"Conn, AMR-1. I've got eyes on three tangos, bearing 159. Range, 2000 meters and closing. How copy?"

"Conn, confirm. Eyes on. We see 'em, Crete. Looks like a standard city patrol out for a nightly jaunt. That's right you striped fuck...keep on walkin'. Cobalt? How's that spell holding up?"

"Nng...g-gettin' hard to keep up at this s-speed...can we please sl-"

"Negative, we gotta keep pace with Rabid and Conqueror. All mechanized units are to enter the city at the same time and if we lag behind we risk our timetable. Somebody get him something to perk him up would ya? Strong and fast hitting."

"Everypony shut the fuck up, I've got this. Don't worry, I got something that should do the fuckin' trick..."

"Is that...fuckin' Dash? Goddamnit Sprocket are you...?! Know what...? I can't even bother giving a fuck today... Alright Cobalt, take a few hits and get your ass in gear, ASAP. Fifteen-hundred and closing fast, everypony!"

The tension was palpable throughout the Mauler for everyone involved. There was going to be a lot of collateral damage, only made worse by the fact most of us had little experience in urban combat having spent most of our time in the relative openness of the Badlands. Our orders were specific but the 'how' of it all was something we were all anxious to figure out. Aside from the two week's worth of experience working alongside an armored vehicle, no one but the Engineers onboard really knew how to work the beast to it's full potential and even that was still to be determined.

Under the cover of darkness we were to assault the proud city of Anakha as part of a full frontal assault to retake it from the Empire; a proud achievement to be for NEATO as the first major victory for the War in the South after years of back-and-forth attrition on an eighty-mile space of dead earth. All twenty-four Alpha Company Bünkerwagens assigned to the new Joint Operations Mechanized Division were arrayed in a circle around the isolated desert city, six MIFVs per Platoon, each split into two groups so we could attack from fifteen different angles at once. With each vehicle carrying ten-to-fifteen Steel and Desert Rangers apiece, it was deemed sufficient enough ground support to protect the beasts hauling the heavy-hitting autocannons. We were only the introduction to a much larger operation involving the poor grunts from Army Group South, a Brigade's worth of soldiers soon to be riding in behind us from the East and North to help 'pacify' the city lead by Brigadier General Sandy 'Sandbag' Kiln. Accompanying them would be elements from Beta Company who would provide additional ground support with their slick new Falke IIs and IIIs armed with long 50mm and 75mm guns, and upgraded armor featuring spaced armor around the turret and along the length of the metal tracks. These were reportedly embedded with small charged crystals which cast a middling ward around these extra bits of armor to help deflect and defend against hexes and curses.

The newest addition to each vehicle however was the inclusion of a Combat Sorcerer whose job it was to project an Illusory spell across the outside of the MIFVs to further mask our approach. It seemed though that this too was a first as well for Cobalt Corona, our resident Ministry Acolyte fresh outta the Ministry of Arcane Science's Combat Division training academy. It was a night of firsts for all of us it seemed no matter our rank or level of previous experience.

There was a cacophony of hacking coughs over comms and a haughty laugh of superiority as Cobalt inhaled from the iconic pastel blue inhaler. It was no surprise to any of us that Sprocket had a secret stash of drugs for his personal use. We had already confiscated several bottles of alcohol and a tin of Mint-Als but he still had hiding places left to pick from it seemed.

"Jeez dude, have you ever taken a fuckin' hit in your life? Hackin' up a fuckin' lung like a freshmare ya fuckin' nerd."

"G-go *cough* f-fuck yourself..."

"Sprocket, get back to your fuckin' post NOW. One click out, ready up! How we doin', Cobalt?"

"Great! Good! I could do this all day! Let's f-fuckin' gooo!"

"Goddesses I envy a first time high..."

My eye on the group was wildly thrown off as the Mauler bounced up and over a rock, my head crashing down on the hull, which still hurt through the cushioning. Worse than the pain, the bounce was hard enough to knock my rifle outta my grip and send her tumbling off the side and into the midnight sands. I was supposed to be acting as an extra coaxial cannon for the crew until we hit the second ring of houses and went on hoof from there in a support capacity to the Mauler while we swept through the city. Having only my Sequoia and a spare sawed-off shotgun to turn to as my secondaries, I was useless until we were right up on them. Could either waste time finding another, lesser rifle or just jump overboard and catch up to the group.

"Shit, rifle overboard! See you guys at the first objective!" I shouted over the radio before using the lip of the roof hatch frame to vault out of the speeding vehicle, tumbling uncomfortably in the sand which cushioned some of the impact.

There were angry, pained grunts further ahead and in the soft red of my NVs I watched as Hucks and Rain brushed the sand from off their dusters; hoisting their weapons to form a defensive perimeter for me as I scanned the ground around me for any sight of my personal cannon. I knew they would be low-key pissed at me, if at the very least annoyed we weren't gonna be around for first strike but my hooves were tied. As an Anti-Machinist, I was a valuable and unique asset to any team I was assigned so to take away what let me do my job was just unfeasible.

"Two-hundred meters...." Dancer grumbled over the radio, watching the faint silhouette of the Mauler drive away. "Two-fifty....common, Athena. Let's get movin'."

"Excuse me for having a fuckin' desert camo print on my bigass rifle..." I grumbled back as I frantically combed the sands with every vision filter I had. "Not like I wanna blend into my primary surroundings or anything..."

"Dance, you're better suited to cover us. Imma help her find it real quick." Hucks replied calmly, rushing over to help me search and almost immediately finding it in a place I swear I had checked twice before already. "Found it! Just start moving, I'll toss it to ya when we get there!"

Immediately I started towards the distant blue triangle marking the Mauler on my HUD, trying to catch up to Rain Dancer who had shot forward the moment Hucks had said she found my weapon. At 40mph, even at a full gallop we would have no hope of catching up to to the rest of the group on hoof before the firstt bodies dropped. If we were lucky, we could rendezvous with the rest of the Rough Riders, the collective name for 4th Platoon, before any real fighting got started. Dance was fast when he wanted to be and tonight, there burned a bloodlust in him that was a stimulant in and of itself propelling his ass across the desert as fast as hooves could go. Pound for pound we carried a similar load but he seemed oblivious to the eighty-ish pounds of equipment we wore, tearing ass across the sandy terrain like a bat outta hell.

The first sounds of combat echoed from up ahead as the true forms of Anakha's poorer resident's mudbrick homes were illuminated in several brief flashes of gunfire; the red markers on my HUD instantly vanishing in unison. Five-hundred meters away to our left and right I could also see the bright blue triangles marking the other Bünkerwagens that formed the Rough Riders; when the distance value started falling rapidly, I knew they all had stopped to offload their payload of troops. Despite the embarrassing fuck-up, we wouldn't miss anything more than that doomed patrol we spotted wandering around our point of entry.

The houses were built very close to one another, save for some wider streets for main traffic, leaving only narrow alleyways barely wide enough for a single body to walk down them at a time. The houses themselves were roughly cubical in shape and came in a variety of sizes and complexity, many strung in between by clothing lines and dimmed lanterns. Dance went down one while Hucks and I dipped left and down another, squeezing our way through the darkness out onto the open street just a few meters down from the rest of Alpha and Whiskey hauling ass trying to offload from the back bay of the Mauler. With everyone present having a PipBuck already, additional blue markers popped up above everyone's head ensuring we could find each other and, arguably more importantly, help prevent accidental friendly-fire.

The sirens finally began to howl across the dark city, electrical power having been cut off to all but the Imperial Army and civilians under a mandatory curfew leaving us able to operate in near perfect darkness. We managed to make good time and caught up to everyone the moment the bay door closed and people started pairing into their pre-arranged teams of two; Rain and Crystal, Onyx and Penny, Brandy and Hucks, and capped off by myself and Buck. Cobalt remained behind in the Mauler to provide directed shield spells to defend against ground targets while Silver Café knelt on the roof adding her dual M214 miniguns to the overall defense; a third turret in the center of the craft as it were.

"Good to have you back, dumbass!" Buck laughed gleefully as he thumped his chest and got the harness system prepped. "Just in time for some action! Common, let's get up and in the air before Beta Company hits the outskirts. Gotta get the comms array taken out and assist with eliminating Anti-Air emplacements."

"I know, had some issues alright? Let's get this shit over with then." I grumbled in reply, rolling my eyes regardless of his ability to see me do it.

