“Anythin’ tah report Crete?” The Colonel asked as I stood before him in the small white canvassed office that had been set aside for him amongst the many rooms of the Command Tent.

“No, Sir.” I said simply, wishing I had the extra layer of facial protection my mask provided. Not from attack but from my less than perfect poker face that knew more than I was telling my commanding officer.

“Hmmph…” He grumbled as he fell back into his hard wooden chair that was far less comfortable than his personal chair back at Camp Macintosh.

“Is there something wrong, Sir…?” I asked with some hesitation as I couldn’t yet tell if he had seen through my lie.

“Can we speak as friends, Crete?” He asked suddenly, nodding for me to close the door, which I promptly did before sitting down on an equally uncomfortable chair in front of his desk.

“O-of course, Sir.” I responded with a soft hitch in my voice. He liked to talk as friends often but there was something about his current attitude that had me on edge.

“Tell meh honestly…” He said tiredly, looking at me with a sudden age appearing in his face that made him finally look as worn out as his official record of forty years in the service indicated. “What are yer thoughts on th’ General?”

“Would you like my official thoughts or my personal thoughts…?” I asked after a moment’s hesitation.

“Well considerin’ Ah just muted th’ microphone they snuck intah mah desk, Ah want yer personal feelin’s on th’ bastard.” He chuckled softly, pulling out a small black disk that had obviously been taped to the bottom of the dull metal desk he had been given, a noticeable bullet hole through the center.

He called the General a bastard so he definitely wasn’t fucking around with this and wasn’t pulling my tail either. I loved my C.O for these very reasons. He knew how to balance professional with personal relationships when it came to how he interacted with his subordinates. It transformed him from some untouchable figurehead to more of a father figure anypony could turn to, save for the new Recruits who had learned to fear authority in the General Army. More often than not he would share a cigar or a bottle of his personal stash of Apple Jack Whisky with a group of his Rangers during the night when things had wound down for the day and swap dirty jokes and war stories. If not for the large office and the silver phoenix insignia pin on his hat and lapels, it would be hard to distinguish him as a C.O rather than just a Ranger or even a common soldier like everypony else at camp.

“Well...if I’m allowed that kind of freedom, then I’m just gonna be brutally honest.” I said with a grin as he leaned back as best he could and sipped from a bottle of whisky while lighting a cigar.

“Yer honesty is ahlways brutal, Crete.” He chuckled as he took a long drag on his stogie and let the thick grey smoke billow out of his mouth like a lazy steam engine. “Tha’s why Ah like ya so much.”

“Thanks…” I replied with a small blush before I regained my composure enough to say, “I think he’s a fucking sadistic racist fat assed asswipe. Sir.”

He laughed heartily as he took a long swig of his bottle and another drag on his cigar.

“Glad Ah’m not th’ only one who thinks our C.O is ah fuckin’ pig.” He chuckled with a wide grin.

“Sir…?” I asked with more humility than I had intended, the need to tell someone other than my Squad what the General had ordered us to do rising like a viper of disgust in my breast.

“Yessir?” He asked, looking up from his bottle that he had been studying, the alcohol already starting to glaze his eyes over a bit with sleepy contentment.

“The General...he’s gotten intel that there’s a caravan of Zebras coming in from the Empire here in a week or so and he’s asked Alpha Squad to lead the assault on it.” I said in a hurried tone as if we were going to be discovered at any moment by the General or worse someone from the M.O.M.

“Oh? Well tha’s nice.” He said with a smile. “Not many get tah do ah mission given by th’ General. Give them Zebras ah nice assbeating k?”

“No, Sir please listen.” I said with almost frantic fervor as i tried to convey the horror of the mission. “The convoy is a bunch of foals. Zebra foals.”

“Foals…?” He asked with confusion. “Why send ah buncha kids tah fight ah War?”

“They’re going to try and settle the Badlands but I don’t think they’ve gotten word about how close we are to kicking them out of here.” I said, trying to settle my frantic speech enough to get through to him. Yet another reason I hated alcohol.

“The General wants us to kill a bunch of kids.” I said with as much sternness as I had in my possession. “Instead of sending them back home or taking them in for ‘relocation’, he wants them all fucking obliterated. He’s assigning his Shock Troopers to work with us and their weapons are designed for massive carnage. Like 60mm launchers and .50 cal miniguns. You don’t send that kind of shit in unless you’re wanting to leave a crater.”

“Th’ T-51?” He asked slowly, visibly trying to fight through the haze of intoxication. “Fuckin’ serious?”

“Have I lied to you before?” I asked before I immediately wished I had worded that differently.

“Heh...ya have Crete but yew don’ fuck around wit' somethin’ this crazy.” He said eliciting a sigh of relief from me. “Ah’m gonna call this one in. He may be th’ General but he still has tah talk tah meh before he goes n’ snags mah top Rangers. Tha’ alone is enough tah phone in abou’. Real question is how th’ fuck do we call this here bullshit in an’ keep ya off tha’ bastard’s Black List? Last thang Ah want is tah have him ship yer ass off tah th’ Zulu Campaign and then boom. Yer fuckin’ dead.”

