not he’d continue on with us after that exchange. I hoped that he would, but I wouldn’t have held it against him if he chose otherwise. My decision was undeniably going to prove to be at least as unpopular with the others as well. Foxglove would think I was being naive, or maybe even that I was thinking with my flank or something.

“This is perhaps a good time to return your possessions,” the stallion said in a subdued tone. His horn glowed and he floated over my saddlebags, which I hadn’t seen since he’d drugged me. My eye widened and I came to an immediate stop. I snatched them out of the air with my wing and started rifling through them. I very quickly found the pendant that Doctor Lancet had given me last night and slipped it around my neck. Next I dug out the bottle of hormone pills that he’d given me and took a hasty double-dose. I wasn’t sure if that would be the same as making up for what I’d been unable to take last night, but it was worth a shot.

I sat in the mud for a while, one hoof clutching the little healing crystal laying on my breast and the other held tenderly against my belly. I couldn’t feel anything of course. It was far too early for anything like that. I just hoped that not having the pendant on last night, and everything that I’d been through all day, hadn’t been the final nail in the coffin that the former Seaddle doctor had warned me was in my baby’s future if I wasn’t careful.

I hadn’t even considered what else I was risking by throwing myself back into the fight like I had. The smart thing to do, for my baby’s sake, would have been to go with Foxglove and find Doctor Lancet and let him look me over and get me a new pendant as quickly as possible. Instead, I’d just gone ahead and placed both our lives in jeopardy.

What kind of mother did that? I bit my lip, doubt besetting me, as I started to wonder if it might actually be better for me to take the healing talisman off and let my body go on doing what it had been trying to...especially if this was the kind of precedent that I was going to set as a parent. I mean, I obviously wasn’t prepared for this kind of responsibility. What did I know about caring for foals?! I’d grown up learning how to kill ponies, not raise them!

“It’s true, isn’t it,” Arginine said in a surprisingly gentle tone as he regarded me, “you are pregnant.”

I nodded silently.

The large stallion’s eyes widened slightly in what, for him, was probably akin to stark surprise, “I will admit that I doubted the validity of your claim last night. I was under the strong suspicion that you were making an attempt to appeal to my sympathies in order to enlist my aid in an escape attempt. But you were being entirely truthful, weren’t you?”

Again, I nodded, my lips cracking in a wan smile, “I doubt something like that would have worked anyway, right? You’re not a very sympathetic pony.”

“I am not prone to emotional investment, no,” the stallion agreed. He was silent for a few seconds, then, “but...had I believed you…” he canted his head and idly stroked his chin, “I would have been...very curious to see the results of a genetic melding of a Lambda Strain with a specimen such as yourself. Such a foal would present with fascinating characteristics,” he mused.

I snorted, unable to help but let out a short laugh, “that has got to be the most Arginine way of saying: ‘I bet we’d make beautiful babies together’!”

“As the progeny of a genetically superior stallion that is the product of centuries of careful chromosomal refinement and one of the most capable genetically invalid mares in the Wasteland, it is doubtful that they could be anything other than a marvel.”

“Wow...that was almost romantic,” I smirked at the stallion, “but you’re not quite out of hot water with me yet, buster. You did drug me and stand by while I was nearly hanged to death, remember? Just because I spared your life and don’t actively hate you doesn’t mean that I’ve forgiven you.”

“Noted,” Arginine nodded, “and to be expected. I am grateful, by the way. I certainly would have understood any desire you might have had to seek retribution through my death.”

I sighed and stood back up, shaking my head, “enough ponies have died today. Besides, I expect you to repay me by telling me everything you know about how to get into your stable. Passcodes, layouts, weaknesses; anything and everything, you’re going to tell us. Understood?

“We’ve just proven that we can kick the flanks of your stable’s strongest and brightest; which means we’re the ‘better ponies’, right? Your goal in life is to help the better ponies, so you’re going to help us―and only us―from now on. You’re not getting a third chance,” I thought for a moment, “or a fourth chance. Whatever chance you’re on right now, it’s your last one.”

“Understood, and appreciated,” Arginine agreed, following at my side, “and I will indeed provide any and all information that I possess.”

“Good,” I nodded. Then I frowned as I beheld what was waiting for us at the gates of Shady Saddles, in the form of a violet unicorn mare with smoldering emerald eyes, “you can start by telling me how to convince Foxglove not to carve you up like a Fancy Buck Cake…”

Footnote:...

Thank you so much for reading! As always, a thumbs up and comment are always greatly appreciated

I've set up a Cover Art Fund if you're interested and have any bits lying around! You can see what I'M capable of, heh; professional assistance is clearly needed here!