I caught my rifle back from Hucks and double checked I had HE-Is loaded before I clipped it across my chest and crouched in preparation to take flight once more. Within a moment I was yanked from off my hooves and was gaining altitude, the hazy outlines of the many cramped residential buildings opening up below me. Quickly glancing around I could already spot other pairs like us and solo Pegusi snipers beginning to circle about the sky and start cracking off shots as they found viable targets. With the level of commotion already taking place across the sleepy city, my E.F.S had to chew through an unusually high number of targets and assign a marker to each and every one of them; chaos and confusion sending them scattering about in panic. Scouting targets from such a vantage point was going to be crucial to those on the ground as targeting information was shared across our data link which meant they could see these enemies from miles away. Five other Rangers present in the skies with us were likewise part of the elite 25mm club in order to sow as much destruction as we could to support the hooves on the ground. It paid to have eyes in multiple places and even more when said eyes are armed to the teeth and stir-crazy for some action. We may be the prelude to the main event but we would make damn sure we made their jobs easier and have them see us while we do it. With any luck, we could capture half the city by the time the first transports arrived and troops dropped from the backs of the Sky Chariots.

Buck cruised at a moderate speed, circling in a wide circumference around the Mauler and our sister Bünkerwagens, Conqueror and Rabid, while pairs of small blue ticks on the HUD spread out evenly between each vehicle. Being part of 4th Platoon, it was our task to silence the radio station located on a small bluff a half-mile South of our position and secure three checkpoints in the old defensive walls to open the gates to the heart of the city for the rest of Army Group South. Well, those assigned to our mission that was; another Brigade and a slew of Combat Sorcerers were concurrently running an op of their own, a diversionary feint on a major crossroads to the Southwest codenamed Operation: West Wind. Thanks to their mission commencing a little less than an hour ahead of ours, a sizable portion of Anakha's garrison rushed out to reinforce the crossroads while the rest kept an uneasy gaze on the wrong side of town. This left the North side nearly bareboned on armed patrols and number of wary eyes looking outwards.

Now though, the garrison was aware it was under attack and spotlights sprang to life across the city accompanied by a mixture of bullets, fragmentation shells and bolts of sickly green lightning which rattled the bones with every crack of thunder.

"Alpha Six-Niner to Command!" I shouted over comms while simultaneously holding back my dinner from Buck's evasive maneuvers around the barrage from an AA battery to our right. "Enemy Shaman on the field! How copy?"

"Solid copy, Six-Nine. Command to all units, be advised. We have confirmed sightings of Imperial Shaman operating within the AO. Step it up, Alpha Company and get those AA sites taken out. Beta Company is en-route, ETA: thirty-minutes. Recommend all Airborne units keep a low profile and only engage targets as can safely be eliminated. Good luck Alpha, Command out."

"Low profile?!" Buck exclaimed, flaring his wings wide just outside the radius of an incoming flak round. "The fuck we look like, pistol swingin' pussies or somethin'?! Give 'em the hurt, Athena!"

There was no point in arguing with the guy I was literally dangling off of so I resigned myself to try and do the most I could with the situation I was dealt. No verbal acknowledgement was needed when my AMR did all the talking for me, five rounds roaring out of the muzzle brake in rapid succession and buffeting his flight pattern considerably from the recoil. The bright yellow-and-red projectiles flew true and impacted the ground around a stationary flak cannon, immediately exploding in a ball of fire, shrapnel and sheer concussive force. The blast wave I felt vibrate through my body was exhilarating indicating strongly that I had hit their ammunition stores for the 88mm adding their chaos to the destruction. As we banked a hard left, I grit my teeth against the creeping nausea and squinted down at the smoke filled area I had aimed for, my visor zooming in and switching to thermals to see if it needed another round.

Fire flickered bright reds and oranges down below while scattered around the still-hot barrel of an 88mm flak cannon were the splattered body parts of what used to be Equines just a moment ago. Even detached from the body, limbs still glowed brightly with heat for a bit of time and were recognizable to anyone after some experience. It cost the EAF almost a thousand bits per 25mm shell produced but for five grand in military spending, I had killed at least five enemy combatants including (hopefully) a Shaman and silenced one of thirty-seven Anti-Air batteries. Cost efficiency at it's finest.

"Weapon ready!" I called out to Buck as soon as the bolt slammed shut on my next five-round clip.

"Copy that!" Buck chuckled gleefully, swinging us around in a hard bank to the left which took us away from our designated post over the Rough Riders but, brought us closer to the next functioning AA battery.

This one was even easier than the last and just begging to be attacked from behind as they had their attention (and barrel) pointed towards another team in the skies. With such an open lane of fire to work with and no need for any fancy flying, Buck retrieved Big Boss from his back and took aim as best he could with me hanging beneath him. At our height we had ample opportunity to lob our ordinance ahead of us with my smaller rounds detonating a moment before Buck's larger ones impacted with the ground. Like the previous setup, this emplacement too exploded with even more violence than before thanks to Buck's contributions. We gave the site one final pass from above before swooping downwards, Buck using his wings to pivot us upwards sending us zipping off into the cloud cover spontaneously produced by Shadowbolt Strike Team 'Crash' overhead. It had taken time for them to deploy all their Cloud Bud kits but their work had paid off as the city and surrounding area were blanketed in a thick layer of clouds.

The moon sparkled a brilliant silver amidst the starry canvas of the night and it's radiance illuminated me the moment we broke through the layer and out into the sky above. And not a moment too soon as the entire mass of clouds roared with thunder and lightning acting as a safety net against high-flying shells and, more importantly, the unnatural green lightning cast by their hexers. In real time I watched as pockets of wicked purple light erupted across the cloud layer as natural lightning bolstered by Equestrian magic met the decrepit electric might of Zebrican Necromancy. Our defense was regrettably not absolute and a stray projectile or two made its way through on occasion at complete random. However, it was sufficient to give us some time to look down across the city and locate AA sites marked by other aerial sniper teams.

"I spot two within a thousand meters, which first?" I asked him as we hovered in place for a few moments. "The one to our left is within reach of Conqueror in a few minutes so I thi-"

"On it!" He interjected, shutting me up by throwing a charm shaped like a lightning bolt into the clouds below from a pouch across his chest. "Hold the fuck on!"

The charm vanished into the writhing mass below us before a small patch of pristine white cloud formed allowing for a safe dive back down under. As soon as the cloud layer became permeable we were already diving right through it, the large red marker surrounded by other smaller ticks on my HUD directly ahead just begging to be exploded. The only problem was...they had seen us too somehow. How could we tell? Well...

"Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck!" Buck hissed in a mixture of panic and anger in my ears as I had to close my eyes against a sudden barrel roll in a direction opposite to where my stomach was already headed. "How the fuck did they have a bead on us already?!"

The air around us was a cacophony of bone shattering booms and I instinctively curled up around myself so only the most armored parts of my body were hit with the shrapnel. Buck's speed was in our favor and sent us into a steep dive under the barrage before more than a few painful thuds against most of my body had occurred. Swooping down between the buildings, he nimbly navigated his way towards the pesky battery that had taken the fun out of our surprise attack; once again exemplifying his mastery over his own wings and the air around them. None of us had a detailed map of the city yet as our auto-maps were chewing through all the data collected by Alpha Company, but Buck didn't need one. Flying by the seat of his pants he weaved down narrow streets and cramped alleyways with all the grace of a Wonderbolt performance before flaring his wings out again to bring us to a halt in a small courtyard of a larger, more affluent home, albeit with a lot less grace than usual as he wobbled very alarmingly in the air.

I was about to ask what his plan was when he dropped me from off his harness eight feet to the ground without warning sending me into a tumble just to try and blunt the drop. Soon as I came to a stop, Buck landed beside me with a loud grunt of pain that was uncharacteristic of him which set off alarm bells in my head. He had gotten hit pretty bad.

"Talk to me, Buck." I grunted as I unconsciously brought up the MHG reports of my team and saw an angry red flashing on Buck's left wing and shoulder. "Ah fuck..."

"How bad does it look?" He hissed as I cautiously switched on my LED to inspect the damage under normal light.

The problem with anyone with wings was the question of how to properly armor something with an incredible range of motion and with very precise mechanics in order for flight to be possible. There were only three ways to go about it: completely encase the wing and make flight incredibly difficult in exchange for the most protection, only armor the outside of the wing leaving the underside exposed in flight or, just simply ignore armoring it altogether. Buck had gone out of his way to get the full package with his Mrk. IV but even with all the armored plating I could see massive holes in his left wing and impacted shrapnel embedded in the wing socket oozing blood. His shoulder wasn't much better sporting more growths of shrapnel in the armor plate and dug deep into the small gap between the pauldron and neck guard; blood trickling down the curves of his armor and puddling on the sandy clay tiles of the courtyard.

"Outta ten?" I said frankly as I dug at my waist for my medkit. "Eight, eight-point-five. You took a hard hit, Buck."

"Yeah? Well no fuckin' shit, numbnuts...patch me the fuck up already would ya?" He growled impatiently, holding out his wounded leg and wing. "Or did Hucks not teach you more than basic ass first aid?"

"Shut your fuckin' mouth, Buck..." I growled back as talking about my mare like that was uncalled for. "I ain't trained for this sorta shit, you need a few minutes on a gurney with some guy with a pair of tweezers and a steady horn."

"Well, fuck you then!" He hissed, wrenching out one of the several large shards of jagged steel from his shoulder himself before glancing at the blood line to see how deep it had gone in. "Ow...no, fuck you for sure..."