I stared at him with shock as he confirmed my suspicions about the mysterious disappearances of more than a dozen officers that I knew about who either got suddenly reassigned to the Zulu Campaign in the Empire or just flat out vanished like they had never existed in the first place.

“Yep, Ah know about th’ General’s Black List…” He said with a heavy sigh. “Ah ended up on it at one point but he couldn’ get rid of meh so easily. See, mah daddy is one of them bigshots back home so tah have meh killed would’ve sparked up an investigation and he ain’t got official backing by M.O.M fer his shit. They’d rip him apart...but we can’ report him just yet. We still gots ourselves ah War tah fight and he’s ah competent tactician. We’ll use this here mission of yers tah our advantage though. Any ideas?”

I thought it through seriously as we were both on the line now. The most logical thing would be for the Colonel to head to Canterlot himself in person and tell the Princess and any others his concerns about what was going on on the Southern Front. Due to the nature of the two pronged attack of the Zebras splitting us between the Eastern and Southern Fronts, most of Equestria’s attention was on the East as many more large cities existed in the area whereas the South was nothing more than dirt, sand and small agricultural towns. With the situation being as it was, the General was granted a lot more leeway in how he ran things as he wasn’t under direct and constant supervision by the Princess, which accounted for the existence of his personal Black List. The fucker could kill or otherwise dispose of anypony he wanted whether or not they posed an actual threat to his reign over the South. The gold stars were his crown and the Badlands his kingdom. The image of the silver engraved motto of the Desert Rangers on my Sequoia came to mind. ‘Against All Tyrants’. It’s what I signed up for wasn’t it?

“Alright, I’ve got an idea.” I said quickly, hoping our time together in private wasn’t running out sooner than I had time to explain. “He gave all of us these holotapes with the mission briefing on them but we’re not supposed to access them until the sixteenth. I don’t know if these things are tracked for unauthorized access but I’m sure you can find somepony who can fiddle around and find out. Either way, take it with you as evidence for my claims.”

“Take it where?” He asked, the alcohol leaving a confused but happy grin on his face.

“Canterlot.” I said firmly, setting the small holotape on his desk with a metallic clack. “Take it all the way up to the fucking Princess if you have to. They’ll listen to you more than they would me. Besides, I don’t exactly have the jurisdiction to come and go as I want like you can. I have to stay back here and lead my team.”

“Tha’ there is truer than a fuckin’ college textbook!” He chuckled, ending in a small hiccup. “Get it? ‘Cause them textbooks be ahll facts n’ truths eh?”

I responded with a half-hearted giggle at his unique if somewhat lame attempt at humor and after a few more minutes of idle conversation about the things we hated about the General’s tubby appearance, I finally asked if I could retire for the night. It didn’t take much for him to agree as it was five something in the morning and I hadn’t been able to sleep since the night before due to the impossibility of taking a nap in this goddamned heat.

His snores were almost noticeable through his closed door as I shut it behind me and took off towards the exit of the Command Tent, only for the familiar voice to call out, “Well, well, well! Colonel Crete! May I have a word with you?”

I steeled myself against my revulsion for the fat bastard and turned to face him and his two Shock Troopers with the neutral face of subordination to authority. It was only the second time I had actually seen him standing and not hidden from the chest down behind a desk and I noticed that his drab olive green uniform did little to hide the excessive curves of his belly and flanks. Perhaps he could delude himself that the uniform suited him and made him look muscular but at three foot ten, he came across more as a gold star spangled bowling ball in a uniform.

“Yes Sir?” I asked with an even a tone as to border on sounding bored.

“Your patrol with Captain Onyx went well I take it?” He asked with a creepy undertone of sneering superiority.

“Yes Sir.” I said simply, focusing my thoughts on images of armor and penetration stats for various bullets to keep myself from showing any emotion.

“Excellent…” He crooned, his accent making my fur stand on end and forcing me to really think about how well a .50 Big Mac Guard saboted tungsten dart would penetrate light armored plating (which was really well, up to nineteen millimeters of steel at 1,400 yards).

“Is there anything else you needed me for, Sir?” I asked politely, nodding towards the large ornate oval clock hanging above the front door. “I would like to turn in for the night.”

“Yes, yes...of course.” He chuckled, motioning for his cronies to follow him. “Take care of yourself, Crete. We need you.”

He left without another word for which I was grateful as I felt I had hit my limit of words that I could spare for him. I nearly galloped the whole way back to my tent, unconsciously wanting to put as much distance between his creepy ass and myself as possible. There was something in the way he addressed me that came across as unnerving and it was more than the fact that he was openly gleeful about mowing down a convoy of children. The skies were clear that night and there was nopony out there digging in the dirt but us. Buck Beak was a bit of a jackass but he knew how to do his job and I had been with him long enough to trust him when he confirmed there was nothing in sight. If there were, he would either just tell us or, more likely than not, just take it out himself as he could never get enough amusement out of the large explosion of dirt and shrapnel (or liquid fire) that came from the end of his grenade launcher. Still...I couldn’t shake the feeling that the General knew a lot more than he let on. Of course then again I was guilty of the same crime.

