I’d killed a fucking tolan.

Ponies might have done it before me—Zip herself had done it before me—and I knew I wasn’t going to be the last. But to just stand in front of its corpse, an enormous pile of meat and bones and scales, and to realize that I’d just killed a monster that could rip steel apart like it was paper was absolutely amazing. I honestly felt a little lightheaded just trying to understand how the fuck I could’ve killed something like that.

But the ‘how’ part was pretty easy. The tolan had twisted when it fell, and I was staring through a hole in its chest about as wide as my head. I could actually see the wall of the warehouse on the other side. Its armored scales were all cracked and shattered, and I could see a few organs that’d been ripped into pieces from the slug punching through its chest. It wasn’t the slug that’d done that, though. All that damage came from the air sucking the tolan’s guts out the other side when the slug ripped clean through it.

I tried to imagine what would happen to a pony if you hit one with the railgun. She probably would just explode and evaporate if you hit center of mass.

Mawari and Denawa stepped out of the arsenal behind me and got a closer look at the monster. I’d told SCaR to keep an eye out for any more wailers, but so far I hadn’t heard anything from him, and there were a lot of dead wailers that’d been smooshed into paste by the tolan’s feet scattered around the door. Finally, the three of us could just relax after a night that went so horribly wrong.

“I can’t believe that monster is dead,” Mawari murmured, carefully walking around the tolan like it was going to come back to life any second. “How these things never wiped out the first colonists all those centuries ago is beyond me.”

“The military probably brought a lot of railguns with them,” I said. I’d left the railgun in the arsenal because it was really heavy to carry around, and I got close enough to the beast to actually touch it. My hoof clacked off of its scales, and I hit them a few more times just out of curiosity. It sounded like I was banging on a chunk of stone; no wonder that thing was so fucking hard to kill.

“We could make a lot of bullets off of its hide,” Denawa said. “Most smiths will buy them at fifteen Cs a plate. They’re great for making bulletproof armor with, if a bit heavy.”

“Denawa, we have an entire stockpile of weapons to go through!” Mawari exclaimed. “There’s probably millions of bullets in there! More than anything we can scavenge off of a tolan!”

Denawa just shrugged and pulled out a knife. “Yeah, but what will the other Runners think if we just head home with thousands of bullets? We’ll be on the wrong end of a gun or a knife in a week.” He hopped onto the tolan’s corpse and started moving toward where the railgun had fucked it up. “If we take back the scales and just stash the bullets somewhere so other scavengers won’t find them, then we’ll be much safer.”

He jammed the knife under the edge of one of the tolan’s shattered armor plates, and Mawari sighed next to me. “I suppose you’re right,” she said, shaking her head. Then, turning to me, she stuck out her hoof. “I feel it’s only fair that you get a share at least. You and your drone helped us out so much; we wouldn’t have been able to get into the warehouse without you.”

“Or kill the tolan,” I said, smirking a little bit. “I guess I helped with that as well.”

Denawa coughed and rolled his eyes. “We wouldn’t have had to fight a tolan or as many angry wailers if you hadn’t have brought it to the foundry in the first place.”

“True, but what’s done is done,” Mawari said. “So, how about it? I don’t know where you’re going, if you’re a scavenger or whatever, but you at least deserve some of the spoils.”

“Well, I could use a new gun,” I said. “I lost mine fighting the tolan in the first place.” Smiling, I shook her hoof. “I’ll take a quick look through what’s back there and pick out a few nice things for myself. I can’t be travelling too heavily; I’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

“So you’re a wanderer then?” Mawari asked me. She nodded to the brand on my flank. “Or a runaway who really knows what she’s doing?”

“It’s… a long story,” I said, glancing at my brand. “The short version is that I got away before the Crimson could make me a slave, but not fast enough to leave with both my marks intact. Now I’m on a mission for the Sentinels while they focus on rebuilding the valley to the north.” I paused, unsure if I should ask them, but I decided to anyway. “Say… if you guys are scavengers, have you run across any old Synarchy installations to the south of here? Some place where there’s a lot of waterfalls or something?”

Mawari and Denawa looked at each other. Denawa frowned, but his sister shook her head at him. Then turning back to me, she nodded. “There are… rumors of an old facility hidden in the mountains, under the waterfalls. The Ruin Runners tried to find it a few years back.”