I rolled my eyes and took the hint, detaching my medkit from my belt while I had him lay down on his side before jabbing him in the neck with a meaty dose of Medix to spare him from any...unprofessional treatment methods. The lazy groan of hazy pleasure that came outta him a few seconds later was my cue and I hesitantly latched onto two of the remaining seven shards I could see. When he breathed out I yanked them out as fast as I could to limit the damage to the muscle tissue from being tensed up, sending them flying into the night and out of my grasp from how fast I pulled. Buck gave a pained giggle in response and stretched out lazily before seeming to remember a fifth of his body was fucked up; the next bits of shrapnel getting flung across the courtyard like so much unwanted rubbish.

For the level of damage I was seeing, I didn't even bother going for anything in my medkit and instead commandeered his. Inside the hard tactical case was a Griffin Stim gun, an unusual but formidable healing tool that injected a concentrated mix of potions directly into the wound with potent results. With an angry hiss, the lightly pressurized mix of charged healing potions was forced deep into the wounded tissue as I pressed the trigger, eliciting a quick yelp from the big bird despite the heavy painkillers. Immediately all wounds in the shoulder and wing joint sealed shut before my eyes while blood seeped back under the skin like nothing had happened; smaller bits of shrapnel spat out of his body by the speed of the regenerative process. Results as good as these could only speak for themselves leaving his shoulder and wing joint completely whole. The wing however...

"Damn...when did my wing get a fuckin' hole in it, dude...?" Buck wheezed after a long giggle at nothing in particular, noticing the partially-healed hole still left in his wing. "Heh...dude I got hit by a cannonball! Awesomeeeee..."

"If you're lucid enough to hear me, your wing is still too fucked up to fly with and I don't wanna risk another Stim on you for this level of damage. This needs a skilled Healer to fix properly and you know better than anyone how delicate wing repair is."

"Damn bro...that's some tough shit right there..."

I couldn't help but giggle as well and help him to his stumbly paws before replying, "Nah, you are the tough shit around here, Buck. I had no fucking idea you took such a gnarly hit...just...jeez dude."

He gave a wobbly salute and followed behind me while I made my way to the only way out of the walled courtyard; the road outside was quiet save for the occasional burst of cannon fire a few hundred yards to our right. This side of town was far less cramped than what we had navigated through thus far and there was decent room to breathe between these larger sandstone buildings which housed Anakha's wealthy elite. And there, just above us on a particularly large manor roof, were the sorry fucks who had essentially shot us down. Buck was down a wing but that didn't stop him from handing ass on the ground and even as we rushed over to scale the building he was growing more and more lucid as the Medix wore off and the Stim continued its dirty work. The manor home followed the same basic rectangular, multi-story design of the poorer houses only much larger and far more refined. Coming complete with finely carved patterns and painted designs, broad covered patios and a large personal garden sporting a fountain that fed water to the various plants and trees. Being opposed to the idea of unequal wealth distribution, the Imperials undoubtedly had a laugh over commandeering this particular monument to a monetary class-structure. Taking cover within the covered doorway to the manor, its majestic brass lanterns unlit on either wall beside us, we took a moment to privately plan our attack. We were both combat ready and Buck had been smart enough to bring along a Survivalist rifle Dark Blaze had left specifically in the Mauler before we departed the Badlands. The AA battery needed to be silenced and both of us had an extra bone to pick with these shitheads in particular.

"Two floors up, no exterior stairway. Looks like we'll have to go through the inside..." I mumbled to him across the radio while we switched to our close-quarters weapons. "Take point since you have the thicker armor, I'll cover your six. And if you see a civie...please just don't."

"Yeah, yeah...fuck em, I like being the center of attention..." He snickered happily as we lined up on either side of the door and prepped to breach. "Got this baby packed with APs, they don't stand a chance! Watch and learn sweet lips, Daddy Buck's got this shit in the bag."

He reached for the door and pushed it open slowly, the latch having been broken sometime previously assumedly by the Zebras when they first stormed the place. Buck quickly pushed through the doorway making it barely a step inside the dimly lit front room before an unseen trip mine went off with a near-deafening roar in the cramped interior room. Infrareds switched on automatically to cut through the dust and I spotted Buck had been thrown several feet to the left, crashing into the sandstone wall with enough force to pulverize a large portion of the plastered exterior and crack the bricks underneath. However...there was something else glowing with life in the room...

"Gah fuck!" Buck hissed furiously, clenching a hand around the bleeding stump of his right front leg which had been blown cleanly off at the elbow joint. "Goddamn fuckin' cheap pussy ass tactic you dishonorable fucks!!"

'Well there goes any fuckin' chance at sneaking up on them... I sighed to myself as I scrambled for his severed forearm to reattach it quickly. "Here, get your fuckin' thing in place while I get an E-S ready!"

The harsh Afrikaans we heard echoing from further inside the house was all the sign we needed to understand just how the deck was being reshuffled against us with every passing second. A moment later the first burst of automatic fire pierced the bedlam of shouts, impacting blindly into the wall on the far side of us. At the same time, I scrambled to withdraw the singular fancifully shaped vial of Extra-Strength potion I had from my limited supplies. Soon as the wax sealed cork popped out, I wheeled around to jam it into Buck's open beak; his helmet laying beside him as we lacked an Auto-Injector system for drugs and first aid Chems like Power Armor systems did.

The second his beak clamped down around the vial I let go and turned my attention full-time to our impending doom, deciding to pop the pin on a new smoke grenade laced with charged powdered crystal to mask against arcane spotting methods. A slightly sparkling blue/white cloud blossomed to life inside the house and within a few moments the plume enveloped everything like a wad of cotton had been stuffed into the room. The cards in play were constantly being reshuffled across the table and this was a much-needed ace up my sleeve in this dangerous gamble I found myself a part of. Goddesses only knew how much work my poker-face needed...

"Stay down, that amount of potion should be enough to get both parts back together but that's about it. It's gonna need to be in a sling till we can get you some proper medivac." I whispered to him, pulling his rarely-used Sequoia out from its holster in the small of his back and stuffing it into his still working left hand. "You're no good to me dead, featherass. Hold the rear, keep an eye on my rifle and kill anyone trying to fuck off out the front door. Only one way in or out so they're stuck in here with us long as we stay alive and frosty."

"Grrr...goddamnit fine. Save at least one of 'em for me though would ya?" He groaned, using a torn section of a fabric curtain hanging nearby to form a makeshift sling before settling into the corner, revolver raised. "Somebody gonna get their eyes clawed out for rigging that fuckin' door!"

"No promises." I grunted back, laying on my belly in order to crawl like some kind of insect along the floor to minimize my profile and reduce the level of noise I generated. 'Only if I get a choice in the matter...'

The charged crystal powder billowing in the smoke clouds worked both ways unfortunately and due to the heat generated by the discharge of arcane energy, all vision filters were just a hinderance leaving me completely blind. Even the E.F.S in all its glory could only give me sporadically appearing red ticks on my HUD to work with. That being said however, the heat promoted the smoke to rise meaning the lower to ground I got, the more visibility I had over anyone standing upright. Not only that but as dense pockets of crystal powder met in the swirling mass of smoke, brief flashes of bright blue light would spark up giving a split-second view of any silhouettes obscured in the smog nearby the flash. These were new toys from the M.O.W and weren't even supposed to be in our inventory for the campaign as it turned out. They were classified as working prototypes by the M.O.A.S egghead they had sent to deliver the dozen crates worth of new equipment; technically still in the lab but these had happened to 'end up mistakenly being sent' to us in Alpha. The video feed from this event, regardless of how it turned out, would be a valuable field report for the eggheads to review and use to refine their work.

Shotgun and combat knife at the ready, the trek across the front room went by achingly slow as I constantly swept my head from side to side doing my damndest to spot obstacles like tables and chairs and give them a wide berth. The room ended with another archway leading to a covered courtyard in the center of the house, beyond that my auto-map indicated there was a larger room with stairway leading to the second floor. My smokescreen was starting to thin with all the open space in the courtyard, escaping slowly through the burlap covering into the open air outside and I hurled myself across the twenty feet of paved stone path. Tumbling to a stop against a stately couch of wood and fabric, I flung another grenade high letting it bounce off the ceiling to halt its trajectory and puff to life in the center of the room. My sparkling battle buddy sprung to life a moment later with a pop and a hiss and I used that as my cue to slither under the table beside me and make my way towards the fizzly red markers on my HUD.

"Spread out! Do not let them flank you, sisters!" Came the first intelligible scream of my enemy for the night. "Do not worry, we have the Eyes of Khonvoum in our midst."