Walking into my tent, I found all but Huckleberry and Rain Dancer had hit the sack already and were filling the interior of the tent with a cacophony of snores. Huckleberry and Rain were seated at the metal table nursing bottles of water and a light snack of honeyed pine nuts and raisins. They regarded me with tired expressions as I entered and Hucks pulled out a chair for me to sink into, pushing a modest pile of nuts and raisins my direction.

“Well…” I finally said after a few moments of relative silence save for the loudmouthed sleepers to our right. “I told the Colonel about the mission the General gave us.”

“Mhm…?” Rain Dancer hummed tiredly, not even willing to form words.

“He said he’s going to take a trip to see the Princess here soon and take it up with her directly. For now, let’s just go about business as usual and hold our heads down until we get further news.” I said dully, the exhaustion finally catching up with me and sludging my words like molasses.

“Great…” Huckleberry sighed, sucking a nut near her face off the table and into her mouth. “What about what’s his bucket?”

“There’s a lot of buckets out there Hucks…” I sighed back, picking out the raisins from the pile before me since they were at least a little more appetising than the nuts, though not by much.

“You know...the one in black.” She said cryptically.

“Oh...we’ll work with him as best we can. There’s not much we can do about him right now so we just have to wait and see. For now...let’s just call it a night, k?”

We all rolled out of our chairs and into our respective cots, Huckleberry pausing just long enough to grace me with a small but meaningful kiss before we all collapsed as one. There was nothing like a day of pure boredom compounded with insane heat and ending with a bizarre and somewhat stressful night patrol to knock the edge out of a girl and make her sleep through anything.

“I’ve got eyes on twenty Z’s. Looks like they’re trying to sneak around the main thrust and corner some of our G.I’s over by that little patch of trees.”

Out of the corner of my eye I followed the view on the helmet feed and found the spot Buck had indicated on the far left side of the canyon wall where a small knot of dried and dead trees stood, a testament to the once extensive orchards that used to occupy the region. The military had been gracious enough to allow us three whole hours of sleep before we were once again thrust into the heart of the day’s newest push to the south, the air alive with the sound of all manner of gunfire, energy blasts and explosions of all sizes. The Zebras had been busy in those three hours and had set up a defensive perimeter a mile from their camp and had dug in with concerning deftness. They had dialed in their artillery onto strategic points in the trench networks approaching Camp Fuck-Off and had made short work of two heavy pushes South. At the same time they had doubled the number of HMGs and flak cannons pointed at the sky all but denying Airborne units any access to the defensive line and having decent odds of hitting them blindly through clouds.

At the moment we were involved in an ever changing combat scenario where everyone’s skill was put to the test and everyone’s chosen weapon had their time to shine. One moment I would be sending fifteen rounds downrange into a group of Askari or a combat robot and the next Pennies Worth was tearing ass with her combat shotgun as a sudden group of enemies swarmed our position keeping us on a constant arbitrary cycle of long, medium and close range combat. Buck Beak had to be careful when combat came too close for comfort as he easily could injure or kill one of us in his attempts to rescue us with a 40mm, which nearly happened more than once. Thankfully our armor was capable of taking glancing shrapnel and the worse that came of it were some cuts in the small areas not covered by armor.

Luckily for me we were at a long enough pause in fighting for me to turn my scope on the area and confirm there were several Legionnaires flitting through the gnarled trunks headed towards a section of trench that flashed with angry lights from the abundance of gunfire therein. There wasn’t much I could do from my elevation except perhaps catch the group off guard and take a few down but I was overall limited on options since I was several thousand yards away from them and could only catch pieces of the whole picture.

“Light ‘em up!” I commanded with pleasure, knowing he had been waiting for the chance to use his multi-barreled rocket launcher ever since the fighting had started but had been barred from doing so due to the close quarters combat and the high potential for collateral damage.

“Oh I’ll do more than that!” He called back, the feed on his helmet clearly showing the long, wide barrels of his quad-launcher on his left side while his pump-action grenade launcher was clutched in the talons of his right arm. “They gonna get wrecked as fuck, Imma tell ya that much!"

It was interesting to watch the missiles and grenades be shot from his aerial point of view only to detonate on the ground before me engulfing the knot of trees in a large plume of hot smoke and flaming dirt. The Zebras had been engulfed in the blasts and hidden from sight but there was still some satisfaction to be gained by watching the little red ticks on my E.F.S that had marked their position disappear like they had never existed. It was a bit out of our way to protect a group of grunts who were probably going to end up dead anyway by the end of the day but they were our fellow Equestrians at the end of the day. They had earned what little help we could provide amidst our own anthill of problems.