“Ruin Runners?” I asked her. “You’ve mentioned them a few times now. What are you guys? Just scavengers with a fancy name?”

Mewari chuckled. “At its barest, yes. We’re organized and can distribute resources better than little scavenging bands or families can. We try to both find forgotten installations on Auris and plunder them bare. It takes every last bullet and bit of technology to survive this world, and everything we can find helps.”

“It doesn’t help if we let others in on promising secrets,” Denawa growled from the tolan’s carcass. “I’m glad you’re not in charge of the gang, Mewari, or we’d be out of business in a week.”

Mewari rolled her eyes. “Maybe if she actually had anything to go off of. She’d have as much luck as we have had trying to find this place.”

My ears perked a little bit. “Well? Did you find anything?”

She sighed and shook her head. “Not the installation, no. But we found some old Equestrian tech scattered around Bluewater Gorge. We weren’t able to go searching for too long, though. A lot of shrikes make their nests in those mountains, and the weather turned bad. But if there’s anywhere in the mountains where the Synarchy might have hid a base of some kind, then it’d have to be in the Gorge.”

I smiled and stepped forward to give her a hug. “You’ve just made these next few days so much easier for me,” I said. Then I nodded over her shoulder. “I’m gonna take a quick look around the arsenal and pick some things out that I might need. I want to be armed before I go check up on my friends.”

Denawa stopped what he was doing and spat out the knife. “I thought you said you were alone?”

“Just because I said it, doesn’t mean that I meant it,” I said, winking at him. “I didn’t know whether I could trust you guys or not earlier. But, well, I think you’re all pretty good.”

He sighed and shook his head. “They better not want cuts, too.”

“Relax, Denawa,” Mawari said, shooting a quick glare at him. “We’re already splitting the cut fewer ways than we were before.”

Denawa tore a big armored plate off of the tolan’s hide and tossed it onto the ground. “I guess we should work on laying them to rest, shouldn’t we?”

I felt a little remorse in my gut and flattened my ears. “I’m really sorry,” I said. “I know they were friends and family… I-I just was too weak and startled to catch Rankan before the tolan got him.”

Mawari put her hoof on my shoulder. “What’s done is done. All of us knew the risks going on. No Runner ever goes picking through ruins without knowing that they could die at any moment.” She sadly chuckled and glanced at her brother. “Denawa and I have been through many places much worse than this.”

Her brother slid off of the tolan’s body and slowly walked over to me. “Yeah, like Equestrian installations. If you do find one in Bluewater Gorge, be very careful. Its defenses could still be active after all these years. That means turrets, robots, and all other sorts of countermeasures you probably can’t even think of. At least it means other scavengers tend to leave them alone. They just want scrap and salvage, they’re not interested in running a gauntlet of traps for a few secrets.”

“Sounds like I’ll need to talk with you guys later,” I said. “You Runners have probably seen and heard a lot of useful things I’d like to know about. Maybe you can help me.”

“Maybe,” Mewari said. “But we’re not supposed to talk about any of our finds. That’ll be up to the boss. If you ever come to Three Rivers, look for us there. That’s where we’ll be going after this, and it’s where we keep our base of operations.”

“Three Rivers. Got it. One of my companions probably knows where that is.” I turned back to the door and trotted inside. “Now to see what toys the Synarchy left us!”

I spent the next half hour just searching through the crates of weapons and ammo inside the warehouse, trying to find the perfect weapon. It had basically everything: pistols and assault rifles, shotguns and sniper rifles, grenades, rocket launchers, and some purpose-built weapons that I couldn’t really make sense of. I kind of wanted to take the railgun with me in case I ran into any more tolans, but it would’ve been way too heavy to carry. Maybe if I was an earth pony I could’ve shouldered that load and not been bothered by it, but I just didn’t have that kind of strength or stamina.

Finally, I made my choice: a very modern BR14M that still smelled like fresh oil. It was the last firearm Equestria had ever made before the Silence; the Sentinels only had a small cache of them at the Bastion, and I’d gotten to try one out at the firing range, but they wouldn’t let me trade my BR12A for it. It had more stopping power than my old battle rifle, could be configured between semi auto, burst fire, and full auto, and had a special set of variable optics with a rangefinder and night vision. Though moonless nights weren’t all that common on Auris, it’d definitely help if I ever had to fight in a cave or something.

Oh, and it also had a grenade launcher on its bottom attachment rail. I knew that’d be useful in the future.