Eyes of...what now...? There was something new going on here and I would have to be extra wary of the unexpected as by the sounds of it, there was no doubt in my mind it was some nasty magic. The ground was thankfully clear of most debris allowing me to creep up to the right side of the broad stairway as I navigated with one eye on the ground and the other on a small map of my immediate area to try and navigate. My patience and wide arc payed off as I spotted the first of my victims as a black silhouette against a lightning flash of bright blue. Silent as a viper I padded my way in the direction I had noticed her prowling in the smoke, spotting her armored hooves a few paces in front of me facing the complete opposite direction expecting me to strike from the doorway. With the opportunity presented to me, giving away my position with a shotgun wasn't worth something I could do with a knife and a little clever hoofwork. The far wall of the room was nearby but would require a tricky angle of attack in order to use to my advantage.

With the mental calculations made, I charged into my target with all the violent intent I could muster and barreled her over and against the wall with such force she couldn't even scream. Instead, there came a coughing wheeze coming from under her detachable gas mask as the air had been crushed out of her by the force of the blow. Without a second's hesitation I drilled the knife poised in my magic down on my target aiming for the gap of the neck where their Mark III armor failed to provide a bevor. She may have been dazed however, but her instincts were still on-point and she used her bracer to block the point from making friends with her collar. Every wasted moment was another second of recovery to a trained combatant, and so mercilessly I pounced on her with all the anger my fear of the moment drove into me. Using my hooves to viciously batter her defending hoof away, I immediately proceeded to hammer the knife deep into the crook of her neck in three furious blows. She went limp at the first blow as her spinal cord was sliced, but that didn't stop my hooves from hammering it in a bit deeper, just to really be sure she wouldn't get back up on me. My knife and duster now properly bloodied, as well as my body pulsating with thunder with every panicked beat of my heart, I withdrew into a new position amongst the haze of the grenade.

"How many?"

"Unknown! Safe to assume a Strike Force."

"Copy, moving!"

"Vile Equestrian magic...it is impossible to see in this mess!"

They honored me by assuming I was a full Squad of ponies. Now I had to perform up to that lofty expectation to the letter or my own vanity wouldn't let me rest, even in death. My E.F.S was hazy on the details still but using what it gave me I guessed there was at least four to six of them left. Dripping knife by my side, I withdrew my shotgun from the magnetized plate on my back and weaved my way to the far side of the stairway keeping an eye out for each and every burst of light. The next Askari revealed herself by blindly opening fire into the open doorway far to my left with an HMG, the enormous muzzle flashes sparkling the air around the form of the shooter as the crystal powder was excited by the hot gases. The level of light produced by her sustained fire was as if she had lit off a flare directly at her hooves giving me all the detail I needed to aim for her head with my glowing green sights and let of a roar of 8-ball shot royally fuck her up at two yards. The shooter collapsed immediately in the mystic haze, the trigger mechanism of her BattleSaddle broken and continuing to fire wildly wherever the heavy recoil managed to flop the corpse. Even as I dove away from the staircase back towards the site of my first kill, the searing pain in my gut and lower chest like a hot poker was something I was expecting at any point during our fight. Agile as I was, nopony can dodge a fucking bullet.

"FUCKKKK...!!" I howled into a thankfully muted microphone while rolling onto my back, continuing to scream into my helmet as my body made me aware of the .338 caliber armor penetrators that had managed to punch through the Celestium plating and two different kinds of Kevyarn.

Without even looking into my medkit I knew I was going to be scrounging for scraps as Buck had already needed the most potent of my shit and the bulk of our supplies were with the Mauler. Technically we were to supposed to remain nearby it at all times but Buck had decided to get us into some trouble and as a result...it was my problem too. With the smokescreen and my own body only having another thirty-seconds or so of life left in it, I had to scan quickly through my inventory to see what I could possibly use against such massive abdominal trauma. The MHG, as helpful and snidely as ever, flashed its cartoonish pony silhouette in the left side of my HUD with the abdomen region flashing a deadly red. I had only survived thanks to the incredible resilience of the thick Celestium of my breastplate, the dense padding of impact-absorbing long-fiber Kevyarn, and the short-fiber underbarding I wore underneath. Had the shots occurred at farther than near point-blank range, it absolutely would have taken the shots better but, as it was...they had slowed down enough to get stuck inside me rather than pass through-and-through. The Mrk. V was no T-45, but it could take a lot of abuse and stop threats better than anything not already classified as Powered Armor. My body on the other hoof...

'A-M XRB!? Not gonna fuckin' cut it... I growled to myself as I painfully laughed off the enchanted gauze bandages hoping for something far stronger. 'Any E-T XR?? No? Fuck!'

Buck had taken my only vial of Extra Strength potion and two doses of Medix leaving me with only one dose of painkillers to jab into my neck. Even with my hatred of needles, the hot searing pain in my gut overruled such a puny pinprick of pain...which gave way to a slightly heady haze as the syringe clattered to the floor beside me. It was a measured dose, enough to numb the pain for me to to ironically think more clearly without the distraction of three tungsten penetrators swimming around in my intestines. With another fresh look over my Aid menu I came to the sickening realization that the only possible course of treatment was whatever juice was leftover for the Griffin Stim I still had on my belt. The gun-like device looked almost comically like some sort of ray gun with the tube containing the healing brew coming off the back of the thing like a vacuum tube. Opiates dulling my higher reasoning, I stuffed the nozzle into the largest hole in my breastplate and pulled the trigger, replacing one kind of unbearable pain with an entirely new form of torment. The only sensible word I could use to describe to agony would be an unbearable feeling of tearing and writhing as the near quarter-dose of Stim worked its magic on me yet spared no punches. It was over in a couple of seconds which dragged on for eternity as the metal darts were dug from the depths of my guts and spat out of my body by the expedited healing process running its course in my bowels. Even as it happened it didn't even feel real...like a horrible nightmare you can't recall while the rest of your body remains tense and on edge.

When it was all over I laid still, gasping for air as a tingling sensation bombarded my body from horn to hoof and the dizziness washed over my poor brain leaving the whole room spinning. If I was alone or surrounded by enemies, I was entirely unaware for a time as the shock of the experience wore off leaving behind a pins and needles feeling under the skin. What part of me that could still think was grateful for the surviving dose of painkillers as it was doubtful I could have remained conscious during the process, let alone ride out the after effects. I had narrowly escaped yet again...and mom was never going to ever fucking hear about it. I couldn't hide the gaping holes in my armor from Hucks or anyone in the Rough Riders, but I could at least rest easy keeping her poor mind in the dark about my latest brush with death this tour. She had suffered more than enough during our short time together and I couldn't handle another round of her maternal concern on the offensive. When the throbbing in my skull calmed down enough for me to move again, I clipped the Stim device back to my belt and racked a fresh shell into the chamber of my shotgun ready for round two. I had only killed a couple of Zeebs so far as I was aware...which meant there were at least three other members of the team that had yet to make an appearance.

"Viper-2, Viper-4 please respond!"

The direness of my situation was temporarily lost on me while the Griffin wizardry destroyed my intestines but hearing the frantic call of another one of my targets roused my mind and body to action. Two of them were down and out, one of which carried that scary ass HMG that had thankfully ran its belt dry of ammunition while I had patched myself up. This left only a few more left to deal with although it both irked and concerned me that I couldn't have a solid number to work with as I was already starting to feel my body begging for a break from the action to recover from all the what the fuck that had been going on the last ten minutes.

"They're gone! Form up on Anthubu, he will show the way through this witchcraft! Viper Patrol, sound off!"

"Viper-1, clear!"

"Viper-3, clear!"

"Viper-5, clear!"

"Present my children...let us bring these meddlesome ponies to rest for the glory of Ogbunabali!"

That had to be the 'Anthubu' they had mentioned who immediately gave away his identity as the Shaman that had caused us troubles to begin with. I was still unsure what the Eyes of...whatever it was they had said implied but I could only assume it was some sort of magically enhanced sight. Would go a long way as to explaining why they had the drop on us despite giving no indication as to where we would descend through the cloud layer. I had to hope beyond hope the addition of the crystal powder was making it hard for him to fucking see anything. It was already unfair enough as it was given their clear advantages but I had found some luck so far in whittling down their numbers by two bodies already and I felt unusually confident in myself. More than likely it was just the drugs telling me I was confident but I refused to tell the difference and made the conscious decision to roll with it. I wasn't invincible, evidenced by the three holes punched into me, but I was hopped up on painkillers and had a goddamn shotgun so I was going to be just fine.

The Shaman spoke once more, this time however his voice echoed in a wholly unnatural way with multiple mumbling voices layered over his own. Fearing the worst I dove to the ground and curled up in a ball behind one of the fanciful stone pillars that supported the high roof. Half a second later the room was engulfed in a whirlwind of fire as the hexer wielded a mighty flame, sweeping across the room multiple times in an attempt to torch me where I stood. I pulled my tail under the tails of my duster and clenched my eyes shut until the sound of spewing flame ceased knowing I was mostly safe with Dragon hide covering most of my body. When the noise stopped I peeked through my lashes to find my smokescreen had evaporated in the inferno and I had lost my biggest advantage to a far superior magician.