It was easy to disassociate yourself from feeling any sort of emotional attachment to the unknown infantry of the General Army who came and went by the thousands while you and your small team stuck around by virtue of your armor and prowess on the battlefield and it was fairly common for even Rangers to feel a level of contempt for these poor saps. I did my best not to (though even I fell victim to feeling a sense of superiority by being a Ranger and a Veteran at that) because I forced myself to remember these guys and gals had family, friends and dreams of their own. Buck Beak knew this feeling better than any of us having been part of the General Army himself as an enlisted soldier. The only reason he became a Ranger and subsequently a Veteran Ranger was his capability with airborne combat techniques and his obsession with explosive ordinance.

A heavy blast detonated a few feet from me and sent me tumbling over the edge of a nearby trench wall and onto the blood-soaked ground below from the concussive force. The helmet had done its job by protecting my eardrums from exploding from the soundwave of the blast while my armor and duster had absorbed the brunt of the explosion leaving me with a spinning head and a painful bruise that went from my butt all the way to my neck. As I lay in a crumpled heap against the shaking wall of the trench, my helmet kicked in its Medical Health Gauge system to assess the scope of the damage. Pictured on the left of my visor was a basic silhouette of a mare’s body highlighting most limbs and my head in green while left side of my ass, chest and neck showed a greenish yellow color. Nothing too serious (especially compared to the bloodied pulp I would have been otherwise) but I felt the relatively ‘healthy’ green understated how much the bruising actually hurt. Hucks was gonna have conniptions for sure...

“Athena!”

Several thumps nearby told me my team had jumped down after me and a painful lift of the head confirmed it. Everyone minus Buck Beak quickly approached and helped me up to my hooves; Huckleberry checking me for injury while the rest distractedly stood guard nearby. In this maze of trenchworks, we were just as likely to be left alone as be apprehended by the enemy which made our time spent below precious, paranoid and numbered.

“What happened?” Huckleberry asked frantically as she yanked my left leg up and checked my PipBuck for the M.H.G readout. "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear..."

“I was hoping one of you had the answer to that…” I groaned, my chest burning somewhat with pain as I breathed in. "Haven't felt a hit like that in awhile so that took me more by surprise than it should have."

“Something went off next to you and next thing we knew you took a dive into this trench.” Rain Dancer commented, looking back at us with his machine gun pointing down the empty furrow of earth before him.

“It felt like a forty-mil…” I groaned, looking up angrily towards where Buck Beak was circling in the sky, small puffs of grey smoke shooting out of his launcher followed by the empty casings falling to the earth around us.

“Mind your aim you dumb shit!” I yelled at him over the radio, craning my head to the side so Huckleberry could jab me in the neck with a dose of Medix to kill the pain. “I know a forty when I feel one!”

“Yo, don’t blame that shit on me, I was still emptying a tube of incendiaries at those shitheads in the trees like you told me to.” He growled back, the sound of his launcher being loaded accompanying the live feed of his armored talons shoving the large rounds into the magazine tube.

“Well then where did it come from?” Huckleberry asked, just as the spark of a bullet shattering on the side of her helmet answered her question.

She and I dropped to the dirt floor, the impact knocking the wind out of me as the Medix had yet to kick in leaving her to draw her rifle and fire ten rounds in quick succession over the heads of Penny and Rain Dancer who had likewise dove for cover. As the empty casings danced off my breastplate and onto the ground, the rapid angry bark of Rain’s machine gun followed suit, accompanied by the flesh tearing roar of Penny’s shotgun. My head was still a bit dazed from the pain but I was infinitely glad that the bullet had only come from a 5.56. Had there been a Zebra with something like a .338 or whatever their equivalent was...I could very well have been laying on my back clutching her lifeless body against me.

While she reloaded her rifle, Huckleberry helped me to my hooves and slipped a standard healing potion into one of my pockets from her collection of medical supplies housed in the large green pouch strapped to her flank she had obtained from the M.O.P before we had set out for the day. It wasn’t the time or place to chance removing my helmet to chug the potion but by the time she had shut the pouch and had pulled back the bolt on her fresh magazine, the Medix was kicking in and I felt a happy numbing warmth spread throughout my body. It wasn’t enough of a dose to render me a stoned-out chemhead as we called addicts but it was definitely enough to render the painful bruise on my side an afterthought.

“Buck! Keep your eyes on us would you?” Rain Dancer groaned over the radio since Buck Beak could have easily warned us of the incoming enemy but had failed to do so.

“Look, I’ve only got two eyes and a whole fucking valley to look at plus you guy’s wingless asses and the fact is - SHIT!” He called back before his video feed dove suddenly, a smoke trail sailing right through where he had just been. “Case in fucking point! I can’t be everywhere at once! You’ve got fucking eyes so use ‘em eh? Such a wonderful fucking idea ain’t it?”

“Fuck you you feather fucking…” Huckleberry growled as she raised her rifle up towards him in annoyance, which I promptly knocked back down with a hoof.