I stockpiled bullets and grenades for it and refilled my saddlebags. It was tempting to just stuff them with as much brass as I could carry, but all the bullets in the world weren’t going to mean anything if I was carrying too much shit to move properly. I laid my collection out neatly, though, in case I wanted to stop by one more time on the way out. Ace might appreciate taking a look through the stockpile here, and maybe I could get something for Gauge or Nova. Adding more firepower to our little group certainly wouldn’t hurt.

Though if only there was some way for me to give Nova her wing back…

I didn’t want to go back and face Gauge and Nova just yet, though. Gauge had probably calmed Nova down some, but I still felt really guilty about just running off and leaving them alone. They were probably terrified that something nasty was going to find them, and I hadn’t left them all that much to defend themselves with.

Well I’m just the shittiest friend, aren’t I?

I decided that if I was going to stall until it was closer to sunrise and Ace showing up, I might as well take a closer look around the warehouse. Maybe I’d find some neat piece of technology or something that might help on the road ahead. I could already see a big crate labeled ‘RATIONS’ a little bit farther back, and my stomach decided that it’d be a good time to remind me to eat something now that the excitement and danger was finally over. So, picking my way around the crates and shifting a few off to the side with my magic, I started making my way deeper into the warehouse.

I stopped once I got a little bit further in. There were some open crates of rations here, with plastic wrappers tossed everywhere. I frowned and sifted through the garbage some. Somepony had been back here, but the wrappers were very old and dirty. Whoever it was, they’d been back here a long time ago.

And then I found a skeleton curled up between some of the rations crates.

I may have jumped back a little bit in surprise, and part of me expected it to suddenly rise up and come snapping at me like a wailer. But it didn’t move, and it was covered in webs and dust, and the tatters of ancient clothing covering its bones had almost wasted away into nothing. And next to it was a piece of etch glass, and I remembered the message I’d found back at the living quarters. Was this Mr. Billet? What was he doing back here?

There were actually a few pieces of etch glass around him, so I picked one up at random. I wondered why ponies before the Silence loved this stuff, though. Wouldn’t paper be easier? Maybe I was missing something. I mean, it preserved notes remarkably well, because paper would’ve just rotted and computer tablets would just break or run out of power and then nopony could read what was on them. Who knows?

The first note was a short message, but it wasn’t really all that clear:

EQUUS IS LOST.

AURIS WILL CONTINUE OUR LEGACY.

WITH THE PASSING OF THE DUSK, WE WILL RISE AGAIN.

WE SURVIVE TOGETHER.

Talk about cryptic messages at the end of the world, right? For some reason, I shivered after reading those four lines. They were so vague, but so terrifying. Whatever ‘end’ had come to Equestria, they’d seen it coming long enough to shoot a message out to Auris. I wondered if there were more copies of this message lying around at various installations and such. There certainly weren’t any at Blackwash, but if a random foundry owner got a message like this, then surely others would have as well. But more importantly, I had to wonder just what exactly happened. If only they could’ve sent us a clearer final message, then maybe we would’ve been able to make sense out of the Silence.

I set that piece of etch glass aside and pulled out the next one:

It’s over. The unthinkable has happened.

Nopony here knows what’s going on—I don’t even know enough to tell them. I put the foundry on lockdown until we could figure out what happened, but the military here isn’t cooperating. They want the plants running at maximum capacity, saying that we need to have the next shipments ready on schedule. But I don’t think there’s going to be a next shipment. The message I got on the emergency comms makes it sound like the apocalypse came to Equus. I know we were losing the war, and losing badly. I have to wonder if the Coalition finally did us in.

Lieutenant Rider is going to the Ivory City to meet with the rest of the Synarchy brass here on Auris to figure out what we should do. If Equestria really is gone, then we’ll need to prepare for the worst. It’ll be up to us to carry on and continue the fight from afar.

I just pray to Celestia that my family is still safe. If only I could’ve brought them to Auris before the blockade formed. If only the Lieutenant hadn’t waited three months to tell me that it was too late to get my family off of Equus.

But for now, I’ll do my part, and hopefully one day I’ll see them again. Assuming that the military can do their part, too.

We Survive Together.

I frowned and immediately skimmed through the next few glass tablets. They were a lot more mundane than the first two, but I could tell that Billet was slowly growing exhausted and on edge. I decided to skip right to the last one he had:

Fuck the Synarchy. Fuck the High Queen. They’ve killed us all.