"Hear me, accursed one!" Anthubu called out defiantly in perfect English. "Your parlor trick was no match against the power of the Beyond! I have seen through your deceptions and know you are merely one solitary soldier...we outnumber you by a number of four-to-one. I know you are wounded...there is no hope to kick against the pricks and survive. Surrender now...and I vow to make your death a glory unto the Gods!"

'Tough sell boss...' I thought to myself as I weighed my options knowing he saw me. 'Thank fuck he hasn't seemed to have noticed Buck yet at least...'

"Cowardly Griffin!" He called out once more in a booming tone, the shock to my body almost as intense as the Stim. "I see you cowering there just beyond the courtyard! You cannot evade the Fires of Ogbunabali a second time!"

'Can't he see me too??' I thought panickily, almost calling out to correct him before catching myself in the act and diverting my attention away from the why and towards how this could be useful to me. Somehow one cover had been exchanged for a completely different one without my knowing but I was not fool enough to pass it up.

I had used my only two spectral smoke grenades but my supply of fragmentation grenades had yet to be touched since my AMR had been the superior ordinance of choice until now. I could clearly see the four red ticks on my HUD now that the crystal powder wasn't fucking with the spell matrix and I didn't waste any time considering my shotgun or knife now my cover had been evaporated. With nothing left to lose, I grabbed the three frags attached to my chest bandoleer, pulled the pins and prayed my counting ability was on point tonight.

"One...two...three..." I counted slowly out loud, every other sound falling on deaf ears as I played an incredibly dangerous game of Cook That Grenade.

On the count of four I leaned out from behind my pillar and hurled my over-easy metal death eggs at the four of them arrayed on the stairs. I only caught a brief glimpse of them as I threw my grenades; three proudly armored Zebra mares in desert pattern armor arrayed in a triangle around a tall male dressed in blood red robes wearing the skull of some beast with a thick blindfold obscuring his eyes. I was barely behind the pillar again when the grenades detonated in mid-air somewhere in front of them, the combined might of three grenades at once could be felt in the ground and the air. The silence that followed was more deafening than the explosions as I waited with bated breath for any sign of life that might have somehow survived.

Before I even knew it an unseen force had lashed around my legs and my head came crashing down hard for the second time that night. I was dragged, roughly and without any regard, from my hiding place and dangled in the air limply as I struggled to get the world to stop spinning on me. The first thing I saw clearly was the Shaman, half of his head and body blown clean off and replaced by a dark, noxious sparking green aura which oozed from his bloodied hooves and into the floor before erupting out of the ground beneath me as barely visible binds. The surviving side of his blasted head still bore the skull mask I had briefly spotted earlier, a single bit of glowing red light in the eye socket coming from under his blindfold that emanated an icy cold malice that could be felt through my armor.

"Countless curses be upon thee!" He growled furiously, the blood dripping from his wounds hissing as they hit the green aura coming from his body. "True Children of the Way shall never know death by the hooves of mere weapons of war, foul Equine filth. I could not see you amongst the mutterings of the Eyes...but a viper caught in the bag must be disposed of for the good of the household, it's origin be damned lest its venom touch what it shouldn't!"

Boom! With a mighty crack a round went off behind me blowing a sizable hole in the fleshy part of my captor's chest. Not a second later this was followed up by a rapid volley of four more shots, each .45-70 projectile dealing devastating damage to what was left of his head and torso. The distraction was sufficient to slacken his hold on me and while I wriggled free, Anthubu recoiled from the impacts into his flesh followed up by a murderous pounce from an enraged Buck Beak wielding...was that a battle axe?

"FUCK! YOU! SO! FUCKING! MUCH! GODS! FUCKING! DAMNIT!" He roared violently, punctuating every word with a heavy cleave from a wispy red ethereal battleaxe straight out of the pages of history.

The axe carved through the Shaman with ease, the first screeches of pain finally coming out of this corrupted fuck before being quickly silenced by the brutal chop job his body was subjected to. The unnatural green mist holding his body together ignited into flame with every stroke of the massive bearded axe in Buck's talons and with one last furious swing the body had been reduced to a lumpy mass of assorted gore, brain and bone. Even after I had landed safely on my hooves I couldn't help but stand and watch in awe as he went completely Feral for half a minute, impressing me with his savage physical brutality. Not only that but the casting of what could only have been a Gryphon spell seeing as Buck had none of the Griffin Sorcery genes in his family tree. For once his boasting wasn't all hot-air which was a refreshing change but I knew this would only make his boasting worse now.

"You uh...you good, Buck?" I asked cautiously, hoping the minute or so pause I had given him was enough time to cool down.

"Huh? What? Oh...yeah! Yeah, I'm fuckin' fantastic Crete. Did you see that shit though?! Did you see that?! I told you I could fucking do Gryphon magic! Suck on it, bitch! Wooooooooo!"

He threw his arms in the air in triumph before seemingly remembering his right arm was still mostly fucked and curling up on the ground around it groaning in pain. I had a quick laugh at his expense and scanned the floor for where the last bit of Medix I had remained from earlier. The room was a fucking wreck with blast marks and bullet holes in the walls, blood on the ceiling and all manner of debris both organic and otherwise scattered across the floor. The chaos we had wrought on the stately home was about what I had expected from the night in general and ensured I had to look hard in order to find the syringe.

"I got ya Buck, don't worry." I hummed as I knelt next to him and craned his head up a bit so I could get at his juggular. "Ain't a full dose like last time but it should make it a bit more bearable until we can get back to the Mauler."

"Nnng...yeah, heh." He winced, the tension in his body lessening a bit after I stuck him. "Hoooboy that fuckin' stings... They're not gonna be happy about us going off radar for a bit."

"Yeah, but we knocked out two AA emplacements, gained some new intel on their Shaman and made a practical use of those new grenades." I replied, rolling onto my back to rest next to him now that we had a moment to breathe safely. "Eggheads'll have a field day over the combat data, we didn't fuckin' die and you can walk away with a nice Amethyst Heart or two. Honestly earned this time too so that's a bonus."

"Wait, you know about that?" He grunted, shifting his weight around to sit upright before slipping the makeshift sling around his busted arm. "Rain didn't tell you, did he?"

"Rain didn't say a thing, Buck. You told me yourself when you were wasted on Absent eight months ago, and before you tell me you don't remember that, I know. You tried to show me a new grapple technique you invented on the spot and knocked yourself the fuck out by tumbling right into a fuckin' concrete barrier. Was pretty damn hilarious if you ask me, heh"

"That...goddamnit, that does sound like something I'd do..." He groaned to himself, looking away from me with a stern expression. "Fine, whatever. What now?"

"Well...." I sighed heavily, the throbbing in my body from earlier still pinging away inside me. "We should probably radio the Mauler, let them know the situation and see if we can secure you some medivac."

"Ugh...and some more fuckin' painkillers, sweet fuck..." He grunted again with a wince, holding the injured limb in his left hand. "Oh, and don't you go tellin' everybody about any sounds of pain you might have probably totally heard tonight."

"Heh...maybe. No promises on Hucks though." I chuckled in reply, tapping the radio in my helmet to unmute other channels. "Alpha Six-Niner to Mauler-3, I need immediate medivac on my position, over."

"Copy, Crete! The hell have you been??"

"Buck decided to ignore the low-profile act and get us into some trouble with an AA battery who had a clairvoyant Shaman. All hostiles eliminated and the 88-Flak on the roof is silent but Buck took a couple bad hits and is grounded, any chance at a pickup?"

"Uhh...hold up! Contact! 2 o'clock at four-five meters, second floor! Exactly there, let it rip!"

"Oh...yeah, kinda forgot there was a bigger battle going on outside for a minute there." Buck chuckled quietly to my right.

"Hoooooo boy! Look at them run!" Copper's voice came in over the radio again. "Sorry, spotted a building that needed some holes blown into it. Uhhhh, yeah we can try to come get you but based on where the computer is tellin' me you two are...it's gonna be awhile till we can swing that direction. We've still got Checkpoint Delta to fuck over and Conqueror is reporting some stiff resistance around a pair of AAs by the bazaar and both of those are in almost the complete opposite direction. How copy?"

"Loud and clear, Copper..." I sighed, running through the timetable in my head knowing he was right. "Gonna have to call in an actual winged medivac then because we can't wait long. I took a few hits myself and had to pop a Stim which...wasn't fun so I'll probably need a look over from a medic as well. Good luck out there, guys! Hopefully I can rejoin you guys soon but it remains to be seen."

"Copy, Copper out."