“Hey, he has a point alright?” I barked at her. “We’ve only got one pair of wings in this Squad so let’s not piss him the fuck off too early today, alright?”

“I heard that!” He called back with a laugh as we all caught sight of the barrel of his XM-41 grenade launcher dip down towards where we stood highlighted with little blue ticks above our heads through his helmet feed. “Don’t make me use Big Boss on you!

I rolled my eyes as I caught my AMR thrown over by Penny who was busy picking through the pockets of one of the dead Zebra Askari for spare shotshells so she wouldn’t have to ditch one of her empty magazines in the dirt. Seeing as Equestria was the first to develop firearms in the world, it was only natural that the Empire stole and copied directly from our designs meaning almost all ammo types, save for a select few, were interchangeable. Whether it was a Zebra Assault Rifle or an M16 Carbine didn’t matter since they both used the 5.56mm ammunition. All that mattered then was your taste in weaponry since both Equestrian and Zebra weaponry had their pros and cons. Every now and again you’d come across a Ranger or a G.I who preferred to use a Zebra weapon rather than the Equestrian one they were originally issued. The practice was looked down on but since the soldier was only as good as his weapons let him be, the CO’s tended to overlook it. If someone was a better shot with the enemy’s weapon then let him use it was the ideology.

I took a second to examine my left side as we climbed back out of the trench to the fairly level terrain above and noted the deep scoring on my shoulder guard, breastplate and cuisse as well as the jagged holes torn through my duster. I was lucky to be alive let alone retain all my limbs after a blast like that; it made me a bit sad to see the new fresh paint job I had gotten for my armor get ruined like that. Then again, the holes and the scrapes and dents gave me more of a grizzled veteran look that said, ‘Yeah bitch, I’m a badass. I took a 40 mil to the side and walked it right off, what up?’ The more I looked at the damage and the unspoken message it displayed, the more I found myself liking it. I usually had my armor fully restored and repainted whenever it took damage to keep a nice clean professional appearance but I found the battered and worn look very flattering. One could even say it was sexy in it’s own way.

“Alright, well I have to ask then. Where the hell did that forty come from?” I asked as I looked around at my Squad mates for an answer. “Zebras don’t use launchers, it’s not enough of a physical challenge for them.”

“This one does.” Rain Dancer commented as he rolled the headless body of a Askari onto its back showing a worn M79 grenade launcher strapped to its chest. “Looks like he snagged one of the old single-loaders.”

“What’s the batch number?” Buck Beak asked. “Maybe we can find who owned it.”

“Umm…” Rain hummed as he unclipped the launcher from the body and started peering at the buttstock and barrel. “Let’s see...I.A #592279. No idea who’s it is.”

“Are we seriously wasting time trying to find the owner of a stolen grenade launcher guys…?” Penny sighed as she almost nonchalantly fired a few Dragon’s Spit rounds into the trench near her setting the dirt aflame amidst the shrieks of burning Zebras.

“Hey! A fallen soldier deserves to be buried with his weapon!” Huckleberry and I said at about the same time.

“You said 279 was the last three on that batch number, Dance?” Buck asked, three explosions detonating several yards from us in quick succession followed by three empty 40 casings dropping from the sky next to me.

“Mhm. Oh, looks like there’s a little carving of a duck here on the butt. You know, one of those rubber ducky toys.” Huckleberry commented as she joined in the search for the missing owner, completely ignoring the whizzing bullets and general mayhem of the conflict going on around us.

“Got it, it belongs to Corporal Yellow Duckling. Damn...KIA three months ago over on the Eastern Front. Wonder how it got all the way down here?”

The ground next to us frothed with loose dirt as a large steel scorpion burst out from its tunnel and showered us with red clay. There was no cover to be found anywhere nearby save for diving headfirst back into the trenches, which didn’t seem like a good idea when you’re being tracked by a murderous digging machine. It was one of the Scorpios as we had decided to call them when they had started cropping up on the battlefield about a year ago. They were about twelve feet long from head to tail but were only about four feet wide to make a slimmer profile for when it burrowed through the ground. The Scorpio came equipped with two razor sharp claws on each mechanical forearm that could cut a pony in half with little effort while its tail was equipped with an energy weapon of sorts that shot beams of Necromantic energy at you that would disintegrate almost anything on the spot. Along the length of the tail were retractable metal spines that oozed thick green poison from their tips that could either be whipped into you by its thrashing tail or flung at you from a distance like javelins. It was as if a killer robot had a threesome with a porcupine and a scorpion and then fell into a pot of mystery science juice and then got pickled in really angry Necro-juice. In other words...I had no clue how the damn things were made but they were deadly, angry and really fucking fast.

“Draw its attention!” I called out as it was far too close for my AMR to be effective and safe to use. “Danger close!”

“Got it!” Rain Dancer and Penny’s Worth both yelled back, running in opposite directions before unloading a hail of jacketed lead with their shotgun and machine gun respectively.