It’s been almost a month since we last heard anything. Where we used to get messages two or three times a day, there’s been absolutely nothing, and our attempts at getting an answer all failed. And Rider never returned. Not fast enough to stop this all.

The garrison here mutinied. Killed the sergeants and started looting the place. They claimed that since we hadn’t heard from the military back home for so long, the Synarchy must be dead. That means we’re all stranded here. Auris doesn’t have the infrastructure to support as many ponies as Equestria stuffed onto it. We were still maybe thirty years away from becoming self-sufficient. And with the Synarchy gone, and all us left out here all by ourselves, that means only two possible outcomes. Either the Coalition finds us and kills us all, or we descend into madness. The latter has already begun.

I’ve heard the gunshots all day. My workers have been screaming and dying, powerless to do anything. The soldiers who once protected and watched over us are now gunning us down and taking whatever they can. I can only imagine it’s the same elsewhere. Desperation and damnation brings out the ugliest in us, and both are in abundance, it seems.

Some of the soldiers are trying to get in right now; I can hear them banging on the doors, demanding that I open up. But I won’t let them in; they’ll just kill me. I shudder to imagine what those marauders would do to the mining complex at the mountain not too far from here with all this firepower. Thank Celestia that the Lieutenant and I were the only ones who knew the code to open this door.

As far as I’m concerned, this is it for me. I don’t plan on living in a world where I have to fight for survival, killing my fellow pony. It’s just a slow death, and I’d prefer to die with my dignity intact. There’s a lot in here that can at least grant me that.

If anypony finds this years, decades, centuries from now, I’m sorry. Take this as an apology from somepony who stood on the threshold of the end of the world and fueled the madness that finished off civilization. I can’t imagine what you’ll have to do to survive. I can’t imagine what life on Auris will be like a hundred years from now. I hope it’ll be better than how I leave it. I know it won’t be.

Steel Billet

I read and reread that last one a few times. It was… melodramatic, sure, but then I glanced at his skeleton and the hole in the top of his skull. A loaded handgun and a spent casing were nearby. I guess he wanted to die in peace or something, that’s why he wrote this whole thing out.

I set the pieces of etch glass back down next to his bones; they weren’t going to be of any use to me, so I might as well just leave them. Besides, I knew all I needed to know. Okay, not in the slightest, but I was getting a clearer picture of what the last days of the foundry were like, and more importantly, what the last days of Equestria and the beginning of the Silence were like. And it did not paint a pretty picture. What’s worse was that all these messages and things were just throwing more paint onto the canvas, not making the whole thing clearer. Just what happened?

“I wish I could just ask you what went wrong,” I muttered to the corpse. “I wish I could ask any of you fucking pre-Silence idiots that fucked everything up for us. But I guess I’ll never know.” After snatching a half-dozen rations from an open box, I shook my head and trotted away, leaving the bones behind, undisturbed. As much as he tried to sound apologetic in his final message before he killed himself, he was a part of everything that went wrong. Why should I waste the time and effort to bury somepony who destroyed the world?

Mawari and Denawa weren’t by the tolan anymore when I emerged from the arsenal; I guess they were finding the bodies of their comrades so they could bury them or whatever it is that zebras do to their dead. But it was about time that I went back to Gauge and Nova anyway, so I set off from the warehouse and into the faint blue glow of the early morning. The sun wasn’t quite up yet, but its light was chasing the night away. It’d be up in half an hour or so, and then I could look for Ace. I kept my new BR14M at the ready, though, just in case I needed it.

It was a little confusing to find my way back to the building Gauge and Nova were hiding in; all the running for my life tonight had gotten me pretty disoriented. I just tried to head in the general direction of north until I made it to the edge of the compound, and then retraced my steps from there. It didn’t take me too long to find a building with the doors torn off their hinges and the wall buckling inward. And there, lying in the debris, was a twisted and broken white wing, with bones sticking out of feathers that’d been stained red with blood.

I stopped and just stared at it for a second. There was even a small pool of blood around where I’d sawed through it. It didn’t feel right to just leave out here, but I didn’t know what to do. Bury it? Burn it? Give it back to Nova?