With the Mauler easily ninety-minutes out (assuming the timetable held out which was highly debatable in an active warzone) we needed to go to the next best thing. Placing a call into Command for a pair of Pegasi with a stretcher to come by and haul Buck to the field hospital located a few miles outside of Anakha where the M.O.P's finest stood waiting in their pristine white tents. The problem with seeking outside help was the fact we would have to explain why we were so far from our designated position. Seeing as I had done the bulk of the heavy fighting so far, this was one problem Buck would have to get himself out of. He had won some hefty bonus points for saving my ass, bringing me my rifle and showing off some impressive brutality...but I wasn't gonna let him off the hook on this one. I had covered for his sorry ass more than once and tonight I just wasn't feeling up to doing anything about it this time.

"What the fuck am I supposed to say?!" He whined the moment I told him the bad news. "You've got the silver tongue, Crete. Work your magic on this one!"

"No, you fuckin' do it, asshole." I snapped back with an angry growl, pointing an accusatory hoof at his fucked up wing. "You ignored orders and dragged me along on your damn crusade. I just went along with it because what the fuck else am I to do? I'm strapped to your fuckin' chest eight-hundred feet in the air completely at your mercy. Fuck right off with your bitching and make the call Buck. I've got some corpses to loot."

When he glared at me silently and unmoving I lashed out with my telekinesis and pulled the EarBloom out from his PipBuck, holding it threateningly near one of his big fluffy ears. His helmet lay nearby but both of us seemingly forgot or ignored it in the moment. It was a battle of wills and I was not going to let his size or moodiness intimidate me into taking the fall for him on something he went out of his way to mock and ignore. If we had done any less tonight so far, there was no way in hell either of us would make it out of the battle without a long debriefing in store for us upon returning to the FOB. Was already a bit of a stretch to think we would get much of any leniency so I wasn't intent on making myself a bigger target for the brass than I needed to be. Besides, I had leap onto one too many metaphorical grenades for his sake and it was his turn to own up to some of his fuck ups while I took some time to get my head together.

"Take it yourself or I shove it in there. Hard." I huffed, even as the realization of my innuendo brought a bit of a smile to my face.

"Fine!" He grunted in defeat, swiping the larger earpiece in his left hand and stuffing it into his ear. "That's what he said by the way."

"Is it now?" I laughed over my shoulder while digging through the blood smeared remains of my foes. "Law never made pegging illegal you know! Never know, guy might like taking it up the ass from his wife or somethin."

"S-shut the fuck up right now Crete!" He huffed indignantly. "I might wanna fuck ya, even let ya top me but like hell I'd ever bend over for ya like that."

"You wanna fuck all the mares in Alpha, Buck..." I sighed, turning my attention back to my pilfering. "You don't exactly try to hide that fact from anyone."

"Heh...look who's fuckin' talkin'!" He replied with a snort. "Whatever...time's a wasting the longer we sit around doing jack shit. What should I tell them? Gotta be convincing so you better have a damn good suggestion."

"The truth, Buck. It's the most believable and our contribution was pretty decent so far tonight with two AAs and at least ten dead combatants while surviving close-combat with the enemy. We'll have to hope the ambiguous orders for teams like us works in our favor on this one, heh..."

"Hmph..." He grunted seemingly unconvinced as he put a talon to the radio in his ear. "This is gonna suck..."

I tuned him out and focused again on the bloody destruction we (mostly me) had left. Anthubu was nothing more than goop on the floor with absolutely nothing recognizable in the mess to pilfer through while the other three bodies nearby his were in similar states of fucked. Three P+ grenades going off at once at near point-blank range nearly liquified exposed bits of skin and fur and gouged out everything else ending with body parts splattered across the stairs and flanking walls. When I found a logistics satchel pack on one of them, my elation and curiosity were immediately rewarded with sheets of paper so soaked in blood and shredded by shrapnel that they were unintelligible and completely unusable. Rounds in most magazines had also been compromised, some even having gone off when hit in the blast leaving very little of anything worth our time grabbing. Even the bodies of the machine gunner and riflemare were pretty barren of anything useful seeing as none of their ammo fit our chosen weapons, their weapons were common and aside from the footage gained from our encounter with the Shaman, there was no more intelligence to be gained from these dead. This left only the rooftop flak gun and anything else they may have around the gun emplacement which would have to wait until Buck was finished with his call.

"Copy, Alpha Six-Three out." Buck nodded before immediately pulling the earpiece out and sighing like his day had been ruined. "Well...that went well enough, I guess."

"They sending an airlift for ya?" I asked, sitting down on the stairs in one of the few clean areas left on the steps.

"Yeahhh...but it's probably gonna be a fair bit before they get here." He grumbled, likewise settling back to rest. "Thankfully they didn't really question anything I said...they seem pretty occupied with other shit right now. Probably could've said anything and they'd have sent the damn thing anyway... Anyways, let's get to the roof so we can pop a flare for them since that's where I said we'd be."

"Any chance they're sending me another pair of wings for me to work with?" I asked curiously. "Or are they just gonna fly me back to the Mauler to work with Brandy or somethin'?"

"Didn't talk about ya to be honest." He chuckled with a wince, going back to holding his wounded arm. "Outside of mentioning you were still here with me and all that, I have no idea what they're gonna do with ya. For once though...I think I'm ready to spend some time with the Healers before getting back to the action."

"Heh, you going out of your way to seek medical treatment?" I laughed in mock shock. "Whatever, heh...I can't blame you on this one. You've taken some gnarly hits tonight my guy."

"Look who's talkin'!" He chuckled painfully nodding with his beak at the holes in my armor. "Damn crazy those didn't just outright kill ya. .338s ain't too kind, even to the Mrk. IV. I mean, Strawberry Cream from Delta Squad got peppered by one not even a month ago and it fucked her right the hell up."

"Believe me, if I was even a little bit slower they would have fucked me up even more. I was lucky as all hell she only managed to hit me three times instead of twenty. And yeah...I remember hearing about Strawberry...goddamned shame what happened to her. Gonna miss hearing the poetry her husband back in Filly used to send her..."

Silence dragged on between us for a few moments as we both just kinda dissociated from reality to process what we had gone through. Buck could have lost a whole wing and definitely lost an arm for a minute there and I was only alive thanks to Arms-Tech's finest work, painkillers and Griffin Alchemy. Hucks was going to have a panic attack the moment she saw the damage to my armor followed by a long medical lecture on the dangers of self-treatment with 'untested methods'. It wasn't that Equine use of Griffin Stims had never been done before as it most certainly had back when they had first been invented six-or-so years before. The problem was they weren't designed for our smaller bodies having been developed for Griffins by Griffins whose over-the-top bravado needed no introduction. Even micro-dosing the potent cocktail of health juice had proven incredibly problematic. The wound was healed as described on the package but the sheer shock to the system and rapid cellular regrowth would almost always kill the user who went out wracked with some of the worst pain imaginable. Naturally, Hucks would be at once both fascinated by my use for the research notes and equally horrified I even attempted the death cure. As for mom... No. I wasn't going to go there, not yet at least. The night was still young and we had a city to secure for Bravo Company. I had my moment to sit and rest, now was time to return to the job I had laid out for me.

"Alright..." I groaned, getting to my hooves and feeling the strain in my body now that the adrenaline and majority of the Medix had worn off. "Let's go get you ready for exfil then."

"Huh? Oh...yeah, sure." He responded, coming out of a daze of his own and holding out his good hand for some help up. "They'll be here any minute now, anyway."

After dragging him to his paws and securing his makeshift sling, we made our way up the stairs and onto the second level of the home. This was mostly a wide, open hallway leading to what I assumed were bedrooms or other such nonsense behind doorways down the way. With no angry red ticks on our HUDs to worry about, we ignored these rooms in favor of the second stairway at the end of the hallway which brought us up and onto the rooftop garden under a cloudy night sky. The city was alive with gunfire and explosions of differing size and intensity while the air was still filled with flak and lightning, only now it was concentrated around the center of town. Looking across the smaller dwellings removed from the spacious property we were on, we could both see for ourselves that despite the opposition, the outer city defenses were finally silent. I was going to mention this to Buck when out of the corner of my eye I saw a faint bit of red on my HUD. And then another. And then a lot of others.

"Oh fuck me..." I groaned out loud, putting my rifle up to my eye and peering through the scope for a better look. "Fuck guys, when I asked for some fun I wasn't thinking of a gangbang..."

"Holyyyy shit..." Buck whispered as he too noticed the approaching red menace. "That's gotta be part of the garrison coming back!"

"Damnit, they managed to get a message out before Second Platoon knocked out their communications..." I grumbled angrily, feeling completely pissed at a call for help I would have made myself were our roles in the battle reversed. "Fuck...this doesn't look good..."

"Yeah, no shit Sheer Luck... I count forty-plus of 'em...'bout ten-minutes out, give or take."

"Aye, I'd have to agree with you on that one. Any ideas?"

He glanced at his fucked up wing before looking towards the flak cannon and humming to himself. The most logical thing to do would be to retreat and try to hole up in another building nearby to wait them out but our time to move was coming and going as we tried to make some kind of plan. With a medivac imminent we would potentially have two more armed combatants to assist us (long as they weren't M.O.P) but the moment they landed they wouldn't be free to take flight again. With over thirty enemy combatants moving to re-enter the city, we had to be so lucky as to fall right in their path towards the city center where the real fighting was taking place. Our only saving grace was the fact they were all infantry with not a single battlebot in sight.