Their rounds sparked and fragmented off the Scorpio’s heavy armor as the glowing red ‘eyes’ tried tracking both assailants at once. It raised its tail to the side winding up for a flick of its poisoned spines and hissed with a grainy, mechanical howl of rage that grated on the ears like hooves on a chalkboard. I instinctively dove as the whoosh of its tail whistled through the air behind me as I ran. And not a second too soon as several poisoned spines sailed over me and skidded off into the dirt several yards ahead of the direction I was running towards.

Without another thought I decided I was far enough away to be safe (ish) from the blast of a twenty-five mil and rolled myself back around to face the thrashing steel monstrosity before me. In the back of my mind I knew I had half a mag of high explosive rounds left in my AMR and I also knew it wouldn’t be as effective without an armor piercer but to switch out mags would cost precious time and without proper cover, Penny and Rain were going to get hit eventually.

“High explosive it is!” I mumbled to myself as I lined up my black and red crosshairs on the writhing mass.

“Wait, what?!” I heard Penny yell as I pulled the trigger.

My first shot obviously missed as there was no immediate explosion but my second and third struck the tail and main body of the machine throwing it onto its back with large sparking holes in its steel body. It knew it was hit and immediately buried itself into the ground beneath it and out of sight though now with a definite red tick marking its stationary position just below the surface. It was attempting to hide itself in the hopes we would think it had retreated so it could pop right back out from behind and impale us in the ass with its spines and Necro-weapon. Unfortunately for it we knew this song and dance and could play along.

“Looks like it’s playing hide-n’-seek!” I laughed as I stood up and reloaded my rifle with a magazine of APEI rounds while transferring the empty into a Stone and putting it away. “You got any burrowing charges Buck?”

“Only a few. Why, you want one?” He asked, his helmet feed showing him drawing out one of the black and brown striped grenades that unlike most 40 mils had a pointed tip rather than a rounded one.

“I’d like one, yes.” Rain Dancer replied, flicking the barrel of the recovered launcher downwards and watching the empty casing get ejected over his shoulder. “Oh, and do you serve waffles at this hour or do I have to come back later for those?”

A few seconds later the burrowing charge plopped into the dirt beside him, which he promptly loaded into the empty barrel and aimed directly at the tilled dirt covering our cowardly foe. The burrowing charge itself was initially designed for blasting the interiors of underground bunkers as well as for clearing landmines but we had found them to be equally effective at disabling Scorpios that thought somewhere in their pre-wired heads that they were safe underground. The launcher discharged with a hearty, hollow thump noise (one that I loved immensely) into the dirt only for it to erupt from below with a thermite charge that melted the machine in pieces as effectively as a hot knife through soft butter. In its wake it left a small crater filled with steaming liquid metal like a giant pot of soup fit for a Dragon who sometimes ate metal as well as gems as part of a healthy diet.

“Damn! I didn’t think you’d actually get a good hit on that thing.” Buck snickered as he landed next to us, the gust of air from his outspread wings slowing him down causing our coats to flap around a bit. “I even had a burrowing charge loaded and ready just in case you fucked up like you always do.”

“I’m not even going to respond to that…” Rain replied as he tossed the empty launcher towards him with a bit more force than was necessary.

“Why? Because you know I’m going to say, ‘You learned from the best goddamn Powder Ganger in the Corps’?” Buck chuckled as he slung the pony-sized weapon over his shoulder and resting it against the comparatively massive barrel of Little Big Cannon. “Of course you did! Because I am the best fucking Powder Ganger in this whole damn Corps!”

He proceeded to flex like any musclebound contestant at the Mr. Olympus Bodybuilding Championship, though the effect was dampened by the sleeves of his duster being too loose to show off the true curves and size of his biceps and the weapons on his back restricting his normal mobility. We all shared in a laugh but had to regrettably return to the action that had moved further south than where we stood as we were continually gaining ground in our push towards Camp Fuck-Off. The defense against our progress was fierce but I still found myself...surprised. It just wasn’t as fierce nor as desperate as the previous day’s defense had been. Either we had killed so many of them they were running low on hooves on the ground or they were cooking up something akin to a trap.

“Am I the only one who feels this push is...too easy?” Penny asked as we trotted after our fellow advancing soldiers from all Corps. “I mean, yesterday they went fucking ape on that one ridge a half mile back. I’ve never seen fucking swords cut down that many troops in my life. Ever.”

I returned a silent nod with the rest of my Squad and immediately responded to my gut shrieking for me to check S.A.T.S. The world stood still as the spell artificially jacked up my adrenaline to insane (but still safe) levels and immediately in front of Penny stood a crouching Dragoon highlighted in neon green with a sword like object clearly coming from its mouth poised to strike. I couldn’t target the damn thing as their cloaking spells fucked with the targeting processor but I used the brief few seconds the spell gave me to think through a way to save Penny’s head and kill the Dragoon. I let the spell drop me back into reality with my body already responding to the commands my mind had sent them during S.A.T.S sending me barreling into Penny’s side just as the invisible sword came crashing down on my right shoulder, the raised neck guard catching the blade before it lopped my own head off.