Okay, no, that last one would be an absolutely horrible idea. The less she had to think about it, the better. Though I knew that she wasn’t going to stop thinking about it for the rest of her life. If only I knew healing magic like Dr. Hacksaw. I would’ve spent weeks working on Nova’s wing and either reattaching the old one or making an entirely new one from scratch. It’s the only way I would’ve forgiven myself, the only way to make things right. But all I knew was fire magic.

Sighing, I carefully moved the wing to a dirt clearing then set it on fire. I watched as the feathers curled before evaporating into soot, smelling the awful smell of cooking pony flesh. But I kept the fire fueled, even forcing more magic into it, until all that remained was a few shattered and broken bones sitting in a pile of ash. Then, scooping up the ash in my magic, I tossed it into the sky, where the wind took care of the rest. It was only fitting that I returned a part of her to the sky. With luck, a piece of her wing would never stop flying, carried on air currents across the world. It would be small consolation to the mare herself, but it just felt like the right thing to do.

It was a huge relief to me to see that the door to the conference room was still securely shut when I got back to it. Trotting up to the door, I knocked twice. “Gauge? It’s me. Open up if you’re still alive in there.”

I heard movement behind the door and then the sound of something heavy being dragged away from it. A moment later, the door unlatched and I saw Gauge on the other side. He sighed with relief upon seeing me, and he opened the door a little wider. “Thank the stars you’re still alive!” he said. “We were getting worried about you, you’d been gone for so long!”

“I’m glad I’m alive too,” I said, shaking my head and stepping inside. “For a second there—ow!” I winced and staggered back, rubbing the stinging spot on my cheek where Gauge slapped me. “The fuck was—okay, yeah, I probably really deserved that.”

“Yeah, you did,” Gauge said, frowning at me. Then this time he actually smiled a little bit and hugged me. “I’m just glad you’re alive.”

I returned the hug and nuzzled his neck. “Almost wasn’t,” I said, and when I moved a little bit to the left, I winced. The Stabil-Ice was mostly worn off by now, and I knew in an hour that my side would be hurting like a motherfucker. “But I’m in one piece. That’s all that matters.”

I stepped inside and let SCaR float in before I shut the door behind me, just in case. Gauge and his drone had a little happy reunion, while Nova was asleep on the floor, a blanket draped over her, and the hair around her eyes matted with dried tears. She looked so normal just lying there, resting peacefully. With the blanket covering her back, it wasn’t hard to imagine she still had both her wings.

“How is she?” I whispered, feeling the guilt well up in my gut just from looking at her.

Gauge sat down on the edge of the table and bit his lip. “Tired,” was the first thing he said, his eyes drifting over to his marefriend. “Upset. Scared, mostly.” He shook his head. “I don’t blame her. It’s less the physical pain and more what it means for her. She’ll never fly again. She’ll be ground bound for the rest of her life. I can’t possibly imagine what that feels like for her.”

“I can,” I said, hanging my head. “I don’t know what I’d do without my horn, without my magic. It’s so much more than just a bone sticking out of my skull. It’s who I am. Now Nova’s afraid that she’s not Nova anymore. She’s afraid she’s some mare stuck between being an earth pony and a pegasus and not really being either.”

Gauge nodded. “I see what you mean. I just… just wish there was some way to help her.”

“You and me both.” Digging through my saddlebags, I pulled out a cigarette and lit it. It was exactly what I needed after all the shit I’d been through tonight, and all the shit I still had left before we could leave this hellhole behind. “It’s just gonna take a while. We’ll just have to be there for her.”

“Mmhmm…” He hummed in agreement and just watched me for a bit as I blew smoke toward the ceiling so it wouldn’t get in his face.

I sat down against the wall and shook the box at him. “What? You want one? I’ll share.”

He just shook his head and held up a hoof. “Not my thing. Nova always complains about how bad your breath smells. I don’t think she’d like it if I took up the habit too.”

“My breath doesn’t smell that bad…” I insisted.

Gauge chuckled at me. “If you say so, Em. If you say so.”

Silence passed between us for a few seconds while I worked on the cigarette, but eventually Gauge broke it again. “Well, tell me about your little trip. Did you find anypony else? You were gone for a while. And what about the tolan? I heard it roaring a few times, even from here, and every time it did, I worried that you’d just become dinner.”