"I got an idea!" He blurted out a moment later, turning to me intensely. "How much can you lift with your horn?"

"Uhh...I...Uhhh..." I stammered as it was a question I had never spent time answering for myself before now.

"Awesome, think you can help me push this bitch to the edge of the roof? Imma fuck with the depression angle so we can give these bitches a taste of their own shrapnel."

He nodded towards the untouched 88-flak and then towards the edge of the roof some ten feet away. As a standing AA battery, the large cannon lacked any roadwheels and instead relied on four support legs which were thankfully not bolted down. All the same it was an insane plan that would almost certainly lead to an arcane burnout for me but was the best use of our ever evolving bad situation. With a shrug of 'fuck it', I wrapped my telekinesis around the massive hunk of metal and threw everything I had into the one and only real thing I could do with my horn hoping it would be enough.

"Hey, good fuckin' shit!" I heard him call out having clenched my eyes shut unconsciously in order to help me concentrate better. "Just hold it up! Don't try to move it, I'll push it over. Just be ready to drop it when I say when!"

"N-not..." I grunted, the strain on my body like I were holding up a mountain attached to a pully system tied to my horn. "G-g-gonna...be...an...i-issue..."

Never before had I tried to do any sort of heavy lifting on this sort of scale. Outside of training myself on levitating my personal weapons and the occasional random small object, I avoided having to rely on my magic. I wasn't talented in it to begin with and lacked most of the traits and self-discipline required to excel in the subject leaving me to be a glorified Earth Pony of a sort. Could I teleport myself from one place to another or cast great balls of lightning even on the scale of an Initiate? Of course not...and I never set out to learn how when I joined the Army. However, there was one rule of magic that had always stuck with me and that was how it could be affected, both positively and negatively, by the caster's emotional state. With all the pain and frustration and anger I had gone through thus far, I found enough strength of will within me to hoist that goddamned thing barely an inch into the air. Hardly any fucking record compared to the literal tonnage trained Lifters could pull off but it was for me and that was all that mattered. Buck heaved himself against the floating mass and pushed it through the air towards the edge of the roof as best he could on three working legs. Within a few inches of the point of no return he had me drop it, something I was more than eager to do as I felt the strain in my horn growing to the point of severe concern. However...even with the heavy lifting done and over with, I already knew I had lost this fight and would soon have to face the music.

"Hell fuckin' yeah, Crete!" He cheered as he panted for breath and hobbled back over to the crates of ammunition stored where the gun used to be. "Take a second to breathe but I need a hand getting the ammo over. I'll shoot, you spot me targets and load 'er up!"

The roof was harder than I expected as my head went fuzzy and my legs decided to give out from under me, the symptoms of light-headedness giving my poor body another solid bitch slap for good measure. All sense of balance and direction was lost while my vision was dim and tunnel-visioned leaving me entirely at the mercy of the world; my body finally said enough was enough and had slammed hard on the emergency shutdown button. For how long I lay dead to the world...I really couldn't tell. It was a baleful waking dream where there was no sight, no sound and barely any sense of being. Was I conscious? Knocked the fuck out? I really couldn't tell...but I could tell I was alive and that was enough of a thought to latch onto for dear life as my body weathered the storm without me. What little part of me that could still feel something could only register a profound feeling of being drained, wrung out like a sponge of all energy and ambition. I was inclined to vaguely wonder how Buck was handling it all now that I was out of it, yet trapped within my own thoughts. The gun was planted and he had been moving ammo when my body gave out so I had to hope he could find a way to play both the gunner and loader role for the 88-mil until I got back. If I got back that is...

"Common damnit...Nimbus! Give her another dose, ASAP!"

A voice that wasn't my own. In fact it wasn't even one that I recognized. And then, all of a sudden, I could feel life returning to my body as though I were being inflated by a cloud of warmth allowing me to finally open my eyes on the waking world again. First thing I saw this time upon coming to was the concerned look on a turquoise Pegasus stallion's face followed by the bright yellow and pink cross emblazoned on the shoulder of his navy blue combat flight uniform. He had to sacrifice armor protection for weight reduction and space for the stretcher harness to attach firmly while every other available bit of him was laden down with enough bags and pouches to give even me some envy. Looking more to my left, I saw my corresponding limb outstretched with a long, slender needle expertly stuck through the Kevyarn of the knee joint and into my vein. Attached to this IV was a second Paramedic, a dusky tan bloke who kept the black visor of his flight helmet down and held aloft a glass bottle of a brightly glowing blue liquid which trickled much-needed feeling back into my body. I knew that glow...

"N-Nexus...?" I mumbled, my mouth and tongue feeling like they were trying to function at half-power as I pointed a weak right hoof in the general direction of the bottle.

"Yes Ma'am!" The turquoise one replied brightly seemingly ecstatic to see me speaking. "Arcane Science boys have been tinkering with something like this for years now but this is the first shit that works the same way each time its used. Little bit of powdered Nexus Crystal, distilled water and some other classified shit but it's a damned sure way of juicing one of you Unis back up to full charge after a burnout."

He wasn't kidding, every passing second I was regaining more and more feeling in my body and felt a gush of energy bubbling up inside me like a mountain spring. It had been years since my last burnout. I never pushed myself knowing full well that I had a very select level of expertise when it came to my one spell of choice leaving my last experience well in the past. Barely a teen filly trying to impress some friends by stacking rocks bigger than myself and ending up in the PonyVille hospital for burnout. It lead to a couple days of quiet, wholesome cuddles and coddling from mom who educated me on knowing when to scale-back my ambitions. The lessons hadn't exactly stuck per-se...but I was still alive despite it all.

"How are you feelin'?" He asked, glancing at a PipBuck 2500 integrated into his left bracer which was plugged by a cable to my own. "MHG reading is stable but this isn't just a physical condition so tell me how you feel, Colonel?"

"U-um...well..." I mumbled, trying to sit up an inch at a time as strength seeped back into my limbs. "I'll tell ya...I've had a hell of a night so far and shouldn't be alive."

"Heh, well you are anyway so ain't that a helluva thing?" He laughed, helping me sit up more. "Let's let the tap run dry on this one, you had a hell of a thrashing there."

The tan one nodded in agreement before calling out, "First Sergeant, status?"

"Four-minutes out, boys! You ready to play on the defensive for a bit?" Buck called out somewhere to my right, assumedly on the cannon already.

"It ain't my first pick but we're armed if that's what you're askin'." The first Paramedic replied as he lifted up some sort of submachine gun and the other flashed an M1 Carbine.

"Heh, ain't exactly impressin' me boys but it'll have to work." I chuckled airily with some feeling yet to return to me.

"Yeah, well we weren't expecting a fuckin Platoon of soldiers to be comin' on back through this area since it was clear when the call was made. Otherwise we would've brought a Paraheavy with us to bring some real heat to give us some room to work."

"We can bitch about this later, Crete! You ready to go or what?"

I glanced up at the guy holding the bottle which trickled the last of its glowing brew into my vein as I watched in real time. Once the last drop left the I.V tubing he yanked the needle cleanly from my leg and coiled it up while the other helped me to my hooves. I was rather wobbly and unsteady so he had me walk in a few stumbly circles and stretch out in different ways to encourage blood flow. It had been awhile since someone new had seen my range of flexibility as when he had me attempt to touch my nose to the ground under myself and I easily went much further.

"H-holy shit..." He gasped in complete awe, his wings flaring wide for a few moments before he blushed and whipped them back against his sides. "U-um, well alright then! I'd say you're back to full form heh!"

"Awesome, either of you guys any good with a rifle?" Buck asked, pointing a talon at my AMR set up on its bipod on the edge of the roof nearby. "Gotta lotta firepower right there and Crete'll be more useful as a loader with her magic. That thing's pretty straightforward, right?"

"Mhm." I nodded enthusiastically while taking a seat nearby the breach of the cannon with a fresh magical grip on the first round, loading it in with a quick motion. "Basic trigger mechanism and the scope can be reset to range out for six-hundred yards which should be more than enough for what we're up against. The kick isn't the most pleasant but there's several recoil-dampening elements at play in this, even more than that bigass muzzle brake. If you've ever had the chance to shoot a Barnette APR-S2, this is the same platform just...a helluva lot bigger heh."