The blow sent me headfirst into the ground, my horn painfully getting jostled a bit inside the hollow cone of the helmet from the impact, but I made an effort to kick in the direction of the invisible Dragoon as I went down hoping the others would catch on. Though I couldn’t see it, as my visor was smudged with wet clay and I was face-first in the dirt, I felt my left hindleg collide against something hard sending a jolt of uncomfortable vibrations up from the tip of my armored hoof and into my hip, which was still sore (if numb) from the earlier explosion. I rolled onto my back to see the partially cloaked body of a Dragoon, this one wearing the same black armor that Zecuro wore, reeling from my kick with a deep bleeding gash on the side of his head from where the somewhat sharpened edge of my combat boot had sliced into him. Before I knew it my Sequoia was out and I was back in S.A.T.S with a ninety-five percent chance to blow his striped head right off his shoulders, which I executed with no little satisfaction.

The body collapsed instantly the moment his head exploded under the might of the explosive bullet and vanished from sight as the hood fell into place where the head would have been, completing the enchantment.

Penny helped me back up asking, “What the hell?! How did you know he was there!?”

I shrugged sheepishly and tried to explain away with the simple gut feeling explanation but she didn’t buy it for a second leaving me with nothing left to try and use to convince her I honestly had nothing other than the fact my gut told me to use S.A.T.S at just that moment. Never mind the fact that I had saved her life, all she was concerned about was my seeming precognition that I didn’t have any explanation for. How was I to explain 'just a feeling'

“Yo, holdup!” Huckleberry called out as she felt around the area where the body disappeared and flung back the cloak to reveal the headless body once more, the earth wet and sticky around the neck region. “This wasn’t Zecuro was it?”

“Oh fuck…” I gasped in fear as I hurled myself towards the body in a panic, silently cursing myself for blowing off the head since that was really the only definite source of identification we had on him.

There wasn’t much to look for as the neck was nothing more than an oozing stump of red flesh and a gore smothered spinal cord and the rest of the body lay hidden inside the strange black armor I had only caught a few glimpses of the night before. The Squad made a defensive circle around me as I made my hurried examination of the body looking for any indication as to who the hell I had just decapitated. I hefted the headless body up and unclasped the Imperial brooch (in the shape of a mohawked skull with ruby eyes surrounded by golden stars) off from around its neck breaking the enchantment on the cloak. The armor beneath was as bizarre as before and I noticed small rubies embedded along the spine that I could only assume interacted with the cloak in some way. The Dragoon didn’t seem to be wearing dog tags of any sort that I could recognize making identification that much more difficult.

Eventually, in frustration, I yelled out, “Who the fuck are you, you blood-belching vagina?!”

“Blood belching what now?” Penny laughed, my anger turning more to embarrassment as I realized the nature of the weird insult.

“Shut up, fucking help me look for something! An ear or a fucking eyeball or something!” I growled back, digging through the gore soaked dirt for anything useful in identifying the deceased.

“Eye found something!” Buck Beak laughed as I looked up and saw him holding a severed eyeball in front of his left eye, the optical nerve dangling like a red and white tail behind it.

“Looks like it’s just the normal brown.” Huckleberry sighed with relief as she examined it for herself amidst Buck’s childish giggling. “Thank Celestia…”

“Yeah, the sword is normal too.” Rain Dancer said as he stabbed the straight bladed weapon into the ground by the body. “Looks like you just killed a regular old shithead. Good for you.”

I too sighed in relief and bent over the body to retrieve the Imperial brooch as well as mark the body with a special E.F.S marker so we could retrieve it later. I wasn’t sure if anyone else yet knew about the upgraded stealth armor being worn by the Dragoons but I intended to let them all know since it was potentially game changing for how we dealt with them in battle. But...I wanted to have some time to look at the armor for myself before I passed it onto the Engineers. I had to stay true to my hobbies and I was hardly opposed to keeping a headless body in my tent for a few hours if it meant I got to see for myself the newest in Zebra armor technology. I had been one of the first to document the Mrk. III and IV Legionary armors when they hit the front lines in the years prior so I felt I was at least partially qualified to examine this new breed of stealth armor.

“Buck!” I called out as I stood and slipped the cloak and brooch into a saddlebag to take back to the Engineers and have another Dragoon added to my head count. “You still got Dark Blaze's call-sign?”

“Yep. Need me to tell him you’ve got another body to snag?” He replied, looking at the body and scratching at his neck.

“Naturally.” I nodded. “Tell him it’s the usual purple tag like last time.”

“Same place as usual?” He asked, tapping one of the rubies on the back of the armor with a talon.

“Yep. Tell him I’ll pay him double if he gets the body out of the armor for me and I’ll even toss in the sword as an added bonus just for the hell of it.”