“Oh, yeah, the tolan’s fucking dead,” I said, smirking a little when Gauge’s eyes widened in surprise. “And those other ponies we heard weren’t actually ponies, they were zebras. And together we found an entire arsenal of stashed weapons the Synarchy hid here and we used a railgun to blow a hole right through the tolan. Then I got this,” I said, showing off my rifle a bit, “and we came back here.”

“So where are they now?” Gauge said. “Are they alright?”

“Mawari and Denawa are taking care of their dead,” I said. “A lot of them died to wailers—those zombie things,” I said, pointing to the corpse of the one we killed earlier, “while they were running around. They’re very nice and trustworthy. Though Denawa, he’s a little bit suspicious of me, but I don’t blame him.”

“Ah. Well, hopefully I’ll get a chance to meet them before we leave. I haven’t seen any zebras since we left Blackwash, apart from a few slaves in Hole.”

I nodded in agreement. “They should be hanging around for a bit. There’s a ton of shit in that arsenal we found, and they want to move a bunch of it someplace safe and hidden in case other scavengers find it, I guess. We can go talk to them when Ace gets here, and then it’s off to Bluewater Gorge. From what they said, it sounds like that’s where the next piece of the code is.” Looking at Nova, I swallowed hard. “I just hope that we don’t have to lose any more limbs to get to it.”

It didn’t take too long after that for morning to come. I could tell by the light coming in through the holes in the ceiling that the sun was beginning to rise, so I took my bags and my new rifle and went to the door. Nova was still passed out and Gauge was on the verge of falling asleep, and he looked up from Nova’s side when I opened the door. I nodded at him, he nodded back, and then he closed his eyes and laid his head down next to Nova’s.

I decided to sit on the bridge that connected the two buildings together. It had a good view of the north and was wide open, so hopefully Ace would be able to find me without too much trouble. Plus, I could also keep track of the movement of any wailers or anything around here. I didn’t need us to get jumped when we were so close to the end.

Speaking of wailers, I looked at my bandaged foreleg again. I didn’t know if it was my imagination or not, but I felt like I had a little bit of a headache, and my stomach was feeling pretty upset. But I didn’t know if that was because I was slowly turning into a fucking zombie, or if it was simple exhaustion and exertion. I’d used a lot of magic tonight, lost a lot of blood, and hadn’t eaten anything good for a while now, apart from those rations I’d snatched from the warehouse. I supplemented those with some of the fresh greens that we’d gotten back in Hole for the road. The greens were kind of small, but green-leafed plants don’t grow all that well on Auris. I guess that’s why the natural plant life is all purple and pink and orange instead. Still, the Equus grasses and flowers were tasty enough, especially after a night as taxing as this one had been.

I don’t know how long I sat on that catwalk, just staring off to the north, when the door to the conference room opened. I glanced over and was surprised to see Nova standing in the doorway. For all the sleep that she’d gotten (however much that was, really), she didn’t look any less tired. Her left wingtip dragged on the ground, though when she saw me looking at her, she tucked it in a little bit. I saw the stub on her shoulder twitch, and I could imagine her trying to move a limb that wasn’t there.

She slowly made her way over to me, and I stood up, though I didn’t move, unsure of what to do. Do I say something? Hug her? Cry with her? Instead, she surprised me by walking right into my chest and pressing her neck against mine. Her left wing wrapped around my back as she pulled me into a limp but heartfelt hug. “Thank you for saving my life,” she whispered, shivering slightly as she did so. “I’m sorry for screaming at you earlier.”

I didn’t really know how to react at first, but after a second, I pressed back against her and placed my foreleg on her back. “I’m so sorry, Nov,” I whispered into her ear. “I wish there had been another way…”

Nova sniffled, and the feathers on my back shifted some. “Yeah…”

We broke off the hug, then sat down on the catwalk together. I just held her close, and she kept her wing loosely around my shoulders. I couldn’t bring myself to say anything, and I didn’t blame Nova for not having anything to say, either. For now, the silence was enough, and I was just happy to be there for her. She needed this as much as I needed it.