The tan Paramedic said nothing and instead cozied up prone with my rifle, shouldering it with proper enough form that I didn't even bother to ask his qualifications. The way he slid right into position comfortably despite the tense situation was all the sign I needed to know he had spent some quality time on the range. Adding onto it was the way he checked the magazine and racked the bolt with an air of confidence. This guy had definitely seen some time with the smaller .50 version of my weapon and he even went as far to plug his PipBuck into the BORS optics system. The more friendly one took up the Carbine set aside by his fellow and settled in behind some sandbags of his own, setting his small stash of grenades next to Big Boss which was fully loaded and on loan for the moment. Buck had already retrieved the spare mags I kept ready to go across my chest and stacked them next to my rifle so all we had left to do was wait. Wait and hope we could fuck them up enough to save our own hides. A call had been placed for reinforcements but comms were so full of radio traffic that none of us were even sure if anyone even heard it. The battle for the checkpoints in the wall around the old city was taking longer than it was supposed to but there was little clear intelligence to be gleaned from keeping the radios on save for a common link between the four of us. We had pre-aimed the cannon at the wide, stately road just outside the courtyard Buck and I had first landed in earlier assuming it was the most likely route they would take. After another half-minute of waiting with itchy trigger hooves, the first of the red markers on our HUDs turned from dull to bright red indicating they were within visual range. We waited until more than eight of them were in view before Buck snickered and gave the signal.

"Alrighty boys and girls, let 'em have it!" Buck bellowed gleefully, his last words immediately drowned out by the roar of the 88mm gun followed up by the considerably less loud report of my AMR, the tiny crack of the M1 and the loud clatter of the first empty shell tumbling out of the back of the breech.

The first volley caught them completely by surprise, exploding in the center of the loosely assembled crowd of armed bodies trying to trot their way towards the center of town. The screams and howls that followed our first shot were music to my ears after the shit I had gone through tonight on Buck's behalf and I shoved the next shell into the breech with immense pleasure. Our second shot took advantage of the confusion of the moment seeing that they hadn't spotted where the shots were coming from yet; another mass of bodies and their carious parts were hurled unceremoniously into the air amidst bursts of fire and gore. When the breech slammed shut on round #3, there were no bright red markers visible in my peripheral and those that remained were clustering into multiple small groups amidst the manors nearby. The fuse on our cannon shells were too sensitive to try and blow through these homes to reach them, at least without leveling most of them which wouldn't go over well with the locals. Thankfully though, I carried a variety of ammo types for my girl and took the break from loading to pop out three mags from a pouch on my waist from the Sigil Stones I kept them stored in.

"Yo, load these and target the clusters!" I called out to him, throwing the new mags within easy reach. "APHE Programmable Airburst, set them to proximity fuse and pop a few rounds."

He remained silent but thankfully followed my instructions to the letter, swapping mags, racking a new shell and sending two downrange in less than five-seconds. As expected, the hard tungsten dart-head of the unique round punched right through the brittle sandstone before detonating out of sight with a group of markers vanishing from existence. Meanwhile, Buck wildly spun the manual cranks on our cannon to turn and face the far left where one of these groups attempted to flank us from the far side of the courtyard in an attempt to seek cover below the depression angle of our barrel.

His next shot was premature, decimating the side of a fine mansion several meters to the right of his intended target but granting us a breather to readjust with the cloud of pulverized sandstone blocking their view. Shell #4 was already downrange by the time I got it inside the gun and I found myself hyperfocusing on my task. Within another round I had settled into a rhythm, turning to grab the next shell from the rack just inches from being sledgehammered by the breech reciprocating giving us a surprisingly high fire-rate for a large breech-loader. At this point I was trusting Buck to keep his brutality in check well enough to let us avoid excessive collateral damage but eliminate as many of those sorry fucks as possible. Before I even knew it, i was reaching for an empty shell rack having let off more than a dozen shots to good effect. There were still more out there though...

"We're all out!" I called over to Buck who was already scrambling out of the gunner seat. "Time to get creative again!"

"I know! I know!" He blurted out, catching his grenade launcher back from the medic and readying it. "Any ideas??"

"No plan necessary, just sit tight and we'll take it from here."

Another new voice, this time over comms but with such casualness that I couldn't help but feel calmed a little. It was female for sure but mature, definitely older than any of us here but with a definite Westcoast accent.

"And who the fuck are you?!" Buck challenged openly over the mike.

"Commander Typhoon, Shadowbolt Team 'Crash', First Sergeant Buck." She replied back boldly with a measure of pride layered in. "You sent out a distress call, no?"

"I...uh...yeah?" Buck replied sheepishly, his respect for the Shadowbolts evident which was an odd thing to hear. "But I was expecting like fuckin' 4th Platoon or fuck, somepony from Beta Company! Not fuckin Team Crash!"

"Well too fuckin' bad, kid!" Typhoon chuckled confidently in reply, just as five jet black figures zoomed by overhead followed by clusters of explosions seen through the gaps between buildings.

Soon as they appeared, the last clumps of red on the horizon quickly went dark one by one. Trying to track their movements was nigh-on impossible, even S.A.T.S only managing to lock on once onto one of the Commandos though with no real clarity. Screams from afar were muffled by heavy gunfire and loud explosions, and in short order, everything suddenly dropped into silence save for the noise of battle elsewhere in the city. Neither Buck nor I had seen a Shadowbolt in action before, let alone a whole team of them at once. All the same, the sight was truly majestic to behold, even if it was nigh impossible to see what exactly they were doing. Buck in particular was enthralled, perched on the roof's edge with his wings spread wide and bouncing excitedly as he watched the pros at work. I knew he wanted to join in the fun....and I felt bad that of all the nights to take a good hit to the wing, it had to be the one time we got our asses saved by fuckin' Shadowbolts. I could only hope something positive came out of it for him, even if he was a shithead.

"Cease fire, cease fire." Typhoon spoke again in our ears as the last of the enemy was slaughtered. "All contacts neutralized. You boys ok over there?"

"Affirmative." I replied after seeing none of the others speak up out of colt-like stage freight around their flying idols. "None of us took a hit thankfully. Well, at least during this half of things. Captain Buck has some nasty injuries to his wing and leg and I took a few shots of my own earlier."

There was a soft series of thuds behind us and we all in unison whirled around to face the surprise attack only to find Team Crash had landed and were approaching us. Their armor was...mesmerizing to witness as its shape was difficult to make out with standard NVGs and on any other filter they barely showed up if they did at all. When the group got close I was better able to get a look at their equipment, which consisted of a slim, form-fitting set of jet-black M-CAP style armor integrated with motion servos making for an odd, entirely unique Light-Powered Armor. Even this close I was somehow struggling to see the real details of their armor as they seemed to almost just fade in with their surroundings. The one in front of the rest pointed an armored hoof at the four of us and nodded.

"Good shootin', all of you. Damned fine performance I'd say! Who's idea was it to repurpose their cannon and send their own rounds up their asses?"

"U-uh...mine?" Buck replied with a shaky raised hand.

"Well hot damn!" Typhoon replied with a hearty laugh. "Good to see the Nad Pads put some good wings to use in their teams. Lemme see the wing, Sergeant. Heard you took quite a hit tonight, eh?"

He awkwardly extended out his busted wing, clearly showing the foot-wide hole cleaved clean through the armored exterior plates. She took one look and gave a whistle of appreciation before getting up close and personal with it.

"Goddamn! You ain't gonna be flyin' anytime soon with somethin' like that keepin' you grounded."

"Debatable, heh..." I spoke up, seeing as he was too stunned by Typhoon gripping onto his wing to speak for himself. "I didn't even know he had been hit until we had flown at least another couple thousand meters and landed down there in that courtyard. Could probably find the blood trail across this neighborhood if you looked hard enough."

"Bullfuckingshit!" She laughed in response, glancing between us through her helmet which seemed to have had its roots in the M-CAP Ranger-series. "I'm amazed you can fuckin' get around wearing all that shit over your wings but now? You couldn't even get your ass off the ground with that level of damage! No offense, heh. That big of a hole would ground me for weeks for damn sure, even with the medical team we have back at base!"

And that was all it took. With a clear and present challenge laid out to him by one of the few people Buck legitimately looked up to, he huffed indignantly and spread his wings wide in defiance. Hole or no, this numbnuts was gonna fly.

"Fuckin' watch me then!" He challenged back, slamming his wings down hard and taking flight; albeit was without his usual grace and speed but still, he managed to stay airborne all the same.

He then proceeded to fly several laps around the manor home before skidding to a stop nearby. The effort had taken a lot out of him, on top of everything previous and he was visibly panting from the exertion. All the same however, he had just put an expert Ace flyer in her place and force fed her back her own words in a show of defiance that summed him up so perfectly. He was good and he fucking knew it, other's opinions be damned and proven wrong as soon as he hears about 'em. Even I couldn't help but beam with pride at him given his boundless ego was proving to play in his favor in front of a true figure of authority we could both tip our hats to in good conscience. He was going places, but only as long as he kept his shit together long enough to keep making good impressions where it counted.

"Sergeant..." Typhoon breathed in the purest sounding awe I had ever heard after several moments of anxious silence. "We've got a lot to talk about you and I..."

Next Chapter: Chapter Forty-One: Death From Above Estimated time remaining: 5 Hours, 58 Minutes