I guess it was a bit weird (if perhaps immoral) that I hired a friend every now and again from the Engineers Corps to smuggle bodies and their armor back to my tent for my own academic purposes but I wanted to be the first to document new advances in armor any time they came out. I had done the same thing for the Mrk. III and IV and I would continue to do so until the War was over and even past that if Equestria still felt the need to make protective gear. Besides, once the military brass got their hooves on the stuff and made their official report, they tended to understate the protective capabilities of the enemy’s armor and never really mentioned what it was made from. I’m a detail oriented mare when it comes to armor versus bullets. If I know what the enemy is wearing and just how much punishment it can take, then I can adapt my strategy accordingly to best suit what I am up against. I wasn’t always going to be lucky enough to have my AMR and Sequoia on me whenever I got into a fight. Thanks to me and Snatcher we found out the Mrk. III was weak to 5.56 on the sides and flanks and the Mrk. IV was weak in the abdomen to shrapnel and fire.

“What time was that little shindig of yours with Zecuro supposed to happen?” Penny asked as we left the body behind and made our way towards the hastily thrown up mountain of dirt that formed the Zebra’s defensive position of the day.

“Like four in the fuckin' morning or something stupid... I’m gonna need a nap.” I yawned, blinking back the tears that normally followed a yawn and wishing I was in bed before the Medix wore off since I liked sleeping on my left side.

“You know we really should be up there with everyone else…” Rain mumbled as he raised a pair of powered binoculars to his eyes and surveyed the ridge. “Looks like they’re putting up a hell of a fight there.”

I yawned again, the pain in my side starting to return as a dull throbbing ache, which was only going to get worse. As amazing a painkiller as Medix is, it has the tendency to wear off if your heart rate is up and seeing as I had just saved my best friend from a sword to the neck by an invisible assassin and thought said assassin was my other best friend...suffice to say my heart was hitting its athletic threshold and then some. Couple that with the fact Medix was denatured by adrenaline in the bloodstream and even the ten cc’s I got was on its way out in a hurry. Thankfully, unlike RadAway, it wasn’t a diuretic so I wouldn’t have to worry about a bathroom break anytime soon.

“Think you guys can handle it from here?” I asked with yet another yawn, looking between them and the ridge ahead. “I need a nap for tonight.”

Buck sighed irritably since he was always gearing for a nap no matter what, but I had important things to do and he didn’t. Plus, a First Sergeant’s commands versus a Lieutenant Colonel’s? No fucking contest. And Celestia be praised for that; otherwise he’d be asleep half of the day and blowing shit up the other half. When those halves happened to occur during the day was up for ambiguity to decide.

“Yeah, I think we’ve got this. Mind if we snag your AMR?” Penny asked sweetly. “Some of us don’t come equipped with a rifle and besides, it’s always good to have an Anti-Machine riflemare on hoof right?”

I tossed it to her and then turned to Huckleberry for my ‘excuse’ to return back to camp before the assault was over. She had a Zebra rifle up and at the ready pointing at the gap between my bracers and the rebraces above. I hated getting shot but I needed the excuse to go home with the only recourse being self-inflicted bodily damage to such a degree as to warrant a medivac. With modern painkillers and Emergency Restoration Potions, many battlefield injuries can and would be treated in the field either from your personal medkit or that of your Squad medic. All these options for getting a soldier back on his or her hooves in the AO made it difficult to find an injury big enough to require seeing an actual healer for. After another heavy dose of Medix, I felt stoned enough to tackle a moving train head on and not feel a thing so I gave her a long lazy nod followed with a stupid giggle. With a small laugh she pulled the trigger and my front legs buckled out from under me though I didn’t feel a thing aside from a painful tickling sensation in my knees. This was followed up with some not-so pleasant knife work from Hucks who knew just where to cut and stab so as not to kill me but leave me with enough injuries that even an Extra Strength would have some trouble managing all of the damage in one dose.

As I laid on my back, Penny and Huckleberry spreading some of my blood on my sleeves and breastplate to make the injuries look worse, Rain Dancer called in over his radio, “Alpha Seven-Six to base, we need medical exfil stat! Alpha Six-Nine is down! I repeat, Alpha Six-Nine is down!”

The blood loss, coupled with the heavy dose of painkiller, were taking their toll more than I expected and I wound up blacking out in the hooves of Huckleberry. We both knew the wounds were treatable in field with her kit and I wasn’t really in any danger but...I still felt bad for forcing her to even pretend that I was in mortal peril. At the very least, I wanted the last thing I saw before I drifted off to be her face but I had to stick with the menacing gas mask of her helmet instead. The only indication of who dwelled inside being the big 303 written in big white numbers on her neck guard and the sides of her helmet. My last thought before unconsciousness set in was a vague hope I got to steal one of the M.O.P’s blankets when they checked me out.

Next Chapter: Chapter Twenty-One: Time for a New Path in Life Estimated time remaining: 22 Hours, 17 Minutes