Pretty soon, I spotted a dark speck on the northern horizon, slowly growing a little bit larger each passing minute. It took another twenty minutes or so, but soon I could make out Ace’s features from the catwalk. She circled over the foundry once or twice, I guess looking for us, before she suddenly broke off and glided down. She came in for a rough landing, stumbling before she caught herself using the railing, and took a few breaths. “Good,” she panted. “You made it… just give me a second…”

She looked like she’d been through Tartarus and back. The half-curtain of her black mane was frayed and clumped with sweat, mud, and dried blood, and there were a few streaks of dried brown blood on her neck and her chest. She’d wrapped a bandage around the upper part of her right foreleg, and a few of her feathers were sticking out at odd angles. I noticed that her wingtips were stained black with gunpowder, and there was some soot on her chest and legs. I guess her two days since we’d all escaped from Hole were just as nightmarish for her as they were for us.

“Holy fuck, Ember, you look like shit,” she grunted once she finally caught her breath. “Good to see you ain’t dead yet. I worried for a bit after I flew off that y’all were gonna blow it.”

“We’re in one—” I immediately bit down on my tongue to stop myself. “We’re alive. Barely. Had to fight off a ton of wailers and a tolan. It’s been an awful night.”

Ace nodded. “That tolan still around, or you manage to shake it?”

“Killed it,” I said to her surprise and my smug satisfaction. “Turns out there was an arsenal that the Synarchy hid here. Me and some zebras from the Ruin Runners found it, and then took it down with a railgun.” After a second, I added, “We can go there in a bit if you want to take a look at the guns and shit. Just please don’t shoot at any zebras, okay? They’re nice and they helped me out a ton.”

“Yeah, don’t worry, I ain’t gonna bother them none. I think.”

“You got something against the Ruin Runners?” I asked her, noting the hesitation. “Or just zebras in general?”

“I used to run with the Runners as a filly,” Ace said. “Our parting weren’t exactly agreeable. I’ll leave it at that.” Her eyes slid between me and Nova and she cocked her head. “Where’s your zebra? He with his kind?”

I nodded back toward the building. “Sleeping. We’ve had a fucking shitty night.”

Ace nodded. “And the drone?” I think she sounded a little bit more worried about SCaR than she did Gauge.

“With him.”

“Good.” She stood up and stretched her wings, though I noticed that she suddenly stopped and carefully tucked them in at her sides when she saw Nova. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, and her lips twitched for a few seconds, but she roughly shook her head. “We should… I mean, are you lot good to go? I put the RPR in a loop, cut down a lot of their soldiers, but we ain’t gonna wanna hang around here for all that long. Hunter’s got a vendetta against y’all, and I already spent the past two days pissing her off something fierce.”

I nodded and started to stand. I intended on helping Nova stand, but the damage to my side and just my general exhaustion meant that she had to help me instead. I gave Nova a quick nuzzle as a ‘thank you’, and I turned around and staggered back toward the conference room. “Come on. Let’s get Gauge, and then we can check out the arsenal before we go.” I yawned and shook my head a few times to try to get some blood back into my brain. “And maybe take a quick nap while we’re at it, too.”

Ace whistled as she looked through some of the guns I’d left out on the floor. “These gals sure are pretty. You ain’t gonna find freshly oiled guns like these no more.”

The four of us (and SCaR) had gone back to the arsenal after collecting all our things, and now Ace was looking through all the weaponry. Gauge had gone off to dig through some crates off to the side, and Nova simply sat against the wall, her eyes blankly staring away as she thought. What those thoughts were, I didn’t know, but I assumed that they weren’t pleasant thoughts. How I wished I could help her.

Our accompanying bandit put down the BR14 she was looking at and moved on to a set of bulky pistols lying in their case. “SP-9s? No way!” she exclaimed, giddily digging them out. I moved over to her side as she adjusted the configuration for wing grip and slid them between her feathers. She moved her wings a bit like she was aiming, and I saw her grin get wider and wider the more she played with them. “Been a long time since I’ve seen one of these puppies. Longer still since I’ve seen a working one, let alone two.”

“But they’re bulky as shit,” I told her. “I don’t even think they’ll fit in your holsters.”

“Psshh. Holsters are easy enough to replace. The firepower these things have? Not so much.” She spun one around her wingtip a whole bunch (I don’t even know how she did it with only her feathers) and pointed it forward again. “They don’t use bullets either. They pull their ammo straight from ambient magic in the air.”

She trotted back over to the doorway and aimed at the tolan’s corpse, and then I saw a blue glow where the slides should have been. After a second of charging, Ace squeezed the triggers several times, shooting a volley of blue beams at the tolan. They shot more than even a submachine gun could manage in a few seconds, but they only left tiny scorch marks on its armor. Those would only sting at the most; I didn’t see them killing a pony.

“What, they just tickle ponies to death?” I asked her. “I got worse burns working in my family’s forge.”

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Ace said, and then she charged the pistols again. This time, she kept the triggers pulled longer before releasing them, and larger blasts of blue energy hit the tolan’s armor. These ones actually made the scales melt some, and a little bit of sustained fire was enough to work through the armor and get to the skin underneath. Then, she charged one for almost ten seconds before firing it, and the recoil viciously yanked her wing back as a blast of energy larger than my head hit the tolan in the back of the neck. It burned through its armor and several inches of its flesh, leaving charred muscle and bone behind by the time it finally dissipated.

I kind of gawked at the damage for a minute and rubbed my eyes. “Okay, I take it back. Those things are fucking great.”

“Ain’t they, though?” Ace said, grinning at me. She tossed her old pistols out of their holsters and attempted to put the SP-9s in them, but they didn’t really fit all that well. Her ear flicked in annoyance and she trotted back to the weapon case. “Ah, figures. Better do some digging so I can carry the damn things.”

“Ember?” I looked over my shoulder to see Mawari poking her head into the arsenal. Upon seeing me, she relaxed some and set down the rifle she’d had between her hooves. “Oh, good, it is you. I heard voices that I didn’t recognize, and I just hoped they were your friends.”

“The shit did they do to the tolan?” I heard Denawa shout from the other room. “Those were valuable scales! The spines alone were twenty Cs each!”

In front of me, Ace just rolled her eyes and went back to looking for holsters.

I trotted over to Mawari. “Yeah, these are my friends,” I said, flicking my ear in their direction. “The two pegasi are Nova and Ace. Ace is the one with all the guns.” Mawari waved to the two, though Ace only spared her a quick look over her shoulder before going back to her work, and Nova waved a little but self-consciously wrapped her wing around herself. She was sitting with her left side to Mawari, and I could tell she was trying to keep her right side out of sight.

“A pleasure,” Mawari said.

“And this greasy motherfucker is Gauge,” I said, pointing to him as he came trotting over, SCaR puttering along behind. “I’m not sure if zebras are any different from where I come from, but you two look the same, at least.”

“I don’t think you could’ve made a more racist comment if you tried,” Gauge said, lightly brushing me out of the way. He and Mawari sized each other up for a moment before they touched hooves. “Good to meet you. Haven’t seen a free zebra for almost a month now.”

“You should come to Three Rivers sometime,” Mawari said. “There are a lot of us there. The city isn’t anything like Hole or Thatch or the Ivory City. We’re neutral, and that’s how we like to keep it. Stop by whenever you’re done with looking around Bluewater,” she added, nodding to me.

“We just might,” I said. “Unless we find exactly what we’re looking for there, I imagine we’ll have to swing by and get reoriented.”

“And just what are you looking for?” Mawari asked me. “You mentioned that it was a mission for the Sentinels, yet you don’t have their armor or anything. What do they want with the rest of Auris?”

I hesitated for a second, squirming in place. “I… well, I don’t think I can tell you,” I said after some time. “We’re looking for some very old and probably hidden Equestrian installations. They have something that we’re after.” I didn’t say anything more than that, because even though I trusted Mawari, the fewer people who knew about the code and just what it could possibly mean, the better. After all, she might not be interested, but what if she or Denawa mentioned it to somepony who was? The last thing we needed was more people trying to snatch up code pieces.

“Well, uh, good luck with that, then, whatever it is,” Mawari said, flashing a small smile at me. Then, sighing, she looked around the warehouse. “While Denawa’s working on the tolan carcass, I guess I should start getting things organized for when we leave. It’s going to be a lot of back and forth trips over the next week or two, I think. You guys take whatever you need, while you’re at it.”

I stepped forward and gave her a quick hug. “You’re too kind.”

Mawari patted me on the back. “Yes, so I’m told.” When we separated, she looked me in the eyes and rested a hoof on my shoulder. “You stay safe, wherever you go. I hope your mission goes smoothly.”

“Fat chance of that happening, but thanks,” I said, smiling a little. “And I hope you and Denawa get super fucking rich from all this shit.”

She flashed her teeth at me. “I certainly hope so, too.”

Then, nodding, we set off to put some last things in order, with the blue sunlight shining through the hole in the roof and bathing everything in an electric glow.